#who did exactly the same stuff tbh i mean same deal

[lainsshop]

Being His First Soul ૭୧

Pairing: Alastor x First Soul ! Reader

Tags: i don’t even know tbh..

A/N: I honestly tried to make this as canon as possibly but I think I failed cause I don’t know but! Please enjoy this, I accept any feedback! And if you have more ideas I’ll make sure to put him here!🫶

How you met. To be honest, there’s so many scenarios of how you two met, maybe you both knew each other when you were alive or maybe you both played a bet, perhaps you were a hopeless sinner who just got there around the same time where he manifested..?

But one thing is for sure is that you two made a deal when you first interacted, you were just that dumb to know his real intentions, darling!

Since you’ve been with him for quite some time, he expects you to be on your best behavior all the time! Which is to never question him or anything like that, yes, you can curse and stuff like that but never try to cross him or there’ll be consequences.

Maybe there was ONE time where you did and it didn’t end up pretty- “I expected better from you, reader-“ He would absolutely use your real name to show you that he isn’t joking or anything like- he’s 100% serious with you.

This mf is the definition of manipulation! He wouldn’t exactly physically hurt you but emotionally..? Maybe, just perhaps. He only does it to show you where your place is, nothing more.

His protection. I feel like he would grow fond of you over the years since well- you’re his first soul, you’re basically around him all the fucking time!

He needs help with something? Summons you. He needs someone to help him on this charity thing? Summons you. He needs someone to help him with his broadcast? Summons you. It’s always you who summons first cause he knows you will do it no matter what, you either learned that from the hard way or easy way.

I feel like you would be friends with Husk and Niffty. Well- it was easy to make a friendship with Niffty but with Husk? Nah, that took a lot of time, that mf was hard to crack but he eventually did, only a bit, just a tiny bit though.

Speaking of friends, you of course met Rosie and Mimzy, you either hate or like Mimzy, I don’t know but you absolutely adored Rosie, she was like a breath of fresh air for you, she was like Alastor but in a better way, you know?

You knowing his intentions. This is hard to explain kinda cause I feel like you would know his real intentions by now like you can read him like a book, you know? Since you’ve been together for so long so I think you can read him with ease.

Playful banter. You’re either going along with it or being annoyed by it and Alastor enjoys that! He loves your reactions to his banter or comments that make you have an entertaining reaction.

Why do I feel like you have this instinct when something happens to Alastor? Like when he made that deal with someone you felt it or when he got hurt from fighting with Adam you also felt that, is like you’re connected with him but not in that way, you know what I mean?

Even if you’ve been together for so long, you honestly still haven’t seen his vulnerable side like yes, maybe you’ve seen him lose his composure and curse at someone cause they pissed him off but nothing more, you could’ve sworn that he didn’t curse or anything like that so imagine you’re expression when he did like damn😭

© LAINSSHOP 2024

[fictionfixations]

the dawn knight in place of yuu

MAJOR JP BOOK 7 SPOILERS

(anyway i like calling him the knight of dawn but also thats too many words for a name im going to be repeating a lot throughout this post so dawn knight)

okay so. i was thinking about a fic to write where a character had a part of themselves appear somewhere else? like ive been getting into omniscient reader but i have a diff story im trying to commit to rn so i cant really write something with it when i dont really know shit that happens besides like end game spoilers lOl

but i find the idea of like the 49/51 (?) interesting? i think thats the right numbers. no context to people who dont know what that means but that part broke me even though all i know about omniscient reader is by reading a shit ton of orv fanfiction. my heart man... sob.

but so anyways my mind wandered to the dawn knight

kudos to that like one fic where the dawn knight's soul appeared and attached itself to yuu except i read it when i didnt even know who he was but i thought maybe he was a buddy of lilia so im just reading and getting confused on like no why you no like lilia what (also he doesnt remember iirc and i think that was just like a instinctual feeling cause yknow humans vs fae??) but uh i know context now lMFAO

but like

just imagine this person who looks like silver but blonde. who doesnt remember who he is (as hes kind of more of just a fragment of his soul? but like he appears in NRC and not RSA because he still has a lingering attachment towards silver. wanting to see him grow because he never got the chance to)

who worries over silver

is a little nervous around fae, but maybe this is ooc but like without all the pressure from what the fuck was his name henrik(??) and like the people around him who are all anti-fae, cause he wouldve liked it if they couldve been in peace and stuff yknow? and also without those memories so its not too difficult for him to get past that and see them as people who will probably not harm others (LOOK i just want twst characters to be happy man cause everything is so sad :((( )

anyway lilia has grown since then and doesnt hate humans. maybe he doesnt exactly know how to feel about the dawn knight (UM like cause meleanor. or is it maleanor? i think thats EN spelling but tbh if not for en i wouldnt know how tf to spell it. but uh ykNOW.. he kinda. uh. still killed.)

but then maybe it becomes clear that this dawn knight (who needs an actual name. dawn sounds too on the nose and i dont think lilia associates dawn with positive feelings considering when maleanor died didnt it turn dawn or something. and then they broke down because shes DEAD.???)

is not the same dawn knight he met so long ago.

like

idk

think about it in like a. okay im pulling out honkai star rail examples now. but think of it maybe like dan feng and dan heng where they're like reincarnations of each other? but not the same person? (some people think of them as still the same considering i think(? its been a hot minute since i went through story) those memories of those reincarnations are then shared to other incarnations to help them in high elder duty thingy whatever its called but i think of them as entirely different people who happen to look similar)

i guess you could view it as a 'i once was [this], but now im this and im not the same person who did all those things'

EDIT: I AM WRONG. 2.5 spoilers but its mentioned that someone made dan heng remember his past life so its NOT canon that they remember their past life. "...led her to perform certain healing arts on Dan Heng, who had just finished his hatching rebirth, so that he would regain the memories of his past life?" but anyway thats how it turned out so uh just pretend that i mean reincarnating/past life type deal but stlil having some of those memories of the former life

idk maybe theres some lilia treating him as another son since like. all three of them are orphans who were taken in???? like its implied parallel of lilia being taken in by the mal... dRACONIA family sorry i forgot the last name om. and the dawn knight being taken in by the whoever is in charge. like the dad of henrik(?) and that person whose name i cant remember i think it was leah who the dawn knight liked and married? but so anyway they both got taken in by a family and owe them a debt and fight for them (and care for them. although idk about henrik ew, but he was also like. wanting princess glow(???) which could supposedly grant wishes i think to like cure their ill father, and saying that the dawn knight should do it for leah or something? i cant remember but he convinced him with something something leah)

i dont know where im going with this thought but like. i remember the dawn knight said something like. if things could be different? but like it cant be because they've gone too far now to forgive each other? but like he wanted there to be peace.

i remember thinking about lilia's wish in the wish upon a star event, maybe it was similar i cant recall exactly

Lilia: My wish is... ...for humans, fae, and all other species to live in harmony. [Img of the wishing star] Trey: Haha, wow. That's a pretty ambitious wish. Lilia: To join joyous hands with one another is no simple feat, even for those among the same species... To say nothing of the difficulties across species divides. You've learned about our history, have you not? All the countless tales of our failure to compromise, and the resulting conflicts? I have no desire to see such history repeated. So I make the same wish every Starsending.

like the dawn knight expressed regret that it had to be this way and wanted things to change but it was far too late. but like. he never did that stuff now (well lilia will remember so poor grandpa but. he's also been really forgiving towards humans when doing it for someone? like he endures it? like when he was searching for a way to hatch malleus and these people were really against lilia for being fae when he just existed, and he didnt fight back because it would paint a bad picture for the draconias? there was another example related to silevr but i cant remember it im. not what i was thinking about but theres also when he contemplated killing baby silver but changed his mind because he'd been trying to teach malleus to like. 'walk in time with his neighbor' and so and so and i forgot what he said but that how could he do that when he should be like setting an example for malleus or something right?)

also silver learning who his parents are in a maybe less traumatic way (like NOT running away knowing malleus' mom might die and then oh shit the ceiling collapsed and IS THAT THE ENEMY oh god please dont let malleus' egg be hurt and then he shares the same face as me? and that ring-- cue silver hating himself and being dragged in by darkness and i am just sobbing my eyes out like no silver he loved you so much :((( )

and even if lilia still holds anything against the dawn knight. still has lingering feelings even towards this not-dawn knight. that he wouldnt want to condemn the dawn knight, and then have silver condemn himself for being of that blood even though he didnt even do anything yknow?

and then when lilia dies he can meet up with the ghosts of maleanor and raverne (is that spelled right? i genuinely cant remember the EN spelling but it was something like that. uhh.??) and i know thats sad but i want lilia to be able to spend more time with maleanor and raverne too yknow? but im not sure how to do that

maybe. like the. the the . council? i cant remember its name fshuidfh but those assholes who appeared when we made it to. blackscale(?) castle... ? i. forgor. maleficia(THATS GRANDMA RIGHT?? i get so confused by who is who in draconia) castle??

but like when we get there with malleus' egg and then maleanor dies

and theres just these voices of long dead old geezers who are bitches to lilia and i hate them and i dont know how they're still there and can talk but i dont want maleanor there because they're horrible. also they literally said her sacrifice was like noble or some shit like that and im just like BITCH- (also lilia is banned from the capital or something isnt he?? like i mean he can still visit the castle. but secretly. but still :( )

so i just think.

fully getting over stuff. heart demons. talking things out. lilia gets to talk about stuff for the first time in awhile (remember when like literally no one talked about the circumstances regarding malleus' birth or something so silver and sebek just had no idea what they were getting into??? and like i guess he could talk to baul? baur? idk which one is the one on EN i forgor. but idk man.)

not-dawn knight being a really good listener. being understanding, sharing his input where appropriate. and like he also gets some of his memories which put a lot of things into proper context. and so sharing thoughts of so and so. and just. basically this talk that spirals into moving on.

sharing frustrations, sharing things that never really got to be known.? like regrets, etc etc

since i think the last time they met was when silver father reveal, and time passed and he died so its just all these lingering things that never got to be said out loud for various reasons. like maybe because company is against so and so so to say something would be like idk maybe traitorous? i dont think thats the right word but words are hard and i keep forgetting words the moment i need them

its like. the unique point of view of talking about things between former enemies. like how they viewed things, etc etc

and then when lilias lived a full life, no regrets, he meets maleanor and raverne in the afterlife.

oh yeah also about his dorm i have no fucking idea. i honestly mostly forgot what each dorm represents but either ramshackle or diasomnia, which i know is like nobility or something? but anyway dawn knight married a princess, also i associate diasomnia with fae / briar valley which is related considering hes book 7 stuff so im pushing him there anyway

or maybe the mirror cant read him because his soul is fragmented. or maybe retcon and his soul isnt like that? idk but i like to think the other part of his soul is in the afterlife with his wife yknow? and eventually silver will be there and able to meet his mom and huggies, and acknowledging that these are who his parents are, but also that lilia is also his parent and the one who raised him yknow? there can be more than two parents in my eyes.

its just that his soul is like in half because of the part of him that wants to have seen silver grown. i think i said this earlier in the post but that since the last time he saw silver was as an infant (also he had blonde hair so-)

also wasnt infant silver asleep for like hundreds of years until it was either because someone who loved him came by (lilia) or because the spell finally wore off (which is what lilia thinks. i dont know where to put my two cents at tbh of which i think is right)

so dawn knight just sitting there in the afterlife like. ..man. my childs still not here. i mean. thats a good thing that they're not dead but like. i kinda wanna see them.

or well silvers the only one so i should be saying he but gidfhuj

also it was either leah or leia i am a dumbass? maybe leah was the EN one. idk i forgot.

anyway thats enough yapping for me

[aihoshiino]

chapter 149 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 6

anybody else here unironically love getting yuribaited or just me

Honestly I kind of don't know what to think about this chapter lol. As it stands I didn't really hate it - in a lot of ways, it feels like a return to the humour and emotional focus of early OnK which is something I've honestly been missing in the manga while revisiting the anime. Mengo's art toys chapter was great and getting some proper Akane focus was nice. On the other hand, transitioning into this style of writing with no cushioning after the last arc is so incredibly jarring and the Akane stuff we get here is… well, we'll put a pin in it for now and address it later.

In general "put a pin in it" feels like the right energy for this chapter. As the second chapter of a new arc it's primarily setup for the stuff we're going to be dealing with for the next however long, I think it's going to be something we can really only chew on when we have a more solid idea of what exactly it's setting up, long or short term.

Anyway…! We start off with an explanation of why Kana seemed to flip so suddenly last chapter which does patch up some of that logic a bit. I think it's a little silly that she didn't actually overhear the conversation and thus clue into the actual goings on with how close she was standing but that's basically romance misunderstandings 101 so…

Her leaping to assumptions and giving up so quick also feels a bit abrupt but tbh Kana has always been deeply insecure and quick to leap to it's so over when it comes to her feelings for Aqua. Not only that but as others have pointed out since last chapter, from Kana's outsider perspective, Aqua was at his happiest and most at peace while dating Akane and has been in a mental health spiral to the point of expressing suicidal ideation since they broke up. Obviously we, the readers, know the extenuating circumstances at place but from Kana's POV it makes perfect sense to conclude that Akane makes him happiest and is uniquely equipped to do so. It just feels clunky in execution.

On the subject of clunky… I won't lie, it really bugs me that the first really significant AKKN interaction we're getting is love triangle shit entirely centered on Aqua. One of my biggest complaints about the series post TB was the way the end of that arc set up a huge status quo change to Akane and Kana's rivalry and then kind of failed to expand on it at all and that continued to be true all the way up to the Movie Arc. I'd hoped that them both working in close proximity as actresses on the same project would give us opportunities to dig into that. We got some lip service in that regard and then swerved hard into suddenly hyperfocusing on Kana's insecurities regarding Ruby while Akane got all of zero meaningful focus during the back half of the Movie Arc even though she was one of the characters with the most potential to bring interesting things to the table.

Honestly, one of my biggest fears with Akane's declaration that she'd stop Aqua's plan was that even though the two of broken up, she would continue to orbit Aqua at the expense of being allowed an arc of her own that focused on her relationships with the wider cast. Like - even if what she says about not being romantically interested in Aqua anymore is true, she is nevertheless entirely revolving around him to a really frustrating degree. It really feels like Akasaka realized Akane would have solved everything going on in the Movie Arc and had to panic and offscreen her as a result lol.

tho akane dismissively talking about the idea of clinging onto a past lover did make me do a very mean chuckle. ouch, better hope ruby didn't overhear that one, girl!

That said, for all my complaints, I didn't hate their little talk. Yes, it contained an absolute mountain of transparent-to-the-point-of-cynical KanaKane shipbait but it was pretty gay so who's to say if it's really good or bad or not. It's also just nice to see Kana and Akane being able to have a talk that isn't entirely hostile even if I really wish it was under different circumstances, or even that we'd just seen the road they took to being able to be so civil with each other. But whatever - we're here now, I'll take what I get.

Circling back around a bit, I am intrigued by the idea of Akane framing herself as having 'moved on' from Aqua when she very clearly hasn't lol. Like I indicated up there, I don't quite think this is the case nor do I think we're supposed to uncritically accept this as being the case - it reads moreso to me that Akane is trying to convince not just Kana but also herself that she's moved on from Aqua so Kana doesn't feel like she's in Akane's way if she tries to shoot her shot. As for why… well, that's something to talk about at the end of the chapter but I do think it's interesting either way. Akane wildly overshooting in her scrabble to convince Kana it's totally just platonic and going for sonzoning Aqua was also about the most insane thing she's said in a while but her utterly panicked and deranged expression as she said it made me bust a gut laughing.

In general, the expression work this chapter was on fire and there was a ton of really funny and really cute moments - Akane's blushy pout after Kana's quasi-confession, the fish-eye lens effect on her when Kana sees her outside her door and especially her and Kana's expressions in the second to last page… jesus i lost it so bad.

I've been gushing about Mengo's panelling and expressions for the last ten or so chapters but she really is amping it up lately. It definitely feels like her art for OnK has been getting really refined during the last few volumes and while this chapter was a little whiplash-y coming off the end of the Movie Arc, I also think it's a really impressive display of Mengo's range, too. Her horror and drama chops were on full display while all that was going on but in a more lowkey chapter like this, she brings a lot of life and charm to even simple things like the little montage of everyone wrapping up their day of the beach - it's three silent, tiny panels at the bottom of the page but she crams a ton of detail and character into each one.

I also am Extremely Shrimpterested in the note this chapter ends on. Something OnK does occasionally is use genre trappings as a smokescreen for what is actually happening on page and Akane's words at the end here seem to indicate this is happening here, too. This entire chapter goes extremely hard on the romcom tropes and dynamics but the way Akane's energy totally changes once she's on her own makes me think this is intentional and a reflection of the way Akane is setting up to use Kana.

Because I do think it's undoubtable that she is setting up to use Kana. Her sudden leap to captain of the SS AquKana is not about wholeheartedly supporting two people she loves (at least not primarily) and more about her continued efforts to save Aqua from himself. Kana just happens to be a convenient pawn in making this happen.

If I'm making this sound very cynical and cold of Akane: it is! But that's why I think it's so interesting. Akane is very like Aqua in a lot of ways and seeing this tendency of his to perform cruelty and manipulation to the greater end of doing the most good (or at least in their eyes) mirrored in her is very juicy and potentially very deadly in the hands of someone as smart and perceptive as Akane.

It's also kind of telling and kind of really sad to see Akane asserting that Aqua wouldn't be able to take revenge if he had a girlfriend at his side when that certainly didn't stop him back when he and Akane were dating. It's subtle but it's consistent with just how little faith Akane seems to have ever had in Aqua's feelings for her. Kana's not the only one struggling with long term insecurities in that regard.

I also can't not address the elephant in the room that is the story setting this up while the resolution to whatever the hell is going on with Ruby is still dangling over everyone's heads. I mentioned this last chapter but it really is getting to be bizarre just how much of a nothingburger that has been turned into, not just in terms of the characters' lack of reaction to it but the way the narrative has just entirely failed to give it any weight or significance whatsoever. I can only assume that one of the other girls making a move to pursue Aqua (if it does end up happening) will kick Ruby into action and we'll get god knows what sort of resolution there but a dark and evil part of me that loves to start shit thinks that the funniest possible resolution would be for it to never come up or be referenced ever again just for the sheer frenzy of confusion and bafflement it would cause. everybody loses!!!

[bestworstcase]

Tbh I don't think anyone's saying that Oz has Never Done Anything Wrong Ever, or at least, personally, that's not my belief.

While personally I believe that Oz hasn't tried actually destroying Salem or erasing her from anyone knowing about her at all, I ALSO believe that Salem Is Not an irredeemable monster. I do believe she's trying to overthrow the gods rn, and that she hates the sword of damocles that is the mandate and has been trying to keep Oz from summoning the gods up until now (bc yknow, why wouldn't she try keeping the Relics from him??).

Plus, her fear wouldn't be unfounded (I still believe Oz was gunning for the task for a long time), and the narrative of "Salem is right" can still easily happen. Plus it's not like Oz is innocent; 1. He lied to Salem for their entire marriage 2. He decided to gun for the task Light gave him 3. Hasn't even tried communicating with Salem and 4. Has demonized her in his mind and to those in his circle. Both and neither are at fault imo. Oz fucked up big time, and he knows this, but the belief Salem hates him and his own self hate is keeping him from Actually Doing Anything. I think this also goes for Salem, fear and possibly self hate keeping her from communicating.

I just come from the perspective that both fucked up, Oz a bit more than Salem ofc. I just think that Oz isn't nearly as bad as people make him out to be. Like, this probably sounds really rude so I'm sorry in advance (/gen), but I feel like Oz being paranoid for No Reason and constantly trying to destroy Salem or erase her from public knowledge and demonizing her for No Reason beyond his own paranoia and unwillingness to change makes him seem... almost cartoonishly bad. Like it makes him sound like an abusive husband 100x worse than Adam and Jacques combined. And beyond that, it makes Salem seem completely innocent pre-war, that she was just dealing with her Abusive Husband who's delusional and paranoid.

To me, it doesn't feel nuanced, or at least as nuanced. I DO like the idea, but only as an AU. Not only that but I feel like it'd be really unfriendly to casual fans, people who don't do analysis n stuff, bc unless you bother analyzing every 2 second scene, you won't pick a lot of this up. And this is in terms of the writers, not you lol. Rwby IS meant to be analyzed, but not a lot of people will bother, and those who do haven't exactly picked any of this up.

I do think they're good theories to have though. Really it just gives me an excuse to re-analyze scenes and see if my thinking is flawed. I mean, if it's straight up Confirmed that your theories are right, then I'll be like "Oh, huh, I was wrong". I figured I'd just give insight to what people are probably saying bc I haven't seen anyone say that Oz is an innocent uwu wet paper bag. Cause he's NOT innocent, but I just don't think he's as bad or evil as people insist he is. And I do my best to analyze without any form of bias. I *did* come to the same conclusion about Salem lol.

Anyways sorry, this got long dhchvj. I hope I don't sound rude, I'm really tone blind (autism), I'm just doing my best to give insight to what people think. Cause trust me, it annoys me just as much as you to see people try to claim that Oz is innocent or that Salem is an irredeemable abusive witch. Cause obv neither is true lmao.

I hope you have a good day :] /gen

you’re fine. 

the core issue i have with the reasoning laid out here is that it demands a presupposition that oz is… well, a miserable spineless cowardly fraud who’s spent untold millennia pretending to believe in a pointless cause that he knows he will never lift a finger to advance in any meaningful sense. because it’s made quite clear that ozpin’s inner circle believes that they’ve been at war with salem for decades, that the huntsmen academies are fortresses oz built not to merely defend the relics but specifically to "stop salem"—that’s the language qrow uses in V4 and oz echoes it in V5—and that this is what oz has been doing for centuries if not   thousands of years, fighting to protect remnant from salem. 

the way qrow discusses the great war in both WOR and V4 insinuates that the conflict was really a proxy war between oz and salem, glynda chides ironwood by telling him "ozpin has experience the rest of us lack," in V3 the inner circle tells pyrrha "we are the protectors of this world" and "our group was founded [hundreds of years ago] to protect both mankind and the maidens" by "remov[ing] the maidens from the public eye, allowing their existence to fade away into legend." or as qrow puts it in V2, "we’re the ones that keep the world safe from the evils no one even knows about!"—i.e., from salem—"[which is] why we meet behind closed doors, why we work in the shadows."

now, while ozpin’s difficult relationship with the truth means we do need to be skeptical as to the veracity of these historical claims… the inner circle is circumspect on the details, but they’re not lying or misrepresenting the purpose of their group. they earnestly believe these things because this what ozpin told them, and in V5 we see oz recount the same general narrative to team RNJR: "i am the combination of countless men who have spent their lives trying to protect the people of remnant […] this curse was bestowed on me by the gods because i failed to stop salem in the past, but we must stop her now."

so there is no ambiguity at all about the story oz tells his closest allies: he is trying to protect the world from an ancient hidden evil called salem, who defeated him once in the distant past but can be stopped now by keeping the relics out of her hands, and in order to do that it is essential to keep the relics and the maidens secret (lest world rip itself apart in wars to claim this incredible power) and likewise to ensure that salem’s existence remains hidden (lest everyone panic and be wiped out by grimm). oz and his inner circle frame this as an secret struggle that has been ongoing for centuries, if not thousands of years. 

his inner circle had no reason to disbelieve what ozpin told them prior to jinn’s tale. and even after the lost fable, no one questions the narrative that oz has been fighting salem for a very long time. "ozpin believed that the best way to fight salem was to do it in secret," says ironwood. "ozpin spent his whole life, many lives, keeping this secret," says qrow. later in V7, ironwood describes salem as "an ancient and terrible evil," and in V8 ruby says "this isn’t some new enemy or invading kingdom, this is a force we’ve faced before, for centuries… salem."

for the moment we’ll just accept the presupposition that salem’s war against the huntsmen academies began with the attack on amber following perhaps a decade of planning and careful preparation, incited by whatever happened when she met summer rose, and that before that time salem was not actively participating in shadow war. 

if this is taken to be true, the question with regard to how ozma has spent all this time becomes: do we believe that he’s been doing what he says he has—trying to "stop salem" by guarding the relics and keeping all these secrets—or not? because it is undeniably true that this is what ozma CLAIMS to have been doing for centuries if not millennia. when ozpin tells people this story about who he is and what he’s spent lifetimes trying to do, is it because he genuinely believes that he and salem have been embroiled in a secret cold war all this time, or… is he just lying?

why would he lie about that? 

consider the things he definitely did lie about. why didn’t he tell anyone that salem can’t be killed? he feared they would fall into despair and give up, lose all hope and the will to keep fighting. why did he lie about his personal history with salem? he believes loving her is his greatest mistake ("the hearts of men are easily swayed" etc) and he feels ashamed, guilty, regretful, desperate to make amends yet certain she will never forgive him and terrified that even if she did it would doom the world—the truth is messy and complicated and he’s convinced that what he wants is evil, so he buries it. 

why, then, would he pretend to still be fighting her when he actually isn’t? if ozma had, at some point, resolved this inner turmoil on the side of "salem was right, the god of light is wrong, i am not going to fulfill my task and will instead dedicate my existence to insuring that the relics are never brought together, the best way to protect remnant is by rejecting the gods and their redemption," why would he lie about that? why would he continue to promote faith in the two brothers and the final judgment he foretold long ago (ozpin includes this story in his anthology with notes urging his readers to believe in it and to act each day as if the gods will return tomorrow)? why keep telling his closest allies, his friends, life after life, that he was sent to remnant by the gods themselves to stop salem from changing the world? 

why wouldn’t he change course?—and i want to be very clear that i’m not asking why he wouldn’t seek reconciliation with salem, because emotionally that’s quite a lot harder. but if he decided the divine mandate was bullshit and he wasn’t going to follow it any longer, why would he not… er… stop telling people that the brothers are the Real True Gods who left behind these divine relics which he is put on this world to keep safe until the final judgment? 

ozma strove to keep salem and the relics a secret for lifetimes—and ozpin was stridently opposed to revealing the truth, we see him and his inner circle balk at the idea time and again explicitly because ozpin insists that secrecy is essential to stopping salem, so we have no reason to doubt that he really did feel strongly that keeping these secrets kept people safe—so in the event he changed his mind and came to believe that the brothers were enemies of humanity who must be kept at bay… surely he would shut his mouth. 

but the brothers and their final judgment aren’t a secret! ozpin published that story in a book of fairytales with a commentary telling his readers to prepare themselves to be judged! after jinn’s tale, nobody freaks out about the divine threat of execution should mankind prove unworthy because they already knew that part; it’s the mainstream doctrine of a well-known religion that exists all around the world, which qrow and ozpin had already told them was real and true. 

oz is not a bad person. he certainly isn’t some sort of craven charlatan who’s spent thousands of years exhorting the world to believe in and follow a creed he secretly opposes—even if he still believed that salem was dangerous and needed to be stopped, it would be so simple to cast the gods as dangerous adversaries who must also be prevented from ever coming back. 

like, he wants people to live. he wants the world to be safe, even if at the cost of his own happiness. that is always what ozma is trying to achieve—even during the ozlem kingdom, he sacrificed the happiness he’d found with salem in their little cottage to try uniting the world with her because he truly, genuinely believed his happiness came at the cost of humanity’s salvation. 

it follows that the reason ozpin tells his close allies that it is his god-given task to stop salem by keeping the relics out of her grasp whilst striving for unity and keeping all this a secret, he does so because he truly, genuinely believes that it’s the best way to protect the world. likewise, when he uses his public platform as the headmaster of a prestigious academy to publish an anthology of tales, including the one about the two brothers that articulates the divine mandate exactly, upon which he comments this: 

We have a fragile peace, and in some ways, we are more divided than ever. Even if the gods aren’t real, even if they don’t return to judge us for our deeds, we should act each day as though they are arriving tomorrow. In the end, we will be the arbiters of our fates. We will either create a beautiful, peaceful world and live in harmony together or destroy ourselves and our planet, and the gods will judge what we have chosen.

ozpin really earnestly does believe that proselytizing the brothers, imploring everyone to live as if the gods will return for the final judgment tomorrow, while keeping salem, the maidens, and the relics secret, is necessary and the best way to keep people safe. he wouldn’t be doing this if he thought it didn’t protect people!

so the story he tells his inner circle about WHAT he does—his purpose, his methods, his strategy—is true. it must be true because it would be both reprehensible and beyond foolish for ozpin to convince his allies they’re fighting in a war he knows isn’t real for a cause he doesn’t actually believe in, and ozpin is neither reprehensible nor stupid.

it follows that ozpin a) believes he has been fighting a protracted covert war over the relics with salem since the ages, and b) can be taken at his word when he says that insuring the relics and salem’s existence remain secret is an essential part of his strategy, especially because without fail he prioritizes secrecy above every other concern throughout V1-6 so he’s very much putting his money where his mouth is in that regard.

in V3, the inner circle makes the claim that their predecessors ("this brotherhood"), centuries ago, chose to "remove the maidens from the public eye, allowing them to fade away into legend." while i do have my doubts about the historical accuracy of that claim—a) the nature of the maiden inheritance rules would make it very difficult to keep the maidens under wraps and b) i think it’s more likely that ozma always intended for the maidens to act covertly, didn’t know what would happen when the first four died, and only pieced it together after a few centuries had gone by and he started to hear stories about young women blessed with magical power and went "…ah."—i don’t think there’s any reason to doubt that the maidens became a fairytale because ozma decided they should be kept secret. 

neither oz nor his inner circle make an exactly equivalent claim about salem… but. the situations are quite similar: the maidens were once "common knowledge," and when ozma first reincarnated he traveled around for years hearing tales of "the witch" wherever he went. some time long ago, ozma and his allies undertook to suppress public knowledge of the maidens, and in the present the last trace remaining is an old fairytale that no one could believe holds any real truth. as for salem, no one knows about her anymore either, and "ozpin spent all his life, many lives keeping this secret." 

the existence of the relics, similarly, is a secret because ozma chose to keep them secret—although the crown seems to have passed through at least a few pairs of hands before ozma tracked it down, hence the fairytale. (this is a subject for another post, but i actually don’t think 'the indecisive king' is about ozma—ozpin’s commentary on it is VERY impersonal and perfunctory compared to what he has to say about 'the infinite man,' 'the girl in the tower,' 'the story of the seasons,' or even 'the grimm child.' i think the original inspiration for the tale was some other person who had the crown before ozma found it, and he included the story because, as he says, he thinks it has an important message.)

so, basically, in the present ozpin and his inner circle are hiding three big secrets: the maidens, the relics, and salem. it’s stated outright that the maidens are secret because ozma and his allies chose to hide them from the world. 

of the relics, three are entirely unknown and one is the subject of a single fairytale of which the reliability is unknown (although my bet is on "the real crown isn’t that straightforward and may not actually work like that at all"); oz has been in possession of all four for at least fifty or so years. we know he found the lamp first, thousands of years ago, that he used both the sword and the crown to end the great war eighty years ago, and ozpin raised atlas using the staff. it’s very likely that he found the other three much earlier. the fairytale inspired by the crown suggests that one might have eluded him for a while.

in any case, once he had them all (and a few centuries had gone by to allow the story about the crown to be forgotten as anything but a fiction), ozma would’ve had nearly absolute power to decide who knew about them—salem being the only other person who could tell anyone, and at the time she didn’t know anything more than "there are four relics of some kind, somewhere in the world, that will call the gods to remnant to judge humankind if they’re ever brought together."

so the relics, too, are secret because ozma decided to keep them secret.

this leaves salem. before the rise and fall of the ozlem kingdom, she lived on the fringes of civilization and knowledge of her existence was widespread. (her decrepit house sat at the end of a paved, well-maintained footpath—she was within walking distance of the nearest town and did not make herself remotely difficult to find.) thousands of years later? nothing but fairytales that are, like 'the story of the seasons' and 'the indecisive king,' either believed to be entirely fictional or (in the case of 'the grimm child') about a real, if very rare, phenomenon unrelated to salem herself. 

this is not something that could have happened at all if salem hadn’t withdrawn from civilization as far as she did—which is one of the core reasons i think she hasn’t been at war with ozma all this time—so she tacitly allowed it to happen. but why did she withdraw so far? 

here is the part where it gets murky and highly speculative because we just don’t know what happened or where she went or what she did in those first few hundred years after the ozlem kingdom fell. it is plausible that salem just ran and kept running until she’d gotten as far away from people as it was possible to get, and stayed there in self-imposed isolation until, well, now—in which case ozma’s effort to suppress the knowledge of her existence would have mainly entailed not telling anyone about her and maybe destroying bits and pieces of the historical record. 

(i do think he’s made an active effort to keep her secret all this time, regardless: that is his first priority at all times until jinn spills the beans in V6, and if he can’t keep the world safe by destroying her then making sure the world doesn’t know she exists is the obvious Plan B. if nobody knows about her, no one can piss off the gods by siding with her. it’s really more a question of whether she put up a fight.)

hooowever. salem is a character defined by loneliness and longing for freedom, which to her explicitly means connection with others. love. companionship. this is why the gods punish her by making her immortal—separating her from the one she loves forever—and then when she overcomes that by going out into the world and turning her immortality into a gift that brings her closer to people and allows her to form new alliances and friendships, rather than a curse imprisoning her in isolation, the gods just. kill everyone. and leave her alone in the ashes. 

and as i said, even when salem is miserably isolating herself before ozma, she isn’t that far away from civilization—she’s living by herself but close enough to somewhere that she could walk into town, and her presence there was not only well-known but welcomed enough that people built a road right to her doorstep. this during a period of her life when she was so profoundly depressed that her house was rotting and falling apart around her! 

the point is that while salem does inarguably have self-isolating tendencies, i… don’t think hers are anywhere close to being as severe as ozma’s. his rendition of himself in 'the story of the seasons' may well be more poetic than literal ("So cold was his heart that the lands around him were covered in snow, the trees were bare, and animals and Creatures of Grimm alike avoided him. For centuries, no one dared disturb his peace…"), but at the time ozma certainly would have had the magical power to freeze all the land for miles around to keep people away from him, and even if it’s only a metaphor for how he felt then the implication is that he hid himself away in total solitude for possibly multiple consecutive lifetimes…

…whereas salem, at her absolute lowest, in the darkest depths of her self-isolating depression, lived by herself a short way from the edge of some town whose residents were probably rather wary of her (she’s not exactly friendly, nor human, and everyone knows she’s a witch) but nevertheless accepted her as a member of their community (because salem certainly wasn’t the one bothering to take care of that path). 

the way things ended between her and ozma, his deception, the deaths of their children, their kingdom collapsing, all of this was extremely traumatic for her and haunts her to this day just as ozma; i have no trouble at all believing that salem would flee to the edge of the world in the immediate aftermath. 

but i find it a lot more difficult to believe that she would stay there for thousands upon thousands of years if the only thing preventing her from returning to the margins of civilization were her own guilt and self-hatred. the gods punishing her by murdering the whole world, being completely alone for hundreds of millions of years, grimming herself, and the way humans would have treated her in an era when faunus were hunted down and caged like beasts wasn’t enough to drive salem into exile. i don’t believe her self-loathing, by itself, is strong enough to overpower her desperation to be free for very long.

i also really doubt that ozma would just, for lack of a better word, trust her to stay gone. especially not if—as jinn implies—he believed salem kept finding him somehow and sending grimm after him, which probably wasn’t true (her command over the grimm seems to be restricted to the ones she makes, and the incarnations we see in this part of the lost fable were not at all significant persons easily identifiable as ozma), but it isn’t an unreasonable fear for him to have? given how badly things ended between them. 

we know salem doesn’t like, obsessively devote her time to scrying until she’s found ozma again (because she doesn’t bother to do that after ozpin dies, she’s caught completely off guard by oscar—and if she doesn’t do so while she is actively waging war against him, it’s unlikely that it ever crossed her mind to try it at all, or else her scrying just doesn’t work that way), but ozma doesn’t have any way of knowing that. we know salem doesn’t control every grimm in the world, and oz seems to have figured that out eventually, but in those first few centuries before he found the lamp? he had no idea what salem might be capable of, what powers she might have hidden from him!

like it isn’t that ozma has No Reason to be paranoid. he knows that he hurt her really badly and that when salem gets hurt she lashes out, often in extremely vindictive and extremely violent ways. (he has no way of knowing that salem has spent these thousands of years clawing her temper under control, and no reason to think she would try.) he probably had no idea to what extent salem being grimm might be influencing her thinking—that’s where all the really deep distortions start to take root, ozma anxiously second-guessing every little thing like were there warning signs i ignored? was he right? did i let infatuation blind me to what she’d become from the very start?—by the time he finds the lamp, assuming jinn didn’t skip over any lives, he’s on his fourth life since the end; that’s a span of like, at least two to three hundred years depending how long he lived and how much time it took him to reincarnate each time. 

that is plenty enough time to convince himself she’s nothing but an evil monster who needs to be put down before he finds the lamp, and then he immediately uses his three questions for that lifetime so it would be another full century after that before he had the opportunity to ask jinn anything about… what salem is doing now, or what she lied to him about, or if she told him the truth after all. which is a terrifying prospect to even consider after a) multiple centuries marinating in an inescapable anxiety torment nexus echo chamber and b) hearing she can’t be destroyed, period. like what if the truth turns out to be "yeah the pool of grimm destroyed her soul and also she wants to burn the world to the ground and eat your heart now because you ruined her FOREVER!!! and there is nothing you or anyone else can do to fix her. you stupid fuck." like his cursed haunted brain keeps screaming at him 24/7?!

so.

we don’t really know anything about this period of time before ozma went after the lamp, except that "no matter where or how he lived, her presence was always felt." jinn combines that with a memory of two beowolves attacking ozma’s town to insinuate that salem kept sending grimm after him, or at least that ozma believed as much. 

but. but—"during his years of travel, he heard the same frightened whispers that spoke of a terrifying sorceress who commanded dark powers in the wilds, among the beasts and monsters. ozma was convinced that this woman was salem, and decided that he needed to see what she had become."

"but no matter where or how he lived, her presence was always felt. if humanity were ever to stand a chance at being united, one thing was clear… [he had to destroy salem.] knowing he could never rid the world of her through any mortal means, ozma sought out the power of the relics: armed with my knowledge, he believed he could fulfill his promise to the god of light."

<- these are parallel statements. everywhere he travels, he hears stories about a witch; no matter where or how he lives, her presence is always felt. ozma was convinced that this terrifying sorceress was salem; ozma grew convinced that he had to destroy salem for humanity’s sake. he needed to see what she had become; he needed to find the lamp to guide him. see the repetition? the echo?

i don’t think salem just vanished into the wilderness. i imagine she ran pretty fucking far, but remnant is a big world and there are people all over—there have even been people living in the southern region of the now-uninhabited continent where salem presumably lives, based on the map shown in WOR: vale. 

(the markers for those settlements are red in color; all the other markers are color-coded to the kingdoms, orange for vacuo, green for vale, while for atlas, blue for mistral, yellow for menagerie and what i assume are a couple of faunus settlements in southern anima, with tracks with the white fang’s headquarters being located vaguely in anima. in the blood-splattered map in the great war episode, there’s a fire burning in the southern peninsula of the uninhabited continent—implying battles were fought there and possibly that some of those red settlements existed as recently as eighty years ago. 

i turn this over in my mind a lot. it doesn’t make any sense to me to think that salem could have been remotely present in civilization anywhere within the past century, but rwby is so particular about color that the only reason to choose red for the now-defunct(?) settlements on the continent where salem lives would be to imply some degree of association with her, and if a WHOLE KINGDOM had been destroyed i think that would have been mentioned so these were probably just free towns and villages—possibly with a loose connection to vacuo? it’s sort of the logical place for displaced peoples from vacuo to wind up after fleeing their conquered kingdom. and in that case their "connection" to salem might be nothing more than her having taken pity on a bunch of refugees with nowhere else to go and kept the grimm off their backs until the great war…happened. but i would like to know.)

…the point being, i think "her presence was always felt" because salem, after some decades, maybe a century, hating herself deep in the wilderness, crept back to lurking on the periphery of civilization because a) ozma was gone and she had no idea where, when, or even if he would ever come back again and b) no matter how determined she is to punish herself, she just isn’t capable of wallowing in abject misery forever, even when she was the only person alive with absolutely no hope she kept moving until she found something to try.

so naturally people would have kept gossiping about the terrifying dark witch who lives in the woods among the beasts and monsters, and ozma would have known it was her. imagine if he’d reincarnated for the second or third time, wound up on a different continent altogether, and immediately started hearing the exact same sort of frightened whispers as before? even if it was pure unfortunate coincidence and salem did not have the slightest idea he was there, how terrifying that would be? and if salem didn’t want him to find her because she was scared or ashamed or angry or all three, then she couldn’t stay in any one place for too long—so this sort of indirect crossing paths oh-gods-she’s-already-found-me nightmare scenario could conceivably happen more than once.

(frankly, even if salem wanted nothing to do with him and was trying her level to avoid him without just never being able to come within sight of another person again, i think her not vanishing forever makes ozma’s intense paranoia so much more understandable because like. very literally, no matter where he lived, her presence would always be there—rumors, frightened whispers, everywhere. of course he’d start seeing her in the shadow of every grimm!)

i don’t think they’ve ever actually come face-to-face since that night—maybe glimpsed each other from afar across a battlefield, but if they’d met or spoken to each other i imagine it would have been necessary for jinn to show it happening. BUT i do think it’s likelier than not that there were several centuries when salem was legitimately an inescapable presence dogging ozma through life after life because she was just sort of… wandering around in a miserable traumatic haze on the very, very edge of civilization. and people talked about her.

so he went for the lamp, and fell into the depths of despair when jinn crushed whatever passed for his hope at that point. that is, almost certainly, what pushed him into his hermit era. 

now! if the fairytale’s centuries of eternal winter isn’t a pure fiction—if there is even the smallest kernel of literal truth in there as to ozma using magic to force people, animals, and grimm to stay far away from him, then. if salem was not already living in exile, this would have been when she began to hear rumors about him. yes? this is the first thing he does that would rise to the level of local legend salem might possibly hear. 

that his seclusion ended with "and then i met four young women who reminded me how to be a person so i gave them my magic" as opposed to "and then salem turned up with thousands of grimm to murder me and salt the earth" suggests that if she wasn’t living in exile at this time, her interest was probably more in avoiding him than vengeance.

and if that’s so, what does she do upon finally discovering where he is? er, probably travel as far away from the Cursed Wizard Forest as it is geographically feasible to go and decide that this is fine, that’s his continent and this is her continent and they can just stay on opposite sides of the planet until the end of time and never have speak to or see each other again. amen. 

if we take the fairytale literally, several centuries pass. lifetimes. enough time for salem to find somewhere to, if not quite belong, at least become a constant because well she’s been here since before granny was even born and no one knows who or what she is because she doesn’t really talk to anyone, but she’s not hurting anyone either, and legend has it that a goliath once attacked our town and the witch just walked out of the woods and exploded it with a glare, and that’s why grimm never come here, so she’s our witch. maybe enough time to send someone halfway across the world to check on the Cursed Wizard Forest to reassure herself that yes ozma’s still there, he’s not going to come after her and he must have come to his senses about the gods so she’s. safe. ish. as long as no one ever finds those relics. 

the fairytale ends with the hermit dividing his magic among the four maidens, and then he says: "My rest is over. It is time for me to resume my journey and work as well."—they didn’t just resuscitate ozma’s will to live, they restored his faith and his commitment to his task. maybe the world can be saved! maybe he can really do it this time, now that he’s found people willing to help him shoulder the burden!

(i do firmly believe that ozma told the original four maidens about his task and salem’s sworn hatred of the gods and the danger she could pose to the world if he emerged to try again, before offering them magic—as we see in v8, he isn’t naturally predisposed to lie or manipulate people, that’s a pattern he only falls into when he feels hopeless and scared. so i think he and the original maidens planned to gather the relics and get to work on uniting humanity, and the vague fairytale ending is an obfuscation.)

aaand i think that’s when he went after salem, because he emerged from his Cursed Wizard Forest after multiple lifetimes rotting in solitude, filled with new hope and ready to try again to complete his task, immediately tripped face-planted into rumors about the witch in the woods AGAIN and panicked. 

he can’t kill her, he can’t get rid of her… she can’t be stopped but, as oz says to hazel, she can be fought and someone has to try. doesn’t he have to try? if he believes the world can be saved, isn’t it his duty to try?—he knows she’ll never, ever bow to the brothers, she made that excruciatingly clear, and as long as she’s present in the world, as long as people might listen to her about the gods, remnant is doomed. so he has to make her go away. somehow. he has to try.

i think for salem all it would take is once. one time. if she still tried after everything to do what was right, leave him alone and not hurt anyone else and pick up the pieces as best she could. because the thing is, salem blames herself for getting her daughters killed in her anger—that’s why she tries so hard to keep her temper in 6.4—she hates herself for lashing out that night as much as ozma hates himself for the same. that self-blame would counterbalance her anger at ozma: yes he lied to her yes he tricked her yes he attacked her but she attacked him right back and now her children are dead.

how much of a temptation is vengeance with that clawing around in her head?

but if her mindset was like, "that was the most horrible thing that has ever happened to me and the worst thing i’ve ever done, and i don’t understand why he lied to me but i just want it to be done, and he’s over there and i’m over here and we can just. leave each other alone forever," and she found a place for herself where she started to feel maybe almost kind of ok again and then ozma violated the truce she’d invented in her mind but never thought to communicate to him by appearing out of the blue to attack her, completely unprovoked as far as she could tell, and whatever little town or village or even just one single person who’d been kind to her got destroyed in the resulting fight?

that’s an injustice. that’s i did nothing to deserve this, how dare you do this to me. 

and… that’s also, i think, the one thing that would compel salem to willingly cut herself off from all civilization and remain in exile for thousands and thousands of years (because she’s impossible to kill and too powerful to force her out if she decides she’s not going to go gently into the night). her fear of collective punishment. if she thought there was even the smallest chance that ozma might start doing what her father did or what his gods did to anyone close to her, i think she’d go and stay gone until she felt absolutely certain she could take him down forever.

(also theres a certain narrative elegance to the idea that they had their horrible mutual-incineration duel where they were equally matched in every way… and then ozma rotted in isolation while salem tried really hard to be okay and convinced herself they could just stay peacefully at a distance forever, until he found a spark of hope that ignited all his desperation so he went after her and she was blindsided by this truly awful and unfair and egregious thing that he did… and then she rots in isolation and ever-mounting desperation while ozma tries really hard to fix everything and pull the world into a semblance of peace until she finds a spark of hope and blindsides him with this brutally ruthless charge for the relics. 

they explode each other, fly in opposite directions—downward spiral vs picking up the pieces—then reach critical mass and explode again so hard they fully reverse positions and do the whole ordeal again. so it’s both a journey of learning to understand each other and a vicious cycle they can only escape by inversion of the first exactly-equal fight that exploded out of nowhere from a seemingly happy partnership, i.e. both reaching out unexpectedly in the midst of a seemingly inescapable conflict. it’s about symmetry)

This Has Been A Very Long Post Sorry About That. but—all speculation about the details aside—i do strongly feel that the most compassionate reading of ozma is that he is completely sincere about whathe’s trying to achieve (uniting humanity without committing genocide or turning salem into a scapegoat so everyone can be saved including her!!) but has absolutely no idea how to make it happen and has only just, in his second-to-last life as the king of vale, accepted the reality that it isn’t possible, and thence the whole building a replica of salem’s father’s castle to put his office in her tower-prison and hucking his emotionally tortured anthology of fairytales out the proverbial window (you know, like the girl in the tower who writes herself out of danger, coming from mr. fairytales this is a tornado siren of a cry for help) so forth. 

thus what he and his inner circle say about his efforts both past and present is true—he has been actively working to keep salem a secret for as long as the maidens have been hidden if not longer. as long as salem cooperated by not wandering around letting other people see and/or talk to and/or run away screaming in terror from her, what "erasing salem from public knowledge and keeping her existence secret" means, practically speaking, is tracking down any texts that clearly describe her as a real person (not a fairytale) or artistic depictions of her from the ozlem kingdom and destroying Those, and perhaps muddying the waters of all those folktales by inventing new nonsense out of whole cloth or mixing stories about her with other stories that definitely aren’t about her to a) blur the details and b) make it look to future scholars like the witch-in-the-woods was a loose folkloric archetype encompassing a huge variety of different beliefs and superstitions as opposed to one very specific kind of story about one very specific witch. 

which is a bit obsessive and weird but given the fate-of-the-world stakes at play here and the plain unarguable fact that humanity cannot be redeemed if anyone sides with salem against the brothers, which is demonstrably something she can accomplish if given the opportunity, honestly pretty restrained. 

and so the million dollar question is: what does it take for salem to cooperate by staying in exile? is the fight in lost fable and her guilt over her daughters shattering enough to lead her to just give up and hide forever alone?—who knows, right now it’s purely a matter for speculation, but i think the circumstantial evidence suggests "no" more strongly than it does "yes." 

which is not to say that she was the pure innocent victim of an abusive revenge quest, but rather that i think the facts of the situation for her would, in the immediate aftermath, tilt her in a more positive direction (he did a horrible thing but so did she, and she’s survived many horrible things before, and she can’t exactly lay down to die instead so she has to do something, and she doesn’t ever want to see him because it hurts so much and she’s so angry but her anger killed her daughters so she cannot ever let it out again so she’ll just have to stay away from him and live with it) whereas ozma. yknow. Spiraled. and her being elusive but inescapably present in the world make that so much worse, which isn’t either of their faults, it’s just a terrible situation.

it’s like. short of literally stumbling into each other by chance and yelling at each other until it was all Out There. i think no matter WHAT she did, ozma was bound to snap and lash out at her sooner or later because he spent centuries. centuries!!! with all this trauma reverberating and intensifying in his head with no reprieve because there were stories about her everywhere he went.

and then as soon as he does that salem’s lifelong extremely traumatic history with collective punishment and her self-hatred and guilt are going to smash together and she’ll run the fuck away to alternately freak herself out and plot his downfall and tailspin while ozma, meanwhile, after a few centuries of her being gone and the endless rumors fading into just old folktales no one really believes anymore, finally gets the distance he needs to catch his fucking breath—his hermit era doesn’t count he was just ruminating for centuries—so he can focus on other things. and by then keeping her a secret mostly boils down to "don’t talk about her" lmao

his paranoia never really goes away, as we see in 9.10, although he does also get really complacent by ozpin’s time, and i think it’s irrational and grounded in a lot of very wrong conclusions he reached during those first couple centuries of Spiraling—but given what he did and did not know at the time i do also think the reasoning and inferences he made were fairly logical; it becomes irrational over time as the reality of the situation (salem avoiding him) increasingly doesn’t line up with his perception, but as we see in V2-3 ozpin is supremely, irrationally confident that salem is not about to unleash a major attack, which suggests that on some level he’s aware that his paranoid beliefs are unsound even if he hasn’t yet had the conscious realization. he’s right on the cusp. 

& then none of this precludes smaller scale, limited conflicts like e.g. salem assassinating a troublesome member of his inner circle or throwing grimm at people to intensify social conflicts and insure ozma never gets comfortable enough to invite his gods to remnant. i’m very sure that salem has made it a habit to check in on him at regular intervals and cause problems if it looks like he’s doing too well because she Does Not Want him to ever summon his gods. and that’s obviously going to be one-sided because i don’t think ozma actually knows where she’s hiding, and salem’s terror of collective punishment is her own seething bundle of irrational paranoia, because after he digs himself out of Spiraling ozma absolutely would not kill people just because they happened to be near her. 

[browniefox]

Alright, more Crisis Core, let's go! This one ended up being REALLY long (we got through two chapters), so I'm putting a read more some ways down so it doesn't kill people's dashes.

The boy said the line!

Yay, Cloud is finally here! He still clearly has the basic infantry model other than the head, but it does mean he stands in the casual almost sassy way they all do haha. In general, it's so weird but cute to see him smiling and laughing. Aw, he's not traumatized yet!

I knew what was coming, but my friend I'm playing with didn't, so it was fun to see her reaction (tho i totally still got so excited anyway haha).

This is just here bc I love them so <3 And then Tseng is also here being a third wheel. The sneaking portion that is right after this I sucked ass at. I couldn't make it five feet without being seen and tossed out, and I just had to wait until the game took pity on me and took the guards away.

Genesis, please I'm begging you just kill Hollander. I do love seeing his hair, once so bright red, getting grayer and darker, how his nice leather jacket is getting all broken, giving a sense that he's not taking care of himself and his things as much as he should be.

My sister has tried to stay more-or-less blind to what happens in Crisis Core (she knows some stuff, I know a little more) but all fics tend to use the same Loveless lines (which makes sense, of course) but I did end up reciting this quote with him bc it's one of my favorites, much to the shock of my sister.

I can't believe Zack really thinks Genesis died tho. Like, the guy has a wing, he can fly, falling is not gonna kill him. I'm still not totally clear what Genesis is trying to achieve, but I've been watching some of ButterBuns CCR videos and she's kind of given me a better sense of Genesis. He's just flailing around, trying to get something, anything, to work. He's a dying man who is desperate and doesn't even know himself exactly what he wants.

HELL YEAH! If the creators weren't cowards they would have let your models touch. Our new thing while playing is being proud of Zack for having two boyfriends and one girlfriend. The boy can get it.

As per usual, my biggest problem with this game is the writing - especially with Angeal, tbh. I guess Angeal is just like Genesis in that he's desperately trying to figure out who he is, monster or man. But every time he talks about being a monster I kind of roll my eyes. He's like an emo teenager. Last chapter I felt like it was getting a better grip and liking for him, but I'm kind of back to just being like 'what's your deal man'.

That being said, I kind of dig his weird monster form! It's a mishmash but super cool, and I love how his arms are folded in front of him. My friend and sister I don't think liked it as much and mostly made fun of it which, fair.

Mostly unrelated, but i really got myself into a big of predicament in that I'm super overpowered, which means I get through battles so quick, which also means I don't get to show off all the limit breaks and summons and such when we're playing ;-; but then I turn it to hard mode and die instantly.

I'm always a sucker for sad sunsets. I might not get Angeal or his deal, but I do at least buy that Zack cares about Angeal. It's kind of like Angeal was too set in his ways of monster vs heroes, and that a monster needs to be killed by a hero. That Zack is the only hero left to kill a monster like him, or that by doing so Zack proves he's a hero. But really all it's done is given Zack trauma and made him more uncertain than ever who he is and what he stands for.

(It kind of reminds me of near the end of Homestuck, when Dave and Dirk are talking, and Dave admits it's possible that Bro was trying to train him, but all it did was make him scared.)

I wish we got to spend more time in the game with Aerith, but at least you get the sense that they do spend more time with each other, especially with Aerith being there for Zack after this.

MY BEAUTIFUL BEAUTIFUL BOY! I wish your limit break looked cooler tho :P

Wait, so are Angeal and Genesis brothers then?? I knew they were connected through Gillian, but I guess how connected never hit me. I mean, Angeal defo has her hair while Genesis has her face, but also I've been imagining and seeing them as boyfriends this whole time???

So many mixed feelings about Zack right now. The first thing is yay, new hair cut! My sister absolutely hated his bangs, so big win for her. I do like that you get to see that, as one of the last remaining Firsts, Zack has started to take on more of a leadership and mentor role for the other SOLDIERs. However, him telling them to protect their SOLDIER honor is weird when Zack doesn't know what that is either. I've felt it, but I am glad Zack himself has acknowledged that he doesn't know what that honor is or what it means. I hope we get to see Zack figure it out. I also like that Zack is kind of unmoored and uncertain now. Puts him in an interesting place for whatever's next.

Beach episode! It is FUCKING INSANE to me that Cissnei just... tells Zack that Aerith is an Ancient. Why? What was the point of that? Cissnei, you can't just say that! I guess it could be seen as her trusting Zack and demonstrating she wants to help him, but it's still so weird. It's nice Zack has been said to be hanging with the turks more, but I wish we could have gotten more of that in game. I don't think he even knows Reno and Rude's names.

BOOO TSENG SHOULD BE IN A SWIMSUIT TOO BOO!

So I know Genesis is still alive, but interesting that this is beign considered since it's Sephiroth's whole deal. Tbh, tho, I'm not sure how I feel about Tseng openly acknowledging that Mako is life. How much is that recognized in general, actually? I mean, people do fade into mako when they die... hm, much to think about.

The chase through the city was so dumb, I've had it with Hollander, how hard can it be to catch and/or kill one guy for real. That being said, I do like how cool the buster sword is, and at the end is Sephiroth :D I'm glad that Zack seems a little bitter towards Sephiroth; they're both mourning in different ways, and it's driven a rift between both of them. But at the same time, they're the closest thing they both have to someone who can understand what they're going through.

Shoutout to Zack's little fidgets :D He's still a restless little puppy, despite it all. Sephiroth and Zack's relationship is just so good and interesting, I need them to hang out more so I can see more of it.

God Genesis is so pretty. Both him and Angeal have fucked up looking wings - which adds to what they're going through - but I actually love it for Genesis. Again, what is this dude's goal? He'll probably tell you once he figured it out himself. I love the reveal that he was also at Junon this whole time. Interesting parallel to how the Firsts fought 'at Junon' altogether and now they can't be further apart.

I need to pet that dog! Is Angeal still alive?? I totally thought he died, he has to be dead, right? Just living on in his copies? Anyway, the dog should be a character who manages to live forever because I love him. Also, laughed so hard when the little Shinra robots came into the church oh my god, it's not supposed to be funny I think but it's hilarious how non-threatening they look.

Wow Kunsel, jealous much?? Also, a little creepy? Is my boyfriend stalking me? If I trusted Kunsel, at this point I'd think he was going to betray me at some point, but I trust him too much for that. It seems more like Kunsel just doesn't know how to say 'I'm worried about you and you should talk to me about what you're going through'. I love Kunsel <3

As usual, this game feels like it goes too fucking fast. It's always one thing after another, nobody's talking or explaining things. Maybe it's because you're expected to do side missions every so often? That would probably break things up a bit more. God, there's such an interesting story here! I just wish it was told better.

Also I've been playing so much of this game and only just learned you can sprint :P

[undertale-writing-times]

Nightmare Sans and his variants with a fem s/o who has strength magic?

They view it as a curse because when people have seen it n the past, theyve started to treat s/o differently. Rougher, meaner, harshly, etc.

S/o is a lady. Dresses and acts like one. Theyre soft spoken, meek, gentle, and very kind. When they get treated roughly, it breaks their heart every time. Its why they think of their magic as a curse.

They were hesitant to show him. When it did get out, they were scared of if itd change how he views them and treats them.

~🌺

I wasn't really sure how to respond to this one without it just being the same thing over and over again haha. Honestly, I don't think any of them would change how they act around you because you got strength magic? Course they might think you're able to protect yourself more, or they can ask you for help with things...

but other than that, I dunno.

Nightmare: He doesn't care. He REALLY doesn't care. You have powers, so what? He treats you how he does because you're you, not because of what you can or cannot do. If anything, he would treat you a bit better! And I mean in the "I now know you can protect yourself." kind of way. The fact you have powers kind of helps him stop worrying so much… not that he would admit that he worried about anyone.

Oxi: It already knew. It knows a lot about you already, and honestly, it doesn't quite understand why you think it would change because of that.

Gloom: When he finds out he's a bit… unsure? Like… he doesn't think that he would treat you any differently, just because you're strong? At least, not in a bad way? He likes how strong you are! Why do you think your magic is a curse? You can help people out with that, right? Sounds kind of dumb to think of that as a curse…

Envy: His mind rushes with different way that this could be used in the mafia, but then he catches himself and feels gulity for thinking about it like that. He tries to not think too much… your power is your ability, and you can do whatever you like with it. He won't judge you or change how he acts.

Dracul: It doesn't care lol. Humans still have magic in this AU, so it isn't that big of a deal to it.

Deep: I don't think that he would treat you much differently, rather… he likes the fact that you can help him with things? Like… he can ask you to help him out of the water sometimes without worrying that he's too heavy? I'm not 100% sure, tbh.

Delusion: Praise praise PRAISE! This boy is SIMP loves how strong you are! Asks to touch your muscles pretty often(if you have them), and loves to see you carrying stuff around. Bitch got heart eyes for DAYS.

Nightfall: it might change him a little bit, though not in a bad way? More he wants to see exactly what you can and can't do? You have strength, but every strength has a limit. He wants to know what yours is… though also doesn't want you to push yourself, so he worries about that. If he sees anyone treating you badly, honestly, he might just make them fall asleep lol.

[adanaac]

tierlist of my favorite color pages and stuff

gushing abt them below ⬇️

i did top 4 and not top 5 bc a lot of the 5th place for these is like a 5 way tie

Double page

ch102: what ive learned from this is i really like full scenes. cmon!! who doesnt!! also man the colors are really good. hatanaka really has a deceptively good character design, once again proving to be senseis blorbo

ch88: sorry principal color page u have been dethroned as my fav i still love u so so so much tho. love the umbrella and plum blossoms, and also obviously principal is really hot. im pretty sure i know the umbrella asset on clip studio and actually have it downloaded. also i just personally love the paper cranes bc my sona is based off paper cranes

ch60: culture fes arc has some of my favorite color pages and b&w pages and my favorite aesthetic in general really. also i owe hijita my life for proposing the chinese dress theme. haru looks so so so good in chinese clothes and the combo with hatanaka's hoodie in the underground culture fes is top tier. also my favorite non-cover color page and volume promo are from this arc too

the color palette is also so good i basically stole all the colors for that halloween art i did (still love it so much). now u might be thinking. if i have so much to say abt this one why is it only 3rd. tbh its bc this one is the oldest of the 4 so ive had more time to savor it. also i just like the principal one better than this one, and i like the hatanaka one better than the principal one. (but i dont actually necessarily like the hatanaka one better than this one?? its a rock paper scissors situation)

ch79: 2 harus. im sold 👍 also makuragaeshi arc just means everything to me also i consider this color spread a package deal with the vol 12 inside color page which makes me like both of them more

at this point the seimeiliker part of me is yelling WHATT THE 2 SEIMEI COLOR PAGES ARENT EVEN HERE??? THE AME ONE ISNT EVEN HERE??? FAKE FANNN theyre tied for 5th!!! maybe even tied for 4th!! i just really like the ones that are full scenes!!!

Single page

ch25: this one isnt getting dethroned anytime soon its just so good. the COLOR PALETTE the LIGHTING AUGH ITS SO GOOD. and of course haruaki looking sexy as always 👍 this might be one of the sexiest harus tbh. i think its also one of my favorite official arts in general i cant think of many that i would confidently say i like more than this one. ITS NOT EVEN ATTACHED TO SOME DRAMATIC CHAPTER ITS THE PTM CHAPTER LMAOOO

ch46: miki pretty privilege.... i think miki arc has my 2nd favorite aesthetic, behind culture fes. tbh i like the 2 b&w cover pages from this arc just as much as the color page (maybe bc theyre more angsty by virtue of being black and white??)

ch33: i am so married to this chapter. one of if not my number 1 fav chapter. tbh this one is tied for 2nd with the miki one, its just bc i like how colorful the miki one is. this is the only time haru gets drawn with just solid black hair and its very pretty 😳 this one is also a package deal with the 2018 october gfantasy cover in my head bc theyre both teacher trio, not really in their usual outfits, from around the same time, and gets made as merch together often

ch75: im not exactly married to this one like i am with the top 3 but its just good art good composition good colors!! its just such a... cozy and normal scene contrasted with it being a color page. (wait fuck thats what the arc was about)

u may be wondering. why are all the single page ones sort of old. this is actually bc recently all the color covers are double pages (from 76 to 102 there's 1 single page and 9 double page covers)

Cover

vol 13: aughhh seimei...... punches walls etc im so normal about it hahahahah god i love the parallel with vol 1. sensei insane for this. i have nothing else to say this cover just fucks so hard i spent days oogling it why is seimei so hot. also aughh the unused draft for it would have been so good too but the vol 1 parallel was probably the right choice....

vol 10: this one stockholm syndromed its way into being my number 2. ok not really its a really good cover everyone is rly pretty and its a very fun composition and u know i love culture fes. but also it was the thumbnail on a lot of manga sites for the longest time so it ended up being the cover i associate with yohaji in general the most, maybe even more than vol 1

vol 14: i am easily swayed by principal 👍 i see principal and i neuron activation. its so funny its like the most blantant spoiler cover

vol 9: i am also easily swayed by ebisu 👍 sensei sure loves her red and blues huh. also sano in the black shirt is really hot. can u tell i also love when theres parallels

vol 8 is tied with vol 9 tbh rintarou and ibara are so pretty

Cover flaps

i didnt do the back covers bc theyre all alright to me tbh theres not standout amazing ones that make me lose my mind. ok maybe the vol 6 and vol 8 one. i am easily swayed by seimei and ebisu

now the cover flaps on the other hand. oh ym god

vol 14: WOOF WOOF BARK BARK BARK WHITE HAIR HARU WOOF WOOF THIS ONE MEANS EVERYTHING TO ME......... normal harus expression is soooo good...... the mini harus...... and Him... my cat..... sobs.... tanaka mai is a cruel god how dare she pull out this design and concept for 1 chapter and we're probably never gonna see it again..... UNLESS??? (<- mentally ill) anyway heres this promo art for no real reason other than i wanted to oogle him more

v7 and v5: lumping these together bc theyre both harusanos. can u tell i love parallels. and vol 5 has the harusano handholding and vol 7 has the sano confession under the moon.... wow......

v13: i love animal trio they mean so much to me. also just look at weasel hatanaka i wanna squeeze him like a squeaky toy

Inside color page

for a while i was like "how come my fav inside color pages all seem to be from recent volumes" it turns out its bc sensei only started doing full scenes for them starting at vol 10

the vol 11 one IS really good but its up against such bangers as "has principal" or "has haru" or "has seimei" sooooo

vol 10: look this one has principal and is culture fes of course its my favorite. easiest decision in my life. i think for all these categories the top 1 spot was super easy and 2-4 could all be shuffled around. it may not make me as mentally ill as the other 3 but its straight up good art i would set this as my phone screen any day

vol 13: hi this one makes me mentally ill. its so cool it has such cool imagery and its also so inscrutable. what does it all mean. why is saturn there. this one (and also all of kyoto arc tbh) makes me want a anime so bad

vol 12: you KNOW im a sucker for makuragaeshi arc aughhhh this one makes me mentally ill in a different direction from the vol 13 one. the fact he wore a blazer uniform when he was actually in high school and him wearing a gakuran in this arc. fucks me up every time

vol 14: aughhhh...... tanaka mai is out to GET me...... i care them so much.... so so much......

5th place probably still isnt the vol 11 one LOL sorry renpapa thats gotta go to vol 6 (the one with haru in the bath)

in conclusion. i am easily swayed by haru/seimei/principal/ebisu and i will never recover from white hair haru

and also culture fes has my no. 1 favorite aesthetic and miki arc is no. 2. time travel arc will probably prove to dethrone miki arc to become number 2 but idk if itll dethrone culture fes

[spiderdramaqueen]

hey, remember my complementary quartet au? (i really, really recommend you to check the first post before reading this, otherwise you probably won’t understand anything)

wait, what do you mean i didn’t write anything about it for two months?..

WELL. the time doesn’t matter.

 so. i mentioned in the previous post that there’s a conflict between Martyn and RK at some point of the au. in this post, i’ll elaborate on that.

you see, after RK and Martyn arrive to Hermitcraft, Martyn begins to spend a lot of time with Ren. it’s not like he’s doing this intentionally, he’s just really excited to meet another version of his King! in the same time, RK and Ren don’t really like each other, to say the least. which leads to them actively avoiding one another.

which eventually results in RK and Martyn seeing each other less, as well.

but that’s not only it. at some point, RK starts to intentionally seclude himself from Martyn. don’t get him wrong, he still dislikes Ren, but… but maybe, just maybe, it will be better for Martyn to stay with him. his other version is not as traumatized as RK himself (from RK’s perspective, anyway), he lives in a peaceful place, he has a lot of friends…

RK won’t admit that Ren might be better in some ways

RK won’t admit he’s envious

he’ll just. he’ll just do what’s right. that’s what it is. nothing more.

 meanwhile, Martyn really misses his King. yeah, he’s having a lot of fun with Ren, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to spend time with RK anymore! so, he tries to reconnect with him again.

then, he notices, that RK is clearly avoiding him. Martyn feels confused. this have never happened before. so, Martyn seeks an advice…from Doc. he noticed, that he and RK became quite close recently…well, in their weird rivalry way. whatever.

Doc doesn’t know for sure what exactly is going on. after all, RK doesn’t talk much about his feelings. but he did notice, that RK cares for his Hand. so, he suggests Martyn to talk to him.

 Martyn does exactly that and confronts RK.

it doesn’t go well at all. RK stubbornly insists that he is fine. Martyn stubbornly (desperately, even) tries to get him to talk. the conversation quickly becomes heated.

maybe at some point RK says something along the lines of “do ye even care to which king do ye serve?”

maybe Martyn leaves the conversation in tears, that RK won’t see.

 (tbh, i have an idea for the event that could’ve been a final trigger for this conversation, but i need to ponder on this a little bit more. wait for another two months idk /j)

 and so, rk-martyn argument actually initiates more rk-ren and doc-martyn interactions. let me explain.

Martyn doesn’t try to seek Doc’s help after that. it’s not because he thinks that Doc’s advice was bad, he just prefers to deal with this alone. tbh, i kinda see c!Martyn as a person who is friendly and outgoing, but prefers to keep emotional stuff to himself, so, yeah. you might say “uhhh but why he did go to Doc in the first place?”, well, at that time he was too confused with RK’s behavior.

anyway, this time, it is Doc who reaches out to him. it’s not like he’s good at emotional stuff either, but hey. he’s pretty good with fixing his redstone machines. it can’t be harder than that, right?..

in the meantime, Ren notices some changes in Martyn’s state too, even tho the latter prefers not to speak about it. even though Ren is already on this whole crown madness stuff, he can put two and two together. he has an idea of what might’ve caused it.

and he decides to confront RK about it. even though he’s still wary of his alternate version.

tbh, their conversation doesn’t change much, but it seems to be a turning point for these two. Ren finally stands up to RK, and RK starts to see that there’s more to Ren than he initially thought.

 well, to be more precise, this seems to be the turning point for the whole quartet, changing the dynamic between all four. and this goes even further when empires crossover kicks in. yeah, i know that i said in the previous post that the rift doesn’t lead to empires in cq!au. sorry, i changed my mind. i just was discussing this with my friend and i thought that empires crossover might be good for cq dynamic.

i can see RK refusing to follow the compass with Doc. he still prefers not to interact with big hermits events much. so, he stays on the hermitcraft. and, as you remember, Ren didn’t join the crossover with others at first. so, i think, RK stumbles upon him at some point. and they… talk.

and then they talk more.

and maybe spend some time with each other.

honestly, i can see them warming up to each other ONLY after the end of RenTheKing’s storyline.

meanwhile, Martyn gladly joins the crossover. and, hey, remember how Doc was freaking out when he got on empires? WELL. i imagine him and Martyn sticking together during the crossover in cq!au. and Martyn, being a wanderer he is, is much more calmer in this situation then Doc. he can show to him all the wonders of an adventure like this, and they bond over this.

 then, after the crossover ends, Martyn and RK talk again, and this time, their conversation is much more fruitful. in the end, the dynamic between all four becomes much more domestic and calm.

 (my askbox and dms are still open for any questions! PLEASE if someone talks to me about cq!au i’ll explode from happiness)

[forcebookish]

Things I love about Top:

He made me challenge my view of certain characters.

Cause I did not like him at first. I thought he was too cocky and thought too highly of himself. But seeing that it was all bravado. And that he really wants to take care of Mew was beautiful.

I also like how he matches the energy of who he is with.

With someone like Boston. Top knows he has to be that confident and assertive. Because that’s the only thing Boston respects. Because otherwise Boston will take advantage. Which we eventually see happen. He found a little crack in the armor and exploited it.

Ray hates Top and is always trying to subtly insult him, so Top is sassy to him.

Chuem really cares for her friends, so Top knows he can go to her with his concerns for Mew.

I don’t know. I like that everyone in the show is a three dimensional character. And even ones that I don’t like. I understand why they are the way they are. And I can see how, from their perspective, they’re making the choices they’re making even if I find the choices really gross or just really bad.

this is a great observation, anon! i think top shifting energies around different characters while keeping his core self is something this drama does really well - he's rough with rough characters, he's gentle with gentle characters.

and it really is that gentleness that boston exploits. mew even said it himself, he's top's weakness:

i'm really glad you came around to him, anon! i think top is the perfect example that your first impression isn't always correct (okay, i loved him before it aired, so my first impression of him doesn't count lol). it's kind of a main theme of his character, right? everyone has this image of the "top-tier," but it's mew and cheum who are able to see who he actually is while boston and ray continue to see him as only a sexual object: someone to possess and someone to rival.

and i think that's one of the biggest challenges of this fandom: the lack of understanding that characters, like people, are fluid. even if you take out all the weird bullshit that they made up about the characters before actually meeting them, it seems a lot of people really can't deal with the fact that not only are you going to sometimes act differently around different people (these people act the same way around everyone!!???!), but that stuff you go through can change you. you know............ character development....... lol

that might be another BL Brainrot symptom tbh 🤔 definitely remember blocking someone during a boss and a babe era who claimed that guncher weren't "the same characters" than at the beginning and were butthurt about it - and like... yeah? i mean, they weren't suddenly out of character like this person was suggesting, but they were different. telling a story where everyone is exactly where they were from the start is... not a story. [homer simpson voice] it's just a bunch of stuff that happened.

and i think only friends is doing an excellent job of that, and having characters who feel very lived in. like you said, three-dimensional! although i don't really get boston and maybe that's just because i don't want to but it's kind of like... ok well. uh, his dad's abusive, uhhh. idk, i'm not saying he's two-dimensional, sometimes people are just huge self-involved creeps lol anyway, tangential.

point is! top's great! i'm so glad you're here, anon!

[jackienautism]

Now I’m really curious about your thoughts on the other counselors. I don’t really have any strong opinions on them much tbh idk why. Maybe it’s the whole “horny teenager” trope or something

(finally getting around to this. sorry for taking so long dfkldg)

yeaaaah fair enough dfgjndg thats exactly why i get pissed off playing the game tbh. it just becomes so convoluted with this romantic whatever bullshit that it gets SUPER TIRING...... but that's ok though bc silas kaylee and caleb need someone to love them unconditionally right?

anywho! i appreciate you wanting to see my other unfiltered opinions on the characters kdfgdfjg bc gosh do i have a lot. especcially for TQ bitches. as i just ssaid,

i AM going to get unfiltered and potentially brutal so if anyone is your ultimate bestie i recommend not reading (abi and laura are safe though of course<3) (mainly because nothing about either of them necessarily irritated me LOL and im easy to irritate)

im going to reference my thoughts on the characters from a note i wrote after playing through like ? chapter 4 for the first time. but honestly not miuch has changed. and just to preface this a good portion of my negative opinions come from the campfire scene in chapter 2 LOL like. when i first played the game i began disliking like more than half the characters here alone

//

dylan: talked about him here (its not positive)

//

nick: i just think hes a prick who doesn't deserve abi 🤷 of course he was given the short end of the stick in terms of screentime, but its kind of funny bc kaitlyn has a similar amount of Actual walk around time and she's there like. the entire game LMAO so yeah that pisses me off. nick has 3 moments where you play as him, and kaitlyn has 5/6, depending on how you separate her section in chapter 10. they both have the same amount of Get To Explore And Walk Around time though, which is a whopping total of one thanks guys. anywho. even before he began acting like a creep i didnt like him lol... and no surprise but it all stems from chapter 2...

long story short, i dont doubt that nick actually cares for abi and likes her but i think in the grand scheme of things it mostly has to do w/ him wanting tits and ass... sort of similar to mike's whole deal... and i believe this based on the bullshit he pulls w/ emma. yeah he says that "tHiS mIgHt NoT bE a GoOd IdEa" and yet he still plays along despite dylan saying that 2 people can kiss AS LONG AS everyone consents. he could've gotten out of the situation. and yet he fucking didnt. i dont care if he didnt realize the consequences of his actions, if he TRULY liked abi he wouldnt have done this shit in the first place. "ive had my moments, im not proud of some of the stuff ive done" DOG YOU JUST HAD A MOMENT AND YOURE NOT EVEN FUCKING APOLOGIZING TO THE PERSON YOU HURT!!!!!! idc if it technically wasnt totally his fault. he still was involved in humiliating and upsetting abi. all he blames it on is playing alonog with emma's plan to make jacob jealous and aside from that just being such a shitty anf fucked up excuse in general, its not even ???? true?????????? GOD. IM SORRY. THE WHOLE SITUATION MAKES ME SO UPSET

//

jacob: as said in my previous TQ / UD rankings... i really flip flop w/ him alot. however im def leaning towards neutral to dislike NGL. i HAAATED his whole thing w/ emma like incredibly so. however. i did feell real bad for him during chapter 1, despite already knowing that he was the one to bust the truck up and keep everyone there another night. i felt bad despite already having a reason TO dislike him. kaitlyn was being mean for no reason. nick and dylan were being mean for no reason. it's just... it's almost like he was being used as the group's laughing stock. but as time went on i just continually became less and less willing to sympathize . hell, he's just a INFINITELY less sympathetic josh... of course seeing him crying and upset in ch 3 was sad, but at this point i don't really know what he expected im sorry. he really dragged all these other people into his bullshit with emma. and it's more than clear how emma feels about their relationship, of course emma wasn't great either with him, but jacob isn't an angel ... EITHER in this situation. of COURSE he couldn’t have known that the night would go the way it does, but it doesn’t negate the fact that fucking up the truck was a shitty move regardless LMAO as said previously, i HAAATe how fucking possessive he is of her. like when nick tells jacob that he could see what emma wantss? and jacob just laughs it off? it's so fucking stupid dog. character wise though, he of course has a lot going for him and i can see why people find appeal in him. especially seeing hwo many stereotypes theyre subverting, in terms of jacob showing emotions and shit. but for me personally, it's a no

//

ryan: my man🤝 even after all this time.... i find him very respectable and i very much appreciate him. similar to my deal w/ abi, even his more "asshole-ish" moments / dialogue choices (aside from a few off the top of my head LOL) are like. justified... and in character... like. him being so pissed off at and wary of laura? like????? laura is my beloved but this random girl just popped out of nowhere, killed one of his closest friends, and now wants to kill what he has of a father figure? like yeah id be acting like ryan too if i were put into his situation LMAO yeah you can be annoyed w/ his actions and behavior, but in context? the way he's acting is understandable and justified. it doesnt DESERVE criticism, because there's nothing to criticize! he's acting as any normal person would! of COURSE it's annoying how he doesn't BELIEVE laura, that's a whole other can of worms, but overall he's allowed to be a pissed off little bitch. and him potentially going against the whole party idea? that line of dialogue is just more in character for him i will not accept any other answer. it makes no sense that he'd suddenly go against chris' word. and it PISSES ME OOOOFF seeing how the game still like ? has ryan show up to the party despite being adamant against it.

ANYWAY.... ppl don't appreciate his autistic swag like i do. "he has no character" "he's boring" TO YOU. y'all rly see a character mainly speak in a monotone voice and rarely smile / show expression and go. yeah he's boring . do you not see the like . connotations of that. like be for real. he’s like. one of the only few genuinely good ppl here lmao and seeing how chris says that ryan is one of his fave counselors and how he TRUSTS him enough to hold all this responsibility + have all these in depth talks w him it’s just. you see what kind of person ryan is just from that. and how so far ryan is the only character (while you’re in control) who’s able to interject whatever bullshit is being said at the moment it just. i’m sorry. he’s just a good guy. i respect how he’s willing to go against the bulk of the group during the whole party or lodge thing. i also respect that he’s willing to put a fucking end to dylan’s invasive fucked up truth question. i KNOW that it all depends on the Player to choose these specific options BUT. they just fit ryan’s character more so🤷 what can i say. fuck everyone else

//

max: my bf (real)

laura: my gf (real)

abi: me (irl)

//

emma: in my original note i said that i was leaning torwards neutral to dislike lmao....... oh have the turns havbe tabled. anywho. i think shes such a stupid dumbass bitch. she's so funny for no goddamn reason. i am shoving her down a flight of stairs. i love her character sooo much. i hate how she acted with jacob (despite most of it being her people pleaser side Showing but, that's a whole different conversation i am willing to have). she's suuuuch a beloved but gooooooood god i draw the line at being such a shitty friend to abi. that's my biggest complaint when it comes to emma and her actions. i understand that she has a moment where she's like "you're my best friend, i need you" and i fucking eat that shit up but almost everything else that happens and happens prior..... just goddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

to get started. most of this is gonna be nitpicky and personal shit, so if you think it's small and shouldn't be addressed, then you're probably right LOL im just ultra sensitive to this sort of stuff due to past personal experiences. ANYWAY!!!!!! you know the little teasy comment emma makes towards abi after you avoid hitting the squirrel? how she's like, "this is her first time asking a guy out like EVER"? it makes me wanna beat her up fr kldfggnfg bc it's like... it's not a thing to joke about... i see sooo much of myself in abi meaning i see her as autistic and that's just. you know how much being autistic hinders those sort of abilities? i obviously can't say for sure but, seeing how abi later talks about people wantingher to interact w/ others better? hence why she went to summer camp in the first place? i'd say that probably isn't too outrageous to think...

and sort of continuing off that same topic, when abi is having trouble choosing someone for truth or dare, how emma is just like. "ding ding ding, my turn!" LIKE. AS HER FRIEND. WHO PROBABLY KNOWS ABOUT HOW MUCH ABI STRUGGLES SOCIALLY. DON'T YOU THINK SHE'D BE LIKE? "OHH ABI JUST PICKK ME" INSTEAD OF HUMILIATING HER? LIKE. BC THERES SOOO MANY DIFF WAYS OF MOVING ON AND HELPING ABI OUT....... GOING ABOUT IT THW WAY EMMA DID ISN'T THE WAY TO GO......... ESPECIALLY KNNOWING HOW SOCIALLY ANXIOUS ABI IS.... anyway. while we're on the campfire scene, it's so fucked why she chooses to kiss nick lmao like ok yeah it may work in the end (potentially) but its still ?????????????? girl you know how much abi likes nick (SUPPOSEDLY) why go about this shit in the most destructive way possible? and what makes me even MORe mad is that. they dont even ever address this scene ever again???? despite it being such a huge and humiliating and probably traumatizing moment for abi??????????? YES they're able to have a more in depth andf heart to heart conversation about their relationship. but its not fucking enough! bc that fucking stupid ass dare and its outcome was the catalyst for the rest of the night's events lmao! imagine beign brushed aside and seen as a social fucking experiment for your entire life. which is something im SURE abi has felt and experienced. and emma, her best friend, LITERALLY CONTRIBUTES TO THAT!!!!!! ITS SO FUCKED AND IT MAKES ME SO ANGRY. i could probably go on about this topic but ill leabe it for a separate post i guess anyway if i were abi id be fucking pissed off and upset

her character means so very much to be like her whole people pleaser and "curate myself to each individual person ive ever met to keep them fromn leaving me" resonates so so much with me and i love it so much. ive talked about this b4 in a previous post but i can only imagine how lonely she feels, acting the way she acts. no one will ever truly know who she is. shes in a constant state of performance. every single person she's ever met has a different perception of her in their head. and, in one way or another, it's all wrong!!!! i love you emma mountebank i love you abigail blyg

//

kaitlyn: i wont even lie i instantly fell in love w her after hearing the INSANE shit she says fnsjfjsnf esp felt it after the “jacob go upstairs. jacob get bag. kaitlyn moves on with her goddamn life” fell in love fr. and her whole stupid monologue after jacob was like "yeah i mean, what did i expect would happen?" SHES LITERALLY INSANE. but. like. i was not and still Am not happy w how she treated abi during the campfire scene though. due to 1. her telling abi to basically hurry the fuck up despite seeing how much she was GENUINELY struggling, and also potentially knowing about her social struggles prior. bc they're friends. right? and 2. just coming up wiht the dare in general lol it was such a fucked up thing to do and as ive said w/ emma, the fact theyre unable to actually jhave a convo abt it later is suuuuper dumb and shitty imo. esp seeing just how upset abi got, and the most fucked up thing is, neither kaitlyn NOR emma seem to show any remorse for it!!!!! that's just so fucked up

anywho. hate how both of their asian girls (emily in until dawn) are characterized as bossy and very. my way or the highway. it’s actually real fucked up in that light. fuck you supermassive. y’all are lucky that these 2 characters are their respective games’ baddest bitches . i SUPPOSE it isn’t THAT as big of a deal in this game bc. there are like. objectively more unlikable characters (in the guys AND girls) so kaitlyn doesn’t stand out as much (as emily did. she was practically written to be hated. bc NO ONE ELSE was as strong personality wise as her. i suppose jess comes close but 1. i think ppl shit on her for other stupid shit anyway SO and 2. she effs off for more than half the game) but it still doesn’t make it ok lmao. bc it’s a trend that is very :/ mmmmmmm. even if it’s not that much of a cliche stereotype for asian women, seeing them write both of their asian girls ALMOST THE EXACT SAME WAY is a bit sussy goddamn baka. went off a bit there lmao. anyway. i’m a weak pussy bitch and after she softened after abi returned freaked out i 😭 i love you. more positive (and NON GUY related) interactions between the girlies please. i literally love her relationship w/ abi so much it's so interesting to me.

and just... to talk about her character real quick, i mmentioned in my tier list that her character frustrates me. and you wanna know why? ive talked abt this b4 but her character is basically a watered down emily davis. and i say this bc. they both overall are the same archetype. except. in kaitlyn's case. there's really no reason for me to like ???? feel bad for her? djjfggkj LIKE. THERE'S LITTLE TO NO SUBSTANCE TO HER CHARACTER.... AND THERE CERTAINLY ISNT MUCH TO FEEL SYMPATHETIC FOR..... i say this bc. almost all the other TQ characters have this moment of ): aw, here's why i should care about and feel bad for you. BUT KAITLYN????? NEVER REALLY OUTRIGHT HAS THAT MOMENT,..... it's almsot like they threw her in there and threw in her characteristics last second.... nothing's really established w/ her. you just. you just keeo finding new stuff about her as the game goes on. like. oh. shes a good shot. oh. she cares about abi. and shit like that. im probably explaining this so terribly rn but hopefully some sense can be made from this scramble. it's just.... thye toook away the interesting aspect(s) of emily'scharacter (her anxiety, her fear of death, her complex to be protected while being fully capable of protecting herslef in times of danger etc etc) and thus gave us kaitlyn. to me she just. she isnt that interesting character wise! there isnt much there for me to grow attached to! people only like her bc shes associated w/ dylan! like shes one of those characters where you sort of HAVE to mold and shape into something that's familiar and Good

re reading htis it really sounds like i don't like her fdjkdg BUT I DO I PROMISE.... i gotta stick w/ my asian girls

//

abi but for real: 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰 do i even need to say anything? its like supermassive made a character purposely JessCore or something like that. i like. haven’t gone In Depth abt why i got so fucked up over what everyone else did to her during the camp fire scene but. know that it hit a little toooooo fucking close to home. like. I Could See Me Sitting There In Abi’s Spot and it HUUUUUUURT!!!!!!!!!!!! like ): seeing her avert her gaze and how she was fumbling over her words i ))): LIKE. AUGHH. esp after being asked THAT question? since not sleeping w/ anyone by this age is seen as “abnormal”? i could feel that so bad man ): no one deserves to be singled out like that. esp not a VERY much autistic girl who is pretty clear to be on the “outside” of the group. bc she’s not “normal” or not “like everyone else here” and it’s just. fuck you all fr choke. enough of that. i just. she’s so fucking cute too? like girl i love you so MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! her lil like. expressive noises and shit are so awesome and make me happy fnsjfjsf you only see them like twice BUT. you don’t really see that from the other characters. so basically: stims. autism. yeah. they rly made abi a little TOO realistic nd relatable fnsjfnnsf but ohhhh man do i love her oh so much. after the camp fire scene i was just. she’s my friend now fuck all of you

//

laura but for real: I MISSED HER AND MAX SOOOOO BAD WHILE PLAYING THROUGH CHAPTERS 1 - 6 SKLDDFJDF i was literally so upset and sad seeing that they werent at camp after the prologue. du eto like literallty all of the characters getting on my nerves I WANTED THEM TO COME HOME SOOOO BAD.... AFTER THE CAMP FIRE SCENE EVERYTHING WENT DOWNHILL AND I MIIISSSEED THEM SOO MUCH i needed them back for real. other than that though, i dont have much to say about laura. i mean of course she's my BELOVED i mean look at my user but. yeah! i think about her often and project some anger shit onto her<3 specifically towards travis for specific and personal reasons<3 even if it's not like character stuff or w/e i think about, i often just rotate herin my mind. i love her so much. plus she's literally a combo of emily and sam aka my 2 fave UD characters how could i not love her?

//

max but for real: i honestly dont have much to say abt him? and i suppose he and laura arent /technically/ a part of the other counselors since they never, yk, showed up. but w/e fdfjgndg i think he's neat. i honestly thought he was like one of the only Good Guys of the game when first playing through,. and that still holds true! i still see ryan as a great guy too though. max just seems like such a good partner and guy in general and i love him. don't necessarily think about him much but as i said before, he's my bf (real)

[a-tale-of-legends]

Okay since I did Wally, it makes sense I would do Blue. Gonna try and keep it shorter than Wally:s lol. Blue's dynamic with the other rivals!

Silver: Little bro # 1. Next to Beryl, Blue pretty much understood Silver the most in his you get years, and because of that he became this mentor/older brother figure to Silvs. Next to the dragon den, Viridian gym became a safe space for Silver to just hang out, though his definition of hanging out is battling lol. Silver had to deal with the love saga that was Red and Blue and will constantly rip at them for it ( Blue would then mention something about Kenji and that gets Silver to shut up).

Wally: The Bestie ( next to his sisters and Red). How did these two become such close friends despite seemingly contrasting personalities? Blue would give you a long backstory as to how the two met and thus became friends. Wally would shrug and say " The fuck I know. But I am grateful to be his friend :)"( note: Blue did not teach Wally to swear. That was Green). The balance each other off really well tbh. Blue had gone full Karen for Wally once, me thinks. Blue has been concerned with Wally's desire for strength at the cost of bonding with his pokemon, but he ( and others) addressed it with him at some point. Wally and his pokemon are doing better for it! Wally, in turn,let's Blue just rant to him about his frustrations- gym stuff, Red, family stuff, his own goals in life...the man was very conflicted in what he wanted to do in life. These two consider each other their best friend, and I will die on this hill.

Barry: This one is hard since I don't know exactly how they would meet? The best I can think of is in b2w2 during the pwt, if Danica invited Barry along as a plus one. But even then, I'm not entirely sure about how blue perceives him. I do think he appreciates the energy and enthusiasm! Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he saw him as another rival( of course Red and Green are his #1 rivals, and no one can top that). I can totally see the banter between these two being wild ( Blue seems to be the type to playfully egg Barry on).

Bianca: Being the grandson of the esteemed Prof. Oak and having your older sister eventually take the mantel of pokemon professor means that you- Blue - by proxy is always In The Know of the whozawhatsit in the pokemon scientific sphere. So,by proxy, he knew Bianca before officially meeting her. Daisy said that she's a sweet girl, and when meeting her ( thanks to Cheren) , he can say she is really sweet. Though he also appreciates the snark in her. Blue would say he's not too deep into the pokemon professor stuff ( he's not one in my au, but he dabbles into it here and there), but Bianca can and will sight the long conversations they would have about whatever sciencey pokemon topic that comes to mind. He ain't slick.

Cheren: So basically it went like this.

Literally anyone: Oh hey, I heard that Unova has a new normal type gym leader.

Blue, a "normal" type gym leader: Oh?

Literally anyone: Yeah, apparently he helped fight off Team Plasma two years ago.

Blue, who had encounters with his own regions evil team: Oh???

Literally anyone: Mhm. He used to be friends with the guy who stopped them, but that guy disappeared one day-

Blue, who is honestly still healing from everything, including Red just up and leaving: Oh you don't say?!

So basically Cheren is Little Bro # 2. He loves teasing him. It took a while for Cheren to really reciprocate( Blue was kinda Too Much, especially given his general, well, Blueness), but now they're really good friends! Much like Bianca, blue has had long conversations about pokemon and stuff ( which includes trauma and feelings of inadequacy).

Hugh: Another hard one, but probably like Barry. Appreciates the vigor, the drive, etc. Gonna look at pokemas for this one.

Okay time for rapid fire stuff cause this is getting long again.

Kalos rivals: Sorry to group them together :(. Blue knew about them before meeting them for the same reasons stated in Bianca's part. Shauna and him are always in contact due to the Chosen business, but Shauna has encouraged his Dramatic Bitch behavior lol. Sees a bit of Wally in Trevor, and likes talking to him about the Pokedex. Isn't super big on contests, but his sister( Daisy) would partake in them, so he would catch Tierno in a few here and there.

Alola rivals: His KIDS!!! Living in Alola means he sees them often, and once again became yet another mentor figure for them. This was at a point where Blue has become his most mature self, still classic Blue, but less likely to egg someone on for a response unless it's actually needed. He genuinely loves seeing them hang out together and enjoy life, as well as battling as they see fit. He gets really sappy around them lol. Gladion and Ames ( not a rival, oc) call him Old Man. In SM he's only 21 lmao.

Galar rivals: Have not met them properly I think. He had heard about Hop from Leon when he- Leon - was champion. He also probably tuned into the Galar gym challenge and watched everything about it, so he knows about Bede and Marnie from there. If I ever have them medy properly, I think Hop and Bede would be Little Bro #3 and 4. Marnie would be Little Sis # 1 ( Green is Blue's actual little sister in my au, so she doesn't count).

And yeah. That was long. Again. Ah well.

[esta-elavaris]

Hello!!

First up, just want to say I love your blog and your stories even though I am a lousy commentor.(I apologise for that)

I really resonate with that ask you answered about children. I feel exactly the same way...sworn off relationships and children. I value my freedom too much to sacrifice it. Children and relationships maybe okay but free time, writing, reading and fandoms are WAYYY better. I tend to keep these views to myself because I made the mistake of opening up and telling this to some of my family and friends only to be ridiculed. They even had the audacity to place bets on me which was quite annoying. Long story short none of them believe me and does not get the fact that I do not need to be in a relationship or have children to be happy. I am quite content with my freedom, studies, reading, writing, fandoms and most importantly my peace of mind. Glad to know there are people like me who feel the same way❤❤

Oh no need to apologise at all, I am also a crap commenter when it comes to stuff I read a lot of the time, so I get it! Thank you! 💜💜

But yeah, honestly it's so disappointing that people are crap about it. Most of my family don't know that I've actively decided not to do either, and I don't see any reason to tell them tbh. I don't need the ear-beating. I've only just started being so open about it online and amongst friend circles because it feels important to voice and validate at this point. It does make me laugh because my mother was a terrible mother and told me at fifteen that I needed to have children one day, because she had to be a grandmother 💀 like she didn't even make an effort with the kids she had herself, what a dumbass.

Our planet is over-populated as it is, and so many kids are stuck with terrible parents who have no interest in actually parenting or being there for their child because they either had kids because it's "what people do", or because they were too concerned with what they thought a child could give them rather than vice versa, or even because they were worried about maybe potentially regretting it one day. One look at the "regretful parents" subreddit shows you the cost of that thinking. I think it's funny that the people who actively choose not to have kids bc they don't think they'd be a good parent are actively making a better parenting decision than the ones who have them and then mistreat them just because "it's what people do!!!1"

With relationships and kids for me there's just too much cost and absolutely not enough reward. I'd much rather write about it than live it ahah. The judgement does absolutely suck, though, like I think people who view these things as an essential part of life really can't grasp that some people just don't, and think we're lying about being happy as is out of denial or and inability to find "the one" or something because they think how they feel when they're single etc. is how everybody feels when they're single. Or maybe it even makes them feel some kind of way because they depend on it so much and they don't like to see others not needing it, and being fine with doing shit alone or "just" with friends. Platonic love is just as important, and (for me) just as fulfilling.

I do think some child-free people give the whole thing a bad name - I cringe when I see people online absolutely foaming at the mouth when a child dares to exist in public, but it doesn't justify the way some people try to make the reproductive choices of others their business. It's also disappointing that it's a decision that's often more respected when men make it than women. Nine times out of ten I see a parent dealing with a meltdown etc. and I just think "I wouldn't do that on a daily basis for all of the money in the world", and that's not even getting into how we gloss over exactly how traumatic pregnancy and birth is on a physical level. Absolutely no part of it is tempting to me. The good moments wouldn't outweigh the sacrifice for me.

I did not mean to write you a whole ass essay here, I'm sorry haha, it's just nice to find people who get it and to have a chance to talk about it! Also didn't know whether to answer this privately or not - so I hope you don't mind, but if you do just lmk and I'll delete 💜

[xaz-fr]

oh fuck hi xaz i was wondering where you went. apparently the reason was a little uh.. well, jesus christ. tbh.

i'm a little nervous about showing my face which is why i'm on anon but ive been in afams and very active in discord since i wanna say the fall before the first skycats thing? and ive been pretty much absent since around when you left. (funnily enough i haven't come up in a single queue in that entire time, or in the year and a half ive been waiting for a project queue >_<)

anyway i wanna say i love and support u and i hope other than this bullshit you're doing well, and also i can definitely corroborate some of the stuff you posted that the afams team has been doing... uh. bad.

especially that part about the one mod having a bunch of complaints about them.. honestly it's at the point where i'm not even sure *which* fucking mod it is lmao. (put some extra info in a second ask)

and the way the two admins treated you, while i didn't see anything super obvious first hand, it always struck me as soooo fucking weird that you could make some of the same kinda jokes that they did, and jokes with "fuck" and "shit" and whatever in them, except you were getting publicly dressed down for it. (i will say there were a couple times you had some less savory jokes HOWEVER you corrected and apologized and didn't do it again. but most times it was regular shit everybody else was saying too, from what i remember)

oh and there was also a couple times where the admins asked for feedback on stuff and i'd try to mention some difficulty, and i'd get completely *publicly* shut down with some ableist nonsense, and nobody would say shit. i'm not comfortable saying exactly what was said, but it was... it was bad. it was bad. like i had to stop going to the discord for like a week when it happened. and myn said she'd talk to the people who did it and now i'm starting to think that just never happened....

I just wanna go on record saying I don't know who this person is but they sound like a an afam helper (not quite a mod bc up until kata we didn't have mods). The server has a few of those. So for the admin babies out there, I didn't tell this person to send this in or anything.

And yes you're absolutely right. The admins loved to ask for feeback or insight on stuff and if it wasn't 100% squeaky clean it'd be shut down. Reminds me of the time one of the admins (not the main ones actually) told me my ideas weren't good and unrealistic during a brain storming thread for an event that never happened last year and no one stepped in to tell her to stop until I stood up for myself and said 'just because they're unrealistic doesn't mean I can't talk about them'.

Some, but certainly not all, of the staff are weirdly ableist as well. I totally forgot about that. I'm a bit mentally disabled but I try and shrug that stuff off so I don't go crazy but I know others are a lot more sensative to that kinda stuff. And while like you said I might have slipped up myself sometimes I did try and correct it and make it right because I didn't realize I'd fucked up until my foot was in my mouth.

And completely agree. You'd go to the admins with an issue about a person and they said they'd deal with it but it... never felt like it did? I remember that was a big point of contention where I was BEGGING the admins to please just TELL US what is happening. Give us updates. Have you followed through with things you said you would? Has the person someone had a problem with been actually spoken to? But it felt like a lotta the time things were sent to the admins and then nothing happened and that's why I always wanted an actual open dialogue so people could SEE what issues there were and hold the admins accountable for those things. But that wasn't allowed bc it was confrontational.

Not all confrontation is negative. It is something that sometimes needs to happen between people so everyone feels heard and understood. But that isn't allowed.

And about your second ask; oh geeze anon I'm so sorry. That sounds horrible. I teared up a little and I'm glad you're away from that person. If you wanna talk more you can always DM me over discord.

[philcoulsonismyhero]

🗡️👁️💭 for George and 🌈💔❗ for Tim!

George Glen

🗡️ - Does this oc have a signature object, accessory, or weapon?

George chews his pens, it's a bad habit he's never been able to get out of, so he always buys the same type of cheap ballpoint with the black caps in bulk. He's Always got a spare one of those pens on him, in addition to the active one, and pretty much his whole team have ended up accidentally stealing one at some point. He also wears reading glasses, the type with the black plastic frames.

Back in the day, I don't think he had a signature weapon, but he's always been quite good with knives. These days, he rarely even carries an extendable baton.

👁️ - How do other people perceive this oc? How close do their first assumptions come to the truth?

Posh, intelligent, serious, the sort of boring workaholic whose entire identity is his job (but it's a job that he's very good at), and a man who doesn't suffer fools and values hard work. People who pay a bit more attention notice that he's got quite a sharp, witty sense of humour.

He puts quite a lot of effort into maintaining that image, and to some degree that is who he is. But he's hiding the fact that he's gay and he's doing it by suppressing most of the fun parts of his personality. When he's relaxed and able to be himself, he's a lot snarkier and he can be quite deliberately silly (he's the one who named their cat The Usual Suspect), and he's not entirely un-camp. He's also a much better actor than his straight-laced work persona would suggest, and exactly as good a liar as you'd expect from a former spy. He comes off as a lot more straightforward (and, deliberately, straight) in people's first impressions than he really is, and it's entirely deliberate.

💭 - How is their mental health? Do they struggle with guilt or shame?

Honestly, I think it's probably pretty good on the whole. He's got the persistent strain of staying closeted at work, and some nasty stuff in his past that can sneak up on him, but he's been in a happy relationship for a decade and he actually likes the person he is now, so he's doing alright. I think there is a little bit of shame involved in how much of himself he hides from his coworkers, but that's more over his former employment than his sexuality. (Closeting himself is a matter of practicality - he's a police detective in the 00s and that's Not a good career or time to be openly gay in.) He's not exactly ashamed of his past, but he's quite realistic about the fact that he did some nasty things that would make people look at him differently if they knew about them, and he doesn't want to have to deal with that. As for guilt, well, there's one big thing he still feels a bit guilty over, but on the whole he's rationalised his past as I Did What Was Necessary, ends justify the means. He's a different man now, he's put that behind him.

Tim Kingswood

🌈 - Do you associate any colours with them?

Colours in general, tbh. Tim has a large collection of very loud shirts, a lot of them floral, and he's just generally quite a colourful person. I don't think I could pick one specific colour.

💔 - Does forgiveness come easily or with difficulty to this oc? Can they forgive others? What about themselves?

Tim forgives wayyy too easily, at least when it comes to people who've hurt him personally. He can be a bit gullible and easy to manipulate because he likes to see the best in people, and it's simultaneously one of his biggest weaknesses and his biggest strength. He's also got a temper, but once he's gotten over the initial explosion he doesn't hold on to arguments for very long and moves on quite easily. He's also quite hard on himself, but at the same time he'll make the same mistakes all over again because what if this time it's different. He makes life difficult for himself, for sure, but it's one of the things that really endears him to people because he cares a lot and doesn't let grudges get in the way of that.

❗- What are the highest priorities to this oc (at a point in their life of your choosing)?

Doing his job well, I think. He likes his job, he's good at it, it matters to him to do it well, on both the pathology and the teaching side of things. His cases matter, his students matter, whatever research he's doing at any given point is usually something important to him. He likes answers and knowledge, and passing both of those along. The guy's a nerd and a bit of a workaholic, and his relationship with George works because they both know that sometimes (even a lot of the time) the case comes first.

Ask me OC questions!

[live-love-laugh-lesbian]

OMG hiiii dw abt it at all! your answer is long enough and im so sorry :( i hope you feel better now/soon!!

thank youu omg well im in my first year so we do a bit of everything! some coding like coding websites and stuff and some written computer problems as well! (i would explain but it's kinda hard to and i suck at explaining so asdhkjasdhjh) its a bit of everything! programming (practical) and theory!

ahsdjkahsdkj owning two trousers is so real lmao i think i only own one pair ajskldsjad and they are flared so not fit for all weathers ajksdhkjsah they sound sooo cute! if you wouldnt mind sharing them, i'd love to see them! but thats totally up to you! i dont want to make you uncomfortable at all so the choice is yours! im just a lil nosy hehe

omg same when i was a kid i once ate like an entire chocolate egg in a day! the time after that was hell i was sooo sick but its worthh itttttt and yes exactly!! like whenever i was young i had school assemblies and they were all like 'i dont play to draw i play to win' and like yeah so real! as long as no ones too mean and harsh while being competitive then go nuts! i love a little competition!! stardew valley is more of like a relaxing game for me! also animal crossing but like i get so frustrated when i cant catch a fish asjkdhaskj fishing is HELLLLLL in animal crossing alksdjlksj

awww thank youu! your hair sounds beautiful the compliments are most definitely soo valid! my hair never reached that point when i was young tho bc its like SOOOO frizzy and fluffy it almost grows outwards rather than down askjdhkasjh so it was always kinda short and super fluffy ajsdskjh

i think stuff abt the modern day world i really hate is that almost everyones so pretentious nowadays like you see someone and youre like oh theyre nice speaking out abt this and turns out that its all hypocritical and shit but also that feels like its not exactly modern? so ill give another answer and that is INFLATION! everything nowadays is soooo expensive oh my god! and yes governments is so reall

hmm, smth in the next five years... this is sooo not related at all and im totally twisting the meaning of your question but my online friends ajsdhkajsdh okay but serious answer? i wish to see less labour! like yk sites that use fast fashion and stuff that force labour onto people and children and i want that to be addressed and reduced bc like. no. labour is bad how is it acceptable for people to pay such horrible wages to their workers who make them so much money!! that feels so cruel! what about you?

and my question for you: what is something in/from a person that makes them absolutely unacceptable in your eyes? (i dont think that makes sense lmao) basically if you were friends w someone, whats one thing they could do to make you immediately see them as a red flag or like not like them/block them immediately (apart from them saying the r word!)

byee have an awesome day!

-swiftie spring exchange anon!

Hello again! I am doing better atm - I've basically had like, one long bug for three weeks, and like...I'd start feeling better. Go to work. Get worse from the exertion. Have to miss work. Get better slightly, so go to work...yeah XD I do seem to be on the mend now, I've just got a bit of residual pain and cough, and some of my underlying issues are being a bit unpleasant. But I'm taking it XD I had to take almost a week off work last week but I think the prolonged rest helped.

And hey that sounds really cool though!! So guessing you're in uni then? How's that going? Where I am it's starting to come up to exam season, so the people that I know are in uni at the moment are all quite stressed, bless them.

I don't mind showing you them like, privately, but due to my style being quite...unique (by courtsey of making a lot of it) I try to keep it off public tumblr to some extent, just because anyone who knows me would know immediately this was me. Tbh it's not a big deal if they did, but since I work with kids I feel the need to be more careful with social media these days.

And ok but see, I have very straight hair, and I've always wanted frizzy/fluffy hair!! Sometimes I fear we just want what we don't have XD

I think the hypocrisy is related to the modern world however! Social media kinda encourages a very black and white thinking of things, and most things are not so black and white (I mean like, obviously if someone's like. "Haha, I want to murder babies"...that's not a black and white issue. But you get me XD) So you end up with people being like "x is always bad". Then they'll later be like..."this thing that's basically x is fine"?

Inflation is SHIT. Look when I moved into my current place my phone bill was exactly 10 quid a month. It's not like 13 something!! It's not the biggest hike, my energy bill has freaking doubled, but by nature of it starting at a solid 10 I can see the inflation so much easier. It's a 30% increase!!

And see I am very lucky, I have seen a few online friends! My gf and I met through tumblr, and I've got two close friends that by thankful virtue of being in the same country I've been able to meet quite a few times...I met one who I've since lost contact with sadly, but I'm hoping to meet a couple more! OH and one is in a ldr with one of my close friends so I'll see her when she comes here (well I should do) but idk when that would be yet.

And look I have SO many fast fashion complaints. A big reason why I do so much thrifting and sewing is because I just hate fast fashion. I know it's sorta popular in some circles to talk about the shit quality, but it's shit because companies are paying people like a penny a piece for it -.- I refuse to use places like shein and temu...

I think in the next five years...generally I'm wanting to see a shift in climate change. I have a lot of climate anxiety, and I'm hoping that we start getting actual change in how politicians and companies approach the issues?? I want more eco changes. More bikes, cheaper plant based food, less fossil fuels, etc...I also want my government to stop making life harder for no reason. They recently decided people who have visas to work in the care industry over here can't have their kids come from overseas too?? Like there are people who now have their kids in other countries cause of this shit??? If they're working here, they deserve their kids to be here. How is that not the default idea!!

Less generally, I'm hoping to see improvements in my personal life XD I want to see a couple doctors to get some shit sorted out, and I want to improve my art further, and sort out where exactly I'm going with my career.

And nah that makes perfect sense! Honestly I'm a bit of a pushover, I'll take a lot from people. I think mainly the things that will really make me go. Hm. I mean, if you're outright a really terrible person (like if you told me you murder babies for fun, to use my "terrible person" example from above XD) I'm not gonna be interested in talking to you, but that's kinda obvious. But I think the things that make me go "red flag" are usually more personal things based on past experience. For example, I knew someone once who would move my mobility aids away from me, and I'd be like...right well I can't. Move now. Please give them back. And they're one of the few people I've cut contact with. But tbh I feel like I probably need more boundaries, I just get like...what if I'm being too harsh on this person XD

What about you tho??

See you again soon, hope your day has been well when you see this!!

EDIT: I forgot to ask a question back!! D: If you could make one trivial change to the world what would it be? Has to be something small, like...renaming strawberries to be fluffleberries, or making bananas rainbow XD

[krakrac]

hiiii time for an OC rant because thoughts have been thought and i need to scream about them into the void 💥💥

i have been thinking for some time now, about yrsk and the fact that he could be read as a DID system; with an emphasis on "could" since i never planned on writing him as a system and i myself dont view him as one and i probably never will (but who knows, he has already changed A LOT since he came into existence).

(had to add read more because god DAMN i will NOT shut UP)

to show what the hell i mean by that: first thing, he goes/went by at least three different names (it used to be just two but some development with the story has been made) and he treats each one of these names as a separate personality of sorts that acts in a certain way. they don't exist simultaneously – two of them are of the past and the third is his current one which would be named "yrsk". sometimes, yrsk does or says things (be they morally questionable or not) that remind him of the way he used to act when he still called himself one of the past names and he tries to avoid responsibility by attributing the "bad" things to one of the past names. basically saying "oh that wasn't me that was this fucking guy" to himself. also he does this more or less subconsciously and only in his mind, he never speaks about this with anyone (this might change as i write more chapters tbh, i can see him talking about it with nyr at some point in a distant future). of course each of these personalities behind the names is still him, the same person, and he is aware of it.

the second thing is how quickly his attitude can change. he could be all chatty and content one second, and harsh, tense and often emotionless the other. which could evoke switching between alters but it's actually just him switching into survival mode. "oh fuck there is danger, enough of shits and giggles i gotta concentrate on keeping my ass alive" kinda deal. since he has been dealing with danger (both short- and long-term) too often, he had to create a defense mechanism for himself at some point to not lose his mind out of sheer fear and stress, which was even reinforced by his mentor as some form of self-control was required by the martial arts he has been teaching yrsk. if you asked nyr, he would definitely agree that yrsk on the run or during a fight feels like a different person and that he could even notice a slight change in his voice.

also, there is this third thing going on with him, which could be a combination of the two points above, or you could very well view it as an actual alter switch (and i honestly wouldn't even be against making it canon because i actually have no idea what da hell was that): yrsk gained an opportunity to finally exact revenge on an enemy who has more or less destroyed a huge part of his life and he took this opportunity without hesitation. in that moment, he was in the survival mode but at the same time one of the "personalities" behind the past names sort of emerged (or possibly both tbh) – the one that wouldn't bat an eye at torture because that was exactly what he did to the enemy. he snapped out of it after the deed was done and needless to say he was horrified by it and infinitely disgusted by himself; it really fucked him up subsequently. hard to say if it was because he was aware it was him doing it, or because he wasn't aware of it.

ik in this case there is this stereotypical "bad and EVIL alter that KILLS people and is VERY fucked up" thing but again it wasnt written with DID in mind.

anyways rant over i guess 🫡🫡 i might've wanted to talk about more stuff but it's almost 3am and im starting to feel tired so i forgor what it was

also im not much more knowledgeable in DID than an average person so i will gladly welcome any thoughts on this rant, if anyone actually read allat lmao