#the problem in the end was one character. i needed to capitalize String...

[dont-open-dead-inside-net]

*crawls out of IDE covered in blood* i can make popups now!

[inspireland]

Some considerations after some shit I've seen on here and on twitter in the last few weeks.

As usually happens, people end up derailing important conversations towards extremes because they just can't help scratch that self-righteous itch, thus missing the crux of the problem in the long run and creating useless fandom tension when we should be presenting a united front on such serious problems.

The way Assad has been treated by AMC should be criticized openly and vocally. It's racism, evidently so. That's not debatable. Yes, s3 is gonna be Lestat-centric because they follow the books, but s3 isn't here yet and the blatant exclusion of Assad from... well, everything until now, unfortunately, should not be ignored. Trying to dismiss the issue is shady af - you're either naively ignorant (in which case, stop talking about a topic you know nothing of and wake up, it's 2025) or you're racist (in which case, you have no place here, in the fandom of a show full of amazing, IMPORTANT poc characters. Idc about book!canon character palette, this conversation involves the show and Assad specifically.)

That said, the way some people dress their hateful vitriol towards Eric/show DM/DM shippers, by using this issue specifically, is also despicable. Threads/posts start with a good point about the issue and by the end, it's obvious that whoever wrote them actually had beef with the above mentioned and wanted a "justified" reason to talk shit, while simultaneously framing any valid criticism of their absurd behavior as supporting the racism AMC has been displaying towards Assad and partaking in fetishizing him.

That's ultimately deflecting from the cause instead of helping it.

I've been in fandom long enough to see all those behaviors repeat again and again and again and it's so tiring and unproductive.

At the end of the day, I invite all reasonable Assad/Armand/DM/iwtv fans in general to ignore such polarizing voices, be them on one extreme or the other, when they're screaming into the void seeking attention, and to address them instead when they're pushing their hateful rhetoric in public spaces, thinking they're doing someone a favor.

But most importantly, I invite you all to focus on supporting Assad, first and foremost, because the way his presence has been erased is concerning beyond just the future of the show. It's a symptom of a larger issue of racism in media, another instance in a long list of such mistreatments.

P.S.: Before anybody comes with "is this about x post/tweet/person", please, I'm too old for this shit - as previously mentioned, this is me having a think after a long string of vitriol I've read on here and mostly twitter, with a sprinkle of tiktok comment sections. My memory is too shit to remember who said what and I honestly don't care, so it's not taking a dig at anybody specifically, although if you feel targeted in some way, I invite you to pause and also have think about what I've addressed. I'm not here to play games, I just needed to take this out of my head and the only reason I'm posting it here is because the other two platforms suck in terms of long-text format. Also, English isn't my mother language and I'm dead tired because capitalism, so if I fumbled wording/grammar, I apologize. I'm posting this without giving it a read so hopes and prayers.

[blbeloved]

UPDATE TO GELBOYS FINALE THOUGHTS

So we’re to believe it’s credible that the most sensible, ethically clear-headed and self-aware person in GelBoys has several times told Bua he doesn’t like him like that, even to the point of cruelly rejecting his ethnicity and physical looks when he knows how emotionally fragile Bua is, because he actually loves Bua all along and really only liked F4M as an overly concerned friend?

A F4M who told him at every turn what he feels for Chain he has never felt for someone he views only as a best mate, and with utmost finality that if another man appears on the horizon (even the unsafe Chian) he’d be grasping that corrosive brass ring first - is the reason Baabin has been rejecting Bua all along?

These incredible inconsistencies are clearly not about being teenagers; it is the conservative adult creators who’re being too immature to go where their original, searing rendition of gay male intimacy in late capitalism, would logically lead the narrative. The characters might all still have ended up in these pairings, but for the creators to present these outcomes as neutral or even romantic given their journey there, is a huge red flag.

This makes the ending of GelBoys one that inspires despair rather than hope, a defining characteristic of great BL narrative including those with “bad endings”.

This series has been triggering for many people, some of whom wrote it off immediately because the discomfort was so personal, for reasons previously stated (https://www.tumblr.com/blbeloved/778646173333471232/gelboys-ep-6-musings-the-feminist-ethic-of-care). Less because it reminded them of their painful teenage coming of age histories, and more because this rocky emotional context is still the reality of too many adults of any gender who have sex with men.

It’s standard operating procedure for how straight men deal with women with low self esteem. After years of stringing along, emotional torture, and assaults to their dignity they turn up out the blue when the woman is at her lowest, with flowers and a ring. The woman crying and accepting this arrangement on a more permanent basis is celebrated throughout the entire culture as “love” but people with life experience and critical consciousness read it as TRAUMA.

The prospective husbands just don’t typically pledge to continue the sadistic neglect in a patently unequal relationship going forward. These relationships last no longer than a snowcone unless one of the CP consistently sublimates their desires to conform to the preferences of the more-valued partner which is how women have typically “solved” this problem.

When you hear people talk about situationships eventually becoming relationships this is overwhelming the dynamic they’re celebrating.

These characters moved me profoundly because I deal with adults who suffer from these ongoing wounds every day.

We know how Chian treated Bua when he was his love interest; he has at no time given F4M the same care, respect and deep understanding of his needs - spoken or unspoken, that he gave to Bua even as Bua treated their friendship as instrumental to his own psychic wants for validation from Strangers.

In the same way, we didn’t get to see Baabin so much as unwittingly show love to Bua, only empathy, concern and of course care, even as a casual acquaintance in close proximity to someone else suffering. Bua, for his part, has not shown Baa anything remotely like a romantic inclination (being horny together does not equal love), up to the Chian/Fou4Mod/Baa confrontation scene.

Ep 7 therefore fails to make either coupling a convincing endgame because a coherent scaffolding to anchor those particular outcomes within a romance logic does not exist in the first place. There is disquiet and consternation among viewers because the set-up was actually quite immaculately constructed but the cynical ending obliterated that promise like a sandcastle in high tide.

I used to be excited that a Fou4Mod/Chian endgame would obviously mean a S2 because it acknowledges the most dangerous conflict has only now started - now I’m not sure if I would want to see it given the political reversal the creators instigated in Ep 7, undoing the scorchingly realistic commentary on masculinity, alienation and late capitalism GelBoys seemed to be giving in Episodes 1-6.

[teecupangel]

I was wondering if you might be interested in playing with the idea of Tears of the Kingdom or Outer Wilds style approach to the ancient aliens nonsense that Assassin’s Creed supposedly does. Because I think ancient human civilization finding broken but still usable Isu technology by literally just slapping it together with some string and wood sounds hilarious.

I keep coming back to this stupid idea, trying to world build a more sci-fi world for Assassin’s Creed to the set in rather than our world but with this one specific sci-fi nonsense but with the generic memories. Like, what if Ancient Greek people had found parts from Atlantis that they could stick on boats to make them hover. Not even really flying, just hovering. They could do a lot with that.

The problem is that you either need an idea of where you want to end up and work backwards or have an idea for something to build from and work forwards. I don’t really know where to start either way.

Anyway, just thought I’d infect you with the random idea I had. Because I am convinced these things are in fact a disease. Or Tribbles.

Love your stuff. Hope your move went well. Take care of yourself!

I do have this fic idea that’s more in line with how Horizon Zero Dawn integrated Old World and machine tech into the current world and the tribes. Like, Aloy’s weapons have strings and wood but they also have parts from the machines she took out with her spear that has a tip of the same metal as the machines so it’s more of a fusion between old tech and human ingenuity. Like, ice and electric bombs make use of the machines’ cooling system or electricity powering them…

Anyway, my idea for an AC fic set in that sort of world was that it was set after the Great Catastrophe.

But not the Catastrophe that wiped out most of the Isus, no.

The Solar Flare that took out most of humanity and destroyed or rendered the current technology dormant when Desmond Miles didn’t activate the device in the Grand Temple in 2012.

The idea was this would be set a few centuries or so after Desmond’s death (of old age) and he’s already being hailed as a god and the main character would be an ancestor of his having been reborn (with no memories of his past life) as part of one of the settlements further from the capital, Monteriggioni. (My obvious choice would be Altaïr because… well, it’s me)

Humanity is just starting to rebuild their life, using what they could salvage from the old world and just slapping them with wood and string to prop them up.

Then the main character would find some ruins underneath their settlement and he’d find some kind of device that lets him talk to a person, an artifact from the Old World that was still functioning for some reason.

But that person who’s talking to him?

He says his name is Desmond Miles and… he doesn’t know who he is or where he is.

Unorganized World Building Notes:

So my idea is more on the side of humans who do not know how to use Old World Tech and Isu artifacts due to unknown reasons so they just… wing it, creating a mix of old world tech, Isu stuff, and human ingenuity.

The people of this world call the technology humanity had before the Solar Flare as ‘Old World Artifacts’ while the technology of the Isus was called ‘False Gods Artifacts’.

The main religion of the new world is the worshipping of the god known as ‘Des Mondes’. The religion’s name is the ‘Creed’ and the clergymen/women of this religion are called the ‘Brotherhood’. While it’s not against any law, it is frowned upon to worship any of the False Gods but only the ‘cults’ worshipping a specific False God are prosecuted. Those who worship the False Goddess Juno, the False Goddess Who Set the World Ablaze. (It’s too long so they usually just say “Juno the Destroyer” or just the False Goddess of Destruction)

The Creed have two leaders, both of which are called ‘Mentors’, and they take new names when they are promoted. Mentor Hastings is the leader who travels around, doing the holy task called ‘Patrol’. Mentor Crane is the leader that remains in the main headquarters, doing the holy task called ‘Maintenace’.

There is a rumor that there is actually a secret third ‘Mentor’ that goes by the name ‘Mentor Miles’. The rumor says that Mentor Miles is in charge of traveling thru the danger zones were the world has become too dangerous for humans in search of any and all possible Old World Artifacts and False Gods Artifacts that could still be of use or could be repaired. It’s all rumors though because a lot of people say that Mentor Hastings already do a similar job.

Monteriggioni, the capital of this new world, is said to be the most advanced city in the entire world and there are rumors that it has a great library deep underground where the ‘forbidden texts’ were located. (Supposedly, these forbidden texts held information about the Old World and the False Gods). It is also the main headquarters of the Creed. Their main fort is located in a place called Auditore and it is said to sit upon the ruins of a temple of the False Gods.

The Creed isn’t necessarily corrupt but they adhere to the Creed as if it’s the absolute law and are quite zealous. The resistance against their oppressive nature is called the ‘Hidden Ones’.

Unorganized Character-Specific Notes:

(If Altaïr was the main ancestor) Altaïr would be living in one of the farthest human settlements known as Masyaf and he’d actually find ‘Desmond’ after his father’s death when he ran away out of grief and fell underground. He would learn how to use Old World Artifacts from Desmond who seemed to have access to a collection of forbidden knowledge which meant that Altaïr had to hide Desmond from everyone. The main plot would be Altaïr leaving his settlement to help Desmond remember who he is by checking the signals Desmond keeps getting.

(If Ezio was the main ancestor) Ezio would be living in the capital as a son of a high-ranking government official. The Creed would take his father away because he was in possession of an illegal Old World Artifact. While his brothers weren’t taken with their father, Federico tells Ezio to check their father’s childhood home which was in a human settlement a few months away from the capital while Federico stays with their family to appeal for their father's release. Ezio does go and he finds ‘Desmond’ underneath his father’s childhood home who serves the same function as he does in Altaïr’s version. Then he heard that his entire family had disappeared and Mentor Hastings was personally on his way to Ezio’s location and Ezio decided to book it. The plot of this one is that Ezio would be looking for his family while trying to find the reason why they’re being targeted with Desmond acting as his support and a bit of a deus ex machina in terms of techs Ezio has no idea how to use.

(If Ratonhnhaké:ton is the main ancestor) Ratonhnhaké:ton would be raised in a settlement by the name of Davenport and it’s less than a day away from the capital. His meeting with Desmond would happen because the ground of their home crumbled and he saw something like an underground cave below. When he went to check it out, it turned out to be some kind of place that looked both Old World but with so many things that Ratonhnhaké:ton remembered seeing in the capital. He meets ‘Desmond’ there and, when he returns, his mother is waiting for him with a pale devastated expression on her face. Apparently, according to the prophecy passed down to their line, one which is of their blood will find their way into the secret resting place of the true god and would have to go on a journey to find the god’s missing pieces, only then will ‘Des Mondes’ be whole. They will not be allowed back into the settlement until the god awakens so Ratonhnhaké:ton sets out on a journey with ‘Desmond’ to make him whole again.

(sidebar: I may have used names that seemed to be all over the world in this one but they’re not the Old World names but names given to them after the Solar Flare. For example: the Masyaf that Altaïr was born and raised in? That mountainous area’s Old World name was “Black Hills”)

[zorilleerrant]

Once again, Moffat thinks he's brilliantly clever for noticing "Villengard" sounds like it has "villain" in it, and makes it your problem. Yes, they are, to the surprise of no one, at the heart of the problem. What problem, you ask? Well, it's not explained or explored at all, despite being the most promising part of the episode - as in, it seemed like it was promising to tell us literally any details about it at any point. Did the bad guys win? Lose? Get thwarted? Is someone higher up pulling the strings? Who cares! Certainly not Moffat.

Like many of his episodes, this was three potentially good episodes in one, giving time to none of them! And, like all of his episodes, it fails to imbue any of the side characters with a personality, leaving everything up to actors struggling to hold up his barely workshoppable script. Also he doesn't seem to think women bother to think about themselves long enough to realize their own last names exist. He thinks this is a deep observation.

I'm quite convinced Moffat is the type of person to psychoanalyze women for existing in public while refusing to talk to him. I bet he does it after he yanks their headphones off.

He's obsessed with the idea of a downtime episode. Probably that's one of his favorite tropes on TV. Unfortunately for all of us, he can only get three lines into one before going "this is so boring and I'm too cool to write this" and then trying to skip to the payoff. Fortunately, not letting him have full control his own scripts allows other people to sneak that connection in there, but it's built on such a flimsy scaffolding you worry they're going to break their necks trying to have an emotion on screen.

Not to mention, he thinks the Doctor is pretty stupid. Not every Doctor, mind, just this one. For some reason.

You'll notice him pulling out the same 'clever hacks' he's reused in basically every episode he's ever writen, because Moffat only has five ideas, and he's cycled through every combination of them several times. That's why he's resorted to cribbing from other episodes of New Who - he watched the Titanic crash just before writing this, noticed most of the audience considered the ending emotional, and went, "ah, I see! It's moving if someone glows." Then hastily ran that speech through a thesaurus. Extremely high but then I realized I don't know what a pun is energy.

He thinks he can build a whole character in two sentences or less. He can't. He can probably inhabit a character that quickly, but with every episode he writes he seems to understand less and less that a TV isn't improv, and it doesn't make it 'infinitely better' to throw random wacky shit into each scene for no reason and with no payoff. He's also convinced his work needs to be pointedly political to be poignant, without having any idea of what his own politics are, except that he would like other people to think he's a great person for having them. Like, fuck, dude, you understand hospital quarantines were instituted to protect cancer babies and shit, not the dipshits in parliament, right, you accidental antivaxxer asshole?

In any case, he concludes, as always, by reminding you to believe in our Lord And Savior Jesus Christ, who in his mind is the only thing that exists in the world besides capitalism.

3/10 could not be saved by the brilliant cast, but might be able to be rescued if ficcers are diligent enough

[stevensaus]

I had a problem. I needed a tool to reliably capitalize news article titles. While sed (I'm using GNU sed 4.9-1 from Debian) obviously came to mind, there's a lot of variation in standardization among article titles. For my part, I needed a few things: The first letter of every word -- including "to" and "of" and the like -- to be capitalized. Capitalizing the first letter after an n-dash The various forms of m-dashes to be turned into -- De-smarten quotes Properly handling where titles have single quotes Properly handling all-caps For example, this fake title (yes, I know the apostrophe s is wrong; it's a needed example): Social Media and E-learning Spurs Kids' Interest In Anti-aging ASMR Products—'this is rad, boomer's don't get it.' when run through a tool like ConvertCase.net ends up being: Social Media And E-learning Spurs Kids' Interest In Anti-aging Asmr Products—'this Is Rad, Boomer's Don't Get It.' Fixing those edge cases ends up involving a pretty intense extended sed transformation, but results in this: Social Media And E-Learning Spurs Kids' Interest In Anti-Aging ASMR Products -- 'This Is Rad, Boomer's Don't Get It. Here's the entire sed string: sed -e "s/\b\(.\)/\u\1/g" -e "s/-\(.\)/-\u\1/g" -e 's/“/"/g' -e 's/”/"/g' -e "s/’/'/g" -e 's/—/ -- /g' -e 's/ — / -- /g' -e 's/ - / -- /g' -e 's/ – / -- /g' -e 's/ – / -- /g' -e "s/"\'"\([A-Z]\)\b/"\'"\l\1/g" Let's break down the bits. The first part -- -e "s/\b\(.\)/\u\1/g" -e "s/-\(.\)/-\u\1/g" -- capitalizes everything that is the first letter after every bit of whitespace, dashes, and quotation marks. I managed to find an answer on Stack Overflow that pointed me in this direction, and trial and error after that. Then you have a bunch of transforms for the types of "smart" quotes and m-dash variations which is pretty straightforward: -e 's/“/"/g' -e 's/”/"/g' -e "s/’/'/g" -e 's/—/ -- /g' -e 's/ — / -- /g' -e 's/ - / -- /g' -e 's/ – / -- /g' -e 's/ – / -- /g' . The trickiest bit was making it so that words like "wasn't" or "boomer's" did not end up being "wasn'T" or "boomer'S". Using the first portion that capitalized some words, I knew the basic structure of what I wanted, but I kept getting results that either refused to capitalize anything after an apostrophe, capitalized EVERYTHING after an apostrophe, or transformed the last letter of every word to lowercase. (HIv, ASMr, NIh, you get the idea.) It turned out to be a really funky bit of escaping combined with a more precise regex check: -e "s/"\'"\([A-Z]\)\b/"\'"\l\1/g" The key is that the single quotes have to be outside of the escaped portion. I've highlighted the portions of the string that are escaped. Even though the single quotes are outside of the escaped (by quotation marks) portion, you still need to escape the single quotes as well: The highlighted portions are escaped by the quotation marks, but the single quotes are escaped only by the \ character. Two styles of escaping in one operation. I wrote up a small bash script that I use with AutoKey to pull the selected text into the clipboard, run the transform, and then replace the text with the transformed text. You can find that script here: https://gist.github.com/uriel1998/37b731725653def3b675705546d14f22 It took me a long time to figure that out, so if you're struggling with something similar, I hope this helps. Featured image by Bruno from Pixabay https://ideatrash.net/2024/06/using-sed-to-capitalize-titles-and-a-tricky-escaping-problem.html?feed_id=129&_unique_id=667ca603ed4f3

[steve0discusses]

S5 Ep 14: So If You Put a Fraction Into a Duel Disk, the Card Explodes

We left on quite the cliffhanger last episode, so I’ll fill you in:

I did not get the haircut.

Like I seriously considered getting a Zigfried for a cool 3 or 4 minutes there, but then I decided to wait a couple of days and I basically forgot.

But, back to the arc finale, Seto has decided to walk, not run, to the Kaiba lab in order to fix the virus rapidly eating his entire company.

I just want to point out that Zigfried went through a LOT of work to get Seto Kiaba to go “uggggh” turn around, and pretend to calmly walk away. I’m used to Seto losing his nut kind of a lot and blowing things up but this season he’s like “be chill be chill be chill” so that the entire world doesn’t think he’s a spaz on TV.

And little aside about Seto’s design choices here, I fell down a hole of interior design videos, and can I just say: apparently these wood frame things on the wall are back in style? Good on you, 2002(3?) Seto Kaiba. Don’t think that current designers are painting them purple but...we’re halfway there to Yugioh fashion.

Meanwhile, Pharaoh decides to remind everyone that these stakes are hella low. The worst that happens is that Zigfried deletes the plane that Yugi needs to fly home...which would be an impressive virus.

Like it’s hard to tell if Yami even has a solid concept of “capitalism” and whether or not he cares about or understands the makeup of Seto’s company (which up till now has operated like a small country and not a business...which is a little more Pharaoh’s understanding. Either way...hard to tell if Yami would shed two tears for the loss of Kaiba corp.)

And, despite what I say in the caps, I feel like Leon and Zigfried are the first villains we’ve ever had that Yugi and Pharaoh didn’t unintentionally disclose that they are 2 people to. Zigfried and Leon are just...completely oblivious to how effed up Yugi’s bean is. They think that’s just a normal kid and lol no dudes...y’all got distracted by Seto Kabia but you have a literal Egyptian God just hovering around in the background and dating 3 people by accident.

Like when the show shelves the main storyline, it is very funny how it’s all “And we’re gonna put the Pharaoh crisis on hold--just put a pin in it. No one will notice this child is two nervous wrecks stitched together” and then Yugi and Yami just kinda hold it in and watch all patiently until it’s their turn to get off the bench.

(read more under the cut)

In the giant computer tower, Seto Kaiba shouts out a string of orders and numbers, admired the many sonar detector looking windows open on every monitor, and then sat down at his desk to like...check the firewall, I guess?

The virus is past the firewall. It’s um...it’s inside the firewall, pretty sure that was the point, but youknow, it’s a kid’s show so they’re just throwing out computer stuff that has no meaning to the writers of this show.

Mokuba thinks fondly of how Seto Kaiba has never screwed him over (which I mean...maybe not on purpose, ((except for that one time he did screw him over on purpose to get Gozaburo Kaiba to accidentally give Seto Kaiba the company, but you could say that was a grander scheme that he knew Mokuba would see through, which...)) but Seto certainly has screwed Mokuba over accidentally. At least once.)

And meanwhile, Yami fixes everything through card shenanigans.

So here’s the shenanigan this episode: I don’t go over cards here but this one requires a limited amount of explanation.

So every round the golden castle deletes half of Yugi’s cards. So he was like...I’ll just draw down to one card. They can’t delete half a card...so that means the card must delete one of the two cards on the field which means it must delete itself.

...which is like the closest Yugioh will probably ever get to abusing a glitch to do a speedrunning tactic like GDQ.

Anyway, like I stated in the title: there are no fractions allowed in Yugioh. If you do that to your priceless one-of-a-kind card you got from winning one of Pegasus’ murder tournies, it will irreparably bust the card.

I’m sure at least one of you will correct me with the proper way to insert a fraction into your duel disk. Cuz like...as I say multiple times so we never forget, I barely pay attention to this card game and I’m just flying by the seat of my pants.

I want to say Seto and Mokuba were in the hacker chairs for like...3 minutes maybe before they realized “oh...Yugi fixed it...” and walked the half a mile back to the duel arena.

and also, as I’m looking at Seto’s glasses here, I just realized...all of Kaiba’s team wears sunglasses all the time. Inside, outside, night, or day...

They haven’t outright said this...but what if those aren’t sunglasses?

Is Roland and that other Roland wearing fancy cyber glasses? They are, right? Because they wear them indoors?

Damn, they can’t take a piss without being on call with Kaiba Corp, can they?

Now the problem is...Yugi played all of his cards (he has two in front of him face down, but none in his deck) and after milling himself, this means he’s now basically a sitting duck for Leon to take the title of “King of Games.”

Leon insists that he defend whatever scraps are left of his card honor and not duel a person who is carrying no cards and Yugi was like “COME AT ME BRO THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I KNOW I’M ALIVE.”

He didn’t even have to do a horror on Leon, he just...played cards good? I skipped it, I’ll be honest, but overall Leon’s card honor was...saved? Maybe? I mean he also go destroyed when his competitor had not a single card in his duel disk so...

...Leon will have to work on his card honor off screen because he’s pretty well humiliated at this point.

But stumbling onto the playing field like he’s half dazed/daydrunk, Zigfried is like “You forgot I already won, bastards!”

Which is when we find out that Zigfried’s “delete all” virus failed to press “enter” and deleted basically nothing. Just like when my Mom attempts to send something in Gmail but doesn’t press “Send” and tells me that Google is down and broken.

Sorry my bro has informed me that he ALSO has had to help my Mother locate the “Send” button and I just...I know she absolutely did that but I’m in denial that this Riddle of the Sphinx has happened to her multiple times.

Honestly, the pep talk we get from Leon at the end to cheer up his bro was a whole lot of “we will pick ourselves up and we’ll do better next time. Together.” and sure you can translate that as “we’ll be honest next time” or you can translate that as “next time we will be not nearly as obvious about inserting a virus into their computer until it is done doing the job, bro.”

Just like Dartz, we didn’t really get a whole lot of retribution or closure when it comes to Zigfried. But, unlike Dartz, Zigfried didn’t do too much murder, so I guess this is fine. He tried to cheat in a card game...

...and I guess tried to delete Kaiba Corp but youknow...

...people let him have that. The police saw the ticket of “this man tried to delete Kaiba Corp” and they just...didn’t arrest him. The judge saw that ticket and didn’t put out a warrant. They just let Zigfried have this, almost like “better luck next time, ya?”

And then Roland clocked out for the day and went home, thus ending this arc.

Look at all these characters, most of which we never saw duel even one card.

We also got one shot of Mai for some reason although she was not in this arc.

AAAHHHH. Every time I’m like “the show is done screwing geography” we get another freakin geography spook!

But we went back to California in order to get a scene of these guys in an airport to get a flight to Japan...

which means Rex and Weevil just...were they shipped home by the Kaibas? Because way to ditch getting arrested by the American Government, hot damn. They are...literally terrorists who destroyed a Caltrain in a plot to kill everyone in the world so like...really surprised Rex and Weevil are in public...but maybe all the FBI were dead at the time so they just didn’t know?

Meanwhile, Duke has to go back to Death Valley and call a tow truck for his car, RIP.

I sure hope he got PTO during this stunt and isn’t going home to a pink slip.

I’m not sure of Dukes life or anything going on with Duke. I’m sure the thing about Serenity is him joking because we have all forgotten about that girl by this point...but also...is Duke...still living in the Tenderloin? The crime rate is very, very high and the ground isn’t solid, so it will liquefy if there’s an Earthquake, but it is one of the few places in the Bay Area that doesn’t light on fire every year. He has that going for him.

I just really hope Duke moves out of the Tenderloin one of these days, he needs a better life.

Meanwhile, Rebecca does one last crime.

This is like a post-epidemic reaction to a hug, but in 2002(3?).

I don’t think I’ll miss Rebecca too much. Wanted to like her more, but she was under-utilized, like most of the characters on Yugioh. Not even just talking girl characters here--most characters on Yugioh are super under-utilized, just Tristan Wallflowers doing nothing, but also being selectively OP as hell about very specific things they never, ever need to do.

Speaking of the devil:

Yugi...just saved his entire company...

But Mokuba is just has to make sure to make it seem like they owed Mokuba and not the other way around. Just in case.

So off they go on this massive plane. It’s probably more to do with the length of the trip as to why the plane is so big but also...

This plane is overcompensating.

But before we analyze that, lets close the book on Seto Kaiba’s very short therapy arc. Overall, it was a nice distraction, but I can see why people call it a filler arc, as it really doesn’t affect...anything going on in the major plotlines, which makes me think it could have been a movie or a game or something. But overall, it’s not bad, it’s just not what you’d expect if you were a Western audience.

Like I’m preaching to the choir, but typically, Western stories are entirely plot focused, and so our arcs always give or take away from that plot. But in a Eastern story arc, it may instead be character focused, where the climax is a character evolving or coming to some sort of cathartic realization, which this arc was, in a big way. We still had some plot, because this is a Shonen, but overall it was about characters, and specifically whether or not Leon and his bro would reconcile or change--which they did.

We did get to see a little more growth on Seto in that he...didn’t go bonkers and hallucinate during a card game. It’s been a while since we’ve had him not do that. Seto was very chill this arc, which makes sense, it was a very chill slice of life arc for everyone involved.

So, next we move on to the next one, which bro has informed me...is

still not Bakura.

According to Bro, the next arc didn’t even air in the Japanese version of the show? Like he’s got a lot of spicy Yugioh headcanons so he could be wrong (He did tell me that he thought that Zigfried was Seto Kaiba’s ex boyfriend when he saw this as a kid which...that sure is a way to interpret this arc, and it probably wasn’t just my little brother who went down that thought tube there...)

(Bro Note: To be fair, I didn’t watch much of this arc as a kid.)

But he says the next arc was originally a movie. But they released it in the States as episodes to be part of S5, just to put more episodes in there. Which, if he’s correct, makes it seem like we’re getting like the Mulan 2 experience kind of shoved in between this arc and the next

But um..

according to bro it has virtually no card games.

.......

I’m so used to only capping 10 minutes an episode, what?

Anyway, until then, here’s the link to read the rest of these from the start in chrono order:

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

I’m kinda itching to do a Season Zero, it’s been a hot minute--so those take a little longer to do, especially since I need to go to a different site I haven’t...checked out yet...I’ll be back...eventually? I just know that at some point in Season Zero they fight it out with yo-yo’s and I want to see it.

[littleabriel-blog]

My Problem with Loki

Loki is a character beloved by many people. He has been for a decade now, although some people who read comics before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a thing were fans of him long before the first Thor came out. Over the years since his appearance in that movie the character has gone through a lot of changes, evolving from a villain to an anti-hero both in the MCU and in the comics, the latter even killing off his original incarnation to reincarnate him in a younger body resembling Tom Hiddleston in the hopes that the comics could capitalize on his popularity in order to sell more books. That move, unfortunately, did not bear fruit, with Loki’s solo series being canceled after only five issues. However, Loki remained popular in the movies, so much so that when he was killed off in Infinity War, people were pissed.

As a result of his enduring popularity, Kevin Feige and company decided to give Loki his own solo series on Disney+ when the decision was made to create a string of MCU tie-in shows to supplement the movies, and boost subscription numbers to Disney’s new streaming service. Fans of the character rejoiced. Finally, our favorite character was going to be in the spotlight, and not be merely a supporting character for Thor and hopefully not a butt monkey for the Avengers like he was in the third act of the movie of the same name. WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier had previously had well-received and successful debuts on that same platform, and it was hoped that Loki would do the same. Loki turned out to be the most successful of the Disney+ MCU shows that have come out so far, scoring highest in the ratings. As of this writing, it holds a 93% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.5 on IMDb.

Those numbers, however, don’t reflect the entire audience and there were a lot of people who were not altogether happy with the product we received. Many people who had been hardcore fans of Loki since Tom Hiddleston first put on the horned helmet were not pleased, myself included.  

The show wasn’t all bad. It did set up the multiverse, introduced Kang, introduced Mobius. The special effects were outstanding, a lot of the gags were hilarious, and we did get some character development from Loki before the spotlight fell away from him and he became all about panting after the real main character...more on that in a few.  

So many things, however, were wrong.  

If you liked the show, thought it was perfect, and were a fan of the romance, that’s perfectly fine. There is no such thing as a wrong opinion on a work of fiction. Everyone has their interpretations, everyone has their likes and dislikes, and there is nothing wrong with liking the show. There is also nothing wrong with not liking the show. This is a concept that people on both sides of the debate fail to understand, and I have witnessed flame wars, harassment from individuals on both sides, harassment of creators on social media from both sides, and various bits of biphobia, homophobia, transphobia, and other assorted types of phobias on display. I have seen people accuse people who have different opinions on the show than them of “not being a true Loki fan” and stating that people who have certain interpretations of the character don’t “truly know Loki”.

I’m not here to do that, and I assure you, if you liked the show, that’s fine. You’re allowed to. I’m allowed to not like it, and I’m allowed to explained why I didn’t like it just as you’re allowed to explain why you did. As long as both of us are being respectful, expressing an opinion is good. There is expressing an opinion and offering constructive criticism, however, and then there is namecalling, trolling, and having a tantrum and accusing someone of being “aggressive” when they don’t share the same opinion you do.

There is a huge difference between saying “I find the character of Sylvie to be problematic, and here is why” and “I think fans of Sylvie are sick and need therapy”, and people need to learn the difference between the two. Unfortunately, you have people who have become very protective of their favorite characters and tend to take any criticism leveled at said characters personally. It’s basically “You don’t like them? Well then you don’t like me, and since you don’t like me, I don’t like you.” Which is, frankly, a dangerous mentality to have. We are talking about fictional characters, not real people, and there is no need to jump to the defense of someone who does not exist. It is those people who tend to demonstrate that they have unstable personalities and immaturity, and they are the ones I have started blocking on Twitter because, being an adult woman, I don’t have the patience to deal with immature nonsense like that.

So, if you read this and then decide you want to hunt me down to give me a piece of your mind, tell me that I’m not a “true” fan of Loki, and accuse me of whatever, don’t bother. This piece isn’t here for that. It’s here because I wanted to compile my thoughts and feelings in a way that would better for me to articulate. It’s more or less a venting mechanism, purely for my benefit. If someone else gets something out of it, fine. If the creators of the show happen to see it, which is very unlikely because A) I’m not exactly going to push it onto them on their social media to get them to read it and B) they already get bombarded with tons of opinions on the show on a daily basis and aren’t going to care about one more voice added to the mix, even one who has basically compiled a novel, then alright.

And it is a novel, because I have a lot to say about Loki. I have been a huge fan of the character since long before Tom Hiddleston began playing him. My first encounter with Marvel’s Loki came in the form of the X-Men comics, specifically The Asgardian Wars run. It’s available in trade, and you should check it out. I read that run when I was around 10 years old, and I enjoyed Loki as the bad guy in the two stories that make up the collection. The first has him creating a special wish fountain that has a monkey’s paw effect in that it imbues mortals with special gifts and powers, and has the potential to make Earth a better place, but at the cost of killing every magical person and being on Earth. The X-Men and Alpha Flight find out about this after a plane piloted by the wife of one of the X-Men happens to crash in the general location the fountain is located. The two teams go to investigate, Shaman and Snowbird who are both magical beings begin dying, it’s discovered Loki created the fountain in order to score brownie points with The Ones Who Sit Above In Shadow (a pantheon of deities who are basically the Gods to the Asgardians), and after a lengthy battle Loki is defeated, he shuts down the fountain under pressure from The Ones, and slinks back to Asgard with tail between his legs.

In the second story, set after the heroes of Earth had helped Asgard defeat Surtur, Loki’s attention is caught by Storm, who at the time was depowered. He kidnaps her and brings her to Asgard intending to use her to replace Thor as the Goddess of the Storm, and use her as a pawn to, what else, conquer Asgard and seize the throne.  

I really enjoyed Loki then, and felt sorry that he never appeared in any other X-Men story, not even in an issue of the New Mutants, and that team boasted an actual Valkyrie (Danielle Moonstar) as one of its members. I was a kid at the time and read pretty much exclusively X-Men since those were the books my father purchased for me. I never felt right about asking him for other books since we were a family with money struggles and I didn’t want to be more of a burden by requesting Thor or Avengers comics--that, and I just didn’t find Thor or the Avengers all that interesting at the time, a sentiment shared by a lot of people until the first Iron Man made us actually care about Tony Stark. I wouldn’t have an opportunity to start reading more comics featuring Loki until I was an adult and able to visit comic book stores on my own. I read several runs that featured him as a character, including Ragnarok, the Broxton, OK run where Loki first appeared as a woman, Dark Reign, and finally Siege. I also went back and read Walt Simonson’s legendary run on The Mighty Thor, which I highly recommend.  

Suffice it to say, I’ve been a fan of the character for a long time, and in fact when Tom Hiddleston was cast in the role for Thor, I remember thinking that he was too young. But then I figured it was Hollywood, of course they’re going to deage Loki so that he appears closer in age to his adopted brother in contrast to the comics pre-Siege where Loki was often drawn to look like he was as old as Odin and therefore could be Thor’s uncle or even father as opposed to brother.  

Over the years I grew to enjoy the MCU’s version of the character, enjoy Tom Hiddleston in the role, and like most other people was greatly saddened by his death in Infinity War. Like other fans, I looked forward to his solo series and had high hopes for it. Hopes that were, unfortunately, dashed.

It Was Rushed

In the MCU, it took Loki years to go from troubled young god, to villain, to ambivalent ally, to anti-hero, to hero. Literally, years. Months had passed between the end of Thor and the beginning of Avengers during which Loki endured who-knows-what at the hands of Thanos. We don’t know exactly what still. The Loki series didn’t answer that, I guess because they didn’t want to devote precious screentime to an interesting backstory for what was supposed to be the main character when they could focus on something else instead. That something else will be elaborated on.

In Episode 1, Loki is still the villain from Avengers, something he would have remained as into The Dark World. It would take him being in Asgard’s prisons for a year and then him accidentally getting his adopted mother Frigga killed in order for him to begin to do a heel-face turn. From this, we can clearly see that a transition from ax-crazy bad guy to anti-hero is not going to happen overnight. For this person I shall call Ragnarok Loki, it was a process that took time. He suffered a complete mental breakdown while in Asgard’s prison, a fragile emotional state that was compounded by the anger and massive guilt he felt at Frigga’s death.  

Even after that, he still hadn’t completely abandoned his villainous ways. At the end of The Dark World we find out that after faking his supposed death earlier in the movie, Loki has assumed Odin’s form and taken his place on Asgard’s throne. In Ragnarok, Loki is still sitting on the throne in Odin’s form, and shows no indication at all that he feels any remorse for giving his adopted father amnesia, stripping away his magic, and abandoning him on Earth to whatever fate he might meet. Loki remains a selfish bastard throughout Ragnarok until the third act, after Thor had treated him to a taste of his own medicine by sticking a taser on him and then giving him a speech about becoming predictable and complacent.  

Loki’s arc was one that spanned four movies and six years, since in-universe there were a couple of years between The Dark World and Ragnarok. That meant that his character development took actual time and was realistic. It was one of the things that drew people to the character, the fact that he had a very relatable and believable redemption arc.

Compare that to Episode 1. In less than a day he goes from being the Loki that we saw in Avengers, batshit crazy, selfish, callous, and untrusting, to making personal confessions to a man he had just met only a couple hours previously and agreeing to help the organization that had arrested, stripped, imprisoned, tried, and almost executed him.

What?

I will give the show this: In Episode 2, he shows that he’s still up to his old tricks when he feeds Mobius and the agents all that horsecrap about how a Loki works in the Ren Faire tent, and then revealing that he plans to take over the TVA when he confronts his variant in the futuristic Wal-Mart. The weeping confession to Mobius, that I can’t really get over. How do you go from haughty, arrogant, and “trust is for children and dogs”, to “I don’t enjoy hurting people” in just a couple of hours? The show never indicated that it was a manipulation tactic on Loki’s part. Instead, we were basically told to believe that they became friends just that fast. That emotionally stunted and closed-off Loki made a connection with another person in a matter of hours. Makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, I like Mobius and feel he makes a good foil for Loki. I hope to see more of him in the future. I just have a tough time finding their friendship all that believable.

This would not be the only relationship in the show that happened too fast that we were forced to just buy, which leads me to Sylvie.

She’s the variant that the TVA had been hunting, that Mobius recruited Loki to help capture. And while I normally hate it when people ascribe a certain label onto a new female character because reasons (ones that are usually misogynistic), I think it fits rather well in Sylvie’s case.

Enter The Mary Sue

Mary Sue is a term that gets thrown around a lot. To sum up the meaning in very simple terms, it refers to a character who is too perfect to be believable. Mary Sues are often author-self inserts in fiction, they’re usually the love interest for at least one male hero and it’s usually the male hero the author will admit to having a crush on, their scenes usually are presented much more descriptively than those of the other characters, the story will revolve around them often at the expense of the development and plots for the other characters of the story, and they’re presented as beautiful, powerful, intelligent, beautiful, special, strong, beautiful, and desirable. Yes, beautiful is on the list more than once, and it’s deliberate.

The term comes from an old Star Trek parody fanfic, and while it is usually applied to original characters in fan fiction, the term has been used to describe characters in canon media as well. Some examples of characters who have been described as Mary Sues would include Bella from the Twilight books, Felicity from the show Arrow, Jaenelle Angelline from Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewel novels, Sookie Stackhouse from True Blood, Rey from the last Star Wars trilogy, and Jean Grey from the X-Men comics. Note I do not necessarily agree that those characters are Mary Sues, I have merely heard these characters referred to as Mary Sues, and when I look at them objectively I can kind of see where the accusations come from. Some other terms that can apply are Creator’s Pet and of course Author Self-Insert. Not all Mary Sues are Author Self-Inserts, but a lot of them are. Also, not all characters who can be labeled Mary Sues are female, though they often are. The male version of a Mary Sue is called a Marty Stu, and a couple of characters I’ve seen get ascribed that label include Harry Potter, Daemon Sadi from Anne Bishop’s The Black Jewel novels, Edward from Twilight, and Red Hulk from Marvel Comics. Even Batman and Wolverine haven’t been immune from the Marty Stu stamp, although you can argue that it does apply in their cases especially depending on who’s writing them. Sometimes it is painfully obvious they are author self-inserts...the aforementioned Bella is a good example. Others, you can only speculate on. And while there are theories going around that Sylvie is someone’s self-insert, we don’t have definitive proof of that.

There are good arguments, however, for her being labeled a Mary Sue and Creator’s Pet.

First are her powers. In the show we are told that Sylvie taught herself magic, especially her ability to “enchant”, the power to get into the minds of others and manipulate them. The fact that she taught herself would indicate that her education and skill in using magic should be lacking, right? She should not be as good as, say, someone who learned magic from his foster mother who herself was taught by Asgardian witches?

Yet in the show, Sylvie not only runs circles around Loki magically wise, she even teaches him a few tricks. This is startlingly in contrast to the comics. Loki’s Sylvie is partially based on the character Sylvie Lushton from the Young Avengers, a bad guy who was once a normal girl whom Loki imbued with powers before his death at the hands of the Sentry during the events of 2010’s Siege storyline. In the comics, Loki not only gave Sylvie her powers, but he was the one who taught her how to use them. Now, of course things in the MCU are not going to follow the way things are in the comics. MCU Loki is nowhere near as old as comics Loki and has so far not demonstrated the ability to give other beings powers. And MCU Sylvie is a composite of Sylvie Lushton and Lady Loki, which is also problematic, but we’ll get to that.

But the point is that Sylvie had no training. Her magic is some improvised slapped-together stuff that at best she picked up here and there and at worst she just pulled out of her ass. Now, knowing that, we’re supposed to buy that she can mop the floor magically wise with someone who was formally trained by a sorceress? And that furthermore, she can school him as well?

To make up for her lack of experience and knowledge, Loki is nerfed. Power wise and intellectually wise, he is nerfed. In Thor and Avengers Loki is smart, well-spoken, and a master manipulator. At one point he is able to turn all of the Avengers against one another, and while his magic has never been anywhere near the level it was at in the comics pre-Siege (after his resurrection, he was powered down and is currently nowhere near the powerhouse he had been prior to 2011) he was able to pull off some impressive displays of skill nonetheless. Shape shifting, illusion casting, it was a good repertoire.  

In Episode 3, however...well, he does use teleportation to some impressive affect during his fight with Sylvie, but he still doesn’t get the upperhand. And he should. Loki is a better trained fighter, better trained in sorcery, and realistically should have at the least managed to incapacitate his variant. He doesn’t however, because the moment he meets Sylvie his IQ drops about 20 points. He falls easily for her tricks, makes laughable plans, gets drunk and draws too much attention when he knows that is a bad idea, and manages to get them both stuck on a moon that will soon be dust courtesy of the rogue planet about to crash into it. Loki has made some blunders in the various MCU movies he’s been in, mostly due to his own arrogance and tendency to underestimate his foes, but he’s not that stupid. In fact, in The Dark World he screams at Thor and calls him an idiot for drawing attention to themselves by hijacking an elven ship and crashing into every column and statue within a fifty-foot radius.

Where exactly is that smart, calculating, more careful Loki we know from the films? He’s been transformed and dumbed down, in an attempt to prop Sylvie up. It’s a tired trope, making the male character a dumbass in order to make the female character look good. Well, I should say male-presenting and female-presenting characters in this case, but their supposed gender fluidity really is not represented well and it’s completely contradicted later on, but we’ll get to that.

Anyway, making the male character stupid in order to make the female character look better by comparison is not empowering. It’s insulting. It implies that women are not smart or capable enough to meet men on equal footing, that the only way we can shine is not by virtue of our own strengths, but merely by making us look better than the men.

She doesn’t just outshine Loki intellectually and power wise, she outshines him period. The show from Episode 3 on becomes about Sylvie. She is the show’s main focus, and Loki? He’s relegated to the role of supporting character in the series that’s named after him. Supporting character, and love interest. From Episode 3 on, the show might as well be called Sylvie.

Now, some people will say that since Sylvie is a Loki, the show was indeed focusing on Loki. The problem is, the show is very inconsistent as to whether or not Sylvie really is a Loki or a different person entirely. I will explain more later, but the writers seem to change Sylvie’s identity to suit whatever narrative they want to present to the audience, including the pre-Pixar Disney romance they foist upon us.

The Romance, and why some find it gross

One major characteristic of the Mary Sue is that she always draws the romantic and sexual interest of the main male character, who may or may not be a Marty Stu himself. Oftentimes he’s not, and Loki does not fit the criteria of a Marty Stu by any stretch of the imagination. These romances always happen fast with little to no buildup. There is no what writers of romance call “slow burn”, it’s just throw Mary at the male character, hook them up, and get the audience to buy it. Basically, it’s reminiscent of the romance stories in the Classical Era Disney animated films. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella all fall madly in love with their princes within minutes of meeting them. There’s no getting to know each other, there is no preamble, there is no slow courtship, no real drama to speak of. It’s basically Love At First Sight or True Love. This trend continues even into the Disney Renaissance. In The Little Mermaid, Ariel is willing to make a deal with a witch to give up her fins for a prince she hasn’t even spoken to yet. He doesn’t even know she exists, and she leaves her home and family behind, gives up her voice, all for a mere shot at hooking up with him.

That’s not love, that’s lust. That’s hormones overruling your brain, and it’s an insulting trope, one that feminists have railed against for years. Disney has made a little progress. The movie Frozen took the mickey out of the Love At First Sight/True Love trope with the song “Love Is An Open Door” and the prince Anna wanting to marry turning out to be a major sleazebag who just wants to use her, but we still only have three Disney princesses (Elsa, Moana, and Merida) who have never had love interests and two (Anna and Rapunzel) whose love stories come close to being slow burns, out of 12 official Princesses. There’s still a long way to go, and boy is there a major step backwards in Loki.  

In Episode 3, Loki fights Sylvie and they end up on Lamentis 1. Sylvie spends a good portion of the time insulting and trying to kill Loki, and Loki finds himself having to defend himself from her. That changes once they get on the train going to the Arc. After sneaking aboard the train using a disguise and a flimsy story, the two Lokis sit in a booth, where Loki proceeds to drink champagne. It is then that, out of nowhere, the conversation shifts from how Sylvie learned her powers to the topic of love.

Why? Why would you bring that up in conversation with someone who was doing her best to kill you a couple hours prior?

Then Loki makes things worse by asking Sylvie if she has a beau waiting for her. Why? It doesn’t make sense. The two of you are at each other’s throats, she’s done her best to kill you, neither of you trusts the other, and, completely out of left field, you decide to basically ask “So...are you single?”

Now, enemies to lovers is a trope that can work when done right. Typically, it’s a very subtle, slow progression that the audience witnesses over time in a novel, movie or television series. Weeks and even months will go by in the narrative during which the two people go from wanting each other dead to developing feelings for one another. There’s usually a “will they, won’t they period” that lasts for some time that’s full of teases and flirting before the couple does hook up and gives the audience the resolution. Done in this way, enemies to lovers can work.

This...this is not the right way to do enemies to lovers. Within a couple of hours Loki and Sylvie go from hatred and doing their damnedest to stabbing one another in the backs, to having a connection that causes a nexus event?

By the way, that nexus event makes no sense. In Episode 2, it is established that it is impossible to create a nexus event in an apocalypse. It is why Sylvie was able to avoid capture by the TVA for so long. In fact, just minutes prior to the two of them almost dying in Episode 4, Sylvie flat-out says that she figured out that she needed to hide in apocalypses because she discovered she didn’t create a nexus event when she hid in them.

Now the two of them are able to create a nexus event in the midst of an apocalypse? Why? Their “connection” isn’t going to lead to any consequences...they were about to die. No one else need never have known about the “moment” the two of them shared. It’s very confusing and the only purpose it really serves is to paint Loki and Sylvie as soulmates, which doesn’t make sense in the context of the show. The concept of soulmates is that for every person, there is someone out there they are predestined to be with. Loki is a show that, at the core of it, is about rejecting predestination and embracing free will. In that context, the idea of soulmates is ludicrous and contradictory to the message that we make our own destiny. This is why True Love is unrealistic, and I hate to break it to you romantics out there, but Love At First sight does not exist.

Infatuation At First Sight exists, but that is not Love, no matter what your hormones are telling you. Love takes time to evolve, and it takes work to maintain. It sure as hell doesn’t happen after less than 12 hours of knowing each other, during which a huge chunk of time was devoted to trying to manipulate, outsmart, and murder the person you’re supposedly in love with. No one falls in love in less than 12 hours, period, unless it’s a Classical Era Disney animated movie. They basically turned Loki into a big Disney Romance trope. I have a very hard time buying that Loki, who we have established is emotionally stunted and closed off, would form a love connection in just a few hours, especially with someone who was doing her best to murder him in that timespan.

That is not the only reason this relationship is problematic. The term “Selfcest” has been thrown around, and a lot of defenders of this particular ship claim that the term was very recently made up in social media for the sole purpose of badmouthing this particular romance. That is not the case. Selfcest is a term that has existed among fiction writers for years, it’s just that more people have recently become aware of it thanks to this show. The trope has been used and referred to in various works of fiction, especially in fantasy and science fiction where cloning, alternative universes, and magic occur. A lot of the insults I get from people who can’t stand that I don’t like the romance basically go along the lines of saying selfcest doesn’t exist. No, it doesn’t...in reality. But this isn’t reality, is it? It’s fiction. It’s a fictional world where such a thing could be possible, and even in works where it’s not possible it’s often alluded to.

In A Song Of Ice And Fire, we have the infamous twincest relationship going on between Cersei and Jamie Lannister, and it is heavily implied that sleeping with her brother is the closest that Cersei can get to banging herself and that is why she does it. Jamie is basically everything she feels she should have been and was denied due to being born a woman. In fact, in later books when he reunites with her after having been away from King’s Landing for over a year, during which time he’s grown a beard and shaved his head, Cersei no longer finds him as attractive since they no longer look as much alike.

And with advances in cloning, selfcest might be possible in the future. We already have sex robots, and people with money are capable of making those robots look like themselves. There is nothing stopping them from doing it.

Knowing all of this, the argument of “selfcest doesn’t exist!” falls flat. And it especially falls flat when you’re referring to a fictional universe where a large purple man once killed off half the population of said universe with a snap of his fingers, where scientists turn into giant green monsters, the Norse gods not only exist but regularly interact with people on Earth, and there’s such a thing as a Sorcerer Supreme.

As I have said, the show has been rather inconsistent in stating what exactly Sylvie’s identity is. One moment, we are told Sylvie is a Loki and that she and Loki are the same person. Mobius says it, Kang says it multiple times, Judge Renslayer says it, the director and the writers state it in interviews. But then in the next breath, they contradict it by saying that she’s not a Loki, she’s Sylvie and a different person.  

You can’t have it both ways. Which is it? Either she’s a Loki, or she’s not. The narrative is very confusing and it changes depending on how they want us to see Sylvie, especially in relation to her romance with Loki. It’s so much easier to avoid the selfcest/incest accusations when you can say they are different people. But then they say they’re the same person. Make up your minds!

Since the show first established that Sylvie is a Loki, I’m going with that. Especially since we saw a bit of her backstory. She grew up in Asgard as a member of the royal family, which means she had Odin as a father, Frigga as mother, and Thor as brother. She may or may not have the same DNA as Loki. We never got confirmation either way, and there are people who argue that they don’t to which I have to ask: How do you know? The show never tells us! “Oh, well, there’s Alligator Loki, are you going to say he has the same DNA as well?” Well, we are never told how exactly Alligator Loki came to be. Is he actually an alligator, or is he Loki who somehow got permanently stuck when he shapeshifted? People tend to forget that he can do that. Ragnarok established that he can turn into a snake, and a deleted scene actually had the childhood story go that Loki turned into a rug to cover a hole in the ground and then dumped Thor into it. There is the scene where Doctor Strange drops Loki through a portal, and Thor is left poking at a business card, and it is clear that for a moment he thinks that Loki turned into that. We know Loki can shapeshift, so Alligator Loki can very well have the same DNA. We just don’t know, because the show never explains it for the same reason the show cut out the scenes with Throg fighting Loki...to devote more screentime to Sylki.

Even if they don’t have the same DNA, it’s still established that they are the same person, they have the same family, they’re both the God/dess of Mischief, and even Sylvie herself acknowledges that she is a Loki despite the fact that she changed her name. So selfcest very much applies here, and a good argument can be made that selfcest is the ultimate in incest...after all, there isn’t anyone else you’re more related to than yourself. It is very understandable, therefore, that a lot of people would be very, very uncomfortable with such a relationship. Having the same DNA would merely be the icing on the very gross cake.

Furthermore, just because selfcest does not exist in reality does not mean someone can’t find the concept distasteful. “It’s not real!” “It’s just fiction!” Yes, and people are allowed to have their own feelings and opinions on fiction. If they find the idea of selfcest hard to stomach, that’s their prerogative and you really have no right to tell them they are wrong for feeling that way. They should not have to justify to anyone why they feel that way either. No one owes you an explanation for why they find real world incest or cannibalism distasteful, so they don’t owe you an explanation for this.

“Well, of course Loki would fall for himself...he’s a narcissist!” Is he though? Is he really? Having dealt with my fair share of narcissists in my life, I have to wonder if the fans who say that, along with the writers, know what a narcissist really is.

Is Loki a narcissist?

Bringing up Cersei Lannister again, the novels she appears in establishes that she is an extreme narcissist. She sleeps with her twin brother because it’s the closest she can come to sleeping with herself, and she desires to do that because she is a narcissist. A narcissist is someone whose personality is defined by an inflated sense of self-importance, troubled relationships, lack of empathy for others, and an excessive deep-seated need for attention and admiration. It’s a very simplistic definition, and there are plenty of YouTube videos devoted to delving into narcissists into more depth, as well as videos on how to cope with the aftermath of abuse at the hands of narcissists. Narcissists are so devoted to themselves that they ignore the needs and the feelings of those in their lives, which often results in abusive behavior. There are entire support groups that exist for victims of narcissists.

At first glance, one can see why some might consider Loki a narcissist. He does engage in some pretty selfish behavior, he goes to great lengths to get attention, his relationships to his family are indeed fraught with drama, and he seems to have a pretty overinflated ego. He even goes so far as to write a play featuring himself as the central character, and build a giant golden statue of himself after taking over Asgard in the guise of Odin. But really, is his ego truly that big? Or he is overcompensating for his self-hatred and self-disgust?

Loki suffered quite the emotional blow when he found out his true heritage, a revelation that shook him to his very core. Of course, his relationship with his father suffered as a result...the man lied to him for his entire life. Their relationship really was not that great even before that since Odin found it easier to relate to Thor, who was more like him in personality, than to Loki, who was more cerebral and quieter. Loki’s relationship to Frigga fared much better. He’s quick to forgive her involvement in covering up the truth about his parentage, and it is obvious that they are close. Even his relationship with Thor prior to the events of the movie is not all that bad, the two brothers are affectionate and playful, and when Loki interrupts Thor’s coronation, it’s not just for the sake of creating trouble, but to postpone Thor taking the crown for another little while because he is not fit to rule. At the time Thor had yet to go through his character development arc on Earth and he was still an overly arrogant, bloodthirsty, elitist douchebag, so Loki really had a good point.

A true narcissist would have done what Loki did just for the sake of making life difficult for Thor. Also, he would have done it because he wanted the throne. Loki states repeatedly that he never wanted to rule. A true narcissist would have been all smiles about taking the throne instead of being reluctant about it as Loki was when Frigga handed him Gungnir.

Throughout the films, and in the first episode of the series, we see that Loki does indeed love his family and is capable of feeling guilt over the things that he does to them, intentionally or not. Narcissists typically don’t feel remorse. As far as they are concerned, they are perfect and can do no wrong, so they have nothing to feel bad about. If they hurt you, it’s because you deserved it. You shouldn’t have provoked their ire.

Loki feels bad for getting Frigga killed, and then later on Odin. Then he is in tears when Odin dies, and later at the mere thought of never seeing Thor again when the two brothers talk in an elevator on Sakaar. Those are not the actions of someone who is incapable of loving anyone but himself, as I’ve seen so many people claim about him. And the fact that he sacrificed himself to save his brother also kind of kills the whole “narcissist” narrative.

In Episode 1, Loki breaks down and confesses to Mobius that he doesn’t like hurting people. He does it because it’s part of the façade, and admits that he sees himself as weak. A few episodes later, he admits to a memory illusion Sif that he craves attention “because I’m a narcissist” and admits to being afraid of being alone. That is far more self-reflection than a typical narcissist is capable of in my experience. As I said, narcissists tend to think they are perfect. A true narcissist would never admit to having any flaws, and sure as hell would never admit that they are a narcissist. As far as the true narcissist is concerned, if you find them flawed in any way, that’s on you. The narcissist has no need for self-reflection because they honestly see nothing wrong with themselves, and believe that they don’t need to change...it’s everyone else who does.

A good real-life example from my past is a former friend I’ll call D. D was a self-proclaimed brat who was quite proud of the fact that she could be difficult to be in a relationship with and tended to go through men like tissue paper. She was demanding, self-centered, extremely jealous, manipulative, and prone to wild mood swings. She could and did go from zero to insane at the drop of a hat. In the time I knew her, she left a string of burnt guys behind, and according to her it was because they just weren’t man enough to handle her. She also left behind a string of broken former friends, to the point where there really needed to be a support group for former friends of D who suddenly had her turn them into Public Enemy Number 1 when they either started taking attention away from D, or...well, that was it really. As I said, she was a very jealous person and had a chronic need to be the center of attention, especially if there were men around. Anyway, instead of working on herself to become less self-involved, self-absorbed, and more empathetic, she double downed on her abrasiveness and constant need for attention until she finally wore the poor man down and he either ghosted her or outright dumped her. She never broke up with them, preferring to keep them around for as long as they were willing in order to toy with them as a cat does with a mouse.  I tried to talk to her about her horrible behavior, but instead of taking my constructive criticism and maybe using it to make some needed changes, she completely turned on me and did her best to make my life hell until I finally cut her out of it. I learned two things: Narcissists don’t want help because they don’t feel they need it and they are never going to change as a result, and never, ever try to confront a narcissist. It’ll only end badly.  

A more famous example? Former US President Donald Trump. I won’t get into that, because really all you need to do is perform a quick Google search to see what all he’s done and witness his narcissism on full display. But really, place him side by side with Loki. Do you see any similarities at all? Maybe on the surface, but when you go deeper...no. Loki is not a narcissist. He’s capable of deep self-reflection, owns his faults, is capable of loving others, and feels remorse. I would argue that anyone who says he is a narcissist, either does not know the character, or hasn’t ever actually dealt with a narcissist in real life, to which I can only say: Lucky you.  

I honestly would argue that calling Loki a narcissist is actually doing a disservice to victims of abuse from actual narcissists.

What about Sylvie? Well, in contrast to Loki who does show remorse while Mobius is playing that “This Is Your Life” reel for him, Sylvie shows no remorse or regret. She knows that the TVA agents she kills are as much victims as she is. They are innocent variants who were kidnapped from Earth and forced to work for the TVA after having their memories wiped. She knows this, yet the first time we see her she burns a bunch of TVA agents alive, and she just stands there watching as they scream in agony. In the next episode she says right out that she’s “having some fun” while possessing the body of C-90 and murdering more agents. She is not at all sorry about doing what she did, and we’re supposed to be understanding since she was kidnapped as a child. Okay, but the entire TVA didn’t do that. The agents she kills didn’t personally kidnap her. The only one we see who was directly involved in that is Renslayer. Sylvie “did what she had to do”, fine. But she doesn’t feel bad about it, at all. The flashback to her as a child takes great pains to try to show us what a good person she is when she cries out “Help him!” as another prisoner is being beaten, but I guess she grew out of it.

We don’t know if Sylvie has any other narcissistic traits besides lack of remorse because, well, the show really doesn’t do much to show her personality. Other than killing people, trying to kill Loki, and then flirting with Loki, we just don’t really see much to her. It’s another trait of a Mary Sue. Mary Sues often have bland, one-dimensional personalities. After all, their only purpose is usually to serve as love interests for one or more male characters. Mary Sues break the “show, don’t tell” rule by having the other characters verbally inform us about their traits, usually while singing their praises, but we don’t actually see those traits in the Mary Sue herself.

Loki calls Sylvie “amazing”, but how amazing is she, really? She kills people she knows are victims, she endangers the timeline just to sneak into the TVA, and then she kills Kang despite knowing that there is a very good chance that doing so could unleash something far, far worse than him. Then again, it doesn’t have to make sense when you’re pushing an unwanted and unasked for romance on an audience who was expecting a scifi show, not a romance.

I have spoken in a few places about this. Romance is fine, but in a show that blatantly places itself in the scifi genre, it really should only be the background, not center stage. When I expressed this opinion, I got accused of being dismissive of an essential part of the human experience. Well, first of all, congratulations: You just invalidated the existence of people on the asexual and aromantic spectrums, not to mention people who are celibate by choice. Second, that is why we have the romance genre. To tell stories centered around romance. I like romance, I read romance novels, and I sometimes write romantic fiction. But there are some places where it just is not appropriate.

There are people who say that adding romance makes things more interesting. Nope, in those cases it’s just a smokescreen, something used to hide plot holes and distract us from just how empty the story really is. Writers like to say that if you need a romance to make things more interesting, then you really don’t have much of a story in the first place. And sadly, Loki does have some plot holes. The nexus event on Lamentis is a good example, and the romance is definitely used to distract us from that. People were so focused on “oh wow, they’re having a moment, they’re soulmates!” that they didn’t think “waitaminute...didn’t they say that nexus events can’t occur in apocalypses?”

We really did not need a romance in Loki. Period. It was unnecessary, it was distracting, a lot of people found it disturbing, and it actively hurt a marginalized group.

Loki Is A Queer Icon!...maybe

I am not going to say that the relationship between Loki and Sylvie is not a bisexual one. A bisexual relationship is a bisexual relationship regardless of whether or not the person the bisexual person is with is the opposite sex. Saying otherwise is biphobic. Biphobic people in both the straight and the queer communities have been excluding bisexual people who happen to be in opposite sex relationships for years because apparently one stops being bisexual once they get into a relationship with someone of the opposite sex. This is horseshit. I’ve been in relationships with CIS men, did I stop being attracted to other men, women, nonbinary, genderfluid, agender, and other genderqueer people? No. No, I didn’t, because while I was entangled, I was not dead. Heterosexual people don’t stop being attracted to other members of the opposite sex when they are in relationships, it’s no different with queer people.

So, stop saying that Loki and Sylvie are not a bisexual relationship. You’re not doing us any favors at all, and in fact you’re only helping the biphobes who want to kick us out of Pride and other queer spaces for daring to date members of the opposite sex.

I will address the “Bit of both” line however. In Episode 3, Loki has that response to Sylvie’s questioning about whether there had been any would-be princesses or princes in his life. Again, a conversation that comes out of nowhere. She stated outright that she didn’t trust him, clearly wanted him dead, and now she’s asking if he’s single. Whatever.

Anyway, people went nuts when Loki answered “A bit of both”. It was confirmation that Loki was bisexual, it was celebrated on social media...and it is really biphobic and Kate Herron, who is bisexual herself, really should have known better.

Biphobic people have long tried to sow division between the bi and trans communities (unsurprisingly, biphobia and transphobia tend to go hand-in-hand) by saying that the concept of being bisexual is transphobic. “Bi” means two, ergo bisexual people are only attracted to two genders, specifically CIS men and CIS women. It never occurs to anyone that the “two genders” a bisexual person could be attracted to could be, say, women (and yes, I include trans women in that, since they are in fact women, get over it) and non-binary people, or agender and gender-fluid people, it’s always CIS men and CIS women. This despite the fact that the definition of bisexual has been “attraction to more than one gender” since long before the Bisexual Manifesto was put out in 1990.

Some people have tried to remedy this by adopting the moniker of “pansexual” instead, which A) is basically reinforcing what biphobes are saying about bisexuals and creating even more division and B) doesn’t just mean “attraction to trans people as well, I’m not transphobic, I promise!” “Pansexual” is not interchangeable with “bisexual”. Pansexual is attraction to all genders. Bisexual means attraction to more than one gender, but not necessarily to all genders. You can have a bisexual person, for instance, who is attracted to all genders except for men. If you are attracted to more than one gender, but not to all genders, you are bisexual, and labeling yourself pansexual is lying and basically caving in to the biphobes.

I’m not trying to police what people call themselves...if you want to use the two terms interchangeably, if you want to call yourself bisexual, or pansexual, it’s fine. But just evaluate the reasons why. Are you calling yourself pansexual because you really think you can be, or are you just calling yourself that out of fear of being labeled transphobic? The latter, in my opinion, is not a really good reason, and it only helps deliver the biphobic message that bisexual people are transphobic.

So, by saying “a bit of both”, Loki is really helping to reinforce that biphobic assertion that bisexual people are attracted just to CIS men and CIS women. It’s disappointing, but it is Disney so I suppose that is the best we can expect for now. It just shows that Disney really has a long way to go.

What’s more problematic is the supposed genderfluid representation. Now, I am a CIS woman. As such, I feel unqualified to really say that the representation is shitty and fluidphobic. However, if I’m not qualified to say that it is, then Kate Herron and the writers are unqualified to say that it isn’t. Rule of thumb: If members of a marginalized group are telling you that you did a poor job of representing them and that you are being transphobic or fluidphobic, instead of ignoring and dismissing their concerns like a good portion of the population already does, it’s a really good idea to listen to what they are saying and learn how you can do better.

There have been some genderfluid and trans people who expressed that they liked the show, and good for them. But I have seen a lot of very valid criticisms and concerns from genderfluid and trans people about the representation on the show, and I think they really should be listened to. Kate, you and I are queer, but we are still CIS women. Ergo, we have no say in whether or not the way you attempted to present Loki’s gender fluidity is transphobic. If genderfluid people say it’s fluidphobic or trans people say it’s transphobic, then it is indeed fluidphobic/transphobic. To say otherwise is gaslighting a marginalized community who already faces gaslighting on a daily basis.

I will touch on a couple of things.

First, in Episode 5, Loki asks a bunch of his variants if they have ever encountered a female version of themselves, a question that is met with varying levels of incredulousness and even disgust. If Loki was truly genderfluid, this question wouldn’t have been asked. Genderfluid means the person shifts genders along the spectrum. Loki does this in the comics. Comicbook Loki switches between masculine and feminine presenting on the drop of a dime, especially in his current incarnation. Loki in the MCU we are told is also genderfluid, and should also be able to hop along the gender spectrum on a whim. There should not be a “female variant” therefore, since they are all the same gender. There could be a female presenting variant, but that is not the same thing. They would still be all genderfluid in that case. Also, Sylvie’s nexus event would not have been “being born the Goddess of Mischief”. Okay, the show never actually says that is the nexus event that led to her being arrested, but it heavily implies it. If Sylvie is a Loki, and as a Loki is genderfluid, her being the “Goddess” of Mischief should never have been an issue since they can change genders anyway.

Second, making Lady Loki a separate person is problematic. A lot of genderfluid people felt that this move invalidated their identity by basically showing that the same person cannot indeed be different genders along the spectrum. I don’t feel I’m totally qualified to really get into this. I will just say that if you’re going to write a genderfluid character, maybe at least get an actual genderfluid person to advise in the writing room.

Third, there is a transphobic movement called trans exclusionary radical feminism. You might have heard of it. Unfortunately, it is a very widespread movement that has done a lot of harm to the trans community, successfully blocking funding to organizations that help trans people, blocking laws that would benefit trans people, and the movement includes celebrities like Graham Linehan and JK Rowling.

One of the weapons they like to use against trans women is the concept of “autogynephilia”. It is basically the sexual fetish of becoming aroused from thinking of oneself as a woman.  Many, many of these transphobic “feminists” love to say that trans women are merely men who have this particular sexual fetish.

It’s bullshit of course. Maybe there is a small segment of the male population that has that fetish, but trans women are not included in that. For trans women, things like dressing as women, changing their names, having state and federal issued IDs that say they are female, and being able to use the restrooms and change rooms that match the gender they actually are as opposed to the one they were assigned at birth is not a matter of sexual arousal. It’s a matter of making their external realities match their internal ones. It’s a matter of validation of their identities as women. Sexual gratification has nothing to do with it.

Now, Loki is not trans, but genderfluid people do tend to fall under the trans umbrella. We have Loki, a supposedly genderfluid individual and masculine presenting, falling head over heels in love with a feminine presenting version of himself. Maybe it’s just me, but it just seems like a form of autogynephilia to me.

Way to go, Kate...you just gave the TERFs more ammo.

One more note: At one point, Kate tweeted a list of the different Loki emojis, and “jokingly” included #FiretruckLoki with an emoji of a firetruck. Kate, you do realize that a “joke” transphobes love to harp on is that they can identify as an attack helicopter, right?

It’s his way of learning self-love!

That is not how you learn self-love.

First, the people who are making this argument often contradict themselves by then saying that Sylvie is a different person. Again, make up your minds. Either Sylvie is the same person as Loki, or she’s not. You can’t have it both ways, and you can’t continue to change the narrative to fit whatever it is you want to shove down the audience’s throats.

Second, romantic love and self-love are two different things entirely. Loki isn’t feeling self-love with Sylvie, he’s feeling romantic love. That’s not learning self-love. That's narcissism, and it’s character regression in his case. He’s supposed to be evolving past being a self-centered, egotistical shitweasel, and falling in love with a variant of himself makes him, as Mobius put it, “a seismic narcissist”. It’s not character development.  

Third, this argument tends to come in the same breath as saying that Loki is a narcissist so of course he would fall for a variant of himself. If Loki is a narcissist though, why would he need to learn self-love? Narcissists already love themselves, that is the very definition of the word. If Loki needs to learn self-love, that would imply that he actually hates himself, which is the opposite of narcissism. Again, the writers and the fans who make these arguments when they feel the need to defend this relationship need to make up their minds. Either he’s a narcissist and therefore already loves himself too much, or he hates himself and needs to learn to love himself. It’s once again changing the narrative to fill a plothole.  

Fourth, the whole learning self-love and trust narrative is completely thrown out the window in Episode 6 when Sylvie decides to toy with Loki’s emotions, using his feelings for her against him by kissing him as a distraction so she could grab Kang’s temp pad and toss Loki back to the TVA. To Sylvie, her revenge was more important than the bond she had with him. The move basically set Loki’s progress back several steps. What little progress he made anyway.

TL:DR, is there hope for Season 2?

Whew, this went on for a while, didn’t it? Told you I had a lot to say.

As I have said, if you liked the first season of Loki and think I am completely full of shit, that’s fine and it’s your prerogative. More power to you.  

But, and this is a huge but, that does not give you the right to harass and bully people who did not like it.

I have witnessed horrible things from both sides of the now split Loki fandom on social media. Harassment and even death threats towards the creators. Telling people who don’t like the Loki and Sylvie relationship that they need to drink bleach. Homophobic attacks. Gatekeeping.  

There’s constructive criticism and sharing your opinions, and then there is...this.

Both sides need to chill.

Anyway.

Even though Kate Herron has left the show, Michael Waldron is still the showrunner and as such I am not altogether optimistic for Season 2. I would like to see more emphasis on Loki himself for that season. Yes, it’s a novel thought, wanting a show that is called Loki to actually be about Loki, but here we are.

I would like to see actual character development in Loki rather than the old “true love transforms bad boy and conquers all” trope. There is a reason Disney has started to abandon that trope in their animated movies. They’ve been getting dragged about it for decades.

If Sylvie must return, there needs to be some actual consistency surrounding her character. The show needs to decide if she is a Loki or not and stick with whichever one they decide. And seriously, no more romance. Frankly, after what she pulled in Episode 6, I will be severely disappointed if the writers have Loki crawling back to her. That would make him pathetic, and Loki deserves better.

Really, Loki does not need a romance, period. He’s too emotionally immature, he has a lot of character growth to go through, and a romance would do nothing but be a distraction and an impediment to that growth. Anyone who got married too young can confirm that it is important to learn more about yourself and figure yourself out before you even think of getting involved with another person, who should not be your whole world. The Loki and Sylvie romance was reminding me of Classic Disney in another not-good way in that the two of them, especially on Loki’s side, were starting to revolve around one another and that does not make for a healthy relationship. Again, turning Loki into a Disney Prince (or, seeing as how he’s supposed to be genderfluid, Princess). Stop it.

Again, the romance was a smokescreen. It was a distraction from just how thin the plot was. Please, for the love of G-d, give more focus to the actual plot.

Do some research and talk to some psychologists for healthy ways Loki can “learn self-love" and develop as a character. If Ragnarok Loki can do it without relying on a romance with a variant with himself, then surely TVA Loki can pull it off.

Speaking of talking to people, listen to the concerns of the trans and genderfluid fans. Listen, talk to them, maybe get a couple in the writer’s room. CIS people should not write genderfluid people, and this season is a good example of why.

Please remember that Loki is not an idiot. Yes, he has pulled some fast ones and hasn’t been the greatest planner, but he is not downright stupid like he was in season 1.

And...really that’s all I have. As I have said, this thesis really wasn’t about making suggestions to the creators because I seriously doubt they will ever even see this. This was more less me screaming into the void, venting because I was that upset about what I saw as character assassination happening to one of my favorite characters. Keeping all of this in was proving to be bad for my blood pressure.  

I am attached to the character, have been for years. Loki is just one character in the MCU who I love, who I want to see done right. I had been looking forward to his solo series for a very long time, and the disappointment I felt was something that I just couldn’t keep in. I kept my mouth shut when they killed off Tony Stark for no reason other than that Ronnie Downey, Jr. didn't want to renew his contract. I didn’t say anything at the Russo Brothers’ “happy ending” for Steve Rogers, even though I feel it made no sense and is a massive plot hole.  

What they did to Loki, however...I couldn’t keep silent.

[sheadre]

Aurora Borealis (Jiang Cheng x Reader) Part Two

Summary: Zhu Ran'En (Reader) the imperial princess, was sent into exile for a crime she did not commit. Meeting Jiang Wanyin, the Yunmeng Jiang sect's leader was not just a chance meeting. Their fates were written in the stars however, her relations to the royal family will never let her live in peace. How will she manage to save the kingdom while trying to keep Jiang Wanyin away from the snakes of the royal family?

Word count: 3281

Warnings: this story contains violence, blood, mindgames, scheming, angst, romance, fluff with Jiang Cheng, awkward flirting.

A/N: If you liked this story, please like and comment or reblog! You may find this story on quotev.com/Vaeri or on ao3. Please check out my other works in the Mo Dao Zu Shi fandom! Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoy!＜（＾－＾）＞

You sat in silence as you sipped on your tea with your face ordered into nonchalance. You got used to having to wear a neutral mask around people in the palace and it was a habit that couldn’t be easily left behind. Your (e/c) eyes looked the sect leader over who was eying you with suspicion. He was handsome as was told by many in the kingdom, his features chiseled and strong, his body lean and tall. You already had time to check him out when you first encountered him but a second glance couldn’t hurt, now could it?

If you would still be a part of the court, your father would definitely try and engage you to Jiang Wanyin. Your father always wished for a strong son-in-law who could protect his daughter. And this time, you wouldn’t protest.

“Imperial guards are asking about your highness all around the other towns in this region” Jiang Wanyin spoke up with a scowl. “You are already spending your time in exile.”

“My dear cousin wishes to secure her place in the court and fears that I will take action” you shrugged. “Not that she is wrong.”

“Your highness, are you planning something?” Jiang Wanyin grumbled, his eyes sparkling with lightning. “I warn you, there will be innocent people caught in the middle of your war against whoever offended you in the court. I’m here for them.”

“And I tell you that those innocent people might all be wiped out if you try and restrain me from taking action. Do you even know why I’m here?” you narrowed your eyes at him, your fingernails rattling against the wooden surface of the small table. It seemed Jiang Wanyin failed to dig deeper than the rumors going on around about the case, his light blush of embarrassment was indicating that. You sighed heavily and picked up the kettle to refill your cups while taking a breath to continue: “I caught my cousin and uncle, the second prince talking about money embezzlement and money laundering. They realized their mistake and now I’m here. To simply put it…”

“There is something more to that if your highness seems to be in such a distressed state” the sect leader noted calmly his eyebrows still furrowed. You wondered if anything would make him smile in his life. You imagined him smiling and hid the picture in the back of your mind. He would give a magnificent sight for sure.

“I advise you to not interfere with my plans… if a commoner like you get caught in the war of the royal family, what do you think might become your future?” you asked. Sitting back down, you pulled your hands in your lap but held his stare.

“Those kind of wars always end up being the public’s demise. Are you planning on sacrificing innocent people?” Jiang Wanyin asked back lifting his chin and you could tell that he was already determined in getting involved.

“I plan to earn the emperor’s favor again” you replied not wanting to argue anymore with him. There was no point, you could just leave him out of everything. You didn’t need his help nor wanted it. He had no idea of the monsters ruling the kingdom and how many people would be devoured by them. You got reminded of the hard times in the palace you spent with cornering people, avoiding corrupt ministers’ hands grabbing onto your sleeves so they could get you involved in their shady businesses. Your cousin always tried to get you in trouble so you would get executed but to her misfortune you were too smart.

“By starting a war?!” Jiang Cheng gritted his teeth angrily.

“Starting one?!” you jumped to your feet from anger. Of course, the sect leader wouldn’t know about anything of your plans but his nosiness annoyed you. “I’m going to end the rebellion the war generals of Wu, Yan and Jin are planning!”

“Rebellion?” his jaw went slack. You rolled your eyes and crossed your arms in front of your chest with a huff.

“If you were sharp enough to notice the imperial guards roaming the area, you should’ve rather noticed the brewing war under our feet” you noted as you sat back down. You didn’t really care about the fact that he left out your title by now. You were convinced that you didn’t need his help but… maybe you were wrong and should consider accepting his hand if he would offer. You had no army, Jiang Wanyin had, you had no connection to the other sects, he had. Then you started massaging the bridge of your nose continuing: “Forgive me for my words… I did not mean to be so harsh, it is only frustrating me so much that I know what awaits us if my cousin and uncle wins. The emperor is old and sickly, everyone is already preparing for the coronation of Crown Prince… however, without me looking out for his highness, I have no idea if he will live long enough to become emperor.”

Silence stretched between you two, him staring you down while you sipped on your tea with the perfect mask of calm. It was quite easy to pull it on by now. You were already planning your next move as you sat there. Perhaps, Jiang Wanyin could be a key character in your heroic story, you just needed to pull the strings in the right way… but that was quite hard.

“Your highness, I am only here to warn you” Jiang Cheng spoke up suddenly and stood up then. “Do not sacrifice innocent people.” His eyes were spitting lightning at you from where he stood before Jiang Cheng turned around and stormed out of the mansion. You smiled at his lack of manners, his temper reminded you of a friend you left in the palace. You wondered how Xiao Pei was doing now that he was by himself. He got a high rank in the military but everyone knew of your good relations. He was like a little brother to you.

You knew that Jiang Wanyin will come back to you in the near future. The news about a rebellion of the three small counties was spreading. Wu, Yan and Jin generals had authority over the three counties closest to where Yunmeng was located. Yunmeng would be the first to meet their united armies once the generals would advance towards the capital. However, you had much to do in the meantime. With a smirk you went back to your study and rolled out a blank parchment.

Jiang Cheng’s PoV.

Jiang sect leader was furious by the way the princess was acting. There was a war brewing under their feet and she was only adamant on getting her place back at the palace. Her position was more important to her than anything else! She was just like the other royals, sacrificing innocent people for wealth and power. He felt foolish for hoping that maybe Zhu Ran’En was different and was rebelling to stop injustice. He was wrong.

For a second he hoped that she was different, that she was using the dark ways of cultivation because she needed to. However, the evil glint in her eyes told him otherwise. Arriving back to Yunmeng gave him a feeling of calm and tranquility. As the days passed, he easily forgot about the princess, work piling up. He spent nights figuring out the financials and counting how much money they needed for the replacements of training dummies and other supplies. Wei Wuxian showed up with his… husband, Hanguang-Jun and was annoying Jiang Cheng to the point he was sporting a massive headache.

“Ah, Jiang Cheng! I heard you went after the Dark Princess!” Wei Ying burst into the study with a large excited grin on his face. Wanyin was already starting to massage his temples but had yet to yell at his brother. “Is she as pretty as the rumors say?! How was she?!”

“Why are you so excited suddenly, ay?” Wanyin asked back as he put down the brush knowing that he won’t be doing any more progress today. “Have you got tired of Hanguang-Jun?”

“Wha-?! Why are you saying such things, Jiang Cheng?!” Wei Wuxian leaned forward right into Jiang Cheng’s face with a scrutinizing gaze before his face lit up like he found the problem for world peace. “Are you being defensive because you like her?!”

“Wha-?! Why would I like her?!” Wanyin jumped up to his feet with his fists trembling by his sides. “She’s evil and vicious! She’s not pretty at all! Just one of the pampered princesses only caring about wealth!”

“Did you get rejected by her?” Wei Ying narrowed his eyes in thought as he tried to guess. “That is why you’re so sour, Jiang Cheng?”

“Who is sour?! Huh?!” Wanyin felt like jumping out of his skin. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to strangle his brother or run away and never look back until he found peace. Lately that term seemed to not exist. People were always finding him for something. A broken practice dummy here, a young disciple in need of a practice sword because the one he had was lost to the river or broken. Was it really such a luxurious request to just be left alone for a while?

What irked the sect leader even more was the fact that Wei Wuxian was not the first person to ask him about the matters of marriage. The elders expressed their concern of a sect heir because other men in his age was already married with at least two children. It wasn’t about him not having any interest in the matter but he was just too busy to think about it. He had no time to court anyone and he refused to just marry a woman he never met before.

“Wei Ying” came suddenly Hanguang-Jun’s quiet voice and just like an obedient pet, Wei Wuxian turned to his husband with a wide smile on his face and hurried over to the entering cultivator. At least, Hanguang-Jun still had manners and bowed to Jiang Cheng upon entering the study. “It is time we leave Jiang sect leader to his duties and do not bother him longer. We have to take care of those ghosts in Chongyang.”

“Alright…” the Yiling Patriarch sighed deflating at the lost chance to annoy his brother further. Jiang Wanyin walked his guests out to the pier with prayers to the heavens for helping him out. His thoughts then turned back to Zhu Ran’En. What was she planning? She was so sure about her success it was giving him chills. She was definitely an enemy he didn’t want to make.

At Chongyang:

The city was quiet. The people were all acting scared and worried, lines were forming on their forehead the second they spotted someone unfamiliar. Fog was encasing the whole city, vendors closed their shops and went to somewhere safe. The small inn which welcomed Hanguang-Jun and Wei Wuxian with reluctance was close to the middle of the city. Wei Wuxian tried to ask around about the sightings of the ghosts but got short replies of the same kind. All of the people were talking about the grey clothed ghosts or corpses who roamed the city at night and killed those who stepped foot on the streets. A few men mentioned that it all started after the appearance of a man in the clothes of the royal officials. No one knew what the man was doing in the city or if he was still around.

It all sounded suspicious to him. So Hanguang-Jun and Wei Ying decided to stay at the inn and see what happens at night. Wei Wuxian sat with his back to his husband’s chest when his ears suddenly perked up at the sound of an erhu. He jumped up and went to the window not caring about his state of clothing. He scanned the area with his eyes narrowed and soon spotted a dark figure standing on the rooftop of the building forty chi distance far from his position. The delicate figure of a woman was sitting on the rooftop with an erhu in her lap. A cold calmness was surrounding her as the wind blew her long dark hair.

“Lan Zhan, look” he mumbled while his husband walked up behind him.

“Resentful energy” Hanguang-Jun said with a low voice.

“Mnn” Wei Wuxian nodded and pulled his robes tighter around himself fixing it before grabbing Chenqing. “Let’s check it out!”

Your PoV.

The city was quiet as the sun disappeared behind the horizon. You always loved to watch life go by under your feet when you observed the world from the rooftop of a building. It was calming, like you weren’t a part of the world and could disappear from sight to watch everything happen without actually taking part in anything. You sat there in silence as the sky turned dark and the stars appeared. The fog around the city only obscured the vision of the starry night sky from those who stood below. However, you could easily admire the beauty of the night. Then you heard it. Otherworldly grunts and moans coming from below.

Liu Minister, who visited the city a few days ago and whom you should’ve met here disappeared when the animated corpses started roaming the city at night. The minister – who was your good ally – sent letter to you about someone following him since he left the Imperial palace in the capital. Pulling out your erhu from your back, you smiled mischievously while you hummed a tune. A tune you learnt from your mother. 恶梦È mèng (Wicked Dream) was the song your mother taught you when her family was accused of treason and got executed. After that, your mother lost the favor of the emperor and was the laughing stock of the people in court. The night you found her dead body, you heard those notes coming from her quarters. You promised yourself to find her killer because even if she was ashamed, even if she lost the favor of the emperor, she would’ve never committed suicide.

The notes were flying in the air as you played. Resentful energy surrounding you before black mist circled the animated corpses and closed around them. You were curious if the culprit would show themselves if you annoyed them with binding the corpses together. Your ears then perked up and before the two newcomers could land on the rooftop you were sitting on, you jumped over to another one.

“Ah, I remember you!” Wei Wuxian exclaimed with a large grin on his face. “You’re the lady who gave up the table for us!”

“Ahaha, nice seeing you again, Young master” you smiled at him.

“You’re using resentful energy” Hanguang-Jun stated but his tone was not scolding. There was no warning in his words, just a simple statement, an observation. You expected a different reception when you thought about meeting this pair again.

“What can this humble one do?” you asked, shrugging your shoulders with a pout. “This is the only way for me to cultivate.”

“Don’t you have a golden core, Imperial Princess?” the Yiling Patriarch asked then. Your smile widened before you let out a mirthful laugh. He was smarter than you thought he was. If he would be your opponent at court, you would have fun for sure.

“A princess is taught to learn embroidery and etiquette, Wei gōngzǐ” you replied squinting your eyes before turning to the corpses. “Don’t you find it interesting that these appear once a minister disappears? Hmn?”

You were well aware of him noticing how you changed the subject but it seemed he decided not to object to it. It was clear you weren’t his enemy which in your opinion was based on where he was standing when your plans were executed. Opinions and interests can change in a matter of time after all. Then you heard clapping from down below. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap. It was repeated once more before the corpses broke out of your energy shield. Their angry moans and grunts could be heard as they approached the buildings you were standing on. Soon, screaming was heard from the house and you saw that it was the house of a merchant.

You stamped your foot on the tiles which broke under the force and a hole opened up under you. You landed inside the bedroom of the frightened merchant and his wife who were hiding behind the over turned table. The corpses stumbled inside toppling over each other but you were quick enough the cut them off before they could get to the pair. Hanguang-Jun and Wei Wuxian was soon following you through the hole and before you had to say anything, Lan Wangji grabbed the husband and wife and took them to safety. Unleashing your full power felt like you opened the gate of a dam. Yet it felt even more liberating when the Yiling Patriarch followed you in tow.

You saw the grin spreading on his lips and knew that he felt the same thing. This burst of power was enough to decapitate all the corpses in close proximity. You hurried downstairs and went out to the street to be faced with more animated corpses. Your sword was a simple sword but was your trusted ally in battles by now. It shimmered in the light of the few lampions placed above the street. Otherwise, the fog made it hard to see further than one chǐ. (That’s like half a meter)

You heard someone whistle with the wind from the distance. You cursed under your breath knowing that the culprit was already too far for you to catch up.

“Lan Zhan went after him” Wei Wuxian spoke up from behind you suddenly. Then you heard the dull thud of corpses falling to the ground. The puppet master was too far to control the corpses.

“He’s too far by now…” you sighed with your eyebrows furrowed.

“Your Highness seems to be upset” he noted stepping closer to you.

“The Minister who visited the city before the corpses appeared…” you started staring at the ground as the fog dissolved around you. “He is a good man but I think he is dead by now or at least the culprit took him with themselves.”

“You are familiar with the minister, aren’t you, Your Highness?” he asked.

“Stop calling me that, Wei gongzi” you shook your head with a sad smile. “I no longer possess the title, not officially.”

“The man got away” Hanguang-Jun spoke up once he landed in front of the two of you. “But he tried to obscure my vision with this.” He lifted his hand with a handkerchief in it. Your eyes widened and quickly approached him taking it from his outstretched hand. The fabric was one of the most expensive materials, only the imperial palace had access to something of the kind. It was a pearly white with the symbol of the Huang house.

“That dirty pip-squeak! Cui!*” you spat angrily as your hand curled into a fist with the handkerchief between your fingers.

“I assume your highness is troubled over the matter” Wei Wuxian quipped curiosity shining in his eyes. You turned around and started walking towards the other direction as you said.

“This is an Imperial matter, please stay out of trouble” your voice rang through the street even when the fog already swallowed you. “This is way too dangerous for those who do not belong to the court.”

To be continued…

*Cuì=啐 is a sound for spitting.

[fillingthescrapbook]

Rewriting The CW's Kung Fu, Part 6: Act II

We're nearly to the end, but if you're somehow seeing this before any of the previous posts, you can find them here:

Part 1: The Characters

Part 2: The Pilot

Part 3: The Mythology

Part 4: The Story Map

Part 5: Act I

If you've read all that, I am hoping that you've gotten to know Nicky enough that you're willing to ride along for the next part of her journey. Because we're going to the territory that the show actually covered (with a few rewrites, of course): the hunt for the mystical weapons.

Episode 6: Bond

We start this episode with Nicky reeling over two revelations: one, that Althea is a survivor of sexual harassment, and two, that Zhi-Lan is her dead mentor's sister. But she's going to focus first on what's more important: her own family. Nicky tells Althea that she will be there to support her whatever Althea decides to do. Althea admits that she doesn't know yet--

When Dennis tells Althea that his family's been invited to a gala at the museum for a loaned Chinese exhibit, Althea also finds out that her former boss at Cloudrush Capital will be in attendance--as a donor. Althea asks Nicky and Ryan to come with her for support--but Ryan has hospital duties. So Nicky asks Henry to accompany them instead.

At the house, Ryan can feel that there's tension between him and Mei-Li. He thinks it's because he's gay--until he realizes that his parents don't actually know that he had come out when he stood with Joe (in the last episode). Ryan explains to Jin and Mei-Li that the reason he only had one girlfriend, who quickly dumped him, is because he is gay. Jin and Mei-Li are speechless. Mei-Li walks out, uncertain of how to act. Jin, trying and failing to be supportive, just taps Ryan on the shoulder.

At the museum, Henry recognizes one of the weapons on display. It's one of the eight mystical weapons. But when he is about to point it out to Nicky, the latter had already left him. Because Nicky spotted Zhi-Lan at the gala. She is about to follow Zhi-Lan when she sees Althea having a panic attack upon seeing her former boss. Nicky weighs her options, but chooses to stay with Althea instead.

With Althea calmed down, Nicky tells Henry that Zhi-Lan is at the gala. Henry figures out that Zhi-Lan is there for the weapon, explaining to Nicky that one of the eight fabled weapons that he mentioned to her before is part of the loaned exhibit. He takes her to the still-closed exhibit--and they catch two crooks trying to steal the weapon. They get into a fight with the crooks. They win. But when they turn to the display case, the weapon is gone.

Nicky sees Zhi-Lan making her way out of the museum. In a hurry. Nicky chases after her. The get into a fight and Nicky is holding her own against Zhi-Lan, thanks to her different training with Henry. But something is holding her back: her need to understand how Zhi-Lan could kill Pei-Ling. Which she asks Zhi-Lan point blank during a stand-off. Zhi-Lan is taken aback for a second before quickly recovering, saying she lost her sister when she was a kid. That the woman she killed at the monastery was of no relation to her. Zhi-Lan manages to knock Nicky down before getting away. Henry and Althea find Nicky and get her home.

Althea and Henry bring Nicky to the community center where Ryan is cleaning her wounds. Nicky explains that the woman she fought with was the woman who killed her mentor at the monastery. Henry explains that the woman, Zhi-Lan, is probably collecting the eight mystical weapons from folklore. According to legend, bringing the eight together and taking them back to where they were forged would grant the collector untold power. Nicky whispers, "Bian-Ge." Althea frowns. "Change?" Ryan is concerned. "Transformation." But Nicky doubts that that Zhi-Lan can find all eight weapons soon. It took her three years before she found the longsword, and she probably only lucked out with her second weapon because it was included in the exhibit advertisement. Nicky is more worried about Althea.

Nicky remembers a memory of her time at the monastery, when Pei-Ling told her about important decisions having a lot of weight. How she lost people she loved because she chose to honor what she believed is right. In the memory, Pei-Ling tells Nicky that time has a way of giving them clarity on what they should've done. But during a moment of crisis, all they can do is trust that their heart is in the right place.

In the present time, Althea tells Nicky that she doesn't think she has the courage to speak up. Not yet. Nicky understands. They all have their own pace when it comes to dealing with problems. She ran away for three years. Althea notes that Nicky is back now, that she's facing her problems now. Nicky hugs her sister, saying: "and you will face your problems too. When you're ready."

Nicky and Henry are targeted by the goons they fought at the museum. They think the two have the weapon that was stolen from the museum. Nicky and Henry get into another fight with the goons. This time, when they defeat the goons, Nicky calls Evan for police help.

Althea talks to her former colleague who wants to speak up against their ex-boss. Althea apologizes and says she cannot come out. Not right now. But she is willing to talk to whoever she needs to talk to. Under anonymity. To save those they can still save. The woman thanks Althea.

At the house, Ryan tells Nicky that he's moving out of the house. Nicky apologizes for not being there when he came out to their parents. Ryan tells Nicky that he didn't need her there after all. But he will need her moving forward. To watch over their parents with him out of the house, to keep him updated, and to still be there for him when he calls. Nicky promises. They hug. Ryan leaves.

Jin sees Mei-Li pulling out an old shoe box. Something he hasn't seen in years. It contains an old photo of Mei-Li...with her sister Mei-Xue. She tells Jin that she swore she wouldn't be like her mother. But why does it feel like she's doing what her mother had done too? Pushing her own children away?

Evan visits Nicky at Happy Dumplings to talk about the goons she and Henry stopped at the museum. Nicky tells Evan that she knows who the goons are working for "Zhang Zhi-Lan." Nicky reminds Evan that he was the one with the info on her connection with the Triad. Evan shakes his head, telling Nicky that they were bailed out by a business owned by a Raymond Tan. This makes Nicky think. Is there another party interested in the weapons?

We will have a mini-reveal here of Henry's apartment. It has a map of the world with markings. Photos of the eight weapons that have strings tying them to locations where they have been sighted. It seems that Henry is keeping a secret from Nicky.

Episode 7: Rage

In this episode, Nicky and Henry work together when one of Henry's students at the community center ask for their help. A friend of his has gotten involved with a dojo that cons their trainees into taking part in an underground fight club. The student shows them footage of the fight, which is a bloody affair, and Henry spots a pair of deer-horn knives in the decor that he tells Nicky later are among the mystical weapons.

Henry's first course of action is to go straight for the source--only to get injured by the guy in charge of the dojo. This leaves Nicky as their only viable way to get into the fight club.

Throughout the course of the story, Nicky remembers moments from the monastery where Pei-Ling teaches her how to use an opponent's emotions against them. Even sharing a story where a loved one got the better of her because she felt overwhelming concern while they were sparring. This is what Nicky will use to win the fight.

To get into the fight club, Nicky borrows money from Althea--which Dennis finds out about. When Nicky explains what's going on, Dennis is all in with helping out, saying he believes in helping the helpless--even when they look like they can take him down. Which gives Althea the idea that Dennis might be okay knowing her secret too. Ryan's in charge of putting first aid on Nicky afterwards, to keep her crime-fighting life a secret from their parents.

Meanwhile, Evan tries to investigate Raymond Tan, wanting to know why a business of his is employing thugs and goons. He gets caught by Raymond's son, Kerwin, who becomes curious about his father's non-business affairs.

Jin tries to reach out to Ryan, apologizing for his and Mei-Li's non-reactions to his coming out. While Ryan is appreciative, he doesn't want to move back in. He's better now, living with Joe.

At Althea's apartment, Ryan and Dennis have set up a laptop to find out what's going on at the fight club. They root for Nicky to go through a tournament so she could face off with the underground operation's main boss.

While Nicky is fighting, Henry goes about a second operation--to take the deer-horn knives from the dojo. In the ring, Nicky imagines Pei-Ling beside her. Cheering her on while she faces different people with different strengths. Telling her that the strengths and weaknesses are both important--because one person's weakness can also be used as their own strength, like how Nicky's small build can allow her to hit lower or drive more power in her hits.

At Althea's apartment, Mei-Li visits wanting her daughter to help with getting Ryan to move back in. Only to catch the livestream of Nicky's fight. Seeing Nicky in action. This makes Mei-Li back away and run. Althea and Ryan become worried.

When Althea and Dennis are left alone, Althea decides to tell Dennis about her experience at Cloudrush. At first Dennis is angry, he wants to strangle Althea's ex-boss himself. But after calming down, Dennis tells Althea that her secret doesn't change the way he feels about her.

The episode ends with Nicky winning the tournament. Henry getting the knives--and evidence that would help shut down the dojo front of the fight ring, preventing them from recruiting more fighters. But when Nicky gets home, Mei-Li is waiting for her. "I saw what you did. At that martial arts tournament." Nicky is perturbed. "That's not the life I wanted for you. But I feel like I pushed you into doing that. Like I pushed your brother into leaving our house. I don't want to push my children away, Nicky. So I'm no longer going to meddle in your lives. Go back to who you wanted to be before I sent you on that arranged-marriage trip three years ago. Get back together with Evan. Go back to law school. Just, please: stop fighting." This leaves Nicky speechless.

Episode 8: Silence

Happy Dumplings is in trouble. A lawsuit has been filed against the restaurant for discriminating against disabled people. Nicky is immediately able to prove that it's a fraudulent lawsuit designed to shakedown store owners who can't speak in English fluently--but unlike Happy Dumplings, other Chinese businesses in the neighborhood don't have former law school students under their roofs.

Mei-Li encourages Nicky to work with Evan to find out out what's going on with the fraudulent lawsuits, hoping that it will keep Nicky out of the warrior way. Jin confronts his wife with regards to her pushing Nicky towards Evan, when Henry is already helping their daughter move on. Mei-Li tells Jin the truth: she saw Nicky fighting people to save someone. She's scared for their daughter. Jin is confused. What's wrong with having a daughter who knows and is willing to defend others? Mei-Li decides to tell Jin the truth. (Off-screen, because there's a revelation--and it helps story-wise if we find out about it with the main character.)

While Nicky and Evan are busy canvassing the businesses in Chinatown that have received a lawsuit, they get assistance from Ryan and Joe--the latter of whom is working with the San Francisco Disability and Aging Services. None of the lawsuits can stand in court, but some of the business owners have already paid up, wanting to keep their head down and not rock the boat. Nicky and Evan trace the lawsuits back to Triad connections. Evan tells Nicky they need to get the police involved. Nicky, angry at Asians knocking down other Asians, thinks it's time to take measures into their own hands.

With Nicky busy with the fraudulent lawsuits, Henry heads back to Professor Chau's office to find out why he hasn't heard back. He learns that the professor still hasn't returned--so he breaks into the office to take a manuscript that was on loan to the professor. While inside the office, he finds a puzzle box that has a connection to the mystical weapons. He takes it too.

Meanwhile, Althea is roped into a family dinner night with Dennis's family. The dinner gets awkward when Dennis's father brings up the news about Althea's co-worker speaking up about sexual harassment in Cloudrush. Dennis is about to stand up for Althea's co-worker when his mother says the woman is probably just trying to shakedown the boss into giving her money or a higher position. Althea defends her co-worker. Dennis and his sister Chloe sides with Althea. But Mr and Mrs Soong tell them that they're just idealistic. They've had experience with people who use social justice just to get a leg up in the business. That not every victim is a real victim. This forces Althea to speak her truth. That she was a victim too. She just didn't want to say anything because she feared people won't believe her. And she feared right. She walks out. Dennis follows her against his parents' wishes.

Nicky almost gets in trouble with the Triad, but Evan is there to back her up. He tells her that he will lose his job if they find out what he's doing, and Nicky says that they're helping people--what's wrong with that? They discover that the Triad is now being run by the former boss's son, with the previous head still being in prison. Nicky wants to know why they're shaking down the Asian business owners. The new boss reasons that those business owners benefited from his father's protection for many years--and they turn their back on him when he needed them the most. Nicky tells him that his dad is a jerk who took advantage of people. "And you're worse because you're using important fights to your own gains--which makes it harder for people who are legitimately fighting for their rights to be heard." Nicky lays the smack down on the new boss of the Triad and his men. Evan points to Nicky everything the police will need to shut down the new Triad operations because he has to leave before the cavalry arrives.

Nicky, Althea, and Ryan get together to compare their days. Althea tells her siblings that Dennis's family now knows about her secret. And Dennis is standing by her. But she doesn't know if she has the courage to actually go public with the truth. Ryan breaks the news that he's going to be living on his own for the first time ever, as Joe has accepted a gig that would take him out of San Francisco for a month, because of the work they had done against the fraudulent lawsuits. And Nicky tells them how easy it was for her and Evan to return to their groove. Which makes her a little torn now, because she thinks she has feelings for Henry...but she still has feelings for Evan too.

At the district attorney's office, Evan gets a visit from Sabine. She shows him CCTV footage of Henry breaking into Professor Chau's office. She tells Evan that she's worried that Nicky might have fallen in with the wrong crowd.

And at the end of the episode, Henry brings the puzzle box he stole to Nicky. Nicky recognizes it as having the same puzzle as Pei-Ling's safe at the monastery. She opens the box. There's a jade key inside. And this is when Mei-Li and Jin arrive. Jin tells Nicky that Mei-Li has something important to tell her. Mei-Li sees the jade key in Henry's hand and tells him that he might as well hear what she has to say too. Their family comes from a lineage believed to be descended from a great warrior called Liang Dai-Yu. Mei-Li turns to Nicky: this belief already cost her a sister. She doesn't want to lose a daughter too. She pleads with Nicky; "you can build the life you want, and I won't argue. But please don't follow in my sister's footsteps. Please don't follow the warrior's destiny."

Episode 9: Isolation

In the last episode of this arc, Nicky wants to find out what happened to the aunt she never knew about. Mei-Li gives her all of Mei-Xue's letters and postcards, and notes that the last postcard came twenty-one years ago. Looking at the postcard, Nicky sees an odd red panda mascot. She searches for it on the internet with Althea's help, and they find out that it's in Canada. In a small town near Vancouver. Nicky invites Henry to go with her to look for Mei-Xue. Mei-Li wants to stop Nicky, but Jin tells her that they have to let Nicky see this through. Maybe meeting Mei-Xue will give her the clarity she needs.

Evan meets with Ryan at the community center, looking for Nicky. Ryan tells him that Nicky and Henry went on a road trip to Canada. Evan is alarmed. Ryan asks if Evan's jealous of Henry. Evan says it's more than that. He believes that Nicky is in jeopardy with Henry. This worries Ryan, so he calls in favors to cover his hospital shifts--as well as his shifts at the community center. He and Evan leave to follow Nicky to Canada.

While on the road, Henry takes Nicky to an old friend--who turns out to be a very sketchy person. Nicky begins to see Henry in a new light, and not a good one. When the old friend sells them out to someone who has it in for Henry, he and Nicky have to fight to get out of there. Henry apologizes to Nicky, and he starts to open up about his past.

Meanwhile, Althea gets targeted by the lawyers of Cloudrush Capital. They want her to sign a non-disclosure agreement for everything that happened to her at the company. Althea refuses. They threaten her career. Althea refuses to sign. This makes her want to stand up against her former boss even more. But first she needs to talk to her parents.

In Vancouver, Evan and Ryan are searching for Nicky. Mei-Li tells them that Nicky was looking for a small town with a red racoon mascot. Evan and Ryan drive towards the only town they could find on Google with red panda mascot and sees that Nicky and Henry have just arrived. Evan is about to accost Henry when Nicky sees the red panda statue from her aunt's last postcard.

After a bit of asking around, Nicky finds Duke--the artist who sculpted the Red Panda--and finds out that he knows Mei-Xue. Duke invites Nicky and Ryan out back to talk about Mei-Xue, leaving Evan and Henry alone. Evan quickly accuses Henry of not being true to Nicky. He shows Henry photos from the cctv footage that caught Henry stealing from Professor Chau's office. Henry tells Evan he can explain. When Nicky returns. But when they realize that they can't hear Nicky, Ryan, or Duke anymore, the two quickly head to the back of the Duke's house--but there's no one there.

Nicky and Ryan are following Duke on a trail. When they reach a certain area, Duke turns against them. He says that Mei-Xue told him that there would be people after her. Duke promised Mei-Xue that he will keep her safe. Nicky and Ryan explain that they really are Mei-Xue's niece and nephew. Nicky even shows the postcard. But Duke doesn't want to believe them. Until Nicky calls Mei-Li, to asks her to talk to Duke. Which finally makes Duke believe. He tells Nicky that he's no longer welcome at Mei-Xue's house, but if they follows his map--they will find what they're looking for.

At home, Althea has already told her parents about what she had gone through Cloudrush Capital. Mei-Li wants to know what Althea wants them to do. She tells them that there's nothing they can do, that they have already done everything she could ever want or need: because they love her and believe her. She just wanted them to know what she had gone through before she goes public. Jin and Mei-Li hug their daughter.

Nicky and Ryan reach Mei-Xue's house, but it's abandoned. There are clear signs of someone recently fleeing the scene though. Nicky finds journals in the house. She takes photos of the pages. She is about to leave when Ryan finds a photo of Mei-Xue and Mei-Li with their own parents. Ryan recognizes their Wai-gong and Wai-po. Nicky hears something from the back and exits through the kitchen--to find that there's a grave in the yard. A grave with Mei-Xue's face. Nicky calls Mei-Li. "Mom, I've got bad news." Inside the house, Ryan finds a long box that has inscription. "Duke, send this to Mei-Li if something happens to me."

At the end of the episode, Nicky and Ryan reunite with Evan and Henry, apologizing for setting off on their own. Evan then tells them that Henry has something important to say. Henry sighs and comes clean to Nicky: His father was a guardian of one of the eight weapons. He's been helping Nicky because it is his duty to keep the weapons, at least the one that his family was supposed to keep safe, separate from the others.

[kikithegeek]

An Amateur Review of Ridley Pearson’s Super Sons

Please be aware: This will contain some spoilers for the Super Sons graphic novels written by Ridley Pearson. If you do not wish to be spoiled on plot or character development, please stop reading this and come back once you’ve read through the books yourselves. Otherwise, enjoy this amateur review.

INTRODUCTION

As someone who grew up reading comics from Marvel, DC, IDW, and Archie, it was always fun when legacy characters were introduced or focused on. Characters that were students or the children of characters that my parents grew up with always felt nice to me, and even relatable when they were introduced or shown to be growing up in a similar or the same time period as my friends and I. Taking this into account, it’s no wonder that by the time I was in high school, some of my favorite comics involved Damian Wayne/Robin and Jonathan Kent/Superboy. Yes, I was definitely older than them by the time their series came in, but some of the problems they faced, even the small ones, seemed familiar to my own. Problems such as Jon’s reluctance of moving away from Hamilton County to Metropolis where he’d be leaving behind people he’s known for years into what is essentially a foreign environment for him, or both characters having to live up to the examples their parents have set; something I’m sure many of us can relate to as children are always compared to their parents or successful family members. The growing friendship between them was always a highlight no matter what type of adventure they were on.

In 2019, Ridley Pearson and Ile Gonzalez released the first book in their 3-part series starring Jon and Damian in a sort of rebooted universe. Fan feedback at the time was mixed, with some fans unhappy and others just happy they were getting more content featuring their favorite duo. Personally, I wasn’t paying attention all that much; I was in the middle of college and my focus had drifted away from comic books that year to focus on my studies, but with the recent pandemic and more time to read I’ve fallen back into the rabbit hole of super heroes and villains. I remember there being an outcry against the books when the previews began to be released, but after they did release and finished their run, I didn’t hear anything. No one really actively talked about what the books were about and most of what I heard seemed to come from people who read a handful of pages, if at all, and then never finished it. So, I decided to put my two cents in and read them. I’ll be looking at them as someone who has been a fan of their main-like counterparts for years, and as someone who also acknowledges that this isn’t canon to it and is an alternate universe (or alternate Earth in the cases of the DC comics multiverse), if anything to look at it from a neutral perspective.  

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time I’ve read through Ridley Pearson’s work. In middle school and even through high school, I couldn’t get enough of Kingdom Keepers and Peter and the Starcatcher, even getting tickets to see the touring cast of the latter’s theater adaptation when they came to my state. I’ve read a few interviews on his work with the Super Sons before going into the books themselves, and he doesn’t neglect to say that this series isn’t connected to the normal DC canon (whatever that is these days; any comic book reader knows that reboots, especially for DC in the last decade, usually happen quite a bit). Okay, that’s probably a given, and it makes things easier considering the main target demographic are kids aged 10-14. There’s a lot of content to go over when it comes to everything connected to Damian and Jon, even more so for Batman and Superman, so this makes it less difficult for kids who don’t have much experience with DC outside of the occasional tv show and movie to get into it.

But what about the story itself?

THE STORY

(The majority of the story spoilers are beyond this point since I summarize the books. This is your last spoiler warning.)

The story itself takes place in an alternate future. America is called Coleumbria and the global climate crisis has gotten to the point where it’s a race to find a way to stop the rising temperatures and constant flooding. While Batman and Superman spearhead the projects set to stabilize and then reverse the Earth’s temperature, their sons are moved from Metropolis to a city called Wyndemer with other refugees looking to find somewhere safe from the floods. This causes tensions in the city to heighten as refugees, called “flood runners”, are harassed by locals. Without going too in-depth into the books (otherwise, we’d be here all day), I’m going to summarize them. Certain characters and events might be omitted, but hey, at least it gives you a reason to read them even if I tell you what they’re about.

The first book introduces us to this crisis and shows us how this world’s Jon (who still goes by Superboy in this) and Damian (who is going by Batkid) meet. While there’s some animosity between them at first, with Jon having a not-too-hidden bias against Bruce Wayne, the two eventually start to work together when they realize their individual investigations are connected. Jon and his classmate, Tilly, have been looking into a mysterious illness that’s hospitalized Jon’s mother among many others, and Damian has been investigating sabotages against Wayne Tech dams. They also meet a girl named Candace who is trying to uncover a mystery that’s plagued her since her mom’s passing. After finding clues at a food company called Sage Foods, the group is attacked and manages to escape after Jon is told their attackers were sent by a woman named Arvyc. After finding out that Candace and Damian had set Jon up earlier in the book to be attacked by a few gang members, the group have a short fight before they go to the train station to stop Arvyc’s gang.

The second book opens with the boys helping Candace make it to a boat while escaping a group of girls called The Four Fingers. While they didn’t have as much of a presence in the previous book, had been shown as adversaries of Candace’s. Continuing into their investigations into the virus, Jon and Tilly learn that it was man-made as Candace’s visions lead her toward Coleumbria’s capital. The Four Fingers, meanwhile, are adamant about finding Candace, so they’ve taken to stalking her friends, until they realize they’re “dead ends”, so they choose to follow their own leads. It is revealed that The Four Fingers and Candace all have powers that connects them to certain species of animals; with Candace, she has a connection to birds and she states her grandmother was the same. Tilly comes up with her own vigilante persona, Puppet Girl, and stays behind in Wyndemer as Damian and Jon leave to go to Cinapolis to find the virus’s source. However, the boys get captured and Tilly decides she needs to help them. Candace in the meantime has found an anointing oil her mother had left clues for her to find, which is the key to the throne of Landis, the country she and The Four Fingers come from. It ends with the Super Sons and Tilly saving Candace and helping her get on a boat back to Landis while Arvyc escapes from prison.

The third and final book opens with Jon, Damian, and Tilly trying to track Arvyc down and it’s obvious that they’ve been at this for some time now, but they soon become the hunted. Candace makes it back to Landis and finds one of the rebels her mom had led before she was arrested. As Candace continues on her journey, Jon, Damian, and Tilly are sent by Batman to a LexCorp lab to retrieve a virus sample, only to find it isn’t there. They decide to go to Landis since The Four Fingers were heading there with the virus (and Candace had gone with intentions to stop them), but Tilly needs to stay behind again. The boys and Candace continue their respective journeys through Landis, however a man who’s been pulling the strings from the shadows for the last two books, Sir Reale, has decided to send Arvyc after them along with Talia. Talia and Arvyc attack the boys who manage to outsmart them for the moment, and are reunited with Candace who has been tracking the virus with two warriors named Kizuka and Archer. Tilly, back in Coleumbia, is sent out to retrieve Damian and Jon by Bruce’s assistant, Patience. After meeting up with Tilly, the group find a lab where The Four Fingers have been preparing vials of the virus in order to release it via bombs, and a battle ensues where they learn that sunlight can kill the virus and that Talia is Damian’s mother. Learning that they couldn’t stop all of the shipments, the group gathers the people of the local town to help them in storming the factory. They succeed in killing the remaining virus, save for a vial to be used to create a cure. With Superman’s mission a success and Batman working on a cure, the book ends with Candace being crowned the new Empress of Landis, Jon’s mother waking up, and Batman making Damian Robin.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE STORY

All in all, the story was okay. Personally, I felt like it was rushed in some places, such as how we’re brought from one character or scene to the next with little to no transition or breathing space. The endings were also kind of abrupt, which I feel really brought down the ending for the final book. We don’t really linger on whether or not Superman’s efforts to reverse global worming worked or have a moment where Jon and his dad are able to reunite with Lois. I was also disappointed to see they didn’t go anywhere with the whole “Talia is revealed to be Damian’s mother he had never met before and barely knew anything about” sub plot they had going in book three. People who know me know that the League of Assassins and any character associated with them are among my favorite villains in the Batman mythos, and to see it be brought in only for it to not have anything done with it was disappointing. Heck, you could have taken Talia out of it and the story would have been the same minus Damian being momentarily shaken before getting back to business. At the very least, an ending scene where Bruce confirms she’s his mother would have been nice enough closure for it. This might have been due to there being a page limit (each book was roughly 151 pages long) which lead to things being cut out, but it’s still disappointing nonetheless, especially since I did find myself enjoying parts that had pacing problems.

Pacing and unresolved plotlines aside, some of the things I did enjoy though involved Candace’s story arc. She’s one of the characters made for this series, and watching her figure out her past and come into her own with her powers was really enjoyable. I also felt like small snippets of character interactions between the boys, Candace, and Tilly were really well written. They actually felt like kids.

THE CHARACTERS

Since there are a lot of characters in this series, I’m only going to focus on the four main characters since we’re with them the entire time.

Jonathan Kent is probably the one out of him and Damian who’s the closest to his original counterpart, and I don’t just mean in looks. While he doesn’t have as many powers as he’s come to have in the main DC canon, he does have some of the powers he has early on in his appearances, such as super speed, super hearing, x-ray vision, super strength, and being able to jump high/far. He’s a bit older here though, 12 instead of 10 making him closer to Damian’s age and allowing him to go to the same school as him and Tilly. He holds his dad’s lessons close and seems to be apprehensive about seriously hurting people, mainly in the beginning. Being older though, he’s a bit more mature than his counterpart was before he was aged up, and I feel that this version of Jon is a good blend between the two.

Damian Wayne on the other hand was given the most changes in terms of backstory and how he acts, which goes hand-in-hand. In the original continuity, he was raised by Talia and the League of Assassins, making him spoiled and a literal killer in the body of a child. Here, he was raised by Bruce (how or why, I don’t know. Talia wasn’t brought up until book 3 so I can only assume she gave him to Bruce as a baby and they agreed to never tell him for whatever reason) and Bruce refuses to let him be Robin, leaving Damian to become Batkid (which is a good reference to past incarnations of Batman’s son in older Elseworlds stories). He’s still arrogant and looks for a fight more than he should, but it doesn’t seem like he wants to kill. Beat up a guy who is already out of the fight, yes, but not kill. One thing people who’ve read the books will notice is I’ve been calling him Damian. Well, that’s out of habit; in this series he is pretty adamant about everyone calling him Ian. Why? Again, I don’t know, and part of me is bothered by it because we never find out why he hates his name. I can only assume Pearson had things planned that would explain this a bit more but had to cut them out due to page constraints.

Tilly is one of the characters made for this series, taking the name Puppet Girl as her secret idenity. She’s Jon’s friend and classmate, and is a computer expert, allowing for her to help the team from home until they need her to fly one of Bruce’s machines to them. She hangs around Jon a lot due to going to the same school and because both of them are interning for the Daily Planet. In all honesty, she reminds me of Kathy from before it’s revealed she has powers and is actually an alien since she acts as Jon’s best friend who isn’t Damian, as well as a girl who Jon might have a crush on or vice versa. The blond hair and the purple-pink outfit scheme doesn’t help.

Candace is our final main character and the second character made for this series. We meet her in the books before we meet Jon and Damian, and her story plays a huge role in the overall plot. Candace has been following a string of clues her mother left her shortly before her death, and we learn as the comic goes on that she’s meant to be the next Empress of her home country, Landis, but was forced to flee to Coleumbria when her family was usurped by a general. Over time, she unlocks her power to communicate and control birds, and later to control the weather. I found myself enjoying her story just as much, if not more than the plots that surrounded the title characters, which helps since her story is intertwined with theirs. If I had to compare her to an existing character in the DC canon, I’d say Wonder Woman due to her super human abilities and her being royalty.

THE ART

The art is also good, definitely better than what I can do. However, a complaint I do have is that the characters feel stiff and rigid. It might be the art style, but something felt off at times, mainly with the posing. Again, it’s still better than what I can do, but I feel like it could have been better. I did like how the backgrounds were vibrant and you could tell where the characters were just from a look, and the art is more detailed in general compared to other young reader graphic novels DC has been putting out. Art is pretty subjective, so I’m not going to go into this too much and a lot of these are my own opinions.

The art has come into debate as well, though not for the reasons I mentioned above. When previews for the first book started to be released, a lot of people were critical toward Candace and Damian, particularly toward their skin color. In the preview images, Candace was shown to have a blue-ish-gray tint (you can probably see why this didn’t go over well) and Damian was shown to be paler than Jon (Damian is shown in the original DC canon to be half Arabic and even though he was sometimes shown to have pale skin like Bruce’s, he was also shown to have a tanner complexion due to his mother’s side. Most fan interpretations as a result more often than not have him with tanned skin). After fan outcry, this was fixed with Candace getting a more natural skin tone and Damian’s being brought down to a darker shade than Jon’s. With Damian’s it’s more apparent in the second and third books since in the first one I did notices there were a few panels where his skin tone would be lighter than in others which makes me wonder if it was a last-minute recolor for the first book’s release.

FINAL THOUGHTS

All in all, I’d say it’s okay. It’s not great, it’s not bad; just okay. I honestly think that if Pearson and Gonzalez hadn’t been given a page limit then it could have been better since the pacing wouldn’t be as big of an issue and they would have been able to get through all of the mini arcs they had set up. They obviously wanted to tell a bigger story but were only given so much room to work with.

It’s obviously not for everyone, and it’s definitely not the Super Sons people like me have grown up with, but that’s okay. Some of the kids I used to babysit who fall into the range of “I’ve never really read DC comics and only ever saw a cartoon episode on TV” read these books too and they liked it. Same thing for the few kids who did have prior experience with the Super Sons. What dragged them in was the climate crisis and (for the ones who read them after the world went into a lockdown) the fact the characters were trying to find a cure for a virus that was similar to the flu. Yeah, and these were written way before 2020, so that’s actually an achievement on Pearson’s part.

You don’t have to like them; heck, I didn’t really have any interest in them because of the backlash from people like me until my friends started asking me to make this review. But maybe give them a chance. Find a kid in your family or friend group and see if they’d be interested, maybe you can read it together once the craziness of the last year’s calmed down.

[qqueenofhades]

Question for you. When you have time. And if you want. I know things are busy for you. What do you mean by end stage capitalism? Thanks.

Aha. I am sorry that this has been sitting in my inbox for a while, since I’ve been busy and doing stressful things and not sure how to answer this in a way that wouldn’t immediately turn into a pages-long rant. Nothing to do with you, of course, but just because I have 800 things to say on this topic, none of them complimentary, which I’ll try to condense down briefly. Ish.

In sum, end-stage capitalism is at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world today, more or less. It’s the state of being that exists when the economic system of capitalism, i.e. the exchange of money for goods and services, has become so runaway, so unregulated, so elevated to the level of unchallengeable dogma in the Western world (especially after the Cold War and decades of hysteria about the “scourge of communism”) and so embedded on every level of the social and political fabric that it is no longer sustainable but also can’t be destroyed without taking everything else down. Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level, but also… we can’t go on like this. So that’s a fun paradox. The current world order is so drastically, unimaginably, ridiculously and wildly unequal, privileging the tiny elite of the ultra-rich over the rest of the planet, because of hypercapitalism. This really got going in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan, still generally worshiped as a political hero on both the left and right sides of the American political establishment (even liberals tiptoe around criticizing Saint Ronnie), set into motion a program of slashing business and environment regulations, reducing or eliminating taxes on the super wealthy, and introducing the concept of “trickle-down” or “supply-side” economics. In short, the principle holds that if you make it as easy as possible for rich people to become EVEN MORE RICH, and remove all irksome regulations or restrictions on the Church of the Free Market, they will benevolently redistribute this largess to the little people. To say the very least, this….does not happen. Ever.

Since the 1980s, in short, we have had thirty years of unrestricted, runaway capitalism that eventually propelled us into the financial crisis of 2008, after multiple smaller crises, where the full extent of this philosophy became apparent…. and nobody really did anything about it. You can google statistics about how the price of everything has skyrocketed since about the 1970s, when you could put yourself through college on one part-time job, graduate with no student debt, and be assured of a job for the next 30 years, and how baby boomers (who are responsible for wrecking the economy) insist that millennials are “just lazy” or “killing [insert x industry]”. This is because we have NO GODDAMN MONEY, graduate thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (if we can even afford college in the first place), are lucky if we find a job that pays us more than $10 an hour, and often have to string together several part-time and frangible jobs that offer absolutely nothing in the way of security, benefits, or long-term saving potential. This is why millennials at large don’t have kids, buy houses, or have any savings (or any of the traditional “adult” milestones). We just don’t have the money for it.

Even more, capitalism has taken over our mindsets to the point where it is, as I said, at the root of everything that’s wrong with the world. Climate change? Won’t be fixed because the ruling classes are making money from the current system, and if you really want to give yourself an aneurysm, google the profiteers who can’t wait for the environment/society to collapse because they’ll make MORE money off it. This is known as “disaster capitalism” and is what the US has done to other countries for decades. (I also recommend The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.) This obviously directly contributes to the War on Terror, the current global instability, the reason Dick Cheney, Halliburton, Blackwater, and other private-security contractors made a mint from blowing up Iraq and paying themselves to rebuild it, and then the resultant rise of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other extremist reactionary groups. The bombing produces (often brown and Muslim) refugees and immigrants, Western countries won’t take them in, right-wing politicians make hay out of Threats To Our Way of Life ™, and the circle goes on. Gun control? Can’t happen because a) American white supremacy is too deeply tied to its paranoid right to have as many guns as it wants and to destroy the Other at any time, and b) the NRA pays senators by the gigabucks to make sure it doesn’t. (And we all know what an absolute goddamn CLUSTERFUCK the topic of big money and American politics is in the first place. It’s just… a nightmare in every direction.)

Meanwhile, end-stage capitalism has also systematically assigned value to society and to individuals depending entirely on their prospects for monetization. Someone who can’t work, or who doesn’t work the “right” job, is thus assigned less value as a human (see all the right-wing screaming about people who “don’t deserve” to have any kind of social and financial assistance or subsidized food and medicine if they won’t “help themselves”). This is how we get to situations where we have the ads that I kept seeing in London the other month: apps where you could share your leftover food, or rent out your own car, or collectively rent an apartment, or whatever else. Because apparently if you live in London in 2019, there is no expectation that you will be able to have your own food, car, or apartment. You have to crowdsource it. (See also: people having to beg strangers on the internet for money for food or medical bills, and strangers on the internet doing more to help that person than the whole system and/or the person’s employment or living situation.) There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as an economic theory. Exchanging money for goods and services is understandable and it works. But when it has run out of control to this degree, when the people who suffer the most under it fiercely defend it (see the working-class white people absolutely convinced that the reason for their problems is Those Damn Job Stealing Immigrants), when it only works for the interests of a few uber-privileged few and is actively killing everyone else… yeah.

Let’s put it this way. You will likely have heard of the two fatal crashes of Boeing 737 Max airplanes in recent months: the Lion Air crash in October 2018 and the Ethiopian Airlines crash in March 2019. Together, they killed 346 people. After these crashes, it turned out that the same malfunctioning system was responsible for both, and that Boeing had known of the problem before the Max went on the market. But because they needed to make (even more) money and compete with their rivals, Airbus, they had sent the planes ahead anyway, with unclear and confusing instruction to pilots about how to deal with it, and generally not acknowledging the problem and insisting (as they still do) that the plane was safe, even though it’s been grounded worldwide since March. There are also concerns that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is too deep in Boeing’s pocket to provide an impartial ruling (and America was the last country to ground the plane), and other countries’ aviation safety bodies have announced that they aren’t just going to take the FAA’s word for it whenever they decide that the Max is safe. This almost never happens, since usually international regulatory bodies, especially in aviation, will accept each other’s standards. But because of Boeing’s need for Even More Money, they put a plane on the market and into commercial passenger service that they knew had problems, and the FAA essentially let them do that and isn’t entirely trusted to ensure that they won’t do it again. Because…. value for the shareholders. Or something. This is the extreme example of what I mean when I say that end-stage capitalism is actively killing people.

It is also doing so on longer-term and more pernicious everyday levels. See above where people can’t afford their basic expenses even on several jobs, see the insulin price-gouging in the US (and the big pharma efforts in general to make drugs and healthcare as expensive as possible), see the way any kind of welfare or social assistance is framed as “lazy” or “bad” or “socialist,” see the way that people are basically only allowed to survive if they can pay for it, and the way that circle is becoming smaller and smaller. The American public is also fed enduring folk “wisdom” about “money doesn’t buy happiness,” the belief that poverty serves to build character or as an example of virtue, or so on, to make them feel proud of being poor/deprived/that they’re doing a good thing by actively supporting this system that is responsible for their own suffering. And yet for example, the Nordic countries (while obviously having other problems of their own) maintain the Scandinavian welfare model, which pays for college and healthcare, provides for individual stipends/basic income, allows generous leave for parenthood, emphasises a unionised workplace, and otherwise prescribes a mix of capitalism, social democracy, and social mobility. All the Nordic countries rank highly for human development, overall happiness, and other measurements of social success. But especially in America, any suggestion of “socialism” is treated like heresy, and unions are a dirty word. That is changing, but…slowly.

In short: the economic overlords have never done anything to give power, money, or anything at all to the working class without being repeatedly and explicitly forced, they have no good will or desire to treat the poor like humans (see: Amazon) or anything at all that doesn’t increase their already incomprehensible profit margins. The pursuit of more money that cannot possibly be spent in one human lifetime, that is accumulated, used to make laws for itself, and never paid in taxes to fund improvements or services for everyone else, lies at the root of pretty much every problem you can name in the world right now, is deeply, deeply evil, and I do not use that word lightly.

[advena87]

Lambert and Keira Metz after the events of Wild Hunt run a joint business in Lan Exeter. Unexpectedly, a  stranger witcher appears on their doorstep with an unusual task.

So the translation of the first chapter of my fanfic where it turns out that Aiden is alive after all.

My English is shitty, so please forgive me for mistakes. I will be grateful for feedback, both in terms of language and story. I don't know if I will translate it further, it's really difficult and exhausting for me, at the top you have a link to the Polish version.

I dedicate this translation to @gridelincarver @marbienl13 @all-my-queens If it wasn't for you, this text wouldn’t have been written, so thank you very much for motivation!

______________________________________________________

Granda

granda (polish) - rumpus, ruction, brawl, bunch but also fraud, hoax, humbug

Chapter 1

Lan Exeter was a beautiful port city, full of vivid but narrow houses and canals instead of streets. The winter capital of Kovir and Poviss, like the whole country, was favorable to sorceress and sorcerers who escaped from war-torn Redania from Radowid's witch hunters. Magicians from the Northern Kingdoms found here a safe haven, job and had great freedom in conducting their research and experiments.

Despite these many advantages Keira Metz didn’t like to live here. It was difficult for her to explain it rationally, she really couldn’t complain about anything, especially after what she went through hiding in Velen. But Lan Exeter got on her nerves. She couldn't focus here and felt something hanging in the air.

Lambert on the other hand was very pleased with the new location. Despite the fact that it was Triss Merigold, who arranged for them enter to Kovir, it was the witcher who indicated the winter capital as the right place to start their small project. He had acquaintances here, in the past he has made several large contracts for important officials. Thanks to these acquaintances, they didn’t encounter any major problems to rent a small, but well-kept tenement house not far from the city's main square. At the start they paid for it from what Lambert saved from contracts, Keira's savings went to the apparatus for the laboratory she arranged in the attic of the building. Now the sorceress has already run her own business, from which she had considerable profits and they divided expenses in half.

She couldn't complain here either. Despite his difficult character, Lambert was a resourceful and responsible man when it came to finances. He systematically searched for contracts and efficiently bargained with clients. He wasn't wasteful and basically the only thing he spent money on was weapon. As for the alchemical ingredients and components, Keira made sure he didn't run out of anything. Always taking orders for her business, she took into account the witcher's need for potions. Before they looked back, they worked out a routine for functioning and cooperation on both: private and professional grounds. And that was another thing that had been bothering her for some time.

Her relationship with Lambert was turbulent at times, but it was exemplary. The Witcher didn’t cause problems, except for the fact that he sometimes returned half-dead from work. And that was basically the only thing they could argue about. Both of them had an explosive temperament, arguments could sometimes alarm their neighbors. However, it always found its finale in bed, which didn’t diminish the amount of decibels they generated and Keira finally cast a silencing spell on their building, because tenants from behind the wall intended to report noise to the owner of the house.

Either way, her life under one roof with the witcher slowly and disturbingly began to resemble a marriage. And just thinking about it, Keira shivers. That wasn’t her ambition. She never dreamed of hiding in a charming house at the end of the world with the One. Keira wanted power and fame, constantly thinking back to the time she sat on the royal council of Temeria, she still remembered the conventions of sorcerers and the feast of the elite, where her word was sacred. That Keira Metz wore the most fashionable and provocative outfits, every night she had a different lover, drank the most expensive and exquisite wines on the Continent, and pulling the strings on the political scene of the country was her element. She had a reputation, people knew her name and felt respect for it. She wanted to create history and have fun, she wanted to taste life. Meanwhile, she was sitting in the politically neutral and boring Kovir, where no one knew who she was, she was selling her knowledge to the populace and slept with witcher.

Well, it was always a few steps better than forgotten by gods Velen, a bunch of illiterate peasants paying her with eggs and shareing bed with bugs. Not to mention the threat of burning at the stake still hanging over her then. So she knew it could always be worse. And she really couldn't say she was unhappy here, just ... it wasn't the kind of happiness she wanted. And Lambert himself was a completely unsolvable matter for her. They weren’t officially together, none of them came up with the funny idea of having a serious relationship. Lambert was supposed to help her with her research, and sex was just a nice addition for both of them. They didn’t claim any rights to each other, they didn’t swear allegiance and devotion, they just went with the flow and in some unexplained way they found themselves in this place. In a shared apartment, with shared business and shared life. Keira didn't remember when she had spent so many nights in her own bed with the same man by her side. She was beginning to fear that it had never really happened before.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a bell. In the tenement they rented, ground floor was adapted for Keira's magical business. At the front door, which was constantly open for the public, they hung a bell that signaled the arrival of a potential customer. The sorceress rose from behind the table, closed the book, which she reviewed to make a mixture ordered by one of the townsmen, and headed for the curtain separating the back room from the main part of the store.

She saw the figure next to the bookcase and thought it was Lambert for a short split second. She was fooled by two swords on his back - such characteristic accessories for her witcher. But it wasn't Lambert. The man was slightly taller, but thinner, he was standing back to her, and he had a hood on his head, but the sorceress knew her witcher too well to confuse him with someone else, she had no doubt. However, newcomer wasn’t interested in books, but in other objects based on a bookcase. Kiera shuddered a little, of all the things that were in this room, he had to choose that one.

"How can I help you?” She finally said, hoping that would surprise him and divert his attention from the things he was watching, but nothing like that happened.

The man, unmoved by her question, still with his back to her, reached into one of the hilt of two swords leaning against the bookcase. He grabbed it and pulled the blade out of the scabbard.

"It's not for sale," she said firmly, and finally got a reaction.

The stranger turned slowly toward Keira, looked her up and down, and a pair of amber cat eyes flashed from under his hood.

"Witcher,” she noted with surprise.

The man weighed the sword in his hand, ran his fingers over the carved runes. Keira didn't miss the way he was holding it. To be sure, she looked at his own swords protruding from his left arm. He was left-handed.

Lambert once told her that a left-handed swordsman is a real pain in the ass. A left-handed witcher, on the other hand, is a death sentence. Admittedly, it doesn't matter with monsters, but warriors trained in swordsmanship don't have much chance against someone like that. Regardless of school, master or experience, almost every swordsman has a dominant right hand. Even if he was born left-handed, when he enters the training he is immediately switched to the right one. Those who decide to train on the left have more difficult learning, but the advantage they gain thanks to it is huge. Left-hander is accustomed to right-handed opponents, they are his daily bread, but people relying on their right have a very difficult task fighting a mirror reflection. As a result, it was also established that a left-handed swordsman was a cheater without honor, so there were only a few schools and masters favorable to teaching left-handers on their dominant hand. Unless they want to train the assassin.

“The devil does not sleep,“ witcher read the inscription from the blade, still carefully examining the sword. ”Silver blade, witcher gear. Where did you get it from?”

"It's not for sale," she repeated and walked over to him, emphatically raising her hand, expecting that he would give her the weapon. “It belongs to my business  partner, also a witcher”.

"I see...” He smiled at her, which revealed dimples in his cheeks, but it was hard to call that smile cordial. He obediently gave her the sword and finally pulled off the hood.

Keira blinked in surprise. She may not have been an expert, but apart from Lambert, she was also dealing with his brothers from the Wolf School and that assassin of Foltest. The witchers were interesting in their own way, but it was hard to enter them into the standard canon of beauty. And the one in front of her was a little more unusual than the norm she knew.

First of all, he was redhead. She lived among the villagers long enough to know that redhead was for them a synonym of a soulless freak. So the red-headed and left-handed witcher would probably be cursed three times for them. Of course, these were only nonsense superstitions of the illiterate pleb, but someone with such qualities had to have extremely hard on the path. His appearance alone was enough for people not to trust him.

Secondly, he looked young. The Witchers in general grew old very slowly, but she has never met monster slayer who looks as young as this one. It wasn’t about the number of wrinkles, but about the youthful charm of teenage daredevil, and when he smiled, two deep dimples appeared on his cheeks. However, his cold gaze revealed that he was long after his teenage years. These eyes could see enough to look distrustful and insensitive now. Combined with this beautiful but predatory smile, he looked like a hungry shark.

Thirdly, he had no scars on his face except for one, thin as a thread that cut his lips vertically to the right and disappeared just above his chin. It was visible mainly because the witcher had a stubble on his jaw, if it weren't for it, it wouldn’t have been visible at first glance. Keira hasn’t yet met the witcher without the obvious scars that disfigure face. The only noticeable defect was the damaged right ear. The helix was clearly jagged, and although the flaw was completely healed, it seemed to be a fairly recent matter.

"Your partner left without swords?” witcher asked with a sneer, and Keira felt uncomfortable.

The tenement house was storeys, there could have been two dozen partners upstairs, but the newcomer knew she was here alone. The sorceress wasn’t particularly fearful and usually she felt more than at ease with men, but he gave her goosebumps. And not the good one.

In general, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to her that he exactly knew who was and who wasn’t around. She lived with Lambert long enough to learn that he hears from the ground floor a falling pin upstairs, but for some reason she attributed this skill only to him. Meanwhile, superhuman senses were a feature of all witchers.

"These are souvenirs," she explained and invited him to the table where she was hosting clients. Before she joined him she put the sword back into its sheath and laid it on the table. "He doesn't use them, so I wanted to hang them on the wall for decoration, but he didn't agree. And then I forgot to put them back in their place.”

"Why didn't he agree?” He asked in a tone of conversation about the weather and sat down, taking off his fingerless leather gloves.

"Like I said, these are souvenirs," she repeated, shrugging. “These have sentimental value and, as he said: ‘these aren’t ceremonial sabers to hang on the wall’."

"So neither for show nor for use," he said, looking at the weapon in front of him for a moment, then looked up at Keira, clearly stopping his gaze on her décolletage. A short grimace ran over his face, and Keira could have sworn, it was amusement. But it disappeared as quickly as it appeared, and after a moment the witcher was looking straight in her eyes, his face expressing nothing. “So much good steel is wasted. I will gladly buy them, I can offer a good price for them”.

Keira frowned. She had already told him twice that swords weren’t for sale. However, that wasn't what worried her. Not even that he was looking at her decolletage. She noted it with relief, because it was something she could deal with and finally he showed some human impulses, even if this view amused him for some reason. What she didn't like here was how quickly he decided to make a purchase. He didn't even look at the second sword!

She witnessed how Lambert bought new blades. The whole process lasted almost a month. A month of watching and comparing weapons at various craftsmen, a month of whining and fussing, and finally commissioned them to be forged. But he was still dealing with materials, because it was necessary to import a special steel alloy. It cost her witcher a lot of nerves and even more money, but he told her then that his life depends on these blades. They must be an extension of his hand, no compromises. 

And this witcher wants to buy swords that he didn't even look at properly.

Maybe he collected them, or maybe he was just stupid, it didn't matter, Keira wasn't going to sell them, even if he had a mountain of gold. These swords were important to Lambert.

"Not for sale," she repeated for the third time, this time in the tone she extinguished the royal advisers in the council, when they began to be a pain in the ass. “Please, better tell me what brings you to me. And to Lan Exeter if I can ask. The witcher in the city is quite an unusual thing.”

"From what I have found out, you live with a witcher,” he raised one eyebrow. “You are one of the last people who should be surprised.”

“That's why it's unusual. Two witchers in the capital are a crowd.“

“I must admit that this is not a coincidence. I’m looking for a partner to fulfill a big and difficult contract. A large and strong imperial manticore come along from the mountains to nearby villages. Kidnap people, slaughter cattle. Three villages funded reward.”

“So you didn't come to talk to me, but to my parner," she said, ready to end the discussion here. She couldn't take contracts on behalf of Lambert.

And it sounded really bad. Maybe the money could be good, but the manticores were extremely dangerous. If the monster flew here from the mountains, then the trip to track it down will be long and exhausting. She didn't like it at all.

“It's not just about the manticore, I also have a request to you. It is very fortunate that I find a sorceress and witcher in one place, although this is an unusual thing.“

“Maybe here in Kovir. Where I come from bards even sing ballads about the union of the witcher and sorceress. A few of my colleagues value such cooperation very much, so I decided to take their advice and enter into ... a partnership with the witcher.“

“I know master Dandelion’s ballads,” he smiled mischievously, and she had to admit that he looked attractive with that grimace on his face, even if it lifted her neck hair. For some reason, his smiles were like a bad omen for her. “And please forgive me boldness, but is your deal just business, or do you also aspire to ballad heroes?”

Keira raised an eyebrow and finally clarified what she didn’t like in this witcher. His cat's eyes were vigilant, just this how he surveyed the room and looked at her... without doubt it was a predator's gaze. A predator who just smelled a prey and was getting ready to jump. The sorceress repaid the same and finally began to analyze more closely what she saw. Neither the weapon nor the armor he wore had any distinctive school features. And most importantly and most disturbing in this all - this witcher didn’t have a medallion around his neck. And a witcher without a medallion can't use signs.

What the hell? She was beginning to conclude that everything was wrong with this stranger. And no wonder that he was looking for a partner to kill the manticore. Lonely expedition for such quarry, when you can’t use signs, is suicide.

"Interesting question," she said finally after a little too long pause. The witcher narrowed his eyes as if he sensed she was uncomfortable. “Are you asking out of professional curiosity?”

"Entirely private,” and that beautiful smile again, but this time it clearly contained a threat. Like an animal that bares its fangs before it attacks. “You're a beautiful woman. I was wondering if you want to replace a witcher.”

Keira frowned threateningly and looked at him with disdain, finally openly letting him know that she didn’t like the direction in which this conversation was going. Far more than once in her life she had to deal with not very subtle advances, and all in all, this witcher hadn't crossed any boundaries yet, but something was very wrong here. Keira never avoided men, even those not very subtle, if she was in a good mood, could count on flirting with her. This one, however, didn’t flirt. Contrary to what he just said, he wasn't interested in her, not in the way he was suggesting. His gaze was cold and calculating, but she saw no desire in it.  

“Please forgive me if I sent any wrong signals,” she announced finally icily, although she knew that she didn’t send any, and her exposed breasts, which was often interpreted in this way, mainly amused her interlocutor. “So now let me be clear, to avoid any further misunderstandings: me and my witcher are loyal to each other. Both professionally and privately. I’m flattered by your interest, but let's get back to business. My witcher would be very unhappy if he knew that we raised such a topic.”

She said this to give him a clear warning. What she meant by this was that if he has bad intentions towards her, he must take into account that she has another witcher behind her, who will deal with him if even a hair falls from her head. However, she was surprised to find that the words she said were true. She wouldn’t turn her back on Lambert, she wouldn’t betray him, even if this witcher turned out to be King Tancred himself. And she was sure Lambert wouldn’t turn his back on her either. The awareness of this alerted her more than the bizarre conversation she was having with her annoying visitor. She quickly put those thoughts out of her mind, this wasn’t the time to analyze her relationship with Lambert.

"My apologies if I offended you,” he raised his hands defensively and something changed in his posture. He became less tense and less alert. The predatory gleam from his eyes was gone too, but he didn’t seem in any way contrite or embarrassed. “I'm not looking for trouble. It just seemed to me extremely… exotic that a sorceress, a woman of scholar, of such status, was interested in a witcher. Perhaps I envied my colleague a little. You understand, we don't have a very good reputation.“

You certainly don’t, she thought.

"It depends on the school,” she finally decided to attack, she was getting tired of this game of cat and mouse. “But you don't wear the medallion. What school are you from? It is quite strange, I thought the medallion was sacred to a witcher.”

The man made a gesture as if to reach for his neck, but he immediately reflected and nipped the reflex in the bud. He winced slightly.

"That's what my assignment to you was supposed to be about," he said. “Some time ago I lost my medallion. It's hard to find a good craftsman to make a thing like this. I was hoping that the sorceress help me. I've heard a lot of good things about you, people praise your amulets and potions. In addition, you work with the witcher, which makes you, in my eyes, more qualified than the rest of the wizards in the city.“

"I have never had a similar order, I will have to ask Lambert to show me his medallion,” for the first time she mentioned her witcher's name and noticed how her interlocutor slightly twitched an eyebrow. She had to admit he surprised her with this order. She also noted how carefully he ignored the question about his school. “Also, there is no elemental circle in the area to charge it, although there is a lot of intersection in the city due to the wide network of canals and the water flowing in them ... I'll have to cast the silver, and have to order the mold from a craftsman… Either way, it'll be expensive.“

“As I mentioned, I have an eye on a big contract,” he reminded. “So I should be able to afford it. Please do a valuation, I will be able to confront it with my savings. And here we come back to the heart of my visit. When can I expect your witcher to return? I'm very keen on this cooperation. I can offer a profit split of up to 30% by 70% for the benefit of your witcher, of course, but I hope that I will get a discount on the medallion. If you have time now, we could initially set some amounts.“

The way he said "your witcher" made her think. She had deliberately emphasized this belonging beforehand in order to make him understand some things, but he made this point with scorn, lined with mockery. She couldn't help but get the feeling that what he really meant to say here was: “Where is your pet sorceress? Will you lend it to me?”, and it immediately infuriated her.

“Slow down, witcher,” she barely suppressed a hiss. “Lambert is my partner and I won't be bidding without him. We don't even know if he will be interested in this at all, so for the moment please consider the medallion issue and your manticore contract as two completely separate matters.How you will resolve the issue of splitting payments will be between the two of you. Then I will possibly consult with him if this transaction will be related to the medallion in any way.”

The witcher raised his eyebrows, his face expressive for the first time. He was surprised. And he was probably pleasantly surprised, because his gaze softened. Previously, it had lost its ferocity, now there was a gleam of sympathy in it.

“I guess I've been making a blunder again,” he said, but he didn't seem a bit too concerned about it. He looked like he was starting to have fun. “Since you are a scholarly woman, I assumed that you are the head of this business.”

“Don't you know the meaning of the word ‘partner’?” Keira was getting harder and harder to hide her anger, her service mask slowly started to fall off, she was on the verge of showing him why teasing a sorceress is a bad idea.

“Oh, I know. It even happened to me that I was called a partner,” she found his stupid smile less attractive and more irritating with each passing moment. “But witchers have a hard time in business, and we are rarely treated as equal partners. We're usually just boys for the dirty work. People value our skills but not us. For them, we are no different from rabid dogs that are unleashed in pursuit of prey, and the command is always the same: kill. Do you know what they do with a rabid dog after it does its job?”

"I can imagine," she said coldly. “And I conclude, from what I have just heard, that you don’t know the correct meaning of the word ‘partner’. You know the highly distorted meaning of this term. Generally sorry to hear all this, but I'm not a rabid dog breeder and you won't find any here. However, when it comes to my partner --”

She broke off when the witcher unexpectedly put a finger to his lips, ordering her to be silent in this non-verbal manner. She hadn't expected this, she opened her mouth to protest this blunt silencing, but realized that her interlocutor suddenly became very tense and focused. He tilted his head a little, like an animal that heard a strange noise, listened for a moment, then sighed heavily, closed his eyes and froze as if waiting for something.

Keira was amazed how his attitude completely changed in a split second. A moment earlier he had been nonchalant and self-confident, now he was sitting in front of her hunched over, evidently disturbed and anxious. Was it the same person at all?

The bell at the door rang and Keira looked away from the man in front of her to look toward the entrance. She saw Lambert in a bloody armor on the doorstep, but he moved freely, he didn't seem injured. For some time now, the sight of blood on his clothes had stopped alarming her, because it usually wasn't his.

“Are you all right?“ she asked anyway, immediately abandoning visitor and getting up from the table, heading towards Lambert.

"Yeah," he replied a bit impatiently, he looked annoyed with her concern, but Keira knew better. There was no anger in his gaze, he was glad to see her. “It's just --”

He paused as his eyes finally fell on the witcher's sitting at the table. The stranger sat with his back to the door and didn’t bother to look back and see who had just arrived. Keira understood that his earlier behavior was due to the fact that he heard Lambert approaching. Lambert must also have been aware of the client's presence before he even entered the house, but it seems that only now he noticed that it was a witcher.

"We have a visitor?” He looked at Keira, there was a question in that look: Is this a client or a threat? It seems that he sensed the tense atmosphere and the sorceress's nervousness.

"Yes, this is--" She paused mid-word, as she was about to introduce them, but she just realized that the stranger witcher hadn’t deigned to give his name. So she turned to him, this time openly irritated. “What is your name, Mr. Witcher, without school and medallion?”

The man at the table slowly straightened and stood up. He waited for an unbearably long moment to react before he turned to face them. And he looked straight at Lambert.

Everything that happened next took fractions of a second. Lambert inhaled sharply and immediately reached into his belt pouch. He took a silver orion out of there and threw it at the strange witcher, but he seemed to be waiting for it. He put his hand out in a defensive gesture, the star digging into his right hand. If he hadn't, it would have hit him in the chest, but not in any vital place.

Keira absolutely didn’t understand what was going on, but since Lambert attacked she had a defense spell on her lips, ready to stun the second monster slayer. She noticed that as Lambert made his throw, he hissed in pain, which meant he must have been injured. Keira had a firm resolve not to let him fight an opponent who was left-handed and in full strength. Unlike him.

“Easy, sorceress, he was just checking,” the red-haired witcher said, very slowly showing his hand to her with an orion in it. “This toy is silver.” After that, with a firm wave of his arm, he threw the star aside, which dug into the wooden floor at their feet, leaving a bloody streak behind it.

Keira was still holding the active spell in her clenched fist, but after this declaration she lost her vigilance. Her eyes followed the orion, then looked up at Lambert.

Her witcher after this violent reaction stared at the other man. Keira hadn’t seen such an expression on his face before. Lambert was absolutely shocked and furious.

"He's checking to see if I'm a doppler,” the stranger kept both of his hands in plain view, as if he were making a gesture to assure them he was not a threat. “I'm not,” he added softly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have held silver in my hand. I'm bleeding so I'm not a ghost either. I can also tell the story of your commemorative swords to prove that I’m not a fraud. I know what the inscription is on the steel blade, and the sorceress knows I didn't get to see it outside the scabbard when I got here. Anyway, ask me any question yourself to test me.”

So Lambert asked: “Aiden, what actual the fuck?!”

“Aiden?” Keira looked at the stranger no less surprised than her witcher.

She knew the name, Lambert once, being heavily drunk, told her about him. She knows who Aiden is. Or who he was, because from the information she had it was clear that she was dead. Meanwhile, he was standing right in front of them, safe and sound, with puppy eyes. Now she understood why Lambert had attacked him, generally seeing someone who should be dead never bodes well. She tried to understand how this was possible, but suddenly realized something else.

First of all: Aiden knew from the beginning what he was here for. He was aware that the witcher Keira was working with was Lambert. He wanted to buy fucking swords because he knew them well - they had belonged to him before. And he was well aware that if he came at this time, he would find only the sorceress here. He came to take a look at her, test her, tease her, and mock her.

Second: Lambert has been mourning Aiden for a really long time. It could have been avoided. However, he allowed him to suffer and murder in the name of wrongs that probably didn’t take place.

In an instant she went mad and did something that neither of the two witchers apparently expected. She didn't really know when she let out the spell that hit  Aiden hard and threw him against the wall. Before he could pick himself up, she caught up with him, casting another spell. The witcher began to choke.

“Did you have fun?” she hissed furiously and raised her clenched fist with the spell upwards, as if she was pulling an invisible cord, thus forcing Aiden to look at her. His pupils were constricted to thin vertical lines, he tried desperately to gasp for air, certainly unable to answer questions. "You miscalculated my dear, you shouldn't mess with someone who might wipe the floor with you!"

"Keira!” Lambert grabbed the sorceress's wrist like a vise, Keira released the spell, and Aiden finally caught his breath. "That's enough!”

“Sorry, I got carried away,” she said weakly, trying to get her balance back. Her heart pounded like a hammer. "But he's been provoking me ever since he got here and he finally got it."

“All this violence is absolutely unnecessary,” Aiden croaked, still kneeling on the floor rubbing his neck. “Can we talk? I'll explain everything.”

"Dead people don't talk, Aiden," Lambert said in a voice that an iceberg wasn't ashamed of. He stared down at him with a mixture of anger and disbelief.

“I've always been special.” Aiden smiled brightly at him. “Come on, give me a chance.”

This smile was completely different from the one he presented Keira for the last half hour. Most of all it was sincere and gentle. He looked at Lambert with trust as if he knew he would agree, regardless of the proposal.

Lambert let out an irritated huff, leaned over, grabbed Aiden by the neck like an unruly kitten and, grimacing in pain, pulled him to his feet.

Something wrong with the right shoulder, Keira noted in her mind. It was the second time he had to use it that he showed signs of discomfort.

“I mourned you, you asshole,” Lambert growled angrily, still holding his collar. “I killed a lot of people to avenge you. You better have a fucking good explanation of this farce.”

“I’m sincerely touched by your devotion.” The smile didn’t leave Aiden's face. "And if it comforts you, you haven't killed anyone who didn't deserve it."

Lambert's eyebrow twitched dangerously. Keira thought that just a moment longer and her witcher would kill someone who definitely deserved it, and then he would regret it very much.

"Okay, that's enough." She interrupted their exchange of glances. “Let's go to the back room, sit down, talk quietly and dress your wounds. Lambert, let go of him and take it off, I want to see your arm.”

They both looked at her in surprise, but neither moved. They irritated her immediately.

“What, did I stutter?“ She huffed and gestured in the direction. “In the back, like, right fucking now. I don't need a client to come and find this scene.”

“You're letting her to boss you around?“ Aiden glanced at Lambert, one eyebrow raised in an act of ironic disbelief.

“Don't piss me off, or I'll let her finish what she started,” the other witcher  hissed in response and obediently moved to the back, dragging Aiden with him.

Keira went to the front door and locked it. It was going to be a long and stormy evening, she decided that there would be enough clients for today.

_________________________________

[warsofasoiaf]

Have you played Fallout 4? What did you think of it?

Joseph Anderson had a phenomenal video on Fallout 4. Although it is enormous, so be careful. Overall, there were things to like and things not to like about Fallout 4. I’ll start with what I liked first. Throwing a cut in here because it’s long.

Combat in the first-person Fallout games has always been clunky, and enemy AI relatively largely consisted of straight charging or shooting from as maximum range as possible. Difficulty came primarily from enemy quantity, high damage output, or incredibly enemy hitpoints. The last of these has been a particular Bethesda problem in their games, with enemies being incredible damage sponges, making late-game fights a boring slog as you slowly whittle down their health while being impossible to damage in any meaningful capacity. While enemy variations aren’t nearly as high as the game’s fans would have you believe if you conceive of them as AI patterns, the AI activity did have some nice variations. Human enemies used cover, ghouls bobbed and weaved as you shot them, mole rats tried to ambush you. It’s got nothing on games with fully realized combat system, but it does make the combat that you do engage in much more enjoyable. 

All of the random crap you can pick up in a Bethesda game having a purpose is another positive. It is a true nuisance to find out when playing a game that I hit my encumbrance limit only to find out it’s because I’ve picked up a bunch of brooms, bowls, and other garbage accidentally while grabbing coin and other worthwhile treasures. Actually having these things mean an object is worthy mechanically, aside from level design; typewriters are useful as items as opposed to something that shows you that the ruined building you’re in was formerly a newspaper. As crafting is a big portion of the game, having these things provide component parts that you use for crafting on their own creates more utility in these elements of clutter which still require modeling, rendering, placement, etc. Now if you need aluminum, you’ll try to raid something like a cannery because it will have aluminum cans, which is an excellent way to create player-generated initiative. It also reinforces one of the primary themes of the game which is crafting and design, where even the trailers of the game suggest building as a key idea of the game. Certainly sensible for a post-apocalyptic game to focus on building a new society upon the ruins of the older one, and given what the game was trying to do with their four factions mechanic, it’s clear that this was their intent, and good job for trying to ensure that things factor back into their principal intent. 

Deathclaws look properly scary, the animations with Vault Boy were funny, there’s some pretty window dressing. The voice work wasn’t bad, the notable standout being Nick Valentine. The Brotherhood airship was an impressive visual. I had a little fun creating some basic settlements, particularly in Hangman’s Alley where I tried to create a network of suspended buildings and Spectacle Island where I had room to grant every prospective settler a shack. Bethesda clearly looked to create a game with mass market appeal, and I believe the metrics bears out that they succeeded in that regard. The robots in the USS Constitution quest were very funny, the writers were able to make the absolute ridiculousness of the situation work (curse you Weatherby Savings and Loan!) and framed it well as a comedic sidequest, with a final impressive visual if you side with the bots and the ship takes flight.

Now that this is out of the way, I think that a lot of what Fallout 4 did was not the right move. 

The quest design was particularly atrocious in this regard. Most of the radiant quests boiled them down to a simple formula - go to the dungeon, get to the final room where you need to either kill the boss or get an item from the boss chest, return. In this game though, the main story quests often were boiled down to just this simple formula. You need to find a doodad from a Courser to complete your teleporter? Go to the dungeon, kill the boss, recover the item. The Railroad needs you to help an escaped synth! Do it by going to the dungeon and getting to the final room. This really hampers the enjoyment of games because the expressiveness of the setting and elements of an RPG is often explored through quests. Quests are meant to get you out into the world and give you an objective, but they are also meant to connect you to the people that you’re dealing with. If every quest is boiled down to the same procedure, that hurts the immersion, but the bigger sin is that when you return you have another quest waiting for you. That robs the player of the sense of accomplishment because there is no permanent solution to problems, even for a minute. There is no different end-state for the player to see the transition from one to the other and feel accomplished that they were the ones who did it. Other RPG’s always understood this - a D&D game might have a party save a town investigate an illness dealing with a town, take out an evil druid who has charmed the wildlife into attacking supply and trade shipments, slay goblins who are raiding cattle, there are a lot of possibilities that might even feel samey: if you’re killing charmed dire wolves or goblin cattle thieves, you’re still going to the dungeon and fighting the boss, the usual flair and variation came from encounter design. After you’d do that though, the NPC’s might say “Hey, Mom is feeling better after you cured that disease, she’s starting to walk again,” “Hey, we were able to send a shipment of wine from the vineyards out to the capital, here’s some coin for the shipment as reward for your service,” or even just a simple “Hey, thanks for taking out those cattle thieves.” There’s a sense of accomplishment even if it’s a fleeting “we did a cool thing.” Computer RPG’s are tougher in this regard, part of the sense of accomplishment in tabletop gaming is also with your friends, it’s a shared activity, but usually in that the reward was some experience and character growth and going to new content. There isn’t new content here in Fallout 4 though, because of the samey quest design and lack of progression.

The conversational depth was also ruined, with so much of the voice choices mangled by the system of conversation they designed. By demanding a four-choice system, they limited themselves to always requiring four options which completely mangled interactivity. The previous menu design allowed for as many lines as you wanted, even if the choices were usually beads on a string. The depth and variation, however, are even lower than what could be found in games like Mass Effect 3, and the small word descriptions were often so inaccurate that it created a massive disconnect between myself the player and the Sole Survivor, because they weren’t saying what I thought they would be saying. That prevented me from feeling immersed, because a “Sarcastic” option could be a witty joke or a threat that sounds like it should come out of a bouncer. The character options were already limited, with Nate being a veteran and Nora being a lawyer, but this lack of depth prevents me from feeling the character even moreso than a scripted backstory. You get those in games, but being unable to predict how I’m reacting is something that kills character. 

Bethesda needs to end the “find (x) loved one” as a means to get people motivated to do a quest, or if they don’t want to rid themselves of that tool in their toolbox, they need to do a better job getting me to like them. More linear games can get away with this, but open world games encourage the sort of idle dicking around that doesn’t make any sense for a person who is attempting to find a family member. Morrowind did this much better, where your main task was to be an Imperial agent, and you were encouraged to join other factions and do quests as a means to establish a cover identity and get more acquainted with combat. Folks who didn’t usually ended up going to Hasphat Antabolius and getting their face kicked in by Snowy Granius. Here though, what sort of parent am I if instead of pursuing a lead to find my infant son I’m wandering over east because I saw what looked like a cool ruin, and I need XP to get my next perk (another gripe, perks that are simple percentage increases because they slow down advancement and make combat a slog if you don’t take them, depressing what should be a sense of accomplishment). By making us try to feel close with a character but by refusing to give us the players time with them, there is no sense of bonding. I felt more connection to James in Fallout 3 than I did for Sean, but even then, I felt more connection to him because he was voiced by Liam Neeson than because of any sense of fatherly affection. The same goes for the spouse and baby Sean, I feel little for them because I see them only a little. I know that I should care more, but I also know that I the player don’t because all that I was given is “you should care about them.” You need time to get to know characters in game, along with good writing and voicework. I like Nick because he quoted “The Raven” when seeing the Brotherhood airship and I thought that was excellent writing, I didn’t have any experiences with Sean to give me that same sense of bonding. 

They’ve also ruined the worldbuilding. The first-person Fallout games have always had a problem with this, with Fallout 3 recycling Super Mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, and other iconic Fallout things into Washington D.C. Part of this is almost certainly the same reason that The Force Awakens was such a dull rehash of the plot of A New Hope, they wanted to establish some sort of continuity with a new director to not frighten off old fans who they relied on to provide a significant majority of the sales. The problem of course, is that this runs into significant continuity problems, now needing Vault 87 to have a strain of FEV and having a joint Vault-Tec/US Government experiment program there on the East Coast, so we can have Super Mutants. Jackson’s chameleon isn’t native to Washington D.C., but we need to have Deathclaws because they’re the iconic scary Fallout enemy, as opposed to creating something new with the local fauna, which is only made worse because they did do that with the yao guai formed from the American black bear (the black bear doesn’t typically range in the Chesapeake Basin near DC these days, but it’s close enough and given the loss of humans to force them back they could easily return to their old pre-human rangings). Some creatures are functions of the overall setting and can be global, ghouls are the big one here since radiation would be a global thing and fitting considering Fallout is a post-apocalypse specifically destroyed by nuclear war. Others though, are clearly mutated creatures and so they would be more localized. Centaurs and floaters were designed by FEV experiments and collared by Super Mutants, they should really only be around Super Mutants. Radscorpions shouldn’t be around, there would probably be instead be mutated spiders. Making things worse are that the monster designers do develop some excellent enemies when they think about it. Far Harbor has a mutant hermit crab that uses a truck as a shell (a lobster restaurant truck, which is passable enough for a visual joke even if it falls apart when you think about other trucks that they might use) and a monster that uses an angler lure that resembles a crafting component - these are good ideas but the developers needed to awkwardly shoehorn in iconic Fallout things that have no place there. This isn’t to say that I’m in love with a lot of Fallout’s worldbuilding, a lot of the stuff in Fallout 2 I found to be kind of dumb particularly the talking deathclaws, but as the series went on it took objects without meaning. The G.E.C.K in Fallout 3 was pretty much a magic recombinator which makes no sense as a technology in a world devastated by resource collapse, something similar can be said about the Sierra Madre vending machines. 

Fallout 4 though, had a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies that really took an axe to the setting. The boy in the fridge outlasts the entire Great War, but apparently never needed to eat or drink water. This is, of course, stupid, because ghouls have always been shown to need to eat and drink - Fallout 1′s Necropolis section has a Water Chip but if you take it without finding an alternate source of clean water, the ghouls will die. Ghoul settler NPC’s that flock to your player-crafted towns require food and water. The entire thing was ruined from a complete lack of care, to build a quest where you reunite a lost boy with his still-alive ghoulified parents. I think this one bothers me not simply because of the egregious worldbuilding which isn’t even consistent in the very game it’s written it, but it’s done so frivolously for a boring escort quest. It feels scattershot, and that’s the problem I think with a lot of Fallout 4′s quests. They feel disconnected, like every writer worked in a cubicle without talking to any of the other writers. Same with things like the Lady in the Fog.

Are we done with that? Good, because now we’re going into the parts that I really dislike - the main quest and the factions. These are just awful. The developers took what folks really liked when it came to Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (Fallout 1 did have interesting factions but they were largely self-contained, more towns than anything else) and completely botched it. New Vegas was the clear inspiration for these factions, with the four faction model of NCR, Legion, House, and Indepenedent meaning that there were four different ways to go forward into the future, so we get three factions that fight each other and a fourth more player friendly faction that roughly resembles the Independent Vegas where you can pick and choose which factions you bring in with you and which you get rid of. Thematically, this fits in with the core of the game, crafting is a big portion of what you do and so crafting what sort of world the Commonwealth would be is simply a logical extension of it. The factions aren’t presented well though. The Railroad are impossibly naive and don’t demonstrate any rougher edges like denying supplies to humans in order to fuel their synth effort, even though such a thing should be evident if the post-apocalypse of the Commonwealth is to be believed. The Institute are sinister murderers and replacers without bringing any of the advanced technology that could provide some benefit such as the gigantic orange gourd that can grow. So much of their kill-and-replace mentality seems to be done for no great overarching purpose. The Minutemen are basically blank, pretty much just a catch-all for the player-built settlements, though the player as the leader of the Minutemen ends up getting bossed around by Preston to the point of the faction rejecting your commands to proceed with the main quest, a significant problem with Bethesda factions where you are the leader but never get any actual sense of leadership. There doesn’t appear to be any addressing of the failures of the previous Minutemen whether that be the previous summit, or new problems such as settlements feuding with each other requiring the general to intervene and mediate. The Brotherhood come the closest to a real faction with advantages and drawbacks if you squint, they are feudal overlords with the firepower to fight Super Mutants and other mutated nasties, but also violently reject ghouls and synths as part of their violent dogma except for seemingly not caring when you bring a companion around or killing ghoul settlers in settlements they control. But even then, we don’t really see the Brotherhood providing protection to the settlements that they demand for food, the typical radiant quest to destroy a pack of feral ghouls or super mutants is directed from a Brotherhood quest giver to a randomly determined location, hardly a good way to illustrate whether or not the Brotherhood is actually protecting settlements that they administer. We see little change in the way of the Commonwealth save that certain factions are alive or not because the game needs to stay active in order to perform radiant quests, so not even the signature ending slideshows can give us the illusion of effects building off of our actions. This is contrary to the theme of building a better world in the Commonwealth because there is no building. 

Special notice must be given to the Nuka-World raiders because they show the big problems with the factions. You can be a Raider in Nuka-World but only after becoming the Overboss, which is fair enough. But you’re already a Minuteman, but the Minutemen don’t activate any kill-on-sight order and Preston still helps you out. The game is so terrified of people losing out on content that they make permanent consequences rare, and when you do something like order an attack, it can be rescinded automatically if one of your companions is there. As an Overboss, you do grunt work in the Commonwealth, and the factions get mad and pissy if you don’t give them things despite even if you only give one section of the park to one of the factions, that’s more than they got from Colter. It’s like they don’t exist until the player shows up, which is exactly how a lot of modern Bethesda character and faction building seems to be. While in most computer games a sort of uneasy status quo is the desired beginning state because it gives the protagonist the chance to make ripples while justifying the existence of a status that allows the player to change it, it has to be applied consistently. 

The main quest itself is silly. There’s a decent twist with Sean becoming Father that sort of works, which would have worked much better if we had actually gotten a chance to bond with him, although the continuity of everything gets wiggy quick. When he said that he looked over the world and saw nothing but despair, I was wondering if they were going to actually bring a big question up and a debate between Father and the Player, the idea of what worth the people on the surface have, but it goes nowhere, it’s a missed opportunity. The main quest is just a means to meet all four factions and it’s a barebones skeleton at best. There are some interesting concepts they try, but what they do often falls flat. They try to establish some sort of empathy for Kellogg in the memory den, but it’s lazy and cheap because he kidnaps a baby and wastes your spouse, a wasted effort of empathy only made worse when you get criticized for not showing any sympathy. Kellogg then shows up in Nick’s memory for one second and then that little story nugget is ignored. The half-baked nature of the story keeps being brought back up, which is a pity because we actually saw them do a competent job in Far Harbor. The Followers of Atom are crazy and they really aren’t sympathetic in any way, but some of the folks inside the sub aren’t so bad that it might prevent you from wanting to detonate the sub, or at least you might think enough that you look for another solution. DiMA did some monstrous things, and if you bring him to justice, the game actually takes the time to evaluate whether or not you helped out Far Harbor, with meaningful consequences being taken if you took the time to do the sidequests which imparts far more meaning to them. 

While there’s a lot of problems that show up in terms of binary completion, the question of whether to replace Tektus and turn the Children of Atom to a more moderate path is a good question, it actually gives a lot more merit to the Institute if they were ever to have been shown to enact the same level of care. That only makes the Fallout problems stand out more, because it shows that they were capable of it but didn’t. This isn’t the only missed opportunity, synths themselves become a big problem. The goal was to create a very paranoid feeling but it was so sorely under-utilized that I never grew suspicious of folks because the game never gave me enough incentive to be suspicious of them. I didn’t think that Bethesda made synths that would give you false information or ambush you because that would have been potentially missed content. The idea of whether you are a synth or not is clearly an attempt to give the game more depth than it is presenting. You’re not a synth, Father’s actions make no sense if you are one, and DiMA attempting to make you think you are is silly because you know you aren’t one.

I think the game would have been much better if they had dropped the notion of Fallout entirely. If they had instead looked to create an open-world post-apocalyptic game focusing on crafting and building towns, perhaps with an eventual goal state of building many towns, establishing transportation networks, and rebuilding a junkyard society as a decent place (or going full Mad Max Bartertown complete with a Thunderdome for players looking for an evil and over-the-top option). That might have been an interesting game for Bethesda to potentially develop a new IP, even contracting with smaller studios for those who wish to tell story-heavy games in the setting. Instead, they applied Fallout like a bad paint job, cobbling together weak RP elements and story that made the game feel like a hydra that couldn’t recognize it was one being with multiple heads, constantly tearing the other parts of itself to ribbons. 

If I wanted to further improve it, I think I would have instead made the spouse a synth. It would require some serious reworking, but I would have made it so that Sean did believe that synths were people, or that they were real enough that the difference was negligible, they had free will. During the initial grab, the Institute took the entire cryopod where Sean was, baby and parent both. They used Sean to create the next generation of synths, but something happened with the parent, and they died during defrost. Sean hates the Institute for what they did, but what happened was truly a medical complication, not malicious in any way. When he learns that the player character is active, he creates a synth programmed to believe they are the spouse. He believes that exposing who he really is to the surviving parent would be traumatic, and as he hears that the player character is thriving, he wants to give them a chance at a normal life, and to alleviate the loss that he had in his life with the loss of his own parents. So the spouse is sent to you, and for a long time, you and the spouse have no idea. You adventure together, you build settlements together, the game encourages you to have a good relationship. It doesn’t have to be hunky dory, and I’d argue it’s actually better if it’s not. Have the spouse be programmed with some rough experiences in the Wasteland, so they’re nervous, skittish, maybe even a little resentful that the player character snoozed their way through everything, but slowly rebuild the relationship. That way, when the quest eventually comes where you find the truth, the player character has to confront that reality. Then when you confront Sean, Sean explains himself and the player is given the choice to forgive him, be understanding but still angry, or be hugely pissed at the manipulation. That’s drama that uses the core theme of what synths are about with the whole kill-and-replace motif the Institute does. There’s a plot twist that batters the player, there’s one that’s just messy and gross and tough to reconcile. There’s one where the conclusion the player comes to is valid because it’s the player themselves deciding what the meaning of it is.

So overall, I see Fallout 4 as a bunch of missed opportunities and clumsy writing wrapped up in the popular shallow open-worlds that triple-A games end up having. 

Thanks for the question, Jackie.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[frncs]

⌠ ERIC OSBORNE, 21, NON-BINARY, HE/THEY ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, FRANCES ‘FRANK’ LAVOIE! according to their records, they’re a FIRST year, specializing in MACGYVER SURVIVAL SKILLS AND NAVIGATION & COVERT OPS; and they DID go to a spy prep high school. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of oversized clothing stitched with thick yarn and littered with cat hair, the snap of stretched balloons before they’re blown and a post-nap dazed gaze. when it’s the (virgo)’s birthday on 09/01/1999, they always request CORN DOGS from the school’s chefs. looks like they’re well on their way to graduation. ⌿ tasha, 22, she/her, est ⍀ 

well well well .. id meant to bring another kid ages ago .. n then jus didn’t because the personality part was/is givin me grief FGJH so pls 🐻  w me n replies as i figure out his voice . also .. haven’t even written out my intro yet . . bt ik it’s gna be long apologies , pls feel free to just read the tldr 

tw: death, accidental murder, grief.

TLDR: grew up fairly well off to spy parents who didn’t want him to be part of that world but apart from that didn’t care what he did with his life otherwise. he often questioned whether they really cared for him at all (tht quote thts like .. if u love me u love me in a way i cant understand). luna’s his best friend, and he’s obsessed with his aunt and uncle’s circus that stops into town every year. life is pretty great until luna ‘dies’ at 16. he joins the circus and becomes a clown, he loves performing with all his heart. at 18, his aunt and uncle arm him with a credit card and tell him to go travel, he assumes it’s because they just want him to explore the world. visits europe for six months and asia for six months, enjoys it but misses the circus terribly, busks a lot. they actually send him away to distance him from the shady happenings that are starting to boil within the company. he comes back in time for the halloween switch-a-roo, where everyone rotates their act (so he does the magic show as a clown). he’s part of a set-up that results in him accidentally killing a person and sawing them in half. his aunt and uncle call his parents, who reluctantly send him to prep school for a little less than a year to heighten his chances of getting into a spy school for protection, which he does. dedicated to working hard and getting a high paying job to pay for reparations for the circus and do a massive overhaul of the way it runs, because it’s like his second home.

grew up in waterford ct, to one retired spy parent ( his mom ) and his dad who works with the government and is aware of espionage. his mom straight up didn’t have a good time, no one really talks about it, he has no idea what happened, doesn’t know if his dad knows either but it’s clear that they don’t want him going into the spy world. 

he feels like he’s always been treated like an adult for as long as he remembers, not in the sense that they burdened him with responsibility, but that they didn’t seem to care what he did one way or another. the best way i can describe it is that his parents had the same energy as a character in a yorgos lanthimos film, very dry and lifeless, like they’re on autopilot. he’d try and cuddle his mom and she’d just pat him on the head. he couldn’t really rebel against them and as long as he went to school and got good grades they appeared un-phased about what he got up to, a very mind your own business dynamic shared between family. 

he didn’t get up to a whole lot, he was a bit of an outsider. didn’t make friends very easily because he didn’t know how to let himself go around people, even though he’d sometimes be excited but wouldn’t know how to show it. definitely had that reserved temperament ingrained into him from his parents. 

he did have one friend who knew him inside and out, luna <3 who was also his neighbour. their demeanours were a perfect match but also he’d find himself getting so excited and wanting to tell her about his day or listen to hers, or read with her or play hopscotch or send her secret notes with his flashlight at her window. 

there was one other thing that got him terribly excited and it’s when his aunt and uncle’s traveling circus would stop in. he’d go every single day for the week and a half it was there. his parents would arrange one dinner with them and consider their familial duty done, other than that they remain out of contact with them. his aunt and uncle tell him that he’s always welcome to join, and he holds them to it. his parents say do whatever you want, just graduate high school first. 

his whole world kinda crumbles when luna ‘dies’ at sixteen. he feels immense guilt over it thinking he should’ve done something about that skeevy bf of hers...this also coincides with one of his mom’s friends dying (harlowe’s mom) which makes his mom act even weirder so he fast tracks his plans to join the circus and joins at sixteen, doesn’t graduate high school. i envision the convo btw him and his dad went like: 

“dad, i’m joining the circus.”

“graduate high school first.”

“no.”

“okay son, i can’t control you.”

the company welcomed him with open arms and he tried out everything, acrobatics, sharpshooting, but wasn’t particularly talented at anything. except, clownery. because messing up is commended, noting how all the kids would laugh at him trying basic magic tricks. so his aunt and uncle got him into a clown costume lickety-split. performing brought him a lot of joy through the grief like he’s an entirely different person when performing, insert that one cursed joker picture: put on a happy face. 

because the owners were his aunt and uncle he was treated exceptionally well and he was very oblivious to the malpractice that went on behind the scenes. the circus had a whole sector dedicated to pickpocketing (other kids who he just saw as friends were often runaways from broken homes who didn’t have anywhere else to go and earned their wages by stealing from customers), and serious kerfuffle with pay, probably some extortion going on, just general yuckery. he vaguely knew it was happening but was kind of like it is what it is kinda standpoint. heavily inspired by the circus barney and clint barton grew up in reffed in the 2015 run of all-new hawkeye.

a couple years later his aunt and uncle give him a credit card and tell him to go travel for a bit. he does because why not but misses the circus terribly. he spends six months in europe and six months in asia, busks as a clown a lot and but his on-the-road/home sickness never really fades.

he returns super excited, ready to clown around but it’s evident tensions are just really high between the workers but they’re still all super sweet to him because he’s very sweet even if he’s oblivious. halloween comes around which is his favourite time of year because they do this thing called the switch-a-roo, where everyone switches what act they’re doing, bicycle acts do contortionist acts, lion tamers do rope walkers, magicians do animal taming and clowns do magic acts. it’s just one big laugh because obviously most of them are cross-trained, but it’s meant to be more of a comedy thing and their mess-ups are to an extent choreographed but also capitalizes on the scariness because they hype up the fact that they have no idea what they’re doing.

he’s doing his magic act, messing up all the magic tricks showing all his cards, and his last act is the sawing someone in half, so the assistant comes out in the box, really selling it like omg a clown !!! being like stop !!! you don’t know what you’re doing !!! and frances is like playing along with the act, as he was told that the gag would be when they split the boxes they’ll have some practical effects to make it look like he’d accidentally actually cut the assistant in half. fumbling with a very real chainsaw, he does the choppity-chop which takes a bit more muscle than he thought it would and the assistant screams a lot then pretends to pass out. anyways it wasn’t an act he accidentally cut someone in half, and they die.

EXTRA CLOWN LORE THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT FEEL FREE TO SKIP!

i envisioned that worker negotiations had been going on for a while and had kinda reached a stalemate where nothing was happening, and there were rumblings about frances being off travelling and spending a shit ton of money where it could’ve been put towards the workers and the circus and his aunt and uncle would hear threats thrown towards frances which is why they wanted him to stay away/go travelling for a while. the girl who was killed did so knowingly, and died a martyr (and also left frances a note explaining things and how she was sorry that he was the one that had to kill her). the whole thing was executed with a lot of thought: how it would affect frances and how it would be seen as a personal attack against his aunt and uncle - and that while the act seemingly went off without a hitch and the public didn’t suspect a thing, the workers have leverage to make it public (which ideally they don’t want b/c a lot of the workers are pretty disenfranchised or have criminal records and truthfully don’t want the end all being the circus closing b/c they do love their job just not the conditions). his aunt an uncle are in a bit of a jam because they need an investor but can’t get that because of shady hiring practices in the first place, and their greed definitely exacerbated the problem.

after that happens his aunt and uncle immediately call his parents, who despite never wanting him to go into the spy industry believe that it would be the safest option for him, and enrol him in prep school (which he attends for less than a year) so that he has more of a chance getting into gallagher the following year, which, with the right strings pulled happens. 

now he’s dedicated to giving it his all so he can get a really high paying job and do a complete overhaul of the company and make a lot of reparations that should’ve been made years and years ago. 

personality

- very patient, a slow talker and more of a listener.  - idealistic, in the sense that he’s always been surrounded by people either in poverty of vulnerable, and despite being a caring guy, adopted that kind of mind your own business mentality his parents had. even his desire to get rich in order to save the circus is a very unrealistic plan or at the very least would take a very long time to achieve.  - tired, i know it’s not a personality trait but i’m making it one, he’s a little bit dazed, not gloomy per se but like he’s woken up from a nap and needs to warm up a bit before being a functioning part of society. but that’s like all his interactions. has the gait of like a drunken kung fu master, very limber.  

headcanons

has slight imposter syndrome about clowning, knows he’s great and always got a standing ovation but can’t help but wonder how much nepotism played a role in her being the main clown in the company.

planning on hiding out in her room during halloween, but is very bittersweet about it, because he thinks that halloween is one of the only times that people are happy because they get to be anyone they want and has found that most people don’t want to be themselves.

has an overweight, old cat which he’s had since he joined the circus and has been everywhere with him. it’s name is cat. he also has an album on his phone of all the strays he’s ever met, which is a lot being on the road. he named all of them but they never got to come with him.

sleeps a lot, probably has some sort of chronic sleep disorder, but enjoys the sweet release from life so he doesn’t question it. has no shame and will sleep anywhere and does.

loves making balloon animals, was his favourite thing to do at the circus. keeps a jewelry dish full of unpumped balloons on his bedside table. also a big reader, and hoarder of anything that can fit in a small travel notebook (leaves, ticket stubs, pictures, anything). 

wanted connections: i’ll update my actual google docs in the coming days but people he met while traveling for a year, anyone with pets wanting to have a pet playdate (cat’s not too active but he could use some company), someone who catches him crying (he cries a lot haven’t peeped his full chart but i can sense the water energy from miles away), people who wake him up when he falls asleep in class, in the common rooms, outside, flirty flirts, someone who’s been to the circus, someone who clowns him about being a clown and he gets super angry, really anything, i’m terrible at coming up with connections i get such a thrill from mundane relations i’m boring <3

[araeph]

Hi, I finished watching atla. It's a good show with interesting characters. But I wonder why Mai is hated. I mean, she saved zuko and co. at the boiling rocks. She believed in him. The brief eye lock they had after zuko locked Mai says so. I just want to know your opinion.

Why Mai Is Hated

(Disclaimer: This is not an even-handed analysis of Mai’scharacter because that was not the question asked. The question was, Why is Mai hated? The following essayattempts to answer this question, and only this question.)

We’re introduced to Mai as abored teenager who hates being uprooted to Omashu. So great is her indifferencethat when a plague has reportedly struck the city, she merely offers her dadfire flakes and looks bored. Her little brother is kidnapped soon after, andshe casts her mother a disdainful glance when the latter breaks down in tears. Maithen joins up with Azula willingly, again because she is bored, and the princesstries to exchange Mai’s brother for Bumi before reneging on the deal, which Maiagrees to without even a hint that she is worried for her brother during orafter the fact.

At this point, Azula tells Maiwhat she needs her and Ty Lee for: tracking, capturing, and imprisoning GeneralIroh and Zuko according to the Firelord’s wishes as expressed in “Siege of theNorth Part 2.” Per the wanted poster Azula brandishes at the royal guard in“The Avatar State,” Zuko is wanted deador alive. Despite being teased for her crush on him, Mai shows no signs of conflictat her mission or trepidation on Zuko’s behalf.

Azula: (to her men) My brother and my uncle have disgraced the Fire Lord and brought shame on all of us. You may have mixed feelings about attacking members of the royal family; I understand. But I assure you, if you hesitate, I will not hesitate to bring you down. Dismissed.

Along the way, Mai also helpsAzula hunt Team Avatar to exhaustion and capture the Kyoshi warriors so thetrio can infiltrate the Earth Kingdom. Unlike in Zuko’s character journey wherehe learns to understand and empathize with the Earth Kingdom denizens duringhis time with them, the most Mai ever says about the people she encounters isthat their bright colors make her nauseous and it’s amusing when one of the DaiLi almost wets his pants out of fear. Eventually, Mai and Ty Lee help Azula andZuko topple the last standing bastion against Fire Nation world dominationwhile Iroh is hauled off as a prisoner.

Azula, who wants to make sureZuko is kept under control, decides to set him up with Mai in order to keep aneye on him. The couple catch on at a suspiciously timed dinner and decide toescape for a fun evening out on the town. They run into Zuko’s ex-girlfriend,which annoys Mai even though she and Zuko are not dating and, as far as weknow, were never actually together. So she pretends to be a knife thrower froma circus and flings an ice dagger through an octopus atop the unwilling Zuko’shead. Mai then encourages Jin, a complete novice, to throw her own lethalprojectile at Zuko, causing him to land in the fountain and endure publichumiliation. This is supposedly revenge for when Zuko knocked Mai into thefountain … as a child … to save her from being burned at the hands of Azula. Iam not sure why this warrants a payback, but it makes sense to Mai. Oncethey’re alone, Zuko understandably shouts at Mai that she could have gotten himkilled. Mai laughs loudly at this and brushes it off.

Once back in the Fire Nation, Maistarts dating Zuko officially. This mostly involves her ignoring or yawning atZuko’s inner turmoil and scoffing at the gifts he brings her, except for therare occasion when she tries to distract him from his problems by makingunreasonable demands on his servants.

They quarrel constantly untilZuko leaves the Fire Nation and Mai meets him again at the Boiling Rock, whereshe lambastes Zuko for ripping out her heart even though he pretty obviouslykept her in the dark for her own protection. She then says that she doesn’tknow Zuko, which is true, as he locks her in a cell moments later so he cansave the people in his life he has a genuine connection to—and who, thoughformer enemies on the opposite side of the war, have thrown fewer things at hishead than Mai has.

Suddenly Mai betrays Azula forZuko. Why? She loves him. Why does she love him? We never find out, since theonly things she ever says about his character are negative. Ty Lee saves Maifrom her impending execution and Mai later pulls some strings to get them bothout of prison. Once she makes her way to the capital, she announces withoutpreamble that she is Zuko’s girlfriend again, pokes him in the chest, and warnshim to never break up with her again.

In the comics, we discover thatthe “don’t ever break up with me again” rule applies only to Zuko and not toMai, since she dumps him in the very first series. However, let us be fair toMai: Zuko did keep the truth from her, twice, and the first time she sought asolution to the problem by getting the Kyoshi warriors to be his bodyguards.But going behind her back to talk to his evil father is the last straw for Mai.It’s such a deal breaker that she leaves the palace when Zuko is facingmultiple assassination attempts and is borderline suicidal.

Mai’s stalwart stance against notgoing behind your partner’s back to talk with an evil father will last untilher next comic series, when she goes behind Zuko’s back to talk with her evilfather. This and her refusal to turn her father in result in thenear-assassination of Zuko and his entire family, including his little sisterKiyi. Kiyi is later kidnapped because Mai’s father is still on the run and shehas refused to come clean. When Mai finally admits her aiding and abetting of amurderous traitor, she reacts to Zuko’s dismay by yelling at him and neglectingto apologize for endangering him and his loved ones.

Pleasenote that Mai’s redemptive deed in the show was her saving Zuko’s life from amurderous tyrant and that her actions here completely cancel that out.

Mai has meanwhile been dating KeiLo, a nice young man whose affections she uses in order to spy on her fatherfor Zuko. Why she used Kei Lo against her father for Zuko’s sake, only tobetray Zuko for her father’s sake, is never explained. The three of them andAang later wander the catacombs trying to find clues that may lead to Kiyi’smysterious kidnapper. But what isquite apparent is Mai’s utter contempt for Zuko during this journey. Shedeprecates Zuko’s dating style in front of her current boyfriend, insultsZuko’s ancestors, obliquely asks when Zuko will die by inquiring whether he’sreserved a grave for himself, and implies that Zuko has weird friends. Why shefeels entitled to remark on this, when she’s had a total of one real friend herentire life, is anyone’s guess. She caps it all off by saying that, thanks toZuko, she needs all future romantic relationships involving her to beemotionally imbalanced in her favor.

In the end, they fight againstMai’s father, he is captured, and Mai praises him for his bravery … even thoughhis actions consisted of hiding in the shadows and kidnapping children, whichseems like the pinnacle of cowardice. The comic ends with Mai and Zuko smilingat each other, Zuko holding his little sister in his arms (whom Mai hadendangered), and Mai holding her little brother in her arms (whom Mai had alsoendangered). Isn’t family bonding time great?

Where this intensely annoyinglove triangle is headed in the comics is uncertain, although to be honest, KeiLo/Zuko is the only healthy pairing that could result from those threecharacters. Certainly Mai and Zuko don’t resume a relationship after this, althoughthe fandom presumption is that, somewhere down the line, the pair willinexplicably marry.

Aside from Mai’s selfishness,hypocrisy, refusal to grow, and lack of compassion, the narrative around her isdisjointed and contradicts itself at several critical points. Mai is made outto be the goth girl who’s a wet blanket on her parents’ emotions, until “TheBeach,” where we are told that no actually, it was her parentsoppressing Mai’s emotions the whole time. Mai is willing to sacrifice everything in “The Boiling Rock” to save Zuko’s life, except that wait, she iswilling to throw that sacrifice away for her father in “Smoke and Shadow.” But holdon, isn’t that the father she implied was neglectful and oppressive in the first place? And wait, if it’s actually her brother growing up without a fatherthat she’s concerned about, why was she so blasé about her brother getting previously kidnapped in “Return to Omashu”? And which is supposed to be Mai’sredeeming character trait: that she stands up for love in spite of her better judgment (“The Boiling Rock”), or that she stands up for her better judgment in spite of love (“The Promise”)?

Mai’s motivations are muddled. Isher first loyalty to her father, her brother, Azula, or Zuko? The story givesus multiple answers, which it then doubles back on whenever convenient. Thisleaves herself as Mai’s only consistent priority, which is hardly a firmbedrock for constructing a heroine. Mai is not moving toward a fixed point indevelopment; the plot is dragging her along for the ride, while she exists asan afterthought. A plume, if you will, of smoke and shadow, that is fast losingwhat cohesion it possessed.