I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears
I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!
The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.
More:
Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.
Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)
Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.
Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.
Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.
The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.
They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.
And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.
I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.
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the thing about megumi is that. he's just a kid. he's been pretending to be an adult since he was five and he's fooled a lot of people. he drinks black coffee, he reads nonfiction books, he doesn't get involved with the others' antics, he pretends he doesn't care. he emulates the adults he's known - detaches himself like his father, places himself in the background like his step-mother, takes on the responsibility of protection like gojo - but he's not an adult. he's fifteen. he's scared, and he's miserable, and he keeps losing everyone he's cared about. tsumiki was cursed, itadori was sentenced to death, gojo was sealed, tsumiki was possessed, and of course everything inside of him shattered. he's been masquerading as someone years older than he is for his entire life, until he snapped in half, because he is a child. and he craves love just as much as anyone else, even if he's been made to believe he should be stronger than that. he's fifteen years old. he should be doing algebra homework and standing in tsumiki's bedroom doorway just to be an annoying little sibling and fighting with gojo over stupid things like curfew times or wanting a pet and instead, he threw himself headfirst into a sorcerer death match and lost everything including himself and he was using all the energy he had left in a last-ditch effort to protect his friends because he loves them and he loves and he loves and he loves and sukuna knew he could take advantage of that because if you look at megumi beneath the surface for even a moment, it's so obvious that he's just a kid who loves too much for his own good. he tries to hide it because he knows it will only hurt in the end, but he's fifteen and he never figured out how to truly erase his ability to care for others and when he's broken down to his bare essentials, when everything is gone but the shattered remains of his soul, what remains is a fifteen year old kid who just wants to be loved
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So .... communities. Right. Once upon a time a guy was so personally offended by the concept of divorce that he hand-wrote my mother a letter to tell her not to divorce my father. Insane. 22 years after this, I had to teach this guy in a class. We had to co-occupy a space both in full awareness that he was the busy-body freak who tried to tell my mother not to get a divorce she absolutely needed to get (And did get! three cheers for divorce!🥳🥳🥳). And. We did co-occupy. The course went great. It was fine.
Life is long and life is weird and I still don't like that guy very much but living in a community means accepting that the guy who gets involved in other people's divorces still has something to offer the world. Or something.
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i've seen a couple of fics where azula and zuko has a third op sibling but i could find none, zero(0) fics where ozai has a sister over him-
i'm saying this because i want his ass pummeled and headwrapped by his (not too much) older sister. i want him to be raised by an older sister
iroh, being like a decade or two older than them both, would neglect them both serving war on propaganda during his prime and takes his leave after his loss not unlike canon
the sister would have a couple (or more?) years with her mother so she picks up some actual parental love and how it's supposed to be before ozai is born
(or not and they end up like zuko and azula except they have just a little more agegap then them, ozai is more ill-tempered than zuko, and the sister pummels him more than azula does zuko but not brutally (or not) and they have a lot of sibling fighting and bonding and normal sibling shenanigans minus the parental love so probably some angst as well)
and if it still somehow ends up like canon where ozai takes over the throne due to either by his plotting or some fucked up misogyny by azulon or sozin's law or whatever she will be fucking furious and she will show it
(if so ozai could team up with her for her support but betraying her when the idea of power gets to his head)
(or or ozai would keen to her after iroh's loss and she would be like "no you little shit i knew all of your antics even better than our elderly dad and ever since you were baby" but if somehow he manages to convince her to her that he'd "do well" on the throne with his personal method of pleading to his sister (you choose) and then betrays her-)
-boy would she be fucking livid. ozai is absolutely afraid of her but pretends he absolutely isn't. she is definitely going to pummel his ass for good
zuko and azula would be mostly clueless at first thanks to ozai's efforts. azula would be a bit more keen though. she may not completely understand what really transpired between them when she suddenly left, but when she finally finds her again bidding for her time she would find the whole situation so fucking hilarious once she got over the initial shock of reunion - the sheer idea of how her imposing father was so afraid of his own sister (who technically didn't actually even do anything to him) that he yeeted her out of the fire nation.
azula would fucking love her.
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