#i come to the unfortunate conclusion that their dynamic is almost exactly the same as radcen and cjreg in the centricide hamilton

[libunityfan69]

friendship over with the centricide hamilton au. centricide hazbin hotel au is all i care about now

[princeresnikov]

it's in my nature {Tangerine} // 11

ten. the scorpion: same eyes in different people.

Summary: Clementine begrudgingly goes back to doing her actual job of guarding The Prince, though unfortunately The Prince wants to go stare death in the face and see her brother. How she knew he was on the train is beyond Clementine, who is unfortunately used to The Prince being smug and correct almost all of the time, and would rather be with the girl than let her roam this train full of killers on her own. A chapter about family or not being welcome in one.

{ Masterlist }

A/N: 5736 words. this time it's only been two months ! WOW! but also hello again friends, i'm here today to celebrate my favourite fucked up dynamic which is Clem & The Prince. i could write them forever i honestly could, I love them so much. this chapter has less editing than the last ones so it might be a bit everywhere but im very tired and haven't been back to the source material in quite a while (the book). i hope you enjoy, and as always I would love if you left a comment about what you've been enjoying so far! ALSO QUITE A BIT OF CLEM LORE???

Warnings: Don’t be surprised when the OC is a terrible person and is implied to have done terrible things along with the rest of them.

Chapter Warnings: discussions of murder, violence, unhealthy family dynamics, some allusions to torture but only faintly, drinking, grieving kind of??

Taglist: @venusthepirate @malar-region @tangerinesgf @esmaada @sarcastic-sourwolf @chuyouchu @justshutupmars @somikesoc @chachadelight @andydre4m @evangelineflowers @darkchai @bellatrix124 @kunikidaswhore @thewinterschildren178 @deadtildeath @folkloreandfall @aniglio18 @geeiz @mimidior @justice-333 @ltlthetrifecta @salsasadd @xkawax @hellsgatelove22 @brownficgirl @tangerineswife @cigarettesandfigureskates @ceciliahargrove @welcometothescreaming20s @moonlight-matcha @thyeb @emilia527 @tangerinefics @charlemagnethesecond @little-miss-bi @megplant @kalli0pes @aaronperryjohnson @nachtcirce @literatureisair @nina-isabelle @queenofspades403 @ayaahaddadd @sweetbutpsychobutsweet @persephones-garden

----

Despite how inherently she lacked one, being around The White Death's family had never made her yearn for a family of her own. Of course she's well aware that they're not exactly the model of a perfect, healthy family dynamic, but it really was all she had to go on -

[I know he's here.] Case and point, The Prince had been sending increasingly cryptic texts that Clementine could only assume was about her brother. The Prince had a way of knowing things, and more infuriatingly, jumping to conclusions based on Clementine's non-answers that were correct a frustrating amount of time. 

"What have you done now -?" Clementine had answered The Prince's phone call with her patience wearing thin.

"I've found the case, our friend is just now working on getting it open for us," The Prince says, reminding Clementine of the hollow-eyed Yuchi who had tailed after The Prince into the bar cart looking like he was already half way to giving up, "and I do worry when you speak to me like that," The Prince continues with faux concern, "imagine if someone heard you talking to your poor, sweet client like that; it'd certainly blow your cover." As if she even cares about how Clementine speaks over the phone to her for the benefit of Clementine, as if she didn't simply take any opportunity she could to exert even some small amount of control over her bodyguard. 

"I'm coming to check on you -"

"So proud of you for remembering to do your job," immediately The Prince fired back, voice all but dripping with sarcasm, and Clementine knows she's rolling her eyes on the other end of the line. 

"Ma'am I was following your instructions of distracting the man in the blue suit." 

"I didn't think you'd go on for this long."

"So you're calling me to come back because you do actually want me around?"

"Don't flatter yourself; Mister Kimura has hundreds of combinations to go through on that suitcase and I'm rather bored," at least her tone matched her words, coming with a faint, exasperated sigh.

"I struggle to believe you're yearning for my companionship in this moment," Clementine deadpans, and much to her surprise, The Prince laughs, the sound bright and genuine on the other end of the line. 

"Of course not!" The Prince practically crows, though the levity dies out, "however I would like to have a serious conversation with you about withholding important information, and you not doing that again." 

About a million different things run through Clementine's head at once, all most certainly incriminating, and all things she'd take to her grave. However she knows better than to panic in this moment, remembering the girl's earlier text messages.

"There are things you don't need to know, ma'am," Clementine tells her gently, all the while thinking - how was I meant to tell you that yes your brother is here, but he's dead!?

"Agree to disagree, fruit fly," and The Prince hangs up. Fuck. How would she even know about her brother being aboard the train? The girl has always known far too much, even for her resources. 

As a child she'd had this insatiable curiosity that had made Clementine wary when they'd first met. The Prince had always seemed like she'd been starved for information, never giving a real reason as to why she'd poke and prod and investigate so thoroughly for someone her age. Information gathering for it's own sake, her father had always showered her with affection for her persistent nature. 

"What's wrong with you?" Was the first thing The Prince had ever said to Clementine. 

In The White Death's office, the next room over, The Son was arguing with his father about the budget they'd been allocated for Clementine's wardrobe and how he believed it wasn't enough to dress her like a believable socialite. Of course Clementine couldn't care less about how she's dressed as long as she's able to do her job; some of the dresses The Son had picked out hadn't exactly been conductive to some the more physical aspects of her job, but they hadn't stopped her either.

The girl is small, dark hair and eyes that reminded Clementine almost too much of The Son; this must be the sister he had occasionally complained about. Never around others, but Clementine clearly didn't matter when it was dawn and she was wiping the puke from the corners of his mouth, or putting ointment on the grazes he got after he ate shit on the sidewalk outside of a club. This is the sister he claims his father cares more about than him.

Clementine frowned at the little girl and her intrusive question.

"You're a child." Clementine still hasn't lost the Russian accent she'd adopted after leaving the country to find The White Death. She avoids using it at The Son's behest, but makes an effort to occasionally revert to it, if only to give off the impression that it was her natural accent. She's not sure why, but he looks strangely at her when she does.

"You sound like my father," the girl says, her own accent a stark contrast.

"Roshan Resnikov?" 

"I'm Prince Resnikov."

"I know."

"Because you're my brother's girlfriend." It's not a question. Clementine corrects her anyways.

"Bodyguard." 

"That's not what he says."

"We," Clementine hesitates, unsure of how to even interact with a child, let alone explain the nuances of the situation to her, "play pretend," she finally settles on, "to keep him safe."

"You keep him safe?" Even at six the girl had a handle on conveying her disdain. Clementine is growing less fond of this girl by the moment. She sounds, just for a moment, like the White Death himself when Clementine had initially requested to work for him. Then, after a moment and without any warning, her gaze shifts to Clementine's bare forearms where she'd rolled up her sleeves, "you let people hurt you." 

Before Clementine can respond, however, an explosive shout comes from the next room -

"If you mispronounce Balenciaga one more time I'm going to kill myself!"

Both Clementine and The Prince look to the office door where they'd just heard The Son shout dramatically. Neither of them hear his father's reply, though the door remains close.

"Father and I don't take him seriously," the young girl says with such ease and casualness, but with a hint of something that sounds like a warning, something territorial. Father and I. 

"If your father didn't take him seriously he wouldn't have hired me."

The girl's expression scrunches up into something disbelieving. After another moment, she fixes Clementine with a scrutinising look, an unnerving look coming from any child let alone this one. 

"You'd be pretty if you didn't have those ugly scars," as if it's note most normal thing in the world, "and you don't talk right," she says, "you're meant to be nice to me." Clementine was unsure of what prompted this response; she thought she had been nice to the girl. In the years that followed, Clementine would learn that being nice to The Prince was just the same as being nice to her brother; humour them, but most importantly, agree with them. 

It was, unfortunately a truth that had carried on even to the present day.

In the bar cart, The Prince is suspiciously alone, of course apart from The Wolf's corpse still propped up in the corner. Her charge is wearing that Cheshire smile that has only ever meant bad things, watching Clementine with a kind of smugness that she knew set her bodyguard on edge. 

Clementine will not speak first, however, making a beeline for the bar. With lazy steps the young woman follows, going so far as to lean on the bar itself, chin resting on her hand with that same, watchful smile. 

"How is he?" 

Clementine glances at her out of the corner of her eye as she opens the bottle of expensive rum, lips pursed and eyes narrowed. The Prince sighs, as if disappointed with the non-answer, momentarily giving up the bit as she tipped her head to the side, the slightest frown gracing her youthful features.

"I do wish you'd watch your tone when answering my calls," The Prince doesn't actually tsk as she reprimands Clementine, but it's clearly there in her words.

"And I wish you wouldn't identify me to strangers in an effort to cause me problems, but we don't always get what we wish for," Clementine told her blithely, back to the girl as she pulled a cup from the shelf behind her.

"Yes, but he wasn't a stranger was he?" The Prince responds slyly.

"You didn't know that, did you?" Clementine frowns for a moment, looking up with genuine concern as she poured her drink. Of course it's a trap, and something almost malevolent lights up in the Prince's eyes.

"So he's not a stranger?" The Prince gives a mean little smile, adding, "I thought I may have recognised him myself," she shoots for nonchalance, "like I read something about him somewhere, or perhaps saw a picture." Clementine goes still, halfway through her first large sip of the liquor, the liquid burning her tongue. Looking over her shoulder, she meets The Prince's knowing gaze, the girl raising a single, perfect eyebrow as if in challenge. Clementine swallows the rum and slowly turns back to the girl, determined to put on a show of being unimpressed, even when alarms were going off in the back of her mind.

"He's worked for my father before," she says, gaze unwavering, like she's desperate for Clementine to react, "did you know?"

"I don't think this is -" Clementine puts her cup down, expression drawn where she meets The Prince's piercing gaze.

"Around twelve years ago, I think it was." She's giving Clementine this calculating look, as if trying to tell if Clementine knows more than she lets on. Clementine looks up blinks slowly, but it's enough for The Prince, the young woman whose known her for years, enough to divine meaning and truth from it. As if satisfied with Clementine's non-answer, The Prince raised herself from the bar, crossing her arms, cruel little smile gracing her lips, "oh how benevolent you are then, Scorpion, if your report from New York is to be believed."

"Where is Kimura?" Clementine asks instead of acknowledging The Prince's statement and it's implications. Clearly frustrated at Clementine's unwillingness to play along, the girl's grin drops, gaze flicking almost irately to the bathroom at the back of the carriage. 

"Busy," Clementine watches as the girl appears to physically shake off her irritation, like it passes through her like a shiver, leaving her as bright as she'd boarded the train. These little moments, these cracks Clementine is allowed to see in her mask, she finds fascinating; where there should be humanity is simply a tide of malevolence and intrigue. From observations and anecdotes she knows that The Prince is talented at gaining fear through respect; her classmates, her teachers, any authority she appeared to come across. Clementine wonders if that's one of the reasons she despises Clementine so strongly, since she could never get Clementine to do her bidding in the way that made her feel the most powerful.

"Still, you've reminded me -" tone chipper, The Prince brings Clementine out of her thoughts and back into their reality, "- let's go see him."

"Him?" Clementine already knows who, but she really doesn't like where The Prince is going with this. As if able to read her thoughts, she shakes her head as if Clementine were a child making a mistake.

"My darling brother," she sounds sincere despite being anything but, "I know he's here," the smile remained, but something had gone cold in the girl's eyes, "and I know you know too."

"How do you know?"

"I don't answer your questions, fruit fly." 

"How do you know your brother is on this train?" 

There's that look again, that intrigued and cruel kind of amusement in The Prince's expression. 

"It's taken you long enough to take me seriously," and beneath the cryptic wording, The Prince sounds almost triumphant. Turning on her heel she begins to flounce out, calling out that she's going with or without Clementine, and despite the day she was having, Clementine felt beholden to her station. Silent but swift, Clementine is following her back through first class. 

In the small segment between carriages, Clementine grabs The Prince by the arm, insistently pulling her to head down the righthand aisle instead. When she hisses for her not to draw attention, she considers it a small victory when The Prince rolls her eyes but agrees. Several carriages later, once more finding themselves in the space between carriages, upon seeing Lemon approaching them, Clementine shoves The Prince into the bathroom, despite the girl's many initial protests -

"Let me do my job!" Clementine hissed, and thankfully the girl relented just as the doors slid open and Lemon joined the confined area.

"Oh, sorry, I -" upon realising it was Clementine, he frowned in question.

"I am a human, I do still need to pee from time to time," she said with an irate awkwardness, "but I've been waiting here for almost ten minutes -" taking a chance on The Prince's love of schemes and nosy nature, she knocks on the bathroom door, and they both hear 'still occupied!' from inside.

"Oh," Lemon says rather lamely, taking it at face value and quickly moving on. 

"You owe me one," The Prince is practically preening as she leaves the stall, smug grin stretching from ear to ear. The momentary ruse had been convincing, Clementine concedes, but at what cost. Her client's ego hadn't needed even the smallest of boosts. 

Outside of third carriage, they again give pause. This time, it's The Prince who stops. 

"You never deserved any of it, you know that don't you?" For the first time in a long time, her tone is completely devoid of inflection. The Prince looks through the window to the passengers, while Clementine wonders if she can already see her brother, but doubts it, "neither did he, but at least he was family." 

And without elaboration, she steps forwards and into the carriage. Much slower, Clementine trails behind. She's not quite sure why she doesn't warn The Prince of her brother's state, perhaps to shock the girl, to see if her brother's death could genuinely rattle her, or perhaps a small part of her believes it would have been unnecessary, that she somehow already knew. 

She watches from several feet away as The Prince approaches her brother, expression unreadable. There's a moment, a single brief look that The Prince shoots to her bodyguard, the closest to hesitation that Clementine had ever seen from her, before she leaned in to get a proper look. Lifting his glass, Clementine can see he's still bleeding despite her earlier efforts to clean him, not that it mattered. Despite all the resentment she held towards him, she still flinches when The Prince spits on his corpse in disdain.

The silence between them as they head back is somehow the tensest Clementine has experienced in a long while. The Prince does not seem rattled, though she does seem somehow affected, though in what way that is Clementine can't begin to fathom. This time when she sees Lemon approaching, there's enough time for her to fit into the little cubical with The Prince herself. It's the second time she's been trapped in one of these bathrooms with another individual with probably malicious intent, yet somehow being here with The Prince was infinitely worse than her argument with Tangerine.

"You couldn't save him either," The Prince tells her coldly after several long moments of silence.

"Boomslang venom kills within thirty seconds," still, Clementine's tone does have notes of apology, not that the girl across from her much cared for them.

"How do you know that yet seemingly nothing useful?"

"I," Clementine gave pause, considering whether she should really be telling The Prince this, but figured that there was a chance it wouldn't matter after today finally ended, "hired a contractor once who used -"

"You couldn't save him if you tried," already bored of Clementine's explanation, The Prince cuts her off with a sneer and roll of her eyes. Then, cruelty bleeding through her tone, her lip curled as she looked over Clementine's attire, "you look like a joke." Biting back her retort that this is how The Prince insisted she had dressed, Clementine lets the girl have this moment over her; clearly she wanted to appear unscathed after confronting her dead brother. But he was still her family.

"I'll find some pants on the way back," Clementine concedes with a murmur, looking away from the girl, trying to give her the barest amount of privacy despite the space they were cramped in. Some of the tension in the The Prince's shoulders that had developed back in carriage three eased. It takes a few more moments before the telltale knock and Lemon's voice tentatively greeting the occupants of the bathroom. Lowering her voice and speaking Japanese, she tells him that it's occupied. After he apologises, she waits another quiet minute before letting them both out.

As promised, when they get to the next set of luggage racks just before they find themselves back at first class, Clementine puts her morals aside to find a pair of pants. Unfortunately, while her wording could have been kinder, The Prince had a point.

"I am curious," The Prince leans against the wall with her arms crossed as Clementine carefully picks the lock on a piece of luggage, "did you ever catch yourself actually caring about him?" And Clementine goes very still.

"In the beginning," she says softly, "I did care about whether he lived or died for more than just my own sake." Silence spills out between them as The Prince ruminates on Clementine's delicate answer. Clementine's not sure where her next words come from, unable to look at The Prince in these surprisingly honest moments. When she speaks, it's quiet enough that The Prince has to step forward, and she's switched to Russian, "when he was my priority, he was my everything," she admits, "and when he wasn't, I had once considered there to be no-one closer to me. I could have loved him, but he never saw me as a person," flicking a sharp look to The Prince, her voice turns sharp on the last few words, and knows without having to spell it out that The Prince understands; I know that you don't either.

"Can I ask you something, fruit fly?" It's not a real question, and the shift in both tone and language is almost jarring, like she was trying to dismiss Clementine's admission entirely, which was, of course, completely standard for The Prince in times like these. Still, Clementine nods, keeps her expression neutral as she's elbow deep in someone else's luggage, finally finding an appropriately sized pair of beige slacks.

"Knowing what you know now, what my father makes you do, how he'd make you my brother's babysitter and all that would entail," The Prince regards Clementine with this kind of scientific curiosity that she usually reserved for when she made Clementine 'test' her 'self defence' weapons, and Clementine steps towards the door to the previous carriage, "would you go back and keep your nose out of my family's business?" It's that same curious but disconnected tone, but the wording catches Clementine by surprise. Looking back at her charge she can see the malice in the girl's eyes despite her deceptively sweet expression.

"No."

For just a second The Prince's expression appears to twist involuntarily furious, betraying her.

"Of course not," almost as if to herself, sounding genuinely frustrated. Then, after a moment, as Clementine disappears through first class to the bar cart she hoped would have remained undisturbed, "why not?" Still sounding irate, The Prince picks up her pace to catch up to Clementine, snapping at her loud enough that one of the few remaining patrons in first class glared at her pointedly.

Once in the bar cart, Clementine turns on the young woman.

"Why does it matter?"

As if realising that she'd had something of an emotional outbursts, The Prince schools her expression and posture into something that reads as otherwise unaffected.

"It doesn't," she shrugs, looking away, her gaze landing on The Wolf still propped up in the corner. Clementine knows her well enough to know The Prince was still both curious and furious.

"It matters to you, Malen'kiy Prints," Clementine pushes, unable to help the faint, triumphant smirk, "don't ever forget that I could have been family; you should be glad I never married your brother -"

"I wish you had!" The Prince snaps, "I wish he'd bought you like he wanted and kept you far, far away from me for the rest of your tragic little life. You could have just pissed off to be his little lapdog you wouldn't keep ruining everything in our lives, you- you- you selfish, little Scorpion! You ruin everything you touch!"

After a long, shocked silence, Clementine takes a deep breath and starts stepping out of her shoes. The Prince let's out a shrill, frustrated noise, stalking over to one of the free lounges, throwing herself onto it, slouched down, scowling, altogether unladylike, a sharp change from the carefully calm composure she carried herself with most other times.

As she's putting on the pants beneath her skirt, Clementine's voice is the only sound other than the quiet hum of the train.

"Is this about your mother?" Clementine switches to Russian once, and The Prince turns her furious scowl upon her bodyguard.

"Of course it's about my mother, Scorpion," she spits back, initially matching Clementine's Russian before she switches back to a contempt-filled English, "she thought you hung the stars in the sky all because my idiot brother was obsessed with you," she rolls her eyes, finally looking away, "I can't believe she let him give you Baba's ring just for you to turn him down," she scoffed, lip curling as she watched Clementine now take off her skirt with the pants secured, "and you still got her killed."

"I did everything I could I -"

"It wasn't enough," The Prince glowers, finally sitting forward and levelling a look of anger and betrayal at Clementine, "and it's all your fault."

The accusation genuinely surprises Clementine, who begins to internally panic - how had The Prince come to this conclusion? She'd been so careful. Keeping a cool head, she decides to play dumb, hoping the The Prince knew less than her accusation implied.

"It was an accident."

"You were her bodyguard, my father trusted you. She wouldn't have even been in that car if my brother hadn't got himself arrested knowing our mother would bail him out; he knew you would be with her."

"He didn't get arrested to see me -"

"Of course he did! Because he knows our mother was on his side, but you couldn't be convinced! You couldn't just let him love you, couldn't let him have you like everyone in our family wanted!"

Clementine let's her rant, watching the girl get worked up in a way that only seemed to happen around her, in just the same way that The Son could only keep his lackadaisical demeanour for so long when Clementine refused to humour him. Part of her wishes she was less adept at getting under the skin of The White Death's children; they often bottled things up, and it seemed like Clementine was the only one they felt the need to lash out at from time to time.

"If you want to blame me," Clementine says carefully, "I'm not going to stop you."

"Oh I do," The Prince says matter-of-factly, punctuating it with a humourless bark of laughter, "I think my father should have killed you and the only reason you're still alive is because he knew mother was soft on you."

"She was always good to me," Clementine agreed, "I tried everything I could to save her," she then lied, "I'm sorry I survived," she pointed out rather firmly, and The Prince pursed her lips, narrowing her eyes as she regained her composure from easier. Standing, she smooths out the pleats of her skirt, taking a deep breath before she turns, expression carefully neutral.

"Come here, fruit fly," and she crooks a finger at Clementine without looking at her. Clementine fights the urge to roll her eyes at the petty power move, but takes the four steps to be beside The Prince.

Turning, The Prince steps into her space, a show of intimidation, but Clementine doesn't back down, doesn't step away.

"I don't care," she says in a dangerously quiet voice, gaze shallow as she meets Clementine's, "how many near death experiences you've supposedly survived, I don't care how resilient you are, how they say you're downright unkillable, Cockroach," she takes hold of the knot of Clementine's tie firmly, voice never wavering, threatening demeanour never dropping, "you see the second my father finally stops having a use for you, I will squash you like the bug you are. I will use everything in my power to make sure I am the one to make your actions have conveniences; I promise," she emphasises eyes going dark, "that I will be the one to make it stick."

As lucky as The Prince is, Clementine wonders if it would be enough.

The Prince tightens the tie tight enough to be uncomfortable around Clementine's neck, like a reminder of her supposed power over her bodyguard.

"Would you like me to set up a reminder in your calendar, ma'am?" Clementine's expression goes a vacant kind of pleasant, as her tone turned sweet and immediately eager to be a people pleaser.

The Prince gives her a look of utter disgust.

"You're trying too hard," The Prince scoffs, stepping away, shaking out her hands as if dirty simply from being in contact with Clementine.

"Sorry, ma'am."

"Go away before you ruin this too," her lip curls.

"Your plan, ma'am?"

"Obviously."

"May I ask -"

"You absolutely may not. Go away -"

Clementine's at the door when she hears her phone go off in her purse. The Prince makes an insistent shooing gesture, but Clementine tells her that it could be her father and she relents with an eye roll.

Except it's not an unknown number, the type The White Death usually calls with. It's the number she'd so desperately hoped would still be active only an hour before.

The name Daddy❤️ lights up the screen, and Clementine is stunned enough that it takes The Prince reminding her to answer it before she does.

"Do you have a gun?" Tangerine on the other end of the line sounds exhausted and put upon all at once.

"I- no, I-" she stumbles over her words for a moment as The Prince is asking if it's her father, "I don't have a gun on me," Clementine tells him while waving a dismissive hand at The Prince, "I gave yours back."

"And I gave it to Lemon," Tangerine sighs, "it's fine if you don't have one," though it doesn't exactly sound like it from his tone, "but how quickly can you get to the front of the train?"

"Do you need a gun?" The Prince says with surprising interest.

"Why do you need a gun?" Clementine frowns, "or me?"

"Our boss has decided to send another welcoming party to make sure we're all on schedule -"

"Fuck."

"Yeah."

"And you need me to -"

"Vouch for us again, yes. Consistency," after a beat he adds, "and he may or may not have threatened to kill everyone on the train if you weren't with us."

"So he knows," Clementine mutters darkly.

"Of course he does," but Tangerine simply matches her defeated tone in the moment.

"I have a gun," The Prince says nonchalantly over Clementine's shoulder, and Clementine momentarily covers the receiver to scowl at her.

"Why do you have a gun?!" She whisper-shouts.

"Excuse you I was almost murdered with it earlier today," The Prince sounds offended to have had to remind Clementine of Kimura's gun that she'd been fussing with earlier, "but you can borrow if it means you'll leave quicker."

After a moment of serious deliberation, she uncovers the receiver.

"I can get a gun."

"Brilliant," Tangerine actually breaths a sigh of relief, "hopefully we won't need it, but -"

"Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, I guess... I still don't like guns-" Clementine hears an unfamiliar voice in the background of Tangerine's call.

"Who is that?"

"I'll explain when you get here," and he hangs up. After taking a moment to steel herself, Clementine turns to see The Prince smiling brightly at her, completely at odds with her frustrated demeanour only moments ago.

"I can get you a gun," wearing a wide, almost innocent smile.

"I have so many questions."

"And I will answer none of them, because that's not how our relationship works, fruit fly," she says, having regained that menacing, chipper attitude with which she usually walked through the world. It takes Clementine a moment for her to process the full situation before she submits to it, closing her eyes and nodding once. While she hears The Prince chuckle softly and move to the back of the carriage and it's bathroom, Clementine keeps her eyes closed. However, with the buzzing of the phone in her hands, her eyes snap back open.

Unknown.

The last damn thing she needs. 

And perhaps it's the alcohol or the onslaught of situations that would have overwhelmed a lesser person, but just for a moment her frustration escapes her.

"What?" She sighed, irate. What followed, however, was silence.

"Tone, Scorpion." The White Death's voice chills her to her core.

"I'm so sorry, sir," right as she realises her mistake she's internally berating herself, heading to the seat The Prince had recently vacated, trying her best to sound accommodating, "how can I help -"

"Your intuition has exceeded my expectations," something about his tone set her hair on end, "you are taking responsibility for both of my children." It's not a question. He knows something's wrong, of course he does; Clementine knows with absolute sincerity that he does not intend her to survive the night.

She pinches the bridge of her nose.

"Of course, sir, I'm just glad you thought to hire the operatives you did to get your son here."

"If my Little Prince hadn't been in your care already I would have had you retrieve him, however," the telling words sour for a moment on his tongue, "priorities."

"I understand," she muttered disdainfully, "but his," her nose wrinkled for a moment, "couriers, I guess you could call them, they're off the hook are they? You knew I'd be on this train, you knew I'd find him searching for my bonus, you knew I'd take responsibility for him from there."

("You couldn't save him either.")

"Of course my little Scorpion, after all, I'm confident you know better than to let harm befall my foolish Frog of a son."

"Of course, sir."

"Good to hear," he says slowly, really letting the moment sink in, "then I suppose if you're willing to give up your bonus, let The Twins return my briefcase to me as they initially intended, my son's care will fall squarely on you, as will the reward for his safe return; double what was promised to you in that bonus."

Despite how he's sweetening the deal, Clementine knows there's no real light for her at the end of this tunnel. But maybe, just maybe, if she could convince The Prince to hand over the briefcase, she could get it to Tangerine and Lemon. 

"Was it a test?"

"It was my way of guaranteeing you would find my son."

"So all Lemon and Tangerine need to do is give you back your case? And if anything happens to your son, it's on me?"

"Has something happened to my son?"

"No," Clementine lies easily, "but if I punch him in his foolish mouth I don't want them being punished too."

"Yours is the only head on the chopping block for my son."

Clementine is quiet for a very long moment, eyes closed as she breathed deeply. After a few beats of silence, The White Death's voice is quiet when he speaks.

"Is that all, Scorpion?" Something about it is almost - almost - concerned. Almost - almost - like he cared.

"Can I ask you something, sir?" She hears The White Death huff the faintest laugh. She takes it as permission, "did you intend for me to kill Tangerine?"

"Yes," he says after a long moment, voice completely devoid of humour, "now, then," she knows in this moment that he means back in New York, "I know what he did to you, and I know you know, Little Scorpion; what he did to you, to..." he sighs, trailing off, clearly having forgotten the name he was searching for. Hearing it all, Clementine feels like her blood is fire in her veins, eyes squeezed tightly shut as she holds the phone to her ear and tries to hold herself together. The fire beats with a demand for retribution that she could never fully forget.

"Ilyanka."

"Ilya," there's a strange tone to The White Death's voice, a darkness that appears only in his muttering of the name, "I tried to give you catharsis. You bargain with me for him, remove him from accountability for my son. I do not understand you." In this moment, though she's not sure why, she hears a familiar voice from a long time passed, the same tone, blue eyes and cruelty in the blood, it's the same confusion and disbelief at Clementine herself that The Prince had always held, even all those years ago; what is wrong with you?

"You knew," it's not a question this time, though she just hopes he can't hear the betrayal in her voice.

"Of course I knew," is said with surprising care, "and I am always sorry it happened to you, Little Scorpion."

"Of course you knew," Clementine choked out, the fire in her veins now white-hot to hear him say these things when she knew he was lying about his own involvement, and just how long he'd known. Except he reads her reaction as merely sorrow, his voice surprisingly gentle as he calls her Little Scorpion in a voice far kinder than she'd ever heard him speak to his own son.

"Can I ask you another question?" This time her shaky voice is met with silence, yet still she goes ahead, "why are you telling me this?"

"Do you not think you've earned my trust after all these years?" His tone demands an answer.

Clementine has so much blood on her hands.

"I- thank you, sir."

[the-hidden-writer]

And Into The Fire

Chapter 4: A Not-Quite-Plan

Summary:

Months after the Mitchells saved the world, Linda gets a phone call asking if she’s seen two defective Pal MAX bots. Powerful people are after Eric and Deborabot 5000, and it’s up to the Mitchells to protect them.

Check reblogs for AO3 link!

A Not-Quite-Plan

An agent came running into the office just as Mark was about to take a sip of his coffee.

“Ma’am! We’ve got into #009181987!”

Agent Ward turned off her tablet and stood up immediately.

“About time!” She snapped. “Come on, Dr Bowman, this is where we need you.”

He barely had time to grab his coffee cup as she practically dragged him toward the door by his hoodie.

Ever since they’d locked onto the missing Pal MAX bots, Agent Jennifer Ward and her team had pretty much taken control of Pal Labs. Or at least the headquarters where Mark worked.

He’d spent the past week or so locked in his office with the scary Agent Ward herself. The tall woman had ordered him to come into work every day despite the complete CIA take-over of his company, just to keep up pretences for the public. And he also needed to be kept under supervision at all times for some reason. He was basically a prisoner.

Oh well. At least he had WiFi.

After pulling him out of his office (freedom at last!) Agent Ward led him down the stairs to the main work area, which was a large room filled with rows of computer desks.

At the very back of the room were two large screens on the wall. These were usually used for advertising and announcements, but recently they’d served another purpose.

Displayed on each screen was a status. Before now, they’d said the same thing. But for the first time in weeks, one was different.

Pal MAX #012041966 Status: UNRESPONSIVE

Pal MAX #009181987 Status: ONLINE

“Online?” Mark wondered aloud. “So you actually got into it, huh.”

Agent Ward scoffed. “Of course we did. Don’t doubt my team, Dr Bowman. Especially Agent Travis here.”

As if on cue, the young agent that had come to tell them the news before came rushing in through the door behind them, and almost glided straight into the wheelie chair next to the computer he’d been working on.

“Actually, we got through a couple of times.” Travis explained, huffing slightly from having to run. “But we got kicked out before we could change anything. This is the first time it looks stable and ready to be edited.”

“Well, these robots are based on AI.” Said Mark. “They’re not as simple to take down as ordinary machines.”

“Trust me, we know.” Agent Ward sneered. “That’s the reason we’re in this mess to begin with.”

She turned to her team, who all had their fingers poised over their keyboards ready to begin typing. “Delete any excess data and then start to rewrite the functional coding.” She ordered.

“Rewrite?” Mark had been under the impression that they would just delete it all to stop the robots for good. That’s what they were trying to do, right? “I thought-”

“Yes, rewrite. Anything more is classified.”

One of the agents raised their hands. “Uh, Ma’am? All the data here looks pretty messed up. Most of its data’s been built onto the errors presumably caused by defects, we have no idea what it actually does. There's words liked 'brother', 'mother'-”

“Do I need to repeat myself, Barker?”

Even though it wasn’t aimed at him, Mark couldn’t help but gulp at the way Ward was glaring at the poor agent.

“No Ma’am,” mumbled Barker, “sorry, Ma’am. We’ll start the rewrite.”

~-.-~

The three of them raced into the room with Monchi following close behind, probably because he was intrigued by all the commotion.

Linda didn’t want to believe it. Her robo-boys being sick was one thing, but fighting each other? That was truly unbelievable. They would never.

But unfortunately, it was just as Aaron said.

Deborahbot was kneeling on the bed with his back to the door, repeatedly hitting Eric’s screen by alternating between using the clenched fist of one hand and the open palm of another. There was a “clunk” sound with each impact, and Deborahbot showed no sign of stopping.

“Deborahbot!” Linda exclaimed incredulously.

The bot’s head turned 180° to face them but he did not cease the attack on his brother.

“Mother! Other Mitchells!”

“What are you doing?!” Demanded Rick, aggressively pointing at the bot in the bed. Aaron gripped onto the back of Linda’s pant leg in fear.

“I am more defective than my brother.” Deborahbot stated matter-of-factly, his calm voice sounding quite scary compared to the current violence he was inflicting. “I thought if he was more defective like me, he would be himself again.”

Rick waved his arms in annoyance. “That’s insane!”

“Deborahbot, stop hitting your brother right now.” Ordered Linda.

“Ok!”

Linda felt a small stab of guilt in her heart. Since they’d joined the family, they’d all tried their hardest not to order the bots to do anything. By phrasing things the wrong way, their programming would make them obey commands mindlessly, whereas the Mitchells just wanted them to be themselves. The longer the pair of them went without being given an order, the more their individual personalities shone through.

Deborahbot released Eric and stepped away. Two seconds later, once the command had been completed, he held out a warning hand to the family.

“Wait, Mitchells, stop!”

Linda was about to open her mouth to ask why, only she first noticed the movement on the bed.

Movement. On the bed.

Under the blanket, Eric looked like he was shivering. Or, more accurately, vibrating. The screen that had been full of color before was now its usual black self, and his red marker face was visible again. The only indication that anything was wrong was that the small LED in the corner of his screen was flashing an array of different colors.

“What’s happening to him?” Aaron asked from behind her, and Linda nodded to encourage Deborahbot to answer.

“I do not know for certain, but I think that the infiltrators have successfully entered my brother’s system.”

“You’re speaking normal again.” Commented Rick, though his cautious gaze was fixed on Eric, as if he would spring up and attack them at any moment.

“That is why I came to that conclusion.” Elaborated Deborahbot. “They have stopped attacking me, so they must be focusing more on him.”

Unlike earlier, Linda drew up the courage to approach Eric in the bed. His shaking was growing ever more violent by the second, and without Deborahbot keeping him down it was only a matter of time before he fell off the bed completely.

She gently placed a hand on his shoulder and made her voice as soft and calming as possible.

“Eric, honey?”

“Dear, be careful.” Rick warned from behind her but she chose not to listen.

“Can you hear me?”

It didn’t seem like he was going to respond. Feeling defeated, Linda was about to turn to ask Deborahbot what to do next when a voice spoke up.

“User recognised: Linda Mitchell.”

Eric’s voice was even more distorted than Deborahbot’s had been to the point where it was nearly unrecognisable.

“Uh, Mom?”

“Linda, get back!”

Linda understood exactly why her family was scared. The bots had never, not once, called her by her actual name. To not hear “Mother!” come out of Eric’s metaphorical mouth alarmed her, but still she couldn’t bring herself to step back.

“Brother?”

In a similar situation, the bots never called one another by their given names. It was always “Brother”. It only made them seem closer to one another in a way that the Mitchells themselves couldn’t be.

“Unknown user. Verify”

Aaron approached them with caution, one hand automatically searching for his mother’s own. She clasped it tightly.

“It’s like he’s gone back into robot-mode.” Said Aaron.

Linda squeezed his hand in agreement. Out of the two, it was Eric that always seemed more closely related to all the other Pal MAX bots for some reason. Still, Eric was their Eric, and not one of the mindless machines that tried to blast all of humanity into space.

Then a high-pitched whine echoed throughout the room without warning, causing the Mitchells (and Deborahbot, who mimicked them a second later) to cover their ears from the terrible noise. Monchi began to bark.

Once it died down, Rick frowned and used two fingers to massage his temple. “What the-”

“B-Brother!”

Rick snapped his mouth shut and all heads in the room turned to Eric, who was now sitting up straight on the bed.

“Brother!” Deborahbot called back in relief.

Eric's head twisted to face the three extremely shocked Mitchells.

“Mitchells!” Eric cried dramatically, his words accompanied by a more familiar glitch. “You are in danger. Pal Labs is taking over our systems, and it’s only a matter of time before-”

“I already told them all that.” Deborahbot interjected.

“Oh.” Eric muttered softly. “Aww.”

It put Linda a little at ease to see her boys’ dynamic return so quickly. That must mean things were getting better, right?

“Brother, what should we do?”

Deborahbot had always been reliant on Eric for decision-making. Linda had no idea how the bots managed to form such a human-like sibling relationship.

“They’ve already gotten to me.” Said Eric, solely addressing Deborahbot now. “It’s safer if you power me off until they stop. If you wait a while and they don’t, then you might have to go to Pal Labs and stop them yourself.”

Linda’s immediate thought was: No. She was not going to turn off her boy.

“How do we know if they’ve stopped?” Asked Rick.

Eric glitched before shrugging. “My brother might be able to tell you, but-”

He was interrupted by the return of the high-pitched whine. This time, Deborahbot did not cover his ears.

A few seconds later, Eric’s voice was distorted again.

“Status: online. Location-”

He did not get to finish his ominous speech as Deborahbot had quickly moved toward him and placed his hand under Eric’s head. After a few short seconds Eric’s screen went completely black with only his marker face remaining as he fell back onto the bed.

“Deborahbot!” Linda exclaimed in outrage. “Tell me you didn’t-”

“He told me a plan.” Deborahbot said nonchalantly. “First I had to power him off, then-”

“Yeah, we heard.” Scoffed Rick. “But that’s not really a proper plan.”

“It’s a start.” Aaron piped up. “I don’t really know what’s going on but I think the bots have it better together than you do.”

Linda bit the inside of her lip. She did not like how Deborahbot switched off his brother without permission. They were technically under 18 and therefore not adults, so Linda felt responsibility for their wellbeing and safety. She tried her best to keep quiet to avoid snapping at him.

“So... what now?” Asked Rick.

Deborahbot took a moment to look at his brother before turning to face the Mitchells again.

“I don’t want to wait.” He said blankly. “So I think that we should go to Pal Labs and tell them to stop now.”

Comments make my day! :)

[bedlamsbard]

I got a couple of different asks about Luke and Ahsoka in other side AU 10, so I guess I will just make it a regular post after all so I can answer all of them at once.

@slecnaztemnot: 

Okay i just read your latest other side chapter and I wanted to ask about Ahsoka and Luke dynamics. I wonder what exactly where their heretics disagreemts about the jedi doctrine? while i can guess some of the stuff like attachements i guess i mostly see ahsoka as nonjedi and therefore someone who should not be attached to doctrine about attachements (haha) so i am wondering how you see her. i would actually love your take on how their first meetings went. continued in next ask, 1/2

1/2 continuation since most people write them as Ashoka immediately spilling the beans about the whole Vader situation to Luke and yours Ahsoka didn't. So I am curious what do you think Ahsoka feels about it. I got of course lot of it from the fic itself so i am mostly asking about how did you base your interpretation, if that makes sense and what led you to the narrative choices to portray their relationship in such way.

@comentter:

I'm most interested in what Luke and Ahsoka know about each other. Luke doesn't know much about Ahsoka obviously, but does he have any idea why she seems to hate him? He must be desperate lol. And how much does Ahsoka know about what happened on the DS2? And how much does Kanan know about these events? What was Hera able to tell him and what else did Luke and Ahsoka tell him? I always figure that everyone but Luke and a few people he told (like Leia) think the Emperor and Vader from the DS2 explosion.

I now have this image in my head of Ahsoka spending time with Rex and her laughing as Rex does something like tell a joke or a specific gesture. Then Luke walks by, does the exact same thing and Ahsoka is like "Of course, you'd do this stupid thing, you idiot!" :D

I think shortly before I started writing this sequence I had seen some cute art of Luke and Ahsoka hugging, which is a pretty common art trope and which has never sat quite right with me.  I also have the tendency to want to do the opposite of common fanon, which I can’t leave out either.  I also wanted to logic out what the hell was going on with Ahsoka’s charaterization in her Mando episode on a Watsonian level rather than a Doylist one (which I did a few weeks ago), even if other side takes place well before Mando and doesn’t intersect with it in any meaningful way.

When it came to the Luke and Ahsoka relationship (or lack thereof), it came down to three questions for me:

Who knows what?

What do they know?

When do they know it?

I made the decision early on in the chapter to leave Leia out of this relationship entirely, since the new canon seems to at this point in time (within a year of RotJ) be keeping it relatively quiet that she and Luke are siblings, and it’s not something that Hera would have a reason to know.  (Note also that this entire sequence is told from Hera’s POV, which plays into the “who knows what when” angle.)

As per Rebels S4 (not the epilogue, because Mando’s thrown that out the window), Ahsoka knows (or has good reason to believe) the following:

Anakin Skywalker is Darth Vader, Sith Lord

Darth Vader was directly or indirectly responsible for the genocide of the Jedi Order and the deaths of any Jedi who survived the Purge (”you and your Inquisitors saw to that”)

Padme Amidala is dead

Obi-Wan Kenobi is dead (Obi-Wan was not dead, but she has no way to know this)

no Darksider can return to the Light side

At the end of RotJ (not taking into account anything that happened in the comics or ancillary novels, which I’m not up to date on), Luke knows (or has good reason to believe) the following:

Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker

everyone Anakin ever knew is dead, mostly because of him

Vader returned to being Anakin Skywalker at the end of his life

(Leia presumably also knows all of this, perhaps with a few more details based on things her parents might have told her, but her feelings about Darth Vader are: Bad, Do Not Want, to be glib about it.)

Now, there’s one other factor here, which is Rex.  Rex knew Anakin and knew Ahsoka and was in the Rebel Alliance -- we know that he was on Yavin IV prior to Luke’s arrival and we know that he fought in the Battle of Endor. (And turns up in a couple of scattered art panels from the comics.)  If we want to take his brief appearance in Galaxy of Adventures with Han Solo’s strike force as canon, then he may have also known Han and probably Luke -- certainly his ears would have pricked up at the name “Skywalker.”  (Okay, there’s one other factor, which is R2-D2, but Artoo never tells anyone anything despite knowing...everything. Or most things, anyway.)  Rex doesn’t seem to know that Anakin became Darth Vader (I believe there’s an interview somewhere where Dave or Pablo or someone says that a meeting between Rex and Vader would be “awkward,” but there’s no canonical reason to believe that he knew about the Anakin/Vader connection), but he probably found out at some point that the 501st was the battalion involved in the assault on the Jedi Temple.  He also, as of Rebels S3-4, assumes that Vader killed Ahsoka -- presumably Ezra would have told him as much as he could.  (And Ezra does know that Vader is Anakin, so he may have told Rex that as well.)  Rex also knows that Anakin Skywalker was having an affair with Padme Amidala, but presumably didn’t know about (a) the marriage or (b) the pregnancy, because how would he know?

Then we come to Ahsoka’s return and unfortunately the current canon gives us no time point for when it actually happened: presumably Ahsoka did not or could not return to the greater galaxy at the point she “left”, during the fight on Malachor (3 BBY), because as of Rebels S3-4 everyone still believes she’s dead.  Maybe she’s still stuck on Malachor without a way to get off, who knows; maybe after S4 Ezra grabbed her into the World Between Worlds she decided to stay on Malachor until she ~caught up with the main timeline, which...you then have to believe that Ahsoka is going to deliberately remove herself from the war, which I can get to, but is not something I’m totally comfortable with.  Or she pops out in the timeline at the same time that Ezra returns to the main timeline and is able to more or less immediately return to the main timeline narrative, plus or minus a few weeks.  (There are, after all, still a couple of Advanced TIE fighters parked in the Sith temple, even if they were potentially damaged in the temple collapse.  Ahsoka could have repaired them or used the comms systems to call for a pick-up -- this is, btw, what happens in Crown.)  We don’t know when the S2 finale scene/S4 WBW scene of Ahsoka walking back into the temple actually takes place in the timeline; it doesn’t have to be at the exact same time as the rest of the S2 finale sequence (since obvs Vader dragging himself out, Maul flying off, and the Rebels crew looking sad doesn’t all take place at the exact same time).

Other side AU is deliberately vague about when Ahsoka returns from the World Between Worlds/Malachor/to the Rebel Alliance; it’s not stated in the story, but I made the assumption that she came back shortly after the (non-epilogue) end of the Rebels finale, but was still deeply messed up from her Malachor revelations.  (Also, like, Sidious, I guess, but she was probably so messed up about Anakin/Vader that Sidious being around barely registered.)  Since she never seems to have held a formal position in the Rebel Alliance, I assumed that after she returned and let everyone know she was still alive, she then immediately took off to try and figure out what the hell happened with Anakin at the end of the Clone Wars, since she saw him like a week before he snapped and at the time he seemed fine.

The problem is that almost everyone involved is dead.

Now, at this point (shortly before Scarif and ANH), a few people are still alive who then die shortly, but whom Ahsoka may have no reason to believe were involved.  Bail Organa, for example, is still around, but aside from him being Padme’s friend Ahsoka doesn’t have a reason to know that Bail was there when Padme died -- and since they were in contact for the nineteen years preceding there’s no reason for her to assume now that he was keeping something for her.  Back in the comics (before I stopped reading them), Vader did some digging to figure out what was going on with Padme and his child; Ahsoka probably would have done the same digging (without having to torture anyone), but without necessarily knowing that Padme was pregnant.  Knowing the date of Padme’s death (same as the Republic, essentially), she may have had a previous assumption that Padme was assassinated on Palpatine’s orders, but knowing that Vader is Anakin probably moves that assumption closer to the truth, that Anakin was somehow involved in Padme’s death one way or another.  Sooner or later Ahsoka will turn up the fact that Padme was pregnant, come to the obvious conclusion that Anakin was the father, and possibly find out the same thing that Vader does in the comics -- that the child was born before Padme died.  (But also probably not that Padme was carrying twins, but even if she found that out, it wouldn’t make a difference.)

While Ahsoka is doing her digging (and there really isn’t much information out there to find), the events of Rogue One and ANH happen, and Ahsoka comes back to the Rebel Alliance to find out which of her friends are still alive.  (Maybe Rex is with her at this point, who knows.)

Everyone in the Rebel Alliance is talking about some young hotshot named Luke Skywalker.

Luke Skywalker who has a very familiar lightsaber, who claims his father was Anakin Skywalker, and who had some kind of relationship with Obi-Wan Kenobi, who turned up on the Death Star, fought Darth Vader, and died.

Ahsoka has just spent the past few months trying to figure out what happened with Anakin, and as best she can reassemble the facts it mostly comes down to “Anakin did something dumb for Padme, that something dumb was ‘turn to the Dark Side and kill literally everyone,’ and then Padme died, the Republic was overturned, and the Jedi Order was wiped out.”  Ahsoka presumably walks into a room, hears the name Luke Skywalker -- maybe sees him -- and is all at once face to face with the living evidence of just how badly Anakin fucked up.

This is just too much for Ahsoka to deal with at the moment, so she takes off again, and spends the next five years brushing in and out of the Rebel Alliance doing odd missions that can really only be done by a trained Force-user.  Rex, who seems to have a more stable position in the Alliance, is always going to side with Ahsoka over anyone else; if she tells him not to tell Luke that she knew Anakin, he won’t.  (And for that matter, he may have somewhat fraught feelings about Luke himself.)  She may have the odd interaction with Luke -- who has heard that there’s another Jedi in the Alliance and wants to be friends/get real training -- but Ahsoka just does not want any part of this. It’s irrational! She knows it’s irrational! But this is the living evidence of Anakin’s failure, Anakin who last she saw him TRIED TO KILL HER, who was at least partially responsible for the deaths of everyone she ever knew.  (And honestly, finding out that Vader topped it all off by killing Obi-Wan is not going to help.)

Ahsoka may also be feeling a certain amount of survivor’s guilt: if Ezra had not pulled her out of the Malachor temple at that exact moment, she came pretty close to bringing the temple down on both herself and Vader, and may have succeeded in killing him.  She did not do so, and who knows how many people died because of that in the years between Malachor and Yavin?  (Just because Tarkin was the one who gave the order doesn’t mean that Ahsoka may at least partially blame Alderaan’s destruction on Vader, if she knew he was on the Death Star then.) She knows he killed Obi-Wan.

The Yoda lineage is very good at going “yikes, I am going off to live alone and beat myself up over my failure for years” and Ahsoka is very much an example of that lineage.

She and Luke have a relationship of “Hi, I’m Luke Skywalker, do you want to talk?” and “I have to leave immediately,” maybe with the odd “please stop using that lightsaber grip it is physically painful for me to watch, do it like this instead, okay, bye.”  Luke probably told all of two other people about what happened with Vader on the Death Star, Leia and Han; he has no reason to tell anyone else about it because it won’t matter to them.  Why would he tell Ahsoka, whom he has no relationship with?  He doesn’t know that Ahsoka knew Anakin Skywalker and would only know if one of four people told him: Ahsoka herself (no), Rex (no), R2-D2 (maybe), or Admiral Ackbar (would never have occurred to Luke to ask, might have occurred to Ackbar to say).  (We also don’t know that Mon Mothma knew Ahsoka very well, or at all, for that matter; they never interacted in TCW.)

As for her swinging harder into overt Jedi-ness by Mando after her blatant “I am no Jedi” of Rebels, it reads to me as a response to the Anakin/Vader revelation (especially the attachment thing).  She had made certain assumptions in the TCW period (see her saving Rex in the TCW finale) and prior to Rebels; Kanan’s method of Jediness was something she could accept in the time period and in those circumstances; the Anakin/Vader revelation shattered all of that, followed immediately as it was by Kanan apparently going full Jedi self-sacrifice despite his attachments.  (Her reaction to Ezra being a trauma response about two very different circumstances.)  All of a sudden what she thought might have been mutable based on the circumstances became something that had to be adhered to in case of dangerous results, which she had just had brought home to her in extremely bad circumstances.

I made a crack somewhere about Mando’s central tension being between “being Mandalorian” and “being doing Mandalorianness”; I think in the post-OT period with Ahsoka and Luke we’re seeing something similar with “being Jedi” and “being doing Jediness.”  Even if Ahsoka isn’t actively claiming the title Jedi anymore (because what does that accomplish in most contexts?), she’s leaning far more into the tenets of the Jedi Order -- which Luke doesn’t know and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.

Thus the doctrinal dispute.

Ahsoka grew up in the Jedi Order.  That’s what she knows, that’s how she knows how to be a Jedi; for her being a Jedi is being part of the Jedi Order, whether or not the actions associated with performing Jediness are being actively practiced.  Luke doesn’t have that context.  For Luke, being a Jedi is...being doing Jediness.  (This is super awkward phrasing.)  Performing the actions of a Jedi.  Luke has a few holocrons, but I’m guessing that a lot of what is on those holocrons makes the assumption that whoever is opening with them has the context of being a part of the Jedi Order and doesn’t explain really basic stuff about the Order or what that means.  Luke’s Jedi Order is not going to be the Republic Jedi Order made anew; it’s going to be something that has a resemblance to it and is based on a similar view of the Force, even arguably its heir, but is just not going to be the same thing.  It can’t be.  Luke doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Kanan, of course, is coming into all of this from a similar context as Ahsoka: he grew up in the Jedi Order, it’s what he knows, it’s who he is.  Except Kanan never walked away from the Order, so while Ahsoka had been disconnected from her Jediness at the time of the Purge, he never lost his -- part of Ahsoka’s tension from TCW S7-Rebels was “I can’t be a Jedi because the Order is gone” and Kanan’s was “can I be a Jedi without the Jedi Order?”  (Ezra is a whole ‘nother thing but is somewhat outside the scope of this.)  The Jedi Order never factors in Luke’s Jediness at all.  (There’s some lineage doctrinal dispute here as well -- the Yoda lineage seems to be very closely connected to the Order as the font of Jediness, the Windu-Billaba lineage somewhat less so.  The Yoda lineage is like...the hardcore conservatives of the Jedi Order, though, and are probably not typical.)

Poor Kanan came back from the dead, after a week in another universe (which had its own problems; he’s been trying to very gently convince his counterpart that even after being an Inquisitor for months he can still be a Jedi), into Luke trying to build a new Jedi Order from scratch, Ahsoka firmly believing it couldn’t and shouldn’t be done and not wanting to be in the same room as Luke at all (not to mention that she really did not believe that they should have gone for “hey, let’s send Hera Syndulla to another universe” as even being an option), and both of them having essentially incompatible notions of being a Jedi at each other -- this is probably the most time Luke and Ahsoka ever spent in each other’s presence.  They’ve probably never articulated their problems at each other, just assumed that the other knew them.  And Kanan has his own “how to be a Jedi” approach, which is from a very different than either Ahsoka or Luke because despite originating from the same context as Ahsoka, he had a very different path to get to his present position.

As for what Kanan knows -- uh, pretty much only what Hera knew, and Hera knew very little?  She was friendly with Luke and Leia, but didn’t have much interaction with them -- she states that she had a tendency to avoid Luke because even if she would never say it to Luke’s face, she silently believes that if any Jedi should have been in the Rebel Alliance, it should have been Kanan and Ezra and not this relative newcomer.  If the Death Star 2 news about Vader and Palps was never common knowledge, then Hera wouldn’t have known it.  Kanan’s in a position of having to play catch-up, but also having a completely different priority (finding Ezra).  He sat through this meeting where after they’d finished grilling him on “you were in ANOTHER UNIVERSE and also you CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD?” they politely sniped at each other with a bunch of context he didn’t have and flat out decided that wow, he did not want to deal with this at all, whatsoever.

(This is also not stated in the story, but Luke and Ahsoka also disagreed about whether Jacen should be trained or not: Luke said, yeah, of course, when he’s a little older! and Ahsoka said nope, he’ll be fine, it will go away. Hera was just very “...I will deal with this later” about it since it wasn’t an urgent issue.)

[badgirlcovenrep]

My Thoughts on Midnight Mass

(Please beware that these are MY thoughts, so if you don't agree with them, please disregard and go enjoy your series, fighting over Netflix media would be a waste of time for both of us)

I liked Midnight Mass but... maybe the characters talked a bit too much?

Don't get me wrong, I love a good monologue, but when it happens so often in an episode that all characters seem to be constantly going into long, drawn out thoughts, it does break the immersion and take away from the severity and importance of their words. Besides the fact that most people don't talk like that in real life, it also seemed as if too often they went into the same themes and came to similar conclusions that the viewer had already been exposed to in previous conversations.

The moral questioning also falls flat constantly, seen as religion is already a topic that has been discussed widely and from all different kinds of perspectives, to the point where it can very easily become tired and endless. It's an impossibly hard topic for any creator to give a fresh view, and unfortunately Midnight Mass didn't hit the mark for me.

It seems that instead of following the footsteps of Hill House and Bly Manor, where a lot is left to our imagination and there is a sense of trust that the viewer is smart enough to understand the themes and character arcs as they go, (if they are willing to pay attention to the queues and details left behind); Midnight Mass almost constantly gives the mystery up to us on a silver platter and undermines the viewer's capacity to understand (and the cast's ability to convey) even simple emotions, ultimately committing the sin of saying too much, and showing too little by trying to give voice to every single one of the characters' even smaller inner struggles.

It leaves the viewer almost no room to guess, which is not a good thing for any genre of TV or cinema, but especially not suspense/horror.

The "angel" and all different lore around vampires/the clergy were incredibly cool, the atmosphere was instantly immersive, the camera work, costuming, SFX and set designs were impeccable and the cast was obviously very talented and committed to their characters. I have to give a special shout-out to the one-take shots that have become so telltale of Mike Flanagan since Hill House, as they absolutely deliver on the visual effect and emotional cadence, especially when wanting to showcase all members of this small community equally.

I especially loved the characters of Dr. Gunning and Beverly Keane. Dr. Gunning because she served as somewhat of a buffer to the stiffness of the other characters, but also because I could very easily relate to her pain of caring for a parent with dementia, and to her subsequent questioning when she sees her mother get better. And Beverly because she genuinely infuriated me at times and I'm a sucker for antagonists that make me foam with anger.

However, even with those good aspects, the execution and writing constantly misses the mark when it comes to creating dynamic and realistic conversations, to the point where it felt like I was watching robots try to mimic human speech with only original copies of Shakespeare as their reference. This resulted in the relationships feeling stiff and unrealized, like something was missing, even when the show constantly repeated and expanded upon itself.

However, in the end, that was exactly the problem, Midnight Mass tried saying too much and it wasn't able to hold on to or really drive home any of it's points. A shame, seen as I was genuinely excited for this release and have been a fan of Flanagan for a while.

5/10

[sighmurderbot]

Irish Coffee Chapter Three

Title: Gatorade and Sixth Floor Coffee

Chapter Rating/Warnings: G, I don’t think there’s even any profanity in this one

Word Count: 2.9k

Summary: They meet over coffee and Kierkegaard. There was a spark in his honey-brown eyes that drew her to him. There was a sadness behind her bright smile that drew him to her. Spencer Reid/Original Female Character. Slow burn coffee shop meet. Strangers to friends to lovers. This fic is also available on AO3, it’s ahead of tumblr currently!

previous chapter//next chapter

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” 

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

One exhausting week rolled into the next. Spencer didn’t stop by every day, but the days he did I found myself smiling a little easier. He was considerate, always making sure I could clearly read his lips when it was noisy, always patient even when I could tell he had somewhere to be.

When the shop was empty he would linger an extra moment or two, giving me some sort of obscure fact about coffee, cafes, caffeine, or something else tangentially related. I soaked it up like a little knowledge sponge. The way he gestured with his hands when he got excited about what he was saying always put a grin on my face. 

When the shop was busy, with suits shoving in and out, Spencer waited quietly in line and was extra polite when ordering, as if his manners would make up for the harsh and hurried words I was subjected to from others. 

And every time he came in, no matter what time of day, rain or shine, he ordered a large mocha with extra sugar.

By the second week I started noticing him before he walked in. Something caught my eye, maybe it was his cardigans or incessantly mismatched socks, or maybe I was developing a Spencer radar, but I started to have his coffee ready before he reached the counter.

The first time I proudly plunked his order in front of him before he could speak I think I really threw him off. It wasn’t a busy day, and I was already leaning on the counter, allowing myself a little bit of rest. He paused, mouth still open, and tilted his head at the cup. He then pressed his lips together and frowned slightly. Was he disappointed? It certainly looked like it.

“It’s exactly how you like,” I hurried to assure him.

“Thanks,” he replied, slowly taking the cup. I felt my stomach drop as he began to turn away. I had been looking forward to his visit, especially since I hadn't seen him for a few days. Somehow the young doctor always found a way to make me smile. 

“I thought,” I called out after him, stopping his movements, “that it would help to have it ready. You know, so I don’t have to go make it in the middle of talking to you.”

He turned back, frown now bent into a small smile.

"How efficient," he said. I shrugged.

"I like to maximize the good things in life."

Spencer didn't reply right away, instead electing to shyly drop his eyes and take a sip of coffee. His muscles relaxed a little as the hot liquid worked it's magic.

"How have you been enjoying Asimov?" I asked, falling back to a safe subject for both of us: books. Any tension that may have been lingering dissipated as Spencer's eyes lit up.

"Fascinating!" He started, and I settled myself against the counter a little more, perfectly happy to listen. After noticing my hearing aids, Spencer made sure to speak clearly when we conversed, and for the few brief moments I was with him, it was like my hearing had never started to degenerate at all.

"Psychohistory as a concept alone is fascinating, and when applied to a well developed futuristic universe it practically crafts the story by itself. The field itself only really became recognized when Lloyd deMause developed a formal approach to apply to the study of psychobiology, history, and social dynamics. Even that was fairly recently; deMause is still an influential figure in the field today."

Without fail, whenever Spencer stopped in, I learned something. The information, the passion with which he presented it, everything down to his soft, first-year philosophy professor look had me longing to go back to school. Listening to Spencer teach, whether it was conscious or not on his part, was like sips of water in the desert.

Not for the first time I wondered what he did for work. He was skittish about the subject, the first time I asked he dodged the question, and any time the conversation had neared the subject again he'd start to clam up, avoid eye contact, and worry at his bag or cardigan sleeve.

If he doesn't want to talk about it he doesn't want to talk about it, I reasoned finally. Lord knows there's enough secret jobs in this city, why would he take a break from work for coffee just to talk about work with a random barista?

So I had dropped the subject, and our talks flowed around books and philosophy and whatever tidbits of trivia were on his mind that day.

Unfortunately, our discussion was brought to a quick conclusion when another customer entered, sending the bell above the door swinging with an annoying tone that ensured I always had a low-level headache.

I stood and exchanged a small wave with Spencer. Even the way he waved, hand low, arm tucked into his side, made me smile. When he left he was careful not to rip the door open, the bell barely moved as he slipped away. 

We continued like that for a time, but as fall turned towards winter, I found myself struggling to get out of bed in the morning. Exhaustion weighted my limbs before I even got to work, and even the heaviest concealer couldn’t cover the bruise-like shadows beneath my eyes. Whereas before I would tidy the shop during lulls, I now had to pause to catch my breath after rushes, as if every customer took what little energy I had with them. My Spencer radar didn’t go off for days at a time, sometimes almost an entire week would pass before he would stop in. I felt foolish for looking forward to a regular so much, but I couldn’t help myself. I enjoyed his company, even though I knew he probably didn’t give me a second thought once he was outside the shop doors. 

It had been one of the longer stretches since Spencer visited when I woke up in the middle of the night, head aching and throat raw. 

It was bound to happen eventually, I thought, dragging myself across my studio apartment and getting a glass of water. Even the simple liquid hurt to swallow.

I winced and returned to bed, grabbing my phone. Flipping it open, I navigated to the two numbers I needed and sent a message to my bosses for both the coffee shop and the diner. Surely they couldn’t begrudge me a single sick day.

Attempting another sip of water, I burrowed back into my blankets and slipped into a restless sleep.

Spencer

A few hours later, in another part of the city…

Spencer found mornings difficult, especially since he was left only with crappy sixth floor coffee until lunch. The team had handled back to back cases that left him drained and a pile of files towering on each member’s desk. 

“Morning,” Morgan greeted as his younger associate stepped off the elevator. Spencer gave him a noncommittal noise and a nod, beelining for the bullpen’s coffee maker.

Prentiss glanced up, sharing a look with Morgan, and they both shrugged. 

“I don’t know how you can drink this stuff,” Prentiss said, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. “Why don’t you just stop for coffee before you come in?”

Spencer kept his eyes on the cup into which he was stirring spoonful after spoonful of sugar. 

“I go out for coffee in the afternoon,” he replied evenly. Prentiss and Morgan exchanged another look, with the other man joining Prentiss and Spencer at the counter.

“Yeah, we noticed,” he said. “Must be really good coffee, in the years you’ve worked here you never used to go further than the cafe at the corner.”

Prentiss nodded in agreement. “And yet, you haven’t been there in two, three weeks, have you?”

Spencer turned, coffee held close to his chest as he looked between his coworkers.

“I thought there was a permanent moratorium on inter-unit profiling,” he frowned, lips drawn together in a slight pout.

“Not profiling,” Prentiss smiled.

“Just observing,” Morgan agreed.

“Hmph,” Spencer huffed, heading for his desk.

“So you're gonna take your favorite coworkers to your new go-to coffee spot?” Morgan called after him.

“I dunno,” Spencer replied, flipping open the first pile of his stack. “I’ll ask Hotch and JJ.”

“Oooh,” Morgan clutched a hand to his chest, as if injured, face drawn in overdramatic pain. “That hurts, Pretty Boy.”

The target of his teasing, however, was already working through the file before him. Morgan sighed, no more excuse available to keep him from doing the same.

At precisely 2:15pm, Spencer stood and gathered his things. He could feel Morgan and Prentiss studying him as he unclipped the gun holstered on his hip and carefully set the weapon in his bag. Slinging the strap over his head he settled it on his opposite shoulder, grabbed his scarf, and looped it around his neck.

“Off for coffee?” Prentiss asked, tone dripping with innocence.

“Yup,” Spencer replied shortly. “See you in a bit.”

“See ya,” she replied.

As the elevator doors slid shut before him, Spencer watched Prentiss slide her chair over to Morgan’s desk. They ducked their heads together, undoubtedly gossiping about Spencer’s mysterious new favorite coffee shop.

They were surprised, then, when he returned in almost half the usual time with no coffee in hand.

“Hey, kid,” Morgan leaned towards the small wall separating their desks. “You didn’t let our teasing stop you from getting your coffee, did you?”

“What?” Spencer looked up, as if Morgan had interrupted him in deep thought. Morgan raised one thick eyebrow. 

“Where’s your coffee?” Morgan asked. Spencer frowned slightly.

“Didn’t feel like it today.”

Morgan glanced towards Prentiss, who tilted her head. He raised and dropped one shoulder.

There was no way they could know that Spencer had hurried a few blocks down from the office, whether subconsciously speeding his steps or not. Neither Morgan nor Prentiss could realize the way Spencer looked through the window to the counter, ready to smile at the sight of a blonde barista with a tall mocha in her hand. They couldn’t know the way his stomach dropped and shoulders drooped when there was no bright blonde with a ready smile and sparkling hazel eyes behind the counter that day. Instead there was a stranger, a young man with annoyance written on his face. A cloud passed in front of the weak fall sun and before Spencer realized it he was walking back to the BAU. His mind was far away, wondering what would cause a break in such a strict routine. 

He hadn’t known Katie very long, but she was friendly, and she listened—really listened—when he spoke. She was so different from his world, so unusual, and yet so absolutely normal. There was much he knew about her: her determination, her punishing schedule, her devotion to cheerfulness, but there was so much more he didn’t know and wanted to find out, if only out of an academic curiosity to understand how and why she did what she did. Why she seemed to perk up when she spotted him on the sidewalk outside, why she let him ramble on far after anyone else would have told him to shut up. 

And why, why wasn’t she at the coffee shop?

Because she has a life, the little voice inside his head mocked. Because you are a customer who is nice to her and it is her job to keep you coming back for overpriced DC coffee.

Shaking his head, Spencer tried to put her from his mind and steeled himself for the inevitable tag team teasing that Morgan and Prentiss would subject him to.

Katie

I groaned curses at the sun as it found a gap in my curtains, slicing through my dark room as easily as any blade. 

Rolling over, the red LEDs of my clock told me it was far past time to attempt a shower and food, sick or not. I couldn’t really afford to be so late with my meds, but I hoped perhaps it would be an okay day and I could slip a few extra hours past my vertigo.

No such luck. I sat up slowly and the room tipped around me. It was a combination of floating and spinning while drunk, and it sent me stumbling to the bathroom on flimsy legs. It was like I had downed a bottle of jack and chased it with that soda from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory that made people fly. 

I almost overshot the toilet but an iron grip on the cold porcelain kept me anchored as I heaved. There was nothing to throw up, but my body hadn’t gotten the message. Nearly twenty minutes passed before I allowed myself to slump back on the tile floor, sweat sticking hair to my forehead and the back of my neck. 

It was like I was on a teacup ride at the fair and it was slow at the moment, but could speed up again at any moment. I just prayed I’d be able to handle it when it did.

Somewhere in the other room my phone buzzed. I hadn’t thought to grab it in my mad rush for the bathroom, and at the moment I didn’t think I had the strength to retrieve it. It wasn’t hard to run through the people who might be contacting me. The only options were one of my bosses or Liz, and I didn’t feel like talking to them at the moment.

You can’t just isolate yourself when things get hard.

The voice in my head sounded a lot like my therapist from school. I sighed deeply, frustrated and tired, tipping my head back to rest on the glass around my shower.

“Right, shower,” I muttered. That was what I had originally intended to do when I got up. Moving slowly and carefully, breathing to steady myself, I flopped into the small tub and turned the shower on full spray, letting the water pepper across my skin.

Eventually I stripped off the tank top and shorts I had slept in, leaving them in a sodden heap near the drain, and grabbed the soap, scrubbing myself until the water started to run cold. After I was clean and all the soap suds had swirled down the drain I shut off the water and cautiously stood, white-knuckling the support bar I had installed in the shower after my first fall. 

The room didn’t want to stay still, but it had stopped rotating enough for me to step out of the shower, make my way to the towel rack, and wrap myself in a large, fluffy towel. 

Water dripped from my body as I padded out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, leaving wet footprints trailing the wooden floor behind me. I pulled a frosty gatorade from my fridge and a sleeve of saltines from my cabinet. Setting the sustenance on my bedside table, I dried off enough to keep my sheets dry and climbed back into bed, not bothering with pajamas this time.

Thankfully, I was able to keep some of the bland crackers and alarmingly blue liquid down. I downed my medication and sunk back into my pillows, even the little I had accomplished that day taking all my energy. 

Hopeful that I’d wake with the cold gone and my meds working, I began to doze, and the dozing deepened into a dreamless sleep.

My one sick day stretched into two, then three. Fighting one disease was hard enough, and it intensified even the smallest infection from an annoyance into a massive burden. On the third day my phone rang. The conversation with my boss from the diner was quick and professional. I understood that he needed reliable employees, but I had hoped the fact that I was never late and always gave as much notice as possible for my sick days as possible would buy me some leeway.

Apparently not.

I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose as I snapped my phone shut.

It’s okay, I reasoned. I can pick up more shifts at the cafe and the bar. They’ve always paid better anyway.

Resting my head against the wall I studied my ceiling.

“What do I do, mom?” I whispered, closing my eyes.

“Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.”

Emily Dickinson had been one of my mother’s favorites, and it was her voice I heard.

Right, I thought, steeling myself. What doors haven’t I tried yet?

Dragging my laptop onto my lap took more effort than perhaps it should have, but I managed it. 

Scholarships. 

Now that I had a full time work record to back me up, I might qualify for more money. And if I qualified for enough I could take the next step, instead of being stuck running in circles trying to earn enough over three jobs to pay for college by myself.

The sun had long since set on my third sick day when I finally shut my laptop and let sleep claim me once more. I now had a small spark of something to go with the stubborn determination my mother had instilled in me: hope.

[wanderlustlanguages]

Brazil study abroad roundup

So since I failed at posting during my study abroad I am going to attempt to sum everything up here. I hope this might be helpful for people who want to study abroad in Brazil in the future.

Disclaimer: This is written based on my personal experience which is of course affected by who I am (20-year-old, female, Austrian, introverted, straight, white,...) and the people I happened to meet and a million other small factors.

If you have any specific questions don’t hesitate to inbox me or send me a message.

Rio de Janeiro

I spent my exchange semester in Brazil or more precisely in Rio de Janeiro. Rio de Janeiro is without a doubt a city unlike any other (I have ever seen at least). My favourite thing about Rio is its diversity in both its population and the landscape. Rio really has it all amazing beaches, lush-greenness and a buzzing city. The city itself was probably my favorite thing about my exchange. I remember the first day I arrived and drove through the city to get to my apartment. I was fascinated by how the rich and the poor lived so close to each other and how there were 15 story buildings right in front of green hills and corporate office next to a beach.

Culture and People

The culture is completely different from anything I have ever experienced before. People in Brazil are so friendly it is shocking. Everyone seems to be open to have a chat and help you out. The one downside I found to this (as an introvert) while everyone is open to having a chat it can be hard to find real, solid friends. People tend to talk about hanging out or doing something but as you are talking about it both of you already know that it will never happen. So while in general, I cannot complain about people since they are very friendly to foreigners I have not made any real friends.

Language

However, not making friends might also have something to do with the fact that my Portuguese wasn’t really good enough to speak much when I arrived here and most people don’t really speak English. While it has improved greatly (especially my understanding of native speakers) I am still missing the practice to come up with words quickly enough to have a fluent conversation. Also, slang is still an issue while I have learned some of it there seems to be an endless amount of slang terms that I will probably never know (the fact that Brazilian Portuguese slang changes quickly and varies by region isn’t helping either):

Food

I have a love-hate relationship with Brazilian food. There’s some food I really enjoy but then there is even more food that I don’t particularly like. The food that I did enjoy seemed to get too monotonous quickly. In general Brazilian cuisine tends to be very much meat-based (being a vegetarian is still somewhat rare here) with carbs also playing a big role. As someone who prefers to eat a bit more plant-based and lighter it was a bit difficult to imagine eating a typical Brazilian diet every day. But of course, this wasn’t really an issue I just bought my vegetables in the supermarket and prepared them the same way I would have at home. But I did miss typical dishes from home and also Maki with avocado or cucumber (for some reason they only have sushi with actual fish here).

Money

Brazil is not as cheap as some other Latin American countries, especially Rio is quite expensive. I would say on average the living expenses here are as much as in other European cities (not London or Paris). The prices for food are pretty moderate with imported goods, of course, being more expensive. The metro is cheap compared to European standards and while it does cover much less area than the underground systems in most other major cities it really does take you pretty much everywhere that you’ll need to go. Uber is also surprisingly cheap. If you can split the ride it might just end up being cheaper than the metro ticket. My monthly living expenses without trips and rent were around: €500.

Housing

The rent prices vary greatly depending on the area you live in, however, in general, the standard of living is lower so even if you pay €500 a month the apartment might have all the necessities but often just doesn’t look as pretty (not an issue just something to keep in mind). I personally chose to live in an apartment in Ipanema which I shared with another girl from my university we paid about €500/month each. When choosing an area to live in you should keep in mind that there are areas that are not so safe. Personally, we booked our apartment on Airbnb but many people find theirs on facebook or upon arrival.

Trips

I managed to go on quite a few trips but getting around Brazil can quickly get complicated and expensive since it is such a huge country. If you have a place you already know you would like to visit I recommend booking the airplane ticket as early as possible the closer you get to the date the more expensive they tend to get. The cheapest airplane ticket I managed to get was about €70 (one hour flight, no checked bags). There are buses almost everywhere and they can be significantly cheaper however it is debatable whether you would rather pay €60 and drive for 14 hours or pay €150 - 200 and fly for 2 to 3 hours. For shorther distances buses are of course completely fine and you can book most of them online or buy a ticket directly at the central bus station.

Personally, I visited:

Paraty Salvador Belo Horizonte Ouro Preto Buzios Blumenau Curitiba Porto Alegre São Paulo Petropolis

Education system

Like in many countries getting a good education in Brazil means getting a private education. Since my university had a contract with a private university that’s the kind of educational environment I experienced. Personally, education is a topic I feel quite passionate about or more specifically I feel quite passionate about the belief that education should be as accessible as possible to as many people as possible (I am not going to go in-depth here about why..). The Brazilian education system is built in a way that greatly advantages people who are more well off than the average Brazilian. I personally was not a fan of my university since I felt the entire thing was just this bubble that didn’t in any way mirror the Rio that I experienced outside of university. 

Society

I touched upon this briefly in the previous section. One of the most interesting dynamics about Brazil is the society. There seems to be this strange dichotomy were Brazilians are proud of the diversity of their population yet there is some kind of deeply ingrained, probably to a large degree unconscious (like in many countries), racism going on. People who are noticeably darker in complexion are mostly still part of the poorest of the population while the richest look astonishingly European and nothing is done to change this. Brazilians are proud of their diversity yet the order of their society still reflects one of the colonial times. (I am in no way saying that every Brazilian supports the way things are. This is more a reflection of the politics going on in the country which are unfortunately corrupt to a large degree so we cannot exactly consolidate the current societal state with the actual opinion of people)

Touristy things + Leisure time

Now for a lighter topic. There is plenty to see in Rio and when I say plenty I mean a lot as in I didn’t even manage to see everything that I wanted to see. I plan to make a more comprehensive post on places to see in Rio (well-known ones and some not so well known). Leisure time is to a large degree spent outdoors on the beach, hiking, or at parties. One disadvantage of Rio is that it is a quite outdoorsy city so when it rains there aren’t many options for entertainment.

Party and dating culture

Parties here are a lot more spontaneous often happening on the street in front of university buildings. They are also a bit wilder it is quite common for one person to make out with several different people a night and it is almost unheard of that someone doesn’t drink alcohol. Dating culture from what I experienced (which is admittedly somewhat limited) is very relaxed. Casual relationships are extremely common and break-ups are usually quite pragmatic. At the same time, the macho culture is still a bit more prevalent than in many European countries. As someone who is introverted and doesn’t really enjoy casual relationships or just dating for the sake of dating it wasn’t my thing but each to their own.

Conclusion

Would I want to live here forever? No. Did I really like the experience? Yes. Brazil is what I like to refer to as an “extrovert country”. So as an introvert it can be quite exhausting to navigate the social life here even more so than in european countries since people here are very talkative and open. However, this was a thing I was prepared for and since it was a dream of mine to got to Brazil one day despite that I can’t say that I didn’t have a great time and that it wasn’t worth it. I definitely see myself coming back to see more of the country. I simply personally enjoy the openness for a short period of time but it would probably be too much for me to live like this for the rest of my life. I am also quite thankful to have been born in a european country with free education, pretty good public health care, less corruption and overall more stability. Still I would not ever tell anyone NOT to go to Brazil, or Rio especially. I like to think of Rio as the bad boy of cities. It might be a little dangerous or more uncomfortable than others but it’s just so pretty, fascinating and mysterious you can’t help but fall in love. 

[natsubeatsrock]

Dearest Friends

I want to talk about Nalu more. I know, what a shock. As if I need an excuse to talk about this ship. But there was a line of reasoning I wrote about a few times and want to follow. (Not to mention if I don't flex now and then, I let the new crowd of Nalu haters win.)

I think that Nalu could have been a good ship. I don't know that any ship I consider of less merit than Gajevy (which is the best of the Big 4) could be seen as a great ship, especially from the guy responsible for Harelie (still an underrated top tier ship). But as far as "friends to lovers" go, this would have been a good take. I don't even put it past Mashima to bring them together during the sequel in some wat that will fall along "party lines". 

Even as I'd argue for other relationships in most scenarios being better, the cool thing about Nalu is that they genuinely grow to care for each other. It's jarring to go back to the old arcs of Fairy Tail and see some of the things Natsu and Lucy do. I know that something, something groping (I'm trying to be nice) but it's hard to see Natsu outright call Lucy useless or even treat her being captured nonchalantly as happens in a few of the early arcs. And for her part, Lucy has warmed up to (some of) Natsu's crazy antics and has, at some of their best moments, been the one planning around Natsu, even as he does the same. 

Speaking of which, another cool thing about the ship is that they have fought together. Action series are no stranger to ships involving characters that can and end up fighting together. But I can't think of too many examples of ships that fight as much as Natsu and Lucy do. More often, people fight each other and end up shipped by fans regardless of whether it makes sense to or not. Of course, that might be a problem with the media I'm currently consuming but, I'd love to see more of this is media (hopes in Yona of the Dawn/recommendations). 

The funny thing about Nalu is that others in the series do hint at them potentially being a couple. Mashima doesn't pull the trigger on them, but the characters in the series tease at the idea that there might be more to their relationship than even they believe to be true. One of my favorite chapters in the series, “Natsu and Asuka”, even almost has them kiss. (inb4 “but that’s an omake”)

What is especially interesting and helpful in thinking about this is that amazing quote from Mashima regarding another favorite chapter of mine. He described his writing of their dynamic as "more than friends, less than lovers". They have a great relationship that has a weight and importance similar to a romantic relationship, but it expresses itself as a platonic friendship. They are friends who ought to stick together no matter what. 

Now, if it sounds like I'm turning a new leaf and shipping Nalu, it isn't. I have always believed that Nalu works at its best when it is a platonic relationship. Of course, there are issues with how their relationship plays out - issues that go beyond "simple problems that happen with imperfect humans." (Sorry I broke into your house again, teehee.) However, I have tried my best not to rely on that as an argument. 

Though, on this side of the last chapter, a rather annoying pro argument for Nalu has gained traction. Apparently, Nalu did become canon in its own way. Rather than having clear romantic canonization, as many argue the rest of the Big 4 do, they became canon in a way that feels more in character for them. You know, because it would be weird to show a couple is canon with a kiss or having an obvious confession like a normal couple. 

As you can imagine, I have roasted this aspect of Nalu arguments within days of that chapter coming out. (People were making that argument back then and I found it stupid then.) I don't consider Nalu to be canon and I have numerous arguments why this is a bad argument. However, I don't think I've talked about what I'm about to enough. Part of that, I'd like to think, is because I've had time to think about the series and its ending as a whole. 

I feel that the idea that this is a kind of secret confession is an unfortunate misreading of the situation. It's been said many times that friendship is the gateway to romance. From my perspective, this is dangerous to leave on its own. To be clear, a good romance should involve an obvious level of friendship (can't say from experience) and a good friendship can become a romantic relationship (again, not from experience). But the vast majority of friendships you will likely be in aren't going to be romantic in any sense. 

The thing that always gets me in these ship discussions, especially as someone who writes about this stuff all the time, is that it's always hard to swallow that pill when it applies to your own ship. I can do that for Nalu, but if this was someone else's post on Graytear, I would have personal issues with them and their conclusions. I get that there's a level of personal interpretation that matters when this comes into any and all shipping. 

But, like, when the series creator says that his current writing of the ship in question isn't exactly romantic, that should mean something in this discussion. (inb4 "but muh death of the author") I feel like the fact that they haven't clearly become a romantic couple means they aren't a couple yet if they're even ever going to become one. There’s a difference between not liking what canon gives you and ignoring reality and this whole line of argumentation reeks of the latter.

What gets me the most about this argument is that this current state of Nalu is probably the end goal of a perfect friendship. Gaining a friend who will be with you forever? Who wouldn't want that? I certainly want something like that, even if it isn't romantic. Heck, there are (probably) advantages to that kind of friend being platonic over a lover. I’m not saying that romantic relationships can’t be expected to last forever? I’m wondering why people think friendships can’t also last forever as friendships.

In Conclusion:

That Nalu and Lucy consider each other to be their closest friend should be amazing in its own right. For all the issues one can have with their dynamic, it should be great that they can celebrate their friendship. This isn't a friendship complicated by weird rivalries or coming from different worlds. They met, grew close together, and will hopefully grow old together as friends.

[naferty]

Part 2!

~~~

Reunion

(Stroganoff au, a/b/o dynamics, stony, Gregory comes for a visit)

They celebrate the get together in his yard. It’s a beautiful day. The sun is out and clouds are slowly moving along. Tables are full of food and snacks. Chips and dip are on one corner and fruit and salad bowls are on the other. Soda, juice, cucumber water, wine and more are available and hot dogs and ingredients to make tacos make up the main course.

There’s plenty for everyone invited. Even the neighbors are invited to stop by and grab a plate for themselves and their families. Many happily take up the offer, chat with Tony and Steve and go on their merry way.

There is laughter in the air. Everybody is greeting everyone. Many are catching up and others are telling stories. Old friends and new and more family. Jarvis is out and about offering drinks, much to Tony and Steve’s dismay. Clint and Rhodey are arguing over the grill and who cooks the dogs better. The Nanas are sitting together in the center, joined by Winnifred. Their laughter in harmony and their stories embarrassing their sons. Tony, Steve, Rhodey and Bucky are left to moan in agony as their mothers reveal everything to everyone willing to listen.

Because of luck, T’Challa is there to join the festivities and brought with him his sister, who’s already causing trouble with Peter, Harley and Riri. Tony had gotten a bouncing castle for the ‘kids’ as a joke, but the joke’s on him as all four are using it to their full advantage. They don’t even care if they’re too old for it. It’s their temporary and personal hideout from boring adults.

Games are being played, drinks are drunk, hot dogs are being eaten and everyone is happy. Worries are far behind them and no one expects the shadow that follows after a sleek, blue and all aesthetic car or what it brings ahead for their festivities.

The first to notice the strange but recognizable face is Jan. It stops her in her tracks as she’s holding a plate of hot dogs and chips. She blinks and blinks again then shakes her head and blinks one more time before finally accepting that, yes, Gregory Stark is really standing on the sidewalk of her friend’s house.

Her sudden stop is not missed by others. Soon, everyone near her vicinity follows her gaze and come upon the same conclusion. That is indeed the CEO of SI and that is him walking towards their gathering with an insulting swagger and throwing shade with just his sunglasses on. His outfit consists of a sharp suit and expensive Italian shoes and is very out of place with all of their casual attires and sundresses.

Jan is quick to move through the crowd in search of Tony, but in the time it took her to find him many of the others further in the crowd have noticed the arrival of the misplaced CEO alpha. The laughter goes down. Whispers and hushed tones fill the air now. The music covers for the suddenly tense atmosphere, but the change is still easily noticed. It catches Peter’s attention. Not wanting to be out of the loop of in his own home he rushes out of the bouncing castle and looks for the source of the sudden silence.

His eyes go wide when he sees the sharp figure. He almost doesn’t recognize him. Photos don’t prepare you for the real thing and Peter didn’t actually expect the guy to show up, but he’s here now and Peter admits he’s a little excited. His Nana Maria might get what she wants after all!

The man stops short of reaching the center of the crowd. He looks around, taking in his surroundings before grinning and taking off his sunglasses. “I’m here at last. I’d apologize for being late, but what can you do? Where are the hosts? I’d like to personally thank them for the invite.”

Peter is left a bit unbalanced. Now that’s a strong personality. “Uh, Mr Stark? I mean - Sir?”

The eyes of the alpha land on him. Cold and calculating blue eyes. Nothing like his Mam’s warm and brown ones or even close to his Pop’s soft and caring blue ones.

“You Peter?”

Peter straightens his back. “Yeah, yeah that’s me. Peter’s my name and you’re Gregory Stark, right? You made it!”

“Yeah, I made it,” SI Stark’s smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Nice party, kid. What are we celebrating?”

Before Peter could answer Harley walks up beside him, posturing as much as a tiny ten-year-old alpha could. “Who’s the suit?”

SI Stark studies him for a second before nodding in… approval? “His uncle.”

“We have enough of those. Thanks,” Harley says and Peter is ready to shoo him away before he scares their Nana’s only chance at the reunion she wants, but SI Stark only laughs.

He looks between them. “Another one? Little Anthony went and had two of you, huh? Surprised he managed you,” he points to Harley. “Didn’t think he had it in him.”

That… sounded insulting. Is that meant to be an insult?

“Gregory, what a surprise.” Through the crowd came their Mam and right by his side stood their Pop. The two… don’t exactly look happy at their new guest.

Gregory is unfazed. “Anthony! A very long time no see. How have you been? How’s business?”

“Oh, you know. Living my life, moving along happily and debating on whether getting a signature stamp for signing all those contracts flooding my desk is worth an investment or not. You know how it is. So what are you doing here?”

SI Stark chuckles as he raises his arms in show. “I got invited. Took a long time for my invitation to arrive, but I finally got it. Thanks for that, Pete.”

All eyes turn to him, making Peter want to melt into the ground. Somehow, sending that letter felt like the wrong thing to have done. Looking around he didn’t see a single face happy at his choice. Not even his Nana Maria, who he had done this all for, looks happy to see her son there.

“You’re welcome,” he tries for cheerful. He fails.

Pop moves forward. “Steve Rogers,” he… introduces himself? - and shit, had they never met before? Did Peter just force his Pop and his brother-in-law to meet for the very first time? Did Peter just cause this gathering to become… awkward??

“Gregory Stark, but you all know that.”

Oh, my god, he did! He did force an awkward force first meeting!

He’s so grounded.

His Pop took a deep breath. The kind of breath that meant he’s holding back something that’s not going to be pretty if unleashed. Peter and Harley knew of that intake well. They grew up fearing it the one or two times it happened. Not aimed at them, thankfully. Aimed at some unfortunate soul unlucky enough to have the wrath of Commander Rogers on them. Gregory is not starting out great at all.

“Sure,” Pop is very unimpressed. “Food and drinks are in the back. We’re about to start some games. You’re welcome to join.”

“Don't think I will. I'll mingle. See what's so special. Perhaps catch up with Mother,” he says in an obnoxious tone before heading off into the crowd. Not bothered by the way the others seem to put distance when he gets close.

That's not how Peter expected this to go at all. They are supposed to be ecstatic and greet each other like long lost family members. Nana Maria is supposed to come rushing to her son and happily introduce him to everyone. Everyone here is supposed to include him with open arms, or at least less hostility, than what most are showing him now.

Instead, no one is smiling. No one even tries to pretend to smile. Not Jarvis, not even Nana Maria, and Peter doesn’t know why. 

He’s left to stand awkwardly as his guest meanders away and attempts small talk with his family members who are very obviously shunning him.

[realfxntasy]

The decline of Game of thrones SPOILERS INNIT

So the show has finally came to an end, it took the world by storm with its twists and turns, the violence, intrigue, characters, worlds and winning the award of most genitalia shown on a TV screen. But the last season was unfortunately blasted with lots of heat, negative opinions rained fire on the show’s creators just as Dany did to all those innocent Kings Landings citizens. So where did the beginning of the end start for game of thrones? Let us take a look at thrones in its entirety and talk about what happened to the show we all once loved.

I absolutely loved the first six seasons, they were incredible, season one introduced us to a world of deep political intrigue, not your usual fantasy, this one was incredibly dark and realistic, realistic even when it had zombies and dragons, like a world that really could exist, because the show managed to capture so elegantly the motives of each character and why they acted as they did. Seasons two, three and four brought the same brilliant realism, intrigue and storytelling but upped the ante with some incredible spectacle, I remember watching the battle of kings landing for the first time, seeing the shot of wildfire explode and thinking this show was just something else, season three brought serious shock in terms of the red wedding and season four showed off the shows continuous ability for intense battle sequences mixed with great character development during the battle for the wall. The first four seasons for me are basically near perfect, I’m sure there are flaws here and there but none I can remember too well, they facilitate game of thrones as one of the greatest shows on television.

Season five is where things began to change a little for me, not greatly though, season five was still fantastic, the plot with the sons of harpy, the tensions on the wall, in Mereen and so forth but I felt the pacing did struggle at some points especially in Mereen and Kings Landing, luckily by the end of the season I felt things really begin to kick off as Dany had to fall to the whims of the slavers and re open the fighting pits, Cersei got in hot bother with the sons of the harpy and was arrested for her sins and who could forget Hardhome, it was amazing. However even though season five was still a high quality part of the thrones story it does to some degree begin to mark the beginning of the end as this was when things really began to deviate from the books, I hadn’t read the books the first time I saw season five so I wasn’t sure what I was missing out on, but my god, I’m up to date on the Song of Ice and Fire novels now and there is some difference, mainly where a certain place named Dorne is concerned, this is where most people’s complains about season five stem from, the whole Dorne arc seemed to be a little rushed and quite flimsy at points, but this was game of thrones, it had delivered so much, so why would we have been worried? Well I certainly wasn’t but looking back now this was where you can really put the show creators into question, they properly deviated from the books this time and it was up to them and their own creativity and it was the first time the show seemed to fall short a little, not that I hated the Dorne arc or anything but at the same time the frustration people feel comes from how good it was in the books I believe.

Season six, I really enjoyed season six, it was the point where the show seemed to really be moving on to its grand conclusion, Bran was having visions about Ned Stark and Lyanna and if you had seen any internet theory video on the fabled R + L = J then you knew what was coming, the hype was real, Jamie was facing off the Blackfish in a part now taken from the books, rather than his Dorne arc which the show writers created the season before and the change in quality here with a sequence from the book was more evident, the battle of the bastards gave us one of the most gut wrenching and intense battles not just on TV but really in any medium, straight out of a movie really, who could also forget Cersei’s glorious revenge against everyone who ever screwed her over when she blew up the Sept of Baelor and finally the season ended with Dany making her way to the seven kingdoms, season six for me was absolute quality and I think we were all pretty hyped for what was to come in season seven.

But then, all of a sudden, something was different. Season seven was when things began to truly go downhill; the show had veered off from the books fully now and it was up to the show’s creators to keep the quality up, season seven for me was poor for a number of reasons, the biggest flaw for me was how they had completely thrown away game of thrones’ realism, not in terms of fantasy, the white walkers and dragons are fine, but how it became a show where things happened for plot convenience and really badly at that, people were using teleportation all over the map by this point like the show was an MMO or something, beyond the wall was the perfect example of this, we see Jon, Tormund, the hound and the rest of the gang travelling north to capture a Wight, its cool to finally see so many beloved characters in one place but at the same time the whole thing feels messy, it looks like a hard and long trek and they send Gendry back to the wall when they’re in trouble because he’s ‘the fastest’, Gendry makes it back to the wall in record time and sends a raven off to Dany, the raven reaches her and she’s off to the north to fight the white walkers, meanwhile Jon and the gang are surrounded by hundreds of the dead, things felt so sped up by this point, there was no pacing, everything was going on at once. Another issue with season seven was to do with the death of intrigue and compelling writing, Kings Landing, where pretty much every scene from the show was riddled with genius dialogue and political stakes was now completely forgettable, not once in season seven or eight did you actually see a crowd of nobles watching the queen decide the fate of the realm, it was simply Cersei and her closest allies treating with Euron and not much else, I was really disappointed with how little interest seemed to be going on in Kings Landing, as for Winterfell, my god, I was furious with the treatment of one certain character, Arya, she was easily one of my favourite characters in the show until this point. The entire debacle for me was over how her relationship was handled with Sansa, they seemed to force some kind of split between the sisters for the sake of it and it just felt completely uncalled for, I get that sisters are like to argue but Arya was pointing out such strange things about Sansa, she was genuinely trying to do what was best for the people of Winterfell but Arya began accusing her of all sorts, of being power hungry, narcissistic and self-serving, I really just didn’t buy it, if they gave it more time and some more development of such an idea like Sansa really trying to uproot what Jon was doing as King in the north then I would have understood, but it really just seemed like the show creators were forcing a divide between the sisters so they could have an excuse to build tension, then have them reunite to kill Littlefinger, which to me was also a bit of disappointment, I think a lot of us didn’t expect Littlefinger to go out so easily, he seemed like he could have a plan for almost anything, if it did come to the point where he was put on trial for being more or less a giant snake wouldn’t he have something up his sleeve? like how maybe the Lords of the vale are under his rule, bound by law to serve their lord, when Robb Stark executed Lord Karstark the north lost all Karstark men, when Sansa executes Littlefinger the Vale just shrugs it off, meh, is basically their reaction, this is the vale which loyally served a lunatic of a women, everyone could see how much Lysa Arryn had lost her mind, but the laws are laws, people must follow their Lords and ladies, such is the nature of Westeros and its culture, or so we’d think, the men of the Vale allow their Lord Littlefinger to perish, Littlefinger being a supposed genius, wouldn’t he think something like, I don’t know, ‘I should probably make sure all the vale is loyal to me so they love me and protect me’ the man is always tactical and conniving, finally he is the Lord of an entire people and he doesn’t really use this to his advantage at all. The dynamic between Dany and Jon Snow was fairly interesting; Jon refuses to have the North bend the knee to the iron throne once more regardless of who is sitting on it, but he also needs Dany for the obsidian down in the Dragonstone mines, it’s a pretty interesting plot, yet still I found the dialogue wasn’t as conveying as the previous seasons where the words which came out of characters mouths were like music to my ears. It was in season seven I began to worry that the lack of episode count in the season really pushed the writers to hurry up and get this thing moving, therefore sacrificing a lot of the shows quality.

Let’s move on to the final season, game of thrones had a much needed years break it seemed to me, I was glad about this, I mean look how long it’s taking Georgie to write the next book Winds of Winter so by all means go ahead HBO and give the show some time to work on what it needs to, so the first episode aired and well, I was excited you know, they had a year off so things seemed to look up, but erm, well I wasn’t exactly super impressed by the opening scenes, one in particular, we’ve got Tyrion and Varys in a carriage, famed for their trading of incredible wit and knowledge, clearly the years have not been kind to Tyrion as all he can muster up in this scene is, “I have balls and you don’t” I know it’s not much but for me it really just set the tone of how dialogue would be handled this season. The next episode picked things up a little for me, there was more character development, Samwell is traumatized by the news of his father and tells Jon of his true heritage and Sansa is also none too happy about Dany and the power she now has over the North, it seemed like things were moving in the direction of some in-fighting, Sansa would maybe raise the north up against Dany, Jon would be highly conflicted on the matter and friends would have to turn on friends, classic game of thrones, I was thinking maybe they would end up destroying each other, and as the white walkers come they are decimated, too busy fighting politics the white walkers end up causing serious damage the living, thus the lesson is humanity could not hope to survive divided. Anyhow the white walkers invade in episode three, now this episode for the most part I found really enjoyable, the action was crazy, it was intense and the visuals were something else, scenes like the Dothraki swords being lit on fire got me all chuffed about how far the show had come and Arya being trapped in the library with a bunch of Wights was gut wrenching, however then comes the end of the episode, in a twist pretty much nobody was expecting, Arya kills the Night King, well damn, there it was, the apocalypse was over, it was very strange to say the least, no one expected it to happen, I was one of the people who was a little optimistic about the season still, I got it, so the Night King is beat and the final battle is for the iron throne, ok I guess it is all about the Iron throne at heart but still it did leave a strange taste in my mouth as the shows greatest enemy was defeated before the final episodes, it felt like whatever could happen now was just a little underwhelming compared to the fight against the dead, all this we heard about no wars mattering but the great war as Jon would say, but now it was over. In the next episode Dany declares optimistically that ‘the we have won the great war, now we will win the last war’ ok cool I get it, I’m thinking let’s see what the show has to offer from here, the party scene shows that everyone loves Jon Snow and that Dany is becoming very insecure about her ability to rule as everyone loves Jon and that he is also the rightful heir to the throne, this all seemed well and good to me, things were getting interesting, sure the dialogue still was off par compared to earlier seasons but I was still behind the program here, despite my fears, by this point a lot of people seemed to have lost faith in game of thrones, I understand this, the decline here was evident but I was kind of hopeful that despite the bad writing and entire rushed feel of the final season the ending would be satisfactory, therefore not taking away from the shows overall glory. As episode four continued some more questionable things began to happen, Rhaegon is straight up shot out of the sky with four straight bolts placed perfectly, it all happened in an instant, so fast I couldn’t really process it, Dany then goes into a rage and heads straight to Euron’s ships to toast them all, as at least a dozen more bolts are shot this time and Drogon is arguably in better range they all seem to miss? The plot armor is pretty strong here, never the less Dany retreats and Euron’s fleet destroys Dany’s. Oh and I almost forgot to mention, let’s take a pause from the episode and have a look at one certain character, Euron Greyjoy, if you haven’t read the books then I’ll explain things for you, Euron from the books is a straight up psychopath, his presence is felt in every page he’s in, the way he is portrayed in the books is brilliant, he’s extremely selfish, power hungry, savage yet also comes across intelligent in a horrifically manipulative way, he’s also very mysterious, the man came back from travelling all over the world, he’s seen things no one else in Westeros has but in the show, he’s pretty dull to be honest, he’s mad but in just a silly lunatic fashion more than anything else, I just don’t think anyone is that bothered about Euron in the show, he’s not a great character, I’m ok with things being different from the books, its fine, but Euron isn’t different to the book in an interesting way, he’s just a really bad version of the real Euron, this is illustrating my point further that the writers don’t seem to be handling things well if it’s not taken from the book, which is sad because in earlier seasons there’s scenes that aren’t in the books that are exclusively part of the show that are brilliant pieces of dialogue, every exchange between Littlefinger and Varys in the show is purely the show writers creation, ‘the chaos is a ladder’ scene isn’t in the books, and it is one of the shows definite high lights. Back to the main story, Dany makes it to Kings Landing and Cersei declares she will not be making peace any time soon, thus beheading a captured Missandei, ok so we all know what is coming, one final battle for Kings Landing. Episode five, some scenes in this episode are actually great, Tyrion setting Jaimie free and them having a brotherly bond hit me hard, visually everything was excellent and you truly felt right in the middle of the onslaught. Drogon absolutely rips through Euron’s fleet like butter, which was weird to me because the season set up how dangerous the scorpions (the giant dragon killing crossbow machines) were to dragons but apparently not, there’s plenty on the city walls and on Euron’s ships but Drogon evades all and destroys every one of them, finally he flies back to the front of the city and destroys the golden company who are meant to be pretty formidable but they completely disappoint, they just act as more cannon fodder really, also I was well salty that no elephants appeared, why even set that up just to tear down our expectations? Then the moment that shocked us all, the men of Kings Landing surrender despite Cersei’s commands, yet Dany decidedly burns the whole city anyway and murders plenty of innocents as part of her rage. So this is where pretty much 90% of the shows audience turns on the show, that’s not an exact statistic but it seems like a whole lot of people got furious here, I want to go in deep on Dany’s turn to full madness, some of it can be explained, she was insecure that the thing she has worked for so hard is now out of reach because she is not in fact the true heir despite believing that for most of her life, she’s lost two of her dragons and one of her closest advisers betrayed her via her lover revealing he is in fact the true heir, it’s tough we can definitely say that, but does it merit what the creators did with Dany, overall no I don’t think so, certain signs were indeed there, she nailed nobles of Mereen to crosses independent of their part in the slave trade and burned one of them to root out the sons of the harpies, from her slow decline you could see how Dany becomes less of savior to more of a lawful bad in serve of the greater good, she wants the best but she’ll be absolute in judgement to achieve it, however the slaughter we see in Kings Landing is chaotic evil, not lawful, it’s just utter madness, killing soldiers in an army is lawful and cannot be avoided, their all farmers and villagers when you think about it, enlisted into the ranks but in war killing them is virtually unavoidable, however I don’t think Dany could see murdering innocent children as unavoidable, the greater good always seemed in her best interest, serving the oppressed in society, here she murders everyone she claimed to once motivate her, her turn to madness is just, well, mad. Her character is completely butchered and not just her, Cersei’s ending I found to be pretty underwhelming, I felt the shows undoubtedly greatest villain should have gone out in a blaze of glory and madness, Cersei was truly mad, yet she gives up completely while Dany takes the spotlight of lunatic, it just doesn’t seem right, it feels completely rushed. Moving onto the final episode, I was hoping despite all that had happened this episode could make the ending still satisfying to a degree, everyone would have to fight Dany and restore order to the kingdom, again the visuals are stunning, the scene where Drogons wings fly over Dany and it looks like she’s half human half dragon was crazy good, I also loved how the throne room looked exactly the same as it did in season two when she had her vision of the red keep, but the action is over before it starts, with Jon killing Dany while she kisses him, it was certainly an anti-climax, what happens from here is by far the worst.

This is where I just wanted the show to end already, there are so many strange things going on in the finale, Grey worm decides to not kill Jon Snow despite already being shown as blood crazed and exclusively loyal to Dany, Grey worm has been in Westeros for maybe a year or less I’m not sure and at no point does he show any care for the other lords of the kingdom, only his queens law, as you’d expect, he’s from the other side of the world and it was Dany who saved him from slavery, he only came to Westeros to serve Dany, but for some reason he keeps both Tyrion and Jon alive and awaits the judgement of some nobles he barely knows or cares about, and what great judgement they all have. This was the biggest crime of all for me, Tyrion spouts some absolute garbage about stories uniting people, to one point I get it, everyone loves a good story about their ruler but really it just wasn’t a very convincing reason overall for me, and to choose Bran as the King of Westeros, what… the … f### ok so the reasoning for Bran to be king is that he, well, knows everything, but this isn’t even a good reason, a king must have heart, he must sympathise with his people and make a choice for the realm he believes is right, having an overpowered omniscient wizard as king is a terrible choice, Bran is so un-relatable, he can’t even connect to his siblings, telling Sansa how she looked beautiful during one of the most traumatising moments of her life and completely freaking her out for example in season seven, Bran also has zero experience ruling anything, he is literally the least suitable choice for king out of everyone sat there, just elect the Dornish geezer because he has a cool beard, that makes for a good story, Brans sister who has survived the Lannisters, Littlefinger and Ramsey Bolton and has also got experience ruling the north is just passed up for the magical tree wizard, I was happy Sansa ended up ruling the north but really did Tyrion not consider her for the throne? She even shows her commanding presence when she completely shuts down her uncle who tries to state why he should be king. Now what about the other characters, Jon gets sent back to the wall, what an unsatisfying character arc for the man rising above his constant mistreatment through childhood as the bastard, as the soldier on the wall, to lord commander, to king in the north, the ultimate underdog, oh then back to the wall, it’s just ridiculous and he doesn’t even seem bothered, neither do his siblings, then he goes off with the wildlings to I assume become king of the free folk which isn’t really explained but we just take it as it is, poor effort I think. The complete decline of smart decisions is shown off with the new small council, why is Bronn on the small council! This is completely baffling, I liked Bronn’s whole point of all Lords and houses beginning out as cut throats, Littlefinger started out from nothing but he’s a devious genius who worked his way up to the small council, Bronn is just there, chilling as the new master of coin literally nothing but a bloodthirsty mercenary, I mean who needs someone with actual knowledge of Westeros’ economy anyway? It was simply so we could see a familiar character we once liked be there for maybe an attempt of fan service or something, it’s strange the final season on one hand feels like a bad attempt of fan service but then also a bad attempt of completely subverting fan expectations.  

So, game of thrones, this is how I feel overall, it was my favourite tv show hands down, it was genius, the first four seasons are near perfect to me, I’d say the decline of this show is down to two main things, the deviation from the books, unfortunately the writers of the show don’t live up to George R.R Martins masterful way with words, the rushed nature, they only had two seasons to finish everything up, with less episodes too, we cannot fully blame the writers, I think in earlier seasons they demonstrated an ability to make great original content for the show, but with the added pressure of finishing the show in just two seasons and thirteen episodes this just put things in disarray, the mistreating of characters, bad dialogue, flimsy plot choices  and an unsatisfactory ending. However despite this I’d say we can still enjoy the good parts of this show, like any form of art, its subject to interpretation, nothing can be perfect and this is ok, I hope the writers of game of thrones take all criticism constructively and don’t get disheartened by the some of the monumental hate they’re getting, this is how art improves, through feedback, I don’t think game of thrones should be rewritten or anything like some are proposing, take it for what it is and enjoy the show for what it once was, a masterpiece and it’s not like there were not some enjoyable parts in the last season, the battle for Winterfell in episode three of season eight was genuinely incredible to me, and who’s to say if you loved the last two seasons you’re wrong, this is simply my opinion so by all means if you loved game of thrones all the way through, more power to you, don’t let others ruin your opinion, I think it’s important for us all to have our own opinion on shows and other forms of entertainment, this is mine, let me know yours! Thanks for reading, peace dudes : )

[pass-the-bechdel]

Continuum season one full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

80% (eight of ten)

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

30.6%  

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

One, episode 1.05, “A Test of Time” (41.18%)

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-two. Seven who appear in more than one episode, five who appear in at least half the episodes, and one who appears in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Forty-four. Fifteen who appear in more than one episode, eleven who appear in at least half the episodes, and three who appear in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Perfectly average, with nothing terrible, but nothing of note, either.  (average rating of 3.0)

General Season Quality:

Solid. It attempts to merge police procedural element with a more serialized narrative, and generally succeeds at both.  It is also clearly a series that realizes the potential of its premise and is interested in exploring it in depth.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Let’s talk about heroes.

Heroism, in stories set in versions of Earth that are meant to resemble ours—see: the MCU, Supergirl, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, earthbound Doctor Who stories not set in the future—tends to be associated with maintaining the status quo. As disruptive as heroes often are by nature and necessity, they generally don’t work to change things for the better in a general way, but rather, to ensure things don’t get worse. Society, by implication, becomes “good enough”—something worth keeping around as is. This tendency is occasionally questioned—not surprising, given all the ways the status quo isn’t actually good for many people—but the story’s internal rules mean that the conclusion is often a half-hearted “eh, what other option is there?” with the occasional “but that way lies tyranny!” While this stance isn’t entirely without reason, it’s also often frustrating. Inaction and tyranny aren’t the only choices, so why pretend that they are?  

This right here is one of the main reasons why I really appreciate Continuum, and why I would probably do so even if the show weren’t as consistently solid as it is.  It is a show entirely built around the idea that the status quo is untenable, and that trying to keep things as they are can only bring about the destruction of the human race at the hands of the 1%.  While it’s far from the only series with a social conscience, it is one of the very few to declare that what is needed is massive, widespread and disruptive social change. That it does so while also being a police procedural, a genre that tends to be almost inextricably tied to conservative politics and an affinity for the status quo, is all the more impressive.  

I’m fascinated by stories about people vs. the future—it’s the absolute impossibility of the struggle that gets me. I mean, how do you fight change? Sarah Connors’ battle wasn’t just about deadly people-killing robots; it was a fight against progress, a refusal to acknowledge that humans will continue to advance technologically no matter what you do, and  “winning,” in those terms, meant undoing the previous fifty years of existence. Team Machine’s battle against Samaritan hit the same points: in the end, if didn’t matter whether one particular artificial super-intelligence was atomized, because another would take its place—maybe not soon but eventually.  

While Liber8’s struggle has some similarities to these fights, it is, in the end, fundamentally different. The Corporate Congress and the mass demotion of actual people to second-class citizens isn’t inevitable the way the advent of artificial super-intelligences is. There’s no reason why humanity can’t continue progressing technologically AND choose not to bring back indentured servitude. If the terrible future happens, it’s not because the arc of humanity inevitably bends towards corporate dystopia, but because the people in positions to change things…didn’t. Also, while artificial super-intelligences are still years away, Continuum’s apocalyptic future isn’t really the future at all.  Corporations aren’t going to wait fifty years before they choose to actively reduce people’s freedoms in order to obtain ever greater profits; it’s what they’re doing at this very moment.  Liber8’s battle is much more urgent and immediate, and that ups the difficulty level of the storytelling immeasurably—it would have been very easy for the series to fuck it all up.  

Fortunately, Continuum, for the most part, hasn’t.  It’s not perfect—its theory of oppression largely ignores the role of marginalized identities, and how these shape the way oppression is performed and perceived (and no, making most of Liber8’s members people of color isn’t enough to address this)—but the series’ heart and storytelling instincts appear to be where they need to be. They actually care about the issues at play, and that’s mostly evidenced in the fact that it treats Liber8’s fight as legitimate.  It could have been the easiest thing in the world for Continuum to be the story of cop vs. terrorists FROM THE FUTURE!, and for Liber8’s motives to be nothing more than the motivation to get the story going, or a cover for more traditional nefariousness. Instead, it is the whole point. Continuum is a series about getting from point A to point B, and about just how complicated things can get.

Speaking of complicated: Kiera Cameron.

While Kiera is very much a genre show protagonist—Continuum is very much a genre show—she actually reminds me more of a character from an entirely different sort of story—The Good Wife’s Alicia Florrick.   This is a good thing, since Alicia is one of the best protagonists on television and I love her for many of the reasons I love Kiera. I love that she’s an introvert who doesn’t make friends easily. I like that she likes systems, and feels most comfortable inside them. I like that she is fundamentally selfish. I like that neither she nor the series is exactly concerned about her being approachable or cool. Perhaps most importantly, I like that while the series is never short of sympathy for her, it is also very clear that her goal is completely incompatible with the good future.  

Unfortunately, none of the show’s other female characters manage to equal Kiera, or even come close. While there’s no glaring missteps I can identify in the show’s female representation—aside from the usual ones—there’s no real revelations, either: Sonya, Garza, and Betty, are, for the moment, just alright. Somewhat ironically, the one-shot female characters do better than the more promising ones, in part because they’re more numerous and varied, and in part because the series can’t afford to punt their development to a future date. While this feels like the result of circumstance rather than intention—with so much to cover and so little time to do so, something had to give—that’s really just an excuse. There’s no reason why the characters who got prioritized this season had to mostly be men.  

If there is something noteworthy in the way Continuum approaches gender, it is in Kiera’s relationship with Carlos, which is my favorite dynamic in the show. While I tend to look askance at calls for more purely platonic relationships between sexually compatible characters—I’m not often confident they’re made in good faith—I do like the idea in theory, and this relationship is an excellent proof of concept. Kiera and Carlos could get together. There’s tons of evidence that they’re compatible, and he’s a better person than Kellogg or—ugh!—Alec.  Heck, there’s absolutely no evidence here that they aren’t going to get together in the future. But it’s not happening now, and neither the characters or the show think there’s anything wrong with that or that it makes their relationship somehow lesser.  It isn’t that romance isn’t important or it’s incompatible with depth or great storytelling and character development; the elements of the relationship that I like— push and pull, between people who disagree on a lot but respect each other and are more than willing to meet each other halfway—could easily still be there if they were together. It’s just that sometimes, it doesn’t need to be there.

(I’m team Kiera / no one, myself.)

Kiera’s relationship with Alec, meanwhile, is not nearly as compelling, in large part because Alec is the element of the show that least works.  I understand his place in the narrative, and I can totally see how a character like him would end up eventually helping create the corporate dystopia, but this doesn’t make the present-day version of the character and his immaturity any easier to take (his future self is fine). He’s not intolerable, and I like the family drama that surrounds him—the best episode of the season is all about the Saddlers and Randols—but he’s also not great, and given just how many characters and concepts are fighting for attention, that’s something the series can’t afford.  

To mix metaphors, Continuum is a high-wire act, juggling so many balls that it is in constant danger of collapse. There’s a let’s-prevent-the-terrible-future time travel narrative, with all the usual complications of time travel stories. There’s a good half-dozen fish-out-of-water narratives.  There’s a traditional police procedural, except that it also involves future technology. There’s an exploration of class warfare and capitalism, and the evolving roles of activism and terrorism within it. There’s family drama. Taken together, it’s arguably more than can be properly explored in ten episodes, and that the series did as well as it did is genuinely surprising. While I’m not sure it can keep up the balancing act indefinitely as it continues, I’m interested in seeing how long it lasts.  

[thelogicalghost]

Hellboy (2019), a review

First, some background.

Hellboy is the title of a comic series centered around the character of the same name. Its core concept is a subversion of the Lovecraft genre: a demon (summoned by Rasputin working with Nazis, for extra evil) destined to bring about the apocalypse who, having been raised by humans, instead travels the world killing other eldritch creatures and preventing dime-a-dozen Lovecraftian apocalypses. Though it's been handled by multiple artists and writers, there's a definitively unique art style and tone that stays constant. Hellboy is a combination of antihero tropes, preferring to shoot things first and ask questions later, although how much his impatience and irreverence may be masking considerable intelligence varies from writer to writer.

In 2004, Guillermo del Toro directed and co-wrote a big-screen adaptation starring Ron Perlman as well as other highly capable actors such as John Hurt and Doug Jones (the latter of who played a fishman who likes to read, and then 13 years later would play another fishman for del Toro). While not perhaps the most faithful adaptation, the 2004 movie got a lot right, and del Toro helmed a sequel in 2008. The movies came just before and after another del Toro classic, Pan's Labyrinth (2006), and the aesthetic and atmospheric similarities do suggest that del Toro was maybe going through a bit of a "fairies but horror" phase. Neither movie was received well at opening, but they've slowly risen in popularity as the comic adaptation genre picks up new converts who now return to these movies and enjoy them as the dark demonic superhero genre-flip that they are.

So now it's 2019, 15 years after del Toro's Hellboy, and with superhero and comic book movies raking in big bucks even on R ratings and nostalgia for del Toro's vision still present, the movie industry has tried to revive the franchise. Kind of.

What this means is that this new movie not only has to adapt one of the trickiest kinds of source material, with a highly stylized feel of its own, but also has to follow two movies made by one of the most incomparable creatives in Hollywood today. Like him or not, del Toro's work is neigh impossible to copy. It also has to recast the equally unique Perlman.

The short version is, it doesn't succeed. Probably no one could have. It has a number of deep flaws, some of which are common to comic adaptations but some not.

I'll start with the plot, because the overall plot is, I think, a strong example of why I had to go through all this background.

The new movie begins with Hellboy as an established character, both to the universe he's in and to the audience, and I liked that. Hellboy's in Tijuana looking for a fellow agent but the rescue is derailed because the agent's been turned into a monster and Hellboy has to kill him. This is classic Hellboy, where all other characters are inevitably killed by the darkness and only the indestructible demon is left to finish the job and move on to the next. Except that Hellboy gets SUPER depressed by the death of this agent, going on a drinking binge for possibly weeks? Unclear dialogue? Anyway, okay, so it's a younger Hellboy. Oh, also, the movie quickly establishes that Professor Broom - Hellboy's dad - is still alive in this movie, and still parental.

This was, to me, the first warning sign. The 2004 movie did the establishing-universe-coming-of-age story, killing off Broom as part of that. So we're resetting the universe, but also not bothering to frame this movie as re-establishing Hellboy's character, assuming that the audience will already be familiar with the basic premise. It wants the easy access of an origin story but also getting to take the shortcut of building off previous incarnations. What that means is that the movie opens with a flashback to Arthurian times to set up the antagonist, but ALSO has to incorporate the re-tread flashback re-establishing Hellboy's origin as a Rasputin/Nazi experiment. We get the awesome sense of worldbuilding with characters who refer to a shared history, but then that history is blatantly exposited or flashbacked. The coming of age narrative has to share screen time and space with a plot that only really works when it's not the first in a series, so plot elements pop up and then are discarded or timing isn't explained or consequences are unclear.

Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the character of Alice: her introduction is fantastic, implying that years ago when Hellboy saved her as a child they established some sort of relationship that sets up a great sibling dynamic between the two. BUT then in order to explain how a secondary villain is relevant, there's an extended flashback to how he saved her, as a baby, with no indication of further association as she grew up, which completely invalidates the previous worldbuilding and implied relationships.

I don't know exactly where the blame for this falls specifically, but I think it's indicative that the director, Neil Marshall, has to now mostly helmed the kind of blood-filled horror flicks where the quality of the dismembered body props is more important than the quality of the plot. Whether it's his direction, or the direction of producers (there are so many listed in the credits I don't know who to research first) or other creative controllers, it's clear that this new movie is intended as horror first and foremost, a sentiment supported by the excessive screen time devoted to redshirt humans being dismembered with unnecessarily vivid brutality.  This in turn brings with it the hallmarks of cheap horror: ignoring plot for the sake of blood and scares, spelling things out so the audience doesn't have to think and can just mindlessly consume, and generally mishandling pacing and tension because the ending is a foregone conclusion.

I understand WHY someone might get this idea from the del Toro movies, especially since I'm pretty sure the creative team also watched Pan's Labyrinth while putting together specific scenes. Unfortunately it's the most surface-level reading of the movies one could get, and it completely misses the point about what makes Hellboy an interesting character and property. They literally did not have his right hand DOING anything, which showcases how much they missed the point.

However.

Strip away the CGI gore and ham-fisted retreading (and cut the retelling of Broom's death, it would be effortless to replace that subplot), and there's actually a pretty awesome movie hiding underneath.

Someone on the writing staff knew what they were doing. The actors are almost all great. (Seeing Ian McShane as Broom here was weird, but I think that's partially because my feeds have been flooded with American Gods S2 trailers, so I had some strong "the fuck is Wednesday doing here" dissonance.) I love the lack of love triangle and instead the strong teambuilding with sibling-style chemistry with situational allies developing trust through necessity.

The main through-line of the plot is exactly what Hellboy should be: monsters, undead things coming back, an ancient evil threatening to engulf the world in darkness, and a determined attempt by the villain to appeal to Hellboy's demonic nature to draw him to her side. If the movie had been confident enough to position itself as a sequel to the del Toro films, rather than a reboot, the revelation of Hellboy's ancestry would have been a great development of his ironic destiny. 

Just take the secret society set up in the first act. An old boy's club of British gentlemen who ritualistically hunt down undead giants on horseback with electrified lance/spears and mount their heads in a Victorian trophy room? This is the world of Hellboy, absolutely. Love it. Baba Yaga! Bleeding trees! Whatever the hell those throat-ghosts are! A fairy ripping out someone's tongue and putting it in their own mouth in order to speak with the person's voice! Hellboy! (Granted that last point was utterly terrible in the context of the plot, but I already ranted about that.)

The movie is pretty optimistic about setting up further sequels, and while I don't know if the box office and reviews will make a sequel happen, I would love for the seeds planted by the good movie underneath the bad one to be nurtured into an actually good Hellboy movie. It just desperately needs to be taken away from people who prioritize cheap horror and its tropes, and given back to people who understand that Hellboy is a fantasy superhero narrative within a Lovecraft setting, the way that del Toro did. 

[lasorciereviolette-blog]

On Witch

(So RP’s are a bit slow right now so I might as well continue down the saltapalooza that has been opened up due to a post on how Sega’s flanderized Amitie over the years. 

This one’s kind of all over the place, because it’s not a strict flanderization argument per se and since Witch is my favourite I like to gush about her. I’ll try to keep on topic as much as possible though.

So I’ll start by saying that honestly, this could be a lot worse in several ways. Sega’s done at least a little homework on Witch. It took them nearly a decade to put Witch in one of their games (no, 7 does not count since she has no lines) but it looks like she’s here to stay seeing as she was kept on the roster for both Tetris and Chronicle.

But... Now what? See, my analysis has led me to the conclusion that Sega have absolutely idea of what to do with Witch.

I didn’t always have that viewpoint. At one time I thought Sega had done a pretty good job with Witch. She showed up, her story was reasonably funny, and she was actually allowed to behave like a selfish jerk unlike certain characters. 

However, a little while ago I came across a translation of Yon’s cutscenes. And I came across an unfortunate discovery: Witch’s campaign in 20th is nothing new at all. Nope. It’s just a copy-paste of her few scenes in Yon, and one cutscene in Sun.

Let me elaborate. See, in 20th Witch is trying to collect ingredients to create a potion in one of Wish’s spellbooks. Collecting these ingredients involves taking parts off of certain cast members, namely Draco’s tail, the Acorn Frog’s eye, an imp’s horns, a ladybug, a dark wizard’s hair, and a fish’s scales. On the surface this isn’t a bad premise. I didn’t mind it too badly before I knew anything about Yon. Except in Yon, Witch’s goals are almost identical. She needs Draco’s tail and Seriri’s scales, and wants to collect Carbuncle’s finger grime (... somehow) just in case she ever needs it. When she comes across a sleeping Dragon, she also tries to seize the opportunity to grab some snot.

The details aren’t exactly the same, at least. Which is nice, because if the scenes were word for word the exact same I’d be even more peeved. I can at least give the writers that much. The thing is, after waiting so long for a beloved character’s comeback, why did they decide just to recycle half the cutscenes from other games? I suppose this can be forgiven since it’s an anniversary title, but it’s still a little odd.

And then we get to Tetris, where Witch has a total of... One scene. When DLC was released, she got another very short scene. While these were both original, there... Really was nothing to them. All she wants to do is perform an experiment with blocks in one, and in the other she mocks Draco, which would have been absolutely unsurprising if you had played either Saturn or Yon in the past. Witch’s appearance is very much a token one and she doesn’t even really interact with other characters besides Draco Centauros when there was an opportunity to have her bounce off of the members of the Starship Tetra, or Amitie, or Ringo. Or maybe to put her in Primp and have her hang out with some of the people she used to. Talk about a waste. Witch is a fun and dynamic character who has been allowed to remain a bit of a jerk. There was plenty of room to have her interact with new characters, but instead they threw her into space and called it a day. Hell, she’s a comet witch and she doesn’t even notice she’s in space!

Which leads me into the next part of this rant, the fact that Sega only really seemed to look at Yon and one cutscene in Sun and determined her entire character from there. Before Yon Witch was primarily a comet witch. While she did make potions in Seriri’s Happy Birthday, Witch’s gameplay was focused more on flight and spellcasting. Based on her moveset in other games, Witch not only shares most of Arle’s spell set (being proficient in fire, ice, and lightning magic, as well as being able to cast Brain Dumbed and Jugem) but has her signature Meteor spell and a few other comet style magics such as Big Bang. These spells have a distinctive star theme when she casts them, distinguishing her from Arle.

Pretty cool, huh? She is also somewhat of a melee fighter, not being afraid to swat people with her broom. (this isn’t the greatest of examples but it’s cool so)

Coming back to her broom flying, a whole game was built around it called Comet Summoner. It didn’t have much of a story, but it did feature a bunch of cute levels and a powerful boss that may or may not have been Witch’s future self. And this future self was strong, with a huge red aura, several health bars, and the ability to not only zip around the stage at high speeds, but cast spells of her own and combo you with a mix of melee and magic if you fuck up and get too close to her.

Witch would make a good fighting game character. 

This is getting a bit off topic, but point is, Witch is versatile. But unfortunately it seems that apart from her spell names Sega can’t be bothered to remember her versatility and just wants her to make wacky potions. I’m not opposed to her making wacky potions, it’s not necessarily bad, but at one time she was a lot more than that.

She was more complex as a character than she seems to be in 20th or Tetris. Maybe not in Yon, where she appears very little, but in Madou Monogatari she got some attention. Yes, Witch is selfish. Yes, she’s pretty power hungry. Yes, she’d probably sell quite a few people out for a single corn chip. But there are some people who are dear to her, like for example her grandmother Wish. While again, I can’t read Japanese, Witch Leeroy Jenkins’s into a room when she sees her grandmother’s body on the floor in Tower of the Magician. Afterwards, Witch’s body language is pretty clear to see.

She’s clearly very worried about Wish and does not appreciate any harm coming to her. Even jerks have loved ones, I guess?

Let’s give Sega the benefit of the doubt, maybe that one trait just hasn’t come into play yet. After all, Wish hasn’t appeared (but she has been mentioned). Sure. However, there are other traits that the Sega games ignore when it comes to Witch’s character.

First, Sega has arguably made Witch into an even worse jerk. In Compile’s games, Witch is often abrasive and rude, but she will defer to an expert’s judgment in a situation she doesn’t understand. Case in point, Saturn. Upon coming across the Yog smoke, she avoids possession because she immediately listens to Arle and Rulue’s advice. She doesn’t argue, she just does it. 

Contrast this with 20th. 

In general, Witch is crafty and rather full of herself in Saturn, but not so much as Rulue. She has a low opinion of martial arts and so that makes her play well off of Rulue (It probably also explains her animosity towards Draco), while she has a high opinion of her magical skill and loves to soak up praise. Witch also shows little ill will towards those who quit the tournament after a Yog presents itself, which might hint at some sensibility the character doesn’t tend to have much of after this. 

Witch is also a bit of a snarker in this game:

There’s character here besides her excitability, or getting pissed off when things don’t go her way. Now Saturn does bring up Witch’s legendary temper, but we don’t really see the results of that in-game. 20th really pushes that informed attribute into the spotlight, where all her thoughtfulness and cleverness go out of the window for her to make a bad potion that obviously contained too many substitutions, to the potion not being useful in the first place, to her beating up Lemres for stating the blatantly obvious. Witch doesn’t really come off any smarter than Draco at the end of this, because all of this was obvious! She just comes off as an even worse ass than usual because of Sega’s wackiness mandate.

I also really don’t get what the point of her fighting Lemres even was. Lemres seems disappointed at the end that he didn’t get to talk to Witch more, but the story just ends. There isn’t any kind of payoff or character growth here. Just... Nothing. Again, a total waste of potential, having the two comet mages meet and then do absolutely nothing of value. Love it, Sega.

Oh yeah, there were two more things Sega forgot about. First, this.

Witch is probably an actual pervert, to contrast with Schezo’s fake perversion (which may or may not be real perversion too sometimes, because Saturn’s fun like that). So that’s another thing Sega forgot, for better or for worse.

Which leads me to the last bit that Sega’s forgotten. This too I can’t really say if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I like that it exists in Compile’s games, but if Sega remembered it would likely devour what remains of Witch’s personality. In certain games, there are implications that Witch may have a crush on Schezo. She fawns over him in athletic clothes in Puyolympics and as seen above, asks if he’s cool and wants to touch him in Saturn. Then of course there’s the whole “I want you” scene that solidifies the thing. For all I know there could be evidence for or against this in Tower of the Magician, which is a game where the two spend quite a bit of time interacting with each other, but since I haven’t learned to read Japanese in the last few hours I can’t comment on that, as much as I want to.

Now whether this is a good or bad thing for Sega to ignore really depends on your interpretation of this trait. I’m personally torn, because again I’m glad that Witch has not been reduced to a lovesick one-note failure. On the other, it’s a facet that a more competent writing team could have explored with some success. So it sucks that it’s been abandoned completely, but the end result could have been really terrible had Sega noticed this, so... Yay?

Okay, so I’ve written blocks of text. What does it all mean? Well, it means Witch isn’t immune to being flanderized in Sega’s works. It could be a lot worse, but there’s plenty of Witch’s character that’s been left out of current Puyo and plenty that has been aggrandized into a worse person. Right now Witch reminds me of a mixture of herself and Saturn’s take on Rulue, which... Really sucks, because no wonder Sega can’t figure out how to make Rulue stand out if they give her traits to other characters! Poor Rulue. Give her some love, Sega. She doesn’t deserve this kind of shafting.

As for Witch, you’re not going to get a total sweet kindhearted girl out of her. She was never that kind of character and that’s not a bad thing. But throwing on Rulue’s most boastful traits and making her a worse jerk, then giving her cameos because you don’t know what to do with her isn’t a good way to characterize her. Return some of that sense into the mix! Like I said in my Schezo comments, not everyone needs to be a wacky joke 24/7.

[vampireheart2404-blog]

How “The Last Jedi” broke me

*BEWARE: Spoilers probably somewhere*

Star Wars and I go way back. It’s a complicated relationship to say the least. We had our ups and downs. We had our moments of pure passion and joy and we had our disappointments and conflicts, but we always remained together. Simpy put, it’s love.

I believe context matters so let me give you brief history of my experiences with Star Wars. It’s important to understand the point I am at at this moment. 

I had the misfortune of being born in Bosnia and as if that wasn’t annoying enough, during my early childhood, between ages three and seven, there was a huge war going on and let’s just say movies weren’t exactly a priority, given all the destruction, death and overall misery. To put it simply, movies like “Raiders of the lost Ark”, “Back to the Future”, “E.T.” were something that was introduced to me a bit later in life. Star Wars saga being no exception. Sure, I knew that there is a guy in a black costume that breathes funny, there were two suns and there were people called Luke and Leia. Even under my rock, I heard some of the names and had the idea how the movie looks like. For most of my generation, it was the same thing. Star Wars as a whole just wasn’t big enough part of our childhoods.

Unfortunately, I was first introduced to the Star Wars saga through the prequel trilogy. I didn’t like it. I just thought they were incredibly boring and gave up on the franchise all together. Until one day, when I decided that it’s time to watch those original movies and wouldn’t you know it - I fell in love. And now, I can’t imagine my life without Star Wars - it’s characters, it’s music, it’s visuals, it’s poetry, it’s cultural impact. It’s a part of me and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Over the years, lots had changed. But the most important change was the internet. I grew up and developed critical thinking. I started watching three, four or even five movies a week and became a huge movie buff and started thinking about movies in other ways than just: “It was fun, I loved it” or “It was boring and I hated it”. I started asking questions: “What is it that makes The Phantom Menace so boring to me?”, “Why does everyone say The Revenge of the Sith is good, when I can almost see no difference between it and Attack of the Clones”? And I loved going online and discuss it. For years it was the same thing - hating the prequels with burning passion and loving the original trilogy with all my heart. The flaws in the original trilogy didn’t bother me, because I loved it so much and I couldn’t understand why people pretend like it’s the most perfect piece of cinema there is. I also couldn’t get enough of talking about how much the prequels suck or understand how people could find anything of value in those movies. As you can see, there was this attempt to observe the movies as objectively as possible, without much success and there was endless discussion on the internet with fanboys on all sides of the spectrum.

Which brings us to The Force Awakens. As I’ve already stated, it was the greatest movie going experience of my life and I will never forget it. And I loved the movie. It did bother me that it was too similar to the original Star Wars. It was safe and marketable and although I enjoyed it very much, it did bother me, I won’t lie. Rogue One was fine. Whatever.

And now we come to the big one, the one that will kill all expectations, the one that will divide fans once again, the second biggest movie opening of all time: Star Wars: The Last Jedi. When I first watched it, I wanted to write a review on it. Like a real review, where I would talk about stuff that I think it’s good and stuff that’s not good with conclusion being that I loved it very much. I thought the choices were very bold and innovative. I liked the performances, I loved the dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren and I even enjoyed the silly stuff. But, when I saw what’s going on online, the rage, the backlash, the rift between the critics and the fans and all that noise, I realized one thing - I am tired. I am so freakin’ tired of this. I saw so many online reviewers just walking on eggshells, trying not to say anything. If they say they loved it, maybe they’re regret it later. Same with people who hated it. “Maybe I need to see it the second time or the third time just to make sure I didn’t miss something”. So, for any other movie, you watch it once and give your honest opinion, but for Star Wars, you have to go multiple times just to give your opinion? Give me a fucking break. At this point, I want to stand up and shout: IT’S JUST A FUCKING MOVIE! God, damn it. And it’s not the fact that I liked the movie and that people hate it. If you don’t like, you don’t like it. It’s fine really. All of the complaints are heard. It’s me. I am so tired of it. I agree that the scene in Canto Bight was stupid but I can’t talk about it in such detail. It’s just a stupid scene in a movie. Who gives a shit. Bottom line: I used to care so much about every little detail in these movies and now - I just didn’t care. 

So, there was only thing to do: Star Wars movie marathon of course. I usually watch them in order of their releases, but this time I watched them in this order: 1. Episode I, Episode II, Episode III, Rogue One, Episode IV, Episode V, Episode VI, Episode VII and I went and saw Episode VIII again. I can honestly say I never had more fun with Star wars movies in my life. I watched them on my couch, drinking hot chocolate with Christmas lights all around me and without being a part of an online obsession with the new release, I felt free and enjoyed the saga more that I ever did before. I know that sounds cheesy but it’s the way I felt. 

In conclusion, I am sick of Star Wars being this huge overblown thing where every frame is discussed for hours. I am sick of people having an orgasm every time something even remotely nostalgic happens and having a stroke when something happens that they think doesn’t fit. I always knew Star Wars was never meant to be taken this seriously, but this is the first time I felt it. These movies are never gonna stop coming out and when I imagine the future where I spent hours, days, months, even years talking about every single plot point, it seems like a huge waste of time that I could spend watching the movies and having a blast. When I say that I’m done and that these are just movies it may seem as if I am not admitting their importance, but it’s quite the opposite: I watched eight movies in a row and felt nothing but happiness doing it. Any movie franchise that is able to do that is worth being talked about. I just don’t want to share my love or frustrations anymore. It feels more intimate that way. 

If you still have the strength to praise, complain, cry, yell or else, by all means, go for it. I am just done. Thank you, The Last Jedi. You broke me. And I couldn’t be happier. 

May the Force be with you, always!

[fancymuffinparty]

Okay, but does Annie really hate Reiner?

This might be an unpopular opinion but I really hope I'm not the only one who feels this way. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people make negative comments on Reiner and Annie's relationship in canon and on the RBA trio in general. While it doesn't bother me all that much (because everyone is entitled to their own opinion), I just wanted to share my viewpoint and explain why I couldn't disagree more with the following statement: "Annie hates Reiner." 

I, personally, do not believe so.

(Then again, the word ‘hate’ is often misused to death... whether it’s an exaggeration or ‘for lack of a better word’ kinda thing.) 

Friendly reminder, Hate is a strong word.

Now I won’t waste my time arguing that Annie and Reiner are just two peas in a pod and total BFFs, because they’re not. But they are allies. Comrades. Warriors. Their relationship is actually one of the most fascinating to me because it’s incredibly complex, wretched, yet honest. 

This is basically just an analysis of their relationship in canon and an attempt to reason with some of the naysayers. Heads up. It’s long.

From the beginning, we see very few interactions between the two (though Annie hardly interacts with anyone), yet when they do share the same panel Annie always seems cold or indifferent. 

As kids, Annie is very detached from the group; very much a ‘lone wolf’. Like plenty of other characters in the series, she has her own personal demons to deal with. As is the case with Reiner, they’re deeply rooted in familial conflicts.

While kid!Reiner wants nothing more than for his family to be united together, Annie feels obligated to live up to her father’s expectations and fulfill a promise. That alone is her one and only mission...

One that she makes perfectly clear following a major setback...

Which brings us to the oh-so infamous quarrel.  

Here we have Annie kicking the shit out of Reiner. Alas, this panel was enough to convince a large sum of readers that Annie hates Reiner.

But let’s take a step back and keep everything in context. This is shortly after Marcel, the leader of the group, has been eaten, thus resulting in the loss of the Jaw Titan. Reiner makes a futile attempt to reason with Annie that they must continue the mission, or face a possible death sentence as punishment. Annie then criticizes Reiner for cowardice and is adamant they immediately return home. Emotions are running high in this rather unforeseen and unprecedented turn of events. And they’re only kids for crying out loud. (Or did we forget that?)

Bruised and bloodied, Reiner fires back at Annie with equal ferocity... but in doing so, he’s willing to make a sacrifice for the trio’s sake.

It’s enough to convince Annie to press on; to move forward with a seemingly impossible mission. She recognizes they are all in this together, and they only have each other.

Not long after this exchange, the trio successfully breach Wall Maria, allowing them to gain access to the interior.

When all is said and done, Reiner makes a promise to Annie and Bertolt that they’ll all make it home, simultaneously breaking our hearts.

Two years fly by and the trio only manages to scrounge bits and pieces of information. They struggled after the fall of the Wall to find the Coordinate, and then realized that King Fritz was a decoy, leaving them with few options. Ultimately, at Reiner’s insistence, they enroll in the 104th cadet corps and pretend to be soldiers to carry onward with the mission. Annie is initially reluctant to do so.

Again, given the limitations of any potential recourse, Annie goes along with Reiner’s plan- though she keeps her distance during their training.

When the two do cross paths in the cadet corps, it’s not exactly giggles and high-fives. Annie’s so done with everything...

After Reiner throws Eren her way during hand to hand combat training, she’s hardly amused, as evidenced by the expression above. Though that quickly changes when she indulges in giving Reiner a lovely throwback to their days as warrior candidates back in their hometown.

(Hey, in all fairness she’s kicked his ass before. I guess some things just never change.)

All jokes aside, is any of this tension the result of hate? A truly deep form of hatred?

I’d say resentment is a better word.

And truthfully, Annie has every right to be resentful.

Prior to the Battle of Trost, the trio plan for another attack on the walls (Wall Rose). Having just graduated (all three in the top ten, of course), Reiner is more than ready to move forward, believing this could be the ultimate turning point for the mission.

Now, one could use this to argue that Reiner in warrior-mode is the exact kind of person Annie can’t stand. She’s believed him (and people with the same mind-set) to be a fool; a mere pawn in someone else’s game. It’s also apparent that she finds the idea of putting on an act rather sickening. However, she comes to realize that lying not only comes naturally to her but is necessary if she wants to return home to her father.

Almost immediately, Reiner sees that he’s gone a little too far and attempts to rectify his actions.

This could be seen as foreshadowing as here, Reiner is reminding Annie of their duty as warriors. Obviously, she couldn’t care less about becoming an ‘honorary Marleyan’, but it’s not long before she’s given a rude awakening of sorts...

Before Eren’s titan reveal/transformation, Annie meets up with Reiner and Bertolt and awaits instruction.

After Eren’s titan reveal/transformation, we have yet another quarrel between the two. Unlike the former, however, Annie finds herself being put to the test.

A defining moment in the trio’s dynamic, indeed.

We all know how this turns out. Desperate and conflicted, Annie remembers her own personal mission, all the while Reiner is pressuring her to make a decision.

 As Bertolt once said: “Who wants to kill people?”

Does Reiner genuinely want to kill Marco? No. Of course not. But he simply can’t afford to jeopardize their mission. One might ask, why couldn’t he have taken Marco’s gear himself? Why did he put the burden on Annie, even after apologizing for doing so in the past? The answer is an easy one.

To test her loyalty to the cause. To remind them they are all in this together. That she can’t be too comfortable riding on the fence.

Was it manipulative? In a way, yes. However, I can understand Reiner’s need to make a point with his comrade. Though a lot of Annie’s resentment stems from this incident alone, she seems to accept the inevitable.

Her hands will be stained with blood, because this is war.

Reiner’s words are harsh but they’re also true. 

And Annie knows it.

Later on, it’s revealed that both had collaborated with another in two critical settings. The first one being the assassination of titans Sawney and Beane.

The second instance takes place during the 57th scouting expedition. (AKA the Female Titan’s debut.) With Armin and Jean completely unaware of his intentions, Reiner utilizes the opportunity to covertly reveal Eren’s location through carvings in Annie’s hand, commencing the first official attempt at recapturing the coordinate.

In both cases, it’s evident that not only are the two capable of working well together, but they’re also capable of putting their differences aside. Reiner and Annie can rely on one another because of their common goal: Returning to their hometown.  

Annie, the lone wolf, can handle herself perfectly fine.

But she’s willing to accept that she needs to cooperate with her allies to accomplish the mission.

The conclusion of the Female Titan arc results in Annie’s neutralization. After her defeat to Eren, she encases herself in a crystal and succumbs to a catatonic state.

Bertolt and Reiner, however, are unaware of this... even after they themselves are revealed to be the Colossal and Armored Titans respectively.

That is until, Armin informs them of an unexpected (though entirely false) travesty.

Armin’s bluff about the SL torturing Annie catches all three listeners off guard. Eren, bound to his restraints, is shown to be disturbed. Bertolt is angered and reacts with hostility. And then we’re given Reiner’s reaction. He too is appalled and angered by the news; finding the implication of his fellow comrade enduring such barbaric torment to be infuriating. 

Whether he believes Annie is actually being tortured or not remains open to speculation. Either way, Reiner is concerned for her well-being, and even fights Zeke when a dispute arises over what should take precedence following the failure. Zeke is convinced Annie is fine on her own and emphasizes the significance of recapturing the coordinate. Reiner on the other hand places a higher priority on rescuing his comrade, thinking back on the oath he made to bring them all back home safely. 

Unfortunately, Reiner is unsuccessful and from then on, he only harbors more and more guilt. 

Fast forward to the present, years after the disastrous Return to Shiganshina arc, and we have Reiner returning to his hometown. Alone.

Bertolt is dead. Annie is but a distant memory.

In flashbacks, we see Annie aloof and detached as always.

From the time they were kids in Marley, to cadets in the 104th, pretending to be soldiers, fighting (and failing) as warriors, Reiner and Annie have had plenty of ups and downs. The majority of their interactions feature Annie treating Reiner either with apathy or disdain, frequently criticizing his decisions. However, they do not let their personal issues interfere with their mission and cooperate when working together in the field. 

I’m not saying Annie is incapable of hating Reiner, but I wholeheartedly believe she is above hating him. I have trouble believing she could ever bring herself to truly hate anyone. Many readers misinterpret her character enough as it is. (It’s a shame she’s often reduced to a ‘cold and emotionless loner’.) Although she’s the type to keep her distance and keep to herself in most settings, I’d reckon that Annie is one of the most sentimental characters in the series- though she’s mastered the  repression of her deeply heartfelt emotions pretty well. 

To offer an additional perspective, we could use the EMA trio for a little compare/contrast. The two opposing groups may have some similarities; the headstrong one, the meek one, the quintessential badass chick. Yet, they differ in how they interact with one another. You’ll find that plenty of fellow snk fans will fawn and enthuse over EMA’s wholesome friendship. But I personally find RBA’s dynamic far more intriguing. These three broken and tormented individuals are brought together as children and endure hardship through a tumultuous five year course. Each have their own reasons for doing so, but they’re bound together with the burden of fulfilling such a daunting mission.

Reiner makes the clear distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’; something that’s not entirely difficult for Annie to accept because she already treats ‘the world as her enemy’. 

Yet maybe that’s ultimately where the two are at odds. They perceive the world around them differently.

But their differences aren’t synonymous with hatred, as they are easily put aside.

Annie has to trust Reiner to a degree, however narrow the margins may be. Reiner undoubtedly cares for Annie, although she may never be aware of the lengths he was willing to go to ensure her well-being. I believe that Annie regards Reiner with at least a half-decent amount of consideration. As stated above, she definitely harbors resentment, just as Reiner harbors guilt.

But to completely write off their interactions (every single heart-breaking and complex one) with a mere “She hates him” is in my opinion overlooking the profound intricacy surrounding this particular aspect of the RBA trio.

Final thoughts: Isayama wrote their relationship very well, and in spite of what others may think, it’s one of my favorites in the series.