#i get why most people + the canon focuses on her being an assassin bc people find that cooler i guess

[caimitos]

saw a post about projecting your ethnicity onto a character and started missing vespa ilkay. so so bad

[blackbird-brewster]

CM Unpopular Opinions

Just a couple of weeks out from the new season, the new trailer just dropped, and people are getting hyped. For last season, I made a CME predictions post (which mostly came to pass, bc this show is so predictable) -- but this season, I'm going to post some unpopular opinions going into S17. Don't like, don't read.

WILL. Since we know Will won't be in this season, there have been speculations that JJ/Will will be getting a divorce, or that Will is going to die. I do NOT want Will to die. I hate that guy, I've never liked his character, but you know who I do love? JJ. She has already been through SO much, I do NOT want Hotch 2.0 in S17. I don't want Will to die, because that would be like ripping half of JJ's soul out of her chest and she deserves better. What I actually think will happen -- is just that Will is going back to being an off-screen partner like he was for most of the series.

JEMILY. I've already written my thoughts on Paget's Jemily hints on social media and why I think that's simply queerbaiting. There's no way Jemily is going to be canon, and I am HAPPY about that. I don't want Jemily to be canon!! Look at how this show treats canon relationships!! How many female romantic interests have been tortured and killed???? Why would I ever want Jemily in that crossfire? Also, as a fanfic author who has been writing Jemily for the past decade -- I don't want them to become canon, because that will squander so much creative potential. Fic authors fill in the gaps and subtext of canon, that's our job, when a relationship becomes canon it really loses it's appeal. That being said, I would love to actually see Emily and JJ interacting again. S16 really ignored their decade-long friendship altogether. Shit, I would love to just see them in the same fricking scene again.

REBECCA. All I want is for Rebecca to survive this season. As mentioned above, the way this show treats romantic interests of main characters is HORRIBLE. I'm forever furious with how the show handled Tara/Rebecca's relationship last season. I know fans hated Rebecca for getting pissed at Tara, but I still don't agree. What I do hate is how as soon as Tara's queerness served it's plot point (getting the inmate to admit he's gay too) -- the show nuked Tara's relationship altogether. I seriously love Rebecca, I think she adds a lot to the show. And since we already know Rebecca is in S17, I would LOVE to see Tara/Rebecca sit down and actually talk through their issues (like real adults!). I would LOVE for them to get the happy ending they deserve.

GARCIA'S ROMANCE. For real, I do not care about any of this love triangle bullshit with Garcia between Tyler and Luke or whatever tf is happening. I seriously hated what they did to Garcia's character in S16, it felt like they completely erased the prior 15 years from her character and replaced it with the most basic hetnormative romance plot. I don't ship Garvez (nor her and Tyler), so I don't really care about that side of things. But I would LOVE to get our Garcia back. I miss her so much.

RETURNING CHARACTER RUMORS. If one of the past cast members comes back in S17 I do not want it to be MGG. CME already focused an entire season on Rossi's man-pain (literally the only reason they killed Krystal was for him to be angry 🙃). I do NOT want another season of white-male centric plot lines (even though that's clearly what's gonna happen with Voight) If anyone actually comes back to guest, I want it to either be Matt or Derek. Alternatively, I do have a crack theory that the unsub/Gold Star is actually Elle Greenaway. A trained government assassin, she became a vigilante after leaving the BAU and she's been operating for all these years without detection. Now THAT would be a good twist.

Listen, overall, I'm not looking forward to another season of Evolution. I think they're trying way too hard to turn CM into some edgy, gritty, Norwegian-type crime drama and in doing so, they've ruined some of my favourite characters irrevocably. I don't have high hopes for S17.

[dracolichbitch]

Oc Infodumping time!

I got tagged by the delightful @lucien-lachance to do this oc questionaire and it looked fun so i can't resist!

Tagging some peeps to do it bc i need all the lore on your ocs! @mightymizora @archduke-enver-gortash @meanbossart @illumiera @bunniletto

heres the questions!

What is your oc's name? Why did you choose it? Were there any other names you considered?

How was your oc raised? What kind of background?

What values do they have? How were they instilled in them?

What does your oc look like? Have they had other designs? How has their look changed?

Does your oc have a family? What do they define as family?

Does your oc have a mentor or someone they look up to? Why do they look up to them?

What has been the most significant event in your oc's life? How has this affected them?

Who does your oc care about? Is it reciprocal?

What are your oc's hobbies? How do they relax?

What should we understand most about your oc?

gonna put my answrs under a readmore bc itll probably be long! its for jura btw

1: Ok so Jura was my first ever actual oc so i didn't think much for her name, i stole Jura from a different book because it looked and sounded cool to me and i stole rhapsodos from my favorite final fantasy character because i can do that. Ironically her second surname Zakierus i did come up with on my own, as its a surname on loan from my original work, the fallacy of the damned. I never really thought of any other name for her because hers just really seemed to fit from the beginning

2: So Jura's parents were both assassins, her father was a thalmor assassin who fell in love with her mother who was a member of the dark brotherhood, and they fled from the thalmor to hide in windhelm. They both had a good deal of money so they were able to settle down comfortably and as far as most people in windhelm were aware, they were merchants but also that's technically true because Ivette did own Rhapsodos brewery and orchard in Cyrodil and is one of the bigger purporters of cider in the empire, and one of black briar meadery's biggest rivals. because of her family's money, Jura and lyra were able to live comfortable childhoods where they never had to struggle or go without.

With the small caveat that they're both trained to be assassins in the dark brotherhoods ways from the time they're big enough to hold a wooden dagger.

It isn't until Jura gets attacked by a sabre cat outside of windhelm and loses her eye that she turns to magic instead and apprentices with the court wizard wuunferth to learn magic from him.

3: So something that's big in Jura's story is that her morals are pretty contradictory. She's big on loyalty and perfectionism, and she's a mostly kind and compassionate person, even if she tends to be rude, but at the same time, while she detests necromancy and holds the mortal soul sacred, she's perfectly fine with thievery and murder.

She's the classic I'll kill you but i won't desecrate your soul. (She'll desecrate your religious artifacts though don't test her)

it comes from being raised by lawful evil assassins in the brotherhoods ways in that she doesn't blink when it comes to killing people for money but she draws the line at soul trapping people and necromancy.

4: So Jura is half nord and half altmer and she has a lot of altmer traits even though by canon standards (i just vomited in my mouth a little) she's a nord. So she has golden tan skin, partially pointed ears and her facial structure is more like an elves than a nords. She has gold eyes with a ring of crimson around her pupils, coppery red hair (that's literally flaming when shes got dragon aspect going on) and when she gets pissed off, the veins in her face glow gold with magic. She's also missing her left eye and has two scars going directly across her eye and face from when she was attacked by the sabre cat as a child. She doesn't have many other scars as she focused primarily on learning healing magic during her studies growing up before branching out more

5: Jura does have family left! She has her twin sister Lyra, with whom shes very close but she also considers the dark brotherhood to be her family as well, with babette and astrid practically being the twins aunts and Festus as her mean grumpy uncle. She also considers Faralda and Tolfdir to be her second parents, to the point that they fill said role at her wedding to Miraak/Faustus depending on the verse (and were frankly some of the few people to even know she was getting married) In my dark brotherhood au with @lucien-lachance and her listener oc Faustus, they have twin daughters Valerie and Vivian

6: For someone who loses a lot of people they care about and doesnt respect many people, Jura has a lot of mentors. She has wuunferth, who first instilled her hatred of necromancy and is frankly the main reason she has any sense of morals at all. Furthermore there's Faralda, who was the first and primary mage to take her under her wing at the College of Winterhold, as well as Festus who was also her mentor there. Babette has always been a mentor to her as well, and is usually the one to urge caution and is capable of yanking Jura's leash and getting her to settle down better than anyone else alive at this point. Jura looks up to all of them because even as a youngster she was bold, brash, annoying and obnoxious but they all still graciously put up with her despite that and worked hard to keep her in line and grounded and she really appreciates that none of them just abandoned her to do whatever she wanted no matter the consequences when it would've been easier to do so.

7: The most significant event in Jura's life would probably be getting mauled by the sabre cat because it lead to her doing an entire 180 with what she wanted to do with herself. Before then she was on her way to being part of the next generation of the dark brotherhood, with excellent martial and sneak skills, and then without warning she's nearly died, even though she survived she's physically disabled from losing her eye, she can't use a bow any more and that was her favorite weapon and how she planned to kill. but it was the fact that she fucking suffered on the brink of death for days because there wasn't a very competent healer in Windhelm that turned her to restoration as a school because she wanted to be the person that she needed when she nearly died and that's what lead her to planning on becoming a priest of arkay.

And of course it was her parents being killed by vampires that was the second most significant event in her life because its what took her away from the path of the righteous and religious and down the road to revenge instead.

8: Jura cares about her sister, the dark brotherhood, and her apprentices at the college. And of course Miraak and Faustus in their respective verses. It's very much reciprocated even if she annoys most of them lol

9: Jura doesn't have a lot of hobbies that don't involve setting things on fire but she likes drawing with charcoal though she never shows anyone these pictures, she also spends most of her down time reading a variety of different things whether its religious or historical, magically inclined or not. Her main hobby is fetching books for Urag and the arcaneum and reorganizing her library at mistwatch. In my darkbrotherhood au shes the brotherhoods archivist

10: The most important thing to understand about Jura is that she's a complex character with conflicting morals and she's aware that her morals contradict each other. it leads to her being very chaotic where she's just as likely to help someone as she is to hurt them and its totally dependent on what the situation is.

Here have a Jura pic for good measure

[ectonurites]

can anybody please explain the appeal of tim drake because ive been into the batfamily for a while now and tbh im really confused on why people like his character so much compared to the other robins. like they all have their own thing going on and he just... doesnt?

Have you read his Robin solo? Because if not and you want to try to like him but just don’t understand why people do, that’s what I’d recommend. That and like, Young Justice 1998. 

Because Tim definitely... does have his own thing going on. Maybe not in the same way as the others, but like, there’s a reason he has a 183 issue long solo comic that ran for like 16 years: he was fun to read about!

But I will give some more specific thoughts on the subject as a Tim Drake Appreciator™ (this got long im sorry)

The appeal of Tim (especially early on Tim) is kinda the fact that he’s this more normal kid. For a while that is his ‘thing’. He was basically designed to be a self-insert (he definitely became more than that along the way, but from the start he was meant to be relatable) in a different way than how Dick and Jason had been before him. 

Like the role of Robin from the start was this way to create a character young readers could identify with more, could see themselves in more. And Dick and Jason did that, but they still had this element to their lives and stories that was more... unattainable for the average reader. Dick was a circus prodigy, Jason was either also a circus prodigy if we remember pre-crisis or if we go with his post-crisis story he’s this street-wise orphaned kid who had a really tough life but still went on to be a hero anyways. Obviously those lives are relatable for some people, but those’re definitely not as broadly recognized as common upbringings especially not by DC trying to market to the ‘average’ kid/young teen.

But the creation of Tim changed the game a bit. Dick and Jason were these aspirations a kid could look to like ‘wow I want to be cool like that!’ but Tim was a Robin designed for kids to look at and go ‘wow, his problems and civilian life are just like mine AND he’s a hero, I want to be cool like that!’, ya know? Tim was... just a clever kid with an average life who managed to connect some dots and had enough drive to want to fix things he saw were a problem, he didn’t have the same kind of heightened drama backstory the others did. The Robins that came after Tim definitely didn’t have this idea of relatability in mind the same way either. Unfortunately Steph’s time as Robin was much more of a marketing ploy than an actual like... decision to make her Robin, so it’s hard to really fit her into this conversation. But Damian from the start was first of all initially created not to be Robin but just as the son of Talia and Bruce back in the 80’s, but when he was later reimagined into the character that would become Robin he had the whole ‘raised by and is the heir to the league of assassins and is the son of batman’ thing going on still. He just was not supposed to be relatable that same way, he was a character designed with different things in mind.

I really think it was more just DC’s 90′s era younger-audience comics in general that tried to push that relatability thing (like in YJ how Cissie even after quitting the team stays a major character as a civilian throughout, and the civilian aspect that’s super present in Bart’s 90s solo too, etc), but later in the 2000’s that idea was definitely pushed to the side in favor of... putting in even more dramatic superhero-y stuff.

And the other thing that’s... such a more normal thing but it actually made him unique here, was that Tim’s dad was still alive until like 2004 (so 15 years into Tim being around as a character). This gave Tim a lot more typical ‘family school girlfriends normal life etc’ problems on top of/in contrast with his superhero problems. These just manifested in very different ways than they could with the other Robins because of that unique situation with a living civilian parent who doesn’t know about hero stuff (until he did find out which lead to that whole Unmasked thing, but there was only the brief time around War Games & Identity Crisis where Jack knew Tim was actively Robin and he was... still alive) Tim also had his life at school expanded way more than most other Robins, like, he had such an extended supporting cast of civilian friends which is a really interesting thing to read about (and the fact that he hasn’t had that stuff since the New 52 I think really hurts his character)

And then related to that loss of his dad... Personally another thing about Tim that really interests me is how a lot of things were more... his choice. if that makes sense. A lot of characters in the Batfamily were struck with tragedy/extreme trauma before they became heroes and that’s what spurred them into this life of becoming heroes. Tim’s situation wasn’t like that at all! When he first got involved in everything during Lonely Place of Dying, the only tragedy he’d experienced was watching Dick’s tragedy happen. Which sure yes traumatic obviously, but that’s not the same as how pretty much all the other Bats had gone through these very personal losses or other sorts of very first-hand personal traumas that served as motivators. Tim didn’t start to experience those things until after he got involved in the hero life, and aside from his Mom’s death which was more of just an unrelated incident (that technically happened before he was officially Robin but it was during his time training to become Robin), pretty much all these other tragedies and things... would not have happened or been experienced by him had he not become Robin. 

That’s not me placing blame on him or anything like that, because god no that’s not how that works, but it’s very interesting because from his point of view he definitely feels that guilt because he knows him being Robin played a role in a lot of it (Thinking specifically about in Adventure Comics #3 when Kon even says “I know what guilt does to you” to him like it’s... it’s a thing with him!). His dad was murdered because he was Robin. He only met Steph and started dating her through being Robin, and thus he would not have experienced the loss of his girlfriend dying like that had he not been Robin. Tim met both Conner and Bart through being Robin, and would not have had a personal connection to them when they died otherwise. The whole Bruce’s death thing after Final Crisis, like. I could go on honestly, that was only talking about losses not even his own experiences nearly getting killed, but yeah, all these personal tragedies were experienced by him specifically because he chose to bring himself into this life, which I think in turn plays into how throughout his comics you see him go from having this really optimistic view on things and being really hopeful to seeing him at that low point he reaches by the time of Red Robin. (thinking about that one post that points out how Tim started out in the 90′s as an optimist and Steph a cynic and by the time they were Red Robin and Batgirl in 2009 they had switched outlooks...) 

I also think that him having had such a great team book with the original Young Justice can help contribute to people liking him. His friendships with the rest of the core four and that team in general are really compelling. (and that’s something like again when looking at the other Robins, while Dick had the Titans ofc, Jason never really found footing with a team outside of like one mission with the Titans and then We All Know How Damian’s Teen Titans Stuff Went. Steph also only ever really worked with a team outside the batfam on very brief occasions) and even though I’m not as big of a fan of the 2003 Teen Titans run that came after YJ, people who read Young Justice and also that could follow and be attached to those same characters over a pretty decently long period of time. 

Idk man, I don’t really have an ultimate point here i’m just rambling. I can definitely understand not seeing the appeal to him right away (honestly i’ve been into Batfam since like 2013/2014 and Tim did not become one of my faves until 2020) especially if like... idk when you say ‘into the batfamily’ that can mean a lot of different things. If you’re reading more like the bigger events with the batfam sure Tim can kinda fade into the bg a bit, if you’re more talking about fanon the fanon version of him is prettyyyyy uhhhhh not really the same as how he was in pre New 52 canon, if you’re mainly reading New 52 era Batfam stuff then that Tim I also don’t understand the appeal of bc thats Not My Boy, if you’re interested in a different member primarily and only familiar with Tim when he shows up in things focused on that other character then it’s easy to not really understand the appeal right away bc he’s more there to support that character rather than shine in his own right. 

I think it’s also worth mentioning he’s just not everybody’s cup of tea, and that’s totally fine. Like, these are fictional characters and sometimes you just will vibe with a character and sometimes you won’t! idk if this helped at all or even made sense. but yeah. I just think he’s neat 😌

[moiraineswife]

Jasnah Meta - The Importance of Context

AKA: PLEASE stop saying that Jasnah is pro-genocide when she is. Not. At all. In any way. Shape or form. Whatsoever. 

TL;DR: Nowhere, at any point, in four ginormous books of text, does Jasnah ever say ‘you know what’s great? Genocide.’ She never even implies. It she never even actually, seriously, suggests it. Please stop saying she does as though it’s canon I lose 12 years of my life every time it’s mentioned. 

AND NOW FOR THE LONG VERSION BECAUSE Y’ALL KNOW I CAN’T LEAVE IT AT THAT!!!!! 

PLEASE NOTE! THERE WILL BE SOME MINOR RHYTHM OF WAR SPOILERS IN HERE. PLEASE AVERT YOUR EYEBALLS IF THIS IS A DISTRESSING CONCEPT TO YOU.

So first things first, let us discuss The Scene Itself: 

“Yes. The answer is obvious. We need to find the Heralds.”

Kaladin nodded in agreement.

“Then,” Jasnah added, “we need to kill them.”

“What?” Kaladin demanded. “Woman, are you insane?”

“The Stormfather laid it out,” Jasnah said, unperturbed. “The Heralds made a pact. When they died, their souls traveled to Damnation and trapped the spirits of the Voidbringers, preventing them from returning.”

“Yeah. Then the Heralds were tortured until they broke.”

“The Stormfather said their pact was weakened, but did not say it was destroyed,” Jasnah said. “I suggest that we at least see if one of them is willing to return to Damnation. Perhaps they can still prevent the spirits of the enemy from being reborn. It’s either that, or we completely exterminate the parshmen so that the enemy has no hosts.” She met Kaladin’s eyes. “In the face of such an atrocity, I would consider the sacrifice of one or more Heralds to be a small price.”

“Storms!” Kaladin said, standing up straight. “Have you no sympathy?”

“I have plenty, bridgeman. Fortunately, I temper it with logic. Perhaps you should consider acquiring some at a future date.”

So the only time Jasnah actually brings up this concept it’s to, hyperbolically, point out that asking the Heralds to return to Braize and trap the Fused may not be the worst idea.

She’s not actually suggesting this as a valid or legitimate tactic. It’s to contrast the plan Kaladin just called her ‘insane’ for suggesting (I bet that’s gonna hurt a million times more than it already does in 900 years when we get Jasnah’s book and backstory but hey. Back on topic) and point out that, in the face of the apocalypse, this is the kind of level they have to think on. 

I’ve already talked about the nuances of this scene at length here, so I’ll just do a quick summary: Jasnah is not as composed about any of this internally as she makes out to be - even what she suggests with the Heralds. 

When we see her alone with Ivory, reading Taln’s repeated mantra, Ivory notes that she’s troubled. The words (and where he was/how he was being treated when they were recorded) is enough to trigger a twenty year old flashback in her. 

This scene is one of the clearest moments (along with the Kharbranth thug scene, I suspect) where Jasnah’s outward projection of her internal feelings and thoughts least matches up with reality.

In spite of the inflammatory remark that sparks this all off,  she doesn’t want to assassinate any Heralds. She quite clearly says she wants to “see if one of them is WILLING to return to Damnation.” She wants to have a conversation with them, understand the Oathpact, and see if any of them would consent to buying them some time. She is not suggesting they knife one of the Heralds in a back alley. That’s Moash’s job.

This is supported by what she does in canon. Jasnah is actually the one who recognises Taln and Ash and, somehow, manages to persuade them to join her at Urithiru and help. She treats them with nothing but dignity and respect in her scenes with them in Rhythm of War, and tries to find out more about the Oathpact and their options - as she said she wanted to do.

But since Jasnah is a Kholin, which means the ‘D’ in her DNA stands for DRAMA, she doesn’t say that, instead she says: “let us find the Heralds and kill them.” (I love her so much y’all. Ahem. Anyway).

But there’s method to this madness, too. Please click the ‘keep reading’ button to discover why! (have to turn my own posts into clickbait bc they’re so long I have to put in a cut to spare ur dashboards). 

Jasnah likes to push people. She likes to force them to think, and consider all angles of a problem, and come to terms with their own thoughts and opinions. This is one of the things that frustrates Shallan about Jasnah in TWOK: 

Shallan caught a victorious glimmer in her eye. She wasn’t necessarily advocating ideas because she believed them; she just wanted to push Shallan. It was infuriating. How was Shallan to know what Jasnah really thought if she adopted conflicting points of view like this?

-TWOK 36

Jasnah doesn’t want to brutally murder the Heralds and force them to return to their maddening idea of hell. But in phrasing it as she does, she can get an insight into Kaladin. Despite the fact we know him very well at this point, this is, this is the first time Jasnah has interacted with him on-screen, and only the second time she’s met him ever. 

“That Windrunner. What do you think of him, Shallan? I find him much as I imagined his order, but I have only met him once. It has all come so quickly. After years of struggling in the shadows, everything coming to light—and despite my years of study—I understand so very little.”

Oathbringer, 33

Jasnah in that scene is deliberately being as exaggerated, ruthless, cold, and harsh as she can get away with. She’s trying to push Kaladin. She wants to bait responses from him, to get an idea of what kind of man he is, and what he stands for. She focuses entirely on him on that scene, and the reactions we as readers get see that as well. 

“If you wish, Captain,” Jasnah snapped, “I can get you some mink kits to cuddle while the adults plan. None of us want to talk about this, but that does not make it any less inevitable.”

“I’d love that,” Kaladin responded. “In turn, I’ll get you some eels to cuddle. You’ll feel right at home.”

Jasnah, curiously, smiled.

 Jasnah likes to be pushed as well. She likes to have people push back with her, and stand up for themselves, assert themselves, make their arguments. She all but encourages Dalinar to publicly do so in RoW. 

Socially, in spite of Kaladin’s rank or status as a Windrunner, it’s probably 100% Not Acceptable to ask an Alethi princess if she wants a basket full of eels to cuddle because she is one, effectively. But Jasnah’s unphased - and even pleased - by Kal’s response. She likes that she’s seeing this from him, that he’s unguarded, and passionate, and more than willing to go toe-to-toe with her, which few people are.

Also, because I foresee potential problems in this meta that I would like to nip in the bud right now, I don’t think that Jasnah is doing this to play with people? That’s not really in her nature or who she is. There’s a purpose to everything she does, and there’s a purpose to her doing this, too.

With Shallan it was to encourage her to think for herself and form her own thoughts and opinions. Just before in that scene, Shallan asked why Jasnah couldn’t just tell her what to think and what was the right philosophy to have in life. Jasnah replied it was something she had to discover for herself - and that’s how she approaches all of their studies. 

Jasnah never teaches Shallan what to think, or even what happened, despite that being the meat of her study. Instead, she teaches Shallan how to think, how to study, how to learn, how to critically reason, and how to form and argue her own thoughts and conclusions. 

With Kal, I think it’s a quick and brutal way of quickly getting to grips with a new, very important, element in what’s going on in her world. Remember, too, that one of Jasnah’s most obvious aims, aside from protecting the world, is protecting her family. And Kaladin is very close to everyone that she loves and holds most dear, while she knows nothing about him. 

However, something else that’s important to note, which, for me anyway, RoW all but confirmed: Jasnah has low cognitive empathy.

She’d come to realize, early in her youth, that she didn’t approach relationships the same way everyone else seemed to. Her partners in the past had always complained that she was too cold, so academic. That had frustrated her. How was she to learn what others felt if she couldn’t ask them?

Chapter 99 really was an absolute fucking gift, I mean really. Asexuality AND low empathy, all in one go. What a delight.

This little snippet can be read as her being asexual, potentially, but I actually think it reads more heavily and obviously about her being neurodivergent? And specially low cognitive empathy. Brandon says that, to him, Jasnah is not autistic spectrum, but you just keep giving me more evidence to say she is buddy!! Anyway. Diagnostic debates aside. 

I would guess some of y’all don’t know what the heck I mean by ‘cognitive empathy’ (I didn’t before I researched all of this a couple of years ago). 

There are two types of empathy, in strict psychology terms (and then there’s the colloquial way we use it to just mean ‘a good person with feelings’ which drives me BANANAS but that’s a rant for another day): 

Affective empathy - which basically means ‘this person around me is happy/sad/excited, I am also now feeling that way. Because emotion is infectious like a cold! How thrilling’. 

Cognitive empathy - is the ability a person has to pick up on/know what others are feeling without having to be told. Using tone/body language/facial expression etc etc. It’s something I, and a lot of other autistic people, are bad at. 

So is Jasnah! 

Her previous partners disliked her probably verbally vibe checking them every other week to find out where they were at. Jasnah was frustrated because how the heck else is she meant to know wtf?? What an absolute mood this woman is. Anyway. 

This revelation/confirmation makes a LOT of Jasnah scenes make a lot more sense. Including: chapter 64, and her insistence, to the point of it almost being illogical, that she fight without her Surgebinding to try and get as clear a picutre of what her soldiers are facing as she can. Jasnah starts off that chapter by saying she’s never actually been in a war before, and states throughout that she wasn’t prepared for what it was actually like. 

Her low empathy means that, without a personal context/experience to relate to and draw emotional experience from, she struggles to understand exactly what her troops are going through. 

Obviously she knows that ‘war is bad, battles are scary and not fun’. But she has no way of emotionally relating/truly understanding what they’re feeling. This is one of the reasons I think it’s so important to her, despite Ivory’s chiding, to do it that way so that she can understand. 

Similar thing is happening here with Kaladin. Jasnah struggles to instinctively Get Vibes from people, so she goes about things in a very scholarly way. 

She does research and makes notes (see: her little folio on the highprinces (which, by the way, misses out on several important aspects of them Shallan picks up on pretty quickly by the power of Intuition), she asks questions - and she sets up scenarios that push people into blatant emotion so she can observe and get an idea of what makes them tick. 

TL;DR TAKE TWO: Jasnah does not want to murder all of the Singers. Jasnah never says she wants to. Jasnah only uses it as a ‘see, asking the Heralds to go back to Damnation isn’t actually that bad now is it?’ hyperbolic counterpoint after Kaladin asked her if she was insane. Jasnah is not actually what she pretends to be in that scene. She is but a hapless gay who cannot detect emotions so she has to conduct her Vibe Checks differently from other people. She is highly valid in every way and i stan her.

[lilatreus]

All of my thoughts on Assassin’s Creed Valhalla!

Of course there are major spoilers for the game and ending. I know it’s been out for like three months now but you never know so I’m putting it all under the cut. And yes this is pretty long. A summary is at the end of the entire text.

also pls don’t send me hate like y’all did for what I said about odyssey literally these are just my opinions on the game if u dont care for them pls just skip I have a lot to say about it and there is actually quite a few things that I really enjoyed when playing the game and if u do read it pls don’t hesitate to shoot me messages and talk to me about the game bc I really enjoy the franchise and I need some more people to talk to in this fandom.

What I enjoyed about the game!!

The blending in with the monks/prayers in the streets to get pass the guards!!!!! Dude!!!!! I know it’s like a really small detail but it just made me so happy because it reminded me of when you had to do that in the first assassin’s creed game. It’s a nice touch of nostalgia and really liked it.

The “glitches” (while some were annoying) I’m super super happy that they were kind of bringing back the glyphs from assassins creed two. I loved doing them because I loved trying to get the little movie. It was really nice of them to bring that back so we can get another little movie like the one from AC2 again.

I think we can all agree: Hytham was a great character. I wish he was more involved in the story than already but that’s just me. I really liked his character so much he’s my favorite from the game.

Desmond having some Easter eggs and basically coming back into the series again was great. It was also a nice touch to see the vault from assassins creed three (the place where des dies). It really makes me miss connor and his band of assassins. I miss assassins creed three :( I want more about Connor please put out some more comics with him in it or some easter eggs please I’m begging you. Also fuck u haytham kenway I hate u.

Shaun and Rebecca being back and now it’s canon that they’re together is fucking awesome. I’m actually really happy about that and I missed them so much. I’m glad they’re in the story again. (Rebecca dude I was so worried that she died like no fucking joke I was so upset I thought syndicate really killed her off).

The game itself actually did very well keeping with the lore we were given from assassins creed origins and was actually doing pretty well trying to connect it to the first assassin game.

Speaking of lore I do think they did the best they could to expand upon the not so well liked lore from odyssey and try and fix it but also it did feel a little confusing but I guess that’s just because i didn’t finish the Asgard missions yet so who knows.

The scenery was very very beautiful and I throughly enjoyed walking around and just admiring the view no matter where I was on the map.

Reda just becoming immortal is so funny and the fact that he was just sitting there telling stories about Aya and Bayek.. please my heart. I love them so so much. The letter Bayek wrote??? Soulmates I’m telling you.

Also I did like that they fixed their plot hole for why Bayek and Aya aren’t known for anything history wise in the story (or mainly why Bayek isn’t in the assassin’s history books and Aya, as Amunet, is really the only one written down). I’m very glad that they explained it and I really think I’m just super happy that Bayek was brought back for some easter eggs within the game.

Basim is very handsome and I liked him but I don’t know how to feel about the ending with him. Yes I do love his character and it was super cool to hang around him and do a couple of missions with him but also it felt weird that now you’re technically playing as the bad guy.

Eivor was really cool to play as. I enjoyed running around as them and doing missions. I like the fact that Eivor was basically like “yo you guys [ pointing to the brotherhood ] are fucking crazy but you guys [ pointing to the templars/order of ancients ] are really fucking crazy and weird.” I really loved basically being an assassin and using the hidden blade again. (Yeah I know they technically aren’t an assassin but yknow just an honorary one).

The Canterbury Tales!! The fucking pardoner’s tale!! That was super cool to do I loved those stories and being able to do them in the game made me super happy. I know it doesn’t actually fit the timeline given it wasnt written until like centuries after the game took place but I just thought that side mission was neat!

Fulke was a very cool templar and I thought her character was really really interesting. I wish they did more with her honestly.

What I didn’t like about the game:

So! Speaking of templars! Boy oh boy I have a lot to say for that subject. So for “the order of ancients”:

— I think my biggest problem with this game (as well as odyssey) is that the templars (“OOA”) aren’t actually important to the game anymore. They’re barely in the story now like out of all 20 or so people you have to kill within their order only like 5 or 6 are actually important to the storyline and that’s my biggest problem with it, because now killing the templars is just like a “well since you’re in the area you can kill this dude” and I really hate it. I truly believe that’s why I didn’t like odyssey that much solely bc they made doing the most core part of the video game series a damn side mission and that also goes for Valhalla.

— Also so many of the templar stories, like scenes we get after you kill them, were just so bland. They don’t make them like they used to and that’s another big core part of the series lost.

— They’re straying very far from the main plot of the series and that’s why these last two games didn’t feel anything like an assassin’s creed game. (And you can’t say that “it’s just different because they’re taking place in a time way before the templars were called templars” bc assassins creed origins did very well to changing their game and how they play but also keeping the main goal from previous games: To be an assassin and kill the templars.)

— Also they need to not show us the outline of who the templars are because I could tell who “the father” was as soon as I was able to see the order tab. Please Ubisoft do better.

I know I said this before however the fucking Beowulf mission. My God Did I Hate That. I was really looking forward to the dlc and to see what they did with the story sucked. In Odyssey we got actual Greek monsters and gods and I expected to be given that in Valhalla for the norse deities. And it didn’t happen. (As of right now I can’t comment on the Asgard missions because I haven’t finished them but I’ll probably edit the post and put them in later)

As of right now with the ending and lore shit I’m really kind of indifferent with it. On one hand they are trying to fix the lore that they kind of fucked up in Odyssey by adding more things to explain it better but also that means they added on unnecessary stuff that makes no sense. On the other hand I really hate that Layla is now technically canonically dead because shes now in the grey and basim now has the one thing that would’ve kept her alive. I really wanted them to do more with her like they did with Desmond. I genuinely enjoyed her as a main protagonist and it sucks that she is now dead. Layla deserves so much better honestly!!!!

Also on des: While I don’t want to smack away a fan service gift that includes desmond; it did kind of feel weird that he’s back in the series. Honestly I don’t know how to go about this. I’m super excited that technically desmond is back in a way but on the other hand I wanted them to focus on Layla more and :( Idk man it’s complicated. They have to stop changing the story’s main protagonists Layla deserved to be in more games and hopefully she will be because her “death” felt so cheap. I also wish they explained what happened with her during the year apart from odyssey and Valhalla.

The side missions I have no problem with except for the fact that the little side mission icon just stayed in the place you first show up to to get the mission. I miss the old side mission mechanic bc this new one felt really really confusing and it made me get lost quite a few times.

This one might just be me but I guess they’re expanding more on the gods reincarnating but they’re not focusing on the sages anymore? Like when will Elijah Miles (the newest sage) be shown?? Odyssey fucked up that lore bit but now they’re not even talking about it because any isu god can reincarnate or can take ahold of anyone if they interact with a piece of eden or something. Idk this one little bit is super confusing for me right now and I don’t like that it’s confusing so I will be doing more research on the isu (again) to understand what the fuck is going on with this damn part of the lore.

I know that this is a game where you kill people but this whole game felt so gore-y that I like had to drop it for a bit. Like dude I didn’t really expect that. This one I really feel like is just me. I did not expect to like hear bones breaking when I played it.

The storyline felt kind of all over the place like yes I could understand the big part of the story but also it was all over the fucking place. I just miss the old plot I really do that had a system that was so good it caused several games to follow it’s lead. (I miss AC1 please remaster that damn game)

Also maybe it’s just me but the story felt so slow at the beginning when ur going to England. Literally I hate to say this bc I love this whole series but I was more happy about finally finishing the main storyline than I was while playing the game.

All in all: I did like the game. I did have fun even though some parts were rough. I’m super glad that they got rid/fixed the ship mechanic because I hated every fucking naval battle in assassins creed and that’s something I was worried about doing when I saw that we had longships in the story. The game was enjoyable and it had a lot of great side characters like Hytham, Gunnar, and Yanli. Basim was a treat, though I hope they explain more about him bc I’m going to be honest he’s a bit confusing with this whole loki thing. But yeah this is all I have so far on the game. If you actually read all the way down here comment or like shoot me message to talk about it bc I really really want to talk about the game. Pls pls pls.

[convenientalias]

Brief Belated Review of "Mine"

Since I made a couple posts about Mine on here sort of recommending it, I thought I would do a brief belated review on what I think of it now that it's been a couple weeks since I finished it. When I first finished it, I was kind of like "...huh", and felt vaguely disappointed, but wasn't really sure why. Now after thinking it over, there are still some things I really liked about it, but it didn't really live up to its potential.

Spoiler warning--I do discuss the ending in this review, though not in great depth.

The Good

The female characters all have their own motivations and are really interesting. The actresses playing them are great too. You have a range of people: some nicer than others, some more rich and powerful than others, some older or younger than others. You get wealthy wives who pretty much are expected to just be wealthy wives at this point in their lives due to familial expectations (they're mostly okay with this). You get a rejected mistress who wants to win back her man and, more importantly, reclaim her child. You get a servant living a Cinderella story but feeling ambivalent about it. You get an old matriarch with anger management problems. You get major conflicts arising between women, women supporting women, and women having sexual tension with women.

I have a hard time finding female-centric shows that I like, especially thrillers (always open to recs btw), so all this was very exciting to me.

Mine is also very aesthetically pleasing. The sets of large, luxurious houses are appealing. The outfits are all elegant and lovely. I actually found myself wearing more dresses than usual while watching this show bc Seo Hi-soo's wardrobe in particular kept on reminding me how nice it is when a skirt goes swish swish.

The Not-So-Good

I'm not sure everyone would agree with me that this is a flaw, but while this show starts out with a lot of female characters in conflict (Seo Hi-soo vs. her mother in law, Jung Seo-hyun vs. Kim Yu-yeon, Seo Hi-soo vs. Kang Ja-kyeong), by the final act, basically all female characters have either ended up on the same side or faded from importance, leaving the major conflicts to be about one man being Just the Worst, that man being of course Han Ji-yong.

The argument in favor of this development could be two-sided: first, arriving at one central conflict rather than eighty separate conflicts makes the finale more streamlined. Second, having female characters cooperate to take down a sexist and abusive man is a feminist plotline. So I guess both of those aspects of the ending are good. I actually really liked Hi-soo, Ja-kyeong, and Seo-hyun teaming up together for the most part.

However, it does make things much less interesting--and honestly, while the female characters all have their own arcs that bring them to the point of cooperating and becoming better people, the fact that they are ALL better people and ALL getting along by the end makes the women of this show feel kind of toothless. This is a show that starts with a murder flash-forward and heavily implies one woman will end up murdering another. By the end, not only do no women die, but the murder turns out to have been essentially defense and therefore justified. And wasn't even committed by a major character! This show spent episode after episode having its female characters grow more aggressive in their fight against Han Ji-yong, and all three major women threaten to kill him at some point, but in the end, it doesn't have the guts to follow through on these threats. Its women have to be good people :) :) so the murdering is foisted on a minor character, who is not even shown as really guilty of murder bc she did it in defense.

This is a thriller! Can I get some morally ambiguous main characters please?

I also thought the way Ji-yong went from kind of an asshole to a complete villain was pretty stupid. If the show wants to condemn him for bringing his mistress into his home, or for abandoning her in the past, or for lying to his wife, that makes sense. For him to continue mistreating women also makes sense if that's how he treats the women in his life. Do we need him to be secretly funding an extreme fighting ring? Hiring assassins? Do we need his lies to be shown as the reason his wife miscarries, and for this to be treated as a natural result he should have foreseen happening? No, we don't need any of that. I feel like Mine started out with a kind of boring Ji-yong, and then just threw all kinds of bizarre character traits and backstory details at him in an attempt to make him interesting. Making him a user and abuser of women would have been enough.

Overall Thoughts

It was a fun show. I don't regret watching it, and I would recommend it for femslash lovers--though the canon femslash is pretty boring, it's still great to see canon lesbians, and Seo Hi-soo/Kang Ja-keyong has amazing enemies to lovers potential. But I do think getting so focused on Han Ji-yong was a mistake, and the ending was very anticlimactic.

[elaphaemourra]

🖊 + Any of them ~

Hooooo this is a fckn, You Have Given Me Too Much Power. I have So Many Words.

Gonna be real tho, this is gonna be a Big Thing about Mita bc I have a fckn AU where he's the Outlander and I have some FEELINGS ABOUT THIS. Bc he's part of my main continuity as an adjacent player to the IA and BH storylines, sharing agent crew/other random shit with Phaeyla for the IA stuff (he got Vector and Scorpio, Phae got the rest) and serving as Another sidequest generator for Jeni in the BH line (I give Jeni so many nerds to keep track of whoops).

(THIS IS ALREADY LONG, AND I'M ABOUT 8 PARAGRAPHS IN, SO IT'S GETTING A READ MORE WHILE I'M STILL THINKING ABOUT IT)

Uh, TL;DR, Mita is handling being Commander about This Well:

OK SO in NORMAL canon he goes with Lana and Koth to go fetch the Outlander (who I decided is actually one of Zal's apprentices, a Voss named Thera-nal, until Zal fckn goes 'no fuck this. I have ghost experience. Gimme the emperor u don't have to deal with this urself' and steals Valk from her bc Good Inquisidad Takes On The Oof Ghost For His Kid) and then gets fckn Ditched on Zakuul. Like straight up that whole 'get the outlander on the ship, Vaylin is 3 meters away FUCK FUCK FUCK' thing, he pushes Thera-nal on and then the ship takes off. Without him. And he does a dive off the platform bc he's like 'nah' @ Vaylin and knows he can survive a Really Long Fall. It's all very dramatic, very ciffhangery. I'm still writing the next chapter beyond that in Left Behind.

He ends up fckn, roughing it on Zakuul, gets himself a sort-of job posing as an assassination droid in a gladiator ring (bc i'm a NERD for gladiator shit), grows up, gains some confidence. Knife baby gets a grow up and a glow up. It's awesome.

BUT. BUT I HAVE AN AU WHERE HE'S THE OUTLANDER. AND IT'S AN EXCELLENT EXAMPLE OF WHY HE SHOULD NEVER BE IN CHARGE OF ANYTHING EVER.

He and Lana don't like each other. It's a Thing. They can put their differences aside for the sake of Professionalism or when they give each other the 'r u seeing this shit' Look when someone else is being Stupid in both their opinions, but they don't like each other (this is true in the normal canon as well, they're very antagonistic to each other, it's a little silly how petty it is but it's Fun). Despite this, and their tendencies to piss each other off on purpose, Mita thinks she's the most tolerable of the initial Pile of People. The Conflict between Koth and Senya was A Lot for him to handle, and he doesn't do Leadership Positions very well. About an hour after they picked Senya up, he was already out of patience.

The constant arguing got to him SO FAST, it ran him out of patience and Fucks so quickly, he started getting real snippy. By the time they got to asylum he was throwing around threats to people who couldn't keep their Shit to themselves. He TRIED to do good things, to pull together enough patience and good will to be Benevolent in his actions, but as his patience fell apart, so did basically everything else good. Mita getting Tora was a whole Thing where he did the Nice Thing by making her apologize to Vik and when she talked back he turned around and drew a knife on her, told her to keep her mouth shut if she was going to complain because he WOULD kill her, and he DIDN'T need an engineer/mechanic THAT much. That he'd use her corpse as payment for the next batch of cargo, which, MITA. WHAT THE FUCK, MAN.

He started falling into MUCH older patterns of thinking, refusing to take any action that was Any risk to himself. It's a thought process he had before he got shoved full of implants, before he realized that he could be a Better Person and started being a rebellious little shit in Intelligence and taking risks that helped Other People instead of just being single-mindedly focused on his own self-preservation.

He's falling back into it, which is BRUTAL because he's making more and more devastating choices, and where he saved people by shutting down that reactor on the First blip of Zakuul, before he ran out of Patience and Fear, and he did Good Lightsided Things to Help People, he just went off with Kaliyo to blow the absolute shit out of that whole thing, and where he used to be like 'shit, we need to make things Better', now he's started talking about Vengeance. Which uh. Does me a Concern about Knife Baby.

Basically none of the advisors actually LIKE him. At best, Senya and him have a solid enough mutual understanding of Work Vs Free Time between them, but she's also Pissed that he keeps taking the Big Death Options and fucking over her citizens. Theron's basically constantly giving him the Pensive Side-Eye because of how consistently Freaky Mita has become. Their first interaction was Prickly at best, and Mita hasn't gained any more patience.

Ofc, Mita and Lana just Don't get along, but they at least vibe on the level of 'i am So Done with everyone here' and she's pulled him aside more than once to get him to cool off a little. Though mostly she pawned him off on HK, when the droid was still aroujd, so she's at least Done Something for his mental state, and he liked that droid enough for talking with him being Relaxing. Kind of.

He's a volatile Commander who Can and Will pull people who irritate him aside to threaten them with mortal or bodily harm, or yeet a datapad at the wall for that Big Sound, or just punch a wall while he's got gauntlets on, to get everyone to Shut Up and Pay Attention so he can yell at them for not keeping their Interpersonal Shit out of the war room and out of his presence. He's basically single-handedly driving the Alliance into the ground, driving it forwards through pure force of will and by making people scared enough to work together without Complaining, hoping that Arcann will give before he or the Alliance do.

He's refused every offer by Valkorion for Everything, and right now that's his saving grace.

Koth bounced, furious with Mita and Kaliyo's 'let's blow this bitch up' thing, and Mita's little circle of people he Actually Likes has uh, maybe Not the greatest influences among them. His inner circle is Kaliyo, Scorpio, Tora (which surprised me, but they are Remarkably chill with each other for people whose introduction was Humiliation and Death Threats, like, a 'they'd vibe and drink in a dark corner together' sort of deal), and Even More Surprising, Aric Jorgan.

Completely separate from the Alliance Advisory Squad, Jorgan seems to be REALLY good for Mita. He's just kinda, it's Working Out. Mita's doing Nicer Shit when Jorgan's around. I'm not sure if it's just, the lack of Shit-Stirrers, the comfort and familiarity of military company, Jorgan's 'ur not the boss of me' thing back in the swamps on Zakuul, or what. But Mita's doing Good Shit when that rad cat man's around. Hell, it might be that he just doesn't want to disappoint his new friend. But like, they're actually a STELLAR team friendship-wise. Mita's actually Relaxed enough to get shit done efficiently, do LIGHTSIDED SHIT, and he basically ONLY brings Jorgan when he goes raiding star fortresses. Kaliyo and Scorpio are higher up on Mita's 'would send out alone' list, but only because he worked with Kaliyo when he and Phaeyla got assigned to each other, and Scorpio was HIS team member.

Even with that though, Mita's reputation among Alliance personnel isn't a Kind one. He's terrifying, volatile and quick to snap at anyone and everyone who gets on his nerves. People avoid him in the halls unless they Absolutely Need Him, and there's ABSOLUTELY a network of people you can ask as a 'where's the Commander now' if you really need to spend the day Avoiding Him.

He's also leaned Heavily into the aesthetic of Big Scary. Dressed like a Sith all in black and white and grey (and a Republic insignia on his belt just for the added cognitive dissonance that gives him), with a Delightfully Menacing Helmet that makes him nigh unreadable. The voice modulation is something he Knows how to use to make himself more intimidating, and he knows how to hold himself to make Pointed Silence into something that can cause fear. He really leaned into that 'scaring people into working for you' thing, which isn't sustainable, and he KNOWS it isn't, but he's hoping to get shit done fast enough that it won't MATTER how unsustainable that type of leadership is.

He's Stressed and Tired and Angry, and he's going down a deep dark hole. He needs to be fckn, sat down and Confronted about where he's going because he MADE that choice to be better, on BALMORRA. It cost him his free will, his autonomy, and his identity. He was PHYSICALLY unable to say his own name without his upper body motor function locking up, for a long time, because it was part of the programming of his implants. He gave Everything up to be Better, and it took so much to get those things back, and now he's squandering it all by falling back into who he used to be.

He needs some Time to Chill The Fuck Out, an Intervention for what he's doing with himself, and a goddam nap.

Knife Baby is Stressed Out. He's the Team Medic. He was never designed to be In Charge, and it took its toll Very Quickly, and it's devolved into something Brutal and Unsustainable. Which is why this is an AU, and why my Canon Commander for the timeline is Zal.

Zal's a good leader, good under pressure, patient and fair almost to a fault, and a good person.

Mita can't handle the strain, and he KNOWS it. But he's doing it anyways, and will drag the people around him down with him if it means he'll win in the end. And in the mean time, he's frustrated, volatile, and Not Very Fun To Be Around.

[one-leaf-grimoire]

“hellfire”

A little one shot based on a throwaway line in “Dyad” that I felt like expanding on. I realized I only showed the titular dyad at full power once in the story so this should be a special treat! Enjoy.

synopsis: Julius prepares a plan for the final battle against an invading kingdom. Takes place shortly before BC canon. Also my OC Lisa is there and they kick ass.

“ About a month before my 26th birthday, the Diamond Kingdom attempted yet another invasion. This time, they were serious, and much better prepared. Luckily they went through the town of Kiten first, instead of my hometown to the North. Still, they gained a valuable foothold and prepared to make a rush to the capital. We didn't have much time to mobilize, and really didn't have a plan of attack. But we attacked... and Julius lead the magic knights into the most important battle of his term so far. I was lucky enough to fight beside him, and all the other Magic Knights; people who were old friends, and people who became new friends. Fortunately, we emerged victorious. The Capital roared with celebration as we arrived back, showering Julius and the others with praise. Everyone wanted to be a magic knight now, and everyone wanted to become the Wizard King. They would be telling stories about his spell for years to come... White Hell. “

Dyad, chapter 53

(Six months before the beginning of Black Clover)

“A push towards the Capitol? Right now?”

“Yes, sir,” Marx stammered, his hands shaking as he held the report. Yami stood behind him, beaten and battered but with a neutral expression on his face and a cigarette hanging between his teeth. The smoke dissipated quickly in the cool night air blowing in through Julius’s open bedroom window. He usually didn’t like to be bothered at this time of night, but when at war, a ruler must be ready to act at any time. 

“What about the defenses in Kiten?” Julius asked, reaching up and rubbing the last of his sleep out of his eyes. “Weren’t you stationed there, Yami?”

“Yep. I beat a bunch of them up,” the younger man replied gruffly. “If I were by myself, it would be easy, but it’s harder to fight when ya got a squad full of idiots to protect.”

Despite the situation, Julius let out a huff of laughter. Nervous laughter, but laughter all the same. “I see, so you fell back… well…” His gaze moved to the window, his wise, old mind starting to work hard. Every solution, every possibility, ran circles between his ears. It’ll take too long to mobilize everyone to defend the city… not to mention that, if we aren’t prepared, civilians are going to get hurt… His brow furrowed as his fingers pinched his chin once, his eyes closing briefly. Our best bet is to catch them on the way… but how am I going to gather enough knights, tell them the plan, then get them into position in time? Ah, this is bad…

Why on earth did Lisa have to be gone now-

Lisa. That was it. She was the answer… like always.

Julius’s eyes popped back open. “Yami, Marx, gather anyone in the capitol right now. All the captains if you can.”

Marx frowned. “Sir, will that be enough?”

“Yes… I think. If Lisa can get here in time-” Julius let out a groan. It’s bad enough that she left to visit Mereoleona for a whole month, but of course war broke out while she’s gone. Not that she would have known… 

“Lisa? Oh no…” Yami took out his cigarette to glare disapprovingly at Julius. “Don’t tell me you two are gonna do that creepy link thing again?”

Marx raised an eyebrow, but Julius couldn’t help but smile.

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

----------------

Two hours later, the group they managed to throw together headed out by broom to the calculated interception point. The night wind rippled Julius’s golden locks as he flew, this time on a carpet that Marx procured. They hung towards the back of the group, which consisted of only the magic knights captains and a few of the knights already stationed in the capitol. Everyone was tense, glancing back at their King who had told them a worryingly little amount of details about this plan. Even Marx, who had inside information, was a little worried. “Lord Julius, if she doesn’t show up-”

“She will.” Julius cut him off, glancing back at the blue-haired man. “She’s on her way now…” his mouth twitched into a smile. “I can feel it.”

Marx gulped nervously, his hold tightening on the edge of the carpet. “How can you say that? I’ve been with you this whole time, and you never called her-”

“When you left to let me get dressed-” Julius cut in once again, his eyes focused up ahead. “I took a moment to clear my head… and sure enough, I could hear her.”

Marx blinked, starting to understand. So… they can talk to each other like that? Miles and miles apart, and yet, he just needs to clear his head. He knew about Lisa’s strange Dyad power, and how she and Julius shared magic as a result. They complimented each other perfectly, and he had always suspected that there was something more than love behind that synchrony. Well… maybe that synchrony was a result of love after all. But that wasn’t his main worry right now.

“So… you’re telling me you don’t have a backup plan?”

Julius was still for a moment, but then he shook his head.

“No. We don’t need one.” His gaze hardened, and his smile widened. “We will win.”

“THERE THEY ARE!”

Fuegoleon Vermillion’s loud voice boomed out into the darkness. He was at the head of the group, tagging a ride on Nozel’s Mercury Eagle spell, and was the first to spot the enemy. “Remember the plan! Engage!”

“KEH KEH! Don’t think you can order me around.” Jack suddenly zoomed past him on his broom, the scythes on his arms glowing green in the night. “I don’t need you to tell me how to slice up my prey!”

He swung his arms forward, and two huge slashes ripped through the night. The opposing army scattered, more than two hundred strong, and then converged on the magic knights like a swarm of bees.

Before chaos erupted, Yami glanced back at his mentor one last time. Julius nodded, then he and Marx descended out of sight below the treeline a moment before impact.

Spells were everywhere, people were yelling, and bursts of light shattered the otherwise peaceful slumber of the earth. Julius stepped off his broom and peered upwards, his eyes widened exponentially and sparkling like a kid in a candy shop. “Amazing… all the captains fighting at once-”

“T-There’s too many of them…” Julius looked over at the sound of Marx’s hoarse voice. He was staring up in the sky too, but with less wonder in his eyes. “We’ll never win…”

Julius’s laugh surprised him. “Marx, I know I couldn’t even take on that many people… not alone, not with all the Captains at my back. But you saw Lisa and I fight together before, remember?”

Of course Marx remembered. No one present that day could ever forget what happened. He witnessed something… indescribable.

Lost in the memory, Marx did not notice the attacker from behind until it was too late. Something slashed down, hitting him in the back. Blood flew crimson against the black sky.

“J-Juli-” 

Marx’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t even finish the name before he hit the ground. Julius started to turn around, almost in slow motion, his gaze landing on his fallen friend first. For one brief moment, shock froze him in place and he was helpless to the mage now leveling another attack at his head. 

Marx…

Before Julius could do anything, the tree trunks around him lit up. A bright blue streak of light, sparking and snapping with power, struck the assassin through the back. His body jerked, then fell down limply at the Wizard King’s feet.

That spell…

Flame Magic: Solar Bolt.

Julius knew it well. It was one of his favorites. 

“Lisa?”

Sure enough, a woman stepped out from behind the trees. She was short, petite, even with her traveling cloak thrown over her shoulders, but you couldn’t take your eyes off of her as she walked with such… purpose. At least, Julius couldn’t.

“There you are-” Her eyes caught his, moonlight reflecting off of her irises like mirrors. She smiled. “-Julius.”

With a sigh of relief, Julius let a grin burst forth on his own face. Forgetting about the battle for the moment, he stepped over the assassin’s body on the ground and bounded towards her. With one swoop, he grabbed her into his arms in a tight hug. She was as warm as always, his little space heater that he missed dearly when she was away. Lisa let out a momentary protest, but he couldn’t hear it over the joy in his heart.

“Julius! Isn’t there, like, a super important battle happening right now? We don’t have time for hugs!” Lisa contradicted herself by letting her arms wrap around his middle and hug him back.

Julius chuckled before pulling back to look at her face. “So? We have time, I say so.” He gave her a wink before reality set in once again. “Ah, but we’ll have time later.”

Lisa nodded before peering around his shoulder. “You okay, Marx?”

“Thanks for asking.” Marx had sat up, still wincing from the pain on the wound on his back. “Luckily it just knocked me over, and it’s not deep.”

“Oh! Well-” Julius was already running over. “Let me close it up-”

“NO! Julius, Lisa, do your… thing. If this can be over as quickly as you say it will, get on with it.” Marx’s annoyance broke for a moment to give Julius a confident smile. “We have a plan, remember? I’m still able to complete my part. You can heal me after you do yours.”

Julius gave him a nod before standing up again. “Right…” He looked down at the fallen assassin. “Is he going to wake up?”

“No.” Lisa walked over and craned her neck to look up at the battle. “Yikes… that’s not good. Are our people still mixed in with all the enemies?”

“For the time being. That’s where Marx comes in. Now, Darling…” Lisa looked back down to see Julius extend his hand to her. “Are you ready?”

With a deep breath, Lisa nodded. “Yes.”

She took his hand and the two of them ran out of the forest to the field underneath the battle.

In a way, it was lucky that Lisa had just been on sabbatical in the grand magic zone. She retreated there about once a year to train with Mereoleona, and learned how to channel large amounts of magic through a body that wasn’t necessarily built to do so. All of that training, all that pain, all this development, she did it because she knew a decisive moment like this would come. 

I have to be strong enough… not just for the Kingdom.

She looked up at the back of Julius’s head as he led them ahead.

But for him, above all else.

Finally, the two of them slowed to a stop in a good central area. Magic was still whizzing above, the tables not yet turned but close to getting there. There were just too many of the enemy, but soon that would all change. Julius sucked in one last breath before grabbing Lisa’s other hand and turning to face her. “Are you sure you can do this?”

She nodded, but Julius could feel her hands trembling. With a calm smile, he leaned down a bit to look into her eyes. “We’ll be together the whole time, remember? I won’t let you get hurt. Remember what you said to me the first time?”

Slowly, Lisa nodded once again, more sure this time. 

“As if I would let you kill me.”

Her grimoire started to glow white, the pages flipping to one emblazoned with a symbol; the same symbol that marked Lisa as Simulcian, as someone who could form a Dyad. Lisa could already feel her mark pulsing, glowing brighter and brighter in the darkness. It was working, as if it had done this a million times instead of just a handful. Julius winced slightly as an identical mark suddenly burst to life on his own head, right next to his swallowtail mark. “Ah… it’s working.”

Lisa nodded, her hands tightening in his. Magic was cycling now, between the two of them, faster and faster and faster and-

I- I can’t do it-

Every time the mana moved through her, Lisa felt the familiar sensation of her very soul breaking.

It’s going to hurt… it’s going to be scary…

She squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to ground herself again. Images were flashing through her mind, both her thoughts and Julius. Each flash brighter and bigger than the last, building up, amplifying, getting so massive that she wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer-

But this is what it’s supposed to do…

Slowly, she opened her eyes to look back up into Julius’s. His eyes were starting to glow like hers, but he was still smiling.

In order to become all-powerful… I must destroy myself. I must destroy both of us.

It’s alright, Lisa. I’ll be here. I’ll always be here.

I won’t be alone.

Without closing her eyes, Lisa leaned up, and Julius bent down to meet her. Their foreheads touched, and their souls shattered.

For one brief moment, neither of them existed. The Ego, the very shape of the Self, was gone, destroyed by the sheer force of their combined mana. But then, it reformed. One new Ego… one new Self.

A Dyad.

Marx watched from the treeline, leaned up against a trunk, his eyes widened as he watched the two of them glowing violently. They’re doing it… are they- He sucked in a breath as Lisa stepped back. They were still hand-in-hand, but it wasn’t them. The being that stood there appeared to have two bodies, but when they turned to look at Marx, he knew he was looking at just one thing. It worked.

Marx stuck to the plan. He raised his hand to the sky and fired off a bright, loud mana blast, which exploded like a firework a couple meters up.

Yami caught sight of the light, his heart skipping an anxious beat. “Everyone! Get out of the sky!” he yelled, swinging his sword once to dispel his enemy before diving down. The other 8 captains and their crew followed, zipping away from the cloud of the enemy as fast as they could. Yami glanced down to see Lisa and Julius standing there, glowing eyes locked on the sky. “Shit, they’re about to blow this place to high heaven.”

Just as Yami predicted, the Dyad made their move. Their movements were eerie, yet perfectly in sync. They were extensions of each other’s bodies, one mind and one soul shared in order to perform a feat of magic. 

This is going to be difficult to explain to the others.

Their hands clasped together, pulling closer together as if they were performing some strange waltz. But then they pointed towards the sky towards the swarm of attackers who were just now realizing that they had fallen into a trap.

At the very tip of their fingers, pressed together with intimacy and precision, a pure white ball of fire started to form. It was only the size of a marble… but it caused the very earth to shake.

Finally, their lips moved to utter the spell.

“Instant Fire Magic: White Hell.”

In that moment, the night ceased to exist. A second sun burst to life in the sky, engulfing the attacking army in its entirety. Light bathed the land, as bright as noon, and more than two hundred people screamed their life out into the abyss. 

As quickly as it started, it was over. Darkness fell over the landscape, as is if it had never been lit up in the first place. Two hundred soldiers of brooms and carpets were suspended in the air, then went limp and started to fall to earth. 

The Dyad did not notice.

They stood there together, inside the recess of their shared mind. It was warm and cozy, like the sanctuary of a bed or even the safety of a mother’s womb. They stood there together, their palms pressed against the other’s. Lisa smiled up at Julius, and he smiled right back. There was so much he wanted to say to her in this moment, but he didn’t have to utter a single word. She knew. 

Because, to be a Dyad is to destroy yourself… to destroy yourself and become something beautiful. It is the only way to truly be known. 

Julius blinked, and it was over. Smoke and dust filled the air, dirt kicked up from the force of many bodies hitting the ground around him. He looked up into the sky and grinned when he saw that not a single mage managed to avoid the attack. “Look at that! We did it, Lisa, you did it-”

He looked down, and realized that she had collapsed at his feet in a puddle of her own blood.

“LISA!” 

Julius fell to his knees with a strangled cry, quickly turning his lover over into his lap. The sight made him as queasy as it did all those years ago; there was blood coming from her nose and ears, and her eyes were shut. Panic beat itself into his chest at the sight and his hands trembled.

Oh god… oh no… I- I actually killed her this time- I should have never-

But then, Lisa cracked open an eye, her lips twitching into a ghost of a smile.

“Boo.”

Julius groaned, his shoulders slumping with relief. “Lisa! Don’t scare me like that!” he admonished lightly, his heart still pounding slightly. “Jesus... I’m gonna have to spank you.” Despite the situation, he threw in a little joke to make her smile.

“Hmm, you can try.” Lisa winked before wincing again. Julius winced as well, feeling a phantom pain through his own head. “Are you ok?”

“Yeah, mostly.” Lisa sat up with some help from Julius, leaning into his chest while she caught her breath. “It hurt a lot, but not as much as last time for sure!”

“Good, good.” Julius pulled out his handkerchief and started to tenderly wipe away the blood on her face. So, she’s grown a lot since last time… To be able to share magic, both members of a Dyad have to be able to withstand the full force of their combined mana. Back in the beginning, Lisa almost died with every attempt. But by working hard and honing the magic Julius shared with her, she was able to do so much better. Pride swelled in his heart, and he couldn’t help himself; he leaned down and gave her a kiss. Her lips were still tinted with the metallic taste of blood, but they were warm.

“Lord Julius!”

Julius quickly broke away (reluctantly) as the other captains ran over. Most of them had stunned looks on their faces, but Fuegoleon and Yami were pensive. The two of them saw the first Dyad on that day long ago, but they were still surprised to see how it had developed. 

This power… Fuegoleon gulped, his eyes flickering between Julius and Lisa on the ground. So easily… they decimated the entire Diamond army. 

Both of them are scary enough by themselves, but when they’re together… Yami shook his head to himself. It’s unreal. I guess I should be grateful.

“What was that?” Rill piped up, his eyes as wide as saucers.

Julius bit his lip, exchanging a glance with Lisa. She was too drained to even move except for a small shrug. They had agreed to keep her power secret, so this was going to be difficult to explain. “Er- a combo spell we’ve been working on. I’ll explain later.”

There was a murmur of agreement among the others. William narrowed his eyes slightly underneath his mask.

Interesting…

“Now!” Julius quickly grabbed Lisa bridal style and rose to his feet. “I better get her home, and get Marx healed as well. The rest of you should contain all the prisoners then drop them off at the border. The reinforcements should make short work of the force at Kiten.”

“Prisoners?” Nozel repeated, glancing back at the bodies strewn everywhere. “But sir, aren’t they… dead?”

Julius let out a hearty laugh. “Of course not! How would that look if we just killed 200 people like that? Anyway, I want witnesses so they know never to come back again.”

“Amazing…” Charlotte’s eyes widened. “How did you save them from the fall?”

“Oh, that…” Julius shrugged before turning away to rejoin Marx. Lisa peeked over his shoulder to smirk back at the other captains before finishing his sentence.

“They are alive because we decided it was so.”

The two of them soon disappeared into the night, leaving 7 of the 9 captains very confused… and awestruck.

The Capital roared with celebration as we arrived back, showering Julius and the others with praise. 

Everyone wanted to be a magic knight now, and everyone wanted to become the Wizard King. 

They would be telling stories about his spell for years to come... White Hell.

Well… our spell.

[jcmorgenstern]

@superohclair oh god okay please know these are all just incoherent ramblings so like, idk, please feel free to add on or ignore me if im just wildly off base but this is a bad summary of what ive been thinking about and also my first titans/batman meta?? (also, hi!)

okay so for the disclaimer round: I am not an actual cultural studies major, nor do I have an extensive background in looking at the police/military industrial complex in media. also my comics knowledge is pretty shaky and im a big noob(I recently got into titans, and before that was pretty ignorant of the dceu besides batman) so I’ll kind of focus in on the show and stuff im more familiar with and apologize in advance?. basically im just a semi-educated idiot with Opinions, anyone with more knowledge/expertise please jump in! this is literally just the bullshit I spat out incoherently off the top of my head. did i mention im a comics noob? because im a comics noob.

so on a general level, I think we can all agree that batman as a cultural force is somewhat on the conservative side, if not simply due to its age and commercial positioning in American culture. there are a lot of challenges and nuances to that and it’s definitely expanding and changing as DC tries to position itself in the way that will...make the most money, but all you have to do is take a gander through the different iterations of the stories in the comics and it’ll smack you in the fucking face. like compare the first iteration of Jason keeping kids out of drugs to the titans version and you’ve got to at least chuckle. at the end of the day, this is a story about a (white male) billionaire who fights crime.

to be fair, I’d argue the romanticization of the police isn’t as aggressive as it could be—they are most often presented as corrupt and incompetent. However, considering the main cop characters depicted like Jim Gordon, the guys in Gotham (it’s been a while since I saw it, sorry) are often the romanticized “good few” (and often or almost always white cis/het men), that’s on pretty shaky ground. I don’t have the background in the comics strong enough to make specific arguments, so I’ll cede the point to someone who does and disagrees, but having recently watched a show that deals excellently with police incompetence, racism, and brutality (7 Seconds on Netflix), I feel at the very least something is deeply missing. like, analysis of race wrt police brutality in any aspect at all whatsoever.

I think it can be compellingly read that batman does heavily play into the military/police industrial complex due to its takes on violence—just play the Arkham games for more than an hour and you’ll know what I mean. to be a little less vague, even though batman as a franchise valorizes “psychiatric treatment” and “nonviolence,” the entire game seems pretty aware it characterizes treatment as a madhouse and nonviolence as breaking someone’s back or neck magically without killing them because you’re a “good guy.” while it is definitely subversive that the franchise even considers these elements at all, they don’t always do a fantastic job living up to them.

and then when you consider the fetishization of tools of violence both in canon and in the fandom, it gets worse. same with prisons—if anything it dehumanizes people in prisons even more than like, cop shows in general, which is pretty impressive(ly bad). like there’s just no nuance afforded and arkham is generally glamorized. the fact that one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, I will admit, does not help. im not really sure how to mitigate that when, again, one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, but I think my point still stands. fuck you, killer croc. (im just kidding unfuck him or whatever)

not to take this on a Jason Todd tangent but I was thinking about it this afternoon and again when thinking about that cop scene again and in many ways he does serve as a challenge to both batman’s ideology as well as the ideology of the franchise in general. his depiction is always a bit of a sticking point and it’s always fascinating to me to see how any given adaptation handles it. like Jason’s “”street”” origin has become inseparable from his characterization as an angry, brash, violent kid, and that in itself reflects a whole host of cultural stereotypes that I might argue occasionally/often dip into racialized tropes (like just imagine if he wasn’t white, ok). red hood (a play on robin hood and the outlaws, as I just realized...today) is in my exposure/experience mostly depicted as a villain, but he challenges batman’s no-kill philosophy both on an ethical and practical level. every time the joker escapes he kills a whole score more of innocent people, let alone the other rogues—is it truly ethical to let him live or avoid killing him for the cost of one life and let others die?

moreover, batman’s ““blind”” faith in the justice system (prisons, publicly-funded asylum prisons, courts) is conveniently elided—the story usually ends when he drops bad guy of the day off at arkham or ties up the bad guys and lets the police come etc etc. part of this is obviously bc car chases are more cinematic than dry court procedurals, but there is an alternate universe where bruce wayne never becomes batman and instead advocates for the arkham warden to be replaced with someone competent and the system overhauled, or in programs encouraging a more diverse and educated police force, or even into social welfare programs. (I am vaguely aware this is sometimes/often part of canon, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s the main focus. and again, I get it’s not nearly as cinematic).

overall, I think the most frustrating thing about the batman franchise or at least what I’ve seen or read of it is that while it does attempt to deal with corruption and injustice at all levels of the criminal justice system/government, it does so either by treating it as “just how life is” or having Dick or Jim Gordon or whoever the fuckjust wipe it out by “eliminating the dirty cops,” completely ignoring the non-fantasy ways these problems are dealt with in real life. it just isn’t realistic. instead of putting restrictions on police violence or educating cops on how to use their weapons or putting work into eradicating the culture of racism and prejudice or god basically anything it’s just all cinematized into the “good few” triumphing over the bad...somehow. its always unsatisfying and ultimately feels like lip service to me, personally.

this also dovetails with the very frustrating way mental health/”insanity” or “madness” is dealt with in canon, very typical of mainstream fiction. like for example:“madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.” yikes, if by ‘push’ you mean significant life stressors, genetic load, and environemntal influences,  then sure. challenge any dudebro joker fanboy to explain exactly what combination of DSM disorders the joker has to explain his “””insanity””” and see what happens. (these are, in fact, my plans for this Friday evening. im a hit at parties).

anyway I do really want to wax poetic about that cop scene in 1x06 so im gonna do just that! honestly when I first saw that I immediately sat up like I’d sat on a fucking tack, my cultural studies senses were tingling. the whole “fuck batman” ethos of the show had already been interesting to me, esp in s1, when bruce was basically standing in for the baby boomers and dick being our millennial/GenX hero. I do think dick was explicitly intended to appeal to a millennial audience and embody the millennial ethos. By that logic, the tension between dick and Jason immediately struck me as allegorical (Jason constantly commenting on dick being old, outdated, using slang dick doesn’t understand and generally being full of youthful obnoxious fistbumping energy).

Even if subconsciously on the part of the writers, jason’s over-aggressive energy can be read as a commentary on genZ—seen by mainstream millennial/GenX audiences as taking things too far. Like, the cops in 1x06 could have been Nick Zucco’s hired men or idk pretty much anyone, yet they explicitly chose cops and even had Jason explain why he deliberately went after them for being cops so dick (cop) could judge him for it. his rationale? he was beaten up by cops on the street, so he’s returning the favor. he doesn’t have the focused “righteous” rage of batman or dick/nightwing towards valid targets, he just has rage at the world and specifically the system—framed here as unacceptable or fanatical. as if like, dressing up like a bat and punching people at night is, um, totally normal and uncontroversial.

on a slightly wider scope, the show seems to internally struggle with its own progressive ethos—on the one hand, they hire the wildly talented chellah man, but on the other hand they will likely kill him off soon. or they cast anna diop, drawing wrath from the loudly racist underbelly of fandom, but sideline her. perhaps it’s a genuine struggle, perhaps they simply don’t want to alienate the bigots in the fanbase, but the issue of cops stuck out to me when I was watching as an social issue where they explicitly came down on one side over the other. jason’s characterization is, I admit and appreciate, still nuanced, but I’d argue that’s literally just bc he’s a white guy and a fan favorite. cast an actor of color as Jason and see how fast fandom and the writer’s room turns on him.

anyway i don’t really have the place to speak about what an explicitly nonwhite!cop!dick grayson would look like, but I do think it would be a fascinating and exciting place to start in exploring and correcting the kind of vague and nebulous complaints i raise above. (edit: i should have made more clear, i mean in the show, which hasn’t dealt with dick’s heritage afaik). also, there’s something to be said about the cop vs detective thing but I don’t really have the brain juice or expertise to say it? anyway if you got this far i hope it was at least interesting and again pls jump in id love to hear other people’s takes!!

tldr i took two (2) cultural studies classes and have Opinions

[burnededens]

   ( avan jogia, trans male, he/him, assassin’s creed: syndicate ) * &. i know it must be scary for you, jacob frye, after not surviving the takeover. to turn into someone like jacob "jake” fowles, a twenty-five year-old bartender at dragon’s breath brewery & fighter at the ring, right here in castle town. just remember that you are as charming as you are reckless, and to be wary, be safe, be true to who you are : neutral through and through. ( hylia gets assassin’s creed on main )

   SO FUN FACT - I have been wanting to write this character in this group for months and it is absolutely a crime that it took me this long to pick him up but here we FINALLY are ! I’m genuinely shocked he’s the first Assassin’s Creed character here because I personally think all of the characters are phenomenal and it was either gonna be this character or the protagonist from two games before ( Edward Kenway of Black Flag ) but I have a slightly greater preference towards Jacob so !! Behold the living embodiment of chaotic good !! Obvious tws for death , violence , and murder under the cut because this is a series about assassins , but also gang stuff ( and a very small bullying mention in the post-snap portion ) too. I hope this is easy to understand !! 

BEFORE THE SNAP  /  J A C O B   F R Y E .

S’OKAY again I will always try and explain the games’ history and Syndicate’s specific plotline in the simplest of ways - and especially because AC can get very confusing very fast. Thankfully Syndicate is one of the more straightforward entries , but before I get into that , I have to give a basic rundown of the lore since... it will not make sense if you haven’t played any of the games.

A long long long time ago , there were these people called the Isu , and the Isu crafted something that the AC franchise refers to as Pieces of Eden. The Pieces of Eden ultimately has access to control other living beings , and they were extremely powerful.

Flash forward a little bit where you have two forces - the Knights’ Templar and the Assassin Order/Brotherhood - that struggled for these Pieces of Eden for two very different reasons.

The Templars valued order and wanted to use them to control others to achieve a utopia - believing that human corruption & essentially free will were what caused most evils of the world.

The Assassins valued freedom & wanted to preserve the free will of the world , believing that control would do them no good and a mutual understanding under this freedom would be what created a utopia.

So basically , Templars wanted peace via control and Assassins wanted peace via freedom.

Templars wanted the Pieces of Eden to control , and the Assassins knew this was Not Good and often sought to keep the Pieces the fuck away from the Templars ( at least , that’s always how I saw it. )

Of course , because we’re now on like ten main games and seventeen spin-off games it’s OBVIOUSLY way more complicated than that , just that’s the most nutshell way to explain everything. That being said , let’s jump more into Jacob & Syndicate. 

SO JACOB. Jacob is one of the two protagonists of Syndicate , the younger twin to the other protagonist , his sister Evie. They were born in Crawley , raised by their Assassin father , but while Evie was always more . . . into the Brotherhood and assassin ideals , Jacob always was more of a rebel & a free spirit. But nevertheless , he grew up an Assassin like she.

Flash forward years later where the main plot of Syndicate starts , during the Industrial Revolution in 1868 , where the twins are set on heading to London , which is pretty much entirely under control of the Templars ( namely Crawford Starrick and his network ) & their syndicates ( ha ha hA ).

This . . . is sort of where Jacob & Evie separate in terms of goals - Evie’s well-aware of the Pieces of Eden and aims to collect them before the Templars do. However , Jacob’s more so intent on taking down Templars & liberating London from their control. He goes as far as to even starting a gang with his sister - known as the Rooks - to combat the Templar-controlled gang that has London’s boroughs in its grasp known as the Blighters. 

Evie’s basically like “okay we’re going to collect the Pieces of Eden so the templars don’t have them bc Starrick will be more powerful if he has them” but Jacob says to her “fUCK YOU I’M A MAN WHO’S GONNA FREE THE PEOPLE” and. Yeah.

Throughout the game , Jacob’s the twin that exhibits a more impulsive , reckless , yet well-meaning approach to problems - and that sorta kinda . . . means that when he solves problems , he also accidentally makes other problems , and his sister has to clean them up because hey , you killed this Templar leader and angered a bunch of Blighters and we are fucked and Jacob can’t really. Grasp that because he’s too focused on freeing London NOW and taking out Templars NOW and [ Sleeping With Sirens vc ] do it NOW and remember deal with it LATER.

There’s a few cases where Jacob has even so ( both unintentionally and intentionally ) teamed up with Templars because he thought they could help him accomplish his goals in taking London back from them.

He teamed up with Pearl Attaway ( a businesswoman who controlled most of London’s transport and wanted basically a monopoly ) and didn’t find out until later that she was a Templar and had to assassinate her since she was the exact type of controller he wanted to rid London of

But also he struck a deal with Maxwell Roth ( basically a Blighter gang leader who had a shitton of power ) to work with him - but Maxwell saw this as let’s cause as much chaos as possible and fuck the consequences where Jacob saw it as more let’s fix problems by any means necessary and he had to shut down the deal when he saw Roth really just . . . didn’t give a fuck about anyone , including innocents. Jacob’s whole goal was to free and protect the innocents , he just didn’t care how as long as nobody got hurt.

AND THAT’S HONESTLY WHAT I LOVE SM ABOUT JACOB LIKE ... Jacob. Is the epitome of chaotic good like he cares so much about people and protecting the innocents & saving them from control that yeah he doesn’t really . . . consider the consequences of his actions especially when his actions are so chaotic but his primary goal is to free the people of London by taking down Templars and he doesn’t give a fuck how he’s going to do it , he just operates on his code of making sure none of the good people get hurt and the bad guys go down. 

Eventually in the game he did come to realize the errors in his own work and way of thinking - he didn’t think much of the consequences , and therefore caused more of a wreckage than he aimed for. He loved the idea of freedom , but drew the line at absolute careless anarchy like Roth.

Basically be a REBEL not an ASSHOLE.

I love this kid tho like he’s so witty and rebellious and chaotic but also good-hearted and will still help even tho he might complain a lot about it ( looks at Abberline and Darwin ) and he !! He honestly acts before he thinks but I find those characters so refreshing esp bc he’s very emotional and adamant about acting on how he feels and his ideals and it’s honestly so. Idk I really like that about him.

He’s also canonically bisexual and that is something I will never shut up about but if you fucking even tHINK ABOUT ROMANTICIZING ROTH & JACOB’S RELATIONSHIP ( like it’s p much confirmed Roth had a thing 4 Jacob but it’s not. That’s not a Good Thing ) I will personally throw some hands with you. 

...Jacob and Ned however-

SPARE NED?? SPARE NED MA’AM??? 

But honestly anyway TLDR; Jacob is a Victorian chaos-bringer who doesn’t really think much about the shit he does but has a heart of gold he’s just. He’s A Lot. He’s a lil bitch but a good kind of lil bitch.

ALSO ALSO ALSO I AM,,,, not exactly entirely sure where I’m pulling Jacob yet like I could pull him from the end of Syndicate’s main story but also there’s the Jack the Ripper DLC which makes me... feel things, but Jacob’s also significantly older than and a good bit of that DLC’s a bit triggering - long story short, we love and will protect Jacob Frye with our entire lives. 

AFTER THE SNAP  / J A K E   F O W L E S .

So PERSONALITY WISE - Jake isn’t much different from his past self ; the only thing is he never grew up with his twin sister , raised an only child , and because Jacob & Evie are meant to balance each other out , he essentially grew up without an entire part of him he isn’t even aware of.

He was adopted - adopted by a working-class family from London that moved to Castle Town , and that was where Jake was raised.

Now , he was always a bit of a rebel. Always a problem child from the start. There were hundreds and hundreds of cases where he was reported either talking back to teachers , misbehaving in class , sometimes even getting into fights with other kids whether it be they were picking on him or someone else.

And he always liked the thrill of being that rebel - being that miscreant that earned a reputation ; never a mean person , never a bad dude , just somebody who . . . acted out. Acted out for whatever reason - mainly because he never liked the idea of obeying or because he taught the rules were stupid or because the rules meant some people were gonna get inconvenienced. Like , if you see someone getting bullied , why just tell an adult where you can solve the problem right then and there and sock the bully in the jaw ??

That was it. That was Jake’s philosophy.

His parents sent him to multiple hobby & art & educational camps & stuff to try and see if he could find some sort of hobby that would sorta get him out of this ‘problem child’ thing - but it never really worked. He always either got sent home earlier or was asked to never come back because hey , you can’t start a rebellion in the boys’ cabin because you didn’t like the way one of the counselors instructed you about knot tying. 

Never worked out , his parents thought he was smart and would make a brilliant lawyer or doctor or something - but nope , he graduated high school , attempted college but dropped out after two years , and when his parents kicked him out , he crashed with a few friends and made a living on odd jobs before he scored working as a bartender at Dragon’s Breath.

And also . . . both fighting at The Ring and also underground matches for some coin.

Yeah. 

It’s sorta-kinda through this he ALSO became aware of the other people who had to resort to means like this to survive - eventually starting his own gang of people who operated on sorta-kinda Robin Hood like terms - protect the less fortunate , combat the gangs who caused way more problems than he’d like , and also to basically uhhh flip the bird to the rich.

You guessed it - they’re called The Rooks and they’re not really . . . big , they’re just kind of. There. And nobody knows Jake’s the leader but it’s not like he’s really pressed if anyone finds out. 

It’s overall not entirely different from his pre-CT life other than obvious modern differences and LACK OF EVIE sooo. Yeah !!

I’ll hopefully work on a WC page for him soon but as of rn I just kinda want to get some threads going - hope y’all enjoy my dumbass kid xoxoooo

[somanypetals]

ok ok ok. are you a spuffy fan? i feel like i've seen spuffy on yr blog and if that's not true then please ignore but i've been thinkin recently and i'm very interested in what you think/how you reconcile spike's attempted rape?? bc as a spuffy fan i love them together but i also can't ignore this part of their history in good conscience. was it ooc? was their relationship building to a horrible climax? i'm just very interested in what people think abt that writing decision

omg I’m sorry for taking so long to answer this, I wrote like half an essayand then firefox crashed and I got grumpy about it for a few days lol ;___;

anyway in short: do I ship it? yes. is my relationship with the shipcomplicated? fuck yes. can I reconcile the attempted rape? on a base level, no.on a character level, I am able to move past it but not look past it. on awriting level, I don’t reconcile it at all. was it ooc? yes and no,which is the interesting part

this got really long and I’m hoping that I can remember everything I wassaying before I had to start all over again (rip) but I’m sorry it got so longunder the cut

so I do still ship spuffy, but I have a really complicatedrelationship with it. I’ve shipped it since I was a tween, before I reallyunderstood the unhealthy parts of it (rape scene aside, which I was very clearon), and I’ve come to see those in a new light the past five or so years, butI’m still also someone who is very adamant about people being allowed to shipwhatever the fuck they want in fiction whether it’s unhealthy or not becauseit’s fiction, and at the end of the day I’m shipping something because I findit entertaining or interesting, not because it’s the paradigm of relationshipexamples. in fact most of the time it’s not, because I find most of thoserelationships boring on screen. so like, I do still ship it, but not the way Iused to?

 anyway, was it ooc? in terms of mythology canon I don’tthink it was ooc at all. spike had no soul, he was at a base level evil. I don’t think this excuses theattempted rape at all, nothing excuses it or forgives it, but it does explain abit how the spike who dressed buffy’s hand wounds at the start of the seasonwas the same spike who flipped a switch and attempted to rape her near the endof the season. spike never became “good” when he had no soul, he was like aferal animal on a leash. he learnt to play relatively nice with others andbecame fond of some of his owners, but he still wasn’t cured and if you tookthe leash off at the end of the day he would have bitten them. yes, spike lovedbuffy in his own soulless way, but he still had a literal, animalistic demoninside him (we even see in angel in over the rainbow etc. what the actual demoninside vampires is like at its base level) and no soul to control it—only theintellectual knowledge that some actions would get him in buffy’s good booksand some would get him in buffy’s bad books and so he kept it under controlbecause he wanted her and he also wanted to not be killed by the scooby gang.again: this does not excuse the attempted rape at all. nothing forgives it. butlike, it does explain why buffy and many viewers are able to move past it. Idon’t think that on a mythology canon level it was ooc at all, I think thatpeople just forget that spike was stillevil when he was being nice to buffy or dawn or joyce. I think that’s partof the reason it’s so hard to piece together whether spuffy really could workor be good as a ship, because the show never separates spike with a soul fromspike without a soul the way they did with angel. with angel it’s so clearlytwo different people, but with spike it’s a muddy mess of the same thing and ifyou don’t write spike with a soul differently to how you wrote him withoutone—how are viewers supposed to forgive him for what he did?

 was it ooc on a character level though? that’s a wholedifferent thing because that opens the can of worms of spike being ooc ingeneral. the spike we see in season four onwards is drastically different fromthe spike we see in season two, and I do think part of that is just plain oldcharacter development but I also think that part of that is due to them wantinga slightly different character when he became a regular? spike was almost woobified by his own writing team? I don’t thinkit’s anything like the character assassination of britta for example, and Iwouldn’t even call it character assassination, but I do think that at somepoint late during season three or early season four they decided they wanted aspike who was funnier, a bit more sympathetic, and a bit more worthy of being afan fave. it's less like character assassination and more like characteradaptation? I feel like they saw that james had this excellent comedicpotential and wanted to use that, and I’ve seen that with other characters onshows too. I think they had to bend spike a bit along the way to get the spikethey wanted and who they could have fun with. he went from spike the genuinelychilling villain, to spike the comedic relief, to spike the stalker, to spikethe coping mechanism, to spike the love interest…and it definitely wasn’t astraight line of development. they definitelyhad to bend the character along the way and lose some of what was thereoriginally and add some of what wasn’t there. and like, it’s not necessarily abad thing, like I fuckin love comic relief spike and I can totally understandwhy they might’ve been like “fuck this james guy is good we want more of that”,but I do think that on a character level they ended up with something that wasquite frequently messy. if you’ve taken this villain and woobified himyourself, then even if he is still evilit’s not surprising that people are surprised or find it ooc for him to attemptto rape buffy because they made him a puppy with a temper instead of a wolfwith a playful streak, and then suddenly his fangs come out again. andobviously to a degree that was the point of it, to remind viewers that he wasevil and he wasn’t good and buffy forgot that, the scoobies forgot that, everyoneforgot that, but at the same time if you woobify a character that much doesthat point land? or does it just become ooc? I think a spike in love with buffyand protecting dawn and getting flowers after joyce died could be consideredjust as ooc as a spike who attempted to rape buffy. he became a bit of a messycharacter if you really think about it for too long, and they never separatedhis soulless state from his soul-having state enough to keep track of it

 so anyway, on a character level I’m able to move past itbecause I think at the end of the day…spike didn’t have a soul when it happenedand he was written kind of weirdly over the course of the show but I still likehim. I move past it as a viewer because I wantto move past it, and because I find the spuffy relationship interesting (yet Istill want more/better for buffy always? man, I said it was complicated hahah)

 NOW, FROM A WRITING STANDPOINT

 bullshit bullshit utter fucking bullshit.

 why though? well apart from the reasons I’ve already mentionedabout kind of messy character writing and it being impossible to tell whichparts of spike are ooc or not…………the attempted rape scene was not about buffy,before during or after it happened

 they wrote it as a gateway to spike’s redemption arc. theytraumatised their main character, this beautiful female character and one of mytop favourite characters of all time, to boost a man’s redemption arc, andthat’s just fucking awful and we’ve seen it too many times and buffy doesn’t deserver that bullshit.

 now I don’t know whether there’s a solid answer on whetheror not spike went to that demon at the end of season six to get his soul or toget his chip removed, but it also like…doesn’t matter, lol? I personally alwaysread that scene as he went to get his chip removed so he could kill her, andthen the demon was like lol psych herehave a soul! which I think also makes it easier for me to move past theattempted rape, because then it didn’t literally lead to him choosing to go have a redemption arc andbecome a better man for her, but like a lot of people do read it the secondway. and either way!! it’s a crock of shit!!

 not only did they put in this scene so they could kickstartspike’s redemption, instead of picking some other non-rape or non-violence againstbuffy related plot point to lead to him getting a soul, but then they sort ofmade it all about spike in season seven too?

 they do address bits and pieces of buffy’s trauma afterwardsand how it impacted her, but way way too much of the focus was placed onspike’s guilt and spike’s wanting to fix it and how it impacted spike etc., sonot only did they have buffy almost raped to kickstart a man’s storyline, butthey barely focused on her trauma over the “trauma” of spike and that’sjust…fucking awful. like it makes me so mad and it makes me feel so gross.

 as a writing decision I think it’s sexist, disgusting, lazyand unforgivable and the biggest fault with what is literally my favourite tvshow of all time lol (you wouldn’t think it is from this rant?? but it is?? andI like spike and ship spuffy??? god this is a mess) and I think it was probablythe worst fucking writing decision on all of buffy (and this is the show thatkilled tara, a literal lesbian angel)

 and honestly……the fact that I am aware of and think it’s theworst writing decision possible almost makes it easier to move past from acharacter standpoint? because it was a bad writing decision, it takes some ofthe weight off of spike’s actions for me and I’m aware that it was stupid and grossand it would’ve been better if spike tripped and accidentally fell into a gravethat had a stray soul in it that he inhaled.

 I don’t know if that makes sense, in fact I don’t know ifany of this makes sense…but it’s like: spuffy is interesting. to me they havechemistry, they have narrative and trope appeal (even though it wasn’tfulfilled, or wasn’t fulfilled right), they are two characters I likeindividually, and so…I continue to ship it and enjoy it despite the horriblefucking bad writing decisions that went down in season six. I know that evenwithout the attempted rape season or even without season six it’s still anunhealthy ship and it’s problematic (and I want better for buffy at the end ofthe day), but it is at a base level to me entertaining, and that’s what I likefrom my ships

 god this is almost two thousand words I’m so sorry I have alot of thoughts and I had to rewrite half of this so it’s really, really scattered and confusing butlike…yes I ship it, no I don’t think the attempted rape was a good writingdecision, no I don’t excuse or forgive it but I do move past it

 and in answer to what other people feel about the scene andship….it’s really divided lol, a lot of people feel like I do, a lot of peopleprefer bangel, a lot of people prefer spuffy, a lot of people can’t look pastthe rape at all, a lot of people look past the rape too easily, and a lot of people probably don’t know what to thinkor have no strong opinions lol

 god

this is two thousand words I’m sorry