#restoration critical

[jade-kyo]

The fact that Restoration actively makes me, a known shisno trilogy hater, want to rewatch the Shisno trilogy says a lot

Shisno trilogy I’m so sorry I ever doubted you (except you season 16, I still don’t like you)

[spacerockfloater]

Cersei Lannister & Rhaenyra Targaryen:

Are forced to marry someone they don’t love, so they find solace in the arms of a family member and commit incest

Seduce members of the Royal Guard

Have their husbands murdered because they didn’t like them

Have three bastard kids

Commit atrocities to claim the Iron Throne

Betray their allies when they feel threatened

Rule with fire and blood

Live in constant paranoia so they murder innocent servants whom they believe will betray them, even if said betrayal would be a direct consequence of the way they treat their subjects

Are hated by the people

and lets us not forget the -

But no, please go ahead and tell me all about how Rhaenyra is this feminist icon who has the divine right to rule over hundreds of thousands of people because her daddy said so, therefore if I don’t support her I’m a misogynist.

[rise-my-angel]

Just a quick reminder since season two seems to not have understood this whatsoever, the King in the North, Torrhen Stark, did not bend the knee in peace to loyally unite the Kingdoms to someone he believed in.

He and his army arrived to fight the Targaryeans, only to arrive and realize that Harrenhal, one of the strongest structures ever built in Westeros, had been turned into this after being attacked with dragonfire:

Torrhen Stark bent the knee out of fear that the Targaryeans would do this to the North next should he choose to fight back against them as he originally intended to do.

The Starks bent the knee not out of any loyalty, but out of a great fear for a destructive power the devastating likes they had never seen in their lifetime. Knowing that were he to refuse, his entire countrymen's lives would be considered forfeit, and this too would become the ruins of the castles and lands in his Kingdom.

Fear does not spark loyalty. It only creates resentment in secret.

[prying-pandora666]

I bet you that if we had gotten Book 4: Air, and there had been a time skip, we wouldn’t be seeing so much Aang hate today.

No really. If the show had been able to continue and gave us an older, edgier, more attractive Aang?

He would have fans falling all over themselves for him.

The thing is that ATLA ended when Aang was barely turning 13. A goofy, bald, pacifist, vegetarian 12 year old isn’t attractive and so too many fans discount him. How can he possibly compete with openly tormented and outwardly angry Zuko? Or quietly insecure and naturally hilarious Sokka?

Zuko and Sokka who are 16 and 15 respectively (nearing 17 and 16 by the end), and therefor at an age where romance is more relevant to most, and so are the focus of so much love and affection and especially shipping?

If Aang had been able to grow anywhere between 15 - 18, he’d be right up there with the other two. You’d see metas about his tragic backstory, suddenly more of the fandom would care about the loss of his entire people, about the survivor’s guilt, the intense loneliness, the diaspora, the yearning for common everyday things that now no one else in the world understands.

But we didn’t get that. Instead we got LOK, with an old, bearded, post-bucal fat removal Aang. An Aang who has already had children and has a controversial score on “dad ratings”.

The poor kid never stood a chance.

@book4air

[gyooza]

finally watching yesterday's four sided dive, and robbie expressing that he has a hope that maybe they could go back to cyrus' body and keyleth could revive him is so intriguing from the angle of his relationship with orym, because imagine being orym and carrying around this deep grief for so long that you make it part of who you are, and then you bond with this person who you believe might now have an understanding of the pain you've been enduring, and then the exact person who was unable to save your family brings his back like it's nothing

[demonio-fleurs]

so i will admit, i am more of a “think of the positive” person because it is so easy to get weighed down by critical thoughts (whether valid or not!) in fandoms and i know from experience how that can have its effects, so this is probably the only negative thing you will hear me say about rvb restoration before i go back to either crying over tex and writing meta for her or just general one piece posting—

that was the ugliest fucking season of red vs blue, ever. of all time. the colors were muddied and ugly, the scenery was so textureless and bland, and the music was absolutely uninspiring. you could feel the lack of trocadero in every high moment, every scene that could have been enhanced by a leitmotif or musical call back.

i am not sure if they were using an in house engine to animate it, or what, but they should have gone back to halo 3 or 4 because even though those games are 10-15 years old, they still looked leagues better than what we got.

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

What do you think about theory that Lila is Manon from future?

I am vaguely aware that this is a thing, but I'm also assuming that it's a joke and not a serious theory because that would be one of the most asinine things that I've ever seen. This fan theory is even worse than the pigeon feather thing in terms of absurdity. It should be reserved for crack fic and nothing else. However, this show never fails to impress me with its poor-quality writing choices, so let's take a quick moment to talk about why this wouldn't be a good twist.

The issue isn't the time travel thing. Lila being from the future is perfectly in line with the sort of crazy stuff that Miraculous does to the point where I wouldn't be shocked if Lila is from the future! Maybe Ladybug and Chat Noir "wronged" her and so she came back in time to try to stop them from being a thing or something like that? It fits her characters. Lila has been shown to be incredibly petty and, whatever is going on, it's clear that she came to Paris with an agenda otherwise why go the multiple identities and parents route?

However, if this from-the-future twist ends up being a thing, then Manon would be the worst choice for Lila's true identity because Manon is a well established character who shares no obvious traits with Lila. The only things that the two characters have in common are their hair and eye colors (or, at least, the hair and eye colors that Lila now has). Nothing else ties them together.

Yes, Manon does her baby-doll-eye manipulation thing, but that's not a sign that she's secretly a master manipulator or a compulsive liar! It's just a thing that little kids do. Boundary pushing is par for the course at that age.

For Manon to be a good baby Lila, we'd need to see Manon doing some actual quality manipulation tactics that trick people instead of just standard little kid pouting and boundary-pushing techniques. There's no point at which Manon is successfully lying to get what she wants. Her requests are always rather blatant and no one but Marinette falls for her "manipulations" because everyone else knows how to deal with little kids as we see in these two exchanges from Puppeteer:

Nadja: Alright, now give the doll back to Marinette. Manon: NO! I wanna keep it! Marinette: She can if she wants. I told her she could borrow it. Nadja: And that's sweet of you, Marinette, but Manon already has so many toys at home, I wouldn't even know where to put it.

Marinette: Manon! What are you- Manon: I left my bag here! Can I have Ladybug? Marinette: You heard what your mom said. Manon: She wouldn't know if I hide it!

Not exactly gold star manipulation tactics here. They'd fail if Marinette had a backbone.

Could you really picture Lila acting like this? I can't and that's the problem. Because Manon is an existing and well-established character, they have had time to make her into baby Lila. Time to set up the twist. But they haven't. They've just written your standard boundary-pushing little kid. Her behavior is really not all that different from Ella and Etta's (Alya's little sisters), so why would Manon be Lila and not one of them?

That's another problem. If you're going to have a big twist like this, then Manon needs to feel different from the other kid characters and she doesn't. Really think about this for a minute! As far as the kid characters' behavior goes, what's the difference between Puppeteer and Sapotis? I'd argue that there isn't one. In both episodes you see little kids pushing boundaries, leading to them being punished, leading to them getting akumatized.

In Puppeteer we get this:

Manon: But, Marinette wanted me to have it! Nadja: You disobeyed me. I told you the dolls were to stay at her house. You won't be needing these anymore. Manon: NO! Mommy, please don't! Nadja: I'm not happy about this. Wait for me here.

In Sapotis we get this:

Ella and Etta: It's not us! It's the—! Alya: That's it! (picks up the twins) Ella and Etta: Come on, Alya! We won't do it again! Alya: Yeah? Well, it's too late! (takes off both twins' propeller hats) We'll all go to the park when you can behave, some other day! Now go to sleep!

Extremely similar scenes with extremely similar outcomes.

Another similarity is Manon, Ella, and Etta's behavior in Simpleman. They're basically interchangeable in that episode, further killing this theory.

If this twist was going to be a thing, then I'd also expect us to see Lila and Manon interact at least once since we do let Lila talk to the kids on a few occasions. And if we didn't get that, then I'd definitely expect us to see a moment between Lila and Nadja or even a moment where Lila avoids Nadja. Anything to establish some sort of tie between Lila and this little family that she was once a part of. As-is, canon has done diddly squat to tie them together so I don't understand why the fandom is making this tie. Do people just really dislike Manon and want her to be evil?

In summary, Lila is - at most - a decade older than Manon, so we should see seeds of Lila already starting to form, but we don't. Lila holds grudges, Manon doesn't. Lila lies left and right, Manon doesn't. Lila plots, Manon doesn't. Lila hates Ladybug and Chat Noir, Manon adores them. In other words, nothing in the text backs up the idea that Manon would become Lila in a few short years, so where did this theory even come from?

[fictionadventurer]

The BBC lady blowing my mind by pointing out the parallels between the endings of North and South and Jane Eyre (man brought low after losing his fortune, woman has gained wealth and comes to his rescue so they're now on equal footing).

She also pointed out that North and South is a continuation of issues Bronte explored in Shirley (to the point that Helstone is named after a character there), so I guess I may have to read that book one day.

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

Is there anything good (positive achievement) about the Valyrian/ghiscarian empires? I feel GRRM didn't bother giving them nuanced and interesting history beside mass slavery, rape and genocide, esp the ghiscarians they are mash up of the all the racist oriental tropes you can think of

Hi anon, this is a really good question. I think you can look at it two ways.

On the one hand, if we're analyzing the books from a literary perspective, GRRM's portrayal of the entire continent of Essos is pretty Orientalist and doesn't hold up that well. And we can blame this to some extent on GRRM being a white boomer who clearly did not think all that deeply about the stereotypes he was playing into when he created his "exotic" eastern continent. 90s fantasy was rife with this stuff (even my beloved Robin Hobb is not completely immune-- I'm looking at you, Chalcedeans), and at the time Orientalism was, much like critical race theory or decolonization, a grad school level concept, unless you ran in activist circles. You didn't have Tumblr and Twitter and TikTok and Youtube generating Discourse, you had to actively seek out different perspectives. And ex-hippie liberal white boomers often assumed that they already had the right perspectives, that they knew what traps to avoid, and so you'd get 90s SFF authors thinking they were very cleverly subverting these tropes by going, "I know, I'll have an intensely misogynistic culture of desert dwelling nomads who have harems and slaves but I'll make them white." It was pretty bleak. Luckily for all of us, fantasy has come a long way since then.

And yeah, once you see the Orientalism in ASOIAF, you can't unsee it. Lys is basically the fantasy version of the "pleasure planet" trope, the Dothraki are a stereotype of the Mongol armies without any of the many positive contributions the Molgols made, Qarth is like the Coleridge poem come to life with people riding camels with jeweled saddles and wearing tiger skins, with its women baring one breast and it's sophisticated assassin's guild, and Mereen has its pyramids. The entire continent is brimming with spices and jewels and pleasure houses and people saying "Your Magnificence." It is also a place of blood magic and dragons and Red Gods and shadowlands. It is everything exciting and "exotic," juxtaposed against what appears to most readers to be very mundane--septas and pseudocatholicism and maesters in the citadel. So yeah, it's an Orientalist's fantasy world, and the point of all this is not necessarily to cast it as evil per se, but to cast it as "Other" (and to be clear, Orientalism is harmful and GRRM deserves the criticism he gets for leaning into stereotypes). Valyria and the Valyrians are certainly included in that-- they are explicitly Other as foreign born ruling family in Westeros, and they are treated that way both in-world and by the narrative.

The question then becomes, although GRRM's depictions of Essos lean heavily and inelegantly into Orientalist tropes, why did he create these worlds the way he did? Why is Valyria an "Other" and what significance does it have to the story? And I think that some of this is GRRM's shorthand for something magical that is lost and forgotten and fading away, just like Valyria itself is in the memories of the Targaryen family. It is the Xanadu of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, not just the East viewed from the West, but the past viewed from the present, a nostalgic yearning for a place that only ever existed in the imagination. When the narrative does visit these places in person, rather than telling us about them secondhand, they become ugly and brutal, the jeweled facade hiding a rot underneath. In ASOIAF we have Dany ripping that facade off of Meereen and Yunkai, but she idealizes her own Targaryen heritage, and that is not insignificant, and as readers, we are invited to idealize it right along with her, in spite of plenty of hints that perhaps we should not (like the aforementioned slavery). We even hear Astapori and Yunkish slavers speaking to Dany echo sentiments about the even older Ghiscari empire, also lost, "Ours is the blood of ancient Ghis, whose empire was old when Valyria was yet a squalling child." Old Ghis and the Valyrians who conquered them are both long gone at this point, and yet their descendants are clinging to the legacies of cultures that would be wholly foreign to both of them. Because if Valyria is Xanadu, the Old Valyrians and Old Ghiscari are also Ozymandias, the mighty who have fallen, their once grand civilizations nothing but forgotten ruins. The Targaryens don't yet realize that they are that "half-sunk shattered visage," that they are yearning for something that is gone and never returning, something they never really knew in the first place.

Westeros is not immune to this either. I think it's a consistent theme that GRRM plays with is the ways which the past is glorified and distorted and romanticized. Even in a meta-sense, his entire medieval world is, in many ways, a half-remembered medieval fantasy, the medieval world as imagined by people who read Ivanhoe, rather than a medieval world as actually was. And GRRM simultaneously presents this romanticized world alongside the brutality of the past (and to drive that point home, George's medieval world is much more brutal than the real medieval world was), and so he asks us, just like Dany must ask herself at some point, is the past really all that romantic? Or are we simply yearning for something unnamable and Other? And if we yearn for that, why?

On the other hand, from an in-world perspective, if you are Westerosi, are there any redeeming qualities to Valyrian culture? And I think we can answer that question by asking ourselves, is there anything salvageable from the past, even if the past was terrible? Even if what we perceive of Old Valyria wavers between a horrific empire based on conquest and slavery, and an idealized homeland full of magical dragonriders, depending on who is doing the telling, if we accept it as a fully fleshed out world, then I think we can remember no cultures are monoliths. Old Valyria had art, architecture, fashion, music, literature, and I like to imagine that there were good freeholders, perhaps even Valyrian versions of the Roman Stoics and the Cynics, who raised moral objections to slavery. Certainly the Valyrian "freeholder" government itself, a kind of proto-democracy, similar to that of Athens, was innovative for its particular time and place, even if it was not as democratic as our modern democracies are, and that model of government is replicated throughout Essos, where strict hereditary monarchy seems to be relatively uncommon. Valyria also had a great deal of religious freedom, which persists throughout Essos as well. And as with any empire, it's important to keep in mind that the ruling class made up only a small percentage of actual Valyria, and we know there were Valyrians who were not dragonlords but just normal people, going about their lives who had nothing to do with the atrocities committed, and those people were telling stories, creating art, writing songs, and producing culture too. So I think, tying back into how GRRM uses Valyria and Essos in his narrative, we do not have to discard the past entirely, nor do in-world Targaryens, but it's the romanticization that's the problem, and I think that's something that both in-world characters and readers are cautioned against.

[anti-fairy-world]

You know, while we don't think Stuck In My Head/Mind The Gap were bad episodes or anything, we kinda wish they'd been cut in favor of making that time the part one to The Battle of Big Wand, with the actually episode being part two. Make it a whole big forty to forty-five special instead of trying to fit it with a twenty-two to twenty-three minute run time

We actually like everything they were trying to do with the special, but we just wish they had more time to flesh things out and play around with the jokes between the plot moments. The writers probably didn't really have much of a choice with the time they were given to work with and had to prioritize where screen time was used, and honestly they did what they could, but sometimes it felt like 'and now this is happening so we can get moving with the plot'

[spacerockfloater]

“A son for a son”? After her faction killed a baby in its crib?

Otto was right from the start, Rhaenyra always intended to murder her brothers if it meant she’d get her hands on the throne.

Looking forward to this horrendous woman and her pathetic whelps getting annihilated.

[duckiemimi]

can i be candid? the reason why i love geto so much is because he reminds me of a younger me. i had a phase where i thought like him, blaming a whole group of people for my trauma. i was hurt, i was angry, and i was misguided—i directed my energy towards things that would solve nothing, like petty vengeance and vitriol, a forever outlet to burn through the pain. but i grew. and i realized that that was not the root of the problem at all. i was, in a way, “saved.” i changed. and if i could change, like i’m sure many people also have, then he could’ve changed, too. he was “saveable.” there was and always has been hope. after all, the systems in place in the jujutsu world aren’t so different to the ones we have in ours.

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Only the MCU can take such a hopeful ending like the one Logan had where after burying Logan and giving him a tribute, Laura and the kids go off to find this safe place, giving us hope that they now free to grow up as kids should and choose what to do with their lifes and powers... ....And basically turn it into actually Laura was approached years later by the TVA who for some reason tell this random variant of a hero that her world is dying, act like surprised pikachu that a hero doesn't want to let that happen and...basically prune her/send her to the void for resisting them. Who needs letting a film with its ending fucking be when you can just fuck it over with the MCU, huh?

[anghraine]

I'm not sure what brought it to mind, but while I was going to sleep, I ended up thinking blearily about how canon Aragorn/Arwen doesn't quite work for me. It's not a NOTP, and there are aspects that are interesting enough, but it feels tacked-on to me even by Tolkien standards of romance, and I don't really buy the Beren and Lúthien parallels or the explanations of why it's actually super important and thematically integrated into the text.

Part of the difficulty for me is that Aragorn is so glorified through so much of LOTR as written—Númenóreans in general, but the heirs of Isildur most of all, and Aragorn is presented as the greatest of them all and is also highly Elvish in upbringing and perspective. Narratively, Aragorn/Arwen feels less to me like a desperate love across kindreds and more like the only really suitable match for him, imposed by authorial fiat.

I feel like the bittersweet aspect to Arwen is kind of attributed to her being Elrond's daughter and tightly connected to the Elves, yet her brothers and father are much more distinctly peredhil where she's sort of locked into this Elf-bride role. She's most interesting to me when this is personal—Arwen not as Lúthien lite, not as the Elf princess figure in a star-crossed match, not as Aragorn's reward and the only woman good enough for the great king of the reunited Númenóreans, but as a very specific person in a specific situation. When we see her as an individual, it's interesting (I think it's really intriguing that she's a reverse Eärendil!), but we see so little outside of the roles she keeps getting slotted into that it's frustrating.

I think this is part of the reason that the one scenario where Aragorn/Arwen does seriously appeal to me is one in which Aragorn doesn't become king of Gondor but the forces of good still win, and his next task is rebuilding Arnor. He'd get aid from Gondor for sure, but that's a far cry from ruling Gondor as an absolute monarch. Aragorn would still be super special and Elvish, but that's a much scrappier situation for him in which he could legitimately feel like he doesn't have that much to offer Arwen in a concrete sense, even with Sauron gone. And Arwen giving up everything to join him and be part of the restoration (Elrond or no Elrond) would have a lot of weight.

It's not that I think LOTR would be better this way per se (Aragorn/Arwen is a very, very small part of LOTR, after all), but I, personally, would like Aragorn/Arwen specifically a lot more against the background of working to restore and rebuild Arnor together.

[jout--jout]

deanna heard imogen had an absent mom and said "hold my yarns"

[kaelidascope]

Woah hey wait a minute, why was the deleted scene from beest fic deleted? Asking for a friend...

All of Beestfic is currently being rewritten 💕 the storyline, scenes, the art, all of it. The tense is also being converted from past to present tense

First wave of updates will drop on March 23rd, the prologue-chapter 10

The full completion of the story will drop weekly during june-july (7 chapters total) to give me time to finish the rest of Midnight Menagerie

Reason why I took the deleted scene down is 1. It's no longer Canon and 2. Beestfic universe doesn't exist anymore. It's not gonna be what I originally planned.

For the longest time, I had canceled and scrapped finishing beestfic because a handful of people made me uncomfortable. In turn, I hated the fic because of it. But just because it wasn't "monstery" enough for some readers and others got upset that I wasn't comfortable interacting with them doesn't mean there weren't genuinely nice ppl who did enjoy the original product and took inspiration from it. I really like drawing for it, and I don't like sitting on unfinished work. So I've been encouraged to spend the last few months turning it into something I can finish and be proud of :) focusing on less porn, more plot

It'll be worth the wait for the massive update, I promise!