#never in my life have i had to fight so hard to post a meta

[monstersinthecosmos]

I'm so glad you're back!! I was so panicked when I saw your blog was gone, because you are truly one of the absolute stars of VC fandom!!

I joined VCblr a few months ago because I have been obsessed with Marius since I was 13, like my Marius obsession literally changed my life in multiple ways and I saw VC was becoming popular again so I wanted to join in! but like one of my first posts got these comments from people I'd never even spoken to before about how I was disrespecting Marius and his fans, and to be a little dramatic the way some of these comments were written, I felt like some of them seemed to actually really hate me personally. It just killed my desire to write fic or meta anymore so I just deleted my tumblr and now I just have an empty one so I can lurk on people. Like I have really limited time and energy for fandom, and I don't want to spend it writing stuff that people just hate seeing and making them feel bad, and then feeling bad myself for liking the stuff I like.

Anyway, I found your blog a little while ago and I am OBSESSED with your creativity and your perspective on like everything, so I'm sorry to be a weird rambling anon but basically I'm just trying to say your blog has made a difference to how I feel about my own freaky way of loving Marius and I just love your openness and acceptance and your ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS A++ MARIUS TAKES and you genuinely have improved my VC experience 100% and I'm glad you haven't been erased from existence.

ugh see this is what I mean dude!! I'm so sorry to hear you had that experience!!!!!! Please talk to me off anon any time, I'd love to see your posts if you wanna come back and share again!

I BRING THIS UP NOW AND THEN so I'm sorry if I'm like a rambling old man telling the same story 400 times, but, now and then I think it bears repeating. But like, when I was 13, a boy at my school bashed my head open on a locker (I had to go to the hospital and get my head stapled shut) and he punched me in the face so hard that I have permanent ligament damage in my jaw. And it was because I was like, a baby bat and I was into numetal and Wicca and I was like the only kid in my small town school who didn't go to church. The day it happened I was wearing a Korn shirt!!! And I had blue hair! And I'd been like very intensely bullied my whole time in middle school, and the adults in my life NEVER protected me. This was RIGHT after Columbine and people were still buying into the propaganda that the killers were bullied goth kids and not fucking neo-nazis, so like, the entire time I was getting violently harassed, every day!, no one protected ME because they thought I would turn out to be the violent one. And yet, I was being put on hit lists. I had a gun pointed at me. A boy one time stole my Wicca book out of my backpack and read it to the class to make fun of me, but *I'm* the one who got in trouble for it because they thought I wanted to cast spells & curses on my classmates. The boy who assaulted me was a KNOWN problem in our school, and I wasn't even the first girl he hurt! MEANWHILE I still got a week of detention for having my head bashed open because they said I started the fight. ((This is up for debate: Yes I actually did throw the first punch LMFAO but he HAD been teasing me incessantly for like ever so like come the fuck on. I deserved that one.))

idk why I was just born like, without any shame or something, I guess it's innate, the rebel streak, I can't explain, but none of this really hurt my feelings? Every time people would make fun of me I was thinking "Yeah but I love Korn and they're so COOL and if you're making fun of me that means you're NOT cool and I don't really value anything you have to say????" And that really sustained me through all of this.

So yatta yatta terfs & conservatives poisoned the fandom well on Tumblr and I always think that it's not so different -- being picked on because you like something weird & offputting or whatever, and being treated like a threat or a danger when you're the one who's vulnerable to harassment and violence. In the digital space on Tumblr it's going to be about like kinky stuff and villainfucking and IRL it was because I was the only goth at my school and I liked horror films. It's the same shit, being harassed because of the fiction you like and the media you consume. And on Tumblr it's people being absolute fucking dickheads and IRL it was me being put in the hospital because a guy put his fucking hands on me, he was that upset that I was into cool shit.

And just. Yknow. It does suck when you want fandom to be a chillout space and you get your feelings hurt. It fucking SUCKS when people show up here specifically to be unkind to others, like I can't think of a less productive use of time. But part of me always thinks "I didn't get my head stapled shut for some grassless little fucking weasel on tunglr dot com to shame me over vampire porn" lmao.

(As an aside if you ever want to look into other examples of people being IRL fucked over over STUFF THEY LIKE, google the West Memphis Three ((innocent metalheads who did 20 years on death row because people thought the weird metal boys MUST be murderers)) or the FBI trying to file Juggalos as a GANG which means anyone who had an ICP phase and got a Hatchetman tattoo as an 18 year old is now in jeopardy of losing their fucking children for affiliating with a gang, okay. And this isn't even to scratch the surface of the way people treat hip hop and way it's mired in racism. Censorship and thought policing are always going to come down to Christofascism and white supremacy, but I digress.)

So blah blah all that to say, I'm not going anywhere and it pisses me the fuck off that people can't keep this bullshit to their private group chats. I have NO idea what anyone gains by acting like this in public.

Like, yeah yeah, fandom is silly, whatever, but hobbies are legit! And we deserve a space to unwind that isn't ruined by capitalism and bigotry and just, some little space to land. ESPECIALLY when, let's be real!, it's very very very common for fandom folks to be neurodivergent. I mean why else would we be so obsessed and blorbo-sick lol. So like, it just feels extra fucking shitty of people to be rude to fans like that, to make you feel shame for the thing that excites you.

Fandoms SELF GENERATE. Someone has to be here posting shit and we have to interact with it and create community. And genuinely if all you can contribute is your horseshit attitude, you can go fuck yourself!!! And I can't begin to tell you how much it breaks my heart when I see this infighting in one fandom, because like, being a Marius fan - BELIEVE ME - when I tell you I've done my time as persona non grata, the antis have fucking come for me LMFAO, I'm on the blocklists, I've been accused of absolutely heinous bullshit for liking a stupid fake vampire character. Like, listen!

I've had my head bashed open on a locker for liking numetal! You're not going to chase me off Tumblr!!!!!!

Anyway this got away from me, idk what I'm trying to say, I'm saying that I'm so sorry you had a bad experience and I hope you come back some time! And I encourage everyone to block & curate your space as needed to make for a happy escape zone. EVEN BLOCKING ME, I KNOW I GET ON PEOPLES NERVES SOMETIMES. And my content isn't for everyone! It's fine! Stay safe please, and I love you, and I have your fucking back dude!!!

AND EVERYONE ELSE JUST, HOLY SHIT BE NICE TO PEOPLE. IT COSTS $0 TO BE FUCKING NICE TO PEOPLE. IF YOU'RE NOT BEING CREATIVE YOU'RE BEING DESTRUCTIVE!

[fushiglow]

Then I guess you're a better person than me, Gojo!!

Because I hate Gege Akutami and I'm *very* angry on your behalf 😃 I’m (sort of) kidding but damn... thoughts on 236 below the cut!!

I held off posting earlier because I felt like going scorched earth on everything jjk. I took some time to clear up some of the translations I wasn't sure about and let the reality sink in, and now I'm ready to talk about this chapter rationally lol.

Firstly, I wanna say that my issue with this chapter isn’t Gojo dying or even the way that he died. I always knew that Gojo dying was likely, but here?? Now???? I've spent all day turning it over in my mind and trying to make it work, but it just won't.

I think Gojo's 'delusion' (daydream? afterlife?) is really beautiful in isolation. Some of the dialogue is really touching and I think it'll benefit from the emotional impact delivered by the full translations. The problem is what follows.

After 235, people were nervous that Gojo hadn't actually won yet. I waited to see what some trusted translators thought of the editor's comment before deciding it was a conclusive win for Gojo, and what I read reassured me that the win would remain intact even if he died at some point over the course of December 24.

In the past couple of chapters, we were told that Sukuna was 'nervous' for the first time in 1000 years and he thought Hollow Purple at close range would be fatal. At the end of 235, Sukuna is looking pretty terrible while Gojo looks fresh as a daisy after fighting in inspiring, inventive ways throughout.

So to find out that, actually, he *hasn't* won and he's been killed by getting cut in half offscreen feels like shock value for the sake of shock value. There have been a few 'shock factor' moments during this fight and they've always bothered me a little, but I could excuse them for the sake of hype building in a weekly manga. However, I never anticipated anything on this level and I'm genuinely so disappointed.

I think this long-awaited fight ending this way cheapens Gojo's character *and* Sukuna's character (and Kashimo's character for that matter!), and ultimately makes the entire thing feel meaningless. 'Meaning' is the thread that has run through Gojo's entire arc, tying him back to Suguru as he sought to build a better world. I always felt certain that Gojo's life and death would have meaning, even if it ended tragically, but I just can't find the meaning in this. I think I understand what Gege was trying to do, but he really didn't sell it for me.

There’s nothing worse than when a story makes you feel stupid for getting invested, and that’s how I’m feeling right now. I find myself wondering, what was the point in bringing Gojo back at all??? Keep him in the box and very little changes in the story, unless it transpires that Gojo 'weakening' Sukuna for the students was his grand purpose after all which... really??

Even worse, I *always* said if it was between Gojo and the students, I wanted Gojo to die. Since 212, getting Megumi back has been my number one priority, but 236 has achieved what I previously thought impossible. I literally don't even want Megumi to come back anymore, because I just can't imagine how he could live with himself after 'killing' Tsumiki and Gojo. It seems kinder for him to die with Sukuna and I *never* thought I would say that.

I'm feeling like a real clown for the meta I posted after 235. I want to take it down because I was so certain that Gojo had won, but I won't because I don't believe my reading of Gojo's character was wrong. I just think my expectations were too high, even though I tried hard to temper them. Even so, telling Megumi about Toji being left to Shoko? Gojo losing and leaving his students to clean up the mess again?? Gojo not even *mentioning* his students in his dying daydream???

It all just feels wrong. Gojo has been turned into nothing more than a plot device at the absolute last second, and maybe it's on me for ever expecting that he would be anything more than that in a series where he isn't the main character, but why bother writing Hidden Inventory then? Why bother getting us invested in this man's story at all?

Right now, I'm feeling like I don't even want to watch tomorrow's episode, but I am interested to see whether Gege can pull this arc off in the long term. I've seen people talking about resurrection theories because of the enlightenment hints and, while I do see the vision, I think Gojo's acceptance of his death and letting go of his regrets can also be read as enlightenment as he escapes the mortal coil once and for all.

Gojo's dying bloody smile shows he's at least happy in his final moments, so my feeling is that Gojo is truly dead and gone. I really want to trust that Gege will make this work, but damn. This is a tragedy.

(Although, if Gojo actually is at peace in death, maybe that's the reason Gege will bring him back. He'll *never* let that man be happy, I swear.)

To end on a positive note, the SatoSugu crumbs were beautiful and teenage Gojo's facial expressions were wonderful. I'm crying again just thinking about the contrast of that last adorable smile with his blank expression on the next page.

I'm dropping all my canonverse WIPs and working exclusively on AU fics for the foreseeable future 😤 I'm gonna give Gojo all the happy endings he deserves!!!

(fuck. poor poor shoko.)

[heliza24]

The Radical Act of Quitting (and Wilhelm)

This is a little more personal than my Young Royals metas normally are. It’s really one-half personal essay, one-half show analysis.  It’s something of a spiritual successor to my post about radical acceptance and Simon’s arc in season 2. And it’s also about the reasons why I want Wilhelm to renounce the crown by the end of season 3. (I am stating that early, because I know many people disagree. Feel free to engage but please do so with kindness; a lot of this is quite vulnerable for me.)

I’m disabled. Specifically, I have a chronic condition that began in my early twenties, and slowly got worse and worse until I was finally diagnosed at 28. I’m 31 now, and I’ve had to grieve the person I once was many times over. I used to be a dancer, I used to be an adventurous eater, I used to love to travel. My chronic pain and restrictive medical diet have taken those things away from me, piece by piece. But the thing I mainly want to talk about right now is quitting my job. At the time of my diagnosis, I had worked at my job full time for three years. For a few years after my diagnosis, I tried to remain at my job part-time, because I loved it. I worked in the music industry, and I had the best team of coworkers. I had a great work/life balance, I was never stressed about work. I looked forward to each day in the office. When I went to events and had to introduce myself during an ice-breaker, I would usually include a fact about my job. I found a lot of my identity there. All of my work directly supported musicians, which was something I was very proud of.

So I tried very, very hard to hang on to my job. My company gave out these ridiculously heavy plaques for employees who had been at the company for 5 years, and I was determined to get one. But it was really hard. I could no longer type sitting up for more than a few minutes, so I did every day from my lap desk in bed. (This is still where I write all of my fic and meta!) I struggled to talk to customers on the phone while I was in pain. The office was closed because of the pandemic, but I would have had to work from home regardless because I couldn’t handle the commute.  Every day was a slog. And my pain and fatigue weren’t getting better. In fact they were continuing to get worse as time went on. Finally, my five-year work anniversary arrived. I made it, but I felt like a runner barely stumbling over the finish line. It was the end of 2021. I talked with my friends and my therapist and my disability benefits lawyer. “I don’t think I can keep working,” I would say. And then I would cry, because the thought of letting go of this last part of my identity, when my illness had already taken so much, was so horrible.

After several months of deliberating and grieving, I quit.  My boss begged me to reconsider (God bless him, honestly). Was there anything he could do to better accommodate my needs? Could I work a different schedule to let me sleep more? Could I work freelance on specific projects they really needed me on? I wanted to say yes so badly. But I knew. The longer I held on, the more I fought, the worse my health would become. And the worse my health would become, the more I would struggle with work. The joy I had felt during my first three years in that office had already drained away. I was fighting just to get through each day, and I didn’t want to fight anymore.

I recognize that having the resources and disability benefits to even consider quitting is a huge privilege. There are a lot of disabled and chronically ill folks who struggle through work at great detriment to their health because they can’t afford not to keep working.  So I recognize how lucky I was to be able to quit. I am so grateful for that option, even as I mourn all the things I have lost.

In my meta about Simon, I talked about radical acceptance and how it has been my guiding light as a disabled person. Embracing radical acceptance means that I have done my best to accept what I can and cannot do, and what I can and cannot control, without judgment. I accepted that I needed to walk away from my job. But how was I supposed to define myself without it?

Capitalism defines most peoples’ self-identity, whether they realize it or not. We identify with our jobs, or with the “grind” culture, or with the moral goodness associated with working hard. But here I was, without a job. And I had my whole adult life ahead of me. I had to find a way to make a new identity outside of work.

Around this time, I started to gravitate towards stories where characters are faced with similar decisions, even if I didn’t realize it yet. And let me tell you, there aren’t many of them.

@bluedalahorse and I talk about this a lot. In our ultra-franchised world, the point of stories, even those that are supposedly about rebellions, is often to return characters to the status quo, so that the next movie/comic/episode can pick back up where the last one left off. And when there is a significant change in the status quo, it is usually because the characters worked, and pushed, and struggled to achieve that change. It’s very rare to see a story about someone who walked away from something that was harming them. It’s rarer still to find something that deals with the aftermath, as characters work to re-establish themselves.

I’ve found a lot of comfort in true stories of people leaving cults and high demand religions, and of queer people forced to leave their conservative families behind. In all of these cases, people are consciously abandoning a predominant belief system that is harming them, and have to start over as they craft their new sense of identity. (I am also queer, which adds an additional level of connection). Often people in these situations come to rely on their found family, a thing I have also found to be true in my own life.

I quit my job in between seasons 1 and 2 of Young Royals, and I don’t think I realized how many themes connected my experience to Wilhelm’s until I was watching season 2. Wilhelm is the protagonist of Young Royals, and his central dramatic question has always been: will he fulfill his duty as a royal? Or will he quit, and discover who he is beyond the system he was raised in? Simon is a huge part of this decision, obviously, but the question has never been strictly about Simon.

While I have no personal experience with the monarchy, I do know what it’s like to consider walking away from a role that you assumed you would fill for the rest of your life. I know what it’s like to think about quitting your job.

There’s so much pressure on Wilhelm to assume the role of perfect Crown Prince. He’s told constantly—by Kristina, by Jan-Olof, by the court-- that he can’t let his family or his country down by deviating from this role in any way.

This is a pretty common experience for people who are trying to quit something. They are told that they will let down those around them if they leave. People who are leaving high demand religions are told that they will not be able to enter heaven.  Queer people in conservative families are told they can’t come out because “it would break [elderly relative]’s heart and kill them.” When I quit my job, I thought a lot about how I’d be letting down my coworkers and everyone who knew me as a hyper-competent career-driven person.(This included some of my doctors by the way, who expressed their disappointment in my failure to adhere to their idea of a “worthy” disabled person, i.e. someone who soldiered through the pain and continued to work. Some withdrew care because of this and honestly I will never forgive them). And maybe I was letting people down, and maybe ex-Mormons really will spend the afterlife in outer darkness, and maybe all the grandmas of queer people will be so upset that they kick the bucket when their grandkids come out. But ultimately, if your happiness or safety or well being depends on leaving, it doesn’t really matter. You have to do it anyway.  You have to abandon the things that you can no longer carry. You have to discover who you are on the other side of religion, of the closet, of capitalism.

I think about this every time people in the fandom talk about how Wilhelm leaving the line of succession will create a constitutional crisis, or impact all of Sweden negatively. I am personally pretty anti-monarchist, but I honestly can’t even tell you if I think that Wilhelm removing himself from the line of succession would bring about the end of the Swedish monarchy or not. Honestly, I don’t really care.  I care about Wilhelm. I want him to seek happiness, to search for the future that must live on the other side of this oppressive system he finds himself in. A constitutional crisis? That’s Kristina’s problem, that’s Jan-Olof’s problem, that’s the government’s problem. Radical acceptance means focusing on the things you can control, and Wilhelm can only control his own happiness.

When this issue gets debated, I often see people argue that Wilhelm is too young to make the decision to give up the throne. But the reality is that we ask teenagers to make decisions about their futures all the time. @bluedalahorse wrote a great piece of meta about that here. I love what she said so much I’m going to quote it directly:

Nonetheless, we ask teenagers of Sara and Wilhelm’s ages to think about decisions that affect their future all the time. We ask them to consider what career they’ll pursue or what university to attend. Teenagers who grow up in various denominations of Christianity consider whether they’re going to go through with Confirmation or sometimes Baptism. Other religions (ones where I can’t speak from as much personal experience) have various other rites of passage around this age, and various cultures have coming of age rituals. For some teens, they do these things willingly and with their whole heart, whereas for others, they do it to please their parents or families or for the social norms of it all.

And if Wilhelm is too young to decide to give up the throne, how can he be old enough to decide to keep it? Surely the decision to take on the governance of a country, even in a symbolic way, requires as much, if not more, maturity than the decision to pursue a less high-powered career elsewhere.

When people in the fandom claim that Wilhelm is too young to make this decision, I hear Kristina telling Wilhelm to wait until he’s 18 to come out, because only then will he be responsible enough to deal with the consequences. That’s a delaying tactic, and nothing more. People who don’t want you to leave will ask you to delay your decision over and over again, because they think that if they can kick the can down the road just a little farther, they’ll never have to lose you.

I also see people argue that Wilhelm isn’t qualified to make a decision because he doesn’t know enough about the “real world” to know what he is choosing. To be honest I don’t think most teenagers know much about the “real world”. I definitely didn’t. But we ask them to make decisions that will affect their futures anyway. And here’s another way to look at this: Wilhelm has plenty of places he can look to for examples of how “ordinary” people live. He can find out what it’s like to be from a noble but non-royal family from the students at Hillerska. He can talk to Simon and Linda about what their lives are like. He can read the millions of books, or watch the thousands of movies and TV shows that feature non-royal protagonists and were created by non-royal artists. But only Wilhelm knows what it is like to be Crown Prince. No one else has had that experience. So I would argue that actually, Wilhelm is the only one qualified to make this call.

Ultimately, the agency and mental capacity of people who are quitting is often doubted, usually by the people who have the most to gain by keeping them in place.

So many people have so much invested in maintaining the status quo. And as soon as you invest in a system, someone daring to leave puts your world view into question. Why are you dealing with so many oppressive rules if someone else can just leave? We see this a lot with high demand religions and cults; if someone threatens to break free, the members often join ranks and work together to pressure them to stay. What has your sacrifice as a woman in a patriarchal religion meant, for example, if another woman can decide to simply walk away? Does Kristina’s grim life of duty and sacrifice matter, if Wilhelm can just opt out and seek happiness instead?��

Then of course, there are all the benefits that an oppressive system confers on its most privileged members. Those benefits are in danger of disappearing if enough people quit, so high ranking people will work to keep others in line.  Think about all the people who benefit from the monarchy: all the staff who work for the royal family, all the nobles who get their reputation by proximity to the monarch, and everyone in Sweden who in general benefits from the image that a long-standing institution of white, straight, conservative power projects.

And those aren’t people Wilhelm needs to be responsible for (or should be concerned with placating, to be honest). If the monarchy fails because Wilhelm leaves, it’s because there’s always been a fault in the system. Those relying on this outdated system have signed their own fate.

No one knows fully what life will be like after they quit. That’s the radical acceptance part of quitting. You have to make a blind leap, and discover a whole new world once you land. Wilhelm is no more sheltered than anyone before they take this leap. Everyone who quits—a religion, a cult, a job—has to go through this process of rediscovery.  You have to learn by doing. People do that successfully all the time, and I believe that Wilhelm can too.

When I was talking about this meta with @bluedalahorse, we talked a lot about Plato’s allegory of the cave. That story goes something like this:

Several prisoners have been kept inside a cave their entire life. They are chained to the spot, and cannot move. They are facing the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a fire, and in between them and the fire, their captors walk back and forth, casting shadows on the wall. Because the prisoners have been kept in the cave their entire life and have only ever seen shadows, they think the shadows are real. They think the only thing that exists in the world is shadows. Until one day, one of the prisoners is set free. He goes outside for the first time, where he is blinded by the sun and overwhelmed by stimulus. But he discovers the real world. He now knows that the shadows he was used to are pale imitations of the real things. He’s so excited that he goes back to tell his fellow prisoners what he has learned. But the prisoners get angry at him for challenging their world view. They don’t believe him, no matter what he says.

There are a lot of ways you can interpret this story. Some people think that Plato is talking about the role of philosophers in society. Some people use it to explain a philosophical concept he writes about elsewhere called “forms”. But I think one thing is clear. Plato didn’t write the allegory of the cave (and it didn’t stick around in human imagination for thousands of years) because he thought you should stay in the cave. Leaving the cave is hard. You will be met with resistance. But discovering the real world, when you were only seeing shadows before, is worth it.

I want Wilhelm to leave to be happy, to see the real world instead of shadows. But I also believe it’s what the story demands. It’s the only answer that makes asking the dramatic question—should Wilhelm conform or rebel?—worthwhile to me.

To be king, but to be the first gay king, would be such an unsatisfactory ending for me. It reminds me of how hard I tried to keep my job—by working from bed, by reducing my hours. My boss could do the best he could to be accommodating, but ultimately working was harming me. You can’t adapt the monarchy enough to make it a non-damaging space for Wilhelm, because there will always be people pressuring him to conform to its straight, stoic ideals. Those ideals have been around for hundreds of years, and to put all of the burden of reforming them on Wilhelm is unfair and unrealistic. If he does stay, I see him struggling to change a system that is not designed for him. Even if he does make small victories for representation or inclusion in that context, it will come at an enormous emotional cost. I just don’t think it’s worth it. Not when there’s a whole world where Wilhelm could be doing good, important work– in whatever arena he chooses– that won’t also come along with inherent emotional trauma. 

Believe me, there’s a whole world to be discovered after you walk away from something that’s damaging you. You grieve, yes, but you also grow. Since quitting I’ve been able to love my friends harder, to treat myself better, to give back to the disabled community.  I think if you talk to most people who have committed a similar act of radical quitting they’ll say the same thing.  I want this future for Wilhelm, but I also want this kind of story to exist for all of us. I want there to be a story that represents those of us who have had to make these kinds of decisions. I want there to be a story that can encourage people who are currently wrestling with their desire to leave and the pressure to stay. And I want there to be a story that shows the hope, the bravery, and the self-belief that is required to walk away and seek a brighter future.

[distort-opia]

I always wonder how does joker manage to hold up in a fight with batman, hes usually depicted as a lanky guy, so how does he hold up going against the super buff tall man that bruce is?

That's an excellent question, and one comics have never been very keen on answering. Joker's fighting prowess tends to be what the plot needs it to be, but overall he's indeed been shown as capable of holding his own against Batman... when he actually puts his mind to it. Most of the time he enjoys getting the crap beaten out of him, so there's plenty of instances where Joker doesn't look like a challenging opponent. However, Joker's fought more people than just Batman, and he's been shown to be a good fighter.

With Joker's backstory and past being a mystery for so long, it's tough to say how exactly he came to be a skilled fighter. Now that the The Killing Joke backstory is canon (as per Flashpoint Beyond), one wonders how the broke comedian ended up being able to eventually last against Batman in a fight. My theory on this is rooted in my personal timeline of Joker's past, which is an amalgamation of multiple comics that have dealt with his origin stories. People tend to think "well, if TKJ is canon, then Zero Year or Streets of Gotham can't be true", but I believe all these stories do ultimately fit together. I've got a bigger meta post on the subject of Joker's past here, but the bottom line is-- there's canon support for Joker having lived on the streets and (unwillingly, and then possibly willingly) being part of the mob. After being placed in the foster care system, it's likely he continued being active in gangs and engaged in other criminal activities like robberies.

So, I think Joker learned how to fight in his youth out of necessity. After running away from home, he grew up in a very hostile environment. It wasn't something nearly as structured as Bruce's years of traveling and training with various masters; most likely, Joker had to learn how to fight in order to survive and protect himself. Although it's possible he did have some kind of training, if he grew up in such close proximity to gangs. Maybe that's how he got so good with knives.

It thus makes sense that Joker had a decent fighting background to begin with, and as the years went by he got better and better. I haven't gotten around to making a second part to the meta about Joker's past (yet), but what follows is that, after being placed in foster care, Joker eventually tried to have a normal life. He finished highschool, he went to university and graduated, then got a job at ACE Chemicals. He married Jeannie... and then everything went to shit again. To be honest, I like this because it makes a lot of narrative sense, and tragically so. Unlike Bruce, Joker never had a normal life, or a normal family. He started out as the opposite to Batman, once again-- in poverty, with an abusive and hateful family that he either killed or ran away from. So eventually he tried to have a family of his own. He tried to be happy and stay away from crime, but following his dreams was impossible without money and resources, so he went back to it... and then Jeannie and his unborn child died. No wonder he broke. And after falling into the acid vat and becoming Joker, he also gained what's undoubtedly a very high pain tolerance, and some kind of metahuman durability (because he's survived so many lethal situations it's ridiculous, at this point).

So! If you combine masochism, high pain tolerance, a street fighting background and a complete lack of fear, you get Joker's hand-to-hand combat style. He's got this advantage over his opponents as well; he doesn't get scared, and pain doesn't stop him the way it would most people. He's thus very unpredictable.

It has to be said though, that Joker doesn't like getting his own hands dirty. He has goons, people that do the hard work for him, sidekicks. He uses laughing gas, acid sprays, hand buzzers, he uses guns and other long-distance weaponry a lot. As a character, Joker was never meant to be a match for Batman's bulk and fighting prowess-- the point is exactly that he isn't, and yet still manages to win. At his core, Joker is more of a mastermind, a brilliant manipulator with heaps of charisma; hand-to-hand combat is rarely his method of choice.

[snickerdoodlles]

ellebeesknees replied to your post "choose violence ask game except its just me complaining about fic tropes..."

☕☕☕.

ooooh three bitchy opinions 👀 okay so, not really a trope but:

authors who are snide towards canon

this one is kinda hard for me to describe, but you know those fics that have a line that Makes A Statement about something in canon and the tone of it is just bitchy? or just any sort of vibe where the author clearly thinks they're Much Better than the actual show writer? sighs.

we've all had that phase in fandom where we hate read/watch something and then bitch about it online but my god am i glad to be over that bullshit. if you don't like it here, you don't have to be here! there's nothing making you stay! I've noticed the trend that if the author's a snide cunt about canon, they're inevitably going to be a snide cunt about some canon thing i do like, and i don't need that in my life. you can disagree with/change canon choices in a way that doesn't automatically put down anyone who does like what canon did, and you can't do that if you're going to be smug and superior about what you do or what you don't like. canon is a sandbox and if you're not here to have fun, please go to a different sandbox where you will have fun, it'll be much nicer for everyone.

spite fic

similarly: i have negative patience for spite fic. what's the fucking point of spite fic? if you only participate in spaces you don't like, you're never going to find the stuff you like or convince anyone in those spaces to change their minds, you're just going to piss everyone off as you trample on their toes. i'm a little steamed thinking about this because of the debacle of people trying to start fights in tags, but overall its just so childish and exhausting. again: why are you here if you aren't having fun!!

like i said above, there's a way to...hmm, dance? with stuff you don't like that still comes from a place of love. like, personally! i do not like Macau & Chay friendship! which is a different post, but fandom largely likes to smash the two of them together for some reason and i Don't Get It. so i avoid that tag, but i wrote interior design with the sort of playfully-antagonistic dynamic i would love to see more of between them. but like, my point was "hey, has anyone considered how funny this would be" and never at any point "the other way people write them is WRONG." because it isn't wrong, it's just not my cup of tea. i'm rambling, but tl;dr- anything tagged with "spite fic" or is spite fic in vibes has me rolling my eyes and scrolling by, no thanks.

fix-it fic

okay so like. i don't automatically click out of anything with this tag, but i'm very leery towards it. my joy in fandom is exploring all the "what-ifs" of canon and canon-divergence is such a fun playground, but i've gotten...really, really frustrated with the fix-it fic tag over the past few years. a lot of fix-its revolve around "what if x choice never happened" scenarios and very often the answer to that is "this significantly more boring y result happened instead" and meh. generally, i find it more interesting to work with things that happened in canon than to just banish them, so anything starting with the premise of just erasing something is a hard sell for me.

for example! after kinnporsche ep4 dropped and the spurt of ~fix-it~ fic that dropped so that either kp didnt fuck or it was fully consensual or whatever. it just...missed the entire point of why it was narratively important, or stripped Porsche of the agency he did have during that scene, or missed the point of how Kinn can't ignore the power imbalance between them. i'm not going to ramble more on the meta about it here, but it felt like a bunch of people clutching their pearls and more anxious about making some fictional guys ~unproblematic~ instead of digging into the story the writers were trying to tell. plus, KinnPorsche as a ship minus the power imbalance or the tension of their circumstances is a much more boring story to me, so my inclination is to just scroll by anything wanting to avoid it.

another example of fix-it fic i hated was after good omens s2 came out, a bunch of people rushed to write ~fix-it fic~ where Aziraphale didn't go to heaven or it turned out ~he was drugged all along~ or anything that didn't have Aziraphale and Crowley splitting at the end. even a lot of the literal story metas dropping at the time were theories on how Aziraphale wasn't actually leaving Crowley or he was literally being brainwashed/drugged into it somehow, and it was just like. hmm. the s2 end was the natural build-up of the story (all???? of s2 was them miscommunicating or trying to find their new purposes in the world???) (also: in all trilogies, the 2nd story ends on a cliffhanger, that's How You Write Trilogies) and like. blah, idk, i get how the natural instinct is to want some comfort food after the bombshell, but the good omens tag (on AO3 and even tumblr in many ways) was impossible for me post s2 because i was really excited about their divorce and all the ways to dig into that split, but everywhere i turned was about turning the wheel back to erase it. bleh.

anyways, overall, nothing wrong with fix-it fic, but it's usually easier to just assume anything with that tag is not a story i'm interested in reading.

...reading back and the tl;dr of this post is that i find it more fulfilling to play in a sandbox i like and take all canon choices in good faith to work with lol

[ send a ☕, get a bitchy* fic opinion ]

*personal opinion, I'm not going to be mean

[outofangband]

Some thoughts on Túrin and Aerin

I wanted to rewrite this post to better explain my points and to offer some more thoughts about the context in the story and for the characters! I originally made this post in June

I’m usually very much sympathetic to Túrin and willing to defend him but his behavior in Dor-lómin is so reckless and almost callous. I know his recent encounter with Glaurung has heavily influenced this, he was shown images of Morwen and Niënor being tortured, that’s obviously going to have a detrimental effect on his decision making and makes him more desperate to get information as soon as possible. But its such an awful scene all around

(CW: mentions of canon abuse)

even before killing Brodda, the ways he tries to get information about Morwen are so uncaring of Aerin’s situation; he marches up in front of her captor and abuser and announces everything that would get her hurt again.

Sador has just told him that Aerin aided Morwen in secret when she could and that Brodda beat her for it. He says she would suffer if she was caught talking to him.

And his response is to go and bring this up in front of Brodda with Aerin sitting there.

Aerin is clearly terrified. "Come," said Brodda, scowling, but Aerin turned pale, ...said Aerin in great fear for Brodda watched her narrowly

I talked about this here and about how palpable her fear is but it’s such an infuriating and heartbreaking scene even BEFORE everything flies off the rails.

At this point Túrin has already endangered her life and there is no way out of it for her.

If he leaves, Aerin will be beaten again or worse. We know from what does happen that if he tries to stop Brodda or attacks him then the Hadorians will face retaliatory violence. Aerin says that this night will be avenged “on all that were here.” As soon as Túrin declared himself publicly like this, there was no way through this plan that would end well for Aerin or for the others and she had tried so hard and suffered so much so her people could have the barest peace.

Even if Aerin had denied everything there, Brodda still would have punished her for it. (I actually talked a bit about my speculation about his thoughts here)

And then he has the nerve to call her faint hearted, because she warns him of the damage he’s caused and because she calls him rash. Túrin has never spent extensive time as a prisoner in the way that she has. He hasn’t experienced this kind of trauma.

He says she was made for a kinder world but she has been fighting and suffering for that world and he is part of the world that has wronged her

It’s also obviously worth noting that Túrin’s treatment of Larnach’s daughter is similarly callous. While he kills her attacker, he also tells her that her father should be more careful with her, some of the most explicit victim blaming in the book. Túrin is very good at killing men who mistreat women but the actual women don’t factor into his actions, at least not as much as they should.

With Aerin it’s so frustrating because she’s been a captive about as long as Húrin has and like Húrin, she has continued to defy her captors at great risk and harm to herself. Túrin has no issue viewing his father's continued defiance in captivity with respect and admiration.

Though I also think it’s worth noting that in neither The Children of Húrin or The Book of Lost Tales is Túrin’s killing of Brodda on Aerin’s behalf

I say this because while Túrin’s actions would still have been reckless and selfish if that had been his motive (not to mention the meta textual elements), I would have had more sympathy for him here. Watching a loved one being abused is in my opinion one of the most anger inducing and helpless feelings there is and it can easily lead someone to reckless behavior that might not be in the victim’s best interest.

But it’s not even that. Túrin certainly knows that Aerin is being abused but apart from saying “(I would beg your pardon) if (Brodda) had done you anything but harm” he does not directly acknowledge this. I don’t think he doesn’t care but he’s completely caught up in his own trauma and views.

Aerin says to him "you cannot mend what you have done". And that just about sums it up

[probablygayattorneys]

So, according to my text log, today marks my third Ace Attorney-versary (well, of rediscovering it, unfortunately we'll never know exactly when I originally got into it). Hard to believe that in just three years, I've played 22 puzzle games (and am in the middle of two more), made friends, got back into sharing my writing and have posted 31 fanfics for a total of 326818 words publicly (and that's not even counting my trio of secret fics that I published anonymously, or the ones I'm still working on), made a semi-successful blog dedicated to puzzle games of the early aughts (I'm sitting at about 400 followers, which is not nothing!), moved (twice!), watched my nuclear family start to fall apart (my mom’s receipt for the divorce lawyer’s retainer is on the fridge, being held up by a magnet of the attorney’s badge), even gotten a tattoo (and am in the processing of working with someone to design a second one), and got semi-engaged and my temporary engagement ring (unfortunately my man has the AUDACITY to live on the other side of the country so I have a different ring than the one he'll actually propose with to signify that I am officially off the market) is even based on Wrightworth colors.

I'm not going to lie and pretend all of the games were incredible feats of the genre (they weren't) or that I've had the best time (in fact, the lowest lows of my mental health have been in the past three years), or that everyone I've met has been so wonderful and welcoming (you asshole anons and certain characters know who you are) but considering that I didn't plan any of this, I basically just stumbled into owning a switch and then @vaptainhammer, knowing that I used to love Ace Attorney, bought me the switch port of the originally trilogy and shoved me down the rabbit hole in the process, I'm grateful I had the experience. Here's to Phoenix, to the Laytons, to Ashley and Kyle, and to Vivian, Abby, Zieg, Ash, everyone else that Sissel dragged in, and of course, my love, my first and my last, my alpha and my omega, my number one puzzle assistant, my personal google, the one who started all of this is the first place and has stood by my side through all the ups and downs that life has thrown at me over the past three years, Blayne. I love you so much, forever, and I can't wait until we're able to bring the government into our relationship and I can start the rest of my life as your hersband, Mx. Vaptainhammer.

Can't promise I'll be helming this blog for another three years, but thank you to everyone who had climbed aboard at any point, and welcome to everyone who will, I hope you've enjoyed the thoughtless shitposts and the thoughtful and deeply cared about edits and meta posts, and are ready for more because I've got a full queue that grows every day. I may not go down with this ship but for everything else, I've had the time of my life fighting (the Defiant) dragons with you.

[angstics]

Thought about a line that i am certain every single grantaire x enjolras fic writer has thought of. And yet i will include it. Because it bangs. It even connects back to valjean’s “i am a man, no worse than any man” and javert’s YOU WILL STILL ANSWER TO JAVERT (THE LAW, GOD!!!!). the self-symbolism vs self-humanizing, all that buttery literal and meta goodness 🤌🤌🤌

heres what ive been thinking of. i want to write a post-canon, canon divergence fic (mostly based on the musical because ive only read a little of the book so far) with NO historical accuracy, i just want to put these two guys in a situation. ok so the au is, what if enjolras and grantaire are the only ones to survive the barricade massacre and theyre sentenced several years hard labor for treason. this is almost nonexistent on ao3 but maybe it’s somewhere on livejournal or wattpad or ff.net or something. so far it’s my personal little idea. in my head, it is so disrespectful of the victims of labor camps and prisons. im interested in the aesthetics of physical labor, the romanticization of the male form… the sweat and tire and exertion and torture… the total breakdown of a self when being used as a machine. putting such Stark Symbols in this setting is so FASCINATING to me. it forces e and g out of their heads into their bodies — that loss of autonomy itself a violation. i want to see them fight to be human beings rather than fighting to be symbols. i feel the barricade is marked by a freedom that allows them to be larger than life… they dont have that freedom here. their fight now is to be men, rather than machines. i want to know how that feels. I want to know how it feels to once be a symbol, i want to know what identity they have without it. I want to know how they chase after these past identities. And i want to know who they are when isolated together, the only people who know who the other is because they are the only people who knew the before. I have a faint idea who enjolras is now, but i have no clue who grantaire is. i wonder if they each get a taste of the other’s medicine — enjolras given up, grantaire enflamed. or if surviving fuelled their previous stances. if being beaten by the system firsthand changes things… is there hope, is there a future?

the romantic relationship kinda goes back to the romanticization of pain lol. i dont know if either of these men ever allowed themselves to be happy. living day by day as people, trying to survive, i think creates an intense need for release. i think the environment also necessitates allyship and company more than ever. i havent thought about this part much, at least compared to the thematic meaning and possibilities. BUT i did think about a hyperdramatic romantic moment this morning while thinking about The Themes. this is what i was talking about with every fic probably having something like this (wouldnt know, havent read any). the moment goes something like:

Enjolras had been picked muscle by muscle, tendon to joint. He had never felt such weariness. “A man on his own can’t be a revolution.”

Grantaire knew that was not true. You were mine.

the people too must rise. in her kiss i taste the revolution. 🙌

[munsons-maiden]

I'm sorry if you've talked about this before, but I truly love how honest and real your views on Eddie are, that I feel like you're the right person for me to ask this. I'll just go out and say that I haven't had the best experience with most men in my life (parental figures mainly) and that sometimes blocks me in seeing that others guys are not like that. Anyway so I wanted to ask, you wouldn't say Eddie has that "toxic masculinity" right? Like, with everything we know about him, he's such a gentleman and such a sweetheart that I really believe he'd be like that, say, as a lover too, even in the long run, even after time has passed and he's been with someone for a while, right? I really wanna believe he'd be the type of guy that's not afraid to be soft and show affection and be emotionally available, and always respectful too. 🥺

Thank you, dear, that's very sweet of you🖤

The short answer is: no, Eddie Munson doesn't have a single streak of toxic masculinity in him.

Now prepare for the long answer😂 To make sure I'm not getting blinded by my love for him, I always make sure to view him and his actions from the perspective of an anti as well when going into meta, and the thing is that that's basically impossible because while he has flaws like every other complex, well-written character, there are no flaws flaws. Eddie is a fictional character written and acted to be an absolute sweetheart. So, there's not a single scene that could be interpreted in a toxic masculine way and the entirety of Eddie's screen-time screams that he embodies the very opposite of toxic masculinity so I'll recount a few scenes where that gets very obvious:

The woods scene with Chrissy. Joe as well as the Duffers confirmed that Eddie had a crush on Chrissy and romantic interest in her - yet he never tried to hit on her. He flirted a little, invited her to see his band (in an absolutely non-creepy way that didn't put her in a position to reply, which was very thoughtful and sweet of him because he just left it to her to show up or not), but he was very careful not to cross any boundaries (just like before in the cafeteria with the girl he jump-scared and the cheerleaders he let pass) and to genuinely cheer her up.

The scene when he meets Erica. I'm working on an actual meta post on this one so in short for now: he never tests Erica because she's a girl and her gender is never a reason for his doubts of her being fit for the game, only her age. He's worried an eleven-years-old wouldn't take the game he worked hard and for a whole semester to make happen, the finale of his grand campaign, serious. But he puts her to the test to see if she's being serious, and she proves that she is. A eleven-years-old girl absolutely roasts his ass in front of all his friends and he LOVES her for it, and is genuinely happy to allow her not only to be a sub but make her part of Hellfire ("welcome to Hellfire"). No man with a single ounce of toxic masculinity would react that way.

When Robin takes away Eddie's cigarettes, he reacts with mild annoyance and nothing else, briefly flinching and looking a little confused but that's it. He doesn't even make a snide remark at her, je just lets it happen like a scolded puppy. And he has absolutely no problem with Nancy being in charge (quite the opposite, he's very happy to have kickass Nancy take charge).

And the final scene: he humbles himself in front of Steve, genuinely and unpromptedly admits his own shortcomings and jealousy, and genuinely tells Steve to fight for true love and get Nancy back.

He is always respectful, even with the girl he jump-scares (doesn't single her out, doesn't comment on her but just finishes his sentence with a loud voice thus not making it personal, keeping his distance, making himself smaller and keeping his hands behind his back and blinking and smiling to indicate he has no ill intent).

And the way Eddie opens up to Steve, admitting flaws he is ashamed of and being very self-aware with the goal of doing better (even at the beginning where he admits that having been held back was his own fault, "I was being full of shit") and advising him to fight for love, as well as him noticing straight away that Chrissy is bothered by something (I mean, he has no way to know about her abuse, her ed or Vecna, but he notices something is wrong) makes it obvious Eddie would be a very loving, emotionally open and available partner and/or friend. And about him showing affection? Look at how he shows his affection for Dustin. It's a familial/platonic love, but by that we can infer that it would be the exact same way with a romantic partner because that's who Eddie is.

With those canon facts settled, there is no way Eddie would/could ever act in any toxic way.

Eddie Munson is the polar opposite of toxic masculinity.

[bambamramfan]

Sim-Modernism

I've been thinking about the endless war between Modernism and Post-Modernism. Not even a debate, since so much of the discussion is about even defining the borders and who is on what side. To restate things:

Modernism is the James Scott sense of a belief that we can figure out the rules and principles - behind the universe, life sciences, sociology, morality and ethics - and our leaders can apply them to create an ordered and just society. The Enlightenment was big on Modernism, and really Marxism was its apex.

Post-Modernism is the post-WW1 understanding that none of these rules ever consistently work and the world is nigh-impossible to understand, and any rules we *think* we have about the world are really just stories we tell ourselves, to justify our position in society or to advance one political side over another. It's very meta, often in the Bulverist sense. This is what current Marxists actually sound like.

(Pre-Modernism just being the regular traditionalist "I do this because my ancestors' ancestors were doing this hundreds of years ago. And because God, speaking through His divinely chosen ruler, tells me to or else He will strike me dead.")

A key thing about both of these philosophical schools is that they can't really be disproven. If a modernist regime fails, obviously they just had bad laws instead of good laws, or the people didn't try hard enough to stick to these principles. And post-modernism never fails, it's failure is just a story *you* tell to justify your opposition to it.

(Really you should think of both of these as tools to analyze situations with, sometimes even using both tools on the same situation and asking yourself which is more useful in this moment. But anyway.)

I'm not going to resolve the war between these things today, but just talk about another *modernism I see that is neither of these.

***

Let's talk about World of Warcraft.

It's the extremely big MMO that has had millions of players for well over a decade now. In the beginning, we knew nothing about the undercarriage of how the game worked (what items dropped from what, how good they were, etc.) Over time we figured out some principles, and we got large forums called "Elitist Jerks" where people argued over the best classes, the best ability rotations, the best gear, etc etc. They referenced guides and came up with general theories and had vibrant conversations. This is clear modernism.

Then almost all the conversations died, and people talk very little on the forums last I checked, compared to years at its prime.

What happened? Politics and post-modernism?

No, what happened was Big Data.

Eventually someone built a downloadable tool called simcraft. It knew every spell, boss, item, and talent in the game. You could just input all your gear, the skills you used, the order you used them in rotation, the general style of fight and... hit a button and it would tell you how much damage per second (DPS) you would do with perfect execution.

This is in some ways a cludge. Few of us have perfect execution, after all. And this doesn't cover utility, tanking, and healing and so those needed other sims with more assumptions. And there were a number of errors anyone could find with its assumptions. But it at least gave a concrete answer to argue over.

Now anytime anyone had a question of "is this talent underrated, because combined with this weapon, on this fight you could..." and the only answer would be "sim it." If sims reliably showed your new idea was better, the top raiders would drift to that, and then the way they did things would trickle down to everyone else. No one really had to argue about which class was the best - there were numbers for it.

The "skill" of the world of warcraft community got better, and the discourse of it dimmed. Just sim it.

Now this would just be an anecdote about games, except for the fact that Big Data is entering more and more of our life.

If you have any problem that can be addressed by throwing it at GIANT FUCKTON OF DATA, now people do that. We often don't know *why* the correlation between two things is the way it is, but we know it's correlated now.

Our incipient AI's aren't Asimovian entities built on three principles taken to their logical conclusions. They're neural nets trained on a ton of data and reinforced with adjustments to hell and back. They give very good answers (and beat us at boardgames.) We generally don't have any modernist explanation for what they are thinking or what rules they are following.

While manipulating training sets is as old as data science, with big data we are talking about sets too big for naive actors to change a few datum and get the answers they want (plus part of this mythos is that anyone can run the simulations themselves if they want to.) The simulations are still built very much on human error, but they are too large and incomprehensible to be easily hijacked by postmodernists into giving the simple answers they want (or rather, that they claim ideologues want.)

This is Sim-Modernism.

We don't just see it in videogame sims and GPT outputs. We see it when someone asks our favorite route from NYC to Philadelphia and we answer "...I just follow whatever Google tells me to." We see it in the most famous political prognosticator of our era not making a simple political model (like Sam Wang would), but rather the model with the most inputs they can imaginably throw in, run the simulation 10,000 times, and see what the results look like. Nate Silver has some idea why his models will favor one party or the other, but he still is in the dark often on what is going on "under the hood." And most of all we see it in algorithms on social media and video sites, that are trained to get the most "engagement" from audiences, and so start throwing up bizarre recommendations that no tech executive would have predicted or even wanted.

A lot of the answers Sim-Modernism gives are pretty good! And even more useful, they are plentiful. Sim-Modernism isn't limited to theorizing what a good novel is, it can generate a new one in seconds, or hundreds of new novels for you to read, once it gets good enough.

I'm not celebrating this as "WE HAVE THE ANSWER that cuts the Gordian knot of modernism." Sim-Modernism does get more accuracy than either regular Modernism or Post - but it's obviously scary in its own way. It means running or being a part of a system that you don't know how it works or where it is really leading you.

(Has anyone else had the experience of driving well out of your way because Google says this path is faster, only to find it eventually requires you to drive through an area you wouldn't have - either because construction means it's really blocked, or it's a suburb that feels like cheating to treat as a bypass?)

And, it will feel sad, in a humanistic way, to live a life that is more efficient but not to understand any of its underpinnings. Do this because "the sim said it is optimal" is not a lot more satisfying than "because your father did and your father's father did..."

And of course, we will have to deal with "whether a computer code that is just regurgitating predictions based on a very large sample of text" is a person or not when it answers questions.

[theggning]

Hello!

While I never hated Godot you made me like him more!

If you don't mind what is your favorite thing about Godot

I'm so happy to hear that, anon. He's a good boy and if I have made anybody like him more then my dorky efforts have paid off. >:3

In general, I really like how hard they go with making him complex. Nothing about Godot is ever black and white. He's simultaneously noble and twisted, incredibly cool and incredibly lame, deeply tragic and deeply funny (is there another AA character who's so off-the-rails weird and laugh-out-loud funny while also being so intensely sad?)

But my favorite of those contrasts is that no matter how hard he pretends or how wrecked he is as a person, there is still good in him. He has a moral code leftover from his former self that he won't betray, no matter how bad he gets. As misguided and intensely mean as he is to Phoenix, he won't cheat in court and he won't get an innocent person sent to jail even to "stick it" to him (Godot literally just stops arguing his case once it's apparent they have the wrong person.) The coffee moment with Pearl and his interactions with Maya in 3-5 are indications that he still has a good heart under all the bluster. (Someone on my other post's notes described this as "he still has love to give" and that phrasing has stuck me in the brain like a splinter. It's haunting me.)

(3-5 spoilers beyond this point.)

Even his worst actions aren't straightforward. Godot takes somebody's life, but it's incredibly hard to call it a "murder." He was inarguably saving Maya's life in the process. The victim isn't straightforward either- he killed Misty Fey, but he also stopped Dahlia in the act of murdering Maya. And yes, as he admits, he did have a hand in setting up the circumstances around it, but so did Misty, and it's just UGGGH. SO TWISTY. And then he calls himself out for it! He recognizes his own failings and admits he was wrong! There's enough good left in him to realize how far he's fallen and how warped his actions have been. He ends the game on a note of cathartic acceptance and relief, and his ambiguous fate means we can freely think about where he might go and what he might do next. What kind of relationships he might have with other characters once he takes off the proverbial mask and lets them know the real Diego. EVEN MORE complexity on top of the delicious ice cream sundae of "I'm going to be thinking about this character forever" (ugh, that's a Godot-worthy dumb metaphor.)

If Godot was another heartless pure evil antagonist like Manfred von Karma or Matt Engarde, he wouldn't be nearly as interesting. If he had actually lost every shred of the good man he used to be, if there was no hope of redeeming him, or if he ever truly sank to the level of committing evil acts, I wouldn't care about him nearly as much. Godot is great because he's not a villain, he's an antagonist, one specifically designed as a foil/dark mirror to Phoenix, which is the kind of deep storytelling meta shit I absolutely eat up.

Also, he's hot. Hottest prosecutor in the series. Fight me, I'm right.

[itsclydebitches]

I've been reading through some of your RWBY meta's (They're very good!), and something that stuck out to me was how, in your entry on Volume Six's "Our Way", you said Cordovin's screams sounded painful. Specifically, when she had her mecha's arm severed.

That reminded me of what happened to Yang.

Take from that what you will.

Thanks, anon! <3

So if you've ever watched Criminal Minds there's a moment where Reid, the brainiac with an eidetic memory, tells his new co-worker, Rossi, a factoid and Rossi is all, 'Wow that was almost word-for-word from my book' and I went "This scene is nonsense." Not because Reid can remember a specific paragraph he read who knows how long ago — that's well established — but because Rossi remembered it. I have never once in my life remembered the shit I've written after, like, 2 months post-finishing it. Max.

Which is a stupid way of saying I needed to go back to the recap in question and remind myself of what exactly I said [checks notes] three years ago XD

ANYWAY yeah. It's an interesting parallel. I mean, it's quite obviously not a parallel the story is intentionally making, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still exist in the story for viewers to potentially interpret. I think one of the reasons why that (probably) stood out to me at the time was because it certainly wasn't the first instance of RWBY toying with the theme of mechanics as an equal to "real" bodies. Right near the start of the series we have Ruby reassuring Penny that wiring and the like is just as real as squishy blood and guts. And as you point out, we've just come out of an arc where Yang must accept her prosthetic as a new limb — different from her old one, but certainly not lesser. Cordovin hops in the mech not just because she's written as a hot-headed authority figure prone to trying to display her power in overt ways (two big guards standing at her shoulder), but because she literally, physically does not have the ability to stop RWBYJNOR+Q without it. The mech becomes her body for that fight and in a story that positions mechanical bodies as equal to "real" bodies... yeah, it reads differently when Cordovin screams over the loss of her metal arm than it does when, say, Roman jumps in his mech for the highway battle. Roman is a fighter. He has aura. When his mech is obliterated he can hop back up and continue the fight (even though he chose not to), making the mech more of a disposable tool than an extension of himself. Cordovin becomes more vulnerable and the danger of the situation increases the more her mech body is destroyed. It's why I hate moments like Ruby taking that headshot, with only the assumption that this mech's glass can withstand her sniper rifle keeping our hero from killing her. Even putting aside the context of the situation and how they should NOT be fighting this hard over an unnecessary plan, they're fighting someone who can't fight back without that tool. So eliminating the tool is questionable when this isn't, you know, a garden variety grunt or an established, evil villain. Say what you will about how "necessary" getting to Atlas is, it doesn't look good if the heroes are beating on people who literally can't defend themselves against their physical prowess. (Insert threatening Oscar and Whitley here.) Toss in the fact that the mech arm is a defense for the entire city and it's like, okay, the heroes aren't just dismantling Cordovin's mechanical body in a narrative that upholds mechanical bodies as an extension of ourselves, but they're simultaneously making the citizens more vulnerable too. This is a bad, horrendously stupid situation that they're perpetuating.

I say RWBY upholds mechanical bodies, but that's really not the case anymore. As I've mentioned in the past, what happens later in the story inevitably changes our reading of what happened before. A while back some fans were expressing discomfort that Ruby cut off Tyrian's tail right in the middle of her sister recovering from a lost limb. Importantly fans weren't upset that she did it — that's a common simplification I've seen to make critics look bad: "They really think Ruby shouldn't defend herself from the insane kidnapper🙄" — but rather that RWBY missed the opportunity to grapple with the obvious parallel there, allowing Ruby to work through another horror of combat and adding some nuance to Yang's story. That would remain a valid disappointment regardless of what came afterwards, but it's important that RWBY has steadily rejected the idea of body equality — an obvious metaphor for disability — as the story goes on. Yang shrugs off her journey by claiming that her arm is just "extra." Penny's metal body is stripped from her without her consent, without her knowledge even, and it's established that she hadn't understood true love and emotion (via the hug) until she had "normal" flesh to feel with. Ironwood's lost arm is read as a symbol of his madness, even though there's nothing in the canon that establishes he willingly chopped off his arm because he was impatient, or whatever the current claim is. Even if there was proof of that, it's still saying that having a metal arm is automatically worse than trying to get yourself into a position, both mentally and physically, to save what lives you can and by extension the entire world. People get that positioning a prosthetic as the worst possible outcome (ESPECIALLY when literal lives are on the line)/as a sign of insanity is bad, right? I mean yes, no media is perfect, we should reclaim bad representation, all of that... but it's still something that many fans are understandably upset with. But far from being just a one-off #choice, it's particularly bad in a story with so much else going on. Like how Ironwood is also the "most" disabled out of the cast (in terms of the amount of his body that's lost) and he somehow becomes a bigger villain than Salem. He's also given a semblance that just happens to read like a mental illness and, again, is framed as the cause of his bomb-happy downfall. We've got our insane villain Tyrian sporting his prosthetic tail. Our non-redeemed (like Emerald) villain Mercury with his prosthetic legs. Other disabled heroes like Maria and Pietro? The show does not care about them, writing them out of the story for the rest of the season (at least) without even a confirmation of whether they're alive or not — and that's following how Maria went "missing" for most of Volume 7, her status as Ruby's supposed mentor reduced to a single chat in Argus. This is the story that started with a pretty decent divide between disabled heroes and villains, with a wide variety of impairments... only to slowly make an enemy out of a disabled man here, redeem an able-bodied woman there, reverse the message that being an android is wonderful, write out a couple of disabled minor characters, make a few ableist comments along the way... the end result, as of Volume 8, doesn't look good. The problem isn't any one of these things, but the collection and the slow shift from where we started out.

Which, as said, colors our reading of past RWBY content. I can't, for example, enjoy Ruby's speech to Penny anymore knowing the story is going to go back on that a couple Volumes later. Similarly, what could have just been missed opportunities or (slightly) unfortunate implications automatically look worse in the context above. Ruby cutting off Tyrian's tail and not caring about that at all, the group unnecessarily tearing through Cordovin's mech, and not having Yang acknowledge that Ironwood gave her that arm, are all observations that many fans are more critical of considering that RWBY has done such a bad job with disability lately. I want to give my shows the benefit of the doubt, but that becomes harder the longer we go without the story giving me a reason to trust in its best intentions. Yeah, back in Volume 4, Volume 6, and even Volume 7, any of these potential story beats in isolation don't mean much, but when set against this backdrop, you start asking questions about why such parallels and connections have been ignored. Yeah, we can always assume that there are legit reasons at play, even the writers just straight up not noticing the potential there — and that might very well be true considering that most writing decisions are made for multiple reasons — but you also start to question whether the ableist turn of the story isn't having an influence too. Even if it's not an intentional influence... the end result from a storytelling perspective is the same. Why doesn't the story care that Ruby cut off someone's limb when her sister is struggling with that very loss, or that the loss of Cordovin's "body" is framed as physically painful, or that Yang has an emotional connection to Ironwood through both their status as disabled allies and him providing her with the means by which she re-enters the fight? Because RWBY doesn't care about these disability arcs and allegories anymore. It was already heading towards a version of the story where disability is shuffled off screen, killed off, shrugged off, or magically erased.

[stillreadingbookswithpictures]

*sighs* look I got nothing to do at work.... so here's some parts and thoughts.

Revenge of the Sith Novelization, Chapter 3, Pages 62-63 Meta

"They stood a moment, side by side.

Anakin didn’t look at him; he stared into the door, through the door, searching in its shimmering depths for a hint of an unguessable future.

He couldn’t imagine not being at war."

- Page 62

Anakin has been raised in conflict, as a slave and as a Jedi. As a slave, we see him very coolly take on a very possibly lethal death race without much hesitation. He jumps right into the fight on Naboo. He doesn't scare easy from conflict, even violent ones. (There's more to add on Anakin's enslavement and how it shapes his psychology, but that's actually a whole different post). Then, he becomes a Padawan, spending most of his time helping with "negotiations" and seeing different forms of conflict, not just violent ones. Trade and ideological disputes for example. Then, before he's Knighted, the Clone Wars begins. There is hardly a place a time when conflict and all of its consequences didn't surround him. Someone with a background so embroiled in conflict and war, how are they supposed to imagine a world without it? Isn't that what the galaxy is just made of?

This is someone who doesn't know what life outside of conflict or war feels like.

It's not as if Anakin is unimaginative either. We see that he thinks outside of the box, earlier in the dogfight around the cruisers. He comes up with ways to get rid of the droids plaguing Obi-Wan's fighter. Now, admittedly, they may not always be the best ideas, but he does have an endless amount of them.

So this really, on a narrative level, hammers down Anakin's inexperience outside of war and conflict (and suffering. Though that's not specifically supported in these sections). A failure of imagination, so to say. Because it is simply hard to imagine a life one's never had. But it is not as if he doesn't want it, he actively searches it for it in the cold metal of the door, in the depths of it.

Anakin is very actively searching, we know where his eyes are. And we know where they are not. Anakin purposely doesn't look at Obi-Wan as he's drawn into these thoughts. The semi-colon gives us a a semi-stop at the action, leaving it as a different action to the rest of the sentence, allowing Anakin the purposeful act of not looking at Obi-Wan.

But Why? Why not look at him?

“Anakin.” Obi-Wan’s voice had gone soft, and his hand was warm on Anakin’s arm. “There is no other Jedi I would rather have at my side right now. No other man.”

Anakin turned, and found within Obi-Wan’s eyes a depth of feeling he had only rarely glimpsed in all their years together; and the pure uncomplicated love that rose up within him then felt like a promise from the Force itself.

“I … wouldn’t have it any other way, Master.”

- Matthew Stover

First off. Gut punch. I honestly wish Palpatine had failed to separate these two, because he never would have won.

"Pure uncomplicated love that rose up within him" - first off, this is in Anakin's POV. These are feelings he's going through, experiencing, these are his emotions that respond to Obi-Wan's. Maybe this is why Anakin has purposefully looked away. Why he pauses at the end of this part.

Back to analysis. So as Anakin is searching fruitlessly, turning away, he's brought back by a touch of warmth and Obi-Wan's soft voice. There's a tone and pace change as soon as he touches Anakin. He's brought out of words like "searching", "depths", "unguessable" and into Obi-Wan's grounding presence, presenting is self as "soft" and "warm", followed by such beautiful words --

He doesn't want anyone else by his side but Anakin. It doesn't matter what the future holds beyond that door. It doesn't matter that Anakin can't see past the war. Because he has someone who's seen everything through with him, in every battle, in every conflict, Obi-Wan has always been there and he will be there afterwards.

"And the pure, uncomplicated love rose up within him then felt like a promise from the Force itself"

Again, these are Anakin's emotions. That's love, plainly and completely from him. And the fact that the emotions Obi-Wan illicit from him is pure and uncomplicated. It's the opposite of how he was feeling before, failing to think of something as complex as the future or even searching for one when the fight isn't even over yet, because Obi-Wan calms him.

(One can even say, on a wider scope, that Anakin seldom feels "pure" and "uncomplicated". He always has withheld rage and fear and anguish. To see him have this small moment, it's really heart shattering for me.)

Obi-Wan doesn't just calm him though. Its love that Anakin "felt like a promise from the Force itself".

(It's funny, because Anakin, the Chosen One, can be described as "a promise from the Force itself". It's... interesting that he applies it to Obi-Wan. And, well, the Skywalker-Force connection has always been special and strong. So a Force promise for a Skywalker... it's a lot. Just,,, I've got a lot of thoughts on this specific line).

Combine and Compare to Obi-Wan Kenobi Part 3:

"Have you ever been afraid of the dark? How does it feel when the light turns on?"

"I feel safe."

The Force feels like the light turning to Obi-Wan, it brings him safety and clarity. As does this promise of love that Obi-Wan so subtly touches on his arm. That's Anakin's light turning on. It pulls him out of his isolating search of this unknowable future and brings him back to the moment, back to Obi-Wan and his grounding presence, back to the present, back to the calm, to safety, that Anakin's never truly had.

And maybe, just maybe, Anakin felt what his life could be without war and conflict. Just for a moment, with Obi-Wan, pure and uncomplicated.

[space-ninja-fashion-show]

HELLO. ask game time. >:) For Alden, I'm curious about 14 (i see your post about making him into everything he was against and i want More) and 2. You gave me five, I'll stick to three - I also wanna know about 7 for Higgins >:)))

!!! Let's go :D

(Gonna go in number order and oh god it got Long)

Alden, 2. What is your character's favourite weapon/way to fight?

His no1 weapon is the Xoris. The same way I canonised Kohlrabi's frame being a Volt Prime waaay before the Sacrifice bc Volt was my starter, Xoris is also chosen for Attachement Reasons. I love that thing to bits, it got me through so much of the game, and even now when I no longer have one single favourite weapon it is still Up There

His fighting style is fast and flashy. He's far from tanky but he's nimble and quick-witted enough to avoid getting hit most of the time, feet barely touching the ground, an eye-catching moving target. He knows that as long as he keeps attention on himself and avoids getting hit too bad, his allies can either get to safety or deliver blows from the shadows to more success, whichever is applicable at the time

Watching him fight is a bit like watching a dance

Alden, 14. How (not) okay are they with being a Warframe?

It's…complicated

Were he conscious during The Old War (he wasn't anything stronger than a flicker, unlike Lanius) he would've hated every second of his twisted existence. He used to tear at Orokin rule from the shadows, fight a war from behind enemy lines, and they made him into something polished and obedient, a gilded attack dog to do their bidding

He would've done everything he could to tear himself away from Tenno control and take a swing at the golden bastards one last time and die trying (he would've loved Kohlrabi even back then. But he didn't need a telepathic leash and he would've had no intention to drag a child down with himself)

I talked about him having a reasonable level of self-preservation before, but were he conscious during the Old War, that would've gone out the window. He would not have seen himself as alive anymore, and so with no life worth protecting. He would've readily died to land just one last blow on the Orokin

But! None of that happened, so! In present day, he…tries not to think too hard about it? He tries to be neutral at least bc there's no way of changing this now aside from dying, and he does not wanna die. He has a family and a purpose. He doesn't like being seen by strangers as an instrument of war, but it's a useful cover sometimes, and the things he can do as a warframe but never could've as a human help him protect ppl

What "being a warframe" is had changed the day the Orokin Empire fell. Alden no longer has a leash around his neck. He was made from something horrible, but now exists as himself. And he decides what that means

If he could, he'd choose to be human, and he doesn't like looking at it like "well at least something good came of it :)" but he also sees himself as a whole, living being, and tries to live his life as such. Some days it's easier than others

Higgins, 7. What is your favourite thing about this character?

Oh fuck, making me choose

On a meta level it's that ppl enjoy him. Like this blog used to get shitall interaction esp in the OC department and now it gets a lil bit more and that started around when I mentioned how inadvisable it is to allow Higgins in a kitchen. Ppl other than me seem to be fond of this shortass lab safety violation and that makes me really happy

On a less meta level…look, i love individual characters dearly but at the core it's relationships between characters that really drive me to write. And Higgins is fun alone but three times as much when it comes to his relationship with North. I'm having Such a good time subjecting them to Situations. They're idiot best friends and they bond via body sharing and they'd die for each other. Higgins gets to be both the comic relief and the angst potential of his own story but that wouldn't work without North being the other half of everything

[cacchieressa]

I posted 5,918 times in 2022

102 posts created (2%)

5,816 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@gffa

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I tagged 5,917 of my posts in 2022

#star wars - 960 posts

#fanart - 520 posts

#get in my mouth - 477 posts

#fashion - 398 posts

#puppies - 373 posts

#obi-wan kenobi - 225 posts

#lotr - 184 posts

#meta - 161 posts

#yes this - 138 posts

#stranger things - 134 posts

Longest Tag: 68 characters

#jensen ackles: punching you in the face with handsomeness since 2000

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

My niece had her baby very early this morning! I am officially a great aunt! Huzzah!

31 notes - Posted December 1, 2022

#4

A Myth of Devotion by Louise Glück

When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added. Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting. A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn't everyone want love? He waited many years, building a world, watching Persephone in the meadow. Persephone, a smeller, a taster. If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all. Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night the beloved body, compass, polestar, to hear the quiet breathing that says I am alive, that means also you are alive, because you hear me, you are here with me. And when one turns, the other turns— That's what he felt, the lord of darkness, looking at the world he had constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind that there'd be no more smelling here, certainly no more eating. Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? These things he couldn't imagine; no lover ever imagines them. He dreams, he wonders what to call this place. First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden. In the end, he decides to name it Persephone's Girlhood. A soft light rising above the level meadow, behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.

34 notes - Posted April 15, 2022

#3

😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍

102 notes - Posted February 7, 2022

#2

Every once in a while I remember how young Anakin was when he fell, and it blows my mind every time. That nightmare sitting on his throne in his lava castle is about 33 years old at the time of the Kenobi show. Just. What the actual fuck.

150 notes - Posted June 2, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

10,092 notes - Posted April 17, 2022

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[swordofsun]

I posted 3,394 times in 2022

That's 2,656 more posts than 2021!

153 posts created (5%)

3,241 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

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I tagged 1,745 of my posts in 2022

Only 49% of my posts had no tags

#wheel of time - 226 posts

#wot book spoilers - 136 posts

#the boys - 104 posts

#the boys spoilers - 88 posts

#wot on prime - 80 posts

#spnwin - 57 posts

#stranger things - 42 posts

#the winchesters - 38 posts

#the magnus archives - 36 posts

#leverage - 35 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#then dean and cas talked about his deal with the empty and carefully held hands as we closed on them starting to research how to fix things

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

There should be one of those reblog game things where we just say The most fucked up scene from Animorphs that still lives in our heads. Occasionally coming out to remind you that those books were Fucked Up.

Mine would be the time Marco almost got stuck as a flea and only managed to partially de-morph so he was a human sized flea and Cassie had to gently hold giant flea Marco and talk him through his panic attack so he could finish de-morphing.

139 notes - Posted February 4, 2022

#4

Okay, @wigglebox wanted me to post this over here and they would follow up with their bonkers dutch angles stuff.

This is a "what the fuck is Dean doing in The Winchesters" theory. It takes Chuck Won as a given and is based on how insanely meta s15 was on top of the show being meta a fuck + the SPNWIN preview and the couple of scenes of tv static + Cas literally being narrative breaking + general vibes.

At some point after the end of 15x18 and the beginning of 15x20 Dean literally stepped out of the narrative. What we're seeing is Chuck's POV. This is the ending he wanted, the ending we never really got to see but that Becky hated so damn much. (Becky the audience insert that is given an absolutely lovely life to show how much the show cares for it's audience.) The Dean we see is a Chuck puppet or illusion of some sort.

Chuck may not have realized Dean stepped out of the narrative.

The real Dean, The True Dean, is off to the side. Just out of sight of the camera, watching it all go down. He can't effect anything because Sam and other Dean (if there even is an Other Dean) just go through the motions. Even more disturbing if it's like in Heaven when someone steps out of the memory and everyone else just continues on like they're there. There's no pie, no one on the piece of rebar, just Sam reacting as if there was. No one driving the Impala, just Chuck controlling everything.

Cas was literally narrative breaking. He didn't do what Chuck wanted and, through the power of love (an actual thing in SPN), Dean is able to make that step too. Just off camera where we can't see him watching.

So the Dean that we see in the SPNWIN preview is searching for the point where the narrative started. He's going back over his parent's story to figure out just when Chuck started actively taking an meddling role. With the end result a Cas rescue from the Empty and actually defeating Chuck.

(And possible AU where we get to see Mary and John without heaven's influence?)

139 notes - Posted July 13, 2022

#3

Sometimes it still amazes me that Stellar Firma really said:

Some people can be so bought into the system that even when they acknowledge the problems they will refuse to admit the system is at fault (Enola)

Even the most die-hard of revolutionaries can get lost when shown the decadence of the ruling class (David 7)

The most morally corrupt person you know can learn empathy and take up the fight (Trexel)

The only ethical solution to end-stage capitalism is to put everyone in the escape pods and hit the self-destruct button

That was a show.

202 notes - Posted April 25, 2022

#2

The important thing to remember about Rand al'Thor is that when he doesn't know what to do next he consults the prophecies that have been written about him for guidance.

The next important thing to remember is that while he's a giant nerd he's not classically trained so he'll jump to some wild ass conclusions.

The final thing to remember is that because he's Rand al'Thor he'll almost always be right about those conclusions.

272 notes - Posted July 26, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Yes, Harvey Dent is a Good Guy. That's part of his whole thing. He was Bruce Wayne's best friend and possibly the only honest DA in Gotham. He did good things and was a nice and honest person.

He's not Two Face yet! And even when he does become Two Face he's still a good guy approximately 50% of the time. That's where the coin flipping comes in. This is why Two Face is such an iconic villian and why you need a really great character actor foe the role. Once Harvey becomes Two Face the actor is essentially playing Two characters.

I'm so excited to see Misha sink his teeth into this role.

872 notes - Posted May 31, 2022

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