#listen i don't care about bad stories

[blazestarre]

I finished Scarlet Blaze last week and currently on Ch 11 of Azure Gleam. Keeping with the theme of my other 3Hopes post, I’m once again focusing on Claude and his...interesting depiction, this time on SB.

Why did I mention where I am in AG? Because the route made me realize something: GW is just a copy-paste of SB’s story. I thought the routes would all be similar stories, just with slight variations based on which route you choose. Nope! The events on AG, while they start the same as SB and GW, takes a huge swerve at the end of part 1, completely changing the story. AG is unique, SB is unique, GW is not. Once again, Claude doesn’t get his own unique route and has to settle with Black Eagles leftovers. I don’t think VW suffers all too much from it, because the story still works - Claude just doesn’t get as much of a spotlight as Edelgard and Dimitri do in their routes and has to share the lead with Byleth. Since Byleth’s presentation is lackluster (I love Byleth, but the devs really did not balance their role as avatar AND main character very well), SS suffers from the lack of a strong lead. VW just takes SS and gives it that strong lead in Claude. So it works.

GW, on the other hand...oh boy. The biggest weakness of GW is that the story does not support Claude’s actions and so they had to have Claude use troll-logic to make any sense of it. I’ve mentioned before that I think I know what direction they were trying to take Claude - desperate and stressed enough to take actions that he normally wouldn’t consider. He lacks the character development he had in WC, never got to know Edelgard and Dimitri, never realizes there’s something more going on with the Church. I get all that and I actually think GW has some really interesting ideas for how Claude could negatively develop as a character. The bits that are good are really good. Everything up to Ch 8 is excellent and there are even pieces of Ch 9 and 10 that work, too (mainly the GD calling out Claude).

Here’s the problem: GW Part 1 has the Alliance winning. They drive out the Empire, stay united, and even beat Count Bergliez. Then there’s the Almyra invasion, which was also excellent. Claude’s moment at the end of the chapter, refusing to participate in a post-battle feast because he just killed his brother? Beautiful. But none of this sets up Claude teaming up with Edelgard. He’s not in a situation to be desperate. The Alliance is united AND they have the support of Nader and Almyra. There’s no reason they can’t ally with the Kingdom like they do on AG.

But SB? Claude’s decision to ally with the Empire makes sense. Here, Claude IS desperate, and in the cutscenes where he appears, they make that very clear. Shahid doesn’t attack on SB (for some reason), so Holst and his troops have to remain at the Locket in case he does attack. Meaning Almyra is a very real threat to the Alliance’s eastern border. Count Gloucester and Count Ordelia both defect to the Empire, along with Margrave Edmund (or he at least shows his support, but he doesn’t have all that many troops anyway). This leaves Riegan and Goneril troops, and the latter are defending the Locket. So really, Claude’s the only Great Lord who can do anything against the Empire. And considering when all 5 Great Lords combined have the smallest army in Fodlan, Claude’s not in a good position.

The Kingdom and Church are not in a strong position, either. They fail to take back Arianrhod and still have to deal with their own civil war. At this point, without WC to learn more about the other leaders in Fodlan, Claude has to take choose which side to take based on what will give the Alliance the best chance possible (he also never forms the Federation here). From his position, joining the Empire is the logical choice, but not one that he’s happy about.

Claude’s rhetoric about the Kingdom and Church are absent in SB. When talking with his allies, he makes it clear that the only reason they are attacking the Kingdom is because the Empire is requiring them to based on the pact. No insane troll-logic about taking down Rhea so Edelgard loses her justification for war. Instead, it’s clear he’s backed into a corner and does what he can to help Leicester survive the war. Hell, he might even be thinking along the same lines as CF!Claude - try to keep the Alliance around, but if that’s impossible, make the transition to the Empire as peaceful as possible.

What makes it clear to me that Claude allied with the Empire because he felt he had no choice is how easy it is for him to be convinced to betray Edelgard. Now, I recruited Byleth so I didn’t get this scene, but I have watched it online. Byleth seems to give him another option, one he didn’t consider before, and that convinces him to turn against the Empire. His speech to the Alliance army is much more in character than his various excuses in GW. Yes, he also declares war on the Kingdom and Church, but I don’t really blame him here. He’s been the aggressor against them already, and again, he doesn’t know Dimitri here. It might just be Claude trying to show that the Alliance is tired of being the third-wheel in Fodlan. Again, he’s been through a lot in SB, losing most of his battles with the Empire and then having them walk all over the Alliance. To me, this is a glimpse of what a negative character arc for Claude could have looked like. 

Now, Claude still isn’t portrayed as an upstanding person here, but I can give that a pass since you’re playing from the Empire’s POV and Edelgard has never had a high opinion of Claude. But despite that, the story still gives solid logic to his choices. This truly is a Claude who is desperate and stressed enough to take actions that he normally wouldn’t consider.

It’s like the developers wrote AG and SB, but when they got to GW, the were just like, ‘Ah fuck, another one? Let’s just slap together something from the other stories. Claude sided with Dimitri and the Church in 3H? Well, have him team up with Edelgard this time for something different.’ Then they did, added some Almyra and gave Claude some lines to justify things without actually rewriting the story, and BAM! GW! 

GW could have been a great Claude story, but instead they plucked Claude from Edelgard’s route and tried to shove him in a route where he’s winning. Now he doesn’t know what to do with himself and the other characters don’t understand what’s going on either.

[thelioncourts]

it's getting more and more difficult to engage in fandom as a large-scope community because the only thing that actually gains any kind of popularity is meme content created by people who 1) don't want to interact with the story as it's being presented 2) want to engage with dark content only when it fits the narrative they wish the entire story to have 3) truly have such a high level of media illiteracy that they view everything as a full-blown attack versus education/discussion. and it's frustrating because you'll see the most insanely inaccurate takes get regurgitated by the same 25 loud people who, in turn, influence the meme content that gets created (or the meme content is just being created by those same 25 loud people) and so the meme content is a direct reflection of the level of thought/analysis being put into said fandom and it makes the memes not even funny, just caricatures of what they could be. and everyone is so bent out of shape at the thought of being told they're incorrect, that they're wrong, that conversation is impossible because they're so determined to do anything to showcase their assumed superiority as opposed to learning and listening in any kind of capacity.

I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said by people much more eloquent than me, but it sucks so much watching stories that are truly complex and that have so much work put into them be reduced to twitter popularity controlled by people who don't know what they're talking about.

[six-of-cringe]

never thought i'd say it. not happy about gay sex

[morningstargirl666]

Me, seeing that one comment on my fic months ago saying how Klaus is pathetic in TBBW because he's always fawning over Caroline, (among other reasons), fully knowing what I just wrote for chapter 33 and 34 was going to happen:

[littlestsnicket]

time of contempt!yenralt is geralt not trusting yennefer and being too scared of upsetting her to say it and sleeping with her anyway and the way netflix!geralt is different, that would never work.

i don't think the writers aren't fighting yennefer's arc in season 2 nearly as much as they are fighting this other version of geralt. and well... i wish some nuances of character interaction had gone a bit differently in season 2, but the thing that irritates me more than anything else in adaptations is when changes are made and the production backs off on them rather than following through. so whatever. i'm more interested to see what they do than anything else.

[torchickentacos]

So. I had been listening to a song and thought, 'Huh. This is going on for a while, isn't it?" So I checked, and.... hm.

[redeyye]

im pretty excited for the new crop of musicals on broadway rn, since 2018 or so ive been worried about musicals going the same way as other media & just running out of new ideas. but there's some bangers out there rn i think there is hope yet

[trans-li-ling]

I think we should give Zora a gun and whatever happens to the Shadow Decree happens

[forcedhesitation]

kali has always been and will always be my favourite stranger things girl. she was so interesting in such a short frame of time & had so much potential to be a really amazing and likeable member of the main cast. 

i love that she is actually morally grey and while she is right about some things, she actually does question herself when she realises she is wrong (showing eleven their abuser & trying to force her to cope with her trauma in the way kali herself learned to, despite eleven having already begun to heal a different way). which is more than can be said of the way some other characters on the show are written.

stranger things is actually pretty good for this overall, but i love that kali hunts her abusers down and kills them, there is not enough of these kinds of characters in media that fully condemn and do not forgive the people who abused them. sometimes, villains cannot be redeemed and i think kali was right to want to kill these people who took her from her family & abused her and all those other children. none of this “killing makes me just as bad as the villain” nonsense with her. 

i will forever want to see what her relationship with el could have been if they hadn’t just ignored her after s2. how the two of them could have learned different things from each other. i could easily see how she could have fit into the narrative if they let her come back in s3 & 4. and as a steve fan i would have loved to see her become friends with him T__T

[beast-feast]

I just spent the past two hours listening to murder conspiracies and doing Cass_Gets_No_Bitches.mp4

[dan-crimes]

I gotta complain abt being a picky eater here for a sec cuz I'm lookin @ all this stuff on the breakfast menu and there's always the SAME ingredients in all these SAME food items and it would be SO much easier if I could just order food without having to think of all the stuff I DON'T want on my food cuz I always gotta put in so much effort to look into every single ingredient in every since food item that I order bcuz I DON'T LIKE MOST FOODS !!! SMHH !!

[theevilcactus]

AI Dungeon is fucking ridiculous sometimes. A character asks me how I like my eggs, I say over medium, and he immediately proceeds to scramble them instead. What an asshole

[fortes-fortuna-iogurtum]

:[

[lilly-white]

i’m goign to stop writing for the rest of my life after this

only comics. only art. that therapeutic feeling of “i’m in the zone listening to music / a neat podcast, and the only thing i care about is the shaded arch of this nose”

[yeslordmyking]

I want to be a crazy fashionista fangirl again 💔

[barnbridges]

no but both sides of the autism voice discourse are so fucking braindead. like yes, it is offensive to me if WHOLE ADULTS refuse to understand that this is *my voice* and i cannot be quieter, this is literally how i am and it should be accepted that not everyone knows or agrees with your "level of comfort" for how loud a voice "should" sound like. like if you're an adult, you should be able to live with that someone's voice is annoying for you to hear, jesus fuck. but also if my voice makes a child cry... i'm an adult and i can stop for a child. a child doesn't need to communicate with me and has no control over if they hang out with me. they deserve to be comfortable, so i will either leave or shut up, and not mind. like imagine being proud of making children cry.