#manipulating hazel in this specific way

[bestworstcase]

I can't remember whether you've answered this before, but. You postulate that everything Salem does in 8.9 after learning Yang's identity is a ruse to justify letting Yang and the others go free; that threatening Emerald is a deliberate attempt to provoke Hazel into attacking her so she has an excuse to turn her attention away from the prisoners.

My question is: Why does she need an excuse? Salem doesn't answer to anyone, and I can't see any particular risk in just saying "I've decided you're free to go, goodbye" and leaving the kids baffled. So what does she have to gain from... making herself seem more dangerous and unreasonable than she is? Not that I think she feels any hope she could convince the heroes she's reasonable -- as you've stated, Oz has done a very good job de-personing her for a very long time -- but I'm not sure why she would go to the effort of constructing an artificial scenario solely to make her enemies think she's more monstrous. What's her motivation here?

in the course of answering the question of her motivation i'm actually going to lay out my argumentation for reading the salem vs hazel fight this way, 'cause i don't think i've ever done so comprehensively before. (on tumblr, anyway.)

the foundational theory isn’t "salem did all this as a ruse to let her hostages go" but rather that this duel with hazel is a performative means to an end. and the reason i think that is the way the fight itself, along with the duel in the lost fable and the brief altercation with the kids preceding the fight, are choreographed.

to preface this discussion, rwby's fight choreography is subordinate to characterization. (this is less true in v1, wherein centerpiece fight scenes put a greater emphasis on style and spectacle, but from v2 onward there’s been an increasing focus on using combat to develop character.) team rwby vs ace-ops is a good example of this: ruby struggles in her matchup with harriet not only because she’s a grimm-fighting specialist whose main advantage (agility) is negated by her opponent being able to match her speed, but also because her heart isn’t in it; she pauses to plead with harriet to stop and think about what she’s doing and never really recovers her footing.

so my first presupposition is that salem isn’t an exception to this principle and her fight with hazel is not meant to just be a dramatic spectacle that Looks Cool but has nothing substantive to say about the characters involved. the writing and fight choreography are reliably cogent and i trust that the same amount of thought was put into this scene. i say this because i think "empty spectacle" is the only other way to parse what happens here.

now on to the most salient piece of context: we know that salem can fight well. because, as ruby puts it, we’ve seen what she’s capable of. the lamp showed us.

in the lost fable, we see:

salem and ozma fighting together, back-to-back, as they escaped her father’s fortress together.

salem stopping a nevermore the size of a commercial plane cold, and then crumpling it up like tissue paper.

salem matching ozma, a skilled, highly-experienced warrior who at the time had the combined might of the four maidens put together at his disposal, exactly blow-for-blow in their last duel.

nevermore crunch gives us a sense of not just the force but also the sheer precision of control that salem has over her magical power. the first fight tells us that even with no formal training, salem had the raw talent (and desperation) to keep up with ozma and hold her own against professional soldiers; the second fight tells us that by the time the ozlem kingdom fell, salem and ozma were equally matched in terms of skill.

the fanon idea that salem can't fight but won their duel by virtue of her invulnerability—whittling ozma down one lucky hit at a time—is a) contradicted by the swift and even back-and-forth volleys shown, and b) plainly at odds with the fanon nonsense that ozma spent most of the duel desperately and futilely on the defensive fighting to shield the girls from her onslaught.

from the tableaux in the second fight, it's hard to determine whether salem bothers with self-defense under normal circumstances (she doesn't, in the tableaux, but nor does ozma). but that in itself isn't a reason to presume a lack of skill in combat because salem has no incentive—other than pain avoidance, which given her extreme tolerance for pain isn't much—to fight defensively.

with all this in mind: we begin with her altercation with the kids.

salem enters the scene by exploding her way out of the whale. notice the kids knocked over like bowling pins on the left: oscar was standing approx. fifty-three feet away from the epicenter of the blast, measured based on salem being six feet tall. (<- with perspective taken into account. from wall to edge, the dock is 48ft wide)

emerald keeps her feet, perhaps because she knows better what to brace for; she's about the same distance away. in any case, salem's next move is to launch herself to the edge of the dock (again, a distance of 48ft—measured based on a different screenshot) and stretch to grab emerald in a fraction of a second.

ok. the women's world record 60m sprint is 6.92 seconds; this works out, rounded, to about 28.4ft/s. at that speed, you can cover forty-eight feet in about 1.7s; salem closes the distance in about half a second, which works out to 96ft/s. from a dead stop.

salem is could-probably-keep-up-with-ruby-rose fast.

next point. these two frames:

are a split second apart. the blast is aimed at ren and when jaune leaps in front of him, hits his shield right in the middle:

had jaune not gotten there in time, this would've hit ren squarely in the chest. in any case it hits with enough force to blast both boys off their feet and slams them into the flesh wall (roughly, eyeballing it based on several shots) 20-30 feet behind them hard enough to visibly strain jaune's aura. keep this timing in your mind for later. salem can fire these things off literally faster than you can blink.

the distance between her and ren at this point is approx. forty-five feet, again using the wide shot from earlier to measure. precise accuracy isn't impressive at this range necessarily but it's worth noting in relation to ren, who fires on her from the same distance, kneeling, with his fully automatics. every bullet goes wide:

& then salem whips around and noscopes him.

similarly, she sticky-hands yang in the face (catching her gauntlets only because yang throws up her arms to shield herself) while upside down with her eyes closed and paste for bones. she's a GOOD shot.

another detail to note here is the difference in salem's reaction to ren's attack versus yang's; ren fires on her, misses, she retaliates with her magical equivalent to his guns, but when yang punches bombs into her chest a second later, salem literally just stands there, even lowering her arm to let yang do it...

...and then after being blown up, rather than firing back with magic, snags yang and pulls her over to look intently at her:

we know that the reason salem grabbed emerald is with the intent to question her about what happened to the lamp, because salem concludes from the available facts that em must have stolen it. we also know that when ren shot at her, salem returned fire immediately, within a fraction of a second—this woman is inhumanly fast, and the time between these two frames:

is exactly equal to the time between these two:

what this tells is that salem did have time to blast yang in the gut with magic. through the whole sequence with yang punching her, salem is looking at yang's face, her gaze tracks down to follow her movement. she sees this coming and she's reacting to it, just making a deliberate choice not to retaliate.

and then she grabs yang.

this is the first weird thing salem does in this scene—every move she makes prior unambiguously follows from salem's belief that emerald stole the lamp and her desire to recapture oscar and take the relic back—and i don't think it's a coincidental that the weirdness begins with salem noticing yang...

...whom she saw like, two days ago rushing forward to comfort ruby after salem your mother-ed her to the ground. i've made this point before but prior to her arrival in atlas salem might at most have seen toddler pictures of these kids; ruby takes after her mother enough to be impossible to mistake for anyone but summer's daughter, but yang isn't even biologically related to summer. so salem wouldn't know her on sight. but this interaction a couple days ago would've given her enough circumstantial context to at least guess that this girl is summer's eldest.

so here, when salem sees yang and instantly flips from slinging bolts of magic around with enough force to break or at least visibly strain jaune's aura to sticky-handing yang to drag her over and grab her, the question is okay, why? why does that shift happen? what is it about this moment that alters salem's motivation? and because the situation hasn't changed whatsoever and there's no other reason for yang to have any significance to salem, the simplest and really only cogent explanation is her relation to summer rose.

onwards. salem isn't expecting oscar to zap her. you can tell because every time salem takes a hit on purpose in this scene, she either tracks her opponent's movements or visibly braces herself and neither of those things happens in the split second between oscar starting to fire and his blast hitting her; and also, she grunts in pain both when it hits her and when she doubles over afterward. given that oscar shouts at her first (so he has her attention) and what oscar and ozma say when they discuss the state of the merge in 7.13 and earlier in 8.9, i think it's pretty likely that salem didn't realize oscar could tap into ozma's magic and thus he caught her off guard.

also i'm not sure oscar realized he could do that until he did it. look at this boy. he's so busy going "wait what?" at himself that he doesn't even notice salem yeeting yang at him until a split second before yang hits him ->

that, or oscar's use of magic jostled oz to the front and neither of them were expecting that to happen.

at this point salem stops fucking around and pins everyone to the floor. and again this is something i want to emphasize because it is effortless for her. when she does this to hazel in 6.4 she makes a gesture with her hands, but here she just decides it's going to happen and it does. (which tells us that the gesturing in 6.4 is for show, just like flipping the table and raising her voice. she's exaggerating her irritation into this over-the-top anger for the sake of intimidating everyone else in the room. it's performative.)

anyway, she hangs emerald on the wall, conjures a ball of magic, and:

SALEM: What did you do with the lamp? EMERALD: ...N-nothing! [Salem leans in to hold the magic close to her face.] SALEM: It's missing. Where is it? EMERALD: I didn't do anything with it! SALEM: Where—[she lowers her hand, turning away]–is it?

ok. salem can tell when people lie. she's also grimm—she can probably sense or perceive emotion the way all other grimm do.

emerald isn't lying to her and salem knows she's telling the truth. the pseudo-repetition of the questions obfuscates this a little, because they're almost but not quite the same, but salem believes both of the truthful answers emerald gives her.

her initial assumption is that emerald stole the lamp and must have done something to hide it ("what did you do with it?"). emerald is startled, confused, and answers "nothing." salem explains why she's asking ("it's missing") and then asks if emerald knows where it is or who took it ("where is it?") because her next guess is that emerald conspired with somebody else who stole the lamp while emerald snuck oscar out.

when the lamp went missing, there were eight people on the whale: salem herself, hazel, emerald, neopolitan, oscar, yang, and these other two children whose names salem probably doesn't know. right before the seers sounded the alarm about intruders, salem encountered emerald and someone she thought was hazel in the corridor. at that point in time, salem expected hazel to still be interrogating oscar, as she's mildly surprised to see him: "ah, hazel. have you gotten what we need yet?"—and 'hazel' behaved oddly enough that salem was side-eyeing him before the alarm distracted her. her reaction to emerald a few minutes later ("you really have been honing that semblance of yours") confirms that she's figured out that 'hazel' was really oscar.

hazel assumes there is an alarm that will go off if they move the lamp, but he's wrong: neo swipes it seconds after they leave the chamber, and salem doesn't know anything is wrong until a) the seers alert her to the presence of intruders, several minutes layer, and b) she goes to personally secure the lamp and finds it already missing.

so salem does not know exactly when the lamp was taken, only that it happened before the seers sounded the alarm. that her suspicion falls first on emerald suggests that salem has—for whatever reason—already considered and ruled out the possibility that the intruders are the thieves (most likely, because the seer alarm calls convey more information than just "stranger danger!" and salem knows the intruders didn't get that far into the whale before being caught). plus by the time she's questioning emerald, salem has a) terrified emerald well past being able to maintain her semblance, which requires active focus, and b) visually confirmed that none of the intruders nor oscar are carrying the lamp with them.

ruling out emerald as the thief therefore leaves her with just two suspects: neopolitan, or hazel. now, salem does not have any reason to trust another of cinder's little pet illusionists, so on the face of it neo might seem to be the obvious suspect.

BUT.

salem expected hazel to be in oscar's cell at the time she unwittingly caught emerald in the act of helping oscar escape. and she knows that hazel is attached to emerald—that's why she punishes him for lying to her in 6.4 by forcing emerald to answer the question hazel tried to dodge, she knows hazel lied to protect emerald.

and emerald could not have freed oscar from his cell without hazel knowing about it.

based on the facts of the situation as salem understands them at the point when she turns away from emerald to ask, rhetorically, where the lamp is, there are only two possible explanations:

hazel stole the lamp while emerald helped oscar escape.

neo stole the lamp while emerald tried to sneak oscar out, either with hazel's assistance or while hazel was somewhere other than where salem expected him to be, doing something he shouldn't.

there is no way—no way—that salem does not realize, at this juncture, that hazel has most likely betrayed her. this woman is a clever strategist who has been running circles around ozpin and his inner circle since the show began and, while she lacks the charisma and social dexterity to be a truly masterful manipulator, she understands human nature and her manipulative tactics are always very shrewd. unless you're willing to assume that the writers just idiot balled her for the sake of the plot—which i'm not; rwby is too well-written—salem's assumption now is that hazel stole the lamp.

(which, she's wrong, but the underlying reasoning in how she handles the situation on the docks up to this point is an application of occam's razor; she begins with the simplest explanation and works upward in complexity from there, so she'd land on hazel stealing the lamp before she got to "neo stole the lamp, emerald freed oscar, hazel was doing something else.")

the shift in her tone as she turns away from emerald and the things she then says to oscar evince this also: her second "where is it?" is rhetorical. she knows that either hazel or neo has it, and hazel is the more likely suspect. since neither of them are here at the moment, but neither of them can leave the whale except through the dock, the question is no longer urgent. she has the situation fully under control. all she needs to do is wait.

so her attention shifts to oscar or ozma. (whether oz is fronting or salem thinks he’s fronting because oscar used ozma's magic is somewhat unclear, but given that she correctly identifies them in both 8.4 and 8.6 i'm inclined to think she’s right this time too, and oz got pulled forward by oscar’s use of his magic)

SALEM: Look how you've diminished. How you've lessened yourself—and for what? These children? This ruined world...? Why—do—you—keep—coming—back? YANG: Why do you?! [Salem glances at her, startled.] YANG: All of this endless death, just because something bad happened to you once upon a time? Nobody gets a fairytale ending! Everything I've lost—every person I've lost!—is because of you! SALEM: And who is it I've taken from you, girl? YANG: Summer Rose. My mom. SALEM: Hm. [amused] Her again?

as i said, salem already has reasonable confidence that this girl is summer rose's eldest daughter, but if she had any doubt or uncertainty prior she now knows for sure. "and who is it i've taken from you, girl?" is salem both engaging with what yang said to her and also fishing for a confirmation that she is who salem thinks she is, which yang obligingly gives to her.

so at this juncture salem now has three goals:

don't severely hurt or kill summer's daughter.

determine who stole the lamp and get it back.

recapture oz/oscar.

with the third being a means to the end of finding out how to access the lamp. this makes #3 the lowest priority, because there are at least six people who know the "password" (ozma, oscar, ruby, yang, and their two teammates) and if salem loses oz/oscar now she can still try to capture one of the other children later.

of the first two, which is more important doesn't really matter yet, because right now they aren't in opposition. she can accomplish the first by not doing anything to harm yang and the second by staying put until the thief—either neo or hazel—tries to get past her.

of course, then hazel IMMEDIATELY shows up. he is, remember, salem's primary suspect at this point and she knows that he, at a minimum, wasn't where she thought he was when emerald snuck oscar out of his cell. even if hazel doesn't have the lamp, salem has to consider him a possible traitor until proven otherwise because there is also this unspoken question of how emerald got oscar out. either hazel was incompetent or he was an accomplice.

salem wants to know which it is.

he walks onto the docks, greets her. salem glances over at him and sees that he does not have the lamp, so either he stashed it somewhere on the whale with the intent to sneak it out later or he isn't the thief. the question of how emerald got oscar past him remains. there is a possibility that hazel wasn't involved in the jailbreak or the theft—he's been in and out of that cell all day—and if salem makes this accusation and she's wrong, she risks losing his loyalty. right. like hazel is already terrified of her and she knows ozma has been feeding him bullshit all day about how she's bent on destroying the world, she walked in on that.

if she takes an aggressive posture here on the basis of an incorrect suspicion that's going to play right into ozma's hands by making her look unreasonable, untrustworthy, dangerous. even if he remains loyal in the moment, he'll have all of this in the back of his mind and he might turn against her at a more crucial juncture in the future.

salem is very risk-averse. she's not going to do that. so now she has a fourth goal: test hazel in a way that will strengthen his commitment to her if he remains loyal, or else force him to definitively prove himself a traitor.

when salem meets emerald and 'hazel' in the corridor earlier in this episode she says "ah, hazel. have you gotten what we need yet?" and then, after the seer alarm, "it seems we have guests [...] find them!"

when hazel arrives at the docks, salem says "ah, hazel. i found our guests." the intonation of "ah, hazel" is the same but exaggerated, and salem's taking "we have guests: find them" and flipping it around; "i found our guests." now, she's aware that the 'hazel' she spoke to in the corridor a few minutes ago was really oscar, so hazel doesn't have context for why this is funny. but she's making a sarcastic little joke at his expense about how she doesn't trust him now.

"ah, hazel" is how she greeted the false 'hazel' whom she did trust and told to find their "guests." she suspects that the real hazel was an accomplice to this scheme so she parodies that greeting and then makes a sardonic jab at him as if the false 'hazel' in the corridor were real and just failed so abysmally at finding the intruders that salem had to do it herself. and then she specifically draws his attention to emerald and goes "this one was helping them."

and this is the test, right.

before she asks emerald "what did you do with the lamp?" salem conjures up a ball of magic and holds it up where emerald can see. very unsubtle threat. she does the exact same thing here.

"this one was helping them," she says, magic crackling in her hand where hazel can see it. there is, again, a very unsubtle threat that she'll hurt emerald. and then she pauses for a solid three seconds, which doesn't sound like a lot but it's the similar in length to her other dramatic pauses like "find the girl that did this to cinder... and bring her to me" (~3.5s) and "before you go, inform tyrian... that i wish to have a word with him" (~2s)

in 6.4, salem asks hazel to give her a specific piece of information about cinder, and he tries to evade by saying "i take full responsibility," so she flips the table, pins him to the ground, and intimidates emerald into telling her instead, because she knows hazel is lying to shield emerald from the imaginary threat of salem's wrathful retribution.

in this scene, salem has emerald pinned to the wall and makes an implicit but extremely clear threat to hurt emerald because, she tells hazel pointedly, this one was helping the intruders sneak oscar, the boy hazel was supposed to be interrogating at the time, off the whale: SIGNIFICANT LOOK. DRAMATIC PAUSE.

this is the test. this is the test. the last time salem put hazel into a situation where he anticipated a punishment falling on emerald's head, he lied to try to redirect that punishment onto himself. if he tries to do the same thing now, he's either going to implicate himself as an accomplice, attack her, or exonerate himself by lying (because salem will know that he's lying if he falsely claims to have been in on it a la "i take full responsibility").

she's not making any accusations but she is giving him the chance to come clean. the last time this happened and he lied to her, she bullied emerald to punish him. the implicit promise she's making this time is that if he was also "helping them" and he tells her the truth now, she won't hurt emerald. if he gives her what she wants, she'll reward him with what he wants.

as. usual. she does not communicate this clearly enough for it to be effective (⭐️ SHE TRIED) and hazel doesn't give her anything to work with, just stands there silently, so... she escalates. "take the boy back to his chamber; i have work to do with this one."

if hazel's silence is because he's upset but still remains loyal, he'll obey and she'll know that she has a much firmer hold on him than she thought. if... he was involved, then his silence is because he's trying to figure out a way to salvage this situation. she still does not have absolute certainty. so she provokes him by raising the stakes and turning her back on him.

um, another noteworthy detail that i think supports reading "i have work to do with this one" as a performative threat salem's making to force hazel to make his loyalties clear:

salem touches emerald's face with this very ominous-looking magic crackling around her hands and nothing happens. the specific threat she's been making in this scene of "answer me or i'll burn your face with this nasty dark magic" is quite literally bluffing. it doesn't hurt emerald upon contact with her skin. emerald just experiences the untold horrors of salem grabbing her face.

HOWEVER. escalating in this manner a) takes the risk of hazel choosing to betray her for emerald’s sake right now even if he wasn’t an accomplice before, and b) insures that if hazel is already a traitor, there will be a violent altercation.

the former is a much less dangerous risk than alienating hazel if he's truly loyal by making open accusations (an immediate betrayal that she provoked and is prepared to handle vs a possible betrayal an unknown amount of time in the future which might catch her with her guard down). the latter is a problem, because there are children glued to the floor who will be in the crossfires of any fight, and one of those children is her general's eldest.

and this is where that second goal of "don't severely harm or kill summer's daughter" comes into play and comes into conflict with salem's need to recapture oscar & oz and recover the stolen relic. it's at this point salem has to make a decision about what to prioritize, and her choice is to—if hazel does what she expects him to do and attacks her—let the children go while she "fights" hazel, then pry information out of hazel once they're gone. so she reveals that her priorities are:

summer's daughter.

the lamp.

hazel's loyalty.

the lamp's "password."

also notice that salem does keep her implicit promise not to harm emerald if hazel gives her what she wants—she releases emerald, too, after hazel punches her. she's thinking ahead to what she'll do once the children are gone and she has hazel alone on the docks. by letting emerald and the rest of the children escape, she removes his motivation for betraying her: he no longer has anyone around whom he could possibly sacrifice himself to protect from salem, because all of them have made it to safety. now salem can pin him to the wall and start asking questions.

either hazel took the lamp and stashed it somewhere on the whale once he realized she'd caught the children, or neopolitan stole it and—if she's still aboard—will need to pass the docks sooner or later. so salem stays put, with hazel, until she has the lamp in hand again or knows where hazel hid it. summer's daughter is safe, hazel has no one to sacrifice himself for (and she has some leverage to counter ozma's lies; letting the children go is her proof that she isn't unreasonable), and salem has everything she needs to get the lamp back. she might have to capture someone again in the future to extract the lamp's password, but there's a chance hazel learnt it from oscar before the jailbreak and theft.

worst case scenario, neo stole it and escaped before salem intercepted the jailbreak on the docks, but at least by questioning hazel she'll be able to determine whether that's the case.

a partial victory is preferable to a loss, and knowing what to sacrifice in pursuit of one's priorities is important. this is salem's basic strategic philosophy and it shows through in her actions throughout this scene; she's making choices about what matters to her most and what she can afford to let go, always with the intent to achieve as many of her goals as possible, in descending order of importance.

with salem it's important to keep in mind that she thinks like this. strategic acumen is her greatest strength and being able to evaluate all of one's objectives in terms of priority, feasibility, and tactical means at once is a critical strategic skill. strategy is about the long term, big picture thinking, where salem excels. so she almost never does anything for just one reason; every decision she makes is a balancing act taking into account all of her important short- and long-term goals.

speaking of which, i've so far limited this discussion to her immediate objectives in this scene, but it's worth remembering that salem has long-term plans that she is working toward and her actions and choices in any given scene are mediated by the big picture; her inner conflict regarding cinder aside, salem is never going to do anything that achieves a short-term goal by harming her strategic ends (and her erratic behavior toward cinder arises from a conflict between her strategic ends and her increasing reluctance to treat cinder like a pawn, i.e. her big-picture wants and needs can no longer be easily reconciled.)

it's much harder to discern salem's long-term objectives because we don't really know what her plan is, except in the broadest strokes. but we can hazard a few guesses:

salem is very circumspect about what happened to summer rose; it may be necessary for her plans to preserve the heroically-martyred idea of summer rose—the most obvious reason would be that "summer was the best, and even she failed" is a very exploitable weakness in her opponents' morale.

if salem intends to confront the brothers face-to-face, using the final judgment as bait, and she fails, the only thing she can do that might prevent the gods from annihilating remnant is ensuring that everyone is rallied against her. forcing the truth of her existence into the open while performing to "monstrous evil witch bent on destruction of all things" expectations is the surest way to do that.

likewise, winnowing her own inner circle such that she is truly and completely alone by the time she has all four relics in hand may be part of the plan.

also worth taking into consideration are the ways salem's trauma circumscribes her decision-making. she is:

terrified of rejection.

terrified to care or admit to caring because the divine mandate is a justification and a threat of genocide strictly to punish her, and she knows it.

convinced that no one will ever truly care about her, hear her, or want to help her without getting something in return.

resigned to being seen as a monster no matter what she does, solely on the basis of her inhuman appearance.

all of these things predispose her to retreat behind her emotional walls and just reflect the expectations of others back to them. she's been viciously, brutally punished every single time she's tried to be authentic and vulnerable with others and it hurts less to shut down and be what she's "supposed" to be than to try and be cut down over and over again. this is a defensive learned response and it informs both her strategic planning and her tactical decisions; even in situations where breaking expectations and being emotionally honest might benefit her if people were to give her a chance, she's not going to do it unless she is really, really certain that she won't be punished for trying again.

now, to wrap this up, let's go over the fight with hazel.

i actually debate with myself a lot as to whether salem did or didn't anticipate hazel punching her, because she a) doesn't brace and b) cries out when his fist makes contact with her face, but i am certain that by this juncture salem did expect and was counting on him to do SOMETHING to stop her. the sequence of events is this:

salem approaches emerald while telling hazel, "take the boy back to his chamber; i have work to do with this one." after a brief pause, hazel answers "yes. of course," and begins to walk over to oscar. at this point, salem puts both of her hands on emerald's face and leans in to emphasize the threat, but still doesn't hurt her.

keep in mind that there is a significant distance between salem and oscar. relative to her position when she entered the scene, salem has moved (roughly, eyeballing) about thirty feet to the left and knocked oscar about the same distance from where he fell when she burst through the side of the whale. so they're still about fifty feet apart.

an able-bodied human walks about 4.2ft/s at a normal pace on average; hazel is quite tall—i believe word of god is eight feet, but he is NOT two feet taller than salem, the top of her head is level with his shoulder line, which if salem is six feet tall exactly would make him about 7'2"—which gives him a much longer than average stride, so we'll presume his normal walking pace is about 4.5ft/s.

when salem walks from emerald over to oscar, it takes her about twelve seconds. if we assume that her pace is the average 4.2ft/s, that would make this distance just about exactly fifty feet. 50ft 5in, to be precise. the consistency here between the visible spatial distance and the temporal distance suggests close attention to detail on the part of the creative team.

(salem returns from oscar to emerald, off screen, in about two seconds, but this is not problematic given her super-fast gliding pace—we can assume that salem slingshot herself across most of the distance and then walked the last couple steps.)

so at a normal pace of 4.5ft/s, it should take hazel about eleven seconds to walk from salem's side to where oscar is... and in fact it takes him exactly that: he begins to walk at 14:35 and stops in front of oscar at 14:46. again, the consistency is telling—particularly because there is no dialogue at all in this span, so how long it took wasn't dictated by the length of a spoken line.

hazel picks oscar up, murmurs "no more gretchens, boy," into his ear, pushes the long memory into his hands, and then drops him again. this takes another ten seconds. hazel turns away from oscar and begins to walk back toward salem at 14:56, punching her at 15:04, so his return is faster but within the range of a brisk walking pace (eight seconds, fifty feet, approx. 6.3ft/s).

the reason i'm belaboring this point is that salem says "i have work to do with this one," and then... stands there without doing anything except holding emerald's face menacingly for a genuinely awkward amount of time. thirty-one seconds, counting the beat before hazel began to move. it's not even clear that salem said anything to emerald—when hazel turns away from oscar and the camera cuts back to emerald and salem, em blurts out "i really don't know!" but whether this is in response to another question salem asked off-screen or just responding to what she assumes salem wants from her is ambiguous.

compare the way salem questioned emerald earlier in this scene: she asked two questions, one after the other, confirming that emerald didn't take or hide the lamp and doesn't know where it is. as soon as it became clear to her that she wouldn't get useful information from emerald—because em truly did not know anything—salem dropped it and moved on to Plan B. she doesn't LIKE emerald and she's ANGRY that em tricked her and helped oscar escape, but what salem CARES about is finding out what happened to the lamp. she's not going to waste her time trying to get blood from a stone.

and compare the way salem conducts herself when she interrogates oscar in 8.4. again, her questioning is guided by practicality, but the more salient point of comparison for this discussion is what salem does when she shifts gears to punishment and torture. namely, she just tortures him. no hesitating, no warnings, no threats, no grandstanding, she just turns around and does it. practical, again.

if what salem intended to do at this point in the scene was torture emerald, either to punish her or for information, she would do so.

instead, salem just...clutches emerald's face. evilly.

for thirty-one seconds.

now, i will remind you that salem has excellent spatial awareness; she sticky-hands yang from at least ten or fifteen feet away while upside-down with her eyes closed. hazel's footsteps are clearly audible. when hazel enters, salem hears him speak and answers him across this fifty-foot span. oscar cries out when hazel picks him up and grunts in pain when hazel drops him, which also makes a quite loud thud. hazel's footsteps would also be audible to her when he returned, although they aren't to the audience.

so she'd be able to sense hazel approaching her again, and if she paid attention—which she must have, because salem's just spent half a minute doing the bare minimum to sell that she's toootally going to start torturing emerald, any second now, and the only reason for her to do that is if this is about intimidating or provoking hazel—then she would have at least heard him dropping oscar, so she knows he isn't "taking the boy back to his chamber" as ordered.

ok.

when the focus shifts back to them, salem's got emerald like this:

this shot is at 15:01.167. hazel will punch her at 15:04 exactly, which at his brisk pace of 6.3ft/s means he's about eighteen feet away. around 15:02.750, when hazel is less than eight feet away from her, salem begins to pull back, lifting her arm as if preparing to strike:

she holds this pose without moving for almost a whole second. remember just how fast salem can be. her release when she fires back at ren, from the moment she begins her 180° spin to the moment the opalescent bolt leaves her hand, is sixteen frames. from the appearance of the black/violet magic bubbles to the release of the opalescent bolt is one frame. ONE.

when she reaches this position, hazel is quite literally right next to her. he cannot be more than three or four feet away, and we can see in both the initial shot and the replay from the opposite angle that he comes at salem directly from the side, not from behind her.

the point is that salem can see him. unless you have vision problems impacting your peripheral sight, even if you're looking straight ahead, as salem is here, you can visually detect motion directly to the left or right within a close radius. and indeed:

salem's gaze flicks to the side before his fist makes contact, and the wider shot from behind shows just how close he is to her before throwing the punch.

and the last detail i want to note regarding the punch is that salem lets go of emerald when hazel hits her, which is something that she does NOT do when yang blows her up:

if salem can remain standing and keep her death grip on this girl's arm while her ENTIRE TORSO IS EXPLODED WITH BOMBS, it... does not matter how strong hazel is or to what degree salem may have been caught off-guard. she had at least a split second recognition before his fist hit her face; that alone is enough to reflexively clamp down on emerald's jaw if she didn't want to let go.

so whether or not salem anticipated that hazel would punch her in the face specifically—and it doesn't seem like she did, given that she yelps—she must have had at least a vague awareness of his presence/approach (because he marched right up to her), and she made the choice to just ragdoll with the hit. the simplest explanation is that once she heard him drop oscar and start power-walking back toward her, salem knew he was going to try something to save emerald and committed to the bit.

she also isn't actually ragdolling; she lets the force of hazel's punch throw her off her feet, but then instead of falling she soars away in this high arc, flips herself around in midair, drops down in a perfectly-controlled landing at the far end of the dock, and rises again:

ok? ok. this sequence, from the end of the slo-mo reaction shot to when salem reaches altitude, runs 15:08 to 15:11—three seconds.

and then she just, erm...hangs out there, not doing anything, until hazel finishes cramming dust into his body and turning his back on salem to give his heartfelt last goodbye to emerald and everything, and faces salem again at 15:41. at which point she says "so, you've decided against vengeance for your sister, after all this time?"

thirty. seconds.

during which the ONLY ACTION salem takes is this... this:

<- make a particular note of how jaune reacts. the tactics guy. while the other kids gasp in shock/relief, jaune is like "wait what?" as he pushes himself up to look at salem—he's confused, because he knows intuitively that Something Weird just happened.

why did she do that?

she didn't need to. it wasn't an accident. salem manifested these sigils with a mere thought, and later in this same scene we'll see her do that again right after hazel smashes her head like an egg. summoning these things also clearly doesn't inhibit any of her other powers, so this is effortless for her and costs her nothing to maintain.

either happened by narrative fiat, because the kids had to escape and the writers just couldn't be bothered to figure out how. the... problem with this explanation, aside from the obvious that rwby is a well-written story that doesn't pull this sort of bullshit, is that the prelude to the big fight makes a HUGE POINT of,

this! oscar is already free and has long memory. if the intention is for the kids to escape while hazel keeps salem distracted, you don't need a narrative contrivance like this; you just slip in a shot or two of oscar snapping these grimm hands or disarming the sigils with his own magic to release his friends instead.

orrr... salem let them go on purpose.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wheeze. ok. we're almost done.

remember how salem can go from empty fist to black magic bubble to releasing an opalescent blast in just three frames?

this first shot is at 15:49. the second is at 15:51. in between, salem just kind of sways side-to-side and then waves her arms around for forty-five frames. even if we count only from her conjuring of the Big Bubble at 15:50, it's twenty-two frames—longer than it took her to snap around and fire off a blast that hit her target dead-on and slammed two teenage boys into a wall some 20-30 feet back.

woman's telegraphing harder than a dark souls boss here.

and speaking of aiming...

these are the three bolts salem fires in the wide shot. top row on the left is her first shot in the instant before hazel begins to run up the slope—i've marked the trajectory and the eventual point of impact in green to make it easier to see that this would not have hit him even if he hadn't moved. top row on the right is the real impact, with hazel now running. on the bottom row are her next two shots. one strikes the edge of the dock nowhere even close to him, the other hits the ground about 8-9 feet in front of him (measuring based on hazel being 7'2" tall). and in the next shot:

it's not that she never hits him. hazel is quite a bit farther away from her than ren was and he's also running at a dead sprint while dodging blasts. tricky target. it wouldn't be strange at all if she missed.

but look at where she is aiming.

top row: both bolts strike the ground 1-2ft directly ahead of him—in the shot on the left, he's veering closer to the wall to avoid stepping on the point of impact. bottom left: this is a second bolt aimed just a little bit forward and 1-2ft out from the wall relative to the top right; these two bolts strike eight frames apart and hazel lunges sideways toward the dock's edge as the second one comes into frame, so when salem fired the second one, hazel was still where he is in the top right. and (the clincher) bottom right: this bolt strikes six frames after the one preceding, 1-2ft directly in front of him, and hazel swerves toward the wall to avoid stepping on the point of impact; notice the correction from #3 to #4 when hazel swerved more toward the ledge than salem anticipated.

not a single one of these bolts is actually aimed at hazel. salem is aiming to hit the ground directly in front of hazel, close enough to convince him that she means to hit him but also low enough that if she misjudges his speed she's going to strike his ankles... and when one blast nearly hits him in the head or chest because he jumped further sideways than salem guessed he would, she instantly corrects her aim to ankle-height again.

she is herding him.

up the docks, closer to her, away from the children, all while taking care NOT to hit him without being obvious about it.

this is the same kind of behavior we see from her in 6.4, where she's at worst a little vexed but flips a table and shouts and throws him to the ground as if she's in a terrible fury—and then a minute later hazel tells her something that genuinely infuriates her and we see her freeze while the windows start to crack, before she sends them all out of the room and struggles to press this rage back down.

because there is a huge difference between the loud, explosive "anger" salem performs to intimidate her associates and her real anger, which she tries very hard to contain.

in a similar vein, we get this fleeting glimpse of salem's actual skill in combat when she spins around and blasts the boys into a wall in the time it takes to blink... and then she sees yang, and the key changes. instantly. for the rest of the scene.

onward. hazel vaults over salem's final bolt and launches three fireballs at her. as these spiral up toward her, salem threads herself between them like they're not even there—it's really fast, the whole sequence from when the fireballs form in front of his fist to when she slings past the third one is forty frames and if you count from when the first fireball enters the frame, her evasive maneuver is over within twelve frames. as she continues past the last fireball, salem swings her arms to finish her movement, as if she's going to lash forward and fire off a riposte:

but then instead, she re-centers, pauses, and does... this:

which i'm sure looks very impressive and terrifying for everyone on the ground, but she is... literally just tossing magic around in random directions. this is not an attack. this is a light show. a firework. her big swarm of magic bubbles spits out of of the opalescent bolts and only one hits anywhere close to hazel. she is just fucking around.

from here, hazel sprints to the edge of the dock and launches himself into the air above her, where he dust-conjures a biiiiig spiky boulder to smash her with... and, uh. three things. first:

this shot occurs in slo-mo to really underscore what happens here. note that salem is looking up at him and has a firing bubble ready to go. hazel is approx. twenty-eight feet directly in front of her (measured in salems); a few minutes ago we've seen her be dead accurate at just a bit more than half again that distance, and we know a blast from her has plenty enough force to knock hazel out of the sky. from the beginning to end of this shot her head moves as she tracks his motion.

she has a clear shot lined up here. she chooses not to take it. then:

hazel conjures The Boulder, and we get this shot of salem's reaction—from waiting indifferently to see what he'll do to wry amusement. and then she physically braces herself to take the hit:

after which point salem just Lies There letting him pummel her for a few seconds before evidently deciding that she's done enough fucking around for those children she let out of gay baby jail about sixty seconds ago to have gotten away so she'll just flick her fingers (while her skull is caved in and her brains are splashed all over the floor, mind you) to pull some more grabby hands out of the air and wrap this one up except—

—NO WHOOPS THEY'RE ALL STILL HERE. lol.

like the fight is over, when the camera cuts back to the kids. salem has hazel completely immobilized. jaune is at the other end of the docks, shouting for everyone to hurry. "she'll just come after us," oscar says, but if salem cared to recapture any of them she would've left hazel restrained and dropped down off the dock to scoop them up as they hit the ground.

she's visibly irritated after regrowing her face, yes. but we have seen over and over—there are multiple examples in this scene alone—that salem can and will set irritation aside to focus on what doing what is necessary to advance her practical goals. she's poisonous with emerald but asks her two questions and then turns away as soon as she's confirmed that emerald doesn't know anything. she takes a deep breath and shelves her fury at ozma to listen calmly while yang yells at her. salem just isn't a character ruled by her anger.

so the fact that she a) continues to focus all of her attention on hazel after restraining him, and b) actually hurls him out of the restraints, in the opposite direction from her escaping prisoners, and turns away from them to just bash hazel's face repeatedly into the floor, suggests to me that her annoyance is perhaps more because these children are STILL FUCKING HERE and she needs them to be gone before she can start to properly wring the truth out of hazel.

she pays zero attention to the children until she hears long memory activate, which seems to startle her; after that she straightens up and stares him down for about four seconds.

they're about ninety feet apart here. salem covers a just over half that distance in two seconds... meaning she is gliding at what is for her a downright leisurely 24.5ft/s. that's a little bit more than a QUARTER of her top speed which is, in case you've forgotten whilst reading this very long post, 96ft/s. or 65mph.

(and here i will remind you that the walking speed distance math earlier checks out perfectly with the measurable spatial distance between emerald and oscar. this scene was choreographed and animated with very close attention to time and distance and i think that's because the speed at which salem does certain things at different points is doing a lot of narrative work. it's seldom necessary to be this precise but in this scene it matters.)

the point is that while salem does slingshot herself at oscar pretty fast here, relative to how much faster she CAN go, salem isn't trying especially hard to Get Him. this is like a brisk jog for her.

now granted, if hazel hadn't scraped up the wherewithal to, i assume, yeet himself after salem with all the dust cooking his body from the inside out, oscar would have been toast whether salem zipped along at a normal human sprinting pace or clotheslined him at car-on-a-highway speeds. but it does speak to the intensity of salem's interest in getting oscar in this moment versus when she went for emerald at the top of the scene.

salem had, by this point, already given up recapturing oz/oscar as a loss, accepted sacrificing the opportunity to do that as a price she was willing to pay for the sake of 1. getting summer's daughter safely off the whale and 2. after clarifying hazel's loyalties, removing the children from the equation so she can squeeze him for information about what happened to the lamp. i think the possibility that oz/oscar might have shared the "password" with hazel when hazel decided to help them escape would've at least crossed her mind as soon as she narrowed her list of suspects down to hazel and neo, too.

there's also the factor that with hazel now compromised, the only person around to interrogate oz/oscar is salem herself, and because that would involve being in the same room with and talking to ozma for an indeterminate amount of time, i don't think salem's all that keen anymore.

thennnn hazel sets her on fire and she screams and thrashes because she's having traumatic flashbacks to the moonfall and then oz blows her and her whale the fuck up.

thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

[dcxdpdabbles]

#holiday request Hi, I love your writing! Could you please update either "Danny's grill", "Congratulations! It's Triplets!" or "Phantom's number 1 fan"? Please and thank you

Jason is once again reviewing the map of potential areas Alvin could have been operating in when his burner phone rings. He snatches it up before it can pass the fourth ring, pressing it gently against his ear.

He offers no greeting. It's a tactic he uses to ensure that whoever is calling him has permission to do so. If someone attempts to conform his informants' and allies connection with him, Jason is not about to give them away by speaking first.

"Hey Boss," Honeycomb's voice filters through, edged by that familiar overdramatic southern draw she did when working. Apparently, the clients like listening to her use her accent. "I got eyes on that doll you've been searching for."

Jason sits up straighter. "Where and when?"

Honeycomb is one of the working girls who's been with him since his return to Gotham. She was the first to sign up for his protection, long before he did the whole heads in a duffle bag thing, and was one of his best eyes and ears on the street in exchange.

He didn't know her real name or age- but he was sure she wasn't underage. He made it clear he wouldn't allow it. All Jason knew about Honeycomb was that she had run away from her home in the southern states with nothing but her pretty face, blond curls, hazel eyes, and the clothes on her back.

She was feisty and could charm her way out of most problems with her silver tongue. Her manipulation of her clients was almost an art form, and she could get any information out of anyone with a well-placed hand on the air and a sweet little "darling" on her grubby lips. He often thought she would have been a lawyer if life had been fair to her.

"Just now, on Ruby Street. He was with a man in his late teenage to early twenties. About six feet five inches, black hair, blue eyes, and Caucasian. Alvin was wearing black tights and a red hoodie. The man is in jeans and a white zip-up." Honeycomb rattles in one smooth report, the huskiness of her accent making her articulation more pleasant to the ear. "Seems they were doing a photo shoot."

Jason is already moving towards his bike, switching her call to his helmet. His stomach turns slightly as he grunts, "What kind of photoshoot?"

"Not that kind, Darling. Seemed more like a scavenger hunt, according to Alvin. They are finding specific landscapes and making posses that are answers to some riddles." Honeycomb responds. Distantly, her heels clicking against the concrete echo a little louder, letting Jason know she has wandered into an alley. "I approached Alvin when the man with him went up a fire escape to take a picture with a gargoyle. I offered him my service to him as a cover. Once he confirmed his name was Alvin and he was already with a client, I left before he could get the idea I was attempting to steal his work."

"Good job." Jason boots up his bike, flying out of his hideout without hesitation. He was still twenty minutes away from Ruby Street, but if the pair was going to be a moment, he could close the distance between them and find a trail to follow once on scene.

He questions as he flies through two lanes, ignoring the honking of angry divers. "How did Alvin look? He's supposed to be with one of my contacts, so if he's with someone, it might be a John roughing him up."

I'll deal with Victorian later. He mentally swears How dare he not tell me, Alvin went back to the field after hiding out for so long without a ounce of protection.

"The sweetheart doesn't seem hurt, but I can tell his client is one of those problematic kinds." Honeycombs sighs, the edges of unease slipping into her voice. "He looks at Alvin like he's in love."

Shit. It's never suitable for working folks to meet someone who "loves" them. Nine out of ten times, it was just a wacko who became violent the moment the prostitute so much as hinted that this was only a job to them. Jason had pulled out three women's bodies from the Brown River the last time one of those clients fell in love.

Jason pressed harder on the accelerator. "Are they still there?"

Honeycomb hums "The John is on the roof now, but Alvin is waiting for him under the street pole-Oh shit!"

Jason nearly slams into a nearby car at her sudden yell. "What happened?"

She doesn't answer, but he can pick up the sound of her running and her fast breathing. He knows she is getting out of danger because if there is one thing Honeycomb is as a person, she's a survivor. He wants answers but would rather she focus on getting herself safe first.

He meanwhile, concentrates on the phone calls and the vehicles he's flying between.

It's a few minutes before she gasps. "Sorry, Darling, I had to run. Batman was on the roof with the John."

What.

"Batman just appeared out of nowhere and threw a bucket of mud at the john. Alvin didn't seem to notice, but I did. Batman made eye contact with me, so I ran." She concludes, pushing through her uneven breathing. "I have to go, Darling. Hideout before the Bats lock me up."

"That's alright. Stay safe." Jason tells her, taking a turn sharply as she hangs up the call without another word. The second she does, he double-taps his helmet to connect to the Bat communications.

"Barbie. I need to know what B is up to now."

_________________________________________________________

Bruce watches the Fae shake the mud out of his face after he has scrambled down the fire escape. Tim was at his side in a second, using a handkerchief to gently clean up the Fae's face.

There were a lot of whispered words, but based on what Bruce could pick up from lip reading, Tim had no idea he was up here. He just assumed the Fae got caught up in a juvenile prank.

Oddly enough, that was primarily due to the Fae covering for Bruce.

It was rather disappointing the repealing spell hadn't worked, but the Justice League Dark the mixture of John's Wort, primroses, and marsh marigolds mushed together with water socked in iron during the full moon should have made it possible to force the contact with Tim to break down.

Of course, this had been a desperate attempt, seeing as all the JL Dark had been unsure which method was best when he asked how to get a Fae to leave a human alone.

A lot of debate went into finding a solution, but in the end, Bruce had chosen a mixture repellent. He had even decided to use some holy water and trough in blessed soil and blessed iron just to make it extra powerful.

The magic users had all assured him it would work as long as it touched the Fae skin while Bruce chanted Tim's full legal name. It had felt rather ridiculous dragging a bucket half the size of himself through the city, trying to spot where Tim and his companion were, and even more so when he had sprinted across the rooftop screaming.

"Timothy Jackson Drake! Timothy Jackson Drake! Timothy Jackson Drake!"

The Fae had been in the middle of taking a photo. He set up his camera on a little tripod and, after pressing the time, had run to face the city- back facing Bruce- raising his arms to form a triangle above his head. Based on fact the camera was slightly lower then the Fae's torso, Bruce could deduct her was attempting to capture himself making the triangle top of one of the most iconic buildings in Gotham.

Spear tower.

He waited only long enough for the flash to go off, so by the time the Fae turned around, he had a face full of mud.

It splat all over his front, covering every inch of what should have set Tim free. The silence followed was louder than anything Bruce had ever heard, even as the Fae calmly picked up his camera and scurried to the ground.

Bruce let him go, wondering why he had failed. Thankfully, it seemed Tim and the Fae were getting back in their car- not the food truck for some reason- and were driving away.

Tonight, Bruce would find its lair and get his son home because letting him take a relaxing vacation was alarming to the rest of his children.

He rushed to the Batmobile, climbing into the driver seat and taking off after the pair. As he was driving, he could have sworn Jason just passed by him, moving like the devil was after him.

Bruce wondered briefly if he should check in on his third oldest but thought better of it when he noticed Cass, Dick, and Duke driving right behind Jason on their own bikes. His children had each other backs.

A few hours later, Bruce stood before a large empty field. He had watched the Fae drive into it and vanish from sight. None of his machines could pick up any hint on where they might have gone, but he was reasonably sure there wasn't any teleportation involved.

Sometimes teleportation left some traces in the airwaves. It's how Bruce could track people using the boom tub or find the Flash whenever Barry went on a craze.

Bruce was thinking that this was the Fae's court and his magical home was being protected by supernatural means. He just had to figure out how to get in and Tim out.

As he was considering the field, a soft, distant roar made him reach for his weapons. He turns one hand poise for a throw, his trusted batarangs in between his fingers, only to become surprised when he recognizes the vehicles driving towards him.

It was his spare Batmobile and four bird-themed motorbikes. His children.

"B?" Dick questions after spinning to a stop and sliding right in front of Bruce. He lowers his window, looking at him with apparent confusion despite the Nightwing mask blocking his eyes. "What are you doing here?"

"Following a lead on the Fae. What are you doing here?" Bruce asks, lowering his arm but keeping his weapon. He could never be too sure this isn't a trick.

"Following a lead on Tim." Dick responds, stepping out of his car. Two other doors open, and out steps Steph and Damian, both looking posed for a fight. Of all his children, those two tend to be the most territorial and have not taken to Tim being a semi-held hostage well. "Oracle was able to track him through the city cameras after he popped up taking photos."

"hmm"

Jason jogged over to them with Cass not far behind. "Wait,, you got a lead on your cases too? We would check in on Victorian and see if he knew anything about Alvin."

He gestures to those behind him, indicating Cass and Duke, but the daytime hero is not paying attention. Duke was staring at the field, mouth slightly open as if in awe. Bruce straightens once he realizes Duke can probably see or at least detect the magical castle.

"Victorian?" Damian asks, crossing his arms. "Who is that?"

"The owner of the giant mansion we're standing in front of. He's one of my contacts."

"Ugh, not to make you feel crazy, Hoodie," Steph speaks up, placing a hand on the crook of her hip and waving her hand to the field. "But there is literally nothing there

"What are you talking about. This place is bigger than Wayne Manor."

Bruce heard about this. Guests who have been here before or have permission to enter can see glimpses of the Otherworld that Fae deals in. However, it is surprising to know Jason has already been in contact with the Fae before and has not been kept.

Did that throw a wrench in his theory of Tim and Alvin being the same person? Why would the Fae ask Jason to find Tim if he was in the creature's home?

Before anyone could say anything else, a giant gate entrance suddenly manifested mere feet from where Bruce stood. A soft creek was heard as it was thrown open, and a glowing woman in an old mail outfit floated just a foot off the ground on the other side. She eyed them all in an eerie, emotionless face before bending her own into a low bow. "Welcome. My King wishes to invite you in."

Well, that's not ominous at all.

His children shared a look between them, silently letting each other know to be cautious as they followed the floating woman. She led them down an impressive driveway that slowly gave way to a massive mansion.

Bruce fought to keep the surprise off his face. Jason was right. This place was more prominent and grander than his manor. It didn't just scream wealth. It screamed nobility; it screamed royalty.

The group walked into the main hall, some muttering thanks to the bowing woman who opened the doors. "Of course. The King stated that his home would always be open to Master Alvin's kin."

She vanished from sight like mist fading away as soon as they crossed the doorway.

Bruce's eyes instantly landed on the figure standing atop the grand stairs. Tim was gawking at them, wearing nothing but a long, seductive black robe with fluffy collars and wrists. The front of the rob was open, displaying a large amount of chest and thigh, but keeping the significant bits out of sight.

Thankfully.

His skin was glowing, his hair tussled stylishly, and a dozen red roses were in his hands. Tim looked like he was planning a romantic evening in his get-up.

"Oh," He said dumbly. "You're not Danny."

"What the fuck is going on" Jason demanded after a long period of silence.

"Um...I was planning on seducing my friend. What are you all doing?"

"Regretting waking up this morning," Damian demands, pressing a hand over his eyes. "Please get decent. My nightmares are horrid enough."

Bruce nods. "You were Alvin Draper and are romantically involved with the Fae. He seems to be treating you well. That's good."

All of his children stared at him for a long moment before the hall erupted with displeased noises. Bruce was taken aback.

Did none of them know any of this? It seemed obvious to him.

[everythingannoyingpjo]

i really don't like how Riordan wrote Octavian in HOO. during SON, it really seemed like he had something planned for him, some backstory or reasoning for his actions, but when he saw the way fans hated on him he decided to just make him a laughingstock. he's supposed to be this powerful guy, Hazel even says so, and he's supposed to be able to talk the senate into almost anything, and yet we don't see any of this past SON. and the hypocrisy for him! with Luke, people forgave him even though he tried to literally destroy Camp Halfblood, gr00med children, and obviously did not care if his own allies got killed. his main reasoning was "I don't think my dad cares about me so I'm just gonna injure and/or off dozens of children!". Octavian does try to destroy Camp Halfblood (which I'm not gonna say is okay, bc it isn't) but he has an actual reasoning! his home had been attacked and the people who did it just ran away with no explanation. yes, Leo had been possessed, but nobody even told Octavian that! so his rage was absolutely reasonable. and he actually cares about his allies. he waits to attack several days to a week just so the onagers would arrive, that way there would be no casualties on his side. plus, it seems like people just ignore the fact that he was manipulated by Gaea and was obviously having a mental breakdown near the end. it's constantly brought up in arguments for Luke like "he was manipulated by Kronos!!" but when a similar thing happens to Octavian, nobody mentions it or seemingly cares.

Note: OP has a negative opinion of Luke and of some fans differing reactions to Luke and Octavian as antagonists. However this is not a fandom complaint or character complaint blog. It is a book complaint blog. This ask was sent before that point was clarified. Please try to limit complaints and discussions to what occurs in the source material only.

Yes, I agree. I tried to make a list of your points below for clarity.

during SON, it really seemed like he had something planned for him, some backstory or reasoning for his actions

It did seem that way. There are a lot of implications behind Octavian and not much fact.

It is implied he was raised in New Rome. This means he was raised in a culture that promoted suspicion of/aversion towards greek demigod culture. (You can see this aversion in the way people/the laeres react to Percy when he arrives at CJ.)

It is implied he has prophetic powers.

It is implied that he is unwell/unstable. It's implied he is being manipulated by Gaea.

It is implied that public opinion of him is favorable.

It is implied he wants to go to war, specifically against greek demigods should they exist, though he should have no proof of their existence.

It is implied that he killed Gwen.

It is implied (in TOA) that he has a connection to the triumverate.

None of this is ever explained/explored/given more detail. Why does he believe Apollo supports him? What is the extent of Gaea's influence on him? Why does he angle for war before the attack on Rome even happens? What does he know and how?

he's supposed to be this powerful guy, Hazel even says so, and he's supposed to be able to talk the senate into almost anything, and yet we don't see any of this past SON.

Given every implication above, he should be powerful, or competent, or at least have the backing of competent people. We never see that. We never know why he makes the decisions he does and how he accomplishes his goals is almost never shown or explored.

Octavian does try to destroy Camp Halfblood (which I'm not gonna say is okay, bc it isn't) but he has an actual reasoning! his home had been attacked and the people who did it just ran away with no explanation.

Octavian was pretty clearly angling for war even before the attack, but certainly that cemented the legitimacy of such an action in his mind. Yet from SoN onwards Rick treats Octavian as a complete joke. Which honestly, I do think Octavian is funny, but I also think the story would have been better if I believed Octavian was a legitimate threat. And I don't because he basically disappears from the narrative at this point except to exist as some sort of omnipresent boogieman. None of his actions, motivations, or reasoning is ever explored. Any shadow of substance he had in the previous books is flattened. He becomes completely two dimensional.

It's hard to even be mad at people for not seeing the legitimacy in his attack when it's the result of Rick completely ignoring his character. After SoN he basically only exists to create a sense of urgency in completing the quest.

and he actually cares about his allies. he waits to attack several days to a week just so the onagers would arrive, that way there would be no casualties on his side.

I mean, this is largely supposition. The narrative heavily implies the wait for the onagers is because he wants to win with overwhelming force. But you are right that his compatriots safety could be the reason he wants to win with overwhelming force! But we don't know, because again, he was never fleshed out!

plus, it seems like people just ignore the fact that he was manipulated by Gaea and was obviously having a mental breakdown near the end.

It's pretty clear he was being manipulated. I think one thing it's easy to forget is that all these characters are teenagers. Octavian is a child. He has been put in a position of responsibility that should be reserved for an adult. It's hard to think Octavian is 100% evil or that he 100% deserves to die. EXCEPT that Rick has prevented us from being allowed to see him as a real person. He has made him feel like a complete caricature of a human being. And even then, it still disgusts me that Rick made his death a complete joke, something to laugh at.

If Rick was trying to say that "people who think this way are a joke" he should have shown us more of Octavian's thoughts. He should have given us the oppurtunity to see the point he was making by laughing at him.

Instead we have the implication that there was more, and no answers. He never even gave Octavian a last name. I do not like Octavian as a character, but everything about how he was written is sort of fucked up.

[anthurak]

Theory - Who Gets to Kill Tyrian? (and why I don't think it'll be who people expect...)

So I feel like there is a general agreement in the RWBY fandom at this point that Tyrian Callows is NOT living to see the end of the series. That in turn leaves the debate as to when Tyrian might bite it, and more interestingly, WHO is going to get to get the honor of murderizing him?

For the ‘when’, personally I’m of the theory that Tyrian is going to bite it by the end of the Vacuo arc, specifically as part of resolving the conflict with the Crown. As in, the Crown’s followers are pacified, Jax and Gillian (likely along with Carmine) are talked into standing down and surrendering peacefully, Mercury is dragged kicking and screaming into his redemption arc like the whiny little edgelord he is, and Tyrian is killed as part of ensuring that Salem can no longer interfere. Really, I just don’t see Tyrian being involved in the final arc(s) of the story. Simply put, he feels much like Watts and Leonardo before him; a villainous minion of Salem’s that fulfills a role for the narrative and other characters, and is then promptly killed off.

So that now leaves the ‘WHO’, and there are certainly quite a few options.

To begin, we have the option that it seems a lot, if not most people are expecting: Qrow Branwen. And he certainly seems like the most ‘obvious’ example, right? In that he’d both be avenging Clover and settling the little quasi-rivalry that’s been brewing between him and Tyrian ever since their fight in Volume 4. The PROBLEM with this line of thinking is when we remember:

When has RWBY EVER done things the ‘obvious’, or rather ‘tropey’ way?

And more to the point, consider just how consistently RWBY has utterly decried revenge arcs and those who fixate on them. Cinder, Jaune, Adam, Hazel, Neo, even Qrow himself. Time and time again, RWBY has presented chasing revenge as nothing but something that will get you manipulated and lose you everything and probably get you, and possibly others, killed.

Also, has anyone else noticed that when RWBY’s villains die, it generally comes as a surprise to them? That their death comes from a direction they didn’t expect, from someone or something they didn’t consider, or downplayed or underestimated as a threat. Whether it’s Roman becoming Grimm-chow, Adam getting killed by Blake and Yang, Jacques meeting the business-end of Jimmy Child-Shooter’s Irony-Gun or Watts getting Cinder-flambéed, it seems like RWBY villains generally don’t really see their deaths coming.

And Qrow being the one to kill Tyrian doesn’t fit either of those trends. It plays a revenge arc straight, plus I have to image that Qrow Branwen is probably the person Tyrian would MOST be expecting to be able to kill him.

So no, I actually feel extremely confident in saying that Qrow is NOT going to be the one to kill Tyrian.

Moving on to what I feel is a MUCH more plausible option; let’s talk about Emerald and Mercury.

Ever since their scene with Tyrian in Volume 6, I’ve seen it discussed a few times that Emerald and/or Mercury will be the one to take Tyrian down. Especially after Volume 8 showed Mercury now directly under Tyrian’s thumb.

And unlike Qrow, I have to agree that this option does feel at least plausible. It would certainly play well into both Emerald’s efforts to help Mercury and Mercury’s own inevitable villain-redemption. Heck, the pair bringing Tyrian down together could potentially have some parallels to Blake and Yang bringing down Adam.

Though at the same time, there are still wrinkles here. For one, I don’t exactly think Tyrian would be especially surprised or blindsided by Emerald and Mercury? Certainly not in the same way, say Adam was by Blake and Yang at the end. Particularly in how Tyrian essentially tries goading Emerald and Mercury into taking a shot at him back in Volume 6. Sure, Tyrian certainly wouldn’t expect Emerald and Mercury to actually pull it off, but he also seems more than smart enough to not underestimate them either. I almost feel like Tyrian would actually be impressed if the pair actually managed to kill him, perhaps leaving them some twisted words of respect at the end.

Also, Emerald and Mercury don’t really feel like the most interesting options to me? For as much as we may have hyped up any dynamic they have, remember that these three really only have two proper scenes together between Volumes 6 and 8. Tyrian isn’t exactly the nemesis to Emerald and Mercury that Adam was for Blake and Yang.

All in all, I do think we COULD see Emerald and Mercury be the ones to take down Tyrian. I just don’t exactly think they’re the most plausible, and more importantly INTERESTING option.

Now for another contender, we have Cinder. And like with Emerald and Mercury, I can certainly see this happening. What with how we’ve seen Tyrian mock and belittle Cinder over the course of the show.

After all, Watts did much the same and we all saw what happened to HIM in the end. Really, it would be rather fitting if Cinder wound up being two-for-two on taking out a hated coworker after their usefulness to Salem came to an end.

On top of that, I think it’s easy to imagine Tyrian winding up a ‘demonstration’ of sorts to showcase not only how powerful Cinder has become, but also how monstrous via her Grimm-hybridization. As scary as Tyrian is, it would be rather appropriate for him to be killed by a Cinder who has become even scarier.

One wrinkle I do have with this option though is that I have a hunch that we’re most likely not going to be seeing Cinder again, or at least that she’s not going to be coming to Vacuo, until AFTER the business with the Crown is resolved, and therefore after Tyrian is dead. As in, it could be that Tyrian’s death and the failure of the Crown is what spurs Salem into sending Cinder to Vacuo to get the Sword of Destruction herself. Or it’s what finally clues Salem and Cinder into what’s been going on in Vacuo, and in turn learning that Team RWBY is still alive, and therefore reigniting Cinder’s raging hateboner for Ruby and causing her to tear off for Vacuo.

On top of that, I can’t help but think killing Tyrian doesn’t exactly add all that much to Cinder’s character? Like her killing Watts was almost an afterthought, a proverbial cherry-on-top of all her other, far greater victories at the end of Volume 8. Plus, while Tyrian has mocked and belittled Cinder much like Watts did, we’ve yet to see anything like the focus that Watts’ enmity for Cinder got in Volume 8 with Tyrian.

Like with Emerald and Mercury, I can certainly see Cinder being the one to kill Tyrian. However, I also can’t help but think it might not be the best option.

So now let’s talk about the option that I think would be, if not the most plausible, then certainly the most INTERESTING. A character that Tyrian has already tangled with, and even left a mark on him.

RUBY.

I mean, she already took his tail. Why not have Ruby take his HEAD as well?

Speaking more seriously though, Ruby being the one to kill Tyrian actually fits fairly well into the trends we’ve seen of RWBY villain deaths. Namely, it very plausibly blends together both the trends of villain deaths coming from a place they didn’t expect, and showing the self-destructive nature of revenge.

If there’s any one of the heroes that could have conceivably really gotten under Tyrian’s skin, I think Ruby is our most likely candidate. While we may not have seen any direct hints to it thus far, I think it is VERY plausible that losing his tail to Ruby has needled Tyrian a LOT more than he’s let show, and that he actually REALLY wants payback on Ruby.

And while Tyrian may have been able to keep a lid on this fixation much better than the likes of Adam or Neo, I can’t help but think that in a full and proper fight between them, Tyrian could all too easily get tunnel vision on getting payback, and miss the genuine THREAT that Ruby could pose to him.

Which in turn could lead to Tyrian getting all too easily PLAYED by Ruby just like Neo, Cordo, Harriet, Cinder, Ironwood, Neo again, and many more, right up until he finds Crescent Rose buried in his chest. Or perhaps cutting through his neck…

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a death VERY much in line with so those of so many other RWBY villains we’ve seen.

But that just leaves the question; why Ruby? What does killing Tyrian specifically add to her character? Or provide an interesting death for Tyrian? What actual connection to these two characters even have that would narratively justify this?

Well, let’s consider for a moment all of the parallels we’ve been seeing more and more of between Ruby and Salem over the last few volumes. How Salem is feeling more and more like Ruby’s villainous counterpart.

And then when we factor in Tyrian’s own fanatical loyalty TO Salem…

I think Ruby being the one to kill Tyrian could wind up being VERY interesting indeed.

Imagine a hypothetical fight between Ruby and Tyrian that isn’t some big, epic showdown. At least not for Ruby.

Instead, this fight with Tyrian comes after the better part of two volumes worth of Ruby having to deal with the ever-increasing amount of SHIT that comes with having to essentially unite all of humanity to fight Salem. All while being only one of at most three actually competent leaders/adults in Vacuo (the other two being Robyn and Qrow).

Ruby has spent the last two volumes dealing with grimm attacks, keeping the locals and three different groups of refugees from killing each other, keeping the local headmaster from going all ‘Jimmy Childshooter 2.0’, dealing with some idiotic cult-leader with delusions of grandeur, dealing with her own cult that’s convincing everyone that she’s some big godsdamn messiah, and maybe learning that her parents lied to her and her dad wasn’t who she though he (or rather she) was.

And while Ruby has maintained her compassion and defiant drive to help people, she’s also found herself growing more and more pragmatic, ruthless and even manipulative in her methods of helping others. Basically, we’re seeing more and more of those parallels to Salem.

So now just picture Ruby, having FINALLY gotten the Crown to chill the fuck out, gotten FINALLY talked Jax and Gillian to peacefully stand down and quit all this moronic ‘true king of Vacuo’ bullshit, and FINALLY gotten everyone to play nice together so they can actually focus on stopping evil sexy satan mommy from killing them all.

Then in comes this raving moronic loon with a murder boner threatening to ruin everything.

Simply put, imagine Ruby going into a fight against Tyrian completely and utterly, absolutely, one-million-percent FUCKING DONE with this bullshit.

And so, Ruby kills Tyrian with such an overwhelming display of power and savage ruthlessness that even to his OWN shock and awe, in his last moments Tyrian can’t help but view Ruby in the same light he sees Salem in. To the point that with his final words, Tyrian outright COMPARES Ruby to Salem.

Even if it’s only Ruby and her closest friends who actually hear this, or even just Ruby herself, I feel like this would have a VERY interesting effect on Ruby indeed.

Over the last several volumes, we’ve seen more and more parallels drawn between Ruby and Salem, something I have no doubt we will see further developed in future volumes.

And I think Tyrian would be a very fitting and interesting means to bring Ruby’s similarities to Salem into the forefront and to the attention of both the characters and the audience.

[jackofallrabbits]

Since some of you seem interested in the witch boys' children from Charm Brought it Back let @naffeclipse and I introduce you to them! All of the children are witches like their fathers and can do magic, but each of them have a magic that is unique to them as well.

First, we have the first born! Biologically Sun's daughter her name is Ember. She is a lot like Sun; bubbly and excitable and passionate. She is the sweetest little girl who can also throw world-ending temper tantrums if she does not get her way. Her magic is shapeshifting. Specifically she likes to turn into a songbird or a fawn. She can be very hard to catch in her animal form (especially when it's bath time or bedtime) but Sun can always catch her. And Eclipse will reinforce rules such as: no turning into a fawn because you don't want a bath. Ember's magic can be hard to control and sometimes she gets stuck in an animal form. When that happens Moon usually sits with her in the form of a raven, tucking her under his wing and helping her feel safe and loved. Ember is adventurous and the most keen on getting in trouble.

Next, there is Hazel! Biologically Moon's daughter she resembles her him in both looks and personality. She is shy and gentle and content to be by herself sometimes. She has the power of song, her magical voice can compel people to do her bidding as she commands. She's usually very good about not using it on others, but sometimes she needs to be softly scolded and reminded that using her voice to manipulate other children is not how you play games fairly. The boys would want her to be proud of her voice but also use it with some care. Hazel also loves water, she'll often run off to swim in a pond and be by herself for a little while. Eclipse is the one who helps teach her how to use her enchanted voice, he's the best teacher among them and is patient with all of their children.

Finally, we have the last born! Biologically Eclipse's son Balor! Balor is the most dutiful of the siblings, often acting like the eldest among them despite being the youngest. Ember wants to get them into trouble and Balor wants to keep them out of it. He loves to read. He'll become absorbed in books for hours on end. His magic is shadow magic, he can disappear into shadows. Slipping between dark spots or looking and/or listening through them. He's not much of a troublemaker but sometimes he needs to be reminded that spying on people is wrong. Balor will disappear when he's hurt or scared though, in such cases the boys can either be patient and wait for him to return on his own or Sun can usually find him since he's the best at hide and seek.

[princessofghosts-posts]

I feel like Gaia was out to get Percy,Hazel and Nico specifically. Like,yes,she tormented all of the Seven from the start,some of them even when they were little,and Hera didn't help them with her involvement in their lives at all,of course. But she was more focused on those 3 at the start.

Gaia had so much personal beef with Hazel (that sound crazy but it's true,go queen) that she decided to reveal her the information about her brother's capture only to put her in more distress,fully aware that it was important for her that Nico wasn't going to be freed. But then she completely forget about her after they defeated Alcyoneus at the end of SoN,shame on you for this Gaia.

But then she started to focus more and more on Percy,which is fair since he was the one she wanted to use to rise again. And from the start she probably knew already he was going to end up in Tartarus so she was happy to make him suffer until he died. But she was out for him from the start,Percy manipulated her to let him live again and see another day after he drank the poison. She was pissed!

And idk if I'm just being extremely delusional or not,but she was also out for Nico,only indirectly. She was behind all of his suffering during HoO (that wasn't a part of his internal struggles about himself as a person/sexuality or his low self-esteem) and Nico was the only demigod she bothered to actually stop. She had a plan for him and left her children to do it because she couldn't have him around freely once he knew about the doors. Not even Percy and Hazel (or the rest of the Seven) had so much attentions from her,and they were killing her sons. Gaia needed the giants to rise again (and keep the gods busy in the meanwhile),so they were destroying more of her plan than Nico ever did. But she made people hunt Nico down through Tartarus and their travel too??? She was so bitter towards him without a reason.

Like,am I delusional or Gaia was focusing on Nico too,even tho at the time he was technically a "side character"? She gave him so much attention,and actively made his situation worst in the same way she made Percy doubts his powers,and taking away every sense of safety he could have about the Underworld. That's so much work to do for a demigod that isn't even in the main prophecy.

Gaia was indirectly beefing with him from the start.

[winniefrezcomics]

THE FAIRY DALE POST

(Credit to @zennyzach / @perisprinkles for this certified banger)

Hi what’s up hello, decided to do this separately from the previous question so it would be easier for those who want to avoid it to do so dndbdhdhdjdjbh

to all the Dale fans out there, I’m sorry to admit that I am not among you- as much as I appriciate what an accurate depiction of an emotionally abusive parent he is, I am NOT manifesting a redemption arc for his ugly ass, and hope that Dev gets to stand up to him in a BIG way in the shows future 🥰

Anyway: Is Dale Still a shoddy father in the Fairly normal Parents AU?-

YES. He’s WORSE, actually!! ☠️

Trust me when I say the read-more is necessary here- PLEASE read the content warnings before deciding to proceed- covering fairy Dale and Fairy Devs relationship requires me breaking away from the wholesomeness of the rest of the AU to cover some darker topics-

CONTENT WARNINGS: dalepreg, mild NSFW text, unwanted pregnancy, references to pregnancy termination, emotional abuse, parental neglect, manipulation, unhealthy parental relationships, Dale Dimmadome in general

Okay, with that out of the way-

One important thing to note about my swap au is that, in the time period the ask blog takes place, ALL the faires are adults! Which I point out only to explain why, at this point in the story, Dev has ALREADY had his gigantic falling out with his father (that’s, tbh, pretty similar to the one I like to think HUMAN Dev eventually has in my personal hc timeline for him) SO YEAH, Dev and his father are currently NOT on speaking terms, and he really dislikes talking about him (Perry has never so much as learned Dale’s NAME. He’s that secretive about it after storming out and getting cut off, but I’m getting ahead of myself snsbdbdbd)

SO, TO START AT THE BEGINNING- Something I have yet to discuss in the ask blog bc we aren’t far enough in the plot yet for Dev to openly speak about magic (yes, plot ☠️) is the fact that Poof’s role as the “first fairy baby in a thousand years” actually belongs to FOUR faries in the swap AU- Dev, Hazel, Winn and Jasmyn!

(Aaand maybe some other kids from ANW too, it’s not carved in stone yet how many characters this includes 🤷)

The reason that so many fariy babies were born at ONCE- (inciting PURE CHAOS in fairyworld, I’m sure) is due to an anti-magical comet passing over fairyworld (which I have not yet worked out the name and specifics of, yall will have to give me til Hazel arrives to get THERE sbdbxjshdjdjjdd 😂)

BASICALLY the anti-comet, unbeknownst to anyone, weakened and warped the magic spell in place that prevented fairy babies from being possible-

-go ahead and assume this middle part for yourself lmao-

Once the pregnancies start making themselves know. FOR THE MOST PART fairy couples are ECSTATIC to learn that they’re expecting- and because the comet violated nothing in Da Rules, they were ALL allowed to keep thier miracle babies (don’t ask abt Antony wheeze, I’m still thinking abt it tbh 😂)

So all of fairyworld is abuzz with excitement about all the expecting miracle parents… with the exception of one. Dale ‘Day-breaker’ Dimmadome, owner of the corporation that runs most of fairyworld, and the LAST FAIRY ALIVE that should have been entrusted with caring for a child, has also found himself expecting (don’t ask me how it happened lmfao, let’s just say “partied too hard in fairly Las Vegas” and leave it at that ☠️☠️☠️)

Needless to say, Dale was NOT on board with the idea of being pregnant, giving birth, OR raising a baby, so he has the AU pairs research every possible solution to the ‘problem’ right away, and keeps his pregnancy a secret for as long as possible.

However, all of that changed when the future visions started. They were mild, at first- just strangely frequent moments of Deja vu in Dales day to day life running his company, and strangely accurate dreams every now and then. BUUT as Dev continued to develop and grow, the visions got clearer and clearer, until Dale finally got fed up and went to see a fairy fortune teller, who informed him that his unborn baby must be the source of the prophetic dreams, and they would only get more powerful with time. Even in his fetal state, other clairvoyants Dale went to see could tell- DEV was going to be a VERY powerful one.

Okay so here’s where the “eugh” REALLY starts for me- (if it hasn’t started for u already screams)

Once Dale realized how USEFUL the future visions were, he decided to halt his research, and carry the baby to term, so that he could continue to have the visions, as he considered them an advantage while expanding his corporation.

Much to Dales dismay however, the SECOND the baby is BORN, Dale loses the clairvoyance ENTIRELY, buuuut now that Dale knows he has something to GAIN from doing so, he decides he DOES want to raise this child, so that it can be of use to him in the future (tho by “raise” I of course mean “make the AU pairs raise ☠️☠️)

I don’t have a drawing of them yet, but fun fact, fairy Dev was raised by two au pairs (the AU’s pixie equivalent) that are based on his drones from ANW- their ‘names’ are technically just strings of numbers, but Dev nicknamed his two servants/gaurdians/weird robotic gay dads “silver” and “Gold” 🥈🥇

I’ll infodump on them too if anyone asks abt em, but this is the Dale post wheeze, back to the horrors-

Dev grows up barley knowing his father, but slowly gets more and more demanding of his fathers attention with time, desperately wanting to form a relationship with him. Eventually, Dale relents, allowing Dev to spend much of his time by his father’s side, almost like a teeny tiny advisor or smthn? Baby Dev couldn’t be happier, but Unfortunately, it’s Dale, so ofc he had ulterior motives. basically as SOON as Dev was able to talk, Dale began to constantly ask if he had had any new visions, even getting dev private magic/ fortune telling/ clairvoyance lessons, to try and hone his child’s skills as much as possible as quickly as possible.

At first Dev thinks nothing of how hyper-focused Dale is on his future-seeing powers, and is just happy to be included and close to his dad for once. He’s more than happy to have visions for him, recounting them with excitement, and delighting in the praise whenever his insight was considered “legitimately helpful”

However, as time went on, and Dev gained the context of meeting the OTHER fairy kids and thier families, he couldn’t help but slowly start to question his fathers “parenting methods” - if you could even call them that ☠️☠️

(Hazel Wishingwell heard a rumor about a secret fairy child being spotted on a balcony of the Dimmadome building, so she, Winn and Jasmyn went to investigate! WIP of a comic I’ll finish eventually. maybe. probably.

poor dev lived a very Elsa-esque, isolated life before he made three gremlin friends who started routinely “kidnapping” him from his damn repunzel tower to have fun and hang out 🥺💕)

This ever-growing sense of unease continues to eat at kid Divination, and part of him starts to wonder if his dad really DOES only care about his powers like his friends say he does…

they are all. horrified. To learn how little attention and affection Devs father gives him. ESPECIALLY because the three of them have incredibly loving parents that have been calling them “miracles” and “gifts” thier whole lives, while Dale has basically done nothing but COMPLAIN to dev about how HARD it was to carry him for all those months, especially when he wants Dev to stop questioning him. ☠️

So one day, as an experiment, Dev LIES about his future vision. Since Dev realized there was no way for anyone else to witness and vouch for the accuracy of his vision-retelling, he decides to advise his father AGAINST the deal he was prodding Dev to see a prediction for, despite his vision clearly telling him that the partnership would be extremely profitable. Dev does this for a few reasons, but it’s a decision owed in no small part to the fact that, the more successful partnerships his dad is involved with at any given time, the less time he has to spend with his son (not that his “spending time with” involves much outside of Dev telling his dad his visions and Dale ignoring any non-biussness conversation his literal child tries to start with him 🙃)

This works for a while, with dev estatic to be getting to spend more time with his dad, even IF his mood is consistently terrible from having to back out of so many potential partnerships that he thought for SURE would work and be profitable, but it didn’t occur to him that his son may be LYING until one day, a partnership HE turned down BLOWS UP after pairing with a DIFFERENT company. When confronted, Dev immediately breaks down and comes clean, trying to defend himself by claiming he “just wanted to spend more time with him”.

Dale is BEYOND un-moved by the sentiment, and swiftly bans dev from his office and advisor council, seeing very little of him for most of devs teen years (tho of course they pass by and interact now and then, Dale goes out of his way to steer clear of Dev is his “emotionally volatile state” or whatever)

Once Dev is a young adult however, Dale makes him an offer for how Dev can once again be useful to thier family business: since dev has been continuing to hone his magical abilities even in his fathers absence, by 17/18 he’s quite the skilled clairvoyant, so Dale offers to instate him as an offical employee of the Dimmadome corporation, and have him offer fortune telling services for a Hefty price.

Dev agrees, and it’s fine at first, but dev quickly realizes he HATES his job, and in addition, seeing into the future MULTIPLE TIMES A DAY was really starting to take a toll on both devs mental AND physical health (he started to struggle with migraines -hence the glasses- and near-constant dissociation episodes, to the point where dev often found himself disoriented and unsure if what he was seeing was real or a vision, if that makes sense?)

Dev eventually has enough, and works up the nerve to, at first politely, tell his father that he needs to quit his job. It takes dale and dev quite a bit of back and forth before Dale realizes the EXTENT to which dev is intending to quit (cold turkey) emotions rise steadily, until the attempted professional resignation has dissolved into a SHOUTING MATCH between a father and son

After dev SCREAMS every single thing he’s been holding back for YEARS into his fathers face, he storms off, and hasn’t been back since. Dev also indirectly trashed his office, because Devs magic reacts on its own when extreme emotions are at play (he gets the flaming hair thing from his dad tho dbdbdbendnd)

Current day dev actually isn’t SURE where he and his father stand, but he assumed it wasn’t good after all his credit cards stopped working, forcing him to take a job as a godparent to earn a living himself (Hazel was MORE than happy to drag him to godparenting school tho lmaoo)

SO YEAH THATS PRETTY MUCH IT

I miiiight make it canon that Dev and his dad reconcile and reconnect after Dev saves fairywolrd, but that’s getting into spoiler territory wheeze

TYSM for the question! Apologizes if this made anyone uncomfortable to read, but thanks for getting all the way down to the bottom of this ungoldly long ramble too lmaooo 🥺❤️

[kohakurin8]

Things I Noticed Watching The Umbrella Academy for the Second Time

Spoilers ahead!

• Leonard was always kinda creepy. The reason most people didn't notice it at first is because the narrative makes you hope for good things for Vanya, especially when he acts kind and supportive towards her. It's a wonderful portrayal of manipulative relationship dynamics because it makes you experience the manipulation first hand with Vanya. Incredible.

• Hazel really came into the "Kill Number 5" job with one foot out the door. He was already planning to leave his job and find a normal life. And considering he actually took the time to realize that he was miserable and then manage to just barely keep his job while looking for a way out, I think Hazel just might be the most mentally stable person in that entire organization.

• Vanya's whole statement about wondering if what Mom says is from her own thoughts or from Dad isn't a nihilistic thought about Mom not being her own person. She was trying to express that Dad might have actually loved them, deep down, because if he didn't then he wouldn't have been able to program Mom to be so loving and caring to them. Not only is this foreshadowing for later seasons, it also means that Reginald specifically programmed Mom to show the children all the love and care that he never could in his role.

• Holy shit, Klaus ACTUALLY DROWNED in that bathtub in episode 3—

• Klaus always had a 70s vibe going on before he ever went to Vietnam. It begs the question, did the briefcase take him to Vietnam because that era was in his heart all along? Is that what happens when you don't program it?

• The series treats Vanya's book like it was some horrible mistake. A bad decision that made everyone's lives worse. At least, that's what most of her siblings think, so it makes the viewer feel that way too. But if you take a step back and look at it, there was nothing wrong with Vanya's book. It was therapeutic for her, and it helped everyone go on to become their own people. They should have been happy that Vanya had the courage to speak out about the abuse that they endured, but instead they hate her for it because it forced them to face negative feelings that they'd been trying to ignore.

• When Five ran back to the academy and found it destroyed, the very first name he called was Vanya's. She was the person he was concerned about the most.

[basicwhitewitchy]

I think most of the issues with HoO start within SoN.

Like the world building. We're introduced to Camp Jupiter through Jason as place where they were fine branding a 2-3 year old. A place where they are sent to train with a wolf that would kill the failures.

Camp Jupiter worships the roman gods, who are specifically described by Clovis as more distant and more militaristic.

Yet when we meet them at Camp Jupiter its light-hearted with almost no oppressive atmosphere.

We're told Frank is hiding his heritage and the fact that his life force is tied to a piece of wood yet the only thing either of those two do is free Thanatos and has no bearing on the worldbuilding or even comes up as a plot point past this. Hell I don't even think Camp Jupiter's learns about franks heritage.

Hazel's hiding fainting spells, cursed gold popping up, and the fact that she was dead. We get a small connection between one of those and Octavian "blackmailing" her but its completely dropped by the end of the book.

Camp Jupiter dislikes borders on despising both Neptune and Greeks yet when Percy appears the camp seems to drop it and never brings it up.

Also almost every diety we are introduced to are using greek names despite them having actual roman names.

The military aspect of the camp is completely ignored. There is absolutely no way for Frank and Percy to be promoted to centurion and praetor respectively.

Frank has only been there for 6 months. We don't know if he's been on any quests and the few incidents he mentions describe him as not quite used to living in a military post.

A centurion is in charge of multiple people and putting him there with very little experience is setting him up for failure. Nevermind the fact he's skipping an entire rank.

Rick didn't even need to promote him to centurion to make the quest continue because hazel was standing right next to him. Hazel who both had the rank and at least a years experience at the camp.

Percy was there for a week and was only at the camp for 1.5-2 days. In combination with the rumors of him being Greek and his parentage nobody is electing him praetor.

Yes he has combat experience but Camp Jupiter doesn't know that. All they'd see was a better than average probatio who is smart.

Also being raised on a shield was never an actual way to become praetor and any political position in ancient Rome. It was a ceremonial thing used to establish legitimacy and seems to have started in the tribes outside Rome.

Jason going missing a few months after a major battle is going to set all of Camp on edge. Somebody should have been able to connect the dots between Jason going missing and Percy showing up carrying Jason's patron as well as recreating the original way the original Jason got Heras favor.

Rick fridged Gwen. He also gave us no reason to care for her death. Like even though its been a little since I read SoN honestly tell me something about Gwen other than how she died and how many years she was at Camp Jupiter.

Even looking at the Fandom wiki page for Gwen it doesn't even know if Gwen's a legacy or if she's a demigod or whose her divine relative.

Rick ruins the threat of the giants in this book. In TLH it took Jason, Piper, and Leo working together to defeat Enceladus and they couldn't defeat the king of the giants.

In SoN, Rick sidestep the giant in alaska despite having all the necessary things to set up the fight. Thanatos (a god) is there, there's a major sacrifice (most of franks lifeline) and there are demigods there yet Rick wrote in a loophole.

During the fight at Camp Jupiter, Percy solos that giant and only gets terminus help at the very end. Nevermind the fact that there were multiple cohorts that could have helped and the very nature of the 2nd great prophecy was that both camps needed to work together to defeat Gaia and the giants.

Setting up Octavian was very hamfisted and not at all smoothly. Like he's supposed to be this master manipulator yet he didn't get the very first step of blackmail was don't do it in front of people who are either are helping with the blackmail or who you are blackmailing.

Nevermind the fact that what Octavian is doing isn't blackmail. If you want to be charitable you could say what he's doing is just him being a politician (something very much set up during Percys first chat with Reyna) or if you want to be extremely negative is at best bribery. Which is a significantly less of a crime than blackmail.

He's described multiple times at not being impressive which makes it hard to take him seriously as a villian

Octavian also has no connection to Gaia which is what made the Titan war work, Luke and Kronos where working in tandem.

Speaking of Gaia, her plots also start making less sense after SoN. In MoA, the group tells the romans that Gaia was trying to start a war by blaming the greeks for kidnapping Juno.

Immediately after that, Gaia starts the war by blaming the greeks for firing onto New Rome. Unlike how Kronos had a new plot almost every single book.

[valzhanginator]

calypso having an emotion-centered character and being viewed & getting treated as the ‘evil woman’ is actually a reflection of how every woman's emotions are villainized when they’re shown vividly and are a main part of their character in popular media.

in general media and riordanverse specifically, women with emotions are always looked down upon because showing emotions is regarded as a dramatic act so when a female character shows and acts on their emotiotions they get degraded and instantly despised because of it. this is done with every single female character while male characters who show emotion are treated like saints and found worthy of self redemption. this happened with annabeth when she didn’t want to believe luke was the bad guy and wanted to try bring him back because she was manipulated by him her entire life, meanwhile luke, who did batshit crimes like causing hundreds of innocent deaths, manipulating little girls by flirting with them, admitting his crush to a 16 year-old at his ripe age of 23, is remembered as a hero and considered ‘redeemed himself’ after sacrificing himself while annabeth was called insufferable when she didn’t believe he was evil in the first place. let’s not forget piper, who’s a lesbian that was forced into a relationship with a man by a goddess and thought she was in the wrong for not feeling right with jason. during the entire relationship she was experiencing a very hard comphet and couldn’t figure herself out because of the fake memories, everybody was bashing her when she was acting confused, when she was, in fact confused. i have a longer post about this specific topic, so if you guys wanna check it out it’s right here. 

 coming back to calypso, first we need to clear out the misconceptions about her curse on percy that affected annabeth. she wasn't blind nor was personally attacking annabeth, her curse was to make someone feel like how she was feeling all time and that’s why percy and annabeth couldn’t reach out to one another while being right next to each other. annabeth’s blindness came from the titan she defeated in the sea of monsters and is actually the first curse to be put by the arai on them, so it has nothing to do with calypso. the curse was affecting annabeth because she happened to be the person percy loved and was right next to him. if percy was there alone either percy would feel alone and abandoned or the curse wouldn’t affect him at all, since there’s no person he can go back to save. and the curse itself wasn’t even a death wish type of curse she just wanted to be heard, be acknowledged and wanted free off her island. not to forget the curse wasn't harming or killing any of them yet it’s still demonized more than by literally every other thing that happened in the books. nothing luke has ever done is seen as evil as her curse just because it was by her and i’m pretty positive if something like this was shown in pjo by luke it would be glossed over and romanticized in the fandom. further proof of how a male character's actions get brushed off and forgiven easily but soon a female character does something even slightly questionable they get villainized on the spot.

she is also despised because she doesn't let everyone's favorite man get away with his misogynistic stuff. calypso doesn't treat leo any worse than he treats her. whenever she starts arguing it is a response to something leo has said or done, which in the most case she's in the right but leo gets so much slack from his past and being fandom favorite to be held accountable for the way he treats people. he's always been written as a misogynist, he never treated any women with any respect. he always had some sort of disrespect for every female character he seems have some sort of closure with like piper, hazel, calypso, the list goes on, but yet calypso is always expected to be more 'tolerable and understanding' bc of his trauma, as if every single character in the series isn't written upon a single trauma they had and have their character built on it. and he always had a problem dealing with others and their emotions and instead of expecting him to be working to change that, calypso is expected to adjust his manners.

oddly enough, she's also expected to show some gratitude towards leo for saving her, when she never asked him to do so and not for a second believed that he was actually going to come back when he said he would. is she grateful that he came back and freed her? yes. should she feel any obligations to make him feel greater because of it? NO. everything leo did for calypso was his and only his choice and nobody else's. calypso is happy that he did so, but expecting her to tolarate every single thing he does solely because of that is wrong.

[rocinantescoffeestop]

I started thinking...

If I wrote a college AU surrounding the seven main characters in the series Heroes of Olympus, I would give them the following majors and extra-curriculars:

Percy -> Marine Biology; pretty self-explanatory here. He is the son of the Sea God which gives him the ability, in canon, to communicate with horses and aquatic life. This ability is a large part of the plot of the books and thus, it makes sense to me to honour that importance by using it as my inspiration for his major. His extracurricular would be student athlete on the men's Basketball Team.

Annabeth -> Architecture. I don't need to explain this one. Her extracurricular would be captain of the women's Soccer Team.

Jason -> Politics. His character arch through the books lands him in the position of "liaison" for Camp Jupiter and Half-Blood as well as the shoulder to bear Minor God Representation. Not to mention, he did not want the power for its own sake, but he had a vision for a future where Cohort five is respected which would consequentially make Camp Jupiter a better place. He would be on the Basketball Team with Percy.

Frank -> Politics as well. His point of view when he was introduced was a dislike for war and violence and power. His arch took him on a journey to recognising and respecting power, in which he realised not to diminish his own but to acknowledge when it was necessary and step up to make the hard calls. He would join or start the University's Archy club.

Piper -> Undecided. So much of Piper's internal monologue is her uncertainty. In Book One, she struggled with 'save my father' or 'save my friends and the world'. In the following books, we see her struggle to determine what she brought to the Seven, if there is anything at all. She learns, over the course of the series, that fighting is not the only way one can be strong, and certainly not the only way one can contribute. She would struggle to find her niche in University but learn how to find confidence without an all-consuming, singular focus. Her extracurriculars would include Theatre and Model U.N..

Hazel -> Geology and Astrophysics. Taking into account her two godly power-sets--geokinesis and manipulation of the mist--it makes sense to me that she would be a double major. Geology is pretty self-explanatory. Astrophysics correlates with Hazel's mist abilities because of the (current) four fundemental forces of the universe, specifically the force of Electromagnetism. The mist obscures the mythical world from mortals, meaning it is an optical obstruction. The visible light spectrum is a part of the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Meanwhile, the unseen parts (to human eyes), on either side of the VLS, are very real and yet--like what the mist can obscure--cannot be seen. If I were to explain what Hazel can do with the mist in scientific terms, she is manipulating the Electromagnetic Force. I would make her a part of the University's Outdoors Club as well.

Leo -> Engineering. Yeahhhh, there's no explaining necessary for this one, either. He would not have any extracurriculars because of the intense laser-level focus he has on his pursuit of creative, industrial innovation and ingenuity.

That is the foundation I would create for a Heroes of Olympus college AU. I probably won't write this, but I may come up with a part two in which I detail if and how the characters know each other from before University and how they would come together in the exposition-period of the narrative.

Have a lovely day, folks! :)

--

P.S Gleeson Hedge would be the basketball coach.

P.P.S Percabeth are high school sweethearts.

[bijoumikhawal]

I've gotten tired of making a post like this every few months so let's just fire a few of these off, and feel free to add on! Tropes you should at minimum reconsider using when you write or talk about Julian Bashir:

Mentions of "harem" pants, "Arabian nights" aesthetics, etc. These are improper terminology (that feeds into racist ideas) for real things, and when using that terminology those things are often being misrepresented. For my part, if you would actually like to know about the material culture of the Middle East and North Africa, I'm a "hobby" researcher of that very topic and will readily answer asks about it- with the caveat that I mostly know about Egypt, and I'm not the best person to ask about Sudanese specific culture even though I know a little, and I don't know much about Indian or Pakistani fashion (mentioning because these seem to be the most common cultures brought up around Julian).

comparisons to monkeys, apes, the word "simian". This should be obvious but it happens a fair amount, and it's almost comedic given a common trope is to comment on how much Garak hates being compared to a lizard.

This is separate but the way some people use mammalian tips from writing xenofic and trying to understand how an alien would think and categorize things into something that feels very exoticifying. It's not a "full stop, do not do this" but it is something I've noticed

Jokes about how undesirable Julian is. He's the exception that proves the rule about fandom's obsession with white twinks and a rare example of a brown nerd who isn't pinned into the "Couldn't sleep with a woman if they were the last two people on earth" box. I'm not saying we can't make fun of how he flirts just- Stay clear of Raj BBT territory

Conversely: my most hated garashir trope is when the author makes Julian's libido a problem by making him inconsiderate, cruel, and outright manipulative in service of his dick, and the writing often makes it clear they're connecting this to his masculinity. Julian does do some really stupid shit when it comes to his relationships, but this particular way of trying to incorporate this into writing him is just OOC, and you need to not confuse writing Julian's canonical robust and healthy sex life with negative stereotypes about lecherous Black and brown men. There's fics that pull off Julian being a bit of a dick or manipulative well- such as Salt the Earth or the ageswap series (at least where I last left off on it).

making his eyes green or blue. I have the same eye color as Siddig, more or less, and while it's technically hazel (or olive, as some people call it) most people think it's brown and most lighting makes it look brown. If you look at screencaps of Julian, you'll notice it also most of the time, looks brown. This sounds minor if you haven't experienced it, but it has a real and very negative impact on people's self image.

Older one but to be clear: if you're writing Julian as explicitly Muslim, find and replacing "god" with "allah" in English text is not how Muslims (or Arabic speakers in general) use the word? It is really funny to read, but please...

Over focusing on Julian as British. There's a long, LONG conversation that could be had about the dynamics of assimilation and how European racism (ime) very specifically views it as progressive to strip people of their culture and thinks they're causing the problem if they don't go along with it that would need its own post and which I've had with white fans before and feel exhausted thinking about- but to put it simply, there is no such thing as "just British", even for white Englishmen.

Yes the inverse is also wrong but I really haven't read a fic newer than 2014 guilty of that lmao and I think some of the more recent complaints about it are overblown, given I've read only a few fics recently published that delve into Julian as a Brown/African Person and I enjoyed them

I would personally appreciate it if fic writers were a little more balanced about cultural discussions honestly. If you write a lot about Cardassian culture, it'd be nice if Julian’s background was discussed. I won't say that kind of research is easy (again, I do this as a "hobby" that's very important to me, it's actually really annoying and difficult sometimes), but it is possible. I recently talked about how not doing this kind of mentally slots Julian into a "white guy" role.

This is not a matter of me policing your "artistic expression". I have no control over what you do. I would just like for fandom, a hobby I do for fun, to be a place where people stop being racist in a way that directly impacts me.

[pepperf]

Question to all the Five fans who haven't blocked me yet: is there anything actually in canon to say that he worked closely with/was personally victimised by the Handler, or is this just an incredibly popular headcanon (because people feel it explains a few things)? Because that wasn't at all how I read it, but Five is not my focus, so I may have missed something?

From what I remember: when she first appears in the apocalypse, they're definitely strangers, and she recruits him. Then on her next appearance, it sounds largely as if that was the last time she'd seen him. She tagged along on the killing of Lila's parents, but this was stated to be unusual, maybe even unheard of ("Management never came on missions" or words to that effect). She focuses on him in s2, but she's working on a specific plan at that point, and although she deliberately plays cat and mouse with him, it's not exactly the worst thing that happens to him that week. And after that, she's fully dead.

I ask because I have seen a lot of comparisons of Five and Lila's relationships with the Handler, and I'm honestly not seeing where that comes from. Lila had years of abuse from childhood, she was indoctrinated and manipulated, gaslighted into loving her tormentor, told that she'd been 'saved', her loyalty had to be absolute - the relationship was one of abusive parent and abused child. Whereas Five was recruited by the Commission, worked for them for...five years? (I don't think they ever specify, but he's already Old Man Five in the apocalypse), and then got out. He barely seems to know the Handler - or the building and people, judging by the introductory tour he gets.

I'm sure he had a shitty time there, and the Commission absolutely uses people! But like...on the level of denying expense claims, judging by Hazel and Cha Cha. And oh, they'll definitely kill you if you're in their way - but it's not personal. For my money's worth, I would say his life in the apocalypse was far more formative for who he is as a person - and that absolutely was as terrible a fate as anyone could wish.

(Relatedly, I think it would be kind of hilarious if Five's there complaining about the Commission with an undercurrent of 'I know that place like the back of my hand', whereas in fact everyone there is like, "The new guy? Yeah, I think I met him in the canteen once...kind of mean...")

[cynthiav06]

The Percy Jackson Fandom as a whole has this blind misconception that Annabeth is the smartest but Percy is this super powerful but dumb guy who can't do anything without Annabeth.

There is no evidence that proves Annabeth is the smartest, and let us break down the criteria for this.

1)Mythological knowledge:

Annabeth gets full points cause she has an exceptional amount of knowledge regarding almost all sorts of things.

Do we know anyone who knows myths better than her?

Nico and Jason most certainly have just as good theoretical information on Greek and Roman myths.

So, is this category inclusive to Annabeth? No.

Another point is that Percy is so good at adapting that even though he is unaware, almost always of who his opponents are, Percy ways manages to outwit them or beat them.

2)Quick thinking/Adaptation:

Percy Jackson wins no contest here.

Most newer demigods like Hazel and Piper have also shown the ability of quick thinking well.

Frank's tactical abilities are really underrated, along with Jason's .

3)Specialized weapons

The invisibility cap

(It was unusable through the whole of HoO.)

4)Power specific skill set:

Photographic memory

(It's an ability all Athena children probably have)

Natural aptitude for weaponry

(All children of war gods have this)

Trickery

I didn't say manipulation cause Percy is way better manipulator than Annabeth. It's not even comparable.

5)No. of Strategies made/ Perceptive ability/

Percy:

Tricking Crusty

Unraveling Ares's scheme

Unraveling Luke's betrayal

Figuring out use for Hermes's gift in SoM

Proving to camp of Luke's betrayal by tricking him

Helping in Tricking Atlas to lift the weight of the sky

Figuring out Kronos's plan

Planning the entire strategy of Battle of Manhattan

Tricking Gaea into helping him over Phineas

Tricking Chrysaur

Outwitting Geras

Annabeth:

Made the plan to kill Medusa

Taming Cerberus

Tricks Polyphemus, however, she directly copies Odysseus, so it's not an original tactic

Figuring out Quintus' true identity (along with Percy)

Activates Deadleus's defense mechanisms

Tricking priestesses of Roman deity

Tricking and trapping Arachne

I think based on all this, there's sufficient information that dispels the misebelief that Percy is somehow dumb and Annabeth is the smartest

[quiteliterallyilliterate]

Omg I saw that you were taking requests- how do you feel about me requesting yandere platonic Malice Link but specifically Fae!Hyrule. I imagine it would take place or at least their first encounter would be in a forest. Since it’s Malice!Link there would probably be at least some hostility at first with the reader walking a tight rope of emotions. But it basically evolves from that to subtle manipulation not even realizing it’s gone from 0-100 with hostility turned into possessiveness.

Order up!

Love this request so much oh my gods!! Hope you enjoy it~

Tw: Yandere, mentioned murder

𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝

The forests here were quiet— and dead. It’s the best way to explain it, but to some extent one would inevitably lead you to assume another. The forest was hauntingly absent of the chitter from its animals and the wind was dead from the sky— it naturally leads one to assume that there is no life within the woods. It would’ve turned most away from making their way through the thorn bushels and further into the forest itself. Or, rather, it should’ve turned you away, you should’ve known better. Bad things happen to the people that go into these woods. But alas, the sun was high and the morning was fresh and some old maidens tale about silly fairies wasn’t going to keep you from some wild berry pie.

There was someone new in his woods. Hyrule had really thought people had learned their lessons by now. Usually the glowing red pools of malice and gloom would steer them off course far enough to walk right back into their own village. The sharp-toothed mouths in the trees drive fear into the heart of any hunter and the sensation of the yellowed eyes watching make any animal prey. And yet, the new animal sauntered through his woods, basket looped around their elbow. Their blood was untainted, it rushed through them beat by beat, the sound filling his ears. They drove his senses haywire, leaving behind a trail that he felt compelled to follow.

The bushes were full of freshly ripened berries, their skins a vibrant glossy mauve. Your basket was filled when you turned to see a person, standing wide eyed behind you. He looked pale, cheeks slightly sunken, light brown hair tousled and with a stare so intent, you felt as if you should’ve expected him to have said something. And yet he stared with unblinking hazel-blue eyes, a single fang pushing over his lip.

“Are you alright?” You could’ve smacked yourself right then. Sneaking into a supposedly haunted forest and seeing a man stare at you, and your first words are ‘are you alright’?

“No” He clutches his sides slowly, sharp nails digging into the fabric of his shirt. With no other real idea of what to do, you hold out your basket of berries —which also included some honey to preserve a few of the berries in— to which he looks inside cautiously. You get a closer look at him and see the freckles dotting his cheeks and the fact he looks dangerously thin. Your eyes catch on a violently red looking scar lining his chest, but when you shift to get a closer look, he darts back. You open your mouth to say something, and yet he’s already back within the woods.

He hated himself. Hyrule doesn’t really recall if he did before, but he most certainly does now. As it turned out, the new person prancing through his forest was not a hunter like the hundreds of others since. You did not come with iron chains and steel blades with the hopes of his death bringing honor to your name. No. You were the closest thing to acceptance he’s had in a long while. Maybe you were a fool. Maybe you were meant to s- He wasn’t meant to be saved. He cut the thought short. He was cursed now, baneful hatred blotting out his mind until he’s not sure what’s him and what’s it. He’d slaughtered the many men that came through his lands like they were no more than mice or minish. It was easy. And yet, as your hand shifted slightly while holding a basket, he bolted like he was the mouse —prey hiding from their death. It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t supposed to crave to be liked. He was supposed to be hated— to be feared. It’s what kept him alive for so long. It makes no rhyme nor reason that you’d care for a cursed creature such as himself. Even if the malice didn’t rip at his skin to make scars and it didn’t taint what was once good and kind into gloomy and miserable, He still couldn’t be loved by you. He was fae. His kind was supposed to trick foolish humans and toy away with their lives. He was supposed to bend his words so you’d agree to a promise sealing your fate to some comical story book ending where he gains the upper hand. And yet, he found himself mulling over the curiosities in your eyes, the purse of your lips, the thump of your heart. All things that —down to his very anatomy— he was supposed to hate. And yet he could not bring himself to. Whatever fleshy scraps were left of his heart were reaching through the cracks in his ribs toward you. He hated it. He hated the way his heart raced when hearing your familiar father-light steps. He hated the way he bore a sharp toothy grin upon seeing your return. Those teeth were meant to cut and kill, not simply be means to an expression. He hated that the honey you left him, infused with wild berries, was so sweet. He hated it was an appeasing offering to him. Maybe to some sense you were a hunter. And what an odd hunter you were to aim for his heart in such a manner.

And yet you persisted. Weekly or so you made a good habit to leave some food for the frail man you saw. You’re not sure why exactly you felt inclined to do so. Guilt, perhaps, he looked rather shaken by you shifting slightly, the last you could do was provide him with some good meals. There wasn’t any good food aside from the plants in the forest anyway, and that wouldn’t keep someone as frail as him alive. You saw more of him. It was slow, a hand taking the food a few minutes after you set it down, a cautious look shared before he scurried away. He’d come out of whatever tree or bush he’d been hiding in before claiming whatever prize you got. And eventually he’d even sit with you as he ate. You were slow, always keeping the same distance and dropping off the food at the same bush you met him. You learned the reason why the old wives of your village told you to stay away from the forest for what may be within. There was evil within the marred roots of every sickly tree and the man in front of you, while not really a man, was sick. And yet like any sick thing the world told you to ignore, he proved he was worth saving. He gathered his own little silly silver gifts to give and kept you safe while you foraged through the night. When you ran out of ear space for the little hoops he gave you rings, all in your size and he didn’t question why you came running, clothes in hand with a mob behind you. Instead he protected you, cradling your shaking body.

His eyes, glinting yellow, bore into the crowd which chased his love right to him. It was quite a strain, he’d admit. First whispering to the weavers, spinning stories of how you’d betrayed your better judgment and was lured into the woods. To them you were cursed just as he was, and so, you were exiled to much the same fate. But you needn’t worry, you mustn’t. He knows which herbs and incantations lessen the malice’s bite. You’ll be safe here with him. Maybe not happy for a while, but it’s not like you have another option aside from him. With rings on your finger and matching curse bound in blood, he dragged you to the little den he’d prepared for him and his spouse. Not quite the storybook ending.

[bestworstcase]

any thoughts on team strq that you haven’t already touched on? like their relationships with each other and oz? you talked about how they’ll play a role in volume 10 but im wondering if you have any other insight into their characters

gestures vaguely in gretchen was the spring maiden and all things must die is about how raven feels abt summers betrayal <- related to whatever’s going to happen wrt team strq in v10 and onward because imo "what exactly happened to the last spring maiden?" and "what exactly happened to gretchen rainart?" are central narrative questions on the same level of importance as "what happened to summer rose?" just less obvious because gretchen/spring isn’t connected to any of the main characters the way summer is…

…but gretchen is hazel’s whole motivation, the last spring maiden’s death is what shattered raven, and in v8 the narrative specifically 1. informs us that salem herself personally tracked down hazel and let him kill her over and over again for HOURS before he tired himself out, and then started talking about his sister, and 2. asks why? why did she do that? why did she choose hazel, specifically? (the answer oz suggests is that hazel is just easy to manipulate, which isn’t really an answer at all. how did she even know about gretchen?)

and then like. the spring maiden vanished “over a decade ago” (so within the last 10-20 years). summer disappeared about 12 years prior to the start of v1. gretchen’s death is less concrete but 1. she and hazel were twins, 2. she died between 17-21 at the oldest, and 3. character ages are really hard to gauge but hazel seems to be in between cinder (mid 20s) and team strq (who must be at least 38 if yang was not born while they were attending beacon) which would make hazel… probably in his early thirties. if he’s 33 at the top of v4, then he and gretchen would have been beacon student age… 12-16 years ago.

interesting how summer’s disappearance, the last spring maiden’s disappearance, and gretchen rainart’s mysterious death on a training mission all happened right around the same time, isn’t it. 🤔

shrug. neither raven nor hazel are prominent enough characters for their respective "what happened?" bereavements to be so narratively important… but if gretchen was spring and she died in connection to summer’s last mission? all three big questions turn out to be really the same question. it clicks together suspiciously well.

assorted miscellanea:

i think both the ‘poly STR’ and infidelity angles wrt the tai/raven -> tai/summer drama are both a) pretty boring ways to interpret the known facts and b) working against the text itself. i also (with apologies to the rosebirds) remain unconvinced that summer/raven was ever… a thing, ravens doomed unspoken little crush on summer notwithstanding.

what DOES interest me abt that whole . mess is the turnover. i think its very unlikely that raven and tai dated through most of beacon (because of the whole "learning how to kill huntsmen" thing) and i would bet yang happened at most a year or two after the team left school. depending how long raven tried to stay that’s like, at most a 5-6 year long relationship that ended evidently because raven felt inadequate as a wife/mother. summer being the rebound, ruby being two years younger than yang, and summer leaving when ruby was about three would similarly suggest a relationship of at most 4-5ish years, by the end of which, as we saw, summer seems to have been very well-practiced emotionally masking around tai.

taking that into consideration with… everything we know about yang’s childhood after summer left, the very quick rebound from raven to summer, and tai’s… at best, insensitivity and emotional immaturity in v4 its kinda. well ok. he acts like this NOW, in his late thirties or early forties, and still thinks the really quite mean prank he pulled on his new roommate on day 1 at seventeen is fucking hilarious, he presumably was like this in his twenties too. raven left her relationship with him feeling deeply insecure and inadequate, summer did not feel able to emotionally confide in him before she also left him, and neither woman’s relationship with him lasted more than five years. interesting.

there’s a lot of speculation out there (mostly: summer/qrow and summer/raven secret parentage nonsense) that takes the very fast rebound and (since v9) the emotional disconnect between summer and tai in 9.10 as textual evidence for summer never having been romantically involved with tai at all, which to be blunt is an unserious and countertextual way to interpret the story, but like. gestures at raven. this happened TWICE with the same guy, back to back.

or there’s the somehow even more off the wall take that wah poor tai got strung along in loveless relationships by these cold-hearted women :( which. hello???

anyway i want to know how summer rose feels about him with fourteen years of hindsight because from where i’m sitting, with the facts we have available, it sure does look like tai is perhaps the common denominator. shot in the dark based on his characterization in the present and the way he talks about raven now? i’d guess charming, bit of a hopeless romantic, fairweather partner who deals with conflict by blaming the other party. tbh.

as for. qrow. his relationships with tai and summer are harder to get a read on than raven (with whom he has a fairly straightforward "siblings who both feel rejected by the other and deal with it by being prickly and jabby at each other" situation going on) ’cause like on the one hand qrow clearly admired summer a lot and he and tai have some… unspoken resentment under the surface but on the other i really don’t get the impression that summer and qrow were especially close and while tai seems to have a problem with him, the opposite doesn’t seem to be true.

qrow’s the one who stuck around and kept trying and wanted raven to come back, and his dedication is specifically because he felt like ozpin (not his team) gave him a place to belong. it’s. hm. between his semblance-related social aloofness and the romantic entanglements of the other three i get the impression that qrow tended to be sort of the odd one out but also the one who most wanted them all to be a real team. which i imagine fueled his devotion to ozpin.

what else…

oh the hero/monster complex with regard to summer and raven is SUPER interesting. the silver-eyed warrior and the bandit training to kill huntsmen. i think—this is very tentative speculation bc it’s based mostly on fractals and why i think summer joined salem—but i don’t think summer ever particularly bought into the black and white fairytale way of looking at the world except insofar as she felt the pressure herself. we know qrow stayed because ozpin gave him a place to belong; i think raven stayed because summer treated her like a person instead of a weapon.