#who's clearly had a powerful influence on him and who he repeatedly longs for over the course of the book

[inferablossom]

Only Emil could talk about falling in love with a girl in a way that somehow makes him sound more gay than before.

He first starts talking about meeting this girl, his "Beatrice" right after leaving off talking about how he's salty about how when he tried to write to Demian he never heard back. When describing Beatrice he repeatedly refers to her as having boyish features. When he tries to paint her the first attempts fail, and when he finally does end up succeeding at painting a face that "pleased him", he realizes it looks like Demian. And then, despite the influence over his life he claims she's had on him, he gets so caught up in musing over the painting and thinking and dreaming over Demian that he completely forgets about her.

[dduane]

...So once again it's the time of year when I return to this piece of digital art (or its earlier versions), tweak it a little in the attempt to get closer to what I see in my head, and repost it for Pride. (ETA, 3 June 2024: image tweaked a little bit more via late-night re-render because the upholstery wasn't rendering correctly, and as a result the kitty sort of vanished. Which would not be at all her style...)

At the moment I'm looking at These Two Idiots (for so they are) and considering with the usual bemusement how long I've been working with them. Of all the characters I've worked with in print, the only ones I've known longer would be the crew of NCC-1701—and very shortly now, for the first time as paid writing, a couple of gentlemen named Holmes and Watson.

I first "met" these guys in late 1970 in the form of the fellow college students on whom they'd be based: a couple of gents (not gay, as it happens) who were friends to me when I needed some. They were a tall dark guy and a short blond one with a mustache that came and went... so that, not even knowing the word "trope" at the time, I fell headfirst into one.

Less than a year after I met them, I changed educational tracks and schools, and we all drifted apart. But something about them stuck. The nature and depth of their friendship was unusual. So was one way it manifested itself: in ruthless snark that had no meanness or cruelty about it whatsoever—just affection.

In the late sixties I'd begun writing some very derivative fic strongly influenced by Tolkien. Rather to my surprise, though, as I started nursing school in 1971, the nature of that fiction started to change, and began rearranging itself around two characters who had a friendship like those of my college friends. With them as its core, a rather different kind of medieval-ish fantasy world started knitting itself together from various scraps of themes and imagery lying around in the back of my brain.

Even so early in the construction phases of this world, something the characters quickly made plain to me in the writing was that their relationships with one another were not what mainstream 1970s culture would consider conventional. They were gay... but that was a background issue,* and not at all the most important thing in their lives. They had far more important business to deal with—as became clear as their personalities and priorities started filling themselves out in the foreground.

One of them turned out to be the deliberate, analytical, methodical son of a provincial nobleman, all too aware of the expectations of those around him: that he might well eventually wind up running that province himself. Yet at the same time he also became aware that he had other problems, chief among them the discovery of a nascent power that would kill him young if he couldn't master it. And in the last thousand years, no one of his gender ever had.

The other presented himself more and more clearly as a difficult case: someone who wanted very much to be good at the family business, but wasn't... and knew it. Kind of a screw-up, repeatedly doing the wrong things for what he was sure were the right reasons. Yet, no matter how often he screwed up, he was also the kind of person who keeps picking himself up and trying again, because he's been told over and over that that's what people like him have to do: otherwise they're no use to anybody.

Imagine my shock when I realized that these two men—initially canonically enemies in their adolescence, then best friends as they grew, and eventually much more—were the (incomplete) answer to the question I'd once asked my Mom at the end of the bedtime reading of some fairy tale or other: "Why can't a prince rescue another prince?" Because one of them got himself more than once into situations where he really needed one kind or another of rescuing. The other one obliged him, while once or twice getting rescued himself. Those interlocking patterns started to solidify out of concept and into character detail and plot, while their world grew and proliferated into its own detail around them.

Then, without warning, in 1978 both world and characters decided they were ready to get real. I was abruptly dragged gasping and flailing under the surface of a novel that would begin the tale of what those two characters had yet to become. The period it took to produce that first draft was possibly the most interesting six weeks of my life... and that includes the six weeks during which I first scrubbed in on brain surgery. Day and night, for days at a time, I barely even existed except as something for a novel to come out of. When it was done with me, it just as abruptly dumped me back into my life and wandered away, leaving me staring around, blinking and wondering if anybody’d got the number of that truck. Nothing like it has ever happened to me since, which may be just as well. I’m none too sure that these days I could handle the strain.

The book—which sold a couple of weeks after it landed on its first publisher's desk—kicked off my career as novelist and screenwriter, and in its way proved that the world was at least somewhat ready for epic fantasy in which the basic culture was pansexual, polyamorous, and inclusive in ways that hadn't been attempted before.

So I owe them a debt, those two gentlemen up there: the tall dark curly-haired guy with the amateur strategist's mind, the blacksmith's shoulders, and the peculiar sword, his background thought always nibbling away at the question of how to heal the world's wounds: and the short fair gent who if he could would stay at home, live quietly in town, and work in the local library... except for when saving the world (or his found family) requires him to subsume his being into that of his ancestral demigod. Due to the success of the book in which they made their debut, these two became, in their way, the fairy† godfathers of the Young Wizards—and additionally enabled all that Star Trek fanfic I'd started writing a decade before to proceed to its logical conclusion.

More to the point, though, a lot of people in the 1980s and '90s who'd never seen queer representation in a fantasy novel, found it first, or at last, while following Herewiss and Freelorn down their road. It's been my pleasure to hold that space for new readers, and keep adding to it... because (if you ask me) it's needed more now than ever.

So, to the readership of the Middle Kingdoms works—now pushing half a century old—and everybody else who's celebrating the season: happy Pride!

*Not least because everybody else in their world is (at least potentially) some shade of queer, including God.

†(snicker)

[mariacallous]

It’s not too late, because it’s never too late. No outcomes are ever preordained, nothing is ever over, and you can always affect what happens tomorrow by making the right choices today. The U.S. Congress is finally making one of those right choices. Soon, American weapons and ammunition will once again start flowing to Ukraine.

But delays do have a price. By dawdling for so many months, by heading down the blind alley of border reform before turning back, congressional Republicans who blocked weapons and ammunition for Ukraine did an enormous amount of damage, some of it irreparable. Over the past six months, Ukraine lost territory, lives, and infrastructure. If Ukraine had not been deprived of air defense, the city of Kharkiv might still have most of its power plants. People who have died in the near-daily bombardment of Odesa might still be alive. Ukrainian soldiers who spent weeks at the front lines rationing ammunition might not be so demoralized.

The delay has changed American politics too. Only a minority of House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, joined most Democrats to approve $60 billion in aid yesterday. What is now clearly a pro-Russia Republican caucus has consolidated inside Congress. The lesson is clear: Anyone who seeks to manipulate the foreign policy of the United States, whether the tin-pot autocrat in Hungary or the Communist Party of China, now knows that a carefully designed propaganda campaign, when targeted at the right people, can succeed well beyond what anyone once thought possible. From the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion, President Vladimir Putin has been trying to conquer Ukraine through psychological games as well as military force. He needed to persuade Americans, Europeans, and above all Ukrainians that victory was impossible, that the only alternative was surrender, and that the Ukrainian state would disappear in due course.

Plenty of Americans and Europeans, though not so many Ukrainians, supported this view. Pro-Russia influencers—Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance, David Sacks—backed up by an army of pro-Russia trolls on X and other social-media platforms, helped feed the narrative of failure and convinced a minority in Congress to block aid for Ukraine. It’s instructive to trace the path of a social-media post that falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky owns two yachts, how it traveled up the food chain late last year, from the keyboard of a propagandist through the echo chamber created by trolls and into the brains of American lawmakers. According to Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, some of his colleagues worried out loud, during debates about military aid to Ukraine, that “people will buy yachts with this money.” They had read the false stories and believed they were true.

But with the passage of this aid bill, Russia’s demoralization campaign has suffered a severe setback. This is also a setback for the Russian war effort, and not only because the Ukrainians will now have more ammunition. Suddenly the Russian military and Russian society are once again faced with the prospect of a very long war. Ukraine, backed by the combined military and economic forces of the United States and the European Union, is a much different opponent than Ukraine isolated and alone.

That doesn’t mean that the Russians will quickly give up: Putin and the propagandists who support him on state television have repeatedly stated that their goal is not to gain a bit of extra territory but to control all of Ukraine. They don’t want to swap land for peace. They want to occupy Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv, and more. Now, while their goals become harder to reach, is a good moment for the democratic countries backing Ukraine to recalibrate our strategy too.

Once the aid package becomes law this week, the psychological advantage will once again be on our side. Let’s use it. As Johnson himself recommended, the Biden administration should immediately pressure European allies to release the $300 billion in Russian assets that they jointly hold and send it to Ukraine. There are excellent legal and moral arguments for doing so—the money can legitimately be considered a form of reparations. This shift would also make clear to the Kremlin that it has no path back to what used to be called “normal” relations, and that the price Russia is paying for its colonial war will only continue to grow.

This is also a good moment for both Europeans and Americans to take the sanctions and export-control regimes imposed on Russia more seriously. If NATO were running a true economic-pressure campaign, thousands of people would be involved, with banks of screens at a central command center and constantly updated intelligence. Instead, the task has been left to a smattering of people across different agencies in different countries who may or may not be aware of what others are doing.

As American aid resumes, the Ukrainians should be actively encouraged to pursue the asymmetric warfare that they do best. The air and naval drone campaign that pushed the Black Sea Fleet away from their coastline, the raids on Russian gas and oil facilities thousands of miles from Ukraine, the recruitment of Russian soldiers, in Russia, to join pro-Ukraine Russian units fighting on the border—we need more of this, not less. The Biden administration should also heed Johnson’s suggestion that the United States supply more and better long-range weapons so that Ukrainians can hit Russian missile launchers before the missiles reach Ukraine. If the U.S. had done so in the autumn of 2022, when Ukraine was taking back territory, the world might look a lot different today.

This war will be over only when the Russians no longer want to fight—and they will stop fighting when they realize they cannot win. Now it is our turn to convince them, as well as our own pro-Russia caucus, that their invasion will fail. The best way to do that is to believe it ourselves.

[youhideastar]

WujiWatch: CQL Rewatch Episode 11

This episode is jam-packed – so jam-packed that I can’t remember whether Meng Yao is thrown out of Qinghe Nie Sect at the beginning of this episode or the end of the last one, but the last post was way too long so I’m putting it here regardless! I’ve got two things on the scene where Meng Yao is kicked out, and one thing on that weird scene where Wen Chao tries to ambush Lan Wangji on the way back to Cloud Recesses.

Fanon Meng Yao is this master manipulator, the smooth talker who moves the people around him like chess pieces—but the thing that stands out to me, watching the scene between Meng Yao and Nie Mingjue, is that Meng Yao’s behavior here is a masterclass in how not to influence people. Like, genuinely, I hope he wasn’t even trying, because otherwise, I’m embarrassed for him.

He starts out okay, talking about how the captain mistreated him, day after day, humiliating him, abusing him—Nie Mingjue says, “And so you killed him,” and if Meng Yao had said, “Yes. That’s why,” I really think Nie Mingjue would have understood. He wouldn’t have been happy about it—he still looks mad when he says, “And so you killed him,” but he’s not disgusted. He knows how long Meng Yao has been taking that kind of abuse from the other disciples, he’s tried (ineffectively) to protect Meng Yao from that, and if Meng Yao just couldn’t take it anymore and snapped, that would therefore be partly Nie Mingjue’s fault for failing to protect him.

But instead, Meng Yao, supplied with a perfectly good excuse for murder, the kind of thing that the hot-tempered Nie Mingjue could easily understand, says, “No, it wasn’t that.” He then raises and immediately discards another perfectly good explanation, saying it wasn’t because the captain repeatedly insulted his mother—which Nie Mingjue could also have understood just fine, and perhaps even found honorable, as a particularly bloody exercise of filial piety. Why even bring it up if you’re not going to claim it as a defense!?

Instead, Meng Yao says it was because the captain claimed credit for Meng Yao’s work. If I were trying to think of the least persuasive excuse you could possibly make to someone like Nie Mingjue, that would be up there. To Nie Mingjue, even admitting that you care about getting credit for your work is distasteful. To kill someone over it? Once he hears that, he’s not just mad, he’s revolted. It is not hard to foresee this reaction. For Meng Yao not to see it coming, or for Meng Yao to see it coming and think Nie Mingjue likes him enough to overcome that reaction, is a huge miscalculation.

Is Meng Yao a talented manipulator? Clearly, he is, in some circumstances. But at some very key points—this scene and the confrontation with Qin Su particularly stand out—that skill deserts him. I think, in both cases, he cares too much about the people he’s confronting, and it impairs his otherwise sharp judgment.

The other and last thing I want to say about this scene is that it is no accident that the “Meng Yao gets thrown out” scene takes place in such close proximity to the scene in which we meet Yu Ziyuan. It would have been easy to introduce her character at several previous points, including the meeting breaking up the engagement she arranged, or a scene during Jiang Cheng and Jiang Yanli’s return to Lotus Pier. But the writers choose this moment: the moment when the viewer has just learned—and Wei Wuxian has just been reminded—that even a highly valued, talented sect member with an important role can be tossed out with nothing but the clothes on his back, at the sect leader’s whim. Wei Wuxian carries himself like the typical powerful, comfortable young master, with his expensive clothes and blithe disrespect for authority. But this is the episode where you see what’s underneath—where you come to appreciate how precarious his position truly is.

One last little random thing, about the scene where Lan Wangji is walking (why?? he can fly!) back to Cloud Recesses and is ambushed by Wen Chao, first by a sinkhole opening up in the road (why?? again, he can fly!), and then by a physical attack from Wen Zhuliu. Wen Chao tries to intimidate him verbally, calling him “Lan Zhan” (Wen Chao’s beef with Lan Wangji, like Jin Zixun’s, is so weirdly personal) and saying that he hates Lan Wangji’s condescending tone, which is fucking hilarious because Lan Wangji has never in his life said a word to Wen Chao. Lan Wangji fends the Wens off with one of Wei Wuxian’s sparkle-distraction talismans and then vanishes.

What I find interesting about this scene (besides the fact that I literally always forget that it exists and am surprised to see it again when I rewatch haha) is that, after all of the above goes down, Wen Chao says, “That’s Wei Wuxian’s [Name of Talisman] Talisman!” (I’m serious, my recall of this scene is so poor, even after five times.) This is one of the very few clues we get in the series that teenage Wei Wuxian is famous throughout the cultivation world for his inventive genius with talismans. Wen Chao might have been able to guess that the talisman came from Wei Wuxian just based on the fact that Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji are friends, but the only way he would know the specific name of the talisman is if he’s heard about Wei Wuxian’s inventions, even all the way in Nightless City where they’re all busy pretending the rest of the cultivation world has nothing to offer. (And this isn’t the writers using Wen Chao to pass along information the viewer needs – we have no need to know what the talisman is called, it won’t come up again.)  Kind of neat!

[lucienne-thee-librarian]

Rose Walker and John Dee: Narrative Foils

Okay this has been percolating in my brain for awhile and I have to shout about it. So. These two characters...Rose and John Dee. Couldn't seem more different on the surface, right? One's a young American black woman, vs older British-raised white guy who's lived all over the world, one painted as a major villain, the other a main protagonist of multiple episodes of the first season. But if you look beyond that, I think these two are, deliberately or not, perfect parallels to each other for their similarities as much as their differences.

First: let's list the similarities:

Difficult childhoods. John Dee's father was...literally absent and that is almost certainly a good thing. But his mother kept moving around to survive, changing her identity. She may have done what she felt she had to do but as a result John was left with no sense of stability and a Very Big Thing about people lying because he feels his mother has lied to him all his life. Rose, conversely, had a father...part of the time. But just by the fearful way Miranda Walker talked about her husband in one scene, trying to prevent Rose from confronting him over taking Jed (but not Rose...which, SERIOUSLY who does that, this man was not a good father, I like how much this one little scene implies) away with him...you get the distinct impression she lived in fear of her soon-to-be-ex-husband's anger. So Rose had a father who was...not good and lost her brother years ago and the pair disappeared before she and her mother could find out what happened. When the show starts her mother is dead too, much like Ethel Cripps died when she went to see him. So both Rose and John had childhoods centered around absent or unreliable fathers and the traumatic loss of their mothers.

Both were given access to great power over the world of dreams, critically: when they were infants and could not possibly know, much less agree to what they were inheriting. John Dee ended up in that hospital in the first place for misusing the ruby that Ethel stole from Roderick Burgess. Rose Walker was literally born a vortex due to inheriting it from her great-grandmother thanks to Desire's interference.

Both end up being chased down by Dream.

Now, the two end up in completely opposite places. But why? What's the difference?

When John Dee gets the ruby, immediately he begins killing his way out and across the country until he reaches the diner. On some level, he wants freedom and that's understandable after a lifetime of being locked up. But he clearly is very skilled at using the ruby which he even modified, and his first and immediate act upon getting the ruby back was to kill every single guard in his way. He didn't try to find another option, he immediately defaulted to the most violent way out. He almost killed Rosemary, though in the end he decided against it, but only because she helped him and didn't lie.

And then when he got to the diner, he spent an entire day and night toying with a bunch of random people until he got bored and let them kill each other.

Unquestionably some part of John was influenced by the ruby, the more the closer it was to him. We don't know exactly how much, we'll probably never know. But it is...alarming, to say the least, how he immediately and repeatedly begins to act not just after having it awhile, but after two seconds of getting it back.

John has traveled and seen the world long before he got locked up. But despite all the opportunities for education and experience he could've had, his worldview has no room for any shades of grey. To him, all lies are equally bad as the lies his mother told him, and all equally as bad as each other. It reminds me a lot of the evangelical Christian idea of "sin-levelling" where all sins are equally reprehensible in God's eyes so nobody is worse than the other - but also, no one better. If you have a "sinful" thought or make one mistake, you're just as worthy of damnation as the worst, most violent people.

Now leaving aside how that's actually treated in these churches in practice (which. LOL all sins are equal. Sure they are) that's obviously a little...fucked? The idea that actually, thinking hateful thoughts is as bad as murder, is as bad as stealing is as bad as...lust?? Gossip? Is both failig to recognize serious harms, and the difference between that and much more minor things one can do to others, or between all that and straight up thoughtcrime. It creates an inflated sense of harm for things that don't really deserve to be treated or even thought of in the same boat with atrocities and violence.

John Dee is if someone took a look at that sort of moral thinking and went "cool system you got there; what if I hijacked it and made it all about lying?"

His worldview is strictly black and white, no room for human error or understanding past a certain point. To him, if you tell a lie, no matter your intentions or the effect of your actions, it's all the same.

Meanwhile Rose has been used without her knowing it, by both Desire and in a way, Dream himself. He knows what her fate must be but for a mixture of motives, mainly mercy but also the knowledge that she could help him find the Corinthian, he spares her.

And his doing so and not telling her her ultimate fate, was the entire reason the Corinthian was able to slip in and find her in the first place. He shows up with Jed, after Rose has tried and failed to get the foster care system to actually let her make contact with her brother or do more than the bare minimum to investigate his well-being. So honestly, no wonder she trusted him at first! He saved her brother! Her brother seems to like him so he must be fine!

Rose has spent this entire season, her entire life, at the mercy of others, trying to carve out her own destiny. But she never uses her powers to deliberately hurt others- any harm she causes is either by complete accident or in attempts meant to defend her own life or her brother.

When she was a child she had no power to save Jed; for some reason we're not told the court sided with her father and allowed Jed to be taken separately, and then the man effectively custodially kidnapped his own son before dying himself and Jed was lost to the system of another state. Rose loses her mother later to some illness, and her friend Judy to John Dee's megalomania. And when she's finally an adult, she tries to find Jed but is flatly denied not only a chance at custody but even to know where he is - at least at first. And this whole time, the vortex she carried in her blood has been hanging over her head as a silent ticking time bomb. Her days are numbered, she will soon, eventually, become a living weapon to blend all the minds of all the dreamers of that world and eventually, the whole universe together into one cancerous magical sea of madness - and the only way to prevent this, we think, is for Dream to kill her. Her fate was sealed the moment she was born and the moment Dream was freed and the vortex awoken. All this was set in motion via Desire, someone much older and infinitely more powerful than herself.

So it would be more than understandable for someone in her situation to snap a little upon learning the truth. Honestly it's kind of amazing to me that she believed Dream when he finally did tell her everything, given he'd put off doing this until the very last minute because of his own reluctance to kill her.

And yet, when Rose finally learns the truth and her fate, she ultimately offers to take the fall, freely. She sees what the activated vortex does to the minds of everyone around her - first revealing everyone's most secret fears and fantasies and then pulling them into the whirlpool of her own power. And she refuses to let that happen. She values her own life in a way most of us would, in a totally understandable and sympathetic way. But unlike John Dee, she also values other people, even when they disappoint her. Hal blatantly tells her he doesn't care about the place they all live in half as much as the chance for success, but she still cares for him. The world is full of people, some of whom have hurt her or hindered her quest to find Jed but she doesn't seek revenge.

John sees the failures of humanity and its dark side and decides that those sins are worth condemnation through the power of his ruby, and assumes he is a worthy judge. Rose hears she could destroy the world and decides that no, the world is worth saving even if that means she has to die, much as she doesn't want or deserve to.

John Dee is, without even realizing it himself, a perfect mirror himself of the potential selfishness and cruelty humans can inflict on each other in the name of "I'm just all about honesty" "knowing what's best for you better than you do" and "fuck you, got mine". Rose is a mirror of humanity at its best - someone with dignity and a sense of morals who doesn't appreciate being lied to or used, and not a doormat - her first instinct is to fight for her life and her brother's - and she's also selfless and caring even for people she doesn't know, even for people who Dee would've argued weren't even worth saving.

[goodqueenaly]

Why do you think Jon had to die? It's obvious that he won't stay dead but why did grrm kill him off, it certainly isn't common for characters that are dead to start living again, not in his world (unlike Lady Stoneheart at least) but why didn't George try to write it in a way where he was simply stripped off of power and degraded from his LC-ship?

I can't speak to the ultimate narrative reasons why Jon might have "had" to die - that is, what about his experience of death will influence his place in an increasingly magical and fantastical (in the most fundamental sense of the word, perhaps) story. We've seen GRRM play with the idea of characters being brought back from the dead and/or living beyond what we might expect to be an ordinary human death - the resurrected Beric Dondarrion and Lady Stoneheart, the weirwood-fused Bloodraven, the skinchanged Varamyr, even (albeit in a very different sense) Daenerys who walked out of Drogo's pyre unburnt and accompanied by three living dragons - so this certainly seems to be an area of magic and mystery the author enjoys exploring. Likewise, given the likelihood of arguments by various pro-Stark factions over the succession to Winterfell, the question of Jon's death may be brought up as a point for or against his accession (with those in the Jon camp, perhaps, holding that death frees Jon from the Night's Watch's proscription on legal inheritance and those in other factions, perhaps, casting doubt on the legitimacy of supernatural resurrection to qualify one for political office). However, because it's as yet unclear what Jon's ultimate reason for being in the story is, it's impossible to say what about his dying (much less dying from being stabbed by Bowen Marsh and Marsh's co-conspirators) is critical to Jon's experience in the story. Doubtless TWOW and ADOS will spend at least some time discussing and dwelling on the personal/political/magical impact that death is likely to have on Jon - but that is for another book (or two).

That said, I will note that on a practical level I'm not sure there was any way for the conflict between Jon and Bowen Marsh to end (at least in a manner that made sense in-universe) without Bowen taking the most drastic action against Jon - which is to say, killing him. It's not that I think Bowen's original plan was to run up to Jon out in the open with a small gang of co-conspirators and stab him - this clearly seems to have been a spontaneous decision made in the immediate aftermath of the Shieldhall bombshell - but I do think Bowen saw Jon as someone who had repeatedly and grossly breached his Night's Watch vows. To that end, I think Bowen may have always believed (at least for as long as he had decided this about Jon) that he had to end up killing Jon, in keeping with subjecting those who betrayed the Night's Watch to the harshest punishment. Just as, for example, Olyver Bracken had been executed (albeit by Lord Stark, but with the aid of the Night's Watch) for trying to make himself into a lord at the Wall, so Bowen may have seen it as his duty to execute Jon for (in Bowen's mind) acting like a Stark lord or king at the Wall more than the Lord Commander of the Watch; just as, for example, the Watch and the Starks had both shown no mercy to deserters (whether Gared or (the assumed) Mance Rayder, among others), so Bowen may have believed that he should execute Jon who had openly announced his intent to desert and fight for the personal cause of House Stark. Again, Bowen's original conception of deposing Jon may have been something more "decorous" - formally trying him, maybe, and perhaps sentencing him to a clean death by the sword - but I think the death penalty was always on Bowen's mind once he decided to move against Jon.

(And after all, what could someone like Bowen do with a brother of the Watch he believed had betrayed the organization? He could not sentence someone already at the Wall to the Wall, and he certainly could not free this person from his vows of perpetual servitude by releasing him into exile. Once Bowen decided he had to depose Jon, he either had to imprison Jon forever - an unwelcome invitation for Jon's supporters to free him and rally around him again, he might have believed - or kill him.)

And remember that GRRM is at the end of the day writing a series of novels. As a storyteller, GRRM has an incentive to make his narrative exciting and surprising (within reason, of course) for readers; as the latest in the long, long literary tradition of Western fiction, GRRM draws from both fictional and historical events for inspiration to enhance that reader experience; as a sophisticated writer, GRRM has the ability to connect aspects of his story across multiple characters and even multiple books. Even those keyed in on the Bowen-Jon tension may not have expected Jon's sudden murder at the very end of ADWD, adding a level of shock and suspense that teases readers for the (presumable) resolution of the problem of Jon's death in TWOW. Jon's struggles of power and final assassination by his ostensible brothers, who seem to have seen him as a tyrant to be deposed - including one of his own chief officers, weeping out of presumably personal grief even as he stabbed him - recalls the famous assassination of Julius Caesar, led by his former friend. Too, Jon's sudden, violent death at the hands of his political enemies recalls the murders of both his (non-biological) father Ned and (non-biological) brother Robb, each in turn brought down (one furtively, the other openly) by men they had previously trusted. I'm not suggesting these are the only narrative points of interest created by Jon's death, but rather offering them as examples of why the author might have chosen this plot development separate from whatever impact that development may have on Jon in the future.

[robotnik-mun]

You know, this came to me just recently, but think of Sonic Underground and Transformers: Beast Machines what you will, I can actually see Gary Chalk’s Doctor Robotnik being comparable to David Kaye’s Megatron from both that show, and its predecessor, Beast Wars.

Yes, some critics have said that Underground!Robotnik was somewhat more laughable than SATAM’s, but that doesn’t mean he lacks certain heinous crimes here and there. Aside from the typical roboticization, treachery, and abuse that goes with most Eggmen, he had a goal of turning the Freedom Fighters’ Sanctuary for their children into a “Cemetery,” he used a Chaos Emerald to power a Flying Fortress to terrorize Mobius, and when that last part nearly led in the world’s destruction, he boldly declared “If I can’t defeat Sonic, then I hope Mobius is destroyed!”

Even if that last sentence could be interpreted as a bluff, it’s no wonder that he’s on the TV Tropes portion for Sonic/Monsters as of this year. And even if SATAM!Robotnik would immediately look down on his counterpart for his “economical views,” I think he and their other variants would applaud Underground!Robotnik in how he entertains himself in pitting the aristocrats under his charge against the rest of his world like how Fleetway!Robotnik would siege on the Emerald Hill Zone and other places he controls just to remind people that he’s the shot caller.

Beast Machines!Megatron may have been SATAM!Robotnik times ten (I don’t recall any Eggmen assimilating the souls of an entire planet’s population for ascension purposes), but in Beast Wars, he was as likely to role play a trial (complete with a judge’s wig and gavel like in Underground’s Bartleby the Prisoner) as he was in completely rewriting history by wiping out a whole valley’s worth of prehistoric Humans.

You get where I’m getting at, right?

I don't really think that comparison really works all that well. Even ignoring his more comedic moments, Underground Robotnik is one of the most 'normal' takes on Eggman/Robotnik out there- a consistent plot point is that he rules much like a real dictator would by having the support of the nobility, whom he permits to do as they wish so long as they continue to support him and fund his robot army. He's explicitly shown as taking initiatives to garner more money to make Swatbots, and its shown repeatedly that he wishes to be taken as the legitimate ruler of Mobius. He is hinted to technically be a regent, with a strange web of legalities having it that while Aleena is still technically 'in charge', she is presently considered absent. While this Robotnik is still a usurper and a tyrant, he is one who clearly rules through corruption and abuse of pre-existing laws rather than purely muscling his way into things.

In Beast Wars, Megatron is a renegade who rejects the authority of Predacon leadership in favor of going his own way. He doesn't really play his subordinates against one another so much that he basically terrorizes and out-thinks them in order to prevent them from trying anything. He is less an evil overlord and more like a terrorist/renegade military officer, one who has eschewed all the rules and laws of his people because he believes that he has found the key to final victory over the Maximals.

By the time of Beast Machines the comparison to SatAM Robotnik is still more apt given that both of their goals essentially demand that every creature on their planet be completely enslaved and obedient to the singular, guiding intelligence of themselves, while destroying and stomping out all organic influence in the name of mechanizing the entire planet.

[ot3]

Wait back up explain how yjk is a trans woman. This isn’t a hostile ask I’m actually very excited about your take

I am happy to explain my take. here’s how trans woman yoo jonghyuk can still win. orv spoilers below, obviously, mostly centered around the murim arc but up through the end of the epilogues as well. 

okay normally in terms of making this kind of post i’d go pull quotes directly from the text and i honestly really want to but i’m supposed to be catching up on homework today and can’t justify taking the time. anyway. i’m just gonna they/them yjh here because i’m never sure what pronouns to use when talking about a character who i think Should Come Out in the Future. 

first things first, everything about being a transcender is very gendery. prominent transcenders in ORV are

- kyrgios, an incredibly beautiful man who is self conscious of his small stature

- breaking the sky sword saint namgung minyoung, who is a woman of an unusually large stature, thought by some to be monstrous, who teaches a discipline of martial arts exclusively for women. 

- jang hayoung, a trans girl, who is the king of transcenders

- yoo jonghyuk. 

when they talk about transcendence in orv there are two very specific things that come up repeatedly: 1. being able to overcome the natural limitations of the body and 2. defying the structure opposed onto them by the star stream system. Specifically an interesting note about that last bit is that there’s this whole thing about how transcendence can only exist because the star stream exist - it exclusively exists in opposition to the rigorous hierarchy of the star stream, which is the dominant social narrative, and has no meaning or power on it’s own.

In a text like orv’s, i don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to see ‘characters who are social outcasts attempt to gain power by forging a sense of self outside of the dominant order and overcoming the limitations of their physical body’ and read it as a metaphor for being transgender. but then, on top of that, there’s all the stuff with the punisher

everything that’s in orv is there for a reason. there is an insanely little amount of wasted space in this novel. despite how much shit that happens it’s an incredibly tight narrative. SO WHY DO WE INTRODUCE THE CONCEPT THAT YOO JONGHYUK IS STRONGEST WHEN TRANSFORMED INTO A WOMAN? obviously it’s just incredibly fun hijinks in and of itself to have yoo jonghyuk’s gender get transed, but literally all of this begs the question of “why write it so that yoo jonghyuk’s primary martial art form is something that’s supposed to only be learned by women.” 

the narrative doesn’t ever really address the in-universe reasoning behind why they can actually learn it. kim dokja gives us what boils down to ‘he manage to overcome that’ without no real elaboration. jang hayoung learns breaking the sky swordsmanship as well. whatever gender-based qualification is used to allow people to learn the skill, it’s not a biological gender-essentialist one.

the punisher introduction pays off when YJH uses that appearance to win the martial arts festival, but to me that mechanical, narratively-oriented reason for its inclusion doesn’t justify it’s presence in the story in and of itself. 

What really stuck out to me on the read through later was this line, from the demon king selection arc, when yjh takes the punisher’s form to combat the constellations after kim dokja has passed out. 

A dazzling aura burst from Yoo Jonghyuk’s body. Soft hair poured down like a waterfall while his large size became a smaller and sleeker body. He took the form that allowed him to practice the ultimate Breaking the Sky Swordsmanship. Yoo Sangah stared at the scene from behind and couldn’t help opening her mouth. “…Yoo Jonghyuk-ssi?” 

 Yoo Jonghyuk slowly turned back, his long hair cut off by the Black Demon Sword. The ines of the face had changed but it was clearly Yoo Jonghyuk. No, it was even more than before. 

basically, after appearing to their companions as a woman, the narrative tells us yoo jonghyuk looks more like yoo jonghyuk than before. 

this reading also makes even more sense when you interpret it through the lens of how power hierarchy actually works in orv’s narrative. incarnation, constellation, and transcenders alike all gain their truest power from their stories. the Story of yoo jonghyuk as a woman is one that is, quite literally, empowering. 

although we know it’s not actually true, yjh themself and kdj’s understanding and interpretation of yjh, present yjh as a person whose only goal in life is to, by any means including the sacrificing of countless human lives, some of whom he is very personally close to, gain the power to overcome the star stream. but here we have a significant power boost yjh seems to actively avoid taking advantage of. which really suggests there’s some deeper emotional issues at play here.

which brings me to my last point: i think it would just be a very fitting end for the character.

We never see yjh’s ◼️◼️ in canon. Yjh’s entire arc is about attempting to claim agency and personhood after that has been denied to them just by virtue of his very existence, and we don’t ever see this come to completion. Which i love, don’t get me wrong. I think yjh’s  ◼️◼️ is something that could never be in canon, because it’d have to be something that happened to them outside of the context of the story, for meta reasons. but that’s an entirely other discussion. Anyway. 

but point being this means that yjh’s sense of self is, at canon’s end, unresolved. Over the course of the epilogues we see yjh become, for the first time, a reader, and i think this is really critical. it’s kim dokja’s status as a ‘reader’ that allows him to have the greatest influence on the story. back before kim dokja seems to come to grips with jang hayoung’s gender identity, what people keep telling him is that there is ‘more than one interpretation of a story’. on a physical level, constellations and high level incarnations are composed of their stories. in orv canon the Self and the Story are for all intents and purposes, synonymous. hence the entire ending.

yjh’s story has been told and read by quite literally anyone but themself up to this point. but now, for the first time, yjh has both the space and means to self-reflect. coming out as a trans woman would be a radical reclamation of his own story, both re-reading their past and re-writing their future, and i think it’s a reading the text explicitly goes out of its way to give some support to. 

also. not to mention. yjh as a woman is canonically the hottest character in all of orv. just SO sexy, guys. so extremely sexy. 

[gakkubi]

Ame Trio's Personalities: Yahiko

I want to share some thoughts on the Ame Trio/Ame Orphans because I do think they have one of the most complex, interesting and beautiful arcs in the Narutoverse.

I will discuss their personalities and thoughts. This post is about Yahiko, there are also Nagato and Konan.

(1/3): I'll start with Yahiko because he's the one who dies first and influences the others' personalities.

YAHIKO:

Also available in Russian: ссылка на русский перевод

Although Yahiko is arguably the character who appears “less” among the Ame Trio - naturally, for dying first - he takes up significant part of the flashbacks he appears in. Jiraiya, Nagato, Konan; even in Obito’s memory of the Ame Trio - which serve the plot purpose of showing how Obito started manipulating Nagato - he spends most of the flashback interacting with Yahiko. Yahiko was extremely remarkable to all the people who met him, there is no doubt that Kishimoto took every opportunity he had to tell us he was a very important character.

Something I find very interesting about Yahiko is how easily he could be a villain; he has many of the personality traits of of classical villains. This is not accidental - in Chapter 372, when Jiraiya finds and confronts Konan, his memories of the Ame Orphans lead him to believe Yahiko was the one who first turned evil (in their conversation, Konan never clearly explains whose ideology they have embraced; it’s very implied Jiraiya was inclined to believe that was Yahiko).

This is built purposefully to confuse the audience regarding Pain’s identity as the one who possesses the rinnegan is Nagato; one has the “villainous” personality, the other has the power.

Of course, we all know Yahiko is not a villain, even though he could easily be. Yahiko’s most powerful personality trait is his ambition; this trait is the one that will always surpass the others.

Yahiko is a survivor; we are shown repeatedly that he would do just about anything to to keep alive (and Nagato and Konan with him). We are shown some of his big and most drastic actions like stealing, but minor details like cooking, gathering supplies and stabilising a house for him and Konan - taking from the story and Nagato’s conversation with Jiraiya, it’s safe to assume Yahiko was the mastermind behind all the actions that allowed them to survive as children. Yahiko knew they needed power to survive, and we’re shown in the anime their journey to find Jiraiya and how he quickly learned to navigate in the warzone by being able to put himself in the shoes of his “enemies” and think like they did. Yahiko always had an extremely clear sense of what he wants and how to get there.

He is also a natural leader; we can’t say for sure how much of his leadership is actually his nature and how much it comes from needing to step up as the leader of the trio, given how Nagato and Konan have more passive personalities. The fact is, by the time Yahiko dies, he has been acting as a leader for more than half os his life; giving orders and being in control is his comfort zone. He will have control and boss others even if they don’t agree with him, which is clearly stated when he tells Konan he believes Nagato is the one who will bring peace; he put Nagato in that position regardless of Nagato’s opinions - Konan will support Nagato and not him, regardless who she thinks is the “bridge to peace” (Chapter 509).

In that particular flashback of Jiraiya, there are two classically villainous traits shown: the first is anger; it’s implied that Yahiko is a kid full of anger and hate, but in fact, he is a very emotional and sensitive person - in that, he is very similar to Nagato - although unlike him, Yahiko will almost always express his feelings. He’s angry because he’s in pain and won’t conform to his fate as a victim of a poor country. The second one is both his ambition and megalomania: He will change the country, no matter the lenghts he has to go through.

Another strong trait of Yahiko’s thought process is that ends justify the means. This is proven by many of his actions; to survive, he will steal; to defend others, he will put his own life at risk - the ultimate proof of this is sacrificing his life to save Nagato and Konan from Hanzo. They are the ones who must survive no matter what; no matter if he dies. Although the famous “the end justify the means” sentence is usually associated with Machiavellianism, Yahiko doesn’t display the other traits needed such as manipulativeness and indifference to morality to classify him as a machiavellian person.

Yahiko could easily become a “villain”; he has unbreakable ambition and he’s willing to go to extreme lengths to get what he wants regardless of the opinion of those around him. I could easily say just about the very same about Obito, Madara and Orochimaru with a few changes here and there; I could even describe adult Nagato like that.

Seeing this particular scene in Jiraiya's memory, his ambition and anger and a "well-intentioned world-domination" goal are enough to convince the reader to believe Yahiko is Pain, even before seeing his appearance. It's notable that Nagato doesn't reply anything while Yahiko is screaming at him, highlighting his more passive personality.

You, reader, must be rather shocked at what I'm saying, because Yahiko is the only one who was never evil among the three of them; in fact, the others turned evil because of his absence. Yahiko is such a special character because he was all those classically villainous traits, the key to his character lies in why he never turns evil despite all of that.

Ambition is the trait that will rule above all; but his vision comes second in command. We are shown Yahiko is a very sensitive child, he cries a lot, he's easy to anger because he's overwhelmed by the situation he finds himself in. In the same flashback that gives the audience all the reason to believe Yahiko could be Pain, Yahiko himself admits inflicting pain on others wouldn't work as a solution.

The very fact that Yahiko wanted help from the very people who were destroying his country and were directly or indirectly responsible for him being an orphan (that is, foreigners) shows how the end goal was more important to him than the mean of how to get there; Nagato's initial distrust was the feeling most people would have in their situation, which shows another difference between their thought process; Nagato holds grudges (he could accept Jiraiya individually, but not Konoha, and he couldn't ever get over his parents or Yahiko's death) whereas Yahiko doesn't ever let any past event, situation or prejudice come between him and the goal he wants to achieve.

But ambition, vision and idealism (which I have not mentioned yet) are all traits he also shares with villains.

What makes Yahiko different from other villains, especially Nagato, is that he develops an amazing emotional intelligence to deal with the information his sensitivity gathers from the world.

Yahiko was extremely hopeful, positive and emotionally intelligent, all characteristics he shares with other heroes like Naruto. Throughout his life, the "classically villainous" characteristics of his childhood were outgrown by the "classically heroic" traits that gained strength overtime. Yahiko walked away from the evil path he could have easily taken by confronting his "villainous" traits.

It was through the use of emotional intelligence that Yahiko dismantled the initial megalomania and revengfullness he displays in both Jiraiya's and Nagato's childhood flashbacks. It's important to highlight that Yahiko's "Savior Complex" was something that stayed with Nagato long after Yahiko no longer believed only a single powerful person could force peace upon others. Yahiko "grew out" of his childish megalomania - Nagato did the very opposite when absorbing many of Yahiko's characteristics after his death.

His emotional intelligence can be clearly seen in Obito's memories of him in Chapter 607; in that same instance Yahiko was one of the few characters to rule out the idea of the masked man being Madara. Yahiko was not especially powerful or intelligent, so he rellied heavily in taking accurate conclusions from his observations of the world.

Another sign of Yahiko's emotional intelligence is his mirroring of Jiraiya's behavior - although it may be first seen as something done just for comedy, it shows how Yahiko was eager to understand other people - mirroring is a display of empathy. The natural inclination he had to understand other people led Yahiko to develop his peaceful philosophy, and was also used for him to gather allies (as shown in the anime).

It was both his emotional intelligence and his vision that kept him from becoming arrogant (and doing things like stealing Nagato's rinnegan to himself, as Jiraiya considered plausible). Whereas villains will usually harvest power for themselves, Yahiko knew that the key to the success of his plans didn't depend solely on him and his actions. He had to support others and believe in them. Understanding the value in community and extreme loyalty was a value Yahiko and Konan shared - a value Nagato also had, which was eventually displaced by other traits. It's important to note how Nagato and Konan perceive their memories of Yahiko differently; of course their flashbacks serve plot purposes, but they also show completely different aspects of his personality, and these differences in perception reflect the own values of Konan and Nagato.

Although his ambition, energy and protectiveness are displayed in both of their memories, other characteristics vary in intensity.

In Konan's memories, Yahiko is much more kind and calm, happy but also introspective. In her childhood memories, he appears more joyful and carefree - as an adult, it's shown how he is hurt by the war, how understanding has made him kind and and how he wants to protect his comrades both physically and mentally. In Nagato's memories, he appears much more angry and harsh in comparison - the anime even takes an effort to "soften" some of his actions; in the anime Yahiko gives back some of the stealing and also prays for Chibi in his death (instead of just scolding Nagato for crying and mourning as he does in the manga).

I don't know how manga to anime adaptations work but it's possible that, due to the difference in pace between manga and anime, Studio Pierrot realized Yahiko would come across much more "evil" if he wasn't softened - and I like the adaptations because it makes Nagato's memories less different than Konan's; all they did was add moments foreshadowing a much kinder personality Yahiko would display on the chapters later on.

(Edit: I added this image from chapter 509 to better illustrate Yahiko's emotional intelligence using an actual canon moment where Yahiko himself reflects on his past feelings and how they changed as he grew up. I really like this chapter, and I think it's nice how soft and caring Yahiko behaves towards Nagato in Konan's flashbacks, worrying about his injuries and telling that "it's ok" and encouraging him to rest, as opposed to Nagato's own flashbacks that show younger Yahiko screaming and scolding him for behaving like a "crybaby" and "victim" while they were all struggling to survive. I think it's important to consider the scenarios of those flashbacks; Nagato's flashbacks find the characters all recently traumatized, while Konan's find them in a much more stable and safe period of their lives).

Yahiko was the first among the three to understand that the pursuit of "justice" would only result in more conflict as one's noble justice could be seen as mere acts of vengeance by another. All the Ame Orphans knew in their lives was war, suffering and trauma, so the decision to pursue a different path away from violence could only come from a person who could look inside their own heart without the fear of seeing ugly things and confront their feelings.

Yahiko's unshakable hope on his dream of bringing peace was a result of his ambition, his vision and emotional intelligence. His sensitivity led him to become a kind, caring person, who avoided violence as much as he could. We know he was extremely loyal to his ideals, preferring to sacrifice himself and die instead of giving up the peaceful philosophy he had established for the Akatsuki to fight Hanzo. The extreme loyalty and the will to sacrifice anything for that was another trait he shared with Konan.

Although I consider Yahiko's vision to be one of the pillars in his personality, he was also extremely naïve. Yahiko's hopefulness and faith in his dreams and plans were not countered by opposite personality traits like being cynical or hesitant. The first time we see Yahiko being naïve was at the very idea of approaching the Sannin and begging for training, which could have easily ended with them all killed (or, more likely, just ignored). Unfortunately for Yahiko, his biggest flaw was not putting limits to how much he believed his ideals, leading him to fall in a trap he could have easily avoided - I left this trait for last because the anime makes Yahiko's willingness to believe Hanzo a key reason for falling on his trap, even though the manga never shows evidence for that and only implies Yahiko's innocence by Nagato's perception of them being "still children." However, I still think it's fitting for someone who displayed early signs of megalomania to have such naïvety.

Other traits that were not mentioned are less about his ideals and more about his nature; Yahiko is also naturally expansive, friendly and unafraid- these traits help him to become both the trio and Akatsuki's leader. In Chapter 509 Konan mentions he was adored by the rest of the Akatsuki, and it's very implied in the manga (and shown in anime fillers) he lead the Akatsuki with a egalitarian philosophy, not abusing his positon as leader through authority, which is another important trait of his personality; Yahiko may be bossy and unreceptive to challenges on his orders, but he is not comfortable with hierarchy and the idea of some people acting as if they were better than others.

I won't talk much about Yahiko and Konan's romance as I don't believe "being in love" can be a part of someones personality, and I don't believe his decision to kill himself to save her and Nagato was influenced by being in love. His decision to sacrifice himself comes directly from his “ends justifying the means” logic, even if in that particular case the survival of Nagato and Konan is the end which can be justified by the loss of his own life.

I do believe, though, that there are many reasons why they could be attracted to each other and I'll highlight specially their loyalty. Yahiko and Konan are both extremely loyal people; Yahiko is loyal to his ideals, Konan is loyal to what she considers "her own'' - her friends, her people. They are also people who are full of faith in the things they believe in; we are never shown Yahiko having doubts on his plans, as well as we never see Konan ever doubting the capability of the people she supports. People who share such characteristics of loyalty and faith will find great comfort in each other, creating a positive circle of both giving and receiving love and support.

Yahiko's expansive and dominant personality, as well as his positivity and hopefulness contrast immensely with Konan and Nagato's passiveness and melancholy. He is shown to be a person who could deal with his pain and his traumas, and was likely the biggest emotional support of the other two; as he himself said, he had hopes and dreams, his dreams became Nagato and Konan's dreams. His death left an immense void that could not be filled with positive, healthy thoughts and feelings, as Nagato and Konan always relied on his hopeful ideals.

The very traits that could have easily made him a villain are the same ones which lead him to achieve his and the trio's survival. Yahiko's personality exists in a delicate ballance between many "classically villainous" traits and the abundance of other solid "classically heroic" foundations.

By taking a complete look at his character it's easy to understand why his death was something really, near-impossible to recover from given the circumstances, and why the love and respect they felt endured so long after his death.

[lex-malla-non-est-lex]

Tatiana, Belial, and their plans relating Jesse in the past

I’ve dabbled on this topic a few times but your comment really got me thinking. @delilahssbard

This turned out long so I’ll put it beneath the line.

Like, ever since CoI I’ve been highkey thinking Tatiana intended for Jesse to be possessed, but the specific phrasing you used reminded me of a part of ChoG and suddenly everything fits even more now.

- Chain of Gold

Back then, I honestly assumed Belial was talking about preference here, especially since he’s made it clear the reason he could possess James without destroying his body is they share blood, but that’s clearly different in Jesse’s case.

Considering how it’s repeatedly clarified that the anchor was placed on Jesse while he was a baby, that fact is probably significant. If anything, I’d dare say the anchor seems to be a workaround Belial’s destruction not just because he was literally anchored to Jesse’s soul, but by way of tolerance, especially since James also seems to have drawn a similar conclusion.

- Chain of Iron

There it is. Belial would have the anchor and a body to possess, as Jesse grew older. The anchor was in him since almost day one, and Tatiana clearly knew about the anchor, but what’s to say she wasn’t involved? We know the only one who was reluctant to place the anchor on Jesse’s soul was Gast. At no point is Tatiana mentioned in this until Belial outright says that he owed her a favor.

Jesse is just Nephilim, unlike James and Lucie, so by all accounts, a normal possession by Belial would have destroyed him, but the anchor intervened in such a way that there didn’t seem to be any visible consequences at all to him being possessed repeatedly (unless we subscribe to the theory that Jesse’s ghost started fading faster near the end because of the possession, but as of right now we honestly have no way to be sure about that specific fact).

We know Jesse’s childhood sickness involved fevers, and perhaps weakness, the latter coming from the statements in which he’s specifically referred to as weak. We also now know that the real reason Jesse died was because the rune he was given reacted badly against Belial’s essence inside him. Jesse’s description of his own death is that he collapsed into bed after getting the rune, then woke up feverish and in agony. Honestly, that just sounds like a worse version of his alleged childhood symptoms.

Considering his death was basically the result of a rune’s angelic magic clashing with the demonic essence inside him, it wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to assume his sickness was just his nature as Nephilim having a bad reaction to Belial’s essence, even if he only died because of the rune. I find it frankly impossible to believe that the anchor wasn’t hurting him, because we know under normal circumstances Belial would destroy a body within hours.

And let’s be real, Tatiana knew this. The only question in relation to her is whether she intentionally let him die.

The following are all quotes from A Lightwood Christmas Carol.

“He is very delicate,” said Tatiana. “Nephilim like yourself wish to put Marks on him, because they are intent on killing my boy as they have killed everyone else I love. You sit on the Council, do you not? Then you are his enemy. You may not see him.”

“I would not force Marks on the boy,” protested Gideon. “He’s my nephew. Tatiana, if he is that ill, perhaps he should see the Silent Brothers? One of them is a close friend, and could come to Jesse at our house. And Jesse could know his cousins.”

Before CoI, lines like these could be shrugged off to Tatiana being paranoid about her son being hurt by marks because he’s sickly, but no, we know now that Tatiana is entirely correct.

And it makes perfect sense that she refused to even let the Silent Brothers examine Jesse. No doubt they’d have been able to notice what was wrong with him wasn’t a sickness. Tatiana made a show out of it to exacerbate her own hatred of Nephilim, but she isn’t unaware of things, she just likes to spin them in a way that can be used to blame her enemies for things.

“Father planned alliances for us, when we were children.” Tatiana shrugged. “How ashamed he would be of you. How is your grubby servant?”

Then there’s her attitude, of course. The implication that she thinks it’s perfectly normal to involve children in alliances and plans. We know she didn’t hesitate to have a dark power forced onto Grace, if anything, it’s implied she requested it. We know Tatiana only sees Jesse as something that is hers, not as his own person, so it’s completely within the realm of possibility that she involved him in her own plans for revenge, even if he was just a newborn with no choice in the matter (or perhaps because he had no choice in the matter, considering how badly she reacts to the fact that Jesse *gasp* has a different worldview than her).

“I don’t care!” Tatiana shouted. “My son is of the blood of two of the oldest of the Shadowhunter families. He is not weak like your son. Go back to your weakness, Gideon. Get out of my sight, get out of my house, and do not darken my door again. I have not missed your company, nor your brother’s, and I am relieved that my child will not grow up under the corrupting influence of either of you.” 

Now, this one isn’t so relevant as much as it’s interesting, because while it looks like Tatiana is just flexing and being mean to Gideon, that whole implication that Jesse isn’t weak does compare to how Belial views Nephilim in general.

- Chain of Gold

Belial had the anchor placed on Jesse alongside his protections as a newborn. Humans never get such protections against possession, and Belial still chose one of the Nephilim as his alternate vessel. He was that plan of his as completely viable.

And much like Tatiana, Belial clearly sees Jesse as a tool, as a method to push his agenda.

- Chain of Iron

And assuming Tatiana knew of the anchor from the start, that checks out. Belial wanted Jesse as a vessel to get closer to his goal. If he’s never seen him as an end-goal, then he’s always planned for Jesse to be a temporary vessel. Tatiana wants the Nephilim destroyed. Letting Belial possess Jesse probably sounds like a completely reasonable thing to her. It solidifies her alliance with Belial, makes things easier for Belial, and as Belial himself implied, Belial owed Tatiana a favor.

- Chain of Iron

Seriously, I can say with reasonable confidence that Tatiana knew Belial would use Jesse, perhaps even agreed beforehand to the anchor itself being placed, because to the both of them, Jesse was basically a puppet. (I mean, even the clothes she had him dressed in within his coffin literally scream Belial)

Then of course, what I believe to be the nail in the coffin for Tatiana’s involvement is just what she tells Grace near the end.

- Chain of Iron

She literally has the audacity to claim Jesse was to blame for his own death and basically defended Belial. You know, Belial, who was possessing and controlling her son. Belial, who placed an anchor in the soul of her newborn son and has basically robbed him of anything resembling a normal life or even afterlife. Tatiana is taking Belial’s side on that without any hesitation.

If anything, Tatiana might have let Jesse get runed just to be able to tell him off, like “ha, told you you were too weak to be Nephilim” or something like that, despite knowing damn well the reason runes would kill him was Belial. Tatiana had literal demons to do her bidding, I don’t doubt she could have physically prevented Jesse from following up on his threat to run to Alicante if she didn’t let him get runes, had she wanted to.

Belial probably can control the dead like Lucie can, most likely having far more experience at it. Tatiana surely knew that. Belial said Tatiana called him after Jesse died, and that he owed her a favor, hence the preservation of Jesse. Obviously, Belial benefited from this, but clearly Tatiana saw Jesse’s death as an opportunity to bend him to her will, because he never shared her beliefs during his life.

Now, this is actually where I believe Tatiana and Belial’s views of the situation diverge. Belial outright says raising Jesse as Tatiana wanted wouldn’t suit him. He had Jesse kept in that so-called twilight state that certainly proved useful to Belial, but I don’t think whether Jesse was alive or not mattered pre-Cortana. Not only does Belial clearly not care about consent, he also probably wouldn’t need it, because his anchor was already deep within Jesse’s soul. Jesse being dead or alive was likely irrelevant to the possession, since the one part of Tatiana’s statement that’s correct is that Belial probably wouldn’t have guessed Jesse would die as he did.

Tatiana wanted Jesse resurrected for herself, for her own desire to have her son follow her beliefs and intentions. Belial just cares for Jesse as his vessel. While they’re allies, I don’t think those two usages were as compatible as Tatiana thinks they were, which is probably why Belial outright says reviving Jesse wouldn’t have suited him, and honestly both of them seem pretty angry about losing control over Jesse.

(Belial’s clearly salty that Lucie exorcised him and Tatiana’s mad he’s “in the clutches of a Herondale”, but clearly both of them lost something they valued as an instrument, none of them are actually mad about their loss of access to Jesse as a person, because they’re honestly both terrible people, to say the least).

I know I called that other one the nail in the coffin, but in relation to Tatiana letting Jesse be runed even though that was practically bound to kill him, Belial outright says Tatiana killed him, even despite recognizing the rune was technically the cause.

- Chain of Iron

TL;DR: Tatiana definitely knew about the anchor, Tatiana definitely knew Jesse would be possessed and used by Belial, and Tatiana also definitely let her son die just because it suited her.

[ilikekidsshows]

I edited the ask slightly to make it clear this is about apologists making excuses for Chloé's behavior and not fans who just feel frustrated over not getting an arc they wished to see.

Anon said: I think what really annoys me is Chloe apologists that cry she’s, “just a kid she can learn to be better and outgrow her abusive tendencies” seem to gloss over or ignore that Chloe has been given MULTIPLE chances to do better for 3 seasons and at every turn she always returns to her spoiled bratty bullying ways. Especially in season 3 where she didn’t listen to Ladybug about never getting the miraculous and felt entitled to the power.

It’s just so annoying how chloe apologists act like she’s the real victim just cause her mommy doesn’t love her, news flash she’s not the only character in the show who has a bad relationship with a parent. It doesn’t give Chloe the right to degrade and abuse people. Im not sure if Chloe needs to hit rock bottom before she turn things around or this is heading towards a corruption arc. However im also annoyed when parts of her fandom claim it’s misogynistic that she doesn’t get better.

Because sometimes bad people stay bad and never get better, it would be a very powerful lesson to teach kids who are in toxic abusive relationships especially with childhood friends that sometimes you have to let them go and cut them off because they’re causing you harm. It was very powerful of Adrien to stand up to Chloe multiple times as an abuse victim and not let her drag him down to her level. All the people mad at him for queen banana don’t realize that Adrien can’t make chloe a kinder person. No one can make someone mean good.

Plus the show is chock full of actual good and kind girls with positive supportive friendships so having one or even two female characters turn out bad isn’t sexist to me. Same with people who claim Zoe is a Mary Sue and it’s wrong that she’s replacing Chloe. Which is weird because Zoe can’t replace what Chloe never was, a friend to the main cast. Chloe was never close with the class or their friend even if she tried to be involved in their projects he never tried to get along with the others.

Plus Zoe made a mistake by trying to emulate her family and be a bully but eventually realized being awful like them wasn’t worth their approval. Whether she’s a better hero or deserves the miraculous is another discussion but we’re talking about Chloe here. If she continues down the path of selfishness and hate becoming like her mother and her sister Zoe, who also comes from an abusive family, doesn’t that just means one overcame their trauma and the other didn’t.

Sorry for the rant just I’m so tired of seeing the tag be cluttered up by Chloe apologists who won’t stop crying or complaining about her character.

With what the canon actually gave us, Chloé's arc could have gone, and could still go, either way on the redemption/corruption scale. Yes, Chloé messed up royally in the season three finale, but she was under duress to a degree. While Chloé showed few signs of becoming a selfless hero, since most of the people she helped as a hero were people she put in bad situations to begin with or she helped out to get to hang out with Ladybug, she's also showed no signs of becoming a true villain the same way Lila has. We can clearly see Lila developing into a supervillain, but Chloé is very much stuck in the middle and could go either way if she suddenly got superpowers with no strings attached.

The real issue here is Chloé's civilian life. She's never been kind to her classmates and goes out of her way to make sure they have a bad time. This has never been influenced by whether or not she had a Miraculous, so obviously something not-superpowers-related needs to happen for her to see anything wrong with what she's doing.

And there's a real chance Zoé is meant to be that thing that makes Chloé see. Chloé could see how her sister was forgiven and welcomed by her classmates and realize how easy it is to stop being awful and get validation and friendship from the class that way. This realization might make her look down on the class as gullible fools, like Lila, or it might make Chloé want to belong and try to adjust her behavior, having her follow Zoé's lead.

Of course there's still a chance that Chloé will just keep swinging between sitcom arch nemesis and not-quite-a-supervillain, that she'll still be used as a civilian life obstacle for the heroes to overcome and she's not meant to be redeemed or corrupted. In this case I can see this fandom discourse continuing for years to come, since it's the uncertainty of Chloé's role that's fuelling it so much.

Crying misogyny every time your favorite female character is treated in a way you don't like, when it’s used in a way that’s clearly just a buzzword meant to manipulate people, is something I'm just so done with. In the case of Miraculous, though, it's especially misguided, with how much the creators clearly try to be feminist. It's one thing to say something they did fails at that goal and leans into sexist attitudes and another to say they're being purposefully misogynistic because the show isn’t to your tastes. Because, let’s face it, a lot of the show’s attempts at being progressive have been tone deaf, but it usually seems to happen by accident and sometimes, at least with Fei’s design, they seem to be willing to amend a mistake when it gets pointed out.

Also, because sexism and feminism are about gender politics, the thing with discussing sexism is not actually comparing a female character with other female characters, it's about comparing a female character with male characters. If a show aims for gender equality, a character's gender can't influence how they are treated. This means we need to see if we can compare Chloé's character to a male character and find equality.

And we can. Miraculous Ladybug has a male character who causes others pain on purpose. This same character has several chances to stop being awful with "not being awful" costing him nothing. He even shows a softer side in 'Style Queen', just like Chloé in that same episode, but ultimately tosses that change aside when he finds something he thinks can help him gain his goals, like Chloé does in 'Miracle Queen'.

I am of course talking about Gabriel Agreste. I have repeatedly said that Marinette and Chloé are mirrors, what the other could be if they changed how they view other people and themselves. Gabriel is a foil to Marinette, so he naturally mirrors Chloé as well. However, Gabriel's arc has a similar forwards-and-backwards beat as Chloé's does. Even Chloé Apologists recognize the similarities between the two, since I've seen them voicing concerns that Gabriel might get redeemed while Chloé doesn't, because they think Gabriel having sympathetic aspects is a sign of a redemption arc for him like it supposedly was for Chloé. Instead, they are still both firmly in the area of antagonists and villains.

Although I will concede one key difference: Chloé is still way more likely to get redeemed than Gabriel.

I also think that, even if Chloé does get redeemed eventually, it’s still important that Adrien didn’t just hang on waiting for it when she spent so long proving again and again that she didn’t want to change. Because the other characters couldn’t know for sure if Chloé would change. Just like in the real world you won’t know for sure if your toxic friend will ever change, so you might have to let them go for your own sake. Even if they might get better one day, even if you’re not their target, it’s not on you to stand by them when they do things that are against your personal ethics.

[plainsight6578]

aftersome.

Pairing: Mista x Giorno

Genre: fluff to angst to a tiny bit of smut and fluff

Summary: Mista and Giorno had been there for each other since that fateful day that they met.

Word count: 3,422

A/N: I don’t really remember the time-line of the anime very well, so forgive me if I made any mistake xoxo. Characters may be a little OOC but i tried my best.

aftersome

adj. astonished to think back on the bizarre sequence of accidents that brought you to where you are today—as if you’d spent years bouncing down a Plinko pegboard, passing through a million harmless decision points, any one of which might’ve changed everything—which makes your long and winding path feel fated from the start, yet so unlikely as to be virtually impossible.

(via The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

Since Giorno was little, he’d been repeatedly told he was a failure, a disappointment, and an eyesore by his loving parents. And, as little children do, he believed every word. So, he never made any friends. In his mind, he was better off alone. Other people would be better off without him. Consequently, he never had anyone to tell him that he wasn’t all those things that he and his parents believed he was.

Giorno never had any, nor thought that he needed any friends. They were useless and would only serve as a distraction from his dream. When he was feeling down, he never had anyone to talk to; since talking was also useless. He just needed to pick himself up, work harder, do better. He didn’t need someone to tell him how proud they were of him, or that he’s been working too hard and that he deserved a break. Those were all useless.

He didn’t need anyone and no one needed him. Giorno never considered himself anything other than what he was told, he never had any reason to. The words that scarred him as a child would haunt him for the rest of his life. He’d always been alone. As far as he knew, he only ever hurt those that were close to him.

So, when Mista called him his “lucky boy”, he was so shocked he could barely process what that implied. That nickname given to him by this strange man he’d just met would mean that everything he’d known about himself - everything he’d been taught about who he was - was a lie. That couldn’t be true. 15 years of bringing misfortune to everyone around him couldn’t be wrong (although, admittedly, he never had many experiences with any other people that weren’t his abusive parents).

‘What a weird guy...’ was Giorno’s first impression of Mista. That was the only way to describe him: weird, not necessarily in a bad or good way. Mista was just weird; he’d contradicted everything Giorno had stood for. 

Mista was a simple man, simply following orders from his higher-ups, doing what he had to in order to survive. He was honest and upfront. Everything you needed to know about him, you could see. Giorno was far more mysterious, hiding his years of trauma underneath a calm and collected façade. He had his underlying intentions, and never fully exposed himself around anyone.

Giorno could never understand the strange man. He certainly wasn’t a lucky boy. It wasn’t luck that allowed him to survive, it was his own intuition, taking things he’d learnt and putting them to good use. It was his own skills that had lead him to where he was, and would take him to even higher lengths. He knew he was capable of achieving that with his skills, not luck.

Giorno stopped in his tracks. This was a first for him; how did this single interaction with this man he barely knew got him to reconsider everything he’d done? It was true, though, Giorno had faith that his plan could work because he had faith in himself. He just never previously realized it. And it felt like all the work he’d put in to get himself this far was paying off, like he was starting to reap the rewards of perseverance. In an instant, he could clearly see where he was going when it had previously felt like a daze. He supposed that he wasn’t entirely a failure, if he’d made it this far. How is he suddenly coming to question everything that he thought he was?

As far as Giorno knew, he was the most unlucky boy on earth. Mista didn’t seem to see him that way. Even though they just met? What did he know? Mista was a simpleton who didn’t know anything about Giorno or his life.

Still, he’d appreciated the nickname. It felt nice to have someone call him something that wasn’t an insult.

________________________________________________________________

After Giorno had saved Abbaccio and Fugo from the Man in the Mirror and had returned safely to the gang, Mista had pestered Giorno for more detail because neither Abbaccio nor Fugo were much of the bragging-about-our-super-cool-epic-win type (and neither was Giorno, really).

“Gimme all the juicy stuff! This dude was tough to beat right?! So, why’re ya leavin’ all the cool parts out?!” He’d yelled.

Giorno had no idea what classified as “juicy”, so he’d simply given Mista a quick summary of the fight: how he’d turned that brick into a snake to find the enery stand user, and how they eventually defeated him. Giorno only realized after he’d finished that he’d been talking for quite sometime. Mista was enthusiastically nodding his head throughout the story, adding in some “wooooah!!” sound effects of his own here and there. Giorno blushed, he got too carried away.

“Man! You’re so cool, Giorno!! I’d never think to do that!” Mista said, with an almost glimmer in his gaze, he was looking at Giorno in a way that hecouldn’t recognize. Rather than hostility, he was feeling...admiration coming from the other man. He remembered a similar look coming from Bucciarati, but that was when he had beat him in a fight then. What did Giorno do to deserve this from Mista? He could almost believe that Mista actually meant what he said.

‘I’m not cool...’ Giorno thought, but when Mista was staring at him like that... Who was he to say no. He didn’t know how to respond, so he blushed and looked away. Maybe he could allow himself to think he was slightly cool in that moment, he certainly did feel... cool, if only just a little.

________________________________________________________________

The long road trip to retrieve their boss’s order from the statue that Giorno and Mista had gone into meant more time alone with Mista. For some reason, Giorno’s heart couldn’t seem to slow down. He decided it was from the paranoia of being attacked by another stand user. Since they’d started this mission, they’ve been relentlessly attacked by stand user after stand user, with barely any time to relax. That’s why his palms won’t stop sweating, and why there was a strange, tingling sensation in his stomach, and why his heart skipped a beat when Mista had called his name... Yeah, he’s just nervous about being attacked again.

Wait. Mista had called his name. He was talking to him.

“Right, Giorno?” He’d asked. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening, Mista,” Giorno replied.

“What are you overthinking now? There isnt another stand user for miles, we’ll be fine.” Mista kicked his legs up onto the dashboard, emphasizing his complete lack of anxiety. Giorno almost envied his ability to be so relaxed (although, he knew Mista was always prepared for an attack, he never really let his guard down). 

Considering how they’d had lots of time to kill in one cramped car, the pair had talked quite a bit, well, it was mostly Mista talking at Giorno. He liked it that way, though, Mista’s voice helped him unwind, and something about the way Mista’s lips moved as they talked made his stomach clench and his mouth dry.

Being with Mista, just the two of them, like this, it could almost convince Giorno to take a break and enjoy the little things in life, all things that Giorno had deemed ‘useless’. And yet, this philosophy that Giorno had held close to him as a protection mechanism was slowly falling apart. Rather, it was being undone. And Giorno didn’t know why, but he felt like a part of him was letting it happen, like, deep down, this is what he wanted: to sit back and be able to enjoy.

“Useless...” He muttered, under his breath he was getting influenced by Mista. He couldn’t afford to relax. But Mista brought that side out in him and he didn’t know why. Giorno couldn’t help but feel slightly at ease with Mista beside him, and it felt nice not to have to keep his guard up around someone all the time. It felt nice to be able to rely on someone else.

________________________________________________________________

Mista somehow always found a way to get himself horribly injured during their stand fights. After the battle with Ghiaccio and his stupidly powerful White Album stand, and after he’d made sure Mista was fully healed, Giorno made sure to give the older man a thorough lecture about his actions during the battle.

“Getting yourself injured like that is useless, Mista. You shouldn’t do useless things like that. What would the team do if we didn’t have you? You should think about that too!” Giorno rambled, “your actions were dangerous, Mista, don’t do useless things like that again.”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” he replied, an embarrassed flush covering his cheeks, “I had the amazing Giorno to cover for me though, so I wasn’t that worried!” He finished with a wink towards the younger boy. And something in that made Giorno’s heart beat faster. Mista is alive, he’s still with him. A feeling of relief washed over Giorno, and he released the breath that he’d been holding in. 

Giorno sighed, he could almost cry. Remembering the sight of Mista’s body filled with bullets and then seeing him here, laughing and joking like everything was fine. Giorno’s heart clenched. Without saying anything, Giorno layed his head on Mista’s shoulder, close to his heart, and listened to the sound of the blood flowing through his body. Mista was left wide-eyed, but laid his hand on top of Giorno’s, who was clenching his fists. Soon as he did, Mista felt him relax against him. 

They sat like that in silence for a few minutes, just breathing in each other’s presence. Mista was caught completely off guard by this, he didn’t know that his actions would affect Giorno like this. Perhaps they’d gotten closer than he’d thought in the short time span that they’d known each other.

“I meant what I said, though,” Mista whispered, “as long as I have you with me, I know everything will be just fine...”

________________________________________________________________

Staring at Abbaccio’s corpse, Mista waited for some sign of life from his comrade. Giorno couldn’t heal him... He was just... Gone. There was nothing they could do. Mista’s head was racing at a million miles an hour but none of his thoughts formed anything coherent.

How did this even happen? They were gone for a minute. Why did this happen? With every blink Mista expected to see Abbaccio in a different position than he was. But Abbaccio never moved. He didn’t even blink. 

“WE’RE NOT JUST GONNA LEAVE HIM HERE, RIGHT?!” Narancia yelled. Mista wanted to agree with him. Watching Bucciarati walking away from their teammate - no, their friend - he understood Narancia’s anger. But he knew there was nothing they could do. Bucciarati was probably hurting more than any of them were.

Clenching his fists, he ripped his eyes off of Abbaccio’s corpse and followed Bucciarati. They all knew the risks of this mission. They had no choice but to continue.

Back inside the turtle, the gang continued on with their mission. It would take some time to get to Rome, so Bucciarati volunteered to keep watch outside the turtle while the rest of them got some rest. Inside, Narancia had passed out on in an uncomfortable position on the couch and Trish had curled up on the floor, eventually drifting to sleep.

Mista couldn’t relax enough to fall asleep. After seeing Abbaccio like that, he was wondering about his other comrades, he didn’t think he could keep his sanity if he had to see that again.

Mista was so lost in his thoughts he failed to notice that Giorno had placed himself next to him, “you shouldn’t think about useless things, Mista,” he said.

Slightly startled, his first instinct was to go on the defensive, “I’m not thinking about anything...!”

Giorno just stared at him blankly, although, Mista detected a faint hint of sympathy.

“Uh, well, I guess I am just overthinking...” He admitted. “I mean, Abbaccio died without anyone even noticing... So, I can’t help but think... That could have been any of us. If our enemy is that powerful... How many more of us are gonna die? Are we even... gonna be able to defeat him at all-”

“That’s useless, Mista,” Giorno stated firmly, “what you’re thinking about is useless. It’ll only distract you when we’re in battle.”

“Y-you’re right...” There was a slight twinge of shame inside Mista for having to be told off by someone younger than him for the second time now, “still, after everything we’ve been through, we all could have died so many times...” He adjusted his position slightly to face Giorno and then cupped both his hand inside his palms, “you amputated your own arms, for God’s sake, and... I almost died too! I just...” His tone was all over the place. Even now, he hadn’t fully grasped the concept of what it means to die. “I really don’t want to lose anyone else...” He said. 

Giorno knew how hard this must be for the him, he’d just lost one of his closest friends, they must’ve been like family, and with barely any time to properly grieve, they were going head-first into a much more dangerous battle. He didn’t know what to do or say. This is the first time he’d gotten this close to someone to consider them a friend and, frankly, he didn’t want to lose anyone either. After everything they’ve been through, Giorno felt a sense of fondness towards the gang members. 

“We’re right here, Mista,” he decided was appropriate, and leaned in to touch his forehead to Mista, “I’m not going anywhere, either.”

Mista’s hold on Giorno’s hands tightened. The look in Giorno’s eyes was so tender and soft, something Mista hadn’t seen in such a long time. Something snapped inside Mista, and he could no longer hold back his tears. Giorno didn’t know what to do as Mista sobbed into his shoulder. He just let Mista let all his grief out, if he could help Mista in any way, he would. This is his way of showing Mista just how thankful he was for him. Thanks to Mista, Giorno felt so much less of a burden to himself and others, he realized that everything he’d thought he knew as a child about himself was so much farther than the truth. 

Giorno’s chest ached seeing Mista like this. He wished he could take his pain away, just as Mista had freed him from his. He let Mista cry into him as long as he needed.

Even after Mista had calmed down, he didn’t move from his position. The way Giorno was leaning forward had exposed his star-shaped birthmark. Mista stared at it for a while, admiring how it seemed to glimmer despite the darkness in the room. He wondered where they would be without Giorno. He would certainly be dead, they probably all would be; with how many fatal wounds he’d healed for them.

Mista couldn’t really face Giorno right now. He liked the position they were in particularly because Giorno couldn’t see Mista’s puffy nose or blood-shot eyes, nor the snot that threatened to drip out of his nose. He’d always showed himself as this strong and care-fee guy; so breaking down in his teammates arms like that felt almost humiliating - or at least, it would be if this was anyone else but Giorno. Still, he didn’t want Giorno to see him in this state. So, as a thank you, Mista had placed the lightest peck right onto Giorno’s star-shaped birthmark. Giorno physically tensed up, and he blushed all the way to his ears. Giorno, being who he was and having absolutely no social skills, he couldn’t understand why.

“M-Mista-” He’d began to protest. “This is how I’m saying thank you, dumbass,” Mista answered, and intertwined their fingers, just for emphasis. “Why...” Giorno asked, what was there to thank him for? 

“Because you’re here.”

________________________________________________________________

Mista was the first one kiss Giorno’s hand after he’d taken over the organization. He experienced Giorno’s skill first-hand, there was no one better he could think to take over the organization. He was a simple man, he followed orders and was stupidly honest. That’s why he swore his loyalty to Giorno.

When the pair had finally gained some privacy, Mista immediately slumped his shoulders, no longer needing to impress his higher-ups or assert dominance to his subordinates. Though, he was still restless. He’d been like that all day, in fact. Being around all the other gang members, meeting new ones, and receiving hunderds of condolences from them, he, naturally, couldn’t stop thinking about finding his comrade’s corpses, the sight and smell of their blood...

Giorno merely stared at Mista as he paced around the room. No doubt he was stressed right now. Everything that he was used to was changing. Nothing was simple anymore. 

But everything was over now. Things would get better... Right? Giorno wasn’t sure- No! He shouldn’t be thinking like this. Abbaccio, Narancia, and Bucciarati had sacrificed their lives for this. ‘Thinking like that is useless.’ He told himself.

He had no idea what was going through Mista’s head right now, and he wasn’t sure how to ask. Giorno had inhaled, preparing to say something before Mista approached him and grabbed both his hands, “Giorno!” He yelled, “you’re still here!”

Their faces were mere centimeters apart, Mista was blinking at him, like he was waiting a response, “that’s right...”

“And you’re not going anywhere!”

“No, I’m not.”

Mista touched their foreheads together, just like they did back inside the turtle, and he smiled, “and as long as you’re with me... Everything’s gonna be alright!”

Giorno blinked. That’s what he said back then, too, and he didn’t exactly classify what had happened as ‘alright’. But, as he was being held by Mista, and seeing Mista’s unwavering smile, he just couldn’t bring himself to disagree.

“As long as I’m here,” Giorno started, lifting his hands from Mista’s grip to cup his face, “everything will be alright,” he whispered into the taller man’s mouth. Giorno also wanted to protect Mista with everything he had.

They were so close to each other... It seemed like they were slowly inching closer until the gap between them finally closed. All of their pent-up desire for each other, the feelings that Giorno had absolutely refused to acknowledge, they were all reaching their climax. They pulled away after a few seconds, before Mista swiftly closed the space between them again, and then proceeding to pull at Giorno’s bottom lip with his teeth, and placed his hands on Giorno’s hips to hold him closer.

Giorno gasped and grabbed onto Mista’s collar for support. His head seemed to be completely taken over by Mista. His scent, the way he tasted, the way his hands felt on his hips, Mista, Mista, Mista. All these new emotions he was feeling made his head spin in the most euphoric way.

Mista took advantage of Giorno’s open mouth and shoved his tounge inside his it. Giorno definitely wasn’t expecting this to heat up so quickly, and he definitely wasn’t expecting to feel Mista’s tongue inside his mouth. Giorno was losing control of himself, he moaned into Mista’s mouth, completely overwhelmed by just making out with him.

Giorno was almost completely leaning on Mista for support, his legs were about to give way any second . When they pulled away for oxygen, Giorno let out a desperate, “M-Mis...ta..” His face was entirely coated with a glowing shade of red, his eyes heavy-lidded, with Mista’s name on his lips. Mista’s lower half twitched at the sight, already addicted to it.

He did have to admit, he felt slightly weird doing this so soon after his friends’ deaths, but with Giorno being the most important thing to him right now, he wanted to feel him in every way to convince himself he was still here. He needed to feel his heartbeat, feel the warmth of his breath, feel the movement of his tongue inside his mouth, feel him moaning into his mouth... He needed to be able to feel that Giorno was alive.

Mista hugged him tight, just taking in Giorno’s presence, “you’re still here...” He whispered into Giorno’s neck, who barely had it in him to point out how, of course he’s still here, where else would he be? So, instead, he simply whispered a quiet, “I’m not going anywhere.”

________________________________________________________________

A/N: ASDKJSFHLSK OMG OMG OKAY IK THIS IS KINDA ALL OVER THE PLACE BUT I WROTE THIS OVER THE SPAN OF LIKE THREE DAYS AND I HAD THIS HUGE ESSAY DUE SO I WAS LIKE WRITING THIS AND MY ESSAY AT THE SAME TIME IT WAS SO CHAOTIC AND MY EMOTIONS WERE ALL OVER THE PLACE

ANYWAY IF YOU READ THIS FAR I RLY HOPE YOU ENJOYED TY FOR READING PLEASE LEAVE ANY FEEDBACK YOU HAVE!!!! I proofread it like six million times but if there are any mistakes I’m sorry!!! Pls lmk so I can fix them :3.

[aurorawest]

I'd really, really like to hear more of your thoughts about Stephen Strange's character in his own film (and in Ragnarok), vs. his appearances in IW/Endgame. "Doctor Strange" is in my top five fav Marvel movies, but I didn't realize how little thought I'd given to his IW/EG appearances until you mentioned the difference in the character between portrayals. (In hindsight, I think this is because Strange feels a bit ... flatly written in IW/EG?) So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

Thanks for asking! You nailed one of my chief problems with his characterization—Strange is flatly written in IW/EG. With the exception of his opening scene with Wong in IW, he’s boring, has little personality, and is just sort of a Generic Superhero. Ben Cumberbatch does his best—that ???? look on his face when Drax says, “I’ll do you one better—what is Gamora?” is one of the funniest parts of IW—but there’s only so much the guy can do when they basically gave him nothing to work with.

This got long and possibly salty, so, more after the break:

IMO, it’s pretty obvious that the Russos and the writers of IW and EG had little interest in Strange. And I get it! Every character is not interesting to every person! That’s why certain characters never show up in my writing, because I don’t care about them. But like, if you sign on to do a big ensemble movie, can you at least like, try to write the characters’ personalities the way they’ve been established? It just seems painfully, painfully obvious that the people making these movies didn’t care enough about Strange to try at all.

I have two really specific problems with the way Strange is written in IW/EG:

1. He tells Stark that if he has to choose between saving Peter and him and stopping Thanos, he’ll choose stopping Thanos and let them die.

...

This man is a doctor. We repeatedly see him, prior to IW, doing no harm. In his initial fight with the zealots at the Sanctum in Doctor Strange, he sends one of them through a door in the Rotunda of Gateways, and, of course, uses the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak to trap Kaecilius. And when he does kill one of them, he’s really upset about it and brings up the fact that he took an oath to do no harm. The final fight preceding his battle with Dormammu is more focused on reversing time and saving everyone’s lives than on stopping Kaecilius and his zealots. In fact, he only fights them when they break out of the spell. The whole plan is to reverse time far enough so that they can stop Kaecilius before the Hong Kong Sanctum falls.

Even the way he defeats Dormammu is about the least violent way he can do it—he never tries to attack Dormammu. And yeah, he does make a deal with Dormammu to send Kaecilius and the zealots to the Dark Dimension, which is probably his most ‘violent’ moment in the movie. He still doesn’t get his own hands dirty, haha.

We even see this in Ragnarok. Strange doesn’t hurt Loki. Here’s a guy who has done considerable damage to Earth. Strange has him on a list of threats to the planet. And yet, all he does is trap Loki in a 30 minute fall. Clearly, Loki is totally fine.

He emphasizes over and over that he’s a doctor—this is an important part of him, so important that he won’t let go of it, even though he’ll never practice medicine again. He sees himself as a healer, as someone who fixes people and makes them better. So the fact that he has that line in IW infuriates me. I get that if he has to choose between saving the universe and sacrificing two lives, yeah, he’d probably sacrifice the two lives. But like, where’s the guilt, where’s the regret at having said this? UGH.

I actually really love the choice between saving one life versus saving the universe—I think it’s endlessly interesting. It’s a thread that’s woven throughout Loki’s arc in the MCU, for instance, and it’s well done. But it was poorly done with Strange. I was talking to @mareebird about this and she rightly said that Strange just wasn’t the character for this particular arc in IW. Even his choosing to save one life (Tony’s) is only because he knows that Stark is going to be the one to defeat Thanos in the end ( @mareebird also reminded me of this).

2. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that they made Strange boring and flat because they already had one snarky genius with a beard, and the MCU has always been about Tony Stark.

So, full disclosure...I really dislike Tony Stark. I didn’t used to, and now I do. I fully admit that this second point influenced my dislike of Stark. The more I came to love Stephen, the more it irritated me the way he gets shunted to the side in IW in favor of Stark. It really feels like because Strange is also snarky, sarcastic, super smart, and kind of an asshole, that they felt it would take away from Stark. And because you can’t do that, instead Strange gets turned into this boring, one-dimensional, humorless character. Don’t get me wrong, he gets a few good lines here and there. But in Doctor Strange he makes jokes all the time! He literally says to Wong, “People used to think I was funny,” which tells us that joking around is part of his personality. Even though the situation we see him in in Ragnarok doesn’t give him a lot of opportunity to be funny, he’s still funny there. His reactions to Thor are comedy gold. That’s almost all gone in IW and EG. Remember how I said that with the exception of his opening scene with Wong, his character has little personality? I think it’s pretty telling that he shares almost every scene with Stark after that.

And just a general point of irritation: they made him so powerful in IW that they didn’t know what to do with him in EG. Instead of fighting, he has to hold up a dam for 90% of the final battle. Here’s a hot take: don’t make your characters ridiculously powerful just for the cool factor, because you’re going to have to deal with nerfing them later. I’m not saying this can’t be done well, but this is not a case of it being done well. It’s really transparent what’s going on (Carol falls prey to the exact same thing). Incidentally this is why I despise Loki stans going on about Loki not being powerful enough in the MCU because guess whaaaaaat, really powerful characters get taken out of the action since there’s no drama when you can just...win.

Thanks again for asking! Haha hopefully this didn’t get too salty.

[bhaleesi]

Im so glad you liked my art! But I had very little material to work out their exact form of relationship. At first I had imagined Selene to be the dignified one, aka the 'One who keeps others in Line' but a rereading of the crypt scene with Selene goading Arion on showed that clearly wasnt the case🤣. Arion, the clown can't take that role so I was sure it had to be our Ayden. I drew Ayden with a prim and proper attire (with no wrinkles in sight), the disciplined one of the group.

But what kind of relationship did Ayden and Selene exactly have (Is Aylene a good couple name🤔)? That was something I kept pondering on. Selene wouldn't have taking Ayden's constant hogging of all her work and she has quite a strong personality. But I cant imagine these people not constantly clashing. Selene would have been the free one with the children whereas Ayden the responsible parent. And what kind of mom was Selene to the twins?

Arion and Persephone seem pretty cool compared to the clashing couple above!

[P.S- Can I know more abt Aylene's wedding ceremony? I wanna draw them! (If you don't mind that is)]

"At first I had imagined Selene to be the dignified one" I snorted at this because Selene most definitely was *not* the dignified one of the group. None of them were quite "dignified" until adulthood, but I'd say the best match for that description would've been Ayden. A summary of their dynamic is:

Selene wants to do something wild and crazy

Arion supports her, the two of them cackling as they plan their latest scheme

Depending on the scheme, Ayden will either cautiously join in (while keeping an eye out for trouble) or will be like "nooo stop".

If Ayden says no, Selene and Arion will do it anyway and Ayden will get them out of trouble once they get caught 🤣

An example is from when they were in their mid-teens in Briar. Lady Fiona isn't a big fan of animals, but Selene found and secretly kept a cat in Briarlight. Selene and Arion would take turns hiding it in their rooms and feeding it so that Fiona wouldn't find it. Ayden also fed it, but he was a lot less enthused and was stressed every time it was his "turn" to dodge Fiona.

But then the cat would purr and he'd forgive Selene and Arion for dragging him into the mess

Aylene is such a pretty couple name! Honestly even as a proper name it's really lovely

I might jot it down and give it to a character one day...

Now I'm wondering what Quill and Ayden would be. Qayden? Aydill?? Quillden?? Not as pretty as Aylene, that's for sure

But what kind of relationship did Ayden and Selene exactly have (Is Aylene a good couple name🤔)? That was something I kept pondering on. Selene wouldn't have taking Ayden's constant hogging of all her work and she has quite a strong personality. But I cant imagine these people not constantly clashing.

You're on the right track with your analysis! They had a great relationship overall, and loved each other very much. They were on the same wavelength politically, since they grew up around each other. When Selene was first crowned, however, she was not a fan of the more ... tedious parts of ruling. That left Ayden free to hog her share while Selene contributed to the war effort.

“Selene was the fighter between us, the one better at inspiring the troops. She always said that,” Ayden’s voice rose, “a ruler is needed on the battlefield, and it should be me. The queen has more freedom than the king does on a chessboard.” He returned to his normal tones. “I know for a fact that she simply did not want to do paperwork.” (From the chapter West of West)

This arrangement works out great for both of them, because Ayden is free to be the micromanaging workaholic that he is and Selene isn't weighed down by things she dislikes. Periodically they'd switch - with Ayden being on the battlefield and Selene sitting the throne - but for the most part they kept to their niches. Selene didn't ignore her duties - she just wasn't at her happiest when dealing with them. So Selene wouldn't have complained if Ayden took over a boring meeting or two.

Towards the last years of her life, Selene takes a more active interest in the throne. This immediately causes her to clash with Ayden, who has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn't share power very well. Plus, Selene started favoring a less aggressive approach to the war, putting her in opposition to Ayden. Thus they clash, Selene leaves to end the war herself, and ... yeah :(

Selene would have been the free one with the children whereas Ayden the responsible parent. And what kind of mom was Selene to the twins?

It's like you're reading my mind because the next chapter of AWAS will focus on that exact question!

Selene was the more relaxed parent between her and Ayden. Ayden isn't particularly strict himself, but being Sovereign didn't allow him to be as close to them as he would've liked just because he would've been so busy when they were young. While Ayden would be stuck in meetings all week, Selene would hang out with the twins, build a swing for Esme, play piano with Lucien, take them out on the river, etc.

I also feel like Selene might've had a slightly deeper bond with Lucien. Being Crown Prince isn't a role that Lucien is fond of, and sometimes wishes he wasn't. Selene would've understand that reluctance a lot better than Ayden, so she'd put a lot of energy into helping Lucien grow at his own pace and finding his feet with all the expectations people put on him. Whereas Esme is a bit of a social prodigy and so would've preferred to be with Ayden. Esme is also pretty adventurous and mischievous, so for sure Selene would've encouraged that aspect of her daughter.

Arion and Persephone seem pretty cool compared to the clashing couple above!

Arion and Persephone are a fun couple to write whenever they're in a scene together! It makes me happy just how much Arion loves his wife 🤣 It's also part of the reason why Arion wants to take a step back from being Suzerain and focus more on Briar~

[P.S- Can I know more abt Aylene's wedding ceremony? I wanna draw them! (If you don't mind that is)]

Sure! If someone is willing to use their time to create art based on my content, I’ll always be thrilled ♥️♥️

Ayden and Selene's wedding was fairly simple, as far as royal weddings can go. Ayden's father would have died not long beforehand, so the mood was generally somber. The war was at an all-time high, so it wouldn't have been a good look to be spending lavish amounts of money when the crown loyalists were technically losing. On top of that, Ayden's advisors would've cared more about Ayden having heirs and the wedding was just a step they had to take so the whole thing would've been organized quickly.

That being said, the style of the wedding would've been overall Eurydicean, not Briarean. Ayden and Selene spent more time outside of Ancient, so the Ironhillers would've partially viewed them as foreign. In order to settle into life in the capital must faster, they would've followed Ancienti customs. So the wedding would've been more Western in its inspiration, with a bit of Briarean influence as a nod to their former home.

The left image is a colorized picture of Tsarina Alexandra of Russia from 1908, to give you an idea of what Selene might’ve worn. The right is Tsar Nicholas II, her husband. Ayden and Selene got married in the equivalent of the 1900s, so you can play around with any particular designs from around that era!

[pally1985]

closer look at the relationship between zues and aphrodite and athena. and why its deeper than you think.(part 1)

its going to be a long one so strap in.

why aphrodite?: Aphrodite was the goddess of erotic love and beauty. Today she is one of the best known goddesses and easily one of the most recognisable. Images such as Botticelli’s *The Birth of Venus* and statues like the *Venus de Milo* are some of the many iconic representations of Aphrodite. Her status as a goddess of love is well documented. Homer, Hesiod, and Euripides have all shown her to be a goddess of great beauty (naked or adorned), seduction, persuasion and passion. She is the divine source of *peitho*, "persuasion," *eros*, "sexual desire" and *himeros* "longing" and Eros was her companion. Hesiod links Aphrodite inextricably to sex with his account of her birth; from the sea where Ouranos’ castrated genitals had been discarded. Before researching this I thought Aphrodite’s remit was limited to love and seduction but there are other sides to Aphrodite that I feel have been a little neglected. Homer repeatedly calls her the Dios thugater (daughter of Zeus) which brings into light the relationship between the Homeric and Hesiodic Aphrodite and Zeus. Aphrodite was the goddess of mixis, the “mingling” of bodies in an intimate physical contact, in a martial and sexual sense. She could also be fiercely protective and brave at times, such as when she rescued Paris from the Battle of Troy. I want to discover why she called Aphrodite Pandemos “She who Belongs to all the People”. Was it because she encompassed so many ideas in one deity?. So it is because of these different and lesser known traits of this deity that I have decided to make this post solely focused on her. I want to explore the little known sides of Aphrodite and in doing so learn a more about her, her interactions with other figures from ancient Greek religion.

Zeus and aphrodite (part 1) In this entry I want to start analysing the relationship between Aphrodite and Zeus. Were they, father and daughter, aunt and nephew, oppressor and rebel or tease and pursuer? From Aphrodite’s birth and marriage, to Zeus’ fatherly instincts and attempted rape, I will look at different examples of the interactions looking into a very complicated relationship between two of the most significant Olympians.

The birth of Aphrodite is a contentious issue as Homer and Hesiod disagree; either she was the daughter of Zeus and Dione or she was created out of the sea where the castrated genitals of Ouranos had floated.

Hesiod believed that Aphrodite was Ouranos’ daughter albeit with an unusual birth. If so then it is understandable that Aphrodite would disobey Zeus over incidences such as her marriage to Hephaistos. She was of an older generation, effectively Zeus’ aunt and therefore not strictly under his control. If she was his daughter then her defiance whilst abnormal is a testament to how powerful she was.

The marriage of Aphrodite to Hephaistos, engineered by Zeus is a key example of Zeus’ power over Aphrodite and then her defiance succeeding. Zeus decided to marry Aphrodite to Hephaistos it was to prevent the desire for her causing conflict amongst the gods. As Aphrodite’s father, or at least as king of the god’s her *kurios,* it was his responsibility to marry her off but as the embodiment of sexual desire it was not in Aphrodite’s nature to be bound by marriage, she was not suitable for this institution. Aphrodite caused the conflict Zeus was trying to avoid when she and Ares were caught in bed. Hephaistos trapped them both in a net of bronze filaments and demanded that the gods come and bear witness to his wife’s lust for Ares. He also demanded that Zeus repay the dowry. According to Cyrino this is an example of Aphrodite being clearly under the parental control of Zeus but I disagree. The significance of this incident lies in the fact that Zeus tried to be in command of Aphrodite but ultimately she still overcame his demands and defied him. He attempted to oppress Aphrodite by making her conform to the norms of Olympian society by becoming a wife, the possession of one male but Aphrodite’s flagrant disobedience, bringing of conflict amongst the gods and subsequent apparent failure to remarry shows her continued dominance over Zeus.

There is no account of Aphrodite remarrying, it seems as though she had a substantial relationship with Ares but no actual wedding and judging by the number of children they had it was more than a casual affair. This would make sense, she was not suited to lifelong fidelity but that does not mean that sexual desire is fleeting; her affair with Ares was very in character. She was never suited to what Zeus had planned. Zeus also played the fatherly role when Aphrodite was hurt in the battle of Troy whilst rescuing Aeneas. Aphrodite’s wrist was wounded and she fled to Dione. Zeus “teasingly rebukes” her by calling her his “dear child” and patronizingly tells her to “take care of the pleasures of love and leave the fighting to Ares and Athena”. Despite seeming weak when running to her parents the fact that she even entered the battle shows her strength and bravery. Zeus displays a caring, fatherly side but his teasing highlights the fact that it would be dangerous for Aphrodite to have access to both love and warfare; she was powerful enough as it is. Jackson says that this scene can be interpreted as Zeus trying to keep Aphrodite away influence in love and war. When telling Aphrodite to take care of the pleasures of love Zeus may have been unaware just how powerful Aphrodite was in this respect. There are many examples of Aphrodite and her son Eros causing gods and mortals to fall in love, for example when Phaedra falls in love her stepson. Euripides describes Eros as her winged partner and her agent in her erotic control.Whether Eros and Aphrodite are active participants in the situation or not as personifications of love and sex they were always responsible for the feelings evoked. Cyrino says that it is the sheer force of Aphrodite’s existence that caused individuals to join together in sexual contact. In this respect all of Zeus’ extra-marital sexual encounters were a result of the force of Aphrodite. Zeus often had to prevent Hera from finding out about his affairs; hence taking disguises when meeting his partners. His desire to sleep with other individuals stems from Aphrodite; she was a major thorn in his side. Hera’s scorn and jealousy towards the children of these liaisons, Dionysus and Heracles for example was a result of Aphrodite’s effect. All the liaisons between deities (and mortals) inappropriate or not were due to Aphrodite. Her power was immense.

The sexual force emanating from Aphrodite made Zeus want to be with Thetis but either Themis or Prometheus told Zeus that a son born by Thetis would be more powerful than the father and would become the ruler of heaven. As a result Zeus arranged for Thetis to marry Peleus. Aphrodite made him desire Thetis, a deity that he could not have without risking his reign. An impossible love is a terrible emotion to feel, Aphrodite was unintentionally asserting herself over Zeus. Her power is making him have feelings that could never be acted upon or reciprocated; Thetis was raised by Hera and frowned upon Zeus’ infidelities. When Zeus united Aphrodite with mortal Anchises it was in response to her serial habit of uniting gods with mortals and then “mocking them all”\[ix\] This has been cited as an example of Zeus demonstrating his supremacy over Aphrodite and whilst he succeeded it does not mean that he was always superior to her. This is a rare occasion when Zeus gives Aphrodite a taste of her own medicine, but in mind this is an isolated incident; Aphrodite actively does this to other individuals regularly and inactively to individuals and animals constantly as she represents sexual desire.

Aphrodite also had enough force to make Zeus desire her. Greek poet, Nonnus, tells us in three fragments of his *Dionysiaca* about the time that Zeus tried to rape Aphrodite.

"once when Kypros \[Aphrodite\] fled like the wind from the pursuit of her lascivious father \[Zeus\], that she might not see an unhallowed bedfellow in her own begetter, Zeus the father gave up the chase and left the union unattempted, because unwilling Aphrodite was too fast and he could not catch her: instead of Kypros' bed, he dropt on the ground the love-shower of seed from the generative plow. Gaia (earth) received Kronion’s fruitful dew, and shot up a strange-looking horned generation \[the kentauroi or centaurs of the island of kypros\]."\[x\]

It is another example of her power over him that she could captivate his desires and then evade his attempts. Eventually when Aphrodite did allow an affair with Zeus Aphrodite became pregnant with the child Priapus.\[xi\] Kerenyi talks of Hera’s anger and jealousy due to Aphrodite pregnancy by her husband and she cursed the unborn Priapos to have unnaturally large genital and he was exiled from Olympus.\[xii\] When Priapus was conceived it was at the discretion of Aphrodite, when she deemed it suitable she then allowed them to sleep together. She teased him with no plan to satisfy him until she was prepared to do so. She was in control of the situation, not Zeus. The relationship between Zeus and Aphrodite is complex but there is another dimension. Zeus greatly favored Athena over Aphrodite she was the lynch pin in the maintenance of his tyranny and the attempted of dominance over Aphrodite. That I shall discuss in Part Two. closer look at the relationship between zues and aphrodite and athena. and why its deeper than you think.(part 2)

### Aphrodite and Zeus Part 2: The Athena Effect: In the last post I looked at the relationship between Zeus and Aphrodite from the starting perspective of them being father and daughter. Aphrodite was often disobedient and took pleasure in humiliating Zeus and many other deities and mortals, but she also posed a much greater threat to Zeus. Aphrodite instigated the Battle of Troy[i], she may have been of an older generation than Zeus and she had control of his sexual desires. However Zeus had a weapon against her; he used Athena who represented everything he could want in a male heir to undermine the fundamental tenets of Aphrodite’s existence. There was animosity between Athena and Aphrodite; at Troy they both supported different sides and Athena could be very scathing towards Aphrodite. After Diomedes wounded Aphrodite’s wrist and she ran to Dione, Athena and Hera taunted her for her efforts on the battlefield.

### “But Athene and Hera, as they looked upon her, sought to anger Zeus, son of Cronos, with mocking words. And among them the goddess flashing-eyed Athene was first to speak: “Father Zeus, wilt thou anywise be wroth with me for the word that I shall say? Of a surety now Cypris [Aphrodite] has been urging some one of the women of Achaea to follow after the Trojans, whom now she so wondrously loveth; and while stroking such a one of the fair-robed women of Achaea, she hath scratched upon her golden brooch her delicate hand.”[ii]

### The competition between them stems their similarities and thier differences. Both were famous for their beauty, hence why Paris had to choose between them. They both possessed a gleaming, golden quality to their beings. Homer records them both has having the attribute of glaukopis; darting or gleaming eyes. He also tells us of how Athena was one the few deities whom Aphrodite's powers had no effect on. Both goddesses have key roles with mortals, Aphrodite makes them mate (with gods also). Athena comes across as a sister and friend to mortals and assists them with powerful gifts and wise council.[v] The animosity arises from a difference of purpose; Athena was celebrated for her mind and wisdom, Aphrodite for her beauty and sensuality. It was also due to Zeus’ relationship with both of them that their animosity grew. The Zeus portrayed by Homer is not an omnipotent ruler; he still faced challenges to his office. Whilst Strauss Clay says that despite the occasional disturbance Zeus’ reign can “no longer be shaken”.[vi] Jackson rebuts that the majority of the divine action in the Iliad is made up of such challenges to his authority. After all if Homer had wanted to show Zeus’s authority as unchallenged then why would the Iliad feature so many subversive elements? Jackson argues that due to this instability Zeus needed someone to help instil order; that someone was Athena. His obvious favouritism of Athena was aimed at subduing Aphrodite. This conflict between him and Aphrodite also highlights the greater conflict between the Zeus and the other gods. Hesiod and Homer have different accounts of Aphrodite’s creation and whilst superficially the two Aphrodite’s appear very different they serve the same purpose relating to Zeus. The Aphrodite in Theogany similar to Athena in that they were both born of one male parent. This created a strong tie with each father; Athena with Zeus and Aphrodite with Ouranos. The place which the two deities sprung out of can also be linked to the characteristics surrounding the father’s reign and the daughter’s actions. Zeus gave birth to Athena out of his head, hence Athena was renowned for her wisdom and Zeus’ reign was “one of the mind”. Hesiod also describes Athena as having “courage and sound council equal to her father’s”[vii] Aphrodite was produced out of Ouranos’ genitals in a act of grotesque violence. In this respect Ouranos’ reign is one filled with “gross physicality”[viii] and Aphrodite is linked with sex and fertility. As Aphrodite was born out of the succession struggle between Ouranos and Kronos then she is linked with the succession process and therefore she poses a danger to Zeus’ reign.[ix]

### Aphrodite’s link with sex and therefore childbirth is a regular source of threat to Zeus. In Hesiod’s family trees he describes the women during conception as literally “dominated in love by golden Aphrodite”. She is inextricably linked with the birth of those who would later challenge Zeus for example Typhon who Zeus would have to engage in single combat to display his right to his throne.[x] When Zeus fell in love with Thetis (due to Aphrodite’s power) then she was setting him up to have a child that would bring instability to his reign. Involved in the conception of dangerous offspring Aphrodite often brings menace to Zeus’s rule. However Zeus’ reign was partly secured by Aphrodite; his repeated infidelity and the children it produced earned him the title of “father of gods and men”[xi]. This infidelity created a network of kin bound to Zeus through love and familial ties.[xii] This network that entrenched his reign stemmed from Aphrodite’s powers over promiscuity; Aphrodite helped establish his reign and Zeus feared she could just as easily demolish it.

### It is in relation to this threat that we must look at Athena again. The creation of Athena was Zeus’ master stroke in maintaining his reign. Both Ouranos and Kronos tried to maintain their reigns by imprisoning their children; Ouranos locked his children in Tartarus and Kronos ate his children, obviously both failing. The way Zeus managed to maintain his rule was by placing all the gifts that would so dangerous in a son (courage, wisdom, skilled hands) in a daughter: Athena.[xiii] She is all he could want in a trusted lieutenant but as a woman she could not assume the throne from him. And as a virgin goddess she could not continue the line of succession so she represented the end of the succession cycles. With the birth of Athena out of his head Zeus placeed the significance of thought (Athena) above the groin (Aphrodite). Still Aphrodite, with her children, and her link to the higher echelons of divine power posed a threat. Although it should be remembered that whilst Zeus may have feared her power; as a woman Aphrodite also could not have claimed the Olympian throne; it would have been one of her children. Thus Hesiod created Aphrodite to be the “other” in Zeus’s reign, always lurking and posing a subtle threat.

### The Homeric Aphrodite is just as dangerous and Zeus curbed Aphrodite’s influence by placing Athena at the front of his affections. In the Iliad Athena is obviously Zeus’ favourite; in Books 5 and 8 she wears his armour and in book 5 Ares accuses Zeus of ignoring Athena’s unruly behaviour. It is interesting that Ares would slight his father in this way; was this the action of a god jealous of his father’s attention on Athena or a god defending his lover Aphrodite? But Ares wasn’t the only jealous deity around; Athena prized her place as Zeus’ darling. When she believed Zeus favoured Thetis she claimed that “the day shall come when he shall again call me his flashing-eyed darling”[xiv] Athena’s jealousy would also lead her to become far more active in the story of the Iliad. Up until the beginning of Book 4 Aphrodite was one of the most active participants in the story, she instigated the war, saved Paris and persuaded Helen to reprimand Paris’ cowardice. It only took a slight mention from Zeus of Aphrodite’s achievements and Athena and Hera’s relative laziness to make Athena take over a prime divine role in the fighting; hence why several mortals prayed to her believing she would be the deity most likely to act for them.[xv] Zeus was being defensive; Athena could be as powerful as she liked but she could never usurp Zeus, Aphrodite was much more powerful and therefore needed to be limited. By placing Aphrodite’s power in the hands of Athena and trying to replace Aphrodite’s inappropriate contact with humans with Athena’s more demure approach Zeus belittled Aphrodite’s power. By championing Athena’s powers of thought over Aphrodite’s powers over the groin Zeus is distancing himself from his father and grandfather and stopping the cycles of succession. By defending Aphrodite from Athena’s mocking, and then teasing Aphrodite when she is wounded, Zeus brings her into the family and places her under his control. It is through the relations with Athena, Zeus’ greatest weapon that he manages to keep Aphrodite a subtle threat, but still a threat to be wary of. Aphrodite is predominantly a goddess of love but despite the best efforts of Zeus to keep her away from influencing warfare there are many strong links between the spheres of love and war under Aphrodite. She might not have been as war hungry as Ares but there is evidence to suggest she did not do as Zeus told her and just “take care of the pleasures of love and leave the fighting to Ares and Athena”.Aphrodite is the goddess of mixis. Cyrino defines this as “the blending of bodies in intimate physical contact, both sexual and martial.[ii] Her birth shows the martial future she had”. The remarkable act of violence which created her[iii] embodies the violence and antagonism which the ancient Greek poets linked with the intensity of human sexuality.[iv] It also linked her from the beginning of her existence to violence and power struggles. In the Iliad she was the first point of intimate contact between mortals and gods, when saving Aeneas from the battle. She was also the first god to be wounded by a mortal in battle which led other deities to engage in further god-mortal combat, for example Ares and Diomedes.It must be asked how Aphrodite could be comfortable entering a battle. When rescuing Aeneas and Paris is it her passion as a goddess of love that gives her the strength to enter a battle. There are many literary examples of Aphrodite being a goddess not of war but linked to war. In Book Five of the Iliad she rides Ares’ war chariot back to Olympus, in Book 21 she helps Ares away from the battle when wounded[vi], she was married to Hephaistos; maker of weapons and armour and most importantly she was the instigator of the most famous military battle in Greek mythology.[vii] As a result Aphrodite is also responsible for all the honour that is bestowed upon the gods and heroes who fought.[viii] Regardless of whether Aphrodite was actively part of the fighting or not the emotion she embodied was inspiration enough for many fighters to bear arms.[ix]

### Aphrodite’s golden quality is most often associated with objects of power and prestige for example armour, breast plates and spear rings.[xi] Other divine objects with this quality were Zeus’ scales, Apollo’s aegis and Athena’s armour. Instead of being a quality just of beauty it is also one of power, it is another embodiment of mixis. There were physical monuments erected to the war-like Aphrodite. In the 2nd century AD Pausanius mentions the existence of “armed” (hoplismenē) statues of Aphrodite. She may have acquired a militarised personality in Sparta where there was a temple to Aphrodite Aria. This temple suggests that Aphrodite was worshiped as a warrior herself or as a mixis between her and her lover Ares.[xii] It must also not be forgotten that two of Aphrodite and Ares’ children were his followers representing fear (Phobos) and terror (Deimos) she must have had war-like attributes to produce children like them.

### The Aphrodite Hoplismenē may not have been worshiped by the majority but her embodiment of mixis, her relationship with Ares, her instigation of Troy and her bravery in battle all point to her being a goddess of war but with a twist on it. It is a mark of her power that even though she may not have shouldered a weapon like Artemis or Athena that she still caused and actively participated in the greatest war in Greek mythology. Jackson believes that Hera is using Aphrodite’s seductive power to subdue Zeus in order that the other gods could fight unhindered and give advantage to the Greeks in battle. Hera asks Aphrodite if she can borrow the “ornate sash” which contains Aphrodite’s powers of desire and seduction because she wants to unite the quarrelling Tethys and Okeanos. But Hera had “every intention to deceive”[iii]; she used Aphrodite’s power on Zeus giving Poseidon the chance to assist the Argives in bettering the Trojans. Jackson states that whilst this scene recognises Aphrodite’s “awesome power”[iv] it also removes Aphrodite’s power from her control then turns it against Aphrodite and her beloved Trojans. Jackson’s Aphrodite is naive and is easily depowered by Hera.I however believe that Aphrodite knew exactly what she was doing and allowed Hera to use her power to seduce Zeus so that she could gain the upper hand over both of them. Zeus had forbidden the gods to intervene in the Trojan War and it was a strain for the gods to obey. By helping Hera distract Zeus it left the gods open to completely rebel against his rule.But Aphrodite would have also liked getting one over Hera. Relations between them were often hostile for example Hera (with Athena) mocked Aphrodite’s efforts in battle[vii] After Aphrodite fell pregnant by Zeus Hera cursed the unborn Priapus resulting in him being born with unnaturally large genitals leaving him exiled from Olympus. Whilst Aphrodite favoured the Trojans and would do almost anything for them, her pride was more important. Hera had been antagonistic so Aphrodite would have relished the chance to be superior. Aphrodite was a powerful goddess and would have liked that both she and Hera would have known Hera was subordinate to Aphrodite on this occasion.Cyrino introduces the reader to the idea of  Aphrodite embodying the concept of Mixis.  She claims that Aphrodite represents the “blending of bodies in intimate physical contact, both sexual and martial”.[i] Mawr states that in Cyrino overuses of the word mixis and “weakens its effective usefulness as an interpretive tool.[ii]  But I believe that mixis is the starting point to view Aphrodite as a binary goddess linked to many opposites; sea and sky and love and war are the most obvious.Not only is she a goddess of female sexuality but in uniting male and female individuals she encompasses both their sexual ideals. The individuals that she unites were of course not just mortals, any combination of god, titan, nymph or mortal could be united under Aphrodite’s power, either in sex or combat. She was a wife and an adulteress. She has a dual parenthood, in one account she is the offspring of Ouranos alone[iii] in the other she has two parents, Zeus and Dione.[iv] Aphrodite also represented the struggle between the desires of the mind and the groin in her competition for superiority over Athena and to a large extent Zeus. In this competition she also represents the clash between what was expected of a male and female deity.

I interpret Aphrodite’s capacity to represent so many opposites as one of her greatest strengths. Mawr might disagree with Cyrino and say that Aphrodite was not one of the most widely worshiped deities in Ancient Greece\[v\] but I agree with Cyrino. I believe that in some places she received the epithet P*andēmos* meaning “she who belongs to all the people”\[vi\] because with the multitude of different notions that she embodied or were related to her how could she be anything but belonging to all the people?

[crossdressingdeath]

I think it’s bit of both. JC uses fear and intimidation to hold power over people like YZY did more than strength, we see this work with the smaller sect leaders like Sect Leader Yao and Ouyang Zizhen’s dad. It also keeps Yunmeng citizens from bothering him and he goes after weak cultivators (if they’re even cultivators in the first place) that may or may not use even a small amount of demonic cultivation or happen to have the name Wen. He lead the first seige but with the Jin’s help. We’ve never actually heard of a battle he handled with his own strength, the fact he didn’t end the Sunshot Campaign without a title tells us he didn’t have a major influence with the battles (WWX & 3zun) or helping the citizens (like LWJ frequently did outside of battle) as the others did.

We’ve also seen repeatedly that he acts on impulse without think his actions through. Stopping to help YZY instead of stopping Wen Chao’s mistress with the signal flare, choking WWX, leading the wens away and regretting it, declaring WWX a traitor without thinking of the bigger consequences it would bring not just to WWX but him and JYL as well in the long run, going to Guangyin Temple with no plan or backup despite knowing somethings up for Fairy to leave JL’s side.

We’ve never seen him win a big battle or make a rational decision. He definitely uses his position and money that comes with it to rebuild and replace parts of Lotus Pier to make it look like it’s flourishing, but when you lay everything outs he’s just an average level leader with a horrid temper that used fear tactics.

JC rules entirely through fear and money. That’s... honestly probably half the reason why everyone knew that WWX was the real power behind the throne post-Sunshot; WWX had so much power, and JC was clearly benefiting from it while... let’s face it, not really being anything special himself. I really do think that part of JC’s purpose in the story is being this guy who really shouldn’t have any degree of power who got that power by virtue of his bloodline and the actual earned power of the one guy who had been raised to be incredibly loyal to his family. And then that situation went exactly as you’d expect a terrible person being given incredible power without ever having to actually work for it a day in his life (yeah, he fought a war, but the lack of any mention of great deeds weakens that argument, plus he would’ve gotten the power if the war hadn’t happened so it wasn’t something he earned through noble deeds in battle or anything) to go. JC just... isn’t a leader. Not a good one, anyway. He would’ve been happier if he hadn’t become sect leader, and it would’ve been better for the people under his control.