#who wants to help people no matter what like bruh how could you characterize these two into such the opposite 😭

[roseofcards90]

I just woke up from a nap and lowkey recovered from an ocd flare up but I truly do hate when fandoms downplay the relationships characters have with each other and water them down to fandom tropes/jokes it just fucking annoys me especially when said relationship has a lot of complexity and it ends up affecting the characterization of the characters involved too that they become misinterpreted/watered down/ flanderized in the process 😭

[vickyvicarious]

Hello! I love your posts about both of the Leverage series. What role does Breanna as a Maker fulfill in the team?

First off, sorry I took so long to answer this. I was holding off until I watched all the episodes because I wanted to see how much more was or wasn't done with 'Maker' Breanna.

And the short answer is? Not much.

But the long answer... well, to sum it up, that might change pretty soon in the next part of the season, and it's actually pretty character-based that we don't see it yet. Let me explain my reasoning.

Breanna tries to sell herself as a team member like this:

Breanna: "I'm not as good a hacker as you."

Hardison: "Damn straight."

Breanna: "But hacking's kinda old-school anyway, it's like any script kiddie can do that. I'm really better with, like, the social media part. Or like, drones, physical builds, you know, like... relevant skills."

So. First off, in this scene she's clearly trying to make herself sound valuable to the team. She doesn't want to just present herself as 'Hardison, but not as good.' She acknowledges that he's a better hacker but then tries to point out her own skills that could be useful, and the 'relevant' dig is just a joke because she's nervous and also he's her sibling so she's gotta.

No one really responds, so she asks them to give her a shot, to let her in because she found them and she's earned this. Hardison, though, is still stuck on her calling him a "script kiddie":

Hardison: "S- I'm s- scrip-script who? Who you calling script kiddie?" [to Eliot, standing behind Breanna] "Bruh, script kiddie? You hear this?"

Eliot: "Hey. Head chef." [pauses, tilts his head towards Breanna] "Chopping lettuce."

I bring this up because I think it's pretty relevant to what we see from Breanna. She literally just tried to present herself as different from Hardison, to emphasize her own skills in drones and social media manipulation. But the very first thing she hears is "head chef/chopping lettuce." Without the context of Eliot and Hardison's earlier conversation about Hardison being torn between his other work (that only he can do) and needing to let go and delegate some stuff, all she's hearing here is Eliot essentially calling her the less experienced cook. Same job really, just not as good at it.

We don't see much reaction on her face to this line. But throughout the rest of the season, a recurring aspect of her characterization is that she gets frustrated or disheartened when people shut her ideas down, and she tends to be less confident in herself/hesitant about offering ideas or surprised by getting praise.

She tries to prove herself quickly in the Rollin' on the River Job by going for the pearl despite being told not to, and then gets very upset and resentful when she's confined to the van for the rest of the con. Thing is, she was trying to prove herself by demonstrating Parker skills - skills which Breanna does not have at this point.

She's also compared negatively to Hardison in I think the same episode or maybe the next one? When she finds the shell corporation and is all proud of herself and then the team just kinda goes "even Harry coulda done that." They're not mean about it, but Breanna clearly isn't going as deep into the research as they like or are used to. Similarly, Eliot complains about having to apply for a job instead of just having it given to him and changes his backstory on the fly when Breanna really isn't ready. She doesn't have all the backups built like Hardison, she isn't able to change them as fast as he can. Again, there's a scene where he left her manuals and she kinda skimmed them but failed at something that would have been explained in the manual if she'd read it all.

She showed up wanting to be an addition to the team, to fill a different role from Hardison. But he took that as the impetus to leave and do his own thing, meaning Breanna now feel like she has to fill his role. And it's not going super well at first because that's not what she's good at. Not that she's bad by any means - but the Leverage team is very used to Hardison, and they aren't slowing down enough for her, or aren't always clearly explaining what they want from her.

Also, they're planning their cons with two things in mind for her: a) her safety, and b) her doing tech. Parker tries to teach her thieving skills onscreen, and just generally be a mentor. They put Breanna in the van early on and hesitate to let her out too much until they're more confident in her skills. This isn't helped by the whole pearl fiasco, obviously, but in general, they build plans around her being with someone else guiding her at first, or her being back at base doing Hardison's old job. Partly because they see that as safer but also because that's just, what they know to plan for.

Breanna is someone who feels bad about herself pretty easily, in my opinion. She gets discouraged. Eliot's early comment and Hardison leaving was enough to push her into the reckless pearl grab to try and impress the team with her skills. When that backfires, she gets a lot less bold about protesting a plan. Part of that comes from Harry's pep talk to her, as well. He encourages her to work as part of a team with the rest of the crew. And she basically takes that and throws herself into being what she thinks they want her to be.

Now, I'm not saying she never offers any ideas of her own. But it takes a while before she's very confident doing so, and it's not until the Card Game Job (which happens to be very emotionally significant for her personally) that she really tries to argue her point. (She repurposes her Halloween decorations to help the con the episode right before, but it's not quite the same situation.) And then she's still shut down. This is partially due to Parker's own hangups about being a mentor meaning she should always be the wiser one and not have to learn from her own student, and that does change over the course of the episode. But Breanna doesn't push super hard for Parker to use her notes at first, despite clearly wanting to. However, she does grow in confidence once her relevant knowledge starts being the key to figuring out the riddle. And at the end of the episode Parker makes a point of mentioning that Breanna's a good teacher.

The very next episode, she brings a drone to a job.

Now, sadly poor little Frodo the drone is killed basically instantly, but that timing seems pretty telling to me. The other incredibly important thing that happens that episode, is that Breanna opens up, at first to Eliot, and then to the rest of the team (minus Harry), about her past and her regrets and mistakes.

We never actually learn what those are, because the team tells her it doesn't actually matter to them. Eliot tells her directly that they don't need her to be Hardison. Parker goes a step further and says "All we need from you is to be exactly the person you are."

And I think that is the key. Breanna was trying really, really hard to show them that she's a worthwhile member of the team. She was trying to live up to their perceived expectations of her, trying to fill Hardison's shoes. And because they aren't familiar with any other skills of hers/don't often work with things like social media and drones, they don't make plans for those. Breanna needs to take the initiative to offer her own skills and ideas, because unlike Nate in the original show, Parker and Sophie don't have the same knowledge of everything Breanna is capable of. They put her in plans in ways they knew she'd be safe, and doing things they expected she could do. And it wasn't exactly wrong of them, but it didn't give her the opportunity to bring many of her own unique skills to the table.

Now, the Double-Edged Sword Job (where they tell her all this) is the second-to-last episode, and the finale is entirely focused on Sophie and the ghost of Nate. Breanna plays a relatively small role in that one, so we don't see instant payoff from this conversation. But I do believe that, now she's no longer carrying the yoke of 'being Hardison', we will see her feeling more confident in offering up her own skills. We will see them succeeded and her own ideas and techniques becoming something the rest of the team learns how to account for in planning cons.

The two things Breanna brags about at the beginning are social media and drones/physical builds. As of yet, we've seen her utilize social media once (to throw the rave in her first episode - when Hardison was still there), and a drone once (the episode after her knowledge was key to the con succeeding). The drone didn't work that time, but I hope to see more, and see more clever applications of whatever "social media manipulation" and "physical builds" even means, in the second half of the season.

(Granted, Hardison never fit fully into a box of just hacking in the first place, and I'm sure there will still be a lot of overlap with Breanna being the primary tech person, but I'm excited for more variety as well.)

[heisalonetonight]

hi - anon from before - pls excuse me bc i'm absolutely /sobbing/ at your response bruh. thank /you/ for answering so openly (just like Adrien! :0 ) I'm shook at the fact you started publishing from 14 to now, that's incredible!! can i ask what you published? :0 Also wow @ that characterization of Adrien towards the end, it really makes a lot of sense!! is there a difference between Adrien and Chat? Or are they similar but just show different amounts of certain feelings? :0

Oh, just poems and stories! I don’t want to show off lol they were achievements for sure but I’m sure you have something better to do than read about them :P And thank you, I have a lot of opinions about who Adrien is and how he does it. Onto Chat vs Adrien - I think inherently they are the same person, obviously, but Chat Noir lives without the same sort of ... suffocation, I guess? Being Adrien Agreste is work. That’s something that he carries with him every minute of every day - being an Agreste means that there are always cameras somewhere, and his every move is scrutinised. As much as Adrien likes to kick back and relax with his friends, and really does love and trust them very deeply (and god, he loves being called ‘dude’!), the role his friends play in Adrien’s life is actually very minor, by necessity (not by choice: he would always choose to hang out with those guys, sans the nights his father promises he’ll make it to dinner this time - this time). He is working. He has expectations to manage and a phone which is waiting to call him home at the drop of a hat when his father hasn’t quite managed to make this meeting, could he please stand in, or Adrien, there’s a charity event you need to attend, or Adrien, please turn another 13 degrees to the left so the cameras can get your smile properly while you talk to your friends. Adrien’s got a lot of very high expectations put on him which are inherently expectations, rather than goals - they are things he can fall short of or meet, but they are so high it is impossible to exceed them, so his options are disappointing his father or .... not disappointing him. 

Adrien really, really cares about his father. I think it’s underestimated, the turmoil that he goes through in Chat Blanc - since the disappearance of his mother his father really, truly changed, and Adrien really believes that that’s because Gabriel is trying to hold things together. He thinks his father has, essentially, fallen apart, and when has it ever been like Adrien to hold somebody’s turmoil and fear and sickness against them? His father is sick. He’s afraid of going outside, he’s afraid for Adrien so hard that it’s sometimes suffocating, and Adrien wants him to get better. Before he met Ladybug, Adrien Agreste needed to find something - some relationship - to anchor himself into, to strap himself onto and not let go of, and for him that relationship was his father’s. To Adrien, he and Gabriel are a team. The same sort of team Ladybug and Chat Noir are, the same sort of inherent and unbreakable bond that they have: he is inseperable from his father. Whatever this terrible grief is, whatever it has stolen from Gabriel, they are in it together. They are in it together and it is just Adrien’s turn to be the part of the team who does more work, and that is because Gabriel is self-destructing, and Adrien aches for his father to be better, more than he aches to be wanted. And besides, Adrien doesn’t do love like that (here’s a link to the fic exactly on that subject!). He doesn’t do it like his father needs to earn it, he has been loved like that before - like he could be loved if only he was good enough - and he would not wish that on his worst enemy, much less the people he loves. Gabriel does not owe him anything, to earn Adrien’s love. If the only way to express it - their partnership - is through the avenues of work that Gabriel opens up to him, asks him to do, then that’s what Adrien will do. He considers them a team. 

Chat Noir, meanwhile, has a different partner - a teammate who will play the game with him in equal parts, who often overtakes him because she is just amazing and dynamic and beautiful, who soars past him on gilded wings and takes his breath away. And then she turns back to offer him her hand, to pull him onward, because she loves him, and it has never in her entire life ever been a problem for Ladybug that she did not feel loved, that she did not know how to show people that they were wanted. She has never even hesitated to smile for people - especially Chat - or to support him when he’s down. She has been wildly, miraculously, crazily kind to him, and been open about her emotions, and accessible, and responsive, and amazing, and his best friend (sorry Nino) he’s ever had, the best friend he’s ever been lucky enough to meet. And you know his luck! She takes his breath away not just because she is kind and gentle and soft, where everybody else in his life has always been hard, but because she is basically a genius and she knows it, and she’s ridiculously impressive, and Adrien Agreste, my friends, is 100% the sort of guy who is turned on by girls who can kick his butt, that is the sort of thing he loves, not least because they don’t need him to be doing anything - they don’t need him in the charity event, they don’t need him to be on call, they don’t need him - but they want him. Ladybug wants him. And if she does need him, it’s only in equal parts to how often and how badly he needs her. She is so.... Anyway. Let’s not go on a long rant about what he loves about Ladybug, I do need to finish this response conceivably within the next several years. The key difference between Chat Noir and Adrien Agreste is that the people who they tie themselves into the world with either love him or they don’t, and Adrien feels like he must be doing something wrong (not being able to reach his father properly - he thinks he just hasn’t found the right path - he thinks they are a team and it is his job to reach him, and he hasn’t done it, yet, and it make him a bad teammate), though he is very quiet about his confusion, and he does what he is asked to do because he has very little alternative. Ladybug’s team... being on Ladybug’s team comes as easily as breathing. It makes him happy. It teaches him everything he needs to be taught about the world, about how love works, about what it is like when you are just - well - happy, and you don’t care if anybody is watching. That same thing can be said, increasingly, more and more often, of Adrien’s time he spends with his friends - Marinette and Kagami and Nino and Alya and Max and everybody - and in fact we have seen the influence of people who really love him leaking into his behaviour, as he is slowly departing from doing every single thing his father ever asks from him, as he sneaks off to London (from which he was, I remind you, once banned, even though he could have gone to his uncle’s funeral) with nary a glance behind him, with this breathy little exhilaration which is only cemented by his friends’ acceptance and excitement rather than disgust and disappointment. He hosts his party. He finds ways to live when he still can, he finds ways to breathe these stolen gasps of air when he’s got the time to do it, and it just would not have occurred to him to even try, before this series started. Before he met someone (in this case, Plagg) who offered him an out. 

There’s a lot to write about Chloe here as well, but I am already several paragraphs deep into this. Chloe’s role as his only friend is important and he really does like her a lot, she is one of his closest and is literally his oldest friend, and there’s a lot to be said for how he defends her and tries for her and believes in her. They are genuinely, really friends. But we’re not getting into it. 

As Adrien prioritises his partnership - his team - with Ladybug more and more, he is growing to learn what a real team looks like. Chat is loose and easy and relaxed and he relishes that, and he loves being with her more than he loves anything else in the entire world, because he has her back and he really believes she has his, and the whole rest of the world really doesn’t matter. I’ve written about this before - he has long-held beliefs about the world, absolute truths that he feels he can dig and dig and dig and dig and he will never come out the other side, they’re just true. They’re just true. 

But it costs Adrien something, to believe that he is a team with his father, and it does not cost him anything to believe the same of his best friend. Still, he will not ever let one of his absolute truths go easily (which is why he struggles with Kagami so much - one of his truths is that he is in love with Ladybug; and why he struggles with Chat Blanc, letting his father go, even though he knew that’s what he had to do), and that is why ... he is a sad boy. It is because he is fighting to find out where the truth is. He knows it has to be there somewhere. He knows it has to be buried somewhere under these swathes of work and isolation and barely-acceptable-son-but-thanks-for-trying behaviour. He just isn’t looking hard enough, there is want, somewhere under there. Gabriel wants him, somewhere there. It does not help that Gabriel throws out occasionally flashes of love, a hug here, concern for him there, a conversation once a month. It doesn’t help that he is being strung along. 

(As a spoiler, Adrien is wasting his time.) 

Anyway, the differences between Adrien and Chat are really just how much of Adrien is actually welcome, at any one time. Adrien mostly just works for his father, has always mostly just done work, he has a packed schedule - and nobody cares who Adrien is, they care what the young Monsieur Agreste can do for them. Chat is always welcome. Chat is always wanted. Chat always feels wanted, and she finds new ways to make him feel it almost every time he sees her. He craves that, and flourishes in it. I guess that’s the main difference. 

[fapangel]

199 chars, I got cites. I'll stick to actions and militia/cult behavior. The sniper attack on power station citation is you missing my point. Antifa has no weapon stockpiles or military training. The groups law enforcement see as a threat are the militias: "Law Enforcement Assessment of the Violent Extremist Threat". PBS: "armed militia groups surging across nation" Cult stuff: Business Insider:"right-wing-militias-recruit-young-soldiers-on-4chan-2017-5" psychologytoday:"the mind the militias".

Firstoff, pastebin.com is definitely the go-to for things like this -there’s no way anyone can make a cohesive argument in that tiny askbox. Just say “pastebin: and it’ll get you past that “no URLs”filter tumblr imposes. But I can answer these points/sources here: 

Have you heard of the John Brown club? They’rean antifa group - the usual insane anarchists - and they’re showingup at protests carrying loaded weapons. The Phoenix group inthat article made a video of themselves doingrange practice. I believe that qualifies as training, youknow, with those weapons you say they don’t have.What fucking training do you think the right-wingmilitias have besides target shooting and playing paintball in thewoods? In other words, exactly what these people are doing? 

And what the fuck do you mean stockpiles? Bro,I don’t know if you’re aware, but we live in America - you know,that free country? If you want a gun, are over 21,and don’t have a felony conviction on your record, you can walkinto any store, do 5 minutes of paperwork, wait for them to call theFBI background-check database and walk out with a new long gun. It’sthat fuckin simple. And they’re not that expensive either, you canget a decentAR-15 pattern rifle for under $500, easily. Same for ammo -you can easily buy bulk, online. The only state where both of thoseare harder is California, and I imagine that suits the huge mobs ofclub-armed antifa cunts just fine, because semi-auto firearms with large reloadable magazines are the best way to counter thugs that badly outnumber you. Stockpiles? That crazy fuck that shot the hell out of a US Representative and two Capitol police officers was using an SKS, a fucking WWII era Soviet rifle that loads from the top with fucking stripper clips. And look how much damage he did - it’s only pure dumb luck that nobody was killed or mortally wounded. 

... stockpiles?  Just how much do you know about guns? Here’s what I found in literally five goddamned seconds on ammoseek.com - you got $290, a credit card, and a shipping address? There you go, a thousand goddamned rounds of .223 Remington. Want two thousand? Three? Change the number in the “quantity” box.

Stockpiles? 

Anyway, I’m not surprised that PBS and pals are back at their fake news, doing their damnedest to gin up right-wing militias as the real threat even as they reply to attack after violent attack by radical Islamists with hey - not all Muslims! Yes, that is the trend; witness this Atlantic article trying to justify it.  But that’s beside the point. For starters, if you haven’t read my 6,500 word post on left wing vs right wing violence and violent rhetoric, I go into some depth with the whole militia thing there. For all their LARPing in the woods, swaggering and shit-talking, there hasn’t been any significant violence committed by right-wing militias since... forever, considering that Timothy McVeigh was never really part of one - and his attack was twenty-two years ago. Moreover, I cover how his attack - and the attention it drew to the militia movement - sent anywhere from “2/3rds” to “80%” (according to two different militia-affiliated folks being interviewed) scrambling away from them at high speed. Protip - actual terrorist organizations tend to attract attention when they manage huge, spectacular attacks - you know, like how Black Lives Matter is still going strong after multiple ambush attacks on cops? Gee. 

And that brings us to the essential point -  if these militias are really dangerous, and not just a bunch of shit-talking LARPers playing soldier in the woods - then where’s the violence? Again, as I document in that post, the only “cells” they find are a few shitheads talking shit in a bar too close to an FBI informant that eggs them on - one of them even gave them free automatic rifles to shoot, to get them all excited. 

As for this study, it’s a start, but this paper freely and breezily equates “anti-government extremism” with “right-wing extremism,” and that’s a false equivalency - because Antifa are anarcho-communists. Just read their handy-dandy guide to setting up an antifa group, where they call the state their enemy multiple times - as well as cops. Shit, they have a whole section on “state repression.” Also note the bit under “political orientation,” where they openly state - in case there was any doubt - that the majority of their membership in the US are anarchists. In case you weren’t aware, anarchists are, by definition, anti-government extremists. The list on page 4 covers “anti-capitalist violent extremism,” but considering that antifa are anarchists and anti-capitalists - where do they fall in the reporting? Did every agency report them the same? In light of antifa’s own literature (again, that guide) advocating strongly that they not even name their groups and keep their identities secret as long as possible, how accurate is each agencies accounting? Hell, where do right-wing terrorist groups fall on this scale, considering there’s several anti-immigration militias that focus on finding and reporting illegal immigrants? Doesn’t that qualify as racist? Or are they anti-government, considering that anti-government sentiments tend to run pretty strong in groups like that, especially with a black Democrat in office who personally did as much as he could to hamper border control efforts?

Shit, by their own admission on page 4, they defined “Al-Qaeda inspired violent extremism” as “violent extremism inspired by the radical Islamist ideas advocated by al-Qaeda and other like-minded extremist groups,” and every other category with one general example; “violent extremism motivated by any other political, social, or religious concerns, including, but not limited to, anti-government, racist, radical, environmentalist, or anti-capitalist views. Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski,) and the Sikh temple shooter, Wade Michael Page, are examples of ‘other violent extremists.” So they only define one category well, loosely define the others, and then they start standing around characterizing the results with terminology (right wing, left wing) they didn’t even use in the fucking survey? When all those other categories were lumped together into “other violent extremism” in other categories? 

And then there’s other data-sets - one just adds up every every crime committed by “groups or individuals with far-right associations,” (which would include every skinhead robbing a gas station, which they do a lot, because skinheads are dime-store hoods almost by definition,) and the well defined report - focusing on premeditated plots by individuals or groups that rise to the level of attempted or actual domestic terrorism,” has a whopping total of... 34 incidents listed in 14 years, and is published by the Anti-Defamation League, which is a fucking activist group, not academics, or law enforcement. Wew lad. The Global Terrorism database is better - more data, and a good definition of qualifying incidents - but it’s only being compared to Islamic extremist terrorist attacks in the US, not left wing domestic terrorism, which is what we’re discussing here. 

Bruh, this is some pretty rough shit, here - all twelve pages of it. Especially that bit at the end where they make a claim about how law enforcement agencies see “right wing terrorism” (a phrase used nowhere in their survey to said law enforcement agencies) as a bigger threat in the city than in rural areas. Yeah, dense urban areas, which overwhelmingly vote Democrat, as anyone who’s seen a county-by-county electoral map can tell you, are the hotbeds of right-wing militias? 

Bruh. Bruh. 

But, listen, you’re actually doing your fucking homework here, which is more than most assholes can say, so lemme help you. The FBI is a great resource here - not only do they publicly publish huge annual reports on all sorts of categories of violence, (law enforcement officers killed and assaulted, general crime stats, hate crime stats, etc,) but they watch fucking everyone. There is no group too big or too small for them to not worry about - they’re basically a domestic surveillance agency. That’s why you have agents going out of their way to hand out automatic rifles to a trio of knuckle-dragging rednecks to egg them on till they can arrest them - these guys have time and resources to spare, apparently. They watch everyone - and they cover them, too, with published reports. I’ve read their reports on motorcycle gangs, and in researching that big post on violence, I found (and used) their public information on the “Sovereign Citizen” movement, which is definitely right-wing. While we’re at it, here’s their page on anarchist extremism. Note that page is out of date, though: 

For today’s generation of American anarchist extremists, the rioting that disrupted the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle is the standard by which they measure “success”—it resulted in millions of dollars in property damage and economic loss and injuries to hundreds of law enforcement officers and bystanders. But fortunately, they haven’t been able to duplicate what happened in Seattle… 

LOL HAMBURG. But you get my point - the FBI watches everyone, even esoteric groups like anti/pro abortion “activists” that get a little out of hand. So the FBI is an excellent primary source to go to - certainly better than another PBS hit piece which is also regurgitating data from the “Anti-Defamation League” and making claims of “thousands” of people flooding to the Sovereign Citizen movement, without citing any source at all. Especially when they started in on how dangerous sovereign citizens are! As I noted in my big effortpost (see that for the links,) Sovereign Citizens managed to kill six police officers since the year 2000 - but twenty officers have been ambushed and murdered in 2016 alone, with multiple attacks committed by black people acting on black separatist/revolutionary rhetoric, including the Dallas shooting (killing five and wounding nine) and the Baton Rouge shooting nobody seems to have heard about (killing three and wounding three.) The latest ambush murder of a police officer in New York was similarly motivated - I haven’t even counted the ambush killings of cops in 2017 yet. But yeah, man, the fuckin right wing millitias are the real threat! Hooooo boy, how fucking hard can they shill? 

Anyway, here’s the FBI’s resources page, complete with all their copious reports in .pdf format, including several on terrorism related topics. I’ll bet $5 you can make a better argument than fuckin PBS with just what you find here. I’d also track down the sources cited in that 12 page “paper” you linked and read them yourself, see what you can get out of them. That should be a good start, at least.