#and it was after we were shown the extent of her suffering that opinions took a 180

[syruubi]

Man its been weeks and I’m still soured by the conclusion to Fontaine’s main story. I'll just rant here

There were a lot of things I didn’t like about it (Arlecchino's altruism being played straight, Traveler being out of character, the lore exposition ass-pull with the prophecy slates, the weird logic about how destroying a Gnosis could potentially wake up the Heavenly Principles but not fucking destroying an Archon Throne when Celestia forced everyone to fight a GODDAMN WAR TO ESTABLISH THEM-) but the biggest offense to me was how Furina was handled. This was marketed as the grand finale of the arc, the climax with Furina at the center of it all. And she got shafted. Big time. Furina had no agency in the plot whatsoever, nothing she did had any effect on how things turned out, and she didn’t even have the dignity of fully understanding why it all had to happen that way.

(Also I will preface this with yes Furina and Focalors are technically the same person with the same origin, but after the split Furina lost all her memories as Focalors. They are two separate consciousnesses with different experiences, and therefore I will treat their individual choices as their own)

I’ve seen people try to argue that no, she chose to take on this role knowing she would suffer, that she didn't HAVE to go along with it. And she was even working by herself to solve the prophecy without relying on Focalors, she wasn’t a puppet/pawn! But the thing is she was essentially in a hostage situation. If she didn’t do things exactly as dictated by Focalors people would DIE. Like there is a reason why criminal punishments are lighter when it’s found the perpetrator was coerced into it! And her researching how to avoid the prophecy changed nothing about the outcome, she could have sat around eating cake and the story would have word for word turned out exactly the same. All that information served to do was highlight her suffering and draw the audience’s sympathy. That's what I mean about her not having agency, it's not about her ability to act as an individual but how her actions had an effect on the overall plot. None of her choices outside of the role designated by Focalors did anything to change the situation for better or worse.

And to top it all off she didn’t even understand WHY this all had to happen. Why do people dissolve in the Primordial water? How does her pretending to be an Archon play into solving the issue? Why can’t she confide in anyone? What the hell is Focalors even doing? She doesn’t learn the answers to any of these until after everything was over, and not even from Focalors’ own mouth, it was relayed to her by Neuvillette.

Speaking of Neuvillette, I’m not gonna lie I’m sorta annoyed at his existence because it felt like Furina was shafted for him. Everything is very tilted in Neuvillette's favor. He gets his powers back, full control over Pneuma/Ousia, final say in trials, the ability to hand out Visions, and just straight up the ability to manipulate life itself. And okay all these things were his to begin with lore-wise, whatever, but he also becomes the "lore important" character after this at Furina's expense. Furina doesn't have her memories as Focalors, she can't tell us anything about how the world works, about Celestia, about what happened 500 years ago. Even though other Archons didn't give us much either for one reason or another, they at least HAVE that knowledge, and are therefore guaranteed to have involvement in future events with the Abyss and Celestia. Furina at the moment, doesn't. Neuvillette has it now. And all that talk about Focalors judging Celestia? Also Neuvillette's job now. And it feels like it was all stolen from Furina from a story-telling perspective because again, she didn't know of the plan to return his powers. She didn't even get to explicitly agree with her other self that he should have them back. The writers really seemed to go out of their way to place him on a pedestal at Furina's expense, which irks the hell out of me.

There are some opportunity for future interludes to turn the current state around, and they probably will since Furina is still being marketed as an Archon, but as it stands I want Fontaine to be over so we can move on to the next disappointment.

[blue-mint-winter]

House of the Dragon ep 8 - Viserys’ Last Supper

To begin with, no dragons in this ep :( -1.

The issue of Driftmark’s inheritance comes up again because Corlys was injured in war. His brother Vaemond is eager to take over even though Lucerys is the appointed heir.

We already know Rhaenys’ opinion from the last episode, but officially she’s loyal to Corlys and his wishes. However, I’m pretty sure her own wish is actually for Baela to inherit since she’s raising her. The problem is that, unfortunately, Velaryons are practicing male inheritance like the rest of the realm.

Velaryons and Rhaenyra come to the capital to settle the dispute. Hightowers are ruling in Viserys’ name because he’s bedridden. They also made some changes in decor at the castle and Rhaenyra doesn’t approve.

It’s very shitty that Rhaenys still doesn’t know about Laenor being alive and thinks that Rhaenyra or Daemon had him killed.

Rhaenyra makes the proposition about betrothing Jacearys to Baela, making her a future Queen, and Lucerys to Rhaena so they would rule Driftmark. Easy solution. Rhaenys isn’t impressed with the offer but in the end she takes it because it benefits her granddaughters the most. It looks like she puts their future over her own hurt feelings.

The star of this episode was Viserys. The show was quite ballsy to show the extent of his illness, his ravaged body. He’s a suffering wreck and it’s just incredibly sad to see him like that.

When Rhaenyra talked to him and asked him to do something about her sons’ rights, I thought she was being unreasonable. What was she expecting this barely coherent, seriously ill man to do? This is her battle. However, having Hightowers as judges was as good as losing, obviously they’ll be in favour of disinheriting Luke from Driftmark so they could soon do the same to Jace and Rhaenyra’s own claim to the throne. So she probably had a point as only Viserys himself could overrule them.

So when Viserys rocked up all dressed up and on his own feet, fashionably late to the throne room - that was a shocking moment for everyone. Otto’s face? Priceless.

Even half-dead, Viserys will fight for Rhaenyra’s rights. And that’s father’s love.

Daemon helping Viserys ascend to the throne and putting the crown back on his head was a nice moment. Isn’t that symbolic of how it went when Viserys‘ took the throne for the first time?

Vaemond realized the tide turned completely against him and used some strong words. Viserys and Daemon synchronized, resulting in Vaemond’s swift death.

Alicent and Rhaenyra are more civil to each other after the years. Almost as if they missed each other. Alicent even goes back to “supporting” Rhaenyra’s claim. I wonder if she was just playing nice in front of Viserys or she really thinks it’s better not to let Aegon rule. With age Aegon became much worse than before, being a drunk and committing rape of a servant girl off screen. Alicent has to clean up his mess and keep it quiet. She basically has to scare the girl so badly that she won’t ever talk about what happened to her. Just how much shame and guilt Alicent feels for raising her son into this kind of man?

The whole family playing nice in front of Viserys during the supper, pretending to get along for him. One last effort for a dying man. Too bad they couldn’t fulfill his wish to truly make peace with each other. However, in the end it was a result of Viserys’ bad decisions that a rift happened and his inability to effectively mediate and manage them.

Servants putting a roast pig in front of Aemond and Luke laughing at it - an excellent moment. Aemond is carrying a grudge (not even for his eye! for the stupid jokes!) and takes opportunity to provoke Jace and Luke. On the other hand Aegon was nasty to Jace just because he could. Ugh.

Despite Aemond winning against Crispin armed with a morningstar he didn’t risk fighting against Daemon.

One thing I’m curious about is that Rhaenyra’s sons with Daemon were shown, but not Alicent’s fourth kid?

OMG that ending with Viserys telling Alicent about prophecy because he mistook her for Rhaenyra. It must look to Alicent as if on his deathbed he made a wish for Aegon to unite the realm when he meant Rhaenyra. He just caused a major misunderstanding that would cause the succession war! Dammit Viserys!

And thus, the show seems to point that probably most of Targaryen crazy decision-making is because of some prophecy. Probably always the same one.

[that-house]

Viego Rant (villainy and character design and tragedy and all that jazz)

Introduction The more I think about Viego, League of Legends’ newest character, the more enamored I am with him as a villain (unrelated to his general sexiness, though that does tie in with what makes him such a good villain).

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about his design. The Ruined King, one of the greatest threats in Runeterra, the progenitor of the Shadow Isles, the lord of the undead, is finally released as a playable champion and he looks like this:

People were expecting another Mordekaiser (who is similarly an undead king with a ghost army), a lich-tyrant clad in iron, decayed flesh peeling from an aged face. What we got was an angsty anime prettyboy, and it was infinitely better than the alternatives. 

Lore Viego isn’t a conquering king. While his combat abilities are indeed badass, his personality is far from it. He’s a whiny brat and that’s incredible. He isn’t bent on world domination. His character arc revolves around just how human, how fallible he really is. For those unfamiliar with his lore, I’ll paraphrase it here:

Viego was the second son of a great king. Overshadowed by his brother and with no expectations upon him and near-limitless wealth, he wandered around being an idiot fuckboy for the vast majority of his formative years. Disaster struck when his brother died in an accident, and Viego took the throne with no training, no experience, and no desire to be king. He was a shitty king. The worst king. Just all-around apathetic. Gave zero shits. Can you blame him? It’s a lot of responsibility to be thrust upon someone who isn’t much more than a child, and with no preparation. He didn’t care about anything, that is, until he met Isolde. She was a poor seamstress, but he fell in love with her upon their first meeting. Together they ruled the country but it was really just them staring longingly into each others’ eyes. His allies were kinda fucking pissed about that, and one day an assassin came from Viego. The assassin fucked up and stabbed Isolde instead, and the poison on the blade made her fall gravely ill. As she lay in her bed, slowly dying, Viego went mad seeking a cure. He ravaged the land seeking any knowledge that might help, pouring all of his money into finding an antidote. He failed. As a last resort, he brought Isolde’s body to the Blessed Isles, a place rumored to be able to resurrect the dead. It worked, to an extent. Isolde’s wraith, confused, afraid, and angry at being ripped from the peace of death, unthinkingly stabbed Viego in the chest with his own magic sword, creating basically a magic nuke that turned the Blessed Isles into the domain of the undead. Viego resurrected as the king of the Shadow Isles some time later, having totally forgotten that Isolde killed him. He controls a big-ass ghost army, could probably beat up any living thing in a fight, and has evil ghost magic. Now this stupid simp wants his wife back and if he has to kill every living thing on Runeterra, well, anything for his queen. He’s even a tier 3 sub to her Twitch.

Music His musical theme isn’t some heavy metal anthem or intense cinematic piece (unlike the Pentakill song named after his sword, Blade of the Ruined King). It’s mostly sad and slow, almost sinister, with a piano and a music box. It has its loud moments featuring violins and choral bits like any villainous music, but the song is mostly subtle. It is a banger though.

In the comments section of this video, someone pointed out that the music reflects his story from beginning to end:

Everything about this champion is so well done. Riot Games really outdid themselves on this one. Bravo, encore please.

Motivation While the Mordekaiser circlejerkers on r/LeagueofLegends won’t shut the fuck up about how powerful Mordekaiser is, Viego is the better villain. Mordekaiser may be a bigger threat to all life on Runeterra, but Viego is a better character. (There’s a guy on my League discord server who won’t shut up about Mordekaiser so forgive me for being pissed at Morde stans).

Mordekaiser is motivated by a desire for control, to rule the world. Viego is motivated by obsession and misplaced love. There aren’t a lot of Mordekaisers on Earth. Supervillains are rare in real life. But Viego’s motivations are a lot closer to home. People in positions of power that they don’t deserve can do a lot of harm (for example: Trump).

He’s a grieving husband who was never prepared to deal with anything more difficult than choosing what wine to drink with dinner, who is trying to get his wife back because the world had always complied to his every whim. He’s a funky mix between a truly hopeless romantic and a spoiled brat throwing a temper tantrum.

Obsession is scary. It’s a real-world emotional state that’s been the cause of a lot of murders over mankind’s history. In contrast, Mordekaiser’s cartoonish Genghis Khan XXL schtick isn’t something that we encounter often. Of course a superpowered ultradictator would be worse for the world, but if you give ultimate power to a random person, you’re more likely to get someone like Tighten from Megamind. Or, more relevantly, Viego.

Design His design is sexy and stupid, just like him. He wears an open shirt into battle and wields his sword like an idiot (I’ve seen all the rants about how that’s not how that sword is meant to be used) because he was never really a warrior. Even at his most violent, right before the end of his mortal life, he didn’t do much combat himself, leaving his military endeavors to his underlings. Even now that he’s essentially a god, he still has a colossal wraith army that causes far more devastation than he ever could personally.

Despite his slim build (by League of Legends standards), he easily wields his colossal sword because of the strength of his state of undeath. Like his political power when he was alive, his posthumous magical and physical powers were never something he sought out, they were just given to him by circumstance.

The big cool-ass triangle hole in his chest where Isolde stabbed him is the source of the Black Mist, which is evil ghost mist that ebbs and flows from the Shadow Isles, bringing with it hordes of the undead. The sadder Viego is, the more Mist he creates. Poetically, his invasion of the world is inspired by his sorrow at his wife’s death and enabled by his wife’s reluctance to return to him. His story is perfectly reflected by his design.

Isolde Isolde’s spirit took up residence inside a young Senna (who’s another League champion, not particularly important here). This led to some Black Mist-related shenanigans and at least for the time being, Senna uses Isolde’s power to fight off the servants of Viego which threaten all life on Runeterra.

It seems pretty clear that whatever love Isolde felt for Viego is gone by now. Whether or not she ever loved him or was just unable to say no to the king is up for debate, but I’d like to believe there was something there. In my opinion, Viego’s story hits harder if they really were a great couple at first, torn apart by circumstance and obsession.

Much like the Maiden of the Woods in that one comic that circulates around here, to whom the knight gave his heart and she was like “yo what the fuck i literally never asked you to do this,” Viego went a little too far in trying to save her. They may have once been happy, but the Ruined King ruined his own life, too.

Unless Isolde is a lot less morally decent than we’ve been led to believe, I doubt she can forgive all the massacring that her husband’s been doing lately. In the recent cinematic, she was shown to be pretty anti-Viego. Maybe she’ll get a bastardization arc, but it certainly seems unlikely.

All of Season 2021 is based around Viego, Isolde, and the Shadow Isles, so we’ll just have to see what comes next. It’s possible that we’ll get Isolde as a playable champion, which should clear a lot of things up.

Final Thoughts Unlike so many villains, he’s not fueled by rage or hatred, but rather by sorrow. He’s stuck in his past, unable to move on. He regrets the actions of his life but is set on his course now. The sunk-cost fallacy comes into play here; he’s put so much time and effort and blood into bringing back Isolde, that turning away from it would feel to him like an insult, not only to her but to the innocent lives he’s taken in her name.

His tale is a tragedy, a love story gone horrifically wrong. Viego has suffered throughout his thousand-year life. Despite this, he’s undoubtedly the villain. His permanent death would be a net positive for the world. In has rage and grief he’s destroyed multiple civilizations, and will burn down the world to get Isolde back.

His heart may be in the wrong place, but it’s in a very human place. I don’t think he’ll get the ending he’s looking for, but I hope he finds some closure in the end.

[fakeikemen]

The Roku/Sozin ancestry plot twist for Zuko

Like I’m sure this has been said before but the twist about Zuko being a descendant of both Roku and Sozin is actually a disservice to his character and his narrative as well? The way the narrative frames this reveal along with Iroh's dialogue, it backtracks on a lot of the story we are shown in Book 1&2 (and sometimes it even clashes with some dialogues in Book 3).

Iroh: “Because understanding the struggle between your two great-grandfathers can help you better understand the battle within yourself. Evil and good are always at war inside you, Zuko. It is your nature, your legacy. But, there is a bright side. What happened generations ago can be resolved now, by you. Because of your legacy, you alone can cleanse the sins of our family and the Fire Nation. Born in you, along with all the strife, is the power to restore balance to the world.”

1. This implies that there are equal amounts of good and evil in Zuko and his internal struggle is about choosing one of them.

The core qualities of Zuko as a character are empathy, compassion and kindness. A person who always gets upset when he sees or even thinks about other people in pain, a person who spoke out against powerful people to save lives that were being sacrificed needlessly, a person who shows mercy to people who don’t deserve it, a person who is willing to reach out a hand to save the life of the man who tried to kill him, a person who avoids fights when possible, a person who is willing to fight on behalf of a family he has known for only one night, a person who reaches out to sympathise after being yelled at— a person like this is definitely not struggling with equal parts of good and evil within them.

Zuko does have two selves, but they can be categorised as pre-scar and post-scar.

His pre-scar version is the version who was unabashedly kind and compassionate, who spoke his mind without thinking of consequences. But his post-scar version was a cover up of the pre-scar version. It was a lie that Zuko lived everyday. He convinced himself that this was how he had to be; because this was what Ozai wanted him to be and that there was no other way.

And yet, when the situation is dire and he is depending on his instincts or when he is given a free choice, we see the pre-scar Zuko spring into action. Because that’s who he really is. It’s not a struggle between good and evil within him, it is his supressed self making an appearance when he slips up and fails to maintain his facade.

Perhaps the line that describes his internal struggle the best is this:

Zuko, imitating Iroh: Zuko, you have to look within yourself to save yourself from your other self. Only then will your true self, reveal itself.

And while this dialogue was played for laughs, it is the most accurate description of how Zuko had to reach for his suppressed self, his real self, to save himself from becoming what Ozai wanted him to be.

2. It also implies that Ozai and Ursa had equal influence on Zuko's upbringing and that he struggled to chose between what was taught to him by Ursa (good) and Ozai (evil).

The idea that Zuko has equal amounts of good and evil inside himself goes hand in hand with idea that the good and evil traits in him have been passed onto him by Ursa and Ozai's upbringings respectively which are legacies of Roku and Sozin.

I don’t need to look any further than “Zuko Alone” to know that Ozai's impact on Zuko's upbringing was slim to none. The flashbacks that we see, are dominated by Ursa's presence. Ozai hardly gets any time onscreen. And when he does, he is shown as a silhouette and when he isn’t a silhouette, we only see him smile at Azula's display of skills and frown at Zuko's attempt.

Ozai was Zuko's father alright, but never in the ways that mattered. We know that Ozai abused Zuko. He constantly belittled him and compared him to Azula. Partially because Zuko lacked the natural talent that Azula had and partially because he lacked the ruthlessness and cruelty that Azula displayed even at her age.

Which made Zuko copy Azula's behaviour to get his father’s acceptance. But whenever Ursa noticed this, she immediately corrected Zuko and clearly told him that it was wrong.

Ozai is never shown to tell Zuko that whatever Ursa told him was wrong. Ozai personally never taught him anything (except that one time). He appreciated Azula's behaviour and encouraged her to keep it up but he just kept on expressing his disappointment in Zuko.

Ursa: Remember this, Zuko. No matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are.

Zuko's innate kindness and compassion were protected by Ursa in the formative years when he was at his most pliable. And this is why no matter what happens, he never loses these qualities and is able to retain his real self even after he tried hard to suppress it.

3. It diminishes the extent of psychological damage and trauma caused by the scarring incident.

The one time Ozai did take it upon himself to teach something to Zuko:

Ozai: You will learn respect, and suffering will be your teacher.

(Notice that here too Ozai's form is silhouetted against the light behind him.)

The scar is so much more than just a scar to Zuko. It is the one lesson that Ozai taught him. The scar exists because of Zuko's innate compassion. It was put on his face in an attempt to burn out his compassion. It was put there to be a constant reminder of what would happen if he dared to do something that went against what Ozai wanted from him. The scar was Ozai’s brand on his face. It took away Zuko's autonomy to make decisions for himself. It was a constant reminder that Zuko’s opinions didn’t matter.

Post-scar Zuko is Zuko's attempt at supressing his real persona to become the person Ozai wanted him to be, because he learned the hard way that he didn’t have the choice to be anyone else.

In fact, the first time Zuko makes a deliberate choice to go against what was expected of him, (letting Appa go) he succumbed to a fever. His emotional turmoil of coming to terms with the fact that he didn’t need to listen to Ozai and abide by him; a notion that he had been force feeding himself, everyday, for the last three years, manifested itself physically in the form of a fever. That was how deep the psychological damage caused by the scar was. (I hate it when people call it an angst coma.)

Saying that Zuko was struggling with equal amounts of good and evil within him, oversimplifies the complex emotional trajectory he had about coming to terms with the abuse he went through and reclaiming his autonomy and his personal opinions and beliefs, into just a choice between two aspects of his personality.

Zuko: I wanted to speak out against this horrifying plan, but I'm ashamed to say I didn't. My whole life, I struggled to gain my father's love and acceptance, but once I had it, I realized I'd lost myself getting there. I'd forgotten who I was.

4. This implies that Zuko's destiny was pre-determined.

Iroh said in the dialogue that Zuko was born with the power to restore balance in the world and that only he could do it.

Zuko, the character who has always had to struggle to gain what he wanted is suddenly told of an advantage that he had just by the virtue of birth? Kinda defeats the purpose of: "Azula was born lucky; I was lucky to be born", if you ask me.

And even more importantly, he let go of the destiny that Ozai forced on him, only to take on another predetermined destiny; a destiny that was his to fulfil by the virtue of birth, and took steps to fulfil this other destiny, instead of making a destiny of his own and paving his own path to it by making the choices that he had been denied for so long because of Ozai. Which seems weird because all the other times Iroh talks to Zuko about this topic, he always emphasises on how it’s Zuko's choice to make his own destiny:

Lake Laogai:

Zuko: I want my destiny.

Iroh: What that means is up to you.

Lake Laogai:

Zuko: I know my own destiny, Uncle!

Iroh: Is it your own destiny, or is it a destiny someone else has tried to force on you?

Zuko: Stop it, Uncle! I have to do this!

Iroh: I'm begging you, Prince Zuko! It's time for you to look inward and begin asking yourself the big questions. Who are you, and what do you want?

Crossroads of Destiny:

Iroh: Zuko, I am begging you. Look into your heart and see what it is that you truly want.

Western Air Temple:

Iroh: You know Prince Zuko, destiny is a funny thing. You never know how things are going to work out. But if you keep an open mind, and an open heart, I promise you will find your own destiny someday.

5. It indirectly implies that the good™ in Ursa and Zuko exists because they are a part of the Avatar's legacy.

Making Ursa a daughter of a nobleman (as intended originally)* would’ve served a much better purpose for the message that the episode was trying to get across: “the Fire Nation isn’t inherently evil”.

Katara: You mean, after all Roku and Sozin went through together, even after Roku showed him mercy, Sozin betrayed him like that?

Toph: It's like these people are born bad.

Aang: Roku was just as much Fire Nation as Sozin was, right? If anything, their story proves anyone's capable of great good and great evil. Everyone, even the Fire Lord and the Fire Nation have to be treated like they're worth giving a chance.

Had Ursa not been Roku’s descendant, then there would've been people other than just Roku and his descendants, who were Fire Nation and good™. (Iroh is literally the only exception.)

Moreover, Azula is just as much a part of “Roku’s legacy” as Zuko is, and yet is completely overlooked when it comes to it. She isn’t shown to be struggling with equal amounts of good and evil. She isn’t gifted at birth with the capacity to bring balance back to the world. It appears as if she had inherited only “Sozin's legacy”.

So, not only does this Roku/Sozin twist go against Zuko's fundamental characterisation, but it also partially deconstructs the narrative that had been carefully set up for him over the course of 2 seasons.

*(I have been looking relentlessly for the post where I saw two screen caps of the two different characterisations of Ursa: 1. Ursa as we see her in "Zuko Alone"; 2. Ursa as Roku's descendant. And I can't find it now otherwise I would've linked it.)

[pizzaboat]

So I've seen alot of people give their theory's and opinions on what's going to happen to Lilith in season 2 of the owl house, whether or not she's forgiven, where she's going to stay and how she'll act I guess, and the major thing being if she's redeemed or how redeemed she is.

I'm just going to throw my own thoughts out there and say that obviously there's still alot to do with her character. I also have no intention of bashing her character, I actually enjoy when she's on screen. I do like her but she's still problematic. So buckle up this is a long one.

To get my thoughts straight I'll break what I have to say down into parts, cause I get distracted easily.

First up im going to say I think she is far from redeemed. My impression of her is that she regrets cursing her sister, but she also finds some sort of sick pride in it too, as shown in agony of a witch when she screams " then why were you so easy to curse!?".

She also has no problem hurting literal children to get what she wants either, but that's another issue I'll discuse.

Lilith seems to resent her younger sister to an extreme, unhealthy degree. I could sit here and theorise about her child-hood and teen years wondering what could have created such insecurities in her, but im not going to. That is irrelevant to the point im trying to make. What's important to keep in mind though is that she was "perfect prissy Lilith"- the covention growing up, Eda was good at almost everything, and that Lilith cursed Eda to secure a spot in the emperors coven when Lilith was 18-19 and Eda was 16-17.

Is she redeemed ?

No i don't think she is even half way there. She cursed Eda in her sleep to win a fight. Lied for over thirty years to Eda about that curse. Mocked Eda for the symptoms of a curse she put on her "Why don't you go home and rest wouldn't want you breaking hip"- sense and insensitivity . she kidnapped Luz to use her against her sister, used Luz as a human meat shield in her and Eda's battle during agony of a witch, was generally quite rude to Luz when she wasn't dangling her over a pit of spikes, and also SPIKES.

Taking on half of a curse she put on her sister in the first place doesn't begin to cover the trauma and pain she's caused in the name of healing her sister, enforcing the emperors laws and joining said emperors coven.

I would also like to point out that she had a way to elevate her sisters pain all this time but she didn't. I've seen arguments like she trusted the emperor to heal her sister but I can already point out so many things wrong with that.

even if she did trust him, no normal person could sit by and watch any family member they claim to care about suffer, if she trusted the emperor so much she would have split the curse sooner, (providing Eda would have let her of course) and had him heal her or Eda both.

But she didn't do that she lied to her sister for years, partly because she was scared of losing Eda and also Eda's reaction which was, and would always be unbridalled rage. but also to an extent it suited her, it suited her to be the successful sibling, the sibling doing things "right" Lilith seems to be as I said before extremely insecure, and I think that just going off the episodes she was in and the impression the show puts forward.

If what I've noticed is correct, Lilith has spent her life in her sisters shadow, bullied in school as revealed in the end of something ventured something framed, nobody took her seriously due to her appearance and probably being a late bloomer in a lot of ways. She would have jumped at the chance to be given the same respect that Eda and other talented witches or well off, higher up witches recieved.

In other words the emperors coven fed Liliths' battered ego, telling her what she wanted to hear.

It makes sense that she wouldn't want to let that go, but in the context of what has happened and the fact she seemed to still try and stick with the emperors coven before Belos sent her to be executed along with eda and king.

She isn't redeemed, she probably doesn't see much wrong with how she's behaved up until now(besides cursing Eda) and there's still alot of work for her to do. She only split half the curse because her expulsion from the coven forced her to address a mistake she made for once.

Season 2 and maybe more seasons looks like where she'll be earning her redemption. Hopefully she'll be forced to face more of her flaws and short comings and work on them.

Will she be forgiven?

Lilith from what has been shown has hurt;

Eda Luz, King, Amity, Willow and Gus. They all have different reasons to be hostile towards her.

Eda

She cursed Eda and almost subjected her to a faith worse than death, lied to her, mocked her. Kidnapped her apprentice and almost got Luz killed a number of times,using her as a sheild. She dragged Luz into the whole messed up rivalry. I don't think Eda will forgive her emediatly, after all, even if she can forgive Lilith for what she did to her, she would also have to forgive her for what she did to Luz.

She essentially kidnapped Edas' surrogate daughter, Eda was much angrier about Luz's suffering than her own "you hurt luz, you cursed me. before anything turns me to stone I'm going to tear you apart!" - young blood, old souls

Yeah Eda was fit to murder her sister, taking some of the curse probably only got rid of her homicidal desire towards Lilith, thats it.

Luz

I've seen some people make fan content in which Luz immediately forgives Lilith or comes round eventually to her when Lilith acts nice around the house.

That seems super out of character for Luz, sure Luz is characterised to be kind and sweet but if the final proves anything its that she has a ruthless streak that comes out when she tries to protect the people she loves, her family. Lilith has threatened the people she cares about. I don't see Luz letting that slide, and she would probably still be on guard. Luz may have accepted her help in young blood old souls, but that was only because she wanted to save Eda she told Lilith she didn't like her "whole deal" and she meant it.

Lilith would have to prove she's really changed for the better for luz to begin to for give her.

King

I like the idea of King and Lilith becoming friends simply for comedy perposes, if King were to forgive her and I think he'd be one of the closest to it out of the main characters.

They'd be a force of sheer stupidity and ego they'd be bad and good for each other, King weirdly enough would be more emotionally mature since he's learned things like you can't be posesive over people in really small problems it's a lesson Lilith needs to learn since she seems to resent Luz to an extent, thinking Luz was taking her sister from her "Edalyn is with her family, her real family. Go back to your world human this one is ours" - agony of a witch

Of course before this she needs to also earn his forgiveness, he wasn't there for agony of a witch but he did experience the fear and worry of losing eda in young blood, old souls the only person he had up until then was Eda " King and I, we don't have much in this world. we only have each other"- A lying witch and a Warden. Lilith helping rescue Eda might have helped improve his opinion of her, but Lilith would have to get over herself first to begin her redemption.

Hooty

I don't think Hooty would hold a grudge, mostly because he's comic relief and weird. Since I personally think no one in the owl house would be bothering with her, and I see her being forced to live In the shed. I think Hooty would be her only company and I think it would be unexpected and really funny if he's the first person/bird thing to open her eyes to her awful behaviour. You gotta start somewhere and Hooty is it.

Amity, Gus and Willow

I think Gus and Willow will be stand-offish until Luz and King forgive Lilith.

Once Lilith has developed more as a person she owes Amity an apology for how she behaved as a teacher. Amity would be mad after the covention episode, but almost killing her crush would make her protective of Luz, and wary of her in general.

Conclusion

Lilith hasn't been redeemed in my opinion, there's still alot of growth she needs to go through, she's made alot of terrible mistakes and decisions, its what makes her so interesting. I like her but she's a sh*t person, but she can learn to be less of a sh*t person.

I'm aware this is a kids show and she probably won't get all this development or she could get different character development and that would be awesome, its just my thoughts and opinions and I'm really excited for season 2.

[kayparker20]

Inner Turmoil - Chapter 5

Chapter 5 - Nightmares, Rescues, and Memories

FFN | AO3

She was paralyzed as she watched the scene before her. No matter how hard she tried to move, she just couldn’t get her body to respond. Her eyes were wide as the tears streamed steadily over her cheeks. 

Kakashi was limp as the raven haired man held him by the throat. A large shuriken was protruding out of his back, one of the blades wedged in between his right shoulder blade and spinal cord. He coughed up blood as he tried to speak.

“Sa...kura.” The silver haired nin coughed. 

Sasuke’s cold gaze stared at him. “Did you really think you would keep her from me?” He seethed. 

“Kakashi!” Sakura cried out. “Sasuke, stop!”

Kakashi struggled to turn his eyes towards Sakura, his chest heaving as it became even more difficult to breathe. 

“None of this would have happened if she had just come with me, Hatake…” He smirked. “Say goodbye.”

Sakura tried to force her body to move as she watched Sasuke throw him. Horrified as she watched the man she loved die as Kakashi landed directly with the shuriken as it pulled him backwards, and finished puncturing through his body, the tip of the blade coming out of his chest. He convulsed before going still as his eyes rolled back.

“Kakashi!” She screamed in her sleep. 

The silver haired nin jumped up instantly, glancing down at Sakura. Her skin was pale and she was soaked in a cold sweat. 

He knew this state all too well.

“Sakura…” He called out softly. He gently shook her shoulder. ��Sakura, wake up.” He kissed her forehead. She started trembling and tears were streaming down her face. 

“No...No!” She sobbed. “Sasuke, no!” She thrashed around, flipping over. She had flung her weight into his chest, her arms coming around him, gripping his torso tightly.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, holding her close and kissing her head. He buried his face in her neck before talking in a low, consoling, but slightly firm timbre. 

“Sakura, I love you,” He rubbed circles into her lower back. “I’m right here. Wake up and look at me…” He shook her shoulders a little more roughly this time. “Sakura, please wake up.” His voice gained some urgency as she continued to cry out in a panic.

The pink haired woman suddenly shot up out of bed, stiff as a board. Her eyes were wide and stinging with tears. A chill ran through her body as she shuddered. She raked her fingers through her hair as her chest heaved with the heavy exhales. Her heart thundered in her chest and she could hear it pounding in her ears.

“Sakura, I’m right here.” He grabbed her hands and brought them to his face. “Look at me,” He carefully and slowly brought his hands to rest over her face, brushing his thumbs over her cheek bones. He steered her gaze towards him, making eye contact her. “It was just a nightmare…” 

She looked at him, staring into his eyes. She let out a shaky breath, trying to calm her breathing. It wasn’t long before she buried her face into his neck. Her arms moved to wrap around him. She sunk into his embrace, anchoring herself to him.

She focused on the fact that she could hear him breathe. She could feel his pulse, which was slightly elevated, on his neck against her arm. She could also feel each rise and fall of his chest, feel his breath run across her messy locks on top of her head. She focused on the circles he still continued to massage into her lower back, grounding herself in everything that showed life in him. 

It had seemed so real, so vivid. And she knew deep down that it could become a reality. She didn’t know what to do, she didn’t want to see Kakashi get hurt because of her. However, she also knew he would give his life for her, or anyone else. 

Kakashi just held her, he didn’t know what to say. He knew there was nothing that would stop the rush of fear that was rushing in her veins right now. Nothing he could say would stop the horrors she was shown from returning. It was months before he stopped waking up in cold sweats, believing he was still being pecked away by birds from Itachi’s tsukuyomi. He felt her body slowly calm, her breath evened. She seemed to be grounded now. 

“I’m not going anywhere, Sakura…” He murmured softly in her ear.

She nodded softly. “I’m… sorry that I woke you.”

Kakashi shook his head and tightened his embrace a moment. “It’s okay, I understand…”

“Kakashi…” She sighed. “I can’t bear the thought of people getting hurt over trying to protect me…” 

He took a sharp intake of breath. “Sakura, no.” His voice was stern, but it was earnest. “You are not going to join him…” 

She frowned. “What choice do I have?” She snapped. “Ino could already be hurt because of me, and now he’s threatened you over me!” 

“Sakura, listen to me!” His voice had an edge to it. “I will not let you sacrifice yourself.”

He stared into her eyes. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. She was the embodiment of happiness. She was his happiness. This was the exact thing he feared before he let his walls down. He couldn’t lose her, like he had lost everything else. She had promised him she wasn’t going anywhere. His heart pounded in his chest as the thoughts of not having her in his arms ever again raced through his mind. Thoughts of never seeing her smile again or kissing her. He brought his hands up to gently cup her face, not sure what else he could say, knowing full well he was probably just making her angry.

“I will not let my best friend die over selfish emotions!” She hissed, trying to keep her voice low, despite her anger. He tried to pull away from his grip, her eyebrows turning down in a glare towards him.

“It’s not selfish!” He insisted. 

“Oh, yeah! We get to stay happy and together while Choji suffers knowing the girl he's loved all his life was killed in an attempt to bait her best friend!” She retorted, her eyes narrowing. “Totally not selfish!” Her voice dripped with venomous sarcasm.

Kakashi winced softly, realizing that, maybe okay, yes, it might be selfish for him to choose his love over their friend’s love. 

No one thought about choosing between them, himself included. Why did she? 

Does she ever think to take care of herself, to protect herself too? Her heart ached. She always put their team first, healing and healing until her hands burned from chakra use and it flickered out. They would have to force her to stop, or else he was sure she would pour ever bit of her life source into them if it meant they would be okay. 

So naturally, she’s more than prepared to give herself over to the snakes of the leaf if it meant her best friends lived and loved and went on as a ninja. Even if it meant her misery, or her death. 

The silver nin pulled her close once more, despite her attempts (rather weak ones, in his opinion with his knowledge of her own strength) to fight his pull. She settled for huffing in annoyance and refusing to look at him.

He gently grabbed her chin and turned her to face him and  gave her a chaste kiss to her lips. “I just got you, I’m not going to lose you, damnit. This isn’t about you or Ino coming home. It’s about both of you coming home.” His tone was resolute, no argument. “If you think for even second that anyone on this squad, especially Naruto, and me, would ever let you join those traitorous snakes, then you truly don’t see how much we care for you.” 

 Sakura’s gaze at him softened at his words, and she reached up to press her hands against his. Her eyes welled up with tears, which only angered her a little more. She wasn’t supposed to be this person anymore. People weren’t supposed to suffer because of her and she wasn’t supposed to cry anymore. “Kakashi…” She spoke softly.

He wiped her tears away softly with the pads of his thumbs. “Sakura, I love you.” He mumbled softly. He pecked her cheek, her nose. He just showered her face with kisses. “And I will protect this team and the people I care about, and especially you.”

“I don’t need protection…” She grumbled, even as she smiled at his affection.

“We are dealing with Orochimaru and Sasuke.” He chastised. “There’s a reason we have a 12 man squad.” He sighed. “And it’s not about whether I think you need my protection or not, Sakura…” He said with clear irritation.

Sakura raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ve always protected me, and me first. I’ve always been the weakest one of Team Kakashi…” 

He took a lock of her hair into his hands, playing with it. “That may have been true once.” He smiled. “But now, I’d protect you first because living life without you in it isn’t bearable. Because I care about you, and I know I can keep you safe…”

Before she could say anything back, he winced slightly before resting his head on her shoulder. He took a deep breath before slowly letting it out.

She frowned, knowing exactly where the pain was coming from. “Why didn’t you say something?” Now she sounded like an irritated nurse, Dr. Haruno coming into action now. He knew that tone much too well, and knew the lectures that usually came with it. It was the same tone she used on all of their team after hunting them down after missions to force heal their injuries, even if they were minor.

“I didn’t want to add to your stress, or have you using precious chakra on me.” He inhaled and exhaled slowly once more. “I’m fine, the pain will fade in a few moments. I didn’t always have orders to be healed regularly, if you have forgotten.”

She gave out an aggravated noise before pushing him onto the bed and straddling his hips. “How many times do I have to tell you? We are literally in the field, right now!” She scolded before raising her hand, the green glow of her healing chakra already present, and gently pressing her palm over his sharingan. “And that was before it started to effect your body in such a way, before you had used it to such extents to where it would fucking bleed.” She huffed something about ‘stupid and overly resilient men’ under her breath, but he just smiled as he gave in.

He let out a defeated sigh, and then another one of relief as her chakra worked its way into his eye. He rested his hands on her hips, before a smirk played across his features.

She frowned. “What the hell are you down there smiling about?”

“We should play doctor more often.” He said in a playful tone, before pressing his hips upwards.

Her face instantly turned a dark shade of red. “Kakashi!” She hissed, completely undignified.

He could tell his eye was fine now, so he rolled them over so that he was towering over her. “Hmmm?” He kissed down her neck, nipping softly. “I think you could use the relaxation release gives you…” He gently ran his hands up her sides and cupped her breasts. “Your entire body is still tense, and we have to be able to run today.” He chuckled mischievously. “It would be a shame if we had to stop because your muscles got too tense.”

She was still cherry red as she let out a small whimper. “Kakashi…” He used all her willpower to push her very irresistible man from her body with her hands pressed to his chest. “I… can’t.” She looked away. “Not right now.”

The older ninja instantly stopped his teasing and turned her face back to look at him again. “Okay. I understand.” He pecked her lips softly before laying back down on his side to watch her.

She turned on her side to face him. She just gazed over all of him, knowing she could never bear the thought of not having him. They had been together for hardly two weeks now, but it felt like so much longer. She gulped softly as the guilt settled in. 

“Kakashi…” She reached out to grip his hand tightly. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “Don’t be, it’s fine.” He brought an arm around her and pulled her close to his chest. “I understand.” He kissed the top of her head.

He rested her forehead against his chest and sighed. “Thank you..”

He nodded, running his fingers through her hair. He learned quickly that that calmed her and he tried to note anything that could ease her anxiety.

He knew she wouldn’t want to think about it, but he also knew she needed to talk about it. Things ate at Sakura from the inside out, and he didn’t want her to be in such distress.

“Sakura, what were you dreaming about?” He asked her quietly.

She stiffened at the question but took a deep breath. “It was just one of the many visions I was shown of Sasuke killing you…” Her hands stopped moving along his back. “I was paralyzed and couldn’t do anything but watch and scream…” She shuddered at the memory.

Kakashi nodded softly, not asking for any more details. “I’m right here. Just remember that.” 

She nodded softly, before slowly falling back asleep. She felt safe in his arms, and took the feel of his body against hers as a constant reminder that he was safe, at least for the moment.

Kakashi knew they still had a couple hours before the others woke up, well, if her screaming hadn’t woken them. Now that he really thought of it, he was sure the sounds of screaming definitely woke up a squad of camping shinobi. 

He was thankful that no one had come to the tent, she would have hated for anyone to see her in such a distraught state, maybe besides Naruto and Hinata. He also knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep, so he just continued to stroke her hair, hoping the relaxing effect would last through the rest of her sleep.

Sai had been sitting at the fire, finding himself unable to sleep, before he heard Sakura cry out. He had instantly run over to his teammates’ tent, before he could hear Kakashi already beginning to console her. He smiled a bit, a bit shocked to hear such a comforting tone come from the legendary copy nin that would be, Kakashi Hatake. He listened for awhile, making sure Sakura wouldn’t need any other assistance. 

Soon he returned to the fire to sit and watch the flames dance in the dark. He heard another tent open and turned to see Hanabi walking towards him. He gave his usual smile and waved at her. “Hello, Hanabi. Are you well?”

The young Hyuuga watched him for a moment, fighting a blush before nodding. “I’m okay, just a little cold.” She sat next to him by the fire.

“Neji is on watch at the moment, but I haven’t been able to sleep.” Sai spoke matter of factly. 

She nodded. “I think it was Kakashi-sensei’s next, right?” She wondered aloud.

Sai nodded. “I believe so, but I may take his watch.” He said thoughtfully, thinking Sakura may need their team leader at her side.

Hanabi smiled, also having heard Sakura’s terrored screams. “So, is it true that Kakashi and her are together?” She asked.

Sai nodded. “I don’t think I’ve seen Sakura as… Happy since I met her.”

She nodded softly. “I think it’s sweet that you’ll take over Kakashi’s watch so he doesn’t have to leave her.” She scooted a little closer to him.

“The book says that building friendships is easy when you do things to help them.” He smiled at Hanabi. “I’d protect my team anyway I can, but I will also protect you if that time ever comes.”

She stared back at Sai, before kissing his cheek. “I’m glad.”

Sai watched her for a moment, before raising a hand to touch the spot her lips had caressed ever so lightly.

Neji watched the scene from a branch above their camp, a small smile gracing his lips. He could only imagine the thoughts running through the socially inept shinobi’s thoughts at the moment.  He wasn’t surprised to see Hanabi make a move. She had always been more bold than Hinata, even going as far to have disputes with Hiashi as she got older. He also knew that Sai would protect her and she would never be in danger in his presence. 

“What was that for..?” He asked the girl quietly.

She shrugged. “Because I wanted to.” She got up then and walked back to her tent.

Sai pondered for a moment, not sure what to make of her action. He decided he would have to ask Naruto and Sakura for advice on this one.

Just then the obnoxious blonde came out of his tent and stretched. He came to sit down on the log across from Sai by the fire. “Can’t sleep either, huh Sai?”

“No, not quite, Dickless.” 

Naruto scowled at the nickname. “I’d tell you to ask Hina all about that just to prove it’s wrong, but I think she’d faint.” He laughed off.

“Do you think Sakura is okay?” Sai asked softly.

Naruto’s expression turned back to exhausted, which was exactly how he felt.

It was obvious to anyone who knew her well that she was far from okay. Her best friend was just kidnapped by the guy she used to pine after. Sasuke put her through a tsukuyomi, showing her Kakashi’s death by his hands over and over again. His teammate had already been through so much emotional torment by Sasuke, and the fact it continues even after she finally moves on angered him beyond belief.

He sighed heavily. “Sakura wears her heart on her sleeve. As a shinobi, she bears many more emotions than most, as do I.” He smiled a bit. “Most people have grown accustomed to that part of us. Some still point it out as weakness. However, this time around, I think she’s trying to hide them.” He sighed. “She is supposed to be the one to save people, and right now I’m sure she has convinced herself she has put Ino and Kakashi in danger by refusing Sasuke, let alone everyone else on this mission.”

Sai nodded. “Do you still believe there is hope in bringing Sasuke back?” He knew this was a sensitive subject, having learned to not call him a traitor and so on.

Naruto was silent for a few moments before shaking his head slowly. “I would have believed it, even after him kidnapping Ino. He’s done so many things, and I tried to believe that once he got his revenge, he would come back to us.”

Sai watched him intently, knowing the story of the Uchiha clan.

“But, after finding out he put Sakura in a tsukuyomi, and doing it basically out of pure jealousy…” His expression hardened, and the firelight only made him look even more angry.

“I can’t believe he still cares for us if he would put Sakura through that. He has threatened to kill us, tried to kill all three of us many times.” He laughed coldly. “However, it was antagonized, or we were in the way of his real goal. It was able to somehow be excused. But for him to suddenly decide he was going to just use Sakura for a means to an end, not even deciding he did love her…” He shook his head. “It’s unforgivable. She’s a shinobi, not just some baby machine. I don’t even know if she wants kids at all…”

Sai nodded before glancing at the tent. “She had a nightmare…”

Naruto nodded. “I heard, but I figured I’d let Kakashi handle it.” He smiled. “Sakura doesn’t like to be seen as weak, even though she isn’t, the less people who see her in a shaken state, the better for her.”

Sai smiled genuinely. “She is quite strong, as we both know, so why doesn’t she think so?”

“Oh, she knows.” Kakashi came out of the tent and chuckled. “But it doesn’t stop her insecurities and comparing herself to the rest of her class, let alone her teammates.”

He looked up at the trees above them. “Neji, it’s time for my watch.”

“Actually, I was going to take your watch for you, Kakashi.” Sai smiled.

Naruto watched the two before smiling.

Kakashi looked at him before shaking his head. “I’ve got my watch, but thank you Sai.” Then he gave an eye crease. “Besides, I believe you have a question and something to maybe explore on your own, Sai.” 

Sai’s eyed widened before he smiled again. “Ah, yes.” He turned to Naruto. “What reason would a girl kiss my cheek?”

Naruto stared at him blankly before busting out laughing, trying to quiet himself. “Why do you ask, Sai?”

“Because the young Hyuga girl I’ve been paired up to protect kissed my cheek, after telling me I was sweet.” Sai watched Naruto, confused by his reaction.

Neji landed silently between them. “Naruto, you’ll wake the whole camp with your howling if you don’t shut up.” He turned to Sai and couldn’t help the slightest bit of a smile. 

Kakashi sighed and shook his head at his team’s antics. “Sai, are you sure you didn’t read anything in a book about this?” 

“No, I have not. Nothing comes up about kisses in friendship books.”

“Didn’t I suggest you read Icha-Icha?”

Sai frowned. “Sakura told me not to read those if I was looking for ways to build relationships with people…” 

Kakashi only raised an eyebrow. “Well, I beg to differ. You would know what a kiss means if you had read them.”

Naruto just rolled his eyes. “Pervy Sage is smiling down on you, such a loyal fan you are Kakashi.” He smiled fondly, before laughing even more.

Hinata came out of her and Naruto’s tent to see what was going on. She rubbed her eyes blearily as she approached them. “Naruto…?” She called out softly. “What’s so funny?”

The poor Hyuga fought the urge to go check on Sakura herself, remembering Naruto’s words about trying to not draw more attention to her. She wondered when her sometimes absent-minded boyfriend became so careful.

Neji looked at Hinata and shook his head softly. “It would seem that Hanabi kissed Sai’s cheek, and the former ANBU is not quite sure what to make of it.” 

Hinata's eyes widened before she smiled. “I remember a certain person who was confused when Tenten made a similar action.”

Neji’s face turned a light shade of pink before defending himself. “I knew what it meant! I was just surprised!”

Sai looked at Neji, noting that he was sure him and Tenten were a couple, and wondering why he was embarrassed by the information.

Kakashi sighed before sitting next to Sai. “Okay, Sai, let me explain this to you.” He gave his normal eye crease of a smile. “When Sakura and I got together, she kissed me.” He smiled at the memory. “Now, me and Sakura had been treading that boundary between friendship and romance for awhile, and Sakura is also a grown woman and bold about it, so her crossing such boundaries in a bold manner suits her.” 

Sai stared at his team leader with curiosity. “So, a kiss is a show of affection…”

Kakashi nodded. “Yes. Or lust, take your pick, it all depends on the situation. It can even be both…” He added the end with a sly tone.

“Kakashi!” Naruto hissed, hating the insinuation behind it. Hinata turned a little red herself now and hushed Naruto.

“In terms of the young Hanabi, Hyuga tends to be more reserved. She’s not as shy as her elder sister, but she won’t cross such blatant boundaries as Sakura would. Not to mention she’s also a young girl who tends to be more insecure.”

“So, Hanabi, is expressing romantic interest in myself?” Sai concluded out loud.

Hinata giggled softly. “Yes, and believe me I hear all about it. She’s quite curious about you.” 

Sai frowned. “But she is fourteen …”

Naruto had finally calmed down but chuckled nonetheless. “How many years are between Kakashi and us again?” He said with a smirk.

“Hey now, that was... different.”

Sai was not quite convinced. “She’s so… Young.”

Hinata nodded, and Neji showed no response. They were well aware that Hiashi seemed to kind of like the ninja, but it was never talked about in ways of now idea. 

“It would seem pretty much everyone besides our medic is awake.” Shikamaru commented as he walked up to the scene, the concern hidden somewhere in his lazy tone.

Kakashi took a look around and nodded. “She needs the rest…”

Everyone nodded, well aware of the unspoken.

“Let’s start packing up and covering our tracks while we wait for her to wake up. We need to get moving quickly in case of injury to Ino.”Yamato called out as he began taking down his tent and repacking his gear which he had already pulled out of the shelter.

Everyone followed suit, packing up their own shelters while Kakashi stood watch, keeping a close eye on the perimeter. After about an hour, Sakura came out of the tent. She had slept for almost two hours since falling back to sleep.

He glanced at her, and was happy to see she seemed much more rested and calm. The stiffness in her body was gone. Her hair was put up pulled back and she seemed just as confident as she was any other day. He smiled softly behind his mask.

“Have any of you ate since yesterday?” She crossed her arms and eyed her squad. She knew ninja had a bad habit of eating poorly on missions.

They looked at each other before laughing nervously.

She huffed. “Figures. Don’t even think of putting that fire out.” She ducked back into the tent before coming out with her pack. She always brought things to cook quickly on missions that were of actual sustenance. She fished out finding one of her storage scrolls before making the hand signs to release it as it rolled open. She started plucking around finding things she knew her usual team members liked.

“Ramen!” Naruto pounced over to her to grab one of the instant cups. “I already know where I’m going to get the water!” He whispered excitedly.

Sakura just rolled her eyes as Naruto bounded off to some stream nearby. “There’s jerky and dried fruit rations as well. Help yourself.”

She stood up and walked away. She began pulling the cots and things from the tent while everyone found something to eat from her scroll.

Kakashi came back to help her silently. They packed everything up quickly. Once the tent and the rest of their belongings was packed up she eyed Kakashi. “Did you eat?” 

He nodded and gave his normal eye crease as he held a bag of fruit and a bag of jerky. “I was going to make sure you did as well.” He said as he tossed her the bag of dried fruit.

She caught it with ease before her lips formed a small smile.

“Everyone, get back in formation and let’s head out.”

Kakashi summoned one of his ninken. “Lead Yamato and Neji to the hideout, Pakkun.” 

Pakkun bounded up to the front with Yamato and Neji, following his orders.

“What the fuck is your deal, Sasuke?” The blonde spat out venomously as he dropped her to the ground in front of Orochimaru.

“What is this?” The elder man asked curiously.

“Motivation.” Sasuke said bluntly.

Ino hands her tied behind her back but she still forced herself into a sitting position and stared back at Sasuke. “You’ve got some fucking nerve.” She spat.

Sasuke looked back at her. “I forgot how chatty you were.” He scowled.

“I forgot how painfully arrogant you were.” She growled.

“Is this the Yamanaka girl?” Orochimaru asked.

“Yes, she’s Sakura’s best friend.” He glared at the floor. “Turns out, she’s not so head over heels for me anymore. She’s slutting around with Kakashi.”

Ino fumed. “Oh wait, that’s right, she was just supposed to wait for your self righteous ass to just suddenly decide revenge wasn’t more important! Sorry, I forgot to remind her when she smiled a real smile for the first time since you left her on a fucking bench.” She seethed. “At least Kakashi has a fucking heart.”

Orochimaru chuckled. “Well, she’s terribly feisty.”

Ino turned to look at the creepy man before her. She had heard enough about him. He killed the third hokage. Tried to kill Naruto. She knew he was the deranged teammate of Jiraiya and Tsunade. 

“Ah yes, the irony. One traitor trained by another.” She retorted in disgust.

“I imagine your plan is for Sakura to come rescue her. Her joining us in exchange for Ino’s safety?” Orochimaru pondered.

Sasuke nodded. “I also plan to kill the copycat bastard, I’m sure he’ll be with her.”

Orochimaru laughed. “Jealousy doesn’t suit you Sasuke.” 

“I don’t know what the fuck he’s got to be jealous over.” Ino glared at the two men before he.

Sasuke slapped her across the face. “None of your goddamn business.”

Ino glared at him as she spat the blood from her teeth cutting into her cheek at him. “Everything about my best friend is my goddamn business, you prick.” She narrowed her cerulean eyes at him. “Then again, you know a damned thing about friendship, would you!” She continued to glare at him, her body tense and ready to react to more blows. “And if you think for a second any of us will let her join you, you don’t know the first thing about being a Leaf shinobi!” 

“How do you expect them to find us?”

“I’m sure they have a whole squad coming for us, and Kakashi has his ninken to track. I didn’t bother trying to hide myself.”

The snake shinobi frowned. “That means I’ll need a new hideout when this is all over, what a shame.”

“You’re the one who wanted Sakura in the first place.” Sasuke chided irritably.

Ino stared on in disgust. “What the fuck for?”

“To heal these wretched arms.” Orochimaru sneered.

“You think she’s going to help you?” Ino laughed now. “Sakura wouldn’t do a damn thing for you, even if her life depended on it.”

“True, but now it’s yours that depends on it.” He chuckled darkly. 

Ino glared. “Team Kakashi won’t be the only people coming, you know.” Then she smiled. “I would just bet my own team leader is itching to do some damage to the man that killed his father.” 

Orochimaru gave a sinister smile before licking his lips and kneeling down to Ino eye level. “I’ll kill him just as easily as I killed Hiruzen-Sensei, darling.”  

She glared. “Oh yes, so easily. That's why you had to call upon the first and second right?” She smirked. “Because you knew you couldn’t beat him on your own.”

Ino shivered then, the fear setting in, even as she braved against them. She hoped there would be enough people to save her, and that Sakura wouldn’t really sacrifice herself to him.

She longed for Choji’s embrace right about now, the feeling of safeness she felt in his arms. Here it was cold. Everything was, the air, the floor. Sasuke and Orochimaru just looked cold hearted as they stood there silently, just waiting.

She wondered what she ever saw in Sasuke back then. He was always cold and distant. Arrogant. He couldn’t be bothered with any of them. She remembered what she had heard Naruto tell of the story.

I’m done playing ninja.

“It shouldn’t be too long before they arrive.” Sasuke said, before grabbing a kunai and grabbing Ino roughly by the hair and raising her up. He stabbed her in the top of her thigh, not vital but enough to bleed and cause a lot of pain. She cried out in pain and thrashed, trying to get away from him.

“You sick bastard…” She growled out as she clenched her teeth in pain. 

Sasuke just smirked. “Just a little more motivation.” He chuckled darkly. “They should be here soon, I wonder how many they sent.”

Orochimaru smiled pleasantly. “Ah, well the more the merrier.” He stated with a sinister pleasantry lilting in his voice.

She groaned out in pain, her breathing ragged. It hurt so much, but she could heal it. She was trying to decide if it was such a good idea. If she healed this non-life threatening wound, would they dish out that was? Was that a risk worth taking? 

For now, she decided to deal with the pain. She’d prefer to at least be alive if her friends were coming to the trouble of retrieving her. And she knew they would, there was now way they would leave her behind.

Not Sakura. Not Choji. She knew she drove Shikamaru insane but she didn’t doubt his loyalty for a second, not one bit. She bit her lip, tears pricking her eyes, but she fought them. She growled out as she ground her teeth. If she was going down, she’d be damned if she was a little bitch about it.

She couldn’t tell how much time had passed as she watched her blood pool around the floor. It seemed to be forever, just sitting in silence. She turned and wretched around to try and not so much pressure on her arms. She could feel that there were rope burns on her wrists at this point. They were burning and she could feel an extra sting of pain everytime she moved. It was agonizing. She had just let her eyes slip closed when something brushed against her.

Mice? She glanced around before she realized it was an ink creature. 

Hope rushed through her veins as she realized it was the same scouting mice she heard Sakura tell her Sai used. She heard the angry voice of one certain blonde knucklehead echo through the corridors. 

“SASUKE!” 

She saw wood penetrate the floor around and create a cage over her body. She wanted to panic at first, before she sensed the chakra signature.

Or rather, signatures. Her eyes widened as she realized how many of them came. Some of them were even unfamiliar. 

Sasuke jerked his head to somewhere down the hall, she supposed the entrance.

“I expected them… Later.” His eyes narrowed. “Surely they had to rest.”

Orochimaru laughed. “Ninja from the lead are persistent, don’t you remember?” He looked over at Ino, distaste clear in his yellow eyes. “Of course, my experiment is here. Tsk.”

“Ino!” Sakura called out, the distress clear in her voice. 

Panic rose in the blonde's heart. Why the hell is she out in the open! She should have been somewhere safe, stayed back. Not right here with them. No, no, no. That’s not how this is supposed to fucking work, damnit.

“Sakura…” Sasuke called out in his distant, but deep lilting tone.

She heard the footsteps hasten. So many steps. She was shocked. What were there, maybe 9 people? No, there’s more…

“Sasuke!” 

“Naruto, get her out of here!” Ino screamed.

They came running into the room where she could see them now. Yamato, Neji, and that one little pug of Kakashi’s. They were followed by Shikamaru, Choji, and Temari?! Another Hyuga(is that Hanabi?) and Sai? And then there was Asuma, Sakura and Kakashi, followed by Naruto and Hinata. 

Twelve people. All for her. She knew she was the next head of one of the five main clans, but she didn’t think they would risk so many of their best ninja against Orochimaru, even for that length. 

Tears flowed down her cheeks. “Choji, Shika!” She sobbed, not able to seem so strong anymore. What good would she have really done for herself? Her hands were tied, she couldn’t have made a single hand sign if she wanted. She wasn’t Sakura, she couldn’t channel chakra into strength to break the ropes.

“Shut it!” Sasuke snapped. His eyes landed on Sakura. “Have you made a decision then?”

Her eyes were dark emerald and angry as she met Sasuke’s gaze. Her eyes slid over to Orochimaru, the same disgust lying in them. “Let Ino go.” 

Ino couldn’t ever remember a time when her pink haired friend sounded so dangerous.

“I believe there was an arrangement in order for this to happen.”

Kakashi had his sharingan uncovered and activated. He stood tall and foreboding, ready and waiting for someone to make a wrong move. Him and Asuma on either side of Sakura, Asuma had his chakra blades out, ready to attack.

She felt something wrap around her wrist. She looked down to find a shadow circling her arm. 

Sakura took a step forward. “You will release her before I do anything.”

“I’m afraid that’s not how this works…” Orochimaru said sweetly.

Sasuke’s eyes didn’t leave Sakura. He grabbed his katana, moving to weave it through the wood limbs surrounding her to stab her once more.

Suddenly the wood moved and wrapped around his wrist, and shoved him out.

“Now!” Shikamaru called. She quickly ripped the ropes with his shadows.

The wood dispersed from Ino before she jumped up and heaved herself in their direction as she sent a burst of healing chakra to the gash on her thigh. 

Orochimaru went to stand before finding himself paralyzed. His eyes narrowed deeply. “A Nara.” Before he shot out his snake sword toward Ino.

Hinata was in front of her in an instant. “Protecting Eight Trigrams Sixty Four Palms!”She continued to block the blows of the sword from Ino. 

She lurched towards them once more, before Choji ran for her and brought his arms around her. “I’ve got you.”

“Ino! Are you alright!” Temari ran over to her, immediately cutting the fabric around her wound. “I’m so sorry, we didn’t get to the village in time to warn you!” 

Sakura ran to heal her, knowing Shikamaru could only hold Sasuke and Orochimaru for so long. “Oh my god…”

“Motivation…” Ino grumbled. “It wasn’t fatal, just painful and lots of blood…” She huffed.

She turned to Temari and offered a smile. “It’s no problem, really.”

After Sakura finished she turned around. She channeled chakra into her fist as she ran towards Sasuke and punched him straight in the face. She heard the definitive crack of his jaw breaking. Temari hurriedly bandaged the wound properly.  

Shikamaru let the shadows go as his arms began shaking and he couldn’t hold them anymore, and the part of the plan was done now. 

“I will never fucking be a part of this.” She seethed. Orochimaru was on her in an instant, but not before Kakashi and Naruto were at her back. 

“You won’t lay a finger on her!” Naruto growled.

She shot another chakra laden punch into his chest, knocking the breath out of him just as he was about to perform his fire jutsu. 

She was the distraction, using the main target to keep their attention. She hoped it worked.

Sasuke's eyes became activated just before Neji’s hit landed, neutralizing his chakra use. Another hit, and he’s unconscious

Sasuke fell to the ground, another thump following Orochimaru’s body doing the same from Hanabi’s gentle fist.

Everything held silent as they held their breath, ready to attack, just in case it didn’t work.

Naruto was the first to loosen. “I still don’t understand why!”

Yamato sighed. “This mission to retrieve Ino, and it was supposed to be before she got here.” 

“We need to go, they won’t be out for long.” Neji said distantly, his byakugan active. “The chakra is already breaking the barriers. Hanabi needs to leave now.”

He retained a fighting stance as Yamato nodded.

“We all need to leave now.”

Kakashi watched Orochimaru carefully. “How many of you have emergency transfer scrolls?” 

Yamato, Asuma, Temari, and Neji indicated they had them. 

“My scroll is for my village, but I need to report back there anyway…” Temari explained.

Yamato nodded. “Everyone divides up into groups of three then.” He stated matter of factly.

“Hinata and Hanabi can come with me, ours is set in the Hyuga compound unlike the rest.” 

“Asuma, take Choji and Ino. Take her straight to the hospital after.” Sakura said in her medic voice, an order not a request.

“I’ll take Sakura and Naruto.”Kakashi said plainly.

“That leaves Sai and Shikamaru for my scroll.” Yamato smiled curtly.

Temari gave Shikamaru a chaste kiss on the cheek. “I’ll contact you as soon as I can.”

He nodded before returning a discreet kiss on her forehead before she made her signs with her scroll and disappeared.

The four with scrolls quickly made the signs over them as their pairs held onto them in some way. Just as Sasuke’s eyes opened, the air around them swirled and went fuzzy as their surroundings changed.

Sakura felt her stomach turn, this particular jutsu was harder on the body, which is why it was for emergencies. She felt dizzy.

They all appeared at the gates, with the exception of the Hyugas. 

She instantly grabbed onto Kakashi’s arm as the world continued to spin. She closed her eyes as she waited for it to fade away. She felt hands on her hips, steadying her.

She heard Naruto whine. “I hate doing that.” He huffed.

“Agreed.” She groaned. 

Kakashi chuckled. “Nausea and dizziness is much better than being mortally injured or dead.”

Naruto straightened and nodded. He watched Sakura before taking a deep breath. “You need to go to the hospital too.” 

Kakashi raised an eyebrow at him, surprised Naruto was going to be the one to address this further.

“Why does Forehead need to go to the hospital?”

Everyone went silent, looking at one another, deciding who would tell, if they would tell. If it was worth Sakura’s wrath to tell.

The blonde narrowed her eyes before setting them on Sakura. “You had better tell me.”

“I’m fine.” Sakura tried to insist as she opened her eyes and stood straight. The world was no longer spinning.

Kakashi frowned. “Sakura…”

Naruto groaned. “Stop that! You can’t get mad at us for not taking care of ourselves if you won’t do it!” 

Sakura wanted to knock him upside the head, but she knew he was right. And she was trying to get a hold on her anger issues these days. 

“Sasuke used his genjutsu on me when I refused to go with him… Before he abducted you.”

“Sakura!” Ino stood up with effort and stomped over to her, well as much as you could stomp with a limp. “Let’s go. Infection check for me, psych eval for you. You idiot!” The blonde simmered. “What the hell were you thinking going on that mission! Did you even tell Tsunade!”

 “I was saving you!” She huffed as Ino grabbed her arm and started dragging her towards the hospital.

“They could have done that without putting you at risk, damnit!” 

“I’d be damned if I wasn’t on the rescue squad when I was the reason you were kidnapped in the first place!”

Ino stopped and looked at her seriously. “You cannot seriously be blaming yourself for this.” She frowned. “Sasuke being a traitorous and unrightfully jealous bastard is not your fault.” Ino sighed exasperated. “So help me, Forehead, if you ever risk yourself for me again, I’m going to knock you into next month, you hear me!” Ino shrieked at her. 

Sakura grumbled as she crossed her arms. They walked on to the hospital for a minute, before Sakura stopped and hiked Ino up onto her back, insisting she only worsen the damage by toughing through the pain, telling her she did stop the bleeding but nothing else.

Shikamaru came to stand by them. “Sakura is just as troublesome as Ino isn’t she?” He smiled softly.

“I wouldn’t call her troublesome, but stubborn is definitely a word that comes to mind.” Kakashi smiled and laughed before it died out.

“She really would have given herself to them if there was no other way, wouldn’t she have?” Asuma stated.

Naruto frowned. Kakashi nodded.

“Why! She just got with you. She's the head medic of the village! She’s supposed to be my advisor, alongside Shikamaru, when I become hokage!” He emblazoned. “Why would she give all that up, to become miserable, a missing nin, and Sasuke’s personal baby maker!”

The entire thought made Kakashi ground his teeth, but he understood. He couldn’t be too mad at her for it, because he would have done the same for any of the current Team Kakashi.

Shikamaru shook his head. “Naruto, if you really think about it, it makes sense.” 

“Her and Ino are the same in a lot of ways. Rivals all the same. Ino and her both take care of other people, long before they take care of themselves. Ino checks us over herself, even after mandatory mission return check ups. She makes sure we eat, go out and socialize.”

“She makes us live a little, not just be a ninja. It’s bothersome but it’s necessary.” Shikamaru laughed. “Let me guess, Sakura chases you down and heals you all herself? I know you have a habit of avoiding hospitals at all costs. Kakashi. Naruto, you think you’re invincible. Sai, you just follow the suit of the other males in the team, right?”

Yamato nodded. “Even though I go for my visits, Sakura always comes to check and make sure everything was healed correctly.”

“Sakura blamed herself for this, she blames herself for a lot of things. She felt responsible for Ino’s safety as her friend but also because she feels like if she had agreed to go, she wouldn’t have been hurt in the first place.” Kakashi sighed.

Everyone began to go their own ways as Kakashi began walking home, sure that Sakura would come to his place after she was done at the hospital. There was a dreadful feeling in his chest, the very feeling he was so intimidated by before he finally let himself love her fully. That fear of losing her, the thing he would have to get used to living with. 

She wouldn’t always be safe within the hospital, within the walls of the village. Sometimes her medical capabilities would be required on missions. Sometimes she would go on missions with her team, just like the past couple days.

He couldn’t stop protecting her, but he couldn’t expect her to put them first. He started to realize why most couples aren’t on teams together.

But he’s loved her before and it worked, it had to keep working. 

He steered away from the path to his apartment, towards the grave stone. He found his way there easily. He weaved his way through the village and it’s people with ease. 

He stood at the cenotaph once again, like a stone. Silent and sad. His shoulders were hanging. Relationships of any kind have always been difficult. Everything seemed like it would be easy with Sakura. Now he feared this need for her would start to interfere with that. She didn’t like being treated like she was fragile. 

She seemed so mad at first, was she still mad? Did she understand? Was he actually selfish like she said, or was she just angry because he wasn’t going to let her sacrifice herself?

He knew she didn’t have any less value for him, but it didn’t make it hurt less that she was willing to give him up so… Easily?

Could it really be that easy, to choose saving Ino over having a life with him? To save Ino and have to be demeaned to nothing more than a homemaker by Sasuke everyday?  Something she didn’t want, or at least not at this current point in her life?

There’s no way that was an easy conclusion, but how could she just accept it so well?

Then he thought of every time he’s thrown himself to her protection, the exact same thoughts flowing in his mind as hers for Ino

As long as she will be okay...

“God, I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to do this…” He sighed out loud. “Sakura takes the protecting ones she cares for to such an extreme degree… How is it I was able to let myself love her now, but fifteen years ago, I couldn’t let myself love you? Even when I tried? I don’t feel healed. I don’t feel any less… Pain.” 

He ran his hand along Rin’s name on the stone. “She’d make the same decisions you made without a second thought. She’s so much like you, Rin…” He smiled. “Falling for the distant team mate and being such a caring person, never giving up on people. She believes in Naruto just as much you believed in Obito. Falling for me.”

“Why do they parallel us so much? Our team and the sannin, in so many ways. In some ways, it’s so painful to watch.” He frowned behind his mask. “But in so many ways, they are so much better. I believe in them.”

“I have to believe in them. Not because I love them, not because they’re my team, or because they are the first genin I ever passed. Because they are the ones to lead the next generation.”

He smiled, looking up at the sky. “I can see it clear as day more and more as I spend more time with these jounin and chuunin. The Third had such a big flame, and it burns within each of this class, the ones who witness his death.”

“I come here to talk to you and Obito often, always after missions. This one scared me, the simple thought to lose Sakura, even if she still lived, wretched at my heart. It was so different. It was terrifying, really.” He laughed.

 “Ah yes, so funny, something scares the legendary copy cat ninja, the cold blooded killer of ANBU. He’d fall apart if he lost one little ill tempered medic. Sounds kind of cliche in a way?” He pondered. “I bet Jiraiya knew we’d be together long before it was a thought in our hearts. He probably would have written an Icha-Icha novel with the main characters in love resembling us in subtle ways.”

The copy nin stared at the stone. “Things are different now than they were back then. After Minato-sensei passed…” He tensed a bit. “I was… I couldn’t take it. It was too much. I couldn’t see Naruto without it bringing everything back. I just went back to ANBU, a deadly tool for the village. It wasn’t until Kurenai and Gai pleaded to the Third that I got out.  Feeling anything hurt too much, so I didn’t let myself feel.” He smiled wide. “And then they put that little brat on my team, except now calling him that is a term of endearment.”

“I remember how uncanny it was when I first saw them. Naruto instantly reminded me of Obito, acting like a fool and spewing about being hokage. Absolutely in love with Sakura and cared so much for her.” He ran a hand over Obito’s name on the stone. “Sakura was just like you, open and caring, and head over heels for the other teammate. Sasuke was a spitting image of me; cold, dutiful, and distant. A prodigy, the last of his clan. When they passed the test, I couldn’t refuse them. I tried to be what Minato was, but I’ve felt I never filled that expectation. Sasuke never listened to me the way I listened to him…” 

Kakashi huffed and looked at her name again. “How were you able to love me, how is she able to? I’m no good at this. I like being in control of things, but now it feels like everything is slipping from my grasp. I had steeled myself, told myself no matter how I felt, I would never act on my feelings. I’d never be able to be what she needs anyway, I couldn’t be that for you…”

“How did I know I’d find you here, sulking like always?” 

Kakashi turned to the voice of the senbon user. “What do you need?” He tried to sound bored.

“I think the real question is, what do you need?” Genma looked at his hand on the stone, placed over Rin’s name. “We all know she’s like her, you know.” He chuckled. “It’s part of how we could tell you fell for her. I bet they would have been best friends. I can see it now, Rin taking Sakura around the hospital as an intern. Welcoming and cheery. Ready to teach her the entire medic nin way.”

Kakashi smiled and chuckled a bit himself.

“You know, talking to your dead friends about advice is counterproductive.” He drawled past his senbon. “They can’t answer you, and tell you’re acting like an idiot, like a completely normal man. ” 

Kakashi glared at him slightly. “Just how am I being an idiot?” 

“You’re not going to mess it up, and you think you will. You’re staring at Rin’s name, thinking about how you couldn't love her, even when you tried at first, so how can you possibly love Sakura?” The brunette deadpanned.

Kakashi stared at him. “That wasn’t exactly… What I was thinking.”

“Sure it wasn’t, but it is in between the lines of your thoughts. I’ll tell you the answer. You refused to feel anything back then, we all knew it. We all seen it, and it started to look like our arrogant bastard friend wasn’t coming back, those three went to the Hokage.” Genma smirked. “You still tried to be distant but we, I drug you out of the house.”

He bounced his senbon. “You refused to teached anyone until the angsty mix of two failed team become one come across you. Nostalgia hits and something in you turns and you wonder many, many things and suddenly decide it’s worth trying life again. I’ll let you think back on what some of those thoughts were.”

What is Minato’s son really like?

Can I help Sasuke not become like me?

Will Naruto become Hokage like Obito wanted to, or will he tragically die too?

Sakura reminds me so much of Rin, it hurts. 

She also seems to act like a lovesick teenager, not a shinobi.

They actually passed, they cared more for their teammates than rules…

“What brought you here today? Besides the guilt of surviving yet another mission past them. What’s really the stress here?”

Genma had always been blunt, he learned a long time ago it did no good to tiptoe around the silver haired man. Just get to the point, it’ll irritate him either way.

Kakashi stared at him a moment before sighing. “It didn’t strike me just exactly how similar she was to Rin until today. Sure, she was caring and outgoing like Rin, but she was also ill-tempered. Today, when she was willing to sacrifice herself to save Ino, she had accepted it openly. Willing to give up everything she has, everyone she has. Her job, her future as the medical director, being by Naruto’s side, being a medic. Being a kunoichi.” There was a shudder that went through him as the memory came back, one he tried not to recall ever. “Just as Rin gave her life to my chidori without a second thought to save the village… Sakura was ready t give up everything if it meant we would be safe from them...” 

“Give up you, and your relationship.” Genma said plainly, not beating around the bush like Kakashi was. “Kakashi, you do realize it’s acceptable to not be okay with that? You’re her man, of course you’re not okay with her throwing herself to the fire. Or to feel even an inkling of doubt when you witness something like that.”

“But I understood it!” Kakashi defended. “I couldn’t be mad at her, because I would have done the same thing for her, for Naruto, for our team or even you! Asuma, Kurenai, or Guy!”

“You can accept something, and still be hurt by it.” Genma said dryly. “I thought you of all people would understand that? Or is that why you have your hand on Rin’s name? Even though no matter how many times we tell you it’s not your fault, you still don’t believe it. She loved you, and she loved this village, and it’s people. So does Sakura, and I guarantee you she would have done the same damn thing if she had been Rin instead of Sakura. But that’s one thing you love about her, isn’t it? Her sense of duty, even past her emotions?”

 Genma’s gaze flickered over his shoulder and then he smiled. “Kakashi, we’re ninja. Our lives hang by a thread and things change every day. No one expects you to let go of the one person you let in completely. Not even her.” He winked before puffing away in a cloud of smoke after a series of hand signs.

Kakashi felt her chakra before he heard her. He couldn’t turn to look at her, what if she’s still angry? Angry that he wouldn’t have let her do it if it came down to it? 

He felt her hand on his shoulder, and it squeezed. It trailed down his back, before she wrapped her arms around his waist, and buried her face between his shoulder blades. He took a deep breath and let alone but it didn’t release a single bit of tension. His hand was still over Rin’s name, it wouldn’t even be the first time she found him like this.

He felt her chest expand against his back, but she said nothing. He tried to keep breathing. Her presence calmed him, even just the tiniest of bits. She would wait until he was ready to talk, she always had waited. 

Why was she able to be so patient with him? Would she ever tire of it, of him? 

How much did she hear? Is she mad that he was here, comparing her to the girl he might have loved and married if life wasn’t so cruel? He couldn’t love her then, but would she be like Sakura is now if she had ever made it to adulthood? Patient, caring, never giving up. 

He was sure she would have. 

He sighed. “Sakura… I’m s-”

“Kakashi, are you really about to apologize for comparing me to Rin, for seeing parts of the girl you loved in me?” There was a touch of humour and affection in her voice and it surprised him.

He turned around to face her, glancing down at her face, and caught the happy glimmer in her eyes.

“I…”

“You’re not the first or only one to see it, or tell me. We learned about her in the academy you know, it’s even taught that she had loved you.” She placed her hands on his face. “And there is no shame in realizing that if given the chance, you would have loved her back. That you love her now. I’ve known that for forever.”

“And it doesn’t...bother you?” 

“Why would it?” 

“Uh… Most women don’t like comparisons.”

“Most women also have types and so do men. I don’t think it’s insulting to know you fell in love with another medic who insistently took care of you, even if you were indifferent and distant.”

“Damaged.” He said softly.

She frowned, before pulling him to start walking back to his apartment. “We’re all damaged. That’s part of our lifestyle.”

“What’s it with you medics being overly understanding.” He chided.

“Empathy makes the job worth it.”

He smiled sadly. “Life’s unfair, you shouldn’t have to bear burdens such as emotionally stupid men like me.”

“Stop that, you deserve someone who cares for you, you’ve spent the last however long sacrificing yourself and feeling guilt over people who cared for you. You’re far from a burden. You’ve more good than harm to me.”

 “But now I have you… who frets about her teammates' health. Who believes in her idiot best friend, falls for the distant and damaged boy, and is more than ready and willing to give her life to save someone else’s. However, I can’t say Rin had a temper or loved our sensei romantically... ” He cracked a smile under his mask.

“Hey, my temper is usually justified...And she loved you, which is similar enough.”

His eyes softened. “I think you both have this incessant need to take care of people. Or the whole village itself.” He sighed. “And it scares me that I’ll lose you to that, just like I lost her…”

“And to take care of you.” Sakura said before kissing his masked cheek. “I’ll bet she’s up there, happy that you are happy, that there’s someone that cares for you as much as she did.”

“Maybe…” He kissed the top of her head. 

“I can’t promise you that I wouldn’t do the same as her, because we both know it’d be a lie.” She sighed. “But I would never expect you to agree with it…”

“Were you mad at me this morning?”

“No. I couldn’t stay mad anyway. I can’t be mad at you for loving me, Kakashi…”

“I still think you deserve better. Rin deserved better. So much better…”

Sakura nodded. “But so do you, now let yourself be happy this time.” She squeezed his hand before he nodded softly.

“I came here today because I remember barely surviving mentally after Rin died, especially from my jutsu, even if it wasn’t my fault, her blood was on my hands…” He squeezed her hand, hard. “Minato-sensei was the reason I made it through that, and when he died… It was you three that brought me back, and at first it was just pure curiosity. But now you’re my family, my precious people, and I love you. I don’t know if I could survive losing that again.”

“You better not be blaming yourself for Sasuke again…” 

Kakashi shook his head and glared at the ground. “No, not for this, Not for how far gone he is. I blame myself from not being able to stop him from leaving. Not for what… Not for how he is today.”

“You know, he won’t stop.” 

“Neither will I.” Kakashi looked at her as they entered his apartment. “I will die protecting you before I ever let him take you from me unless it was of your own desires to be with him, not go be a martyr to save the village from his wrath at the cost of your happiness.”

Sakura went to open her mouth to argue against before snapping it back shut. She remembered Ino, Tsunade and Shizune telling her one time a long time ago.

When someone decides they will take care of us, because we absolutely refuse to do it ourselves, don’t fight it. Just let them, because it’ll be useless to fight it anyway, because they love you and won’t sit back and watch you destroy yourself. 

One of these days, some hot ass shinobi is going to make you sit down and be cared for instead of being the one doing the caring, and you had better let him. 

Sakura kissed him, wrapping her arms around his neck. She felt his strong hands grab her waist and hold her close. “I’ll be counting on it, cause someone has to, and I’d trust no one else but you…” She whispered into the kiss as he picked her up from the ground. “I love you, too…”

[jellyfishinc]

Good Morning Everyone

Before I begin, I just want it on the record: I am a 26 year old middle class white girl who is only talking about the movies mentioned from a moviegoer’s perspective, and is not in any way shape or form trying to suggest she knows anything except her personal opinion.

Since by now Disney Pixar’s Soul has dropped on Disney+, and judging by the reactions I’ve been seeing, that no doubt that means we’re all worried about how well it’s going to do overall with the general public, and are no doubt worried in the long run it’s going to be labeled as another flop.

But I what I really want you folks to remember is that some of the best films were also initially labeled as cinematic flops, or as doing mediocre at the Box Office, and all it took for them to be respected as such was that same thing we’re all wishing we had more of: Time.

Example 1: The Nightmare Before Christmas

To date, there’s still debate on whether it’s a Christmas movie, Halloween movie, or both, despite the director’s official statement on it. Tim still gets fan mail thanking him for making it, claiming it saved their lives.

If you haven’t already, I suggest you go watch the episode about it from The Holiday Movies that Made Us, so you can get a good look at all the time and effort that went into making this movie into what it is.

Even with all the initial lukewarm reception, it’s a classic film that still holds up, even after all this time, and it was made by misfits, for misfits.

Example 2: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty remake

A lot of people legitimately forget that this movie even exists, but I have noticed that once they’ve actually tracked it down and given it a fair shot, a popular reaction I’ve seen is, “Why didn’t this do so well if it’s so great?”

And I have to say, after seeing it myself, I have to agree. It has a message that I know for a fact that many can relate to, especially if you’re like me and are still at a stage in your life where there’s so much you want to do with your life.

I have no doubt that given even more time, this movie will come to be given the respect it deserves.

Example 3: Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Note: In case it’s not obvious already, I do have a bit of a soft spot for Tim Burton films, but that doesn’t make what I’m saying about them any less important.

I won’t go as far as to say that it was necessarily a flop, but I do know for a fact that it was heavily criticized by people who had already made up their minds to hate it because the original film had already been around for a long time.

And for those that may come across this post: I respect your opinion, and I won’t waste your time listing all the complaints people had about this film, but I want to at least touch on a few that stand out, because because I feel like there’s some of you out there that are judging it too harshly because you don’t know the full extent of everything that happened with both films.

The first one: Roald Dahl hated the original film, so much so, that the planned sequel that would’ve followed Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was promptly dropped. It’s because of that that after he’d passed, his widow flat out refused to let anyone else touch the story again.

And that didn’t change when she was approached by Tim Burton about it, either. But because it’s Tim, he clearly knew how skeptical she would be because of it, so he was very respectful and showed her some of the concept art he had drawn up for the film.

Her reaction? She LOVED it. In particular, the design for the Bucket house. If any of you wondered why it looked so crooked and funny, there’s actually a reason for it. Tim had it specifically designed after Roald Dahl’s famous writing shed. And it was that that convinced her the story would be in good hands, and she gave him her blessing to make the film.

Number two: Johnny Depp’s Wonka Portrayal

Many have criticized his portrayal as being too weird and a far cry from Gene Wilder’s portrayal, which for many believe is what ruined the remake.

For the record: I used to agree with you, until I saw a very in-depth analysis that managed to show me what I had missed initially.

Essentially what it said was that it’s actually a more accurate idea of what would happen to a person who willingly shuts himself away from the outside world, with only his workers for company.

And I am absolutely not to make light of where America is right now, but consider: we all make jokes about how we’re all going to be an antisocial wreck when we’re finally allowed to resume like normal, having not seen hardly anyone in person in weeks, maybe even months at a time.

Now imagine instead the pandemic lasts for years, from when he had to let everyone at the factory go, all the way to when he finally decided to reopen to a select few. What do you think a person who goes through something like that would look like?

Like it’s shown in the film. And on top of it, he’s also portrayed as someone who suffers from flashbacks of traumatizing moments in his life, and while I personally don’t suffer from them, according to those that do, it’s a very accurate portrayal.

There's also a whole analysis I did about how this Wonka has undiagnosed autism, but I'll be nice and just say a lot of his personality suggests it.

But like with the other listed films, more and more people have been revisiting this film with this new knowledge and found it’s value.

But please don’t take this as me bashing the original, because that’s not what I’m trying to do. If you still like the original even after knowing all this, that’s fine. You’re more than welcome to say so. All I want to do is share the truth.

Example 4: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, live action adaptation

I've seen everyone including the Nostalgia Critic have nothing but disdain for this film, and it seems to me that it's largely because of the same problem Charlie and the chocolate factory did: they thought the original was better.

What I have to say about it is they both have equal value, and to me still have the same message, even if the live action remake came at it from a different angle.

In the original cartoon, the Grinch just hated Christmas and that was that. The Whos loved Christmas, and that was that. Even when she Grinch stole everything, the Whos were still happy. And it's my firm opinion it was just a reflection on the time period it was made, in that Christmas was just a holiday to celebrate with family and friends.

In comparison, the live action remake was more of a reflection of how Christmas was already rapidly changing into the commercialized holiday we have now. And in that regard, it's incredibly clever to set up the film like this, because, again, with time, we start to sympathize with the Grinch more, because most of what he says about how people treat Christmas is true.

Some were okay with him hating Christmas just for the sake of hating it, but if you can invent a backstory that's not only plausible, but relatable, then I'm all for it.

So now that I’ve taken up about 5 minutes you’ll never get back, what does this all mean for Soul?

Only that even if it does flop, it will be in good company, because flopping has proven to be a rite of passage for many of the great films, and given enough time, it will get the respect and recognition it deserves.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk :)

[veinereastath]

Far Cry: New Dawn was a disaster, and here’s why.

Okay, just to be clear - this is my personal opinion, not pure, cold facts that I’m trying to push down people’s throats. I just felt the sudden urge to break down piece by piece my utter hatred towards this game. So, let’s go. What exactly went wrong with it, and why Far Cry 5 was way better? I will try to present my ramblings and point of view by putting both of these games side by side. So, when reading every sentence in this... thing, add in your head a “it’s vei’s opinion” bit to avoid misunderstandings. Thanks in advance! First thing, to make everything clear - Far Cry 5 was not a perfect game. No, actually, it was far from so; there are many games much better plot-wise, with more entertaining gameplay, bigger world, more interesting side quests and so on. But, one thing for sure, this game has a spirit, an unique aura that makes many people want to come back to it and replay it over and over. The way Ubisoft portrayed Hope County is absolutely fantastic - the music, the landscapes, the characters. It was something new, something fresh, and despite quite a lot sceptical voices when the first trailers came out, it turned out really well, and in general, people really liked this game, or loved it even. Yeah, some people hate the endings, the fact that every single one of them is bad one way or the other and that you can’t basically win (I always thought this was fantastic, because, hey, you can’t be a perfect hero every time - even so, I love how this game, Seeds especially, mock the “hero attitude” that protagonist tries to have). But even so, Far Cry 5 was mostly a success, right? And the canon ending when the nukes get dropped seemed to leave a perfect opportunity for a sequel. So, what could go wrong? Well, about that...

1. How long is this game? New Dawn is short. It’s fucking short, because I installed it right after it became available (fun fact, this was the first and the last game I ever pre-ordered, so imagine how excited I must’ve been), and started playing it as soon as I could. In my case, it was around 2-3 am. I had a break then, woke up at 7 am and continued playing. I was playing it slowly - completing the side quests, because I wanted to know what has changed in Hope County, and, of course, I was looking for some easter eggs regarding the Seeds (surprised pikachu - there weren’t any, Old Compound, John’s bunker and Ranch are too obvious).  Took me around 5 hours to move on and actually start playing the main story. I was pretty sure that it will take me at least 10-15 hours to complete it (why was I thinking so, don’t ask me, I guess I still have way too high expectations after what Witcher 3 expansions have shown me). Again, surprised pikachu! I finished the whole game in 16 hours. Sixteen. Including liberating all the outposts (1 star in each, didn’t bother to get 3) and finish all side-missions + driving around the County just to look around. The hell? And it wasn’t a DLC? Just for a little comparison, because, yes, FC5 can also be completed pretty damn fast if you rush it, but my 1st playthrough of it, with all the quests and admiring the landscapes took me 33 hours. Which leads us to the next point on this god forsaken list, and that is... 2. The map.

The next reason why I am shocked this game wasn’t a DLC - the heckitty hecck they did with the map in New Dawn. Radiation zones? Sign me the hell up, they make sense, are cool and stuff, but adding them just so you could bite off half of the original map is stupid, and extremely lazy thing to do. Okay, you can take off some parts, but if you’re doing so, add something new - some new paths, caves, mountain routes, something. And no, expeditions don’t count. To make it worse, the parts that were deleted were one of the best parts of the FC5 storyline. Faith’s Gate, Drubman’s Marina, Jacob’s Armory, Wolf’s Den, and the fucking Veteran’s Center. The opportunity to make this a haunted location with an entertaining quest in it was HUGE and it was absolutely wasted. It’s not like they couldn’t done it, we’ve got the mission in old Joseph’s statue, and the crocodile pikachu in Inquisitor’s Grave (which, by the way, shouldn’t actually exist - this bunker was blown up to pieces, but it seemed pretty decent in New Dawn, there are barely any sings of explosions, not to mention that “The Confession” room is untouched!). You bought this game with an intention to actually go back in time and find out about something that FC5 didn’t tell you? Kekus maximus, you don’t. Have some photographs instead (which are a nice addition, but seem lazy). To give this post even more personal hatred - I really don’t like the Henbane River region, so you could literally hear my heart breaking when I saw that we got 50% of the River, 80% of the Valley and 10% of the Whitetails, which were my absolute favorite. So fun!

3. The Villains. I must admit, in the trailers, back when the hype for this game was insane, Mickey and Lou seemed to be quite interesting. Even though back then it was obvious that Highwaymen won’t have that kind of depth that Eden’s Gate had, it was still something I was looking forward to, even though those vibes aren’t really my cup of tea; but most of my excitement was born from my love for Far Cry 5, so if course I had to try out the sequel. So yes, the trailers were quite nice (just not the live action one - that was a fucking disaster, and killed my hype for a few days afterwards).

Mickey and Lou were quite fun, but to little extent, sadly. I liked their sister-sister dynamics, they really seemed close, and it was nice that shey were so different from each other - Mickey was more calculating, while Lou was living for the action and brutality in itself. The Highwaymen as a faction in itself wasn’t really that great for me, because their only purpose was to cause mayhem, and I simply don’t like something like this. But the sisters were something different, right? No, they weren’t, and that’s the point. I felt like there was little to no depth in their actions - it was all for fun, and I find this just boring and pointless (pr maybe I’m the boring one). I know that this is often how the world works - people take and destroy simply because they can and because it’s considered cool. We suck as a species, that’s official and well known, but I expected something more entertaining from a videogame. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I did. And Mickey and Lou were literally Highwaymen members with a VIP crown above their heads and nothing more. They left their mother? Okay, that is something that could lead to other interesting things. They killed their father for power? Huh, alright, I can work with that. The point is, it didn’t give them that much depth, their main purpose was to plunder everything. Which would be all good and nice if they were some kind of a side-faction. But this was The Villains™, and I wanted to feel something more towards them. And to be honest? I didn’t even hate them. I felt absolutely nothing, they just existed and I didn’t care, because they didn’t make this game interesting. What I will say now may sound brutal, but I will say it: I don’t consider two young people (they were around 19/20) just wanting to blow everything up “for lulz” a good villains. I fucking don’t. It was a huge downfall after what FC5 has given to us. I was just so bored when fighting the Highwaymen, because they were shallow, and their personalities were only focused on one thing. 

Of course, there is also Ethan. Yes, I hate him (he even has a very punchable face, what a coincidence!), but I admit he was somehow a nice touch in this game. Yes, he was a prideful, irritating kid, but while I was just utterly bored by the Twins, Ethan actually managed to make me hate him. The only thing that I’m quite bothered by is that I don’t believe that he’s actual, biological son of Joseph. To put it shortly, and say it louder for the people in the back - The Twins were just meh. Boring. How was the situation in FC5 better? Oh boy.

Putting their obvious... Attractive physical appearance aside, and focusing purely on their personalities, because that’s what I’m trying to explain - they were something else, and something new. Ubisoft took a risk with creating four villains for a single game, because it’s extremely hard to give each one of them the screentime they deserve, and make them interesting and unique. Did FC5 succeed? In a way, yes. I’m not saying that Seeds are absolutely perfect villains (they aren’t), but they can eat Twins for breakfast and still stay hungry. To show you what I mean, have some short descriptions: JOSEPH: Cult Leader, “The Father”, a person who claims to hear the voice of God himself. Someone from a broken family and difficult life, who was in prison (according to song dedicated to him), lost one job after another, lost his wife, killed his daughter, and then formed a religious cult. JACOB: military veteran suffering from PTSD, with a massive knowledge about history and psychology, someone who literally brainwashed nearly half, if not more of the County, and manages to combine religion (something he clearly isn’t really fond of) and personal, darwinistic look on life. JOHN: former lawyer, a person skilled in adapting to any environment, charismatic manipulator abused as a kid, forced to spend most of his life pretending to be someone he hated to be, battled with addictions, emotionally unstable and with sadistic outburts. FAITH: young woman devoid of purpose in life, also battling with addictions in the past, probably on the verge of suicide at some point, who was manipulated (and quite possibly drugged) in order to comply; a broken girl hiding her pain behind lovely smiles. Sounds pretty diverse, right? And I bet that at least one member of this family was somehow entertaining for everyone. Now, here’s what New Dawn has given to us: MICKEY: the more calculating sister; young girl who followed her father and chose brutal life, creating entertainment for herself by making others suffer. Shows some kind of regret when you defeat her by the end of the game. LOU: the more brutal sister; young girl who followed her father and chose brutal life, creating entertainment for herself by making others suffer. Doesn’t show any regrets towards her actions.

And honestly, that’s it. I really tried to write something more for the Twins, but I couldn’t put my finger on anything. That’s all we know. And yes, I know that there is a major difference between them and the Seeds, which is the age gap - FC5 villains are simply older and have more life experience, but honestly, this doesn’t make it better. Mickey and Lou could have much more depth and be far more interesting despite them being young. Age is not a problem in such a case. I suggest to compare Mickey and Lou’s descriptions with the Faith one, since she’s just few years older. There is a difference, isn’t it? And even when playing both of these games, the Seeds just seem to be better developed than the Twins. Ubisoft did something weird, because they managed to focus on four villains and make each one of them interesting in their own way, but made just two main villains flat, and nearly identical. 4. Radio calls. This is a continuation of the point above, because it’s also something I wanted to point out and is connected to the villains of both games. The things you can hear directly from The Twins can be mostly described as “hey rabbit, you’re pissing us off a bit”. Same with the things they say at outposts and direct them to the Highwaymen - it’s always about the same thing, and there isn’t a single line that I found interesting or worth remembering (okay, my bad, the fact that Mickey and Lou seemed to be dissapointed after Nana chose to stick with the Captain rather than them was a nice touch). Meanwhile, I can recite most of the dialogue lines from the Seeds from my memory, and it’s something I could do after 2 playthroughs. They seem to be on a whole different level - and yes, it is true that to some point, the “rabbits” thing is similar to “the weak” theme of Jacob, or “the sinners” in case of John, but it didn’t seem to be that much tiring to hear about. Faith’s radio calls were interesting, because with each one of them you could hear her demeanor towards the Deputy changing - in the beginning, she was friendly, but after you destroyed Joseph’s statue, she was scared, and at the final confrontation - maliciously hostile. Jacob started his radio calls history with a threat towards you, and kind off keeps that all the time, but the closer you get to the final meeting with him, the more... Okay, how the fuck do I describe it in a non-thot way amused (I guess we can call it this way?) he sounded. He was still far from friendly, you still didn’t have any doubts he’s your enemy, but there was something in those radio calls, something that suggested he actually sees the Deputy as something more than just enemy, as a tool he crafted all by himself and he was proud of it. John welcomes you with this cheesy ad at the beginning of the game, and as time goes on, he goes even more obsessed with making you atone and confess; not to mention his absolutely fantastic reactions to stealing his house and destroying his sign. His calls are something unpredictable, because once he’s all official and charismatic, but suddenly he switches to this ominous mode that actually makes you want stop for a bit and look around you, as if he was lurking somewhere. To sum it up, this game made you feel like if you were actually developing some kind of a relationship with each one of the family member. But the radio calls from the Twins seem to be always the same, it’s all about “rabbits” and “problem solving”. Yes, it might've been better if only one sister was all about it, and the other one had something else on her mind, but making them nearly identical was a lazy move.  5. Landscapes.

Far Cry 5 was amazing, because every region was different and had something else to offer. Henbane River was full of Bliss, which created weird hallucinations, Faith dancing around you was also pretty interesting addition, and The Pilgrimage was also a nice touch (I recommend going with it, it’s a really nice experience, actually). Holland Valley was the pure definition of Montana countryside, and it felt fantastic to walk around and see those little farms, cows, windmills and so on. Whitetail Mountains were also something unique, with less open spaces, a huge amount of wildlife, combining massive mountains with deep forests. And even though the colors of this game could be simply described as beige-green, I didn’t really feel bored when wandering around. New Dawn had a cool concept, actually - makind the post-apocalyptic world colorful, instead of making it a grey wasteland was something new and I was excited. And, honestly, I really liked how it all looked like during the first 2 hours of playthrough. After that... I was just so done. The pink colour in itself wasn’t bad, really, but the way they added it everywhere made me feel sick. Those flowers were nearly everywhere and they were always the same. And while I love screenshoting landscapes in games, New Dawn didn’t really felt like something I wanted to spend time on. I like to admire the views of FC5, but not in ND. Combining the small as hell map with nearly the same flowers on your every step was a bad solution. 6. Other. To mention other things - well, I guess we could mention the music, but I feel it isn’t fair, actually. Both games did this well in some way, FC5 songs are certainly something unforgettable, and I mean both the cult ones as well as the OST. New Dawn did what it could - gave Highwaymen music that fits them. The OST, however, isn’t that good. Maybe because it just doesn’t feel unique to me, while the different type of music in each region in FC5 is, for me, unforgettable in many ways.  I won’t really talk about The Deputy >> The Judge metamorphosis, because everyone sees it in a different way. I personally don’t consider it as a bad thing, it’s quite a nice plot twist, and I like it (even though I went with a totally different path with my deputy OC).

Okay, I think it’s time to get to the main point. Why I consider New Dawn as a disaster? The Villains were devoid of any depth and felt exactly the same, the map was small as hell, the story was way too short (and these two things should be enough to make this game a DLC, not an actual installment of the franchise), the landscapes were repetitive, 90% of what was left from FC5 (locations, for example) didn’t get a chance to shine. Just imagine how much more entertaining this game could be if we would find some old recording of the Eden’s Gate songs somewhere. If there were mentions of some terryfingly huge wolves roaming around, if the members of Prosperity actually mentioned something about John Seed (which house they are living in!), if we could visit the remnants of the Faith’s Gate, hear the ominous “Only You” when approaching the Veteran’s Center and read some old notes about experiments that were happening in there, and so on. Basically, the main opportunity that got wasted was focusing on continuating FC5 legacy in a more respectful way. The things I mentioned above seem like small details, but they really could make the experience something else entirely. So, yeah. I hate New Dawn, in case someone didn’t notice. :)

[aerithagainstabusers]

So I saw Greg’s review of the Final Fantasy 7 Remake and it was so dumb I had to pick it apart so here we go. Spoilers for the remake below

This starts off bad. Immediately Greg is whining that the game isn’t what he wants. He complains about knowing the characters too well which is an absolutely insane thing to complain about. The deaths of the AVALANCHE don’t mean much in the original. You meet them a few times then they die. You have no connection to them

By getting to know them more - like Wedges love for the Sector Seven cats and how Jessie was an actress before her dad became gravely Ill after working for Shinra, they become more human. You can relate to them more and there’s more investment there. So when the fall of that plate comes? Losing them is more impactful than in the original

The battle system can be set to the same as the original in classic mode except you can’t physically attack (that is automatically done for you) so Greg can’t really complain about that. Sounds like he’s mad he died at bosses he didn’t die to in the original

His complaint about Sephiroth is weird. He’s the main bad guy. He needs to show up. With Sephiroth in the OG, you only hear about him a few times while in Midgar, where the remake is set. They need to bring him In much earlier and show Cloud suffering PTSD to understand this guy is a threat.

He also complains about not having a lot to do. And yeah while it’s not as open you have way more to do. The side quests are actually side quests - with the original, the only side quests you really have before leaving Midgar is dressing Cloud up and getting the perfume, tiara, and underwear. Otherwise? You’re stuck doing what the game tells you to do

You might ask “why are you always saying ‘in the original when you’re in Midgar’and I’ll explain that now

This. Is. Not. A. Spoiler.

The creators said from the start it would only be in Midgar and it would be an episodic game. All the promotional materials showed the game only in Midgar. It was obvious that IT WAS ONLY IN MIDGAR. Greg has no right to complain.

Now yes. You don’t have the same free travel but there is more to travel and there’s so much more content to make up for the fact you can’t leave the city. And by doing so, Midgar comes alive. So when you leave? It feels more of a loss and like you are leaving somewhere you have a connection to. Now this was disappointing because I was definitely wanting more. Like I wanted to keep playing in because it was dragging me in. But it was clear from the start and they were transparent with this. Greg clearly wasn’t looking all the things that were coming out about the game since you knew what was going on.

It even says on the back of the box it’s going to be the story in Midgar and that it’s the first game of the remake “project” and would go deeper into the city

Why is Greg surprised and acting like he’s being cheated out?

His next complaint is.... very worrying

Nanaki in the original never acted like a pervert with Aerith. He acted like he was aggressive to lower Hojos guard but that’s a nitpick. But the rest? Holy fuck Greg, STAY AWAY FROM WOMEN

in the remake, Hojo does not have plans to crossbreed Aerith and Nanaki. Instead? He wants to have SOLIDERS repeatedly rape her so she can “breed” and laughs in her face as he tells her all about how he ripped her mother’s corpse to shreds so he can continue to investigate her. There’s only molecules left of Iflana. He also tries to kill Cloud, Tifa, and Barret so he can show aerith their corpses to kill her hope she’ll be saved

But more importantly, Hojo's proposal in the remake is far more horrifying than in the original. He wants her to be raped over and over. Why the fuck doesn’t Greg see this as being bad an as a “P.C. culture” addition? What is wrong with you, dude. How do these things not show how insane he is

The cross-dressing is a stupid complaint. So you don’t get to go to a brothel and watch a small cutscene. Who cares? You get to see Cloud perform on stage at a cabaret and he is dressed up while on stage while you do a mini game. And that isn’t fun? Okay, Greg.

The events he’s talking about by the way? You fight in a Colosseum, you can choose to help Johnny, and/or you can do the iconic squatting game. Then you go to the Honeybee Inn, do a dancing minigame, and perform on stage. 

As opposed to the original where you talk to a man and tell him what dress you want. Do the most squats, Buy some wine at an inn, have a bath with a bunch of men, and give a woman some medicine. The amount of time you spend doing that will take you the same amount of time to do one side quest in the remake. Of course, the original had it’s restrictions because of the platform it’s on, but the remake definitely did go out of its way to expand that and make it feel like you were doing more.

This is a bit more valid. Like I get having nostalgia for the OG game and preferring it and that’s okay! But the Harry Potter comparison ruins it. Also Greg doesn’t seem to realise the difference between a remake and a remaster. The game is being remade. Of course the gameplay is going to change. Turn based games aren’t viable anymore and considering how good the graphics are, it would ruin the immersion. They had to change things like this to make it more modern. Remember, they aren’t just making this for fans. They’re wanting to bring in new people. 

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW FOR THE REMAKE

SO PLEASE

IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED IT

READ THIS NEXT PART WITH ABSOLUTE CAUTION OKAY?

OKAY

SPOILER

WARNING

OVER

I really hope this is just a joke that Zack wasn’t mentioned before he appeared. But considering this is Greg, and how he really doesn’t seem to understand this game, I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t know the significance of this scene. He says later in this article that it took him 24-40 hours to finish the game. Which, if you actually complete it (by doing all side quests, unlocking all limit breaks for everyone, getting master materia etc) it should take you ninety hours. Which makes me think he never went to Nibleheim and saw the cutscene of what happened to Zack and Cloud. Because FF7 is a very quick game if you just focus on the main quests. If you actually dig down deep? You can go way past the timer and have it frozen at 99:99:99. I don’t think he did anything in the original game and just did whatever the game told him to do without looking at anything else.

I really hope this is just a stupid edgy joke because Zack is a well-loved character but you never fucking know with this moron.

I understand his complaints about Nanaki. Nanaki is always in my party in the original so I was bummed you couldn’t play him, but he appears in the penultimate chapter. The writers probably didn’t feel it was worth their while to add him as a party member, and instead, make him a guest who helps.

The Sephiroth complaint is stupid because he’s missed the point. Up until he appears in the Shinra building, he isn’t actually there. Cloud is hallucinating. He is shown as being mysterious and unreachable as Cloud tries to get to him or freaks out whenever he sees an image of him.

Honestly this just sounds like Greg is mad it’s not the exact same as the original.

Which would just be boring, in my opinion.

Y’know what I said about Greg doing what the game told him to do and nothing else? Yeah this is proof. You have an All materia. It’s called ‘magnify’. And unless you didn’t look for treasure or looked at the new materia when you collected it? You would know this is the all materia. The summons in this game aren’t what they are in the original. You can’t use them in every battle and they only come in boss battles or otherwise difficult encounters because in the remake, it’s made clear that they are incredibly powerful. They come to you maxed out. Which he would know if he paid attention.

I will agree with him to an extent about the maxed out materia. Materia is easy to obtain in the remake (Cloud says this to Aerith when she playfully brags about having it), so if Greg had critical thinking, it would be clear that they don’t sell well is because .... well, it’s easy to max out. Everyone is doing it. But I will agree with him that the game is ‘too short’ in a sense, since having Firaga in only Midgar can be problematic for later games. I do have to wonder what they’ll do in the next episodes. Will you have to level up the magic power after upgrading it so Firaga does the same damage in later dungeons as it did in the sewers of Midgar? It would also be neat to physically ride the chocobos through Midgar to make life easier but I also understand why they had the carriages  as it makes it less weird when Tifa suddenly appears in one when she’s going to Don Corneo’s only to never see a carriage in Midgar again, and the loading screen when they ake you from place to place does make it quicker for you to get places.

Still, it would be nice to ride them at some point so I will give Greg this complaint.

Like I said above, if you do everything in the original it should take you 90 hours. If it took Greg 2 days cumulatively at his highest estimate, he’s not completing the game, and he’s not achieving anything.

For comparison, here’s my latest game

As you can see, it’s at 44 hours. I have done all the sidequests (excluding the one mandatory Fort Condor which would add more time on to it but I didn’t want to do that this time around). I have reached the bottom of the crater, however, I have not done anything further and am now focusing on doing the rest I need to do. Like getting to level 99 on everyone, maxing out my command, summon, and magic materia to get the master materia for those three. Or maxing out all four enemy skill materia. Or getting everyone's limit breaks, or beating the weapons. Because these things take time. I could easily run and kill Sephiroth in that run right now. I could finish the game. But as I’m wanting to complete it as much as I can, then I can’t do that. And that’s not me doing a perfect game where you need to get 99 of each item you can (excluding things like the battery where you can only get three of). If you’re doing a perfect game, it takes even longer but honestly, that’s not something I’d say you’d need to do to ‘finish’ the game. That’s only if you want to challenge yourself.

Also might I add, the remake? It takes about 40 hours to finish it (I don’t know if that includes sidequests). This means in one part of a game  is the same length as the original if you don’t do any sidequests in the OG. I don’t know what Greg is talking about by ‘achieving less’. Yeah you don’t go to as many places, but considering this will be in different parts like the original, you do way more in the remake than you do in the original while in Midgar. 

The random encounters are definitely less in the remake. They don’t happen every a certain number of steps. Instead, you stumble across them in a realistic way rather than have a screen transition. It is way more immersive and again, is something that makes the game feel alive. It feels like an obstacle to overcome to get to the next place rather than an interruption like the original game random encounters (which I do love by the way, but it is very much a product of it’s time)

The next part also makes me laugh. He seems to think that because the other game has things finish ‘faster’ means it’s more productive. Which really shows he thinks his channel is great because he does more videos in a short period of time. Which, yeah, on a surface level it is more “productive”, but it’s not exactly exciting game play, is it? 

For comparison. Aerith says in the original that Sector Six is dangerous so she’ll help him out... but it takes about two minutes to go through and the random encounters are incredibly easy. It’s also not explained why the place is in ruins.

In the remake however, Aerith leads Cloud through it as Cloud is unfamiliar with it, and it is more of a challenge to get through, and he actually needs her help to get through the rubble. She explains part of the plate collapsed the tunnel and that’s why it’s such a mess. You get attacked by bandits on the way there and you spend an entire chapter trying to get through sector six, as it becomes the threat and the difficult path Aerith describes in the original. Rather than a place you just pass through with no issue, making you wonder “why the hell is Aerith insisting she goes with me?” outside of her having a crush. 

It’s small details like that which make the game come alive and actually makes you feel like you did something rather than it being a place you just passed through. It takes you longer, but it feels more like an achievement.

No one feels like they achieved something when you leave Sector Six and go to the park outside Sector Seven’s gates. Because it’s just a road to get to where you need to go. Your next challenge is trying to get Cloud chosen as the girl for Corneo but that is optional. I mean, if you prefer that it’s easier to get through as you like just seeing the story than solving dungeons, that’s fine! But this just shows Greg’s ‘quantity is quality” mindset. 

Also, when you climb up the plate to get to the Shinra building? IN the original, you climb up some pipes. The hardest part is the swinging pipe, which is incredibly easy when you time your jump to the squeaking of the pipe. They tell you it’ll be difficult to get to the Shinra building... when it takes you all of five minutes.

The remake has you climbing up the plate and broken buildings, using a grappling gun to get to higher ground when your walking path is done, while you get attacked by Shinra soliders trying to stop you from getting to higher ground when they recognise you as AVALANCHE. While it’s not hard it definitely feels more of a challenge than “climb up this pipe. jump onto that pipe, now climb up another pipe” in the original. And with the Shinra soliders while you can stop them easily, it does make you feel that getting there is going to be a struggle, or at least something that’s inconvenient and it’ll be ‘hard’ because people will try and stop you along the way.

Although I do wish that when you were in the Shinra building, you had to do more sneaking in the higher floors like you did in the original, but at least the game does give you a reason why you don’t need to sneak around. The mayor’s off hand comment about hating Shinra as he gives you a keycard in the original is expanded to the Mayor being a member of AVALANCHE who is actively helping you.

 I also think it's funny he complains about “mundane tasks” when the original game is full of that, too. All JRPGs have it

Basically, this entire review of Greg’s can be “WAHHH IT’S NOT THE ORIGINAL WHY IS IT MAKING ME WORK HARD!” and it’s hilarious

[jojiship]

Why Isak is my least favourite main in Skam OG?

Before some of you come here with pitchforks and insults, I just want to say a few things. First, this is my PERSONAL opinion. You can see from the title what this is about, so if you don’t agree with it, don’t read it. Second, I don’t hate Isak. He’s just not my favourite main in Skam OG and I think at times, he is overrated. I do like him, but I like the girls more than him and enjoyed their characters more. Also, in a show where William exists, who will hate Isak more than him? Now, let’s start with it. Third, his season is my second favourite out of all four, but Isak being main isn’t the reason why. 

.Sorry for any mistakes. English isn’t my first language. (Also, want to tag @poweratsea because they were interested to read this. I hope you enjoy it)

Most of the reasons I enjoy Isak the least out of the mains and dislike at some points, it’s his treatment of Eva. During season one, he annoyed me the first episodes. Both him and Jonas were condescending and mean to her when it came to her grades. In the first few episodes, they continuously make jabs about her intelligence, especially in the cabin episode. I always hate when characters do this to others, especially when the characters are men and the person whose intelligence they are mocking, is a woman. They did it too many times for my liking. 

I started to like Isak more as the season progressed. He seems to be there for Eva at times and I found that very cute. Boy, I was wrong. Isak knew what Jonas was doing. Everytime, he ‘helped’ Eva, he chose to make Eva’s insecurities about her relationship even worse. He manipulated Eva. The way he responded to her questions and treated her made her more insecure. While the relationship between Jonas and Eva was extremely fucked up, you can’t deny that Isak played a factor in that relationship’s downfall. His conversations with Eva, especially in the cabin episode, played such a big part in Eva thinking that Jonas was cheating on her with Ingrid. Eva trusted him and Isak returned that trust by manipulating and lying to her causing her to become more distrusting towards Jonas.

Eva trusts him with the secret that she kissed Penetrator Chris. Isak promised not to tell Jonas and he didn’t. He didn’t tell Jonas. No, he decided to tell the whole school that she hooked up with Penetrator Chris. Most importantly, he humiliated Eva and to an extent, he humiliated Jonas as well. I get that love makes us do stupid things, but nothing can excuse Isak’s actions. I don’t know if he thought about the consequences of what he did, but I’m sure that he knew they were going to be consequences that will hurt Eva. I just think he didn’t care about her. Let’s not forget that she was supposed to be a close friend of his. Who does that to their friend, huh? Someone who doesn’t care about them. He took a private matter and made it public to the rest of the school. It would have been better to tell Jonas what happened rather than what he did. He choose to tell everyone because not only did he want to break them up, he wanted to hurt them as well. No, you can’t change my mind about that. The fact that the fandom joke about this and call him a snake just blows my mind. Hold your favourites accountable for their shitty actions (especially since Isak never suffered the consequences of it). Also, Isak isn’t a snake, that action reminds me of a rat.

It pisses me off that after everything blows, he goes and comforts Eva. It makes the situation even worse. He goes and calls her weak for wanting to leave Nissen. How did he even have the audacity to do that? Of course, she was thinking about leaving. She was being treated horribly. She was getting letters written in period blood, was being called a slut by everyone and everyone was turning their backs on her. When Eva is told by Iben that it was Isak who did it, I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t expect anyone else to be. From the scene in the skate park, I knew he was going to rat her out. Though, it hurt that Eva didn’t expect him to do it. She was so shocked when she found out and that made the situation worse.

Eva does cut Isak some slack because of what happened with his dad. It’s understandable for her to do that. Isak didn’t need more problems at that point. When she faces him with the truth, he seems so unapologetic and doesn’t seem to care. His apology seems so fake in my eyes. It didn’t seem that he cared for what he did. He apologized three times to her. The only time I found some sense of sincerity in the apology was in season three (a year after all that happened). I didn’t know hoe Eva forgave him because if I was in her place, I would never have forgiven a friend who betrayed me like that. It would have been different if he told Jonas rather than the whole school. Also, I want to say that Eva acted quite shitty with Isak too in season 2. Her interest in his sexuality was just appalling and disgusting in my eyes. I get that he hurt her, but no one should meddle in someone’s private life no matter what.

Another thing that bothers me is that Jonas never found out what Isak did. Some of you probably will say that some things are left buried, but I disagree. I liked that Eva didn’t tell him, but I wanted Isak to tell him. I wanted Isak to be honest with his friend of years. In my eyes, the friendship between Jonas and Isak would never be good because of that. Imagine if you were in Jonas’ place. Wouldn’t you like to know something like that? I really wanted for Isak to tell Jonas what he did in season 3. I thought that he would one day, but it was never mentioned. It was forgotten until the last minutes of the last episode.I was disappointed because I wanted that to happen since season one. Jonas never found out that it was Isak who told everyone. He needed to be told that. He needed to know that his best friend told everyone that his girlfriend cheated on him. Yes, Isak did it because he was in love with Jonas and that would make things awkward. However, it’s better to live in awkwardness rather than in a lie. That’s why I never liked the dynamic between the boy squad that much. This big detail always bothered me. If Isak told Jonas, it would have shown more growth and development in Isak’s character. Also, let’s not forget that Jonas and Eva ended up together. Does that mean what Isak did was going to remain buried and unsaid forever? Probably. I hate that Isak  never suffered the consequences of what he did in season one. 

Also, when he points out to Eva why they have drifted apart in season three, it was so dumb. Maybe most of the fandom forgot what he did, but I sure as hell didn’t. The show made it seem like Eva did too. Isak, her close friend of years, betrayed her like that and Eva just shrugs about it. I wish there were more scenes with the two of them. I would have loved to see those scenes more than hearing Magnus talk about sex. I wish Isak offered her a proper apology. Even the one in season three that seemed the most sincere, lacked so much in my eyes.

Now, in Isak’s season, I started to like him more. Before it, I hated him and found him annoying. His season did make him look better in my eyes, but I’m still bothered by the fact that he never told Jonas what he did. Also, the fact that he started the season by trying to screw Eva all over again. We love consistency in characters. His relationship with Even was interesting and beautiful to watch, but Isak wasn’t as exciting as a main. I liked his relationship with his parents, but we didn’t get enough of that and his internal homophobia was handled well in my opinion. That’s it. Besides that, I wasn’t impressed by him, especially with all the lies he told with no regard of other people’s feelings and the way he used other people as well. His lies were lazy and he didn’t even think them through. I just hated when Isak (and Noora in her season) constantly lied and sometimes, for no reason at all. 

In the fourth season, Isak was just a fanservice prop in my eyes. He and Even became one in season four and all of their troubles was just forgiven. Honestly, I forgot that Even suffered from bipolar disorder in season four. I wonder if Julie Andem did too. It was as if Even’s MI was cured by being in a relationship with Isak. Also, the bench scene with Sana wasn’t IT in my opinion.

That’s all I have to say about Isak. The fact that most of his actions had no real consequences pissed me off. He could and should have been written better. Y’all cal Noora a Mary Sue when Isak is right there.

[mishas-angel-eyes]

My sister hasn't seen the show since the end of season five. I asked her to see the last episode and give me her opinion. She said it seemed like a parody, a caricature of the characters and their relationship. She didn't know if the purpose was to make fun of a particular sector of fans or they had done it seriously and it had gone very wrong. What do you think?

Hi Nonny,

Thanks for reaching out and I hope you are doing well processing the finale and the ending of the show.

I started watching the show during Season 12 with the infamous, “I love you. I love you all.” episode, Episode 12. At the start, I noticed the quiet, innocent, adorable angel Cas and was drawn immediately to that character the way one would naturally gravitate towards sweet, loving, blameless creatures. But as the episode progressed, he was tortured constantly throughout the entire hour, and even with that initial attachment I felt for the character, it was painful for me to watch. While I was relieved that he was saved at the end, I wondered to myself, what kind of show is this? Because when you torture characters who are so lovable and loved, you are in a way torturing your audience. There appeared to be some underlying sadistic element within the writing and a degree of masochism in sticking around to witness it. SPN is not unique in that way, given the widely prevalent entertainment culture of killing characters to “subvert expectations,” but it certainly stood out to me from the start.

Since Cas was my favorite character, I found that I enjoyed watching only the episodes he was in, but even when he was in an episode, his character wasn’t treated with the same weight as the other main characters and I was continually disappointed, for him and myself. I was traumatized after I unintentionally witnessed him being stabbed in the back by Lucifer and dying with Dean next to him. It was so awful. Even though I knew he would come back, I simply didn’t want to see it. I had heard that he dies in all kinds of ways throughout the series and I’ll take everyone’s word for it, since I don’t want to watch my favorite angel die ever again. I didn’t even watch 15x18 because I can’t stand watching him die. If Castiel were my creation as a writer, I would never have hurt him. He is too beautiful of a character to have to suffer like that. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t do it. So, due to my distress over seeing Cas die and to some extent the degree of unattractive campiness I detected in the show each week, I felt like I outgrew it quickly in that sense. I also had some very painful and unexpected personal reasons to stop watching as well.

I came back after the Destiel surge post 15x18, as I’ve always been a Destiel fan. It is one of the most famous, well loved pairings in pop culture for good reason, and it is sad to me that the individuals in charge did not recognize or embrace it as such.

I have been hurt in the past by people who were incapable of putting themselves in my shoes to empathize with my position, so in this instance, I tried to put myself in the shoes of the writers or whoever made the executive decision to end the series this way (because it may not have been the writers), although granted it is difficult to do so, as it seems obvious to me that they operate from a very different sheet of music than I. The only explanation I can deduce is that they wanted to pay tribute to the two characters who started it all off and give them the chance they never had to live the ordinary lives they would have. Then they could die with no regrets, having lived both an extraordinary and an ordinary life. While I personally would not have made that choice, it apparently was what those in charge wanted. It is hard to please everyone when you have a large audience, so it is a valid choice to just please yourself if you can’t please everyone, which seems like the choice that was made in this instance. Though I personally would not have selected that approach, I can understand it at some level. 

I disagree with that approach, however, because the show was more than just those in charge - it was everyone, it was all the characters and actors and all the fans who loved them for many years, so to throw all of that out and not even consider it at the end of all things, is unfeeling and insensitive and not reflective of what the show had evolved into over the years.

Dean was too special to die in that way. I would’ve borrowed from the story of Enoch; that he walked with God (Jack) and was no more. Then we could’ve had him enjoy his pie in Heaven, surrounded by his loved ones and be the man who never died, as a character who was as immortal and otherworldly as the creatures in his world, an ending I feel would befit the Winchester brothers.

I certainly wouldn’t have wanted Sam to suffer and be separated from those he loved either, but suffering is rather on par for the series, so in a sense that was true to the general experience of watching the show. With the series finale, they basically had one more chance to sadistically inflict pain on Cas, Dean, and Sam fans equally and they, perhaps inadvertently, took it.

And to my precious Cas, I would’ve shown him living happily with Dean, Sam, and Jack at the very end with all of his original powers restored. While a Destiel ending would have been amazing, I would’ve been overjoyed just to have Cas hear from Dean that he loved him back, in whatever shape or form that took. Cas, as all loving beings do, gave too much of himself, and it would have been a fitting end for him to finally have that loop closed where we could witness him justly be given back all the love he had given out throughout the entire series. Cas was so loving that he sacrificed without expecting anything in return as that is what true love is, but were I to fashion an end, I would have shown Cas experiencing the requited love he so deserved in the finale, not only for a character that was so beloved, but also to pay the fans back for all the trauma they incurred from watching him die, had they managed to sit through it all those times. In the real world, oftentimes kindness, loyalty, and love are not rewarded, but in the SPN world, it was within their power to change that, and while logically the door is left open for it since Cas is in Heaven and undoubtedly he and Dean will be together again, I am sad for the missed opportunity to actually witness that interaction between the characters and obtain satisfying closure as an audience member, rather than having to imagine it.

Thanks again for messaging. It must be quite a burden on those in charge to have ended such an iconic show and while I feel for their circumstances, I must politely disagree with their approach, as the ending was ultimately unsatisfying and left important words unsaid and meaningful issues unaddressed. 

[suthoughts]

The Future of Steven Universe

Since Change Your Mind aired both myself and other fans have found themselves asking, what’s next for Steven Universe? With corruption cured and the apparent destruction of Homeworlds cast system where else is there to go?

In this post I’m going to talk about what I think is next for Steven Universe, looking at the unresolved mysteries and problems, along with characters who still have a story to tell, and the possible aftermath of the last episode.

Unresolved Mysteries:

The Pyramid Temple:

We can deduce from the era 2 diamond insignia on the floor that the Pyramid temple was sent to earth after the war. Why was it sent and what was the meaning of the rather cryptic mural on the ceiling?

Pink Diamonds Creation:

The drawings Steven looked at during Familiar seemed to be depicting Pink Diamonds creation. Was there any reason why she was created? One of the drawings seemed to depict a Geode, is there any connection to the Geode on Earth.

Lion’s Chest:

We’ve gone back to feeling like we have a much more solid grasp on Roses life again, however this chest remains unexplained. What’s in there and why did Rose want to keep it locked away somewhere so secure that it couldn’t even be accessed after her death? Where is the key now?

The origins of Pearl:

The fandom is currently divided between those who believe our Pearl was created by the other Diamonds as a replacement Pearl for Pink, and those who believe she once belonged to White Diamond. Either way, what made the Diamonds give her a new Pearl if she got the last one taken away for ‘bad behaviour’?

Pink Pearl’s Missing Eye:

How and why did Pink Pearl lose her eye? The fact that the first thing she does is feel where her left eye used to be while she asks what happened suggests that her eye was still there when she was ‘bleached’ by White. Is it a result of being under Whites control for so long or did something else happen?

Jungle Moon:

The planet that orbits the Jungle Moon was destroyed, and not in the way that you get from colonisation. What happens here?

White Diamond:

Why did White Diamond know so much? Not just about the fact that Rose Quartz and Pink Diamond were the same person, but she also knew a lot about organic terminology (such as mother and child). Why did she believe she was supposed to be perfect and how did she come into existence?

Unresolved Problems:

The Human Zoo:

Both the bubbled Rose Quartzes and the Zoomans need to be dealt with.

The Zoomans present the problem of being not only content with their captivity but completely unable to survive outside of the zoo. Even beyond the complexities of the human world they’re going to need to be taught a lot of things that most people wouldn’t even need telling due to their upbringing. They currently have all the fear and common sense of a baby and have to be taught not to just walk into the sea or run into the road. Also, given how they coped with rejection, how will they respond to things like hunger?

The Bubble Rose Quartzes have a simpler solution of just unbubbling them with the knowledge they won’t Immediately die, however there are still complications regarding their release. Regardless of the way individual Rose Quartz may feel about having been bubbled for goodness knows how long (which presents a whole other set of problems) they still have to be filled in on a LOT of Gem history and, most importantly, relocated.

The Resource Crisis and Gem Reproduction:

Homeworld is still in the middle of a resource crisis, likely brought on by the unsustainable way they have of producing more gems. Sooner or later the Homeworld will run dry, and sooner or later the Diamonds are going to want to colonise another planet and, in the process, wipe out all the life from it.

Shattered Gems:

Shattered gems have a degree of consciousness, not enough to truly alive, but enough to suffer. Ideally a way would be found to free them from their gemstones and let them move on.

Characters:

Bismuth:

Bismuth has just been reunited with her closest friends, however for a very long time her existence revolves entirely around the war to the extent that her ‘purpose’ was making weapons for the rebels to fight with. While the construction of the house is keeping her busy at the moment how will she adjust to the life of a civilian and how will she handle rubbing shoulders with gems like Jasper or Nephrite, who used to be her enemy?

Lapis:

Now that she’s stopped isolating herself Lapis’s character can begin to grow. At the moment she feels she’s the only one who can’t ‘let go’ of her trauma, something that (given that the episode after she said this saw us journeying into Pearls repressed war memories) is obviously untrue. What Lapis needs is constructive coping techniques that don’t involve lashing out at those around her.

While Steven and Peridot meant well they both have a tendency to blame themselves for situations outside of there control and were scared of hurting Lapis further. Now however, as part of the main group, Lapis will have to interact with Pearl (who knows what it’s like to be treated like an object, and used to have a very similar way of dealing with her feelings) and Garnet (who while being kind and supportive will let Lapis know when she goes too far).

There’s also the matter of her back story. Now that we finally know about Pearls life on Homeworld she is now, officially, the Gem we know the least about. It’s also important to note that, other than Lapis, every other part of her origin story was a silhouette, something that has been repeatedly used (for instance in Your Mother and Mine) when a story doesn’t quite match reality.

Peridot:

Peridots relationship with Lapis was stifling. In my opinion this came partly from the fact that she had no idea how to support someone like Lapis, and partly from the fact that, during conflict, she assumes she’s the one in the wrong.

During her ‘redemption arc’ she was the main source of conflict, due to (generally out of ignorance) saying hurtful things to the Crystal Gems. She spent a lot of time being taught the correct way to behave. Before the revelation that Rose was Pink Diamond she never saw conflict between the Crystal Gems and may have assumed it had only happened because of her ignorance. If this is the case then the next step for Peridot is trusting her feelings and realising that sometimes other people make mistakes too.

Jasper:

There’s a lot of story potential for Jasper, from her origins in the Beta Kindergarten to the revelation that the Gem who took everything from her and her beloved Diamond were the same person. The cast system she absolutely believed in is now suddenly gone and she’s suddenly got nothing to fight and therefore, no purpose. Does Jasper even know that the Famethyst are still alive and at the zoo? Then there’s her whole negative experience with fusions to consider, along with the negative way she views herself.

Nephrite:

I’ve already made a post about Nephrite and what I believe to be her backstory so I’ll just write a summary here: Nephrite was considered something of a failure on Homeworld and, despite being persistent believes that she can do nothing right. If I’m right then she story will likely be about her, not only dealing with the trauma of corruption, but learning to believe in herself. It could also possibly give us information on how planets are scouted out.

Rhodonite and the Rutile Twins:

Out of all the off colours Rhodonite is the one who seems the least comfortable with her existence, ranging from telling Garnet that they should all be ashamed to occasionally correcting herself when she starts to talk about herself as one person instead of two. The Rutile Twins self loathing seems to be a little more subtle but they seem to have a similar dislike of their body as Amethyst and Peridot once had.

Jade and the Zircons:

Last seen poofed by Yellow Diamond we don’t know where they are or what happened to them.

Lars and Sadie:

What’s going to happen now Lars is back home. Both he and Sadie have grown as more independent people during his absence, will they still be able to connect with each other or have they grown apart?

The Aftermath:

Pearls:

While the cast system has been destroyed and all the gems are now no longer obliged to fall into their specific rolls, are the Pearls free? They are treated as objects by Homeworld and, as such, the Diamonds may have not mentally included them in the liberation. Even if they were included how willing would members of the elite be to give up their Pearls? In fact, if the theory about Rose accidentally breaking her Pearl is true, can Pearls even be given their freedom?

Former Corrupted Gems:

Did any of the gems go back to Homeworld with the Diamonds, and if so how many? Either way that’s a lot of gems who now have to find a place to live. Given Homeworlds mentality towards off colours how are they all going to cope with the fact that, with their new appearance, that is basically what they have become.

Homeworlds Off Colours:

As we’ve seen from Lars’s crew among others, the conform or die oppression the Homeworld off colours have faced have left them with a lot of issues. Even ‘acceptable’ off colours like Peridot were left feeling resentful towards themselves after being dressed up with lim enhancers to look like ‘real’ gems. Homeworlds mentality will not have changed in one go and there will be those who remain hidden out of fear, or out of a refusal to accept themselves. There may also be those who are (rightfully) angry about their oppression and want revenge for how they’ve been made to live.

The Former Elites:

Now we reach those I consider most likely to be the future antagonist of Steven Universe. While there will doubtless be elite gems who embrace the change there will be those who do not. Those like Aquamarine, who like their power over others and aren’t willing to let it go. A lot of people think the Gem shown in the film trailer is Morganite, the former owner of Rhodonite’s components, and if that’s the case, the deconstruction of the cast system, along with her views on thing like cross gem fusion would give her a motivation to start (or at least join) a revolution.

Middle and Lower Class Gems:

Gems who are not members of the elite, particularly low class ones like Pearls and Rubies, have problems regarding their own individuality and desires. They’ve always been treated as one of many identical and indistinguishable copies. As we’ve seen from both Ruby and Pearl, the affect of Homeworld on a gems individually can take a long time to lose its hold.

Then there are the gems like Holly Blue Agate, who have spent their lives sucking up to those above them and kicking those below. How will they cope with the changes? If there is a revolution I can see at least some of them joining in an attempt to get more power for themselves.

I can also see some lower class gems deciding to join, either in an attempt to secure some of the power that had been denied to them, or out of fear of freedom.

[throwinggrapesoffthebalcony]

preface to LAVENDER SOAP

You can feel apocalyptic in a number of ways, even while living in peaceful times. But what many times looks like peace, isn’t. And so a piece may arise during our own suppressed apocalypse. That was the case with Lavender Soap and my life in 1996. Very few places have had the energy to influence me as a writer, to feed into my tendencies, and even fewer places that could provide a sense of peace, that I was only ever able find in the water; buoyant saline, under the warmth of the ray’s of the sun. Even in storm, or the dead of winter, it was a tranquility, a sanctuary, that I could never find on land. Depending on your life, it’s a beautiful separation.

The epoch and the hotel was very different then, it was at peace tucked into the trees. It wasn’t decimated  by this new cheap world yet. The perfect air was still influxed with the smell of foliage and perfume and of old materials, plaster ruined and repaired a thousand times, regrouted with the tiles left intact, the aging glue of wallpaper is sweet. Decor should be timeless during our lives. Life is so short after all. It was a hotel imbued with and not completely claimed by the past yet, with the past, absorbed into the walls and woodwork and tapestries. The faint voices, rapes, murders, sufferings, and suicides of a more glamorous past, saved like metal oxide on tape in the walls; played when the atmosphere is right. The first element that effects me are women I’ve been involved with sexually and their particular fashion and our conversations, the other is the inspiration of architecture; this necessity to remove and protect ourselves from the elements of nature. And the third being that wild energy of nature itself, weather, thermal dynamics, etc. I’ll save the commentary about the energy arising from the earth and surroundings for the preface for SSHS, which was more influenced by the raw energy of a geographic location and life’s tragedies than it was about architecture. And writing that piece was never about silence for me, while Lavender Soap was born, not in the clash of an apocalyptic scene, but in the very opposite, in the midst of the most pleasurable quiet, not an absolute silence, but a perfect quiet. The sound of air moving through trees, the sound of a rotary telephone ringing, faint voices speaking somewhere, the existence of humanness, not intruding on your life, when it doesn’t need to. That was a time when I think everyone had their own scenario, there were bounds, and knew that your scenario wasn’t their scenario; which is called sanity. Perfect separation of lives, we were humans not insects. And because of this, meeting someone was always much more interesting than now. Lavender Soap is, besides being a psychological piece delving into my experiences at the Chateau, it’s also to a great extent a retrospect, and a regression to my childhood. It was in a childhood bedroom that I perfected disassociation, disconnection, and detachment in, out of necessity, for survival. A house of continual violence, week after week, year after year, leaves you with nowhere to go but down. Fantasy and pictures, allowed me to drift off. A calendar out of date, a hopeful month of lavender fields is where all of my loves stood. They never take you up. Sleeping with my weapon of choice, a tapered necked ball peen hammer. And with the faint smell of WD40 and rust the angels never come to save you from the screaming. A movie about war, that’s pretty in a way, is the only way I can remember that film.

In 1996, experience wasn’t found on a cell phone. I was young and if you wanted to feel something or experience something, you had to shower, dress and traverse whatever plane you were on. And from one location to another, so much could happen, and in-between there was discovery, moments. Forget the set pieces, that’s not what this life is made of. This life is made of moments. In my opinion, that curiosity is what the young are absolutely lacking in today’s world, that and not feeling like individuals. There was a conversation that I read, I think around that same time, where a film editor, I think Murch, if not, one of the other prominent film editors, was talking about editing on a Moviola. And because of the linear nature of working with whole strips of 35mm film, he would have to pass through a lot of footage that he hadn’t previously considered, and that he would have, if working in a non-linear manner have never encountered. And there, he would find moments that worked more profoundly than what he was intending to use. And I think that lack of an analog approach in living, has people missing the more profound encounters, the accidental encounters, encounters more enlightening than what they might experience with a premeditated itinerary. But wait, they had an exchange on tender; what a fucking joke. I feel sorry for them. I’ve never fallen in love with this new digital era, a work of spite and bitterness, a reaction to a world that didn’t feel inclusive enough, so it’s become a strategy of slash and burn. And how do you tell someone to fuck off so they truly listen in today’s era? Must it be an apocalypse for the stalkers. Are people always drawn into that state of darkness. And it’s so easy to lose sight of the jungle you’re in, when the modern world disguises the archetypes so well. The weeks become months and the months become years and years become a decade, while I was creating the philosophies of a man facing death, even while undeservedly healthy, and unfairly able to fuck.

Arriving at the hotel in 96’ was serendipitous, or fateful, whether you want to believe that life is steadfast or whimsical. It felt whimsical when I met a couple of cute girls named Hanni and Sunny at Beverly Connection one evening; one lovable, the other the type to want to watch, then try to explain what each of the other really wanted. I jotted down a few impressions I had of them at the time. They told me that they had this special place they wanted to show me. I thought they were full of shit. But one evening they picked me up and took me to the Chateau Marmont. The weather was terrible that night. I was dressed for the woods. It was a quiet place, empty, with an entrance of willow branches hanging dank over the drive. We sat in the living room and even while I tried to concentrate on the conversations we were having, I was only half there, while the other part of me had already wandered off into the hotel, amongst the spirits and whispering lips. Sunny called, with the concern of the other on mind. It was against her religion to have sex before marriage, and she was confused as to whether oral copulation was sex. I gave the wrong and less comforting answer. Of course it is. People go stagnant just as places do. I went looking for Hanni where she worked at Milk and Honey as a hostess. I saw her through the windows, but the place was busy and I didn’t want to get her into any trouble, so I continued on my walk. I didn’t see them much anymore, but I kept going back to the Chateau. It was just as quaint during the afternoon as it was at night. On most nights, it was desolate, like a huge spaceship had hovered over and removed every last trace of guests. This was before they began to monetize the mythos of the place, and run it like a circus. The hallowed courtyard had eyes in 1996, and then in 2006 it had the eyes of a cheap set looking for anything edible. Drug dealers intwined with movie moguls and music producers. When first arriving there, there was peace, and I would explore the floors unimpeded. I felt strangely allowed. One afternoon that week after the two girls had shown me the place, I went and stood on the landing on the shady side of the hotel. I could have stood there for centuries. I thought about a life with her, while still in love with what I couldn’t have. I wasn’t apart from those feelings yet. They choked me up, but I would never cry. I probably set the record for being on the verge of tears, while they dried. The people were more reclusive and weird then. With so many people in those rooms, so few went about. They come out for air. They ask each other, never asking you. Even while asking me, would be the quickest way to find something out. Strange quirks with some of these who reside here. Notes I wouldn’t even have to look back upon to remember. I didn’t know about the inner workings of Hollywood yet, even while I was already pitching ideas, but wrote literature and not scripts. I didn’t know there were those perpetually green-lit, only needing content, and those perpetually in the red light. But on the surface, everything was crystal clear, with my young primo lenses at the time, seeing even the minute texture in anything like glitter in the dust. I suppose speculation has always been a turn on. But the place was an immediate enchantment, and people were actors, so forgiven, and no idiosyncrasies of the fauna would keep me from going back. I loved the place. It gave me a chance to linger in that aesthetic. There were occasions when I’d stay in the living room until dawn, undisturbed, when I could have stayed and ordered breakfast if I’d wanted to. Hollywood and this hotel had already had a long history before I arrived. The materials, the curtains and rugs and upholstery was already soaked to the bone, damp with the secretions of the body, the blood, the saliva and vaginal fluids of the past. In the present, you can smell the distinction of a vagina from a mouth perfectly. But through time, it becomes this amalgamated scent, so fine and subtle that it could be bottled as perfume; an aphrodisiac for the intellect. I want to stay and live here, but it costs a fortune. Check out time is like another death, the woman who spreads the sheets might be the perfect fuck. Dreaming in a bed that saw the golden age. The ghosts of a thousand whores arise. But that was the wet part of the dream. They all say the same thing, they all dance the same way. They all want to stay in this world. This, while everyone claims to live in a higher plane. They want freedom without the label being emblazoned upon them. Today’s perfect. That’s just a desirable label and we all have desires. You wish you could turn them all into someone someone would have loved. On the landing on the shady side of the hotel, the rush of thoughts has me without sight, the sun penetrating my eyes. I wouldn’t even know what a strange thought was then, always in the wine. I went into the shadows falling over me. The strange trees don’t know my past, but it seems that they love me. She was cold, goosebumps on the skin, she never warms. She’s not of this world. But this place is like heaven’s turnkey, and here I can dream, that I’m living a spectacular life. My every thought here like a disco in the dark light. It’s coming up river with the blackness gleaming to take my life. In the past one only had to return to civilization. Now, there is no civilization to return to. Modern society is like a plague that has no brains. That dies out, not by heat or cold or is prevented by the razor wire of another man’s desires for peace of mind. Death is the only peace. Just as I was told of my literary pursuits, that all the hours were wasted, and to think about the fact, that all those I admired in that craft, are all dead, and so was the craft. I was sitting at a drive-in theatre. Hail memory. Prefaces are life, when a form of death has already occurred.

On the subject of soap balls, they were always perplexing. My grandmother, a strange woman, born in New Braunfels, Tx, who never opened her presents, wouldn’t let me wash my hands with them. They were decorations, to be dusted and sniffed for their essence. One lathered by mistake and placed back into the bunch looked funny, and you wondered if she’d notice. They looked like dull gum-balls in a decorative bowl, and I’d acquired a taste for soap, or at least I wasn’t as disgusted as they’d wanted me to be. You can frustrate the hell out of a nun that way, by loving it, and asking her for more. But I was curious as to whether they were different flavors. I couldn’t tell; perhaps because sometimes smell and taste are inseparable. Perhaps their mystery lays in their not being of a practical shape, and round always tends to represent the erotic, like ovaries, representing the female anatomy. But there’s also a aspect in the work that I didn’t consciously think about until after writing the piece. And that was that in the victorian era, in the psychological journals, they often considered masturbation an attempt at suicide, or a suppressed death wish. And even while much of what they believed in then is laughable, maybe the act of masturbating with lavender soap was my fragrant wish to kill myself. I don’t know if I’m trying to cum or kill myself in the present either. My theory is that it keeps me from being desperate and at the mercy of women, when they aren’t readily available to me.

Dark blue was a piece I was more in love with writing, a story about a woman who’d committed a sin, that caused me to become an exile to femininity. When you can no longer trust women, there’s no longer a church to visit, there’s no safe place to hide. Dark Blue wasn’t as spontaneous as Lavender Soap, it was more evolved, I wanted to think carefully about it, I wanted some past world to be impressed. I wanted to stay immersed in a calm exile. Those who could even judge literature, now were few and far between. And because Dark Blue was also set at the Chateau, it was slowly being devoured by this more delirious work. It was like one stage of my life devouring another. And I wasn’t even in that careful mood to make a copy of it before I began cutting it up, and making fodder of it for a pop piece. I’ll probably extract Dark Blue from Lavender Soup and make it the subtle, psychological piece I’d wanted it to be; another conversation piece, the finite texture of dark blue polyester, a comfortable face and beautiful thighs, and a line, ‘I can’t believe you’d ever do this to me.’ You never expect a woman to be a criminal. It’s subtly frightening. You take the time to stare more deeply into the mystery of a pair of eyes. And when you can no longer believe in the feminine, when that door too, says deception, when it says enter at your own risk, it leaves you with no sanctuary at all in this world.

Lavender Soap was a chance to dwell on audiophilia and woodworking, even though much of the elaborations ended up on the cutting room floor, when it began to feel like This Old House. I think in every field, there’s an equilibrium with our humanness. And I think that wood and glass and analog technology was something that we can never rise above. There was no dissonance between it and the human body. We evolve technology, but the whole while we’re devolving. Like an individual, as a society, we cannot admit to wandering onto the wrong path, out onto a branch that leads to our demise, and while looking back at our past selves in arrogance, at our own expense. They’re already like zombies, and I think 5G will finish them off. Lithium, lithium, lithium. War, an OLED screen, and a sickening.

There was that first period of time exploring the Chateau when LA was magical, then I moved to D.C. and New York for a number of years. And as I did, many of the stories I’d started in my notebooks about or taking place in that setting were put on the back burner, while I was experiencing more of the in between and writing what I considered more significant novels. I’d visit Los Angeles on occasion, and the first place I’d want to get to was Venice, then after that, the Chateau Marmont. There were no marriage vows on the east coast, so I moved back to Los Angeles around 2006. I’d seen the Chateau become a less mysterious and more clamorous place during my visits but that was confirmed when I started going there frequently again. The magic was gone, for sure. And that magic was peace and quiet. Literature was becoming a dead beast, that had no place in this frivolous nature. I myself was disenchanted. I met a girl named Emma while I was living up Larrabee. I thought, maybe. And for the record, it was unfair to her that I quickly had such high expectations. I wanted a family. She said I was too smart for my own good and proceeded to eat my heart out. But I admit, I had her on the most perfect day of her life. No one will remember her so fondly. And so, at this breaking point of my life, I’d gone to a bicycle shop down Robertson and bought a chrome Bianchi Pista, trying to remain relevant and alive. I belonged in nature with a risk to life and limb; this was a crazy city now, homogenized, ceaseless, hungry. It was a point in my life when I had to seriously contemplate a return, a return home, or to academics, even while I despised its limitations, and had already fallen in love with studying outside of those restraints. I needed to give hard thought to returning to create some stability for myself, a life of normalcy, even if in some nowhere place. I already knew I’d been on a blacklist for some time by then, and well aware of the futility of trying to make it, while there are those determined to keep you down. But I kept writing, even without those motivations. And so I was riding around with that last chance to return on my mind, like always being conscious of death. The new technology had everyone riddled with something more invasive than neutrinos that just pass through everything. I was trying to shake off the stogy thoughts of literature and avoid the lack of patience that had infected everyone. And disappointment only aggravates your pride. You want to prove something, so you slip even in the bright sunlight, further into the heart of darkness. I’d try to ride through it, and write through it; the dystopian nightmare that everyone had feared would come, if they had their way, and they had their way. Without an exit strategy, the delusional self-induced Berkeley type archetypal bitch, had a plan. The illusion of an alternate world onto the real world. It had me dreaming of a landslide or a flood or a ball of fire heading right for us more than ever at the time. The freeze of disappointment settles on the brain. The billiard balls cease to scatter with infinite possibilities. You have to begin to look for your moments, then get the hell out before they burn down around you. But I would ride and when moving at the right speed, I could still say, that it was the place I first fell in love with. I played dead riding with no hands. I brought my old notepads out and began burning into Lavender Soap on a silver airbook. And again I’ll save this subject matter of writing tools and how they effect the process, for SSHS; the pen as opposed to a laptop, as opposed to a typewriter, etc. etc.

Why my father or anyone else for that matter was so miserable is about a past we cannot know. My father lived a life before I was ever born, I can’t judge him. It’s just the sight of an underwater knife and old scuba gear; everyone dives and that’s their life and no one else’s. And despite the terror in the household, he made an effort to educate me. He was a musician, so I was dragged around to Jazz festivals, which I always found fascinating, even while never being my favorite genre of music. More importantly, he loved film, and would take me to see first rate films while I was still at an impressionable age. It was Texas at a very different time. I don’t think he would in today’s world ever be able to sneak me, as a child into movies like The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, or Apocalypse Now. At least without being escorted by the police past the ‘no such thing as gender’ restroom doors, which the icon of the beast and word androgyny. Apocalypse Now is still my desert island movie, it was like candy to a child’s mind. I leave it in the DVD player for months at a time playing on a loop. It’s a movie I never tire of watching. I love when someone hates what I love, so maybe it’s a way to turn the stalkers off. Let them dwell in what will break them. It’s based on a book called Heart of Darkness, which is also one of my favorite works. It’s about the primordial model that we can’t get away from. We can build empires, then die over the wrong look. And when you’re a child, you see everything so differently, your eyes move to different parts of the screen, you take a different path through the film. You may not understand the poetry yet, or the subtext, or every word uttered, but you see another layer of beauty, that an adult might miss. And so your memory of certain elements are vivid. What’s written on a helicopter as it lands, ‘death from above’, and lavender smoke in the air making the ravages of life so pretty; like makeup on the whorish face of humankind. Then all the years have gone and it becomes like a masterpiece of background noise to a life in the continued, but post modernistic bloodbath of tribal animosities and nepotistic tendencies. The Heart of Darkness was a perfect model, because it’s the only model that makes any sense. We will die of a spear in the modern world. That dark model dwells in the modern city, and she’ll fuck us when she wants to. The end is always a bright pink clit coming down with bitterness and animosity. I can’t wait. 

When I first arrived in Los Angeles, we were consumed by the talk of lenses and cinema and the craft of filmmaking, when the craft was religion, and not political correctness. We knew our lenses. How’s political correctness done as an industry?, you may ask. Fairly well it seems. The advertisers don’t give a fuck what they’re selling or what Greco Roman history they’re destroying. They’re mercenaries. They’ve not replaced civilization with anything that will last. But now, nothing’s supposed to; not even history. Once again we can’t escape the analog nature of ourselves and how other methods aren’t as conducive for the flesh or for externalizing our fascinations for the world to see. Our inability to get away from that period will see us shrinking as human beings. We won’t be strong enough to fight off the virus. Analog is more evolved than digital, and I call this the ‘prism effect’; if you’ve ever seen a prism penetrated by sunlight, and how it separates white light into a spectrum of colors, it’s a beautiful sight. Now imagine the energy it takes and the technology to do what the prism does so simply, and without the need for batteries. We’re trying to digitize and synthesize nature until it resembles nature again, or sounds analog again, or feels like flesh again. Why? So someone can shut it off when they’ve lost control. The digital age has allowed a bunch of really strange and ‘awkweird’ people to rule over earth; and as it’s turned out they’re not immune to the thirst for war and destruction or terror. They just like to fuck things up from a distance, and don’t believe in repercussion. But someone at a pseudo think tank can cost so much life then walk to Starbucks to get a cup of coffee. We’re all vulnerable to nature. 

We can try to escape to places like Topanga or Malibu, but they want to stay connected. They don’t want the natural world to take place, even with all the natural beauty that still exists. Off the grid, makes them nervous, they’re so used to spying on everyone’s every move. It’s become their addiction, their lithium. I’m not your lithium. And it was during a time I was trying to escape, living out old Topanga road that something that might be considered trivial happened, but that in my mind was like some completion to an era of my life, like some forgiveness to put that part of my existence to rest. It was an afternoon that my girlfriend at the time and I made a stop at PC Greens along the Pacific Coast Highway, headed for a beach higher up. She waited for me while I ran in to buy a few things. And there, roaming around the store, was Martin Sheen. An old man now, but with the same face and voice. I looked into eyes I felt I knew well. I’m never one to bother actors, I know they fight for their private lives as well. But when heading for the checkout he came towards me like an old friend, and he was in a sense. And like perfection, what was playing and what was he singing to me? ‘The answer my friend is blowing in the wind.’ And he sang it as if disappointed, but as if there were time. We can’t know each other’s lives, but it was a beautiful sentiment. I went back out into the sun, elated, as if spared. Interesting. The wind took us up. We could have dissolved at that point with the waves breaking over us. Never complete, never finished.

And now, on another now. I leave the menu screen on flickering for hours, with the droning sound of the helicopter over fiery palms sweeping across my life, before I can bring myself to hit ‘play film’ again. 

-Alan Augustine

Los Angeles, 2020

[moonlit-maiden]

On Nico di Angelo, "Pairing the Spare" and How to Shaft a Complex Character in Less Than 500 Pages

This will be long. Strap in. This is long overdue.

So more longtime followers of mine may already know this but I adore Nico di Angelo from the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. They also know I continue to eastly, to this day, about how he was handled at the end of the Heroes of Olympus series. Now, I've never fully delved into the 'why's and I will do so now as it's probably best to actually articulate it at some point instead of continually lamenting it without presenting rationale.

First: WHY do I love his character so much? It all boils down to shared/similar experiences for social ostracization. Growing up, I was quickly pushed out of social circles due to who my parents were; immigrants. Simply existing with the ethnicity and cultural heritage I had labeled me as untouchable. To sum it up succinctly; white but not the "right" kind of white. Keep in mind this was at the end of the Cold War; attitudes towards Slavic peoples were poor as hell. Fuck, they still are 30 years later! Nico is ousted due to his heritage too; being a Hades child. It's not something he chose nor controlled. He himself did nothing wrong to any of the campers yet when word got out they pushed him away. The same happened to me. As soon as the school kids and/or parents realized my parents were Slavic immigrants they shoved me out. It still hurts to this day. As such, I can deeply empathize with Nico.

Why does this matter? Because that blanket social rejections fucks people up. Nico is shown throughout the series to be distrustful, preferring to isolate himself. He has been shown time and time again he is unwanted due to being a Hades child. Eventually you just... stop trying. When you beat a dog enough times it stops coming around. This is the same thing. In addition, Nico has lost his elder sister, Bianca. The one person he felt understood him because she, too, was similar to him. Now I have Opinions on Bianca that would piss off 99% of the fandom but it's irrelevant here. Her death occurs shorts before or after it's revealed Nico is a Child of Hades. He is 10 years old with no one and the whole camp rejects him. It's a cruel thing to do to someone no matter how much you try and justify it. Rick did an incredible job highlighting how racism, ethnocentrism and bullying harms a child. Nico immediately became my favorite for this and I applauded Rick for having the balls to shine a very uncomfortable light on a situation similar to mine. A situation, I'm very sure many first generation or immigrant kids can relate to.

So where did it all go wrong? To be blunt, Blood of Olympus. Now, the final volume of the HHO series is a hot mess in general. Almost ALL characters get shafted on way or another with mischaracterization, simplification or backtracker on character growth. Not to mention the plot feels very slapdash and messy at times. But again, another subject. We see Reyna and Coach Hedge start to really get to know Nico and realize the extent at how bad his abuse has been at the hands of monsters and demigods alike. Neither feels this is right and shows it as best they can while respecting Nico's boundaries. In the previous book, House of Hades, Jason does the same thing. But then we finally get back to Camp Half Blood and shit falls apart for Nico's arc.

It's plainly obvious to anyone who's ready the series in full that Nico is traumatized, even moreso then most of the cast. He has been physically tortured multiple times, psychologically tortured by the camp and emotionally manipulated by several individuals. Keep in mind, by HOO, Nico is roughly 14. Fourteen. Can you even image how that feels?! He's only just now, after Jason, Hazel and Reyna's persistence that they will not hurt him, that they genuinely care for his well being, that they don't care about his heritage (and don't care about his sexuality, from Jason specifically). And then Will appears and Nico magically forgets 4 years of pining for Percy. It's so jarring, like a screeching record! This is when we enter the issue.

In writing, there are many rules. Like all rules, they can be bent of broken under certain circumstances. The rule in question is the 'pair the spare' rule. The rule states that if the pain cast has paired off, do not pair of the "spare" aka the odd man out unless it's been led up to. Rick chose to ignore this rule and pair Nico with Will, citing that as a canon LGBT character, he wanted to send the message to LGBT kids that they were worthy of love. This in itself is not a bad message. What IS bad is execution. First, Will is a background character. He very much has potential, don't get me wrong! But outside of having a few minor scenes in final volume of the PJO series, Will has only ever been mentioned in passing. From what we've seen, he and Nico have never interacted. On top of that, Will who is a healer, completely dismisses Nico's trauma. This is a very big red flag. When someone is traumatized, particularly psychologically, the absolute last thing to do is to dismiss the experience as "teen angst" like Will does. It shows absolute disrespect for Nico as a human being. And he is a healer. He should know better. In addition, Nico himself is not fond of the dismissive personality Will is displaying, the 'I'm going to tell you what to do' persona because he's a doctor so 'doctor knows best'. And in Nico's POV he says as much in his inner monologue! Yet he's "drawn to him". I'm sorry, but I call bullshit. Nico has been shown in 9 1/2 books to be quite smart, paranoid about social intentions due to past experiences and won't take crap from no one, not even his own father, the Lord of the (fucking) Underworld. Yet he'll just grit his teeth and basically follow Will's lead with little complaint? It's so out of character it's jarring and painful.

We briefly see Nico and Will in the first Trials of Apollo book. They're acting like the normal couple with Nico being the "sassy, snarky" one of the pair. Please note it's been 6-8months since the end of BOO, in-universe. In this one scene it completely erases Nico's trauma, very valid feelings of distrust and hurt, his struggle with both his heritage and his sexuality, his years-long unrequited love for Percy, his grief over his sister and his struggle to make connections with his fellow demigods. Love is powerful but its not a cure-all. It doesn't make the years of hurt and abuse magically disappear (trust me. I know.) and it doesn't change someone's personality to well-adjusted.

Pairing Nico with Will at the end of BOO completely destroys his characterization from a writing standpoint. All the real struggle, grief and unpleasant consequences of abusing and bullying people who are "other" in socially-acceptable ways is wiped away in less then 50 pages. It also send a very VERY dangerous message to LGBT youth; find someone you're attracted to and they'll fix you. That's a toxic message to tell to straight kids so why the fuck would you tell it to LGBT kids!? Unlike most LGBT character in literature that I can tell are shoehorned it, Nico was planned to be gay from the start, I have no issue with this. What I do have issue with is throwing his character out the window so he can chase some cute blond ass. Nico deserves better then that as a character. People who suffered socially-acceptable abuse deserve better then that. Immigrants and first-generation kids deserved better then that. LGBT youth deserved better then that.

THAT is why I keep getting so pissed; Rick took a genuinely complex character and fucked him over so he could lazily pair the spare and not be accused of leaving the only canonically gay character single. But there is a reason 'do not pair the spare' is a rule. It's better to leave a character single then slapdashedly pair them up. This goes double for characters who have trauma in their life and trauma is a serious issue that should be respectfully addressed. Love is powerful. Love helps to heal. But the love of family (Hazel) or budding friends (Jason and Reyna) is just as important, valid and send a powerful message. It sends the message 'you are not alone. You are worthy of love. You are a human worthy of regarding of both your experiences and your fears.' Pairing Will with Nico completely and utterly stomps on this message. It sends horrible signals to LGBT youth and scraps his complex character into the token goth gay boy. And Nico di Angelo deserves better then what he was given.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[yanagi-uxinta]

Adam Taurus, fandom, and redemption.

Okay this is my first proper RWBY analysis post because after several weeks of having mine and several other fans’ opinions misconstrued and shit on just because we like a *problematic character* I’m fed up. So if you don’t like Adam, you’re sick of all the RWBY bickering on your dash, or you just want to look at cat pictures and chill, best give this post a miss.

For all my annoyed tone, I’m going to try and bring this down and do an actual examination of Adam in general, why his fans are frequently said to want his character to be redeemed (whether we do or not), and what we mean by ‘redemption’ in the first place. I will not use this post to shit on people’s ships or anything like that, and honestly Bumblebee probably won’t have much or anything to do with this analysis at all.

Disclaimer: I am only speaking for myself. I know several other Adam fans who will likely agree with me, in the broad strokes of my argument if not the fine detail, but there are going to be those who disagree completely with what I say. This is just my take on what the hell has happened to the reaction to Adam’s character and the fandom since the end of volume 6. Of course there will be spoilers so if you’ve not seen the last few episodes of volume 6 yet, don’t continue reading! The rest will be under the cut with spoilers from the outset.

So since Adam’s death in the show, a lot of discussion has centred around how his writing was handled, both for his character and for the larger Faunus discrimination plot that his character tied into. While I may not personally have enjoyed the turn his character took, I will not be berating the writers for that or shouting about Monty, as that isn’t fair to anyone, is disrespectful to Monty himself, and we’ve always got fanfiction for our ‘I would have preferred this’ scenarios.

Looking at the writing alone, let’s have a recap of what we’ve got, focusing first on what we see of him, then what other characters say about him. This is going to get long, fair warning, as quite a few of the complaints I’ve seen on Adam reviews so far have been how people have left certain scenes and information out to support their story. I’m trying not to do that, but given I’m also summarising and trying not to quote every scene and mention, I might miss a few things. Apologies if I do.

- Adam was introduced as a high-ranking member of the White Fang.

- He was older than Blake, cast estimates say by about 5 years.

- He was a skilled swordsman with an extremely powerful semblance, and is used to leading raids for the White Fang. He started back when Ghira was in charge; this is also when he first killed in order to save Ghira’s life during a fight against humans. While he initially accepted Ghira’s admonishment, Sienna’s claim that he was a hero and the other WF members cheering him seemed to facilitate his later ruthless nature. He showed particular enjoyment when attacking SDC locations and staff, where his killing was not encouraged, but it also wasn’t punished.

- He initially believed in better rights for the Faunus, and that the White Fang would bring about a revolution.

- He shows no compassion for humans, and a willingness to kill them if they get in his way.

- He rejected Cinder’s first recruitment attempt because she was a human advocating for a ‘human cause’, despite her claiming they would both benefit.

- Cinder chose to ambush a Maiden rather than push the issue with Adam, and only returned to press-gang him into service after she had acquired half of the Fall Maiden’s power.

- Blake left between Cinder’s two visits. Adam’s lieutenant was shown swearing to bring her back, only for Adam to tell him to ‘forget it – it’s time I returned to Mistral and-’ here he is cut off by Cinder’s return.

- Adam worked with Cinder after his people were either injured or murdered by her, Emerald and Mercury, since the only options given to him were to work with her for lien and dust, or die – implied to be by immolation. Cinder had to demonstrate her Maiden powers to get him to agree since until she did, he seemed willing to fight.

- Adam had enough sway with the White Fang that even after their numerous casualties during ‘Breach’, that they continued to follow his orders.

- He participated in the Battle of Beacon, where he provided the ships in which the Grimm were smuggled in, and was seen fighting and presumably murdering Atlas soldiers and Academy students.

- This is where his anger and the first signs of abuse of Blake became apparent. He saw Beacon as an opportunity to strike back at humanity en masse; to destroy their communications and one of their main signs of strength – the Academy, despite Beacon accepting multiple Faunus students. He sees peace and equality as impossible, and undesirable. He equates Blake’s ‘impossible’ desire for an equal society with his desire for her; and rather than try to get her back, he decides to destroy everything she loves as he sets out to impose his version of justice on humankind. At this point, his two goals are balanced. He starts by amputating Yang’s arm when she, a human, comes to Blake’s defence, and would have killed her had Blake not intervened.

- After Beacon Falls, Adam is pursued by authorities, and meets all attempts to bring him into custody with ‘brutal force’.

- He returns to Sienna Khan in Mistral. Here he is ‘punished’ for his participation in the Battle of Beacon, but we get no details on what that is, only that it wasn’t as severe as it could have been. Adam does not seem affected by the punishment at all, and pressures Sienna to agree to the attack on Haven. It is implied he has explained his deal with Cinder to Sienna, but we do not know to what extent or if he mentioned how he was recruited. All Sienna seems to know is that these ‘humans’ are an unknown quantity who have given Adam empty promises, and that Adam’s agreement to fight at Beacon demonstrates his talents being wasted by short-sightedness.

- Adam calls in Hazel to explain more. Here we learn that the White Fang practices execution for treasonous acts – something already covered briefly with Tuckson.

- Sienna believes the Faunus cannot win a war against humans, which seems to be her leading motivation behind not starting one as opposed to any moral reasoning. Adam disagrees, and Sienna takes the chance to listen. Adam’s argument is that the Faunus are superior, and they have the help of Hazel’s ‘master’, which would swing the war in their favour. He believes humans should serve the Faunus. Sienna does not directly rebuke him, but seems frustrated as she says she’s ‘had enough of this conversation for tonight’, and orders the guards to escort them out.

- This is when Adam’s ambitions are revealed. He performs a coup against Sienna, saying he is doing what’s best for the Faunus. He murders Sienna, pinning the death on an anonymous human huntsman, and makes her a martyr. When Hazel objects, Adam’s reasoning is that Salem was dubious about Sienna’s willingness to cooperate – with him in charge, that issue is removed.

- As High Leader, he orders the Albain brothers to slaughter Blake’s family in Menagerie, but to bring Blake to him alive after they made a stand against his leadership. Here his composure is shown to be slipping, and the Albain’s imply they will replace him if his sanity suffers too much. This is the first time we see him close to losing control; he was angry at Beacon but still completely in control of his reactions. The attack fails thanks to the Belladonnas refusing to go down easy, Blake working with Sun, and being able to convert Ilia mid-fight. The Albains are killed or imprisoned, Menagerie rallies behind Blake against Adam.

- At the attack on Haven, Adam oversees the setting of the bombs on the CCT and the Academy, and orders the small team back to ‘perimeter watch’.  Before they can, Hazel is thrown out of the building, distracting the group long enough for Blake to arrive and demand they stand down. Adam’s obsession is brought back up again; he’s amused that after the attack in Menagerie failed, Blake ‘delivered herself to him’ anyway. He is taken aback when Blake’s back-up arrives, called the ‘brothers and sisters’ of the White Fang members. In one case, this is literal. Adam insists they are enemies, but is interrupted by the arrival of the Mistral Police Force with Kali. His emotions get out of hand again; backed into a corner he tries to detonate the bombs in a mass murder-suicide attempt, which fails thanks to Ilia disarming all of the bombs. His own people start to doubt him, even as Adam justifies his actions as making humanity pay for what they’ve done – even though the vast majority of the people present are Faunus, not humans.

- When Hazel refuses to offer aid, Adam attempts to murder Blake. This is the infamous ‘dodges into the sword slash, cracks him on the back of the head’ move. This initiates a battle between the eight White Fang members, Sun, Ilia, and the Menagerie army.

- This is where Volume 5’s poor writing, pacing, and placement make things awkward (please, no arguments. While 5 had it’s enjoyable moments, even the writers have flat out said it was rushed and there is a 2 hour long video on all the placement issues of the Ruby vs Cinder team fight alone. You can like it by all means, I’m not saying don’t like it, but from a technical standpoint it’s bad). Adam is still on the ground after ordering the start of the fight, despite a battle around him, Blake running a quarter of the way around the courtyard following Hazel getting dragged back indoors by Weiss’ lancer, seeing her team, watching Yang chase Raven into the Vault, silently communing with Ruby, and running back outside around a quarter of the courtyard again... only to be standing in front of him, still kneeling on the ground, at the opening of the next episode. And when we see Blake running, she’s not doing her super-fast run from the Black trailer and choosing to be Yang’s partner back in Volume 1, it’s a normal jog. So Adam just... stayed kneeling on the ground until plot plonked Blake back in front of him rather than diving into the battle around him. I digress.

- The White Fang are overwhelmed/disarmed. Adam gets back up, says he will make Blake regret ever coming back (on her own terms, I assume he means...). More police are inbound, as are huntsmen... despite Qrow not being able to find any earlier in the season... and Blake claims she is here for Haven, not Adam – even though her sole reason for being on the continent is stopping Adam. Discrepancies aside, Adam continues to paint Blake as a coward who cannot face him without back up, claims he has powerful friends – something refuted by Sun. The White Fang are being arrested, Hazel is... offscreen pissing off everybody else with his semblance, and Blake says she has ‘more important thing to deal with’ than Adam making her regret coming to Haven. Adam gets pissed, attacks Blake and Sun for a few seconds, then makes a run for it since the police airships have a spotlight trained on him, and as Blake speculates, he wants to lure the two of them away and pick them off.

- Adam observes Hazel fleeing with Emerald and Mercury, and chooses not to make contact.

- This is where the short confuses the timeline slightly. I’ll go with what I think makes the most sense/is implied by the narrative.

- Adam returns to the WF throne room, only to hear the remaining free WF members complaining about his abandonment at Haven. Considering Ilia said only Adam escaped Haven, it’s unclear how the rest of the Mistral WF members knew what happened since this scene is implied to have happened as soon as Adam returned from Haven. Either these were a part of the ‘perimeter watch’ and weren’t accounted for by the police, Ilia was wrong about the success of the police (unlikely as we see all eight of the WF Haven group being apprehended), or this is a continuity error. Either way, Adam demands they step away from his throne, implying the group were considering a coup. Whether they were or not, Adam initially explains his demand as ‘we have work to do’. When they refuse, citing his abandonment of the WF at Haven, he repeats his demand. They refuse: ‘We’re not taking orders from you anymore. We heard you folded the moment you got sass from the Belladonna girl. I guess she’s got more control over you than you-’ It is at this point – specifically on the word ‘control’ – that Adam draws Wilt and slaughters everyone in the room. He retakes his throne seeming completely calm and not even out of breath, muses on ‘the Belladonna girl. Blake,’ stands, and slashes his throne apart and screams.

- I assume this is where the scene from the end of his short fits in, where he drops his mask in the forest and staggers as if exhausted. It seems to me that Adam has massacred every White Fang member left in the headquarters, explaining his fatigue, and in dropping the mask he is abandoning the White Fang and thus the Faunus – choosing to focus solely on Blake.

- Two weeks later, Blake sees him blindfolded and hooded on the train headed for Argus. This implies, with his admission of stalking her later, that in those two weeks he tracked her down and followed the group to the station, sneaked onto the train through the open door Qrow points out to Dee and Dudley, and was intending to take the train to Argus with the group and was waiting for a chance to get Blake alone. With the grimm attack derailing the train, Adam is taken to Argus with JNR, and presumably waits there for Blake to arrive. It is possible he is the reason for the technical issues Terra Cotta-Arc is being blamed for, but that is pure speculation and he could have been lying low for the day and a half it takes RWBY, Qrow, Oscar and Maria to arrive.

- Adam somehow becomes aware of the plan to steal an airship, or possibly follows the group to the cliffside, shadows Blake and Yang long enough to figure out where they are headed, and beats them there. Either way when Blake tries to disrupt the comms tower, she finds all the staff murdered and Adam waiting for her. Adam admits he’s followed her, waiting for her to separate from the group. In this conversation/fight, he swings between bitterness that she ever entered his life at all, and swearing he’ll never let her go again. He is inconsistent with whether he wants Blake dead, or as a trophy.

- We get to see a wider scope of Adam’s fighting abilities in his battle against Blake and later Yang. He attempts to psychologically manipulate and intimidate both as well as physically fighting them. He refuses their attempts to defuse the situation, turning the scenario into life-or-death. When he is disarmed by Yang, rather than shoot one of them with the gun still on his belt, he instead dives for the broken Gambol Shroud, racing Blake. Blake and Yang prove faster – though there are a few minor placement issues here as well, with how far Adam is from the sword after catching his foot on it and taking two steps away, as well as how close his hand was to it in the shot before Blake seizes it – and is killed when both girls stab him with the broken pieces through the chest and back. He staggers to the cliff edge and falls, his body hitting the rocks before falling into the river below.

We hear about Adam via Blake more than we see him on screen. In order:

- Blake calls him a partner or mentor, who changed, and whose ideal world wasn’t perfect for everyone – i.e. humans. Given her descriptions of the White Fang to Weiss and her sketching Adam in her notebook as if she misses him, at this point in time it seems like Blake still thought Adam was misguided like the WF, forced to take drastic measures in the face of the racism espoused by humans like Weiss and Cardin, who called the White Fang pure evil and the Faunus animals respectively. However she still called him a monster for the actions he took, which made her run away. She later calls him someone very dear to her, and describes how he changed – gradually. Little choices that built up that he told her not to worry about; starting as accidents, then self defence, until even Blake was convinced he was right. We see one of these conversations in the short, where Adam has recently killed on a mission and Blake is calling him on it. Adam very quickly and easily turns the conversation around – placing the death as an unavoidable casualty of fighting, himself as the person willing to do what has to be done for the cause, and implying Blake wants him to abandon the Fang, ‘like her parents’. This changes the argument on Blake, leaving her to refute a claim she never made, give him support when he professes his fear she doesn’t believe in him anymore, and does not address the actual issue she brought up. Talking to Sun, Blake goes through her own changing perception of him – how he was justice, then passion, but she later saw him not as hatred or rage, but spite. ‘He won't accept equality, only suffering for what he feels the world did to him, and his way of thinking is dangerously contagious.’ The word ‘feels’ here is complicated, since we now know what the world did to him and it was genuinely horrific, but ‘feels’ implies that it is an imagined slight; something Adam has blown out of proportion. Blake later tells Yang that ‘he never really liked people telling him what to do.’ She says that he’s strong, but his real power comes from control – he would get into her head and make her feel small, which she now says was him pulling her down to his size (I mean he’s six foot four, so how tall was Blake to start off with?).

So that’s Adam in a recap. While the slow change Blake talks about isn’t shown much, we do see his continuing changes in the show – he does go from someone whose focus was Faunus revolution, to revenge against humanity and Blake, to believing only he can lead the Faunus – ironically echoing Blake, who thought she was the only one who could figure out the White Fang’s plans back in volume 2 – and murdering his mentor to do so, to abandoning the Faunus cause entirely when it becomes apparent that he is no longer in control of the White Fang, because Blake tarnished his reputation, and thus deciding to hunt her down to the exclusion of all else. We see his ambitions rise as his emotions spiral out of control, and it is emotions – so well contained in his first appearances – that get him killed when in his anger he forgets he has a gun on his belt and instead goes for a broken sword.

Adam is proven to be a horrible, violent person, even if he started out differently – something we don’t see directly as an audience; the closest we get is his silent moment of regret after his first murder. So how come so many people were invested in his character, when what we’ve seen of him has been so consistently bad and cruel?

Some people just like a good villain – which Adam was, when he had the complexity of both Faunus rights and going after Blake. A lot of people didn’t like the reveal he was an abuser in volume 3, preferring the revolutionary character who felt betrayed by a partner in a freedom fighting army, compared to the ex-boyfriend angry at the girl who left him and put that personal insult on an equal level with fighting for the rights of his entire species. Personally I didn’t mind the twist, though I do think they should have built it up a bit more prior to the reveal – Blake only expresses her discomfort at his treatment of humans and how violent he became in the White Fang raids before Beacon, and never implies he was abusive towards her. This of course could be her needing the distance and time to realise it, and the Fall of Beacon being the biggest wake-up call possible, but we don’t get any confirmation of that. Either way, I liked the volume 3 Adam. He not only thought he was fighting for his people, he had a personal stake in Blake’s story, and it was the level of threat he presented to Blake and the rest of the main cast that made him intriguing and something to look forward to, even though his actions were despicable. It was the conflict he offered that made him a character I liked. He presented not only a physical threat, but a philosophical one as well – because his methods got results. Blake’s didn’t – her parents already proved that.

But what about those who didn’t like that, who just wanted the revolutionary, and the student-mentor relationship between him and Blake? Or those who lost interest in Adam after volume 5, and only gained it back in 6 after his face reveal? From what I can see, a lot of it has to do with that reveal of the SDC scar on his face.

The SDC is well known for its atrocious working conditions and reliance on Faunus labour. As we discover in volume 6, they brand Faunus. This explains Adam’s ruthlessness in the SDC portions of his short and the Black trailer; he is striking back at the place that abused and marked him, even if the individuals he’s attacking had nothing to do with his personal trauma.

Now for all our speculation, we don’t know how or when Adam was branded. What we do know is the SDC branded a Faunus not only on his face, but over his eye, permanently disfiguring and blinding him on that side. Whether they practice slavery or not is not yet confirmed, though given the connotations of branding – like ranchers do to cattle – it is highly likely.

I’ve seen a few references to how in different parts of history, known criminals were often branded or permanently marked in some way or other so they’d be recognised, raising the possibility that Adam was branded after a botched raid on the company. However, in these historical instances where the marking was a part of the law, there was a set designation for the brand – for example, in ancient Rome marked robbers with ‘F’, and in Britain in the mid-1500s brawlers were branded with an ‘F’ for ‘fraymaker’. If Remnant’s punishment of criminals involves branding – something that has been largely abolished since the 1800s in our world – then they would not brand them with a company name.

Given Remnant is meant to be (very approximately) socially analogous to our so-called first world civilisations depending on what aspect you’re looking at, I highly doubt branding is an accepted legal punishment. That places the convention and the blame solely on the SDC – and if that is the case, then they have some very worrying analogues to branding in American slavery practices. Some would have a set logo they would use, others would use a basic hot iron and try to make a particular symbol or letter, as is the case of a Micajah Ricks, who when describing a runaway slave he was looking for, ‘burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face, I tried to make the letter M’.  Now we know that Remnant as a whole outlawed slavery back when the Vytal Treaty was signed 80 years before the show began, but that hasn’t stopped effective slavery continuing today in prisons and it still occurs in certain parts of the diamond trade today, so the SDC practicing slavery dressed up as employment - or hidden entirely - is not outside the realm of possibility. 

If my speculation here is accurate, then what Adam’s face reveal tells us is that he was a slave, and was branded either to mark him as property, or for attempting to escape. We know the branding was done a long time ago as it seems fully healed, but we do not know how old Adam was when it occurred – if he was a child or not. We don’t have an official age for him, but if I recall Arryn and Barb estimated his age to be around 23 when volume 3 was airing or just finished, making him approximately 25 in volume 6. According to the NHS website entry on burns, ‘more severe and deeper burns can take months or even years to fully heal, and usually leave some visible scarring.’ Given the extent of Adam’s scarring, we know his was a deep burn, at least a third degree – and with how dark some of the discolouration is, it’s possible the deepest sections were fourth degree, which indicates tissue death. The site says that burns can be sensitive to direct sunlight for up to three years, though to take care to use factor 50 sunscreen on the burn and avoid direct midday sun as much as possible after this period as well. Even if Adam was branded after a failed raid with the White Fang, we seem him first don the mask in his character short back when Ghira was leader – five years or more before the show. If Adam was 23 during 3, he was either 23 or 22 at the start of Volume 1, not counting the trailers where he was likely 22. Five years before volume 1 would make him 18. Assuming the Adam short opening was after the burn had fully healed – I’m taking three years healing period here as a ballpark – he would have been 15 at the oldest when he was branded.

Now this speculation is based off assumptions, since all we know about Adam’s backstory is that he was branded by the SDC. That’s it. But I hope that this speculation is at least reasonable and rational, and backed up with enough evidence to at least be plausible. So if you’re still with me this far, we have either a child or a teenager being branded on his face for either criminal activity – and given Ghira was peaceful and did not condone Sienna’s later tactics, it’s doubtful Adam was working for the White Fang if this brand was because of a crime – or because he was a slave, who may have tried to escape.

And people wonder why anyone has even a shred of sympathy for the character.

Seriously though, the scar reveal makes all of Adam’s actions against humanity understandable, if not justifiable. The revolutionary people liked at the start received more backing and rationale for his actions, and even some of Adam’s more ambitious and villainous actions started to make sense – his coup against Sienna, for example. Adam had become so twisted by his hatred of humanity that a partnership he was initially forced into at fire-point became, in his mind, the best chance he had to get revenge on humanity – and Sienna wasn’t on board with that alliance or their actions, so he justified her murder as the Faunus needing him instead of her, because only he could bring them the justice they deserved.

The scar was also when a lot of people started raising the possibility of a redemption arc. Now the desire had been there before, since the very beginning in fact. But this was when it started looking like a genuine possibility, with the knowledge that the team were heading to Atlas, the source of Adam’s abuse, next. I know when I saw the reveal, my fears they were going to kill him off this season were eased a bit – surely this was setting up a future plot point? Why make the brand SDC if it wasn’t; any other brand – simple numbers even – would have conveyed the same story and had the same impact, without making it look like Adam would be a part of the future story.

And yes, I said ‘this season’. Adam I feel was always going to die, and a lot of his fans were fine with that. What we have issue with is the execution (no pun intended) of his death – something lots of people have already covered. What I want to focus on is the reason ‘redemption’ was bandied about as a possibility.

Now, let me clarify what I mean by redemption. I think when people see the word they think what we wanted was Adam to become good, to have his sins forgiven and to become a hero in reality and not just in his mind, to team up with RWBY and go up against Salem, potentially going down saving Blake as a last act of goodwill, or surviving to lead the White Fang and Faunus properly.

That’s not what I wanted. That’s not what most of us wanted.

When a lot of the Adam fans I’ve talked to mentioned ‘redemption’, there were two things we wanted. One was for the writers to redeem their bad handling of him (and everything else) in volume 5. Of particular note is how sudden the change is in his character between 3 and his first ‘live’ appearance after becoming High Leader as the holo-message to the Albains.  The only scene between the two is his coup against Sienna, where his ambitions and ruthless rationale become clear, along with how content he is with his deal with Salem, but where - like in 3 - he is overwhelmingly in control. Sienna was already overthrown before that scene even starts, she (and the audience) just doesn’t realise it. Yet the next scene we have of Adam, he’s screaming in fury - and this isn’t the raised voice of Heroes and Monsters, where he tells Blake ‘what you want is impossible’. This is an uncontrolled emotion that he visibly has to fight to rein in - compounded by Fennec’s comment that ‘he seems unwell’. With that one line, Adam’s character is changed - he is now unstable when prior to this scene, he was one of the most collected characters on the show, even in the face of defiance from both Blake and Sienna. A lot of people see this scene as the beginning of the end, if not the outright death, of Adam’s character.

By and large the writers managed to claw back Adam’s respectability in 6, with the exception of how he died - it being that instability and emotional lack of control that got him killed. The other thing Adam fans wanted when discussing redemption was for Adam to find balance again as a villain. Let him be a threat. Let him be terrifying. But don’t let his existence revolve around Blake, especially now we’ve seen his face and know what his original motivations were. If she gets in his way in his pursuit of justice, great. He’ll go after her and her loved ones. But he won’t go out of his way to do so. His desire to elevate the Faunus should have stayed strong. Yes, some people wanted Adam to forget Blake entirely and just focus on helping the Faunus, but I feel that would have been too big a reversal for his character. Adam is a villain, and the vast majority of us don’t mind that. We like that; it’s one of his selling points. He’s one of the most effective ones in the show (again, ignoring volume 5 where everyone became an idiot, hero and villain alike).

We all know Cinder is evil and is totally remorseless about the Fall of Beacon and the lives lost, same as Adam. We know she has a personal grudge against one of the main characters, and wants to kill or severely harm them, again, same as Adam. We know both want power. And when they divert from their original purpose, it is to get revenge on a member of the main cast. The difference? Adam succeeds. He helps destroy Beacon. He provides a direct threat to two of the main cast. Even in the weakest volume, he becomes the leader of the White Fang and would have succeeded in blowing up Haven had Blake not had prior warning of his plan and turned up to stop him – Team RWBY had no idea he was there or what his plan was; if Cinder and co’s plan had gone as they thought it would (so Vernal was actually the Spring Maiden) I imagine after killing Ruby and Qrow and securing the relic, their plan would have been to use Raven to teleport out before Adam detonated the bombs. When Adam abandons the White Fang, he finds Blake within a few days to two weeks and stalks her until he gets the chance to confront her. Cinder is responsible for the Fall of Beacon, but when presented with the chance to get revenge on Ruby, the character she’s been murdering illusions of since Beacon, she goes after Jaune instead (and fails to kill anyone except Vernal). Cinder gains the full Maiden powers, yes, but almost immediately loses her social power amongst Salem’s group when she’s maimed by a fifteen year old and does not gain that power or influence back. She is ostracised from Salem’s group because of her failure at Haven, leaving her a vagabond having to murder and steal for money and clothes to try and buy information – on Ruby. Yet Cinder never comes into contact with Ruby all season.  

This is one of the reasons why Adam is more compelling – though I won’t say likable – than Cinder. The other is we actually have a glimpse of his backstory supporting his goals, unlike Cinder who could have popped up fully formed watching Emerald steal and we’d be none the wiser.

It is also why most of us were fine with Adam dying. He’s a villain, and villains tend to die and deserve it. It’s the way he died, and the timing, that annoyed us and sparked this whole month-long debate. A lot of our complaints could probably have been averted if a) the scar had said anything other than SDC, b) if he’d not forgotten about his gun OR he’d forgotten about it earlier in the match to foreshadow his lapse in concentration later, and c) Yang’s line about who he was pretending to be. It’s a good line, don’t get me wrong, but it does not make sense for Yang to say it. If Blake had said it, it would have worked and given us more insight into Adam – that he’d changed far earlier than we first though, and kept the facade going to keep Blake sweet. But Yang doesn’t know him. She knows very little about him, and she and Blake have had one very short conversation about him since Beacon, during which Blake never implies that Adam was pretending to be better than he was. If the line had been ‘the person you used to be’, then fine, great, that works perfectly because it’s consistent with the knowledge Yang has of him.  

There’s also the group that say Blake and Yang murdered him, and it wasn’t self-defence. I’ll be honest, I’m on the fence. Did they have other options, once he was disarmed? Yeah, probably. His aura was broken and Yang, a hand-to-hand fighter, was behind him. She could have sucker punched him and knocked him out rather than slowing down to pick up a broken sword to stab him with. Did they feel like they had those options, in the moment, after giving him several chances to walk away and he was diving for a weapon? Probably not.  Would I have preferred to see a scene where (if they had to kill him now) there was zero ambiguity? Yes. However the writers made their choice, and we’ll have to see what they do moving forward. I won’t be dropping the show or boycotting or anything like that, but I am disappointed in their handling of it, especially when the finale was so lacklustre. They should have saved the Adam fight for the final episode, if only to give us the emotional stakes completely lacking in the Cordovin fight.

Speaking of moving forward, I would like to see the death have an impact in the next volume. There wasn’t much time in the finale for an in-depth look at Blake and Yang’s emotional state, but this is something that should be explored in volume 7. Killing a human is different to killing Grimm, and while team RWBY have been guilty of endangering or ending lives before (hi nameless White Fang goons on the exploding train!) the narrative has never addressed it, and I feel this is a good place to. Adam wasn’t just a faceless, nameless enemy who you didn’t directly kill, even if you left them to the Grimm or they got caught in an explosion you survived. He was Blake’s mentor, partner, lover, and nightmare, and she killed him with her own hands. He was only ever a monster to Yang, one who changed her life forever and haunted her ever since, but he was a person and she killed him and saw how devastated Blake was afterwards. Blake had an emotional breakdown in the immediate aftermath, but this was used to reinforce her relationship with Yang instead of explore her complex relationship with Adam in its final moments, and I feel like one scene where only one of the two characters is upset over what they did is not enough to cover a subject that should be quite deep and managed tactfully.

All we can do is hope that the writers do well next volume, and given how strong the majority of volume 6 was I think they will. They’ve shown their willingness to take feedback on board, and while nothing else can be done with Adam’s character (unless as Kerry says they decide to pull a Darth Maul), I hope they do the impact he’s had on the characters justice and we get to see a more in-depth look at the conditions that made him who he was: a warped, broken man who was a victim, a survivor, but who took the wrong path and became a villain.

Edits: Included a couple of points thanks to a friend on Discord and @blek-is-a-cat, thanks to you both!

[asheternal]

[DO NOT REBLOG PLEASE.]

(THIS IS NOT FACT, IT’S JUST MY PERSONAL VIEW. Keep that in mind! How I interpret media is probably different than your own perception! This also has one  vague personal anecdote about my past with abuse as forewarning.)

(Also I avoid canon names as to keep this shit out of tags so this may sound incredibly dorky, apologies.)

 This by no means is meant to discredit or harm abuse victims- please take this as a “bringing some nuance” to the discussion rather than an outright attack on someone’s ideas/beliefs. If I wanted to or planned to attack people- I’d reblog them and go off. This is a discussion on the concept, not anyone specifically. If you see the ship as abuse personally- that’s your perspective. I have no right to tell you not to think that way and this mini-essay does not carry that intent.

C*tradora is a ship people are starting to consider abusive and while I agree in present context it might be to a degree (though I’d call it TOXIC, not abusive) I feel like people forget that things between both of them can very much change.

 Abuse cycles only exist when the line is indoctrinated into believing that their behavior is right- when it’s a situation where they can’t find outside support to break that thinking... though Cat has two key characters who will most likely push her to a redemption arc- Scorpy and Entra. Both can be easily re-goodguy-ised due to their already neutral stances on the horde vs. everyone else, and it’s clear Cat relies on them both to some degree as she’d have never fully gotten the chance to overcome BADMOM without them.That can lead into Cat trying to make amends with Ador- bringing up her abandonment issues, possibly finding her homeland- finding out that she’s the princess of beasts or idk attractive cat people. It’s a very open plotline if you look at her original iteration from the 80s.

 Sidenote- this argument was a common one back when barnmates was released and people shouted that lap//idot was abusive when it really wasn’t. It was toxic, that is until Peri learned to respect Lapis’ identity and allowed Lapis to approach her on her own merit. It took true redemption to finally push both of them to their true selves- to true recovery. Both had to lose everything before they could remotely consider healing, be it limb enhancers or having to flee to the moon out of fear. (Even if their progress wasn’t really shown, rushed writing of a subplot is a valid crit. of their relationship.)

 The abuser in that ship was neither of the two involved- it was the abuse they suffered from their upbringing, from homeworld, which is very similar to the evil horde. In ALL of their cases, they only learn and heal once AWAY from their abusers, the narrative of “cat is becoming an abuser BAD SHIP” is one that is very.. understandable to some extent, but also sort of harmful to people who suffered parental abuse or other forms of systematic abuse. It’s saying “this pair is bad- all people who were abused will become abusers” and that’s frankly untrue and very nihilistic. I’d say if you’re a victim who never got help/didn’t fully recover long after escaping, you have a higher probability of becoming an abuser or showing abusive tendencies, but the notion that Cat WILL become an abuser or IS becoming one is highly flawed IN MY OPINION.

 I’d argue that cat struggles with being toxic herself while in the horde, though once she distances herself she’ll become less and less consumed by it. We won’t see this until we see more of the show- it’s only the FIRST SEASON, so making big assumptions like “this ship will ALWAYS be abusive” is incredibly shallow. This isn’t an issue you can apply black and white thinking to- it’s an incredibly grey sort of relationship. Likewise- cat is still a TEENAGER (I know it’s hard to remember with some animation styles) and until you hit a certain age (it varies from 18-21, it’s an ongoing argument I’d rather not open up as I have a very individual based belief that it’s all on your personal development rather than age) who is living under AN ABUSIVE DICTATORSHIP where they intentionally brainwash these youngins into being super soldiers. It’s very much implied that cat was abused more heavily for developing feelings for her equal, hence why BADMOM was so keen on abusing cat. It’s why she was seen as “poisoning” Ador and was responsible for behavior Ador did that she was by no means in control of.

Alright, anecdote time because abuse and abandonment issues are like.. a big thing with my past. I used to, when I was in an abusive relationship/friendship, do what Cat does to some degree- when I could escape I didn’t. When I could do the right thing I didn’t. When I could hold my own view on the world I didn’t. When everyone told me I could get away from the abuse I didn’t and yknow why?

 It’s easier to let it keep happening while being fully aware it happens. Hence why Cat KNOWING BADMOM was abusing them was such a hit in the face. Cat is a VICTIM, she doesn’t know anything better than what she has and the thought of having NOTHING is far more horrifying than the “comfort” of your normalcy- which is far from normal, it’s abuse. As an outsider, even as a possible victim yourself, it can seem so.. irrational for someone to keep going back, it can seem like they’re just reveling in the “power” aligning with abusers as a victim can have, but it’s anything but that. Sure- you can ham it up and act like that’s your intention, that you’re no victim, that you’re just “doing what’s right” but in the end all you’re doing is admitting you’ve fallen to the parasitic existence that is being a true abuser.

 What happens when the victim, the host, is subject to repeated failures in the eyes of an abuser? You’re abandoned, thrown away. You’re demoted, mocked, called a “traitor” and left to fend for yourself. (In a hypothetical horde that is. Real life isn’t as theatrical... I’d hope.)  Those people who wanted to help you may not be around still- you may have scared them off, they may have forgotten about you, they may have given up. Though in time alone you start seeing the world for what it is, eventually people come back once they see you’re away from your controller- you begin healing. People will return, just not the people you expect to- not your abuser, not your abuser’s abuser. Friends, people who saw the good in you but couldn’t handle seeing you destroy yourself or others for a twisted, sick abuser.

 Though, with healing comes guilt, and with guilt comes understanding. The road to redemption isn’t a single action, it’s a chain that starts once you realize how messed up your situation is. I see that in Cat- starting with when she gave Ador her sword back, admitting without her she has no purpose to her abuser, no purpose for herself. “Letting go” of her feelings for Ador is not literal- it’s never that simple, they fester- it’s a sign that the grasp her abuser had on her is starting to break, so she has to do more drastic things to justify her actions, she has to desperately find some form of “usefulness” to the horde otherwise Ador was right. Otherwise BADMOM was, to some twisted degree, right. Cat is, by the definition of the Horde- weak, because she LOVES her lifelong teammate, her role model, her best friend. Love is not allowed under the rule of the Horde as it means she’d turn on them if it meant helping who she loved, so that was routinely beat into her. Ador never showed the same “weakness” in her- she could ignore her feelings and get results, she was always useful to the horde and losing her to her discovering she is capable of feeling things the horde deems unfit made her undesirable to the big bad guy.

 If I am proven wrong and cat is later on shown to be 100% abusive, then yes- I won’t defend the ship at all on that. Though in the current state it’s a far more complex situation than “is cat an abuser” or not.

This sounds like a youtube script I know, so I’ll leave you with this last thought:

We can’t mend an abuser, but we can clean off the toxicity from a victim, thus preventing good people from becoming that which torments them. It’s not going to be solved by asking people to leave their situations- it takes a lot more effort to push someone to their own conclusions which is ultimately the best way to help someone caught in that sort of situation. You cannot force someone blinded by an abuser to “see the truth” if they refuse to, though you can influence their views and offer perspective to a situation they once saw as black and white.

  In the end- the true evil is the system and parental figures these characters were raised by, not each other. I hope this could bring even just a little grey thought to those reading.

Thank you.