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caelestis-composition · 3 years

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killshot anon! YEAH i totally agree w/ your view on kaeya. it's so weird to me that people will blame him for his role in a situation he was forced into as a child through no choice of his own. that itself had to be traumatic, not to mention everything that happened later. i hate when people say he's untrustworthy - like yeah, he's lied, so has everyone? it's clear he does it mostly to protect himself. not to mention that (& sadism) can be symptoms of trauma. kaeya deserves nothing but happiness

take a seat folks it’s time for a “brynn should’ve been an english major” lesson! today we’re gonna learn some literary theory; specifically, we’re gonna apply psychoanalytical trauma theory to kaeya’s backstory and current character. killshot anon i bet you never thought this would result in a whole ass essay.

disclaimer one! you are allowed to dislike kaeya! i am not saying you need to like him or his character, you’re entitled to your opinion and i’m not here to change your mind.

disclaimer two! i am in no way an expert and this is all for fun! this is just my silly little analysis of one of my favorite characters as someone who’s studied literary theory and rhetoric and can also apply personal experience. seriously analysis is like a hobby to me and this is just an excuse for me to ramble about kaeya.

disclaimer three! this contains lots of spoilers! basically for everything we know in-game, general knowledge as well as stuff from his voicelines and character story. don’t read this if you don’t want spoilers.

since this is going to be filled with spoilers and is about to get really long, everything will be under a cut. for those who wanna read my dumb super informal essay: enjoy!

final note: yeah this is over 2000 words long can you tell i like analysis

⭒

let’s start by getting a quick rundown of trauma theory out of the way. to begin, what is “trauma?” in this case, trauma is going to refer to an experience that greatly affects and changes one’s life; attitudes, memories, behaviors, mental state, etc. while not all changes may be bad, per se, the overall effect of trauma is generally a negative one, which is why it’s so significant. literary trauma theory, then, explores these changes and the impact of trauma in literature. it analyzes the psychological and social effects of trauma, explaining what those effects are and why they happen. in the context of a specific character, trauma theory breaks down said character’s behaviors, feelings, and general mentality in relation to their past experiences; trauma theory hopes to explain to others the reasons for why a character may act or feel the way they do, all based upon the character’s experiences, particularly traumatic ones. our character today is the lovely kaeya alberich, with the “literature” being genshin impact. i’ll be referencing kaeya’s wiki page to ensure i get all details correct for his character story and voicelines.

it would be good to review kaeya’s backstory before delving into the actual analysis. though we don’t know much about his life before living in mondstadt, we’re told he was sent as an agent of khaenri’ah. and by “sent,” i mean his biological father abandoned him in a completely unfamiliar land to serve khaenri’ah’s interests and fullfil his mission—what this entirely entails hasn’t been revealed. mondstadt, however, welcomed kaeya “with open arms when they found him.” crepus ragnvindr took him in as his adopted son, with diluc as his adopted brother. kaeya and diluc were “almost like twins,” so close they “[knew] each other’s thoughts and intentions without a word.” he’d began a new life in mondstadt, one surrounded by friends and family that loved him; one that was completely shattered by crepus’s death. kaeya arrived at the scene of the disaster, and was led to believe diluc was the one who killed their father to “set his father free” from the effects of his delusion. there’d always been one big question in kaeya’s life: if it came down to it, who would he support? the nation that abandoned him, but he still felt loyal to, or the nation and family that took him in and really loved him? overrun with guilt, kaeya confessed his purpose to diluc, sparking a fight between the two brothers. in this fight, kaeya receives his cryo vision. though both brothers stepped away alive, they’ve never been able to make peace with one another. now, kaeya is the eccentric and charming cavalry captain of the knights of favonius; a man who gets his way by using any means necessary, regardless of whether or not it seems right.

kaeya’s not evil; he’s morally ambiguous, and that stems from what appears to be a general distrust of others. his life is one shrouded in secrecy. from the moment he stepped foot into mondstadt, he was surrounded by secrets. even now, he doesn’t talk about a lot of things, namely his past, vision, and feelings. though he’s always willing to get information out of others, kaeya never reveals anything about himself. he repeatedly tells the player they can confide in him, but whenever you try and pry into his life, he deflects your questions with some sort of witty comment or flirty remark. anything he does reveal is vague, or spoken in some sort of “code.” for example, his “interesting things” voiceline. he tells us about the owl of dragonspine, how it “seems to look right through you, while letting go of none of its own secrets,” and then tacks on a “quite fascinating, don’t you think?” it seems like an awfully accurate parallel to himself; kaeya does all he can to get information from others, but never gives anything about himself. now, this whole thing—his relationship with diluc falling apart and his need for secrecy—could have probably been avoided if he had just come clean about his mission years ago. so why didn’t he? to start, kaeya was a literal child. not only are children unable to properly tell the difference between right and wrong, but they’ll also typically follow their parents’ orders blindly. kaeya had just been abandoned, and he wouldn’t want to risk being cast out by mondstadt as well if he came clean right away. you see, there’s this thing about trauma, something that trauma theory states. traumatized people feel a sort of shame or guilt regarding their traumatic experience; they’ll keep quiet because they don’t want to cause problems or bother others with their issues. of course kaeya wouldn’t tell the truth about his past, he doesn’t want to destroy the genuinely loving relationships he’d built in mondstadt. his fight with diluc only proves what he was afraid of: if he’s honest, he’ll be abandoned again. and if kaeya’s used to all the lies, why should he bother changing?

another thing, if he’s not going to tell the truth, then why would he have initially gone along with his father’s plans? again, he was a child. he really had no choice, and was forced into a very wrong and cruel situation. there’s a good explanation for this, too, which is also stated in trauma theory; traumatized people will still do their best to please their abusers. especially if said abuser is a parent, that will drive traumatized people to work even harder to please them. although his father hurt him by ruthlessly abandoning him, kaeya still sought to make him and his homeland proud. he was willing to be used as a tool for their gain; that is, until he found people who actually cared about him. he was an impressionable child, of course he’s going to obey orders. but as he gets older, he feels torn. does he serve those who abandoned him, or those that took him in? his father—and arguably, khaenri’ah as a whole—hurt him, sure, but he still feels some loyalty and connection to his former home. instead of revealing anything, he lets the situation play out. that way, he can’t be blamed when things fall apart.

the thing about claiming he’s untrustworthy is that hardly anyone in-game believes that. he’s adored by the older folks in mondstadt, and foes and allies alike find him easy to talk to. despite seeming lazy and uninterested in work, kaeya takes his job very seriously. in fact, his story states that crepus’s death was the “first and only time kaeya failed in his duty.” the “only time” is especially important, because it signifies kaeya still fulfills his duties successfully. he’s had a total of one slip-up, and hasn’t failed since. no, kaeya is not untrustworthy. rather, kaeya finds everyone else untrustworthy. it’s not unlikely that this is a direct consequence of being abandoned as a child. although it’s been established that kaeya and diluc were very close as children, when crepus dies, kaeya assumes diluc is the one that killed him. in order to jump to such an extreme conclusion against someone he was so close to, there had to be some underlying sense of distrust. furthermore, kaeya expresses feeling as though he doesn’t belong anywhere. he was abandoned by khaenri’ah, and then worried he wouldn’t be accepted by mondstadt. he is, but there’s still that worry. if you place him in your teapot as a companion, he tells you that your home feels like someplace he belongs, following it up with a “heh, who’d have thought…” kaeya still feels as though he doesn’t belong in mondstadt; despite the fact that he’s a high-ranking knight of favonius and rather popular, he still feels like an outsider. he doesn’t trust that anyone actually wants him around, and he finds joy in testing peoples’ trustworthiness. it’s noted in his story and through his voicelines that the beloved cavalry captain has a rather sadistic nature. he likes putting people into difficult situations, to see what decisions they will make. he does this to both opponents and allies, testing to see who’s going to back out and who’ll keep fighting; in the sake of allies, who can he trust? or who will turn tail and abandon their teammates at the slightest hint of danger? i mentioned it previously, but kaeya doesn’t care what measures he has to take so long as his job gets done and he gets the answers he wants. it’s a sort of self-preserving mindset, putting himself above the safety of others. kaeya’s trying to protect himself, which makes sense with all he’s been through. he doesn’t want to be hurt, and instead finds pleasure in threatening harm upon others. it’s twisted, sure, but it’s because he can only trust himself in a world that he believes is out to get him. he’s got as many enemies—if not more—as he does allies; of course kaeya focuses on protecting himself first, whether physically or through keeping his secrets, well, secret.

his most obvious traumatic effect is definitely his alcoholism. but he uses it as a distraction, not just to wallow in self-pity. this is seen again in his story, particularly in story 3. it’s found that when his favorite drink, death after noon, is out of season, mondstadt’s crime rate is decreased drastically. at face value, this just means kaeya spends more time working when death after noon is low in supply. but kaeya doesn’t skip work to go to taverns; it’s already been established he takes his job very seriously, so this means he actually patrols and tracks down threats while off work when he can’t indulge in his favorite alcoholic drink. he doesn’t get drunk simply because he’s depressed. if he did, there wouldn’t be a drop in incidents when death after noon is out of season. no, kaeya uses both the alcohol and fighting to distract himself. after all, it’s a little hard to think about feeling sad when you’re either drunk out of your mind or fighting for your life.

despite being so secretive, kaeya gives us glimpses of his true emotions from time to time. as previously mentioned, his flirty attitude is nothing more than a mask to hide how he really feels; and kaeya is terribly, terribly lonely. that may be why he seems so extroverted. constantly being around people should, logically, drive away that feeling, but it doesn’t work like that. when he talks with the player, he frequently expresses disappointment when you have to leave. each time, though, he dampens the weight of his words with playful or flirty language. he’s lonely, but doesn’t want you to know that, like he’s afraid of asking you to stay. he takes the seriousness of his feelings, and basically bends it into some sort of lighthearted joke. kaeya hides his true feelings—negative feelings, to be exact—so that he doesn’t bother anyone. which is, again, something that happens with traumatized people. he displays that hesitance to reveal his true feelings, because there’s a shame or guilt that comes with his past. he doesn’t want to bother others or hold them back, so he puts on a smile and amps up the charisma. one other very important thing—but very small detail—i would like to note is his feelings toward family. his fell apart not even once, but twice, and kaeya still holds familial relationships in high regard. we know he doesn’t exactly care how he goes about getting his work done. he doesn’t pay attention to what’s “right” or “wrong,” so long as he gets what he needs. but one of his informants, vile, notes that the cavalry captain has one exception: he won’t work with those who threaten others’ families. in fact, kaeya claims those who do should be hunted down and destroyed. even though his own families have caused him so much pain—and he ended up estranged from both—he still understands the importance of having people who love you in your life. because he didn’t get that.

kaeya’s not evil. ultimately, as a knight of favonius, his goal is to protect others, because no one was there to protect him. and because no one was there to protect him, because he’s been hurt time and time again by people who were supposed to love him, kaeya has taken to protecting himself. he hides any and all negative feelings with a charismatic, friendly façade, because he thinks it’ll drive away his persistent loneliness. any “bad” actions of his were hardly his fault; he was forced into a life of secrecy and lies, and then abandoned by the first people who truly loved him. kaeya’s a multi-faceted, tragic character, one that toes the line between good and evil, and that’s what makes him so interesting.

#brynn yells #brynn answers #killshot anon #brynn's writing #genshin #genshin impact #kaeya #kaeya alberich #genshin kaeya

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ectonurites · 3 years

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hey! how knowledgeable are you on stephanie brown? because i got in a bit of an argument with a dc fan on reddit who claims she's all these awful things, but im still relatively new to steph and i want to see what was true and what wasn't. link to screenie right here: https://ibb.co/vh6CYCJ

these may be matters of opinion, but even then, i'd like to know your take. i haven't read her firsthand often enough and i trust your judgement over this random redditor who seems to have some sort of blonde-woman related trauma left untapped.

I'm not necessarily the most knowledgable on her in the world, but I do know a decent amount because she's one of my absolute faves and I love her

But ohhhh boy that screenshot is a lot.

I will say that several of the things this person brings up are based in canon but are taken in the worst faith and framed in the way that makes her look as bad as possible, if that makes sense? It’s ripping things away from any context, because there's a very clear bias against her here.

I'll go through it point by point under the cut

First of all though before digging into this, I want to make it clear she was a 15 year old for the majority of the things this person is talking about. Like just pause for a second and remember she’s a 15 year old victim of abuse. That is something that I think factors into a lot of her behavior! Anyways, I kinda while doing this got into a ranty 'talking at you' format in response to the person who wrote all that, so don't take any of this as me yelling at you who asked the question/you anyone reading this.

"She always acted entitled" - Saying Steph is entitled is absolutely ridiculous to me. Stephanie grew up with a very unstable childhood due to her dad frequently being in prison and her mom dealing with a drug addiction, living in a lower class part of the city. Tim is entitled. I don’t mean that as like a bad thing about him, but he is based on his living situation, she is not. She has wanted life to be better for herself and her mom, and is determined about that, but she is not and does not act entitled.

(Secret Origins 80 Page Giant)

"and stubborn" - I will give you stubborn though, that one is true. She’s stubborn as hell! I don’t really see that as a bad thing though, pretty much every bat is stubborn?

"demanding that Batman and Robin accept her untrained ass" - Steph may have been untrained in fighting but she's shown to have exceptional gymnastics skills from the start, and at one point Bruce even says that with the right training she could be as good if not better than Tim (in Robin #88)! So like... her realizing she enjoys trying to be a hero after she tried it out to deal with her personal business, so she looks to the local experts… and is determined about it… how is that a bad thing? It’s also not like she walked up to them and said ‘im perfect as i am let me in’ what she wanted was a chance to be a hero. But she also wasn't even really looking for approval, either, not having Batman's blessing was never going to stop her. ("So excuse me if I don't jump when you bark, Batman." in Robin #16) Later when Bruce does bring her in to train (and she also gets to train with the BoP) she's excited! She’s stubborn about wanting to be in the hero business, but it’s not like she’s unwilling to work for it.

"advocating leaving criminals to die because they 'deserve it'" - She’s a 15 year old who grew up knowing firsthand how dangerous Gotham criminals can be because of her dad, of course off the bat when they’re in a dangerous situation where any of them could die (because that’s the context here, this is in Robin #35 where they’re trapped in some super dangerous snow) she thinks they shouldn’t go back for another criminal who just tried to kill them and should instead save themselves. But she also literally WITHIN THAT SAME ISSUE then says she realized she learned something after listening to Tim and trying to save the guy! In the same issue! Characters in a story aren’t supposed to be perfect from the start… they learn things along the way???

(Robin #35)

"trying to steal from the shops they just stopped from being burglarized" - She’s 15 and doesn’t have a ton of money. She was gonna take two sodas, and when Tim said not to do it she paid with very little fuss. They stopped people who were robbing the place at gunpoint for prescription drugs. If you can’t understand the difference in severity between those things like… I do not even know where to start. (this situation is in Robin #56 btw)

"forcing physical affection onto Tim despite his visible discomfort and repeated objections (not even stopping when he told her he had a girlfriend)" - This one I will give you because she did cross boundaries with all that! But I do also want to clarify that she didn't start coming onto him until after Tim kissed her first (in Robin #5) while not telling her he had a girlfriend. That doesn’t excuse her later actions but for the first issue that she’s coming onto him from her perspective he expressed interest and she was just returning it! She even specifically says 'Maybe I should pay you back for saving my life the same way you paid me' (in Robin #16) before kissing him. That first time she kissed him unprompted was under essentially the same circumstances he kissed her unprompted, and she literally did not know about Ariana until after the fact. From that point once she knew about Ari she definitely should have backed off and she didn’t, that’s a very fair thing to criticize about her as a character. But Tim lead her on first, and I feel a lot of people like to casually forget that when talking about this situation. The way this is phrased of ‘not even stopping when he told her-‘ implies she was repeatedly doing the bad behavior before he told her, which is not the case. She still did bad things here but don’t misrepresent the situation.

"And lashing out at Tim, her mother, and her classmates in violent fits of anger" - Every comic book character lashes out at other people for the sake of drama like, I dare you to come up with a well-known superhero character who hasn’t done shit like that to a partner/family/friends in a moment of high tension/stress?

"She treated the girls around her like they were stupid bitches" - frankly this ones a little too vague like, I'm not sure off the top of my head exactly what they're talking about? in that era right around her pregnancy and stuff I really don't recall her being mean with other girls? I could be forgetting something I guess but the closest I can think of is a bit after this period of time when she has the confrontation with Greta in Young Justice but that was Greta attacking her first, not the other way around.

"got insanely jealous if Tim so much as expressed concern about another girl" - Steph getting jealous and thinking Tim was cheating isn’t that crazy when STEPHANIE BASICALLY WAS THE OTHER GIRL DURING TIM’S LAST RELATIONSHIP? Tim has cheated a little bit before! Tim cheated on Ari with both Jubilee from Marvel (during a crossover thing where he even mentions Ari specifically so it’s not like this was out of continuity/a setting she wasn't an issue or something) and also with Steph. While most of the kissing between them was Steph coming onto Tim which I wouldn’t count as cheating on his end, he did still kiss her which I would count. Not to mention that the jealousy thing (I imagine they’re talking about the instance with Star, the girl who taught Tim to skateboard, this arc of stuff starts in Robin #80 and continues for a few issues) is happening during the time she’s dating him while she still doesn’t even know his real name. He literally has a whole other life she doesn’t know about, and is someone who has initiated romantic moments with other girls while in a relationship multiple times before! With that in mind I don’t think a 16 (she's def 16 by this point) year old girl being kinda paranoid about how he interacts with girls he might know in his civilian life is that unreasonable? The later big instance with jealousy is the Darla situation- where Steph sees Darla kiss him and gets mad about it (and doesn’t talk to him about it) and thats what prompts her to become Robin. The important thing to remember about Steph in this time frame is that DC decided she had to die and they wanted to make her Robin first to drum up more attention for that death. They were doing ooc things with her to set those pieces in motion, and that needs to be taken into account. I think her getting upset about seeing something like that isn’t even ooc, but her using it as motivation to become Robin and not even saying anything to him about it is. In the earlier instance where she’s upset/jealous about Star, she does communicate to him what’s going on at least a little bit on the rooftop after they’d saved her. She makes it clear the thing she was upset about is that she feels like she can’t trust him because she doesn’t really know him while he knows everything about her, and that’s why she thinks he’s cheating. Her reaction to the Darla thing is not in line with how earlier in canon Steph would have handled the same situation, because they wanted her to die and needed a way to explain her becoming Robin.

"and expressed that jealousy by accusing him of cheating and throwing things at him" - I just addressed the cheating stuff but the throwing things was fucking slapstick oh my god this is a comic book for kids/teens like. ah yes this is horrible abuse in this little funny montage of how Steph wants him to leave her alone because she’s mad at him and he refuses to give her space

(Robin #82)

I don’t think anyone at DC or even in fandom would/should try to argue she’s perfect, because she’s not! And I don’t want her to be because perfect characters are boring. Steph is flawed, Steph has been compared in canon to Robin-era Jason by Cass & Bruce

(Detective Comics #790)

And I think these highlight some of her very real flaws that are an interesting part of her character. These plus her stubbornness and determination are part of what makes her her.

And for fuck's sake the world was mean to her, and to act like it wasn’t is just blatantly ignoring a lot. A criminal father who made her life really difficult (‘when my dad was mad at me he’d lock me in the closet!’), that time she got kidnapped for two weeks and her mom had left her (a 15 year old) alone at home so long she didn't even find out it happened (in text Steph says Crystal was visiting friends, a lot of people interpret that as her mom possibly being in rehab for her addictions again), that whole thing about how one of her dad’s friends tried to sexually assault her as a child, also just how due to her dad's work sometimes criminals would be living in their house (Literally the fucking Riddler at one point!), the fact that we as an audience watched her get tortured for several days because a plan she tried to enact to prove herself backfired since Batman didn’t trust her with important information (something Selina even calls him out on in her internal narration), like… sorry but in what way is all that not the world being mean to her?

She was Robin, she dated Robin, she likes Eggplant (because purple would've looked stupid), and makes jokes. She’s also impulsive, headstrong and determined, and wants to prove to herself and others that she can be more than just the daughter of a shitty criminal, that she can actually be a force to do good in the world.

She’s a complex character, and nobody is required to like her, but to act like she doesn’t have a single redeeming trait is ridiculous. You could write a paragraph like that with the worst moments of basically any character and make them look like shit if that's what you were setting out to do.

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incorrect-ikevamp-quotes · 4 years

Text

Comte AU Event

Aight because I have Comte brainworms (is this a surprise to anybody I sure hope not), there’s something I’ve just been thinking about a lot ever since completing one of the story events a month ago:

The cover art being very sexy aside, I naturally did Comte’s story event and I have yet to move on. Namely because of one specific line. (Disclaimer: Keep in mind I don’t mean to say I’m an expert, I just translate for fun--I don’t have the same prowess as an official linguist. That being said starts the circus music let the show go on)

"...it amazed me. You never stopped trying, never stopped helping others or gave up on them--even while every day was a living hell for you."

This is the line I want to dive into, but before I can really talk about it, we need proper context.

Event spoilers below:

This event is a little different since it’s an AU, so the mansion and its residents don’t exist. (Comte lives in the mansion on his own, but it’s not the same one we know.) Instead Comte, Leo, and Arthur are stand alone suitors who have turned MC into a vampire. Because MC has no clear memory of how and/or why it happened, MC is seeking vengeance against her paired hottie--and fully intends to end their life one way or another.

Aside from how sexy revenge is and how much I love the enemies to lovers trope, Comte’s entire storyline gave me more life than I can humanly convey. Here goes nothing!

So it begins with MC knocking on his door and Comte answers it and literally just stares at her silently like some kind of Furby. MC starts out by saying she’s been trying to narrow down the bastard that ruined her life and her search has finally brought her to his doorstep. She basically demands the truth from him and he just keeps. Staring owlishly (lmao). He eventually relents and tells her that a conversation is much better held inside, and invites her into his home to talk.

She's sus as hell but enters the house, and he asks if she's had blood. This stops her in her tracks, shook, and her monologue drifts to explain a few things. When she woke up years ago, a new vampire, she had instructions to approach the Rouge/Blanc dispensary for what she needed. The staff there told her that everything was paid for, and she continued to receive support from an unnamed benefactor. She asked them for the identity of this person, but they were beholden to customer confidentiality. As such, she's been searching for information to narrow down her target for years until she finally found him tonight.

Despite the years it doesn't mean she's any more comfortable with her new existence. She notes that she still tends to stick to drinking Blanc--only drinking Rouge (in other words, blood) when she has no other choice. When Comte puts the Rouge on the table, she becomes notably unsettled. She's thirsty, but she won't concede to his request that she drink it; she refuses.

(I feel like he can probably tell because he's her sire/because of his experience with vampires). Comte--naturally--refuses to let her go hungry, so he knocks it back and kisses her to get her to drink it. He lets go as soon as she's swallowed it, and doesn't resist when she shoves him off. She rails at him about how awful he is for doing that, he agrees. She asks if he was the one that killed her parents, he confirms with blasé indifference. She's fuming quietly, but she notes that he doesn't really look happy or triumphant about it. What he's saying isn't reaching his eyes; his gaze is distant and sad. And it's confusing her. Isn't he supposed to be the enemy?

She's lost in her thoughts and unresponsive until there's a loud cry from outside the house, the shriek of a nearby owl. She snaps out of her daze to see that she still has his hand in a vice grip from when she shoved him off, and his skin is blanched--she cut off his circulation from the pressure. She releases him, startled, but he says nothing.

She's trying to sort out what's going on, and doesn't have enough information to really piece anything together. She wants to hate him but things aren't making sense. Why did her parents have to die in the first place? Why does he bother keeping her alive at his own expense? Even just now, what he did felt more like an attempt to get her to eat than anything else. Why isn’t he more malicious? This MC is desperate for answers, and she says as much: "What are you hiding…?"

Comte doesn't answer her, just averts his gaze and remains silent. MC decides she won't do anything until she learns the full extent of what happened the night she was turned. Furthermore, she's well aware of Comte’s status being a problem. If she goes too far without proper motive, the aristocracy could come back to bite her in the ass. (The implication here is that she's more concerned about being wrong and living with that regret, rather than any necessity to protect herself. The state of his gaze--the melancholy there--keeps eating at her. Until she knows why, she won't move forward.)

Comte is shocked that she demands to live alongside him in the mansion, but he doesn't take any issue with it. He says the mansion is pointlessly huge for one person anyway--she's welcome to stay. Either way she wins with this arrangement: either she gets the truth or she finds an effective way to destroy him by the end. And so their little cohabitation begins!

After a timeskip, MC recounts how she's been spending her days in the mansion. She's been tidying around the house, both in the hopes of finding evidence and/or in the hopes of repaying all the years of living on his assistance. He doesn't stop her, letting her do as she pleases and keeping his distance.

One day, she's about to step out into town to grab some groceries. Comte approaches at the front door, cautioning her to be safe--there have been many reports of scuffles/dangerous encounters. MC brushes him off, unsurprised he knows what's going on in town. He's very well connected to the aristocracy, and she notes that he's often at dinner gatherings and parties when he's not home. She insists she can't let her guard down, that he can't be trusted; no matter how kind he is to her face.

Another day, he asks her to attend a ball later in the week. He tells her she's under no obligation to stay with him while they're there, just that he wants her to take some time and relax--to have fun. She tries to insist that going to something like that would be more stressful than fun but he won’t hear of any protest, walking away before she can fully reject the outing. (Comte, an idiot, speed-walking out of the room: and that is what we call finessed). She sighs, thinking she'll be nothing but a burden to him given her lack of knowledge about events like that. She doesn't really know the proper etiquette or how to dance, it’s completely out of her depth.

Surprising no one at all Comte buys MC a dress and accessories to match regardless, and when she comes down the staircase leading to the front door he's awestruck. He tells her she's beautiful and she's miffed by the raw sincerity, trying to remind herself that he is eeeeevil. He knows how to talk to women given his status, he's just smooth talking... (She's trying to convince herself, essentially.)

And so they go, and she's a bit of a wallflower. He leaves her alone--doesn't want to bother her--while she sticks close to one wall. Several men ask her to dance, but she politely declines. Her monologue explains that, given what she is and the fact that she’s only living for revenge, she sees no merit in trying to court human men. She sees it as irresponsible and inevitably disastrous, and…

[Given the nature of what I am I just can't. I can't fall in love with a human man. Besides, the only person I really want to dance with is...as much as I hate it, my line of sight keeps drifting to Comte. Suddenly he looks up and meets my gaze, but I hurriedly look away--my heart pounding in my chest. Why. In a room full to the brim with people, why do my eyes keep looking for him. Whatever, time to go cool off for a bit.]

She leaves the ballroom--mortified at herself--to get some fresh air. Not five minutes into trying to figure out whatever the hell is going on with her shitshow of a life, a man appears asking what she’s doing alone. And da da da d a Zelda treasure chest sound effect he whips out a knife covered in blood and tries to stab MC. Naturally, because I’m an idiot, my first thought was:

TW: knife attack

TW: homicides by serial killer

But it turns out our local serial killer remains nameless in this event, so I can point no fingers. MC is panicking about needing to run and frozen in place from the shock, but Comte appears to pull her out of range--knife sinking into his back. He doesn’t react much to the violence as the attacker runs away, yanking out the knife and focused on checking her for any wounds. She’s still reeling from how quickly he reacted, and he reassures her (probably at the sight of her bewildered/worried look) that law enforcement is on alert in the area. They’ll find him, they’ll arrest him.

She tries to ask him why. Why would he protect her like that? His first instinct was to take the hit and ensure her safety first, and it doesn’t make sense. Comte reassures her again, joking that purebloods are sturdy. See? The wound’s already healed c:

[Even though I've been spending all this time trying to get my revenge on him, my heart stopped when he was attacked. As if to reassure me, frozen and speechless, Comte smiles gently. This person.......I can't do it. I can't kill him without meaning, without being sure of the truth.]

"...Comte, I can tell you're a good person. What happened that night, so many years ago?" Because even now, he's still protecting me. "Please...tell me the truth. I want to know."

[I know this isn't the time or place, but if I don't know I can't worry about him with a clear head.]

TW: human trafficking and drugging unconscious

Comte concedes and goes into what happened that night so many years ago. Apparently he was acquainted with her parents long before the incident, and they fell into debt as a result of gambling. He approached their home in the hopes of paying them a visit, checking up on them, only to encounter tragedy. They intended to sell their daughter off and the man they ended up making a deal with more or less slaughtered them all in cold blood. The reason MC doesn’t remember any of this was because her parents drugged her the night it happened. No consciousness, no resistance.

"In that room suffused in the odor of blood and despair, I found you, MC." Her pained, struggling cry is what led him into that room--and seeing how desperately she was fighting to survive, he turned her against all his better judgement. Feeling certain she would hate him forever for the choice he made compounded by her terrible circumstance, he bailed, leaving her instructions and resources to survive on her own.

"Sold off by your own parents, attacked by a serial killer, seconds from death. I thought....I thought telling you about it would only bring you pain, that it would leave you numb from the shock and despair. That's why I kept it from you.”

"...After turning you, I was consumed by regret. I felt certain you would hate me for the choice I made. So I left." [When I don't know what to say, he keeps talking.] "But I was worried about you even so. I tailed you quietly, making sure you were getting along okay. I was fully aware you wanted to kill me for what I'd done. Even so, I wanted to check on you."

And that is where the line comes in.

"...it amazed me. You never stopped trying, never stopped helping others or gave up on them--even while every day was a living hell for you."

He admits that he fell in love with her after a point. And she’s baffled, considering she’s been looking for every reason to tear him apart--assuming he was the perpetrator when he actually saved her life. She protests immediately, asking how he could possibly feel that way after the level of vitriol and judgement she’s levied against him when he was only trying to help.

"That's not true at all. At heart, you're a very kind young lady. You haven't raised a hand against me all this time. And even when you considered me to be a repulsive presence, you were worried about me."

At this MC is conflicted--because his words are a further extension of his equanimity. He’s well aware that he brought about all the confusion by not being honest, but it’s also clear there was no ill intent involved in that decision. He was concerned; hitting her with that level of misfortune and senseless terror all at once could have been incredibly destructive to her health. (This isn’t to say he made the ‘right’ decision; I don’t think there is any right decision in the face of such a complex situation. Given he takes full responsibility for what happened and does his best to help her, I think that’s a fair response.)

This is essentially where the common rt ends. But because I’m feral for Comte and enjoy talking about him, I’ll finish up the summary and then go on to do my analysis.

After that riveting assault, MC is feeling very lost about how to move forward. Her fury at Comte’s injustice has all but evaporated, which means a complete re-evaluation of how she’s going to move forward from now on. Does she continue with her revenge anyway, still angry for the dishonesty? Or does she try something new?

If you do the premium end that means choosing to forgive Comte and climb him (as he deserves). Therefore I, being an intellectual, chose to ride him into the sunset.

The premium end begins with Comte taking her to another ball because the first one kind of went to shit and he feels bad about it (retraumatization was not in the plan...). And so MC basically does the same thing as the first time, just vibin and taking in the scenery, thinking things over. Comte’s concerned about her not having fun, so he approaches her to ask if she’s feeling okay. He makes it clear that he really doesn’t mind if she dances with someone else--even if he admitted his feelings for her. She doesn’t owe him anything, and he has no intention of imposing on her future.

"Whatever it is you choose to do, I don't mind. I just want you to be happy"

[This person is so, so gentle...His words penetrate deep and settle with warmth over my heart, my chest light.] "Comte I.......I don't want to dance with anyone but you." [I still don't know what to do about the future, but for now I think following what my heart is telling me is the best move]

"!!!....well then, if you insist..."

Comte’s just:

He’s beyond shocked, but accepts her invitation when she confirms it’s what she wants to do. Leading her in all his infinite grace, MC marvels at his ability to dance so elegantly--even with a partner who’s deadweight, like her. She also finds it astounding how easily he makes her forget what they are, how easily she just enjoys the moment; no turmoil, no lingering in the worst of her miseries. She’s just...having fun? For the first time in so very long.

[Comte murmurs in the short distance, clear remorse on his face--as though he can't help it.]

"MC, it's kind of you, honestly. That you'd give me the time of day, that you'd agree to dance with me. But I...I'm the one that turned you. There's no denying or escaping that fact. If it's you, I'm ready to accept any consequence. If you want me gone, you're free to attack me. If you just want to be as far away from me as possible--to live your life in peace and solitude--I will do everything in my power to help you."

[He said it as if he was trying to convince himself. Like he was trying to remember why he couldn't assume more of this single dance together, why he couldn't let hope emerge from this single shared moment.]

[.....I'm not that kind, Comte. I asked because it's you.....Feeling his warmth beneath my hands, I come to a decision.]

There’s a timeskip, and then MC--being the badass that she is--knocks on Comte’s door the night of the crescent moon. He lets her inside more than ready to accept her judgement, whatever it may be. MC asks about his feelings, seeks to confirm that he still loves her before she confesses herself.

"Comte. Comte you said--that you loved me right?"

"Yes that's correct...no matter how much you might hate me, these feelings won't change. I love you."

[Hearing those words again sets my chest on fire. And I decide to tell him my honest feelings.]

"I love you too. But......I've held a misguided grudge against you for so long, is it okay for me to love you now?"

[Can that misunderstanding really be forgiven? Am I allowed to love you? Comte's eyes widen, and the breathtaking gold of his eyes shimmer/waver.]

"...shouldn't that be my line? I mean even despite the circumstances, I still made the choice to turn you :o Can you really forgive me?"

"...If I'm honest, I still have a hard time drinking blood and I'm a little scared of an immortal life. But......I think if I could spend that eternity at your side, I could find the means to smile again. And....the thing is....I also want to see you smile, to make sure you remember how to smile."

".................." [Le Comte stared at me, before extending his hand. And he hugged me so, so tightly.] "MC......."

[In that single word all the raw emotion of ten years can be heard. It was an indescribable sound--one that spoke of an unimaginable, impossible love. This person loves me so very dearly.]

The event ends with them biting each other as proof of their bond, essentially a vow to stay together moving forward. It felt very much like the shared act of biting was a promise of love, how vampires might get married or commit to each other romantically. The summary essentially ends here.

Here’s where the semi-meta comes in, because I literally just can’t stop thinking about the implications of this event.

"...it amazed me. You never stopped trying, never stopped helping others or gave up on them--even while every day was a living hell for you."

I just...I just don’t even know where to begin with how hard this line hits. Comte’s MS conveys this sentiment powerfully too, but there’s just something about them choosing to emphasize it yet again. The reason Comte falls in love every time has to do with his MC’s strength, her ability to surmount remarkable obstacles with so much poise. She’s deeply in tune with her reality, but no less relentlessly positive. She won’t burden others with her problems, and she’ll do everything in her power to move forward in constructive ways.

Even when every day was a living hell. Both Comte and Leonardo perceive eternity to be something of a curse; an endless sentence. Whether it means suffering boredom, reliving tragedy, or going nigh numb from the loneliness--being an immortal creature isn’t always sunshine and rainbows.

And that’s exactly why I think he fell in love with this MC? I don’t think his feelings would have run half as deep if it was just anyone. He doesn’t strike me as the type to get attached easily. Because if he’s going to have a life partner, he needs someone who's going to be able to roll with whatever life throws their way for conceivable lifetimes. Somebody that loses heart quickly or is easily prone to delusion would suffer eternally, and the last thing he wants is to subject a person to that. MC gives him hope certainly, but she’s also emblematic of a kind of fortitude he both needs on a personal level and she would need to be beside him. It’s interesting because it’s a responsible choice on his part, but also just very befitting of his nature. He’s somebody that staunchly believes in the ability of good to prevail, but he’s also realistic about it. He knows doing the right thing isn’t necessarily easy; he does it because he could never live with himself if he did otherwise.

(Think about Comte’s approach with Jeanne. It meant years of being on the receiving end of hatred he didn’t deserve, but he didn’t mind if it meant Jeanne could find a way to heal. It’s not the most practical or immediate solution, but it is the most restorative option. Comte doesn’t care that he spends years living alongside Jeanne’s outspoken displeasure and even violent outbursts. Why? Because it’s all a means to a greater, better end. If he has to suffer a little discomfort, he’s willing to make that sacrifice. That’s the thing with Comte; intentionality is everything. Comte’s intention is to help. Whether that’s a short or long process, a smooth or rough process, he’s going to do what he can within his means.)

That dynamic is reflected in his respect for this MC who is filled with fury on behalf of all the life that she lost unfairly, her relentless pursuit for the truth of what happened to her. Notice, she’s more interested in truth than retaliation. She refuses to lay an intentionally violent hand on Comte until she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was worthy of being on the receiving end of that retribution. Who does that sound like? If you guessed Comte himself, then you see where I’m going with this. What MC and Comte have in common is that they have a sharp emotional fortitude that they keep under tight, rational control. They will react with sizable passion or hurt or warmth--but their externalized reaction will vary depending on the situation. If it’s a minor annoyance, they have the patience to diffuse and try to alleviate the problem. If it’s on a larger scale or it’s an egregious violation of their personhood, then they up the ante accordingly.

Think about it. MC appears on Comte’s doorstep full of righteous rage and even when he confirms what he’s “done,” she hesitates. Her emotional intelligence is telling her something isn’t aligning properly; something isn’t quite right. She forgoes immediate revenge for proper answers instead. MC and Comte have this kind of balance, where they are more than happy to hear people out--but there is a limit to that propensity. Push them too far? They’ll bust your head. I guess I’m particularly interested in the way Comte seems to yearn for that kind of identification with a partner. Somebody who has similar values: not merciless, but also won’t bend when a situation requires confrontation.

All that being said, there was one more aspect of the story that I was endlessly interested in. I’m going to link the post here, in that it’s tangentially related to this meta; it really made me better able to articulate what I mean to say.

“Never let generosity hold hostages; courtesy is an essential tool, but a cruel master.”

I’m gonna let that sink in for a moment.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because it’s very rare that I read something once and I’m forced to read it several more times before I begin to understand it. My interpretation of that line is to say that benevolence can showcase your good will to others; it can be a reliable proof of good character, and a way to help someone. But the problem comes when people do conventionally/perceived generous things with the explicit intent of repayment by some measure. While it is only responsible to care for others as they care for you, you shouldn’t make impossible sacrifices with the expectation that the other person is indebted to you--especially if the other party had no ability to consent to that sacrifice.

How does this apply to Comte in this event story? Er, in almost every way humanly (vampirely?) possible, in my view. Comte turns MC into a vampire after seeing her plight, largely because he gets the impression that she was fighting for her life--had impossibly survived against all odds. The situation is complicated though. MC wasn’t fully conscious when it happened, so she doesn’t have a proper understanding of how everything went down. So what does Comte do? If he can’t bear to face her or reveal the truth of how horribly she died, he at least gives her every means to survive and makes sure she’s doing okay since she’s technically an orphan now. He doesn’t interfere with her life, or demand recognition for the life he gave her. He fully understands that she wasn’t able to properly consent to his decision in that split second moment, and even if she had he doesn’t see it as a debt she owes him now. He was able to help save her life for at least a little while longer, and so he did. It was as simple as that. He had the ability, she had the need. That’s the end.

But Comte’s emotional acuity doesn’t just end here. Even when she comes after him to kill him, he doesn’t respond with anger because he knows full well he hasn’t explained. Sure he’s sacrificing their relationship (the ability to get along on half-decent terms) but if it means she can find a reason to live, then so be it. He doesn’t lord that sacrifice over her head by any extension; he’s just sad about it because he thinks she’s a wonderful person, and he doesn’t want to be estranged from her. But in his view, her needs supercede his wants.

He doesn’t force her to do chores around the house during her stay, she does it to keep herself busy and search for the truth about his intentions. He even asks her to take breaks and look after herself first, more concerned with her well-being than the state of the mansion. At the ball, he doesn’t force her to linger around him or dance with him despite inviting her there and giving her the dress/jewelry to attend. He leaves her alone as she wishes, only glancing at her to make sure she’s doing okay. When he takes the hit from the violent stranger--a knife straight to the back--he jokes about being s t r o n k, never once blaming her for the wound he sustains no matter how brief.

He explains that he didn’t tell her the truth because it was incredibly traumatic, and it’s only in the safety of the moment--after years of having conceived of her own selfhood beyond the event--that she’s able to take the weight of what happened without falling apart. The premium end just keeps hammering this shit home. He openly tells her she doesn’t have to dance with him at all, that she doesn’t owe him anything just because he likes her. He’s aware it’s unrequited (he thinks) and he doesn’t go on and on about all the sacrifices he made for her with the expectation she’ll reciprocate. He just did what he wanted to do, nothing more. If she feels the same way by some miracle, that’s amazing! If she doesn’t, as it would be valid if not, that’s fair too; no hard feelings.

She has to be the one to invite him to dance and insist. She’s the one that smiles fondly when he’s telling her that she can choose whatever outcome she pleases, even if it means wanting to live as far as possible from him. There is no guilt trip, no expectation, and no pressure. She has the freedom to leave or stay. It is entirely dependent on her own will. For the first time in a lifetime of loss, her agency is restored to her. That’s huge.

She even admits that she feels bad about being so angry when he really was just trying to help, now that she can understand what he’s doing. And he’s openly shocked to hear it. He had no intention of expecting or asking for an apology. He understands it was his own imposition, both biting her and obscuring the truth, that led to her setting her mind on vengeance.

I’ve probably hit it home harder than necessary, but Comte just feels like the epitome of good will in the best way possible. One can argue he’s a little selfish for keeping the truth from her for so long, but honestly? Given the horrific trauma of her situation--and his personal fear of making her miserable for an eternity when all he wanted was to give her a second chance away from all that hurt--I feel like his reaction was closer to considerate and reasonable. Comte doesn’t sacrifice anything he isn’t unwilling to give, or anything that would cripple him to give. Furthermore, he doesn’t make love out to be a kind of 1:1. He recognizes that while he might know her well, she doesn’t know squat about him. And, as such, he doesn’t expect her to trust his intentions or reciprocate his feelings in any capacity. It’s just a delightful surprise when she does. When he tells her that he loves her that first time, it’s an explanation. Not a guilt trip. He knows she won’t be satisfied years of protecting her simply because “he wanted to” and he promised her the truth, so he tells her. Not only that, in the aftermath he repeatedly reminds her she isn’t bound to him. She commits to him before he relies on any kind of active bond between both of them.

I don’t know, maybe I think too hard about it, but I feel like the older I get the more I see a shortage of this kind of fine-tuned caring about the other person in a relationship. I guess I just enjoy seeing a man give a woman her health and agency without treating her wellness/happiness like it’s a burden to his life? First and foremost Comte really is concerned with her self-actualization before his feelings can have any place in their relationship. And even when he does confess his love, it isn’t a way to force her to feel indebted to him; it’s an attempt to erase any false pretenses. MC loves him, not because she has nowhere else to go, but because he’s proven himself time and again a worthy companion. Always putting her first, always worried about her feelings, paying such close attention that he sees her to the core of who she is despite her iron front--kind, beneath all that hurt. They spend so much of this event really listening to each other despite such difficult circumstances, and it leads to a deep and abiding love against all odds. And I find that incredibly moving...

Oh and, before I forget? Let me circle back for a moment:

"...it amazed me. You never stopped trying, never stopped helping others or gave up on them--even while every day was a living hell for you."

The best part about this event is that--while Comte says this about MC--this is also precisely the reason MC falls in love with Comte too, even if it’s never stated outright. Because despite how lonely and tired he may be of eternity, no matter how many troubles he’s facing himself, he never stops trying to help and support others (namely MC) in any way he can.

Drops mic

#ikevamp #ikemen vampire #ikevamp comte #ikevamp saint germain #ikevamp jpn spoilers #ikevamp meta #ikevamp au event #comte propaganda #fangdad propaganda #i love him so very dearly #this event just made the feelings come rushing back #can't have five minutes without comte giving me heart palpitations huh #i feel so personally attacked #anywho i hope yall enjoy this wild ride as much as i did #minnie finna peace out and sleep for 70 hrs #**dives into bed beside comte**#rambles #not incorrect quotes

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the-coffee-story · 3 years

Text

Rise of the Forest God

Chapter 17 - Professor Tally Winchester

Winchester Hall was a beautiful, dark Victorian mansion á lá Addams Family that rested proudly upon the tallest hill around. The windows, grey with age and dust were tall and skinny and a rusted iron gate, with weathered carvings now indistinguishable rested half swallowed by dirt and uncut blades of long dry grass. The whole thing blended rather well with the crawling forest behind it.

The team was waiting by the gate, curious and giddy with half-numbed nervousness.

"Well, now I'm definitely interested," Walther commented, peeking through the towering, rusted gate. "This looks like it's haunted by at least three ghosts who died a horrible death. They never found the heads."

October laughed.

"Seriously October, imagine the Addams Family's mansion, now scale it down a little."

He raised an eyebrow. "Can't wait for Morticia to pop out."

"Well, Morticia was definitely not on the phone," Violet noted.

Suddenly, the carved, dark-oak door that rested comfortably in the centre of the home's front opened, and a young man peeked out, adjusting his glasses as he took a moment to assess the situation. After a few moments passed, he noticed the team waiting by the gate, waved to wordlessly grab their attention, and quickly scuttled over.

Tally Winchester was a medium-heighted, slender and bald individual with large, wildly blue eyes behind thick glasses and a countless amount of scattered silver piercings dotted in and around his earlobe. Despite the fact that it was it had just dawned early spring, his skin was sunburnt and tanned, as if he spent most of his days somewhere lost outside. He walked with a noticable limp, and Walther didn't need to wait long for an explanation, when a prosthetic briefly appeared between his worn brown converse sneakers and faded jeans.

"Hi!" He flashed a toothy smiled at the group and opened the gate. "Great to see you, I'm Professor Tally Winchester!" He shook everyone's hands as they trickled past. The sleeves of his petrol flannel were rolled up, revealing a rather out-of-place, faded tattoo of a crawling lizard and a bunch of old scars. "You can call me Tally though."

Violet held out her hand. "Hi, I'm Violet, we talked on the phone."

"Great to meet you all!" He grinned. "Are you coming inside?"

***

"Before anyone asks, I inherited the house," Tally explained while leading them upstairs. "It's rotten and I hate it and the bills are a naked horror but I doubt I can find anything that has more capacities for a library." He opened a door. "Intrate, everyone."

"Remarkable," Doc commented.

Remarkable was indeed an understatemt. The room they'd entered was a library- with a beautiful brick fireplace and huge windows that let in the sparse afternoon sun, bookshelves brushed against the webbed ceiling and sunk into every wall. The floor was carpeted, through incredibly uncomfortable to walk on, and the furniture antique. One wall was plastered with photographs and notes.

"Nice," Walther mumbled, taking the second to once again soak in their surroundings.

Tally grinned, idly brushing aside pages and old notes compromised of incomprehensible scribbles and drawings. His teeth were somewhat crooked. "I didn't replace any of the furniture, but I did sell a chunk of the old books. There was just no space for mine." He closed the door behind them. "So anyway, you wanted to know about the cult?"

"There's been a bunch of murders in Forest Lane that were eerily similar to what it did, so yeah." Thasfield shrugged his broad shoulders. "We suspect the cult might be involved."

"Oh, I heard about that on the news!" Tally sorted the files on the table until he found what he was looking for. Then he looked up. His face was serious now. "At this point I'd like to admit I have a slightly selfish motivation in this."

"What is it?", Violet asked.

"You see..." Tally leaned against the table. "For context, I'm a history professor, but my focus is on cryptids and modern legends. Historical context, potential explanations, yada yada. A few years ago I stumbled across the legend of the Forest God."

Walther's face lit up. "Oh, I remember that story, my parents used to tell it to me when I was a kid! This one guy got lost in the woods, was found dead and after his funeral his reanimated corpse came home and his wife who loved him very, very much-" They side-eyed Violet and Coffee, who in turn glared back. "-couldn't accept that maybe it's not exactly normal that your husband's corpse is vibing around, then after a while he started killing people, then he killed her and then the neighbours buried him in an iron casket in the woods so he would stop randomly murdering people. Right?"

"You summed it up." Tally nodded.

"But who believes in that?!" Violet frowned. "I mean... it's just a legend, right? Somebody finally snapped, had a rough week or something, and people straight up believe his bullshit?"

"He came back from the dead and started murdering people, Violet," Doc commented.

She shrugged dismissively. "We've all been there."

"I don't want to meet you after a bad week," Tally remarked with mild discomfort, absentmindedly flipping through pages of notes and nonsense. "The existence of the man who allegedly became the Forest God is proven. His name was Eustace Wyndham and if you ask me he had rabies and some things were added for drama. But that's not even relevant, because the cult came almost a hundred years later." He slid around the table and opened another scattered file. "1969 they started to worship the Forest God. At first it was nothing special, you know, just the average college student nonsense." He held up an old photograph, subtle wonder in his eyes as he stared into it, before handing it to Walther. "Here, you can take a look at this! That's the entire cult. The guy in purple with the long hair is one of the founders. The other founder left in 1970 after getting a bad feeling about the whole thing. I caught him for an interview five years ago. Lovely guy, sadly died of cancer shortly after. It's a shame. You can pass the photo around! Notice how they're all wearing cow parsley wreaths. That was the flower associated with the Forest God and the flower scattered all over their murder victim's body, or rather what was left of it."

"All the victims had cow parsley in their mouth," Doc realized, dragging a hand up to rest in his soft ginger curls, staring blankly into the distance, thinking.

Tally nodded hastily. "Exactly! And now please look at what I found on my windowsill this morning!"

He limped over to the tallboy, half relying on the nearby furniture for support. Leaning down and throwing open a drawer, after a short while of sifting through papers and photographs, he took out something else. Then he held it up.

It was a wreath of cow parsley.

"That's....not good," Walther murmured after a long moment of stunned silence.

Tally nodded, twirling the flowers between his thumb and forefinger. "You get it. You know..." He leaned heavily against a dusty, worn table and heaved a small sigh. "When Wilhelm called me at first I was very sceptical of it all. I'm not a group project person, if you know what I mean. But this is just the tip of the ice berg and I have a feeling that I might be next, so I decided to work with you." He shrugged his shoulders.

While he'd been talking, Coffee had been furiously typing. He handed Tally his phone and Tally read it out loud.

" 'How about we use you as a bait?' Um... Can you...can you please explain what exactly you mean? That doesn't sound particularly safe-!"

He handed Coffee's phone back to him, paranoid he might accidentally drop it, and the detective started typing an answer, this time with significantly more determination.

Hear me out. So my idea was basically that tonight we let the killer come, but were going to be prepared. In other words, we gather a big group that's going to protect you, and we're going to arrest the murderer once he's here. What do you think?

Tally hesitated for a short moment and chewed his lip, opening his mouth to reply, then closing it again.. "I mean... I guess you have a point, sooner or later he's going to get me either way."

"I mean, let's be real, you can't run forever," Thasfield said, leaning forwards. "Even if you move, it's still going to take a while, and judging by what we know you're being pretty actively stalked, so it's quite possible he'll just follow you and then you'll be killed by a Forest God in a hotel room in Central Graytown. Which probably makes for an interesting plotline in a noir film, but we're talking real life here and I highly doubt you're so keen on landing in the morgue anytime soon. Although the Doctor is an expert at autopsies."

Doc smirked.

".........yeah," Tally admitted. He sat down on the table and scratched the back of his head. "Yeah, that sounds...icky but realistic." He closed his eyes took a deep breath. "Alright. Who's gonna be on this team?"

Doc's phone's rang loudly to shake up their newfound confidence, and he excused himself, stepping back into the dusty hallway to take the call.

"I mean, most of us for starters," Violet said. "But I was also thinking of grabbing Gary Fox and Wilhelm. Strength in number, you know?"

Doc eventually came back to the group. His weathered face was stricken with subtle anxiety. "Bad news."

"What is it?", Walther asked.

"Alice found her mailman by the stables."

Walther frowned. "Okay, and what's so special about that?"

"His left arm was by the stables. The rest of him was scattered across the field."

"Dear God, is he okay?"

"He's okay, but he's dead." Doc turned to Tally, lowering his voice just enough. "Can we settle on tonight?"

Tally nodded. His sunburnt face had notably paled, turning his skin a somewhat pasty yellow. "Sure. What time are y'all coming?"

"Is five o'clock alright with you?"

Tally shrugged his shoulders. "Sure."

#reviews are welcome ;)#remember to listen to the song #the coffee story #rise of the forest god

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mst3kproject · 3 years

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The Phantom from 10 000 Leagues

I found this movie online while looking for From Hell It Came (which I haven’t yet found – someday I will and then you’ll all be sorry) and it looked bad, so I checked out the details. Turns out it stars Kent Taylor from The Crawling Hand, Cathy Downs from The Amazing Colossal Man, and was written by Lou Rusoff, who was behind It Conquered the World, The She-Creature, and… oh god, he also wrote Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow. This is gonna suck goat nads. I must watch it right away.

You shouldn’t picture me groaning when I write stuff like that, by the way. You should picture me giggling like a maniac and rubbing my hands together with glee.

A monster is killing people at sea near an incredibly bleak and depressing California college town, and the bodies and wrecked boats it leaves in its wake are scorched by radioactivity! Washington sends Agent Grant to find out what’s going on, and he soon discovers that the Pacific College of Oceanography is positively overflowing with suspicious characters. There’s the reclusive and paranoid Professor King, who is working on weird experiments in his locked laboratory. There’s King’s assistant George, who follows him around and hides in the bushes to watch what he’s doing. King’s secretary Ethel blames the professor for the death of her son and wants revenge, and George’s girlfriend Wanda is a foreign agent. Not to mention the visiting Dr. Stevens, a radiation expert with an unsettling habit of turning up just in time to discover the bodies. Someone among this motley crew has created a sea monster… and someone else is planning to sell it to the highest bidder!

You know how some movies save their monsters until the last minute, in order to build suspense? Or because what we imagine is always scarier than what we actually see? Or because the monster sucks and they’re ashamed of it? Or some combination of the above?

Phantom from 10 000 Leagues is not one of those movies. Before we’re even a full minute into it, the monster has appeared on screen in all its ridiculous glory. Stevens calls it a hideous beast that defies description but I think I can make an attempt. It looks sort of like the lovechild of a saber-toothed tiger and the Horror of Party Beach. There’s a ridge down its head and back like an iguana and a poorly-camouflaged window in its neck so the dude inside can see what he’s doing. The whole costume is also rather buoyant, and the actor is having to work hard to stay underwater. Sadly, this beast remains lurking in the depths and never shambles out onto the beach to menace sunbathers, which is the only thing it would have needed to make it a perfect bad movie monster.

The creature is not the only nuclear threat in this movie… or even the silliest one! During an investigatory dive, Stevens discovers a glowing patch on the seafloor which he says represents an ‘activated’ uranium deposit with the potential to form a naturally-occurring death ray! We finally get to see this in action when stock footage of a ship passes over it – and turns into a different ship that immediately blows up! I’m just sad this only happens once. The glowing stone itself is represented by a mirror with a light shining on it in underwater shots, and by the reflection of the sun when seen from the surface.

So the effects are not special and make an already silly threat even more hilarious. What about the story? Like all cheap monster movies, the focus of The Phantom from 10 000 Leagues is not the creature killing people but the investigation into it. There’s a large number of potential monster-makers here, which could have made the movie a bit messy – but by the time the words The End appear, we know who all these people are, how they’re involved, and what they hope to accomplish. Even the women are given distinct motivations and personalities, although those fall neatly into the ‘maiden, mother and whore’ tropes I’ve discussed in the past. The dialogue is not exactly subtle, but it seems like I can’t wholly blame Lou Rousoff for Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow.

It’s also nice that, despite the preponderance of White Men In Suits (Stevens and Grant both walk along the beach in suits and ties at all hours of the day and night), the characters all look different enough that I can tell them apart! None of the cast are great actors, with a lot of stilted or awkward line deliveries, but then, a lot of the things they’re saying are completely ridiculous, so I probably can’t lay that entirely at their feet.

Unfortunately, the plot of Phantom From 10 000 Leagues is rather unfocused, and like so many of these films it’s not sure who its main character is. It seems like either Agent Grant or Dr. Stevens, who are each conducting some kind of investigation into the goings-on, ought to be the protagonist… but both are introduced in contexts that make them seem potentially suspicious. Dr. Stevens is actually significantly more suspicious than Grant, because when he first turns up he gives a fake name, and later proves to have actually performed experiments with mutating sea life in the past. Yet for much of the movie, it’s Stevens we’re watching, as he cozies up to Professor King and flirts with King’s daughter Lois. He actually gets far more screen time than Grant, with the latter sometimes being out of the movie for long enough that the audience kind of forgets he’s there.

Stevens and Lois’ love story is, as is probably inevitable for a movie of this kind, completely bland. Kent Taylor and Cathy Downs have no appreciable spark between them, and one gets the uncomfortable impression that he’s about twice her age. The movie never offers even an approximate age for either character, but Lois is still unmarried and living with her father, which in the 1950s suggests she’s in her early twenties. King describes Stevens as a ‘young man’ but between his appearance and his impressive academic credentials he’s obviously not, and when I looked up the actors I learned that Taylor was forty-eight when The Phantom from 10 000 Leagues was made, while Downs was twenty-nine. That’s… well, they’re both adults, but he’s still old enough to be her father, and the younger we assume they both are, the worse the two decade gap gets.

Once we actually get to know the characters, the solution to the mysteries is fairly obvious, but this lets us spend some actual time with these men and find out what they think about the situation. Stevens, who’s been down this road before, wants these terrible experiments to stop before any more people get hurt. King, hearing about it for the first time, is more excited about what he might be able to learn by building on Stevens’ work. This represents an interesting inversion because if you’ll recall, King is supposed to be significantly older than Stevens (though actor Michael Whelan was actually born only five years before Taylor).

Usually knowledge and wisdom are both associated with age. This is a very old trope and has some fairly sound logic behind it: the elderly have had longer to learn and to experience. In Phantom from 10 000 Leagues, however, we have the older Professor King excited by the ground-breaking discoveries made by a younger scientist and wanting to learn more about them, even when the (supposedly) younger Stevens warns him about Tampering in God’s Domain. Each assumes the role their ages might make us expect of the other.

This is reflected in their respective fields: depending on how you define it, oceanography is as old as mankind. Humanity has been mapping the seas for as long as we’ve known how to sail across them, and marveling at the monsters we pull from its depths for as long as we’ve been catching fish. That is the Professor King’s domain. Stevens, on the other hand, is a specifically nuclear scientist. Nuclear physics technically begins with the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890’s, but it seemed like a new and scary field in the 1950s, as the development of atomic weapons forced scientists to take a closer look at the phenomenon’s effect on living tissues. To King, who is an expert in another field, the possibilities of this relatively new work outweigh the potential consequences.

As sloppy and poorly-made as Phantom from 10 000 Leagues can be, this contrast between Stevens and King does make it a movie with something to say. It of course has the standard moral for a fifties atomic monster piece, about paths science is not meant to tread, but it also wants us to think about that connection between age and wisdom. On the one hand, King’s interest in Stevens’ work tells us that you’re never too old to learn something new. On the other, just because somebody is young doesn’t mean they have nothing to teach. If King had taken in Stevens’ wisdom along with his knowledge, a lot of suffering need not have happened.

Even if you’re not into that, the crappy monster, the bad acting, the ridiculous science, and all the sneaking around and backstabbing that goes on makes Phantom from 10 000 Leagues plenty of fun watch. It’s much like Beginning of the End in that it ticks all the MST3K boxes, while remaining coherent enough that you can enjoy the actual story along with the badness.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #phantom from 10000 leagues #it's beginning to look a lot like fishmen #50s

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the-homicidediaries · 4 years

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Chris Benoit

Guys.

I am so excited to talk about this.

Not because of the context, but because this is one of the reasons I love wrestling so much; there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes that people have NO CLUE about.

There have been several professional wrestlers who have killed people or been killed themselves and the rabbit hole goes deep.

(Rey Mysterio accidentally killed a man on live tv and they still have the video up on YouTube.)

(Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka murdered his girlfriend in May of 1983. Who is Jimmy Snuka? Jimmy Snuka was related to The Rock, Rikishi, and The Uso’s.)

THERE ARE SO MANY MORE THO.

But today, I want to talk about the Daddy of them all, Chris Benoit.

Chris Benoit’s crimes are so heinous and unforgivable Vince McMahon has swept his name under the rug and removed him from The Hall of Fame.

Benoit’s crimes also changed the dynamic of professional wrestling forever.

Chris Benoit was born in Montreal, Quebec to Michael and Margaret Benoit on May 21, 1967. He and his family resided in Edmonton, Alberta, however.

During Benoit’s childhood, he idolized Tom “Dynamite Kid” Billington (a British wrestler who competed in the 1980’s and had ongoing feuds with Hart) and Bret “Hitman” Hart (a Canadian-American wrestler and a member of the notorious Hart Family. He is a personal fave of mine as well).

When Benoit was 12 years old, he attended a local wrestling event where both Dynamite Kid and Hart were competing and he knew right then and there that he was destined to become a wrestler.

He trained in The Hart Family “dungeon” and was coached by none other than Stu Hart (Bret and Owen Hart’s father. If you don’t know Owen Hart, you should google him as well because he died under bizarre circumstances on live tv as well.)

When Benoit fought in the ring, he channeled both Dynamite Kid and Hart, even adopting Hart’s signature move, “Sharpshooter” as his finishing move.

Chris began wrestling in 1985 in Stu Hart’s Stampede Wrestling promotion. He was quickly recognized as a force to be reckoned with and received his first title, the Stampede British Commonwealth Mid-Heavyweight Championship, on March 18, 1988.

(This dude has a very extensive history or wrestling in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, World Champion Wrestling, Extreme Champion Wrestling, and World Wrestling Federation/Entertainment, but I just.. I cain’t get into all that, please forgive me. Haha! We are talking 22 years here! So I am humbly skipping to his family life.)

-Okay, so. I would love for this to be a romantic love story for the ages and the deaths resulted in crimes of passion, but that didn’t happen. At. All. Not at all.

You’ll see soon why this was all brushed under the rug.-

Benoit was married twice.

His first wife, Martina, and he had two children David (who is a wrestler as well) and Megan. By 1997, their marriage had broken down and Benoit and Martina decided it was best to end it.

Benoit began living with his girlfriend, Nancy Sullivan, who was the girlfriend of Benoit’s frequent opponent, Kevin Sullivan.

(It started off as an on-screen relationship for views and it led to a real-life affair. Many people joke that Kevin Sullivan booked his own divorce.)

On February 25, 2000, Benoit and Nancy’s son, Daniel, was born.

On November 23, 2000, Benoit and Nancy were married.

This 👏🏼 was 👏🏼 not 👏🏼 a 👏🏼 good 👏🏼 marriage.

In 2003, Nancy filed for divorce from Benoit, saying he would break and throw furniture and was cruel to her. She later dropped the suit as well as the restraining order she had set against him.

Benoit became good friends with fellow wrestler Eddie Guerrero, (a beloved and incredible wrestler, one of my dad’s faves), following a match in Japan, when Benoit kicked Guerrero in the head and knocked him out cold. This started a friendship that lasted even after Guerrero's death in late 2005, in which Benoit had written diary entries to him just ten days after his passing.

(I’m only mentioning this because Guerrero’s death has been rumored to be one of the reasons Benoit did what he did.)

Here’s where it gets gory.

So we know Benoit and Nancy did not have a good marriage, but things seemed to be okay because she dropped all the charges against him.

Benoit and Nancy were living in Fayetteville, GA, with 7 year old Daniel.

On June 25, 2007, police entered the Benoit home after Benoit’s WWE employers requested a welfare check after Benoit missed weekend events without notice.

(Benoit was actually scheduled to win another title during these weekend events.)

Upon arriving at his Georgia home, authorities found Nancy wrapped in a towel. She had died from asphyxiation.

Their son was also found, also dead, apparently strangled. Benoit placed a Bible next to each of their bodies.

Benoit’s body was the most disturbing to be found. The wrestler was hanged on a lat pulldown machine, with a Bible lying on the weight machine beside him. There were also allegedly 10 empty beer cans and an empty bottle of wine.

Autopsies concluded the murders and suicide took place over the course of three days.

On Friday, June 22, Chris Benoit killed his wife Nancy in an upstairs bedroom. Her limbs were bound, and her body was wrapped in a towel. A copy of the bible was left by her body. Injuries indicated that Benoit had pressed a knee into her back while pulling on a cord around her neck, causing strangulation. Officials said that there were no signs of immediate struggle. Toxicologists did find alcohol in her system, but they were unable to determine if she had been drinking prior to her death or if it was a product of decomposition.

Daniel was suffocated and killed in his bedroom, and a copy of the bible was left by his body. Daniel had internal injuries to the throat area, showing no bruises. Daniel's exact time of death is unknown. The reports determined Daniel was sedated with Xanax and likely unconscious when he was killed. Daniel's body had also just started to show signs of decomposition but was not as far along as his mother's body, so they were able to determine he was murdered after his mother.

(It was later alleged that Daniel had Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disorder that is characterized by mild to moderate intellectual disability. Physical features may include a long and narrow face, large ears, flexible fingers, and large testicles. About a third of those affected have features of autism such as problems with social interactions and delayed speech. Males are affected more than females. Daniel also had needle marks in his arm and it’s alleged that these were the result of growth hormones given to him because Benoit and his family considered him to be undersized.)

Chris Benoit committed suicide by hanging. Benoit used a weight machine cord to hang himself by creating a noose from the end of the cord on a pull-down machine from which the bar had been removed. Benoit released the weights, causing his strangulation. Benoit was found hanging from the pulley cable.

(On a podcast called The Talk is Jericho in 2016, Nancy’s sister Sandra Toffoloni divulged some more information. She said Benoit’s internet search history showed he had searched “the quickest and easiest way to break a neck”. Benoit had a towel wrapped around his neck when he committed suicide and his neck was broken instantly.)

A suicide note was not discovered, but a note written in one of the bibles Benoit had said, “I’m preparing to leave this Earth.”

A few possible motives I’ve seen people mention have included:

•CTE - Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a neurodegenerative disease caused by repeated head injuries. Symptoms do not typically begin until years after the injuries and can include behavioral problems, mood problems, and problems with thinking. During his autopsy, it was concluded that Benoit did suffer from CTE after wrestling for so many years. (Back when they threw people from tops of cages, hit each other over the head with chairs and ladders, etc.) Autopsy experts say Benoit’s brain was so severely damaged that it resembled a 85 year old Alzheimer’s patient.

•Nancy’s abuse and filing for divorce - In February 2008, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Benoit was having an affair with a female WWE wrestler and Nancy found out. It was also speculated they argued over life insurance policies.

•Benoit’s alcohol abuse - Benoit abused steroids, but many people believe it was his alcohol abuse that led to these horrific murders. Many of Benoit’s colleagues attested he would drink more when problems with Nancy occurred.

•Eddie Guerrero’s death - Benoit and Guerrero and Benoit were very close. When it came out that Guerrero has died in his hotel room in November of 2005, Benoit was devastated. WWE held a televised memorial for Guerrero and when Benoit was giving his testimony, he broke down in front of the camera. Some of Benoit’s colleagues say, “he was never the same” after Guerrero’s death.

But at the expense of sounding completely heartless, (mind you, I’ve been suicidal myself), why didn’t he just commit suicide?

Why did he have to murder his wife and seven year old son? If we go with the CTE theory, it makes sense because he was not thinking rationally.

I wish Nancy had had the strength to leave him when she tried.

The night after Benoit’s body was found, WWE Raw had a televised memorial for him and his family with Vince McMahon standing in the middle of the ring breaking the news and a video montage.

No one knew he was the one who had killed his family.

When it was later revealed that Benoit had committed these crimes the episode was removed and WWE made the decision to remove nearly all mention of Benoit from their website, future publications, video games, merchandise, DVD/Blu-Rays, and future events.

Like I said.. swept him under the rug.

Benoit is now the “He Who Shall Not Be Named” of professional wrestling.

In ending this, I’d like to quote Stone Cold Steve Austin now.

“Well first and foremost, what I think about Chris Benoit is that guy was one of the most nicest guys I ever met in my life. He’s one of the most talented, hard working cats I’d ever seen in the squared circle. Anybody who knew Chris would tell you those exact two things. That guy loved the damn wrestling business, he was born to be a wrestler and was absolutely phenomenal. Drawing a lot of his influence from The Dynamite Kid, he blazed a path as the Pegasus Kid and his legacy as The Crippler Chris Benoit was just one hellacious career.

“One night, Chris ended up killing his wife and his kid. That is an act so terrible and horrible I can’t even comprehend or guess as to what happened in that house. That will always overshadow any accomplishment Chris had in the ring. He’ll never be in the Hall of Fame, it will just never happen. His career will speak for itself but his record as a human being, his first and foremost, and those actions will never be forgotten. That’s my feelings on that, we don’t even need to talk about the Hall of Fame. Speaking for myself, Chris Benoit as the person I knew, loved him. Chris Benoit as a wrestler, loved him. Chris Benoit as the person who did what he did, unforgivable. Bottom line.” – via NoDQ.com.

Pictured below are Chris and Nancy Benoit, their son Daniel, and their home in Fayetteville, Georgia.

#chris benoit #wwe #true crime

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kogo-dogo · 3 years

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ooh 5, 9, 43 maybe??

5. What are your fanfic pet peeves? Do they have a huge effect on whether or not you decide to read something?

I can’t read things that are improperly formatted. If something isn’t spaced correctly or is an utter block of text, my brain just shuts off. It could be the most innovative, well-written work to have every spilled from human hands, but the inside of my head would just be angry and afraid and flip the “off” switch. Said brain just expects a pattern, and when that pattern is broken? I can’t do it.

I’m also not huge on most AUs. I’m what a lot of people would have called in the olden days a “canon elitist.” I’m all for flubbing things if you can make it make sense in the context of the original material, but I’m always wary of AUs. I blame the fact I was very heavily into the Elder Scrolls fandom when Mog Mod was popular and everyone’s Dunmer was a goth boy in leather chaps.

That said, not all AUs are made equal. Some people know how to write in-character and compelling content. Sometimes I’m guilty of it myself (I say, while gesturing violently to HRV). I’m just very, very leery of them.

9. Tag 3 fic writers you think are underrated/unknown in the fandom/fanfiction community.

The fics I have in mind that are unknown are fics that are literally lost. I think it’s kind of interesting to have Secret Knowledge of Hidden Fics, so I’m gonna share those instead.

- There was an illustrated(?) fic that was lost when the PlanetElderScrolls forum was destroyed, which was a screenshot-with-story fic written by a guy named Captain Jordan. About... Captain Jordan. He was a ship-sailing pirate who hung out in the Sea of Ghosts in Morrowind with a rag-tag group of non-lore compliant friends and kept ending up in weirder and weirder predicaments. Glitches that happened in-game were treated as “canon” to his adventure, and included a whale that jumped so high out of the water that it flew away, a Nord named Cjad who repeatedly died from falling from the crow’s nest, and his Khajiit and Bosmer companions getting into a raging fist-fight while a castle burned around them. It was... not lore compliant, but it was fucking hilarious because the author had one of the best senses of humor I’ve seen in writing.

- A New Vegas crack fic I found on the Fallout Kink Meme back in the day. It was about Vulpes Inculta infiltrating a slumber party with all of the most famous females of the Mojave, while dressed in a bad wig and pajamas. Throughout the whole thing, he was kept perfectly in-character, and so while all of these women are talking about their crushes and painting their nails, he is trying to piece together sensitive information from their conversations. It ends with him becoming convinced they’re oracles because they’re using a paper fortune teller to “see the future,” and he covertly informs Caesar that they’ve predicted he will do “naked Twister with the whore, Santiago.”

- My holy grail that I hope to find again someday: The Vulpes/Deacon fic. It wasn’t a ship fic, but was basically a redemption arc for Vulpes Inculta. I remember he joined a caravan after the Legion was destroyed at the insistence of Courier Six, and marched eastward until he wound up in the Commonwealth. Once there, he’d already realized how misguided he was, and while stopping at... that one settlement that hates synths? He finds a tape for “Join the Railroad” in a trashcan, and is inspired to actually seek them out. The rest of the fic is Vulpes trying to atone for his life as a tyrant and slaver by liberating synths and fighting the Institute (who he considered a second coming of the Legion). He becomes friends with Deacon, and hilarity ensues as... they’re both expert spies but have vastly different personalities and approaches. It was very good and I would pay money to have it back again, but it seems like whoever wrote it wiped it clean from the internet.. and it was unknown enough that I’ve yet to even find somebody who also read it.

43. Talk about a positive experience with fanfiction or the fanfiction community that you will always remember.

As much as I roll my eyes at the “goth boy Morrowind” time of the fandom back in the late 2000s, the Elder Scrolls fandom was actually very encouraging. I was a sixteen year old surrounded by grown adults in the forum I frequented, and I would write some of the worst, most cliche, garbage stuff known to man... and all of these adults would just applaud me and clap me on the back and congratulate me and tell me to keep going and chase that dream.

The same community that harbored all of these bizarre Mary-Sue Nerevarines and goth clubs in daedric shrines were some of the most affirming people I’ve been around. In their eyes, this was all for fun and personal enjoyment, so you can write and do whatever, so long as it didn’t hurt anyone and it made you happy. And if you wanted to put a Dremora in raver gear or dress up your Khajiit like he shopped at Hot Topic? Fine.

Those people are the entire reason I started taking writing seriously in the first place, and I adore them even over a decade later.

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goldenhydreigon47 · 3 years

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Y'know, I'm bored. May as well talk about the OCs I have for Rebel Hearts.

Aight so context: Rebel Hearts is based on the Terraria Calamity mod and is set after the Supreme Calamitas fight (Henceforth, I shall refer to Calamitas as Cal, Catastrophe as Cat, and Devourer of Gods as Dev. Why? Because that's what they prefer to be called in the story) but before the Yharim fight. Why? Well, simple: The Yharim and Draedon fights aren't in the game yet.

Please note, the only characters original to Calamity mod involved in this story are Cal, Cat, Cataclysm (the youngest of the siblings of themself, Cal, and Cat. I'll make another post about these three and Dev since I like all four of them so much), Dev, Xeroc, Noxus, Ignalius, Providence, Yharim, Yharon, and Draedon. Everyone else is a fully original character. So, uh, yeah. Here we go!

First up is the main character: Mariko Yamamoto (he/him or they/them pronouns). He's half human and half demon and boyfriends with Cataclysm in the story. Mariko's in the Mage class but specializes particularly in ice magic. His father, who was a thief and murderer who also did quite atrocious things I don't feel comfortable mentioning on here, was killed in front of Mariko when he was only 5 years old. His mother, depressed at the loss of her husband, tragically took her own life a few weeks later. Mariko was trained in combat, education, and life skills by his brother, Kronus, until Mariko was 16. A few weeks later, Yharim came along, bringing a then brainwashed Dev and Cal with him, and demolished Mariko's entire hometown, his brother sacrificing himself to save his life. Mariko, determined to save people, guided everyone to the exits while warding off Cal, who was less aggressive seeing how noble and polite Mariko was. Afterwards, Mariko literally dies from exhaustion, but is revived by Xeroc, who mentioned that his brother's dying wish was to, "Keep Mariko safe," or something along those lines and gives Mariko temporary immortality. Three years and three hundred and sixty deaths later, he defeats Cal and her brothers, but spares their lives, knowing that they don't want to live under Yharim. Months later (and additional fifty deaths, one of which caused by a backstab from Mariko's ex-ally Necro. Also, Mariko is 20 by now), Mariko is kidnapped by Yharim and tortured, causing him to die ten more times. However, as he was chained up, Mariko saw remorse in Cal's eyes, and decided to free her himself since her brothers had escaped already. Three months later, he encounters an escaping Cal and Dev and togther, with Cal's brothers, they form an alliance to defeat Yharim, with others joining later on. Speaking of which...

Akira Tadashi (they/them) is the next major OC to join Mariko's alliance. They were a vigilante Rogue class after Yharim burned down their hometown with Yharon when Akira was 15. This, along with constant abuse from his father because of Akira's feminine looks, caused immense trauma and PTSD for Akira. As a vigilante, they sometimes encountered and helped Mariko, with Akira never saying their actual name to Mariko. Upon encountering Mariko, Cal, Cat, Cataclysm, and Dev, Mariko and Akira have a friendly duel to test each other's strength and, after Mariko wins, Akira quickly joins them in their quest to eliminate Yharim (they are 19 during the story).

Next is Josephine Joachim (she/her), or Jojo as she prefers. Raised in the village of Erupis, she is from a long line of Summoners and gained her Stardust Guardian, which she dubbed 「Guns and Roses」 (yes, this is the character most of the Jojo's Bizarre Adventure references are going to) after an encounter with Yharim when she was 14 (she's 18 in the story). Upon meeting Mariko and Cal, she offers to take the team to her hometown but tragedy strikes as her mother is killed in front of her by Draedon and his new assistant, Sunork (keep that name in mind when I give the villains analysis later this week 😉). As she watched her mother die in her arms, she realized her true purpose: Defeat Yharim and free those trembling in fear from his tyranny.

Also, Yhagrim (he/him). Labelled as the "Hermit of the Mountains," most details about him are unknown minus his age (he's 27). After being discovered by Mariko, Yhagrim explains that, in fact, he is the youngest of the sibling trio of himself, Ignalius, and Yharim (Yharim is also related to Mariko but we'll get to that in the villain info). Upon their village trying to kill Yharim for trying to obtain power with dirty deeds, Yharim goes mental and destroys the village, including killing Ignalius. When he saw his brother, Yhagrim noticed Yharim stole the dragon egg that he was given by his parents at age 13 (this egg hatches to become Yharon). Yharim then quickly takes over a majority of the world and banished Yhagrim, erasing his name from all records as well as any info about him. When asked if he wanted to join Mariko's squad, Yhagrim initially declines, but joins after hearing about some of what Yharim did to his subjects (trust me it isn't pretty. Btw, Yhagrim's Joining arc isn't complete yet but it goes DEEPLY in depth into Yharim's childhood and family life. This is just a summary). Being an expert at Melee class attacks, Yhagrim can dual wield two of the Melee's best weapons: Nanoblack Reaper and Triactis' True Paladinian Mage Hammer of Might, so don't cross him.

And finally for the main cast out of the OCs I made, Drakonis Tremaine (she/her or they/them). While this Ranger class hasn't joined Mariko's group yet, her arc is after Yhagrim's so its very soon (she even forms a love relationship with Jojo). However, I wanted to mention her here because, what the hell, I mentioned everyone else, may as well talk about her. She is notably the edgiest and angriest of the group (only getting slightly less edgy during the story might I add) and is very reckless. How this came to be? Well, as a child, she grew up around a very conservative community she didn't really care for, despite how rich her parents were. This hatred only grew as she slowly started to become more comfortable with saying she was trans feminine and lesbian. However, upon coming out to her parents, they screamed at her and abused her for several months because bastards. If that wasn't enough, because her parents were high standing citizens in her city, many of the other bigots living there harassed, bullied, and even attacked her with intent to kill. All she wanted was to be accepted and validated, which she would later gain upon meeting Mariko's group, but her idiotic community wouldn't give her the acceptance or validity she needed (this entire bigoted community thing is based on my experience as a bisexual in the highly conservative state of Kentucky. I am not okay. Send help). So, eventually, her bottled up sadness, pain, and rage erupted and she genocided everyone in her town. This temper and dark side of her was sought out by mega bastard Yharim. However, Drakonis now lived by the ideal of, "Trust nobody, not even yourself, unless your desperate," so she outright refused to join Yharim, shooting him in the arm and nearly killing him, but he escaped because of Draedon's teleportation device. Many years later (she's 18 by now), she encounters Mariko and Cal, who offer her a spot on the team. With an annoyed and sarcastic tone, she again refuses, but some midnight talks with Jojo while the group is in Erupis and another major event that takes place during Drakonis' arc force her hand causing her to join.

Main Character OC Infodump completed. Infodump on Cal, her brothers, and Dev is next, then an infodump on the villains.

Hope you enjoyed this and I'll post excerpts from the story (currently in Yhagrim's arc) soon to show what happens during each arc (which range from two to twenty five sections). : )

#terraria calamity #writing #original character

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luci-cunt · 4 years

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Tell me about Magneto🤭

MAY YOU CAN’T SEE IT BUT IM KISSING YOU SO PASSIONATELY RIGHT NOW

Ok so listeeennnn tooooo meeeee, okokokok, so a while ago I went on this James McAvoy bender--don’t ask--and I saw he was in the X-Men movies, whic hi haven’t watched since the Wolverine movies/ Last Stand when I was like, actually a baby. So anyways I flipped them on thinking “yeah what could go wrong?” except I watched them in the wrong order

Anyways here’s an essay on why neither Erik or Prof X was right and the actual answer would be to compromise and these movies how how because they’re both too stubborn and couldn’t it destroyed their friendship and fucked everything up.

Also the fact that X-Men: First Class is the best Villain origin story to ever cross the screen.

Ok so spoilers ahead for X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: First Class

Now, it should be noted that I’m no an X-Men expert I just love these two movies.

So for some context: First Class and Days of Future Past are both kind of prequels, except DoFP is a prequel-sequel?? becuase of time travel?? I’ll explain don’t worry. The point is, they take place in the past where all the characters are younger. James McAvoy plays Professor X (who I’ll just be calling X for this whole thing), Michael Fassbender plays Magneto (aka Erik), oh and Jennifer Lawrence plays Mystic--who will be appearing in this essay XDD.

Alright so first of all have a plot summary: DoFP is about Wolverine getting sent back in time so he can convince a younger Prof X to stop Raven (aka Mystic) from getting caught by this guy Trask who then uses her DNA to create super weapons that irradiate all mutants. The current future Wolverine is in, he, prof X, Magneto, and a few other mutants are trying their best to survive but it’s a losing battle and their only hope is to literally change the past.

This one takes place after the events of First Class, which I will now explain.

So in First Class a younger Prof X and Magneto team up to find and recruit bb mutants to X’s school because the government wants to use Mutants to help fight the Russians (oh head this takes placee in the 1960′s right before the Cuban Missile Crisis). This is essentially a Magneto origin story and also--in my opinion--the best villain origin story to ever cross the screen.

OK so now some details on our main characters:

Magneto/ Erik Lehnsherr: a literal holocaust survivor who’s only goal in the begining of the story is hunting/ killing nazi’s, specifically one nazi who tortured him specifically and I will get into him later don’t worry.

Professor X: super smart rich white boy with a heart of gold but also enough naivete to make a lamb look like a Stephen King character.

Already you can see very stark differences between the two of them. Erik is set up as being a staunch pessimist while X is a vivid optimist, and that makes sense. X’s grown up sheltered and never wanting for anythign while Erik suffered a trainwreck of the greatest traumas in human existence hitting him over and over and over again from like age fucking 9.

Ok also tehre’s J-Law’s character Raven, who is a mutant that can change her skin to look like anythign she wants it to but her actual form is blue/ scaly/ “not pretty” (bullshit but ok). She met X when she broke into his house one night to steal some food and then they became friends, their relationship will become important later but for now that’s all u need to know.

ok so anyways, in the begining of First Class Erik is hunting + killing Nazi’s, specifically looking for this one called Schmidt because when Erik was little he and his family were carted away to a concentration camp where Schmidt witness Erik use his metal bending powers and decided to “train” him. aka physically/ mentally abuse him for years. The whole thing starts with Schmidt trying to get Erik to lift a metal coin with his mind, when he can’t (because he’s a child who didn’t even know he had his powers until literally hours ago) Schmidt puts his mother’s life on the line and when he still can’t Schmidt kills her. This sends Erik it’s a rage and he crushes some nazi heads but then Schmidt is still standing and mentions how “oh gotcha, so it’s rage and pain that’s the key to your powers huh?” anyways this tidbit and the coin will become important later trust me--

Meanwhile Prof X is graduating from Oxford/ generally being an idiot pretty boy. He’s a telepath who knows about his powers and has used them from an early age. He also wrote some big paper on mutants, which gets the attention of an FBI agent who witnesses the villains being mutants and wants his advice

However, the villains just so happen to be Schmidt, who’s going by “Shaw” now, so when X and the agents catch up to him Erik is already there and on a mission to murder his ass. Some bs happens, Erik tries to pull a submarine out of the water but can’t (T-T this will be important) and X jumps into the water to stop him because the mental stress is literally killing him.

That’s how they meet.

It’s important to note: up until this point, Erik didn’t know there were other mutants, so meeting X, who’s friends with Raven, is kind of a big deal for him. He and X become very fast friends and also have a very homoerotic montage where they become dads for a bunch of mutant teenagers, because they realize they can use X to track all these baby mutants, collect them, and train them so they don’t grow up fearing their powers.

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Anyways, the other thing about this is that now that Erik has this newfound group of people that are just like him, he’s opening up, and X is helping him realize he’s actually so much more powerful when he taps into happy memories rather than fueling himself on pain and rage. This scene always makes me sob oh my god--

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Also, fellas--is it gay to “access the brightest cortex” of your homies memories and remind him that hate and pain are not good motivators before reminding him that he has good memories he can draw on and showing him that his life has not been entirely painful?

YEs, the answer is yes are u shitting me??

ok so anyways--something to note about this is that X and Erik are both very protective of all their new kids, but Erik is especially so. I’m going to be getting into this more but just tab thsi thought for later :)

Now, the plot’s kicking up a bit, because it’s at this point that Erik and X capture one of Shaw’s (aka the nazi’s) main lackies and they question her until she gives them the info that Shaw’s planning on using the Cuban Missile Crisis tensions to start a nuclear war to wipe out all humans so that only mutants survive in the new world.

Obviously they want to stop him, but also, you can kind of tell that Erik is not totally against this plan, which only gets to be more later but that’s for later.

Right now I wanna take a quick break to talk about Raven--aka Mystic, aka J-Law. She and X were childhood friends and she kind of clung to him because she doesn’t have family/ anyone she can really be herself around besides him.

X insistently says throughout the movie he sees her as a sister, but it’s kinda obvious she’d be down to fuck. She has this big plotline where she keeps trying to get X to understand why it’s so frustrating for her to have to be using energy to look “human.” Because her natural form is the one with the blue skin. X doesn’t understand this because his power is easy to hide, it’s simple for him to just fake-human and have no one be any wiser, Raven, however, doesn’t have that luxury and when she tries to explain this to X it just flies over his head, insisting she hide her natural self to better fit in if that’s what she really wants.

Queue Erik, who comes in as a king of self love. He’s pretty blunt about it, but his point is basically “you’re wasting energy by constantly pretending you’re something you’re not--stop” and she responds essentially with “yeah but then no one will like me” to which he responds “then make them.”

Raven’s relationship with both the boys is used through both First Class and DoFP to really highlight their faults. X believes humans and mutants can coexist but he thinks we go about doign that by completely ignoring the pages of history of abuse mutants have suffered--and it’s mostly because he hasn’t experienced it.

Erik on the other hand will do everything and anything he possibly can to protect his new family/ people, and in his head that means exterminating any and all threats. By the end of the movie--humans become one of those threats.

The point of this whole ramble is that: they both represent utter opposites, BUT, X’s blind optimism and Erik’s blind pessimism are equally bad.

Ok so back to plot for a second to prove this.

Shaw is revealed to be a mutant himself and he also has a helmet that can block telepathy. (yes it’s the magneto helmetjasjd;fkjaskl;dfjasldkj jsut wait).

His plan’s complicated but basically: he’s going to poke America and Russia until they pop and incite a nuclear war. And it works. The whole pre-climax of the film sees X, Erik, Raven, and the other mutants all working double time to stop Shaw’s plan (AND IT INVOLVES ERIK SUCCESSFULLY PULING A SUBMARINE OUT OF THE WATER!!! BECAUSE NOW HE’S USING HAPPINESS INSTEAD OF ANGER/ PAIN!!!).

Anywho, they’re doing all this, but then some bullshit happens, the plane they’re on crashes oh and -- yeah there’s this part where Erik uses himself as a seatbelt for X it’s fantastic but anyways--

This is finally the climax of the film.

Also possibly the greatest scene in film history in my humble opinion.

Because listen--in order to stop Shaw they need the helmet off of him so that X can telepathically freeze his ass and they can arrest him or whatever. So they split up--Erik rushes into the wreckage to find Shaw and X stays behind ready to freeze the guy as soon as the helmet comes off but--

Well, vengence is just too tempting.

So when Erik gets Shaws helmet off, X freezes the guy, and he’s ecstatic, at least until he realizes Erik plans on killing Shaw.

He’s pleading with Erik because this is vengence and he can’t chose that but Erik just puts on the helmet and--taunts Shaw, pulling out the coin Shaw taunted him with all those years ago and in a mimickry of the game Shaw forced him to play as a child and killed his mother over--he slowly floats the coin at Shaws head, telling him “I’m going to count to ten, and all you have to do is move.”

But he can’t--because X is holding him--and that’s the point, Erik wants him as helpless as he was, and X can’t let his hold on Shaw go because that would mean putting Erik in danger but he’s also in Shaws head so he feels the coin go through his head as though Erik was doing it to him and the fucking cinematography in this scene is so fuaksdjf;laksjd;fjasd;lkfjadsl;asdjf;ljL:DKJFL:SDKJFL:D KFUCKKKKK

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This scene is cinematic perfection don’t fucking lOOK at me unless you agree.

T-T and then, it only gets worse, because now Erik’s finally finished his original purpose--killing the man who killed his mother and ruined his life--and now he’s got a new one, aka protecting his new family aka the mutants.

AND HE’S ONLY PROVEN RIGHT THAT HUMANS ARE A THREAT BECAUSE THEY TURN AND TRY TO KILL ALL THE MUTANTS IN THE PLANE CRASH AND JSUT--

And so he stops all the missiles flying their way, and turns them around on the humans and X has to stop him but he’s not listening and the rawest fucking line in the whole movie comes when X says

“There’s hundreds of men on those ships--innocent men. They’re just following orders!”

And Erik simply replies, “I’ve been at the mercy of men ‘just following orders’--never again.”

And then he goes to blow up the shipsthen one of the other characters goes to shoot Erik and he deflects the bullet wtihout thinking right. into. X’s. back.

Paralysing him.

And just akjd;fjasdflkjasd;lfkj this scene speaks for itself

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Listen just--akjdsf;ljasdlk jguys this movie has no right being this good.

And then the movie closes off with X and Erik literally begging one another to just see it their way--because they both want so badly to be on the same side but they’re too stubborn and they refuse to see compromise and just ajkdf;lja;sdkfja;sdljkfsadlkf

Ok I realize now that I barely talked about DoFP but this is already so long. The major things I was going to bring up was teh absolutely fantastic bitter exes energy that McAvoy and Fassbender bring to that movie it’s excellent but also the fact that X is literally the only person Erik goes out of his way not to kill despite standing directly in the way of Erik’s goal.

Like, you remember my whole deal with Raven??? yeah that’s x10 in DoFP (which takes place quickly after this movie) yeah so her and Erik are close, and shown to be close, but the second he thinks she endangers his fam he literally 180′s so quick and tries to straight up murder her.

BUT HE FUCKING BENDS THE BULLET AROUND X’s HEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! X!!!!!!!!!! WHO’S LITERALLY 100% AGAINST HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JUST

Ok, that’s all. By the way I don’t want to like, up your expecations too much because I actually kind of hate X-Men: First Class almost as much as I love it?? it’s very..... of it’s era, and cheesy, and dumb--but fucking magneto you guys holy SHIT

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narukoibito · 4 years

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charity work bonus snippet

@the-hinny-shipper

Oh my gosh I love this. Probably not, but is there like a part 2 or something? I know that's meant to be the end, but I need to know what happens next.

Thank you so much for the kind words to charity work, my Muggle AU where Ginny is a famous football player who helps Harry teepee and egg his ex’s house! ♥️

I am actually working on a part 2. Harry and Ginny of this world just couldn’t stop chattering in my head, and there’s about 2.5k words thus far. I know what’s going to happen - I just need to write, edit, and pull the trigger and post it...

But in the meantime, I am sharing a funny little subplot that I wasn’t sure was ever going to see the light of day. It’s a bit of a prequel that I started but then dropped because it didn’t add much to the story...but today I thought, eh, why not share since we can all use some laughs now more than ever. It’s unbetaed, and I’m still iffy on it, but I hope you this will tide you over until I get part 2 posted.

(Also tagging the lovely @isidar-mithrim and @blattgefluester in case you are interested since you were both so amazingly kind toward charity work!)

Summary: This wasn’t what Seamus had in mind when he suggested Ginny do more charity work.

The Prophet landing on the table with a loud thud.

“What’s this?”

“This, Ginny, is the result of your spectacular interview with Miss Rita Skeeter.”

Ginny lifted her chin, pushing the paper away from her and returning to shoveling her porridge down. “So it’s the usual rubbish.”

Seamus pursed his lips, annoyed that once again she wasn’t taking this seriously. “Rubbish it may be, but rubbish that sells.”

She arched an eyebrow at him. “So are you here as my publicist or as a friend?”

“Can’t I be both?” He grinned.

She prodded the offensive article with distaste. “What do they say this time?”

“Well, Miss Skeeter took it upon herself to approach all your exes for an ‘expose.’”

“I like to kick a ball for a living. I don’t understand the obsession with my love life.”

“The all-star player who went pro at your age with your looks?” Seamus winked. Ginny rolled her eyes.

“Don’t let Dean catch you doing that.”

“He knows I’m a hopeless flirt,” he dismissed cheerfully.

She made a strangled, irritated noise.

“Look, it’s not too bad.” He unfurling the paper with a wince. The headliner, Wonder Girl Weasley Not So Wonderful Girlfriend?, paired with an unflattering photo of Ginny shoving a camera away from her face flashed back at her. “She found some, er, old classmates to go on the record.”

Ginny’s expression darkened. “Record about what?”

“You remember when you stopped people from bullying Luna? And Neville? And when Dean and I got together? Well, somehow Skeeter got in touch with Parkinson, Zabini, Smith... Skeeter may or may not insinuate that you’re…aggressive. Have a bit of a temper.”

Ginny grabbed the paper and began reading loudly, “Since the early days of her youth, Ginevra Molly Weasley, better known as Ginny, the Wonder Girl Weasley, has been bewitching men to do her bidding. We here at The Prophet have long extolled the many virtues of Miss Weasley, but I, your fearless investigator of truth, uncovered a disturbing pattern in how Miss Weasley wraps men around her little finger. What others thought was wit and charm, I have uncovered may actually be the result of a threatening temper. I dare to ask, should we be concerned with Miss Weasley’s trail of broken hearts and perhaps other broken body parts?”

He bit his tongue as Ginny read the part where Rita expounded on Ginny’s "commoner” country-side upbringing” surrounded by her “rowdy” brothers as the source of her “violent streak.”

“I only punched Parkinson once, and that was when she poured punch on Luna!” Ginny scrunched up the newspaper and flung it angrily into the bin. “She goes on about some weird sorcery I have with men.”

“Look, I’ve already called Parvati about getting you on some morning shows, but maybe this time we can agree on some talking points, hmm? And maybe have you do some charity work, show your gentle, caring side. Get some positive press coverage.”

She continued to fume, muttering under her breath, “Skeeter gives witches a bad name.”

“It’ll all pass, Ginny,” Seamus smiled at her sympathetically. “Come back later tonight. Dean’s making roast, and we’ll talk about how to set the narrative straight.”

He sent her on her way, hoping that practice would relieve some of the rage.

Seamus’s head emerged from the oven, his face flushed scarlet. “Ginny, you can’t just go meet random fans and help them commit a crime!”

Even after all these years, she never ceased to amaze them. But this - randomly taking an Instagram follower’s request to egg and teepee a house? This was one of Ginny’s more...creative ideas.

“That’s right,” Dean agreed, taking the roast and plating it. “For all you know he could wank to your posters.”

“Well then you’d know he has good taste,” she said, dripping her finger into the cooling gravy.

“Ginny,” they sighed together in exasperation and pushing her away from the kitchen counter.

“What happened between this morning and now?”

“You’re always saying I should do more charity,” she said pointedly.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Seamus wagged a finger at her. She folded her arms across her chest, staring them down (which was quite the accomplishment, considering how much taller they were).

“We can’t let you do this.”

“When has anyone ever let me do anything?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

Seamus and Dean shared a long look, no doubt both of them remembering that one time she broke into the headmaster’s office to steal back the replica toy sword Ron was stupid enough wear to school as part of his knight costume for Halloween.

“Look,” Dean said carefully, leading her into the dining room as Seamus followed, plates of food laden in his arms. “We know you’re more than capable to taking care of yourself.”

“Damn straight,” she said, but she let him gently nudge her into her seat.

“But as your friends — ”

“One of whom would like to stay gainfully employed,” Seamus cut in, playing the food on the table.

“—and who would absolutely be murdered by your brothers if they ever found out, we want to make sure you’re…thinking straight.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Oh, we know,” Seamus said, deadpan. “But I really don’t need another article supporting this theory that you’re aggressive. If you beat the bloke up and the press catches wind of it…”

“I’m going. I put this idea into his head. And look at him,” she said, holding up a picture of H-P-Lightening, smiling sheepishly into the camera.

They examined the photo skeptically as Ginny tucked into dinner. Maybe while they were distracted, she could nick an extra bit of roast.

“He’s cute,” Seamus pointed out.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “Not the point.”

"Doesn’t hurt,” Dean said.

“He and I share a similar goal: to serve some much-needed justice in the world. And since I can’t go about egging Michael’s house without it ending up on the Sunday papers, I can at least help someone else.”

“His hair is an absolute disaster, but it somehow works on him,” Seamus continued, ignoring her.

“Those green eyes,” Dean said appreciatively.

“Plays football too,” Seamus said, clicking through to some videos. “He’s fit.”

Now they were both giving Ginny a look with entirely new context.

“It’s not like that,” she said breezily.

“Maybe she’s hoping he wanks to her poster,” Seamus snickered, not believing her for a second.

“He could wind up in trouble if he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“And you’re an expert?” Dean asked.

“I’m a Weasley.” She smiled wickedly, and they laughed. “Besides, who am I to ignore a gentleman in distress?”

“Okay, fine, if we can’t stop you —”

She snorted.

“—then we’re coming with you.”

“What?”

“We’ll watch from a safe distance,” Seamus assured her, Dean nodding along. “Just to make sure you don’t end up in the papers.”

“We will help you hide the body,” Dean said.

Ginny looked from one to the other. They were grinning at her, half eager and half earnestly. She didn’t need them to come. She was more than capable of taking care of herself. But, suppose this turned out to be something she wasn’t expecting…

“Fine, but —” she added quickly when they started to wiggle their eyebrows at one another “—the moment, and I mean the very moment I give you the signal, you better make yourself scarce.”

Dean and Seamus beamed across the table. “Whatever you want, luv!”

“You can’t stay if you’re going to be this obvious.” Ginny growled.

“Obvious? We’re perfectly inconspicuous,” Seamus bristled.

“You brought binoculars,” she said dryly, placed her hands on her hips. “And a bat."

“Told you she wouldn’t like that,” Dean said.

“I won’t use the bat. It’s just in case we need to scare him off.”

Ginny and Dean gave him a look.

“What? This person could be tricking us!”

When Ginny’s glare made his back hair stick on end, Seamus relented.

“Fine, we’ll cross the street,” Seamus said, taking Dean by the arm. When they turned around, Ginny was still scowling, whipping out her phone and texting them furiously.

You are going to have to HIDE.

There’s nothing strange about us being here! Seamus typed back.

You’re two random, loitering blokes, ready to stalk or bean someone. If you’re going to stay, you’re going to hide. Ginny over at them critically. Behind those bushes.

“Ugh,” Seamus groaned, crouching down and behind the bushes with his boyfriend dutifully following. He swatted at a twig that was unpleasantly digging into the side of his bum.

Happy? he texted her back.

Delirious. Remember. You both better leave when I give the signal. Or else.

A shudder went down his spine, knowing very well what Ginny was capable of.

“This isn’t what I imagined our cozy Friday evening being.”

“You don’t really mind,” Dean said, smiling knowingly.

Seamus huffed and peered into the binoculars rather than reply. Yes, he was worried about this blowing up in his face (things often did), but he couldn’t deny he was a bit curious. He had never seen Ginny look that way at a photo before.

“You just want a front row seat,” Dean teased.

“Shut — oh, I think that’s him!”

They watched with anticipation as a lanky, bespectacled bloke with tousled black hair ascended the train station steps. He seemed to be deeply brooding as Ginny approached him. Through the binoculars, Seamus watched as this fellow, Harry something-or-other, looked up, eyes wide, and nearly tripped over the last step.

“They seem to be hitting it off,” Dean said as Ginny and Harry laughed before she handed him a hoodie.

They began walking, and Seamus scrambled to follow. “Come on.”

He kept an eye out for anyone else who might be around, but there didn’t seem to be anyone who recognized or followed Ginny.

“I think we can leave the bat.” Dean chuckled, swiping the binoculars for a closer look himself.

They trailed the other couple from across the street, doing the best they could to be inconspicuous. Ginny and this bloke looked good together. He looked oddly charming with his wild hair and glasses, but it was really the way he looked at Ginny at set Seamus at ease. They kept talking, laughing, smiling at one another. Seamus hadn’t seen her laugh so much since…he couldn’t even remember.

Was that — was Ginny Weasley blushing?

After several minutes, Seamus and Dean stopped and looked at each other.

Ginny had completely forgotten about them.

“Do you think if we leave now, we can still catch the last half of the game?”

“Yeah,” Seamus said, taking Dean’s hand as they headed home.

Maybe their Friday evening plans could be salvaged after all.

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duhragonball · 5 years

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Dragon Ball Super Movie 1: Broly (2/2)

Last time, Frieza was planning a trip to Earth to make a wish on the Dragon Balls, when Cheelai and Leemo showed up with a new recruit, Broly. Now they’re hanging out in the mess hall of Frieza’s ship, and the strongest guy on the crew is drunkenly creeping on Cheelai. I guess that lady in the background already shot him down, or he has a thing for the green ladies.

I like this part where Leemo tries to defuse the situation noviolently. He’s not a fighter, and even if he were, he probably wouldn’t stand a chance here, but he’s lived his whole life surrounded by super-strong guys, and he knows how to make due with what he has. It doesn’t work here, but it adds a lot to this scene.

Anyway, I don’t think you need me to tell you how this turns out. Broly steps in, and he overpowers whatsisface in two seconds. This is especially ironic in the U.S. dub, where Broly was voiced by notorious sex pest Vic Mignogna. I kind of wonder what was going through his mind when he did this scene, except he probably didn’t even know the context. They just told him to grunt and yell. Still, he must have watched the movie at some point, right?

Like how would he not make the connection that he’s the grey dude in this scenario, and Broly is getting major babyface heat by standing up for Cheelai? Like, this whole scene was created to make Broly sympathetic, especially compared to his original 1993 incarnation. Good guys respect women, bad guys harass them. Did the point just sail over his head? He was probably all: “Gosh, Broly should have stayed out of this, and donated money to the grey man for his defamation lawsuit against Cheelai.”

Oh, who am I kidding, he probably spent the whole movie staring at Cheelai’s boobs. Or the nearest woman in the theater.

Anyway, Paragus thinks Broly’s getting out of hand, so he uses the shock collar to settle him down. Cheelai and Leemo are outraged (again), but Paragus insists that it’s necessary to keep Broly from going nuts and killing them all.

I’m a bit conflicted about the collar. It’s clearly a replication of the mind-control tiara Paragus used on Broly in the DBZ movie, but this is much simpler in design. Just an electric shock, nothing more. I like the simplicity of it.

However, I also liked the mind-control tiara. It looked stylish, and I liked the mystery of how it worked and where Paragus got it from. There was that scene in Movie 8 where he had an alien henchman run a diagnostic on the device, but there’s no telling if that guy built it or if he’s just the closest thing Paragus could find to an expert. There was a mystique about the thing, which the shock collar just does away with entirely. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not.

But it probably serves this plot better, because Cheelai picks Paragus’ pocket while they talk, and she stomps the controller after he leaves. Probably would have been harder to make this work with a magic device like that arm thing Paragus used to make the tiara work.

Paragus gets summoned to Frieza’s chamber again, so while he’s gone, Broly hangs out with his new pals in... I guess a cargo room? He thinks ordinary water is delicious, to give you an idea of how rough it was for him growing up on Vampa. He then explains the fuzzy green thing around his waist, which always reminds me of the bathmat at my grandmother’s house. Paragus used to make Broly provoke a giant green animal on Vampa as a training exercise, until eventually they became friends. Broly named it “Ba” after the noise it made. Paragus disapproved of their friendship, so he shot Ba’s ear off to piss him off good, and put a stop to that. Broly never saw Ba again, so he kept the ear as a memento, and that’s what he’s been wearing this whole time.

See, I like this better than Broly’s Movie 8 outfit, because it has a backstory. I think Ba’s ear was conceived as a way to give Broly a wrap like the red one worn by the original, but someone, probably Toriyama, wanted there to be something more to it.

Anyway, this tale pretty much defines Paragus and Broly’s relationship. Paragus seems to genuinely care about the boy, but his main objective is for Broly to become as strong as possible so that he can prove King Vegeta was wrong to exile them. In pursuit of this goal, Paragus has micro-managed Broly to the point where he has almost no freedom at all. Cheelai suspect that Broly doesn’t even enjoy fighting, which sounds pretty extreme for a Saiyan, but she might be right. I’d like to think this version of Broly would enjoy fighting, but not the way Paragus has been handling things.

Meanwhile, the good guys arrive at the ice continent to find the seventh Dragon Ball. Frieza’s goons stole the first six and the Dragon Radar, so it doesn’t take long for Goku and Vegeta to track them down. Here, we see them in their cute cold weather gear. I don’t get how those coats do a damn thing in the antarctic, but I love Bulma’s spacesuit-looking thing.

So they find the two goons, and one of them looks like an alien John Banner from Hogan’s Heroes. They’re terrified of Goku because he’s breathing hard on the glass of their ship. I’d be more worried about him doing a pressed fruit basket on the glass.

Luckily for them, they radioed Frieza about finding the seventh ball right before Goku showed up, so Frieza comes to the rescue. They banter for a while, but the big story everyone wants to know about is Frieza’s backup. He introduces Paragus and Broly, and Frieza’s plan is to have Broly do all the fighting, and he’ll let them kill Vegeta as long as he gets to finish off Goku.

So Vegeta and Broly start us off. Broly does reasonably okay, but Vegeta seems to have the upper hand the whole time, and then he turns Super Saiyan, which freaks Paragus out, because he didn’t even know that was a thing. That bums Frieza out, because I guess he assumed Broly could do it too? Why would he think that? I mean, he turns out to be right later, but he should know that not just any Saiyan can pull that off.

Moreover, Vegeta can transform further than this. People made a big to-do about this part, where he uses the Super Saiyan God form Goku used in Movie 14, but I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. I mean, Super Saiyan Blue is better, and Vegeta knows how to do that one, so what’s the difference? I mean, I’m the guy who really wanted to see Vegeta use Super Saiyan 3 a long time ago, so I get why this is a big deal for people, but it doesn’t mean much to me personally.

At any rate, Vegeta seems disgusted with Broly’s performance, but I think it says a lot that he managed to hold out this long against Super Saiyan God Vegeta.

Around this point, Paragus tries to call Broly off, but he can’t, because he doesn’t have the remote to use the shock collar. I’m not sure I understand what was supposed to happen if he still had it. Was Frieza going to fight Goku and Vegeta by himself? Was he going to just quietly withdraw and leave the Dragon Balls behind?

Also, I’d just like to take this time to point out that Paragus looks really dumb here. He looked cool at the start of the movie, when he was younger and looked more like his 1993 design, but then they dressed him in this green and purple number, and the pink shower curtain looks really dumb. Also, I hate how they lightened his skin tone in this movie. At least they brought back Dameron Clarke to play him in the dub. I really like Paragus, and he’s mostly okay in this movie, but he’s nowhere near as cool as the ‘93 version.

As for the fight, Broly somehow gets a second wind, and holds of Vegeta, even in his god form. Paragus suggests that Broly has somehow tapped into the Oozaru power Saiyans have when they turn into giant apes. Except Broly’s tail was cut off at a young age, so he hasn’t turned into a giant ape in years. Paragus seems to think that Broly’s body is using that power anyway, but without the transformation turning him into a big, bulky ape, there’s nothing to slow down his movements.

Also, Broly is glowing green when he does this, so maybe the implication is that this was what every version of Broly has been doing, and I guess Kale too. I’ve also seen it suggested that this ties into Super Saiyan 4 somehow. I mean, it makes sense, because you have to be a Super Saiyan and a Giant Ape at the same time to go SSJ4, and then you shrink down into a humanoid state, with the powers of both. Broly’s doing it in a different order, but maybe he’s worked out something similar?

The thing is, I don’t really buy Oozaru power as a useful thing. This franchise retired the concept thirty years ago, save for a brief comeback in Dragon Ball GT. Hell, they didn’t even show anyone turning into a giant ape in this movie, which seems to rely onthe concept quite a bit. If Great Ape power was so hot, why don’t they just go all in and use it? The implication of DBZ was that, past a point, it just stops mattering, and when Goku and Vegeta became powerful enough, the form became obsolete. But somehow Broly’s using it and he’s strong enough to throw hands with god-Saiyans. Or maybe Paragus is completely wrong about all of this, and he’s only guessing Oozaru stuff for lack of a better explanation.

I mean, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. There’s SSJ4 fans who really like how this movie teased at the form, and that’s great lore, even if this is as far as it goes, but it doesn’t mean that much to me. Personally, I’m more into how Goku used the term “base form” in the script. As in: Broly is holding off Vegeta, even in his base form. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time it’s been used in official material.

So then Goku decides to jump in, using his base form as well, which I find pretty dumb, since Broly was beating up Vegeta in SSG mode a minute ago. This sort of teeters on the brink of GT Logic. I really prefer the way things were in the Cell Saga, where no one would even try to fight Cell or the androids until they were comfortably transformed. I mean, why would you not?

Goku uses Super Saiyan Classic for a bit, then he ramps up to his own Nacho Cheese form, and he manages to subdue Broly for a hot minute. He tries to reason with the guy, saying that he isn’t all that bad, so why not make peace. Notably, when Goku tells Broly he doesn’t have to listen to those bad guys at the ship, it makes Paragus really nervous, like he’s terrified that someone will tell Broly that and he’ll actually listen.

But then Broly powers up and fights his way out of it, and starts taking control of the battle again.

The weaker bad guys lift off to get clear of the battle, while Frieza and Paragus remain behind to watch. Cheelai is frustrated that Broly is being used to fight this sort of battle, even though he happens to be doing pretty well so far.

Piccolo contacts Goku telepathically about this situation, and Goku plans to teleport to Piccolo’s location if things go south. But first...

... he turns Super Saiyan Blue and tries to fight Broly that way.

And this is where the movie uses a bunch of CGI stuff, like like in Battle of Gods and Resurrection F. The graphics look better, like something out of Fighter Z instead of Raging Blast 2, but it still looks dumb. What Toei doesn’t seem to understand is that this stuff ages really poorly. This movie’s not even a year old, and it already stands out. It’s not about improving the graphics, either. The problem is that the poses look so robotic and lifeless. This is especially true for this movie, where most of the animation is so fluid and expressive.

For example.

During this part of the fight, the land gets torn up, exposing the magma below, and Paragus begins to wonder if King Vegeta had been right all along. Maybe Broly really is too dangerous, and sending him to Vampa was the best thing for everyone. As it is, Goku Blue is winning, and Broly is too far gone to realize that he needs to stop fighting. Without the remote, Paragus can only stand by and watch his son get killed.

But Frieza isn’t giving up yet. Once he’s certain that Broly has no more miracles in him...

... he kills Paragus himself, and calls out to Broly to make sure he sees what’s happened.

And that causes Broly to flip out and turn Super Saiyan himself. I guess this is just Super Saiyan 1, and not some nutty alternate form, but the point is that Broly was doing very well in his regular state, so any transformation on top of that makes him unstoppable. Goku tries to hang in there, but then Vegeta jumps in and tells him that he can’t possibly win alone.

So they try hitting him with a Kamehameha/Gallic Gun combo, but that does nothing...

... then they lead him directly towards Frieza, and Broly attacks him instead, because I guess he’s not picky at this point.

Then they teleport to Piccolo. Goku’s plan now is to use the Fusion Technique, but he needs Piccolo to coach them because Vegeta’s never done it before.

Okay, so a couple of problems I have with this part. First, I really don’t like the idea of Broly vs. Gogeta being a thing. I first saw this idea in the opening credits for Dragon Ball Z Budokai 3, and it always annoyed me because I never cared for the idea of Broly as such a powerful threat that only fusion could beat him. Broly’s deal is that he’s an evil Super Saiyan, so my preferred scenario is for Goku or Vegeta to beat him solo.

Second, I’m not wild about how this movie tries to do Broly, Gogeta, and Bardock as a combination platter. The Bardock stuff works reasonably well, since Broly’s origin story takes place when Bardock was around, and Dragon Ball Minus was already written. And Broly was a non-canon concept, so revamping him for this wasn’t a terrible idea. But throwing Gogeta in too just feels like pandering to me. For years, Fathom Events has been screening DBZ features in theaters, and they always seem to go for “Bardock: Father of Goku”, “Fusion Reborn”, and “Broly: The Legendary Super Saiyan.” I feel like a Cooler movie made the cut once, but that was a long time ago. The point is that someone in charge seems to consider those three specials to be the most popular or best ones, and it feels an awful lot like this DBS movie is trying to cash in on that.

And I can’t blame Toei for wanting to combine three popular titles, but it just feels a little too convenient. Fans saw Gogeta coming, because they noticed the lineup Fathom Events had before this movie premiered, and they knew Broly and Bardock would be in this one, so it got them thinking Gogeta would make an appearance as well.

With Bardock, you can make a case that this version is an improvement over the “Father of Goku” version. And Broly may be better off this way than the 1993 version of the character. But this take on Gogeta isn’t nearly as fun or cool as “Fusion Reborn”. The boys just leave the battlefield and drill the Fusion dance until they get it right. How does that make any sense?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s funny how Frieza gets the shit beat out of him for over and hour, but how does that make sense at all?

I mean, Golden Frieza couldn’t beat Goku or Vegeta in the last movie, so how can he survive against a guy who was taking them both on at the same time? For an hour? How did Frieza survive this?

Really, longer than that, because Gogeta takes a minute to decide what to call himself. It’s a cute moment, but still. Part of what makes Fusion Reborn so awesome was that Goku had to convince Vegeta and teach him the fusion in the middle of the battlefield. When they screwed it up, Janemba kept trying to kill them while they tried to deal with it. This movie sucks all of that tension away.

There is a part where Broly goes after Whis and can’t hit him, so maybe Whis kept the big guy busy for a while, but I dunno. Anyway, Gogeta teleports in and promises to handle the rest.

Bulma looks really cute here, by the way.

So yeah, Gogeta goes Super Saiyan and they fight so hard that it opens up a dimensional rift or something...

I don’t know what the idea here was, but it’s trippy and I like it, I guess.

Anyway, Gogeta goes Blue and punches Broly hard enough that they go back to the real world.

But this screencap pretty well sums it up. A blue guy and a green guy shooting green and blue shit at each other.

Gogeta even uses the Stardust Breaker from Movie 12, but Broly survives, even though Gogeta’s at Super Saiyan Blue. I gotta be honest, this is just a bit too wacky for me.

Meanwhile, Cheelai and Leemo steal the Dragon Balls and summon Shenron. She forces whatsisname to tell them how to make the wish, but it turns out you can just ask Shenron directly, so it’s not that complicated.

See, the big twist of this movie, which is really what holds all of this together, is that Broly’s not the villain after all. He’s the victim here, and that puts things in a whole other light now that Gogeta is turning the tables on him. When I found out this movie would come down to Broly vs. Gogeta, I wondered how evenly matched they would be, but since Broly is sympathetic, it changes the equation. Gogeta can just whale on the guy, and it doesn’t matter, because the real suspense is whether Cheelai can save Broly before it’s too late.

As Gogeta prepares a finishing blast, Cheelai wishes for Broly to be sent back to Vampa, and Shenron does it. Vampa sucks, but at least Broly is safe here.

Then Leemo and Cheelai fly out of here to save themselves. Frieza tries to blast them out of the sky. Why didn’t he stop them before they made their wish? Also, why didn’t Shenron offer to grant two more wishes?

In any case, Gogeta stops Frieza from killing them, and he shrugs Gogeta off and prepares to leave. Gogeta just... stands there and lets him? Why? Vegeta has always wanted Frieza dead, and Goku learned the hard way in the last movie. This is dumb.

Meanwhile, Beerus has done absolutely jack shit through this whole movie and he’s very pleased about it.

In space, Cheelai plans to drop Leemo off somewhere and then head for Vampa. She figures she’s a fugitive from the GP and the Frieza Force, so it’s about the only place left for her to go. This definitely has nothing to do with the generous bulge in Broly’s tights, no sir.

But Leemo wants to tag along, since he figures he doesn’t have much going for him either.

Frieza knows that they’re all together on Vampa, but he decides to leave them be for now. He seems to think they can make Broly stronger and better able to control his power, and that suits him for... some reason.

This line confuses me. Is he saying he wants another nemesis, in addition to Goku and Vegeta? Or is he saying that he wants a potential ally to help him defeat Goku and Vegeta? Or something else altogether?

On Vampa, Cheelai and Leemo are starting to realize what they’ve signed on for here. The only food on the planet is bitter, and everything is trying to kill them.

Then Goku just teleports into their cave and gives them a capsule house full of provisions. He even gives them a couple of senzu beans.

Cheelai is suspicious of Goku, but he explains that he just wants them to be safe and healthy, because he wants to fight Broly again sometime. After all, it took nothing less than Gogeta Blue to beat him, so he must be a worthy opponent.

Cheelai still regards Goku as an enemy, but he doesn’t particularly care, since he can find them wherever they go, and Broly seems happy with the idea of fighting with him for funsies.

So Cheelai lightens up a bit and thanks him. Then they ask Goku his name, because they never heard who this guy is or what he’s all about.

So he says that he’s Son Goku... and Kakarot. I like the dub version better, where he specifically says “Broly... call me Kakarot.” Either way, I like this ending, because “Kakarot” was Broly’s catchphrase in the 90′s, and he never says it once in this movie, because he never heard the name until this point. So that’s pretty cool.

But more importantly, I like this as character development for Goku, who once bitterly rejected his Saiyan heritage, including his birth name. Now, it looks like he’s come around on that, to the point where he wants other Saiyans to call him Kakarot. It works well with my personal canon that Saiyans view this as a matter of honor. Vegeta knows he goes by “Son Goku”, but he thinks it would be more insulting to call him that, even if that’s his preference.

And that’s the movie. All in all, a pretty good one, probably one of the best, but not as good as my favorites. I think it would have been better if they had used new concepts and characters instead of mining the past for ideas. A different Saiyan could have played the Broly role just fine, but they went with Broly because of his popularity. Some other power could have been used to defeat him, but they went with fusion because it was popular. It get the reasoning, but I can’t help but notice how Cheelai became the breakout star of this thing, and everyone loves Cheelai and she just might be the most popular thing to come out of this movie, and lo and behold, she’s a wholly original idea. It just makes you wonder what else they might have come up with if they hadn’t stopped with her.

#dragon ball #dragon ball super #dragon ball super: broly #2019dbliveblog #goku #vegeta #frieza #broly #beerus #whis #bulla #bulma #piccolo #gogeta #cheelai #leemo #ba #paragus #berryblue

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Carry The Fire Podcast with Gerard Way: Full Transcription

Welcome to Carry The Fire, a podcast where we explore the big questions of life through the lens of the good, the true, and the beautiful. I’m your host, Dustin Kensrue, and my hope is that through these conversations with people of diverse and divergent backgrounds and beliefs, we can glimpse the world anew through each other's unique perspectives.

Gerard: Fiction is something to a degree that you'll hide behind in a way, and it allows you to expose yourself… I always saw the characters that I've played as some aspect of myself turned up to 12... Overall, I considered The Black Parade to be a death fantasy… death and rock and roll were kind of intertwined… Every time you get onstage you have to be prepared to die.

Dustin: Hey everybody. It is episode five of Carry The Fire podcast. Today we are joined by Gerard Way who is the singer of the band My Chemical Romance as well as also having released some killer music on his own. He has spent the last few years though, spending most of his time writing comics, including the very popular Umbrella Academy comics which have recently been adapted into a great show on Netflix. In our conversation, we talk about creating worlds and inhabiting characters, we talk about the beauty and the difficulty of creative collaboration, the complexity of trying to incorporate time-travel into a story, and we also get into Gerard’s spirituality a bit, and I want to give a brief heads up for some of you regarding that.

Gerard is going to talk a bit about magick and witchcraft. While I’m no expert on either, I do know enough to know that these words in this context probably don’t mean what most of you think they do. Some of you might not bat an eye hearing them but a lot of you probably came up inside a worldview where someone who was interested in these things was considered very evil. Gerard is very far from that. If I can try to provide a new framework for you it would be this: Generally, modern practices of magick and witchcraft, while being diverse in form, incorporate various insights and rituals from animistic pagan and folk religion, as well as incorporating some psychological intuitions from different fields and traditions. Practitioners generally tend to be very concerned with the earth and our connection with it. While this is not my spiritual tradition or practice, I recognize that we all have things to learn from each other. I think especially the ideas in these traditions about finding our place within the natural world are a helpful corrective to a lot of the western traditions’ tendency to want to dominate over nature, rather than seeing ourselves as a part of an interconnected web of being. I had no idea we’d be talking about any of this going into this conversation, but in the spirit of this podcast, I was so excited to hear from another unique perspective on the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I hope you will be too. Let’s get into it.

Dustin: Thank you so much for doing this.

Gerard: No problem.

D: It's super good to see you.

G: You too!

D: I'm trying to think of the last time we even saw each other and I- it was probably on tour.

G: Was it on the arena tour?

D: That's what I'm thinking.

G: It's been a long time.

D: And we were playing a bunch of World of Warcraft.

G: Yeah! That's my strongest memory. I have a lot of great memories of you guys, obviously, but the one that sticks out in my head the most is when we're all playing Warcraft in this big room and you had to go onstage, and you literally had your rig hooked up, you had your in-ears, they weren't in yet, but you were wired up, and I believe you even had a guitar, and you were still playing. You went literally from the keyboard from the computer right on stage.

D: Dude, I got way too addicted to that game. It's your guys' fault.

G: It was our fault, yeah!

D: Oh dude, it was so fun. It was probably like, what? Eight or nine of us playing in a room.

G: Yeah!

D: I don't know if it was the tour after that or two, and I had started just dreaming in Warcraft, and I went onstage one day and I was onstage and I had this moment where I was like, "I'm done! I can't," because I had tried to wean a little bit and it wasn't working, so I was like, "I gotta go cold turkey."

G: Yeah.

D: And I got offstage and I gave someone the Warcraft and I said, "Don't give this back to me. I'm done. I deleted it." Yeah. Which is funny because I seriously hadn't played video games since then until I just bought my kids a Switch.

G: Okay!

D: And they're playing Zelda.

G: Zelda, yeah.

D: And I decided to treat myself.

G: Nice, nice.

D: That's why I got a Switch for the road because Zelda's the best.

G: Yeah, I play Zelda with my daughter and it's so big though. We're having a really hard time getting a handle on the game because it's so vast.

D: Yeah, it is crazy.

G: I had to quit Warcraft too. I had to go cold turkey because it was still in my life when I wanted to write The Umbrella Academy.

D: Oh.

G: And I actually had this- I was at the crossroads and I had this moment where I was like, "I can either play Warcraft or I could write this comic."

D: It's a time sink.

G: Totally.

D: That game especially.

G: Yeah.

D: The social aspect, it just ends up being enormous.

G: Yeah yeah, so that was it. I quit and never looked back.

D: So, I was gonna ask you, prompted you earlier to think about it. What was something that gave you a feeling of wonder as a kid?

G: Okay so, I have a couple really obvious-

D: Or multiple things.

G: Multiple things, yeah, I have a couple real obvious answers.

D: That's alright.

G: And I know this is such an obvious one but Star Wars was really big. It just was and I know it was for millions of people. Once I saw that, it was like the first movie my parents ever took me to see and I was really young, but the thing back then was they were running these in theaters for like three years.

D: Oh really? I don't think I realized that.

G: Yeah. So Star Wars had come out and then they just kept running it until The Empire came out. I must've been two or something and they brought me to the theater.

D: Oh wow! I think I remember, I think my first memory of going to a movie was seeing- Was Jedi '84?

G: '83, yeah. I think it was '83.

D: So I remember going to see that, standing in line with my dad.

G: Me too!

D: That's the first, I don't know, there's just those moments where you have those- I remember listening to certain records in my dad's car.

G: Yeah.

D: And he'd turn it up loud.

G: Yep. That's one of my favorite memories of my dad is him picking me up from school early and then taking me to go see Jedi.

D: Oh that's cool.

G: Yeah, we waited in big lines that wrapped around. Even back then, there were a couple people ordering pizza. That's one of my favorite memories of being with my dad.

D: That's super cool. What about Star Wars specifically created that wonder? Was it the world?

G: The world, I think. It was the world, the scope, just this world you wanted to live in, that you wish existed and there was only three movies back then, so your brain would kinda fill in the gaps like, "What is it like? What are their supermarkets like?" And your brain would kinda- and later, that would come into play when I would RPGs, which is another thing I'll bring up in a minute. There was a time where I was in college, or right before college, where we were playing a Star Wars RPG that I was running, and it's just such a rich world.

D: Like a tabletop one?

G: Tabletop, yeah. And it was a really great game and it was super epic because the one thing about it was everybody already had a sense of that world in their head.

D: Yeah, you don't have to build that already.

G: Yeah, you didn't have to build.

D: You just add onto it.

G: Yeah yeah, so they all knew the world so when you would describe something, everybody had a vivid picture in their head, and then anything you hadn't seen before, you would just describe, but people had a point of reference so they would know.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: But yeah, Star Wars was like the first one and I was just obsessed with that for my whole childhood, playing with the action figures with Mikey, and we had our own sarlacc pit which was a dirt pit, and stuff like that. And then the other thing that was really important to me were tabletop RPGs. So, I was in the 3rd grade at a new school, but I still hung out with my best friend who was still at the old school. Anyway, basically he had an older brother- his friend had an older brother in college and he was way into D&D and he would run D&D for us, and we're all 3rd graders. That was a major moment for me.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: Yeah, it was. And to have a college-aged Dungeon Master who knew the game inside out was a really amazing way to play.

D: That's pretty cool.

G: Yeah. And that really opened up a big world for me. So then I would go on to- so I never stopped playing since the 3rd grade and then I took a try at being a Dungeon Master, and even just from playing and Dungeon Mastering, I learned how to tell stories, and I was really into that. You'd learn things even about leadership if you go to become the party leader, or if you're the DM, you learn how to keep people engaged. You learn how to keep momentum, things moving.

D: That's interesting. I feel like that's something that maybe a lot of storytellers are not paying as much attention to as they used to. There's the book I brought you, it's called Invisible Ink.

G: Oh, cool!

D: This guy, Brian McDonald, who's kind of like a story guru. He consults at Pixar all the time, teaches screenwriting, he's very cool. But he grew up watching a bunch of the classic movie directors coming up in the '60s and '70s or whatever, and they all had this vision of what stories were and really paid attention to how- they thought about how the audience would react, imagined them in the theater, or whatever. And then, something he was talking about is he just feels it's dropped off, that interplay of trying to connect and let that influence how you're actually creating the story.

G: Yeah. I'm excited to read that. I'm a big fan of structure and I'm a big fan of outlines.

D: Okay.

G: Yeah.

D: You'll like this.

G: Yeah! Good! I'm a big fan of those things because the way I see it, if you know your whole story, and I always feel like you don't need to know all the details, you don't need to know all of it, but you should know kind of- you should have some kind of outline or a structure, and then you get to have fun because you do know the beats you need to hit, but all the spaces in between, you get to fill that in.

D: I think it's rare that anyone doesn't do that and does it well. Stephen King's maybe the only one that I can think of that just doesn't write that way, and somehow he just has internalized it or something, and it ends up working itself out.

G: Yeah.

D: That's cool, man. So would you say those kinds of things, these imaginary worlds, these built worlds, are the things that still bring you the most wonder and joy in a sense?

G: Yeah! And it's something that I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to build my own worlds that people could share and be a part of, and that was something I did all throughout the band was just kinda- and building all these different worlds and the people that inhabit those worlds and the details down to the stickers on the Trans Am for Danger Days, those were all planned out. So my favorite thing to do is world building. And I've done it for projects that haven't come to fruition as well. Like I was working on this sci-fi TV show for a while and I just went deep, and I just came up with- with my friend Jon Rivera, we just came up with this whole world. So world building is something I'm a big fan of. And it's something I've noticed people talk about when they're talking about either my work with Umbrella Academy or My Chemical Romance, is the world building aspect, so. World building as a job title isn't a job, but I think it's- that element is, I feel like, one of my strengths.

D: Yeah. As far as the world building, I feel like you've not only built those worlds, but with MCR, you lead in inhabiting them in a way.

G: Yeah.

D: It's fun to watch. It's scary for me a little bit, watching it. Is it scary for you or is it safe for you? To be in that character.

G: That's a good question. I think there's a bit of safety that comes with being a character, and obviously, I was looking up to my heroes when I was constructing that. I was looking at David Bowie, especially around Black Parade, that's when I was like, "I'm gonna be a character." Early Black Parade stuff was like, I had written this line out that basically said, "What if Death had a rock band?" It obviously changed from that and we all became Death in a way, the whole band, but there was a safety with inhabiting a character, and the character I was during Black Parade was fun because I think in an entertaining way or a positive way, there was this level of disdain that you would have for you audience as playing as The Black Parade. But it was, to me, a healthy kind, because you were just playing really. And I thought that was a fun aspect of that character. But then there's a lot of you in the character and it's kind of- I always saw the characters that I've played as some aspect of myself turned up to 12. It's interesting when I would meet people afterwards and stuff, they would be like, "I didn't think you were gonna be so normal when I met you," just because the way I would act onstage. And I met a lot of kids who were like, "I thought you were gonna be such a jerk."

D: That's funny.

G: Because I would play one, you know. And it was just part of the drama for me.

D: Yeah. That's cool. Have you read any Ursula K. Le Guin?

G: I love her! I just reread Earthsea, the first one.

D: I haven't read it. I've heard it's amazing.

G: Yeah, it is.

D: I just got into- I read The Left Hand Of Darkness.

G: Oh, I've not finished that, but I loved what I've read.

D: It is a very slow book, in a sense. It's not exciting, in a sense, but it's got this patient movement and by the end, I was just floored by it. It was fantastic.

G: I have to finish that one. I love her and her work, especially Left Hand Of Darkness, it does have a patient movement, I think that's the best way to describe it. And I've also loved the way that she talks about storytelling in writing, and one thing I've read from her recently that really stuck with me, this is a quote of hers, and I'm paraphrasing it, I don't know if I'm getting this exact, but she basically said, "Not every story needs to have a message. It could just be the act of telling a story. You don't have to lecture your readership or your audience, or hit them over the head with this big message. It doesn't have to have one."

D: Which is interesting because I feel like she is a very message orientated writer in a certain way, but maybe that's coming in in a very natural sense.

G: Yeah.

D: [C.S.] Lewis talked about that too, where he was like, "The last thing you wanna do is write this thing that's just trying to tell something." He's like, "Whatever truth that you actually believe, those things are coming out if you just write."

G: If you just write, I agree with that.

D: Like Narnia, apparently, started from- he had a picture in his head of a faun in a snowstorm holding a parcel with an umbrella. That's the whole world built out of that, and he loved that image, and his love for it blossomed into something.

G: Yeah! That's awesome!

D: It's super cool. So, the beginning, in the intro of Left Hand Of Darkness, Le Guin says, "I am an artist, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth. The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor." So even when you're making music, you were talking about you're making these fictions, you're lying as it were. I was watching something the other day, you said something like, "Sometimes fiction is closer to fact," or something in that range. Is that accurate of how you feel creating, that sometimes by- you're getting at a deeper truth by telling a fiction?

G: Yeah yeah. That could happen, and I think it's kinda magical when it does happen. Black Parade especially is filled with a lot of metaphors and maybe the fiction is something to a degree that you'll hide behind in a way, and it allows you to expose yourself. Because exposing yourself is really hard and one of the- just allowing yourself to be vulnerable is really hard and one of the things that Rob Cavallo said to me when he was producing Black Parade was, "Making a record, a great record, is you're almost pulling open your insides and you're pulling all your guts out," and things like that, and it's a brutal process because of that, but I think I did that on that record a lot. There's a lot of self loathing and there's the Catholic guilt I grew up with appears in stuff like Mama and House of Wolves, how you think you're destined for Hell and things like that, but it's cool, yeah. Fiction gives you a way to express these things and make yourself vulnerable and open yourself up and that's the way I like to use it, and then sometimes, there's stuff that's just straight fiction or fantasy. Overall, I considered Black Parade to be a death fantasy. A rock and roll death fantasy because I thought death and rock and roll were kind of intertwined in a way, because I think Mick Jagger had said once, "Every time you get onstage you have to be prepared to die."

D: That's amazing.

G: Yeah! So, it was this rock and roll death fantasy, Black Parade.

D: That's cool. I have the worst memory. So, I was preparing for this and somebody was like, "Hey, ask Gerard if he really wrote the treatment for the Image Of The Invisible video," and I was like, "Holy shit!" I totally forgot that-

G: Oh my god!

D: That you did that.

G: Oh my god! That was so fun too! I totally forgot! I gotta rewatch that.

D: What's funny too is I watching your videos and I was like, "This is so cool, these characters. We've never really done anything like that. I guess Image Of The Invisible is kinda like that," but didn't even make the connection, but it's totally that way because you were building that world!

G: That was so much fun.

D: And I got to live in it and it was cool.

G: That's cool. Yeah, I was really honored that you asked me to conceptualize a video for you guys.

D: It was fun. I don't think we've ever had another one where it was such- well, definitely not such a developed story.

G: Right. Didn't we do something too where we had lights on their helmets?

D: Yeah.

G: Their eyes were supposed to be lights or something?

D: Yeah, maybe it was like a single eye was a red laser-y light.

G: Yeah. That was cool. I'm gonna rewatch that when we're done.

D: So you grew up with the Catholic guilt, you said. Did you ever feel like you inhabited that world, or was it something being kind of thrust on you that you didn't- I mean, it's hard as a kid.

G: Right.

D: You don't even know, but I'm curious about that and then where you'd feel like your kind of big frame worldview is now on like, "What are we all doing on this rock?"

G: Right, right. My family, my parents, they weren't super religious. I come from this Italian Catholic background though so it was the kind of thing, my grandmother would go to church sometimes, but never would push us to really go. But for Christmas or something, my mom would go with her. But I think they thought, my parents thought, "This is the right thing to do. We should raise our child with believing in God and raise them Catholic because we're good. Even though we're not always there, we're good Catholics." So, they kind of put me on that path and I think the first thing I learned from being Catholic, or just religion in general, maybe it's somewhat at times specific to Catholicism, is this fear. And this fear of Hell, that's they really instilled in us. I think I was in the 1st grade or something, really young, and there was this thing that would happen where they would talk about death and Hell and all that stuff, and there was this period which, because of these classes, these after school classes, I would have these bouts of just crying. I guess I was coming to terms with the fact that my parents wouldn't be there forever or I would lose them and they would die. But then the additional fear of, "Well, if they behave bad, they'll go to Hell, and I'll go to Hell too," and so, there was this period where it was really upsetting for me, and I channeled that. I tapped into that stuff on a couple records, and on Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, I borrowed a lot of Catholic imagery, and that second video for Helena being in a church, and things like that. So I kinda started- and in some of our merch designs too. I remember we had one with a cathedral and a rosary and all this stuff, and then that would come to a head in the song Mama on Black Parade but, yeah, my journey in terms of spirituality and where I came with that. Obviously, at some point, I was confirmed in the 5th grade, so I did that. But then after that, my parents didn't have any more requirements out of me, because it was all about baptism, communion, and confirmation. And if you did those three things, you were good, then you could go as you wanted. So they never pushed me to go. And then, over the years, obviously I got into punk rock and I didn't believe in God for the longest time, and then I just started to really need spirituality in my life as I got older. And I'm more of the sense where I believe in there being some- I don't know if it's a God, but I do believe there's something.

D: Something, yeah.

G: Yeah. There's something out there, there's some kind of reason. I also believe we come from- because we do, we come from star stuff.

D: Yeah.

G: We come from the universe. We're birthed from the universe. I'm a believer in the fact that the universe is chaos and born out of chaos and it's uncontrollable, and there's kind of no rhyme or reason to anything, and tragedies and accidents and bad things happen and good things happen, and it's really just chaos being this constant true thing in the universe, and I came to those discoveries through my study of magick, occultism, and things like that, which I was inspired to do by my friend Grant Morrison. He's kind of like a big brother to me, mentor, he's really supportive and he's very into magick. And so I became interested and he's given me some lessons, and I actually wanted to do a podcast one day with him where I literally just sit down with him and have him talk about magick, because the way he describes it is, you would almost need it to be recorded to fully explore all the theories and things like that. So, I started to need magick, high magick, chaos magick, and eventually witchcraft, and witchcraft is something I felt more comfortable with because I always felt like, when I was reading about chaos magick, it felt like it was about making the universe bend to your will, whereas I was looking for something more that you were in service to the universe.

D: Interesting.

G: I think I got this from reading Crowley's book on magick, but basically, I don't know exactly what he said, but basically reality is your perspective. And that was kinda one of the key points of magick, your brain builds your reality.

D: Yeah.

G: And I thought that was a really great take away from all that. So, yeah, I've been interested in spirituality and things like that and studying shamanism, and all that stuff. We, with our daughter, we didn't raise her with religion, but we, Lindsey, my wife, is really spiritual too. Not like a practicing witch or anything, but she's just naturally adept at those kind of things. She's really in tune with nature, she knows a ton about herbology, a lot of the founding cornerstones of witchcraft is just kinda part of her life. And so, we do raise Bandit with- Lindsey teaches her all about herbs and plants and we have a witch's garden, and communicating with nature and trees and animals and things like that. So we're teaching our daughter that there is a kind of magick to life and magick does exist. It's not Harry Potter magic, but you know.

D: A lot of that seems like it's about an embodiment, a connectedness to everything, to other people.

G: Yeah, connectedness, for sure, yeah. And just teaching her that she's connected to the universe. And if she grows up and wants a different kind of religion, that's great too, and I know I explored those. I was looking for a religion in art school, because I had a class where we had to study all the religions, or most of them. And I kept going from each one and I was like, "I like bits of this one, but I don't like that." I couldn't find one that I landed on until I got later in life into more spiritual things like magick and witchcraft.

D: Cool. So with something like witchcraft, which for a lot of people are gonna hear it and have not at all the idea that you're talking about I think, so something like the idea of goodness in that, where does that derive from? Is that coming from the inter-connectedness? It seems like there's a moral view to it rather than morality being a decree maybe. It's something that arises out of those connections?

G: Right right, yeah! I think the positivity in it, to me, and here's the thing. I don't consider myself a practicing witch or anything like that, I just read a ton of this stuff. And that's one of the things they kinda warn you about with magick and everything, you could read all the books you want and some people spend their whole life reading books and never practice, but the thing they tell you to do is practice. And I think yeah, the goodness comes from being in service to the earth. Being connected to that and also, what I've learned about witchcraft, or at least the kind of witchcraft that I like, is it's very gray. It's not black magick, it's not totally white magick, it's just understanding that the universe and all things in it are very gray, there's no black and white to everything. And I've really liked that the most, because I get older- when I was younger, I was very black and white about a lot of things. Especially in the earlier days of My Chemical Romance, everything was really military and rigid, and black and white, and this is right and this is wrong. You kind of get older and you start to realize, "No, things aren't that simple. Not everybody's all good or all bad. There's a grayness there."

D: Which, I think, I have a song of the latest Thrice record called The Grey and it's dealing with that idea of deconstructing the black and the white, and I think the biggest danger there is the idea that even if there was straight black, straight white, you are betting a lot on your ability to discern it at any given moment.

G: You are.

D: And then if you are actually holding to it, and you're basically betting on your ability to discern this thing and now it's of the most ultimate consequence and you filter out everything that doesn't fit into that, which is basically a bunch of yourself and a bunch of everyone around you.

G: Yeah, exactly, yeah.

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D: So I have a couple questions I’ll pepper in here from some of the Patrons. James Corvit said, “What is the purest form of goodness you’ve experienced as a human being, and how do you explain it?”

G: Purest form of goodness.

D: I don’t know, it’s deep.

G: Yeah.

D: I don’t know if that’s from someone or just internally.

G: The purest form of goodness. It’s a tough question but it’s a great question. I think the purest form of goodness is forgiveness. Or that would be something I would say is a very strong form of goodness. Even when you see people that the most terrible things happen to them, like a serial killer murders their loved one and then some of these people, not all of them, and I don’t blame the ones that don’t find forgiveness, but some of them find forgiveness and are able to forgive people for the most atrocious things, and so that feels like a really powerful form of goodness.

D: Yeah, I feel like in the middle of me deconstructing a lot of that stuff, something I was like- the idea of grace and forgiveness is something that goes deep there and I’m not willing to let go of that. Over the centuries, there’s been countless efforts to define beauty. Aristotle defines beauty as having “order, symmetry, and definiteness.”

G: Hm.

D: But it’s always struck me as a fairly anemic version of beauty. And then I saw on the cover of the My Chem single Sing, there’s a question on there that says, “Would you destroy something perfect in order to make it beautiful?”

G: Right.

D: This makes me think that you probably also take issue with that definition a bit. I wanted to ask, is there something about brokenness that’s near the heart of beauty for you?

G: Absolutely, yeah. And that, I was trying to remember that phrase a couple months ago too, that was on the cover saying, yeah, “Would you destroy something perfect to make it beautiful?” And yeah, I think beauty is way more complex than symmetry and I think there is a brokenness to beauty. I think, you look at a lot of musicians, you could arguably say from a certain perspective, if you subscribe to symmetry and things like that, a lot of musicians or front-people, men and women in bands, some of them you could say they’re not traditionally beautiful, or not what you would think is beautiful, but something about their vulnerability or their confidence and things like that, make them beautiful. And that’s in any case, even non-musicians. Like people that just go to work in the world and have normal jobs, there is something about beauty that is much deeper than just what you see visually.

D: One of the Patrons was saying that, “My Chem’s music reinforced to me and my friends that being an outcast was okay.” Was that something that you wanted people to feel? What were things growing up that made you feel like it was okay to be an outcast or a misfit?

G: I think by the time I was definitely not in elementary school- well, I didn’t have to struggle with being an outcast in elementary school. I actually went to a really cool school, it was just a normal public school, but the one thing I thought looking back that was very interesting about those years is we all got along, we were all friends, even the weirdest kids, and a lot of kids would just have these parties back then and everyone was invited. And then my first real experience with being an outsider was going to middle school, and then so, you aren’t all friends anymore, and there’s all divisions and cliques and things like that, and then I found myself to be one of these outcasts, one of these weird kids that listened to heavy metal and wore flannels. There were only a handful of us in the school that were like that. But it wasn’t until high school where I fully embraced being an outcast. The first year, freshman year was really hard because I was really an outcast and I didn’t even know where to sit at the lunch tables, because I didn’t fit in with any of these groups. And it turns out I ended up sitting with a table of metalheads because they saw me sitting by myself and they were like, “Why don’t you sit with us?” And that’s where I would learn about certain bands that they were into, like Murphy’s Law and the kind of things they were listening to back then. But it was important for me to have something that spoke to outsiders with My Chemical Romance because when I was that age, there wasn’t anything that really spoke to me like that. Or there wasn’t something so specific to being an outcast. There was lots of stuff that if you were an outcast you listened to like The Cure or The Smiths, so of course, I found all those bands. But there was nothing specifically geared to somebody that feels invisible or is an outcast or rejected and things like that, so when we started My Chem, it felt very much like we were channeling the energy of being an outcast onto whoever listened to us. And in the early days, it wasn’t a lot of kids. I mean, there weren't any kids that really listened to us. It was kinda older punk rockers, it was very interesting in the beginning. And of those older punk rockers, a lot of them were actually outcasts as well.

D: Yeah.

G: Within a scene so. And maybe they weren’t even full-on punk rockers, they were just a guy with a leather jacket at a bar who just saw something in us.

D: Yeah. That’s cool. The Patron Jonathan Clark is asking, “Do you have any rituals or practices that you do to find your center, wait for yes, get connected, see the good, the true, the beautiful in others, or let go a bit?” Basically he’s kinda asking if you have any meditative, mindfulness, something to practice.

G: Right right. I really enjoy T.M., Transcendental Meditation. Actually, I’m in an interesting spot with this though.

D: That’s where you’re chanting.

G: A mantra, yeah. You have a mantra and you kind of just repeat it in your head. It helps you, basically when you’re doing it, it releases negative energy and tension and things like that, and it’s very good. But sometimes, at least in my experience, and this is why I’ve kinda paused my practice at the moment, sometimes it could release trauma and things like that, and sometimes you end up reliving that and it makes it- and granted, your body is letting go of it, but sometimes it’s hard and I found when it would get its most intense, I would catastrophize things in my head and be- so I would be focusing on the mantra, but then things would happen like I would be thinking about the worst things that could happen to my family or my loved one, or something bad happening to them or getting hurt.

D: Is that something that happens to you? Do you tend to catastrophize in general?

G: Sometimes. I do tend to catastrophize sometimes, and it’s something I work on in therapy. I’m a big believer in talk therapy and, I don’t try to push medication on anybody, but I always just share my experience, and that it’s helped me.

D: Yeah.

G: I was somebody who was extremely imbalanced all through the years of My Chemical Romance, and go through these extreme highs and crushing lows where I wouldn’t get out of bed for like three months, but then I would be in a manic phase, and I would be up until 4am working on zines all of the sudden, and I would say to Lindsey, “I don’t need to sleep. Why do people sleep? I don’t get it.” So there was a lot of that, and then Lindsey found me a therapist and we did a lot of really hard work and I faced myself a lot, I looked inward. And at the same time, before we were able- before we explored and did the work, we stabilized my brain chemistry. That was the key. Once we were able to stabilize my brain chemistry-

D: You were able to actually…

G: Do the work, yeah. So, I am a big believer in T.M., it’s just that sometimes I struggle with it, but I know all I have to do is check in with the T.M. center and explain what I’m going through, and actually my therapist had found me this woman who’s one of the heads of, I’m not sure if it’s the David Lynch Foundation or something else, she actually said, “You should come in, I’ll talk to you, I’ll walk you through the trauma stuff and all the hard stuff.” But I’m a big believer in it because when it was cooking, and there were two months this year where it was totally changing my life until some of the negative came out. It was, I was a more productive, more focused, calmer, more engaged, more present. I’m a believer in it and a big believer in therapy and just having somebody to talk to.

D: Yeah. That’s awesome. On the drive up, I was thinking about Umbrella Academy and I really love it in general. I remember getting the comic when it came out. The show turned out so great. Are you really happy with it?

G: Yeah yeah! I’m totally happy. At the end of the day, it was somebody else’s vision and I was able to let go of that. I think I needed to. When the process first started in making it a TV show.

D: That’s gotta be hard.

G: It’s hard.

D: That’s your baby.

G: Yeah yeah! But I was really upfront when I was talking. I went in to meet with UCP and Dawn and the people there. I was with Dark Horse and they said, “What is your goal?” And I said, “My goal is to make great comics because I already went through a whole big thing with Universal trying to make this a movie and it just drained me.”

D: Oh okay.

G: And it was full of really difficult things, it took up a lot of my time, and disappointments, and I really turned my focus back to comics because I was like, that’s where you’re in charge. Nobody can- you have an editor, obviously, if you have a great editor, you’re doing great work together and you’re making changes, but it doesn’t feel like something creative is being ruled by committee, and that’s what it feels like in Hollywood. I was really upfront with Dawn and I said, “I want to make great comics so you guys have good material to make a good show.” I ended up being more involved than that. The extent of my involvement is giving notes, especially about things like wardrobe, costumes, the look and feel of the world, the fact that it’s kind of an alternate reality, and I give notes on scripts and I give notes on edits and things like that, so I am involved for sure. But I was able to realize this is somebody else’s baby and I’m happy with the results for sure. My whole thing is the proof is in the fact that everybody loves it.

D: I like Klaus a lot and I can’t remember, because I read the comics so long ago, how true to the book that character is.

G: Right.

D: Do you feel like it’s capturing what you were trying to get out with it? G: It is capturing, yeah. It’s capturing, to me, what Robert who plays Klaus, he’s capturing this kind of sadness and tragedy to the character. Also obviously, the humor. In the comic, Klaus is a little bit more of what I call a dry goth. He’s very nihilistic in some ways.

D: Not quite as whimsical, maybe.

G: Yeah, not quite as whimsical as what Robert ended up doing. But the way Robert approached the character really ended up working and he adds a lot of humanity to the character, that maybe there’s not so much of it, or you don’t see it very often in the comic with Klaus. Klaus just does bad things and makes bad decisions and obviously, a lot of that is coming from a place of trauma that he experienced as a child, and in the show, it’s cool because the drug use is there to help him quiet the voices in his head. They explored that a lot deeper and I thought that that was really cool.

D: Is that less of a focus in the comic?

G: A little bit. I never really explored the fact that he’s constantly seeing and hearing and talking to ghosts, and so these drugs kind of quiet his mind. I’d never explored that really deeply.

D: Which is cool because you, it’s another evidence of you’re building a world and someone else was living in it, and then they were like, “Well yeah.”

G: Yeah!

D: “Of course he’s like that,” and you’re like, “Well dang.”

G: Yeah! That’s a cool thing. They’re able to point at things you weren’t seeing because sometimes when I’m doing stuff like creating a world like Umbrella Academy, a lot of it is running off the subconscious. A lot of it is, some things you don’t realize you’re putting in there. And when they look at making a TV show or a movie, they really kinda deconstruct it and look at it and say, “Well, this makes sense because of this.”

D: Some of the beauty with the comic is that the concise kind of form makes it to where you don’t always have to trace down all of these rabbit trails, but when you're trying to blow it up into something else, you’ve gotta figure out how to make sense of it all.

G: Mhm. And to bring it back to the question of a sense of wonder. That was the other thing I thought about this morning when you asked me the question was, “what do I get a sense of wonder from,” and comics were a big one. Because to me- and then I would later reinforce these feelings when I started making them and writing them. You could do anything in them and that’s really what’s beautiful about them. I also love the mechanics of them, because there’s definitely things you could do in comics that you can’t do in film and TV and I love that. So I’ve really learned to embrace the medium when I’m writing them. I think I’m writing comics that are definitely comics, and they’re not just a TV show playing out in a comic.

D: Yeah. How much do you draw your own stuff just to get your ideas going? Or is it more conceptual?

G: Quite a bit. No, I do- well especially for something like, less so on Doom Patrol but Umbrella Academy, Gabriel Ba, the artist and I have this really cool relationship and I think the ideas kinda need to start with me, and I’ll do a sketch and then Gabriel will completely reinterpret that and kinda make it much cooler and much better.

D: That's because that’s your complete world from scratch, whereas with Doom Patrol you’re reinventing something?

G: In the beginning, Umbrella was definitely my complete world from scratch and I had this idea, but Gabriel, especially even in the early days, he helped build that world. I was able to give him a couple references and I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe it’s the ‘60s, maybe it’s the ‘70s. People are dressed like the ‘60s and cars look like they’re from the ‘60s, but there's modern things too.” And he loves drawing architecture, which you don’t find a lot of in comics. A lot of people try to stay away from the buildings in the background and the architecture, but he embraces the architecture so he really built that world with me in the beginning. But we still have our process and the process usually, not always but usually is, especially if it’s a villain or something like that, I’ll do some kind of sketch, even if it’s bad, and then Gabriel will take that and make it something.

D: That’s cool. Collaboration is terrifying and super fun when it’s working.

G: Yeah! When it’s working, it’s amazing, yeah. I love collaborating, and I’ve learned to really embrace it over the years. Delegating and collaborating were two skills I really needed to get really good at, and I think I got better at collaborating after the band. Although, we were pretty good about collaborating in the band, I just got better at it though.

D: Yeah. It’s definitely for Thrice, the most fun but also the hardest thing for sure, and it causes the most tension.

G: Right. Yeah, for sure.

D: Just because you care.

G: Because you care, yeah! You care, and sometimes you do see or hear a complete vision so you want that realized.

D: I think that’s the hardest part. You’re like, “I see all this,” and you’re like, “Okay but there’s three other people.”

G: Yeah!

D: Every single time that I’m set on something, and then everyone else is like, “Dude, no,” every time by the end, I’m like, “Wait, what was I stuck on?”

G: Yeah.

D: It didn’t matter anymore.

G: Yeah!

D: It’s totally a psychological issue at that point.

G: It is!

D: “It has to be this way.” No, it could be a million ways and they’re all different and cool.

G: Yeah. And that’s what I learned too when collaborating on music, is exactly what you just said. You don’t even remember what you were hung up on.

D: Totally.

G: Because it’s just much better after everybody's worked on it.

D: It’s very similar to being super upset about something in the moment and you’re just not thinking clear, and you sleep and you wake up and you’re like, “I was real upset about that. It doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.”

G: Yeah.

D: Time travel is a big thing in Umbrella Academy.

G: Yeah.

D: Which it’s notoriously troublesome to write stories with time travel.

G: Yeah.

D: And not have it just fall apart. If you’re trying to get a specific future, you have to have a bunch of people constantly fixing these things.

G: Right right!

D: I like that way of interpreting because usually it’s, “Oh, we fixed this one thing,” and you expect it to just keep going straight, but no way.

G: Right. I really like that the show took that from the comic and really explored it. All these people making these little corrections, sometimes they’re violent corrections, but sometimes they’re very simple. But time travel is such a pain in the ass. I did not envy them when they were starting to do the writer’s room for Umbrella Academy.

D: They try to make it all work.

G: Try to make it all work. And they’d have to put up these big timeline boards and be like, “Alright, this happens this year,” and that’s what I was doing when I was writing the second volume, Dallas, because there’s not much- I don’t think there’s any real time travel, besides Number 5 coming back, there’s no real time travel in volume one, Apocalypse Suite. But Dallas is all about it, so that was the hardest volume I’ve ever had to write, because time travel is just, it’s so hard.

D: Are there any stories that you like that you feel do it really well?

G: I don’t know if I’ve read enough time travel stories. I mean, I thought Back To The Future did it really well.

D: But then I always get stuck on the idea that you have to, there’s an endless cycle of Martys that have to go back.

G: Oh right!

D: And keep- my brain breaks when I try to be like, “But what if he doesn’t? Then none of it works anymore?” It all breaks.

G: Yeah, it can break very easily, and I think almost every time travel story has the possibility of completely breaking, or at least in some person’s mind out there, it is broken.

D: Yeah.

G: So sometimes you have to take time travel stories almost at face value and be like, “Alright, this works.”

D: Yeah, you can’t- well I think part of that is on the writer or whoever’s making it to address and deflect. The Brian McDonald guy I was telling you about, he talks about that somewhere where he’s like, “You gotta spot the problem and then you just need to have some character address it, and then sweep it away,” just so that it helps whoever’s watching or whatever, it helps them be like, “Oh yeah, what about this?” And then, “Oh, they thought about it.”

G: Yep.

D: And it’s not like it’s making it perfect, right? But it gives you permission to let it go, I think.

G: Yeah yeah. And you do have to address these concerns. I realized my answer might have been possibly a little lazy about taking things at face value, but one of the things I had to do in Dallas was address every concern that I thought the reader would have.

D: Which is great. When you do the addressing, it lets the reader or the watcher or whatever, it lets them let it go and enjoy the story.

G: Yeah, exactly. I’m about to start volume four of Umbrella Academy and I’m really happy because I don’t think it’s gonna have any time travel in it, so I think we’re a little bit away from more time travel in Umbrella Academy.

D: Alright, this is a question from Mike Morale, he says, “In his recent arc, Cliff Steele aka Robotman, regains his humanity, at least in outward form. But on Gerard’s latest, ahem, cliffhanger, Steele burns it all up after facing the painful inhumanity of someone with power to hurt him. I suppose my question is, how do we protect the precious beauty of our humanity while remaining vulnerable to those who have meaning in our lives?”

G: Oh wow. How do we protect that humanity? Well that’s a big question, because especially with given how the world is now and the toxicity out there online and things like that, how do you protect your humanity? Because toxicity, like the kind that Cliff experiences when he goes to visit his mother in that nursing home, it’s a very real thing and it’s something you have to deal with. I don’t know how you hold onto your humanity, it’s hard sometimes.

D: While being vulnerable too.

G: While being vulnerable, yeah exactly.

D: Which I guess is almost synonymous to holding onto your humanity.

G: Yeah.

D: Because you could close off but that’s not good.

G: Yeah exactly. I know this isn’t the healthier, great answer, but I think one of the things I did was to kind of remove myself from certain social medias. But it wasn't unhealthy because what I did was I decided to look inward at that point. Instead of, and I could tell you as many harsh people are on the internet, I was much harsher on myself. I looked in and I asked myself tough questions, I really asked myself what’s right and wrong. I think about these things deeply when I’m writing, but holding onto your humanity is very hard. And Cliff, obviously, he doesn’t hold on to that humanity, and he goes back into his cage because that makes sense to Cliff.

D: His follow up question was, “And does skin make the man, or can metal reflect who we really are just as well?”

G: I believe metal can reflect who we are just as well. I think Cliff Steele is very much Cliff whether he’s a human or a robot. He’s still Cliff and I think that’s one of the things that’s great about the character and why he’s so fun to write because no matter what, he’s still Cliff.

D: I wonder if there's anything you’ve been listening to, watching, reading, that you think people should check out?

G: Let’s see. What have I been reading recently? Well, this is old but I just decided to reread Lord Of The Rings from start to finish, and I made it through the books rather quickly and they’re just such a joy to read. They’re so relaxing, but there is a real build up to Lord Of The Rings. It gets so dark at one point, and horrific, but there’s a calm and a peace to reading it. And the way Tolkien writes, you’re just thinking about the greenery and the trees and the rivers and all of those things, and so it’s a real relaxing read for as much as it ramps up. I have a hard time watching TV. I feel really trapped when I’m watching it so I tend not to watch it at all, which is interesting about having a TV show. I bring a different perspective when I’m giving notes because I don’t watch a lot of TV. And more or less the only TV I watch is edits of Umbrella Academy. But every once in a while, Lindsey will rope me into a show that she feels like I absolutely have to watch, and she did that with Breaking Bad, and I’m really grateful she did. She literally rewatched the whole thing with me, made me watch it, and it’s still one of the best I’ve ever seen. And then she got me into Cobra Kai, have you seen that?

D: No, is it good?

G: I think it’s really good, yeah. Especially the first season is really amazing.

D: I had huge doubts about if that would be good at all.

G: Yeah, watch the first season and one of the things that actually helped hook me into the show is the episodes are a half hour, so it was really cool. I didn’t feel as much of a prisoner of the television when I was watching them, because you can watch a half hour and be done.

D: But books don’t make you feel that way? They expand.

G: Books are my favorite thing, yeah. Books are- you know how a lot of people will use a television to kind of tune out and shut off and relax? I use books to do that, so there’s piles of books next to my bed.

D: Thanks so much for sitting down. It’s been so good to talk to you.

G: You too! It’s been a long time. I miss you.

#gerard way #dustin kensrue #carry the fire podcast #full transcription

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leakinghate · 6 years

Text

Legendarily Defensive: Editing the Gay Away in VLD

Disclaimer: This meta is a collaboration of the entirety of #TeamPurpleLion. We understand while we do touch on narrative romance, we are intentionally trying to be as ship-neutral as possible, and provide that which we only have evidence for. We encourage the experts in their respective ship-fandoms to meta as they do best on these topics, and we hope this can be a factual basis to springboard from.

In the most recent AfterBuzz interview March 4, 2019, Executive Producers Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim dos Santos revealed in no uncertain terms who, precisely, is responsible for the editing fiasco that resulted in the version of Season 8 presented to the fandom, including explaining to their viewers when the changes were called for, and a heretofore unknown why: the removal of a mlm relationship between two of the male Paladins.

Let’s break it down.

The interview itself is a little very difficult to stomach, especially the latter half. But, the first portion is an unusually open and honest discussion of what went down behind the scenes, and what it meant to the producers. It’s also the place where we’ll be lifting direct quotes from. The hosts of AfterBuzz allow the Executive Producers to have the floor and speak with quite a bit of leeway, and some very curious facts come to light. For anyone interested in the source, the interview can be found on Youtube.(3)

Voltron is a unique case. While much of the fan base may not have been around for prior incarnations of this franchise, it has existed for quite a while.

It originally came from a Japanese show Beast King GoLion. From this show, the robot we recognize from Voltron: Defender of the Universe, was created in 1984. There exists an interview with the Executive Producer of Defender of the Universe, Peter Keefe, as well as other cast and crew on the production of how BeastKing became Voltron.(4)

After Voltron: Defender of the Universe, several other iterations bloomed forth - some in the form of comics, some as sequels, some as reboots. The first series to follow Defender of the Universe was Voltron: The Third Dimension, a CGI-based sequel released in 1998.

While not nearly was popular as its predecessor, it managed to stir up some legal conflict:

“Worse, the Japanese creators of Beast King GoLion — Toei Animation — began saber-rattling. Toei believed World Events had overstepped the boundaries of their 1984 agreement and made the CGI series without buying those explicit rights.

To quash this dispute once and for all, Koplar and crew purchased GoLion outright in 2000. Now they had the freedom to adapt at will. But nothing was in the works.”(7)

As of 2000, Koplar and World Events Productions (WEP) owned all the rights to Voltron. Talk of a live action movie has been in the works since 2005, but with little traction. In 2010, WEP licensed rights for the Voltron franchise to Classic Media (now DreamWorks Classics) (7). By 2011, the animated series Voltron Force was released.

In 2014 Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos approached DreamWorks Animation with the idea of producing a new Voltron show, with the license DreamWorks had recently come to own through their acquisition of Classics Media. In 2016, Voltron: Legendary Defender launched.

It’s worth noting World Events Productions licensed rights to produce Voltron content to DreamWorks Studios. They did not hand over the entire franchise to do with as they saw fit. DreamWorks only purchased the ability to play with the characters and the story in whatever capacity WEP believed would remain on-brand.

Amidst the protests and visceral reaction to the final season of Legendary Defender, many have felt confusion about where to direct their frustrations.

In another post, @crystal-rebellion theorized the symbolism in Season 7’s Episode 4 ‘The Feud’ was actually a very blatant representation of what was going on behind the scenes, and why. (2)

Since the most recent interview, statements from the Executive Producers as well as the host have confirmed this to be an accurate assessment of the situation.

Joaquim Dos Santos says it himself:

"This is not a vilifying of DreamWorks. Any exec we ever interacted with was like, 'Hey, we understand why you want to tell the story, we understand where you're coming from. It's a little bit bigger than that. There's other sort of controlling parties with Voltron, which makes it unique.’ It's not just a DreamWorks owned property, and I think it got logistically really really weird." (3)

Seven times, he specifically mentions the pushback didn’t come from DreamWorks, but from ‘other controlling parties.’ He alludes to some logistical weirdness, the implication being a difference in creative direction, or some dissention from higher up. In fact, the hosts and EPs discuss a controlling IP owner eight times in the course of one interview.

He also says, in regard to the issue of LGBTQ+ representation and Adam specifically:

“Here's where we arrived on this. And we were pointing to things like Overwatch. We were pointing to Steven Universe. They're different scenarios, we were in a slightly different position. We didn't have that position of being the creators of this IP. And we also weren't a video game that was marketed to teens and above. We for all intents and purposes were started as a show for boys like 6 to 11 to sell as many toys as possible. And that's just like a fact and that's business, and it is what it is.” (3)

DreamWorks is not a platform that markets ‘toys for boys’ (a talking point brought up no fewer than five times) - but World Events is. President Robert Koplar himself states his target demographic is boys and their dads in Episode 12 from the Let’s Voltron podcast not once, but twice. (5)

The EPs confirm as much with their recent statement in the March 4th ABTV Voltron interview(3) that the possibility of a male paladin’s replacement was greenlit until the IP holder learned the male paladin was to be replaced with Acxa, a woman. This kind of sexist hypocrisy goes as far back as 1984 with Allura being spanked in front of her own team in one episode(11) and tied to a chair by them to prevent her escape in another(11). The 2003 Devil’s Due comic shows Lotor, who looks to be no more than five, witness his mother’s murder via strangulation by his father (complete with an expression of horror on her dead face)(12). Lotor then suffers the same type of non-lethal strangulation in a scene where his father interrupts what the comic refers to as “recreation” with a scantily clad blonde resembling both Lotor’s mother and Allura in a different series(13). All of this takes place in a franchise whose target demographic has consistently been six to eleven year old boys and their fathers. Koplar’s company has made their hypocritical moral stance abundantly clear in Legendary Defender, even going so far as to order the destruction of the entire final season. According to Dos Santos:

“Specifically with Season 7 and 8 we basically held onto Season 7 so Season 8 was like done by the time S7 was dropping. We had like a month left when reaction for Season 7 started coming in, and that was day of the drop. We were in a weird position. To DreamWorks's credit, the tide started changing internally. They came back to us and said, okay we're open to explore this relationship between Adam and Shiro so we were in this weird position where we had all the animation done, we had $0.00 left in the budget in terms of like what we could do and it was like, all right, we know Adam's fate is what it is, do we do this and sort of like take this step knowing that we're going to take some flack? And we decided to do it so we revised the dialogue. You can probably see it in the animation. If you really pay attention it's like, it's literally our editor cutting out mouths and like puppeting different dialogue. The dialogue is pretty vague, it's sort of the best we could do, and that was a process of discussing what we could actually have them say.”(3)

Hold the phone. Taken in context, Dos Santos is explaining the process of DreamWorks giving the showrunners the green light to change the epilogue of Season 8 to give Shiro the unambiguously gay orientation they had written out of Season 7. The problem is, there is no dialogue in the epilogue. Even if we consider the epilogue to consist of everything from “one year later” onward, there is no dialogue for Shiro and another male character that would have to be reworked.

Here is what we think happened: Season 8 was finished in June. The IP owner hated it and ordered it changed at the beginning of July. Those changes included cutting a male/male romance. August came and the fandom melted down over Adam dying. Hoping to avoid a repeat of the Adam debacle, in mid-August DreamWorks came around and offered to let the showrunners put something into Season 8 for more gay representation. By this point the edits to Season 8 were almost complete, the budget was gone, and time was short, so they opted to give Shiro a wedding during the ending, in the epilogue. In an effort to brush off the clear edits to Season 8, Dos Santos mentions the lip movements during the interview but is confusing the making of the epilogue with the rest of the edits.

Indeed, it seems those edits resulted not only in the deaths of the series’ heroine and a childhood abuse victim, but also in the demolition of not just one but possibly two completed romantic arcs. When discussing Allura and Lance’s romance, Dos Santos and Emma Fyffe have this to say:

JDS: I could see the argument where it’s like, it's basic. It's what we've kindof come to expect from okay the guy sort of turned around and-- but I think Lance's arc aside from being with Allura was bigger than the Allura love story.

EF: And Lance's overall story arc I really enjoyed. But again, I think it's this whole idea that we were dealing with this IP that was like "okay, monster of the week, it was like dudes being in love with one hot girl and just macho men with fighting robots and whatever was happening with Pidge".

JDS: Right, yes, yes. (3)

The showrunner himself not only agrees Lance’s milquetoast romantic arc was due to pushback from the IP holder, in discussing the controversy surrounding the main characters’ sexual orientation, Dos Santos inadvertently reveals a major romance between two male paladins was cut.

EF: ...it is important to know that, again, you have this character who is very much your sort of quintessential, like, alpha male.

JDS: That-that was the trope that we were trying to, like, sort of step on was that, you know. I grew up with characters like Duke. To a much lesser degree, he’s a big, giant robot Optimus Prime. The idea of Optimus Prime being with another Optimus Prime was off the table. Like it was a no-go. (3)

If Allura and Lance’s IP-owner-influenced romantic arc is any indication, clearly two main paladins being together was fine. Dos Santos is referring to the inability to pair two male mains.

We don't know for sure, and won't until the original S8 is released. But, we have reasonable cause to believe Keith was intended to be gay and part of the romance that got tanked. When speaking about Keith’s sexuality Dos Santos says:

JDS: Because, I think we didn’t, we didn’t pair him with anybody, you know what I mean. I think we didn’t designate sort of where he stood. We don’t know. It’s-- It’s--

KC: We don’t know

JDS: Yeah, it-- It doesn’t really matter to be honest with you. I mean it would be great to confirm just to make people happy, but, like at the end of the day he is who he is, and leaving it open to interpretation. (3)

Do you hear that? “It would be great to confirm”. Not that it would be great if they could have done it, but if they could have confirmed it. It seems that JDS conceptualizes Keith as having an attraction to men, but he was forbidden from making that fact plain. Again, we have no concrete evidence of who Keith was slated to be with, just that the writers couldn't have two gay male paladins.

The wording of his statements is just clear enough to avoid dishonesty and just vague enough so as not to break contract. Even beyond NDAs, it’s not as if the Executive Producers can speak more directly to these points. We already have evidence of the IP owner’s character in the form of the Voltron Store’s Twitter presence outright lying about WEP and the store being separate entities:

(8) When only a few weeks earlier they had liked a tweet explicitly identifying them as one and the same, while confirming they have the final say over what can be done with the characters:

(1)

Before the fandom realized that WEP was behind the edits to S8 of VLD, the information that they owned the license was accepted fact. This excerpt from the Lets Voltron Podcast, Episode 134, is just one example:

(talking about a Voltron reference in Ready Player One)

Host 1: For those of you not in the know, if you think DreamWorks is the all in all for Voltron. Well, World Events Productions is the company that owns --

Host 2: The Voltron intellectual property.

Host 1: Many of you have heard of DreamWorks obviously. They make the show. Well, World Events Productions owns the property and has helped make this new show and all previous shows possible.

LV Podcast EP 134, 5:00-5:30 (6)

Now? Many official avenues are hastily attempting to downplay WEP’s involvement. When reached for comment in February 2019 the LV Podcast claimed that DreamWorks owned the licence.

The official phone number listed on WEP’s website no longer offers an option to connect a person to WEP, instead it offers three options: to directly input an extension, the accounting department, and The Voltron Store. (9)

In an effort to prevent fans from contacting them with complaints, WEP have inadvertently made their association with The Voltron Store explicit. Regardless of what the twitter account may claim, they are one and the same company. If these incidents weren’t damning enough, the store has further attempted to engage in a subtle smear campaign by liking tweets from users apologizing for harassment and death threats the store had received over Season 8, when all groups bringing the problems with its forced edits to WEP’s attention have specifically advocated for civil and nonviolent communication. (8)

As the story unfolds, one point is clear: Each new interview brings more information forth, repeatedly shining the spotlight on one little office in St. Louis.

WEP LLC is a private company. It has no shareholders, investors, or boards to answer to. It is the sole IP holder of the Voltron brand, and its President is the only person in the entire world who has final say over what can and cannot be done with the characters. When someone says “the IP holder” they are really talking about one man: Bob Koplar.

#TeamPurpleLion is a collective of analysts ( @crystal-rebellion, @dragonofyang, @felixazrael, @leakinghate, and @voltronisruiningmylife )intent on tracking down the who, what, where, how, and why of the destruction of VLDS8. We present sourced & cited commentary, relying on evidence so the VLD community can see what happened behind the scenes.

#Shiro #Keith #Lance #sheith #klance #VLD #voltron #Voltron legendary defender #FREEVLDS8 #WEP #World Events Productions #meta #Hate tries to Meta #fubob #TeamPurpleLion #crystal-rebellion #felixazrael #homophobia #Allura

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