#tts moira caine

[spooky-activity]

Thinking about @bestworstcase ‘s Moira Caine… the world’s biggest moronosexual

[pancat-n-sausage]

I'm caught in a hurricane I'm leaving here dead or alive And I know that I'd be willing to feel the pain If it got me to the other side - Hurricane by Theory of a Deadman

companion piece to this (based on the fics by @bestworstcase)

[bestworstcase]

do u think cassandra/lady caine is still an appealing ship in tts canon apart from bittersnow?

i mean. yeah for sure.

the main difference is just timing bc in a more canon compliant setting i imagine nothing would develop until after the events of s3, and without the mountain of messy overlapping trauma and like specific connection moira has with cassandra’s past in bitter snow things’d probably develop slower -

but the essence of the ship to my mind is finding solidarity and shared ground in both being people corona fucked over pretty hard and then friendship developing from there, and like. that 100% still applies in a canon compliant post-s3 scenario, no question.

(in general esp with the way i characterize caine i see them as people who are just. like fundamentally compatible. it’s not a cassunzel situation where one or both of them would need MASSIVE amounts of character development to achieve a functional relationship - it’s like. bar situational obstacles like cassandra’s loyalty to corona and rapunzel pre-RATGT they just… work, so in any au where they cross paths i could see them at least having potential. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Just wanted to casually offer unofficial CassCaine content on this last day of pride month (I had a great time and hope you did too regardless of your affiliation with the LGBTQIA+ community 🥰)

[tangled-the-series-forever]

That Moment When…

you almost buy a magnet because it reminds you of a certain fictional female pirate

… one whom I honestly didn’t think much about until I read @bestworstcase’s Bitter Snow series on ao3

Now? I can’t stop thinking about her.

Literally about to buy this ring on Etsy because of Bitter Snow as well.

This series has changed my life, ya’ll. If you want some incredible writing, this is it. I swear nothing compares. Forever amazed by this brilliant series 😍😭😍😭

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Cass, Caine, and a Touch of Raps

I’ve gathered some pictures taken over the past few months that remind me of these gals

First up are things that remind me of Cass

blue hair dye (plan to use that soon)

moonstone Cass gems

moonstone Cass aesthetic

Here we have some Caine-related things ft. one for Rapunzel because it was Twin Day at school

nickname for Jackbox game (notice it’s a trivia murder party 😉)

same thing except I won (also, this happened a couple weeks ago so that’s why the Caine is so festive 😂)

tumblr post I came across on Pinterest while searching for writing tips and this totally reminded me of Caine and Cass all throughout the bitter snow series

like I said, Twin Day. Enough said.

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Benighted Snow vibes

Otherwise known as “I went to a Spirit Halloween for the first time and took pictures of everything that reminded me of Moira Caine and Benighted Snow and anything remotely TTS-related and-”

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Bitter Snow glow-up

Noticed this parallel while re-reading one two of my favorite chapters of all time:

“Cassandra doesn’t think she’s ever hated anybody more than she hates Moira Caine.”

Benighted Snow, Ch 11

“‘Moira is the best friend I have ever had. I trust her. I feel safe with her. I like spending time with her.’”

Moonless Air, Ch 11

These girls have my heart 😭😭

[bestworstcase]

With Cass changing sides with how she views Corona (and with the current strain on her relationships with Eugene and Rapunzel) how will this change Cas's and Caine's interactions? Will all of this bring them closer? Should we anticipate a possible rift in Cass's relationships with Eugene and Raps?

spoilers, anon! 😔 though i will say that all of these relationships are dynamic and not necessarily linear in how they develop. (also that there are already rifts in cassandra’s relationships with rapunzel and eugene.)

but i will happily chatter about the first two arcs and the kind of… overarching structure of moonless air. because it’s fun 8)

except wait to back up a little. benighted first. benighted follows a very strict plot structure of inciting incident -> rising action -> first crisis -> aftershocks -> second crisis directly resulting from first crisis -> aftershocks -> third crisis directly resulting from second crisis -> aftershocks -> climax -> falling action/resolution.

(cass gets a letter -> cass writes more letters/character building stuff/emergence of black rock subplot -> journal theft -> cass wrestles guilt, doubt, and fear -> party at janus point -> cass is a hero!/sirin reveals shattering truths -> blizzard and BOOM -> cassandra flees herzingen/sugracha enters the ring -> party at janus point…2! -> getting the band back together.)

once the big domino of the first crisis began to fall, things just… snowballed. avalanched.

moonless air is not like that. it follows a much more episodic structure - it has arcs instead of crises - with each episode strung along the intertwined through lines of 1) cassandra’s personal journey [the emotional core] and 2) the quest for the moonstone [the overarching plot]. (sidebar: this is the exact same plot structure tts s2 used except item #1 was rapunzel’s personal journey.) WHICH MEANS. that every arc has 1) its own little self contained ‘cass journey’ and 2) pushes the moonstone quest forward in some way beyond the obvious of they are traveling toward aphelion.

(sidebar again: tts s2 accomplished item #1 but not item #2, as the only episodes that drove the moonstone quest forward in any way beyond physical travel were BTCW [met adira, learnt black rocks were now inert], KOTS [gained scroll piece], RATGT [dark kingdom/moonstone lore, crispy hand], rapunzeltopia [cass face heel turn begins], LAF [demanitus exposition, completed scroll], and DC [climax]. that is… 5 out of 21 episodes. this is why the pacing sags.)

sO.

in moonless air there are 10 arcs: alcorsīa, vardaros, quintonia, spire, swamp, azoth, GT, HOYT, badtimes, and aphelion. with a handful of transitional chapters scattered in between. we’ve just reached the end of the vardaros arc - chapter 8 transitions us into quintonia. which means we’re done with and i can talk about the mini-journeys and plot engines of two! whole arcs now.

alcorsīa

- the purpose of this arc is, first, to transition from the end of benighted into the eldritch travelogue that is moonless air by establishing the immediate status quo that team corona and team pirate settle into once they are forced by circumstances to merge, and, second, to lay the groundwork for one of the big…recurring themes of moonless air which is how people are sculpted by their pasts.

so we get cass meeting moira’s family and making this connection with her own aunt and how that causes her to feel the absence of her lost family much more keenly, and we also get cass having these buried/forgotten memories starting to trickle free, and we get the huge unfolding clash between rapunzel (who is trying to make sense of cassandra’s past without any of the perspective, people skills, or personal experience to do so and fails miserably) and cassandra (who is trying to communicate her past without exposing herself to further pain and failing miserably on both fronts). and we also get caine making jabs at rapunzel with history that rapunzel was only very tangentially a part of. there is - by design - no emotional resolution to any of this. it just builds up behind the dam of people not talking to each other. that’s the mini-journey.

the plot engine here is obvious: varian learns about a new kind of magic by studying the zampermin and making connections with what he already knows about turul. there is also a smaller secondary plot engine of cassandra learning a bit more about zhan tiri. nothing too complicated yet, we’re just getting warmed up.

vardaros

- the purpose of this arc is to break the stalemate of the alcorsīa arc. that stalemate exists because moira thinks rapunzel is a privileged and spoiled brat who treats cassandra poorly, rapunzel thinks moira is a cruel and domineering monster who treats everyone poorly, and cassandra is trying to appease them both whilst also cajoling them into getting along. and in order to break it she has to pick a side.

so we get cass sort of ping-ponging back and forth between defending rapunzel to moira and then defending moira to rapunzel, and we also get cassandra changing her perspective on both of them as a result of this big catastrophe, which shows her a really vulnerable side of moira and a more thoughtless/self-absorbed side of rapunzel. she realizes that moira isn’t this strong, snarky, 100% self-sufficient person but actually someone harboring a lot of anguish and who could really use her support sometimes, just as cass sometimes needs hers. and she also sees that moira is willing to bend and compromise a lot by rescuing lance and eugene after the threat to her ship becomes a moot point, but that that isn’t enough to make rapunzel (or eugene) reconsider their judgment of her on their own. and this change in perspective leads to her deciding that she’s going to get off the fence into moira’s pasture, because she now trusts moira to meet her halfway and doesn’t have that same trust in rapunzel.

meanwhile the primary plot engine is dipping our toes into the saporian agenda for this trip, which is very different from the moonstone quest, and the secondary plot engine is the dream sequence in 7, which is connected to both the overarching plot and to cassandra’s personal journey, and there are also two tiny tertiary plot engines in the form of 1) varian’s success in contacting adira and her promise to meet them at the spire and 2) abraham learning definitively what happened to his niece after midwinter.

so that is where things stand Right Now. 8 transitions us to quintonia, and the purpose of the quintonia arc is first to examine how the dynamics of the rapunzel-cassandra-moira triangle shift as a result of cassandra’s choice in vardaros, and second to take our first real dive into the lore via varian’s research. make of that what you will and stay tuned 8)

[bestworstcase]

If there was a tv show version of Bitter Snow, do you have actors you would imagine to play Cass, Raps, Eugene? Caine? Do you still hear Mandy/Eden in your head when you're writing them?

i would want it to be animated. 

for a number of reasons, but mostly boiling down to i think animation, as a medium, is a far superior vehicle for fantasy storytelling than live action. i do not want to see made-for-tv CGI zhan tiri or green screen alcorsīa; i want to see the world illustrated. 

i’ve mentioned this before but my imagination is very visual and i tend to ‘see’ these characters more in my style than the style of the tv show so i wouldn’t necessarily want the hypothetical benighted cartoon to directly mimic the tts style—in particular it would be really important for me to avoid the disney female sameface problem. i would want cass/raps/moira to all have distinct face shapes and appearances. (at some point i’m going to get around to drawing and posting bitter snow character designs for the three of them -_-)

in general i do ‘hear’ the original VA cast. the big exceptions are zhan tiri (who in my head at this point is still more amber gray than jennifer veal, because that’s how i ‘heard’ her voice when i started developing her and writing her pre-s3) and cassandra (who is increasingly drifting toward having murphy’s voice in my head because i keep listening to murphy’s songs while writing aljskfdlkfds)

aaaand i would also want a lot more singing than tts had mainly because i have never quite escaped being a theatre kid 😔

[bestworstcase]

What do you think is the hardest thing when writing relationships? (Romantic, platonic, antagonistic, etc) What tips do you have when it comes to writing relationships and how to accomplish making them complex, relatable, and realistic?

hmm so this is both something i struggle with as a writer and an issue that i notice in a lot of fiction that i read/watch myself (both fic and published works) but - there’s a temptation or tendency to sort of… lose the individuality of one or both character involved in the relationship.

to borrow an example from tts itself: consider frederic and arianna in s1. frederic is afforded a great deal of development as an individual, with focus given to his personal trauma, his individual failings, and his complicated feelings vis a vis rapunzel… and arianna is just, like. His Wife. she’s just there, being married to him and dispensing life advice to rapunzel. this results in their relationship feeling shallow and vague, and imo contributes to the fandom trend of posing arianna as a victim of abuse from fred and/or just making her a fandom mouthpiece… because there’s only a few crumbs to work with, right? (but then even in fics that do this there’s still generally not like… significant explanation of how this influences the dynamic between arianna and frederic, from moment to moment or day to day. like if ari hates fred’s leadership, i want to see what she’s been doing about it for all these years, you know? and how fred reacted to that and how she reacted in turn etc)

whereas with, say, cassandra and rapunzel in s1-s2, their friendship is so grounded in and fraught with their individual concerns; they’re both fully realized characters and they continue to be that way in the context of their friendship. both of them have hopes, thoughts, goals, opinions, LIVES outside of each other, and these things don’t only exist in order to generate interpersonal conflict between them. does that make sense?

basically - the goal is for the relationship to come from the natural interaction of the characters, rather than the characters being defined by the relationship, and that can be difficult to achieve. especially in a romance, if you’re very invested in the ship.

like for example - the first scene of chapter 4 of moonless air was SO tough to get right and about half of the drafts i had of it flat out didn’t work because i kept writing cass and caine communicating *too well.* a key pillar of their relationship is that caine CAN communicate clearly and is good at reading between lines, whereas cass WANTS to communicate, but often can’t articulate what she feels or thinks. so they fit well together, because caine is skilled at interpreting cassandra’s real meaning and responding to that rather than her often muddled words.

so writing from that point of view, the argument should’ve gone more like: moira sees cass getting upset because moira “didn’t tell her” about the separatist thing, identifies correctly that cass is actually upset because she figured it out and assumed it was supposed to be secret, so she feels like moira doesn’t trust her… and then moira goes “oh, shit, no, i really thought you knew and just didn’t want to talk about it” and that deescalates the conflict bc she can demonstrate that it was just this dumb misunderstanding and she truly does trust cass. but then the rest of the argument becomes just about rapunzel and that doesn’t ring true…

…because moira, as an individual, has her own set of problems at this point and is in her feelings and stressing out and that inhibits her ability to read cassandra. her thoughts are going a mile a minute chasing contingencies and risk assessments about this talking to the baron plan and she is so not prepared for cass to walk in having a crisis of insecurity… so moira completely misses cassandra’s subtext and brushes her off in what she thinks is a teasing way about something that is, taken at face value, ridiculous—and is then blindsided and hurt when cass flips out and starts making accusations and talking about rapunzel because WHAT??

and at the same time cassandra is tunnel visioning on her own problems because she feels stuff so intensely and because in her head moira is this stoic, strong, largely unflappable person who in contrast to cass seems totally in command of her feelings, so she tends to take everything moira says at face value; if moira is condescending and dismissive it must be because moira actually holds cass in disdain and not because moira has a million other, more pressing things on her mind that aren’t this minor thing cass is using as a proxy for asking if moira trusts her or not.

so like, approaching this from the perspective of the characters as individuals, their key strength as a pair actually becomes an obvious weakness in this situation—they’re accustomed by now to communicating effectively with each other and when that breaks down due to individual concerns they *both* escalate the situation and end up hurting each other’s feelings pretty badly.

i’m rambling but i hope that makes sense kjkfkcksb i guess just, making sure that characters individual problems, flaws, concerns etc don’t get subsumed under the typical dynamic of the relationship: people are individuals first and friends, partners, or rivals second.