#mainly because he’s one of the only islanders that distrust him

[cheese-water]

I just wanna say, after the whole Forever debacle, this is another instance of Tubbo having weirdly accurate hunches. Not talking the donowall stuff but about his perception towards the N.I.N.H.O and Forever himself.

There’s a reason why he hasn’t set up Sunny’s N.I.N.H.O room yet. Even after being gifted one by Forever. Just a small joke said in response to Forever explaining how eggs and their parents can double reinforce their rooms so that even he couldn’t access them.

“Alright. Well as long as you don’t go crazy again, I’m not fussed.”

Tubbo then not only places Sunny’s warp plate out in the open but also pulls Sunny aside to reassure her that they will create their own safety precautions outside of the N.I.N.H.O. How that he’s found ways with newer mods to make a better safety system that he will use on his own.

Like at first, I wanted him to make improvements on the already existing N.I.N.H.O to protect more eggs. But now, thank GOD he didn’t.

[lionheartedmusings]

the thing about q!bad recreating the soulfire base basically block by block and planning to surprise the team with it is that it says a whole lot about him, where is was during purgatory, and where he is now.

q!bad spent months trying to burn bridges and push people away, he effectively placed himself in a distrusted position on the island, his children (the only reason that man breathes) vanished in the middle of the night, he was actively torturing himself and kidnapping people. he was a man on a mission, sure, but time and time again he reinforced to us the audience that he wasn't *happy* about what he had to do. his plan — whatever his plan is — is something he deems necessary enough to have been alright with ruining his own life. as he said to q!baghera: "i'm expendable".

suddenly there's hope in egg island, but egg island is actually a hellscape and he's trapped without his biggest support systems — q!bagi, q!baghera, q!foolish, and even to an extent q!forever were the people he had to take down, they couldn't be there for him anymore. and from his team? other than q!tina and q!aypierre, he wasn't close to anyone or was just... directly antagonistic towards them (mainly q!pac and q!tubbo).

and then the funniest thing happened — he found family in hell and in people he never truly expected to be comfortable around.

he grew to respect and care for q!tubbo, he grew much closer to q!tina, his relationship with q!aypierre was tested and strengthened, he found a connection with q!niki and by god, he protected q!pac — who'd once been terrified of him — with his life. even the people who didn't log on often, he grew to see as part of his pack in a way he (and i) didn't see coming.

when soulfire mains talk about them being the perfect example of found family, that's what we mean. slow, careful changes that grew into love and protection beyond belief — enough that when green gay ninjas were split, everyone was welcomed with a warm hug and a cup of tea, now part of the family undoubtedly and forever. just like that.

their family was hitting their stride when purgatory ended and q!bad tanked a nuke to his back to save his son, and now his bookshelves are all knocked over and his memory's slipping. he's dying, he knows he's dying, and he's holding on by a thread for dapper and pomme even if he's aware that he can't just "bear it" much longer. he's isolated again, hiding and lying about his condition, watching the world turn and knowing his clock is ticking... sometimes he knows nothing at all.

and in this moment of pain, and solemn realization of the end of this version of him?

he's spending his time rebuilding the last place that felt like home block by block, talking openly about how he feels nostalgic and misses their base, their god awful spawn, the memories they made. his time with his daughter has been spent down there.

i know we as a fandom have theorized that one of these days, his memory's gonna snap down there and he'll think he's back in purgatory and it'll be a mess. sure. but right now?

right now that rebuilt base means love, and friendship, and family, and safety. it's the last place things were okay, and he felt cared for in a way that frankly your children can't provide.

a group of ragtag mismatched people got put together in a poor man's hunger games and they saw this demon — bloodthirsty, destructive, full of cold calculated murderous intent and a need to win for his child and instead of being horrified, running away screaming from his fangs and his claws?

they loved him. they found the gentleness beneath the blood and guts. they called him their attack dog because he's so full of love and so protective, and would tear anyone to pieces to protect their family.

team soulfire saw q!bad in a way no one in the island had, and they loved him for it — even when he drove them up the walls and they had to hold the leash tight, they loved him.

and now he's remade their home.

[deathmetalunicorn1]

Hello! I have been a follower for some time and enjoy all your work! I’m glad you finally opened requests again. Can I ask about a female Kyojuro Rengoku reader x Zoro? Being someone with a very enthusiastic, kind and smiling personality would contrast greatly with him. Not even they themselves would know how they ended up as a couple, please and thank you.

-You fit right in with your crew, the Straw Hats, when you joined along with Chopper, whom you befriended when he found you out in the snow after you woke up in this new world.

-You were quite…cheerful for someone being in a new world you knew nothing about, most would be thrown off and scared, something Chopper and Kureha told you, but they were taken by your cheerful nature.

-You were a fierce warrior, something they and your new friends, got to see firsthand, when you charged in to save Chopper from being attacked by Wapol, using your breathing style, surrounding yourself in your flames.

-Seeing the flames surrounding you and paired with your immense strength due to hard work, Luffy had quickly decided you were going to join his crew.

-You instantly accepted, grinning brightly, not thinking twice about it, which did throw a few, like Usopp, Nami, and Sanji off. It would have thrown Chopper off, had he not met you months prior and got used to you.

-Sanji was quickly fawning over you, complimenting your strength, but Nami could easily see that you were rather… dense about his flirting, just taking his compliments with a big smile.

-Zoro, unlike others who joined after you, being distrustful with them, instantly accepted you, mainly because the two of you bonded in the snow after the battle had ended with Wapol, and he challenged you to a fight and you looked excited, immediately accepting.

-To Zoro, you were kin- you were a swordswoman, and a powerful one, so you easily had his respect and he had a strong sparring partner.

-It wasn’t until much later, when the ship had stopped by a popular summer island resort, and Nami convinced you to wear a bikini, which looked amazing on you- as you filled it out very nicely, along with your muscles.

-You quickly had lots of eyes on your and Zoro didn’t like that, he couldn’t explain it, but he wanted to fight everyone who was looking at you, including that ero-cook Sanji who was fawning over you, Nami, and Robin.

-Robin thought it was rather cute, seeing Zoro looking so jealous but when she said something, he was quick to deny it, “I’m not jealous!” Franky instantly grinned, seeing what Robin was doing and went to help, “Oi Y/N!!”

-You turned as Franky came over, “Want to play a game of chicken with me?” everyone, except Luffy who didn’t realize it, was quickly in on it, and Sanji held Nami on his shoulders.

-Zoro, seeing your thighs touching Franky’s face, quickly set him off and he was going to go and do something before Nami caught you good, which made certain things on both of you bounce, and Sanji quickly had to be rescued from not only drowning but also blood loss.

-Zoro came up behind you and put his over shirt over your shoulders, which surprised you as you turned and you could see he looked a bit annoyed before he motioned a thumb over his shoulder, C’mon- let’s go get a drink.”

-You beamed brightly, taking his hand in your own, not at all bothered while he was red faced. Robin and Nami fist bumped, seeing this while Luffy was confused, “Where is Zoro and Y/N going?” Usopp just chuckled, “Going to do whatever couples do.”

-Luffy’s draw dropped, “Ehhh?!?! Their dating?!” rolling eyes went all around the crew before laughter filled the air while you were enjoying a large fruity looking drink, “TASTY!!” while Zoro smiled over at you.

-He loved your enthusiasm about everything, including eating and drinking, it made you special to him. He never wanted you to change.

[yonemurishiroku]

Hiya yone! Recently my brain has been infested with bugs that want me to make a Circe Nico AU (Nico is Circe?? Kinda.) You are the glorious fanfic writer who can conjure up anything from anything, so please do your magic.

I'll try my best, however I only know like. 2 stories about Circe at best? So please don't put too much trust in me lol 😅😅

The first one is when Odysseus visits her during his return voyage to Ithaca. I forgot most of it (typical me) except that she turns his crew into animals, which Odysseus managed to convince her to undo and if I'm not mistaken, they live together for a while?? Let's just go with it.

As for this story, I think it would fit best with Jasico? Mainly bc they have that sort of enemies-to-lovers air (Jason distrusted Nico at first). Jason is best fit to be a returning hero, too. Though the Cupid debacle is like heaven and earth with mere convincing on Odysseus' part, I reckon we can work around it with enough maneuver. Why does Nico accept to turn them back? - Maybe he's feeling generous, maybe he's a petulant lonely witch who wants people to stay but never knows how to voice it, and ppl often run at the first sight of him, so he just turns them into animals to keep them by her side.

In the end, Odysseus leaves Circe. This aligns well with the fact that Jason just dropped dead shortly after he and Nico became friends. Which is a funny (and depressing thought) if you put thoughts into it. Which I can't atm lmoa.

Anw. think of it as a piece of quiet Jason has given Nico in the expanse of his loneliness. That, though he was swept away by the natural order of things at the end, Jason did try his best to alleviate Nico's pain. So I reckon there should be a little bit of affection - if not love - in there.

The second story is, well, Circe and Scylla. And the male lover whose name I forget.

This is a classic case of jealousy - so who fits it better than Percy, the canon epitome of every jealous trope in the history of fiction?

sorry that was my pettiness talking. Anywayyyyy, I suppose I don't need to talk about this... I mean it's pretty clear who is who and how the story transpires: Circe is in love with that-something-sea-god, who is in love with Scylla, so Circe turns her into a monster. The only difference between Circe and Nico in this is that he doesn't do anything to Annabeth (even refuses to hate her still. gosh).

But that wouldn't be Percico, is it? So I say just say fuck it and make Percy a sea monster or something Idk. A witch living secluded in an island with his beloved sea monster? I'm in.

Another choice would be to make Annabeth the bad one but I'm in no position to make that propose.

If you still want to keep the story, and if you're any of an unhinged person like me, just make Nico the villain. Well, Circe is the villain in this story, yeah? Embrace it - Nico as the powerful witch, whose loneliness-induced jealousy wreaks havoc on even a sea god. What's left is not love - because love is the last thing Yone needs in fanfics srsly - but an impression of terror, of how disastrous Nico's love can be.

The concepts mix well in this case btw. I remember a painting of Circe pouring a plate filled with poison into the sea. Just imagine it - a blinding blackness spreading rapidly across the lapping water with just a touch of Nico's dainty finger. The shadows overlap with the roaring waves - the black undercurrents raging all the same - and darkness swallows all those whom he call enemies. If Percy's the sea and Nico's the lightless bottom, dark, mysterious, and full of threats.

That's everything I have atm, I guess. Sorry for not being able to help much :(((

[pixiecaps]

heres a long recap on qjaiden and qfoolish’s relationship, their ties to cucurucho, and recent lore

it mainly started around the time qjaiden was doing her cucurucho missions and there was a lot of distrust on the island towards her. qfoolish seemed to be one of the few people who genuinely didn’t seem affected by her working with cucurucho. mainly due to the fact he wanted to befriend cucurucho for a cloud. so over time they got closer as friends over this very thing. they both held some type of connection with cucurucho. she eventually shows foolish her base at bobby fields which is a very special place for her. only inviting those over who trust her. foolish & leo were in-fact the second people she ever showed this base to. roier the first and cellbit & richas the third. over time she’s one of the few people who gets to witness and hear about all random interactions foolish has with cucurucho. i feel like over this time they were dubbed cucurucho buddies. there’s also the blue bird mission where jaien is tasked to go to coords which led to a dangerous dungeon but no worries because foolish, cellbit, and bad all follow her invisible (though she was aware of this) because they worried something may occur to her. all of them seemed bonded even closer after that and they called themselves the jaidens. also important to mention foolish and cellbit are technically related since foolish is roier’s father and cellbit is roier’s husband. which makes foolish cellbits father in law.

now to present time foolish gets given the task of arresting tazercraft. when he went to go do that tazercraft were giving jaiden a haircut. so somehow she ends up roped into the arrest and is one of the few witnesses. fast forward theres the interrogation between cellbit and foolish. foolish calls in jaiden to be the witness and lawyer. fun fact there was a court trial previously on the island and jaiden was a lawyer and she slayed. moving along, foolish doesn’t say anything important to cellbit so jaiden tells cellbit she’ll take charge and get the real scoop since her and foolish are bonded. she does this for cellbit because her and cellbit also have a close relationship due to roier her bestie being married to him and then later gaining a genuine respect for each other. remember he was the third person she showed her base too and actually showed the entire base to including the basement. cellbit was also one of those few people who was empathetic towards her during the distrust period. so you could say they’re pretty tight. in this moment she is deliberately choosing to help cellbit.

so afterwards she does just that and speaks with foolish about everything to learn about what truly occurred. and she got all the information from him! however this is where some things begin to get a little mixed up. foolish lies to her about his conversation with cucurucho in an attempt to make himself perhaps look better, maybe more understandable on his part, or even just for some spice (who fucking knows its up to you to have your own interpretation). in this lie he tells jaiden that he was given two options arrest pac and mike or kill richarlyson. the richarlyson part a lie. and jaiden having no reason to distrust foolish or question him as foolish has never once lied to her before believes this. and empathizes with his situation and says she would’ve done the same. she has a strong passion for protecting the eggs as do many of the other island residents. so then after this conversation ends she runs off back to cellbit and informs him of what she was told. unknowingly spreading this lie. this is another instance where things get interesting she once again goes back to speak with foolish. and tells him that she told cellbit about what occurred. foolish admits he assumed she would do that. a moment that insinuates the lie to be calculated on his part. now jaiden here says she isn’t sure if she wasn’t supposed to tell foolish she told cellbit all the information but she felt she had because she felt bad about lying and going behind his back. it is her friend at the end of the day. throughout their conversation it really appears that jaiden doesn’t want this conflict to blow up outta proportion, to me i interpreted it as her character really not being fond of conflict. or at least conflict between her closest friends. despite foolish knowing she told cellbit his trust and bond with jaiden didn’t seem to waver at all. friends who cucurucho together stick together i suppose (bad joke)

the next day foolish gets a couple threats from both forever and fit about the whole arrest situation and betrayal. after hearing foolish decides he’ll try and search for the prison but no luck. then he tries to learn for mr mustard. this is when leo suggests doing a summoning circle to see if this capybara will show up. jaiden logs on just as foolish finishes and he immediately invites her to tag along. foolish, leo, and jaiden did the ritual together and sadly mr mustard was not summoned however cucurucho was. they’re both surprised but they go along with it. foolish takes this chance to ask cucurucho what happened with the arrest, if they were wrong about who kidnapped mr mustard and if they could release pac and mike. and this is when cucurucho asks a very important question. “your decision. alone or accompanied.” foolish responds saying the second option. so important to note foolish had no context about what was going to occur or be said after he replied so he just wanted jaiden to be there. he also doesn’t read this book aloud which leaves jaiden with no context to what was happening as well. im quoting the moment here because i think it’s important to understand why jaiden even tagged along.

foolish: yeah! i think you know it’d be more fun that way. well maybe i dont-

cucurucho: yes

foolish: well congrats jaiden we uh-

jaiden: what?

foolish: okay yeah nevermind yep

cucurucho: follow me

foolish: following

jaiden: okay? well i’m coming too. come on leo

so they follow cucurucho and it takes them to a room in the prison. both never having been there or being sure whats about to happen. this is where cucurucho offers foolish the detective position and the mr mustard report as sorta a reward for the arrest. the report details that mr mustard was last seen at the hide and seek arena and that crushed oranges had been found at chume labs most likely signifying a struggle, and lastly that the murder mystery arena still had to be investigated. foolish questioned if cucurucho was completely sure about all this information and all it replied was “do you want to find mr mustard”. after everything was said foolish asked cucurucho if this was a public thing? cucurucho said no. this position was meant to be a secret. then he asked what exactly stops jaiden from telling others? cucuruchos told him “you said you wanted company. it is your choice. :)” which to me is super intriguing because it insinuates that foolish could’ve been doomed to fail from the start. if someone like bad had been with foolish and he had replied to be accompanied then immediately he would be compromised so cucurucho seems to have definitely been ready to brew some conflict. some important things to note foolish’s decision wasn’t impulsive he surprisingly thought this through and asked many questions. even asking leo for her opinion and if they wanted him to do it. he did ask about pac and mike and each time cucurucho refused to tell him where they were or the fact they had already escaped. foolish’s attempted to also get jaiden a detective role but cucurucho did not seem too into the idea replying with a “no. maybe.” and ended up not doing that. after he agreed to the detective position and the case jaiden and him spoke. she swore secrecy to foolish and that she would not be telling anybody about what occurred. to directly quote her,

“no i’ll be honest i didn’t feel good about tattling. so i hereby swear secrecy to you. i feel like this is bigger than me i don’t want to fiddle with it you know. if you want to tell people, tell people but my lips are sealed”.

that explains her position on everything and why she hasn’t informed others. there’s also a moment after all the cucurucho stuff where bad, foolish, and jaiden hang out but nothing really important happens since neither foolish or jaiden spilled anything to bad.

then rather recently she logs on (today, july 29th, when this was posted). bad decides to interrogate her after his conversation with foolish since she was with foolish yesterday. after all that she goes and tells foolish what happened with everything and that she wasn’t mentally prepared and apologized for the slip up. they then sort their stories out so that they’re on the same page about everything. foolish decides he won’t tell them about cucurucho showing up despite jaiden’s slip up since he wasn’t the one to admit it. she also makes the joke about staying at her base at the time being during all this foolish stuff so she doesn’t get bothered further. foolish asked jaiden if she wants to be kept in the loop and told information about anything that happens in the future and her answer to that is that it is completely up to foolish. up to this point foolish still hasn’t told her that he lied and he doesn’t seem inclined to at all. so i suppose we’ll have to see what he decides in the future. later a disguised bad and pierre calling themselves The Justice League torture foolish to get him to try and confess and admit that slip up to be true. he does not do that at all and says perhaps jaiden was lying or jaiden was the one having the conversation with cucurucho but not him. The Justice League says they would’ve included jaiden in this torture but she had logged off (lol she escaped just in time).

and i think that is everything up until this very present moment. i am normal about these characters as you can tell. if i made typos. no i didn’t 👍

[karramberrychez]

If I were doing the animated series "Peter Pan and the Pirates", I would change something ...

1. I would make neverland even wider. I would add a winter taiga island where characters from Slavic fairy tales would live, or just characters of Slavic origin. Among them there will also be mermaids who will be friendly and polite to everyone (even to Wendy)among the Slavic characters there will be a girl who will be in love with one of the lost boys (most likely Slightly). Also, these characters can turn into animals with the help of masks.Mermaids of Slavic origin will be able to turn into ordinary girls in a couple of seconds. They will not be strongly attached to water and therefore they will live in the forest.

2. I would add a few more characters: It will be a vampire boy who will not forcefully suck blood from anyone. He will need a blood donor who will pay with something precious.

unlike Peter, this boy will be calm, cool-headed, thoughtful, assiduous, romantic, but at the same time he will also participate in adventures. He will be in love with Wendy and make friends with the lost boys almost immediately. Peter will be jealous, since Wendy has this vampire there will be many common interests, and because of this, wendy will often spend time with him, and not with Peter.even though peter will seek adventures on his ass, he will also compete for wendy's attention. But despite this, peter will not harm the vampire, it is also possible to make friends with him, but a little later than it happened between the boys and this vampire.

also I would add a fairy for Wendy. She will be jealous of Wendy for Peter and often fight with Tinkerbell. She will teach lost boys magical techniques and knowledge that can help in an emergency. She will also protect Wendy from the mermaids and often come up with punishments for them so that the mermaids will leave Wendy alone. Fairy Wendy will be very smart and will treat the boys like her brothers, however, she is distrustful of Peter, and Tinkerbell will often criticize and even openly hate.She will be arrogant and toxic, but not towards wendy, boys and tiger lily. She will also be very similar to wendy in appearance, but with some differences: The hair will be long, the wings will be like a demon, only white. Most likely she will also will be in a dress, only in dark colors. And on his head he will wear a crown, like some kind of princess.

I would add another character - a mysterious guy who will be the personification of karma (the idea from the series is "a girl from nowhere")he will mainly be connected with Peter. His task is to teach Peter lessons so that Peter begins to understand the consequences of his actions and that Peter becomes smarter and wiser. He does this because he is also connected with neverland, he understands that this Peter most likely he will be the ruler until the end of his life, and in this way he wants to protect Neverland, doing something like re-educating Peter. He will be the personification of not only bad karma, but also good. This guy is not good and not bad, he just does his task.maybe he will also play a role in peter remembering his past (which will be drastically different from other adaptations and from the original book) and also peter will learn more and more secrets about other "perpetually immature boys" before him. And also maybe he will play a role in the fact that the hook will reconsider its priorities, and turn from a villain into an anti-hero who had a tragic past. Maybe just the hook will have a chance to adopt a girl living on the moon.

3) I would also like to show the backstory of Lost Boys. I believe that Peter did not kidnap anyone, that the children themselves followed Peter, because in their life there was not something bright, but life in principle. Perhaps, at first, out of pity, Peter took the children from some boarding school or shelter, and then, without noticing it, he becomes attached to them. I also think that the boys didn't initially trust Peter, and maybe Peter needed to try to gain their trust, and one day he saved them altogether. Perhaps Peter did not immediately become a leader among his friends. He had to prove and show why he should be a leader. I think that most likely the lost boys were already teenagers (not counting the youngest ones), so Peter managed to get along with them. And also I would like to show how they interact while already in Neverland. That the boys are not afraid of Peter, that they can openly confront him and swear at him, because Peter is first of all their friend, and not their father, or elder brother, or tyrant. That even despite quarrels, contradictions, Peter accepts them as they are

the story of how Peter and Wendy met. Their acquaintance will also be fundamentally different from other adaptations. Wendy is a very smart girl, and therefore she is unlikely to trust an unfamiliar boy. It is possible that Wendy did not really believe in Peter Pan, but told fairy tales to her younger brothers , and Peter accidentally heard and began to fly in. Once when Wendy was in trouble, Peter saved her, and after the rescue he flew to her a couple more times to ingratiate herself with her and take her to neverland. At first she was a little afraid of him, but when she realized that Peter is not such a monster as described in the original book, she became friends with him. If we talk about Tinkerbell and her attitude towards Wendy, then she did not try to kill her, although she was against the fact that she was in Neverland. But over time (as already shown in the animated series) she cooperates with her, accepts her and is friends with her. Wendy agreed with Peter and the boys that she would read fairy tales to them, but she would not be a mother, since she does not behave like a mother, and the boys are able to themselves pr prepare food and clean the house.

and last. backstory of Peter himself. Most likely, Peter already got into Neverland as a teenager. Most likely, he had no plans to run away from mom and dad, but since he had a big fight with them, he decided to take a walk to cool off. However, who then stole him and tried to kill him, but Peter survived, got to the garden, where Tinkerbell found him, and saved him, taking him to Neverland. perhaps due to the severe head injury that his captors inflicted on Peter, Peter forgot how to read and remembers nothing about who he really is. (Some kind of horror movie has already turned out). But that's just my opinion, and my idea of ​​what could be added to this series if there was a sequel. You have every right to disagree with me. thank you for reading.

[lafayetteworld]

Robin 2021

Okay, so it's been a while since I've been actively posting on tumblr, mainly because I haven’t had time. That being said, the commentary I am about to make on the Robin 2021 series is not meant to offend anyone and while I am particularly critical, I also acknowledge that some people genuinely like it/prefer the direction its's going in. And that's fine. But I did want to break down why I feel the current series is just 'meh' to me at the moment and it’s not necessarily because Damian is potentially being shipped with a newly introduced character.

Please be aware, that there are lots of spoilers. 

So, to start off, I am a big fan of the older Batman and Robin (2009) series, where Damian had partnered up first with Dick and later Bruce (2011). I do no think they are flawless, certainly. I think, in particular, the Nobody plot - excluding of course the interactions between Batman!Dick and Robin! Damian which are gold - was very good. In just a handful of issues, I think we were offered a great insight into Damian's character and how layered he is. 

My first thoughts when I heard about Robin 2021, based on the announcement: Damian will follow his own path, for some reason he retains the Robin moniker which is weird but okay, it does seem like something he'd do I suppose. He will participate in mortal kombat-sort-of-tournament, which will showcase his abilities and in the process, 'he will seek his own destiny' (which I believe was a line used in the actual announcement). The reason he wants to win? Initially, it appeared to be only because he wanted to prove to be the world's best fighter -- which by the way, how is only a tournament of this level only coming up now? Anyways, ignored that. Not a big deal. The idea of watching Damian fight different opponents was appealing either way.

The art of those comics is perhaps nowhere as striking/appealing as Robin 2021 and there's certainly not as many elements to it, but there was just something about it. I stopped reading comics after, for reasons I can't recall but I do remember finding out that Damian was killed off sometime after. I was super heartbroken over it but luckily I found out about it right around the time DC decided to bring him so really I had to wait a short while to see the little shit being Robin again.

I am not as familiar with the arc on Alfred's death but I know Damian watched what was basically his grandfather figure die in front of his eyes. How it was addressed after was rather poorly and that's a discussion for another time, just as it is that hot mess of Gleason's Titans.

 My hopes may have been too high in thinking we will be offered the introspection we'd seen in Batman and Robin, or him deciding what type of vigilante he wants to be. Like who remembers Damian admitting 'sometimes I don't know who I am or what I want' or him saying he does not wish to be like Nobody. That was so poignant.  

First issue of Robin 2021 was a disappointment. I know that there's a lot of damage to the character that had to be addressed but why did he die from like the beginning? Why is it the first thing we see is the author's OC defeat him? I mean, we really didn't need that to find the tournament's rules. Anyway, I was so sold on the art that I could have overlooked all that, except then the art became inconsistent so.....

Do I think Flatline's design is awesome? Yep. Do I like that she is potentially a badass female fighter? Sure. Do I like her abilities? Somewhat? They haven't been explored that much. But to me, having an OC appear out of nowhere and kill the character I was hoping to watch mature/develop is a bit underwhelming. Then, we start getting references of how poetic it is that Damian may fall in love with the first girl that kills him. I thought it was funny at the beginning but subsequent issues only seem to point that actually, the author does want to use Flatline/romance in this journey of growth that Damian is undergoing. I mean, we really shouldn't be romanticizing that she killed him? The girl is serious about winning too. That she caught him off guard is actually rather awesome but I don't think it had to mean anything more than Damian meeting a potentially dangerous fighter and that he needs to be less reckless.

Damian is a pretty complex/difficult character with a lot to figure out. Why does he need a girlfriend? Why can't he have friends that helps him grow or mentor figures? Him and Rose have such a great dynamic, for example.

I see a lot of people saying 'well, he's a teenager boy so it's normal'. Yeah of course it is. But why can't it be the opposite? Damian isn't a normal teenager. Out there, may be teenagers who feel the same. They don’t care about this stuff. 

It is so frustrating, and underwhelming. Not because there's anything wrong with Damian having a crush. Not because there's necessarily anything wrong with Flatline. But because there's no need.

Why is it just because he's a teenager he has to have a romantic interest? If romance is introduced in a plot, surely it doesn't have to be just because 'he's a teenager'. And if he does, why does it have to be an OC that hasn't been explored very well? Flatline could be a seriously cool character without needing to be a romantic interest for Damian and vice versa, Damian has so much to figure out on his own. So for me it's not the shipping that’s an issue, it’s the reasoning and how it may perpetuate clichés when there’s other angles that could be explored. 

Also, why the hell is Alfred used to drive Flatline's likeability? If Alfred is Damian's guilt manifesting, then that's actually Damian thinking that?

'I like this one, Master Damian.'

Seriously. I really hope we end up finding out that was tied in with Flatline's ability or something. So, Williamson won't explore Damian's guilt over Alfred but he'll give us a panel where Alfred (or a manifestation of him) is basically giving his thumbs up for his OC. That doesn’t sit well with me. Not so early in the series, anyway. 

Why is this whole manga thing keep coming back? Yes, Damian reads manga. I loved this addition and I think it's great that Williamson actually brought it in. The fact that it was Flatline who found it seems cliché. And no, I don't think it's a parallel between the shojo manga characters and them two. I really hope that particular manga has a deeper meaning than that. The fact that we keep seeing the blood sprayed (or is it cuts? not sure) on it does seem to hint at that.

There were some good moments. Damian and Dick. Basically every single interaction between Damian and Ravager. The whole Damian and Conner could have been developed better, because it seemed rather sudden they had a heart to heart when Damian can be such a distrusting little shit. Damian reuniting with Goliath.

Why is it that we're five issues into this series and it's all over the place? I don't dislike it. The art is great, although there's so many inconsistencies. But it's been super hard to feel in any way about it other than just 'meh'.

Issue #6 was boring. I didn't mind Flatline and Damian analysing other fighters, it was interesting actually, but that it's still being framed as heading towards a romantic relationship is so.....well, eugh.

Overall, I just don't feel there's enough...substance? Damian does interact with a wide variety of characters and there are a lot of things going on - batfamily searching for him, Ra’s Al Ghul (which was funny yet so odd the way he was characterized), the whole tournament and magic island, so on.

Flatline is not the issue for me, but rather one part of why the series has not managed to appeal to me. I do feel there's a bit too much of her. Or rather, there's not enough of her as a character and too much of the whole 'they're teenagers so they'll have to end up having a crush on one another because he's a boy and she's a girl who literally stole his heart'. Like, I wouldn’t mind having Flatline or other fighters background explored, just to see the types of people they are and so on. 

I wish there'd more of Damian's inner thoughts too. If not that, then give us more fights. Not just snippets. It's a tournament. Let's see how badass they all are. Damian’s fight scenes in #6 were beautiful but brief. I hope the next issues will give us more of that.  As someone who does like Damian x OC fics, I can’t blame the author for wanting to hype their own OC, but I am also a great fan of friends to lovers, slow burns, friendships can be just as great as romantic relationships, of taking the time for mental/emotional growth. 

Anyways, if you've made it to the end of this commentary, I applaud you. Once again, if you do like the whole Damian x Flatline thing, that's cool. I don't, but I do understand to an extent why people find it appealing. And if you think the Robin 2021 series is amazing, then I am happy for you -- I wish I could be this enthusiastic about it.

P.S just saw the cover for issue #7 or is it #8 ? I think I may cry.

[24-guy]

The saddest thing about "it was never meant to be". + A theory when the next one will be said (if at all.)

Obviously we know it was said by the traitors to l'manberg. Eret before they sacrificed and betrayed everyone, Wilbur before he blew up the country he built, Niki after she burned l'mantree.

I think it also stands for, in a way, them realising something else.

They sacrificed everything by uttering those 6 words. No matter if they were whispered into the wind by an unheard voice, or yelled to everyone for anyone to hear. Those people sacrificed everything.

Those words reek of betrayal and distrust, saying them has a track record of leaving the person isolated and alone. Eret is barely trusted by those who heard him, Niki lives in a solitary city, only trusted by those who followed her beliefs of l'manberg being destroyed, Wilbur died, coming back a shell of himself that everyone around him doesn't explain much to.

Anyone that followed in Eret's words made the decision to repeat them. It became an iconic phrase because it's dramatic but the connotations behind them are not just ignorable. I may be repeating something that someone else has posted or is pretty obvious at this point.

But we haven't had a "it was never meant to be" this season yet. I believe it'll be happening when everything crashes together. When all the plotlines converge into one.

Eret caused wars with those words.

Wilbur destroyed a nation with those words.

Niki marked the end of L'manberg with those words.

Now there's no l'manberg, what faction is there to start wars over?

The eggpire.

We have a perfect moment. Ranboo lore followed by the red banquet.

Two seemingly major lore bits right next to each other. I was right about the lore picking up recently.

So. "it was never meant to be". Let's quickly analyse the current meaning behind it.

It's the realisation that this ideal they hold is impossible. L'manberg could never be what anyone wanted it to be.

So. If we're going with the Red Banquet theory, who is part of the egg? Or at least allied?

Bad, Ant, Ponk, Punz, Purpled, Skeppy (maybe).

It probably won't be Bad or Ant, they're the spearheads of the egg. Let's get Skeppy off of the possibilities, he's off on an island and I don't think he's in lore anymore. At least not majorly.

Which leaves Punz and Purpled.

Purpled is barely on the server, but he is in Lore. He's been asked to kill Puffy, I think.

Punz, however, is also barely on the server, but he takes place within being possessed by the egg.

Ponk, on the other hand, I think I saw something where it was saying that he has no want anymore. That he joined the Egg because of wanting Sam back, and now that is gone, he has no reason to follow the Egg anymore. There's no appeal. Unless he has a want for vengeance.

So my thought is that, if anyone is going to say the line "It was never meant to be", it'll be ponk

Ponk. It would make sense because he might realize that the egg can't help him with Sam, so he goes against the Egg.

I don't know the consequences of that. But maybe it would make sense, seeing as the most of his positive relationships are from the eggpire, saying the phrase that shouldn't be said would erase those. Much like everyone else who said it.

Update to this due to the lore stream that obviously happened as I was being a functional human and sleeping,

Maybe Bad does say it.

Maybe he realizes the Egg can't help Skeppy, so... In an act of trying to save Skeppy, he realises the ideal of the Egg making everything better is just a fantasy.

So, "it was never meant to be". He'd loose the egg and the friends that came with it, he might loose Skeppy again. But in the end it matches up with everything else.

Also, it may not be the same words, but I'm mainly talking about the moment it happens in. The moment of betrayal to prove a point.

[sokayisaidiot]

Dream SMP Assumption #7

Today’s topic: Everybody is suffering and you know it.

Please DO NOT read if you’re uncomfortable with the themes of death, depression and suicide. It’s a very complicated theme. I did NOT study it and do NOT know some aspects of it. I just go off the things I saw in the smp and made my own theories about it. If you’re even slightly triggered by this, please stop and do NOT try to read it. Please do NOT put yourself in some kind of uncomfortable zone.

Please do not. Thank you

(This is all assumptioning from the fictional world of dream smp)

(Heavy spoilers on the resent events)

(Also just assumptions, when you know something, you can always drop it :))

(Mainly around the lmanburg way, sadly need to learn more about badlands ): )

(This Series is created by another person, that’s just too fuckin lazy to move her butt)

Trigger warning today:

Suicide thoughts

(PTSD)

Depression

War

Child Neglect

Betrayal and Trust Issues

Death

Lets get this straight, no one is pure evil just because. Everybody has something happening and BOOM, finished chaos and sadness and strange behavior and aggressiveness and- You get me? Good. I will take on EVERYBODY who says that a person in the story didn't suffer. I aint a Apologist either. I just want to make some things clear who suffered how. Understand? Good.

Stop saying “[Character] didn't suffer!” Hell yes somehow everybody, close in the lore, fuckin did.

LET’S GET STARTED

__________________________

Tommyinnit

Lets start with one, who should be pretty obvious. Tommy. In my second Assumption, I explained symptoms of PTSD and Depression. 

He was never really trusted by any point

Was just as used as Techno, because who had Tommy controlled was pretty powerful

He was exiled by a country, he HELPED saving MULTIPLE times

He saw his brother get killed by his father

He experienced so many deaths (Tubbo’s, in the final control room, Schlatts, 

He lost his pets 

He lost his belongings

Has to be on edge constantly

Gets accused by someone and then MOSTLY EVERYBODY believes, it was him

He isn’t really taken seriously

He gets seen as power-hungry person

People literally having him on the Hitlist

He nearly saw his best friend dying, on a mission, that was started by him

His older Brother, who he has an confused relationship with, doesn't even want to be revived.

Lost his brother to insanity and had to sit in the FRONT ROW of this spiral

PTSD

Depression

Suicidal thoughts

Betrayal

next to no one on his actual side

got left by almost everyone

was stuck on a island with an amnesiac ghost, who is a shell of his older brother

gets told his comfort items he had before everything else didn't matter

constantly has to live on the edge because he runs around with one just fuckin heart

Tubbo

Next to Tommy, he also suffers from PTSD, Depression and Suicidal tendencies. And that doesn't mean you kill yourself. It means you are too careless to give a fuck. And that can happen. TUbbo was way too easy to give up his OWN LIVE for something his best friend has passion in it.

He got publicly executed in a place HE DECORATED by someone he considered his Allie

Had the burden of Presidency on his YOUNG shoulders

The People who had to teach him about it, were also there for the tyranny

Got constantly considered a pawn, a throwable item

The adults use him as a figure head and proceed then to use him

He HAD to exile his best friend, or Tommy would have died sooner than ever

PTSD

Suicidal in a way of being okay for dying

Depression

Betrayal

Never gets taken seriously

Gets over-spoken a LOT

GETS COMPARED TO FUCKIN MANIACS OFTEN

Didn’t get nice words after his manipulator told him down, just SILENCE

He nearly died

He heard 

Got left by everyone, when they didn't see anything in this place anymore

got told by his best friend, that the discs were more worth than him

As Tommy, he is always on the edge of death

Technoblade

Techno is one of the most powerful people here on the server. No doubt about it. However, if someone, even a God, tries to refuse they have feelings, it’s impossible. And those feelings, when they get something terrible done to them, get hurt.

BETRAYAL

Loneliness

A bloodlust he sometimes seriously can't control, no matter how much he tries

His best friend (Wilbur), died before his eyes

He thought he could trust his (little brother figure) friend

Gets used often for material

betrayal

Has a hard time understanding his feelings

Gets talked over

Is socially avoiding talking

Gets seen as a bad guy many times

Trust issues, yay!

Also BETRAYAL

has at least some people who want to kill him

Wilbur Soot

Our favorite maniac! Yay! We can all see how he fell from a proud Leader of a family to an lost in himself man, with nothing left to loose

Had to countdown his brothers death

Was killed by his father

His OWN SON disowned him

He wasn't able to get help, especially not from his younger brother

His Allies were not really trust worthy

He got betrayed by a close comerade

His dear Brother was sometimes really chaotic

He had to lead an army to war, not one, but two times

He lost the election

He had to run away from a country he helped create

Had a hard time with this father (with how it’s shown, that he maybe was neglected and had to raise Tommy)

Ranboo

Our favorite Memory-Minutes-Boi! I think EVERYBODY in this community will protect him

His first days on the server were pure Chaos

Had to see a person, he considers a friend, being rotten away and not being able to do anything about it

A sister figure who just went angry

He isn’t trusted by anyone really

He knows things others don’t

ALSO LOSING YOUR MEMORY AND HAVING CONSTANT MEMORY LOSS FUCKIN SUCKS, TRUST ME

Has serious issues

GETS TALKED OVER

Is often forced to take a side, even if he's against it

Phil

He has a hard time. Especially with the death, failed resurrection, disowning one of his son, he didn't got even close to. Being 

Also on the edge of death every day

Was in the end peer pressured into killing his own son

Suffering from the loss of his son

Couldn't help his youngest son in exile, because he thought Tommy hated him

Wasn’t there for L’Manburg glory days

was ridiculed in his house arrest

Dream

Of course, we all know how mad he is now and shit, but you gotta think, he has some points here, that are infecting his behavior LARGELY

His friends left him, without considering helping him

He had lost his dear pet before

He actually wanted peace, but fell into the fun of destruction and chaos without someone knowing or helping him

He is homeless

Probably, he is a old being, that already suffered for millions of years

Sapnap

He’s actually one of my favorite Characters and I think we know he has a place in here.

Third wheels a  l o t

Constantly being referred as the THIRD person, who isn't important

Fought his friend, who took the side of a child

Said friend had one of his beloved fishes by his side the hole time

Said Fish got thought as dead

Fundy

Some of you guys forgot how sad actually Fundy’s character is. He IS one of the most hurt characters. And he gave up hope

constantly being talked over

disowned by his hole family

GREW UP IN OLD L’MANBURG, WHICH WAS AT WAR

doesn’t think he is a part of a group

had to disown his father, to help fight a tyrannt

Got babied his whole life

His dead father is still running away from their problems

Doesn’t know where his mum is

Lost his home so often

Nihachu

Actually the person I watched for the first long time as in the SMP

Again, being talked over

Doesn’t get taken seriously

Lost her Best friend (Wilbur)

Got betrayed by her friend, Karl, by him selling their Land to L’Manburg

Gets used as a hostage or Maid in Distress, even when she isn’t

Got her pets killed

Then constantly being used for her niceness

Jack Manifold

He has a pretty big Role now, and he's very VERY angry. And you might ask why

Got left behind by his country

doesn’t get taken seriously

Got his most powerful items removed in one thing

His land somehow is near a crater

got told he didn't suffer somehow

Went to mf hell

Quackity

Quackity, despite his funny demeanor, he's one of the hurt character

with him staying with Schlatt, he had a uncomfortable relationship a long time

got killed by the festival

somehow helped organize the death of a child

Said kid helped a revolution against him

he helped a tyrant come to power and will probably never get it live down

fought for a country so often, but, two times, it got exploded in front of his face

had to face war, also in a young age

Eret

Our favorite King is here too! Yes, he may have started the distrust spiral of Eret, but somehow, someone would still have led them to the FINAL CONTROL ROOM. Somehow History will always be happening.

Had one of the hardest time, getting forgiven

Was never really given a chance

got accused of something

gets used as a pawn

He has shown often regret

got left alone

I think we all can say they are just having MULTIPLE communicate, trust and self worth issues. Like goddamn, Puffy, please help them, you’re one of the only sane people in the lore-

[anewstartfanfic]

Can I ask for a special headcannon about killer? You've been making it hard not to ship reader with killer over ace recently ❤

Sure!

Killer

-Born raised in a brothel with his prostitute mother

-The main reason why he knows soooo many innuendos

-Very observant and listens to everything and is self aware.

-Father figure was a pimp who often told him that a bad person can be a good person. He took care of him after her mother passed away. Later found a mother figure in Kid’s mom and they became brothers.

-Took care of Kid once his mother was killed. Consoled him and everything and took him home.

-Falsely accused of a crime by a slave trader, the Marine in town was on the take and allowed Killer to be taken to the human auction.

-Told Koala to take a dive knowing that if they thought she was weaker they wouldn’t put her into hard labor.

-Feel guilty that he managed to get out unbranded instead of her.

-Was super close to becoming Null’s plaything. Null refers to him as “the one who got away”.

-Made a promise to repay Reader if he ever saw her again. Remembers and misses their late night talks together.

-Immediately got back to Kid and with the help of the pimp, both got on a ship not caring where it took them as long as they were far away from that island as humanly possible.

-Traveled and a stayed in many places until they ended up in Gray Terminal where they thought was the best and safest place

-Was shocked when he saw Reader and Sabo and thought she was fucking with him until he realized that she had NO idea who he, Sabo, or Sanji was either and was okay with that.

-Loves messing with Ace especially when it comes to Reader and liking the Bunny Princess series.

-Also knows what buttons to push or bribery for almost everyone, except the adults. The only way he could get Ace to cosplay the Wolf Prince.

-Knows he’s cute and will flirt with girls and boys to catch them off guard or just because

-Knows a lot about hair care because of his long hair.

-Loves when the girls brush and braid his hair. He doesn’t mind it and likes doing theirs

-Miss Ribbon makes sure to brush it for him. He pretends he doesn’t like it to keep up appearances

-Likes sharing his books with Reader, mainly to return the favor.

-Knows Reader can take care of herself and likes to tag along but still tries to make sure she’s okay constantly.

-The voice of reason in the group.

-loves his new family and sees Law, ASL, Sanji, and Reader as his siblings

-likes some structure in his life since he could always come and go as he pleased at the brothel

-Perv, Nobara, and Poppy are Killer x Reader shippers and has a side bet with them

-Dom also has a side bet. Both hers and Perv's are NSFW XD

-He and Kid tries to keep their wild feral boy facades from time to time, until they realize that they willingly sleep in warm beds, eat better food, do chores, and don’t mind being fussed over at Miss Ribbon’s because they actually like staying with her. She lets them still come and go as they please

-Hates Aokiji with a passion but respects that he’s not trying to become a father figure to him and Kid.

-has an automatic distrust for Marines but trusts Corazon and Bellemere, mainly because of Law. Still has a hand time seeing Corazon as a Marine

-Polyglot and speaks with a slight accent. He comes out more when he’s around Kid or when he’s upset. Keeps it especially when he’s older.

[princeindisguise]

The Heirs of Auradon: Chapter 1

Every story ever told really happened, but they didn’t happen the way they’ve been told. 

This story is about the children of fairy tale/Disney heroes and villains, mainly the children of Belle and Adam (the Beast) from Beauty and the Beast, Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, Grimhilde (the Evil Queen) from Snow White, Jafar from Aladdin, and Cruella de Vil from One Hundred and One Dalmatians. It’s inspired partly by Disney’s Descendants movies, but most of the names, events, ideas, etc. comes from Droo216 and his amazing Descendants AU.

Here’s the first chapter. (And here’s the prologue!)  

Chapter 1

Angelika had only ever seen Auradon in grey. Watching the world outside the isle was like looking through a dirty window. On the Isle of the Lost, there was no weather – hardly even any seasons. There were no animals, no grass, no trees, no flowers, no clouds. Only houses of stone varying in size, worn out inhabitants, and the barrier like a dome of murkiness, keeping them inside.

If Angelika, like most young habitants of the isle, had only known about the outside from books, pictures, and her parent’s memories, she might have thought about things differently. She might have looked at the colorful clothes hanging out between the windows to dry, the bright paintings covering a lot of the greyness of the stone houses, and the different shades of the magic steam coming from chimneys all around the isle, and thought it was the other way around. That her home was a single splash of color in a grey world.

She knew better. Nefaria had been to Auradon so many times at this point that Angelika knew it as well as if she’d been there herself. Auradon was bright and thriving. Queens and kings, princesses, princes. Beautiful homes. Huge libraries. Little bridges over little rivers. Lush trees, and sunlight – clear, yellow sunlight. No magic was allowed there. Apparently, their life over there was so good, they didn’t think they needed it.

Angelika and Nefaria were both over sixteen, so technically, their education was over. No more repeating elementary math – there were no other types of math books available – in the attic of Maleficent’s mansion. No more reading history books by Auradon natives about the founding of the nine kingdoms and about the never-ending pursuit of catching all the villains of the world and put them where they belonged. Neither Nefaria nor Angelika had ever been interested in any of that. Angelika’s interest was potions and spells, and Nefaria’s was transformation, flying, and fire.

They both had the same interest, really: getting back. Getting the villains back into the real world, and getting back at those who’d put them here.

“Are you daydreaming again?”

Angelika blinked, turned her head from the view and looked into the eyes of Vladimir de Vil. They were a rich, brown color, and the most expressive part of his serious face.

She could see something in his eyes now. Something was coming.

“I guess so,” she replied.

He smiled a little. “About what?”

“Revenge.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and turned her around. She liked to feel the softness and warmth of his fake fur coat against her skin, hearing his metal bracelets clinking when he moved his arm.

“Naturally,” he replied, as they started walking. They headed into the center of the isle, and had they been two regular, unknown inhabitants, they would have been bumping into people constantly. They weren’t, and people saw them and made way.

When she breathed in through her nose, she felt the smell of sweat, dust, and things rotting. She never noticed it unless she thought about it. When she did, she was always amazed by how distinct and awful the smell was.

“Have you seen Nefaria or Rizal anywhere?” she asked.

“Nefaria told me to go find you. We’re going to meet at her house. Her mother wants to talk to all four of us.”

“Oh, no.” Now she understood why she’d seen that look in his eyes.

“I know.” He laughed violently, throwing his head back. “It does not bode well for us, does it?”

They didn’t say anything more. They weren’t going far – on the isle, you never were. Besides, Vladimir was one of the few people in Angelika’s life she was comfortable enough to be silent with.

She wondered what Maleficent could want with them. Angelika hadn’t talked to her in years, and Nefaria’s mother had never seemed to care much about what any of them were up to, not even her daughter. Never cared about Nefaria sneaking out, whether it had been to fly through the barrier or just take a walk at night. Not that she’d ever had any reason to worry – Nefaria could take care of herself. Everyone knew that.

Even though the isle was crowded with buildings, there weren’t enough houses for everyone anymore, and a lot of the newcomers slept on the street. New people were shipped there at least once every other month, some whose stories hadn’t been told yet. Some of them died, usually from unknown diseases. Angelika’s mother thought it was the air on the isle – for some people, it was too hard to adjust to. The air had probably been fine when the first habitants were brought to the isle, but keeping the barrier closed for so long had made it worse. It might be all the magic and potion brewing that did it. Angelika didn’t know if it was true. She didn’t know of anything else.

Maleficent’s home was made of marble, and that wasn’t the only thing separating it from the rest of the houses on the isle. It was carbon black, and high enough to give a view of the entire isle as well as a bit of Auradon. From the top floor, you could see the Beast’s castle. Every time Nefaria had flown over to Auradon, it had been from up there.

When they arrived in the hall of Maleficent’s mansion, Nefaria and Rizal was already there, waiting for them. Nefaria’s horns were growing so fast, it was almost like you could see them getting higher if you watched closely enough. Angelika could swear they hadn’t been that high, or that pointy, the day before. Just a few years earlier, Nefaria’s horns had been so small they could easily be covered up when her hair fell over them. Now, they were getting close to the size of her mother’s. On the left side of Nefaria was Rizal, seemingly tense, and not his usual, jokey self. He kept glancing at his father with a questioning look in his eyes.

Not only Maleficent and Jafar, but Cruella and Grimhilde was there as well. Jafar seemed even taller than usual, and he was dressed like he was celebrating something. Like Maleficent, he had his staff with him. His was golden and looked like a snake straightened out to its full length, while hers was lilac and twisted at the top. Grimhilde, Angelika’s mother, looked as young as ever, with thick, black hair and smooth skin. It made Angelika proud every time she saw it, because in her eyes, it was a sign of her own accomplishments in potions and spells.

Maleficent had always moved slowly, but through the years her leisurely movements had started to seem less a sign of pride and power, and more one of age and exhaustion. Her fingers looked like her horns, only thinner – like crooked, greyish tree branches. But the light in her eyes was still shining – no one would have doubted her ability to change into her dragon form, or work any kind of powerful magic had she had the tools to do it. Although Cruella was the youngest of the four, her hair had turned completely grey, and she always had bags under her eyes. Even though she and Vladimir always had enough to eat, she was thinner than ever.

Angelika didn’t know what she had expected, but she was surprised. Maleficent’s facial expression was frozen, like she didn’t even have energy left to change it, and she was leaning on her staff as if she could hardly stand straight.

She spoke, and her voiced echoed in the grand hall. Her voice didn’t sound old or tired at all.

“Now that you are all here, I will tell you what happened. A white dove came to me with a letter. A letter from Auradon.”

They were quiet and waited, expecting the worst.

“The Beast is dead.”

If Maleficent’s voice had been cheerful, they would have cheered. It wasn’t, so they remained silent.

“You are going to finish your education,” she said, looking at Nefaria, Angelika, Rizal, and Vladimir, one after the other. Nefaria’s facial expression changed slightly, as if she was trying to find a way to question her mother, but she closed her mouth again as Maleficent continued. “… in Auradon.”

The room went unnaturally silent – it was like you could hear everyone’s minds go blank with surprise.

Then Nefaria whispered, her voice filled with distrust and cautious joy:

“Those fools want us in Auradon?”

Maleficent looked at her, straightened her back, and smiled in a way that gave life back to her face.

“My beautiful girl… Yes. It’s the son’s idea. He will be crowned king in a month.”

Nefaria blinked, very fast, and made a movement backwards, very small, as if flinching at the mention of prince Beau.

Is that how it works over there? Angelika thought. They lock us up on an island prison, they turn their eyes towards the ocean and see us all the time, and they don’t care. Until one day, when they feel like doing a good deed for whatever reason.

“What do you want us to do?” Rizal said, wanting to get to the point.

“Go there, play the part, and get the Fairy Godmother’s wand. The barrier was built with the wand, and only the wand can bring it down. But they know that in Auradon. They might be expecting you to try to steal it.”

“How long do we have?” Vladimir asked.

“If you play your part well, then at least a month,” Jafar said. His voice was steady and breathy. He was expecting big things. “Enough time to be there by the coronation. That’s the only time they take the wand out of the safe. It’s crucial for the blessing of the next ruler; their tradition and law say so.”

Angelika asked: “Will it just be the four of us?”

Grimhilde answered: “Yes, darling.”

“Why us?” Vladimir asked.

Cruella shook her head and pulled her coat closer around her body.

“We don’t know.”

Nefaria didn’t say anything.

“What does ‘playing our part well’ mean? What do they want from us?” Vladimir looked skeptical, bordering on disgusted. “Regret? Gratefulness? We’re supposed to show them that?”

“Be careful,” Maleficent said. She looked directly at her daughter, forcing her to meet her gaze. “They want to test you. They are expecting you to be harmless, uneducated, and stupid, or else they wouldn’t be letting you out. You must play that part. They cannot see you as a threat.”

Nefaria shrugged.

“Works for me.” However, she did not seem convinced.

“How are we supposed to get the wand?” Vladimir asked.

“You gain enough of their trust to get close to it,” his mother replied.

“In a month?” Vladimir turned from his mother to Maleficent. “How are we going to do that? There’s no way we could make them trust us that much within a lifetime, even less within thirty days.”

“The prince is young and idealistic. He wants to see the good in you. Fooling someone who thinks highly of themselves is always easier than you expect.” Grimhilde smiled. “Some people trust too easily. I would know.”

“I just don’t think –“

Maleficent interrupted Vladimir before he could finish that sentence.

“If you have a better suggestion, then please, share it.” Her voice was vicious, her grip tightening around her staff, and Cruella reached out and put a hand on her son’s shoulder. Everyone knew the staff still held magic powers. Maleficent didn’t have access to all her powers, not on the isle, but she might still be powerful enough to kill.

For a moment, it looked like Maleficent wasn’t going to do anything. Then, she raised her staff. In a fast movement, she raised it and pointed it to his leg, and a white flash shot out of it. It hit Vladimir, and shouting with pain, he fell to the floor. When he looked up, Angelika could see that his jaw was clenched, and his eyes wet with tears. He got up, furious, but the wound in his leg kept him from walking properly. Cruella caught him before he fell again. Angelika felt stiff; she wanted to help him, stand up for him, but she didn’t dare to.

”Well? Do you?”

Vladimir looked at Maleficent, trying to shake his mother’s hands of, but without saying anything. By the look in his eyes, Angelika could tell he was going to stay angry for at least a few days.

After glancing at the staff, he replied, with surprising calm:

“I don’t.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“But what if we don’t get the wand?” Rizal said, taking a step forward. He had never been afraid of pain. Never seemed afraid of their parents either – not even Maleficent. “What good is it to us, going there? There’s another plan, right?”

“There’s always another plan,” Maleficent said. “It’s called ‘Do as much damage as you possibly can’.”

“How?” Rizal was frowning.

“’How’? Use your imagination. Find out their weaknesses, their secrets, or any information that might be valuable. Spread rumors, ruin friendships, start fights, start fires, do whatever you can. If you sense that you’re not gaining their trust, if there’s any reason to believe they’re sending you back anything soon, do as much damage as you can, and do it quickly.”

“And what will they do to us when they find out we have?” Angelika objected.

“Nothing, if you’re discreet,” Jafar said. He had a way of making people feel guilty, even when they hadn’t done anything wrong.

Angelika knew she looked like she wanted to say something – all four of them were – but they remained silent. They knew that if something bad happened in Auradon, they would be held responsible for it. How discreet they were wouldn’t matter. But none of them felt like saying it out loud – their parents already knew.

“We would never tell you to do this if we didn’t believe in you,” Grimhilde said. “We believe you can do it. We don’t think anything bad will happen to you. Even if they do catch you doing something wrong, they won’t be that hard on you. You’re just children, after all.”

She smiled. Angelika believed her; she didn’t think their parents would be asking them to do this if they thought it meant real danger to them. She would never think that.

Maleficent looked at Nefaria, then Angelika, then Rizal, and then Vladimir. She smiled. In a tone that could easily be mistaken for warm and encouraging, she said:

“We love you. Don’t let us down.”

[joculatrick]

she-ra...but it's avatar....

au time babey

it's in the time of sozin + roku (it fits a lot better shh)

catra + adora grow up in the fire nation

they're in an elite soldier training program they were inducted into at 5

sw is their supervisor, a water bender that defected from the nwt for power

they never knew their parents

both are stars of the program, adora first and catra a persistent second despite her unique blue firebending

at one point in their late teens they go exploring farther from base than usual, deep into some woods bordering the ocean

adora starts to hear whispers. ancient voices telling her she has a purpose and worth outside of being a soldier, telling her to do something she doesnt quite catch

catra pulls her away, distrustful of the idea of voices and change and tries to dissuade adora from returning, and to avoid upsetting her adora pretends to concede

of course, she does return, and the voices coax her into bending air and discovering she's the avatar

shocked to her core, having been told that the avatar died out, adora is at a loss

suddenly she's wrapped in ocean water and out spring glimmer, the daughter of the chieftess of the water tribe, and her nonbender bff bow

the 2 snuck off a northern water tribe ship sent to spy on the growing fire nation army

delighted to have caught an elite soldier of said army, glimmer and bow are totally hostile towards their hostage

pleading with her captors, adora says she's the avatar and bends fire and air (a lil bit, shes a beginner)

bow and glimmer's jaws drop. the world had been alert for the avatar but the fire nation had claimed that a new one was never born so the world mourned

confused but warming to adora, b + g take her back to the ship and immediately their captain strikes a course back the nwt

on the way they discover how sheltered and abused adora was and start helping her heal, as well as bonding!! adora tries to bend water on the way but has very little success, it is her opposite after all

bfs rolls up to angella, leader of the nwt

unsurprisingly she's not eager to trust

but after some time, everyone basically adopts adora the avatar because she's just that lovable

meanwhile, in the fire nation...

with adora absent, catra finally gets to be first and graduates top in her program, becoming a commander of her former classmates

she feels utterly betrayed and abandoned by adora and takes on the task of hunting down and delivering the avatar to firelord hordak with vigor

she's accompanied in the task by scorpia, who as daughter of 2 general moms felt she had to inherit the mantle even though she's not much of a fighter

even though scorpia's a commander herself she's infatuated with catra and follows her command

eccentric IT genius entrapta, who built herself 2 prehensile arms attached to her back via harness, is often consulting the 2 and strikes up a friendship with them (super pal trio for life!)

now, back to the best friend squad and element learning:

adora's waterbending teachers are princesses glimmer of the northern tribe and mermista of the southern tribe!

glimmer is a talented bender but never the master her mom is no matter how much she struggles

she is a much better leader though, as well as a good friend

obviously adora struggles a lot with water, and that coupled with the nwt recieving dire messages from their sister tribe prompts the bfs to travel to the south pole

once there, they discover that the fire nation has been raiding the swt

after sending a message to her mother for northern reinforcements, glimmer and squad invite mermista, daughter of the chief and ridiculously talented water bender, to the group

(glimmer imagines herself mermista's rival and pushes herself wayyyyy too hard to try and top her. eventually, with reassurance and camaraderie with adora, she gets over it)

from there, the princesses + bow (as bow teasingly calls them) start the long trip to the earth kingdom

along the way - bonding, shenanigans including adopting pirate comedian seahawk, flirting (adora to glim, unknowingly, glim gay panics) ((seahawk to everybody)), bending practice (adora finally makes bubbles! and waves! she's ecstatic and splashes everyone constantly)

finally, they arrive at the earth kingdom!

it's adora's first time seeing a bustling city not made of ice and she generally just looks around in awe (glim thinks it's adorable)

how adora wishes she could share it with catra.

as representatives of the northern and southern water tribes, and the avatar of course, the group is invited to a fancy ball hosted by a powerful family

there, adora and fam run into catra, there as rep from the fire nation. there's dancing. and lots of gay tension.

the host of the ball is none other than frosta, recently orphaned and secret master earth bender (I went more based on personality than Princess Ability for the elements of the alliance members, and if you make a couple logical science jumps earthbenders could bend ice)

after adora and crew fend off some burglars that interrupt the ball, frosta is enamored and begs to join the group and teach adora earthbending

she does just that, with a healthy dose of tough love

at this point, the bfs are seasoned friends and formidable fighters

unfortunately, after a timely break and a few vacations, the pals hear a devastating message. "the fire nation attacked the north pole, trying the capture the moon spirit to control the source of water bending. the attack failed, but only because angella gave her life to stop it."

stunned, the group returns to the north pole. bonds are tested under the weight of glimmer's grief and impending responsibility.

once there, glimmer has her coronation ceremony and becomes distant and stressed, bending over the weight of a whole tribe to lead

after a tough couple months, adora feels her last element calling to her. glimmer pleads her to stay and help defend her nation but adora needs space to breathe, and doesnt feel confident as a protective force without well rounded bending knowledge. she leaves. bow accompanies her

the 2 journey to the western air temple, the closest to the fire nation, because it just feels right to adora. bow worries.

there they find perfuma, stalwart gardener and accomplished airbending student, the mysterious madame razz, and a young dragon named swift wind

perfuma teaches through learning WITH adora, and this method really helps adora find confidence and some inner peace, away from the chaos and demands of her life

finally having an animal companion also helps! he's fun loving and flies while she glides and is an excellent listener

madame razz speaks in riddles, but she helps adora learn about her past lives and the chakras. throughout this process adora accepts a lot of what makes her her, but she gets stuck on letting go of attachment

letting go of her friends, her found family, is tough, very tough, but even after she manages that she's still not there. there's only one face she sees and she doesn't understand how she hasn't let her go yet

meanwhile, in the fire nation...

the attack on the nwt was a huge success, mainly due to catra's tactics

however, her habit of challenging authority left her in a tough spot with firelord hordak from the beginning, and her control of this last battle was the last straw

he challenges her to an agni kai, claiming she undermined his authority

she wins

keeping sw as an advisor, she takes command, and her first target? the western air temple

all together now!

in the midst of adora's training, catra strikes

she slashes adora's confidence, back, and progress on letting go of attachment

the chakra is locked

catra ends up defeated, but only just, and only because glimmer showed up with a ship full of water benders and scorpia and entrapta defect

meanwhile, charismatic political leader prime leads his followers in an uprising, kidnapping catra and glimmer after the battle ends

captive at prime's estate on a faraway island, catra and glimmer bond over adora, rashness, and isolation. it's rough but at least they're not alone

desperate to save glimmer, adora and bow pile on swift wind and start searching for the elusive island

when they arrive, catra creates a distraction and frees glimmer, sending her to adora with a message not to return

the bfs is finally reunited, but adora is missing something. she confesses she wants to rescue catra and glimmer is right with her

with adora on the attack, sw bloodbends catra to fight her, finally throwing catra off a cliff. adora follows

shifting into the avatar state through pure rage, adora heals catra, beats sw, and takes catra home

catra bonds with the bfs and starts to heal, and her and adora slowly return to their flirty best friendship

glimmer and catra flirt up a storm "as a joke" (the only ones they fool are eachother)

adora knows they'll have to defeat prime. there will never be peace with him in power

they come up with a plan, but it mainly relies on adora sacrificing herself. adora knows it's her pupose

catra can't stay and watch, she can't

adora is heart broken

on her way to prime, she has a vision of catra, its tender and loving and it hurts

catra comes back. she passes glimmer and bow guarding the way. glimmer hugs her

right before adora enters the throne room, catra pulls her back

she kisses her

adora finally understands, and becomes a fully realized avatar, and uses the avatar state with control to defeat prime

catra and adora and glimmer and bow watch their world blossom with a new peace

[chiseler]

TWO ALONE: A Noir Pastoral

It gets darker in the country than in the city.

Urban areas are thought to teem with crime and vice, but for city dwellers used to crowded, well-lit streets there’s a special terror about lonely rural roads at night. To the wary urbanite, the country—while it may be pretty for a Sunday outing—is a place of isolation, ignorance, backwardness and intolerance. This distrust feeds a strain of the rural gothic that trickles through Hollywood movies, always marginal and often subversive. Less common than the swampy, overripe Southern gothic, this genre of bucolic noir portrays farm life as mean, hard-bitten, joyless, and rife with exploitation—less salt-of-the-earth than salt-in-the-wounds.

F.W. Murnau’s City Girl (1929) set the template. Here Murnau inverted the pattern of Sunrise (1928), in which George O’Brien’s restless farmer is corrupted by an immoral city vixen and redeemed by a his wholesome, pure-hearted peasant wife. In City Girl, the eponymous heroine spends her days slinging hash in a Chicago lunch counter, sweating and footsore, batting away passes from endless hordes of male customers. At night she goes home to the roar of the El outside her cramped little room, blows the dust off her pitiful potted flower, listens to the chirping of a mechanical bird toy, and dreams of a better life outside the city. But when she marries a naive farm boy and goes home with him to the wheat fields, she’s briskly disillusioned. She has to contend with her harshly disapproving, bible-thumping father-in-law, who dominates her spineless husband; with a crowd of lecherous hired hands whose leering and pawing are worse than anything at the lunch counter; with thankless toil and her in-laws’ grim obsession with profit.

City Girl was caught in the changeover to sound, made as a silent but released in a mangled form with added musical and dialogue scenes. (The silent version has since been recovered and is now the only version available.) Among the changes that came with the adoption of sound was an intense urbanization of Hollywood’s output. The difficulty of location shooting and the influx of actors and writers from New York may have been the causes, but the whole tone of pre-Code movies is urban: wised-up, fast-paced, slangy.

Even when someone tried to make a film extolling the virtues of rural life, it seems they just couldn’t stop sneering and shuddering. The Purchase Price (1933), a total mis-fire by William Wellman, follows the basic trajectory of City Girl but is made with complete disregard for narrative logic or credibility. Barbara Stanwyck plays a nightclub singer so fed up with life on the Big Street, and with her seemingly amiable racketeer boyfriend, that she decides to flee to North Dakota as a mail-order bride. There she behaves like a brainwashed gulag inmate, cheerfully undergoing her re-education-through-labor: waking at dawn in a room so cold the water in her pitcher is frozen, and slogging through back-breaking toil in support of a churlish ingrate husband. (Played by the charmless George Brent, he pounces on her without preamble on their wedding night, and is so deeply offended by her rejection that he refuses ever to give her a second chance.) Of course, who would want to earn a cushy living warbling a song or two in a silver lamé gown when she could don an unflattering apron and a pair of galoshes and tote heavy pails of water along muddy paths while fending off cretinous rustics and suffering the scorn of a man with a chronic sniffle? Umm....

Somehow I imagine that the men who wrote The Purchase Price (the screenplay was by Warner Brothers regular Robert Lord, having an off day) were about as fond of clean country living as Oscar Levant, whose freak-out upon finding himself on the remote Neshobe Island is memorably recorded in Harpo Marx’s sublime autobiography, Harpo Speaks. He describes how Levant dissolved into panic when dragged off to this idyllic spot: “‘Birds!’ he wailed. ‘There are birds here! The sickest creatures on God’s earth! Trees! Even the trees are psychotic! Bugs! Don’t tell me there aren’t any insects here because I know there are!’ He grabbed my arm. ‘Harpo,’ he said, ‘What have you done to me? Take me away from here. Take me away from here!’”

Rural gothic films succeed where they avoid Purchase Price-style hypocrisy and are unapologetic in their antagonism. The completely unexpected Two Alone (1934) is such a triumph. It is unexpected both because this kind of dark, brooding, romantic, Borzagean tale was out of fashion in 1934, and because no one involved in the film had a distinguished record elsewhere. Director Elliott Nugent started as an unpreposessing actor (he’s the wimpy love interest in the talkie version of The Unholy Three, and had his best role as an emotionally damaged ex-pilot in The Last Flight) and as a director churned out mainly lightweight fare and earnest mediocrities like the 1949 Great Gatsby. The cast is headed by bland B leads—lovely Jean Parker, whose acting is rudimentary, and perennial kid-brother Tom Brown—and by a crew of usually predictable character actors. But nothing about this film is predictable.

It opens with barnyard footage that prepares you for a quaint rustic comedy (an expectation encouraged by the presence of ZaSu Pitts’s name in the credits). But the scenes of farmer Slag (Arthur Byron) rousting his family out of bed for another workday have a nasty edge: he’s a mean bastard, his wife (Beulah Bondi) is a sour-faced shrew, and their daughter is all one would expect from such a love match. The next shock is our first view of Mazie (Parker), bathing naked in a stream, her fully exposed rear ogled by Slag in a creepy Suzanna-and-the-Elders scene.

Mazie is an orphan and essentially a slave to her foster family, who exploit her powerlessness to the full. When the stingy, iron-fisted Slag growls self-righteously that “No one ever gave me anything,” one can hear the echo from today’s G.O.P. candidates. The protestant work ethic has drained this family of the last drop of humanity; they’re more miserly with compassion than with coin, and their flinty obsession with squeezing every penny from their workers and their land is related to Slag’s predatory lust and his wife’s barren prudishness. (When a hired man quits, Mrs. Slag confronts him with a shotgun and goes through his suitcase to make sure he didn’t steal any spoons; he jokes unkindly that she doesn’t need the shotgun to protect herself from him.) When Mazie falls in love with Adam (Brown), a reform school runaway who becomes another de facto slave, their romantic and sexual union is the ultimate threat to the Slags: a combined threat of rebellion, of idleness, of emotional warmth, of fertility, of freedom.

These themes are woven cleverly through the film. There is an ambiguous scene at the beginning where the middle-aged hired hand George Marshall (Willard Robertson) talks to Mazie by the well as she’s fetching water. Robertson was a character actor distinguished by his hard slitty eyes, and he usually played cops and sheriffs—the kind you know won’t believe your story. Here, he’s kind to Mazie, but his interest seems suspicious, especially when they talk about her unknown father, and Marshall opines that “no substitute has been found yet” for a biological father. It later turns out that Marshall is her father, that he has sought her ought and plans to rescue her. Hence the well, where Mazie looks at her reflection and imagines she is seeing her mother’s face, becomes a symbol of revelation—truth emerging from the well, as in the old adage. Yet it remains an ominous image too: in the end Mazie will throw herself into the well as Slag attacks Adam, who is now the father of her unborn child.

We first see Adam literally falling off the back of a truck, where he has been hitching a ride, and tumbling down a dusty slope. Tom Brown has a baby face that usually shone with gee-whiz, schoolboy cockiness under slicked-back hair. Here, with his hair tousled and a look of wary bitterness on his dirt-streaked face, he’s surprisingly attractive and forceful. Adam was sent to reform school after beating up his father, who abused his mother; Slag sees a chance to benefit by concealing Adam and blackmailing him into working for no wages.

Mazie and Adam bond first like brother and sister. Their awakening to something more comes in a dark, weirdly sexy scene that suggests anything but innocent pastoral romance. Left behind while the Slags are off at their daughter’s wedding, the young couple sits around a fire outdoors with Sandy (Charley Grapewin), a harmlessly demented dipsomaniac whose daughter (Pitts, in a very minor role) locks him in the shed to keep him out of trouble. Sandy starts telling them about the customs of Indian weddings, in which the groom has to chase down the bride. As he beats hypnotically on an upturned bowl to imitate the tom-toms, Adam and Mazie are unnerved and then possessed by the drumming; they run off into the dark woods and kiss.

Later, after they run away together, they succumb again in a field full of cloyingly sweet night flowers. But their sexual passion leads them into a love as pure and faithful as anything in Borzage. Their position as outcast waifs who find salvation in one another recalls Lucky Star—where crippled Charles Farrell and ragged farm girl Janet Gaynor develop an achingly delicate love in a bleak, slovenly rural gothic setting. The loveliest moment in Two Alone comes when Mazie, who has just realized she’s pregnant, faints and is carried into the house by Slag, who shoos Adam away. Ordered back to her chores as soon as she revives, Mazie goes to the porch for firewood. Through the window, we see Adam standing outside in the lashing rain, waiting to find out if she’s all right. It’s a beautifully framed and lit image that illustrates, without mawkishness, Adam’s devotion and the forlorn yearning of the young lovers kept apart.

Perhaps it’s unlikely that this story would end well, that the one good father would win out over all the bad fathers. George Marshall shows up in the nick of time after Adam has brawled with and been shot by Slag, and Mazie has thrown herself in the well. Adam still has to go back to reform school, but it’s a generally hopeful ending—and it comes as a great relief. It’s a tribute to the small film’s emotional power that we really don’t want to see the the luckless young lovers suffer any more.

Two Alone feels out of place at the tail end of the pre-Code era; it looks both backward to silent melodramas and forward to rural gothic noirs like Borzage’s Moonrise (1948), Jean Negulesco’s Deep Valley (1947), and Delmer Daves’ The Red House (1947). In Deep Valley, Ida Lupino is an isolated girl whose parents’ frosty, sick, mutually punishing relationship has reduced her to timid, stammering neurosis. She blossoms after meeting another wounded soul (Dane Clark), a convict escaped from a chain gang that is building a road through the remote woods; but he can’t free himself from his compulsively violent nature, and finds escape only in death. Clark had his finest hour in the gorgeous and haunting Moonrise, as a young man ostracized by his nasty Southern backwater town because his father was hanged for murder.

The past lingers longer in small towns and lonely farmsteads than in cities, where anonymity and change constantly wash around the inhabitants. This makes rural noir a more natural phenomenon than is commonly assumed, since the fatal grip of the past is a central noir theme. The Red House is a psychological haunted-house tale, and if one is not too distracted by the incongruity of Edward G. Robinson and Judith Anderson playing both siblings and farmers, it achieves a dense atmosphere of decay and blight. One-legged Pete Morgan (Robinson) relies on both spooky rumors and a hired redneck with a shotgun to keep people out of the woods around a ruined farmhouse that harbors the macabre secret of the woman he loved and killed. The woman’s daughter, ignorant of her past, is Morgan’s adopted daughter, and as his mind crumbles he begins to mistake her for his long-lost love, a disturbingly incestuous delusion. There’s a campfire-story creepiness about this film, you can almost hear the twigs snapping and see the light flickering, making the woods beyond blacker.

Bring a flashlight. It gets dark out there in the country.

by Imogen. Sara Smith

[cha-d]

Early in the formidable new essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. “In the popular imagination,” she writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, she observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.”

Hong, who teaches at Rutgers, is the author of three poetry collections, including “Dance Dance Revolution,” which was published in 2007, and is set in a surreal fictional waystation called the Desert, where the inhabitants speak a constantly evolving creole. (“Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere,” the narrator says.) “Minor Feelings” consists of seven essays; Hong explains the book’s title in an essay called “Stand Up” that centers on Richard Pryor’s “Live in Concert.” Minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong describes her childhood home as “tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches.” Her father drank; her mother, she writes, “beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father.” Her parents grew up in postwar poverty in Korea—as a child, her father caught sparrows to eat. In order to get a visa to immigrate to the United States, he pretended to be a mechanic, and ended up working for Ryder trucks in Pennsylvania, where he was injured, and fired. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown, then bought a dry-cleaning supply warehouse, and became successful enough to send Hong to private high school and college. He recognized that Americans valued emotional forthrightness in business and developed a particular way of speaking at work. “Thanks for getting those orders in,” Hong remembers him saying on the phone. “Oh, and Kirby, I love you.”

Hong feels ashamed, but not of her proximity to awkward English, or her features, or witchy domestic stenches. “My shame is not cultural but political,” she writes. She is ashamed of the conflicted position of Asian-Americans in the racial and capital hierarchy—the way that subjugation mingles with promise. “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering,” Hong writes. “The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.” She becomes a “dog cone of shame,” a “urinal cake of shame.” Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured. It is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.

For a long time, Hong recounts in the book’s first essay, she did not want to write about her Asian identity. By the time she began studying for her M.F.A., at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she had concluded that doing so was “juvenile”—and she couldn’t find the right form, anyway. The confessional lyric felt too operatic, and realist fiction wasn’t right, either: “I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” In “Stand Up,” she asks, “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” The predicament of the Asian-American writer, as Hong articulates it, is to fear that both your existence and your interpretation of that existence will always be read the wrong way. At Iowa, Hong noticed other writers of color stripping out markers of race from their poems and stories to avoid being “branded as identitarians.” It was only later that Hong realized that all of the writers she had noticed doing this were Asian-American.

I read “Minor Feelings” in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. I have tended to interpret my own acquiescence to and resentment of capitalism in generational terms rather than racial ones; many people my age seem to accept economic structures that we find humiliating because we reached adulthood when the margins of resistance appeared to be shrinking. I know, too, that my desire to attain financial stability is connected with a hope, bordering on practical obligation, to protect my parents, as they grow older, from the worst of the country that they immigrated to for my benefit. But, for some reason, I haven’t written very much about that. Was I, like Hong’s grad-school classmates, afraid of being branded as an identitarian? Had I considered the possibility of being positioned as a proxy for an entire ethnic group, and, unlike Hong, turned away?The term “Asian-American” was invented by student activists in California, in the late sixties, who were inspired by the civil-rights movement and dreamed of activating a coalition of people from immigrant backgrounds who might organize against structural inequality. This is not what happened; for years, Asian-Americans were predominantly conservative, though that began changing, gradually, during the Obama years, then sharply under Trump. Today, “Asian-American” mainly signifies people with East Asian ancestry: most Americans, Hong writes, think “Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.” The term, for many people—and for Hollywood—seems to conjure upper-middle-class images: doctors, bankers. (We are imagined as the human equivalent of stainless-steel countertops: serviceable and interchangeable and blandly high-end.) But, although rich Asians earn more money than any other group of people in America, income inequality is also more extreme among Asians than it is within any other racial category. In New York, Asians are the poorest immigrant group.Hong describes a visit to a nail salon, where a surly Vietnamese teen-age boy gives her a painful pedicure. She imagines him and herself as “two negative ions repelling each other,” united and then divided by their discomfort in their own particular Asian positions. Then she pauses. “What evidence do I have that he hated himself?” she wonders. “I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them,” she writes elsewhere. “But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.” Hong doesn’t fully retract it—“we” appears fairly often in the book—but she favors the second person, deploying a “you” that really means “I,” in the hope that her experience might carry shards of the Asian-American universal.

Throughout the book, Hong at once presumes and doesn’t presume to speak for people whose families come from India, say, or Sri Lanka, or Thailand, or Laos—or the Philippines, where my parents were born. The Philippines were under Spanish control from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and under American control until the middle of the twentieth. Many Filipinos have Spanish last names and come to the States speaking English; many have dark skin. In his book “The Latinos of Asia,” the sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo argues that Filipinos tend to manifest a sort of ethnic flexibility, feeling more at home, compared with members of other Asian ethnic groups, with whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and other Asians. The experience of translating for one’s parents is often framed as definitive for Asian-Americans, but it’s not one that many Filipinos of my generation share; my parents came to North America listening to James Taylor and the Allman Brothers, speaking Tagalog only when they didn’t want their kids to listen. I grew up in a mixed extended family, with uncles who are black and Mexican and Chinese and white. Ocampo cites a study which found that less than half of Filipino-Americans checked “Asian” on forms that asked for racial background—a significant portion of them checked “Pacific Islander,” for no real reason. It denoted proximity to Asian-Americanness, perhaps, without indicating a direct claim to it. (About a month ago, at a doctor’s appointment, an East Asian nurse checked “Pacific Islander” when filling out a form for me.)

“Koreans are self-hating,” one of Hong’s Filipino friends tell her. “Filipinos, not so much.” My experience of racism has been different than Hong’s, as has my response to it. Much of the discourse around Asian-American identity centers on racist images associated with the stereotypical East Asian face: single-lidded eyes, yellow-toned skin, a supposed air of placid impassivity. I don’t have that face, exactly, and I’m not sure that I’ve confronted quite the same assumptions; when I hear people perform gross imitations of “Chinese” accents, I don’t know if it hurts the way it does because I’m an Asian person or because I come from a family of immigrants or simply because racism is embarrassing and foul.

If you escape the dominant experience of Asian-American marginalization, have you necessarily done so by way of avoidance, or denial, or conformity? What can you do when colonization is embedded in your family’s history, in your genetic background, in your very face? If I feel comforted in a room full of Asian people rather than alarmed at the possibility that my inner racial anxieties have been cloned all around me, is this another effect of the psychic freedom I’ve been granted with double eyelids and an ambiguously Western last name, or does it mark progress in the form of a meaningful generational shift? In the decade that separates me from Hong, the currency of whiteness has lost some of its inflated cultural value; one now sees Asian artists and chefs and skateboarders and dirtbags and novelists on the Internet, in the newspaper, and on TV. Is this freedom, or is it the latest form of assimilation? For Asian-Americans, can the two ever be fully distinct?

“Minor Feelings” bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people,” she explains. She’s circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature—it was published in 1974—argued that “euphemized white racist love” had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.” A quarter century later, in her book “The Melancholy of Race,” the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described “the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?” In the introduction to his essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as “unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved.”

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and “Minor Feelings” serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!” call the stereotypical Asian-American “contemptible because he is womanly”; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, “My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”

I hate my Asian self the way I worry about being written off as a woman writer—which is to say, not at all. Hong concedes that the self-hating Asian may be “on its way out” with her generation: for me, the formulation still has weight, but does not capture the efflorescence of the present. The question, then, is whether the movement toward love, as Anne Anlin Cheng put it, can be made outside the grasp of coercion. Is there a future of Asian-American identity that’s fundamentally expansive—that can encompass the divergent economic and cultural experiences of Asians in the United States, and form a bridge to the experiences of other marginalized groups?The answer depends on whom Asian-Americans choose to feel affinity and loyalty toward—whether we direct our sympathies to those with more power than us or less, not just outside our jerry-rigged ethnic coalition but within it. The history of Asian-Americans has involved repression and assimilation; it has also, to a degree that is often forgotten, involved radicalism and invention. “Aiiieeeee!” was published by Howard University Press, partly as a result of the friendship that one of its editors, Frank Chin, formed with the radical black writer Ishmael Reed. Gidra, an Asian-American zine that was published in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, called for the “birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices.” (Gidra reported on cases of local discrimination and profiled activists such as Yuri Kochiyama; it’s now back in print.) To occupy a conflicted position is also to inhabit a continual opportunity—the chance, to borrow Hong’s words, to “do better, be better,” but in moral and political rather than economic terms.In one of the essays in “Minor Feelings,” called “An Education,” Hong looks back on her friendships in college with two other Asian-American girls—brash, unstable hellions named Erin and Helen. They made art together, they traded poetry, they got drunk and fought and made up. “We had the confidence of white men,” Hong recalls, “which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our career, underestimated.” The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves—and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn’t. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.

[authenticaussie]

What do you think the difference would be in a TMNT/OP fic with different collections of turtles?

oooooooo okay so I should be getting ready for class tomorrow but you have 100% captured me I’m so invested in this

mainly I know 2003, 2012, and Rise - well, at least, they’re my favourites and have the most distinct characterisation tbh bc they’re long-running series - SO I’ll do those guys :DD

THIS GOT LONG (because of course it did, I’ve never made a short post in my LIFE) SO FIRST: 

the main difference in fic would be tone!!!!!!!! The turtles are all really affected by the shows they come from so there’d be big differences in how they react to the new situation. Combining OP and 2018, they’re both such loud and bright shows that writing them sad would be kinda….disatisfactory to a reader. 2012 is the one where you could get kinda dark, and go down the genetic experiment and “oh wow these kids need a therapist” and Luffy being >:T wtf why are your lives so Fucked Up route, and 2003 would be hilariously awkward because they’re technically all in the same age range but they act so different wheezes

Second!!! Fun character analysis and Shenanigans under the readmore. 

2003

Probably the most responsible on this list, they’re like??? tbh, barely teenagers?? Or at the very least, 18 or 19, and they can be air-heads but 2003 goes feet-first into the whole plot and character and Everything Happens. I mean, literally in season one there’s this whole subplot about how you define monsters and genetic testing and Wild shit like that so they feel Way more adult than the Strawhats get at times. Even though One Piece covers some dark topics it….the characters - the strawhats, in particular, is what I mean - don’t feel like adults the same way the 2003 turtles do. 2003 also doesn’t feel as dark as 2012 gets sometimes, but I feel 2012 is also because they seem really young, and in 2003 at least they get to process their trauma. 2012…..kinda beats them up a lot akhsdg pft.

Sticking them with the Strawhats would be !! Honestly really funny? I feel Mikey would get along with them really well - in every iteration he’s very good at going with the flow, and hey, pirates? and they’re nice? and cool powers? - he’d have the time of his life. Donnie would try and figure out What Was Going On (as the resident “please fix this in case it’s dangerous” guy, that’s probably what his role would Often be) but I can see him being easily distracted by Franky and the whole devil fruits thing. GOD him and Franky is a thought and a half omfg. The level of tech in One Piece is so different when compared to the modern world, and it operates on rules but like, rules that are just ever so slightly different. 

Raph would be in debt Immediately. Mainly bc Nami’s manipulative like that but also because he’s just………..Like That. He’d be rude and insulting and if the strawhats were helping them out he’d be the team’s voice of reason. Or, distrust, I suppose. The one who hangs back, who’s prickly, who’s the last to offer his trust because his family needs him to be uncompromised, just in case. I think he and Zoro would clash for a bit, not like, in words but just in gestures, until the crew + turtles had been through their adventures, and gotten to the end of Whatever fic was being written, and then they’d be friends. Not best buds but like, healthy respect for each other. 

Leo……….absolutely does Not understand why Luffy is leader. It’s like making Mikey the boss; it doesn’t make sense to him, because Luffy is too trusting and he’s strong but strength doesn’t make a good leader, and in 2003 Leo’s kind of a pushover so he’d stay on the sidelines and watch with Raph. But, as everyone knows, Luffy’s magnetism is Pretty Hard To Deny, and the crew’s respect for him does a lot to show to Leo that he may be missing something but that he doesn’t have to understand. 

2012

I always……..feel so bad for TMNT2012 //weeps They’re just kids and they get put through so much like wow I’m only at season two but from spoilers there’s like?? their dad keeps DYING and being bought back to life???/ THAT’S GOTTA FUCK YOU UP!!! Plus all of them have all these different insecurities and they’re kinda mean to each other (Raph….has only given a proper apology for being a dick once so far, and I’m like. mid-way through season two. I’m sorry if this makes me mikey kin @@zali but pLEASE I cannot stand this LET THEM BE NICE TO EACH OTHER ;A; Like they’re still obviously a family but gosh they’re– so prickly)

Honestly depending on how the Strawhats meet them, like holy shit :o they might be Enemies. In 2003 I feel like they’ve been through enough to try and de-escalate a situation first, but 2012 are so Paranoid that unless they had April with them they’d be like WELP this is another mind-control alternate dimension thing, time to ninja vanish. And sure, after they ended up on whatever quest they needed to go on, Luffy would be fascinated by them (2012 definitely pushes the limits of what you can Actually do, in terms of hiding and shit, but I think that makes it fun !!) but I feel the turtles would be pretty paranoid at first. Mikey & Donnie would be the first two to be dragged out of their shells (snickers) because Donnie would be super curious (and also…probably kinda aggravated and confused) about how the one piece world rules work, and Mikey because…friends!! They already have a reindeer mutant on the crew, they’re obviously cool with mutants :D

akhsdg okay I mention that 2003 would hang back and assess Luffy’s leadership still but like 2012 would be such a dick. He never seems to learn the lesson that people have different strengths and different ways of doing things >:T and watching Luffy lead would drive him crazy. I bet he’d try and make plans and be all structured and in control and Luffy would wreck things and/or the strawhats would be like “lol no lmao, you’re not the captain”. Even if he did have a good plan, like….the Strawhats rarely follow plans if Luffy says they’re doing something different snickers. I feel a major part of this could just a nice subplot line of Leo learning to Chill and also like………give the 2012 a fun adventure I’m begging you sobs. Do a Long Long Island filler arc or smth, where it’s dumb and silly and barely dangerous because they’re all competent af. 

Also: Mikey constantly trying to find a devil fruit because “dudes, it’s probably not gonna apply when we go back home and think about how SICK superpowers would be!!!!!!!!”

He does not get one, to his disappointment. 

2018

These guys are IDIOTS and would fit in with Luffy’s brand of chaos p e r f e c t l y 

Okay so yeeeeah I’m probably biased because I think Rise may be my favourite (the family dynamics!! the character designs!! the animation!!! the stupid jokes!!! the sudden flashes of deeper plot!!!!!!!!) BUT. No-one can argue with me that Rise turtles are chaotic as fuck and they’d have the time of their LIVES with Luffy’s crew. Raph would fall in love with Chopper (Chopper would be terrified of him, continuing the terribly sad trend of Raph being Bad With Animals), Donnie would go wild glitter-eyed over the devil fruits and technology and immediately try and do a million mad scientist experiments (and look. SMILES are fucked up. But this boii would totally try and make one/figure out how they worked). He’s….a mad genius and maybe a little bit evil. 

Leo would either drive Sanji crazy or be INSTANTLY adopted and taught how to be “cool”, but I can also see Sanji and Zoro lowkey fighting over him SNICKERS. Because Leo has a sword so he’s obviously Zoro’s, but he’s suave and likes fashion so he MUST be Sanji’s, and it’s not an argument persay, until Leo says he thinks both of them are cool and then it’s a battle to the death. 

(The end of leo’s sentence was “not as cool as me tho ;P” only they didn’t notice that bit.)

April would absolutely fall in love with Robin. And also Nami?? But I feel mainly Robin like Oh Man Robin is so cool and both of them are hypercompetent??? April’s like teach me how to be a badass assassin and Robin smiles and laughs and absolutely does. 

Mikey’s so loud that he almost terrifies Usopp, and terrifying Usopp is kinda a no-no in Luffy’s book, but he likes these guys and Mikey’s just excited to have an artist friend and so both of them bounce around the ship like ping pong balls. 

There is………yeah. A lot of paint covering the Sunny after they’re through. I can’t decide if Franky would cry or laugh but I know one (1) single drop of paint got on Nami’s tangerines and she Banished them. Rise turtles probably have a really good time and the crew figures out they’re basically children really quick and make sure nothing bad happens to them. Leo promises to try and get better at portal-making so they can come visit New York sometime, and everyone is like “what the fuck is new york??” at the same time as Donnie says HEY WAIT, I THINK WE’RE ON AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION and they get teleported home :DD

THANKS FOR LETTING ME SPILL ALL MY TURTLE FEELINGS EVERYWHERE

[tymptir]

POST BATTLE FOR THE DAWN “WTF HAPPENED TO MY MUSES” #02

find part 1 over here, munchkins.

Maron Greyjoy did not take part in the Battle for the Dawn, but instead returned to Pyke alongside his sister Yara. in the weeks of battle preparation, Maron has used Euron’s absence to usurp his throne and establish himself as King of the Iron Islands by right of birth. he has captured ships along the coast, boosting up the Iron Fleet to a remarkably 80 ships, and increasing the Ironborn army to around 2000 men, mainly by taking thralls in raids and having them trained for combat. after receiving a raven informing him of Theon’s death, Maron sets out for Winterfell with only four ships, to collect his brother’s body, insisting that Theon has to be laid to rest in the fashion of his people and their faith. with revenge and Euron’s death on his mind he, as plotted with @killthebxy will approach Jon for an alliance against Cersei. considering that the Iron Islands are still the sole people, other than the South, with a large standing army, the offer is tempting of course. Maron’s price for the alliance? the independence of the Iron Islands with him as the rightful King, as well as the privilege of being the one to kill Euron after all he’s done to his family.

Orys Baratheon long long dead, entirely unimportant for this plotline. sorry, big guy.

Samwell Tarly canon compliant, again I am quite happy with what season 8 has given me for Sam so far. @killthebxy and I already spoke a little, and agreed that Jon will have tired to get Sam down into the Crypts with the women and children, but was met with very stern opposition. while Sam is well aware that he is no fighter, he knows he wants to be a coward even less so. the scenes in the courtyard thus take place the way they do, including Edd (in the case of @thedolorous almost) giving his life to save Sam. while Sam manages to kill some wights, he will spent a great deal of the fight cowering and crying and being scared to death. he survives mainly due to being overlooked by the enemy. after the battle, Sam’s mental health is essentially broken. he is traumatized beyond repair, the sole thing keeping him on his feet is the work he does trying to heal as many of the wounded as he can. he will become very, very quiet. Jon’s brief coma as headcanoned by @killthebxy will be especially hard on Sam, because right now he’d need Jon to give back some courage. if Edd died, Sam will suffer from severe survivor’s guilt for the rest of his life. if he lived, he will give it all to help Edd recover and ensure he’ll get back on his feet, blaming himself for all eternity for all the horrible wounds his friend has sustained. the little bit of ego he’s built up over the past years serving as a Brother of the Night’s Watch, will be pretty much shattered again. at Jorah’s death, Heartsbane will be handed back to Sam, who doesn’t know what to do with the damn thing.

Tyrion Lannister again, canon compliant. as well as Jaime and Sam, I enjoy Tyrion in season 8 so far. Tyrion survives the Crypts, managing to kill a few whights alongside Sansa. I’m relying on the unpublished materials for the crypts we’ve seen in videos, showing the two of them sneaking up on a wight to kill it. it will, however, not have been many and what ultimately saved their lives down there was Arya killing the Night King. post battle, Tyrion start conversations with Davos Seaworth about the possible rebuild of Winterfell. he will also aid Sansa in rationing food, and overseeing the treatment of the wounded. an abundance of conversations will happen with Daenerys as to how they will continue from here, given that in plottings with @zcldrizes we have decided that Dany doubting Tyrion was bullshit. in order to ignore the trauma he’s suffered from the battle, Tyrion will dive head first into the plans for the next war. as plotted with @perzyr he will find his comfort in an AU-ish scenario with Viserion, to whom he’s grown close since releasing her from her chains in Meereen.

Varys canon compliant. he survived the Crypts and returns to his post as Daenery’s adviser. essentially cut off from his network, Varys will put a lot of effort into re-establishing his little birds to find out as much as he can about Cersei’s current plans and movements. if the battle has mentally scarred him, he doesn’t show it. Varys is still pretty much the same man he was before the battle.

Victarion Greyjoy here’s me only just now realising I’ve never given Vic a show based verse. I am keeping Victarion as close to his book actions as I can, so considering that he is incredibly loyal to his King, Victarion will in fact be with Euron, commanding the Iron Fleet Euron has built for Cersei. he hates and distrusts his brother as much as he hates and distrusts Cersei, but loyalty to his family compels him to fight for Euron. given the chance however, Victarion may be convinced to turn on his brother, thus possibly proving himself to be a very, very important ally for Daenerys. plotting is required here, but getting him to change sides could potentially be a game changer for Dany and her troops.

if anything is unclear or you need me to elaborate on anything, by all means do let me know. I’ll accept all kinds of anons and whatonot, or come talk to me via IM or discord. same of course goes for plotting with any of my muses.