#the iron bill

[bitterflames]

who has that kind of money, xiao hua

[j-liz]

So much of the group interactions are spurned on by Damian and Anya (for obvious reasons!). I would love to see some Becky, Ewen, and Emile friendship moments. Do they even have any?

Rich people play golf I think? Full color is for previous supporters of all forms on Ko-Fi!

[felinelord-bowbeforemepeasant]

REREADING TIME

I have some funfact

I don't know if anyone remember this but I was rereading some of the chapter and I see this note

And yup like the note say is was quite ironic for them to be like this

I think other than the two fukus they really should put fukufuku too but it a note so meh

[themarvelproject]

Marvel house ad for Power Man and Iron Fist featuring art by Bill Sienkiewicz (1983)

[dailybill-cipher]

Can you draw Bill drinking a slushi and being hyper?!

[151] Slurping from a slushy with his eye-mouth!

[greenerteacups]

Hi GT, I hope you are doing well! who is your favorite Weasley?

Thank you! Absolute treat of a question. Oh, man. It's Ron, right? It was always going to be Ron.

So here's the thing: the Weasleys are a really well-characterized family in that you can kind of see a lot of character emerge through limited sketches and contextual information. Bill is Number One Boy, the best at everything, oldest child who was always confident and at peace with his indisputable place in the family; so he's a chill, cool, incredibly competent guy who naturally takes-charge. Charlie is a patented never-grew-out-of-your-middle-school-dragons-phase Weird Kid, but like, mindfully and enthusiastically so, because his parents probably still had plenty of time to support and nurture his interests; plus he's also different to Bill and excels in different ways, so they aren't too competitive (as we see). Percy is the first one to suffer from the pressure of mounting expectations, and he's very quickly followed by the twins, who do the classic "if I can't be the best I'll be the worst" late-sibling trick of acting up for attention, so he gets lost in the shuffle. (The fight between Ron and Percy in Chapter 58 is, hence, in substantially about the relationship between the two most-ignored members of the Weasley family, and that's why Ron is so much angrier at him than the rest of them. Like I've said before, Ron always thinks he's got it the worst, but he takes pride in being able to kinda "tough it out," and nothing pisses him off like other people's self-pity.) Ginny is obviously the baby of the family, a girl with everyone wrapped around her finger, and I love her, but I feel like we didn't get enough grit in her portrait— she's just really successful in everything she does, in a way that can read as flat to some people, and certainly read as flat to me my first time through the books. In fact, Ginny reminds me a lot of Bill: first daughter/first son, described often as "cool" and clever and good at basically everything, charming and generally liked by all. Which is lovely. A delight to read, just like the twins are. But my taste in characters ranges way more fucked-up and mean.

Ron is the last boy, "sixth son of a woman who wanted a daughter" (fascinating line that complicates everything we know about Molly's relationship with her kids — and BTW, how the hell does Ron know that, and how old was he when he learned it? And this also comes into play with Molly's cry of "not my daughter" to Bellatrix which like, as a moment obviously fucking rules, but also — there's a reason she says daughter, not "child," right? Do you see what I'm digging at? Anyway). Ron meets Harry and recognizes himself in how Harry defaults to thinking people don't care about him, or won't help him if he asks, because — although they come from very different circumstances, Ron's home was completely loving, just not as nurturing as he always needed it to be — Ron usually goes in assuming people don't care about him, too. So his first instinct is to go: "Alright. Well, I'll care about you, then, weird stranger. Do you want to share my horrible sandwich, and also my life, perhaps?" Goddamn! Sixth of seven in a house with never enough to go around, and he's immediately like: "fuck it, room for one more." Because he could have been Percy — and you can see it in the way that Ron is mean, sometimes, he's not careful with his words and he struggles with empathy and he's got a vengeful streak that comes out when he's pissed — but he isn't selfish enough, he loves too much and too easily, and it takes shockingly little to earn his loyalty. You just have to pay a little attention to him.

[ckret2]

Editing's going faster now. Here's chapter four of The Mystery Shack Takes Human Bill Cipher Prisoner. (Real title TBD.) Chapters one, two, and three.

####

In the middle of the night, Ford knocked on the attic door: "Eye check!"

Mabel and Dipper groaned.

"No complaining! This is for everyone's safety." Ford opened the attic door. "This will be the last one before Stanley and I take over guard duty, you can get some uninterrupted sleep then."

Mabel squinted up at Ford's flashlight with her blanket pulled up to her nose. Dipper groggily sat up as Ford inspected his eyes, but then he snatched the flashlight. "You too."

"Good thinking, Dipper. I know I'm me, but the rest of you shouldn't take my word for it." Ford crouched by the bed and let Dipper shine the flashlight in his eyes.

"Okay, clear." Dipper handed it back.

Mabel yawned. "What if Bill got colored contacts? We wouldn't be able to tell he's in someone's head, right?"

Ford froze halfway out the attic doorway. "Nobody go back to sleep! I need to do another eye check!"

The entire household groaned.

####

Once Soos reassured the Pines that Bill was "Still sleeping like a creepy, tied-up baby," he and Melody went to bed as Stan and Ford took over guard duty.

Usually, the cellar was one of the least interesting rooms in the shack. A water heater, a washing machine, storage for some old furniture and electronics. But when Stan and Ford opened the cellar doors, the first thing Ford's flashlight beam fell on was the body of Bill's puppet, face covered in a cloud of hair, curled up small on the bare mattress at the bottom of the stairs. The bright yellow and purple in the dull room was as shocking as a scream.

Ford quickly turned his flashlight off. He stood stock still on the top step.

Stan locked the doors behind them. "So, uh. Do you wanna just... stay up here?" 

Ford nodded stiffly. "That seems wise. It keeps us between him and the only exit." 

"Yeah. Smart thinking." 

They sat on the stairs together.

Even with the flashlight off, Ford couldn't stop seeing the figure curled up below—invisible in the dark but nevertheless vividly, dreadfully imagined. It changed the room, transforming it into a tomb. The walls seemed to tilt in on the unconscious, unseen silhouette, forcing Ford and Stan toward the thing that wanted them dead.

After about fifteen minutes, Ford was on the verge of being driven insane by his own heartbeat pounding in his ears, when the cellar's silence was interrupted by a soft shuffling-creaking on the mattress below.

Ford elbowed Stan. Stan snorted and started awake. "Huh—what—?"

"Shh!"

There was more shuffling, then a groan. A high, fearful, feminine voice called out, "Wh... where am I? Am I tied up? What happened? What—"

Ford turned his flashlight on. The person on the mattress flinched, blinking heavily at the sudden light. "Hello? Wh-who are you? How did I get here, what do you want with me?"

"All right, calm down," Ford said brusquely. "Tell me, what do you remember?"

"I..." The person on the mattress frowned in concentration. "It's a blur. The last thing I remember is this... weird dream about a golden triangle?"

Ford exchanged a glance with Stan. "What did the triangle do?"

"I think he offered me some kind of bargain? After that, I'm not sure... I think I remember sleepwalking—"

"That was Hebrew," Ford said. "You speak fluent Hebrew?"

The person below blinked. "Jewish school?"

Stan snorted.

"Fine," Ford said. "Where are you from?"

"You mean, before all this? Arizona—I'm from Sedona—how far am I from home—?"

"And," Ford said, "that was Latin." Stan wheezed.

Open mouth. Shut mouth. Open. "I... majored in classical studies—"

"Give it up, Bill."

The expression of innocent fear melted away into a tired, almost bored look. "Ha. All right, I'm too tired to talk my way out of this one." Bill's voice sounded like him again. "It was worth a shot." He struggled in his restraints to roll over. "Turn off the light, would ya? My head's killing me."

"Leave it on," Stan said.

Without looking at them, Bill said, "I can make my voice very annoying."

Stan said, "Leave it on, and I'll get a sock and duct tape."

Ford turned off the flashlight.

When Bill had been unconscious, he'd been a vague, undefined threat. The dark seemed different now. Less frightening. Knowing Bill was awake made it easier to remember what he was:

A pest. A nuisance. A pain in the keister.

Stan quietly pantomimed chucking something at Bill's head, then muttered under his breath, "I don't know why he's tired. He's almost got a full night's sleep."

"I don't know if he's ever controlled a human body for this long," Ford said. "Much less been magically trapped in one by a unicorn belt. Maybe prolonged psychic puppetry drains his energy—"

"Or maybe he's a wimp," Stan cut in. "That's what I was going for, I'm suggesting he's a wimp."

Ford snorted quietly. "Or he's a wimp."

There was no sound from below. Either Bill had already fallen back asleep, or he was doing a darn good job of pretending he had. For a moment, Stan and Ford remained silent, listening.

Then Ford stood, unlocked the door, and quietly left.

####

There was a clatter at the attic window. Dipper and Mabel both immediately bolted upright, fully alert—they'd never quite gotten back to sleep—and exchanged a terrified look.

There was a second sharp tap. They scrambled out of bed, peered out the window—and then flung it open. "Wendy!"

Wendy froze in the middle of winding up to throw another stone. "Hey! Dipper, Mabel! I couldn't sleep, I was worried about you guys. Is your secret weird paranormal thing over?"

Dipper and Mabel leaned out of the window. They were wearing pajamas and matching tin foil hats.

Wendy stared at them. "I'm... taking that as a no." She bit her lip to keep from laughing. "You guys look exhausted."

Mabel groaned. "It's been keeping us up all night. It's impossible to lay down with tin foil on your head?"

"And we've been getting checked on every couple hours," Dipper said.

"Plus it might not be safe to sleep!"

"And—" Dipper grimaced. "And we can't even talk about it until it's over..."

"Okay, yeah, got it," Wendy said. "Secret family business, it's cool. Just—reassure me that you guys are safe? I don't want you to get eaten by a T-Rex-nado or something before we get to hang this summer."

Were they safe? They exchanged a look. Mabel tilted her head and shrugged uncertainly. Dipper said, "The threat... is... securely contained."

That time, Wendy did burst out laughing. "Okay! I'll accept that. I already told Soos, but—call me if you need backup, all right?"

Mabel stuck a thumbs up out the window. "You got it!"

"Thanks, Wendy."

"I'll see you in the morning if the Mystery Shack's open," Wendy said. "If not... I dunno, my day'll be free, maybe we can do something? If you don't have to deal with the contained threat."

"Yeah, that sounds great," Mabel said. "I'm gonna see Grenda and Candy sometime tomorrow, buuut I don't think Dipperhas anything planned—"

Dipper kicked her ankle. She kicked his back, grinning.

"Awesome. See you tomorrow, then."

When Wendy had biked away, Dipper said, "You're not gonna spend all summer teasing me about last summer's crush, are you?"

"Nooo, I'm not, I promise! But I had to get one in." Mabel laughed and flopped heavily on her bed. The old mattress springs wheezed. "Besides! I know your heart belongs to that girl at the judo club who likes you."

"Mabel, I don't—" Dipper paused. "Do you really think Kelsey likes me?"

Mabel laughed. "Good night, Dipper."

Dipper shut the window. They both got back in bed, slid under their covers, and stared at the ceiling. And stared at the ceiling. And stared at the ceiling.

"Pssst. Dipper."

"What is it?"

"I can't sleep. Can you?"

A heavy sigh. "No." Voice low, as if afraid they could be heard all the way from the cellar, Dipper said, "I just keep wondering—did we really trap him in that tourist before he escaped? Or did we lose as soon as he fainted?"

Mabel kicked off her covers, sat up, and turned to face Dipper, hugging her knees. "Actually, I think we did trap him. I... kinda think Bill can't escape?"

Dipper sat up as well. "What do you mean?"

"You remember how I wrestled him when he was you?" Mabel asked. "Your body was really, really cold. Like, dead-cold. But when I was drawing on Bill's face, his skin felt..."

"... Normal." Dipper had spent six hours tackling Bill. When he'd been trying grip Bill's arms and ankles so he couldn't flail free, Dipper hadn't noticed anything unusual about Bill's body—but that was unusual, wasn't it?

"Yeah. Normal. What if he's not controlling somebody? What if he, I dunno, turned himself human to avoid getting killed? Like a unicorn."

"Unicorns don't do that."

"They can if a wizard helps! That's not the point. The point is..." Mabel struggled to put her mountain of emotions into words, and finally, simply finished, "... what if he's just a human now?"

They both had to sit with the suggestion, waiting to see if it filled them with relief or dread. A human was less powerful than whatever Bill had been; but in some way, the human body shielded Bill, too, making it impossible to properly confront and defeat him.

"What if his human body is like a Trojan horse?" Dipper asked. "And this was all a big trick, and he's just—waiting inside it? For one of the remaining micro-rifts to the Nightmare Realm to widen, or—or the perfect moment to return to his real body?"

Mabel hugged her knees a little tighter. "But if he could leave the body any time he wants, do you think he'd be patient enough to just wait?"

"He was patient enough to wait billions of years to get into our universe."

"I don't think that counts. He wasn't biding his time, he was stuck. He would've gotten here sooner if he could have." 

"Then... I don't know."

That was just it. They didn't know.

They didn't want to talk about the dread pooling in their stomachs and creeping up the backs of their necks. They didn't want to talk about their anger—the injustice that he was back, that this wasn't over, that another summer was going to be overshadowed by him.

But if they weren't talking about that, what else could they talk about? It was all they could think about. For a moment, they just sat together in silence.

Which was when they heard Ford yelp in alarm.

####

Soos had answered the knock on his bedroom door holding a baseball bat.

Ford drew back, hands raised. "Soos, it's me! What's this for?"

"Sorry. It's been a crazy night. I keep having dreams about the Roman Senate assassinating Bill? Like, Julius Caesar, except he's a triangle?" Soos put the bat down. "Anyway, what's up? Is it time for another eye check?"

"Yes, but that's not the main reason I'm here."

Still in bed, Melody groaned, "Are all these really necessary?"

Soos had to use his fingers to hold his eyes open for Ford's flashlight. "'Fraid so. Bill's really good at taking over people. He's got Dipper, he's got Ford... One time he got me! That doesn't really count though, it was in a dream. Kinda."

"All right, you're clean." Ford looked at Melody, decided that since he'd had confirmation that Bill was still in the body in the cellar it might be a little too rude to examine a half-asleep young woman in bed, and offered the flashlight to Soos so he could check his fiancée instead. "What I really came up here to say is that Bill woke up. Now we know he's still in that body."

("Melody, have I told you lately that you have really pretty eyes?" "Awww, Soos.")

Ford cleared his throat. "Stan's 'friends' are waiting. Time to gag him and go."

Soos's expression hardened. (It wasn't terribly intimidating.) "I'll get the sock and duct tape."

Melody rubbed the spots from her eyes. "Are you up for this? You've got a long drive, and you've been up all night looking at everybody's eyes."

"Bill's given me worse sleep deprivation than this," Ford said wryly. "I'll be fine."

"You're sure? If you need someone to help drive..."

"Melody, you're an angel for helping as much as you have. Especially when none of this is your problem yet." Even though she occasionally spent the night with Soos, she wouldn't be moving into the shack until after the wedding and honeymoon, which they'd scheduled for after the summer tourist rush. "And I know you have reservations about—how we're handling this."  

Melody shrugged ruefully. "I mean—I don't like that you've got the demon triangle in your cellar, but Soos says you're some kind of insane space wizard and an expert on this stuff, so..." In the dim light, she flashed Ford a strained smile. "Just—I guess—tell me if there's anything else I can do to help prevent the apocalypse." 

Insane space wizard. Ford hoped that was a compliment. "Just hold down the fort while we're moving Bill. Thank you."

####

Dipper and Mabel pulled their ears away from the attic door. Dipper whispered, "Anything could go wrong while they're moving Bill. Do you think we should...?"

"Pfff!" Mabel rolled her eyes. "C'mon bro, is that even a question?"

Dipper smiled wanly.

Wordlessly, they put on their backpacks—already packed—and pulled sweaters on over their pajamas, and tiptoed downstairs with their shoes in their hands.

####

Ford inspected Stan's eyes again before he said, "Soos will be down in a minute."

Stan blinked the lights out of his eyes. "You'd better not keep doing that while I'm driving." He shut the door so that if Bill woke back up, he couldn't listen in on their plans to relocate him.

"You're not going to be driving. I am."

"Come on! It's my car!"

"It's night, you have cataracts, and you already fell asleep during guard duty."

"I wasn't asleep, I was resting my eyes!"

"In the dark?" Ford asked. "Would you prefer Soos or me?"

Stan grumbled and crossed his arms, but decided he wasn't going to win this fight. He nudged Ford and changed the topic. "Now, that Latin was all Greek to me—but is it just me, or is his Hebrew better than yours?"

He was saying it to be annoying. Ford knew he was trying to be annoying. It worked. Ford was annoyed. "Well—of course he's better. He's probably been speaking it three thousand years. And his accent's probably just as old."

"Ah, excuses. Bet his Latin's better, too."

He was doing it on purpose. He was doing it on purpose. "You wouldn't know Latin from Latvian!"

"This isn't about me." Stan gave Ford his most annoying shit-eating grin. "Hey—when did you pick up Latin, anyway?"

At least he wasn't teasing anymore. "I needed to complete an undergrad foreign language requirement."

"You just couldn't go for something useful that living people speak, huh?"

"On the contrary, Latin's been enormously useful in my study of weirdness. It's very popular with sorcerers and occultists alike," Ford said. "And it got us out of that bar brawl in Atlantis, didn't it?"

"That gobbledygook was Latin? I thought it was some kind of mermaid language. Or Italian," Stan said. "Well, whaddaya know? Good job going to the only college in the world teaching Conversational Latin, I guess."

Ford grimaced. "Actually... I just learned to read and write Latin at Backupsmore. The only reason I can speak it... is Bill."

An uncomfortable silence settled over them, the way it always did when Stan asked where'd you pick up—? or how'd you learn about—? and Ford had to say Bill. It was an answer that demanded more questions that Stan didn't really want to ask and Ford didn't really want to answer. Usually, when Ford said Bill, Stan changed the topic.

But burying the topic was harder when Bill was less than twenty feet away. Stan shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his gaze on the weeds sprouting in the shack's parking lot. "You've said he used to be your friend. You didn't mean like when you call a guy a 'friend' because you don't hate running into him twice a year at the grocery store. Did you?"

Ford got the impression that Stan wanted to believe Bill had just been a cordial acquaintance. Ford wished. He shook his head.

Stan clicked his tongue. "You know, I never got the impression you were 'friends' when I was reading your journals. He just seemed like another of your random... demon-fairy acquaintances."

"I ripped out the other pages about him."

"There were more?"

Ford's head burned with shame. He'd waxed poetic—called him divine, blessed, a miracle, a muse—been inspired to draw sunrises and constellations because a mere drawing of an eye in a triangle couldn't convey the all-encompassing awe Ford's muse filled him with—and all that for what? A two-dimensional two-bit con artist who'd been slumming it in the lawless no man's land between civilized dimensions, now chained up on a dingy mattress in Ford's cellar.

Stan had a right to know—but it was hard to admit just how enraptured Ford had been by an interdimensional grifter. Hard to admit nothing else had enraptured him so much since. Nothing sparkled quite like fool's gold. "We can talk once he's gone." 

Stan paused. "Yeah. That's probably better."

####

Apparently Bill really had fallen asleep again that fast, because he didn't stir as the Pines and Soos gagged him and carried him into the back of Stan's car. Soos sat in the back with his baseball bat and Bill, and Ford and Stan silently envied him for not having to turn his back on Bill. The car pulled away from the Mystery Shack with its headlights off.

Moments later, Dipper and Mabel followed on bikes.

####

[tillandbed-travelingvlog]

bill and ted at a metallica concert pretty pls ?? 🥹

bill and ted are at a metallica concert! hey bill, ever thought about steellica?

[k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9]

He was turned to steel In the great magnetic field When he traveled time For the future of mankind Nobody wants him He just stares at the world Planning his vengeance That he will soon unfold Now the time is here For Iron Man to spread fear Vengeance from the grave Kills the people he once saved

Nobody wants him They just turn their heads Nobody helps him Now he has his revenge

𝔅𝔩𝔞𝔠𝔨 𝔖𝔞𝔟𝔟𝔞𝔱𝔥  -   ℑ𝔯𝔬𝔫 𝔐𝔞𝔫

[loubetcha]

why does a24 zac efron look like will i’m sobbing

[dragonagesb]

This is a lot of rambling

Trying not to cry or throw up thinking about how Iron Bull grows up under the Qun a place where you don’t have names and are addressed by titles Bull’s title literally being Liar but he describes finding his purpose as being a slab of marble having the last of the junk knocked off and finally seeing the final form of what you’re meant to be taking shape

He becomes one of if not The Best Ben-hassrath (secret police) agent ever, Gatt (a former Tevinter slave now Qunari agent Bull himself freed and gave the nickname Gatt short for gattlock the explosives) says Bull kept the streets of Seheron (a place that’s been in the crossfire of a seemingly endless war between the Qunari and the Tevinter Imperium full of constant death) clean longer than anyone before or after him to the point it almost kills him waking up one day and not being able to find a single reason to do his job anymore

He reaches his breaking point and turns himself into the re-educators people that literally torture you to try and ‘re-educate’ his obv ptsd but idk if that really works so instead they send him far away to Orlais to work undercover as a mercenary “tal-vashoth” (people who from his own experiences are ruthless bloodthirsty killers) (still battling with the being an object/person) he loses his eye and builds his own family of misfits, makes a name for himself (literally)(and makes a point of using an article to sound more like a ‘mindless and destructive thing’)

Eventually a demon spitting hole opens in the sky and a longdead archdemon-controlling darkspawn magister shows up claiming god is dead and he’s taking over, and now Bull finds himself working for this inquisitor some rando from no where that is the worlds only chance at beating this undead not-god and the inquisitor is also the guy who in one instant has the power to sacrifice Bull’s new family for an alliance with the Qunari or not and have Bull officially be considered Tal-Vashoth and be excommunicated from his home, friends, and family

All this to say I thought about what if in Demands of The Qun you tell the chargers to hold their position and then Iron Bull returns to Skyhold afterwards all alone…still technically apart of the Qun still technically an agent of the Ben-Hassrath, still another tool to be used by someone else….and he just has to keep going, keep lying

I’m going to start crying jfc just the thought of Bull quietly sitting in the back of the Herald’s Rest all by himself, there’s still the hustle and bustle of Skyhold, all kinds of people coming and going but none of the background noise will be his boys anymore (´༎ຶ^༎ຶ`)

[askyoungiron]

Question for Edward: How do you deal with Bill and Ben? They seem so annoying.

EDWARD: With a lot of patience, guile and cunning. They're not so bad once you figure out all their tricks. You can use it against them and they get completely flustered.

[marvelousmrm]

Avengers Annual #9 (Mantlo/Newton, Dec 1979). Tony grapples with his family legacy when the Avengers realize a deadly wartime project of Howard’s is buried beneath the mansion.

[themarvelproject]

Marvel house ad for Power Man and Iron Fist featuring art by Bill Sienkiewicz (1983)

[yardsards]

living in america is literally just like. yeah i could probably benefit from inpatient mental health services but honestly the resulting medical bills would just make me want to kill myself even more

[lgbtlunaverse]

I think i need to explain why this line makes me go so feral

I think the "fine! I'll kill myself after I kill you" line from nie mingjue in chapter 49 permanently altered my brain chemistry and it has something to do with precisely how i got into the mdzs fandom space in the first place.

I've mentioned it a few times but i started watching the untamed in late 2019 right as it was blowing up everywhere and, likely due to a combination of undiagnosed adhd wrecking my ability to be interested in anything for longer than 4 seconds and me very much not being used to the specific style of acting, especially during fightscenes, i never finished it. The only concrete memory i have of it is seeing wen qing's face and meng ziyi completely short circuiting my little gay brain. I remember more of staring endlessly at pictures of her than I remember of the plot. Press F to pay respects.

Flash forward a few years and a friend recommends me a fic writer for an fma fic (the fic riter in question is metisket) and i like their stlye so much i decide to read other stuf they've written. Here we get to our prime suspect: "the one body problem" a genuinely hilarious fic where jingyi gets posessed by wei wuxian like a year before the plot happens and they become awkward brain buddies. 10/10 i loved it (and still do) even though i remember huasiang showing up in my first reading and I, having fully forgotten his name, had no fucking clue what was going on. (Little did i know...)

Anyway flash forward ANOTHER year and I decide to reread that fic, and then the other untamed fic metisket wrote, a wen qing time travel fix it that's also real fun. And then i'm like. huh. that's fun. wonder if there's anything in their bookmarks.

And then, within 20 days, I had read approximately 350 fics. Many of them 100k+ words. I cannot stress enough how much this CONSUMED my brain's ability to do or think about anything else. I now think back to the early days of getting my adhd diagnosis and insisted that while i had pretty much all other symptoms, I did not get hyperfixations. Lol. Lmao, even.

I am mainly focused on wangxian and the junior quartet becuase they are my baby ducklings and i love them. I do come across some 3zun fics and I think huh... this is interesting. But the 3zun brainrot is LIGHT at this point.

The thing about reading more than 350 fanfics is that at some point you kind of piece the plot of the source material back together backwards. Especially because my favorite genre was time travel fix its, where characters relive the whole plot and like to make allusions to all the ways everything went wrong last time.

Because I'm still squarely in my wangxian + juniors (plus a heavy dosis of yunmeng sibling reconciliation) corner here... the feelings on jin guangyao in my fandom corner are. different from where I'd end up soon after. He is my special little guy though, so I do kind of immediatley develop a fondness for him, and I approach my 3zun and early nieyao thoughts specifcially from the assumption that the widespread opinion is that nie mingjue is a fine good guy and jgy is the evil one (I have not seen the bad nmj takes yet. well... I am seeing DIFFERENT bad nmj takes but they're nice to him. In, like, the wrong way. With no solid undertanding of the inherent tragedy at the heart of him that makes him so blorbo to me. But still.) major reactions to the stairs scene as I see them on twitter are "girlboss! He should've kicked him harder 💅"

And the baby jgy apologist in me goes :/ me no likey. And at this point I am also actively seeking out metas and analysis posts so i'm seeing some better opinions than that and getting a halfway solid graps on the themes. wwx and jgy being foils becomes very obvious to me very quickly. So, with my curent understanding of the plot, I go... you know all you people who are like "god i wish nmj would have killed jgy sooner" it uhh... kinda sounds like he'd have died if he did that. If he'd killed him before meng yao had gone off to spy there is a very big chance they'd have lost the sunshot campaign and most of the main cast would be dead. If he'd killed him at the stairs that's... well that's killing your sworn brother, which by the canon's own admission is a universally reviled crime, and jin guangshan could easily take advantage of this by demanding nmj's head in retribution, since he already wanted to get rid of him anyway. He doesn't give a fuck about a-yao of course but he could pretend well enough that he does. And what leg would nmj have to stand on? The jin clan is canonically both willing and able to slaughter entire clans for the murder or attempted murder of the leader or his family, and nie mingjue is the kinda guy who'd immediately offer himself up if it meant the rest of his clan would be spared.

This combined with jin guangyao specifcally dying for his murder of nie mingjue, with huaisang basically not caring much about everything else he does and wanting to get revenge only for his brother, it gives nieyao a sort of mutual doomed soulmates feel. For either of them, killing the other would spell death for themselves. They either both die or they both live, one cannot live on without the order. That's crunchy. I like it.

The fire palace though? well, on meng yao's part there is a real argument that if he'd let nmj get killed immediatly instead of dragging it out he wouldn't have been able to get wrh alone and distracted enough to assasinate him, so that's one half of the mutual doom coin, and if nmj had killed him during their fight there he's also done for. But after? Right before Xichen intervenes? I had no answer for that yet.

(You know what's coming. I did not)

It is at this point that i realize that if this is gonna keep being A Thing then i need to read the source material before I catch fatal fanon poisoning. Yes, I can piece together the plot and themes from seeing what stays consistent across fics and what are the author's own opinons. But I know just as well that sometimes fanon just agrees on shit that didn't happen and treats it like canon, and I have no way of knowing which is which. So I start reading the novel.

And of course, eventually I get to the empathy sequence. And remember, my "nieyao both live or both die" theory is heavy on my mind at this point, and the only stickler is that nmj could sort of have killed meng yao after the confrontation with wrh, still believing meng yao was actually working for him, and not a spy, and get off... not scott-free, Xichen won't be happy, but it's not gonna cost him his life.

And then I read THIS.

Please Imagine dropping a whole block of pure elemental sodium into water. Except the sodium is this quote and the water is my poor little delicate brain. Not only is my theory right, it is ten times more unhinged than i thought it was.

And considering that Nie Mingjue does not seem like the kind of guy who'd consider something like a life debt to have an expiration date, and because after this he will link himself legally and socially to jin guangyao as family and declare that one among their brotherhood turning against the others is to be met with a painful death, I can no longer read the scene at the stairscase in jinlintai without the impression that he is still planning to die afterwards. Which, if you wanted to make that scene even more painful, this is a very efficient way of losing all your remaining hinges.

I think I'd have gone crazy about this line no matter what context I heard it in, but this one specifically? where I'm already obsessed with idea of nieyao's deaths being connected by the narrative and missing just this one piece and having it confirmed? out loud? from one of the characters himself? It's like giving cocaine to a baby.