#his funky little friend

[andi-o-geyser]

His trauma hair and bitchy attitude have bewitched me body and soul

[dovalore]

friendly shade entity that helps you order food

[keeper-of-the-dimension]

2024-09-06

A girl and her cat

[virfujiwara]

He doesn't drink blood btw

[six-of-cringe]

I think that one of the reasons why people misinterpret Wylan's character and arc, among others, is because they misinterpret the relationship between him and Kaz. This post has kind of mitosised off from the BFWP (Big Fucking Wylan Post) I'm writing because it's a bit of a different focus and constitutes its own post.

A lot of people talk about Wylan's character and development as though it's meant to match Kaz's - starting out as a nice kid who the city forces to become amoral, indifferent to violence, and well-versed in crime. These qualities are usually talked about with a weird reverence as an irrefutable symbol of "badassery", as though it's always a positive development for any character regardless of the story's narrative, which annoys me but is not the topic of this post. That's part of the BFWP's job.

Following Kaz's exact development is not the point of Wylan's character. The point is that Kaz and Wylan narrative foils - very similar in many ways, but with a fundamental difference that creates the "broken mirror" effect/shows how they could have turned out if they'd chosen differently. I think that difference is how they respond when they climb out of the harbor after their respective betrayals. Narratively, Ketterdam represents a very harsh system that presents the people struggling there with very few options. You can either choose to ditch decency, play by the Barrel's rules, and live, or you can hold on to decency and die.

When Kaz returns to the streets after Jordie's death, he chooses the first option. He copes with what happened through ideas of revenge, and to survive long enough to see it he quickly turns to thievery and violence. He thinks to himself after he robs a kid for money and food that it was much easier to survive when you've left decency behind. He survived through violence, creating the Dirtyhands persona around himself for protection.

When Wylan has to fend for himself, he choses the second option. He finds "honest work" at the tannery, where they exploit workers and expose them to toxins. He wonders if he'll live long enough to use his savings to leave the city, or if the chemicals would kill him first. He was smart enough to steal and survive, but he chose decency, and with it, he chose death. There are a number of reasons why he chose differently than Kaz despite their similarities - his older age and thus more developed moral code, having no one to avenge but himself when he believed himself worthless, his more privileged upbringing, and his relatively low drive to live. Alone, he would have died.

Then Kaz steps in. Kaz's role in all the crow's lives is that, intentionally or not, his ruthless rule of the Barrel creates a sort of haven that allows them to survive where they would have died had they stayed alone. Wylan is a really clear example of this, and though Kaz's intentions were at least partly self-serving, his involvement both kept Wylan from dying of exposure or street violence as well as prevented him from needing to do the more terrible things that it takes to survive in the Barrel. Throughout the books, we see Kaz kind of taking the brunt of enacting violence in Wylan's place - traumatizing Smeet's daughter, killing the clerk on the lighthouse. Wylan could get by making explosives in the workshop rather than having to shoot or stab or beat the life out of people. And at the end of the series, Kaz sees to it that he never will have to. Of course Wylan did bad stuff to survive when working with the Dregs, it's the Barrel. But the extent is greatly lessened because of Kaz's involvement.

Wylan's arc was never about becoming comfortable with violence, or becoming just like Kaz - the way people characterize him as some sort of ruthless murder mastermind is inaccurate and redundant with Kaz's character. He isn't nonchalant or celebratory about crime or death or violence by the end of the book. He doesn't HAVE to become like Kaz, because Kaz himself gave him the space to continue being decent, intentionally or otherwise. Understanding that dynamic is important to understanding what Wylan is like as a character and as a person. If you assume Wylan's trajectory is to become "Kaz 2.0", then you're going to mischaracterize him. I've seen posts about how Kaz was the Jordie that he didn't have to Wylan, and I think that makes a lot more sense. Because Kaz is willing to do the horrible things in his stead, Wylan has the third option otherwise impossible in the Barrel - maintaining his decency and surviving.

[doobydoobydoowau]

getting into classics as a kid because you read percy jackson <<< getting into classics as a kid bc you wanted to know why the FUCK the president of the capitol had such a weird name

[journeysfable]

Not to be adhder on main but q!Pac, q!Mike, and q!Felps knowing q!Cellbit from prison, and Cellbit murdering a friend of theirs, only for all of them to become besties, really reminds me of Red VS Blue.

Cellbit 🤝Agent Washington Doing terrible things to people and somehow ending up a part of their found family anyway

[im-smart-i-swear]

guy trapped in a hell of his own creation: haha ive never done anything wrong in my entire life. and im always right:] anyway. why did my little brother move out:(

its so funny to me that at first glance tashi seems like hed be the most 'normal' out of all the clones but at least all the others are slowly healing n shit while hes just getting more and more insane each day and one day hell snap and explode and maim someone

[handsome-john]

Everyday I think about the ending to Claptastic voyage and how it ends with Shadowtrap offering Claptrap power and how claptrap refuses this, wanting to stand with his friends and then how shortly after those friends turn around and kill him and his entire product line just as Shadowtrap said they would and how much Claptrap truly believed his friends were his friends and how they hated him and how even Athena who was neutral towards Claptrap did nothing to stop him from being destroyed and how the only reason Claptrap even survived was because of Shadowtrap and how Claptrap is just supposed to be an annoying side character that the audience and the characters could laugh at and make fun of but the writers turned him into the most tragic and heartbreaking character ever written and holy shit I hate borderlands

[pikkish]

idk if this is a good prompt but put doomguy in myhouse.wad I think he would find it enriching

Right, so I've been mulling on this one for a little bit now, n I'm not opposed to writing something for you, I'm just not... entirely sure what to write? Because the thing is, myhouse.wad doesn't actually really have anything to do with Doom as a story. Sure, Doom is important in that it's the vessel through which the story is told and one of the connections between the narrator and his dead companion. But as far as Doom itself goes, and the story about a man who was too angry/stupid to die, fighting demons and saving earth, none of that is at all relevant to myhouse.wad and its story. For all intents and purposes, Doomguy isn't actually a character in myhouse.wad. So I'm not really sure how exactly to fit him in there.

[alshaverpressbox]

this is what I mean when I call matt boldy white bread (affectionate)

[shardofsun]

Hey has anyone ever thought about how messed up IDW Ultra Magnus is from specifically Optimus’s perspective. Like, they were friends. Imagine if your friend died and someone else just. got inside his corpse and kept pretending to be him. And a bunch of people kept doing this for years, and you’ve been friends with so many people all wearing your friend’s body and nobody ever told you. Did he ever notice things were different? Did he ever wonder why his friend kept changing in ways so subtle he couldn’t explain how it felt wrong? Basically what I’m saying is IDW Optimus has been stuck in the world’s most long running horror novel

[twistedappletree]

am i alone in thinking lan sizhui would not make a better sect leader than lan jingyi or nah

[cryptvokeeper]

“Modern au chopper is a baby” “modern au chopper is a dog” Doctor Tony Tony Chopper is a grade A character how dare you do this to him

[morg-among-the-stars]

The sillys <3

[cathalbravecog]

i cant forget about the time i was multitooning with archie on my other tab... i was fighting deepdiver with my friends and i jokingly wanted to bring archie along to watch, but they haven't been to BB yet, so i had to walk them there on my other tab... and guess what was the FIRST thing they saw RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM when they walked in? yep it was mary. probably mustve been scary, but! mary is a friend :] AND SO I DOODLED IT!!

what's also funny i kinda decided that bb was kinda archie's area bc of their lil' sailor hat, so it only makes sense heehee