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vermililion · 26 days ago

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edward nashton 'the riddler' fic recs ✧°‧⭑.ᐟ

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continuing to update | last updated 27/05

─── ✧ DRABBLES/BLURBS

voyeurism | @pictureinme

kinktober - pervy eddie.

from your secret admirer | @boyprincessarchives

you're edward's newest penpal! ...unbeknownst to you. set in the riddler year one comics, in the midst of finding and fulfilling his purpose to rid the city of its impurities, edward finds that his biggest hurdle for his plans are the growing thoughts about the corner diner's newest regular. but he cant just come up to you!! maybe notes will have to suffice...

─── ✧ ONE SHOTS

home is where the heart is | @vigilvntes

There's no where Eddie would rather be than home.

the getaway | @abrcmswrld

You should've turned him away that night. Instead you let him in your home and into your mind and into your heart, and now he's burrowed himself so deep it feels like cutting out a vital organ to send him away.

keep looking up | @goodboyriddler

He's utterly obsessed with you. Your face, your smile, your smell. He'll do anything, beg for you, take that fight for you.

good boy | @/goodboyriddler

He's always nervously stealing glances at you when you come to the dinner, blushing when you look back. When you praise him accidentally one time his whole body shudders. Oh. This is going to be fun.

the one I love, the one I left behind | @mypoisonedvine

for the most part, you've managed to let go of the life you lived so long ago, fighting to survive in an orphanage with your best friend at your side; you thought it was the only way to cope with the trauma and move on so you could start living in better means...

so long, prison boy | @mermaid-trash

Reader visits Eddie in Arkham after finding out he is the Riddler, angst follows.

jail bird | @passi0np1t

whole lotta angst. In which the gn reader visits edward in jail after he’s arrested.

puppet master | @get-your-fics

Who's really pulling the strings?

covered in you | @starlightsearches

neighbour riddler.

moving too fast | @/starlightsearches

eddie is a virgin and doesn't know how to tell reader.

edward nashton | @the-witty-pen-name

collage au with edward.

i knew him | @sadtrombonemusic

Y/n gets caught up with the GCPD after she is singled out by the Riddler.

Damn bitch, you live like this? | @rat-cigars

riddler being the riddler - based on 2022 batman, pre-canon into main canon.

─── ✧ SERIES

lessons in design | @ohcaptains

edward is in charge of registering the new recruits. it’s boring and dull work, but he happens upon the newest member of the design team and becomes a little bit too interested in her startup.

disarm (AO3) | @/writingsofmax

Edward Nashton is working on his Riddler plans for Gotham when he unexpectedly meets Y/N, someone who is struggling with her chronic illness one night while out driving. Edward had always been a loner that had serious issues relating to other people and now has to reckon with his growing feelings for Y/N over time as he also continues to work on his plans in secret.

tax season on camera | @killerlookz

Edward Nashton is a simp in every sense of the word, having fallen head over heels for a camgirl he'd found, whom he barely knows. but somehow Eddie gets lucky, and his favorite cam girl moves right next door, and just so happens to need his expertise.

pick-up lines | @/starlightsearches

Imagine getting creepy cute cards from a “Secret Admirer” and finding little gifts at your work, in your apartment...and you’re shocked to find out The Riddler is leaving the same style of cards for Batman at his murder scenes....

saturdays - sundays - weeks | @ficsforyou

He sees her, someone rich, someone famous, someone who eventually will be his.

truth's out | @/sadtrombonemusic

you found out that your husband was the man terrorizing Gotham city, how does that affect you and your child?

faustian bargains part ii | @acapelladitty

Assigned as the newest psychiatrist to treat Edward Nashton, your first meeting quickly descends into a dangerous game which sees you making a deal with the devil to survive.

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visenyaism · 9 months ago

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Okay I simply must ask, what are Cersei and Rhaegar’s kids Aegon and Rhaenys(? - I assume that’s what they called the other daughter) like? Do they get along with their sister?

hmmm i think Rhaenys inherits her father’s melancholy and solemn sense of purpose, but very practical. not a big believer in magic or prophecy. why would she be. that’s all reserved for her brother who is going to save the world that’s what everyone says. has a genuine passion for statecraft that no one in her life humors or encourages aside from the occasional books sent by her uncle tyrion or her grandmother rhaella on a quiet day who might listen to her and nod quietly. her mother loved her when she was a little porcelain dress up doll toddler but has little regard for her any older. shunted between being betrothed to her uncle viserys and her brother aegon depending on if her father or grandfather has more power at court but really she’d be happiest as like. master of laws in her own right. neutral towards her brother, has a healthy amount of disdain for visenya ii because rhaenys recognizes the same thing in her that exists in viserys and aerys and maybe also her father as in there’s something living within you that makes you destroy everything you touch. she doesn’t understand it and doesn’t want to.

Aegon is pretty messed up given that Cersei is trying to groom him into the perfect extension of herself prince-king she was never allowed to be and Rhaegar is trying to groom him into being the messiah. Don’t think he ever gets the chance to be his own person or develop a personality outside of crushing pressure that externalizes as arrogance. when his parents’ marriage falls apart and both of them are trying to win Aegon over to have him be like their puppet heir he crashes out, is not seen at court for six months, comes back wrong. Not close with either of his sisters, not even the one he’s engaged to, because he’s not really close with anyone. readily apparent that he cannot take off the mask or turn off the messiah prince persona because there is simply nothing underneath. if Dany brings back the dragons in this at all it’s definitely his death that does it.

#asoiaf #and again visenya ii targ-lannister is a serial killer but she can’t help it it’s in her nature #cersei’s evil targaryen children

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catboxcoffin · 11 months ago

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Battler/Kinzo/Projection

Battler’s narrative assault & sexualization is pretty interesting to me as an inversion of sexed roles, so I’ve decided to refine and paste some of my thoughts on it, beginning with Yasu-trice. Battler repeatedly has Kinzo’s (amatory) role projected onto him, both by Piece-Beatrice directly and Yasu’s authorial insinuations. (I won’t incorporate Meta-Beatrice into this analysis for a few reasons, the main being that I don’t think she is Yasu in the same sense as the others; secondarily that she is so gratuitous in her assaults and references that it would be nonsensical to lend any nuance to it. Plus, her indiscriminate performance in the earlier episodes is what sets up such a divergence later on)

I. Episode 4

Gameboard events are a requisite to understanding the skeleton of the stories that we’re actually being shown. Given the nebulous nature of the Meta and what it represents, a tale created and decorated in-universe in an attempt to communicate is generally more useful in viewing its subjects. On that note, the end of Episode 4 is a scarce instance where we are given a physical interaction between Piece-Beatrice and Battler. As Battler stands before the balcony denying her riddles and threatening her, Beatrice doubles down on her stern insistence regarding ‘testing’ him as the Successor, yet engages in innuendo the second he attempts to physically approach her. This presents a noticeable incongruence between Beatrice’s projected mythos and Piece-Beatrice as played by Yasu. She is physically distant, reading as almost shy. She’s stepped down from being an active harasser, instead functioning passively and reactively, ungracefully shifting between goals for the conversation. She is clearly very alienated from an autonomous sense of eroticism, which is why she instead endeavors to lure it out of him (despite her performative disdain). Her drunken sexuality is framed in relation to what she thinks hides ‘within’ Battler; her musings are based on the assumptions regarding <The Head>. She arrogantly asserts that her superficial form is his type, making sure to paint it as a shallow preference she’s pinpointed. (However even this is something she already knows as a fact, erasing any chance of the ‘unpredictable roulette’ she seems to exalt. She has little real confidence in her desirability, and even less in her ability to make him remember his sin)

She continues her attempt at testing his resolve, presenting herself for her ‘new master’ to own her flesh and soul as furniture, victimize her into surrender, and, crucially, remind her of Kinzo. Because that’s what Battler is to her: a reincarnation of Kinzo, carrying his spirit and blood most strongly. And how could he be anything else? Yasu is ‘Beatrice’ incarnate, her predecessors being both swept away and brutally betrayed by Kinzo, and by virtue of Battler’s failed promise, he has done the same. Her conflict arises here: her love for Battler meshing with her repulsion towards Kinzo, and her inability to reconcile them as full people. The same assumptions about Kinzo’s relationship to preceding Beatrices that traumatize her into hatred are simultaneously twisted into a romanticized ideal, and she is continually unable to conceive of her relationships without paralleling these identities and dynamics she’s latched onto. She is an ancestral fatalist, resigning not only autonomy within her own life but puppeting her relatives’ souls as her own. They cannot sleep peacefully as themselves, and neither can an unadulterated Battler. Beatrice indirectly castigates Battler (or her idea of him blurred into Kinzo) through her earlier ramblings on the nature of love-as-lust and the cage of flesh, but later turns around and flirts with the ideas, even going as far as writing her piece to romance Kinzo directly, despite knowing she’s caricaturing her own mother’s harrowing circumstances.

II. Message-Bottle Furniture

Lovelessly—or, perhaps, in a twisted abundance of love—Yasu’s message bottles distort Battler’s entire character into something alien in his six-year absence. This is what it means for new truths to triumph over old truths. Battler, the boy who left his own family due to his indignation over infidelity and who sought the heart in every story, is suddenly a perverted beast. He is a vapid womanizer like his father and an exploiter of status and naïveté like his grandfather. Beyond his will, parodied projections of his profanity are exposed within the message bottles, existing to cement his sin as irredeemable. I believe this is both a semi-conscious self-justification on Yasu’s part (cutting out the moral ambiguity of him simply forgetting) and a way to cope with her own undesirability (by manufacturing a more ‘active’ sin, one that would require Battler to care in the first place).

(…Side Note: I like how the attempted grope of Shannon in EP1 encompasses both this hostile projection and a dance around the desire to be discovered… [Fake breasts]. It adds another layer of selfish assumption to her narrative: he was always a piece. He doesn’t solve the epitaph and he doesn’t remember her because he never had the chance.)

To reiterate, his character is degraded and he is manipulated as a plot device within the message bottles. The narrative hinges on his existence, yet he has little room to move—In fact, his actual presence is hardly necessary. He committed a sin that permanently scarred someone, and he cannot apologize. The victim no longer exists. Battler, as a concept, constitutes a motive for murder. In his absence, he is a myth.

Remind you of anyone else?

III. Kuwatrice-Kinzo / Chick Beatrice-BATTLER

This parallel creates an interesting issue. The line of descendant/reincarnation is blurred and there’s an explicitly incestuous tone, but it quickly becomes more of a foil than a mirror. Kinzo’s idea of reincarnation is pure delusion, Battler rejects it despite it being true; Kinzo is affectionately dominating, Battler is cold; Kinzo rejects his status as a father, Battler grows to accept it.

So, Kinzo’s role is subverted. This should be a good thing, right?

It isn’t. At least, not to the judge of sin.

Chick-Beatrice is not a new creation; this is a glimpse of the Beatrice that first adopted Shannon’s bud of love for Battler six years prior. At this point, ‘Beatrice’ was still individuated. She wasn’t yet mutated by the legend of the witch, the solving of the epitaph, or, arguably, her Battler-desirability complex. This, I assert, is the closest we see to a pure ‘Yasu’ in later years, as the remainder of her true self that resided in Shannon had already been compartmentalized by that point. This is why Dawn is so tragic. Battler has allegedly solved her heart, yet even in his ‘enlightenment’ he is dismissive of her. To the first-time viewer, this rejection is bittersweet: he is waiting for the ‘real’ her to return. Issue is, that is the real her. This is the ‘Shannon’ he knew, before she was twisted into a sadistic amalgam of escapist fantasies dressed up with his desires. By all rights, Chick should align much more with the ‘Shannon’ that loved Battler. The dutiful “blindness of a girl in love,” willing to wait a century to be noticed. But he doesn’t understand that, bemoaning being too late while literally being thrusted another chance to do it right. Of course this chance doesn’t apply to reality, but it never did. He was already facing a postmortem trial for his failure in life, and the end of Meta-Beatrice marks his failure in death.

Battler is fated to only ever have a paternalistic, sympathetic affection towards Chick. Even after learning the truth, it will always be Beatrice that he loves. As much is clear in his Twilight gameboard. He recognizes Yasu as a vessel, but she’s virtually indistinguishable from Piece-Beato, an actor serving as the means for the illusion and providing a sympathetic backstory. Ange was right—there’s no point in having someone love in your place.

Regardless, Battler is himself. If he’d only inherited enough of Kinzo’s blood, maybe he could have loved all ‘iterations’ passionately and indiscriminately. Kinzo fabricated connections out of nothing, he ‘understood’ the reincarnated soul, and he was willing to die before he let her escape. His overbearing, cloying affection had a certainty that I believe Yasu envied, in a way. To be kidnapped and caged forever would be morbidly romantic, to her at least. How tragically ironic that the fatalist who desired to be carried away ended up having to orchestrate the game of love&communication herself…

IV. The Head

Aside from what I’ve mentioned, Yasu has a final, strikingly obvious reason to project Kinzo onto Battler: deflection.

Yasu is a disastrous parallel to Kinzo. They share the disturbing quality of willpower exceeding their body, a flippancy regarding life and death, living in spite of frailty. They are born with and die with nothing. She too dances with the magic of the roulette, staking fate on a miracle. She too ‘met’ Beatrice as an attempt at severing her regrets in life; she too summoned the Golden Witch and received a fortune at the cost of her soul; she too felt blessed and mocked by the myth of Beatrice, after wandering half-dead in a life that was not her own. A life in which she had been suddenly given power as a prank of fate, with the included (mis)fortune of polydactyly. They were each forced to endure Endlessness, awaiting the revival of love that may never come, desperately discarding their dignity for the sake of resurrection. The epitaph chooses both Kinzo’s and Beatrice’s successor. To ‘see’ is to answer the riddle. Just as Kinzo did to ‘Beatrice,’ Yasu has sewn the Ushiromiyas’ souls onto the island with magic, allowing them neither power nor form. Both are vulnerable kings protected by their own castles, refusing to speak the truth. Their massive wealth will be distributed, but the secret tales die with them.

Yasu was afforded unbelievable power by solving the epitaph, but it ended up destroying her with knowledge she did not want. She was given the reasoning that kills love. Upon the horrific discovery that her romantic feelings not only couldn’t be consummated but were incestuous as well, it is almost certain that she would feel the same repulsion towards herself as Kinzo. From that moment, she too was lying about the true nature of her relationships with the ones she loved. She too could not curb her affection or fear in time to tell the truth. There is no path she can make for herself, as she cannot live independently of projected roles. Incapable of individuating herself from Kinzo with self-identity, the logical conclusion is to invert the roles and make herself Beatrice, and more importantly, Battler Kinzo. Then, she must pray for the miracle that someone would come and solve the epitaph, taking back the role she was so haunted by and carrying her to a better life…

#umineko #umineko spoilers #battler ushiromiya #kinzo ushiromiya #sayo yasuda

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