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beyondthecosmicvoid · 4 years

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"What you're talking about is manifest destiny."

"You can call it whatever you want, Tom. The fact remains that if the human race needs to do something to survive and lower orders don't have the power to stop us, we will prevail. It is not right ir wrong, it is just the way things are. You've got to stop projecting human motives and es onto other organisms. Everything is merely what it is. A mongoose that tries to steal a cobra's egg isn't evil -- it is just trying to survive. But the cobra is trying to survive too. And if it catches the mongoose in its nest, there's going be a fight. Fortunately for the mongoose, it has faster reflexes and a more efficient metabolism. Whether that's fair or not isn't event part of the equation -- it's simply the way things are."

"Yeah? Try telling that to the cobra. But for the sake of argument, we'll ignore the question of ethics. Still, all you're saying, Scott, is that it's all right to do whatever we want. To exploit any ecosystem, any species -- as long as we don't run into anything big enough to kick our butts."

"If you want to phrase it that way. Yeah. That's the way nature works."

"Sure, on tutoring disks, but not in the real world. Every part of an ecosystem is dependent on every other part. It's that interdependence that makes interfering with existing systems so chancy. Even the smallest components are vitally important."

“Who could have guessed that millions of ‘killer bee’s could spring from a handful of escaped African bees? Or that a few Brazilian fire ants could make the Southeastern portion of the U.S. virtually uninhabitable in just over seventy years? And what about the ‘oil-eating’ bacterium the gene-splicers at the petroleum companies developed to clean up their spills? Remember how they thought they had it completely in their control?”

“Come on, Tom, the oil would’ve dried up sooner or later anyway, and I hear the new repro-inhibitors they’re using are making a substantial dent in the fire ant populations. Sure, we suffer setbacks, but we’ll always find ways around the problems that nature throw at us.”

“Will we Scott? I’m not so sure, mankind never seems to learn. We get our hands slapped on a regular basis, but we still can’t seem to keep them to ourselves. The tighter the grip we try to get on nature, the more nature pushes through the cracks in our technology. And with some of the things we’re encountering in the settlements, we have no idea what kind of trouble we may be letting ourselves in for by messing around.”

“Well, so far we’ve done okay. On all of the life-supporting planets we’ve come across. The worst thing we’ve ever encountered has been the ‘blood willies’ of epsilon INDI TWO. And I hear they’ve got a vaccine for that now. If I were you, I’d put my faith in science and stop worrying about the bogeyman. And I’d watch what I said around the corporate types, Tom. All any of them care about is their jobs, and you’ll make them nervous with talk about problems that don’t exist yet.”

“I don’t care. This is my last long haul. I’m getting out while the getting’s good. All of the monkeying around the corporations are doing out in the settlements may not bother you, Scott, but it does me. We’ve had a long run of good fortune –longer than we’ve deserved there’s a major league turd coming down the pike, mark my words--- and I don’t want to be around when it hits the fan. I’m telling you, we shouldn’t be messing with mother nature. She’s a real bitch. We have to learn to work with nature. This reliance on technology is getting to be too much for me, Scott. It’s no longer a means to an end. It’s become an end unto itself. We use it like a wall between ourselves and our surroundings … between ourselves and who we really are. We’ve come a long way in the past three thousands years but I can’t help feeling that we’ve lost as much as we’ve gained.”

“So what’s your solution Tom? Give up modern convenience and go back to stone knives and squatting in caves?”

“You’re reaching for extreme again, Scott, but that just might be what it takes to put us back on the right track. And I’m not talking about austerity or deprivation. I’m talking about the challenge of putting away the crutches of our technology and going back to relying on our own strength and cunning. These days we’re so insulated that we make heroes out of anyone who dares to face up to a challenge. But it wasn’t always like that. Life of death challenges used to be an every day thing and real men didn’t wait for adventure to come to them. They rushed out to meet it not like the generals and corporate heads these days who send out the little guys to do their dirty work. It used to be that a man’s standing as a leader was determined by how he handled himself in the face of danger.”

“Yeah, yeah – very nostalgic, Thom. Very macho. But it’s not very practical in this day and age. Can you see a bunch of corporate VPs duking it out for the right be CEO? Or maybe you and me going at each other with knives to see who gets a better pilot’s rating?”

“Hey, every culture observes its own rituals for establishing status. Look at the infighting and back-stabbing that goes on at every level of our society. And we’re still fighting over the same things: property, leadership, territorial rights. The only difference is our methods have become more subtle, less direct. Somehow the old ways seem more honest.”

“You’re an idealist, Tom. What happens when the wrong guy wins? Then you’ve got the neighborhood bully calling the shots: You’re back to pack mentality.”

“There are checks and balances in every system, Scott.”

“Yeah, but your way leaves them all up to individual initiative! Without some kind of sanctioned avenue for dissent. A guy would have to be a real hero or a real fool to butt heads with the chief.”

“So? Are things really so different for us? You’re the one that’s always telling me to watch what I say around the desk jockeys. Where’s my ‘sanctioned avenue for dissent’? At least if I bust a gay in the chops, he clearly understands that I don’t like what he’s doing.”

“There you go with your idealism again. You’re trying to romanticize this into two tigers brawling to determine dominance or rights to a favorite hunting area. In the same situation humans would just kill each other. We’ve ‘out-grown’ the instinct for species preservation that prevents that in the lower orders but we haven’t truly grown into the morality that you’re so fond of citing, Tom. The society we’ve built isn’t perfect. Granted. But it works, probably more because of our level of technology than in spite of it. How many guys wouldn’t want to trade their boring, earthside job for yours: a job made possible by technology? But if you want to get back to nature, there are ways to do it. Go on one of those ‘wilderness’ safaris to Alpha C. I understand the gene-splicers now have something that almost looks like an elephant. Or, if you want real adventure, sign on for a hitch as a ranch hand at our next stop; plenty of fresh air, hard work, and not much else. Maybe that’s your idea of fulfillment. Though I can’t imagine anyone envying you the job. Me, I can get enough adventure from the vids. God bless modern technology!”

(...)

“You’re awfully quiet, Tom. What’s the matter? YOu mad at me?”

“Huh? Uh, no Scott. I was just thinking.”

“Look, I know you said it as a joke. But maybe I should go on one of those safaris or sign on as a ranch hand. Maybe it’ll turn out that you’re right, and I wouldn’t like it. But I should at least give it a try. A change of scenery might be just what I need ... Get back to the land and living things ... Get some adventure and uncertainty back into my life. Did i ever tell you that I went hunting once? I had an uncle who was wealthy. He took me qual hunting when I turned fifteen -said it wuold make a man of me. But all I could think about was how big my shot gun was, and how small the birds were. I guess I oculd understand the potential for excitement in the hunt, but for me the thrill was missing. The contest seemed so lopsided. I wondered what it would be like to hunt something that was capable of hunting me. The challenge. The Danger. To put yourself on an equal footing with nature, that’s got to be the ultimate thrill! To risk everything on your own skill and strength ... I mean, look at what we do for a living - access the computer, punch a few buttons - all of the work is done for us. Anybody could do this job, with the right training. I guess that’s what I meant by m anti-technology tirade. It’s not that technology is evil in and of itself - but once in a while we have to put it aside and do something to remind ourselves that we’re alive - prove that we can accomplish something by relying solely on ourselves. I can’t help but think an experience like that would change a person. Maybe not in a way that other people would notice, but it would be something you’d carry with you for the rest of your life.”

“I know what you mean, Tom. Kinda like the first time you get laid, right? Did I ever tell you about that? I was at this party, see, and ...”

“Oh, brother ...”

~ Conversation between Tim & Scott from ALIEN VS PREDATOR #1

^It’s this type of existentialism that makes Dark Horse comics and other graphic novels set in the ALIENS/PREDATOR universe some of the best stuff in science fiction. It has a little bit of everything. Philosophy, cosmic horror, with occasional degrees of theological abstraction.If Disney wants to add more money to their pockets and wants to be true to their motto of inclusion and so on, keep this universe. Don’t erase it. Everything that it preaches, are in these comics. Not only that, but there is also a diversity of ideas where it subtly criticizes every school of thought via different characters and storylines. These are the types of stories that attract every fan, regardless of what their politics are. It’s entertainment, pure escapism (without preaching or self-serving, shaming BS) and world-building at its finest. And it remains respectful of ALL the ALIENS/PREDATORS films, while still offering something new.

Take Tom and Scott’s conversation here. These are two space truckers, blue collar workers like those from the first ALIEN movie, that are bringing up two very interesting points. They don’t fit into any neat box we assign a certain ideology. BOTH of these guys make good salient points. There is also a reason why the first issue of the AVP series starts with this conversation of technological dependence vs the old ways that Tom keeps going back to. While these two argue to disprove the other’s point and defend their own, we catch a brief glimpse into Yautja (Predator) society. It is a violent hierarchy where might becomes right. This is the type of meritocracy that Tom keeps defending. At the same time, it is also opportunistic and more technological advance to the point that they use their technology and survival instincts to hunt other species they deem worthy. This is done at the back of other species they consider inferior or worth risking for the ultimate hunt to prove their worth. Everything that Scott defends is part of the Yautja culture -with the obvious exception of divisions and over-dependence on technology and a corporate conglomerate controlling every aspect of daily life. Then there are the Xenomorphs (aliens). They are the other that is constantly being used as a coming-of-age rite for the predators, It’s an interest dynamic which hasn’t (yet) been explored in the films. This, among other things, makes this universe one of the most fascinating in the science fiction and horror genre.

#alien vs predator #graphic novels #comics #yautja #predator #alien xenomorph #one of the best openings in comic book history #science fiction #scifi horror

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a-student-out-of-time · 4 years

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//That's called a Mary Sue. And speaking of that, is there any other character in the Danganronpa canon you considered one aside from Chiaki?

//Hoo boy. That’s a term I think is really misapplied to a lotof situations. I never actually said Chiaki’s a Mary Sue, andthat’s because I don’t think any incarnation of her is one.

//”Mary Sue” is such an overused and yet misunderstood conceptthat people use. And oftentimes, it gets thrown around becauseit feels like it adds validity to criticism that I feel is franklyunearned. The reason for that is because Sueness isn’t acharacter problem, but symptomatic of a bigger writing problem.

//See, a lot of people think Sues are just unrealisticallyoverpowered, have no serious flaws, every person in the storyloves them no matter what they do, etc. but you can use thosetropes well with some quality writing and apply those to pretty muchany protagonist character from anime or superhero stories, butusually they don’t get called Mary Sues or Gary Stus or whatever.

//No, what really defines Sueness is that they warp the reality ofthe story around them. A character can be at the center of a story,but a Mary Sue warps the story so the entire universe revolvesaround them, whether it’s showing how great they are, how evilthey are, how much their life sucks, etc. That’s fundamentallywhat makes a Mary Sue or Gary Stu what they are: they’re at thecenter of everything and everything has to be about them insome way, shape, or form.

//Supporting casts, villains, side characters, plot, themes, allof it revolves around what the Sue does. All morals are defined aswhat the Sue thinks is right. All situations are resolved because ofwhat the Sue does. It’s all about them. Nothing else matters,nothing else exists.

//Now let’s look at Human Chiaki. She starts off as a quietgamer girl who originally didn’t have friends, but managed to getcloser to her classmates and bring everybody together throughher love of games. She opens up, has a great time with them, andbecomes their de facto leader, and also gets a lot of friendshipscenes with Hajime. All of which become poignantly tragic when shedies and everyone falls into despair.

//That’s it, really. That’s not a Mary Sue, that’s just afairly flat character. And really, you can make the same argumentabout everyone in Class 77: they’re side characters in a storythat should be about them. And even when theytalk about how great she is, not everything revolves around Chiaki.Hell, she’s not even around in a few episodes of despair side andthere’s plenty of moments when nobody talks about her.

//That’s one of the things that bugs me when people complainabout DR3. Hajime didn’t choose to become Izurujust to impress Chiaki, she was a small part of his ever-growinglist of insecurities. She didn’t solve every single issue inClass 77, she didn’t stop Junko, she couldn’t save anyone, andmost critically, she actually did kinda assist ingetting everyone to fall into despair by encouraging themto save Chisa. That lead them right into that trap.

//Human Chiaki isn’t a Mary Sue, she’s a nice girl leader typesadly suffering from a serious case of underdevelopment Andit’s disappointing that people jump to “mary sue”to explain why, when really the issue is that she wasn’t givenmuch to do along with everyone else. DR3 Despair Sidereally revolves around Chisa, Ryota, and Junko.

//I actually liked Chisa, so I don’t have too many complaintsabout her other than disappointment in how her character arc ended.

//Ryota bugs me because he was created just to be the explanationfor how all this happened and they pour on all this angst and sadnessto make you feel for him when we literally didn’t know him untilthis anime existed. And honestly, if the anime didn’t spend somuch time trying to make us feel bad for him and dropped the stupidbrainwashing, I’d probably be more sympathetic. I at least applaudthem for going with him actually creating the brainwashing anime andit was completely his own fault.

//And that brings me to Junko. She’s really the closest to a Suein this situation, and frankly a lot of DR. It always has to comeback around to her, her schemes, her plans, her boredom, hermanipulation, her pulling the strings in some way, shape, or form.And DR3 really is the worst example of it, where she gets awaywith her plans completely unimpeded. Yet was too lazy to actually doanything, so went with “lol brainwashing.”

//The fact that the DR fandom has “It was really Junko allalong” and that they actually reference that fact in V3 is proofthat this franchise has a serious issue with revolving the situationaround a character that...frankly bores and annoys the hell out ofme.

//Junko just isn’t an interesting enough character in my opinionto hold this status as total and complete mastermind of everything.Not even in SDR2, which I actually really liked. It’shonestly everything that happens around her and because of herthat I find far more interesting. She sets into motion so much coolstuff and it’s really the people motivated to these things by heractions that make DR interesting.

//She’s supposed to be this profoundly intelligent manipulativemastermind, and I applaud Kodaka for not giving her a backstory asan excuse, but let me ask this: do we ever actually see heruse any manipulation techniques? Do we see her successfully turn orconvince anyone on screen? Do we see her successfully playing puppetmaster? Not really.

//The most we get are people saying she did or it happeninglargely off-screen. And what she does on screen in DR3 is just usingsomeone else’s creations and skills to achieve her own goals.Beyond that, most of what we get is her rambling about despair overand over to the point that it stops sounding like a word. Herattempts at manipulation always felt hollow to me, and maybe it’sbecause I’ve heard a ton of villain speeches before, but I wascompletely unphazed by all of her pseudophilosophical ramblings.

//That’s not just a dig at her. Characters that only everwhine about how life is boring, without meaning, imperfect, too hard,or whatever always annoy me. And especially when their logic forwhat they’re doing boils down to petty childishness andself-centered entitlement. I could write an essay about how muchI despise Adachi from Person 4 and completely fail to get why so manypeople love him, but that’d be getting off topic.

//Point is, based on the definition I provided, Junko is far moreof a Mary Sue than Chiaki is and the issues with DR3 go beyondcharacterization and extend more to having too little time towork with everything they have and devoting it to thewrong elements. DR3 feels like a fist draft that was madeinto a final product.

//And also, that’s not me saying you shouldn’t like Junko. Ifyou like her and think she’s a compelling villain, go for it. Morepower to you. I’m not one to tell you which characters you can andcan’t like, I’m just explaining my opinion.

//I’d also prefer if people stop tossing around “marysue” like it’s a shortcut to criticism without analyzing what itactually means. It’s less of a character problem and more of anoverall writing problem. Your story should not be an eventhorizon bent around the singularity of a single character.

#mod talks #mod rambles #a student out of time #mary sue is an overused and yet misunderstood term #Anonymous

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grump-the-deer · 5 years

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great (and meh) things about HDM ep 2

GREAT:

- the FIGHT between PAN and MONKEY was AMAZING!! holy SHIT!

- Pan’s using more forms! moth and wildcat are back! hell yeah!

- the dæmon expressions, particularly Pan’s in his ermine form, are spectacular for real

- the windows look INCREDIBLE, they’ve got little fibers like the strings of the multiverse are torn

- Mrs. Coulter has some really good little moments, really fantastic. we get into her head a little more as far as when she challenges people, and those glassy-eyed looks she gets, like she’s just so removed from reality. she feels like a tiger prowling inside its cage, daring anyone to get too close.

- Roger is such a good boy I love him :C

- Lyra is still so absolutely wild and I adore her. she just tears around the place and I love her using the air vents to get around

- Mrs. Coulter talking about being compelled towards the edge, to fall - HAUNTING REFERENCE TO HER EVENTUAL DEMISE ANYONE?

- the alethiometer only starts working when Lyra begins to think critically about herself - self-awareness. mmmm symbolism.

- some of the parallel shots are STUNNING. especially where Lyra is confiding in Pan after the tense bath scene, and afterwards they cut to Mrs. Coulter dissociating doing her own little distress breakdown and the monkey is concerned for her, but when she sees him instead of confiding in him she rebukes him for wanting to care about her. it’s chilling.

- ALMOST as chilling as the golden monkey prowling around the house WITHOUT HER. I never really got that if it was intended in the books? but it would make sense that he has a longer leash so to speak, considering how far removed she is from herself.

- a lot more dæmon involvement in this one, awesome. really takes it a step up from the last ep, I think, especially with background characters’ dæmons. ESPECIALLY WITH CRUSHING THE BUTTERFLY. HOLY HELL.

- they let Mrs. Coulter do the scene with the gobbled kids! yesssss, perfect, this is what I wanted from the first ep

- adding the “of London” to the Gobblers’ GOB title was clever. very clever. GOBOL.

- I like that Father McPhail is just completely immune to Mrs. Coulter’s charms. it’s a nice touch. and I’m glad Lord Boreal still seems enraptured by her.

- the sets are still stunning, I love the addition of the lift even. has a good trapped-in-a-cage feel. and I love that Lyra climbed out the window instead of waiting for it - makes her own way out.

MEH:

- what.....are they doing with Lord Boreal? he’s already in our world, but it just feels.....weird. like, Asriel was always the first one to make the window their world knows, it was always a grand thing. it just feels cheapened by the fact that Boreal has already crossed over. he feels like more of an antagonist than Asriel, which is just not right at this point. I still don’t like how badass and smooth he feels, he was always supposed to be an admittedly clever but smarmy yucky middle-aged man.

- the golden monkey is feral, don’t get me wrong, but he’s just...not as much. I like what they’re doing with Mrs. Coulter, but he seems like he’s got the moral compass out of the two, and that’s just weird. they’re both supposed to be pretty amoral, and have this weird sickly sweet relationship as if for show, even though she abuses him from time to time. here it just seems like they’re extremely removed, which has its advantages, but also misses the mark in a way.

- still think Billy is boring. and the gyptians are just, lifeless to me. I really miss their original personalities and while the scenes are supposed to be gut-wrenching I just...can’t bring myself to care about these versions. the only scene that actually felt good was John Faa talking to Ma Costa with their foreheads together, promising her that they’d find her son. otherwise, they’re just kind of...bland. and it makes me sad. Ma Costa is just an upset mother, John Faa is just the stoic leader, Farder Coram is......the same thing, a little less serious. where’s the heart??

- the silver fox is SUCH a weird plot point. why did Pan go towards it in the end? does it have some kind of weird power to compel children’s dæmons towards it? why ? ? why not just a surprise attack? Pan is too smart to just wander off alone like that, I don’t get it.

- weird way to introduce Asriel as Lyra’s father. much preferred it given by the gyptians, tying them into her story. right now they seem way too uh parallel but separate. also does Lyra not question how Mrs. Coulter knows so much? ?

#hdm #his dark materials #hdm spoilers

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cometsweepandleonidsfly · 5 years

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"Game of Thrones" had a woman problem. And it always will.

This isn't anything new. Against a backdrop of gratuitous female nudity and frequent rape scenes, "Thrones" has always struggled to fully define the women who play its game. It's had trouble with the men, too (character consistency is one of the writers' biggest weaknesses), after the final episode of the TV juggernaut, its mistreatment of the women who once made the series great will be remembered as its original sin.

The last two episode of "Thrones" were a particular insult to some of its most beloved female characters. The remaining women (and those recently departed) have been ill-served by a mad dash to the finish line with little regard how to get there. Now that the smoke has cleared on the series, one of the many mixed morals of "Thrones" is that women are just too darn crazy. Groundbreaking, I know.

In this final season, "Thrones" has wasted Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), once its most engaging villain, giving her little screen time and an anticlimactic death. It also featured Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner) expressing gratitude for enduring rape and torture; the death of Missandei (Nathalie Emmanuel), its only woman of color; turned Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) into a sappy rom-com character more concerned with her lover's destiny than her own; and Daenerys Targaryen's (Emilia Clarke) hurried transformation into a "mad queen," as the woman who once freed thousands of slaves became a murderer of countless innocents because her best friend died, her boyfriend/nephew rejected her and she's angry no one loves her. And when it came time for Dany to meet her fate, it was as anticlimactic as Cersei's death, and shedied while begging Jon (Kit Harington) to take her back.

Dany's heel turn into megalomaniacal villain is one of the most controversial decisions in the whole series, perhaps even with the decision for Bran to rule Westeros at the series' end. Many fans felt that Dany's choice to murder thousands came out of nowhere, and while the writers planted seeds of her so-called madness over the years, foreshadowing isn't the same as character development. Sure, writers made her seem cruel over the years, but there has to be a reason why. Coupled with a scene in Episode 4 in which Varys (Conleth Hill) extolled Jon Snow (Kit Harington) as a leader just because he's a Targaryen and a man, and claimed that Dany is too unstable and too strong of a woman to rule, the writers seem like trolls who rant online about "crazy" ex-girlfriends.

Had the series taken time to make Dany's descent to villainy a slow slide instead of an air drop from 50,000 feet, it would feel more earned and far less stereotypical. Women don't have to be virtuous heroes to be great characters. They just have to make sense.

Cersei, Sansa and Brienne didn't make much sense this year, either. The smart, diabolical Queen Cersei turned into a spluttering mess in her final episode, which was a huge disservice to one of the series' best characters.

The Cersei who destroyed the Sept of Baelor would have had an exit strategy from The Red Keep during Dany's siege. The Cersei who almost committed suicide to save herself and her son from failure at the Blackwater never would have cried about dying in her brother/lover's arms. The Cersei who killed Robert Baratheon with a well-placed flask of wine would never have been dense enough to think her Lannister soldiers were so loyal and strong they'd defeat a dragon.

The Cersei we knew would have done more than stand still and stare off into the distance in her last hurrah. But the writers weren't interested in Cersei making sense. In Season 8, Cersei was a glorified roadblock to Dany's war crime. And so, in service of a hasty and ill-conceived plot, Cersei was dispatched as indiscriminately as she once eliminated her enemies.

In the middle of a race to the happy ever after finish line, the show somehow found time to get in one last turn of the screw when it came to the series' depiction of sexual violence. Sansa has been the woman abused most often over the years. The series drew its harshest criticism for the Season 5 storyline in which she married Ramsay Bolton and suffered repeated rape and torture at his hands.

To add insult to a very raw injury, in Episode 4 this season, Sansa expressed gratitude for her abuse, claiming it strengthened her. It's an offensive, inaccurate portrayal of trauma that undervalues Sansa as a character. But the writers had to justify that rape scene somehow, right? Sure, she got her own throne in the North in the end, but only after the lords of Westeros picked her robot brother to rule the other six kingdoms because he was the least objectionable man around.

The disservice done to Brienne is perhaps the most heartbreaking, considering her arc over the course of the series has been so strong, and Christie's performance so consistently brilliant. But the independent warrior spent most of the final season pining over a man, in a wild turn. Yes, it was nice to see Brienne's vulnerable side when she slept with Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but the writers took it too far. She gets her dream job in the finale just like everyone else, now lord commander of the Kingsguard, but instead of writing her own history into the order's historical record, we see her update Jaime's. Brienne deserved better.

"Thrones" is just one big missed opportunity when it comes to women. George R.R. Martin's novels feature several complex and fascinating female characters, but many of the supporting women in the TV series have been completely wasted. The Sand Snakes were boring sex objects with whips instead of personalities. Yara (Gemma Whelan) popped up only when we need to be reminded that the Greyjoys exist. Fan-favorite Arianne Martell from the novels was cut out of the series entirely.

For 73 episodes and eight seasons, "Thrones" has credited just two women, Jane Espenson and Vanessa Taylor, as writers, with four episodes between them dating back to the show's first three seasons. Only one woman, Michelle MacLaren, has directed episodes (four of them), but not since 2014. It's painfully clear that "Thrones" was a series created by (and in large part written for) men.

Sunday's final episode was a mess for many reasons, but in particular it will be infamous for cementing the series' reputation for failing its women. We probably should have known "Thrones" would disappoint back in the very first episode, in which Drogo (Jason Momoa) raped his new wife Dany, which never happened in the books.

But as a TV series, the women are props for spectacle and shock just as much as the dragons and white walkers.

#game of thrones #spoilers #women #misogyny #cersei lannister #daenerys targaryen #missandei of naath #brienne of tarth #sansa stark

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mountphoenixrp · 4 years

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We have a new citizen in Mount Phoenix:

Ok Taecyeon, who is also known as Tyler; a 31 year old son of Horus. He is the head of security at Visión / Ilusión and a self-defense instructor at Zero to Hero.

FC NAME/GROUP: Ok Taecyeon / 2PM CHARACTER NAME: Tyler Ok | Ok Taecyeon AGE/DATE OF BIRTH: December 27th, 1988 | 31 PLACE OF BIRTH: Boston, Massachusetts | Washington D.C. OCCUPATION: Head of Security at Vision/Self Defense Instructor at Zero to Hero HEIGHT: 6'2" | 187cm WEIGHT: 172lbs | 78kg DEFINING FEATURES: Very muscular, broad shoulders, stiff posture, 2 black bands tattooed around his right forearm. Many scars littered across various areas of his body from his work as a Navy Seal. When using his powers his left eyes becomes a dark grey and his right eye a deep amber gold color.

PERSONALITY: After being in the military for so long it’s hard for him to hide the intensely stoic, rough, and meticulous side of himself. The things he learned in the military from such a young age have long been ingrained into who he is as a person. He has a very intense moral compass and fights for what he believes in, even if that means putting himself in danger. However, once you get past the gruff, war-hardened outside - you’ll find a very sweet and lovable man. Tyler is very passionate and kind to those close to him, he’s also known to be very silly and goofs around a lot. His natural leadership skills lead to him being the one people looked up to a lot growing up. His younger brother’s especially, leading him to immediately offer anyone who needs familial support a place in his family. Hides his mental scars from what his experiences in the military did to him.

HISTORY: Ok Taecyeon was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Ok Hejin or Virginia Ok from Buffalo, New York. A young girl in law school, doing her best with what life handed her, in this case it was a baby - the child of a god no less. Virginia went on to finish law school with the help of her parents watching Tyler whenever they could and her friends babysitting him while she was in class. She passed the bar one month after Tyler’s fifth birthday. Virginia was a good lawyer and an amazing mother, never failing at the perfect work/life balance. She worked hard as a single mother to give Tyler the best life they could have. Virginia was apprehensive at first about allowing Horus time with Tyler. She was heartbroken in her own way but, she still knew it would be good for him to have his father in his life somehow.

Tyler was incredibly smart and well liked as a child, other children easily gravitated towards him and followed him. He always ended up the leader of his own squadron of students on the playground. It wasn’t a type of power he wanted but, he was a kind child and never used the fact that kids looked up to him for ill. The number one thing he had issues with growing up was not being able to use his powers around his friends, or really anywhere outside of his home. It was a dream of many children to be able to fly through the sky without being on an airplane and Tyler could do that. He learned how to master soaring through the air in his backyard pretty quickly and loved it. Nothing felt better to him that hearing the air rush past his ears as wind whipped past him.

Life was easy for him growing up, his mother didn’t date so it was just the two of them in their small Boston home. He played football all through school, becoming captain of the team and winning the regional championships his senior year. He was the kid everyone wanted to be, the cliché popular guy that everyone looked up to. Tyler made a point to help out in anyway he could, knowing that if he had that many people behind him watching his every move and copying him - he had to encourage them to be kind. All through high school he volunteered everywhere and anytime he could. The work he did mostly was for younger, under privileged kids that had much harder lives than him. Volunteering as a big brother for many years to fill the gap he’d always felt - wanting siblings more than anything in the world.

After graduating high school with honors he was offered several football scholarships but, that wasn’t him. He played ball because it was fun and it was what was expected of him. Instead he enlisted in the military, the Navy to be exact. Around this time his mother, Virginia met and fell in love with his step-father Jordan Masters. A defense attorney who worked in downtown Boston, that made it his mission to represent the less fortunate. Tyler was unsure about him at first, quickly being worried for his mother as this was the first time she’d dated anyone since he was born. It didn’t take long though, for the two men to quickly become best friends. Jordan never tried to replace Horus but, he did his best to support Tyler and love him as his own.

While Tyler was away at training his mother fell pregnant with twin boys! Suddenly his one wish came true, he was going to have to younger brothers and he couldn’t have been more excited. Those little boys are his world and he loves them more than anything.

Tyler excelled in the military, being recognized for his marksmanship, leadership skills, and discipline. He was an exemplary sailor and worked well under pressure, other trainees and petty officer’s looked up to him and his commanding officer more often than not used him as an example for new recruits. Tyler loved being in the Navy, being apart of something bigger than himself and having a whole crew of brothers and sisters he could lean on as well as lead. After a few years of working his way up the ranks and being deployed twice, once on a destroyer and the second time on a submarine - he was sent to Seal training. His CO’s believed he had what it took to make a great Navy Seal and Tyler was nothing if not up for the challenge.

Yet again, he excelled in his training and quickly was stationed with a squadron of Navy Seals in Afghanistan. Working tens of hundreds of leads on possible terrorists groups and working to protect innocent civilians. It was not a war he agreed with and he struggled with some orders he was given, but did as he was ordered. After serving for four years with the Seals he was honorably discharged after his squadron was bombed while rebuilding a school. He spent a year recovering before he was recruited by the FBI. Tyler moved to D.C. to work with a special unit working undercover as security for governments officials. The FBI was investigating two large private security companies as well as the secret service for disorderly conduct as well as drug and human trafficking.

Working undercover was new to Tyler but, it was unsurprising he was good at it. Annoyingly good at it actually. In fact he was almost too good at being under a deep cover. Tyler stayed undercover at the same agency for several months investigating them from the inside but, this is where things got messy.

Love is already complicated enough if you don’t add on top of it the threat of national security. It was cliché and he knew it, an undercover agent falling in love with someone they were charged with investigating. There was just something about her that made him forget everything he was ever taught and every order he was ever given. He fell head over heels for her, and she also fell for him. Sadly love can make you blind… Tyler falling for his charge was against every regulation in the book and it was only made worse by the fact that it was discovered that she was the one running the operation he was meant to be gathering intel about.

When his lover discovered he was a federal agent, she was out for vengeance and blood. Seeing his cover as the ultimate act of betrayal to their love. She ordered him to be killed but, the agency pulled him from the investigation before she could do so. If his team members hadn’t rescued him when they did, he would have exposed his powers to the organization as well, using his wings to escape. Thankfully it didn’t come to that but now… Tyler is in hiding from the woman he loved.

Loved. Is the important tense in that statement. As soon as Tyler learned that she was also not who she said she was - an innocent diplomat - but was in fact, a ruthless drug and human trafficker? He was devastated and knew he had to stop her from hurting anyone else, no matter how much he loved her in the past. An almost two year operation was ruined because he fell in love with the woman who wanted them all dead. Ty was placed into protective custody with US Marshalls but, even that didn’t stop her from trying to get to him.

After a year it all came to a very explosive end, leaving his love to die in his arms and him to spend several weeks in the hospital. There is no way to tell if Tyler has recovered or will every truly recover from the mental jumble that has been the past few years of his life… He’s always been very good at pretending everything is okay all the time. He resigned from the Bureau and moved into the private sector, working security for real this time. Acting as a hired body guard for many rich and powerful people but, he grew bored of his everyday life. After spending an entire decade constantly moving, fighting, working, investigating, and serving his country - it felt like his life had ground to a halt.

He needed a change and the place his father told him about could give him just that.

PANTHEON: Egyptian CHILD OF: Horus POWERS: Natural leaders; air manipulation, falcon wing manifestation and flight (only for short periods of time, flight drains their energy quickly). STRENGTHS: Brave, Driven, Humble, Intelligent WEAKNESSES: Stubborn, Cynical, Over-Critical, Stoic

#kpop rp #krp #2pm #ok taecyeon #taecyeon #mp; welcome

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nova-network · 5 years

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A personal ranking list for “husbandos” in the Fire Emblem series

This post will be cared about by exactly two people: Admin Annette of @imaginebluelions, and myself. This is structured in the same manner as her own tier list, as that one inspired this one (especially with her insistence that I make it, hee hee!)

Note: I am an Awakening baby, and have not yet gotten the opportunity to play the older games yet. The placement for characters on this list who originate from games made prior to Awakening is based on the information that I have gathered about them from Fire Emblem Heroes, and from further reading about those characters. As a further note, Shadows of Valentia characters (well, the one SoV character on this list) are only based on their character in SoV, and not in the original Gaiden.

Without further ado...

S Tier:

Robin (Awakening): Robin is a very talented individual, being highly skilled at tactics and magic, and he manages to be a logical pragmatist while still being rather friendly and empathetic. He’s kind of a dork, but still social enough to carry on a conversation well and not be embarrassing. He has a clean, smart-looking appearance, without being stuffy. Additionally, in some portrayals, he and his magic come across as somewhat dark and otherworldly -- most notably in Fire Emblem Warriors, where he is capable of using dark magic in the Tactician class and gets around by levitating. His connection to Grima is emphasized, but he remains as much of a legitimately nice and helpful person as ever, and the juxtaposition between those two factors is VERY attractive. He’s Good Guy Julius. He’s like a one-man rebuttal to the Loptous cult back in FE4, showing that no, your bloodline doesn’t determine your fate after all, and even turning everything he was mean to be against Grima itself. He also may have a claim to the throne of Plegia, due to his heritage, and is thus potentially politically viable.

Robin is the safe option, being relatively free of angst, emotional baggage, and potential danger, despite what he was quite literally born to do. There are only two potential drawbacks to him, and they can both be mitigated. The first is that he is probably reluctant to make a claim to the Plegian throne, unless I were to push him into it, and the second is Tharja, who can be set up with some other guy and thus could end up an ally instead of a potential relationship threat.

Laurent (Awakening): Like his mother Miriel, Laurent is an utterly brilliant, highly scientific-minded individual, often striving to obtain new knowledge about the world or trying to quantify the magic he uses. In short, he thinks like I do, though he is also a lot more introverted and serious than I am -- and I think that’s a good thing, allowing each of us to understand each other without overlapping so much in personality that we would simply clash instead. Laurent often seems to be interested in practical applications of his research, too, instead of just staying with theory, so I think we could work very well together! I think Laurent would be capable of understanding me on a fundamental level that few other characters could, and vice versa. Laurent looks scholarly and refined, and he definitely is! And yet, at the same time, he isn’t a total boring stick-in-the-mud -- he can be surprisingly theatrical with how excited he can get about his ideas and innovations, and that is very attractive too!

Laurent’s supports with Noire indicate that he was very much... um, interested in her rage-breakdowns. As someone who has a tendency to dramatically lash out in a similar (albeit far less exaggerated) way, Laurent is uniquely suited to dealing with me and helping me through it, heehee! Laurent does, however, have the issue of being a politically unviable option -- he’s just a researcher, not a potential leader, so I’d have to work very hard to be able to establish myself in the archaic Ylissean government system if I wanted to go that route.

Hubert (Three Houses): Normally, I don’t go for characters who are as hostile and sinister as Hubert von Vestra, and yet there is so much about him that is absolutely my type. He is very clever, very ambitious, and very, very dramatic. He’s like a goth theater kid who went into politics instead of theater. He is very loyal, but not blindly so, willing to think critically about what is really best for Edelgard and their shared ambitions instead of just doing whatever he’s told. He’s very responsible, but not exactly honorable by Fire Emblem standards -- after all, he goes around scheming in the shadows and plotting assassinations quite a bit -- and I like that a lot. He’s fiendish, he’s devious, and yet, at least on Edelgard’s path (my preferred route by far), he’s definitely not evil, and even turns out to be quite a bit nicer than he generally lets on with his threatening demeanor. His dedication to following Edelgard’s ideals of abolishing systems like primogeniture and Crest superiority are even outright admirable, and make him uniquely suited to understanding my perspective on the world. Like most Three Houses characters, Hubert does seem to have quite a bit of trauma under the surface, but he’s a logical type of fellow, not one to need constant emotional support and coddling -- just someone he can, for once, actually trust. He’s the sort of person I could stand with instead of having to stand behind.

Also, um, I kind of want him to intimidate me. I think I would like it.

Hubert is quite possibly the single most attractive character I’ve seen in this entire franchise, but he has one single important point against him, as well, which keeps him in this tier with the others: he keeps a lot of secrets from people he cares about, and I have trust issues of my own. (And not that he’s, y’know, a creepy assassin wizard butler who has committed multiple murders. That part is okay. Welcome to Fire Emblem, I guess.)

A Tier:

Linhardt (Three Houses): Oh, Linhardt. I once dated a guy who was a lot like Linhardt. He was a biology student who legitimately considered selling his bed in order to buy a flow cytometer to put in his room because he usually just fell asleep in his chair anyway. So, right away, I can tell you that Linhardt is an excellent choice. Our interests overlap, but not so much that I would consider him competition or a threat. He’s just content to do what he wants to do. His rather lazy demeanor is a big point against him, but at the same time, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he’s so brilliant when he does try to accomplish something. And I think he could balance out my super driven, very Type A personality -- Linhardt can keep me in balance and prevent me from losing who I am or my connections to everything around me, because he is so relaxed. With his aversion to causing harm and the fact that he seems to be a lot more empathetic than he lets on, he could keep me from ending up as a bitter mad scientist type if things go wrong for me, perhaps better than any other character on the list. He can be to me what Byleth can be to Edelgard. At the same time, I think I could be somewhat of a motivating factor for Linhardt, so he can be the best he can be and really apply his brilliance for the benefit of the world instead of letting his mind languish in apathy.

Klein (Binding Blade): Klein is so elegant and refined! And yet, at the same time, he makes sure to treat everyone equally, no matter whether or not they are of noble birth. He would be able to recognize me for my accomplishments, for what I do and who I am, instead of just where I come from. I think Klein is another good balancing factor for me, as well -- he’s a skilled diplomat, apparently, which provides an excellent complementary counterpoint to my more blunt and aggressive demeanor. Klein can help me circumvent problems that I can’t just plow through, and I can help him take action when action needs to be taken. Klein may not be as scientific-minded as some of the other people on this list, but given that his father is freakin’ Pent, Klein is probably quite capable of understanding a lot of the things that I say and willing to listen to a lot of my interests. There is, however, one very significant problem with Klein -- his sister. I can tell you right now that I would not get along with Clarine AT ALL from the very first time we would meet, and Klein would have to handle a lot of conflict resolution and mediation. It would be an absolute mess.

B Tier:

Ephraim (Sacred Stones): Ephraim is somewhat unique in this tier list because he’s not really much of an academic type at all! He’s good at tactics and leadership, but not much else. But at the same time, he has a clean, sharp sort of athleticism to his appearance that I like a lot, and he’s very confident and outspoken without being a jerk at all. Since he does end up in charge of Renais, he’s also a very politically viable option (are you seeing a pattern here for characters who don’t come from 3H, the game where monarchy and inherited nobility are deconstructed more instead of taken for granted?). I think Ephraim would be able to listen to me and understand my strengths, while at the same time, I can understand his talents and perspectives as well. On the other hand, he probably wouldn’t know what the hell I’m talking about half the time, which could make me eventually feel kind of isolated.

Henry (Awakening): The cute one. Henry is just such a legitimately nice and fun person despite his morbid personality. He wants to help, he just doesn’t always know how, because his grasp on human morality and empathy is a bit nebulous. He’s a twisted fellow, but not a mean one, and I think I could really appreciate his curiosity and vice versa. He’s smarter than his goofy personality lets on. I think we could talk about a lot of things with each other and accept a lot of things about each other that most people wouldn’t be able to, or at least not as easily. And he is apparently a very good parent! There are still a couple of problems with Henry, though. Most importantly, he’s kind of immature, and I don’t know how much I could handle that in a relationship. Also, he’s technically a mass murderer, though this is mitigated by the fact that he’s not a bad guy, and could be mitigated much further if his willingness to take a stand against Grima gives the public a bit of a better view of him. Also, he’s not politically viable. Whee! And I’m not sure how old he is.

C Tier:

Leo (Fates): Logical but theatrical, pragmatic and cold but surprisingly nice and dedicated despite that. He’s like a proto-Hubert, for the purposes of this list. Leo is a pretty great pick for pretty much all the reasons that Hubert is, but... just less so. Also, he has a couple of major drawbacks -- I don’t want to have to deal with his family (Camus-archetype Xander and ingenue Elise would be enough of a problem, but Corrin? Well, Camilla’s okay, I guess), and like Henry, I’m not sure how old he is, either. Leo is, ironically, probably best on the Birthright path in terms of husbando properties, because now I don’t have to deal with Corrin, who I would immediately consider a threat because Corrin is a pile of naivete with way too much power for his/her own good but people like him/her anyway.

Ignatz (Three Houses): Pretty cute, especially post-timeskip. A nice person, and could be great to cooperate with in terms of that Victor Trading Co. This guy just wants to paint nice art, but his family is successful enough to hire a private military, how cool is that? He’s also pretty smart, given that he excels at Reason magic. There are quite a few problems that keep him from being higher up, though. Ignatz is full of guilt, full of art, and not much else. I’m not sure how well I could ever truly connect with him.

Alfonse (Heroes): POLITICALLY. VIABLE. More importantly, Alfonse is the nerd lord! He’s good at strategy, likes history and mythology and folklore, and strives to avoid collateral damage when he fights. He’s a rational sort of fellow, which seems to be a rarity among all the crazy people in Zenith. However: it would only work out if I am the Summoner, as opposed to it being some generic-Kiran, I’m not sure how much he would approve of the darker sides to my personality, and he’s kind of a stick-in-the-mud. And that’s saying something, because Laurent is up in S tier and Klein is in A.

Exception Tier:

Canas (Blazing Blade): Canas would be most likely placed in A. He’s a brilliant scholar, and a super cute, absent-minded dork. He’s someone who could challenge me with his intellect without me ever considering him a threat. However: he already has a wife, and is thus off-limits. There is only one possible scenario that could circumvent this barrier: me being the Summoner of Askr and picking him up and rescuing him right at the brink of his untimely death, to start a new life in Askr without affecting the Elibean historical record -- but even that has its own problems. Did his wife survive in the snowstorm longer than he did? Would he just go right back there and die if the contract were broken? How much does summoning affect the mind of the person summoned? So Canas simply gets an honorable mention.

#fire emblem #husbando #fire emblem robin #fire emblem laurent #hubert von vestra #linhardt von hevring #fire emblem klein #fire emblem ephraim #fire emblem henry #fire emblem leo #ignatz victor #fire emblem alfonse #fire emblem canas #if you don't have a last name you are just mr fire emblem sorry

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thehubby · 5 years

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Hey Mike, hope you don't mind if I jump on the advice train. My family decided to sit down and try out Monster of the Week (it's basically a game based around shows like Buffy, Sailor Moon, etc) and our GM is super new. That's fine! I came into this fully prepared to not backseat GM because I know how daunting it can be to do this for the first time. My issue is kind of all us players?? One of them kept talking out of turn and tried to dictate to the GM, one kept watching other stuff (tbh 1)

uh I think I complained about one person not paying attention? Yeah so two of the players were being super annoying so like…I kept shutting down? I know it made it awkward at the table and I feel bad now, esp since I’m the most exp player at this point and I feel like it was my responsibilty to wrangle? Should I try to step in more next time or say something to the GM and hope he steps in? We all just want to have fun so should I just wait it out and hope it gets better? Thanks!

Not at all, I enjoy helping out with these issues. Establishing a lasting and fulfilling tabletop group can be a challenge, one which I try to support.

In my opinion by not “wrangling” during the session you did the right thing, awkward or not. There are a number of things to consider here. First, like Kenny Rogers said, don’t count your money at the table. Sure, he was talking about poker winnings, but the moral is that unless things are getting seriously heated to the point of lasting damage to friendships (or a physical altercation which, bizarrely, can happen over tabletop gaming) and whatnot, it’s often better to let the session ride out and then afterward have a discussion about how to improve things for next time.

And speaking of improving things for next time, the hard reality is that much of that will be on your GM’s shoulders. As an experienced player and/or GM, you can offer bunches of advice to your GM on how to handle things going forward (heck, that’s kind of what I do in these posts here), but the bottom line is that it’s the GM’s table. They control everything about the game, its rules, its world. They are the kid in the Twilight Zone episode about the cornfield (”It’s a Good Life,” if anyone wants to look it up); they can, at will, destroy characters and end the campaign. That’s the power they wield. But that power is balanced by the fact that the players can choose to leave the table if they want, permanently. The GM is the leader and authority of the group, but if they don’t exercise that power properly, they can find themselves without a group to lead, and without any power or purpose. A well-operated game should be a joint effort; it should not feel like players are competing with the GM.

Player characters aren’t the only ones who level up after adventures. So do GMs. Part of that process is building confidence and learning how to manage the group, and if your GM is inexperienced, it may be a bumpy road. But they have to be willing to lay rules down for the group. A proper GM will not be dictated to. They will work to resolve issues and do so fairly (that part is critical) to the group. But their word is law, and with good reason – there has to be a final arbiter at the table who can unilaterally solve all disputes. That’s critical in games of competition between players, but it’s still vitally important in cooperative games, so no player feels like their ability to contribute or enjoy the game is less than another’s.

My recommendation to you is to talk to the GM in private (to help ensure that in any ensuing conversation there’s no potential for the GM to feel “ganged up” on), express some of your concerns, and offer A) to help in any way you can, and B) to make some suggestions that may help if they want them. Some people would be embarassed in accepting such help or think it makes them look weak, others will be extremely grateful. If the GM is unwilling to make changes and after a few more sessions the situation doesn’t improve and you are still left uncomfortable and dissatisfied, you are certainly within your rights as a player to find a different table to play at. A GM puts a lot of time and effort into running a game, but the player’s time spent is just as important. (Note that I don’t see this as criticism or management-style coaching, but if you do, there are lots of resources available that talk about how to approach that kind of conversation with someone, balance good things and bad things talked about, all that.)

If it were me, based purely on the information you’ve provided and with no other sides to the story having been heard, I would make the following changes:

The GM has the final say over what happens in the world of the game being played, the results of each player’s actions, and control over every NPC character (but not the player characters, who act according to the player whims) – this should be a given, but if someone is trying to “dictate” to the GM, they may not have gotten the memo. If what the GM says does not gel with the rules, you may politely mention so, but if it threatens to disrupt the game, it can be talked about after the session.[This rule is in effect for our group, and works well.]

There are no cell phones, books, televisions, radios or anything else brought to the session that serve as distractions to the game. Players are expected to pay attention. If you are bored during the game, let’s talk about why and fix that, if possible. If you are always going to be bored when it is not your turn in the game, then a tabletop game where people take turns may not be for you. Casual talk relevant to the game is encouraged during everyone’s turns. Is not Buffy the Vampire Slayer filled with witty dialogue during fight scenes? Sailor Moon has had conversations that happened in the middle of transformation sequences. Games like these are meant to be social experiences, not mechanical exercises in dice rolling. Extensive non-game-related discussion that distracts from the game itself is not welcome, though. We’re here to roleplay to at least some extent. If you’re not acting out what Hotaru Tomoe would have thought of the most recent Terminator movie, then maybe not discuss that.[This rule is in effect for our group, with very minor exceptions for fun: notably, players are allowed to occasionally queue up music on their phone for dramatic or humorous impact, such as “Danger Zone” when our fighter gets bold in combat, or a horrible recorder-flute version of “My Heart Will Go On” when our oracle attempted to play a complex musical symphony.]

You should not talk over another player when it is their turn. They have the conch shell, this is their time. Feel free to talk with them (in character, preferably) and if they declare an action that will likely destroy the group, there’s definitely room for some discussion about the wisdom of that. But by having them at the table, there’s a covenant between all players that each will exercise their own agency, and common manners will allow them to do so on their turn. (When the character makes a completely boneheaded play that could end up in a Total Party Kill, it’s up to the GM ultimately on how to interpret it, and a good GM will know whether the table wants the brutal results borne of recklessness, or a little bit of leeway to recover from such.)

As GM, always leave time at the end of a session to ask the players how it went, hopefully as a group (or as individuals if there are some notable hard feelings lingering.) The GM should take these discussions seriously and try to resolve any concerns while simultaneously understanding that while they are effectively God of the universe the players are in, they cannot always solve all the problems of the real world.

#Anonymous

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foeseekerwriter · 6 years

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VLD Cast, Sorting Hat Chats Style

So if you aren’t aware, the Sorting Hat Chats are an absolutely incredible method of character analysis (and it’s lots of fun for real people too!) and I use it all. The. Time. So, since I’m working on a VLD project, I decided to do a breakdown. Cliffnotes version of the SHC sorting method: everyone has a “primary” house - why you do something - and a “secondary” house” - how you do something. Here’s a really oversimplified breakdown of both sets.

Primaries Gryffindor - gut instinct, “this is the right thing to do” Ravenclaw - analysis, a morality system, “this is truth” Hufflepuff - community-oriented, loyal to groups, what is best for everyone Slytherin - loyal to their people, take care of them above all else

Secondaries Gryffindor - charge, take things head-on Ravenclaw - contingency plans, mix and match premade methods to adapt Hufflepuff - toil, steady work, often lean on other people to help get things done Slytherin - adaptability in the moment, a tendency to swap masks

All the houses, both primary and secondary, can be “burned”. In the case of a primary this means losing faith in your natural primary (e.g. a Gryffindor who no longer trusts their gut instinct). For a secondary, this means you’re just slogging through trying to get things done any way possible. Primaries and secondaries can also be modeled. Slytherin primaries, for example, often model other primaries in situations where what they’re dealing with doesn’t touch upon “their people”, but everyone can model to some degree for another (for both healthy and unhealthy reasons). A less strong version of modeling is performing, where someone takes on the appearance of another house but it doesn’t feel natural to them.

For a variety of reasons, unless otherwise indicated, I am only using material up through season 6, just so you’re aware.

Anyway, here goes.

MAIN CAST

Shiro—Gryffindor/Hufflepuff

This boi is an overwhelmingly Gryffindor primary. He is willing to throw himself into any and every situation, no matter how hopeless or deadly, if he thinks that is the right thing to do. Witness his determination to find Ulaz and the Blades despite Allura's outspoken protests and the fact that he was going off hazy memories and a gut feeling. It is worth noting, though, that if Allura had really put her foot down on that matter I do think Shiro would have obeyed—reluctantly, but he would have. And although he willingly allows other people, people he cares about, to go into danger—or even sends them there—if that's the right thing to do, whenever possible he does the dangerous thing himself or leads the others into the danger. He's not actively looking to get killed, contrary to all the "guess I'll die" Shiro jokes, but doing the right thing is definitely higher on his priority list than keeping himself safe.

Shiro is a Hufflepuff secondary. He is steady, dependable, works hard, makes people feel safe, is quietly caring, and chips steadily and persistently away at problems ranging from convincing his friends get some sleep to saving the universe. It is this trustworthy, community-focused secondary that gives his primary its great warmth. It also lends to his tendency to “feel” his way through things instead of “think” through them—not that he doesn’t think at all, but he is willing almost more than anyone else in the cast to make decisions off gut feeling instead of careful logic.

(Incidentally, this Gryffindor/Hufflepuff combo may be where the writer criticisms of “Shiro is boring” come from. Healthy, passionate Gryffindors, especially those with the warm and loving Hufflepuff secondary, have a totally undeserved reputation for being uninteresting because they tend to be uninclined to moral angst - which a lot of people seem to think is the only thing that makes characters interesting - and typically don’t spend huge amounts of time thinking through problems. What makes them interesting is not how much they beat themselves up or agonize over their decisions but the depth and passion of their convictions in the face of all odds, and their ability to inspire others toward something better. They are strongest in a group, and they often wind up the leader not from any desire for power but because they engender trust in others. Steve Rogers and Clark Kent, two other fantastic characters who are often unjustly labeled as boring or shallow, share this sorting, by the way. Steve’s sorting you can find on the Sorting Hat Chats. Clark is my own analysis, mostly based in the Young Justice cartoon.)

The overall resilience of this Gryffinpuff sorting can truly be astounding, especially considering that it tends to be a highly idealistic, optimistic combination—ideals and optimism that at best the world often laughs at and at worst spits on and crushes underfoot. In the short term this can be horribly debilitating, which we see most clearly in Shiro after Allura is captured near the end of S1. When he steps out of that escape pod to face the rest of the team is perhaps the lowest we see him in the entire show. But the paradoxical resilience of this combination also allows him to bounce back quite quickly, the strength and passion of his ingrained beliefs and convictions buoying him up in the longer term as he plunges back in to right the wrongs. This is likely how he survived Galra captivity without burning either his primary or his secondary. Most of the others would likely have burned at least one of these, emerging broken or angry and with a much grimmer outlook on the world. Shiro makes it through with his optimistic approach to life largely intact based on what we see of him pre-Kerberos—acknowledging that the world can be gritty and cruel and painful but determined to do everything he can to make it better, determined that it is possible for it to be better, and trying (without much effort) to see the best in every person and situation.

This is how Shiro leads, and this is how he best fights: with people he has brought together at his side to watch his back, to trust and to be trusted, to point the way and inspire others with his convictions and then to lead a motley but effective team toward a chosen goal with the noblest of desires and intentions at the fore. He is certainly willing to fight alone, but whenever he does his fights have a desperate, last-ditch feel—taking Matt’s place in the arena, defending Lance and the Castle against Sendak, facing Haggar on the Galra ship. He is much more comfortable—and much more effective—when he has a team around him on whom he relies and who rely on him. As the leader of Voltron, Shiro regularly leans on the improvisational secondaries of Keith and Lance to come at a problem, and on the foundational secondaries of Pidge and Hunk to figure out how to come at the problem in the first place. It is this natural tendency to encourage and foster teamwork, combined with Shiro’s determined Gryffindor moral compass, that makes team Voltron under Shiro so effective and unified.

Interestingly, it is this trustworthiness and tendency toward reliance on gut instinct that get everyone in trouble with Kuron. Because they’re used to Shiro’s “I can’t necessarily explain this but I have a feeling” MO, and because he’s simply a dependable person who engenders trust in those around him, the rest of the team doesn’t question (much) Kuron’s insistence that they support Lotor until it’s far too late.

Keith—Slytherin/Gryffindor

Keith's Achilles heel is his friends—first, last, and always. He is willing to throw aside the fate of the universe to save one person, and he wouldn't even bat an eye about it. He breaks into a Garrison facility to rescue Shiro, he jeopardizes their mission to the Blades' base because he hopes to find out more about his family, he fights Zarkon alone to save Shiro, his desperation to help his friends allows him to join with astral-Shiro to unlock the Black Lion’s teleporting ability... His friends and family are his whole world, Shiro more than anyone else.

He tries really hard to model Shiro’s Gryffindor primary, but the poor boy is so bad at it that it really is only a performance, and a half-baked one at that. Almost every single attempt to use this performance gets him into trouble, even with Shiro, whom he’s trying to emulate in the first place. A couple examples of this are when he proposes leaving Allura in Zarkon’s captivity and his kamikaze attack on the Galra cruiser. Neither of these choices feel natural to him; he is trying and failing to do what he thinks he is supposed to do, not what he feels is right or what he wants. He does pull it off successfully a couple times, most notably in the first episode when he advocates for staying on Arus instead of running away, but this is definitely the exception versus the rule and likely had some of his Slytherin primary loyalty behind it (“if these people knew what was happening they’d be counting on me, I can’t let them down”).

I think Keith is actually a burned Slytherin and has kicked himself out of his loyalty circle. He remains devoted to his friends, especially Shiro, but he shows little to no concern for himself. Shiro’s return loyalty and devotion helps keep this burning in check, at the very least by watching out for Keith when Keith won’t watch out for himself, but when Shiro disappears and Keith is forced into a leadership role the burning spirals out of control. It reaches its climax with his kamikaze attack in S4. This burned state gives a desperate edge to his Gryffindor secondary.

Keith’s Gryffindor secondary is loud and brash and is basically summarized by his go-to strategy in almost every circumstance, that being, “I run in and I stab it.” This makes him prone to open-mouth-insert-foot moments, as well as jumping into hot water and needing his friends to bail him out, but it can also make him highly effective when this charging tendency is properly applied. For example, when he and Lance were infiltrating the hangar on the balmera Lance got them there using his come-at-things-sideways Slytherin secondary, but once in the control room he kept looking for a complicated solution to getting the doors open. Keith saved them a lot of time and effort by just putting his hand on the handprint.

This overall Slytherdor combination is what makes leadership so difficult for Keith. Without a reliable primary model to fall back on when something doesn’t land within the bounds of his Slytherin primary, and not having developed a way to keep his charging tendencies in enough check to prevent him and his friends from getting killed, he is not prepared to have team Voltron dropped on his shoulders. He already doesn’t have much confidence in his own ability to handle things or his own instincts about what he should or shouldn’t do, a confidence that Shiro was only just able to keep afloat. Sans Shiro, Keith falls into further loss of self-loyalty and trust in his own ability to manage a given situation (greatly exacerbated by the epic failure of his first mission as Black’s pilot, where Lotor spent the better part of a day running circles around them). In an attempt to cling to something, anything, to give him a foundation as a leader, Keith winds up leaning heavily on a combination of Lance’s Ravenclaw/Slytherin personality and his own very contrived Gryffindor performance. This doesn’t work very well and is one of the reasons team Voltron under Keith feels a lot shakier than it does under Shiro.

In addition, when Kuron takes over Black and Keith leaves for the Blades, the team still feels unbalanced without Keith’s Slytherin primary to help them stay focused on nearest people and priorities first and his Gryffindor secondary to help them charge at the problems that can be charged at. Just because Keith has loose cannon tendencies on his own doesn’t mean he’s not an effective and necessary part of the team makeup. (And by the way, leaving for the Blades is about the only healthily selfish choice we see him make in the whole show, and even that was largely motivated by his Gryffindor performance of “this is the right thing to do so I should do it”; whatever idiot on the writing crew decided that the whole team would jump on his case for this decision needs to step on a Lego.)

In Keith’s (and Shiro’s) defense, given enough time to grow and mature his true primary; develop a healthy, workable Gryffindor (or really any) primary model; and get a bit more control over his Gryffindor secondary tendency to charge, Keith really does have the potential to be a downright incredible leader. A couple great examples of Slytherdor characters are Han Solo, who winds up an excellent and effective leader in the resistance by the end of Episode VI, and Zuko, whose leadership potential gets most fully explored in the truly epic and renowned fanfic Embers by Vathara in which he… well, it’s awesome. (The Sorting Hat Chats folks narrow Zuko down to either Hufflepuff or Slytherin primary. Based on Embers, I think he’s modeling burned Hufflepuff primary at first and eventually loses it in favor of his natural Slytherin primary.) This sorting combo in potential leaders means they tend to take a long time to get to the point where they can be reliably trusted with the lives of others, and even when they do get there they’re often fighting for the cause of “this affects my people so I need to do something”. That doesn’t make them any less effective at what they do, however, and Keith has the potential to reach this place given time, nurturing, and proper motivation. He’s just pushed into a leadership role way too early and not given the sort of support system that would actually allow him to grow and mature while in this position.

Krolia especially has the potential to really help him with this growth, because that woman is an amazing and unapologetic Slytherin primary and her entire life and work is built around it. This both baffles and awes Keith, who assumes Krolia left him and his father for “the mission”—a Gryffindor-esque reason that Keith thinks he should have and tries so hard to believe in, and fails. Krolia without a moment’s hesitation replies, “I did it to protect the person I love most in the world—you.” Given time and the chance to see her in action I think Keith could really grow and mature his own primary based on what he sees in his mother. Add in the return of Shiro to regain his basis and guide for a Gryffindor primary model, plus learning to rely on other people to get things done when he can’t, and down the road I do think Keith could be a leadership force to be reckoned with.

Lance—Ravenclaw/Slytherin

This guy was hard to pin down, as not only is the Ravenclaw primary typically the most adaptable primary (and has the potential to resemble any of the others) but also Lance starts out with the least mature primary of the whole cast, and he changes quite a bit over the story. He's definitely got a feel for right and wrong, which is assisted in its maturation by the confident and outspoken Gryffindor primaries of both Shiro and Allura, but more than either of them Lance approaches situations acknowledging his gut feeling and then asking "why". See 1x04 when he and Coran are leaving the bridge and Lance senses something’s wrong. Instead of immediately bolting he goes, “Wait, where’s Pidge?” and tries to figure out what’s going on.

Unlike some Ravenclaws he doesn't entirely dismiss his intuition, but he's much more laid-back about his approach to a situation then his Gryffindor leaders, interested in looking at all the angles of a problem before finding a middle ground that best fits the facts of the scenario. With said Gryffindor leaders he usually gets along fine, and he plays an important role as Shiro’s lancer by poking at the black paladin’s gut instincts to see the logic behind them, as well as by utilizing his spur-of-the-moment Slytherin secondary to get things done. He does tend to get frustrated with charge-in-half-cocked Keith, however, since an approach like that for Lance means risking the possibility of jumping to conclusions before an accurate picture has been obtained.

Lance's Slytherin secondary is what makes him the yin to Keith's yang, at least when it comes to combat, as this secondary’s highly adaptable strategic abilities makes him excellent at handling himself and other people in the heat of battle. The red and blue paladins work best together when Lance comes up with a plan and then lets Keith charge it headlong. It's worth noting that Lance is not involved in pre-combat strategy all that much. It is in the middle of combat where he shines, taking situational awareness to a whole new level and quickly formulating battle plans on the spot to adapt to changing circumstances and take advantage of unexpected opportunities.

This Ravenclaw/Slytherin combo makes Lance a quiet information gatherer—not the “knowledge for the sake of it” type like Pidge, or even actively seeking knowledge at all, but more someone who quietly files away facts and tidbits gathered through passive observation for when they might be useful. No one realizes he does this until he casually spits out a perfect conversion of minutes to doboshes or points out an alternate route nobody else noticed. This means he doesn’t always come across as intelligent, but when everything hits the fan he’s probably got a supremely practical collection of data that will be hugely useful in getting everyone out of whatever scrape they find themselves in this time.

When push comes to shove Lance has the potential to be an immovable rock—a Ravenclaw primary certain in his truth and a Slytherin secondary who knows where he stands. We haven’t really had the opportunity to see this in the show, however, both because Lance hasn’t been put into a situation where it’s called for and because he struggles with insecurity. Unlike Keith, whose insecurity comes from a belief that his instinctual priorities are screwed up and he can’t trust himself, Lance’s insecurity stems from the fact that, especially as a Slytherin secondary, he swaps masks moment to moment and so struggles with a two-fold problem of longing to “be real” and fear of being “found out”. He very rarely drops the masks to enter the Slytherin secondary “neutral state”, something that takes confidence and trust in the people around him; we really have only seen him do it for more than a few seconds when he’s talking to the mice in S5. (For an example of a confident Slytherin secondary who actually spend most of her time in the neutral state, look no further than Toph Bei Fong.) This exacerbates the insecurity problem because Lance is so desperately attached to his masks that he hasn’t looked beneath them much, so he struggles with self-understanding.

Lance has additionally been further crippled by the fact that Keith, as team leader, latched on to him as both a moral compass and strategist. The net result was that Lance effectively led the team by proxy, figuring out what they should do in a given situation and even if they should do it at all. It also locked Lance into the role of Keith’s right-hand man when Lance actually operates at his best shifting to fit whatever position is necessary at the time. He is most naturally a jack-of-all-trades (further exacerbating his feelings of isolation and uselessness, as he doesn’t have a “thing”), but being forced to act as Keith’s steering wheel and leash didn’t leave him much opportunity to do anything else. With Kuron as black paladin Lance still is stuck in this position to a degree, since he has to take over the role of charger that Keith left vacant (which leaves some of the adaptability to Allura, who is able to pull it off thanks to her Ravenclaw secondary but isn’t as natural as Lance when doing it). This situation, especially taking on the charger role, is threatening to burn Lance’s secondary. I get the impression that this has already started to occur, as our favorite blue boy is starting to seem more and more worn down as the story goes on.

What Lance needs is for someone to help him see that having masks isn’t a bad thing, and also that taking them off is okay. He actually could learn a lot from Shiro, who was quietly supporting him through S1 and 2, and from Keith, whose brash honesty about who he is (even if he doesn’t like it) is a great opportunity for Lance to gain some confidence. He needs to grasp firmly at truth so that truth can set him free, and then that freedom will give him the solid foundation to plant his feet when the need arises and tell the world, “No, you move.”

Pidge—Slytherin/Ravenclaw

At first gloss Pidge looks like a straight Ravenclaw, nerdy and obsessed with knowledge. And she definitely has a strong love of truth for truth’s sake and seeks out knowledge like a squirrel does acorns. However, once you start poking under the surface, this Ravenclaw primary-ness is in fact a very robust model bolstered by her Ravenclaw secondary. Her true primary is Slytherin, made evident by the fact that she is willing to throw everything out the window, go to any and all lengths, in order to help her family and friends. She even tells us this in 1x04 when she says to Allura, “My first priority is finding my family.”

This Slytherin primary is healthier and more mature than Keith’s, and it’s clearly been Pidge’s driving force her whole life. She’s got that healthy Slytherin self-interest, always pushing herself to be the best (at least when it comes to science, tech, and engineering). This drive is fueled by her honest love of knowledge, certainly, but also by her desire to be the best, not because she has any interest in rubbing it in people’s faces but because it’s something she wants. (What pride we do see in her usually stems from a job well done versus being smug about her intellectual superiority as such. One thing that’s fantastic about her journey as green paladin is her coming to realize and appreciate how much she doesn’t and can never know.)

She is fiercely devoted to her people above and beyond any semblance of logic. Witness her decision to leave team Voltron to go find Matt and Sam, despite the fact that (as the team and circumstances eventually convince her) she is best served in that endeavor by remaining with the team. When Zarkon uses Sam as a hostage to bargain for Lotor Pidge is beside herself at even the slightest suggestion that they won’t do everything possible to get her father back. Even Matt, who is definitely upset, doesn’t show nearly the same amount of wild desperation. And it is her devotion to her team that enables her to unlock the Green Lion’s vine cannon. She can and often does channel her Ravenclaw secondary when going about her commitment to her people—for example, creating an entire new identity for herself in order to infiltrate the Garrison and find her family, as well as building technology capable of scanning alien radio chatter. But that application of knowledge serves the larger purpose of finding and helping those she loves the most.

With her Ravenclaw secondary Pidge hoards knowledge of all kinds, though she tends to focus on science—specifically physics, engineering, and computers. She is all about contingency plans, tinkering with things to see what new stuff she can get it to do, breaking things into their component parts and mixing them up. She’s not an on-the-spot improviser like Lance; instead, she has a vast array of systems and methods that she switches between and sometimes smashes together in order to tackle a problem. On Olkarion she takes her understanding of binary and puts it into a new environment, enabling her to use their plant-based tech. She reverse engineers the maze walls to develop her own cloaking tech. Like her “Galra tracker” she puts the world through a filter of logic and data and breaks things apart to find patterns and methodologies. This gives her an impressive amount of adaptability within the wide limits of these operational methods, as she is able to take plans and processes and apply them or rearrange them to fit her purposes.

Hunk—Hufflepuff/Hufflepuff

I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that Hunk is a Hufflepuff primary. He loves people and community and has a deep, iron streak of justice that is terrifying when it comes out. A gentle soul, he still is willing to do whatever it takes to help the most in need, even if that means laying down on the wire or borderline bullying people into getting things done. This desire for justice overrides even his strong sense of self-preservation, which does tend to come across as cowardliness when contrasted with bold Gryffindor primaries like Shiro and Allura or everything-for-my-tribe Slytherin primaries like Pidge and Keith. Lance is the bridge between Hunk and these others, advocating for leaving to fight another day in the first episode. But both Lance and Hunk learn to think beyond themselves over time, and for Hunk the tipping point was the balmera.

Before going to the balmera, Hunk had agreed to participate in team Voltron but his heart wasn’t really in it. He was more doing it because it was expected, that’s what his friends were doing, and in all honesty he didn’t have much choice. Once he visited the balmera, however, and met its residents and saw what the Galra were doing to them, he committed entirely to the cause—and for him, it’s not “because it’s the right thing to do” (Shiro and Allura) or “my people are in danger” (Keith and Pidge). It’s because people, people and communities he cares about, are suffering, and they need someone to help them. That’s not to say he doesn’t still have moments of fear or nerves, but his devotion to this cause of helping the needy gives him the courage necessary to overcome his fear.

This dedication to community gives Hunk a commitment to justice that can be truly unnerving to see come out in someone so gentle. It happens only rarely, but when it does we see the full extent of Hunk’s quiet power and unyielding foundation. The best example is Rolo and Nyma when the bounty hunters hold up team Voltron on their way to the balmera. This incident happens largely because of Shiro and Allura’s idealistic Gryffindor primaries, and although Hunk doesn’t like the delay he hasn’t yet learned to push his point with his leaders (or to trust his instincts; Hunk is someone who has been a follower for most of his life, if only because he’s gentle and laid back enough to get pushed around by stronger personality types, and part of his growth is learning to stand up for himself and his beliefs). Once the bounty hunters’ true motives are revealed, the depth of Hunk’s fury is terrifying. Months later, when he encounters Rolo and Nyma again after the bounty hunters have joined up with the rebels, he is still angry—because they upset the scales of justice and injured the community and the overall good, and violating trust like that takes lots of time and lots of effort to overcome. It’s possible, but although he is willing to give new people the benefit of the doubt this Hufflepuff does not forgive serious grievances easily.

Hunk is a Hufflepuff secondary—the quiet, trustworthy, reliable guy who often gets overlooked until as a last resort he throws back the curtains to reveal a powerhouse surrounded by an unswervingly dedicated group of people - and often he doesn’t even throw back the curtains. People he didn’t even know were dedicated just show up to punch the lights out of whoever dared to mess with their precious cinnamon roll, often to Hunk’s surprise. He’s not an obviously inspirational community builder like Shiro, but he nevertheless quietly and unconsciously builds a loyal community that often takes him for granted because he blends in with the scenery most of the time. Even as they don’t notice he’s there, however, they pick up the bits of comfort and safety and quiet trust he offers them, making him a sort of glue in the woodwork—invisible, but holding everything together when the rubber meets the road. He lacks the Ravenclaw ability to adapt, but he still is a foundational secondary that the others lean upon in times of trouble.

He also has a wonderfully down-to-earth approach to things, pointing out that “we are in some kind of futuristic alien cat head right now” and, though he is certainly able to be impressed, he much prefers to see things as they truly are than as he would like them to be. As an extension of his sense of justice, he much prefers pure honesty to half-truths, and he really doesn’t seem to have a deceptive bone in his body. He pushes steadily through information until he uncovers the foundational truth of a matter.

To a degree he models a Ravenclaw secondary, gathering information about food and cultures and science (especially engineering and chemistry) and asking questions that often don’t even seem to occur to the others. But he lacks the adaptability of a true Ravenclaw secondary, instead using that secondary’s toolset only to the extent that it furthers the needs of his true Hufflepuff secondary.

Allura—Gryffindor/Ravenclaw

Allura’s strong Gryffindor primary is fed through her Ravenclaw secondary, making her a far more logical (and even coldly ruthless) Gryff than passionate, Hufflepuff secondary Shiro. This makes for an interesting paradox with their roles, as Shiro—the head—is deeply centered in feeling and instinct, while Allura—the heart—approaches things from a much more logic-based viewpoint. At the end of S1, when Allura is captured and Shiro is leading the team alone, he is undeterrable from his commitment to rescue Allura because he feels that’s the right thing to do, darn it, and to heck with all the reasons why it’s not. (There are actually some very solid strategic reasons for rescuing Allura, but Shiro is totally uninterested in them. This is simply the right thing to do; reason and cold logic is secondary.) Upon the team’s arrival Allura’s immediate reaction is “why the heck did you come here, that was so stupid.” Shiro’s role as the passionate head is guided by Allura operating as the rational heart.

Now, that’s not to say Allura is always actually truly rational about her choices and beliefs. Witness her “never trust a Galra” mentality of most of the first two seasons. Granted, she has some pretty good reasons for it—the Galra kind of massacred her entire people and destroyed her planet, after all—but when faced with a heap of evidence that there actually are trustworthy Galra it takes her a while to warm up to the idea. The fact that she does eventually come around is evidence of her willingness to actually listen to reason, not just the way she wants or believes things to be, but her difficulty in doing so is rooted in her Gryffindor passion and stubbornness.

She seems to be a Ravenclaw secondary, but stretched thin on time, resources, energy, and mental capacity, she focuses much more on practical knowledge, whether that be the ins and outs of the Castle systems, alchemy, or matters of state and diplomacy. She doesn’t have the luxury of delving into something just for the sake of learning about it, but she tends to know a bit about everything. And she does have a wide range of strategies and behavioral structures that often emulate the other secondaries—Gryffindor charging (probably learned from Alfor, and this is usually just in combat), Hufflepuff caring and toil (she’s taken on a task that can’t be solved in a day, after all), and even Slytherin manipulativeness (she never speaks untruth but she does lie by omission during S1, avoiding telling the paladins who the previous black paladin was until that lack of information puts all their lives in jeopardy).

This extensive and varied array of mechanisms at her disposal indicates a widely applicable and decently adaptive Ravenclaw secondary. However, the clear demonstration of traits of other secondaries, plus her “whatever is necessary to get things done” mindset, suggests that Allura is in danger of burning her secondary. There is a satisfaction when she completes a task that seems to indicate she hasn’t yet done so, but the risk is definitely there. She continues to take on more and more in order to further her goals, and although she is devoted to her team she’s not quite as capable as Shiro at fielding out tasks to those best suited to them. Granted, quite a bit of what she does can’t be fielded out—piloting the Castle, making wormholes, flying Blue, alchemy. But she’s stretching herself dangerously thin, and especially without Shiro there telling her to take a break when she’s pushing too far she is getting very close to tipping over the edge into exhausted slogging through tasks using whatever methods necessary.

Part of the problem, too, is she is not as well suited to Blue as Lance is. Blue is the middle ground Lion in pretty much every way—speed, armor, combat ability. It is a Lion meant to fill in the gaps between the others wherever and whenever necessary, which requires some degree of jack-of-all-trades functionality. Allura can do many things, but she doesn’t fit this description as well as Lance does, if only because there are other things she can do much better. Her Ravenclaw secondary means she is intellectually adaptable, but not necessarily situationally adaptable, at least to the same extent that Lance is. She’s able to make up the difference enough to get by, but the resulting adaptability isn’t as fluid as Lance’s and is hindered by her Gryffindor primary fixation on the end goal. This puts yet another bump in the cogs of team Voltron when Lance and Allura are in Red and Blue, and it gives Allura yet another ball to juggle, taxing her even more. She needs to get out of Blue and hand over to others those tasks that do not absolutely require her to do them, which will allow her to better and more fully do those things that do require her.

SECONDARY CAST and VILLAINS (Note: Most of these sortings tend more toward speculation, as we have often seen very little of these people on screen and so it is harder to make calls about some of them.)

Coran—Ravenclaw/Ravenclaw

Coran is hard to figure out because his whole life and person are channeled through his role as Allura’s servant, steward, and advisor. He’s definitely a constructionist house, but I ultimately peg him as a Ravenclaw primary because he doesn’t throw everything to the winds when Allura (the person he is devoted to above all else) is in danger the way you’d expect with a Slytherin primary. This doesn’t make him any less loyal to her, but threatened loyalties don’t have the same kind of earth-shattering power over him as they do over, say, Keith and Pidge.

He’s a situational secondary, but I have to go with Ravenclaw again here because he doesn’t have quite the Slytherin make-things-up-as-I-go tendency. And when everything hits the fan and he’s out of typical options he tends to panic instead of jumping on the duct tape and string and making something up on the fly. When we do see him improvise (e.g. that thing he did jumpstarting the Castle system with the bottle of alcohol at the end of S6) it’s with materials and data he’s noted and catalogued previously.

He definitely has a rather eclectic and not always useful mental hodgepodge of information, and he’s prone to get sidetracked on tangents about this or that interesting factoid. While not a scientist in the same sense that Pidge is, or dedicated to practicality like Allura, he still is curious and is happier the more he knows.

Krolia—Slytherin/Slytherin

This woman is a gorgeously unapologetic Slytherin primary and I love her for it. Her entire life is built around her deep motivation to protect those she loves most, especially Keith, and she demonstrates far more confidence and trust in the rightness of this drive and desire than he does. She may have a Gryffindor model for handling things outside of this primary—we don’t know what her reason for joining the Blades was, but although I can imagine several Slytherin motivations it could also have stemmed from a modeled Gryffindor idealism—but we haven’t had the chance to see much of anything except her Slytherin primary in canon.

I have to go with Slytherin secondary for Krolia, too. She seems to spend much of her time in her neutral state (and as such Lance may actually be able to learn a lot from her—I totally want to see her adopt our favorite blue boy and aggressively mother him to his wits’ end), which results in a beautiful bluntness that looks a lot like her son’s Gryffindor secondary. However, she sorts into the Slytherin secondary because she is a master of subtle manipulation and deception. Witness how effectively she’s able to integrate herself into not one but multiple high-profile Empire missions, manipulating the people around her into believing that she is entirely committed to the mission—and even getting them to self-destruct.

Romelle—Gryffindor/Gryffindor

Dedicated to doing the right thing come hell or high water, Romelle exemplifies the Gryffindor primary. She distrusted Lotor based first on nothing but a gut feeling, and maintained that stance despite her brother’s protests (and all evidence) to the contrary. Then, when her brother’s death validated her concerns, she grieved, but she was also furious and determined not to let such a thing happen ever again. So when an opportunity arose to take Lotor down—offered by another half-Galra and a full Galra, no less—this Gryffindor secondary carpe diemed so hard she broke Lotor. I am so on board for her and Krolia teaming up, the best of Gryffindor and Slytherin united as a force to be reckoned with.

Matt Holt—Gryffindor or Hufflepuff/Ravenclaw or Slytherin?

Sheesh, we just don’t have enough info for this guy. He doesn’t have quite the dedication to his people that you’d expect from a true Slytherin primary—see my analysis of Pidge—so not that. I kinda like the idea of him as a Gryffindor primary like his father, but I can also see him as a Hufflepuff or even maybe a Ravenclaw. As for his secondary… I’m leaning toward one of the improvisational ones, probably Ravenclaw, since he doesn’t really seem to have the role-switching and manipulativeness of a Slytherin. But he could be a Hufflepuff secondary with a Ravenclaw model… argh. We just don’t have enough canon info to sort him.

Sam Holt—Gryffindor/Ravenclaw

One of my few exceptions to sorting people based on material from S7, Sam’s got a commitment to doing the right thing that breaks through even the somewhat laid-back, nerdy professorial persona he usually demonstrates (not an act, it’s just the way he is when he hasn’t had that Gryffindor passion stirred). This persona feeds from his Ravenclaw secondary, and though he may model Ravenclaw primary when in a science setting his love of truth is motivated by a deep belief that truth aligns with the right thing to do. (Interestingly enough, in a family of scientists, with the possible but unlikely exception of Matt, none of the Holts are Ravenclaw primaries. At least two secondaries, but no primaries. Yay for bucking stereotypes.)

Colleen Holt—Slytherin/Gryffindor

Again an exception to my desire not to use any material past S6, this sorting is also based a bit on my own headcanons and plans for this character. Colleen is devoted to her family before anything and everything else, and she’s willing to tear apart institutions, governments, and other people if that’s what it takes to protect her loved ones. She’s got an Irish passion as befits her name, and that passion is focused entirely on her husband and children. She’s incredibly direct about this passion, too, cutting right to the heart of things instead of weaving around and greasing up the problem the way Krolia does, though she’s certainly willing and able to at least assist with subterfuge. She helped Katie get into the Garrison, after all.

Lotor—Ravenclaw/Slytherin

Lotor has constructed a belief system that is totally foreign to every other character in the show, comfortable in the dichotomies and contradictions of that belief system and convinced that everything he does is for some vague greater good—a good he, conveniently, gets to define. He has sought truth and information, certainly, as befits a Ravenclaw primary, but instead of trying to learn the way things truly are and shape his beliefs around the reality he uncovers he has created a system built upon his own desires about the way he wants the world to be. It is beautiful in a terrifying way—a man so thoroughly convinced that he is right that he’s willing to harvest the very life-force of others in order to further his ends, convinced that this is the right thing to do and that not doing so would be a failing on his part.

He exemplifies the ultimate levels of Slytherin manipulativeness and role-shifting, to the point where he seems to have deceived himself into believing in some of the masks he puts on (e.g. the noble hero who sacrifices the few for the sake of the many). When the masks are finally all stripped away at the end of S6, he hates what he sees so much that he can’t accept that what lies beneath is truly him. It is someone else’s fault, it is because someone else has denied what he wanted, and so he lashes out.

This guy is kind of evil Lance, which is a really frightening thought—and probably part of why Lance seemed to dislike him the most out of the whole team (aside from Lance’s crush on Allura). Lance was possibly able to see, at least subconsciously, through some of the scheming and persona, something like “if that were me I wouldn’t trust myself”. I wish we’d seen more of them going intellectually head to head. Having two sides of the same coin pushing at each other—one who’s had centuries to delve for truth and has chosen to use that time and knowledge to shape his beliefs the way he wants them to be, not as things are, the other who is not yet twenty but despite his facades and many broken wishes tries to take the world as it is and is willing to accept truths he doesn’t like—man, that would just be fantastic to watch. And a great chance for Lance to shine.

Zarkon—Gryffindor/Hufflepuff

This is largely speculation and mostly based on what we see in the flashback episode, but… Zarkon, at least in his younger years, had the gut instinct thing going as a leader, and he put his nose to the grindstone and plowed ahead with a course of action once it had his convictions behind it. Witness his very much felt dedication to Honerva and her cause—investigating the rift—despite any evidence to the contrary. Obviously he got his priorities screwed up, but the passion he put into his decisions really feels Gryffindor to me, coupled with the rooted stubbornness and the community building of the Hufflepuff secondary (note how readily the other original paladins respond to him as a commander).

I actually don’t think he’s burned his Gryffindor primary by the time we get to the show’s present day. Quite a few of his decisions—e.g. dragging off one of his generals based on very little evidence, as the guy actually made a decent strategic move all things considered—feel like they’re being made based on feeling versus logic (or anything else). Again, the guy’s obviously got his priorities and methods screwed up, but the Gryffindor primary MO is there. He looks like he may have shifted to Gryffindor secondary, or at least a model, but I think that’s more because he’s got a (not unfounded) high opinion of his own prowess in combat, so he charges right in ready to hack enemies to pieces. This actually only backfires on him once Shiro gets the black bayard back and Voltron is able to stab Zarkon with the flaming sword. (Haven’t watched the Zarkon vs. Lotor fight lately so I can’t call anything based on that.)

So all things considered I think Zarkon is an example of what happens when a Gryffinpuff (I’m convinced the Lions have types, by the way) falls—not burns, but falls. Goes bad. Uses his ability to inspire for evil purposes instead of good, and denies evidence that the course he’s set himself on is wrong. In all likelihood, considering this sorting’s penchant for gathering people close to them and relying on those people, I would imagine that bad influences contribute in a large degree to this fall—at the very least because the Gryffinpuff can’t bring himself to acknowledge that he’s been wrong about his beliefs, choices, and loyalties once problems start cropping up.

Honerva/Haggar—Ravenclaw/Ravenclaw

One of the very first things we hear Honerva say is a dismissive comment about any knowledge that doesn’t stem from science: “our ancestors thought lightning was shot from the bows of the gods until science proved otherwise”—in other words, if we haven’t studied it, tested it, poked at it, that knowledge is suspect at best. She is dedicated to her alchemical work beyond any bounds of reason, pursuing truth in such an obsessive, reckless way that she jeopardizes and ultimately brings about the destruction of her husband’s planet. She’s the sort of scientist who thinks that if we can do it we should do it—truth is to be pursued at all costs, and all possibilities must be explored. While in theory noble, this Ravenclaw primary drive needs to be tempered with reason to prevent injury and loss of life. Honerva refuses to listen to reason and so dooms herself and millions of others.

This primary is so overpowering that we don’t really get a good feel for her secondary, but she’s got a methodical approach to things that suggests Ravenclaw. We don’t actually see her much in situations where everything’s hit the fan and she has to pick up the pieces, but the one time this happens—at the end of S2, when Allura faces her down and destroys the quintessence-draining device—Haggar can’t improvise fast enough to prevent it from happening, and seems to short circuit when something unexpected happens. So she’s got plenty of knowledge and data, but if something falls outside any and all operational systems that she possesses, she can’t really make something up on the fly. I really don’t think she could be a Hufflepuff secondary, because despite her methodical way of functioning she doesn’t have the community-building qualities of a Puff. She really doesn’t seem interested in people at all, actually, having friends and family but willing to jeopardize those people and relationships for pursuit of knowledge. Definitely not a Hufflepuff.

Sendak—Gryffindor/Gryffindor, Slytherin, or Ravenclaw

Really not sure on this guy, though I do get a passionately evil Gryffindor primary vibe off him. Kinda Jayne Cobb from Firefly. And potentially any secondary except Hufflepuff. I think. Slytherin doesn’t seem all that likely either, though, so I’m going to guess at a straight Gryffindor.

Alfor—Slytherin/Gryffindor

Further evidence that the Lions have a type, Alfor shares the Slytherdor combo with Keith. He’s a lot more cheerful and optimistic about it than Keith, at least in his younger years, and he sometimes seems to charge more as a lark than a grim necessity, trusting his friends to bail him out if he gets in over his head. That’s not to say he’s irresponsible—he seems to be a highly competent and reasonable ruler and alchemist—but when he’s got loyal companions backing him up he’s much more willing to go, “Hey guys, bet I can’t do this!” and jump headlong into something crazy.

It is his Slytherin primary that gets him into trouble when Zarkon and Honerva start to slip. Loyal to a fault, Alfor is willing to give his trusted friends the benefit of the doubt, assuming that they know what they’re doing. He is devoted to those he holds dear and is optimistic enough that he doesn’t see their faults until it’s too late.

I do suspect that he burned at least his secondary, because the few glimpses we see of his last hours suggests a much more worn, damaged person than the enthusiastic young king we first met. He may have even burned his primary, at least to a degree, though he remained loyal to at least Allura.

Iverson—Gryffindor/Gryffindor or Hufflepuff

I can see much younger Iverson and Sam Holt bonding over their shared primary, gung-ho about the world and space and adventure with Sam providing the Ravenclaw brains and Iverson providing the inspirational enthusiasm. His secondary could go either way, I think—we don’t get to see him in action much, and the one time we do, when he stands up to defend the Holts against the admiral (again breaking my past S6 rule), it’s driven from his passionate Gryffindor primary. Though he’s a very direct sort of person, suggesting a Gryffindor secondary, I could also see him as a rough-around-the-edges Gryffinpuff in the same vein as Shiro. Their friendship is important to me.

Slav—Ravenclaw/Ravenclaw

This crazy genius is the most eccentric Ravenclaw of all time. In all his speculations about realities, pursuing truth in an unbelievably intellectual way, he’s become so disconnected from this reality that he just doesn’t seem to be functioning on ground level with everyone else. He is all about systems, methodologies, poking and testing and experimenting and running analyses on the statistical likelihood of X event happening in this reality. Brilliant, insane Ravenclaw all the way.

Anyway, that’s it. Hope you enjoyed!

#sortinghatchats #vld #shiro #allura #lance #keith #pidge #coran #krolia #season 6

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ajebjorkman-blog · 5 years

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The Long Cold Open to Socialism or Barbarism... or Party Space Alpha

Recently, I bumped into a few of those unfortunate zombies propelled into mindless shuffling by the absolute horror of the hollow center; and, if it’s the case that the concept of the hollow center draws a blank—the dank whiteness of the silver screen before some Clint Eastwood shooting-gun-male-sociopath-revenge-drama—try to imagine a vast pit of waste, much like the overarching metaphor of Don DeLillo’s mind-numbingly boring Underworld. All in all, though, and to cut my tendency toward preciousness to at best shorter, the hollow center is cra(aa)p—the hollow center is a space endlessly differentiated and endlessly atomizing and endlessly unfeeling, and as is the case with the very idea of all things endless (whatever that may mean), time and history stops to matter, specifically history. The end of history has already happened, though, with the fall of the Soviet Union—at least according to Frances Fukuyama. He’s still alive, right?

Or, or…

or think of the hollow center like this: it’s the forever-noon party—or whatever time of day the elderly booze up and kick down—of Hypercharged Capital held at Party Space Alpha.

Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek are adored keynote speakers, brought back from the dead by scientism-magic to white-counter the supposed browning of the world, or, as some religious zealots opine, the existential threat of the tainting of the world.

Rand says, “The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.”

The crowd cheers and chants, “Galt! Who the fuck is Galt!!?”

Friedman says, “Shock, shock, shock!”

The crowd cheers and chants, though quizzingly, “Who is Galt?”

Hayek says something about force from afar as a corrective while the crowd tries to find the one voice who said, “Galt is Atlas, no? Greek stuff, I think.”

After speeches and rants, lobotomized servants serve finger food from gold platters, and Ted Nugent takes the stage, humps his guitar and sings about pedophilia and freedom.

And look at those skeletons shuffle and jig, some pumping their fists and whiplashing their necks.

Joy and sanity, re-enter my world. You enter Party Space Alpha, try to get a feel for the place, and you think:

So this is where I’ve come to.

You mingle...and look, there’s one of those Zoomer-influencers you’ve heard about, always be gramming.

“What I’m trying to do, see,” the Zoomer-influencer says, “is to make jokes about race and fucking and such, you know, make them great again, hint, hint.” (Yes, he says hint, hint out loud-) Also, ”That dead man hanging. Sad, very sad. I already said I’m sorry, ok!” He storms off, leaving you to think about things when a hand, moist, so moist, graces your shoulder.

You turn around. A somewhat cross-eyed dude—on closer inspection, however, he’s not cross-eyed, just dead-eyed—speaks to you in an affected, puppet-like voice, like his vocal chords are somehow placed inside his Adam’s apple.

The dead-eyed dude with weird Adam’s apple-voice says, “Want to discuss ideas?”

You nod. You’re already here, you think, so why not. You throw a few ideas up for consideration and deliberation: Socialized housing and healthcare, that’d be a good start, you think, after which you mention structures of oppression and that they’re crap; you mention essentialism, the idea of Spinozian substances and God-given grace and soul and pineal gland homunculus’ puppetry and phrenology and sociobiology and Steven Pinker, and how these fucked up descriptive statements prescribe fucked up social agendas; you skip from Hume (you can’t experience causality, am I right) to Kant (Let’s critique pure reason, am I right) through Hegel (History isn’t purely spiritual, am I right) to Marx. Also, because why not, and it’s not really and ad hominem, you mention that it would be quite funny to create a Japanese game show where libertarians, fascists, conservatives, and dangerously daft liberals are mildly tortured for the prize of cool trinkets.

The dead-eyed dude nods, furrows his brow and smacks his tongue—a hint of anxiousness, like eels speeding his dead eye-water, momentarily turns him somewhat human. He says:

“I see. But you see, I want to discuss high-level ideas, like do you have an iPhone? If so, you’re no oppressed.”

You leave because the dead-eyed weird dude was about to have a stroke, or so it seemed, ranting about oppression O(h)lympics and whatever else.

From the corner of the vast space, a dwarfed dude with a boyish bowl-cut speedily espouses that facts don’t care about your emotions and that the labor theory of value is anachronistic balderdash. He espouses this to a party-fun-house-mirror, in training for debate-destroying. To his right, arms crossed, stands a gang of clean-shaven dudes. They all wear Fred Perry- shirts. They’re all sweaty, and their sweat forms a cloud, and the cloud spells: We Are Disenfranchised Also, Blue Lives Matter. Also, one of the dudes holds a katana. Lord knows why. Another dead-eyed dude-bro-boy close by—there’s so many of them, more or less affective, this one like a flat line—explains that the Lord is dead, which, sure, you think, sounds like a shame.

In a dull monotone, the Flatliner continues:

“The hadith… the muslem or Mos-Lem religion, Islam—that explains the katana. It’s a necessary precaution to ward off the onslaught—and don’t take me out of context, please, I’m only ideating like Socrates in the, eh, in the Atheneum.

“What onslaught?” you ask.

“It’s a moral priority to honestly and openly assess the geopolitical and, eh, moral consequences of the actual content of the Quran, and, eh… so, turning a blind eye to, eh, to statistically significant increases in, eh, rape and… so rape and terror, yes terror—that’s not only morally ambiguous, it’s morally vacuous, and my contention and intention as a civil Western…”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I do wonder what you think about this, Mr. Flatline: Socrates was deemed dangerous and such, right, and he was killed by the state for riling up the hoi polloi, for advancing critical thinking and debate. He was force-fed that killing drink, right, the one that killed him off in increments from feet to head. So, as a latter-day Socrates, will you help me understand if there is an analogy between being forced to drink the killing drink and, how should I phrase it—being coerced to drink the Kool-Aid, in that both drinks literally kills off something? I know it’s somewhat heady and not entirely coherent, but you know, nothing is entirely coherent. Contradictions and that.”

“Well, this is typical muddying of the water…”

“Or muddying the fluid? Kool-Aid, killing drink, Kool-Aid, killing drink…”

“Woo-woo. If you look at the end of my first book, in the last footnote of the epilogue, I clearly refer to a footnote in a blog post about this subject, and that footnote, if only you’d just read it—it clearly refers to what I said in my podcast some year or so ago, so.”

You leave, not daring to continue what already initially was a torturous exchange. You start to feel heavy and kind of fragmented at the same time. Weird.

Somewhere else in Part Space Alpha an orange blob in diapers eats hamburgers and ribs and chocolate and wipes the drooping and drooping corners of his mouth with the flag of Palestine while a hunched over assistant takes notes:

NEED TO BUY MORE FOOD FOR LEADER. (It’s so Alpha to capitalize notes.)

Someone fires a gun into the air and laughs amidst applause. Such a nice gun! The orange blob stops munching and laughs without it sounding like laughter. He just opens his mouth and shows his teeth. He says:

“My guy. Give him a tank.” He realizes, shouts: “Where’s my African American!”

No one responds or arrives. There’s few to no black or brown people in Party Space Alpha; also, quite a few women dare venture into Party Space Alpha, because… Party Space Alpha.

Hunched over one of the few women present, Slender Man in a fedora and a pinstriped suit berates and gestures and cries a little:

“The absence of women in Party Space Alpha forms the materiality of the legitimacy of the perceived subordination of those young men to whom the existential and the individual necessity of sexual intercourse is denied. If only these young men were allowed to slap and slap happily, there’d be mental equilibrium.”

Enough.

You exit by the back door unto the Wasteland, your only refuge from the constant violence of Party Space Alpha; and you’re not feeling morally vacuous for being ok with the idea of this vast space somehow eating itself to death. So, Party Space Alpha is the hollow center. It WILL fuck you up.

#leftisbest #socialism #nonfiction #creative nonfiction #aje #party space alpha leftism lumpen dave rubin ben shapiro jordan peterson sam harris fuck trump

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kylandara · 5 years

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A very interesting take. I would sadly agree Jon fell from grace, because whether political Jon is true or not, he enable Dany this far to cause the destruction she did. Not that Dany doesn’t get the max blame, but Jon has his share for his own soul. I can almost imagine his PTSD when this is all over. Onwards

——————-

The hysterical reactions to Dany’s dark turn were initially amusing to me because I enjoy suffering, but as this week has gone on, I have grown more disconcerted by 8x05 myself. I am not an emotional person by nature, but each day I am more agitated by the episode rather than less. I didn’t know exactly why it bothered me so much until I realized that I was running through the same stages of grief that Dany stans were.

Both of us lost our heroes.

I had been laughing about Dany stans not seeing where her arc was going when there is ample foreshadowing in books and show as pointed out in articles, metas, posts on Reddit, answers here on Quora, YouTube videos, wherever it is you go for GoT fan content, Dark Dany has been discussed. I thought the proof was so overwhelming that to not see it meant you were in denial.

I did not know I was in denial myself.

I thought Dany stans were watching a different show than the rest of us.

The truth is, I was watching a different show than some of you.

As much as this has frustrated me to no end, I think it has been the greatest success of GoT that D&D have exposed us to ourselves. Or at least, it would be if we pulled ourselves away from our feelings long enough to acknowledge what’s been staring us in the face the whole time.

Dany was not the only hero who fell from grace Sunday. I have been grieving for my own.

Dany burned thousands, tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people Sunday, a horrific and inevitable event.

My hero stood by and watched. Worse, my hero knew it was likely to happen and enabled her. Even worse, my hero marched his men South to help her. And still worse than that, when Varys looked him in the eyes and said they knew what was going to happen, Jon refused to even try to stop her.

My hero did not commit the inexcusable evil that Dany did (Yes, EVIL. Yes, INEXCUSABLE.) But my hero did not take a stand. My hero was not heroic. My hero stood by helplessly while children were burned alive. How harshly did I condemn Stannis and the Red Woman for burning Shireen because I loved her? How harshly should I then condemn Dany for the same crime tens of thousands of times over? How harshly did I judge Stannis’ enablers for not stopping him? How harshly must I then judge Jon for not doing something, anything before Dany burned King’s Landing?

Dany stans justified every life she took before 8x05. I justified every life Jon had taken. No, there is no moral equivalence between those, but on Sunday, both committed wrongs that there is no justifying. Again, there is no moral equivalence between Dany’s actions and Jon’s inaction, but I realized my emotions as a Jon fan have been paralleling to a much subtler degree, Dany fans.

They are shrieking about bad writing and OOC behavior, and I have been saying much the same of Jon. But, maybe I was just as deluded as they were, believing what I want rather than paying attention to what I was seeing.

I thought the Battle of Winterfell was bad writing. I didn't think D&D were actually trying to tell us something about Jon, but maybe they were. Yes, his strength is uniting people, but if they are being led by the wrong person, it is meaningless to do so. As seen on Sunday, the wrong leader leads to madness.

The events of 8x05 may be the narrative punishment for Jon not taking up his crown with further spiraling yet to come, or, perhaps it was the rock bottom of him refusing his destiny and what we witnessed is what motivates him to rise up. We might see him well and truly defeated in the finale by what he has participated in, or he might take a stand.

Either way, I don't think this season has been the total destruction of his character I initially thought it was. I think what we’re seeing is writers allowing a hero to suffer the emotional and psychological impact of what he's been through. I wish they would let us experience it with him, I wish they would have give us more that a rare glimpse, but just because I wanted something different doesn't mean they weren't being purposeful.

I resent what they've done because they took my hero from me and gave me a broken man. That's too realistic for me to enjoy, and I wanted to enjoy this season, not suffer through it. I did not want my vision of a victorious hero thwarted for anything. And that’s when it hits me. This is why it hurts. I can either morally compromise myself to pretend like Jon wasn’t wrong, or I have to allow my hero to fall.

Many were upset by Jaime returning to Cersei because we bought into his version of himself as a man escaped from his captor. We thought he had become good. We wanted him to be with Brienne. Yet, how can we objectively say that staying with a new lover is the morally superior choice to trying to save the life of the woman who bore his children? The woman who was pregnant with his child? In falling from grace in the eyes of Braime shippers, Jaime made the right choice.

Jaime is a better person for having died trying to save Cersei than he would have been had he chosen to fulfill his own selfish desire to let her die alone. He wasn’t good enough for Brienne before, he certainly wouldn’t have been if he had let his child die without attempting to save it. In breaking the hearts of shippers and fans around the world, D&D (damn them for making me appreciate them after I decided I didn’t!) turned Jaime into a morally superior character in 8x05 than the Breaker of Chains. A guy who pushed a child from the window attempted to save life while our Khaleesi took it.

Just because we have a version of a character in our head and a path for them to follow, just because we know what we want and are upset when we don’t get it, doesn’t make it better. Jaime chose better for himself than we would have chosen for him. Shame on us for being so morally incompetent that we didn’t recognize it immediately. By leaving her and trying to rescue Cersei, Jaime was closer to deserving Brienne than he ever had been before.

Another surprise in the episode is that The Hound had more moral clarity than Arya. The Hound who murdered for a living became the voice of sanity when he told Arya that if she followed where he led she would only find death. He told her to choose life even when he couldn’t. Arya listened, she chose to put aside vengeance and preserve life rather than take it. And here, we, the audience had been cheering her quest for vengeance, only to then cheer on the new decision, because we are led by our emotions and dumber for it. The Hound had better morals than we did. THE HOUND.

Cersei, that power crazed woman was just another victim. The bells rang and Dany burned them all anyway. And all the Dany stans who are finding ways to excuse, rationalize, or simply crying out “character assassination” are just in denial. Your hero failed the test of basic humanity because she has always wanted to. Her first instinct has consistently been to burn and destroy, she’s just always happened to have someone holding her back before.

That’s not bad writing. That’s making your audience question what we’ve been accepting and reject what characters say about themselves and think critically about what we have witnessed with our own eyes. It’s mental torture, but it’s the right kind of subversive because there are threads we can find that were always going to lead us here.

Some of us had been condemning Cersei and cheering on a woman who was essentially doing the same things. We just didn’t recognize it because we didn’t want to. Because Dany was framed as a hero, and we all know Cersei is a villain, we didn’t stop and think about what Dany has been doing for years and ask if it was right.

Jon didn’t know as much about Dany as we did. Maybe he hadn’t heard of what Dany did before coming to Westeros. Perhaps he didn’t fully comprehend what happened during the loot train attack, but he saw her talking about wanting to burn the Red Keep in s7, he saw what dragons were capable of beyond the Wall and during the Battle for Winterfell, he heard his queen threaten Sansa’s life for the horrible crime of asking what they were going to feed the armies. And yet, he refused to ever question her.

I don’t know that he had a good alternative, but Varys chose to defy the queen and die rather than take part in her plans. Jon refused to help him. Was Jon being a fool or was he being cunning? I still don’t know, but either way, he stood by while an innocent man burned. Either way, he did nothing. Nothing is never the best you can do. Except, nothing is what humans do all the time. I was prepared for Jon to lie, to be sneaky, to outsmart and use people. I was not prepared for that. I wanted clean margins around my hero, and they didn't give them to me.

People wanted Jaime to kill Cersei because we all know she’s evil, never mind the fact that Jaime has done his fair amount of evil, never mind that she was carrying his child. We don’t mind evil, we just don’t want it to upset us. In our heads, murdering Cersei was fine, but hurting Brienne wasn’t. We accept the grey, the dishonorable, the bad, but only when it’s in line with what we want.

I wanted Jon to be darker this season than the Jon we’ve had before, but I wanted it to be in line with the hero’s journey. I wanted it to be justifiable. I didn’t want it to be in the form of a mistake. I didn’t want it to be him misjudging the character of his queen. I didn’t want it to be at the cost of the lives of countless children.

I was willing for Jon to stray from the hero’s pretty, pretty path just enough to make it interesting, not enough for it to matter. This was a detour I did not expect, that I can’t just ignore, and that is a brilliant move by the writers. Oh geez, I’ve just complimented D&D again. Someone save me!

Jon, no matter what he does next, is stained in blood. He can’t be the hero I wanted him to be, there is no erasing this mistake. I didn't want him to fall prey to a cult of personality, I didn't want him to be stupid. I still don't believe he’s a total idiot, but while I watched 8x05 I took notes and when I reviewed them, I sounded like two different people. One screaming at Jon for being a moron, the other entirely sympathetic because he didn't have a choice. Both views were guided by my emotions. Whether he fell in love and was in denial or if Pol Jon is true and he believed he had no choice, Jon was complicit.

Either because he allowed love to blind him, or desperation to take over, while I still have hope for him, I can't deny what I saw. I hated seeing Jon as he is now: a man made less than what he is. He isn’t the hero I had fabricated in my head. I didn’t even know I had done that, but I had. This isn’t what I wanted. It’s not how the story is supposed to go.

But it is how this story went.

I wanted the fairytale. I wanted Jon to be untouched by what Dany did. I wanted him to remain innocent. I didn’t want him to be weak. I didn’t want him to fall. I wanted him to be above this.

But on Sunday our heroes fell.

What happens when they fall?

We can deny, excuse, insist its solely bad writing, claim it’s OOC, or we can accept that we are simply upset because it isn’t what we wanted. The second step is to acknowledge that this is what it means to have morally grey characters. This is the realism in fantasy GoT has always been touted for, we just never had to suffer so much for it all at once. We never had to face the reality that our heroes aren’t pure goodness, our villains aren’t pure evil with such high stakes before. It’s one thing for Jon to miscalculate and be murdered by his men, it’s another for him to not prevent a city of people from burning alive.

The “grey character” idea only works if you still recognize good and evil. We can’t twist right and wrong to make sure our heroes are always in the clear. Grey characters does not mean we should be morally colorblind. It means that the good and bad still exist, but that both reside in each character and in each of us. We have to choose how to act, and in certain situations, we will wander closer to one side than the other. It’s saying, let’s make heroes falter and villains sympathetic and force ourselves to see ourselves in what we hate, and what we hate within ourselves.

We had seen the good side of Dany intermingled with the bad, but the bad emerged in an unprecedented way on Sunday, and suddenly now we know that how we had masked it was always about protecting our own feelings, not about understanding who that character was at her core. Some in the audience have found strength in Dany, and to see her fall tore at parts of themselves that she had impacted.

Jon is still lighter grey than Dany, but on Sunday, I saw a streak of something repugnant to me, something that is the natural fallout of Jon’s behavior all season, but I had been ignoring it. Before this season aired, I expected victorious Jon. Now I think, even if Jon survives, I don't know how he'll live.

It is shocking to me how much it hurts to let go of my delusions and think, this is it. This is what all those words I’ve been spouting off about complex characters mean, and now I have to accept it. I have to “Look the truth in the face” as Sansa says, and as silly as it is since it is a tv show, it genuinely hurts! To a certain as yet to be quantified amount, Tyrion and Jon refused to do this. To a greater extent, Dany stans refused to.

I refused to.

So, what do we do when our heroes fall?

We must choose to be heroic ourselves. We acknowledge the truth. No more complaints or excuses. Our heroes fell last Sunday because this is that story.

I mentioned in a previous answer that I had a general feeling of defeat this season, and I think this is why. Jon has been slipping off the pedestal, and I have been trying to keep him up there anyway. Whether Jon was a “Northern Fool” or unsuccessful “Political Jon,” he isn’t the man I wanted him to be. D&D emphatically knocked him off his hero perch Sunday. Silly to be so attached to keeping him there, but I was. Emotionally, I was depending on my hero to make it all better. Maybe the point is, there is no hero who can?

Dany climbed too high and fell too far. She isn’t coming back from this. In my eyes, Jon hasn’t. D&D just made him fallible. He made a grave error and thousands upon thousands of people paid for it. I thought he would rise up a hero and prevent this, but there was nothing in this season to indicate that he could or would, and when the time came, he didn’t. I didn’t expect to see consequences for his “My Queen” routine, heroes don’t usually suffer those, but it is right that Jon see where that leads. It is good that we see it.

I think that’s what I’ve been mourning. I wanted hero Jon, not human Jon. Seeing Jon stand there with Drogon over his shoulder while Varys burned was very upsetting. I couldn’t reconcile it with who I thought Jon was, but that’s because I was thinking in the traditional sense of hero. In other books and shows, that wouldn’t happen. But, Jon made a series of choices that led to his presence and inability to do anything at Sunday night’s slaughter. Based on his decisions this season, Jon’s fate of standing there while people were murdered was just as inevitable as Dany’s fate of being the one to burn them.

It is much harder on the audience to endure this kind of story, but GoT has never tried to be easy. I didn’t want this, but it’s okay to not always get what we want. It’s okay for the writers to crack my rose-colored glasses.

Regardless of my misconceptions, in spite of his mistakes, Jon is still Jon. I still have faith in him. He’s just not impervious to failure, and somehow, I had forgotten that. And, for the first time, I genuinely do not know what the cost of this will be. That’s why I am so disturbed. I don’t want Jon to suffer, but his inaction may require narrative punishment. Maybe what we witnessed is the only catalyst that would force him to do what he needs to do, but it may be his mental and emotional undoing.

I don’t want that. I am uneasy after this episode because for the first time, I am genuinely wondering if I was wrong all along. Maybe this story isn’t building up to Jon defeating all odds, maybe the odds defeat him. So, instead of insisting that the writers are wrong, I am wondering what story it is they are telling. Is this a story about what it takes to make a man who can survive the game? Is it about a man who refused to play the game and will therefore be punished? Is it about a man who tried to play the game and learns that there is no winning without losing? Is the point that there is no winning at all?

I don’t know anymore.

So, in this, I have sympathy for the other side of the fandom that has broken hearts this week. And it isn’t entirely because D&D made bad choices, wrote this season poorly, should have had a longer season. I am upset because I am not liking the story they are telling me. I am not sure that that is anyone’s problem but my own for not recognizing what this was from the beginning. I’m still hopeful, I don’t know what we will see in the finale, but I have to accept that my hero fell on Sunday, and I don’t know if he will get back up. He could, but it is possible that he won’t

#anti daenerys #grey!Jon

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vmheadquarters · 6 years

Text

Happy Birthday @spookykinney!

For your birthday, surfer-Logan and FBI-Veronica are teaming up in this delightful remake of Point Break as told by our very own @cheshirecatstrut! We hope you have a great birthday and that you enjoy this first chapter of Taking the Drop.

It’s not like Veronica thought, while fighting tooth-and-nail to win a job at the FBI, that a law enforcement career would be glamorous. She assumed ‘high-risk’ and ‘life-consuming’ went without saying… but jumped in with both feet because everyone assumed she’d fail. Throughout those years she waged battles with a stacked system, though, to earn her gun and badge—she never once imagined the work would be BORING.

She’s currently reading email nine-thousand-three of more than forty-six thousand, however, so she can catalog contents to make a searchable database; and the sheer tedium has her reconsidering her position. Because sure, she MIGHT find the smoking gun in this stash, and put an international fraudster behind bars. But since right now she’s transcribing vet bills for a Pomeranian’s impacted anal glands, she has her doubts.

Voices filter back to her small and grimy cubicle, her reward for graduating Cum Laude from Columbia Law; she perks up as she hears the words, “…see if an agent’s available.” Since she’s fresh out of the Academy, and most junior on staff, Agent in Charge of Random Bullshit is usually her.

Approaching footsteps bolster this theory, so Veronica pitches her gum, straightens her somewhat-wilted blazer. Turns expectantly towards the entrance, alert-and-professional expression in place, just as Logan Echolls lounges against the frame.

He looks GOOD, she thinks illogically, even as she wilts like her sport coat. Tanned and buff and fifty times healthier than he should, considering those six years of tabloid-chronicled hedonism since she dumped him. He’s in old jeans and flip-flops, his ‘Live Fast, Die Young’ t-shirt both worn and snug; faint sun-wrinkles at the corners of his eyes deepen when he notes her disappointment. Darla from reception waves and OH-MY-GOD’s behind him as he says, “Why am I not surprised you turned a felony kidnapping investigation into a job?”

“Why am I not surprised you’re still wasting your potential at the beach?” She gestures up-and-down at his ensemble. “And what on Earth are you doing in the San Diego field office, Logan? Are you planning to make another romantic drunken speech? Maybe you saw a joke flyer advertising kegs, and the metal detectors failed to deter you?”

“You wound me, Veronica,” he says, clearly not wounded, as she shoos away Darla. “You know full well I’m always the host. Like I’d deign to turn up at some random loser’s party.”

She snorts, and his grin faintly manifests. “Tragically, though, there’s a distinct lack of revelry and booze at this locale, so how about I cut to the chase? Can I interest you in a theory regarding bank robberies?”

Her eyes widen and she sits back, gesturing towards the uncomfortable guest chair. He unfolds from his lean and slouches into it, stretching out his long legs and making the cube feel minuscule.

“Now what would a boy like you know about felony theft?” She taps her lower lip while he crosses his arms, entertained. “I’m guessing very little, unless you learned on a film set—but I’ll admit you’ve disappointed me before.”

“I’m talking, specifically, about high-yield local jobs—the ones you guys have bungled like Keystone Cops for three years?” He bobs his brows, tone ever-so-slightly-patronizing. “The robbers wear Ninja Turtle masks, and collect massive hauls with a crew of four?”

“I may have heard a mention,” V says, with irony, because this case is the local Holy Grail. “As has every cable-news watcher in America.”

“Any lovers of partisan coverage realized yet the jobs only take place in the summer?”

She rolls her eyes. “Give us a little credit. We’re the FBI over here, not credulous guest stars on Scooby Doo.”

“And has it further occurred to you,” he leans forward intently, elbows on knees, “that these are the prime surfing months in So-Cal? For the rest of the year, surfers travel to the best waves…which costs more than people other than me can afford.”

He’s close enough now for her to smell his cologne, the sun-baked scent of his skin. Her voice, when she speaks, is husky. “Logan, what have you heard?”

Shrugging, he reclines against the wall, satisfied he’s piqued her curiosity. “Rumors,” he says, with a hand wave. “Nothing substantial. You know how it goes, when we reprobates toast marshmallows and gossip. High-denomination bills are turning up among locals, lately…and I’m the only guy who hasn’t spent his trust fund.”

“Rumors,” she repeats flatly, disappointment washing over her. Decides he looks and smells too lickable for pointless conversation to continue. “Well if that’s all you’ve got, no need to prolong the awkwardness. Thanks for stopping by--we’ll look into your allegations and touch base if necessary. Appreciate the good citizenship, blah-blah, God bless America.”

She finger-waves, and he stares for a moment, disbelief fading into cynicism. “Fine,” he says at last, pushing up out of the chair. “Your loss. I’ve had fun exchanging insults again, Veronica—it’s been a while since my last creative tongue-lashing. Good luck with the glamorous new career. Oh, and…excellent choice, reverting to shorter hair. There’ll be less to tear out when ignoring my clue gets you nowhere.”

He winks and strides away. She runs a palm self-consciously along one side of her sleek bob, and watches his back muscles shift as he goes.

XXXXX

Veronica submits a form detailing the interaction, per procedure, then tries to re-focus on the mind-numbing emails. The memory of Logan’s disappointed expression nags…but what did he expect, showing up out of the blue with no evidence? She WANTED to believe him; just like she wanted, once upon a time, to have faith he’d give up reckless self-endangerment. But leaping without looking is Logan’s thing--and the best way to protect him is to NOT inquire into crimes of his nearest and dearest.

She’s a professional, though, and the bigwigs want their database yesterday. So she dutifully enters emails till it’s eleven and she’s wiped. V then drags herself home to run on the treadmill, eat a frozen dinner, and feel both sad and glad she’s got no hungry dog waiting.

When her alarm goes off (too early) the next morning, she staggers into the kitchen to grab a bottled coffee; slumps half-awake at the breakfast table to chug. Mac’s gone for the day, probably practicing Tai Chi in the park, but the San Diego Union-Tribune’s on the table, neatly folded to show the front page. Veronica’s bleary gaze passes over it…then swings back, focuses. She grabs it in both hands, cursing.

The headline reads, ‘Wild in the Banks? Surf Wax Found at Multiple Robbery Sites, Source Claims’. The article beneath, written by some pompous windbag named Julian Grac, details the theory Logan laid out yesterday…along with several bits of evidence she’s sure were kept from the press.

“That asshole talked to the PAPER,” she mutters, crumpling newsprint in her fists. “When I kicked him to the curb, I should have kicked HARDER!”

Her rage sustains her all the way through her shower and commute. But when she gets inside the forbidding white-stone-blue-glass building, and finds a summons from Agent Morris waiting? Anger gives way to foreboding.

Morris still holds a teeny-tiny grudge about the whole getting-outsmarted-IN-RE-Duncan thing. And continues to view Veronica with unreasonable suspicion--which is troublesome because right now she’s V’s boss.

Her fearless leader’s planted on the desktop when Veronica enters, legs crossed casually, arms folded. The ‘lazy housecat, circling’ routine Morris uses to intimidate is getting old; so V goes full can-do chipper in response. “You asked to see me, ma’am?”

“Mars, am I right in assuming we work for the same department?” Morris arches one eyebrow, and Veronica has to bite her tongue to contain sarcasm. “It’s not something I hallucinated, due to lack of sleep from investigating bank heists?”

“Last time I checked, ma’am,” V replies breezily. “Unless there was a re-org this morning while I was stuck in traffic.”

“And when a potential witness for said case appears in said department…” Morris pauses, for dramatic effect, Veronica assumes. “Shouldn’t the interviewing agent, who’s incidentally my subordinate, notify me ASAP?”

“I passed the information up the chain as per FBI rules,” Veronica says. “And you must have received it, or I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“Yes, but if you had walked Mr...” Morris consults a sheet of paper on the desk by her hip, “Echolls upstairs personally, instead of sending him on his way and writing a bare-bones report, I would’ve received the information YESTERDAY. BEFORE he ran to the paper, and spilled critical intel to perps. I might’ve even convinced him silence is golden, since you didn’t find it worthwhile to try. Here’s a hint—fake sympathy and charm work wonders.”

Veronica finds this claim dubious, but all she says is, “Ma’am, he was passing along rumors. He didn’t give names or offer proof. And I doubt he’s a witness to anything but his own moral decline.”

“Be that as it may,” Morris says. “He HAS made the acquaintance of this pain-in-my-ass Julian Grac. Who somehow knows about the beeswax residue at six of nine robbery sites--the chemical composition of which matches a well-known surf product. Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax, to be precise. Bubblegum scent.”

Veronica contains an eye-roll. “A detail which was kept out of the press.”

“Right.” Morris levers herself up to standing. “My question is, HOW does Grac know? Did he learn this tidbit from Echolls? And if so, where’d Echolls hear?”

“Logan parties a lot.” Veronica shrugs, hoping she comes off unaffected. “And snoops. Probably he stumbled into the wrong crowd and overheard a conversation. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Yes, I was interested to learn you and Echolls share a history.” Morris consults the paper again; Veronica wonders whether it’s a car-wash receipt or actual research. “He was your boyfriend after Duncan Kane fled the country, correct? It’s great you didn’t disappear him, too, because we can use that relationship to get close to his sources.”

“Logan Echolls isn’t big on being used,” Veronica says, lightly. “You might not find him accommodating.”

Morris sighs. “Look, Mars, we’ve been praying for a break on this case for years. And, as I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn, none of our agents surf. He does, though—Echolls—I understand he’s pretty good. He also trusts you enough to hand you dirt on guys he knows. It might be…” she trails a finger along the edge of her desk, slants V a sly look, “…advantageous to your career to demonstrate team loyalty, Mars. Convince the guy to be our confidential informant. Get an introduction to some surfers, find out who’s flashing mystery cash. His social circle’s no doubt heard about your turbulent former romance. He could help us infiltrate the locals-only crowd, none of whom like talking to Feds.”

“But if I go undercover,” Veronica tries to conceal her mounting excitement, “who will log the last thirty-thousand Sanderson emails?”

“Let me put it this way, Mars.” Morris smirks. “If you DON’T go undercover? I got a server in today from Atlanta containing another hundred-k.”

“You know I’m a professional, ma’am.” Veronica folds her hands behind her back to conceal the involuntary fist. “Whatever my task may be, I’ll work hard to exceed expectations.”

“So you say.” Morris lays the paper, gently, down. “I’d rather you prove ‘my task’ means ‘anything the FBI asks’. Not ‘whatever I feel is right, even if it’s against the law’.”

Veronica nods, giving away nothing. Morris contemplates her in silence. “We’re working on an alternate post-Hearst background for you,” her boss continues, after a tense thirty seconds. “You’ll have it by the end of the day. I’ve also called in a favor from the owner of Neptune’s Net, a local surf hangout—congratulations, you’re waiting tables. You’ve got a month to produce actionable evidence, plus I want weekly reports, in person. And Mars…from now on, don’t leave ANYTHING out.”

“I would NEVER.” Veronica presses a palm to her heart. Morris narrows her eyes, then waves a dismissive hand.

XXXXX

Once back at her desk, V pulls up tools that make Prying Eyez look like a toy and researches Logan. Within two minutes she’s got a list of his petty crimes, including one drunk-and-disorderly sophomore year and two expunged charges…destruction of a police vehicle, and assault of Mercer Hayes. But since junior year at Hearst, Logan’s flown under the radar. He earned a political science degree, with honors, followed by a Masters in English from YALE; and then…he bought a house in San Diego by the water, and a dog from the SPCA. She copies down the innocuous address, cracks her knuckles and considers.

High-tech’s getting her nowhere, so Veronica decides to Google; finds a ‘What happened to Logan Echolls?’ article which reveals precisely nothing. Next she turns her attention to Julian Grac, which at least has the benefit of novelty. It yields links to crime stories in the Union-Tribune, and an article about ‘ten great authors you’ve never read’.

Frowning, she clicks through, only to realize it’s name confusion. But the phrase ‘a writer who prefers obscurity’ catches her attention, so she speed-reads the autobiography of one Julien Gracq; a turn-of-the-century novelist who rejected awards, refused to do book tours, and lived as a hermit. His masterpiece, ‘Chateau D’Argol’, was about a rich man whose best friend brings a poor girl into their social circle. After which the girl seduces, then ruins, them both.

At this point Veronica throws her pencil holder across the room. Because this is EXACTLY the kind of pseudonym Logan Echolls would adopt, and smirk about regularly, knowing few had the insight to penetrate his ruse.

She doesn’t need to use the search tools on Grac, at this point; but doing so reveals his paychecks languish in a shell account. Suspicions confirmed, she picks up the phone. Adopts the sugariest Southern accent she can muster, just because, and spins a tale to the Trib’s receptionist about the tip of a lifetime for ‘Monsieur Grac’. The voicemail box she’s transferred to boasts an inspirational quote (‘All news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit it are old women over tea’), recited in a drawl she recognizes. She hangs up, high on triumph, and decides a long-distance chewing-out won’t serve.

XXXXX

Veronica leans against a lamp post across the street to wait; within half an hour, Logan bounces out of the brown skyscraper housing the Union-Tribune. He loosens his tie as he walks, laughingly calling goodbyes to co-workers. He’s in designer flat-front slacks and a white oxford, hair mussed like he’s been running his hands through it--his impersonation of clean-cut and trustworthy is so cute she has to grit her teeth not to smile.

The street is packed with cabs, so it takes him a minute to notice her. When he does, he pulls a theatrical double-take before jaywalking, hands in pockets, smiling wryly.

“So,” she says, as soon as he clears the road, “Can I interest YOU in a theory about people who lie to FBI agents?”

“I didn’t lie, per se,” he counters, rocking back on his heels as his grin grows Grinch-like. “I just wore my weekend clothes and kept my mouth shut. The Veronica Mars Express Train to Paranoia-ville did the rest.”

“This is a serious federal investigation, Logan,” she chides, folding her arms. “Bringing evidence to the authorities isn’t a game for personal amusement.”

“What, exactly, are you mad about?” He lifts his brows. “That I gave you a hint instead of handing over story notes? That I failed to shout my job history from the rooftops? Or maybe you’re just pissed I’m not an alcoholic loser, since it makes you ditching me seem…selfish?”

“I could’ve had you subpoena’d and interrogated under oath,” she says, faux-thoughtfully. “But browbeating you in person seemed much more fun.”

He laughs. “THERE’s the Veronica who ran afoul of the Russian mob. So what convinced you my theory was worth pursuing, sugarplum? Not my charm, surely. Some fact in the article your colleagues missed, perhaps?”

“Like I’d discuss cases with a reporter,” she scoffs. “Why’d you go with ‘robberies only happen in summer’ when you had physical evidence in reserve?”

“Like I’d reveal my sources.” He grins. “Gosh, Veronica, seems like we’re at an impasse.”

“My supervisor wants to use your connections.” She goes sardonic in response to his glee. “I’d ask if you have experience undercover…”

“…But you know first-hand my skills are professional-grade?”

She narrows her eyes. He cocks his head, amusement warring with calculation. “If I help you, what do I get?” he asks.

“First crack at the story immediately following arrests,” she says. “With our full cooperation. And any information you gather solo you can use…unless, of course, it’s classified.”

He removes car keys from his pocket; stares, considering, into the distance as he flips them around one finger. Returns his gaze to hers and locks on, Logan-style. “I assume my role is to introduce you to suspicious surfers? Since I further assume you won’t let me handle this and report back?”

“You know what they say about assumptions,” she says, by way of answer. “Of course, you’re an ass already, so maybe you don’t care.”

“I should warn you, a lot of our high-school classmates have stuck around.” He holds his tie down with one palm as a breeze shifts it sideways. “This may suck for you, but you’ll have to pretend we’ve reconciled.”

She nods, and he extends the non-key-containing hand. “Give me your phone.”

V shouldn’t violate protocol; but Logan’s trustworthy, within limits, so she types in the code and does. He enters his number in the contacts and gives it back. “There’s a party tonight at Black’s Beach—should be locals-only, very exclusive. Text me an address, I’ll pick you up at eight. Oh, and dress like a surf bunny, even if doing so offends your sensibilities. Not all these people are stupid, you’ll need to blend.”

“Gee, I was hoping you’d refuse to cooperate,” she says wistfully, pocketing her cell. “Then do something worse than jaywalking, then flee, so I could knock you down and cuff you.”

“Maybe later, if you’re REALLY nice,” he says, leaning confidentially towards her ear. Then walks off, whistling, while she tries to purge the image from her brain.

XXXXX

Veronica’s sitting on the porch of her rented condo when Logan pulls up at 7:55—in a dusty black vintage Range Rover, not the shiny orange Porsche she envisioned. She considers, as she stands, whether she also makes too many assumptions. But his appreciative whistle while he opens her door is distracting.

“Guess it slipped my mind how much you love playing dress-up,” he murmurs. She doesn’t miss the quick once-over he gives her as he releases the brake. “You look great, Veronica, love the sarong. And friendship bracelets are a nice touch.”

“This is actually a tablecloth.” She strokes the fringed white linen, embroidered with red roses, she tied over one hip so she’d feel less naked in her green bikini. “I favor a no-nonsense black wardrobe these days, because Cup ‘o Soup stains don’t show.”

“Wise,” he says, and clears his throat. He’s in linen too, a short-sleeved, half-buttoned summer shirt over cargo shorts; she notes with amusement the shark’s tooth necklace has reappeared. “I figured we’d start at the top of the food chain and work our way down, since most surf crews around here are big on punching but short on brains. Brains being a prerequisite for smoothly-planned bank jobs.”

“Sounds fair,” she agrees, watching his arm muscles shift as he changes gears. “This party is where we’ll find apex predators?”

“Black’s has the most challenging waves in the area—ten, twelve footers courtesy of an offshore trench. It takes stamina to swim out and ride, so this spot attracts real athletes…the ranked surfers that compete on TV. And Zen masters, who just want to be one with the ocean.”

She makes a face, and he says, serious, “It’s not a joking matter to these people, Veronica. They don’t welcome posers in their midst. I vividly recall you disapproving of fistfights and vandalism, so be warned; the elite surfing community makes me, way back when, look like a piker. Crews are similar to those biker gangs you inexplicably love, although these are black sheep from MIDDLE-class homes--plus more ethnically diverse. This particular group is Mother Nature mystical in a way you’ll loathe and mock; so expect pot and hallucinogens, free love interspersed with showdowns. Stick close to me or you’ll be propositioned…and whipping out a taser would break your cover.”

“Understood.” She studies his face, surprised to see concern there. Gentles her tone in response. “I’ve gone undercover before, Logan. And agents are extensively trained in hand-to-hand combat. I can handle myself in a fight now.”

“Like you couldn’t before?” A smile plays across his lips; a street lamp illuminates his face as they pass beneath, then he’s cast again in shadow. He turns into a parking lot at the edge of a cliff and kills the engine. “I’m not worried about your moxie, Veronica. I just don’t want you to mouth off and find yourself surrounded. Out here, surfers make the rules.”

“I have full faith in your ability to fight dirty defending me,” she says softly. He laughs, gaze tracing her face, and she’s reminded of previous evenings with him in a parked car.

“Nice to see some things don’t change,” he murmurs, then climbs out to help her down. His hands linger on her waist as he lifts her from the seat, skin-to-skin.

They pass, in the moonlight, a brown sign that reads ‘stairway unstable due to rains’. He walks behind her down a narrow path with a rotting rail, hand on her shoulder like he’ll catch her if she falls. It’s nice, this unwavering focus, his concern for her well-being despite angry words. She used to take it for granted, the way she drew male eyes. But she’s grown up, post-Hearst; and she realizes now most men don’t pay attention as completely as Logan did.

At the base of the cliff, past a saucer-shaped observation tower, a bonfire sends smoke spiraling into the sky; loud music blasts, Dick Dale with the bass maxed. Seventy-ish people cluster near the crackling flames--on either side, a ribbon of sand stretches off into the dark. The water looks black, boasting military-formation-regular waves, and the rock wall at her back is smooth, forbidding.

The crowd’s uninhibited as advertised, drinking and making out, smoking and laughing. A few guys dance in a circle with much hilarity, like they’re having some Lord of the Flies moment or praying for rain. A knot of humanity encircles loose boulders at what’s clearly the party’s center.

It’s obvious Logan’s no stranger, despite his current respectability. He greets people with grins and backslaps, jerks of his chin, less unaffected than he seemed addressing work colleagues. Almost, he slides back into his high-school persona—the 09’er general who dictated popularity, who slashed tires and started shit when his judgments were questioned. But there’s a watchful tension to the set of his shoulders, and he glances left frequently to make sure she’s beside him. That, more than words, convinces her there’s danger.

They take an indirect path to the cluster by the boulders; Logan accepts a shot en route, which he tosses back, unhesitating. Cracking his neck, he meditatively surveys the throng, then coughs to get her attention as a gap opens.

“Guy holding court at the center,” he murmurs, indicating a ropily-buff Asian man with longish hair and ratty swim trunks. “That’s Bodie Chang, he was a year ahead of us at Neptune High. You remember?”

Veronica nods, watching Bodie gesture lazily from his semi-reclined position. Watching the crowd guffaw when he speaks, soak up his every word. “He’s come a long way since I interviewed him for the school paper. I remember Chang being shy.”

“He’s one of the top twenty-five surfers in the world, now.” Logan shoulders aside a drunk dude-bro to attain the inner sanctum. “In this place, he’s King.”

She opens her mouth to reply; but Dick Casablancas erupts from a log like the Ghost of Shitty Memories past, and drapes a wasted arm around her partner-in-crime. “Lo-GAN!” he shouts, like Logan’s not next to him. “Mr. Echolls in the house, now the party can START!”

“Enticing ladies again with the scents of puke and Jagermeister, I see.” Logan shoves Dick off, not without affection. “I thought you weren’t coming tonight, dude. Something about college cheerleaders and a hot tub?”

“They had emergency PRACTICE.” Dick accompanies a raspberry with a thumbs-down. “Seriously, how much do you need to rehearse waving pom-poms? It’s not like anybody looks at the props. Hey, who’s the wahine?” He squints, attempting focus. “Nice boobs, looks sort of familiar. Maybe I’ve seen her in a por…oh, holy SHIT! Dude, why the FUCK did you bring V…”

“Hey ECHOLLS!” a voice calls, mercifully drowning out Dick’s fit. Logan spreads a palm across V’s back to steer her--towards Bodie Chang, his summoner, and the makeshift royal throne. The King of Black’sBeach looks them both over impassively. “Thought you were too busy for our modest shindigs these days, man.”

Logan shrugs, nonchalant, but shakes the proffered hand. “You know how it goes,” he says, easily. ”All that money to spend, all those waves to ride. Plus too much temptation here to drink to excess. My body’s a fine-tuned machine.”

“I can respect that,” Bodie says, with a faint smile that reminds Veronica forcefully of Agent Morris. “Looks like maybe you’ve had other distractions lately, too. Who’s your date?”

“This,” Logan says, pairing a smile with a warning glance, “Is Veronica Mars.”

Then he snakes an arm unexpectedly around her waist. His hand finds the gap in her makeshift sarong, cups her hip; he pulls her flush against his side and adds, “My girlfriend.”

#veronica mars #veronica mars fanfic #vmhq birthday club #spookykinney #vm fanfic

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