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a-couple-of-notes · 1 year

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types in tension: kit tanthalos as royal and skeptic

a lot of people have pointed out how archetypal and dnd-esque the characters from willow feel - and I agree! they're absolutely tropey and built to serve very clear, specific functions within the ensemble. willow is the wizard and the mentor. elora is the sorcerer and the chosen one. boorman is the rogue/barbarian and the sixth ranger.

but I want to talk about my favorite example of this: kit. kit has her own clear place in the ensemble - but the archetypes she's made up of are ones usually in tension. this gives her a fascinating kind of depth and motivation - and is, perhaps, reflective of similar tensions in the rest of the characters. let's discuss.

kit as the royal

kit is introduced in contrast to jade, her humble, dutiful, long-suffering knight. this highlights all of kit's opposite qualities: her relative arrogance, rebelliousness, and desire for adventure over duty. when she conflicts with her mother and makes a scene at the party, we understand that she's feeling constrained by the arranged marriage and dreading a future stifled political life like her mother's. but the narrative also makes it clear that this is a selfish thing to do; kit clearly hurts jade, graydon, and airk, who haven't done anything wrong.

so kit is set up as a rebellious/spoiled royal: she chafes against her responsibilities and her sheltered life, not knowing the full extent of her privilege. she wants to go into the outside world but underestimates how dangerous it is. her arc should be about getting thrust into those dangers and balancing her headstrong, cocky independence with a dose of humility. she should come back stronger, but with more respect for duty and the difficulty of leadership.

basically, kit should be kind of like merida. which makes a lot of sense, given the very merida-like speech kit gives during the party.

but then airk gets kidnapped, and kit is thrust into the outside world, taking her place in an ensemble of other characters. and something interesting happens: kit becomes a skeptic.

kit as the skeptic

to balance the group, they were always going to need a skeptic - someone more invested than boorman (the apathetic) but not falling over themselves to save the world like willow (the mentor and true believer in elora danan, at least as a concept). with jade sworn to the queen’s (and thus elora’s) service and graydon falling in love, they needed someone who could/would consistently challenge elora; who could suggest practical courses of action against high fantasy wish-wash; and whose narrative arc toward belief would be, essentially, the show's ideological argument for hope and idealism.

so it's kit. kit wants to keep them on track. she doubts magic and the idealistic plans the others have for elora. not only is she aware of the practical concerns of the quest, she's often the one reminding the others of that. while it may be out of jealousy, the kinds of questions she asks - “is this really working?”, "how long until elora can do magic?" - are things that the party has to consider just...logically. will it significantly slow their travel if willow has to teach elora for an extended period of time? will they need more rations? when will elora be able to contribute to potential combat?

skeptics on magic shows like this often get a bad rep (except when they get a very good rep because they're hot and sad), because we know the show's overarching philosophy is one of belief. there's a combination of out-of-universe impatience, waiting for the skeptic's narrative arc to catch up, and in-universe - well, arcing, where the the events of the story prove the skeptic wrong and the other characters (the believers) right.

here's the thing, though: skeptics have usually come by their cynical realism after a hard, unfair life. they've seen some shit. they've got a tragic backstory. they’re your han solo from star wars, eretria from the shannara chronicles, cara mason from legend of the seeker. we understand their abrasiveness and accept their position as a legitimate argument because it's born from experience - experience that the idealistic heroes don't have yet.

so here's an interesting tension: how is kit both royal and skeptic?

because the arc of a rebellious/spoiled royal hinges on the fact that they don’t have experience. they don’t know how tough the real world is, and they haven’t thought through the practical considerations. and where the royal is the one who needs to be taught these things, the skeptic is usually the one teaching.

I suspect this is the crux of some people’s annoyance with kit - she’s taking the place of the skeptic in the party, rough-edged but logical, but her introduction indicates she doesn’t have enough experience for that. so instead of going, “you know, even if that wasn’t the nicest way to put it, that’s a good point. in-universe, it doesn’t seem like elora is going to learn magic very fast, and that might be a legitimate liability to the party,” the response is, “what do you know? you grew up a spoiled brat!”

why is this happening?

before I discuss the implications of kit’s character as both royal and skeptic, I want to take a moment to talk about why it’s happening. I think there’s lots of factors - well-written characters often involve things in tension, and there’s a whole layer of kit trying to imitate the seasoned warrior type of her father - but I think there's one main reason: elora must displace kit as the royal in the ensemble.

elora isn’t spoiled, of course. but she starts out pretty naive and chases after airk without practical consideration to her actual abilities or (later) her duties as the chosen one. she is the one that everyone has sworn to protect and save, sometimes from problems of her own making. elora must learn to lead, master her powers, and make hard decisions in a messy world.

the switch is clear even in the very first interaction kit has with elora. when kit asks if dove has any battle experience and dove snidely reverses the question, it’s establishing kit as the more practical, skeptical, and indeed, experienced, voice. kit has, actually, had more real-world battle experience than dove.

so while we were initially introduced to kit as the hero and royal, in the party, elora is the hero and royal, with kit falling to the lancer and the skeptic. this neatly dovetails into kit’s feelings of abandonment and jealousy over everyone choosing elora. even the framework of the story, the meta functions of the characters, have placed elora over kit.

the implications

so why am I even talking about this? why does it matter? after all, despite her function in the party, large parts of kit’s arc follow the rebellious/spoiled royal’ arc. kit is constantly getting knocked down a peg, losing what she thought was hers; this follows the general arc of spoiled royals losing everything and then rebuilding themselves as stronger, kinder people. but I do think the royal-skeptic tension adds another layer, and here are three thoughts as to why:

1) I said that viewers might feel that kit’s royal background makes her “unqualified” to be the skeptic; I also think this is an interesting lens to apply to the characters. graydon dismisses kit’s irritation with elora as “she’s just jealous.” jade and boorman say that kit could never do the dirty work of killing a corrupted graydon, with the implication being that kit can’t take the reality of it. are these lines just excuses for the writers to tell us with 100% certainty what kit’s motivations and limits are? maybe. but it’s more interesting to me if these characters are interpreting kit through their experiences of her - as a royal who graydon barely knows and who jade has spent years protecting - and missing some stuff.

2) it adds a cool dimension to kit and elora’s relationship. we’ve talked about the rebellious/spoiled royal’s arc as one of learning humility, and that’s one kit’s definitely going on. but at the same time, kit must complete a skeptic’s arc: learning to believe in magic and idealism, learning to believe in the chosen one/royal - which means the story is just as dependent on elora proving herself to kit as it is kit yielding to elora. a lot of kit’s other relationships center on kit humbling herself (kit has to apologize to jade and graydon, kit has to learn to respect willow). but kit and elora’s dynamic - and their whole arcs! - require both of them to make an equal effort.

3) the royal-skeptic tension just...adds all sorts of possible motivational layers to kit’s actions. there’s the jealousy underlying kit’s questions to elora, which we’ve talked about: it’s both a royal’s discomfort with losing privilege and a skeptic’s practical logic. but there’s also kit’s name-dropping; it seems like a classic royal move to get special treatment, but two of the three times she does it, she’s doing it for pretty practical reasons. she’s identifying who sent them to the nelwins - not trying to pull rank - and she’s proving to the bonereavers that she can get them money - a pragmatic offer to get the party out of trouble. how much of kit’s friction with willow is royal naïveté, ignoring the words of a more experienced mentor, and how much of it is an equal competing philosophy, a skeptic’s real-world practicality against an idealist’s grand plans? it’s both. kit is always both.

(note: I feel like this reads as favoring skeptics over royals, which is not the case; they’re value-neutral narratives. however, as this is, at least in part, my attempt to figure out why I've felt so bothered by people interpreting kit as simply a “spoiled princess,” some of that frustration may have leaked in. though I think even if kit had followed the royal arc to a T, with none of this archetypal tension, I still would have been frustrated by, like, misogyny and people not letting characters go on an arc. you can’t win, I suppose.)

#willow 2022 #willow meta #kit tanthalos

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shackledeath · 2 years

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Trigger warning: mentions of suicide, existential crisis and extreme topics.

now I’m about to get real deep and dark but getou. I relate to him deeply. I at one point in my life was going downhill into the ideology of nihilism I was extremely suicidal going through existential crisis and believed that my life was worthless it meant nothing and that I could no longer live happily in this world. but not only that, I believed the world around me was too broken too full of hatred, racism, prejudice, unfairness, inequality, injustice and so forth. due to my experiences in life along with having mental issues and not getting help from any of the sources that were supposed to “help” me like the cops, doctors, therapists, teachers, etc. my systems had failed me, I felt there was no one that could help me (I still believe that no one can help me but I’m much much better now) or even cared about me. I went to the cops for situations like someone breaking our window and blackmail got no help. I’ve went to the doctors seizing explaining to them that idk what’s happening to me that I have epilepsy but this seizure was coming from a fall, they doubted me accused me of lying. I’ve asked my teachers for help on things I didn’t understand, they ridiculed me and made a shit show out of me. I’ve done everything and ran to aaalll those resources, they didn’t help nor care. so naturally I felt like I couldn’t live anymore there was no way I could be happy here and after the blm the protests the amount of people dying learning about medical racism my mother possibly dying due to medical racism and so forth I began to feel uncomfortable unsafe afraid of everything and all my resources and the supposed helpful systems that were around me and white people. I began to become afraid of my world. so in getous words “I can’t be happy in this world” is how I felt. how could I live in such an unjust society, how could I be happy in it. nobody cares there’s no humanity here that’s not what I saw on this earth, not in this world, not in my life. it was rooted into my mind at the time that I just couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t care for me people like me people who aren’t like me, I couldn’t handle all the injustices I was having an existential crisis. what really tore me into pieces was how no one cared about my mental health how easy it was for people to dismiss how suicide is a joke how easy it is for me to commit the fact that people think I’m crazy because I am struggling and not getting any help the fact that doctors can misdiagnose me feed me drugs and make me think that it’ll be all better once I take them HELL making me take shit that’s not even for any of my mental issues the fact that psychiatrist hospitals are more traumatizing and damaging for my mental health when they are meant to HELP you. the fact that I am scared till this day to fully commit suicide again because i am afraid for it to fail and wake up in a hospital and they tell me I have to be in a psychiatric ward for x amount of months, weeks and that I’ll be forced to stay there. so yeah I really really resonated with getou when he said he couldn’t be happy in this world, because at the time I couldn’t either.

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22degreehalo · 2 years

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Okay so I know this is out of nowhere and completely out of context to recent things I’ve been posting/talking about but something Happened in a subreddit and I need to finally get out something that’s been on my mind a lot recently:

A lot of gaming communities are absolutely plagued by a group of people - very often in the majority - who do not wish to do whatever it takes to win competitive matches, but also hate losing. But rather than simply not playing the game, they continue to play, but merely get very angry at their opponents for not making the same choices they do.

I’d like to make it clear that this isn’t about ‘skill issues.’ This is about people making deliberate choices to use their Favourites rather than the meta-relevant choices. This choice is almost always extremely obvious to the player, and in fact most of these players take immense pride in chosing favourites over meta. None of this is wrong! The problem comes when these people play competitively, and actually do not enjoy losing to meta teams, but then blame the other players for not chosing the same as them.

This is dumb. It is just deeply, entirely unfair and unrealistic. Some people genuinely enjoy and have fun making tactical choices and trying to maximise their scores! It’s a fun puzzle, like chess! Getting mad at these people is elitist gatekeeping that attacks people for Having Fun Wrong, full stop. And not to mention that people who play this way are, in my experience, inordinately autistic-acting, giving this whole debate an uncomfortably ableist slant.

And yet, most of these people who use favourites like to think that they are fighting against elitist gatekeepers and bigots. So why does this happen? (At least, in the context of two games I’m most familiar with seeing this in: Fire Emblem Heroes and competitive Pokemon.)

For starters, I think part of it is a weird moral element to it: that the favourites-user is making the Moral Choice, and therefore Deserves to win for that, somehow. Winning by actually playing the game is ‘cheap.’ This ties in to a lot of standard ideological stuff that the world is divided into an oppressor who is inferior in every important way, but wields power over others due to their willingness to use Dishonorable and Unfair tactics that the oppressed are too morally pure to consider. In this view, the correct and ‘default’ position is to play the using-favourites way, and everyone is capable of that.

But that doesn’t work in practice, because the rules of what constitutes ‘fair’ play are entirely vague. (Which is part of why I do feel like there’s an ableism issue, here: the social vagaries of what is an Acceptable level of Trying is very very very allistic.) What happens if someone’s favourite happens to also be a meta choice? That’s often acceptable (even if it means that a ‘favourites over meta’ team is actually not particularly un-meta), but not always. How is the meta player supposed to hold back, so they aren’t trying ‘too hard’? Surely they’re allowed to try to win, but how hard are they allowed to try?

For freemium games (such as Fire Emblem Heroes, which sparked this post), the cut-off seems clear: paying money to win. The ‘unfair’ players are the whales with +10 new, premium units. But the thing is that in practice, you don’t actually need to be a whale to play meta, at least in FEH. In Summoner Duels, the most maligned mode, you usually really only need a single copy of each premium unit to make use of them, and that is not at all hard to achieve. In this case, the commonly-accepted logic of ‘this mode is overrun by tryhard whales who steamroll everyone else’ is just not really true: people who really wanted to play the meta certainly could do so without paying real money. They just don’t. So, why?

I think the key to this is my previous question, of how hard meta-players are allowed to try to win. And I think there are two answers to this, representing two categories of these types of players.

For one category, the answer is that, yes, the player is supposed to try to win, but they want it to be a fair fight. They want to believe that if they really invest in their favourites and get the most out of them, they have a chance at beating meta players.

For these players, the real problem at the crux of the issue is that the game just isn’t balanced that way. The true enemy here is the game itself and its designers. Their frustration is entirely understandable; the problem is merely that it has been misdirected.

This however immediately becomes complicated again when these people exist in the context of competitive Pokemon, where there in fact ARE many different tiers of play that almost always allow some way for their favourite pokemon to be useful. And yet for some reason these players never seem to consider other tiers to be valid ways to play.

I’m... not entirely sure how to rationalise that, to be honest. All I can really gather is that some of those people seem to want to be able to just hit up the ‘default’ tier and use their faves and find other people also using their faves, and even things like checking which tier their favourites are best in is ‘too much work.’ (Of course, this is also unrealistic: even if you could somehow get a group of people who have all spent the exact same vague amount of Effort putting together a team of favourites, those teams would all be incredibly varied in their overall strength, so the problem would still remain.) But I think at this point the group starts to morph into the second category of players.

The second category is of players who in fact don’t want the other player to try to win. Because they don’t want to have to try to win, either. They don’t actually enjoy playing the game. But they want to do it and win, anyway.

Why? In some cases I think it’s just that this is the only game they can really play with these characters and so it’s the best they can do. Even in this case, I can’t help but think that if they try different game modes or tiers or whatever, they might surely find a version of the game that they enjoy more. And if not... then maybe it’s just unfortunate that while they enjoy the characters, they don’t enjoy the gameplay, and will just have to try and find different ways to appreciate those characters.

For others, though, I feel like they almost feel a weird obligation to play competitive. This is more common in men IMO: there is certainly an unfortunate gender role expectation on men to prove themselves Superior in competition, even among feminists; note that men who are incapable usually have toxic masculinity read into them and are mocked for it regardless of their actual intentions. But there’s also a weird strong defensiveness here, or even a vulnerability, that the Meta Players will make fun of them and just in general be mean elitist gatekeepers.

In this situation, there’s a very real sense of ‘get them before they get me.’ The players try to turn it around, and instead accuse THOSE supposed gatekeepers of ‘playing wrong’ and not being ‘real fans.’ I don’t think they realise consciously just how much they’re reading in to other people things they have never actually said, here, because a lot of it is actually projection. Meta-players don’t have to say anything at all - just by existing, they make some people feel insecure and defensive, and liable to lash out.

I think the realest sort of semi-realistic worry is the idea that not playing competitive is intellectually lazy, or just stupid. That ‘smart’ people could just pick up the game and win that way. Playing non-meta often seems like an almost instinctive self-protective thing, then: they don’t need to actually put their smarts to the test because they never Really had a chance to win, anyway.

But the thing is, very very few people are just naturally smart enough to easily win at games like that. I don’t even know if that’s really a thing? People who do well usually do so because they actually really enjoy playing it and thinking about it, and work hard on it. Not being good at a game doesn’t mean you’re dumb, it probably just means that you haven’t really looked into the tactics as much, or gotten as much experience playing.

But maybe some people don’t like to think that they haven’t tried as much because it seems like it means they don’t care as much about the game and aren’t a Real Fan? But you can be a fan in all kinds of ways - getting better at the competitive game is just one! Though, these players often try to combat this by recontextualising ‘real fan’ as ‘one who actually uses characters they care about because they really know the character well’ which... is just more generic bad Real Fan gatekeeping as well.

Of course, this entire way of thinking is also very unfair! If you deliberately hold yourself back, you can’t complain to the other person when they win! But, of course, there is a sense of envy, there: that that person is confident in their abilities enough to really try. Thus again we get the moral argument, that Actually Trying is unfair and unreasonable and they are taking the Moral choice by not doing so.

Which is the other reasoning: Trying is for Nerds. They aren’t some fat ugly autistic incel weeb who has never touched a girl in his life! They are social people who touch grass and Have Sex! They are very keen to prove that they’re Not Like The Other Nerds, and need to have a bad example to prove themselves against. But when they reach that position in practice, they chafe, because they really do want to try to win and they’re envious of the other player for just being able to do so. But that goes back to the first category again, of people who really do want to try.

So. What have we concluded from this? Honestly, there’s quite a lot more variety in these groups of people than I even believed going into this post, and there’s no one easy way to combat this bad behaviour. Do they want to try hard but are embarrassed or insecure, or do they not want to try at all and are embarrassed or insecure about that? Is the problem with the game itself, or the culture around it?

But ultimately, yes, this is a problem. Too many people are attacked or treated with extreme hostility literally just for playing a video game and enjoying it. That’s not okay. All these phantoms invented to explain why these meta-players are actually Jerks who deserve to be mistreated are just that: phantoms. Everyone deserves to be able to have fun playing video games. Including those who want to try very hard to win.

#my thoughts

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magicalink · 5 months

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Hi, I just wanted to say that I love your blog because of your writing, your fic reblogs and your feminist reblogs 💜 It has a lot of things that I like, it makes me feel like I'm not alone in my opinions and that maybe I can find someone that shares them and my interests! You don't need to post this if you don't want to, but thank you for your blog (⁠◍⁠•⁠ᴗ⁠•⁠◍⁠)⁠❤

Omg, this has to be one of the best messages I ever received! 😭

Honestly I get some shit and hate thrown at me for being feminist, as any feminist does, especially in this blog that is focused on erotic content because of the nature of the majority of the community 💀 So receiving messages of other women and girls who also enjoy videogames and erotic fanfics while also having feminist ideas makes me feel finally not alone 💜

It means the world to me, truly. Because in feminist environments I always feel like I will get called a pervert for liking Genshin and writing smut about it, but in gamer and fanfic environments I get called a prude or a feminazi/transphobe for not complying to the gender ideology that dominates the field (and politics all around the world except for China and Russia) So I'm always caught in the middle. I'm a person who cares a lot about politics, economy, but fundamentally about human rights and especially the human rights of women who are trampled all the time. (Shout out to WDI for making a manifesto of women's sex based rights that is slowly getting support and being signed by women all over the world despite having the queer lobby trying to crush it down with the full force of the political machine they move) But I'm also a person who enjoys having hobbies, like any other. And those hobbies include videogames, reading, writing, and this blog is the space I reserve for that. But of course we people are a whole so my writing and this blog reflect the things I'm most interested in, that's why it's centered around of heterosexual and bisexual female main characters and their desires and turmoils regarding men, misogyny, masculinity, shame, desire of freedom, etc. In some fics like Better Find Husbandos the mc is deeply traumathized because before arriving in Teyvat, she lived in a misogynystic world like ours, and it's reflected on her thoughts about men and sex. In others like Catboys in the house, the main character lives in a mathriarcal society that doesn't oppress men, somewhat like the Barbie movie, and the conflict is placed in other things while her relationships with men are pure comfort, and this is a way of escapism. Assembled Love is a bit in between, the setting is in a world like ours, but it won't depict explicit forms of abuse like Better Find Husbandos will, the main character will suffer sexism at school but not its extreme and more violent ways.

I'm working a lot on my blog this new year and preparing a special post talking about why I started this blog, which has everything to do with this, with my struggle with sex, with being female in this pathriarcal world that I started suffering from a very young age. Of my journey from the deepest depths of internalized misogyny to the battle I'm fighting against it nowadays.

I was scared to reblog feminist content in this blog at first but I decided to stay true to myself. And what a pleasant surprise when I found other Genshin fans reblogging it as well! It was so worth taking the risk and face my fears. I found that very much the same as it happened to me, when other people read feminist takes well explained they find out they completely agree with them, that it was just that the media was painting feminism as something horrible without even letting them know what it really was about, because they know that when women are allowed to discover what it really is about, we dive right in! 💜 I used to hate feminism as a kid because I was completely misled about what it was about, like the majority of women out there. I found it on accident, and I feel it's so unfair I wasn't exposed to it as a kid before the damage to my mind was done. I feel I found it really late, at like 20, but the worst part is that other women find it even later and some women are completely deprived of it. It only changed my life for the better. It's painful, no doubt, to realize the injustice and abuse I and all women are subjected everywhere, as Andrea Dworkin said:

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

It is as if our oppression were cast in lava eons ago and now it is granite, and each individual woman is buried inside the stone. Women try to survive inside the stone, buried in it. Women say, I like this stone, its weight is not too heavy for me.

Women defend the stone by saying that it protects them from rain and wind and fire. Women say, all I have ever known is this stone, what is there without it?

And it is a brutal agony. But I find it worth it because even if being conscious of it makes me feel powerless and depressed, when I compare my life now to how it was when I had no clue what was going on, I see it's much better. Being unaware of the oppression didn't make it disappear, it made me even more anxious and depressed because I didn't understand what was going on, I thought I was doing something wrong, I thought it was my fault, I hated myself, I hated my body. Nothing changed my life more than one day at like 18 finally realizing that the problem wasn't my body but society, and that was like 2 years before discovering feminism. Like, REAL feminism, as Andrea Dworkin said, "not the fun kind". When I discovered that women before me had the same ideas I had been having centuries ago, that the could articulate them way better than I did, that they wrote lots of books about it, that there was an entire movement that was discretely and deliberatedly HID from me that I only found it on accident by finally daring to talk with other women on tge internet about my traumatizing experiences was MINDBLOWING. Yes, it made me FURIOUS that I had been kept away from thia treasure my whole life. But I also felt relief in the sense that I finally felt that I was not alone. I had never been alone. It is like Simone de Beauvoir expresses in The Second Sex, very academically but overall saying that women are raised to be loyal to men and to hate other women and be wary of them like they are the competence so that we don't recognize ourselves as a social class and we are unable to lead a revolution. We are raised to think that we are alone. Helpless. That the other women are bad, are shallow, are inferior, are competence, thst "the worst enemy of a woman is another woman" instead of the men that oppress us, so that we turn our backs on other women and seek safety and protection from a man because it feels it's inevitable, it's the only way. But it turned out, it was just another lie in the wall. I was not alone. And that, along with discovering that there were words to describe what was being done to me: for example, discovering the term "gaslighting" changed my life because I had a ruthless male bully during hisghschool that made me feel like I was crazy, a bad person, humilliated me in front of everyone, spread rumors about me and made me look like the bad guy, etc, and I could never describe the twisted mind games he played with me, no one believed he bullied me because he never punched me or groped me. If I had known what he was doing I wouldn't have spent my teenage years wondering WHY I felt something was wrong and feeling like I couldn't articulate my feelings and experiences with words.

But I'm not alone, so THANKS A MILLION FOR THIS MESSAGE!

I genuinely love you 💜

#magical asks #magical life #magical women

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pingnova · 8 months

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Thanks for being honest about how hostile most Christians are to even the most basic show of support for queer people. Christians love to claim the Bible is only full of nice things and any of the overwhelming evil that's come out of it over the millennia is just random bad faith outliers who weren't true christians. The reason those folks probably think their religion supports their bigotry is because the official church organizations materially do support their bigotry and have for centuries, even if it's not supported by the words in the book

Christianity is synonymous with colonization, it has been the single largest concentrated force for homophobia cisheteronormativity misogyny forced pregnancy and child abuse for the entire lives of everyone alive today, at the very least. Personally i don't think it's worth trying to reclaim an ideology that's filled with bigots and officially stands for bigotry. I don't think there's anything worthwhile in there that you couldn't find somewhere else where it isn't packaged along with bigotry. If someone publicly affiliates with Christianity, they're broadcasting to strangers there is a high likelihood they don't recognize the personhood of over half of the people on this planet and believe they will be cosmically punished for their divergence. I'm going to assume they're a bigot until they prove they're not, and after that point, I'll wonder why they lend their name to an organization that stands for bigotry if they don't believe in it.

I don't think this is an unfair assumption. I saw how American Christians acted toward queers during AIDS, I'm not just gonna forget. They were very vocal. That's what Christianity means to millions of people around the world

Yes I agree if someone tells me they're Christian I'm instantly on guard for these reasons. I do personally find redeeming value in it but I'm fully aware of the terrible things people have done in its name. Forced conversions, boarding schools, anti-abortion campaigning, advocating for more queers to die during AIDS. Too many to list here. As a queer Christian myself I can't really afford to be romantic about it. I believe Christianity could do so much good, and yet the majority of those who claim it choose not to. So I tend to not talk about my personal conviction IRL too much, and if I do I make it clear as quickly as I can that doesn't eclipse my queerness or progressive convictions, but actually goes along with it.

A lot of unpleasant and conservative brands of Christianity get a pass on account of "religious freedom" and I feel like I'm in a particularly good place to openly criticize them. I also practice this religion and don't feel the need to oppress people over it. In fact we have a lot of the opposite convictions. So I don't think enacting laws to hurt people because you believe something or its "in the bible" is right, because that's not part of MY version of your religion and i didnt see that in MY bible. Sus. I can only do so much tho, being queer I'm marginalized and then being ELCA I'm kind of marginalized in the wider Christian world, like my post outlined. There are Christian bodies out there doing good but sadly they are the minority. They shouldn't be the minority, especially bc none of that conservative crap is "in the bible", but that's the reality. And even those groups likely did terrible things in the past and now have to grapple with how to right that.

To me, bigotry is not a religion. That's my motto. People and groups can practice whatever religion they want, but they should be held accountable for their bigotry no matter what. And I give them an unimpressed stare if they try to tell me it's what their religion says.

#asks #personal #christianity /

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locustheologicus · 2 years

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July 4th Reflection on Religious Liberty

July 4th weekend is here and I for one am very much excited. While we tend to associate this holiday with fireworks, family gathering and barbeques there is one essential element that I often find missing on this occasion, the Declaration of Independence. On the event of July 4th in 1776 not only was this declaration signed by our founders but it was read aloud in Philadelphia thus informing the people of the core principles and values which guided our American ancestors in making the difficult decision and sacrifice that they chose to make with respect to their relationship with Great Britain. For me the fourth of July ought to be a teachable and reflective moment on these values especially in light of our current social reality. This year it feels that such a reflection is that much more valuable considering the recent actions of the Supreme Court and our own Church's celebration of Religious Freedom Week this past week.

With that in mind I would like to offer this reflection on the values of this nation from the consistent values of the Christian/Catholic faith (since my American identity is colored by my own Catholic perspective). This year I would like to reflect on the issue calling to mind a reflection from Pope Benedict XVI's 2011 World Day of Peace message, the belief and support of religious liberty and expression. It is good to consider this particular concern especially during this occasion since it is an expressed value of our nation.

The Declaration of Independence, which was authored by Thomas Jefferson, is very much a theological statement even though its sets the values for a secular society. It is a theological statement in so far as it recognizes its values and inalienable rights as self-evident truths that are “endowed by their Creator”. Furthermore it recognizes a supreme equality that again is derived from the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”. For us who are Catholics this statement is particularly meaningful since it attributes natural law as the force behind these divine principles. From these statements the founders extrapolated the concept of religious liberty and they eventually incorporated it within the legal framework of the U.S. Constitution.

Reflecting on his social concerns for 2011 Pope Benedict XVI raises this issue on a global scale. He shares his concern for the development of religious fundamentalism and secularism. Vatican II set out this defense of religious liberty in the document Dignitatis Humanae and in this recent message Benedict asserted his support for this principle which as you can see follows the language of our own American founders.

The right to religious freedom is rooted in the very dignity of the human person, whose transcendent nature must not be ignored or overlooked. God created man and woman in his own image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:27). For this reason each person is endowed with the sacred right to a full life, also from a spiritual standpoint. … Respect for essential elements of human dignity, such as the right to life and the right to religious freedom, is a condition for the moral legitimacy of every social and legal norm. – Pope Benedict XVI, 2011 World Day of Peace Message

Religious fundamentalism and secularism are two opposing polarities that compromise the principle of religious liberty. Religious fundamentalism occurs when a particular religious view dominates and oppresses the rights of others to freely engage in their own spiritual relationship with God from the rich tradition of their own faiths. It starts by establishing unfair judgment and criticism on a particular religion or religions and then eventually moves to curtail those religious practices. Secularism acts independently of religion and extols a secular ideology that is used to put down the right of communal religious expression. The Constitution gives us the right to practice our religion individually and as a community. We are not allowed to superimpose our faith or secular ideology or to critique and degrade the religious belief and expressions of another. This is not only a legal issue for us but also a moral position that is based on our faith. Even though the Catholic Church defends the faith as revealed by Jesus Christ it still recognizes that the universal Divine truth transcends religious institutions and that all people have access to the Divine truth from their own faith tradition. Pope Benedict supports this belief and defends it by quoting St. Thomas Aquinas who says that “every truth, whoever utters it, comes from the Holy Spirit.”

This being the July 4th weekend let us reflect on the historical episode where our founders wrestled with this very question with great consideration for the purpose of defending religious liberty. The Constitutional debates of 1788 considered this issue but not so much with regards to its protection under the first article of the Bill of Rights. Instead they were concerned with the language of Article VI of the Constitution which stated that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any office of public Trust under the United States”. Two concerns were recorded with regards to this clause: that “Pagans, Deists and Mahometans might obtain offices among us”, and that “the Pope of Rome might be elected President”. These concerns were addressed by a Federalist delegate from North Carolina named James Iredell.

In his response he respects the concerns that have been raised but he believes that the creation of a dominantly pagan society and the threat of Papal rule were both slippery slope fallacies. Instead he argues that the historical reality of religious persecution through the sponsorship of the state to a religious creed is very much a real and valid concern. Delegate Iredell defends the clauses for religious liberty in this way:

But it is objected, that the people of America may perhaps chuse Representatives who have no religion at all, and that Pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices. But how is it possible to exclude any set of men, without taking away that principle of religious freedom which we ourselves so warmely contend for? This is the foundation on which persecution has been raised on every part of the world. The people in power were always in the right, and every body else wrong. If you admit the least difference, the door to persecution is opened.

We must be cautiously reflective on how we protect this cherished freedom. Sometimes religious freedom is raised in defending one religious view over a secular perspective and that is certainly not the case. As we can see from our own history, some of the founders had this biased perspective and were afraid that Catholics and Muslims would ever be able to have political power. Thankfully delegate Iredell was there to recognize that such biased interpretation would violate the very notion of religious liberty. Today we may need to hear Iredell's concern yet again as we reflect on what it truly means to protect religious freedom in the United States.

As we celebrate the birth of our nation let us reflect on the concerns that our founders had in making sure that religious liberty would be the law of the land. Let us also value the universal truth that transcends all religious institutions and allow ourselves to value the truth that we all speak from the goodness of our own religious tradition.

#july 4th #religious liberty

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juniperhillpatient · 2 years

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jet and azula both are manipulators and leaders, one uses fear the other love(?)

jet is all about liberation, azula about control

azula is a colonizer, jet is an anti-colonizer

okay... (for blog organization, in reference to this)

Jet & Azula are both manipulators & leaders. Notice how you used the term 'manipulator' there?

Merriam Webster under 'manipulate' okay - 'to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means, especially to one's own advantage.'

Look, I love Jet because he's a bit of a flawed asshole - most of my faves are. Jet & Azula both 100% included. I often get bored with characters that are too perfect, fiction is about conflict. Jet is a manipulator & can be cold & calculating, just like Azula, but for different reasons.

It's not a condemnation, it's part of his character. Jet uses his charisma & good looks to trick Katara into being part of a plan she would never have agreed to. Sure, when confronted with someone who doesn't like Jet I'll jump on the "Jet's never done anything wrong in his life actually" train because I love him & want to defend him & I DO think his behavior in the context of the war is sympathetic. But also, in terms of honestly analyzing his character, he's morally gray & far from a saint. Jet has a lot of anger & a tendency to try & solve his problems with violence. This is part of what makes him a compelling character, denying it is boring.

While I DO understand your argument about Azula being a colonizer & part of the nation responsible for Jet's trauma, by that logic Zuko, Mai & Ty Lee also should've never become friends with the gaang. Maybe you feel they shouldn't have, I don't know your full opinion, but if that's the case we're losing a common thread of where to connect because Zuko's redemption arc & eventual befriending of the gaang is pretty core to the narrative of the entire show. Not saying it was 100% perfectly written, but it is a core aspect of the story.

Avatar as a story is big on forgiveness & healing & capacity to change. To an extent, I understand why some fans are frustrated by the sympathy given to characters like the fire siblings. I actually strongly agree that Jet should have been portrayed more sympathetically by the narrative & that he deserves healing & forgiveness too. I just think (& this part is almost definitely about to get me cancelled by some people) that sometimes when the Fire Nation characters are so harshly condemned by a portion of the fandom that even the idea of someone traumatized by the war reconciling with any of them is abhorrent, we're losing the thread of the fantasy world & the narrative of the story. Zuko & Aang learning to work together is a huge part of the story & Aang is the last survivor of a genocide committed by the Fire Nation. Zuko rejects Fire Nation ideology & his father's ways (there are no comics in Ba Sing Se ok) & learns to be a kinder person working toward a new age of peace.

Why shouldn't Azula be given that same chance?

Anyway, Azula & Jet's complicated dynamic is, can't emphasize this enough, part of why I love them. You're exactly correct. Azula is a colonizer & imperialist & Jet is an anti colonizer & a rebel fighter. He has a pessimistic view of the war effort overall & a violent hatred for the Fire Nation. Azula has an unfavorable view of people she considers below her & considers the Fire Nation perfect. In canon, could they ever reconcile? Post-war, I think perhaps if Azula learned to change her ways like her brother did. I tend to write alternate universes but these two would still have vastly differing opinions & it would lead to conflict. In every fic with a focus on their dynamic that I've ever written, they have a rather contentious friendship with a lot of arguments. Because that kind of dynamic is interesting & fun to me.

TLDR: Sure, & this would create conflict but also pretending Jet is morally pure isn't true to his character either & also I just think Azula & Jet have a lot of similarities that would make it interesting to see them interact

#jet #azula #jetzula #my atla post #asks #anon #answered #discussion

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klysanderelias · 2 years

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tl;dr dark souls discourse drives me nuts because so many people seem to fundamentally misunderstand what game they're playing: this ain't dragon age or the witcher, this is honestly much closer to like, DDR. And yeah, the game devs keep making games that fail to communicate that, but also, demon souls came out like THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, it's beyond frustrating that the community is full of elitist assholes who can't or won't explain that concept

also, just play bloodborne. Bloodborne is still the single best soulsborne (i haven't played sekiro yet) game out there and does the best at actually teaching the concepts you need to enjoy the game.

I keep thinking about Margit and I went and looked at some of the articles about him and it's so wild the messaging about Elden ring right now. There's an article I think from polygon about how hard margit is, and how people have been struggling to fight him, and some of the responses had me dumbfounded.

Like. A +8 weapon? I'm not trying to shame Jenna stoeber, or ANYONE who's having trouble against him, but there's a difference between 'this is what I as a player did' and 'here's an article on the front page of Google of you search this boss'

I guess the disconnect for me is like... To a certain extent, this is part of the reason why people are afraid of dark souls, because people LOVE the narrative of like, oh my God only 2/3rds of the people who bought the game have beaten the first boss (which is wild because like, one, that's how video game purchases work, there's like 15% of the people who will never load up the game let alone get farther than an hour or two, and two, I'm 13 hours into the game and beaten like six bosses and I haven't beaten him yet, it's an open world game for chrissakes) because it makes the people who DID beat him feel like super special boys

I keep saying that the biggest problem with dark souls is that the community cannot and/or will not explain anything, and the git gud meme is just a shallow vision of the deeper toxicity of a community dedicated to sucking themselves off for getting 'elite gamers' and in order to reinforce that hierarchy you CAN'T help introduce people to your fun game (which is why if you ever bring up 'should dark souls have an easy mode' you're sure to start a huge fight with someone whose identity hinges on that not happening)

But also like, this isn't a game where you should WANT to beat a boss on the first try! That's not what the game is about! Forgive me for crawling up my own ass here for a second, but for me, part of the fun is learning the fight and getting into the flow, to the point that on a couple of these bosses, I've been legit disappointed when I beat them on the first try. Like, it's fun to beat a boss, but I see so many people get frustrated and cheese or bosses or just over level to the point that they can steamroll and I'm just like... Are you actually having fun? Is this enjoyment for you? Or are you just relieved it's over?

And genuinely the more I think about it, the fundamental misunderstanding is that people are approaching it like a traditional RPG experience where you're expected to basically win every fight, it's just a question of how rough it is. And I've seen a lot of stuff for elden ring that continues to run that exact same ideology! They say of COURSE margit is hard! that's because the game is trying to tell you to go somewhere else and level more before coming back and crushing him!

And I just have to shake my goddamn head and wonder what the fuck went wrong.

You don't pick up guitar hero, open up a song, and expect to get every note correct on the first try. You don't start DDR, step on the pad, and decide that clearly the game is too hard when you can't hit all the steps! And it's so frustrating to try and explain this to people like, yeah, I get it, you're dying a lot, and that's upsetting, especially because some of these bosses seem super overpowered or unfair, but I promise you that they're not. What people don't seem to understand (and again, is not ever explained to them) is that the point of dark souls is to fight the bosses. Not to BEAT the bosses, but to fight them. That's why every game ends with starting over. That's why people play them over and over again. Not because the story is so deep, or the choices so meaningful, or anything like that, but for the exact same reason you open up guitar hero once you've played every song.

And part of the reason why this polygon article drives me so nuts is because this is a major gaming website communicating a completely bonkers read of the game to the people trying their first souls game, and probably turning basically all of them off.

And like, I'll be the first to admit that the souls games are deeply flawed, kind of irritating, and have failed to actually improve on their failings despite huge amounts of money and attention, but also, I want people to be able to enjoy them!

And it's a conversation for a different time to talk about how dark souls should have an easy mode, or at least difficulty settings, but that's important too, because there's too many assholes who use these games as a core part of their identity because being 'good at dark souls' is some kind of badge they wear with misguided glee at the cost of ruining so many other people's play experiences.

Anyway not to plug my own shit again but I'm going to put the video of my final run against the Tree Sentinel here again, because I think it's a good way to illustrate what I'm talking about. When I fought this boss, I was at the base level, using the base gear, without using any cheese. It took probably two hours to figure out the flow of that fight. But like, you can see how I've learned the patterns to his attacks, learned the timings to dodge, and I end up getting through the fight without taking a single hit, and I can tell you I had a blast doing it. I could have taken a run or two, decided he was 'impossible at my level', and gone fucking around for a while before coming back and just brute forcing the fight with healing and massively upgraded weapons, and yeah, maybe that's more fun for some people! But I'll tell you, from personal experience, just because you're overleveled and overupgraded don't mean you're gonna win the fight.

https://youtu.be/eDdukfmknHc

I've literally watched a dude do a playthrough of DS1 close to 100 levels over where he should have been by the halfway mark and STILL struggle to beat bosses. The suggested level to beat the end of the game is 80.

Anyway, the point is, I'm just complaining because I have so many goddamn feelings about dark souls as a series, and I'm really enjoying Elden Ring right now but also I'm aware that not only am I the hyperspecific player type it's built for, but also I'm aware that it still dramatically fails most of the people who are going to pick it up over the hype, and that's very disappointing to me because I want to share my love of these games with people who aren't self-righteous pricks.

#dark souls #elden ring #look man I'm not out to assassinate anyone at polygon but I feel like they're doing us a disservice #and I get it! it sucks to lose over and over! but that's why the discourse needs to be about difficulty settings #because otherwise people are just like 'well if you do xyz strategy with these specific weapons #and often they completely misunderstand why they won and are merely setting everyone else up for failure #anyway here's my 3k word dissertation on why I'm the only one who truly understands dark souls

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imagineddworld · 3 years

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Hidden identity

Pairing: Fred Weasley x Slytherin!Reader

Summary: You were walking around with a hidden identity, but one particular moment will reveal all truths. Luckily for you, it ended up being in your favor

Word count: 8,2 k (8240) (sorry)

warning: brief mention of dead grandparents, very short and Umbridge’s detention but no description of blood or pain

Author’s note: A big part of this fic is about the reader. I don’t know if this is interesting to anyone. But there are also parts of their friendship with Draco and eventually fluff with Fred.

Also my apologies for making another very lengthy fic- The longest that i have written ever. I was just bursting with sudden inspiration. Hope you enjoy reading this! x

PS. Also let me know if you prefer longer fics, or if you want me to split these in two/three parts?

Being a Slytherin wasn’t your favorite thing. You hated how quite some fellow Slytherins had tendencies to believe the ideology of blood status. Your parents were absolutely disgusted by that ideology. Even if they are from a high ranking at the Ministry, they were the most open-minded, understanding and loving people you knew. They didn’t thrive for power, only for justice and equality. They didn’t care about others blood status, their wealth or any other materialistic things that didn’t define their worth. They just cared if you were human and if you were treating others well. They even were fond of the Muggle world and their inventions. A passion they shared with Mister Weasley, who they often protected against other members of the Ministry.

As a child you often were found at the Ministry. Your parents took you with them and let you run around the place. You loved hanging around the people working there and asked them questions about their work. But Mister Weasley was your favor person to hang around with. You always darted off to his department to talk about his newest fascinations with the Muggle world. This loving and caring aura radiated of him, filling you with a special warmth. He just had this comforting nature around him.

But being the daughter of well-known and respected people of a high ranking also came with a downside. People would treat you differently. They would expect things from you that weren’t expected from others. They didn’t give you a fair chance at things. Even if people didn’t know you because of seeing you around at the Ministry, they still could recognize you immediately. Your whole family was characterized by a single feature. All your family members had a bright white lock of hair at the front of their heads. To most it wasn’t that special, but it was a clear give-away for your identity. None the less, you were proud to be a part of such an amazing family. But as you were going to start your Hogwarts career, it would only cause unfair situations that either were in your favor or to your disadvantage. So your parents came up with a plan.

You were a Metamorphmagus. You could change your appearance whenever you liked. Sometimes when your emotions got the best of you, they unintentionally changed your hair colour or eye colour. But over the years you had been able to master your abilities. So in order to be given a fair change at Hogwarts, you would change your appearance the slightest bit. Even if you didn’t like to hide your bright white lock of hair, it was the first thing that needed to change. Now you only had a head full of silky (Y/H/C) locks without a bright white one contrasting in the mix. After that, you tweaked some of your facial features - only the lightest bit in order to not cause a total identity crisis. It was just to throw people off. Another thing that was going to change was that you were going to go by your mother’s last name. Her name was also known by the people, but going by your father’s last name would be the biggest give-away. At least now, people would need to take some time to figure out your real identity. Hopefully that would give them enough time to get to know you first, instead of believe their assumptions about your family.

When you first set foot on the platform, you were buzzing on adrenaline and anxiety. Your parents had dropped you off at front gates of the station, in hopes not to ruin their plan. Immediately your eyes had found the bright red-headed family standing there with their beloved children. It was a lovely sight to see. They are wore bright smiles on their faces and hugged each other goodbyes. You were immediately drawn to them. You already had started to grow a certain fondness for the Weasley family. It had started off with Arthur. He was the kindest man you had met. He always spoke in a very loving and caring manner about his wife and his children. They all had the same welcoming and caring energy radiating of them. Even if you had only saw them from a far distance, it was clear as day that they were raised by two of the most loving people and naturally had picked up that characteristic. You knew at that moment that going to Hogwarts with them around was going to be great.

As the years passed on you were delighted with how well everything was going. People took their time to get to know you. Even if they eventually figured out who you were, they mostly kept it to themselves. They had seen how kind you truly were and therefore it didn’t matter who your parents were. But perhaps they kept it to themselves because of how respected your family was. Not that therefore people agreed with their morals and praised them as saints. No, they just had this energy around them. Something that showed you how powerful they were but at the same time showed how open-minded and understanding they were. They were humble and honest. Or perhaps they kept quiet because they knew you weren’t scared to voice your opinion to someone and didn’t hesitate to confront someone about their wrongdoings. You absolutely couldn’t stand it when someone was discriminated because of something foolish as blood status, wealth, their Hogwarts house or anything else that didn’t define someone’s worth. You weren’t loud nor an extroverted person, but you would always stand up for those who were being targeted by the close-minded bullies. It didn’t matter if there was a big crowd or a small one, you were going to give them a piece of your mind. It was something that your parents had taught you, so you would continue to do so.

You also hadn’t failed to notice the bright red-heads. You assumptions about them -when you first saw them at the platform- were right. A loving and caring aura hung to all of them. For some reason they just warmed your heart. But a specific set of twins had caught most of your attention. They were charming guys, always made people laugh and even took care of the younger ones. They also shared the same mischievous twinkle in their eyes whenever they got excited about their pranks or other passions. Besides, they were also extremely attractive, so you couldn’t blame yourself when you started to develop some silly crush on one of them.

It was strange to form a crush on a person who you rarely had talked to. They were in your year, so you had the occasional small talk. You also had told them off a couple of times for pranking some poor student. But besides those moments, you never really had a long interaction with them. And for whatever reason, your crush had started to evolve into feelings. He had found a way to make your heartbeat quicken without actually having to interact with you. He had found a way to captivate your attention.

You had tried to push away your feelings, but they just grew more and more by each passing day. You started to adore his little freckles, started to love how the sun created a honey glow in his eyes whenever it hit the right angle. To be frankly honest, you were smitten for him. But you weren’t going to admit that. Seen their reputation as the most famous pranksters of the school - who had all the girls and boys crushing on them- nothing would ever happen. Besides, they didn’t particularly hate on Slytherins, but they surely didn’t liked them either. They still had their assumptions about them. They probably thought all of you were cold-hearted spoiled children who only cared about blood status and wealth. They perhaps thought that about you. But you weren’t sure. They had seen you defend a lot of people, even if you were not aware of their presence whenever you stood up for someone. You surely weren’t afraid to start a fight, if it was necessary in order to protect and defend someone. That was how you and Draco had became friends. And unknown to you, also the time that you truly had captured Fred’s attention.

Draco’s parents were familiar with yours. You had attended to the same balls, but only acted civil to each other as an act. Your parents saw them as idiotic people who had their heads too far up their arses. While his thought that yours were naive and blood traitors. That they were a shame for the Wizarding World and were abusing their power for the wrong deeds. So when you and Draco attended Hogwarts and ended up in the same house, you hated his absolute guts. With every chance that you got, you were there to tell him off for discriminating and bullying other students until they cried. At first you had tried to keep it respectful, as you parents taught you that vile words weren’t going to bring you anywhere. It would only show a weakness. But after months of constantly telling him off in a respectful manner, you had enough of his behavior. So you started to taunt him as well, let him taste his own poisonous medicine.

But one day, you saw him cornering a poor first year against the wall. He was taunting him with horrible names and threatening him. The poor guy was silently sobbing, cold tears streaming down his cheeks. At that point you were filled with rage and disgust. Steam was probably coming out of your ears. You didn’t care who saw you in that moment. It could have been the whole school or only you, Draco and the poor first year; you felt obligated to jump in. Without any hesitation, you hit Draco square in the face. Your fist had made contact with his nose, that caused it to bleed on his pearly with dress-shirt. He stumbled back a bit, feeling dizzy from the impact of your harsh punch. As he looked up to you, he was met with one of your coldest, most murderess glare. You warned him with a venomous threat and softly pulled the first year to a more quiet place. You sat him down on a bench and took your time to calm him down. It didn’t matter if it took a hour or half a day, you were only going to leave as he had a smile adorning his face.

Ever since that enounter, Draco had found a soft spot for you. You had awakened something in him. Slowly but surly he started to see through his own arrogance. He still believed the blood status ideology that he grew up with, but started to lessen his use of slurs and bully less. He still was a cold-hearted person to others, but you got to see his caring side. You could say that you were a good influence on him. The truth is, Draco doesn’t need someone who agrees with him all the time. He doesn’t want someone to constantly follow him like a dog begging him for attention. He loved when someone dared to talk back, when someone put him in his place. He thrives for that rebellious behavior that he couldn’t out at home. He wanted to be challenged. That’s why he preferred you over any other Slytherin. That’s also why he despises Pansy Parkinson. But of course, she didn’t took that hint.

As your birthday arrived, you became more sad. For most people birthdays were a happy event, but to you it was a reminder of your grandmother passing away. She had died four years ago, just a day before your birthday. Ever since then, your birthday had never been the same. It was weird to celebrate it without her and her freshly baked cookies. She was like a second mother to you. Seen how busy your parents jobs were, you often were at her place. Her death had been heartbreaking to you. But you knew she was in a better place. She has been reunited with her husband who had passed away 5 years before her. That is what gave you some peace with the whole ordeal.

When you left your dorm, dreading the day, you were met by a small box that stood at the bottom of the door. A small card hung from the ribbon, your name neatly written on it. You hesitantly picked up the present, hiding it underneath your bed. You weren’t in the mood to open presents, maybe later on. But for now, you just needed to survive the birthday wishes. You rather just sleep all day so you wouldn’t need to portray a happier version of yourself. A version that people were expecting from you on this so called ‘special day’.

You quickly passed through the Common Room, relieved to only see a small group of students who luckily didn’t bother to congratulate you for your birthday. You smiled sweetly at them, receiving small nods in return. Before you made your way to the Great Hall, you were greeted by Draco with a warm hug. He whispered a soft ‘Happy Birthday’ in your ear so no one would overhear him. He knew how you felt about your birthday. He knew not to pull any unwanted attention on you. You thanked him and continued your way to the breakfast table. You smelled the delicious food, but even that couldn’t make you hungry. You just sat at the silence part of the table, blankly staring in front of yourself. But Draco wouldn’t allow you to go on your day without any food. So he kindly placed an apple and a small piece of toast on your plate. He also filled your cup with a relaxing tea, that would hopefully calm down your emotions. ‘Just try to eat a bit of the toast. You can take the apple for later on the day’, He said in a soft and caring tone, while lightly bumping your shoulder to shake you out of your trance. The smallest bit of a smile curled the corners of your lips. It was endearing to see how caring he could be. Deep down he had a golden heart, he just hid behind his pretentious act as a cold-hearted bully in order to protect his emotions. In some way he hated to be cruel, but he didn’t know how else to behave. He father always taught him to be cold and emotionless in order to be even slightly accepted by him. Draco just wanted acceptance. He just wanted to feel loved. So when he felt the opposite, he created this persona to hide behind.

With difficulty, you finished your piece of toast and cup of tea. You knew you had to eat, but the sadness had put a big lump in your throat that didn’t allow anything to go through - or at least made it way more difficult. You placed the apple in your bag, knowing that hunger would eventually take over. As you stood up, you softly placed a kiss to the top of Draco’s head while you slung one arm around his shoulders. ‘I’m going to head back to my Dorm Room. I don’t feel that great... Thank you’, you said before straightening up completely. He gave you a sympathetic smile.

You just made your way out of the Great Hall, as you heard soft footsteps following you. A larger hand placed itself on your shoulder and the familiar minty sent filled your nose. You turned around with an arched eyebrow, questioning his sudden appearance. ‘I forgot something’, he looked around him. Once he made sure that no one was around, he pulled out a small present form his bag. A lopsided smile covered his face: ‘I know how you feel about your birthday, but I couldn’t resist..’ With your current emotional state, you couldn’t help but feel tears stinging at the rim of your eyes. ‘Your really shouldn’t have done that’, a faint smile took over your exhausted expression. He huffed at your comment as he pushed the present in your hands. ‘Open it before anyone sees it’, he teased light-heartedly. Your curiosity won, eagerly undoing the present of its beautiful green wrapping paper. A small gasp escaped your lips as your eyes widened. In your hands laid the book that you wanted to buy three months ago. You really wanted it. But seen that you had plenty of unread books laying on your nightstand, you made a promise to yourself to first go through the pile of books before you were allowed to buy new ones. But thanks to Draco, you finally had the desired book in your possession. You pulled him in for a long hug. ‘Thank you so much, Draco.’ He wore a proud smile on his face: ‘I remembered how badly you wanted the book, so I thought it would make the perfect gift.’ You nodded happily: ‘Yes. It really is perfect. Thank you so much.’ You gave him a small peck on his cheek, while he kissed your forehead. After that, you both said your goodbyes and went separate ways. Even if this day had become your most hated day, he had found a way to make it less sufferable.

You laid comfortably in bed while reading the first chapter of your new book. You were so excited to finally have it in your possession that you couldn’t resist reading it. You technically hadn’t broke your promise. You didn’t buy this book yourself, it was a gift. So it was just one of the many books that you still had to read. After finishing the first chapter, your eyelids became heavy and they stung lightly. A little nap wouldn’t hurt. So you placed your bookmark between the pages and carefully placed the book on top of the growing pile on your nightstand. You thought you would rest for roughly half an hour, how most of your naps went. But to your surprise, you woke up 4 hours later. You felt less dreadful than when you first had woken up this morning. You sat up in your bed, still feeling the daze of sleep lingering in your eyes and mind. The room was filled with a yellow glow of the warm sun rays peeking through the window. The soft light warmed up your skin, making a content feeling spread all over your body.

As you looked around the room and your eyes landed on the newly gifted book, you were reminded of the mystery present that was currently hiding underneath your bed. Your curiosity already started nipping at you, begging you to open it as soon as possible. So you caved in. You carefully undid the red ribbon and unwrapped the burned orange wrapping paper. Inside the box sat a small notebook with no further indication of an identification on it. But to your surprise the small book was filled with written letters that were directed towards you. With big eyes, you started to read the first note that had been scrabbled on the first page in a neatly written handwriting.

Dear (Y/N)

If you received this present, it means that I finally found the courage to give it to you. It has been sitting in my closet for years now, but back then it was still a work in process. For the last two years it just has been my lack of courage... This may seem like a surprise to you. But imagine how big of a surprise it was for me when I realized I had fallen quite hard for you- a girl that I barely spoken to. If I’m being frankly honest, I’m absolutely smitten for you. But that wasn’t the surprising part. The fact of how long it took me to admit it, was the real surprise. Courage always had been my strong suit, but when you captivated my attention; it all seemed to crumble.

I understand if you want to make fun of me for this, or even want to yell at me. Feel free to do so. The supposedly brave Fred Weasley - great prankster of the school who can’t take anything serious- has taking his feelings a bit too serious. But I felt obligated to let you know how i feel, before we would graduate. What you do with this information and this notebook is up to you.

I hope I at least made a smile appear on your beautiful face.

Sincerely Fred Weasley

You couldn’t believe what you were reading. The overly confident Fred Weasley suddenly showed his vulnerable side to you. Even more so, he trusted you enough to give you the evidence of his vulnerability. He somewhere knew that you wouldn’t use this information to your advantage. Even if he stated you were allowed to do so, he had to know that you weren’t like that. But that made you wonder, how did he know? Was it just a wild guess, or did he actually noticed you?

You mind was filled with questions, blooming curiosity coursing through your veins. This book filled with mysterious messages to you, was way more valuable than any present could be. It held so much meaning. If you were being honest it even made you tear up. You were already in an emotional state, but the negative emotions had vanished. The tears were from pure happiness. All of sudden your emotions had revealed their actual depth.

With teary eyes and quickly beating heart, you continued to read some of the notes that Fred had written. It were little moments where he admired you, where he wrote down his feelings and thoughts. Moments of you in the library and in class where you just did daily tasks. But to your surprise there were also moments of you described where you stood up for others, where you comforted the victims of someone’s bullying. He wrote how fascinated he was by your courage, how beautiful your mindset was and how kind-hearted your soul was. All these notes made you feel extremely loved and appreciated. And the feeling was caused by no other than your own goddamn crush. Someone who you thought would never feel the same way about you. Someone who you thought would never take notice of you. But it turned out, that he was the person who had taken a big interest in you, that you had captured a lot of his attention. He noticed little details about yourself, that even you nor anyone else had seemed to notice - or at least had never mentioned to you. It all seemed so unreal. It seemed like a dream that you never wanted to wake up from. You would take to him later on. You needed confirmation that this was true and not a prank or a dream. You needed to know what he was expecting from this and if he still felt those emotions.

‘Umbridge is looking for you’, Draco’s voice broke through the silence that had filled your room with a comfortable atmosphere. Your head rapidly spun to the source of the shaking voice. You were met with a very concerned looking Draco, who was panting lightly against your closed door. He probably had ran here, in order to warn you in time. ‘Why?’, you asked confused. Before you made your way over to him, you hid the notebook underneath your pillow. ‘You missed all your classes’, he stated matter of factly. ‘So?’, you raised your eyebrow, your confusion only growing. ‘All of Umbridge’s classes’, he corrected himself, now phrasing the sentence in clear words. He was more concerned than you, his breathes becoming shallower by the minute. In a comforting manner, you placed your hands on his shoulders and reminded him to concentrate on his breathing. ‘It’ll be alright. What is she going to do?’, you spoke amused, after you made sure that his breathing returned normal again. ‘Probably going to give me one of her detentions. As if that scares me’, you huffed as you kicked some invisible dirt. That pink toad didn’t intimidate you one bit. You easily could hold power over her, she just didn’t know it yet.

Umbridge detested your parents. She found their morals idiotic and naive. She found them a disgrace to the Wizarding world. She shared the same opinion as the Malfoy family. That they were a bunch of blood traitors that were abusing their power for the wrong deeds. That they were the reason that the Wizarding World was going to end in a huge disaster. Because of her growing hate towards your family, she also detested you. But she couldn’t do anything against you or your family. She would have loved to use you as her little poppet that tests out her vile punishments, but nor you nor your family would let that happen. You were sick of watching her torment the whole school for almost a year. You were thrilled to finally be able to break her bubble and reveal the harsh truth to her. You could easily ruin her whole career, her whole life even.

‘Well, sort of yeah. She has also has gathered a crowd of students, saying that she will set an example for everyone who doesn’t obey her orders.’ Draco held his head low, knowing that he couldn’t do anything to stop this madness from happening. But as he looked back up, he noticed your bright smile and the mischievous twinkles shining in your eyes. He knew what you were up to. ‘You’re going to reveal your true self, aren’t you?’, he asked with a raised eyebrow.

Draco had been one of the first who found out about your true identity. You expected that information to spread like a wild fire. However, it never happened. He seemed to keep your secret to himself. You hadn’t even asked him to do so. Of course, he did use the information against you to taunt you. He thought it was a weakness. That your parents were ashamed of you and therefore made you change your name and appearance. But eventually he started to understand why your family had created this plan. Because of his family name, people assumed all kind of things about him without actually checking their facts. People didn’t want to befriend him or were rude to him, just because of his name. In all honesty, a big part was also because of him being a total arse. Despite your differences he respected your secret, even if he taunted you about it in the past. If he did so, he always had made sure that no one was around to hear him.

‘Yep’, you nodded your head excitedly, ‘She’s in for a big surprise’. As you spoke the last part of your sentence, your eyes shone even brighter from mischief. You couldn’t hide your excitement any longer. You were ready to shock her to her core. She detested your parents, but she was terrified of them. They could ruin a person’s life within seconds, but never abused that power. They didn’t liked to go into extreme matters. They always tried to go for another option first.

You walked out of the Common room with your head held high and a straight back. You were going to end that pink toad. As you turned the corner, you were met with a big crowd of students as Umbridge stood in the middle of them. She stood next to a desk while she held her ‘special’ quill in her hand. Your eyes roamed over the group of people, being met by a set of red-headed twins. They both had concerned expression, but Fred was in a worse state than his brother. You smiled at him, trying to ease his nerves with a small wave. As you were about to mouth ‘it’s alright’, Umbridge disturbed your view. ‘Oh, so the girl finally decided to show her face’, she said with her high-pitched voice that was lingered in fake sweetness. A tone of voice that made you want to rip out your ears. When she stepped closer to you, the clacking of her heels only annoyed your further. As she stood in front of you, she spoke in a harsher tone: ‘Sit down, now!’ She was able to scare some students, but you stayed unimpressed by her little act.

You decided to obey her stupid order, just wanting to get this over with. ‘What stupid line do I need to write for ‘Your highness’, you looked her straight in the eyes as you spoke, rolling them at the end of your sentence. You saw how she balled her fists and clenched her jaw, trying to stop herself from strangling you in the middle of the hallway. You greeted her angered expression with a proud grin. You knew exactly how to get under her skin. ‘I shall not disrespect the rules nor the headmistress’, she said with a forced tone that needed to hide her anger. She had to keep up this pretentious act. She couldn’t cave in because of some foolish student who disobeyed her. You gave her another eyeroll, clearly showing your boredom.

‘You can’t do that’, a familiar male voice spoke up from the crowd. The voice belonged to Fred Weasley. He and his twin were all too familiar with her punishments. He didn’t want you to go through the same pain. A similar pain that many other students had to undergo themselves. But he knew that this punishment was going to hurt way worse. This was supposed to teach everyone a lesson. It was a warning. Luckily for you, gave his little disturbance enough time to mumble a quick spell that would prevent you from scarring or feeling any pain. The wound would show up, but your skin would return to normal in a couple of days. Your parents had taught you plenty of tricks that were similar to this one. They had tried to prepare you for the harsh reality that the Wizarding World could be. They had been tortured in their past. People wanted information from them, seen that they were in a high ranking position. They knew that you possibly could go through the same troubles as them. Therefore they wanted to share their knowledge with you, hoping that you would never need to use it.

‘You don’t tell me what I can’t do or can do, mister Weasley’, her screeching voice filled your ears, making your scrunch up your nose in slight pain. She was offended by his comment. She couldn’t tolerate anyone talking back to her, seen that her ego and pride already were bruised by you. ‘You will be joining her-’, you rudely cut her off with the most monotone voice you had to show her how unimpressed you were. You showed no emotions, only pure boredom. ‘No, he will not.’ You snatched the quill from her hand, twirling it around in a challenging manner. ‘Do I get a parchment? Or do I need to write it on my arm?’ As she turned to face you, a smug grin was plastered on her face. ‘Actually, yes. Write it on your arm, that way it will sink in better’, the last bit was dripping with vileness. Her eyes had darkened form the hatred that had been growing inside of her. ‘Whatever you want, ‘your highness’‘, the call-name was dripping with sarcasm.

You wrote ‘Screw you!-Doleres Umbridge’s doing’ on your arm with an emotionless face. You just knew how furious her expression must be as she couldn’t detect any sign of pain on your face. As you finished your sentence, you slammed the quill down on the desk with such a force that you nearly broke it. You stood up from your seat with abrupt movements, making the chair fall to the ground. You walked to the other side of the desk, resting your wait against it with your lower back. When she got a view of the writing on your arm, her face turned a bright red from the anger that had started to boil furiously. ‘Happy now?’, you asked with a snarl while a fake smile curled your lips for a few seconds before your cold expression returned. She rushed over to you at a rapid speed, but you didn’t flinch. Her face was mere centimeters away from yours. You could smell her flowery perfume and felt her breath fan against your skin. It gave you an unpleasant shiver that you needed to suppress from crawling over your spine. ‘How dare you! You- You -YOU...’ she pointed a daring finger at you, while trying to calm herself down for the umpteenth time in the past 5 minutes. No one had ever disrespected her that much. She could kill you right now. It didn’t matter who saw her, she was beyond furious. ‘You’ll regret this!!’

You couldn’t stop the laughter form leaving your throat, your falter slowly fading. The fun was about to begin. ‘I don’t think I will regret this’, you said amusingly, ‘In contrary, I love every bit of it’ Once again the mischievous sparkle in your eyes shone brighter than ever before. If it were possible steam would be coming out of her ears and nose. She was fuming. ‘Listen up, you snotty brat-’, you interrupted her little speech, already knowing what she would say. ‘What? Are you going to call my parents? Boohoo’, you were mocking her. She was about to explode, but had to done down her voice. ‘Bet your arse I will!! Your life will be over!’ You laughed at her comment. She was digger her own hole deeper and deeper. You just had to give the smallest push and it would be over. ‘Oh yeah? Do It’, you challenged her as you neared her face so your noses were nearly touching. You stood over her just the smallest bit. ‘I dare you’, with that last part said, you leaned back on the desk that stood behind you.

When she opened her mouth to say something back, you allowed yourself to change back to your original appearance. The features that you had missed all these years, were finally taking back their usual place. Your bright (Y/E/C) eyes shone brighter than the full moon on her best display, the mischievous twinkles dancing like little stars. The white lock of hair contrasted nice against your velvety (Y/H/C) locks. Your hair accentuating your facial features and the natural glow of your skin, making you seem all the more powerful. A wicked grin plastered on your lips, curling the corners impossibly high while little crinkles formed at the corners of your eyes.

The stunned expression on her face was worth the while. Some students were shocked as well, but they didn’t matter in this moment. This battle was between you and the pink toad. You almost won. She was already falling in the hole that she dug herself all these months. You just needed to make sure that she was going to hit the bottom. ‘Hello, Dolores. It was about time that we met again’, you grinned, sitting proudly on top of the desk as you nonchalantly swirled the quill between your fingers. A dreadful expression danced on her frozen face, giving the extra boost that you needed. ‘I’m sure the Ministry won’t be pleased to hear what you are doing behind their back. Surely not when I tell them of your usage of the Black quill, which is by the way against the laws. Therefore your punishments are illegal. I’m sure they won’t tolerate such actions.’ The words easily slipped through your lips. You waved the quill in front of her face as an intimidating act that also needed to mock her.

She no longer answered back. Her pride had been buried long ago. Everyone knew that you had won, even the thick-headed toad knew. ‘Choose your next move carefully’, you darkened your eyes to scare her even further, ‘I could also tell the Ministry about the real reason behind your absences of their meetings. If the first part didn’t angered them enough, I’m sure the second part will.’ You paused your speech, analyzing her poster. She still stood in her frozen up position. Her shoulders were sloughing low, her knees were slightly bent and her face clearly showed how petrified she was. You had backed her up into a corner that she couldn’t escape from. She had no other choose but to act dismissive towards you. Even if she hated you terribly, you had a lot of power even if you were only 18 year old.

‘I advice you to go back to your office, change things to how they were before and get the hell out of here... If I play my cards right, I could get you killed. So don’t tempt me’, the grin had vanished from your face. You were staring her down with you coldest expression, showing how serious you were about this. You hated to use your parents name for things like this, but you couldn’t find another way to stop this vile woman from manipulating and torturing students behind the back of the Ministry. This had to be done, even if you hated to use their power to your advantage.

As you had said the last part and Umbridge didn’t show any sign of a possible reply, you pushed your way through the crowd. You hate being put on the spot, even if it was unavoidable. It made you anxious, you just became a master at hiding it. As you left the group, Umbridge seemed to snap out of her frozen state. The shock and fright had turned into pure rage and embarrassment. ‘LEAVE! ALL OF YOU! GET OUT OF MY BLOODY SIGHT!’, you heard her yell behind you. The students burst out into laughter and chatter, each going their own way. Some students who passed by tried to congratulate you on defeating that horrible monster, but you shook them off with a small smile. It wasn’t something you were particularly proud off. Even if it was a deserved punishment for her, you still had used your parents’ position to your advantage.

You needed to calm down. You needed some time to put your thoughts back in place and make peace with what just had happened. Anger still pumped through your veins, as anxiety and guilt started to mix in. You were proud of putting that monster in her place. But you hated how you had used your parents name to do so. With racing thoughts you made your way over to the Black Lake, its calmness alluring you. The sight always made you feel at peace. The sun hit the water perfectly, making it seem like bright little stars were floating on top of it. The warm glow that had fallen onto the Hogwarts grounds, made the grass greener and brighter. You stood against the tree as you inhaled the fresh air, allowing your lungs to fill themselves. You closed your eyes as you put your focus on your other senses. You heard the soft breeze whistling in your ear and picked up the songs that were sang by some far away birds. The cooling spring breeze felt pleasant against your heated skin, as it also softly began to play with your hair. It gave you all different sorts of calmness.

Even with your focus on your surroundings, you had failed to notice that Fred had made his way over to you and currently was standing next to you. His worried eyes examined your body for a sign that said that he shouldn’t interrupt you. But his autopilot took over. A small ‘hey’ left his lips before he could stop it. Hopefully he hadn’t frightened you with the sudden announcement of his presence. Your eyes shot open upon hearing the soft sound while you pushed yourself away from the tree with the foot that was resting against it. ‘Oh, hi’, you breathed out, having difficulty concentrating on properly stating the words due to how distracting and foggy your mind was. ‘Are you alright?’, he asked sincere, worry clearly visible in his eyes. ‘I will be. Don’t worry your pretty head about it’, the words easily rolled off your tongue. If you had paid more attention, you could have seen the light blush painting Fred’s cheeks.

He tried to push away the flustered feeling, knowing that those words probably didn’t meant as much to you as it meant to him. He should be focussing on your wellbeing. ‘Are-are you sure?’, he stammered out, stumbling over his words. You felt his eyes focus on your arm, knowing what he was referring to. ‘Yeah, Don’t worry. Thanks to the spell that my parents taught me, will my arm be back to normal in no time’, you paused for a few second, unsure about your next words. ‘It’s just... I- I am not proud of what I, uhm.. did back, uhm.. there’, you struggled to get the words out as the lump had closed off your throat again. You held your head low as your eyes were concentrating on the ground. They seemingly had found something extremely interesting about the grass. ‘Why not?’, his voice was soft but had a hint of confusion in it, ‘It was bloody brilliant. Someone finally had the guts to put that disgusting pink toad in her place.

You felt his gaze burning holes through your soul, but you still didn’t dare to look at him. ‘I- It’s that, uhm..’, with a sigh you let yourself slide down against the tree. Your hands covered your face, as your knees tugged themselves to your chest. You breathed in a couple of deep breaths. After half a minute, you felt Fred’s hands against your skin. He softly took your hands away from your face and continued to hold them in his. ‘Take your time. I’m not going anywhere, unless you want me to. I’ll wait until you’re ready to tell me what is bothering you.’ Your heart fluttered at his words. He always held on this confident and cocky persona that took everything as a joke. But often his deeply caring character shows through. An inherited characteristic that he shared with his whole family.

‘It’s just... I don’t like using my parents name to make a point. It doesn’t matter whether they are from a high ranking or not. It just feels wrong to use such a materialistic thing in my advantage. It feels like I was abusing their power.. But I- i didn’t know.. what else to do’, you mumbled on, your train of thoughts streaming out in soft, unsure words. Your eyes were trained on your hands as you softly fumbled with his fingers in an attempt to calm down your nerves. Therefore you were unaware of the adoring smile that covered Fred’s face as his eyes took in your soft and innocent features.

You were truly a beautiful person, both on the inside and outside. No one could ignore your beauty. You were breathtakingly gorgeous. Surely now that your true features were revealed. He always had been curious of what you really looked like. It shouldn’t had been a surprise that he knew about your hidden identity. First of all, he wasn’t daft. Second of all, his dad never stopped talking about your family. He had described you in such a way that convinced him that you were an amazing person. Throughout his Hogwarts years, you hadn’t disappointed his expectations. You had overdone them. You were extremely beautiful, even if it was only a vague resemblance of your true self. Now you were even more breathtaking to him. But besides your beauty, you had also a wonderful mindset. He loved how you viewed the world, how you came up for your believes and confronted people about their wrongdoings. He was fascinated by your courageousness. Not many people were prepared to physically fight to get a point across. Most people hid behind pathetic insults and empty threats. He also loved how caring and passionated you were. You always comforted the people who had been victimized by someone’s wrongdoing, not leaving their side until they had a smile on their face. You always tried to help people with their studies and showed nothing more than pure affection to others. To put it shortly: He’s absolutely smitten for you.

‘You have a beautiful mind, darling’, his calming voice filled you with a specific warmth that spread sparkles all over your body. He let go of on of your hand, so he could cup your cheek. He softly caressed the skin with the pad of his thumb as he lightly lifted your head upwards to meet his gaze. ‘You haven’t abused your parents power. Not even close. You did the right thing and I’m sure they’ll be very proud of you.’ A smile curled the corners of your lips upwards. Fred was good with words. He always seemed to know the right words to say. With just couple of words he managed to decrease your worries and guilt. ‘Thank you.’ His eyes were looking at you with total adoration. It made you want to shy away from his intense gaze, but you didn’t. This was everything you wanted, even if it still felt unreal.

‘I just stated the truth, darling’, he spoke in a nonchalant manner. The pet name making your heart flutter even more. After a small pause of silence, he said something that confused you. ‘But I should thank you and your parents too.’ He chuckled lightly as he saw your eyebrows knitted together while you slightly tilted your head to the side. ‘They defended my father plenty of times, and you always kept him company at his work.’ You ducked your head down as you lightly bit your lower lip. To you those actions were a normal thing to do where you didn’t need to think twice about it.

‘He told me a lot about you. He never shuts up about you. In all honesty, I think he loves you more than his own children’, he laughed. His beautiful laughter was so contagious that you couldn’t stop your laughter from bubbling in the air. ‘If it makes you feel any better, he never stopped talking about you guys. He always tells me stories about his family that clearly shows his love and endearment for you.’ Once again his contagious laugh filled your ears as his head tilted back lightly. If his weight wasn’t supported by his hands - that stood beside him- you were sure he would’ve fallen on his back. But it was a beautiful sigh to see. The sun made his hair look even brighter, like an orange fire burning on the top of his head. His freckles were dotted around his nose, as if small specks of brown had escaped his eyes.

You had to admit, you missed his warm touch. But the close proximity made up for it. ‘That’s exactly how he talks about you... I guess he sees you as a part of our family’, he spoke in a joking tone, but his eyes held a certain seriousness to them. Your cheeks painted themselves a bright red, surprising you with how flustered you felt all of sudden. Him implying such a thing made your heart go crazy. With a burst of confidence that came from deep down, you decided to take a leap in the dark. ‘Maybe, I- I could be a part of your family.. in some way’, you suggested, shyly glancing up at him to observe his reaction. Luckily he picked up on where you were going. ‘Maybe you could be yeah’, he smirked a smug smile, ‘If you want to at least.’ You nodded your head shyly as a smile spread itself on your face. He tapped your leg with his foot in a teasing manner: ‘Maybe we could discuss the details this Saterday at Hogsmeade?’ Your blush increased while your smile brightened. ‘Sounds perfect to me. We’ll meet here after class.’ He smiled and held out his hand: ‘It’s a deal.’ You shook hands like you were business people stepping into a partnership.

You expected him to let go of your hand, but instead he pulled you closer to his chest. You laughed as he wrapped his arms around you in a warm embrace, you doing the same to him. His sweet sent infiltrated your nose, calming down your racing heart. He had a special way to make your heart hammer against your chest like a mad man, but at the same time also had a very calming effect on you. The hug was longer than just a friendly manner, but you could say that you were already past that state. As you pulled away, both of you wore idiotically bright smiles on your faces while your reddened cheeks matched his bright hair. ‘I can’t wait’, he said, while helping you up. ‘Me neither’, you blushed as you slammed against his chest again by the strong force he used to pull you up to your feet. You both chuckled. This seemed like a great start to some amazing new beginnings.

#fred weasley #fred weasley imagine #hp fred #fred weasley x reader #fred x reader #weasley twins #fred weasley fic #fred weasley fluff #fred weasley fanfiction #fred fluff #harry potter imagine #hp fanfic

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ramblingguy54 · 3 years

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“Everything’s changed, since you came here...Being around you makes me do stupid things and I wish it didn’t!”

This moment really surprised me in showing not just Amity Blight’s vulnerability, but especially Luz’s emotional sensitivity, too. Amity has a lot on her plate, in terms of baggage, from many regretful acts growing up underneath the abusive environment of her parents. However, that isn’t to say Luz isn’t without any kind of grief either, considering this kid is going through quite a lot currently, as well. Luz isn’t sure when she’ll see her mother again, felt seriously guilty at first about Eda’s curse overtaking her at Season 1′s end, and still doesn’t know how to exactly go about confessing the truth of her real whereabouts, which was the entire conflict of Grom Night’s plot surrounding Luz’s dramatic internal conflict. Luz’s greatest fear was her mother not understanding and being greatly hurt by her lying about summer camp, where she stayed in a more dangerous reality.

What seriously crushed me about this line of dialogue above from Amity is how she wishes Luz didn’t bring out this kind of inspiration to do super impulsive things from herself. This obviously isn’t so much a matter of Amity saying, “I hate you, Luz.”, rather I took it as Amity inflicting loathing sentiment upon her own self esteem. Amity has done a lot of things she’s not proud of whatsoever, which can definitely be seen through her treatment of Willow and how it was ripped to shreds by her parents demands for a great period of time, until Luz came along. Amity isn’t used to feeling so free to have a sense of self, let alone having some definition of happiness. Before Luz appeared, a good chunk of Amity’s life was ruled by manipulative, uncaring, and toxic parenting on how she should live. She was never allowed to have an actual carefree childhood, due to her being born a Blight getting saddled with unfairly high expectations of deemed “perfection”.

Luz is the complete polar opposite of how she has lived in contrast to Amity’s lifestyle. Luz wasn’t expected to become anything spectacular by any means necessary. Granted, her mother was gonna send her away to a summer camp as an attempt to try getting Luz’s more wackier nature under control, but to be fair it was also another way for her to try getting the kid to make actual friends. Regardless, my point is, Luz was able to live an all around normal life, whereas Amity had to immediately follow shallow standards set from the get go in a society full of unfair ideologies surrounding magical abilities. Amity meeting Luz, this kid who was so optimistic, endearing, and Hell bent on becoming a Witch, was such an alien concept to her, overall. Amity has been so used to living a life of obedience where, like her parents constantly beat into her mind, that a Blight must never show weakness to anyone on the Boiling Isles, so for awhile this was the mantra this kid followed at the expense of having genuine friends.

Every time Amity saw Luz in public it reminded her of the person she truly is buried underneath all the bullshit her parents threw onto her. A kid who simply wanted to become a Witch through hard work, determination, and have loving companionship, too. It’s why Amity was so terrified of Luz rejecting her in Grom Night because after everything that has happened she feels, “Do I deserve to be happy or loved? I’ve hurt people in the past and brutally cut off my best friend, Willow. Who would ever want to be with a person like me?”, which was plaguing her thinking throughout that entire day, until Luz helped pick her back up to take on the dark shape shifting blob of nightmares turned real.

“It’s okay I-I-I do stupid things around you too, Amity...”

There’s a lot of poetic truth to Luz’s statement here on her connection to Amity. After all, in Grom Night she willingly took on the ceremony upon herself in Amity’s place because she wanted to help her out that badly, despite having next to zero knowledge about how dangerous this tradition actually is in their world. Even after being filled in on the deadly details of how important it is to defeat the creature, Luz still didn’t waver in her determination to combat the nasty creature. Luz has unintentionally caused Amity so much trouble in the past, where she wanted to help with something very serious for a change because she knows there’s real compassionate kindness inside of her. Luz may have started to run away when her worst fears became manifested from the creature about her mother, but Amity rushing to help her out made them both inspired to defeat it together. It was the best way to explore their blossoming respect and love.

Luz did all that for Amity because she wanted to and not outta some obligation from an unfair code of Blight honor. Amity isn’t used to seeing someone go this far out of their way to help her this passionately, given she’s most likely accustomed to other peers at Hexside either fearing her, or outright being bitter about that ranking as a top student. Amity didn’t know what to make of Luz’s intentions for awhile in Season 1, due to this super self conscious behavior of conflicted inadequacy. She had a set path on her way to becoming a Witch suddenly interrupted by someone who reminded her of something Amity thought was out of reach, her happiness. While Amity felt so oddly happy about someone wanting to be there for her, it also tore the kid up inside emotionally because those regrets gnawed away at her. One could say Amity was “content” in living life of solitude away from those, like Willow, who actually care for her well being.

Luz, however, completely threw a wrench into those plans for Amity breaking her free of the mental shackles set by undermining parents. It drove Amity up a wall in the best and worst ways. On one hand, she’s deeply thankful for what Luz has helped her through in confronting bigger emotional issues, yet is still greatly confused on what it all means in the long run. Does she get a second shot at having real friends through her own decisions? Is she worthy of being loved? Is it not too late to change for the better at last? Can Amity live a life that isn’t ruled by her parents? Yes, of course she can. It just boggles Amity’s mind still that there’s someone who’s willing to go so far for her happiness this drudges up insecurities of guilt for past mistakes. Some part of Amity still thinks those moments define her, so to see Luz try to apologize wanting to make amends for the library incident in this episode’s story makes her feel, “Why are you apologizing to me? I’m not worth giving the time of day to, Luz.”. All of that gets undermined with an act of love by Luz to help get Amity her job back, by taking on deadly trials to accomplish this goal.

This moment between them carries so much layered weight.

#toh season 2 spoilers #toh spoilers #toh season 2 #through the looking glass ruins #the owl house #amity blight #luz noceda

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bloodbenderz · 4 years

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humaniterations (dot) net/2014/10/13/an-anarchist-perspective-on-the-red-lotus/ this article from oct 2014 is very dense — truly, a lot to unpack here, but I feel like you would find this piece interesting. I would love it if you shared your thoughts on the points that stood out to you, whether you agree or disagree. you obv don’t have to respond to it tho, but I’m sending it as an ask jic you feel like penning (and sharing) a magnificent essay, as is your wont 💕

article

i know this took me forever 2 answer SORRY but i just checked off all the things on my to do list for the first time in days today so. Essay incoming ladies!

ok im SO glad u sent me this bc it’s so so good. it’s a genuinely thoughtful criticism of the politics in legend of korra (altho i think its sometimes a little mean to korra unnecessarily like there’s no reason to call her a “petulant brat” or say that she throws tantrums but i do understand their point about her being an immature and reactionary hero, which i’ll get back to) and i think the author has a good balance between acknowledging like Yeah the lok writers were american liberals and wrote their show accordingly and Also writing a thorough analysis of lok’s politics that felt relevant and interesting without throwing their hands up and saying this is all useless liberal bullshit (which i will admit that i tend to do).

this article essentially argues that the red lotus antagonists of s3 were right. And that’s not an uncommon opinion i think but this gives it serious weight. Like, everything that zaheer’s gang did was, in context, fully understandable. of course the red lotus would be invested in making sure that the physically and spiritually and politically most powerful person in the world ISNT raised by world leaders and a secret society of elites that’s completely unaccountable to the people! of course the red lotus wants to bring down tyrannical governments and allow communities to form and self govern organically! and the writers dismiss all of that out of hand by 1. consistently framing the red lotus as insane and murderous (korra never actually gives zaheer’s ideas a chance or truly considers integrating them into her own approach) 2. representing the death of the earth queen as not just something that’s not necessarily popular (what was with mako’s bootlicker grandma, i’d love to know) but as something that causes unbelievable violence and chaos in ba sing se (which, like, a lot of history and research will tell you that people in disasters tend towards prosocial behaviors). so the way the story frames each of these characters and ideologies is fascinating because like. if you wanted to write season 3 of legend of korra with zaheer as the protagonist and korra as the antagonist, you wouldn’t actually have to change the sequence of events at all, really. these writers in particular and liberal writers in general LOVE writing morally-gray-but-ultimately-sympathetic characters (like, almost EVERY SINGLE fire nation character in the first series, who were full on violent colonizers but all to a degree were rehabilitated in the eyes of the viewer) but instead of framing the red lotus as good people who are devoted to justice and freedom and sometimes behave cruelly to get where theyre trying to go, they frame them as psychopaths and murderers who have good intentions don’t really understand how to make the world a better place.

and the interesting thing about all this, about the fact that the red lotus acted in most cases exactly as it should have in context and the only reason its relegated to villain status is bc the show is written by liberals, is that the red lotus actually points out really glaring sociopolitical issues in universe! like, watching the show, u think well why the fuck HASN’T korra done anything about the earth queen oppressing her subjects? why DOESN’T korra do anything about the worse than useless republic president? why the hell are so many people living in poverty while our mains live cushy well fed lives? how come earth kingdom land only seems to belong to various monarchs and settler colonists, instead of the people who are actually indigenous to it? the show does not want to answer these questions, because american liberal capitalism literally survives on the reality of oppressive governments and worse than useless presidents and people living in poverty while the middle/upper class eats and indigenous land being stolen. if the show were to answer these questions honestly, the answer would be that the status quo in real life (and the one on the show that mirrors real life) Has To Change.

So they avoid answering these questions honestly in order for the thesis statement to be that the status quo is good. and the only way for the show to escape answering these questions is for them to individualize all these broad social problems down into Good people and Bad people. so while we have obvious bad ones like the earth queen we also have all these capitalists and monarchs and politicians who are actually very nice and lovely people who would never hurt anyone! which is just such an absurd take and it’s liberal propaganda at its best. holding a position of incredible political/economic power in an unjust society is inherently unethical and maintaining that position of power requires violence against the people you have power over. which is literally social justice 101. but there’s literally no normal, average, not-politically-powerful person on the show. so when leftist anarchism is presented and says that destroying systems that enforce extreme power differentials is the only way to bring peace and freedom to all, the show has already set us up to think, hey, fuck you, top cop lin beifong and ford motor ceo asami sato are good people and good people like them exist! and all we have to do to move forward and progress as a society is to make sure we have enough good individuals in enough powerful positions (like zuko as the fire lord ending the war, or wu as the earth king ending the monarchy)! which is of course complete fiction. liberal reform doesn’t work. but by pretending that it could work by saying that the SYSTEM isnt rotten it’s just that the people running it suck and we just need to replace those people, it automatically delegitimizes any radical movements that actually seek to change things.

and that’s the most interesting thing about this article to me is that it posits that the avatar...might actually be a negative presence in the world. the avatar is the exact same thing: it’s a position of immense political and physical power bestowed completely randomly, and depending on the moral character and various actions of who fills that position at any given time, millions of people will or won’t suffer. like kyoshi, who created the fascist dai li, like roku, who refused to remove a genocidal dictator from power, like aang, who facilitated the establishment of a settler colonial state on earth kingdom land. like korra! she’s an incredibly immature avatar and a generally reactionary lead. i’ve talked about this at length before but she never actually gets in touch with the needs of the people. she’s constantly running in elite circles, exposed only to the needs and squabbles of the upper class! how the hell is she supposed to understand the complexities of oppression and privilege when she was raised by a chess club with inordinate amounts of power and associates almost exclusively with politicians and billionaires?? from day 1 we see that she tends to see things in very black and white ways which is FINE if you’re a privileged 17 yr old girl seeing the world for the first time but NOT FINE if you’re the single most powerful person in the world! Yeah, korra thinks the world is probably mostly fine and just needs a little whipping into shape every couple years, because all she has ever known is a mostly fine world! in s1 when mako mentions that he as a homeless impoverished teenager worked for a gang (which is. Not weird. Impoverished people of every background are ALWAYS more likely to resort to socially unacceptable ways of making money) korra is like “you guys are criminals?????!!!!!” she was raised in perfect luxury by a conservative institution and just never developed beyond that. So sure, if the red lotus raised her anarchist, probably a lot would’ve been different/better, but....they didn’t. and korra ended up being a reactionary and conservative avatar who protected monarchs and colonialist politicians. The avatar as a position is completely subject to the whims of whoever is currently the avatar. and not only does that suck for everyone who is not the avatar, not only is it totally unfair to whatever kid who grows up knowing the fate of the world is squarely on their shoulders, but it as a concept is a highly individualist product of the authors’ own western liberal ideas of progress! the idea that one good leader can fix the world (or should even try) based on their own inherent superiority to everyone else is unbelievably flawed and ignores the fact that all real progress is brought about as a result of COMMUNITY work, as a result of normal people working for themselves and their neighbors!

the broader analysis of bending was really interesting to me too, but im honestly not sure i Totally agree with it. the article pretty much accepts the show’s assertion that bending is a privilege (and frankly backs it up much better than the original show did, but whatever), and i don’t think that’s NECESSARILY untrue since it is, like, a physical advantage (the author compares it to, for example, the fact that some people are born athletically gifted and others are born with extreme physical limitations), but i DO think that it discounts the in universe racialization of bending. in any sequel to atla that made sense, bending as a race making fact would have been explored ALONGSIDE the physical advantages it bestows on people. colonialism and its aftermath is generally ignored in this article which is its major weakness i think, especially in conjunction with bending. you can bring up the ideas the author did about individual vs community oriented progress in the avatar universe while safely ignoring the colonialism, but you can’t not bring up race and colonialism when you discuss bending. especially once you get to thinking about how water/earth/airbenders were imprisoned and killed specifically because bending was a physical advantage, and that physical advantage was something that would have given colonized populations a means of resistance and that the fire nation wanted to keep to itself.

i think that’s the best lens thru which to analyze bending tbh! like in the avatar universe bending is a tool that different ethnic groups tend to use in different ways. at its best, bending actually doesn’t represent social power differences (despite representing a physical power difference) because it’s used to represent/maintain community solidarity. like, take the water tribe. katara being the last waterbender, in some way, makes her the last of a part of swt CULTURE. the implication is that when there were a lot of waterbenders in the south, they dedicated their talents to building community and helping their neighbors, because this was something incredibly culturally important and important to the water tribe as a community. the swt as a COLLECTIVE values bending for what it can do for the entire tribe, which counts for basically every other talent a person can have (strength, creativity, etc). the fire nation, by contrast, distorts the community value of bending by racializing it: anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is inherently NOT fire nation (and therefore inherently inferior) and, because of the physical power that bending confers, anyone who bends an element that isn’t fire is a threat to fire nation hegemony. and in THAT framework of bending, it’s something that intrinsically assigns worth and reifies race in a way that’s conveniently beneficial to the oppressor.

it IS worth talking about how using Element as a way to categorize people reifies nations, borders, and race in a way that is VERY characteristic of white american liberals. i tried to be conscious of that (and the way that elements/bending can act in DIFFERENT ways, depending on cultural context) but i think it’s pretty clear that the writers did intend for element to unequivocally signify nation (and, by extension, race), which is part of why they screwed up mixed families so bad in lok. when they’ve locked themselves into this idea that element=nation=race, they end up with sets of siblings like mako and bolin or kya tenzin and bumi, who all “take” after only one parent based on the element that they bend. which is just completely stupid but very indicative of how the writers actually INTENDED element/bending to be a race making process. and its both fucked up and interesting that the writers display the same framework of race analysis that the canonical antagonists of atla do.

anyway that’s a few thoughts! thank u again for sending the article i really loved it and i had a lot of fun writing this <3

#this is 2.1k words LMFAOO #asks #analysis #do i have an analysis tag?#crit #lok crit

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fantasyinvader · 3 years

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Beat Binding Blade tonight

So, right off the bat I'm going to admit. I abused the arena and save states. This is a really, really hard game. And while I enjoyed it, I'm going to give three things I didn't like about it.

1)Enemy reinforcements arrive at the end of the player phase, and can attack during the enemy phase. That is unfair, especially when I assume that parking a unit on the spawn point will prevent them (It doesn't) or my healer just happens to be in the area. I like difficult games, but when I fail at something in those I want to feel like it's my fault for doing so. When I die in Bloodborne or lose a unit in Fates Conquest, I'm willing to accept it because I felt it was fair (plus I'll just restart the chapter in Conquest anyway). I could have not died if I had played a little better. This game was not fair when it did that.

2)The supports. A lot of the stuff about the characters is locked away in their supports, since this is one of the old Fire Emblems where it throws units your way because it's assuming you didn't reset the game when one died. They don't get cutscenes to be important, and with only five supports per character (barring if one dies, then any unit that had supports with gets those supports back). And even then, getting an A rank doesn't pair up any units except for Roy. So you don't get to play love doctor here, it's only really there for the stat boosts. But in the case of my boy, he needs those supports in order for his character to fully come through.

3)I can take 8 units into the final battle, and they're the only ones who get full ending cards. Everyone else just gets a single line. Kinda weak if I use someone like Fir for most of the game, but bench her at the end to give Rutget Durandal.

Even with my cheating, I still enjoyed this game. Mostly for the story. When Fire Emblem first appeared in Smash Brothers Melee, as a kid it instantly caught my attention. Roy and Marth just looked so cool with their swords and armor (true fact: My favorite design for Link is the Skyward Sword design, simply because it has chainmail under the tunic. I get it, the tunic is iconic but SS's Link just looks practical), and I preferred Roy because I though his fully-charged shield breaker hurting him was cool. I even keep a Cipher card of his in my wallet for good luck. I wanted to know what Fire Emblem was, what kind of game it was. My friend showed me a screenshot of the upcoming GBA game in Nintendo power, which I got for the following Christmas (sadly, I didn't get Sacred Stones as I got a PS2 the following year). I loved that game, but the idea that I was playing as Roy's father always was a bit of a sour point for me. It's because of that game when I got a 2DS a decade later, because I wanted to game but kept getting pulled away from my console, I eventually went back to Fire Emblem.

And, I'm going to admit, Binding Blade hurt me because I played Blazing Blade first. It really did. I mean, Hector dies early on, Lyn is presumably dead hell a lot of my old comrades probably died in this war, Eliwood's wife dies shortly after they are married while Eliwood is more useless than ever, the kid I saved in Bern becomes a genocidal maniac, and the fact that the characters of Blazing Blade kinda caused this to happen by releasing the seals on the Legendary Weapons in their own quest... It kinda bugs me that the Legendary Weapons I used in Blazing Blade are in their trap filled storage places. Like, who returned them there? And if I have characters from that game returning in Binding, I find it strange they don't comment on needing them again. But this is a case of the game trying to be a prequel to a story that wasn't written with it in mind.

But at the end of the day, one thing just kept popping up in my mind. Binding Blade is the antithesis of the Crimson Flower route from Three Houses. I know they said Genealogy of the Holy War was an inspiration, but I can't help it. I've seen so many people try to praise that said route as some sort of denouncement of the rest of the franchise. That it's about putting power in the hands of the people (it's not) instead of having some Lord be the good king. Granted, the Mandate of Heaven seems like it's a running theme of the series, so without understanding what that is I can understand why people don't grasp what that part of the message. But Binding Blade, it just hit so many things on the nose that I needed to say something.

So without further adieu, I'm just going to bring up a few points.

With Regards to Humanity

It's interesting how both Zephiel and Edelgard come at this from different angles. Sure, they both lead wars of conquest across the entire continent, and I'm guessing Zeph didn't tell his troops what he was planning on doing once he won so there's likely a level of deception going on there as well. He really doesn't care for his fellow man, and the game goes out of it's way to show us why. Hatred, greed, or even selling out your people in the name of self-preservation. The game doesn't shy away from showing us any of this, saying that it's wrong and thus why Roy has to kick some guy's arse. Zephiel knows this, but in Edelgard's case? She's out there fighting for absolute power, destroying anyone who won't bend the knee to her while those who do out of self-preservation like House Gloucester are rewarded for it.

In essence, Edelgard is everything Zephiel saw wrong with the human race, she is why he felt we needed to go extinct. The very things he condemns humanity for are the things she reward. Zephiel would have actually handed over power to those he felt deserved it if he had won, whereas Edelgard is demonstrably shown to hold onto power until near the end of her life. One wants humanity dead, the other wants all the dragons. They even oppose each other in their classes. Edelgard is based on the red emperor archetype, she wears red, her class is the heavily-armored Emperor and her weapon of choice is an axe. Zephiel is a king, armoed but wearing purple and he uses a sword in battle.

Even if they both have screwed up history with their family's due to their father's inability to keep it in his pants, they're both presented as villains despite being ideologically opposed which goes to show with Fire Emblem the method IS the message.

Ancient Wars, Super Powered Weapons and Lies.

War of Heroes vs. The Scouring. The former is an event where the full details are shrouded in mystery, up to the player to piece together the clues and figure out the truth for themselves...or in Crimson Flower's case, ignore the truth and act out in your ignorance.With Binding Blade though, when the truth starts coming out, it hits hard. I mean, right from the beginning of the game we're told man was the one who broke the peace by attacking the dragons, but then we learn that those legendary weapons messed up the environment, resulting in dragons needing to use human forms only to be slaughtered by man. Dragons were blamed for the environment, the people who used those weapons were revered as heroes. We don't know why mankind launched their attack, but we do know that they weren't able to slay the Demon Dragon, one who had her soul destroyed in order to control her, because the Heroes felt sorry for her. It's making dragons out to be the victims here, much like the dragons in Three Houses. But Crimson Flower only serves to demonize them, acting like they can't understand humanity when the dragons in that game are a lot closer to humans emotionally than the ancient dragons in Elibe.

The Elites in comparison weren't heroes, and that lie has been confirmed as Rhea trying to make peace.

The good ending for Binding Blade is being able to save the dragon whose soul was destroyed, whereas Crimson Flower ends with slaying a dragon after you've spent the entire game triggering her (and is the ending that leads to oppressive rule under Edelgard, in addition to the only ending without sunlight. What? You thought you'd get the good ending when her final boss theme was playing on the last stage?). Also, you need all the Legendary weapons in order to unlock the final stages, which all play into the big mystery. Crimson Flower requires the player to not understand that the world-building was done to support fighting against Edelgard instead.

Merits of a leader

Let's not beat around the bush here, Roy will not carry you through Binding Blade. His bases are low, and while he has good growths he is unable to promote until the very end of the game. Even then, you need to save the Binding Blade's usage to ensure you get the good ending. Roy is also very unsure of himself, thrust into a position of leadership despite his young age. But look at what happens when he succeeds, he manages to overcome the odds and take down the mightiest army on the continent. At the end of the game, he's shown himself as more than capable of leading. Not to mention, he also believes that humans and dragons can live together, even seeing this in Acadia (and if Ninian was his mother, he's unknowingly proof of this as he is 1/4 dragon himself. May explain his poor bases). If he marries Liliana, he even becomes a King for likely much of the same reason Byleth does in SS/VW (most leaders are dead following the war, plus combining his territory with Ostia which had already taken over Lyn's land after she abdicated/married Hector). Roy learns the truth as already established.

Compare this to Crimson Flower Byleth. Byleth leads the Black Eagle Strike Force, but credit for it goes to Edelgard. Byleth never gets any recognition for this, no position of authority despite proving themselves, instead that goes to Caspar Jenkins of all people, and ends the war continuing to fight TWSITD from the shadows to support Edelgard's regime. And if you read between the lines, Edelgard is NOT a good leader, resorting to bribes, threats, cronyism, secret police, propaganda, and even TWSITD's support and later stolen tech in order to maintain her rule. Byleth lost whatever emotional development they got from White Clouds during this route, once again becoming the Ashen Demon, and is even willing to let themselves die if they can't keep their “humanity” in check showing a distaste for their own draconic heritage (showing humans and dragons can't live together in this timeline). They didn't grow into being a leader, they devolved into being Edelgard's unthinking muscle. Byleth never learns the truth in this route, falling for Edelgard's manipulations resulting in them losing Enlightened One/Nirvana status.

Not to mention, Heroes Relics have really low weapon levels. In theory, they can be used by anyone but only safely by those with Crests and most fully with a matching Crest. Legendary Weapons, on the other hand, can be used by anyone with an S rank in their type. Your characters have to EARN the right to use those things and you'll need them to deal with all the Manaketes during the final level, whereas Relics aren't exactly that level of broken.

Honestly, seeing the ending of Binding Blade and Idunn recovering put at least one tear in my eye. Crimson Flower's just made me feel like the game was calling me an idiot (which considering the Nirvana/Enlightenment thing, it kinda was). I would love if Binding Blade got the Echoes treatment, or even if they just did a GBA collection for the Switch. But after all these years, one thing is as certain now as it was when I was a kid.

In this house, ROY'S OUR BOY!

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