#i reread it and it got me thinking

[solitaire-sol]

Daily Prongsfoot Thought 011

James/Sirius has the same energy as Bill/Richie (IT). Observe:

Both are pairs of best friends even among their other best friends, with special bonds or interactions between them that are noted as separate from their interactions with other friends: Sirius is noted as the only one James will listen to, for example, and Richie is the only one who not only notes when Bill doesn’t stutter, but why.

Both feature characters who serve as the heart/‘leader of their respective friend-groups (James and Bill) and their best friend who is outwardly more surly and prone to stirring the pot, but who are in fact motivated by incredibly deep, unspoken loyalty (Sirius, Richie).

Both pairs are initially stunted as ships by fan adherence to (heterosexual) canon: Besides being dead, James marries Lily in canon, and early HP fandom as I remember it was often obsessed with what is or could become canon, while fans of IT focused on Bill’s childhood crush on Beverly and then on his marriage to Audra.

Both have their original book-based relationship overwritten in the minds of many with their portrayals in their respective movies, which downplays their relationship by marginalizing or outright giving parts of it to others: James’ bond with Sirius is eclipsed (heh) by Remus in the HP movies, while Richie/Eddie is canonized in the 2019 IT movie.

Both pairs are subsequently slept on by fans who primarily became familiar with them through the movies, and who often have little or no engagement with the original books.

Many current fans engage with the fandom’s material purely through fandom - fics, art, TIkTok - thus further burying both pairs’ original chemistry and potential under poor movie adaptations and bad takes, with the resulting fandom takes being treated as universal common knowledge: Ex. Mischaracterization of James and Sirius, Bill and Richie having a vitriolic relationship or barely being friends vs their actual novel relationship.

Both pairs are subsumed beneath the shadow of all-consuming fan-preferred pairings, whose shippers have a myriad of reactions to the pairing in question, with a common refrain from fans who are against these pairings being “but they’re such good platonic friends! :)”: J*gulus and W*lfstar for James/Sirius, Richie/Eddie for Bill/Eddie.

In conclusion, Prongsfoot and Bichie (yes, that’s the most common shipname for Bill/Richie) are both tragically underestimated, and should be more plentiful, but will never be fully embraced, as they would easily become too powerful and devour us all. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post

[nectarishes]

Slip from the trees to the dirt

[winnie-the-monster]

“My god,” he said, his voice a mere shadow louder than breath, “you’re so beautiful.”

And for the first time in her life, Penelope truly believed that might be true.

[pbnmj]

noir fanartists deliberately ignoring how he doesn't need glasses anymore is so funny to me. i hope we all think he's blind as a bat

[narugen]

LOVE his kansai dialect so much huge shoutout to his seiyuu (kengo kawanishi) here’s 34 seconds of it from the new episode

(also whilst confirming that i wasn’t saying the wrong shit i found a thread on how his dialect gets translated in the manga from an official translator!)

[merlins-strawberriesandroses]

The thing no one ever considers while writing up character analyses about Merlin is that. he must have been sooooooo sleepy.

[necrotic-nephilim]

what's fun about shipping Tim with Dick, Jason, or Damian is he has, at some point, hallucinated all of them to comfort himself. even when he doesn't like them or particularly get along with them, he has to imagine/hallucinate them just so he has the power to go on. Tim's concepts of the Robin mantle and what it should be is so fun, because he respects the others through the Robin mantle. Tim worships Dick because he was the first Robin. he wouldn't be Robin if Jason hadn't died in the mantle. and a lot of his frustration with Damian is he feels Damian isn't honoring the mantle correctly. when you ship Tim with the other Robins you can't divorce their identities as Robin from it because Tim will always see them as a Robin first and that's so fun and fucked up. like.

batman (1940) #456

Tim perceiving Dick as *Robin* cheering him on, not Nightwing, which is the version of Dick that Tim actually knows? that's just. wild of him. he will always view Dick as Robin first, his personal hero but also the original of the legacy. his love for Dick is shaped by that.

and then of course, even when he's hallucinating/imagining Jason cheering him on, it's *still* through the lense of being reminded how Jason failed? subconsciously believing that Jason got himself killed because of his actions, and that being a lesson for Tim to learn from? Jason isn't a person to Tim, he's a moral lesson about how to be Robin. any potential idolization he could have of Jason isn't because he loves Jason, it's because of the lessons Jason's death taught him.

and then, even though him hallucinating TIm is from the New-52, which makes characterization all kinds of questionable, i do think it makes sense for TIm to hallucinate/imagine Damian after Damian's death in an attempt to cope with it.

teen titans (2011) #18

to an extend, he sees Damian's death as in part his own fault. and even hating Damian, Tim needs the comfort from this to cope with Damian being gone. he's angry that Damian even was Robin, and has to learn something from Damian's death and how it impacts the Robin mantle, and teenage heroes as a whole. like, Tim can pretend he hates Damian all he wants, even getting taunted by the image of Damian, but there's still an underlying love to their relationship.

i think that's just the fun of shipping Tim with any of them. you will never divorce Tim's views of them from the Robin mantle and how fucking Unwell he is about anyone else who's been Robin before or after him, to the point he has to hallucinate them comforting him when he's at his lowest. it's always going to be a little unhealthy, a little toxic, and driven by Tim's relationship with being Robin as well. i need more Tim being weird about Robin in these ships.

[makiswirl]

can i just say. and this is probably a niche hill to die on. that i am so gobsmacked every time someone vaguely hints at the idea that jotaro doesn't care meaningfully for the other crusaders, usually particularly kakyoin and joseph, when those two actually tend to be the ones he reacts to being hurt the hardest

like he cares for his loved ones!!!! that literally plays into his character motives in every single part he shows up in!!! stop lying to me!!!!!!!

[originalaccountname]

Uhh i just finish stormbringer and i didnt quite understood Rimlaine relationship im sorry if this comes off as annoying its just that i read some of your analysis and you explain thing very good, thanks in advance 💗

Their relationship is complicated and contradictory. Ultimately, their lack of communication (both in talking and listening) dug a hole so deep between them that they both had to die before it was fixed.

I'm gonna attempt a timeline to break it down, so you can see what happened. This got way too long despite my best efforts so I'm putting it under a cut:

At an undisclosed time, Rimbaud, a spy/special agent working for France, goes to defeat a mad scientist and ability user, Pan. Pan had created a sort of puppet, named Black No12, who could manipulate gravity and obeyed him blindly. Rimbaud managed to cut the link between them, and Black No12 turned against and killed his creator and master.

Rimbaud took Black No12 under his wing as a fellow spy for France. He trained him and made him his partner. He gave him a name, his name from before he changed his identity to become a spy: Paul Verlaine.

Rimbaud wanted the formerly brainwashed person he found to be independent. Despite his origins, Rimbaud wanted Verlaine to feel human. He was his friend and wanted him to be happy.

Verlaine, on the other hand, was haunted by not being or feeling human. He felt lonely and isolated, and Rimbaud pushing so hard to make him feel human only rubbed salt in the wound. But he didn't tell Rimbaud any of that.

Rimbaud gave Verlaine the hat right before their operation in Japan to retrieve project Arahabaki. The hat had a special ability alloy woven into it meant to make sure no outside instructions could be used to brainwash him again. That was Rimbaud trying to guaranty Verlaine complete agency, one step closer to making him human. This was only a grim reminder of what he was to Verlaine. After the lukewarm reception of his gift, Rimbaud starts to feel permanently cold.

When they got (what they thought was) the artificial human from Project Arahabaki out of the lab, Verlaine was taken by the Bungou Stray Dogs curse of seeing yourself in other people and wanting to save them to save yourself. Verlaine told Rimbaud he was taking the child and going into hiding to raise him as a normal human being, to protect the child from the same pain he felt. Rimbaud, who hadn't realized how his dear friend suffered, still didn't understand and tried to reason with Verlaine that they couldn't possibly turn their backs to their home, and that the child would still be with them in France.

This poor communication resulted in Verlaine feeling trapped and choosing to shoot his only friend in the back. They fought and Rimbaud got the upper hand before he got surrounded by the lab's guards and desperately tried to use Arahabaki to defeat them too. This ended in the Suribachi incident and his loss of memory. Verlaine still had enough strength to stop Arahabaki/Chuuya's rampage before vanishing who knows where.

Fast forward 8 years, Fifteen happens, with Rimbaud, now permanently cold, who got some of his memories back. Rimbaud wants to know more than anything what happened to his partner and friend all those years ago, and is even willing to kill Chuuya (and Dazai) for it. As he dies, he remembers what happened that night while they were escaping, and how Verlaine chose to shoot him in the back over Chuuya. He tells Chuuya that he was probably human all along, and to live no matter what, before vanishing into thin air.

One year later, and Verlaine has found Chuuya and decided to try again to take him so they can be lonely together. He's trying to both isolate and protect Chuuya in a twisted sense of responsibility and kinship (and the power of projection). When Verlaine finally loses himself to Guivre, he manages to tell Chuuya about how he stopped Arahabaki 9 years ago in Suribachi so Chuuya could do it to him now. Chuuya understands from this that Verlaine might have felt lonely and oh so bitter about the world, that he might have hated his existence, but he had found friendship in Rimbaud and wished to save the world in his name. One person had been worth it, so he couldn't just destroy it all.

After the fight is over, Verlaine is dying from Guivre's energy having been depleted by Chuuya's efforts. As he dies, Rimbaud appears: Rimbaud has created a singularity with his own ability at the time of his death, maintaining his mind alive in his subspace by absorbing himself as his ability on loop. He's like the Old Boss was in Fifteen, just a puppet, not a human... but he's still Rimbaud. And Rimbaud wanted his friend to live and be happy.

Rimbaud apologizes for not understanding Verlaine's struggle with humanity and incidentally handling it badly. Then, he passed on his ability, now a singularity, onto Verlaine to replace Guivre as his source of life: a lot less powerful, but enough to keep him going. Rimbaud tells him he's glad Verlaine was born because he got to meet him, and disappears for good.

Verlaine realized then, way too late, that he really cared about Rimbaud. Rimbaud spent a whole year as something that wasn't human just for the chance of seeing Verlaine again and apologize to him. That got to Verlaine too. Since then, he's been hiding in the Port Mafia's basement, uncaring of the world, and mourning his friend and the friendship he passed by without knowing.

In the shortest, in-novel words possible:

[dragonseeds]

do you have any thoughts on daenys the dreamer?

extremely fun and obvious play on the cassandra figure. a version where her family not only believes her but venerates her visions and prophecies—like, she saves them and a handful of dragons and, in doing so, the world, but it also curses her bloodline. the thing that once saved them becomes an obsession that consumes them literally in wildfire. the idea that you can be doomed by believing in and actively trying to fulfill a prophecy (aegon v at summerhall, melisandre and stannis) just as easily as others are doomed by their disbelief or their attempts to circumvent fate (cersei echoing my buddy king laius)—like that’s so, so cool to me. i love the ambiguity between fate and choice, the way grrm takes the whole trope apart and plays with all the individual components.

also very interested in the line running from daenys to daenerys, and i always wonder if daenys saw her too and if so, how much of her life daenys saw and was able to contextualize? did she see clear images like melisandre and bran or more metaphorical ones, like jojen or dany in the house of the undying? something like… a dragon with three heads fighting in a frozen wasteland lol?

considering the the loss of female power in house targaryen is so deeply entwined with the dying of the dragons, underneath all of that for me is aemon’s line in affc and the context that follows it:

what were they translating?? were some of the documents in other languages? it couldn’t have all been daenys’ works because aemon says they’ve been wrong for a thousand years. this prophecy has been a motivating factor for the targaryens (and valyrians?) for a thousand years, but i wonder at what point the translation error actually crept in? daenys was valyrian and that would’ve been her primary language—i like to think she would’ve understood the nature of the dragon in a way her male descendents couldn’t. no one ever looked for a girl, but it was always a girl. not men in a patriarchal feudalist society reducing women to their reproductive capabilities (rhaella’s miserable life being one of the most egregious examples of this) and then being surprised when a woman is needed to rebirth the dragons lol.

this got away from me because i think the (deconstruction of the) use of prophecy in asoiaf is fascinating and everything we know about daenys is tied up in that. cutting myself off before i start talking about gender as it relates to this prophecy. beyond that, i’m really not interested in interpretations of daenys where she’s catatonic or broken by what she’s seen any more than i am in interpretations of dany where she goes mad, just because i’m sick of the seeing the general victimization of women in asoiaf taken to such an extreme that they’re defined by it—with whoever suffers most ecstatically being the least problematic to stan, especially when the women in question are from/associated with house targaryen.

[puffywiz]

you can crown this bitch with so many crowns

[cerealmonster15]

walks into the function wearing a tshirt that says ASK ME ABOUT MY TOXIC THIRD YEARS POLYCULE HEADCANONS

this map has been stewing in my mind for years i think and i finally wrote it down in the illegible spaghetti way that i always do let's GO

lilia is not in the polycule he's just playing his own game of collecting sons. everyone is his son. he's also going to watch the drama because who doesn't love a soap opera playing out in real life he's got front row seats to the divorce vortex.

cater/trey/rook/vil are the ultimate four way polycule but also oh god theres so much going on there.

cater and trey are a ride or die duo but also trey knows cater sometimes isnt completely open with him but trey has a very passive nature to him as we've seen in book 1 and when he mentions cater's wish to himself in the starsending event... but theyre still close and care for each other a lot and i will die defending them if i have to fjdklsjfds

rook and vil oh my god rook and vil. they are so married. and so dramatic. and so. sdkfjsdkljf a little divorced because rook is also in love with the biggest rival of vils life but that is NOT enough to break their marriage. love finds a way. somehow. fdskjfjksdlg

^ i could go much more into both those duos but we simply. we dont have time we are moving along we are walking

rook and trey beloved science weirdos oh my god every time theyre on screen together theyre so funny. i love odd friendships. science marriage real.

cater canonically flirted with vil even tho it got somewhat censored in engtwst and was partially probably for clout reasons HOWEVER, to ME it's also for bisexual reasons. vil is canonically very pretty and caters like yeah 🧡🧡🧡 vil can see through when cater's being more superficial BUT ALSO they have genuine moments of getting along!!! like in events, beanfest 2 and the puppet one that's not out in eng yet. no spoilers here but there is a bit in puppet event that has me so vindicated on how they really do work well together and respect each other!!!!!!! into the polycule you go.

vil and trey,,, gestures to vil's lab coat story klsdjflksd they get along and it's cute. everybody loves trey.

even leona wants trey in the divorce polycule. no spoilers but please see playful land puppet event / leona's card vignette for that event. and also i think treys platinum birthday card story sljdflksdjf

the extreme difference between how malleus reacts to cater bothering him vs rook bothering him or even just Talking To Lilia is so funny. like he gets along with rook sometimes but in those two pe scenes hes SO aggro he wants that twink OBLITERATED he is going to KILL ROOK HUNT. but he will play tag with cater :^)

leona is the king of divorce. he is divorced to everyone he touches . he invented divorce. he's turbo divorced with vil and malleus because he and vil are just sooooooo. fsdkjfskdlg when therye on screen together it's like passive aggressive but mostly just aggressive bitching and bullying. theyre so funny. they have this energy of like "we have Tension but also i am going to kill you. i begrudgingly respect your abilities but i will only say so with layered insults." like the way vil says "so leona's got a pretty face but that's ALL he has going for him" like. multiple times. why does he keep doing that.

and then whatever he has going on with malleus is so funny. like malleus seems like hes a smug little bitch having fun with the banter [again he wants to Destroy Rook in those PE stories, but leona's blatant insults i feel like he's more teehee you stupid bitch >:)] and leona's just so pissed mad angry forever he's like no i need this dragon fucker DEAD for EXISTING !!! but i think malleus' having fun with the fellow teen experience of stupid razzing

leona and cater are giving me subtle divorced vibes in that one scene in book 2. listen. i have headcanons. ive talked about it. moving on 🚶

rook. leona. i feel i do not need to elaborate jfklsjfkljsekljfkl

idia is so funny. why are his opinions about everyone around him either "oh god hes ultra tier scary" or "he's so sparkly dazzling handsome beautiful". he does this often with no filter and it's so funny. i like that he and leona played chess for like hours or whatever in that one birthday vignette but i forget which one lol i think it was idia's union bday or something

do i have more to say. ive been thinking about them for hours and also years. i can and will talk about them forever i think they are So funny. this is just a messy summary of it all i'm barely scratching the surface i simply cannot go into full detail or this post will Never End GOODBYE!!!!

[surreal-duck]

valkyuri

[numbuh424]

shoutout to whatever L and Light had going on in Time Speaks

[beanghostprincess]

Sanji being the only one checking up on Usopp during Water 7 and Enies Lobby makes me ill. The second Luffy and Usopp are arguing and Sanji kicks his own captain for acting that way. The way he snaps at literally everyone. Like-- Okay, everyone was irritable and emotional at the moment because Usopp was leaving. But there's just something about the way they portray Sanji's anger and reaction towards the situation that makes me go insane. It's not only the fact that he defends Usopp at all costs, but also how he's the one verbalizing it too. He cares deeply about him. And I feel Sanji is the one who would look around him to look for Usopp even when he knows he isn't there. And then he finds him again, and the first thing he does is kick Franky for hurting him. No hesitation. "Our long-nose" what do you mean OUR???? He finds the possessive somehow comforting because Usopp is still theirs, no matter what. And then Usopp acts like a proud, stubborn, dramatic idiot. And he wears that stupid Sogeking suit and Sanji is just so done with him but in the most endearing of ways. Then the whole "I'll do what you can't, and you'll do what I can't" thing happens, and it's so important for Usopp's character. It makes him trust in his crew and believe in himself and his abilities and it's Sanji the one saying it because he was with Usopp in Alabasta when Usopp told Chopper "Just do whatever you can". It's just so beautiful. The bond Sanji and Usopp have throughout the series and how much it shows in Water 7 and Enies Lobby that Sanji cares about him in a different way he cares for the others. He wants to protect him but he knows Usopp can do it alone. He protects him when it matters. Sanji understands Usopp because he's been there before, feeling left out, weak, and inferior. Then the whole drama happens yadda yadda yadda. And when Usopp is plotting how to get back to the crew, the one listening is Sanji. He asks himself what is the idiot he has for a friend doing, but he stays to listen to him. To keep an eye on him. He could've just told him to come back right at that moment. Talk to him. But he didn't because he knew this was something Usopp had to do for himself. He just watched his steps carefully and wished for the idiot to come back soon. And you know, I think it's nice to see how Sanji keeps Usopp close all the time.