#who cares if your fundamental identity has broken down far from how people know you

[rottingsick]

I need a new fuckin vent blog but I'm so tired of account hopping at this point

[professorspork]

Hot take, perhaps, but if/when Penny 3.0 happens I don't think she should have Floating Array, etherial or otherwise. It's just too bound up with her self-image as a Weapon instead of a Person. If Penny gets a sword, it needs to be a sword she can put down.

This is-- a fascinating take! I’m not sure I agree with it, but I think there’s some meaty ideas here worth unpacking. And I do think we agree on the fundamental premise (i.e. Penny’s autonomy needs to be foregrounded above all).

You assert that Penny’s current problem is that she sees herself as a Weapon and not a Person, and I don’t think that’s exactly the case. 

One of the things I admire most about Penny is is that when people try and tell her who (or, insultingly, what) she is, she quietly but assertively refutes them. Though early on her conviction in her own personhood was somewhat shaky, when her friends encouraged her she took it to heart. After Ruby “I Love You And Your Beautiful Soul” Rose told her that she was real and Winter “Everyone’s Feelings Are Valid Except For Mine” Schnee told her that her opinions mattered, she got-- really quite bullish about this. To illustrate:

Random citizen: It's Ironwood's robot! Robyn: [suspicious] Penny. Penny: I-- I didn't! [7.06, A Night Off]

Vine: I thought you were supposed to protect the people, not hurt them. Penny: I would never hurt anyone. Elm: Well Winter’s in critical condition, because of you. Harriet: And you repaid her by stealing the power that should have been hers. Penny: But taking the Maiden power was the only way to stop-- [8.03, Strings]

Cinder: You’re just a tool to be used! Penny: You do not know what you are talking about. ... Cinder: I don’t serve anyone. And you wouldn’t either, if you weren't built that way. Penny: That is not… I choose to fight for people who care about me. [8.05, Amity]

Which isn’t to say Penny isn’t prone to self-doubt, because she absolutely is, or that Penny doesn’t have a self-sacrifice streak a mile wide, because she absolutely does. But Penny wouldn’t have that reflexive, Janet-saying-“Not-a-girl”-style reaction to people telling her she’s nothing but a weapon unless she genuinely thought they were wrong. She’s not defensive, in these moments, even though she’s defending herself. She’s certain.

Maybe this is me splitting hairs with your argument, but I don’t think Penny’s issue is that she sees herself as a weapon. It’s that she sees herself as a hero. Not just a soldier, but THE soldier. The Protector of Mantle. She’s not Winter; she’s not most comfortable when she’s got orders she can hide behind so she can reassure herself she’s doing the right thing because someone else already did that math. She’s-- she’s Spider-Man. She feels a tremendous responsibility to save everyone she can, because that’s what you do. And yes that’s also, literally, what she was built for, so I can see where the argument is coming from, but I think it matters that the argument’s being made about someone from Remnant.

And on Remnant, your weapon is an extension of who you are.

We’ve never, as far as I can remember, seen anyone straight up switch their weapon. Ironwood made the nuke attachment for his pistols, but it’s still Due Process underneath. Maria only carries one of her two canes, now, but she didn’t make any design changes. Same with Yang and (lefty) Ember Celica. Jaune gave Crocea Mors substantial upgrades, but it’s fundamentally the same weapon; Blake chose to solder Gambol Shroud back together rather than replace it... and if anyone had an argument that using the same weapon might be too traumatic, it would be her. I mean, hell, the Messrs Oz have been using the same staff for millennia.

Weapons aren’t something you turn your back on. I don’t think it’s something that would occur to people. It would be like-- like turning off your Aura. That’s you. 

Unless, of course, you’re Cinder.

Cinder gave up on Midnight after the Beacon arc, and we’ve never seen it since. She relies exclusively on Maiden weapons instead-- some of which she molds into forms quite similar to her old swords or bow, but still. She tossed it aside. This follows the logic of the show: Cinder discarded the weapons, and with them the person she used to be, when she found it all to be lacking. Instead, she embraces what she sees as a higher form of power.

I don’t think Penny would think of Floating Array that way; as a sign of her failure. Nor do I think she’d see it as the prophesy/burden your take implies.

Granted, Watts used a sword from Floating Array in order to get access to her code and install the virus; it ended up being the vector for a huge breach of autonomy and violation of consent. But so was Tyrian using Harbinger to murder Clover, and Qrow’s still using it.

And granted, Penny didn’t choose Floating Array in the same way most people chose or designed their own weapons. She was born with it; activated combat-ready. But then, that’s not so different from Jaune inheriting Crocea Mors, is it? It might not be what either of them would have selected or been most suited for if they’d had the chance to say for themselves at the start, but... well, we’re far from the start, now. And Penny does choose Floating Array, when it matters. When she conjures weapons in her new, self-created body, she instinctively reaches for what she knows, what’s familiar. Her father’s providence. So for me, the moment you’re alluding to... it’s already happened. The whole point of leveraging Ambrosius’ limitations in the way they did is that Penny is separated from the parts of her that can be weaponized-- she watches her synthetic body eat itself, consumed by its own self-destructive urges. It doesn’t get much more metaphor-made-literal than that!

What remains, then, is Penny. And Penny uses Floating Array.

If Penny comes back and doesn’t resume the Winter Maidenhood (which I think is... low on the list of options, given Winter’s desperation and the likelihood that Maiden transference shenanigans are going to be a part of the vehicle that allows Penny to return in the first place), then she won’t have a choice. Either because that will mean she’s back in a 3.0 robot body (in which case it’s the same lack of choice she always had; Pietro wouldn’t give her an unfamiliar weapon after all that) or because she’s a Regular Normal Flesh Gal now and unless her Semblance is telekinesis (which it may be!!! we don’t know!!!) a weapon like Floating Array just isn’t on the table. But all of that, as I’ve already laid out, has to contend with so many unknown factors. How she comes back, and in what form, and at which time.

If Penny does end up designing a wholly new weapon, to me that would signal total transformation, given the rules and themes of the world. And that... well, it depends on the execution, I suppose, but I think I’d find that a little alarming. That she’d choose to have so little of her old self in her new form. But on the other hand, maybe I’m dead wrong there! That could also be read as yet another gorgeous act of creation by the Maiden best suited to it; it could be Penny choosing to yes-and herself into doubling down on her identity. She could be SO MUCH of a person that she, and she alone, gets to make a new weapon for her new self. I’m not against any of that! 

But even if that’s the case, I still think we’d see the hard light version of Floating Array again, especially if we have a Maidenbowl Redux. Even if I were to concede to your point that it’s too bound up in her self-image issues, that doesn’t imply to me that she’d have to move beyond it. If she’s to contend with herself, if she’s to decide she’s a person and not a weapon as you lay out, she’s going to put all of herself in the effort. As the speech goes, it’s a part of her. Even if it’s just a part, that’s still... a part. And this show has never been about severing yourself from your broken bits; it’s been about embracing them tenderly and letting them actually heal.

...also, Floating Array is *checks notes* cool. 

[saturdaysky]

hello! i hope you don't mind a message, but i am just excited to see someone else who liked AMCE and would love to know if you have recs for books that are similar, because i've been thinking about it for like a month straight since i finished reading it and would love something else to occupy my brain the way that it did. no pressure to answer ofc, just happy to share good vibes over a book :)

I do not mind it at all! <3

I do have some books that scratched a similar itch as A Memory Called Empire! I looooved the thoughtful focus on culture and language and identity within an intricate setting, so these recs follow that pattern somewhat.

Under a cut because this got kind of long.

The Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie

Liked the exploration of culture, identity, and imperialism in AMCE? You will probably like these books, since they also grapple with those themes. Also present is the exploration of personhood, who has it, and who does not -- because our main character is a person who used to be a starship. Or well, sort of. Wikipedia has a decent blurb:

The novel follows Breq—who is both the sole survivor of a starship destroyed by treachery, and the vessel of that ship's artificial consciousness—as she seeks revenge against the ruler of her civilization.

These books are honestly some of my favorite books ever. They combine a really thoughtful and deliberate focus on all the stuff mentioned above, fascinating plots and world-building, and characters who absolutely made me Feel Things. Highly recommended if you like, say, emotionally closed-off and damaged characters learning to care and be cared for while also skillfully navigating an intricate web of power to pursue their goals and reckon with the harm they've caused. But with bonus smart thoughts about robots.

The Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh

I haven't fully made my way through this series, but it's rewarding every time I sit down to read another book. The books follow Bren Cameron, diplomat to an alien court, as he negotiates the intricate web of politics and intrigue involved in making sure the crash-landed colony ship he represents doesn't get obliterated or obliterate anyone else, despite humans making some monumental fuck-ups in the recent past.

And when you live and work and eat among one people, how much do you really belong to the people you came from? Of course, neither side really trusts someone who straddles both worlds, and to cap it off, the atevi people he lives among are different from humans in a fundamental way: they have no word for friend or love because those are alien concepts to the atevi. They do not feel such things. Instead, they live by an intricate web of obligation and favors. Trust is something a little more practical and a lot more deadly, for the atevi.

But these are not heartless novels -- part of the joy is watching the main characters grow meaningful relationships, even though the form is fraught and strange and never quite means the same thing to the people on either side.

If you like slow and thorough explanations of culture where meeting with your friend's grandmother is a potentially perilous activity (because the tea might be poisoned, because she might take you on a hunting trip you won't come back from, because she's a formidable political power and might be trying to assassinate your friend, because your friend might know all of this and have sent you anyway, also your friend is the king) these are books you might like.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

If you like deep dives of culture, language, identity, and loyalty within the deadly intrigue of a fantasy court, I hiiiiighly recommend this book. The book follows Maia, the youngest and least-favored heir to the throne who gets unexpectedly crowned when everyone else in line dies and must quickly learn to survive the cutthroat politics. But Maia isn't cutthroat by nature; he is kind and must negotiate how to keep that kindness in the face of pressures that would be easy to solve with cruelty, as well as people keen to take advantage of what they think of as a weakness.

This book'll hit you with a lot of fantasy language at first (it's a focus of the book), but if you stick with it you'll be fine. You're learning all this intricate court language at the same time as our protag; he too is a little out of his depth at the start.

Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein

I dearly want to go back and read these -- it's been a few years, but they absolutely sucked me in. The books follow Rowan, a steerswoman, as she tracks down the mystery of a strange and incongruous gemstone. In-universe steerswomen are basically traveling scientists and naturalists who have taken an oath of truth.

The books start out in what seems like your fairly typical Standard Fantasy Setting with wizards and dragons, but as Rowan learns more about the strange gem, it's clear that this Standard Fantasy Setting is...not as it seems. There are three things that I loved about these books: the sense of wonder and discovery as our fantasy scientist protag reasons through problems and begins to discover she lives in a sci fi world, the interesting relationship between the main characters, and the excitement you as a reader have when YOU realize exactly what mysterious object Rowan is describing and what the implications of that are for the setting.

The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Riveting series -- brutal and beautiful. Straddles the line in some respects between sci fi and fantasy. Follows characters who live on a far, far-future Earth plagued by catastrophic climate events called "Seasons" that last generations. There are some people born who have power drawn from the earth; these people are alternately hated and ruthlessly trained to hone their powers to attempt to prevent another Season. (This sort of sounds like the setup to a YA coming-of-age novel, but it is really really not.)

The world and fantastical aspects are fascinating (cyclical post apocalyptic societies! geology magic!), and the books themselves explore family bonds, racism in both a personal and systemic sense, and broken systems and the wounds they leave upon the people within them even as those people wound others. The series is not a light read, but it is a good one.

Literally anything by Ursula K. Leguin

All of her work could be recommended if you liked AMCE. Her writing spans fantasy and science fiction, and includes thoughtful and moving explorations of some similar ideas: culture and cultural exchange, gender, different societal setups, you name it.

If you're looking for a good novel, The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic for a reason. If you'd like a sample platter of interesting short stories, The Birthday of the World and Other Stories is wonderful.

[bigskydreaming]

what are your opinions on we are robin?

Massively complicated by the fact that DC's writers don't have an ACAB bone in their collective bodies.

Dunno how new to my blog you are and thus how familiar or not you are with my ACAB stance for Dick and my personal tendency to never acknowledge or interact with the specific idea of Dick as a cop...like there's more than enough material for me to work with without ever having to delve into that and I fundamentally believe being a cop is counter to everything I see as Dick's core premise and makes no sense given the specific origins and continuities I view as most 'him' -

But I WOULD have a lot of thoughts about how Dick would feel about this massive city-wide movement that he had no hand in creating and how he would inevitably feel personally responsible for every life to put on a facscimile of his family's costume AND the things they did in those costumes (such as the kid who was manipulated into killing someone while in that guise, per the Court of Owls' agenda).....

AND I would have a ton of thoughts about the fact that it was Alfred who secretly engineered this movement and how he of all people should know how Dick might feel about that, and thus how Dick WOULD feel about that information, but complicated and coupled with the fact that Alfred most certainly was motivated in part by his grief for Dick and seeing this as a kind of legacy, a way to honor his grandson, and able to justify to himself any transgressions towards Dick's feelings here with the idea that Dick wasn't alive TO be hurt by his actions here....

BUT the reason I avoid engaging with We Are Robin content beyond acknowledging it as Duke's origin story in the background of Duke content I write....

Is I absolutely can not - or more to the point - WILL NOT - attempt to justify Dick's decision to get all the kids arrested and locked up for their own safety while he went after the Court alone.

To be clear - I absolutely am of the opinion that Dick was and always will be right and justified in not wanting to see anyone get hurt in the colors and image of his family's legacy. That this has absolutely NOTHING to do with his impression of any such individual's competency, nor is it about trying to restrict their agency. That its wholly a PERSONAL thing for him, its a private instinct that is entirely reasonable and allowable, for him to have a kneejerk need to keep more people from dying or suffering in that specific mantle that he never intended to BE a legacy beyond just himself.

I headcanon that after Jason himself, nobody hated the memorial in the cave more than Dick, because the last image he had of his family was them lying dead on the ground of the circus ring, just broken bodies colored from high above in the classic Grayson colors and covered in blood. That THAT specifically is the image Dick so often saw in his nightmares in his early years in the Manor, that is the SPECIFIC visual Bruce so often comforted him about upon waking....and that it was a massive slap in the face and an indication of Bruce's most unfortunate tunnel-vision tendencies in his own grief, that it never even OCCURRED to Bruce that in memorializing Jason in the specific way he did, he was also subjecting Dick to a constant, ever present visual reminder of one of Dick's personal most traumatic images....the sight and idea of his family, now not just his parents but also his brother....reduced to just broken, bloody costumes he'd never get to see as anything but that again.

Not to mention then captioning this memorial with "a good soldier" and thus in the process of disrespecting Jason's true bond with Bruce, simply because Bruce couldn't handle that at the time and was trying to literally DISTANCE himself from that view of his loss, the loss of a son, of family....Bruce simultaneously disrespected Dick's legacy of his family and everything he'd created Robin to be, and envisioned Jason-as-Robin to be from the moment Dick gave Jason his own old costume and embraced him as the new Robin and by extension, HIS family as much as Bruce's.....like, no matter what Bruce intended for HIMSELF and his feelings about Jason's death with that caption, he literally reduced Dick's tribute to his parents and expression of brotherhood to his brother to.....nothing more than the uniform of a child soldier, a subordinate of the Batman in HIS personal crusade. Something that Jason never actually was, and Dick CERTAINLY had never created - or gave Jason his blessing as - Robin to be.

So on that front, I have no problem with Dick WANTING to keep all the Robins, every child who called themselves one, safe - and to take on the Court of Owls alone, by himself, because like it or not, that will ALWAYS be personal for him. That is about HIS family in a way that it will never be about the family, the heritage, of anyone else, even his adopted siblings. The Court were after HIM, specifically, and always were and always would be. I don't see anything hypocritical about Dick's desire to keep kids out of that fight when he himself would have never been okay with Bruce benching him as Robin in some random fight....because this fight is deeply personal for Dick in a way that's not transferable, and to be honest, I see his desire to keep anyone else from dying as a Robin, in a fight against the Court ESPECIALLY....I see it as an inherently selfish want of Dick's. 

A selfishness that I think he's entirely justified in having. Its not about anyone but him. Its about HIM not having to deal with the burden of any more deaths in his family's colors, his family's name, when he in all likelihood originally created Robin in that particular guise because he figured he'd likely die as Robin at some point, and thus he'd never have to see anyone die in the image of his family's costume and colors ever again because the only person left TO die in them, at the time, was he himself.....thus kinda ensuring for Dick that when he did die, he'd go out just as his parents did, which in his youth at least was likely a weirdly kinda comforting idea for him.

So on the one hand, Dick's desire to keep the kids out of harm's way was ultimately a selfish - but justifiably so - desire to not see anyone else dead or injured in a literal WAR of CHILDREN being fought in his personal family colors and image....especially when 99% of them had literally no idea what the colors they were fighting in signified and meant for the mantle's original creator.

BUT.

BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT.

Where this all falls apart for me, and why I don't just go with this take and instead just kinda sidestep around the whole story itself and don't engage with it....

Is there's absolutely no way to 'fix' the story as is.....without coming up with an entirely different middle climax, in which Dick finds some way to sideline the kids without getting them all arrested.

Cuz see, what I'm NOT gonna ever do, is try and argue from an in story perspective, that Dick would ever be stupid enough, or try to justify, getting kids - many of them marginalized, and people of color specifically - arrested in the name of keeping them SAFE.

That's just stupid to the nth degree, and unilaterally the fault of DC's writers being oblivious to the real-world realities of police brutality and the interactions and dynamic people of color have with the actual police.

It was DC's fuck-up there, but I - especially as a white writer and fan - am not going to try and fix or transform that fuck up short of entirely rewriting the whole second half of We Are Robin's plot, which to be honest, I don't see as likely to ever be a priority for me as there's so much other content in Dick's narratives I'd rather get to first. Its just way too far down the list, the premise itself doesn't interest or engage me enough to make me WANT to invest in that particular story heavily enough to create a whole other direction for it, that navigates around the issue I have with it here.

So again, I mostly just....don't engage with it. Because I can't see Dick's stance on the issue of his family's legacy ever being other than what I always see it as, and thus see it as here, but I'm definitely never going to find it appropriate to write Dick trying to justify his decision to ENGINEER the police arresting all these kids for their PROTECTION....to a black character like Duke in specific.

Because its not. But again, this wasn't Dick's decision at the end of the day, because he's a fictional character who can only make the decisions he's written making. And thus it was the decision of writers who wrote these characters in situations that contained analogues to real world issues without keeping centered an awareness of how those issues intersect with people of different identities, particularly people of color and black people in specific.

So its not a decision that made me like, dislike Dick, because its one that I don't think he should have ever been written making, but its not a decision I care to justify in universe.

And that's about all I think I ever intend to - or even could - expand on that subject, I'm pretty sure. *Shrugs*

Oh wait, no, I lied!

Quick thought for white fans in particular....because I HAVE seen this subject tackled at least once or twice in fiction, from an ACAB standpoint that had Duke reaming out Dick for his decision here, for the same reasons I'm outlining above.....

This isn't an attempt to gatekeep or police anybody as like, I'm not actually ever trying to do that, I'd have to know every fic writer's personal identity and marginalizations TO do that, and I'm not pretending to know that or asking to, like, its just not on the menu for me so please don't get me wrong, this is purely aimed at a plea for white writers in particular to exercise personal accountability and good, sincere judgment in this regard:

No matter your personal feelings about Dick Grayson, the subject of Robin, or any of this in general, PLEASE keep in mind before utilizing Duke as a mouthpiece for giving Dick shit for this in the name of smearing the latter's character or making him look bad, like.....

Dick is of Romani descent. In the New 52 continuity as well as pre-Flashpoint. That's been made explicitly clear, and as such......there is no substitute in our current real world zeitgeist for the interactions the police have with black people, but please keep in mind that Romani people have a very, VERY long history of being subject to police brutality and persecution in a wide range of countries. Its a big part of why so many people are so uncomfortable with cop!Dick in the first place, and as such, it makes treating him as this naive, privileged white guy when having the realities of police brutality explained to him by another character, like.....not look exactly like you might intend there, because the reality is he's not SUPPOSED to be that character, but too few people at DC, and ESPECIALLY the people writing the We Are Robin stories, like, completely fail to ever extend the idea of Dick being Romani to any kind of examination of what kinds of lived experiences, perspective or perceptions this results in him having specifically.

And that's a failure on DC's part, but you don't need to go making it your failure as well, so for those of us who are white like, this really is something that should be kept centered before we decide to engage with story elements like the above one from We Are Robin, and like, if we do, then HOW we go about that specifically.

[ohshitmomitsawritingblog]

Hi! Can I request romantic hcs of post-war Sasuke? Like, would there be anything different from how it would've been before the war? Would it be someone from another village?

 Post-war sasuke …. anon your mind. All sasukes are good but this one is like a fine wine WITH a complimentary cheeseboard because there’s just so. much. potential. Also this got really really long and a bit off topic and I apologize DEEPLY.

Post-War Sasuke

So. Post war sasuke. Sad, broken, beat down. I think as much as Sasuke tries to be content with his lot in life, he’s just tired in a way pre-war Sasuke just isn’t.

Like. Here’s the thing. Sasuke hasn’t ever, in his life, been able to form a solid identity for himself. People talk about being shaped by trauma, and this is especially true for Sasuke. Being born a Uchiha, for better or worse, puts Sasuke on the outskirts of the society he’s born into before he’s even aware of it. The murder of his clan is compounded by the betrayal of his brother. This is the big event that triggers a lot of things around and inside Sasuke. Other smaller, but still traumatizing, life altering things happen. Orochimaru happened. The Chuunin exams happens. Itachi happens. Again.

An early Shippuden romance with Sasuke would be slightly possible in the way that it’s not so much romance as a pre-romance romance. Not quite friends but not quite lovers because Sasuke wouldn’t ever say ‘I love you’ or ‘you’re mine and we’re exclusive’. It’s just an unspoken agreement/ultimatum.

If Sasuke ever took interest in anyone during his time with Orochimaru, it’d be something he’d only be half aware of, or dismiss entirely.

In a lot of ways, he’d be far more rigid than post war Sasuke in love. His S/O is with him, or against him. They have to, HAVE TO fully support his revenge against Itachi, and later on Konoha, or no dice.

He could be very oblivious to downright dismissive to his S/O’s feelings and thoughts. This trait is especially prevalent during Sasuke’s very Special Corrupt Political Figure Assassination arc.

Speaking of which, Akatsuki/Danzo Murder arc Sasuke? -100 chance at romance. Please avoid.

This is of course on the premise that he gets with someone. More than likely, he wouldn’t get into any sort of relationship with a potential S/O.

He’ll push away any sort of romantic relationship, even if he really, really likes someone. He’s not at the point of burning out yet, and maybe, in the back of his mind that is isolated from the many, many roadblocks, he pictures a world where he can speak with this person who he so clearly - in his mind - likes, one on one, with no threat of a tragedy, repeated, tugging at his brain like a dark cloud.

Ultimately, pre-war, (especially early Shippuden) Sasuke is a human being, and humans love and crave connection. Of course there’s the possibility that he’d be interested.

Sasuke however, is someone driven by fear. Fear of loss, fear of not being good enough, fear of always, always failing the most important people in his life in the most fundamental of ways. 

To quote Game of Throne’s Gregor Clegane: ‘The pain was bad (…) but the worst thing was, was that it was my brother who did it.’ Which I think summarizes that kind of betrayal, and resulting fear of becoming close to others, that Sasuke carries with him. Part of the reason Sasuke is the way he is, is because he’s unable to process and move on from the pain Itachi inflicts on him. Not even Itachi’s half admittance of the wrongs he’s done to Sasuke and the resulting declaration of love really changes Sasuke on a fundamental level, because it’s ultimately not for Sasuke, it’s for Itachi.

Sasuke post-war is a Sasuke that gives up. He’s tired, he’s burnt out, his brain and to a lesser extent his body is just worn down from the single minded drive for revenge Sasuke has carried with him for so long. 

He goes with Konoha because it is familiar, and it is the only place who will take him. He accepts punishment because part of him is convinced he deserves it - because killing Itachi only made him more confused, only added to the grief - and because it’s just easier than fighting a system that has proven well adept at crushing Uchihas. 

He leaves because he can’t tolerate Konoha - and the people in it - for very long. He loves them. He hates him. He resents. He envies. He ultimately feels empty, and is convinced he deserves this feeling. 

I think the biggest difference between pre- and post-war Sasuke, is that he’s so worn down that he just can’t run from his feelings anymore.

There’s no pushing away, or avoiding it when he gets hit with romantic feelings for someone.

Sasuke is burnt out, but he’s young, and for once in his life, as he wonders Shinobi lands by himself, he learns about the world outside of the context of potential battle and conflict. He learns about fertility festivals held in oceanside villages in the south of the Land of Wind; he learns of women who dive deep into the oceans in search of pearls and other treasures in the Land of Waves. He learns he likes dango, just not the kind made in Konoha. He learns he doesn’t the overly savory, preserved foods that are popular in the north. 

In that way, I can see it being more likely that he meets an S/O outside of Konoha. I wouldn’t entirely shoot down the possibility, it’s just not as likely, just by the fact that Sasuke makes sure he’s almost always out of the village if he has the option. 

This is an imagines blog so the details of how, where, and why Sasuke meets and hooks up with his S/O is up in the air: but let it be known that when Sasuke falls in love, he falls so far, and so fucking deep. He’s helpless. 

The gravity and depth of his feelings both scare and excite him. He carries some intense anxieties over the future of the relationship close to his chest, but unlike before, where Sasuke would distance himself from those feelings, he holds them tight. He doesn’t know what’s different now. He only knows he wants what he has with his S/O, and maybe, just maybe, even more.

Sasuke eventually goes from learning about himself, to opening himself to another again. This time, it’s new, and this time, he actually has a choice. 

Sasuke’s love language is a mix of quality time and the spoken word. He’s an intellectual lover, he falls in love with people through a mixture of spending time in the same space, working toward the same goal, and exchanging words. He likes someone whose an introspective conversationalist. His and his S/O’s talks are sometimes casual and go nowhere, and sometimes deep and in the middle of the night. All of them are important to him.

The courtship is an agonizingly slow, but steady process. Sasuke doesn’t quite know how to operate in a romantic relationship, and he’s too proud to confide that in his S/O, even after they get together. 

He’s not exactly an easy person to love, and although Sasuke isn’t as prickly and turbulent as he was in his past, old habits die hard. He’s a bit like a cat: wanting attention and love on his terms, and gets spooked over the most minor of infractions. He needs an S/O with a lot of patience and a strong backbone.

He wakes his S/O up in the middle of the night, tells them something horribly fucked up from his past, and then turns over and falls into a dead asleep. 

When he cries in front of his S/O for the first time and feels no shame, nor need to hide himself, that’s when he knows it’s for real for real.

As a romantic gift of sorts, he’ll take his S/O to remote, out of the way villages or places he particularly liked. The peace and fascination these places instill in him is something he wants to share with his S/O.

Sasuke isn’t one for material gifts. He’s grown up with that fat Uchiha check in his bank account, always had food in his stomach and cloths on his back, so he just really sees no point in things like jewelry or cloths as gifts. 

Sasuke was always inclined to more practical, no frills-oriented way of life, and living a very nomadic lifestyle encouraged this trait. If he moves in with his S/O, he has absolutely no idea how to decorate, and even less interest. To make himself feel useful, he would probably would opt to do things like put together a kitchen full of good quality ingredients and cutlery. It takes time for Sasuke to get used to domestic living in more ways than one.

Home is a very strange concept for Sasuke. It would be a huge shift in their relationship, and in Sasuke, to take that step to move in together.

 I don’t think post-war Sasuke thinks about his life in neat terms like his younger self would. I think pre-war Sasuke would probably think he would get married before even considering moving in with someone. Produce heirs out of obligation to his clan. Become a respected man in his field of choice. Everything an honorable son of a practically dead clan would do.

instead, post-war Sasuke takes life in stride, especially with the presence of an S/O. If they aren’t keen on marriage or children, Sasuke just goes with it. It’s not that he’s willing to obey his S/O’s every wish so much as he’s just more relaxed. If it happens, it happens. 

Labels and titles become something he just doesn’t care much about. If he loves his S/O he loves his S/O, if he’s shadow Hokage he’s shadow Hokage; or not. It’s that simple.

In terms of physical affection, Sasuke has a tendency to sling his arm around his S/O’s neck and bring their face up (or down) to his level and kisses them on the cheek pretty habitually. It’s a very territorial display.

On the rare occasion he wants something put out for display, like a bowl he was gifted in a tiny village, or a painting given as a gift from whatever small kingdom he visits, he’ll present it to his S/O first. Even if they’re with Sasuke on his travels, or staying in whatever village or town they decide to settle in, it’s important to Sasuke that his S/O has a say in just about everything in their lives. He also just wants them to like his rare assertion to the aesthetics of their home.

Speaking of, he’s the type of man who secretly loves hearing his partner’s opinions, but will never show it. This is in direct contrast to a younger Sasuke, who didn’t want to hear anything from anyone about anything. With age comes wisdom and a willingness to love people in the way they deserve, with this guy.

Sasuke just overall becomes more pensive and considerate. While he’s not ever exactly perfectly mentally healthy, and he can have bad, bad tunnel vision, the days of feeling hunted by his own emotions are more or less gone. Life is a less frantic need to succeed as soon as possible so much as it is to just live. It makes for a lighter Sasuke.

If Sasuke and his S/O have children, he practically becomes a homebody. Despite his feelings of obligation towards Naruto, he puts aside his unofficial title as shadow Hokage and well and truly settles down. Family is so, so important to Sasuke. Starting one scares the hell out of him, when he has his first child he promises himself that he’ll never, never leave them. He knows what it is to be alone and put aside. He would never do that to his child. Fuck what Kishimoto said.

Also as an end note: Blood Bank is a very Romantic Sasuke Song.

[villainousshakespeare]

A Forest Interlude

Summary: Eleonore (OFC) discovers a wounded man in the woods near her home and seeks to heal him. Little does she know that it is none other than the heir to the throne, Prince Hal of England.

Rated E

Warnings: smut, sex fluff, angst, oral sex (female receiving), fingering, hand jobs

In this chapter: Hal’s reality comes crashing into his romance

Read the entire story on AO3

@nrthmnsplbnd09 ;  @nonsensicalobsessions @yespolkadotkitty @just-the-hiddles @from-hel-i-with-love  livviedoo @hopelessromanticspoonie @arch-venus25 @caffiend-queen @dangertoozmanykids101 @kellatron55 @myoxisbroken @thecutestlittlebunbunfairy @vodka-and-some-sass @shiningloki @hiddlesholic

Time seemed to have slowed almost to a halt as Hal watched the proceedings from the shadows of the doorway to the kitchen. His mood of just seconds ago, buoyant, lustful, and eager, shattered and turned to a panicked horror as he watched his brother Jon step forward and introduce himself to Nell. Desperately he tried to Will Jon to disappear, or at least to speak no further, that Hal himself might be the one reveal his true identity to her.

"And as for what I call your lucky guest, why brother and His Highness, Prince of Wales."

The words were spoken, impossible to be recalled. When he finally ascended the throne, years hence God willing, Hal vowed that his very first act would be to declare fratricide legal.  

"The Prince of Wales? Why what a fool I've been," he heard Nell utter in shock.

Watching her, the way her back stiffened and her head snapped up as if struck, Hal grieved for his Nell, cursing himself, his brother, all the world for inflicting any sort of unpleasantness on her. The men surrounding Jon, grasping leaches all, exchanged glances, chuckling amongst themselves, and Hal's hand itched to do violence to them. How dare they condescend to one so far above them in all measurable ways?

"Your Grace must pardon me, pray come inside," Nell said a moment later, wrapping herself in the poise and grace born of generations of nobility. "You and your fellows are most welcome here."

They would be more welcome at the bottom of the Chanel, Hal thought darkly. He should step forward, he knew. He should proclaim himself and rescue Nell from the situation she now found herself trapped in. Yet even as he knew this to be true, his feet refused to move. He did not think he could bring himself to look into her eyes, those lovely, fathomless grey pools that glistened like a calm winter sea, and see the betrayal shining there.

"Might I be so bold as to ask your name?" Jon asked Nell solicitously as she lead them a few steps further into the room. "And into who's good care my brother fell?"

The way Jon was holding Nell's hand was becoming problematic for Hal. His younger brother had always been a touch quiet, particularly in comparison to Hal. This had allowed the general opinion of the world to think him shy, even a touch innocent. In fact, Hal knew that Jon was far more perceptive, and far more shrewd than people gave him credit for. He had noted long ago the way his brother used his reputation to put others, particularly women, at their ease. They would find themselves drawing him out, comforting him, assuaging his shyness, and the next thing they knew they would find themselves in his bed. Hal would be damned if Nell followed such a course.

"My name is Eleonore D'Amboise, Sir," she told him, saying her full name for the first time in Hal's hearing. "My father is the Earl of Danbury. This house, though mean, belongs unto the Earl."

"D'Amboise! In sooth," one of the other men gasped, "oh fortune, smile you down! Perchance it then your mother is at home?"

Another round of ribald laughter, grating upon Hal's ears, greeted this question. The speaker, one Archibald West, was known to Hal, a younger son desperate for advancement. Silently he swore to make sure that the man was posted to the farthest reaches of Antipodes.

"She is, sir, but doth not receiveth guests," Nell ground out repressively. "I fear it is with me that you must deal."

"A hardship more for you than for ourselves," Jon assured her sweetly.

"I pray you all, be seated at your rest," Nell's voice was beginning to fray about the edges, "While I do go to fetch for you The Prince."

The bite on the last words was enough to convince Hal that she had had enough. Saying a silent prayer to whatever force might look out for wayward men, Hal steeled himself and stepped into the room.

"No need for that, my Lady, I am here."

As often happened all eyes instantly swung to him. He wished intently they had not. The men surrounding his brother were all quick to nod their heads in deference, even if their faces showed surprise or stark amusement based on their varying natures. Jon, a soft smile on his face that showed not a hint of surprise, raised a speaking eyebrow at Hal as he quickly took in Hal's casual clothing and the sling holding up his arm. Hal could see the questions unspoken in his brothers eyes, and sighed at the knowledge that a long and painful grilling was inevitable.

At last, reluctantly, he turned his eyes to Nell. Lord, she was beautiful in her anger! His first thought, fundamentally inappropriate, had him willing his over eager cock to stay still. This was decidedly not the time. As he focused in on her eyes, however, any stirrings of lust were quickly overcome by the icy cold deluge of regret. The hurt, betrayal, and worse embarrassment he saw cut him to the very bone. He needed to get her alone, he thought. To explain everything, as if there was an explanation sufficient to his crime

"Harry, thank the Lord that you are well," Jon said at last, as the accusing silence stretched out.

"I wrote to you as much, I do recall," he replied with silken malice, wanting to shake his brother for his ill timed arrival. "There was no reason, then, to seek me out."

"It seems you have a great deal to discuss," Nell's brisk voice cut through the tension between the brothers, "and therefore will I leave you to yourselves a go seek out some repast for your friends."

"But tarry, Nell, you do not need to flee," he pleaded, grabbing her arm as she went to go by him.

"Your Highness must forgive me, as I hope," she ground out, not looking at him. "For I am not attired as I am in fit state to receive such august guests. I beg you, Sire, give me leave to go."

The title, spoken with such a mixture of formality and loathing, caused him to release her from his grasp.

"Then go Nell, but I warn you go not far," he told her quietly, voice pitched so only she could hear him. "For you and I have much still to discuss, and know, my love, that if you try to run, that I will go to Hell to track you down."

Not deigning to answer him, Nell dropped a quick, graceful curtsy and fled the room.

"It never ceases to amaze me Hal," Jon said, crossing to clap him on the shoulder, "how it doth matter not where you do go, but there be some fair, beddable maid there. Tell me, have you seen the mother yet? If rumor and the daughter's looks hold true, she must put Aphrodite then to shame! Come, out with it! I know you've lingered here. And now 'tis clear the reason for your stay. So is it just the daughter you pursued, or had your way with both of the D'Amboise?"

Not thinking, but acting purely on instinct, Hal's good arm swung out to strike his brother a blow across the face. Jon, reeling backwards from the punch in a quite satisfactory fashion, was quickly helped up by his companions to look accusingly at Hal.

"You will not speak, Jon, of the lady thus," he seethed. "She has done nothing to deserve such talk. It is all to her skill I owe my life, for I was left for dead, if you must know. The lady found me lying in the woods, wounds to my head, my ribs, a broken arm, and brought me back here to attend on me."

"Forgive me Hal, I did but speak in jest," Jon insisted, eyes wide at Hal's heat. "I mean no disrespect unto the maid."

"Then give none, for I will not hear a word that anyone shall speak against her, Jon. For she is clever, kind, and generous. Her family name, though the Earl be exiled, is of the highest rank, impeccable. And as for Nell, the Lady Eleonore, she is herself so far above you Jon, or me or any of those here amassed, that we should look up to but kiss her foot. So keep a civil tongue within your mouth, lest I be forced to disconnect your jaw."

"Why, faith now Harry, this is a new tune!" Jon laughed, massaging his jaw as he did. "What, would you wed her that you speak her so? Indeed, she must be a true paragon to so impress the wastrel Prince of Wales!"

"Try not to be an altogether fool," he sniped back. "Come, I would have a word or two alone."

As Hal lead Jon outside into the sunshine, his mind reeled at his brother's words. The question, so idly put as it was struck Hal in the gut. Surely Jon did jest! Yes, Hal was rightly enraged by his brother's slight against Nell, and therefore sought to defend her honor, but what prince and knight would do less? He would not let so good a woman as she be slandered by anyone. Not when the only sin she had committed had come about at his hands. But marriage? That was years away, and no doubt destined to be to a foreign princess selected by his father more for her lineage and connections than for her figure or her mind.

And yet... that little voice whispered in his mind, if one were to look for lineage and connections, one could do far worse than a daughter of the D'Amboise family.

"In faith now, Hal, be not so wrought with me," Jon was saying as they sat on low bench in front of the house. "I did not mean to raise you dander up."

"Why came you here to seek me, tell me that?" Hal demanded, letting his inward thoughts still.

"'Twas not for idleness, nor mischief Hal," Jon's voice became serious. "The King, our father, seeks to have you home. I thought it better, having read your note, that I did seek you rather than his man. For, while I might make sport over your chase, I never would betray you to the King."

"Ah, thus I see you did act as a friend," Hal sighed, running his hand over his face. "And did receive for thanks nothing but blows. Forgive me, Jon, you caught me by surprise. The blow I landed you I should have rung against my own head, for I much trespassed. I had not told the Lady my true rank."

"I guessed as much, from watching her react," Jon grinned, much to Hal's irritation. "I must confess, it came as a surprise. If should did know who she had in her home, she might not have been quite so noble, Hal."

Jon had things so backwards that Hal could but laugh. He should be insulted, he knew, that his brother believed that his title might be the thing to attract Nell to him, but he himself had acknowledged that to most women it was great incentive. To his sweet Nell, thought, his name was the thing which he feared would come between them.

"What happens that the King doth call me home?" he asked, knowing he must return and dreading it.

"Why war, what else? The border with the Welsh is all ablaze with skirmishes and raids. It will be full out battle before long."

"With Wales, you say, why that is just the thing!" Hal smiled grimly.

"I beg your pardon? Why say you such a thing?" Jon gaped at him. "I never knew you to have lust for blood."

"Nor do I now, though I shun not to fight," he shrugged, mind racing. "But there are matters I must soon arrange, for which I will require our Father's aid. And if there be unrest with our Welsh lands, it happily doth lay the ground work out."

"And might I know to what these matters tend?" Jon asked curiously. "For you to seek a favor of the King, it must be truly something of great weight!"

"It is indeed a thing most dear to me," he said, picturing Nell spread out on his bed. There is a wedding I mean to prevent, for that the would be groom is but a worm."

"And what can war with Wales avail to that?"

"Why Jon, his sympathies lie with the Welsh, or in any case might look to do. And if he were to rise in his estate, and ally with a greater power still, by forging of a sacred marriage bond, our Father would be strong against the match."

"I see, 'tis good of you to let him know," Jon's attempt to look innocent would most like have fooled others, but Hal saw right through it and bristled at his amusement. "That he might scorch this fire or ere it lights. But tell me, brother, who might be the groom? And who the hopeful bride that you would cross?"

"The bride is far from hopeful, lest it be a hope that this cursed wedding may be stopped. And do not think to I know not what you mean," Hal glared at his brother. "I owe her Jon, and would not see her wed, where she would be unhappy, that is all."

"If you do say so, Hal, I'll take your word," Jon said.

"Speak not of this to any of your friends," Hal let his disapproval of Jon's cohorts sound in the word. "I do not wish it to be widely known. And while I speak of them, I want them gone. I do not trust a single one of them."

"Why, what a lark that you are grown so strict," Jon laughed out loud, rising and holding out his hand to Hal. "Have you no fear, I will away with them. But you, my brother, must be gone with us."

Hal closed his eyes, trying to deny the truth of his brother's words. He knew it was time. A summons from the King could not be denied, not even by the Crown Prince. His idyll here had come to an end, as he had known it would. If only he had a day more, he thought forlornly, or perchance a week. He had not even begun to discover the pleasure to be had with his darling Nell. Not that such pleasures would be granted now, but it was cruel that things should end when they had just begun.

"I will require an hour or two of time," he said, "for I must make amends to my hostess."

"Take all the time you need, my dearest Hal. As long as we are on the road today."

She would understand, he tried to tell himself. After all, he had not lied to her exactly. He had simply omitted titles. And in truth, it was no more than she had done herself. Except, he could not help but remember, she had come clean with the truth, confessed herself before they had consummated their affair. He, a coward, had remained silent.

Could she find it in her heart to forgive him? And would he be able to live with himself if she did not?

[gra-sonas]

➡️  EW interview with Tyler from February 2019, right before 1x06 aired ⬅️ 

For a small town, a heck of a lot goes down in Roswell, New Mexico.

The CW drama has it all: there’s aliens, murder mystery, and some pretty steamy romances — that tragically are all on hold for the time being as their participants deal with catastrophic secrets and lies that have the potential to keep them apart indefinitely.

One of the relationships on the show that has stolen fans’ hearts and earned its own moniker on social media (#Malex) is the one between human veteran Alex (Tyler Blackburn) and extraterrestrial jaded genius Michael. In desperate need of more dirt on what’s to come between them and ahead of tonight’s high school throwback episode “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (WHERE EVERYTHING CHANGES!!), we caught up with Blackburn to talk all things #Malex and what the future holds as the truth outs.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s go back to the beginning a little — what was your initial impression of the reimagining of the series and Alex as a character? TYLER BLACKBURN: I remember the original series from when I was younger so when I heard of the reimagining, I was pretty nostalgic about it. I just thought it was great to have a character in this world that’s extraterrestrial  — and pretty unrealistic in many ways — be so real in very human ways and complex. I feel like I can understand his journey a lot; he’s really lost himself throughout his teenage and young adult years. He’s a broken man and I feel like we all understand that idea of needing to pick ourselves back up after losing bits and pieces of ourselves along the way. I just thought it was intriguing to play someone who has so many layers to him in a show that’s also so magical.

Did you then go back and watch the original series or did you want to come at this from a fresh perspective? I actually started watching the pilot of the first run and then I kind of decided that I wanted it to be its own thing and I hope it turns into its own thing, so I didn’t want to be influenced by the old one much. Alex is a very different character and I feel like it wouldn’t have done it justice, so I chose not to.

One of the differences in Alex in this version is that he’s gay. Was the show’s more inclusive nature this time around part of the appeal? Yeah, I feel like the coolest thing that made this very relevant was all of the different topics that were covered, including Alex being gay, including him being in the Air Force as a gay man, his struggle with his own identity, and his struggle with his own emotions towards someone who he feels like he can’t really be with easily. I just found that all to be very appealing. It gets juicer and juicer too, so it’s really cool to play the progression.

Do we get to see more of Alex’s military past this season? This season we do not get flashbacks of that. I actually asked for that, but they were like, ‘It’s not in the budget this season.’

I’m sure that kind of setting wouldn’t come cheap… Right? To create a war zone…So, no, we don’t really get the flashbacks. I feel like what’s interesting this whole season, though, is that he’s needing to confront really old emotions and really the fundamentals of his insecurities. I hope that in season 2 we can kind of see a little bit more of his life as an adult man throughout that time and his journey because even though he never really wanted to join the Air Force, — he was kind of forced to by his father — he found solace in it in a way. I think it was important for him to be part of something, part of a group of people who are fighting for the same thing. In some ways, it was really good for him to be in the Air Force, so I hope that they do explore it a bit more.

Did you have detailed conversations with the writers about his backstory then? To understand where he’s coming from? Oh yeah. One of my favorite things about this whole process was how collaborative it actually was among the actors and also with the writers and with Carina (Adly MacKenzie, show creator). It was fun to sit there and create backstory that isn’t in this season. Some of it’s known by Carina or the writers and we’re just not finding out quite yet, so to get those definite answers was good too. Like, how did he lose his leg? And just learning a little more about that.

Okay, let’s talk about #Malex. Fans are crazy for the romance between Alex and Michael. How has that reaction been for you? Honestly, it just fills me with joy. All of the relationships on this show are complex and have their own nuances to them that I think people can relate to in different ways. But just the fact that a gay relationship is being celebrated in this way — and it’s not even being celebrated because it’s a gay relationship, it’s just being celebrated because it’s such a tangible one that there’s so much history to — I take a lot of pride in that. Working with Michael Vlamis was honestly surprising. I wasn’t sure how it was going to play out and it exceeded every expectation; we created such a magnetic chemistry. We gave permission to each other to just go to the depths that we needed to go to in order to make this a real story. I think that it’s so beautiful that we live in a time where our audiences are celebrating this in that way. It makes my heart so full — it’s progress for sure. Even for Michael, he too is complex. He’s a little more sexually fluid so for him to represent a category of people who aren’t necessarily gay or straight, they just feel what they feel for who they feel it, that’s just a beautiful thing. It really makes his character so juicy too.

How do you think Alex would deal with knowing the truth about Michael? Could a relationship between them withstand that information? I feel like Michael’s being cautious. I think Alex has really given him the runaround up until this point. I don’t think the Michael would have as big of an issue as one might think in telling Alex, I think he just needs to fully trust him first. Because he loves him so much, I think he’d be more willing to be open up. Alex isn’t left completely in the dark for the whole season. You’ll have to watch to see how that unfolds and how that changes the relationship.

Eeek! Speaking of learning new things, let’s talk about tonight’s episode. It’s a flashback to the Roswell inhabitants as teens graduating high school. Was that just so much fun to play Alex as a teen goth kid? Yes! I graduated high school in 2004, so it was close enough to my real high school experience. Honestly, I always secretly wanted to be a goth punk! So I just love that Alex was that. It adds another level to him that I loved playing on where it was like, before all the trauma he was this free-spirited rebel. It’s just really cool to be able to play that then, and now play this closed-off, uncertain version of him. It really takes it full circle.

Was it difficult to leave behind all later traits of Alex’s you’ve picked up over the season? It wasn’t too hard because I feel like I know Alex really well, but it was fun. Some of the content in this flashback was a little hard to shoot. The woodshed scene? That was really crazy to shoot. We spent a lot of time on that scene.

We can’t say anything else about that for now (check back here after tonight’s episode for an in-depth interview with MacKenzie), but one more thing on this episode: Alex’s style! Did you have any say in his hair/makeup/jewelry? [Laughs] Little things were collaborative, like would his nail polish be chipped or would it be solid? Also with costume fittings, that tux really was my favorite suit of all of the ones I tried on for the prom.

We see some tension between Alex and Kyle (Michael Trevino) in this episode, but last week they were bonding a little and Alex seemed to forgive Kyle for bullying him in the past. Can we expect to see more of a friendship between them in the rest of the season? They start to join forces a bit. Trevino and I joked around about being the Hardy Boys going on these little excursions together. They definitely put their differences aside. They always kind of give each other sh—, but they start to understand each other on a different level and care for each other more. They each have skills that can be used to undercover the mystery of what is going on. I don’t want to say too much, but as you saw last episode, Alex found the piece of alien glass and now he has questions that he needs answered, so Kyle’s a source of answers.

Can you tease anything else about what’s to come this season? Tonight’s episode feels like a massive turning point… I’m very excited to see this episode. I remember reading the last script or two and there are some turns that I just really wasn’t expecting in regards to Rosa’s death and things of that nature. I thought we had it figured out and answered, but it’s revealed even more in the finale as far as that goes. So it keeps you hanging until the very end — it’s pretty wild. It isn’t exactly what you think.

~ EW

[intruality-overlord]

Why Are We (Best) Friends?

Warnings: excessive swearing, alcoholism, mentions of drugs, drug use, suggestive humor, implied sexual content (no smut), some gore descriptions. Generally, Remus stuff.

Taglist: @blogging-time @veraisnotfine @littlestr @jessibbb @broken-pens @hi-its-tutty @idkanameatall @moxiety--sanders101 @theyluna-womoon

Let me know if you want to be added or removed from the taglist! Last update Wednesday/Thursday. Second to last chapter! Damn nearly over already.

Chapter Seven: Fuck Me

The Present.

Patton flug Remus’s door open so fast there was briefly a void where it bluntly cut through and the air was too slow to refill the space.

And he caught the doorknob quickly before it knocked a hole in the wall because he wasn’t actually going to trash his friend’s place. That would be a dick move.

Patton made a beeline for Remus’s bed. Pulling out the mini fridge tucked underneath, not yet pausing to properly acknowledge Remus.

“Patton?”

“Remus.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think.”

Patton tipped his head back and—

Remus snatched it from Patton’s hands and promptly poured the unholy liquid on his carpet. What? Do you really think he cares more about a stain on his stupid carpet than his best friends mental breakdown? Shame. Shame on you.

Patton mournfully watched it sink into the carpet. There was a look in his eyes Remus knew meant he was mentally debating. “If you lick that off the floor I will disown you,” he snapped him out of it.

…

Coming to settle beside Patton, he rested a hand on his shoulder. “Tell me what happened, Puppy,” Remus carefully told him. He applied a warm, gentle pressure with his palm to Patton’s shoulder, who subconsciously leaned into the touch, knowing it helped ground him. The poor touch starved soul. Patton was ravanis for touch.

“Don’t call me Puppy. I’m not in the mood,” Patton quipped.

“Stop avoiding the question.”

“I got rid of my fake friends, happy?”

“You— you w-what?” Remus stammered, his grip briefly wavering, yet Patton collapsed further into him. Remus quickly braced him with his other hand as well. The faintest of smiles grace Patton as his eyes fluttered closed for a second. “So what? I’ve got you.”

“But why even are we friends, Patton?” Remus said, desperately confused. “They’re not wrong, you’ve said so yourself. I’m a bad influence on you.”

“You say that as if I’m any better of an influence on you,” Patton chided, slurring slightly, but he suddenly felt incredibly, painfully sober. The hopeless hurt in Remus’s voice felt like an ice cube sliding down his back.

“Seriously, Patton!”

Patton bit his tongue to repress a comment about Remus being a very un-serious person, or a, “Logan, is that you?” Instead he tried deflecting with a half/mostly-truth.

“It doesn’t matter. It never has, we just are what we are and I’m happy with us, aren’t you?” He said earnestly.

“It does matter if you’re going to give up your life as a light side for me— ditching all your friends— for me! Me, of all people,” Remus said, feeling like he was talking to a brick wall. “W-wha— what—” his hysterics muddled his words, “What kind of nutter does that?!”

“A nutter who has thought it’s tea time for the past couple years I suppose…” Patton dropped his eyes to his knotted fingers, a dead chuckle on his lips. Patton tripped into thinking of what he’s really just done.

(Patton didn’t have nearly as strict of a moral code as he used to. It’s only natural: Morals are completely subjective and change all the time. Currently, his moral code had been stripped down to two rules. Very lenient rules at that. One, as long as you’re not hurting others, it’s okay. This rule used to include “or yourself” but that part of the rule had been overwritten by his second rule. Don’t be a hypocrite.

Rule number two, don’t be a hypocrite, was the most important rule and it took prominence over every decision he made. It’s the rule that ultimately dissolved every other rule he’d ever made for himself and Thomas. As he kept breaking his own rules, he’d have to cross them off the list.

An identity crisis would be a polite way to describe Patton’s mental state. The subjectivity of morality, combined with his ultimately inconsequential feelings, shattered his entire selfhood. (See, his vobaculary consisted of some fucking brobdingnagian words.) But he didn’t mope about it. If his feelings didn’t matter to anyone else, why should they matter to him either?

Patton would also say that “treat others how you would like to be treated” was a rule he lived by too, but what he really means is “treat others how they treat you” which is, fundamentally, very different. It was also the rule he ended up justifying his words with (not that they needed justification. That’s not something truth requires). Patton had hurt them. He knew he did, and he knew it was wrong. Yet, he couldn’t seem to summon the energy to bother with apologies. They had treated him like shit. They talked down to and stepped all over his emotions and opinions. He had every right to do the exact same as far as he was concerned.

He was supposed to be morality, after all. He decided what was good and bad or inbetween. If the others disagreed, too bad, he was right by default.)

This is all a long way of saying fuck you. Fuck them. I’m fucking done.

(Fuck was Patton’s favourite word, if you couldn’t tell. It just felt so, well, fucking good to say. Fucking liberating. Fuck was a word he could always rely on for proper fucking emphasis, and to fill fucking awkward silences. Patton would never be speechless again, even when he’s too drunk to conceptualise language, now that he has Fuck to fill that void. Totally didn’t have anything to do with the fact Fuck rhymes with duck, something so innocent. So far away from each other while simultaneously being separated by only one letter. Patton could relate to that on a spiritual level.)

Meanwhile, as Patton slipped into spiraling thoughts that would inevitably lead him to, “Would it be better to have a flashy but painful death, say, via explosion, or a boring but less painful death like gorging himself on sleeping pills?” And so on, Remus watched on with due drop round, doe eyes. Tears wedged his eyelids wide open, sclera reddening with the strain. He knew the look on his companions face and it was never good. Under the influence of too many drinks and Remus’s room wasn’t a good combination.

Maybe if the others hadn’t hindered Patton maturing naturally, Patton might not have completely rejected his inherent childness. (Who knows, that’s just Remus’s opinion.) Doesn’t matter now. It wasn’t exactly something you could grow back like fingernails to hang on your chalkboard.

Remus presented him with a glass of water.

Patton, regardless of his mental state, looked unimpressed.

“Did you just summon that?” He said, eyeing it suspiciously.

“Just drink it,” Remus said, exasperated.

“Everything you summon tastes awful! And it’s water that’s all I’ll be able to taste,” Patton cringed, leaning back with folded arms.

Remus scoffed. “As if anything you summon is any better.”

“Excuse me, but I’d rather bitter honey over pickle juice so salty it makes your tongue feel dry,” he argued.

Glass insistently was pressed against his lips. Remus’s eyelids dropped into a deadpan stare, which Patton tried to glare into submission. Remus didn’t relent. Slowly, Patton’s resolve weakened and slipped from him in a sigh that parted his lips. Glass was simultaneously shoved past his teeth. Patiently, Remus tipped the glass, assisting the pickle-water to flow, until Patton’s timid hands had a good hold. Their touch lingered before Remus relented.

Despite the taste, the drink (let’s face it, it’s hardly water) settled the crashing waves inside his bones, sobering him somewhat.

…

“Just because they’ve known me longer doesn’t mean they know me better,” Patton eventually said.

“You're not the one sheltering me supposedly for my own good. You’re not the one making decisions for me, talking down to me, making me feel dumb. You’re not the one making me pick sides, putting pressure on me. You’re the one who lets me be myself. You're the one who I can spill my guts out to. I don’t have to worry about judgment, with you. You’re my real friend.

And if they won’t let me be around you, then so be it. They’re not my friends anymore.”

“I’m— I-I’m not worth it, Patton.”

“Yes! You are! Remus, you’re worth everything!”

A rabbit heart hopped in the silence.

“…I love you…” Patton whispered. His eyes widened. He was realising for the first time. “Love love.”

“You… you what?” Remus was in shock.

“I wouldn’t spend every speck of my free time with someone I didn’t love. I wouldn’t do favours for someone I didn’t love. It took me a while but I— shit— god-fucking-damnit I fucking love you,” Patton whimpered. The realisation smacked him over the head like a mace. Him and his foolish heart knew perfectly well that Remus wasn’t interested in dating whatsoever. Why must he fall for the one person who can’t return his feelings?

“I’m so fucking sorry,” dispair warped Patton’s words, squeaking past his narrowing throat, into a beg. A beg for it to not be true? A beg for forgiveness? A beg to please not hate him?

“It doesn’t have to have a label. We’ll… figure it out as we go.”

Huh?

Nervously, Remus reached out a hand to Patton’s cheek. His touch was feather light.

Lightly pressing their skin flush so his emanating warmth seeped into him, Patton held Remus’s hand to his cheek. He briefly imagined his hands slipping up into his hair and locking them in a secure grip so Remus could have his way with him in a way that made sense. Not in this gentle, and caring, and unimaginable way. Either way, Patton was more than willing— eager— to give himself. Whichever way he wanted, Patton would pour his love into him.

Patton and Remus had always shown each other their love (platonic or otherwise) in a language they could understand, and Remus wasn’t going to stop now.

“Maybe we don’t love each other in the same way, but we still love each other, right? That’s what matters.”

Then Patton chanced a glance at Remus’s eyes. A glance turned into a mesmerized stare when Remus’s hazel framed, paradoxically glimmering blackhole pupils pulled his gaze in.

Patton had never seen anything like it, but he didn’t need to to know exactly what it meant. It was unmistakable. A glimpse into the innermost depth of his being where only the most precious tenderness could reside. It didn’t leak into his body language, facial expressions, or even corrupt his words with stutters. It pooled solely in his pupils that had been pumped full of the ebbing love. What breed of love it was didn’t matter, Patton would cherish it.

Patton saw past the event horizon.

That’s when he realised he'd never seen anything like it within any of the others. Never was there any substance to their charade. He should have known, the fool he was.

Before Patton could react (which in reality was quite slow, but Patton’s mind was working at the pace of dragging your feet through mud), Remus scooped him up in his arms.

“I can still walk.”

“I know.”

Patton felt like he was pushing his luck, but he still had to ask, “Stay?”

“Of course.”

Next Chapter:

[scattered-irises]

LONG AWAITED CONCLUSION TO THAT ZEXAL PHILOSOPHICAL CHAT I POSTED A YEAR (or two) AGO

Part i

Basically, the theory is: Tron is a figment of the Arclights’ imagination and it’s actually just Byron going around messing everything up. Tron is a symbol of the corruption of the Arclights. 

****

And so, I pose you this question, Phosphorous. What if Tron never existed and was just a metaphorical representation for Byron's hatred and anger? What if the Barian World hadn't done anything to him and instead, just made him an angrier old man? So instead of this creepy, laughing child, we have this creepy man who goes around ruining people's lives for the sake of his revenge. 

The child is just something the Arclight brothers made up because they couldn't stand the fact that their father had become like that. But that was why they still followed him. Because he was still their father.

I see your point there. It has plausibility, muses Phosphorous. 

The reason why Tron erased their old names was because it was a way for all of them to disassociate their current selves with their past selves. They have changed too much to be considered Byron, Christopher, Thomas and Michael anymore. Christopher has turned extremely cold and calculating compared to his happier, gentle brother attitude when he was younger.

And Thomas...the poor child. He used to be a happy boy that teased his younger sibling but as IV, he masks himself as a happy celebrity loved by all in the world and underneath that mask is a sadistic monster and underneath that mask is a son that just desperately wants his father back and will do anything to get it and underneath that mask is a lonely young man who wishes to be understood.

Arguably, Michael is the one who remains closest to his original self. He's still the beloved younger brother and like when they were younger, still has a close relationship with Thomas. But he's cracked beneath his placid smile and gentle nature. When angered, he lashes out terribly and like Thomas, will do anything, even murder, to achieve his family's goals.

And so, one could argue that Tron is basically just an overall representation that their family has changed for the worse.

“How much autonomy do the brothers have? and how do they relate to others as they attempt to fulfill their families goals?” poses Phosphorous.

  Ah, ah. An insightful query, my friend. They are pretty much never seen doing things of their own free will. Even when it seems like they are enjoying themselves (I.E III sneaking into Yuma's house to eat lunch and meet him. It actually was just a scouting mission on his family's next target), their actions are meant to serve ulterior motives. In the end, all of the things they do is in the name of serving the family. 

A somewhat random note, Christopher looks at Thomas with contempt. They're basically polar opposites (But not really. Once Christopher gets emotional, he's just as broken and destructive as Thomas). 

Thomas has a grudging respect for Christopher because a part of him still recognizes him as his older brother. 

Christopher seems to care a bit more for Michael, but when Michael was being tortured, he watched the scene at the insistence of Tron. At the end of it though, he turns away, hinting at a bit of a conscience. 

It's Thomas and Michael that are more of a sibling relationship. This is most likely because they have spent all of their lives together while Christopher had been absent for 5 years from their lives. He was gone when Thomas was 12 all the way to when he turned 17 and Michael was 10 and is now 15

Thomas genuinely cares for Michael, going as far as to shout at Tron for treating his brother like that. Christopher immediately silences him. 

Michael also returns that gesture, although less because he ended up falling into a coma before we could see more. 

“Yet all three are, at least at times, willing participants in Tron's schemes?”

Yes, my fellow thinker. Christopher is the most loyal one. He never questions Tron’s orders. Michael will go with his father in hopes that he will get his family back. He is Tron's favorite because he is a "gentle and obedient child." I find it quite sad how, although Christopher is the most loyal one to the cause, he isn’t the favorite. I suppose it is also because I am the eldest of three, yet am not as favored as the youngest. 

“The youngest seems to be favored most of the time,” muses Phosphorous as they look out at the tumultuous Barian sea. 

It's Thomas that sometimes goes out of line. He's the strongest of the brothers, but Tron is always saying that he is the weakest. It is most likely the fear of Thomas realizing that he's actually powerful and could turn on Tron. Hence, that is why Tron says he trusts no one.

Phosphorous stands, overlooking the gloomy landscape of crystals. 

“So each and every one is then beholden to this idea of what? A happy family? Or just something different than their current state of affairs? Do all the brothers truly share this idea of a return to a happy family? Or do they don't even know that that looks like and just want something to change?”

In short:

Tron: Kill my murderers and I'll become your happy ol' dad again and we can go back to England and do happy British people stuff

Sons: Uh sure okay

Personally, I think they all know to an extent that they're deluding themselves

They're just ambling down this path of lies because the brothers are desperate to have a place to belong to after being separated for so long

But you might have a point that they might not even know what a truly happy family is anymore.

“So it's like they're chasing something that doesn't exist then?”

Exactly. Much like the couple that was running to the end of the rainbow. They are chasing a boat that has already long passed by. After all of the things Tron did to them, I'm sure they all know that they will never be "normal" and "happy" again.

“So under your theory, Tron doesn't truly exist, or at least is highly metaphorical, which makes all of their struggles self-inflicted and their delusions even more deep.”

Quite perceptive of you. Tron does exist, but he's basically Byron but meaner. They merely use the child with the ruined face to cover up the fact that their father has turned into a monster.

"Hey so dad's gone nuts but let's pretend it's a weird little boy who's nuts so it takes a bit of the pain away."

“Ah, so then they could say "Tron" instead of ‘Father.’”

Yes, exactly. They almost never address Tron as father. They only talk of their father in the past tense.

“But then,” proposes Phosphorous, dramatically turning back to me. “Why would they care so much for the new names they received? Or do they not care for them?”

Those names have become a part of their identities. They use it to cope with the fact that they've all gone south personality-wise. Thomas even uses IV as his celebrity name, perhaps as a sign that he does not recognize his celebrity persona as his true self.

Phosphorous takes in a deep breath, the acidic breeze rustling their toga. Their eyes meet mine own with a sharpness that I had always so admired.

  “So these new names, they're basically masks, but do they disassociate themselves from their new identities the same way they do with Tron and their Father, or do they still think of themselves as fundamentally themselves, just forced to do things they wouldn't normally do? Though I would assume each brother is affected differently by their mask,” says my friend as they begin to pace.

Ah, they still view Tron as their father (A leader) but deep down they probably don't want to put two and two together. So it's a superficial belief of "We fight for Tron (our father but let’s not think about that.)"

Either that or,

They are fighting for their Father,

 who is basically just an idea of a happy family now whilst Tron

represents a bad family.

Onto your second point, the brothers fit into their masks to different extents.

Michael doesn't seem to mind III for they appear to have the same personality, save for III's destructive tendencies.

When Christopher is reunited with his student that he abandoned and is called Christopher, he sadly smiles and says. 

"It's been a long time since someone has called me that"

And Thomas probably has an extremely difficult time taking off his mask after wearing it for so long in front of so many people

“So then do their numbered names also represent a bad family? also why do they start at three, like why not 1,2,3 instead of 3,4,5?”

I still don’t understand why it’s 3 4 5 (Nor does anyone else, for that matter.), however, their numbers are probably how Tron sees them. From his scientific background, he probably just sees his son as pieces of useful data he can use to his advantage.

“Hm, the only thing I could think of for the numbers was that Tron was somehow including him and the boys' mother in his count, like their the first two so that's why it starts at three, which is something you probably already thought about,” theorizes Phosphorous futilely.

Perhaps the numbers are used as place holders. They are not Christopher, Thomas and Michael. They are merely placeholders for when Christopher, Thomas and Michael return. When their family is whole again...

“But if the numbers are place-holders then so is the name ‘Tron,’” concludes Phosphorous.

Indeed.

“But I wonder if the brothers associate the numbers with Tron, like the numbers aren't really them, just a means to an end that will be removed when they get their father back, or if they're deluding themselves,” muses my friend.

Yes, the numbers are most likely temporary to them. Christopher is deluding himself.

He knows that he’s Christopher under V’s cold exterior. Same for Thomas and Michael. They are a family of delusions, united under the promise of a better tomorrow that will never arrive. 

  And so I thank you, for bearing with me. 

  Without ceremony, Phosphorus walks away from the crystal cliff, leaving me. I stare into the depths of the sea of ill intent and allow the sounds of the waves crashing against the crystal to overtake me. Closing my eyes, I begin to meditate. 

  Thus we conclude our bout of philosophy and ardent beard stroking. 

[raywritesthings]

Bird in a Storm 2/17

My Writing Fandom: Arrow Characters: Laurel Lance, Oliver Queen, Tommy Merlyn, Cyrus Vanch, Thea Queen, Captain Stein Pairing: Laurel Lance/Oliver Queen Summary: The confrontation between the Hood and SWAT on the roof of the Winick Building goes differently, altering the course of Laurel's career, relationships and efforts to save her city forever, the shockwaves of such an altered path making themselves felt throughout her family and friends. *Can be read on my AO3, link is in bio*

Cyrus Vanch watched the news on his brand new flat screen, a smile stretching across his face.

“Miss Lance has since stated she does not know where the Hood kept her during the hours she was missing, and police do not have any further leads.”

Vivian sat on the arm of his chair. “And what’s got you so pleased?”

He nodded to the screen where a picture of the lawyer was displayed.

“Her?”

“Calm down, baby, I’m thinking business here. My guy at the precinct tells me Lance was there for a meeting with the Hood, and it was the cops that shot at her.”

“So the cops are useless. I could’ve told you that.”

“It’s not them that interests me. The Hood. You know we gotta clear him out before we can run this town. And clearly he has a weakness.”

Vivian grinned. “Kill two birds with one stone.”

“Exactly. The boys and I will be going hunting.”

He stood, fixing the lines of the coat he had borrowed from his old lawyer’s closet.

“You think you should go tonight?” Vivian asked. “The police probably have her place surrounded in case that Hood is still hanging around her.”

Cyrus paused. “You know, babe, that’s not a bad thought.” Not that he was surprised; his girl had kept his various operations running the whole time he’d been in prison, after all. From what his guy on the inside said, that Detective Lance could be overbearingly protective.

“Alright. I’ll get my guy to find out if there’s a schedule, and we’ll wait it out. Let them get comfortable.”

It wouldn’t be too long. Good people always got complacent after a while.

---

It had been a long week so far. As necessary as she knew it was, the physical therapy didn’t hurt any less for it. Tommy drove her there and back without complaint each day, and Laurel knew she really did need to find some way to make things up to him. Even if they fundamentally disagreed about the cause of her injury.

The police had been aimed at the two of them even before Oliver had moved her in between. She’d been in danger the moment they’d stormed onto the roof, and not before. It still was hard to believe her father had been willing to use her like that. She’d have preferred he just confiscate the vigilante phone instead of lying to her that he was okay with her having it. He had finally taken it at the hospital, not that she needed it anymore now that she knew the Hood’s identity.

That was another thing. Laurel was sure Tommy would feel differently if he knew the truth. He’d have to. Oliver and he had been best friends since childhood, practically brothers. Tommy would have to know she’d been safe with him. But she hadn’t had the chance to talk to Oliver since leaving the Verdant’s basement and knew that bringing Tommy into the know would have to be up to him.

“So, dinner?” Her boyfriend asked. He did not sound enthusiastic.

“Go ahead and pick something you want for delivery.” Laurel carefully lowered herself into the couch so as not to bump her shoulder. 

Tommy sorted through the menus and called. Once he hung up, a silence that wasn’t borne from comfort settled over them. Was it always going to be like this? Silence or arguing? They’d already had one fight about whether Laurel ought to bring charges against her father’s taskforce; Laurel was of the opinion that letting the police get away with spinning a false narrative and shooting at an unarmed civilian was wrong while Tommy took the line that she was lucky not to be getting charged herself with aiding and abetting a criminal.

She didn’t particularly need or want Tommy’s permission to go ahead with the charges, but it would have been nice to have his support. In the end, what decided things for her was that the last place she wanted to be any time soon was a police station. Not that home was much more welcoming these days.

Soon enough, there was a knock on the door, and Tommy looked glad to go receive it. She bent to get her wallet from her bag; even if he was getting it up front, she wanted to pay him back. It was her fault neither of them were in the mood for cooking or going out.

“Hey!”

Laurel looked up at the sound of a crash. Two men had shoved their way in, and one pushed Tommy up against the glass cabinet. Another looked around and spotted her.

Laurel lunged off the couch towards the desk, ripping the drawer open to grab the handgun. With one shaking hand, she managed to flip the safety off.

She stood and faced the second thug as he stumbled to a stop mere feet from her, hands raised.

“Get the hell out, or I will shoot.”

She couldn’t hold both hands to the gun like she’d been taught, and her aim would be worse as a result. But from this distance they both knew she had a good chance.

The thug backed up, his buddy releasing Tommy who fell to the floor. Laurel tried not to wince. She could see to him once they’d left.

Just as they both backed into the doorway, a third man appeared on the threshold. Cyrus Vanch himself.

“Oh, now this is interesting. I love a girl who can take care of herself.”

He walked past his two goons and into the apartment.

“Do not come any closer,” Laurel commanded.

Vanch ignored her. He looked at Tommy on the floor and tsked. “Pretty boy here clearly can’t cut it. But he’s not the one I’m interested in.”

“Leave, or I will fire.”

“Better idea,” Vanch said, pointing at her. “I want you to help me send a message to your other boyfriend. The tough guy.”

“Get. Out.”

The first rule of pointing a firearm was being prepared to shoot the target.

Vanch raised his other arm, a weapon of some kind in his hand. Laurel squeezed the trigger.

The kickback jolted through her and made her other shoulder sear with pain. But more importantly, Vanch went down, blood running down his side. He dropped the weapon. When she looked up, his goons had disappeared, and she heard the slam of the fire door to the stairwell.

“Damn,” Vanch gasped, his head falling back.

Laurel only just remembered to turn the safety back on before setting it down on the coffee table. Her fingers were shaking as she picked up her phone, but when the dispatch operator answered, she spoke clearly. “I need to request an ambulance and report an attempted home invasion. One attacker has been shot, and there is a victim with a possible concussion.”

As if cued, Tommy groaned and started to shift around.

“Tommy, don’t move! There’s broken glass all around you.”

His head lifted and he blinked at her. “Laurel?” Then his eyes drifted to Vanch on the floor. His face took on a look of horror as he looked back up at her. “...you shot him?”

Laurel stared back with no idea how to answer.

“Miss? I need your address,” the operator stated. “Miss?”

---

Oliver, for the second time in a week, found himself hurrying to the scene of a crime involving Laurel. Only this time, he wasn’t one of the participants. In a way, that terrified him more; anything could have happened.

But he made it past the officers in the hall to find Laurel standing at the door to her guest room. A couple of EMTs were with Tommy, shining a light in his eyes and treating some scratches on his neck and arms with antiseptic.

“Hey.”

Laurel looked around, her furrowed brow clearing up at the site of him. Oliver held himself back from hugging her because of her injury and settled for laying a hand on her good arm instead. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, for the most part. It could have been so much worse. Vanch brought a taser with him.”

“A taser?”

“I don’t think he was planning to kill me. He said he wanted to send a message. To the Hood.” She gave him a pointed look, then turned and headed down the hall towards her own room. He followed.

Once she had closed her door most of the way, he asked, “Did Vanch say it was about the Hood?”

“Not in so many words. I guess he must have gotten interested after I had you look into him. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “I’m just glad you and Tommy are safe. What’s Vanch’s condition?”

“Critical.” Laurel looked down. “I was aiming for his leg, but I didn’t have both hands to hold the gun steady.”

“Hey, that wasn’t your fault.” He waited for her to meet his gaze. “He came in here, hurt someone you cared about and threatened you. You did what you needed to to survive.”

“I guess you have some experience with that.”

He nodded.

Laurel looked back at her closed door. “I wish Tommy felt the same way about it. You should’ve seen the look he gave me when he woke up.” Her good arm wrapped around herself.

“I’m sure he was just in shock, Laurel. He might even have a concussion. But if I know Tommy, he’ll be glad that you are safe.”

“Miss Lance?” A voice called.

Oliver reached to open the door for her, his other hand landing on the small of her back as he had to lean around her to do so. He followed Laurel back down to the guest room.

The EMTs were packing away their things. “It’s a minor concussion, fortunately. He should have bed rest and not too much strenuous activity for a week.”

“Guess that means I need medical leave,” Tommy remarked as he glanced up at Oliver.

“Not a problem. I’ll handle the club prep,” he promised.

“I guess we got off easy tonight.” Tommy laid his hand out and Laurel came over to take it. “Is your shoulder okay?”

“Yeah. I just don’t know how I’m getting to physical therapy now. Or work.” She leaned down to kiss his forehead. “But don’t worry about it.”

“I could help with that,” Oliver offered. “Me or Mr. Diggle.” It was his fault Laurel had been injured in the first place, and he wasn’t about to see her recovery go by the wayside.

“Geez, Ollie, you gunning for dad’s humanitarian of the year award or something?” Tommy asked.

He shook his head. “Nope. Just trying to be here for my friends.”

“Well, thank you.” Laurel walked back over to him and gave him a one-armed hug. He took care not to disturb her shoulder as he reciprocated. His eyes closed, and it wasn’t until he blinked them back open that he noticed Tommy staring.

Oliver stepped back. “I should let you guys get some sleep. Let me know if you need anything.”

“We’ll be fine for a night,” Tommy said.

“Right.” With one last look, Oliver left the apartment. It wasn’t until he passed the same officers in the hall that it occurred to him there had been one prominently absent element during all of this.

He stopped and turned back to the officers. “Excuse me. Has Detective Lance already been by?”

One of them shook her head. “Miss Lance specifically requested he not be called to the scene.”

Oliver grimaced. He really had no idea how that particular rift between father and daughter would ever be healed. “Okay. Thank you.”

With that, he returned home.

---

Thea wasn’t sure what to make of the past couple weeks. Between her friend and legal sponsor being kidnapped by the Hood and then a home invasion by a wannabe crime lord, she didn’t know why Laurel was even bothering to come into work.

When she said as much the first day Mr. Diggle stopped by to pick Laurel up, her friend replied, “Well, if I wasn’t going in, you’d have that much longer to wait to complete your service hours.”

“Good point,” Thea said. “How’s Tommy doing?”

“He’s fine. Trust me, he’s enjoying having a week off.”

Thea grinned. “Yeah, I bet.” He’d only been working a job for the last few months. No doubt he was itching for a vacation, and probably wishing Laurel had taken one with him.

“Well, I know I miss him,” Ollie said from up front. He was riding in the passenger seat so they wouldn’t all be squeezed into the back with Laurel’s injured shoulder. Thea hadn’t realized that was why until she’d asked when they were leaving the manor, but she thought it was pretty sweet of him.

Oliver was being nothing but sweet these days. Thea’s eyes had nearly bugged out of her skull that night when she’d been watching the news coverage and seen her brother’s announcement for a reward just for information about the Hood or Laurel’s whereabouts. Her mother had simply sighed with a weary smile and reached for a checkbook.

She didn’t know if they were actually on the hook for any payments, seeing as how Laurel had walked herself right into a hospital, but Thea wasn’t about to go bugging either her brother or mom about it. Some things she just didn’t want to get in the middle of.

Mr. Diggle stopped in front of CNRI and Thea got out of the car. Oliver got out as well and came to open Laurel’s door.

“I’m fine, Ollie.”

“I know, but there’s no reason to risk it. I’ll be back at four to get you for physical therapy.”

“Okay, thanks.” The two of them shared a smile, and then Laurel turned and headed for the building.

“See ya,” Thea said to her brother before turning and following. She glanced back at Oliver as he waited by the car before getting back in, a lot of questions buzzing through her head.

Some of those questions she couldn’t help asking. She held off successfully for about three days. “So what is the Hood like, really? What’s his lair look like?”

Laurel shook her head. “He doesn’t have a lair. And I don’t know. I was blindfolded.”

Thea raised both eyebrows. “He’s into some weird stuff, then.”

Laurel choked on what sounded like a laugh as Oliver, who was making a weird face in the rear view mirror, said, “The Hood is a cold-blooded killer, Thea. I don’t think his actions have to do with anything other than most efficiently completing that goal.”

“Well, if that were true, I don’t see why I’m still alive,” Laurel countered.

Oliver glanced back at her. “Even as crazy as he is, he’d have to be a whole lot worse before he thought you had ‘failed this city’. Or whatever his dumb catchphrase is.”

Laurel didn’t reply, turning her face towards the window instead. But Thea thought she could see a smile in the reflection.

Thea couldn’t explain what felt different. Just that, the way Laurel looked at her brother these days wasn’t with the same guarded skepticism she’d had ever since Ollie had come back. It was something warmer. Fonder. Like Ollie was someone she believed in again.

And Ollie...well, everyone had known how he wanted things to go when he got back. And they hadn’t, of course, and Laurel had started officially seeing Tommy instead. Which just left Oliver sort of there. Thea could only wonder if her brother was just going to hang around waiting forever for a chance he’d already lost. That was, if it was really lost at all.

But it wasn’t her business. Considering what had happened the last time she’d assumed something about her family’s romantic relationships, it would only do her good to leave it alone. She loved Oliver, Laurel, and Tommy. They were some of the only people left in her life now that all her so-called friends at school had cut her out of their circle for getting clean.

Thea just hoped neither her brother nor either of his friends would end up on the outs like she was, however things went.

---

If there was one thing Police Captain Harry Stein hated most, it was a failed op. And so far, the op he was running to catch the vigilante commonly known as the Hood was failing.

He was allowing Detective Lance the illusion of running the Anti-Vigilante Taskforce, but that was merely because one would be expected to exist, and better to put the bull in a china shop that was Lance in charge of the public-facing op while he ran his own operations, sometimes piggybacking off of Lance’s but mostly taking what the detective was doing the step beyond that which he appeared willing to go.

For example, if Harry had been in charge of bugging Lance’s daughter, he wouldn’t have stopped there; he’d have placed a tracker on her as well. Then they’d already know where the Hood was making his base of operations. They could have swarmed him and hauled him in front of a judge by now. But Quentin Lance didn’t have the mind for such things. He would have considered it a breach of his daughter’s privacy too far no doubt.

Harry had tried to do follow-up on the Laurel Lance angle regardless. He had had two plainclothes officers stationed outside her apartment every night since her return by the Hood, and they were instructed not to intervene in anything until the vigilante himself were to show up. That had included standing down for that business with Cyrus Vanch. It wouldn’t have done any good to apprehend the man if it would’ve stopped the Hood from coming back to Laurel Lance’s apartment. But it had been weeks now, and the vigilante had yet to show. So what did that tell him?

Either the Hood was choosing to stay away from Laurel Lance or the two had found another means to communicate. Proving the latter would be tricky without some sort of evidence to bring Laurel Lance in on; a lawyer like her would know that. But Harry could not stand the idea of the woman collaborating with a vigilante only to get off scot free for it, and all while giving the SCPD a black eye. Yes, Harry had superseded Detective Lance’s order to hold fire until his daughter was out of the way, but as far as Harry was concerned she had been a fellow criminal, not an innocent hostage.

There were other matters to consider as well. Councilman Kullens had been to his office this afternoon to discuss matters pertinent to the society group he belonged to, Tempest. Commissioner Nudocerdo had always been the one to entertain such discussions before his disgraced resignation — not that Harry felt Brian had done much wrong blaming the Hood for his own copycat — but as the Captain, Harry was the presumed leader of the department, and he found himself under certain obligations, like finding ways to punish Tempest’s enemies such as this Hood. He hadn’t found a way to do that, much to his frustration, but what he did have was a known conspirator to the vigilante’s crusade.

So what was to be done about Quentin Lance’s daughter? An arrest wouldn’t stick and the Hood clearly wasn’t watching her place closely enough to stage a home invasion that they might catch him in. Considering she was armed and willing to stand her ground — a rare trait in a lady — he didn’t want to risk men loyal to him on that kind of operation. It wouldn’t be so easy to brush aside, either, what with Laurel Lance being well-educated, connected and frankly of a demographic this sort of thing didn’t happen to.

Physically threatening the young lady was out, but there were other ways to make examples of people. Harry picked up his office phone to dial.

“Kate? It’s Harry. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about those people over at CNRI. Off the record, if you don’t mind.”

Kate Spencer understood these sorts of things just as well as any of them, and she never even had to know she was acting on behalf of Tempest. It was the best way to keep this city running day-to-day, and no vigilante or his helpers could be tolerated in disrupting it.

[aspoonofsugar]

Which is your favourite dynamic in Requiem for a Phantom? Do you have a favourite episode? Quote?

Hello anon!

Thank you so much for this ask because it gives me the chance to talk about this series!

My favourite dynamics are the ones among the three phantoms and especially the one between Elen and Reji because of its importance for the whole series and for the themes.

Phantom explores several themes. Some of them are the following.

1) Giving one’s own life meaning despite how tragic it is. Because of the nature of the series, this often happens through death meaning that many characters try to give their deaths a meaning or to conclude their lives the way they want to:

After all the series is called Requiem for the Phantom and a requiem is something made to celebrate a dead person. The title highlights that the story is about celebrating the phantoms’ lives despite how short and tragic they are. The point is that even these individuals who are not part of society and have committed sins and lack an identity are worth being remembered and being given value.

2) The series explores a specific setting and underlines the cruelty of the criminal world from which it is very difficult (and basically impossible as far as the series is concerned) to escape. The criminal world is described as a literal hell and it is embodied by the organization Inferno which wants to unify it under a single name.

Inferno is a group made by the traitors of other organizations:

This is fitting thematically because it shows how the criminal world twists every relationship and attempt to maintain some kind of honor.

This is shown multiple times and the story arc centered on Tony Stone is the first example offered by the series. Tony, despite being a criminal, loves his people and family and believes in a code. However, in the end he loses his family and dies, his organization is destroyed and used as a scapegoat and he is betrayed by a friend. His story conveys the futility of trying to build some kind of ethical system in a world which is driven by power and ambition and where people’s lives are constantly at stake.

In the series as a whole this same theme is mostly expressed through Lizzie’s character arc. She wants to be treated as a person and asks her employer to do as much in exchange of her loyalty. However, in the end she is betrayed and is forced to kill that same employer despite the fact that she still cares about her.

3) Finally the story is one of self-affirmation and of obtaining a will:

A person should take responsibility for their own actions and sins because only in that way they can truly become an individual.

The relationship between Reiji and Elen (and also the one between Reiji and Cal, but I am not talking about it here) is important for all these three themes and it is fundamental for the whole story.

2) Let’s start from the second theme aka how personal relationships are sacrificed for survival or power in the criminal world.

The important thing when it comes to Elen and Reiji is that they are an exception to the rule. As a matter of fact, even if the people around them like Scythe and Claudia try to manipulate them and to force them to fight against each other, they keep caring for each other and always choose each other over the interests of the organization.

They struggle to do so because of their flaws, but in the end they manage not to betray each other.

This is made obvious in the climaxes of the first two acts which are built so that they are mirrors. In the first act Claudia manipulates things, so that Elen and Scythe are hunted by the organization and in the second act Scythe does the same targeting both Claudia and Reiji. However, both times Reiji and Elen avoid killing each other.

This is also connected to theme number 3) i.e. to the ability of affirming one’s own will.

First of all it is interesting that Elen sees Reiji in this way:

Elen is a person with a very frail sense of identity because of the abuse she went through. She has developed a specific coping mechanism to survive her assassination job:

She nullifies herself and makes her completely dependent on others. If she is ordered to do so she can kill anybody without getting hurt because, in a sense, she is not killing out of her own free will.

Claudia wants Reiji to be different:

She wants him to become more independent and to accept his new life as an assassin in a more proactive way. However, she still manipulates him, so that he works for her. Her manipulation is just different from Scythe’s. He suffocates his subordinates’ feelings, while Claudia nurtures emotions and uses them to manipulate people even more effectively than Scythe.

However, the fact that Reiji himself is manipulated is not really important for Elen who simply sees him as a freer version of herself:

Elen had always assumed that her way of coping was the only one possible, but through Reiji she learns she has other options and starts questioning what she was told and what she had assumed.

The story makes clear that deep down Elen has never lost her most genuine part of herself:

Episode four goes out of its way to establish exactly this.

The episode opens with a very different and overly cheerful Elen who acts in a childish way and has fun going shopping:

This is soon revealed to be a mask she uses not to give away her true identity. However, this mask gives us some information about her real self as well.

First of all, Elen uses this cheerful personality whenever she needs to move around in a public place or when she has to interact with regular people. She uses this persona both in the first act and in the third act. This is interesting. After all, Elen could just take on different personas instead of sticking to a single one. The fact that she doesn’t may very well symbolize that this personality tells us something about her.

All in all it might simply convey the fact that Elen is deep down very child-like. She has been taken by Scythe when she was younger than Reiji and so when her identity had still to properly develop. Scythe manipulated her and took her memories away leaving her as a person completely dependent on others like children are. So it is fitting that her “normal” persona is a childish one because that is the stage in which her development was interrupted.

At the same time, the episode plays with the viewer’s perspective of Elen. Her having fun with the teddy bear is immediately contradicted by her breaking it to retrieve the data and when she later on is asked if she is interested in the touristic depliants she coldly rejects the assumption.

However, by the end of the episode we are shown that she kept both the Teddy Bear and the depliant.

Both are symbolic objects.

-The teddy bear represents her childish self and it is symbolically broken because she herself has been broken when she was a child. Let’s also highlight that in act three where she had the chance to experience a healthier style of life for some months she has a teddy bear on her school bag.

-The depliant is representative of her home town aka Mongolia which will be the end of her journey where she finally finds herself. The fact that she has it since episode 4 clearly shows that deep down Elen had always known from where she came from.

Then why did she not try to leave before Reiji’s arrival?

The answer is this:

In order to grow up Elen needs to face who she truly is. This means that she gets to finally feel complete, but at the same time she has to leave behind a coping mechanism which makes her feel safe and to accept what she has done.

This is something she can’t do alone and needs Reiji’s help in order to succeed.

Reiji too needs Elen and this is made clear at the end of the first act.

As previously stated, Claudia is manipulating Reiji to have him grow apart from Scythe and Elen, so that he can work as her own Phantom. She tells Reiji she is leaving the final choice to him, but she doesn’t really plan to as her orchestrating the whole mess with Scythe proves.

In the end she gives Reiji a choice. He can either go back to Japan or work for her. She knows fully well Reiji will not probably be able to go back to his normal life and the chaos of the situation might very easily push him towards her side. However, Reiji takes a third option:

He wanst to protect Elen and to help her to become a complete person. This is the path Reiji chooses in order to remain himself despite his new identity as an assassin.

In other words, Reiji needs Elen just like Elen needs him, but in a different way.

We can say that they develop a relationship which has shades of codependency since one can’t properly function without the other.

Without Reiji Elen can’t free herself from Scythe, while without Elen Reiji completely loses himself and spirals in his new role as phantom until he meets Cal who saves him.

The end of the second act perfectly shows what their relationship is about.

Elen is still unable to rebel against Scythe and keeps fighting Reiji, but stops when Reiji takes away her mask which is symbolic of him seeing her as a person.

At the same time Reiji is ready to die. He thinks Cal has died because of him and that he has become a monster and prefers to die rather than keep living in the criminal world where people use and betray each other. However, Elen saves him:

Elen’s two scars were both made by Reiji. Reiji is fixated with the second one he gave her when he accidentally shot her. That scar represents Reiji’s guilt and his crimes and it is the only part of himself he can currently see. However, Elen reveals that it is her other scar the one she cares about aka the one he gave her when he saved her. She claims that that scar is the proof of her existence and why she keeps fighting.

In this way they save each other. Reiji is given a new reason to live, while Elen is taken away from Scythe for good.

The third act shows that they keep learning opposite things from each other:

And it is also interesting that in terms of proactiveness and passiveness they start to exchange roles. As a matter of fact in the third act Elen is far more active than Reiji, while it used to be the other way around, especially in the first act when they had to run away.

This is also something that Scythe’s behaviour highlights:

He keeps assuming that the one taking action against him is Reiji, but it is not him the one who has come up with counter-measures against Inferno, but Elen who proves herself to be perfectly able to read Scythe’s way of thinking.

This is illustrated also in their final showdown.

Scythe thinks that thanks to having integrated Claudia’s philosophy with his own he has finally been able to create a group of perfect specimen. However, Elen proves him wrong and states that these new experiments are exactly like her and that Scythe has not grown:

While she has:

Her reasons for killing Scythe are also interesting:

She says that she is killing him because he hurt Reiji which is surprising because she too has been hurt by Scythe and she has been abused by him far longer than Reiji. However, I think that this line highlights once again that Elen really sees Reiji as a better version of herself. Even if she has grown Elen still struggles to see herself as a person and so, instead of telling Scythe that he has hurt her, she tells him that he has hurt Reiji, but she is really speaking of herself in the scene.

In other words both Elen and Reiji are able to go back to be people because of each other. This is true especially for Elen whose whole arc is about this. What is more, they are clearly presented as two sides of the same coin to the point that their two arcs and characters appear as clearly linked:

When Elen “dies” at the end of the first act, so does Reiji and he has does so in a way similar to hers.

At the same time, the first act also plays with the dream/flashback in episode 7.

The sequence starts with Elen remembering the day she met Reiji and it ends with Reiji waking up from a dream where he supposedly has remembered a part of his past. In short, it is not clear who is the one really having the flashback and it is really not important because this just cements the idea that Elen and Reiji are complementary and really two “versions” of the same entity without a personhood who is the phantom.

1) It is precisely because of this link that symbolically Elen dies when Reiji does.

When one considers it from a realistic in-universe stand-point it has probably to do with the afore-mentioned codependency. The two of them have been utterly devastated by their experiences and would need time to properly heal, but they are denied it. Because of it, when Reiji dies Elen takes her own life.

However, I think that there are different reading levels to the ending which have to do with different themes the story wants to convey.

As mentioned above the series depics the criminal world as a horrible place from which it is basically impossible to escape. This is why we are shown different people trying to live in this world with different methods and objectives. Claudia wants power and believes that one can only live one’s own life to the fullest by taking risks. Scythe wants knowledge and believes that he can pursue it in the criminal world. Lizzie wants to apply some sort of ethics to her killing, but she realizes that her gun has become too heavy for her and prefers to die rather than to kill a person she cares for again. Cal and Mio are both asked to choose if they want to enter the criminal world to be with a person they care about or not. Cal does so and dies, while Mio doesn’t and survives. The different outcomes of their stories have also to do with their different social standings. Mio is privileged and loved and has her family’s support when she needs it, while Cal is a runaway child who is left alone by everybody she cares for. For her entering the criminal world has also to do with her gaining strength.

What is important is that all these characters die. As I stated above the only prominent characters who survive by the end of the series are Mr McGuire and Mio. This is not by chance because they represent two opposite extremes thematically speaking.

Mr McGuire is literally the devil who rules Inferno as all the symbolism associated to him proves. He is symbolically the underworld itself and this is why he survives the ending and has supposedly Reiji killed. It is because the underworld is very difficult to destroy.

Mio is the normal person whose life is not involved in the underworld. The fact that she is secretly a mafia princess without her knowing might very well be symbolic of how even the parts of society which seems uninvolved with the criminal world are actually still intertwined with it even if they ignore it. Mio has come to an understanding of it by the end of the series and chooses to keep living her life in the normal world.

In other words, if the series wants to give this depiction of the world of criminality as a world which is unescapable at least physically, then it makes sense that Reiji and Elen, just like Cal, can’t survive the ending. However, they are given, just like Cal, an ending where they can stop being phantoms and become someone. This is emphasized by the last episode being called Elen. The title highlights how the whole story is about the original phantom aka Ein becoming Elen.

This is what the last scene is about. Even the fact that Elen kills herself, as sad as it is, it is something she had failed to do early on in the series:

In the end Elen chooses to die as herself and in her hometown.

This is at least one reading that can be done. Either way, several are possible in my opinion.

This is an analysis of Elen and Reiji’s relationships which is one of my favourites. I also love the one between Cal and Reiji, but I chose the first one because it let me talk about the series more generally.

When it comes to my favourite episodes, I love the last two ones where the major conflicts are settled and where there are many of my favourite moments.

I also love episode 6 because of how well it is structured and powerful thematically despite it being tragic.

As far as my favourite quote is concerned, I actually love this one by Claudia:

Like you say, we may be forcing this lifestyle upon you, but you are not a slave. Even you possess a freedom…Speed…Even in a set course, as long as you desire and work for it, you can accelerate towards any goal. (…) How you run through it is up to you. Don’t ever think of yourself as a slave again. As long as you have that thought in mind, you are granting victory to those who belittle you.

I think this quote is very meaningful when it comes to Claudia’s character and also to the series general themes because it emphasizes the necessity of facing even an unfair life and to do the best you can of it. It is just that what Claudia wants to do with hers is something completely different from what Reiji wants.

Thank you for this ask!

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

There’s a post that’s been bothering me for literally four years. It managed to somehow be both homophobic and transphobic and the (very popular) social justice blogger who made it never got any serious blowback. I’m going to post a screencap of it here, but I won’t say who it’s from because it was four years ago. What I will say is that as far as I know, they have never addressed it or apologized despite having been asked more than once, never did anything about all the people in the notes using it as a reason to be homophobic, and that they are still a pretty popular, well regarded blog.

This post was made in response to part of an old conversation that got dragged up. It was one of those things that’s like, maybe this was okay, maybe it wasn’t, depending on the context, which I’ve never been able to find. The person who originally pulled it up was a transphobe who was talking about “biological sex,” so I don’t trust their judgment or intentions, but a broken clock is right twice a day, so it’s possible that something actually homophobic was said. I haven’t posted it here because that would just be taking it out of context again and as OP has pointed out, that isn’t helpful. Here’s the part of their response that deals with monosexuals and making assumptions about people’s gender. The rest of the post talked about why taking the comment out of context didn’t accurately represent their feelings and how the conversation had also been about biphobia and bi erasure, and that’s all fine.

It starts out fine (making assumptions about someone’s gender and anatomy based on their appearance is cissexist and we should all try not to do it), but it turns into “and I don’t do that because I’m bisexual.” Which like, you’re a cis woman so yes you fucking do. I’m nonbinary and I still do it sometimes. And then there’s that line at the end about how gay and straight people’s orientations are based on assumptions about people’s gender and anatomy. 

I’ll note that they were talking about monosexuals, which includes lesbians, gay men, and all straight people and was also read like it was directed at people who were doing it out of ignorance rather than malice, so this post was not specifically about terfs and isn’t really applicable to them at all because they know exactly what they’re doing. Terfs were also considered just as bad in 2015 as they are now, so if that comment had been about terfs, they could have said that and it would have gotten them off the hook with the people who were calling them out in good faith.

They then wrote out a longer explanation about what their current feelings were on the subject. This is broken up into two images just because it was too long to screencap at once. I haven’t removed anything. The first post and second reblog are the OP:

They later edited the post twice--once to specify that they were only talking about cis monosexuals and once to add “and sometimes also bi and pan people do this too,” which did little to address the fact that this post was literally claiming that being gay or straight was inherently problematic and that bi and pan people were automatically less transphobic by virtue of their sexual orientation and just ended up implying that it’s only okay to be gay if you’re trans (because I guess that means you’re woke enough to stop yourself from being attracted to people on sight?). Here’s 

Four years ago, I wasn’t really able to articulate a response that cut to the root of why this post bothered me so much more than any other homophobic or transphobic bullshit and to navigate around the fact that there are parts of it that I genuinely agree with (most of the stuff about anatomy), but I’m older and more practiced now, so here we go.

This post is based on a number of incorrect assumptions:

That gay people can’t find someone they’re not attracted to aesthetically pleasing to look at

That gay people are, across the board, only attracted to certain genitalia and base their sexual orientations off that

That gay people’s thoughts immediately jump to sex the first time they’re attracted to someone

That the only way to be bi is to be attracted to every gender

That gay people base their assumptions about people’s gender on whether they’re attracted to them

That still being willing to have sex with someone after finding out you were wrong about their gender makes your assumption less transphobic

They were not willing to listen to any of the gay people in their notes trying to explain to them that this isn’t actually how being gay works at all or any of the bi, pan, or trans people who called them out for being way out of their lane. The only person they responded to at all was a trans lesbian who pointed out that they hadn’t ever specified that they were only talking about cis gay people (that person also pointed out several ways in which the post was homophobic, none of which were addressed beyond “that’s not what I meant”). 

Basically, the thesis statement here is, “Gay people’s attraction is based solely around sex and genitals and none of them are attracted to trans people, but bi and pan people are attracted to everyone so we don’t make as many assumptions about people’s gender, and when we do it’s less problematic.” Which is obviously very false for multiple reasons. 

I’m going to go through all of these assumptions and talk about the underlying thought processes underpinning them and how they’re even more insidious than they seem on the surface. 

1. Gay people can’t find someone they’re not attracted to aesthetically pleasing to look at

This is actually one of the more benign assumptions and what it really comes down to is not understanding that thinking, “That person is hot” isn’t the same thing as thinking, “I would be interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with that person” (which also isn’t necessarily the same thing as thinking “I would be interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with that person” but this post completely ignores that romance might be part of being gay--we’ll get to that later). It’s really just a fundamental misunderstanding about what sexual attraction is and how it works. 

2. Gay people are, across the board, only attracted to certain genitalia 

The obvious thought process underlying this attitude is that you have to be attracted to women in some capacity to want to date and trans man and vice versa for trans women. There are two possible assumptions that could be causing this. The first is that all gay people (and all straight people) are transphobic and only care about genitalia. The second is that a trans man who hasn’t had bottom surgery isn’t really enough of a man for someone who’s only attracted to men to want to have sex with him, and the same for trans women. You’re either being homophobic or transphobic here. 

In fact, what it really reveals about OP is that, regardless of their self-righteousness on this topic, they are the one equating being attracted to women with being attracted to vaginas and being attracted to men with being attracted to penises. That’s not to say that there isn’t a transphobia problem in gay communities, but the implication here is that these are the objective definitions of being a lesbian and a gay man respectively. There are definitely cis lesbians who date trans women and cis gay men who date trans men. 

OP assigned a transphobic, incorrect definition to gay people and then based a lot of their argument on that. We see this a lot in ace discourse (”it means not wanting to fuck”) and in bi vs pan discourse (”it excludes nonbinary people”). It would be a problem if it was true, but it’s not, and while there are people who ascribe to that definition, those people wrong. There are lots cissexist bi and pan people who equate gender and genitalia until told otherwise, and it’s not less transphobic when they do it. It’s a transphobia problem, not a being gay problem.

3. Gay people’s thoughts immediately jump to sex as soon as they’re attracted to someone

So this is just blatant sexualization of gay people, and it really explains a lot of about the first two assumptions. Being gay is all about sex, so if you’re gay, you can’t possibly think someone is hot without immediately thinking about what they look like naked and how you want to have sex with them. And of course because being gay is all about what kind of sex you want to have, your attraction must be defined by the genitalia of your partners. 

It should go without saying that this is really homophobic. Even for gay aros, this isn’t how it works. I guess I can understand how if you’re equally attracted to everyone, you might not understand how gender plays a roll in attraction outside of thinking about sex, but it does, and that you don’t get it doesn’t excuse this. It just means you shouldn’t have been talking about it.

4. The only way to be bi is to be attracted to every gender

 There are a couple of assumptions that could be underlying this. The possibility that’s most charitable to OP is that they are attracted to every gender and assume that that’s the only way to be bi. This is the only option that avoids exorsexism, but it is biphobic. 

The second possibility is an assumption that nonbinary people don’t exist. Therefore, the only way to be bi is to be attracted to both men and women. This is extremely exorsexist for obvious reasons. 

The third is a little more complicated, but it’s basically an assumption that being attracted to nonbinary people doesn’t, on it’s own, make someone bi. So, a person acknowledges that nonbinary people exist but basically thinks that either, because nonbinary people span so many identities, it’s impossible to be attracted to them if you’re not attracted to everyone. So a bi woman who’s attracted to nonbinary people and women shouldn’t exist because some nonbinary people identify so close to being a man that you couldn’t be attracted to them if you weren’t attracted to men. This is where the fetishization argument that a lot of exlusionists use comes from (I’m not saying that OP is an exclusionist, this is just the underlying ideology they use), and it ignore the fact that identifying as being attracted to women and nonbinary people doesn’t mean you’re attracted to ALL women and nonbinary people. It just means you can be attracted to women and nonbinary people.

Another possible mindset underlying that assumption is that if you aren’t attracted to everyone, the nonbinary people you’re attracted to must be so close as to be indistinguishable from whatever binary gender you’re attracted to, and therefore don’t count as being a different gender. That mindset stems from not thinking aboit nonbinary genders as being as legitimate or meaningful as binary genders and from seeing nonbinary people as basically whatever binary gender you think they’re closest to (”If you’re a bi woman who is attracted to men and nonbinary people, you’re really straight because your nonbinary partner looks like/acts like/is basically a man”). This is again exorsexist for reasons that should be obvious. 

5. Gay people base their assumptions about people’s gender on whether they’re attracted to them

This is the assumption that gay people go: 

I’m attracted to this person -> They must be a man/woman

rather than

I think this person is a man/woman -> I’m attracted to them

This frames gay people’s attraction as the reason the assumption about someone else’s gender is being made, and not the fact that we were all raised in a cissexist society. It’s also lets cis bi and pan people completely off the hook cissexism. If gay people’s assumptions about other people’s gender is caused by or is somehow made worse being attracted to them, then bi and pan people should be basically immune because they’re attracted to everyone (according to OP).

The mindset underlying this assumption is that there are people that you are innately attracted to and gay people are just attempting to shape their sexual orientation around their best guess at who those people are. Therefore, everyone is... I don’t know, varying degrees of bi I guess?... and gay people (and straight people) are just the transphobes who assume they know what everyone’s gender is, while bi and pan people are enlightened enough to realize they don’t. OP claimed in the notes that they weren’t saying monosexual orientations don’t exist, but if the point your making is that monosexual orientations are based solely around an assumption that’s probably wrong, then that is what you’re saying. And they definitely didn’t correct the first reblogger, who was unequivocally saying that.

It completely ignores the probability that a person’s attraction would disappear after finding out the person’s gender was actually not compatible with their sexual orientation, or the possibility that a gay person might know someone at least well enough to have some idea of what their gender is before becoming sexual attracted to them (because, as we’ve covered, just thinking someone is hot isn’t the same as attraction, and many gay people aren’t fantasizing about sex with complete strangers). Unless we’re talking about a closeted trans person, you usually don’t have to know someone that well to know what their gender is.

Shocker: most assumptions about people’s gender are made because they “look like” one of the binary genders, have certain secondary sex characteristics, have a traditionally masculine or feminine name, use he/him or she/her pronouns, or have a certain gender marker on their driver’s license. These are all things that bi and pan people are equally susceptible to. 

6. Still being willing to have sex with someone after finding out you were wrong about their gender makes your assumption less transphobic

It super doesn’t. You still made the assumption. Framing it this way implies that transphobia is all about whether you would be willing to have sex with a trans person. I shouldn’t need to explain why that’s bad.

In conclusion

I want to mention that OP clarified that they weren’t try to say that everyone is bi in a reblog, but if that’s genuinely true then... I honestly don’t know how this post made sense to them. The point is either “people only think they’re gay or straight because they’re making assumptions about other people’s genders” OR “gay people want to have sex with strangers and that’s problematic (but it’s fine if a bi or pan person does it).” Which is a great example of someone setting a standard that requires huge changes from others but none from them and then getting self-righteous because other people don’t meet it (surprise surprise, the post I was referencing when I brought this up yesterday was from the same OP). 

Anyway, regardless of which is true, it’s wrong. This post is homophobic, transphobic, and also erases a lot of bi experiences, and I still can’t believe that so many people just let this go unchecked when it happened.

mod k

Note: I better not catch a single one of you using this post as an excuse to be biphobic. 

[mswyrr]

lucifer s4 trailer

I think it looks really good! It looks like they’re digging into character and theme stuff I’ve wanted them to handle in depth.

Chloe

They started out well in S1&2 balancing the romance but I think that they delayed the reveal just a little too long with the stretched out S3, so here we’re getting the chance to catch up with important elements of Chloe’s side of things. Notably, her moral/identity struggle. It’s been limited by her lack of knowledge and that worked at first but leaning too heavily on Lucifer’s POV tends to lean towards pedestalizing her. She’s not actually PURE (tm) or else she wouldn’t find him so attractive as a person. As I mentioned in my meta post here, telling a “monster romance” like this, from the monster’s pov, does have that weakness of potentially not giving enough material on the fact that the heroine is attracted to the monster as a way of relating to her own darkness/suppressed desires.

And that is, I think, what she has to cope with here: she’s drawn to this person on a deep, soulful (in addition to physical lol) level. (When it was just physical, she wasn’t into him. She’s genuinely into him as a person.) He speaks to something in her deepest self... and now she has to deal with the horrifying moral/ethical/existential mindfuck of it turning out that this person she rings so true with--who is something to her no one else has ever been, who touches her heart in a way no one else has been able to reach--is, you know, SATAN lmao

Not “canon Satan” but still... And she just had a horrible clusterfuck of a relationship with Cain, so Biblical Evil is not exactly looking that shiny right now.

Linda never rang true soulfully with the guy like that - they just banged, you know? They’re good friends and they used to bang. And her self-identity isn’t structured so strongly around a fundamentally moral worldview as Chloe. Sure, Linda is a wonderful person! But her pov is more interpersonal/psychological, whereas Chloe really centers herself in her own deep thinking on what Right and Wrong are - something she’ll go against the tide of other peoples’ opinions to defend. She can be so strong! BUT the one thing that can absolutely destroy her is if her foundations are shaken...

Without that core she’s lost. She has to rebuild it from the ground up.

She’s an intensely moral atheist thrown into a world where all this supernatural crap is real and btw... this figure she was so drawn to, this trickstery sweetheart, kinda nuts but at his worst a self-destructive “homeless magician” is something far, far different than she thought.

Her foundations are how she manages to be so strong for others. That core of truth she’s worked out for herself. And that’s been ripped away. 

Lucifer is himself, with all the issues we know so well, so he’s really focused on his own self-worth stuff but IMO her conflict isn’t exclusively or primarily about whether she loves him enough, it’s about her own identity issues and this big question of “What even IS right and wrong in this new world?” and “Am I allowed to want this?” “What does it say about me that I love this person so much?”

Eve

This show is good about letting female characters be flawed and even do awful things but still be treated with narrative sympathy. I think Eve’s “You don’t have to change. You’re already perfect.” is clearly setting her up as representing the antithesis of the entire damn show, textually and meta-textually. It’s all about growth and redemption and change and she’s planting her flag against that.

IMO her classical role with Lucifer has been reversed: this time *she’s* the one offering the temptation.

And it’s not even about sex, drugs, and such. It’s just: give up and stop doing the painful work of growing. It hurts, why bother?

But I also trust that she will be handled with as much care as, say, Mum was, so I’m SO TOTALLY down for her. What she’s telling him is probably a lot about herself and her own issues - in choosing to have Eve show up they’ve got a female character who has been as misrepresented and vilified as Lucifer himself, which is going to be significant (since apparently she’s very no1curr about him killing her son??? LOL Okay, hey, if I had a son like that... /snort/).

Like, Eve was used to justify the oppression of women for centuries in the West. It was no joke. Early feminists actually had to reinterpret her in order to articulate their position. (“Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women” from 1611 by Amelia Lanyer is a personal fave of mine, in terms of women’s literary work and women’s history.)

I really hope that this show will give her due respect as a female mythological/religious/etc figure. In their wonderfully stylized totally bananas way ofc! They have a good track record on BONKERS theology and writing complex women, so I have every reason to be optimistic.

Overall Themes

For her part, I think the images of Chloe walking into the Catholic church and talking to the spooky religious guy is all about her being tempted in the opposite direction. Eve is all: go wild! Stop trying to work to be better, just be the perfect devil you are! And Chloe might very well be tempted by the comforting absolutism and clear “hard work” of the forms of false certainty people offer.

They did a really good job showing self-righteousness as a sin with Amenadiel’s fall and I think it would be really cool to represent moral certainty as a kind of “apple” that Chloe-as-New-Eve is tempted with now that her foundations have been ripped away.

Again, like with Eve--but doubly so because the writers love Chloe--I am confident this will be handled well.

IMO the core of the show is a kind of humanism/human goodness. Lucifer was broken by the cold absolutism of the celestial vision of goodness. And the fact that evil very much isn’t his thing either. Heaven and hell weren’t home, as he said to to Mum. LA is the only place he’s found belonging, and it’s explicit in the canon that it’s not just the place, it’s a person.

The warmth of the kind of fierce humanistic morality and love Chloe embraces, that feels like home. Humans let you be messy and incomplete and still worthy of love. They embrace struggle. They come up with genius things like “therapy.” They glory in all their contradictions.

They can, like Chloe, believe there is no God and yet be incredibly decent and loving.

She’s off-kilter because of the reveal and so too is he, each in their own way. They’re supposed to balance each other so when one is struggling the other will too. The goodness the show is aiming for can be compromised either by a truly selfish hedonism that doesn’t care about trying to do better by others or also by a moral absolutism which is harsh and unkind. This is because self-righteousness is ultimately also putting your own satisfaction above the well-being of others, just like a selfish hedonism is. The pleasures of the two are superficially different, but at core they’re the same. I think it’s cool paralleling if they’re tempted by these respective sins in the show’s moral vision.

The idea of them both being tempted and struggling and then coming back together could be really amazing. With the clearly increased budget for visuals, I am hoping we get a really great poetic visual moment of them coming back together. That could make for an eXCELLENt arc.

[cat-at-dawn]

IN DEFENSE OF THE DEATH OF  ████████ , AND AN ARGUMENT AGAINST SUICIDE

This one’s for the manga readers! Post-volume 19 meta, spoilers aplenty! read at your own risk

Though the literal iteration of the death of Ash Lynx can be viewed as a purposeful shuffle from this mortal coil, a specific decision made with weight to return to the New york Public Library to live out his last moments dwelling on Eiji’s letter only to intentionally fade away, here stands a lonely argument; out of the entire cast, no one person deserves death in the same capacity more than Ash Lynx does, and his death is not a suicide. Let’s break it down.

Out of all of the MANY problematic elements of Banana Fish, not even trying to hazard which offense is worse than the next, we can all simultaneously agree that one of the most heartbreaking twists of the series comes at the end of volume 19, when after receiving Eiji’s goodbye letter, which essentially amounts to an incredibly pure love declaration, Ash allows himself to be mentally distracted long enough for Sing’s brother Lao to deliver a killing stab to his intestines. Though Lao dies shortly after Ash’s retaliation, Ash continues to linger in a liminal place. The question hangs in the mind of the reader, if Ash approached a happy ending, why would he not seek hospitalization? Why would he allow himself to bleed out? The manga strikes back hard at the reader with a quite prolonged death sequence, in which Ash retreats to his favorite place to be alone, the New York Public Library, where, with a smile on his face, he falls into a peaceful sleep and dies at a reading table while clutching Eiji’s now bloody love letter. What is the nature of his mindset which dictates this course of action? Why, with Eiji hale and hearty, would Ash choose death instead of medical treatment and a possibly much happier ending to this tale of woe? At this point, I can only wonder if we, the readership, have read the same story. The ending of Banana Fish is hotly debated, and even though as a queer storyteller myself I fundamentally have trouble with gay death as a narrative element, I can’t help but question why people can’t empathize more with Ash’s decision. When judging the manga as a standing piece, I can’t think of a more satisfying, or simply more correct turn of events.

Directly out of the gate, Ash’s death is foreshadowed in the title of the series. A Perfect Day For Banana Fish is a short story by J.D. Salinger which follows the last day in the life of mentally ill World War 2 veteran Seymour Glass, who befriends a little girl while on vacation at the beach. He invites her to catch bananafish with him, and explains that the greedy fish enter holes to gorge themselves on bananas, but become too large to escape again and instead perish in the hole. Later, Seymour returns to his room where his wife is sleeping, and he kills himself. Salinger relates this as a metaphor for his own personal experience in the war, specifically to his time at the Battle of the Bulge and in Nazi concentration camps. He is quoted saying Seymour is an iteration of himself, and has gone so far as to say that he “found it impossible to fit into a society that ignored the truth that he now knew.”  The point of the story has always been to examine the irreversible damage done to the human psyche by war. The Perfect Day referenced in the title is exactly that; the quest of a broken man lacking the power to overcome his trauma to find exactly the perfect day to die. So it also is with Ash, we understand from the very beginning that making this direct analogy to Salinger means the manga will be the slow disclosure of someone who is irrevocably damaged by their circumstance as they come to terms with the moment of their own death. From the very first panel you see him, Ash’s death is already fated, and truly the most heart-rending struggle of the series is watching him grapple with this identity, up to nearly the very last second. As a reader, we continuously keep hoping and praying that he might, against all odds, find salvation despite literally every piece of contrary evidence suggesting otherwise. We have violent affection for Ash as a hero, and we want him so badly to live on, to make it to the other side. He both finds salvation and doesn’t find it, because like everything else about this manga, Ash operates thematically on contradictory levels all the way through the story and on to the bitter end. Let’s break it down even further, by considering exactly just how fucked Ash really is.

Ash is born Aslan Jade Callenrese, and then quickly discarded. He briefly experiences a short period of normalcy with the love of his brother and distant father before Griffin is drafted. Almost immediately after, Ash is raped by the Bluebeard of Cape Cod and then blamed for it, and from then on, his life is a progression of non-stop horror. He is kidnapped by Marvin who repeatedly rapes him over a period of years. He is sold into sexual servitude at Club Cod. He somehow  manages to avoid getting addicted to the opioids that all the child prostitutes were fed to keep them tame, and when Ash escapes, it is only because he is instead personally taken under Papa Dino’s wing, who specifically sexually abuses him while simultaneously not knowing or caring that Marvin continues to rape Ash, among presumably a handful of other people. Blanca is a small, bright focal point for Ash at age 13 when Ash lets himself briefly believe he has autonomy, and he is released to start his own gang. Ash’s fundamental humanity and inherent leadership magnetically draw people to him, and for the first time in his life, Ash briefly entertains the idea of having a private romantic relationship of his own. He is attracted to a girl he likes very much, but she is murdered almost immediately due to her association with him. He afterward throws himself into the business of his gang without ever fully extracting himself from Papa Dino’s hold. It is only with the discovery of the capsule containing Banana Fish that Ash for the first time in his short life discovers a bit of real leverage he can actually use against Dino. The subsequent drug war sees him beaten, sent to jail, raped many more times, and sent on a cross-country mission on the lam from the law, as well as from Dino’s goons, both Corsican and Chinese. Yut-Lung proves to be a worthy adversary in LA, and his teaming up with Arthur sees Ash murdering his best friend Shorter in cold blood who is forcibly high on banana fish in order to save Eiji from an especially savage disembowelment. Ash is later declared legally dead, sent to a private insane asylum to be experimented on, tortured with the mangled bits of Shorter’s brain, and then after escaping yet again, still forced into a corner when Dino tricks and threatens him into becoming officially adopted, once more in order to prevent Eiji’s death. Ash is drugged, literally blinded, beaten, and emotionally and physically torn down. He nearly dies from intentionally wasting away, and is hospitalized. When he eventually once again manages to escape, it is only to regroup long enough to prepare to engage with his men in actual guerrilla warfare. The mercenary Foxx kills nearly all of Ash’s remaining gang, and once AGAIN, Ash is raped.  Ash is ultimately deprived of his revenge when he then has to witness Papa Dino’s death by the hand of someone other than himself. These are the major plot points, and don’t even touch on the myriad of lesser cruelties Ash has dealt with over the course of his short life, of which there are many, many more.  (See: The death of most of his friends, that fucklord Arthur, everything about Cape Cod, the pain of using his sexual wiles as a weapon, the pain of knowing if he opens up to others that the lives of his friends will be in danger, the pain of being unable to give his loved ones proper burials, his one hundred issues with classism, his complete inability to trust others with important tasks, the list goes on.)

Around volume 10, I started, in a serious way, feeling like Ash deserved death. Not in the way that a dog is put out of it’s misery when it is sick, but more in the way that when the path is this hard, the reward at the end should be equivalent to the struggle. Being a CSA survivor all on its own demands a certain level of understanding, especially when approaching volatile, sensitive subjects like suicide. The act of taking one’s own life is so deeply personal and hotly debated that there is no true narrative argument legitimate enough to address it’s purpose. All of it is too subjective. However, in the case of Ash Lynx as the thematic hero, the case stands that he never, except for perhaps the small corridor between the ages of 0-7, lived a life anywhere remotely near average, so his many brushes with near-suicide are chillingly understandable. At one point, when forced to either shoot himself in the head or watch Eiji die, Ash even goes so far as to grab the gun and immediately try to blow his brains out. When the gun is proven empty, instead of breathing a secret sigh of relief, Ash only demands that Yut Lung give him a bullet. 

Though this emphasizes Ash’s near fanatical devotion to protecting Eiji, whose innocence he both disdains and canonizes, it also represents his constant readiness to die. This flirtation with the reaper is emphasized over and over in the official art, where a sexual element is often present in his interactions with death. Ash wishes for death to embrace him, he literally desires it. This is mostly on a subtextual level, but other times his desire is stiflingly surface-level.

 The extent of Ash’s damage is so severe and was inflicted on him so early that his ability to live a normal life was only ever subject to his situation. An argument can be made that his unusually high IQ kept him from the brink of emotional destruction for the majority of his life, but in spite of his incredible virility and strength of character, Ash’s prospects as he aged were always bleak at best. Ash the adult is almost unfathomable. He was literally never allowed to be a child during a key developmental period, and even the manga infers that Eiji’s presence as a romantic element is strongly tied to Ash’s desire to return to a time of innocence. Ash is permanently trapped in a never-neverland of sorts, sexually defiled to the point where his own sexual awakening has been completely obscured beyond his own recognition. His relationship with Eiji is painfully asexual, one, because literally everything about Banana Fish is painful, but also because it is unclear if Ash may have been naturally asexual in the first place or if he was made into an asexual as the result of his childhood trauma. Either way, he certainly doesn’t have a lot of choice about the way that he is, and that way is, fundamentally, morally, and spiritually exhausted. It is only his tenacious spark, his survivors grip to life, and his affection for others in his life whom he loves that are weaker than him, that keeps him stubbornly clung to his own mortal vessel until the very end.

Eiji’s presence as a guiding light is, in THE definitively heartbreaking turn, the permission Ash needs to allow himself to finally die. He has always known that he would die, probably even thought that he should have already died, many, many times over. He is permanently and irreversibly damaged by the course of his life, and though we scream and cry and pray in the hope that Ash can make it, that he can still pull through and come out on the other side living and thriving in love, he was ultimately just never meant to make it that far. Even when Eiji tries to convince Ash that he is not the leopard, that he can come back down from the mountain, we are distantly still aware that this is not true, despite how difficult it is to accept. This difference of character is most clearly seen in Ash’s foil with Yut-Lung; both boys are the savant products of rape-and-murder-riddled childhoods. However, where Yut-Lung lacked anyone to give him acceptance and affection as he grew, Ash ended his time knowing love. Where Yut-Lung survives to the end and goes on to an even higher position of strength, he still has an emotional arc to complete. Yut Lung must discover for himself the value of human life. Ash already knew this value from the beginning, because his moral compass, which sometimes admittedly became scrambled, more or less always pointed true by the end of things.

The argument can be made that as the embodiment of the concept of Salinger’s short story, Ash is fated to die. Eiji, who in many ways is the window through which we experience this world, refuses to bend to fate. He insists in innocence again and again that Ash can change his fate, and for a moment, when Ash finds the plane ticket to Japan in Eiji’s letter, we really, really want to believe him. So, of course, because this manga is singularly cruel, it is here that Ash is stabbed. Of ffffucking course, after everything, death comes for Ash in a fashion which is completely mundane against the grandiose, bombastic scale of the story. An old grudge settled by someone Ash didn’t even have the time to hate in the first place. Ash let himself believe in a real life with Eiji for a single moment, and that proved to be his downfall. When he let his guard down, he let death in. He realizes his destiny immediately, because he is not stupid. His death is not a suicide, it is an understanding. 

 According to Akimi Yoshida, fate always wins out, but what the manga adds to this sad experience is this; despite everything, unlike Salinger’s broken Seymour, Ash’s heart in the end is full of love. His perfect day to die is the day he reads Eiji’s letter, the letter that declares them permanently bonded. Falling in love allows Ash to let go of himself gently, instead of the infinitely more brutal end he would have met at a villain’s hand otherwise, if he hadn’t fought tooth and nail for his very last scrap of autonomy up until that moment. Eiji’s love as an act of compassion is most perfectly realized; because Ash’s Perfect Day is one of is own making. All the circumstances together form a perfect conclusion. He didn’t see the knife coming, and he didn’t need to. After Papa Dino’s death, after Eiji is gone, Ash can finally stop. He can accept that his trauma is greater than even him. In a life spent being forced back and forth according to the violent winds of his circumstance, he chooses to, (and that’s important, he chooses to,) retreat like a cat to a quiet place of safety to live out his last moments. In this way, Ash’s death is merely a setting down of something unbearably heavy. Because he is loved, because Eiji is safe and far away, Ash is at last released from the prison of his life.

Other Banana Fish Meta: CAPE COD AS PURGATORY AND ASH’S BREAK FROM INNOCENCE

[otdderamin]

Analysis Critical Role C2 Ep014 Molly's Backstory Part 6: Disciple of The Moonweaver

This post is part 6 in a 7-part series examining everything we learned about Molly's backstory in Critical Role Campaign 2 Episode 014. They are meant to be read together in sequence, but 9 pages seemed a little long for Tumblr, so I've broken them up into separate posts. You can also find links to this series, as well as further reading, on my Molly Index.

Disciple of The Moonweaver

Building himself as Molly was about more than the practical consideration of not being recognized.

"Can you imagine what it would feel like to not feel anything about anything that had happened to you so far? […] It's very freeing. It's the best thing- It's the thing that happened to me. It's not the best thing that happened to me, it's the thing that happened to me. I found peace in building a new person. The Moonweaver-" (CR C2 Ep014 2:10:36)

It was probably the people of the circus who introduced him to The Moonweaver, a chaotic good goddess of the Trickery domain. "[She] is considered to be the deity of love, protecting the trysts of lovers with shadows of her own making. Those who work in darkness and trickery often ask for her blessing." Her commandments are, "Seize your own destiny by pursuing your passions. Let the shadows protect you from the burning light of fanatical good and the absolute darkness of evil. Walk unbridled and untethered, finding and forging new memories and experiences." (Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, page 17) To someone starting over from scratch building a new life, these are very appealing commandments, and have probably deeply shaped who he's become.

Molly's had to learn or relearn everything in the last two years. Language seems to have come back fairly quickly, so some of his old mental mapping had to have, too. But even things that came back must have been spotty and needed to be filled in. Which means he's had to actively think through every abstract concept we take for granted because the rest of us learn them through social osmosis. He had to ask himself questions like "Do I like purple? Why do I like purple? Am I a person that likes plaid?" So, he reached ideas around things like gender and absolutely had to think through all of them, individually, how he associates himself with them, and why. (Gender specifically I'll be talking about later in another article. My current thinking is that his demonstrated preferences for colors and patterns tell us a lot about gender identity, too.)

"I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad, and to travel for it too!" (Shakespeare, "As You Like It" act 4, scene 1, line 25) Building a new person became a way of asserting control over his life and seizing his own destiny. Faced with no memories and only vague clues about his former life, he had to choose between picking through the mystery for a sense of self he might never fully relate to, or letting it go entirely. What he did know was nothing he wanted to be associated with. "Whoever that was came to that end. And I want nothing to do with that. Whatever it was, it doesn't feel good when I- the moments when something creeps through, I don't like it. I don't want anything to do with it." (CR C2 Ep014 2:05:05) "Some asshole got buried in the dirt. Fuck him. I am enjoying what I'm doing. I want nothing to do with that. Anything that came before, I was happy to just leave it be." (CR C2 Ep014 2:01:36)

Feeling beholden to a past that you can't be part of and can't connect to is a lot like having a phone number that used to belong to a shady person. You don't have anything to do with them, but other people occasionally bother you with the misapprehension that you're the same. For Molly it was easier to just cut ties, change his number again, and move on. “New identity, who did?” The directive to "Walk unbridled and untethered, finding and forging new memories and experiences" was permission to build a new life wholly his own. He worries, "What if [my past] feels that it- that I owe it something?" (CR C2 Ep014 2:11:36) "I don't want to remember anything, I don't want anybody else's baggage in my head, I don't want anybody else's problems, thoughts, ideas." (CR C2 Ep014 2:09:45) Taliesin said:

“[Molly] doesn't care who Lucian was. […] It doesn't matter if he was a good person or a bad person. It's, 'I'm me now, and I have decided this is what I'm doing.' This was, 'I am made of nothing but decisions that have led me to be this person, and if you think I need to add a bunch of decisions to be more complete, or if a bunch of stuff that happened in my past is more important to who I am than who I am now, that's wrong. That's just- That's fucked up and stupid. I mean, that's madness.' You get to decide who you are, and he has very much decided who he is. And there's this little tangent, and wherever it leads, good or bad, is possibly to someone who- or to a person who's going to change- want to fundamentally change who he is and overwrite a lot of that. That's yeah, no. He wants nothing to do with it." (TM 2018-04-17 0:39:24)

He added later:

"I have friends who travel with the circus, and I have friends who live kind of that lifestyle, and who travel. I just saw a couple of them a few days ago. And there is a joyous freedom to not owing the world anything of yourself. Of just being, just- And it's not even just being responsible only for yourself, but just choosing not to just let yourself get bogged down with a bunch of stuff that doesn't really doesn't matter to you." (TM 2018-04-17 0:41:35)

Molly is an interesting character because he is a synthesis of the philosophical debate around what constitutes personal identity. (Which is far outside the scope of this analysis, but I encourage you to look it up.) It was performers who helped him shape his identity, and that has had a profound effect on how he views the purpose of his "self." The goal of a circus is to lie, impress, entertain, and delight in a way that convinces people to further your survival (give you money). He says, "I like pretending. Pretending's great. Who cares where anybody came from?" (CR C2 Ep014 2:03:26) "I spent two years, before I met you all cajoling people, occasionally ripping them off, occasionally doing a good turn here or there; never trust the truth. Truth is vicious; the truth thinks that you owe it something; none of that. I like my bullshit. It's good, it's happy, it makes other people happy. […] It is exactly who I am!" (CR C2 Ep014 2:11:59) Telling others the semi- to wholly- fictitious story of who we are and what we are comprised of is how all of us interact with other and shape how they see us. Molly just does this very deliberately and without pretense.

Molly's understands that other people deal with their impression of you rather than your impression of you. I elaborated on this in my earlier articles "How Molly uses appearance to assess people" and "How Molly manipulates the way people see him" Keenly aware that he's an outsider, he's shaped his appearance to challenge people. If they have an immediate recoil reaction, even if they cover it after a moment and act cordial, he knows not to trust them and their bullshit. If they take his appearance in stride, he knows they're open to outsiders and might be worth engaging. He also makes his appearance overwhelming so people focus on that and don't actually focus on him or his abilities too closely.

Part 1: Separating Molly and Lucian Part 2: Cree Part 3: The Tomb Takers Part 4: The Ritual Part 5: Molly Awakens Part 6: Disciple of The Moonweaver Part 7: Weird Blood Powers

If you like this transcript, please consider donating your time to Critical Role Transcripts, @CRTranscript on Twitter, to help them provide closed captioning to Critical Role. We’d like to share this wonderful show with as many people as possible, regardless of hearing ability or English language skills.

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References  

Mercer, M. (2018). Blood Hunter Class Details.  Retrieved from D&D Beyond.

Mercer, M., & Haeck, J. (2017). Tal'Dorei  Campaign Setting. Seattle: Green Ronin Publishing.

Analysis Critical Role C2 Ep014 How Molly manipulates the way people see him

Transcript Critical Role C2 Ep014 0:13:00 Molly’s Backstory 

Transcript Talks Machina 2018-02-20 0:20:50 How Molly uses appearance to assess people

Transcript Talks Machina 2018-04-17 Alpha 0:35:07 Molly’s notion of identity

[snootch]

I’m a little wine drunk and instead of making a new years post I’m gonna make another xuexiao post

Something that’s been bouncing around in my brain for a while is one of the things Xue Yang said during that last confrontation between him and Xiao Xingchen. I don’t remember the exact quote, but something along the lines of “If you don’t understand this world, then you never should have come down from your mountain.”

We know Xingchen left BaoSan SanRen’s mountain to ‘come save the world’, to experience it, to understand it, and it’s something that Xue Yang knows and resents Xiao Xingchen for. He sees Xingchen as privileged in not understanding the cruelty of the world like he understands it. And he’s absolutely right about it, but he didn’t understand how fragile that actually made Xingchen.

He views the world as this neverending cycle of seeking vengeance and of those in power stepping on everyone beneath them. So when he’s beating Xingchen down, telling him of all the atrocities he’s committed in trusting Xue Yang, his fatal flaw is in assuming Xingchen will react in a similar way as to how he reacted when Xue Yang blinded Song Lan.

When Xue Yang wakes up in Xiao Xingchen’s care, it’s apparent right away that he thinks Xingchen will seek vengeance on him. He probably continues on those three years, concealing his identity, at least in part because he believes Xingchen will reciprocate the violence he imparted on Song Lan. When Xingchen Does find out who Xue Yang is, he Does react with violence, thus confirming Xue Yang’s worldview.

Xiao Xingchen is this figure of justice, an incarnation of righteousness, purity, heroism. Xue Yang views him as this naive do-gooder, but only understands the naivety as far as not understanding the grey areas of life. Which is what he hates about all cultivators, in that they are all essentially privileged in not understanding the traumas Xue Yang had to go through in life. It’s why the only other people Xue Yang shows affections towards are A-Qing (However briefly, in his own ways), Jin GuangYao, and Wei Wuxian- All people who have less than favourable backgrounds and who understand the grey moralities of life, as Xue Yang percieves them.

Xingchen is different. Fundamentally. The kind of ‘naivety’ Xue Yang is used to is that of cultivators who have lived in the world, seen the hardships of the less privileged, and consider themselves deserving because of their hardwork, not because of the spoon fed to them at birth. Xingchen isn’t that kind of naive, which is where Xue Yang fundamentally doesn’t understand him.

Xingchen is naive in that he has literally only lived in the world for a few years. Xingchen doesn’t understand grey morals because he doesn’t realize how much of life’s hardships come from literally just how you’re born. He /doesn’t/ understand the world, he hasn’t seen enough of it to possibly understand it. He came off his mountain with whatever stories he’d been told by BaoSan SanRen, stories that were probably quite biased and outdated.

So Of Course he doesn’t expect Xiao Xingchen to kill himself. He doesn’t understand Xingchen’s naivety, so he doesn’t understand his fragility. Xiao Xingchen doesn’t operate on a desire to Get Even, he operates on an almost child-like motivation of love. He left the mountain out of a love for the world, a desire to protect it and purge it of evil out of love for his fellow man. He sacrificed his eyes to Song Lan because he loved him.

So when everything is ripped out from under him, what’s left isn’t an anger for himself and a need to seek his own justice- it’s heartbreak. His heart is broken over the loss of Song Lan, it’s broken in realizing he’s created the horror and atrocities he came into the world to eradicate, and it’s broken over the loss of someone he Thought he trust (this person he thought Xue Yang was).

He doesn’t have the life experience to handle what’s just happened to him. He didn’t have a lifetime of smaller heartbreaks to harden him against bigger heartbreaks. And all of these disconnects are why Xue Yang did not anticipate Xingchen killing himself.