#also can we still say animu or....?

[flawseer]

In your last ask, you mentioned misgivings with Book 10's ending, and especially how it pertains to Winter. I absolutely agree, and I know why, but I wanna hear your thoughts on it, too: What's up with Book 10?

The following is a (very long) examination of my personal feelings with regards to the WoF second story arc finale. While it is based on what is in the text, this analysis will be interpretive and fill in blanks with my own thoughts. Keep that in mind.

Hahhhh... okay. Since mentioning it in my last post I’ve gotten several requests to talk about my feelings regarding the second arc finale. There’s probably no way around it then.

If you haven’t read that last post (it was admittedly very long, and so will this one be), I talked briefly about why I didn’t like that part of the story. I have to warn you now, this will likely be the most negative and dour post in the history of this blog. In a few parts it will sound like I hate Wings of Fire, and I want to say now, while I still have the chance, that I don’t. I love this series, thinking about its setting and characters brings me joy.

I also—very emphatically—want to make it clear that I have no ill will against Tui T. Sutherland. I’ve looked around other people’s stuff a bit and there are a huge number of posts wishing violence upon her or threatening her for doing things to her series that people don’t agree with. That is NOT what I am doing here, shit like that is NOT okay! While I will be critical of her choices, I still respect her effort of bringing this vibrant, wonderful world of dragons to all of us.

Also, obligatory last disclaimer: If you liked the finale, that is okay. You are valid for feeling that way. I’m here to share my point of view, not to demand people agree with everything I say. Just be warned that you most likely won’t enjoy what I have to say. If you don’t think you can handle that kind of criticism, this is your guilt-free opportunity to stop reading.

Otherwise, let's get into it.

CW: Discussion of parental abuse, depression, disease, and extreme acts of violence.

In defense of the finale

Before I start to systematically disassemble this narrative and get lost in a quagmire of negativity, let’s talk a bit about the circumstances that brought forth this part of the story. The plot of this arc was a mess from the moment animus magic was unshackled from the restrictions it had in the first arc, and from then on there was no longer any conceivable way to end this story in a clean way. Sutherland had created an invincible, unbeatable, omnipotent villain; he could read minds, see the future with perfect clarity, and anything he could imagine he could conjure into existence at any time with no cost to himself and no drawbacks. She was likely wracking her brain about how to resolve this impossible conundrum. What we got wasn’t good, but I believe nothing could have been. The foundation was rotting and by the fifth book it couldn’t bear the weight of the plot anymore.

The thing about animus magic in arc 2 is that it is so potent, so all-powerful, and so free of restraint that everyone who uses it also HAS to be a simpleton, or they would be able to break the plot immediately and become god. From the moment Darkstalker broke out of that mountain, he could have said “Any and all spells that are cast with the intention to harm me, interfere with my plans, or do something I don’t consent to will not work, from now on until forever”, and he would have instantly won. The strawberry would have fizzled out. The Darkstalker-blocking earrings would not have been created, and no one could have saved the Icewings. On the flipside, Turtle or Anemone could have said “I enchant the concept of animus magic itself to no longer obey Darkstalker”, and his threat would have been neutered. Point is, powers as potent and easy to use as this really need limitations, or they will quickly eat your plot alive.

I don’t envy the situation Sutherland was in at the time at all. If you’re an author, that kind of thing is a nightmare. It really is no wonder she decided to blow up animus magic for good in her next arc, even if I would have preferred it to get more healthy restrictions instead of killing it outright.

The Darkstalker age regression thing

Everyone has talked this part to death already, but if I am to write a thorough analysis of my feelings regarding this finale, I’m going to have to talk about it as well. I’m sorry if I end up repeating a lot of things you’ve already heard.

This final fate of Darkstalker, to have his memories wiped and be reset to an infant, is really uncomfortable. As far as I am aware, though correct me if I’m wrong, Sutherland said in an interview that she didn’t want Darkstalker to die because, in her view, he did not deserve to. We can debate here about the philosophical question of whether anyone is truly deserving of death, and the merits of “justice” and “punishment”, but in general, Wings of Fire did not seem to have any issues killing off its villains prior if they committed suitably terrible acts. That makes this moment stand out as noteworthy.

Who is Darkstalker then--and if we assume villains can be “deserving” and “not deserving” of death--what about him speaks in his favor, or against? The guy had a pretty crappy childhood, coming from a broken home (there is that inadequate parent theme again). He genuinely loved his sister and felt protective of her, and whenever he liked someone he wanted them to be happy and feel affirmed. The thing that Queen Diamond does to his mother is awful and he is justified in hating her for it. He is also portrayed as rather sympathetic in Moon Rising. When he asks Moon to find his scroll for him and not to leave him, he is not manipulating her, he is sincerely begging for her help. He is stuck somewhere underground, trapped in darkness, in a space so tiny that he can’t move. He remains that way for months, lonely and sad. If you just focus on these aspects, it’s easy to understand why he has so many fans who want him to see healthy and happy.

On the flipside, while he is dedicated to the happiness of his friends, he doesn’t always go for the most ethical way to achieve it. He tries to brainwash said friends without their consent whenever they exhibit behaviors he doesn’t like, or when he thinks he knows better and wants to “fix” them. He has very little regard for other people’s autonomy, lies to his loved ones with alarming frequency, and is unhealthily attached to the idea of power. Those things are certainly not good, but they are his character flaws. These are his demons; everyone has them and they make him a person. If this was all there was to it, he might still be a villain, but I’d argue he’d not be wholly irredeemable.

But there are things about him that take him beyond the pale. Things that go beyond the realm of just being misunderstood, or easily excusable.

He is possessive. He wants Clearsight and Fathom for himself, and for them to listen to him primarily. When Indigo makes it clear she doesn’t like him and cautions Fathom against trusting him, he deceives his friends and traps Indigo in a wood carving, just so he can isolate Fathom from his support network and manipulate him easier. He alters Clearsight’s mind to make her more agreeable and stop her from holding him accountable for his actions; while he thinks he loves her, he only loves an idealized version of her that is wholly devoted to and unquestioning of him. This is why, when he later forcibly overwrites Fierceteeth’s existence to recreate her (which is another horrific thing), he tries to excise the parts he finds undesirable to create a perfect version of his lover. But this caricature he has created in his head is not and can never be Clearsight, which frustrates his attempts.

He is vengeful. Not against people who have actually wronged him, like Queen Diamond. That would be questionable, but understandable. What makes this unacceptable is his frequent targeting of innocent people who just happen to be related to the person who wronged him in some esoteric way. He enchants a secret murder knife that kills random Icewings regardless of who they are or what they think about the Queen, just because the one who took his mother from him happened to share their tribe. He hates Turtle and wishes death upon him in Moon Rising just because he is a green Seawing, like Fathom was. And then there is the big one: He tries to kill all the Icewings who are alive in the present day, where Queen Diamond is long dead and none of them have ever even met her. Even his mother, who suffered from Diamond’s actions the most and has the most reason to hate her, is horrified and calls him out on that one.

And lastly, he is sadistic. He revels in torturing those he hates. He forces his father to disembowel himself, while the latter is fully aware and powerless to resist AND the man’s traumatized daughter is watching. Later he sends a magical plague to kill every single living Icewing sans one.

It should be noted that Darkstalker possesses virtually infinite magical power; whatever he declares, with very few exceptions, will happen. Even if he wanted them dead, he had the power to prevent unnecessary suffering. He could have said “Arctic, fall dead instantaneously”, or “Every Icewing will fall asleep and pass away peacefully,” but he didn’t. He wanted them to feel pain and pass away in the most wretched, agonizing ways he could imagine.

So what he chose to do instead is—and I want you to picture this for a moment—Darkstalker sat down, calmly, and said “Henceforth every living Icewing, excepting Prince Winter and those of hybrid blood, will fall ill with an incurable disease. This disease will cause heavy internal bleeding and make its victims cough up blood and waste away for a few days, followed by certain death.”

This spell does not discriminate with regards to who its victims are. The book glosses over the implications, but imagine the ramifications. Young children are notoriously frail, how many newborns got infected and died because of this? How many families were torn apart because they couldn’t get the magic earrings fast enough? Or accidentally got one earring less than there were family members and had to decide who has to die?

Most of the Icewings were physically cured by the earrings, but an experience like that sticks with you for the rest of your life. Somewhere surely, a dragonet watched as his mother put the earring on him and then slowly wasted away because she didn’t have one for herself.

It’s really easy to overlook how horrific this spell is because it isn’t shown or dwelt on. But the trauma, grief, and suffering it caused must have been immeasurable.

And none of those victims have ever even met the person Darkstalker wanted to get revenge on. None of those deaths meant anything to anyone.

The attempted death toll and scale of the calamity here puts even Scarlet to shame. The ones who come closest to it were Queen Battlewinner and Morrowseer with their attempted Rainwing extermination. All three of those died for what they did. Gives you some food for thought for sure.

Peacemaker’s burden

Despite just airing all of his dirty laundry and declaring him an irredeemable villain, I actually do have a lot of sympathy for Darkstalker still. His story is really sad. He was a child born with an amount of power that nobody should possess, and it corrupted him to the point where it destroyed his life before it began. His parents were always fighting and no matter how good his intentions were, he was unable to understand why he couldn’t hold on to his friends and relationship. He kept making mistakes, then made bigger mistakes to fix those, until his hands were covered in blood and he couldn’t stop anymore. My belief is that, after he wakes up in the present and realizes Clearsight is dead, he loses his reason for living and becomes completely lost in his grief.

Therefore, my opinion is that it would have been appropriate for him to die. If not to punish him, then to finally grant him reprieve from all that rage and pain, and let him rest. I think that would have been a dignified end.

But instead he got turned into a baby. ... And then they decided to magically erase his father’s blood from him? I don’t know what it is, but something about that Icewing erasure makes my skin crawl?

The thing that turns this baby twist from weird into highly unsettling is the context. Darkstalker’s mind is erased, then modified into a new person via animus magic. This is the technique a lot of this arc’s villains used to victimize Hailstorm, Queen Ruby, Peril, Kinkajou, Fierceteeth, and Winter. The same technique is now used again, by the heroes, which is a dangerous thing to have your protagonists do if you want them to remain morally upright.

It is also very reckless, because in almost all of these instances, animus mind alteration has been shown to be very unreliable. The spells seem to wear down over time and are susceptible to partial breaking upon encountering certain strong stimuli. Hailstorm—while trapped as Pyrite—seems to retain trace amounts of his former memories, which is why Pyrite is subconsciously drawn to Winter and clings to him all the time. Ruby is able to ignore half of her conditioning because her familial love for her son partially overpowers the magic. Qibli is just straight up able to reason his way out of it.

The thing to note here is that spells of this nature require a very meticulous approach; you can’t half-ass your reprogramming or the victim will just think their way past it. If you alter someone’s mind, the wording of the spell must be ironclad, lest you risk it wearing down over time and even break.

Luckily we have nothing to fear in that regard, because the spell that created Peacemaker was written by a Rainwing with a total of four days of literacy training. No one better mention the name Clearsight to the new baby Nightwing, or next month is going to be rather interesting.

But that’s just speculation on my part. Let’s assume that, somehow, this spell isn’t as unstable as all the others. Somehow Kinkajou threaded all the needles, and masterfully dodged every conceivable pitfall to pen the perfect incantation, despite having been illiterate just a few weeks prior. This one is built to last and Darkstalker is sealed away really thoroughly, for good.

That is still absolutely terrible and morally dubious, because now you have Peacemaker, who for all intents and purposes is a COMPLETELY innocent little kid, saddled with this huge burden of being the certifiable reincarnation of a genocidal ancient wizard. He’s gonna grow up thinking things like “Mommy gets real quiet whenever the topic of the Icewing tragedy is brought up,” and “Why does Auntie Moon look at me like that? One time she accidentally called me a weird name, who is Darkstalker?” “What is this ‘Clearsight’ name my mind-reading friends from the village found in Mommy’s mind?”

In a village that will be full of mind-readers soon, eventually the secret will come out, and Peacemaker is going to learn what was done to him. A huge, messy load of undeserved baggage was forced onto this completely separate, innocent entity. He will be devastated. Whether he then chooses to forgive them for this remains to be seen. To be honest, he would be well within his right not to, and turn resentful.

Poor kid.

Qibli’s callousness

I love Qibli, he is one of my favorite characters. This happens to be his book, and the fact that I fundamentally dislike half of it makes me rather sad. If anything, I hope this tells you that I’m not just hating on it for my personal amusement. I really wanted to like this. I tried to, and I couldn’t.

Qibli is really weird in this one, to be honest. He is suddenly made to be co-dependent on Moonwatcher, fawning over her every third paragraph, saying how much he loves her, how he is an incomplete and dysfunctional wreck without her, how it physically pains him to be apart from her, oh if only the stars would grant his wish and split the mountains apart so that he may fly to his princess, his muse, his goddess of ebony wit. It gets so old.

And it’s not Qibli. He never acted this clingy towards Moonwatcher. It’s more intense than even Winter gets about Moon, and Winter was actually depicted with a crush on her in book 6. Qibli was always just a supportive element, eager to befriend Moon but never desperate, like he is going to keel over if he is separated from his true love five minutes longer. These very frequent love declarations feel so forced coming out of him. It strikes me like it was just written in service of the love triangle. Maybe if we make him confess his love every four seconds readers will overlook the fact that they had no proper romantic build-up.

You might rightly accuse me of bias. I have previously admitted I am fond of Qibli/Winter as a romantic pairing, on the surface this seems like I am just not happy with my pet ship being blocked by Moonwatcher. But I assure you, I am actually pretty flexible and accommodating even towards pairings that contradict my preferences. I have no issues with Winter/Moonwatcher, for example, because the possibility was properly established and they have good romantic chemistry in Winter Turning. In theory, I would have no problem with Qibli/Moonwatcher either if it was ever set up as an interesting romantic dynamic. But to me, it seems like Qibli is written as a good, supportive friend to Moon for four books, only to pivot hard into “Moon moon moon moon moon moon swoon” at the last second, and it just reads to me as obnoxious.

I got distracted. This section is called “Qibli’s callousness”, and I haven’t even talked about the main part.

Qibli and Winter have excellent chemstry together, whether you read it as romantic or platonic—both of these interpretations have merit and are set up. They’re always the highlight of any scene they’re in. Throughout the story arc you get the impression that these two really get on each other’s nerves, but they bond and grow into really strong friends who bicker a lot but have each other’s backs when it counts.

Then there is a scene where Qibli casually tells Winter that he wouldn’t object if someone wanted to mind-control away some of Winter’s more objectionable traits.

This is genuinely a terrible thing to say to your friend. Like, it crosses a line and ceases to be harmless banter; you’re just telling them that there is something you hate about them so much that you wish they were someone else. Winter actually WAS mind-controlled earlier and felt (and proably still feels) guilty about having attacked Qibli in that state. And now Qibli says “Hey, I wouldn’t mind if someone did that to you again! Hue hue!”

It is awful, BUT I don’t necessarily object to Qibli saying this here. Qibli is in the middle of his character arc at this moment, so he is expected to be flawed. He is making a mistake by thoughtlessly telling Winter this horrid thing, and it seems like a believable continuation of his current character track. This is a reasonable development as long as the plot acknowledges that it’s a mistake.

Spoilers: The plot doesn’t acknowledge that it’s a mistake. Qibli never has a scene after where he reflects upon what he said and apologizes to Winter. When Darkstalker has Qibli trapped in his mountain jail and mind-wipes Qibli’s grandfather into a toddler (hey, wait a minute), Qibli gets visibly disturbed. Like, this is so off-putting to him that he gets queasy and Darkstalker hastily changes the spell. That could have been a great way to bring this back. Like in the epilogue, have Qibli track down Winter and tell him about disturbing baby grandpa theater and how he realized that wiping people’s minds is actually messed up and should have never said that to him.

But he doesn’t. He just lets Winter go, allowing him to believe he is broken and needs magical intervention to be tolerable. It leaves me to think that maybe he’s still okay with it, and fantasizing about rewriting his friend’s mind. Great.

Moonwatcher’s character death

You will find as this goes on that, I get the impression that the second half of this book takes all of the wonderful, endearing characters I have learned to love throughout the story and replaces them with really mean, or stupid, or otherwise inaccurate caricatures.

Moonwatcher’s relationship with Darkstalker gets plenty of setup and development in Moon Rising. You get the sense that these two could be great friends if their circumstances were a little different. It does a great job at making you think maybe Darkstalker is just misunderstood; maybe Moon should free him from his predicament.

Then at the end of Escaping Peril comes the emotional gut punch. Darkstalker actually IS a villain. He callously admits to Moonwatcher that he used his magic to make his own father gruesomely disembowel himself. Moonwatcher is horrified and disgusted that he would do that. There is no circumstance in which something like that would ever be okay. She ends the scene awash in tears because the person she thought was her friend is a murderer and a sadist. This is good, that is a natural reaction to what she was just told.

A few hours from there, in Talons of Power, Turtle finds Moon again and she is completely cool with Darkstalker walking free, despite crying her eyes out after feeling so betrayed earlier. That may seem strange, but this is still good because later, Darkstalker’s mind control plot is discovered. This scene was obviously written to set that up, Moon is mind-controlled into forgetting that Darkstalker could do something that morally reprehensible, and thus forgives him. This is also completely in line with his characterization in Legends: Darkstalker. It’s a kind of stunt he would pull to get Clearsight to shut up about him slipping into villainy.

In my earlier post I alluded to a moment where Moon is set to narrative auto-pilot and says something so rampantly off-kilter that it does irreversible, permanent damage to her character. It happens here, in the second half of book 10. Qibli gives Moon the Darkstalker protection earring, and Moon, somehow, says “I’m not being mind-controlled, Darkstalker really is my friend.”

I get what the plot tries to do here. It’s taking this concept of mind-control and adding a nuance, in an attempt to flesh out Darkstalker and give his character depth. He is ready to control everyone in the world, but for Moon, who is his best friend in this era, he wants her to remain herself. Perhaps this is his attempt at attonement for playing with Clearsight’s mind and driving her away from him. It is very touching in a way, viewed in isolation.

Unfortunately, it does not work with the full context of all the books. Because Moon is in auto-pilot mode right now, her main character trait is “Darkstalker=Friend,” so naturally she would speak in support of him. But this revelation has devastating retroactive consequences. The earlier scene that was written with Moon under mind-control is now altered into her having been in her right mind! She is completely okay with Darkstalker’s admittance to cold-blooded torture and evisceration, within hours of being so shocked by it that it made her cry and ready to denounce him. That is such a quick turnaround it’s giving me whiplash. And what’s more it turns Moon from a principled, upstanding girl into a sociopath who casually accepts gruesome torture and murder if it is committed by someone she likes.

Did Sutherland forget about the scene two books ago, where Darkstalker’s actions were so inconceivably horrid for Moon to learn of that she started crying? It baffles me that this made it into the final version. Her saying she was never mind-controlled makes Moon come off as so awful. This torture-excusing lunatic is not the same kind-hearted and insightful character I followed in all the other books.

Kinkajou’s character derailment

The world is a sad place when I have to question the way Kinjajou is written. Fortunately she is mostly fine, despite her having the biggest excuse to act out-of-character since she’s the victim of a mind-altering spell. Her only real moment of “what!?” comes at the end.

I already talked about her role in casting the spell that regresses Darkstalker into an infant. But I didn’t mention how her being the source of it is questionable in itself.

The clue is in the first paragraph of this section: She herself has experienced the effects of invasive mind-alteration. She was cursed by Anemone in the previous book to be in love with Turtle, and kind of half-struggles kind of not with it, it’s really strange. Turtle is appropriately horrified and acts like really awful things are happening, but then it’s mostly played lightly for some reason. My assumption is that Sutherland introduced this plot point, but then realized how uncomfortable this premise really is and tried to downplay it until the story got to a point where it could get done away with.

But I think the takeaway is still supposed to be that this was a horrid thing to do (which it absolutely is), and that Kinkajou will have to spend a lot of time trying to untangle her real emotions from the fake ones the spell created.

The point is: Kinkajou knows first-hand how awful it is to do something like that to another person. Ideally she should never even conceive of the idea to cast a spell like that, but if we’re really set on this Darkstalker baby thing and it has to happen, she should at least be a bit hesitant about it. And afterwards she should struggle with the guilt of having resorted to it. Not celebrate it and be proud, like it’s funny.

The assassination of Winter’s future

Now we come to the part I’ve alluded to previously; the part where all of these threads converge to utterly destroy one character and drive him to the brink of ruin. Let’s talk about Winter.

Prince Winter is the son of Tundra and Prince Narwhal, hatching in the same clutch as his sister Icicle. He spent his formative years being unfavorably compared to said sister—who easily took to traits that Icewing royalty considers desirable—whereas Winter struggled greatly to embody those same ideals. He was just a little too kind, too merciful, too gentle. As a result he often had to endure abuse from his parents, who made him feel like he was defective.

Because he was young and didn’t have any other frame of reference, he embraced this abusive narrative and began to drive himself with a vigor unreasonable for someone of his age. He scraped and cloyed for every bit of credit he could get, obsessing over advancing up the circle rankings in an attempt to “purge” the wrongness out of himself. To make his parents as proud of him as they were of Icicle.

This never worked. He was always seen as the runt, poised to embarrass the family name. Whatever he did, no matter how hard he strived, there was always something he could have done better.

The only real source of love and affirmation in his life was his older brother, Hailstorm. Where everyone else only saw what Winter wasn’t, Hailstorm embraced his brother despite of his “failings” and was openly affectionate with him. When Winter was with him, it was okay to not think about rankings all the time, and just be himself for a bit. I assume Hailstorm fulfilled a similar role for Icicle as well, which is why both of them love him dearly, and Icicle destroys her own life to bring him back.

Winter also has a fascination with scavengers, possibly because they are small and perceived as useless, like he himself is. He likely feels a kinship with them and observes them being craftier and more adept than everyone else sees them. This is therapeutic for him, to see that a thing can have merit even if no one wants to see it.

One day, he and Hailstorm sneak into Skywing territory so Winter can catch a scavenger as a pet. This excursion turns hostile when they are discovered by a roaming Skywing troop and faced with the prospect of capture, possibly execution. In a gambit to save Winter from this fate, Hailstorm mirrors the words of his parents, calling Winter pathetic and useless, so the Skywings will not think of him as a threat and show mercy. His act succeeds in convincing the Skywings, but it also convinces Winter, who does not understand Hailstorm only said these things to save his life. He returns home—believing his brother hated him all along—to face the wrath of his furious family for losing them “the desirable son”.

For all of his life, these themes have repeated themselves and haunted him. “I was born wrong and defective,” “I am unlovable,” “No one wants me.”

A few months after the war ends, Winter is one of the five Icewings enrolled in the newly founded Jade Mountain Academy. Shortly after departing, he unexpectedly returns home, having successfully rescued his older brother and bringing him back. He is made to believe that this erases his mistakes, his mother even pays him a backhanded compliment, an uncharacteristically “nice” gesture. He is promoted to the top of the rankings, finally his parents are proud of him.

But of course it is all a trick. The “adoration” afforded to him was all a ploy. Secretly, his parents abused power and tradition to arrange for Winter’s death. They force him into a lethal trial they intentionally rigged against him, all to finally erase that stain on their family’s honor.

Winter finally realizes the true nature of his parents’ opinion of him. Even when he succeeds, and does everything right, he is still defective, unlovable, and unwanted. He will never be anything else to his family. And so he leaves his homeland, pretending he is dead, resigned to live in hiding forever.

During this time, while at the brink of despair, Winter is able to draw strength from one source: His new friends from the academy. He vocalizes that, for all the abuse he suffered at the hands of his birth family, he fervently believes that THEY would never do anything like that to him. They chose to stuck with him, even when he was awful, and told him he was not hopeless. He was not a mistake; he could be deserving of love.

So naturally, he returns to them; they accept him readily, are willing to be his new surrogate family. When he almost burns to death at a later point, they fear and weep for him. When Qibli sets out to confront his own abusive family, Winter, despite being mind-controlled into a placid potato at the time, feels concerned enough for his friend’s safety to insist to come along (returning the favor of them accompanying him in his time of need in book 7). When Darkstalker’s mind control forces Winter to attack Qibli, he is shown ashamed and guilty of it once the control wears off again.

They bicker and struggle, and make mistakes, they break up but always come back together again. Time and time again the one thing that is always reinforced: When the cards are down, Winter loves his friends, and they love him. They would never intentionally hurt each other, or give up on each other.

I want you to keep in mind how wholesome, and loving, and mutually supportive this ramshackle band of misfits has been portrayed to this point... Because we’re moving on to the arc 2 finale, and it will do everything it can to corrupt all of it and consign Winter to a life of misery.

We arrive at aforementioned scene, where Moonwatcher receives her earring. Just a little bit prior, Winter had learned that Darkstalker unleashed a magical plague onto his people in an attempt to wipe them out. Now here is Moonwatcher, revealing that she is not under any spell, and has aligned herself with this guy willingly, speaking fondly of him as if he was a dear friend who never did any wrong. Winter takes this badly and accidentally breaks a vase; the narrative lingers on this moment and really tries to sell us on how unreasonable Winter’s reaction is, how he is overreacting, but let’s examine that interpretation for a moment.

Moonwatcher doesn’t yet know about the attempted Icewing genocide, but she DOES know about Darkstalker being okay with casting spells to inflict immeasurable torture upon those he hates. WE know that she knows this, so her stance here is already suspect. Yet she goes on to praise Darkstalker and refer to him as a friend. Look at this from Winter’s perspective. This “friend” of Moonwatcher just tried to kill his entire tribe, and he actually succeeded in killing his aunt, Queen Glacier, a person Winter greatly respects. Winter is currently unable to return to his homeland for fear of being branded a traitor. Even if he could return, he knows his obstinate and spiteful family would prevent him from attending the funeral, meaning he is not even afforded the basic dignity of saying farewell to his aunt. The aunt whom Darkstalker murdered by making her vomit her own blood until she withered away in her bed. And here is Moon, absolving the person who did this to Glacier from his appalling actions, despite knowing full well what Darkstalker is capable of and choosing to look away.

I don’t know about you, but I think I can forgive the grieving, emotionally overwhelmed boy for shattering a little pottery after hearing his trusted friend—who held his hand when he was dying—say that the guy who makes people disembowel themselves and wipes out entire countries may be misunderstood and not so bad. I think I would have a similar reaction. In fact, I would never want to talk to her ever again.

There is no way I can read this scene in which Moon doesn’t come off as either an absolute lunatic, or critically stupid and callous. In fact, based on her earlier behavior I half-expect her to get over the news of the attempted Icewing massacre in a couple hours, saying “Eh, it’s kinda bad, but you just have to do these kinds of things sometimes, you know? I’m sure he had his reasons.”

Then there is the part where Qibli makes his off-color comment about how Winter’s brain could really use a good wash. I already went into how it could have worked but didn’t. But with the timing here, we’ve already had Moon spit on their friendship, so as Winter’s other closest friend, it naturally follows that Qibli also craps on his feelings.

Consider the context: Winter comes from an abusive household where his parents forcibly tried to change him away from who he was to purge the “wrongness” from him. When they betray him and he narrowly escapes their attempt on his life, he re-affirms his belief in his friends, and the knowledge that they wouldn’t treat him like that gives him the strength he needs to keep going. But now, Qibli asserts that Winter DOES need to be altered, thereby AGREEING with Winter’s abusive parents, rendering Winter’s affirmation from book 7 erroneous. Qibli WOULD treat him like that if it made Winter less “intolerable”.

Neither Moonwatcher nor Qibli ever make an attempt to repair this rift. Winter is left betrayed and alone.

Stuff happens, and the forces of the Nightwings and Icewings come to blows over Jade Mountain. With his two closest friends having written him off and his support network eroded, Winter relapses into thinking he is worthless, seeks validation in unquestioning patriotism, and realigns himself with his abusive family by throwing himself into the battle. Nobody wants him to, in fact his parents still hate him for it, but whatever. His father dies and his mother blames him for it.

Meanwhile Turtle, Anemone, and Qibli are cooking up a solution to the battle problem. They have the idea to make everyone’s minds connect in a huge empathy wave for a few moments, which I think is a pretty interesting idea for what it’s worth. But then they teleport both armies back to their homes, and the spell sweeps Winter up with them, taking him out of the rest of the finale and bringing him to the Ice Kingdom. The characters say “whoops” but aren’t further concerned with the situation. It’s all a big laugh.

Let me remind you that Winter is currently considered not welcome on Icewing territory. His family, whom he was sent back with, is extremely abusive and vindictive. His friends know this. Said parents have previously arranged for him to be killed, and are still on record as wanting him dead. His friends KNOW this. And now he is alone with them and a gaggle of other royal Icewings who all are extremely pissed off at him for ruining their sacred trial site.

It is very possible that he is being torn apart and mauled by an enraged mob right now. He could be forced into captivity and flayed. Maybe the interim regent is sentencing him to death and getting the rope ready. There is a million different horrible things that could be happening to Winter right now, while he is trapped alone with people who hate him, things his friends would be reasonably able to anticipate. And nobody is doing anything to get him out of there, to suggest bringing him back, even though it would only take a single spoken sentence to do so! They aren’t even concerned!

Then the climax happens, strawberry thing and all, and we get the coup de grâce. After all is said and done, the group decides that Winter is untrustworthy, and that they must protect the secret of Darkstalker’s fate from him, because they fear if he knew he would kill Peacemaker.

Moon, who read Winter’s mind in book 6 and reached out to him about how the “ruthless Icewing warrior” persona in his head is a facade and how she sees he has a gentle and good heart... Moon, who in book 7 finds out about Winter’s secret deal to kill Glory and STILL trusts him, who calls out his bullshit to his face because she KNOWS how kind-hearted Winter is and that he would never resort to murder... Moon who, again, held his hand while he was dying... thinks that the dragon she has reminded of his compassionate nature time and time again would kill an innocent child.

This is disgusting. Moon believing that is so far off the mark with regards to anything this group has embodied or done for any of the last 4 books, that my only conclusion can be that these are different characters. Maybe the Nightwing library collapsed on top of original Moon, and when Darkstalker magiced her back to health she came back wrong or something. I don’t know.

So after all of this, Winter is left alone. He somehow escaped from the Ice Kingdom; luckily there is a timeskip so we can just gloss over the horrible situation he was put in by his friends. He thinks about Jade Mountain. He reflects on everything that happened, how his parents never really loved him... How they hated him so much they tried to kill him... How he despaired, but found solace in his friends who loved him for who he was.... How those friends then betrayed him too and magiced him away... How they didn’t care about what happened to him... And he decides he is done. He won’t bother going back. A few people, probably Sunny, reach out to tell him he is welcome back, but he says “it wouldn’t be fair to other Icewings if an exile took up a bed”. The decision isn’t hard to make, after all there is nothing left for him there. Everyone has written him off, moved on and left him behind.

Kinkajou visits sometimes, tries to stay in touch, but that’s just how she is. Maybe the others sent her to check on whether he’s going to become troublesome. They don’t trust him. Better to keep an eye on him, he might kill the baby.

With nowhere else to go, Winter moves to Sanctuary, a place for rejects like him. I picture him standing there, at the edge of a cliff staring blankly into the distance. He is completely alone; no one wants to go near him or talk to him beyond the bare necessities. He could probably make new friends with the Talons of Peace if he tried, but there is no point. Why should someone like him have friends? It wouldn’t work. They’d just decide he is too inconvenient to be around. Sooner or later they would just tell him to leave anyway. It's better not to try, so he doesn't get hurt again.

And slowly it dawns on him. His parents had been right all along. It was never them, or the others, it was him. He is the problem. The Icewings said it, Qibli said it, Moonwatcher said it. There is just something fundamentally wrong with him.

He is defective. He is unlovable. Nobody wants him. He will never be anything, or have anyone. And so he stands at the cliff, looking over the broken vase fragments of his life... This is who he is. Prince Winter. A mistake.

And quietly, where no one knows or cares, he does the only thing he has left to do... he begins to weep.

As it is written, the tale of Winter is the story of a boy who is told he is wrong for being alive. He closes his ears and tries to keep walking forward, desperate to prove that he is not an error, that he has merit. But this book comes out and it unmistakably says that he doesn’t. He is nothing, and he deserves to have nothing.

And I just cannot accept that.

Why did this have to happen?

I think that the author was really struggling with the ending of this book. I’ve said before how much of a corner she wrote herself into with such an invincible villain. I think she came up with the strawberry idea as a solution to this problem. But as she was writing it, the characters kept fighting her. It was not a natural solution, not a decision the characters—as they were established—would ever make.

So concessions had to be made to force the issue. Established traits had to be bent slightly to make this plot work. The farther she went, the worse it got. The concessions piled up and turned into contrivances. Eventually the characters were no longer acting like themselves. Their bonds got stretched too far and some snapped. It’s a very tragic pitfall that occurs with long-running series.

I think Sutherland must have also been tired. Writing an entire book is a monumental task, and writing 6 connected ones even moreso. She also comes out with these things really quickly. Maybe she was burnt out? Maybe she wanted to be done and her attention lapsed. Maybe that’s why she forgot that Moon knew about the disemboweling. It seems reasonable to believe when you consider that the next story arc would make a relatively clean break from the problems of this arc, especially with regards to the magic system.

But I don’t know what ultimately happened, so I can only speculate. I reiterate, I bear no ill will against Sutherland for writing this. Even if I kind of hate everything about this finale, and very vocally wish it would be different, I don’t want this examination to generate (or reawaken) any hatred towards her, or to attack her personally. I understand the pain of an artist who gets trapped with something for too long and has to find the means, any means, to see it through to the end. I criticize the story, but I could never hate anyone for that.

But for me, I do not consider this half of the book as part of the story. The characters act too unnaturally for it to have happened. So to me, it didn’t. We don’t know what happened, maybe Darkstalker is still out there. Maybe they dealt with him. Maybe what actually happened is my crappy and self-indulgent rewrite of the ending which I will never show to anyone because it would be really embarrassing.

But whatever actually ended up happening, I am sure Winter never ended up at that cliff, pondering how worthless and meaningless his life was. He is currently at Jade Mountain, surrounded by friends who love him, and bickering with Qibli about the correct solution to their advanced calculus assignment that is due tomorrow.

Is there anything left to say?

Probably.

I didn’t talk about Anemone yet. You know, in the epilogue she enchants herself a bracelet that makes her “not be so mean all the time”. I find that creepy. To me it reads as Anemone voluntarily brainwashing herself with magic to erase her negative traits instead of growing past them naturally because she finds them undesirable and wants to work to change for the better. I would ordinarily assume that this is an overreaction on my part, and I’m just reading the scene wrong. But no, we just got through a part where the heroes brainwashing someone is treated as an unequivocal good and worthy of celebration, so I think my reading may actually be spot on. Why are we letting the little kid alter her own brain without supervision? Hello? Tsunami? Someone intervene maybe? This cannot be healthy.

Turtle stands out to me as the one bright spot in all of this. He (and Peril, but she’s mostly out of focus) remain as the only main characters of this arc who don’t have any mind-boggling out-of-character moments or sudden streaks of uncharacteristic callousness. I really like the part where Qibli goes to free Turtle from his captivity and plans to give him an earful about the comically unhelpful messages he’s been sending him. But when Turtle asks if what he did was helpful, Qibli sees how beaten down and exhausted Turtle is, and wordlessly drops his frustration to tell him “Yeah, they were helpful.” That is the true Qibli shining through for a moment, showing that he cares about the well-being of his friends.

Do I hate the pairing of Qibli/Moonwatcher? No. Well, I DO hate how it happened in the book, and how the story tried to assassinate Winter’s character to resolve the love triangle and make it happen. I don’t hate it on principle though. If you are a fan of Qibli/Moonwatcher and want to write fanfics about it, please do! I absolutely encourage you to do that! Maybe you can fix this mess and turn it into something that’s actually properly handled!

Mightyclaws keeps the power that Darkstalker granted him past the finale. That means all the spells that Darkstalker cast are technically still active. Does that mean the Icewings have to wear earrings for the rest of their lives? Do they get sick again if they take them off? Is Peril forever cursed to think of Darkstalker as a cool old uncle and has to somehow reconcile how everyone else thinks of him? How did the Nightwings relinquishing their powers work, do they have to wear the earrings forever too now?

And there is one more thing to mention.

My confession

You may have already intuited this, if you’ve been following the content of my blog. It is very heavily skewed towards the first and second arcs of the series. I would now like to confess something.

When I read the second half of book 10, I found it so disillusioning, Winter’s fate so upsetting... that I put down the series then and there. And I haven’t picked it back up since.

That’s right, I have not read arc 3. I don’t know if that makes me a fake fan. I know pretty much everything that happens in it, the controversial twist at the end, Pyrrhia coming back into the story later, Snowfall getting brainwashed by a piece of jewelry until she cares about a plot that had nothing to do with her or the fate of the Icewings, etc..

It’s not out of malice, or because it’s a new continent. The opposite in fact; I would have greatly prefered a clean break with a new setting—Bug-themed dragons in a slightly more contemporary, developed environment sounds fascinating and full of potential. I don’t hate Pantala or the new characters.

I just... I can’t really do this again. I can’t handle the thought of Pyrrhia coming back post-Darkstalker, with Winter showing up and talking to these guys again like nothing happened, seeming like a different person, joking around with them like his entire character wasn’t dragged through a mountain of manure to make the plot bend a certain way. I think as long as this is the ending that the story is continuing from, seeing that would just make me miserable.

Maybe I will just stay in the parts of the story that I fell in love with. And imagine a version of reality in which Pantala is allowed to exist on its own, where Swordtail was the fourth POV character of arc 3, where Queen Wasp stayed the villain throughout, and Snowfall got her own legends book about how she reformed Icewing society and fixed all the shit that poisoned Winter’s life, so future generations don’t have to suffer through the same stuff he did.

~~~~~

If you’re still with me, thank you for reading this far. I think this is everything I ever thought about the finale of the second story arc, so now I never have to talk about it again. Writing this was difficult. I found it crushing at times. This will probably stand as the only overtly negative post I have ever made on this blog. I love Wings of Fire, and I want to celebrate it. To add to it, not tear it down.

I hope this wasn’t too boring, or painful, or frustrating, or soul-crushing to read through. I’ll see you later, hopefully with a more constructive post.

[wings-of-fire-confessions]

I think a lot of people forget that Darkstalker was legitimately considering killing Clearsight after he figured out she stole his scroll. He thought to himself that maybe he won't have a queen by his side and then we cut to Clearsight's pov when she is making the bracelet with Fathom and she actually sees futures where Darkstalker kills her if her plan doesn't work. What makes it even worse when Darkstalker is twisting her wrist and asking where his scroll is, when Clearsight is able to slip the bracket on him and he is able to read Clearsight's mind for the first time in a long time she still loves him while he is seriously considering murdering her. Like hello why don't more people talk about this.

I also think people forget how much of a bastard Darkstalker was even in the beginning of the book. Like shortly after he met Fathom and Indigo he thought that Indigo was a threat and that he could kill the insta kill tail band thing he was wearing. The only reason why he didn't do it was because he thought a sad animus dragon with nothing to lose wouldn't exactly be the best thing for him or anyone else. Like I guess you could argue that's because Indigo threatened to kill him first but my gripe is that he's so sadistic when thinking about it he enjoys the idea of killing her way too much while Indigo is just traumatized from the entire Albatross situation and Darkstalker should have known because he can read minds and see the future but I guess not.

Also the fact that he doesn't really like it when Clearsight is with Listener, he never hangs out with them because and only joins with Clear after Listener leaves. Pretty sure this is because he doesn't like Listener for being suspicious of him. He also tries to read Clearsight's mind after she says she doesn't want him to do that by diverting her attention, even though she didn't fall for the disrespect for her boundaries and her feelings are still present even in the beginning.

Like I am not saying it would have been impossible for Darkstalker to actually realize that he is in the wrong and change his ways early on (and I only early on in the book my cut off point was when he enchanted Clearsight because that shit was just disgusting and actually unforgivable), but it would be difficult. And after he enchants Clearsight to not see the bad futures it would just be impossible because he starts seeing dragons as objects and becomes more dismissive of everyone else, also because that's the point where I think his actions become unforgivable.

So yeah Darkstalker is a dick and if for whatever reason I ever met him I am throwing hands, animus magic be damned.

.

[minkydinks]

Why HiveWings in canon do NOT have to be the result of tons of generations of detrimental incest (a hot take maybe)

@sarcasticrat @incorporeal-entity @daishitheprofessionalfool

It's a funny meme in the WoF community that HiveWings are incestuous abominations having all descended from a single dragon (Clearsight). But honestly I think a lot of the weirdness revolving around that idea is missing a fundamental piece of the way WoF genetics work.

It's relatively well known that when two dragon tribes hybridize, their offspring will primarily take after their mothers. Every. Single. Time. At most, there may be somewhat-even mixes of both parents, but the mother's tribe is still largely apparent. We see this with Whiteout, Darkstalker, Typhoon, and Sunny. Whiteout and Darkstalker appear primarily NightWing, like their mother Foeslayer (although Whiteout has a little more IceWing than Darkstalker). Sunny is mostly SandWing in appearance like her mother Thorn; enough that most regard Sunny as a regular SandWing that may just have a rare genetic anomaly. Typhoon confirms his mother as a SeaWing in his dialogue, when he mentions that his father is ill by the animus IceWing plague that Darkstalker caused.

What does this mean for HiveWings?

While it does still sound exhausting to have so many relatives, it's very plausible for her to have caused a branching new tribe with her genetics, WITHOUT inbreeding being involved in that process.

Because Clearsight is female, the VAST majority of her dragonets with BeetleWings would appear.... mostly NightWing! Mostly black scales!

Somewhat like this, if you assume this is relatively canon:

And, any of her daughters who decided to have dragonets themselves, would have ALSO had dragonets with primarily black scales, no matter WHO they married to. The black scales would have easily passed along hundreds (if not thousands) of dragons, without a single instance of genetically problematic inbreeding, so long as the direct descendants of Clearsight were female and had black scales. Regardless, no matter how many children Clearsight had, her daughters, granddaughters, great granddaughters and so on, would pass down her black scales to future generations; all of their Night/Beetle offspring would have taken after the mothers that appeared more NightWing-like, until eventually the form of HiveWings became most familiar because of the consistent mixing of the NightWing & BeetleWing physical traits.

Clearsight may well have only needed to EVER have 6 of her own dragonets total, for there to be a tribe split based on her genetics; depending on whether or not all of her dragonets chose to have families of their own (which we assume they all did). But, it is canon that Clearsight remarried several times, so we can assume she had more than 6; albeit probably not as many as your mind wanders into thinking. No slutshaming!!!! /j

Assuming she had 4 daughters and 2 sons, and each of her children had 3 dragonets of their own (predominantly female from her daughters and predominantly male from her sons), that would be 12 NightWing-dominant hybrids and 6 BeetleWing-dominant hybrids to kickstart the tribe splitting. It's perfectly plausible with the way canon genetics work.

What about SilkWings?

BeetleWings were a spread-out tribe, not existing purely in one location for their kingdom. So, while it's fun to theorize about SilkWings also being descendants of Clearsight, it's improbable at best (and disprovable at worst) that they're related in any way. It's theorized (and probably accurate) that BeetleWings had already been in the process of diverging into SilkWings, and Clearsight's arrival sped up that process significantly by reducing the population of non-diverging BeetleWings.

Incest had to happen at some point, didn't it?

I'm going to tentatively say, yes. But not in the way you're thinking.

At some point, after the BeetleWings had been bred out of existence and replaced by HiveWings and SilkWings, there HAS to be interbreeding of HiveWings at some point. And if ALL HiveWings are descended from Clearsight, that would mean that modern HiveWings are technically inbreeding by continuing to have eggs with other HiveWings, instead of more BeetleWings.

However, this is not as problematic as you'd think. (Stay with me here, this isn't proship territory. I promise.)

If we're looking at animals as a prospect, you'll notice that millions of extant species in REAL life are actually the result of similar conditions. Direct descendants of ancestors that they inherited their primary abilities and traits from, that have ultimately somewhat inbred.

You may be shocked (and even grossed out) to hear that we're actually all somewhat related, especially to those in our own countries. However, the reason incest between close relatives is considered immoral to people (and is illegal in many places, thankfully) is because of genetic anomaly. There is always risk to pass down genetic anomalies, I happen to have one myself! (A congenital defect of the heart that gives me two aortic valve flaps instead of three. This is a standard defect though and I promise I'm not an incest baby.) But the issue with inbreeding is just that it drastically increases the chances of such anomalies happening, the more closely related to an individual you are.

To put it more science-y, inbreeding only increases the chances of consequential or fatal anomalies if the offspring of two individuals contain alleles at the gene site that are identical from descent. In other words, there's a single ancestor shared from both the maternal and paternal sides. This becomes negligible when it's no longer probable to pass identical alleles from both sides; i.e, hitting about 6th degree (roughly second cousins once removed).

In other words, should someone interbreed with their second cousin-once removed, the chances of there being genetic anomalies or consequences are so low, that it's about as likely as if you had a child with any other person in the general population of your area. Your average shared DNA with that 2nd cousin-twice removed would be ~1.5%, which is actually lower than the default chance of any other average birth defect happening to the child of an unrelated couple (~3-4%). Genetic counsellors themselves state that they completely stop worrying about the potential for inbreeding-related fetal anomalies (AND moral code) once the relativity is 4th degree or further, because there is simply such a low chance of any defects, and it would be substantially different from marrying & reproducing with your siblings, parents, grandparents, and other direct relatives. Simply put, incestuous pairings are not black & white when it comes to more distant relation. Although direct relative pairings are inherently risky and therefore morally & ethically reprehensible by any means.

Dragons in Wings of Fire live to a maximum of about 130 years, and 2000 years had passed since Clearsight's arrival to Pantala. That's about 13 generations of dragons, give or take a few. We know based on the story told by Lady Scarab that a close relative of hers that she knew personally actually named the HiveWing tribe - implying that BeetleWings' extinction was actually relatively recent; within the last 200-400 years. Meaning that the genetic diversity of modern HiveWings is high enough that it would be incredibly unlikely for any random pair of HiveWings to pass down identical alleles to their child and cause significant issues.

So while, definition-wise, it is TECHNICALLY inbreeding, it is not a morally questionable issue because there are very few physically consequential results from their pairings; there have simply been FAR too many unrelated BeetleWings in their family trees for so long, that the VAST majority of HiveWings are as closely related to one another as the average city population in the United States.

Additionally, reptiles are not affected by incest the same way mammals are. The majority of unique pet trade reptile color morphs is a result of inbreeding for those colors; it's quite rare for them to have consequential anomalies as a result of such inbreeding as long as they aren't direct relatives only exclusively inbreeding with each other. Also these are magical fantasy dragons, so like. Shrug. I can't imagine incredibly distant relative consanguinity would affect them as badly as anything that's ever happened to British royalty.

(Also you didn't hear this from me, but MudWings are probably significantly more worrisome because of their monthly random breeding nights and no real semblance of family trees. I'd worry about them before worrying about tons of generations of hybrids with the genetic diversity of New York.)

[esamastation]

lil bit of AC x Temeraire

"Translation error," is Clay's verdict.

"Translation error," Desmond repeats dubiously, staring down at him.

"Yes."

"Uh-huh. And that means what, exactly?"

So many things that he doesn't understand, it turns out. Stuff like how Animus code works and how badly it was originally designed, Abstergo trying to derive from the First Civilisation's work and how it was bungled up. Add into the mix human DNA - Clay's - being translated into Animus simulation which was then translated into whatever the Grand Temple had going on for itself which was then translated yet again into the background processing of the universe, plus the delightfully unstable addition of stray thoughts and the fact that Desmond has slight Piece of Eden infection and apparently the placebo effect is actual fucking magic -

"What?" Desmond asks helplessly.

"Stalk it up as a glitch in the Matrix, times a thousand," Clay concludes. "And don't worry about it."

"Um. No, I don't think I can," Desmond says, emphatically, and motions at him. "Clay, you're a dragon."

Clay looks down at himself, at his sinuous body of pale gold and burnished bronze. He's not a very big dragon, about the size of a big dog maybe, but he's still very clearly a dragon. Wings and tail and talons and all.

Clay looks up at him, and his voice is sardonic. "Wow, your Eagle Vision must be levelling up, Desmond, your observational abilities are off the charts!"

Desmond folds his arms. "I'm also observing that there's something wrong with the Grand Temple," he says flatly.

Clay swings his long necked head around this way and that, taking in the ancient volcanic cave around them. "Looks the same to me."

"All our stuff is gone, Clay. And I seem to recall that part having collapsed. It looks pretty uncollapsed to me. Also, the barrier is up again," Desmond points at the glowing Isu-tech barrier between them and the device Desmond is pretty sure he just activated. "Are you seeing the barrier, Clay, the barrier I spent the last week's of my life opening?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Seventeen, you're not dead yet."

"Clay," Desmond says, even flatter.

The dragon blows out an acrid smelling breath. "Okay, fine, I did maybe attempt a little bit of time travel," he says defensively. "You would've too if you realised what the Grand Temple could really do!"

"Which is… time travel?"

"Pretty much anything that your little mind can come up with, actually."

Desmond gives him another one over and folds his arms. "Like turning you into a dragon."

"Manipulating probabilities is one hell of a thing," Clay agrees and nudges his side with his nose. Snout? "But the dragon bit is definitely a translation error. I was trying to recode myself into an Isu," he adds, very quickly under his breath. "Not a winged reptile with an upset stomach."

"You - what?"

Clay avoids looking him in the eye and huffs out an embarrassed breath. "Also you're not dead. You're welcome for not being dead," he says pointedly.

Desmond stares at him for a long moment before letting out a sigh and letting it go. "Thanks. You have an upset stomach?" he then asks.

"It kinda hurts, yeah," Clay murmurs, shifting his weight a little, and just then there's an audible gurgle from somewhere within him, his draconic belly rumbling.

Desmond lets his hands drop to his sides. "You're hungry?" he asks incredulously.

"I haven't eaten anything in almost a year, Desmond, have some sympathy."

"Yeah, well, you were dead," Desmond says, making a face, and then hesitates. "I should be dead."

"That's what Juno wanted to happen anyway," Clay agrees and unfurls his wings tentatively. "Again you're welcome."

"Right. You… saved me. And brought us back in time," Desmond says slowly and frowns  "When exactly are we?"

Clay spreads out his wings and shakes himself. "If I didn't mess up the calculations, maybe two hundred years back in time."

"Uh. Why two hundred years?"

"It's enough time to fast forward industrial revolution without breaking history too badly," Clay says almost flippantly and gives him a look. "And all your major ancestors have procreated and died and so if we mess up time, there's still a good chance you will be born."

Desmond blinks. "That's," he starts to say and then isn't entirely sure how to continue. It's not exactly comforting, not exactly worrisome. It's something in between with a little bit of existential horror thrown in. "Okay," he settles on saying, feebly. "And what are we going to do? Just cause an early industrial revolution?"

"That and some other things. I have some plans," Clay says, not quite modestly.

Desmond isn't exactly reassured by his tone. "And how does becoming a dragon feature in those plans?"

Clay hesitates and looks down at himself, shifting his weight on his taloned claws. "Well," he says and his stomach grumbles again. "I think it might change the first step. Get food, instead of find riches. Do you think we could get some food? I'm really hungry, Desmond. You know how to hunt, right?"

Desmond eyes him for a moment and then hums. "I know how to hunt, yeah," he says slowly and looks away, towards the entrance to the Temple. Or rather the exit from their point of view. "But, uh."

"What?"

"You know, we needed Minerva's Apple to get in here. The door was pretty well shut - and had been for tens of thousands of years." Desmond points out and nods at the sloping cave, leading away from them. "How do you suppose we're going to get out?" 

Clay stills and then tucks his wings back in. "Oh," he says.

"Yeah. Oh."

-

What if Travel Winds but with Clay and more crack?

[teecupangel]

Here's an idea I think you might enjoy: animus but Des is in their head, controlling them. They can feel it and talk to him and everything, ratatouille style.

……………… You know what would be funny, nonny?

If Desmond sucks at controlling them.

Like, we’ve heard the rites of passage in AC games:

We make them jump instead of doing a leap of faith

We accidentally make them climb the wrong high building and the actual viewpoint is the tower next to it

We miscalculate a jump and fall into the waters below or into an unsuspecting civilian

And there’s the game specific problems I refuse to believe I’m the only one who suffered thru it.

So just imagine Desmond trying to control them in the Animus and they know they’re being controlled.

There’s this… change in the air around them. It feels more charged. More… mysterious.

And they also become clumsier for some goddamn reason.

Incidents include:

Altaïr falling into the waters in the docks of Acre for the fifteenth time and he just hisses under his breath, “What is wrong with you?! Do you enjoy seeing me wet?!” and Desmond’s just “Dude, your control sucks!” which leads to Altaïr having an argument with Desmond under his breath about how his ‘control’ (whatever that means) does not suck, Desmond just sucks at this thing he likes to call ‘platforming’ and they both just agreed that, yeah, okay, they’re gonna assassinate Sibrand by going around instead even if it meant Altaïr had to walk slowly and pretend to be praying the entire time.

Altaïr breathing heavily as he glared at the ten (nope, five more guards found him in open combat, damn it) guards trying to kill him. One of them stepped forward and raised his sword. Altaïr readied himself and he still got hit, “(Growl)! Desmond! Get your timing right!” “Your Hidden Blade counter timing is too fast, Altaïr! Let’s just use your swor-” “No! You will learn how to counter using the hidden blade or, I swear, I will find a way to control you and drill it to your body myself!” (Guards just glance at each other, thinking “oh shit, he’s insane”)

Ezio just staring into the sky as he places his hands on his waist as he called out, “Desmond! How about we try this again later?” “No! I almost got it!” “……… It’s been an hour, Desmond. Let’s try clearing this tomb after-” “No! We’re gonna get that Armor today if it’s the last thing we do! Just… this goddamn time limit is annoying! Time limit sucks!” Ezio who is already used to the mysterious voice (who calls himself Desmond)’s strange words: “………… (sigh)”

“I can take them out. Desmond, please, I’m begging you, let me take them out. I can do-” (Desmond takes control and Ezio watches as his recruits take down the targets) The recruits looking at Ezio for approval. Ezio: Bene, that was a good takedown. (inside, Ezio is just tired because Desmond is enjoying all this ‘summoning’ thing too much…)

“Why can’t we have different lethal bombs?! You have the ingredients for it!” “I don’t know, Desmond. Could we just please finish preparing all the bombs?” “Dude, wouldn’t it be better if we have, like, all of these bombs?” “… I don’t think I have enough space in belt for all of them…” “You should get a bag.” “(Sigh) Desmond, we already talked about this. This Animus of yours don’t allow more ‘inventory’, right?” (inside, Ezio is wondering what his life has become that he sorta kinda understand the words leaving his mouth)

“Desmond… I’m imploring you to not mess this up.” “I’m trying, man, this is hard.” “Who are you talking to, Haytham?” “Ziio! No… no one.” “…” “… sigghhh… Desmond say hello to Ziio.” “Hi, Ziio.” “… is this a curse placed upon you white men?” “…” “…” “…” “Perhaps.” “Sorta?”

“You are a Templar. May the Father of Understanding guide us.” “May the Father of Understanding guide us.” “Wait, what?!” “…” “…” “Master Kenway, is something the matter?” “… no, Charles. I simply… remembered something foul.”

“It’s okay, Desmond. You’ll get this soon enough. Just take a deep breath and………… Desmond. Desmond. Please stop doing whatever you’re doing right now. My head is starting to hurt.” “It’s not me! The cameras of these tree view points sucks ass!”

“How is it you came to captain a ship, given the way you sail?” “Oh, screw you, Haytham! You wanna talk shit, why don’t you try doing this shit yourself, huh?!” “…” “…” “…” “… Apologies, father. Desmond was out of line.” “No, I’m not, fuck you, Haytham!” “I can say with absolute delight I have not missed you one bit, Desmond.” “Bite me, tacohead.” “I still do not know what that means.”

[hamliet]

can you analyze the song Out for Love from Hazbin Hotel means to veggies character arc

It's the main theme of the entire series: people can only be redeemed through love.

Hard work, sure. Struggle, sure. Apologies and accountability, of course. But it's ultimately dependent on love.

The only way any lasting change of meaningful measure is made is through love. And yeah yeah it's simplified but it's the main message. Think about Sir Pentious. What is his last action?

Telling Cherri Bomb he loves her.

His sacrifice amounts to nothing at all, but he died to save Cherri alongside all his friends/family in the hotel. It's not a coincidence that Sir Pentious says that line before making his sacrifice: the writers are telling us exactly what they want us to associate his getting into heaven with. Love.

But the song does have really cool Easter eggs so let's go:

I see you're driven by your detestation Your every step is stoked with animus You need a different type of motivation Or there's no way that you can handle this

Obviously, being driven by revenge doesn't work. However, there's a clever play on words here with "animus." See, Vaggie is Charlie's Jungian animus, and vice versa. The anima (or animus) is, inJungian theory, the masculine within the feminine and the feminine within the masculine. The goal is to align with your animus.

We see that in Vaggie and Charlie's respective attitudes and outfits--again, this is simplistic, but as a design choice it was deliberate. Vaggie, the more aggressive one, dresses far more feminine. Charlie, the princess who sings her heart out, dresses in suits. They're each others' animus.

I know you're thirstin' for vengeance, Vaggie You're out for blood But you'll only stand a chance if you're out for love

Out for love, love Think of who you care about, protect 'em and be Out for love, love You're gonna fight without gloves, long as you're out for love

Vaggie actually always wears gloves, but fingerless ones, symbolic of how she's partially letting Charlie in but still keeping part of herself back. Except now the truth is out there.

So in the final battle, it's fitting that she has new gloves. It's not practical to fight without them, but she has new ones to reflect her internal change.

Fuel yourself with the fear of losin' That somebody who's your reason to live Harnеss your heart, and you can't help choosin' To fight with all you can give

She's also wearing a harness over her heart, literally taking Carmilla's words to heart. Plus Charlie's in a dress and Vaggie in armor, showing again integration following their reconciliation.

Out for love, love Think of who you care about, protect 'em and be Out for love, love You're gonna fight without gloves And when that push comes to shove Yeah, you just might rise above, long as you're out for love

If you're out for love you might rise above... to heaven, like Sir Pentious.

Anyways continuing with my argument that Hazbin is actually theologically fascinating for Christians as a work, the focus on love also is very, uh, Biblically sound, considering 1 John says "God is love," and, well:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3

So yeah. Literally angels might have power and be in "heaven," but without love, they are nothing. Which we see in the end when Adam gets stabbed by literally the lowliest at the hotel.

[youremyheaven]

this is gunna sound so weird... men make my skin crawl. Like im attracted to men but everytime i see a man, my rbf awakens and i become hyper aware of my surroundings 😭

it doesn't help that im attending an all girls college now... any advice on how to ease up pls around them? I find it hard to even want to talk to them 😭 ik all men aren't bad and i may always not be in danger (imagine that in all caps and red) but i just wanna be able behave and think like a normal person around them ( this is so much that i even can't stand strangers)

Loads of luv to you ❤

honestly i hope u meet better men!!! there are some disgusting nasty perverted pieces of shit out there who dont deserve to be around women and i completely get why u would feel repulsed by them.

i wonder if u have malefic influence, they usually struggle the most with the opposite gender

tips on how to ease up around men:

think in terms of energy. dont project anger or hatred because thats what you will see in return. i know this is very triggering and difficult for many people but you HAVE to believe in good to SEE good. despite absolutely everything that ive gone thru, i still believe that people are inherently good, kind and helpful and i see proof of it everyday.

ive had men treat me with dignity, respect and kindness in the shadiest of circumstances and ive had men be nasty to me out in the open, so it just comes down to character. just think of men as people honestly and not as hound dogs about to attack u.

2. imagine them as little boys

sometimes when men are soft or boyish with me, it reminds me of how they mustve been as kids and it warms me. i have two little boy cousins who are 12 and 6 respectively and they both adooooreeee me and want to marry me when they grow up🥺🥺🥺theyre the sweetest kids on the planet and i could never ever feel otherwise, theyre my babies. idk if this is something u can relate to but think of a little boy you're close to, how innocent and silly he is and how you could never see him as a threat or hate him and understand that grown men can be like that too.

3. how we treat people has a lot to do with how people treat us

if you have a rbf and generally act standoffish and cold/distant, then you're probably perceived as being bitchy 😬😬and nevermind men, even women probably find u intimidating or hard to approach. im only saying this because learning how to navigate social situations is 90% of adulthood and the key to personal and professional success.

learn to smile more. i know women hate being told to smile but honestly we should alllll smile more. force yourself to do it until it becomes a habit. be that person who smiles at strangers. dont u feel happy when someone smiles at you??? so in turn, be that person to others!!! <33

learn to get out of your head. most people think too much. i hate spending time with people who talk about everything from a victim pov. like yes sure u/we women, are in a position of disadvantage in many ways, historically speaking but ???? this attitude?? wont get u anywhere. (I'm speaking generally and not about you particularly)

i would say the key is to turn inward and work on yourself. read all those cliche self help books about "how to influence people" yada yada,, learn social etiquette and watch all those youtube gurus who teach soft skills. forget about men and hating them for a second and just focus on self improvement. as you change, youll see the world change with u.

just think of men as people basically. also idk if youre familiar with carl jung but i feel like you have a wounded animus. many women who grew up with an absent (emotionally or otherwise) father grow up to project all that onto men. and in turn have damaging relationships with men!!

im not a man defender and im in no way saying all men are good but i genuinely dont think its healthy to hate, thats all!!

idk if any of this is helpful sikeee but lmk if u have any updates

also lots of love to u too angel!!<3

[thelesbianpoirot]

Do you have any advice for us lesbians who feel hopeless when it comes to our own dating life? I have ever only been with one woman and while I cared about her so much, I'm starting to realise now that I didn't mean much to her. And sex was actually depressing because she never wanted to return the pleasure I gave to her. It all felt, it still feels so hollow. And being a masculine lesbian makes it even worse - I feel like I've always been ugly but the sin of homosexuality AND masculinity makes me even uglier in the eyes of everyone. And I feel like so many women expect that if you're masculine, you will basically maintain this stoic persona 24/7. You'll be somebody who never needs anything, who doesn't need pleasure, love or joy. It's like having to repent for being a woman in a wrong way. I feel like I've only been ever used by other women or they played with me, and then when they realised I am not their perfect Animus, they discarded me. I know that's so much negativity in one anon but I really enjoy lurking on your blog and kinda look up to you as I'm a bit lonely. Like that post where you mentioned skipping class to have sex, that was so iconic. So I was just wondering if anyone else has ever felt like this? If you have some wise words? Or maybe I should just accept and cope with my own ugliness.

Can I tell you I feel seen by your ask? This ask is essentially my life. You are not alone. Do not be fool by the snippets of my life I share on tumblr. Me having a sex life was short lived, and I have been sexual with four women, one of which was a love distance relationships with phone, skype sex and regrettably sending nudes. I made out with a couple more women, but they didn't want to go further and I respected that. I am no don Juan, I just am not afraid to ask women out, I have lived in about four countries and I have spent way too much time on dating apps. Of the women I had actual sex with and made cum, none of them wanted to return the favor, but I enjoyed giving them pleasure, but after multiple sexual encounters with no women wanting to interact with my naked body, and make me cum, it becomes a read.

I had a post much earlier on this blog about how no women I have ever dated has been as passionate about me as I was about her. I believe a couple women I dated only dated me because we live in a small homophobic region and the lesbian dating pool is microscopic and they have few options. This is how they treated me. The women I skipped class to have sex with had an on and off again sexual relationship with me for several years, her family lived in my country but she was Canadian, she would stay for couple months, we'd have sex and she'd leave again, I was something to do while she was there, she mocked my skin color (she was also black) a few times and did many other rude things. But I was so attracted to her, it made me fucking stupid. Many interactions with women have made me feel repulsive, and not worthy of living. I would talk for months with a woman on a dating app, then move to whatapp, calling and texting to schedule a meet up, and she cancels or stands me up, multiple times. I exist to make her laugh or feel good about herself, but she doesn't want to be seen out in public with me. My homosexuality, my masculinity, my skin color, my weight, my shape, my everything has made me feel repulsive to other women. What keeps me going is reading romantic/erotic fiction and hoping it happens to me, forging platonic connections with women who actually care for me, and the understanding that MID to HIDEOUS broke untalented and boring straight men get to have beautiful female partners, I should too. There has to be some sexy weird women out there who are attracted to me physically, and will love me passionately. And me killing myself or something will just be another lesbian woman this world has gotten rid of. I keep living and wanting more for myself purely out of spite sometimes. Every comment that says "terf dyke kill yourself" makes me take better care of myself and prosper. My dating life would probably improve if I lived in a big metropolitan city in a country with 1mil+ people, because I can ask out beyonce if left alone with her for five minutes, my fear of approaching women is GONE, because she can only say no. I have had a girl I asked out in college laugh in my face, in front of her group of friends, I can handle anything. But I don't think I will ever not feel like some disgusting monster. I don't own mirrors, I had a eating disorder, SIS, we are birds of a feather. Only advice I can give is that They want you feeling this way, they want you defeated and hopeless, while straight pig men have loving wives and gfs. Why we can't we! Ugly to whom? I was just watching challengers today with some of my friends, the women spent the whole day lusting over the two male costars, I may be a lesbian, but I think I can spot a handsome man, one who society has told me is a handsome man, one who's personality overcomes his face and body, but those two men were ugly as sin to me, their faces just made me cringe disgust, yet I was in a room with 3 women lusting over them. Lets hope together that even if we're ugly, we're have three eligible women in the world of eight billion who eagerly want to fuck us, attraction is strange.

[joyswonderland1108]

Letter

I hesitated to write this post, i did say in another post that i decided to post it later (wow that’s a lot of “post” in the same sentence lol) so i can say that this has been sitting in my drafts since hours ago but i guess i’ll just post it anyways. As you can guess it’s about “Letter” 

So as you may know, Jimin brought us a surprise which is a hidden track called “Letter” with JK doing background vocals (The Jikook subunit we never knew we’d get, well close enough i still see it as a subunit i don’t care sue me), thing is, i’ve seen some “theories” going around it about how “It’s a letter to us 🥺” or “It’s a Jikook song” and well.. I don’t agree with either one of those, why? i’ll tell you

Yes despite being a Jikooker i’m not a crazy cultist to come up with theories where i just stop seeing Jimin and JK as two individuals, we don’t do that in this house. So reason why i disagree is because this album is supposed to about Jimin all about himself, about facing himself, about growing out of a toxic past, leaving it behind and taking new fresh steps full of acceptance of who he truly is, he said it himself he didn’t want to have any collab because it wouldn’t make sense for someone else to sing about what HE feels.

Now “Letter” is supposed to come after “Like Crazy” English Version, well not really after it but it’s part of it, and i know that not everyone is smart enough to understand the message, many ignored the purpose of the album completely and the clear messages written ON THE ALBUM to interpret it but let me just rewrite it (i know damn well the homophobes will turn a blind eye to this) On Jimin’s album this is what’s written

Key sentence : The reflection of myself in an unfamiliar appearance. Despite people freaking out about “OMG i thought they were going to kiss” “It’s a break up song and the girl is supposed to be his gf/ex-gf” 

(Okay i know i’m now talking about Like Crazy while the initial post said i was going to talk about Letter but trust the process)

While Jimin did say that Like Crazy was based on the movie, it also wasn’t LITERALLY based on it, there’s this general idea, a story each can relate to it their own way and that’s what Jimin did, In an interview this was his reply

Key word : Ambiguous. 

Jimin isn’t making an OST for the movie so why would anyone think he’s taking the literal story for his song? Going back to what he said about his reflection and the girl that made people go crazy without doing the minimum effort to understand, she basically represents Jimin himself, they walk towards each other but never collide because they are reflections

And to give you more insight about this, this is basically coming from “The Four Carl Jung Archetypes”. Carl Jung identified four main archetypes: the persona, the shadow, the anima or animus and the self. These are a result of collective, shared ancestral memories that may persist in art, literature and religion but aren’t obvious to the eye. These recurring themes help us understand the Jungian archetypes.These Jungian archetypes represent a journey from an unconscious state to individuation: a merging of the conscious and the unconscious.

What people also failed to notice is the very clear queer-code in the MV, from the colors, little details, clothings, etc.. As someone said on Twitter “This feels exactly like how my gay ass feels when i’m in a bar surrounded by straight people”. The outfit : 

Which has Robet Michael Mapplethorpe in it

Now this one is my very own interpretation so take it with a grain of salt but this 

Personally to me, him sitting between a woman and a man kissing says a lot to me. It’s the fact that he’s in the middle.. I’m not going to further explain those who get it get it, those who don’t don’t.  But that’s my own personal interpretation i’m just slipping it in here.

Now that this is out of the way let’s go back to “Letter” this whole talk about “Like Crazy” is mainly because to me Letter is related to it since very obviously both tracks are one technically speaking. So while people think it’s a letter to Army but i’m over here like “If it’s a letter to Army, why is it hidden? Why would they make it so that it’s only accessible to people who have the physical album? I thought the purpose of an Army dedicated song was for it to be OFFICIALLY out for all Army to listen to” because yes despite that being uploaded online by other Army but if we all decided to be petty and selfish af, this won’t see the light of the day on the internet and that defies the whole purpose of a song for Army.

As i said above this album is about himself, he’s talking about his own struggles so saying that this is an Army song as if Army are a struggle too is a bit.. And that also on his very first solo album where he’s supposed to focus on sharing a message about himself. When Hobi decided to dedicate a song to Army he didn’t put it in JITB it was a separate single, Joon didn’t have no Army dedicated song in Indigo either because again their solo Albums are about themselves, it’s a journey to share with us their individuality and their own colors. Jin didn’t have much of a choice he had to leave for MS there wasn’t enough time for an album or maybe he himself didn’t really feel the need to make an album and his main focus was to make a song for Army which he did and gifted us Astronaut. (GOD I MISS JIN)

The lyrics too, i as Army and as Jimin’s FAN, it didn’t feel directed to me. “Now I'll be the one to hold you, When you want to cry, So you won't trip and fall” or even “Because we don't know what days await us, Though it's scary, though we're afraid, Never forget that we're together” those feel like something related to himself as well, let’s also not forget that technically speaking it’s related to “Like Crazy” too which i explained above, why would anything Army related be scary? Why would we be afraid? What is there to be afraid of? Also how will Jimin hold us when we want to cry? 

I also said that i disagree on the fact that it’s a “Jikook song” i don’t know how to explain precisely but some people seem to interpret it as THEIR song whereas even if Jimin is actually singing about his relationship with JK it’s still about his OWN feelings, his OWN promises, his OWN confession, despite JK doing the background vocals in which they harmonized so very beautifully kudos to them, i still think it’s all about Jimin, yes there might’ve been a reason why he chose JK himself for that or maybe they chose that together because really it could’ve been anyone and JK could’ve done the background vocal to any other song in the album yet it was on this one. He really did a lot of effort to open up to us so i really hope people see it as his pov on everything. 

I made a post relating the song to There for You from GCFT and yes quite honestly to me it feels like a response to “I’ll be there for you but you gotta be there for me too” and yet again it still goes back to the same thing, it is Jimin’s OWN reply. I also noticed how Army songs didn’t have other members in them (well i mean Army songs in this solo era) so again why would this be an Army song if JK was in it? I don’t even know if all of this makes a lot of sense, can’t say i’m the best with words but i tried to convey how i see it. 

Oh and let us be reminded that this was his reaction to knowing we found out about and and so cheesily saying that he won't tell us about it for now lol

Boy what are you all giggly and shy for?

🧐

(Tagging this under Jikook because i don’t trust the rest of the fandom that much)

[andbrokenmemories]

So it's weird how like. The Kennet girls are good at everything, aren't they? [pale spoilers ahead]

Like that's obvious, it's textual -- it's very textual, other characters being in something like awe over it over and over and over across the story. The girls are very good at this, and they have a deep well of power. This comes up continuously.

what's weird is thaaat a lot of the fanbase seem to like, enjoy that. Enjoy having protagonists who can play around with magic in a way Blake never ever could have. I kind of get that, I won't like shit-talk it too hard. (I do like Verona, y'know?)

But it's an interesting fact. Because Wildbow's the underdog protagonist guy! At least in action scenes, that's his whole thing! Taylor and Blake have to eat shit and die to claw their way to victory, and often those scenes work for me. And it's one of the things I think WB gets the most praise for? Like, from his established base. It's a conscious choice to not do that for Pale. He like, introduced the idea that this kind of wild practitioner would be especially powerful. He made that up for this book.

I wonder what that decision looks like -- after Ward, and Ward's issues, especially, since that seemed to be the first break from this. Underdog protagonists seem to be the default, for him; the thing he has most experience with. I've seen posts from him describing his process -- put characters against the wall without having a pre-planned out for them, so WB himself has to puzzle out exactly what they can use to make it out alive -- and he seemed to derive like... An actual enjoyment, out of it?

Yeah, there are fights in Pale where they're up against the wall... even one where, with Dire Consequences for us all, Wildbow had them lose because he couldn't see a way for them to win!

But it's not the same. I'd honestly say they usually lose because of their like, lack of full maturity -- their child soldier-y emotional rawness and uncertainty -- their lack of cohesion, as the book usually plays it. Lucy cannot stop John from joining the Contest because she can't hold her nerve against him. The girls cannot stop the murder plot from coming to fruition because they lack unity, aren't working together as a team. Emotional stuff. The girls have more tools in their box than any Wildbow protagonist before them, by far, but they can't always use them properly to get the W, for emotional reasons, for character reasons.

In theory, that's an interesting direction (maybe, possibly), and I should be relieved that Wildbow is trying something fresh. In practice... I've said I don't like Pale's fight scenes. I think Wildbow is plainly worse at this than the content of his previous works.

Part of this is seen in the Contest. Or, at least, how Wildbow Posts about it. If you can't tell, a specific WoG lives in my brain: Wildbow said once that he kept the story going past Break because he genuinely did not believe the trio could beat Maricica. I can imagine him doing his typical calculus for this, and what led him to that conclusion, maybe. For example, we've heard a lot about the ability of the Fae to manipulate stuff, aaaand to have the girls come along and undo all of that with minimal information to begin with wouuld sort of. Damage our belief in Faerie significance. Still, though -- cards on the table, here -- I think this was a Dumb and Bad choice. (It's a sidenote to this post, but I think it's very strange that, in-story the straw that breaks the camel's back is shown to be the Alabaster allowing shit to go on rather than throwing in with John, effectively a betrayer revealed moment -- a thing that, even if sorta his intention from the start, he could simply say 'aw beans i never really planned this out far enough' and just drop. for the sake of wrapping up a better story. and naturally i believe this would have been better also because it means we never would have fucking gotten White Woman Animus!! i digress. i digress.)

Maricica had weaknesses the story gave us to nibble on, and those weaknesses... are just kind of dangling threads, now? As of where I hopped off? like, guess she can't be that inexperienced with people if she became a goddess and started a cult and helped with all that red heron shit lol

So it's that thing I said, about fight scenes being more character driven. But then also, he's clearly thinking about this the same way as ever! As shown by his weird logic with framing the story going past Break as a thing he Had To Do, for Logical Reasons, or at least that weighing on the decision. a thing that is silly and i disagree with on it's face. right?

And then this shows in the sheer quantity of fight scenes -- if the girl's main limiter is internal emotional context and stuff........... uh... why are there so many fights? Why wouldnt the story naturally curve towards. having fewer fight scenes when theres no other way to square things away. that progress character arcs. whyyy do i care about fight scene 129 when i know how strong these girls are. whyyy are we fighting so many random others, and dedicating genuinely long segments of story to them, rather than montaging that shit? Getting it over with? If it has to be there at all? (for reference -- I just tried to think of a Random Pale Fight i fully don't think mattered. i selected the random like. angel summoner guy? with the fortnite constructor angel. that's a part of the musser invasion or whatever. this is a character with literally no substance, just a musser-side goon. From him entering the ongoing! fight to Lucy getting out of dodge is 4.6k words. Plague 12.7, the Mannequin fight, up to Mannequin leaving -- that's almost the entire chapter -- is 6.9k words. on the worm wiki, i saw there's a brief 'major events' summary of that chapter. i couldnt tell you the major events of the Pale chapter, of which that section of fight is like a third, maybe. lucy gets a bit more upset. lucy gets in a few quips against musser-side characters that actually matter but actually dont matter much to how that broader conflict is resolved. i guess.)

Wildbow writes any random fight the girls get into as being worth as many words as his fights in the past! the scrappy, pay-offy ones. bleh. My point in all this: you cannot simply set your protags up in the way I'm positing, here, and then continue to use the same vocabulary of every other serial anyway. it straight up doesn't work. it's exhausting. The Future is An Eternal Slaughterhouse 9000 Arc. Look, thats a criticism that boils down to 'web serials are too long'. And I'm not sure I care too much about web serials being too long! I have read longer web serials with longer fight scenes! I have written fiction with a longer average word count per chapter than Wildbow, at least during Worm! its a real criticism, but its not one im amazingly interested in personally. But the Kennet three could've had weaknesses to play around -- or at least, more weaknesses. We are in a Post-Pact world, and in this Post-Pact world, the magic in Pale really barely feels like it, uh, relies on discourse and presentation. like at all. And that seems like an option to give these characters obstacles! An option Wildbow gestures at during the Musser meta-arc!

but what struck me getting that word count comparison earlier, skimming that fight? The girls just aren't operating in that world. There's never a thought for presentation -- maybe sometimes, for a slight edge. But it never really matters, certainly not after the blue heron. They're using glamour as a workhorse tool, covering goblins in it for brief misdirects to get an edge in a fight; they're calling on the same shrine spirits over and over. They don't build up tools over a portion of story then cash them out for a satisfying win, they're just... strong. They have more items in their bags than Wildbow probably knows what to do with. Strong enough for just Lucy to dunk on any random set of practitioners, but not strong enough for the story to just skip that part, and not strong enough to just solve the plot until it's time to go fuck up Charles and end the story.

I know you could argue that I'm making this up, or that it's what some people prefer to what Pact was doing. But I just think it's not even what wildbow is good at! (and i always theorize that when wildbow is writing kind of bad, it's probably because he's not actually engaged or happy with what he's putting himself through. did he read a specific thing that made him personally excited to make the girls so versatile? I don't really know, but I don't get that vibe.)

And I have a couple of specific things I want to point out to try and prove this is like. a thing at all, to wrap up on: First, Glamour is used as this very, uh, soft magic thing, this very basic narrative tool. A pure mechanic of, like, mental states. If you're shaken, if you're uncertain, your glamour gives out on you -- if you shake your opponents, make them skittish, your glamour is better at misdirecting them. This is fiiine? But too vague for what Glamour is. Wildbow simply failed to properly present tradeoffs to one of his character's main action verbs, one that literally had those tradeoffs in Pact. And one last example to try and prove this: they dont even wear the hats and cloaks anymore duuude. Like, in my eyes: there was a very simple to read gambit being made, with the hats and masks and cloaks? You are awakening early, you will always have awoken early: You accepted an early shield against what that meant. A constructed image in place of the image of a fully-fledged adult, masking that youth; Whimsical and inherently magical, inherently wild. It's a very basic tradeoff, and one the story promises you it knows: even if they really would rather not have to go through the whole song and dance of suiting up, if it's tactically suboptimal or else they mature out of it and realise it's not for them, they will never be able to escape it -- not without giving up power. A mark accepted that cannot be given up. A mechanical restriction on their powersets to make up for some of their advantages, that also has some character relevancy. The Good Stuff.

except yeah it can. be taken off. it doesn't super matter. not really. they do plenty of magic without all the stuff on or even any of the stuff on -- it's rarely presented as an obstacle. it doesnt really matter. Because then, you see, they couldnt mature out of it and do cool stuff! it'd be. annoying. frustrating. they'd have to like. deal with changing past the natures they made for themselves. they'd have to. be characters. with character issues. that present themselves in fight scenes. you know?? what are we doing.

[fanworldbuildingfun]

I’ve been pondering the question of loyalty in Assassin’s Creed. Specifically, loyalty and how it works with Eagle Sight

See… We do know that different parts of the brotherhood can and do coexist – but that doesn’t make them outright allies. A prime example being Masyaf and Alamut. To a point, one can say it’s the same with Italian and Spanish branches during Ezio’s time

So will the ally-blue be the same for both branches?

Why my brain decided to bring this up: what if the team (Shaun, Lucy, Rebecca, and definitely William) did NOT show up as allies in Desmond’s vision? He had, after all, grown used to Altaїr’s Brotherhood in AC1. They would have been the “branch” his mind would have pegged as allies. Later, same would happen with Ezio’s brotherhood – and, to a point, possibly the Constantinople branch.

And Ratonhnhaké:ton? Yeah, taught him to question things, greatly

But they way they interacted and functioned is completely different from modern times. So there was always just enough nagging doubt in the back of Desmond’s mind to paint the team as neutral-white at first. And as the Bleeding Effect got worse, the white started to bleed into red – because they still wanted him to go into the Animus. Despite the damage it was causing to Desmond. Despite it having killed people in the past

And the more red he sees, the more Desmond doubts, and the more red he sees. It’s a closed circle. So, by the time he wakes up from Revelations, he knows he has to prepare. Because the team can’t possibly have his wellbeing as part of equation

It’s hard. It takes maneuvering. It gets Desmond to practice being extremely sneaky. And by the time the choice at Temple rolls around? He has contingencies

His choice to turn on the Aurora Borealis device wasn’t just altruism. IT also got everyone out of Temple so he can try to *survive*

And he does

And then, Desmond leaves. He doesn’t let anyone know – because this is a new level of anonymity that he feels he has earned. It gives him a certain freedom to not just re-orient himself, but to take a step back and dig into who he can go to and what he will be doing

…And when Origins rolls to an end, it’s not William Miles that finds Leila

[whatevergreen]

“You Can Have Fun Too” poster, created by Mick Hicks for SFAF, 1984

"In 1984, Rick Crane, director of the (San Francisco AIDS Foundation) at the time, hired famed local photographer Mick Hicks to photograph two men for a safe-sex poster to be put in the city’s gay bars, baths, and other locations. Hicks worked for virtually all the LGBTQ newspapers in the Bay Area and had spent a year and a half photographing people with AIDS, chronicling their struggle with the disease. He quickly accepted the commission.

At the same time, a young Black man named Robert Gray, a native San Franciscan raised in the Bayview Hunter’s Point area of the city, and a proud sixth-generation descendant of the Georgetown 272 (a group of 272 African slaves who were sold, in 1838 by the Jesuit priests who ran George University to keep the school afloat), was rather well known in the Castro and Tenderloin areas. “I had started meeting and dating guys in my junior year in high school,” he told me. “I went to high school four or five blocks from the Castro. I would find my way up through the bar scene during that time, sneaking into gay bars and discos.” Of course, he realized that AIDS was rampant through the city.

One day, as 24-year-old Robert wandered down Castro Street, a man approached him and asked if he would pose for a photo for a safe-sex poster for San Francisco AIDS Foundation. “The gentleman advised me that a young photographer named Mick Hicks was looking for two subjects, one Black male and one white male, for the poster. Having seen so many of my personal friends succumb to this deadly virus, I felt it was something I needed to do to help stop the spread of this horrific disease. I asked myself, ‘Why not?’ With AIDS affecting so many of my gay brothers and sisters, I felt it was my responsibility to do something to contribute to AIDS awareness and prevention. I needed to take action, whatever I could do to be a voice of action and help my community.” He agreed on the spot to do the poster.

“You Can Have Fun (and be safe too)” read the final poster. The image that Hicks created featured Robert, shot from the back, embracing a white model (Hicks’ partner Nick Cuccia), his white arm and bubble-butt standing out prominently against Robert’s skin. Even the Chronicle columnist Herb Caen took notice of the photo. The sex-positive message of the poster advocated “mutual masturbation,” “erotic massage,” “imagination and fantasies,” and “limiting social drugs.” The poster portrayed and promoted gay sex as normal, expected behavior, and emphasized the pleasure that could be had while still protecting oneself against transmission of the virus. The poster caused a huge sensation and started appearing in gay bars, discos, and bathhouses from San Francisco to New York. Mr. Gray told me, “As the young kids would say today, ‘it went viral,’ no pun intended!”

(Castro, San Francisco postcard, 1984)

Regrettably, the poster also launched a two-pronged backlash, one prong based in religious prudery, the other in racism.

By asserting that gay sex could be both fun and safe, the poster was the first to portray gay sex as normal, healthy, and fun. Even before AIDS, gay sex had been viewed as aberrant, “unnatural.” As an offshoot of that prejudice, AIDS was thought by many as a visitation of the wrath of God on immoral men who were violating God’s law. How many times did we hear in the early 1980s, “At least AIDS is killing all the right people”? The poster’s sex-positive message was condemned as an affront to decency and family values.

Even more lamentably, the poster inadvertently shone a light on the racial animus within San Francisco’s gay community. As Rick Crane told the Bay Area Reporter in 2014, “Gays as a group were considered second-class citizens and, ironically, gays themselves were treating gay blacks the same way — as second-class citizens.” Although racial tensions had eased somewhat from the flashpoints of the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was still a clear racial divide in the bars in the Castro. The Pendulum was the Castro’s only gay bar where black men and white men went comfortably to meet; the other Castro bars catered primarily to whites. The Trap, located in the Tenderloin district, also catered to interracial couples. Thus, some of the bars and other establishments refused to display the poster, deeming it “unacceptable.” Regarding the response to the poster, Gray said, “I would go into bars, and I would hear the chatter amongst people about the poster. I heard some really positive things, but also some really negative, racially motivated things.

(Below: "Thyrell And Chris Outside The Pendulum Bar SF", 1986 by Jim James aka Photojimsf)

“At the time that I did the poster,” he continued, “I had no idea that it would be so controversial. Honestly, had I known this upfront, I might not have done it. But looking back on it now, I would do it again because it was the right thing to do.” But still, he laments, “Who would have thought that a photo would open my eyes to the racism within the gay community? We are so much more alike as a people than different. One would think we could get along better and come together for a cause greater than us individually. Being a proud Black gay man, I must fight harder than most for myself and for those who come after me.”

These days, Robert Gray is still that proud Black gay man who changed the face of safe-sex advocacy. Sixty-two years old now, nearly forty years since he posed for the SFAF poster, he is semi-retired and lives in Vallejo, California. He is now a widower, having lost his partner of 42 years (his husband since 2013). He remains quite proud of the poster to this day, even if that pride is somewhat tempered by what he considers a lack of recognition for his work. “I thought over time I would see the poster in the gay pride parades or that I would be given some special honor from major players in the movement, like GLAAD. There is still a lot of racism in the gay community.”

Adapted from a February 18, 2022 article by Hank Trout:

https://www.sfaf.org/collections/status/why-did-a-safe-sex-poster-spark-controversy-in-1984/

[consistentsquash]

What are your top 10 snarry favorite fics?

Hiya! I feel like my top 10 changes depending on my mood. Snarry fandom has a lot of great fics. Sorry for slowness but life was kind of crazy.

I like fics with a lot of magic/whimsy/darker vibes. A big fan of canon divergence because Snape needs to live! Dubcon with bittersweet ending but also they need to be in love.

My super subjective top 12 which is going to change in like 5 minutes because I am a flake. It's going to be in two parts for reasons... also chronological because why not!

first part

A Bittersweet Potion by alchemia and bugland. This is like the only oldschool Snarry that works for me now because my reading tastes changed a lot. I got lots of bookmarked chapters I reread. Just love the fic. So crazy creative. Also crazy. This started in 2002 iirc.. So really, really old. WIP!

In Between Days by atrata. I really like this. A lot of things won't work for new readers because it was written before the books finished. But it's peak Snape before the big canon reveals and has a lot of ambiguity in his characterization. This is 2005 so you can kind of see their dynamic developing like the middle books.

Morior Animus by Vain. OMG. I read MCD but I don't normally reread it a lot. This fic though. It's got MCD but it's super beautiful and the premise of the fic is just incredible. snarry games fic. A lot of my favs are from that collection. A lot of fics in that time get super creative because the books were still going on. 2006 before DH iirc.

This Boy's Life by pir8fancier. This is my fav fic from the author. The fic is just ultra intense. So we get to see the whole Lily situation. I reread this one a lot. 2007.

When the Rose and the Fire Are One by @perverse-idyll. So this fic burned me out on Snarry. Especially on Snape characterization. Sometimes you just read a fic which says literally everything you wanted about the characters and you don't feel like reading that pairing again? So that was me with this fic. I just didn't read a lot of Snarry after this. also Snarry games. 2008

second part

part two of my favs are from more recent years after I got over that fic…

6. a certain optimism by @hippocrates460. The fic which got me back into Snarry bigtime! Love the Snape POV so much! It's kind of not that common in Snarry fics to get Snape POV. This one is brilliant. It feels like something from a different life, more now than when it had been decades since he’d last heard it. 2019

7. The Measure of A Man by @ac1d6urn. Gosh the intensity. I just. But also really healing and love the feels. Super cathartic vibes. I reread this fic a lot. It's got a great Harry characterization. One of the best honestly. A lot of Snarry fics don't really go into Harry. This fic is Harry's fic! <;3 2019

8. Close Encounters by @likelightinglass and bleedcolor - I am a big sucker for mysterious identity slow build and this is 100% that fic. Lots of classic tropes with ultra perfect execution! Kind of a comfort read for me honestly. 2019

9. Green Grow the Rushes, O by eldritcher - I am a big fan of magical worlds and imagery. Omg this fic! It's like a fever dream. Really lucid, really intense but also like a Van Gogh painting. Somehow plays it straight and also gets mythological at the same time. The fic that made me fall in love with reading aloud. Musical like whoa. There is only the moon and bright Venus to greet them. Severus heals Harry with song and spell. He fucks Harry until he is drained of fear and fury. 2021

10. Suspiria by @ripeteeth - A big fan of the 2nd person POV! Also unicorn rare. But omg I love it in this fic. It adds insane levels of intense for a pretty intense premise. You can really feel the mental spirals. Snape POV! Super ambitious and really, really delivers on that. Why does he look at you? Perhaps it’s in penance. 2021

11. Realisations by @titconao3 - A big fan of 1st person POV but it's like unicorn level rare now. This fic rocks the 1st person POV. Also Harry POV. I mean that's like 2x levels of ambitious :D But it works great. I really love this postwar setting and the pacing. Feels really organic. Oh, since then, I’ve had the biggest, most doomed crush on the most unlikely, the most unreachable man. 2022

12. Contempt by @danpuff-ao3 - Gosh. This is like Old school Snarry but like with really tight pacing. It sucks you in and you just have to go with it. It goes to some crazy places. Which is what I want from Snarry! They need to be crazy :D. Also the summary is literally Snarry ship manifesto Harry hates Snape, and he always will. (He will, won’t he?) 2022

[clearsighting]

woah sixty notifications anyways,

to preface arctic is my favorite character but narratively not in a “wow he’s a good person” way so let that shape your opinion of my opinion

giant fucking essay under cut i’m sorry

can anyone hear me. why is arctic portrayed in the fandom as tragic and had a negative character arc after killing those icewings with his magic. when he’s been horrible the entire time, just more subtly. he found everything in his life to be utterly tragic and boring and it all to be a big drag. he was a prince and he was expected for the animus powers he held and the offspring he’d have. arctic saw himself as an extension of diamond— which all princes are to their queens, basically— and he hated it. he had no authority over his own life and this was also enforced by the ranking system and general icewing culture.

…except that he never had any ill thoughts about that. it was always about what power his mother held over him. interesting! he didn’t care for the system and the hierarchy enforced by it, because by being an animus prince he was naturally at the top all the time and he didn’t have to care about how he treated other dragons because he was his mother’s favorite little dragon.

he detested THAT. his MOTHER was the one deciding everything for him. and he was powerless to do anything about that! how could a prince stand up to his queen and mother, animus or not, and live past that conversation. so he lashed out outside of that. he hated and ignored snowflake because she was just an extension of his mother. he describes her as “sparkly and boring the way mother likes” because he never bothered to see past what role she served in his life. she’s actually deeply complex as we can tell by runaway winglet where she’s her own pov, with an intricate and dark mind and more motivations than arctic ever had in his life.

arctic does not care, because he considers her lower than him. his mother can exercise her power on him through other dragons all he wants, but he still knows that he is severely more powerful and more important than any other dragon except her in his life. …and also, i think he has a weird complex about female dragons. hear me out,

when arctic meets foeslayer, it’s the first time he meets a nightwing. he expects them all to be boring and not of any interest to him in the slightest, but foeslayer just happens to overhear his conversation with snowflake and finds it hilarious. she laughs in his face, makes fun of him for forgetting his betrothed’s name. this is interesting to arctic. nobody has dared to make fun of him in his entire life because of his status. instead of being upset, like most icewings would, his situation with diamond shaped him to respond with amusement. what does he have to gain from laughing at himself with a nightwing? well, he gets a bit of freedom. room to stretch his wings and see beyond his mother’s (and the icewing rankings, but mostly he thinks of it as his mother) suffocation on him and every opinion he dares to hold.

arctic barely sees foeslayer as a romantic interest because because she’s charming, funny, pretty. he sees her as a way to piss off his mom. look at this dragon who doesn’t follow rules, who is starkly not an icewing noble with pretty glittery scales, who is not at all someone diamond could ever see her precious animus son with. foeslayer is crass and doesn’t think before she speaks and clumsy and not at all caring of how other dragons think of her and arctic likes that. he even gives her one of his earrings and enchants it, dares to defend her in the meeting hall by saying that she hadn’t actually stolen it and that he had given it, because he knows it’d get to his mother. he’s spitting at the ground in front of her feet, saying, “i can do more than you want me to”, “i am my own dragon”, and “you don’t decide my life”.

to arctic, female dragons in his life are a tool more than they’d ever be individuals.

obviously arctic’s rash decision to fall in love with a random nightwing is not the narrative’s favorite choices. obviously.

let’s skip forward a lot and, almost at the end here i promise, look at how he treats his offspring.

by the very start he meets darkstalker with contempt. he doesn’t like his name (because it’s creepy, and because foeslayer chose it and not him) and he doesn’t like how much attention foeslayer gives him. let me restate. arctic, the grown, married, ADULT MAN. Is jealous of his newborn son for taking up more time in foeslayer’s life. how interesting.

he detests darkstalker because he also looks more like a nightwing than whiteout. we don’t see whiteout hatch (because darkstalker is off running around and being the most self absorbed guy ever, even if he pretends he’s not) but we know this about her and arctic. arctic named her, and arctic doesn’t think of her as much of a dragon and more of a pretty thing he can flaunt around until he’s done. darkstalker points this out, which is means to scrutiny because darkstalker himself is a very unreliable and rose tinted narrator, but i think it makes sense based on arctic’s track record, honestly.

female dragons are NOT anything he cares about as individuals. Loud and clear. this is not a trait that is recently developed after he finds out foeslayer ‘betrayed’ him. He has been like this the entire time.

he wants to bring whiteout to the icewing kingdom not because he cares about her, but because he wants to use her and make his mother like him again. arctic wants to go back and grovel to his mother using his daughter as a bargaining chip, because he doesn’t want to kill his offspring, that’s a bit too much for him. but he does want his mother’s attention back, because foeslayer has stopped serving the role of a surrogate caretaker to him. now that she knows better. arctic by this point has learned loud and clear that the nightwings (against foeslayer’s wishes and hidden from her but he doesn’t really care by this point) wanted to steal him for his animus powers.

that’s.. not what he wanted. in the unwilling prisoner sense AND in his fantasy of sticking it up to his mother and spitting in the face of her power over him. now he’s in the power of another queen that he doesn’t like. isn’t that great, it’s all looped back on itself and arctic realizes that he receives consequences for his actions of being a complete asshole and misogynist!

anyways yeah. he’s one of my favorites because he’s deeply complex, at least in my brain if the complexity i’ve outlined here was unintentional on tui’s part and was just a big fumble that ended up being GOLDEN. also this essay doesn’t exist to try and convert anyone into my way of thinking and as a big brainwashing scheme to make you like arctic, no, i just wanted to get my thoughts out clearly before i got cancelled for the thought crime of liking a fictional dragon misogynist.

anyways cheers if you’ve made it this far, thanks for listening to my insanity.

[twinflameauwof]

what’s the lore of the world? like what’s going on? the conflicts some may say (i love all the art you’ve posted btw)

aaaaaa I’m genuinely so glad I got this questionnnnn!!! (YAP FEST HERE WE GO)

I’m not the best at explaining things, but basically in Pyrrhia, there are 8 tribes instead of the canon 7, and that extra tribe is the Mistwings. The Mistwings are descendants of a large group of Rainwings, Seawings and Icewings that somehow formed a society together. This resulted in the Mistwings, dragons that are a mystery to the outside world, no one knows they exist.

They live deep in the rainforest, where the land was enchanted by an ancient Animus to have constant mist falling over it, and the Rainwings are too scared to enter it. The enchanted object is called The Ghostflame, and after a princess wins a challenge against the queen, the former queen will stick around until a new heir is secured, and then she will disappear into the forest, this is believed to “feed” the Ghostflame.

Anyways, moving on from those guys, the Sandwings are basically the Nightwings in this situation, pretty much everyone see’s them as self-righteous, full of themselves, hoarder dragons because of previous queens, and the current queen, Mirage, is making many attempts to de-stigmatize her tribe, which isn’t helped by many rebellious Sandwings going out and doing whatever they want to please themselves, this results in late Mudwing Queen Fern’s death.

MudWings are nomadic, being tough enough to traverse through nearly any environment (except the Ice Kingdom), many troops leave the kingdom to cultivate and sell unique goods.

Nightwings are how they were in Darkstalker’s book, basically, and under the royal family, there are three Nobel houses named after the three moons, Oracle, Perception, and Imperial.

Seawings are split between three societies, the Deep Kingdom, the Sea Kingdom, and the Reef Kingdom. The “DeepWings” are a group of Seawings that live out in the open ocean, pulling rafts behind them for proper resting and feasts, they technically have a “queen” but it’s less traditional. The Seawings are closed off and often don’t participate in many inter-tribe events except for the royal family. The “ReefWings” are far more social, living half in the ocean and half on beaches, their scales are more colorful than the others’, and they are responsible for most trade. The “Council of Pearls” is a group of regal dragons from all 3 segments that make decisions.

The IceWings aren’t doing the best, but they’re not doing bad, their last queen, Chorus, died of an illness soon after having her first egg, leaving her husband, Silver, to fill the roll until their (luckily) daughter could grow to fill the roll. In this version, the Icewings are less isolated, and have one of the greatest armies on the continent.

Queen Talon of the Skywings loves being entertained, which is why the Skywing Arena still exists in this AU. However, instead of it being essentially an execution, it is seen as a way for dragons to earn glory. There are very strict rules in place to keep dragons from being harmed severely, any heavy injuries can lead to suspension and even being banned from The Arena.

Rainwings are also very similar to canon, except for the other tribe’s opinions on them, in this AU, their venom is common knowledge, and it is well known the amount of damage they could do if involved in a war. They do not write scrolls (although they can still read/write, just not often) instead, they share stories and teaching orally, they are believed to have one of the best schooling systems of the continent.

I hope this was sufficient information! Much of this AU is still being worked on, and Pantala is being covered by the other owner of this account, so I don’t have much info on that, and I’m also not completely finished with the lore and culture for each tribe (I made some of this up on the fly lol) so if anyone’s curious about something specific, please ask, it will force me to continue thinking about this! (Which is a good thing, trust me)

[teecupangel]

So this idea has been bouncing in my head like an excited rabbit on caffeine. (I also don't know if anyone else thought of this but I thought it would be cool) so you remember the reblog chain where the players are all in Desmond head talking like a twitch chat, and the other reblog chain of Desmond's ancestor data gaining sentience because isu bstm, right? Well I had a thought, what if we combined the two, like maybe something like the part of the main group + Desmond are trying to get to the others who are in another part of Abstergo or the assassin's network and Desmond, let's say that while he was split he couldn't hear us until they passed through this really corrupted part of an ocean map (let's say it's in Edward's time) then all of a sudden Desmond hears one of us. (Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I hope you have a heath day/night)

I think this is the AC characters data in Abstergo’s database regaining sentience AU reblog chain with @piratekenway you’re talking about?

The Ratatouille AU where the ancestors can hear Desmond while ‘playing’, its more unhinged cousin, the Ratatouille AU where Desmond can hear us and the outside POV of Al Mualim thinking the Apple broke Altaïr and the sidestory of Altaïr accidentally connecting with Ezio while looking for Desmond (I hope I didn’t forget anything else)

Okay, so the idea is that we’re using the setup for the character data gaining sentience and we’re setting this as sorta like the ‘epilogue’ to the Ratatouille AU.

Instead of letting the world burn (“As a treat!” one of the voices chirped), he sacrifices himself. When he wakes up, he’s in Abstergo’s database, chained as a digital copy of Sample 17.

He can’t hear any voices anymore.

Are they disappointed with him?

Did they think they wasted their time trying to help him?

Did he… make the right choice?

He doesn’t know how much time has passed… when the virus started taking over the database and servers.

.

In this one, the virus isn’t made by Erudito + Assassins. It’s of ‘unknown origin’.

All they know is the name of the virus is “for desmond!” and it is targeting Desmond. Of course, Sample 17 is in one of the more secured encrypted ‘part’ of the database so it mutated to wake other data up.

Data that has connection with Desmond.

Along the way, the virus inside them starts waking up other data nearby, creating a strange team to rescue Desmond.

We can sorta play with this a bit and make Arno, Evie and Jacob become part of Abstergo’s database because they do have data of Arno’s descendants and it makes sense that the reason why the Templars knew where the Shroud is because they can access the twins’ memories as well and the Assassins just stole their DNA for their own Animus instead.

So they get to Desmond who is staying in the Grand Temple, just sitting there, staring at the devices, doubting and double-doubting himself if he should have activated the device when the people who care for him the most asked him not to.

Of course, Abstergo’s anti-virus and probably the entire security system is chasing after them so they don’t have time to actually talk.

They just run.

Well, they sailed using a fusion of the Jackdaw and Aquila…

… into a corrupted part of the West Indies.

The idea was… the virus didn’t harm them but it definitely fucks with Abstergo’s anti-virus and security system.

At the very least, they were hoping it would slow them down.

What they did not expect was for the entire thing to collapse under them…

And drop their modified ship into a different unfamiliar ocean.

“Holy shit!”

Desmond blinked.

“That scared the crap out of me. Goddamn it, Ubisoft. I know this is still being betatesting but Jesus Christ, loading the entire ship and dropping it from above??? What kind of programming does this game have???”

“Lollol. Dude, chill.”

“Is it an enemy ship? Like… can you shoot it?”

“Should you shoot it? Check its level first.”

They were all familiar voices.

“You don’t want a repeat of-”

“Guys?” Desmond asked, his voice a bit too quiet.

Hesitant.

He didn’t dare hope that it was them.

Not all of them.

But some of the ones he was most familiar with.

The ones who stayed with him the most.

“Holy shit.”

“Oh my god, Desmond?!”

“What’s Desmond doing in this game?!”

“Is it our Desmond???”

Desmond’s lips curved into a smile and his voice croaked as he said, “Yeah, I’m your Desmond.”

“Oh my god.”

“Desmond!!! You’re okay!!! We were sooo worried!”

“You think this is [Bored Anonymous]’s work??? Did their plan to use all our computers to try and connect with Desmond’s world and send our gift work?”

“Gift?” Desmond tilted his head.

Did they mean the virus?

He felt someone nudged his arm and he turned to look at Ezio. Everyone else seemed confused but Altaïr, Ezio and Ratonhnhaké:ton seemed to have an idea on who he was talking to.

Wait.

They can hear them!

Before Desmond could tell the voices that everyone could hear them now, one of them said hurriedly, “Oh fuck! Someone get [Bored Anonymous] quickly!”

“Why?”

“I only have 1 more hour to play this beta! What happens to Desmond if he stays in this beta server after the time is up?!! We can’t lose him!”

“Ohshitohshitohshit!”

“I’ll alert the discord server!”

“I’ll try to message them in Tumblr! They’re always online there!”

“Pretty sure that’s their queue…”

“We can still try!”

Desmond simply laughed.

Sure, the time limit they’re talking about was worrying but hearing all of them worrying about him…

It felt like he was finally home.