#warrior nun long post

[ohlexa]

AVATRICE + wlwyearnbot tweets (insp)

[simplykorra]

I think it's easy to forget just exactly what Ava went through. She was SEVEN years old and woke up in strange place, with cranky old nuns, only to find out she was paralyzed and that her mom had died. Not only that, but no other member of her family ever came for her. Nobody was looking for her, nobody wanted her and suddenly she's all alone and dealing with the loss of her mothre and her independence.

You'd think, oh well maybe she has a support system in the orphanage? Nope, they treat her like shit, like the burden she believes she is. As someone who has been in a wheelchair their whole life, let me tell you, feeling like a burden is an everyday thing. You’re not, and having people who remind you that you’re not and make you understand that you’re not is beautiful, but Ava didn’t have that. She had Sister Frances, who went out of her way to tell Ava she was worthless and I doubt anyone else there was much better.

So it's no wonder Ava was a sarcastic, snarky little shit to the nuns in the orphanage - they made her that way. Being bratty to them was the only thing she could do to feel some semblance of control.

Flash forward to Ava's death, where she was literally murdered because nobody cared and there was nowhere for her to go. Ava spent twelve years in a personal hell of being trapped in her own body, was then killed like someone taking out the garbage. Empty, alone and tossed aside.

So when she was revived by the halo, with her legs suddenly working and freedom to do whatever she wanted, of COURSE she wanted to be free.

That's the entirety of Ava's character arc - SHE WANTS TO LIVE! She hasn't been able to for so long she barely remembers how to do it.

It's not that easy, of course, the halo carries a ton of weight and Ava fights it and runs from it and resists it as much as she can, and who can blame her? She finally gets the chance to be alive, to be free and enjoy life and all these strangers (who are everywhere becuase Ava is completely alone in the world) are pushing and pulling her in every direction. She's constantly told that she doesn't deserve the halo. Doesn't deserve this chance.

Despite ALL of that, Ava's heart is strong and her passion for life overshadows all the darkness she's been dealt. She isn't just full of life, but love. She's spent years not having anyone to love her, but more than that, she's never been able to give anyone her love and I think that's very important to her. We see it so much as the show goes on. Her softness with Mother Superion when she finds her halo scar, and the way she connects with Mary, Camila being sweet to her, little things like that.

Then of course there's Bea.

Beatrice, who never sees Ava as someone that needs to be replaced, but as someone who can be taught, trained and shaped into what they need. Who sees that Ava, the human being, has value and that she's worth protecting. They connect and share and for the first time, Ava has someone who actually accepts her as a person. Not a burden or a vessel for the halo, but Ava Silva, the girl inside that's been so alone for so long.

I think that's why Ava is so bouncy with Bea, falls for her so easily, because Beatrice saw Ava's zest for life and her need for love and embraced it. Saw it as something worth fighting for, beyond the halo or duty, Beatrice liked HER. Probably the first person who felt that way since her mother was taken from her (outside of Diego, but he was so young it couldn't have been the same).

Anyway, this long winded post that probably doesn't make any sense is just my way of saying that I love Ava. I love her joy and her humor. I love that she has had so much pain dumped on her and still chooses to smile. Given the way she was treated and the power she was given, Ava could have been a villain. She could have carried a hatred for god or the world and everyone in it who forgot about her but she didn't. Instead, she found the life and love she desperately wanted and gave up everything to protect it.

[specerhastings]

ALBA BAPTISTA as ava silva in warrior nun s2

[tallulahblankhead]

I think my favorite interaction this season between Ava and Bea is actually the cheek kiss bc it reveals a few things about their months hiding out together:

1. That Ava has come into her feelings for Bea much more obviously. We saw in season one the way she always looks at Bea very softly. Almost reverent. She does that this season too, but the cheek kiss is certainly more mischievous than she had been with Bea in the past, indicating that she no longer sees Bea as just some cool badass who comes to her rescue. Bea is her cool badass who will let her get away with anything.

2. She's pushing the envelope a little bc I think it's obvious they're both kinda touch starved people for different reasons. That's her saying "I'm comfy with you and I'm trying to be affectionate with you, but I know you're skittish so here is something with deniable plausibility. Don't overthink it."

3. She's straight up flirting with Bea and of course it would be Ava doing it first. She's brash. She takes life by the horns. It's so in character.

4. Bea is of course overthinking that moment. She's stunned by something so small bc she's probably listing a million reasons in her head why that's a platonic kiss bc of her own internalized homophobia.

All of this to say that when you have writers and directors who know wtf they're doing, every small interaction is meaningful. Which, the moments between Avatrice have always been meaningful, and if people on the internet had any goddamn media comprehension they'd see that from season 1.

[taikoturtle]

I smell apples.

[grettysart]

Day 27 - Portal

[oliveoomph]

Ava & Beatrice - Warrior Nun s02

[dumpsterfireofsubtext]

Oh btw, if the upcoming news isn’t what people wanted or expected I will still be here writing and enjoying WN. I feel like that goes without saying but I’ve seen a tiny bit of catastrophising recently, particularly the closer we creep to the day of the announcement.

[smokestarrules]

memes because I was left unattended for too long

[birgittesilverbae]

thinking of babea au again…

bea going to the movies for the first time with mary and it’s like 2008, so they’re going to see Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

bea frets and spends daaaays agonising over it because she wants to go see the film in her padawan robes that one of the sisters helped her sew and she wants to bring her toy lightsaber, but she’s also terrified of standing out. doesn’t want people to stare at her, because it’s not very jedi-like to hide in mary’s jacket while she orders popcorn.

and it’s shannon who finds her haunting the chapel, coming in barefoot, sore, a little dab of blood still on her neck, which bea points out to her with a soft fingertip as shannon settles into the pew next to her.

“that was ketchup,” she tells bea, swiping at it with the heel of her palm.

“you shouldn’t lie in a church.”

they sit in silence, votive candles and their soft puttering, casting spear-tip shadows up the stone walls.

eventually, shannon yawns, “so hey, sister agatha said you disappeared before lunch. it’s 7pm.”

“i know what time it is.”

“never doubted you for a second” - shannon reaches out to tuck a rebellious strand of hair behind bea’s ear - “but my point was more about you and me maybe going to the grocery store to get some stuff to eat? we can get those instant noodle pots and add M&M’s. have you ever tried that?”

a perturbed frown, “noodles with M&M’s?”

“yeah, the pretzel ones.”

and bea senses, then, that shannon’s trying to rile her up and slip through the cracks formed by her frustration, so she settles back against the pew, folds her hands in her lap, “no thank you.”

but a moment later she’s clenching and unclenching her small fists, staring fixedly at one of the crucifixes. it’s her favourite, apparently, because instead of nailing his feet to the cross, the sculptor gave jesus a little shelf to stand on. ‘that’s actually a little cruel,’ beatrice told her once. ‘without the asphyxiation, it would take him much longer to die, unless the centurions were feeling merciful.’

“bea,” she says, soft. “you know you can tell me what’s wrong. i’m not saying i can fix it, but i’m not going to say it’s stupid.”

bea’s silent for a minute. “but it is stupid.”

“more stupid than noodles with M&M’s?”

her brown eyes are almost blackened by the shadows in the chapel, irises laced with faint impressions of candlelight.

“mary’s taking me to a movie tomorrow.”

“i know,” shannon reaches into her pocket, produces two slightly-crumpled pieces of paper. “i picked up the tickets this morning.”

“oh.” bea squeezes her eyes shut, like she’s trying not to cry. “it’s just… i don’t think i want to go.”

and she tells shannon why, taking out her plastic lighsaber (blue, of course) from under the pew, holding it.

shannon kisses her forehead and takes her through the convent to her room, where her armour rests on its stand in the corner. someone’s already cleaned up the blood.

she lets bea touch the gauntlets, the links of the mail bumpy-smooth under her fingers. tells her, “i felt ridiculous wearing it, in the beginning, but then it saved me from a stab to the chest and i realised” - she huffs a laugh - “that i’d rather be alive, and myself, than one hundred percent comfortable all the time.”

she puts a hand on bea’s shoulder, “you should wear what you want, bea.”

so she does. holding mary’s hand with the sleeve of her padawan robe slipping up her arm, passing kids wearing darth vader helmets and carrying lightsabers just like hers. a couple of them wave at her and say “hi Obi-Wan!” and she buries her face in mary’s jacket, but she’s hiding a smile.

she has a short lightsaber fight with another kid in the lobby while mary’s ordering popcorn; a girl who shows her a pack of Top Trumps cards and tells her she thinks C3PO should be more powerful. bea gives a soft sigh of appreciation whenever Obi-Wan appears onscreen, and afterwards shannon picks them up in the van and bea falls asleep against her ribs as mary drives through the dark streets.

S.O.S. not shannon showing bea her armour and getting her even more invested in warrior nunnery

[selkiemaidenfae]

this is something i want to go deeper into in a video essay but it can't be understated how fucking weird it was as a deeply-oblivious-to-my-feelings-for-girls baby bi to be on tumblr during the time when every popular straight ship was healthy and sweet and every popular wlw ship was abusive and toxic.

i envy the gen z kids who grew up with avatrice and calliette and lumity. or even older gen z kids who grew up with korrasami and catadora. they got wlw ships that were not only canon but warm and sweet and based on genuine affection.

when i was a little baby bi on tumblr, the big sapphic ships were swan queen (regina was canonically a rapist and her most consistent character trait was torturing people who tried to help her) and emison (allison spent years bullying emily for her sexuality and only stopped when she decided she wanted to fuck her).

these are the ships that tumblr tried to sell me as high sapphic romance.

hetero couples were given grand love stories and confirmed soulmates. gay couples were rarely canon, but fanon told the story of star-crossed lovers, destined to be apart yet deeply embedded in each other's souls.

and the lesbian romances were... women yelling at each other and gaslighting each other as an audience of mainly grown women insisted one character's abuse would just go away if they were given the green light to fuck the other into submission.

as a teenager, i was just starting to understand that i liked girls. but i didn't want the kind of relationship that was being romanticized. i didn't want a girl to hate me but also want to sleep with me. i didn't want her to hurt me and then maybe feel a little sorry afterwards, but then do it again.

i wanted the grand love story i saw for straight couples. i wanted fairytales and friendship and devotion and affection. i wanted women who healed together, women who protected each other, women who built lives together.

that isn't what i saw in fandom, though. so i thought that maybe wlw relationships were just... like that. maybe they were mainly physical, always tumultuous, never soft. if i didn't want that, i probably didn't want to be with a girl. i buried the feelings deep.

also, the amount of swan queen shippers that called me an evil straight person for not liking the ship probably didn't help that particular journey of self-discovery.

i wish i could go back and tell baby me that the sapphic love stories i wanted exist and they are beautiful and canon and beloved. a couple of them are even written by me.

i guess i'm just feeling reflective. and i've never seen anyone share this kind of experience, so i figured... why not? someone will get it.

[ohlexa]

You are my cinema, I could watch you forever

[simplykorra]

another dose of kristina

[specerhastings]

Why? Because of the mission? Or because-

[sisterdivinium]

Finding "the meaning" to a show that could have had up to five or seven seasons but was cancelled after the second is somewhat like trying to understand a novel composed of seventy chapters by having read only twenty — there is a whole wealth of information which we do not possess that could alter our reading of any given element or of the entire thing in itself.

Still, there are always patterns that weave a story into a cohesive unit and they can help us to better grope in darkness towards comprehension. One such pattern in Warrior Nun appears to be how the consequences to mistakes, "sins" or evil deeds committed by characters manifest.

Basic storytelling usually requires characters to act on something so that complications or resolutions may arise from their choices and move the plot forwards. In Warrior Nun, many of these actions are quite tragic in nature: Suzanne's arrogance and pride lead to the death of her Mother Superion; Vincent's allegiance to the higher power he believed Adriel to be inspired him to kill Shannon; Ava's flight from the Cat's Cradle ends up damning Lilith as she is mortally wounded and taken away by a tarask... All of these events have negative outcomes and heavy repercussions on all characters directly or indirectly involved. Something changes permanently because of them, be it in the world around them or within the characters themselves.

And yet, it would seem that all of these dark deeds not only move the story forwards but might also have overall positive results. We would have had no protagonist without Ava — and she would arguably never have received the halo to begin with had she not been murdered. What's more, on a personal scale, the horrifying crime she suffers is, in the end, the very thing that allows her a second chance in life, a new life.

An act of outside evil permits Ava to grow and develop, shows her a path she would not otherwise have found. Without her own season in some sort of hell, Lilith would not have been able to advance towards other ways of being and understanding beyond her very strict limitations. Vincent and Suzanne would not have embarked on their own journeys of enlightenment without having caused the pain they are responsible for.

Beatrice might have been paying for someone else's mistakes, but she, too, is given the chance to grow into herself through it. The afflictions that torment these characters advance the overall plot, but they also advance them, as individuals, as long as they are willing to learn and keep going despite the calamities large and small that they are faced with. Beatrice keeps going after parental rejection, Mary keeps going after losing Shannon, Jillian keeps going after losing her son (in part through her own actions, adding insult to injury)... Trouble and the adaptation that follows it, if one is open enough to learn from the experience, motivates the characters, propels them forward, teaches them.

The problem of evil has occupied the minds of many a thinker throughout the ages, given how the very existence of it, evil, might call into question that of God (a good, omniscient, omnipotent one, anyway). A common way of justifying suffering (and also God), then, is by claiming, as Saint Augustine, that "God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist".

Now, it would be rather ridiculous to say of Warrior Nun that it follows in Leibniz's footsteps, also because this philosopher, expanding on the augustinian concept, attempted to defend the goodness of a real God with his "best of all possible worlds" while all we have is... Well, whatever/whoever Reya is.

But there seems to be an inclination towards some sort of optimism as a worldview nonetheless.

Betrayals reveal truth and grant knowledge (Vincent's culminates with the coming of Adriel, which allows us to know of the threat of a "Holy War" and thus prepare for it; Kristian's gives Jillian much needed insight, William's lights up the fuse for the fight to be taken more seriously...), crimes committed willingly or not open the way for Ava (Suzanne's killing of her Mother Superion causes the loss of the halo, which is transferred to Shannon, whose death opens the gates for Ava to walk through after being herself murdered by sister Frances)... The magnitude of these positive outcomes is perhaps not "balanced" when compared to the evil that brings them about, but there is still something to take out of the catastrophe.

However tragic the tones of a given event, the show itself appears to shun the predetermination that makes tragedy as a genre; if everything is connected, here it at least appears to not necessarily drag everyone into their horrible dooms.

What's more is that this lurking "optimism" matches really well with our own protagonist's personality.

And it makes perfect sense that Ava would do the best she could with whatever she is given.

Life for her, in the conditions she experienced after the accident, would have been unbearable without some sort of positive outlook on life. However deadpan, the joking and the "obscene gestures" and whatever other forms of goofing around beside Diego are a way of turning a portion of the situation in her own favour. Proverbial eggs have, after all, already been broken right and left — might as well make an omelette of whatever remains.

Humour is just another way of looking at the bright side of something, or, at the every least, of mitigating the utter horror it might bring. If the show allows for moments of lightness, if it lets us laugh, if it takes us through a perilous voyage which still bears ripe, succulent fruit instead of the rot of pessimism and its necessary contempt for humanity, it is because Ava herself sees things in this way. It isn't gratuitous or naïve in this case, but a true survival strategy, especially as it is confronted with the morbidity of Catholicism.

Here is a religion that soothes its faithful with the promise of reward in the afterlife — how else does one charge into battle against the unknown, risking one's own death along with that of one's sisters, without the balm of believing that we shall all meet again eventually, "in this life or the next"? How else does one come to terms with the ugliness and the pain of this existence if not by looking forward to a paradise perfect enough to make all trials and tribulations here worth it?

True nihilism would have annihilated Ava. Her present perspective is what avoided the abyss.

And there is nothing Panglossian to her attitude or what the show might imply by giving us her view on things. This isn't about "the best of all possible worlds", but of making the best of whatever situation we're in, of taking what we have and doing something with it, something good, something of ourselves. It isn't God making good out of evil, but our choices.

Killing innocent people and feeling no remorse will never be the best someone can aspire to do. Sister Frances, cardinal William, Adriel all learn this the hard way.

Those who do their best find that, somehow, they can move on from whatever it was that paralysed them. Ava, most of all, knows what it is to be stuck, frozen in place; she can never be the character who refuses to grow, even through pain, lest she condemns her spirit to the same fate her body is all too familiarised with. Those around her wise enough to let themselves be touched by her, by the dynamic power she carries, walk forth with her and live.

It says very little about "God" that Warrior Nun should adopt its heroine's views and seem "optimistic" as it progresses — but it speaks volumes about the values it presents for pondering, of the inspiration its protagonists provide, and of the multiple reasons why this is a story unlike most others.

[whaledocboi]

the girls are fightinggg - pre-canon

(continuing this post, but i added the first one in for more context anyways)

the OCS break into a random warehouse for a mission and a next thing they know is that they're being ambushed by a very unhappy 17~something y.o, who apparently has an entire little flat set up there and is not at all flattered that these strangely dressed people are violating her space

lilith is rude and short tempered (wants to get over w/ this already), camila is also rude and short tempered (they broke into her unofficial home), so they go at each other before shannon and mary could even begin to talk it out like civil people