#and why it made no narrative sense against part 1 they just contradict each other WE MISS U BRUCE

[aeirithgainsborough]

I absolutely loved this episode of the last of us but it really emphasised how mean spirited tlou part 2 is and that it was heralded by people as such a masterpiece makes me feel violently depressed about what that says about the bleakness of life and this planet we live on. 

Never more than in this week’s episode have we seen so intimately Joel’s mental state. This is an addition in the show; the conversation between Joel and Tommy is very different in the game. We know Joel feels like that but it never says it so explicitly. And that’s a good thing. So much of who Joel is is shaped by his devastating loss. He has severe ptsd and trauma from not only losing Sarah, but the way he lost her. He wasn’t able to save her, he failed her, and that’s why Ellie terrifies him! Because he presumes he’s going to do the same thing again. He’s going to lose her. He even lists ways he’s already let her down. It’s made patently clear in the way he is with Ellie and things he says to her that this fear is because he cares about her. He tells her he does outright. And as he begins to care for her, we see his ptsd rearing its head in more obvious/physical ways. Makes sense, right? Loving someone, caring for them— that’s Joel’s trigger. But we also see something else. We see Joel talking. Jesus he’s barely talked this series so far in the way he does in episode 6. Most of the time his conversations have revolved around logistics and plans. Now he’s talking about dream jobs and football and his old life. And he’s smiling when he does it. He’s laughing. There’s so much contentment in him in his scenes with Ellie. This is what healing looks like. There are painful, heart stopping moments. But there’s also joy. When was the last time Joel felt joy, do you think? 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The Last of Us Part 1 is a love story at its very core. It’s about how love is where you find a reason to live even in dire times like an apocalypse. It’s about how things can seem so bleak but if you allow yourself to love, you CAN find pockets of joy. You can find hope. This is what Joel learns through Ellie. Love makes life worth living again. And, in fact, it saves you. There’s a reason we have a cutscene with Bill in the game in which he tells Joel that caring about someone only gets you killed. It’s not just a throwaway line as we traverse Bill’s Town with him. It’s a proper, cinematic cutscene. Bill tells Joel/us this, and then the narrative works the rest of the time to undermine it. Ellie’s love for Joel is what saves his life in winter. The things she does to keep him alive and safe are insane. It’s not just finding food and water for them both at 14 years old. She finds medicine. She uses herself as bait to keep David away from Joel. That’s nuts! And it’s because of love. Love is what helps Joel not get killed. It’s the same for Ellie later: because Joel loves her, he saves her life instead of letting her get killed. He sees her as a person of value, as a person whose life means something irrelevant of her immunity. He sees her as someone who deserves to live. Love literally saves her fucking life. And as well as all this, we see how love saves Joel and Ellie in every day ways. Ellie is no longer alone and scared. She has someone. Joel finds joy in life again. He pets giraffes and he laughs at stupid jokes and he talks and talks about a life he’s been burying for decades. Who is the only person he’ll accept Sarah’s photo back from? Ellie! ‘I’m taking a ride with my best friend.’ And they ARE best friends. This episode went to great and beautiful lengths to emphasise how broken and afraid Joel is, and how hard it is for him to show up for Ellie, but that he does because he cares for her. It goes to great lengths to show how Ellie is starting to affect a change in Joel; that she’s helping him overcome the grief that has lain stagnant in him for 20 years. It’s starting to show how they’re best friends. It was an exceptional episode. I loved every second of it. But when I think about part 2, I’m so stuck on how mean it all is and how it works against what they (bruce i see you pal) were telling us in part 1. 

In fact, it’s not just mean, it’s cruel - both to Joel and Ellie, and to the fans who love them and are attached to their journey and got something out of it. What’s interesting is considering Bill and Frank’s story and the changes that were made to it. I absolutely loved the episode but it’s difficult to completely ignore pinkwashing claims (if you care to look, there have been many complaints about the game and its overall treatment of lgbt+) when Bill is rewarded for doing the same as Joel: he protects his one person too. In doing so he hoards valuable resources that could be used to help thousands of people. In twenty years ordinary people just looking for safety will definitely have made their way to Bill’s Town  and been turned away. Bill’s refusal to turn his town into some sort of a functioning community like Jackson definitely killed people. But this is presented as a good thing. He’s protecting Frank. That’s his job. And he’s rewarded with so many happy years and a peaceful death in an apocalypse. There’s a reason that resonates with people more than Bill’s original story which is bleak and sad. He ends up alone. Frank dies hating him. To see instead that actually you can have joy and hope and love in a post apocalyptic world is meaningful to people. 

Joel and Ellie are not so lucky. Joel does the same as Bill. He picks Ellie. He does what he has to to protect her. He defends them both from hostile attackers. His refusal to let her be a lab rat prevents a cure (arguably) so people will die but he saves her life and gives her a life worth living, the same as Bill does for Frank. He isn’t rewarded for it. There’s no great love is so good message here. Unlike Bill, Joel is punished so horribly for years in the narrative through Ellie. She’s used as a pawn for the vehicle in which the narrative tells us Joel did something wrong and he deserves punishment. This hurts her too by the way: love has hurt her too. But the narrative has to punish Joel this way to really make sure we know he did something so terribly wrong, so for 2 years Ellie isn’t allowed to give Joel a proper chance to explain. He isn’t allowed to defend himself. And after these long painful years, Joel is then killed. But he’s not just killed. It’s so brutal. It’s long. It’s painful. And Ellie is there to watch, to be held down on floor level so he’s all she can see as he’s killed, and she’s begging him to get up. Bill’s stance and actions are presented as a good thing. He’s the hero who saves Frank and allows him to live a good life. He gets a hero’s story. Joel, on the other hand, is a villain for doing the same thing. He dies a villain’s death.

Ultimately, Bill is right, despite what part 1 appears to be telling you (that’s part of why I hate 2 SO much, it’s so contrary to the themes and messages of 1). Love does get you killed. If Joel didn’t love Ellie he wouldn’t have saved her and he wouldn’t be dead now. Love will make you soft and stupid. You’ll run into rooms of armed strangers without concern after 20 years of being constantly on guard, or at least that was Neil’s explanation as to why Joel would get himself into a situation that was so out of character for him. If you love someone you will be punished for it. They’ll stop speaking to you because you loved them and because of that love knew you had a life of value that was worth living and not because of immunity. They won’t even give you a chance to explain, after all the ways love drove you to keep each other safe and alive. If you love someone you’ll be brutally tortured and murdered and you’ll deserve it. You will be constantly punished and criticised and villainised for that love. Literally, love makes you a villain. You will suffer because of love, you will lose everything. What’s the message here???? What on earth were Neil and Halley trying to say (sos bruce we miss you)???? That healing from your trauma will get you killed? Will get you punished? That Joel should have stayed broken in the QZ? Because if he’d done that, he’d have been better off than his ultimate fate. He wouldn’t have lost a daughter again and he wouldn’t have been beaten to death slowly and died quite likely thinking Ellie’s going to be killed after him so he’s let another daughter die, and he’d probably still have Tess. 

Joel, through Ellie and overcoming immense fear and ptsd in order to love her, heals from his trauma, he’s finally able to deal with his grief and move on. He, after twenty years of rejecting it because it caused so much fucking pain, loves again! He truly loves! Then it first hurts him again, and then it kills him. Love is good, love is necessary they told us in part 1. But in part 2 they tell us it WILL get you killed though. And that’s so fucking miserable.

[yanderefairyangel]

How much of a pass can we give writers for writing one thing that wasn't intended to be something different (usually controversial) but it was interpreted that way by the audience/fandom?

Normally as much as needed, but in this era the answer is sadly none.

But I feel like most people don't even realize some of the things they say are problematic and not just because of the questionable morality of accusing someone to villify a mental disorder without actual proof nor actually listening to their real intentions but also because of the effect it has on the writing.

Not trying to bring this back but when the Fell twins were confirmed romance and thus leading people to try to prove they are siblings to Alear (because of course, that's the normal response to that ) they don't even realize that Alear being siblings with the Fell twins has ACTUAL bearing on the plot and would have consequence on the continuity of the text. However, independantly of their S support with Alear, it's kind of obvious IS wasn't intending to do anything too big with them : their plot relevance last the Fell Xenologue and that's it. The writing for their relationship with Alear and how they don't affect much the plot in general and their design or how the writers purposefully made them not siblings to their Alear in canon so that it would determine their relationship with our Alear, regardless of Sombron. And the thematic of the pair of sibling within our cast and how they foil each other. So their S support isn't really the cause of this narrative but more a result of this narrative which is that IS didn't knew what to do with them and made them romance to call it a day...(regardless this decision will result in IS denying the siblings allegations, as they always do).

In the case of Veyle and Seadall, you'd have to ask yourself what DID and ED brings to their writing seeing how 1/In Seadall's case, the diet thing just exist and isn't deeply explained 2/ In Veyle's case, it kind goes against her own character arc of finding herself and becoming whom she wants to be since the brainwash is likely a metaphor (used literaly here) for the psychological damage a parent inflict upon his children when he is being violent against them... I mainly say this based on Rafal and additonally her brainwash doesn't exist just to explain why "evul" but to create a parallel with Alear and their past self... to put it short those allegations are all bothersome in the sense that they show that they don't understand the writing and blame the writers that never intended that to happen in the first place.

In one case it makes Seadall looks like a lazy attempt to tackle a heavy topic when... it was clearly not the goal and in another it would make Veyle's narrative convoluted leading to a contradiction between what the story is showing and telling and whatever those people though the writers had in mind

The difference between the two and idk Bernadetta is that Bernie explicitely tell us herself that her "waky attics" are actually PTSD comming from the parental abuse that her father made her go through so there you can say that the handling of her trauma is badly done in 3H because of how the writing contractids herself

This doesn't exist in Veyle and Seadall's case because Seadall's situation is never treated as seriously and Veyle is never used to make slapstick jokes.

What's worse is when the fandom doesn't even realize that it really is just an intepretation on their part and get mads at other for trying to explain that to them while unfairly accusing the writers of something they never though someone would imagine

(note : me talking about the Fell twins/Alear situation as an example is not an invitation in flodding my ask box with arguments to whether or not they are close relatives)

[linkspooky]

hi, do you have any thoughts on itadori and mahito? specifically why mahito tell him that they are the same?

A. Yuji and Mahito is the Same... 

Except they’re not. Not really. Yuji saves people without thinking, and Mahito kills people without thinking but there’s a clearly a difference between saving people and killing people. One of them is a whole lot less murdery. Rather than saying that they’re exactly the same, I think the narrative is setting up the idea that they are supposed opposites who have uncanny similarities to each other. 

"I will say at once that both courses lead to the same result: the “uncanny” is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar."

The uncanny is the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. Described as Freud omething that is both at the same time resembling a human, and clearly not human. The term comes from his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, which explores the eeriness of dolls and waxworks. Why are humans creeped out by something that resembles them? 

Freud offers his hypothesis about the uncanny: it something we have forgotten or repressed that is now coming to light against our will. The uncanny unsettles us because it reminds us of ourselves. The uncanny is a concept used repeatedly in psyhological horror, the concept of the doppelganger, dolls, mirrored images things which are human and remind us of ourselves can also subconsciously remind us of the fear of ourselves, so Freud says. 

1. Baby Boy, Baby. 

Mahito is, specifically the fear that humans have for each other. In that way he embodies the uncanny perfectly. He even looks uncanny. He’s the most human looking of the curses, but at the same time he looks like a stitched up Frankenstein’s Monster. There are many ways his behaviors are just plain wrong and contradict each other, he can talk with other humans, he’s polite, well mannered, always smiling, and then he can kill someone and laugh it off like it’s nothing. Mahito resembles a human, but his every single action is there to remind us that he is inhuman.

Mahito is also the mirror to humanity. Reflections are, things that appear human but are not. Reflections in the mirror look exactly like you, but they’re two dimmensional shallow images and they don’t move of their own accord. Reflections are another brand of doppelgangers. However at the same time, a mirror doesn’t lie, it just reflects. A mirror is just showing what is looking into it. 

There’s a story by HP. Lovecraft. (Wow, first Freud and now HP Lovecraft, I’m sorry for citing all of these terrible, terrible men), called the Outsider. A human who is locked away in a castle its entire life finally escapes, and tries to join a party of other people they see from the outside window, only to see them all run off in terror. The last line of the story, after seeing a horrible monster, the monster realizes it was just looking at a mirrored surface and he himself was the monster that everyone was running from. The fear the story preys upon is the fear of oneself, and the fear of the ugliness in oneself that the mirror might show. 

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

Mahito is a mirror that reflects Yuji, but only his bad traits. Mahito reminds Yuji of everything he dislikes about himself. Which is why Yuji sees Mahito as an enemy he can’t step forward without killing. So, what is this great similarity between them? I think the main one is that they’re both children. 

Part of the foiling in the Young Fish and Reverse Punisment arc is that both Mahito, and Yuji are people that Nanami identifies as children. A cursed spirit who is still learning to be a cursed spirit, a child who is still learning to be a sorcerer.

Early on the arc makes it pretty clear how much Yuji loathes being seen as a child. It’s not that he thinks he deserves special treatment, it’s that Yuji hates powerlessness, he hates the lack of agency, he hates not being able to choose. He doesn’t like being strong enough, because that means he’s not in control of the situation, and he has no choice but to watch as his friends get hurt. Yuji nearly killed Megumi the last time he was powerless and gets things get out of control. Yuji hates being weak like a child, and not being able to be weak like a child, and the result of this is Yuji turns into a pretty self loathing person. 

Yuji’s mistakes usually have big consequences. He lets Mahito get near Junpei, because he forgot about Nanami’s careful instructions to watch out and run away if he saw a cursed spirit with a patchwork face. It makes sense that Yuji would forget that in the moment, he’s just a child, it’s forgivable but Yuji never forgives himself for those mistakes. That’s where his self loathing comes from. 

It’s the same when Yuji lets Sukuna rampage on Shibuya. It’s not Yuji’s direct fault, however it’s his mistake in losing the fight that enabled Sukuna to rampage so Yuji takes responsiblity and takes all the blame on his shoulders. The way Yuji sees it, it’s his fault for being weak in the moment, he hates his weak naive self, he hates how much he still acts like a child. 

Yuji’s response to this however is to not think. To try to shut out those feelings of self loathing, to keep moving, to keep fighting, to fgiht against them so he doesn’t have to feel that way. 

2. Evil. 

Mahito is the uncanny foil to Yuji, Yuji doesn’t want to recognize anything at all about himself in Mahito, because Mahito embodies everything Yuji doesn’t like about himself. 

Mahito’s written to be the foil to Yuji in all the ways that deeply unsettles him. Yuji is always thinking about what a natural death means, whereas Mahito is always killing people in the most unnatural and unnerving ways possible, warping them until they no longer look human. 

Yuji is a strong and brave shonen hero, who is even willing to lay his life down for others. In fact he always agrees to risk his life a little bit too easily, like he’s just waiting for a cause to martyr himself on. Yuji is willing at almost any moment to die in the line of duty, Mahito is a coward who always runs away from his life and not only that a proud coward at that. Mahito considers his cowardice and his craftiness a good thing. 

However, as Nanami says at the end of Reverse Fish and Young Punishment people don’t exist in these simple black and white categories. Junpei wasn’t just an innocent suffering victim, he also went Carrie and tried to burn the whole school down in addition to the people who bullied him. He tried to hurt Yuji, just for getting in the way. 

Yuji sees people in categories of good and evil, but people don’t exist in those categories. Which is why Mahito is there to make him question himself. The uncanny similarity, because Yuji can act like Mahito without even realizing it. Not because Yuji is a good or bad person, but because he’s a collection of good and bad traits. Yuji is extremely caring person, but he also gets angry when people get hurt. Yuji is a very loving person to others, but also deeply self loathing. 

Yuji wants to believe he’s selfless and good, and to an extent he is, but then he looks in the mirror and sees a monster, he sees Mahito who is so openly self involved and uncaring and he’s scared am I like that? 

Yuji is someone who can become violent, angry, and obsessed with destroying someone too. At the moment killing a curse and killing a person aren’t really the same thing. However, there are two dangerous qualities about Yuji. One, he’s a foil to Geto. Geto is also, a rule abiding good boy, who just tried his best to save everyone around him. However, his definition of “everyone” changed. 

That’s the comparison they’re making with Yuji when Mahito says “You kill curses without thinking.” Curses are becoming more and more human like. There’s Choso who is literally a human half breed, who like isn’t really responsible for his existence. It’s bad of course that Choso kills humans, he’s willing to kill innocents for his own survival, but he’s also like... a fetus who was kept in a jar for a hundred years. The boundary line between curses and humans are blurring, and at the same time Yuji once again sees the world in strict and rigid black and whites. 

And Yuji’s response to this is usually “I don’t want to think about it.” Yuji wants to reject Mahito, his uncanny reflection in the mirror, and all the unnerving similarities between them. And it’s not really hating Mahito but loathing himself. Yuji hates himself, and wants to reject the possibility he can be in any way like Mahito because then that what he fears about himself might have been true all along. Yuji is, desperately self loathing, and also desperately trying to avoid having to look at himself. 

And it’s once again because Yuji himself can’t fit into his own black and white definitions of good and evil. Yuji can’t forgive himself for his mistakes. Yuji just decides to accept, because he let Sukuna rampage, because he made that mistake he’s responsible for it, he’s a murderer now. Mahito isn’t really Yuji, but he’s a good reflection of how Yuji sees himself, and he also shows us why Yuji is so dead set on helping people. Because if he doesn’t move forward. If he doesn’t help people. Then he’s just a murderer. If he can’t save people, then why is he even alive? 

[btsandvmin]

why do u think fandom brozone vmin so much? it doesnt happen nearly as often w other ships

I have talked about this a great deal before, and for good reason. It does happen a lot, and it has always been like this. At least I can speak for the years I have been in the fandom as the first post I ever made properly was about this exact topic. (The “bromance” issue) It’s short and a bit outdated, and honestly we also have to admit that while a lot of people still keep insisting on Vmin not being shippable and being “brozoned or friendzoned” there are also a lot more people who both ship Vmin and even see actual real potential in them being more. (You can even tell by the increase in analysis here on tumblr.)

Personally regarding the “issue” of how Vmin are viewed I am no longer as annoyed with it as I used to be. I do think it’s mainly a problem when other shippers come and say it about Vmin, because that is frankly just hypocritical. I have also written  Normalizing Vmin or “Vmin” and  Shipping vs Believing that explains more about my views on the subject of friendzoning and shipping as a whole. (Personally I feel Vmin get more friendzoned than brozoned, but that’s just a minor detail.)

But your question was about why you think the fandom brozone/friendzone Vmin so much, so let’s get to that.

First of all I obviously think there are several reasons, but this is all based on my speculations after being in this fandom for so long and what I have seen. Every person could have their own very different reasons to why they think the way they do. I think all the reasons play a part, but might not be equally important and might also not apply to every single person, but rather affect the fandom as a whole in one way or another.

So let’s break it down to the things I think play the biggest role in why Vmin are seen as platonic, regardless of if they are or not, just simply compared to a lot of the other ships.

1. They have since the start used the label “friend” or “best friend” to describe each other. In particular the label “chingu” of course, which in actuality is used to described someone of the same age that you are close with. 

2. The English translation and constant use of “friend” will when repeated constantly get stuck in people’s minds and affect how they view a dynamic. Just how “hyung” gets translated to brother, but a lot less well known and noted by the fandom. Basically the western fandom will likely get even more platonic feelings towards Vmin because of the word being translated to friends.

3. Compared to the other “chingus” in the group, Namjoon and Hobi, there is much more emphasis on Vmin as the same age and as being close and best friends. Namjoon himself made a comment on this. I also think the use of “friends” or more recently “soulmates” by editors is a reply to this, basically that the editors too use these words because they are used a lot by the members first. Hence it gets doubly reinforced. Every time we hear it or read it we get another reminder of Vmin being friends.

4. Their early dymanics were less soft. A lot of their interactions were teasing like Taehyung’s “Jiminie pabo” and fans saw it as two siblings or friends rather than as the “teasing your crush”. Basically people didn't read their behavior as romantic. When BTS first started Vmin already called each other best friends, and that stuck, even more so in combination with people basically not seeing any "spark" between them. I would call this preference in a lot of cases.

5. There were in the beginning already a lot of competition between ships. Jimin often focused in a lot on JK and basically flirted with him while he at the same time brushed off Tae when he did similar towards Jimin. Meanwhile Tae and JK had a very physical relationship as well and JK often seemed the most open and comfortable with Tae. I think both of Vmin kind of pushing themselves on and teasing JK was a dynamic many shippers like. Meanwhile you aslo had Yoonmin getting popular due to Yoongi seeming a bit soft on Jimin and Jimin being very open and loud with wanting attention from Yoongi.

6. Some people find Vmin's dynamics boring. To a lot of shippers “too” obvious closeness might be a little boring and get labeled as just being friends or bros. This was in particular evident in the early days of Vmin. It also matters for fan content, and we can see a lot of Vmin fiction use a bit more “soft” tropes and might not get as many readers as more conflict driven plot. For me I would also include Vmin’s bias towards each other as another point here, that people might see as too much if they are a couple and have to hide. Basically a lot of people don’t see friendship to romance as the most interesting, or the "obvious and equal dynamic" as interesting. BTS said Vmin were the closest or the “best duo” etc. but since all of them were close people picked based on preference for their ship. Of course this still applies to shippers now, they fall for the type of dynamic they like, but now they also have a easier time getting convinced by material from other shippers. Having analysis is another thing that can make a ship more appealing as well.

7. Speaking of, fan content getting created and spread will reinforce certain images. Reading BTS fanfiction or watching moment videos you will see a lot of Vmin being “the best friends”. Basically once the image is used a lot, it will get more spread and used even more. It will be a constant in many places and when talking to a lot of people. It will also of course pull people in to other ships that makes Vmin impossible. Not to mention the big ships will get bigger and spread more easily.

8. Now this might not be true for a lot of people. But I have come across a lot of fans who seem to think being a friend is something that makes romance less likely. For me I want my partner to be my best friend as well, but a lot of people do see these two things as mutually exclusive. Many see friend and lover as two very different things and that you have one best friend and one partner, not someone that are both. Basically just the view on friendships and labels and how that might lead to some feeling being romantically involved is something separate from a close friendship. 

9. Other ships spreading the narrative even further. It’s easier to just call Vmin friends, honestly. It’s often hard to deny their closeness (not that you should have to just because you ship something else, doesn’t change reality). But Vmin being so close and being part of the three biggest ships in BTS of course their label as best friends will be spread and used even more by those shippers. And because of the size of those ships it eventually gets turned into not just those shippers views, but the whole fandom’s.

10. More recently I would also say fear is a reason why people push back and try to remind the fandom that Vmin are “just friends”. Because we have very bad examples of what happens when shipping goes too far, basically it makes many non shippers try to protect Vmin from the same faith. Not a bad thing (again, as long as you don’t ship something else and is a hypocrite), but it surely does further the narrative of Vmin being very platonic. (A bad group is of course included here, which are homophobic fans, but since they feel the same about all ships it’s just a sidenote.)

11. Lastly, and probably most influentual, is the fact that Vmin and BTS friendzone Vmin in many ways, constantly. 

I won’t go into all the examples, but I think we all know a few moments even at the top of our heads by now.

I mean.... They called their song about being soulmates and wanting to be together for eternity "Friends". And maybe that's what they are, but they sure like to remind us.

So we have times when BTS or Vmin basically remind us and spells it out even more clearly that Vmin are FRIENDS. They use it very very often, and personally to me sometimes at very weird moments. Even so, the things most fans see will of course be what they say. Vmin are friends and that is it.

And at face value that is true. I just personally don’t see being best friends (and soulmates) as meaning they can’t be more as well. Especially since they wouldn’t even be able to say more than that. I mean, if Vmin are basically described as the closest in BTS, then why does that mean they have less odds of being real? Being friends doesn’t have to equal being only friends.

However, Vmin have in fact said things against being interested/denied the other, I don’t want to lie. I am sure some would see this as 100% truth and use it againt the possibility of Vmin being real. Like when Taehyung basically said he would rather date Hobi.

However, Jimin said he would definitely choose Taehyung to date, but that gets ignored by people who ship Jimin with others, so it’s really just about choosing what fits your narrative. All ships have contradicting moments or statments or answers where they answer two different things at two different times in general.

We also have how Jimin answered back to Taehyung about liking men by saying he isnt “like that” to Taehyung.

There are moments like this, and even though they might be small and forgotten by most I think they could in a sense still have registered in some fans who then basically managed to spreak the “vmin are just bros/friends” into the more common perception. 

However we also have opposite moments when they try to appeal to each other, or like when Taehyung asks Jimin to be the girlfriend etc. and personally though I do take these things into account it’s a bit like when you see members say “men can’t do this or that” and it doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t be queer. To me even though there are things against most ships, there are still a lot that speaks for some, and that’s why I remain unsure.

Sometimes you might get more defensive or nervous if there is some truth in there as well. It’s all about interpretation, even though I don’t want to blatantly ignore what they say. But since they have said and done directly contradicting things (like how Jimin said he would choose to date Tae while also saying he doesn’t act like “that” to Tae, or how they have changed a lot of answers in general) I also don’t see it as something definitely against them being more. Not to mention time can change things as well. 

In the end though this isn’t about what other things there might be that show Vmin might be more than friends or not, but simply reasons for the fandom’s view of them as platonic. (Personally I think they do a lot of things not normally seen as platonic, which is obviously the reason for me having this blog and writing anlysis on them.)

So, Vmin is friendzoned by the group, and by shippers of bigger ships, and even by themselves at times. Then everything else is reinforcement and inability to view them as anything more than friends.

There are some other things I think might play a part in it as well, but most comes down to personal preferences or what you get exposed to. Like who is the bias of the shipper and what things do they come across to make them a shipper, what kind of dynamics do they like etc. (It's more likely for someone who "falls" for JK to have JK in his ship, for example. Because they will focus on him and notice his interactions and then likely fall for a certain dynamic.)

History is a huge factor in general, and trying to change the perspective of the fandom might not be easy. But with a lot of new fans coming in and seeing with their own eyes how Vmin have behaved the last two years in particular, I think we can see a change.

Vmin are loved by the majority of this fandom, and that’s far better than them having people be anti them because of their ship being too big or too toxic. So in the end I do feel it’s a good things for them and for us that Vmin is being viewed as mostly platonic while they manage to slowly include more “normally not platonic things” into their platonic box. (I mean we are at a point where they can casually mention sleeping together and sing about being soulmates and hold hands in public).

Thank you for the ask and I hope you found this interesting. This is a topic I have a lot of opinions on and think is interesting myself, so I hope you enjoyed this post. No matter what we all know that one truth won’t change; 95z is love!

[murdereraisuha]

Final Chapter 5 Reflection

This will have my personal opinion/thoughts on:

The VDC outcome, Rook’s actions, and what could’ve made it better

The Rook reveal and Neige

Kalim, Jamil, and Epel’s development

The Grim scene

Total word count: 2134 words

--- 1 ---

So, RSA won the VDC. My feelings on this are mixed.

Looking at it in relation to the whole plot of TWST, it makes sense. It moves the chance for NRC to finally beat RSA to the upcoming magift tournament, which gives NRC’s potential victory a large amount of excitement/importance which it wouldn’t get from this middle of the year championship.

Furthermore, Rook’s actions do make sense based on his personality. If Vil really didn’t believe that he himself was beautiful, Rook of course would vote for the team that exhibited pure joy in their performance and therefore exhibited a heartfelt beauty. It would be a lie to vote for NRC, and it would disgrace both Rook and Vil. Rook’s actions plot wise also lead to the discussion about Vil valuing himself vs seeking value from others, which I think is a crucial thing for Vil to remember. While trying to gain recognition for hard work is good, and Vil certainly does deserve recognition, it’s much more important to maintain a good perception of yourself even when things happen or people wrongfully say things that might tear down your self-esteem

However, I still have issues with how this played out in relation to the plot of chapter 5. It’s unrealistic for all of Vil’s misgivings about himself to get fixed through the power of friendship and beating each other up. But, still, the team went through a lot in order to get to the championship united and ready to perform. It feels like a slap in the face for them to lose after all that. Especially the scene with Kalim and Epel crying while Ya Hoo cheerfully plays in the background, it's so comically dissonant. Though we already got an explanation from Vil about how Neige’s performance appeals to viewers, I was still shocked. At least it was a close competition rather than a crushing defeat. 

Also, while Rook’s message was sound, the timing was rather bad. Vil and the rest of the team just had a massive battle and then went through a whole song & dance performance without major blunders while still injured. Focusing on Vil’s self-esteem there makes it seem like Rook is just brushing all that determination and effort away. Though Vil doesn’t seem to truly hold it against Rook since he offers the handkerchief back to Rook when he cries, the situation still feels off.

In conclusion, I think that the plot events made sense. However, the execution of them could have been improved. As is, it’s hard to understand Rook’s motivations in this part due to the ridiculousness of RSA’s kid’s song winning. To fix that without just completely overhauling the plot, I believe that the admirable qualities of Neige and the dwarves should have been shown more clearly. For example, while the Pomefiore CM shows a glimpse of their bond, that’s nonexistent in the game. I think that incorporating that into the game (ex. a short scene of Neige reassuring the dwarves that their performance will go well before they step on stage) would help people understand Rook’s point of view better by showing instead of just telling us about the belief Neige has in his friends.. 

Moreover, alongside better reasons for why Rook choose RSA, I think it should be clearer why he did not choose NRC. It seems an attempt at warning of the “betrayal” was done with Vil menacingly saying he’ll win the VDC during the voting, followed by the shot of Rook just going “........”.  To make this less sudden, I think I would change episode 66. Though that episode has Vil saying that he’s ugly, because the team contradicts him and keeps him as the leader it makes it seem like the problem is solved there. Therefore, to better lead to Rook’s speech, I would change episode 66 to have Vil show more hesitation and signs that he still doesn’t believe in himself. 

--- 2 ---

Anyway, on to the reveal about Rook. I wasn’t sure what to think about the name slip up during the previous part, but I just guessed that maybe they’d met before and that meeting is related to RSA and Rook having light magic. Nope, we get Neige simp Rook. I think this reveal was really surprising, but more in a funny way than a “ruins Rook’s character” way. It’s nice to see Rook seriously caught off guard by Neige just nonchalantly exposing him in front of everyone, and everyone’s reactions were extremely funny.

I think that the chapter did a decent job of making it clear that Rook’s relationship with Neige as a fan of him is vastly different from Rook’s calm admiration of and friendship with Vil. I’m kind of curious now about how and when Rook became a fan though. Him being the 2nd member of the fan club implies that Rook found Neige when Neige still hadn’t gotten much fame yet. 

I loved everyone’s Ya Hoo too. Ace and Jamil having level 0 enthusiam, Kalim and Rook having level 1000 enthusiasm, Deuce being startled but slowly getting into it but still being kind of eh, Epel just keeping that wide-eyed confused expression the whole time. ボーテ、１００点. For Vil, I understand that he was probably faking his big smile for the benefit of the audience. However, I still hope his opinion of Neige has improved somewhat or will improve. Neige telling Vil that he’s still number one in the eyes of the people who voted for him was really sweet and their interactions with each other are pretty cute/funny when Vil isn’t trying to murder him.

Unlike other minor characters like Chenya and Farena who either weren’t involved in the plot or were only involved as backstory, Neige is Vil’s present rival and motivation for doing the stuff he does and over blotting. With such a large presence that continued all throughout the chapter and the Rook reveal, it would seem strange for Neige to suddenly drop out of existence come chapter 6.

Therefore, assuming that the Grim situation doesn’t derail the current patterns we’ve seen in the story, I think that Neige will be included as part of the Pomefiore involvement in chapter 6. Of course, it could be something small like getting called in for a favor near the end or just mentions of Rook continuing to write him fan letters. However, I’m hoping it’s something larger. From my analysis of the previous part:

Vil’s team’s performance had a lot of cohesion and rehearsal put into it, but it was very competitive focused. On the other hand, Neige and the dwarves obviously had a lot of fun with their performance. However, it was clumsy and they were ill prepared. Therefore, Vil could teach Neige more discipline and planning while Neige could teach Vil about how to not lose sight of finding joy in your work. 

Now that we have confirmation that Neige is a genuinely nice guy, I really want Vil & Neige friendship to happen, or for them to at least be on good terms with each other. It might just be my personal love for relationships where one person tries to be all rival-y but then the other is like “nope, I’m going to friend you whether you like it or not,” but I think this sort of development in the story of TWST would be really enjoyable to watch.

--- 3 ---

For the performance of Absolutely Beautiful, I love that Jamil got to be in the center for a bit. However, that also just makes me more disappointed that we didn’t get more Scarabia or anything about how their families are watching this. With the stuff in 5-30 and 5-34 focusing on Kalim’s perspective on things and his relationship with Jamil, I thought that at some point we would get a final scene focusing on them and how they’ve developed since chapter 4. What we got with  Jamil swooping in to the rescue with the magic carpet then talking about how he could sense that Kalim was about to do something stupid was better than nothing, but idk. I just love the writing and complexity these two have gotten and I wanted that to continue to the end. I still have hope though! If we can get a thing about Leona noticing the traces of magic in the arena, then we can get future appearances from the Scarabia boys too!... please...

Now, for Epel, I also have mixed feelings about his development throughout the chapter. I absolutely loved the beach scene with Deuce and Epel, it was so cute and I liked Epel realizing the power of beauty because of the apple juice Magicam post. However, I think the narrative missed something important. Though Epel’s views had a lot of improvement to be made, Vil’s treatment of him was also terrible and should have been addressed. I believe Vil saying that “throwing a tantrum and taking it out on others was terrible of him” in episode 66 implies that he’s realized that all his actions, not just the overblot, were wrong. However, it’s not clear enough that that was the intention. Vil does not apologize specifically for how he attempted to force Epel to conform to his own beliefs. Though there’s always chapter 6, it still doesn’t seem like the story will ever really address this issue, which is a shame to say the least.

Furthermore, in this final part, Epel offering to take the center position was really good and showed how much he’s grown since the beginning of the chapter. However, it still didn’t bring the whole “poison apple” thing to fruition. Absolutely no one made any comment on his cuteness or how it might rival Neige’s cuteness. Did they plan something with that but scraped it? Like, this is way too little pay off for such a focus on Vil shaping Epel into a way to best Neige. My disappointment with this ending might have to do with these past 3 main story updates being the only ones I’ve been in this fandom for, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Whatever the cause of my disappointment may be, my disappointment still does exist.

--- 4 ---

To top off this roller coaster of a chapter and end this reflection with a more neutral analysis, we have the stuff with Mickey and Grim. Mickey seems really nice, I’m glad that Yuu seems to have made an ally in him. We certainly need one after whatever the hell just happened with Grim. I really have to give props for how unsettling both Grim’s appearance and the sounds during that scene were.

Though we’re obviously getting close to the endgame, the Ignihyde sneak peak that we got seems pretty normal and related to their personal problems rather than the plot. Though it would be interesting for a big change to happen like Yuu being out of commission for the chapter, I think it’s more likely that Yuu will be rescued, Grim just goes missing, then we don’t get much more info on that whole thing until the end of chapter 6 leading into chapter 7.

Anyway, for the scene itself I understand if it just because silent protagonist, don’t want to make them talk/do too much, but it feels kind of weird that there wasn’t really any indication of a struggle? Just standing there, staring at Grim, getting clawed, then black out. Nothing to indicate trying to step back. There was some weird clopping??? sound after he attacked but since the camera didn’t move that wasn’t Yuu collapsing.

Also, it might just be supposed to be “Grim’s laugh but creepy,” but his ケヒッ、 ケヒヒッ laughter sounds unusually distinctive? Idk, I just had the thought that it could be in reference to some other disney character with a similar laugh but idk who that would be since I’m not big into disney movies.

Right before he attacks, Grim also shouts “this is my stone!!!” Firstly, assuming that this stone is the same small size as the others, shouldn’t he already be done eating it? Yuu’s not exactly gonna stick their hand down his throat to retrieve it. So what stone is he talking about?

Well, we know that the magic crystal on the magic pens is supposed to collect blot so that it doesn’t built up inside someone, right? Blot accumulated from outright eating it instead of blot accumulated from casting magic is probably different, but what if some of the blot from the black stones did get gathered up by Grim’s crystal on his collar? We know how crazed he has been getting about the black stones. Is it so much of a stretch to think that he might be trying for more? That he might be trying to create instead of just find? 

How would a black magic crystal taste?

[ghostmartyr]

SnK 133 Thoughts

They’re trying to stop the apocalypse but they’re dummy traumatized and the clap of their sins keeps alerting the glow tree.

Kids, just remember: Body count doesn’t matter, it’s how you feel while producing that body count. If you’ve killed people to stop genocide, you are not immune to being party to genocide. ⭑⭒⋆

I’m being reductive because I’m not too eager to go over how not all murder is created equal again.

Going by a good faith read, I do think what the narrative is attempting to establish is that these characters all know what it’s like to be backed into a corner and do desperate things they’re horrified by.

Putting aside the extra psychological difficulties of his childhood preceding the choice to knock down the wall, Reiner believes he’s saving humanity. There’s an island full of devils, and he’s attacking them. He, Bertolt, and Annie are dumb kids who do what they’re told. Because they think it’s right, or because they want to go home, or just because they are dumb kids.

Armin’s killed plenty of people with the power of the Colossus. He can’t plead innocence; he attacks Liberio’s port intentionally, knowing exactly what terror the people on the ground will be going through.

Connie kills the friends he’s trained with for years, when the worst thing about Reiner and Bertolt revealing themselves is feeling betrayed by comrades he loves.

None of this is directly equivalent. Dumb children at war are trying their best. Always, this conflict has been orchestrated above their pay grade. RAB get abandoned behind enemy lines and are told to make the best of it. Armin destroys Marley’s port because Marley will not stop going after Paradis, and Eren has forced a renewed conflict that they need to move against fast. Connie betrays his friends because they’re okay with letting the rest of the world die.

No one on this ship has enjoyed any of this. They have consistently been doing their best with the information given to them while people with more power drag them into fights that never should have happened.

Shiganshina falls because Marley chooses to murder Paradis.

Liberio falls because Eren turns himself into Paradis’ only hope and puts himself into a situation he can’t win alone.

In the crudest way of putting it, these people are grunts. They’re not the ones who picked the game being played. They’re the ones being manipulated into war after war.

That’s why they look at each other without counting the bodies. It isn’t the scale of their actions that hits at this moment, it’s the decisions they’ve made to be part of it. They choose to keep fighting. When it creates an outcome they hate, what can they say? ‘Look what you made me do’?

Whatever their reasons, and whoever set up the board, they are the ones who participate. In this case, pure moral imperative is the driving force. Daz and Samuel die because they’re willing to let genocide go uncontested. That’s on them.

Guilt doesn’t work like that, though. Daz and Samuel die because they are killed. Connie kills them. He betrays their trust.

All of this is to say that the people on the ship truly do understand each other perfectly, even despite the difference in scale. It’s a bit on the nose, but I don’t think anything they’re going through is at odds with the people they are.

Applying that feeling to Eren is a feat of misguided grace that... hell, I don’t know.

As a human person, I like grace as a concept and want more of it. I don’t want the world to burn, I want the burning to stop, and for everyone to be okay in the end even if they don’t deserve it. A world where we all get precisely what we deserve seems an incredibly dark place to me. That doesn’t leave room for mercy or kindness. You get what you earn, and nothing more.

The more time we spend on this portion of the story, the more I’m inclined to think that the themes agree with me. Our heroes at this point aren’t full of the rage they’re entitled to. Every inch of them is tired, and they’re not here for more death. They’re willing to keep going, but even the thought of killing Eren, when he’s massacred thousands, makes them all hesitate.

Everyone wants to go home and have the fighting stop.

That’s all.

Whatever happened, and whose fault it is -- forget all of it, just give them a place to rest and have it be over.

Thematically, yay. I approve. Beautiful. We start out with a series that makes a name for itself almost entirely on the back of the spectacle of violence, and after years of participating in that violence, the main cast wants nothing to do with it anymore. Love it.

Within the plot, I am not in the mood to have Eren’s traumatized friends apologize for not understanding him.

I get it.

I get why they all feel this way.

I do not like reading it.

They’re projecting their own guilt on someone who has shown a reckless disregard for their lives and sanity.

They’re trying to reach Eren as a human being and friend when he’s done his absolute best to make himself unreachable.

That’s sort of the point Reiner thinks is being made. Eren has intentionally set them up as his adversary so that if he has to be doing all of this, maybe there’s still a chance someone can stop him.

Okay, fine.

It falls short for the same reason all of Eren’s stuff is falling short.

We don’t actually know what the fuck is going on with him. We’re guessing.

You know those picture puzzles you do as a kid? Draw a line from bubble 1 to bubble 2 to bubble 3, and eventually you will make a bunny. Or a dog, or flowers, or something that looks like a picture in the sloppy mess of numbers.

Eren’s general portrayal matches that of a toddler who doesn’t yet know his numbers, and understands the instructions to be that he’s trying to get to the last bubble by scribbling lines through all the other bubbles.

Look, it’s a bunny.

And Eren’s friends are all like, oh wow, that’s such a good job! We’re going to put it on the fridge!

Then people come over and are like, why is there a constellation of a deer jumping through a house on the fridge, but they hear the child did it and immediately are like, oh yeah, that’s the best bunny I’ve ever seen, I can’t draw like that.

The child, being a child, is like, ‘Damn right. I’m going to be in bunny museums.’

Meanwhile, I’m just going to come out and say it.

It’s not a fucking bunny.

What it is, I don’t know, but it is not a bunny, stop calling it a bunny, it is actively erasing the knowledge of what a bunny looks like in my mind.

So ends this skit on what Eren’s portrayal has been like.

Eren has decided that this is all necessary. He doesn’t like it, and wants someone to stop him, but he is totally going to do it, and he knows he’s going to do it because future vision told him so and he’s really sad about that even though he’s emotionally in a place where genocide sounds like the only way out but that is wrong.

I think I’ve said before that Eren getting to this place mentally isn’t too off the rails. His sanity has been deteriorating with each mission, and he’s nineteen. Snapping like this could arguably be expected.

But the last we see of Eren’s thoughts, we still have this back and forth of how he refuses to yield the future to fate, but he already feels condemned by that future because he chooses to cause it.

Eren is clearly trapped by this web of contradictions, but his motivational core is so obstructed that it’s hard to actually connect to. It is easier to say that Eren’s gone off the deep end than it is to spend any amount of time asking how Point A became Point 3.

That’s frustrating, as a reader. I don’t want to be told a story, I want to experience it.

Eren’s experiences are not universal.

I need some hand-holding here. There needs to be a few more clear indications of Eren The Person, and how the individual we know wrapped around to making these choices.

Hooray, he’s not taking away their powers.

The guy he let run his cult still nearly killed all of them.

Hooray, he’s protecting his island.

He just actively courted an international incident so everyone wants the island dead.

Yes, Eren thinks that hope is lost before he makes these choices. That’s how moving forward drags him to this place; he doesn’t have the vision to imagine a world where this isn’t happening.

If you don’t fight, you can’t win, and Eren’s still fighting. But he’s forgotten what winning looks like. All he knows is the dreary march forward.

I would like for that to be explicit, not me extrapolating. Because even as I’m typing all of that, and feeling like it makes sense, it has the confidence of tissue paper, and I know my numbers, but half the numbers making this bunny were missing, and I’m not an artist.

The story I’m digging around here for is one I could like, but I don’t trust that it’s actually the one being told, because too much feels unexplained and weird. You can’t just make your main character nuts and use that as an excuse for anything.

Well, okay, you can.

You shouldn’t.

Please don’t do that.

Which I guess leads us to Eren and OG Ymir doing a Shining twins thing.

Here is my wild speculation.

The Attack Titan is the only Titan capable of resisting the Founder. It cannot be controlled, it simply continues forward, fighting for freedom.

When Eren talks to Ymir, her eyes losing their shadows are the cue for him taking full control of the Founder.

Now we’re back here, and her eyes are shadowed again, with Eren’s joining the ride.

I think that where we’re going to end up is that Eren’s mental fragility made him incredibly susceptible to the Attack Titan’s core nature, and enough of that nature aligned with Eren’s that everything except pursuing a way forward fell away. The Attack Titan is Ymir’s furious will, and she’s had it suppressed for 2000 years. I don’t think either one is emotionally capable of surfacing and deciding to resist the urge to march forward and destroy this world that has cursed them so.

Making my theory that yeah, okay, Eren’s lost it, but he lost it with the help of ancient plot magic, which we are now seeing the full extent of.

Does that have any basis in anything?

Who the fuck knows.

But one thing is very clear: Eren’s not free.

“In order to gain my own freedom... I will take freedom away from the world. [...] You are all free.”

The Attack Titan “has always moved ahead, seeking freedom. It has fought on for freedom.”

Eren, embodiment of the Attack Titan, is the first one to hear Ymir in 2000 years. Going with the vaguely logical theory that Titans are all pieces of Ymir herself, the Attack Titan is the part that rebels against every indignity she bows to in life.

Zeke frees the Founder from its promise of peace. Eren frees Ymir from the chains tying her to the royal family’s will.

All that’s left is 2000 years of trauma, and the ability and will, for the first time, to lash out.

It’s not what you’d call surprising.

It’s the getting here that I take issue with. Now that we’re here, yeah, got it. But I really don’t feel like Eren’s journey here has been done well enough to capture the emotional rawness that is trying to be accessed. His friends are shouting for someone who is effectively dead, for all the presence he’s showing.

Then you’ve got Annie and Kiyomi sad.

ON A BOAT.

While Falco wants to be a Titan with WIIIIIIIIIIINGS.

Kiddos, you’re very cute, and I support you not wanting to sit still and do nothing while the world is ending, but I can’t begin to express how little I care.

Except that your families are alive and you two and Annie deserve to be reunited.

SO FINE, OKAY, FALCO CAN HAVE HIS WINGS AND SAY HI TO HIS PARENTS AND GABI CAN SAY HI TO HER PARENTS AND ANNIE CAN SAY HI TO HER DAD AND IT’LL ALL BE FINE DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT THE FUCK WE’RE GOING TO DO ABOUT EREN?

BECAUSE YEAH, I’M SURE THE AIRSHIPS ARE JUST GOING TO SPLODE HIM AND END ALL OF THIS AND EVERYONE WILL HOLD HANDS AND SING SONGS THAT THE EVIL HAS BEEN DEFEATED AND THAT WILL BE THE END OF IT.

Conversation: FAILED

Attack: probably FAILED

GO AHEAD, MANGA. SHOW ME THE DEUS EX MACHINA. I’M NOT GOING TO LIKE IT, BUT I AM PREPARED FOR IT.

inb4 yeah they just are going to bomb Eren with Armin that’s how we end this.

133 status: Still Looking For A Win Condition (This Ain’t It Chief)

[felassan]

Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 3

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler continued playing DAO from where they had left off in Part 1 and Part 2. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, personal accessibility reasons, etc). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into other parts of the franchise. Some of it is info which is known having been put out there in the past, and some of it is new. There’s a bit of overlap or repetition with topics covered in Parts 1 and 2. This post leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

The stream can currently be watched back here. Next week LE will be streaming a different DAO playthrough with commentary from another guest. Two weeks from now LE and DG will return to continue this playthrough for another stream session like this one.

(Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

The Battle of Ostagar cutscene is one of the first big cutscenes that got made during production. When it was shown to the team for the first time, it was one of those moments where DG felt like “Awesome, this is a game!” Context: During the development of a game it feels more like doing a series of disconnected tasks and assets rather than working on a game, so seeing stuff come together at times like this is rad. The first time it was shown, it had temporary placeholder voiceacting.

Pathfinding is always a nightmare to do, especially in games which involve a party of NPCs. As soon as other characters are involved alongside the PC, it’s exponentially more difficult and takes up a lot more resources. The PC is the most complex thing going on visually on-screen, with so many moving pieces, and in party-based games you have four [etc] of them. So, some critique that’s made of the DA games in regards to this subject which compares it to games like The Witcher doesn’t really make sense, as The Witcher has a solo PC.

‘Weird mage hats’ didn’t really become a trademark ‘DA thing’ akin to their place of random pieces of cheese around the world until later games. For DAO, someone probably asked the artists to create “mage helmets”. Mage hats actually looked better in the concept art than they did in-game. What happened was that they were already modelled and then they didn’t have time to re-do them.

DAO was made for PC first. The plan from the get-go though was that it would be an all-platform release (PC/360/PS3). Games like these are always made for the “lowest common denominator” from among the various platforms that they’re being planned to release for. Games have to be made for the most stringent/basic of the platforms because this makes for less conversion rate. At the time of DAO’s development, the PS3 was getting weak graphically and getting old, and this was quite a limitation: “Why do we have to limit [crowds?] because of this one platform?” “Well, we just gotta”. The original models were a bit too detailed. Later on, the artists started making models that had lower polycounts that they could put in a bit more of. DA was never really focused on making environments realistic in an ambient manner (making environments less “gamey” and more lived in, like having crowded places). They could have put more emphasis there but this would have led to a resources issue. Ambience basically wasn’t a high priority. As a writer DG isn’t keen on this decision and naturally he wanted the world to look more realistic, but he noted that it’s easy for him to say this when this would be work that he didn’t have to do personally.

During DAO development, they might have just had a dev sphere originally that was called “tech design”. DG thinks this was later broken up into systems design, combat design and maybe level design. Level designers are the people that are the implementers of the plot. Narrative design is a branch of the level design spoke. System designers respond to requests from lead designers. Narrative designers and writers don’t interact with system designers much unless they have to. As an example of interaction here, system designers might come to writers and say, “Alright, so we’re doing combat, what are the sorts of things a mage can do in this world?” The writers would be like “Ok, these are the sorts of spells we imagined.” The system designers might then come back with “Ok, that fulfills 2 of the 10 things we need mages to be able to do in combat. Is it possible that mages could do [this]?” Sometimes it is, and other times it would be like “No, that’s really outside of the lore”. Still, sometimes said original-lore-breaking things would be added to the game a week later due to necessity and DG would be like “Oh ok”. This kind of stuff is an insight into how some aspects of the lore came to be or changed over time during development.

The system designers on DAO got a better idea of what could be done and what could not be done according to the lore as things went on. At first, DG had to keep telling them things like “It’s not that big a deal, but in the lore mages can’t teleport. Instant teleportation isn’t possible in the world”. The system designers needed a spell where someone could get from spot A to spot B really fast on the battlefield. DG said that that’s fine in itself, “have them turn into a cloud of bees or have a light that moves between the two places. We can use magic as a transition or as a speed thing, but what is against the lore is instant teleportation, to traverse distance like that”. At first the system designers weren’t on board with it, but they got on board with it later. 

This sort of thing doesn’t just depend on the system designers. It also depends on what the tech artists are willing to do. Sometimes a certain request made of them was too hard and they said they weren’t able to do it. Other times it was a matter of DG not communicating the request properly, or the tech artists had already done the work and so throwing out all their work to re-do it just because he didn’t communicate clearly wouldn’t have been cool. So sometimes the originally planned lore got contravened, and sometimes things other parts of the team implemented in the game became the new lore.

LE made an insightful observation at this point: You can’t think of game development as a cohesive series of decisions that everyone on the team is involved in. This simple isn’t how it works at all, especially on large complex projects. There are processes at some studios for decision-making, but most of the time, a bunch of decisions get made by system designers. Others get made by level designers, still others by narrative designers. Situations then arise where someone notices a certain decision and that that decision and another one contradict each other. This is where conflict arises and a solution has to be negotiated. This is why often in games we get elements in the end product that are dissonant, because it was discovered too late or by the time it was realized, it was too difficult to change. It’s actually a miracle that on a game of DAO’s depth and scope that all these things largely hold together. [My note: With this insight and the context below on documentation, it makes sense how BW sometimes appear to ‘forget aspects of their own lore’ or end up contradicting parts of the lore in different parts of the franchise]

Sometimes such things would be noticed in time and DG would go and say, “Can we not do that or do something else instead?” and the relevant parties would be totally accommodating and do it (depending on how much time they had or how much time it would take to remedy). Sometimes this worked out and sometimes it didn’t. For the most part, everyone wants to work together. DG couldn’t be involved in every aspect of systems design “like some kind of All-Watchful eye of lore”, so he had to rely on the people who were there knowing enough from the documentation. Not everybody reads every document however. There was so much documentation even back during DAO. DG can only imagine the sheer amount of world/lore documentation that now exists now in the run-up to DA4; he said he thinks that nobody at this point on the current team has read it all, as editor/lore-wrangler Ben Gelinas isn’t with BW anymore. Lots of legacy documentation accumulated very quickly. Sometimes, the old document would still be there. Over time it became harder for people to discern which was the most recent version of a particular document. Sometimes people didn’t update the relevant documentation after changing things. Lore documentation was particularly bad for this issue. BG wrangled all the documentation and created an internal reference wiki (essentially acting as a lorekeeper). He was constantly coming in and picking DG’s brain to clarify conflicting aspects or obtain the correct, in-date information etc (“Good on him”).

DAO was the first time DG was involved in voice-recording. Prior to that he was only on the receiving end, in that the recordings would come in and he’d review them as they did so. DAO is when BW set up their own VO department and where Caroline Livingstone came on. CL wanted DG and Mike Laidlaw to be more involved in the casting process. As a result, the writers then were to write casting scripts: like, ‘For Morrigan, can you write a 1 page script that goes through 3 big emotions? [like regular talking for a bit, then here’s a bit of heightened emotion such as anger, then here’s a part where they’re being funny if they were a comedic character] These scripts had to be kept short so that the recording that was made from it wouldn’t be more than 30-40 seconds in length.

For the initial VA sessions, DG and CL flew down to Technicolor studioin LA and they had all the major castmembers there (later on, recording sessions were done a lot more remotely; this became easier as BW’s setup got more sophisticated). The idea was that they would both be present live in-person for the first 2 or 3 sessions to help each VA find their ‘voice’, and for DG at the first session to sit down with each VA and walk them through who their character was, what DA was about, and help them figure out how their character should talk. Claudia Black was the first of these sessions and he was “a wreck” going into that one. It got easier after that however. CL gave directions into the soundproof booth and DG was present to give notes on things like pronunciation or the intentions behind some lines. He says he learned everything he now knows about VO direction from CL. The things and tricks CL can do to get a performance out of an actor are amazing. Sometimes an actor would get a bit fixated or stuck on a particular way of delivering a line. CL had atrick to help them past this; “I want you to clear your mind, and I want you to give me a version of this line that’s more yellow”. The idea is that they just had to break out of where they had been stuck in that mindset, and the thing was that it doesn’t matter what “yellow” meant, but what was important was what “yellow” meant to the actor. They could then take that new varied delivery and progress from there.

Alistair’s dialogue when the PC talks to Flemeth outside her hut was the first complex conversation DG wrote for DAO. It was the first one that had a lot of branching and fiddling to it. The hardest conversations to write are the ones with a lot of exposition, and when they do have exposition still making this interesting and natural. At this point in the game, the player has no agency, just reactivity. The devs talked a lot about this subject when they wrote the origin stories. Some of the stories allow the player to initially say no and refuse to join the Wardens, but you always end up being railroaded (the devs here ended up doing a form of the trope ‘But Thou Must!’). Do you give the player the option to say no? Is it important to allow them that option? At some point, writers have to accept that the player has some level of buy-in and is game to play. They discussed a lot where they sat on this and what is agency. “Maybe don’t worry about offering the player every possible choice, but about having reactivity.”

Loghain wasn’t okay with letting Cailan die. He didn’t sit and angst about it openly where the player could see, and once the decision had been made, it being Loghain, it was Made and Had To Be Done (he felt that it was something that had to happen). But he didn’t kill the son of the woman he’d once loved dearly as a random off-handed thing.

The Solas twist was planned from the beginning, from the DAO dev days. Such big things/broad strokes have stayed the same. However, some of the details have changed or been added along the way. They didn’t know for instance that Solas was going to be a companion; that was something they came up with when they were planning DAI. Flemeth’s true identity has never changed.

Zevran says Rinna was an elf, but WoT says she was a bastard child of a noble in line for the Antivan throne (the Antivan royal family being human). When asked if this was an oversight, DG said yes she was a bastard, but she may have been really far down the line of succession, i.e. technically in line, but would probably never have been allowed to take the throne in practise had that scenario ever actually arisen.

DA was maybe inspired a bit/some by ASOIAF. This was way before it was on TV of course. DG at the time had read the first book or so. He liked the fact that it was a fantasy setting but low-magic, and was about the people in the world and their politics rather than magic, prophecy and other high fantasy stuff.

It was only by DAI that the system designers decided that it was okay to think of banter as an “activity that players engaged in”. In previous games, the devs had inadvertently managed to ‘train’ players to immediately stop when companion banter fires so that they could hear it all (because if you do something else, it gets cut off). When the level designers put together the spaces, they accounted for what players would be doing i.e. how much time between combat. They didn’t however account for like “You’re travelling down this hall and there’s a banter for half of that space. This is an activity, so it’s okay not to put anything in there”. This is how the inadvertent training happened, when originally banters were supposed to be a thing that ran as you move around the world (as opposed to stopping and standing still). 

When asked if the Blight resulted from the creation of the Veil or pre-dates it: “I think you’ll probably have to wait on the game[s] for that answer, if it ever explains it”. He was also asked whether Arlathan is the Golden City. He won’t answer such questions naturally because they are “DeepLooooooore™~~ ♫”.

DG isn’t sure that he will play DA4 when it comes out. It’s not that PW and the team won’t do a good job, they will, it’s just that when DG plays RPGs he has an analytical mindset going on and finds it difficult to slip into the game and just enjoy. For DA4, as he was previously so involved in DA, there’ll naturally probably be an extra level of that with feeling like “What would I have done [for particular parts of the game’s design]?”. Alternatively he might instead feel like “Wow, this is awesome, here’s a game I would have made but didn’t have to do any work on!” DG stressed that it’s important to him to be fair about the work of his former colleagues - he wouldn’t want to come out and be like “I wouldn’t have made [this or that] choice”. He also noted that just because something might be a call he personally wouldn’t have implemented in the game, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad call. There are people out there where if DG intimated at all that there was an aspect of DA4 that he wasn’t keen on, he’s worried that they would pounce on it and use it as ammunition against the current team (who are his friends that he really cares about and wants to do well). He walked away from DA voluntarily and is happy his game will continue on. PW popped by in chat at this point and agreed that it’s definitely hard to play something that you used to work on.

Other assorted tidbits:

DG really opposed the part at the Battle of Ostagar where mabari are set to charge the darkspawn horde - “That’s not how you would use dogs [in war]”

There was supposed to be a cutscene where Flemeth rescues the HoF and Alistair from the top of the Tower of Ishal in her dragon-form. This was cut. DG remembered being angry about this like “nobody is gonna buy that you fall unconscious and then wake up in the hut totally rescued. [...] I guess I’m not always right”

When DG went to Beamdog there was a period where they thought about making a Baldur’s Gate 3. They put together a pitch and had a long series of discussions contemplating things like “What do we need from BG3? What do we expect it to have in order to have the BG name? What is needed and not needed to connect to from the previous games?”

DG isn’t sure who designed the DAO inventory system

PW in chat recalled a game writer from another company who was really ragging on DAI on the Christmas Day after release

Narrative designer and system designer are very different positions/roles with very different responsibilities

Simon Templeton as Loghain did all his voicework stuff in one take, which was very impressive

It would have been the marketing department that chose 30 Seconds To Mars for music. DA was really good at choosing up-and-coming acts for this that weren’t huge when they used their songs, but became huge afterwards

During work on Baldur’s Gate 2 was the most DG has ever crunched. He slept in the office a few times

“As soon as you get both Alistair and Morrigan in the party, that’s when it’s like ahh yes, this is a BioWare game”

Were Flemeth and Morrigan’s interactions with each other and the PC when Morrigan is being told to leave the Wilds and go with the Hero an act, considering that Morrigan did know about the OGB plan? No. That was The Plan, but said plan wasn’t like “Ok, she’s going to leave Right Now”

The elves and the inversion of the traditional elven trope are DG’s favorite part of the world/world-building

One of the original intentions for DAO was to make it so that the player wouldn’t need a healer in the party, or that there would be different kinds of healing, or that healing itself wouldn’t be a thing, but this just didn’t work out

The Imperial Highway used to be a really important part of the lore but it kind of got forgotten a bit

It’s kinda funny that after release some players expressed that Corinne Kempa’s accent as Leliana was “sooo fake”. It’s not fake, she’s actually a Brit that moved to France when she was young, so she has the exact type of accent that Leliana would have (Leliana was born in Orlais and is culturally Orlesian, but her mother was Fereldan and she considers herself as such)

They talked some about the need for documentation and how doing this can feel beurocratic and uncreative and how like you’re not working on a game or writing. PW in chat expressed that there was a year where they spent a lot of it working in PowerPoint and Excel, “so I feel this”

When they switched art directors to Matt Goldman, his first big complaint was about all the brown. He came to DG like “Is there a lore reason for or are you particularly in favor of the brown for story reasons?” DG was like “Uhh no” and Matt was then like ���Ok good”

Console codes/commands aren’t usually stripped out of a game before release, they are usually still in the built, just disabled. The system itself is not removed but how to access said system is

BW doesn’t crunch as bad as we hear some companies do, and kind of prided itself on “not being terrible at crunch”. But BW’s “not terrible at crunch” is still crunch. We obviously don’t commend abusive family members for only abusing people on certain days of the week or whatever

Kate Mulgrew is American but she at times did the same thing a lot of the British VAs did, which was that the devs had a lot of struggle with getting them to say “darkspawn” correctly, with the emphasis in the right places. They’d say “dark SPAWN” as if it was two words with an adjective, and the stress put in the wrong place

Lack of children in DAI was a resources thing. They only had time to make a certain number of models. There was a series of meetings where they had to decide what things to cut. In the last meeting it was like ‘Here’s a bunch of things you don’t want to cut, we need to cut 4 of them’

They decided to put horned qunari back in DA2 because then they had the resources to do so. They then ended up having to explain why there were hornless qunari at the same time, and make this an in-world explanation as opposed to just ‘We didn’t have the resources, that was totally intentional’

Lots of players missed out on recruiting Leliana and/or Sten on their first playthrough and didn’t even know they existed/could be recruited. “Apparently we weren’t that great at pointing players in the right direction”

Tevinter is inspired by the Byzantine Empire (which wasn’t called that at the time incidentally, this is a name given by historians after the fact), what used to be the Roman Empire after the western part fell. This is the era Tevinter today is meant to encapsulate: decadent but clearly in decline, far away from the heyday and the heights of the former empire [source]

[Part 1]

[Part 2]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

[struggle-but-its-all-ocean-floor]

I don't get it - what's wrong with the BB interview? Even you've addressed how PTD wasn't that great yet still raced to #1. They could change their rules but to what exactly? It's a popularity chart. If the same people are streaming the same song over and over - is that not precisely what manipulating the charts is? I mean, we're smart and found a great loop hole but how is this great for the boys? Making them think they're more popular than they actually are? PTD was weak, man and I love them??

I'm really glad you asked me this question because I wanted a chance to talk about what I did find insightful about the article. To be honest, when I started reading the article I thought "They're right", but the more I read it the more the lack of professionalism and the clear agenda it had bothered me.

First of all, talking about chart manipulation isn't a bad thing. But paying a group to be on the cover of your magazine and mentioning their achievements only to question them isn't the right way to do it. You think they'd do this with anyone else? Had it been Dua Lipa, the article would've been about her artistry and achievements in the industry, and she would've been portrayed in a positive light. Did BB even treat BTS as artists? To me they were only treated as an interesting phenomenon.

BB could've done an exposé on BTS and chart manipulation, but not like this. It's a bit rich for BB to question BTS only. Instead of opening a discussion about the merit of the charts and the ways the industry circumvents BB's guidelines, the article points fingers only at BTS, implying that, in contrast with Dua or Olivia, BTS are cheating the charts. BB essentially avoids taking responsibility for its own methods and its influence in the industry by saying BTS are the only ones compromising the legitimacy of the charts and their value. It's an easy way to make BB look good and BTS look bad - the charts and the US industry aren't the problem, BTS and the Korean music industry are. Throughout the whole article, the way they talked about the "fascinating" case of HYBE and BTS's success felt more like an insult than a compliment, or even an objective analysis. Anything related to Kpop or Korea was more or less used against BTS.

Second of all, the way they discussed chart manipulation was deeply flawed. They didn't lie about Army's strategies nor were they wrong to question the ethics of mass buying, but they should've done their research first. Quoting twitter users, alluding to "experts", admitting they didn't know exactly how Army operated, etc. is really bad journalism. They want to expose BTS for chart manipulation without proper evidence? The language they used conveyed ambiguity and uncertainty too. They never explicitly stated things, it was all hearsay. What kind of journalism is this?

But, again, even if they had done their research, targeting BTS without likewise exposing other artists on the charts is having a clear bias.

The article was also very interested in HYBE. This is another interesting topic, sure, but HYBE isn't BTS. If they wanted to write about HYBE they should've done so in another article. And it's telling that they talked about HYBE almost exclusively in an unflattering light. What they said wasn't false: for example, they questioned the company's longevity and worth due to their undeniable dependence on BTS - I agree with that, but what about HYBE's success story? BB aren't anticapitalism. They are pro-money hungry companies, and HYBE is certainly smart when it comes to money. Were it any other company, BB would've been all over that. But with HYBE they mention Army, and how HYBE exploited the fan-artist relationship, as the reason behind the label's success only to make HYBE and Army look bad. Artists profit from their fans, but usually no one talks about it; it's bad form. We talk about how cool and iconic Beyoncé is, not the amount of money she made, directly or indirectly, from her fans - or rather, the money she makes from her fans is legit and not worth questioning, unlike the money BTS make from Army. (As an aside, had Beyoncé been on their cover, do you think BB would've questioned the legitimacy of her feminism/activism due to the money she earned from a clothing line made at sweatshops employing mostly woc?...)

I agree that the relationship between BTS and Army is interesting, but streaming is only the tip of an iceberg that BB didn't bother to uncover.

To me, it's clear they had an agenda. The way they spoke about BTS's diplomatic passports, HYBE, Army, the charts, etc. - all of it had a negative connotation and contributed to the narrative of BTS being shady or puppets, or whatever. It was more of the "dark side" of Kpop. Why does no one talk about the dark side of American pop?

Also, like I mentioned, the article tackled too many topics. If you want to talk about HYBE, write an article about HYBE - the company's executives were quoted more than most of the members; it doesn't make sense. And if you want to talk about chart manipulation, that's a separate topic that shouldn't be the main focus of a magazine Army is expected to buy. Who, if not Army, is expected to buy the 7 different editions for each member? Army is supposed to buy an article slamming them and BTS?

There is a time and a place to discuss these things. Most of what was said was legitimate, but the authors twisted the truth to fit their narrative when they refused to do actual research on the topic, quoted fans of artists competing with BTS on the charts, and refused to look at chart manipulation as a whole and how other artists are attempting it as well (they even pointed out that other artists' fans try to do what Army does but less successfully - which is why they are... what, more innocent than Army?...).

Another thing that was unprofessional was the fact that BTS were rarely quoted directly. On the last part of the article, regarding the English singles, I can't even form an opinion on what was said due to the ambiguous, even manipulative way, the section was written. They quote an executive on how BTS compromised with the company and make it seem like BTS were unwilling to release English tracks (which fits their narrative), but they don't quote the members themselves. In the initial article I read they noted that RM remembered the situation differently and quote him saying "There was no alternative", which made it seem like RM was never in conflict with HYBE. But now the article states "RM wasn’t fond of the idea, though he acknowledges it was a crucial way to keep buzz alive during the pandemic. “There was no alternative,” he says.", and now it seems like RM opposed Dynamite at first, contradicting the initial article. This correction only corroborates with BB's narrative. But what about the members that were allegedly in favor of the single? And why is Jin only quoted to share the struggles of recording the song? Why was nothing positive said about Dynamite when we know for a fact they must've said it? It simply wasn't interesting to BB. The members were only quoted when they had something juicy to say, and we were never offered much context or told what question they were replying to, what tone they used or how it fit the real time conversation BTS were having with each other and with the interviewers.

Essentially, although the writers didn't lie about most things, the article was biased, ambiguous, unprofessional and lacking in direction. It was like three insufficiently researched and prejudiced articles in one.

Also, while PTD wasn't that great, there are many not so great songs that make it to n.1 on BB. Being great has nothing to do with your results in the chart. Many artists make songs no one really likes yet we're forced to listen to them on the radio anyway. Fans streaming like it's their job and bulk buying songs isn't right, but at the very least you can say that it is their choice, and it reflects the fans love for their artist even if it doesn't always reflect their love for the song. A lot of American artists have it easy and top the charts with generic songs that the GP listens to without even meaning to - they're just shoved down our throats by their labels. That's chart manipulation too, isn't it? What is BB supposed to represent? Popularity? If so, maybe BTS don't deserve the top spot, but maybe those artists who do only get that number 1 because their labels know how to put them up there. If more artists had the same treatment that artists like Dua Lipa get, then maybe the n. 1 song would be different. Isn't that chart manipulation as well?

[bisluthq]

Kaylor Rises?

We’ll never know the mechanics or reasons for Joshlie going on a break (or even if they just decided to be more casual for a bit). Maybe it was Taylor related, maybe it was all the stuff with his family, maybe it was the spectre of differing religions, maybe it was the age gap, maybe he started to agree that a ‘lingerie model’ was unsuitable in the long run… But one fact we do know, from investigative journalism done on the Kushners and also from looking at contemporaneous gossip blogs is: Joshlie have taken breaks. We don’t know exactly exactly how many, or why. But we know that they did. Again, this is one of the biggest pieces of ‘evidence’ that they’re real because why bother faking problems and breaks? Why not present yourselves as head-over-heels? It doesn’t make sense, but it’s what happened. And it also opens the door to some romantic!Kaylor. And in March 2014, Josh disappears from the picture and Taylor is suddenly a massive presence - way beyond the fun, highkey promotion we saw up till now. 

1 March 2014 - We see Kaylor both attend a Pre-Oscar Party. I think a Joshlie break was what led Karlie to go to LA and stay with Taylor. At this stage, they’d known each other publicly for about five months but, if we factor in possible negotiations, they might have known each other for much longer. I really do think they were good friends by this stage, because Taylor is a terrible actress and they clearly really enjoyed each other’s company. It was as good a place as any for Karlie to go and lick wounds. 

2 March 2014 - Kaylor attend the Vanity Fair Oscar Party and the Vogue profile talks about this being where they connected and decided to do the road trip: “A few months later they saw each other again at an Oscars after-party, and Kloss suggested they do something spontaneous. “I’d been to Big Sur once before, and I was like, ‘We should just do it,’ ” says Swift.” I suspect this story is a bit of a lie - but I do think it is true that they hooked up around this time, and decided to take a road trip to Big Sur. Taylor had been there once before, with Jake Gyllenhaal. Karlie had never been. It’s interesting that for Taylor it was already a “romantic” place, at the very least publicly, and it’s where she decided to go with Karlie at this point. 

Also, in terms of the “lie” factor - they’re saying this is where they reconnected but they were partying together the literal night before. So they’re obviously blurring reality a bit in the interview. Which is okay, maybe they misremembered or misspoke. But when factored into a pattern, it seems an odd thing to get confused about. 

The road trip itself is ICONIC. Taylor allegedly plays Karlie the whole of 1989. They take a million gorgeous photos. The daisy thing happens. 

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts the ‘Karlie loves Taylor’ sand pic. Taylor likes.

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts the ‘best road trip ever’ daisy pic.

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts the ‘adventure of a lifetime with my girl’ cheek kiss selfie.

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts a pic of her and Taylor with the caption, ‘woah, what a view huh?’

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts the pic of her hugging Taylor from behind.

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts a picture of herself apparently taken by Taylor.

5 March 2014 - Karlie posts a picture of her and Taylor jumping with the caption ‘❤️’

5 March 2014 - Taylor posts a picture of them and captions it ‘On the Way Home’ - possibly a reference to YAIL. 

When they return, things still seem very, very good in Kaylor Land.

12 March 2014 - Karlie attends the Art Production Fund’s White Glove Gala without Josh.

24 March 2014 - Taylor diaries that she’s moved into her Tribeca apartment in the “last few weeks” which means they are in the same city and that, when Karlie was in LA, Tay was still permanently based there. 

1 April 2014 - Karlie attends The New Museum annual Spring Gala without Josh.

1 April 2014 - Josh attends a New York Observer event without Karlie. His family is out in full force - again, this is their family business. It’s actually really odd that he is there on his own. Oh, and by the way - Mikey Hess isn’t there either lmao. 

3 April 2014 - Kaylor go to the gym and then out for lunch at the Butcher’s Daughter (which, for the record, is very close to Josh’s apartment but since he and Karlie have not interacted publicly in well over a month that seems irrelevant). They are papped continuously on both halves of the date. 

14 April 2014 - Kaylor are papped in NYC.

21 April 2014 - Taylor is papped with Cara and the articles that follow are all about “gal pals”. I do not think Cara and Taylor were together at this point but it’s vital to see the rollout of the “Girl Squad” PR strategy. It was not just about Karlie. Karlie was meant to be the ‘main’ Squad girl, but there were others.

26 April 2014 - Kaylor are papped in NYC

2 May 2014 - Karlie brings Derek as her +1 to the memorial service for L’Wren Scott.

4 May 2014 - Karlie posts a photo of herself with Taylor and Kate Bosworth at The Jane Hotel for Harry Josh’s party.

5 May 2014 - Kaylor get ready together and then attend the Met together. Josh is also there with his brother and Ivanka. Kaylor interact with the Kushners because this photo gets taken. We also get this pic (peep Tay’s dress in the background). Karlie sits at a table with Josh, and Taylor sits very, very far away. (Here is a pic of them seated). Now, it’s possible the tickets were booked and the seating arrangements made well before Joshlie went on a break. Or it’s possible going there was just a stunt and Karlie and Josh were very much together.

If Josh was a beard contract, this would’ve been reversed. Karlie would have showed up and walked the red carpet with Josh and sat with Taylor once inside. Instead, Karlie was papped with Taylor on the outside, and sat in the cheap seats with Josh, on the other side of the room from Taylor, once inside. If Josh and Karlie both needed a beard, why would they allow Karlie to show up and walk the red carpet with her girlfriend when they both attended the event?

And here’s what’s interesting: Taylor references this evening extensively at the end of the Wildest Dreams MV. She closely replicates the outfits - Karlie’s, Josh’s and her own - and casts herself as the “other woman”. It’s a telling video because that twist in the end is not necessary for the song to make sense (at all), Tay’s character is hurt and surprised by the MV love interest having a partner, and in the end the love interest’s feelings seem genuine as he runs after her - but she’s already gone. It’s a pretty loud scene in all and I’m not sure how else to interpret it, really. It’s also interesting that Tay’s character in the video falls in love with her ‘onscreen’ partner - kind of how Kaylor probably started as somewhat scripted ‘Famous Friends’ but possibly grew feelings.

Taylor also references this evening in LWYMMD when a 2014 Met Taylor appears several times. A zombie Taylor wearing the dress she wore in the OOTW MV buries a Taylor wearing this 2014 Met Gala dress and later she appears again. Considering all the other “Taylors” are extremely iconic (for example Kanye interrupting dress), I’m not sure why 2014 Met Gala Tay is here. It’s not the best example of one of her princess dresses… It’s not indicative of an ‘era’...

Unless the evening was important to Taylor herself, and the most logical reason for that would be Joshlie. It seems that this was the night that Tay, like her character in the MV, found herself cast in the unfortunate role of “other woman” - a part she would have struggled with ever since. So, with that in mind, here are some photos of Kaylor from that night where Taylor looks miserable: x x x

12 May 2014 - Karlie attends the American Ballet Theatre Opening Night Spring Gala alone.

15 May 2014 - An article with People comes out where Taylor makes getting ready with Karlie sound like a fun pre-prom time, proving the earlier point that them showing up together was part of their PR relationship.

Early May 2014 - Kaylor go for dinner at Toni Garrn’s, further debunking Korlie rumors.

22 May 2014 - Karlie attends amfAR’s 21st Cinema Against AIDS Gala alone.

CONCLUSION: From late February/early March it seemed as though Kaylor were together and possibly exclusive or at least getting somewhat serious. However, in early May Josh and Karlie reconnected around the time of the Met Gala - that’s what the Wildest Dreams MV seems to suggest at least. The fact that they interacted and sat together despite not apparently going ‘together’ is very loud. 

However, Joshlie were not fully back together at this Met Gala stage. I believe they reunited proper only at the end of May, at which point the Kaylor dynamic shifted gears.

However… the contract for the publicity deal was still in place and they had to carry on carrying on. It’s telling that their respective close friends didn’t exactly warm up to one another - their personal friend groups never really meshed. This contradicts the het narrative of them being just extremely great friends. If they really were, why wouldn’t they be hanging out with each other’s main people (in very simple terms, people like Derek and Abigail)? And before you @me, a few likes are not great evidence of hangouts - Josh also liked a bunch of Tay’s posts, and it’s pretty clear they were never friends.

More likely, Karlie and Taylor hooked up… And, of course, Karlie was an important part of this era’s publicity rollout. And that’s where things got messy.

[spideymybucky]

Harries keep saying that holding hands doesn't mean they're dating but.for some reason (be it PR or not) I am 100% sure they are dating. Like hugging her before leaving the set, her defending him on social media and constantly commenting and mentioning him, harry following her back to her trailer, her doing a 'happy dance' when he was casted, potentially living together while filming in Palm Springs and in LA currently, taking her to a very exclusive and private wedding ( i don't think he took her as a friend like some claim, corona still very much exists and it's dangerous) , sharing each others clothes like he did with camille , hanging out with his rich friends, pictures of them arriving at his house and sitting at the balcony and of course the lap sitting.

My take is that they had/have hots for each other and started messing around which evolved into dating and then they decided they could get something out of it (pr) but it backfired because the hadn't expected people to be hostile and not supportive

Either way it's a big mess they should have kept secret

Ok. If you believe this, go ahead. Here is my input on the situation. 

1. Remember when they announced it was gonna be Florance + Harry? How the Harries acted?? They all thought they were gonna end up dating, but then came the other side of the fandom saying no. Why not? Cause she’s been in a long term relationship, and Zach Graff talks about her in his podcast, and she in it too. So... the rumors died down, everyone thought, oh, they are just co-stars and starting to become friends. They were seen hanging out and just getting to know each other. People accepted that, that they were only friends and nothing else. That is the reason why Florance Pugh, who might have been the first girl they thought for the stunt, didn’t become part of this shit. 

2.  The vote shirt. If y’all didn’t know, the Vote shirt, which there are more models of it, it was a way to invite people to vote. Harry Styles wasn’t the only one to get one; so were other artists and celebs. Why? Because they wanted to make people vote, they wanted to invite young adults and newly turned 18s to vote for Biden and kick trump out. You think those posts were coincidental? That they came out of nowhere? No. They were taken with their knowledge, well Harrys, and that's why he wore that shirt. It's super coincidental that no fans saw him with that shirt, but we got those pics right before election day. Super coincidental. So... why was Olivia wearing that shirt? Probably because they gave the whole cast the same shirt as a PR package. So, if they all have the same shirt... and they want to start rumors about H+O, they photograph Harry, and then Olivia photographs herself with the same shirt. But funny how no one connected the dots there, right? That's because it seemed far-fetch of them being together. 

3. The constant media of Harry Styles from her was to plant us the initiative that she has an interest in him and pull people to the movie. If you have an artist with millions and millions of following, he’ll always make a big headline with entertainment media. This will bring free mtking for the movie and people will remember it. Also, she needs the notoriety for the film; you see, she was acclaimed for booksmart and now requires that same energy with this movie. She needs it to be successful. 

4. the trailer and set photos. I find it interesting how they are to high-quality. Pap photos that aren’t staged tend to be so blurry, and for these ones to be so well made and just not bad quality at all, it's obviously staged. Also, she is the director of the movie, and this is H’s first significant role in acting. I would find it weird if H didn’t talk to her, asked for pointers, guidance, etc. Florance and all the others have years in the film industry, and he doesn't. The vid where they are hugging, that one is backgrid too. It looks really staged and him just saying goodbye. It's weird though, how come we only get paps from Backgrid and Digzy, the pap photographer? Two of the main staged paparazzi we have out there. They wanted us to believe that they were together, start speculating, but we never did. They had to shove it in our faces for us to realize. Actually, after this, in December, an article came out where he said he wasn’t in a relationship and didn’t want one. It's so funny how this situation contradicts everything he has said.

5.The wedding was staged too. Some people say it was in Jan, but I found an article that said he was married to Glenne, which was outed on November 25th. Many people have messaged me that they’ve called the Ranch, and it hasn’t been open since November, and then others have said it was in a private estate, which still doesn't make sense cause he let paparazzi in, no one can go in without authorization. So, him holding hand with Olivia, walking slowly, and then running out and leaving her (which those pics were outed and were paparazzi taking them outside the venue) doesn’t make sense. None of the wedding pics or statements make sense. All of them state something different. One article says it's at the ranch, the other private estate, then him saying, ah my girlfriend, while officiating and those people being the sources? None of that makes sense. Y’all really believe that the 16 people there would out Harry?? If he was in a real relationship, nope, they wouldn't. 

https://www.thefocus.news/music/who-is-jeff-azoff/ 6. Them living together doesn't make sense either, as he has said that he was living with friends and then at a friend's house. Why would I bring my s/o around when it's not my house? None of the storylines, the narrative, anything of it makes sense. The photos of them going out are also weird, they are near a restaurant, but restaurants are shut off cause of Covid, from what I’ve heard. Again, the photos of them entering a house, a girl looked into it and found the address. It's a house a lot of people use to stage pap pics.  So... this is my long as answer... second of all, not all Harries believe it's a PR stunt. Most harries are actually shipping them and saying they are dating, trying to prove it. I don’t think that, and if he is genuinely dating her, then he is an asshole, which goes against everything he’s said and done. 

[something-tofightfor]

He’s Not Here - Epilogue

Pairing: Billy Russo x Reader

Word Count: 6437

Rating: M (language and violence, talk of murder and death)

Parts 1-24 + the interludes and NSFW alphabet can be found on my Masterlist (link in bio)

Summary: Billy’s awake, but what are the next steps... and are you ready to take them? 

Author’s Note: I want to get emotional about this because it’s the last chapter, and this story has been a labor of love from the moment I started it until now. But if you know me, you know how much this story means to me. You know how much work I’ve put into it, and you know that I refused to compromise on it. @its-my-little-dumpster-fire has been there with me day one, and was the ONLY one that knew how it was going to end for a while. I thank her endlessly for her support, for her agreeing that it made sense to do what I did with it, and for encouraging me throughout the writing of this.  Thank you for all of your comments and messages. Thank you for reading. Thank you for taking the time to fall for this Billy with Reader. Thank you for not abandoning this story even though it’s taken a million years to tell it. Good things come to those who wait, and I’m positive that this isn’t the ending you expect - but it’s the one that Billy deserves. 

Banner by @the-blind-assassin-12

You were curled up in your favorite armchair, knees drawn up to your chest as one hand toyed with the thin chain around your neck, fingers closing around Billy’s dog tag as it had plenty of times over the previous months. Matt was sitting on the couch, Foggy at the dining room table, fingers wrapped around his phone. “They’re here.” The blonde man  tucked his phone back into his pocket, breaking the silence. “Karen just -“ I don’t want to do this. 

 “Hey.” Matt moved, leaning forward and placing a hand on your knee. “It’s going to be alright.” You turned your head toward him, eyes moving over his face - glasses and all. So weird how he just knows. He tightened his fingers on your knee, clearing his throat. “You’ve gotta calm down, though, this isn’t going to help anyone.” You took a deep breath, nodding even though you knew he couldn’t see it. “I’m right here, he won’t -“ 

 “I’m not afraid of Frank Castle.” You sat up straight, letting your feet fall back to the floor. “I have no reason to be.” But I do. “I…” You trailed off, thinking. You’d seen what Frank had done to Billy - what he’d done to Rawlins and Schoonover and even Wolf. You knew what lengths he’d go to to avenge his family, and yet you weren’t afraid of him, not in the slightest. He’ll understand. He has to. A knock at the door startled you, and you watched Foggy move to answer it, heart rate quickening again. Here we go. 

 ---

 After the day that Billy had woken up, Matt or Foggy or Karen had visited with him every day, working with him. While Billy didn’t remember much of anything from the previous deployment or the time after he’d come home, all three of them told you that he remembered basics - his name, his upbringing, his struggles. He remembered Frank and the Castles, remembered being in the Marines… but when it came to you, Billy was tight-lipped. He said he didn’t remember any lasting relationships, didn’t remember anyone aside from Frank and Curtis and the Castles that had been constants in his life. Things stayed that way for weeks, and though you were told that Billy was getting stronger - could see his face filling out as he returned to solid foods, had heard his physical therapist talking as he’d left the room on multiple days - you knew that he still had a long way to go. 

 “He’s asking for Frank.” Karen was sitting on your couch, holding a coffee mug between her hands. “We’ve been telling him that he’s out of the city, that he can’t come see him yet, and Billy’s so… frustrated with himself that he’s not questioning it.” You frowned, and even though you still went to the hospital often, Billy would keep his face turned away from the window once he’d seen you standing there, often asking Matt or Karen or Foggy to close the blinds with a vague wave of his hand, which hurt you. “He just wants to remember, but he can’t remember everything, and his doctors still day that we can’t… we can’t just bombard him with the memories we have, with the things that we know all at once.” 

 “Even if it will help him?” She nodded. “That seems counterproductive, Karen.” She shrugged her shoulders, shaking her head. 

 “I’m a lot of things, but a doctor isn’t one of them.” You laughed. “And he’s making progress, so I guess I can’t really question it, but Dr. Dumont says -” You wrinkled your nose at the mention of the woman’s name - and you knew that Karen caught it, but she continued. “She says that for a lot of people with a TBI, either nothing will come back or things will come back all at once.” Karen stared at you. “We want to make sure that when Billy knows what happened to him, when he remembers, that it’s not … too much.” Probably a good idea. “She’s working on memories with him, a little more each day, but he doesn’t trust her yet, and he needs to before he can really… remember.” 

 “Why?” The woman had rubbed you the wrong way when you’d met her for the first time, and you wanted to know what Karen’s take on her was. “He needs to trust someone. Do you think that…”

 “Look.” Karen set the mug down, leaning in. “She’s… Billy…” Karen chewed on her thumbnail, blinking. “Before you, Billy didn’t really trust anyone except for Frank, right?” You nodded. “So, he’s confused right now, and because he feels like everyone’s keeping things from him - which we are, he’s going to question any help that he’s offered, even if it comes from someone like her, that’s just doing her job. Sure. “I think that Billy knows that she knows what happened with him, who did this to him, and even though that can’t be the focus right away, he wants it to be, so he feels like she’s…”

 “She’s steering him in the wrong direction.” Karen nodded. “She asked me so many questions when we talked, I just got this… feeling from her, like that fake smile is just…” Karen nodded, rolling her eyes. “I had to fill in so much for her without contradicting what Madani is saying, what the police think, what the reports say… without telling her what we know…  it was like she was looking for the weak spots in what Billy and I had, like she thought I was making it all up, just to…

 “You’re not. And you know you’re not, so… don’t let it bother you.” You nodded. “We need her. She might be able to help Billy organize the memories, which he needs.” You went silent, thinking of the way that the dark haired woman had stared at you, the look in her eyes a mix between contempt and pity. She gets to be in there with him, and… and I… “He’ll figure it out. It might take him a while, but… he’ll figure it out.” Karen cleared her throat. “I wanted to talk to you about something, something that Matt and I…” You tilted your head to the side, waiting. “We… we want to bring Frank back here, to New York.” What? “He’s going to need to know what’s going on, and I’m sure Madani’s already told him Billy’s awake, but I think… I think that memory coming back will…” She pressed her lips together. “I think it will bring a lot of other things back, too.” 

 ---

 Keeping your eyes on the floor in front of you, you waited until the door opened and you heard new voices - first Karen’s and then Frank’s - to look up. Karen stepped into the room after Frank did, her hair loose around her shoulders and a light colored sleeveless dress floating around her legs, which was a stark contrast to the almost all black  outfit Frank wore, ball cap pulled low over his brow. “Why am I here?” His gravelly voice loud but even, Frank finally made eye contact with you. “Why are we all here?” 

 “Frank, we need you to…” Karen reached out, touching Frank’s shoulder gently, the man looking back at her. “You’ll understand soon.” 

 “What’s Red doin’ here?” You watched Frank step toward Matt, the second man smiling easily as he stood, extending a hand. “Thought you’d be-“

 “Hello, Frank.” Matt gestured to the couch, still smiling. “Sit down for a minute, please.” Frowning, Frank did as he was asked, Karen taking a seat next to him - and, you noticed, angling herself so that their knees were touching. Good. “We’ve been trying to get ahold of you for weeks, Frank.” Matt moved to stand behind the chair you were in, his hands resting on the back. “We needed you here t-“

 “Only reason you’d need me here is somethin’ to do with Bill, and Madani says-“ 

 “Madani doesn’t know shit, Frank.” Karen spoke first, shaking her head. “She’s so concerned with her own narrative that the truth doesn’t seem to matter much.” 

 “Truth?” Frank turned his head to look at the woman next to him, eyes glinting. “Truth is that piece of shit is still breathing when he shouldn’t be, and is pretending not to remember anything about what he did and why he’s-“ Matt sighed. 

 “He really doesn’t remember, Frank.” You looked up, watching as Matt’s jaw clenched for a moment. “I didn’t quite believe it at first either, but when I talked to him? You can fool someone with body language and expressions, Frank. But not… not the things inside, the things I can… Billy’s telling the truth when it comes to losing his memory. He remembers flashes, small things, little details.” Me. He remembers me. The room was silent for a minute, giving you time to think, to watch Frank. 

 “Why are you talkin’ to Bill? He’s in the hospital, still doin’ therapy, they’re tryin’ to get him ready to go on trial.” She didn’t tell him, Madani didn’t...

 “They’re Billy’s lawyers, Frank.” Karen’s quiet voice filled the room, her attention entirely on the man beside her. “He’s going to go to trial, but it’s not what you think.” She reached out, taking his hand in hers, and despite the tension in the room, you felt yourself smiling at the way he unconsciously curled his fingers against the back of her hand, eyes darting to her fingers and then her face. “That’s why you’re here, Frank, because…” 

 “Because we need you. Because… Billy needs you.” You finally spoke, and though you’d played the moment over in your mind countless times, your words came out shaky. “Billy needs you to help him prove that-“

 “I’m not doin’ shit for Bill, except maybe finishin’ what I started last year.” Frank was staring at you, eyes full of pain and anger. “That son of a bitch needs to remember what he did, and if he doesn’t, then he shouldn’t get to live.” No. You waited a moment to speak, thinking of Billy’s face through the bandages in the first few weeks, the bruises on his body, the lines across his face after the gauze had been removed, the way his eyes had still lit up in recognition - even slightly - the first time he’d been awake to see you, the way he’d tried to talk to you without letting anyone else know it the day he’d asked for you. No, Frank. He gets to live. “Now will you fuckin’ tell me why I’m here?” 

 “Frank.” You spoke again, voice stronger. “You’re not going to kill Billy. You’re not going to hurt him again.” 

 “He left you.” Frank leaned forward, shaking his head and licking his lips. “He left you for money and power and other women.” He did. “He killed my family, and you’re telling me that I’m not going to hurt him again? He deserves it. Every bit of pain and confusion and-”

 “No, Frank.” You squared your shoulders. “You’re wrong.” Frank laughed out loud, an incredulous smile on his face. “You’re laughing, but you won’t be after you see what we have to show you.” He shook his head again. 

 “Show me? What are you going to show me? Let’s go, Karen. This is bullshit, and I don’t know why you brought me here.” Frank stood, looking down at the woman, who simply stared up at him, shaking her head. “What?” 

 “You need to sit, Frank.” She tugged on his hand. “I’m serious. This isn’t just about you and your family, Frank. It’s…” She wet her lips. “It’s more than that, and I didn’t believe it at first either, but there’s too much proof, Frank. Too much for it to be coincidence, too much… Matt and Foggy, we ...” Frank sat again, looking between the four of you. Good. He’s sitting. But then Frank spoke again, quietly.

 “Matt, eh? He’s Matt again, Karen? And he’s workin’ as Bill’s lawyer? That what you did, Karen? Soon as I was outta here, you ran back to -” Frank’s voice was angry, but you also heard the hurt in his words, felt the betrayal that he assumed of Karen. It’s not like that, Frank. Come on.

 “Frank.” Matt’s voice was low, tinged with anger. “You don’t know… That isn’t what…” But Frank shook his head, lips curled up in a snarl. 

 “This another thing like when you decided to represent me, Murdock? When you wanted to see the good in me, make people believe that I wasn’t a bad guy?” Frank’s lip curled. “Well I was. And I am. And so’s Bill. He’s the worst kind of guy there is, doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself or…” Frank trailed off, shaking his head. “You aren’t gonna get him off for this, Red. He deserves to be right where I put him, right where Madani put him - right where he put himself.” You don’t know, Frank, you don’t… 

 Karen said your name, drawing your attention back to her and ignoring Frank’s tirade. “Where’s the laptop?” Foggy moved first, carrying the computer into the living room and setting it down in front of Frank wordlessly. 

 No one moved until you felt Matt nudge you on the shoulder. Here goes nothing. “Frank.” You sighed, feeling tears in your eyes. “Billy did all of the things… most of the things you say he did.” Swallowing, you met Frank’s eyes, “The drugs and the dirty money, yeah. But they preyed on him - on his desperation, on his… need for success. Cerberus - “

 “How do you know that name?” Frank leaned forward, lip curling again. “There are only four people alive ‘sides me that should know that name, and you’re not one of ‘em.” 

 “I know it because Billy told me, Frank.” You tapped the computer. “He told me everything.” You swallowed again, staring directly into Frank’s eyes. “He knew… things couldn’t last forever, and wanted there to be a… record, I guess?” Frank looked confused, but you continued. “Billy didn’t… Billy didn’t just betray you and your family for money, Frank. That was part of it, sure, because he needed it to start Anvil, and he was desperate and already in too deep, but he…” Matt’s hand moved from the back of the chair to your shoulder, anchoring you. “He did it to save my life.” 

 --- 

 Frank watched the first video silently, eyes on the screen, on Billy’s tear streaked face. He watched as Billy admitted what he’d chosen, what Rawlins had demanded of him. He’s paying attention. The video filmed the day that the Castles had been murdered got a vocal response from Frank, a loud groan followed by a long, low whine that left the man’s throat unconsciously. I get it, Frank. The video had been painful for you to watch, because in it, Billy wasn’t only distraught, he was angry too. He apologized countless times - to you, to Maria and the kids, to Frank… each time, the sincerity in his voice became more and more apparent, the look in his eyes less and less like Billy and more like the man you’d watched on the news and in the papers in the year following the tragedy. The video started with Billy’s eyes full of tears, the liquid leaking out of the corners of them and down his face, but it ended with him seething in anger, vowing to get back at Rawlins, to make him pay for taking away the only family Billy had ever had - some of the only people he’d ever truly loved.

 The videos - there were more than a dozen of them, recorded over the course of that year - were of varied lengths. Some were only a few seconds long, Billy reciting a password or explaining a document or a picture, but others were minutes long, where he poured out the stress and frustration of his days, not knowing whether or not anyone would ever hear the words. 

 You skipped over the video that Billy had recorded after New Year’s Eve, telling Frank that that one was personal, moving ahead and letting him go through the others, clicking open the documents that he’d also saved onto the laptop. “Everything’s here, Frank.” Foggy spoke quietly, a thick file held in his hands. “We’ve got enough information to prove that Billy was a pawn, and that the story that got concocted afterward is a load of crap. Yeah, he did a lot of bad things, and he made some really terrible choices, but once he was mixed up in Cerberus, he had no other option. Schoonover and Rawlins made it that way… and it would have been the same for you if they hadn’t -”

 “I’d never kill a woman or children like he did.” Frank’s voice was angry. “Never.” He looked at Karen. “You believe this shit? You know Bill, you know it’s all lies, and -”

 “It’s not, Frank. We’ve looked into it. The information he left us has merit.” Karen shook her head, hair moving over her shoulders. “The discharge papers that Billy has aren’t the ones that were released, or that the prosecution will be using. The money transfers aren’t the same. They don’t line up. Nothing does - this story that Madani and Marion James and Rafi Hernandez are telling about Billy and Lewis Wilson? It’s paper thin. Billy used the money they gave him to open Anvil, but once that was done, he did nearly everything except the drugs by the book - until the last couple of months, Frank. He did things under the table too, but that was because he had to. We followed the money. It checks out. Anvil itself was a legitimate business except for the… he just needed to get there.” He muttered the words ‘it doesn’t matter’ under his breath, but Karen continued. “It does matter, Frank. Because Billy -”

 “Billy did what he had to do to survive, Frank. Same as you.” You finally spoke again, feeling the anger coursing through your veins. “He got in over his head and couldn’t get out because he had no one after you chose not to transfer with him.” You leaned in, narrowing your eyes. “He couldn’t let them kill someone innocent because of what the two of you did for Rawlins, and so he decided…”

 “Why did you get to live?” Frank’s eyes were on you, but his voice was ice cold. “You get to live and my little girl didn’t? My wife is in the ground, and you’re still here, walkin’ around and defending the piece of shit that put her there?” Frank pushed to his feet, towering over you. “Why do you get to fuckin’ live and they didn’t? My family didn’t? And you tell me that I need to understand why he did it, understand where he was coming from? A couple of goddamn videos are supposed to...” Unblinking, you stared up at him for a moment before you stood, too. No. 

 “I got to live, Frank, because Billy loved me.” Loves me? Maybe? Still? You felt yourself getting ready to cry again, but you stood your ground, even though you could feel Frank’s breath on your face. “He didn’t know about the kids. He didn’t know that they’d… you heard him, Frank. He thought they were just going after you, and if that was the case, you’d have a chance, even if you were caught off guard. You know that’s true, Frank.” You took a breath. “You got your revenge on him. You hurt him. You almost killed him. But he was sorry before that even happened - he never wanted anything to happen to you … to any of you.” You gestured to the computer that was sitting on your coffee table. “You saw it. You heard it. There’s more to see, more to go though, more to… I’m not asking you to forgive him, not right away.” You shook your head, eyes still on Frank’s face. “But he needs you, Frank. He can’t remember without… you here. He just remembers the skull, remembers the fight, remembers…” You were crying, the tears silently rolling down your face. “He’s stuck back in that period before you went to Afghanistan. He remembers how he felt about you and your family right then, but…everything else is scrambled.” 

 “You want me to help him? Want me to tell him that I fuckin’ destroyed his face because he killed my family, but it’s fine because I want to help him and make sure the right people pay?” Frank shook his head. “You think he’ll be good with that? Think he’ll accept that he was like my brother and he killed my family so I almost killed him like I killed everyone else that had anything to do with this? I took away his looks and his power and his reputation?” Frank’s head moved again. “No.” You felt your heart drop, and Frank leaned in. “Not gonna happen. Not now, not ever. I’m gonna tell Madani -”

 “No, you’re not.” Matt’s voice filled the room, quiet but sure. “You can’t tell her anything, Frank. We need to build his case, and it’s dependant on her not having any access to him anymore, her not knowing what we’re doing with him. She and the prosecutor can’t… they can’t know. Not yet” Frank’s eyes darted over your shoulder to Matt, nostrils flaring. “There’s enough information here to prove that Billy’s not innocent, but that he acted on orders to begin with, and that… well, there’s enough to totally expose Rawlins and Wolf and now Madani and James and to make it so that -”

 “You think you can win this? You think that you can come out on top?” Frank pointed toward the door, head shaking back and forth. “We tried. We tried to get out, tried to fuckin’ end it. We couldn’t say no to Rawlins or to Schoonover. We couldn’t get anything past them. They owned us.” Frank sniffed, closing his eyes for a moment. “You think they didn’t cover their asses when they made this story up about Lewis and Billy? Madani’s untouchable. The CIA is -”

 “Not untouchable, Frank. Not with all of this information.” Foggy lifted a finger. “Which we all obtained legally, I might add. Billy was very thorough with records and -”

 “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, because I’m not helping you.” Frank looked at you again, sadness replacing the anger in his eyes for a split second. “You think I’m gonna help you so that you can get your happily ever after with Bill Russo? You don't get that.” There’s no happily ever after, Frank. Not now. “My wife didn’t get to live. My kids had no future. Why? Because Bill fuckin’ Russo let them die!” The last three words came out in a roar, and Frank lunged toward you, reaching for your arm. You dodged him, but Matt was faster, using his surprising strength to push Frank away from you. “He shouldn’t be alive. I should have killed him last year. How can you even look at me right now, how can you say their names, or ask me to help you or help him, or -” 

 You spoke again, the tears still falling as you stepped toward the two men; Matt with his feet planted, arms locked around Frank’s waist. “Frank, I… you have no idea how hard it is for me to… to know that I’m the reason…” You shook your head, using one hand to wipe the tears away. “That he didn’t come to you and warn you because of me.” It was the first time you’d said it out loud since you’d told Karen, and the weight of the admission made your knees weak. They died because of me. “They’re your family, Frank. Billy was your family. And he picked…” You shook your head, still moving closer, one hand on Matt’s back. “It’s alright, Matt. He won’t hurt me.” But part of me wants him to. Frank hitting you or crushing your arm in his grip wouldn’t help, but it would feel a little like making amends - like you were finally paying for your part in the whole situation. Matt stepped away from Frank, warning him in a low tone to keep his hands to himself, and Frank nodded once, head lowered. “Maria and Frank Jr. and Lisa should still be here. And they would be if he’d come to you like he should have.” You swallowed, reaching for one of Frank’s hands. “He said he loved me, Frank. But I never thought he’d choose me over you guys. I’m sorry he did. I’m sorry about it every day, because it shouldn’t have...” 

 “Well he did, and I’m sorry about that too.” Frank let you take his hand, and you watched him duck his head further, eyes on the ground. “Bill saved your life and destroyed mine.” He did. “Who would… I can’t believe that the first time Russo decides he loves someone more than he loves himself, this is what happens.” You laughed weakly, still crying, and waited until Frank’s gaze met yours. “You really believe this shit… believe… him?” You nodded - just once - lips pressed together. 

 “He made it a point to get this stuff to me, Frank. He thought… you were going to kill him, or he was going to kill you, or you’d both... but he wanted me to know, even though it probably wouldn’t matter.” You stepped closer, squeezing Frank’s hand. “But he’s alive, and you’re alive, and it does matter.” You swallowed. “Madani might be untouchable. There’s still a lot to consider… but he’s alive, Frank. And we can help him. You can help him. He didn’t do any of this because he wanted to, and now he doesn’t remember… but he will. The more information he has - the more confirmation… it can help the memories come back.” It can bring Billy back to me. “It won’t bring them back, Frank. But… if this goes how we hope it will, it might stop things like this from happening to other families, and give you...” Peace of mind? 

 Frank didn’t move or speak, but he watched you intently. Swallowing, Frank looked around the room, jaw working beneath the thin layer of stubble. “It’s not your fault.” You felt your breath leave your body in a single exhale, crumpling into Frank’s chest as his arms went around you, forehead dropping to your shoulder. “You didn’t ask for any of this, it’s not on you.” You started crying again, feeling his grip change, and moved to hug him tightly, feeling him take deep breaths. This is good. When you pulled apart, Frank’s mouth was set in a thin line, his eyes on Karen. “We need to get in touch with David.” 

 Glancing over your shoulder, you watched the woman nod. “We didn’t know if you’d want us to, Frank. Not before you came back, so…” She shrugged. 

 “I want him to look at all of this. He’ll be able to tell if it’s real and when it’s from and…” Karen nodded, Frank looking back at you. “What do I need to do?” You opened your mouth, but Matt spoke first. 

 “We haven’t shown Billy any of this yet, or told him that we’ve got it. We just took over his case from the shitty public defender they assigned him, since as far as they know, he’s got no money.” Matt gestured toward you. “She’s footing the bill, but they don’t need to know that, not yet.  We wanted to wait until we knew if you’d help or not before we decided exactly what we were going to do, what our strategy would be… but the first thing is going to be getting you into the hospital to see him.” Frank nodded, jaw still clenched. “Foggy and I will be with you, of course, but…” He trailed off. “The next thing is going to be getting her in there.” Frank’s eyes widened. 

 “You haven’t seen him yet?” You lowered your head, whispering the word “no”. “You want me to do this and you haven’t even talked -”

 “He won’t let me, Frank.” You swallowed. “I saw him once with Madani, right after you came to tell me where he was. He didn’t even know I was there.” You sighed. “And he asked for me by name once, too, after he woke up, and so they let me in, but it wasn’t… Matt was in the room, and so was his therapist, and when Billy saw me…” You closed your eyes at the memory. “He acted like he didn’t know me aside from my name. Told me to leave, told me to…” You took a deep breath. “But he knew who I was, he just didn’t want to…” You were sure of this; his phrasing and movements had been too precise, too specific to mean anything else. 

 --- 

 “He asked for you by name.” You were sitting in a small office with Matt and Dr. Dumont, the dark haired woman across the desk from you, her hands folded on the surface of it. “We were doing our session today, and William said that he remembered something.” She studied you, brow furrowed. “He said your name - first and last - and asked if you were the one that was waiting out in the hallway.” She waited for your reaction and because you were stunned, you gave her one, your eyes going wide and a hand going up to your mouth. “I’d like to have you in the room with me the next time I go in. I didn’t confirm anything for him, but since he asked…” She smiled, the expression not reaching her eyes. “I want to do whatever I can to help him.” Sure you do. 

 But you’d agreed, the three of you walking down the hallway from her office to Billy’s room, past Madani, who was pacing in the hallway. Dumont warned you that Billy got agitated easily, that he often lashed out at her - at the doctors and even at the lawyers, something that Matt confirmed with a quiet chuckle. “From what I know of Billy from before, there’s still a lot of him in there, even if he doesn’t realize it yet.” 

 It gave you hope, and as Krista pushed the door open, you took a deep breath, wishing that you’d had time to go home from work and change. It doesn’t matter. Billy was restrained in the bed, arms and legs strapped down, and you frowned as you saw that he was wearing a mask over his face, the smooth white surface obscuring his features totally - except for his eyes. “I brought you a visitor today, William.” Krista stepped next to him on the bed and you hung back, feeling Matt’s hand at your elbow. 

 “His heart rate changed when you walked in.” Matt leaned forward to whisper into your ear. “It’s racing.” You swallowed, staring at Billy, and then your eyes moved to the doctor, hearing that the woman was speaking but not listening to the words before they fell back on Billy’s form, laying flat on his back in the bed. I loved you too much. 

 “Billy?” Your voice quiet, you stepped forward, and at the sound of it, Billy looked away from Dr. Dumont, focusing his gaze on you. “It’s good to see your eyes open, the last time I was in here, they were…” You smiled at him - a real one - and continued. “You weren’t awake.” He blinked, and you saw his fingers flex. Krista had stopped talking and you glanced over at her, noting the frustrated look on her face. “I know… you’re confused about a lot right now, Billy.” You moved from the foot of the bed up toward the head of it, his eyes following you as you stood opposite of the doctor, never looking away from him. “But she said that you asked for someone by name earlier, and…” You paused, biting your lip and thinking. “Do you know who I am?” 

 He was silent for long seconds, though he kept staring at you, the look in his eyes unreadable. You hadn’t heard his voice in person in months, so when he spoke, words muffled by the mask, you fought back a gasp. The first words he said were your first and last name, and even as you felt relief flood through your body, you were nodding, taking a half step closer to the bed. “I know your name.” Good, that’s good. “I recognize your face.” You nodded again, finally closing your eyes for a second and taking in the sound of his voice. Still him, still in there, still… “But I don’t know how I know you.” It hit you hard, and you opened your eyes back up, finding Billy’s again. “I should know how I know you, right? We -” Unsure of what to say, you watched as Billy shifted on the bed, the straps on his legs and arms pulling tight. Should you? Did I… 

 “Billy, I…” He let out a breath, head shaking back and forth, and your eyes moved up to Krista and then back to Matt, though you didn’t know what he’d do. “Hey, stop. It’s alright, Billy.” You leaned over the bed, unafraid of the movement of the man, and said his name quietly. “I’ll go, Billy, I don’t want this to…” You gritted your teeth. “Billy.” He stopped moving, once again looking at you. “It’s OK if you don’t remember.” Fighting back tears, you nodded down at him, noticing the slightly wild look in his eyes and the rapid rise and fall of his chest. He’s scared. “I wanted to be here sooner, and I’m not going a-”

 “I think it’s best if you go, and let me calm William down now.” Krista’s voice interrupted your staredown with Billy, and you could have sworn you saw a flash of annoyance in the deep brown. “We can try this again later, after he’s had some time to -”

 “I… I miss the Crown.” Billy was staring at you, eyes refocused. “You know? Page outta your book?” Billy. You opened your mouth to respond, but Krista beat you to it. 

 “Sometimes he says a lot of things that he doesn’t…” But you tuned her out, still staring down at Billy, watching as his eyes moved over your face, recognition in them along with a careful curiosity. You noticed for the first time that he was turned completely away from Krista, one cheek pressed against the pillow. She can’t see the look in them, she… “William, if -”

 “Go. I want you to leave. I need you to leave” His tone was harsh but the look in his eyes didn’t change. He moved his hand, and though you didn’t want to look away from his face, you glanced down, watching as he held his hand up, fingers shaking slightly as he spread them out. Oh, holy shit. You felt Matt step closer to you from behind, his hand again closing around your elbow and his voice low in your ear, telling you it was time to go. Yeah, it is. 

 “I understand, Billy. You need to… just you.” 

 --- 

 “So they told me not to come back after that, and Dr. Dumont says that until he remembers other things, me being there won’t help. But he needs to know… he needs to feel like we’re there for him...” 

 You thought of the way that the woman’s dark eyes had looked you over while you were walking down the long hallway away from Billy’s room, the way her voice had filled your ears - sickeningly sweet as she spoke to Billy before, turning colder when addressing you and telling you how much you’d upset him. “But me bein’ there will?” You nodded, bringing yourself out of the memory. “How?”

 “You’re his best friend, Frank. Even if that’s not how you feel right now, it’s the truth. It’s what he remembers.” Karen spoke up from her place on the couch before taking her lower lip between her teeth. “We’re going to have to take it slow, probably include the doctor in some of our … she’ll need to try to work with him on the memories, on how to unlock them without us feeding him everything,  but we just need to…” She shrugged. “Play it by ear, I guess. We’ll make it work.” 

 “He remembered her, Frank.” Matt spoke up, his voice sure. “His heart rate changed, he was speaking deliberately, controlling the way he…” Matt stepped forward again. “Him saying that he didn’t know how he knew her before, telling her that he wanted her to leave when she was in there? The only thing he’s ever lied about - that I’ve heard - are about her.” Matt paused. “He knows more about her then he’s letting on, from different times, and is trying to protect her.  We’re going to have to talk about that with him, but there hasn’t been a good time.” 

 The room went silent again, you turning to stand next to Frank and look at the others, waiting. Can this work? There was a lot of information on the computer, but there were also things that Billy and Frank would need to fill in in order to truly make a case. It won’t be easy. Your eyes fell on Matt and Foggy - two of the hardest working and smartest lawyers in the city, people that you knew wouldn't be intimidated by going up against powerful people. They then moved to Karen, the woman strong enough to believe in Frank when no one else did, willing to love him despite his flaws, also unbothered by a challenge, no matter what it was. 

 They finally moved back to the man standing next to you, his chest rising and falling as he thought. Frank, you knew, was Billy’s best chance at remembering (apart from you) because Frank had been with Billy not only in Kandahar, but also in the days leading up to the fight at the carousel, had learned things that no one else knew - could fill in blanks in ways that no one else could. We need you, Frank. Billy needs you. “Yeah. OK.” Frank nodded once, and for the first time since you’d watched Frank’s frame retreat toward the elevator after telling you he’d put Billy in the hospital but let him live, you felt a real spark of hope flicker in your chest. “Tell me what we’re gonna do.” We’re going to help you, Billy, bring you back here where you belong.

---

. . . To be continued . . . 

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[aspoonofsugar]

Nen and Characters: Razor and Genthru

The Greed Island arc has two main antagonists, who are Razor and Genthru.

At first glance, they seem two completely different people, but they both explore similar concepts like the idea of redemption and the necessity of finding a good equilibrium between individual strength and teamwork.

What is more, the narrative itself invites us to compare their stories since Razor is introduced as the boss of fourteen devils, while Genthru as the leader of the Bomb Devils. The names of the two groups clearly highlight how both Razor and Genthru are (or used to be) criminals aka people outside society and who are able to damage it.

This meta will use concepts I have already explored in this meta and will try to explore them more in depth and to broaden the topic.

RAZOR: A HYPOCRITICAL TEAMWORK

Razor’s character is important for at least three distinctive topics.

1) The theme of redemption.

2) The theme of teamwork and bonds.

3) The theme of the link between fiction (the game) and reality (the real world).

1) The first theme is pretty clear and explained through a flashback:

Razor became the person that he is because Ging gave him a second chance even if he used to be a criminal. It is implied by Razor’s narration that, before Ging, nobody treated him as a person or thought that he could accomplish anything in life. This is interesting for three reasons.

a) Razor’s story resembles Binolt’s:

Just like Razor, Binolt is portrayed as a ruthless criminal, but a quick flashback implies that he is partly who he is because people have refused his kindness. Binolt’s memories show him as a poor boy who tried to give a rich couple their purse back. However, they, instead of thanking him, gave in to their prejudices and hit him thinking that he was a criminal.

The implication is clearly that Binolt has become who he is because society saw him in a specific way and so he decided to give in to society’s expectations. This is why Gon earnestly thanking him for the help he gave him and Killua during the training is something which gets to him. His story ends with him leaving Greed Island and presumibly starting a new life.

Let’s highlight that Razor and Binolt are not the only characters who suffered because of society’s prejudices. As a matter of fact Battera is a victim of this as well:

Battera is introduced to us as an extraordinary rich man who is ready to spend a fortune to obtain three magical objects. At the beginning of the arc both the characters and the readers are led to believe that he wants these objects for materialistic purposes like becoming more powerful and influential. However, by the end we discover that all Battera wanted was simply to spend time with the person he loved.

b) Razor himself is probably trying to offer the people under his leadership a chance similar to the one Ging offered him. As a matter of fact, the group of people who are with Razor are real world criminals and Greed Island is basically their prison.

Given Razor’s own background and how much important the game itself has been for his rehabilitation:

it is easy to infer that he would like for other people as well to be saved thanks to this game and the chance of redemptions it gives. If that were not the case, Razor could have simply been the only person taking part in the event to gain Plot of Beach. After all, it is clear that he has the power to do so. He decided instead to take some criminals with him and to have them serve as characters in a game.

That said, even if these may be Razor’s motivations, he is also ready to kill one of his own men and this act of violence is indicative of other contradictions that the character has.

c) The main contradiction is shown by his own ability. As a matter of fact Razor has the power of creating a bunch of nen creatures who will act as his own teammates and would generally move as he wishes.

This is interesting considering that for the major part of his life Razor has probably been pretty lonely. As a result, it is easy to imagine that his power is somehow the result of him creating his own comrades. Razor has probably been searching for a way to feel less lonely by materializing parts of himself he could interact with. However, this can’t fill the need of human interactions which was somehow satisfied when he met Ging, aka someone who is not a materialization of Razor himself, who would treat Razor as a person.

2) This leads us to the second point mentioned above. As a matter of fact despite how much a friendship with another person has been important for Razor, he keeps depending mostly on himself.

This is shown by the fact that he himself turns out to be the fourteen devils mentioned by the woman:

This is proven when he tells the others he would take care of the matches from that moment on and it is highlighted by Gon as well:

Razor’s behaviour here is contradictive and partially hypocritical. As a matter of fact the condition to gain Plot of Beach is to form a group big enough that they can take on fifteen individuals, but in the end their major opponent is just one person aka Razor himself. Why should people unite and be tested over their teamwork when the person they are fighting is simply fighting alone?

This contradiction is embodied also by the card Razor is guarding:

As explained by Killua, the card, even if fifteen people must come together to obtain it, can be transformed only a limited numbers of times. This means that there is the risk of inner fights after the battle against Razor is over. This is not casual because, all in all, the fight with Razor seems to have been thought in order to test people about their teamplay and their bonds.

In a sense, the battle to obtain Plot of Beach is representative of the whole contradictive nature of the game. On one hand it is obvious that players would naturally join groups in order to finish the game. On the other hand only three objects can be taken in the end. What if a large group is composed of individuals who all want different things? This trap is probably also why the game as a whole is called Greed Island. In there people are tested to see if they will end up prey of their own greed or if they will manage to channel it in a constructive way.

The battle against Razor is not exception and, in a sense, it can be seen as a test to see how strong the bonds created throughout a common struggle are and if they can survive individual interests.

The answer is that they can:

Not only does Gon’s team win only because more individual combined their abilities, so that they could overcome Razor, but also they avoided any inner fighting after the fact. Despite this, even if fighting together made so that important bonds could be born, this does not mean that every conflict is immediately settled or overcome:

Hisoka who was fundamental to the team’s victory and even commented that said victory was the result of team-play has no problem to lie to his “comrades” and, once the fight is over, immediately goes off to pursue his individual interests which conflict partially with Gon and Killua’s.

So, in the end the fight against Razor is a celebration of team-play, but at the same time it highlights the inconsistencies and contradictions of more people uniting for a common goal. Moreover, the whole situation also underlines the paradox of such an individualistic character like Razor celebrating team-work.

3) Razor’s other power is the ability to transform his aura in a ball. This ability is interesting because it is linked to the last theme this character explores aka the link between games and reality.

First of all, it is interesting that Razor challenges his opponents to sport matches since sports are not supposed to be especially dangerous. They are basically games with specific rules which are also used to avoid extreme damage among the players. However, as the dodgeball match goes on, it becomes clear that what is happening is basically a fight to the death and that Razor’s balls are not really balls, but weapons.

This description fits Greed Island in general. Greed Island is a game which was hypothetically made in order to be enjoyed, but it ended up becoming a death trap for those players who were not strong enough. This is why Gon and Killua are immediately said so:

And Gon immediately reacts this way:

The truth is that both perspectives are wrong. Killua’s point of view is probably the most accurate:

The game has been created, so that it can be played in different ways. If one wants to steal all the cards from other players they can, while if another wants to win each card on their own, they still can.

All in all, this is so because the game is a mirror of the world. To be more precise it is a smaller world where all human dynamics, both positive and negative, end up being amplified. The island is a place where you can easily meet other people and keep in touch with them (the transportation spells and the book are used to do so), but also a place where you can steal from others (the stealing spells are there to encourage theft).

What is more, the island is isolated by society and this makes it the perfect place to transform into a prison like Razor has done. At the same time, it is the perfect place to transform into a training camp as well:

So, it is obvious that the island is strictly linked to the real world and it is not by chance that the fight against Razor is where the protagonists discover such a truth:

This is because the battle against Razor is fundamental to win against Genthru as well. As a matter of fact it is through this fight that Gon, Killua and Biscuit forge their bonds with Goreinu and Tsezguerra and these bonds will prove fundamental to take down Genthru and to finish the game.

This also explains why the Greed Island arc has basically two boss fights. The one against Razor (an opponent in the game) is propedeutic to the final one against Genthru (an enemy in the real world). This is just another way to highlight how much the lessons learnt in the game can be useful in real life as well.

GENTRHU: ACTING CRAZY

If Razor plays the part of a pirate, then Genthru is the island equivalent of a terrorist, like his powers make clear.

Genthru’s most dangerous ability is called Countdown and it is interesting because it shares some similarities with Gon’s Jajanken.

First of all, both abilities share some similarities with common games. Gon’s power takes after rock, paper, scissors, while Genthru’s has some similarities with a game of tag or with cops and robbers. As a matter of fact a person has to touch another saying a keyword and the other has a time limit to touch the person back saying another keyword.

What is more, both Countdown and Jajanken are difficult to freely use in a fight because they both need time to be activated. This is because Gon needs time to concentrate his aura, while Genthru needs time to properly explain how his ability works. That said both characters come up with creative and smart ways to change this weakness into a strength.

These similarities already show that Gon and Genthru are more alike than what one might think at first sight. In particular, they have a common trait which has been commented by both Genthru and other characters:

This trait is firstly mentioned by Puhat and it is the ability of moving at one’s own pace without being influenced by others. This is an ability both Genthru and Gon show and it is later on called by Genthru the ability of “acting crazy”:

Genthru highlights how often people who assume a crazy demeanor can be dangerous and effective and juxtaposes this idea to Puhat trying to act in a smart way.

All in all, both Genthru and Gon have shown to be able to think outside the box, but they have declined their ability in opposite ways. This is shown since the first time they met. In that occasion, as it was shown above, Genthru condemned the game and called it cruel, while Gon said to believe the game to be entertaining and affirmed his will to enjoy it. These two opposite perspectives symbolize two different ways of living and of experiencing society.

On one hand one can only concentrate on the most negative dynamics and use them to their own advantage. Genthru does exactly this and is even able to discover hidden rules which make him able to kill more easily:

Moreover Genthru’s whole tactic makes use of the most toxic and greedy aspects of the game. For example, he makes use of a large group which could be formed only because of Battera’s huge reward and used the fact that Greed Island is isolated in order to spread the rumor of the Bomb Devils and used said rumor to his advantage. This strategy was especially effective because of the limited size of the island and the fact the everyone there knew about nen. What is more, once he revealed his power he could easily use a spell to put distance between him and his victims. In short, Genthru used the traits of the game to his advantage and used also things like fear and paranoia to “infect” people with his power. This is also represented by the bombs being linked to one’s pulses, so that the panic works to Genthru’s advantage. Genthru is a character who feeds people’s worst instincts and is fed by them in return. This is lampshaded also by Biscuit:

In the end if all the people who were infected by Genthru had attacked him together some of them might have survived, but ironically, such a large group came together only for convenience and so lacked the team-spirit and the selflessness to pull off such a feat.

On the other hand one can concentrate on the opportunities society gives to grow up, like Gon does while playing Greed Island. It is not by chance that he is able to obtain the card Wild Luck Alexandrite which can be obtained only by helping a group of bandits using the Paladin’s Necklace. All in all, it is a card which can be obtained through altruism and it is not by chance that Genthru, who is obsessed with finishing the game and has mostly stolen cards from others does not have it. The fact that actually very few people have that card despite it not being that difficult to obtain is symbolic of how much the majority of players is motivated by selfishness and greed and not really by the desire to finish the game. This is something proved also by the fact that Gon, who enjoyed the game most of all, is the one who answers the major number of questions during the final quiz.

At the same time, Gon is genuinely able to forge positive relationships within the game and the final group who fights Genthru is composed not only by him, Killua and Biscuit, but also by Goreinu and Tsezguerra’s group. It is only because Tsezguerra is able to selflessly put his life on the line and to believe in his alliance with Gon’s group that Genthru is finally defeated.

This leads us to another point of comparison between Gon and Genthru and about another theme the character explores. In particular, if Razor explores the theme of teamwork, its importance and its contradictions, Genthru explores the theme of the importance of being self-sufficient and in particular of developing a personal strength. I will be quoting the meta I linked above:

This  is also shown by Genthru who is both a character able to fight alone  and a person who works well with his comrades (as a matter of fact they  seem to share some powers).

The way Gon fights him is also  indicative of how the boy is trying to reconcile a strong wish of individual strength and the necessity to work together:

As  a matter of fact Gon has been given by Killua a plan to follow and if  he did, he would not have any problems in defeating Genthru. However,  Gon is not completely satisfied because he wants to use the battle to  test himself. So in the end he chooses to follow the plan only after he  managed to injure his opponent on his own.

This solution is a good  synthesis of Gon and Killua’s struggle to grow up together, but also in  an independent way, so that the can keep being friends, but also become  proper individuals. This is something which will be explored also in  the CAA with their friendship being partly deconstructed after GI spent  much time showing its importance and positive effects.

This is something which is not only conveyed through Genthru alone, but also through his two other comrades aka Sub and Bara who are nothing more than satellite characters and even lack a specific personality of their own. Sub and Bara seem to completely revolve arounf Genthru and the Bomb Devils since they both have a tattoo which symbolizes the group on their own forehead. What is more, they also lack any personal hatsu and the only nen power they are shown to have is the ability of making the bombs of Countdown detonate before the time and, even then, they need to be together with Genthru.

In short, Genthru’s group is clearly unbalanced and Genthru is the centre of it all, the most intelligent member and the strongest. This is not true for Gon’s group where Biscuit is clearly the strongest member and Killua comes up with the majority of the strategies of the group among which the one which leads to genthru’s downfall. In other words, each member of Gon’s group has their own personalities, talents and objectives.

This is clearly shown in Biscuit and Killua’s fights against Bara and Sub. As a matter fo fact the two battles end up just being moments where the two characters can be explored more. In particular, Biscuit reveals her true self during the fight and shows the readers something she has hidden even from her two students. Killua, instead, uses the fight to develop himself and his hatsu, so as a wayto train and to advance in his journey for individuality.

In conclusion, the victory against Genthru is finally reached thanks to both individual strength and team-work and it is symbolic of Gon and Killua’s growth throughout and thanks to the game. At the same time, Genthru’s defeat is also a defeat of an excessive greedy and selfish perspective:

Gon, Killua and Biscuit manage to touch Genthru’s with their generosity and convince Goreinu to cure also the three bomb devils. In this way, Genthru too, just like Razor, is saved by a stranger’s generosity and can hope to redeem himself thanks to his relationships with his comrades which humanize him.

CONCLUSION: THE GOOD SIDE OF THE MAN-CHILD

All in all, Razor and Genthru are two people who are given a second chance thanks to Greed Island.

What is more, this second chance is given to them thanks to a particularly childish character (Ging for Razor and Gon for Genthru) who did not let himself be influenced by society’s standards, but imposed his own. Ging saw in Razor more than a criminal and Gon decided to fight Genthru not following the man’s rules (kill or be killed), but his own ones (enjoy the game and play correctly).

Both Ging and Gon’s behaviour can be seen as utterly childish and they are both described as selfish in multiple occasion. However, at least in Greed Island this childishness of them is not condemned, but highlighted as a positive trait which is able to offer an alternative take on things and on society’s most rigid structures.

This is also why it is so important that Greed Island in the end is nothing more than a game aka something created to have fun. This fact also underlines both Ging and Gon’s approach to life as something which must be enjoyed to its fullest.

At the same time, the arc itself has some things which will later be deconstructed. As a matter of fact Gon’s incredible stubborness is already criticized in this arc and will lead to a disaster in the CAA as it will Gon’s tendency to judge people according to how they behave with him. This tendency lets him forgive people like Binolt, but will prevent him from properly empathizing with people like Pitou in the CAA.

Finally, even the important themes of team-work and selflessness are partially subverted in the end. As a matter of fact Gon, Killua and Biscuit end up taking three cards with them in the real world.

-The first one is Blue Planet and it is Biscuit’s reward.

-The second is an Accompany card disguised as a Plot of Beach card.

-The third is the Paladin’s Necklace which is necessary to convert the Accompany card to its original form.

Let’s concentrate on the last two cards.

The Paladin’s Necklace is a card representative of the main characters’ philosophy throughout the game since they were like paladins trying to pursue a positive way to play and to defeat the people who were transforming the game in a trap. At the same time, it represents Killua’s selflessness and devotion to Gon since he basically chooses this card in order to let Gon’s trick to smuggle an Accompany in the real world work.

The fact that the Accompany has the appearance of a Plot of Beach card is also to highlight the importance the fight with Razor had in Gon’s personal journey. That fight is also a link Gon has with his father.

Finally, when it comes to the Accompany, Biscuit comments this:

She says that it is possible Ging’s message for Gon is that if he truly wants to meet him he should both become strong and leave everything behind. Let’s highlight that this message is coherent with the idea of Greed Island as a place to test people’s greed. According to this reading, Ging’s test on Gon is also one about his moral character. Will Gon lose himself after jewels and power or will he sacrifice them in favor of his bond with his father? Will he choose a simple spell over the wonderful cards he could take?

At the same time, the conclusion of Greed Island puts a dent in this reading and makes the situation more complex:

In the end Ging refuses to meet Gon because Gon chose an Accompany rather than a Magnetic Force. This can be read in two different ways.

a) What Ging is asking Gon to leave behind, so that he can meet his father are not only power and items, but also a friend who has helped Gon up until that point.

However, the fact that Gon does not can be seen as a way to highlight that not all greed is negative. As a matter of fact Gon treasures the people he grows close to and this in itself is not something negative. So, in the end, him not leaving Killua alone to go meet Ging can be shown as a sign of this.

b) In order to obtain the spell card Gon needed Killua’s help and he needed his help to complete the game. Gon needing comrades to complete the game is surely something Ging knew in advance. As a matter of fact, in order to use a spell card outside the game, two cards are needed. Given the nature of the game, it is very difficult for a single player to finish it on his own. This means that Gon would have had to surely join forces with someone, but if that were the case, then he would have had to share the reward in the end. This means that, in order to obtain two of the three cards given as a reward, Gon would have needed comrades ready to give them to him.

Because of this, it is hypocritical for Ging, who gives a lot of importance to comrades and the bond of friendship, to refuse to see Gon simply because he brings a friend along. 

We are again in a paradoxical situation similar to the one of Razor where there is a person celebrating bonds, but also refusing them on a certain extent.

Thank you for reading!

If you are interested in other analysys of HxH characters through their nen abilities here is a list of the ones I wrote up until now:

-Nanika

-Kurapika and Chrollo

-Killua and Illumi

-Gon and Hisoka

-Meruem and Komugi

-Palm Siberia

-Neon Nostrade

-Neferpitou and Shaiapouf

-Kachou and Fugetsu

-Menthuthuyoupi

-Ikalgo and Welfin

-Knuckle and Shoot

[bat-lings]

Do you think Dick and Damian have a brotherly relationship?

Anonymous asked: “What do you reckon Dick thinks of Damian and what's your view on their relationship?”

The first thing that jumps to my mind when thinking of Dick and Damian is, oh, how far we’ve come.

[Nightwing (1996) #138 || Batman (1940) #687]

Dick didn’t particularly care for Damian before Bruce’s death. He didn’t have to. This was obviously a child with no interest to get to know him (waaaay unlike Tim who was the initially one-sided motor to his own relationship with Dick), a brat, and more importantly not Dick’s responsibility.

As hinted in the last panel above, Dick’s involvement with Damian starts very much as a duty thing. Someone has to take up the Batman mantle after Bruce’s death. Someone has to keep Damian in line and guide him. And there’s no one else to do either, so Dick steps up. He didn’t particularly seek to engage with Damian before he lost the luxury of the choice, much like he lost the luxury to be Nightwing.

It’s a stage of transition for both. Taking on the mantle is an extremely delicate process for Dick. Damian’s identity was built entirely around the fact that he’s Bruce’s son and heir, but his father isn’t here anymore and he’s got no interest in knowing what he thinks is an usurper. But Damian is terribly out of place too. He struggles to adapt to values that contradict everything he was taught, reins himself in against every instinct, and is still told he’s too aggressive, too violent, not enough in a sense. Unworthy of his father’s legacy, and unable to change that with the means he knows.

They’re both at a crossroads. That specific configuration complicated their early days to no end, but it’s also the reason Dick invested so much into their duo. It was hardly a natural thing to do for him– much like becoming Batman.So, how do I do it? Dick thinks, on both front. He has to settle on what he’ll make of Batman, and what he’ll make of this improvised partnership with Damian. Let’s discover it together, he tells him.

[Batman (1940) #688]

And this right here is another defining point of their dynamics: Dick includes Damian in every step of the process.

It doesn’t make everything easy or instinctive. At this point uncertainty defines their relationship. They both have to learn their new personas. There’s a lot of bumps on the way. Dick has to settle on the kind of Batman and mentor he’ll be, and Damian’s still an insecure, uncooperative brat.

[Batman & Robin (2009) #1, #2 & #4] 

Some would find Dick almost uncharacteristically patient during most of his interactions with Damian. Tbh I do think he’s been toned down and I’d have expected him to let his temper get the best of him more often– he snapped at Tim (the first person he really saw as a brother) on several occasions ffs.

Yet the narrative emphasized Dick’s conscious decision to take on that responsibility and to make the best of it. It’s not just that he has to get to know Damian, like he did with Tim. He has an additional work to do as the only mentor available.

Damian thinks respect is something you gain. He yells at Dick to prove himself as a teacher, but in the same vein Damian thinks he must prove himself worthy of being kept around. Dick teaches him that a worthwhile dynamic is based upon respect. That Damian already has his, but not only.

[Batman & Robin (2009) #3]

Maybe some of y’all are starting to know me. That’s where I groan, because Damian’s reaction at someone giving a shit about his life lies on the fact that under Morrison his mother cares for him only as a weapon, Talia’s character-assassination, yadda yadda yadda.

But there’s another point to that scene. This is Dick teaching Damian another type of devotion. Not one you grew out of respect to your superior, but one you grow out of care.

In the first few issues of B&R, Damian outwardly went against orders, used excessive force, and went after Pyg on his own. Dick went after him to ensure his safety. In the following panel, Damian questions orders because he genuinely doesn’t understand why Dick is keeping him apart of the main action. So Dick explains.

[Blackest Night: Batman #3]

Dick respects Damian and trusted him with something Bruce never even considered– Robin. Bruce wanted to provide a home for Damian, he wanted to step up as his father (at least when they first meet, then he kinda messes that up too), and man did he try to be patient with him. But not once did Bruce consider making Damian Robin. We joke a lot about Dick being the favorite but I feel some people forget how much Bruce loves, respects and admires Tim. Had Bruce never died, I don’t think he’d have given Robin to Damian at all before Tim chose to step down himself. And even then... he’d have expected Damian to change drastically before he gave him Robin.

When Bruce is known to return soon, it’s bitter-sweet because Damian fears to lose his partner, but also because he’s understandably unsure of Bruce’s intent to leave him the place Dick did.

[Batman & Robin (2009) #10]

Damian needed a place in his father’s legacy. He needed to be acknowledged as worthy to be part of it. I think Dick got that fairly early on (hence his decision to take Robin away from Tim) but that it went completely over Bruce’s head. Dick gave Damian the fragment of security that made it possible for him to realize his potential, then grow into his own person, something that’s absolutely crucial to Damian’s development.

Damian comes to confide in Dick and accept the provided comfort. A vulnerability he didn’t allow himself before, because this is the kind of weakness that Damian thought would nullify his chances of being accepted as a worthy heir/partner. But Dick worked hard on establishing that Damian already had his place as a bat, that he had nothing to prove, and that he could feel comfortable accepting reassurances.

[Blackest Night: Batman #1]

[B&R #22 || Streets of Gotham #7]

So. Father-son, or brothers? Well, I’m not sure we can categorize it that easily.

For sure, they’re equals & partners.Dick is Damian’s teacher in more ways Damian could ever have imagined. He’s also someone Damian can confide in, exchange easy banter with…

[Batman & Robin (2009) #17 & #20 || Streets of Gotham #7]

And someone he shares a true complicity with.

[Batman & Robin (2009) #17]

The grounds on which that relationship started make me lean more towards a parent-son bond than a brothers one. Because while family relationships are never easy, the parent has a duty to guide the child the best they can. If siblings don’t get along, then they don’t get along and (often) everyone lives their life. In most configurations, siblings don’t quite have the same responsibility towards one another than parents have towards their kid. There’s a reason mentor-student relationships are often associated with parent-child ones although they’re not quite of the same nature.

On more than one occasion Dick plays moderator between Damian and Tim, which feels like a “parent” role. Through his mentoring Damian, Dick definitely gathered facets of a parent– teacher, patient guide, placating presence. Anchor.

It’s when they grow closer that they really start to make me think of siblings. The banter, the specific brand of complicity. After Damian’s progress I get the feeling that Dick can loosen the mentor boots the slightest bit and relax in exchanges that are more natural for him.

The way he always treated Damian as an equal and let him in in the decision-making process, too, edges more towards friends or siblings than a strict mentor-protégé/parent-child dynamic. Dick explains his orders and never expects blind-obedience. I mean, elder siblings are often the Actual Worst at treating their cadets like equals (”nuh-huh I’ve got the power of experience respect me!” god shut up), and Dick himself is not without his authoritative sides with other teams/friends he worked with. But based on his global relationships with Tim and Damian, Dick is, as a sibling, above that.

But Dick is also the one who truly brought Damian into the family. His first teacher in this new environment; his first guardian. And Damian is the first kid Dick was truly responsible to guide into realizing his potential. It’s not like with Tim, when Dick took part in his formation on Bruce’s instructions. Dick was entirely in charge of Damian. It’s a mirror situation of Bruce taking Dick in. They’re each other’s first Batman and Robin.

Dick probably first thought of Damian as a responsibility. Alfred helped him see Damian’s potential & good heart, but once Dick saw it, I don’t think he ever doubted of it. I don’t know if he now sees Damian more as a son or as a younger brother. Probably a bit of both.

It’s a multi-faceted dynamic that I can’t sum up with one word. They’re the guys who reinvented the dynamic duo.

[heka-write]

Merlin Rewrite #2: Morgana’s Character Arc

Doing this rewrite series has made me realize that all of the characters in this show had a lot of lost potential. Merlin could have been more enlightened, Arthur could have been more accepting, Gwen could have had more natural character development. But Morgana was probably the most robbed character of all, and I think the show mishandling her character was ultimately one of it’s downfalls. 

Morgana Pre -Villain days

Morgana was really at her peak in Seasons 1 and 2. She was good at heart, but also edgy enough to be a rebel. She cared for the citizen’s of Camelot, both magical and non-magical. She scolded Uther’s treatment of the poor and the magicians, in contrast to Arthur who was more hesitant to question his father’s policies. 

More importantly, she was complex. She hated Uther’s policies and did plot to kill him so he could be overthrown, but when time came to actually go through with her plan (in Season 1 episode 12) she couldn’t do it. Not only does she really care about Uther, but she was good at heart. She couldn’t kill.

Even in the season 2 finale when she plots to kill Uther again, she shows such reservation on going through with her plan. You can see how hesitant and regretful she looks after the plan is set in motion. 

Then Merlin poisons her. She is visibly hurt and shows feelings of betrayal.  Morgause takes her away, and she is gone for a year. 

Naturally, her hatred for Camelot grows, and her anger for Merlin for betraying her is intact. It makes sense for her to try overthrowing Camelot once again. 

So what part of her arc in the show doesn’t make sense? 

Morgana’s Behavior Post-Villain 

Morgana comes back, rightfully mad at Uther, rightfully distrustful of Merlin, but she is suddenly brutally killing harmless guards, and letting innocent civilians die. 

Good? The whole reason Morgana went against Uther in the first place was because he was killing innocent people. Why would she say “good” or even put other innocent people at risk? Morgana joining the villain team because she has no other way of fighting against Uther’s tyranny makes sense, but this? This is straight up OOC. 

People often talk about how Morgana wasn’t an effective villain. Seasons 3-5 are essentially three seasons of Morgana trying a scheme to overthrow Arthur, failing and trying again the next episode. Critics are definitely right in this respect; the only thing that she really accomplished was killing Uther, and Arthur in the very end (but also dying herself, so that doesn’t really count) all of her other plans fail repeatedly. We know Merlin will come in at the end of the episode (or the next if it’s a two parter) and thwart her plan. 

In season 1, we had a different villain every week. Each one had their own unique personality and goals so seeing them fail didn’t get repetitive the same way it did for Morgana. 

Not only that, but her motivation was completely whack. Her goal was to protect innocent magical people from being killed, but she killed plenty of innocent people herself. How exactly would that work? None of the peaceful magical people would bow down to her if she looked like she would be a ruthless and cold leader. 

Her hatred of Gwen in particular came out of left field. Morgana had a strong bond with Arthur before becoming evil, and it made a bit of sense as to her hating him because he was following in Uther’s footsteps. However, her bond with Gwen was completely shoved under the rug for the sake of causing conflict. The show was trying to say she hated Gwen because she betrayed her (in her Season 3 takeover), but where did the hatred of her becoming Queen come from? Morgana never cared about royalty until she found out she had a right to the throne, so why is Gwen such a threat to her when they had an intense bond? When just the prior season she was begging Uther to save her (Guinevere and Lancelot)? Morgana didn’t just hate the way Uther treated magicians, she hated the way he treated the poorer civilians of his Kingdom. Her hatred of Gwen completely contradicted her motivations. 

I’ve watched the show twice as of now. The fact that I can’t pinpoint the exact actions or reasons as to why Morgana started hating her best friend shows how convoluted it all was. 

Back to her bond with Arthur, the aftermath of that bond wasn’t addressed well either. They were super close in season 1, distant in season 2, and after season 3 they are just enemies. There is no recollection of their pre-villain bond. No moments of hesitation or complexity. No mention of their bond before Merlin even came to Camelot. Morgana simply hated him and he simply treated her as an enemy. We only get some half assed lines about “my sister” or “my brother”, there is no real feeling behind them. 

All in all, Morgana was not an effective villain action wise nor motivation wise. Villains are nothing without their motivation, and the thing about Morgana is that her motivation was not evil. 

Her motivation was that she wanted to protect magical people from unjust persecution. Camelot embodied that oppression. Uther was a tyrant. Her motivation was actually good, but because it went against the hero’s (Merlin and Arthur) destiny, she was automatically vilified by the narrative. 

The reason Morgana failed as an evil character was because the writers’ were too desperate to have a consistent villain. They wanted a final boss instead of a villain of the week routine. It didn’t matter that Morgana’s motivation made little sense in portraying her as evil. It didn’t matter that two seasons of character interaction and relationships were being contradicted. As long as they could have a FV they would do it.  Morgana failed as a character because the writer’s shoved her complexity under the rug for the sake of making her a villain instead of embracing her complexity and letting it flourish. 

How it Should Have Been Done

I have spent the entirety of this post talking about how badly Morgana’s villain arc was handled, but I am not against the idea of her having a villain arc. In fact, I think Morgana would have perfectly suited the anti- hero arc, one where she joins the villains to fulfill the needs the hero team can’t meet, but ultimately comes back to the good side with a fresh perspective. 

Other people have pointed this out, but Morgana’s character would have been perfect for a lancer arc in the five-man band. In this case it would be the four-man band of her, Merlin, Arthur and Gwen. 

Arthur is the hero of the show, and in true lawful good nature he follows the law of the land and is completely loyal to his father’s ways. Morgana, in the lancer contrast, is more chaotic good and does what she thinks is right, regardless of if it is lawful or not. She has openly rebelled against Uther for what she thought was right. Morgana and Arthur were presented as complete foils to one another, and it fit perfectly well because they were half brother and sister. 

It does total sense for Morgana, not having any other resource to turn to, to join the villains to take down Camelot. Especially since Merlin had kept her in the dark, she could have joined them or worked with them but not go completely off the rails like she did in the show. 

A prime example of this is Sasuke Uchiha from Naruto. Sasuke was more morally ambiguous than Naruto or anyone in the Leaf Village, so he temporarily joined the villain Orochimaru to achieve his goals of getting revenge on his brother because his hometown simply could not help him. However (in the early days of the show) even when he was with Orochimaru he would not kill innocent people. The show had implied since the beginning that Sasuke would eventually come back to the good side, because he was never truly evil.

Plenty of other shows have followed a similar arc structure, and even though it may be cliche to some it would have been beneficial for Morgana’s character because it keeps her complexity while also highlighting the complexity of the issue.

Morgana, in her time away from Camelot, would have to struggle in deciding which side to choose. The villains would insist that the only way to get rid of Uther’s unjust laws is to hurt the citizens of Camelot, but she wouldn’t do it because she knows that’s wrong. Arthur and Camelot would insist that the only way to rid the world of the evils of magic would be to persecute magicians, but she would stand against that too. In her time away, she would learn that there aren’t just two sides to a problem, that the world isn’t black or white. That instead of joining Morgause or any other magical villain, she could join the Druids and other peaceful magical people in protest and rebellion. 

 If she eventually came back to help Camelot, this would have a positive affect on Arthur as well. The girl he thought betrayed him came back to help him, despite the fact that she is now working with magicians. He would be confused because his father had taught him his whole life that magic was wrong, but his own half sister would be fighting for good. 

Arthur and Morgana relationship could be a lot more fleshed out and complex. Arthur would be fighting the side of Camelot’s protection, Morgana would be fighting the side of innocent magician’s protection, and they would eventually have to come together and find an even solution that meets halfway. It would be especially symbolic because it would mean Uther’s children are bringing peace to the land by bringing together both sides that he had failed. This type of rivalry of philosophies in fiction is almost always done in male-male or fraternal relationships, so having it done through a brother and sister relationship would be something new. 

The middle ground that these two siblings would meet would obviously be through Merlin. He has always the one in the shadows mediating relations between Camelot and the magician, so having him do the same thing between Arthur and Morgana and eventually bring peace through that would earn him his title in the show. This would be possible if Morgana was still IC, and not just turned completely into a villain and closed off to Merlin. This scenario would be much more preferable than him simply taking Arthur’s side and eliminating anything that got in the way. The show completely threw his bond with Morgana under the bus for the sake of Merthur and fulfilling his destiny, and I think that was ultimately his downfall (but I’ll get into that in another post). 

This scenario could also fix the problems with her relationship with Gwen after season 3. I could definitely see Morgana being away from Camelot and resentful of it, but coming back to help save Gwen when she is in danger. Arthur would be annoyed, but reluctantly accept her help because someone they both care about is in danger. 

I could also see Gwen being resistant to Morgana, but ultimately accepting her because Morgana proves she is loyal to her, the same way she was before she found out she had magic. 

This storyline for Morgana would also make so much sense because in the Arthurian legend (to my knowledge) she does get redeemed at the very end. She does turn good, so why couldn’t the writer’s give her this chance in the show? 

In conclusion, this storyline for Morgana would have been 10000x better for the show than what we really got. The reason the real ending failed was because Arthur and Merlin ultimately failed. They failed to bring magic back to Camelot. They failed to bring peace. Arthur failed to live on as a successful king. They failed because they refused to acknowledge the humanity in Morgana’s argument, and the side of the magical people. If Merlin had reached out to the opposite side (the side that he has ties to), he would have been able to win them over. If he defended Morgana in front of Arthur more, she would have stayed good. Instead, anything against Camelot was automatically labeled as evil, and nothing was really able to change. The show just continued the cycle of two sides, and failed to bring them together because it failed to let Morgana be seen as a complex leader of her side. But I’ll get into the detail of Merlin’s toxic loyalty to Camelot in a different post. 

Believe it or not, this post was actually cut short. In the upcoming installments of the “Rewriting Merlin” series, a lot of my other posts would be influenced by a better Morgana storyline. That’s how important she was to the show. 

[anonymouscrocodilefan]

Addendum: Ex-Slave Croco Theory

LONG TIME NO POST, and not quite a shower thought, but it occurred to me at one point that I never actually debunked the other common theory about Croco’s secret (the one Ivankov has on him).

The major theories I’m aware of (all of which I find flawed):

1. FTM Croco (Croco was a woman & other gender/sexuality-related variations). This is the immediate conclusion most people jump to, and I’m pretty sure it’s a red herring. Although, as I’ve mentioned, I wouldn’t mind if it were true. I pretty thoroughly debunked this in one of my first posts: http://anonymouscrocodilefan.tumblr.com/post/132946232157/2-crocodiles-past

2. Croco was on Whitebeard’s crew (in some variations the chopped off hand was to remove WB’s tattoo). And is for some reason ashamed of that and/or left for reasons related to his weakness. This has been completely debunked by Word of God. See my very first post: http://anonymouscrocodilefan.tumblr.com/post/132880323933/1-crocodile-the-warlord

3. Croco’s missing hand originally had a different power from the “drying” ability of his right; the secret behind this removed power is related to his other weakness. I don’t think this theory is as widespread as the others, nor am I particularly against it. But I don’t really buy it either. Plus I think with the advent of “awakened” powers as a concept, this idea is getting less and less likely. I’ve only ever tangentially discussed this though (never directly addressed the specifics of this theory): http://anonymouscrocodilefan.tumblr.com/post/135195626561/shower-thought-handedness

4. An actual physical/power-related weakness (aside from the water weakness and the obvious existence of haki). Discussed this in the same post as FTM Croc. This one seems to make sense in context, but is narratively unsatisfying to me. I can kinda imagine it though – if water is a weakness, I wonder about wind (water clumps sand, but wind does the opposite)? Still, Oda could’ve easily done the same scene with something along the lines of “no worries, I know how to defeat him” – so the specific and somewhat ambiguous use of the word “weakness” and Iva promising not to give him away if he behaves is... interesting.

5. Croco is a former slave (like Hancock and Fisher Tiger). I can’t believe I never discussed or even brought up this theory... because it’s actually one of the earliest ideas I personally considered (along with “Croco has revolutionary connections [beyond the acquaintance with Iva]”, which I’ve long since discarded).

Like the “revolutionary” theory, I discarded it very early on (and didn’t see it discussed nearly as often), which is probably why it slipped my mind.

Also, my arguments against this particular theory are mostly circumstantial, like my arguments against the missing hand/physical weakness theories (but unlike the FTM/WB theories, which have fairly solid textual evidence working against them and in the latter case has been explicitly contradicted by Oda’s statements).

Still, it’s probably worth discussing. So here are my thoughts.

First of all, it’s a tempting theory on the surface. Unlike the FTM and WB theories, it also gives him a valid motivation for his dislike of the government (and apparent desire to create a Utopia [we are soooo short on details there, including how seriously he meant it]). It would also fairly neatly explain his trust issues, although maybe not why he’s so adamant at first about human connections being worthless (the WB theory probably does the best on that one, but like I said, it’s total bunk).

Nonetheless, it doesn’t really “feel” right, either.

As I’ve previously noted (see the post with FTM Croco), Crocodile’s reaction to Iva’s threat is actually relatively subdued despite the way the whole thing’s been blown up in the collective fandom consciousness. Sure, it pisses him off, but he’s not upset or anything either. We have several known ex-slave characters whose behavior can be easily contrasted with his, in fact. Fisher Tiger’s undying hatred. Hancock’s deep shame. Koala is the most well-adjusted one we’ve seen so far, but I think that’s probably down to the fact that she was still very young at the time (much younger than Hancock!) and has since grown up in a very supportive environment. For all three though, there is that underlying sense of having been betrayed by the government and its support of an inherently unjust system, and moreover by humanity itself. On the other hand, Croco’s scorn for the Marines and the government overall seems more akin to Law’s feelings on the subject, i.e. they’re useless assholes. In other words, yes he has trust issues, but he never comes across as traumatized. (Law maybe isn’t the BEST comparison there.)

The timing is tricky. Surprisingly, we know a handful of solid dates for Croco, despite the fact that he’s never gotten a backstory flashback. All of which I’ve discussed before, but again – he was at age 22 present for Roger’s execution. He became a Warlord shortly thereafter, with his defeat by Whitebeard presumably marking his first real setback as a pirate. Around age 30 he was featuring in newspapers for his “heroic” acts. By the time the series starts, he’s been a public figure for 20 years or so. Basically, he could’ve only been a slave during his child/teen years... and couldn’t have been part of the big breakout all the other known ex-slaves escaped during. That is, he would’ve had to escape on his own, or I suppose potentially with Revolutionary aid (which maybe accounts for the eventual Iva meeting when he’s a rookie). The former seems unlikely, no matter how clever the dude is. But the latter would have more naturally led to him being involved in the Revolutionary faction sooner or later rather than setting sail to compete with Roger and Whitebeard and coming up with his own grandiose schemes.

I talk about this all the time, but if we can trust his SBS child illustration – and I think we can, based on past experience – he was already toting around a real gun as a kid. And in fact it seems like he was probably already fairly skilled in its usage (mentioned this in the handedness post, but I have a feeling that his gun is holstered in a cavalry draw position rather than the more typical cross draw). His expression and stance also already lack that veneer of innocence that many (not all) of the child illustrations tend to have. From that (among other things), I’ve always gotten the sense that he was a street kid who pretty much raised himself/grew up in the underworld... and would have been far too careful and shrewd to have been captured by anyone.

If his missing hand was the one with the tattoo (kinda has to be, since he had to get undressed for the Impel Down “baptism”)... well, Croco’s much too pragmatic to have chopped it off just because of a tattoo. Especially when there are more obvious ways of subverting or hiding the symbol (see also: Sun Pirates). No matter how well he’s adapted to the lack of it, he is NOT the kind of man who would have willingly given up the practical benefits of having two working hands, imo. Even to escape (he’s no Zoro lol).

I dunno, even if all the above points can technically be written around, it feels kind of redundant to have another ex-slave Warlord in the mix. Sometimes redundancy is good, and adds thematic texture due to the different nuances. But I think we’re already pretty well covered.

(The remaining variations on this theory that I actually think are kind of viable but require way too much guesswork: he betrayed his allies into slavery [after being betrayed by them first, I’m thinking], OR he attempted to pull a rescue but failed [again, perhaps due to treachery] and chose to abandon them/save his own skin. These not only fit what we know about his personality, but also provide a decent explanation for why Iva specifically would be involved/aware, and suit the context of the exchange during Impel Down. Like I said though, way too much guesswork, especially re: what exactly in this scenario would serve as a hold over him.)

As for what I personally think the actual secret is, if not those two above options – my thoughts haven’t really changed that much since I originally wrote the FTM debunk post. In my view the three main options are 1) the backstory behind him obtaining his fruit; 2) whatever backstory there might be regarding his hook/scar (assuming they’re not just design elements like Doffy’s sunglasses LOL); and 3) the backstory behind his knowledge of Pluton and the poneglyphs (plus I assume he’s one of the few who knows the truth behind Ohara). Possibly those options might even be related to each other.

The only somewhat new addition to my thoughts: since Oda’s made the parallels between Croco and Luffy* even more explicit than before, I suspect Croco had a similar experience as Luffy/Sabo/Ace did in the Gray Terminal. (Remember that I think Croco was a street kid.) Only his reaction was something more along the lines of Sabo’s, if Sabo hadn’t gotten proper guidance in form of Dragon and had turned pirate instead.

(… I can’t be the only one who can imagine alternate universe Sabo going the evil mastermind route, can I?)

* The Croco/Luffy parallels are key to the Alabasta arc, and Oda then brought them up again with the SBS about Croco’s pirating history. And as I’ve argued in my MBTI posts before, their personalities are mirrors of each other (rather than “in opposition”).

But I’ve also seen people point out that there’s an interesting parallel to be found between Croco and Ace as well. (Both talented and ambitious young Logias who challenged WB early on in their pirating careers; one submitted, one picked himself back up to attempt his own path.)

Which I think makes it not unreasonable to eventually see an echo of Sabo in Croco as well. (Although I have previously thought the more explicit Sabo foil was Doflamingo, hence him turning up specifically during Dressrosa.)

I mean no matter what, the weirdly romantic vibe of Baroque Works and the idealism implied in “Operation Utopia” have been cracking me up for ages. And that’s gotta have its roots in something, right? Odd to think about, but we actually know way more of what makes Doflamingo “tick,” what his driving motivations are. We never got a true explanation for Croco. Just like Big Mom’s yearning for family and belonging is a corrupted version of Whitebeard’s family ethos (and note apparently SHE wants to construct a “utopia” of sorts as well), Croco’s stubborn opposition to the government strikes me as a corrupted version of the Revolutionary stance. That’s like the one thing we’ve known about him all along, the one reason we know he was after Pluton – and Marineford only further supported this. I mean yeah, no pirate actually LIKES the government for obvious reasons, but Croco’s disdain has been consistently highlighted in particular.

I’m convinced it means something.

[medschoolash]

Not trying to start anything, but I'm wondering how HE breaking up means anything for KH given the fact that the reason HE broke up is bc how violent Elijah is. Klaus has been way more violent towards Hayley & others, so I really don't see it going in that directions especially when the writers specifically said that Elijah's violence/violence towards Hayley was the reason they broke them up

Honestly I’m glad you sent me this anon.

Ever since Friday there has been such a gross oversimplification of Julie’s quote and what happened in the episode floating around so let me address this.

1. Hayley didn’t just break up Elijah because he is violent. She admitted that she is a monster as well, that she has done bad things….the problem is that the violence that Hayley experienced week before last is the fundamental core of who Elijah Mikaelson is. This is an exact quote from the episode where she goes through the red door. This nature is the core of his being, which means that Elijah is almost completely unchangeable. THAT’s the root of the statement Hayley is trying to make by letting him go. Elijah isn’t just violent, he’s violent at his core and he can not be any other way as evidenced by his progressively bad behavior. It started with sending davina to her death, then progressed to killing Marcel his own nephew, both of which she forgave even tho it contradicted things she had previously said about family and friendship. Then it progressed to him thinking about killing children the same age as hope to save Klaus, then it progressed to him actually killing 4 teenage girls on a whim. He also told Marcel he would end him for no other reason besides he felt that Klaus’s love for him was a weakness. Elijah is inherently unhinged, he has nothing there to ground his monster any more since it was only kept in check all this time by Klaus’s monster and Hayley finally realizes this. The violence he has perpetrated against her and other people can no longer be ignored for the sake of a love that she is coming to realize was rooted In fear at a vulnerable time in her life and a broken childhood.

2. The brutality Hayley experienced traumatized Hayley VERY badly. People want to gloss over this because it was in Elijah’s “mind” but she experienced every second of that beating. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a hallucination, it actually happened. She experienced more trauma at his hands than she has ever experienced from a man. He banged her head against a pole repeatedly, terrorized her in the woods as she screamed for help, choked her, hit her, body slammed her, tossed her against a tree like a rag doll, fed from her, and nearly killed her if not for her 7 year old intervening. To sit her and say that anything Klaus has done to her compares to that is just a misrepresentation of the truth. We know Klaus has done bad things to Hayley, the main two being when he choked her in season 1 and cursed her at the end of season 2, but Klaus has never brutalized Hayley in that manner before. Hayley has never experienced the sorta terror she experienced behind the red door at the hands of Klaus.

3. Timing is relevant here. It’s the most relevant thing when dissecting Julie’s quote about it….Elijah JUST brutalized Hayley a week ago, on the TO timeline it’s prolly only been days. She is very correct that if you subject a woman to that type of brutality at the hands of a romantic partner you can not in good conscious continue to lean into that idea that what they have is “love” and that it can just continue on. To have a woman who says repeatedly that even tho she is not perfect she does not want to invite depraved violence into her life and her child’s life just up and gloss over what happened to her with Elijah and what she now knows he’s capable of doing you set a TERRIBLE narrative for a female character. Carina had to explain this over and over again on twitter but Hayley hasn’t been perfect, she’s been selfish, violent, but SHE’S TRYING TO DO BETTER. She wants to do better. To have that be her narrative for the entire season and part of her narrative from the very beginning then have her be brutalized by her romantic partner and just continue on with their love story like it’s nothing would have been a disgrace to everything they have ever established about Hayley as a character and would have displayed a very ugly idea that a man can whoop your ass and then tomorrow it’s no big deal because “love”. She can’t fix him, it’s not her responsibility to do so either, and he’s pretty much unfixable, so what choice did they really have after making Elijah brutalize her. If you’re in that writers room as a woman it’s hard to look at that and say “but they love each other so we can’t tear them apart” at some point you have to love your female character enough to give her some growth and have her stay true to her beliefs as a woman and a parent. That’s what they did with Hayley. After seasons of brushing over the sad root of her affection for Elijah, after making her contradict herself over and over to hold on to this unfulfilling love, it sadly just couldn’t continue after is escalated to her traumatic experience behind the red door.

4. Nothing I’ve mentioned applies to Hayley’s current dynamic with Klaus, and nothing Julie said does either which is why this idea that “well Hayley doesn’t want violence so she can’t want Klaus later either” is laughable. Klaus Mikaelson hasn’t been in a violent situation with Hayley since 3x02, during which he was not her romantic partner. Klaus isn’t a depraved violent man at his core even if he is a monster, it’s actually been established that Klaus has always been much more gentle compared to his other siblings and has hardened over time. I can almost guarantee you that if Klaus was to be trapped in his own mind he wouldn’t find refuge in the darkest most depraved place of his subconscious. His core being is not the same as who Elijah is at his core which is why Klaus actually has the capacity to change and actually has done so. Klaus ahas shown progressive growth as a person over the series ESPECIALLY in his relationship with Hayley. He went from being unable to let her in early on to confiding in her about his turmoil while he was held captive, he went from trying (and failing) to control her giving her the utmost respect and autonomy, he went from believing he needed to bully his way into her life to being her true partner in every sense of the word. Klaus is doing the same thing as Hayley, something Elijah can not/has been unwilling to do which is accept your past but try to do better. Hayley herself has shown appreciation to Klaus this season for doing things that makes hope life less chaotic because she knows is hard he’s been a mess for 1000 years and change is hard for anyone but she sees he loves his daughter, he respects and cares die her, and he’s trying his best to be who she and hope needs him to be. These are two people who have had some rough times with each other, but Hayley has held Klaus accountable for every bad deed he has done towards her, she has challenged him to do better, even went as far as walking away from him when she felt he was a threat to the life she wanted for herself and hope and every time Klaus has rose to the occasion and changed. He has corrected his behavior, he has genuinely felt shame and remorse for all that he has done and has made a concerted effort to not repeat it. Out of the two men on her life right now Klaus is the only one actually doing right by her, he’s the only one there giving her space when she needs it, giving her comfort when she needs it, respecting her desires, and actively working on himself so that they can build the life that they both want for their daughter. If Hayley fell for Klaus it would not be making the same kinda statement that having Hayley stay with with Elijah would have been making. There is no violence between Klaus and Hayley, there is friendship, understanding, trust, partnership, and affection…all of which are absent from her dynamic with Elijah and was already absent even before the beat down.