#it is about human beings making choices

[ilynpilled]

i know people mostly take note of jaime being associated with the warrior & the maiden because of the whole huge gender extravaganza that is going on with j/c/b but i love how he also seems to be strongly connected to the stranger throughout the text. other than all this, he has the death motif (death of the boy, scythe sword chops hand/rebirth, aerys, ilyn the executioner, the bear, stoneheart, cersei, hooded figures in his dreams, the ghosts etc) along with the dance with death thing. when he refers to himself as “a stranger in my own house,” in the next few chapters he gifts oathkeeper to brienne and aids her in working against his family’s interests, the major color symbolism shift starts: crimson/gold vs white, and frees tyrion which leads to the death of his father and the head of his house (he told the corpse. “The blood on his hands as much as… Tyrion’s.” The blood on his hands as much as mine, he meant to say.) and i think we can all guess what else is coming when it concerns jaime embodying the stranger in the future. i like that cersei “all the time was the stranger” to jaime, and he comes to that epiphany and continues diverging from her, and he “has become” it for cersei, but she is not aware of it, like she doesn’t think he means her death. and i am sure it is meant to be loaded that the character who is the primary deconstruction of knighthood/the kingsguard in the series also embodies the stranger (he certainly fulfills the role of executioner & judgement in some form, and i do like these layers when it comes to the medieval narrative of “it is ‘god’ who shall judge tyrants, not anyone else” which can also serve as a tool for class stratification, and avoiding the precedent of sovereignty being challenged. it is touched on in different ways in the text) but i dont have my thoughts together enough about this lol. we do know george is an agnostic:

"I suppose l'm a lapsed Catholic. You would consider me an atheist or agnostic. I find religion and spirituality fascinating. I would like to believe this isn't the end and there's something more, but I can't convince the rational part of me that that makes any sense whatsoever. [...] And as for the gods, l've never been satisfied by any of the answers that are given. If there really is a benevolent loving god, why is the world full of rape and torture? Why do we even have pain?”

his view is verbatim jaime’s argument: “If there are gods, why is the world so full of pain and injustice?” and the whole conversation parallels brienne’s statement: “Jaime Lannister murdered the rightful king […] Where were the gods then? The gods don’t care about men…”

but george is absolutely not a nihilist in any way, so i think much of it is about placing human agency at the center of all this, and it is some kind of discussion when it comes to karmic or divine intervention. he is half a corpse too. a man is a man, not god. and a man is “whatever he chose.” it is man who acts, not gods.

[wojtekaneko]

That's how it went

[wigglebox]

Supernatural September - Day 2 | Identity

[edwinisms]

it’s actually so wild to me that this fairly quirky YA type show gave both of its main characters deaths that can, in one way or another, solidly be considered hate crimes. they were both flat out murdered as a result of being A) gay and effeminate or B) brown (south asian, specifically) and you could argue whether or not those kids thought of it that way in the moment or whatever but the bottom line is that they would not have been in the situations that killed them if they weren’t of their respective minorities. like legitimately that is a ballsy choice for this kind of netflix show, let alone for the two Main Characters, and i respect it big time

[moeblob]

I love Chris so much you guys.

[felixakranken]

TWF fans have a strange habit of, for lack of a better word, woobifying Mr. Walten.

I think a lot of you seem to take this series a lot less serious than it actually is, and those same people have a very bad habit of making Jack out to be a saint. He's just a normal guy. Just because he loves his family doesn't mean he's some sweet and perfect guy who has no flaws. I never see any of you discuss or portray his anger issues that Martin has mentioned numerous times.

You all blatantly ignore the fact that Sophie's only memories she retained of him were that he was angry and he worked all the time. Just because he loves his family and didn't abuse them doesn't mean he's perfect. To deny him of these flaws take away what a dynamic character he's being written to be.

We know Felix sucks. We all know this because no one shuts up about it. That's his best friend of 20 years, someone he chose to have around his family, and someone he chose to start a business with. Felix's actions don't reflect on Jack, obviously, but you have to think about the fact they are best friends of 2 decades.

The small bit we know about Jack and what things Martin has let on to his personality over time is very different than what everyone makes him out to be, and it's strange. If you choose to ignore that Jack is just a normal middle-aged man in the 70s, that's on your own inability to actually like the character that's there.

[foxx-queen]

i keep thinking about the datamined conversation between halsin and minthara and what gets me about it is that if you side with halsin and turn minthara away, thats objectively the bad choice.

like at this point, you've rescued minthara from moonrise. you know now that she was being controlled to act against her will. you've gone to the trouble of rescuing her from her tormentors, and you've experienced what it felt like as they tried to destroy her mind. you know what will happen to her if you turn her away. and if you do, you're willingly condemning her to that fate. you've essentially allowed her to experience freedom, to regain her sense of self, only to tear that away from her again.

whereas if you side with minthara, and halsin leaves, that's the only consequence he experiences. that he's not a companion anymore. at this point, we've saved the grove, we've saved him, and we've lifted the shadow curse. we've helped him achieve what hes been hoping to do for over a century. leaving your party won't see him lose his free will. he can return to the grove and live his life.

the choice is essentially either condemn someone to a fate worse than death, knowing exactly what that entails vs not letting someone travel with you anymore. its pretty clear cut to me.

its just interesting to me that they've switched the morality of it around given that minthara is considered the 'evil' companion by so many.

[gideonisms]

THE number one most irritating thing about life is deciding when you're meant to speak or make eye contact and when you're not, and for how long and how many phrases you're meant to say at a time

[androgynouspenguinexpert]

congruent of d'deridahn

[spacedlexi]

the way the ericson group were at the outbreak just a bunch of troubled kids who made various mistakes or committed crimes and were judged by a system that punished and abandoned them instead of giving them the support and love they needed, are then nearly a decade later put into a situation where now they must judge a troubled child for the mistakes and crimes hes committed against them. and 5 to 3 vote them out 😭

[uncanny-tranny]

I promise you can speak about and denounce undesirable behaviour without attributing it to some in-born, immutable, unchanging trait that you must "civilize" away.

In this specific instance that inspired this, you really don't need to attribute bad behaviour that's done by a man with unchanging character traits. This isn't even solely about men, because doing this affects everyone, men included.

"Men needed to be civilized out of behaving this way!" Who are you expecting to be doing the civilizing and why? This is just defending the idea that women are responsible for training up men - the millenia-old idea that a man's failings are actually a woman's fault, not his.

As a man, I am responsible for my actions. You don't need to dehumanize me in order to preserve your misogyny and your need to hate a group of men. Don't get me wrong, this rhetoric absolutely is not good for men to face. It especially targets men who have experiences with marginalized identities. If you're on my page, you know that this is something I deal with personally, have personal stakes in that affect my life daily. I just also think we really need to remember that this issue exists in a context where women and other folks will inevitably be punished as a direct result of these ideas as well.

I need to make that last part emphatically clear: even if this rhetoric (somehow) only hurt men, it would still be wrong. It would still be wrong! I want to - as a man - remind people (especially those who already have decided to dehumanize entire groups of people) that nobody is safe from being exempt from punishment due to this rhetoric.

[meteorstricken]

A Casual Indictment of Clive Rosfield

Thinking about how Clive swore to kill the one who killed his brother.

Thinking about how he told Cid that once he'd done so, "whatever happens, happens", and how Cid then chided him for being a slave to fate.

Thinking about how, according to the Ultimania, Clive made Joshua the core of his spiritual identity...and how he began training to be his Shield since the tender age of 6.

Thinking about how, when fighting Ultima in the end, he did so as Joshua's Shield, and nearly every exchange he had with Ultima was drawn from Joshua's last words. But when the fight was done...his high idealism of humanity seemed to fade. Because it wasn't his own. It was Joshua's.

...Thinking that the "Logos" presence that Ultima picked up on in the Interdimensional Rift and in Origin was not Clive--it was Joshua. Joshua, who'd picked up the power of creation. Joshua "with my light in your heart" Rosfield, who occupied Clive's being so much that Ultima could not. (In short, Joshua benevolently "stole" Mythos out from under Ultima.)

...Coming to the conclusion that Clive ultimately did fulfill his original vow, coming full circle: To kill the one who killed his brother, and then let whatever happened next, happen.

Which means...if we agree with Cid's perspective, Clive was not free. He did not fight for himself, nor against his fate. He did not try to save himself after Joshua was gone, even when so many others wanted him to. (Irony of ironies, Clive committed what was one of Ultima's chief sins according to his brother: He refused, in the end, to honor the faith and will others had for him to return, even those he most treasured.)

If one person makes their relationship and duty to another person their whole identity, can that person truly be free willed, on a spiritual scale?

No...I don't think they can be.

Free will (I think) demands some sense of inherent worth, independent selfhood/ personhood--a sense of identity that allows for the value of others' input, but does not require them to validate or qualify it.

Whether he triumphs or fails; whether he lives or dies, I would very much like to see Clive fight for himself--to find out who or what he is to himself when not defined by his role or duty to another person.

[firestorm09890]

FUCK what I said about the majority of significant changes to dialogue in Re:CoM being to adjust Axel's characterization, the most egregious change is actually this

(GBA CoM)

(Re:CoM)

if I had to guess, the reason for this change was because in GBA CoM, The Superior was a spooky, unknown being at the head of this Organization we had very little knowledge on, and for Vexen, the guy who runs his mouth constantly about how much better he is than the others, to be terrified of him, he must be some pretty scary dude. But then after kh2 we know him, it's Xemnas, he's very dramatic, he likes to talk to the moon, and the effect of your mind filling in the gaps about what "The Superior" must be like is gone. So it wasn't really necessary anymore, right?

(rest under cut because it's long)

Except... the way they changed it is so weird. In the GBA version, what's happening is pretty clear:

Marluxia tells Vexen that his project is a failure

Vexen demonstrates that he does not give a shit about Marluxia's opinion

he does care very much about The Superior's opinion, though, and Marluxia uses this to blackmail him into eliminating Sora- an action which is nonsensical, as the entire point of what they're doing needs Sora alive, making it clear to everyone in the room that he is deliberately sending Vexen to die

and then after that, when Vexen shows up to fight Sora, he goes "if you want to fight me for real you've gotta do it in the memories from the other side of your heart lol bye" and Sora goes "huh? other side?" and then it cuts to a scene on the top floor:

and then this gets more into subtext but here, Vexen has realized he's totally fucked and his only hope is to mess directly with Marluxia's plans (well, they were the Organization's plans, but it's pretty obvious by now Marluxia's abusing his power for his own purposes) by giving Sora more information than he should know. This does get the traitor gang worried enough to send Axel to go kill him (as opposed to just letting Sora take care of him, which was presumably the original plan)- he very specifically cuts Vexen off to keep him from saying too much (this is retained between the original and the remake)

Anyway, what happens in Re:CoM sort of follows the same order of events, but everything is changed slightly in a way that just makes things more confusing.

Marluxia tells Vexen his project is a failure and Vexen demonstrates that he doesn't give a shit about Marluxia's opinion, as before

Marluxia threatens Vexen with a weapon, rather than threatening to tell the Superior

this, notably, does not seem to faze Vexen very much. he continues to run his mouth while having the scythe pointed at him.

Xemnas is still leveraged- Marluxia points out it was the Superior who entrusted him with the castle

...even though reasonably Vexen would already be aware of this, and has still demonstrated that he has zero respect for Marluxia despite it

the lines about betraying the Organization being a capital crime are retained, probably because it's super relevant later, but then that line of thinking is abandoned in favor of Marluxia and Larxene just taunting Vexen instead

The part where Marluxia says "do it. you won't" could be seen as a sort of threat... if not for Axel's line: "You give a challenge like that to Vexen and he'll seriously want to eliminate Sora." It frames it all as though Vexen went to fight Sora out of some sort of pride.

And look, Vexen may have a temper and a superiority complex, but he's not stupid. They're obviously baiting him. Plus, what happened to him seeing himself as above the others and countering things he doesn't like with "well actually I'm higher ranked than you and also you're an idiot"? Is he that insecure in his fighting capabilities? I could deal with characterization changes doing him dirty if it didn't also make no sense in the context of the plot.

So now we have Vexen going to try to kill Sora, something that really makes no sense to do, out of pride. What was the purpose of sending Sora to Twilight Town? Also pride, over the fact that he managed to get that information? Giving the writing the benefit of the doubt, I could say that these nonsensical actions can be explained as evidence that Nobodies can have hearts and people with hearts do strange and rash things, but that just feels like a reach, which is bad because what they had in GBA CoM worked perfectly fine and made sense without any reaching for the "idk emotions make you do strange things" explanation.

It continues. After Vexen gives Sora the Twilight Town card in Re:CoM and Sora wonders about what the "other side" means, this is that version of the conversation the top floor members have:

...what? "If Sora disappears, that would mess up the Organization's plans"? what are you worried about? the only reason Sora would disappear is if Vexen killed him. there's no way they think Vexen being in Twilight Town would give him an advantage, right? they know he's a pathetic fighter. "Vexen has clearly committed a treasonous act against the Organization" HOW? HOW IS IT CLEAR? they don't express any worry about Sora learning too much, up until Axel says "I came to stop you from talking too much" when killing Vexen- and that being there makes it seem like they were worried about Sora learning to much, but if that's the case, why would they replace the perfectly serviceable lines in the above scene? it's just... baffling that they would want to lean into the narrative that Vexen going to kill Sora (which he'd been goaded into doing) is the problem here, because it just makes so little sense compared to what it was originally.

once again giving them the benefit of the doubt: Marluxia's real plan was to take over the Organization, and he saw an easy way to pick off one of the members, so he took it. the motive for stopping Vexen doesn't actually matter.

buuuuut it's the same as with Vexen earlier. Marluxia may be too self-absorbed and power-hungry to notice Axel is scheming against him, but he, too, is an intelligent man. he's plotted for a while, getting into Xemnas's good graces in order to be put in charge of the Castle. this is incredibly sloppy for him. I guess it could be said that getting so close to his goal would make him sloppy, but again, if they'd just left things the way they were in GBA CoM, I wouldn't even have to be saying this

in conclusion: GBA Chain of Memories' intra-Organization strife subplot is so tightly woven with calculated moves on all sides that Re:CoM changing certain things without taking into consideration the consequences makes certain parts of the plot fall flat and become far more confusing than in the original story

[worshipfulmercy]

i have so many thoughts about his gender and how he's kind of textually a woman and/or abinary (read tags if interested)

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

sometimes i remember that gojo wanted to tell geto “we’ll meet again, right?” just before he died but forced himself not to knowing it would have cursed him and then i start thinking about how kind and thoughtful gojo is as a character and how he hasn’t been able to lean on another human being since geto defected and then i want to . Scream

[moeblob]

Oh that's a dwagon! (they're so cute!)

Siblings that hoot and holler together, stay together. (thank you so much!! I love these silly lil kids)