#tldr most of my speculation hinges on

[lunanoc]

For the ship thing, Liu Sang/Wang Can our of curiosity

anon i think you want to watch the world burn

disclaimer heads up once again that these are all 100% my personal feelings and not moral accusations of any kind, so if you happen to like this ship that’s your business and my opinion means nothing. that being said, fair warning, this isn’t going to be positive

so yeah i uh. intensely dislike this i’m not sure anyone’s surprised and there’s vaguely lore as to why that i’m not going to get into excessively, but the tldr of it is basically in two (ish) parts.

the first is that strictly coming at it from canon, independently of what your canon of choice is, this ship is wonky at best. and yes, i know, not everyone cares about that, and i’m not saying it’s completely impossible because AUs/canon divergences exist for a reason, but that’s point number one. i’m not even going to get into the fact that wang can, who’s very much a blip both in sha hai the book and sha hai the drama, di es in both which makes things even more impossible unless you redact that. then there’s simply the circumstances factor. the only way in which i could see this potentially being remotely possible in a canon setting is if you infer that liu sang’s association with tudian means that if tudian had extensive contact with the wangs, they might have crossed paths at some point. but given how little we know about tudian and his everything, it’s speculation, but it’s not impossible so there’s a window there i guess. and you’d also have to assume liu sang, who re: restart the book was born in the 90s, was born in the earlier half of the decade because otherwise he’d have been a bit young: not so much in general, because though that’s a topic for another discussion people do ship wu xie and li cu, more in relation to the popular fanon surrounding the liu sang/wang can ship which i’ll get to in a bit. as for how they’d work even if you filled in all those conditions? to be honest i’ve never thought about it extensively, but i don’t that we really get enough of wang can as a character to be able to pin him as more than a highly driven wang operative, and as for liu sang, given his general approach to most people and things, i can only really picture this in a ‘what if liu sang had been endoctrinated into the wangs’ AU because the way i see it, liu sang is someone who tends to be driven by the same sorts of intense/bordering on fanatical feelings in interpersonal relationships (re: how he is about xiaoge), so he and wang can would have to bond over their mutual devotion to the cause. again, not impossible, but you do need to get creative

this does bring me to the second part of the ‘why i want to burn this with fire’ lore, which is the fanon behind this ship even existing, and even that’s twofold. again, this is purely my personal feelings, but the biggest no-no for me from the get-go is this ship contains liu sang, and i do not like liu sang as a character. and yes it is practically entirely because of his fans but that’s also a topic for another time. unfortunately for similar reasons that also extends to most if not all characters who have been played by the same actor. so this ship is pretty much a double no-no for me for solely those reasons. then there’s the other aspect of the apparent appeal of it that specifically hinges on the fact both characters were played by the same actor, and so that i’ve seen, it’s a fairly popular take to make them both fanon long-lost twins. which then turns it into fanon incst and that’s just. really not my cup of tea. it’s just one of those things i let be but want to stay far away from, which makes it doubly unfortunate it’s another one of those ships i’ve had pushed at me directly or not before i distanced myself from most popular dmbj fandom spaces to avoid them

i wish i had more constructive things to say about this but unfortunately i don’t

[bestworstcase]

It's true, Cinder needs to find trust in something that'll give her the security to disengage from the absolute extremes of destruction to something more balanced, something I don't think she and Salem can negotiate between them in of themselves? That's the main conceit your posts seem to imply that I don't think works, because they're on a toxic loop that needs boundaries, and RWBY constantly shows that two person relationships exist in the context of, and benefit from, the community around it.

mm the way i see it, the most pressing issue for both of them is that they simply don’t have anyone else. cinder kinda, sorta had emerald, but em bounced and frankly i don’t think em would have been able to speak to the heart of cinder’s problem if she tried, because at the end of the day 1. em has moral qualms cinder doesn’t, and 2. cinder’s fear of salem is wildly overshadowed by the things she WANTS from salem, so emerald’s position that salem is terrifying and dangerous is just… like… cinder knows that and she’s decided it’s a worthwhile risk.

in another story cinder might have an out in the form of the heroes making overtures—they get a glimpse of how bad her situation is from emerald and offer to protect her if she leaves, that sort of thing—but rwby doesn’t really go in for the whole magnanimous noble heroes thing. sure, they’ll give their enemies chances to BACK OFF, and when the villains do flip they’re willing to provisionally accept that. but they’re not, and they’ve never been, especially driven to “save” villains. this is a story where two protagonists shanked an abusive dickhead who refused to leave them alone, and nobody on Team Good blinked twice. there’s a pragmatism to their compassion, and cinder has proved over and over again that she is too dangerous to mount a serious campaign to ‘rescue’ her from her own choices.

(also ruby was at “silver glare blast cinder on sight” even before cinder murdered penny.)

likewise salem is—well, salem. one hundred percent of her enemies believe she’s an immortal monster who can’t be reasoned with because she’s driven by insatiable desire for destruction and/or apocalyptic suicidal ideation, and her remaining allies at this point are 1. a lunatic who slavishly worships her as a goddess of destruction, 2. a cynical nihilistic mercenary whose attitude is “welp can’t beat her might as well fall in line,” and 3. cinder, who is too busy trying to drag emotional validation of salem to be properly terrified of her.

their relationship is a toxic, abusive dumpster fire and unfortunately also the best relationship that either of them *has* right now. (with the usual corollary that summer remains a potential wildcard here.)

and it bears repeating that—all jokes about them power of friendshipping each other aside—i don’t foresee them fixing each other so much as i think 1. salem’s foremost problem lies in believing that no one will ever perceive her as anything but a soulless grimm, so why bother even trying, and 2. cinder is embroiled in this one-sided emotional warfare for salem’s attention/validation/indulgence that salem is on the cusp of becoming aware of, and therefore 3. cinder fall is currently the only character in the cast who can pose a credible challenge to salem’s self-perception and the apathetic cruelty it engenders.

there’s this emotional logjam happening with salem where she is on a path of total destruction because she has been hopeless for so long that she cannot conceive of any other way to move forward, and it isn’t in her nature to be able to stop moving forward. breaking that logjam, giving her even the smallest, tiniest spark of hope that things could be different, is what will make it possible for her to at least try to find a different path.

and, like, we’re talking about a woman whose first instinct when the gods hurt her and she decided to DO SOMETHING about it was to… go out and rally people to her cause. her isolation is a symptom of apathetic despair. fundamentally if the inciting force that gets salem to turn away from this path is cinder cracking through the walls of “no one will listen, why bother” then the obvious next move is for salem to break her silence. to stop letting ozma’s narrative define her.

like, at this point i’m positive a ceasefire or enemy-of-my-enemy truce is gonna happen, but i’m 50/50 on which side the offer will originate from because, as i see it, if salem can clear the enormous first hurdle of finding enough hope to try, it’s pretty likely that she would land on “your gods want us all dead and unlike you i have an actual plan to defeat them once and for all, let’s talk.”

which is to say, loosely the sequence i anticipate here is:

1. cinder continues escalating the volatile/defiant behavior while salem tries to maneuver around it and fails, pulling their dynamic further out of balance

2. until salem figures out that the root of cinder’s problem isn’t frustrated hunger for power, it’s all this festering emotional junk that cinder can’t or won’t talk about, at which point salem has to confront what it *means* that this girl she’s done nothing but hurt and use is nevertheless looking to her for emotional fulfillment

3. which by extension incites a serious reckoning with the apathetic despair she’s imprisoned herself in, and—salem being salem—a reckoning like that DEMANDS actionable change. (salem isn’t a “ruminate on my mistakes for a year before finding the wherewithal to apologize” kind of character, she is a “i’ve realized that treating you this way was a critical mistake that cost me your loyalty and i am going to announce this in front of my whole inner circle before taking immediate, dramatic steps to correct my error” person, and while that was primarily a tactical decision on her part i see no reason to think that her response upon realizing she’s made an emotional mistake would differ significantly.)

4. cinder goes ???!??!? because she is in no way prepared to deal with salem doing this and; her emotional turmoil probably leads to outbursts, and as we’ve seen already cinder’s frustrated outbursts often take the form of questioning salem’s decisions, which potentially makes cinder the first character to just come right out and ask salem what the hell she’s really trying to accomplish

5. i cannot conceive of a scenario in which cinder hears “the gods want us to grovel for the privilege of existing” and doesn’t immediately decide that killing the gods sounds fucking swell.

6. which in turn reinforces salem’s emotional swerve towards believing that it is, at least, POSSIBLE that somebody might listen to her—and therefore that it is worth trying—and that creates an emotional foundation from which the narrative can build to:

7. salem decides she’s done letting ozma make her the scapegoat for the cruelty and tyranny of gods he serves and, never mind the sword of destruction for now, her ends will be better served by getting more people on her side. “your faith in mankind was not misplaced; when banded together, unified by a common enemy, they are a noticeable threat…” <- like. these are salem’s own words and she has got one hell of a common enemy in her back pocket.

8. while the brutal reality of her past actions and the narrative ruby constructed when she revealed salem’s existence to the world are significant obstacles, they are not insurmountable ones—and besides the looming danger represented by the gods salem can probably also leverage vale surviving the fall of beacon and mistral taking the skirmish at haven more or less in stride despite having been abandoned by its own allies (thanks james!) to her advantage here. if summer rose is a) working for her and b) presentable for public appearances, so much the better, but even without that i think salem *could* get a coalition going if she exerted herself.

so *waves vaguely* it’s… i can see cinder being what salem needs to have a shot at breaking the cycle, and vice versa, and if they can clear that hurdle salem… like… she has this impulse towards movement-building, you know? she’s not like ozma, who’s wasted thousands of years trying to ‘unite’ humanity by [checks notes] molding a few hand-picked individuals per generation into lone guardians because his own natural inclination runs toward knight errantry. salem rallied armies to take the fight to the gods. salem heard ozma bemoaning how divided humanity had become and went okay have you considered… that we could… do something about that…? hjscvjk

i’m talking in circles a bit here hdhdjs sorry the point is: salem is desperately lonely because she’s convinced that trying to make connections with people is pointless, and cinder is obsessed with power because she’s convinced that she’ll never be free or safe without it.

what salem most needs is to be confronted by someone who engages with her as a person—not a monster, not a goddess—and right now, by dint of seeing her as a dangerous but fallible rival/mentor, cinder is in a position to BE that person. their toxic convoluted dumpster fire of a relationship can only exist as it does because cinder isn’t terrified of the “monster” or in awe of the “goddess.”

likewise, what cinder most needs is for someone to see the lacerating pain at the center of everything else—the terror of powerlessness and the desperate rage it fuels—and validate it. she needs SOMEBODY to, figuratively, look at the shell-shocked fifteen-year-old girl with blood on her hands and say it’s okay, you were protecting yourself, you deserved to fight back, it’s okay. and… salem hasn’t seen past the power hunger yet, but as soon as she does? she’ll get it. of course she gets it; she WAS that girl. she’s spent millions of years trying to escape being that girl.

and for both of them, getting these things—that’s not what fixes them, that’s not what heals them. it’s just the spark that shows them the possibility of change. in salem’s case at least i can’t see her not lunging for that possibility as soon as she knows it’s there; and… like, if salem makes this genuine effort to change, then cinder has very little incentive to leave her, because that effort would necessarily have to involve salem relinquishing the abuse.

SIDEBAR. i am also thinking it’s… pretty likely that salem’s next move is hauling cinder back to vale, rather than going to rendezvous with tyrian + mercury in vacuo; 1. salem is clearly getting nervous about the crown still being missing, 2. it’s in salem’s best interest to give cinder something to distract her from the other maidens, and pointing cinder at the vault only she can open is an obvious way to do that, 3. vacuo is like half a dozen powder kegs stacked on top of each other and tyrian has got so many matches that adding salem and cinder to the mix feels like risking threat fatigue, and 4. 99% summer rose is stationed at beacon and she’s about due for a reveal.

and if that ends up being the case, hypothetically the lion’s share of this sort of mutual-rekindling-of-hope and subsequent change arc(s) would play out in the context of salem+cinder… searching for the relic of choice in the rubble of beacon academy… which would SURE BE A WAY TO DO THE CHOICE ARC WOULDNT IT

[fermented-writers-block]

Where did the portal come from?

(Note: Parts 2 and 3 to come later on the timeline of events and further speculation)

This question has been plaguing me the past few weeks of discussion with my friend @sepublic​, and while we obviously don’t have any information to make any conclusive statements on it, I think I may have figured out what’s been bothering me so much about the door. Specifically, the way it is designed and the direction it opens.

To start off with the picture down below, we can see both sides of the door, with the front sporting a rather distinctive eye, and the back a diamond with a brown almost peephole-like circle centered slightly below where the eye would be:

With this in mind, comparing the portal to how the handing of a door is determined tells us that it is closest to either a right handed outwards-opening door, or it is a left handed inwards-opening door, and I think it’s most likely the former, what with the aforementioned position of the eye framing the Human Realm as the “building” and the Demon Realm as the “outside”:

As for why this interests me so much, it’s because exterior residential doors tend to open inwards - just like Hooty’s door does for example - because of security, aesthetics, and maintenance reasons from my research. This is due to the hinges being on the inside of the house rather than on the outside, and are thus protected from both the elements and attack. 

Meanwhile, exterior commercial doors tend to open outwards - like the portal appears to do - particularly for buildings with an occupancy rating of 50 people or more, as in the case of an emergency evacuation, these doors are typically required to swing towards the primary route of egress, or outside.

Although these aren’t concrete design principles that all doors adhere to, given the way how many are often designed to ergonomically go with the expected flow of travel as well as how you usually have a starting entry point and a final exit destination when establishing a gateway between two locations, there’s only two possible directions of travel the portal could have been made with in mind, and I think we might be able to rule out the second one from the evidence given:

TLDR Part 1: Of these two options, the direction the portal is designed to face and opens in suggests that it is actually meant to be a gateway TO the Demon Realm FROM the Human Realm, not the other way around

Of course, this obviously raises the obligatory questions of just how it could have been made in a realm that was demonstrated to not have any ambient magic of its own this last episode, but with this, it could very well tie into why the door so far seems to only end up at the abandoned cabin in the Human Realm no matter where it is opened in the Demon Realm.

Perhaps the portal was established and built at that spot in the woods on Earth’s side of things and - maybe unbeknownst to Eda - can be opened to basically anywhere in the Demon Realm, functioning similar to a door station from Monsters Inc:

In both cases, there’s the many, many potential destinations one can take - the closets of children all around the world and anywhere in the Demon Realm - but there’s only one single, unchanging nexus point/entryway from which to get there. If you have the right card - and maybe the proper visualization of the particular place you want to go to in TOH’s case - then you can go through to practically anywhere you want to go, but you will always return to the same door station and the same abandoned cabin in the woods. 

That is to say, you will always return to the same spot in the woods, which just happens to be inside of an abandoned cabin at the same time. With this, it seems likely to me that the cabin was built around the portal’s entry point rather than the cabin coming first and the portal coming second, as then the cabin would make sense as both a way to make traveling out in the middle of the woods less conspicuous and it would be a good place to rest up and store things or supplies for forays into the Demon Realm/put souvenirs from your travels. 

And on that note, I’d like to bring back attention to the brown circle in the middle of the yellow diamond on the back of the portal. With that, the comparison I drew to a peephole at the top of this post would be quite relevant with the topic of getting a proper visualization of where in the BIs to go.

After all, it would not be surprising if one could open the brown circle and look through and move the eye on the other side of the portal, thus granting quite a large range of vision for looking “out” from the Human Realm while preventing those in the Demon Realm from looking “inside” at the same time like real peepholes do:

Overall, I hope this first part of my portal theory was an interesting read to go through, and while the questions of just how the portal could have been made in the Human Realm, who made it in the first place, and how exactly it’s connected to the cabin are nowhere close to being solved anytime soon, make sure to keep on a lookout for what I have in store for Parts 2 and 3 whenever they come out, as I have quite a few ideas and research findings I think you guys would be interested in.

[hydradrive]

Go Hellnalysis (aka : hydradrive gets mad at the fanbase for ignoring go’s ongoing 2 season long breakdown for like, 5+ paragraphs)

We are talking S1 foreshadowing as it relates to the facts of S2. As already mentioned, I think it sucks of the writers to do it to him like how it sucks how they treated Emma and Aoi throughout the entire series and reeks of colorism like. having your two darkest skinned characters be actively antagonistic as s2 goes on is a bad fucking look. 

But it’s there, and I am not happy that people defend Lightning weirdly when he treats people he knew for years badly, and then turn around and say wildly fucked up shit about Go.

I guess today is the day i Get Into It Again. I’ll be rehashing some of my points from my old thread on nac, so strap in i guess.

This is said to Playmaker in season two. 

‘After i lost to you’. 

So, by episode 4. And the text backs this up. The text in season one aligns.

In Go Onizuka VS Genome :

[ transcript for subbed text: 

Dr. Genome : Did your defeat at Playmaker’s hands force you to evolver? 

Go Onizuka : As much as I hate to admit it, yes. That was when everything changed. 

/end text screenshot id ]

That was when everything changed.

Let’s look at the rest of it, then. How it affected him, in the long-term. The Go Analysis... Is here.

MASSIVE CWs for discussion of canonical weight loss, brief discussion of disordered eating in the context of that, and a whole bunch of other stuff re: the brain hack that I don’t even know how to tag, really. medical? Basically, if you have any triggers relating to that, please exercise due diligence because I will not pull any punches about the implications.

tldr version :

This is real dialogue from Go Onizuka’s first (and only) duel against Revolver. 

No matter what he says trying to spin it a different way after this segment of text, that it’s about fighting for yourself, these statements exist, and they exist with the context given by his own words; that he was struggling, mental health-wise, when he said these words.

[ transcript for subbed text: 

Go Onizuka : Until now, I’ve battled in front of huge crowds. (There is a single beat frame, to indicate silence.) But I realized I’m all alone. There are no fans rooting for me here. I realized... We always duel alone. We fight for ourselves, not for anyone else. 

/end text screenshot id ]

But perhaps this isn’t compelling enough for people. Fine. Let’s go even further back.

[ transcript for subbed text for screen readers : Go Onizuka : It’s my fault that Makoto is in this condition. /end text screenshot id ]

Go has an easily seen habit of assuming the worst, and with regards to stuff like Makoto, blaming himself, to the point that if his manager hadn't said more on Makoto, he would've been going into VS Genome blaming himself for Makoto getting into duel monsters in the first place.

In episode 5 it was shown that with one loss he was entirely certain that nobody would care about him in any capacity:

But why?

... It’s brought up in one of the first episodes of the entire series.

[ transcript for subbed text for screen readers : 

Go Onizuka’s Manager : That’s exactly it. It’s a winner-take-all world, after all. 

/end text id. ]

And given an even more... depressing? Spin later, when Go thinks about it throughout S1 and S2 during his duel with Takeru:

[ transcript for screen readers : 

Before I was placed in the orphanage, I only relied on myself. The world I lived in was all about survival of the fittest. “You must protect yourself” was my credo. 

/ end text screenshot id ]

It’s genuinely that simple. He slipped back into his old way of surviving because the way he did in season one didn't. save him. it didn't save him from a duel he needed to win, not just for himself necessarily. he would have died if playmaker had lost. a lot of people would have. He was already starting to have these doubts about his entire reason d’etre for dueling, and his loss only further spurred it on.

It’s repeated, again and again:

[ transcript for screen readers :

Go Onizuka : For everyone to appreciate me, I must win! 

/end text screenshot id ]

That sentiment. “People won’t like me if I lose.” “People will abandon me, if I lose.” In his own words, his losses, losses in duels that were important, rotted him. And it /is/ true. His manager said he’d leave if he went to try and stop the Tower Of Hanoi and lost. And he followed through with it, by all implications. He didn’t come back until season 3. Keeping in mind that Go’s self-hatred spiral regarding guilt over in his mind dragging Makoto into the mess that was season one-era Hanoi shenanigans was only cut off because his manager and other people talked him out of it... Yeah.

This is before we bring in the other complicating factor : a certain little company, who never did anything good for anyone. A man, who despite supposedly being well-intentioned, did very little to help, until it reached the darkest point.

[ transcript for subbed text for screen readers, since that’s the primary important stuff : 

Akira Zaizen : But we don’t intend to acknowledge that the network was on the brink of destruction. So I ask you don’t cause the press to delve into this. 

/end text screencap id]

People focus so much on him yelling at the press because they keep asking about Playmaker but with this context?

[ transcript text for screen readers: 

Akira Zaizen: You’ll continue to be the focus of the press. /end text screenshot id ]

He’s not allowed to talk about how you nearly died.

He’s not allowed to talk about what really was at stake.

In fact, he’s not allowed to even act in a way that makes people even a little suspicious about what happened.

And yet.

‘But he could just ignore this advice’ . Not really. Go Onizuka’s platform was built in Link Vrains. Being the whistleblower about the actual danger of Link Vrains would not endear him to Sol, and potential backlash from Sol, from everything we know about the company? Hmm, gosh, wonder why that might be bad. Almost as if Go is basically a livestreamer who is at risk of having the video platform he exists on die.

It would be incredibly difficult to continue working under the public eye like that. The stress from that alone would start tearing someone to pieces.

Ergo, his decision to work for Sol Technologies as a bounty hunter. Both jobs now hinge on him currying favor with a horrible megacorporation, one just has less baggage from his past way of surviving and gives him the ability to talk a tiny bit more freely about things.

This is all the leadup, of course, to the ultimate lowest point. The duel chip. Brain hack.

[ transcript text for screen readers: ‘By implanting this duel chip, the brain’s thought capabilities expand.’ /end text screenshot id ]

[ transcript text for screen readers: 

Akira Zaizen: You can always refuse.

Go Onizuka : Your methods are dirty. You guide me to the gates of hell, but you don’t care what happens afterwards.  /end text screenshot id ] 

Let’s talk about the physical side-effects of the brain chip on Go Onizuka.

Me, personally? I genuinely wonder what came first; the most severe physical side-effects or a worsening of Go’s mental health that made him stop eating. 

It’s never stated what came first. We only see the mental health side effects of the chip in flashbacks initially.

I looked at one of the instances where Akira pulled go out of the sim wrt: the listed sys/dia ratios on-screen. They have those in certain shots, btw! They’re consistently really fucked up!

Here’s what those were, in one very notable instance:

... So, right off the bat, a heartrate of 195, huh.

And a sys/dia of 187/112 with a mean of 136. Wow! I wonder what that means for him!

I can tell you. 

He statistically would be in the range of having a hypertensive emergency. Having rates like this can damage your heart muscle when you don’t literally have a heart attack, hypertensive encephalopathy, ( which can cause dizziness and altered levels of consciousness, if we are getting into it.), kidney failure, coughing up blood...

I don’t want to speculate too much about why the Duel Chip caused this, but I will note that blood pressures like this sometimes come about as result of issues with the neuroendocrine system. This would tie in with a loss of appetite and some of the other things Go seems to canonically have had from the getgo of having the chip installed, and probably added on to his already pre-existing mental health stuff which I personally parsed as depression.

... I think this mostly covers the main points of what gets missed. Aka, literally all of his arc. Just, literally every piece of his arc. People miss all of it.

Also, to reiterate : it is NOT GOOD the way this is framed by the writers. it is loaded to, in a series heavily informed by the main character’s trauma, have a teenaged darker skin character ( Go is 19!! ) be portrayed as more erratic, etc etc. I do Not care about Lightning. He is a little robot, and while there is probably some ableism in the way trauma is represented therein as a corrupting force, it is far more worrying how Go is treated in terms of representation, and I am not going to bat for the guy who treated Haru like dogshit lmao. 

The fact that one of the two darker skinned MOC is given more obvious mental/physical illness signifiers in terms of symptoms to mark them as antagonists (when, again, Yusaku literally CANONICALLY HAS PTSD) fucking blows, and I’m going to personally fight the writers. 

But. I am also laying the blame at the fanbase’s feet for this shit, too. They literally ignored this to coo over Lightning. I’m going to bite them.