#however the very interesting contrast between “accepting he's going to die for REVENGE for his lost friends”

[rotisseries]

planet of love

[linkspooky]

Why is shinobu such a great character? I love her, shes my favorite pillar.

I think the single best thing about Shinobu’s character is that she’s a bitch. Wait, wait, no get back here I’m going to explain myself. I think what makes Shinobu great is that she’s THAT BITCH. 

There’s a pressure for characters, especially female characters to be written with no real substantial flaws. At best they have job interview flaws, they are clumsy, oblivious, or they’re just too giving towards people. They’re too empathic. They’re too nice and they let people walk all over them, but to no real consequences. 

Often characters are written to be likable, rather than to be complex and flawed. They’re written in a way that they will be likably received by an audience. Which is why the rough edges of them tend to get sanded down. I think this is a problem for both male and female characters by the way, that characters are reduced to bland characterizations as opposed to complex ones. 

It’s like the difference between Uraraka and Himiko in MHA, a shonen manga that runs within the same magazine. Himiko as a character is far more developed because she is allowed to have flaws and get in the middle of bloody confrontations. Uraraka is a character who could be interesting: a hero motivated by personal greed, a child who feels that they burden they’re parents, someone perceptive and empathic but who always keeps her mouth shut for fear of tripping on other people’s feelings. She has complex flaws, but priority is given on making Uraraka look like a nice girl. Himiko isn’t nice, but she gets to like... do things. 

Shinobu has flaws, and she holds onto the ugliest parts of herself, her anger, her desire for violent revenge, and refuses to improve as a person and ultimately dies to those flaws and that’s what makes her so unique and interesting. I’ll go over those underneath the cut.

1. Medicine and Poison

Shinobu’s entire character is written around this dual meaning: basically, medicine is something that both heals and hurts. Most people think of medicine as something that is comforting and nurturing, but too much medicine can become a poison that destroys the body instead. Often many drugs we use for medication are toxic in excessive amounts. 

Shinobu is a character who toes the lie between a healer, which is how everyone expects her to act, and a poisoner which is what Shinobu regards herself as. She is someone capable of both. She can heal and nurture others, she can also destroy them with horrible poison. However, her arc in the story shows more and more that she chooses to poison and destroy because she doesn’t see herself as someone capable of healing.

Demons were once human. They are still capable of human feelings. They all have human desires and fell into demonhood for very human reasons. 

Tanjiro is someone who ultimately rejects the actions of Demons, but also sympathizes with their humanity. He doesn’t want to kill. He acknowledges that he has to due to circumstances, but no matter what he cannot stop seeing the humanity inside of the demons he is fighting against. Tanjiro is a merciful killer.

Shinobu is introduced right after we see Tanjiro introduced to the idea that demons have feelings and motivations and grapples with that and his own empathy. Shinobu is presented to us as a character without any empathy for demons. She is a merciless killer. 

Shinobu wants to repay cruelty with cruelty. She relishes in the chance. She likse feeling more powerful than the demons that victimized her. Tanjiro and Shinobu’s methods of dealing with demons are deliberately contrasted to show how different they are. Shinobu doesn’t see demons as humans, just as things, that need to be punished. She’s not wrong for thinking that demons need to be stopped and killed in order to prevent them from hurting innocent people, but torture is bad yo. 

It’s even shown that Tanjiro is much more willing to accept demons who genuinely are repetant for what they did in the past like Tamayo. Whereas, Shinobu does work with Tamayo she mistrusts her and resents her the entire time. Shinobu’s view of the world is black and white, where she is the personal judge, jury and executioner of demons. Yes, that’s how most of the demon slayer pillars are introduced to us, but it’s especially drawn attention to in Shinobu’s case with her introduction, and her comparisons to Tanjiro. 

Basically Tanjiro’s stance is I’m not going to belittle those who regret their actions, and see the humanity in demons. Shinobu’s response is I’m going to belittle the HELL out of them. 

Shinobu mocks, teases and belittles because she’s someone incapable of being sincere. The main difference between Shinobu and Tanjiro, is that Shinobu’s sister is dead, and Tanjiro isn’t. Tanjiro still sees himself as fighting to protect someone whereas Shinobu only lives to pay back the damage that’s been done on the world. 

Shinobu serves a dual role in the series. She’s the one who nurtures and heals everyone on the butterfly estate. She’s also the most remorseless killer of demons who physically enjoys the slaughter. She is medicine, but she is also poison. 

Shinobu’s anger is a very poisonous part of her personality, but rather than deal with it, and attempt to be better she’d much rather put on a fake smile and let the poison flow. We’re given a reason why. Ever since her sister died Shinobu felt like everything that’s good about her died with her sister, and now she’s indulging in the worst of herself. 

If Tanjiro is someone who fights out of their love for other people, then Shinobu is someone who fights out of hatred. She hangs onto that hatred because she feels like that’s the only real part of herself and she can’t be good like her sister.

There’s a reason that Shinobu is paralleled to Doma and it’s because everything that’s positive about her, her gentle nature, her smiling, her empathy is completely faked. It’s an act that she puts on to be more like her sister while holding her resentments deep in her heart. She could be medicine or poison, and chooses to be poison. 

Shinobu could have chosen the path of healing or forgiveness, but she didn’t want to. She chose to die, angry and fighting instead. Her last action is tantamount to suicide. She chooses to die poisoning another, rather than try to live healing herself because she thinks she is incapable of living without her loved ones in her life. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s a powerful  writing choice. The choice not to forgive. The choice to stay angry. Shinobu is a character written with powerful emotions behind her, hiding just underneath the surface which is all fake smiles and friendly pleasantries, and that’s what makes her a compelling character. 

[blackicewave]

hot take on the recent chapters

I came up with this while I was on too little sleep & after a friend caught up to the manga, it’s really long and I hope it makes sense - so, enjoy! 

I think what is happening right now, might be Ymir trying to re-establish her former form.

Because Eren has three out of nine titans right now - Attack, Founding, Warhammer. The Founding Titan was the very first of all titans before Ymir started gathering/creating all those other abilities. 

We currently have this written/known about it specifically on the official wiki page:

Its Scream can create and control other Titans, and modify the memories and body compositions of the Subjects of Ymir, but this power can only be used by the royal family under normal circumstances.

According to Marley's Titan Biology Research Society, the Founding Titan is the point where the paths that connect all Subjects of Ymir and Titans cross.

We have been known that only the royal family can properly use it, which is why Eren only managed to use the Founding when touching Dina Fritz's titan (the one that ate his mother) to protect Mikasa after Hannes was devoured and then when coming in contact with Zeke, seeing as he is from royal blood as well. However, the royal family is bound by a vow and the ideology of Karl Fritz - basically, he wanted the Eldians to be locked up and separated from the world because they had been too involved in wars before. So he wanted to protect them, essentially.

The vow is renouncing war to stop Eldia from using the Founding Titan to devastate the world ever again and it possesses the individual to follow the idea. That is why Frieda, even though she viewed the Eldians as sinners, still followed that protocol.

Now, with Grisha devouring Frieda and gaining the Founding Titan and passing it on to Eren, the chain of royal blood inheritors was broken. Which is why, paired with Erens own ideology to go behind the walls and see the world, Ymir zeroed her interest in him as it's seen in the recent chapters.

She herself wasn't of royal blood and being used to fight wars for that king in the backstory most likely built a hatred for humanity in her view - she was viewed as that slave, of which Eren broke her free. He's the only inheritor that hasn't been shaped and controlled by that ideology of King Fritz that she could get her hands on, so she can twist his views or add her own to it in having to destroy the world and humanity in it.

I think that she's using Eren as a vessel to collect all titans. He already has three, and with every other shifter present right now - Armin (colossal), Reiner (armored), Annie (female), Falco (jaw), Pieck (cart) and Zeke (Beast) - she can take them prisoner and force them to join with Eren. 

She basically already has Zeke in her control, having lured him into paths with Eren, and she just took Armin prisoner with another previous titan. Why else would she take him prisoner and bring him to "Eren's ass" as Levi said and separate them by a hoard of powerful, controlled titan shifters if not to ensure they don't get him back until she has taken all of them captive? She knows how powerful Levi and Mikasa are - most likely through Eren's memories. She most likely wants to create a vessel with all nine titans again to merge with Eren fully, maybe even devour him herself, to use her full former strength to get back on humanity and make them pay.

In the first chapter about her backstory it's shown that she was being punished and chased to her "death" because she let the pigs escape - in the last chapter 135, however, in the very first panel, it's shown that she willingly opened the gate to let them escape. She wanted them to run away. Whether or not it was planned that she'd be chased like that and would tumble into the tree trunk is questionable, but I think it has to do with it.

To add to my suspicion of not killing the current inheritors of the nine titans because she needs them later on, look at chapters 114-115 specifically.

Zeke blew himself up in the scene with Levi, and that entirely. He was torn in half. His spine was destroyed and therefore the titan in him "lost" because he had no one to pass it on to. He accepted that he'd die, told himself that. He did die.

But Ymir brought him back. She rebuilt his body and brought him back to life - if she really did that out of pure selflessness and devotion to her people, why didn't she do it with Levi? He's Eldian, too, technically, even if he's an Ackermann.

But Ackermanns are a byproduct and made to protect the royal family, and if we follow my thing right here, then she hated the royal family - she was forced to marry the king and give him offspring, after all. And she was nothing but a child. And she knew how dangerous Levi was - so she planned for him to die while rescuing Zeke, because she had a plan for him while Levi would have only endangered that.

In chapter 110, Zacharias refuses Mikasa and Armin to go see Eren - and promptly dies in an explosion. This might be a hot take, but I think Eren might have ordered someone to do so (because Ymir made him?) - because she needed to split the bond between them. And afterward, Eren escaped. Maybe it was used as a maneuver to get the attention off of him.

In chapter 112 he returns to meet Mikasa and Armin in the table scene - already threatening to transform if they make any move. "I am free. Whatever I do, whatever I choose. I do it out of my own free will."

That's what he says, entirely unprompted really. He proceeds to tell Armin that he's the one being controlled by Bertholt, and I think that mirrors the situation properly. Because it could serve as a parallel that it's not Armin but Eren controlled by "the enemy".

In that chapter, Eren effectively cuts all of the bonds to his friends even though in a few chapters before (when discussing who will inherit his titan once his time is over) he claims to care about them more than anything. And he does. He cares incredibly, he's a very emotional person - but suddenly, all of his emotions are gone. Seems fishy. ‘

He cuts Mikasa off by telling her he's hated her for his whole life, knowing it's her weak spot. He beats Armin up, knowing it's his weak spot because Eren was always there to take hits for him when he got beaten up as a child.

Once again, I think that's Ymir taking control of his memories and using them against him. That, or Eren used those purposefully to get them away from him and out of the danger zone, knowing that he's a time bomb.

In that chapter, it is thickly laid on that Eren "hates" slaves. "Do you know what I hate most in this world? Anyone who isn't free. That, or cattle. Just looking at them made me so angry, now I finally understand why. I couldn't stand to look at an undoubting slave who only ever followed orders."

Maybe, once again, that is Ymir speaking - she was reduced to a slave, and her creation of a titan made to fight was broken down by a vow the Eldian King created. The following inheritors only ever accepted that fate and didn't do anything to break free from it. 

In chapter 130 when Eren tells Historia his plan, he says the following: 

"The only way to put a final end to the cycle of revenge born from hate is to remove that history of hate from this world and bury it in the ground, civilisation and all." - he knows it's a repeating process, possibly because of previous memories handed down to him through the Attack Titan and looking through the royal bloodline with the Founding Titan (first seen when he kissed Historia's hand).

The cycle of revenge born from hate - gotta keep that in mind, cause I think it's very important looking at all of his actions. 

There's this constant reference with his friends. In so many flashbacks, it tells us that Eren wants his friends to have happy lives. To be free. To live long. He adores his friends and loves them with all of his heart. So why tell them he hates them? Why beat them? Why get them involved in all of this? 

Because it isn't him saying those things, and if it is there's more behind it.

In chapter 131 he apologizes to a child for everything he is about to do before it even happens. Maybe because he saw the outcome of it all?

He knows how much he will hurt the world and people, but he does it anyway because he needs this cycle to end.

 I'm not fully sure what the rest of his apology means, talking about how he was disappointed learning that people lived in the outside world. But what I do think is important is the last panel in that chapter, this one:

It views Eren with his eyes shut. Just his head. Usually, whenever he controls his titan, his eyes are open. His own body moves to control the titan. Here it isn't, though. I feel like that symbolizes how it's not him.

We established that he's a very emotion bound person that often rejects logic to follow his heart - he doesn't have his heart here. He can't listen to it. If you are manipulated the source of that manipulation always tries to break your mind first. Rob you of your beliefs and make you follow others. 

The contrast is right then and there - why would he apologies in tears to a child he doesn't know at all and explain his intentions and beliefs when once it happens, and once the child is murdered, he doesn't show any reaction?

Sure, one could argue that he's not conscious after his head was shot off, but who caused the jump and transformation into the titan if not Eren? Possibly Ymir. 

It is shown that the user has to focus on that goal to transform, as in season one with Eren and the well, so either Eren was conscious enough - somewhat doubtful - or Ymir had full control of him then and there already as soon as he stepped into paths.

In chapter 133 Reiner says something important; "If it was me, I'd probably.. want someone else to handle the power of the founder by now. And if I couldn't, I'd want it to be stopped by someone."

There's pretty much a direct contrast once again - are Eren and the Rumbling controlled by someone else? In my opinion, yes. 

Does he want someone else to stop it? He most likely does, why else would Mikasa, Armin, and co be able to move freely? Ymir not so much. 

I feel like he's putting up a resistance to them, which is why she can't control them properly despite them being Eldians. 

They get thrown into paths then, and when they see Eren it's him but his younger version. Around nine or ten, probably.

What I think happened here is that Ymir is keeping him trapped in a younger version of himself - similar to that one time he was wrapped up in blankets in his home and Armin was knocking on the window behind him, trying to shake him awake and conscious again.

She's keeping his conscience reminded of good memories to hold him there and be able to move freely with his body - like I said, she's using him as a vessel to push her actions, her dream, her ideal world and outcome into his hands.

"In order to gain my own freedom, I will take freedom away from the world." Sounds a lot like something Ymir could have been saying, in my opinion. But then again, who knows.

This panel is also important:

Eren, in his young form, is simply standing next to Ymir. And he doesn't do anything. He doesn't react or recognize his friends, and most importantly, he mirrors how Ymir is standing in the exact same way.

She's mirroring herself onto him, projecting her conscience onto his body. It proceeds with "If you want to stop me, then try to stop me from ever taking another breath" -  once again, and I cannot stress this enough, Ymir uses Eren's memories against him.

She knows his friends won't risk him dying. She knows they would do anything to protect him. This is her playing it safe; they won't kill him, ergo they won't stop her from continuing her plan by using him. 

Now in the recent chapter, she's standing on top of his spine and it becomes very clear that she's controlling it all. She's building former titan shifters from his spine, and controlling them to separate the team from Eren's location - and Armin's, most likely even Zeke's. 

She figured out that they won't give up until they found Eren and can talk to him, so she creates that barrier that she's sure they won't manage to surpass. Not with limited supplies. 

When Pieck becomes a danger, she eliminates her by impaling her on that trident - but she doesn't injure her beyond conscience or in a threatening state. She specifically uses Galliard and Berthold against Reiner, and throws those two on him to damage him in his abilities and trick his mind, to manipulate him.

Armin says it himself: "If Eren is only attacking onward like he said he would then this resistance is coming from Ymir." If Eren is attacking onward to follow the goal to end the cycle, then Ymir is the one bringing all the complications. They might work hand in hand, but I do strongly believe that all of the complications are solely on Ymir. Eren never wanted to risk hurting his friends.

In fact, and this is if he is conscious enough to pull any strings right now, I think he might be setting things up to ensure that his friends are the ones that kill him. 

[the-trashy-phoenix]

Supernatural season 4 review (part 1)

Link to part 2:

Carly and I have been waiting for this season since we started watching Supernatural. She had been sending me Destiel posts and pictures and telling me about them even before we watched the very first episode, so I had a lot of expectations on this particular season, and on one particular character.

Castiel appears from the very beginning (I thought he wouldn’t come out so early) to explain Dean’s inexplicable resurrection. In fact, Dean died at the end of the third season and at the end of his last year on earth due to the deal to save Sam, but we already knew he would survive because the authors would never let him die at the third season and we are no more surprised by the fact that in Supernatural being dead permanently is more unusual than coming back to life after a while.

The first episode is happy and tragic at the same time: Dean wakes up in his coffin (that was pretty disquieting if you ask me) and he manages to come out and reach Bobby. At first he cannot believe he’s really Dean, but Dean convinces him even without knowing how he was saved from hell. Bobby’s pain for Dean’s death is comprehensible, as he considers him as his son, and so it is the confusion he feels seeing him again, but that’s nothing compared to Sam’s reaction. He’s been deeply broken by Dean’s death and, as it was predictable, tried in every way to take him back, and failed (as most of the fans have noticed, this total impossibility of the brothers to live without each other is quite toxic, but from some point of view their entire life is…). In fact he’s so surprised by Dean coming back from hell he can’t hide the fact that Ruby kind of took his brother’s place. She is an interesting character who emerges properly only in this season and develops through it in a quite complex way: I was never able to tell if she really wanted to help the Winchesters, as it seems in the first place, or if she was only following a mysterious path. By the way, thanks to her help and especially her blood, Sam, without Dean in his life to stop him, persuaded himself that the best way to keep hunting was by enhancing his demonic powers in order to kill demons. I’m quite sure he thinks it’s a good compromise between his two sides, good and evil, but I also think that something happens inside him the exact moment he sees his brother again. He’s so afraid of Dean’s judgement he tries to hide his relationship (also romantic, which is quite creepy) with Ruby, also because deep inside he knows what he’s doing is somehow wrong, even if he’s actually saving people. Of course when Dean finds out he gets mad at him, and that’s understandable considering how suspicious he’s always been about Ruby. However, he himself is never really sincere with Sam about what happened in hell, both because he doesn’t want to remember and somehow feel again all that pain and because he feels deeply guilty for having accepted to torture some souls, even after a long period of resistance. Also, Dean’s pain doesn’t end as he’s back in earth, because he meets again several times Alastair, the powerful demon who tortured him in hell and forced him to torture other souls (and I was quite happy when Dean had the chance to get a little revenge and torture him). Of course these big secrets lead to fights and misunderstandings to which we are used, but those issues could have been solved easily, if only they had spoken to each other from the beginning. After a while they finally do clarify their positions, and that’s a relief for us all. Sam tells Dean what Ruby has done saving him on a lot of occasions and partly persuades him to rely on this good demon, but even after this clarification, the problem is not completely solved because Dean can’t but think Sam has replaced him with Ruby and prefers following her advice rather than keep hunting with him. Deep inside Sam has always the same feeling towards his brother: he doesn’t want Dean to treat him like a child, and his biggest struggle is being considered as the little brother who needs protection. That’s why he wants so bad to break free from Dean. Although, he doesn’t understand that also Ruby is patronizing him and, as he acknowledges at the very end, she’s not doing it because she loves and cares about him, but because she needs him.

I’ll jump quickly to the final episode, as we’re talking about Ruby. The main villain of the previous season, Lilith, was not defeated at all: in the last episode we just get to know Sam can resist her, so she has to find another way to take over him. During all the fourth season we see Lilith breaking the so-called “seals”, which will allow her to free Lucifer from his cage down in hell. The boys struggle with that all the time and they don’t know how to stop her, apart from killing her. At the end, Sam decides to do that all by himself, helped by Ruby and by the demon blood he can’t stop drinking at this point, without knowing that’s exactly what he has to do to bring Lucifer back and Ruby has been cheating on him all the time. I do have to admit it was quite a shock, because I had started to like and trust Ruby and to think Dean was a little too paranoiac, and jealous, about her. Maybe it’s just that I liked to think that someone who’s destined to be a monster, like a demon, can actually have a choice and do the good thing. Also Sam always seems to hope that, because he himself has demon blood in his veins and tries to use his evil powers for the good. He mirrors himself in monsters all the time, as in episode 4, when he tries to convince Dean that a bad creature can really control itself if it wants to, but everything, even in this episode, seems to prove him wrong. Even his blood thirst is insatiable and, although he thinks he can control himself and choose the good side (as he thinks he’s doing when he accidentally frees the Devil), at some point in episode 21 Dean and Bobby feel the need to close him into the panic room to detoxify him from demon blood (and they would have succeeded, if he hadn’t managed to escape).

As I mentioned Bobby, I’d like to point out the fact that the boys seem to consider him only when they’re both alive, while, when one of them is (temporarily) dead, the other one is so lost he cuts every link with other human beings, especially Bobby, who in the contrary is always there for them. I just think he deserves a little more consideration and gratitude, because he loves the boys just as they love him and they don’t seem to realise he suffers so much when one of them dies or if he doesn’t know what’s happening to them.

To go back to the final episode, you may wonder what Dean was doing while Sam was freeing Lucifer and starting the apocalypse… To answer this question we have to go back to the beginning and Castiel.

As I said before, this mysterious character appears as Dean’s saver and presents himself as an “angel of the Lord”. Of course we’re as surprised as Dean is hearing that, because we’ve learnt to think the world is full of evil and there’s no such thing as a good supernatural creature, so we wonder what’s the truth. Well, there’s no contradiction: we soon also learn angels aren’t as good as the Bible teaches us (at least the ones in Supernatural). They do exist, so Castiel is not lying, but they just want to do their own good and they don’t care at all about humans (that’s quite paradoxical, that Sam and Dean care more about protecting humanity than angels, and as far as I know God himself, do). But that’s another thing we get to know as the show goes on and that reaches its apex in the last episode.

Of course I already knew something about Castiel (and his “special relationship” with Dean) as Carly told me a lot about him, but still I found his appearance and the whole angel thing quite interesting, especially because at first Cas tries to be solemn and focused on his duty, which is at first even a bit scary, then quite funny considering how his relationship with the brothers will evolve through the season and through the entire series. His character changes a lot not only in his behaviour towards the Winchesters, but also in his faith in God’s and angels’ plans, as he decides to actually do the right thing against all the odds and against his own father, which must’ve been really hard for him, knowing how blindly faithful he was at first. He decides to put himself into the hands of those two guys without knowing anything but they’re fighting to save as many people as possible, and that’s why we love him and consider him the only angel worth the name. The more the show goes on, the more we see the continuous contrast between Castiel’s attitude (at first just a little uncertain) and the other angels’. I’ll mention just two of them for now, Anna and Zacharia. Anna is a girl who’s perceived as crazy because she says she can hear angels speaking, and of course demons hunt her as a means to find out the angels’ plan. When Sam, Dean and Bobby find her and try to help her, they call Pamela, an old friend of Bobby’s who always helps the boys as best as she can (I think she’s one of the characters that help Sam and Dean more and that they never thank enough, considering she finally sacrifices her life to allow them to conclude a hunt successfully). Pamela makes Anna realise she’s a fallen angel, and that explains why she’s able to hear angels’ voices, and after some time, she can go back to heaven, the place she belongs to (only after having randomly had sex with Dean because why not…). Anna’s story is quite unusual compared to the other angels we met: most of them are just sort of powerful and incorporeal spirits, who, just like demons, need a human body to fit in. We see it in detail in episode 20, in the narration of Castiel’s story. I think this mechanism of appropriation of innocent human beings contributes to Supernatural’s evil connotation of angels, who seem to be even more sneaky than demons, because they take advantage of people’s faith to convince them to hold them in their bodies and do whatever they want once they’re into them. Of course this vision of both angels and demons as villains is clearly made to make us sympathise even more with Castiel, who rebelled, and with the brothers, who seem to be the only ones really caring about mankind.

Angels’ wickedness emerges in all its power in the final episode and in the character of Zacharia. That’s the time when the entire plot is solved: Zacharia, an important angel in heaven hierarchy, keeps Deans locked in a sumptuous room to prevent him from stopping Sam from breaking the last seal. Just as Sam doesn’t know what he’s doing while he thinks he’s saving the world from apocalypse, Dean didn’t know angels actually wanted the apocalypse to happen to purify the world and finally defeat demons and Lucifer. It’s quite shocking for him (and also for us) and, even though he had never liked and trusted angels, he’s led to hate them completely. He thought he was brought back from hell because angels wanted him to help saving the world, but he understands it’s exactly the opposite. In addition, I also think the worst feeling for Dean is feeling useless and not being able to protect someone he loves, especially Sam; that makes his situation even more painful, and Zacharia seems to know it well. At the end, he manages to escape, but he can’t stop Sam from killing Lilith and the brothers can do nothing but acknowledge together the beginning of the apocalypse, which will be the main theme of the following season.

I’ll go rapidly through the single episodes as usual, to highlight some I particularly liked.

I found the fifth episode, the one in which a monster fakes itself into Dracula, quite original and I appreciated the mixture of colored and black-and-white scenes, aimed to mark the difference between “reality” and the movie set up by our Dracula. In the sixth episode we are shown a hidden side of Dean, an uncontrolled fear which is of course aroused by something the brothers are hunting, but which is also credible imagine is actually an emotion Dean constantly feels in his dangerous life but can’t allow himself to show. One of my favourites of the season is episode 8, where all people’s wishes come true, because the scene of the little girl wishing for a giant teddy bear and actually getting it was so funny and scary at the same time. Episode 13 gives us another piece of the puzzle to reconstruct Sam and Dean’s childhood and youth, as they work a case in a school they had attended: apart from blaming John for making his sons change home and school so often they can’t even make friends or built a sort of life, these highlights from the boy’s past provide us even more information to understand how they became the men we see in the present and how they were, and still are, deeply different from one another.

I feel I have to mention a new character, who is quite important for the Winchesters and also recurrent in the show, Adam. He randomly comes out as Sam and Dean’s half-brother, son of John and a local woman he met during a hunt; of course at first the Winchesters don’t believe him, but at some point they have to face the truth and kind of feel sympathetic with him for John’s absence during his growth, because they’ve been through the same issues even if in theory their father lived with them. Moreover, Adam’s appearance testify once again Sam and Dean’s biggest weakness: even if they don’t know Adam at all, they can’t help but try to save him and give him love (especially Sam, I have to say) welcoming him into the family. That’s so cute, but that’s also what keeps bringing them troubles.

I’ll end my review with episode 14: the hunted monster is a siren, which, as you all probably already know, shapes itself as a male federal agent to seduce Dean. “Big hint of Dean’s bisexuality!!”, I can hear some of you scream. What I think is that the explanation the episode gives for it (the siren takes the shape of a man similar to Dean, in other words the type of brother Dean has always wanted) is quite convincing, and is not the strongest element to sustain Dean’s queerness. I’ll impatiently wait for other clues in the next seasons…

- Irene 💕

[saltyfilmmajor]

AN EVEN DEEPER DIVE™ INTO THE THEMATIC SYMMETRY IN MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

A Breakdown of the character relationships in Rogue Nation and Fallout

For: @not-too-tall-for-trick

Y’all, I literally spent four days of my spring break working on this Rogue Nation Analysis Video and I also made this post a while ago touching on this subject, but I really can’t stop thinking about this. So here we go diving deeper into the implications of the characterizations of Ethan, Ilsa, Lane, and Benji.

Ethan Hunt will always do good no matter the cost. He disregards his own wellbeing if it means that the world will be safe. This is consistent in his characterization throughout the franchise. Which leads to the tragic implications that Ethan and by extension Team Hunt aren’t fully realized, elf-actualized people. They are tools for the government they work for, even if they are not loyal to that government.

Ethan’s loyalties despite everything he has gone through has always been on the side of protecting human life and the innocent. And he has remained able to keep a steady head on him, unwilling to sacrifice the needs of one over the needs of the many. Hunley even says as much to him in the beginning of Fallout. But never once throughout Rogue Nation and Fallout does the audience ever see Ethan being concerned with his own wellbeing.

When The boat scene in Rogue Nation occurs, Ethan already has made a decision to send Benji away: “I can’t protect you, that’s why I NEED you to leave.” The dialogue here is very significant. It’s not a want, a selfish desire. No. Ethan needs Benji to stay safe which is want informs a majority of the decisions he makes in Rogue Nation especially. The entire plot of Fallout kicks off because he was unwilling to let Luther, his oldest friend, die.

Ethan can never choose between the needs of the few and the needs of the many, at that includes himself.

Ethan, having done this for like some 20 odd years now, understands this. Ilsa however differs, but they go through similar circumstances that parallel and make them interesting to analyze closer.

Ilsa is not a bad character, (morally speaking anyway, her character in the narrative is fucking amazing and I love her and so do all my other film major friends) She has different priorities than Ethan, yet they strive for similar things, making them thematic mirrors/parallels.

Ilsa is put in a similar situation of having to go rogue in order to bring down the syndicate, she is forced to be disloyal to her government in order to live. Ilsa still holds on to her personhood and does not accept that she must be loyal to Lane or Atlee. She and Ethan agree that Lane needs to be stopped and no one will believe them, but she still believes she can walk away from the spy world and become a free woman.

“Lane, Atlee, your government, my government, they’re all the same. We only think we are fighting for the right side because that’s what we choose to believe.”  

She is ideologically more aligned with Ethan than she is with Lane. She does not agree with his methods, but she understands why Lane is opposed to his government. She is concerned with survival above all else, which is why in Fallout she must kill Lane. Otherwise, she will never again be able to live in peace.

So, both Ethan and Ilsa experience similar character arcs, but they go about it in different ways making them not foils but parallels of each other. They are on equal standing in the narrative but can’t see eye to eye in a few things.

Contrast that between Lane and Benji. The narrative between both Rogue Nation and Fallout posits them against each other and are in an odd position of being mirrors of the other, as well as being highly antagonistic towards each other to quote my friend @Snovyda

“Which is peculiar, because usually, parallels are drawn between the main villain and the main hero. Not between the villain and the hero's friend.”

They aren’t exactly mirrors, but they are linked thematically, they are connected

See, they are both competing for Ethan’s attention (not in a ship or romantic way, I just don’t have a better way to say that, the English language can only take me so far.)

It’s inferred that Ethan was to be turned to Lane’s side after that whole torture sequence, in which Ethan looks like a whole ass snac (rip sorry it’s just Tom Cruise’s Arms Make me feel safe, amongst other things) Vinter even says “What does He [Lane] see in you, I wonder?”  Lane saw protentional in Ethan to become a terrorist (That’s what he is be we don’t really have time to unpack all that.) And Lane was attempting to manipulate Ethan by whichever means to get what he wants, which is ultimately the disk. To him, human nature is something easily manipulated, which is somewhat proven right when Ethan unlocks the disk in order to keep Benji safe.

Lane sees no other way to becoming his own person than through terroristic acts. He also is definitely the leader of The Syndicate; he shoots those he deems have outlived their usefulness and the audience is never shown if he ever takes any advice from those around him. He is violent, cold, calculating. Contrast with Ethan who is caring and compassionate and only managing to get by, but because he values his team’s input, because they are all equals, he prevails.

Benji is competing for Ethan’s attention in that, he wants Ethan to know that he does not need to be alone on his mission to stop The Syndicate. He wants to be seen as just as capable. He and Lane are both monitored intensely by their government, and how they react to this informs the audience of their character’s and make them appear as thematic mirrors of the other. They both rebel against their government, in order to achieve their goals. Benji wants to help Ethan and take down The Syndicate even if he does not come to believe that the syndicate really exists at first.

Lane from the get-go seems to know about Ilsa’s mission to infiltrate his group but still believes in her potential, it is not until he realizes the disk is empty, that he truly turns against her.

In Fallout, Lane who is far more concerned with revenge, states this to Ilsa: “Ethan Hunt will lose everything and everyone that he ever cared about.”  And immediately after that, the audience hears Benji’s voice coming from the off-screen space. The editing is very intentional in setting up that Lane is not referring to Ilsa, but Benji.  The dialogue choice is very deliberate here. Because first off, the laymen will take “everything” to include “everyone”. The way Lane does this is very reminiscent of their conversation in the graveyard in Rogue Nation. “I’d like to see who you blame for what happens next.”

He is making it clear that whatever is to happen in the following encounter, it is her fault. If Benji dies his blood will be on her hands. This also makes it clear to the audience that Benji, is the “everyone” that Ethan cares about. Which is quite telling and functions on two levels in the narrative.

Firstly, Benji serves as a metonym of the entire conflict that Ethan has throughout the course of the narrative. His Team vs The Mission. Secondly, it reinforces that idea that Lane and Benji are forcibly connected.

Lane attempts to hang Benji, not shoot him or any quicker means of murder. No, he ties a noose around his neck and forcibly hangs him. Benji is the one that got away, the one who lived. Benji is the one Ethan’s attention was on, and how perfect it would be to kill him now that Ethan’s attention lies elsewhere.

The reasoning Lane has however also extends in his logic for tying Ilsa up. While it seems that His revenge is sole focused on quite brutally killing Benji, it isn’t.

Ilsa refuses to kill an ally or any innocent person. Her final test was based on killing both Ethan and Benji after Lane got the disk. Yet she refused. Because he has known her for a longer period of time he is able to use this knowledge in order to enact his revenge.

Vinter says something quite apt in Rogue Nation, that is “People break in different ways” and so the same logic applies here. Lane’s aim here is for Ilsa to be made to feel helpless, making her complicit in Benji’s murder. That’s why Lane gives his whole revenge speech to her. She is not meant to be included in the “everything and everyone”, she is just an observer, forced to watch Benji die, She is apart from them, and Benji, whom Lane knows Ethan would sacrifice anything for, is the one he sets his eyes on to be more brutal.

The Character dynamics between these four are very connected and reinforced through the narratives making them, if not mirrors of each other, then thematically linked at the very least. 

[noddytheornithopod]

Danganronpa: Parallels Between Class Trials 1 and 5

I’m sure someone far more familiar with Danganronpa has made this observation and has articulated it better, but a certain set of events I’ve noticed in the first game seem to mirror each other. Namely, class trials one and five: the ones where Makoto Naegi is attempted to be framed.

For starters, there’s who the framer is in each situation. For the first trial, Sayaka Maizono is the one who attempted to frame Makoto, even if it went wrong and she died. In the fifth, it’s Kyoko Kirigiri attempting to frame him even if neither actually committed the murder.

It’s interesting that in both instances, the person attempting to frame Makoto is the person he’s closest with at the time, to the point where romantic feelings are implied at some point. Sayaka and Makoto immediately grew close before she was killed, and we see Makoto and Kyoko both grow closer throughout the game, even if the latter tries not to reveal too much about herself.

As we all know, things went very differently for the both of them. Sayaka was hesitant and instead ended up killed by Leon, but since she planned everything Makoto was still framed for her murder and he had to prove everyone otherwise. Kyoko doesn’t die obviously, but actually succeeds even though the position she was placed in was more a matter of circumstance: Makoto purely happened to be the most likely person besides her (even if neither actually committed this murder that wasn’t even new), so she had to make him seem suspicious to survive.

Their motives also actually have a rather interesting contrast. Sayaka was purely scared as anyone reasonably would be, and after seeing the video of her pop group disbanded she felt like she needed to get out at any cost. Including framing the person she is closest to at Hope’s Peak. Basically, there was a more selfish element to her reasoning, even if there was a bit that seemed to be motivated by the people who were basically her best friends breaking up and likely in terrible conditions now.

Kyoko on the other hand is someone determined to uncover the mystery of Hope’s Peak and stop the mastermind. Instead of being driven by fear and despair, she’s being pragmatic. Pragmatic to the point where if someone has to die so that the truth can be uncovered (and therefore, everyone else can stop suffering and this evil can be defeated), she will pursue that path. Sayaka was driven by her intense emotions, Kyoko was putting them aside to pursue what was she viewed as important for everyone as a whole at the time.

Even if her motives are obviously more selfless here, there is still a selfish bent akin to how Sayaka has a slight selfless one: she believes she needs to be alive for the mysteries of Hope Peak to be unraveled. It is somewhat arrogant on her part, yes, but the curious thing is... she’s actually right. In the bad ending where she’s killed instead of Makoto, we see that everyone lives in Hope’s Peak for the rest of their lives and pretty much just accepts it.

Thing is, Makoto needed to survive too. We see this in the climax of the game where he’s necessary to keep hope alive in everyone as Junko reveals the truth about the outside world to them, which honestly would be despair inducing in anyone. When Makoto was sent to be executed and she wasn’t, it not only became clear to her that trial five was indeed set up, but that the Mastermind saw Makoto as a threat too. She recognised she was one piece of the puzzle, but even if she was aware of Makoto’s ideals and optimism, here is when it actually hit her that he was the other piece they needed to get out.

I also think there’s a curious element of hesitation and regret with both of these trials. With Sayaka, she was driven to get out to the point of betraying the person she grew closest to, but I do agree with the idea that she was conflicted about her decision. I mean, Kyoko believes her hesitation is actually what caused her plan to fail and end up with her killed. She didn’t want to frame Makoto and end up with him dead, but she put her survival first. When she was killed by Leon, she very well could’ve spelt out his name as an act of revenge, but obviously doing so would save Makoto and the others. She probably did regret attempting murder in the end, especially after Makoto promised he’d find a way for them to get out together.

With Kyoko, it might not make itself apparent until after Makoto’s attempted execution, but I really doubt she was okay with putting the one person who believed in her, someone who had actually managed to befriend her, under the bus the way she did.

All their interactions before this trial suggested that Kyoko was genuinely warming up to Makoto - I mean, she was pretty clearly upset at him not discussing the possibility of Sakura Ogami being a mole less about the idea that he knew something that she didn’t, but that he offered trust and when having a chance to prove it goes both ways he blows it. Basically, she allowed to open herself up only to feel betrayed. She was upset because she was beginning to see Makoto as a friend and was warming up to him.

She goes back to being her usual more distant self after that brief falling out, but they still spent all this time together and got to know each other. When the fifth trial came, she knew that she may have had to make sacrifices, and of course was able to put any feelings aside to achieve that. She was quite clearly lying to frame Makoto, but she did what she had to for her survival. Thing is... she may be pragmatic enough to achieve this, but deep down I bet she was pretty upset at what she may have had to do to survive.

This all culminates in Makoto’s attempted execution. This is when she realises her mistake of putting her survival (and in her eyes, what’s necessary to uncover the school’s mysteries) first. She may have thrown a wrench into the Mastermind’s game, but this was still a friend she was risking for it all. Sure, she does admit she can’t solve the mysteries of the school alone, but that’s not there all there is to it: Makoto is a friend, possibly her only friend at this point. One she literally just saved from being the actual murder the trial would focus on. The regret is strong enough for her to literally go into a garbage dump to find and rescue Makoto. Not only that, but she’s actually trying to look out for his wellbeing since she brings food and water, and actually is willing top open up about her past to show she’s more trustworthy.

I think there’s also a mirror in regards to trust. With Sayaka, regardless of how conflicted she was with carrying out her plan, she still took advantage of Makoto’s trust in her. A big thing in the first trial was Makoto realising that he needed to put aside his preconceptions to actually face the truth: that Sayaka was attempting to frame him. Here, Makoto was too willing to trust her, and that easily could’ve been his downfall.

With the fifth trial however, Kyoko is quite obviously lying to frame Makoto, and Makoto specifically spots a lie that only he could know in regards to the Monokuma key that can open any door. This is quite clearly a betrayal, but Makoto chooses to trust Kyoko regardless. Why? Well, I mean he wasn’t declared the Ultimate Hope in the game’s climax for nothing.

Instead of a more oblivious trust he placed in Sayaka based more on a small shared past and mutual romantic attraction, the trust he placed in Kyoko was one that proved to work out with experience. Instead of trusting Sayaka because of the relationship they had, the experiences Makoto and Kyoko shared and their working together ended up helping form their very relationship.

I tie this to the Ultimate Hope thing because as Makoto’s optimism is his big thing, he chose to have hope that Kyoko had ulterior motives since they both realised the fifth trial was rigged. He could’ve continued insisting he wasn’t guilty, but he took a massive risk that could’ve ended his own life because he believed Kyoko had a plan as she usually does. And of course, experiencing each other’s methods over the game ended up forming their friendship, and that caused Makoto to trust her not only as someone he worked with, but as a friend.

Makoto’s trust in Kyoko ended up being a gamble that worked because even though neither knew it and this was indeed a massive risk, Makoto was saved by Alter Ego. Here, Makoto’s luck, and more importantly hope, really did win out. Of course, as discussed Kyoko didn’t realise Makoto actually would make it out and really was putting his life on the line, but he still trusted her enough to take what was the biggest risk of his life at that point.

Some smaller things too:

I also noticed that preceding both trials, there is some pretty significant stuff that happens where stuff happens with both Sayaka and Kyoko that is quite concerning and gets Makoto worried: Sayaka has her freak out and goes into panic mode, while Kyoko disappears until the trial actually gets started (though in the anime she actually shows up for the investigation, even if Makoto’s worrying is still there).

Before both murders are discovered, there is a major incident where both Sayaka and Kyoko come to Makoto’s room. Sayaka comes because she claims to be scared of someone breaking into her room, while Kyoko comes over as Makoto is sleeping to save him from being killed by the Mastermind.

This is probably the wildest stretch of them all, but in the events leading up to both of these cases, there is a rather... lewd reference to their potential romantic development in both cases. With Sayaka, it’s the suggestion to sleep in Makoto’s bed, which prompts a brief moment of shock because of the sexual connotations of this act in most cases elsewhere. With Kyoko, it’s when Makoto is diverting Monokuma’s attention, and Monokuma asks what they’re doing in the bathroom, claiming it must be something dirty.

I’m not exactly sure where this is going, but I think this is interesting to look at. I guess if anything, these situations kind of mirror each other as a way to show how both characters Makoto grows close to and their respective relationships with him end up comparing and contrasting? Something like that, if anyone can articulate something better then go ahead.

[icharchivist]

DGM: It's pretty fascinating how the main 4 relate to Death. For all of them it's both simple yet very complex (honestly I wouldn't have room for maybe even one of them). Kanda protects people as best as he can but when they die he moves on very fast accepting that's part of the world he lives in. The only exception is his 'that person' who he refuses to believe is dead despite the possibility of it being so likely. And then it becomes Alma. Ouch. But again Alma dies and Kanda accepts that-

2 being happy things are made right between them before Alma goes and not letting Alma's burden him. In fact he's pushed forward by the restored bond and honest. Out of gratitude, his way of freeing Allen fro m the 14th is death if it comes to that. Kanda making it his priority in fact to be the one to kill Nea for Allen's sake. Alma got to die as himself. So will Allen. Lenalee is the strangest in some ways. She cares so much about her people she feels a part of her world gets destroyed if one-

3 person dies. She's kind of like Kanda though in that she can also move on really fast. She'll feel sad but not broken. Ex, Everyone thought all of the trapped Order members died during the Invasion when the L4 woke up. After Allen and Lenalee found out they survived, Allen broke down sobbing. Lenalee clapped her hands and smiled. 1 reaction seems bigger then the other. Not to say Lenalee can't be broken. Losing Allen nearly sent her comatose. She'd lose her mind if anything happened to Komui-

4 I think like Kanda, Lenalee has just seen so much death she just has to keep moving on fast like that. She's way more openly emotional about it but that sense of acceptance vs unacceptance is always inside her. I feel like Allen and Komui are the 2 people she cannonly can't accept death from because she relies on them too much (contrast to,her thinking Allen died to thinking Kanda died. Its not that she cares less at all but they both have different roles in her life). Lenalee can accept -

5 death and properly mourn a person she loved. But she is terrified of people she loves dying. Dying is more of a trigger death itself. Also let it be known she's ruthless. The only other Exorcist besides her to kill a Third was Sokaro (who implied he had to jump in and do it because Krory couldn't bare to). She hated to do it. But she did it (I don't think I did her justice but lets move on). Lavi. Wow Lavi he's someone who hates death. Like more then anyone. At least he's among the worst -

6 at coping with it. He spent most of his life watching humans massacre each other causing his hatred of humanity to blossom. Then his first real friend (Dug) died and his body became a akuma, forcing Lavi to kill it. But that only enforced Lavi's detached outlook on life. Ink was Ink. For whatever reason, Allen became the first real death he couldn't walk away from. There was actually a lot of things about it that have impacted Lavi's security. 1) Allen showed good humans like him existed -

7 and died unfairly. Things got darker. 2) for the first time Lavi suffered guilt and helplessness. He could have killed the akuma that made off w/Allen but failed. This was probably a 1st for him that a person he liked died (in his view) because he wasn't good enough. 3) it's pretty much canon every time someone he cares for dies Lavi gets triggered remembering the night Allen died. That night symbolized Lavi's humanity and he hates how much it hurts. Death is such a deep issue for Lavi. -

7 Death of himself is scary. But was prepared to kill 'Lavi' the mask if it interfered w/his goals. He was prepared to die to save Allen and Lenalee and beat Road. Death is natural. But humans killing humans is unsettling. Despite being so logical, being helpless to save his friends can make him illogical. All the pent up rage, hatred, despair and loneliness (and I believe a part of Lavi is very lonely) rush forward to the surface. He can become the most revenge driven and will settle things-

8 with death as the answer for the target if he lost something precious enough. Death is Lavi's worst trigger. It reminds him of how powerless and insignificant his own humanity is, no matter how above it he tries to be. In that way he can contrast Kanda who can find strength from death while Lavi finds only weakness. I thought I was going to yak about Allen. But Allen is Waaaay too much. I couldn't even death the surface w/o running out if room. But yeah their dynamic w/death is interesting.

This is fascinating and thank you so much for putting it into words and into my inbox! 

I think you’re spot on on everyone and i don’t really know what to add, and going onto Allen would be... boy where to even start, the guy’s story had been kickstarted by the death of his father and the guilt he felt toward it and the whole “i cannot mourn or the Earl will find me”.

In a way, I think all of this adding up makes a really neat tie in with the fact the enemy, the Earl, is weaponizing Death to start with. As in, the Noah don’t just spread death, they use people who died and the grief that comes from it in order to further harm people. Perhaps that’s why the two who were raised inside the Order have a better ability to at least handle it and move on?  Because they really have been sent on battlefields when they were children with that very specific mindset and threat of the Earl anytime. 

which makes me think, Lenalee especially reacted badly for Allen’s death for the same reason Lavi did: she felt guilty about it. she told him they needed to save Suman, she left him alone to save the little girl, and when Lavi yells at her about “there’s nothing we could have done” we see both the Lavi scene you mention showing he feels guitly the Akuma took Allen away leading him to his death, and Lenalee’s flashback of her moments with Allen. So it’s possible that the guilt that settled after Suman might haunt her for ever about Allen, especially with how much he gives her strength, while for Kanda for exemple, she grew up with him and they probably had a whole “we can die in battle anytime” mentality growing up that she might not have projected on Allen yet. Basically what i’m saying is that she had her whole life to come to term with the fact Kanda might not come back from a battlefield. But for Allen it was barely a couple of months and the guilt that sank in making it all the more difficult. 

Anyway back to my point, Lenalee and Kanda specifically having grown up in a war where grief was your greatest enemy’s strength, and who have both been child soldiers with a lot of loss to witness everytime (Lavi meets Lenalee while she’s crying over losses of a newest battle for exemple), so they have to find a way to move on and get used to it somehow. Both however refused to give up on their humanity while doing so: I suspect because both were holding onto the war for very personal feelings reason: Kanda to find That Person, and Lenalee so Komui’s sacrifice of joining the Order for her wouldn’t be in vain. 

Thus they have the distachement necessary from growing up in this state, but the emotional attachement needed to not lose completely their sense of humanity- in a way they find a way to ground themselves in the life they have to keep moving on into. It was their way to not let grief find them.

In opposition, even if Allen grew up always knowing of the Earl and after the Mana incident, of Akuma and such, Allen hadn’t grown up in the war. We know Cross rejected the Order’s orders and Allen was more concerned most of the time with the casual nightmare Cross’s life brought up. So Allen’s relationship with grief is one he had to deal with on a personal level (a bit like Kanda regarding Alma, while Kanda did manage to move on more than Allen, there are a lot of things that ties him back to the memories of Alma - it’s just that Kanda could move on by thinking of another alive person while Allen lives on for a memory. The irony is that Kanda’s “alive person” was Alma and now he’s dead, and that Allen lives for a memory of a dead person who is alive and is actually his enemy now. Oops.)

In a way Allen didn’t have to go back into thinking about the casulties of war to such a degree, he didn’t grow up on the battlefield, in a way he was more sheltered than litteral child soldiers who could be sent anywhere anytime. I think it’s interesting too that we’ve seen how Allen’s direct grief after Mana’s death affected him when you can compare to Kanda’s direct grief after Alma’s death for exemple. Allen had the time to freak out, to be a mess, the few flashbacks we have of directly after Mana’s death show that for all the terrible parenting Cross had done he actually gave all the time Allen needed to recover with his freak outs. But with Kanda after having to kill Alma, we don’t have much except that he had to immediatly be on the run with Marie until they could find Tiedoll.And I seriously doubt Kanda would have ever shown the amount of distress Allen had shown afterward - because Kanda was already daily tortured and a product of the war by that point while Allen barely knew about the war at all. 

When Allen the dog dies Allen is frustrated that Mana doesn’t show grief. He considers it abnormal. Which now that I think about it can mirror a lot how Kanda thought it wasn’t normal Alma kept on smiling after all the tortures they endured together and that’s why they fought a lot before realizing how much they just coped differently with the same event. 

... I lost my point wait. 

Anyway yeah so, the thing is, Mana did mention the Earl multiple times before but Allen always thought it was just something weird, and the “I can’t grief or the Earl will find me” thing was something Mana kept repeating but Allen didn’t get until the Earl actually found him. Allen paid the high price from not handling his grief and had since then forced himself to move on as quickly as possible without processing the grief because he’s traumatized by the event. In a way, both Kanda and Lenalee knew enough about the Earl to find another way to process death, and they have seen much more deaths than Allen has during his training with Cross one would assume, so they developped others coping mechanisms where Allen could just focus on the one he inherited from Mana. (and there is also a lot to say about how he is just repeating the same thing Mana used to say - Allen coped by copying Mana in every way after all. Kanda and Lenalee’s rolemodels are unlikely to be the dead person they would have had to kill and grief. Lenalee doesn’t have such a person in her life that we know of and Kanda didn’t take Alma as a rolemodel. So it’s already another aspect of how to relate to death).

Which brings us to Lavi and you’re entierely right about everything, i’m just adding: since Lavi have grown up wars after wars, it was indeed easier for him to deshumanize everyone around him in order to not feel attached. There’s no grief to process when you don’t have the attachement to the people who are dying. Which is already something that opposes the others three who all have clear people they care about so they risk grief, so they have to find a way around it. Lavi tried to protect himself from grief by not caring enough to have any reasons to, which was doomed to fall back against him because he couldn’t just not care for people.

Which now make me think specifically since when did Lavi know about the Earl and the Holy War? After all considering Bookman was on the Noah’s side 40 years ago there’s no way he wouldn’t know that grieving is a major risk in general. Which could add to why the non emotion rule even exist within the Bookmen. I doubt something that huge, that dangerous, wouldn’t be mentioned to a child  who is doomed to see grief after grief. But it feels like they took it by the wrong end. 

I think it’s that, with Lavi being an observer rather than a soldier, it was far easier to distach himself than for Kanda or Lenalee. Kanda and Lenalee by being on the field are always aware of how the rest of the people may be hurt in a mission. It’s more than likely that at some point, when they were young, some finders may have died because they weren’t quick enough, or died protecting them specifically because they can’t afford losing exorcists. It seems a given. So Kanda and Lenalee specifically has to deal with the fact people can die because of/for them. Lavi (and Allen on that regard) doesn’t. Because he’s not supposed to be on the battlefield enough to develop this sort of thing. So Kanda and Lenalee were in situation where the loss of people they couldn’t save were directly on their conscience and they had to find ways to deal with it. Lavi doesn’t have any reasons to have had this sort of dynamic with anyone on the battlefields he had been into.

and it’s not even mentioning that for Kanda and Lenalee, they grew up in the Order so they know the others soldiers to some degree and know why the soldiers sign up/are forced to join. They know the ultimate goal and had grown used to it. 

Lavi meanwhile had seen 49 wars, before the Holy War, he seems he stayed 4 months on each wars’s battlefield. No time to get used to people and to their motivations. so the easier to make it (”humans just like to destroy each other”) the less likely you torture yourself over what those conflicts bring. Which is signifiant that it’s the war he’s been into now for 4 years in canon that is now weighing on him and makes him unable to not face his grief. Except that it’s the very war where giving in to grief isn’t an option.

And I would be really curious about if Lavi grew up with the back on his mind that grief and the Earl was an issue, because therefore just like Allen there would be a deliberate choice tonot let grief get to you, without Lenalee and Kanda’s being forced to see too much grief in order to process it. 

... okay for someone who doesnt know what to add i added a lot kjdhfdkjf

But my point, the reason why i ended up developping that while you’ve been perfectly spot on and i feel like i’m just repeating your points, is specifically how relevent it is that the 4 main characters have very specific ways to deal with Grief and Death, while the main villain is constantly weaponizing both Grief and Death. So there is this whole thing too about the degree of awareness about the Earl, and how much the characters had been subjected to grief in order to find their way to cope with it to keep the Earl at bay. 

And I think it’s really, really fascinating that they all have their very distinct way to deal with it with different reasons each, and it’s arguably very ironic that Lavi, who’s the one who’s the most distached from the war where grieving is your enemy, that is the one who has never learned to grief properly. Evenmore so when you can argue that all the people who almost died near Lavi enough to push him to complete panic were all people who had been specifically aware of all of that, who all dealt with grief to some extend (Lenalee specifically pushed herself to her limits against Eshii because she still grieved Allen for exemple - Allen’s actions are still shadowed by his grief toward Mana - Even Chomesuke dying add to that considering an Akuma is made of said grief.)

The  way Lenalee, Kanda and Allen all deal with grief is super interesting as for what it means to the way they have grown up in the war, and ultimately, the Holy War had been the center of their lives. It never was Lavi’s however, so it is incredible to see how much grief had taken him by surprise and keeps challenging him over and over again, leaving him in complete distress.

The rapport they all have with death is fascinating to me. And it works so so so well with the fact the enemy is specifically using grief as a weapon. It makes such for a strong theme to run through the main characters it’s just. Gahh i’m just repeating myself but i love it.

thank you so much again for the initial ask! this is very spot on on all the characters and it sooo good to read!

[fe8meta]

Desire vs. Responsibility: Joshua and L’Arachel

While these two aren’t a sibling duo like Eirika-Ephraim and Innes-Tana, Joshua and L’Arachel also play important roles in the story as supporting characters.

Joshua is, for all intents and purposes, living exactly the kind of life that Ephraim sought after, and thus has a contrast with Innes that is explored in their supports. L’Arachel has Tana’s outgoing and loud personality, but it hides a more sensitive and emotional side that is like Eirika’s—or, perhaps, even Lyon’s. However, Joshua is driven more by his responsibilities (at least as a pretense), and L’Arachel her desires, which makes them a “balance” between the other two royal sets.

Joshua

Joshua is an interesting mixture of desire and responsibility. His intentions are rooted in his responsibilities, but most (if not all) of his actions in-game are tinged by his desires.

    When he was a child, his father died, likely of illness. According his father’s will, his mother, Ismaire, took the throne as queen regent due to Joshua’s age. However, it was hard on her, as indicated by her dialogue with Carlyle about how “It was through your unwavering support alone that I still sit upon the throne,” and her dying apology to Joshua that “I was so intent on being queen that I spared no time to be your mother.” Provided that he’s alive, Joshua will afterwards state:

I’d grown tied of the formality of palace life, so I...just left. I wrote a farewell and left the palace, taking nothing with me. I felt I could never understand the people while I stayed sequestered in a castle. I abandoned my identity and roamed the continent, working where I could. I wanted only to be worthy of becoming king. [...] I was such a child, I see it now. Was I simply rebelling against my mother? Punishing her for tending to her duties?

    While Joshua gets to live the life that Ephraim wanted, Joshua left with the intention of doing it to become a better king—though in hindsight, he himself believes he was motivated more by resentment towards his mother’s neglect. Ephraim, meanwhile, had no intention of using new experiences to become a better ruler. He wanted to discard his title completely. Because of this, while Joshua’s situation bears similarity to the situation that Ephraim desires, his objective is more along Innes’ line of thinking. In fact, in their A support, they have this exchange:

Innes: Interesting. I’ve never had any experience with this sort of thing. One only has so much time when he’s groomed to become the king, you know.

Joshua: I can imagine. But a king must have a wide range of knowledge, don’t you think? When I was a journeyman, I lost a lot of money to scams like this. I started learning these tricks so they couldn’t be used on me anymore! It’s all rubbish, innit? But it’s not a bad thing to add to your experience.

Innes: I must hand it to you, you have a point. Some things, you can only learn firsthand, on the field.

    Joshua’s side plot bears many similarities to Eirika’s story, so it’s little wonder that we find out about it on her route. Both became/posed as mercenaries after running away from home to avoid being recognized; however, both intended to return to their country to fulfill their duties. Their only remaining parent is slain by Grado’s forces without them able to do anything about it, and they vow to put an end to the war and restore their homelands. Furthermore, they are betrayed by someone who should have been loyal to their cause: Carlyle for Joshua, Orson for Eirika.

   Joshua and L’Arachel are mirrors in their implied lonely childhoods; Ismaire was too preoccupied with the court to make time for Joshua, and while L’Arachel has a good relationship with her uncle, she is constantly burdened by the knowledge that her parents died before she could even form memories of them. Eventually, they leave home to go on an adventure.

    However, this is just about where their similarities end. Joshua snuck away without anyone knowing and was able to keep up his disguise for around ten years. Meanwhile, L’Arachel demanded that she be allowed to travel on her very-non-anonymous journey. (Her best disguise is the fact that her very existence is practically unknown.) Furthermore, Joshua ran away out of a mixture of disgruntlement towards his home life and to learn more about his people. Though L’Arachel claims to be on a holy mission to exterminate monsters, it becomes quite evident in her supports with Dozla that it is more ego-driven than charity... to speak nothing of the fact that she can’t even fight monsters herself when you meet her.

    This isn’t to say Joshua’s a shining model of responsibility. As the game makes clear enough, he has a bad gambling addiction, and as his solo ending tells us, he also has a wanderlust persists for the rest of his life (it only settles in his paired ending with Natasha). Those aren’t exactly qualities you want to find in a future king, and he never really gets penalized for his gambling ways outside of his supports with Gerik and L’Arachel. In Gerik’s, Gerik sees through his trick and calls him out on it; in L’Arachel’s, her divine luck surpasses any attempt of Joshua’s to cheat her out. However, neither of those “lessons” permanently stick on him anyways.

    Furthermore, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that Joshua’s been away from home for ten years. After Ismaire’s death, he says, “I knew one day I would return.” Doesn’t sound like he had a plan about when he would return, not to mention that it’s completely possible for him to die before he makes it back. Unlike Innes and L’Arachel, he won’t retreat when he’s gravely injured. He has no true consideration for his mother, nor of the fact that he’s left the throne vacant should Ismaire meet an untimely death. She does, and it’s only by chance that, if he’s alive, Joshua reunites with her as she lays bleeding to death on the floor. It’s after this turn events that Joshua vows to join forces with the other royals put an end to the Demon King’s threat.

    Luckily for Joshua, the story isn’t a political one, and the game didn’t want you to lose a unit for their political duties. Realistically, his almost-immediate departure from Jehanna after it just lost its known leaders (Ismaire and Carlyle) would have thrown the country into chaos. (Though, if there are roughly two weeks between each chapter, he may have organized something before leaving.) Of course, this assumes that people would accept Joshua as king to begin with, after his ten-year disappearance. Long in short, Joshua’s irresponsibility gets handwaved in FE8 because politics are nonexistent. Sure, you can disguise yourself among the people to discover how to best rule them, but it’s all for naught if you can’t even get the throne afterwards.

    (He’s also lucky that all the other royals, save for Innes, are laid-back people. Being away from the royal court and living as a mercenary for 10 years probably means he’d have a hard time dealing with court intricacies... the very ones that consumed Ismaire to the point that Joshua ran away.)

L’Arachel

Much like how Joshua's motivations for running away from home were both to become a better king and to get revenge for his parental neglect, L’Arachel’s “holy mission” is one she claims is part of her responsibilities as Rausten’s princess. However, it is made evident that much of said mission is really her excuse to put herself in the world and gain fame. At the same time, however, she proves herself to be genuinely knowledgeable and serves as a confidant for both Eirika and Ephraim in their times of distress.

    Even without going into her supports, this exchange alone tells the whole story behind L’Arachel’s “holy mission”:

L’Arachel: Oh… I suppose there’s naught to be done about it now. Very well, Eirika. You’ve found me out! The beauteous wanderer who’s been your boon companion is none other than… the jewel of the theocracy of Rausten, Princess L’Arachel herself! I was acting under divine order to strike down evil in this land.

Eirika: ….. Is that so? But why did you…

Soldier: The truth is… The princess was enflamed by the words of the court troubadour, Saaga… She forced us to allow her to journey forth anonymously on a quest for justice.

    When we meet her in Chapter 4, L’Arachel is a straight example of a cloudcuckoolander. She charges on-screen with Dozla and Rennac in tow, overlooking the battle from a steep cliff. Her suggestion is then to charge down said cliff to intervene in the battle, and luckily for her, Rennac manages to talk some sense and convince her not to go and die trying.

    In many of her early story interactions and in her supports, she’s rather self-centered and prioritizes herself without much regard for others. It doesn’t seem to be deliberate, but she’s so naive in the world that everything ends up becoming self-centered. This is particularly evident in her A support with Joshua, where she indignantly declares, “Fixing? What do you mean? The game’s not broken. I’m doing fine!” In fact, in the Japanese version of Dozla and Garcia’s A support, Dozla even says that being L’Arachel’s attendant is like being the attendant of a young child.

    However, L’Arachel isn’t completely irresponsible. Unlike Joshua, she will retreat if she’s defeated. This guarantees that she will survive to take up the throne regardless of what happens on the battlefield; she even has alternate bits of dialogue in her recruitment chapters if she was defeated. Even if we never see her actually pray or talk about the gods, she proves to be knowledgeable in Magvel’s legends, recounting to Eirika the legend of Latona.

   Despite lacking a bit in emotional intelligence, she genuinely cares for others, and her desire to become a beauteous warrior of justice isn’t all just self-indulgence. In Chapter 14 of Eirika’s route, she’s the one who goes back to seek out Eirika once they find Ismaire and realize Eirika isn’t with them. As the story progresses, she continues being the spark of optimism and hope despite the odds. In Chapter 18, she displays concern for both twins when they insist on pursuing Lyon, urging Eirika to place herself over her desire to save Lyon, and suggesting Ephraim leave Lyon to the rest of the army.

    Her concerns are proven correct when she and the rest of the army catch up with the runaway sibling, only to find the Stone of Renais shattered. Despite that, and Innes and Seth's observation that Lyon has escaped, her reaction is “So he got away, is that it? There's no cause to be discouraged.” Even though the party party suffered a pretty large blow to morale with the loss of the fourth Sacred Stone, it is L’Arachel who pushes them on. Her insistence on visiting Rausten Court instead of immediately pressing on to Darkling Woods is what saves the final Sacred Stone and Mansel’s life. In this way, her willfulness turns out to be beneficial as well.

    If Tana dies in Ephraim’s route before or during Chapter 19, L’Arachel will speak to Ephraim in her place; she is the only option in Eirika’s route. For a while, I couldn’t understand it—Tana’s the one who was closer to Eirika before the war, so why can’t she speak to Eirika? Then it hit me. L’Arachel probably asked to speak to Eirika to atone for Chapter 18. Telling Eirika about how Latona resisted the Demon King gave her the spark of hope that ultimately resulted in the loss of Renais’ Sacred Stone. L’Arachel may have blamed herself for it, and so talking to Eirika in Chapter 19 was her way of taking responsibility.

    L’Arachel and Innes serve as foils to each other; they aren’t good at communicating with others, but ultimately have good intentions. L’Arachel is too desire-driven, which makes her come off as demanding and selfish, while Innes is too responsibilities-driven, which makes him callous and bossy. While talking to Ephraim, she says that she and Ephraim are alike because “You refuse to show weakness, and you want to accomplish everything yourself.” Innes admits to Gerik, in their A support, he was mistaken in his belief that “Those born to royalty cannot show others any weaknesses or deficiencies. If they’re not perfect at all times, their enemies will take advantage of them.”

   L’Arachel was heavily affected by the early loss of her parents. She may have wanted to go on her anonymous quest to also prove herself to be as capable as her late parents. Meanwhile, Innes was hailed as a genius strategist, but always feels a tinge of unworthiness, and his failures during the war only further his doubt in himself. It is by interacting with others in the army—Eirika for L’Arachel and Gerik for Innes—that they gain more (genuine) confidence in their abilities.

[angryhappyhat]

In a somewhat surprising, but not unprecedented, turn, the show opts to draw from a significant turning point in its source material to deliver a dramatic cliffhanger. With yet another rescue party out to retrieve yet another of the protagonists, the audience would be forgiven for believing the series to be stuck on a loop. Sometimes patterns build to something bigger, though, and that appears to be the case here. The show has always prided itself on its ability to parallel past events and draw attention to the significance of their similarity to the current circumstance. All three protagonists have come together, finally, tensions still high and conflict unresolved, but no more so than it has been at other lulls. This is the time for banter and jokes and meaningful glances, reconciliation and a completion of the reunions of the previous episode. But all of that is cut short by, quite literally, the wrath of God. And it stings.

  3P Reviews Series: Preacher

  Spoilers: YES

Audience Assumptions: I’m kind of assuming you’ve been following the show, but do what you like. Oh, also some pretty substantial book spoilers too, so you’ve been warned.

  Season Four

Episode Six: The Lost Apostle – *****

  Part One: If You Look Closely, You May Notice This Season Was Filmed in Australia

There’s that motif of ominous planes again. By the end of the episode, we know what it’s all about.

Tulip and Cassidy have arrived in Melbourne to rescue Jesse, because it just wouldn’t be Preacher unless one or more of the protagonists was in dire peril and needed rescuing. Initially, they just want to find him so they can continue to support his inane God quest, but after a bit of Australian humor, they come across Eugene and realize he’s being held captive by the Saint. To what purpose, no one is quite clear for a while.

Despite his evident desire to do Jesse in, the Saint stays his hand to march Jesse across the Outback (because how else would they travel?) to the Lost Apostle. The place Jesse was going anyway.

The Saint reveals his plan en route: he wants Jesse to kill God. Flawless, buddy. I can see no point where this could go wrong.

Jibes aside, here’s another of those classic moments where the fate of the characters is revealed to them long before they’re ready to accept it. In summarizing the books compared to the show, the main difference has always been show Jesse’s desire to find God for peaceful reasons. The books make no pretense of Jesse having a beef with God and going after him out of anger, but the show’s version is deluded by his faith. He wants to know what’s going on, he wants to know his place, he wants to help God in some way, because that’s how he reconciles his beliefs with the sudden knowledge that his god has abandoned him and everyone else. He holds onto the very persistent idea of a benevolent all-knowing god who loves all Christians and would never do something like this without a reason. He’s skeptical enough to want to know that reason, rather than accept events without question, but he has a very particular idea for what God should be, and he’s reluctant to give it up.

It’s fitting, then, that the Saint would be the one to decide God needs to die, rather than the reverse. He has reason for it, and much as he dislikes Jesse, Jesse’s just some person in his way. He needs Jesse for something, though. Or, more likely, he needs Genesis.

So that’s the reason for these two hiking across the Outback together. They’re at a stalemate, the Saint unable to kill Jesse because he needs him and Jesse unable to kill the Saint full stop. To pass the time, they talk. One can imagine the Saint isn’t much for conversation, but Jesse, not too eager to get on with murdering his deity, tries to reason with him. He tries to save him in that Christian sense, going on about redemption and how this doesn’t need to be the way things go. That they should trust God because He knows what He’s doing, and it’s worthwhile. In response, the Saint murders an entire family in cold blood.

  Part Two: The Conference

Sneaky set designers fitting that snow globe in surreptitiously. I see it, and I applaud. If they actually get the Alamo setpiece in, that’ll be a setup running since the very first season (just take a look at my review of Monster Swamp).

On the other hand, little details like that can make the outcome seem disappointing if it doesn’t come to fruition. Adaptations generally offer little risk, but where it does exist is in the details. Unthinking mimicry like in the recent live-action Disney films can lead to a domino effect where parts of the story no longer work without modification. A good story is like a house of cards, and the more interconnected it is, the more little changes disrupt the rest of it.

On the whole, I’ve been impressed with how Preacher has handled extensive alteration of its source material while still adding homage to the original. However, the weak point is frequently this homage. The show wants to be a bit indulgent, and I’m more than willing to enjoy it as a fan of the books. But after the initial appeal of recognizing a reference fades, its contribution to the whole often comes into question.

For instance, the end of the world. The series teases impending Armageddon through the Grail, inching steadily closer to it with some bizarre choices involving nuclear tensions between, of all countries, Australia and New Zealand (neither of which are nuclear powers). That scene involving the New Zealand MP that I said was pointless? Turns out I was wrong.

On some level, I love how ridiculous this subplot is. It fits the show without taking away too much attention from other subplots. But the thing is, by this point in the story, the Grail is more or less obsolete. Starr’s still here, getting his penis eaten by a dingo. Featherstone’s still here, at least until she squirrel-suits out the window. She actually gets a decent bit of an arc, asking Starr to at the very least execute her personally when she’s failed him, and dipping when he designates the assignment to Hoover 2.

To be fair, the Grail subplot is in pretty much the same position after Book Four. Promises of the end of the world diminish into a pissing contest as Starr, losing valuable body parts left and right, uses up all of the Grail’s good will and resources trying to get revenge on Jesse. Its counterpart in the show has a similar tone, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable for the show to set up a different outcome where the world does perish, while still keeping an absurdist tone.

Unless, for instance, the show also wanted to divert to a more character-driven narrative focusing on the relationships between the protagonists or give Jesse some sort of climactic resolution with God on a personal level.

You can have Jesse face God, Cassidy, or Starr at the Alamo, but you can’t give him all three.

The problem here is that of the three big subplots coming to a head — Jesse’s personal quest, the protagonists’ interrelationships, and the end of the world — the latter is the weakest. The former subplot is the most unique to the series, and seems to be where it’s heading. I’m fond of the middle one for character potential and depth, but it requires the most time to play out, and while the show seems interested, I don’t know that it has the necessary framework this late into the series. The latter subplot is the obligatory one, and the one no one seems overly interested in, but it’s still there, trucking along. And as much as I’m on-board with it as a side-hobby, we only have three episodes left. Something has to be cut, you can’t be that fucking greedy, show.

I’m not going to lie, I’m also less enthusiastic about Jesse’s confrontation with God than I should be. I think it’s because this quest has consistently taken him away from the other two protagonists, so I’m projecting my frustration of the weaker parts of the second and third seasons onto it. There are a million things the show could have done differently to give the payoff more appeal, particularly if it had spent more time showing Tulip and Cassidy’s relationships to religion as a contrasting point. It exists, and seems to be a sore spot for both of them. The interconnection between this plot and the character plot works in the first season with both Tulip and Cassidy going to Jesse’s sermons and helping out around the church to spend time with him, but it pretty much fades after that. The bottom line is, if the show wants to throw the climaxes of the three main plots together, fine. They just won’t have anything to do with one another, and I foresee it being a bit of a mess.

We’ll see, I suppose. I can’t help but think back to the latter half of the previous season and how disconnected and unnecessary the Allfather, Les Infants, and Angelville subplots ended up. They all had resolutions, sure, but poor Tulip was stuck without anything personally compelling to do in that final episode, and as fun as it was to see her fight Nazis and give God what-for, I do feel like the show could have made her contribution to the story more integral. Same with Cassidy. As satisfying and resonant as certain scenes have been, they mean a lot less if they don’t fit within the story you’re trying to tell.

Also, where did my gay content go, show? You promised me homoerotic subtext and text, goddamnit!

I don’t think I can blame references to the books as the sole cause of weaknesses in the plot, but there are enough moments to point out and make it look damning. Toscani, Masada, Allfather, Eccarius, the angel, Tulip nearly dying, Jesse losing his powers, the end of the world — hell, even the entire Grail, really. If the show had cut the Grail entirely, what, story-wise, would we lose?

All of these elements have their merits, and the showmakers have done a damn fine job of making them entertaining.  I do wonder, though, if the show knew how many seasons it would be getting from the start, would it have gone about them the same way. Maybe. Maybe it would have gone to greater lengths to ensure that the fan-pleasing moments were better integrated into the story.

For all my misplaced ire, though, I can at least point out one major plot point lifted directly from the books that, even with a new set-up and slightly different context and its scene playing with the panels in the graphic novels almost a story board, works. Other than the Coffin, I mean.

And that’s the setpiece for this episode: the one where Jesse dies.

  Part Three: Foreseen Consequences

Do you know when the last time the three protagonists were in the same room together was? It was Season Three, Episode Four, The Tombs. Specifically the moment where Tulip bursts in on Jesse trying his darnedest to murder Cassidy with a stake. The time before, the last the three of them had a conversation together, was two episodes earlier. I don’t say any of this as a complaint. In fact, despite my previous complaints, this episode, and its ending sequence in particular, almost justify the amount of time spent keeping these characters apart. Now, finally, they’re reunited. Fucking finally.

And then it’s gone.

This is the turning point in the books. It’s probably the single most important thing that happens in the series. Unlike in the show, most of the main characters in the books rarely spend more than a few chapters separate from one another. Up until this point, the record is about half a book, and that’s often not by their choice. Jesse has flaked out on Tulip to save Cassidy before, and Cassidy has gone off and been kidnapped or waited for the young-uns to rekindle their love for one another, but beyond that, they’re usually no more than a few hours in-world from regrouping.

When Jesse falls out of the airplane, it’s sudden, unexpected, and leaves the team shattered. He’s not technically dead, as we soon find out, but he might as well be for all the other two know. They think he’s dead, and everything spirals downhill from there. His absence comes at a bad time, exacerbating tensions between the other two that have been building for the last few chapters. Tulip doesn’t want to be left alone with Cassidy, Cassidy likewise is wary of being left alone with her. But they both love Jesse dearly, and they need support for their grief. Him dying where and when he does makes them to stay together long after they should have parted ways. Tulip turns to drugs and alcohol, and Cassidy turns to abusing her, twisting the tragedy of the situation to his advantage.

After this point, the story becomes much more about Tulip and Jesse reconciling with what Cassidy has done to them. The latter remains something of a nuanced character, if still a tremendous asshole. One of the major throughlines that remains up to the end of the series is that as duplicitous and vile as Cassidy has been to Tulip, and as jealous as he has been of her and Jesse’s relationship, at the end of the day, he does still care about Jesse very much. The situation isn’t orchestrated, he’s not intent to off Jesse to get at his girl, and though he lies about Jesse’s last words being for her, his assholery is a domestic sort, and it exists alongside the character’s few better attributes. One of those is his willingness to go to the ends of the world for Jesse.

The actual scene plays out much like it does in the show: the door falls off, Jesse falls out, Cassidy grabs him, Cassidy starts to burn up in the sun, Jesse realizes Cassidy can’t pull him to safety, and Jesse commands him to let go. It’s not a long scene, but it’s beautifully paced out, largely visual with just a few words between the characters, most of them yelling. The situation is appropriately frantic, and the cartoon style sells it. Expressions are exaggerated, the panels are all different angles and sizes, Cassidy is mostly campfire by the end of it, and the medium of the graphic novel allows every single panel to have an impact. You don’t even see Jesse fall or hit the ground, you just see a smoke trail falling away from the plane. Tulip remains unaware for most of it, only realizing that someone has fallen out after the fact, and not knowing who. Her rushing back to see ends that issue of the comics with these three panels:

It’s difficult to replicate that level of expression on film. The simplicity of the lighting and background allows the panel to draw a razor’s focus on what’s important. Panel position and the mere fact that all movement is implied allows the individual frames to stand out. This scene, as written, only works in comics.

So the show doesn’t even try to do it that way.

Certainly the actions are the similar. After the trail goes cold, Tulip and Cassidy stumble upon God’s RV (He needs somewhere to store His motorcycle and dog suit), whereupon they find that Jesse is headed to the Lost Apostle. They run across him, stage a quick rescue, and keep going for the rock. Once they get there, God strikes at the plane. The door comes off, Jesse falls out, Cassidy catches him, then catches fire, and Jesse makes him let go. The main difference from a script standpoint is that Jesse tells Cassidy to tell Tulip to read his letter (as opposed to telling her he loves her), and there’s no need to explain to Tulip what happened. She was in the cockpit of the rinky-dink aircraft just a few feet away.

The season knows it’s been leading to this, and it’s ensured the audience knows too. It plays a little bait-and-switch with audience members familiar with the books by having him survive an earlier plane crash on the way to Australia. Now, not only does the show call into question the reality of everything Jesse had done between Masada and Melbourne, it also makes this event seem inevitable. He’s been heading for this plane, and the ground below, since the start of the season. This was always going to happen, manipulated by God and the screenwriters alike. It’s not a spur-of-the-moment mishap.

That doesn’t relieve the other characters of guilt over it, though. The show does a solid job of layering the series of things that go wrong on top of the foreboding imagery leading up to the accident, such that the precise cause of death isn’t entirely clear. Not all of these lines of reasoning are satisfying — for instance, it takes a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief to accept that Tulip wouldn’t realize until the last minute that maybe her finding a convenient post card in God’s RV wasn’t a coincidence. Or that they would come across an airplane that could stay in the air in near-junkyard condition. Or that God could send a sort of fire storm toward said plane with the only consequence being its door flies off.

Much as the effects could stand a bit more budget and workshopping, I’m inclined to say these moments of disbelief actually add to the scene in the intended way. It’s all to do with how Tulip and Cassidy respond. They’re both glad to see Jesse once rescued, but their interactions are brief and superficial. Cassidy makes a joke about The Big Lebowski, because of course he does, and Tulip gives Jesse a bit of a cold shoulder for abandoning him. That’s pretty much all of the conversation they get to before God attacks the plane, and from then on, Tulip is stuck struggling with the controls to ensure the plane stays aloft. The part with Cassidy and Jesse is probably the most consistent with the books, but as the former has no confessions about hitting on Tulip, there’s no real added weight of feeling obliged to save him to redeem himself. He’s just holding onto him because Jesse’s his friend.

The visuals of the scene are less impressive than those in the book. The most Cassidy catches fire is his arm, and, well, it’s not like his fingers are falling off or the plane is spiraling away from a nuclear explosion or anything. Jesse just falls out of the plane because it’s a piece of junk and God’s a petty asshole. We even see him fall. Hell, it’s one of the things the season opens with. We’ve known this was coming, and it’s even played like a joke. Like that’s the way he gets to the Lost Apostle, by falling from a great height and landing in a puff of dust like a cartoon character.

Perhaps it’s because the scene is so much more mundane that the ending hits an effective blow. The episode ends with a few shots of Tulip and Cassidy glancing at each other and then off into space, not a word between them. They both look exhausted and teary-eyed, but they hardly emote at all. They just kind of sit there, stunned, Tulip still flying the plane, like it hasn’t fully registered to them what’s happened. And if you’ve ever been in a dire situation before where something horrible happens that you’re powerless to stop, that feeling might be familiar. Distress sometimes has a delayed response, to the point where you’re not even sure if you’re grieving properly because you don’t feel right. What it leaves you with is this unusually quiet head that ensures you hear every unbidden thought that tells you what went wrong with perfect clarity.

The show doesn’t give us much indication of what’s going on in the protagonists’ heads after Jesse falls, but beyond the simple shock of losing him, you can imagine there’s plenty of guilt. Guilt that Cassidy didn’t close the door properly, guilt that Tulip couldn’t evade the attack in time, guilt that Tulip couldn’t help, guilt that Cassidy couldn’t pull him back in, guilt for picking an airplane on its last legs, guilt for bringing him into a trap, guilt for not realizing sooner, guilt for not making the most of the few minutes they had left with him, guilt for letting him run off on his own, guilt for not joining him sooner, guilt for screwing things up every step of the way with the stupid accidental affair that both of them are kind of embarrassed about anyway. It doesn’t really matter if these were avoidable events or not — that they all feel avoidable is what really matters. Cumulatively, they put all of this pressure on the characters that the audience can empathize with because that’s what we would be thinking of under the circumstances.

It’s a different effect than the books have, not necessarily worse or better. I think I prefer the delivery of the scene in the books for general enjoyment, but I’m curious to see where the show takes this. These are different characters, and whether the show wants to hit certain plot points from the books or not, what it does will be all its own.

  Series Breakdown Rating:

Characters and Character Development: 9 Aesthetics and Style: 8 Creativity: 8 Overall Plot: 7 Subplots: 8 Sum: 40/50

Out of the Blue – Preacher, Season Four, Episode Six In a somewhat surprising, but not unprecedented, turn, the show opts to draw from a significant turning point in its source material to deliver a dramatic cliffhanger.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Educating Vitae

by Shim

Monday, 18 January 2016

In which choices are explored, people do things they know to be bad, blood is unhelpfully like sex, and there are altogether too many types of vampire.~

I must apologise firstly for the title, and secondly for not incorporating any song titles from Meat Loaf into this article. I already spent too long writing it.

So, only six years late, I finally finished reading Vampire Academy.

It’s quite fun. I originally wrote "really fun", but reflection on the social plot has made me a bit less enthusiastic.

The following will contain enormous amounts of spoilers, including big plot-type revelations. I should also point out that the book includes self-harm, and I will briefly mention it but not go into detail.

On Protagonists and Viewpoints

So the book is a little ambiguous about its nature. Let me cite some of the back blurb here.

Lissa Dragomir is a mortal vampire. She must be protected at all times from the fiercest and most dangerous vampires of all - the ones who will never die. Rose Hathaway is Lissa's best friend - and her bodyguard. Now, after two years of illicit freedom, they've been dragged back inside the iron gates of St. Vladimir's Academy. The girls must survive a world of forbidden romances, a ruthless social scene and terrifying night-time rituals. But above all, they must never let their guard down, lest the immortal vampires take Lissa - forever...

Huh. I don’t think I’ve seen a single night-time ritual. How misleading.

But never mind that! The point is, in this blurb and the early stages of the book, it’s not entirely clear who’s the protagonist (as discussed originally in

The Text Factor: Halloween Special: Girl Books for Girls

). The description kicks off with Lissa, and she’s the vampire, and the one affected by most of the weird events of the book. However, our viewpoint character is always Rose.

I wondered for a while whether this was going to be a dual-protagonist book with a single viewpoint character; due to blood bond shenanigans, Rose sporadically ends up in Lissa’s mind, which is a handy way to convey key information. That would have been interesting.

As the story progressed, though, I increasingly got the feeling that Lissa is more of a plot point (albeit a nicely characterised one) than a protagonist in her own right. Her early interactions with Christian, and her special status, suggest that her experiences might be the main focus of the book, with Rose there for support, observation and a bit of romance on the side. However, it soon becomes clear that Rose’s experiences are going to be much more narratively important than Lissa’s.

Introduction to the Vampire

There’s quite a lot of vampire stuff to introduce, especially for those of us not familiar with it. I’ve not idea how closely it fits folklorific ideas of vampires. However, the broad-strokes picture we get of how vampire society works seems to fit together in its own rather bizarre way. The relationship between moroi

[1]

, dhampir

[2]

and humans is clearly unhealthy, particularly their utterly hypocritical view of the people they depend on for blood.

However, Mead is careful to weave in some explanations for this. Not only are the ‘feeders’ providing food, which tends to dehumanise them; they do so willingly and eagerly, because of the intoxicating nature of vampiric saliva, making them into addicts. Society doesn’t respect addicts, so it’s easier to accept this situation. Moreover, Rose calls out the hypocrisy in the situation explicitly, while still allowing shades of it to slip into her own attitudes and words. Knowing something’s morally dubious isn’t an easy route to resolving it, after all.

They were well cared for and given all the comforts they could need. But at the heart of it, they were drug users, addicts to Moroi saliva and the rush it offered with each bite. The Moroi - and guardians - looked down on this dependency, even though the Moroi couldn't have survived otherwise unless they took blood by force. Hypocrisy at its finest.

This trait of allowing grey complexities into Rose’s voice is one of the things that pleased me about the book. Rose is quite perceptive about wrongs, injustices and ambiguities, but Mead hasn’t written her as some righteous, crusading heroine. In fact, the book is riddled with her weaknesses. You might even argue that one of the themes of the book (and, I suspect, the series) is morality, boundaries of acceptability, and the strength and opportunity to make moral choices. Let’s see if I can make a case for that.

Choices and Morality

One of the first things that happens in the book is a feeding; Rose’s vampire, Lissa, needs blood from her. This introduces the intoxication aspect, but it’s only later that we learn how unacceptable – dirty, perverted, unthinkable – this is in vampire society. However, it’s a decision they made to keep Lissa alive, and one that’s left Rose with a mild addiction.

Soon after they return to school, Rose walks into a classroom to find two high-status kids tormenting a poor kid, magically blowing his papers around the room. In many books this would be a teaching point, where Rose or Lissa stepped in to deliver justice and demonstrate their righteousness. Here, nobody does a thing.

My instincts urged me to do something, maybe go smack one of the air users. But I couldn’t pick a fight with everyone who annoyed me, and certainly not a group of royals – especially when Lissa needed to stay off their radar. So I could only give them a look of disgust as I walked to my desk.

And then the narrative moves on to another part of the plot. Although Lissa is technically high-status, and both were once socially powerful, the school has moved on in their absence. Now, the rumours about their escape – and soon about a series of associated events – greatly complicate their attempts to blend back in.

Similarly, Rose frequently does things that aren’t particularly nice, or good, or sensible. As the story is told from her viewpoint, we even hear her acknowledging these issues. She still does them, though. It’s very human.

Some tiny, tiny part of me was starting to feel sorry for Christian. It was only a tiny part, though, and very easy to ignore...

And later on:

"...between stealing [her boyfriend] and spreading those stories about her parents, you guys really picked the best ways to make her suffer. Nice work." The smallest pang of guilt lurched inside of her. "I still think you're lying." "I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a lair. That's your department. And Rose's." "We don't-" "Exaggerate stories about people's families? Say that you hate me? Pretend to be friends with people you think are stupid? Date a guy you don't like?"

All of the above accusations are, of course, entirely accurate.

A feud erupts between Rose, Lissa and another girl called Mia, apparently at Mia’s instigation. Still, both sides are determined to utterly crush their rival and exact painful revenge, which means immense suffering for both parties as their most private secrets are turned into playground gossip by the other side. It’s mutually-assured destruction, basically.

Another important decision involves Lissa’s vampiric powers. We learn early on that Lissa has some compulsion abilities, and gradually discover that she can influence both humans and vampires, which is highly unusual. When their social standing is destroyed by revelations of blood sharing, a furious Lissa resolves to use those abilities to forcibly change people’s opinions of them, catching them one by one and altering their feelings by magic. This does indeed allow them to gradually regain acceptability in the school, but Rose is deeply uncomfortable about it, with good reason.

Finally, there’s Natalie. Poor Natalie.

Natalie is the daughter of a powerful vampire, Dashikov, and she just wants to be loved. Throughout the book, she seeks social validation, but it’s made clear that above all, she wants her father’s affection, and doesn’t quite get enough. This poisonous little worm is enough to turn her into a pawn for him, and his total carelessness about her really reinforced how unpleasant he is. From spying on her friends for his sake, she’s eventually pushed into leaving mutilated animals around in an attempt to make Lissa reveal her healing powers.

Finally, when her father is captured, she takes the ultimate step of becoming a Strigoi, murdering one of the teachers to gain the power to break him out. It fails, and her death is another trivial loss in his quest for power. Once again, out come those Themes I mentioned.

Natalie breaks the bounds of friendship in the hopes of winning validation from her father, and what she’s prepared to do for his sake pushes her into the final betrayal of her friends and her entire species. Although apparently happy, she doesn’t have the willpower to withstand his influence and refrain from doing wrong on his behalf. Dashikov betrayed his duties as a father by turning Natalie into a pawn for his own sake, and manipulating her love to force her into immoral acts. This contrasts with Dimitri, who as a child defeated his vampiric father to defend his mother, and now bursts in to help Rose defeat her one-time friend.

Although Natalie was only ever a minor character, looking back, you can see hints of what’s going on in the way she casually teases out information and hangs around Lissa. I did feel genuinely sorry for her, and I was sorry to see she just got killed off at the climax. On the other hand, stories where the bad guys just hang around indefinitely can drag.

Knowing what’s best for you

It strikes me that throughout the book, I don’t think Lissa ever actually asks Rose for anything. Partly this is perhaps just habitual expectation that Rose will be there, but I feel that part of it is that Rose projects her own ideas about what Lissa needs onto her charge. The mental bond that lets her literally see through Lissa’s eyes and experience her thoughts surely doesn’t help. We never see Lissa’s side at first hand.

This is shown up most flagrantly when she intervenes to block what she sees as an unhealthy friendship blooming between high-status Lissa and the local brooding loner, Christian, whose parents were killed after going rogue and hunting other vampires. Lissa finds his company soothing and there’s a sympathetic spark between them.

Rose, who is unusually bound up in social games for a contemporary heroine, is horrified at the thought of Lissa associating with this outcast, and repeatedly takes her to task. Between her prejudice and his rather erratic behaviour, things spiral until Rose intervenes, actively lying to Christian to separate them. Naturally, both Lissa and Christian think the other party has wronged them, and things become progressively worse. She does become guilty, though, and eventually she’s forced to admit that she was in the wrong.

Nonetheless, Lissa’s story throughout the book is one of having her best interests decided and controlled by other people. Her escape from the school turns out to have been at Rose’s instigation and with no warning; they’re forcibly returned to the school; Rose patrols her friendships and tries to dictate her social interactions; and eventually, Dashikov steps in to capture her in the hopes of curing his terminal illness. Even this he tries to frame as being good for her, providing an escape from the problems caused by her unique magical abilities.

The problems are, essentially, mental illness. For some reason not yet explained, Lissa's abilities not only lead to her mental bond with Rose, but also to extremely distressing mental episodes. Her coping mechanism for this is the self-harm I mentioned above, and there are a couple of explicit scenes, including first-person perspective courtesy of Rose's bond. Her eventual hospitalisation after a particularly bad episode causes yet more social waves, but also kicks us over from the social plot to the Dashikov plot that seems likely to be the overarching arc of the series.

Interestingly, I don’t think Christian ever does this. One of the things that seems to make him a suitable friend is that he’s fully prepared to leave Lissa alone. In their first encounter he simply extends a tenuous offer of conversation, making no attempt to force it, and he gives her plenty of space. When Rose tells him that Lissa doesn’t actually want him around, he immediately pulls back (causing both plenty of grief).

He does approximately set someone on fire to end a spiteful conversation about Lissa and Rose, but in fairness it’s purely a distraction and he doesn’t really get a chance to ask whether they’d like any help. Although he also clearly thinks it’s really funny. It's sort of reminiscent of the earlier scene with the boy being bullied, only this time the observer does decide to step in and face the consequences.

Since neither Jacob nor Ralf would have set Ralf on fire, it sort of made the culprit obvious. The fact that Christian was laughing hysterically sort of gave it away too.

Coming back to my point, though, I do think his willingness to just let her be herself – tied in to his own solitude and need to just be himself – is a strong point in his favour. When he realises she’s been self-harming, he twigs immediately, says nothing, and just exudes a kind of supportiveness that Lissa finds very comforting. He’s also smart enough to realise she’s been mesmerising everyone to restore their social standing, which is another point in his favour. Admittedly, he thinks it’s hot, rather than an alarming abuse of a power she shouldn’t even have, but then he is a teenager, and she is canonically doing nothing harmful with it, so the narrative’s always going to be on her side.

What I’m saying is, basically, I liked Christian as a character. I thought he was a well-constructed love interest, even though we mostly only see him in brief glimpses through Lissa’s eyes, as he doesn’t let his guard down as much around Rose. To some extent he comes across as the conscience of the story, reminding Rose and Lissa of their moral failings.

In fact (if I can be astonishingly pseud for a moment) you could almost posit him as a jester; his outsider status, total lack of social power and uncaring badass lonerism means he can speak truth to power (and set people on fire) with impunity, having very little to lose. He's also positioned to observe the other students without much personal involvement, and thus to comment on them.

I found Dimitri appealing as well. Mead did a good job of building the connections between him and Rose – they have similar mindsets, a strong sense of dedication, they feel somewhat isolated, and they’re very physical people. In both cases, they bring an outsider perspective that gives rise to mild contempt for some aspects of vampiric society; a sort of flipside to Christian's status as scion of a family fallen to the strigoi.

Yet they’re not entirely the same. There are clear differences in upbringing: she was raised by the school and indoctrinated from birth to become a model guardian like her mother; he was raised in a tight-knit community of blood-donors. Age also creates a distinction: I can see Rose eventually maturing into a more measured person, though probably still less reserved than Dimitri.

The older lover thing is a trope, and being a trope it isn’t quite as problematic as a 17-24 relationship would seem to me in real life. Rose has also been surviving in the real world for two years, so she’s a bit more savvy than her years. I was pleased that Dimitri, and to some extent Rose, recognised and tried to deal with these issues. As well as the simple age barrier, school rules, and his pastoral responsibility towards her, there are some professional complications.

One odd observation: given how Dimitri is presented as a consummate professional, he completely misses a massive and glaring clue that something suspicious is going on, and the narrative skips right over it.

"Well, it was a hell of a lot better than the last one they tried" "Last one?" "Yeah. In Chicago. With the pack of psi-hounds." "This was the first time we found you. In Portland." "Um. I don't think I imagined psi-hounds. Who else could have sent them? They only answer to moroi. Maybe no-one told you about it." "Maybe," he said dismissively. I could tell by his face he didn't believe that.

It's not very clear to me whether this is supposed to mean "he decided Rose was making it up" or "he was deeply suspicious and pretending not to be". Either way, nothing seems to suggest that anyone actually follows up on this obviously suspicious point, even though it ties strongly into the conclusion of the story.

Changing Minds

It’s maybe worth noting that this offers one of the more accurate portrayals of manipulation and social dynamics I remember seeing. Everyone involved is aware that what they’re dealing with is say-so, rumour and gossip, and quite harmful gossip at that, but they nevertheless either spread it or at least allow it to influence their behaviour. First Lissa, and then Rose, know the other’s desire for revenge is excessive, but they don’t seriously intervene and eventually both are committed to destroying Mia (we never get to see Mia’s side, sadly).

This isn’t just about bitchy girls, either. The boys in the story don’t come out too well. Several are happy to spread damaging lies about girls to get some attention, or even to be bribed with sex. There’s petty bullying, and Lissa and Rose are regularly targets of leering remarks and speculation on their relationship. Even the nicer named boys, Mason and Christian, are hot-tempered and use violence to defend Rose and Lissa from bullying. Only Dimitri, Rose’s smoking-hot combat instructor, escapes most of this – and as a 24-year old, he’s presumably matured more than the others, though he does have one aggressive confrontation with a student.

The school principal is interesting in the little we see of her. Rose views her quite clearly as despotic and arbitrary, but I don’t think the text quite supports that. She is quite harsh with Rose and Lissa, but then she has very good reason: they have committed a serious breach of rules by running away for two full years, causing enormous trouble and worry for a lot of other people. They also appear to be habitual troublemakers (lots of illegal parties and midnight escapades) and smashed up another student’s bedroom before leaving. Of course she’s going to be strict.

Moreover, this isn’t just normal school strictness; the vampires face the very real threat of strigoi hunting them down. In the absence of a very good explanation, which the girls don’t dare to give, severe punishment is inevitable and appropriate. She does intend to expel Rose before Dimitri intervenes, but then again, she’s prepared to change her mind when he agrees to take her in hand. I thought she was pretty well-done as a character.

Social Protagonists

On that social games point – my observation (from an admittedly limited subset of reading) is that the majority of protagonists in contemporary literature, particularly literature aimed at younger people, don’t really dabble in social politics. Many are bookish nerds, particularly on the more fantastical end of the literary spectrum. Many others are simply everyteenagers; they’re averagely attractive (at least in theory), averagely clever, have an average number of friends, and so on. I can only remember seeing high-status people in more literary books, or that high-society flavour of romance a la Jilly Cooper. Historical novels seem much readier to star nobles and the socially-influential, possibly because those are the bits of history that sound most fun.

As such, it was interesting to see a story whose protagonists were enthusiastic participants in the social scene. I was a little disappointed to realise that that was going to be strictly past tense; I suppose it does make sense for things to have changed in their absence, including their own feelings. Mostly, though, I imagine the narrative called for them to have to make new friends and not have very much support, because most of this volume is about that social uncertainty, and how it leaves them vulnerable.

Oh Sole Mia

Mia was actually the aspect of the book that I thought was weakest. I liked the fact that there was an apparently-arbitrary rivalry between these girls, and was quite sympathetic to Mia. Truth be told, I still am. We learn that her family are very low-status and she’s managed to work her way into more influential circles – another example of boundary-crossing, as this seems to be viewed in much the same way as social climbing in 1950s Britain, but seems quite reasonable to me.

Later it’s revealed that the reason for the feud is her appalling treatment by Lissa’s deceased brother, which Lissa is naturally reluctant to believe (as quoted above). Again, the brother made bad choices and harmed Mia both personally and socially in the process. However, Lissa loved and had faith in her brother, and it's difficult for her to accept that he was not only in the wrong, but actively wronged someone else. The fact that she's currently in a serious feud with Mia naturally makes that even harder.

I felt like both sides were being realistically angry and vindictive, but both were also understandable and sympathetic in their motivations. Although Mia technically starts the feud, she's clearly on the defensive from the start, responding to what seems an invasion of her social territory from someone she hates both as a royal and as the sister of her horrible ex.

Later on, though, the authorial voice turns violently against Mia. She becomes increasingly desperate in the face of the nobility closing ranks against her (which is quite understandable), and resorts to trying to get Rose’s help after a fall-out between her and Lissa. This is a sort of unpardonable sin in narrative terms, trying to create a betrayal between friends, and she’s quite explicitly painted as dangerous and ruthless. Of course, this is all in Rose’s voice, but it also felt fairly clear that this was the reality.

Worse is to come, though; it turns out that Mia spread rumours by offering sexual favours to a couple of bragging lads, while in a steady relationship with someone she’s apparently devoted to. This is the point where the narrative switches from nasty-but-somewhat-understandable to, it seemed to me, depicting her as genuinely obsessive and (in Rose’s words) “well into sociopath territory”. It’s not the actions specifically, so much as how far she’s willing to push boundaries in pursuit of revenge. Rose, on the other hand, is the Sexy Spice half of the Rose-Lissa pair, but the text is careful to emphasise early on that she hasn’t had sex, despite all the kissing and “semi-nakedness” that’s brought up regularly.

The problem is, though, that this leaves us with an antagonist who is flat-chested (highlighted very early on), short, relatively unpopular (until she started dating Lissa’s royal ex, apparently), working-class, and promiscuous, who is also portrayed as nasty and sociopathic. I feel like the conflation of those things is a bit unnecessary – I’d rather hoped to see the end of Bad Common Girl when I stopped reading Enid Blyton. She’s left to contrast with a conventionally-attractive, athletic, popular, high-status party-girl heroine who’s conveniently balanced between “sexy” and “virgin”.

This increasing vilification of Mia helpfully means that Rose and Lissa never have to really reconsider their own actions or question their consciences. In fact, the final flare of this plot in the book involves Mia making yet more bitchy remarks while Lissa is in hospital, and Rose punching her in the face. The uberplot kicks off while she's under lock and key, awaiting punishment. Narratively, Mia is placed firmly in the wrong, and I think that's a shame.

Weirdly, in some ways I actually felt more sympathetic to Mia than to Rose. She’s got plenty of issues, but she had been very badly treated by Lissa’s brother, and had fought had to overcome the major social disadvantages of her background in a prejudiced society, only to have that stripped away by the sudden return of Lissa and Rose.

To a large extent I also felt she was treated badly by the narrative, with Mead making an apparently conscious decision to make her a nasty piece of work and piling sexual condemnation on top of that. I’d have liked to see an antagonist who was just someone whose interests constantly clash with the protagonist, and I feel that would have worked well, given how Rose is constantly presented as flawed.

The Sex Talk

Awkwardly, I think the book is framing a lot of the social stuff around sex. I don’t know much about the sociology or literary issues here, so apologies for the aspects I will undoubtedly miss. Essentially, there’s a slightly weird thing where blood is sometimes a sort of metaphor for sex, except there’s also sex. You know?

People who provide blood to vampires are popularly called “blood whores”, which seems to be completely acceptable terminology – the only alternative, “feeders”, isn’t much better. I’m a bit surprised there doesn’t seem to be a single official or neutral term in use, even if teenagers don’t use it. The characters conflate these with the dhampir communities who raise children, creating an impression that non-guardian dhampirs (mostly women) are basically just sources of blood or sex or both for moroi. It’s not entirely clear how accurate this is in the setting.

The entire blood-sharing issue, which is the cause of Lissa and Rose’s fall from grace, is explicitly depicted as both “dirty” and strongly associated with kinky sex. The rumours spread about them claim that Rose has been sleeping around while allowing vampire boys to drink her blood - which is, predictably, treated as only being icky on her side, because sexism.

I mean, it makes some sense. I can see that in a world where “people you feed on” is an actual thing, then taboos would quite likely arise on also having sex with those people, and that all sorts of baggage would build around this.

The awkwardness here is that half their social redemption comes from proving (well, getting those same accusers to declare) that it’s all lies and Rose never actually had sex with anybody, let alone allowed them to drink her blood (the issue of Lissa is allowed to drop). The second half comes from revealing that, while Rose hasn’t been having sex, Mia has, which makes her the slutty one, so ner ner na ner ner. More or less.

It’s all fairly believable behaviour-wise... no, wait. The responses of the teenagers to these various bits of gossip and scandal are sadly believable, though Mia’s behaviour specifically was pretty hard to credit as plausible. At the same time I found it uncomfortable, because these attitudes were also bundled with Mia being quite clearly the spiteful antagonist and also presented as somewhat unstable, and the fact that she specifically uses sex as a lever to get boys to lie on her behalf.

Broadly speaking, you end up with a situation where Our Heroine is vindicated and approved because she wasn’t having sex, whereas Our Antagonist is condemned because she was having sex. This is, bizarrely, true even though Rose and Lissa actually were doing the blood-sharing that’s the biggest part of the taboo, whereas Mia just had sex.

It’s also a bit strange that as far as I can tell, the two boys who spread vicious lies about Rose in exchange for sex are perfectly happy to admit it and don’t seem to expect any consequences. Sexual mores are messed up, but in my experience flagrant lying tends to cause social backlash – and more so considering that the targets of the lies, Lissa and Rose, were social bigshots whose popularity is now restored. As far as I can tell, they agree to come clean under threats from one of Rose’s friends, but I didn’t find it entirely convincing. It felt a bit like the writer just needed to wrap this arc up now to start introducing the series plot.

It wasn’t a huge problem for me or anything, but this Rose-vs-Mia arc is the biggest arc of the book (it’s a series, so the main plot only just gets a look in), so it seemed a shame it had this awkward aspect to it. I feel like just dropping the sex aspect and having the scandal built purely around blood-sharing would have been both neater and stronger, as well as less problematic. As it was I didn’t feel like this arc was very well written.

The end bit

I feel like I should have some kind of conclusion here, but I don't really. I'm not sure whether I'll read any more of the series; I thought some of what it was doing was quite interesting, but I've noticed how much hmming and hawing I'm doing here, especially over poor Mia. The fact that I'm even thinking "poor Mia" is perhaps an indication that this series isn't for me.

I must also confess that I've got limited tolerance for plots along the lines of "you alone have the one special magic long thought lost or legendary, which will be the key to saving the universe".

On the other hand, I liked the bits of it that weren't about Mia, and maybe with the uberplot kicking off, that won't be much of an issue? I dunno. I've got plenty more to read right now. But perhaps, as with

Fallen

, now that I've worked out what the series is doing I've got what I need.

[1]

“Vampires” who are, as far as I can tell, essentially human wizards who drink blood but not in a bad way you guys, and also don’t like sunlight. They don’t seem to be superhuman other than some elemental magic.

[2]

Half-vampires who are basically Buffy as far as I can tell, but get brought up to be fanatically loyal to their vampiric masters and dedicate themselves to either protecting moroi from attack by the strigoi

[3]

, or being “blood whores” because… why not, as far as I can tell. Maybe it’s hard to get social security numbers when your parent was a vampire? Your dad, I mean. Dhampirs are basically all the bastard offspring of horny male moroi who wanted to get some curvy human female action, because moroi are always pale, thin and flat-chested.

Canonically, the dhampirs do all this to ensure the survival of their species, which is to say, their hybrid. Given the reality of dhampir life, I’m not sure why. Basically this seems to boil down to accepting a brutal life of either dedicating yourself to being elite bodyguards for feeble moroi and under constant risk of death, or being junkie blood sources for moroi and at constant risk of abuse, or breeding the next generation of dhampirs – in order to ensure that you can have descendants who have the same kind of lives.)

[3]

Vampires who are canonically evil because they kill their victims, although I get the feeling they’re mostly bad because they feed on moroi specifically to be honest. Also their bite turns people into more strigoi. They’re presented as being incarnations of predatory evil, but from the one strigoi we meet in the book, they come across as a mixture of Character In Goth Makeup and

Character In Evil Voice

. Basically these seem to be the Buffy Vampires of the setting – basically just like they always were, except faster, stronger, more metal, cooler and probably sexier.Themes:

Books

,

Young Adult / Children

,

Horror

,

Text Factor Halloween Special

,

Romance

~

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~Comments (

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Bill

at 17:25 on 2016-01-18

The girls must survive a world of forbidden romances, a ruthless social scene and terrifying night-time rituals. But above all, they must never let their guard down, lest the immortal vampires take Lissa - forever...

Two out of three ain't bad

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Shim

at 18:31 on 2016-01-18

Two out of three ain't bad

I... how did I miss that? *facepalm*

Also I just realised this cover is different to mine (probably the US edition?) and although it's the exact same photo, mine is very pale with black hair and red lips (classically vampiric), whereas the above is pinkish with... brown hair, I think?

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Robinson L

at 15:00 on 2016-05-24I checked this one and its sequels out, along with

Fallen

and

The Morganville Vampires

after the TeXt Factor Halloween special. I read the final book, book 6, a year or two ago, and I recently started listening to the spin-off

Bloodlines

series on audiobook. So, I obviously liked it—quite fun on the whole, with occasional forays into really fun. I'd put the series somewhere above

Fallen

, but below

The Morganville Vampires

in terms of my enjoyment/appreciation.

(I also encouraged one of my sisters to read the first book, and while she enjoyed it, she loathed Lissa and all the Moroi, because she considered them useless in their dependence upon the dhampir guardians.)

I broadly agree with your case for the themes the book explores, and I'd definitely say it carries over to the rest of the series—and the first two spin-off books, at least. Interestingly enough, despite dealing with these fairly weighty issues in a moderately intelligent manner, the books still come across to me as light beach reading; I still haven't worked out whether I think that works towards their favor or against it.

Book 2—where my sister bailed on the series—is a downgrade in quality from the first, as there's less stuff going on through most of it. However, it rallies at the end with an exciting climax, and one which redress one of my major disappointments with the climax to the first.

Book 3 is a return to form, and a solid addition to the series.

Book 4 is, in my opinion, the best of the lot: here we see Rose's internal struggle at its most intense, and Rose herself at her very lowest point in the series. I said the books feel like beach reading, but there was a point about two thirds of the way through the fourth book which got me right in the heart, and I was impressed with the depth of emotional reaction Mead managed to evoke. Plus, the Lissa subplot was pretty cool, and the resolution was both awesome and unexpected.

Book 5 like Book 3, is a really solid addition to the series, though it feels like a bit of a downgrade coming off the high of Book 4. Still, it's got a lot going for it, and while the big plot points themselves aren't to surprising, I wasn't expecting when or how they would play out.

Book 6 was a little disappointing, not because it did anything really bad, just that it wasn't quite as exciting as I would have liked from the final installment. While I like that the climax doesn't revolve around a big fight with an Arc Villain for the series, I could have done with something a

little

more epic. Plus, the villain turned out to be a very likable character I'd pegged early on as being either a villain or a victim, because they didn't fit into any other story slot. Just when I was beginning to think this was just a cool supporting character, it's revealed that person was a villain after all. Sigh.

I agree with you about Natalie, poor thing.

As I recall, the school principal is, indeed, a strict but ultimately reasonable authority figure throughout the series, whom Rose misreads because Rose's and Lissa's behavior often brings out the “strict” part of her character. Actually, that's a bit of a running theme in the series.

From what I remember of the first book, Mia does degenerate from understandable antagonist to Designated Villain, part of which involves her engaging in sex to influence someone else's behavior—rather than for love, in contrast to both Rose and Lissa* over the course of the books—and that's not good. It's probably no big spoiler to reveal that Mia is rehabilitated later in the series, but as I recall, it's a case of a reformed villain rather than both sides admitting they shared the blame equally.

*I think Lissa slept with her then-boyfriend—Mia's current boyfriend—before the events of the book because she was young and horny, which is still more “legitimate” than sleeping with someone because so they'll help you out in your evil scheme.

I also felt like the series as a whole has a disappointing lack of follow-through regarding some of the more unpleasant aspects of Moroi society. The hypocrisy over feeders (I think that

is

the common parlance “neutral” term) is brought up at times, but nobody ever really tries to do anything to resolve it, so the overall message comes across as a helpless shrug, “too bad, what'cha gonna do?”

Furthermore, the books never really acknowledge how immensely f*cking scary the Moroi's compulsion magic is, and how, in a more realistic universe, even well meaning people like Lissa would probably wind up using it for much more destructive purposes than undermining their rivals' popularity; kind of like a miniature version of the One Ring. (One character in the

Bloodlines

novels is suitably freaked by it, but this is explicitly depicted as part of their irrational distrust of Moroi and magic in general. Not once so far have we seen how easily compulsion could be abused to disastrous effect. I know Robert Jordan had a lot of flaws as a writer, but his characters knew to treat that kind of power with the respect and suspicion it deserves.)

The Moroi's institutional aristocracy and monarchy (even if it's a constitutional monarchy) also strikes me as pretty disturbing, but no one even suggests there might be something wrong with that one.

I think Mead does a better job of keeping Rose's faults and flaws as a character foregrounded, even with Rose providing first person narration the whole time, while still keeping her a likable character. One of the fascinating things in the later books is the way Rose gets into relationships which we know because of narrative convention are never going to work out, and which she has some misgivings over, but which she talks herself into anyway, sometimes multiple times, and the boy in question is so enamored of her that he keeps holding out the hope she'll commit to him for real. It's very unfair of Rose, and depicted as such, but also as completely understandable given what she's going though. It's like a total deconstruction of the Evil Girlfriend Who Toys With Innocent Boys' Emotions archetype, without ever hitting you over the head with what it's doing. (Indeed, I could be prepared to believe Richelle Mead didn't set out to explode this stereotype at all, and just happened to do so in the course of writing about a young woman caught up in an Epic Tragic Romance trying as best she can to navigate a swathe of feelings and emotions which she doesn't fully understand.)

The older lover thing is a trope, and being a trope it isn’t quite as problematic as a 17-24 relationship would seem to me in real life.

Me too—although on the other hand, one of the best matched couples I know got together at ages 17 and 30, and they're still going strong 8 years later. Funny old world.

On a tangential note, it's really weird to consider that I'm now several years older than Dimitri in the books. The way he acts, I guess I always tend to think of him as being in his early 30s, rather than early 20s.

I must also confess that I've got limited tolerance for plots along the lines of "you alone have the one special magic long thought lost or legendary, which will be the key to saving the universe".

For what it's worth, we meet a couple of other spirit users over the course of the series. Also, while Lissa's magic is, indeed, critical to the plot, it is not the key to saving the universe, as that's not really what the books are about.

We learn a lot more about Strigoi in later books, too, and they do indeed come across a lot like Buffy-esque Vampires: pretty much the same personalities, and they seem to have some sort of feelings for other people, and yet still somehow evil and uncaring, and the juxtaposition of the two is about as awkward as you would expect. (I fantasized while reading those sections that the Moroi and the Guardians might just be mistaken, and Strigoi, while alien and with very different priorities, might not be actually evil and uncaring. No such luck, sadly.)

If you do decide you want to continue reading the series, don't get attached to the psi-hounds. They get dropped so completely in later books that I was shocked to see them when the film version of the first book came out, as I'd literally forgotten they existed.

[archivesdiveronarpg]

Congratulations, RONI! You’ve been accepted for the role of CIRCE with the approved faceclaim change to AARON YAN. Roni, what else is there to say except that your applications are always, always inspiring? You grasped Cinead’s voice so perfectly I got chills the more I read of your writing. From their cryptic, coy interview answers to the perfectly pivotal moments you captured in your para sample, you’ve demonstrated that the awe they inspire is, while terrifying at times, subtle in its potency. I especially loved the bit about their hoarding, and that they named their beloved crows! Congratulations - I’m so excited to see Cinead grace our dash! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

                                                                             WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Roni

Age | 21

Preferred Pronouns | she/her

Activity Level | I’m attending uni this year, and it’s not too difficult at the moment. I have a lighter course due to dropping a class, yet the ones remaining are still rigorous. So while I am on Tumblr during my free time, it’s hard to gauge when my free time will be. However, I would probably rate myself a seven out of ten on weekdays and a eight out of ten on most weekends, depending on how many replies I have/the length of my replies.

Timezone | EST

Permission | yes, you have my permission to publish this application!

Added note | I am turning this in with ten minutes to go before the submit closes, so I apologize for any grammatical/spelling errors!

In Character

Character | Circe // Cinead Tsai (with a fc change to aaron yan please?)

What drew you to this character? | like i’ve said before, i love playing neutral characters, as i love the dynamic neutral characters have with everyone. and reading through the witches, i was pulled to each of them, for their demeanors are absolutely wonderful and enticing. yet i kept returning to cinead. there is something so enticing about them, in the contrast they hold among their siblings, and the aura they possess within verona. they and their siblings hold a level of control among a city belonging to such an old feud; essentially, they all can hold their own. and with cinead, they can hold their own with that flare of indifference; mallory is the heat of a flame, hea a cool breeze that comforts and stings, and cinead is the cold chill that never truly leaves your bones. and that chill permeates throughout verona, and gosh, i would love to roleplay that if accepted.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character?

( plan i ) there is something elusive to cinead about both matthias and hugo. they spark their interest unlike so many others, and it doesn’t escape their notice how different they are. of course, if they were similar, perhaps neither would capture his eye. the urge to test them, to push them past their breaking points, is a nagging notion that refuses to release them. oh, there are more important things in their lives that requires their attention —- and yet, their thoughts will drift to one of them more often than not. perhaps they want to see them burn. perhaps they want to touch their lives in ways they will never dream of. not even they know for sure what they truly desire of them. they are willing to discover it, though, and they will push and pull the strings to attain it.

( plan ii ) their siblings are their lifeblood. whatever true happiness they experience, whatever contentment they derive from this life, it all begins and ends with mallory, hea, and themselves. the three of them —- cinead cannot imagine what life would be if one of them disappeared from their lives. and yet, they dance on the edge between gods and mortals, and despite their confidence in the fact that of everyone in verona, they cannot die, there is a sliver of doubt. that inkling that, yes, they are mortals like those who surround them, and they all will die with a soft exhale. cinead does not wish for their bond to each other to break, nor does he wish for any of their deaths —- and yet, what will happen if either were to occur? what would happen if that sliver of doubt turns into the heartbreaking reality? how would verona explode after that?

( plan iii ) what would happen if someone forced their hand, and their reaction essentially caused them to choose a side? whether they wanted to side with any group is beyond the point; the action has marked them. how would that challenge their siblings? how would that impact the world they’ve slowly built? how would that change the stance they’ve all adopted for years? i want their would shaken, completely disturbed, and that could very well be the best way to disrupt what they have held close.

In Depth

What is your favorite place in Verona?

A raised brow, a flicker of a smirk. Humorous, really, that their time is being wasted on questions and words when their answers usually depend on actions. Their mind flits from the room to what the city is like that day. It’s as if their sight is linked to that of their crows —- there, the dark lady, a foreboding place of uneasiness, even for them and their siblings. the cathedral in the distance, tall and grand and antagonizing like always. The Capital Library, where knowledge should be a safe haven for many, and yet, it’s only for a select few. The roads and alleyways, the bodies littering the ground, the desolate wailing as their tears mix with the river —–

They blink. They are in a room, and the person is waiting with bated breath.

“I’ll share a secret with you,” they finally whisper, and, oh, the spark of excitement and wariness is exactly what they wanted to witness. The two of them lean forward at the same time.

This time, the smallest of smiles instead of a flicker. “Sometimes, us witches need an escape. Sometimes, we use our own rooms at the Hotel Emelia. It’s relaxing, quiet, little space for the wars that rage these streets.

“And it is the best place to share secrets. And if any spill from our doors — especially our own, especially mine if I even were to share — the consequences are just as quiet, just as relaxing for some.”

As the being leans back, lips pressed thin, Cinead’s smile grows inch by inch.

What does your typical day look like?

“I’m the one who greets you in the morning, depending on where you are,” they answer, smooth and effortless. “My siblings don’t tend to rise with the sun, but I enjoy sipping coffee as the sun rises. It’s a beautiful masterpiece, just like the ones at our museum.

“Every day I work — on different things than my siblings, of course, though we do share duties from time to time. Have to, if we want anything we touch to run smoothly and successfully. And then, perhaps on a particularly good day, you can find me at the Tempest Lounge.”

A tilt of the head, then, another flicker of a smirk. “Were you wondering, by chance, what my work entails? If it includes anything unusual?”

        ( —- a flock of crows, gold coins slipping through fingers, a soft note of warning —- )

“I assure you, whatever you suspect it is —- well, my work depends on it, don’t you think?”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

They cannot help the scoff that escapes. The other is startled, unsure of how to react, and Cinead rolls their eyes. “Their war is suffocating. Their war is damaging. Their war is ruination. And that is what the city needs, in some sense. One cannot know peace without war; that is how we thrive, that is how we remain alive. The thought of something better being so close amidst chaos —- that brings people together.”

A hum burns the back of their throat. The sound is choppy, something unnatural coming from them. “It is true art of the human life, is it not? This devastation, this cry for revenge, this begging for peace. It’s beautiful and entertaining, a brilliant show to witness.”

Their gaze locks with the other, and the other sucks in a harsh breath. Another smile blossoms across their face, and, oh, they feel how absolutely crushing it is. “Are you not entertained yourself?”

In-Character Para Sample: (unfortunately, this isn’t as long as i planned it to be, so hopefully the snippets allow enough insight!)

Imagine a single being, born with eyes closed, and yet saw the world as it was: darkness. Imagine that being opening their eyes to witness light, and yet know they were not led astray. Imagine still how that being grew, with light surrounding them, trying to convince their soul that darkness did not exist, that salvation existed for them and everyone.

Imagine the being seeing a crow in the distance, black as night, existing as truth.

Know it was a call of reckoning; know it was the first curse and blessing bestowed on the earth the being walked.

It is Cinead’s origin; it is Cinead’s truth.

****

They return to the orphanage with less than they left; some of their belongings had burned in the house fire, and some the foster family denied them. Cinead had left the latter matter alone; there was nothing of importance, and they believed the family had suffered enough.

And if they hadn’t, the cycle of fate would. That, of anything, would always remain despite the passage of time.

Mallory and Hea did not notice their return. Thirteen and twelve, they still remained in the corner by themselves, quiet and thriving all at once. It was something Cinead had longed for while away.

Hea is the first to notice their entrance. Their fingers brush Mallory’s, and the youngest whips their head to the door. Both stand, both glide across the floor, and both surround Cinead with silent questions, slow nods as silent answers are given.

Hea’s warmth embraces them, and a beat passes Cinead’s arms wrap around the other. “I’m sorry the foster family did not work,” they say, and their voice lacks the genuine lilt they usually possess.

Cinead nods. “Me too,” they reply, and their tone exposes the lie they do not care to hide.

They are home. And they are not sorry.

****

"Pitiful.”

It is the only word they offer to the air, and neither Mallory or Hea are surprised. They all stand upon the roof of the Hotel, the image of the dead stamped in the back of their minds. The cycle is anew with the arrival of new players, and it was something the two warring families did not expect. Though what is worse, is the three of them could not foresee the change in its entirety.

In the moment, Cinead does not know who the label is directed for.

Still, change is a card one wants on their side; while inevitable, the consequences can be controlled.

A deep breath, a slow exhale. “It seems we are in need of a wider scope.”

Mallory huffs, arms crossed in annoyance. “We are in need of the unexpected, Cinead. Just as these Spades possess.”

“And we will possess it once more, you two. A mere blip is all this is,” Hea says, their voice soft as the breeze kissing their cheeks.

“A mere blip is a beat of a butterfly’s wings, Hea. I do not intend for us to be caught in the impending tornado.” Licking their lips, Cinead takes a step away from the lights and the screams that still echo the night. “Do not lose sight of what is important. Our lives could burn at the same time as theirs.”

This time, Mallory rolls their eyes, their hand trailing up Cinead’s arms to rest on their shoulder. “This eldest sibling act isn’t a good look on you, Cinead. Especially if you begin acting like a toddler who lost a board game.”

“Please, do you see me stomping my foot Mallory?” Cinead says as Hea’s chuckle resounds behind them.

Once silence embraces them once more, Hea whispers, “We will not forget as long you don’t, Cinead.”

They all stare to the bright lights of a city that is truly theirs (for how can this city belong to any meaningless humans?), and Cinead sucks the dark world into their lungs.

“I will not forget.”

Extras:

~ color palette

~ quotes

“you are the one everyone fears: the monster in the closet, the witch at the stake – the devil, falling. all of this is because they cannot understand you. they fear you like they fear death; instinctively. do not mind them, for death is a kind god: the sweetest sleep, the darkness from which life is born.”

“hope is going to kill you and it wont be a pretty death. sorry.”

“it’s quiet and you feel serene you splay your fingers against the water and you sink lower and lower just enough to breathe”

“We learn that the heart is the same size as the fist but we keep forgetting they don’t have the same functions.”

~ headcanons

cinead’s crows are their delight and joy. while many have been seen flying above where they walk ( a true sign of a blessing and a curse ), there have been three by his side for many, many years. once upon a time, the flicker of the thought in naming them after themselves and their siblings highly amused them to the point of almost following through. instead, in order to avoid confusion for the rest of their lives, they settled on different names. tempest, the strong-willed and loudest of the three, one, emelia, the quiet, elusive darling, and twelfth, the one who delivers the most trinkets. creative names, no?

they dabble in makeup, more for the aesthetic than for a true passion. eyeliner designs decorate their eyes, their temples, whatever they decide to settle upon that day. they appear as a run-way model most days; however, if they ever need to blend, they will easily wipe away the designs with no regret.

they tend to hoard items they believe to be interesting, or items that twelfth has brought to their attention. the collection isn’t organized as it should be, and their room is messy because of it. their siblings tease cinead is truly a crow’s counterpart, and they aren’t sure whether they take the remark as a compliment or not.

they take their coffee with one cream and half a sugar cube. they would rather wake in the morning with little bitterness, but not too much sweetness either.

they rather adore the museum; is was their desire to fill the museum with mostly baroque designs, as the era and style enraptures them. though they understand they cannot control those who kiss the statues, they will certainly complain about the marks left behind.