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fortunatelylori · 5 years

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Sandtion: The Sense and sensibility connection - a meta collab with @and-holly-goes-lightly

As some of you may have gathered, @and-holly-goes-lightly and I are salt mates (this is a tumblr term I have learned only recently and am planning to run into the ground. You have been forwarned. I don’t want any complaints down the line!)

It all started about a year ago, with this:

And progressed steadily until we ended up here:

Occasionally, between ogling pictures of naked men, we discuss serious issues as well. Those end up as metas for your consumption, most of the time.

It’s a colaboration that works well. I write long metas, she writes really good ones. We enjoy. We have fun.

Given that we both obssesively analyze tv content and that we tend to reach about the same conclusions, we have been planning on doing some project together for a while now.

I think if 2 months ago someone had told us that Sanditon would be the tv show that would see us join writing forces, we would have been more than a little shocked.

But here we are … hoplessly obssessed with Austen’s unfinished novel and ITV’s unfinished tv show (get the hint, ITV?!?! I hope you do. Chop, chop! You can’t live on Downton Abbey reruns for the rest of time, you know)

So on this most special of days, @and-holly-goes-lightly and I bring you the motherload of Sandtion metas. Two crazy writers, one tv show, one simple title:

Sandtion: The Sense and Sensibility connection

It’s no surprise to anyone, at this point, that Andrew Davies wears his Austen influences on his sleeve in Sanditon. You can find easter eggs for most of Austen’s work, from the famous Pride and Prejudice to the obscure Lady Susan.

However, Sense and Sensibility seems to be one work that hasn’t insipired much comparison from the fandom. And it’s perhaps for that reason that Sandion’s last two episodes were so hard to digest and why so many question marks were raised in regards to Charlotte’s characterization.

In this project we aim to dispel some of that confusion and attempt to put into prespective the character arcs of both Sidney and Charlotte in:

Sidlotte: A parallel journey between Sense and Sensibility by @fortunatelylori

As well as delve deeper into Charlotte’s POV through out the season finale in:

Charlotte Heywood - From Sensibility to Sense by @and-holly-goes-lightly

We hope you enjoy our take. Please don’t forget to leave us your comments in the reply section. This is a new format for us and we’d love to hear from you on how you like this kind of collaborative work.

Sidlotte: A parallel journey between Sense and Sensibility

As I was reading the now infamous Theo James interview, I was reminded of the “unusual” visual representation of Sanditon. It really does look quite different to most Austen adaptations which are defined by the sunny, sanitized domesticity of the English garden.

Sanditon doesn’t look like that. It’s rough and a little wild. It presents a world in the throes of change, with gales, nudity and darkness lurking around the corners. I think it’s those visual cues that made Theo link it to Wuthering Heights with its Yorkshire gloomy moors and harsh winds.

But that just goes to show you Mr. James has not done his proper Andrew Davies research (Tsk, tsk, me thinks he will need to do a few more nude scenes to atone for it) because the wind swept beaches, the wilderness of the English countryside, the cowboy motif? They all go back to this:

I imagine the visual style of Sense and Sensibility 2008 was in part generated by an attempt to separate it from the very famous 1995 version (the quintessential sunny English countryside film) and in part as a response to the earthier approach Joe Wright took for his now very influential version of Pride and Prejudice (2005).

But I do think Sanditon owes more to S&S 2008 than just its visuals. I’ve talked about this in the past but Sanditon, to me, is really Davies’ homage to Austen’s entire body of work so the more you dig and analyze, the more similarities and parallels you are going to find between Sanditon, its characters and the rest of the Austenverse (I really hope this is just a thing I say in a sarcastic way on tumblr. Not everything needs to be a –verse, people!).

Episode 8 really brought this theory into focus for me. In my review I said that the finale marked the tonal shift of the story from the naïve, hopeful and mostly comedic territory of Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice towards the darker, more reflective tone of Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility.

Of course, comedy and witticisms are a core trait of all of Austen’s work. Her voice is so powerful that she is always an extra character in her own stories. However, Persuasion and S&S are also permeated with a sense of loss and angst that her other works don’t really have.

They’re more mature I suppose one could say. And it’s that maturity that plays a role in the shift that occurred in the season finale of Sanditon. Because Sanditon is really all about Charlotte Heywood. We enter this world with her and we follow her coming of age story throughout the season. And that story is marked by a pretty steep transition from the romantic, hopeful heroine represented by Marianne Dashwood to her restrained, sensible sister, Eleanor.

One of the things I liked the most about S&S 2008 was how much more balanced its view on Marianne and Eleanor was. In the 1995 film, it always felt as if Marianne was presented as a cautionary tale while Eleanor was the heroic nurturing woman who endures everything stoically and is rewarded for her restraint in the end.

But that’s not really, to my mind, the message Jane Austen would like us to get out of S&S. Just like with Pride and Prejudice, Austen is shining a light on the folly of both extreme sense and as well as extreme sensibility. It is not wise to jump head first into situations having only Lord Byron’s poems as your guide but it’s also equally unwise to constrain yourself to the point where you are unable to confide in anyone, to the point where you deny your feelings and end up a passive participant to your own life.

With Charlotte Heywood, we get to explore both those behavioral patterns.

The change from Marianne to Eleanor doesn’t occur in episode 8, by the way. It occurs at the end of episode 6 and carries through to the finale. That’s why people, including myself, were taken aback by Charlotte’s apparent change in demeanor in episode 7, from the girl who always spoke her mind (even when she shouldn’t) and wore her heart on her sleeve to the outwardly detached, apprehensive young woman who was waiting for the other shoe to drop even as the man she loved was about to propose to her.

It would be easy to blame this transition on poor execution and I do believe the shift was too sudden and it was a mistake to have it start off screen (in between episode 6 and episode 7). However, the arc itself is not a mistake and it’s actually very clever.

For one because it allows us to explore this story both from the naïve, romantic perspective as well as the angst filled one.

Secondly, and most importantly, because it works in tandem with Sidney’s arc, who is going through the exact opposite journey from the emotionally repressed outlier to the open hearted tormented hero, representative of the Byronic romantic ideal.

What was supposed to happen is that by the end of episode 8, Sidney and Charlotte would meet in the middle, she as a more controlled romantic, he as a warmhearted stoic. What Davies gave us instead is two ships that passed each other in the night and have, by their last scene in episode 8, completely exchanged places.

So I think it’s important to go back to the beginning and analyze how the meeting between the naïve romantic Charlotte and the world weary Sidney ended up altering them forever and how, while deeply painful for both of them at the moment, their separation and behavior shift will end up benefiting them when their eventual reunion occurs (whether or not ITV decides to renew this series, Charlotte and Sidney WILL get married and have 2 to 3 adorable children because this is an Austen story and I will accept nothing less, damn it!)

One of the most important scenes in the whole season for me was the carriage scene in episode 6. I wrote a whole meta on it that you can find here and I have to go back to it in order to reference this extremely important exchange that sits as the lynchpin of this meta:

Sidney: And what do you know of love? Apart from what you’ve read?

Charlotte: I would sooner be naïve than insensible of feeling.

We’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing this scene and how pivotal it is in the story of Sidney as the motivator behind his lowering of his emotional guard. But I don’t think we’ve spent nearly enough time asking ourselves what this exchange tells us about Charlotte.

Because this doesn’t just announce a change in Sidney, it also foreshadows one for her. Sidney is correct in implying she doesn’t really understand love because she’s never experienced it. She is, however, about to realize that she’s in love with him and thus her assertion that she’d rather be naïve than insensible of feeling is just about to be tested.

And the surprising result is … Charlotte fails at her own paradigm. For the rest of the season, she will never be as emotionally open as she is in episode 6.

Charlotte is unable to remain the open book, expansive girl in the face of first supposed unrequited love and then as she experiences loss. She, instead, withdraws inward and begins building up her walls just as Sidney did after Eliza left him.

I think Davies understands Austen’s ultimate message that you fall into the extreme of sense or sensibility at your own peril, which is why he chooses to have his main two characters traverse opposite journeys so they can be brought closer by the end of the story (in season 2 of course).

That’s because at the core of all of the fights and misunderstandings between Charlotte and Sidney sit two problems:

Sidney Parker does not believe in the good intentions of other people. He is operating from a place of hurt and feeling under attack. He is essentially under the impression that the people he comes into contact with have ulterior motives, and none of them are good. And you can’t really blame him for that distorted image of reality when you consider what the two most meaningful relationships in his life have been up until this point.

On the one hand you have Tom who weaponizes even the most benign of compliments:

Tom: At least I have your prowess on the cricket field to be thankful for.

Sidney: Well in truth you have Lord Babington to thank for that. I am here at his behest to give him support in his time of romantic need. God knows he shall need it.

Tom: You’re a good friend, Sidney … I don’t suppose you could try just one last time… [to go ask for money]

On the other hand, you have Eliza Campion who says stuff like this with a straight face:

Sidney: You didn’t have to wait for me, you know.

Eliza: I’ve waited for 10 years. What’s another quarter of an hour?

While researching this meta and also trying to figure out my Christmas fic, I’ve come to realize that both Tom and Eliza are using a victim narrative to get what they want from the people around them. What Sidney has learned from these relationships is that nothing in life comes for free. Any compliment, any sign of affection comes with a price tag or an eventual let down.

For her part, Charlotte Heywood is suspicious of Sidney because he doesn’t make himself easy to understand.

Charlotte thrives on communication and she tends to empathize and like people who share, or overshare, information with her. Her opinion on Tom shifts the moment he starts including her in his Sanditon projects. She is apprehensive of Otis for quite a bit of episode 4 but ends up completely on his side the moment he talks about his past as a slave and making innuendos about Sidney, despite neither one of those things really resolving her initial reasons for being apprehensive.

This behavior is really down to Charlotte’s upbringing in a very large but very happy family. Or as Eleanor Tilney in Northanger Abbey would put it:

Eleanor: I think you have had a quite dangerous upbringing. You’ve been brought up to believe that everyone is as pure in heart as you are.

Incidentally another Andrew Davies adaptation …

In Charlotte’s mind, people who are open emotionally and speak their mind must be good people. After all, she is this way and she certainly always has the best of intentions. When someone doesn’t do that, or worse they evade and try to manipulate, she distances herself from them, as is the case with Edward and Clara.

And since Charlotte views meaningful communication as the ultimate sign of trust, it’s this withholding of information, this emotional barrier she can sense in Sidney, that makes her mistrustful of him. She can’t understand his emotional withdrawal for what it is – a response to trauma - because she’s never experienced it. And as such she will always fundamentally misunderstand him.

We see these two character hang ups rearing their ugly heads again and again in their conflicts:

Episode 1

Sidney: And what have you observed about me upon our small acquaintance?

Charlotte: I think you must be the sensible brother of the three. I may be mistaken but it seems to me that your younger brother, Arthur, is a very … contrary nature. Alternately over lethargic and over energetic. While your elder brother, Tom, could be called over enthusiastic. I’m afraid that despite his good nature, he neglects his own happiness and his family’s in his passionate devotion to Sanditon. Don’t you agree?

Sidney: Upon my word, Miss Heywood, you are very free with your opinions. And upon what experience of the world do you form your judgments? Where have you been? Nowhere. What have you learnt? Nothing it would seem. And yet you take it upon yourself to criticize. Let me put it to you, Miss Heywood: which is the better way to live? To sit in your father’s home, with your piano and your embroidery, waiting for someone to come and take you off your parents’ hands? Or to expend your energy in trying to make a difference? To leave your mark. To leave the world in a better place than you found it. That is what my brother, Tom, is trying to do. At the expense of a great deal of effort and anxiety, in a good cause in which I do my best to help and support him. And you see fit to … to criticize him … to amuse yourself at his expense.

Fortunatelylori: … I have a theory that the reason why Sidney’s been forced into prostitution by the end of season 1 is because he used the argument of the fucking patriarchy to defend Tom The Worst Parker. Gee, Sidney, us women would love to go out there and change the world but your male friends are forcing us to stay home with our pianos and embroideries to make sure they take full advantage of our ovaries. Please take several seats!

Fortunatelylori: Also … fyi … Tom isn’t protecting England from the French or helping Warren de La Rue develop the freaking light bulb. He is trying to run a dime a dozen seaside resort and failing miserably at it so spare us the change the world one naked ass at a time speeches.

Charlotte is baited by Sidney, the emotional recluse, into oversharing which she can’t help herself from doing because even at this early stage she has a crush on him and wants to impress him with her insight. He takes that rather kind take on his brother Tom and spins it into a narrative of inexperienced superficiality and mockery because that’s what he’s conditioned himself to think about people.

Episode 2

Charlotte: Our conversation at the party … I expressed myself badly and I fear you misunderstood me. I didn’t mean to disparage your brother or to offend you. Indeed I have the greatest admiration for what you and he are doing here in Sanditon. You were right to rebuke me and indeed I am sorry. I hope you won’t think too badly of me.

Sidney: Think too badly of you? I don’t think of you at all, Miss Heywood. I have no interest in your approval or disapproval. Quite simply, I don’t care what you think or how you feel. I’m sorry if that disappoints you but there it is. Have I made myself clear?

Fortunatelylori: Badly done, Sidney! Badly done indeed!

Not much to say about Charlotte in this one as this argument is ALL on Sidney and his trust issues. In his world, this kind of earnest apology and brave taking of responsibility is always a precursor to a guilt trip or a victimization episode. So he has become very adept at shooting down any such attempt forcefully.

It’s only in episode 3, when he sees Charlotte helping Mr. Stringer without any expectations of reward and her accepting his apology without any hint of emotional blackmail that Sidney is able to lower his guard and begin to see Charlotte for the honest, kind and generous human being that she is:

Fortunatelylori: Awwww! This is Sidney essentially seeing his unborn children in Charlotte’s eyes. (that is the most romantic lyric in the English language and no one will convince me otherwise)

However, what ends up happening? Sidney lowers his guard just in time for Charlotte to reactivate her suspicions which leads to their most explosive fight to date:

Episode 4

Sidney: Did we not agree that you would look out for Georgiana? Keep her out of trouble? I should have known you weren’t to be trusted.

Charlotte: And I should have known, despite your professed concern, you care nothing for her happiness.

Sidney: I would ask you to refrain from making judgments about a situation you don’t understand.

Charlotte: I understand perfectly well!

Sidney: Of course you do! Even though you’ve known Georgiana but a handful of weeks and him but a matter of hours.

Charlotte: That was time enough to learn that Mr. Molyneux is as respectable a gentleman as I have ever had cause to meet.

Sidney: You seem to find it impossible to distinguish between the truth and your own opinion!

Charlotte: The truth? You wish to speak of the truth, Mr. Parker? The truth is you are so blinded by prejudice that you would judge a man by the color of his skin alone.

Sidney: You speak out of turn.

Charlotte: Why should I expect any better from a man whose fortune is so tainted with the stain of slavery!

Sidney: That is enough! … I do not need to justify myself to you.

They essentially spiral out of control in this scene. Sidney’s trust issues come back and his lack of feed-back to Charlotte’s accusations make her provide increasingly horrible explanations to fill in the blanks.

Because their fights tend to be very intense (they are both people with very strong personalities), it’s easy to think of the two of them as simply not being compatible.

But their issues aren’t a matter of compatibility but rather an inability to find the right channels on which to communicate with each other, despite both wanting to.

Which brings us to episode 5

I love these little acting choices Theo James makes. This sigh is so evocative because it’s pretty clear it’s not frustration or boredom, but rather Sidney still reeling from her accusations in episode 4.

On the other side, Charlotte looks at him and thinks he is distant and non-affected and because, despite being angry, she still wants to connect with him, she tries so hard to use Sidney’s acerbic wit against him and keeps attempting to poke the big grizzly bear:

Charlotte: I assume you are here for the cricket.

Sidney: Never short of assumptions, Miss Heywood.

Unable to find a chink in his cold shoulder, Charlotte tries again at the cricket match:

Charlotte: Good luck to you too, Mr. Parker. Although I imagine you don’t think you’ll need it.

Sidney: Yes more assumptions, Miss Heywood?

Sidney is so pissed at her in this episode, not even her low key flirting with James Stringer galvanizes him.

But then something quite unexpected happens … Without actually realizing it, Charlotte manages to find the right channel to communicate on:

Stringer: You haven’t got another player to replace him. We win.

Charlotte: I’ll play.

With the wide eyed enthusiasm of a true romantic, Charlotte taps into the core of what Sidney desperately needs in his life. She doesn’t just help and support him when he needs her to but crucially she doesn’t put a price tag on it.

Charlotte: Is that a smile I detected?

Sidney: Oh, I doubt it …

Charlotte doesn’t enter the cricket match because she wants to use that gesture to ask Sidney for money for her pyramid scheme or gaslight him into thinking her betrayal was actually her “waiting” for him. Charlotte does it because she wants to see him smile. And just look at him …

Unfortunately that momentary progress is derailed again when Georgiana is kidnapped which will eventually lead to the carriage scene in episode 6 where Charlotte’s need for feed-back clashes with Sidney’s trust issues in their most revealing conversation.

It’s tempting to look at this argument and think Sidney is the only one who is in the wrong and who needs to change. But that would be missing a few important aspects of the story.

Charlotte: Otis never meant to place Georgiana in harm’s way. Any more than I did.

Sidney: And yet you both did.

I think a lot of people, Charlotte included, fall into the trap of believing that if someone didn’t intend to harm someone else that means they haven’t actually done something wrong. Which is why there are still people in the Sanditon tag that are resisting the idea that Tom Parker is a villain. Surely he never meant to hurt his brother and he didn’t force him to propose to Eliza, so why is everyone so hard on him?

But like Charlotte had to learn with Otis, just because Tom didn’t intend to cause Sidney harm doesn’t change the fact that he very much did.

In this case, Charlotte’s major mistake was not that she helped Georgiana stay in touch with Otis. Charlotte’s mistake was in assuming she had the whole 1000 piece puzzle completed when she only had about 200 pieces in place.

Charlotte: All I ever cared about was Georgiana’s happiness.

Sidney: What did you think I cared about?

Charlotte: That is anyone’s guess!

Sidney: I’ve done the best I can by Georgiana.

Charlotte: No! At every turn you have abdicated responsibility. If you truly cared for her welfare, you would have watched over her yourself.

Sidney: It is a role I neither sought or asked for.

Charlotte: Of course not! Because you are determined to remain an outlier. God forbid you give something of yourself!

Sidney: Please do not presume to know my mind, Miss Heywood.

Charlotte: How could anyone know your mind? You take pains to be unknowable. All I know is that you cannot bear the idea of two people being in love.

Despite admitting she doesn’t know his mind, Charlotte can’t help herself from filling in the blanks with what she assumes is a conscious desire to be uncaring. Because she doesn’t have the life experience to come up with another answer.

For his part, Sidney is hurt by her lack of trust in him but unwilling to trust her enough in return to tell her the whole story. Still her words do affect him enough to make him begin to lower his barrier and give Theo James one of his best acting moments:

Sidney: And what do you know of love? Apart from what you’ve read?

Charlotte: I would sooner be naïve than insensible of feeling.

Sidney: Is that really what you think of me? I’m sorry that you think that. How much easier my life would have been if I were …

Fortunatelylori: I just … he’s very good … that is all

It would be very tempting to assume that since Charlotte admits to being naïve once the whole Otis and Georgiana’s situation is revealed:

Charlotte: It’s all so overwhelming! I hardly know what to think anymore. (beat) About anything! I’ve always felt so certain of my judgment. But now I see that I have been blinded by sentiment and naivety. How could I have gotten it all so wrong? No wonder your brother has such a poor opinion of me …

and Sidney begins to show more outward concern for the people around him and validate Charlotte in ever increasingly romantic ways:

Charlotte: I know … I’m too headstrong. I’m too opinionated. I’m too …

Sidney: No. You are not too anything. Don’t doubt yourself. You’re more than equal to any woman here.

That their clashing world views are now aligned. But the truth is, Sidney isn’t the one to explain to Charlotte how it was that he became “insensible of feeling”. It’s Tom that tells her that story (and then promptly bungles whatever help he might have provided his brother). Sidney’s trust issues remain which is evident even as late as episode 8:

Babbington: I believe she’s tamed me.

Sidney: Yes … I just imagine how that might feel.

And

Sidney: I have never wanted to put myself in someone else’s power before.

Don’t get me wrong, I melt every time I hear that second line but it is indicative of the fact that love still feels like an inherently risky and dangerous thing for Sidney where he is obliged to hand over his power to someone else and pray that person doesn’t abuse it the way Eliza did.

For Charlotte’s part, Sidney beginning to reveal more of himself and show her the true man underneath the armor, makes her fall more and more in love with him. And the more she loves him, the more afraid she is of outwardly showing it. His confusion over his feelings for her and Eliza’s reappearance in his life, cause her to attempt to fill in the blanks again in episode 7. First by proxy, while talking to James Stringer:

Charlotte: You are far too sensible to form such a misguided and futile attachment.

Stringer: Why should it be futile, Miss Heywood? For all you know your feelings are repaid 5 times over.

Charlotte: I allowed myself to believe so for the briefest of moments. But I cannot deny the evidence of my own eyes.

And then directly:

Sidney: I hope you weren’t too offended by Mrs. Campion. It was only meant in jest.

Charlotte: Is that all I am to you? A source of amusement?

Sidney: No. Of course not! You’re … Forgive me.

Charlotte: On the contrary, you’ve done me a great service. I am no longer in any doubt as to how you regard me.

So what happens in episode 8? Well, they essentially trade places, going from this:

Charlotte: I hope you won’t think too badly of me.

Sidney: Think too badly of you? I don’t think of you at all, Miss Heywood.

To this:

Sidney: Tell me you don’t think too badly of me.

Charlotte: I don’t think badly of you.

In one of my metas I made the point that Sidney Parker IS Charlotte Heywood’s coming of age story: he is her first love, the first man she is sexually attracted to, her first kiss and well … unfortunately also her first (and hopefully only) heartbreak.

By being forced to deal with her own sense of loss and the pain of being separated from the person she loves, Charlotte will finally be able to understand the true nature of Sidney’s insensitivity of feeling. Instead of causing her suspicion or apprehension, she will be able to connect with it because she’s lived through it herself.

As for Sidney … I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the end he is forced to do to Charlotte what Eliza did to him all those years ago. He chooses to marry a wealthy woman he does not love and disappoint a poor woman whom he does love.

I think given that his motives are obviously altruistic while Eliza’s were not (both per Tom’s story as well as her general character as revealed in the show so far), the point of the similarity is not to bring him closer to Eliza. Certainly not when he’s looking at Charlotte like this:

Which means that him being forced to contend with what happened 10 years ago by reliving the incident, this time in the role of the aggressor, is there to increase his level of vulnerability and put him in the place of the earnest person trying to reach out for emotional connection and having to fight to pull down the walls he himself helped put up in Charlotte.

You know what they say … If you really want to know someone, walk a mile in their shoes. No one ever said those shoes would be comfortable.

#sanditon #sanditon meta #sidlotte #sidlotte meta #jane austen adaptations #sidney parker #charlotte heywood #sense and sensibility #sanditonmetacollab

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jadejedi · 4 years

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So You Hate The Last Jedi

Part One- Theme Part Two- Luke Part Three- Rey Part Four- Finn

Part One- Intro and Themes

So, you hated The Last Jedi. I know that this is a hot take in most corners of the Star Wars fandom here at tumblr.com, but The Last Jedi is my second favorite Star Wars movie of all time, easily, behind Empire. I know a LOT of people disagree with me, especially among hard-core Star Wars fans, and I understand. I really do. I actually hated The Last Jedi when it first came out. I hated it for a good year or so, until I heard some convincing arguments that made me want to rewatch it, and after that viewing, I appreciated it more. And honestly, the more I rewatched it, the more I loved it.

I realize that this movie is more than two years old at this point, but I still see a lot of hate for it here, and that makes me sad :( So, I wanted to talk about it.

I know that the sequel trilogy isn’t super popular with most prequel fans, but I hope that if you are a prequel trilogy fan, you will hear me out, because I personally find a lot of closure for the saga as a whole, especially the prequel trilogy, in The Last Jedi, and think it does a lot to tie the saga together.

And If you’re a fan of The Force Awakens, but hated TLJ, I hope you’ll hear me out because I was you, for a long time. I couldn’t even think of this movie without my blood boiling. But now I see it as a great continuation of the characters that we first fell in love with TFA.

Okay, let’s strap in.

While there are perfectly valid reasons to dislike and criticize TLJ, such as the pacing, for example, I do take some issue with a lot of the criticisms I see of this movie.

Some of these things have been covered to varying extents by the videos that convinced me to do a rewatch, and some I haven’t really seen discussed, so I want to just write out some of my thoughts. This could honestly be a really, really long post, so instead I’m going to split it up into five parts.

A couple of things before I start:

First off: here are the videos that originally made me reevaluate my opinion:

Shaun’s “A Defense of The Last Jedi”

Jenny Nicholson’s “Top Ten Worst Reasons You Hated The Last Jedi”

And this one, which I only watched recently, but also adds to the discussion:

Just Write’s “The Last Jedi and the 7 Basic Questions of Narrative Drama”

And secondly:

I am not going to defend every single criticism I’ve ever seen levied against this movie, because honestly, I don’t care. If you didn’t like this movie because of the choreography of the Throne Room fight scene, or because you think the Holdo manuver is stupid, or you’re mad that Snoke wasn’t Darth Plagueis, then I don’t think I will be able to change your mind.

Here are the main criticisms I want to deal with:

1. Luke’s character was treated horribly. Luke would never try and kill his nephew, not when it was his love that saved and redeemed his father. Having him run off and hide on a deserted planet, cut off from the Force, and drinking green milk from an alien sea cow is a disservice to his character.

2. It’s stupid that Rey’s parents are nobodies (I’m going to pretend that TRoS doesn’t exist because it clearly doesn’t reflect Johnson’s intentions, therefore isn’t relevant to my argument). She should be a ______ (Skywalker, Kenobi, reincarnated Anakin, Palpatine, etc).

3. Finn’s character arc was pointless, the whole Canto Bight storyline was useless because it didn’t accomplish anything and why was he stuck with Rose the whole movie and split up from Rey/Poe?? Also, his character arc is literally just a rehash from TFA????

4. Why did the movie portray Poe as a too cocky flyboy? Why didn’t Holdo just tell him the plan?

I’m not going to discuss Kylo Ren, because I think Shaun and Jenny’s videos both do a great job of discussing this and I have nothing to add. Same thing for anyone who thinks that Rey is a Mary Sue. It has been discussed at length by many people, and does not need to be echoed by myself.

With that out of the way, we can get into the first topic: theme.

In order to properly address these criticisms, we first need to have a discussion of the themes of The Last Jedi. Most of these questions listed above can be answered by the theme, which is all but stated outright several times, first by Finn, and then by Yoda.

After the Canto Bight chase scene (a scene I admit is a ‘fill up your popcorn’ scene), Finn states, in response to Rose telling him that they’re trapped, “It was worth it, though. To tear up that town, make ‘em hurt.”

And when Yoda’s Force Ghost appears to Luke, he says, “Pass on what you have learned. Strength, mastery, mm, but weakness, folly, failure, also, yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher failure is.”

These are basically the two most important lines of the movie. If you get anything from The Last Jedi, it should be these two lines, as they summarize the theme. I would say the theme of TLJ can best be summed up as, “Failure is not always a bad thing; through failure we can learn from our mistakes, and there is hope that can be taken from that.”

That is why the movie’s main villain and our protagonist’s main antagonist, Kylo Ren, says something along the lines of ‘let go of the past’. He doesn’t learn from his mistakes. As Shaun says in his video, he kills his father in The Force Awakens and is emotionally crippled because of it, but then in The Last Jedi, he fails because he once again tries to kill his other main father figure, rather than learning from his mistakes.

And that is why Canto Bight exists. Or at least one of the two main reasons. Canto Bight doesn’t do a lot for the plot, but it does a ton for the theme. The whole point is that good things can come out of failure, that sometimes it is the things you learn along the way that are important.

Why does Luke try to kill Ben? Because of the theme. Now, that doesn’t mean it was a good decision for his character, I’m leaving that for part two, but that is why. And why Poe is so cocky, and why Rey believes that she can turn Kylo, even when all evidence points otherwise.

While this theme of failure is the main theme of The Last Jedi, it is not the only theme. I would say that there are two smaller, yet still significant ideas running through this movie. The first is one that reeeeeaaaaaallllllllly pisses off some of the more dudebro elements of the fandom, specifically the idea of how men listen to women.

In The Last Jedi, there are three main male hero characters, Finn, Poe, and Luke, and all three of them have conflicts that involve disagreeing with a woman. Now, first of all, I am NOT saying that these three male characters are sexist, or that Rian Johnson thinks that they are, or even wrote them to be. To me, this message wasn’t so much for the characters, as for the audience. He didn’t write three men being wrong about a woman to say, “hey look Finn, Poe, and Luke are all bad and sexist’, he wrote them this way to say, especially to the very dudebros who took offense to some parts of this movie, “hey, look, sometimes women will challenge you. It’s up to you to listen to them and take them seriously.” And hey, love that for us.

While a large part of the Star Wars Fandom is some amount of progressive, a very vocal part of the fanbase is decidedly not. I appreciate, in fact that Rian Johnson was able to put in this message *without* making Finn, Poe, and Luke look sexist, as I like to think sexism is fairly rare in the world of Star Wars. The reason that these characters disagreed with Rey or Holdo or Rose wasn’t because they are women, but the reason that some male fans are so upset about it is. I think just seeing these male characters learn important, valuable lessons from these female characters is really great, and really not what I would have expected from this movie.

The second smaller, yet still important, idea running throughout this movie, dealing with a collective dark history, is one I will deal with more later.

#star wars #star wars meta #sw meta #sw #the last jedi #tlj #hannah talks #so you hate the last jedi

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snkpolls · 5 years

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SnK Chapter 124 Poll Results

The chapter 124 poll closed with 2,065 responses. Thank you to everyone who participated!

This month’s poll team: @erensjaegerbombs @momtaku, _Puppet_ , @shifter-lines and @ladymoe6

RATE THE CHAPTER 1,926 Responses

Fours and fives still dominate but there’s no denying that this chapter lacked the hype we’ve seen recently. “Thaw” had the lowest number of 5’s this year, performing similarly to the Zeke-centric flashback chapter in 114, “Sole Salvation”. (There’s a pun to made here about us “warming up to Thaw” but sadly I am not smart enough to make it.)

The Chapter of Necessary Filler & the Obligatory Cliffhanger

I love that Isayama isn't rushing everything and is actually focusing on little details and small interactions between characters. He really isn't glorifying an "apocalyptical scenario" just for the sake of destruction in itself or shock value.

This chapter felt like a nostalgia trip, but I wasn't in for the ride.

This chapter was a breath of fresh air ngl. These past chapters were mostly full of either a flashback, monologue or just having two characters talking in a realm where nothing happens and time is frozen, but, at last, the plot is moving foward in the real world too. Not only it contained long gone titan action, but also great character development/moments as well. I missed this.

The leaks didn't give this chapter justice

A weaker chapter overall, I hope all this buildup will be well spent in the next chapter.

I actually loved everything about this chapter, I can't believe Isayama finally gave me a reason to kind of like Gabi. I'm sure she'll do something to immediately change that…

Isayama-sensei is the best, each chapter is a 10/10 for me. I do agree that this chapter is not as great as as the last 5, but it's still great. This year is impossible to choose the Top 5 Best Chapters of SNK

It was good, but I was hoping for a crazier year closure.

WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING WAS YOUR FAVORITE MOMENT?

1,995 Responses

There were many great moments in this chapter, but Annie’s highly anticipated return to the active plot takes up the largest amount of votes! Other notable moments were: Shadis taking command, Armin realizing Annie’s crystal must have unhardened, the 104th discussing Eren, and Jean’s salty reaction to Floch’s continued survival.

A N N I E is BAAAAAAACK!!!

as someone too invested in the gabi-nicolo-braus plot thread by i love sasha i am absolutely Fed with that excellent "get out of the forest" talk. thank u for the good food nicolo

It's great to see the other 104th members discuss about Eren's actions. At least we got a glimpse on what they think about Eren's plan.

For once I'm gonna forgive Isayama for putting off Levi and Hange. I FEEL BLESSED TO HAVE ANNIE BACK ON MY BIRTH MONTH!!! BEST PRESENT EVER

I like the parallels to Trost, especially the part with the thunder spears sort of mirroring the thing with the guns and the elevator from S1

WHO WAS THIS CHAPTERS MVP? 1,988 Responses

Despite the influx of negative commentary, 38.2% of respondents agree that Gabi’s persistence to save Falco and reconciliation with Kaya earned her the MVP title this month. The strongest contenders were Shadis and Jean.

Annie saved this chapter from the Gabi / Kaya focus

Connie- the underrated suffer boi

Gabi best girl!

I am proud of Jean for taking charge, he acted like a real commander.

Reiner Best character 😔👌

SHADIS IS THE MVP AND I LOVE HIM

WHICH CHARACTER WERE YOU MOST DISAPPOINTED WITH? 1,998 Responses

“None of the above” was a popular suggestion (25.2%) but Connie edged that choice out by a percentage point (26.3%) . At least you guys listen when the evening news says that stealing children is bad.

Silly of you to ask us which character we're most disappointed with. We're always disappointed with Floch in every panel he shows up in

it's good to have a connie development, but I was a little sad about his attitude

I'm not so much disappointed with Connie in this moment as I am with the direction his character arc has gone lately in general. I miss when he was fun instead of angry all the time.

I think everyone is acting super irrational. Eren is going to destroy the world but all the SC are "accepting" of it. I think deep down they are all horrified and in a completely insane mental state causing irrational decisions and thoughts such as Jean being okay with genocide.

I understand that Connie is desperate to find a comfort after all the ppl he lost, but I'm still extremely disappointed in him for wanting to murder a child. Not just Connie tho, the same goes for Jean and Armin. Armin didn't say "Let's not kill a freaking child" he just objected because he didn't want to provoke Reiner and Pieck.

WHAT DID YOU THINK OF REINER’S ROLE THIS CHAPTER? 1,889 Responses

Reiner takes a back seat this chapter, and just barely over half of the fandom believe he deserves that nap after all he’s been through. Another quarter, at 25.8% are wishing he could just die at this point, for better or worse.

"Enough already. Just sleep." - Reiner to Eren in 117

Can Reiner pick an opinion and stick with it for .2 seconds. he's like hardcore ready to kick ass and then immediately turns around and is ready to die again

Game over man

He's cute. End of the story.

I think it was bizarre that Gabi just let him fall asleep and left him in an enemy territory where he could be captured or eaten by a mindless titan

I understand him being tired an all, but sleeping in the middle of a warzone and at the start of the apocalypse???

Helos needs his rest and good dreams of Bert

I think it is set up for his future death : saving Falco by being eaten by Connie's mom (he was there with Connie in Ragako village)

Madlad goes to sleep instead of dying

Man literally too tired to die

There were certainly worse ways than "passed out from exhaustion" that he could've been written out of the chapter. At least we know his current status this way, unlike a certain duo...

He need some milk

Reiner votes for “Can’t he just die already?”

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE EREN PARALLEL IN GABI AT THE MIRROR? 1,869 Responses

Gabi’s design is based on Eren, and she’s had similarities and parallels to him in the past, what does the parallel in this chapter mean stacked on top of all of that? About 70% say it’s to further emphasize how similar she is to him at her core. 12.7% don’t think it was an intentional parallel to that Eren scene, 7.7% say she’s going to receive his titan, and a solid 1% wrote in the eloquent thesis of “Fuck Gabi.”

A bit too on the nose

Both have the common factor of determination and the desire to fight to save someone else. "Fight, fight" = "Like I'd give up" In Eren's case, his scene in the mirror is portrayed in a darker, more aggressive environment, he must fight to save his loved ones, but for this goal he must destroy everything. On the other hand, Gabi shows a more heroic/pure attitude, the light is predominant, and his words refer to the desire to fight to save Falco without taking this violence path unlike Ere

Eren cant copyright this hairstyle

How dare she stand where he stood.

I didn't like any parallels that include Gabi. Not this one, and most certainly not the one with Sasha.

It definitely foreshadows something, but I don't think it's that she'll inherit his titan. I think she's going to be the one to end this madness and break the cycle. Unlike Eren, who fights for freedom both for himself and his loved ones, Gabi will fight for peace and equality: a different kind of freedom.

It symbolizes Gabi's character arc starting to go in the opposite direction of Eren, rather than showing them being similar.

It symbolizes Gabi's change in motivation to do anything to save her friends. Just as Eren's motivation in the mirror scene really marked the moment he turned genocidal to protect his friends.

DO YOU AGREE WITH JEAN’S CONCLUSION THAT EREN IS DOING WHAT HE’S DOING TO PROTECT THOSE HE LOVES? 1,950 Responses

Jean believes he’s figured out why Eren’s doing what he’s doing, does the fandom agree? The large majority think that’s at least a part of it, as 40.8% think it’s solely that goal in mind, and another 53.5% believe it stemmed from that desire but has evolved and become more complex. 3.3% of fans don’t believe that’s where his motivation stems from at all.

But if that's his goal it still doesn't explain chapter 112

EREN is doing it to protect his friends. YMIR wants vengeance and bloodshed.

I agree, because I really don’t know what else could have been done. The Eldians were hated all over the world and Talk-No-Justu is a folly.

I don't know what to think. At first, Jean seems to be in denial (like most of the 104th), but perhaps it's his way of realizing things. No, Eren must love them a lot, there's absolutely no way that his genocide is unjustified. Right...? Wait…

I think he's being pragmatic and analytical. Like a real leader. Something I expected from Armin. However Armin has strokes of genius during critical times so I'm expecting something.

In a breaking bad way, yes

Yes, although I believe Eren's old and complex relationship with the idea of freedom also plays a big part in this situation.

No, because he isn't doing anything about the mindless titans and treated his friends like trash. I didn't see any kind of concern while they were in danger. I think he's more eager to set his ideals into action.

WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS THE CORRECT RESPONSE TO WHAT TO DO WITH FALCO? 1,958 Responses

Another serumbowl type discussion arises, yay!!...? The vast majority, at a combined 81.4% don’t want to feed Falco to anyone, and just want to wrap him up and not start any more conflict. 11.6% think he should be fed to a known titan such as Pixis, and only 4.3% side with Connie’s reaction of feeding him to his own Mama Springer.

Falco is too important. He and Connie will probably have an arc.

Feed him to Floch, jaw titan always dies stupidly and Floch never dies so it should cancel out

Feed him to Levi that way we get jaw Levi and his hand back.

Feed Zeke to Connie's mom instead and take Falco somewhere safe

I don’t have anything against Falco personally, but it makes since to feed him to someone else

I like Falco, but Connie has lost far more than anyone outside the Walls. If feeding Falco to Connie's mom gives Connie some semblance of peace, so be it

NILE !

In a perfect world Connie can have the satisfaction of feeding ZEKE to his mother. Kinda proud that I predicted the “Connie tried to revive his mom” plot point but I think the fact that it’s falco means that Connie fails

There's no right answer here, but I can't imagine any mother would be able to live with the fact that she ate someone else's child in order to live again, so that's probably the worst option.

Well, logically speaking, Falco should probably be fed to Pixis. But my heart calls out for me to wrap him in a blanket.

WHAT DID YOU THINK OF CONNIE SEEMINGLY SNAPPING ON THE OTHERS AND INSISTING FALCO BE FED TO HIS MOTHER? 1,947 Responses

Understanding prevaled with close to 80% of the fandom selecting “I don’t agree with his actions but I wholeheartedly sympathize with his reasoning”. Only 13% indicated that they were disappointed with him.

Falco's a kid, man! You don't cross that line!

Connie, if your mom needs a kidney transplant, you don't just shank another person to steal their kidneys. Just saying.

Connie has been pushed to his limit. He needs a nap and a minute to cry.

Although Connie is not thinking clearly, I'm glad they're not blindly hating on him like some have been doing for Eren.

Connie's break is truly amazing to me. The guy was always so good and chill and dedicated before these hard times. To see him at his breaking point, horrified by everything that is happening and overwhelmed by the situation, and thus reverting into single-minded dedication to one fundamental goal - saving his mother. It's tragic to see him like this and it's probably not the best "logical" action, but it makes complete sense that he'd do this. He's sick of this clusterfuck. He has a ticket to save his mom and he's gonna take it. Poor Falco though, of course.

I didn't see it coming, but it's not like it's unthinkable. When the world collapses we often want to run back to our mama.

I disagreed with him, but I thinks his feelings are understandable and, also, I liked a lot that he pointed out 104's hypocrisy. The serum drama is coming back to bite their asses.

I understand he wants to see his mom again but does he really want to give her the cruel fate of becoming a titan shifter?

I understand his reasoning, but this is literally the WORST possible time to cause an internal crisis

I'm sad for him & deeply uncomfortable by it.

I’m mad at Connie only because he straight up abandoned his duty to pacify the Titan situation. He left Jean, Mikasa, and Armin to take care of it without him. Lucky Shadis was there to help.

REGARDLESS OF YOUR VIEWS ON CONNIE’S ACTIONS, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT HIM FINALLY GETTING SOME TIME IN THE SPOTLIGHT? 1,946 Responses

More than half the fandom was happy to see him speak his mind and get some character development (53.3%). 16% were absolutely thrilled. Those who don’t care, and those whose disappointment over how he returned soured the moment came in at 10%... I’m willing to bet at least one of those votes is because he doesn’t have a new hair style.

Going to the dark side doesn't suit the former sunshine called Connie.

My man has been in the story since the beginning. He is well overdue for an arc.

A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one.

But why FALCO? He's the ONLY character outside the Walls I actually LIKE!

Finally we get to see him say something about his mother. Yeah, maybe he's not one of the most important charcters overall, but what he lived through when he saw his mom on that roof finally deserves some thoughts and emotions. Connie was on the margin of the story for way too long, and I'm happy we get to see him talk about how he feels.

Glad he’s doing stuff but he’s 100% going to die

I haven't really liked his development. He's, altho understandably, just an angry dude that can't help himself from getting overcome by his emotions. Not a good look.

I really liked his whole "Eren's crossed the line", now he's making the same mistake. A bitter irony, but does Isayama have time for that?

I'm really disappointed in Connie's "friends" for basically telling him to "chill out, you can't save your mother because we need to make our enemies happy". Hell no to that, I completely sympathize with Connie far more than his "friends" especially since Armin is being the world's biggest hypocrite

It's good because it now opens up the possibility of Connie finally getting his revenge on Zeke

My Boi Connie deserves his own plot-line, so I'm really excited

TITAN ACTION! BUT OF THE PURE AND AVERAGE VARIETY INSTEAD OF COLOSSALS, WHAT DID YOU THINK OF THAT AS THE FOCUS OF THE CHAPTER? 1,936 Responses

A chapter in the endgame that’s almost reminiscent of the defense of Trost with respect to mindless titan action and defending a base. Despite many other happenings such as the rumbling going on currently, 46% were totally fine with the focus on mindless titan action and thought it was written well, whereas 35.6% enjoyed it, but wished there was a bit more beyond checking that box. 10.8% wanted a larger focus on the titans in the rumbling, and 5.5% would have preferred a focus shift away from Shiganshina entirely.

I love the fact that shows how prepared and easy fighting mindless titans is for them now. When the titans attacked Trost they were hopeless and Jean was the one frozen in fear. Now we get to see him clear up the titans with ease.

I think showing smaller happenings before the big reveal of Eren's titan and the effects of the rumbling are important buildup.

I would have rather focused on what's happening to Pieck and the others near the wall.

I didn't feel that was the focus, but either way, I liked it.

I wish more would’ve happened outside of it BUT it’s important to show them being dealt with otherwise readers would be like “wait, what about all those people who turned into titans?” So not the best, but necessary.

I'm not crazy about fighting scenes, I prefer the ones where they discuss stuff, but these were really emotional with Shadis and Pixis and everything. Like, it wasn't even so much about fighting itself, for me at least, but about Shadis uniting people again and Armin setting Pixis free finally.

I wish the chapter had explored the idea of Titans appearing now that the Military has begun using weapons which are more effective against humans than Titans. I had thought that the reappearance of Titans would do much more damage since the Military is no longer equipped to handle such threats.

Reminds me of the Trost arc and I love it, but it will probably end up being the last time we see pure titans as this much of a threat.

I love the Season 1-esque fan service. How this series has evolved.

I just wished they didn't have to kill their comrades...C'mon this poll question is so heartless wth?

AFTER EREN GAINED THE FOUNDER, WHY WHERE THE MINDLESS TITANS STILL ATTACKING THE SOLDIERS? 1,944 Responses

Nearly half of the fandom are giving Eren the benefit of the doubt that he simply cannot control the titans, rather than not caring about them or using them. Although many believe that he’s too focused on other things to concern himself with them, and many others feel certain that mindless titans attacking the soldiers is part of his greater plan.

3 times it was mentioned that Eren/Zeke can't control the Titans, I think someone else is controlling them. Possibly Ymir, maybe we'll see Eren getting betrayed.

Eren can't control the mindless Titans because they're Zeke's Titans

It's highly likely the Founding Titan's power and control over Pure Titans has a collective effect of sorts. That is, it can turn Pure Titans back into humans, but if it did, it would happen to ALL Pure Titans, not just a specific group of them. It's possible that is how the Fritz royalty used the Pure Titans while maintaining the Eldian population during ancient times. Here, if Eren were to use that aspect of the Founding Titan's power, both the Military Branch Officer Titans AND the Wall Titans would be turned back into humans. Right now, Eren is bent on using the Wall Titans to flatten the World, so he most likely does not want to use the power of the Founding Titan to turn all the Pure Titans in Shingashina + Connie's mom into humans; otherwise, the Wall Titans would turn into humans again too, and that would ruin his rumbling plan.

Regarding Eren and the mindless titans, control issues aside, I just don't think he cares.

WHAT WAS THE MOST MEMORABLE TITAN KILL THIS CHAPTER? 1,968 Responses

In a chapter full of titan action, several titan kills stood out as both awesome and tear jerking. Just over half of respondents, at 51.6%, most remember Armin taking out Pixis after thanking him for his service to the cause. In a very narrow battle for second place, Keith Shadis sowing the recruits how it’s done won out over Gabi taking a cue from Sasha and saving Kaya.

All of them were pretty darn cool

Gabi's and Mikasa's tie for me

Hard to choose, they're all good

I didn't find any of them memorable if I May be honest

Can I choose all? Because I am.

It's a tie between Shadis arriving to save the recruits, Gabi saving Kayo from the Nile Titan, and Armin killing the Pixis Titan. If I was forced to pick, I'd say Armin's scene because of his sorrowful dialogue upon seeing Pixis as a Pure Titan and the flashback to one of Pixis's earliest highlights when he believed in Armin and Eren shortly after they first met.

Literally all of them what kind of sadistic question is this how could I possibly choose

Loved all the kills!!!

ALL OF THE ABOVE

THERE WAS A LOT OF DEBATE AS THIS CHAPTER WAS COMING OUT ABOUT GABI, AT THIS POINT DO YOU LIKE HER AS A CHARACTER IN THE STORY? 1,985 Responses

Nearly two-thirds of of the fandom currently enjoy Gabi’s overall character, despite what their first impressions may have been (65.1%) . Though there are still many who have yet to warm up to her, if they ever do (34.9%).

Gabi is beginning to grow on me enough I feel neutral about her.

Gabi is a LITTLE more favorable to me, but I still hate her and I wish she never existed. She can never earn forgiveness for Sasha.

gabi is good you guys are just mean

WHICH THOUGHT BEST MATCHED HOW YOU CURRENTLY FEEL ABOUT GABI? 1,977 Responses

One of the most controversial characters in the story is of course Gabi Braun, but what do fans truly think of her? Almost half, at 45.9% don’t profess love for her character from the mountains, but understand why she’s important to the story. In contrast, 19.6% firmly believe the story would be better off if she never existed, and 17.6% want to see even more of her in the upcoming chapters. 16.9% just think she’s been in the spotlight a little bit too much.

Fuck Gabi, Eren will always be better, not this carbon copy Mary Sue

gabi fucking GANG

Such a great chapter! I’m glad that the Gabi hate is stopping now.

Don't know why are people surprised about Gabi. Her closure with the Braus family is something I figured was gonna happen eventually. Guess Isayama wanted to get that out of the way early.

Of course my opinion of Gabi is unchanged. I still hate her no matter how much "development" she gets.

Gabi is a super uninteresting character to me

i really liked gabi’s character development in this chapter, especially since i was previously a gabi hater.

She is the new MC now. Upgrade.

I see why Gabi exists but she’s just such a forced character. The parallel between her and Sasha was so forced and just felt wrong. Don’t care about her killing Sasha her character is just a forced rehash of eren.

I'm disappointed in her as she is becoming more likeable

Gabi's character development finally completed in a brilliant way

Like Eren, she's fighting for people she cares about, even if she's wrong/vicious with her methods.

I’m tired of Gabi

Really wish we wouldn't have Gabi shoved down our throats, she's not a good character, let alone person

I'm really proud of Gabi and how far she's come from her original POV. I'm really hoping that this influences Eren and I really hope Falco and Gabi get to reunite.

yams wants us to like her more

She has the same motivations as Eren once had, to save the world, basically.

I will admit Gabi has gone through a lot of development. But that doesn't mean I have to like her. I still hate her, and I will NEVER EVER forgive her for what she did to Sasha.

Gabi's haters being mad is so funny. My girl truly shined this chapter, I love her even more.

Gabi.... I feel like I would absolutely hate being around her irl but I guess I do appreciate her as a character in the story.

Never wanted to kill a child so badly in my existence

Death to Gabi Braun!

I don't hate Gabi enough to want her dead, but "too much spotlight" is the understatement of the year, especially when there is still a lot that has yet to be resolved with the main characters

She just wants to protecc

I love Gabi but she gets too much screen time at this point in the story. I want to see Historia and hopefully Eren later.

I LOVE GABI SO MUCH SHE IS THE BEST GIRL

I like Gabster. Gabi Gang Gabi Gang

Me no likey bad bad

NOW THAT ALL OF THE ORIGINAL BRANCH HEADS ARE GONE, WHO SHOULD BE IN CHARGE OF THE PARADIS MILITARY? 1,955 Responses

The head of all of Paradisian government, Darius Zackly, went out with a bang, and now we’ve lost the interim head Pixis, as well as Nile Dok. Who’s going to pick up the torch? There’s a big three that seem to have emerged as popular choices, with Jean winning out, Hange coming in second, and Shadis taking up third.

A combination of several people noted above.

Hanji+SC Armin+Garrison Jean+MP

Anyone but Floch

Jean. He's the only one that can view the Rumbling objectively and not rule it out as bad because their enemies are destroyed

Armin for strategy, Jean for leadership, Hanji for progress

Daz

Shadis should take over, but only untill Jean can get a little more experience leading.

As long as they agree Marley needs to be wiped out for the sake of Paradis, I'm okay with any leader that accepts that responsibility

Definitely not Hange. She wanted to make peace with Marley. Not leadership worthy at all.

Rico ;-;

Hange may be commander, but they are unfit for taking on as the head of the military. Same goes for Keith, though in this chapter he shows courage by stepping up to push the trainees to fight, I doubt he is willing to go back into a similar position as he was before as the Survey Corp's commander. Among the candidates, Armin may seem like a promising candidate, but aside from his proven intellect, just like Hange both do not possess the level of prowess of leading all three branches (four if count the training squad)of the military. More I think about it the "best" candidate in this list may surprisingly be Jean, but so far he hasnt been giving me the impression as someone who can take on such a massive role.

Erwin

WHY DID FLOCH ARREST THE VOLUNTEERS? 1,903 Responses

The fandom is fairly divided on Floch’s motives, with a three-way split that comes close to being even. The highest amount of respondents feel he is arresting the Volunteers because he doesn’t trust them based on past actions. In the middle, people feel that he doesn’t want to be associated with any non-Eldian people. And in third place, people felt that he doesn’t trust Yelena specifically, and is taking her group down with her.

As far as I've seen, Floch is on Eren's side, not Zeke's. So that would make Yelena, who hasn't heard about her boss and the euthanasia plan, dangerous as fuck. Even with that, Floch's following his own principles. He has different reasons than Eren, but he just needs the "devil" figure to project his own will.

He always knew Yelena and Zeke's intentions because of Eren, and now he's arresting them to prevent more trouble caused by them. I think Eren "trusts" and is working with Flcoh more than the fandom expect.

Because they conspired to sterilize/euthanize the Paradisians.

He's a completely inconsistent character whose personality and character motivations change at the drop of a hat in order to create conflict in the story.

He thinks Yelena can take over his position of the best Yeager fanboy and he can't have that.

He was never really on their side at all! Just like how Eren saw them - they were a means to an end, a useful tool but a dangerous one that could never really be trusted. Now that Eren has made his intentions clear and the ideological split is visible, he's fully turning on them and suppressing them from potentially pursuing their own agendas further.

There’s not enough room on Paradis for both of those eccentric hair cuts

GABI AND ARMIN BOTH SEEM INTERESTED IN PUTTING ASIDE THEIR DIFFERENCES: WILL THE SURVEY CORPS AND WARRIORS TEAM UP? 1,928 Responses

After having been warring factions since the beginning, will the warriors and Survey Corps finally team up as one? 62.9% feel a team up will happen, but not everyone from both sides will want to be involved, and a solid 30% believe a full team up is in the cards. Only 5.8% don’t feel that it’s possible at this point.

Any cooperation will be a compromise, so maybe?

At this point I really don't know. Their passivity disappointed me fully this chapter. They need their TRUE leaders who are MIA at the moment.

I hope it happens but I think Armin is acting under Bert's influence

I hope not, it sounds lame.

i think maybe they will be forced to work together to stop the titans because they are attacking both sides.

It's the ideal scenario I suppose

Only until the Rumbling stops. After that, the SC needs to dispose of all the remaining Warriors to end the war for good.

PLEASE MAYBE REINER WILL GET SOME CLOSURE OUT OF IT

Probably but it’s waaay to cliché. Please don’t Isayama

They'll team up to stop Eren, if that works they'll be enemies once again

Yes and Yes! I've been saying this for months: warriors and SC are going to have to work together. Magath is going to play a role in this too.

ANNIE!! THOUGHTS: 1,948 Responses

91 chapters. 91 Months. 7 and a half years. Longer than we were with the characters pre-timeskip. Annie has been in a crystal, but now she's free! 33.4% think she came back at the perfect time and Isayama has nailed his writing once again. 18.4% are excited for her return, but don’t feel there’s much time left in the story for the wait to be worth it. 15.7% aren’t worshippers at her crystal, and so aren’t too hyped out of their minds. 29% however: A N N I E

akueeoekskfnfjyfjekqwiruuri MY GIRL IS BACK BITCHES, AND I NEED POST-AWAKENING MIKANNIE FANFICTION NOW

glad she's back but the plot has nothing for her to do anymore

How he brought her back makes perfect sense and I love it. If she chose to come out at this time rather than being forced, it would have been awkward and forced to be honest. But Eren taking away all hardening is the best way to bring her back AFTER SEVEN FUCKING YEARS.

glad to have her back but sceptical of her importance

go back into hibernation

Good in-story reason, great writing, but waited far too long. Not sure if she will even be relevent for the remainder of the story that already has a lot of loose ends.

Hentannie

I am not hyped because it took too long and the series has gone too far down a path I can no longer follow.

I DID MY WAITING! TWELVE YEARS OF IT! IN AZKABAN!

I don't know what Annie can do at this point of the story that will make her return worthwhile

I don’t think Isayama and his editors would allow her to be brought back for a poor plot point/reason, so I’m curious to see what role she’ll have.

I wasn't too concerned about Annie at this point in the story but I'm glad that her return makes sense with the events currently taking place and I'm interested to see what Isayama has planned for her.

I'm no fan of her so I'm not excited at all, but I assume she'll drive the plot somewhere soon.

She's got a lot of catching up to do. Concerned it won't be handled well.

The reasoning is sound, and I am glad that Isayama thought that part through, but we have a limited number of pages left, so I am worried about how this will play out.

Took too long so it ended up being very 'meh' for me, but congratulations Annie-stans, have a drink tonight

Should've been way sooner, her potential as a character feels wasted since we're almost done now. All she'll have time to do is get caught up on what happened and then have a couple reunions.

I honestly have no idea what Isayama plans to do with her but I’m just GLAD SHES FINALLY FUCKING BACK!!!! MY BABY GIRL IS BACK!!!!

ANY THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT ANNIE WILL DO NEXT? 675 Responses

Annie will have a run-in with Hitch, get things explained and head towards the main conflict.

Dare I say it, Assist With Armin’s Talk No Jutsu with Eren

"Run"

Definitely try to get to her dad.

Try to find her warrior friends

Determine her situation and act accordingly

She won't be too surprised at what Eren's become. She remarked how when the "good guys" take power, then it's all over to Marlowe in Season 1.

A girl can dream of her and Pieck being badasses.

All the titan shifters will come together (location-wise), it seem like a flag? Since all the shifter's powers is a part of Ymir herself, having them close might have significant meaning.

ANNIETHING

Be traumatized by manga spoilers? Wonder wtf happened?? Try to find Reiner??

Annie will join Eren.

Not give a shit about anything apart from Papa Leonhardt

Annie will play a huge role in stopping Eren, in some way.

be a badass like usual and FEMALE TITAN ACTION?????

Change her clothes because why is she wet

umm take a shower lol

Character development and teaming up against Ereh

I think Hitch will be the one to find her - she was in charge of guarding the crystal. I think she'll be too weak to fight right now though, so I'm worried that she's just going to be used as a Titan Shifter snack :(

Somehow affect Eren's mindset. Not sure exactly how.

Go kiss Armin pls

I'm hoping for Armin to transform into the Colossal Titan. Annie will see this thinking it's Bertoldt, and then have a good character moment upon finding out that Armin ate him.

Her endgame is to at least partially counteract the rumbling with her scream ability.

Confused --> Shocked --> Mad --> or all at the same time. Anyway, she will probably meet up with Armin and the gang and they will explain the shit situation to her and somehow they will come up with a plan or smth.

I think she’ll be forgotten about for a few chapters then show up in the battle. It’ll be interesting to see what side she takes at that point. I’m sure someone will conveniently fill her in on the last few years.

She's a wild card, but the last we saw her she wanted to get back home. I'm sure she will be invested in saving the world from annihilation.

She is FAR away right now. I think dealing with Annie is a good wind-down after all this World-ending stuff has been dealt with, like when they save the Shire after defeating Sauron

Crystallize

Yeet to Marley and die with her papa.

Annie's first move will be to find a toilet sure she must be dying for a pee like

HOW HAS YOUR OPINION ON THE FOLLOWING CHARACTERS CHANGED?

Shadis, Jean and Gabi are the big winners in the opinion poll this month with the majority selecting “More Favorable” reaction to them. Shadis had 1379 respondents selecting “more favorable”, Jean had 1076 and Gabi came in third with 980. Fighting titans so soon after surviving a bear attack is impressive, so I’m not surprised with these results. At the other end of the spectrum, Connie (542) and Floch (496) had the most number of “Less Favorable” selections. While the good outweighed the bad, Gabi again proved to be polarizing with 432 people choosing “Less Favorable” despite her positive development this month.

FAVORITE NEW TITAN DESIGN? 1,926 Responses

Isayama’s nods to his television viewing habits continue with the appearance of the “Better Call Saul” titan. Our appreciation of Isayama’s sense of humor continues with more than 50% of us selecting it as “Favorite New Titan Design” (51.5%). Pixis was a distance second with close to a quarter choosing his titan form (23.7%) as their favorite.

Still laughing over the Saul Titan. Good ol' slippin' Jimmy

the Better call Saul titan looks more like Bolsonaro (Brazil's president)

one last hurrah to the Pure Titan mayhem the series was originally known for, and witnessing the tragic end to Nile and Pixis

WHAT ARE YOU HOPING TO SEE NEXT CHAPTER? 1,926 Responses

The three elements of the story which have been absent for months, or even years, take the top overall votes for what the fandom would like to see next. 33.6% are dying to see present-day Levi and Hange again. 24.1% are still eager to get Historia’s perspective. 23.6% are still hoping to one day see Eren’s inner thoughts.

All I want for Christmas....Is Historias POV

I'm missing Connies adventure on the 'What are you hoping to see next chapter?' question.

Bitch give me Levi. It’s been more than half a year.

I literally only care about the 104th characters so the more of them we can see next chapter the better

Give me more Eren action pleaseee

So why is Annie pov not an option for next chapter?

I have waited for 7 years, finally, Annie is back. I wanna see more of her story and character development. I cant wait to see her conversation with Hitch and Armin!

Please Isayama give me more good Shadis content

I really want to see Eren's full complete titan. Issayama, stop blueballing us please!

I would actually like to know more about that spine creature that is evidently the source of Titans.

Is there a Kiyomi option?

WHERE DO YOU PRIMARILY DISCUSS THE SERIES? 1,843 Responses

With close to 200,000 members it’s no surprise that Reddit continues to dominate the discussion field (47.7%), followed distantly by Tumblr (15.5%), Real Life (9.8%) and Discord (6.7%). Amazingly, 9% don’t discuss it at all. This month, FIVE of you said Snapchat, up from four last month, so while there’s still technically a possibility that you guys are actually forming some weird snapchat cult and this isn’t an elaborate psyop, I’m still not convinced. But regardless of where you discuss the series, or if you even do, we truly appreciate your participation in the chapter poll!

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS? 416 Responses

OMG! Okay, it's happening! Everybody stay calm! Annie! Annie! Annie!

Annie got crystalized in chapter 33, and now she's out, 91 chapters later. Since 12 chapters are published in a year, we have been waiting for her (not including flasbacks and her just chilling in the crystal) 7 years and 7 months. I salute all the diehard Annie fans, you had a long wait.

Once again I have marked my calendar. May 9, 2012 - December 5, 2019. After 7 excruciating years our queen is FINALLY awake. This deserves a new record for longest amount of time a character has been comatose in real life. Thank GOD it's finally over I still can't believe it.

I'm a big fan of all of the smaller storylines coming together, hoping for everything to be wrapped up nicely and characters from different factions (i.e Hange, Annie, Historia) all coming together to address the rumbling.

It felt a little like a breather chapter, despite all the action. It was nice to slow down and get some character development for everyone.

“Everyone has a devil in them” is a great message. Hope they all team up and stop Eren. Very curious about what Annie will do!

The parallels to Trost arc were nice, but I felt like the endgame was finally amping up only to be put on hold.

Great chapter! I like Pathland, and the flashback with Levi and Hanji was great, but it was a relief to get some current time action. Gabi is best girl, Armin just went up by leaps and bounds in my book, and Annie is back!! So excited for the next chapter…

Great one ! The fear from the mindless titans in back, like in Trost. Many side characters development/deaths (Nile, Pixis, Shadis, Kaya, Nicolo, Gabi, Annie, Connie, Jean...). So much good stuff, I almost forgot about the rumbling going on !!

Amazing. If Isayama maintains this quality til the end, then this will be one of my favorite series, of any media, ever.

I'm wondering what Annie can realistically do at this point. Sure she beat Eren before but now he's in another level.

Guess we don't have to deal with the genocidal jock for a while

REINER HELOS BRAUN WILL SAVE THE WORLD (after his power nap)

ANNNIIEEEEE; Shadis' comeback was wonderful. I hope he can make up for the loss of Pixis and Erwin and such. He has great potential and he's a well developed character. Jean is asking the real questions, but the showdown between him and Floch is about to go down.

I said previously that if Floch survives I wanted my money back. But you know what? I'll take my refund in Annie store credit. Thanks for that bright spot, Isayama! Also: this chapter pointed out how many good people in the world will suffer if Eren succeeds. And I felt as frustrated with the remnants of the 104th as Gabi. Nicolo and Shadis became my unexpected heroes this chapter.

Is Zeke still alive? Is he still controlling the mindless titans?

Floch didn’t do anything particularly bad this chapter but every time I have to see his face my opinion of him becomes less favorable. When Jean said “so you lived...” I FELT that disappointment lol.

I love the Braun siblings interaction in this chap. And Nicole's "we'll try to get out of the forest" sends chills. I think that's one of the point ISTM is trying to get across.

Does Connie realise that if his mother was given one of the nine titan powers she would be made to fight? Getting one of the titan powers is very much a curse not a blessing (especially with the Jaw titan)

At this point the Eren/Gabi parallels are feeling a little overdone and forced.

If Gabi receives Eren’s Titan it will be the stupidest most disappointing thing to happen in this- no all of manga! Besides, what is the damn point of her “paralleling” Eren anyways? But the Sasha paralleling was even more gnarly YUCK!

It's true that the people of Paradis will benefit from this shit, but I highly disagree with any justification when it comes to Eren's horrible actions. GENOCIDE IS NEVER THE OPTION. I think Jean is disappointed too but he's trying his best to rationalize the crap Eren's carrying out for he still doesn't want to believe his friend is committing genocide. I expect he comes back to his senses soon otherwise I no longer will appreciate him as a character.

That "who are you most disappointed" will sadly be filled with Armin hate tbh. And in the end he was just wanting to avoid unnecessary conflict... tbh Anyone hating on Connie, Gabi and Armin doesn't seems to know how humans emotion work in helpless situations...

What Yams is doing to Connie is further proof he is ruining his main characters (the good ones) to make room for his precious Marley characters (the crappy ones)

Connie's regression and frustration was more and more visible since Sasha died. He's lost everyone close to him. I am happy to see him finally snap at Armin and go his own way. This was foreshadowed for a while now.

I hope Isayama sensei doesn't forget to include World Millitary's raid in the action. They already mention in some previous chapter by Zeke.

Quantity-wise, the chapter wasn't centered around Gabi, okay. But. BUT. Gabi got quite a few powerful scenes, very Gabi-centric scenes, and I'm not happy about that. I don't see how and why the fandom so easily forgave her for what she's done. Isayama drawing parallels between Gabi and Sasha was insulting and distasteful.

It is highly likely that this is the last time we are going to see Pure Titan mayhem in the series now that the Rumbling is taking place, so I think it was great to that focus in this chapter. I thought it was handled well, especially with Shadis's scenes, the parallel of the new recruits seeing the Pure Titans peaking through the hole of the fortress tower much like a similar scene in the Trost arc, the tragedy of seeing Pixis and Nile (two of the last remaining head honchos of the military not counting Hange and Shadis) as Pure Titans and getting killed off for good, and how characters like Armin and Jean fought those Pure Titans.

WARMASTER FLOCKE, TO LEAD THE ARMIES OF ELDIA TO VICTORY! Haha no I guess not. I'm torn between Flocke, Jean, Eren, and Shadis. All could be good picks but all outcomes would have different implications on the story and what it means. I guess if I had to pick, it'll be Shadis or Eren for now and then perhaps Jean later when things have settled and they've grown up more.

I honestly can't keep up with how many faces Floch has.

With how the pacing is handled there's no way this is ending in 6 chapters. The real climax is Eren having to go against his friends because there's no way in hell Mikasa is allowing him to genocide kids

As heartbreaking as this chapter has been, I already had my hopes destroyed when 119 was released. Today has been the confirmation for two awesome characters, who fell because of the non-veteran rule. I don't know why I still hope to see Keith staying alive, but at least we got an awesome moment of his.

Characters are being balanced relatively well. Isayama's got a lot of characters and plot threads to deal with, and while Levi, Hange and Historia are getting less focus than I would like, I think he's doing a pretty good job of keeping each character relevant and giving them all some good arcs/ moments

Everything (except for Gabi scenes) was perfect for me!

Eww Gabi-focused chapter…

I simply hate how cowardy the 104th is acting. It's clear they're only fighting in their own interest and are just pulling excuses after excuses for supporting Eren. At least Floch is honest about it.

Man, the 104th always been the group I care the less in the story, but this chapter they're being so annoying (apart from Mikasa). Well, I can forgive Connie because of everything he went through, but Jean... why are you saying this ""there was no other choice, eren is protecting us"" bs ? Nice of you to be complicit of mass genocide. (Yes, I know his face shows he's conflicted, but he still sides with eren) Also Armin... at least he's horrified at what's Eren's doing but when he said that if they don't kill Falco there would be no conflict with the warriors since Marley will be gone....that's just dumb. Their home and families are going to be destroyed, but ok Armin, go off. And getting into another serumbowl situation, with one of my fave uncounscious while the SC decides who will eat him... I don't like it. (I don't think Falco will be eaten tho, the whole thing raised many death flags on Connie)

Great chap, Isayama seems to finally give closure to certain plot parts. End is near.

Here's a crazy idea: feed GABI to Connie's mom instead of Falco, there would be nowhere near as much arguing with that

Highlights that people can rise above their conditions to become better people, offering a counterargument that humanity should be wiped out.

I don't get why the story pacing was disrupted so much. Why build up to a climatic cliffhanger with the rumbling, only to basically ignore it for the entire following chapter?

I honestly wonder if titan shifting still works as it used to. I'm afraid of seeing Falco get eaten for nothing. Honestly I'm worried about Falco dying for nothing while people right over him as a pawn in general.

Quite interesting chapter. Had fun with it. Much, much slower paced than expected almost. But then again we need time to cover all this stuff. And I'm happy it all took place in the current rather than another flashback. Not really a fan of the Gabi stuff but it is what it is. The other character developments were quite nice. Reiner literally just falling asleep tho lol. Overall I guess I wouldn't say it's a "big" chapter but it is necessary to bridge what came before with whatever comes next. And at long last Annie is back, so that's GLORIOUS.

I hope Annie will have such a big role she gets repaid for the all years she's been gone😞

I hope Isayama uses the slowdown in the pace to better sell the scale of the rumbling, we already see part of that by hoe Eren's dino titan still isnt complete, even after all this time

I love how the story is progressing.The next chapter is always something I personally don't expect and it's always exciting. The hype at the beginning/end of the month is unreal. As for the chapter itself, it's always refreshing to see Jean's perspective on Eren's plans because I love his interpretations on him. #TEAMJAEGER

i love my waifu annie i missed her so much

I love you Connie and I'm sure your mom is nice and all but Falco is a precious bean who needs to be protected.

I really hated the Gabi-Sasha and Gabi-Eren parallels. I also still think Gabi was never needed in this story, in fact I don’t know how I’ll be able to stomach season 4. Ugh, the first half will be completely and utterly Gabified. Gabi in color and motion plus speaking, YUCK! Anyways I hope that the next chapter will have an update on Hange, Levi, and Historia. And maybe Floch getting punched by Shadis that would be the Cherry on top.

It was an average chapter, not bad but nowhere near as good as the previous ones. Plus I'd appreciate if other characters, outside of Gabi, had more spotlight. Her arc and development is done, give more development and screentime to other characters such as Mikasa please.

Just being disappointed. The pacing is very slow. Also the main cast's reactions were too passive. I hated it.

Just great. Just great. The drawings were incredible and the plot just keeps getting better.

Less Gabi, more Historia!

Levi and Hange better return in some way, shape, or form, or Yam's is in for it.

Levi is the new Annie

Love getting to see thoughts from many different characters and where they stand. A lot of them are still left behind trying to rationalise things to make it emotionally palatable, or simply stuck not being able to accept the reality, whereas Gabi has kind of gone ahead and realised there's evil on both sides, and she's willing to kill Eren or work with him if she can best protect the people she cares about (eventually probably not just her friends and family either, but the outside Eldians as a whole).

My baby is back!!!!!!!! I wanna see more of ANNIE!!!!!!

Nicolo talking to Kaya and Gabi was cringey af. Did they really do back to that derpy forest analogy? If this series ends with them holding hands and singing around a campfire imma legit be so disappointed. I need me my Rumbling!

This chapter felt like a nostalgia trip, but I wasn't in for the ride. It was a mess of short catching-up moments when I just want to pick Eren's brain. I want to see Levi and Hange alive or hear what Annie and Historia think about the events, but at the moment I don't care about even those storylines. I just want to know what the relationship between Ymir and Eren is now that the walls came down.

The first panel being Mr. Leonhart was a pretty strong indicator to me that Annie would be released in the last panel, and it was. I felt that to be extremly poetic, and the timing is good too. Another wildcard in the plot. Excellent.

Compared to the previous chapter, this one turned out to be very disappointing. I was excited to see the rumbling and getting a glimpse of Eren’s thoughts and feelings. But instead I got Reiner going to sleep, Gabi being paralleled to Eren (again) and Sasha, the 104th busy arguing over what to do with Falco instead of, you know, focusing on THE RUMBLING

Good chapter, but if S4 is the final season and airs Autumn 2020, and with a monthly release, curious as to how isayama might tie up these "last minute" plot threads such as the new developments with Connie and Falco.

What else can I say except it's amazing and it was worth the wait

Where is Levi damnit

#snk poll #snk poll results #snk chapter poll #snk 124 #snk chapter 124

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mtjester · 5 years

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I have finally finished both the meat and candy routes of the epilogue. Full(-ish) thoughts are under the cut, but for the tl;dr crowd: I honestly enjoyed myself, and I’m excited to read more.

First off, and to be totally clear, I am not trying to dismiss anyone’s particular emotional response to the epilogue. I am not here to say, “No, your emotions are not valid.” I’m making my observations just as subjectively as anyone else. So, thoughts:

I believe the epilogue’s main folly, perhaps the main reason it’s not going over well, is that it by nature may only appeal to a fraction of the original audience of Homestuck.

Homestuck’s original audience was vast, and the interests of the people who read Homestuck are varied. It’s hard to prove whether this is true or not, but it seems that a large, perhaps the largest, chunk of the original Homestuck fandom was interested in character. This epilogue, for that group, is not likely going to be satisfying. The epilogue seems to appeal much more strongly to the section of the fandom interested not only in character but in the overarching themes/conflicts/medium/metafiction of the story.

The other issue is the density of the epilogue’s existential and metafiction discussions. The level of reading comprehension necessary to not only wade through but also appreciate some of these details is somewhat ridiculous. That’s not out of line with Homestuck, which also has some fairly sophisticated commentary on the nature of self, identity, reality, etc., but it makes the more enjoyable parts of the epilogue somewhat inaccessible. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to discuss these topics in such depth and through such a story without getting a little over the top.

That said, I do think a large portion of the Homestuck fandom, particularly those most concerned with character, forget that Homestuck is at its core an absurd black comedy and occasional satire.

Remembering the villains in Homestuck helps to reframe the story: we have an underling turned god-dog who snaps because of a workplace dress code dispute; we have doll capable of possessing people; we have LITERALLY BETTY CROCKER; and we have a petulant boychild asshole turned muscle skull monster. Are we really going to get mad that Dave Strider’s big turn happens during a conversation with Barack Obama’s projected brain hologram? The precedence for absurdity was set long ago for this sort of thing.

Homestuck does take large breaks from its particular brand of comedy to deal with issues seriously and sincerely, but these instances do not change its nature. While the epilogue wasn’t uproariously funny by any stretch of the imagination, the kernel of absurdity rules it. Why else would Jake English’s ASS be such a big deal on Earth C, like as a plot point and major element of the conflict? The same can be said about the black comedy and satirical elements, which can and do affect characters and plot.

Even at its start, Homestuck was rather adversarial towards the audience, who literally sent suggestions to Hussie which he often fucked with as an element of his comedy. Based on what Homestuck is and has always been, it’s doubtful we would get an epilogue that was simple, clean, and palatable, especially towards characters.

About the writing: I have seen it said that the epilogue is an example of bad writing. I’m going to separate the craft of writing and characterization specifically, which I’ll discuss below. As for the epilogue as a piece of prose, I believe it is far from “bad.”

Writing two separate but intimately intertwined stories in itself is not an easy task. It requires careful planning before the figurative pen ever touches paper, and then the effect has be thoughtfully cultivated. The stories themselves are stable, decently well-paced, and sometimes astonishingly poetic.

The way the writers dealt with the overarching metafictional elements is actually brilliant, especially in the meat track. Like, they used a switch from third person perspective to second person as a form of foreshadowing. That’s bananas. I was impressed. Not to mention how Alt Calliope sheds light on it in the candy track, which either foreshadows the shift in control of the narrative if you’ve read it first or else explains its significance if you read it second. Like, shit!

About the mischaracterization, though.Yes, this is an element of writing, but it is also essentially an act of interpretation for any writer, including Hussie himself.

I will use Jade as an example. Did I like her characterization in these epilogues? Largely, no, I did not. I found it uncomfortable. But was it incorrect? That’s the harder question. When Homestuck finished, she was 16, and she had spent the majority of her life alone, often in a state of extreme unhappiness about it. Could she become a 23 year old adult who is the way she is? Well, yeah. Any character could grow up to be sexually liberated, if we’re being real, and she is part dog, which could be construed to affect her libido. She very well could have abandonment issues that could take the form of multiple sexual partners. Her characterization in the epilogues isn’t wrong; it’s just far from satisfying.

Same with Jane. The narrative explains away her behavior as being a subtle result of the Condesce. John even mentioned a thought I had myself: his nanna was Jane, and she just wanted to throw pies and have a good “hoo hoo!” The narrative gives us enough to make her what she is, but it’s not satisfying. Ultimately, the narrative needed a villain to push the conflict, and in a “utopia,” the only recourse is to exploit the dysfunctionalities in the existing powerful characters. In this case, the character needed to support the plot, rather than the other way around. That is, unfortunately, the breaks in this sort of situation.

The one character I was excited about was actually Dirk. I believe that his character was believable, as much as anyone might dislike me for it. Dirk realized that he had the ability, as part of his ultimate godtier self, to destroy the lines between himself and others, to destroy individuality, to essentially take control of everyone’s identities. Given that power, would there be any doubt he would use it to do his “machine and puppets” megalomania bullshit? The narrative makes it clear that he believes he’s doing what’s best for everyone, even if they think he’s a villain for it; to me, that sounds like exactly the sort of think he would do, faced with this situation.

Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t ANY straight up bad characterization. Eridan spoke like five lines and still managed to make me cringe.

The last thing I want to talk about is the sentiment that Hussie has given up, that he doesn’t care, or that he’s actively trying to alienate the fanbase.

I do not believe this to be the case. In fact, I would argue that the epilogue was rather lovingly constructed; as a creative writer, I can see that this text was not a slipshod job.

I believe the problem here is not a disconnect between Hussie and his text; rather, it is between Hussie and his audience, as I mentioned above.

Hussie is a person who writes the brand of comedy I discussed above. While he has grown tremendously since the first days of Homestuck, it seems sometimes that he’s being pigeonholed into a genre of writing that isn’t so much his wheelhouse. The fandom wants him to write a satisfying epilogue that somehow closes Homestuck and ALSO does justice to all of the characters; yet, Hussie’s writing in the past does not seem to lend itself well to this particular kind of conclusion, and neither does the story of Homestuck itself.

I rather believe that Hussie cares a lot but is split between his impulses as a writer, his artistic vision if you will, and the desires of the fandom. I’m not convinced that what we want is also what he wants. I’m also not convinced that what we want is more important than what he wants. After all, what did we pay to read the epilogue? I paid a whole fat boatload of NOTHING. I mean, I donated to the kickstarter, so I would like to see some satisfying reward there. And what has Hiveswap been so far? Characters! Lots of characters. Just what the fandom seems to like the most. But Homestuck? Was it ever meant to get this big, to put him on a pedestal to be boo’d or loved depending entirely on the fandom’s reception of his work, which was perhaps undertaken for his own pleasure as much as anyone else’s?

To conclude, a reader disliking the choices made for the epilogue is not the same as Hussie not caring. Perhaps the thing that Hussie cares less about is sacrificing his own artistic vision for the whims of his readership. The epilogue really is doing interesting things about exploring identity and narrative and the like. Perhaps that’s what he cares about.

Not that anyone has to like him, of course.

I think that’s all for now. I mean, I could have more to say, but I got my words off my chest about it.

#homestuck #epilogue #meta #spoilers #i didn't proofread this and i'm not going to

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thegeneralsnotebook · 4 years

Text

Adventures in Deckbuilding #186: Rainbow Dash, Flight Instructor (Blue/White Aggro) [Core]

Rainbow Dash, Flight Instructor

Nimble On Her Wings

Sideboard Convention: In general, the 2-ofs

I will freely admit that it wasn’t only a lack of time that was holding me back from building a deck for Rainbow Dash this week, though it was certainly the main reason. I also had quite a bit of a creative block with regard to this Mane as well. On the one hand, I had done Blue/Purple with this Mane first, I just did Blue/Yellow two weeks ago, and I wasn’t particularly feeling a connection with any of the other colours. On a whim I decided to try out Blue/White as I hadn’t used the colour combination in a long time, and I remembered that it had a couple of interesting multicoloured cards in LL that I hadn’t tried using yet. Rainbow Dash, Fashion Distraction that appeared like it could be going places when it was first spoiled, but clearly went just about nowhere in actual practice. And one of the clear reasons, I think, is simply that Core is really, really short on Accessories right now.

In total, across all of the colours, there are only six Accessories in all of Core, and thankfully for these two colours they have five of them. While the interaction with Gala Gown is pretty good, Gown on its own is only a middlingly good card and there isn’t much to specifically recommend about any of the other Accessories. Plus, the idea of running some sort of slower Control deck that repeatedly makes use of Dash’s ability is pretty antithetical to this colour combination. Among other reasons, I think these are the big ones why that bare idea never quite took off.

Now, the first time that I built Rainbow Dash, I focused on single faceoffs, and that deck did so with a lot of Purple movement abilities that could put opposing Friends at a Problem so that we could force a faceoff at it. While that particular build wasn’t super successful, I still think that the theory behind it was pretty good, and so with these colours I decided to take a slightly different try at it. These colours have excellent faceoff-oriented Problems, and allow us to combine Scootaloo, Most Creative with Daybreaker for even more faceoff payoff. And the other Blue/White LL card, Bulk Biceps, also incentivizes us to get into faceoffs. This Rainbow Dash is best when loading up a single Problem, since her extra movement has to take the second character to the same place that the first one went. So again, it’s best if we can focus on single faceoffs rather than doubles. But without being able to move our opponent’s stuff for them, how can we reliably start singles?

In these colours there is a way, and funnily enough Fashion Distraction actually helped out quite a bit with it. It turns out that without movement shenanigans, the easiest way to secure a single faceoff is to disrupt an opponent as they attempt a double faceoff. So long as we ensure that they only successfully confront one Problem, we need only worry about confronting that Problem and then taking our single faceoff. So the answer was to load up this deck with as much Immediate-speed disruption as I could find, which admittedly in these colours isn’t a whole lot but there is at least some. Our playstyle will be to wait, either taking a reliable double when we can get one, or else pouncing on any single that the opponent gives us a look at. And yes, some amount of tactical flexibility needs to go into that, but in broad strokes this is what we’ll be trying to do.

As always with Rainbow Dash, a key consideration is the pathway to flipping her. I discovered last time the folly in trying to use Buckball Strategy for this, at least in a deck without a lot of 1-Power Friends, and a deck that wants to win faceoffs probably shouldn’t be including too many of those anyway. That means that this Mane places a premium on easily played 3-Power Friends, and as well on anything that can come out above that like Caramel Apple. A second note to be made is that White as a secondary colour encourages the use of Motivational Speech over other forms of entry as giving your Mane will allow Generous Pony to activate. Finally, yes, the deck has no Resource removal. These two colours are traditionally awful at it, and I’m willing at least for the moment to entertain the possibility of going without, at least until I lose horribly to a Spooky Ruins or something and am convinced once again of the need to put a Spearhead in here to at least have something.

Lo, and behold! We will have at least one of every Mane done here before New Dawn, because the number of Princess Twilight Sparkle, There’s A Spell For That! has finally been drawn.

#mlpccg #deckbuilding #adventure

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dishonoredrpg · 4 years

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Congratulations, ROSEY! You’ve been accepted for the role of THE HIGH PRIESTESS with the faceclaim of SOO JOO PARK. The High Priestess fits you like a well-tailored glove, ma’am, I must say that. Levana is a fascinating study in what occurs when you let Necromancy take root without letting it fully control you. This application very much made me feel like a student of Levana’s, someone who could look up to and admire her while also trembling at the power she dragged along behind her. The human elements were there, yes, but it became clear by the end of the application just who Levana was: a frame, a shell, a portrait of a woman in the middle of decay. She’s cold and merciless and starving, and I can’t wait for her to meet the dashboard.

Please review the CHECKLIST and send your blog in within 24 hours.

THE HIGH PRIESTESS APPLICATION

- OOC -

NAME: rosey

PRONOUNS: she/her

AGE: 23? i think?

TIMEZONE, ACTIVITY LEVEL: PST area and i don’t even know...i think i can put out 3-4 replies a week, although i do take breaks sometimes just to keep myself refreshed and going! so i think my activity could be a 7/10

ANYTHING ELSE?: ty for taking the time to read the app !! uwu please feel free to throw it in the garbage disposal BECAUSE IT’S TRASH

- IN CHARACTER-

TW: Death, child death, dark themes, and abuse throughout the application

SKELETON: The High Priestess

UPRIGHT

Intuition -- She has always had a remarkable intuition, knowing exactly how to pull and tug at minds and heartstrings. And so too has she always trusted in the way that she works her magic, in the way that she pulls and weaves the energies of the world to give life to once-beating hearts. Her intuition has always been her greatest asset, as though the Undying God herself has granted it to her and made it a blessing greater than her powers.

Sacred knowledge -- From a young age she understood her place in the world and why the Undying God had placed her upon it. There was a certain surety that came from understanding the Beginning and the ever-looming End, the tale of the wolf, the serpent, and the folly of man. How the birth of the Undying God came to be. Her parents looked at her and were jealous of the daughter that they had, of the age-old look in her eyes and how ignorant she made them feel.

Divine Feminine -- A divine woman is one who is circumspect in all things, tying together intuition, compassion, empathy, and inner wisdom. And at one time, she did have empathy for her fellow man -- for each person who sweated, bled, and ached as she did. But the ability to commiserate is no longer an option to her, but that does not taint her very intimate understanding of the plights of others because, at one point or another, it is likely she has felt such things herself. Having lived the life of man three times over, how could she not?

Subconscious Mind -- It’s in her dreams that she feels closest to them, the Undying God. There have been times where she swears she can hear their voice, and feel her touch. But then she wakes and the voices fade to whispers, which fade to breezes, which fade to nothing more than a melancholy silence. Every time she wakes and finds herself conscious, she wishes to hold a wake and mourn the loss of being so close to something so divine. But, as she wakes, that hunger comes for her again, and her subconscious mind is eclipsed by that yawning hunger for power once more.

REVERSED Secrets -- She keeps too many of them. Hoards them hungrily, like a bear dragging one poor doe after the other into its den to gorge on before the long winter comes. She keeps them even when she knows that they are of no use, even when she knows that they’ll die with her and none shall ever be able to taste the potency of their sweetness on their lips. Maybe it’s because she thinks she’s given too much to the world at this point in her life -- and these are the only things she can think of to call hers and hers alone.

Disconnected from Intuition -- It happens when she begins to perform resurrections that drain more from her and those around her. The weeks that follow leave her disconnected from herself, leave her tormented by her own silence. Her eyes shift around the room, trying to linger on a face that would give her that familiar pull in her gut, that certainty in her soul. But she’s left adrift in an ocean of quiet, and she has no choice but to lean on her logic and reasoning, to deduce until she can be as certain as she can be. All she has is her intuition and that, too, is slowly dying.

Withdrawal & Silence -- At a young age she became very adept at withdrawing into herself, at slipping into shadows. She realized that biting at the hands that sought to strike her only ended up in her getting hit harder. That raising her voice only ended up leaving her hoarse from her sobbing and tears. As all things in life, this means of survival was learned and it was a more difficult lesson to swallow. But after living two lifetimes, she realized that it was difficult to feel pain when you’re made of nothing but hard, unmoving stone.

NAME: Levana Morrigan Morrell

LEVANA Being given the name of a dead thing was perhaps the most ironic prelude to her story. Being forced to act as they would have expected her sister to, the most cruel. Her mother never missed the chance to tell her how beautiful her older sister would have been, with her wide, dark eyes and sweet disposition. Even though her sister never lived past the second summer of her life, she was the one that was meant to bring them out of their destitute life. What a disappointment then that the namesake had to be given to a child that was far less capable-- according to her mother -- of gaining such a future. To which her father would sagely nod his head, watery, large eyes blinking at her sorrowfully as she sat at the rotting table, cheeks burning as she pushed her food around. She forgave them for it, though. After all, Death could rob people of their ability to love.

MORRIGAN It’s the name of her rebirth. It’s the name that she gave at the Temple, the name that she would give at courts when bestowing them with the great gift of her presence and knowledge. Sometimes used in place of Levana, other times attached to it. Nevertheless it was a name that would forever remind those who had bore witness to her power the Undying God had blessed her with. It was the name that was tied to the image of a woman bent low over the corpse of a wolfhound, teeth bared, eyes as dark as the coal that she smothered around her brow. Then the wolfhound’s teeth bared, like hers. It’s eyes opened, like hers. And soon Death gave way to Life, just as Levana gave way to Morrigan.

MORRELL -- NO LONGER USED/RECOGNIZED A name that was never meant to make something of itself, and a name that never would. Her father, whenever he was in his drunken stupors, would always remind her that the Morrell name was cursed and that she was the culmination of its disappointments. The words would slide off of his lips, the slurs a true litany illustrating her uselessness and shame. There was no use in taking the bottle away, though, not until it slipped out of his grasp and rolled onto the floor. Now, though, she never bothers to acknowledge her surname. Why should she, when they know her as Levana the Necromancer? She had promised to let the Morrell name die with her, and it did. It died with her the moment she put breath into the life of the first corpse that was laid at her feet.

FACECLAIM: Soo Joo Park Marquita Pring Golshifteh Farahini Freida Pinto Inbar Lavi

AGE: 220 years old

DETAILS: You have not always been power-hungry. It was from the very first line that I think I fell head-over-heels in love with her. She has so much power held within the palm of her hand but the cost has been so very, very great. When you read about the necromancers all you can really see is their power and glory of the title, the High Priestess being a force within herself, gaining the ear of a king, the power of a God, the reverence and awe of so many more. But there is such great weakness and pain that comes from holding power -- and it’s reverberated within every single aspect of the High Priestess. She’s suffered such great loss and the most tragic part is that she can’t even grieve it because that ability, too, has been stolen away from her.

I feel like...in general, people might think of a character like her -- old, withering, so close to death as someone boring. What is there to do with a character like her? What does she have to live her? But that’s what I love so much about her. She’s seen so much, has been through so much and she’s jaded by every single thing in the world. She’s lived for so long, what’s to keep her from doing what she wants and saying fuck all to everyone and everything? There’s a motivation that’s keeping her from completely letting loose on them all. Perhaps it’s the mere love of the long game but I think it’s because, at her core, she’s a giver and she wants to leave some semblance of good -- what she defines as good -- in this world.

BACKGROUND:

It’s an unfortunate thing, to carry the legacy of a ghost before you’ve even taken your first breath. Her parents were never able to really let go of dead things, though. Their marriage was long dead before they even tried for their first child, the love that they had once had for one another before even that. They held onto their dead ideas and dreams just as they had held onto the memory of their first daughter years after she was buried six feet beneath the dry soil of the summer ground. A famine had swept through their country and Levana’s poor sister had never stood a chance, despite the prayers that had been offered up by the Morrells time and time again. The last vestiges of their hope for something living had been placed on Levana and even when she had been placed into her mother’s arms, howling and red-faced, it hadn’t been enough. Where her sister had been a thing of beauty, she was a shock of white hair and sharp edges -- looking like the corpse that her sister very much had been.

The irony of it all was not lost on her. It was perhaps why she had such a wry, dry sense of humor despite how tragic it actually was. In the face of fate’s cruel humor, she couldn’t help but laugh along with it. She still had air in her lungs, a brightness in her eyes and a smile so bright that the moon had no choice but to look on in envy. When her mother would bite and spit at her, she would simply turn her gaze the other way and go out to the fields once more - either to lay in the wheat or lounge upon the back of their old, weary work-horse. As the sun would shine upon her pale, ivory skin she was more than content to let it eat away at her, all too happy to live a life of ease, if it only meant that she not bother the world with her existence and it not bother her with its woes and tragedy. Levana had disappointed her parents enough, there was no need to disappoint the rest of Tyrolhm by imposing her useless heap of skin and bones, her cutting mouth and staunch moralities.

When she wasn’t blissfully sketching away with a bit of charcoal stolen from the hearth or wrestling another bottle out of her father’s hand, she always managed to corral the kids of the neighboring farms into grand, elaborate games. She was always the leader, the one who set the rules, who dictated what was fair and what wasn’t -- just as she was always the one to clean up the scrapes and bruises of her comrades, whether they “fight for the king” or not. Even when she ruled with an iron-fist it was clear that she was soft around the edges, forever armed with a warm smile and a bawdy joke that would have made her mother balk and her father grab the broom to smack her with it.

What a lovely childhood she had. She wished she could remember it, now. She wished it had lasted longer.

The days of playing games of mages and holding mock-court were long behind her. The reality of her inability to be anything more than a farmer’s daughter was beginning to make the Morrell household a rather suffocating place to be. Too odd-looking to marry off, not savvy or competent enough to hold the land and keep it to herself. There was no profit to be made in caring for the children of the countryside or teaching the war-ravaged and orphaned creatures how to find joy in capturing the smile of another in charcoal, or coaxing them into sweet sleep with tales of pirates and warrior women. No man wanted a woman so useless. No family wanted to pay a dowry for useless little Levana who could only offer a shining -- albeit impish -- smile. The only suitor that had come knocking had left in quite a hurry when he realized how strong-headed she could be, how sharp her tongue was and how her eyes seemed to see right through the facade of gentility and courteousness. For the umpteenth time in her life, she had been sent to bed with an empty stomach -- though, throughout the night it had been full of laughter at her suitor’s expense.

Not long after, on the night of her 20th birthday, when her parents were ready to sell her to the most ill-reputed house in Tyrolhm that was furthest away, the Undying God decided it was high time that the blessings they had placed upon her be brought into the light -- the revelation of her abilities shining unabashedly in the bright, spring sun.

Her little gaggle had all grown and had children of their own or moved to have adventures across the Sahrnian sea. Some of them even became clerics at the Temple, while she was all too content to take each day as it came, toiling away at the dying soil, listening to the bickering of her loveless parents, frequenting the markets and listening to the songs of bards that were passing through. Levana had taught the children of the countryside her games -- telling them tales of the glorious adventures she and her friends had when they were in the golden years of their childhood. Wars raged while wielding sticks in the place of swords, and pieces of barks as shields. One of the girls had stumbled into the stream -- its waters tumultuous and high from floods that had come from the melting winter snow. The fretful, panicked hands of the small children tugged at her skirt, pulling her from her place beneath the shaded tree, voices high and weeping as they tried to pound life into little Errena’s chest.

That was the first time Levana could recall giving everything.

That was the first time Levana could remember trying.

She remembered peering up through the leaves, watching them sway in the light breeze. Years later, she knew that it was the last time she had ever known the meaning of peace.

Untrained and reckless, she had poisoned the earth that was there -- and because it hadn’t been enough, she had poisoned something within herself as well. The grass had grown black beneath her fingers, parched and dry as though it had never known green days. She remembered the cries of horror from the children as they had watched her body bow over little Errana’s, had heard the guttural noises that tore from her lips, the darkness that had been cast over her eyes. If the Undying God were to have had a voice that could be heard, it would have been the very same that poured from her lips as she called Errana’s name from the land of the dead. When she had arisen with the girl’s cold, trembling hand in hers, she looked at the children that stared at her in terror -- a weary smile on her lips as she told them to run along and keep this secret between them. There was no need, though; terror was the most effective muzzle.

She packed her bags and made her way to the Temple, leaving the Morrell lands and the Morrell name far behind her. Levana never thought to question why it was so easy for her to leave those ties behind -- the land of golden wheat and warm, drowsy memories. She never thought to ruminate on which part of her had died that fateful day when she had exchanged a life of peace for Errana’s beating heart. Levana built her life anew as Morrigan, giving the name at the steps of the Temple, while enlightening them about the tale of a girl once known as Levana. There had been no need, though; it would always be worth it for the lives that she managed to call back from the arms of the Undying God. Her tutelage at the Temple illuminated the path that she had willingly turned a blind eye towards in favor of lazing days spent adventuring under Tyrolhm’s golden sun. Ravenously, she consumed the tomes that they placed in front of her, testing the limits of her power and reflecting on the tolls that they took on her. For one of the orphan girls she resurrected a bird that had been target practice for the impish little boys -- and for that she lost her taste.

For a queen’s handmaiden, she had animated the limbs of her poxed brother, and for that she lost the life of the only person she had made there that she could have called friend -- a wizened old tutor whose eyes were milky and whose lips carried lines from smiling so often. The years began to bleed into one another, her hunger for knowledge growing as her abilities did until she began to spend restless nights squinting into tomes as the wax of once-tall candles melted into stubs. The coldness of corpses and the silence that they offered became more familiar to her and far more preferable than playing the enigmatic mage at the courts that the Temple recommended she visit. But for many years, she clung to who she remembered herself to be, the charming and vibrant girl that had spent so many days dictating which child would be allowed to be king, who was to be the advisor, the general, the serf, the mistress, and the queen. Her cutting tongue was known to cause riots within courts, stirring subjects with barks of laughter, making handmaidens and queens flush -- charming kings and princes and royals alike.

They whispered of her across the lands and the wide, raging sea -- the necromancer with silver hair and dark eyes, whose smile you wished to see before you died, whose siren-like voice you heard call you from the embrace of the Undying God.

But just as death and life were inseparable, were one, so too was the love and hatred of those who heard the tales of Morrigan. There were those who sought to control her, just as she had controlled the corpses -- shackling her in dungeons until she did their bidding. There were kings and queens who wished to bed her and use her for nothing more, casting her out of their castles mid-winter when they realized she would not. Poisonings and beatings were something she learned to become familiar with (demoness, devil, defiler), prejudice, bigotry, and poverty haunted her as assuredly as her sister’s nearly-forgotten ghost had. And what did the Temple do but preach to her about the practices of her power and her duty to guard wayward kingdoms from their tumultuous, violent ways? What more was she meant to do but bear these burdens and slights, so that they might know she might usher in a new age of peace? In her many travels and over the two centuries that she walked the earth she had lived a number of lives. The mage, the pick-pocket, the farmer’s daughter, the con, the philosopher, the artist, the scholar. Not a single one of them had known peace as intimately as Levana Morrell had.

But she was dead.

Only brought back to life once, in the chamber of a queen she thought she had loved, across the Sarhnian sea who always kept a wolfhound at her side. Morrigan thought she had the heart of a wolfhound too, which made it all the more easy to lay her heart at the queen’s feet. She remembered how she had poured herself into the creature, had harkened for its heart to beat, for its heart to rise. Some nights she can still taste the growl that had torn through her throat -- an echo from the wolfhound’s maw. She could still feel how her spine had bent over the limp form, arms twitching, back arching as the creature began to rise to its feet, tongue lolling, eyes black. In restless fits of sleep, her and the hound became one in the same. Sometimes she would wake, touching her teeth, thinking that they might be sharp. Within that week, she had been ushered out of the castle by one of the queen’s advisor, his eyes unable to meet hers as her threw her traveling cloak over her shoulders, shuddering away when his skin had grazed hers, paying no mind to the way he had the guards drag her since her legs didn’t seem to respond and gave way.

When she was returned to the Temple she wept for a fortnight, unable and unwilling to leave her bed. She had given everything and they had taken everything. There was no one but herself to blame -- and what was worse, she still craved the power that had poured forth from her. She hadn’t noticed how her legs had failed her, only the way all eyes within the court had looked to her in awe, in terror, in reverence, in horror. In the years that followed, she learned to use her legs once more, the iron casts and crutch aiding her, adding further allure to the century old necromancer whose bright eyes brought corpses to life in the Undying God’s name. She knew what power the whispers of common folk and courtiers had. When she had laid her heart out for the queen consort, something within her had exhaled its final, shuddering breath. Something within her had risen from its ashes and come to life -- awakening with a ravenous, insatiable hunger that eclipsed any she had ever known.

In the eyes of the great court, she had seen within them the reflection of the death defier that was whispered about. In them, she had seen the power that she had. She could realign the stars and there was no doubt that they would look at her with that intoxicating concoction of horror and awe. They would have no choice but to do as she wished -- and what she wished was for that power to be wielded by her and her alone. To bring about the Golden Age of the world as she would define it.

The woman that stepped into the court of King Septimus was a far cry from the girl that had spent her days lounging beneath the large branches and green leaves of an age-old tree. Her iron casts had echoed as she entered the large, grand doors of the castle and from the moment she laid eyes on Septimus, she saw a future of glory -- the Golden Age made incarnate. He was malleable beneath her touch and in the first decade of his rule, she flourished. It was not unlike when she was a child, dictating this and that, her the cutting edge of her words coming off as roguish and charming, refreshing and novel as the entirety of his court leaned in to listen. Morrigan forgot, though, how quickly novelty can wear off and before long the revulsion sets in, her contempt for Septimus beginning to become a nigh-impossible pill to swallow. She thought that perhaps her intuition had failed her, that once again fate, with its cruel humor, hoped to make a mockery of her once more.

The mage with all the power in the world at her fingertips was unable to bring anything more than a handful of decades of tenuous peace, known for nothing but carnage and carnage alone under King Septimus’ rule.

She didn’t even have the ability to laugh, as she once might have been able to. That power had been taken from her, too.

The yawning hunger within her, though, did not balk in the face of kings, though. It recognized neither the limitations of Morrigan’s own body, the intricacies of politics, nor the iron, bloodied fist of Septimus. All it knew was how close she had been to power -- fingers outstretched, yearning, reaching, grasping. She remembered the weary faces of the soldiers as they returned from the carnage, how pale and wide-eyed they had been, how their armor had shone, painted with the scarlet blood of the fallen. One soldier’s eyes had lifted to hers and within them, she saw the lifelessness of so many corpses that had been laid, prostrate at her feet before harkening to her call, their once-still hearts beginning to beat something fierce.

If she could not bring them peace with King Septimus then the issue was simple; she did not have enough power to. That made her culpable for this carnage. The sharp-toothed hunger within her stirred, sinking its claws deeper into her as the last vestige of her patience was swallowed whole. She would take the power that was not given to her. She would crown a new king and usher in the Golden Age of peace that she had envisioned, or upturn the board and start this game anew, with the rules dictated by her and her alone.

Her lips had twitched as she recalled a girl, standing atop a rock, dictating to those beneath her the new rules of a new game.

That young girl had been rather good at that.

She would be too.

PLOT IDEAS:

THE GATHERING: The most difficult part about being a necromancer is the fact that everyone fears you. Levana is quite aware of the fear that she incites in people -- and the problem with wanting a major shift in power is you need support in order to make sure that the kingdom isn’t lost in total and complete anarchy. The best way to ensure that the shift of power has some control and stability is by having a group ready to take control when there is a vacuum of power. And in order to have a group with a shared agenda and mission in a monarchy, one has to have a figurehead to throw their support behind. First, though, she has to assess who is loyal to who -- or who, at the very least, can be swayed. Which means networking, connecting with people, communicating with them. This is going to be a rather difficult piece of her plan to achieve since the way that people connect with others is by emoting -- and she can’t do that anymore. It’s going to certainly push her out of her comfort zone and is going to be an interesting test that will force her to reflect how much she’s changed, and how she’s lost the ability to do one of the most human things: connect with others. THE REVOLT: I broke this up in two parts because right now I see two definitive ways for The High Priestess to incite a revolt (although this could totally clash with the plans for the rp, I would be more than happy to completely scrap these OR do them and have them fail). So I think, first, she would have to find someone to support -- because she would never ever ever be the face of a revolt -- if she were, it would be coming from a mage and that would throw a wholly different light to the war and it’s not one she cares to think about (much). First, I think that she would find two of the more malleable minds that are in line for the throne -- the World and the Chariot. Depending on which one she thinks is better for the position, she would talk to them directly and either enlist their help OR if they have something in the works already, try to push herself into a position of power within the revolters group so she can have a definitive say in how this is going to play out. THE FLOURISHING: Despite how much she’s grown with her power, there’s always an opportunity to grow even more. One idea that I keep on playing around with is mass resurrection. She’s been able to resurrect individuals with repercussions, but I think she wants to try and do more. The frustration with the limitation of her powers is beginning to grow more and more apparent, and I don’t think she’s going to be satisfied until she’s exceeded everyone’s expectations. Including her own. When she performs her magic, she gives everything she has into it, pouring pieces of herself until there is nothing left -- but it still isn’t enough. If she learns how to do this, the tides of war will be changed at her say-so. Why wouldn’t she want that? THE INSTITUTION: The Temple taught her a lot, there is no doubt. But it did not teach her everything and distinctly ties the power of the mages to this idea that they are either blessed/cursed and that they owe something to the Undying God for their abilities. However, the fact that there’s only one way of learning how to control something so personal and unique to oneself does not sit well with her. It makes her lips curl and coats her tongue with bile whenever she thinks of the waste that there must be -- how a mages power can be limited by such narrow-minded thinking. And I think that the Wheel of Fortune, the Moon, and the Hierophant are evidence of that -- that, though they study the arcane there is no need for their methods to be archaic. The times are changing and so should their perceptions of magic, their understanding and belief in the Undying God, and their perception of themselves. THE EVOLUTION: One aspect that I would like to explore with the High Priestess is her perception of herself because as she grows more disconnected with the humanity that there is within her, it’s only natural that she would reflect over whether or not this is the next stage of the necromancer. There is no other like them, so why aren’t they considered gods? Why aren’t mages revered for all that they do for those who are could be conceived as “lessers”? It’s a dangerous train of thought that I think she’s careening whole-heartedly towards and something that I think could take a dangerous turn for her. Her body is literally decaying and yet she can stave off death itself at the expense of others. Isn’t there something god-like about that? WHO IS GOING TO CHECK HER? THE AGENDA: Okay this is gonna sound ICKY but Levana is the type to utilize her resources and the thing about being an orphan is that no one looks twice at you. Which makes you an asset -- someone unseeable, someone who can listen with there being no threat. The Temple didn’t utilize the orphans as they should have, and I think that (if it’s allowable) Levana has no problem utilizing these resources and taking advantage of them. For every whispered secret, she gives them a coin or resurrects a beloved pet. For orphans who give especially prized information or promise their loyalty to her, she might even hold the possibility of resurrecting their parents above their head. No one gives to her without receiving in return. Besides, you can’t survive long at court without having a means of leverage or the assurance of mutual destruction.

CHARACTER DEATH: Triple dog fishy dare you to do it, coward.

- WRITING SAMPLE -

Another bawdy dinner -- lavish, opulent, and wasteful. Dark eyes drank in the scene before her, the court members whose mouths were stained red with wine, howling and cackling. The women of the night, scantily clad, flitting from one odious lord to another, shoving their breasts in the faces of those who seemed more like boars than men. Their wives drinking more and more so that they might pretend that they didn’t notice. Perhaps, in another life, she would have acted like one of the boorish men, drinking to her heart’s content until the room grew hazy at the edges of her vision and the smile became a fixture on her face. But not now. Not with this path that she walked.

Instead, all she could do was look on in disgust.

Every barrel of wine that was rolled in might have been used to pay for a bowl of stew for a child, Another bed in the orphanage. A bushel of wheat for a hungering family. The ingredients for a doctor to mix a rare salve that might soothe the growths on a suffering, aching face. Or, at the very least, they could have saved it for when the economy of the kingdom would assuredly crumble. But who was she to say? It wasn’t as if Septimus had the capacity to process an intelligent thought. Levana had a working theory that he had three main thoughts and they rotated between power, pussy, and potent wine. Anything more than that would throw him off and likely send him into a tantrum. She supposed it hurt his brain to expend itself in such a manner, which is why he would only be able to respond in the most barbaric way.

When he patted her hand to garner her attention, she wanted to let her lip curl and pull away -- but her body was slow to respond. Today was particularly vexing -- she had brought The Wheel Of Fortune to an orphanage and the two of them had set about practicing their animations on corpses. She was resistant, which had meant that Morrigan was forced to do the majority of the work.

It’s a shame that such intelligence was outweighed by cowardice.

Her limbs were weary and deft to her commands, choosing to listen when they wanted to, which meant that her movements were labored and slow. As a result, she had no choice but to sit, watch, and endure the putrid smell of the sweaty man who was unfortunately the crowned king. So she swallowed down the bile that coated her tongue and turned to him -- she had never been more thankful for her inability to show her disgust -- brow rising as she subtly pulled her hand onto her lap.

“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” she apologized, playing coy as she tilted her chin down. It made her look as though she were batting her eyes at him, but the fumes of his breath made her want to gag. It was nothing more than an avoidance tactic that required minimal usage of her facial muscles. Morrigan’s eyes slid away from his. “I couldn’t hear you over the sound of your bloated sense of self-importance...”

Her voice wouldn’t carry in the room. It always seemed to fall away, giving out at the end before she could quite finish, fading into the noise, into nothing.

“WHAT WAS THAT?” He bellowed, shoving the poor drunken woman off of his lap as he leaned towards her. “SPEAK UP, MAGE.”

Against her own sense of self-preservation and thoughts for cleanliness, she leaned closer to the king, turning into his ear. “I said that your subjects will no doubt speak of the debauchery of their king.” It wasn’t exactly a compliment but it was the truth. Hopefully he would hear her over the sound of his own labored breathing -- she was curious to see what his reaction might be.

Septimus leaned back with a grin and looked at her, hesitating a bit as he tried to process what she was saying. Perhaps he was waiting for someone to tell him whether or not he should consider the words a compliment. He didn’t quite have the faculties to gauge it for himself. His eyes flickered over her face -- not quite seeing her and unable to interpret the micro-expressions.

It was like looking for fog within mist.

There was nothing to be found except further nothingness. There was something blissful about knowing that she could never be understood, that interpretations of her words and actions could never be understood correctly. Another beat passed and then another. Her mouth didn’t shift upwards, her eyes didn’t wrinkle in delight -- she merely looked at him as she waited for him to grasp her words. Then Septimus let out a loud guffaw and she inclined her chin, turning away.

“You’ve got quite the mouth on you,” he howled, “I bet back in your day before you started wearing the ugly make-up and looking like death you could’ve used it for something too!”

“Yes,” she answers, eyes flickering back to him briefly. “I happily used it for making already small men feel smaller.” Her lip twitched, nothing more than a slight lift, before dissipating quickly. It seemed that her muscles were too tired for that, even. “To chew up bones and spit them back out.”

He certainly caught that.

He snorted derisively and waved his hand. “Don’t bring talk of death here, not tonight, Morrigan.” Ah, Morrigan. So he truly was done with her for the night if he wasn’t calling her m a g e. Tediously, she rose to her feet, nodding at the Wheel of Fortune to hand her the crutch, leaning against the wall. Levana’s eyes shuttered wearily as she rose to her feet, iron casts around her legs groaning and creaking as she righted herself.

The king watched on in boredom, not bothering to help as he pulled another woman onto his lap.

Levana turned around and bowed.

“Long live the king,” she sighed, a pretty little (little, nothing more than a light lift of her lips, barely-there) smile pulling at her lips as she bid him goodnight.

One could only hope that he choked on his own tongue between now and tomorrow morning. As she put herself to sleep she couldn’t help but smile as she thought of the sound of him choking.

EXTRAS

Anything you’d like can go here, whether that be a playlist, a pinterest board, some headcanons, or whatever you’d like to show us!

#accepted #accepted: the high priestess

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sclfmastery · 6 years

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//this will invariably draw anon hate but i really don’t mean it divisively.

i’ve just been, for days, months (years lol) trying to figure out why exactly simm!master, whom so many people now just...openly despise...is still my favorite master.

and i think the main reason is still the marked, strong metaphor of chronic invisible illness posed by “the drums.”

BUT. there’s another reason.

examining photosets on my dash today, from episodes with other masters, especially in new who, the most marked characteristic about the simm!master is his DEFIANCE. of all things that try to hinder him, but particularly, of the doctor. which sounds strange coming from a hardcore thoschei shipper, but hear me out.

from one vantage point, that defiance can read as folly, as self-defeat, as an idiotic determination to despise someone you once loved, as miserly and small-minded, and it is, no doubt.

but shift your perspective, and that defiance reads as a refusal to accept at face value the sometimes equally small-minded, chauvinistic, sanctimonious twaddle of the doctor. though this post isn’t about missy, she is the one who said it best: “[the doctor’s] version of good is not absolute. it’s vain, arrogant, sentimental.”

and where even missy has decided it is best to compromise, to choose her battles, to bide her time, with the doctor, simm!master remains the ONLY person in all of new who, except Donna Noble (incidentally my favorite companion), who steps back and says, “oh bullshit. knock off this nonsense. i’ll gladly take you down a few pegs, right here and right now, if you don’t. i will say ‘tough’ when you say sorry; i will say ‘i refuse’ when you order me to do something.” outright, without censure.

and as stupid and self defeating as simm!master is, i think that’s something about him that i find perennially refreshing. there have been periods of doctor who that have suffered from “the doctor is a genius so we pardon everything the doctor says and does unproblematically,” and sometimes even missy is pulled (by specific writers, not by the essence of her character) into that trap of making the entire show about congratulating the doctor’s brilliance, about basking in the doctor’s danger and charisma. when the core of doctor who has always actually been celebrating the people around the doctor that have ended up teaching the doctor as much as or more than the doctor teaches them.

and i dunno, somehow, simm!master’s “fuck you” attitude toward the doctor lends itself more to content that says “yeah actually, the doctor is hugely flawed.” and just. removes absolute power from the doctor and from people writing the doctor’s narrative who want to identify with an unapologetic asshole that nobody checks or tells “hey, that wasn’t cool.”

this is not to say other masters don’t in their own way defy the doctor--especially in classic who. but i just. i think it’s interesting that when simm!master was reprised after a decade, during the era that most often falls for the “let’s all masturbate to the doctor’s awesomeness” trope, somehow the simm!master’s “doctor, you’re full of shit and here’s why” tendency was twisted into “i’m such an asshole that nobody should listen to the way i criticize the doctor anyway. i’m such an asshole that my judgment is called into question. pay no attention to the man in black, he’s a moron and a pitiful excuse for a version of the master.” all to prop up the doctor’s motivations as unquestionably noble. i just kinda go “hmmm” at that. i really do.

it was a very clever maneuver that had nothing to do with the master and everything to do with the existing DW staff’s highly self-conscious self-justifications.

but as for me, the brusque asshole that nobody loves, who screams “NO” in the doctor’s face, is still my favorite, by virtue of his very defiance.

everyone has “their” doctor. as for me, i have my master. and my master is an impenitent hellraiser.

#meta #headcanons #ooc

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krokodile · 6 years

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hank hill:

house: gryffindor

wand: fir, dragon core, 11 1/4 in, reasonably supple

My august grandfather, Gerbold Octavius Ollivander, always called wands of this wood ‘the survivor’s wand’, because he had sold it to three wizards who subsequently passed through mortal peril unscathed. There is no doubt that this wood, coming as it does from the most resilient of trees, produces wands that demand staying power and strength of purpose in their true owners, and that they are poor tools in the hands of the changeable and indecisive. Fir wands are particularly suited to Transfiguration, and favour owners of focused, strong-minded and, occasionally, intimidating demeanour.

As a rule, dragon heartstrings produce wands with the most power, and which are capable of the most flamboyant spells. Dragon wands tend to learn more quickly than other types. While they can change allegiance if won from their original master, they always bond strongly with the current owner.

The dragon wand tends to be easiest to turn to the Dark Arts, though it will not incline that way of its own accord. It is also the most prone of the three cores to accidents, being somewhat temperamental. - garrick ollivander

patronus: st. bernard (so close to being a bloodhound, but so far, dangit)

Despite its large and intimidating size, the St. Bernard is known to be kind, loving, and gentle. Great with families and very loyal, the St. Bernard will always be by your side. They are quick to protect family members who may be in danger and often act as a guardian for those around them. Strong and powerful due to their size, the St. Bernard will fight off Dementors and stand by you, come what may. - mugglenet

obviously i would have said bloodhound:

peggy hill:

house: slytherin (though she obviously thinks she should be in ravenclaw :P )

wand: chestnut, dragon core, 11 1/2 in, hard

This is a most curious, multi-faceted wood, which varies greatly in its character depending on the wand core, and takes a great deal of colour from the personality that possesses it. The wand of chestnut is attracted to witches and wizards who are skilled tamers of magical beasts, those who possess great gifts in Herbology, and those who are natural fliers. However, when paired with dragon heartstring, it may find its best match among those who are overfond of luxury and material things, and less scrupulous than they should be about how they are obtained. Conversely, three successive heads of the Wizengamot have possessed chestnut and unicorn wands, for this combination shows a predilection for those concerned with all manner of justice.

patronus: orca (and boy would she never stop bragging about having an unusual one)

It’s no mistake that orcas are nicknamed “killer whales.” They are one of the most effective hunters in the ocean. Orcas use teamwork and complex communication skills to hunt and the same cunning to protect their young. With the fierce, calculated protection of an orca on your side, you can rest assured that the Dementors will be no match for you. - mugglenet

i would’ve said mink, though:

luanne platter:

house: hufflepuff

wand: english oak, phoenix core, 13 3/4 in, slightly yielding

A wand for good times and bad, this is a friend as loyal as the wizard who deserves it. Wands of English oak demand partners of strength, courage and fidelity. Less well-known is the propensity for owners of English oak wands to have powerful intuition, and, often, an affinity with the magic of the natural world, with the creatures and plants that are necessary to wizardkind for both magic and pleasure. The oak tree is called King of the Forest from the winter solstice up until the summer solstice, and its wood should only be collected during that time (holly becomes King as the days begin to shorten again, and so holly should only be gathered as the year wanes. This divide is believed to be the origin of the old superstition, ‘When his wand’s oak and hers is holly, then to marry would be folly,’ a superstition that I have found baseless). It is said that Merlin’s wand was of English oak (though his grave has never been found, so this cannot be proven).

This is the rarest core type. Phoenix feathers are capable of the greatest range of magic, though they may take longer than either unicorn or dragon cores to reveal this. They show the most initiative, sometimes acting of their own accord, a quality that many witches and wizards dislike.

Phoenix feather wands are always the pickiest when it comes to potential owners, for the creature from which they are taken is one of the most independent and detached in the world. These wands are the hardest to tame and to personalise, and their allegiance is usually hard won. - garrick ollivander

patronus: dolphin (thank god this wasn’t hank’s!)

Intelligence and sociability are among the main attributes of the dolphin. Also known for their playfulness and loyalty, dolphins live and work together in groups to aid the sick and injured and to defend each other from predators. Its incredible intelligence is put to good use in the form of solving complex problems and other such challenges. The dolphin does not enjoy dull, routine activities, so keeping busy with interesting tasks is a must! - mugglenet

#krokodile's weird pottermore shit #king of the hill #fandom #Harry Potter #gryffindor #slytherin #hufflepuff

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septic-dr-schneep · 7 years

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What does Dark want Host's role in his plan to be?

I don’t think even he knows for sure, but he’s already started subtly influencing him to make him more open to the idea of turning on the others and on Mark. I guess this is a good time to post my little story about that...

MP Fanfiction - Forgotten Chapters

Summary:When the Host struggles to control his visions, a reliable companion is there. Perhaps he shouldn't trust him as much as he does.

For the most part, the Host’s sleep was quiet, though occasionally restless. There were nights that his bandages got twisted up in his hair or he tossed and turned if his blankets weren’t enough to combat the unabating chill in his room, but he had come to accept that it was as much rest as he would get and he ought to be grateful for it.

Those were the good nights.

On other nights, his Sight innocently filtered into his subconscious; his dreams didn’t give him any respite from the visions of the day. The dreams were loud and sharp, too fast to decipher but too long to ignore, showing him things that he didn’t know and didn’t want to understand. All he wanted was relief, all he wanted was for his head to stop hurting—eye sockets, stop bleeding—nails, stop tearing—throat, stop screaming—

Screaming—

The breath was stolen from his lungs in one sudden rush, taking all of the force out of his cries, and he would have panicked because of it, but the bubble of pressure around him was heavy and cool, smothering his first reactions. The visions hit a wall and dispersed like fine dust, leaving him in dry, unmoving darkness.

A choked, broken noise, the last of his air, escaped then and he curled his torn hands into his bedsheets as a trembling wave of nausea swept over him. He couldn’t bring himself to care about dignity when he felt the bed creak, but the thought occurred to him that this particular visitor was least likely to be unnerved by the Host’s shattered composure.

“Should I summon the doctor?” Dark asked. His voice was low, but it reverberated against the Host’s ears, the only sound that wasn’t muffled by his racing heart and scattered breaths.

“It will pass,” the Host countered through gritted teeth, bloody tears dripping from his chin and down his neck as he leaned his head against the back wall. He couldn’t be bothered to wipe them away; he was far too preoccupied with the overwhelming fight-or-flight responses surging through his body.

He didn’t want to see the doctor, not like this. Over the years, Iplier and the others had gotten so used to the solemn, introverted, soft-spoken Host who could end arguments simply by predicting what their folly would lead to. Even the brief glimpses they got of the cracked, agonized character underneath were ignored as soon as they were out of sight; it was as if none of them were willing to acknowledge that Host even existed.

Dark was different. At the core, he was the harshest of the Personas; it was obvious, despite his attempts to hide it behind a suave, distant demeanor, and because of it he had developed a fascination with the ugliest parts of the Host’s story as soon as they were introduced. The Host, for his part, felt…safe with him. He could be himself, with everything that entailed. His body reacted to that notion, seizing up with tremors more pronounced than before. Dark noticed that immediately.

“Would you like me to stay?”

The Host couldn’t help the faint flicker of surprise at the offer, but it was squashed by the greater spark of gratitude. He moved his hands from the sheets to his chest, curling into himself, tendrils of Dark’s smoke trailing through his shaking fingers as they fisted into his nightshirt.

“Yes,” he breathed. “The Host would…like to request that Darkiplier…speak to him. About anything. A separate voice…assists the Host at times.”

There was a rigid, wary pause, after which he thought he would need to explain further, but Dark cut him off with a hand on his forearm. The Host wasn’t sure what the gesture was meant to be; Dark’s grip was cruelly tight, but it provided something of an anchor. The hand never wavered as its owner cleared his throat and spoke to him.

“Breathe,” he ordered lowly. “Let your throat relax. Lower your shoulders back and apart. Open your chest. Feel the air as it fills you.”

The haze tasted faintly sweet as it hit the back of the Host’s throat, spiraling down to settle into his lungs. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but it did burn and, for reasons beyond his knowledge, it made him a little lightheaded. He swallowed hard, pressing his lips tightly together as he forced himself to inhale again.

“Breathe…” The word echoed several times over, each echo softer than the last, and the Host obeyed, relaxing as much as his body allowed in its current state. It was only a fraction of what he needed.

“The Host finds it—difficult—” he admitted haltingly, tilting his face in his companion’s direction, searching for something. Dark’s hand on his forearm tightened further, hard enough to bruise, contrasting the silk woven into his voice as he continued.

“There is nothing to be afraid of. Here, I am always composed and safe. So are you. Nothing can breach this place.”

Echoes. Composed…Safe…

Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Host realized that the words themselves were enough to be afraid of, but they were keeping him grounded. There was nothing else to latch onto but those words. Words had always been his weakness and his strength and in Dark’s realm, he controlled them.

He said that the two of them were singular, alone, unlike anyone else.

He spoke of their control, of their souls, their unseen potential.

He assured him that they were important, far more important than the others could ever hope to be.

He hissed about their creator’s destruction and then murmured their own vivid praises.

The Host, calming ever so slowly, couldn’t help but listen. It was something of a story and it was…entrancing. With Dark’s miasma swirling around him, unexpectedly gentle, the Host Saw a different vision of the future, one with lesser light and greater darkness—dimmer, grimmer, but somehow softer.

It was the last Sight to fill his mind when he drifted off and by the time he woke again, it was gone, a forgotten chapter. Dark forgave him for that. He waited patiently. He would tell it to him again. He would press it upon him again and again and again. One day, given time, the Host would have no choice but to write it.

#youtube #markiplier #youtube fanfiction #fanfiction #darkiplier #the host #power play #mind control #hypnotism #dark being a manipulative friend #it hurts #but i love it too?#it's just who he is #i live for queerplatonic dark and host #dost hark #answered ask #Anonymous

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harlothane · 7 years

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Why do you love the Starks?

There are ghosts in Winterfell. And I am one of them. They walked on. Barbrey Dustin’s face seemed to harden with every step. She likes this place no more than I do. Theon heard himself say, “My lady, why do you hate the Starks?” She studied him. “For the same reason you love them.” Theon stumbled. “Love them? I never … I took this castle from them, my lady. I had … had Bran and Rickon put to death, mounted their heads on spikes, I …” “… rode south with Robb Stark, fought beside him at the Whispering Wood and Riverrun, returned to the Iron Islands as his envoy to treat with your own father. Barrowton sent men with the Young Wolf as well. I gave him as few men as I dared, but I knew that I must needs give him some or risk the wroth of Winterfell. So I had my own eyes and ears in that host. They kept me well informed. I know who you are. I know what you are. Now answer my question. Why do you love the Starks?” “I …” Theon put a gloved hand against a pillar. “… I wanted to be one of them …” “And never could. We have more in common than you know, my lord. But come.” ADWD. The Turncloak.

This part here is the core of Theon’s character and storyline - up until TWOW at least, as his story may take unexpected turns after ADWD.

It explains every strange move he did, misplaced thought he ever had. Take his devotion to House Stark in AGOT, or this enthusiasm at seeing the wolves distrust other people, strangers.

Their eyes found Lannister, or perhaps they caught his scent. Summer began to growl first. Grey Wind picked it up. They padded toward the little man, one from the right and one from the left. “The wolves do not like your smell, Lannister,” Theon Greyioy commented.

Theon Greyjoy put a hand on the hilt of his blade and said, “My lady, if it comes to that, my House owes yours a great debt.”

If you take a step back, it is strange that a ward in name but a hostage in truth would demonstrate so much loyalty - why ? He could surely have been treated worse in Winterfell, but it was never the warm home any child dreams of. He had to wear the Greyjoy colours, reminding every single person of his precarious status. And he did live in fear.

Lady Dustin’s serjeant raised the lantern. Shadows slid and shifted. A small light in a great darkness. Theon had never felt comfortable in the crypts. He could feel the stone kings staring down at him with their stone eyes, stone fingers curled around the hilts of rusted longswords. None had any love for ironborn. A familiar sense of dread filled him.

Still, he encourages Robb to call the banners and start a war for the honour of House Stark; he helps and supports the heir to Winterfell; he saves Bran Stark’s life; he is eager to fight - and risk his life for them; worse, he is proud of this, a fact he does not manage to hide before Balon Greyjoy or Dagmer Cleftjaw. “You take this business too hard, boy. It is only that your lord father does not know you. With your brothers dead and you taken by the wolves, your sister was his solace. He learned to rely on her, and she has never failed him.” “Nor have I. The Starks knew my worth. I was one of Brynden Blackfish’s picked scouts, and I charged with the first wave in the Whispering Wood. I was that close to crossing swords with the Kingslayer himself.” Theon held his hands two feet apart. “Daryn Hornwood came between us, and died for it.” “Why do you tell me this?” Dagmer asked. “It was me who put your first sword in your hand. I know you are no craven.”

Was it a defense mechanism ? Showing loyalty to your captors in the hopes that they will treat you well, always ? Perhaps. But that line - it brings love into the picture.

Also, “Only a fool humbles himself when the world is so full of men eager to do that job for him”, says Theon. He is not one to submit easily, on the contrary. He even defies his father right after meeting him for the first time in years. His loyalty to House Stark wasn’t the product of fear, it came from a place of love, and the desire to be loved back. As he leaves Robb’s side, his status appear to him in all its fragility - he will never be a wolf. But he does regret this. (“I am no Stark.” Lord Eddard saw to that. “I am a Greyjoy, and I mean to be my father’s heir. How can I do that unless I prove myself with some great deed?”)

And the capture of Winterfell, in this light, is a tragedy. Theon in Winterfell reminds me of a terrible child, desperate for a toy he doesn’t know how to handle right. He wanted his toy, he dreamed of it for so long, knowing it could never be his. So he stole it, took it by force, and ended up breaking his precious castle. He desired the love only a true home can offer you. He doesn’t take him long to realise he will never find it with the Ironborn.

He tossed his bow back to Wex and strode off, remembering how elated he’d felt after the Whispering Wood, and wondering why this did not taste as sweet.

By his own actions, he wins the exact opposite. Searching for admiration and love, he lets himself become a despised tyran, rightfully hated by Winterfell, its people, its ghosts and its very stones. He cannot win Winterfell’s heart, and so all of this - the scheme, the capture, means nothing anymore. There is despair in the way he compares himself to Ramsay - of all people - to make himself look good. Worthy of protecting Winterfell.

“There will be no flaying in the north so long as I rule in Winterfell,” Theon said loudly. I am your only protection against the likes of him, he wanted to scream. He could not be that blatant, but perhaps some were clever enough to take the lesson.

The century old place rejects him. Still, he never leaves. He refuses Asha’s offer to come with him. Luwin’s proposal to join the Watch. If his core desire was to prove himself to his father, he would have accepted Asha’s suggestion at least, hoping for another opportunity to show his valor.

He doesn’t. He prefers to die at Winterfell, that’s where his heart led him, after all. “To great folly”.

#theon greyjoy #asoiaf #i just........love this line #words are wind #asoiaf epiphany #i adore this scene it's so perfect and well-written and emotional #d&d were utter fools not to adapt these bits - it's not only important to theon's character - it tells so much about how the Starks #are perceived by the North in general #and it's just a beautiful scene overall #SIGHS

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nothingman · 7 years

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It’s official: Disney has acquired the film and television arms of 21st Century Fox for $52.4 billion.

Assuming regulators allow the deal to go through (it’s expected to take at least a year to close), Disney will own the rights to everything from the Avatar movies to FX’s The Americans. Fox, meanwhile, maintains the rights to Fox News, the Fox broadcast network, Fox Sports 1, and the gigantic Fox studio lot in Los Angeles. One of the six core studios that make up Hollywood has effectively been gobbled up by another, the biggest deal of its kind in decades (probably since the 1955 dissolution of RKO, since by the time MGM finally disappeared, it had been ailing for decades, unlike Fox). Variety marks it as the second-biggest merger ever after AOL-Time Warner.

Much casual interest in the sale has been driven by the fact that Disney will now own the film rights to the Marvel comics characters associated with the X-Men and Fantastic Four, which Marvel sold off to Fox long before either was a Disney subsidiary. (Marvel still doesn’t entirely own film rights to the Hulk — solo Hulk movies have to be produced with Universal, which is probably part of why there haven’t been any recently.) But Disney also now owns the rights to a bunch of other well-known cultural properties, including The Simpsons, the Alien franchise, and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Considering that Disney has proved so capable at turning beloved cultural properties into blandly effective hit-producing machines, there are a handful of reasons to be at least cautiously anticipatory about what it might do with all of its new toys.

But for the most part, this deal is a little terrifying. There are myriad reasons, but here are five that are most distressing to me — and only one of them is the incredibly troubling march of further media consolidation!

1) It’s entirely possible the Fox TV network will slowly wither away

One of the assets Disney couldn’t buy from Fox was its broadcast network of the same name, home to everything from The Simpsons to New Girl to The X-Files. The network launched in 1986 and was largely seen as a folly, but by the mid-’90s, it was a mainstay in most American homes, breaking the hegemony of the big three networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Federal Communications Commission regulations state that no one company can own more than one broadcast network, and Disney already owns ABC. This would be fine if Rupert Murdoch and News Corp were simply going to keep running the Fox network as it’s been run until now. But in 2017, there are essentially only two ways to make money as a broadcast network: make it a home for programming already owned by the network’s sister studio (meaning ABC airs mostly programming made by ABC Studios or other Disney sister companies), or make it a home for ridiculously cheap programming (meaning reality shows and news). So it seems unlikely they’ll stay the course, even though early reporting suggests Fox TV will exist much as is for now (though scripted product is expected to decline).

Fox, in essence, can’t pursue option one. If the deal goes through, all of Fox Television’s other assets — including its studio and attached cable networks, of which FX is the most prominent — will belong to Disney. And while there are a few programs on the network that are money-printing machines and will thus continue for at least a little while (The Simpsons and Family Guy chief among them), and a few other programs that it’s in Disney’s best interests to keep going (like the Marvel co-production The Gifted), there’s no reason for the Fox TV network to keep airing almost everything on its lineup if it won’t be collecting revenue from those shows via other means, like international sales or streaming sales. (Broadcast networks make almost all of their money from selling advertising space, a shrinking market in an era of ratings diminishment; essentially every other revenue stream is funneled toward the studios that produce TV shows.)

Now, there are ways that Fox could largely continue as-is. Disney could cut it a huge deal to carry many of those old Fox shows cheaply, figuring that they’re worth more to Disney as part of a huge streaming library and, thus, worth losing a lot of money on for a while. It’s also theoretically possible that Fox could sell off its TV network to another major studio that produces its own TV but doesn’t have a natural home for all of it (in essence, Sony or Warner Bros.). It could even become a glorified CW, should a studio like Sony team up with another player to share the cost of the network. (The CW is a joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros.)

But consider this: One of the key reasons to invest in the Fox network is that it holds NFL rights to broadcast NFC games, as well as the Super Bowl every third year. While NFL ratings have slipped, they’re still by far the biggest game in town, and if Fox really is refocusing on news and sports, letting NFL rights slip away wouldn’t make a lot of sense. And when you further consider that Fox has a longstanding relationship with (and share of) the reality TV producer Endemol Shine, it seems all the more likely that the network will continue to exist but mostly become a clearinghouse for reality programming, sports, and news content. This evolution, barring a sale to a different studio, seems inevitable. The network will still be Fox, but essentially a halfhearted version of itself.

Disney announces it has reached a deal to acquire 21st Century Fox, as predicted by a Simpsons episode that first aired on November 8, 1998. http://pic.twitter.com/kzloJQHeM8

— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) December 14, 2017

2) Hulu will almost certainly become a Disney property

Hulu

One of the things keeping Hulu from truly taking on Netflix and Amazon for streaming network superiority has been its strange ownership situation, in which it is owned in part by Fox, Disney, NBCUniversal (an investor in Vox Media), and Warner Bros. When Fox sells its 30 percent share of Hulu to Disney in this deal, Disney will become the majority shareholder in Hulu. It remains to be seen if NBC will sell off its 30 percent stake, or Warner Bros. its 10 percent stake, but I think such a deal is likely.

Disney has been looking for a streaming platform with which it can strike back at Netflix. It made noise about creating its own platform, but just buying Hulu outright makes a certain sense. Hulu, after all, is already built and simply needs to go international. (Currently, Hulu is only available in the US.) And considering that Disney will now control the considerable TV library of Fox — as well as the smaller but still impressive Disney TV library — it will have a substantially advantageous position to turn Hulu into the Netflix competitor. (Disney is still said to be looking at building streaming platforms for sports programming, and then for its Marvel and Star Wars properties, but it’s also easy to imagine these proposed services becoming pricey Hulu add-ons.)

There are a handful of exciting things about this from the point of view of TV fans, like the idea of better integration between Hulu and FX, for instance. But one of the things that’s made Hulu work is its unstable ownership situation, which has essentially given the service access to almost all of the good TV, with packages that allow you to include even more TV networks to your Hulu bundle as add-ons. That’s led to a neither-fish-nor-fowl problem here and there for Hulu, but it’s also led to a massive library of TV shows, as well as the first drama series Emmy for a streaming service with The Handmaid’s Tale. It would be a shame to see that turned into another arm of the Disney monolith.

3) Wherever Rupert Murdoch ends up, he’ll have $52 billion more to play around with

The real wild card in this deal is what happens to Rupert Murdoch. He and his family now own 5 percent of Disney and will hold seats on the company’s board of directors. But Murdoch, by most accounts, has always preferred the worlds of news and sports to the world of movies and scripted TV.

The important thing is this: Murdoch has long wanted to take Fox News international, previously via a furtive, aborted attempt to port the model to the UK. The jury’s out on whether he can actually accomplish this (the network may simply be too wedded to the US Republican Party in the eyes of overseas viewers), but it’s not as if socially conservative, jingoistic nationalism can’t gain a foothold in other countries. One hitch in this is that Fox sold off many of its international TV assets in the Disney deal. Yet if any media platform can figure out a way to make that work, Fox News seems as likely as anybody else.

Couple that with the Fox broadcast network’s need for cheap programming (which would likely include news programming) and Fox Sports 1’s inability to get out of the shadow of Disney-owned ESPN, and you have what amounts to a company that exists largely to keep the Fox News business humming along. (News Corp, of course, still owns a number of print publications, including the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal.)

Of my five points, this is by far the most speculative. To be sure, it’s unlikely this will happen overnight, and it might take as long as a decade or two. But the successful future of the Murdoch empire is now tied largely to the successful expansion of Fox News. And the most likely path to chart leads out of the US and overseas.

4) 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight at least tried making films for adults. They now belong to a company only interested in making blockbusters.

The Post is one of several Oscar-friendly films Fox released this year.

Niko Tavernise/Twentieth Century Fox

This is, in comparison to most of these other points, ultimately a somewhat minor concern. But it’s true that Disney doesn’t make many movies per year, and those movies are almost always aimed at the blockbuster audience — which is to say families and young men in their early 20s and late teens. Disney is, in a real way, in the blockbuster business, making lots of Marvel, Star Wars, and animated films while rarely straining for much more.

Consider, for instance, that the studio is pumping a lot of money into an Oscar campaign for its Beauty and the Beast live-action remake because it … doesn’t have much else (though the strong reviews for the latest Star Wars film may give it another competitor). In contrast, Fox has many of the year’s most Oscar-friendly films, with two released under its Fox Searchlight banner, The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and one from Fox proper, The Post, combining for 19 Golden Globe nominations just this week. Add in scattered nominations for the studio’s Battle of the Sexes, The Greatest Showman, and Ferdinand and Fox’s total rises to 27 nominations in total.

This isn’t a one-off, either. Fox Searchlight is fairly consistently in the Oscar hunt, and 20th Century Fox might not win awards as consistently, but it still continues to produce films aimed at adult audiences, like the surprise success Murder on the Orient Express or the less successful The Mountain Between Us.

Fox certainly tries to play the blockbuster game, but most of its major franchises, from X-Men to Planet of the Apes, have seen stronger box office returns in the past. While it might be worth it to Disney to get the X-Men and Fantastic Four back in the Marvel fold, Fox itself doesn’t bring a ton of great franchise assets to the table (though the Avatar sequels, slated to begin arriving in 2021, are a huge wild card in this equation). And though Oscars may not be incredibly important to Disney, it’s not as if the company wouldn’t like to win a Best Picture trophy someday (remarkably, a Disney film has never won Best Picture, though the former Disney subsidiary Miramax won a couple of times), which Fox Searchlight might help with. Indeed, Disney’s early messaging around Fox Searchlight has been largely positive, and it’s expected the division will continue as it has, for the most part.

But in order to not trip up antitrust regulators, it’s most likely Fox itself will have to reduce overall output. (It released 16 movies in 2016 and 13 in 2017.) So will Disney allow Fox to continue making movies aimed at a wide variety of audiences, some hitting and some flopping? Or will it push Fox into the same box as its other subsidiary studios, like Marvel and Pixar, responsible for a certain number of films per year, all of which are expected to set certain box office benchmarks? If that’s the case, then film fans will have lost something.

5) Yeah, media consolidation is bad, and it’s only getting worse with this deal

The quick and obvious take on the Disney-Fox deal is that media consolidation, already bad, is only getting worse. It’s been ages and ages since a major Hollywood studio just … disappeared, and now one that seemed pretty healthy from all evidence has been consumed by a bigger corporation. The big fish are eating each other, and soon there may only be one left.

The standard rebuttal to this concern is that tech companies can come in and “disrupt” the entertainment industry and media and shake things up to create room for new voices. And maybe this will happen! Certainly Netflix has become a Hollywood heavyweight in record time (even if it still struggles to draw interest to its films).

But for the most part, tech companies have built really great aggregators of content that comes from elsewhere. Outside of Netflix’s TV division, there aren’t any real roaring successes out of the tech industry — and you can’t create great art, or even popular art, simply by throwing money at it, something Hollywood knows all too well.

But if Fox is now part of Disney, then it’s hard to imagine that we’re not heading toward a universe where essentially all of the major media providers in the world are owned by three or maybe four companies. And while the most obvious issues with that stem from how media consumers are able to get news that takes on corporate interests, there are a host of others that range from the political to the artistic.

Suffice to say that having one less major studio isn’t a great sign for the health of the American entertainment industry, for the future prospects of film lovers, and for anybody who read the David Mitchell novel Cloud Atlas and recoiled a bit when learning that his futuristic, dystopian society where humans are literal corporate cattle described movies as “Disneys.”

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kennysamathedeviant · 8 years

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Man of Steel's Critique Of The No Kill Rule

I’ve made it no secret that i detest the no kill rule, and it’s not because i think the rule is bad in and of itself, but it’s that it’s always been presented as this superficial, mentally coddled world view of absolutist morality; a view that says that no amount of innocent lives being wasted and lost is ever a reasonable, nor justifiable reason to circumvent your morals, you’re better left shrugging and holding onto it, regardless of consequences. It’s a rule that celebrates apathy but masks it to be about virtue. If your virtue comes at the expense of letting evil prosper, then are you really virtuous? This rule, of which my distaste is bottomless, has only ever been applied intelligently twice to my satisfaction, once in the DCAU Justice League and secondly, as a broken rule (imagine that) in Man of Steel. I’ve always had very high opinions of Man of Steel, it’s only gotten higher ever since i became conscious of the anti mos/dceu narrative (i was out of the loop initially), which challenged me to scrutinize the story and it’s final act all over again and again and again and again and for me, it continues to hold up and it will continue to hold up for eternity.

Man of Steel, as the complex masterpiece it is, can be interpreted in numerous ways, as long as your “interpretation”, is supported by the canon. One such interpretation i’ve had forever, is that the entire film can be viewed as a direct critique of the moral absolutism associated with the no kill rule and the kind of apathy it creates in the name of virtue. Basically, it criticizes the no kill rule, not as bad, but as horrifically ineffective and atrocious in most applications, just like the movie shows what actually happens (what you see but don’t think about even when it’s right in front of you) when superheroes and supervillains fight in populated areas, so also does it reveal the inherent folly of holding so tightly to the no kill rule as if it’s about virtue, when a little closer inspection will reveal it promotes apathy and detachment. Let’s look at the ways i believe the movie makes this statement:

The Kryptonian Council

This is the first red flag we’re introduced to in the story, the Kryptonian council is painted in a negative light right from their introduction. They are horribly ineffective, engage in endless debates and when they do bother to make a decision, it’s a decision that negatively affects every other Kryptonian in the story. With their planet on the verge of death and their race on the verge of extinction, what does the Kryptonian council do? Dedicates the last of it’s resources to imprison a criminal who goes on to later cause pain and hardships for everyone else in the movie. For clarity, this criminal; General Zod, who’s murdered dozens of people, a council member, and his own best friend, all in the name of being more proactive in comparison to the slowness of the council, is sentenced to the Phantom Zone. This requires the very last of their resources, resources that could have been used to get however number of Kryptonian citizens off-world to the old Kryptonian outposts like Jor-el suggested in the first place. And in so doing, they damned not only their race, but Earth by extension because their actions, while unforeseen, were callous enough to be considered culpable. And this isn’t the first time the Kryptonian council is guilty of finding “another way” when they blatantly had only one way out.

In the Man of Steel prequel comic, the council stashes Dev-em; a Kryptonian murderer, the first in generations, aboard a maiden voyage to the stars in search of new worlds, because in their own words, “we are not barbarians like the Thanagarians” so in other words, they were too “moral” to execute him. That maiden voyage’s crew included Kara Zor-el, Kal-el’s ancestor, who was undertaking what was at the time, a bold move for their race to stretch their influence to other worlds. The magnitude of this mission can’t be understated, this voyage was one of many that led to the creation of the Kryptonian outposts mentioned in the film. The film points out that abandoning this venture, was one of the ways Krypton’s eventual demise started, along with artificial population control, the eugenics based system it employed, the predetermining of a child’s purpose and the waste of their natural resources including drilling into their planet’s core. But back to the council’s decision, Dev-em escapes captivity, kills all crew on board the ship, gets in a scuffle with Kara Zor-el and crashes the ship. That ship is the scout ship that summons Zod to Earth in the movie, it’s distress signal being a cry for salvation from Dev-em. So we have two important instances where the Kryptonian council would rather find “another way” than take the one in front of them because it’s not moral enough for their virtuous tastes. But let’s also look at the methods they seemingly prefer to use, shall we? Let’s see if these methods are actually better than this immoral action they constantly refuse to take.

The Phantom Zone Prison

To those unaware, the phantom zone is a Kryptonian prison that houses Krypton’s most dangerous criminals. But even more insidiously, it has in most incarnations, been described as and looks like a fate worse than death, with the Donner movies, Smallville and the DCEU basically contesting for the most horrible version ever. Donner’s Phantom Zone was a diamond shaped prison where prisoners are stuck and ejected into space forever, Smallville had the prisoners bodies destroyed and their essence left in the zone as shambling, body stealing wraiths. The DCEU’s version will require a more explicit explanation. It involves a process of encasing the accused completely in ice, a very painful process as seen by General Zod’s cohorts screaming in pain, with the exception of Zod himself and Faora, who manage to bear it all with teeth clenched willpower. There’s also the implication that they are completely conscious even while encased completely in ice and in pain the whole time, their nociceptors working on overdrive. It’s so easy to overlook the horrific nature of this “moral” punishment while joking that their ice-maiden cocoons (because they look like and function like iron-maidens) look like dicks, doesn’t it? Then they’re sent into a ship, that carries their cocoons through a hyperspace portal to the phantom zone until their sentence runs out and then they’ll be released. Except they wouldn’t be. Krypton was dying, the end was here, their sentence of 300 cycles of sematic reconditioning meant nothing, they were damned for all eternity by those who considered execution too morally repulsive, even though given a choice, they would likely choose death. They were to consciously suffer their punishment within the ice for all eternity, and yet were only being sentenced for 300 years in what sounds like a sick joke.

Zod: You won’t kill us yourselves! You won’t sully your hands but you’ll damn us to a black hole for eternity!

The phantom zone is the go to excuse for that “another way” but there’s nothing better about the way it’s been applied in most media, it’s just there to coddle the morality of a desensitized viewer about what was right and what was needed in a story and Man of Steel clearly shows that there was nothing right or “moral” about it. But does the kind of morality that Kryptonians display influence the way Zod or any of his followers view Kal-el?

Expectations of Kryptonian Morality

If you’re like me, and you believe that absolute morality is being criticized in this movie, then Faora’s verbal smack down on Kal carries more meaning. While it’s easy to interprete her words as being about Clark having moral principles which put him at a disadvantage compared to their advantageous lack of it, it could also be interpreted as Faora pointing out that she expects him to display the very same self righteous air of moral superiority common to Kryptonians, a morality so high, it’s not above letting evil triumph as long as it stays intact. She expects him to be so caught up and drunk on his idea of morality, that he’d be willing to let people die rather than stop them, just like the Kryptonian council did. It’s decision to imprison them, ensured their survival, hence their “evolutionary advantage” over Kal, who could still be stuck in that same bubble.

Even in the final battle, Zod visibly smirks when Kal declares he’ll stop him, how could he not? Kal’s statement was virtually empty, how could he stop Zod? He’s exhausted all alternatives, sentenced his people to a fate worse than death, now he was going to feel Zod’s wrath. It was going down, of course he’d smirk. Kal’s been placed in that very same position Krypton’s council was, an entire planet’s fate in his hands, and Zod naturally expects his mind to be soaked in that same Kryptonian mentality, so will he keep trying to find “another way” as people keep dying or will he realize that there’s only so much he can actually control? Is his sense of morality really stronger than his concern for the billions of lives depending on him? And throughout the fight, Zod hammers the message home:

Zod: I will make them suffer, Kal. These humans you’ve adopted, i will take them all from you one by one!

Zod: There is only one way this ends, Kal. Either you die, or i do...

Zod: If you love these people so much, then you can mourn for them!

Add to this, earlier in the movie Jonathan tells him he has to decide the kind of man he wants to be, because that man; good character or bad, will change the world. Throughout the movie he’s proved what kind of man he was in different ways; selfless, brave, vulnerable, kind, empathetic, trusting, hopeful, etc. Now, he had to make a choice again, this time for an entire race and he chose what is undoubtedly the right choice in my opinion. Sure, it may not be a comfortable message for people to hear or read that Superman’s choice should involve killing Zod, but this is a movie that has proven time and again that actions have consequences, there are no deus ex machinas, get out of jail free cards, nothing. Clark has helplessly watched his father die, all his life he’s learnt there’s only so much you can control, you can’t save those who don’t want to be saved, you can’t just harmlessly stop those who don’t want to be stopped. He’s been pushed hard all his life but Zod is no schoolyard bully pushing him against a fence, Zod isn’t some nobody that can’t hurt him, Zod is the single worst phenomenon that dwarfs everything else he’d been able to passively endure in his life. Clark was able to keep his existence a secret for most of his life but within an hour of showing up, Zod outs him. Clark’s been passive his whole life despite ridicule, bullying and humiliation but within 24hrs of showing up, Zod pushes him enough that he throws his first punch ever. Everything he was taught, Zod was that antithesis that put it all to shame. But more importantly, Zod was proof that Clark was ultimately as helpless to control life like any other human and therefore, his decisions will carry repercussions and can’t be taken naively. And so, Clark chose to kill Zod, out of a lack of other options beyond falling back on the suicidal black/white morality his people were known for.

But since i said the no kill rule encourages apathy and detachment from viewers, is there any basis to any of it in the real world? Hello? This is Man of Steel, aka the movie that proved lots of people are fine letting evil prosper as long as they can shrug and say “at least my morals are intact”. This movie definitively proved that people’s sense of morality had taken a nose dive straight into apathy masqueraded as virtue. There was no end of “the real superman would have found another way!” in a story where an entire race vanishes overnight over that very same mentality. The obsessive focus on the action of Superman killing Zod rather than the context that more than justified a death that was already rightly bought when Zod commanded the World Engine be used to kill people. That the movie frames his death as a last resort only adds to my respect for it because he doesn’t even deserve that benefit. “Superman never ever kills! Ever!” cried detractors as they salivated over a version of superman killing a powerless man and joking about it. What do we call this kind of morality? One that calls an unavoidable death inexcusable but relishes a senseless one? And then would years later, go on to salivate over a near repeat of it, another senseless death covered up in jokes considered as acceptable? Because it seems people are 100% okay with their heroes (especially superman) killing, as long as they joke about it and feel nothing. So is this really about virtue? Or is it just an apathetic and detached populace fooling itself that it actually cares about morality? Because when it comes down to it, even despite proving that he wasn’t the kind of man to let people die in some misplaced sense of moral superiority, Superman mourns having had to take such a decision and mourns the death of a man who didn’t deserve it and refused to back down or stay down regardless of his pleas. He cries over his own helplessness and the ultimate imperfection that living in the real world (so to speak) brings. Because even though the movie criticizes moral absolutism, even though it hammers home the inherent stupidity of the no kill rule as an absolute, it never pretends like subverting it was without it’s own moral and emotional consequence. It was a blow to all his years of upbringing, his ability to navigate the world, to make decisions, his pacifism, but most of all, his conscience and faith in himself. A bad man died, a world lived and a good man was broken despite taking the only reasonable decision he had left, actions have consequences, we make decisions and we have to live with it. So Superman ends up showing more moral fiber in a movie where he kills than his own detractors do and it became just one more reason why i detested the rule because people didn’t care about morality in the first place.

#man of steel #the no kill rule that never was #dceu!superman #anti mos bias #pitiful dc hate #that people insisted and demanded that superman take a course of action #that the krypton council took ealier in the movie #and was instrumental to the extinction of their race is worrisome #how anyone could overlook what a threat zod was and insist the outcome had to be different bothers me #because it's clear this is about ego and self righteousness #none of these people actually care about morality #this movie criticizes that way of thinking and yet people fell back on that very mentality #sometimes you'll have to make hard choices #those choices will have consequences

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