#villain/antagonist blorbo

[intistone]

MY SON. LOOK AT MY SON AS HE SCURRIES AT YOU

[mrstsung]

Shang tsung looking at me like

"How did i get so lucky?" "Lucky to have a sweet soul like you?" "And to think *chuckles* you're all mine,heart and soul"

Don't mind me I'm being self ship trash.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~♡♡♡♡♡~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(I still will only accept this version of shang tsung if it's my hc version. Which has nothing to do with the storymode or entirety of mk12/mk1,erased that completely. So yeah,I basically have it be shang tsung during his time under shao kahn in outworld,when he was coerced into serving that binch. Aka peak power shang tsung,young shang,early days as a powerful sorcerer. Before he got his island but not quite when he got a following. Still was hated slightly by some people. And only has just became a master of soul magic. So yeah. Hc shang only. Look i don't mind this shang. I don't mind him being young and or sympathetic. It's just the narrative is bland and horrible. And "fans" of this particular shang are insufferable and refuse to be normal in a way that isn't vomit to my eyes,like come on guys i thought y'all would be better than that. It's the tumblr loki problem all over again. Cept shang tsung was never a loki type EVER. HE'S A LUCIFERIAN TYPE OF VILLAIN! judas at bare minimum. But y'all miss the point even on that i feel. Anyways this version of him is my hcs only. May post hcs later.)

Do not reblog plz. This is a personal blorbo supreme appreciation post. Thank you.

[cishet-dj-octavio]

I wish Octavio hung around during and after Splatoon3, even if it’s kinda like in previous games where you can’t speak to him and he just stares. Bro helped you save the entire planet then fucked off

I really wanna see what everyone in the NSS thinks of him most of all. Hesitantly trusting? Still hating of him? He did a lot of bad things, but also helping someone save the world without even being asked is a pretty huge way to redeem yourself. But the fact that he helped, please correct me if I’m wrong, is literally never mentioned after??

I really want to know where he went. What was he even doing all storymode? Was he watching the entire single player campaign happen from afar? Was he just hanging out in Splatsville?? Was he aimlessly flying around space until he happened to see Agent 3 about to plummet to their death? I REALLY hope we get to see more of him in the DLC, maybe get some answers to these questions

[leatherbookmark]

idk maybe it makes me a child or Someone With Shit Media Literacy, but i feel like when people discuss fictional events that were good or bad writing, they often look to general fiction tropes rather than what makes sense for the individual story? like, oh, well, this is a [genre] story, and in these, it's either X or Y, so it's going to be either X or Y. or: this character technically could count as a [character archetype], so obviously they only have one very predictable ending. what wonderful, emotionally moving writing!

and like. are we writing stories, or producing products that check off all the most common boxes on the Successful [Genre] Story list? this is not to say that you can never kill off your mentors/father figures, or that your protagonist should never fail miserably in this or that point of the story -- sometimes it really is the most fitting and sensible solution! sometimes leaving a character alive would undermine or muddle up the message, if there is one, or it would simply make it more difficult for the writer. and it's fine. but when your reason for this or that writing choice is not "because it makes the most sense" but rather "because that's what happens in other stories", it's, uh, not good writing at all. it's barely any writing, really!

[copaganda-clobberfest]

WELCOME… TO THE COPAGANDA CLOBBERFEST!

(i could not come up with any other tourney name. sorry)

You know that trope? That one trope *Everyone* hates? The trope in which a well meaning antagonist to our heroes, one looking out for the good of a certain community, suddenly does something horrible and drastic to make not only them, but the ideology they stand for the most villainous of all?

and no, I’m not talking “well meaning” as in… they had a sad life. Their parents died or something. Etc.

I’m talking:

“This person wants change in a corrupt system.”

“This organization made up of a marginalized group only wants their basic living rights.”

“This person wants equality for their people.”

Etc etc etc. Only for it to drastically become:

“This person wants change in a corrupt system… so they BLOW UP AN ORPHANAGE OF GRANDMOTHERS.”

“This organization made up of a marginalized group only wants basic living rights… so THEY’RE ACTUALLY EVIL UNSYMPATHETIC TERRORISTS.”

“This person wants equality for their people… EXCEPT HAHAAA THEY DONT” That stuff. Stuff that makes you really question what the writers were really trying to get across.

But enough of that, let’s talk tournaments. With as much as this trope makes these villains blow up houses of grandmas and likely makes you, the viewer, want to blow up something too, you can now throw them at me and I’ll let them blow up each other!

Here are the rules.

No Harry Potter. Thank you!

Submit via the ask box and submission tab on this blog please. I sadly don’t have one of those google thingies :( I’m goofy

When sending in your finest challenger, give me propaganda too! Propaganda will be included once we’re ready to get the polls out.

Fictional peeps please.

You can submit up to 3 characters/groups of characters/whatever whatever in an ask/submission.

The following is a list of antagonistic fictional characters, or antagonistic fictional organizations/groups I am automatically putting in the poll:

Magneto, X Men

The White Fang, RWBY

The Flash Smashers, Marvel

and Amon, The Legend of Korra

But please please PLEASE send me propaganda for those four if you have some! Falls to my knees like a Victorian orphan boy…..

Anyways, I hope I explained the premise of this whole ~tournament~ correctly, or at least half decently. Hope this goes well, and may the worst troper win in the COPAGANDA CLOBBERFEST!

Inspired from @look-how-they-massacred-them, @battle-couple-battle, @controversial-blorbo-bracket, @greengirlfight, @ffshipbracket, @star-wars-tournament, @the-robot-bracket, @tmblrsfavshow, @bestanimatedmovie, and @fave-fight !!!!!!!

[downtroddendeity]

@turnkeyassurance saw your tags and figured I'd take the opportunity to pause my descent into madness to give my more sober opinions on the Ni no Kuni franchise, lol. (Warning: I am a humongous JRPG nerd)

The NNK games are really odd ducks, quality-wise. You can call either one a good game or a bad game and call either one better than the other, and any combination of those opinions can be something I think is entirely justified. Both of them have things they do remarkably well and also serious, profound, deal-breaking flaws, and the really weird thing is that there's almost no overlap between those two lists for the two games. What clicks and doesn't about both of them is going to be deeply individual.

What Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch does, with resounding success, is Vibes. It sets out at every single step with the goal of being a playable Ghibli movie, and it sticks to that principle. It's all about beautiful, cel-shaded whimsy. It's a game for people who want to feel like they're wandering through the meadows in the movie version of Howl's Moving Castle. There are lots of puns, and you can befriend all the random encounter monsters and feed them ice cream.

But that's also its Achilles' heel: because it's dedicated entirely to imitation, it has trouble bringing things to the table that are really its own. It has the visual and narrative aesthetics of Hayao Miyazaki's films, but it doesn't have the raw emotion at the heart of them. And as a game, its mechanics combine the clunkiest features of menu-based combat and action RPGs, and while everything about the Pokemon-esque mechanics seems designed to encourage players to collect and experiment with them, the balancing turns attempting to do that into a miserable grindy nightmare.

The other problem is that it... isn't actually the first Ni no Kuni game. Wrath of the White Witch is, in fact, a remake of the Nintendo DS game Ni no Kuni: Dominion of the Dark Djinn, which was never released outside Japan. The reason for this is pretty easy to explain, because DDD had another gimmick besides its aesthetics: it came with a real-life physical copy of the wizard spellbook, and the player had to look things up in it and draw sigils on the DS touchscreen to cast spells. So, we've got a high-effort remake that had to completely cut the central mechanic... and which also expanded the plot so that the original main villain was no longer the primary antagonist. This results in a game with what is very clearly a final dungeon and very clearly a final boss and very clearly a resolution to the story, which suddenly has a completely different plot dropped on it like a fucking anvil that it expects you to be just as invested in even though it hasn't had anything like the same level of buildup.

And ironically, this is almost the exact opposite of the biggest problem with Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom, a.k.a. the one with my new blorbo, the President of the United Union of Eagleland. 2 is an effort to try to cement an identity for the series that can be its own, rather than requiring them to depend indefinitely on borrowed Miyazaki nostalgia. It just has the teeny-tiny, itsy-bitsy problem that at some point in development it had a budget shortfall so bad that you can finish the game without ever realizing that there is a continent-sized crashed interdimensional spaceship on the world map.

This game has had a machete taken to it. Don't get me wrong, I genuinely respect the work they did to make what they could with what they had, but you can see the signs of massive scope cuts to literally every aspect of the game. The back half of the game has almost exclusively recycled enemy and environment assets; voice acting has been trimmed down to canned voice clips; the catboy protagonist's ears and tail are barely animated; one minigame was so inadequately playtested that a level 16 mission is massively harder than level 50 ones; and while whatever restructuring they had to do to the main plot still left the final version with a more solid and coherent central arc than WWW in my opinion, it also left a lot of truly gaping plot holes, like oh, I don't know, why the President of the United States got turned into a 19-year-old.

Literally, they just. Entirely forgot to explain that. Half the DLC is just the writers scrambling to fix stuff like that and add a bunch of character development that should have been in the base game.

However, despite all this, I personally enjoyed NNK2 more than NNK1 unironically, not just for Rolandposting reasons. Compared to the first one, it plays much more smoothly as a straight action RPG, and while it can't provide the same knock-your-socks-off aesthetic cohesion, to me it seemed a lot more heartfelt- that is, like a game that was made because people had a story they wanted to tell.

But, well, we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the non-unironic reasons, because the story they really, genuinely wanted to tell was about a magical catboy growing up and learning to become a leader, and somehow, miraculously, they really thought that was the story I was here for too when they opened the game with the President of the United States being isekaied by Nuke-kun.

Sorry, guys, I have a crippling addiction to dramatic irony and my day job is tech work in local politics, you could not have more laser-targeted this at making me specifically laugh my ass off if you tried.

[victimsofyaoipoll]

Round 1

Propaganda Under Cut

Chi-Chi

I think the fandom has had a turnaround on her in recent years, so the Chi-chi abuse has abated quite a bit from what I've seen, but for the longest time your standard Goku/Vegeta fic included SOME manner of sidelining her HARD, if not outright villainizing her or killing her off for convenience. Fuck, I'm guilty of it, even. I've seen meta and fics that go on and on about how she's abusive or ignorant or a bad wife or an overnearing mother or useles, and seen episodes where she's put aside as a gag, the nagging wife of Goku. Poor Chi-chi...she is so great and pure-hearted and stong-willed and yeah she's a bit of a tiger-mom and her name is a pun for tiddies but she loves her family and kicks-ass and she was done so dirty by the franchise and the fans for so long I wanna marry her.

Being a victim of yaoi is just one of the many ways Chi-Chi gets fucked over by the fandom. She also gets degraded for being a nag (wanting her family to be safe and not fight) and stopping her son from reaching his full potential (not wanting her son, who is anywhere from 5 to 11 depending, to be killed in a big alien fight). In this case, though, she gets killed off, divorced, or otherwise fucked over so her husband Goku can bang local genocidal maniac and fandom babygirl Vegeta. Bulma (who is canonically Vegeta's love interest) gets some of this too, but Chi-Chi's treatment tends to be worse since the fandom hates her already.

She's the wife of the main character Goku who is poorly written and consistently presented as a domineering nag as part of that classic sidesplitting routine. The very creator of the manga himself has admitted he hates drawing her and only kept her around as a punishment to himself. Because she's a loud woman people will shove her aside and completely ignore her to ship Goku with his rival Vegeta (which does also involve neglecting Vegeta's wife Bulma but more people at least like Bulma as a character.) She is consistently demonized by the fandom and I have even seen some go so low as to as to ignore her so they can ship Frieza, one of the biggest and most obviously evil antagonists of the franchise, with Goku.

Every Supernatural Woman

Supernatural is so mean to women and committed to queerbaiting but it still gives Sam and Dean lovers to kill. The writers kill and villainize them and the fans get the few that remain

wincest and destiel shippers cannot handle the idea of their blorbos having a Woman THREATENING their SHIPS god FORBID

It literally used to be a running joke that if a female character got introduced you knew she was going to die soon because fans would react so negatively to her "stealing" one of the boys away from the big ship, whether it be destiel or wincest

[chaifootsteps]

Look, I think it's quite normal when someone likes a villain just like a villain, there's nothing wrong with that. For example, I really like Bill Cipher, Gothel, Frollo, witches and Valtor from Winx (we do not take into account the ending of season 3 and season 8), and similar one-dimensional villains. And if we touch on the universe of Viv, then I really like the villainous version of Stolas from the artist lima.jei. They have their own antagonistic charm and charisma, given all the terrible things they've done. Therefore, I don't see anything wrong with someone liking Valentino. Yes, it's hard for me to understand this, because I think he's a pretty mediocre, stupid and boring villain, but I don't see anything wrong with that. Nevertheless, Norry's reaction to the fans' desire for the worst to Valentino seems to me terribly ridiculous. Shouldn't this be proof that the character did a good job of being the antagonist? And their argument that "this is a fictional character" is broken down by their own actions. If this is a fictional character in a fictional story, then why are you wasting time defending him online?

Exactly, there's absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with liking Valentino, regardless of what he did. Might be something wrong if you're out there defending actual, real life people who are dangerous, ala what Elcee was doing, but fictional villains? People like those for all kinds of reasons.

Norry's a disingenuous idiot. It's okay to like bad characters, it's okay to hate bad characters, but it's not okay to call for the mass reporting of posts that criticize your favorite rapist blorbo.

[cer-rata]

Goddesses That Would Be Better Wonder Woman Antagonists Than Hera

Enough with Hera as a bitter, manipulative, shortsighted hag!!!

WE GET IT! HERA HATES ZEUS'S BASTARD KIDS! SHE GETS MAD ABOUT IT! ENOUGH! SHE HAS OTHER TRAITS!

*Cough*

I'm so sick of media making Hera a flat, hysterical cunt, especially compared to the general moral nuance that her entire pantheon represents. It's just lazy at this point and done to death, and for Wonder Woman to have to fight a woman who's main grievance is being cheated on and generally mistreated by her husband again and again again and again like...optics people.

So here are my choice picks for goddesses of other pantheons (and one Greek on) that would be interesting obstacles to Diana, both ideologically and materially. Also! I say antagonists on purpose, because generally in polytheism, gods aren't truly evil, even if they have negative attributes, it's always more complicated than that, and while these ladies WILL cause some conflict, they're all more than just flat villains. Most could reasonably also be allies, and Diana is all about making her foes into friends.

Skadi

A goddess and Jotunn, Skadi is the queen of bowhunting, skiing and winter, generally. Famous for storming Asgard alone to avenge her father, and being intimidating enough for Odin to choose to attempt to appease her instead, Skadi is intense, and fittingly cold, but also fair and capable of seeing reason. Her tentative truce with Odin and her failed marriage to the god of the summer, Njord, could be ripe to twist into reasons to cast her eye towards current events, both divine and mortal. A proud, mighty giantess that will do what she deems necessary to see justice done to herself? You can do stuff there.

Izanami-no-Mikoto

The Shinto creation deity turned goddess of death, Izanami is upset! Very upset! And fairly so! She's like if Eurydice got really livid after Orpheus ignored her simple instructions and vowed to break all of his little toys. Because that is exactly what happened, they almost have the same myth. As revenge for him messing up her resurrection, Izanami vowed to kill 1k people each day to hurt her husband, Izanagi, the other creator deity. Izanagi responded by making 1.5k new people each day, which...I mean solves maybe the wrong end of the problem but...

Unlike Hera, she poses an active threat to mortals and has the power to make dealing with her difficult. Maybe Diana and Amaterasu have to team up to deal with her insane...uh...step mother? Kind of? It's a little complicated, I'm not going into it, Wikipedia is your friend.

Ishtar

I'm going to be honest she's my mythology blorbo and I made this post for her okay--

The Mesopotamian goddess of love, war, conquest, divine law, the Queen of Heaven, patron of queer folk (No I'm not making that up, she's down for the gays mythologically speaking), Ishtar is complicated, a little strange, and funny, so funny. She's got a short temper, is easily offended, yet is generally fair and uninterested in harm coming to mortals. Her bit thing is how her conquest domain often manifests. She doesn't care about leading armies or whatever, she goes to attempts to swindle or fight other gods for their domains. Her big famous myth is about her hubris in attempting to single-handedly storm the underworld to steal the seat from her sister. She's incredibly powerful and self assured, a little petty, but not cruel. If you want a goddess who will show up, slap Diana down a city block and intend it as a friendly hello, while also vaguely suggesting that they make out, it's Ishtar. She's a perfect occasional antagonist/ally depending on her whims, and she's so disinterested in bothering humanity that you can really have mostly consequence free god fights. An arc where she decides that Ares is starting to embarrass the war god community and she's going to beat his ass and take his job? Diana has to try to get her to stop without offending her and making it a personal problem? Because again this woman is crazy, she has beaten a mountain to death because it wouldn't bow. It was not a sentient mountain. She'd be so much fun!

And we're going to ignore the version of her that showed up in "Black Adam" because that was boring, lame, and focused completely on the sexual angle, because straight men can only focus on one trait at a time--

Pele

Polynesian goddess of volcanoes, Pele fills a lot of the same niche's as Ishtar here, in that her rage and displeasure is catastrophic, befitting the personification of a volcano. Though even as a volcano god she's notably scary, in some tellings the previous volcano god who occupied the volcano she lives in now, caught wind that she was coming in his general direction--not specifically for him mind you, just in his direction--and he fled for his life, vacating the volcano. She's as multifaceted as a volcano though, bringing life as well as destruction. But you know. Her domain IS a natural disaster, so it's not hard to create a scenario where Diana would need to try to stop that from being a thing. Bonus points if she's irritated about the colonization of Hawaii, that could be an interesting narrative for Diana to contend with.

Nemesis

DC dropped the ball here as well, don't look her up, you REALLY don't want to see her design, it's nasty.

Anyway, Nemesis is the goddess of retribution, but SPECIFICALLY for the crime of "hubris" or arrogance against the gods. She punishes you for thinking you're hot stuff in comparison to the divine. She's the reason Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection and died. She did that. She thought he was a bitch, and she was correct. Why is that distinction important? Because she's not just vengeance, she's a tool to defend the honor and ego of the gods. Who in the DC universe would make the Greek gods feel disrespected and threatened? An alien who is willing to punch them in the face perhaps? We could have Diana desperately trying to stop this divine terminator from messing up her super friends who really don't understand the levels of petty the her pantheon is willing to stoop to to save face. Shes a winged warrior goddess with a heart of stone!!! Give us that fight!!!

Anything but Hera!!! Anything!!! Leave her alone!!!!

[intistone]

prison of my own making

yooo oc art for my blorbo Kez hehe : D

[mrstsung]

Ok it's late. It's demon time boiz! 💖😏💋🐍

Shang tsung nsfw art.

Mk11/mk95 shang tsung specifically

Cw: not sfw.

💖💋🐍💖💋🐍💖💋🐍💖💋🐍💖💋🐍💖💋

Shang tsung dakimakura. God i wish this was real! I didn't wanna color because I'm afraid to ruin the beautiful highlights and gloss. Unf

Hope y'all shang tsung tsimps like it.

Censored version:

Like holy hell this is the best nsfw i drew in a hot damn minute.

Now.....to make a certain thunder god nsfw dakimakura next *rubs hands evilly*

[best-female-villain-tournament]

best female villain tournament!

SEASON 2

RULES:

- Only submit the same character once

- Multiple submissions with different characters are fine!

- Matchups will be posted as soon as I have enough submissions and will include the most submitted characters

-Resubmissions are fine as long as they weren’t on the tourney last time

- Please be as detailed as possible

I had issues on my end with some technicalities and media’s. eg a lot of characters from the hatchetfield musicals by team starkid were just submitted as hatchetfield which made it harder to search for them to identify them and get pictures etc. If those and similar fandoms could be submitted with what musical etc they’re from that would be great :)

Those who sent submissions through my askbox will be getting submitted by me unless it was off anon(because you’ll be getting a notification)

Cool people/awareness tags:

@tournament-announcer @bisexual-protagonist-competiton @the-ballerina-battle @the-great-british-blorbo-off @pinkhairswagtourney @childhoodfriendstoloversshowdown @most-tragic-character-tournament

characters in the last poll(please do not submit):

Makima(Chainsaw Man)

Dahlia Hawthorne(Ace Attorney)

The Handler(The Umbrella Academy)

Margaret Slitheen(Doctor Who)

Linda Monroe(Hatchetfield)

Miyo Takano(Higurashi When They Cry)

Diane Makepeace(Layton Brothers: Mystery Room)

Marisa Coulter(His Dark Materials)

Vespera(Keeper of the Lost Cities)

Master Cyclonis(Storm Hawks)

Exellinor the Witch(How To Train Your Dragon(books))

Lady Felmet(Discworld(Wyrd sisters))

Magica De Spell(Ducktales)

Twyla Sophio(Cemetery Mary)

Liliana(Oxventure)

Marie Campbell(Killer Frequency)

Jezaille Brett/Asa Shinn(Ace Attorney)

White Diamond(Steven Universe)

Medusa(Kid Icarus)

Bryce Tankthrust(Brandon Rogers/Bryce Tankthrust, CEO)

Beatrice(Umineko When They Cry)

Shiela young(Hatchetfield)

Odalia Blight(The Owl House)

Cora Mills(Once Upon a Time)

Alcina Dimitrescu(Resident Evil)

GLaDOS(Portal)

Eris(Sinbad)

Beroba(Kamen Rider Geats)

Poison Ivy(DC)

Harumi(Ninjago)

Lusamine(Pokemon)

Arlecchino(Genshin Impact)

Dr Olivia Octavius(Spiderman: Into The Spider-verse)

The Other Mother(Coraline)

Granny Rags(Dishonoured)

Larxene(Kingdom Hearts)

Morgana Pendragon(BBC Merlin)

Barbara Burgess(The Goes Wrong Show (90 Degrees))

Cinder Fall(RWBY)

Lanfear/Selene(Wheel of Time)

Azula(Avatar: The Last Airbender)

Queen Chrysalis(My Little Pony)

Mother Gothel(Tangled)

Cruella de Vil(101 Dalmations)

Missy(Doctor Who)

Nightmare Moon(My Little Pony)

Himiko Toga(My Hero Academia)

Maleficent(Sleeping Beauty)

The Iron Queen(Sonic the Hedgehog)

Lust(Fullmetal Alchemist)

Shego(Kim Possible)

Queen Beryl(Sailor Moon)

Medusa Gorgon(Soul Eater)

The Enchantress(Shovel Knight)

Delilah Briarwood(Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina)

Delilah Copperspoon(Dishonored)

Kaia(Motorcity)

Lady Gisela Sencen(Keeper of the Lost Cities)

Evelyn Deavor(the Incredibles)

Yzma(Emperors New Groove)

Madalena(Galavant)

Ragyo Kiryuin(Kill la Kill)

The Prince(Bullet Train)

Queen Cersei Lannister(Game of Thrones)

[leggalese]

do u have a fav antagonist ?? :3

examples are dahlia, kristoph, manfred, matt, gant, uhhh cant think of any othwrs

Now I know what some of you gon say...

But leggo isn't Nick your fav, your blorbo? What about what she did?

And yeah that's exactly the point.

In my opinion a good villain inspires emotion even if they are negative hence the term "love to hate". There is something especially despicable about manipulation, deception and playing innocent that scratches my brain in complex ways and Dollie does that. She is also very entertaining very Darla Dimple.

Special mention also goes to Matt, that bastard got me good. Never forgetting the ass clenching moment when I realized what a complete fubar the case was...

[yonemurishiroku]

To those who read TSATS not for Solangelo

Crawl your way through it and you can get these:

(Might contain some spoilers)

Nico's adorable terrifying friend choices.

And whatever he is having with bones.

Dionysus being a tsundere. Okay not literally. But you know what I mean.

The emergence of Will's POV and his character as a whole.

Sally and Estelle.

And Percy and Annabeth. But honestly I don't like their interaction that much

An insight into what the Underworld is.

How cute the trogs are.

The mention of one unexpected past antagonist.

An insight into Persephone and Nico's dynamic.

Nico and Bob's friendship.

Me as the supreme villain. Yes, me. Me as in the toxic fascination I have of Nico di Angelo's existence because apparently I'm the cruelest blorbo-haver in this Nico fandom.

Happy Underworld family reunion.

Self-love Nico! Self-love Nico! Self-love Nico! Important notions must be repeated three times.

And with that the start of another family… I think?

Nico and Piper.

As someone who engages in a large part of the fandom and is interested in Nico specifically, I have to say, TSATS has many things to appease my obsession. Some of them are blatant fanservice, yes. In a way, they bring a little spark of joy, like little treats.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

nobody thinks izzy is mean to ed “for no reason” btw. he’s got reasons! he’s got motivations! but izzy’s reasons don’t excuse him, and they’re not written to excuse him. izzy’s actions are justifiable from his perspective, but the show doesn’t agree with his perspective. yknow, because he’s an antagonist?

and an antagonist’s actions can be unjustified AND sympathetic, actually. i personally don’t find izzy to be sympathetic, but that’s just my taste in blorbos. just for an example tho: azula from avatar the last airbender is very sympathetic to me, but that doesn’t make her actions justified, yknow? she was helping her dad commit genocide. no amount of childhood trauma excuses that.

that’s where the “villain discourse” around izzy comes from. when there’s a post talking about how fucked up it was that izzy called ye olde SWAT team on the Revenge and someone argues “well, he just wanted his captain back! ed was changing and leaving izzy behind! he felt betrayed and heartbroken!” it’s like… yeah, we know??? that doesn’t make calling the navy not fucked up????

or a post about how cruel izzy’s being when he says “i should’ve let the english kill you. this… whatever it is you’ve become is a fate worse than death. edward better watch his fucking step” getting countered with “izzy thinks ed needs to be tough or else the crew is going to lose respect for ed and their respect for ed is the only reason izzy didn’t get thrown overboard” or “izzy doesn’t understand how ed is changing and he doesn’t like it” like yeah we all know that, the thing is that izzy is wrong and that’s the whole point.

idk. liking and sympathizing with izzy doesn’t have to mean misunderstanding his narrative role in season 1, y’all. he’s an antagonist, and his reasons are not meant to be excuses. if he gets a redemption arc, it’s going to be a redemption arc, not an “izzy-was-justified-the-whole-time” arc. and as long as the fandom understands that, then we’re all in agreement!

[vegalocity]

Listening intently: i would love to hear your thoughts on syntax

Oh buddy-

where do you want me to start

there he is- the blorbo from my shows

The only people that live rent free in my brain even more are Sailor Moon and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Primarily Raph and Leo)

So here are my thoughts on Syntax and i will TRY to not go into how un-fucking-fairly the spiders were treated by the narrative. Also this is from the perspective of someone that does not ship T0x!c!n$@n!ty (leet speek'd as to not end up in the tag) so don't expect any of that-

So the thing about Syntax- something i had fully EXPECTED to come up again but didn't- is that his story is INHERENTLY sympathetic. He was a captive scientist coerced into working for Spider Queen and mutated and mind controlled by her

I heard some people try and make it 'softer' by saying it was more voluntary than not- like 'oh he took a job' or 'he was already an immoral scientist' or something (even though it seems hes more of a programmer and tinkerer than a capital S Scientist) mostly to try and minimize the level of moral grey that is brought up when you bring the whole thing up- makes it easier for fic purpouses you know? either to justify him hooking up with another villain or to make him an easy 'antagonist' for a different ship or to not have to look at the general moral quandries to the whole thing

And since the writers fridged him bc the spider lego sets didn't do well enough in sales to justify looking into him beyond the surface level of 'nerd spider' and 'please don't think about the fact that he was mind controlled and mutated against his will'

which naturally is WHY i felt so interested in making my main lmk OC's a family he was ripped away from, making that moral quandry front and center, and also my main SHIP with Syntax putting it front and center. Sometimes what i find interesting about a character is completely apart form the things the fanon latches onto and-

I think 'Gamer Syntax' is the thing everyone latched onto, when my read on him was more 'tired millenial also extremely autistic' and sort of just.... latched onto him

I'm projecting my autism onto him probably more than i do to Red Son lmao-

He's my funky lil sci fi loving programmer nerd and He and the rest of the spiders got spat out of LBD's ghost jail and they're not gonna do villain shit for awhile and instead just do their own thing trying to regain power because if they're not LOUD enough to get the Monkey Boy's attention he just fucking won't notice and never find out they were still alive.