#the reason they seemed to want to recruit mary ann was because shes funny and hasnt actively antagonized anyone

[the-knight-of-destiny]

On Fantasy High, Redemption, and Agency (General Spoilers for Junior Year, sort of?) Also this post about FHJY is long as fuck, as all of mine are getting. In short it's my understanding of how Brennan Lee Mulligan sets up the teenage villains of Fantasy High.

Fair warning, this is LOOOONG below the cut.

Y'know when I said I wasn't going to talk about Ratgrinder discourse? I lied.

So Brennan as a DM has a very specific narrative language for how a villain is 'redeemable' and it primarily has to do with the level of agency a villain has in their actions. This isn't particularly hard to notice when you look at our very own (and fan favorite) reformed villain squad.

Starting with Ragh, while he was in his right mind for most of his villainy in Freshman Year, he really didn't do too much other than beat people up and be a bully? While he worked with Daybreak on some level, he wasn't anything more than muscle and not very in on most of the plans. There was also some implication of grooming and manipulation from Daybreak to Ragh.

Zayn as an example also helps build this thesis, while he also hasn't done a TON evil he's generally a bit more discerning than Ragh. However he builds the understanding of how Fantasy High looks at it's redeemed teenage villains, when Zayn is found as a ghost he explicitly calls out Daybreak as being the only reason he's still housed, were he not to go along with the Freshman Year scheme he'd have been sent back to his abusive parents, the foster system, or homeless as like, a fifteen year old boy.

But the actual silver bullet to understanding this is Aelwyn, to preface. Aelwyn fucking sucks in freshman year, way worse than Ragh or Zayn. She's also responsible for way worse than any other teenage villain in the series. She's arguably committed worse than Dayne Blayde or Penelope Everpetal, but there's an important component to her redemption in Sophmore Year, something Brennan has her stay conscious despite making death saves to explain.

In tears Aelwyn notes that Kalina was actively threatening to kill her had she not complied with the Kalvaxus plan.

So there's a running theme here, Ragh didn't seem to have much of an idea of what the wider plan even was and was just muscle, Zayn was under significant threat to his personal safety (and unbeknownst to him, also under threat of death, a threat that actually gets carried out), and Aelwyn was literally convinced she'd be murdered for not complying.

This tracks with the teen villains who DON'T get redeemed by the way, Dayne had no qualms about casually murdering his classmates with a great sword, Penelope didn't seem to mind the idea of throwing her best friend Kalvaxus for a power play. They both get killed because they don't seem to really care what happened, were fully complicit, and had no form of remorse at all.

This leaves us with our code to cracking if Brennan sees the Ratgrinders as possibly worthy of redemption (IMO, signs point to yes, but it's complicated.) We know the Ratgrinders are being manipulated heavily by Porter (I have so many more thoughts about Jace's place in this but that's for a whole other post,) however they don't have Ragh's excuse of being mostly in the dark.

Kipperlilly and Oisin for sure know exactly what's going on, and the rest (sans Buddy) probably do too. The actual question is how much does Ankarna rage affect one's reasoning, and the thing that's interesting about how the Ratgrinders have been set up is that question is sincerely ambiguous.

Signs point to the corruption needing some sort of genuine anger or frustration to latch onto, but this is my first hot take here. This isn't really that damning? Pre-Rage Kipperlilly said some concerning things, in private confidential counseling. She (at the time) understood her fixation on Riz was a problem and perhaps not fair. Oisin probably was mildly frustrated or saddened a girl he had a crush on didn't notice him, but to cast Pre-Rage Oisin as a full on Biz Glitterdew incel is, in my opinion, unlikely. Ruben was already seeking attention but wasn't anything worse than a mildly annoying teenage boy, etc.

These aren't exactly 'good' feelings but they are pretty normal for 14-15 year olds. Pre-Rage Ratgrinders really aren't that much worse than Pre-Character Development Bad Kids, let's not forget that they too definitely act out in really mean, unfair ways at around the same time as Pre-Rage Ratgrinders (Fig and Fabian, most notably.)

As for agency though, they clearly have a bit more of it than previous teenage villains, and are a bit more aware of their actions. They're not under direct threat of violence like Aelwyn or Zayn (though the way Porter and Jace act around them may make that threat implicit.) and they don't have Ragh's excuse of being seemingly largely in the dark.

The Ratgrinders I feel are an intentional test for the Bad Kids (and the Intrepid Heroes as players) because they're significantly more antagonistic than previous teenage villains. Heck, even ones that turned out totally evil. Dayne's kinda chill to the Bad Kids initially, Penelope is a bit backhanded but she isn't outright mean. If you count him, even Johnny Spells humors Riz and is relatively lax to him. Ragh's honestly way more harsh for most of the first half of Freshman Year, Zayn's initially more rude and confrontational to them too.

That said they're both being influenced by a much worse adult (Like everyone in the Reformed Villain Squad) and have a rage god clouding their judgement to an unknown degree. If we follow previously established patterns, they're salvageable by the story's own logic.

The test is for the party, it's easy to forgive Zayn when he openly cries and apologizes immediately when finally confronted about his place in the villain plot, it's easier to forgive Aelwyn when she openly puts herself in harm's way and almost dies to save Adaine.

It's going to be harder, emotionally, for both the player characters and the players themselves to forgive the Ratgrinders and recognize they're also victims in some sense when the Ratgrinders have been actively fucking with the Bad Kids for the whole season, and taking an obvious amount of satisfaction in it.

The challenge Brennan has set up for the party, I feel, is a test of their character. Fighting a possibly ascended god Porter is gonna be a lot easier without a whole other party of enemies in the fight (and even much easier if you can convince some to fight alongside you as a part of heroes.)

[thecorteztwins]

razzle-dazzle-13 replied to your post “What characters would YOU have liked to see in X-Men Evolution? Send...”

Have you done Fabian Cortez, because I WANT EVO VERSE FABIAN CORTEZ. If yes how about Catseye?

Both coming right up! Under a cut for length because I have LOTS OF IDEAS!!

CATSEYE So I have a concept for the Evo version of the Hellions HERE but if we wanted to just do Catseye and not the whole Hellions team, I have another idea too! There start being reports of a big cat on the loose in a major city, assumed to be an escaped zoo animal or illegal pet. The X-Men are aware of it, but don’t consider it to have anything to do with them, until a photo of emerges of the beast transforming into a werecat-type form. Obviously this is mutant business now, so they fly out and go on a hunt for the creature, to find her before human authorities do! They succeed and, of course, it’s indeed a mutant, it’s Catseye! Rather than being unable to speak when they find her, I’d say she already has her sing-song broken syntax speech, suggesting she was abandoned as a child rather than a baby and thus retained language, she just hasn’t used it in a LONG time because she stayed in feline form most of her life, til said form got too big to be taken for a normal cat anymore. Rahne is obviously her bestie, they’re FREQUENTLY seen together, and Rahne really enjoys having someone she can run around in animal form with (Evo Rahne doesn’t seem to have the same issues/upbringing as 616, though she also didn’t get much spotlight in Evo either so I think we can hint at some slightly similiar stuff) They definitely get into LOADS of trouble, and there should absolutely be whole episodes dedicated to that! But another character she ends up being close to is X-23, who is a New Mutant by that time (and still going only by that name) A lot of people call X-23 “feral” but like...she’s not? Her entire existence is defined by captivity. She doesn’t act like a wild animal at all, not really, she acts like an ABUSED animal. Catseye, by contrast, is the truly free one. Everyone else wants to teach X-23 to be a person, which is definitely super important, but only Catseye shows her how to be an animal, beholden to nothing but her own natural desires and instincts. And Catseye isn’t doing this DELIBERATELY, it’s just her being herself. She also doesn’t look at X-23 as different from any other human, because she has no frame of reference for what a “normal” human is anyway, and that ends up meaning a lot to X-23 even if Catseye never knows it. Catseye also never calls her X-23. Catseye doesn’t call ANYONE by their actual name. She may call them by their codenames, but mostly she gives them nicknames based on their traits. She says this is because human names like Kurt or Sam don’t tell you anything about who that person is, but some codenames do (and some don’t, like Shadowcat, she’s not a cat, Catseye is a cat!) And...that gets X-23 thinking...she doesn’t want to be X-23 forever. She’s actually wanted to be called something else for a LONG time now, but she could never think of what. Because she doesn’t have an identity besides a weapon. But...maybe a new codename could be a good start? That’s how she starts going by Talon. She won’t start going by Laura until she meets Gabby. Catseye really frustrates and flusters Scott, as he really just has no idea how to deal with her? Deliberate troublemakers or the other kids being stupid are one thing, he’s mastered that, but Catseye just this entirely NEW thing. Jean is a bit more patient with her, but she can probably afford to be thanks to her powers letting her deal with Sharon easier (telekinetically stopping her, telepathically showing her something that she can’t verbally understand, etc) She also scares and upsets Amara, who is supposedly the “princess” of the bunch according to source material, and Amara’s reactions just make her keep going. She also has made it a game to try and catch Kurt (especially his tail, it moves around and she HAS to catch it!) because his powers make it such a challenge. She LOVES pouncing Multiple because of how he splits into duplicates when she does. A lot of people get fed up with her, and for good reason. Rahne will gently try to correct her in private, but in front of others, she ALWAYS defends Catseye----she didn’t hurt anyone, she doesn’t understand, etc. It’s expected by everyone that Beast will be her favorite teacher, that they’ll relate, etc., but in fact Beast shies away from her. It turns out that she reminds him of his own “beastliness” too much, his fear of becoming an animal on the INSIDE as well as in appearance, and it makes him uncomfortable to be around her, and then THAT makes him feel guilty because she’s just a child and he should be helping her. He gets this whole arc of coming to terms with this, with his fears, and then trying to connect with her...only for her to be totally disinterested in having him for a mentor, because their interests are totally different. Much like how Hellions!Catseye didn’t understand that the New Mutants were her enemies, Evo!Catseye doesn’t understand that the Brotherhood are the bad guys either. I can see her developing friendships with all them except Pietro. I think Wanda and Lance end up letting their walls down with her because she’s more like an animal than a person, so they don’t feel uncomfortably vulnerable being nice with her like they would with most people. With Blob, she’s not put off by his simple nature or intimidating size or his lack of social skills, since, as with X-23, she doesn’t know that these things aren’t “normal” or have any frame of reference to judge him by. And though she’s VERY intelligent, she’s also pretty simple too. And with Toad, again, she can’t judge that he’s “weird” and I don’t think his odor puts her off like it does other people. Cats are very clean creatures, of course, but their standards of what smells good and bad are different than humans. Like cats LOVE stinky socks! Pietro I think though would just not have any patience with her and not see any use in being pals with her. There has definitely been an AWKWARD AS HELL moment where she, in full human form, jumped into Prof X’s lap in front of guests/visiting parents. FABIAN Okay so LOTS of versions/ideas here! When I first made this blog, my idea for Evo Fabian was just...Duncan Matthews as a mutant. If you don’t remember who that is, he’s the jerkass blond football jock that Jean dates for a few seasons. He’d be a cocky, athletic asshole who hits on all the girls and is unbearable to EVERYONE. Total bully, total creep, gets recruited into the Brotherhood as a baby budding mutant supremacist with his sister, everything you’d expect. Then I actually started writing him and...it went differently than that? He ended up not being so much a Jerk Jock cliche as just a...pretty NORMAL guy? He’s simultaneously a little full of himself and a little unsure at the same time, in the typical fashion of teen boys, and he gets more unsure as he begins meeting other mutants and realizing how outclassed his powers are, which prompts him to try to be competitive with them, especially the other boys, which makes him come off as kind of an ass, especially when butting heads with guys who are already kind of prickly, like Lance. But he’s also like...he’s not CRUEL either, he can be nice and friendly and nervous too, and he actually actively looks out for Anne Marie. He’ll call her stupid and stuff, but he’s always got her back, and he sticks up for her when someone else calls her the same stuff or upsets her. He’s like...not so much “Fabian but a teen” as he is “Fabian BEFORE he actually became Fabian”? So less over-the-top delightfully fun asshole, but also more well-rounded and human. I also started thinking...would he be Brotherhood? Because a common factor of all the Bhood kids is that they seem to come from lower-class backgrounds and broken homes. Pietro and Wanda were abused and abandoned by their shit dad, Lance was in foster care when Mystique found him, Fred was in a truck show with no parents/guardians in sight and doesn’t seem to have ever attended school before, and Toad...we don’t really know, but I think it’s safe to say that any adults in his life either aren’t there or don’t care that he’s living in this shitty boarding house with no adult supervision half the time. Whereas I see the Evo Cortez twins as coming from a nice middle class suburban nuclear family, with good parents and a good support system and all. And I think that would make them harder for Mystique to exploit. She seems to prey primarily on kids with nowhere else to go, who no one else cares about. So maybe Fabian and Anne Marie might very well end up with the New Mutants/X-Men, which could be a lot of fun too! Just because teen Fabian is a human being and not GIANT IRREDEEMABLE ASSHOLE 616 FABIAN doesn’t mean he still can’t act cocky during training and get his ass handed to him, or try to flirt with every girl in his class (I think he’d like Amara best, she seems most his type, which makes me want to see Tabitha either try to keep him away from her or try to push Amara to “go have fun with the new hunk!” though tbh I ship Tabby/Amara SOOOO) But the difference is we could get DEVELOPMENT with that! Like maybe the reason he’s such a cocky asshole in training is that he’s embarrassed about his benign/passive/”useless” powers not being suited to combat, and feeling emasculated by it compared to the other guys. And the obnoxious hitting on the girls coming from not actually knowing how to talk to them normally, because the only girl he knows is Anne Marie, who is definitely not a mode for normalcy, and who only responds to/understands TOTALLY BLUNT BLUNTNESS Anne Marie should also get EVO’S FIRST SAME-SEX ROMANCE! So like...I feel like we could totally get a cute, human Fabian while still keeping his funny traits? And he’s A TOTAL JERK to the Brotherhood BIG TIME of course, like he considers them TOTAL TRASH, so there’s definitely still some “bully” there too! BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! So, obviously the allure of Evo is it’s a canon high school au, we get all our faves as teens. But, some are still adults! Beast, Storm, Pro f X, Mystique, Magneto...what if Fabian was one of those? So, we see that in the future, Magneto himself will change sides and become a teacher to the New Mutants. That’s going to leave a big power vacuum, both in the universe and in the plot. So who steps up to fill it but...FABIAN CORTEZ? Which follows comics canon of him trying to usurp Magneto’s place as the leader of the radical mutant supremacy movement, just in this version he (probably?) didn’t try to murder him to do it, he just picked up where Magneto left behind, and uses the anger of Magneto’s former followers at Magneto “abandoning” them to his advantage. He basically gets to be the new Big Bad on the “evil mutants” side (and unlike the Brotherhood, he and his Acolytes will live up to the term!) and be the evil, over-the-top, over-dramatic Fabian Cortez we all know and...er, kinda love? And he can still be creepy too, just he only hits on the adults like Storm (and maybe Jean, who might be in college at that point) and probably his own lieutenants, as he’s doubtlessly recruited some new Acolytes. He’ll be 2D, sure, but Evo Magneto was a pretty irredeemable bastard too most of the time. Also, remember how the Brotherhood is shown to join up with SHIELD as adults? I wrote a fic last year in which FABIAN WAS ON THEIR TEAM