#it's just also very meaningful in its LITERAL events and I enjoy that quite a lot!

[metanarrates]

watched a majora's mask analysis earlier today with my fiancee. my verdict is that I actually really enjoyed the op's interpretations, but that I wished that they talked more about mm's literal level and what one can get from it, rather than talking about those events as if they are strictly metaphor. yes, of course the metaphorical layer of the game is rich to dig into, but it's also such an open-ended and surreal game that it's difficult to nail down every single distinct metaphor that can be derived from its events. which is why I consider it necessary to discuss the way the literal layer presents itself and what sort of motifs and ideas exist there as a baseline before you begin looking at it as metaphor

[jmalegni]

Hetalia Axis Powers (Episodes 1-19)

Welp, after reading Angel's post there is literally nothing new I can contribute to the discussion. Might as well pack up and go home now.

Hetalia is unique to everything else we have watched in class. It takes a very heavy topic such as war and geopolitics, then removes any meaningful conflict, inserting comedic moments in this vacuum. The countries involved are personified according to the common stereotype, but some receive a overall more negative personification than others. See Germany compared to Canada. From an outside perspective this is quite funny, and as long as you don't either look into it too much or are directly affected by the stereotypes it seems fine. It is still worrisome though. With current geopolitical examples there is a serious potential for harm, take Russia as an example. In the anime, Russia is seen being nice on the outside to its allies, but secretly waiting to commit horrible acts on them as soon as he gets the chance. Combine that with the war in Ukraine and all the negative media coverage Russia as a whole is receiving, most people could believe that Russians are not good people and always looking for an opportunity to cause harm. Now it is very important to separate the actions of the Russian government and its citizens. The government is actually doing horrible things with bogus justifications, but the average Russian citizen is not looking to physically invade former eastern block countries in the name of Restoring Russia to its former glory. My point here is that it is dangerous how Hetalia's personifications exaggerate stereotypes that are based on a country's government's choices. It doesn't separate the government and its citizens. Even with the stereotypes that stem from how certain people are believed to act still can be damaging to their reputation, even if it is just subconsciously.

I still personally was able to enjoy it, I probably just have super low standards and will pretty much enjoy anything presented to me, but I cannot stress it enough that you can't take anything seriously or think too much about it. After seeing this, I would love to find an anime that actually sticks to historical events more, I think that would be great. But it could also suffer from some similar problems Hetalia has.

[nincompoopydoo]

DEBRIS AND MISERY

WELCOME BACK, AGENT ; PART 4 / ?

PAIRING: Loki Laufeyson x Female!Reader WORD COUNT: 2.5k SUMMARY: You're back at your desk job at the TVA, suffering the consequences of your mistakes that led to your crash on Sakaar. However, Mobius has a better job for you than doing just paperwork. A/N: I feel like this one has more platonic mobius x reader than loki x reader lol but you know, this loki is meeting her for the first time again. please leave comments, criticism or love, whatever, I love to hear from you guys who are reading this. enjoy xo gif by @alligatorlokis from this gifset WARNINGS: Swearing. Paperwork. support my writing through ko-fi💖 MASTERPOST ; MASTERLIST

The sweet musky smell almost lulls you to sleep as you skim through the case file of a Loki variant, pictures and text of monochrome glaring under the unforgiving fluorescent office lighting. It’s a harsh reminder of your mishap; a simple overlook during a mission that sent you crashing onto the wasteland of Sakaar. According to the reports as you stood on the pedestal, pleading your innocence to the judge, you were there for an estimated 600 years. Maybe more.

The thought of spending six centuries stranded on a planet sends a wave of pain through your skull—it’s overwhelming information but unsurprising. You do feel like you’ve spent 600 years on that God-forsaken planet.

Now, your once fugitive days have been replaced with the return of being trapped behind a desk and having to recount every event that took place during your time there. Word for word. You despise the TVA’s love of paperwork—it’s a fucking nightmare.

The collar of your shirt feels itchy against the back of your neck, bringing your nails to graze it furiously.

You decide to ignore Miss Minutes' cheery voice despite your agitation, your name rolling off her southern accent. It hints at her chagrin towards your disregarding nature.

"Are you even listenin' to me?"

Her voice lacks all sense of her once constant sunny disposition. You spare the projection a glance, watching her rubber-hose-like arms curve to her where you assume her hips would be. She looks at you with an expectant raised brow. You don’t say anything, keeping eye contact as you snatch an empty event report template, spinning in your swivel chair and away from the glowing tangerine clock.

With pursed lips, you swipe the scatter of mess away, revealing an orange typewriter that sits idly within the expense of your stacks of case files and your collection of vintage Earth cassettes. You hear Miss Minutes' sigh as she strides to the other end of your desk, perching on top of a dusty stack of pending paperwork.

“C’mon, it’s just a test,” the animated clock says. You spare her another look as you feed the report template into the roller forcefully. Bing! The return bar dings unceremoniously as it nearly startles Miss Minutes off the stack.

“That is exactly why I’m refusing to listen to you,” you mutter with annoyance, fingers already flying across the keyboard, punching letters onto the event summary section. The loud clickety-clack of the keys makes it impossible to hear over it. “I don’t get why I need to take a test when I clearly know everything I need to know.”

“Well, you were gone for a very long time and we just wanna test your memory on policies and procedures here at the TVA—”

“Then, why didn’t they come and get me earlier? From the moment I stepped foot on Sakaar, I did everything I could to create a Nexus event or even just a spike and you only came when? When I met Loki.”

Your eyes are now on her startled figure, clicks and clacks coming to an abrupt end. You’re upset over your arrest, the whole hoo-ha at the courtroom, and everything before that. Your behavior is nearly childish but understandable to those who express empathy. You feel like you were being used, prioritizing the capture of the Loki variant that has been causing a ruckus to the timeline. But, it is your job to protect the TVA and the sacred timeline. Although you feel that the TVA should be protecting its employees as well.

“Look, I am not taking that test and that’s my final word. Everyone knows I am capable of handling myself. Plus, I do have tons of paperwork to refresh my memory on policies and procedures if that’s what you’re worried about.”

The cartoon clock nods but with hesitation. However, you do make a fair point. Thus, with a swish and a blip, Miss Minutes disappears into thin air, and you’re left to your own devices once more.

Finally some goddamn peace.

As if the universe doesn’t loathe you enough, someone calls your name, approaching from behind you. A groan escapes from your lips, scowling at the glaring keys of the typewriter.

“What?” you spat. In a swift motion, you swivel in your seat and turn to look over your shoulder.

It’s Mobius, approaching you with sudden caution. You let your shoulder sag with relief, happy to see a familiar friendly face.

“Glad to see you’re back and still feisty.” Mobius hesitantly taps your shoulder, flashing you a small consoling smile. Your expression, however, remains unchanged. “Well, you guys did find me after all.” He spots the glimmer of melancholy in your eyes; they avert back to face the typewriter, hands resting on the keys. Mobius shoves his hand into the pockets of his brown slacks, shifting to lean against the edge of your desk. He knows to tread lightly around you after what happened. You’ve changed with wrinkles of age and crinkles of exhaustion. Sakaar must have not been kind to you.

Yet, you’re here, at your desk; alive and well.

“Hey, what’s got you all wound up?”

It’s a stupid question, really but it’s a question to show he still cares. You have every right to be upset. However, you have every right to be thankful. You would have been pruned. Desk cleared and cassettes discarded—it would be as if you never existed. Renslayer would have never given you any mercy after the act you pulled. Disobeying orders and recklessly throwing yourself into danger with the risk of bringing the whole TVA down. You’re impulsive on missions, but it’s your unrelenting determination that drives you to be one of the greatest analysts Mobius has ever seen.

You’re also a friend. A great one. And he isn’t planning on losing one.

“Please prune me, Mobius.”

Your statement comes off as intentionally sarcastic rather than truly meaningful.

“What? I always thought you adored paperwork.” Mobius hears you groan, burying your face in your hands, elbows propped up on the desk. “My back is already hurting, and I have a migraine just thinking about typing out reports of my time on Sakaar. I think it’s quite clear I adore paperwork.” Your muffled voice tinges sarcasm heavily.

Laughter erupts in his chest. He's glad that your sense of humor never changed. Then, the moment quickly passes and he senses a sudden change in the air. You turn up to look at him.

“What was my Nexus event?”

It’s abrupt, almost arbitrary but leads him to even more confusion. Mobius finds himself frowning. “You don’t know?”

You blink. “That’s the one thing they never told me.”

He shifts in his seat on the edge of your desk, blinking up to the ceiling in thought. “Well, from what I heard...it was because Loki willingly helped you. And it wasn’t for his own advantage.”

It’s your turn to frown. “Wouldn’t that be Loki's fault?”

“Apparently not. It was all you.”

You laugh in response; it comes out like a puff of air. “Well, then. That’s a first. I guess I can finally add manipulation to my list of skills. Plus, pick-pocketing weird cosmic fruits.”

Mobius laughs and taps your shoulder again.

“C’mon, take a walk with me. I’ve got a new case that I need your help with.” You shoot him a quizzical look, eyes catching sight of a thick case file in hand—must be important. “I thought I was supposed to be on desk duty.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to sit behind the desk the whole time,” he shoots back a clever answer with a raised eyebrow, beckoning you to accept his offer. Your laugh comes off as more of a snort. It’s the first one in a while. You stand on your feet, stretching your limbs as you shrug on your coat that was hung over the back of your chair.

“Plus, you’re under my supervision,” he says before turning on his heel, heading for the exit. You watch him raise a hand, his back to you, gesturing for you to follow as he pushes through the wooden door. You hum with amusement, trailing behind him.

-

The winding hallways feel hollow, mundane walls lacking any color of brightness the TVA tries to bring to the space when in all fairness, orange isn’t much of a fun color now that everywhere you look, there’s a tinge of tangerine somewhere. The posters that adorn the walls are your least favorite parts of the headquarters’ decorative choice. You pass one that says 'Always Watching' in big bold letters, ominously glaring at you. The words are far from comforting, almost inhumane—a jarring reminder of where you are and where you stand in the hierarchy of this bureaucratic organization.

Mobius clears his throat from beside you, pulling you out from your thoughts. In a weirdly discreet manner, he hands you the case file with an outstretched hand. You take it, eyeing him and his odd behavior, there’s an unexpected shift in the air.

Then, you glance down, reading the scrawled words on the file that reads: Variant L1130, Loki Laufeyson.

Your strides come to an abrupt end, whipping your head up to see Mobius’ sheepish smile. Your eyes are wide, and you’re shaking your head in utmost objection.

“No, no, no. No. Absolutely no—”

“C’mon, it’s just—”

“No, Mobius. Nuh-uh. I swear, if I have to deal with another Loki, I will prune myself. I literally will.”

You're shoving the file to him, as he attempts to suck it up to you like the optimistic idiot he is although he very well knows once you’ve made up your mind, you cannot be swayed. You’re stubborn, rebellious—it’s what makes you dangerous. Yet, the TVA are pessimists. It’s Mobius who truly recognizes your accompanying positive characteristics that make dealing with your spontaneous character worthwhile.

Then, coincidently emerging from the door of the locker room is Loki himself, dressed in a dress shirt, tie, and slacks—clothes and color schemes accustomed to the TVA’s dress code. Mobius can practically see the wires in your brain short-circuiting as soon as you lay eyes on the God. Your eye twitches and from that, he knows you’re about to go mayhem. It’s the mayhem that’s going to break out on him like a hurricane devouring everything and anything in its way.

“You hired him?! You hired a Loki?!”

Your voice is loud, startling Mobius and Loki as passersby stare at the commotion you’re causing. You find yourself hunching in response, shoulders sagging as if it’s supposed to help with averting the attention away from you. Still, your expression doesn’t falter, and you’re staring at Mobius like he’s nuts.

Your voice comes off as a whisper, tone still harsher than before. “Mobius, are you insane?—”

“Just, let me explain,” he cuts you off with a raised palm to you. You purse your lips, sparing a glance to Loki who seems amused by the looks of the conversation that’s turning to more of an argument because you’re directly questioning your colleague’s sanity in public. Nevertheless, you decide to hear him out.

You watch Mobius sigh at the sight of your raised brow. “We have a variant. A Loki variant that’s been killing our Minutemen and I believe it’s the same one that threw you to Sakaar. So, to hunt down a Loki, what better way than to source the help of another?”

Silence. You’re giving him that deafening silent treatment once more. You’re thinking, he can see the mechanics in your brain running like a steam engine. He observes the way your eyes flicker between him, the file, and Loki who attempts to hide his confusion of you and the whole situation.

You’re not his superior, not even close, but he’s hopeful for your approval of his plan.

You cross your arms, shifting in your stance. “Which Loki is this?” You gesture to Loki with a tilt of your head. Mobius heaves a sigh, a hand to his hip and the other waving in the air.

“He’s, uh, he’s from 2012—”

And you’re back to causing mayhem.

“2012?! Mobius! That’s the worst one yet!”

“Now, hang on just a minute—” Loki interrupts, voice tinged with bewilderment and resentment but with two sharp looks directed his way, he instantly shuts his mouth.

You and Mobius are now back to your whispered debate.

“Look, as much as I hate to admit it, the TVA’s survival all depends on catching this variant and that means our survival. He has potential for change, so much of it...You just have to trust me on this.”

Mobius makes an excellent point but you can't help but feel the queasiness rising from your stomach. It feels like bile. You begin to feel the weight of the case file in your grasp becoming heavier and heavier. It’s the thought of risky business, and you’re almost upset as to why Mobius thinks it’s such a brilliant idea to pull you into this case after the stunt you pulled.

“Care to explain why I'm involved in this? You do know I’m being scrutinized for every move I make, right?”

Following your question, he glances at Loki who seems to be growing impatient, eyes wandering around the hallway. He leans forward and lowers his voice though his pitch raises, like when he's excited about a breakthrough.

“Because I know you’re capable of getting Loki to trust you. It happened once, there’s a high chance it’ll happen again and that’s good enough for me.” He watches you blink once. Then, twice. He continues, “And you’re being scrutinized by me. So, does it really matter?”

You’re silent again but in deep thought and not out of spite. Your troubled eyes find Loki’s. He’s already staring at you and for a moment, you see an unknown glimmer in his eye, expression nearly vulnerable but in an instant, he seals it away from you and averts his gaze, busying himself with straightening his pecan brown tie. It’s a small sign that he must have heard what Mobius said to you quietly. Nothing more.

Your gaze returns to your colleague and you pull yourself together, heaving a deep sigh. “Fine, but I still think you’re insane.”

Mobius beams down at you in an almost proud manner. “Welcome back, agent.” And with a turn of a heel, he waves for Loki to follow as the three of you head down the hallway. Loki quickly catches up beside you, much to your dismay. “So, what’s your story?” he leans into you with a curious smirk. You keep your face forward, shoulder back, and chin up as you reply with a monotonous tone. “None of your business, daddy long legs.”

In your peripheral vision, you note how the God retracts in response to your reply, brows now furrowed as he glances down to his legs in an almost sheepish and innocent way.

You struggle to fight down a growing smirk.

Mobius looks over his shoulder for a moment and catches sight of you and Loki’s expression after your exchange.

It looks like the two of you would get along just fine.

TAGLIST:

@lareinedususpense

@poubxlle

@mystoragehatesme

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[kaibutsushidousha]

Danganronpa 2 artbook - Nagito Komaeda

Happy Komaeda birthday, everyone. (UPDATE: I typed the wrong number when queueing and this got posted 2 before Komaeda’s birthday. Pretend this didn’t happen and wait for the right day to read it.)

Seiyuu’s comment: Megumi Ogata

Nagito Komaeda is a very complex character, with a lot more layers to him than simply an evil villain. He was extremely difficult to record for until I got a good grasp of his psychology. But he was very fun to voice once I found my way to interpret his character. This game has a lot of surprising events, mostly thanks to our Komaeda being a main character. Please enjoy Danganronpa’s unique brand of subversion of expectations.

Kodaka’s comment: The twisted rival

Komaeda was made to be a threatening rival, a role we didn’t have in DR1. However, if I simply made him a villain, he’d overlap with the mastermind, and if I made him an underling of the mastermind, he wouldn’t be all that threatening of a rival. My solution to that was making him into what he turned out to be, a person with a perverted hope, conceived by contradictions and the horrors of people incapable of empathy. Writing a contradictory character takes courage, but once I committed to it, he was, surprisingly enough, the most fun to portray. Another concept for him was a Makoto Naegi who took a step down the wrong path. He’s one of DR2′s main themes (hope taken too far turns into despair) taken to its logical extremes. Naegi and Komaeda are complete opposites and, at the same time, amazingly similar. It’s just like how the front of a Mobius ring connects to its own back and vice-versa. He exists because this was a theme I wanted to make really memorable. The physical similarities between the two might have happened for the same reason. If they have similar ideologies, one would inevitable think they should look similar. By the way, despite his quite meaningful name, I was just trying to come up with a name that was both cool and suspicious, and end up finding an anagram to you-know-who’s name by complete accident!

Komatsuzaki’s comment: Blank beauty

The earliest version of Komaeda was a Naegi turned evil. Literally just Naegi but shorter, with glasses and a black devil parka. Much later, when we had to balance out the 16 characters, I changed his height and redrew him as an anti-hero instead of a villain, burdening him with the role of classic pretty man. The hints of social anxiety in his appearance are remnants of his beta design, and the spiky edges on the hem of his jacket are based on the tail part of the aforementioned devil parka. Also, Komaeda has a lot expressions with complex nuances, and I believe those got exponentially more enjoyable after multiple re-adjusts inspired by Ogata’s voicework. My favorite part is how his hair goes blanker the more it rises up, ultimately shiningly like a flickering flame.

[joontella]

achromatic.

Yandere!Kim Namjoon x Female Reader

Word Count: 11.1k

Genre(s):  Angst, Slight Fluff, (HORRIBLY WRITTEN) Smut

Trigger Warning(s): Mentions of religion or lack thereof, blood, murder, idk how the human body works, (unknown) consumption of blood, manipulation, stalking, male masturbation (again, horribly written), Namjoon is an asshole, and musical terms because i play music rip, minor character death, slight gore. it gets really shitty towards the end. i’m sorry

Merry Merry! It’s Peppermint! Your gift is finally here, @exhausted-joy​! I’m sorry for the wait. I had to make sure that it was perfect. This is my first time doing this, and I really wanted to give it my all. Please forgive me, and thank you for putting up with my antics in the server. I hope you enjoy it!

I also want to thank Saniya (@smeraldos-blog), Mari (@joheun-saram), Hannah (@spicykoreantatertots), Ley (@pars-ley​), Avery (@ksmuttherapy​), and everyone else who tolerated and/or helped me out! I love you all and thank you so much for the help and support! I’m so happy to have met you all!

ach·ro·mat·ic /akrəˈmadik/

adjective

without color.

“Damn. There goes my chance of starting my winter break with a passing grade.” One woman groaned.

“What the hell are you talking about? You have a solid ‘C’! I’m literally failing everything!” Her friend responded, as her arms waved in a cartoonish rendition of exasperation. “And whose fault is that?” “Not mine! This semester was nothing but a months-long depressive episode. How could I focus with everything that’s going on?”

He so desperately wishes that they would shut up, or at the very least, take their obnoxiously loud conversation elsewhere. Namjoon twirled the ink pen in his hand with a practiced precision only years of being hunched over paperwork could provide. However, those were nothing but pipe dreams as the two students turned their attention over to him. “There’s Kim Namjoon! He’s had the top spot for years now, way before he was enrolled here.” One began babbling quite loudly whilst pointing to the man in question. “I bet he came out of the womb with high marks. I heard that he scored in the 99th percentile for his newborn screening tests.” The other swooned in response to her own musings.

Obviously, these two were much more idiotic than he had originally thought. It didn’t take an expert to read his body language: the way that he twirled his pen faster, as if that could speed up the agonizing conversation he was being forced to bear witness to; the way his jaw clenched so tightly that it could easily break a metal wire; and the position his shoulders held, resembling an animal coiling in preparation to strike or flee. He pleaded to gods he didn’t even believe in for the duo to be quickly eradicated with a swift strike of lightning. According to the calculations he made swiftly in his head, the chances of something like that happening were infinitesimally small. How unfortunate.

Deciding that the best course of action to take would be to leave the two neanderthals to their devices, Namjoon did just that. He quickly snapped his book shut with one hand and a loud, meaningful clap as the pages suddenly collided with each other. If that didn’t make the nuisances jump in surprise, his words would.

“Although I’m a source of inspiration and wonder to many, it’s degrading to hear someone so openly refer to me in a way that one would to an exotic zoo animal,” He began. Namjoon’s tone was cool and even, carrying an air of regality all the while retaining a bitter edge of contempt and disdain for both the conversation and the mere existence of the two original party members. 

Finally, the two felt the brunt of the consequences their crimes on Namjoon’s ears had to offer. They both visibly wilted, reminding the tall man of his mother’s daisies being roasted and withering under the dry summer heat. Normally, this would have been more than enough to diffuse the situation and lift him of his auditory burden. However, his heart ached for more. His brain so desperately yearned for more stimulation and a rush of dopamine.

He decided to twist the knife, so to speak.

“Also, you too could rise to the top.” Namjoon said as he began to turn away.

Out of his peripheral vision, he could see the two wilted flowers gain new life and their faces brighten with newfound hope. The loudest of the two even had the audacity to whimper a pathetically optimistic, “Really?”

Twist. Twist. Twist!

“Of course~.” Namjoon purred, deciding to turn to face his victims’ satisfying demise. His heart threatened to beat in double time in anticipation.

Although their anxiously awaiting smiles made his stomach turn, he couldn’t deny the mirth swirling alongside the disgust in his belly.

“First off, instead of blaming your inadequacies solely on the tumultuous events of this year, take responsibility for your shortcomings. Only children avoid blaming themselves.”

He could hear the glass shattering as their faces fell in a tandem that most would find heartbreaking. He found it utterly amusing. Now, he would take his leave. After receiving the reaction he desired and more, Namjoon wanted nothing more than to leave the duo to stew in their humiliation. Yet, one last thing lingered. He had yet to land the finishing blow that would ensure that he wouldn’t be bothered by these two pieces of scum ever again.

Twist. Twist! TWIST!

“Before I forget, avoid talking so loudly. As you may or may not have noticed, I was trying to study. You know, one of the things that facilitates good grades? I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but your incessant bantering made it increasingly difficult to do so. Might I suggest that you follow my example and do the same? Maybe then, one day, you could take my place at the top.”

Namjoon wasn’t even facing them anymore. His back was to the two women, further solidifying his dismissal of them. With a simple and curt wave of his hand, he simply uttered,

“Ladies.”

And he was on his way.

“Exam results will be posted this afternoon. I trust that you all scored high enough marks to keep our university in high regard.” Your professor droned from the front of the lecture hall. “I know that many of you despise the fact that a standardized test is still administered in college, but so far, it is the only way to ensure that Mugunghwa National Academy is churning out bright students worthy enough to contribute to society!”

The students in question couldn’t care less about their scores or the school’s prestige. All they were worried about was getting the hell out of there after two hours of examination and stifling silence. They all stood from their seats and slung their bags across their bodies. A disgruntled murmur rang throughout. Quite frankly, you were no different.

As you hugged your notebook close to your body, your professor stopped you as you reached the lecture hall door.

“Ah, Miss (L/N). A word, please.”

Surprised, you let out a soft, “Sure.” and walked over to the podium where your professor started to neatly stack and organize his papers.

“As you know, Miss (L/N), you are one of the two best students we’ve had at this academy recently.”

You shifted your weight awkwardly at the sudden praise. You felt heat rise to your cheeks as you began to speak. “I mean, I guess? I wouldn’t go that far, but I suppose that records and the numbers do suggest that I’m performing quite well.” Your professor scowled at your response. You were a bright young woman. You deserved to flaunt it and soak up the praise every once in a while, right? He folded his arms and sighed deeply causing your brain to go into overdrive on how you could rectify the situation. “While pride does come short of a fall, you should learn to take compliments when they’re given, (Y/N). I promise you that you won’t become an egomaniac anytime soon as a result.” He said gently, causing your nerves to subside. Right. Maybe you should just accept compliments. A little self esteem boost never hurt anybody, right? “Thank you, professor, but may I ask why you’re telling me this?” You asked, trying to move the conversation along as politely as you could. You had an hour before you were due to go to the college’s radio station and prepare for this evening’s broadcast. Hopefully, your professor would get to the point so you could quickly grab a bite to eat before you started airing.

“Oh yes, of course! I’m sorry! I said all this to tell you that I have your exam results already. Seeing as how you are the brightest in your class, you finished early, giving me enough time to grade yours while your peers were working. I think that you’ll find the results to your liking, Miss (L/N).” He grinned, handing you a white manila envelope with the school’s insignia printed on the front.

You quirked a brow and opened it. You were then greeted by the name of the school, its motto, and yet another print of the school emblem on the header. Your (E/C) eyes scanned the page until you found what you were looking for:

𝑴𝒖𝒈𝒖𝒏𝒈𝒉𝒘𝒂 𝑵𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑨𝒄𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒚 𝑨𝒑𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝑬𝒙𝒂𝒎 

𝑵𝒂𝒎𝒆: (𝑳/𝑵), (𝒀/𝑵) 

𝑴𝒂𝒋𝒐𝒓: 𝑱𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒎 

𝑫𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝑬𝒙𝒂𝒎: 𝑵𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓 21 

𝑺𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒆: 98/100 

𝑪𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒔 𝑹𝒂𝒏𝒌:

1 𝒐𝒇 300

You stood there, dumbfounded. The paper you once held gingerly and timidly was wrinkling and threatening to tear under your now iron grip. You were now number one. Somehow, some way, you managed to best Kim Namjoon. Mugunghwa’s already carefully balanced and fragile ecosystem was crumbling around you. What have you done?

“I take it that you’re in shock. I’ll leave you alone to celebrate.” Your professor said smoothly as he slung his coat over his shoulder. “Congratulations, (Y/N). Please enjoy the rest of your day.”

“Uh huh… Will do…” You uttered dumbly.

Mugunghwa National Academy ran on strict rules, but most of them were unspoken. For the sake of your sanity and that of the rest of the student body (and let’s face it, staff, too), you intended to follow those sacred and silent rules to the letter.

Rule Number One: Don’t look in the janitor’s closet near the athletics facilities. You may not come out the same way as you came in.

Rule Number Two: If the cafeteria serves meatloaf, avoid it at all costs. Only eat it if you want to get sick and purposely miss class.

Rule Number Three: Kim Namjoon is the best at everything. He is to be number one until Hell freezes over.

Rule Number Four: In order to keep peace and balance between the nations, (Y/N) (L/N) must always come in second. This is the natural order of things.

You were content with being in second place. To be frank, you preferred to leave the pomp and circumstance of being the top dog to Namjoon. He was more equipped to bear the burden, after all. Besides, it wasn’t like your future career was depending on you being the best. You could skate by with a silver medal and leave Namjoon with the gold. You preferred the look of silver, anyway.

Now look at what you've done. There’s no doubt that the records have been updated by now. Your professor did grade yours early, and it’s reasonable to assume that Namjoon’s was as well. You’d inadvertently torn a hole in the gossamer fabric that was Mugunghwa National Academy. With one exam, you signed the collective death certificate of every other person besides Kim Namjoon himself. 

May God have mercy on your wretched soul.

“Young Master, your father would like to have a word with you in his study.” The head butler of the Kim mansion stated simply.

For the second time that day, Namjoon clenched his jaw tightly. He shrugged off his coat and handed it to the older gentleman who was automatically waiting at his side to collect the article of clothing. He hadn’t even gotten through the door and already his father wanted to speak with him. This didn’t bode well.

“Seokjin, did he mention why he’d want to see me?” Namjoon asked dryly. Seokjin simply shook his head and hung his coat on the nearby rack. 

“He only mentioned that it was urgent, so I suggest that it would be in your best interest to make it there expeditiously.”

This certainly did not bode well. Kim Joonho was a man of few words. Most would say that he’s the very definition of “actions speak louder than words”. Whenever the CEO of Kim Industries did something, people watched in equal parts starstruck awe and fear. However, when the CEO of Kim Industries deemed something important enough to speak on, there was no choice in the matter. You either listened intently or you perished in more ways than one. This was no different for Joonho’s family. In fact, he was worse to them. Working under the guise of caring for his family, Joonho was more stoic to his wife and children.

Regardless of his debatably righteous intentions, it sent the Kim family into delicately managed dysfunction. Simply put, Kim Joonho never spoke to Namjoon out of wishing to connect with his son on a more personal level. Namjoon was the next heir to Kim Industries. Being his son was an unfortunate side effect.

“Sir, I know that I did implore you to hurry, but-”

“What?” Namjoon growled. His nerves were shot to shit today. Anything that impeded his meeting with his father and his goal to quickly get it over with was met with hostility.

Seeming to understand this, Seokjin cleared his throat and motioned a gloved hand towards the mansion’s threshold.

“You know better than to walk in the house with your shoes still on,” The Kim butler began smoothly as he made his way over to Namjoon to collect his shoes. “I do understand that you are upset, but you shouldn’t let your emotions cloud your judgement so drastically that you forget such basic cultural conventions.”

Namjoon sighed sharply and bit back a retort that was bubbling in his throat. Arguing with Seokjin was pointless. As per usual, he was correct. Engaging in such petty conflicts would only worsen things.

“Right. I suppose I was quite hasty. Thank you.” Namjoon sighed whilst peeling off his shoes.

“I do believe that an apology is in order, Young Master.”

Namjoon was already halfway across the foyer, about to ascend the grand staircase leading to the upper floors when Seokjin’s cheeky remark reached his ears. He felt his blood begin to simmer in his veins and his muscles stiffen.

“The fact that I haven’t fired you by now and ruined any chances of you gaining any further employment should be enough of an apology. You’re treading on thin ice, Seokjin. Remember your place in this world.”

With that, he continued his journey to the final boss room within the Kim family mansion: his father’s study. The last he heard of Seokjin was a sly chuckle and the clicking of his polished leather shoes against the floor. Staff were not guests. Therefore, they were not allowed the privilege of removing their shoes. They were expendable. They needn’t get too comfortable.

Despite how much he detested it, Namjoon couldn’t deny that cold chill of anxiety that frosted his entire body. His father never wanted to talk to him. Ever. He could count on his hands the times that Joonho requested his presence. He could count on only one hand how many times Joonho requested his presence to celebrate his son’s successes. Their relationship was solely professional. There was no love to be found, no matter how hard you read between the lines. Even in as high of a position as Namjoon is in, he is still subservient to his father.

That’s the natural order of things.

“Come in, Namjoon.” Joonho’s voice rang from behind the large mahogany doors.

Almost cartoonishly, the hinges squeaked like Namjoon was uncovering the entrance to a haunted crypt. Namjoon decided long ago that was an eerily apt way of describing his father’s study.

Naturally, Namjoon obeyed his father and entered the room. Dead center, there sat Kim Joonho on his throne. Sitting with perfect posture behind the large oak desk, Joonho stared his son down with cold eyes filled with disdain. How Namjoon desperately wished he could gouge them out with his father’s prized letter opener.

“Don’t waste my time. Have a seat. I don’t have all day.” Joonho snapped.

“Of course. How are you today, father?”

The CEO’s eyes narrowed at his son’s inquiry. “Spare me the niceties, boy. Sit down. We have business to discuss.”

Before Namjoon could interject, Joonho was already reaching into a drawer and produced a white manila envelope. Upon closer inspection, one could see Mugunghwa National Academy’s insignia emblazoned on the front. Once Namjoon was properly seated, he reached out and grabbed the parcel.

“May I ask what this is?” “You may not. You have eyes, boy. Read it for yourself.”

The frigid chill of anxiety was soon being replaced with the molten heat of fury. Some tiny part of Namjoon’s mind was concerned that he would develop a fever at the sudden and constant shifts in his body temperature. That wouldn’t do. He couldn’t afford for his health to decline. That would be another thing for his father to berate him for.

“Of course. My apologies, father.” Namjoon whispered as he undid the envelope’s fastening. Once he did so, he pulled the paper out with an air of nonchalance. Surely, it must have been another letter from the school to congratulate him on some academic achievement he didn’t even realize existed. However, in his eyes and in the eyes of his father, it was the exact opposite.

 𝑴𝒖𝒈𝒖𝒏𝒈𝒉𝒘𝒂 𝑵𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝑨𝒄𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒎𝒚 𝑨𝒑𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒖𝒅𝒆 𝑬𝒙𝒂𝒎 

 𝑵𝒂𝒎𝒆: 𝑲𝒊𝒎, 𝑵𝒂𝒎𝒋𝒐𝒐𝒏 

 𝑴𝒂𝒋𝒐𝒓: 𝑩𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔 

𝑴𝒊𝒏𝒐𝒓(𝒔): 𝑩𝒊𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒚, 𝑬𝒏𝒈𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 

 𝑫𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒐𝒇 𝑬𝒙𝒂𝒎: 𝑵𝒐𝒗𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓 21 

 𝑺𝒄𝒐𝒓𝒆: 96/100 

 𝑪𝒍𝒂𝒔𝒔 𝑹𝒂𝒏𝒌: 2 𝒐𝒇 300

For the first time in a long time, Kim Namjoon’s world fell apart before his very eyes. Suddenly the sturdy and imposing columns holding up the large study appeared to crumble around him. The fire that crackled in the fireplace was reduced to nothing but pathetic cinders. He felt the ground split beneath his feet and his father… His father grew to a monstrous size in comparison to his surroundings, suddenly hunched over his son in preparation to strike.

“This must be some mistake! The results must have gotten mixed up! I-”

“Enough!” Joonho boomed. He swiftly slammed his hand down on his desk, successfully frightening his son into silence. “Only children avoid blaming themselves. I thought I taught you to accept responsibility! How dare you blame your inadequacies on the people who made them apparent?!”

Namjoon clenched his fists tightly in his lap and pushed down the urge to go through on his original plan of plucking his father’s eyeballs out.

“Can’t you see? Whoever graded my exam was clearly incompetent. If they had a brain stem, they would know that I am only capable of producing top-class work! Just like you should not be blamed for one measly employee’s mistake, I should not be blamed for the mistake of someone beneath me!” Namjoon exclaimed. Once he finished his spiel, he found himself standing up, but he didn’t remember willing his muscles to do so.

“This entire conversation is pointless. It’s inefficient at best and mind-numbing at its worst! For someone who values time and money more than his own family, I find it quite curious that you’re willing to waste both so frivolously.”

Now, it was Joonho’s turn to clench his jaw and his fists. Despite the utter disdain he felt for the situation, the patriarch had to admit the merit in his son’s retort. His pride would never let him express the sliver of admiration that stirred within him at Namjoon’s courageous display.

Nobody dared talk back to Kim Joonho. That was the natural order of things.

“Regardless of who’s truly at fault, find this (Y/N) (L/N). She usurped your throne, Namjoon. She deserves to be punished for her transgression.”

“Of course. She’s public enemy number one, but she won’t be number one ever again.”

With that, the young master of the Kim household turned his back on the old master and shut the door to the crypt behind him.

“Aaaaaand now, we’re back after our break!” Your co-host chirped from beside you.

The red on-air sign glowed warmly overhead, creating a sense of coziness and heat in the otherwise cold station. You wrapped your cardigan closer around you before adjusting your mic.

“And we’re about to go into our winter break soon. How fitting!” You posited, trying to match your co-host’s energy.

“That’s right! Mugunghwa exams are finally over, and the scores and ranks have already been updated for some! Care to talk about that, (Y/N)?” Taehyung, your co-host, wiggled his sharp eyebrows in his quest to prod for information.

Normally, his rectangular grin and bright eyes would warm your heart. Today, however, you wanted to punch that devilish smirk right off of him. You should have known that Tae would have suddenly caught wind of your latest academic achievement. He’s the university’s most involved (read: nosiest) student. 

“Not really… But you won’t shut up until I do, so…” You sighed as you spun around in your swivel chair. Once you stopped your cycle, you scooted closer to the microphone and cleared your throat. “I got a 98 on the exam. My professor stopped me after class and told me the news.”

Not that anyone but you and the sound director, Yoongi, would see it, but Taehyung’s impish smile turned into a disappointed pout. “Ah, listen to our (Y/N). Always dodging the important questions. Such a tease!”

You shoved him gently and laughed at his comment before shaking your head. “This guy… To everyone who dreams of dating him, work with him first. You’ll see how much of a horrible person he is.”

“Yah! That’s slander! Aren’t journalists supposed to avoid that?”

“I’ll kick your ass.” You licked your lips and began to answer the original question in further detail. “Yeah, so… Anyway, I got a 98 and I guess that warranted me becoming number one…?”

Both Taehyung and Yoongi’s faces dropped. From his booth, you could see Yoongi grimace and in your peripheral, you saw Tae stiffen.

“Up next is Still With You by our resident golden boy Jeon Jungkook. We’ll be back soon. Stay tuned.” 

Suddenly, the on-air sign was turned off. The song began to play and Taehyung immediately gripped your shoulders.

“You what?!” Taehyung nearly screeched. “(Y/N), do you have any idea what this means?!” “That I took Kim Namjoon’s place and sent the fragile society of Mugunghwa into ruin? Yeah, I do.” Tae blinked for a moment. “No… Although, that does make sense. That seems way more important than what I was gonna say. Huh.”

You were actually going to punch the shit out of him. “Dude, what?”

“Listen, this is your chance! You can finally get recognized as the top-tier person that you are! As long as you were under Kim’s big, goofy shadow, you were going to be pushed aside! Now you can show everyone here how cool you are!”

You felt your throat tighten. That all-too-familiar sensation of a goose egg being lodged in your esophagus rose. You were going to cry. How you desperately wished that you could view the world like Taehyung did. How you longed to see the silver lining of every situation just like he did. All you saw was destruction and despair. All you felt was guilt for damning the entire student body to some cruel fate that only Kim Namjoon could dish out.

“Tae, I love you, but you don’t fucking get it! I’m screwed! We’re all screwed! I broke two of the sacred rules of this school! Kim Namjoon must always be first! I must always be second! I just sentenced everyone to death!”

Taehyung raised a brow, as if what you were saying were the incoherent ramblings of a mad woman. “You describe my cousin like he’s some heinous demon.” Even the usually passive Yoongi had to straighten his spine and widen his eyes at this revelation.

“He’s your cousin?!”

Tae leaned back in his seat with yet another smirk. This time, you couldn’t put a finger on the emotion this specific lift of his lips held. “Isn’t the resemblance obvious? The Kim line has some strong genes. It’s been that way since the Joseon era, I’ve been told.”

Ignoring the historical implications for why such strong genes would still be present thousands of years later (assuming that Taehyung was actually serious), you hurried the conversation along. Jungkook’s silky voice had faded away a while ago, leaving the two of you with little to no time left before it was time to open the floor to callers. This was your last chance to get some useful information about Namjoon before you were dragged into what you knew was going to be a relentless storm of phone calls and incredulous screeches at the news.

Like you had said before, you’d damned everyone. Who wouldn’t want to yell at the person that had the audacity to send an entire population into ruin?

“Get to the point, Taehyung. You’re telling me that you’re related to Satan himself? And I’ve been your co-host for how long?!” You near screeched.

Tae’s ambiguous smirk was now replaced with a blank expression. “I didn’t think it mattered, (Y/N). Why does it even matter now? If there’s a bigger issue here, I think you’re dodging it.”

You froze. He was right. For as long as you knew him, Taehyung had this uncanny ability to pick people apart and leave them vulnerable in an instant. This was especially effective on you, you’ve come to realize. The funny thing was that you hadn’t realized that you were employing tactics to postpone the inevitable inundation of accusatory and furious phone calls being thrown your way. Deep down, you always hated confrontation. Until Taehyung uttered those words, you hadn’t realized how deep that hatred and aversion was ingrained.

“Damn. You’re...good… I guess I am avoiding things. Let’s just get this over with. If we hold it off any longer, things will get worse.” You muttered as you looked towards Yoongi’s booth, motioning for him to put you both back on air.

Taehyung placed a comforting hand on your shoulder and flashed his signature boxy smile. “You don’t even know what they’re going to say. Who knows? News of your latest accomplishment may have brought the (Y/N) (L/N) Official Fanclub out of hiding. I bet that there are going to be several callers professing their undying love for you!”

“Their what now?” You asked dumbly.

Taehyung placed a hand on his heart and slipped into a persona reminiscent of the male protagonist of one the many romance dramas that were plastered on television nowadays. His deep voice rumbled the soundproof padding on the walls and wrapped you in its velvety embrace.

“(Y/N), I’ve been in love with you for as long as I can remember. I’ve struggled with these emotions for so long, but news of your success has given me the courage to confess them. I can’t quite make heads or tails of them, but I want to explore them all with you…” Not that anyone but you and Yoongi could see the exchange, but Taehyung gently cupped your chin with his large hand and looked longingly into your eyes. “That is, if you’d let me.”

Silence. Then raucous laughter from you and Taehyung. (Yoongi was visibly cringing in his booth.) You expected nothing less from the theater major, but you couldn’t help the delicate fluttering that began in your stomach. Was this the fabled Taehyung Effect at work? The two of you turned to your microphones and opened the floor to callers, as per usual for this segment of your show. What was highly unusual, however, was the heartfelt “confession” that was unwittingly broadcasted to everyone tuned in. Unbeknownst to everyone, the red on-air sign shone above your heads, serving as a beacon or perhaps an unfortunately ignored warning. A warning that your lighthearted joke wasn’t going to be a joke to some.

A warning that the harbinger of doom himself was listening in… A warning that he had now collected leverage over his new enemy… A warning that he was going to destroy you, even if he had to use his own relative to do it. He would surely add this to his rapidly growing arsenal of schemes.

The next day, the very air at Mugunghwa was different. Somehow, despite being the enigmatic second-place student, everyone instinctively knew to distance themselves from you. Biologically speaking, humans were still animals, despite the staunch separation that was created over time. There was still a basal instinct to survive. In this case, that instinct screamed, “Get away from the brainlet that dared to tip the scales and anger Kim Namjoon.” You didn’t blame anyone for their decision. You couldn’t. You’d be the world’s biggest hypocrite if you did, and you didn’t want “hypocrite” to be engraved on your tombstone next to “cold-blooded killer”.

Everywhere you walked, people watched you intently with eyes filled with either fear, confusion, or disgust. You could hear thinly-veiled whispers as you passed your fellow students. 

“There she is.”

“She’s surprisingly pretty. I expected some ugly broad to be under Namjoon’s shadow.”

Ah, yes. You had forgotten your previously fairly secretive life before the shoe dropped. You were content with living under the radar. After all, it kept the vicious rumors of the poor girl who by hook or crook got her way into an elite university on a full-ride scholarship at bay. As long as you held the number two spot, nobody cared about you. News of your arrival and subsequent theories surrounding it were just a fad that most people shortly moved on from. The drastic and sudden change from peaceful irrelevance to hostile notoriety made you nauseous.

The cold air nipped at your flesh while you made your way to the library. Fresh snow made its satisfying crunching sound as you sped towards your destination. Wait. Sped? Only when you looked down at your feet did you realize that your steps were quicker than usual. Needless to say, you were confused at this revelation. Were things really this bad? Why was your body subconsciously hurrying you along when no danger was immediately present? Then, it hit you: If the Kim Taehyung Effect caused your insides to flutter and your heart melt with glee, the Kim Namjoon Effect caused everyone to cower and hide in pure horror. Maybe it ran in the family. After all, the two were related. How that crucial detail managed to slip past you was beyond human understanding.

Soon enough, you made your way into the campus library. Warmth enveloped you and thawed your chilled skin with each step into the large building. The tall bookshelves that towered over you and the other patrons made you feel safe. The walls of knowledge served as barriers from the predatory glares that were shot your way anywhere else. Here, while not entirely forbidden, hushed insults and remarks were more so. The library was your sanctuary when the dormitories weren’t, and with all the girls and even your RA avoiding you like the plague, it was safe to say that your dorm wasn’t very inviting right now.

Whatever it took, you needed to get your mind off of the Namjoon business. Sitting down in the warm silence served to do just that. You absentmindedly wandered through the various sections of the building. The nutty scent of someone’s morning brew filled your nostrils on your journey, easily putting you at ease in an instant. The rhythmic click-clack of someone's fingers against a computer keyboard kept your body grounded to the Earth. It served as a nice tether and protection from your thoughts that threatened to whisk you away into the stratosphere with every step you took.

Your feet took you past the reference section, the nonfiction section, and even the genealogy section before making its final stop at the fiction section. When you first started college, you found it odd that a library carried such books, but you soon came to realize that an escape into another world was appreciated by everyone. A love for fiction did not have an age limit.

You found yourself engrossed in a high fantasy novel by one Bang Sihyuk. (A very talented author, you decided. You made a note to look into some of his other works when you weren’t staring death in the face.) The sweet sound of yet another page turning and revealing more of the lore slowed your racing heart. The subtle smell of ink and glue softened your muscles, willing them to relax into the plush chair. The floor lamp next to you glowed softly and turned the usually stark clash of pitch black lettering against white pages into a mellow brown against cream parchment.

Even if you knew you had to face the wolves outside your sanctuary eventually, you still savored the solace you had in that moment. What you never considered was that those halcyon days were going to soon fall into utter ruin and despair with a singular human-shaped silhouette.

Everywhere Namjoon went, eyes followed. The air around him crackled with apprehension, but he couldn’t care less if he tried. This was natural. The pitiful prey animals around scrambled away for dear life, functioning solely on the fleeting notion that sticking around would spell their demise. Most of the people here were college students beginning their prime. They couldn’t afford to wither away… Not yet, at least… And certainly not here.

Stifled gasps laced with fear and admiration threatened to strangle the poor Kim heir. How he so desperately wished that they would all shut up! The constant buzzing murmur felt like mosquitoes tiptoeing across his skin during the hot and balmy summer months. It was highly annoying, to say the least.

His piercing mocha eyes landed on a target. A mousy figure was dwarfed by Namjoon’s taller and muscular frame. Pair the size difference with his steely and—arguably murderous—gaze fixed on the piteous male before him, both parties were surprised that the smaller student didn’t go into cardiac arrest.

“I would stay to chat, but I have important business to attend to,” Namjoon began. The timbre of his voice seeped into the small man’s bones and rattled them with each syllable. “You obviously know something, or else you wouldn’t be so pathetically fearful.”

The other male gulped audibly. His dull brown eyes stared into Namjoon’s vibrant cocoa ones. His pupils contracted as a cold sweat formed on his forehead and neck. Deep down, he knew that one wrong move would send him spiraling into horrors unimaginable. This was Kim Namjoon he was dealing with. He only had one chance. 

“I don’t know w-what you’re talking about…” He squeaked.

Namjoon narrowed his eyes with clear annoyance and disgust for the situation and the animal shivering before him. This caused the mousy man to gasp sharply.

“Tell me where (Y/N) (L/N) is. It’s a simple request. Even someone of your calibre should be capable of such a mundane task.” Namjoon stated simply. Disdain bled through his words into his tone and seeped into his prey’s already paper-thin psyche.

With a trembling arm, the rodent (as Namjoon decided to call him) pointed in the direction of the campus library. Of course you would be there. It made his blood boil to think that you’d already be in the library after receiving news of your latest feat. Anyone else would be a fool to risk losing such an honor. Studying was the only way to cement your new station as Mugunghwa’s new number one.

Without so much as a half-assed utter of thanks, Namjoon strode off in the direction of the large building. He was so hyper-focused on cutting you down and ensuring that you wouldn’t be a problem again that the signature thud of a body against snow missed his attention completely. The concerned and shocked gasps of onlookers didn’t affect him either.

Soon enough, he was at his destination. The same book-filled shelves and walls that greeted you greeted him at the entrance. Upon seeing his figure, the librarian at the circulation desk straightened in order to greet Namjoon properly. ‘At least one person here knew their place.’ He thought to himself.

“I’m looking for (Y/N) (L/N). It’d be in your best interest to point me in her direction as quickly as possible, Jimin.” Namjoon stated coolly with a tinge of nonchalance. Although he was painfully aware of the importance his little scouting mission served, his seemingly apathetic tone was the result of having said the same thing over and over like a broken record. The sooner he found you and got you to bend the knee, the sooner he could return home to his own studies.

The librarian, Jimin, nodded and swiftly pointed towards the fiction section. His mug of hazelnut coffee threatened to spill at the sudden and crisp motion. “She went that way, towards the fiction books.” He stated plainly. Namjoon couldn’t help the small smile that crept onto his features. Jimin was always such an attentive servant. 

Ever since that little incident before Mugunghwa’s annual recital, the dance major felt a deep sense of allegiance towards the older male. He had to. Namjoon was the only reason Park Jimin was able to continue his dream of becoming a world-class dancer, and it was made abundantly clear that what Kim Namjoon giveth, he can just as easily taketh away. Poor Jimin had no idea why you were being sought out by the most powerful student at the university, but he couldn’t help but suppress the gnawing sensation that he was leading you to a painful end.

Once again, forgoing a thank you, Namjoon began the final stretch of his arduous journey to find you and finally set things right in the world. The only issue was that he had no idea who he was looking for, exactly.

Oddly enough, despite your status, you had managed to keep a low profile. Very few people actually knew what you looked like. Hell, your student profile didn’t even have an image of you posted. In fact, the only way people outside of your direct circle of cohorts started to gather what you looked like was because the web connecting (Y/N) (L/N), radio show host and journalism major and (Y/N) (L/N), former number two was finally starting to weave itself. As far as most of the student body was concerned, you were nothing but a faceless placeholder image against a drab gray background. It wouldn’t have surprised Namjoon if you actually walked around with the words, “NO IMAGE AVAILABLE” permanently marked on your body. What he saw, however, was beyond his own comprehension.

There you were, his enemy, his prey. You sat idly in the large cushioned chair with your book nestled delicately in your hands. For the moment, you were blissfully unaware of the danger that loomed nearby. This was almost too easy. Almost as if your presence unlocked a vault to all his plans to destroy you, you looked at him.

And then his world changed. He almost felt sick at the sudden rush of sensory input his brain was forced to parse through. The previously unsaturated hall roared to life with colors he hadn’t even seen before. Warm browns, reds, and hues of every other name shot into Namjoon’s retinas upon gazing at your graceful form. This was (Y/N) (L/N)? This hidden gem? He was meant to demolish this?

He couldn’t. He shouldn’t. He wouldn’t. For the first time in a long time, Kim Namjoon was rendered speechless. His heart began to beat in double-time. If his biological functions were a musical piece, this specific section’s tempo marking would be prestissimo. Beyond vivace, beyond presto.

He couldn’t take it, so for the first time ever, Kim Namjoon ran away.

You didn’t dare move. Fear wrapped its spindly fingers around your heart and clutched it in its icy grasp. You didn’t have to move your eyes off of the page to see who the shadow cast onto it belonged to. Deep down, you knew. 

Goddamn it.

You just knew.

Just when you gathered the courage to face your doom head on, he was gone.

“What the fuck…?” You whispered. Your fantasy novel fell to the ground on its spine with a soft thud. Was this it? Were you officially losing it? Was stress causing you to hallucinate and see literal shadow people?! That was it.

Not wanting to have a literal breakdown in the middle of the library, you honed your senses in on the now cold-smelling coffee nearby. The faint hazelnut blend managed to at least tether you down to reality once more. You took a deep breath. Everything was now in focus. You had to leave, you decided. So that’s what you did.

If the library’s other patrons noticed the shocked, glazed over look in your eyes, nobody said anything. You had just come in contact with the menace. You were lucky to be alive. There’s no need to add insult to injury by inquiring about your current situation. Wordlessly, you ambled out of the library door. Jimin’s small eyes followed your every movement until you were finally out of his line of sight.

Soon enough, you made it to your dorm room. Oddly enough, it felt like you’d walked through a wormhole and warped to the private space. It appears that moving effortlessly through time and space was an eerily common theme that day. Not wishing to dwell on it any further, you plummeted onto your bed and let a dreamless sleep whisk you away from all your troubles.

A month had passed since your clandestine encounter with Namjoon. Surprisingly enough, after the first week or so of living in terror, the foreboding feeling of doom had all but disappeared. Like a colony of ants rebuilding their anthill after a sudden rainstorm, so too did Mugunghwa National Academy rebuild anew. As Thanksgiving rolled into Christmas, the student body had learned to accept that you were now at the top of the food chain. The status quo had shifted in your favor. Students that would previously mutter curses after you passed by would suddenly wave amicably once they noticed your presence.

While the sudden lack of hostility was appreciated, you couldn’t help but notice how shallow the whole situation was. A faint sense of disgust settled at the pit of your stomach. Or was it foreboding, after all? After your encounter with Namjoon’s shadow at the library, the Kim Industries heir had disappeared suddenly. He had disappeared without a trace. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. His scores were still updated regularly; his name was still in the mouths of every man, woman, and child that walked across campus; and you swore that you saw his tall figure slither like a snake behind buildings and shrubbery one time after class. While there was solid proof that he still (at the very least) resided within this plane of existence, Kim Namjoon had achieved cryptid status. Just a month ago, he was the dark overlord that ruled Mugunghwa with an iron fist. Now, he was merely a relic of the past, a name synonymous with the Boogeyman. Kim Namjoon was now used to scare freshmen like tales of a monster under one’s bed were used to frighten young children.

The truth, like all things are, was much more complicated than that. After he met you, his goddess, at the library, Namjoon spiraled out of control. Nothing was the same for him. At first, it was a fleeting rush of endorphins, he had decided. Perhaps the sense of victory he felt after finding his long lost rival caused his brain to go into overdrive with glee. With that in mind, he returned home to lick his wounds and rewrite his battle plans.

The next day, everything seemed normal enough. His world was in grayscale once more. Individuals who weren’t of direct importance to him retained their distorted, blob-like features. His senses were mostly dulled once again… Until you appeared. You walked across campus with grace that put the supermodels that his father regularly “worked with” to shame. To be honest, they looked like pitiful crows with snapped legs when put up against your stork-like elegance.

His previously unsaturated world regained its color. His heart rate increased, warmth filled his veins as a result. Everything was crisply in focus when it came to you. For the first time in a long time, Kim Namjoon was terrified… But that’s what intrigued him all the more. Once you left his sight, however, the blooming colors vanished. Everything was blurred again. The warmth had died and left him empty, hollow, and cold. After a few days of this occurrence, Namjoon made his biggest realization yet: he was in love with you.

He was quick to write it off as pure lust. After all, remaining at the top didn’t leave much time for him to indulge in more carnal pleasures. Hell, the only thing he could remember slamming on a table on doing all night long was homework, as old and pathetic as the joke was. Namjoon was a dashing, intelligent young man beginning to reach his prime. Abstaining from such a primal and basic need wasn’t good for him. With that in mind, he immediately began his conquest.

First, it started with the models his father would fuck behind his mother’s back. Despite how carefully manufactured their appearances were, they didn’t quench his thirst. In fact, they enraged Namjoon to the point where it wasn’t uncommon for the women to leave his bedroom bruised the next morning. This charade went on for much too long until he’d had enough.

No other woman could set his heart aflame without even trying. No other woman could bring life to his distorted and achromatic world like you could. So he tried a man. Several men, in fact. He got so desperate that not even his little Park Jimin was safe from his ravenous clutches.

Nothing. Nothing had worked.

Now, as the clock struck midnight in his grand bedroom, Namjoon sat in his bed with his hand wrapped around his cock. He’d been so on edge for the longest time, yet nothing he did could stir him. So, he did the only thing he knew how… Thoughts of you filled his mind as he ghosted a finger across his limp member. The warmth he felt was returning once more…

“Namjoon! There you are! I’ve been so lonely… Don’t you know that I’ve missed you?” 

There you were in the Kim manor’s living room. A black silk robe hugged your form perfectly as you bounded over to him. Golden sunlight filtered through the curtains and cast you in its heavenly warm glow. Your (E/C) eyes peered up at him with such admiration, lust, and most importantly, love. Before he could even properly process the scene, you had him enveloped in the warmest hug imaginable.

Namjoon felt a rush of lust and blood shoot straight to his dick.

“I know, darling… But I’m here now. We can be together. I’m all yours from now on.” He replied smoothly.

Namjoon didn’t even think it possible for your eyes to shine any brighter, but they did. And they were all for him. Your eyes, your beautiful eyes, for his eyes only… He gently caressed your cheek, careful not to mark it. The time for leaving marks and bruises would come later on… 

“Really?” You asked. Your entire face lit with hope and wonder. “You mean it? Please don’t tease me, baby~. I don’t know what I’d do if you had to go so soon…” 

You buried yourself into him, as if you knew that your home was within his embrace. He relished in it. He really did…

Namjoon felt feverish. His hands got to work immediately. Visions of you nestled against him, starlit eyes gazing into his, your form undulating beneath him as he pounded into you with everything he had. Your ecstatic moans and gasps filled his ears and mind, creating a carnal symphony only you could compose.

Sweat beaded on his temples, his arms beginning to burn with exhaustion as they continued to bring him to completion. Musical, “I love you, Namjoon”s and “Please! I’m so close, baby! Fuck me!”s began to crescendo rapidly. The world around him went from a gentle warmth to a blazing inferno. Colors reached their maximum saturation. Namjoon’s heart began to beat erratically. This was it. This was it! This is what he needed!

“Yes, (Y/N). You’re so good to me! Take it! Take it!!”

With an animalistic roar, Namjoon shot his seed. It coated his body and even his blanket that he pushed aside in his lustful fever. The fireworks came to a close. His jagged breaths began to even themselves out. The angels stopped singing. He was alone once more… But he wouldn’t be for long.

Tears filled Namjoon’s vision as he looked at his clock. Time wasn’t important anymore… But you were. He was going to have you, and he was going to become number one again. Kim Namjoon was going to be your number one.

Just like that, the year of terror had come and gone. Now, a new year was upon you and another December along with it. You stared up at your dorm room’s ceiling with a dumb smile etched on your face. After all, that was the only expression you could possibly muster, given the circumstances. 

“Damn… What the hell happened to me?” Was all you managed to say as you turned onto your side. Your phone in hand, you scrolled through your photo gallery almost absentmindedly until you reached one particular photo. There you were at a carnival with the Devil incarnate, Kim Namjoon. Your eyes bright with glee at the large plush you held in one arm as you posed with Namjoon for a selfie.

You chuckled and zoomed in on the image with a wistful smirk. While you stared ahead at the camera, Namjoon stared at you with an expression that you didn’t even know that he possessed: pure, unadulterated admiration. You were almost inclined to call it love.

The past year and some change was a whirlwind. Your earliest memory of it consisted of finally coming to terms with the ecosystem at Mugunghwa, only to be faced with Namjoon and your whole world coming down. Students and staff alike scurried away from the dining area, not wanting to be a witness to a crime. You had gained new friends over the course of these months. They simply couldn’t stand to see your last moments on this earth in complete agony.

However, your death never came. Namjoon stood proudly in the now empty cafeteria, as if he relished in the fact that he could clear a room without uttering a single word.

“(Y/N) (L/N). It’s so good to finally put a name to a face… And what a lovely face it is…”

If Namjoon wasn’t going to kill you, the water lodged in your windpipe at his words would. You sputtered, hands waving as you choked on your water. Suddenly, Namjoon came behind you and swiftly patted your back. Once you could breathe again, you wiped at your tear-filled eyes and peered up at him. “I’m sorry… What?”

Namjoon returned to his original position in front of you with a smirk. Pulling out a chair, he sat down with the practiced air of a businessman about to make a deal. “I called you beautiful. I do hope that wasn’t too forward.”

Now, you were suspicious. Satan himself had saved you from choking and was now calling you attractive? Were you dead? Did you imagine Namjoon helping you as a last-ditch effort to survive somehow? Was that the image your brain created as you slipped away into the world of the dead? But this was reality. Something deep down told you that you weren’t dying or dreaming.

“Forgive my skepticism, but I highly doubt that you came to exchange compliments. What do you want, Kim Namjoon?” You asked icily. The male in front of you visibly recoiled at your tone, as if he didn’t factor in the possibility that you could speak with such a tone. He quickly recovered, however, and he began his pitch.

“You’re half right, (Y/N). I didn’t come here to only compliment you, but I came here to have a discussion that is long overdue. At my core, I am a businessman. I make deals, I negotiate. That’s what I’m here to do.” Namjoon stated simply. Looking deeply into his eyes, he didn’t show any signs of insincerity, but that’s to be expected. He’s been trained his entire life to hiding his true intentions behind an amicable facade, regardless of how nefarious his plans may or may not be.

“I see… What is it that you wish to discuss? I’m afraid that I’m not as well-versed in business etiquette as you, so please forgive me for any mistakes or slip-ups that I may make. That being said, this is not an invitation to walk all over me. I may be inexperienced, but I am by no means an idiot.”

Could you be any more perfect for him? A beautiful face and body, poise and grace, and the courage to hold her own in a negotiation? Not to mention, the colors were swirling around you and blooming delicately in such a comforting fashion. He was absolutely smitten.

“I wouldn’t dare make the mistake of calling someone who replaced me as top dog an idiot. Give me some credit. I’m not as vile as the university’s tall tales make me out to be. I’m sure that my cousin, Taehyung, could vouch for me.”

You bristled at the mention of Taehyung. What had he done to him? Did something happen? No, that couldn’t be. You had just finished your show with Tae only a half hour ago. Surely, that isn’t enough time for him to get into any trouble, right?

“Calm down, (Y/N). Nothing’s happened to him. I can see the wheels turning in your head. My cousin is safe and sound. I can even call him up for you, if you don’t believe me.” Namjoon said smoothly, already fishing his phone out of his designer coat’s pocket.

“No, that’s fine…” You swallowed and regained your composure. Once you were calmed down, you returned Namjoon’s gaze. “I’m sure he’s alright. If anything, I’ll call him later. Right now, this is more important.”

Namjoon put his phone away and leaned back in his chair whilst giving a dismissive wave of his hand. Hopefully, the display of nonchalance would mask the sheer excitement and feverish nervousness he felt from being so close to you. Hearing your voice was like hearing the soothing melodies of birdsong in the morning. His heart soared at the mere act of being in your presence.

“Very well. I came here to apologize. You see, I’m well aware of the distress to you and everyone here at Mugunghwa that I’ve caused, and for that, I’m sorry.”

You could have died right there. Kim Namjoon? Apologizing? And apologizing to you, no less?! The infamous heir to Kim Industries, known for the downfall of any and everyone who dared impede his goals was apologizing to you?!

“Please, (Y/N). Forgive me. It’s just that losing to you has put my life into perspective. Yes, I was the head of our class, but what did that mean? Why was I fighting so hard to keep a title that in the long run, means so little? What was the point if I had no one to share it with?”

“What the hell are you getting at, Kim? I fail to see what this has to do with conducting business.”

As precious as you were to him, Namjoon despised your tone. If you were to be his, that sharp tongue would have to be dealt with. Besides, in that instant, you reminded him of his lowlife father. That certainly wouldn’t do. His queen should never adopt the mannerisms of Kim Joonho. Never. Ever. You were to whisper sweet nothings into his ear while he reciprocated. You were to never take such a tone with him ever again.

“I was rambling, so I’ll forgive that insolent remark of yours just this once. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Namjoon stated darkly.

Not wanting to push your luck, you relented. You were actually talking to Kim Namjoon. You couldn’t afford to ruin an opportunity like this.

“Right.” He resumed “The truth is that I’ve been watching you for quite some time. Honestly, that’s all I can ever do anymore. You’ve occupied every inch of my mind, and I just wanted to ask if you’d be mine, (Y/N).”

You sat there, slack-jawed. Was he serious?! What was happening?

“You’re joking… There’s no way that you could be serious. There’s no fucking way!”

“I am. I’ve done some soul-searching recently, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you are what I’ve been fighting for all this time. Not a damn class rank. I’ve been fighting for love, affection, understanding… And I believe that I can find all of that in you.”

“You… What…? I- How?”

“February 14, a dozen red roses were waiting for you on your desk in your dorm. With them, was a card addressed to you from a secret admirer. March 14, a diamond necklace was gifted to you for White Day by a secret admirer. And now, these.”

Namjoon produced a stack of envelopes bound by a black silk ribbon from his jacket pocket.

“These are from me. You’re a smart girl, (Y/N). Can you tell me who your secret admirer is?”

That was April. After a few talks with your co-host and having to sit through embarrassing stories of their childhoods, you finally took the leap and went out on a date with Namjoon… And you were the happiest you’ve ever been. The large stuffed animal that Namjoon had won you sat on a bookshelf, next to several other trinkets he had given you over the months you had dated.

You chuckled to yourself at the memory and closed your photos app. After which, you opened up your messaging app to shoot a quick text to Namjoon. That was until, you got a notification reading,

KIM INDUSTRIES CEO, KIM JOONHO FOUND DEAD IN HIS WINTER ESTATE.

Without thinking, you dialed Namjoon’s number and was greeted by a somber moan answering the phone.

“Namjoon, baby, I’m so sorry… I just saw the news.”

A sniff. “Hey. So the news outlets already published the story, huh? I should have known that it wouldn’t take long… They could at least have the common decency of letting his corpse grow cold first before they publicize it.” Namjoon chuckled humorlessly.

You didn’t know what to say. You couldn’t imagine going through the sudden shock of losing your parent, only to deal with the press soon afterward. You sensed that Namjoon needed some time to himself to grieve, and you were more than willing to give it to him.

“Yeah, it’s shitty what they’re doing. And to think that I’m going into that profession. It’s crazy.”

“It is what it is, (Y/N). Besides, I have faith that you’ll be one of the good journalists that don’t try to weave everything that they hear into lies and defamation.” He said earnestly.

Something about the way Namjoon spoke was unnerving. He didn’t sound like someone who was mourning their late father, but then again, he might have been in shock. His apathetic demeanor on the matter must have been a coping mechanism. After all, losing your father so suddenly is a lot to process.

All you could do is hum in response. “I’m glad you think so.”

“I know so, dear.”

A pregnant pause.

“Hey, (Y/N). I know this sounds horribly insensitive, but, can we still have our dinner date at my mansion? It’s just that I can’t bear to be alone right now, and you’re the only person I’ve been able to trust lately. It doesn’t have to be a date. I guess I just want you to come over.”

Your heart shattered into smithereens. He was alone and scared. Namjoon had no one to trust or turn to in his time of need, yet he found it within his heart to ask you. Who were you to refuse?

“Alright. I’ll go. Same time?”

He didn’t have to say a word, but you could hear his dimpled smile some out to play.

“Y-yes, yes, of course! Same time! Thank you so much, (Y/N). You don’t know how much this means to me. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“Alright, see you soon. Bye.”

You hung up the phone with a sigh and faced your closet. You had exactly two hours to get ready for dinner. You had two hours to prepare…

And so did Namjoon.

Once again, Namjoon was summoned to his father’s study. He was expecting it sooner or later. His class rank hadn’t improved since his father sent him to take his top spot back by any means necessary, but you were number one now. Namjoon wouldn’t dare dethrone his goddess from her rightful pedestal.

What he wasn’t expecting, however, was upon opening the large doors a swift slap coming across his face.

“You useless, useless brat! You can’t even eliminate a simple girl?! You can’t even reclaim your title?! How am I supposed to leave my estate and company in such incapable hands?!”

Joonho was fuming. His once pride and joy had betrayed him and disappointed him. How dare he? Namjoon sat on the floor, gingerly rubbing his cheek. He was sure his father’s handprint was burned into his flesh.

“I swear, you’re incompetent just like your brother! He disappointed me, and look at where he is now! I should have known that it was too good to be true.”

At the mention of his brother, Namjoon’s body stiffened.

“All of this. You’re ruining your life and your career all for some girl?! You’re willing to throw away what I’ve essentially bred you for, all for some lowlife pussy?!”

At the mention of you, Namjoon began to see red.

“I suppose I’ve been too lenient on you. I should have known that you would flounder. Maybe I’ll get rid of (Y/N) myself. It’s clear that she means a lot to you. Maybe you’ll get back in line once she perishes.”

That was the final straw. With pure rage fueling his every cell, Namjoon sprinted over to his father’s desk and grabbed his letter opener.

“Say it again, bastard! Say it again!”

Now, Joonho’s figure was dissolving into a crimson blob. All of his human like features were gone in a furious red haze. Kim Joonho wasn’t his father anymore. He wasn’t even human. 

He was the enemy.

Without giving his father a chance to speak, Namjoon plunged the letter opener into the older man’s eye sockets. After that, it was a blur. Hours had seemingly passed and Kim Joonho was nothing but a human pincushion. Stab wounds littered his body, and blood was oozing out of every one. With a satisfied grin, Namjoon stood and cupped a crimson hand to his face.

“Seokjin! Seokjin! Come down here!”

The head butler rushed in the study and into the carnage. The older male was mortified at the bloodbath before him, but he couldn’t help the relieved smile and tears of joy forming in his tear ducts.

“Brother, come help me clean up father. Unless, of course, you have some words for him?”

Seokjin carefully approached his father’s corpse and smiled wickedly. He placed a gloved hand on his eyeless face.

“You’ve disappointed me, Joonho. And now look where that’s brought you. My transgressions against you warranted that I were to be stripped of my place in the world as your son, only to become your servant. Your transgressions warranted your death at the hands of your prodigy. Isn’t that poetic justice? Sleep well, father.”

“Master Namjoon will be down in a moment.” A maid stated as she had you seated.

A white cloth napkin was folded and placed on your lap while you got comfortable in the antique dining chair. Staff hurried to and fro to finish preparing for your meal, and it was almost amusing seeing them rush around like busy worker bees instead of the esteemed staff of the Kim Manor.

A few moments ticked away before Namjoon made his appearance. He was elegantly clad in a designer Armani suit, giving a regal and princely appearance as he made his way over to you from the grand foyer.

“Please forgive me, dear. I had some business to attend to.”

Namjoon outstretched his arms, motioning for you to give him a hug. You happily obliged.

“Namjoon! There you are! I’ve been so lonely… Don’t you know that I’ve missed you?” You cheekily giggled. If you ignored the whole dead dad situation, the whole scene would appear wholesomely domestic. You decided to indulge in that notion.

Namjoon’s breath hitched.

“I’m sorry that I’ve kept you waiting. I hope that we can make up for lost time during dinner, yeah?”

You nodded and sat down in your chair. Namjoon was seated right beside you. As if on cue, the staff brought in your dishes. A classic Christmas dinner, consisting of turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, ham, and vegetables was placed in front of you. On a small dish nearby, some cranberry jelly sat. You tried to hide the grimace at the red jelly. You were by no means a fan of the garnish, but you didn’t want to appear picky or ungrateful, especially considering the reason why you were having dinner with Namjoon in the first place.

Ever the attentive partner, Namjoon was keen on noticing your inner turmoil. “Is something not to your liking?”

“Uh, it’s just… I don’t really like cranberry jelly… That’s all.”

Namjoon looked utterly dumbfounded before letting out a joyful, booming laugh. “That’s all? Oh, (Y/N). You had me worried! I thought that I’d ruined the whole meal for you!”

His fork stabbed into a piece of turkey and he dipped the meat into the red gelatin.

“But, please do try the jelly. My brother and I, we made it for this occasion. I promise it’s nothing like the canned slop they sell in grocery stores.”

Namjoon made this? Now, this you had to try.

“Alright. Since you went through the effort of making it, I’ll give it a shot.”

You copied Namjoon’s actions of taking a slice of turkey and dipping it in the cranberry jelly. With the expression of a chef on Chopped, Namjoon eagerly watched as you placed the food in your mouth.

“Mmm! This is delicious! Namjoon, you should sell this! This is amazing!”

Another laugh came from Namjoon, although, this one had an arguably maniacal lilt. “Why, thank you, but I’m afraid that this specific batch is one of a kind. Besides, cranberry jelly isn’t the most profitable market out there.”

Little did you know that you had just ingested Kim Joonho’s coagulated blood. Perhaps that was why his cranberry jelly was one of a kind.

Merry Christmas.

[rinharu-purple]

Lucien: MLQC’s Mastermind

Yes, I said that Lucien is the creepiest LI in my opinion, and I wouldn’t choose him in a million, billion years. BUT, Lucien is by far the one person, who is pulling the strings and is the driving force of the MLQC universe. He is the only person who acquires all the information from all sides and is connected to every important actor in the story. Therefore, Lucien has become the second LI I’ve started to follow more attentively. Mind that the ranking ist 1) Gavin 2) Gavin 3) Gavin 4) Lucien ;)

In my manifesto, why Gavin is MC’s choice, I’ve already mentioned briefly, that Lucien has the strongest EVOL among all the characters but is also the strongest character (it’s not the MC or the Black Queen, let’s not fool ourselves)

The Machiavellian

Before we talk about Lucien’s part in the MLQC universe, we should first look at him as person and observe the elements that make up his personality.

In the game, all our guys have their personal priorities. Gavin and Kiro are on the front line, fighting for peace and prosperity, Victor, well...I don’t think that he cares for anything else besides MC, maybe his position. But with Lucien, his priority is not a person or a concept, but rather a philosophy. Lucien wants to see the next step in human evolution and is determined to take any measures necessary to see it to it’s end. Other guys can not stand oblivious to other things that come up their way in achieving their goals but Lucien only has his eyes on the prize and to him nothing else matters, no one else matters and no ethics matter. 

Machiavellianism denotes cunningness and claims, that those dark triads use whatever means necessary to gain power. If we consider the choices Lucien has made throughout the story so far, we can clearly find his manipulative ways in getting other actors to the positions of his conjecture. He lies to MC and hides his personality as Ares, penetrates Black Swan to use their facilities, but also uses LFG’s resources for his R&D projects all the while concealing his true nature. 

Another trait of a Machiavellian, is that he is charismatic and friendly, all the while displaying no emotions. I think, there can be two possible reasons as to why Lucien has limited display of emotions. The first possible explanation has something to do with his parents passing and the trauma he suffered afterwards. Among all LIs Lucien is the one with the most loveless childhood and teenage years, the most important years in developing one’s psychological traits and during those years Lucien received alongside with Kiro the most blows. That resulted in him losing the connection to his emotions as a defense mechanism. 

Another possibility might be him losing the connection to his emotions as a result of a chemical reaction in his brain due to excessive testing Black Swan objected him to. Lucien’s EVOL was created in a lab and he was the first man-made Evolver. Lucien is called various times a psychopath, because he shows signs of psychopathy such as lack of remorse, empathy or compassion. It is said that that kind of behavior might occur due to a misconnection between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala. Considering the fact that Lucien’s parents were killed right in front of him and that he was both physically and psychologically abused for the coming years, this might have led him to experience an imbalance in his chemical balance. One might argue, that his altruistic actions in the orphanage are an evidence for his compassion, I think it is yet another disguise for his unethical ways of reaching his goals.

The Orchestrator

In all honesty no one is actively seeking alliances and keeps tabs on other’s actions for their agenda like Lucien does. Maybe Commander Leto but he mostly fails in drawing others to his side, because he is not able to speak in their pendants’ language or resonate with their perspective. Lucien, on the other hand, is gifted with an extraordinary ability to observe his surroundings and companions, making it very easy for him to talk to them in their terms and desires. Lucien doesn’t show much empathy, UNLESS, it contributes to his cause, in that case he can perfectly put himself in other’s shoes and plays them in such a meticulous way, that they join him willingly.

That is how Lucien directs MC successfully in entering the Black Cabin or in understanding the evolution core.

Lucien is not exactly a piece on a chess board, but is a player, who knows all the pieces very well, knows the rules of the game, has observed many games and took notes of how they all has turned out and therefore knows what kind of a game he is going to play. Just watch closely. how he co-operates with Kiro and the Black Queen. He knows that Kiro is using Black Swan for his goals, much like he does, so he uses his hacking abilities to access to information. The Black Queen is the initiator of everything in S1, so he makes sure to stay close to her. He knows that Victor is searching for MC and trying to understand the Evol gene, there he has an investor. 

The Cool, Calm and Collected Type

in the MLQC universe, everyone loses their composure at one point or another, because...who wouldn’t? Time and space warps constantly and people are also changing their stances depending on the time-space constellation they find themselves in. 

MC loses her cool almost on a daily basis, Gavin was in a constant haywire in the Daybreak era, Victor literally threw people into black holes in CH11 and freaked out as he saw the Black Queen for the first time and Kiro walks around in a bipolar state. So, everybody is pretty unstable due to understandable conditions but we never see Lucien lose his cool and this is one of his best qualities. 

Here is the thing about Lucien. This guy is always at least one step ahead of everyone and he achieves this by two simple rules: 

1) Acquire all possible information

2) Observe everyone and everything at all times

Why am I saying this? It lies in the basis of anxiety and angst. We humans tend to feel uncomfortable in the face of an uncertain situation, meaning in the wake of the unknown. MC is constantly anxious, because she doesn’t know what is going on, why is everyone after her, why is she blessed with the unconditional affection of 5 equally attractive men? (ehm, but not quite equally ehm *Gavin* hihi, sorry, Gavin-stan gotta Gavin-stan ^_^). Anyway you get the picture. Gavin went haywire in CH22 because he was pushed in a tight spot and therefore had angst. Same goes for Victor in CH11 his mind went blank as he saw history repeating itself and then in CH18 when he saw with his own eyes what could the girl of his dreams might become.

We don’t see Lucien in such deadlock situation though do we, and I think it is mainly because he is always prepared for every possibility and he can calculate them meticulously, because he possesses the largest chunk of information and also keeps tabs on everyone and everything that’s going on. So, when a crisis occurs he doesn’t freak out, sure he gets surprised at times, because the outcome of a a certain situation is the possibility, which he calculated to be no higher than 1% and yet there it is. But since he’s already took this into consideration, he has a plan. Combine this with his knowledge about the persons and organizations involved in the matter, then you have a calm Lucien, who is in control of the situation. Thus, he is calm. You can actually also bind this behavior of Lucien with that of a predator, whose movement are languid, is non-reactive and doesn’t mind turning his back to his opponents, since he doesn’t perceive them as a threat.

If this wasn’t enough, Lucien manages to joggle all of this without exposing himself. Even in the last stage of the play he never gets caught. Unless he willingly exposes himself, as in the case of revealing Ares to MC. MLQC actors can usually see through each other and use their weaknesses to meet their own ends. MC is obviously Gavin, Kiro and Victor’s weakness and their opponents can see this pretty easily. IT’s not quite the same with Lucien though and he doesn’t let himself be blackmailed or threatened by any weakness. He always keeps his cards close to his chest. 

Considering the fact that Lucin is the least outstanding LI, this is pretty impressive. So I guess this makes him the embodiment of the phrase “still waters run deep”.

The Renaissance Man

Lucien is a man of science and aesthetics. Explaining phenomenons with associations and loading them with philosophical substance. He doesn’t necessarily perceive things bluntly as they are, but interprets them in a meaningful way. The way he associates MC with a butterfly, how he wants to entrap her in ajar, so she wouldn’t get away, alas taking the only resource of color in his life away. Not only that, but he can also break down the matters at hand to its fragments and can therefore work his way up from there. He is blessed with a strong deduction ability, so he can connect the dots easily, come to a conclusion and act accordingly. No doubt that the other guys have very good deduction abilities, but because Lucien always has a bit of an information more than them, he can find the solutions just a little bit faster in my opinion. 

Reading is a necessity for his guy much like eating and drinking, Which is why we see him reframing events in the context of a certain story he’d read at some point in his life. With time, I will add here some of his quotes about certain situations to explain what I mean. Or even better, if you have some, that are evident in you opinion, you could add them in the comments. I really enjoy reading/hearing Lucien’s philosophical, scientific explanations to certain moments in MC’s life. They are always to the point and helpful.

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

So this is my very first analysis on Lucien and I have to admit, I still have  so many material to check on him, so if anything is missing please bear with me here :)

I was watching Joe’s Twitch while I wrote this, so there are many spelling, grammar mistakes, which will be corrected gradually.

This post will get better and better, scout promise!

[natsunoomoi]

So sometimes I check wikis to like look things up about a show or series that I don’t have time to read or watch the whole thing fully cuz that’s a time investment I just don’t have but I have questions I just want a quick answer to.

The problem is, wikis are of course, made by like regular people with varying levels of biases and also sometimes selective memory of events. As can be seen in my more recent posts with SVSSS and MXTX’s works I’ve been on those wikis, but sometimes the explanations of plot points and a bunch of other stuff are really confusing and circular. SVSSS’s is being more cleaned up recently, but it still has some things that it says happened, that I couldn’t find at all when reading the book and I’m just like, where did they find that info to put on the wiki?

Like one of my earlier posts when I started reading SVSSS at the beginning, I mentioned how I read that original Luo Binghe got killed by his harem eventually and I thought that made sense cuz ultimately no one in that original plotline made choices that made them genuinely happy. But when I read the book, I didn’t see any mention of that anywhere...? I think last time I went to go look at BC Novels they had one chapter left to translate. Is it in there?

Then at other times, I wonder if there’s an inconsistency because there’s a limitation between the translation I read and like something in the original Chinese text like there’s a typo, which obviously there’s a mistake then. But then other times, I’m wondering if people read a different thing, but most of the people with a different interpretation don’t seem to be able to read Chinese and are reading the same translation as me, but I’m confused where they got certain details from?

Like for instance, there’s another part on the wiki where it says Airplane originally planned for PIDW to be a BL from the beginning, but I’ve literally been trying to find where that was stated because I don’t remember that and I don’t see that anywhere and the chapter citation that is listed on the wiki goes to a chapter that doesn’t talk about that at all. Airplane/Qinghua does say that he made changes to Qingqiu’s character that were originally more complex to make him a trash human and he did that to make a living, but I can’t find where it says he originally wanted it to be a BL theme to begin with. In the chapter they cite it says that Qinghua had designed Binghe to have an appearance in a way that appealed more to a female audience and be more of a pretty boy. That doesn’t mean that he meant his entire book to be a BL it just means you make your main character look a certain way partly for internal logic because that look is really popular with women so the in-story women would probably find him attractive and in a meta sense any females who happen to also read a stallion novel like some women read shounen manga would find him hot in real life. A successful story does things like that to reach people outside of its target audience and that’s kind of a lot of the reason why a lot of Shounen Jump manga are really popular with women too even though a lot of the stories have the male perspective in mind. The chapter it cites only talks about the actual physical appearance design choice he made for Binghe vs Mobei-Jun. He just says that Mobei-Jun was made for the kind of male character he prefers to think about, but Binghe was just designed with the idea of what would make him more popular and also could kind of be like a self-insert-ish for his desire to beat on people for funsies. It doesn’t talk at all about what the genre he planned for the book to be and interpreting the text to that much is really stretching the context to wishful thinking levels. I don’t even actually care either way what kind of novel PIDW was because it’s not actually that important to enjoying the story of SVSSS, but I don’t know if it’s the Ravenclaw in me or what, but it just bugs me when there’s something that seems *wrong* printed on a thing that is supposed to inform other people. I’m literally reading chapters at the same time as trying to write this post to find where I think maybe it was said, but it sure as hell wasn’t the chapter the wiki cites.

The other day I re-read the chapter when Qinghua taunts SY with Qingqiu’s real memories, and he doesn’t even say it then. ATM, I’m trying to look through the last chapter because there’s that one part when Qinghua shows up right at the end and talks with SY at the celebration, but even at the start at the chapter, SY talks about how Qingqiu was super straight to him. SY is an unreliable narrator, but given the context of Qingqiu’s life events that makes sense. His personal trauma because of Qiu Jianluo also pushed him away from any amount of closeness he could have with other men other than ones he already trusted to some degree. He had a lot of problems forming new relationships of any kind with other men because of deep-seated trust issues. Not that he didn’t have any, but meaningful ones were pretty absent. One only because of a very sad misunderstanding and lack of communication and explanation, but the others just tough.

But like also there’s like that SJ slept in the Warm Red Pavilion and he went there just for comfort rather than more lascivious reasons. Yeah, it’s true that he didn’t go there for those intentions, but like it’s still in the environment so it’s not like he’s unaware of what happens there. I mentioned it in the previous post about his search for means to grow his cultivation, but only to say he’s probably not that innocent and there may be some truth to him wanting to do something to Ning Yingying out of desperation to make up for his low cultivation foundation. Like he’s aware of those kinds of things and he probably came across something that said that was a way he could grow his cultivation. Desperation and this motivation I think is probably the only reason why he would be so tempted to cross that line with Yingying because he otherwise treats women rather well. She is his favorite too, so if a person who usually treats females well for some reason wants to do something that would be hurtful to their favorite person, there has to be a much deeper motivation behind that. The only thing that is a canonically greater obsession I think would have to be his cultivation level. He has a number of self-esteem issues and such a well, but his greatest pride and greatest concern is his cultivation. He is proud of his abilities, but also he laments and regrets the version of him he couldn’t become so much I can foresee that if there was a suggestion that he could overcome his late start in some way by using someone female, I think he’d at least think about it and also consider who he knows could be a viable candidate should he want to act on it and that is how that part of PIDW happened. Pain and desperation make people do things that are uncharacteristic, so it has to be something that really bothers him more than in a moment of weakness that idea is there.

Which is another point I have an issue with on the wiki because it says his low cultivation is “logically” because he started late and spent so much time with a fake master. It’s not logically. It’s factually. It’s mentioned several times especially in the extras chapters from Shen Jiu’s point of view where he talks about how he is specifically behind because of wasting time with Qiu Jianluo and Wu Yanzi and also that he was the last to form a golden core. If it was coming out of SY or someone else’s mouth as an explanation, maybe you can say “logically”, but if it’s coming from SJ’s point of view chapter it sure as hell is not. That *IS* his motivation. He states it himself.

Also, I think some people don’t understand what it means to have a low cultivation foundation. Cultivation from what I gather according to the rules of this world is like a lot of talents we have in our world where you need to start young to be good at it. There’s a few skills that you can learn that if you don’t start at a specific time you lose the optimal window to develop your talent for it because of the way the brain functions and basically purges off skillsets you’re not using in your environment. 

Learning a language is one such skill. When a baby is born, it has the capability to learn how to speak every language in the world, but as it gets older its brain purges out the sounds that it doesn’t hear from its environment and this keeps going into older childhood as well. The taxi driver I talked to the other day about this said you have to start before you’re 10, which sounds about right. The phoneme purging in your brain starts quite early though so that’s why my company has classes for Moms and their 1 or 2 year old so that they can speak to them in English to try to keep English sounds in their environment so that they can have perfect pronunciation when they grow up. If you try to learn a new language when you’re older that’s how you have accents. You don’t have the phonemes to speak the language perfectly so your brain is imitating the sounds with the ones you do have. Plus it’s a constant use skill. I used to be able to speak Cantonese with no accent up until my teens, but I haven’t spoken it in so long that slowly I started to have an accent and now I can’t say the words properly anymore. I don’t know that much Cantonese to begin with that aren’t baby words, but I used to be able to say them properly.

Music is another one and that one has an even more narrow window. Kids with parents hoping that they will be music prodigies usually start them on music VERY young like 3 or 4. It’s not that it’s impossible for someone to pick up an instrument later in life, but there’s a type of sense to music and hearing the scale and developing that skill that if you don’t start kids on it at that time, their musical ear will not be as good.

And it’s that “not as good” thing that Qingqiu is chasing. He is exceptionally powerful and talented which is why despite starting late he became favored. He is very capable and good at what he does, but he is not as good as what he could have been. Even though he is so good, he is only haunted by how much better he would have been if he had started on time and had proper instruction. A musician who maybe wants to be a concert violinist but took up the instrument late may struggle to get a good seat in an orchestra because despite any talent they have, their ear is not as developed as someone else. Such a musician would be vexed and lament that they hadn’t discovered their love for the instrument sooner just as Qingqiu is vexed and laments that he didn’t start proper cultivation development earlier.

And I’m griping about SVSSS more because I read that book so I have more points of reference to go on. But like the wikis for MDZS and TGCF aren’t much better. MDZS is maybe a little more coherent and easier to follow, but TGCF confused the hell out of me and it took me awhile to understand what was going on. I really needed it though cuz I was watching the donghua and like I think the way they present some of the scenes is like slightly out of order for like foreshadowing and other like film reasons, so I checked the wiki while watching to try to get more context cuz I don’t have much time right now to pick up another book at the moment. I was so confused though cuz like...it seems like the logic in the entries is so circular and I’m trying to keep track of all the characters and what’s happening. I hope it’s better now but at the time I was watching it I was so confused and struggling to make sense of what’s happening.

And like maybe you’re wondering why if I read the book, would I bother checking a wiki. Mostly out of laziness because I’m thinking of something and I don’t want to go find the exact chapter to help me flesh out my thought and reference point. I end up getting more frustrated sometimes depending on what I’m looking up because of the above things.

Plus again I’m like a bit mystified as to why Qingqiu’s look seems to appeal to me. It’s not just him though and like other characters with a similar style in some of the games I play. I think there’s some imprint from some very old childhood memory that I only vaguely remember. Like it’s a look that seems familiar, but I can’t put my finger on where it’s from and I can’t figure it out, so I keep just going to check images to see if it will make me remember. I think it’s a movie I saw with my Dad as a young child, but I can’t remember it at all. I remember there was one Jet Li movie I watched with my Dad once and I ended up watching all the time cuz I thought Jet Li was really cute in that movie (I was also 3 so I don’t know why I’m thinking that way, but whatever), but like Jet Li was bald in that movie because it was about a Shaolin Temple. I think at the time my Dad showed me that movie I already showed an interest in movies from my own heritage, so that’s why he showed me that. But like I can’t remember anything else. I suppose it could have been something my grandpa watched because sometimes he’d watch a Chinese movie when I was playing in the living room and I’d stop to watch too and then he’d fast-forward through the intimacy scenes, but because I’d just look over at something he was already watching I have no idea what any of those were.

[wehavethoughts]

Prison Playbook (슬기로운 감빵생활) Review!

Prison Playbook (슬기로운 감빵생활)

Dark comedy

Originally aired on tvN (2017). Distributed by Netflix in the U.S.

Written by: Jung Bo-hoon (정보훈)

Directed by: Shin Won-ho (신원호)

Rating: 2.5/5 Hotteok’s

This post CONTAINS spoilers for Prison Playbook.

Content Warnings for Prison Playbook: violence, rape/sexual assault, homophobia, drug addiction, death penalty (mentioned)

Summary: Kim Je-hyuk is a talented baseball pitcher who recently signed a contract with Major League Baseball in the U.S. With his departure to Boston imminent, he witnesses a man attempting to sexually assault his sister. He confronts the perpetrator and saves his sister but is convicted of assault and is sent to prison. It follows Je-hyuk’s eventful journey as he tries to make a new life in the prison. The show also revolves around Je-hyuk’s cell mates and the correctional officers at the facility.

Earlier this year, I watched Hospital Playlist and absolutely loved it. I enjoyed how the show focuses more on telling the stories of the characters rather than solely being focused on the plot. Then I learned that Hospital Playlist is a second show in the Wise Life series, and there is a show called Prison Playbook which is the first in the series. (Prison Playbook and Hospital Playlist’s Korean titles, 슬기로운 감빵생활 and 슬기로운 의사생활, mean Wise Prison Life and Wise Doctor Life, respectively.) While I wait for Hospital Playlist’s second season to come out next year, I decided to check out Prison Playbook, also directed by Shin in 2017.

Kim Je-hyuk (김제혁) is an extremely famous and beloved baseball player (baseball is very big in South Korea). He finds himself in jail overnight, after he attacks a man who attempted to sexually assault his sister. Against the public’s assumption that he would be released on the grounds of self-defense, the court convicts and sends him to prison. He has to learn how to live a new life in the prison, on the verge of losing everything.

How Je-hyuk makes his comeback despite all of the struggles, is quite an amazing story. Additionally, similar to the structure of Hospital Playlist, Prison Playbook also invests a lot in telling many different characters’ stories, rather than focusing only on Je-hyuk. I enjoyed this format that lets you get to know each character more in depth. And the show does a good job with its dark comedic components. It manages to talk about prison life with levity, humor, and warmth. I think the main story that they wanted to tell is that a life in the prison may not be so much different from our own lives, in a way that you can grow through the relationships you build with people around you. And it does send this message well. But even though I binge watched the show, I’m only giving it only 2.5 out of five hotteok’s, mainly because of how it handles its female characters, drug addiction issues, and homophobia.

I guessed that the show would be heavily focused on its male characters because we are following a cis-gendered male character in the South Korean prison system which still operates on the binary gender system. But I was still disappointed in the roles that the female supporting characters had in the show. Kim Ji-ho, Je-hyuk’s girlfriend, is a typical ‘good’ girlfriend. She supports Je-hyuk throughout his baseball career and his prison life. Not that she shouldn’t, but she does everything that is expected from a good girlfriend/wife in the Korean society. There is even a word for that in Korean: 내조, which literally means the wife’s help (from ‘inside’, as her place is to be at home) for her husband so he can succeed (in the outside world, where he belongs). And a woman is often praised or criticized for her good or bad 내조, especially when she is in a relationship with a public figure. While the male characters go through their own redemption or reconciliation, there is not much of character development for Ji-ho. The only main struggles that she faces in the show are (temporary) break-ups with Je-hyuk – the first time because he is too busy playing baseball, and the second time because Je-hyuk tries to let her go after he goes to prison. And while the set-up that they knew each other for most of their lives and how Ji-ho is the daughter of Je-hyuk’s baseball coach who passed away, is supposed to make everything more meaningful and sentimental, can we talk about their age difference? To some extent I do believe that age is just a number, but it also seems like Korean shows and movies are usually too okay with telling stories about a man who falls in love with a younger, underage woman, waits for her to turn 18 to start dating (ex. Parasite, and many more). To be fair, it seems like Je-hyuk starts to have feelings for her only after she goes to college maybe? But the flashbacks showing how Ji-ho was a little kid when Je-hyuk was about to go to college did make me feel a bit uncomfortable. And there are also Je-hyuk’s sister and mother, and Kim Min-chul’s daughter, who do not deviate at all from the roles that they are expected to play as good sister, mother, and daughter.

How Yoo Han-yang’s character, who is a gay drug addict, is portrayed is another issue I had with the show. There are multiple scenes where they mention that Han-yang’s drug addiction is due to his lack of will to stop using drugs. And his addiction is portrayed as evil. The show really let me down at the end when Han-yang is finally released from prison, but there is his seller waiting for him, and Han-yang gets high and gets caught by the police right away. (It was a setup by the police to tempt him to use drugs again so they can take him back.) His story ends with his parents and boyfriend waiting for him in an empty restaurant. I really don’t understand what message they wanted to tell with this ending for him.

I was quite surprised to see Han-yang and his boyfriend in the show, since the Korean media often avoids anything that are not patriarchal heterosexual relationships. But even though the show had a chance to contribute to normalizing LGBTQ relationships, all it does is explicitly show the society’s bigotry and prejudice towards LGBTQ members. For example, Yoo Jeong-woo, one of Han-yang’s cell mates, accepts Han-yang as a friend but says that he cannot accept or understand Han-yang dating a man. One could possibly argue that the show attempted to show the ugly side of the Korean society as criticism, but to me it did not seem that way and the show did a poor job with their only queer character.

Overall, if you would like to watch the show, I would not stop you from watching it, but I will not actively recommend the show to people. It has a compelling storyline and it will make you care about each character by the end of the show. However, I cannot ignore its bias and prejudice against its female and LGBTQ characters. It also has an uneducated and quite hateful stance on drug addiction issues.

- CoreaMod

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

Hey, i binged the first 14 episodes of Supernatural just last week and enjoyed it so far. But have struggled to hype myself up to finish the series. I found out the last episodes are coming out in October and think it would be cool to catch up by then so i can watch the last ones as soon as they come out. Could you give a (as spoiler free as possible?) list of what about the show make it great to you overall? Things to look forward to, cool plot development, favorite characters, whichever...

hi, anon! 

i don’t know, anon, when i first heard i have these nightmares--and sometimes they come true in early s1 and as long as I’m there nothing bad’s gonna happen to you at the end of 1.14  back in the day, i was pretty hyped af to find out what happened next. but to be fair, 2006 was a different era altogether and some vaguely defined potential Special Ability that doesn’t even work unless Certain People are involved isn’t too exciting when every show these days with two pennies to scrape together for a VFX budget has its characters move things with their mind while shooting blue lightning out their ass.

sorry, i digress. i don’t really know how to sell this unwieldy chimera of a show to you--or if i even should--but let me give it the old college try:

1. for such a long-running show, spn has a tiny list of dramatis personae. on one hand, this means that it can feel intimate and its emotional beats deeply resonant, with long and complicated character arcs and interpersonal dynamics; but on the other hand, if you don’t find them interesting or they’re just, you know, actively annoying, you’re fucked, because there are only ever three or four main characters at any point on the show and two of them never. change. 

1.5. spn has also demonstrated--inadvertently perhaps--that having fewer characters to divide fannish devotion means more stans per character and more friction between these large groups of character stans. somewhere along the way the terms samgirl and deangirl have come to symbolise more than just a mere preference for one character over the other; it’s become a fandom shorthand for personality much in the way of astrological signs or MBTI types: utterly meaningless, but people insist on defining their identity that way anyway. 

(i say this not just as a card-carrying samgirl, but a bitter samgirl).

2. it’s also quite claustrophobic at times. sam and dean are ostensibly driving all around small-town america, but what we usually see is One Possibly Canadian Town indistinguishable from the other. as i mentioned before, the characters are few and spn rarely attempts to relate to current events or make any kind of subtle/meaningful social or political commentary (tho others may disagree with me on this). but this also means that the stories that it deals with have a timeless quality to them: family and trauma and existential angst and the Power of Love and the ways all of them can fuck you up. spn is at its absolute best when it’s dealing with stories on a deeply personal level, sometimes literally burrowing into their characters’ heads and having the entire universe mirror the dynamics of its central relationship. 

2.5. this can be a liiiitle hard to reconcile with how the show keeps raising its stakes with every season, but again, when spn is really on its game, it keeps finding new and creative ways to explore the personal with the universal, and when it’s not, you have supposedly cosmic entities reduced to the most boring metaphor imaginable for modern-day capitalist culture.

3. there’s something that spn does that i love which is turn really absurd premises into a thin veneer over a dark abyss of existential trauma which is something it doesn’t do nearly enough in the latter seasons, which is a great pity.

4. a quick rundown of the seasons:

1 - looks pretty and ends very strongly but also suffers from a case of early 00s uninspired-genre-television-itis

2 - Now This Is Where Things Get Interesting; sets up themes that are explored repeatedly for the next 13 years; please look out for ava wilson, an actual Queen

3 - a reminder that this show has been around long enough to actually have a season that was truncated by the 08 writers’ strike; plus, it contains my favourite episode of the whole show and possibly my favourite episode of television ever

4 - A MAGNIFICENT SEASON that gets better with every rewatch. the closest to flawless this show has ever gotten

5 - contains a number of the show’s best and most iconic episodes, but also sets up a lot of the show’s more... problematic motifs

6 - a HUGELY underrated season depicting some of the most delightfully creative explorations of the aftermath of deep and unusual trauma that i’ve seen, dark and thorny and uncomfortable but so goddamned sharp

7 - kind of gave up on itself halfway through; the last time this show ever took any risks/bold choices with respect to its world-building

8 - you know how these days even the most hotshot, rebellious, high-spirited, come-out-of-nowhere-with-nothing-but-heart-and-ill-advised-amounts-of-courage hero is revealed to have actually descended from some important Hero Bloodline and whoops did you think even fiction was going to indulge in the fantasy that just anybody could change the world? yeah.

9 - should’ve been this show’s turning point, except it turned a whole 360 degrees. still has some really iconic episodes, tho.

10 - eh. skippable after the first few episodes.

11 - the point where i stopped watching regularly. still horrifying but more bleak and despairing than jump-scare-and-gore

12 - this season is a black hole for me. for the life of me i can’t remember what happened in s12 - did it exist? or did spn just skip that number like some hotels skip a floor number entirely? huh.

13 + 14 - Listen It’s A Very Competitive Market And The Only Strong Thing Going For Us Is Our Large And Devoted Fandom So Let’s Obliterate The Fourth Wall Altogether And Go Full Meta, Who Gives A Shit? it’s spn back to being absurd to cover up a pit of howling, abyssal horror, and frankly it’s delightful.

5. the fandom, man. i’ve been spoiled rotten. there is nothing that can’t be found in spn fandom, no matter how brilliant or terrible or eye-searingly horrifying, and this is something i’ve chased in other fandoms with no success. 

In conclusion:  watch it if you like, it can be a cool show. But That’s Just My Opinion, Bro.

[jimlingss]

Thank you, everyone, for your words of encouragement. In this short amount of time, I’ve been absolutely overwhelmed with messages of support. I want to reassure you all that I’m by no means as hurt as some of you think, or at least not after so much kindness. I’ve always encouraged all kinds of feedback!! From compliments to constructive criticism. And I’m (supposedly) an Adult™, so I can definitely take someone’s opinion.

Regardless, thank you to everyone who reached out to me. I want to respond to each and everyone of you under this post so I don’t flood other people’s dashes.

Anonymous said: about the anon who said your fics lack emotion, hmm i wouldn't quite agree tbh, i remember reading tears of a villian and deadass crying, it hurt me so much!! also, in "fall in hatred" their feeling are so well portrayed and i could understand why they acted a certain way! to conlclude, there is always some space for constructive criticism but your stories, are to me, something very attentively built and created, it's apparent that you completely enjoy writing, I can feel your enthusiasm!!

--to that anon; pls don't get this wrong way but it's just the way I see it and I've read quite a lot till now

nah deadass crying isn’t good enough anymore, anon. You have to be keening and violently sobbing until you’re brought into the ER for my fics to be considered to have emotion. lol I’m only kidding, thank you for the message.

peachiest-hun said: To that anon who said your work lacked emotions, I beg to differ! I have read Jungle Park so many times I know at exactly which chapter when the heavy angst starts happening and I read those parts when I just want to have a good cry (I still cry every. single. time)! Also Head Over Heels to Hell, The Colour of Our Voices, Love So Shallow (because I so relate with OC), and many more have given me the FEELS (happy and sad ones). 1/2

So what I'm trying to say is that Jimlingss is doing a great job in her craft. She does deliver emotions in her work and the reason I love it so much is that it's SUBTLE and not completely in your face. Sometimes emotions that are subtle and they hit you slowly, but powerfully it hurts even more for me. On another note, I'm loving Sugar and Coffee. In times of darkness which are often these days, I have something to look forward to every week to keep me motivated. So thank you Jimlinggs! 2./2

Istg Jungle Park is one of the most unexpectedly beloved fics on my blog but I love it hahaha I can’t believe you’ve read it to the point of knowing what chapter is what though. that’s an honour. There’s definitely stories of mine that are less subtle than others, but I’m glad that you enjoy the latter of them too :’) Thank you.

Anonymous said: This is my first time ever leaving a message on someone’s tumblr, but I just felt that I HAD to after reading that anon’s comment about your stories lacking emotion. I wholly disagree (in the nicest way possible, not throwing any shade at anyone). I’ve read all of your fics (for the past two years) and I look forward to when you release new material (the highlight of my Mondays right now after I come home from working at a clinic). Your stories have really lifted my mood during this pandemics an

Anonymous said: Sorry for that long tangent. Don’t even know if I made sense. You don’t have to respond to any of this, but you deserve to hear some positive words as well.

Oh my god. Did I just take your tumblr-message virginity? asdfghjkl I’m kidding. but thank you for reaching out to me. I can’t believe you’ve been around for such a long time and that I’m a part of your Monday routine :’) 

Anonymous said: OK that ask about "constructive criticism" was def imo RUDE. You don't just anonymously go into someone's asks and bluntly tell an author that their fics "lack emotion". That is not the way to encourage someone to improve and continue to work hard. That's just flat out mean. That person clearly doesn't care about your feelings or the fact that you write and share your stories for FREE for us to enjoy. I love your stories and appreciate what you've shared with us. Thank you for your hard work ❤️

I like to give the benefit of the doubt to anons and anyone sending me a message online in general. God knows there were times I meant well but it was received wrongly. But anyway, my mind was more boggled than I was hurt, that’s one thing for sure.

joonie-mono said: + it was called love so shallow which genuinely made me see myself in a character, but my point was that your writing has a specific feel to it, it's made me laugh and cry (His Name personally killed me :] ) and that's my opinion. You and your writing are amazing and I'm sorry but that anon was just so wrong.

oof bringing out the evidence. be my attorney please.

Anonymous said: As someone who has read your entire masterlist (and going through it again) i will have to wholeheartedly disagree with that anon. The way you portray SO many emotions in your fics is *chefs kiss* and I honestly thought that the ones that “lack emotion” were meant to be that way, with an open ending, the idea that their love just started, soo.... yeah, I’ll have to disagree.

There are definitely stories of mine that are a bit looser on romance. Such as Kitchen Romance, The President’s Son, The Heiress’ Son, Arcadia, etc. But I have a loooot of fics that are quite emphasized in either despair/sadness or cute fluff.

ladyartemesia said: ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! I am here to disrespectfully disagree with anon who probably doesn’t write effing ANYTHING and has no idea what it takes to produce the content you do. I have followed for months and I’m still not through your masterlist BECAUSE reading your stories is a bloomin EMOTIONAL EVENT. When I read Brass and Strings, I LOST A WHOLE DAY. Like I was so into it, my DAY was gone. Anon is prolly salty there isn’t more smut I guess. That’s whatever for them. (Part 1)

It’s subtle, deep, meaningful, and incredible and you’re one of my favorite authors. I can’t FOR A SECOND let that comment go cause it’s RIDICULOUS. You’re literally so gifted. You don’t need to change a thing. Every artist, no matter their medium, should continue to improve. So in that sense I wish you all the growth in the world as you work towards the perfection of your craft. BUT SERIOUSLY you’re an incredible writer. That anon is loony. I’m so sorry you had to even read those crazy words.

As I answer these messages, it’s starting to feel like I’m the third party mediator of a dispute and all y’all are just HAMMERING it to this anon, LOL. I’m not sure if the anon is necessarily requesting for more smut but if they are, they might be happy this Friday (*COUGH spoiler for those actually reading my responses)

Anyway, you’re too kind. thank you. I am definitely not as hurt as I was earlier.

((and tbh you’re hilarious, you’re actually making me laugh irl))

krystle1990 said: Woah!! Ok first that Anon is absolutely crazy. I literally stalk your page for new work being put out! I probably blow up your notifications daily. I've never been disappointed in any of your work. You always give a heads up if it will take time for the characters to realize their feelings which I absolutely love. It always leaves me ready for the next part and I am glued to my phone with every update. You're amazing and I can't wait to see how you grow with your work. 💜😘

ASDFGHJKL PLEASEEE if it’s someone who’s worried about blowing up notifications, it’s me. To those who have notifications on I sincerely can’t fathom how often I blow up people’s phones. I digress, I always give out warnings to keep people patient since I know slow burn can be excruciating haha thank you for the message.

kigurumu said: Also just want to add that saying you have good intentions or "don't mean to be mean" does not cancel out whatever offensive thing you just said. IT WILL STILL RUDE. Not saying all negative feedback is bad. Criticism can be hard to take no matter how it's phrased, but telling a writer to be more like another writer is like telling them their style isn't good enough which is NOT helpful. Your writing is your own. If the anon wants to read fics that are like gukyi's, they can read gukyi's fics 🙄

Also I've been waiting until Sugar and Coffee is done so I can binge it all at once but avoiding spoilers from all the asks is so hard haha! I keep seeing all these good things about it and I'm SO tempted to just read it now but I've already waited this long so I don't wanna give up kfnrjrofvjskdh guess I'll reread your other fics in the meantime

The message was fine on its own but I think dragging in another writer at the end was definitely not ok. When will comparing writers end. But regardless, gukyi and I are cool with one another - i mean we wrote 100k together so it’s gonna have to take a reverse Zuko arc for us to be on bad terms lol

Anyway, oooh you’re one of those bingers. Can’t say I blame you cause I love binging myself, so it’s understandable for readers to wait till the series is over. and since you were so kind in following up your original message with two more and expressing so much appreciation for me :’), I’ll let you know that the finale of Sugar and Coffee will be posted by July 20th! by then, the entire series will be completed. 

Anonymous said: Tbh i think that neither you nor that anon is wrong. Some people like it more romanticised and cheesy, some people dont. I believe that your stories are more on the realistic side of life. People (whom your characters represent) cant always be cheesy and passionate for love, there are other things in life! Maybe you're just the type who's too realistic for any hopeless romantic things like i am and it's fine. Not all writers can write dramatic romance

Tbh, I agree. It’s a matter of opinion and there’s no one wrong in the fight of opinions. As I’ve said many times on my blog, the cringe factor varies between person to person. What someone might think is fluffy is absolutely cringey to another. What someone might think is a good amount of fluff is not enough for someone else. I’ve written a lot. And I’ve made sure to add lots of variations between the amount of romance in my stories. Indeed, some are definitely more subtle and “realistic” while others are completely cheesy and makes me gag from the amount of sugar in it lol I just think the anon should take a look at more of my stories before coming up with such a conclusive opinion.

Anonymous said: I’ve been reading your fics for over a year now and religiously follow updates every week. Why? Because they make me feel something whether it be joy from fluff or grief from angst. I’ll remember a story of yours months after I first read it and return to it just to feel those emotions again. I understand that emotional responses are usually subjective but I think that anon needs to read your works again, because they sure are missing out.

I replied to that anon that they should check out more of my fics and then come back to tell me if they haven’t changed their minds, so I don’t know if they’re missing out or not lol

I don’t expect my stories to elicit emotional responses or fanatic feedback for everyone. God knows there’s been other people’s writing styles that just didn’t resonate with me no matter how hard I tried to read their stories. But all I ask is that people try. It’s fine if you give up halfway but at least try reading. That’s fair to ask, right?

[arpwrites]

[Tarot!BTS] Their Philosophy in Life

© | Disclaimer! | Tarot Masterlist | Commissions | Tip Jar Do not repost, modify, or translate without explicit written permission.

In order to get a deeper understanding of who the boys really are, I’ll be drawing a few cards to find out their attitude towards life and how they think it is/ should be lived.

Read my disclaimers for fullest understanding of this reading’s implications!

Kim Seokjin

Jin thinks you are completely responsible for your own life. You have complete power and control over the things that happen to you, you can choose to let events affect you or not. The strong eat the weak and if you don’t want to be eaten, then you have to become strong. It’s not a rosy outlook, there is a starkness to it. He sees in black and white, and believes in self-reliance.

Min Yoongi

Yoongi’s life is all about material wealth and prosperity, and his determination to achieve it. He wants to make sure he and the people around him are looked after and have stability. He wants to be a safe provider for his family and his community, and slowly broaden his generosity to the world as his influence and wealth grows. He has a laser focus towards this goal of his but he will not do it at any cost. The ends don’t justify the means for him. He will achieve it through hard work and earn it rightfully rather than through cunning or deceit.

Jung Hoseok

Hobi thinks no matter how close you are to someone, you go through life alone. Only you can know all of yourself and in his mind, that creates a barrier that cannot be overcome. He can never truly, fully be known by anyone else. He knows this is reality but it doesn’t stop him from hungering for someone who can Know him. 

There is also a sense of powerlessness, or perhaps surrender. With life, Hoseok thinks you need to go with the flow and take what comes as it hits you. There will always be people who have power over you and sometimes, the best thing to do is give up and let them do as they will so they don’t break you.

Kim Namjoon

Joon’s philosophy is to make the best with what you’ve got and regain mastery over life with creativity and willpower. When life gives you lemons, become a baker and build a business with lemon cheesecake. He doesn’t allow himself to be backed into a mental corner. No matter what it is, even if the obstacle before him seems fated and impossible, he uses his mind to strategize and take concrete, practical steps towards getting control over it.

Park Jimin

Jimin thinks life is full of betrayal and heartbreak and you do what you can to push forward anyway. There’s always going to be people who gossip about you, backstab, say goodbye to. There’s always going to be problems and you’ll keep repeating mistakes. You just have to cut through the sludge and get back up every single time. 

Kim Taehyung

Tae’s philosophy for how life should be lived is exactly as he lives it now - with authenticity and childlike wonder. He thinks its most important to always be one’s truest self no matter now strange or unusual because that’s where true beauty lies. Life should be approached with the innocence of a child, with a purity that doesn’t hide it’s true self. He thinks life is glorious and inspiring and a rapturous experience to behold.

Jeon Jungkook

Kook rejects the concept of life being about finding a romantic partner, a grand love isn’t the end goal. He thinks life focuses on the self. It’s about self discovery and self-expression, separate from another human being. He isn’t against romantic relationships or love, he just doesn’t think that’s the purpose of life. Love is everywhere in many shapes and forms and Jungkook exalts in discovering all the hues.

A/N

Jin drew The Magician yet again, it’s a card that appears very frequently for him along with Death and this reinforces the strong Capricorn energy we’ve been getting from Tarot!Jin in almost every reading ever. It corresponds to his Capricorn Venus which is at a critical degree in his Vedic chart. 

Yoongi’s cards, the Rx. Queen of Pentacles and The Chariot, fit perfectly with what his vedic stars say about him. He is literally built for wealth and generosity, and his penchant for focused hard work always comes through in every reading ← I’ll link to the series when it’s up again - sorry, my blog’s under construction.

Hoseok’s reading has such a gaping hollowness to it. He drew The Magician and The Hermit. Both cards have significantly solitary figures that are standing under the moonlight. I think this fits very well with the Tarot!Hoseok story we’ve seen so far. This reading reinforces the theme of Hobi struggling with relationships, his lack of control over his work, and the fragmented, hidden parts of himself.

Joon drew the King of Pentacles and when I asked for clarification, 8 of Swords, 6 of Swords, Rx. The High Priestess popped out and Rx. Ace of Swords was at the bottom of the deck. My deck identifies him as the King of Swords and there’s massive sword energy in every reading I’ve done for him - he’s a very rational, logical man and power is something he pays attention to. 

Yikes, Jimin drew the Rx. 10 of Swords with The Chariot at the bottom of the deck. It doesn’t surprise me considering his past readings.

The deck took exactly 0.0001 seconds to talk about Tae. He drew The Star which is the same card my deck uses to signify him. Taehyung practices what he preaches and there is no dissonance between who he is and who he wants to be. 

Kook’s readings have mentioned before that romantic relationships don’t take up space in his life. It’s not that he doesn’t want one or is aromantic or asexual, it’s just not his focus right now. He’d much rather spend time with himself and his friends and family than spend it seeking out a romantic connection when he doesn’t need it. 

Overall, I feel about a 95% percent accuracy with what I’ve said for this reading. I felt quite connected to the cards which was surprising to me because it’s been a while since I did a reading on the boys. Guess it’s like riding a bike. 

If you enjoyed reading this and feel like you know the boys a little better now, please support me by interacting with this post through likes, replies, or reblogs 🥺👉🏽👈🏽 It tells the algorithm that my work is valuable, so it’s a meaningful way to let me know you’d like to see more of the same work from me 🐨🌷

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this post. Let me know if my reading aligns with your perception of the boys or if it completely surprised you. Does your life philosophy match any of the boys’? Do you agree with their viewpoints? What can we hypothesize about their character from this? Let’s have a discussion 🐸☕️

Bonus: Relevant Discussions

© | Disclaimer! | Tarot Masterlist | Commissions | Tip Jar Do not repost, modify, or translate without explicit written permission.

[ronnytherandom]

Accidental Animated Film Week, or Watch Me Continue To Know Nothing About Media Analysis While I Liberally Abuse The Semicolon In An Attempt To Sound Smart

18/1/2021: Hotel Transylvania Lots of fun but this is a weird one, varies drastically in some strange ways. The comedy takes hit and miss to extremes, simultaneously being laugh out loud hilarious and possessing moments of ungodly cringe. The pacing is unbalanced with the first half feeling awkward, taking a while to really get into; the latter much too fast and not taking the necessary time, some scenes seeming to serve their function as minimally as possible. This metronome of quality exists primarily in these respects and is quite noticeable, but doesn’t ruin the experience and I think that’s testament to just how good the rest of it can be, though there are still caveats. The animation is fantastic, incredibly expressive and creates truly hilarious physical comedy, and I feel this is to be expected of a Genndy Tartakovsky film, I grew up with and deeply appreciate his animated features. The emotional core of the story really begins to hit in the latter half and is very effective though the Zing concept I take issue with the name because it just sounds too silly without being humorous; its just a weird little gripe, the word zing annoys me. That said I was genuinely invested in this love story which is a feat, I’m not a romantic person at all. The acting is generally very good, I enjoy the expanded cast and Adam Sandler is excellent but Andy Samberg’s Johnny has an accent that gets on my nerves and feels like he’s being a bit too heavy handed with it. Again, just a little gripe. The message is clear and heartfelt, strange as it seems to make the message for the parents of the features target audience it still works and resembles in parts the “dadification” that’s been occurring in media (especially video games) over the past decade. Ultimately, it’s a good time so long as you can deal with a few groan inducing moments and a little strangeness.

19/1/2021: Princess Mononoke Holy shit, why haven’t I watched this sooner. Transcendentally good! My new favourite film, an absolutely incredible achievement. For fear of wading into sub v dub controversy the English dub is good though I’m definitely going to watch it subbed at some point. Its Studio Ghibli, everyone knows that Miyazaki runs a fantastic operation, thus the art and animation is faultless. There are moments where every single frame is a true work of art. Induces nostalgia though I’ve never seen it before, the art style and tone of the soundtrack are endemic to the late 90s and remind me of the animation from my childhood. The message is also wonderfully nuanced, focusing less on Humanity’s responsibility for the natural world but rather a reconciliation between the ambition of humanity and the life of our world through respect and veneration of that which we’re dependent on to survive. I love the world so much; I think one of this film’s pinnacle achievements is conveying the impression of a deep living world with relatively little worldbuilding. Just watch it aight, everyone needs to watch it. Fucking Incredible.

20/1/2021: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie (rewatch)

Very Fun. Powerful nostalgia, I think I saw this literally hundreds of times as a child, may have had the whole thing memorised, and have always been a huge fan of the SpongeBob series. Even despite that I think there’s a lot of quality here. Pretty much every aspect of the film is enjoyable and well done, even if I think the moments featuring real people are kind of awkward. The gags and humour mostly hold up but I don’t think they have aged so well as the original run of the series, but there’s not much as can live up to that standard. Has a little to say about being a goofball, but ultimately its all about the gags for me with this one.

21/1/2021: Nausicaa: Valley of The Wind

Magnificent. Meaningfully very similar to Princess Mononoke, not quite as good, but still very worthwhile. I really like the mid-century sci fi vibe going on here and think the worldbuilding is excellent, though some of the expository dialogue is a little clumsy. I imagine there’s a little bit of nuance lost in the dub but cannot be certain as I don’t understand Japanese. That said, the voice acting is generally good. The art is magnificent, as it is wont to be in Studio Ghibli films; or in this case the proto-studio-Ghibli-film. That every culture has its distinct style is one of my favourite things, amongst which rank the Ohmu, Nausicaas glider and most of all Teto. Look at his little tongue! Most of all I love the ecosystem that arises from the polluted earth, how the earth cleans itself, it is a spectacular thought. I have an interesting thought about the soundtrack, specifically during actions sequences. The musical quality is good, especially the main theme, but there are issues with the editing of the action sequences’ music which intrigue me. Because the edit is always jarring and I don’t think the style of music necessarily fits the film; but I think it is a technical limitation, that contemporary audio systems were not necessarily able to apply the soundtrack in a less jarring manner. Just an interesting thought I had and I may look into the history of sound software etc. to see if that’s right. I think it is a beautiful work and well worth watching, I enjoyed it greatly.

23/1/2021: Howl’s Moving Castle

Good. Far and away less impactful than Mononoke and Nausicaa but still very good. Standard Ghibli points: Its beautiful, well animated and full of character. I find all the lead characters quite charming and well performed; it is set in a very interesting world with lots of interesting quirks and cool magic. Further it is powerfully meaningful, with a clear statement on confidence and empowerment. There’s just something about this one where the vibe is slightly off and I could not fully explain why. It feels disjointed, as though all the parts of the world are not fully connected. I feel like if you were to list the plot points in order some would be labelled “??????? Make it happen” as some events and conclusions are reached without purpose or motivation. Only some though and I’m not trying to seriously say it doesn’t make sense that’s just how I feel in post. I enjoyed it but I feel like I don’t fully understand this one.

24/1/2021: Spirited Away

Beautiful. This one I think is the best showcase of Ghibli’s style: the art is beautiful; the water is viscous and the spirits are fantastically grotesque. There’s a vibrant world shown here with a lot of charming characters and expressive animation which I think creates the most visually stunning of the Ghibli films that I’ve seen so far, though I fear I’m a bit basic and unsophisticated as I still prefer what I recognise as more traditional fantasy and sci-fi worlds like Mononoke and Nausicaa. I feel the story is also a well nuanced coming of age tale as it balances between relying on your friends and standing up for yourself. I also really like Yubaba or more generally how antagonism is handled throughout this movie; and to an extent in the broader Ghibli canon. Rather than create comically evil villains who exist purely to do bad these features all showcase antagonists with genuine sensible motivations driving their action and the only thing defining them as antagonists is the framing and perspective. On that point you could argue that Yubaba is the closest to a genuine villain but I think the materialist-critical aspects are more of an aside than a genuine statement, as appreciable as they are.

[tslasvegas]

Episode 4: “I'm sorry Daddy, I've been very naughty.” - Keegan

Dan and JAKE! A WORD IN MY OFFICE PLEASE! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS.

Wow! Today was A Day to say the least. I feel like boo boo the fool with how things went down today, but hopefully, I can recover from that now that there’s a new tribe. I’m excited to get to know new people, but sad to see my old alliances have to come to an end. I guess we’ll see what happens

Finally a swap and golly 5 OG Palazzo! I really hope this works in our favor. Kinda nervous for Joey and Stephanie tho because now they are in the minority of their tribe. I do hope they’ll find a way to survive till merge

LMFAO IM... watching the tribal council for the other tribe and I'm SORRY??? Who the fuck is Jake S he is the most condescending man I've ever seen in my entire life YIKES. Anyways this swap is nice.. I think I've got a good group, I really hope we win the next few immunities because I 1) really dont want to see Rachael on this tribe and 2) i want to try and rebuild my um. tattered relationships. I did the best I could in the challenge for tonight, I'll try to come back tomorrow a little more renewed cus I'm kinda wiped out from today's events. Now that my tribal council cherry has been popped for this Org its time to go crazy woop

So good not to check Luxor anymore! 

Well last tribal went fine, I got to see what was in the Prize Vault which is awesome; now I have a better idea of the twist. Big problem though- Our swap put me in the minority. I was running Luxor and had a core 4, now they have 5 OG Pink so they can pluck us off, one at a time. I went from drivers seat to getting driven over. We need to win the challenge, so I'm gonna go ham in winterbells and hope to pull it out.

We swapped! I think I made a confessional already, but honestly I don't remember. I gave Livingston some of my chips so he can go visit the vault after the immunity challenge. We'll see what is in there and for how much, and maybe snatch up some real nice items to help us out. I've also got Andrew on my side, which is great and he's apparently quite tight with Pat, which is fantastic. Mo is a pretty decent dude and I've been talking with Jake a lot today. Things are going alright. I just hope we can win this challenge. 

Phew, while the swap was not ideal. I was really liking my tribe, we were kind of quiet but individually everyone was great and we also kicked butt at challenges! Anyway, the swap with numbers wise not great, but I know Xavi from a previous game and we have a solid relationship, I hope he and John and Joey and myself can build a solid squad to make it to the merge. The challenge was rough tbh, I am not great at video games, but I think I did ok... Jaiden got like 20 trillion points on a game so really I have no idea how I did. Hoping for the best!

I am losing my mind in my personal life so I am sorry that I have been mia. I appreciate the patience from the hosts and my tribe. It makes me still want to play even though I've been kinda invisible. I'm aware of that. I'll fix it. I promise. Otherwise, its been pretty good as a tribe so far. Andrew, Pat, and NIk and i are all really close from other games, so we're good and Andrew and Pat and I are together, which is just really unfair if you ask me. I can't wait to start scheming!

Uhhhhhh.................................... anyways........ yall hear somethin? Oh I hear something. It's the sound of Joey literally blowing himself up to me hardcore!!!! The narcissism and arrogance really jumped out on this one. So Joey had the idea of calling tonight to go over some stuff and honestly out of the 2 hours we spent, I think about 45-60 mins of it was rather nice and I do feel that I enjoy his presence, but omg... his desire for control is so noticeable and its kinda gross. Joey and I debriefed on what went down on Bellagio and I totally understand why there was the difference in us discussing tribe dynamics - I had to give up all my info while he kinda kept things more reserved. I want to assume this is because of the fact that I went to tribal and he hasn't until now. I won't judge him for that. However, after this he's kinda like dictating the fact that an OG Bellagio needs to go home. Ben is the easier person to throw under the bus since he didn't even bother to do the challenge/let us know what's up. Not a big fan of that, but aight. Then Joey starts suggesting we vote out Kailyn...?? Uh... not on my watch. I have to make it up to Kailyn at least a little bit so even though she's probably got a loaded gun pointed at my head rn, I want to defuse the situation rather than start throwing her out there as a potential target. Even if it isn't coming from me, I'm not here for that. The information that Joey did give up to me relates to the chips in the game. I've never paid much attention to the chips, but I guess it takes 10 to get into the vault and Joey's got between 11 and 15 (he changed his answer on the subject SEVERAL times). He says there are three idols worth 40 chips each, then a super idol worth I think 50 or 60 (can't remember). On top of that, there are nullifiers, vote advantages, and a legacy advantage, too. He seems fixated on the legacy advantage and really wants the chips to get it. Like.. ok do you but we NEED the super idol?? Does he not realize that thing has more power than anything else in the vault combined..? ANYWAYS. What really started to turn me off about Joey is that there was this sudden expectation that I'd be giving him all of my chips thus far. I don't care about them to begin with but knowing what I know now, it doesn't make sense for me to give him my stash just to fuel his hunt for... a measly legacy advantage... I put myself in a compromising position. I told him that once a host gets back to me on my exact total, I'd be willing to trade him my chips for I guess an allyship going forward. I mean that. I want to work with Joey at least through this vote, but I can't guarantee that it'll go much further than that. He is a very risky person for my game right now because if he's coming off this strong to everybody, it's only going to hurt me by association to stick with him longer than a vote or two. However, I'm going to try and divert the attention and just be like, maybe we need to use my five as a bartering piece for new allies at this point. I want to try and build meaningful partnerships right now, especially since that was the only reason I wanted to make it to the merge.. Rebuilding is crucial as well. Kailyn and possibly Nik/Rachael are not going to be fond of me once we all have "the talk" about last tribal. I put myself in an even more compromising position with them, but I'll find my way out of that mess. I think........ As far as this tribe goes, I think between Joey's WILD imagination/constant over-analyzing and the lack of direction this tribe has taken so far.. I'm doing okay. Nobody is really standing out besides Joey and I guess myself in a way, so if I keep him around it MIGHT even shrink my own target little by little - unless people find out we're together then FUK. 

......five seconds later

In terms of my other relationships right now, I love John Coffey but this is old news, I've been in love with this man since like 2016 and it's fine - totally fine - just fangirling a bit rn since I get to spend more time with him!! woohoo. Xavier and Stephanie are straight up non-entities which makes me SO scared of them especially since Stephanie's won an ORG before... how can someone be so irrelevant yet still win something? Hmm... Makes me think that she's secretly a ninja, you never even see her around. Nik has grown more and more quiet as the days go along and I wonder what's goin' on with that. Maybe they've decided since Biden won the election that moving to New Zealand is a bad idea? Lmfao. I dunno. Nik stresses me the hell out because I have no idea what they're thinking at any point in time even in the off-chance that we are talking. I think I might just have a personality they don't mesh with because I noticed on call forever ago that none of my jokes were particularly landing but Nik had a lot to say and a LOT to joke about there... rip. If it's a personality conflict - go off, I guess. I'll try on a couple different hats w this person to try and see if I can get things to go better than they have been. Kailyn.. like I said before, pretty sure she's after me but I am really trying to sell it to her that I like her a lot, because I do. I literally compare her to my best friend irl because they have very similar attributes and I consider Kailyn kinda messy but fun and quirky like my BFF so I hope that Kailyn did truly appreciate me making that comparison. Ben's inability to do this challenge is going to be his undoing. I think the only acceptable move is to vote him off this time because I HAVE to prove to Kailyn that I can stay the course, and I also need to whittle down Bellagio numbers to prevent people from targeting us and having everything go to shit that way. Let Joey control this, please dear god. Don't let me get blood on my hands. Let Rachael integrate herself well on this tribe. Let someone else blow themselves up in the process. Just not me plz and thanks. There is no fear in my soul tonight. Joey might be a fucking crackhead but so am I. I'm breaking down walls that I didn't think existed but Joey basically told me tonight that he thought I was confrontational, rude, chaotic, and all these other things but was impressed at how calm, optimistic, and outgoing I was. Love to hear it. He might think he overestimated me but he was right about the initial impressions... too bad he won't be around long enough to see that side of me :~) 

FIRSTLY, DeNara was robbed. Okay so I already wrote this a while ago in my host chat about how the fact jake and dan are praying for my downfall because after the swap i am the only og bellagio on a tribe with 5 palazzo and 2 luxor. so after I slowly blinked at my screen for a bit I was like okay how do we survive this if I go to tribal. Because I’m under the impression tribes are gonna stick together especially going into merge but since Luxor is already down so many members it’s kinda Bellagio Vs. Palazzo. but then I was like okay wait I’m the only member of bellagio on this tribe after coming from a tribal so I’m the only one who can say what happened and I can create what narrative I want to help me get through the next couple rounds. Because if I was like oh blah blah I was in majority im so fucked then of course they’re gonna target me to get me out. But if I play the victim card and milk the fact that I voted in the minority acting like I hate my og tribe maybe they’ll think to use me as a pawn. To take down others moving forward. Listen if I have to be labeled a goat to move forward then BAA bitch.

.....five seconds later

Things are going good, because not only am no longer in danger this round but that means Rachael is going to the enemy tribe which if she came to our tribe that might’ve disrupted the narrative I had going of me being against og bellagio. Also DeNara should still be here, don’t think I didn’t clock the fact that Ben scored a 0. I also found out from Andrew that Rachael and Ben are apart of the same Tengaged group which explains why Rachael was so set on Ben staying but like, listen, if I end up in a game with someone I’m friends with, and they’re not active and helping the tribe. Good riddance.

What the. We lost yet again. I have lost everything since the start of the game. It's crazy. There are 4 from Bellagio, 2 Palazzo and 2 Luxor. 2+2 seems like an obvious plan, but it looks like it is falling apart already (read: Joey). Sucks to be across the world, so instead of scheming, I'll be sleeping.

Forgive me father, for I have sinned. is the same as I'm sorry Daddy, I've been very naughty. 

The swap did happen. Expected it. Glad we won this first challenge in this new tribe tho in worried for Stephanie and Joey

Vault Shenanigans - Holy shit I did not expect this to be as powerful as it is. I was preparing myself for some sort of payment based search system, but being able to straight up buy the items I want, but its also the same for other people. I had a misconception at how generous the wheel was so I'm probably behind some people with the amount of chips, but I could very well start scooping up some of the steal votes and just say "see ya" to the idols, although getting a super idol would be very wild, it still seems risky to hold out that long to get it, even though there's a great amount of power associated with it. The other issue with a super idol is that I think that its very likely that if I get into a position where I need to use it, that I lose a lot of respect with the jury if it does happen. The only benefit from actually having it would be that I no longer have to worry about someone else whipping it out, so it'd be less for me wanting it, but more for others not having it. As of now, I think my optimal play is to hold on to my chips until around ~40, and then buy both vote steals at once, OR go all out for the super if someone has already bought an idol by that point, because I would be operating under the assumption that the frontrunner is already out of the running. Tribe Swap Shenanigans - This is a hell of a tribe swap. 5-2-1 is always a great spot to be in, I am already good within the 5 that I have so I don't have to worry about anything there, it should be relatively smooth sailing as far as getting to the merge. Mo/Jake are alright so far, neither particularly speak too much. Kevin has not reached out at all, probably will try to talk to him tonight for general purposes, even if he seems like he'd be an easy one to get out first should we go to tribal the next time. But generally I really don't plan on losing so it's kind of a wash. I'll take the smooth sailing, easy path to merge. Premerge is never as relevant as merge is when it comes to FTC as long as you have something to show for yourself at the merge. I've got all game to make my presence known, and I plan on using the entirety of the game to do so.

I feel super anxious today because even though I had a great conversation and built a good connection to Joey, there hasn't been any talk about the vote quite yet. I mean obviously names have rolled out but nothing solid is out there still, I think I just need to let go of the urgency for a name to start being spread early on and just let things be. Stephanie and I have been chatting a bit here and there today so I feel more comfortable with her and hopefully she sees things from a similar perspective as everyone else - the Bellagio foursome needs to get broken up right now. As long as it's not my name of course!!!!! Plz vote Ben @everyone. Or Kailyn tbh save me a little bit of trouble now. Talking to Xavier is SO HARD LMAO. He doesn't immediately contribute information into a conversation and as bad as I wanna get rid of Ben, I almost..almost think going for Xavier is the smarter move, since Xavier doesn't seem too motivated to actually get to know ME and work with me. I'm selfish that way. Kailyn doesn't seem like she wants to do Ben which is a little frustrating but I totally get it, if Ben stays he's going to go after her hardcore but like she needs to actually pitch me an alternative lmfao. I don't wanna go bending over backwards just to appease her right now so if she doesn't gimme a name.. sorry sis but then I think it's gonna be Joey's call on this one :/

I am being very cautious now. The 4 of us (me, John, Joey and Steph) are going to vote together. Now Jaiden wants to vote Nik. And Kailyn wants to vote Ben. Why can't we just agree on one?! And it always has to go down to the wire. Stick together, people!

I think I am possibly leading the charge against Nik rn?? Joey told me he wanted Ben and then I told him I wanted Nik and now he wants Nik LOL take that Stephen 

Okay well I have no idea what's going to happen tonight, but I'm going into tribal not afraid of the vote I am probably going to have to make ... I think the best move is to just vote for Nik and be done with it, but it's going to cause a serious rift in a lot of my relationships if I do so. I've been super wishy-washy to a lot of people I think and right now it doesn't make sense to continuously do one thing when I mean another.. especially since there seems to be zero ground to move upon when it comes to getting the vote to turn from Nik to Ben. Nik doesn't even SEEM ACTIVE?? Why are we making this a bigger deal than it needs to be. Ben can't just walk around deciding what's going on and I think Kailyn would prefer to keep Nik around rather than Ben but it's like... so push for Ben to be the target hun! She's feeding into someone else's move no matter what she does, it's either Ben's agenda or John's agenda. Pick a side, but pick the side I'm on, too. Why don't we just vote for Kailyn tbh. lmao

[gayregis]

if you've read season of storms is it any good? i read a sample and was kind of bored but i don't want to spend money on it if it's going to be like,,,,,,,,,lady of the lake

reading this i was like “wait lady of the lake was good though,” then i paused to actually think about it as a cohesive narrative for a bit, and went “actually wait never mind :/...” it was good thematically, and there were a lot of great scenes, but like as a whole book... if you could only read that book on its own... it would be very long and confusing. i just think lotl’s good because i do the uncivilized thing of skipping around to the parts i like and then i don’t read the parts i dislike

but luckily i have already ranted about season of storms before, and i’ll post that rant here now. for context, i actually read season of storms from cover to cover... yeah.

overall, it's a disorganized and aimless plot. it's set inbetween tlw and sod, so there's no quest to find ciri, because geralt hasnt met ciri yet, he's still our free bachelor geralt. which means hes still quite directionless and when it comes to his personal life it's mostly preoccupied with romance. but more importantly it means the plot is incredibly aimless and NOT PERSONAL to geralt, like all the stories in TLW and SOD and all the saga books revolve around events and people super meaningful to him. what happens in the plot is a whole JUMBLE of things that feel like sidequests from the witcher games, not a story from the witcher books. nothing really means anything for geralt's character development, and it suffers from being so long because there's like a lot of different settings and characters and everything just seems completely thrown together, mashed up, and not coordinated. 

i will admit that baptism of fire & tower of the swallow followed a style of “random encounters” in which geralt and the company traverse on and just interact with whatever they happen to find, but it felt like they were accruing knowledge (and also. members of the company) as they travelled on. in season of storms, it feels like geralt starts over and the entire book resets itself every time there is a new scene. none of the plotlines fit together, so it is just a super confusing and exhausting reading experience, unlike in bof & tos, where you can follow the action quite easily and it’s very pleasant to read because it’s all one continuous storyline.

in addition, all of these mashed up stories are pointless, because they dont END with the reader learning anything about the universe the characters live in or their relationships with each other. we might learn that sorcerers are power-hungry, but we already knew that. we might learn that people are violent and corrupt, but we already knew that. we might learn that geralt loves yennefer, but we already knew that. in the short stories, you learn so much about the world and geralts relationships (for example: we learn so much about the situations surrounding the elves in edge of the world, so it’s worth reading because otherwise you will not understand anything when the scoia’tael show up in blood of elves and later in the saga). and in the saga, this continues and more worldbuilding/relationship building occurs (geralt and ciri’s relationship grows from a question of price and then becomes crazy right around baptism of fire when they’re super linked by destiny). it really doesnt in season of storms. you don’t learn anything meaningful about the world or the characters like in the other witcher books.

another large flaw is that in the stories and saga, sapkowski was really good at creating likeable, enigmatic characters no matter how few pages he had to create them. they were deep and almost lifelike and also usually told a larger message. the NPCs- sorry, "characters" in season of storms are SUPER flat and uninteresting.

coral is h*rny for geralt and jealous of yennefer, like every sorceress ever to exist, pratt is a dick and corrupt, degerlund is corrupt and evil, mosaik is timid, the werewolf guy is JUST THERE, the auguara isn’t super interesting despite being cool, nimue feels flatter as a character than usual, even dandelion- okay actually jk i liked dandelion he was the sunny part of this book AS ALWAYS ... ofc he felt one-dimensional but he usually does so you know, EVEN GERALT feels a little one-dimensional and not his typical introspective self

one of the worst things sapkowski did was [SPOILERS] make the major villain character of the book gay and feminine... like its mentioned SO many times that "ohhhh this is a man that looks like a woman WOW HOW EVIL!" and he literally does the worst things like rip ppl to shreds and want to kill geralt painfully by torture with syringes, also he uses his sexuality to ?? seduce an older sorcerer to be his favorite so he can keep his job as a sorcerer?? 

and OK vilgefortz and bonhart arent complex villains. but theyre despicable and it feels a little deeper bc vilgefortz has that backstory and hunger for power, and bonhart is just terrifying and the embodiment of wretched evil, this guy from season of storms is just annoying and anime villainy like “OOHOHOH watch how i kill you now >:)” also theres a lot of crass humor like fart jokes and villains that are described as really super ugly like omg wow never saw that one coming!!! it just feels super bland and basic and almost like the antithesis of The Witcher as short stories and a saga, super out of place with the rest of the series. [END SPOILERS]

in my opinion, the BIGGEST FLAW with season of storms is that since the plot is so all over the place, and since the characters are so flimsy, the entire book feels meaningless. it feels like it would appease games or netflix fans who just want to read about geralt going on some crazy adventures, and it does serve that purpose, but it is NOT a “book belonging to the witcher series.” it has no depth where there should be... i do not feel like sapkowski is trying to tell me something as a reader about human nature, or the nature of parent-child relationships, or society, or violence and war... 

it just feels like geralt is doing all of this shit just because sapkowski had some remaining ideas and wanted to get all of them out into the world all in the same book, like sewing a vest out of fabric scraps. it was not refined like the witcher saga, because none of them were really meant to fit together anyways, and because they weren’t meant to fit together, there is a distinct lack of message and substance to it.

TLDR: no cohesive narrative and a confusing plot, no deeper underlying message or arguments about humanity or society or nature being made by the author, cheap new side & background characters, no ciri and no yennefer so geralt is quite directionless and stupid

other remarks that are just my personal preferences and comments:

geralt & dandelion:

geralt mostly works alone in this book... which is... not my favorite. this is why i got bored with tw3 after i read the witcher books, because i can’t stand geralt being alone, the world feels so... lonely! although he meets up with dandelion and has an affair with coral in season of storms, most of the book is him waffling about with side and background characters that i couldn’t care less about because sapkowski put no effort into developing them to be enigmatic or at least lifelike and likable (unlike some really minor characters in the witcher saga that, although they were so minor, were incredibly likable: for example, applegatt and toruviel i quite like). 

of course, i also have a preference for when geralt hangs out with dandelion, because it usually creates more of a lighter tone for the scenes and a more humorous nature overall, plus geralt changes his personality to be not in such a bad mood and we get to see him being kind and friendly. so it annoys me that although dandelion has some scenes with geralt, they never really have deep conversations like they do in a little sacrifice, or witty remarks & banter like in the edge of the world... i feel like dandelion was quite in-character for the whole book, which is good, but also, he’s dandelion so he’s pretty easy to get in character. he’s just easy-going, arrogant, preoccupied with earthly delights, cowardly, and friendly to geralt. but it annoyed me that their scenes together were both not very deep, and that they didn’t get as much interaction as i think they deserved. usually in a witcher book or story in which geralt and dandelion have met, they stay by each other’s side for like, the whole book or story, lmao... 

that being said, they do have some fun moments in this book and dandelion has some funny lines which i quite enjoy. like. they are eating at an inn, and the innkeeper asks them “how are you finding the pork?” and dandelion replies, “we’re finding it among the kasha. from time to time. not as often as we’d like to.” and somehow i just find that line so fucking funny... i think it’s just because it’s really relatable

sorcery:

coral is SOOOOO one-dimensional, she really is just like the same character as fringilla vigo or some other sorceress that’s jealous of yennefer for getting to bang geralt, and this lack of characterization is super transparent. people laugh about how many affairs geralt has had, but they never discuss how all of them have been super uneasy and unfulfilling.

already said that i hate degerlund as a character and all of the sorcerers being morally wack is predictable if you’ve read like, anything from the saga about the sorcerer/esses. also geralt talking with sorcerers is like, interesting if the sorcerer in question is vilgefortz, but everyone else is just super boring

other:

i didn’t really like ferrant de lettenhove until the very end of the book (which i won’t spoil) but because of this end, i wished that he got more backstory/development

NIMUE I LOVE YOU and it was nice that nimue got some more backstory in this.

i do enjoy the end of the book. not to say “my favorite part is when it ended,” but it’s true, because the ending in kerack is interesting and full of drama, the moments in the inn are alright if a little void of substance, the ending with geralt and dandelion on horseback is beautiful, and the epilogue with nimue is wistful and beautiful as well.

sheer pettiness:

oh my GOD why are the CHAPTERS so SHORT? it’s like, 20 chapters plus a bunch of interludes and an epilogue, and the book is only 357 pages long. it feels like as soon as i was getting into a scene, it switched to another chapter. i mean, idk whether i prefer this, or the haphhazard long as fuck chapters from baptism of fire where i’m not quite sure when a chapter begins or ends because i memorized the scenes and not when a chapter occurs. 

i dislike how coral is on the cover of it, even though it’s fitting, because if there was a work about... oh idk... the hansa... then angouleme could have been on the cover... and then i could have had geralt + yennefer + ciri + dandelion + the hansa on the covers... like wow that would be cool...

this book would have functioned much better as a series of short stories... i think sapkowski has talent for the short story medium, but novel-length books are more desirable by publishers, but this is literally just a guess, i don’t have anything to back this up

my recommendation: don’t buy it if you are just looking to read the witcher books as in, get a feel for the book canon world and characters. it’s pretty unnecessary for that. do buy it if you are a completionist like me / the witcher is something you’ve been into for years and you’re about to buy all the books as a set and it would feel weird to not have all eight books on your shelf and it’s only like $5 more to buy the set of 8 as compared to the set of 7. don’t read it and expect perfection, it’s basically like “drabbles” but canon from the author. there are like 2 or 3 nice gerlion moments if you care about that.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 115 Review

nickyoung_confused.gif edition

Point in favor of Levi being alive: Note how he was found. He was lying on the banks of the river perpendicular to the shore. Remember, the last panel in the last chapter seemed to indicate he was going to land in the river. This implies he survived the explosion and was able to swim to shore. That means Hange was lying about him dying instantaneously from the blast, and from there we can infer she’s also lying about his current condition.

Point against Levi being alive: note how Isayama draws his eyes. They’re blackened out, like they’ve been removed completely. This is exactly the same way he drew Zeke’s eyes when he was dead.

My best guess is that Levi survived the explosion and was able to make it ashore, but lost consciousness shortly before Hange found him. If he isn’t dead now, he will be soon. I’m not holding my breath.

But if Levi IS alive right now, he definitely should be. Drowning is traditionally not helpful treatment for the severely wounded.

Last chapter was about Zeke’s origins, but in hindsight, it plays a lot like the first part of a two part special. 114 and 115 are basically a double length chapter as far as I’m concerned. Together, they tell Zeke’s story.

And it’s very enlightening about Zeke’s character.

Perhaps the most interesting new element to Zeke’s character is his loneliness. Zeke…is lonely. It’s a lonely place at the top (of Mount Psychopath). His father never loved him and he knew it. He loved and trusted Mr. Xaver more than his own flesh and blood. After biting Mr. Xaver’s head off, Zeke calls him father, as he should.

The relationship between these two people is quite something. They gave each other the loving relationship they weren’t able to have on their own, and together, with full faith and conviction, they concocted a truly despicable plan. They’re bound together in sickness and in health.

Suicide and euthanasia are touchy subjects, so I won’t go into them here, but I will say this:

Euthanasia without consent. Is. Murder.

They call this the “euthanasia plan” but that’s just good branding. Their plan is to murder the Eldian race. It doesn’t matter if this is an act of mercy, as the word euthanasia implies, if it is done without the approval of the subject, it’s murder. The Eldian people, of course, cannot consent to this because there is no one body or individual with that authority.

The only two people who could conceivably make that call are Historia, the reigning Eldian monarch, or Eren, as bearer of the Founding Titan. Zeke is just some rando who took it upon himself to genocide a whole swathe of the population. He clearly has grandiose delusions.

This plan also reveals a very odd facet of Zeke’s thinking. He seems to view the Eldian people as a singular entity. And I mean, yeah, they are all connected to each other through the Founding Titan, but it still says a lot about Zeke that he describes his goal as a “euthanasia” (a thing that is done to individuals) instead of as a “genocide” (a thing that is done to groups and what his plan actually is). He seems to have taken it to heart that the Eldians are just an extension of the Founding Titan.

This truly is a deranged plan. The way of thinking that underlies the euthanasia plan is basically a kind of anti-hedonism. Anti-hedonism would be the idea that painful events are inherently bad and that there is no such thing as an inherently good event. No such thing as an inherently good event.

Zeke doesn’t believe in inherently good events.  

There are only things that cause us pain, like having a shitty dad, and things that serve to diminish that pain, like playing catch, but those events are not good in themselves. Thus, the only intrinsically valuable things to gain from living are things that have intrinsically negative value, so we’re all better off dead.

If that sounds stupid, that’s because it is. This is a really fucking stupid idea. Believing in this means believing that pain now for the sake of happiness in the future is nonsensical.

Because happiness has no value in itself, but pain does have value in itself (negative value, that is) the concept of sacrifice does not compute. This is probably why Zeke couldn’t understand the sacrifice the Survey Corps made at Shighanshina, or for that matter why Levi was willing to sacrifice his fellow soldiers.

Enduring pain for the sake of happiness makes no sense when pain is inherently meaningful and happiness isn’t.

But the idea that there is never any reason to make sacrifices is ridiculous.

And another thing: why doesn’t Zeke bring his plan to its natural conclusion? If death is preferable to living, then why not use the power of the Founding Titan to just kill all the Eldians up front? 

It would be easy. He could alter Eldian biology so that oxygen was poisonous to them. 

Why not? If non-existence is the best state of being, why not just kill them all?

But that’s the biggest indictment of Zeke’s plan. The logic behind Zeke’s plan leads you to one unavoidably dumb conclusion:

Murder is cool.

Killing people is cool because life is suffering. Zeke is what you get when you take edgelord teen philosophy to its logical extreme.

Except that’s obviously not true. Happiness/pleasure/fulfillment/what have you are clearly inherently worthwhile, and so long as that is true, living will always be preferable to death. The reason why is because of opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost refers to the benefits you miss out on by choosing to do one thing over another. If you die, then you miss out on the happiness you would have enjoyed had you lived. If the opportunity cost of dying is greater than the cost of living, then living is preferable to death.

But in the end, all this talk of preferring death over life is beside the point because that’s not even what Zeke’s plan involves. Zeke’s plan is not to literally euthanize all Eldians, it is to sterilize them so their race dies out in 100-aught years.

That’s genocide.

The enforced sterilization of a whole people is genocide. Not just colloquially, but even legally. The crime of genocide was first defined by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which entered into force in 1951.

Article 2(d) is very clear:

“[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: […] Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The idea that destroying a whole group of people is immoral is based on the notion that life is inherently worth protecting. But of course, Zeke doesn’t believe in this. See: all the bodies he leaves in his wake.

Yes, Zeke’s logic is that life has more pain than pleasure, but this logic only works if you also assume the positive aspects of life have no intrinsic value. The euthanasia plan is just as much a product of Zeke’s psychopathy as it is a product of his ideology.

It’s not that Zeke is a psychopath because he thinks death > living, it’s that he thinks death > living because he’s a psychopath.

Speaking of dumb things Zeke believes, I looooove the meeting between him and Eren.

Eren feeds Zeke this obviously dumb line poo-pooing the Eldians for making them kill innocent people by existing and Zeke is in tears because yes, finally, someone gets it!

Eldians never should have been born; because they were, I have to kill innocent people in furtherance of my ideology that Eldians never should have been born.

...

Wait.

Eren’s statement makes no sense at all, but Zeke “11/10 intelligence” Jeager has his head so far up his ass he doesn’t even see it. Dude is so overjoyed that someone is finally stupid enough to see things his way he starts crying.

And I’m crying too. Because of how sad this is.

Eren obviously doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Zeke just wants someone in his life who understands him and he thinks he’s finally found that someone. But he truly is alone. I might actually feel bad for him when it all falls apart for him.

Eren is almost certainly playing him. Eren fights for freedom. I think the kind of freedom he supports is shallow, but ultimately freedom to Eren entails living, so there is no way he’s actually on board with this plan.

Eren siding with Zeke essentially makes him a proponent of the King Fritz School of sinful atonement, and unless a substantial flashback is in the offing, there’s no way such a drastic change in his character would happen off screen.

Another interesting new element is Zeke’s view of the titans. He seems to believe that titans aren’t the problem, it’s the people who abuse them. It’s a take on the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” line you see sometimes. It’s not the tool, but the people who use it.

But it also seems Zeke has no faith in people (what a surprise) and that the only way forward is to deprive them of those tools completely. He sees humans in puerile terms, as hopelessly immature. And as far as the story is concerned, he’s right.

Yelena makes the point that power invites temptation for abuse. Having titans at your disposal gives you power over others and people have abused that power throughout history.

But Yelena is a hypocrite. She was known for abusing people she took captive. And now, having won power over Pixis and his men, she has decided to impose a caste system on them.

Paradisians must now wear armbands that denote when they swore allegiance to Zeren. And because the time of your swearing determines your station, these armbands are also a status symbol. They indicate your status in the new social order. For the people who surrendered last, it is a form of public humiliation. It’s cruelty.

It’s also what the Marleyans did to the Eldians, and Yelena thinks this was a good policy. Reminding the lower classes of their place is a good thing to her.

I think the point of this anecdote is to show how hopeless humanity is. I don’t know where the story is going with this. My sense is that Isayama is going for an absurdist moral to the story.

Such a moral would look something like this: life is a grueling struggle that you will ultimately lose. But you should keep struggling because that is the only way to rebel against the cruelty of the world.

Isayama did say in an interview that certain philosophies have influenced him, and Albert Camus’ absurdism is one of the more well-known philosophies.

During their meeting, Eren mentioned how Grish killed children. And Eren killed children too, so let’s delve back into this in light of what Eren said.

It’s awful whenever anyone dies, but not all killings are immoral. There are exceptions, and those exceptions depend on your ethical framework.

The one that SNK appeals to the most is a form of consequentialism. Consequentialism, to put it simply, is the idea that actions are moral if they make the world a better place. By what measure depends on the specific kind of consequentialist theory you believe in. And ONLY the consequences matter. Nothing else.

There is nothing wrong with having a consequentialist worldview. If those children had to die to save those people, then killing them was not wrong, provided Grisha didn’t act with any malice.

But there are other ways to judge. One of them is by applying the Principle of Double Effect.

The double effect principle states that actions are not immoral even if a bad result comes of it if the bad result is a side effect of the action. (In the past, “double effect” referred to what we now call a side effect)

The principle of double effect is often misunderstood, so I want to be clear here: it is not the idea that it is ok to do a bad thing if it will lead to a good outcome. The bad result must be incidental to the action, not a direct result of it.

The exact criteria varies, but it usually goes something like this:

The action must be inherently good or at least morally neutral.

The person committing the act must merely permit the bad result to occur. It cannot be intended.

The bad result must not be a direct result of the action. It can only be incidental.

The good result must adequately compensate for the bad result.

If these criteria are met, the Principle states the action was a moral one.

For example, when confronting the Female Titan during the expedition, Erwin kept many soldiers in the dark about his true plans, and many died because they didn’t know what they’d be dealing with. Was that wrong?

No, it wasn’t. Many soldiers died, yes, and Erwin certainly foresaw that would happen, but that was incidental to his decision. Erwin Smith bears no burden for their deaths.

Now think about what Grish did.

He killed children because they were royalty and he wanted to eliminate the possibility that the Founding Titan could be reclaimed by them.

By the criteria of double effect, this is clearly immoral. Grish intended for them to die. He wanted it to happen. And their deaths were not incidental to Grish’s decision to kill them. 

Needless to say, people die when they are killed. 

Grish killed them for a good cause, but committing a bad act in pursuit of a good goal is impermissible under double effect.

Now what about Eren?

Eren wanted to launch an attack on the Marleyan government and he did it from the basement of a building. He did it by transforming into a titan while in the basement. He knew there were people in the building and he foresaw they would die if he transformed. He did it anyway. During the attack, people in the crowd were also killed. Was that wrong?

Yes, it obviously is.

Killing people and provoking the world’s militaries was the entire point of the attack.

Eren wanted them to die.

And it’s not like these people were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Never forget that Eren used the people in the building as shields first. By threatening to transform and kill them if provoked.

Eren intended for them to be in a position to die if he transformed, which he was planning to do anyway all along. They died when he transformed because Eren wanted it to be that way.

Honestly, I’m not even sure Eren’s actions were ok even from a consequentialist perspective. Yeah, his plan may make the world better off, but there’s something to be said about necessity.

Did those children really have to die to make this plan work? Why is it necessary to gather a coalition of the world’s militaries at Paradis? That’s the only part of Zeren’s plan that remains to be revealed.

I don’t like how the series implies a choice between Grish being right and Zeke being wrong and Grish being wrong and Zeke being right.

Grish’s actions are controversial. At. Best.

This series tries to push the line that people need to do bad things to bring about a good ending. I still have flashbacks to Armin’s “Erwin is a bad person for doing what needs to be done” speech in the Female Titan Arc. It’s dumb and it makes no sense.

You can’t be a bad person for doing the right thing. You just can’t. It’s impossible. I don’t have to explain why, do I?

No?

Okay, good.

So in other news.

Congratulations everyone! If you had “Zeke dies but comes back in a reference mashup of Star Wars and Jesus’ Resurrection,” come on down to collect your winnings! Now I wonder if Luke emerged naked from the taun taun 🤔

Seriously wtf?

What’s great about this chapter is how well it does subtle comedy.

Zeke emerges from that titan and the rain stops. The clouds part and a naked Zeke is bathed in rays of light as he emerges from his titan incubator. :D

Zeke is asked what happened and he straight up has no idea. Hard cut to him looking on in bewilderment as a girl molds his body out of dirt. :DD

Eren says he wants Gabi to help him flush out the Marleyans who’ve infiltrated the walls. Pieck is standing right behind him. XDDD

It’s disturbing how Eren apparently can’t be bothered to learn Gabi’s name. To him, she’s just the brat who killed Sasha.

Sasha is dead and Eren was her friend. He has every right to be upset. To be upset at Gabi. But that’s no license to disrespect her person by refusing to learn her name. Mr. Braun has shown that.

Eren has only ever called Gabi “that girl who killed Sasha.” That sends a clear signal. That signal is that this is all she is to him. It’s dehumanizing and it’s why I hope that through it all, Eren will not be elevated by the story by being made into the ultimate hero of it.

He is just such an asshole.