#I think that she deserves infinitely more mercy than she was given by the narrative and ESPECIALLY by the worm fandom.

[dw-flagler]

fuck. I was writing this emma barnes fic and I've come to a realization. For a period of exactly seven days in 2009, Emma Barnes is a completely different person from the one in canon. Like, I always knew that meeting Shadow Stalker the second time shaped her as a person, but it's genuinely shocking how utterly different the road of her life could have been.

Like, for my fic I had these two paths I was struggling to pick between, which I'm calling Wire and Cloth, as a joke about imprinting (see neither is good but one is distinctly better than the other), one where Emma ends up being kidnapped by the ABB and one where she ends up as shadow stalker's apprentice. But.

Look, here's a line from Interlude 19: "What got her, the nebulous idea that haunted her, was the impact those scenes had.  There were so many defining moments, so many crises, big and small, that shaped the people they touched.  The biggest and most critical moments were the sorts that wiped the slate clean, that ignored or invalidated the person who had existed before, only to create another."

Like, yeah, she's talking about triggers, but what's getting to me is how empathetic (in the literal "I can relate to your pain" sense) and compassionate she sounds. Like. Emma shuts herself in her room for a week because she's incapable of dealing with the horror of knowing that hundreds of little girls are going through what she did every minute of every day. She can't deal with it.

This emma, who only exists for a week, is haunting me. She's just--It's just weird!

And the Emma who exists for the rest of the story, for every section except for less than half of one chapter, you can see the remains! She's there! Emma recontextualizes her existential despair at the enormity of human suffering, something she only really understood in abstract until now, as Sophia's predator/prey philosophy, right? It's so easy for her, because it gives her a way to explain it. There's predators and there's prey. It already slots into her worldview. Like (and I'm really just harping on about victim blaming today aren't I?) those girls who suffered like Emma did, they suffered because they were weak! It's simple now. There's two kinds of people, the ones who are hurt and the ones who hurt, and all Emma has to do to make sure that she is never hurt again is to be the one who does the hurting.

But for seven days, there's that ghost. The kind Emma Barnes, who doesn't want anything like what happened to her happen to anyone else. It's not as narratively interesting, I get that. Who wants a worm character who's all peace and love? That doesn't make for a mentally disturbed teenage girl doing horribly violent acts, and that's what we in the worm fandom all want to see. But still she haunts me.

[margotverger]

top 5 best hannibal takes and worst hannibal takes. go

okay i’m going to do this generally on what other people’s takes (that i’ve seen or read somewhere) are because none of my hannibal takes are bad. 

top 5 best:

that margot should have been butch in the tv show and that the margot/alana romance could have been developed a little more, i’ll elaborate more on the butch angle in top 5 worst, but i think while i enjoy marlana in s3 (who doesn’t) i do think that there could have been a Little More to it, especially since there was admittedly a lot of gratuitous metaphorical work on a visual or verbal level in early s3 that didn’t... really do much after the first few, and that i think bryan fuller definitely got a bit self-indulgent. while i love s3 i think it was weaker because it got quite ensnared in feeling like it had to explain everyone’s individual recovery (not a bad thing necessarily and the looping narrative definitely had this feeling of “time has been changed, mutilated, adjusted after mizumono”, but on a narrative level it could have probably still been achieved but left more room for things to. Happen) and i think that some of the excess could have been trimmed to allow for more margot-alana development beyond simply talking about taking revenge, i would have loved to see some genuine conversation that only affected both of them that made us realise just why alana would raise the child with her, why they would get marriedーalana having very little dating life and presumably trauma around relationships since her immediate ex tried to murder her and is also a serial killer, and margot having been traumatised repeatedly due to being a lesbian in a very homophobic family, they deserved some space in order to explore why exactly they mean a lot to each other. even a singular scene that didn’t depend on taking vengeance on the men who hurt them would have given us enough i think. 

lara jean chorostecki’s hot take (implied) that freddie would have a wife. groundbreaking. love that. regardless of bryan fuller i am assuming with full confidence that freddie lounds has a wife after the timeskip

autistic will graham. enough said. hugh dancy’s only stupid thing was saying will isn’t autistic. that was a sin. will graham is autistic

lesbian abigail hobbs. lesbian abigail hobbs!

the hot take that hannibal doesn’t do its women characters justice, this isn’t just about deaths (i do agree that for the gothic horror narrative characters are doomed to some extent, and i don’t overly grieve over deaths that came too early, so i’m not too fussed) but on a writing level, bryan fuller definitely tries to portray himself as a very woman-positive author who introduces feminine energy - and he does! but at the same time there is a lack in developing relationships between women, and for a story to truly give space to be a genuinely woman-positive story there needs to be strong relationships between women that don’t depend on men; obviously since hannibal’s presence is insidious and infects everything, as is his luciferian ways, and will’s often the binding agent, this can’t be entirely avoided but regardless of hannibal they can exist, on some small level, individually. we saw that a lot in s1! between abigail and freddie and alana and abigail mostly, plus there was a small glimpse at it in season 3 with bedelia and chiyoh (underrated imo i would love to see further into why bedelia has her views of chiyoh and what that means ... i hope they interact again if hannibal s4 comes to pass!). so it proves there is room for it. it doesn’t need to be every episode or even have a huge arc but seeing hannibal pass the bechdel test more than like. twice a season would be nice!

top 5 worst takes:

that bedannibal is more romantic than hannigram (lol)... i love bedelia and bedannibal a lot but that’s just. hm. incorrect

that hannibal has never loved anybody except will. i’ve wrote about this before but i think that’s a deliberate misunderstanding of the character hannibal. what is unique about hannibal and will’s relationship is not the presence of love but the presence of being changed by that love; transformation is at its core, the openness to being adjusted or altered... recognition, seeing, understanding, and that allowing compassion not only for the other (in hannibal’s case) but for the self (in will’s case). hannibal loves a lot, but his love is not separate from crueltyーi think this is where people misunderstand. just because he is willing to hurt or harm people isn’t, in the narrative (not in real life), because he doesn’t love them. his cruelty is because he loves people enough he wants to bring them to the height of their being, in extremis. he loved alana, which is why he showed her a chance at mercy. he loved bedelia. he loved jack. he loved abigail! he loved bella especially, and he genuinely mourned. these went beyond fascinations; these were genuine expressions of affection, love, whether they be platonic or romantic or familial. hannibal’s flaw is not that he is incapable of love. and personally i think to disrespect his relationships with other characters (who are all women, black or both lol) in order to further isolate the white m/m relationship is... not ideal. not a sign that someone is wholly prejudiced but i think it’s something we should be critical about, especially when hannibal through word of god is confirmed to love other people. 

bryan fuller’s own take that margot being femme is somehow less prejudiced or problematic than if she was butch. i haven’t read the book yet but i already know that margot’s portrayal as a butch lesbian was problematic but thomas harris is . undoubtedly prejudiced in many ways and that’s a fault of him, not a fault of the existence of being butchーbeing butch isn’t just a “stereotype” it’s a genuine mode of existence, it’s an intricate relationship with gender, sexuality and love, and butchness deserves to be represented as something beautiful, desirable and complex... instead of just deciding she should be conventionally feminine because that’s somehow more progressive. but then again he also made her have sex with a man so you know. lol

ANY take that involves over-analysing who is a top or who is a bottom and then rendering the characters into homophobic/fetishistic stereotypes. it’s ugly! it’s weird! keep that shit away from me. also any take involving “dark!will”. again that just does the character of will disrespect lol. the whole point of will is that he is morally complex and perhaps beyond the human scopeーhe is not just an echo of hannibal... i’ve seen one too many fics where will just becomes a savage brutal unfeeling murderer who only cares about hannibal after s3. like please watch the show

that hannibal is a narcissist/sociopath... or any other ableist interpretations. not every villain is a narcissistic (a genuine disorder) sociopath (just another word associated with npd etc) just because they do bad things. they’re very real disorders that people deal with and are infinitely more complex than just a character having a god complex and killing people. the whole point about hannibal is that he exceeds what is considered neurodivergent and while i don’t mind if people with similar disorders relate to him (much like how i relate to will’s autistic traits) i think a lot of bad comes from people throwing the label sociopath around because it becomes dehumanising and leads to further stigma against truly vulnerable people. 

basically any trope that just does a character a disservice or neglects the actual story in further of fetishistic thinking, prejudiced thinking, ableist thinking... will graham can be autistic because of his empathy (i’ve seen it implied that he can’t be because of it when, as a very empathetic autistic person, hyper-empathy is a very common if not universal symptom, it just appears differently) and hannibal is not a sociopath just because he kills and eats people. and we should all have a little sip of critical thinking juice

[16ruedelaverrerie]

SOUND THE HORNS, RAISE THE ALARMS, it’s time for THE WAR ON STARK PROPAGANDA haha that’s a severe way of putting it, “Stark propaganda.” But it really is a case of emotional allegiances affecting the interpretation of narrative events; the first trouble is that the audience loves the Starks too much, and that Theon loves the Starks too much (for a given value of “love”).

It’s not like the show never points out that Theon’s position in Winterfell is one of hostage! But the centrality of the Starks to the show makes it really difficult to look at things through anything other than Stark-tinted glasses-- and because the show primes the audience to think of the Starks as generally good and noble and kind, it’s not easy to see that even those who are good and noble and kind are perfectly capable of inflicting harm on others. Just because Ned Stark seems like a really nice dude doesn’t mean he won’t take a child hostage. In fact, it is absolutely because Ned Stark is a... nice dude... that he takes a child hostage; this is a kind of niceness that has very strict limits on what kinds of mercy are allowed and when. Taking Theon hostage means that the Greyjoys can be kept in check instead of being eradicated off the face of the planet, but just because that minimizes overall bloodshed doesn’t mean that Theon can’t be rendered precarious and miserable by it.

Also, it’s extra hard to remember that Theon doesn’t need redemption when Theon himself is constantly looking for redemption. Even though the only real human connection he has with the Starks is through Robb, Theon does DESPERATELY want to belong to the family that he’s grown up in. So, you know, I get it! I understand why a lot of people would watch the show and think that Theon’s betrayal of Robb’s trust is tantamount to turning on one’s own family! That his taking of Winterfell is some sort of INTERNECINE CATASTROPHE!

But that’s a conclusion that comes from adopting the show’s viewpoint as your own. Again, I get it. When a text wants something, it tries to make you want it too. My concern is that reading against the text is a skill that we're not really given the chance to learn very well or practice very often, but that it’s such an important skill to have in order to be thoughtful, critical interlocutors of both fictional and nonfictional materials. Saying that Theon needs redemption is to take for granted a lot of assumptions that undergird GoT’s diegetic worldviews (some of which are also ASoIaF’s); that the Starks are “good,” that family must come first, that one has to pay for one’s wrongs with suffering and death. But none of these are inviolable truths! The Starks are just people, a family is nothing but a socially constructed unit, and punishment is not the only possible response to a misdeed.

The last point, especially. In a Renaissance revenge tragedy, things don’t end when vengeance has been served and everyone is satisfied with the state of affairs. They end because vengeance has snowballed freakishly out of control and there is no longer anyone left alive to pursue vengeance or be avenged upon. Suffering can never adequately pay for suffering. How the heck does Theon lying dead in the Godswood do anything to unstage the Red Wedding? What does Theon being flayed in the Dreadfort do to unkill the miller’s boys? To think of Theon’s story as a redemption arc is also to place his torture and abuse within that framework, and the rhetoric of “he got what he deserved” presupposes a moral economy that operates on the principle that punitive measures are necessary to right a wrong. But suffering can never adequately pay for suffering. I read the Reek section of Theon’s story as being in large part about the inherent failure of this sort of punitive moral economy; you may want to see someone punished, but the problem is that once you start punishing them, there’s no clear point at which to stop.

What’s so vile is that setting up Theon’s story as a redemption arc also made a lot of people react to trauma with a fantastic lack of compassion! This is why Peter Sagal can call late-season Theon a loser, and why a major-outlet thinkpiece can state with confidence that no one stans Theon. In a redemption arc, you serve your time and you stand back up and you finally do good; Theon’s inability to rise to the occasion in the aftermath of Ramsay was therefore a source of frustration for people who were expecting a glorious moment of redemption for Theon. Under this framework, his failure to fight Euron was a failure to seize that redemption when it was offered to him.

But why is violence the only way to answer violence? Why can’t Theon respond to his own wartime deeds in some other way that doesn’t involve more war? When I said that I wanted Theon to have a fleece blanket and a bowl of soup, it wasn’t that I wanted him to withdraw from the story or to cede control to Euron. It was that GoT has never been interested in imagining a truly viable alternative space to the theater of war, and I wanted to see what it would look like to turn some swords to goddamn plowshares without waiting for the current war to run its course. When I say this, people keep telling me that the world of GoT is a harsh one and the only way to survive is to fight. But literally there is nothing to stop anyone from imagining otherwise! That’s what fiction is-- the act of imagining otherwise. But all GoT wants to do is imagine the same thing over and over again; Sam wants to fight, little girls want to fight, everyone wants to fight because D&D have created a world in which there is nothing outside of fighting. Sansa tells the Hound her suffering did her good because she now knows how to fight better (not physically, but more shrewdly; more mistrustfully). Theon is worthless until he fights again-- and eventually dies fighting, because having regained that violent worth, his arc is ended and he is no longer needed for any further violent purpose.

I’m not a very good watcher of the show. I don’t think I ever cared who sat on the Iron Throne, I don’t instinctively understand the desire not to be spoiled for plot developments, and I’m mostly skeptical of spectacle. It’s probably the case that I’m not the person all this was meant for! So my opinion counts for very little... but here is the opinion that counts for so little, @hurlumerlu. These are my tangled feelings. There is also a side branch argument about how I find the redemption arc to be uninteresting as a narrative shape because it is too neat, but that’s a different aesthetic argument for another time.

 Oh my god I’m sorry @we-return-in-waves, just to get here you had to scroll past ten thousand lines of me wishing that someone would establish a women’s shelter in Westeros or something kl;dkhglk actually I’m sorry to @hurlumerlu as well, in fact I’m sorry to everyone for making the previous answer part of an askbox post and not its own separate entry. But I DON’T KNOW, I JUST STARTED DOING IT AND THEN I REALIZED THAT MY ANSWER WAS TOO LONG BUT BY THEN IT WAS TOO LATE AND ALSO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?? ME TYPING TOO MUCH = A PROBLEM THAT RECURS IN EVERY AREA OF MY LIFE EXCEPT FOR IN MY SCHOOLWORK, UNFORTUNATELY ENOUGH

Which is a segue back to your message. You are truly an infinitely better human being than I, firstly because you are generous enough to derive enjoyment from my shitty DBH posts; but secondly because you are disciplined enough to use fandom as a motivation! If I were you, I would just end up staring at a blank Word document for two hours, thinking but what if Gavin wins a Grand Prix and instead of celebrating like a normal person he just breathlessly yells NINES, MEET ME IN THE BACK into the interviewer’s microphone before flipping off the entire crowd and walking backwards offstage

Fandom hinders me from getting schoolwork done and schoolwork hinders me from getting fandom stuff done. It is a vicious cycle of no great consequence but I am despondent over it anyway. Thank you very much for dropping me this note, @we-return-in-waves! I do it all for you.

 No bruh you. What?

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Please tell me all about your complaints with BBC Merlin, bc I too have Many Complaints (ft. Miscommunication and Secrets Are Good For Drama to a Maximum of One Season and Certainly Not Five; Morgana is a Terrified and Oppressed Woman Who Is Made Evil for Being Terrified and Oppressed and Does Not Deserve It, Much Like All Mages; and Everyone Has A Serious Case of Forgetting Their Character Growth when The Plot Requires.

*deep breath*

Honestly I think my ultimate complaint about Merlin is that it suffers from an absolutely crippling case of narrative cowardice, which is a concept you might recall from my Inevitable Tirade About SPN.  Basically: if you open your show with a large portion of it predicated on a conceit that has to be drastically altered in order to accomplish the ultimate goal of the plot (in the case of Merlin, switching from uther’s Camelot to Arthur’s Camelot), you can’t be a shit about it and you have to actually goddamn do it.  CHANGE YOUR PARADIGM, YOU LIMP NOODLES.

No, I’m dead serious, all their problems basically boil down to a critical inability to change the paradigm.  Let’s do an experiment to prove it.

Merlin’s magic, obviously.

Two things here.

First, Merlin hiding his magic.  At the beginning, Merlin can’t tell anyone about his magic on pain of death, because Uther.  This implicitly sets up the eventual transition into Arthur’s Camelot as a shift into a ‘safe’ Camelot for magic users in general and Merlin in particular, because we all know a little bit about Arthuriana and we know that Merlin becomes Arthur’s trusted adviser, magic and all.  So in order to accomplish that transition, what ‘should’ happen (by ‘should’ I mean, ‘the thing that makes intuitive sense to someone waiting for the plot to advance’) is that Merlin’s presence and involvement in Arthur’s life gradually makes Arthur more comfortable with magic, until finally a crisis forces a reveal in which Merlin comes clean and puts Arthur in the position of deciding once and for all where he stands.  Plot and precedent in every other Arthurian legend requires that Arthur decides, at the very least, that Merlin is not evil and that consequently magic can be used for good.  This would by virtue of necessity put Arthur and Merlin against Uther, and moreover mean that it would be the two of them scheming together in order to save the kingdom every couple weeks, which would be an excellent way to develop their relationship and progress toward Arthur’s Camelot.  Instead, by trying to uphold the ‘secrecy’ conceit, the plot is forced to relapse to Square One every couple of episodes, and therefore when Arthur’s Camelot does come ‘round, it’s not safe for Merlin to come clean, Merlin still doesn’t really trust Arthur, Arthur’s playing checkers on a board where the other side is playing chess, and We The People feel pretty fucking cheated.

Second, Merlin’s magic in general.  FRIENDS.  COMRADES.  IF YOU ARE GOING TO GO TO GREAT LENGTHS TO SET SOMEONE UP AS THE MOST POWERFUL MAGE IN HISTORY, I WANT TO SEE THEM BE THE MOST POWERFUL MAGE IN HISTORY.  Honestly by about season 3 there’s no point to Merlin being worried about coming clean, because we’re told repeatedly that he’s powerful enough to not worry about being burned at the stake or whatever.  According to what we’re told, Merlin should have the raw power to walk into Uther’s courtroom and announce “Hello, all, I am a warlock and I dare you to mess with me” and then go back to his business.  But since we never see him actually carry that out–y’all he fucking killed Nimueh with lightning, why didn’t we see that again?–Merlin’s power level is mostly an Informed Attribute, which leaves the viewer frustrated and confused by a lot of the tension the show sets up regarding threats to Merlin’s life.  We see Merlin demonstrate multiple times that it would be almost impossible to execute him by traditional methods, and yet we’re still supposed to agree that it’s too dangerous.  Like.  Listen, my friends.  Here is a pro tip.  It’s actually not a narrative-ending problem to have a ludicrously OP character (which is what Merlin would be if the writers were consistent with his abilities), but you have to acknowledge that they develop a whole different set of obstacles than someone who isn’t ludicrously OP.  It just takes some creative thinking.

Morgana!

Morgana is horribly mistreated by the narrative and I’m not gonna question you there, but moreover, a lot of the problems with her magic plotline are, again, about a fear of changing the paradigm.  So, like, okay, let’s all agree that it would make infinitely more narrative sense for Morgana to go to Arthur, her foster brother and trusted friend, in distress and tell him that she thinks she can do magic, which Arthur would tell his servant Merlin.  The two of them recommend that Morgana keep it under wraps, and maybe that’s how Arthur starts to come around on the magic thing, rather than Merlin’s influence.  Sure, super chill.  Instead of just doing an about-face on the whole loyalty thing because…what…she’s not the heir?  (It’s been A Minute since I put myself through this show.)  Instead of that whole mess, maybe Morgana comes to Merlin when Uther is wounded and begs him to help her find a way to heal him, because surely, surely, if his beloved ward (and daughter) uses magic for something so pure and innocently good as healing the king, it can’t be evil.  When that inevitably backfires, Uther banishes Morgana from Camelot, and Arthur tells her to go because it’s safer.  Morgana, betrayed by Uther and perceiving herself to be abandoned by Arthur and Merlin, turns on Camelot in a rage and allies with her sister Morgause.  This plotline gives Morgana more agency, avoids the rather unsavory “madness leads to murder” overtones, minimizes the predatory vibe of Morgause’s plotline, and actually contributes to developing Merlin and Arthur as leaders and characters alike.

The problem, of course, is that this plotline hinges on Arthur’s character not being a static piece of shit that would honestly fracture under even the most minimal paradigm shift.  So instead, Morgana draws the short straw for a sudden face-heel turn so that there can be a motivation to enforce Arthur’s hatred of magic and Merlin’s fear of telling the truth, and then she disappears for half a season only to show up again crazy and homicidal, which…honestly there’s not a lot of emotional punch there.  At no point in time did I sympathize with Morgana because, update, I do not believe that fratricide and patricide are legitimate responses to her situation in the show.  But since they presented it as a problem that should have been sympathetic, I was mostly just angry rather than disinterested.

Merlin and Arthur’s friendship!

Honestly this should be pretty blindingly obvious, but Merlin and Arthur…I actually don’t super care for their relationship, because there are so few occasions when Arthur counterbalances his constant insults and judgement with the kind of do-or-die loyalty Merlin shows him.  And like on the one hand it’s clearly meant to be largely in good humor, but there are plenty of times when it’s Clearly Not.  But the worst part is that I can’t even hold it against Arthur because Merlin is not telling him the truth, which in turn I can’t hold against Merlin because Arthur is pretty much a narrow-minded magic-hating prick, which never changes because Merlin isn’t telling him the truth, because Arthur has never given him reason to think he’d stand by Merlin against Uther, and so on down the line.

And you expect me to believe that relationship develops into something strong enough to build a kingdom on?  To build a legend on?  I think the hell not.  In order to develop that relationship into something that feels as last-gasp-devoted as the show tells you it should, someone’s paradigm has to shift and it basically has to be Arthur because See Above and, again, the showmakers are fucking cowards.

Arthur’s personality AS A WHOLE

Once again: I am existentially exhausted by the whole Arthur Is A Dick thing.  And I don’t blame Merlin for starting it, but it’s definitely a peak concentration of the whole phenomenon, and I fucking hate it.  I eventually stuck it out and watched three seasons and change and I did genuinely enjoy a lot of things, but I attempted the first episode three times and had to stop because I was so fucking aggravated with Arthur’s character.  And basically, in order for him to move firmly out of Spoiled Rich Prick With Issues into Competent Merciful Leader With Tragic Backstory That Panned Out Well In The End, he needs to acknowledge in-narrative that he’s been, A, contributing to the persecution of magic users and that’s something he’ll never truly be clean of, and, B, he’s been not only mocking but actively penalizing Merlin for what Arthur does not realize is saving the country.  Basically, it would require Arthur to grow up, not just in his status as king but in and of himself as an individual, in his relationships as well as in his throne, become more than a war hero with more courage than is healthy.  It would require Arthur to spit out an apology that sounded like an apology, and start trusting Merlin’s word as an adviser rather than a conveniently intelligent servant.

And like.  That paradigm shift would probably have made the showrunners shit their pants on the spot.

If you, like me, couldn’t move past these issues but still want(ed) to enjoy the characters and universe, I have a solution for you!  Here is the most magnificent series rewrite I have ever seen in my life, and as far as I am concerned the One True Merlin Canon.  The link is to the Season 3 rewrite, which is where it goes hard AU and solves a lot of problems. 

In conclusion: fuck this noise, everyone go watch Legend of the Sword instead, @Guy Ritchie please make at least one sequel.