#a woman whose entire character is NOT just being a romantic interest

[shorthaltsjester]

if i ever have to see another thought piece on the description of the white picket fence outside of fjord and jester’s place in mighty nein reunited indicating jester’s unhappiness in the relationship i will burn the world to the ground.

a) heteronormativity doesn’t exist in exandria !

b) fjord isn’t your Typical Male Love Interest Guy. if i ever have to read someone say that shit again i’m gonna (correctly) assume they haven’t paid attention at all to campaign 2 and any of fjord’s character arc.

c) perhaps, jester lavorre, woman who was raised on the ideology of romance novels and sexuality as exchange, might just find it uh… not a terrible thing that the white picket fence is falling apart outside since… fjord explicitly does Not feel like those romance novels to her, instead he feels comfortable. the way that a brightly painted but rarely used house might, especially when the couple in question spends most of their time adventuring together… which is an essential part of jester’s motivations throughout the campaign.

d) the reason fjord and jester seem unhappy in the reunion might be because, well, uh, whereas everyone else was getting a “vacation”, jester and fjord’s life together (specifically the fact that Fjord Loves Jester Enough To Risk The World (Momentarily) To Save Her) was the inciting action for an apocalyptic demigod being released - they Were unhappy. who wouldn’t be given those circumstances. jester nearly died, and fjord felt like the god that once saved him had now abandoned him, i am so truly sorry that their romance was not satisfactory for your vision of atypical romance (which, by the way, is literally reinforcing the restrictive romantic tropes you think you’re criticizing, so good job i guess). i would be much, much more concerned if jester and fjord Weren’t clearly dismayed.

e) both fjord and jester are individuals whose entire lives and character are defined by the expectation (both external and internal) that they behave and emote a certain way. that they’re in a relationship with someone who they feel that they can show that they are frustrated with or disagree on the layout of their house with or have different ideas on how to deal with the looming threat of a demigod is incredible. jester and fjord are emblematic of a relationship in which the characters Aren’t meant to be, but they Want to be together and they want to understand and support the other person so they work at it. we wouldn’t have conversations like “you seem disheartened..” “i am very disheartened! you almost died!” if they didn’t take the time and care to communicate with one another.

f) if you want a honeymoon era joyful queer romance, yasha and beau are right there! they are explicitly horny and in love and bright about it! if queerness is your measure of “trope breaking” i am very sorry to tell you that queer people partake in white picket fences, and i’d actually argue that in terms of Lifestyle Metaphor, beauyasha are more adherent to the whitepicket fence, nuclear familyism. this isn’t a detriment to them, just, very literally, beau works a 9-5 where she comes back to her housewife who gardens and cooks dinner and their future includes explicit reference to children. comparatively, fjord wants to address some issues in his past, jester is an artist, and both of them are interested in adventure for the foreseeable future.

g) if you truly think that a single part of laura’s description of the part-time abode of fjord and jester overrides every interaction and choice that both laura and travis make towards fjord and jester caring for each other in a deep and meaningful way that goes beyond the weird fandom constructed Man/Woman characters being portrayed by a married couple i truly, Truly have no idea why you even watch the many hours of content that cr is when you could… play/write your own shit.

[lizzybeth1986]

Liam and Olivia: When You Prefer The Side Character To The Main

Series - TRR's Alternative LIs: The Romances that Didn't Happen

Previous: A Brief History of Alternative Romances in Choices

A/N1: My apologies for the length of this one! There was a LOT to explore, and even more that I had cut out from my initial draft.

A/N2: This essay operates on the premise that Liam is not the "favoured LI"/"golden boy" of the team - an argument I have made in detail in other Liam-centric essays. I am not interested in arguing those same points in my comment box/reblogs. Visit the Liam section of my meta masterlist if you want to learn more about that.

CW: Mentions of non-consensual kissing. Mentions of the plot against the MC in TRR1. Very fleeting mention of the "infertility subplot" TRH pushed onto Hana.

(Screenshot from HIMEME's YouTube channel)

As I mentioned in the previous essay, TRR (along with ES, to a far smaller extent) was the only series that seemed to make an attempt to pair even their popular LIs with another character. It also was (along with TCaTF) one of the very few books that hinted at an alternative romance in the first book itself.

This section of the essay series will perhaps be the longest, since Liam x Olivia got the earliest hints, and was built up first. While the other three pairings were introduced or hinted at in Books 2 and 3, the reader got to see glimpses of a possible Liam x Olivia pairing from the finale of Book 1 onwards.

Why An Alternative LI?

TRR is, essentially, a story that hinges on the likelihood of an arranged marriage. The character that makes this entire story possible, Liam, is expected to pick a bride by the end of his social season, whether he is ready for marriage or not. The ending of Book 1 itself ties his ascension as a king to marriage.

(Screenshot from Skylia's YouTube channel)

To prove Madeleine's point, the finale actually shows us that until he picks a fiancèe, he literally won't be addressed as king, but still as Prince Liam. So while this point does get heavily retconned later on in the series, the original story itself required Liam to be married sooner than any of the other LIs.

But Liam's story doesn't just hinge on needing a good Queen for his kingdom. His arc - at least in Book 1 - involved learning that being a good king doesn't mean he needs to sacrifice his own desires or romantic sensibilities. If that were the case, he could have just been stuck with Madeleine. No - the story was supposed to be about Liam learning to validate his personal aspirations without hurting his political position. It was essential then that the woman he picked was someone he either was already in love with (the MC), or someone he grew to love over the course of the series.

When you take this context into account, having an alternative romance becomes not only convenient, but essential.

And if the MC doesn't choose Liam as her endgame...who better for this "romance" than an old friend who has always held a torch for him?

A Romantic Rival

(Screenshots from Skylia's YouTube channel)

As most of the fandom remembers the first book and the trajectory of the Liam and Olivia relationship in it pretty well, I'll try not to go into too much detail. The Olivia of Book 1 has two parallel storylines: the one with the MC, where they first start out hating and then learn to like each other...and the one with Liam, which begins with Olivia assuming she will win the social season, but becoming more and more resigned to the MC's chances of winning as her position in the competition declines.

There is obviously a lot more focus on her dynamic with the MC, for two reasons:

1. Until the MC chooses an endgame, an LI will never show more interest in another person. It will always be the alternative LI whose interest initially drives that side-story. Making an LI reciprocate that interest can result in a negative impression of them, as fans could potentially believe that their love for the MC is not genuine or special. This is the case for all LIs in the series, not just Liam.

2. Narratively, the first book wants to make Olivia's love for Liam their big character reveal. It is the first time Olivia actively opens up to the MC, and is canonically the beginning of their "friendship". So very little emphasis is placed on her emotional attachment to Liam until the Coronation (with her cactus gift and her confession to the MC before leaving), and even less on how Liam feels about her.

Whatever little we do get of Liam and Olivia's dynamic before the finale is focused on their childhood friendship. We learn from Liam that she was a sad, lonely child when they met, heartbroken by her parents' death and the negligence of the aunt who was supposed to raise her. Her attachment to Liam emerges from his support of her when they were children, and we later learn in TRH that he not only supported her, but often empathized with young Olivia and comforted her in ways that didn't give away her vulnerabilities.

Olivia claims at the beginning of TRR1 that "everyone just assumed Liam and [Olivia] would get married one day". Given what we learn later about Constantine and the Nevrakis family (and the fact that no one backs Olivia's claim at any point in the book), it is possible she was exaggerating. But it is also true that until the MC gains more popularity and Madeleine makes her entrance, Olivia is assumed to win the social season quite easily. In the same way that Madeleine is positioned as the "political" rival in Book 1's story, Olivia is viewed as the "romantic" counterpoint to the MC.

From Liam's end, there is actually very little shown about his thoughts on Olivia. It is clear that he cares for her, wants the MC to think well of her and understand her circumstances. While as a child, he comforted her when she was called a cactus by reminding her that they were tough plants that no one messed with; as an adult he is pained by her vindictiveness towards people who haven't even harmed her. There is plenty of grounds here for some sort of relationship, but enough there that shows why the MC who will marry him would be a slightly better fit.

The second half of TRR1 focuses on softening Olivia to an extent - having her and the MC optionally bond over their dislike for Madeleine (who is viewed as the "bigger bad" at this point) and having her only occasionally approach Liam for his company. Her feelings for him come to the forefront only during his Coronation, around the time she withdraws due to the blackmail exposing her parents' attempts to assassinate King Constantine.

This moment in the series completes Olivia's transition from antagonist to a possible friend. The reveal that Olivia loved Liam all along ensures that the MC can sympathize with her for not getting the man she loves, and allows the reader to envision her as a future ally.

To some who already vouched for a Liam-Olivia endgame before the finale, this moment was a confirmation. To others who didn't exactly see Olivia's actions towards Liam as rooted in affection, this moment was a revelation. Whatever it was, this moment made her extremely popular in the fandom.

But this scene also had a more important purpose - it provided players not interested in Liam, a possible out from the situation. The ending of TRR1 hinged on Liam choosing the MC as his future bride, then being forced to accept someone else when the scandal broke out. Book 2 allows the MC to explore what she wants without the expectations of a social season. The prospect of a titled lady who genuinely loved Liam being his potential endgame would make it easier for fans of other LIs. It sounded like a perfect ending for everyone.

The (Unwanted) Kiss, and What It Says About the Fandom

(Screenshots from Danni Stone's YouTube channel)

A scene that often gets ignored (or conveniently forgotten) when discussing Liam x Olivia in TRR1, is the kiss in Lythikos.

The Lythikos Ball in Ch 8 is already a social battleground of sorts for Olivia. She wields her power as hostess here - monopolising Prince Liam's company, and humiliating the MC and her friends with the worst seating and ice-cold food. Things come to a head when - while dancing the Cordonian Waltz with Liam - she forces a kiss on him, completely disregarding his ability to consent.

I use these precise words to describe this incident for two reasons. First, because canon refused to do so. Second, because most of the fandom refused to do so.

Different characters in the story respond to this incident in different ways. A shocked "what a bold play!", a sarcastic "Olivia's growing up, how sweet", and an enraged "she's gone mad with power here!" emerge from the ladies of the court - all focused on Olivia's intentions and actions. None of these responses ever address Liam's end of this situation.

Even more interesting are the options the MC is given to address the situation when Liam speaks to her later.

(Screenshots from Danni Stone's YouTube channel. This is the second dialogue option)

She either speaks to Liam like nothing happened, or engages in victim blaming. Personally I think both options are as bad as each other. Neither of these options include "are you okay?" or "were you comfortable with that?".

Liam's answer to the MC's (optional) accusations is perhaps the only time the issue of consent is even barely addressed (and even here Liam is duty-bound to think of Olivia's welfare over his own comfort). It is appalling that it takes the MC practically victim blaming this man for that to happen. And it is equally disturbing that Liam's response is so apologetic, so contrite, as if this entire situation was his fault.

The kiss is viewed as a number of things in the book: an affront to the suitors who have no power in Olivia's estate, or a political blunder. But what does it mean to the man who had this kiss forced upon him? Would he really feel comfortable or safe around her again after that? The writers clearly didn't know, nor did they care. And most of the fandom was only too happy to follow suit.

The few times this kiss was spoken about amongst the fandom, the question of consent was barely ever addressed. The kiss was either brushed aside as unimportant, seen as an indication of the "love and passion" Olivia had for Liam, or viewed as a manifestation of her jealousy towards the MC. Liam is sometimes seen as "clueless" for not "noticing Olivia's feelings...I mean, she literally kissed him!!" All of which could be true, but it doesn't erase the fact that his consent was never given, nor his comfort with the situation ever considered.

It is doubly ironic given the fandom reaction to the MC's plight in Applewood, after Tariq attempts to kiss her without her consent (though this situation involves significant privacy violations and dark conspiracies, and Liam's does not). The MC's situation was (rightfully) viewed as horrible and potentially traumatising, and many were upset that the emotional impact of it wasn't adequately addressed in the story. It wouldn't be surprising if Liam's situation wasn't viewed on the same level - given the difference in contexts - but the fandom and canon rarely saw this as something that happened to him, without his consent.

Ironically, the fandom never really considered Olivia planting a whole smacker on Liam's mouth as possible "proof" that she could engage in creepy, entitled behaviour...but they did often view Liam as "creepy" for...complimenting diamond-option outfits, or saying romantic-coded dialogues that the MC would reciprocate by default (again - I don't deny this is a problem and those lines should have been coded properly. However one cannot deny the doubt standards here). Olivia was the one who forced a kiss on the object of her affection in canon, but Liam was the one who got so many "abuser" and "harrasser" (and worse!) depictions in fanfic when TRR2 and 3 were out.

I will be addressing this particular scene again in another context, in a later essay in the series. I would like my readers here to not forget this scene, or the (lack of) outrage around it. It would be helpful to ponder over why Olivia's behaviour here is largely viewed as no big deal, especially when other side characters (and at least one main character) could be villainized for far, far less.

Olivia and Liam in TRR2 and 3

(Screenshots from Skylia's YouTube channel)

TRR1's finale and TRR2 show a small shift in Liam and Olivia's dynamic. Now that he is engaged, and in love with a woman who isn't Olivia, their interactions become sporadic and awkward. To ensure that Liam won't be viewed as a cassanova, the narrative keeps their interactions to a minimum. Group scenes that involve Liam often leave Olivia out, and group scenes that involve Olivia exclude Liam.

However, to address the "romantic potential" from TRR1's finale, the book shows Liam and Olivia interact in at least one scene in Ch 10. Here, they have a short, stilted conversation that leaves Liam concerned about Olivia's well-being, and that makes Olivia grieve over her unrequited love for him to an equally concerned MC.

Olivia's story in TRR2 largely centers around establishing her character (snarky, prickly, warriorlike. Much of this is actually a deviation from her writing in TRR1), strengthening her relationship with the MC, and integrating her into the core group.

Olivia's feelings for Liam get addressed again after the MC makes her final choice of LI. The MC's acceptance or rejection of Liam's proposal results in a bit of tension between the two women. If Liam is the MC's choice, Olivia admits to her heartbreak despite being truly happy that Liam has found love. If not, she reveals a slight resentment that the MC could so easily throw away the love that Olivia so badly wanted. The narrative allows Olivia her complicated, ambivalent feelings towards the Liam x MC match, and expects the MC to understand and sympathize. By default.

If you don't choose Liam in TRR3, his romance with Olivia does start here. And by this I mean that Liam is now allowed to reciprocate her affections.

(Screenshots from the Skylia YouTube channel (Drake playthrough). The screenshots aren't in order. 1st Liam x Olivia scene is the handholding at Applewood (5), 2nd is dancing at Vegas (1st two), 3rd is Liam asking Olivia for a dance at the finale ball (middle two), and the last is Liam asking Olivia out (6))

Even in the playthrough where Liam is marrying the MC, his default is to trust Olivia, show her kindness and staunchly defend her to people who suspect her motives. Liam advocates for her innocence in TRR3 Ch 2, even as her family becomes one of the prime suspects. The MC may vouch for her by choice...but if she does choose to suspect Olivia, it is Liam who pushes back against the idea.

By this point, the MC and Olivia can cement their friendship if the former has worked on gaining her trust. If not - the book has already created an inbuilt mechanism to ensure Olivia's loyalty anyway. It is tied to her gratitude and affection for Liam, the one person who consistently believed in her from childhood. Whether the MC makes an effort to win her approval or not, Olivia respects her. Her emotional attachment to Liam as an old friend, and loyalty to her king, ensures that her support is gained by default throughout.

Outside of his own playthrough, though, the narrative does slip in a few extra scenes where Liam shows an obvious romantic interest in Olivia. It's small - he isn't exactly yelling from the rooftops that he loves her - but it is definite progress where he seeks her out for support, dances with her and eventually asks her out to dinner at the finale. The scenes are few but prominent, and leave no doubt to the reader that Liam fully intends to court her.

So...why is Liam still single in the Drake, Hana and Maxwell playthroughs of TRH?

Writer Bias

When you read enough interviews and watch enough livestreams from the TRR team, one thing becomes very, very clear. They love their TCaTF callbacks. And no callback is more beloved to the writers than the repurposing of Zenobia Nevrakis' sprite to create her descendant, Olivia.

In this section, I will focus in particular on Kara Loo, COO of Pixelberry and one of the head writers of the TRR/H/F series. Going by several interviews and social media posts, Kara wrote most of Olivia and Drake's scenes and dialogues (along with "some of the Prince's speeches"), and was in fact the driving force behind how Olivia's character came to be, in the original series.

"...when we were creating Book 1, we wanted an evil redhead to be your antagonist, and Kara said, "Oh, what if we used Zenobia, but the twist is she's a Nevrakis descendant?"" - Jennifer Young, Looking Back on The Royal Romance (Sept 2018)

Kara has openly admitted before to having a fondness for Olivia's particular character type. In an interview with Daily Dahlia, she spoke of Val, one of the TCaTF LIs, in glowing terms that perfectly fit the way Olivia has been written as well:

"I love writing Val Greaves in The Crown & The Flame. I love writing for characters that are a little meaner and will really just say what they’re thinking, even if it isn’t exactly tactful." - Daily Dahlia's Interview with the Pixelberry Crew (Sept 2016).

The love for mean (and white! Don't forget white) women among the team, is pretty clear when you look at the kind of reception TRR's mean white women get.

Notably, Kara does have the occasional nice thing to say about Liam too. In an interview before the release of TRR2, she spoke of how "considerate and loving he is", how "there is nothing mean or selfish about him". As a Liam fan who kept seeing him bashed left and right after the TRR1 finale, those words initially felt like a massive relief.

But now, seeing the way the team treats nicer and more diplomacy-oriented characters in the series, this fulsome praise for Liam's selflessness gives me pause. It reminds me too much of how most of the team swore up and down that Hana would be their choice of LI to marry in a livestream, at the same time that they were slamming an infertility subplot on her in the books. Looking back with the knowledge of how the writers would treat Liam later, praise like this seemed less focused on finding him lovable, and more on ensuring that he gave constantly to the MC without ever getting much in return.

While Liam's treatment is not as bad as Hana or Kiara's, one must take note that the team - esp the head writers - have never really hesitated to throw Liam under the bus or retcon entire chapters and backstories to make characters like Drake seem better than him (eg. The narrative choice to have Drake claim Liam was leading the MC on when they first met in TRR3, which has led to more than one attempt to rewrite the bachelor party).

Part of this could be attributed to just the fondness for a specific character type. But I do think that with Kara in particular, ideology also plays a role in her preferences. There are at least two interviews from the team where her liking for darker, more violent storylines has been mentioned. In TRR3 the team affectionately called some of their brainstorming sessions with Kara as "Kara's trail of bodies" (one idea was to kill off Madeleine in Lythikos), and in the TRF livestream they mention that she initially wanted a war storyline.

This leaning towards a more militaristic mindset shows...in the care that Kara takes for Olivia's dialogues and especially her spy scenes (tho such scenes actually don't contribute much to the plot). In contrast there is a subtle disdain for the more diplomacy-minded characters shown in scenes where Olivia's ideologies are measured up against theirs (eg. Any scene where Hana and Olivia are supposed to work together, or the vast difference between the "valiant" Lythikos tournament and the "ridiculous" Castelserraillan flower competition in TRH3).

Even though it is often the diplomacy that saves the day at the end, the framing always highlights the militaristic way of thinking more positively. Given that Kara writes a lot of Olivia, and a fair amount of Liam, it's pretty obvious now where her (and the team's) particular bias may lie.

Because of this bias, it became far easier for TRR's writers to lean into popular fandom myths when it suited them, or pander to a particular section of the fandom. Which is the subject of my next section.

Fandom Entitlement

Olivia often has two types of fans - the ones who wanted to ship her with their MCs in canon (and couldn't), and the ones who wanted to be "bestieeeees!" with her. The frustration of the former was rooted in the fact that wlw had only one romantic option, but I will not be talking about them.

The latter were found in plenty among the Liam, Drake and Maxwell stans - all of whom either viewed her as an ally to win over (Liam), or as someone to push onto Liam, so they could romance the men they preferred in peace (mostly Drake and Maxwell. Some Hana stans but not as many).

As I'd mentioned in an earlier section, Olivia's final scene in TRR1 allowed people who didn't want to romance Liam, to envision a narrative 'out' for themselves. By the time Olivia reappeared in TRR2 Ch 5, she'd gained a cult following among many, many fans. A lot of them were actively rooting for the start of a romance between Liam and Olivia, and very few resented her for her feelings or begrudged her past actions.

But there was one downside. The intent among the majority who rooted for this pairing, was more about "getting Liam out of the way", than any actual romantic potential. Because of this, certain Liam x Olivia stans (ironically, the Drake romancers were the loudest voices in this group) felt a ridiculous level of entitlement towards this pairing.

A number of readers insisted on having Liam fall for Olivia immediately, wanted him to show feelings for her instantly, and complained when he didn't do so while his (optional) romance with the MC was still on.

Olivia's sad, longing gazes in TRR2 propelled many a reader to complain about what an awful situation poor Olivia was in and how insensitive and uncaring Liam was (even in the face of screenshots that clearly showed him worrying about her desolate mood). One of many examples comes from a post in Feb 2018 - a Drake stan's written walkthrough of TRR2 Ch 10, and ironically the following lines were made above a screenshot set that clearly showed Liam noticing how sad she was and worriedly asking the MC about that:

Liam finds you and as always, can’t help fawning over you. This time Olivia is right there and he is like, Oh yeah, Olivia, you are too here, hi. She definitely notices, gets upset, and leaves because she really does love him and she is third choice at best.

This was not the only one. There were multiple posts like these, and they often positioned Olivia as a figure of sympathy, yearning for a love that would never be hers. Liam in these readings was always positioned as someone who "didn't care" and later, "didn't deserve Olivia".

When he did start showing an interest in Olivia in Book 3, it went largely unnoticed by most of the fandom, even though he was romancing her in at least 3 out of 4 playthroughs. There were very, very few posts made about any of these romantic moments. Instead, from Chapters 3 to 10 of TRR3 - where Liam didn't show any indications of heartbreak re: the MC - certain Drake/Maxwell fans made posts complaining over his not pining over the MC, or theorizing that some of his friendly attempts to educate the MC about the country had to have been done with more than friendship in mind.

This section of the fandom often got insane amounts of pandering from the writers themselves. When TRR3 returned from a hiatus post Ch 9, we were suddenly hit with more scenes involving Liam's "heartbreak" (it featured sporadically in all three of the other playthroughs, but you could tell it was tailor-made for the Drake one because it got referenced there waaaay more) before the big battle with Anton. Fandom spoke far more on these scenes than on the ones they got for Liam x Olivia.

What was completely missed was that such "heartbreak" scenes happened because there was a demand from readers who weren't even Liam stans in the first place, and the same stans didn't hesitate to flip and label him "desparate" or "pining" or write fanfic where he was an absolute creep in response to a thing they asked for!

As for talk of the Liam x Olivia ship post TRR3, the phrase "sloppy seconds" started to be used often to address the pair after the series ended, and there were quite a few posts claiming that Liam didn't deserve such an incredible woman like Olivia.

(Edit Source: the playchoicesconfessions Tumblr blog)

Using the pining subplot that nonLiam stans had asked for, some of the same people would insist that Olivia "deserved better than to be sloppy seconds" (at some point after TRR3, I noticed that even some Liam stans would say the same!). This argument often came hand-in-hand with the lie that Liam never cared for Olivia enough (as one can see in the edit above). It also often hinged on the premise that the MC was Liam's first love, that he wouldn't (and shouldn't!) ever get over her, and that anyone else would rank as second best to him. And while I agree that Olivia deserves a partner who would wholeheartedly love her, this argument seemed to come from people who were eerily reluctant to imagine Liam leading a happy life without the MC.

Tbh, the fandom at large has always had a very confusing relationship with Liam as a character. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said that from TRR2 onwards, making Liam a scapegoat was a very popular reading from the fandom. He was often expected to live up to impossible standards - way more than the other male LIs - and criticized incessantly for dialogues and action that the other two could easily get away with.

Many fans were (rightfully) frustrated by how Liam could have romantic lines by default (which the MC would by default reciprocate, to their chagrin) all through TRR1 - while ignoring romantic default dialogues from Drake - but also complained when Liam responded more calmly than expected to her rejection of his proposal. They also didn't like that he could be largely neutral/merely friendly towards the MC for most of TRR3. Damned if he didn't, damned if he did.

I'm not saying that this was the viewpoint of the entire fandom. There were people - yours truly included - who pushed back against such a biased view of this pairing. Against a view that insisted on centering only Olivia's feelings, while either badmouthing Liam for not returning her love, or ignoring the times when he did. There were people who pointed to canon for proof that he cared.

But enough voices vouched for this other, more unsavoury reading that "Olivia deserves better than to be Liam's sloppy seconds", that it became quite popular. That it became the accepted view in canon too, when the writers began work on TRH.

Olivia x Liam (not), TRH and Beyond

As we all know by now, Liam x Olivia did not happen in TRH. After a dance and an invitation to a date in the finale, Liam was back to being single and uninterested in any romantic relationships (like all the other LIs). It went to the point where he was ready to appoint the MC's future child as his heir (heir apparent, not presumptive. The fandom mockingly dubbed him "Rumpelstiltskin" for this). At the time, I imagined that perhaps the narrative was trying to erase the pair altogether, since no other LI got paired up either. It would be fair.

This wasn't exactly the case. In fact, in my opinion, what they managed to do was much worse.

(Screenshots from the HR Gameplay YouTube channel. Liam is renamed "Rayden" here)

Savannah's bachelorette (TRH1 Ch 7) has the MC and the ladies "address" certain pairings that were hinted at in TRR3. One doesn't get addressed at all, one addresses the LI by name only if the playthrough isn't the one where the MC is married to him.

Olivia's is the only one that got addressed regardless of whether the MC was married to the man she had wanted or not. And looking at the scene now, I really, really wish they didn't write it at all.

If the MC encourages Olivia to talk about her feelings for Liam, the latter shows anger and resentment over Liam not choosing her twice over. This, despite the fact that he did attempt to date her the previous book. This, despite the fact that he never indicated interest until he actually felt it. This... despite the fact that not returning the feelings of someone who likes you romantically is a normal, natural thing that said someone should accept without judging other person!

In fact, the fandom was more than willing to view other LIs "not returning feelings" as normal, natural and blameless...so why did only Olivia get sympathy and praise for her unrequited love, and why did only Liam have to be criticised for the same?? Even in THIS scene??

Liam x Olivia would not be referenced for 3-and-a-half books after this, until the very end of TRF. Over the course of the series, the team tested her compatibility and possible chemistry with at least two side characters. One was Jin, the Auvernese spy that Olivia fights with in TRH1 Ch 19. While they did seem to have some banter in the first book and a smattering of scenes in the second, interest quickly died down and Jin was written out of the story once the Auvernese royals' scandals were exposed.

TRH3 then hinted at Amalas x Olivia as a pair, peppering hints as early as the introductory chapters. There had been a few murmurings among the fandom for the same, since a number of wlw were fond of Olivia, and people liked headcanoning her as bi or lesbian (in fact, when the team claimed in a TRH1 livestream that having Olivia as an LI would "soften her" too much, the fandom protested). Amalas x Olivia was met with more approval than Jin x Olivia, and in TRF you could encourage Olivia to ask either Liam or Amalas for a dance.

Liam himself never got any other options for romance (understandable, none of the LIs did), and in fact had several aspects of his story chipped away, chunk by chunk, to benefit other characters. In the end, Liam is treated like Olivia's "alternative LI" than the other way around.

It was a pretty ironic ending for a pairing that people felt so entitled over in the beginning. After years of protests against Olivia being Liam's "sloppy seconds" just because he chose her after being rejected by their MCs... the narrative didn't mind treating him like some sort of "consolation prize" (one of two) for Olivia. And as expected, nor did the fandom.

Conclusion: Could This Pairing Have Worked?

Much as I dislike it now, I did think Liam x Olivia had some potential back then. Politically and emotionally, Liam and Olivia were opposites in many ways. There was a lot you could explore. Their background history and the sweetness of their childhood story had the potential to add layers to their dynamic.

But for a pair like Liam x Olivia to work, romantically, some things would need to change:

1. Respect in the writing room for both their ideologies, not just Olivia's. If you view one with adulation and the other with disdain, that will eventually show in the writing. These two could have been a solid power couple if the team could just set aside their boners for violence and knives once in a fucking while.

2. THE KISS. If you're going to have that kind of a scene around, especially in the context of TRR1's larger story, it needs to be addressed. From Liam's point of view. With Olivia openly regretting it and atoning for it, and Liam getting to choose how to handle that. It isn't just enough to assume they spoke offscreen, and then pretend the forced kiss never happened or that that violation meant nothing.

Olivia was wrong. Olivia crossed boundaries. Olivia disregarded Liam's consent. Liam was the victim here, not the person the MC should be shouting at - even by option.

If a romance should proceed between the two, that kiss deserves to be addressed with a lot of sensitivity and respect to Liam's own experience.

3. BALANCE! Between their perspectives, their viewpoints, their beliefs. Which would only be possible if you equally valued both characters.

4. Respect for Liam's feelings and his romantic choices, whatever they may be. Liam knows what he likes best. Him not returning Olivia's feelings is not a crime, nor does it make him any less of a caring person. Him falling in love a second time, seeing an old friend in a new light, should have been embraced as a concept.

Loving someone else deeply in the past shouldn't make his feelings for his second love any less genuine. But most of the fandom adopted such a way of viewing the Liam x Olivia relationship because it allowed them to pity Olivia and blame Liam (again) - and the team validated those sentiments out of excessive care for one character, and a lack of it for another.

Changes like these four would have definitely made for a better-written alternative romance. But given the kind of team and the fanbase TRR had, none of the changes I mention here would ever have a hope of becoming a reality. Olivia is too popular, too beloved to her writers and fandom, (and too white!) to be viewed with even this much of a critical eye. And tbh, once the fandom has marked a character (esp a character of colour - customizable or not) as a scapegoat, they would enjoy bashing them too much to stop. From then on, it would only be a matter of which excuse, which nitpick, which set of double standards, would work best.

Liam and Olivia had potential. And the narrative was able to get that story to the point where the two could at least have a first date. But team TRR squandered all its future possibilities in the mad rush to pander to a portion of their fandom, with a clear bias for the side character...and so we will never know how a more balanced portrayal would've looked like.

A/N3: I have quoted posts that have actually appeared on Tumblr, but without any identification marks. All of them are one among many such posts - either lost to digital decay or hard to find. I do not want to call out any of the individual posters - I want to make it clear that many of these posts are indicative of a fandom-wide problem. Do not try to find out, or harrass, these posters.

Next - Maxwell and Penelope: When You Like the Side Character So Much, You Gift Her A Shiny New LI

[beastabyss666]

The new Mammon and Fizz episode has been released and I wanna put my two cents in.

The palette is oooof........ One of the most "hard to watch" HB episodes. Seriously, hasn't anyone told Vivzie that her colour choices are just utterly failed?

Mammon was simply annoying and cringe, especially considering he's one of the highest "demons". He curses every few seconds, has an Australian accent and is some kind of a rock star(because......because). Oh yeah, he's also a very bad guy, cuz he disrespects women! Also I find it funny that Vivzie said in one of her tweets that she apologizes the fans wouldn't like him, as he's "fat and ugly". In reality, he's just a typical Vivziepop-ish male character, having sharp teeth and eyes without pupils. And his "fatness" is just looking like a Christmas tree with a round body.

Overdetailed backgrounds and sloppy animation, as always. Some moments look reeeeeally stiff. Maybe Vivzie starts drawing easier backgrounds and make characters with less details so the animation was better and faster to produce? Just dreaming.......

The songs are just generic tasteless pop-stuff. Gosh, I just wish they have a better composer cuz it's tiring to hear these cheap pop tunes every time. Maybe get some real rock or something with synthesizer........ I don't know.....

The background characters in this episode look much less like some early Deviantart furry OCs or cosplay freaks, which is a real plus. Take some cuties:

Hee hee goat boy

Hee hee goat girl(kinda accurate to the demonology, love it).

I really like the left amphibia girl, she's so pretty. Also yeah, bg characters really look better than in previous episodes. Almost like they were drawn by someone who actually knows their job well and doesn't make every person look like different art style or different teenager's OC.

Fizz being tired to be a clown for entertainment, having panic attacks, dealing with crazy fans and a shitty boss was honestly a good idea but the final song was just too weak to handle it. If it was done better, it would be really good.

The sigh language kid is cute and it was interesting to see a disabled person being cheered and supported by another disabled person.

Oh wow Viv made another female characters whose entire personality is being bitchy and arrogant(even to each other, though they're sisters they're calling each other whore, bitch etc.). Can't wait for the fanbase to hate these two or lust for them in the worst way possible.

Though there were actually some beautiful and......esthetic frames.

Am I the only one who never understood why Fizzarolli is considered a sex icon in this show? Like, yeah, Mammon said that he'll exploit his "clown employee" in every way possible and it's all for money, but I still don't get the whole "having tons of sex dolls based on him" thing. Who in sanity would buy a sex doll of Fizz? He looks like a stick with limbs and painted face, which is somehow considered sexy by Vivzie or her fans? Wouldn't it be more logical for a woman to be a sex icon? Lots of real women, including teen idols, were sexualized and fetishized for media by their producers and shown as beauty icons. But I just couldn't imagine the same with males. Like, I'm sorry, but to me Fizz who's a circus performer, celebrity and a sex icon is in the same category as Angel Dust who's a porn star, stripper and prostitute at the same time.

I'm very glad there wasn't much Blitzo.

It's funny that this girl looks like a better design for Loona than Loona herself, lmao.

It's actually a progress to see that Vivzie didn't fetishize a romantic relationship between two men and actually showed them as a loving couple which doesn't talk about sex and cocks every five seconds. She actually has put some unexpected effort in it.

Oh wait she didn't—

[randomnumbers751650]

Talking about a ship for me is complicated because the feeling that I might be missing something or extrapolating too much. But still, I want to talk about Kafka/Blade.

Since HSR is a gacha, the chances of playable characters having romantic relationships are very low, so the fans have to pick the crumbs. Sometimes it’s pretty much obvious the devs want certain characters together, but the hand of the gacha business model holds them back. Other times, not really, maybe the devs are really aiming for platonic or other. And, of course, fans are free to interpret their own. So, I’m here to give my interpretation of KafBlade, why it called my attention.

From their interactions, they are working together and they have a level of affection: Kafka calls him Bladie (and he’s upset if others call him by that), Blade loves hearing her singing and is receptive to her whispers; they also seem to have good synergy in the battlefield. It also works in accomplishing missions, with Kafka’s lack of fear making her prone to injuries and Blade acting as her immortal bodyguard. Plus, there’s the implication they had to fake being a couple for a mission, which I hope it never gets a full flashback because imagining how it went is funnier. How they complement each other is what makes them so interesting.

They are both fundamentally broken people. We know Blade’s story, but it’s pretty implied Kafka has some tragedy in the closet (with Blade commenting he doesn’t want to see her sad; would it really be surprising?). And, they are villains after all.

But still, what I see in them is how they can still experience with each other things that they couldn’t imagine to experience or that they thought that they’d never experience. For example, Kafka is a liar. It’s a strength in her job, to the point even when she’s telling the truth it still feels she’s lying. She uses her whispers to dominate men and then discard them when they’ve done their jobs. She goes full “nothing personnel, kid”, because for her everything is just a job.

And then, one day, appears a guy who’s like “can you do that again?” A guy who wants to be whispered, whose lies sooth and motivate him. And then she learns he’s an immortal that wants to die and then she decides that she’ll help, but that she will strive to make his life more fun until that day because he amuses you. She has no feelings for him, because she has no feelings at all (or are very different from what normal people think to be); either she wasn’t born with them or the organization she learned her skills remove them, but still she just wants to make him feel good about his journey to death.

Blade is similar: he wants revenge. He crafted his entire life and used all his bladesmith skills to pursue that goal; it’s easy to imagine him forgoing everything, his feelings, his self-care, eating whatever slop he puts on his face, a very miserable life. And then one day a woman appears saying “join me” and she’s actually…fun to be around. Sure, they are using each other to their respective objectives, but there’s something more to it. He starts to pick her habits and helps her whenever she needs carry her stuff. And then he starts to wonder that, yes, his life sucks, but it sucks a bit less with her around. The blade he crafted for revenge can be used to protect, unexpectedly.

It should be noted that the devs already had opportunities to portray their relationship as toxic and abusive, but they haven’t. I’m not sure I’d call healthy either, but there seems to be a mutual respect and trust about them. I mean, they are dangerous (along with the rest of the Stellaron Hunters, Silverwolf, Sam and Elio himself (it’d be really funny if he was the cat)), but still it’s not hard to imagine them as a found family. We have to wait for future updates to see how they’ll be developed, but their Team Rocket dynamic with the heroes is fun.

One last thing is how I think it’s funny that KafBlade is “what if Gojo and Marin (from My Dress Up Darling) were evil?”. Kafka is the extroverted girl that loves shopping and fashion, while Blade is the recluse artist, but that grew bitter - as Yingxing, he was one the best bladesmiths of the Xianzou, he knows what beauty is (also please read the fanfic “dal segno al fine”, it really captures this side of his) – and would be reluctant even if Kafka’s feelings were like Marin’s; Kafka would have to have a lot of patience, but I think she’s not one to give up once she set up a goal.

I didn’t really review their text and quotes, I’m remembering all of it in the game and some comments in the internet. Even so, I wonder if others share these thoughts on them, especially the fact they bring out things that were previously kinda buried in each other, so it has potential for a more mature love story.

[utilitycaster]

I'm surprised you think Travis and Jake's characters fall outside the boundaries of traditional masculinity, if anything they're the popular AP players I'd be the most comfortable saying I can always count on playing a traditionally masculine guy in some way. What makes them fall outside of that in your opinion?

In case "both embody and yet still fall outside the boundaries" was insufficiently clear, they do fit, on paper, the qualifications of traditional masculinity, but any reading beyond the most surface level reveals that they are constantly failing to measure up (and are struggling with that).

Hardwon was teased as a child, was dumped, is a virgin well into his 20s, and constantly craves approval and platonic affection; in his appearance in Campaign 3 he is utterly distraught at the death of a friend, retreats into a several year depression and regresses 11 levels, mechanically, as a result. Henry Hogfish is the shortest of the group and is a sad sack divorcee whose son is turned against him. Calder is the baby of his family, cannot make fire, and is the quiet intellectual compared to the more boisterous and melee-oriented Sol and Callie.

Grog is unintelligent (the bounds of traditional masculinity are ever-shifting but also very narrow; being too bookish and being too stupid are both sins), his closest friend is a woman in which he shows no sexual interest, and his arc is entirely about fear and vulnerability. Fjord is physically extremely unimpressive, romantically inexperienced, narratively propelled entirely by his silver tongue (mechanically, even his swordsmanship is dependent not on strength but on charisma), and his authoritative front early on is a cover to a fairly emotionally brittle interior; he also very directly explores the idea of performing an even more traditionally masculine front by putting on the voice and mannerisms of Vandran, believing his own to be insufficient. Chetney is small, weird, old, and has a high voice, wore a dress to a ball without blinking, and is also one of the most emotionally mature characters in the party. All of Travis's characters are united by being incredibly good listeners as well; they can be relied on to actually pay attention to what is being said rather than project their own beliefs back onto the speaker (consider: Grog asking Scanlan his mother's name; Fjord consistently being willing to allow the rest of the Nein to be vulnerable with him without pressing; Chetney being the "weird core" per the most recent 4SD.) Fjord and Chetney have also both unironically, though not necessarily without other motives, flirted with men.

Both Travis and Jake are also some of the players who most embrace failure and will gladly sacrifice dignity for story or for the bit; they will gleefully drop all gravitas and stoicism at the slightest provocation.

The post this is in reference to is ultimately about how Traditional Masculinity is a performance just as much as any other gender, and as I said above, a punishingly narrow and rigid one. Travis and Jake consistently explore that and show the work being put into that performance by playing characters for whom that masculinity is, ultimately, a tenuous facade at best.

[evilwickedme]

The thing I find most fascinating about Spider Gwen in general and Matt Murderdock in particular is the way their narrative and themes so directly contrast and contradict and comment on 616 canon.

Like. I just read the Death of the Stacys, and these are such iconic moments in the history of Spider-Man, but at the end of the day Gwen Stacy's death is so much more about Peter's grief than it is about Gwen's life being cut short. Meanwhile in Spider Gwen we don't even get to meet Peter before he dies; his entire purpose is to haunt Gwen, to be her Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy and Green Goblin combined, even before Harry turns into earth 65's Green Goblin. He is the one who drives her to be a hero, who drives so much of the plot, a stand in for her failure and yet also the reason she continues to do what's right. His death haunts her not exactly in the way Gwen's death haunts Peter, because they weren't romantically involved, but also not exactly like Uncle Ben haunts Peter, because they were peers, childhood friends.

The fact that Peter is so much of a character in Spider Gwen comics but only after his death is a direct commentary on the fact that Gwen Stacy is often relegated in 616!Spider-Man comics to "the dead girlfriend", maybe his biggest failure as a hero, but not much else. In the introduction to Death of the Stacys, Gerry Conway calls her "boring". She was Peter's girlfriend, but not much else - the TASM movies made her incredibly interesting, smart and funny and charming, but the original comics, back in the 60s and 70s, weren't particularly interested in making her much of anything at all.

65!Peter has, on the other hand, such strong characterization that even though we never once see him alive we can't help but feel Gwen's grief even without having spent much time with him. There's also the fact that while by the time 616!Gwen dies she has no family left, 65!Peter's Aunt May and Uncle Ben are very much still alive and actively mourning their nephew's death. It's difficult to impossible while reading Spider Gwen comics to not constantly compare these two stories and see how much more deftly handled 65!Peter is than 616!Gwen.

The fact that traditionally Daredevil and Spider-Man are friends, then, is part of what makes Matt Murderdock such a compelling villain. By all rights he should be Gwen's closest ally; and while he is drawn to her, it is from the perspective of someone trying to ruin everything she stands for - everything 65!Peter's death has taught her to try to be. He, himself, is 616!Matt's complete inversion - he's a killer, he's a member of the Hand instead of fighting against them, he's actively the Kingpin (and previously friend to Wilson Fisk) instead of fighting against organized crime, and while he was roommates with Foggy in college, they are not partners in a productive fashion, but rather in a way that shows corruption in 65!Foggy that 616!Foggy is constantly learning to fight against. Murderdock is a lapsed Catholic, a man whose morals are in complete opposition to 616!Matt - and yet, in a way, he feels as though there's something deeply wrong in who he is, and that is what drives him to try and corrupt Spider Woman. He says it himself - it is a selfish need to prove that he is not the only one who is corruptible. In a way, it actually proves that at his core, given other circumstances, he would have grown into someone very similar to 616!Matt.

This is what compels me so about Murderdock and the Spider Gwen narrative. Yeah, Murderdock is a sarcastic twink and I love him for that too, but on a thematic level it is not only its own story, but also a story about our main continuity. What 616 did wrong, and how it could have gone wrong. And that's just... So interesting to me.

Anyway read Spider-Gwen

[hello-nichya-here]

Why do you say Ted is worse than Ross

Because he is - and I say this as someone whose least favorite character of the main six in Friends is Ross because the dude can piss me off A LOT.

Ross is selfish, whinny, spoiled, obsessive and immature like Ted. But the writers of Friends were far more self-aware than the writers of How I Met Your Mother - mainly because they were not using Ross as a self-insert, and would not use Twitter to say shit like "If you ship Rachel with Joey instead of with Ross, you're the reason people like Trump get elected and destroy nations." No, I am not kidding, that actually happened.

Ted CONSTANTLY acts like a creep and the show treats it as fully romantic, and if a woman (mainly Robin) is turned off by it, the show tries to spin it as "She's afraid of commitment" or some bullshit. When Ross is getting possessive over Rachel the show actually allows her to call him out and she doesn't always run straight to his arms - not to mention, she can act just as unreasonable and entitled, meanwhile the most Robin does is say "Maybe, someday, if we're both single and miserable and no one else wants either of us, I'd consider marrying you."

Even Ross's most absurd moments get a bit more of pass because they're (usually) meant to:

1 - Show that the character is flawed (Him constantly getting paranoid that Rachel is gonna cheat on him with her co-worker is meant to show he's insecure, jealous, possessive AND doesn't listen when she repeatedly says she loves HIM, not this other dude - though the writers do still want the audience to root for him and Rachel to find a way to make it work)

2 - Make a joke about how he's kind of insane (see him not telling Rachel they're still married because he can't have another failed marriage - a situation in which NO ONE in the cast makes excuse for him, and we even have Chandler rightfully saying "At point did you think this was a successful marriage?")

Meanwhile the writers of HIMYM did things like:

1 - Say Ted breaking up with a girl on her birthday, through an answering machine that all the guests in her surprise party heard before she did, finding her years later, winning her back, then breaking up with her on her birthday AGAIN is totally just what was meant to be because "Well, she found true love later"

2 - Have him use "It was past 2am" as an excuse to cheat on his girlfriend/lie to Robin about being single to sleep with her.

3 - Make him have an emotional affair with a married woman that then left her husband (who thought of Ted as friend) for him, accept getting back together with his ex that was engaged and then left the groom at the altar, and make a move on his ex that was engaged to one of his best friends on the weekend on their wedding.

4 - HAVE TED TELL HIS KIDS HE WANTS TO TELL A STORY ABOUT HOW HE MET THEIR DEAD MOTHER, BUT IT'S ACTUALLY ABOUT HOW HE ALWAYS LOVED A DIFFERENT WOMAN THAT HE WAS STILL OBSESSED WITH AFTER 25 YEARS.

Not to mention, even the stuff in Friends that genuinely did not age well at all and that the writers weren't self-aware about in any way have a bigger excuse than the stuff HIMYM did because Friends started in 1994 and ended in 2004, yet HIMYM was on the same level, if not worse, and it started in 2005 and ended in 2014. There's a reason audiences tolerated Ross's shenanigans way more than they tolerated Ted's - Friends was a product of it's times, HIMYM felt behind it's time. Ross feels like a typical character you'd see in the 90's, Ted feels like the hero of every "Nice Guy" that is actually not nice at all.

Plus, Ross had much better chemistry with Rachel than Ted ever did with Robin (or literally any love interest except the Mother) and the series made sure to never give us an alternative pairing that was much better than the planned one like HIMYM did with Barney and Robin (and I say this as someone that ships Joey and Rachel). And while Josh Radnor made the rare good scene of Ted feel great, David Schiwimmer, and the entire cast of Friends really, made mediocre or downright bad scenes enjoyable or at least tolerable. The only one in the HIMYM cast with the same talent was Neil, who was playing the character that we were not supposed to actually want to see get the girl, which just made it even easier for audiences to root for Barney, not Ted.

It's just a perfect storm of different factors that makes a character like Ross getting a happy ending after all the shit he pulled MUCH easier to accept than when that happens to a Ted type, hence the finale of Friends still being incredibly beloved by nearly everyone, while HIMYM's ending was absolutely hated to the point that it shelved the planned spin off and put the showrunner's careers in limbo for nearly a decade.

[racke7]

I was re-reading "In Flight" (because I have literally nothing better to do, stuck at home sick), and I started to think.

Like, gabriel_blessing's Shirou Emiya is an... interesting character. He's not a very good "Shirou Emiya", but he's an interesting character who happens to share that absolutely unhinged lunatic's name.

I can't even entirely blame the author for it, because Shirou is a... very complicated character to do right by. It's a knife's-edge of trying to balance "too traumatized to consider themselves human", and "thinks that this is normal", and trying to fit that into an entertaining (and not trauma-focused) narrative is... not easy.

But. Looking at a character who's called "Shirou Emiya" behaving in ways that don't mesh with "Shirou Emiya"? It's weird. And it sometimes makes me step back and go: "what the fuck kind of Sekirei-story could you write with the actual Shirou Emiya?"

Pre-War Shirou? He's basically just a traumatized nice guy with the ability to make a crowbar a little bit tougher. He kind of disappears into the background, is what I'm saying.

Fate-Route Shirou? You put a Sekirei in front of a man who's sworn his heart to another? You try to steal him away from his beloved Saber, who he must always search for until his dying day? Jail! Jail for the author for a thousand years!

(I could see him being good friends with Miya or Kazehana, who both know what it's like to love and lose. But he didn't really lose, did he? She's still waiting for him, even now.)

UBW Shirou? Do you really think that Rin would ever give up on a promise she made? Her promise to watch over him and guide him away from Archer's path? Rin would rather try to raze the Clock Tower to the fucking ground, than give up. And Zelretch would probably think that that's too fucking hilarious to not reward, so trying to split them up is just... very much a long-shot.

HF Shirou? He's already happily married, dude. He's not gonna fuck your aliens, he's too busy being satisfied with his life.

It just-... There's just no Shirou that really meshes well with Sekirei, because he's already made his choices by the end of the Routes, and those choices don't include ecchi-aliens.

BUT

But, there's one idea that struck me.

HF Rin comes back from London, and stumbles across a young boy desperately searching for his little sister. A boy who is clearly not human, and whose sister is very likely to be targeted sexually (because Sekirei-Ashikabi are romantic bonds).

HF Rin who knows some of those horrors from the suffering of her own little sister? Of fucking course she helps. She'll turn the entirety of Shin Tokyo upside-fucking-down if it means she can track down that girl faster and make sure that she isn't being hurt.

Which made me think about "how would she track Kusano down?". And the answer to that is blatantly obvious: "Shirou is a goddamn blood-hound for magic, and he'll probably owe her like half-a-dozen favors at this point".

And if we'll be involving Shirou by calling him over from Fuyuki in order to track down someone's little sister? I feel like we need to up the absurdity-value of Shirou's entrance.

So, rather than calling a young man who looks very friendly and reliable, Shiina's new Ashikabi calls a tiny little girl with pink hair.

That's right, Emilya von Einzbern is dragged into this mess, and Sakura (who absolutely refuses to have her senpai out of her sight for longer than five minutes) comes with her (and Rider plays chaperone, as always).

So now, we have a very pretty tiny little girl with pink hair. A tall and very sexy-looking (almost unnaturally so) onee-san with glasses. And a young woman with very sizable... tracts of land.

Of course they're going to be mistaken for a group of unwinged Sekirei.

(And then Sakura murders the poor Ashikabi who tried to flirt with her cute senpai.)

As for the rest of the story? I have no clue. But like... what a fucking entrance.

[littlestpersimmon]

i started reading the series (aaa im not sure which part is the actual series name so sorry) with the fitz / the fool as a kid but i never got too far in the series so i was really surprised to see you post about tones of mlm (esp bc my dad was the one who owned this series and suggested i read it, and hes homophobic as shit) i was just curious, what is the nature of the relationship of fitz & the fool in the series? (the snippets you posted just before, seemed like unrequited love?) im esp intrigued of your interp of it as someone who is mlm. though, pls dont feel like u have to go into it if its too extensive to go into or anything though or if u just dont wanna!

Fitz and the Fool's relationship tends to go under the radar, but you wanna know whats hilarious though? Some of the oldest comments in goodreads and ancient forums online complain that Fitz should have realized that the Fool was actually a woman and that the Fool is Fitz' true love, lol. Canonically, The Fool is genderqueer, using he/him and she/her, depending on who is present, and the Fool is canonically, outright in love with Fitz. It's accepted that Fitz and the Fool are canonically romantic, but only at the very end of the series, in their deaths.

My personal interpretation is that Fitz is gay and not bisexual.

That's my Personal Opinion, as in, you guys can disagree. Molly never stops feeling like puppy love, like someone Fitz cares about because of what she represents and not of who she is as a person. I don't like complaining about canon, but rote is my one exception. People rag on Anne Rice all the time for being notoriously anti fanfic, but what she was saying at the time was shared by many other authors, Robin Hobb included, whose anti fanfic post made it to encyclopedia dramatica. Robin Hobb said "for Fitz to be gay is a destruction of his character". Robin Hobb said that nobody in realm of the elderlings gets a fairytale ending because that's not how the world works, while Burrich is conveniently killed so Fitz can marry Molly.

Fitz is terrified of coming out to Robin Hobb.

Maybe that's why the Fool says Fitz shows his love from his actions. Fitz says he could never desire the Fool sexually, but when faced with the possibility of the Fool being intimate with someone else (Jofron), he is devastated. Fitz doesn't like Amber because not only does Amber (who is the Fool as a woman) forces Fitz to confront his own transphobia, she also makes Fitz uncomfortable with his own homophobia. The Pale Woman is also a good example of this. She promises to give Fitz what Beloved could never give him, she promises to "perfect" What Fitz has with Beloved, and all the while, the Pale Woman's most effective weapon against Fitz is of how much she reminded Fitz of the Fool.

Robin Hobb made it a point that her series always veered toward unsatisfying endings because that was how realistically the world worked, so it makes me wonder why Fitz didn't end up with women like Jinna or Starling, who both would have been more narratively interesting (imagine Starling, who hated the Fool, popping out Bee, a kid who looked just like the Fool.)

Fast forward to Fitz in Withywoods where he is unhappy with his life. His relationship with Molly is never shown but told, and you, as the reader will just have to be convinced of it. He stays in his little room aching for his wolf and his friend, never telling anyone about them, always feeling like a part of him is missing.

Fitz never takes the initiative when it comes to how he loves people. The way he loves is unassuming and reticent, and not everyone will understand that, but the Fool did. Throughout his entire life, starting from their childhoods in the castle as outcasts.

They're canon kind of by the 3rd book of Farseer, but the flirtation between them is deeply subtle, always brief, it's like Fitz only seeing the Fool through a hallway made of sheer curtains until the very end of the 17th book where he tears down all the thin walls between them to be wholly together.

It's funny how the Fool is the one throughout the series poking and prodding Fitz, needling him and initiating the little proclamations of love and devotion and you get angry at Fitz for not reciprocating until you realize the Fool is also guarded, has his own walls up.

To Molly, Fitz is newboy, to the Farseers, Fitz is the son of Chivalry, to Starling he was the promise of a song, but to the Fool, he is the closest he will ever be to Keppet, the boy who was loved by his mountain mother, and the boy who was loved by the white prophet

And in the very end Fitz is the one who has the resolve; that he wants to be with the Fool, more than anyone else, in his dying thoughts he wanted only to be with the Fool, who still has his walls up, until Bee tells him

"don't you realize you were loved the best?"

[alegacyofmonsters]

That finale was brutal for anyone who enjoyed the characters of Legacies, but especially for anyone who had Lizzie, MG, Landon, and Jed as comfort characters.

Lizzie's romantic and personal arc for four seasons being trying (and failing) to force an epic romance with various men, including MG, instead of being independent ends with her unenthusiastically giving in to someone who never accepted that she wasn't interested (and this is coming from someone who loves the fuck out of MG) and who she still can't even say she has any sort of feelings for?

What was supposed to come out of that "I owe him a shot" "I have no reason not to anymore" narrative other than encouragement for men to keep going and going and going until the woman finally gives in, even if in this case, years later, and encouragement for women to settle out of fear of being alone. To see a show that's supposed to be aimed at a younger audience with that theme is, quite frankly, terrifying. Especially one that advertised itself as "woke" on and off screen for four seasons.

Lizzie could've easily ended the series single and finding herself like her entire arc was leading to, but the choice to shove her with the person who has been disrespecting her boundaries for years, the person who she proudly admits to being able to manipulate and not feel anything for, was intentional.

They set MG's character development all the way back to Season 1 and erased every way he had grown in the last four seasons. They set Lizzie's character back to Season 1 and undid every ounce of her growth in the cruelest, most misogynistic way possible. They made it so evident in their treatment in the finale that neither character ever meant shit to somebody in power on that show.

Mild-mannered MG who would never, whose whole thing that made us love him is being a kind-hearted, feminist-pacifist, and strong-willed Lizzie who supposedly learned her self-worth over the series, instead of getting any sort of ending, any sort of scenes with their best friends or family (Kaleb and MG got not one scene, Hope and Lizzie got a singular thirty-second moment), revert backed to the 1940s miserable house-wife and husband stereotype.

Lizzie spent a majority of her screentime sitting, being yelled at by someone trying to mainsplain the school's meaning that she, the one the school was literally created for, would understand better than everyone else. The man who would, to be very clear, absolutely never shout at his friends about what their experience should be and would never say they were bullying him by making the personal decisions that were best for them. Who has always preached about personal agency. Caroline showed up for the first time in three years, no explanation, and Lizzie got two thirty-second moments with her.

Lizzie and Hope, who were the only remaining main characters after Josie left, got back-burnered in their own finale and to their love interest men, which, in some way, seems even crueler because these men are absolutely amazing characters we love. They're adored and we wanted to see them on our screens, we wanted time with them in the finale, but not at the cost of our female leads. How are we supposed to keep loving their characters without holding some sort of animosity towards how things shook out in the end?

And that's not to say their treatment was any better either. Pardon my language, but what the fuck kind of ending is Landon being separated from everyone he loves and trapped in an emotionless eternity of servitude? "I finally have a place where I belong" and it's being servant to limbo for the rest of his life which is forever. Why was so much of the finale devoted to hammering in how awful and unfair and cruel his circumstances were while trying to pass it off as some sort of happy ending? Like he was just okay with this monumental injustice?

Landon's unfair treatment certainly didn't start this episode either, but Alaric getting to just run off and write another book about the supernatural without any sort of nod to what his return yanked away from Landon? No second thought to him? Not a single mention that he wouldn't be here, wouldn't be able to do any of this, without Landon's sacrifice?

I say this as one of the rare someones who actually enjoys Alaric's character, there's no way to spin that doesn't make it look like some in power on that show favors old white men, whose story is long overtold, over semi-decent storytelling. There was no reason at all for him to come back. He added nothing to the story afterwards, spare a few good fatherly moments with Lizzie and Hope, whereas Landon would've added everything. You can argue that it was meant to be unfair and that it was meant to shake the watcher's sense of justice, but the "happy" ending makes me not buy it.

That is the type of cruelty exclusively reserved for POC under Julie Plec's reign, which leads exactly into my next point: Jed. Jed spent an entire episode fighting with Ben about his "curse" and how he didn't see it as a curse. Ignoring the fact that this "angst" seemed to be manufactured out of thin air for the drama, it lead to a long speech about how much Jed enjoys being a wolf. He loves it. It's very much a part of who he is without being unhealthily all of who he is. He loved being the alpha and he loved his pack. He didn't want to get rid of it, and he made that painfully clear to Ben and Finch both. It could not have been any clearer.

So why, praytell, did the finale illogically bring him losing his werewolf side? MG and Kaleb remained vampires, and in Kaleb's case, a dragon as well, so why did Jed, the one person who loved his curse, get it stripped away? Had there been another episode or even later scene that touched on it, it could've been good. He could've grappled with it. It could've been something for him to overcome. But instead he just ... accepted it?

Jed didn't get to have any feelings about part of himself disappearing in a disappointingly Landon-esque way. He didn't get to have thoughts on something he loves being stolen? No emotions to be had and expressed? No outrage at what had been done to him, when just an episode or two before he had been shouting from rooftops about how awful it would be to take that part of him away? That feels like a giant slap in the face to anyone who loved him or even just valued him.

Yeah, the finale was never going to be perfect. It was never going to wrap up everything open with a little bow. It was never going to be enough to honor everything in the trilogy that had come before. I think most of us had accepted that. We were ready to love something less than perfect so long as it remained Legacies, so long as we got to spend another 42 minutes with our favorite characters, and we fucking didn't.

[tialovestelevision]

Why The Show Is Better

I like the Wheel of Time show better than the books.

This isn’t because I dislike the books. I love them. Wheel of Time was a constant companion to me through some very hard times. Part of what got me through Hurricane Katrina was knowing I’d be able to pick up a copy of Knife of Dreams in a few months, and I read the entire series more than once. Given its length, that is commitment. That is love.

But Wheel of Time has... issues. The pacing is the most talked-about one - even before Crossroads of Twilight spent 704 pages on reactions shots, the progress of the plot had slowed to a subglacial pace. Jordan got far too invested in showing us every single detail of the admittedly amazing world he had built at the expense of the actual story that world existed to tell, and that hurts the books far more than I could describe.

But it’s not the worst thing about the books.

Jordan can’t write women. I say this in spite of some of the women in the books - Moiraine, Elayne, Min, Siuan, Nynaeve, and especially Egwene - being some of my favorite characters in literary history, and there is no contradiction there. When those characters are being people, they are wonderful and fun and engaging and just an absolute joy to read about. But when Jordan tries to write them as women, with the fact that they are women foremost in his mind, they immediately recede to being two-dimensional caricatures. Nynaeve becomes a braid-tugging annoyance elemental, Min a parody of the Not Like Other Girls trope, Elayne a boy-obsessed floozy. All of these things exist in contradiction to their portrayal when they are shown as people.

This feeds into a larger issue - Jordan can’t write interactions between genders. He’s already coming in from a very gender essentialist position, which... I’m trans. That’s a losing place to start with me. But it gets worse from there, with every single member of gender A thinking of every single member of gender B as an incomprehensible cipher whose behavior is beyond mere mortal understanding. The one pair of people who are an exception to this - Lan and Moiraine - are probably the most interesting different-sex pair to watch interact because their dynamic is defined by who they are as people instead of Man No Understand Woman Woman No Understand Man. I love Lan and Moiraine.

Throw in the twin facts that Jordan is just not great at writing romance generally and that the books treat queerness as something to grow out of, and every single romantic relationship in the books is plagued by these issues. In scenes dealing with romance, when characters should be at their most open, they are instead their least themselves. The best romance in the series, Nynaeve/Lan, works because it happens mostly offscreen and they manage to have chemistry despite the issues in the writing when they manage to spend time together on page.

Characters whose role in the series is defined by their romantic relationship to a more significant character - and these are almost all women - get it the worst. Faile, in particular, is just difficult to read about.

Contrast this with the show. The show is perhaps a bit too briskly paced, but it’s way closer to ideal pacing than the books are. Its women are just people. Its men are just people. They interact, love, hate, and have sex like people instead of a set of mutually indecipherable ciphers. Many of the best scenes are romantic, or are intimate in ways that don’t need romance. Moiraine and Siuan being all the way queer and in love makes their relationship hit so much harder than it does in the books. Lan and Nynaeve are an utter, absolute, complete joy to watch. Rand and Egwene are immense fun, and their going separate ways has so much more in terms of stakes than it did in the books.

That’s not to say the show doesn’t have problems. I’d love to have seen more of the Two Rivers (every genre show needs its own Short Treks). “Perrin has a wife oops she’s in a fridge now” was a hamfisted way to start his “hammer or axe” arc. While I get why they skipped certain stuff, I desperately wanted to see Whitebridge and Caemlyn, to see the Green Man and Aginor and Balthamel.

But the show is better than the books.

[unsoundedcomic]

On this note: "almost that entire series is told from an unabashedly female perspective." This is an interesting point to me. Of course marginalized creators in positions of creative control are valuable and important. Totally agree there. But could you elaborate on how this "unabashedly female perspective", as you put it, manifests in the actual narrative of the LoK series?

Oh, hello o/

Personally, the thing that always stood out most to me was the complete lack of sex and objectified females in the series (other than dumbass Umah in BO2 but we all know that game barely counts). That was almost unheard of in a video game back then. Instead the LoK world is a sexless utopia where highly emotional and eloquent men obsess over each other, stalk each other, commit passionate murder of each other. Raziel has his dick melted off before his story even begins. That always felt like a statement to me.

Afterwards, we always know what's in Raziel's heart and head. The game obsesses over his thoughts, his hopes, his despair, his bloodlust. He narrates in places that don't require narration, just so we know how he's feeling. He's perpetually being tossed around, manipulated, pursued, and put in vulnerable states by bigger, stronger men and monsters. Everyone wants him, or wants something from him. This is sexy. His tragic, quiet, Shakespearean death as Kain hovers over him in despair is supremely romantic. I hesitate to even say it because it feels like I'm revealing a dark secret that will turn boys off from enjoying them, but Ms. Hennig's LoK games are structured like an epic Boys Love (yaoi) story. Fights take the place of sex, but all other tropes are firmly in place.

Anyway, Soul Reaver was probably the first game I ever played that never had moments of sexism that took me out of it. Dealing with sexism is just something you have to do when you play video games. We all know this. But in Soul Reaver? No princess-rescuing, no one in a bikini (die, Umah), no female characters acting like idiots, cowards, bitches, or children all for the sake of building up the male protagonist.

Maybe the only way Ms Hennig was able to do this was by leaving ladies out entirely. Other than Ariel (whose face was half-skull), after Blood Omen there are no female characters (die Umah). Nevertheless, to me, female attitude and priorities pervaded the Soul Reavers and Defiance. I didn't need to see women characters in them to sense the woman holding the pen. When I did learn that a lady had written and directed them, I was not at all surprised. But that fact and her work were far, far more meaningful and influential to me than another Lara Croft or Aerith.

I hope that makes sense :)

[dreamcaught]

The Doc/River and Doc/Clara are equally valid ships.

I'm a Tentoo stan all the way, so the Doctor moving on to a new romance doesn't bother me, especially the first time I watched the show. But on rewatch, I'm frustrated with how poorly his new romances have been executed.

(My apologies to any Thasmin fans -- I haven't seen any of that yet, but I hear your ship is gold, so kudos there and I'll take your word for it.)

The problem I've had with both of them though is that they occur concurrently. Matt Smith said in an interview once that it was tense to introduce his girlfriend to his wife. And while I'm genuinely on board with polyamory, I do not think that's what this is. It takes away from both relationships and confuses the narrative.

I think that the Doctor loved Clara but never had her, while he had River but never loved her. Their romantic stories are sometimes interesting from his perspective because it's him trying to do the right thing for both women and failing in consequence. But it's also taking away the agency from Clara and River who just become the mistress and the wife.

It confuses things even further when you realize that both of them were introduced in a strange out of order way and whose main arcs revolve entirely around their interactions with the Doctor. This is flanderized with River (literally - her actual life revolves around him) and, while there is an attempt to fix that mistake with Clara (by making her only part of his history because of a paradox), it ultimately falls flat. Their backstories, their personalities and their interests make them feel much like the same person as much as their relationship with the Doctor does.

(Don't even get me started on how much River and Clara sound alike, either. Moffat only knows how to write one woman. She makes an appearance in Sherlock, too. But I digress.)

The essential problem that I have with these concurrent relationships is the faithlessness that the Doctor demonstrates. Again, it could be argued that some of these feelings are only problematic when seeing them from a monogamous perspective. The Doctor could not be monogamous, except that he is. The level of devotion and faithfulness to Rose through to Journeys End is one example of this.

However there is also that Twelve's reactions to River's exploits and other marriages shows that it bothers him. Eleven calls River his ex when he's with Clara, because being with two people at once bothers him. Both River and Clara are jealous of each other. The Doctor keeps them a secret from each other while simultaneously dating both. That is not devotion to either of them, nor do they have devotion to him.

Honestly, unless River is a plot point in the episode of choice, she is essentially forgotten about. Then, when Clara is actually forgotten about, River comes back. It's sort of like Moffat thought they were interchangeable. It's like he wrote part of River's timeline and then fell in love with the idea of Clara but had already tied the knot with the whole marriage to River thing that he had to begrudgingly keep on -- and it shows.

(And sidenote, Moffat: bisexual people are not polyamorous by rote, just so you know. It can happen like once and be okay, but you used that card with Jack Harkness.)

I know this is mostly nonsense because I'm talking about the B romantic plotline of an action/adventure/science fiction show, but how these characters interact with each other has a big impact on why we enjoy watching them. I don't like being taught that it's okay to emotionally cheat on someone you're with, whether that be either River or Clara, and I think that's ultimately why I could never get on board with these ships.

[dctrreids]

------SHIPPING INFO. answer the following for your muse so people know how shipping works on your blog !

WHAT IS YOUR OTP FOR YOUR CHARACTER.

if we're talking CM canon ships i was very much a fan of maeve and reid, even if i'm not fond of how it ended up ( let them be happy? would it kill you to not fridge maeve and to let spence be happy for more than 12 seconds???? ) but beyond that there's no other "true canon" ships i'm really fond of for spence. he's a bit niche and doesn't really need romance to develop imo.

if we're talking blog canon, obviously it's gloria (@medicbled). setting my bias aside for frigga as a writer, gloria is an excellent compliment to spence and helps bring him out of his shell in an organic way without sacrificing the true nature of his character for the ship itself. plus he really loves her. a lot. it's cute.

HOW LARGE DOES THE AGE GAP HAVE TO BE TO MAKE IT UNCOMFORTABLE.

here's the thing, spence's age ranges anywhere from 22-38 on the blog, depending on the season. (22/23 being pre-show, then following the seasons.) i'd say i'm safely not wildly into anyone whose like 3 years younger than spence at any given time, and i'm really not interested in writing ships with spence pre-bau (so nothing 22/23.) i tend to operate with spence at like 30-35 primarily, so i'd say nobody below like 27?

that being said ... age gaps are subjective to the ages of the people involved. i don't want to write 38 y/o spence with a 25 y/o, that's ick to me. likewise, i don't want to write 28 y/o spence with a 45 y/o muse. i know these gaps exist irl but i'm just not interested in exploring them. his characterization suggest spence is attracted to women more around his own age-range.

HOW FAR DO STEAMY MOMENTS HAVE TO GO BEFORE THEY ARE CONSIDERED NSFW.

so reid isn't ... the most sexually experienced person. i've spoken that he's, canon ... maybe had sex twice in his life. it's not hard to fluster him, but he's also not very good with social cues. it depends entirely on the mood and context of the thread because sometimes something as simple as kissing can be nsfw depending on the exposition and entire scene being set. but a typical rule of thumb for me is ... if they're getting naked and the connotation is sexual, it's probably good to consider it nsfw. but you can also be pretty sexual with your clothes on so ... context matters. especially with reid.

ARE YOU SELECTIVE WHEN SHIPPING.

yes and no. all i really want is to have chemistry between muses && writing chemistry with the mun. we don't need to be besties irl ( and honestly these days i'm really wary becoming pals with people ooc ) but if our writing styles don't match or if i have a hard time staying mentally in the moment when i reply to you, it's going to be hard for me to ship with your muse. and that's nothing against anyone or a commentary on anyone's writing ... sometimes people's writing styles just don't jive and that's ok.

but also our muses have to have some sort of chemistry. especially someone like reid, who requires a bit of an emotional connection ( a lot of an emotional connection ) before he'll consider anything romantic or sexual.

WHO ARE OTHER CHARACTERS YOU SHIP YOUR CHARACTER WITH.

aside from gloria (@medicbled) i definitely ship him with evie's sharon (@thirt13n). we've chatted some about the dynamic there and it's super cute + they riff well off of one-another. she's very intelligent and patient with him and he certainly gets flustered around her in non-work settings because of that. but his comfort with and around her is pretty flawless because of her dedication to work and intelligence.

i'd also say mari's melissa (@stingslikeabee). melissa is a very shamelessly sensual woman who is very in-touch with her sexuality and it's a nice contrast to reid. she absolutely flabbergasts him and tongue-ties him which is cute, and it puts a fun spin on the conventional dynamics between man/woman relationships.

and that's the fun part with ships with reid, i think, is that he tends to take a more passive ( but not submissive ) role in the relationship because of his social anxieties, or generally being socially unaware, but is also very shamelessly in tune with feeling and expressing his emotions. so it's fun to see how he plays off of these absolutely strong and fierce women because they bring out a more confident spencer.

that being said, i am ... always open to more ships. i love them, and ships are a very fun way to explore nuances and developments in a muse.

DOES ONE HAVE TO ASK TO SHIP WITH YOU.

for the sake of being clear that we're on the same page, i'd say yes. there's a strong chance i can see a ship happening / working in some fashion. if there's chemistry between muses, if the plot makes sense, and if there's equal interest then i'm probably down to try it out.

that being said, i'm not picky. as stated above - if i can see it happening, i'm willing to try it out.

ARE YOU SHIP OBSESSED OR SHIP MORE-OR-LESS.

i obsess over ships i know have substantial growth for both parties and have equal interest from the writing partner. i think the reason i feature frigga so much ( aside from the fact that i love her ) is that she fundamentally understands spence in a way where i trust her to assume actions / thoughts about him because she knows his character and motivations. so it's really easy to hyperfocus them because i trust frigga, her writing, and know gloria relatively well ( or so i'd like to think .)

otherwise, while ships are really fun ways to develop a muse, it's not necessary. as a whole i'd say i'm ship more-or-less, but it's situational.

ARE YOU MULTISHIP.

absolutely.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVOURITE SHIP IN YOUR CURRENT FANDOM.

again, per CM canon i'm a big fan of reid and maeve. they were really sweet, and i think they really complimented one-another. i wish we got to see more of it.

FINALLY, HOW DOES ONE SHIP WITH YOU.

send in a meme. ask. express interest in spencer as a muse and character and interest in developing YOUR muse with me in that vein. i'm not gonna hold you - while spence is an expert at reading behavior and intention, i am not. just tell me if you feel it and we can go from there.

[utilitycaster]

Regarding people responding to the Gnarlrock scene between Imogen and Laudna by only focusing on how sad it makes Laudna, I have to wonder if it's another symptom of people ignoring what Laura Bailey does with her characters in favour of their own headcanons. There's a trend in fandom I've noticed, particularly in shipping spaces, that really "owo smol-bean"-ifies Imogen. Her problems exist not to drive her character forward and to give her conflict and development, but to be something Laudna can kiss and make better. So now that Imogen is having a (completely reasonable) issue with Laudna, people don't know how to reconcile that with the watered-down version of the character that exists in their heads.

I agree completely, and I'm grouping this with this other ask with which I also agree and then choosing extreme violence, after which I require that any further questions on this topic that aren't just "oh yeah makes sense" or whatever be both a. off anon and b. well-articulated with a reasoned argument and a thesis statement; anything else will be deleted.

Like, that's it in the end. How dare Laura's character be a independent being whose existence doesn't begin and end and fully center around someone else, whether it's her dead brother or a person with whom she's shipped? How dare she disagree with characters people like more? How dare she exercise any measure of agency that conflicts with the fandom's stupid-ass desires?

How dare Vex get married without Vax there even as he started his own relationship first and actively encouraged her to pursue her own romantic interests with her eventual husband? How dare she continue to live out her remaining 150 years of life without him and experience joy?

How dare Jester react positively when the person she'd indicated interest in reciprocated? How dare she choose a life of ongoing adventure and a home near her beloved mother instead of living as a housewife in a faraway foreign city where her god is illegal? How dare she not read the minds of the people who have crushes on her and know how they feel and respond accordingly?

How dare Imogen focus on her own, lifelong, painful problem and the loss of a potential solution instead of dropping everything and focusing on Laudna's problems instead? How dare she feel upset about this? How dare she get in the way of my fabricated picture of perfect girlfriends who have zero problems or obstacles?

How dare this woman be angry? How dare this woman have feelings I don't share about the situation? How dare this woman display even a shred of self-interest that isn't completely in service to someone else's goals? How dare that dumb bitch do what she wants and not what I want?

I deleted an ask this morning that was like "it feels like you're invalidating people who are sympathetic towards Laudna" like first off I'm specifically calling out people who are sympathetic towards Laudna and not towards Imogen which is absolutely crucial context and second of all yeah. I do not think you're valid. That's the fucking point. You're not entitled to my validation, and you don't have it. If you act like this? I think your opinions are garbage. If you need my agreement to feel valid, that's extremely not my problem (and, honestly, you're just giving me more proof as my whole point here is "sometimes people disagree with you and that is entirely their right and if you think the mere existence of disagreement is invalidating, you suck so fucking much.") Develop a sense of inherent self worth and/or develop better opinions, and either way, leave me out of it.

[aegor-bamfsteel]

Have you been keeping up with the HoTD? They’ve made different character choices from F&B - my absolute least favourite being the change to Aemond’s character as a quasi-Daeron (who isn’t in this season and may or many not exist in show cannon, and probably my favourite character in the book) who kills Luke through a series of unfortunate events (in fact the whole war seems to be a series of mistakes), to the point where people are having full blown discussions on here if Aemond should be the rightful heir due to how dutiful (gag) and dedicated he is. I feel that a lot of adaptations of asoaif completely fail to understand and include some of George’s larger themes - like nobility and feudal society having no regard for civilians, which later returns to haunt them. If they’re attempting making Aemond into a rival/foil for Aegon as an option for the greens, that shows me that writers have again failed to understand what GRRM is trying to put across. The character who rides a nuclear weapon that he uses indiscriminately, exhibits psychopathic traits and commits as close to what can be considered genocide in Westeros is getting a character makeover. The craziest part is HBO also wants to adapt Dunk & Egg, a series whose entire arc focuses on a Targaryen finally gaining a shred of empathy and emotional intelligence to understand that actually, you should care about the civilians you rule.

I’ve been keeping up with HOTD enough to make some low effort memes about it. I’m going to be saying “It’s Game of Thrones—civilians don’t count!” derisively every time they want us to care about these upcoming battles. Imagine adapting a series with one of the big messages that the smallfolk suffer the most in these wars—even when the cause seems right, like Robb Stark whose men terrorized the Westerlands/Crownlands—and concluding they don’t count. Can’t relate.

I was never a fan of Æmond in the novella except for how over-the-top terrible he is, kind of like Euron but fortunately without the rape aspect (his attachment to Alys I think is genuinely interesting, especially contrasted with his womanizing foil Dæmon). Daeron D is one of my favorite characters as well—as the generally good kid of the Greens who is in service to a bad cause, doesn’t want the throne, felt sickened by Tumbleton but still killed hundreds as he burned Bitterbridge out of blood revenge for his nephew, didn’t get to die heroically unlike his counterpart Addam Velaryon—so to have the character in the books who is a cartoon villain take some of these traits is cringeworthy for me. According to the same “civilians don’t count” show writer, we’re also supposed to be sorry for Aegon because he might not know what consent is (when the actor, who has half a brain, said maybe don’t make the character a child rapist if you want the audience to sympathize with him) Don’t worry; Daeron D exists in the show, as he’s been added to the Targ tree and will be in next season (Seven’s sake I have to come back here for a next season…and it’s going to be 2024), though what they’re going to do with him is anyone’s guess (I mean they got rid of Rhaenyra’s romantic friendship with Laena in the show for Alicent, and killed Laena off graphically the first chance they got). I agree with everything you said except about Egg. His treatment of the Blackfyres/their supporters in refusal to show mercy, his enabling Aerys’ corrupt regime, and especially his actions at Summerhall show he was just as dragon-crazy and entitled as the rest of them.

thanks for the ask.