#as in the characters who actually engage in piracy and criminal acts

[salteytakesonmanga]

And a minute ago they were so worried about her leaving without taking any money.

I absolutely adore that this trait of Nami’s never changes. Most of the Straw Hats aren’t overtly criminals, in the sense that the only thing that makes them criminals is the very act of calling themselves pirates and therefore anti-government. They don’t pillage towns, they don’t attack civilians, they don’t loot other ships… Any time these things do happen there are always extenuating circumstances that we as readers can point to as a reason it’s okay.

Nami is different. Nami is a career thief. She is good at it, she likes doing it, and she’s never going to stop. She is an “immoral” character and she’s also written in such a way that none of that matters. This isn’t a “god forbid women do anything” or “girlboss” thing. This is “sometimes characters are morally questionable and that is not a problem. You can and should continue to like them.”

[gravecinema]

Why The Goonies is the Perfect Kids Movie - 08/24/2020

I love The Goonies. It was one of my favorite movies growing up. It’s probably the best story about a group of kids that end up going on an adventure that you can watch. It’s an adventure filled with excitement, gadgets, danger, treasure, and a pirate ship! It has the realist and most genuine group of kids I’ve ever seen in a movie. It also has them acting like how actual kids are in real life. It helps make the story seem entirely believable, and it has you relating to and rooting for the kids for the entire movie.

The story of The Goonies starts when a family of criminals known as the Fratelli’s break one of their own out of jail and then evade the police. During this chase, we get a quick introduction to most of our characters for the movie, before transitioning into the house of our main character of Mikey and his older brother. The kids gather into Mikey’s attic in the search for something exciting, and there they find a treasure map left by the pirate One-Eyed Willy.  

With the threat of foreclosure looming for Mikey’s family in the Goondocks, he and the rest of the Goonies decide to follow the map in an effort to find the “rich stuff” and save his home. However, the start of their adventure leads them into the path of the Fratelli’s from the start of the movie. The Fratelli’s soon find out that the kids know who they are, and that they are also chasing after a treasure. It then becomes a race as the Goonies try to track down One-Eyed Willy’s treasure through an underground cave, all while staying one step ahead of the Fratelli’s.

On this adventure, the kids are also joined inadvertently by Mikey’s older brother, along with his love interest and her friend. This group of seven soon find themselves facing skeletons, booby traps, creatures, and dangerous paths on their trek to the treasure. One of the kids, Chunk, gets captured by the Fratelli’s early on and winds up befriending the deformed brother of the Fratelli’s known as Sloth, whom they keep chained to a wall. Sloth and Chunk then attempt to follow the Fratelli’s to help save Mikey and the rest of his friends.

The story is completely engaging, and we as the audience are with the kids every step of the way. Mama Fratelli is a great antagonist, and her pursuit of the kids is relentless. The interaction between her two sons that are with her is also a fun dynamic to watch. As great as the story is, the story is highly elevated by the great cast of characters throughout it. There is not a weak role or performance in the entire movie.  

What really makes the movie great for kids is that they can relate to the characters and their motivations. What kid wouldn’t want to go on an adventure looking for buried treasure. Every kid would also love to have a group of close friends to adventure with, and to essentially waterslide down a cave leading to a pirate ship. I was completely fascinated with all of this myself when I was a kid. I always wanted to go on a grand adventure, exploring new places, and having a close group of friends to do it with. That’s one of the reasons why I always loved this movie growing up, and continue to rewatch it as an adult.

I still get the same feeling watching this movie as an adult as I first did when I was a kid. That feeling is one of pure excitement. Every scene of this movie has a layer of excitement attached to it. There’s the Fratelli’s basement, the booby traps, the climactic battle on the pirate ship, and the scene of the playing of the bone piano while the Fratelli’s are close to catching up with the kids. This scene always has you on the edge of your seat and is my personal favorite.

Speaking of favorites, my favorite kid from the group has to be Data. He’s the inventor of the group and has all sorts of gizmos and gadgets that he uses to help the group on their adventure. He’s the most fun to watch, and that’s really what this movie is all about: Fun. This is just a plain fun movie. The scenes are fun, the music is fun, the characters are fun, and the action is fun. If you want to make a perfect kids movie, then you have to make it fun, and not be too nitpicky about certain details, like how a pirate ship found its way to being trapped in a cave in Oregon when the vast majority of piracy was located in the Caribbean during that time. As a kid, we don’t care about inaccurate historical details like that. We just want to watch a fun adventure movie, and The Goonies is exactly that.

Once The Goonies grabs your attention, it never lets go of it. From the second those kids enter that fireplace into the cave, and to the moment when they first lay eyes on the pirate ship, you are with them throughout the entire movie and adventure. The moment when the Fratelli’s capture the kids on the pirate ship and then Sloth and Chunk show up to save them make for a great climactic sequence. The final shot of the ship sailing away into the ocean is also a great way to end the movie.

I clearly have quite a bit of nostalgia when it comes to this movie. The best time to first watch this movie for anyone is when they are a kid, as that’s when it’ll leave the biggest impression on you. Even as an adult, I love to rewatch it again every so often, just to capture that same feeling of excitement and adventure that it brought me when I first saw it. I look forward to eventually watching it with my own kids one day, whenever that day comes. These are all reasons why I believe that The Goonies will always go on to be considered a perfect kids movie.  

[bestworstcase]

how's everyone in bitter snow feel about the justice system in Corona? also how are the guards in bitter snow, how do these people treat their positions as guards?

okay anon you said “everyone” so like

gonna talk specifically about all the character’s perceptions right now, as of chapter 9, because a lot of these feelings evolve over the course of benighted and also the rest of the series 👍

major characters!

cassandra!

she is well aware of the harshness of the system. her own birth parents were executed for their crimes—we’ll get more into that later >:)—and given who her father is and what her aspirations are, she knows some of the more unsavory details about what guard work can mean. there is a part of her that is… uncomfortable with this, but she rationalizes it as a discomfort related to feeling like she’s trapped in the shadow of the (very serious) crimes for which her parents were executed. she has very much drunk the kool-aid that all of this stuff is correct and just because it’s only being done To Criminals, who of course are not like regular people, who must be protected From Criminals (like her parents, there’s this whole nasty feedback loop of self-disgust going on with this). 

she also very much has her dad on a pedestal and doesn’t want to think badly about anything he does, and she wants to make him proud, and in her mind making him proud = succeeding as a guard. so that’s another huge thing tilting her in favor of the coronan justice system. 

rapunzel!

i don’t think rapunzel has quite made the connection between the existence of the king’s watch and what they actually do, which is arrest people and feed them into the horrible justice system. she knows that eugene was arrested and nearly hanged, and she doesn’t feel good about that, but she also has not been exposed to this system as a… daily thing with a wider scope than simply being something eugene escaped from. she has a very particular kind of self-centered naivety where it is still hard for her to grasp that people… exist, outside of her life, almost like a lack of object permanence where the concept of Other People is concerned? because she grew up in a tower with nobody but gothel. she’s beginning to develop inklings of this, but it’s not there yet, and with frederic and everyone in the palace actively trying to shelter her from the more upsetting pieces of palace life still, she’s still kind of navigating around obstacles that she can’t see in order to get there.

anyway all of which is to say she’s laboring under the impression that everything in corona is hunky dory. still very much in the homecoming honeymoon phase.

eugene!

eugene is in this weird transitional place where he, by his own actions in the last chapter, has been rather rudely shocked out of his own complacency and now he’s looking around at all the luxuries and privileges he has been granted purely by virtue of being the guy who happened to bring rapunzel home and he’s going: oh. oh i didn’t earn any of this actually. 

he knows exactly what corona is like. if you’re a thief in this world you know not to get arrested in corona. and he did get arrested in corona and he came very close to losing his life because of it. for a while there, i think he just fully embraced his pardon and decided to live it up because, well, why not, it’s what he deserves after a lifetime of hard living and fighting to survive… but fundamentally, he’s not an asshole even if he is sometimes an ass, and the more he lets go of the flynn rider persona the more his natural empathy reasserts itself. right now, his focus is on being better for rapunzel, but i think he sort of has in the back of his mind how very, very lucky he got in his brush with the coronan justice system and that inclines him to at least feel… dubious about becoming a cog in it. 

lance!

he’s sort of similar to eugene, in that he has this criminal background and he knows exactly what sort of reputation corona has in the criminal world… but there’s also this element of, he’s sort of… adjacent to law enforcement now. thief-takers are sort of like private investigators and sort of like bounty hunters, and they exist in the weird margin between law enforcement and criminal activity and lance has this very personal experience of having been sort of… invited into that space as an opportunity to reform his ways, and that worked for him.

i think he and eugene could probably have a really interesting conversation not too far down the line about how they got out of the thieving business and became better people and ways that could be applied on a broader scale versus just chucking everyone in prison, which i imagine tends to be the default not just in corona but in most countries in this region. lance sees his experiences helping victims of theft as intrinsically linked to his personal decision to never steal again, whereas eugene reformed because rapunzel, specifically, treated him with compassion and dignity. put those two things together and you have a decent platform for a restorative approach to criminal justice. 

varian!

varian is a kid. he has no clue about anything but his alchemy lol. i think he probably has a lot of romanticized notions of adventurous thieves in the vein of flynn rider and is accustomed to seeing guards/watchmen as The Enemy through that lens, but he has very very little actual real world experience with either and to him it all has this aura of fiction. it’s something that happens To Other People, not to him. 

caine!

caine saw the coronan justice system tear her family apart when she was nine years old, over a petty theft her father committed to feed his starving family. also, she’s saporian, so she has this extra pile of cultural grudges against corona in addition to this personal trauma. she hates corona, and unlike in canon—where the narrative need to make everything About Rapunzel demanded that her motivations be dumbed down—she puts the blame for what happened to her squarely where it belongs, on king frederic’s crackdown and the system backing it. though she’s not a separatist herself, she’s perfectly happy to work with them to attack corona, and she sees her piracy as… sort of a campaign against corona and its allies? in that she targets mostly trading vessels belonging to the seven kingdoms and has definitely liberated coronan prison barges in the past. 

as far as she’s concerned corona can just burn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ up saporia

sirin! 

…honestly you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who hates coronan justice more than sirin does because [spoilers lol]. she keeps it on a very tight lock, because she is a pragmatist first and foremost and she isn’t interested in expending her rage on a doomed cause. when she acts on her hatred, she wants it to matter. and she’s also a leader, with a lot of vulnerable people relying on her to keep them safe, so she can’t just lash out the way she might want to if she had no other obligations. so she’s cultivated this very cold, very methodical anger and is proceeding with her plan very carefully but also, definitely enjoyed getting her hands bloody in the prologue. 

assorted secondary and minor characters (just the ones i feel like talking about, rip to everyone else)

commander peter!

it is peter’s job to enforce the coronan justice system. fundamentally, he has to agree with it. i think he has this ideal of what justice should be in the back of his mind and he sees all the ways that coronan justice doesn’t line up, and he’s trying his best to close those gaps while working from within the system. he cares very intently about his country and its people, and he firmly believes that he’s working to keep everybody safe—even if it comes at the cost of this harsh, sometimes unfair system. 

as part of this, he keeps very high standards of conduct for his watchmen. abuses of power do happen—peter can’t always be watching every single man in his force, and while he ostensibly commands the city watches in the rest of corona’s city’s too, in practice his influence tapers off outside of herzingen simply because of distance—but he tries to stamp them out as best he can.

(there’s definitely a big range within the king’s watch itself vis a vis how the guards approach their work. i think, taken on average, they... are cops. their job is to enforce the system first and foremost and they wouldn’t get into that career if they didn’t believe in it; some try to be more compassionate about it than others and some are just in it for the authority but they’re all... working to serve the system.)

arianna!

she’s both a foreigner originally—she was born and raised in eldora, one of corona’s neighbors—and very well traveled, so she has seen a lot of other models of justice in action and this leads to her taking a dim view of the way corona handles things. i think she and frederic probably have a lot of heated arguments about his crackdown in particular, and it’s one of the biggest points of contention in their marriage. she does often succeed in being a moderating voice, and i imagine she is a vocal proponent for reform not just in corona but in the seven kingdoms generally, but unfortunately she has no real authority in corona (because frederic is the monarch, not her) so her influence in this regard is limited. 

frederic!

in contrast to arianna, frederic i think truly believes that cracking down harder on crime is the only way to make it go away. he’s thinking about how a criminal in a jail cell is a criminal who isn’t out on the streets hurting people, rather than thinking about where these criminals are coming from in the first place. he listens to arianna—and to ludolf and peter, who are other moderating voices in this regard—but he also has a very hard time stepping out of this mindset of “we just need to take the bad people and put them somewhere else so the good people will be safe.” in a way, i think he has a very similar mindset to rapunzel in that they both tend to engage in black-and-white thinking, but where rapunzel sees only the good parts of the world, frederic tends to see things in the most bleak light possible. 

gilbert! 

gilbert is a career military guy in a kingdom with no standing army during a time of peace. this… absolutely has an impact on his approach to domestic justice, and in particular he takes the attitude that criminals and dissidents are The Enemy. he feeds into frederic’s worst impulses and fears because in his mind, frederic is too cowardly to do what must be done to quash The Threat. i think… like frederic a lot of this ultimately comes from a desire to keep corona safe, he’s just jumped fully overboard into not considering the “wrong” sort of coronan part of the country he wants to protect. and then him seeing everything through this military lens is fuel on that fire. 

ludolf! 

he’s a champion of compassion. he hates the existence of the prison barges and the gallows, but i think he also does not have much in the way of actionable alternatives; he’s has this kind of idealized, almost rapunzel-esque idea that if they just apply a little faith and goodwill then the problems can be solved (and this tends to weaken his stance politically, because he runs into the “well then what do you propose we do” problem; he works best in tandem with someone like arianna or peter, both of whom are details people who can come up with real solutions). 

quirin! 

having been… sort of? the closest thing aphelion had to law enforcement back in the day, i think he has strong opinions on corona’s system—namely that it’s all wrong—but he keeps them to himself because he’s not one to talk about the past in general and he’s also well aware that in corona, he’s just some peasant and his opinions aren’t wanted. mostly, he tries to keep his head down, keep himself and his kid out of trouble, and focus on preserving the simple life he has constructed for himself. 

(in aphelion, i think criminality was dealt with through the moonstone cult—this decayed somewhat over the course of the dedication, as aphelionese people lost their strong connection with the moonstone, but the basic philosophy still remained, and the basic philosophy was “work to understand the root of the problem, then shine the light of truth and understanding on it until the problem reveals its solution”)

adira!

adira very much thinks coronans are all a bit nuts and unlike quirin is not at all shy about voicing this thought when it happens to come up on the rare occasion that she stops being a vagrant long enough to talk to somebody. but that doesn’t happen very often. mostly she’s been too focused on searching for the sundrop and fixing the moonstone to care much about what corona does with its criminals, but also if she were directly asked she’d be like “were you trying to create a criminal assembly line? because that’s what you did” lol

nigel!

i think nigel is a very fearful person in general but this also wars with a degree of practicality. the notion of criminals frightens him but he can also recognize that many people turn to crime out of desperation or fear, and he has a tough time navigating this dissonance. on the whole i think he’d tend to lean toward whoever argued the most reasonably on any specific subject where coronan justice is concerned, which in practice means he ends up aligned with peter a lot—he respects peter’s authoritative experience in dealing with criminals, and peter tends toward this reasonable-sounding, incremental reform approach to the system that speaks to both nigel’s fearfulness and his practical side. 

feldspar! 

he’s in kind of an uncomfortable situation, in that he is saporian but i don’t think he is particularly open about that fact and would really prefer his coronan neighbors not… know about it. because being saporian, he has a clearer view of how the coronan justice system disadvantages his people and how the crackdown landed especially hard on saporia. i think he lives in perpetual anxiety over the possibility of getting in trouble or being accused of a crime and having his whole life destroyed as a result. also with his friendship with cass, there’s definitely a part of him that wants to just. shake her. until she wakes up to the injustices being done; but he’s far too anxious to actually do something like that so whenever she starts going on about being a guard he’s just kinda like :| 

xavier!

as the royal blacksmith and thus supplier of the weapons and armor used by the king’s watch, he has this closeness to the law enforcement side of it that definitely biases him a bit in favor of them; they’re one of his primary customers and biggest sources of business. but also, he’s a very intelligent, very well-read person, and i feel like he spent some time traveling in his youth, so he’s in a similar boat to arianna where he knows for a fact that this is not the only or the best way to do things and he could probably be coaxed into a lengthy conversation about it with the right questions. 

[thehorriblemu]

On One Piece and Piracy (Opinion)

First off: I love One Piece. I love the characters, I love to world, I love the lore surrounding it, and I absolutely love the comedy.

That being said:

One Piece in itself is very liberal with the term “pirate”.

Piracy, in its most basic definition, is attacking and robbing ships and coastal towns of valuable goods, and, in a wider definition, engaging into other illegal activities such as smuggling or slave trade, for the sake of profit.

Most pirates came from poor families, were people who have sunk very low, were slaves or were former slaves, in other words people who couldn’t help themselves and saw no other way (in that sense, Nami, Brooke and Robin are the only people of the crew remotely close to that). I also want to clarify that that doesn’t mean they are stereotypically greedy.

The Straw Hat crew very rarely did any of that. Aside from their intention to rob Skypia, they rarely engage in illegal activities that would actually define them as pirates. “No prey, no pay” is practically non-existent (yet, there always seem to be enough money to sustain themselves).

That, however, doesn’t mean they aren’t criminals. Or that they aren’t considered “pirates” in-universe. I think they are pirates in the loosest sense of the word, as they DID commit acts of piracy, though very rarely, and lean more towards “explorers”. The Straw Hat Pirates are a group of friends and vigilante heroes that follow common hero tropes, but in this case under a Jolly Roger.

Also, Nami, Usopp and Sanji (depending on how you see his position within the crew), all have committed acts that could have lead to marooning (being abandoned on a deserted island) or execution, with Usopp being the worst offender by committing mutiny.