Man its been weeks and I’m still soured by the conclusion to Fontaine’s main story. I'll just rant here
There were a lot of things I didn’t like about it (Arlecchino's altruism being played straight, Traveler being out of character, the lore exposition ass-pull with the prophecy slates, the weird logic about how destroying a Gnosis could potentially wake up the Heavenly Principles but not fucking destroying an Archon Throne when Celestia forced everyone to fight a GODDAMN WAR TO ESTABLISH THEM-) but the biggest offense to me was how Furina was handled. This was marketed as the grand finale of the arc, the climax with Furina at the center of it all. And she got shafted. Big time. Furina had no agency in the plot whatsoever, nothing she did had any effect on how things turned out, and she didn’t even have the dignity of fully understanding why it all had to happen that way.
(Also I will preface this with yes Furina and Focalors are technically the same person with the same origin, but after the split Furina lost all her memories as Focalors. They are two separate consciousnesses with different experiences, and therefore I will treat their individual choices as their own)
I’ve seen people try to argue that no, she chose to take on this role knowing she would suffer, that she didn't HAVE to go along with it. And she was even working by herself to solve the prophecy without relying on Focalors, she wasn’t a puppet/pawn! But the thing is she was essentially in a hostage situation. If she didn’t do things exactly as dictated by Focalors people would DIE. Like there is a reason why criminal punishments are lighter when it’s found the perpetrator was coerced into it! And her researching how to avoid the prophecy changed nothing about the outcome, she could have sat around eating cake and the story would have word for word turned out exactly the same. All that information served to do was highlight her suffering and draw the audience’s sympathy. That's what I mean about her not having agency, it's not about her ability to act as an individual but how her actions had an effect on the overall plot. None of her choices outside of the role designated by Focalors did anything to change the situation for better or worse.
And to top it all off she didn’t even understand WHY this all had to happen. Why do people dissolve in the Primordial water? How does her pretending to be an Archon play into solving the issue? Why can’t she confide in anyone? What the hell is Focalors even doing? She doesn’t learn the answers to any of these until after everything was over, and not even from Focalors’ own mouth, it was relayed to her by Neuvillette.
Speaking of Neuvillette, I’m not gonna lie I’m sorta annoyed at his existence because it felt like Furina was shafted for him. Everything is very tilted in Neuvillette's favor. He gets his powers back, full control over Pneuma/Ousia, final say in trials, the ability to hand out Visions, and just straight up the ability to manipulate life itself. And okay all these things were his to begin with lore-wise, whatever, but he also becomes the "lore important" character after this at Furina's expense. Furina doesn't have her memories as Focalors, she can't tell us anything about how the world works, about Celestia, about what happened 500 years ago. Even though other Archons didn't give us much either for one reason or another, they at least HAVE that knowledge, and are therefore guaranteed to have involvement in future events with the Abyss and Celestia. Furina at the moment, doesn't. Neuvillette has it now. And all that talk about Focalors judging Celestia? Also Neuvillette's job now. And it feels like it was all stolen from Furina from a story-telling perspective because again, she didn't know of the plan to return his powers. She didn't even get to explicitly agree with her other self that he should have them back. The writers really seemed to go out of their way to place him on a pedestal at Furina's expense, which irks the hell out of me.
There are some opportunity for future interludes to turn the current state around, and they probably will since Furina is still being marketed as an Archon, but as it stands I want Fontaine to be over so we can move on to the next disappointment.
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I turned off rbs on that earlier post abt the AU that thin people live in because I could feel it wanting to grow legs. and. contrary to popular belief, I do Actually value my sanity.
a snippet before I go finish making my stew: what's unsaid here, but should be EXTREMELY OBVIOUS. Is that nobody takes issue with someone who is thin, making their own post or talking to a friend, bringing up a time someone made unsolicited comments about their body. and complaining, bc who isn't going to complain abt someone being shitty at you. (that's not "skinnyphobia" btw it's usually just misogyny)
but that's not what happens, bc what happens is that someone uses the time Jimmy called them emaciated in high school as a REBUTTAL, AGAINST a fat person who was already talking about their own bad experience. and that one time the dress shop didn't carry XXXS is Proof that fatphobia isn't real and that thin people suffer just as much. check and mate. your thing can't be true, because someone was mean to me Once.
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Hi GT! Congratulations on the last chapter, as always! Lately my brain has been fixated on a detail that I find very interesting. I can't help but think that any adult in LH who is preparing for war has at least once thought while looking at Draco "ok, this could definitely help us in the future". And I find it almost hilarious because I love the way you characterize Artur and Molly and their protective instinct towards the kids... but let's be honest, Hermione, Ron and Harry have ensured the heir of the greatest house in the wizarding world to the cause.
One of the interesting parts about the Harry Potter series is that both sides of the conflict use child soldiers, and you get to see a realistic range of reactions to that from the adults around them. There's Molly, who's reasonably unconditionally opposed to it on the grounds that They're Children, and then Sirius, who unreasonably supports it on the grounds of being himself a stunted teenager, and then Mad-Eye, who reasonably supports it on the grounds of "they're going to have to fight anyway," and Dumbledore, who is some combination of these viewpoints depending on the situation — most protective of Harry when the danger is real, but perhaps necessarily the most realistic about Harry's role in ending the war. Lionheart has a slightly different cast of adults, because it's a different POV, but you still see a range of opinions from Narcissa ("you'll harm my son over my dead body, but also he needs to be able to defend myself") to Snape ("careful, Draco") to Moody (the same, arguably more so, because he's thinking of the long game) and Dumbledore (again, some situation-dependent combination of viewpoints). The kids are often so caught up in their own part of the conflict that it doesn't occur to them the strategic decisions that are happening over their heads — when you're a teen and an adult tells you you're too young for something, the kneejerk reaction is "fuck off" — but there are always conversations happening in other rooms, especially in Grimmauld Place.
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Love (cannot emphasis how much sarcasm there is in that word) that an official Canadian government response to high cellphone rates is to switch carriers.
Switch it to what? We basically have three companies since one was allowed to eat the forth (with the government saying it wasn't anti-competition and the company eating the other pinky promising they wouldn't jack rates up). Even the smaller companies have to rent infrastructure from the Big Three so there's only so much they can do if that rent costs an arm and a leg.
And that's not touching on how many "small companies" are actually just subsidiaries of the Big Three. You may save $5 but you're still with Telus/Rogers/Bell.
Or that the actual small companies tend to have shit coverage because they don't have the infrastructure available to them and are prevented from getting it. Or their traffic is throttled in favour of the Big Three's customers. Or both.
Or that they're extremely regional thus aren't an option for a huge chunk of Canada's population.
We have no true options and the government has shown time and again that they're fine with monopolies, in multiple industries, and don't care when said monopolies jack up prices to make shareholders and the c-suite more money at the expense of everyone else. At most there will be a verbal slap on the wrist and a giftcard for $25 that people have to register for, for a decade and a half of price gouging.
It's not talked a whole lot about outside the country from what I've seen and heard but Canada is a country of monopolies. A handful of companies own nearly everything, every province has a family or two that owns a hell of a lot (Nova Scotia is basically owned by one family at this point), and our government ignores it. Even the branch that is supposed to be against monopolies is fine with mergers and takeovers in most cases.
Because, you know, the company said it totally wouldn't use consumers' lack of options to increase prices.
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