#Let Meta Knight be fallible! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

desultory-novice · 1 year

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I've been reading your various theories/analysis on the Nightmare Wizard and I was impressed what you came up with, given how HAL has given us virtually nothing on Mr. chin man.

It's a somewhat popular headcanon that Meta Knight was created by or at the very least connected to Nightmare, but this came from evidence in the anime canon. I was wondering what are your thoughts on this theory based on game lore?

Hrgh! I LOVE Nightmare! I have so much fun writing him and speculating on him! I mean, whether he's an actual physical, incarnation of the concept of bad dreams or just a once-upon-a-time power hungry Wizard who decided to name himself after the concept... that's so cool?!? It doesn't even bother me that he gets jobbed all the time. It's the POTENTIAL!!

I love his VA, Banjo Ginga, too. This wizard might have a chin the length of a galaxy but he's got a VOICE to back it up!

Now, you said game lore, but I'm going to go ahead and talk HC because, like you said, we know almost nothing canonical about Mr Chin Man, but the chance of a Halcandra connection seems GOOD at least. (Actually, even better now with a parallel version of him showing up in the same game with the Gem Apple Tree?)

So, I strongly HC him as being responsible for Marx (in several ways) but anime-originating or no, I think making him Meta's creator/corruptor is a fun little theory.

It's common to assume Kirby's species just gains wings as a matter of fact (I'm undecided, despite the fact that we have three winged... err, four if you count Zero Two - then again, those are apparently veins?? // why did this never click for me despite the fact that they show it in the END CREDITS?! // so maybe three - members of the "species") but if you start the whole line at Galacta, as a progenitor being or even god, with their unsullied angel wings, there is something "monstrous" about Meta Knight's devil/bat wings. He LOOKS like the "evil clone" despite being more the hero on every level.

(...Once we forget the military coup. Silly tangent, but I saw someone on Twitter make a joke about Elfilis and the Beast Pack forcing the captured Waddle Dees to work the generators and how cruel that's portrayed, when Meta Knight's own ship uses Wheelies for the same purpose! ...Of course, maybe that's just exercise for Wheelies? We don't know if it was mean... necessarily...)

Speaking of Meta Knight and a questionable past, I was thinking the other day about DMK and Marx and since they're the last two of the "You jerks don't deserve to be Dream Friends!" trio - Magolor having proven himself a true friend and worthy ally after an extended trip through hell - and trying to think just what Dark Meta Knight and Marx could possibly have in common. (Outside of Salty French Bread canon (?) where they get along surprisingly well. Then again, everyone in that group is a secret maniac, except Adeleine) This is especially when I step back and remember that DMK is still BASED ON Meta Knight. Meta Knight's thoughts and feelings exist somewhere within Dark Meta Knight, they're just twisted. (And under what grounds would META KNIGHT ever have to get along with/sympathize with/feel camaraderie with Marx??)

.That's a long way to get around to saying I'm actually REALLY fond of Nightmare Knight (...is that a badass name or what?! Also love that his independent play modes are called "Meta Knightmare" Too bad that's a localization only thing, as it would be GREAT fort this theory...) as a splinter HC! I actually have a lot of room for this to fit in my personal/main HC too!

(:cough: since I liked to imagine Nightmare as a former Halcandran Geneticist, this would not even be hard for him, especially if he managed to get ahold of Galacta Knight's DNA. And my Nightmare, who absolutely has a twisted sense of "humor"...

"You COULD have given the Noddies arms, you know." "Ha! They're literally engineered to sleep all day! What possible use would they have for arms? Grabbing a pillow??" :later, Marx, trying and failing to grab a pillow: "...Grrrr...!!!"

...would absolutely see Meta Knight as a consummate warrior and thus, as the "cherry on top" program him with an insatiable lust for battle, "...just like his stabbity-happy genetic predecessor!" Something Meta Knight is constantly trying to combat w/ copious amounts of book reading and fancy sweets... :cough:)

You know, it would be kind of fun, too, if that played into the reason Meta acted so unusual in Adventure. He's on-board with Dedede's plan to stop Nightmare, but he also knows well enough that the stall won't STOP Nightmare and thus, he supports Kirby throughout the puff's adventure.

Or maybe Meta Knight was even fighting his genetic programming/monster nature during that campaign? (Does that happen in the anime, too? Generally decent critters who are monster-fied try to fight the evil inside??) The potential story ideas are endless!

I was told at one point that Marx pulling his MWW stunt out of hunger from the "Spring Breeze" famine was the only way to explain how his game fit in the "plot" of Super Star. But when I think about Nightmare reaching out his long claws to manipulate both Marx and Meta Knight (one last tangent: but Noddies are pink just like Kirby. Both Marx and Meta Night look like them but with a distinct blue(ish, in Marx's case) palette. And who else is those colors??) the fact that you unlock Milky Way Wishes after Revenge of Meta Knight (I lied/another tangent: What IS Meta Knight "revenging" anyway? His defeat? The one he basically engineered in Kirby's Adventure? Weird thing to get upset about...) could also give you a slightly different take on that "storyline." Maybe?

The only thing I DON'T like about this theory is it would potentially make Meta Knight realllllllly old. Centuries, even. And that doesn't matter so much if you throw out the concept of realistic human-esque aging in Kirby altogether (which I sometimes do, because I'd easily take "Kirby is hundreds of years old but STILL maintains a young, optimistic, innocent point of view" over "Kirby is an almighty battle toddler" - We don't know Kirby's actual age, but I've seen some numbers thrown out by fans, and the idea of non-chalantly sending a literal 6-10 year old to do the stuff Kirby puts up with in game makes me uneasy) but in a lot of cases, I think i prefer Meta Knight to be closer to a contemporary with the main gang?

Chalk me up as one of those people that thinks Meta Knight tries his hardest to act mature, to always be seen as the "smartest and the eldest" but is actually a big, huge dork on the inside. Like he decided he would have the role of "group adult" only because he wanted it, not because he did anything to earn it.

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butterflies-dragons · 4 years

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Hey love your metas! I want to ask about Sansa dealing with her sexual assaults and trauma. The way she mismemorised the traumatic events, do you think she gonna misremember any other similar traumatic events in future? Do you think her family will help her remember these events n dealing with it?

Hello Anon,

Thank you ♡

I recently wrote about Sansa dealing with trauma, particularly sexual assault trauma.

Here is the post for anyone interested.

And here is another one.

Almost every meta, essay, analysis, etc, about the so-called “un-kiss”, has been written from a sexual perspective. For the majority of this fandom, either shippers or not, Sansa remembering a kiss instead of the sexual assault she suffered and later having nightmares with her assaulter being in bed with her, CLEARLY means that she is having sexual fantasies with her assaulter, that she is expressing her dark, repressed, hidden, deepest desires about her assaulter, that all this is part of her sexual awakening.

But every time GRRM has been asked about the subject, either from a sexual perspective or not, he consistently tagged Sansa misremembering things and events as “unreliable narrator.” Lets see.

In chronological order:

JUNE 26, 2001

SF, TARGARYENS, VALYRIA, SANSA, MARTELLS, AND MORE

[GRRM is asked about Sansa misremembering the name of Joffrey’s sword.]

The Lion’s Paw / Lion’s Tooth business, on the other hand, is intentional. A small touch of the unreliable narrator. I was trying to establish that the memories of my viewpoint characters are not infallible. Sansa is simply remembering it wrong. A very minor thing (you are the only one to catch it to date), but it was meant to set the stage for a much more important lapse in memory. You will see, in A STORM OF SWORDS and later volumes, that Sansa remembers the Hound kissing her the night he came to her bedroom… but if you look at the scene, he never does. That will eventually mean something, but just now it’s a subtle touch, something most of the readers may not even pick up on.

[Source]

It is very curious that the person who misremembered Joffrey’s sword name wasn’t Sansa, it was Arya:

The big man shrugged. "I was Joffrey's sworn shield. The butcher's boy attacked a prince of the blood."

"That's a lie!" Arya squirmed in Harwin's grip. "It was me. I hit Joffrey and threw Lion's Paw in the river. Mycah just ran away, like I told him."

—A Storm of Swords - Arya VI

But despite the unreliable narrator’s identity confusion, what I understand from George’s answer is that misremembering a minor detail like Joff’s sword name “it was meant to set the stage for a much more important lapse in memory,” like the “un-kiss” for example, that George mentioned next.

At the same time, the “un-kiss” will eventually mean something, but just now it’s a subtle touch, something most of the readers may not even pick up on.

Take note that George’s answer is from 2001, after ASOS was published, so by that time he already knew about the existence of the shippers that want Sansa with the Hound being together in a romantic/sexual relationship. You can check this fact by reading the questions and answers from 1999 compiled in this post. But he still mentioned that the meaning of the “un-kiss” was “a subtle touch, something most of the readers may not even pick up on.”

So much for the so-called “evident”, “canon”, “endgame“ ship and ASOS being “their ship’s book” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

* * *

OCTOBER 05, 2002

SANSA’S MEMORY

[Note: This mail has been edited for brevity.]

… this is an inconsistency with ASoS more than an outright error. In ASoS, Sansa thinks that the Hound kissed her before leaving her room and King’s Landing. In ACoK, no kiss is mentioned in the scene, though Sansa did think that he was about to do so.

Well, not every inconsistency is a mistake, actually. Some are quite intentional. File this one under “unreliable narrator” and feel free to ponder its meaning...

[Source]

Here George’s answer is more succinct: the “un-kiss” is not a mistake, it was intentional, file this one under “unreliable narrator.”

* * *

NOVEMBER 27, 2007

GEORGE R.R. MARTIN ANSWERS YOUR QUESTIONS

Here’s a really particular question (which I realize means it probably won’t get asked in a general interview): In A Storm of Swords, there is a chapter early on where Sansa is thinking back to the scene at the end of A Clash of Kings when The Hound came into her room during the battle. She thinks in the chapter about how he kissed her, but in the scene in A Clash of Kings, this actually didn’t happen. Was that a typo or something? —Valdora

GRRM: It’s not a typo. It is something! [Laughs] ”Unreliable narrator” is the key phrase there. The second scene is from Sansa’s thoughts. And what does that reveal about her psychologically? I try to be subtle about these things.

[Source]

Here George gave us little clues:

[The un-kiss] is from Sansa’s thoughts [an internal thought for herself, she is not telling anyone that the Hound kissed her]

What does that reveal about her psychologically?

I try to be subtle about these things

Also take note how GRRM repeatedly highlights the word “subtle” regarding the “un-kiss”:

but just now it’s a subtle touch (After ASOS but before AFFC)

I try to be subtle about these things (Shortly after AFFC)

This is a stark contrast with the majority of this fandom, either shippers or not, that interpret and believe that Sansa remembering a kiss instead of the sexual assault she suffered and later having nightmares with her assaulter being in bed with her, CLEARLY has to do with her sexual awakening, that the “un-kiss” means that she is having sexual fantasies with her assaulter, that she is expressing her dark, repressed, hidden, deepest desires about her assaulter.

And I wonder, since Sansa has similar dreams with Ilyn Payne and often feels naked around him:

As the headsman looked at her, his pale colorless eyes seemed to strip the clothes away from her, and then the skin, leaving her soul naked before him. Still silent, he turned and walked away.

—A Game of Thrones - Sansa I

She dreamt of footsteps on the tower stair, an ominous scraping of leather on stone as a man climbed slowly toward her bedchamber, step by step. All she could do was huddle behind her door and listen, trembling, as he came closer and closer. It was Ser Ilyn Payne, she knew, coming for her with Ice in his hand, coming to take her head. There was no place to run, no place to hide, no way to bar the door. Finally the footsteps stopped and she knew he was just outside, standing there silent with his dead eyes and his long pocked face. That was when she realized she was naked. She crouched down, trying to cover herself with her hands, as her door began to swing open, creaking, the point of the greatsword poking through …

She woke murmuring, “Please, please, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, please don’t,” but there was no one to hear.

—A Game of Thrones - Sansa VI

Once she dreamed it was still her marrying Joff, not Margaery, and on their wedding night he turned into the headsman Ilyn Payne.

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa II

Does this mean that Sansa is having sexual fantasies with her father’s executioner as well? Does this mean that Sansa has dark, repressed, hidden, deepest desires about Ilyn Payne too?

I think that the “un-kiss” has to do with Sansa’s internal thoughts, how her mind works, how her mind deals with unpleasant/disturbing events. So in order to decipher its meaning we must ask ourselves about Sansa’s psychology, she is a deeply traumatized child by many events: Her direwolf’s death, her father’s death, the disillusionment of her Prince and the Queen as high moral figures, the disillusionment of the knights as fair heroes, the psychological, physical and sexual abuse she has suffered so far. The “un-kiss” is a subtlety from the author, this can’t be as easy as “Sansa has the hots for the Hound”.

Sansa: All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs. —A Game of Thrones - Sansa I

Sansa: Almost raped by the Hound during the night of the Blackwater Battle, he invaded her bedroom, pushed her to bed, put a dagger at her throat, requested a song from her under threat of death.

There is a song called “Off to Gulltown” that says:

Off to Gulltown to see the fair maid, heigh-ho, heigh-ho. I’ll steal a sweet kiss with the point of my blade, heigh-ho, heigh-ho. I’ll make her my love and we’ll rest in the shade, heigh-ho, heigh-ho.

Sansa: The Hound kissed me during the night of the Blackwater Battle.

Fandom/Shippers: Sansa fancies the Hound uhhhhhhhhh

Sansa: Has unpleasant memories of the “un-kiss” feeling soiled by it.

Sansa: Has a nightmare about Tyrion and the Hound in bed with her the night after Marillion attempted to rape her.

Fandom/Shippers: Sansa fancies the Hound and have fun dreams with him uhhhhhhhhhh

It's really all that easy?

George hates to be predictable:

I spoke earlier about how predictable stories bore me. And we’ve all, you know, seen the stories where the hero, you know, he seems to get in trouble—he’s all alone, he’s surrounded by twenty foes, but he’s the hero! You know he’s going to get out of it; you’re not really engaged. I want you to be engaged. I want you to feel what the viewpoint character is feeling. If the viewpoint character is in trouble, I want you to be afraid, I want you not to know whether he’s going to get out of it. And I think the only way to do that is establish very early in the books that you’re playing for real, that anyone can die, and if the character’s in a life or death situation that he might not survive it. That these are not superheroes, these are not Indiana Jones. These are fallible human beings who are vulnerable to death and betrayal and all that. To my mind, that makes the stories much more suspenseful and gripping and emotionally involving.

(...)

I also liked the idea of the story not being predictable. Too much of fantasy is too predictable, you know? They say we write the stories that we want to read. And I was a reader long before I was a writer, and as a reader I love stories that take me to places that I don’t expect, and I hate stories where you read the first five pages and you know exactly what’s going to happen for the rest of the book. Those stories bore me very quickly, and I don’t want to bore my readers or indeed bore myself in writing, so I try to, you know, create a fairly complicated thing that’s full of twists and surprises and unexpected turns, but all of them rooted hopefully in human nature and arising out of the characters and the desires and wishes and dreams of those characters.

—A Dance With Dragons: George R. R. Martin

And he is always distracting us:

There are some mysteries in these books. There are some things that I’m gonna reveal later on that I’m planting clues for. There are some later plot twists that I’m foreshadowing. There are things that are gonna happen in Book 5 and Book 6 and Book 7 where I’ve planted a seed for it in Book 1. But I don’t necessarily want to give away my hand. So, what do I do when I plant the seed? Well, I plant the seed, but I try to do a little literary sleight of hand, and while I’m planting the seed, my other hand is up there waving and is distracting you with some flashy bit of wordplay or something that’s going on in the foreground, while the seed is being planted in the background. So hopefully the seed is there, the foreshadowing is there, but maybe you won’t notice it, because it’s surrounded by so many other things.

—The George R. R. Martin Podcast, Episode 7 (9:17)

Transcription provided by this post.

Think about it!

* * *

DECEMBER 2016 ASKING GEORGE R.R. MARTIN ABOUT SAN/SAN

My question is regarding Sansa Stark. Her sexuality has evolved through every book and yet the memory that seems to stick the more with her in this regard is the night of the Blackwater. So I was wondering if you can expand on your view on what this is, since as before that night her interactions with Sandor Clegane weren’t really physical.

The night of the Blackwater, yes. Ahhh… Well, I’m not going to give you a straight answer on that hahaha… Uhmmm, but I would say that ahhh… you know a television show and a book each has its own strengths and weaknesses; there a re tools that are available to me as a novelist, that are not available to people doing a television show. And of course there are tools available to them, that are not available to a novelist, I mean they can lay in a soundtrack, they can do special effects, they can do amazing things that I can’t do, I just have words on paper. What can I do, well I can use things like the internal narrative, I can take you inside of territories… thoughts, which you can’t do in a TV show… Ahhh… You just have the words they speak, you see them from outside because the camera is external, while prose is internal, and I have the device known as “unreliable narrator”… Ahhh… Which again, they don’t have. So, think about those two aspects when you consider that night of the Blackwater.

[Source]

Here George was asked directly, by a shipper, about the ��un-kiss” and Sansa’s sexuality, and he stuck with his classic “unreliable narrator” answer.

George also repeated these things:

I can use things like the internal narrative

I can take you inside of territories… thoughts

Prose is internal

I have the device known as “unreliable narrator

His comparison between a TV Show and a Book is very telling:

You just have the words they speak, you see them from outside because the camera is external, while prose is internal.

Also, it seems that he is done with questions about Sansa’s sexuality, as you can see from the chronology of questions and answers in this post.

So, the “un-kiss” and any other misremembering from Sansa has to do with her psychological state, not with her sexuality in particular.

Sansa did something similar with the Trident incident, where her direwolf Lady, part of her soul, was killed by her own father using his sword Ice.

She remembered the facts exactly as they happened when she told her father about it. But later she started to blame Arya and Cersei, but exculpates Joffrey, her future husband:

Sansa and Septa Mordane were given places of high honor, to the left of the raised dais where the king himself sat beside his queen. When Prince Joffrey seated himself to her right, she felt her throat tighten. He had not spoken a word to her since the awful thing had happened, and she had not dared to speak to him. At first she thought she hated him for what they'd done to Lady, but after Sansa had wept her eyes dry, she told herself that it had not been Joffrey's doing, not truly. The queen had done it; she was the one to hate, her and Arya. Nothing bad would have happened except for Arya.

—A Game of Thrones - Sansa II

She accommodates and compartmentalize a lot as a way to cope and survive every unpleasant, disturbing and traumatic event that already happened to her in her short 13 years.

So to answer your specific questions:

Do you think she gonna misremember any other similar traumatic events in future?

I think so. This is sad because it means that Sansa will experience even more traumatic events that she will have to deal with...

We need to wait to know the “un-kiss” true meaning. She romanticizes the Hound’s rape attempt against her and made it into a kiss, just like a song called “Off to Gulltown” that describes a non-con/sexual abuse situation against a maid, like her.

Inside her mind Sansa decided to remember the good things that men like Tyrion and the Hound did for her. In her first AFFC chapter (Sansa I), she thinks:

When Joff had her beaten, the Imp defended her.

When the mob sought to rape her, the Hound carried her to safety.

When the Lannisters wed her to Tyrion against her will, Ser Garlan the Gallant gave her comfort.

Only in her nightmares the true slipped out:

And she dreamed of her wedding night too, of Tyrion's eyes devouring her as she undressed. Only then he was bigger than Tyrion had any right to be, and when he climbed into the bed his face was scarred only on one side. "I'll have a song from you," he rasped, and Sansa woke and found the old blind dog beside her once again. "I wish that you were Lady," she said.

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VI

But after Marillion’s attack, Littlefinger forced kiss and Lysas’s death she is starting to join the dots. For an instance, when she hears Littlerfinger using the same sexual innuendo than Marillion, “Let me warm you”, she realizes that Petyr Baelish is bad news:

Let me warm you, Sansa. Take off those gloves, give me your hands."

"I won't." He sounded almost like Marillion, the night he'd gotten so drunk at the wedding. Only this time Lothor Brune would not appear to save her; Ser Lothor was Petyr's man. "You shouldn't kiss me. I might have been your own daughter . . ."

—A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII

The whole passage from her first AFFC chapter (Sansa I) is very revealing:

The things her aunt had said just before she fell still troubled Sansa greatly. "Ravings," Petyr called them. "My wife was mad, you saw that for yourself." And so she had. All I did was build a snow castle, and she meant to push me out the Moon Door. Petyr saved me. He loved my mother well, and . . .

And her? How could she doubt it? He had saved her.

He saved Alayne, his daughter, a voice within her whispered. But she was Sansa too . . . and sometimes it seemed to her that the Lord Protector was two people as well. He was Petyr, her protector, warm and funny and gentle . . . but he was also Littlefinger, the lord she'd known at King's Landing, smiling slyly and stroking his beard as he whispered in Queen Cersei's ear. And Littlefinger was no friend of hers. When Joff had her beaten, the Imp defended her, not Littlefinger. When the mob sought to rape her, the Hound carried her to safety, not Littlefinger. When the Lannisters wed her to Tyrion against her will, Ser Garlan the Gallant gave her comfort, not Littlefinger. Littlefinger never lifted so much as his little finger for her.

Except to get me out. He did that for me. I thought it was Ser Dontos, my poor old drunken Florian, but it was Petyr all the while. Littlefinger was only a mask he had to wear. Only sometimes Sansa found it hard to tell where the man ended and the mask began. Littlefinger and Lord Petyr looked so very much alike. She would have fled them both, perhaps, but there was nowhere for her to go. Winterfell was burned and desolate, Bran and Rickon dead and cold. Robb had been betrayed and murdered at the Twins, along with their lady mother. Tyrion had been put to death for killing Joffrey, and if she ever returned to King's Landing the queen would have her head as well. The aunt she'd hoped would keep her safe had tried to murder her instead. Her uncle Edmure was a captive of the Freys, while her great-uncle the Blackfish was under siege at Riverrun. I have no place but here, Sansa thought miserably, and no true friend but Petyr.

—A Feast for Crows - Sansa I

As you can see Sansa is starting to realize that the persons that help her, can also hurt her and have ulterior motives to help her, that the help is not unconditional and always has a price.

So I think she will reach a point where she would be able to do the same with all her abusers, she will realize that men like Tyrion, the Hound, Dontos, etc, have helped her but at the same time have hurt her, Tyrion accepted to marry her and almost commit marital rape, the Hound attempted to rape her and repeatedly abuse her psychologically and physically, even Dontos, always requesting kisses.

Do you think her family will help her remember these events and dealing with it?

Most probably. Meeting Jeyne Poole again, for example. Knowing what Littlefinger really did to her, and all his crimes against House Stark.

I really hope for that moment of realization, when she can stop lying to herself, when she can clearly see all those men as her abusers and that she owns them nothing.

George, please! She had enough already... Give her some peace and quite! Give her true friends and her family back!

Thanks for your message.

#anon ask #sansa stark #anti sandor clegane #anti tyrion lannister #anti petyr baelish #anti littlefinger #anti sansa's abusers

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