#I'm glad we have so many different settings and universes that are meant to explore different dynamics.

[sovamurka]

the sheer hilarity of Odyssey Jinx and Kayn being down bad horny for each other, Jinx is like 'me? being in love with scary cosmic dude that wants to kill our crew for stealing from him? MORE LIKELY THAN YOU THINK!' and Kayn is like 'I'LL KILL ALL OF YOU! Hmm, crazy ginger one is kinda cute tho... wait... Oh. Oh.'

[cooking-with-hailstones]

I’m curious, what do you think about Zelda games and continuity in general? I know one point of contention with BOTW/TOTK is the “lack” of continuity which yeah, i get it. It could be better. However the Zelda series is not known for its continuity lol. Like, take OOT and MM for example. MM is supposed to be a sequel to OOT, right? Well, tbh it’s not a very good one. Besides the fact that Link is the same one from oot, and the happy mask salesman and skull kid return, it feels really disconnected from its predecessor. I think Twilight Princess fits more as a sequel to OOT than MM. I could go on and on but what are your thoughts?

Very good question! So yeah, I know that the Zelda games give 0 craps about consistent lore or continuity, which is fine! I think they put forward a lot of different and interesting ideas. As a fandom, and especially as writers, we can treat it like a buffet of ideas to sample and play around with.

You raise an interesting point with oot/mm. I think the difference between oot/mm is the fact that they have very little in common with each other. New map, new characters, a completely different concept. There's a lot of mechanics that are the same but it really feels like you're in a new universe with the same aesthetics as the previous one, and that's about it.

I think TOTK stands out to people because it is a direct sequel with only a few years between them in-universe, but there is very little story, lore, and setting continuity between botw and totk. If it were a whole new game with a new slate of characters and a new map, I don't think the discrepancies would feel as jarring. That being said, I really love totk as a game! It's fantastic and I've sunk at least 100 hours in.

However, botw remains my favourite game because: botw is a gesamkunstwerk. TOTK is not a gesamkunstwerk.

And now here's my very long tangent about this:

I'm sure I've seen a video talking about this idea before but basically, a gesamkunstwerk is a German term for "total work of art." Coined by the composer Richard Wagner (whom we do not like, but his ideas were very influential), a gesamkunstwerk is a large scale work where everything reinforces each other. It is "a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms, or strives to do so." So in opera, for example, this would be how the orchestra, the costumes, the text, the music, the set pieces, everything comes together to tell one unified story.

I believe botw is a good example of a gesamkunstwerk: the open world setting serves the narrative framework, the Sheikah technology is incorporated seamlessly into the game mechanics, the story is scattered throughout the world for you to discover, but everything is still centered around your final goal and the narrative arc you're meant to travel. You're meant to explore, meet people, hone your skills, then face off against the final foe that you've been staring in the face for the whole game. You're meant to discover the world, to do all these things, as the player and as Link. Everything in botw reinforces everything else. It's not a perfect game by any means but it is incredibly well crafted.

And while totk improves on all the things in BOTW, it loses the cohesiveness that tied the first game together. I find that totk fights itself in a lot of ways. It didn't commit to being a linear game but it clearly has a linear path in mind (hello dragons tears...I am so glad a friend of mine told me to do them in order) The integration of zonai and Sheikah mechanics made no sense to me. The sages... Good gravy the sages...

Anyways this turned into a much longer post than I intended, but I hope this all made sense.

[mercurygray]

Mercy Street? I'm a little one-track right now. Alternately, A Discovery of Witches - what's another major even in world history Matthew's been through?

So, I took this prompt and kind of squished it with another post - I think it was from @begins-with-an-absence-of-desire - about a Downton crossover and said, Interwar Oxford and  vampires on shooting weekends. That’s a thing we need.

Sometimes his mother could be infuriating.

Matthew had finally settled into his new rooms at Oxford, one more pale, anxious face among all the other pale, anxious faces, and what had Ysabeau done but come barreling in fresh from Paris like some over-zealous society mother hen to drag him away to the country.

He knew she didn’t approve of his experiments, nor did his father - but if Baldwin could brood in Threadneedle Street buying and selling the world, and Verin swan through the backstreet cabarets of Berlin, and Stasia sit in state somewhere in Shanghai presiding like an empress over a string of gambling houses and opium dens, then he was entitled to something to call his own, and if it was too staid for his parents -  well, that was just too bad.

This would be his…fourth? fifth? time at Oxford - a new degree, a new college, new people and new ideas to explore. This time would be easier, after a fashion - so many of the new men were already older, coming out of the army to finish degrees that the war had pushing into a waiting room. They came with a sense of comradeship already built, their proving under fire forging links far stronger than ties of school colors and cricket games ever had. And if they assumed that he had passed the war as they had, what was the harm in that? He had been a soldier, more than once, for England and for France; he knew something of mud, and blood, and death, and he knew what it was like to do things that terrified you, that you’d never thought yourself capable of doing.

 It would have been simpler to move back into Woodstock, but there was something about being in the thick of the university that comforted him, grounded him to his work. At Woodstock, he remembered being a spy, a courtier, a poet. In Oxford, he was a scientist, an examiner of puzzles, a fellow sufferer on the wheel of academia.

Except, of course, for this weekend, when he would have to play the handsome, available son for whatever bored daughters of England’s aristocracy had come along for a shooting weekend.

Was his mother bored? Had she done this to spite him? Was this payback for abandoning her (her words, not his) during the war? Or simply one more effort to get him to abandon his research? Matthew didn’t truly know, but if several centuries had taught him nothing else, it was pointless to argue with Ysabeau de Clermont.

Whatever the reason, the matriarch of the Clermont clan was, at present, looking very pleased with herself in the backseat of the saloon car conveying them up to whatever country estate they were meant to be visiting this weekend.

“You haven’t asked where we’re going.” She sounded a little put out, but Matthew would be damned before he gave her the satisfaction.

“One English country house is much like another.”

“It’ll be fun,” his mother said with a smile, nudging his knee with her own. “You’re too serious these days, Matthew - you need a little color in your life.”

Ah, color. Cecelia had been colorful, and how had that ended? Debutante found dead in Seine; foul play suspected. Matthew hardly trusted himself any more where color was concerned. Let Stasia have her exiled White Russian princes to fuel the family gossip and let him have a quiet, uncomplicated, colorless life in Oxford.

Well, if this was the price for a few months’ peace, he’d pay it - a few days to shoot, and ride, and pay pretty compliments, and then he could go back to his lab and his books.

They drove for an hour or two down roads that had been set down around the time of the Conquest and only macadamed to suit current taste, making a turn into an old and well-maintained park, the road opening up for a moment on the long park in front, the house crowning a small hill.

Ysabeau smiled, their destination in sight. “Ah, Godwit.”

Godwit Park was not really what it claimed to be, its pedigree just as complicated as that of the family that lived within, built 17th century in the Jacobean, remodeled 18th century in Free Gothic, appended, added on, gardens redone, redecorated by the wife of the 14th holder of the title, until the thing being presented was as far from the original as its creator had intended.  It was, for Matthew, a painful artistic exercise, coming back to a place that he had known and loved in its first incarnation only to see the things that gave him joy taken away, the ghosts of well-carved cornices and chimney pieces lingering only in his memory. Not to mention the actual ghosts - most homes in England had at least two or three - which naturally flocked to creatures like moths to candles.

It had not always been thus - he could remember a time when every self-respecting noble house in England had at least one witch on staff, a housekeeper or nursemaid who managed these things along with other small domestic concerns. Alas, those days were long gone, fallen prey to Victorian respectability and universal education. There was less magic left in England, now, and less creatures to remember it.

And Matthew was old enough to remember, at least, the days when the park had taken its name and the first Lord Belhurst had declared that he would only have people of ‘good wit’ at his table. There had been dancing in the hall, and great quantities of wine, and toasts had been drunk to Charles and his pretty, witty Nell. Yes, that had been a party -and this weekend would be very, very different.

Here was the drive, and here the front door, servants assembled in black and white, and here was the lady of the house to welcome them. “Isabelle!”

“Louisa!” They kissed in the continental manner, like two old schoolfriends, though that was hardly how they knew each other. (There was something about charity work for French refugees, and tea dances, and Claridges.) “You remember Matthew, I hope.”

Lady Belhurst looked him over with an assessing eye. “I feel like every time I see you, Mr. Clairmont, you get taller. Isabelle tells me you’re at Oxford, studying!”

Matthew silently remembered a time when no one sent to Oxford (including young Lord Belhurst, son of the house’s builder) had actually studied, and smiled. “One has to keep busy somehow.”

“Well, I am glad you’ve made time for us,” Louisa said. “We’re only a small party this weekend, just twelve, and I had such a time making up my numbers. None of Freddie’s friends could get away and when Isabelle said she would bring you it was such a blessing. I think Lydia’s through here.”

There was no time to see what changes the family had wrought in the intervening years - Matthew caught a glimpse of the young Lord Belhurst with his dogs at his feet in a heavy gilded frame, a flash of the young Lady Belhurst, his wife, in full court array down another corridor. (Her hair always smelled of chamomile, to keep its color; Charles had given her those pearls, and she’d gambled them away for - but it hardly mattered now.)

There were two women sitting in the drawing room enjoying their tea. Lydia Belhurst was built in the family pattern, with a generous face and a jolly smile that would have looked well under Cavalier curls, but the woman sitting with her was a different creature entirely, all fine lines and flashing eyes and cultivated coldness, her beauty of an older stamp, dark where Lydia’s was light. She did not seem the kind of woman who would greet a friend as Lydia did, rising quickly from her seat and coming to embrace him.

“Oh, Matthew! Mama said you might come. Has she told you you’ve saved the numbers?”

“I’m in danger of having that be how I’m introduced all weekend,” he quipped, and Lydia laughed. But was that anger he had seen on the other woman’s face? Disdain, perhaps?

“I’ll try hard not to say it again, then. Do you know Lady Mary Crawley? Her people are up in Yorkshire - the Earls of Grantham. Mary, this is Matthew Clairmont - one of Freddie’s friends.”

Again that flash of unease! “A pleasure.” A slim, elegant hand was offered, delivering a handshake that meant business. Power seemed to crackle around her shoulders, but Lady Mary Crawley was no witch - only a woman used to getting what she wanted. A dark dress and a wedding ring told him everything he needed to know - widowed, doubtless. Some well-meaning relative had dispatched her in the same way that Ysabeau had dragged him along. Well, there was a kinship to be had there.

What on earth was that damnable smile of Lydia’s? She looked like a cat who’d gotten into the cream. But there was no time to ask - her attention was quickly drawn out the window. “Good heavens, is that the Seatons? I thought they wouldn’t be here for ages! There’s tea here, Matthew, if you’d like some - must dash!”

And, just like that, she was gone, leaving the two of them alone. Mary watched Lydia leave and sighed. “I wish they wouldn’t be so damn obvious about it.” She turned to Matthew and gave a thin, belabored smile, the kind that is generally sick of playing games and having to give such smiles. “I’ll apologize now, Mr. Clairmont, and spare you the effort - I’m afraid Lady Belhurst’s romantic plotting won’t come to anything.” He tried to look politely confused. “I’ve been listening to Lydia extol your considerable virtues for the last half-hour and now she has - conveniently - left us alone.”

Ah. Yes, that rather explained it. “I appreciate the honesty - but Lady Belhurst’s plotting wouldn’t have come to anything from my end, either. At the moment I’m rather married to my work.”

“Oh?” She looked interested at that - a welcome changes from her usual round, then. Mary Crawley was used to being an object of universal desire. (As she would be, if she were beautiful, titled, and - were the Earls of Grantham rich? He couldn’t remember.)

“I’m down at Oxford. University College - Chemistry.”

She looked him over, making some small sound of amusement. “Funny, you don’t look at all like an academic.”

Was that a challenge? “Why, what should an academic look like?”

“Well, I don’t know…thinner and less …rigorous. And you’re missing a pair of glasses and a…a general air of derangement.”

There was something about the way she said rigorous that sparked something - this was a woman well-used to managing her desires, a common enough type for women of her class. A physical attraction was to mean little to her, the primary prize a man’s wealth and his station. But if she was a widow, she’d presumably made the first marriage that her family had so desired - which meant she was now free to do as she wished in the matter of her second. So you find me attractive, Mary Crawley, and you’d rather you didn’t - because that would make brushing me off just that much easier.  Well.

“I’m so sorry, I seem to have left all of those in my other trunk. I can go and come back wearing something more suitable, if you’d rather.” A smile - genuine, this time. Why did that feel like victory? Why did he care? “So,” he asked, bending down to pour himself a cup of tea and settling into the sofa.  “What shall we do to encourage their plots?”

Are Mary and Matthew going to re-invent fake dating for their shooting weekend? Probably, because…that would be entertaining to me. Why not set this at Downton? I liked the idea of being in a sort of ‘neutral’ territory. 

I can’t remember right now the name of the other woman Matthew fell in love with, after Eleanor - was it Celine? Cecelia? It started with a C. 

On a side note, I’m totally in love with the idea of Matthew having a kind of kinship with this generation of the shell-shocked officer class. 

[letsdiscoverkitty]

What's your advice on deferring uni because of anorexia? I suffered a really bad relapse during my exam period a few months ago. Since then I've made a good start on recovery although everyday is really tough. I'm meant to be going back to uni soon but I'm not sure whether to defer and focus on recovery or just go anyway?? Any advice would be much appreciated! Xxx

Hey love, firstly I am really sorry to hear that you had a bad relapse during exams, stressful periods can be extremely challenging and we all know how sneaky ED can be. However I am glad to hear that you have been trying to work on things since, and I really hope things continue to improve for you. Please do not be too hard on yourself, recovery is a tough road to walk and not every day is going to be good. Some days are just hard, without there being any exact reason behind it, but I promise you that you are not alone in feeling that way. You are still quite early on in recovery and I know it might feel like every day is a struggle but you have made it this far, you can continue to move forwards from here.

As for taking time out from education/uni, I think that it is a very individual thing however it is important to explore all the options, of which there are many areas to consider, before you commit to a decision. First and foremost I think you need to trust your instinct when you answer this question: Do you think that you will be able to continue with recovery and fuel yourself if you were to return to Uni, along with coping with your course? And that means more than ‘just enough’ to get by, it means being able to continue to focus on your wellbeing and recovery (mental and physical) as well as your studies and social side. University is a lot to ask of anyone, let alone those in recovery as recovery is literally a full time job in itself. 

When thinking about whether you would be able to cope/manage at Uni I think it is very important to ask yourself what support network you would have set up around you. I am assuming that you have returned home for the summer? Have you been receiving support from MH services at all? Is the environment at home a supportive one for your recovery and are your parents a positive support to have around? Do you think that you would be able to move back to your University city, into a new environment, and be able to find support in the people around you? Is commuting to university whilst living at home a possibility? or maybe transferring your studies to a University closer to home if you feel you would be better off staying at home? It is important to ask what kind of support you would be able to get if you were to be at University, would you be willing to work with the ED/MH team and also leasing with student support, your GP and any mentor schemes that might be available? 

As I said at the beginning of this reply, I think it is a very individual thing and there is no ‘set’ one answer. However, having said that I think it is very very important to remember that your education/Uni will ALWAYS be there down the line. Yes you might end up graduating a year ‘later’ than others you started your course with but that really doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. YOUR HEALTH AND WELLBEING has to come first. No question about it. And if you have any worry/doubt that you would not be able to cope whilst at University then I definitely think that you need to consider, very carefully, the option of taking a year out. A year out to focus on your mental health does not have to be seen as a ‘wasted’ year, it is so far from that and can be filled with many opportunities alongside focusing on your recovery and wellbeing. 

Have you spoken to your parents about your current worries? I think it is really helpful to talk about these things out in the open, especially with the people closest to you as well as any other services you may be seeing. I think that if you were to return to University then you would need to have some very strict parameters set up e.g. if you were beginning to relapse again or not complying with treatment or struggling a lot to take care of yourself, then you have to agree to come home. I think having specific parameters in place, although difficult to have to think about as we hope that it would not come to that, is very important as it may be a motivator to help you keep on track and not falling back into the grips of anorexia as it will try to make it seem very appealing. 

I would definitely recommend taking some time to write out a pros and cons list for both sides: number one going back to University and the other for staying at home for the year. Be honest to yourself when you write the pros and cons and try to think about all the different options that there are. If you are set on returning then please make sure you contact student services in advance to returning and talk to both your tutors and your GP at university to make sure that you have a support network set up around you. 

I hope that this has helped even just a little bit to help think about the possible options that lie before you. At the end of the day this is a decision that only you can make and I really hope that you can make the one that is best for you. Whatever happens, I wish you all the best my lovely, and please feel free to message me anytime, I know how tough it can be having to consider a year out, so please remember that you are never alone. Sending love and hugs your way xxx