#...but they fail to address the main points of those original posts

[unofficialadamtaurus]

per the rules, everyone take a shot 🥃

[thebandghostofficial]

[MESSAGE FROM THE CLERGY]

An important (and overwinded) announcement regarding this blog below the cut.

Hello everyone! This is Rawkin Ghoul/ Tumblr Ghoul/ Tumblrina/ Soda/ etc etc.

First thing’s first: no, this blog is not an official Ghost social media account.

I started this blog in late 2022 when ghost-official started blowing up (I do not believe this one to be real either, and honestly I won’t believe they have a Tumblr until it is linked on their official website) and thought, “wow, I could make a better Ghost blog than that. One that’s way better organized and actually advertises properly for them, and posts regularly!” So I did.

Originally it was meant as just that, a little joke between some friends, and wasn’t meant to really get farther than that. But then I thought, Ghost does have a lot of fans on Tumblr- a lot of exquisitely talented and devoted fans. Maybe I can kinda “roleplay” it for a while, build almost a bit of a portfolio, and then either offer the blog to management or offer to run it for them officially, for fun, if they were interested.

More time passes and more people followed. I thought “xofficial” as a username was a common enough joke/ gimmick that people would realize it wasn’t for real (and in fact, when I first searched the URL, I found that this username was once in use years ago! Sorry, previous owner), especially after posting that April Fools joke post- this was wrong of me to assume. There are a lot of roleplay/ joke “official” Ghost accounts all over the web but I failed to really properly disclaim that I was one of them.

I of course don’t plan to reach out to Ghost anymore and haven’t for some time, for multiple reasons including Tumblr just not being a good website for advertising. But another one is I got pretty loose on here. Tumblr is so different from Twitter and Insta and all that- you guys (and myself! I go here too) don’t want to have someone sell something to you- but you do love interaction and jokes and solving things together.

I think we can all admit it- when Ghost is dormant, the fans can get bored and even agitated, and can start to have a go at eachother. I’m certainly not guiltless there either. I wouldn’t say I’m notorious or even particularly well known in general but I’ve gotten into drama here and there. I figured the blog would be a fun way not just to distract the community, but really engage with it. The blog passed 5k a month or so ago and I started thinking, we could do something really cool with it. Smaller events like fanart contests and zines. But what if we did more? Organizing pre-ritual meetups. Larger community projects like fan-made music videos. ARG. Maybe even a short video game- there are so many incredibly skilled and hard-working Ghost fans and I wanted to try to bring them together because I think our love for Ghost, for whatever reason we love them, screams so loud and everyone deserves recognition (also a reason I started Fanart Friday as a regular thing).

You guys know I do my best to keep up with your tagging and what you’re saying and everything and I’ve seen the people pointing out the blog isn’t real from the beginning- I didn’t want to address it directly at first because I thought if nothing else people enjoyed the mystery.

But, more lately there’s been more and more people who are agitated, disappointed, and even a little scared to hear that this blog is not official.

I want to offer my very sincere apologies to people who I made feel that way. I should have made it obvious sooner- I know so well that there are a lot of very young Ghost fans especially who wouldn’t necessarily surmise that this isn’t real. I’m really sorry to those of you I disappointed.

I will never ask you for money here, or any personal information, or send asks anonymous or otherwise from here or my main personal blog as “Tumblr Ghoul”. I have had one person ask to message me so I messaged them to allow them to do that. If somebody contacts you claiming to be the person running this blog, they are lying. Please block them. My interactions here I aim to keep as public as possible, hence being increasingly liberal with replies and reblogs as the number of people interacting grew.

My only goal with this blog is to advertise for a band that I love and to entertain/ help the fandom when and where I can. I love and appreciate all the fanart and interest in the character of Tumblr Ghoul but I don’t want anybody to feel obligated to me and I especially don’t want to hurt anybody. I started this blog for fun and that how I want it to remain- fun for everyone.

People pointed out when I didn’t post for some time a few months back and it was because I had lost interest in the blog and was going through a rough time- and then one particularly bad day I got on to check it by chance and just seeing your guy’s tags and comments made me feel so much better. I tell people that I found Ghost when I really needed a friend and they fulfilled that for me, but the past few months you guys have done just the same for me. I am so sorry to have betrayed that and made you feel unsafe and lied to in return.

As of posting I do intend to still run the blog as I have been (with a disclaimer added to the bio regarding the legitimacy of this account)- posting about tours, chapters, merch, etc, as well as Fanart Friday. I 100% understand if anybody doesn’t want to be involved in that, so anybody who has tagged me in something and don’t want it on the blog now, I can open messages and you can let me know. I will probably close them again after a week or so if I get a large flood of unrelated messages.

Please do not message me asking me who I am, who knows about the blog, etc. Gaining popularity was never something I wanted from this so I will stay anonymous, for the time being at the very least. A very small number of people know who is behind the blog and to my knowledge only one of them is even on Tumblr and in the fandom.

Thank you for all the support you’ve shown me, Ghost, and eachother. It can be easy to see the bad parts of a community and roll your eyes electing to keep your distance, but since starting this blog I’ve been reminded what good community is even when it’s frustrating sometimes.

Thank you for reading, I won’t hold it against anybody who wants to separate themselves from this blog at this point, and please don’t let my oversight and general dummyness sour your experience with Ghost or its other fans. Enjoy the rest of this tour and whether it’s with or without me, please keep rawking 🤘 Be good to eachother.

Thank you.

[v-arbellanaris]

PLEASE share about the Cullen Cult Arc

sighs. this is my second time writing this post ;~; literally why does the autosave option exist if tumblr doesnt actually bother to autosave anything, i dont fucking get it.

this is going to be much briefer than the original post i wrote because im still REELING over how tumblr just ate the entire fucking post. its fucking gone. and idk if i have the energy or mental capacity rn to rewrite the whole thing. basically, this arc - which is the arc i developed for him in vee verse - is the arc i think cullen should've had in dai.

firstly, i'm not retconning anything he said or did in dao or da2. this is because those things serve a narrative purpose. cullen is a good templar - that's the entire crux of the problem. he exists in these two games as a narrative tool; he represents the views of the chantry. as such, anything you do with his character arc cannot be divorced from the reality of the mage/templar conflicts, and the glaring issues of the chantry and must, actually, address and involve those things, because cullen is a product of his surroundings. i'm not saying this to minimise or give him excuses for anything he's said or done, but that is made true for him by his very positioning in the narrative as being the chantry's voice. for most of my playthroughs, which lean pro-mage, cullen is an antagonistic force - he has to say and do horrific things, and it would be stupid for me to retcon the horrible things he did.

secondly, my main issue comes from his writing in dai - probably to no one's surprise. i am not unopposed to having a redemption arc for him in dai - this is villain-fucking the blog, sorry not sorry - but the problem is that he does not have one. to have a redemption arc, the following two things needs to happen:

the realisation/acknowledgement/knowledge/whatever that he caused harm to people with his actions/inactions

addressing the False Belief that he has embraced that has previously justified his harmful actions/inactions in order to accept the Truth (this is just basic character narrative construction).

and dai fails to do both of these because the writing team in inquisition is physically incapable of admitting the chantry is wrong and has done wrong and will continue to do wrong. they are physically incapable of looking at fucked up power dynamics and clear cases of oppression and not going "but what if the oppressed people. wanted to be oppressed. NEEDED to be oppressed, even."

which leaves his character arc - whether you want to consider it redemptive or not - confusing. he's trying to shake a lyrium addiction? sure, okay. but why is he addicted to lyrium? why is being addicted to regular ol' lyrium bad? it's not blue lyrium that killed meredith, it's not blue lyrium that corypheus and samson are using.

you get confusing things like cullen's entire character arc being centered around lyrium addiction... but no one seems to give a shit if the inquisitor takes lyrium and becomes a templar, except cullen. you get confusing things like cullen's entire character arc being centered around recovering from lyrium addiction and the templar route in dai and you get to the scene where all the templars get their lyrium draughts. the ceremony and chanting and celebration around getting the lyrium, when barris takes his draught, which is frankly revolting. but it highlights the inconsistency - lyrium, this scene tells us, is good. because the templars are good, and they use it for good. yet cullen's entire arc is about overcoming his lyrium addiction, but don't worry!!!! templars are still good and lyrium is still good. its fucking INCOHERENT!!!!!!

he is addicted to lyrium because that is how the chantry maintains absolute control over its templars. it is a mind-altering substance that causes paranoia, which the chantry specifically takes advantage of and feeds with their all mages are inherently dangerous rhetoric, which is a false rhetoric, as i've pointed out before. but instead of acknowledging any of that, dai's writing goes "lyrium is Bad because [mumble mumble] and its So Important that he doesn't take it so that [mumble mumble]".

because the story is physically incapable of uttering anything even vaguely critical of the chantry.

so, this covers my main issue with his writing in dai. i would ideally try to fix it - without retconning anything he did in dao or in da2. this is what the cullen cult recovery arc is referring to.

i'm not going to go into it in too much detail but the templar order - inclusive of the seekers - fits a lot of the parameters of a cult. specifically, the BITE model, but also this checklist, and a whole bunch of other parameters i found when researching into cults for this specific reason. (which. makes sense. seeing how the orlesian chantry is was also technically a religious cult that becomes the main religion of the lands by actively slaughtering all the other sects)

but what's particularly interesting about it specifically is that, in-world, no one else seems to think it's a cult. for all of cullen's views, he is not the extreme end in da2 - alrik is. meredith is. what's particularly disturbing to me about cullen's point of view is that because he's a product of his environment, because he's a narrative tool representing the chantry's views, cullen's opinions and actions are actually a normality test. people in thedas don't find cullen's views repulsive because most average joes in thedas agree with him. i think it's easy to forget cullen isn't the outlier in-universe - we are.

but, canonically speaking, this is what happens: cullen, like most good antagonists getting a redemption set up, misses his chance to Embrace Change at the end of da2. he sides with meredith too late for it to matter or make a difference - mages (who you learn on the templar route, he's not exactly eager to kill) who he's supposed to protect are already dead. but what happens in kirkwall shakes him to his core and he looks to leave the order entirely - a good step.

the problem is that he leaves the order to join the inquisition. the inquisition, which is headed by the left and right hands of the divine. the right hand of the divine is a seeker herself. the inquisition is spearheaded and justified by the divine, who he has been trained for most his adult life to be subservient to. the divine who formed the inquisition to replace the templar order and hired him to essentially train and recreate the order.

worse, still. no one thinks he did anything wrong. kinloch was not his fault, it was the fault of greagoir and the older templars who were simply not vigilant enough, meredith told him. how he acted to keep order in the circle and the city after the viscount was executed is admirable, cassandra tells him. he was only following orders, leliana admits grudgingly, he stood up for what was right when meredith went too far. no one thinks he did anything wrong, because he is a good templar. because all the atrocities he committed were not committed against people - they were committed against mages, who are not people, not like you and me.

cullen hops from one cult to the next. the inquisition is the exact same thing he's always done and known, just repackaged - quite literally, considering the inquisition's symbol. but canonically, he thinks it's something different. he wants it to be different.

it's not, though.

so, the thought process behind my thoughts for him boils down to this: how does he get the language to describe exactly why this is wrong? how does he get the language to describe why it matters, why it's important, that he hurt real people? how does he get past the Lie that he believes - that he has to be a good templar, to stop anything like kinloch from happening again, since kinloch happened because they weren't vigilant enough, because they were too sympathetic to mages?

his arc shouldn't have just been about overcoming lyrium addiction. his arc should have been a story about recovering from being part of a hate group, a story about recovering from part of a cult.

there's several ways to go about it, i think. and if you want to specifically know how i'm going to do it, you guys should encourage me to write vee verse 😌

[billsfangearring]

Monthly Fandom Faves: January 2023 (ALOTO Edition)

I want to get back into reccing this year! I previously did themed rec lists, but I'm going to experiment with unthemed recs of a few things I loved reading each month, split into separate posts by fandom. Here are my inaugural ALOTO recs, which are all Jess/Lupe this month. (No one is surprised.) They're also all WIPs, which I promise won't always be the case. I hope you enjoy!

Fics reviewed below the cut, from longest to shortest:

relief next to me by meyeri

I've nowhere to be, other than right next to you by @7central

A letter does not blush by @oldmannuka and @talaricula

Posting this early because (1) my cat's first adoption anniversary is Tuesday and she deserves my full attention and (2) I have no chill.

relief next to me by meyeri

(Jess/Lupe, E, 60k and counting)

Jess takes a final drag and maybe she performs a little, because she wants to see what’ll happen: maybe she licks her lips before, maybe she leans so the jut of her collarbone stands out underneath her shirt, maybe she makes a point to catch García’s eye when she inhales, when the smoke pulls into her chest, when she hitches her breath to keep it there. Because García is watching, she has Jess pinned with her eyes, and this is probably a goddamn catastrophe of an idea (come on, don’t shit where you eat, McCready) but something about it feels alive to Jess, feels jittery and itchy like the buzz of a radio, like a snakebite under her skin. It feels right when the whole fucking day has felt wrong.

relief is a devastating, atmospheric, and visceral immersion in Jess's mind if she and Lupe were casually sleeping together from the beginning, slotted very precisely into the spaces between canon. It encapsulates everything that I read fanfic for—emotional depth, evocative prose, and nuanced characterization—both for our main duo and for the fic's secondary characters, especially Greta, who add so much richness to Jess's life on the team. Jess retains her fierce protectiveness even amid her uncertainty about where things stand with the magnetic enigma that is Lupe García. I've reread each chapter many times and never fail to notice something new. Also, uh, it's incredibly hot. Trust me.

The reality of Lupe García, her brother, this person who shows her iron shell to the world and yet incomprehensibly and inconceivably shows her softness and delicacy to Jess, whose walk is an echo of Jess’s own and who strides through life like she’s carrying the whole thing on her shoulders, like she’s resigned to her solitude, and yet for some reason allows Jess to see the strain of it, just sometimes—like one day she might let Jess share the load of it.

Note: the first chapter (roughly 6k) was originally posted as a one-shot, so you can still give that a go even if you aren't interested in committing to a long WIP!

I've nowhere to be, other than right next to you by absurdcapybara

(Jess/Lupe, E, 55k and counting)

Lupe and Jess end up in New York City for the off-season. Most confessions can be made over a good ballgame. New York is the prime spot for those few exceptions that can’t.

In thinking about how to describe this fic, I keep coming back to how Lupe and Jess's relationship ebbs and flows like the tides. Their life together in New York feels very real as the intimacy and domesticity between them grows in fits and starts as they transition from being teammates and housemates to roommates with Only One Bed. This story is a full-body experience to read, and I read it much more slowly than my usual so I can relish absurdcapybara's gorgeous metaphors. They really get Lupe, my beloved, and also address how Lupe's insecurities and guardedness have real consequences for Jess. The 1940s New York setting and all it entails are ever-present in the fic as well.

Lupe didn’t know what lines were left between her and Jess. She didn’t know if they were friends or ‘friends’ or brothers or soulmates or ships passing or cars crashing, and for one wonderful moment, she didn’t care that it was so ridiculously undefined.

A letter does not blush by summerdrive and talaricula

(Jess/Lupe, T, 18k and counting)

In the 1943-1944 off-season, Jess and Lupe settle in New York together. This collection of letters between them and Esti, as well as some of the other Peaches, tells the story of those few months.

The wealth of tiny details tucked into the letters and notes—from Jess's inclusion of detailed weather information such as the dew point in her letters to the use of real newspaper clippings and such from the era—make this an incredibly immersive and entertaining fic. I have so much fun trying to piece together what's going on behind the notes every time this updates. (And I'm ashamed to say I figured out the unfinished hangman game immediately.) Our hermanos' relationship with the delightfully perceptive Esti is a particular bright spot in this fic, especially the contrast between Jess's fatherly generosity and Lupe's hesitance after the events of last season, and the authors nail all the characters' distinctive voices. This is unquestionably one of the most impressive epistolary fics I’ve read.

Note: All the letters/notes/etc. are written in the typical AO3 style as well below the images if you prefer to read in that format, but I had to include part of one of the images and nothing will ever be funnier to me than Lupe’s 23 Dec. ‘43 diary entry:

Jess in feud with ex who stole fishing spot = butch??? Investigate

All of my ALOTO fic recs can be found here. I hope you find something you like!

[spacenutspod]

You think you know someone, then you see them in a slightly different way and BAM, they surprise you. I’m not talking about other people of course, I’m talking about a fabulous star that has been studied and imaged a gazillion times. Beta Pictoris has been revealed by many telescopes, even Hubble to be home to the most amazing disk. Enter James Webb Space Telescopd and WALLOP, with its increased sensitivty and instrumentation a new, exciting feature emerges.  Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in the southern constellation Pictor. It is a very young star, thought to be about 20 million years old and at a distance of just 63 light years, is in our cosmic backyard. Observations in 1984 revealed that Beta Pictoris had the most amazing dust disk out of which planets are forming. The European Southern Observatory has since confimred there are at least two planets (imaginitively called Beta Pictoris b and Beta Pictoris c) orbiting within the dust disk.  Over the years, Beta Pictoris has been the target for many observations including those from the Hubble Space Telescope that revealed a second, previously unseen disk. The second disk is slightly inclined to the first but further observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed a new structure in this second disk.  The team, led by Isabel Rebollido from the Astrobiology Center in Spain used the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRI) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) of the JWST to explore the disks of Beta Pictoris in more detail.  They were surprised to find a new structure at an angle to the secondary disk that was shaped like a cats tail. Despite the plethora of previous observations including those from the space busting HST, the instruments on JWST are more sensitive and have greater resolution.  MIRI, ( Mid InfraRed Instrument ), flight instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, during ambient temperature alignment testing in RAL Space’s clean rooms at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, 8th November 2010. The “Cat’s Tail” was not the only surprise. When the MIRI data was studied, it revealed that the two disks were different temperatures revealing they were composed of different material. The secondary disk and Cat’s Tail were shown to be a higher temperature than the main disk. It’s also easy to deduce they are both made of dark material since they have not been previously observed in visible or near infra-red light but are bright under mid infra-red wavelengths.  One of the theories to explain the higher temperature is that the material is highly porous, similar perhaps to the material found on comets and asteroids. The nature of the dust is one question that is perhaps easily addressed, something a little more challenging to answer is the nature and origin of the Cat’s Tail.  The team explored a number of possible hypotheses that could explain the tail’s shape but failed to settle on a satisfactory model. One of their favoured theories is that the tail is the result of an event that occured within the disk around a hundred years ago! The event may have been a collision sending the dust into a trajectory that mirrors that of the impactor but then it starts to spread out to produce a curve. A contributory factor may simply be the angle of the tail from our vantage point causing the angle of the tail to seem steeper than it actualy is.  One thing is for certain, the recent observations of Beta Pictoris have revealed some surprises of a very well loved and observed object. Further research will help us to gain a more fuller understanding of these new features but it leaves me wondering what other objects that we are familiar with still hold some surprises.  Source : Webb discovers dusty cat’s tail in Beta Pictoris system The post Webb Blocks the Star to See a Debris Disk Around Beta Pictoris appeared first on Universe Today.

[phoinexboi]

Evolution:

This is gonna be different from the Illusion post I made. Why:

1. I made the first part of this MONTHS ago for a freind therefore there's a whole introductory paragraph waiting for ya'll (It's definitely edited and refined like A LOT)

2. I need to explain things before I analyze it this time because this episode was... confusing.

Okay one of the things we have to address is the time travel rules this show follows. Now the show is attempting at a loop theory (although they are failing miserably. Why do I say they're doing this? Because this episode basically sets off the events of the show!

For those of you who don't know, the loop theory is a theory in time travel in which whenever someone goes back in time, NOTHING WILL CHANGE. This theory can be done well of horribly. For example, a positive example of this could be "Secrets of Sulphur Springs". It's a fairly underrated mini-series and should deserve more love. ANYWAYS, this show does the loop theory well because... you don't know how things go down in the end. And even if you do it will be written off in a satisfactory way. The show's main element is time travel and it does well with it. A bad example is the episode Timetagger. Now the Bunny/Rabbit miraculous has a fair amount of inconsistencies from the power function to the actual power itself. The main one I wanna focus on is the loop effect that kinda but isn't there....

Lemme explain. Earlier in the episode Bunnyx REMEMBERS that mini-her was waving. Meaning that this event had been planned and happened before looping.

However, later in the episode when the civillians were transported to the past they changed many paintings. If the show was a loop that never would've happened.

Now my problem with this episodes loop...

Master Fu chose teenagers because he MET teenagers. So he KNEW to give it to TEENAGERS!

A lot of people have illogically complained about how this doesn't make sense and how he couldn't see through the Quantum masking. BUT HE DIDN'T HAVE TO!

He knew they were teens... that's all.

My problem is that this is a LOOP situation which is shown throughout the episode but the "time travel is dangerous" exuse. Is still used when it either won't matter in the end or will just be inconsistenly used throughout the episode!

They practically ruined the show with this one scene...

Anyways, that isn't the whole point I just had to get the time issues out the way so you can get back to your irregularly scheduled content.

Now onto my actual thoughts regarding the episode...

Look I originally liked the episode when it came out but I think that was just recency bias...

Was the episode bad? No. Just boring...

Not super boring but slightly repetitive

The show has trouble doing something outside of the format they usually follow and you can tell!

Let's start at the beginning. We pick up right after the Season 4 finalie. The crowd chants Ladybugs name.

I didn't like that they did this... Why? Because they killed all momentum they set up in Season 4! I mean, first off, look what happened in this episode. BARELY ANYTHING! I liked this episode because of the ending. That's it...

So now it's time to continue this epic roast.

Now time for the real JUICE! Me breaking down random and somewhat opinionated thoughts I had about the episode and writing them for the public ^^

Note time!

• Can we just mention the Synopsis though... "Ladybug and Chat Noir face an opponent who is in possession of the rabbit miraculous in a race against time" how cringe...

• The intro still bops-

• The hand holding!

• The Parisians completely ignore Chaton as usual 🙄

• Why do they always respect Monarchs name change in canon? Like I get why we do it but like in canon why can't we just choose whatever name we want at whatever time.... oh right this is a kids show that has no logic and wants to keep things as simple as possible-

• Gabriel is pure evil

• The animation downgraded but it's still good

• Nadja's hair color is so inconsistent in this show across the studios XD

• I thought LB stuck out the middle finger for a second...

• Was it ever confirmed it was called a message retriever? Because that's what the wiki calls it

• Thomas confirmed that Monarch's symbol was a work of the butterfly, Turtle and fox miraculous'. If so... why didn't I see any smoke when Ladybug breaks the akuma signal?

• HOW DID CHAT NOIR BREAK THE SHEILD WITH HIS STAFF ALONE IF HE HAS TO USE HIS CATACLYSM LATER ON?!

• How weak is the shell cast by "Shell-ter"?

• "It's you and me" that's quite important

• LMBO! The scene with Gabriel and the kwamis while LB and CN talk to the Parisians is so funny because it's so poorly chopped together!

• I love how Sass is the father figure. I mean he is the concept of "Intution"!

• Gabriel didn't do anything can he please stop taking credit

• Nathalie is the adult and Gabriel is the child in like 90% of their scenes together...

• Gabriel's camouflage miraculous designs suck

• Gabriel is so quick to do and so late to think

• The LB and Rabbit Noir scene still proves the loop theory

• BUNNYX IS A LIAR! Time Travel won't change anything 🙄

• The faces have definitely changed since previous seasons. You can tell with all the flashbacks this ep!

• BURROW BRAWL!!!!!

• What would Gabriel do with his second rabbit miraculous if he got it?

• Why couldn't Chat Noir extend his staff this time? Is the burrow too small?

• RABBIT NOIR!

• "It's you and me remember?"

• Ladybug is falling in love with Chaton by this point and we all know it

• They chase after Monarch for a bit... very old school...

• "Impressive..."

• No Marinette or Adrien this episode just heros

• The Master Fu scene was cool

• WHY COULDN'T HE JUST EXTEND HIS STAFF AGAIN

• I'm not going in order because this episode is all over the place...

• Bunnyx comes back LITTERALY Teo seconds later to return the Miraculous to Wang Fu

• Alix and her father have such a cute relationship 🤧

• Canigirl is cool. I don't like how they pronounced it in the English dub "Cane-I-girl"?

• Ready for action!

• The resolution for getting the rabbit back was cool but kinda odd because it wasn't much of a fight-

• But then again fighting doesn't solve every problem even in a superhero show ^^

• Bunnyx leaves for a while... it's undetermined for how long though...

• Chat Noir supports Ladybug again even though she doesn't deserve him!

• Nathalie goes off on Gabriel and leaves him for dead

• "LAAAADYBUUUUG"

"And they all screamed into the sunset"

Some inconsistencies but an 8/10 would recommend. I was a bit hard on it but despite a few "boring" scenes it was a really fun episode!

P.S. Sorry for comming out with this so late... school has been very demanding as of late...

[shelby-bach-books]

If you are already feeling really excited and energized, you’re probably tackling transformation head-on already. Fatigue is not on your radar.

If you’re already feeling tired, then transformation fatigue has arrived. You may be thinking, “Well, the answer is obvious. I’ll pause my changes and rest for a while.”

Both answers are correct and accurate for those situations, but in a time of rapid change, situations can shift quickly and without warning. Addressing transformation fatigue helps you prepare for the changes you can’t see coming (and we have all experienced a few of those already).

So, why do something most people consider unproductive?

I grew up in North Carolina, where snow days were infrequent. Less than an inch of snow could get school canceled. Few locals knew how to drive in it, and even fewer owned snow shovels—there was no need.

Back in 2010, well before any of my books were published, one of my very first blog posts was about shoveling snow. I described visiting a farm in Maine with one of my high school classmates, who had also spent his whole life in North Carolina. When we were assigned the chore of shoveling snow out of a field so that the farm’s sheep had room to frolic, we both grabbed our shovels and dug out some space for the flock.

Neither of us complained, but by the end of the afternoon, when we were tired and sore, my classmate commented, “It is weird when you realize all you did today was relocate water.”

Some people, faced with a porch hip deep in snow, will struggle to see the point in relocating water. It’s easy to think, “You know, when spring comes, it’ll melt on its own. I don’t necessarily need to do anything.”

You might also think, “Well, the snow is too deep for me to use the porch out there, but do I really need it right now? It’s pretty cozy inside.”

We can temporarily get used to having less space, the same way we can temporarily grow accustomed to having less capacity for transformation. Temporarily, that may be the best option.

If it is still snowing, or if temperatures are well below 0 degrees F, or if the wind is blowing very hard, or if the weather is truly terrible in some other way, it’s probably not the best time to be shoveling snow.

If you have the flu and are running fever, it’s probably also not the best conditions for outside activities. Your body needs immediate care much more than the porch does.

But even though you may need to wait for decent conditions, waiting till spring has its own dangers.

Individual snowflakes are light. On your skin, you feel their cold, not their weight. But as snow accumulates, so does its density.

You may be okay with losing access to the porch until the spring melt, but you also don’t know when the next blizzard will hit. Eventually, the porch may begin to suffer under the extra weight. If that snow gets heavy enough, the structural integrity of the porch will fail, crumbling under that pressure.

You’ll either lose that porch space forever, or you’ll have to rebuild it completely.

Obviously, I am not just talking about snow and porches. Frozen water is often used as a metaphor for stuck emotions, which accumulate through times of pain and trauma. (For example, in the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen had the ability to freeze hearts through shards of her broken mirror.)

Leaving old feelings untended is understandable. In the middle of a crisis, you’re dealing with challenges pressing in on you, and once those events pass, it’s tempting to stay inside your cozy house and just wait for those stuck emotions to melt away on their own.

You tell yourself, “I don’t need to go out there right now,” and as I mentioned before, waiting for your moment is sometimes a good decision.

But the porch, weighed down by all that snow, is much like your overall mental health. Stuck emotions are weighing it down and putting stress on its structural integrity.

Both in our personal lives and in the news, we have all seen what happens when someone’s mental health suffers a complete collapse. Sometimes, their lives end in the most tragic of circumstances. Sometimes, they simply spend the rest of their lives with limited capacity. Sometimes, that individual spends years struggling to rebuild their mental health after that collapse.

Addressing transformation fatigue is one way you can relieve the stress of that stuck weight.

Others see you pausing to tend old emotions and wonder, “Why you are relocating water?”

You can remind yourself, “I am preventing collapse and reclaiming all the space available to me.”

-

More on transformation fatigue here.

[mirceakitsune]

Wanted to start by saying this is NOT a call to attack FA: Unlike the Twitter mob that came after several of us last week, I don't do mobs to harass people. But it does intend to show the extent of the abuse happening on the platform, to the point where logic is pushed to the very limit just to go against artists the site considers undesirable. Needless to say this isn't getting posted on Furaffinity, both because it contains the image I was banned for and joking which is officially forbidden there I guess.

After initially being banned for a week due to the fact that 7 years ago I sketched some joke about foxes eating babies, I was then banned permanently for my latest 3D render. Upon contacting the staff they must have realized how utterly absurd that was so they reverted to the original temporary ban. While this was definitely good news in the moment, I feel there's a huge problem that needs addressing fast.

After new year I made a joke render about the January 6 capitol riot, consisting of bunnies beating and humping secret agents to catch politicians with a news caption calling them the far-right. I never imagined someone would find a way to argue such a thing is against any TOS on the planet, presuming the silly tone made it clear this is intended as pure parody. They not only considered it worthy of a PERMANENT ban, but went for the most absurd route possible in doing so: Suggesting it's COVID misinformation of all things. Two years ago I was warned to stop talking about COVID and ever since I have respected that wish… despite this the ban message suggested they removed more journals where I somehow violated this rule while listing this image as the main reason.

Obviously I didn't care to support or promote anything there: I just realized January 6th would be a fun subject for a project to have fun with. Nowadays I don't even believe most stories about election fraud since Republicans failed to bring more evidence to light… QAnon I legit consider crazy on most things, not all but most of what they say goes too far even for me. If there was any intent involved, it was making people stop taking everything so god damn seriously an making it a taboo you can't even poke fun at… same thing comedians do and are now getting beaten up for on stage for, once upon a time a certain Charlie Hebdo got shot up for it. Unfortunately the people who practically run FA are more in line with how the Taliban reacts when someone makes a caricature of Allah or Mohamed: We're at the point where fun is literally banned if it offends the religiously strict ideology of the day. And thing is, they could at least update their TOS to say "any joke that could offend us is forbidden"… instead they use deliberately vague rules that can randomly apply to anything so anyone can target you if they have it in for you.

I'm not among those who think Dragoneer is evil: I don't know him but from my few interactions and what I've seen he's a pleasant person. He's completely lost control of the site though: Whoever is both writing the rules and appointing moderators are literally doing whatever the heck they want. I literally don't feel I know what can even be posted on the platform any more: Even if I depressed myself by reading their bizarre TOS periodically just to remember every crazy little detail, it's applied so broadly you can't know what will practically get you in trouble just by reading it. In this case it doesn't say anywhere "joking about something automatically means promoting something else that's slightly correlated".

Unless Elon Musk buys FA like Twitter, I don't see much changing to be honest. None the less I at least wanted others to see how bad it is given it's a general current. If in the year 2023 it's literally a crime to draw a simple joke on a mainstream art site, anyone with some awareness should be terrified of where we're once more headed: You know it's bad when you have to make a parody of a parody about being attacked for making a parody.

[sabugabr]

Netflix's"The Witcher" and how costuming matters (1/2)

OR: The Witcher must have the most confusing worldbuilding I've ever seen and they could have easily helped that by doing good costuming — but then they didn't.

Hello again! You see, I'm a little late to the party since season 2 literally already debuted and all, but I've been wanting to write about Netflix's The Witcher since I watched the first season back in 2019, and originally I intended to discuss the narrative structuring errors the series makes when adapting the original material from Sapkowski's books (which took me a while to read, hence why took me so long to write this), but then I realized that first, there were already several articles and posts on this topic, written much more deeply and in detail than I ever could, and second, I noticed a lack of discussions about what really bothered me the most in this series: the clothes.

Look at this lovely swordfight between a medieval lady and a guy in a tweed blazer

SO, I think one of the things we can all to some extent agree on is that The Witcher is a flawed adaptation. You may like it, you may not like it, you may think it is good or bad on different levels of your personal opinion, but in terms of visual translation of a written narrative, and structural and narrative fidelity, The Witcher simply fails on several crucial points in its first season, which directly adapts the events of the first (in its fictional chronology; published second in original Polish) of the two collections of short stories preceding the main Witcher Saga written by Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski, "The Last Wish". As I mentioned before, I won't get into it specifically, but if you like you can check this great video by "The Closer Look" to see what I'm talking about. And one of the major critics regarding the series's first season is how confusing it is.

Look, I know this confusioness is, by some extent, purposeful. The story is told out of chronological order, the series moves back and forth in time, "present" events mix with flashbacks, everything is revealed at the end, etc etc. Which would be completely ok. However, the impression I had is that even what was not meant to be confusing got confusing, due to both:

textually cutting out the necessary contextualization to understand some situations; and

not correctly constructing the peoples and political relations between the kingdoms presented in the series.

And here I'm gonna adress the latter.

* DISCLAIMER * : in this post I'll only cover season one, first because I haven't watched season two yet, and second because interestingly Netflix has hired another costume designer for season two. Maybe after watching I can write about it separately. We'll see

So, without further ado...

1.1 VISUAL NARRATIVE AND CLOTHES AS STORYTELLING

To convey my arguments, I'm going to literally quote myself in some explanations from my Clone Wars post due to lazyness practical porpuses, so bear with me.

First, I'll cover the more technical aspects of visual representation in fantasy worlds. What I'm going to talk about now is not an established rule of thumb or anything like that, but simply something that's commonly done in visual media, especially when you have different cultures and peoples, or different kingdoms, which is to make the characterization of these peoples and cultures and kingdoms as characteristic as possible.

This serves not only to create a richer world, with more beautiful and creative possibilities for the use of colors and shapes and fabrics, but also to help those watching to follow what is happening on the screen, especially if you want to address social and political relations.

Seriously, I can't stress enough how things like the use of color can help in the assimilation and understanding of a story, and how this can be a life savior when it comes to crunching extensive content in a short time for an audience in the most effective and simple way possible.

In a conflit, for example, it’s easier for the audience to distinguish one "side" from the other if the people are visually characterized very differently, or to highlight a specific character in a crowded setting.

Take HBO's Game of Thrones for example. If you pay attention, at the beggining of the series every house and “region” had very distinct fashion tendencies that went way beyond the house’s coat of arms: the gowns were all cutted very differently, the colours and embroidery were unmistakable and the hair styles also differed a lot. You could determine the origin or political alignment of a character purely by fashion silhouette.

You can very clearly point out who is from which place, in addition to creating unity between certain groups. This can also be used either to show a character's personal evolution (like Daenery's costumes) or to visually express political innuendos, as for example in the case of Sansa, who always wears the same hairstyle as the woman she seeks to please at the moment. Or Cersei and Margaery, whose dresses are always (and I repeat, ALWAYS) a political statement.

Note that even though Daenerys' clothes clearly show an arc of evolution, there is a unity both in shapes (the constant use of oval and V cuts — symbolizing eggs and claws) and silhouette of the dresses (her clothes often have the strong, pointy shoulders that are Targaryen characteristics) and in the colors (white and aegean blue) and textures (always evocative of dragon scales) that consolidates her personality and makes her unique from the other characterizations.

And in the case of Cersei and Margaery, as I mentioned before, note how it is possible to make a clear distinction between when Cersei wears King's Landing's court fashion and when she wears her personal style (which can be easily identified), and how Margaery (whose personal style was previously determined by light and sensual clothing, in shades of light and baby blue with rocaille pattern embroidery) when appearing in the golden gown following Cersei's style, uses this as a soft power to not only insult Cersei but also firmly establish her position as the new Queen — and therefore toss Cersei aside. On the other hand, you can point out how clearly Margaery's gown and posture (the hands!!!) are a copy, and how better is the original, so we have all these layers going on here.

I could spend PAGES only going on and on about how great were the costumes for each caracther in Game of Thrones (thanks to Michele Clapton’s work), but I'm deviating from the topic here and you can find truly great meta about it all over the internet and particularly in this blog, if you like!

So, going back on track here, clothing can be used to visually depict narrative and time progression or even to secretly throw hints at the audience (like for example if you have side "Blue" versus side "Red", and a previously "Blue" character starts using reddish clothes, that can be an indicative that they've switched sides, even before this is actually confirmed by text).

When talking about personal characterization, one of the most important things about character design is that a character's costume essentially reflects who that character is, much more than their lines or actions. Just by looking at a character's costume (if it's a good costume) you can basically know everything the movie or series or play wants you to know. And especially if you're telling a story where a character goes through internal changes, the exterior (ie, their costume) should reflect that as well.

So, how are all those concepts applied in The Witcher?

Poorly

1.2 CHOICES WERE MADE — AND THEY WERE ALL GENERIC

So, for the first season of The Witcher, the costume designer in charge was the brittish Tim Aslam. And I want to make it very clear now that I am in no way personally attacking Tim Aslam here. In fact, I'm a fan of a lot of the projects he's worked on (I recently found out that he was a costume assistant on Phantom Thread, you gotta respect that curriculum). And you also have to take into account the influence that producers and all sorts of things have when you're making costumes for movies and series. And all that.

That being said,

This is bad costuming

They all look just SO OFF??? It took me SO LONG while watching to really get that Calanthe and those guards in the first picture and those guys in white in the last picture were all from Cintra. Because there's just no unity at all. Not in shape, not in colors, not anywhere. The only unit I can point to is the similarly shaped helmet of Calanthe's armor and that of the guards in the first picture. But in reality, the guard's armor looks a lot more like Eist's (the guy to her left), who is not Cintran (he was the ruler of the Skellige archipelago — still the Northern Kingdoms, but still somewhere else). And I still haven't figured out how Calanthe's armor was silver in this scene but golden in the banquet scene (it looks way better in gold tho)

And you know what, that's ok that's fine you can definitely make the ruler's armor different from the guard's armor (this is even a good move, since theoretically the ruler's armor has to be better than the guard's, right? ) but still, firstly, I personally found the guards' armor to be richer and more ornate than the QUEEN's, and secondly, if a helmet is all you can keep in style, you're clearly lost.

And then we get to the poor soldiers in the last picture.

And being fair, there are differences between the two armys — you have white armor vs black armor, the white Cintran armor here is very classic 1400s full plate armor with that round breastplate, while the Nilfgaardian armor is...? Some kind of studded leather, kinda? Anyway, I'll get to the Nilfgaardian armor later, don't worry. But even so, they are absurdly generic.

The helmets (the helmets) are basically the same, and so are the shoulder pads. And I may be speaking purely my own opinion here, but for me this scene was so confusing and the lighting was so dark that even the contrast of the black and white colors was lost to me sometimes. And because their armor was so different from the other Cintran armor that had appeared, I had to Google Cintra's coat of arms to confirm that it was really a battle between Cintra and Nilfgaard, just to make sure. And if Cintra's colors are golden and olive blue, why they were suddenly all in plain silver? I have so many questions.

AND YOU KNOW WHAT OK, FINE, armor is tricky, we have bad costuming in armors all around fantasy media, ok. But I found similar issues within every other costumes in this series.

So let's play a game

Look at the following images:

If you didn't know these characters, would you be able to tell me which kingdom each of these people is from? Look closely at the council scene or the ball scene, can you look me in the eye and say you know who's who? Point out for me who at the ball is from, idk, Aedirn or Temeria. You know what, you don't even have to go that far, just separate the people in groups you think belong together. Can you?

Me neither!!!!

Those guys in white at the ball, are they from the same country? I really can't say for sure!!!!

And I don't even find these specific clothes ugly, on the contrary, I find them individually very nice. But they do seem to be all inferior derivatives of a single model. Because, in reality, that's what they are.

See how Tim Aslam describes the costuming design:

“I started with in-depth discussions with showrunner Lauren Hissrich about the kind of look and feel she wanted for the show. I came up with a concept which was a mix of contemporary high fashion with Gothic influences from all the periods where Gothic researched in fashion history – notably, the 1890s and 1930s. Plus a lot of ethnic world costume”. “The Witcher is set, after all, in a kind of parallel fantasy world, where anything is possible. I have always particularly loved 1930s fashion. So it was ideal to be able to bring in the ‘30s Gothic feel, along with a little film noir feel, to some of the characters’ costumes.” (source)

Great, lovely, perfect. However, in my point of view, this was only truly applied on Cintra, and the character that best represents it (and the one that for me has the best characterization, and the greatest cohesion in clothes) is Calanthe herself.

You really get to see the Gothic and european 1930s inspirations (I didn't put references here because of the tumblr 10-image limitation, but google "1930s velvet gown" and see what I'm talking about), and the whole wardrobe looks just marvelous. I LOVED the blend of cool tones with gold, the consistency in the boat necklines and the overall embroidery and fabrics used, the application of the "surface cording" technique in both her and Ciri's gowns' necklines and sleves, the coherent hairstyles, everything.

So, for Calanthe and Cintra, this concepts works at it's best, and was is just Cintra, it would have been perfectly fine, showstopping, 10/10. But he applied it to the whole costuming, and what we got is that he used a single concept to develop an entire world. This is very problematic because not only it makes it harder for us to identify the people on screen, but also because it deeply undermines the richness of the source material.

For example, I really find Mousesack's houpelande charming. It's pretty simple, but I didn't dislike the copper aspect it has in the scenes. But it looks way too similar to Stregobor's, and does it give any indication that he, like Eist, is from Skellige? The archipelago which, from the description of the books, can be directly associated with Danish cultures, and whose people are often associated by readers (myself included) with Vikings? Even ignoring the Viking thing, can you say, only by looking at them, that they both come from the same country?

I even named them there to make your life simpler

The two pretty much wear only goldish clothes, but then, King Foltest of Temeria also uses gold, and by the way Calanthe does too.

Perhaps you could argue that gold is associated with nobility, and we just accept that all nobles wear gold. It's a logic, yes, but I personally find it so disappointing when it comes to a series that spends so much time in political intrigues of different courts and kingdoms. In fact, it seems to me more like there is no concept at all between the courts, and that all characters buy their clothes at the same department store. So, besides everything I've said on narrative issues, this kind of approach "cheapens" the entire production.

Look at the sorceress:

They all seem to come from the same base model, using the same fabric, but at the same time they're not similar enough to argue that it's an intentional unit. Far from that. In these pictures alone you can see Triss wearing 4 dresses in not only different colors but also different cuts, one of them actually being the boat neckline that I once thought was characteristic of Cintra but apparently I was wrong — Triss comes from Temeria. You can vaguely identify the concept of "Goth 1930's evening gown meets contemporary high fashion", but here it just seems, once again... generic?

Unlike Calanthe's case, it doesn't seem like the concept was made with her in mind, for her. Some of the gowns don't even seem to have been very thought out. It just seems like they picked clothes that would look good and vaguely medieval-ish, and they went with it.

Tissaia on the other hand always wears clothes with VERY characteristic cuts, but this seems to be more of a personal style than any indication of a connection with Aretuza (the magic academy Yennefer goes to)

ac I couldn't tell if Tissaia is wearing the same dress in the first two images and they just look different colors because of lighting and editing. I hope that's not the case, because otherwise I would be even more disappointed with the lack of care for the costumes in this series. But moving on

I even thought the connection could be defined by the color blue/turquoise (as all apprentices use that shade of greenish blue too), but if thats the case it really bothers me,

firstly because they decided to use blue as the primary color in Ciri's characterization throughout most of the season, and I think it's flawed to have two different elements identified by the same color, and

secondly because if turquoise really represents a connection with Aretuza, it's NEVER used narratively in any way that I could identify, not even with Tissaia, which is simply a waste of narrative tool. It seems she only wears blue at the academy and her relationship with the color comes down to only that. As for the others, they use bluish tones but this is the only connection that I could make.

Again, it's as if each has their own unique style, but they all go shopping at the same store — except, in some scenes, Yennefer.

But since tumblr CENSORS more than 10 images, I'll have to slip this into part 2, so

PART 2: LET'S TALK ABOUT YENNEFER ->

[nevertheless-moving]

Unnamed Extremely Bad Plan to Defeat Darth Sideous AU - SW AU NO 9

Hopefully writing down this star wars au will help me exorcise the cringe demon that helped midwife it. Time travel au where obi-wan and Anakin come up with an extremely SPECIFIC and UNCOMFORTABLE plan to defeat Palpatine because it unfortunately, would actually work, as it capitalizes on one of Palpatine’s easiest to reach political vulnerabilities. This is not a unique plan- there are other au’s like this, but this one is mine. When searching for ways to explain exactly why this anti-sith strategy inspires such cringe and delight in myself I realized, with sinking dread, I have seen this in an Always Sunny episode...which yeah. I might be over reacting but hey, cringe is a personal phenomenon, everyone’s different.

Anyway! Uh here’s a bunch of plot that will eventually culminate in the plan. 

*Too much plot, aaaah*. **All plot actually.** ***Its 1 am and this is still a draft*** ****It’s 2am**** *****This post will be just be background I guess.*****

*******STAR WARS AU NO 9 LAZILY OUTLINED CHAPTER ONE*********

Force ghosts Darth Vader and Ben Kenobi have had time to yell at one another without need for breath, and have more-or-less come to terms with the trainwreck that was their shared life. I wouldn’t call them well adjusted, but they’re more stable then they were the last decade or so of their living existence. 

In haunting Luke, they end up encountering an artifact in an ancient Willis temple that offers spirits the chance to fix the mistakes they made in life. It doesn’t truly unwrite what’s been done, but it lets you create an alternate timeline. So this galaxy will still be what it is, but some alternate galaxy somewhere could at least have it better. Its almost never been used, because becoming one with the force usually lets you accept the past, but viewed objectively, Vader and Ben’s lives involved an extreme amount of yikes. They say goodbye to Luke and are flung backwards and sideways.

Anakin is holding his mother as she dies. Obi-Wan is landing on Genosis. 

Vader just barely manages to avoid slaughtering the tuskens. To be honest, he doesn’t really get why he shouldn’t- his moral compass is still pretty f-ed up. He’s fairly certain the force is just torturing him, but still he controls himself (for Padme for Luke for Leia).

I’m gonna say well-adjusted!Vader sees murder in general as more of a vice than a sin- on par with having a beer. And really well adjusted Vader is willing to admit to himself that he’s an alcoholic, he seriously cannot regulate, its a problem. He really can’t let himself go, because he’ll just end up spiraling. And so he restrains himself and only seriously maims a few of the adult raiders.

Vader figures he can always come back later and slowly torture them to death if this whole ‘save the future’ thing doesn’t pan out.

Obi-wan leaves his shuttle and hides under a rock for 30 minutes. He calculates thats just enough time for him to pretend he went on an extremely effective and sneaky fact finding mission- just in case anyone checks R4′s records. Gets back in shuttle and gets the fuck out of there, much to Dooku’s chagrin, who lost sight of him after the shuttle landed and is now going to have to switch to one of his alternate start-the-war plans. 

On the flight back he reports everything to the council- fallen Dooku and the separatist leaders, the trade federation and the massive droid army, Jango Fett the clone template of the republic army (?) working for the separatists. He briefly comms Anakin, but anyone hacking into their conversations would hear only a nonsensical, rambling conversation. Later, a hacker might turn over the idea that they were speaking in elaborate code, but why would Jedi invent such a thing during peacetime?

The war still starts; at this point in the timeline it was inevitable; the artifact was only designed to give them the chance to correct their own failings, not the galaxy’s. Palpatine still gets his emergency powers. 

The same day the armies are discovered, separatist war ships take off to engulf Ryloth. The Jedi are instructed by the senate to lead the clone army and provide immediate relief-this will not be a repeat of the republic’s inaction on Naboo. It’s both better and worse than the first Battle of Genosis. So many more civilians are caught in the crossfire. The first titanic battle is not contained to evacuated droid factories, but rages across an entire populated world. The battle lasts for weeks.

The main reason this fight is less deadly is solely due to the fact that General Kenobi manages to maneuver his way into high command of the entire army.

 “I believe assumptions were made since I was the first point of contact with Kamino, Masters,” the Knight explained apologetically to the arriving high council members. “I realize its not quite appropriate, but for right now I am the Jedi most familiar with our forces and the enemies. I would, of course, prefer to cede the role to someone else.” 

The assembled Jedi can feel the truth in that statement.

“For better or for worse, advance troops were directed by the senate to land planetside and have met heavy resistance. I managed to redirect them to a more defensible position, where they can provide surface based cover fire for incoming reinforcements. The battle has already begun.” He received a grim nod of approval from Master Windu.

“I feel the need to say now, that if there’s one thing I learned from my time as a general on Melida/Dann, or in working against Death Watch on Mandalore, its that having a clear chain of command is vital for a military to succeed. I don’t need to remind some of you that leadership breakdowns were what ultimately ended both the Stark Hyperspace War and the Yinchorri Crisis,” Masters Koon and Tiin exchanged looks before deliberately sending forth a small force wave of approval, understanding where this briefing was leading. 

“I believe that unnecessarily restructuring command before the battle is won here could do far more harm than good.” The reminder of Obi-wan’s unusually militaristic apprenticeship put some of the assembled knights at ease even as it inspired a twinge of guilt in the older masters. 

“In command you are, General Kenobi,” Master Yoda finally acknowledged. “A Jedi Master you will be, once done this battle is. Have us do, what would you?” 

The battle lasts for weeks, and when its over, the commanding Jedi and Troopers involved will openly acknowledge that had anyone else been in command, it would’ve lasted months, if not years. Facing down logistical, strategic, and tactical problems on a scale unheard of for a thousand years, High General Kenobi does not falter.

Enemy reinforcements seem unending. For all their preparation, every single trooper is new to war, and secretly concerned that should they fall, they will be replaced with cadets who hadn’t even finished their training.

Obi-Wan is putting out fires before they can start. Much to their shock, clone commanders are informed that they will, for the time being, remain in charge of their troops. With a handful of exceptions, Jedi ‘Generals’ were in fact, to be treated as a cross between highly skilled commandoes and advisors with abnormally sourced field intelligence. 

“All of you have spent your lives training to lead your brothers into combat. The Jedi Masters and knights who are being assigned to your divisions have not received such training.” 

General Kenobi addressed the division commanders, some in person, some over holocomm. All focused in rapt attention as their General reordered the shape of their lives using language they could understand.

“The command structure I am issuing is designed to maximize our ability to utilize our respective strategic capabilities, while minimizing potential loss of your life. It will be our great privilege to serve alongside such an army, and while I fully expect a complementary exchange of knowledge in time, for now, focus on survival.”

The Jedi received similar briefings, tailored for their broader array of combat and military experience. Some, including Jedi Master Pong Krell and Grandmaster Yoda, were pulled aside and tasked with the essential mission of infiltrating and destroying the Droid factories on Genosis. If they were to have a chance of winning this war, they they would need to cut off the seemingly unceasing flow of droid reinforcements. 

An elite squadron of Arctroopers and Jedi field operatives were covertly dispatched, Grandmaster Yoda himself in command. Considering Count Dooku had yet to appear anywhere near Ryloth...the grandmaster had the best chance of bringing in the fallen separatist leader alive for questioning.

Shortly after they left, Anakin arrived, having finally turned over Padme’s protection to her regular guard. With the military creation vote past, the assassination risk was considered minimal. The real delay in his arrival came from her repeated attempts to join the Grand Army of the Republic on Ryloth with the intent of coordinating humanitarian assistance. Eventually he managed to convince her that she could do more good in the senate. 

After all, he pointed out, someone would need to followup the military creation act with a bill to grant clones equal citizen rights. Otherwise, the legal grey area that cloning fell under and their non-republic origin would inadvertently make the clones slaves. 

His borrowed Nabooan cruiser entered the warzone with the grace and efficiency as a small neutron bomb.

Those close enough to see its flaming descent watched in horror, realizing that the high generals own padawan would likely be a war casualty before he ever engaged in combat.

The legion nearest to soon-to-be-ground-zero, under the command of Captain Rex of the 501st, were distracted by heated combat, as the temporary barricade they had put up to defend the civilian population gave way to droidika artillery. 

While reloading, several dozen troopers happened to look up to see a speck detach itself from the hull as at spiraled in the lower atmosphere. Hope spread that the Jedi had managed to activate some sort of eject hatch. A skilled shocktrooper could probably control and and survive such a fall with luck, which mean a Jedi almost certainly could. 

A few tactical scouts charged with watching the skies confirmed that the speck was indeed a humanoid. No chute was visible, but even 8 days into the war, rumors had already spread about how Master Windu had passed off his chute mid-air to a troopers who had been damaged by suppressing fire, cushioning his free fall solely with the tank he crushed upon landing. 

Only one trooper, stationed in the town clock tower specifically to track the Padawan’s arrival and issued with a high-resolution farscope, saw the whole thing. Fortunately for his credibility later, in its current setting, the scope automatically logged photos every 5 seconds, ensuring that for years to come Obi-Wan would have a flipbook as evidence that he was not the crazy one.

CT-3609 or Blink (as he was named after winning the division wide staring contest on Kamino two year prior) forwarded the trajectory of the vehicle to command, who confirmed his analysis that it would impact two clicks out from their makeshift fort and not present a risk to civilian or trooper lives. 

As it traversed the stratosphere a figure (desperate repair droid, Blink assumed) emerged from the cockpit to perch on the nose of the ship. As it entered the troposphere, it became painfully obvious that the figure jutting out from the hull of the ship was in fact not a humanoid droid, but an unarmored human. The Jedi stood on the prow of the ship, seemingly impervious to and oblivious of:

air resistance 

centrifugal force

normal space gravity 

Blink’s slack-jawed bewilderment

the flames engulfing the ship below him

At this range, the smirk on the man’s face was visible (man? boy? kriff is he even through puberty?). Several miles above the surface he leaped, diving towards the ground like a bird of prey. 

To the west, the ship made impact with the ground, sending a shockwave that shook the tower just enough for Blink to lose visual in the final moments of descent. Cursing, as while he was confident the Jedi would inexplicably survive, he really wanted to see how. The trooper scanned the droid-engulfed farmland to the north for a crash site, to no avail. Lingering smoke from the burnt countryside negatively impacted visibility low to the ground.

Rather than trying to articulate his report into words, he sent the 50-odd frames the farscope had saved, as well as the coordinates for the jedi’s projected radius of touchdown. A quick radio over to long range electro-ballistics ensured that his landing wouldn’t be marred by friendly fire.

He awaited follow-up questions on the absurd entry method, which, when they came, mostly consisted of variations on “...Is this for real?” and eventually “Can you set the scope to video for a little while?” and finally “Do you think that’s how he got the name Skywalker?”

There was a temporarily lull in fire from the west, likely a ripple effect from the ship’s explosion. From his vantage point Blink could see his batchmates using the opportunity to try and plug the holes in their barricade with broken droid pieces. Regardless of the itch to join them, he knew he couldn’t leave his post until the Jedi actually arrived in camp. Finally, a distant explosion and thick pillar of smoke gave the Jedi’s position away.

He tried to make out details, but the scope had a difficult time focusing through the haze. Manually trying to fine tune the scope’s settings, Blink caught a glimpse of what looked like half a hover tank sailing through the air to impact with a trade federation troop carrier in a fiery explosion. Several more explosions, flying droid artillery, and plumes of smoke were caught on record before visual contact with the source was established. He was mostly visible as a blue blur, lightsaber mowing a meandering path towards their location. 

It wasn’t until Skywalker braced himself in place to punch a droidaka into pieces that Blink caught actual sight of the man. Only his eyes were visible, nose and mouth covered by layers of cloth. He blurred, then reappeared on top a massive missile launcher attached to an absurdly heavily armored vehicle. A minute or so of rapid blue flashes passed, the longest he had seen concentrated in one area. Then Skywalker was gone, movement clearly visible as he for once he moved in a straight line, plowing a rapid path away from the launcher. 

Less than 30 seconds later, Blink had to wince away from the scope, as a burning white explosion temporarily overwhelmed the direct light filter. The trooper panicked for a moment, thinking he had gone both deaf and blind, but the abrupt, sucking silence ended after a moment with a deafening sonic boom. The shockwave rattled the farscope, nearly knocking it over, but Blink managed to steady it and himself in time. 

A cheer emerged from pleasantly surprised vod below. The entire droid legion that had been guarding the missile launcher and apparent ordinance bay was flattened. 

It took a moment for the realization to set in that the background noise of missile and and anti-missile collisions directly overhead had slowed pace. With the northern flank gone, artillery were able to redouble efforts to the east, and a second white hot shockwave ensued, signaling that the tide of battle had shifted. It was almost too easy for the republics electro-ballistics to tactically devastate the surrounding forces. 

Eventually some sort of win/loss programming must have set in and all forces outside of a certain radius began retreating southward, conceding the scorched land to the republic army. It was cadets work to clean up the final suicidal droid charge. 

A commotion ensued as Skywalker leapt the barricade with a mid-air flip. The vod greeted him with cheers, as they correctly assumed his appearance had something to do with the skirmish’s decisive victory.

Blink sent the video of the battle to command and quickly packed up his scope and assorted equipment. Hurrying down the battered tower, Blink thought to himself that this Anakin Skywalker was the best sort of Jedi a trooper could ask for.

uh sorry i got really sidetracked there moving on

Kenobi and Skywalker quickly become the face of the war once again

they grit their teeth a bit, but when they finally have a moment to really plan they eventually agree that to take down Sideous they have to cut off his political power in addition to everything else, and taking advantage of their public personas was the most accessible way to do so (*evil laughter*)

While Dooku wasn’t captured, Yoda heard the truth in his old student’s cryptic warnings about a Sith in the Senate, and the council begins carefully editing their release of tactical plans to the Chancellor’s office in the hopes of ferreting out the spy in their midst.

Pong Krell looses two arms in his duel with Dooku. Obi-Wan successfully hides his smug pleasure at the news. Anakin enjoys makeing comparisons between him and Grievous. 

Kenobi doesn’t allow the origin of the clones to go unexamined, although he agrees that if the public were informed that they don’t actually know who ordered them it would probably cause panic.

The ‘inhibitor chips’ are ‘discovered’ early on and Anakin leads the effort to ensure that they are phased out and removed immediately. This consists of reminding every Jedi who even hesitates about how how he as a child slave had some experience with control chips and unless you want to take a leaf out of the hutts books lets start doing brain surgery chop chop mmmkay?

(This isn’t to say that Vader doesn’t still a twinge of shame at acknowledging his slave roots. But it is eclipsed by the burning guilt that he knowingly acted as slave master to his troops for decades after Sideous wiped their minds. He tried to rationalize it to himself, after all he didn’t immediately understand what Order 66 had done to the troopers. But while the morality of murder was more of an intellectual concern than a personal one, treating people as things...)

The Kamonions are a little harder to budge, referencing contracts that they refuse to allow the Jedi to see

Finally Vader snuck into the Chief Medical Scientist’s home while she was sleeping and straight-up threatened to murder her and burn down her lab. At the risk of losing her life’s work, Nala Se complied.

Vader left with the final threat that in the event that Darth Tyranus caught wind and activated Order 66 prematurely, he would kill 100 Kamonians for every Jedi felled by troopers. Shaak Ti was pleased by the cloners sudden change of heart. Tyrannus, and by extension, Sideous, are in the dark. 

Obi-Wan frequently publicly confronts Palpatine about the troops citizen status, urging him make use of his emergency powers to grant them citizenship and full pay, with the option to leave the army should they so wish. 

Anakin manages to play off his avoidance of the Chancellor as disappointment in his perceived lack of dedication to anti-slavery efforts

Finally Palpatine gives in- regardless of what happens next, the troops will be looked after.

With 2/3rds of the troopers dechipped, Vaderkin is eager to kill Sideous again, but after several intense screaming matches and sparring sessions, the time travelers come to the agreement that even if they succeed in their duel, with things as they were, the perception of the Jedi military coop would cause mass civil unrest. The scattered sith apprentices, while individually weak, were more than capable of magnifying that fear and anger until the galaxy breaks. Darth Sideous wanted to ensure that if he couldn’t have the galaxy, no one would. 

(Vader knows this. Sideous enjoyed monologuing, and much of his plotting couldn’t be safely bragged about until after he had decisively won, leaving Vader as the unwilling receptacle for years of pent-up rants and self-satisfied gloats about the inevitability of his victory)

Continued Here

[dokugaholidayexchange]

SIGN UPS FOR DOKUGA HOLIDAY EXCHANGE 2021!

It's that time of year again: time for the sign-ups for the Dokuga Holiday Exchange!

Important Dates of 2021:

August 20th – September 30th: Sign ups for the Exchange

October 1 – The name of your giftee will be sent to you along with the prompt 

December 12 – Stories/Art are due by midnight EST UNLESS extension given

December 25 – December 31 - Posting of gifts will begin on the 25th and continue to the 31st until all gifts are posted. This is a tentative schedule and may be expanded if there is a very high turn out.

Guidelines

- Please use the following form when signing up:

Dokuga or A03 Username (if applicable):

Tumblr Username (if applicable):

Livejournal Username (if applicable):

Email Address:

Ratings You Are Not Willing To Write/Draw:

Ratings You Do Not Wish To Receive:

Prompts you are requesting in your work:

Are You Willing To Be A Pitch Hitter?:

Age Statement (are you 18+):

Code Word:

GUIDELINES PART II

- The whole point of this is to be a gift exchange. To get a gift, you must give a gift. If you drop out or disappear, your gift will be given to the group as a whole. Those who disappear without word will be banned from the exchange for one round.

- The story/art must be centered around the Sess/Kag pairing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be focused on romance - it can be based on first impressions, friendship, even some sort of hatred. Side pairings are fine, just as long as it focuses on the relationship between Sesshoumaru and Kagome. This is a Dokuga Holiday Exchange, after all!

- Gifted works must be new to the exchange. Sequels to previous works, new chapters to a current story, ‘deleted scenes’ from other stories, or anything related to any of your previous work isn’t allowed.

-The story/art can be any genre, though you should go by the prompts given to you to make your best judgment. If your prompts are vague, do your best to work with them. But please pay attention to what is requested to stay away from. If a platonic relationship is requested, do not give a romantic one. If you have any questions about the prompt requested, you can always ask me for clarification, and I will pass your question or concern on to the appropriate person. Please DO NOT contact your giftee directly as your giftee is not supposed to know who the gift is coming from.

-For prompts this year please pick 1 prompt from one of these two lists that you would like your gift to be based on:

1. 25 Days Christmas Romance Prompts

2. OTP Christmas Scenarios

- All ratings are welcome, but if you have a rating that you refuse to write or wouldn't like to receive, please make note of it whenever you sign up.

- When working on your piece, please keep in mind what the recipient wants. If they ask for certain things to be used or not used, please follow them. Usually, there is nothing demanding in the requests; mostly just small things like the type of relationship or universe.

- If you are new to the exchange, please provide a link to a story (in any fandom) that you’ve written that is more than 1500 words. Drabble collections do not count. You can link to a one-shot or even an incomplete epic you’re currently working on, just as long as you can prove that you can meet the word count minimum.

- There will be a three strikes policy. I simply do not have the time to go chasing after everyone who signs up for the exchange, therefore there will be a three strikes policy as far as contacts/behavior go. If you ignore/fail to answer any correspondence within one week of sending, you will have a strike against you. Three strikes, you’re gone from the exchange.

- Please add the exchange email (dokugaexchange@gmail.com) to your contacts so you can avoid anything from us hitting the spam filter.

Explanation of Age Statement:

Again I will be asking for a statement of age (example: ’I am over the age of 18’/’I am under the age of 18’). The purpose of this is to prevent minors from gifting or being gifted with works that are rated MA. The official rule on Dokuga is: ONLY users ages 18 and up may read or post MA rated work, 16+ for rated M. As this exchange is affiliated with Dokuga, I will be following the same rules on ratings as are followed at the main site. That being noted, if you falsify your age statement you will be removed from the exchange and receive an email notifying you why you were removed.

- Real life does get in the way sometimes, so if you have to drop for any reason please let me know as soon as you possibly can. I understand that you’ve got other obligations, and am not going to be angry with you should something come up. The code word is oak tree. I will be angry, however, if you’re putting things off and finally fess up after your second extension and the posting date is looming. Should you drop, with or without word, the gift prepared for you will be shared for the group as a whole.

- It is your responsibility to have your story beta read before you send it in. We are looking for stories that are in their final polished form, not something that is hot off of the press. I simply do not have the time to beta every story that comes in. If you do not have a regular beta, you can look for someone on the Dokuga Forums, or on the SessKag Discord servers.

- Should a story come in that does not meet the requirements, the mods reserve the right to reject the piece and ask you to correct it. Ignoring this request is grounds for your removal from the exchange.

- Stories should be sent to the exchange email, dokugaexchange@gmail.com. Either attach in .rtf format, as a googledoc, or add it directly into the body of the email. If anything is sent in any other format, you will be asked to send in the preferred formatting.

- No posting of stories elsewhere until after the big reveal on New Year's Day. The whole point of a secret gift exchange is to keep it a secret. I will let you know when it is clear to post your stories on your own sites.

- Keeping with the above statement, please don’t give out the name of who you are doing a gift for. Blowing the secret ruins the fun!

- As I am running the exchange, I will not be participating.

- When you send your story/art, please include the following header.

Title:

Author/Artist:

Recipient:

Rating:

Summary:

Original Prompts:

To ensure you have read and understood the rules, please send in the code word when you sign up for the exchange.

And as always, you can reach out to me with any questions on

Dokuga

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Discord (Kaoruhana (or Kaoru)#9994)Kaoruhana

[carlyraejcpsen]

alright, i’ve tried to keep quiet because i truly believe in karma and wanted this rp to close through the admin’s own actions and not give them any opportunities to blame it on me instead. it also felt like beating a dead horse, because i was sure they’d close the rp after losing a huge proportion of their active members and the majority of their diversity. however, after seeing multiple people sharing their experiences today, they are still posting promo posts and starting their event. so yeah, here’s my experience with @thevillagerp​​

NOTE: i no longer have screenshots from my conversations with the admins, as i blocked them when i left the rp for the sake of my own mental health, but i did save the text in my drafts, so the messages below are copy pasted. i have not edited them in any way. They also deleted my original anonymous messages off of their blog.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: racism, very vague allusions to homophobia and transphobia

so i was a member of this roleplay for around two months. during my time there, it was startlingly obvious that white fcs were preferred and prioritised, both from the fact that they got more plots and interactions in general and from the fact that admins never promoted diversity on the main. even now, they repeatedly say they “would still love to receive some more male and non-binary apps” while ignoring that they currently have a ratio of 8 fcs of colour to 24 white fcs. their diversity rules at the time were that 1/3 of a mun’s characters had to be played by an fcoc. so people could easily just play one or two white characters.

a while ago, i sent an anonymous message to the main asking if they had considered perhaps changing this rule to be 2/3 characters instead of 1/3, since there were so few muses of colour in the roleplay (as i said before, they’ve since deleted this from their blog so i cannot provide a screenshot). they responded that they had been thinking of upping the character limit to four instead of three, with a rule that 2/4 must be played by an fcoc. i gave them the benefit of the doubt and the time to enact this change, but nothing happened.

so a few weeks later, i sent them this message on anonymous:

I was wondering if you had thought any more about the diversity rules here? I know you said before that you were considering increasing the character limit, but I noticed that hasn’t happened and I wanted to know if that was a change we’re going to see or if you would consider changing the rules in another way? I’m really disheartened by the lack of diversity in the roleplay

at the time there were 18 characters of colour out of a total of over 60. they responded (again, i’m sorry i don’t have the actual wording since they’ve deleted the messages) that they had thought about it and decided against upping the character limit, but instead would be having a weekly “poc acceptance day,” where they would only be accepting apps with fcs of colour. they also said they were doing this “now that the waitlist was mostly cleared,” which meant that the rp was mostly at capacity anyway, so they needed to look more at how to encourage their existing members to promote diversity, since there weren’t spaces open for new people to bring them in.

i responded with another anon expressing my disappointment and pointing out that they had done more to prevent having too many celebrity characters than too few muses of colour, as at the time they had a ban on celebrity muses. i wouldn’t usually suggest a ban on certain fcs, but as it was something they had done for celebrity characters, then i supposed it was a reasonable option.

they didn’t even respond to this message and instead posted on the main asking me to come off anon to discuss it. so i did, and i sent them the following dm:

i didn’t want to come off anon because i honestly feel really ostracised in this group and didn’t want to make it worse, but i don’t want to drop this issue and you aren’t comfortable addressing it publicly so here we are i guess. like i said in my previous message, i really don’t see how a “poc acceptance day” is going to make anywhere near enough of a difference. people will just wait for the opportunity to play their white characters. there are only 18 characters of colour in a roleplay with over 60 characters. that’s less than a third, which is obviously concerning. what’s even more concerning for me is that these characters are more often than not overlooked. i am often ghosted when plotting, or people don’t even reach out at all when i like plotting calls or intro posts. and then i have to watch characters like leo almost exclusively interact with white women (i’m sure that’s not the only example, but it is the first that comes to mind as he is one of the more active characters).

so this issue goes so much deeper than there just not being adequate representation in the rp. i really tried to help, i suggested making it a rule that 2/3 characters need to be poc in my original ask and you mentioned upping the character limit in response. i was worried that my concerns were being brushed aside, but i waited a while to give you the benefit of the doubt and the space to discuss the issue. so you can understand why it was really upsetting today to learn that the one thing you suggested was dropped and instead replaced with something that is barely scratching the surface of the problem. and i don’t know if it was your intention, but by saying that you were waiting for the waitlist to clear, it comes across as not wanting to receive any backlash from people who would want to join with only white characters. and even if people did want to join with faceclaims of colour, they can’t because the waitlist is cleared. like i suggested, you could change the rules so that 2 out of 3 characters must be people of colour. or, as was your proposed idea, up the character limit to four. you could also put a temporary ban on white faceclaims until the ratio evens out. as i mentioned, it’s really distressing that this was something you were willing to do for celebrity characters, but not to aid diversity.

i also just want to make it clear that these have been the only anons i’ve sent, i know you’ve been getting other ones, but those weren’t from me!!

( for context, they were receiving anons from someone else claiming that they felt left out in the rp ).

i had hoped that coming off anon would show them that this was a very real issue which was affecting their members, as well as giving them a space to discuss it privately instead of on the main. they responded with:

Hi Em, thank you for coming forward. We really, really appreciate it and we understand it’s not an easy thing to do. We also appreciate you flying the flag for diversity so strongly. We can always strive to be better, we are on the same page with you here.

Let us just explain our decision making. Firstly, just to address the waitlist, that was certainly not at all our intention when we brought it up. It was a logistical decision with 5+ applicants having already waited a week for acceptance and aware of their position on a waitlist.

When we decided against upping the character limit (and therefore the 2/4 POC character rule), we thought a POC acceptance day could be a good alternative course of action. In our eyes, this was something that would probably bring more POC characters to the group than the 2/4 rule because we knew there weren’t going to be many muns taking up an additional fourth character. This was a rule we’ve seen other groups enjoy success from so we wanted to try it out here. Plus, we think a day that explicitly highlights diversity every week would bring the message to the forefront of everyone’s minds. As we said, we’re going to monitor this over the next couple of weeks to see if it brings any improvement because we’d really like to have it as an ongoing rule.

The non-POC ban is actually a measure we’ve spoken about too and we are considering putting one in place should this fail. Thank you for raising your concerns, know that we’ve taken them very seriously and we hope that you’ll trust our judgement in trying this rule out first to see where it leads.

first of all, i don’t think i even have to mention the wording of “flying the flag for diversity.” but the real crux of the issue here is that they supposedly wanted me to come off anon to discuss the issue, but instead just explained their idea further and didn’t take anything i said on board. they didn’t even say a single word about how i told them i felt ostracised and regularly got ignored. i knew from speaking to other muns in the rp who played muses of colour (and just from looking at the dash) that they felt the same way too, but of course was only speaking from my own experience.

i thought long and hard about how to respond to this, as i was so disheartened by their unwillingness to listen to their members and the fact that they didn’t care that i felt left out. it felt like they had asked me to come off anon just so they knew who was messaging them and therefore put a target on my back, so honestly the thought of being on the dash or talking to the admins made me incredibly anxious. before i had a chance, however, they responded again with:

Hi hun, we’ve continued discussing this issue over the last couple of days and we wanted to let you know that we’ve decided to put in place a non-POC ban instead. Thank you again for holding a mirror up to the group. We do hope that this will recorrect the balance.

so i waited to see how things would play out. they posted about this new ban here and pinned the post to the top of the main:

[ IMAGE ID: a screenshot from thevillagehq of an admin update, which reads: in the interest of keeping the village a diverse space, we are currently only accepting applications for POCs. please note that any apps or reserves submitted to us for faceclaims that are not POCs will be deleted. we will lift this rule once we see fit.

thank you for your understanding and your efforts in making this group a brighter, more inclusive and diverse place for all. /END ID ]

this rule remained in place for around two weeks, during which time they made almost no effort to promote it. the above post was pinned to the main page, but that was the only mention of the ban anywhere on their page, they didn’t update the rules page or even put a note on the application page about it. during this two week period, the admins posted 10 promo posts, none of which suggested fcs or even mentioned the ban or diversity at all. the ban was then lifted suddenly when the pinned post was removed and the admins just went back to accepting apps with white fcs. the ratio had only evened out in those two weeks (from 18 out of 65 to 24/50) because of people going inactive or leaving, and there was nothing put into place to continue to promote diversity after the lift of the ban. in the three days after the ban was lifted, the admins posted over 10 promo posts, the same amount they had posted during the entirety of the ban. it was clear that they had no intention of actually making changes in their rp and had only done so because i refused to drop the issue.

again, i thought a lot about what i wanted to message them. i knew at this point that they didn’t want to make any real changes, but i still felt like i had to make it clear to them how disappointing their actions were. once again, i was messaged before i even had a chance, this time for bubbling.

as you can see in the above correspondence, i had told the admins point blank that i felt left out and ignored in the rp because of the characters i played (aubrey plaza, mj rodriguez and keiynan lonsdale fcs. all of my characters were queer and used either she/they or they/them pronouns). as a general rule, the only people who wanted to write with me and have interesting plots with me were people who played other muses of colour. the rp had a rule that you must reply to 3+ muns on every character, which i had been doing. i had only been back from my hiatus for a few days at this point and had responded to 6 different open starters the day prior. their message to me read:

Hi hun. There’s something we wanted to address to you directly. It’s been expressed to us by multiple members during these last few weeks that they have felt excluded by your character within the group, especially when it comes to the friend bubble that has formed between Mars, Bowie, Luvena, Asher and others. 

While we encourage the development of friendships and trust that this isn’t intentional, we have a zero tolerance for bubble roleplaying at The Village. We are aware that our three mun activity rules have been met by all parties involved, however, bubbling is usually a little more nuanced than that and it seems it has unfortunately begun to create a bit of a divide within the group. 

We have already issued individual warnings to a few people within the bubble, however with multiple members still expressing their concerns to us, we decided it would be better to address the group as a whole. We hope that by pointing this out to you, you will try and branch out to your fellow members a little more from now on - and try and be a little more inclusive when it comes to everyone else in the group. 

We take such matters very seriously as admins, and while we hope it won’t have to come to this, there will be consequential steps taken should we not see any changes in your interactions in the weeks to come.

as you can imagine, i was incredibly upset to receive this message after already telling them i didn’t get plots from many of their members and they had done nothing. even people who i had previously messaged continued to only write with the same few white characters. i don’t deny that we definitely had a friendship group between our characters, but there were multiple people in that roleplay, including the admins, who only cared about ship plots or plots with the same few muns. me and other people who received the same message had all previously told the admins that people aren’t plotting with us and gotten ignored, so receiving this message made it clear that they neither cared about us nor wanted us in their rp. and so i responded as below:

yeah i literally told you i felt left out because there are multiple people only writing with white characters and you never addressed it, so this message is honestly insulting. i have reached out to almost every new member, responded to multiple open starters and have tried to plot with as many people as possible. like i told you, i am often left on read or people don’t even message me at all. if people do message me, i am usually expected to put in all of the effort and if people aren’t interested in actually developing plots with me then i am obviously not going to force my characters on them. all of my characters are queer, non binary people of colour and the harsh truth of this roleplay is that people don’t care about them. i even wrote out a whole list of 20 detailed suggested connections in an attempt to get more plots and nothing came from that either. i’ve even gotten anonymous hate saying that offering to explain my characters’ pronouns was “patronising,” which i didn’t feel like i could approach you about because, when i told you about how i’m feeling excluded, you didn’t care.

so if i only have actual plots with the people who actually care about my characters, i make no apologies. i also don’t even have threads with half of the characters you named, asher being the only one, and have literally only just come off hiatus. so please explain how i am bubbling, because this really just feels targeted at this point.

you’ve made it endlessly clear that this rp isn’t a safe space for people who want to play diverse characters. the main was practically silent while you had a ban on white faceclaims, which you never actively promoted, and then you dropped that suddenly without putting anything else in place. you also deleted my initial anonymous messages asking about diversity as if you were trying to hide that there was ever an issue. you turned anonymous messages off, so that no one can safely criticise you. because i did that off anon and ever since it has felt like there is a massive target on my back. my characters have been “accidentally” on the activity checks multiple times despite me being on hiatus (people get a notification that they were tagged even if you remove their name from the list btw). plus when i asked for an extension on my hiatus, you said that you would allow it “just this once” which now makes me feel like i can’t come to you if i’m busy. right now, for example, i am in the middle of moving house, but i’m also stressed about trying to stay active because you have made yourselves completely unapproachable.

the ratio only evened out slightly because members left. then suddenly after the ban you’re posting multiple promo posts a day??? you couldn’t get more obvious. i came to you about diversity in good faith, hoping that it was something you were unaware of, but you have made it abundantly clear that you actively do not want to promote diversity in your roleplay, we are just here to be witnesses to your ship. there are multiple members who are actually bubbling who have been brought to your attention, but nothing has been done. leo continues to only write with the same three white and white passing characters. charlotte pretty much only appears to write with leo and post a vague “message me for plots” post that wasn’t even tagged. both of you only put effort into your ship threads with each other and the occasional text threads. even with something like group events: while i’ve been here, there’s been a pride event that neither of your characters were even in new york for (an event where i was the only one reaching out and posting multiple starters, by the way); there was no event last month, and this month all you’re talking about is this housewarming party.

i’m really disheartened that it’s come to this, but i can’t be here anymore. please post unfollows for all my characters. you’ve said multiple times that we should trust you as admins, but this message shows again that i simply can’t do that. from the disregard of trigger warnings, to the way you treated being held accountable for the lack of diversity, to how you respond to people asking for hiatuses, this isn’t a safe space. even if i stayed, the target you have placed on me is making it insufferable to just write my characters in peace.

the other muns who received the same bubbling message (copy pasted btw, we all got the same one word for word) all responded with their own concerns and criticisms in responses of a similar length to mine. none of us received a reply, our unfollows were just posted the next day without any further responses from the admins. a few of the other members who had written and plotted with us chose to leave as well, which the admins wrote off as us just dragging them with us as opposed to them being able to make their own decisions and being aware of the situation (which was incredibly obvious. no promotion of a white fc ban, suddenly being active on the main once they try to stealthily drop the ban, then the majority of their muses of colour leaving???)

i haven’t paid the rp much attention since i left, as i mentioned above i blocked the main and the majority of the members just for my own mental health. but from a quick scroll through today i can see that the only change in diversity rules is that now instead of your third character having to be a poc, it is now your second. however, you still only have to have 1 character out of 3 have a fc of colour. so very little has been done, but of course i’m not surprised in the slightist.

these admins don’t want diversity in their roleplay. if you play any character who isn’t a rich, white, cishet neurotypical, please avoid it at all costs. it’s not in any way a safe environment.

[liesoverthec]

the post hasn't surfaced yet so please use this ask to talk abt the objectification of the 911 men!!

Ahh May you’re too nice but also thank you, I’m gonna 😂💛

This got. CRAZY long bc I just had a million thoughts so I’m gonna stick it under a cut.

To be honest, I think the reason they do *any* sort of objectification at all is that middle aged and older viewers are used to being able to objectify actors to a certain extent. Lord knows it happens on literally every other single piece of media, and this is a mainstream broadcast show, not an indie series or the likes, so I think they have to cater to those people as well as us, and the WAY they do it is so interesting to me bc even when they’re doing it, they use it as a way to drive home other, deeper messages.

For starters, I feel like the show OG was trying to be in the pilot and the first few episodes would have objectified the men WAY more than we see now if there hadn’t been that shift in tone - the sex addict plot could have been SO much more extended and given us a lot more opportunities to see Buck shirtless and to objectify him and his body. So I find it SO interesting that around the same time as Bobby opening up about his family and his past, we also stop w/ Buck being blatantly shirtless all the time. Narratively, it signals to me the point where the writers moved away from the the typical tv show that will treat their actors like meat, and moved more into a “female gaze” show. And then what’s really interesting to me, is that for Buck, after that, when he has sex w Taylor Kelly in s2, both times we NEVER see him undressed. The second time they don’t get very far, but he’s wearing a buttonable shirt. He absolutely could have been wearing that shirt closed, and she could have opened it, and he could have been wearing nothing underneath it, and we would have seen his chest again in a sexy scenario - but they didn’t. In fact they made the DELIBERATE choice to give him an undershirt. And of course with the first time they cut away and just left us w the understanding that sex was happening, yet again taking away an opportunity to show O.S. at least partially undressed. Which is SO different from how s1 goes about it, where we actually see Buck w his shirt open and his underwear exposed MULTIPLE times. So it’s so incredibly interesting to me that while none of the (main/regular) women’s stories are ever about sex like Buck’s is, I also think it’s REALLY interesting that the objectification of the men was, and could have been, much worse and that they didn’t have to move away from that, but they did.

But then secondly! The very last time we get into a plot that revolves around the men’s bodies specifically is in 2x01, which is SUCH an interesting plot. Surface level - it’s just about the men competing about who’s more attractive, and we get lots of muscle flexing and hot manliness to go along with it. And it is, at a surface level, incredibly shallow. But simultaneously they use it to 1. Introduce the idea that Buck wasn’t a sex addict bc he was “dealing w the stress of the job” like s1 mostly implied. It was bc he’s desperate to feel useful and wanted by someone, and at that point he really wanted that acceptance within the firehouse, rather than from other people. (Bc lbr, Abby didn’t do shit for Buck. It was Bobby, opening up and accepting the family, and specifically Buck, that gave him the connection he’d been seeking through sex.) And then 2. They also use it as an opportunity to SPECIFICALLY, IN CANON, say that it’s what you do that makes you attractive, and that makes you a hero, not how you look. Which is just!!! A crazy message!!! Especially considering they follow through on it, particularly in the areas where the women are concerned!

And in regards to 2x01, it’s soooooo fucking interesting to me that the ONLY time we really truly see Eddie shirtless, he’s actually putting clothes ON. They literally do the opposite trope of 'giving the hot male an excuse to take his shirt off'. And sure, they make it a sexy moment, but there's absolutely interesting commentary there about him actively covering himself up at the moment he is most sexualized, and it being taken as a sexy thing. Something about how you don't have to be naked to be attractive, it's about your intent in your actions, rather than your physical body. (Probably me reading too far into it, but again, they COULD have had him striping off his regular shirt, a good few seconds of him shirtless digging through a bag, and THEN the sexy slow mo pulling shirt on. At the very least, when they objectify him there, they make it MUCH shorter than they could have, which is SO DAMN INTERESTING to me).

But then finally, we still do have shirtless scenes! But the fact that it’s Chim who’s shirtless is just SO FASCINATING. Bc THE WAY THEY DO IT - they're never dunking Chim in a lake, or having something spilled on him, like other shows would do, to get his shirt clinging to him and him to whip it off in a spray of water or whatever. It's in scenes where it makes sense for him to be shirtless, and its NEVER treated like a big deal. It's just Chim, in his body, comfortably living his life. So I think the way they do it gives him more respect than other shows give their male characters, let alone their female characters 💀

And it's SO interesting to me that they use Chim (I mean, besides the fact that K.C. clearly has muscles for days and wow of course you'd use Chim). But I just think - on any other show, it would absolutely be Buck who we see casually shirtless. And that WAS almost this show, which is why we saw him shirtless at all. But failing that, it should have been Eddie. And then of course, after Eddie, it should be Bobby. I mean, plenty of other shows go for the 'sexy middle-aged white man' (cough cough LS) so Bobby would be the next logical step in the "who are we gonna make our hot man?" ladder, also - P.K. has BICEPS THAT COULD CRUSH ME so I would not blame them for making him the hot one.

But - like I said in my tags on my original post - I'm always thinking about Chim's story in 2x01 with the calendar, and feeling like he never gets to be the hero (WHICH I COULD GO ON AND ON ABOUT HOW BEING THE HERO IS EQUATED THERE TO BEING THE HOT ONE, SO LIKE, CHIM BEING SHIRTLESS, SUBTLE REINFORCEMENT OF HIM BEING A HERO!) I love that for him, being the truly hot one on the team. And then you throw in his story from 2x04, and feeling like his life wasn't going anywhere and seeing him now, comfortable in his body and his life and being happy??

I wish no one had to be objectified and shirtless but I know this is broadcast tv, and honestly, the choice for it to be Chim, with his story and his background, in itself is I think a choice that makes me happy.

Of course, the show is nowhere near perfect, and I’d argue that it’s one of the areas they fall shortest in. Buck sleeping w his therapist would never have happened for a woman on this show, and it CERTAINLY wouldn’t have been brushed off again as a joke like it was in s3. And it really bothered me in 4x07 when the lady slapped Eddie’s ass, esp since he was clearly uncomfortable with it. I’d actually really enjoy seeing them write a plot for one of the men that addresses them feeling oversexualized as firefighters, and how people seem to think they have permission since the men are all public employees, bc I think the show could do it really well, and I think it’s an area that hasn’t been addressed on other shows recently (plus lbr I know I’m biased but I think OG would do it better if it has been done…)

So idk. I don’t know if I have a solid conclusion here. The show does SUCH a good job with the women, and a solidly less good job with the men - but I also see some really interesting choices at work that I really respect.

Thanks for the opportunity May, sorry if there was no coherent thread to this. 😂🤷‍♀️

[jonsa101]

Yes, There’s Only 14 Episodes in Season 3 But Sharpwin is On Track and Progressing How They’re Supposed To.

There has been so much talk about this season’s writing and the lack of Sharpwin scenes that I thought I would just address everything in this post.

First, the writing this season is NOT BAD! In my honest opinion I actually think this season has some of the best writing in the series. Compared to season two, the writing is head and shoulders above what we got last year. More than ever before we are diving into these characters stories, seeing friendships form, getting a better look into their home life and seeing secondary characters shine! This is a good thing! These were the things that were so desperately needed in season 2 but we didn’t see this play out. I’ve said this before in my infamous season 2 rant and I’ll say it again, a show can’t solely depend on a ship! It has to have great storytelling and good character development for all of it’s main characters. This is what New Amsterdam failed to do in season two and they’re now making it up for it in season 3. The only area I would say the storyline suffered was the Cassian, Helen and Max “love triangle.” There was definitely more intent with that plot before the pandemic. Cassian was not only supposed to be a catalyst for Jealous Max and Sharpwin but he was also supposed to come in and challenge the way Max did things. Cassian’s whole thing was self care first=great patient care which was the complete opposite of Max and the two of them were supposed to clash. Obviously this completely changed due to the pandemic. You can’t have a storyline about a doctor prioritizing himself first for “better patient care”in the midst of thousands of doctors globally throwing themselves on the frontlines and even loosing their lives to COVID-19. It would have been a terrible look to have that storyline so they clearly scrapped it! What we saw was probably them trying to salvage whatever was left from the original plot while they still had Daniel Dae Kim in the limited amount of episodes for season 3.

Apart from that, I think the writers are doing a fantastic job in terms of character development this season. Arguably I would say that Iggy probably has the best storyline so far and that’s incredible for his character. Tyler Labine is acting his ass off and Iggy’s scenes with Lauren, Vijay and Martin were top tier!!! We are finally getting a Max and Reynolds bromance that was teased in season one but literally know where to be found in season two! It’s great seeing them bond on screen and I hope we get more moments with these two. We’re also seeing Reynold’s “life plan” blow up in his face and we finally have some closure with Bloom. They kept us in limbo for so long! We didn’t know if him and Bloom were truly over but now we finally know. Also, it seems like he and Evie are officially done as well and he might have a new love interest on the horizon. For Lauren, she’s clearly seems to be having a coming out story which is something I didn’t see coming at all. I’m really curious how they’re going to play this out for her and can’t wait to see it unfold. Last but not least, for Max and Helen they are both going through massive character development phases which leads me to my second point.

I love a good Max and Helen scene as much as the next person. To me they’re the ultimate ship and I want to see them thrive and flourish but just because we don’t see Max and Helen interact doesn’t mean that the show isn’t properly developing or investing in their relationship!!!!!!!!The relationship between Max and Helen is so nuanced that their relationship doesn’t hang in the balance because they don’t have more witty, flirtatious, or emotional dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, I adore those moments. Those scenes between them make us the passionate sharwpin shippers we are. At the same time though, we have to truly take a look at why the state of their relationship is where its at now and why from a narrative perspective their current interactions make sense. In order to do this, we have to take a look at where Max and Helen left off last year.

At the end of season 2, Max made a move on Helen and almost kissed her in her office. After this moment occurred he never addressed it and at the time he was still dating Alice. There’s no doubt in my mind that this was the catalyst for why Helen started dating Cassian in the first place. She had practically laid her feelings out there and told Max he was the reason she gave up half of her department. After this revelation and the massive, intimate moment he initiated in her office, he didn’t even have the decency to address it. He swept it under the rug and wanted to keep the same relationship that he had with her like nothing ever happened. Even though Helen was aware about Alice, we now know from season 3 that Helen felt a type away that Max never “officially” told Helen that he was dating her. This is IMPORTANT!!! Max and Helen did not end on a high note in season 2. In fact, the very last scenes we see of season 2 is Helen blowing off Max to go on a date with Cassian and Max breaking off things with Alice. I know this wasn’t intentional due to the season being cut short but it definitely contributes to where they are now. 

Fast forward a year later, and not only do we still have a massive almost kissed elephant in the room between Max and Helen but also the trauma of being on the frontlines of a pandemic and going through the biggest social justice movement the world has seen. This is something I’ve said many times over but I’m not sure the fandom recognizes how much these events have permanently altered these characters and changed the dynamics of this show. COVID-19 changed everything. The Black Live Matter Movement for the first time grabbed the attention of the world and changed everything too! Max and Helen are in the process of trying to heal and rebuild their lives the best they can as individuals after such a tumultuous year. At the same time, they are acutely aware of the feelings they have for each other and the UST between them and are carrying the weight of that as well. Naturally guys, the combination of all this is going to change most dynamics in a relationship. Things are awkward and distant  because Max and Helen are awkward and distant!! They have a lot of shit that they’re going through as individuals and subconsciously as a “couple.” They are clearly not in a healthy place to be as vulnerable as they once were to each other. And how can they be when their feelings have literally been eating at them for over year?! It’s hard to ignore that and try to force yourself to go back to the way things were. Especially when their feelings have “technically”  been out in the open since the end of season 2. They both know what it is! They were steps away from unleashing years of built up sexual tension between them and they went on with their lives like it never even happened. Max walking in on her and Cassian kissing in HER OFFICE and subsequently having that convo with Helen was not for shits and giggles. It triggered the BEAST of his feelings that he had fought so hard to suppress. There is no doubt in my mind that when he saw them in her office kissing, he was having some serious dejavu to their almost kissing affair last year. He‘s in love with her and she’s in love with him but this what happens when you continuously try and run away from those feelings and let it fester instead of trying to deal with it head on. The dynamic  were seeing between them now is a result of their unresolved issues and it absolutely plays into Sharpwin’s story. It doesn’t take away from it. It makes sense for where they are NOW! 

If we look at season three holistically, you’ll realize that a momentum for something significant happening for Sharpwin has been set through the acting and writing. I got to give it to Ryan Eggold. He has that fire and desire, Mr. Darcy type level acting down to a tee so far. It is so satisfying seeing Max so overcome with his feelings that you can tangibly see it in his body language and hear it in his voice. We have seen Max taken aback by Helen before but we have NEVER seen him like this. I keep on saying it but this is different guys. Something has shifted and it seems like Max is on the verge of exploding. His feeling are burning hot right underneath the surface and it’s a beautiful thing to behold. Last night’s episode was ripe with this type of content and Ryan was in his acting bag! It wasn’t an overtly “Sharpwin” episode but the writing and the acting is so clever and methodical, it will have you thinking otherwise. At the beginning of season 3 Max told Helen that he wants to build something better for Luna and something better for her. Was last night not a beautiful reflection of that? One question asking Max if he has ever loved a black woman put him in the shoes of his patient’s husband and had Max advocating for his wife like he would advocate for Helen if it was her! If that’s not fucking romantic I don’t know what it is and if the alarm bells aren’t going off that there is something deeper at play here with a huge payoff around the corner I don’t know what to tell you! Another moment that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is when Helen was telling Cassian that her brother died. I wrote about this in a previous meta of mind but Helen at her most vulnerable telling Cassian that she feels like she’s running out of time is SO SIGNIFICANT guys!!! It’s not only tell us that she fears that she’s missing out on the windows of opportunities for the wants and needs in her life but it literally sets the pacing of how quickly Sharpwin is going to progress. It is the beautiful freudian slip that tells us exactly where things are headed for these two. To me this is equivalent to Max telling Helen “I love my doctor” and “what if I want you?” in season 1. This episode had no interaction between Max and Helen but it was a MASSIVE Sharpwin indicator through and through! These are just a couple of examples but even their respective journeys in parenting is so Sharpwin driven. So in all I’m not mad in the direction the show has taken to showcase their relationship this season because Sharpwin is deeply interwoven in the storyline this year even if it’s not overtly obvious through emotional dialogue/ interactions. 

Also, one thing you have to realize is this, season three is wrapping up a lot of loose ends from season 2 and when it comes to Max and Helen these two points will be/ have to be addressed in the next six episodes.

The Almost Kiss

Whether or Not They Want To Be Together

The showrunners know without a shadow of doubt that the resolution for these two points is owed! If Sharpwin is talking about their almost kiss, there is no way that they aren’t talking about what they mean to each other and what their future looks like together. Both solutions literally go hand in hand and I promise you they are not delaying the resolution for that till season 4. It’s not happening fam. We will see this play out within the next six episodes. So in hindsight, more Sharpwin interaction are on the horizon. 

When I was making predictions about this season I wasn’t aware that this season would only be 14 episodes. I’m sad that season 3 is so short but that still doesn’t change my mind for where I think the story is going. Call me crazy but I’m sticking to my guns. There is something about how Ryan is portraying Max that is signaling something huge. Also I just trust the context clues that i believe the show is giving. I trust it! Anyway y’all! If you have any sharpwin question just DM here or message me on Twitter! my username is @oyindaodewale. 

Love you guys! ❤️

[octerminal]

Hi there! I'm a first time Mass Effect OT player thanks to the Legendary Edition. In relation to your post about avoiding the romances in Mass Effect 1 (which I bookmarked for reference,) I was wondering if you also made posts for avoiding romances in the other two games as well, and if you had, where I could find them? And if not, do you have any general advice for not triggering the romances? Thanks!

Hey! Thanks for the ask.

I’m sorry, but I haven’t made a guide for the other games. This is mainly because ME1 is the only game where it’s easy to accidentally trigger the actual romance, by which I mean the game now acts as if the two of you are in a dedicated romance and it will automatically proceed to all the major romance points, like the locker and en route to Ilos scenes. ME2 and ME3 still have issues where Shepard can accidentally trip flirtation (or be forced into it, depending on the LI), but it’s much harder to trigger the actual romances because in both games they're scenes where Shepard or the LI will point blank say, “Hey, wanna go out?” or some iteration, lol.

That being said, I still have plenty of tips I can give you to avoid those issues, sure! I can probably guess which LIs might’ve brought this question on since there are a few “main offenders” - if we want to use that term lol - but I’ll try to address what I know about each LI. Please be aware that this won’t be as specific as my ME1 guide because I don’t have any handy transcripts available so I’ll be working purely off memory.

If anyone has anymore specific knowledge on any of these LIs, or thinks I have made a mistake on any of them, please let me know. Thanks.

ME1 LOVE INTERESTS

General note: If you are not romancing Liara, whoever your VS is will always seek you out in the ME2 prologue. This is not romance specific. It is only romance specific with Liara.

Kaidan: I addressed how to avoid his flirtation issues in ME3 in my ME1 post because he is one of the aforementioned “main offenders” people complain about the most frequently, and all of his issues are easily fixed once you know how to do it.

Ashley: I don’t really have any data on her for ME3. I’ve only ever done Ashley-as-VS-with-mShep saves when I also romanced her in ME1. I don’t believe she’s similar to Kaidan in that she will always proposition you if you’re not locked into a romance (because I believe Kaidan does that for a variety of reasons that are purely mechanical/dev signalling in nature, which are irrelevant for Ashley). I would imagine that if you don’t want her to be romantic with you in the hospital, the same rule of thumb of “tell her the romance is over on Mars” would work, but I haven’t personally tested it.

Liara: There is not really any way around a lot of her scenes. A lot of her romanced content is shared with unromanced Shepards. Even in places where it’s not, Shepard is usually more intimate with Liara than they are with other squadmates. (Example of this: I’m pretty sure when you meet on Illium in ME2, every Shepard will hug her, but only romanced Shepards will kiss her.) This means wishing your Shepard didn’t hug her on Illium, or that she didn’t have your Shepard’s armor in LotSB, or certain banters of hers that trigger in ME3, etc., are impossible to avoid because it is not the game having her flirts easy to trip. It is the game just straight up making very little effort to make a distinction between romanced and unromanced Liara.

That being said, if it really bothers you, being renegade toward her when the option is available helps balance it out. For example: at the end of LotSB, Shepard is not forced into comforting Liara or hugging her; they can just let her cry and move on. Things like that.

ME2 LOVE INTERESTS

General note: When speaking to Kelly about any of these characters, it doesn’t hurt to go neutral or renegade. I think being forced into a discussion about how attractive you find these LIs is really only an issue for mShep and it’s fairly easy to avoid for femShep.

None of the romances can be properly triggered until after the LI’s loyalty has been successfully completed. No amount of flirtation negates this. So at the bare minimum, you really only need to be vigilant after completing a character’s loyalty.

All of these characters also do not really have any wonky mechanics going into ME3, because to have a romance with any of the ME2 LIs in ME3, you have trigger it in ME2 first.

Jacob: Jacob is also a frequently complained about “main offender” because it’s easy for femShep to flirt with him. He is also one of the few LIs in ME2 where you can kind of kickstart his romance in ME2 by expressing interest and having a few conversations about that before Horizon, but this does not actually trigger the romance. You are not locked into it if you do trip into this scenario with him, because it’s completing the loyalties that allow for you to actually trigger a character’s romance. You cannot romance a character properly if you either don’t do their loyalty, or you do it but you failed to secure their loyalty during it.

If you tripped into this scenario with Jacob, you can just simply not continue it going forth, or you can do an organic “breakup” after his loyalty where you continually try to press him to unpack his feelings about what just happened with his father. He will end things with a Shepard who does this to him.

As for avoiding the flirtations at all: it is possible and I do it all the time, but I have no transcripts available so I can’t exactly show which dialogue options to pick. I want to say neutral and renegade dialogue options are your friend here, though some of those can still be flirtatious, if I recall correctly.

When he talks about leaving the Alliance, don’t pick the options that sound like it could be about his body/fitness. When he mentions that Cerberus rebuilt Shepard, don’t have her pick the options that seem like she’s asking if he likes what he sees, etc. Unfortunately, I remember the actual lines better than I remember what the dialogue wheel option was. I recommend saving before talking to him and going through all the dialogue options and reloading until you find the ones where femShep doesn’t sound flirty. (That’s how I found them.)

Or, if you play on PC: you could simply just wait for someone to re-release the mod that gets rid of the flirtatiousness between Jacob and femShep. There was one like that for original ME2, though I never used it so I’m not sure how it actually worked.

Garrus: It is really hard to both accidentally flirt with Garrus and to accidentally trip into his romance. He has little content before his loyalty, and after his loyalty, you have to take a very specific dialogue option to trigger Shepard’s proposition. Even after that, the game still gives you a way to back out if that was, in fact, not what you expected to happen.

Thane: Considering that Thane isn’t even available to recruit until after Horizon, his mechanics are also fairly “safe” compared to, say, Jacob’s. That being said, there is the infamous “I want you, Thane” option on the dialogue wheel, but that one is fairly...obvious. I recall most of Thane’s dialogue options seeming fairly obvious and thus easy to avoid if you’re not wanting to flirt with him. If you’re having trouble, neutral or renegade is probably the way to go. He also always calls femShep “siha” once loyal (I believe that conversation happens after his loyalty, anyway); there is no way around that outside simply not talking to him. Him calling femShep “siha” is not indicative of a romance being triggered.

Jack: Jack, like Jacob, is one of the characters who you can start a flirtation with before Horizon. Again, this doesn’t actually trigger the proper romance. To my knowledge, Jack will also always proposition mShepards. This also does not trigger her romance - in fact, if you accept, it locks you out of her actual romance because she no longer trusts you. Unfortunately, if you want to avoid the proposition entirely - I don’t know or remember if there’s a way to do that.

Tali: I recall Tali’s main issues being the conversation with Kelly after recruiting her (but this is hazy, sorry) where I think Kelly always implies Tali has a crush on you. If this is the case, I have no idea how to avoid it. The other main issue is after you successfully complete Tali’s loyalty and you get to the conversation where she talks about linking suits. It is very easy for mShep to accidentally trip into a romantic conversation with Tali here, and thus be forced into turning her down afterwards. I am pretty certain it’s possible to avoid this, and it likely involves not taking the paragon option. If it isn't possible to avoid though, then all you really have available is to turn her down when she brings it up.

Miranda: I don’t actually recall anything egregious with her mechanics. I am fairly certain that she is not like Jack and Jacob where you can soft start her romance before Horizon, because I remember noticing that when I did her romance recently. After Horizon, I want to say that her romance dialogue options are fairly obvious, but I could be wrong. Either way, the same as all the other LIs would apply: you’d have to complete her loyalty to begin with to even get access to those conversations, so you really only need to be vigilant after her loyalty has been completed.

Samara and Kelly: They are not “real” LIs, which means you don’t get a romance achievement for them and they have next to no content. Kelly’s romantic dialogue options are similar to Thane in how exaggerated they tend to be, and thus are easy to avoid. Samara is only receptive toward paragon Shepards to begin with, but also puts a hard stop to any flirtation attempts regardless, so tripping her “romance” is not really an issue.

ME3 LOVE INTERESTS

General note: Just lock into your preferred LI’s romance first. I am serious. That will solve nearly every issue. Locking into your LI’s romance is not Shepard still expressing interest when they first meet again unless your LI is Tali, whose lock-in is her cabin date right after she comes aboard for the first time. Otherwise, the lock-in moment for most of the LIs are their Citadel dates that happen after the Coup.

James: Technically, he’s not a love interest. I’m including him because he always flirts with femShep. There is no way around this, sorry. The best you can do is to not allow him to call femShep “Lola”, which happens after the sparring match you two can have in the cargo bay. He still flirts with femShep outside that however, and there are a few times where femShep unavoidably flirts back. If you don’t like this, you just kind of have to plug your ears and pretend it’s not happening. Or just not speak to him at all, lol.

Hopefully with MELE’s new modding capabilities, someone will release a mod that fixes this since James’ conversations with mShep are more normal.

Allers: She is similar to Kelly and Samara in that she is not a “real” LI. I believe you can’t even trip her “romance” until after you finish Rannoch anyway, since it’s tied to the interview you do with her. There can be an awkward moment after Tuchanka or the Coup (I don’t recall which, or if it’s both) where she might sound flirtatious and you’re forced into flirting back or turning her down, but nothing comes from this. If it does happen after the Coup’s interview, you could try pushing it off until you lock into your preferred romance, but it’d have to be before you complete Rannoch since I imagine the Coup one would expire and be replaced with Rannoch’s.

Traynor: Traynor’s romance is actually easy to miss if you play renegade. I know this because I finished her romance a few months before MELE came out and I had to redo twenty hours of gameplay before that because I got locked out of it for being too much of an asshole to her. (Absolutely hilarious in hindsight, incredibly annoying in the moment.) After some digging, I found some old forums detailing that you apparently cannot be renegade toward her about her toothbrush in your first conversation and when she tells you about Grissom academy or else she evidently decides you are too mean and/or not interested in her. (Whether or not this is true, I have no idea. I didn’t bother risking it and went straight paragon with her in all of our conversations until I was able to lock it in.)

What this means is that if you want to avoid her shower scene entirely, just be renegade toward her until you get her cabin date, because you straight up do not even get the option to offer your shower to her if you were renegade enough.

If you're roleplaying and your Shepard wouldn’t take those renegade dialogue options, follow the advice in the general note: lock into your preferred romance before doing Traynor’s cabin date. Like Kaidan, this does mean that if you romanced Jacob or Thane and don’t wish to move on to anyone else, you’re a bit out of luck if you want to avoid the option triggering entirely.

That being said, even if you are doing a paragon Jacob, Thane, or no romance run, and thus still get the shower option, just...simply don’t let her in your shower. Problem solved.

Cortez: Cortez’ romance does not have any egregious romance mechanics that I’m aware of. To my knowledge, he never flirts with Shepard first before his romance is locked in. In fact, if you do flirt with him but you had a pre-existing romance from ME1 or ME2 (or I think if you are already locked into your romance with Kaidan as mShep) he will make a mention of that romance when you do try to flirt with him. This is all to say: to my knowledge, there is really nothing to avoid with Cortez. You have to go out of your way to flirt with him and lock in the romance. That being said, if there is something I’m missing, the same “lock into your preferred LI’s romance” rule of thumb should apply.

Hopefully some of this helped! If you have any other general questions about this issue or about a specific LI, let me know. Please note that I am also basing all of this off my knowledge of the original games, but I’m assuming nothing has changed in MELE.

[temple--ghost]

SNK Chapter 133 - Levi on Eren’s Eventual Death

An analysis of Levi’s emotional state in SNK’s recent chapter.

___________________________________ Boring Disclaimer: I’m Ereri trash. However, in terms of Isayama’s intention for the series and these characters, I believe Isayama has sought to depict their relationship as one completely without romantic or sexual undertones. 

However, there are enough "blank spaces" and "building blocks" in his work that a reader can conceptualize and read given scenarios in many ways. In aspects of film and media theory, characters and narratives are often treated as if they aren't just blots of ink hitting paper, but as a hypothetical reality in which to judge character morals and meaning. When we intake any piece of fictional media, the ideal is an engagement with the characters and the story. We can consider the author’s intent, while also acknowledging multiple, theoretical “realities” of this created world as it is portrayed to us using media-driven language. 

That said: I cannot argue that there is a romantic undertone between these characters; instead, I believe there is a significant relationship here that is vague enough to be twisted by interpretation. 

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Introduction

This is where we begin:

Hanji has been left behind to die. Eren’s rumbling has slaughtered thousands. Countries and cultures have been left to ruin. 

And, our group of protagonists are unsure how to stop Eren. 

We have two crucial suggestions from Armin: try to talk with Eren and, as a last resort, kill Eren.

Coming off of Armin’s mention of this “last resort,” Levi says:

We know there are a multitude of reasons for Levi’s death-wish against Zeke, 

So, in trying to understand his motivation here, I can see Levi’s words being read in two ways:

1. Going after Zeke in place of Eren may prove a simpler solution, while also fulfilling Levi’s desire to kill Zeke. Furthermore, if both Mikasa and Armin are hesitant in killing Eren, logically, Zeke could be the substitute. Levi’s suggestion is made out of intelligent convenience. His main priority with this suggestion is Zeke. 

or

2. Replying directly to this “last resort,” Levi offers up an alternative TO this last resort. “I’m fine with us having a last resort BUT...” and he offers Zeke’s death in the place of Eren’s. Simply put: he, personally, does not want Eren to die. 

My following argument and theory correlates to what is stated in #2: 

Based on the way in which Levi is portrayed in chapter 133, it is clear he remains emotionally invested in Eren’s life. 

And, notably, this is not the first time Levi has offered this solution...

Substitution 

Chapter 112: the Jaegerists are uprising. Eren has now not only forced the Survey Corps into action by attacking Marley on his own, but has also begun an uprising within Paradis himself. Soldiers find Levi and relay the information; Levi is told of the plan to kill Eren.

His reaction...?

To offer up Zeke. 

He goes on to admit:

“I don’t know if Eren’s really being controlled by Zeke or not. But we just need to end Zeke and they’re done for.”

There’s an obvious parallel to chapter 133, in which:

- Levi seems aware that Eren’s actions are likely his own. Eren is likely guilty in being a provocateur of destruction and yet...

- Levi acknowledges that Eren’s life is threatened. He offers Zeke to save Eren from death.

(For the sake of length, I’ve omitted a few panels. Eventually, I intend to address this entire moment in a future meta post, wherein I want to discuss if Levi’s desire to protect Eren stems from a personal attachment, or if his only concern is the concept of the “wasted” lives that have died for Eren’s sake). 

Let’s return to chapter 133.

Eren’s Answer 

Levi’s suggestion to kill Zeke with the help of the others prompts a discussion point from Reiner.

“Eren might want us to stop him, no?”

A scene change occurs soon after; our protagonists are transported to PATHS. Levi is the only character to realize:

In this moment, Levi acknowledges the possibility that Eren may have been listening and reacting to the idea that he (Eren) wants to have someone kill him. Levi is putting the pieces together -- Eren has heard them and this will be his response.

Our characters call out to Eren. Levi is the last to speak.

Somehow, in this moment, there’s still a sense of humor in Levi’s dialogue.

Despite Eren causing the deaths of thousands... despite the loss of Hanji, Levi’s comrades, and of the hope Eren was supposed bring... Levi’s greatest “threat” is to “let [Eren] off with an ass-kicking.” 

Through the lens of the odd and physical nature of Eren and Levi’s relationship, the threat is sentimental, almost. 

His final callout (”Why don’t you speak up for a change?”) brings to mind a fantastic meta done by @yaboylevi​, in which they explore Eren’s process of verbally retreating from Levi and the others. As well as how, in multiple instances, Levi tries -- and seemingly fails -- to speak to and understand Eren, but Eren would not let him in.

Directly following Levi’s words, Eren appears -- seen first by Levi -- and Eren’s monologue begins.

This is it. Eren has heard and is responding directly to our protagnoists’ question. And it is here that Eren not only confirms but takes it a step further by threatening further destruction unless he is destroyed. 

And it is only after this moment, after Eren has given them no other choice but to kill him, does Levi's knees hit the sand

The monologue continues. We see a close-up of Levi's face, while all of the others are in the background or not made purposely distinctive -- his is the face that sticks out.

Let’s talk about scene framing or, in a more common term used by those in media criticism: mise-en-scene.

Per Dictionary.com, we can define this term as:

The arrangement of scenery and stage properties; the setting of surroundings of an event or action.

In visual media, story-boarders and artists use the placement of characters to communicate messages to an audience. Mise-en-scene is often one of the first and most important concepts taught to those within the industry. Why? Because how these characters are placed within a frame manipulates an audience; there are, across all aspects of visual media, certain “tricks” a director or artist may use in order to convey a message through the visual representation of a scene.

If you wish to understand this aspect further, I highly suggest this article. But, let’s move on and apply this concept to Levi within this chapter.

I would argue that it’s significant that, within all the ‘PATHS panels,’ he is not only portrayed on the left-hand side, but also at a lower elevation than the rest of the characters. Characters portrayed at a lower elevation often intend to display ‘weakness, defeat, insecurity.’ The left side of the scene is also reserved for this indication. I’ll quote filepicker.io for this:

“Left: weaker side of the frame, reserved for villains, powerless or insignificant characters”

I want to bring up this page:

Where the others stand together in (what I see as) the same level of awe and shock, Levi’s differing in his placement and emotions is made purposely distinct. 

With Levi in the foreground, he is made completely separate from the homogeny of the rest of the group. The reader's eyes go to him on the ‘weaker’ side of the frame. While all others stand and look at the same point, he is the only one sitting and staring downward, listening and in thought.

He feels weak. Defeated. Powerless. I read the downward tilt of his head and the slump of his body as conveying a deep and thoughtful sorrow. 

The audience is told not only in Levi’s expression, but in the author’s entire use of framing, that what Eren has communicated in PATHS has a very significant effect on him and we, as an audience, are meant to see this. 

Levi’s Response

Immediately after this page, we return to the plane. 

Note Levi, whom remains in the similar crestfallen state as before --  still, obviously, in the same state of emotions and thoughts he was in just prior. 

One panel later he states:

He is back on the other side. He has been told, by Eren himself, that Eren’s death is the only option.

He has been given a straight-forward answer. He has obviously ruminated on this. He must now have an inkling of doubt that killing Zeke will stop Eren. He must understand the further depth of terror that will happen should Eren not be stopped. He must understand the loss of lives lost in Eren’s wake.

And yet, his emotions remain tethered to Eren. Despite his original promise in chapter 19. 

At this point, after all that has taken place between them, between then and now...

 Once again…

“...Now what?”

He does not consider the option of killing Eren.