#Ignition Point

[adventuretimetournament]

Dad's Dungeon: Finn and Jake are shown in the center, charging toward the camera in a long brick tunnel lit by yellow light. Several monsters in the foreground are facing them, along with a pile of treasure. The title is above them in yellow letters and a font reminiscent of ancient Greek.

Ignition Point: Flame Princess is shown in the center, holding her face as a fireball explodes beneath her with several evil, shadowy faces in the flames. Several candles have been sent flying from the explosion, and Finn and Jake are leaping toward the camera on either side of the screen with determined expressions. The background is white, and the title is at the top, each letter made from a blue, lit candle.

[relatablepicturesoffinnmertens]

[pictures-i-like-of-fp]

[yahoo201027]

Day in Fandom History: September 17…

Finn and Jake travel and sneak down to the Fire Kingdom in hopes of retrieving the scented candles that belonged to Flame Princess and giving them to her and end up stumbling into a plot to take the Flame King out. “Ignition Point” premiered on this day, 12 Years Ago.

[deathricedrawn]

i'm ready to try

[hyunpic]

hyunjin and d4vd finally got to meet 🥹

[pencilofawesomeness]

How Fairy Tail could have had a really cool thematic parallel if they Committed to the Bit:

I often joke about my constant urge to spew essays on characters and topics I have thought too much about, but I refrain because translating all the thoughts in my head to words takes time and effort, and sometimes I am speaking to the void. However. I am spinning in my chair, gnawing at the bars of my enclosure, and frankly thinking way too much right now so I must scream.

It would have been so impactful if Fairy Tail emphasized Jellal being brainwashed.

Jellal is my boy, of course, but I’m not even just talking about the impact to his character: I mean the impact of the entire plot. This, of course, if we went the whole mile with the theming. The machination of being controlled, emotionally or magically influenced, or even unable to fulfill a desire due to an insurmountable obstacle, comes up numerous times throughout the plot, to both primary characters, supporting characters, and antagonists. While Fairy Tail is absolutely a series about friendship, it is also about choosing your path, with a large recurring theme of, regardless of connotation, about being selfish, and what that means on both ends of the spectrum. It’s a matter of free will, and the antithesis to this is all manner of external control. So really, it makes sense that this should be a thoroughly explored theme.

I could talk all day about all the different examples and aspects of this but I came here to talk about Jellal. First, the slavery aspect really hits the nail on the head, so we’re off to a great start—this, of course, applicable to multiple characters, which I really enjoy. Things go wild, however, when Jellal effectively chooses to trade himself for Erza in the punishment game and gets the ever-living shit beat out of him at the ripe age of eleven or twelve years old. He is, understandably, not in a good place, and he comes to the stunning conclusion that… he hates the slavers. Yeah. Checks out. Then, he hears the voice of ‘Zeref’ spewing rhetoric about hate, and it overwhelms; this, we know in hindsight especially, to be Ultear casting a mind-fuck spell in order to manipulate him, under the guise of pretending to be a figure young Jellal believed to be a god. 

When I first saw this flashback, watching the anime, I was unbelievably hyped. For all of Fairy Tail’s odd relationship with foreshadowing, I got the gist of it as soon as the magic went into his right eye and overwhelmed him. In Japanese media especially (largely due to the prevailing symbolism of the daruma doll), the right eye is a huge indicator of free will and the future—namely one’s goals. Creepy magic ghost entering the right eye with magic-bind looking things and immediately warping Jellal’s goal? A+ delivery. Of course, at the time Zeref—an unrevealed ‘evil’ entity—seemed a likely culprit, but Ultear being the puppeteer changes little of the result. In fact, it actually creates a super interesting parallel, but more on that later.

First, there are the consequences of Jellal being an antagonist who is not in control of his actions. I see people lament that it “cheapens” the severity of the arc and provides a cop-out redemption for Jellal, and while the execution of the latter certainly could have been different, I don’t think the premise of mind alteration cheapens the overall plot and theme of Fairy Tail at all; on the contrary, it could have been used to further emphasize intra- and inter- character conflict as well as provide a super engaging parallel for the end of the series. The theme of nakama, family, and friendship is huge, so what better way to emphasize that than to show a twisted example of it?

Jellal goes from ride-or-die loyal and ‘good’ to circumstantially loyal to an ideal (and the people attached to it) and ‘evil’ with the flip of a magic switch. Erza gets the immediate short of the stick when she is the first victim (aside from Jellal himself) to this meddling, and the caring friend she had seen days or weeks before is now cruel, insane, and full of threats—threats she takes heed to as she is cast from the island. Now, Erza is also a child, and one full of trauma, so I am not trying to invalidate her fear or blame her for any outcome. This also does not dive into the intricacies of saving friends at cost to oneself, and all of the conflict thereof; if anything, the complication of the matter bolsters the drama and impact. And then, we have the rest of the squad. Sho, Wally, and Milliana buy into the idea without any trouble, and they continue to buy into it as they get older. Beyond morality, it’s a power fantasy, and those are easy for formerly powerless people to latch onto. However, Simon is the only one who realizes that something is fundamentally wrong and twisted with Jellal… and his ultimate goal, developed over the course of roughly seven to eight years, is to wait it out until he finds the opportunity to kill him, or get somebody else to do it. Ultear, even after integrating herself into the group out of nowhere, gets away with her plan, because ultimately nobody questions that Jellal’s sudden change was anything but a result of trauma and his own will—even in a world with magic, where the very first arc revolves around the use and mistreatment of charm magic.

(Now, as an aside, I unfortunately have some experience in friends suddenly changing. In real life, it is rarely so sudden and obvious, of course, and the culprit is usually those horrible little signals and hormones within the mind, and nothing so fanciful or external as magic. I had a friend take a nosedive into some truly batshit ideas—cult-starting worthy—and exhibit wild mood swings and displays of unprecedented behavior. It admittedly took me a moment to ascertain it among the known issues, but once the pieces clicked, it clicked. I wished I had noticed sooner, and even though she was more culpable of her choices than a person supernaturally influenced by an outside force, I still can’t hate her for all the harm done. This is all just to say that I have, especially in recent years, a personal perspective on this trope and an appreciation for the painful nuance.) 

Refusing to reveal this mindfuckery in the arc diminishes the severity of it a great deal, I fear. We, along with the characters, spend time believing he died an insane villain… and then when he comes back amnesiac, it softens his character but does nothing to contradict how awful he had been. It’s not until years later, arcs later, that we get this random instance of the long overdue reveal to tell us that the manipulation has been discovered off screen. Not only is this utterly underwhelming, but Jellal is now actively working with Ultear and is fine with it! He’s still (understandably, after all this damn time thinking otherwise) blaming himself and lighting his own pyre to atone for things started by a factor completely outside of his control, and every character lets him. The discussion of autonomy is wasted. So, too, is all the juicy emotional fallout. We don’t see Jellal grapple with the horrifying reality that he has not been himself, that years of his life were wasted as a mental slave instead of a physical one; we don’t see Erza beat herself up (likely unnecessarily) because she could have potentially protected him but she hadn’t out of fear, and then she condemned him unknowingly; we don’t see the others truly come to terms with the fact that Jellal had been stolen from under their noses and they never noticed; we don’t even get more than a glimpse in Ultear’s head, who committed the deed because she thought her means wouldn’t matter and then they did. 

It’s horrifying. It’s tragic. It was, perhaps, preventable—in that the problem was a punchable one, to a degree—except the people involved were just children, just human, and it wasn’t enough. Friendship and flashy magic power could not trump trauma and entrapment, not this time. No matter how I think the series could have and should have handled it (and I have several ideas, of course), Jellal’s story provides a haunting case of failure regarding the themes of friendship/community and freedom that our protagonists embody. 

Which brings me to the perfect opportunity to follow up this occurrence of stripped autonomy and loss of freedom with a culmination of the affected themes, plot points, and more: the books of Zeref. 

Namely, the idea that the etherious—sapient, cognizant, and fully capable of autonomy via every depiction given of them, from Tartaros to even Lullaby to especially Natsu—can be and have been resolutely manipulated and controlled via the books by Zeref. Now Zeref, infamously hands-off up until the finale, barely utilized this. The most we ever see is instilling a directive and supernatural need to kill Zeref in the texts, which serves as an externally imposed goal. (Sound familiar, yet?) Provided Larcade clearly doesn’t have these instincts, it is not a guaranteed addition either, which further adds to the sense of deliberation. Natsu experiences this only in the last arc, in what I assume is supposed to be a very tense and jarring plot of a friend and protagonist suddenly losing himself, but it does not get expounded on for long enough to hammer the point home. The plot point of reclaiming the book becomes about saving his life only, and not his autonomy. Not only could this have been emphasized to be properly horrifying and devastating, but the effect—and the suspense—would be doubled with the prior establishment of Jellal’s arc and the tragedy therein. 

To back up for a moment, this parallel is further accentuated by the fact that Ultear and Zeref are clear mirrors of each other. Ultear was afflicted by a magic condition outside of her control and she was enslaved as a lab rat for it. When she broke free, she perceived her mother to have abandoned her, so Ultear, in her unresolved anger and grief, aims her entire goal to rectifying it, which culminated in planning to undo the entire timeline in order to make the one she wanted all along. Any casualties, any cruelties—including the mental enslavement of a slave child—are means to an end, and will ultimately be forgotten. Zeref lost his entire family to tragedy, and in his grief, he refused to forfeit the idea of regaining what was lost, namely his brother. He became afflicted with a curse—a magic condition outside of his control—and experienced cognitive dissonance for it. Ultimately, this miserable existence culminated in the idea of erasing the timeline entirely and forging his own. Any casualties, any cruelties—including subjecting his creations to the same lack of complete cognitive control—are means to an end, and will not matter. 

I mentioned that selfishness is also a recurring theme and this is a prime example of the dark side of it. For Lucy, claiming her independence and following her own path against the wishes of her estate, it is a wondrous thing. Freedom cannot be achieved without some selfishness, and this is a wonderfully handled theme in Fairy Tail, where our protagonists unabashedly put their friends above concrete morals and follow a creed to live their life to the fullest—the eternal adventure. For characters like Ultear and Zeref, their personal desires—born of horrible tragedy and frankly understandable things to want—come at the cost of the autonomy of everyone else, especially the pawns they use to further their goal. This, in true fictional hyperbole, begs the question of where the line in the sand is to be drawn, of what is acceptable on a moral standard and what is not. It is, of course, colored by the protagonist’s point of view as clear antagonism, but as a viewer of the media it provides to us to question when protecting one’s ideal becomes irrevocably an attack on the sanctity of others. 

Which brings us back to the matter of the books. The intended horror of Natsu losing control of himself, I think, could have been really emphasized in order to highlight these aforementioned themes. Imagine if, instead of a complete menagerie of new characters as the final invading force, Zeref’s key piece of his invasion was Natsu. With the intended goal of undoing time, having Natsu kill him is no longer necessary, so it would be more pragmatic to use Natsu instead as a weapon of mass destruction for his goal. Not only is he inside of Fairy Tail, but Zeref is, theoretically, doing this for Natsu too, and he won’t remember this upon success—nevermind that the Natsu we know, that presently exists, that we have watched develop over the entirety of the series, would be forever erased regardless. 

Armed with the knowledge of what happened to Jellal, and how he ultimately had no one to intervene for him, this increases the urgency within the characters and will likely expedite their discovery of why Natsu turned against them out of nowhere. This time, a resistance is launched, and characters have the chance to intervene on the behalf of a friend. Gray couldn’t save Ur, Lucy spent years ensnared by the will of a family member, Erza didn’t recognize Jellal’s plight until it was too late, but they can save Natsu, and save him quickly. Fairy Tail, Team Natsu especially, can rewrite the book of E.N.D. solely for the great cause of freeing their friend and handing him back his free will, and in the process, Fairy Tail saves their own future as well. This doesn’t preclude the ability to free Zeref from his curse, but with or without that we have a beautiful culmination of fighting for the sake of a friend, for the individual and for the whole group. This time, friendship wins. 

I just think it could have been really cool.

[annabelle--cane]

I'm in the pits of despair. my dorm building replaced the vending machines in the lobby a few months ago and the new ones are my mortal enemies. they can't scan our student ID cards anymore, the only cash they take are $1 bills, $5 bills, and quarters, and those are literally the only forms of currency I'm currently out of. I have every other kind of bill and coin But those. blease I just want some potato chips.

[littlemissmanga]

I gotta talk about Bix for a second. Full Andor season 2 spoilers below.

I can't get over that scene where the Jedi Healer is talking to Bix. She calls Cassian a "messenger." He's not just gathering his trauma, he's bringing people together to turn the tide of the war. The Force is wielding him as a tool. He's the relay that connects Luthen to the Alliance at this point. And it's that connection that directly leads to their success at Yavin, and the broader civil war.

But the healer doesn't know that. She just sees his importance in the Force. And she tells Bix "Maybe where he's meant to be is with you."

You'd think that would be a comfort. But Bix's face remains tight and unsettled.

I think it's because she KNOWS that's not right.

She knows that Cassian can do so much more for the cause than she can. She knows he can "make it worth it" - the rallying cry he uses whenever faced with the reality of the sacrifices he has to make to survive.

And she also knows he'll choose her over the rebellion. He always has.

And so she does something objectively terrible - she hides her pregnancy and robs Cassian of the knowledge of his child. In any other situation (barring the father being abusive), that is reprehensible.

But here? I love it.

Because it perfectly shows just how HARD the true sacrifice is. Dedicating yourself to the rebellion is not just risking pain and death. To devote himself to the cause, Cassian is forced to give up even the chance of love and a family. Something people like Luthen and Saw understood. But Cassian - who would leap into danger himself every time to save others - couldn't make that choice. It was a sacrifice too far. Because he proved he'd choose Bix over the cause again and again.

So Bix made the choice for him. It's brutal and cruel and necessary. And that's HER sacrifice, too. She knew if she asked, Cass would have taken her to Mina Raou and lived peacefully with her. So she didn't ask, and she didn't give him a choice.

It gives us context to explain why rebellion is so hard. Why more people didn't act sooner. Because sacrificing your life or freedom is one thing. But condemning yourself to do it alone or risk your family's lives? That's an entirely different kind of sacrifice. (Just consider Lonni in that last arc, constantly negotiating for his wife and daughter, not himself).

Bix deserves that peace at the end. To see the sunrise she bought with her sacrifice. She wasn't a fighter, wasn't going to be a force in the rebellion. But what she could do was make sure the one who was stayed, dedicated to it. Unlike Cassian, she is very aware of what she gave up for that sunrise.

Similarly, on Scarif, having successfully delivered the Death Star plans, Cassian was able to know his death would be "worth it" because it meant the galaxy Bix lived in was safer than before.

[rantsramblesandrandomthougts]

Now, i love our arsonist boy lockwood, but i'd like to take this time to remind yall that, in the book, it was LUCY who set the Hope house on fire

[adventuretimetournament]

Ignition Point: Flame Princess is shown in the center, holding her face as a fireball explodes beneath her with several evil, shadowy faces in the flames. Several candles have been sent flying from the explosion, and Finn and Jake are leaping toward the camera on either side of the screen with determined expressions. The background is white, and the title is at the top, each letter made from a blue, lit candle.

Marceline the Vampire Queen: Bathed in red light, Marceline is shown from the chest up, staring seriously ahead as the wind blows her hair. Behind and around her are angry villagers with pitchforks and torches. The title is at the top in thick white letters.

[gnawerpoint-rw]

Designing some of the other iterators who dont actually appear in the mod...

[pictures-i-like-of-fp]

[yahoo201027]

Day in Fandom History: September 17…

Finn and Jake travel and sneak down to the Fire Kingdom in hopes of retrieving the scented candles that belonged to Flame Princess and giving them to her and end up stumbling into a plot to take the Flame King out. “Ignition Point” premiered on this day, 11 Years Ago.

[todays-just-a-daydream]

the needling liam is doing across this interview:

@1:42 who picked the tracks? i did. and then presented them—no he just fuckin' done it and that was it. that’s not true.

@2:02 there’s never an oasis meeting. there’s only a noel gallagher meeting. that’s not true either.

@5:08 is there a story told in the tracks that you picked?

@5:24 those are the songs that i feel are our best work. did you hear that? ‘i’. (smug)

@5:33 (on wonderwall) i’d have left that out. i wouldn’t have put that on there. (cheeky grin)

@6:40 five of us four of us can’t sit in a room and pick a tracklisting. i always pick the setlist. and if anyone’s got a problem with it they say i’m not doing that, i’m not doing that, i’m not doing that. it’s the same with the tracklist. i picked it. it all went round. i didn’t get any of the usual phonecalls you know at 4 in the morning.

@9:59 so this retrospective it seems to me is picked from a purely musical point of view. it doesn’t document the high points and low points. it documents what you think are the best tunes…it sounds like a nice flowing record, you know what i mean?

@12:10 we’re not being cunts by leaving a certain tune off. you know noel is but i’m not.

@15:54 (on masterplan as a b side) good to know some things haven’t changed. you didn’t have a clue what you released man. i know i’m an idiot.

[sunriserose1023]

Point of Ignition [masterlist]

A fresh start.

That’s what you’re focusing on. You’re leaving your past behind you and starting fresh, joining your best friend at college. You’re focused on your studies and nothing is going to get in the way of you being “normal,” for once.

Enter Bucky Barnes.

The campus bad boy has his sights set on you, but you are determined not to become just another notch in his bedpost. When his best friend falls for your best friend, the two of you are stuck in close proximity, and you are set on staying strictly in the friend zone.

However, the more time you spend with him, the more you like him, and the more time he spends with you, the less he feels like hanging around anyone else. You’re set on being just friends, but Bucky has other ideas on that, and he’s determined to convince you to follow his lead.

WARNINGS FOR THE STORY: Violence, fighting, mentions of blood and injury, betting, language, reader has a sketchy past, foster care, adoption, emotional angst, Bucky is kind of a jerk sometimes, drinking, getting drunk, hangovers, kissing, sex, hurt/comfort, angst, fluff, more could be added as the story progresses

Part ONE Part TWO Part THREE Part FOUR Part FIVE Part SIX Part SEVEN Part EIGHT Part NINE-- coming soon

*This story has an undetermined amount of chapters and is a work in progress.*