#living at the absolute crux of all of these attacks and trying to do so very optimistically and validating and carefully

[cascadianights]

I have actually been working incredibly hard to limit my social media to either non political things or political news with direct action spelled out, and to set aside a single day a week to read and engage with and catch up with the news beyond that. And I've been working really hard on focusing on what I can control, which is mainly improving how functional my living space is and pouring my energy into gardening so that I have enough food crops to share sell And eat and make sure everyone I know has food. And I'm working on my health and my mental health and my routine and all these things while my grandfather's dementia gets worse by the day and the country is falling into fascism in a way that feels like every day a new specialized scope on a snipers rifle clicks into place and I'm trying to not feel this stuff on a daily basis but actually have space to feel it that one time a week and it is all so. Hard

[beifong-brainrot]

Hi hello, feel free to ignore this ask if you're sick of people bugging you about Su's relationship with Lin.

Why do you think Su said that shit that was like "No wonder why Tenzin left you... [you're just a sad old woman (or some shit I do not remember exactly what was said but girl!! shots fired!!)]"

Would love to hear your take on what was going on in Su's mind there if you're up for it.

Honestly? Because she probably knew it would hurt Lin's feelings. Look, I defend Suyin when I can, but this was mean as shit and it was intended as such.

I do think this is a boling point for Suyin as much as it is Lin. Although Lin has reason to be angry with Suyin, and I'm nor expecting her to be warm and friendly, we can't deny that she has been... well, a bit of an asshole throughout her stay in Zaofu.

(Side note- I do love Lin growling when she's upset because my dad also does that and now I find middle aged people -my dad is not middle aged but lets pretend so we don't hurt his feelings- growling in annoyance normal and endearing)

She's been consistently antagonising Suyin with small jabs, which, I believe, especially the one about Suyin's motherhood were absolutely out of line.

Lin: Five kids. What a nightmare. Suyin: No, no. My children are a blessing. Lin: Yeah, mom used to say that too, but she never meant it.

Like, m'am, in front of said kids. Like I can easily see this hurting Suyin's feelings, with how strongly she is attached to her family. And then Lin drives Suyin's daughter to tears, which probably didn't smooth the situation over.

Suyin: I know she has a problem with me, but she had no right to yell at Opal last night.

And, mind you, once again, before people flood my inbox again, Lin isn't entirely in the wrong here. But she's also being a dick, and Su has been mainly allowing her to rage.

This is not to say Su has been completely rolling over for Lin, but I think it's more that she's been allowing Lin to take her anger out on her, perhaps hoping that is what Lin needs. As that is also her perogative when Lin attacks her.

Suyin: You've got it out of your system? Lin: [Angrily.] Not quite yet!

Maybe this is a pattern of behaviour from when they were younger that they have fallen into (since it did kinda work in the end lol) . So, Suyin allows Lin to lash out at her, even if some comments could get under her skin.

I think Lin yelling at Opal changes the situation for Suyin a bit, since now her child, who was just trying to be nice, is collateral in this sisterly beef. Suyin's tone is also much more stern and angered when talking about Opal getting yelled at.

So, I think the stage is set for Su to lash back out at Lin. And so next time they speak, Su says what she says. Especially that it was a tense conversation, and Suyin truly does appear hurt by Lin's constant rejection of peace. She's hurt that Lin pushed her away for almost 30 years, which, while it was Lin's right to do so, doesn't negate the fact that Su is stated to have reached out multiple times and tried to work things out with Lin. However, Lin is still very weirdly obsessed with the idea that Suyin hasn't changed at all.

Lin: You think that just because you live in a big, fancy house, and have a chef who cooks you fancy food, that you're a different person? Maybe you could fool everyone else, but you can't fool me. I see right through you. Suyin : You know what, Lin? You're the one who hasn't changed. You're still a bitter loner who only cares about herself. No wonder Tenzin ended things with you years ago.

And this is the proverbial straw that broke the camels back, because say what you want about Su, but she has changed and grown since her and Lin last saw each other. And, honestly, I think Lin's constant assuredness that Su hasn't changed stems from Lin's crux character flaw of stagnating and rejecting change. It's not that Su hasn't changed, it's the fact that the way Lin perc8eves her has not changed, which is, of course, one and the same to Lin.

Suyin's words also call back to the same phrasing Korra used in Old Wounds, and it drives home the message the writers want us to see- about the fact that Lin's coping mechanisms arr not healthy for her or those around her.

I love the Zaofu arc for Lin, because it's one of the only times her stagnation and stubborness get challenged. Are the other characters being mean to her? Yes, but mainly because she was being mean too. It's the most aggressive intervention for one of the most stubborn characters of the show, and I love it. I wish that there was more development around Lin, because yeah, she is a loner (nothing wrong with being introverted, but Lin seems to actively isolate herself) ,yeah, she is bitter and she's taking it out on herself and on others, and it's not healthy.

Also, side note, we need to talk about Lin's weird paranoia thing around Su. Like the whole "Maybe you could fool everyone else, but you can't fool me." and being hell bent on the idea that Su is working with the Red Lotus. Like Lin is there in the corner with her tin hat on waiting for Suyin to be the show's next twist villain or something lol

[cerastes]

Hundred Line Killing Game

Alright, that's another 100 Days, they really did it the absolute madlads.

I feel like this route gave me a LOT of information, and it was incredibly tense, fun, and engaging.

I loved everything about it, except two small things:

Everything to do with Nozomi's direction here was not satisfactory to me. The whole Sucking Blood Megabond changed her character radically literally overnight, it felt like a contrivance that was way too forced. I also did not appreciate her entire character changing to Onee-san from that point on, it felt like she really just exited the plot as a character that very moment. I did like Kummy though.

The ending was basically, Vex dies, next scene, we are in the pod, thinking about all the cool stuff we'll do. I think it could've benefited of a bit more preamble, show us a bit more. I also wish we could've seen a bit of the Satellite, if only to confirm they really are going to live like roomies as they all wanted to, but I also get that something is going on in the Satellite of course, given the stinger of the first 100 Days, they can't just show us that.

These are very minor gripes, of course. I already liked Yugamu, so having a whole route of Yugamu was really cool, and getting to know him past his big thick wall of Trying To Unnerve You For Kicks was amazing, the crux of his character was the raw guilt he felt over using his own friend, Kyoshika, as a vessel to deliver the poison to the first Sponsor. Darumi was surprisingly amazing in this route, too, once you get to her in the lategame. It's a constant reminded that she's a broken, damaged person, but she is no less noble: She wants the killing game as a way to die, not kill others. She was genuinely sad when Gaku got murdered, and her entire motive for attacking you later on is not to prevent you from ending the Killing Game, but so you kill her and get a ton of points. She knew all this time about the secret rule for points, yet never once killed anyone else. She simply wanted to die doing something like right out of her misery porn games, and seeing her get a dream because of Tsubasa showing her affection was heartwarming. Tsubasa herself was also very fun, her relationship with Takumi was cute, she stabbed Other Eito in the throat, though I think she could've been more active. Minor gripe, though, still enjoyed her a lot.

I Enjoy.

[datawyrms]

“Did you apologize to Tucker yet?”

“About what? Wait, are we talking again? I thought we weren’t talking.” The ghost circled back, blindly fumbling with the thermos lid, eyes busy squinting at the hunter’s mask as if it would let him see through it better. “You’re not gonna say it’s fine then shoot me, are you?”

“Why do you always remind me why I don’t like talking to you like this.”

“What’d you mean like ‘this’? Like I should pretend that isn’t a totally valid question?” 

Valerie groaned, gesturing at the ghost. “Like that sort of thing is normal!”

Phantom smirked, letting the edges of his boots hit the hoverboard. “Welcome to my life.”

“And how you just keep that stupid confident face up.”

“Uh huh. I thought you were lecturing me about Tucker, not my personality.”

She deeply considered having the board jar the ghost off, but that’d probably just amuse him more. “You seriously don’t remember why you should be apologizing?”

“Well according to you, I should basically apologize for existing. So sometimes I lose track on the particulars.” There was an edge there that the blithe tone couldn’t quite cover up, even as the ghost sat down. “Y’gonna enlighten me or what? I’m bad at twenty questions.”

“You broke your promise to him, remember?”

The blank stare she earned in response was absolutely infuriating. “Uhhh. Which one?” He had the sense to look embarrassed, hand glued to the back of his neck.

That wasn’t going to help him though. Shooting him was actually sounding like a fair idea if it was the only thing that would get him to actually learn and pay attention. “To stop possessing people. The big one? The really easy one that NONE of his other friends need to worry about doing ‘accidentally’?”

“Wow Val, if you just wanted to say you think I’m weird you didn’t need to drag Tuck into it.” The embarrassment slid into a scowl easily enough, arms crossed as if that would defend him. “I haven’t done that for months.”

“He’s been telling you he hates it for years.” Before she even figured out Danny’s dead man walking secret. Tucker was too good a friend to be ignored for literal years because a ghost conveniently forgot how fucked up it was to invade someone’s body and use them as an unwilling meat puppet if it was ‘helpful’.

“I try, okay? I’m not doing it to upset him!”

“Somehow everyone else can manage without doing it.”

The ghost tilted his head. “Well duh, you guys can’t.”

“Even if we could, we wouldn’t.” She snapped, the confusion and completely casual excusing of his actions just a little too much to deal with. “Heroes don’t control people.”

“Well excuse me for needing to protect myself. If what I am gets out to the wrong people, I’m dead. More dead.” He groaned face in hand “You know what I mean. Worse than dead. Dani too.”

“Do you really think Tucker’s dad would have ratted your whispy ass out? That he wouldn’t help you explain? Or was it just an excuse to let yourself do what you want?”

“Well you seem to have decided that it was! Which it wasn’t!” His eyes flared green with the defence, and Valarie had to work to not react to the impulsive want to get away from an angry ghost. “I just- reacted, okay? I told him that!”

“Well Tucker and Sam keep forgetting how much of a ghost you are, so of course they won’t buy that excuse.”

“Excuse? It’s not an excuse!” He was up, the offended squawk reminding her so much of how he was before. When they were all fourteen, and every uncomfortable problem could be chalked up to being ‘a moody teenager’ and ignored for a while longer. “And you could stop saying ghost like that, while you’re at it?” The glow dimmed, but he kept the distance. “Sound like my dad.”

“What, you want me to say it like you do when they keep coming here to threaten people? Deal with it.”

“There are plenty of ghosts who don’t do that.”

“Yeah. They don’t come here, and they aren’t my problem,” she shrugged, considering. “I’ll say it nice to them.”

“Oh, real funny.”

“You deserve it.”

She expected a scoff, at least. Probably a laugh, considering how often he’d joke about being the town’s public enemy for a time. Instead he averted his eyes. “Maybe we can finish this talk on the ground?”

It was easier to be ticked off at him when he was joking, or steamed himself. Phantom didn’t ‘do’ uneasy. Maybe it was a good sign that he was actually listening, if he wanted to continue ‘off the clock’. “Space cadet wants to land? Sure, if you want.”

“I wouldn’t go with ‘want’, but yeah.”

It wasn’t much trouble, in the middle of the day. A quick glance while hidden in at least one direction was enough. People who lived in Amity Park knew they should get out of the area of a ghost sighting at this point. Even if she and Phantom were trusted enough to deal with it, stray shots happened. Things fell. Not too many eyes to avoid, even if her identity felt like an open secret most of the time.

Danny had it even easier. He just had to think. It felt like a sick joke, that he could stop being dead on a whim and blend in fairly well. The gangly man leaning against the tree looked human. Black hair, blue eyes, needed a tan, unremarkable. Average. Unless you knew what to look for, anyway. How a casual slouch didn’t match up with how he was always looking for something, a tense energy that seemed desperate to crack free of that spine. That he could walk in winter with the thinnest of jackets and not shake from the cold even once. “Hey.”

Valerie rolled her eyes, sitting on the bench. “Hey yourself.”

Danny grimaced, looking up and away. “How much of a ghost I am, huh?” It wasn’t an angry question, exactly. He was still slouching, hands in pockets. Guarded and uneasy. How much of that fear and caution the person she thought she knew, and how much of it was just another part of his act?

“You’ve said you’re at least half of one.”

“Yeah. You just make it sound like that’s a bad thing.”

The whole crux of the issue, really. How no one really knew how to deal with Danny, his secret and how he’d changed. “It’s not a bad thing on it’s own.”

“So I’m the part you like to sneer at,” his brow furrowed, the creases and wrinkles more ominous as blue slid closer to green. “I thought we went over this. You know what actually happened. How I never really attacked people.”

She admired Tucker and Sam’s patience, she really did. “We have. It’s not about that stuff. That’s years ago, you know it. It’s the other stuff.”

The anger was gone in an instant. “What other stuff?”

He was a living migraine waiting to happen. “How you keep thinking things from seven years ago are more important than things happening right now?”

“Hey, you’re the one that held the grudge for two.”. 

“Months. Not years.”

He slouched more at the correction, apparently very interested in his own hands. “Oh. Right.”

“You haven’t been using the reminders like Jazz told you to, have you.”

“I can remember fine! I don’t need some box doing it for me. I’ve just been busy.”

Busy. That was his excuse this time? She crossed her arms and leaned back. “Okay, what year is it?”

“Uhm.” he paused to pick at a non existent loose thread “One starting in 2?”

“Danny.”

“What! Lots of people don’t care too much about the time.”

He didn’t even try to guess within ten years. There was living in the present, and there was this. “No, you know your ghost side makes you act in certain ways and keep denying it. So you still get the complete pain version of ghost. Get it?”

“I’m not that different.” He wouldn’t look at her, hand clenching. “I’m human too, you know.”

“Uhuh. The way your eyes flare up when you’re mad is super human.” She ignored his scowl, pushing forward. “I get it. You don’t like being reminded. Tuck and Sam try to ignore it for your sake.”

“Val, I’m not denying it okay? I know. It’s pretty obvious!”

“Then stop pretending you don’t know. They’re trying so hard to help you have a chance of getting a job that isn’t with your parents and you won’t even use the reminders to help you remember where in time you are!”

That got him to bristle, shaking off his slouch in a sudden reminder of how tall he really was. “Why does it matter? We’re all just kidding ourselves about me ever leaving here.”

“So you just won’t try? Just give up on finding anything else? For someone who keeps insisting he’s human, you sure seem eager to ditch that half of your life.”

“That isn’t what I’m doing.”

“Then what are you doing? Because all I’ve seen you do is get tetchy about ghosts and instinctively do ghost things. When you’re human.”

“I’m putting in the work.You know it’s hard to study or hold down a job.”

“So stop making it harder on yourself.They’ve found ways to help keep you grounded, so do it.” Sam should be saying this, of course. She’d heard it frustratedly repeated so many times, but she never dared to actually say it to the one who had to hear it. Because he was already prone to pulling away or vanishing when you pressed too hard, made things too uncomfortable. Ghosts didn’t do coping, and Danny was never great at facing personal issues head on before becoming a menace to her sanity either. “You think making things harder makes you more of a hero?”

“‘Course not.” He wasn’t looking at her anymore. He was looking for an escape, an out. “I shouldn’t need that stuff, alright?”

Now it was her turn to be puzzled. “Why shouldn’t you?”

A lopsided grin answered her question. “Who likes admitting they’re a freak?” The tree no longer had a human standing by it, but his voice was easy enough to hear. “ But I guess some people care about a freak like me anyway.”

(did Valerie use a tracker to smack him and say ‘you’re not a freak’ right after this? yes)

[smylealong]

The Tragedy of Song Huai'en

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a Liu Duan Duan fangirl. Unapologetically so. This is a spoiler filled post, so reader discretion is advised. (Written with some inputs from @terribleteej)

When we first meet Song Huai’en, we don’t see him. The focus is fully on Xiao Qi (a brilliant Zhou Ye Wei), like it should be, because he is the male lead. And this was his introduction scene. I, of course noticed him because I started this show forLiu Duan Duan. At this point, he is just a background figure – standing half a step behind Xiao Qi, a lieutenant bellowing his General’s orders.

When we next meet him, we learn that he is Xiao Qi’s right-hand man. Walking behind him, following his orders, fiercely loyal and protective of his General.

Decked in all black, he lurks in the shadows. In fact, he is Xiao Qi’s shadow – something that both becomes the cause of his meteoric rise and terrible downfall. But more on that later.

As the episodes go, we see him as this loveable dork, who likes to playfully banter with his friends. We see him gently tease Xiao Qi, and sportingly let people tease him. One cannot help but love this sweet man. The fact that he looks super pretty is just a bonus. But up until this point, he is, as the poster would have us believe, a side character.

In fact, based on that poster, I assumed that Zitan was the second lead. Huai’en did not even feature much during A’Wu’s abduction and subsequent rescue. A brief, flash in the pan appearance follows when A’Wu and Xiao Qi are attacked, but here, we do see that this man can be very intimidating, something that comes to play later.

However, a discerning viewer might notice that in the small appearances that the character is making, his eyes seem to be trailing A’Wu. He is very quietly crushing on her and at this juncture of the show, we cannot really blame him. A’Wu is stunning and as a young man, he was attracted. Understandable and even innocent.

It is only when we get to Huizhou that we see Song Huai’en in his element. He is leading the army, defending the city, working with A’Wu, Pang Gui, and Mou Lian to make sure that Huishou does not fall. This is the brave General who shines like a bright star, earning A’Wu’s trust and respect, and Yu Xiu’s undying devotion in the process.

At this point in the series, to the viewers at least, Huai’en’s crush on A’Wu becomes obvious in the little queries, the shy smiles, and the feeble excuses to see her. Before he can introspect on his reasons for wanting to see A’Wu, Ma Zi Lu goes tyrannical and Huai’en has to put aside his personal jumble of feelings to focus on the chaos that Zi Lu has unleashed. In trying to do so, he is tortured, believes that he failed in doing the task that A’Wu assigned him and in doing so, falls in his own eyes. One thing that I would like to point out is that here is where he also sustains a significant injury to his head.

Why am I talking about this scene? I mean, it was just whumping, and Pang Gui got massively whumped, so why the focus on Huai’en’s whump? Because unlike Pan Gui, Huai’en suffered a cranial injury. An injury to the head is not something to be brushed off easily. Even a tiny clot in the brain can change a person drastically. And Huai’en does change. He pretty much splits into two – Song Huai’en and Su Yi Bo. I believe that some of it was his inherent fragility, exacerbated by an injury to head that was never addressed. He comes back, all guns blazing, and shoots his arrow to put an end to Ma Zi Lu’s reign of terror.

The chaos reined in, he settles back to his comfortable familiarity and all seems normal. However, with Xiao Qi’s presence at the Yuzhang Manor, things are not what they were before. Huia’en too, is no longer who he was before. The cracks are hairline at this point, so no one notices it. But change is there. He starts to pull back from Xiao Qi and by extension, A’Wu.

On some level, he too understands that his desire for A’Wu is not right, so he holds himself back. The scene below is a perfect example of it.

He comes in with medicines and a plant. A plant that A’Wu had asked him to take care of. Clearly, he wanted to show her that he did what she had asked him to do, but then, when A-Xue jumps to the conclusion that the plant was for Yu Xiu, like the medicines, Huai’en quietly surrenders, knowing that it would be improper for him to harbor any kind of feelings for A’Wu. A theme we see repeated in his terrified reaction to his dream.

Granted it happened after Xiao Qi called him out on his frequent visits to A’Wu, but here is a man who understands he’s crossed a line he shouldn’t have. This is a critical juncture for his character. This is where we first realize that not everything is copacetic with Song Huai’en. Suddenly, his little rueful dialogues early on about Xiao Qi selling away his material possessions take whole different meaning. This is where we learn that this brave soldier from a humble background is dazzled by the material possessions and wealth that is in abundance in the capital. This is where we see that Huai’en is not a mini-Xiao Qi. That in comparison to Xiao Qi, he fails.

Here, I would like to call attention to Xiao Qi’s personality. Xiao Qi is, simply put, larger than life. He is a brilliant General, a loving husband, an adept politician, with iron control on his desires. In some ways, he practically has no vices. If he has a flaw, it is that he is perhaps a tad too patient. What I’m getting at here is that Xiao Qi is like a saint. He is a standard that is almost impossible to achieve.

Huai’en, being his shadow and arguably his best friend, understands that. He is keenlyaware that he is not Xiao Qi and as people start comparing him, his bravery, and his valor to Xiao Qi, it begins to grate on him. If you have ever had a sibling who outshines you in every aspect, you would understand how that slowly chips away at your confidence. All your merits are recognized, but they are perennially the lesser than that of the golden child. This is the crux of Huai’en’s problems. He is eternally the second best.

Wang Lin later states that Huai’en has an inferiority complex, and he is absolutely right. At this stage, Huai’en begins to realize just how wide the chasm that separates him, and Xiao Qi is. And that starts eating at him. The laughing, joking, shy Huai’en slowly starts to retreat into his shell. Both as a scared reaction and as a punishment to himself, he latches on to Yu Xiu.

Why Yu Xiu, though, one might ask. To some, it may look like him trapping her in a loveless marriage. I, however, saw it as him deciding to do the right thing and step away from A’Wu. It was also a bit of if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you are with. He chose a woman he liked enough to give himself a chance to love someone else other than the one forbidden to him.

And love her, he does. But if you are looking for the extravagant flair and loud actions declaring his love, like Xiao Qi does for A’Wu (the second marriage, for example), you won’t find it. Why? Because the entire arc of Song Huai’en is that he is not Xiao Qi.

With A'Wu and Xiao Qi, they have the same love language. But as someone who's been married for 13+ years, I can say that is rare. Most cases, the love languages of couples are different and it takes some time for each to fully understand the language the other is speaking. Time that the two did not get. Yu Xiu never hid her feelings for him. She was upfront with it. So, what was the language that Song Huai’en speaking?

Yu Xiu says he treats her well. Gives her gifts, medicines, clothes, jewelry. Having grown up poor and struggling, money is a big deal to Song Huai’en. Every human being shows their love to their partners with the one thing about themselves that they value the most. For some, it’s food. Some singing. Huai’en is a battle-hardened killer. That’s what he is good at. That can’t be the language of love. So, what else can he do? He showers her with gifts. That is his love language. Yu Xiu wanted more, but Huai’en is not one for big declarations.

Carrying her in his arms is the biggest declaration he would ever make. His love shows in the softness of the tone that he speaks to her in. His love shows in his reaction to her tears. In the soft smiles he gives her. In his horrified reaction when he sees her at the city gates. The battle-hardened Duke is suddenly reduced to a terrified, trembling man. He tells her to go away, repeatedly.

Huai’en is not Zitan. He is not delusional. He knows that there’s a good chance that he would end up dead or worse. He did not want Yu Xiu to witness that. As their conversation proceeds, you see his heart breaking in his eyes.

(Man, Liu Duan Duan spoke VOLUMES through his eyes. Somebody give this man an award already!). And then, he shoots an arrow at her. Only, it misses her. Or does it? An archer of Song Huai’en’s caliber would never miss a shot that easy. This was his way of scaring her into going away, because Yu Xiu was not listening to his words. This was also his way of trying to show the world that she was not his weakness. Only, this backfires and Yu Xiu, in a desperate attempt to make him see reason, jumps from there. The moment she fell, Song Huai’en broke. Shattered.

But he did not weep. Did not seem to mourn her loss. He just moved on. Because, again, Song Huai’en is not one to show big emotions. Not so publicly. Look at his eyes instead. Listen to his gasp of horror and pain. If he had lived through the coup, Huai’en would have mourned Yu Xiu in solitude. But not while thousands of eyes were on him.

But what of the scene where he pushes Yu Xiu and orders her to stay home? He did try to be gentle. He did try, as lovingly as he could, to tell her to stay away from it, but she refused. She dug her heels in. And with so many people watching, and the clock ticking, he snapped. We have all said and done things to the people we love that we should not have. That’s human. I will not crucify him for this one event.

An argument can be made against my theory of him not willing to show his pain in public – that he wept in that carriage with Wang Su when he learned of the Empress Dowager wanting to kill him and the news of Xiao Qi’s death reached him. Yes, he cried. He cried because with Wang Su, was private and safe to show the emotions. (He didn’t know of the assassins waiting outside). Something that the city gates most certainly were not. At the city gate, he lets the soldier in him take over. But in the carriage, he is still Song Huai’en.

Which brings me to Wang Su and by extension Wang Lin. Wang Lin, being the snake that he is, tells Huai’en exactly what he wants to hear. Wang Lin is a master manipulator; he’s made his entire career out of being the devil on people’s shoulders. Huai’en was just not equipped to shut out that insidious voice. It had been previously established that Huai’en did not understand court politics as well as Xiao Qi did, so the puppet did not see the strings till it was very late.

Wang Lin, however, for all his tricks, forgot a crucial thing. That Song Huai’en is a Ningshou General. The army that has, on more than one occasion, changed the course of history with their blades. And that Huai’en is a soldier through and through. Something Wang Lin should have realized with Maidservant Xu’s stabbing, but he didn’t. He missed just how easy it is for Huai’en to switch from a human to a killing machine. He did not realize that it was Su Yi Bo that he was talking to when he told Huai’en that he could not let Xu Gu Gu see him. When she does see him, he instantly goes into the soldier following orders mode. It was a crucial bit that Wang Lin missed. It was a mistake that ultimately cost him his life.

That cold blooded killer is the one that resurfaces with the killing of Hu Yao. Yet again, I have seen people rage at him for killing her and yes, it was not pleasant to see, but guess what? They were at war. They were both fulfilling the role of a soldier. One died, one moved on. It hurt him to watch his comrade fall under his own blade, you can see it on his face, but the soldier marched on.

By now, Su Yi Bo, the Edward Hyde to Song Huai’en’s Henry Jekyll, is fighting Huai’en for control. He’s at war, both inside and out. But he still doesn’t show it. He puts his game face on and goes on to fulfill the one dream that both the viewers and Huai’en himself have nurtured for a very long time – he flings Zitan out of the throne. (Man, that was glorious!). Allows Wang Lin to sit on it, only to stab him in the back, both literally and metaphorically.

When Wang Lin turned his back on Huai'en, the real soldier --a General of NIngzhou-- stepped out and killed the opposition leader, and thus did as he has been trained to do all his life. Fight and conquer and take from the enemy. He knewWang Lin was the enemy in the end and he rose to the surface long enough to do what he has been trained to do all his life. But immediately after that, Su Yi Bo takes over.

And then, and only then, does he speak of his real feelings. Feelings that he has buried deep in his heart. Feelings of inadequacy and neglect. Feelings of being the second best. The silent fight he fought all his life. The one thing he wanted to do – get out of Xiao Qi’s shadow. That was his motivating factor. By this point, his proposition to A’Wu is more of a snub to Xiao Qi than a love declaration for A’Wu. He knows very well she would not accept him. And at this point, he no longer cares. He is broken beyond repair. He is unstable, switching between Song Huai’en and Su Yi Bo.

Song Huai’en is the one that killed Wang Lin and threw Zitan away. Su Yi Bo is the one that killed Hu Yao and propositioned A’Wu. Su Yi Bo is the one who gets shot by the arrow, but Huai’en is the one that pleads with Xiao Qi to take him back to Ningshou with his dying breath. And then, Xiao weeps.

Xiao Qi weeps at the loss of his best friend. His brother. Arguably the one he loved the most after A’Wu. Xiao Qi is the first to see the crack in Huai’en. Upon discovering the evidence of pilfering, Xiao Qi hopes that his veiled insinuation and gentle nudges will put Huai’en in the right path and for a time, it does. But then, the Empress Dowager pulls them apart by sending Huai’en as flood relief. By the time Xiao Qi meets Huai’en again, he is aware of what the court is doing. By then, Xiao Qi has already been framed for Zilong’s murder, has lost a chunk of his soldiers and has been labeled a traitor.

When Huai’en and Xiao Qi meet at the gate, Wang Lin’s claws are already deep into Huai’en. When Xiao Qi addresses him as Su Yi Bo, he has already realized that his best friend and brother is lost. Cracked. Xiao Qi mourns the loss of his trusted General and yet, holds on to the hope that Huai’en will pull through. But as a more than a month passes and Huai’en doesn’t come to visit them, Xiao Qi has to accept that things will never go back to being the way they were.

Yet, it is Xiao Qi’s love for his brother-in-arms that makes him adopt Huai’en and Yu Xiu’s son. It is of note that Huai’en did not name his son. It may not the sign of neglect that it is perceived to be. I know that in some parts of the world, there was a custom to not give a baby a name for he first six months of its life for the simple reason that infant mortality was very high. Once the baby was relatively safe, the parents would name them. I don’t know if this was a thing in ancient China, but it might be. By the time the child became old enough to be named, Huai’en is already splitting, being pulled in a hundred different directions. He never got a chance because of the Roaring Tornado of chaos in the capital that kept him too busy to be able to focus on his home. He did not name his child. He should have, but he didn’t.

He was undoubtedly the most tragic character in the end. He broke and he did some things that are very hard to forgive, but those were done in the throes of insanity. Not bitter hatefulness. Zitan was hateful, Zi Lu was hateful. Wang Lin was consumed with hate. Wanru and Jin’er fed the hate in their heart, enjoyed it even. The Empress Dowager hated the whole world. Huai’en, however, was just tragic.

At the end of the day, I guess what I’m saying is that Song Huai’en is not a villain. He is human. A fallible, flawed, foolish one, but human, nonetheless. Conflicted, controlled, corrupted, confused, cracked, and compromised. And he is not, as the poster would have us believe, a support character. He was the second lead of this story and that is a hill I will plant my stake on.

[liquidstar]

I'd love to hear some of your recommendations! And I'm good without any content warnings, but since you're posting this for all your followers to see probably best to add them

Alright sure! I’ll be general then and since you’re just starting out this will sort of be bringing up a lot of really popular ones, the really good ones where the general consensus is “you gotta see this!”, but I’ll also try to give ones from different genres so you have a variety of things to pick from, so this isn’t really a list of personal favorites but I’ll throw in a couple of those too lol, but generally think of this as a handy beginners guide with just a little personal bias.

I wrote a lot so I'm gonna put them under the cut here.

Fullmetal Alchemist

Fullmetal Alchemist is a franchise that’s considered a must-watch, it takes place in a world where alchemy is a borderline magical power, but is considered scientific in-universe and follows scientific laws, namely the law of equivalent exchange. Something can’t be made from nothing, to gain something of equal value must be lost. The story follows the story of two brothers, Edward and Alphonse Elric, who at the ages of 10 and 11 committed alchemy’s one and only unforgivable sin, human transmutation, in an attempt to bring their mother back to life. As a result, one brother lost his arm and leg and the other lost his entire body, leaving his soul bound to a suit of armor. However the brothers are resolute to regain their original bodies, and the older brother, Edward, joins the State Alchemists, a branch of the military, to try to gain access to research materials to help them achieve their goal. But was that really such a good idea?

Fullmetal Alchemist can be a bit confusing to get into due to the fact that there are two series: Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009). The latter is a reboot with a different story that follows the original manga. They both have the same beginning, but diverge paths and tell very different stories. My recommendation for how to watch this show is: Watch 2003 first, and Brotherhood second. Everyone has a different opinion about which is better, but everyone agrees that 2003 has better backstory but a contrived ending, and Brotherhood has a rushed beginning (Because it works off the assumption that you’ve seen 2003) with a great and fulfilling ending. If you can’t do both I say just watch Brotherhood because it will leave you more satisfied and you don’t have to watch 03 to get into it.

For both series the biggest trigger warnings are: Parental death, child death, pet death, war, genocide, dismemberment, religious themes, and miscarriage. For brotherhood specifically: on-screen suicide, and for 2003 specifically: rape (not on-screen) and pregnancy from it. The 2003 series is also a lot darker than Brotherhood which has a more optimistic tone, so that’s worth noting too.

Soul Eater

A show I think is incredibly fun, and a good one for an October watch if you wanna save it. It takes place in a world where certain people have the ability to transform into weapons, and they team up with other people who become their meisters. The characters often travel around, but the main setting is Death City, a fictional city in Nevada based off of Las Vegas but with a huge Halloweentown vibe, and a school right at the top of it called the Death Weapon Meister Academy (DWMA) where a bunch of kids that turn into weapons learn how to hunt down witches and kishins (Beings that consume human souls). The school, of course, is run by the grim reaper, Lord Death himself.

Our main characters for the series are a group of 7 students. Our protagonist Maka Albarn and her weapon partner Soul “Eater” Evans, a scythe. A loud mouth assassin named Black✰Star and his weapon partner Tsubaki, who has many weapon forms. And the son of the grim reaper, Death The Kid, and his two weapon partners Liz and Patty Thompson, who are twin pistols. There are also a bunch of really lively colorful background characters and antagonists, and the cast of the show being as insane as it is really makes it, on top of the great atmosphere and of course the plot, which just builds more and more as the series progresses. Also Crona is there and we all love Crona.

Trigger warnings for this show include: Child abuse (Mental and physical), manipulation, snakes and spiders (The motifs of two major villains), some very surreal moments that can verge on unreality. Also, in the dub and most subs: misgendering of a canonically trans character. Crona is a character who is non-binary, but the dub and subs use gendered pronouns for them due to general ignorance about neutral pronouns in 2008, though this isn’t the fault of the original series and falls on the translators hands.

Also it’s important to note: that the first 3 episodes are prologues and they take themselves less seriously, there’s more fanservice in them than there is in the rest of the series (Except for Blair she stays the fanservice character :pensive:)

Zombieland Saga

Idol anime is really prevalent as a genre, the most popular being Love Live, but my personal favorite is Zombieland Saga. It’s an idol anime, but it’s also a comedy about zombie girls who become idols. It sounds ridiculous but there’s an insane amount of heart in it regardless, it wasn’t a show I expected to get emotional at but I did! It also made me laugh a lot too. The series itself can serve as a bit of a subversion on what idols are, not just because they’re literally zombies, but because of who the characters are.

Sakura Minamoto is a character who starts off as a more typical idol, a peppy pure girl, as the series continues her struggle with depression gets highlighted. Saki Nikaido serves as her initial foil, a delinquent girl with a criminal record who subvers the idea of pure perfect idols. Ai Mizuno, a former idol who has since undergone severe trauma (The way she died). Junko Konno who has ideals that seem very different on what idols “should” be due to the time period she died. Lily Hoshikawa, an explicitly transgender idol. Yugiri nolastname, a former high ranking courtesan, subvering the pure image of an idol by being a sex worker. And Tae Yamada, a completely nonverbal idol who’s still treated with the same amount of importance as the rest of the team. The premise here really is just that these girls don’t fit the incredibly rigid mold of what idols should be and yet they still all deserve love and they gain a fanbase by being their earnest selves.

Trigger warnings for this series aren’t incredibly severe but since they’re zombies there’s still talks about death and they way they died (Including motorcycle/car accidents, plane crashes, getting struck by lightning, and a heart attack), there’s also comedic dismemberment, as in their arms just sort of pop on and off and stuff like that. The most notable thing is the deadnaming of Lily, the trans idol, by her father, but it doesn’t appear to be malicious in any way.

Note: this series is in the middle of it’s second season right now, if you want to wait until it’s over it should be 12 episodes long and just aired it’s 3rd, so about 9 more weeks.

Death Note

This is also absolutely another series that gets recommended to people right off the bat, and for good reason, this show is an intricate game of chess between a serial killer and a detective trying to catch him, and it’s incredibly easy to get super invested in the suspense of what happens next. The story begins when a shinigami, a god of death, drops his “Death Note” into the human world out of pure boredom. A Death Note is simply a notebook where if you write someone's name in it… They die! And who better to pick up such a powerful object than Light Yagami, a prodigy praised for his genius and academy accomplishments as well as his charm and popularity, and with a very strong but juvenile black-and-white sense of justice, likely due to being raised by a cop.

So naturally Light begins his power trip as soon as he finds the notebook, he intends to “fix” the world by cleansing it of all the bad people, but truly he intends to become the world’s new god. Or the “God of the new world” as he puts it. But there’s one thing standing in his way, a detective resolute on catching him with the codename L. The series entire crux is a game of cat and mouse between these two, as they try to outsmart each other and the murders continue, Light loses more and more of his humanity, L becomes more resolute on catching him. There are more twists and turns than a cheetah race, and it’s honestly pretty addictive to see what happens next.

Trigger warnings here obviously include a lot of death and murder, including suicide, but in some cases it’s a forced suicide at Light’s hands. Also abuse, as Light loses his humanity he isn’t above manipulating and discarding people who love him. And one instance of near-rape on screen fairly early on, but the purpitrator dies before it happens and the victim escapes.

K-On!

Slice-of-life is an incredibly popular genre, and K-On! is the quintessential example of it. It’s a series that not everyone will like, because not a lot truly happens, and it can be overly saccharine or “moe” for a lot of people, and that’s fine. But I personally think that despite not a lot happening, the story has genuine substance, more than you may gather at first glance. It’s true that not much in the way of big plot really happens, it’s mostly life events, that’s why it's a slice-of-life. But it’s not about nothing. The real theme of the show is the fleeting nature of youth. It’s about how important the friendships you form at that time are, how they’ll stick with you for a lifetime, and how everything comes to an end. It’s sweetness even becomes a little bittersweet because you knew their after school tea time would end come graduation, and as they realize this it breaks their hearts a little, but they continue on, because they’re still After School Tea Time!

The series itself is simply about 5 girls in a band, Yui Hirasawa on lead guitar, Mio Akiyama on the bass, Ritsu Tainaka on the Drums, Tsumugi Kotobuki on the Keyboard, and Azusa Nakano on Rhythm Guitar (Who shows up later). They’re in a club at school called the light music club where they waste a lot of their time just drinking tea and eating cake, but they’re having fun and that’s what counts! The series has a lot of really great direction and expressive animation despite the fact that a lot of it is just sitting around and talking, it’s incredibly visually interesting so you don’t get bored.

I honestly don’t think there are any big trigger warnings I can give for this series, maybe that Sawa-chan can be a little too forceful when she wants to dress up the girls in cute outfits sometimes but it’s usually not presented as too creepy especially after season 1 where they tone it down due to straying from the manga.

Mob Psycho 100

This series is an absolute love letter to the art of animation as a whole, the artstyle itself may not seem like much to look at but the animation is some of the most expressive, fluid, creative, and vibrant out there right now, it’s the type of series that you can tell was made with a real passion for its medium and it’s story. It’s protagonist is Shigeo Kageyama, nicknamed “Mob”, a term that literally means “Background character”. Mob is a middle school kid and an incredibly powerful psychic, like, insanely overpowered, but he’s currently working part time for a shady conman, Reigen Arataka. Though it may seem as if Reigen is just using Mob for his powers, their bond is actually a very sweet one and you can tell they care for each other, it’s a very important one at the heart of the series.

The core themes of the series itself are what really make it shine, it’s message is stated as clearly as possible in the opening songs, “your life is your own” and “if everyone is not special, maybe you can be what you want to be”. Put simply, you’re the protagonist of your own life, but the other important message of the series is that all the supposed background characters are just as important. The friends you make, the connections you have with other people and the way they impact you, they’re what make you strong. No one is born special, everyone is just a normal person, and everyone deserves kindness. It’s a series that I recommend incredibly strongly for just how powerfully it portrays this message.

Trigger warnings for this series include kidnapping, possession, a scene with a “man in a dress” joke, and a racist design for a background character. Also (spoilers) a scene where it seems like a child was murdered and a scene where it seems like Mob’s entire family was murdered.

Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War!

Hey, speaking of amazing animation, Kaguya-Sama is a romantic comedy series centered around the premise of two incredibly arrogant people falling in love. Kaguya Shinomiya and Miyuki Shirogane are the vice president and president of the student council at the prestigious Shuchi'in Academy, they eventually develop feelings for each other but they’re both simultaneously too proud and too insecure to admit it, so the real crux of the series is the 3D chess they play with each other to try and get the other to confess first. Along with the scatterbrained secretary, Chika Fujiawara, the treasurer in desperate need of Prozac Yu Ishigami, the cast is incredibly fun and they all fit into the comedy great. Every single little game of “do you like me?” that they play is written like the most intense thing in the world, the insane animation absolutely adds to it, making it seem almost like a psychological thriller, the comedy comes from the absurdity of just how much they hyperbolize it.

It’s not pure comedy though, due to a lot of the series being set up around mindgames, the characters are actually fairly psychologically complex with a lot of genuine development stemming from their childhood to explain why they are the way they are. The series may be about mindgames, but the actual narrative frames them as a juvenile way to go about relationships, a way to try to protect yourself from getting hurt because you’re afraid to trust. The entire core theme is that communication in relationships of any kind is the most important thing and you cant replace it with clever little tricks, so the main pair only ever make actual progress when they’re actually upfront with each other. Even if it’s scary to be that vulnerable with someone, especially if you’ve been hurt in the past like they have, the relationships you build off of mutual trust and openness will be worth the risk, and they can help heal you. And one of the things I love about the series is that this doesn’t just apply to the main pair, but it places equal emphasis on the importance of friendship. All the characters' relationships with each other are unique and interesting and they all develop the same way, with trust and openness, and they become better because of each other.

Despite being generally a comedy, a lot of the characters deal with some really heavy things too so trigger warning for: child abuse (not on-screen), child abandonment (again not on screen), anxiety and panic attacks, suicidal ideation- initionally played off as a joke but it becomes very obvious the character in question is legitimately suicidal and in the manga he nearly attempts it but is stopped, this plotpoint will most likely be in the anime at some point as it’s also not complete.

Your Lie In April

Alright I gave you a funny show now I’m going to make you cry. In fact it’s hard for me to type this synopsis because I’m an absolute crybaby and thinking about this show gets me, but I think it’s absolutely worth checking out because it’s a very beautiful sadness. Your Lie In April is a series that follows the stress and trauma young musical prodigies face in their lives, as well as the people around them, and it’s a series about the beauty of music and art, and just how much it affects people. The music in the show is absolutely gorgeous, the way that they convey emotion through it is so beautiful and intricate that it just sticks with you. You feel the music, and you understand.

I’m actually going to give the trigger warnings right now instead of at the end because in order to explain the plot I’ll have to talk about them so tw for: Child abuse (phsyical and mental, on-screen), terminal illness, death, in depth depictions of PTSD, vomiting, panic attacks, the works.

The series follows Kousei Arima, a formal piano prodigy who hasn’t performed since the death of his mother two years ago. Kousei's mother was terminally ill, but she was also incredibly abusive. Kousei has incredibly complex feelings about his mother because of this. The trauma she instilled in him is severe, but because he was a child, he still is a child, and he loved his mom a lot, as any child would, and he didn’t want her to die and he blames himself for not being good enough. He wanted to make her happy, and the only way he knew how to do that was to play the piano. So he played and played and practiced until he was perfect, they called him the human metronome. But he would still get severely punished for being anything less than perfect. He had lost all the passion he once had, and after his mother died it was the final nail in the coffin, his trauma manifests now in a way that makes him unable to play. But all that changes one day in April when he meets a violinist named Kaori Miyazono, a girl full of life and passion for music, she’s someone who according to Kousei “Exists in springtime.” and she’s going to help him play again and refined that love for music whether he wants to or not! Teen drama happens of course, but there are much bigger roadblocks ahead.

Assassination Classroom

This series is thankfully generally more lighthearted… Most of the time at least. The premise is pretty simple, but incredibly ridiculous. An incredibly powerful octopus-like creature is the teacher of a classroom of middle school students tasked with the assignment of assassinating him in order to save the world. The series starts off very slice-of-life as it focuses on introducing the very large cast of characters inside of Class E, also known as the “end class”, but it quickly gains traction and gets a lot more intense as time goes on.

The octopus creature in question, Korosensei, is actually a very kind and genuinely good teacher to all his students. The real crux of the series is that it’s sort of a critique on the educational system, the students in the end class are there because they’ve been ostracized from the rest of the campus, far away in the mountains, to be made examples of. Why? Because they’re students that are considered worthless, instead of getting help they’re only pushed back further down in the system and left to struggle within it fruitlessly. They’re given up on, despite being children with so much potential, because they don’t fit a very rigid mold. That’s what Korosensei wants to help them with, and they’re able to grow as people together. As the series progresses you feel such a great sense of unity for the class, they’re like a family, they stick together and it’s very heartwarming. And watching them work as a team of assassins is so fun!

However the series can get heavy at times too, it doesn’t stray from heavier subject matter at all and i found myself incredibly shocked by it a few times, so trigger warning for: Child abuse (on-screen and off), both at the hands of a parent and a teacher and in one case a parent who is also the principal, misgendering of a character, sometimes as a “joke” but other times played dead serious at the hands of his mother, child death- specifically suicide, a successful one as well as 3 assassination attempts that doubled as suicide attempts by the main 3 characters (weird parallel they all got there huh)

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Honestly this is a series that is good to go in blind for if you need to tws, it’s a deconstruction of the magical girl genre, but if you don’t want to know more than that you can stop reading here. If you want to know more, it’s a series that starts off very light-hearted and in tune with typical magical girl conventions at first, however by episode 3 it’s made painfully clear that these girls are being led to sign up into something they shouldn’t. It’s heavy, though not incredibly so, but it’s also a lot to explain in a summary. Madoka magica is… It’s Faust with magical girls.

I’ll explain as much as I can without giving too much away. The story begins when Madoka Kaname and her friend Sayaka Miki encounter a creature who calls itself Kyubey, who says it can grant a wish of theirs and in exchange they have to become magical girls and fight witches. Both the girls are hesitant, but Sayaka wants to wish for her childhood friend’s injuries to be cured so he can play violin again, while Madoka is content as she is and can’t think of a wish. Luckily they have a mentor, a magical girl named Mami Tomoe who helps introduce them to everything. However something is stopping Madoka from becoming a magical girl, a mysterious new student who is also one herself, Homura Akemi, is resolute on keeping Madoka from becoming a magical girl by all means possible, for reasons Madoka doesn’t understand. Things get even more complicated when a rival magical girl shows up, Kyoko Sakura, who becomes Sayaka’s new rival. As things get more heated between those two they discover a terrible secret about the nature of magical girls, and what they truly signed up for.

Spoilers ahead but trigger warning for: Child death, parental death (backstory only), decapitation (off-screen), needles, incredibly surreal imagery inside the witch’s labyrinths that may feel unreal, mind control, suicide, depression and despair expressed by young characters. Also don't bother with Magia Record

The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K.

Alright something lighthearted now, there are a lot of comedy anime I enjoy, a lot of series that have made me laugh, but none has made me bust a gut like this series has, it’s absolutely hilarious. It follows the life of a boy named Saiki Kusuo who has psychic powers. His powers are incredibly overpowered, and he absolutely hates them, in his eyes they cause him nothing but trouble. There’s not much in the way of a plot to describe, because there isn’t any, the series is comprised of 5 minute segments surrounding Saiki and an incredibly vast and colorful cast of characters that are just all completely insane, many serve as parodies as types of anime tropes because the series as a whole is very self aware and doesn’t shy from breaking the fourth wall a lot, but the characters surrounding Saiki are what make his life… Disastrous.

Like I said there’s not really a plot to describe but like FMA people may get confused with this one, there are 3 seasons but one of them is titled “The Disastrous Life Of Saiki K: Reawakened” as is a continuation of the first two with just 6 episodes in it. Also for some reason only the second season isn’t dubbed so if you’re planning on watching it that way you’d have to either stop or switch to subs for season 2

The only major tw I can give here is an ongoing joke about a character being into his sister, he’s treated as disgusting for it of course because he’s a parody of that trope but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable, luckily he doesn’t show up much.

Little Witch Academia

Little Witch Academia is a series I personally just adore, it takes place in a world where witches are common and well-known among the people, but the era of witches is over and magic is dying out. However that doesn’t mean passion of magic doesn’t exist, the protagonist is a young girl named Atsuko Kagari, or Akko for short. She’s resolute on being just like her icon, a witch known as Shiny Chariot, as she attends the same magic school: Luna Nova! Unfortunately Akko isn’t exactly a magical prodigy, in fact she can’t even fly a broom, but that’s not gonna stop her, nothing will. Just like Chariot said, believing in yourself is your magic.

Once at school Akko gets into all types of crazy shenanigans with her with her two roommates, Lotte Yanson and Sucy Manbavaran, and occasionally her rival, Diana Cavendish. Akko still struggles a lot in school, in fact her inability with magic is pretty explicitly handled as a metaphor for a learning disability, and though this makes it harder for her she’s still resolute. Though the series is generally episodic, a concrete plot starts to form by the second core. Along with the help of her guidance counselor, Professor Ursula, Akko learns that she needs to unlock 7 “words” to bring magic back to the world, each time she learns a new one it comes with an important lesson to her and ultimately relates back to each of the core themes of the series

The series is pretty lighthearted so the biggest trigger warning I can give is one for bullying, two characters in particular tend to target Akko for not being a good witch and it can really sting to watch. Other than that none come to mind

[solalunar-eclipse]

Team Dark: A Holiday Special

Chapter Three: Rouge

One | Two

Word count: 5900 words

Warning: entomophagy again (more eating bugs)

Author’s Note: I believe it’s the winter solstice today, so happy winter solstice! I heard once that there used to be a holiday around this time called Saturnalia to celebrate this solstice (way cooler than my holiday name which definitely wasn’t borrowed from a game)

Thank you to everyone who read this fic, but in particular to @maddgirlzartz, @feliner, and @teamxdark for your wonderful comments! I always love to see what people have to say about my writing, and it was great to read what you thought of this little holiday story I wrote.

...

Rouge was the first person to wake up on the third morning, which was a surprise in and of itself. Normally, Shadow or Omega would have gotten up by now, but she figured that watching movies until late last night had made both of them need some extra time in bed (or at the outlet).

The bat crawled out of bed and flapped her wings, coming to hover silently above Shadow’s bed. She watched him sleep for a moment (and briefly entertained the notion that this might be creepy before deciding it was his fault for falling asleep in a room with her). All of the stress and worry that normally lined his expression was gone right now, making him look so much younger as he lay curled up underneath a thick quilt. 

She almost felt bad about what she was going to do.

Almost.

Folding her wings tightly against her back, she crashed onto Shadow’s suddenly no-longer-asleep form and screamed, “Happy Wintersday!”

Shadow gasped and flailed under the covers for a second, before realizing that it was just Rouge and they weren’t, in fact, under attack. He struggled to catch his breath, wheezing, “Why...the heck...would you...do…”

“Because it’s a holiday, hon!” she chirped, grinning wickedly down at him.

The hybrid resigned himself to being Rouge’s new bed. “...happy Wintersday.” he muttered, looking significantly less upset than he should.

Omega had powered on in a rush when Rouge had yelled, and he was now staring at the scene in front of him with something akin to resignation. “What in the name of Chaos are you two doing.” he said flatly, in a tone that suggested that he really didn’t want to know what they were doing.

“Happy Wintersday, Omega!” Rouge said brightly, deciding not to respond.

Shadow said the same, but his statement was rapidly followed by a very loud growling noise.

Omega looked slightly confused, but Shadow just sighed. “Rouge, that was you, wasn’t it.”

“What can I say, hon? It’s wintertime- time to eat!” she said a little too loudly, ignoring the spreading pink blush on her face.

“Sure.” Now it was Shadow’s turn to smirk. “You’re hungry because it’s wintertime.”

“Shut up!” she huffed, smacking his arm. “Anyway, we’re not ready for breakfast yet. I bought something for the two of you first.”

“I thought we were exchanging our presents tomorrow before the party.” Omega said skeptically.

Rouge grinned. “I know. This is something extra.”

She enjoyed their expressions of dread following this statement immensely.

…

A minute later, Rouge had dug out the crux of Operation: Festive from her suitcase, only to be met with decidedly unappreciative stares.

Omega was the first to realize what was going on. “Oh. Oh no. No way. There is a zero percent likelihood of me wearing that ever. I will not compromise my coolness.”

“What is that?” Shadow asked, using a tone that implied that he was looking at something disgusting, not Rouge’s awesome plan.

“That is what you are going to wear.” She smirked.

His eyes widened in horror. “No.”

“Come on...won’t you please just do this one thing for me?” Rouge asked, using her warmest, gentlest voice. She knew for a fact that neither of them could resist that.

Shadow trudged forward, accepting the offending item as Omega reluctantly snatched his from her hand. The bat felt just a tiny bit guilty, but not enough to make her regret this.

Specifically, buying the three of them matching ugly sweaters.

“Matching as a team can be cool, but never like this,” Omega sulked as he put his on (it had taken a miracle to get one in his size).

“It’s clashing with my stripes…” Shadow muttered unhappily.

Then they both began to glower at her, for some reason. “And yet you still manage to look decent in it somehow.” the hybrid grumbled.

Rouge glanced in the mirror. She supposed it wasn’t unflattering, per se, but it definitely didn’t complement her body type like most of the clothing she wore did.

“Come on…” she said, honestly pleading with them. “If you really hate it I won’t make you wear it, but I was looking forward to this…”

Both of them immediately looked anywhere except at her.

“I guess it’s warm enough.” Shadow conceded reluctantly.

“I will tolerate it for one day and no longer.” Omega informed her flatly.

“Yesss!” Rouge cheered, smiling brightly at them. “I so owe you guys.” 

“Don’t forget it.” the robot remarked.

…

Overall, the morning was really nice- although Rouge’s family was horrified when Shadow chose to eat his hot chocolate by alternating spoonfuls of cocoa mix and drinks of boiling water instead of out of a cup like everyone else. She loved seeing her family’s reactions to the various gifts she’d brought, since she’d spent quite a bit of time picking those out. Omega was the center of attention, as always, and every child was vying for his opinion on their specific gift.

As Rouge relaxed next to the fireplace, sipping her own steaming mug of hot chocolate (with the powder and water combined, thankyouverymuch), she felt someone tap on her shoulder.

The bat turned to see her mother sitting down next to her, looking very tentative.

“Honey?” she said softly. “I know I mentioned this yesterday, but...would you ever feel comfortable telling me about how you met your friends? I’m not asking because I’m judging them,” she added quickly, holding up her hands, “I just...want to know who they are to you. And you don’t have to do it right now, either, just maybe someday?” She’d begun to rush her words out at the end, clearly feeling at least a little nervous.

“Aw, Mom, you know I’ve been having fun telling stories this whole time!” Rouge got into a more comfortable position. “Oh, but these are some of the craziest ones I have. Promise not to freak out, okay?”

“I’ll do my best…” her mother said cautiously.

Rouge took a deep breath to get started. “Alright, so, I met Shadow when he was trying to blow up the planet with a giant cannon-”

“You what?!”

“You said you wouldn’t freak out!” Rouge protested good-naturedly.

“Yes- but- a giant cannon??” her mother gasped.

“Mom, seriously.”

“Fine…”

…

Rouge was halfway through her story about “that time with Infinite” when it happened. She was leaning extremely far forward- which didn’t happen unless she was truly invested in what she was saying- and holding her mug of cocoa off to the right to keep it out of her way.

Unfortunately, to the right was exactly where the fireplace was. 

And since she was wearing a dangling sweater… the end result was a lot of shrieking from both Rouge and her mother as she swatted furiously at her sleeve in an attempt to keep the fire from burning her arm. 

The younger bat frowned at the end result, though, which was a very scorched and blackened sleeve that did not match the green sweater at all.

Her mother looked rather frightened at this, but Rouge assured her that it was nothing bad, she’d been through far worse- hadn’t she just said as much?

Eventually, after some more questions along the lines of “are you sure you’re alright?”, the two calmed down enough for Rouge to resume her story.

Her mother was clearly fascinated (and slightly horrified) by her tales, although she seemed particularly sympathetic to her daughter’s predicament of “I’m the only one with a brain on this team so I’m holding everything together like ninety percent of the time”.

Once she was finished, though, Lila looked at her nervously. “You won’t be too busy with all this work to come visit us...and maybe call occasionally...will you?”

Rouge smiled warmly at her mom. “No way. I love hanging out with you guys! Just because I have Shadow and Omega now doesn’t mean I’m ditching you guys- it just means more family.”

The older bat looked relieved. “That’s good to hear...I love you, sweetie. And I’m so proud of you.”

“...thanks, Mom….” Rouge said, ignoring the tight feeling in the back of her throat.

They hugged again, of course.

…

When Rouge finally caught up with her other family, though, she found an absolutely hilarious sight.

Somehow, two of her uncles and several kids had managed to wrangle Omega into allowing himself to be decorated with tinsel and lights, so he looked less like a carefully engineered machine of destruction and more like a very expensive Wintersday decoration. Shadow was hiding in a corner, meanwhile, and growling at anyone who dared to come within ten feet of him with any decorations.

Which happened to be just about everyone.

Rouge was determined to see her friends properly decorated, however- and hopefully tease them in the process. She started the process by sticking a poinsettia plant on Omega’s head and draping a strand of lights over his shoulders. He glared at her, but refused to move, likely making sure not to drop the plant on any of the various young children swarming around him. “The pot’s plastic, but you’d better not move anyway.” she warned him, earning an even more intense and furious glower in return.

After that, she rushed upstairs to grab a couple of special items, including one for her makeup kit. She’d dismissed it as unusable and too childish before, but now? Now it was perfect.

Smearing a copious amount of both items on her hands, she walked into the living room (after stopping to grab one other thing from a box just outside the door) and made a beeline for Shadow. He hissed at her, his teeth bared.

“Stop right there.” he growled menacingly.

“Come on, hon!” she protested, fighting her ‘mischief smile�� down. “Do you see any decorations in my hands?”

“No…?” Shadow answered cautiously.

She frowned just the right amount, leaning in slightly to inspect his quills. “Hang on, Shadow, you’ve got something in your quills right there…” she said, trailing off as she began to brush at his uppermost quills.

“What? What is it?” he barked, and she struggled to keep from bursting into laughter.

“There, I think I got it.” she said. “Probably just a-”

Omega interrupted her, his eyes switching to their half-moon shape. “Shadow. You have been pranked most egregiously.”

He looked shocked. “Wh-wha-?” he stammered, reaching up to touch his quills.

The bat grinned the moment his hands came away sticky with glitter gel.

“Rouge…” he snarled, a murderous gleam appearing in his eyes.

She patted him on the head once, slipping a holly sprig out of her glove and tucking it next to his ear simultaneously. His expression morphed from furious to perplexed to- when he saw his reflection in the window- straight-up deathly angry. “There you go, all festive now!” she chirped in a manner she just knew would irritate him.

Five seconds later, a scream that was very much ultrasonic rang through the house, followed by a wild-eyed bat and a hedgehog blazing with chaos energy. A faint shriek of “not the carpets!” came not long after.

Eventually, though, Shadow settled down (after cornering Rouge on top of a bookcase and attempting to climb said bookcase for revenge). He accepted that ‘okay, maybe it doesn’t look completely terrible’, and at least allowed the bat to spread the glitter around evenly.

“None of those moronic hats.” he’d snapped at Omega, who was trying to put a pointed red hat with white trim on his head. “I don’t care if they’re historical or traditional or whatever, I have heard far too many comments regarding my quills and starfishes already in my lifetime.”

Rouge cackled. “Ahah- starfish. That’s too good!”

“Don’t you start-!”

...

Not long after, though, he seemed to have made peace with his fate, as Rouge caught him curled up like a cat in front of the offending fireplace from earlier, a blanket draped over him and his eyes closed peacefully.

She didn’t really want to disturb him, but by the time she’d walked over he was already up. “What now?”

“Lunch, then the video call.” she said.

“Oh right- I nearly forgot. You did pack the presents, right?” Shadow asked her.

“That was Omega’s job.” she said, before giggling at the flash of panic that appeared on his face. “Don’t worry, I made sure they came with us.”

“You’d better. I didn’t bring a Chaos Emerald and there’s no way I’m wearing myself out with a Chaos Control for Sonic and his sunshine crew.”

Rouge snickered again. “I’m sure Knuckles and sunshine have never ever been compared before in the history of this planet- he’ll punch you out if he ever hears that.”

Shadow rolled his eyes. “Fine. I know you’re trying to be more friendly with him, so I guess I’ll be decent so your sweet-talking doesn’t fail.”

“Good!” Rouge clapped her hands together once. “I still can’t believe Sonic was so impatient he insisted we do this a day before- we’ll all be exchanging presents at the party tomorrow anyway.”

“You can’t believe Sonic was impatient?” the hybrid scoffed. “Please. He’d fail the marshmallow test every day.”

The bat hid a grin behind her hand, before walking off. “Come on. Lunch.”

Shadow grumbled something about “but I’m warm here”, but followed her anyway.

…

Later, after some frantic rushing-upstairs and fumbling with phones after lunch ran just a little bit too long, the video finally clicked on.

“Hiiii!” Sonic called brightly once they could see each other. “Happy Wintersday!”

After the various exchangings (and re-exchangings when people got mixed up) of “Happy Wintersdays”, the blue blur got right down to business.

“So. Presents.” he said, rubbing his hands together with a broad grin.

“Oh, chaos, you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through just trying to keep his hands off your gift.” Tails groaned, looking tired at the very thought.”

“He wouldn’t let me touch mine!” Sonic whined.

Knuckles sighed and rolled his eyes. “Sonic, you’re not supposed to touch them. It’ll ruin the surprise. You know, he’s spent at least an hour total staring at your present today, Shadow.”

The hybrid smirked. “Did he really.” 

“No!” Sonic shrieked through the connection, his face turning slightly pink.

“Yes.” Tails said smugly, clearly wishing for some revenge after dealing with the energetic hedgehog.

“Ugh, fine, whatever, now can we just open them already?” Sonic huffed.

“Yeah...but you can open yours last.” Knuckles added, earning a horrified look from the hero.

“I’ll go first, then~!” Rouge sang, tearing into hers. The bat let her eyes burn a mocking hole straight through the camera and into Sonic’s disappointed pout.

When she pulled out the present, though, her smirk faded as she gasped happily. “Knuckles! You didn’t!” It was a small white box with golden embossed letters spelling out the name of a well-known jewelry store.

She didn’t fail to notice how Knuckles averted his eyes, looking tense and...slightly upset?

But by then, she’d opened the box and her attention shifted again to the gorgeous diamond necklace inside. It was fixed onto a fine silver chain, and the diamond itself was held in a swirl of more silver.

“I mean...I guess it’s okay…” the echidna muttered weakly.

That was when Rouge noticed the little slip of paper inside the lid: 100% Cubic Zirconia.

So it wasn’t a real diamond- why should she care? It was beautiful and shimmery and a very thoughtful gift, which all counted for plenty in her books.

“It’s wonderful, hon!” she said cheerfully, putting it on.

“Sorry about, you know…” He sighed, his pride clearly wounded. “Guarding the Master Emerald’s a full-time job...and it doesn’t exactly get you the big bucks, you know?”

Rouge smiled warmly and reassuringly at him, making the echidna blush. “It’s nothing to be sorry for. I love it.”

“That’s good, then.” His shoulders sank slightly with relief.

“Now you open yours!” she insisted, changing the conversation. “It took me some serious work to find, so I want to see your reaction.”

Knuckles tore the paper and opened up the cardboard box….

His silence spoke volumes as his eyes widened considerably.

The echidna pulled out a pair of high-tech sunglasses, all points and cool colors. Then a sort of-necklace, made mostly out of metal. Some steel covers for his spikes. A pair of gloves with more steel woven into the fibers….and a long, thin crystal.

He put on all of the gear and grinned at Rouge. “Remind you of someone?”

“As a matter of fact…” she said, watching comprehension dawn on everyone else (except for Omega, who she knew would have some questions later), “...I do recall a certain echidna who saved me from a rather fiery doom…”

“And I,” he added, smirking now, “remember getting called a creep who just wanted to hold a specific bat’s hand.”

They both burst into laughter at the memories, looking back on them now with fondness and a touch of embarrassment.

“Is it my turn yet?” Omega asked impatiently, already holding his present.

Not waiting for an answer, he ripped open the long cylinder, revealing a cardboard tube with something inside. Shaking it out, he found...

...blueprints for a giant cannon. Specifically, a cannon to be installed in his chassis.

Omega’s eyes sparkled- literally, they turned into sparkles. “Yes.” he said, sounding pleased. “Yes yes yes. This will be very good.”

“It’s all ready, too!” Tails exclaimed. “I just need to wire it into you.”

“Do it tomorrow.” he insisted.

The kitsune seemed pleased with the reception of his present, but was all too eager to get to his own gift.

Opening the box a moment later, his eyes also widened to double their usual size. “Wh- what!? An antimatter injector? Some new chaos drives?  You can’t get those anymore! And- is that nanotech assembly gear?? Where did you find these?”

“Oh, you know.” Omega said nonchalantly, pretending to examine his steel fingers. “Places.”

“Very top-secret places.” Rouge said, her face hurting from grinning so much.

Sonic was the only one who looked even remotely distressed. “Isn’t...isn’t that illegal?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve become a G.U.N. sympathizer now, Sonic.” Shadow said teasingly.

The blue hedgehog scoffed. "As if! If it's G.U.N.’s stuff then it's totally fine." 

His pretense of sulking completely dropped when Shadow began to carefully unwrap his own present. The hybrid, unlike his friends siblings, tugged carefully at each corner of the box, making sure not to tear any of the (slightly crumpled) paper.

Once it was finally open, his expression became softer than usual. "You remembered."

"Of course I did!" Sonic chirped. "Can't leave a friend in the lurch, now can I?" he added with a wink, smiling.

Shadow lifted the box out of the paper to reveal a small makeup kit- no, make that two, Rouge realized. One had some eye shadow in several shades of black, silver, purple, and red, as well as a black eyeliner. The other, which she noticed he was hiding slightly, had what appeared to be some jewel-tone and pastel colors in eyeliner, not eye shadow. 

So that was what Shadow had meant by ‘you remembered’. Rouge remembered too- specifically, she remembered Shadow griping loudly because he wasn’t allowed to use her makeup kit when she needed it. It was hers first, after all.

Rouge smirked. "It looks great, hon! I might need to borrow that sometime…" She trailed off, her knowing grin growing to blatantly wicked proportions.

"No!!" Shadow and Sonic yelled simultaneously.

"Dude, I literally got him this so he wouldn't steal yours! Don't you dare!" Sonic gasped, looking more than a little frustrated.

"Relax, boys, it's alright." Rouge said calmly- which only served to rile Shadow up further. "I'm only teasing, you know."

The hybrid scowled and clutched the boxes possessively, making Rouge smile again. He could be such a little kid sometimes, but she preferred it infinitely to the grownup facade he liked to project.

"Alright, Sonic, now you can go." Tails sighed, with the air of someone who had almost given up trying to impose rules on a hyperactive toddler.

"Allllright!" the hero whooped, ripping into his gift with no mercy.

Once it was open, though, he frowned, seeing only a dark wooden box. "Uhhhh...what kind of present is this?"

Shadow leaned forward in anticipation. "Open it and find out."

Sonic flipped open the lid- and froze, eyes shining in shock and pure joy. "No way…" he breathed.

Tails's fur bristled. "Oh, no."

"What? What is it?" Rouge strained to see. "He didn't even tell us, what is it?"

Sonic grinned. "Candy!" he gasped, sounding like an excited little kid. "Loads of it!"

He turned the box around to reveal several rows of neatly stacked candy bars, including several 'extra large' ones. 

Knuckles's eyes widened, the echidna having just gotten his first good look at the contents of the box. "Oh chaos…Shadow, he'll be bouncing off the walls!"

"Yes, but that's your problem, not mine." Shadow sounded sarcastic, but Rouge could see the happiness in his own expression- clearly Sonic's joy was infectious.

"Hold up- why's the bottom so loose?" the hero asked suddenly.

Shadow's smile became almost predatory. "Open it and find out."

Sonic lifted the tray...and his smile grew to rival that of the sun’s rays themselves. “Bro! Dude! You did not!”

“What?” Rouge shrieked, feeling irritated and left out.

“Dude, there’s, like, so much chocolate in here! Where’d you get all this??”

Shadow looked like he was physically forcing down a grin by now. “Places. Also, there’s no dark chocolate, so I’d better get a great thank-you card considering that I decided to cater to your trashy tastes.”

“Yeeeee- wait.” Sonic frowned. “Hold up, I don’t trust you just yet…” he said, glowering at the box. Apparently he was talking to the object, not the hedgehog.

He rattled the tray.

“What the heck, man?” The hero stared into the camera. “How much more is there?”

“You know what I’m going to say.” Shadow answered, raising a brow and looking pleased with himself.

Sonic lifted the tray very cautiously this time, as though there were a bomb underneath.

“Yo! Yo! Yo! You got- you got it, how’d you find this, where’d you get it? I saw it, y’know, on TV, but I thought it was a scam!! Dude! Is this real life??”

“Apparently,” Shadow said, finally giving in and smiling as proudly as he could, “foot-long candy canes are in fact a product that you can buy. Consumer culture has truly come a long way.”

“A foot long?” Omega asked, looking far too interested to have any healthy thoughts about it. “Show us.”

Sonic reached into the box, mumbling something about how his face was starting to hurt, but he didn’t look upset in the slightest. He pulled out a candy cane that was as long as his leg, letting out a little giggle as he did so.

“Look at this! Holy chaos, it’s so big!” He held it up to the light and stared, his eyes bright. “What the- it’s literally, like, the same distance round as my arm!”

Rouge cackled. “I need to get some of that, hon!”

“No.” Sonic hissed, but he was still smiling. “Mine...all mine…” He began to pet the candy cane, cradling it in his arms, and Rouge heard a soft snicker to her right, where Shadow was.

The blue hero had clearly heard it as well, his head snapping around to the camera in time with Rouge’s to see Shadow hiding a laugh behind his hand.

The bat noticed that Sonic’s jokes were more effective than Shadow let on...

As it was, though, they had to say goodbye soon. “We’ll see you guys tomorrow for the party, right?” Sonic asked hopefully.

“Of course. We would not miss it.” Omega folded his arms. “How could you ever think so low of us.”

Tails giggled.

“Well…” Knuckles said reluctantly, “I...guess we’ve gotta go for now.”

“Us too,” Rouge muttered. “People are gonna start a search party if we don’t head down soon.”

“See you tomorrow, right?” Sonic added hopefully. 

“Yes.” Omega confirmed. “Tomorrow. When I will get a cannon.”

“I’ll make sure to do it ASAP!” Tails chirped.

“...happy Wintersweek.” Shadow said, far more warmly than usual.

After another round of well wishes, Rouge shut off the call.

Immediately, Shadow took his treasure and escaped into the bathroom, while Omega began to pore over his blueprints, probably processing (read: fantasizing about) how best to integrate the cannon into his fighting style.

Rouge flopped back onto the bed and sighed, a small smile remaining on her face as she played with her necklace. Shadow and Omega had both looked so happy...and she felt great, too.

Chaos, she was getting sentimental. A far cry from her early hardened days with G.U.N.

Far better than those times, too, she decided. Far better.

...

It was the Final Dinner Of The Family Reunion, and Rouge was so ready.

Everyone banded together in the kitchen throughout the afternoon, slicing, basting, cooking, and otherwise handling food to prepare a fantastic, show-stopping feast that all of the family would be talking about for weeks. Rouge had needed to fry, bake, and mash different kinds of potatoes and sweet potatoes, set up a casserole, make half the macaroni and cheese, prep some kind of gravy...and she got a light load.

The best part was when Omega was roped into helping and ended up wrist deep in a bowlful for crickets mixing them with seasoning, she had to admit.

Shadow didn’t give her any dirt at all (something she was still sulking about a little), just generally being quiet and going exactly where he was needed when he was wanted most, sometimes even showing up right before someone called for him.

Rouge groaned internally. It was some weird sort of Ultimate Lifeform stuff, she was sure. (His quiet, antisocial nature probably meant that he wanted attention to be called to himself as little as possible, too.)

But now, her mood took a sharp turn for the better, as the food was finally ready. She practically launched herself into the dining room, vaulting over the back of her chair to sit down.

This was the hardest part, though.

Now, the bat had to literally sit on her hands to keep herself from tearing into the food that was right in front of her. The smells of the various different dishes floated through the air, many of them were placed perfectly within reach, and they looked so good…

And she couldn’t touch any of it until every. Single. Person. Sat down at the table.

“Ugh…” she groaned, attempting to vocalize her discomfort to her companions.

Sadly, when your best friends/idiot brothers are a robot who doesn’t need to eat and a hedgehog who barely needs to eat, you get absolutely no sympathy from either of them. Immature and rude. She huffed quietly to herself.

Thankfully, the promise of a giant meal brought everyone together quickly, they all raised their glasses, and then-

Slamming her glass down, Rouge snatched a serving spoon millimeters from another bat’s fingers. Shadow and Omega watched, their faces morphing into something akin to an awestruck expression as the table exploded into chaos. Rouge filled her plate through sheer cunning and- in one case- a vicious staredown and tug-of-war for control of the meat knife (which she won).

“Remind me never to get between her and food, Omega.” Shadow whispered behind her back.

“Affirmative.” the robot muttered.

Several minutes later, Rouge’s plate was filled to her liking and she began to devour her food, as did the rest of her family. Some of the relatives who were significant others, not related by blood, watched with an equal mix of fascination, morbid curiosity, and horror as the bats at the table scarfed down the food as though there was no tomorrow.

Eventually, Shadow took some food, but Rouge didn’t look at what. She had more plans in mind for the other member of Team Dark.

When Omega turned his head for a couple of minutes to display the various hilarious robotic spinning motions he could perform, Rouge snagged several pieces of food and rapidly arranged them on his plate.

The robot returned to the table to discover a giggling Rouge, a smirking Shadow, and several slices of meat, some green beans, and artfully placed ketchup that, among other things, formed two circles on the top of the placement and an omega logo on the upper right part of one of the meat pieces.

Essentially, it was a food Omega.

Rouge had expected some irritation on his part, a shout of “THIS LOOKS NOTHING LIKE ME”, perhaps, but instead Omega took several pictures.

He fiddled with his phone for a few minutes (tiny phone + giant robot hands = lots of difficulty), before sliding it over to the bat.

All of his profile pictures, on every social media site and all of their group chats, were now displaying the same image as his plate.

“Yes! He appreciates art!” Rouge yelled, showing Shadow, who promptly snickered behind his hand.

“Excellent. Let’s go hang it in a museum.” he remarked dryly.

The rest of the dinner passed relatively without incident (although one of Rouge’s uncles and one of her aunts had to be pried off of the fruit platter after both refused to let go).

When dessert showed up, however...things changed.

The main creation that Rouge’s mothers had brought out was a three-layer chocolate cake made with lots of icing. Various other sweets surrounded it, and Rouge noticed several members of her family looking at it with a near-vicious gleam in their eyes.

She was definitely surprised- but pleased- to see Shadow’s reaction, though. 

He stared at the cake like it was a Chaos Emerald and he’d just fired a few hundred Chaos Spears without a break. Rouge grinned as she saw him lean forward slightly in his seat, never breaking eye contact with the sweet confectionery. 

“You like that, hon?”

Shadow jolted back to reality, clearly unaware that he’d just been eyeing the cake with an expression normally reserved for feral lions when they’d spotted a particularly plump zebra.

“It seems...well made.” he conceded.

“Okay, so in Shadow-speak that means ‘I want some and I want it now’.” Rouge corrected, smirking at his indignant expression even as she turned to her mom. “Hey Mom! Can Shadow have some cake over here? A big piece?”

Within seconds, a large slice of cake was handed over and Shadow was left speechless. He blinked, then picked up his fork and poked it once, as though he expected it to disappear. 

“Are you going to eat it? You can’t do that with your eyes, you know.” Omega remarked from Rouge’s other side.

Shadow glowered at him and stabbed the fork into the cake, bringing up a piece and shoving it contemptuously into his mouth. The glare faded the second he tasted it, though, his eyes widening again.

“What’s in this?” he asked, the moment he’d swallowed his slice. (Rouge cursed to herself again at the loss of teasing material. Maria had really taught this guy his manners when he was young...)

“It’s nothing much, honey.” Rouge’s mom said warmly. “It’s just a lot of chocolate and cocoa.”

“It’s amazing.” he said quickly, before turning his undivided attention back to the cake and scarfing it down in a manner that made Rouge proud.

Halfway through the piece, the younger bat grinned at him. “See? You’re practically related already.”

Shadow looked like he didn’t know whether to scowl or keep eating, so he settled for a rapid glare in between bites. 

Rouge laughed for a full five minutes after that.

…

Late at night, after her shower, Rouge walked back into their room only to see Shadow sitting upright, his silhouette framed by the rays of the moon. Omega was still awake, too, just two red circles of light showing and the rest of his body shrouded in darkness.

“You two okay?” she asked carefully.

“I’ve been thinking…” Shadow said quietly. “...about how much you’ve had to do for us. You single-handedly built this team up from the ground, even as Omega kept on going off to do his own thing and I dealt with...various issues. I wish there was some way I could express...how much...” He trailed off, clearly unable to find the right words.

Rouge felt a big smile grow on her face. “Awww…” she said gently. “I did this because I wanted to, don’t you know that? Sure, I wanted you two to stop fighting, and sure, I figured it just made sense at the time, but in the long run...we really work well together, you know?”

Omega spoke up next. “Regarding what you said yesterday, Rouge...I do believe that I am better off with you two than alone. Mostly because it enables me to achieve my-

“-actually, forget that. Never tell anyone else that I said what I am about to say. Or…or else. I have, for a while, had one goal: to destroy Eggman and his inferior creations. However...I have also had, for a somewhat shorter amount of time, a second goal: to...protect and...help, in whatever way they require, my...teammates, or friends, or siblings, whatever you call it.” 

He had trailed off into mumbling by the end of it, clearly disliking how much his little speech had contradicted his usual ‘big bad robot’ personality.

The only noise after that was a high-pitched ‘aaaaaaaa’ from Rouge.

Shadow smirked faintly at her reaction. “Do I need to make a dramatic announcement as well?”

“Shut up.” Omega muttered petulantly. If the robot could scowl, Rouge knew he’d be doing so.

“No, hon. Only if you want to.” Rouge said to Shadow, ignoring Omega’s comment.

“Then I suppose…” He clutched one inhibitor ring for a moment. “....I will simply say that I am...happy. Here. With both of you.”

After a couple minutes of comfortable silence, Rouge and Omega both made their way over to the middle of the room, where Shadow’s bed was. Somehow, they worked it out so that all three sat on the mattress and the bat and the hybrid each leaned against one of the robot’s sides, their arms meeting around the back of his metal casing.

It would have made a strange silhouette if anyone could have seen them then, a spiky head and a bat wing the only defining features next to the bulk of a giant robot. But they didn’t give a single thought to how anyone else viewed them.

They were good for each other, even if nobody else had the sense to realize it. All their rough edges and jagged pieces from their pasts just meant that they understood what it was like to go through difficult times and come out the other side.

All three had been alone at some point.

But none of them would have to go through that again.

And Rouge decided on something as she leaned against Omega, her hand on Shadow’s arm. 

The family you find is just as important, and just as real, as the one you’re born with. Many people have one but never the other, but Rouge realized that despite all the terrible things she’d been through…

...somehow she’d been lucky enough to have both.

[misterbitches]

Dude yong jie’s character is literally unbearable this is like how not to write a vharacter 101

Our first intro to him is stalking, then PUNCHING someone in the LIVER bc the person he “loves” was fucking drunk and he blames his best friend? Then his mom is like “lmao actually um hes psycho” so anything they try to do retroactively like how they peppered in HIS DAD DIED A BLOO BLOO but previously it was also his OWN MOM going “im afraid he’ll lose his humanity” so not only was there no breathing room then it’s bumrushing him into their lives as best friends and it doesnt work. This dude sucks and he isnt even fun to watch. You know how breaking bad has one of the most abysmal main characters of all time but all of us were fucking ENGROSSED but the show made it clear that every enemy he faces, even the DEA, we want THEM to win (it is also a class analysis but woreva) so i am like wtf they show us literally nothing here. He’s just there. Wasting space and being awful. What is the purpose of his character in ssu’s life? Once you rape someone it is fucking over full stop but he didnt even fucking manage to start off in any compelling fucking way. Absolutely bonkers dude Esp bc theres at least a base moral code ie DONT HARRASS GIRLS UR “INTO” and thats why mei fang the absolute mad lad beaut was like “lmao nah i hate u”

Soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo?????????????????????????????????? WHERE IS THE WRITING HERE? WHAT IS THE SCRIPT? awhat is the PROGRESSION? This is such an insanely fucking dumb plo5 point i rly cannnnjnnntoeiwijshsgsgsgsgsgsgeggwiwowiw GORL

Lets talk abt the good things in the characters (theres none for yong jie hes just there being a little bitch)

Li cheng - himbo dumbass “manly” cutie and the manly stuff is fun cos it gets heaped on and yet every bit of him can be extremely “feminine” and jubilant. Great.

Muren - seems >:O but i rly like that hes actually pretty open in his own way. Side note: he is so thin and willow-y i rly loke tall pretty boys (and all women lmao) and he doesnt do it for me but He suits the character like his body and the way his character is. Also u gotta be weird and he is

Hsinng ssu (girl im never gonna learn how to spell their names it’s too much work cos the eng alphabet andnromanization is terrible) - mild mannered, good son, a homosexual confirmed confirmed g”(awesome!) great friend, good brother (and i guess his reward is being raped, great message!) and someone ppl like

The establishment of the three of them and their distinct personalities happens within minutes and then we meet

Yongjie - what about him? He may have an MI, okay, but we dont know for sure and oh gee that doesnt matter actually bc u have to get urself treated and also not be terrible. Not even psychopaths do the shit he does BC THEY HAVE TO GET HELP. Why the parents didnt get him help and are just realizing their son is terrible? Who knows . His purpose seems yo be “boy obsessed with brother like his actual brother” i dont care id they arent related in that way bc that’s not the fucking crux of incest and it is so insanely Fucked every thing to do with incest is almost always a disgusting powe r issue. WHAT PURPOSE DOES HE SERVE? WHAT DO WE ONOW ABOUT HIM OTHER THAN HE IS A FUCKING JERK AND AN IDIOT AND SUCKS AND I HATE HIM AND THAT HE WANTS TO STALK AND ATTACK THIS REALLY AWESOME FUCKING DUDE OK

There’s no returning point deom rhe line they croased byt theyb set him up for failure. Even in the fight hes a fucking cheater hes a goddamn immature rat they know he fucking sucks but he just sits there and waits for everyone else to move around him. A fucking selfish prick with nor edeeming qualities snd hes also a violent rapist stalker. Really great that thry have no clue how to make this dude actually have any humanity or likeability. Hes the man from 365 days basically except not even that hot and at least he kidnapped her but “WAITED” for “CONSENT” but in that movie’s world nothing mattered and it was bad and the point was to have a horny movie. But this show is for younger ppl and also IT HAS RULES AND IT KNOWS WHAT BAD ACTIONS ARE???? Soooooooooooooo in all these other dumb salacious books there seems to be just a mutual agreement that it’s fucked up but totally normal i their movie’s universee (it isnt and it is still just bad filmmaking)

Also it is up to yong jie to figure put how to get over it and understand that his brother is concerned for him. Bc it is. His brother. There’s a reason that incest is never advisable and thays bc there is no way in that situation that people aren’t somehow being coerced. There has to be a sort of split in the pursuer and the person being pursued bc one person is not thinking that way. (This is why people who find out they are related after the fact and havent grown up together is something thatms really unfortunate. They had no idea and they have to grapple with that but that is another scenario and it happens bc THEY DIDNT GROW UP TOGETHER.) i have experienced this from a (not immediate) fam member and i was the vulnerable one, had less powr, that is how it must go.

Thats why the power imbalance is scary and none of this is acceptable but it begs the question how did they get to this point? But the show doesnt even address that bc they cant bc theyre not original. And power imbalance does not mean automatic absolutely not territory. Theres things we dont like (in my casee i hate age gaps a lot) but i will avoid that.

I havemt seen “right or wrong” and i have no desire but from what ive garnered from ppl i like who liked that episode, the show outlined the moral issues with it. Idk if they did it in a way i would have preferred (again no desire) but at lesst from what ive heard it...tries? Idk i dont see the need for these if they dont give us a reason why these ppl should be together and there’s several lines that cannot be crossed that were. Basically it’s like stockholm syndrome now and there’s no choice for him, it goes beyond power imbalance and “legality” so to speak and now it’s just entrapment.

Theres not even avoiding or enjoying. Even for MODC as stupid as i found the secondary rship and negligent even like ok. Fine. Whatever. His boyfriend is 100 but at least it was semi agreed upon. It is what it is, go forth. I will criticize it but at least it was the story and as stupid and gross as i think it is and they will probs break up (idc what the show says) at least there are set ups that can make us see “why” it works and oh, gee, their whole rship relies on a different fucked up but at least at some point it could possibly be transcended. The foundation of youngjie is “rape entrapment and aw now they are in lvoe” BITCH NOOOO???? Where is the REASON? And why should we root for them? (There is none and when the Thing happens it is now impossible for that not to be absolutely foundational to their rship lmao and that is never something that goes away.)

I would like to say theres nothing romantic int he flashbacks i know thats what theyre trying to twll us but the actor is 30 and that child is like 8.

Im not missing the point bc i see it with my eyes and it sucks. If you cant even write the character well then how do you interest something heavy and work out the links? The only solution is yongjie dying i mean fucking off forever and hsing ssu not letting him into his lifeXni doubt we will get that but at the very least they cannot end up together and that will be their crowning fucking achievement over the waste of time bullshit plot this was. Imagine actual conflict that wasnt so deeply fucking traumatic and, oh, again WHERE ARE THE PARENTS? They fucked up SO FUCKING BADLY. This gives people the wrong idea about how these things work. God he is truly a shitty character and his ass isnt even fat so wtf bitch why am i here!

[misha-moose-dean-burger-lover]

Every Breath I (Can't) Take.

Sam doesn't come out of his room all night.

Dean waits till it's night, then goes out. He contemplates checking on him another time when he's back, this time with food, but it's the lack of sound through Sam's door which makes him change his mind. Maybe his brother had fallen asleep. And Dean definitely wanted him to rest. Kid needed it, deserved it - really fucking earned it.

So instead, he has dinner by himself, forcing himself to not think about any of it. The deafening silence provokes every bit of emotion he's felt that day to roar back to life. But he shoves them down, follows it with food, and buries it there with alcohol.

When he's finished, he can't bother clearing up. His limbs feel like they'll drop off. He's been on patrol most nights, and the mornings were used up trying to figure out solutions. He's done, and tired, and ready to pass out.

So he picks up his beer - huh, that's far too empty; so then he drains it in a single gulp, and picks up the entire sixpack, and goes to his room.

And that's that. He's managed to make it through the first night.

*

He doesn't know how he manages to fall asleep. He's almost sure he won't be able to, until his head hits the pillow, his back settles in the warm mattress and his feet stretch. He still doesn't think he'll sleep that night - but it's soon that he's completely knocked out.

It's a dreamless slumber though, and he wakes to the world, one eye blinked open at a time - a tired shell of a man; the weight of his losses just beginning to settle.

He gets up.

And tells himself that had he kept lying, horizontal, the pain would just have sedimented at the bottom, and that's just where Dean always was anyways. He'd have gotten crushed under the densing pressure.

So instead, he makes himself stop thinking again, and showers.

*

When Dean drags himself into the kitchen, his head painfully points out that Cas isn't there. Before, he used to be right there, with a cup of coffee on the days Dean was lucky, waiting to ask him how he’d slept.

(When Dean misses Cas, he always misses this version of him, who lived in the bunker and truly lived there too. Back then, Dean could breathe him in the sheets, find him in front of every shelf in the library, and hear him in all the hallways. He used to be so present. Good fucking times.) 

Dean's eyes involuntarily swept the place. As if Cas had snuck back in at night, and might be perched in a particularly camouflaged nook, waiting for Dean to notice.

As if he was ever coming back.

Dean swallowed. Hard. The thoughts he'd fought so hard to keep away were all pushing their way back in. The longer he twitched at Cas's absence. His chest started to constrict.

Gone was the sleep-roughened voice, though he didn't fucking sleep - still so gentle when it addressed him with a 'good morning, Dean'. Missing were the blue, blue eyes which followed Dean as he cluttered around the space to make them both breakfast. No longer, did Dean get to accidentally brush against Cas's shoulder in his hustle - and receive an upturned smile through his eyelashes, when he landed across Cas with his plate full.

Maybe Dean imagines it, but he thinks he swayed on his feet a little bit. And reaches for the counter, just to be sure.

Maybe he's still drunk.

Cas had walked out. And taken with him, all of himself. The talkative smile had disappeared; so soft, enthralling and oh, so contagious.

And then, dawned the earth-shattering realization that Cas was not. Here. Anymore.

Cas used to disappear during the day, angelic errands and noble mercies and whatnot; and Dean ate out at motels and clubs, most nights - but this was a morning. Mornings were what they used to have.

And the fact that Cas wasn't here anymore - that he'd left Dean, left him with that piercing speech, and those flashing eyes, and the finality in the air. And he'd not let it strike him yet - so it struck the hardest yet.

Cas has been wrenched away from him many times. There's been apocalypses, there's been betrayals and there's been the good of the world.

But it's only ever been a compulsion. Cas had to go. It had to happen. The World must be saved, God needed to be found, Lucifer had got to be beaten. And Castiel, hero that he was, such a goddamn courageous sonuvabitch - had to go! It was undeterrable, and Dean had always struggled to let him go - but at least, at the very least, it had always been demanded, all those times.

This time? It had been a choice.

And the selfishness he didn't know he'd been masking, roared in his ears; it was never fine to be away from Cas. But it had still been something Dean was used to, it was relatively okay if the reasons were unstoppable. If it was inevitable. But, this was different.

Dean grabs onto the slab tighter, because his knees feels weak. He needed to get a hold on himself. His head reels, but it isn't like he can stop thinking. One painful thought shoved the last out of the way, and each stream of scenes seemed to take him farther away from the present.

Cas had walked out.

Dean couldn't get him back and pull him home. Not if he wasn't being dragged away in the first place. And that's the crux, isn't it? Some part of sneered. He wasn't being taken away. He had decided to leave.

Dean Winchester had always screwed things up, messed up his life, and almost broke the world a couple of times - but Castiel had never left.

He'd lifted him from his road to corruption. He'd threatened to stay when Dean had the Mark of Cain. He'd refused to let go till the demon in him had been controlled.

And now, he was gone.

Dean's eyes sting, so he screws them shut, and his mouth is dry. He's been clutching onto the counter for a while now, and his knuckles are white now. He's heaving with every breath.

Cas was gone.

Suddenly, it was all that mattered.

Or perhaps, it was all that had ever really mattered, and all that would ever really matter.

But he was gone, and he was done with Dean, and Dean had driven him off, and he wasn't coming back. No, of course he wasn't, because he was moving on - he was moving on from Dean.

Dean's panting now. He has no idea why. He can't stop thinking - about anything, about everything, about nothing at all. He wishes he could. No, this was hyperventilating.

How could Dean ever have told him that there was no moving on for him. From what Cas meant to Dean, and the magnitude of e everything he took up in Dean's life - there wasn't any filling that, not with anything else.

He hadn't said any of it. He'd said absolutely nothing at all. And he should've. Because a Chrysler-shaped piece of his life had been ripped away, and Cas had walked out of the bunker and not looked back. And Dean could never move on from the way he'd looked at Dean - like he wanted Dean to stop him, but didn't believe that he would. Dean could never move on from any of it, at all.

Dean's chest hurts. His lungs fight for air, but his senses don't comply. He can't breathe, and he feels like he might choke.

Cas. Cas! Cas had left him. Cas wouldn't be back! Cas was gone. Cas was -

There are tears streaming down his face.

How had he let this happen? How did he not even move? Cas had been in front of him, why hadn't he been able to stop him then? How had he pushed him away so far, that Cas forgot how much Dean needed him to come back? How could he have -

Dean was a fucking asshole. He'd been a goddamn jackass. Cas should hate him. Cas did hate him. Cas needed to come back, but Dean deserved this, and yet -

"Ahh!" He growls, trying to make himself stop. He's trembling, his face is burning up, the tears won't stop. He needs to stop thinking, about Cas, about everything -

Cas doesn't want anything to do with him, anymore. Dean won't ever get to see those eyes again. Make him laugh. Fight by his side. Clink his beer to his, or make fun of his tastes in movies. Dean wasn't going to get any more of Cas.

Because Cas was moving on. He had upped, and gathered all of himself, and walked out of Dean's life. But he'd forgotten to take with him the pieces which were studded in Dean's soul, the wisps of grace that had flowed through Dean's veins since Hell had happened, and all the love that Dean had collected for Cas in his heart.

Dean gasps, struggling. He's sweating profusely, and he might have fallen if he hadn't been holding onto the slab. "AHHH!"

The last sound is wrenched from his gut, as Dean's hands give up on him, and he stumbles. He reaches out to catch hold of something, anything - his head spirals, he knows he's going to fall -

"Dean?"

Dean turns wildly at the voice, hoping in his state of desperation that it's -

"Dean, are you okay?" Sam runs towards him, his eyes wide with concern. "Fuck, Dean, what happened? Calm down!" His hands held Dean up, almost bringing him into a hug - or maybe that was Dean who was doing that. "You're having a panic attack, Dean! Sit down! What's happening? What do you need? Say something!"

"Sam." Dean lets his weight fall on Sam, but it still felt like all of the guilt never stops pushing down on him. His voice shivers, just as he does, as he looks at his younger brother, who looks frenzied at his state. Had Dean seen himself, he wouldn't have been particularly reassured, either.

"It's Cas." His voice cracks, and Sam swears under his breath, probably assuming the worst. And then Dean tells him. "Sammy, Cas left."

[slightlyrebelliouswriter23]

We’re All Mad Here | Jurdan College AU

Summary: Tenacious student, Jude Duarte, discovers a dark underworld in the very heart of RGU. It’s all just a game of Russian Roulette. Harmless, as long as you’re the one holding the gun.

Content Warning: Cursing, mild mention of panic attack (to skip, stop reading between the ~~~~~)

Part II   |   Masterlist   |   AO3

Part I- Slow Burn

I, Jude Duarte, third year at Royal Greenbriar University and soon-to-be reigning Top Scholar, am in a hurry.

It’s rush hour. The pavement is slick with sleet and packed with important people in fancy suits. They brave sheets of freezing rain that lash down from the angry October skies with an unending canopy of black umbrellas.

I don’t carry my own. Umbrellas aggravate the chaos of mornings in Insmire, and I don’t need to add another to the mix.

Luckily, I am short. Manoeuvring through gaps in elbows and shoulders does not take much effort on my part. It’s the briefcases and patches of ice which make running a bit of a challenge this morning—but then, I have always enjoyed a challenge.

As I tear through the crowded streets of Insmire, I only know one thing: No amount of wind or hail or people can stop me. And if anyone gets bludgeoned with my thirty-pound backpack as I weave through the throng, well, that’s on them.

Cold air slices through me with every heave of my lungs, every pounding thud of my boots on the sidewalk. My legs are sore from yesterday’s fencing practice, but I savour the sweet ache and forge on.

I am used to this rushing, for I am always in a hurry. It sometimes feels like I’ve been in a hurry from my very first breath. As if I’m constantly trying to catch up to something just out of my grasp.

My twin sister, Taryn, and I were born in a hurry.

So excited were we to join the ranks of men, we surprised our mother half to death by wandering into the world nearly four weeks early.

As a result, we spent the next several weeks of our lives as tiny things in incubators—a little sickly and terribly jaundiced. This was how our mother always used to describe it, at least.

Ever since then, I have been invariably late to everything. Mostly, I blame it on the incubators. And the jaundice.

If I’m being honest with myself, though, being always late is a trait I can only attribute to who I am as a person. It is as much a part of me as the tip of my left ring finger is not.

I sometimes wonder if that’s exactly the crux of it; that just like my fingertip, my punctuality has somehow been taken from me, too.

I have heard of twins absorbing their siblings in the womb. I can’t see why personality traits should be any different. Especially since Taryn and I had to spread them so thinly between two of us.

And Taryn is always perfectly on time.

I risk a glance at my watch. A tiny crack runs up the glass. It’s been there for ages, but I am still nettled by the sight of it and the unbidden memory it stirs.

It’s because of this tiny crack that the watch’s face is now fogged up from the inside. I can barely make out the three little golden hands racing each other toward my tardiness.

Seven minutes past eight.

I am really very late. Or, I know I will be, at least.

Technically, if I go straight to the Silhouette Gazette now, I will be right on time for my interview.

But I can’t go straight there. Not when I haven’t had coffee.

Without my fix, I won’t be able to string together even one sentence. Much less make it through an entire interview with enough charisma to snag the internship position I so desperately need. Since I am not very charismatic to begin with, I’ll need all the help I can get.

Everything depends on my getting this internship. If I don’t, there’s no way I’ll maintain my near-perfect GPA, no way I’ll graduate summa cum laude or Valedictorian of my class.

And then I’ll have to go into something boring. Like publishing. A shudder runs through me that has nothing to do with the cold.

I shove between two men wearing long coats and flat caps. They grunt in shock and disapproval. I hardly feel the zing of pain as my shin collides with something hard.

A briefcase flies out of its owner’s grip, crashing onto the pavement a few yards away. I don’t stop to apologise.

“Bitch!” One of the flat caps shouts after me.

Yes, I agree silently, hopping over the felled bag. I am very much that.

If I had the time and breath to tell the men just the same, I would. Instead, I flip them a rude gesture over my shoulder and don’t turn around.

I’m already ten paces away when a dull throbbing starts on my leg. It radiates from where I know there’ll be an unsightly bruise tomorrow. But bruises are a thing for future Jude to handle.

There is no way I will let what happened last year happen again. Second-year was a fluke. A one-time thing.

I will get this internship, take back my rightful title of Top Scholar, and keep it until I graduate—just like my mother did. I absolutely refuse to be beaten out by some preppy moneybags prick.

Or a bit of hail.

Before flying out the door of my flat this morning, I did a quick search on Google Maps, the results of which yielded the quirky little coffee shop I now see in my line of vision.

The White Rabbit sits mercifully in all its three-story glory right across the street from the newspaper’s office building. If luck is on my side, if I hurry, I should have just enough time to grab a cup to-go and make it with a minute or two to spare.

My thoughts are all jumbled as I barrel through the glass doors.

A white-haired barista stands behind the counter at the back of the shop, taking a customer’s order with an unbearable amount of cheer for a Monday morning.

The queue isn’t too bad, maybe three people long. I send up a quick thanks to whatever power of the universe might be in charge of coffee queues.

It smells miraculous in here—freshly ground coffee and something buttered and flakey. Suddenly, I am too warm.

I make a beeline for the back of the queue, shucking off my hat and gloves as I go. I’m unzipping my coat, a difficult task with hands full of knitted things, when a wall of black blurs into my periphery.

I don’t have a second to react before that wall smacks me right in the forehead. And collides everywhere else.

A scalding liquid sloshes down the front of my shirt. I stumble backwards, gasping at the pain.

There is a very loud “Fuck” followed by an equally as loud “Shit!”

I am not sure which curse fell from my lips, but I know it was one of them. All I can feel is this dreadful sting. It spreads like a wildfire across my chest.

Perhaps, I’d cursed both words. The pain certainly warrants it.

“Are you alright, dear?” a dark, silken voice asks. A pair of beringed hands steady me, grasping my shoulders with the barest of touches. As quickly as they appeared, like that they are gone. And then they are handing me a wad of brown paper napkins.

“Here,” the voice says.

I snatch the proffered napkins and look up at my assailant.

Perfect. Just perfect, I think with a scowl. Of course the person who spills their drink down my blouse has to be stupidly attractive.

The man before me is so beautiful it’s almost cruel.

A crown of crow dark curls circles his head, framing his oil slick eyes and sharp cheekbones. His is an unnecessary sort of perfection that sets my teeth grinding.

He’s clad in all black, save for his coat—a beaded brocade of black and crimson silk with quilted red lapels. From the breast pocket, a beaded scarlet brooch in the shape of a dahlia dangles in ostentatious splendour.

There is something familiar about him I can’t quite grasp.

For some inexplicable reason I amount to probable insanity, I cannot stop my gaze from flitting to his mouth.

Bad idea. Very bad idea.

His lips look like two full flower petals. I’m plagued by the inane thought that they might feel just as soft. If I can only reach out and—

I shake my head.

Concern creases the man’s brow now. To my horror, I realise I haven’t responded to his question. I’ve just stood here, dripping and sticky, for who knows how long. Staring. Like an idiot.

“I’m fine,” I grit out through barred teeth and my own mortification. I pat at the stain hastily with the wad of napkins. “I’m just great.”

It’s useless, of course.

The stain isn’t coming out, I’m late to my life-altering interview, and to make matters worse, I still haven’t had coffee. Not to mention, my chest burns in a way that makes me tempted to scrap everything in favour of a doctor’s office.

~~~~~

That’s when panic seizes hold.

A strand of pearls tightening around my throat. I am sure it means to strangle me because I cannot breathe.

My heart takes flight, battering my ribcage as if it intends to escape entirely. A trail of sweat trickles down my forehead.

I am going to be late. I am going to have this horrid stain on my shirt. I am going to fail this interview. I am going to fail this year and myself and my family.

There’s something heavy sitting on my lungs. I am both hot and cold, here and not.

Tears prick my eyes. I will them not to spill over, but of course, my body betrays me. I swipe furiously at my cheeks.

Everyone in the coffee shop plus one unfortunately attractive dude must be staring, watching as I teeter on the edge of full-blown hysterics.

“Hey,” Unfortunately Attractive Dude croons, but I don’t see him.

I try to draw even breaths. And fail. And fail again.

~~~~~

I’m barely aware of the hand that guides me to a corner of the coffee shop. It’s darker here. A bit quieter, too. I notice a large bookshelf obscuring the alcove from the main seating area. Away from prying eyes.

“Just relax,” the man says. “It’s going to be okay. Are you hurt?” He looks inclined to place his hand on my shoulder again but thinks better of it when he sees my expression.

I want to punch him in his stupid face. Maybe I should. It’s only fair, given the circumstances.

“Relax?” I scoff, hating the way my voice cracks. “Don’t tell me to relax. I’ve got an interview in ten minutes and I’m fairly certain my would-be boss won’t appreciate my being late. Or this sort of oversharing.”

I make a wild gesture at the stain on my chest, ignoring the slight tremor in my hands. I am acutely aware of the fabric’s transparency there. Today was not the day to wear a bright purple bra.

A moment passes before a smirk slips into place on Unfortunately Attractive Dude’s hateful mouth. He folds his arms across his chest, giving me a once over.

“You sure about that?” he drawls, and now I am positive I’m going to punch him. My hands curl into fists at my sides.

“You’re disgusting.”

“And you, sunshine, are no longer having a panic attack.”

Indeed, the tightening in my throat has waned. But as keen an observation as it might be, I would first run my hand through with my fencing sabre than admit he is right.

“I wasn’t having a panic attack,” I say too quickly. He produces a smug expression that is just as bewitching as it is infuriating.

He knows what I’ve said is a lie. I know it’s a lie, too. Very deep down. In some dark forgotten place inside me where things that don’t want to be admitted go.

The man grins as if I should be grateful. I am decidedly not.

“I don’t know who you think you are,” I say, taking a step toward him. “But don’t pretend to know me. Because you don’t.”

He lifts a brow—the worst kind of dare. “Don’t I?”

“No,” I say. I hope I come off more menacing than I feel with my tearstained cheeks and conspicuous underthings on display for all the world to see.

“Pity,” he says, still wearing that stupid smile. “You seem delightful.”

My face grows hot. Blood pounds heavy in my ears, and I feel like I’m running anew. I’m so angry I cannot think.

And apparently, I don’t think—because I take another step closer.

The rest of the world slides away. It’s just me and this loathsome beautiful heinous man in a secluded corner of a strange coffee shop.

He towers over me, lithe and angled, face limned in shadow. He’s unflinching and returns my gaze with equal distaste.

My heart skitters wildly, stumbling one beat over the next like it knows it's been spotted by something with sharp claws and jagged teeth.

In the unclosed space between us, a glittery treacherous thing ripples.

I am suddenly very glad for bookshelves.

I should leave. I should go to my interview before I do something I will regret. Before I ruin everything. I should walk away.

Then, I do the opposite of that.

“I’m the farthest thing from delightful,” I tell him, shooting a dagger-filled glare from beneath the hood of my brow. “Which is why I’d strongly advise against getting in my way again. And don’t call me sunshine.”

Something smells familiar; like a forest in winter. Like cedarwood and myrrh. With a jolt, I realise it’s him and dig my nails into the meat of my palm.

He chuckles, raising his hands in defence. “Fine,” he says. “Won’t happen again. But at least come with me. I think I can help.” He juts his chin toward the back of the coffee shop, presumably towards the toilets.

I wrinkle my nose.

This can’t seriously be some kind of come-on. I don’t have time for unsolicited advances right now. I don’t even have time for solicited advances.

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I spit, and he flinches. “First, you give me third-degree burns. What’s next? Chop me up in the alley out back?”

The corner of his mouth twitches slightly. “As appealing as that sounds,” he says. “I’m shit with knives.”

“Oh, that’s a comfort.”

“Better with fabric, though.” He gives an unbothered shrug. “I was going to offer to get that out for you.” The man nods, seemingly unfazed, at my chest. Heat rises in my cheeks again.

“You’ve done enough already,” I snap.

Maybe I’ll just wear my winter coat through the whole cursed interview. Even that would be a better solution than this conversation.

I turn on my heel to leave, but the man catches my wrist.

Bad move, I think.

I’m contemplating dragging him out of this alcove by the ear so I can punch him in front of every customer in this coffee shop when, to my surprise, he lets go.

The man rakes a hand through his dark curls, heaving a great sigh.

“Wait. Just...” he starts. “Look, I feel bad enough as is. Let me make it up to you. It’ll take five minutes. You’ll only be a little late to your interview, and you won’t have to deal with a dry cleaner’s bill.”

I snort. I haven’t been able to afford dry cleaning since I stopped living in Madoc’s house two years ago. I will likely have to throw this shirt away if I can’t get the stain out with a good old-fashioned scrubbing.

“I’ll buy you a coffee for your troubles while we wait.”

I consider him for a moment. He seems sincere enough, though attractive people always seem sincere, even when they are truly not.

Now, though, I don’t really have much left in me to care.

I want the stain out of my blouse, a vat of coffee in my system, and a teleportation device that can transport me to the sixth floor of the Silhouette immediately.

If this man is a willing rung in the ladder to get me even two-thirds of those things, I will consider it a blessing.

“Fine,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I’ll take a large cappuccino. Extra shot of espresso. And a shot of caramel. To go.”

“Wonderful.” The dazzling man smiles his dazzling smile. “Follow me.” And with that, he leads the way out of the alcove, a gleeful bound in his step.

I already regret my decision.

☽☽☽☽☽

Part II 

Masterlist 

AO3

Tag List: @the-mithridatism-of-jude-duarte @velarhysismine @knifewifejude

AN: this was originally sent to me as a request for the prompt “I’m running late to an important interview/meeting and you accidentally spill your hot cocoa all over my outfit” from a winter prompt list. but it spiralled into several chapter outlines and an almost fully-fledged plot so i’m rolling with it.

anyway, thanks so much for reading! hope you enjoyed :) if you’d like to be tagged in future updates for this AU, feel free shoot me an ask/message.

a few disclaimers:

1. i don’t think publishing is boring! i’m technically trying to go into publishing for my career so really just poking fun at myself. but i do think jude would find publishing (or any other office job) incredibly boring.

2. the depiction of jude’s panic attack is provided by yours truly, though i do not claim to speak for everyone who gets them, and am aware that they differ in both manifestation and severity from person to person. this just pertains to my own experience.

3. i was definitely listening to slow burn by kacey musgraves while writing part of this lmao (hence the chapter name).

[agentsokka]

Nott’s Conflicting Narratives

[[Spoilers for Campaign 2 up to Episode 75]]

Man. D’you ever get the need to talk about how much you love your favorite character? Because I am feeling PASSIONATE for a specific little goblin girl right now.

I love Nott. She’s the peanut butter to my jam, the sugar to my spice, the awkward green butterball mushing around in my heart. She’s my absolute FAVORITE character of the cast and one of my all-time favorite characters in general. So, of course, I feel the need to bend over backwards, snap my spine into a pretzel, and projectile vomit my absolute love for this woman all over your dashes.

In this piece, I wanted to talk about her personal growth over the story and how she’s evolved from what viewers believed was merely a skittish, oddball of a green powder monkey klepto into an equally odd but emotionally resonant mother desperate to reclaim her life and family.

In my opinion, Nott’s overarching story revolves around a mother attempting to recapture her personal narrative from a world that has tried to tear it away from her.

Let’s first establish Nott’s position as the “mother” of the Mighty Nein.

Time for a recap.

As we discover in episode 49, Nott is a little goblin girl, who was once a young halfling woman, who was once a halfling child. In her desperate dash to protect her family from goblin kidnappers, the halfling woman known as Veth Brenatto is recaptured and put to death. Her corpse is then reanimated into the flesh puppet goblin suit we know and love today. In this process, her skin, body, and even mind are reconstructed to be more goblin-esque – a situation which Veth vehemently despises. To put distance between herself and her former life, she renames herself “Nott the Brave,” an anagram of Veth Brenatto.

“They made me everything… that I thought I was. Not pretty…not good. Just not.”

This event is significant for a multitude of reasons, primarily of which revolve around Nott’s relationship with motherhood.

In her essay The Symbolic Annihilation of Mothers in Popular Culture, Berit Astrӧm (2015) observes that mother characters are routinely devalued in popular culture via what she terms “symbolic annihilation.” Gaye Tuchman (1978) originally coined the phrase to describe the way in which media trivializes, condemns, or outright excludes mothers, but Astrӧm extends it to include the removal of mothers from narratives entirely.

We’ve seen this play out time and time again: for example, how many times have we questioned “what happened to the mother” in Disney movies? Often, we see that their exclusions leave little impact on the story and characters, with many media franchises unceremoniously minimizing the mother’s very existence as if it held no more meaning than an ironically titled paperweight.

Now, how does this apply to Nott?

Nott’s character is an inversion of this trope. Although she is killed by the goblins as per the trope’s wont, the narrative does not revolve around her son or husband trying to cope with her loss. Instead, the narrative remains centered on she the mother as this little goblin girl punches a fist through the earth and screams NOT TODAY SATAN. Her story revolves around her identity as a mother, and it takes shape in a plethora of different ways.

Nott exhibits many atypical characteristics that are not commonly associated with the idealized form of “motherhood.” She’s loud, she’s boisterous, she’s mischievous. She’s self-admittedly “strange” and eccentric. She saw it suit to dump a pitcher of cucumbers and proceed to eat them off the ground. Absolutely no one can convince me that this a goblin-specific trait and not just Nott being her weird little self.

And yet, Nott exhibits many typically feminine/motherly traits as well. In spite of her vulgarities, she’s gentle and kind towards Caleb, and it takes some time for their relationship to evolve beyond that. She likes dresses! She likes feeling pretty even though the situation rarely allows her to be. She likes to collect buttons and baubles and cutesy trinkets. And most of all, Nott expresses love. Beau’s the first person in the group to say it to someone else, but Nott is the first of anyone to emphatically express her love for this ragtag group of misfits they’ve wrangled together.

“I know we have things to do, and I want to do them, but the reason I want to find these people and rescue them is not to use them, or not because we’ve invested time in them. But it’s because… I love them.”

Nott is very much “the Heart” of the Mighty Nein, in spite of her idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. In this sense, she views herself as their mother – not just as Caleb’s parental figure, but the entirety of the group. It’s not just a meme, with adoption papers scrawled across a series of barbeque-stained napkins in chicken scratch. Over time, she’s genuinely adopted the M9 as her own, welcoming them under her stubby wings. Nott has said as much several times, but most significantly in episode 76, when she told Caleb that she wanted to protect everyone on their own individual quests.

“I protected you so that you could go on your journey and find yourself and fulfill your quest. I feel like I’ve got to do that for everyone now because, I don’t know, deep down inside it feels like my quest might not be done till everyone else has figured out who they are and what they want in this world. Everyone’s seeking something, you know?”

This protection – this overwhelming need to shield, to safeguard, to provide security and aegis – is crucial to recognizing what Nott is as a parent. A protector. A defender. Nott firmly believes that protection is representative of parenthood, its indistinguishable mirror image.

How do I know this? Nott confirmed it word-for-word in episode 13, when she explained her relationship with Caleb to the rest of the M9.

“Caleb and I have a very special…relationship. And it’s that of a parent and a child. But I am the parent, you do understand that, correct? I protect him. He’s my boy, and I keep him safe. … It’s my job to protect him, because I love him, and I am his protector.”

Nott clearly associates parenthood with protection. She reiterates it again and again. If you fall under her protection, you are her child. It doesn’t matter how old you are, how strong you are, how quick you are – she will protect you to the very last inch of her life. And over the course of the campaign, many, many times over, she’s nearly given said life to ensure the protection of others. An early example is when Nott threw her body over Caleb’s to shield him from attack. In 45, she drew the blue dragon’s attack to save Jester, shaving her hit points down to 1.

Nott again establishes this in 76.

“So I feel like, I need to be there to protect you all. To rescue you when there’s a dragon about to kill you and use my body as a shield; or to pull Beauregard out of the mouth of a worm; or to catch you when someone falls with a feather fall spell.”

This is a fundamental aspect of her character, and explains the majority of her actions. Even though she’s anxious and scared, Nott powers through her fears to protect her loved ones at any cost necessary – with a few nips to soothe her nerves, of course.

And as sweet as this gremlin of a goblin is, she doesn’t extend her protection to everyone she meets – she’s self-sacrificial, but only to her proverbial children, after they’ve spent more than enough time becoming comfortable with one another. In episode 75, for example, Nott suggested that Reani was expendable and thus should go first when facing the dragon. She likes Reani, sure, but if it came down to her and the M9? The outsider would be the first to go.

This further lends itself to the idea that Nott perceives protection as parenthood, self-sacrifice as motherly duty – she’s not just a nice gal throwing down her life in order to ensure the welfare of others, but only for the select few she deems in need of her protection.

However, Nott isn’t just a mother, which comes to the crux of this post. For the majority of the campaign, Nott has primarily identified as a mother figure – to Luc, to Caleb, to the M9 at large. But over time, she’s steadily developed into wanting to be more than just a mother. At the very least, she’s expressed her desires more openly over the course of the show as time has gone on. This development intersects with her identity issues as Nott struggles to reconcile two conflicting lives.

Throughout her short life – and I do mean short, she’s only about 25 (I’m turning 25 this month and the extent to which this little goblin has pushed herself through sends me into anxiety just by association) – Nott’s life has followed a very, shall we say, standard route. She’s always been someone’s daughter – someone’s wife – someone’s mother. Veth Brenatto grew up the small town of Felderwin with very few expectations of their people beyond the usual sort, assuming that said small town followed real-world small-town culture. As such, Veth traversed domestic paths in life, not straying far from those expectations. In spite of her intelligence and capabilities, Veth remained a housewife essentially, assisting Yeza when need be and taking care of Luc. This narrative held steady for some time.

And everything changed when the Fire Nation goblins attacked.

Veth’s narrative as a mother, as a wife, as a little halfling from the little hovel hole of Felderwin, was abruptly disrupted when she became Nott. Her narrative was stolen from her, manipulated and perverted into something she deemed grotesque. Forced to co-exist with the tribe, Nott becomes the torturer’s assistant – the absolute antithesis to motherhood in the representative forebearer of violence, depravity, and death. Her desire to nurture and protect is met with oppression and bloodshed.  

It’s no wonder Nott detests the narrative the goblins thrust upon her. Her goblin exterior fundamentally represents a life forced upon her, a narrative chosen without her consent.

“I just don't like how I feel when I see my hands or my feet. They just feel wrong. I want to be different.”

“I'll be honest. I've started forgetting what it feels like to be a halfling, to be me. I don't remember everything any more. I feel like every day I'm more and more goblin. I don't like it at all. I don't like myself at all.”

“There's still something that's not right about this. This is not my body. It's just not me. And people liking you is nice, and people accepting you is nice. But if you feel wrong inside your own skin, then, well, you can't be a good mother or a good wife, or a good anything, really.”

Upon escaping, her narrative again changes: she’s no longer anyone’s assistant, but existing for herself. And only herself. Before she meets Caleb, she’s alone, unwanted by the populace at large and unable to return to Felderwin. She’s no longer a mother – just detested vermin looking to steal and connive, so people would believe.

That is partially why, in my opinion, she adopts Caleb as her own so quickly. Of course, Nott sees him as a means to an end in the beginning, as does he. They both admit that they had ‘other intentions’ in staying together than purely out of goodness of their hearts. However, it is evident that well before the campaign started, these two forged a bond that went beyond that of convenience. Nott fills the hole in her heart, the hole in her very narrative, by becoming Caleb’s adoptive mother, assisting him in his ventures and protecting him whenever need be. By doing this, she is able to choose for herself, to differentiate herself from the goblin’s narrative of pain and misery. She is no longer just “not,” she is Nott, Nott the Brave.

As was aforementioned, Nott’s motherhood narrative grows to include the rest of the M9. However, with time, she reaches a conflict within herself: while she hates being a goblin, she enjoys her new lifestyle. Is she afraid? She’s fucking petrified. Yet like the rest of the group, she’s fallen in love with adventuring, the highs and lows that demonstrate the extent of her capabilities. Nott isn’t just an assistant anymore – she can do magic! She can fight, she can pick locks, she can adapt firearms and create explosive weaponry. Hell, she can wield a crossbow with the dexterity of an Olympic gymnast and liquidate giant spiders into bloody pastes on the wall. With the M9, she’s seeing the world, far beyond the borders of Felderwin and her small-town life.

And suddenly, Veth’s narrative as a stay-at-home mom isn’t so appealing anymore.

Is there a problem inherent to existing as a housewife and full-time mother? No, of course not. Nevertheless, Nott has found herself in a strange position – she longs for her old life and family, ripped away from her by the gnarled claws of fate, yet remains enthralled by the wonders this new narrative can offer her.

In 36, Nott reveals to Cadeuceus that she believes the M9 could be representative of a new life for her – a new narrative.

“I’m not a religious lady, but I will tell you that, for me, this journey with the group has been a bit of a sign. … A sign that there could be, for all of us, another chapter.”

It’s a new chapter, a new narrative, a new life for Nott. One she could never have imagined possible for her in the confines of her small town. And by god, does she want to live it. Nott expressed this desire to live this life to its fullest, to live this new narrative to its fullest, in 27 after Molly’s death.

“Mollymauk was a rainbow man who represented life at its fullest. And. That’s what I want, even more than… even more than what we’re going for before. Together, we’re sort of living life now, aren’t we? And before, we were… in the darkness, so. … I want to find them so we don’t go back to the way it was, when we were hiding in the shadows and, and ducking into alleys to get away from people. We were safe, but we weren’t really alive, right? With these people, we’re having fun and winning contests. And. And killing bad guys, and rescuing children…it’s amazing.”

I’m of the opinion that Nott’s speech is reflective of both her experiences with Caleb as well as her own in Felderwin. She was living before – and she enjoyed it, yes! She obviously loves Yeza and Luc. But now, she’s seeing what life can be like when lived to its fullest, seeing what life can be like when she spearheads her own narrative. She gleans inspiration from Mollymauk, who decided to head his own narrative and remain unrepentantly unconcerned with what his past might have been like. With his death, Nott becomes convinced that she needs to truly lead this life, lead this newfound narrative with this family she’s amassed.

But with that realization comes conflict once the dredges of Nott’s previous life begin seeping into her narrative. This is especially once Nott reunites with Yeza in Xhorhas.

“Caleb, I’m feeling uneasy. … I, because. What the fuck am I doing here? I just was reunited with my husband, and I’ve – I -- we were given a chance to go on an adventure and I jumped at it like that. Am I a bad person? I just left him, I ditched my husband in a den of monsters to go adventuring with you.”

Rather than hold down the fort with her newly reunited husband, Nott instinctively leaps at the chance for adventure, the chance to go out and see more of the world. She doesn’t even think about it, it’s just oh? A side quest? Well fuck me rosy, time to knock my crossbow. Because that’s what Nott would do, not Veth. And once she realizes what she’s done, Nott begins wondering if she’s a terrible person for living her life. She begins questioning her intentions, wondering whether her actions are the ploy of some subconscious desire to remain free, remain independent of her responsibilities. 

“You don’t think I’m just…delaying the inevitable? Scared of going back to my old life, or anything?”

Nott further recognizes the disparity between her two lives and how wide the gulf between them yawns. 

“It’s just, I just don’t know like. Is he gonna…even like me anymore, I’m so different. Not just physically, I do different things now. … Will I like it? I’ve gotten a taste of adventure and, and seeing the world, and now I’ve gotta go back and be a…a housewife again?”

Nott doesn’t even know if she wants to be called Veth anymore. Not by people who have come into her life since Veth’s apparent demise. When Caleb asks her in 59, she dismisses the question and asserts that they should just go with Nott for now.

She asks Caleb to tell her what she should do, in a desperate plea for someone else to give her direction in life. Because driving your own narrative is hard. It’s a painful, painful process, full of ups and downs and mistakes and setbacks. But Caleb fundamentally cannot decide her narrative for her -- it’s Nott’s narrative, not his. He can help her along and support her, but he will never be able to direct it. She has to do it for herself. 

(As a side note: I love, love, love how far Nott and Caleb’s relationship has come. Prior to the Xhorhas arc, Nott never bothered him with her problems, drudging on ahead as she didn’t want to “distract” him from his personal quest. She’s exactly like a mother, masking her insecurities and fears from her young child so that they won’t worry about what they can’t control. And now, as her child has grown up and become more aware of his mother’s struggles, she’s leaning on him more and more for support. It truly mirrors parent-child relationships and is representative of how far these characters have grown over time.)

With these conversations, it becomes evident that Nott is seeking more than family, more than the life of a housewife. And yet, simultaneously, she embodies the narrative of a mother, loves being a mother, and loves the people in both her immediate and found families. To merge these narratives will be an almost insurmountable task, from her perspective -- how can you raise a family when you’re constantly adventuring? You can’t endanger their lives. Conversely, is it responsible of a parent to endanger their own life, potentially risking everything for adventure’s sake? To widow your husband and orphan your child if something goes horribly wrong? If she becomes a housewife again, how long can she keep up the charade pretending she’s a halfling? If she stays, will she forever remain uncomfortable in her own skin? How long will she even live? Nott is juggling so many plates, and dropping even one could result in the partial devastation of these narratives she’s cultivated.

And she’s scared. She’s really, really scared. Nott is petrified of what comes next -- she knows it’s inevitable that she’s going to have to face these conflicting narratives in the future. She knows she can’t ignore it forever. And that prospect terrifies her. She says this explicitly in episode 69.

“I'm just scared, that's all. I'm scared of...I'm scared of what happens next. You know? I don't know what's going to happen after this. I found my husband. I found my son. And I want to go back with them so much. ... But I'm worried that if I go back, that'll be it.”

This overwhelming, paralyzing sense of fear has driven Nott to drink. Even more so than usual. Over the course of the show, Nott has made no secret of her drinking habits. She’s a drunkard -- she knows it, the M9 knows it. You, me, and the NSA agent watching you behind the screen know it. But it’s no accident the M9 has begun commenting more and more on her habitual intoxication. She simply is more intoxicated than usual. She’s depending more and more on her alcoholism to get through each day.  

Nott is of course afraid of enemies, of secret dangers lurking behind every corner. She’s a perpetually anxious person, constantly filled with frenetic energy. But these anxieties have worsened ten-fold with the inclusion of her intersecting narratives and responsibilities. And honestly? With all that going on in her brain, Nott just flat out doesn’t want to think about it. She wants to live in the moment -- not in the past, not in the future, but the present.

“I'm thinking about things. And I don't want to think about things. I don't want to think about anything. I just want to be on an adventure with you guys and that's all I want and I don't want to think about anything else past that.” 

And so, she turns to drinking. As she tells Caleb, drinking is her own form of self-care. While she may protect others, she herself needs protection too -- from her own thoughts, fears, and inner demons. From the physical dangers that manifest in front of her very person. 

“I know you all have my back, I know you all care for me, but no one has my front. So this flask that I drink from, it’s not for fun, I’m not taking nips because I’m looking for fun. If I wanted fun I’d be in Nicodranus with my family. This flask is my shield. It allows me to do these things, to go forward and to protect all of you.”

Nott needs to shield herself from fears that she may not come back to her family. She needs to shield herself from fears that she won’t find a remedy to her situation, that she won’t ever be Veth again. She needs to shield herself from fears that these conflicting narratives will never reconcile, thereby isolating her from either family she’s come to love as her own. 

All in all, Nott is currently torn between two lives -- one whose existence is linked to traditional motherhood, and another whose fate is yet undecided. And yet, by continuing with the M9, Nott has found herself on the path towards potential self-realization. This route she treads has the potential to shed the narrative the goblins thrust upon her and totally make one anew, one that is her own. In that sense, it’s representative of what this narrative means as a whole: Nott is more than just a mother. She’s a mother with autonomy. A mother with hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Unlike Berit Astrӧm’s (2015) analysis of symbolic annihilation, she is more than just a paper cutout of idealized motherhood left to be abandoned.

Indeed, Nott can be a mother without being the mother archetype.

Nott will certainly struggle to reconcile these narratives. She loves being a mother, but she clearly wants to love herself too. She wants to be more than just a mother, and thus she quests to recapture her personal narrative -- one where she can be both a mother and retain her personal autonomy. 

I love the nuance and complexity Sam has demonstrated with this character, and I’m sure we’re only going to see more in the future.

[flightfoot]

Addressing Syren Salt

Okay look. So sometimes I see Adrien salted for his actions for Syren. For him sitting around while he waits for Ladybug to get back, finally getting fed up with being left in the dark (though notably, he does NOT take it out on Ladybug, he’s more annoyed at whoever’s telling her not to share), and finally threatening to give up the ring.

Just to remind everyone of the actual exchange:

Cat Noir: This is so dumb! (stands up) Claws in. (detransforms) Plagg: (groans) What's taking her so long? (Adrien holds up his hands to Plagg, and starts to pull off his ring a little bit) Whoa, easy! W-What are you doing?! Adrien: (grimly) If you don't tell me what Ladybug is hiding from me, I'm done! Plagg: You can't do that! Adrien: (bitterly) Why not? No one'll know if I quit. No one'll care! Plagg: I will! Adrien: Why? (cynically) Because you won't have anyone to give you Camembert? Plagg: Oh, I'm sure there'll be another Cat Noir to give me cheese... (pauses, and turns to Adrien) ...but he won't be you. (Adrien's expression softens) Master Fu: (suddenly appears next to Adrien) Hello, Cat Noir. (Adrien turns and gasps in shock)

A few things to note here: His reason for getting rid of the ring isn’t just a childish tantrum to try and get what he wants. He genuinely doesn’t think he matters here, that his absence will harm anyone. It’s not like he’s needed for the Miraculous Cure or for purifying akumas, he technically doesn’t HAVE to be there, especially since Ladybug now has other allies (or well, just one ally at this point in the show) that she can call on. So it’s not like this is some huge ultimatum that will doom Paris if he goes through with it, at least to his perception.

Also honestly I’m pretty sure he’d just give Plagg to someone else so they can be the new Chat, though it’s hard to know for sure with so little canon material to draw from for that kind of thing.

Yeah, he’s upset for being left out of the loop, and honestly I can’t blame him. I think that’s just being human. Especially since they ARE supposed to be partners, not Hero and Sidekick. It makes more sense when Ladybug starts training to become a Guardian I think, but Chat doesn’t even know the Guardian EXISTS, so he has no idea why his partner, his equal, suddenly HAS more secrets concerning the Miraculous than he does. And not even knowing WHY she suddenly knows where to get more Miraculous, why she’s allowed to know more than he is... yeah that would bother me too.

It kinda makes me wonder; if Marinette was in his position, with Chat suddenly pulling more allies out of nowhere, being allowed to know their identities, and just generally knowing more about the Miraculous and not being allowed to share, would she be bothered by that at all? At repeatedly being told to wait for Chat to go do something somewhere, but not being allowed to know what it is or why, when previously they were pretty much equal partners, at least as far as knowledge and experience goes? Do you think that would bother her at all with it happening repeatedly?

That’s not really the crux of the MAIN salt I see concerning Syren though. The major salt seems to be centered around him threatening to quit while Paris was underwater, under the assumption that he’s thinking about quitting while many, many Parisians are dead or drowning, and that he needs to suck it up.

If this was a more serious, gritty show, I’d probably agree. Like most live-action superhero movies? Sure. Or grittier superhero shows that have major, potentially life-ending consequences for supervillain attacks, like season 3 of Young Justice? Absolutely!

But Miraculous Ladybug IS. NOT. ONE. OF. THOSE. SHOWS. It’s fairly lighthearted and the world was pretty much engineered so that no matter what horrific devastation and consequences is visited on the people of the ML universe, it doesn’t have major negative consequences. That’s part of why the Miraculous Cure exists, which is something that those other more serious shows DON’T have. Even in situations where the Miraculous Cure ISN’T brought out to play the actual logical negative ramifications of the events of ML episodes are glossed over, to say the least. Adrien should have had some MUCH more obvious negative effects from going through several months of just rushing out and attempting to take down Desperada with Ladybug every five minutes, for instance.

And as far as death and destruction from akuma attacks go? The general rule seems to be “if you’re not actively, currently seeing people being harmed, then no civilians are currently in major peril, even if they logically would be. And even if they ARE shown as being in peril, they’re only background dressing really UNLESS they’re an actual character and not just a stock background model.”

For example, in Origins - Part 1, StoneHeart leveled a skyscraper. Logically it would have been FILLED with people, so everyone in it would have died, along with anyone it fell on. That would have been hundreds, if not thousands of people dead, with (at that point) no reason to believe that they would recover, AND Parisians weren’t used to this kind of thing yet so they weren’t just jaded to it.

Yet, neither Adrien or Marinette seemed to be horrified at so many people dying, nor mourning their deaths. And as for the news coverage afterwards? (And remember, Ladybug didn’t use her Miraculous Cure until AFTER Stoneheart was defeated the second time, so there was a good 24 hours or so to assess and count the dead).

But the news didn’t talk about those people’s deaths, only the people who were turned into statues:

Nadja: (standing to the side of a picture of one of Stoneheart's minions, tablet in hand) The stone beings are scattered all over Paris, and for the time being, they are showing no signs of movement. (a variety of pictures is shown) Police have cordoned off the area. André: (on television alongside officer Roger) We won't stop until we find a way to get these people back to their normal selves, but for now, we're not making much headway. (The camera flips backs to Nadja standing next to a photo of Ladybug and Cat Noir.) Nadja: Paris is relying on our new guardian angels, Ladybug and Cat Noir, to save us all. Our lives depend on them.

Miraculous Ladybug just doesn’t have people be seriously physically or psychologically harmed by akumas in a way that lasts.

Now the show can be REINTERPRETED in such a way that these things DO matter and have lasting effects, but if so, then this isn’t the only episode that would apply to. It would apply to the WHOLE SERIES. Which means that in say, the Bubbler, Ladybug used up her charm and delayed fighting Bubbler for several minutes KNOWING that adults were floating up into the sky while children and babies were wandering around and getting into who-knows-what trouble, possibly getting injured or killed.

Just in general, the whole series would have to be reinterpreted, and unless their canon personalities were altered in that scenario, I’m pretty sure they’d act a bit differently if people were dying or being seriously injured all around them and it MATTERED. Like they’d be WAY more stressed for one thing, and both of them would have some pretty severe PTSD from watching and listening to other people die or be badly wounded, and so would a lot of other Parisians.

Also pretty sure that if there were drowning civilians in need of help that we’re supposed to consider in canon, then Ladybug would have said something like “I need to go, you help the civilians until I get back!” or something, just to establish roles.

[iturbide]

Ever wonder if someone with the wrong crest used a relic meant for a different crest (like Sylvain using Areadbhar) could ever potentially become a Demonic Beast? I sometimes wonder

i mean

mostly i wonder how fast it would kill them

this kind of gets into Part 2 of the Crest Virus so here comes the Science Hat

Now, before we go too far, we’re going to need to talk a little bit about dragons themselves.  As we see from the startling variety of physical forms among them, dragons are a remarkably varied group, but they all share several commonalities, among them the presence of a Creststone.  We can also loosely define three ‘tiers’ of dragon-kind: Sothis, the Progenitor, who according to legend used her blood to create her offspring; Seiros and her siblings, Sothis’ first offspring made with her blood, akin to demigods; and the “Children of the Goddess,” who we could probably refer to as ‘mortal’ dragons.  (Why do we need to differentiate this way?  Because Rhea says in the last chapter of Verdant Wind that she is “the last child of the progenitor god” -- which makes absolutely no sense outside this specific grouping since we know for a fact that Seteth and Flayn both are dragons.)  The major differentiators between the three groups are, above all, lifespan:

Sothis arrived in Fodlan thousands of years ago with enough expertise and technology to engineer offspring from her own genetic material, helped humanity’s rise in technological advancement, ended up going to war with them, and then spent another thousand years trying to clean up from that mess before taking a well-deserved nap.  She was undoubtedly ancient before Nemesis killed her -- and she didn’t even die of natural causes, she was murdered, implying she could have (and likely would have) lived even longer.

Seiros and her siblings were created after Sothis’ arrival in Fodlan, and though we only have one example to go off of here in the form of Rhea, she’s still looking pretty youthful despite being several millennia old, and based on her appearance at Tailtean she’s aged only slightly over the course of the near-thousand years between that battle and the game’s events.  She probably has a finite lifespan, and degeneration is clearly an issue given the events of Silver Snow, but that’s still an incredibly long life.

The last and largest group, the ‘Children of the Goddess,’ have all manner of quirks not seen elsewhere.  This group has the ability to go between a dragon and human form, but can lose that ability in either direction (Macuil and Indech gave up their human forms, Seteth and Flayn gave up their dragon forms -- Seteth remarks in Silver Snow that he can’t transform anymore, but Rhea still can despite not having done so in almost a thousand years).  They also likely have the shortest lifespan and high degeneration risk because of it -- something implied in Sothis’ Red Canyon paralogue, where Flayn and Byleth both have unique dialogues when attacking the “Demonic Beast” (Sothis calls it a “poor, lost soul”).

Generally, though, despite the wide range of body plans and individual Crests, dragons can all be considered part of the same species in that they appear capable of interbreeding with one another and producing viable offspring.  So a not insignificant chunk of their genetic code is technically the same, but different combinations of genes and unique gene expressions lead to individualized traits in dragons.  Meiosis probably plays a big part in this process: pieces of the unique Crest identifiers from both parents are grabbed in the division process, and when they fuse into a complete gene sequence you end up with a brand new Crest rather than two Crests on one individual (so even though canon hasn’t confirmed anything, personally I think Flayn’s mom was also a dragon, hence why she gets a brand new Crest of Cethleann).

Now as discussed in Part 1, dragon blood in human bodies more or less acts like a virus, splicing itself into the human host’s DNA to impart the donor’s Crest.  First-generation Crestbearers end up with extraordinarily long lifespans because of it and invariably have major Crests, as evidenced by Jeralt: Rhea gave him her blood to save him after he protected her, and he’s over a hundred now because of it and hasn’t aged a day in the past 20 years according to Alois (who was effectively raised by the man himself).  Now, from the second generation on, Crestbearers don’t get this lifespan, and inheritance becomes a gamble, especially after a thousand years; meiosis is absolutely bizarre, and what genes do or don’t get included in an individual gamete is completely up to chance, leading to a piecemeal Crest genome scattered throughout the human population incapable of producing brand new Crests the way dragons could.  This scattering of genetic markers on both sides of the genetic equation also leads to variable inheritance in terms of expression strength, with some people wining the proverbial jackpot (like Felix with his Major Crest), getting lucky as carriers (like Ingrid with her Minor Crest), or get the shortest end of the stick (like Miklan).  Invariably, though, they only ever have one Crest.  Even if two people with different Crests have kids together, those children will only have one or the other (if they have a Crest at all). 

What all this is getting at is: Crests don’t want to share a host.  Doesn’t matter if it’s the original dragon or a human, Crests are not things that naturally co-exist with one another.  Pregnancies with Crest-bearers are potentially rife with issues, especially if the parents have different Crests; an embryo with the markers for two different Crests likely self-destructs, leading to miscarriage, while an embryo with the markers for the father’s Crest rather than the mother’s could lead to major health issues for both mother and child should the baby even make it to term, similar to the complications associated with Rh-factor pregnancies where the mother is Rh-negative and the fetus is Rh-positive. (Baby dragons who naturally don’t share their parents’ Crests are technically a nonissue since dragons probably have an easy way out of this: they can lay eggs).

But what happens when you specifically aim to get two Crests on a single host?  Absolutely horrific things.  Lysithea attested that the kids in her extended family suffered and died one by one at the hands of the Twisted conducting the Crest experiments -- which, unfortunately, makes sense when you think about Crests not wanting to share hosts.  After hijacking a host’s systems, a Crest genome also starts producing antibodies to protect the host from infection by other sources; this is still true in second-generation Crestbearers on, who naturally produce antibodies to stave off a new infection -- so if a second Crest ‘donation’ is introduced, the ingrained Crest is going to fight back hard.  The host body’s immune system goes on the attack in an attempt to drive off the invader, destroying cells that have been ‘infected’ by the new genetic material in order to stop the spread of the second virus; in cases like Lysithea, where there was no ingrained Crest, both try to claim a foothold and then start attacking one another in a bid for dominance, trying to root the other out so that only one is left.  Most often, this autoimmune response is fatal, tearing the host apart from the inside as their body’s defenses target their own systems as foreign entities; in cases where it isn’t, and the host miraculously survives the procedure to gain two Crests, the internal fighting leads to significant genetic decay and a drastically reduced lifespan rather than an increased one -- which contributed both to Lysithea’s grave life expectancy and her two Minor Crests, despite likely getting infusions of pure blood.

(As a note, the Crest of Flames plays by entirely different rules because it’s so much stronger than anything else; survival is rare even in humans without Crests, and it’s likely the only Crest with the potential to establish itself at full strength even with a pre-existing Crest trying to fight against it, as in Edelgard’s case.)

And all of this finally leads us to the question of what happens should someone with the wrong Crest bear a particular Relic.  Well, Crests don’t like to share bodies.  There’s a major dissonance between the heart and body vs the blood, and while it’s not likely to do (much) harm in the short term, too long with it and the Relic will probably try to straight-up attack whoever is wielding it, possibly causing recoil-type damage each time it’s used, since that foreign Crest is viewed as a threat to the overall system.  In cases where there is no Crest on the user, the Relic is trying to recreate a system, using the wielder’s body as a crux to build a larger form off of; where the Crest is just wrong, they would probably never go full-on Beast, even if the Creststone does activate enough to overtake the wielder, since the whole intention of overwhelming them is to snuff their life out and eliminate the threat to the body system, at which point it would return to effective dormancy once the ‘infection’ has been taken care of.

[bigskydreaming]

AU where someone, anyone, shows up to comfort Dick after the TWO canon times someone burns down Haly’s Circus, his childhood home - just to hurt him. First Blockbuster, and then Joker, in the New 52. Like....Dick already lost it once, when he was taken away from it as a child, but how debilitating must it have been to lose it a second time, and know it only happened because of his connection to it?

On a somewhat similar note, my nonexistent kingdom that I’ve already given away like a dozen times in posts like this, for fic that has one of the Batfamily freaking TALK to Dick about the revelation of his family’s history with the Court of Owls. I’m not talking about fic where he’s abducted by the Court or turned into a Talon - just purely having a conversation with him about the psychological and emotional impact of finding out that he thought he had no biological family left, but turns out, he’s got an immortal great grandfather who’s an assassin for a secret society and who has intended Dick to follow in his footsteps since before he was born.

Like, imagine what that revelation has to do to a person, ESPECIALLY someone like Dick, for whom his independence is so fundamental and important to him as a person. Who, thematically, is a character who routinely has his agency violated in all manner of ways, not just sexually, but in how his world was upended after his parents’ died and he wasn’t allowed to stay in comfortable and familiar environs, or how he was fired from being Robin and had very little control over his own legacy at times. Or the many, MANY times he’s been brainwashed or controlled by villains, the way he so often has to put aside what he wants to do or be or what’s important to him to be what others need, like when he became Batman while Bruce was lost in time. Or the way villains tend not to target him directly, but rather everyone around him, not just Blockbuster but the Court, Joker, Deathstroke, and more have all followed this pattern, resulting in the frequent loss of friends, casual acquaintances, his various homes, his entire city....

My point being, Dick doesn’t often have memorable physical traumas to point to as proof of what he’s been through over the years, as even the ones he does have, like his two times being shot in the head, tend to get glossed over and moved past. But that’s also largely because the vast majority of his traumas and tragedies are intangible, attacks on his agency and his choices, his freedom to be in control of his own life. 

Which of course, translates directly into WHY he’s so stubborn about things, and why he’s so volatile when he feels his choices are being limited or not respected, and so fiercely protective of his right to be his own person, outside of just who he is as Bruce’s son, partner, leader of the Titans, etc. He doubles down whenever he has the opportunity to make his own choices at all, because of how rarely that’s even been possible for him throughout his life, and how much he expects and takes it for granted that his choices will come under attack and people are going to once again try and take away his ability to decide what he does. 

Because that is the pattern in his life. The one that repeats most consistently.

So imagine what an opportunity the Court of Owls is, just to have Dick’s family really GET this about him. Because often, given how stubborn and impassioned they all are, they wind up on the opposite side of Dick in arguments about his choices, and so even in relatively minor disagreements....they’re poised to be defensive about their own stances, and why they feel the way they do about his various choices. But Dick’s forceful denial and resistance to his biological great-grandfather’s agenda for him...how it affects him, what a blow it is to him for the specific reasons it is - that the very idea of his life’s path having been predetermined by someone else is an attack on who he fundamentally is at his core....its an ideal opportunity for them to understand, to view objectively, as spectators rather than active participants....that its NEVER been about them. Its never been about Dick coming into conflict with them on these matters because of something he does or doesn’t feel about these various members of his family of choice. It was always going to happen, no matter WHO it was in opposition to him, because this is JUST WHO DICK IS. 

He NEEDS that independence, that freedom to be his own person, that ability to sometimes put distance between himself and anyone else, whether the Titans or Bruce or Kory or Babs....and to be able to say I am still me, I am not defined by who I am in those settings or those dynamics....I am the person I am because of ME....to be able to say, to know, to believe...that he is still his own person, not just the sum of what Bruce and various other important figures in his life WANT him to be.

And this, I think, is at the heart of so many of Dick’s conflicts with his friends and family, because they look at him being stubborn over something they don’t see as that big of a deal....not realizing he looks at it and sees just one more attempt in a long, LONG string of them, to get him to fit into someone else’s mold, fall in line with someone else’s expectations or desires for him.

And Cobb and the Court of Owls are like...the ULTIMATE embodiment of that. The reappearance of biological family in Dick’s life, long after he’d thought that an impossibility....but bringing with him nothing BUT expectations, agendas and plans for Dick, whether he wants them or not....and he very much does not.

Imagine the impact this must have on someone who lost his first family when he was so young. There was SO MUCH he likely never got a chance to know. All the questions he must have had for them over the years, about his parents, their parents, their family history....just some basic connection to where they came from, where he came from. The kind of things his parents might have been waiting to tell him when he was older, because they’re not always good stories, just...

To have closed the door on that part of his life, no doubt thinking it was for good, because there was nothing more to be learned about all of that....and then surprise, surprise - here it comes swinging wide open, an ancestor whose son was the literal birth of the Grayson family name.....as William specifically picked that name for his son when he gave him to Haly’s Circus a hundred years ago. 

Here’s someone who has all the answers Dick might ever have wanted to ask, who is that direct connection to his family history and past.....but whose very existence is a catch-22, because he comes with all these strings attached...strings that Dick absolutely does not want attached to him, no matter what Cobb could offer him in return.

This is a huge emotional upheaval, no doubt. A shock to the system that upends so much Dick’s long implicitly believed about his family and his place in the world....and I’ve never seen anything actually delving into what effect this and this alone would have had on his psyche. 

There’s such rich potential for his family to reach out to him in the wake of his learning all this and reaffirm for him just WHY they are his family in ways Cobb could never be....as long as they themselves use the opportunity to reaffirm how important it is to Dick to even HAVE family, a support system, that lets him just....be. 

That values him for who HE wants to be, rather than how well or not he’s living up to their intentions for him. Vowing never to be the kind of family Dick’s last biological family has proven to be....people who would throw away everything Dick is, everything Dick has made of himself, by his own choice....in order to prioritize instead, what they think he should be. 

Like, centering this particular plot or character arc as the crux of a fic about Dick’s family of choice gathering around him to shore up whatever damage the reveal of Dick’s biological family does to him.....that has SO MUCH POTENTIAL to cement a new understanding between Dick and the rest of the Batfamily as to WHY he’s the way he is, and why certain things are so important to him....if they’re just written showing a willingness to accept this and understand that....they don’t always HAVE to understand his choices in order to just....be supportive and trust in his decisions and his reasons for prioritizing the way he does.

I do think due to the....idk, ‘shiny’ factor of the Talons and that aspect of the Court of Owls storyline, its easy to overlook a lot of the other angles inherent in the larger concept. But IMO the reveal of Dick’s secret family history and Cobb and the Court’s intentions for him alone is a psychological treasure trove of potential character development, insight, angst and more.

[hellyeahheroes]

“If you are poor how do you have an iPhone”

This is something that was gnawing at me for several weeks by now. Very recently comicbook twitter has gone on an anti-piracy outrage when one of the indie creators found out their comic book, that same one that had to change from selling in floppies to only selling in trades due to low sales, had hundreds of thousands of views on a pirate website. Due to the respect I have for that creator, I want to preface that what I am about to discuss is not a defense of piracy per se. it is not an argument that even applies in a large scale to indie scene that by far avoids some of the issues I will be talking about.

While I would never openly condone piracy, I have found myself playing devil’s advocate on that day out of sheer anger at one very specific argument that I have seen being thrown around by people condemning piracy. The exchange usually went like this - someone would go and try to say that comics are too expensive and that person would then be mocked for posting from their iPhone or another company equivalent. Every time I saw such behavior I have called it out. In some cases, people would apologize upon me explaining why this line of argument is out of the line. But in one a person had gotten furious I dared to question them, quickly devolving to childish insults and outright toxic behavior (the fact this person is an editor at Geeks World Wide made me completely give up on that website). But that is beside the point.

I want to just make it very clear that this “argument” is rooted in classism and, quite frankly, doesn’t even work. Let us explain the latter first

1. Why You Cannot Just Buy A Single Book

First I want to give the benefit of the doubt to the people using this argument. So we will do something dreadful and talk about math. For the purpose of this argument, I’m even going to go as far as not address the fact that even if you buy an iPhone through installment payments, at one point you are supposed to just have finished paying for the hardware. Meanwhile comic books expect you to keep buying if not one title, then hopefully another effectively forever. This fact in itself breaks the whole line of argument; A person could have wrapped up paying for the iPhone long before they ended in a financial situation where they cannot afford even comics. I will be ignoring this to address what I believe to be a steel man version of the argument - the strongest possible interpretation I can imagine. But even if we assume we live in a capitalist nightmare of endless payments, the rhetorics do not hold water.

Currently, on Apple official store, the newest iPhone11 costs you 30 dollars a month, while iPhone11 Pro is for 25$. In theory, the comparison that is presented should therefore work. After all, if you can afford 25$ dollars you can easily spare $5 for a comic book, right? For that price, you could buy as much as 4 comic books each month. Except that this assumption comes from a perspective that in order to read a single comic book all you need to do is buy that one comic book. Which is not the case. Or rather, it might be a case if we’re talking about independent publishers or markets like European or manga. But is certainly not one for Marvel and DC. While the problem is better than it once was we still regularly end in a situation where, in order to understand what is going on in a single Big 2 book, you need to read several others. This is a common case with big events. Let’s take a look at recently finished Absolute Carnage

This event had the gall to ask you to buy seven books and then upped it to nine. Nine comic books roughly 5 dollars per issue is 45$. To buy all of it would be to spend the equivalent of your iPhone11 Pro fee for five months.

Someone might now say that you obviously do not need to read the entire event. But the truth is, you do not really know that when it comes to making preorders. The event comics are deliberately constructed in such a way to trick people into thinking they have to buy all of it to understand what is going on. It was true when they were humongous, reaching even a hundred issues like the first Civil War, and it is true now. And while veteran fans have learned that usually you only need to follow main series and tie-ins written by its writer, even that can be a strain on someone’s budget. It might be that this person could only afford this one, single comic book. So when they suddenly find what might be their only source of entertainment incomprehensible without paying more money, they may face a dilemma. Deny yourself your one source of joy for any duration of time from a month to half of a year. Or quickly pirate that one book you never wanted to and was never interested in buying in the first place until you had the title you were paying for effectively held hostage.

I want to underline this is not just events. The most outrageous case of this issue right now is the X-Men line since Jonathan Hickman’s takeover. Which has become so self-referential you need to read all the titles in order to understand any single one. Without doing it the books become incomprehensible. This is me speaking from experience here. I was only interested in a single title from the initial launch. But the moment I saw characters talking about events from another book in a way that assumes I’m up to speed, I dropped it. 

In order to get into this so-called great new jumping-in point as it launched fans needed to first spend around $20 a month to buy two miniseries for 3 months. And as Dawn of X rolled in, the number of books rose and keeps rising. X-Men, X-Force, bi-weekly New Mutants, Excalibur and Fallen Angels already request you to invest an equivalent of the monthly price of an iPhone11. And they soon shall be joined by Wolverine, Hellions, Cable, X-Men/Fantastic Four and possibly monthly Giant-Size X-Men. Those keeping attention to the math part might have noticed we are a single series (and we are lead to believe there is more than one coming) from X-Men becoming an investment equal to paying for two separate iPhone11s each month. It is proof that the Big 2 has adopted a “more eggs, fewer baskets” mentality. This customer-unfriendly approach to storytelling seems by design prone to weeding out and turning away all but big spenders who can afford to regularly buy multiple books. it is not different from the exploitative systems we find in video games, designed to prioritize so-called “whales”, as the industry came to call people who can blow ungodly amounts of money on a game, over regular customers.

2. The Rhetoric Itself Is Flawed

However, even if the hypothetical scenario presented by people using the “why do you have an iPhone” argument was true, we need to recognize how toxic this argument is. First of all, this whole line of reasoning is out of touch and assumes that a working iPhone is a luxury, while more and more times in modern society it becomes a necessity. I live in Poland and have not encountered this issue yet, I keep hearing of people who simply cannot get a job without having an iPhone. It’s because more and more fields require you to have working company apps or use them to find new workers in the first place. The miniature computer in your hand has become such a utility tool it now is actively getting harder to operate in modern society without affording it. This line of argument only betrays that you are out of touch almost as much as a similar argument being used to claim people who have flatscreen TVs are not “really poor”. Currently, flatscreens are only TVs being produced and sold anymore, cheap for purchase and cheaper to maintain than a full-sized TV long time out of use and with spare parts likely no longer produced.

Moreover, you don’t really know how exactly that specific person’s financial situation is. It may be that yes, they can afford an iPhone out of necessity but it does require them to be on a tight budget. Maybe the phone itself is actually passed on from a family member - speaking here as someone whose every phone ever was such a gift. It may even be that the person had to work extremely hard and save up a lot to afford this phone and simply is not able to expand on their profits anymore. Or, as mentioned above, that they once could and finished paying for the last installment but have fallen on hard times ever since. The list goes on. The crux of it is that you do not know other people’s stories and have no right to hold them to some arbitrary standards without that knowledge.

Which brings me to my final point - the whole argument relies on perpetuating a myth of “properly poor” people. The made-up image of nobly suffering poor who deny themselves any and all form of luxury in life (and remember, we established that the whole argument relies on seeing modern phones as a luxury, not a necessity they have become) to save money to get themselves out of poverty. Not to mention a similar myth of “kindhearted poor” who gladly give up what little they have to help others - the kind media love to perpetuate to distract from how bad the state of society is to lead to this situation in the first place. This not only does mispresent how the whole capitalist system is rigged to make it easier to save money the higher up the financial ladder you climb, but it also does not understand human nature. Human beings aren’t machines and it is impossible to really go through every single day without some sort of relief. Sometimes it may be a video game or a dinner at a fancy restaurant. Sometimes it may be a smartphone. Or a luxury item you never plan to use but just want to have to remind you what your goal is.

Yet our society made a game out of shaming and being judgmental to every poor person who spends even the tiniest amount of money on escapism, on any sort of relief from how stressful poverty is. And, speaking as someone who had panic attacks caused by sudden financial expenses wrecking my monthly budget, it is stressful. We expect people to act as all forms of entertainment and escapism aren’t also contributing to one of our human needs, the need to simply be able to wind down for even a moment, and thus not worth spending money on. Then we judge them if they resort to illegal means to fulfill that need. 

I would go as far as making the argument this is a self-perpetuating problem. This very line of thinking, that poor must be at all times miserable and them spending even the slightest amount of money on anything nice is worth scorn? it is what actively encourages them to resort to piracy even if they could afford to buy comics. They are being constantly told by society they shouldn’t buy themselves anything not essential. And then the society acts surprised when they then fulfill their needs through illegal means to save money. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I am not making this post to defend piracy. But I think we need to seriously consider what kind of rhetorics is being used to condemn it and what it actually says about people who use it and those who silently nod in agreement.

- Admin

[jq37]

[obligatory recap ask]

**spoilers for subway skirmish and borough of dreams**

@kickmuncher3 and @galfast: ty for your asks, I’ll use them for the next two recaps. this is probably the least efficient way for me to handle this but I want to keep all of these visually consistent dammit. 

One of the funniest things about this season of D20 is most if not all of the cast has lived in NYC which manifests as very specific references and in character complaints that you just know come from a place of truth and experience. Which is to say we got a lot of that in these episodes.  

Also, this has nothing to do with anything but living in NY update: On Sunday, I saw a man hanging upside-down from a tree--by his feet--and playing the flute. And barely anyone registered it at all. So I really cannot stress enough how much New York is Like That.

Pete opening the fight by blasting a fireball and then telepathically calling out Kingston is--como se dice--a Power Move.

Brennan *immediately* channels the opposite of whatever energy Emily's on and goes right for Ricky's dog to the horror of everyone at the table and his absolute delight. Like, it's a spectral dog but still. Bro. Dog. 

Kingston taking the heat metal damage to get Epona to drop him is so raw. But then, for the rest of the fight, he doesn't say a single thing except for his Command spells which is a very different kind of raw. 

Question: Is Riz's mom the only good cop that exists in D20?

I know this was an RP ep and I know they knew it was gonna be an RP ep but I wonder what would have happened if they had pretended to cooperate with Epona to get more info. Probably just an extended RP ep that would have segued into this same fight eventually. But I'm curious about what information they let get eaten by a swarm of rats.

Misty's Irresistible Dance spell is very clutch. 

The gators from the last fight are back in the form of Kug's summons and one of them still has a grudge against Misty. Misty is all, "send me your resume!" because she appreciates the spunk. I was starting a sentence about what the hell play this sentient gator is going to be in but as soon as I hypothetically asked it my brain was like, "Peter Pan. Next question."

Y'all, this really was Kug's fight. Between calling the roaches, crocs, and gators, channeling Moonshine to call lightning, and killing Epona within 40 mins of the ep, he truly was on fire. Good for him. He also turns into a bear but specifically a bear that would have escaped from the zoo. It's the little details that make this show great. 

Brennan putting his foot down on tying rats together not being acrobatics is the eternal DM mood. 

Back to Epona for a second, do we think she was working for Robert directly? Someone connected to him? Something else? When her shadow split after Ricky's attack was that meaningful or just flavor? Where did that badge come from? Has it always existed? What does destroying it mean? It didn't seem to help. The bad cop ghosts were still around, just no one could control them at that point. If they had yoinked that badge, could they have had a summoning item that hey could use? Or is it bad karma to use something like that? Is it still bad if you're forcing the bad cops to do good stuff? Did Brennan anticipate this or is the Coach Daybreak 2: Electric Boogaloo? Lots of questions.

Misty's cutting words to the cop (saving Ricky) making the Law and Order "DUN DUN" noise is great. 

Emily ends up not needing to roll to make rat nunchucks because her health goes low enough that her magic ring activates but I feel like she low key wanted rat nunchucks. 

Wild that Kingston went down for just long enough for it to be cinematic before being revived by Misty ("Get up, old man,")

Also wild that this whole fight only took about 45 seconds of in game time. It makes sense if you think about it the way you would a movie and that's how most D&D fights are but that's so much play time for so little game time and it hit me this ep because I was actually keeping track of rounds. 

Anyway, I have not mentioned up until this point that the whole crux of this fight is to last long enough for Alejandro to roll high enough to summon the train to Nod but, long story short, Pizza Rat shows up to save the day. Does that make more sense in context? Marginally. 

I like that the train to Nod shows up on the wrong side of the tracks. Like I said, man. Details. 

Oh and to my above point about the cast making comments about NY as people who have lived in NY, I loved Brennan looking directly at the camera when he was going off on people who just stand at the door like idiots while you're trying to get in and then Siobhan pokes like half her head into frame so she can also stare directly into the camera. Mood.

When Ally said Pete shoots Kingston I half believed it for a good couple of seconds. I was right there with Lou. 

OK, so I don't know how many of you have watched Sharkboy and Lavagirl (and, if you haven't feel free to skip this bullet) but no movie has brought me more enjoyment overall than SB&LG. Not because it's good because it's not. But it's so insane that it's amazing. It's right in the sweet spot. I always say, if it was any better, it would be Spy Kids 3 and, therefore, unwatchable (SK 1 + 2 are dope as hell though, for the record). I bring it up because the way Brennan describes Nod reminds me a lot of Drool in SB&LG. Like, the rollercoaster subway car def could be in the same universe as the Train of Thought. This is all to say that I think Brennan could have written a version of SB&LG that was better without being worse. Idk if that comes across as complimentary, but it is, and to both parties actually. 

From the way Nod (the kid) is being framed (in this ep and the next) I know we're not supposed to mistrust him but, put in that situation, there is no way I would trust the gray faced, black eyed, creepily gliding dream child. 

Post fight, Kingston wants to offer an apology for what he said about Pete and Nod wants to apologize for putting Pete in his current situation. Also, the group decides to be more open in general. Kug, as most of us guessed, got beauty and the beasted for white collar crime by his business partner (Gabby) who is Esther's mom and a witch (also, Ricky thinks his crush on Esther is a secret which is just adorable and completely incorrect).  

Brennan cuts sharing time off because this is the combat episode dammit! Save it for next session. But, because I'm behind, next session is now! Let's get into The Borough of Dreams.

Misty, as a faerie, is instinctively mistrustful of vising other magical worlds and eating the food or taking things at face value. I love that she's playing a character where she can ask these questions and not be meta-gaming because I had some of the same concerns. 

Wildly, WALLY walks out of the train as he just happened to be on it (as conductor) at the time. Kug bursts out with the fact that he's his dad and Wally takes this to mean that Rat Jesus is his bio dad but, even after being left alone for so many years, he claims Bruce as his real dad. He's wrong but he's sweet. 

"I thought you were mad at me." Brennan, you didn't have to do that.

Murph clearly trying to not accidentally call Wally a piece of shit because that's his go to Kug way to describe things is so funny.

"We could turn me into a rat." WALLY

Kingston and Misty looking at each other like, "These absolute children," while Pete and Soph are making Brittney Spears references. 

So we find out what all of the magic stuff they picked up does. Misty's mirror can see invisibility. Pete's grill helps with persuasion. The thousand hour energy makes you immune to sleep for 42 days(!) The bagel can be used for divination or to essentially kill a person but spread their essence throughout the universe  (which low key sounds like a sacrifice someone might make to help cancel the spread of say an undead presence or a money virus). 

I want Ricky and Wally to be friends forever. 

Kingston's lack of connection to the dream world is so sad. Like, he's no nonsense but he's like NO NONSENSE. Like no nonsense possible. So he's just walking around like Eddie Valiant in Toontown. 

And, at the same time, the rest of the party is doing the MOST nonsense. Mary Poppins-ing into the sky. Misty is making out with the moon. Wild. 

SOBER SALAD

Ally drops the ketamine on the tomatoes line and Brennan fully breaks

Very sweet for Pete to bring Kingston a salad, even though that's such a random food to just have in your pocket(???). Why does salad keep coming up on this show? One more time and it's officially a motif.

So the dream world basically works on Sharkboy and Lavagirl/Xanth/Phantom Tollbooth/Wonderland/Toontown logic. If you've seen/read any of those, you basically have it down. 

"Only people with Sprint have service."/"Oh, amazing!" Brennan threw that softball out for anyone who wanted it and Emily, as usual, hit it out of the park.

Brennan very clearly knows his NY history. The mob boss (lucky Luciano, no not that one) that he mentioned during the sleeping with the fishes bit is a real dude and basically the dude who brought organized crime to the US (in the form we know it now). 

Ricky and the mints. Lord.

Anyway, the one item I didn't mention earlier is the holy grail detergent which can literally clean souls. Which sounds mighty interesting considering some of the other stuff that's come up this campaign. 

(Also, I wonder if you could use the bagel as spell components since it contains everything in the universe in microcosm).

I can't believe Pete was the one saying, "At least eat before you shotgun that 1000 hour energy." By the by, the 42 hour span of the energy drink makes me suspicious. Is that just for humor (and accurate math) or it this a Chekov's Gun kind of an item indicating some kind of time jump at some point? Ricky drinks it later in this ep so, if there's a clock attached to that, it's ticking. I'm prob reading into this but I assume if you're still reading these, this is what you're here for. 

Ally making sawing motions before being told an egg creme has nothing to do with eggs and is in fact a drink.

Pete! OK, so Pete has made some good steps in this ep, starting with promising to start reining in the drug usage. Later he works on his magic and also gets over Priya. This is the most endeared I've been to him all season. Especially his, "I try to do a good job," line. I felt that. 

"It's still open to you." Aw.

Brennan clearly saw the chance for a lore drop this ep and boy did it drop. Let's run through the highlights.

Nod dumped all this on Pete the way they did because it's super super hard to contact a Vox Phantasmus beforehand due the the natural, waking world inclination to brush off dreams. You have to have the job before you can talk to the boss. Cruddy system but that's how it goes. 

When Sophie said the thing about Robert Moses creating spaces that can't be accessed she meant by magic but it's an interesting way to phrase it because the irl Robert Moses is known for (allegedly, but like, it tracks) trying to keep black people out of certain spaces. 

Robert Moses sold his soul to Hell and Faerie which is why he's still alive it seems. No one wants to collect on his soul and anger the other party.

Whoever predicted that the golden door for Emma Laz's poem was the rectangle from episode one, collect your prize because it's confirmed in this ep. 

We learn about the ephemeral axiom which basically says, a dream can be all things but once it manifests, it's a single thing. (you might even say, "it is what it is".)

So another big thing we learn is that if a dream gets so big that manifesting them in the real world would break the game, it's called a Paragon. There are four total: Heaven, Hell, Faerie, and The American Dream. (Wild that The American Dream is the only country specific one that exists. Like, I rep my home team of course but the U.S. is a pretty latecomer to the country party. You'd think someone else might have gotten Paragon status at some point.)

"Was one of them the Grand Canyon?"

Anyway, dragging the American Dream into the waking world would fix the American Dream to mean one thing--I assume making tons of money if Robert Moses has his way. I'll admit, I was a  little fuzzy on the mechanics of this on my first watch-through because pulling the American Dream into the real world sounds like it should be a good thing. But I think, at the most basic level, it's a matter of you shouldn't put magic that shouldn't be in a box in a box. I'm still wondering about the exact implications for the waking world if he succeeds though. Like, how would that manifest? Would everyone suddenly become money hungry (lol, how would you tell)? Would people still want what they want but the American Dream would just be understood to mean making stacks and none of the good Superman-y stuff?

"It's not Protestant work ethic is it?"

Robert Moses is undead and can't get into Nod, so those are good things to note. 

I was so ready for Wally is get dispelled and for him to be a figment of Kug’s imagination or a dream or something. I braced myself so much. I was ready to set up a firing squad for Brennan for doing that to Kug.  

Who tipped the bugsters off to where Pete was gonna be? As far as I can tell, the only people that knew were the gang plus Alejandro and Esther. Maybe someone was scrying on them and that’s what the roll Zac failed during the wedding ep was. 

As soon as Brennan mentions locking the door, Ally immediately makes the connection and goes, "Key to the city." Nod "locks" the American Dream and gets rid of the lock which seems to mean the American Dream is temporarily unavailable. Which seems not good and like it's gonna have collateral damage for sure but I guess you bad is a matter of degrees and Robert getting in would be worse. But still, imagine your immigration papers get declined because some random kid decided to close down the American Dream for a couple of days. 

So, we get some backstory of Misty. She apparently just was straight up not having a good time in Faerie so she stole Titania's shoes (allowing her to be in iron-filled NYC without triggering her fairy vulnerability) and peaced out. 

"She's gonna kill you."/"Only if she can get here and I have her Goddamn shoes." (**A million airhorns in the distance**)

I love that Emily is still on the souls thing. Emily doesn't believe in Occam's Razor. In fact, I'd like to propose a corollary called the Axford Axiom: The coolest path between two points probably isn't the correct one, but it should be! I want her to run a campaign so bad so I can see her be in a game where her crazy endgame is what's going on because she's the one who wrote it. 

Misty: Let's go to hell!

So much like a videogame, the map has opened up and we have three places to check out. The former locations in the dream world of Faerie (Carnagie Hall), Heaven (JFK airport), and Hell (where do you think? Hell's Kitchen). The gang splits up to look for clues (and drinks, in Misty's case). Actually, make that four places: Pete goes to the Met Museum of Memories to basically Avatar mind meld with the other Voxes and get a handle on his magic to a degree (thank God--Nod?). We'll take these in order of appearance, which means we're off to Hell with Kug and Ricky (plus Ox and Wally).

(Focus on the Pizza, baby!)

At first I wanted Ricky, the good boy, to go to Heaven, but the idea of a firefighter in Hell also has appeal. 

Re The rat holding his guts: Gross. 

Ricky holding his axe like a cell phone.

So we and Kug learn that the rat-spell that was cast on him wasn't actually a rat-spell. It was a spell that would make his outsides reflect his insides and his insides happened to suck. I'm wondering if that means that it's a static spell that reflects his outsides at the time it was cast and it would need to be recast to reflect any moral progress made or if it will just revert him once he's made enough progress. 

I'm also wondering (partially bc one of my players asked to do this last session) can a Druid wildshape into a person? I feel like no, but like, did any of you ever read Animorphs? You know how in book 1 Tobias gets stuck as a red-tailed-hawk but then later her gets his morphing ability back and then he can turn back into his human form for 2 hours at a time? What if Kug just started doing that? Just being a rat who is sometimes a dude. 

They also go to the statue of liberty (which has a French accent, natch) who shows them that there's, like, a money/greed virus infecting the Dreaming and the American Dream. Ricky smells undeath again. They think vampires. That's plausible but I'm not sure. 

OK, Heaven. 

WHOOOO, strap in y'all

(Sidenote: I wonder what would have happened if Soph hadn't chose to go to heaven. I feel like she could have easily run into you know who in hell had she chose to go there, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

Brennan actually tries to lead Emily into the thinking about Dale mindset but Emily, having reached a note of closure in Soph's character arc, pushes back on that.

honeyougotastormcoming.gif

Brennan,about to wreck her entire life: Cool.

I and the cast keep saying heaven a lot but it's like an all roads lead to Rome situation. It's heaven, Valhalla, Elysium, nirvana. Like, whatever Good Place you believe in. It's the Good Place. 

Sophie, upon being told that if she jumps into the fight at the Pearly Gates she knows nothing about, she might literally die: And what about it?

Emily's face when Brennan says, "And you see Dale," is so much. You can see the entire range of human emotion in her eyes in that moment.

Sidenote: I wonder how much of her backstory Emily planned and how much Brennan dropped on her. Like, she knew Isabella was part of her backstory obv. Did Brennan come up with all of this whole-cloth or did she say she wanted there to be something supernatural and and let him fill in the details. Very curious about the collaborative process.  

 When Dale's character art comes up, it says "Sophie's Angel" for Dale's descriptor so where I thought we were going was that Dale was Sophie's Guardian Angel who wasn't supposed to be romantically involved with her and the reason he was gone is that he was forcibly brought back to heaven. But that may be because I recently watched this.

Dale, is upsettingly sweet with Sophie, calls her "sweetie" the entire time they're together, fights a ton of angels to get to her, and says he got her text message. Emily is about to cry. *I'm* about to cry. I'm sure the only reason Brennan isn't fistpumping is because he needs to stay in character. 

Dale gives this cryptic piece of advice before he is dragged off by angel guards: When you get to the top, I know what it'll seem like, but there is someone there.

Emily, of course: I fight the angels.

The angels, hilariously, don't take it personally that she's fighting them--and very well, but not well enough to beat a nat 20. Sometimes the dice are spooky in tune with the story.

"He's got a job to do here. Who's gonna watch the deer?"

Dale also tells Soph to tell Jackson he said hi which is interesting to say the least. 

Emily gets two very dope lines in a row:

"Let me hold your hand through this Alejandro."

"I'm gonna kill her. And I don't think she's going to the great big airport in Brooklyn."

That's it for her for now, but let's put a pin in that for now and come back to it after we check in with the others. 

Siobhan and Kingston are at the former spot of Faerie, the Glamour Bar.

Zac jokingly (I think) guessing Dr. Doolittle as the thing Siobhan can't remember when she says Eliza Doolittle is so funny. 

Also, her terrible cockney British accent on top of her actual British accent is great.

I love that the two actual Real Adults are the ones who go and get wasted mid-mission. 

Brennan introduces "Bobby Goodfellow" and it takes Siobhan exactly four seconds after Brennan finishes the word "Goodfellow" to be like, "It's Puck." She knew and she knew her character would know it and she hardcore pounced.  

I meant to mention this before but it's super funny that Kingston has been around the magical block but there's still so much he doesn't know. He was surprised by a bunch of stuff in this ep that I'd think he would know about (like the Midsummer's faeries being real) but nah. He's like, "This is my specific brand of magic nonsense. That's what I know about. I don't mess around with any of *that* stuff. I stay in my lane. I stay in my city."

Ty Brennan for teaching me how to pronounce sláinte. This is the first time I'm hearing it out loud. 

I love his Puck voice. Like, the little British street urchin voice.  

No big surprise, Puck sent the mirror on the order of Oberon and Titania (who are not back together but are knocking boots according to him). 

Puck warns Misty, "The world of mortals is not long for this world," and follows it up with a seemingly sincere, "Come home. We miss you," which is an interesting thing to say after announcing that Titania is gunning for her. Who is this we, Puck? Your boss wants to bodyslam her!

Also, what do the faeries know that they're not saying? All of them in the bar seemed to know something was off but none of them said anything and Puck didn't elaborate. 

I've always liked the trope of the person from the otherworldly, magical or super advanced being like, "Idk what you're talking about. Humans are great!" because it's the opposite of the snooty elf/vulcan/whatever trope that I really can't stand. Misty showed shades of that in this conversation but I feel like there's still so much that we're missing in her backstory and I wanna know what it is.  

(Also, this is prob just me being a little pepe silvia but I would be very unsurprised if Misty got an opportunity to betray the party at some point. Don't @ me. It's just something I could see myself offering to a player for the drama of it all). 

Anyway, Kingston is extremely uncomfortable in the bar and makes a hasty exit so let's go to the museum with Pete and Nod.

Ally jumps onto the, "Suggested donations are for suckers" train w/ Siobhan. 

Turns out, Pete f'd up Robert up so much that he has kind of a brain link with him. I wonder how long that's gonna last. 

Pete gets proficiency in arcana and a choice between lesseing wild magic surges or gaining some control over them (2 wild magic rolls on a fail and ally gets to choose which effect takes place). Obv the second one is more fun rp-wise so that's what Ally picks.

It's a memory museum so OF COURSE he gets a chance to look at the memories of the rest of the party. But it's getting late so he only has a chance to check on one person's memories. He, naturally, picks Kingston. Makes perfect sense from an RP perspective but out of character I feel like Misty is the most closed book of the party. 

Pete sees Kingston's life from his childhood to the present (Brennan puts Lou on the spot to do some improv...I mean beyond the improv they're already doing) and it's about what you would expect based on what we know about Kingston but it's very beautifully described (sidenote: did any of y'all ever watch the life and times of juniper lee? where she can't leave the city bc she's like the buffy of that world? I really felt shades of that, except more self imposed).

During that montage, a character is like, "You could make hundreds of millions of dollars--I mean, I'm exaggerating," (s/t like that) and I'm not gonna go back and check but I feel like Brennan (or maybe Lou) made almost exactly the same comment in the first ep of this season in a very similar context.

Oh, also, Kingston gets dubbed Vox Populi by a dragon on Bleecker Street in case you were wondering about logistics. 

Again, Nod says that inviting Liz into his life was basically dooming Liz to be stuck dealing with the Unsleeping City but I feel like unless you have a Vox position or something similar you should be able to, like, opt out. So what you need to ignore some weird stuff day to day? May I direct you to my earlier anecdote about the flute dude in the tree. New Yorkers are good at that. And if she moved away, would it even be an issue?

Actually, that raises another question. Is NY the only place where magic is happening? It can't be because Santa is doing his thing at the North Pole. And NY has the Umbral Arcana which shields magic from muggles. Does that mean that elsewhere, magic just isn't hidden? I'm guessing that works because the bulk of magical happenings are happening in NY. Which, again, if so, couldn't Liz just move if she really wanted to? Or is she actually being *kept* there? 

Ahhhhh, that argument scene with Kingston and Liz. Ow. 

Robert's subconscious is heckling Kingston's memories the entire time. 

The party gets back together, Pete immediately lets Kingston know he was memory spying on him and hugs him (while Misty is drunk a singing over him). Their rift literally caused a kind of rift in NYC which is now healed (which causes Sophie to see the Unsleeping City/Dreaming Yin-Yang sign over their heads).

 Ricky drinks the 1000 hr energy so start the clock I guess. 

Misty, upon hearing that Dale is dead basically does that John Mulaney bit: Hey, do you want me to kill that guy for you? Because it sounds like [s]he sucks and I will totally kill that guy for you. 

It's the day of Priya's art show which I totally forgot was happening. Before that, Sophie finally goes to see her brother and we can return back to that pin I mentioned earlier.

(Also, it’s the 20th which means we’re getting really close to Christmas)

He says that their family got mixed up with the Confettis and they've been helping to launder magical items that Confetti is paying some rep from Hell (an associate of Robert's).

And by, "Some rep from hell," I mean Isabella Infierno specifically.

Emily, hilariously riffs for a while about how small it was of her to call Isabella a succubus even though she clearly knows at this point that Isabella is some kind of demon. I mean...Infierno. Come on. 

Sidenote: Which demon actually trying to be subtle would pick the last name Infierno? You wanna blow your cover for the aesthetic that bad?

Emily goes, "Oh my (beat) Nod," which I think is the exact way she dropped the first, "Oh Melora," in one of the first eps of Naddpod. 

Anyway, it turns out that Soph's family knew that Isabella was gunning for Dale (he was getting close to realizing something shady was going on) and, while they didn't call the shot, they let it happen.

Oh! He also says Dale was a chosen one from "some monastery" which, of course, fits in with Dale's comment about saying hi to Jackson. Now I'm wondering if his other comment--about there seeming like there's nothing at the top--is about whatever chosen one test he had to take to get the position to begin with. And maybe he was giving a clue to Sophie so that when she takes it, she'll for sure pass and get whatever dope powers or weapons or privileges come with the position. 

"The only reason I'm not going to go after you right now is because I'm not organized enough to give you the fucking revenge you deserve." Soph is cold as ice after hearing about what her family did. 

"Maybe you should have said that to Isabella before she went after me." Another mic drop line from Emily. This really was her episode. You can really see Emily channeling hr genuine emotional reactions into her character.  

La Gran Gata shows up to let Soph know she has her back to hunt down Isabella. The only other warlocks really seen played are Fjord on CritRole and Leiland on Bloodkeep so it's wild to see a character with such a chill relationship with their patron.

So, Priya's art show. They show up (to a distressingly unsafe building from Ricky's perspective) and it turns out, not only is it performance art (the worst kind) Pete *is* the art.

"I present to all of you: cruelty, a exploration of a relationship. Peter, take my hand."

major barf.

Pete goes OFF

Kingston: Picasso is art, this is bullshit!

Siobhan: Her last name is Danger? I hate this bitch.

Pete gets over Priya instantly which totally tracks because, like I said, barf. 

Sophie stealing Ricky's thing and rooftop jumping. Zac narrows his eyes when she says that.

I love Isabella's title card. It says, "Literal Succubus". It reminds me of the funniest scene in Bedazzled when the Devil (Liz Hurley) gives Brendan Frasier her business card and it just says, "The Devil".

But she's here and she's here to fight! I'm so excited for this one y'all! Unsafe building. Lots of civilians. Sophie (and Emily) going totally feral. I haven’t looked forward to a fight this much since Adaine went for Aelwen. Let's gooooo!