#writes a story about character who gets their memory altered to the point of warping their reality and who they are supposed to be

[dizzydennis]

My ideas for Sonic Riders 4!

Title:

Sonic Riders: Drift Dimension

I have a lot of ideas for a potential Sonic Riders sequel and I hope you can enjoy what I have to say. I am very passionate about the Sonic series and would love to see the Babylon Rogues again. I wrote a lot, but any comments or feedback would be wonderful! Check it out under this cut!

Story:

I would like the story mode to continue to split between Team Sonic and the Babylon Rogues. For the sake of making this cohesive, I will write out the narrative linearly.

Set a few years after King Doc’s tournament, Wave has convinced Jet to allow her to continue to investigate Babylon Garden even more under the promise that it would improve their Extreme Gears. The 3 Babylon Rogues go deep within the ruins of Babylon Garden by using their gravity modules (from Zero Gravity.) Wave is still worried about the black hole that could occur, but her calculations assure her that it won’t be a problem. However, while in the heart of this floating island, the gravity modules float into the rocky ruins and activate a bright light as Babylon Garden powers up.

Tails pilots the Tornado with Sonic, Knuckles, and Amy in tow. He detected the massive energy surge that cause Babylon Garden to light up. It seems like the garden is warping reality around it, but with their courage, they enter into the void.

It seems that Babylon Garden has teleported to another world. With their airship being grounded due to the warp, the Babylon Rogues hop onto their Extreme Gears to explore. Before long, they encounter a massive airship that completely dwarfs their own. Upon being captured, they learn that Jet’s father, Kaze, is the leader of this group known as the Babylon Legion. The Rogues have been reunited with their ancestors and family. Naturally, they’re overjoyed! Especially Jet who has been longing for his father for years.

Shortly after, Sonic and his friends encounter the airship and are reunited with the Babylon Rogues. Their fun meeting soon turns dire as the Babylon Legion surround and arrest Knuckles.

Later, Jet inquires about why they apprehended Knuckles. Kaze explains that years ago when they crash landed on Sonic’s planet, they had encountered a terrible Echidna Clan who were power hungry to conquer others. When the Babylon Legion refused to give their advance technology to the Echidna Clan, they were seen as enemies. When there were murmurs that the Echidna Clan had awakened a god of destruction, the Babylon Legion tried to get reactivate Babylon Garden to allow them to leave the planet.

Instead, Babylon Garden was stricken deep into the planet and the Babylon Legion was warped to parts unknown. Jet was baffled by what he heard, but he trusted his father. Upon meeting with Sonic and the others, they discuss what happened and that there were plenty of holes in Kaze’s story. Jet, upset that others would accuse his father, argues with them. However, there was one point that Storm brings up that cannot be ignored. How were Jet, Wave, and Storm on Sonic’s planet if the Babylon Legion were teleported to this planet?

They learn that when they were younger, Kaze had volunteered the three for an experiment to see if they could return, but in doing so, the 3 Babylon Rogues were stranded on their own with no real memory of what had happened.

The Babylon Rogues have to choose between siding with Team Sonic or the Babylon Legion, but they soon find out that Kaze intends to use his technology to convert Babylon Garden into Mecha Babylon. Having learned from the Echidna Clan, power needs to be met with power. Therefore, Kaze wants to teleport back to Sonic’s planet with Mecha Babylon being the ultimate weapon; a fortified island with weapons and a metal shell.

All the heroes band together to stop Kaze from reaching the inner ruins of Babylon Garden to allow it to teleport back to Sonic’s planet. During the climax, Kaze activates the portal only for Sonic and Jet to work together to knock him off of it. Torn between going with Sonic or staying with Kaze and the Babylon Legion, Jet ultimately decides that he must go back with Sonic. He claims that “The Babylon Legion had their chance,” as Sonic grabs his hand and the two dive into the portal.

Cut back to Sonic’s planet, Babylon Garden continues to float around the planet, perfectly reflecting Angel Island. Here, Knuckles and Storm reflect that the Echidna Clan and the Babylon Legion were a lot more similar than they were different. Wave notes that it isn’t one’s lineage that defines who they are, but what they do to better that lineage for future generations. Jet and Sonic use that as a means to claim that they’re the fastest as they race across Babylon Garden. Kaze’s words echo through Jet’s mind as he overtakes Sonic and the two ride off into the distance.

Stages:

Tundra Peaks / Frigid Avalanche – A snowbound stage high in the mountains that mixes canyons, rocky hillsides, and snow. The former stage features nice, mountain villages while the latter stage takes place with massive avalanches falling around the player.

Future Mall / Shopping Calamity – A futuristic city that leads into a massive shopping mall. Players would weave in and out of stores while making their way to a large building outside. The latter stage would be at night where a certain band of robots might be trying to get away with a robbery and chase.

Tubular Coastline / Hurricane Seaboard – A gorgeous beach that runs along side an advance city. You can choose to ride along the sand or take to the waves to get some boosts by performing tricks on the water. Be careful of the storm coming in the latter stage that alters the stage in a crazy way!

Thrill Park / Cursed Midway – A theme park with roller coasters, log flumes, and plenty of other rides. Be warned though, the haunted house gets a bit intense at night and changes the entire park!

Neon Woodland / Forest Illumination – A forest hidden within a valley that glows with luminous mushrooms and vines that glow as they are touched. This place really comes alive late at night when a rave party is going on!

Babylon Garden / Mecha Babylon – While not a remake of the original Sonic Riders track, this version would start on the outside of Babylon Garden as you go deep within the floating island. The mechanized version of this stage is far more dangerous with lasers and robots about; players would fire themselves across the island via giant turrets. Mecha Babylon would be the final boss fight against Kaze.

Dimension Hops / Nostalgia Trip – This is a bonus track where you hop between dimensional pockets of Metal City, Aquatic Capital, and Dolphin Resort. It’s a celebration of the Sonic Riders series. Nostalgia Trip sends players through Green Hill Zone (of course it’s here), Final Rush, and Sunset Heights. This one celebrates the Sonic series. These two tracks would not share music.

SEGA Heroics / SEGA Darkness – Much like the other SEGA fan service stages in the series, this one instead separates the two stages between the heroes of SEGA’s rich history and the villains. Lots of fun to be had here!

Playable Characters:

Sonic the Hedgehog, Miles Tails Prower, Knuckles the Echidna, Jet the Hawk, Wave the Swallow, Storm the Albatross, Amy Rose, Kaze the Hawk, Shadow the Hedgehog, Rouge the Bat, Cream the Rabbit, Blaze the Cat, Silver the Hedgehog, Vector the Crocodile, Dr. Eggman, NiGHTS, Kazuma Kiryu, Arle Nadja

Gameplay:

The gameplay would avoid the failings of Sonic Free Riders. Motion controls have been pushed since Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity and they’d be mostly dropped here. The game would implement the AIR system, but with the multiple routes with the gravity modules. Due to plot reasons, the gravity modules themselves can’t be used, so this mechanic would just be a movement of the Extreme Gears. Speed, Fly, and Power routes would still be available based on the characters and not the gears... and would hopefully be better balanced. The springs would be taken out as they were so painfully contextual in previous games. One thing from Sonic Free Riders would be certain items to change the course of the races including missiles, ink traps, and a few others. The grab mechanic to reach out to the left or right can be brought over too as it holds a lot of potential. Also, the vibrant visuals from Free Riders should be carried over! Moreover, the boost from the original game would be present. Lastly, the game would feel faster. Drifting, much like Team Sonic Racing would be emphasized more in this game.

Typical features would include the Story, Grand Prix, Battle Mode, Time Trials, Character Profiles, Gear Shop, Gear Gallery, Online Multiplayer, and Options. Let’s have alternate costumes for the characters too! Also, the Grand Prix mode would have character specific endings that would be simplistic, but still a treat and motivation to play through it with each character!

That’s basically it for my ideas. I know it’s just a pipe dream, but I would love for a Sonic Riders game to really get into the old stories and characterizations of the original two games, while adding some heart for the Babylon Rogues. It doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel, but rather just create a fun racing game that focuses on these amazing characters.

[scarlet--wiccan]

(1/?) The MCU is going on a specific direction and might touch Wanda's history of mental illness. Maybe talk about that when you have the time? Wanda was going on a nice direction before all that happened.

Whew! Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer this— I have several super-long message chains like this one in my inbox and they’re hard to parse through and harder still to write a real answer for. I’m gonna try through a couple of these today.

Well, I think you hit all the important points here-- the optics of a mixed-raced family of first- and second- gen Holocaust survivors committing mass acts of terrorism, becoming rulers of a fascist, supremacist regime, and then, finally, committing pseudo-genocide, are, you know, not great. These are complicated characters whose representation can easily swing in either really positive or really, really negative directions, but this goes beyond the pale for me, especially given the proximity to 9/11.

The portrayal of Wanda's mental illness during this time, while not wholly unsympathetic, is wildly inaccurate and generally played as a horror motif. I'm not an expert on schizophrenia, but I think we can all agree that it's high time we moved past exploiting sick and disabled people's experiences for cheap scares. It's especially frustrating because Wanda, as a character, does have ground for poignant stories about mental illness-- she's had numerous traumatic experiences, starting with generational trauma and a lifetime of violent discrimination, and ending, at that point, with the deaths of her young children and the abrupt dissolution of her marriage. Her mental health should be addressed, but not in a way that demonizes illness or characterizes sick people as villains. One thing I appreciate about Robinson's Scarlet Witch is that it represents her mental illness in a very human, matter of fact manner and gives her the power to take control of her own wellness. She has realistic symptoms and pursues realistic treatments, instead of, you know, making hallucination constructs and getting mind-probed by Charles fucking Xavier.

Wanda is simultaneously infantilized and vilified in these stories-- she's denied agency at every turn, and yet, Wolverine and the other "heroes" of this saga view her with unbridled contempt, and most of them are immediately ready to murder her in the name of justice, even before the "no more mutants" spell was cast. You wondered how Bendis was able to inspire such a long lasting hatred of Wanda, and I think the simple answer is that almost every character in House of M hates Wanda. The characters you root for, the characters whose perspectives dictate the tone of the story, direct palpable fury towards her, and even those who aren't out for her blood don't extend any actual empathy towards her-- most are ambivalent to her wellbeing, while Xavier and Strange are incredibly paternalistic.

The final spell, "no more mutants", has baffled me for years. You're spot-on in saying that Wanda here represents a self-hating minority, but it's really hard for me to understand how she could have reached that point. It's not consistent with her previous characterization, nor is it thematically connected to the factors which led to her breakdown. Bendis places the onus of her condition on Erik, alleging that he abandoned and abused his children in his fanatic commitment to the mutant cause, which, besides being a willful misinterpretation of canon, has nothing to do with Wanda's current circumstance-- she's like this because Agatha Harkness altered her memories, because the Avengers continuously gaslit her, and becaue Mephisto killed her kids in the first place. It has nothing to do with Magneto, and Wanda's breakdown has nothing to do with mutant politics. She and Pietro were raised in a loving family until their adoptive parents were killed by racists. Erik didn't knowingly abandon them, and while he did mistreat them during the Brotherhood days, it wasn't parental abuse because he wasn't a father figure to them-- neither party had any idea they were related. Bendis is evoking specific forms of trauma that never actually happened, while ignoring the ones that did, and the effects of the spell itself are vague and seemingly random.

~~~~~

Young Avengers does call back to Wanda's circumstances in Disassembled and HoM, but it doesn't execute the concept of reality-warping in the same way. The driving force in YA is the spell which Billy casts, and Loki tampers with, in the first issue. It is a spell which distorts reality, but it has specific parameters, and neither party is characterized as "crazy" the way Wanda was. The spell was intended to bend space and time so that Billy could pull Teddy's mom from the past, before she was killed, into the present-- it's not dissimilar from how Wanda "retroactively reincarnated" her kids. Due to Loki's interference, however, the spell was hijacked by an interdimensional parasite called Mother. The Mother virus appears primarily as a construct of Teddy's mom, but as her influence over the Earth-616 dimension grows, she's able to create constructs of other dead parents, and even mind-control living adults. All of the ways in which reality is being warped hinge on the specific conditions under which Mother was summoned, and while it is Billy's magic that's fueling these constructs and distortions, they aren't symptoms of psychosis-- Billy doesn't lose control of his magic because he's losing his mind, he loses control because he's too young and inexperienced to protect himself from predatory forces. Those forces do take advantage of his depression and anxiety, but his condition is never the cause.

Loki's magic is wrapped up in the spell, too, but rather than conjuring dead parents, it emerges as a construct of their former best friend, Leah. Loki, in Young Avengers, is a mashup of two personae-- the reincarnated child Loki, and Ikol, a phantom of their past life who is carrying out the previous Loki's evil will even though their heart isn't in it. Ikol has mostly overshadowed Loki, who has been reduced to a ghost that torments Ikol by acting as a constant reminder of their guilt. Ikol is haunted by their past, but it's important that this haunting is a nuanced metaphor and not literal hallucination, as Wanda's condition was in HoM. Because Loki's power is part of the spell, Kid Loki's ghost is able to hijack the reality distortions to summon the construct of Leah, who, in turn, is able to summon the Young Avengers' other exes, the same way that Mother, in the form of Teddy's dead mom, can summon other dead parents.

Loki does raise the question of whether or not Billy might be subconsciously influencing Teddy with his powers, but this is clearly illustrated as a manipulation tactic and disproven several times. Loki's original goal in summoning Mother was to draw out Billy's full magical potential so that they could steal his power for themselves. Driving a wedge between Billy and Teddy, and causing Billy to question his own sanity, were devices to make Billy more susceptible to having his power stolen, and they worked-- Billy is not able to divest his magic from the spell and banish Mother from Earth-616 until he overcomes his self-doubt and start exercising mindfulness. Loki, in turn, is not able to divest their power from the spell and banish Leah and the other exes until they own up to their guilt and admit everything they've done. Both characters are experiencing symptoms of exacerbated mental illness-- Billy's depression and suicidal ideation, Loki's disassociation-- but their mental illness is not the source of their magic, but a challenge which makes it harder for them to live as their fully realized selves... just as it would be for any normal person.

I know that was a long-winded explanation, but I wanted to illustrate what sets Gillen's take on "reality warping" apart from Bendis's. It's based on clearly though-out ideas of how magic works and what defines "reality" in a world populated by parallel universes and living myth-forms. Gillen affords Loki and Billy a degree of sympathy without denying them agency, and Loki is held accountable for their decisions without being painted as a total monster. Bendis, meanwhile, characterizes Wanda's magic as delusion made real, and completely vilifies her for her illness in spite of the fact that she's given no control over her actions.

[reluctant-fan-girl]

My thoughts on 139 as an Ereri shipper

Buckle up for a long read and some unpopular opinions haha. Feel free to add on/ correct me but this is only how I feel so take it with a pinch of salt, I'm not asking anyone to change how they feel because we're all feeling some feels right now and your grief is valid. I just really wanna talk about the chapter before I go back to my Yaoi ship. (Forgive my grammar errors and all I wrote this at 5am and I'll probably come back and fix the spelling and stuff later today)

Thoughts on ch 139:

Well... here we are guys. The last chapter, it's been one hell of a ride and even though I have only been a part of the community for three years I'm still sad it ended. (Not to mention it finished 4 days before my birthday but that's just an extra oof) I keep seeing a lot of Mikasa hate and even though I used to despise her this chapter really got me thinking and damn, she's definitely one of the strongest characters (second to Levi at least in terms of resolve but hey I'm biased lol) she killed the person she loved, who pushed her away time and time again, and until the very end wanted to save him yet she was the one who ended it all. I doubt I could do that if my girlfriend was doing something similar... but I guess most people are like that. I admit, when I read the chapter at work I began crying in the break room, not because the ending caught me off guard, it was about what I was expecting, but I'm still sad Eren died. All this stuff was foreshadowed through especially the last few chapters and I kind of hopped into the manga around when Zeke blew Levi up, and even then... I feel like I knew this would be how it turned out some time last year? It was mostly predictable since this story, from it's inception, has done nothing but break the shonen stereotype time and time again and this was just the kind of ending that would shatter the mould and make it worthy of that moniker. Now am I happy that Eremika is canon? Not really, in fact not at all I'm mad. Although tbh it's not that I really expected a same sex, age gap relationship to be canon in mainstream manga, but this is what fan fiction is made for right? Besides as much as this manga has challenged or straight up ignored it's very obvious what the intended ship was going to be from the start. Even still the confession at the end by Eren is honestly OOC from most of everything else he's said/done and feels forced but, 🤷🏻‍♀️ like... the ending would have been better if Eren's feelings stayed vague so we could come to our own conclusion. If I had my way I'd have Eren confessing to Levi and they'd run off to live in secret but again... that isn't how it ended and I'm accepting that even if I don't like it. (Plus I can read/write a fanfic of a 'better' ending to make myself feel better) but I'm glad I stuck around for such a bitter sweet end.

Eren's character:

Now I love Eren as much as anyone else, but I see lots of people crying "character assassination" and I feel this personally isnt true at least not completely. We're all grieving right now and I know he was so cute and lovable at the start (hell in a way he still is) but this has always been his character. He is the one who most desperately yearns for freedom because feels trapped by his fate more than anyone else. The line "I felt like I had to and I let myself get caught up in the flow" is proof he *knows* he isn't free despite his father's reassurance, and his own repetition of the phrase. There's a common phenomenon with mantras or the practice of repeating something over and over in your head, the more you say it, *the less you believe it* and IMHO Eren never really felt free from the start. He knew his fate was sealed and he probably could have, no... *should* have acted differently yet he himself couldn't change what fate had in store. He just kept moving forward for no other reason than he wanted to save Mikasa, Armin, and his people. He (may have?) sacrificed Carla, not to serve as motivation, but so that he could save Armin later on by eating the Colossal titan instead of burning to death. It must have been a heart wrenching choice to make but he cares for his friends more than anyone else. He gave them a fighting chance and his death gave the alliance a good name so the world (or the 20% left of it) would see they aren't the same as him. Of course I'm thinking, "What if he had Dina free Carla or just let her eat Bert I mean Grisha probably would have passed on the Attack titan to Eren even if Carla had lived," but Armin very well could've died in another way or things could've turned out so much worse for everyone else. But even if Eren hates his choice I think something to note here is he doesn't seem to regret it, taking some of Levi's advice with him to the grave (quite literally) Plus you guys have to remember he died at 19 years old, that is *young* and I may only be a few years older but 18-21 is a huge period of change and you wont make the best choices, he's dealing with all that on top of the memories of the other titan holders, and the founding titan which I think really messed with him more than anything. He even says he only wants to live 10 more years ;-; the poor thing deserved a full life too even if his perception of time is warped and he never got a chance to become an adult.

The aftermath:

Well, everyone seems happy for the most part which is great! The one thing that I didn't expect was for the ending to be bitter sweet rather than total annihilation. Historia really does seem... fuck it I don't know and this is the part that bugs me most is she never really got the ending she deserved and felt kinda... forgotten? It's hard to tell but I think she ended up loving her child in the end... maybe... she's smiling while holding her... right? Levi is out beyond the walls and he may be wheelchair bound and half blind but he's still alive! Now this is honestly my saving grace here I mean god imagine him surviving a literal bomb only to die such a lame and pointless death in the last chapter. My boy made it through everything though and he's still got them dad vibes with Gabi and Falco which is kinds sweet... but I still hate Gabi. I still really hate Gabi, but it's nice to see that they're all somewhat okay. (Plus okay... Eren Canonically being reborn as a bird is kinda hilarious yet fitting since he got his freedom... Parasitic Jaeger haha good one Isayama.) Who knows if the war will ever end, heck Isayama himself said this is only the begining and while the fight goes on they have a chance thanks to Eren sacrificing himself the way he did. He could've made so many other choices and I don't know what could've/would've been better. Maybe Isayama knows but time travel and altering the past opens a whole ass can of worms that is just... like the killing your grandpa paradox kinda thing and if I were writing this story I wouldn't wanna try and deal with that either, especially after writing one story for eleven years.

(LEVI LIVED MY BEST BOI LIVED WHOOOO YESS 😭😭😭 ALL I COULD ASK FOR AHHH) *cough* sorry I had some crying fan girl in me that demanded to be seen too

Anyways this was just my thoughts for now, I may eventually write more and hell I'll probably go back to sweet sweet denial myself, posting contradictions because dammit I love my ereri too much and some people have good points or some posts are just funny in general. Have a good day, stay safe, and we are all in this together <3 Thanks for reading all the way if you did! (And here's a good meme to lighten the mood too)

[bettsfic]

Hello! Betty, I read your new fic and I love it and I was wondering if you have any advice when it comes to writing a character with PTSD?

well first i think it’s important to figure out whether your character has PTSD or C-PTSD which may seem similar but have some major symptomatic differences. with PTSD, a character’s trauma can be pinpointed to one (or several) major events. with C-PTSD, the trauma is/was longstanding. 

for example (and this is a very reductive example for a very complicated thing), if you survive a shooting and have post-traumatic stress after that, you may become hypervigilant in public spaces, and avoid keeping your back to a room. you might be triggered by the sound of popping. you might avoid places with large crowds, or similar places to wherever the shooting occurred. you might develop trust issues. overall, an individual trespass occurred that reshaped your understanding of reality. that’s PTSD.

but let’s say you were in an abusive relationship for five years. every time you spoke up, you were screamed down. maybe you were hit. maybe you were gaslit. that situation is a long-term, ongoing trespass to your understanding of yourself and reality. it turns the ground beneath your feet into sand. 

once, my emdr therapist asked me to focus on my “moment of trauma” as if there were only one and i would be able to recall it. and i had to explain to her that i couldn’t do that, it was just all bad. there was no one thing to point out. that’s what sucks about C-PTSD -- it’s not in the DSM yet (afaik) and the treatment for it is the same as PTSD even though it’s completely different. (the year of your story, btw, is really important, because PTSD was only put in the DSM in the 70s, and as i mentioned, C-PTSD still doesn’t technically exist from a diagnostic standpoint. so if your character seeks treatment, the year is important to consider).

emdr is a super effective therapeutic tool that helped me a lot, but it only helped with one single moment of my life, and didn’t touch on any of the rest. that’s another thing about trauma: it’s not relative. what gives me post-traumatic stress might not affect somebody else at all. it might just roll off them. conversely, what someone else might be hurt by may not bother me in the slightest. for example, my ex-bf pulled a knife on me once. other than thinking about that moment probably more than i should, it didn’t really alter my perception of myself or reality. he was an asshole, i knew he was an asshole, and he was acting in a way that was congruent with the person i knew him to be. moreover, by that point i had way unchecked C-PTSD so my perspective of Good and Bad was totally warped. to me, it made sense that he would hurt me. men hurting me was in line with my beliefs of reality. that’s a situation where earlier PTSD affects the perception of trespasses later on.

but my next boyfriend who never laid a hand on me eventually cheated on me, and that was like a kick in the teeth. it pushed me down and kept me down. i lost all of my confidence, i believed i wasn’t worthy of love, that i was disgusting and worthless. and i think it hurt so much because i had worked so hard to become who he wanted me to be and make him happy (we had a very unhealthy codependent relationship, and i thought it was my duty to conform to his needs in any way i could), and i saw our breakup as a personal failing. more importantly, i never thought he would do something like that. it was a total betrayal of everything i thought he was, and it made me hesitant to trust other people.

that was the memory i chose in one of my emdr sessions, and it helped a lot. it was a single moment i could lock down and attribute to many of my negative self-beliefs. and it was kind of amazing, that i walked into that office still, years later, painfully in love with this dude, and i walked out not caring about him at all.

in another emdr session, i focused on my dad dying. it didn’t help at all, because i certainly didn’t blame myself for his death. what i was struggling with was how much i loved him while feeling guilty for being relieved that he was finally gone. and in a more complicated way, i was also angry at him that he died before he could realize how horrible he treated my mom, sister, and i, and he never managed to apologize. emdr couldn’t begin to touch that knot of confusion. and so, to this day, i’m still trying to work it out.

anyway, back to writing.

the point i’m trying to get at is that to write a character with PTSD, you have to Know them. who they were before the trespass and how it shaped the person they became. if they were abused their entire lives, their development will be completely distorted. they may have trouble understanding right from wrong, especially in regards to themselves (which is why villain origin stories have a lot to do with a major trespass; it can alter your ability to morally reason). they may not know how to love without hurting themselves or someone else. they may believe that love looks like pain. they may have such insidious negative self-beliefs that compliments just slide right off of them. they are probably not self-pitying (although they could be). rather, their incorrect beliefs about the world are simply unshakeable. they might be afraid of everything, afraid of nothing, or afraid of weird things. they might be triggered by something clearly relating to their trauma, or triggered by something so strange and obscure and complicated it’s hard to see it as a trigger. they might fly off the handle when triggered, or they might dissociate for days on end, or both. they might be extremely performative and obsessed with how other people perceive them. they might be constantly attuned to their own body. they might see themselves from outside of themselves, through multiple lenses, in order to craft the image of themselves they want to be seen. they might do this as a safety measure, so as to be agreeable and pleasant and potentially stave off any harm that might come to them. they might be a people-pleaser. they may not have any access to their own emotions and have to find them through alternate means. they may be more prone to hurting themselves and other people, and not realize that doing so is wrong, because to them, pain might be a totally neutral thing. similarly, they may not be sad when people die, because they’ve always seen death as a peaceful escape. they might have drastic mood swings. they might not have moods at all. they might be impulsive and risk-taking. they might be prone to bouts of psychosis, depression, anxiety. they might have had hundreds of hours of therapy and still have not begun to chip through the surface of their trauma. they might not know their own trauma, or they might be acutely aware of it, and regardless, it will affect them the same. they might fixate on their trauma, or they might not be able to remember it. they may have a complicated relationship with memory. they may not have a strong grip on reality, or they may doubt their perception of it. they may easily fall into relationships with narcissists and sociopaths. they might constantly set other people’s needs over their own. conversely, they may be selfish and self-serving when it comes to very specific things. they may not be able to accept good love and affection, and they may sabotage their own health and happiness. they may not see this as a problem.

ultimately, to learn how to write a character with PTSD, you should be watching/reading everything whose characters you admire through the lens of trauma. ask yourself: how have the ways they’ve been hurt shape the person they’ve become? how is their worldview and self-perspective distorted by the negative events that define them? who would they be if those events had not occurred?

hope this helps. thanks for the great question!

writing advice tag | patreon

[deadmomjokes]

ooh I'm so curious about your boon now. how myc of it are you willing to disclose? what's the setting? how does magic work?

I’m so flattered anybody’s interested in it at all! ^.^

I confess, I’m super, irrationally paranoid about idea theft, so I don’t share a ton of details outside of my writing group and alpha/beta readers, but I’m trying to get past that, so I’ll share a little bit and see if I can talk my anxiety down to sharing more later. Basically I say this to apologize for the fact that I’m being a bit vague here. It’s not because I’m offended you asked or anything, I’ve just got some issues of my own.

So the basic premise in a really shortened, simplified, and condensed version is as follows:

About 15 years before the story begins, there was a war with an evil sorceress. She basically converted all the other magicians to her side and they were just absolutely annihilating everyone. Three countries formed an alliance and ended up taking her out. Huzzah, day saved! The story picks up right before a big festival in honor of the 15th anniversary of the alliance’s formation. The alliance, while originally a military compact, has kind of spread into a trade compact as well.

The main character is the right hand to the King who initiated the alliance in the first place. His name is Ayris. He has no last name (other than his title, “Kingsman”) because he more or less washed up on shore and the King found him. He was kidnapped as a child from his home country by some of the sorceress’s goons and had his memory wiped and they intended to bring him to the Sorceress as a kind of sacrifice. Because he’s super magic. Only after they left is when the alliance was formed and so they had no idea that the war had ended and their boss was dead. They get home and go “oh crap,” and the King rescues this little boy and goes “oh crap” because this kid is magic, and people are kind of super duper against magic right now on account of the fact that magic folks just tried to wipe them all out. But he’s a big softie and doesn’t want anything to happen to this kid so he takes him in to keep him safe. Over the years, he realizes Ayris has a talent for fighting and is super smart and super observant, so he promotes him from ward to his bodyguard, and then to a kind of all-around advisor.

And that’s where Ayris starts his journey: Content with being his King/adoptive father’s right hand man, and hiding his magical abilities because if anyone knew he’d more or less get burned at the stake.

The complications?

First, one of the nations in the alliance is super xenophobic, and they don’t like that Ayris is a “foreigner.” Even though the poor kid has no memories other than the country in which he now lives. But he ~looks different~ too- he has dark skin, white hair, and blue eyes, in a country full of tan-ish average white folks- so there’s no hiding the fact that he’s not originally from here. So he’s got to deal with all that while still acting as the King’s right hand, which means he cannot avoid the xenophobes’ leader because he’s gonna be right there with the guy the whole time.

And, of course, we have the Big Problem: The Sorceress managed to survive, as most evil magicians will, of course, and she’s back because she has a score to settle. Specifically with Ayris’s King, who dealt the ‘killing’ blow. Which, another major subplot: Ayris does not know that. He has a Batman code about killing. He refuses to take a life, and as far as he knows, the King shares that determination, because he’s very vocal about talking things out instead of resorting to violence. All that is a very formative concept for Ayris. So when he finds out that his King saw no other way to deal with things and resorted to straight up killing, he has... a LOT to process. Because....

The issue is that the Sorceress needs batteries, essentially. She’s almost out of power just from sustaining her spirit for a decade and a half. So she subsumes all the kids who had been born magic and didn’t know it since her downfall, only surprise! When she reaches out to snatch them, she finds a grown man! Ayris is all like, “Excuse? Who are you and what do you want with all these small children?” and she’s like, “Excuse? I ate all the magicians last time.” and he’s like “I beg your pardon?” Because it turns out that after she turned the magicians to her side, she decided that was too much a liability and so she snatched all their powers, killing them. Why did she decide they were a liability? Another subplot! A few of them resisted her and tried to break free of her control, but it went horribly wrong and only one of them survived, but was totally severed from her magic powers. We actually meet that character- she’s a major foil (and hardcore frenemy) for Ayris.

BUT ANYWAY

The Sorceress and Ayris are now more or less linked because of the way magic works in this world, and she’s bent on turning him or controlling him because he’s pretty dang powerful. (Which is why her goon squad kidnapped him in the first place.) She has all kinds of tricks and is basically pushing buttons from the inside to break him down, so he’s dealing with an evil lady in his head who’s attached to his powers. So of course the easiest way to isolate and mess with him would be to mess with his magic and make it hard to control. So he’s trying to keep the King safe from her hit squad, make nice with the xenophobes, and hide his powers despite this chick messing with him and trying to out him. They also have to find a way to get rid of her before she builds her army up again and goes for Round 2, and find a way to get her out of his head before she manages to take him over like she did to all the other magic folks last time.

As for how magic works, it’s described in text as a second world laying over the top of this one. Most people exist in only one world, the one you where your body is, and that’s where their soul lives, too. But some people are born with part of their soul in the other world, called the Tapestry. These people have the ability to manipulate things in the physical world because of this connection to the Tapestry. They also have an inherent connection to everyone else who is a part of the Tapestry, hence how the Sorceress can consume peoples’ power and influence them so easily. Of course, doing anything to influence or harm others in the Tapestry was always taboo, she’s just the first that managed it on a large scale and escaped the punishment.

Powers could be more or less unlimited in type and scope, but because you still exist in the physical world as well, you’re bound by your body. What happens to you in the physical happens to you in the Tapestry, and vice versa. So if you kill someone’s Tapestry self, their body dies. If you hurt someone’s physical body, their Tapestry self is also hurt. (The sorceress managed to discover a way to separate her physical and Tapestry selves, and that’s how she escaped death.) But the point is, doing magic takes energy from your body, so the more and bigger you do, the harder it is, and you could, in theory, kill yourself if you tried something big enough.

Most magicians have a specific kind of magic that comes most naturally for them, so they would often specialize. Anyone can do any kind of magic, but individuals would often train in what “called to them” most. So one guy might specialize in telekinesis, another might specialize in all things water, one might specialize in healing humans, etc. The only kind of magic that was forbidden was altering or influencing peoples’ minds or will, and that’s what made the sorceress evil- she felt drawn to/called by Feelings, other peoples’ emotions. She was a natural empath, and wanted to turn that into manipulating how people felt and thought in order to settle conflict, but that was forbidden. She didn’t want to be controlled, so she ran away from the others, started exploring and experimenting on her own, and started messing with things that she shouldn’t have and ended up kind of warping her own sense of justice and morality by toying with things she couldn’t control or understand. So now she’s bent on domination and subjugation of people who won’t willingly listen to her, all in the name of trying to bring peace and balance and justice (which was the code of the magical order she belonged to).

I know that’s long to be a summary, but this is a very, VERY long and complex story. To the point that this is going to be two books minimum. I’m about 15 chapters into the first one and working on the first round of structural edits so I can get on to writing the back half of it (more like the back 3/4, like I said, this is going to be a LONG story).

Oh, you also asked about setting! I confess to yet another late-Middle Ages European base, but culturally I tried to diversify more. The country of Xenophobes is a polytheistic theocracy with notions of manifest destiny that they’re just barely holding back on because they’re friends with the neighbors now. The country the story takes place in is culturally not super religious, and highly tolerant for the most part, which is why it’s so sad that everyone turned against the idea of magic. The third country straddles the line between the hyperconservative and frankly quite annoying theocracy and the (moderately agnostic) more liberal, understanding nation to their south. They also have a pantheon, but they allow religious freedom (also, fun tidbit, their King is gay and has a husband and an adopted son); however, they don’t allow women in combat (whereas the country Ayris is a part of does), and the people are generally more skeptical of foreigners than Ayris’s country is (except their king; he LOVES Ayris and is more or less the fun uncle).

So yeah! Book One is Ayris discovering a lot about himself, magic, and the past, and dealing with the fallout from that, and trying to find a way to protect himself and his King. And Book Two is the bigger, multinational conflict and inevitable war, and Ayris dealing with the sorceress attacking him personally and trying to find a way to stop her while the world starts falling apart around him. I don’t want to say too much more because some Stuff Goes Down in the first book that’s influential to the second one, but also kind of a surprise at this point.

Thanks for listening and letting me gush. I’ve been working on this story-- the concept, worldbuilding, and then the actual writing of it-- for a cumulative 8 years now. It’s my baby almost as much as my actual baby, and I’m very protective of it and also terrified of letting anyone see it. The mortifying ordeal of being known and all that. (Luckily my writing group is super helpful, patient, and kind!)

[jeanjauthor]

Hello I came from the ask on waoiaf. I’m a different anon but I thought your answer was pretty cool. Hope you do not mind me asking but I am in a similar boat with merging two cultures. I am making a female prevelant book with five female POV’s and most are in the merchant world which I took inspired from the late mediveal- Renaissance Italian era, I have two that are in the nobility which takes more after 16th century France and partakes in Salic law. Do you have any worldbuilding fem tips?

I don’t mind being asked, no worries!  My thoughts & ideas might work, or might not, but then that’s true for any answer I’d give, lol.  It all depends on the situation.

Okay...so if I understand correctly, it’s not real-world history, but you’ve got a created world culture with some late medieval Italian renaissance flair and some age of exploration French aristocracy with Salic law issues.  Had to look up Salic law, lol (for those curious, the wiki article is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salic_law ), but yeah...basically criminal laws that evolved to include inheritance laws & patriarchal/misogyny based issues as well, predominantly the “women cannot inherit titles /powers /duties /property” bs for royalty & nobility...

Mkay, first question, and this is a genuine one:  Is it necessary to have misogyny imposed by law for inheritances?  If so, is it part of the story, driving either the plot or the character’s struggles and growth?  If so for either of those, remembering that you’re writing for a modern audience (and that readers’ tastes have shifted quite a bit in the last 10 years alone!), are these issues going to be addressed in the story and overcome in a meaningful way?

These questions are predicated on the basis that you’re not writing real-world history, but rather a created world based upon, but not dependent on, these incorporated influences.

One of the reasons why patriarchy & misogyny are so heavily incorporated into European history is because of the patriarchal & misogynistic influences of the Christian Church after around 300 CE, iirc; my memory of the exact dates is fuzzy, but that’s about when it gets going--prior to this point, the Christian Church was a lot more egalitarian.  So egalitarian, in fact, that many major early Church leaders were women, to the point that it actually started to overshadow the standards of Roman custom, culture, & law of the day--Roman women could own property and run businesses, even if they couldn’t vote...but the Christians! *le gasp!* They were letting women vote on how their cultural government should be run??

Yeah, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, not in a widespread way...but at some point, male leaders in positions of power (secular and/or religious) decided to NOPE women out of positions of power, to make them second class citizens, and even nope them all the way down into being barefoot preggers in the kitchen, etc, chattel.  They used the Christian religion as their vehicle to gain power, influence, and dominance over society, warping the original Christian culture and its values away from egalitarianism.

But that is the real world.  So does your created world have that kind of religious /historical /cultural influence?  This is important because we know that in our world’s history, Salic law remained pretty firmly in place for well over a thousand years...and we’re still fighting to change it for the better today.  Your world is different.

If the inherent misogyny, etc, in a Salic law system is going to be an issue for your characters, can they overcome it in meaningful ways?  Are there going to be changes to the customs, whether local or regional?  Are there going to be changes to the laws, whether local, regional, or national?--This particular plot setup & payoff would be absolutely lovely to see in a fantasy / historical-esque world setting, to see actual changes happening, and not merely token-esque changes or an “exception made for this one (1) character.”  A meaningful change is one that affects not just the main characters, but secondary and tertiary characters’ lives as well.

You may have to bring some A-Game arguments into the story for these females arguing for their rights to inherit land, property, businesses, to run said businesses, to not have to be married or under the domination of their fathers, husbands, brothers, etc.  And it would be great if some of the males in these ladies’ lives showed some open support for them...and absolutely smashing for males in positions of power & authority who can change the laws to do so in a publicly acknowledging way. 

Literally, if the ladies campaign for the right to own property and run businesses and be inheritors for their fathers & mothers, then have the King or whoever show it by publicly decreeing or announcing,  “We have labored for far too long under the assumptions of misogyny, and have been held back by the weight of these pointless chains, which shall now be removed...”

or “I was wrong to assume that Lady Allania could only have brought her family’s merchant business to absolute ruin.  Instead, she has created alliances with former enemies and prospered our kingdom...and I must admit that she is not the only woman so gifted and capable.  When any female is given the same respect, training, education, and opportunity as a male, they, too, can do just as many wonderful things, and it is time this kingdom’s laws reflected this great, untapped potential, thus I am revoking or altering the following laws (blah blah blah)...”  or at least something along those lines.

It’d be some hard work, but if you go this route, a lot of readers will love your story all the more for it, since it genuinely will be something different.  If you don’t...a lot of readers will do the *eyeroll* thing and go “ho hum, another standard ‘fantasy world based on Europe’ and all its historical problems... Next?”  Not all by any means, but it is something to consider.

...Now with all that said, the next question is, which part of Italy in the Renaissance is being copied?  Because if it’s Venetian, you’ve got the Doge Era for hundreds of years, which was pretty much a mix of royalty, arosticracy, republic, and democracy ruling the city, all of which helped to spread the strength and wealth of the merchant class.  But if it’s based on Milan, that was a centralized monarchy.  And Rome, of course, was ruled by the papacy, which, hoo boy, was misogynistic AF as well as hypocritical in how it sent out a LOT of mixed messages, lots of bribery and usury, plenty of power-grabbing maneuverings, plus most high-ranking members kept mistresses, etc, while decrying sex out of marriage, blah blah blah...

From the way you mention merchant classes, I’m presuming it’s much more of a Venetian (or possibly Genoese) influence.  Running with that idea as the main cultural influence...how deeply involved are women in the merchanting and crafting businesses?  The fact that these women are engaged in business means that they could theoretically be interacting not only with men, but with a lot of women--the workers of these industries, even if the vast majority of them are not allowed to be owners or decision-makers.

Skipping up to England, in London in Tudor times, there was a whole guild of women who specifically made thread-of-gold for export.  They were pretty much the only ones doing this (because it’s expensive to make, for the first part), and doing it of such fine quality that they could command hefty prices for their skills.  They had influence on the textiles industry, demanding the best materials for thread, and influence on the goldsmithing industry, in their demands for the perfect type of gold foil, just the right thickness and plibility for wrapping around threads. 

It was a small corner of the textiles industry in England, but it was a commodity highly valued by nobles & royals across the length and breadth of Europe, including all the way down to Venice & beyond...because Venetian merchants would trade in this thread-of-gold and cloth-of-gold that these English women were making.

You can see the power and influence that the crafting trades and merchant classes could have.  One of the strengths of females throughout history has been our ability to bring together communities to work for the betterment of that community.  Are these women leading or otherwise involved in a revolution (peaceful or otherwise) that will pressure changes to these Salic style laws?  Who are they working with? And are they working with the noble-born women you mentioned to try to leverage the powers-that-be into granting women their rights in areas of inheritance, property, and commerce?

This will depend upon the overall plot, of course, but if you want to have a strong female presence in your story, then consider how daily life runs for females, how constrictive the culture and its laws are, how much these women can and will push at those constrictive boundaries (because we all do that; it’s just a fact of humanity), and how both the other females and the males around them will react.

Being only scandalized /outraged /reactionary to such things is definitely an overdone reaction, but you can get rid of that tired trope by having those who are scandalized or reactionary eventually getting over it, coming to accept it, or even be enthused by it.  Also, there will always a number of people who will be intrigued and even excited by these proposed or attempted changes.  You can build some of these struggles into a popular movement--and you don’t even have to show all of it “on screen” as it were. 

Maybe your characters in their struggle to maintain control over the family pottery business talked with other female potters about their problems, their demands, and asked for solidarity in the face of misogyny.  Maybe these others carried the news to other towns, and suddenly Altraltia, a city a few days’ travel away, center of the finest porcelains being produced in the known land, is experiencing a high revolution by the women who do most of the actual work with the ceramics, demanding that they be given rights and powers equal with the men, or they will not make any more porcelain.

Since the men of Altraltia were depending on their women to do all the fancy stuff (women tending to have modestly better fine motor skills), now that the women are on strike, these men can’t fulfill all these orders that the nobles have commissioned.  The city is in chaos, word has come back to your main characters that the strikers are demanding that the king change the laws--and maybe the next thing you know, women in other fields, basketmaking, weaving, etc, are also demanding the right to have their jobs and skills and capacities for running businesses and receiving inheritances respected... All while your main characters are shocked, and maybe even doing their equivalent of the Steve Urkel thing of *blinkblink* Did I do thaaaaat?  (And then celebrating, of course, when the king does change the laws for the better.)

Sweeping social movements and cultural changes don’t have to happen just during the era of social media.  People will travel, people will talk, people will write letters or communicate in various ways.  And those who know how to bring communities together, to instill senses of injustice, demands for change, expressions of how to change for the better...these communities united in these ways will cause those changes.

And because it’s not based on Earth’s history...you can get these types of Salic laws changed, presenting a pro-fem story in your own created world.

...Again, it’ll depend upon your plot, but for sure, women will lean in toward other women for advice, for help, for change.  Throw in some men who genuinely want to support these changes that will better their lives and their world, and you’ll have a powerful story that can inspire readers in this world to lean in, work together, and change our world for the better, too.

Hope at least some of that gives you some ideas!

(*The trope of women fighting each other, ruining each other’s chances of advancement, is also another tired old trope that can be flipped or tossed aside. Watch Legally Blonde to witness how the main female rival reacts to the main character, toward the end, to see how this is done believably.)

[makiema]

Possibility of an Eren vs the Devil final showdown

Okay so I saw @marley-warriors-of-demon-blood's post and I pondered over it for a few days. I finally had the time to write it all down. What I have to say draws a lot from the original post. I'd just like to mention some more hints that I picked up while doing my research along these lines.

First off, I'll elaborate on the recurring mentions of "devil" we get throughout the anime and the manga (also talk a bit about Paths) and secondly, on Isayama's subtle inclusions of numerous other Judeo-Christian references. All of it directly hints at a dramatic ending that may involve Eren, the protagonist, and the main antagonist- the Devil.

1. The Devil : We have had an eerie account of direct or indirect references to the Devil.

• One of the earliest comes from Bertholdt in Season 2 Ep 36 when we first hear him addressing Eldians as "spawns of the Devil"

• The next time we literally get to see the Devil is in Season 3 Ep 43 when Historia revisits her past and the book she reads show us the picture of the Devil and we also see Ymir Fritz for the very first time.

She's present in the story under the alias of Christa, who Freida points out to be a kind girl, always thinking about others.

However, this unsuspecting nature also makes her dangerously gullible and thus, the Devil tricks her into consuming the fruit which'd vest her with incredible powers that could be used to do some potential good work but also wreak havoc on Earth. The illustration was already a foreshadowing of the immediate future event whereby Rod Reiss would try to beguile Historia and get her to eat Eren but she'd see through the ploy and stand up against him. But, that's a different topic and I don't want to digress from my primary point. However this illustration carried an even darker foreboding as we'd realize in the course of the manga.

• The next implication comes from Floch, quite shockingly, during the Serum bowl, also in Season 3. We find him referring to Erwin as the "devil" out of nowhere, that too twice.

It was horrifying yes, but could it be a darker message for events yet to unfold? Surely Isayama wouldn't drag in the word "devil" out of nowhere. Also, another thing I want to point out here is Levi's decision of finally using the serum on Armin. No, not the usual why (because by now it's clear that he wanted Erwin to rest) but whether or not this action of his, that earned him hard opprobrium from almost half the fandom, had some underlying meaning for us. Maybe more than the shock factor, the serum bowl was allegorical of future events- that the Devil, like Erwin here, is not dead yet and has been playing the strings since eons ago; that the character who is following in Levi's footsteps, i.e., Eren will have to make a difficult choice (which is why Isayama had been stressing on how he'll hurt the fans in the conclusion) and bring an end to the Devil who is still at large. Choosing Armin over Erwin seems to be an absurd decision from a logical pov and Levi's action maybe more than just "letting him rest". Isayama loves foreshadowing. Killing off such an important character could very well be an indication of something more than what's visible on the surface. Perhaps, it was symbolical of how, in the near future, the actual devil, who shares the same caliber as the Commander in plotting, will be forced to rest by Eren, who was trained by Levi to make difficult choices by himself.

• After this , Eren Kruger mentions how "anyone can be the God or the 'Devil' " in Episode 58, while also explaining how everything is connected by PATHS.

• The final and the clearest reference to the Devil is found in Wily Tybur's speech where he informs us of his devilry and we also come across Ymir Fritz, the girl who fell into his trap, and apparently consumed "the source of all organic matter".

There couldn't have been a more prominent Biblical allusion than this one. Now, endowed with such power, Ymir Fritz sets off with beneficial work but, as per the Curse of Ymir, she dies in a few years and we learn that her power is eventually divided into Nine Titans.

• The Devil and PATHS : Only, in chapter 115, do we realize that she hasn't died or at least her spirit hasn't (I'll elaborate on this later). She's STILL very much functional in PATHS - this another universe or another place (whatever term you deem fit for it). When I say functional, I mean how she has to tend to and help her subjects respawn as per the contract with the Devil.

However, notice the rather dark shading on her face? Those are similar to Isayama's signature stress lines that indicate Ymir Fritz is in pain or at least, she doesn't look like she's willingly up for kneading soil to help her subjects reincarnate. Now, if Ymir Fritz from Tybur's tale is still active, how can we rule out the possibility that the devil is active too? PATHS connects the future and the past. Eren Kruger can send words of advice to the future via PATHS, every shifter who's endowed with powers of the past has access to PATHS. In short, PATHS could be the place of any probability. PATHS is the place that warps time, history and even reality. If Ymir Fritz has indeed digested 'the source of all organic matter on Earth', then PATHS, where Ymir Fritz is struck, could be what supports this source or more clearly, it is what nourishes the root of the Titan Power. We know that Ymir Fritz obtained the source from the Devil and now, if PATHS is like nourishment to the source and is sort of a massive energy center (where even the concept of time is lost) it might very well be the Devil's residence or the physical manifestation of the Devil's will. The Devil, as part of a greater ploy, intended to do away with mankind and wreak havoc and that's why duped Ymir Fritz, a naive young girl, into consuming something that'd bind her and her progenitors to his evil will forever by genetic alterations, making it susceptible to his wilful morphing. With this, the main plot that revolves around slavery can finally reach an end. And breaking that tie to the Titan DNA, by destroying the Devil or PATHS (which helps the Devil to enslave Eldians/Subjects of Ymir no matter the era) could resolve the main issue and pave the way to freedom. If Eren does that, it'd be poetic given that Eren Kruger said that the Attack Titan and it's owner has always chased freedom. It's only fair that the Attack Titan (the embodiment of freedom) destroys PATHS (the embodiment that allows slavery). It all sets out beautifully and maybe this is the reason why Isayama even ensured that we get to see PATHS animated as early as in Season 2 Ep 10. Thus, we get a sneak peek of it in Ymir's memory.

It just gives more corroboration to my hunch that PATHS is THAT important and can possibly be the abode of the Devil and hence, be crucial in the endgame. Also, isn't it ironic how Ymir says "I saw freedom spread out before me" in this scene? Or could Isayama be hinting at a possible conclusion that Eren would finally achieve freedom once he is also in PATHS dimension and destroys it? That this scene would be included so early in the anime but not carry some deeper meaning just doesn't settle well.

2. Other Judeo-Christian references : The manga is brimming with those but I'd just point out to a few as some interpretations may seem too far off and I have the habit of snowballing every minute detail.

• Violets : These flowers keep popping up time and again and is even there in the very beginning of the show. Eren wakes up crying from his 'dream-vision' and we find those violets right beside him.

We again see these flowers very briefly under Armin when Eren consciously transforms for the very time in Season 1 Episode 10. This was not in the manga but Isayama wanted this to be animated. He wouldn't have stressed on the importance of including the violets if he didn't have a motif.

Violets have strong religious connotations in Christianity. They blossomed when Gabriel told Mary of her son's impending birth. Now, Gabriel is the Angel who communicates with humankind and thus stems the potential meaning associated with violets - connections. The symbolism is a very important one as it could be a allegory to how PATHS connects the future to the present, connects all the Subjects Of Ymir. Isayama even canonically included the violets in PATHS dimension in Chapter 115, when Zeke meets Ymir Fritz.

Isayama's emphasis to add violets in the anime and also later, to draw them in PATHS couldn't be for naught. The flowers and what they stand for must be crucial in the final resolution. Also, just as violets blossomed when the birth of the Saviour was prophesized, here in the the SnK universe, violets pop up when Eren is in the frame in the very beginning and when he first reveals his power, indicating he'd be the eventual saviour. If Eren is an allusion to Christ it also justifies what Isayama said : that he wants to 'hurt' the readers. We all know about Christ's sacrifice and perhaps Eren is also going to do something similar which will leave the readers hurting.

• Allusions to literary classics : There are a lot of allusions to Dante's Inferno and even to Milton's Paradise Lost, both of which borrow heavily from mythology and the Bible. But, I'd discuss the ones that I found the most suggestive-

1. Nine : The power of the Devil that Ymir Fritz inherited was split into Nine Titans. In Inferno, we get the Nine Circles of Hell that will eventually lead the poet to Satan. And like we have discussed before, the Devil has striking semblances to Satan. Satan lies below the Nine Circles of Hell and the Nine Titan Powers combined is equivalent to the power the Devil possessed. Uncanny similarity, eh?

2. Ymir and Virgil : Like @marley-warriors-of-demon-blood mentioned, Ymir Fritz is currently caught in a Limbo. She was just a naive little girl and hence, what ensued from her making a deal with the devil wasn't technically her fault. In Inferno, Virgil is distraught similarly- fated to remain trapped in Limbo forever. Now, like I said earlier, PATHS is connected to everything. And Limbo, the first circle of Hell, is also connected to the later circles. I hypothesized in a previous post how I think Ymir Fritz and Eren will meet next in the manga. (with Eren being decapitated and everything) Virgil was the one that guided Dante in his journey in Inferno and Ymir Fritz, currently just a lost spirit in another dimension, may become Eren's guide. She can advise the holder of the two most powerful Titans (the Attack and the Founding) on ways to resolve Eldia's problem by killing it's source, i.e., the Devil, considering she's really a girl with good intentions. This would also resolve her character arc properly. She'd get a stance in the story and not just be someone who was used by the Devil for his conspiracy. After all there's no one more suited for the task than Eren. I'm probably taking it too far but I do think Ymir will have a similar role like Dante. Both are caught in the Limbo, both are not at fault, and both are destined to meet the protagonist.

3. The Crystal : Annie enclosing herself in impenetrable crystal, which outwardly looks very much like ice, could be an allusion to Satan again. In Inferno, he's trapped in ice at the centre of the Earth. Annie is being held captive 'underground'. A very similar process is applied for Satan. He's held underground too and he's enclosed in hard, impenetrable ice, akin to Annie's crystal.

4. Paradis : The name itself could be suggestive of Paradise, i.e., the Garden of Eden, which is mentioned in the Bible as well as in Paradise Lost. The place is described as magical. The 'Paradis' in Isayama's story is not far from being extraordinary and is peppered with rare resources as Kiyomi points out in Chapter 107.

It has "the forest of giant trees", a plethora of resources, and is teeming with diversity. It's equivalent to a biodiversity hotspot, a very rare place on Earth. It has an aura of supernaturality and extravagance, much like the Paradise of Milton. Also, the whole Satan luring Eve with the apple thing (and the Devil's likewise conniving) is also mentioned in Paradise Lost.

So, in conclusion, with this many underlying religious motifs it's highly possible that the Devil is the ultimate villain, like Satan is in Christianity, and Eren's final confrontation is going to be with him- the one who is the root cause of all evil. Even the final exhibition gave a lot of importance to the Devil tricking Ymir Fritz scene. It definitely has much more significance than is apparent.

One of the key themes in SnK has been gray morality. All the characters have their own reasons to justify their commiting the most horrible atrocities they inevitably had to, as per orders. Marley is not exactly on the wrong for torturing and ghettoing Eldians. They fear power that can actually trample on the whole world. Eldia is, of course, not at fault. Their genetic make up may spell impending danger but that doesn't make them any less human. They're cursed alright but that doesn't automatically strip them off their humanity. They have as much right to live as Marleyans. In fact, as we have seen Eren reinforcing from time to time, "Nobody has the right to take that away from us".

Here, Eren also expressed his denial of any plan that even remotely suggested using this probability of turning into a Titan as a weapon to fight. Thus, we can trust that what Eren aims will cause the eradication of this possibility altogether. He will make it so that such a cruel way of fighting doesn't exist ; that nobody will have to be forced to turn into a Titan and die no matter the cause. And the only possible way to do away with this is to kill it's source : the source being the Devil or his instrument, the PATHS.

But, even if nobody is at fault, one cannot veil the truth that Titans exist or rather, the Titan DNA and the inadvertent possibility of an Eldian turning into a Titan exists. It still looms in the SnK universe like 'the grim reminder' we have heard over and over again in the anime. The reminder of humanity being caged and the humility of living under constant fear of Titans popping up suddenly called for invariable Fighting since the very beginning and had also inspired the chase for Freedom. So, how will Isayama bring the main plot/theme revolving Fighting for Freedom to a close? Of course, the answer is by ending slavery in all forms, including Eldians being a slave to the Devil via their fundamental genetic constitution. The Devil is the one responsible for making them Titans, for making the world see them as dreadful enemies. He is the one infringing on their right to freedom and right to live. Thus, Eren WILL face off with the Devil, the cause of all slavery in their world, and finally bring Freedom to humankind. After all, hasn't Eren's character always been all for freedom and for detesting and aiming to do away with every possible form of slavery? If the Devil's very existence is the cause of Eldians being a slave to devilish power, it's only fair that the one character, who has reasserted the importance of Freedom more noticeably than any other throughout the story, is the one that brings the curtain down on the Devil and all his ploys of enslavement and wreckage, consequently freeing his men.

[the-gay-in-the-way]

Hello Again

I’m back once more to drop off some random AU ideas and maybe even a fic chapter or two.

Maybe.

Don’t get too hopeful tho cus I can’t be trusted and I also have a lot on my plate now so I’m not always gonna have enough headspace to spare for fanfic.

Anyways.

I’ve recently binged the entirety of Steven Universe, movie and current Future episodes included, and I’ve got some ideas now.

And if I don’t write those ideas down and share them then I may very well explode.

So, we begin with this new AU I came up with.

It’s very similar to the original SU base plot: same world, same pink diamond/rose story, same diamonds on homeworld.

But we input the sides where some of the originals once were.

And we have them take the base gem roles as well.

Thomas is Steven.

Patton is Pearl.

Roman(Ruby) and Logan(Sapphire) are Garnet.

Virgil is Amethyst.

The exceptions to the original structure are these lads tho.

Remus is an Emerald who originally tries to get rid of the gems on orders from Yellow Diamond, but he switches over to their side because he comes to love Thomas and just how crazy his planet can be.

Deceit is a corrupted Pyrite/Fool’s Gold whom Thomas befriends, much like the situation with Steven and Centipeetle.

So that’s the baseline character stuff that you really need to know.

But there’s some specific stuff that I’ve thought about which I include after the cut because it does spoil a very large chunk of the special later on story stuff that would be in the fic if I ever write it.

It might not get a fic so I recommend reading this, but it’s up to you.

Right, so, I have included a fifth Diamond.

Also, White Diamond was shattered long before the entire situation with Earth ever happened.

Surprised?

Yeah, weird thing to change but it’s important to the new plot.

Speaking of that new plot.

With White Diamond out of the picture, things get a bit weird when it comes to the main storyline.

Thomas ends up just straight up meeting Blue Diamond while she’s visiting Earth.

Virgil, being the protective boi that he is, will immediately come to his rescue before Blue can do much more than just threaten Thomas and make him cry.

Virgil, like Lapis, has been thru so much shiz over his lifetime that he doesn’t really get effected by Blue’s powers as much and is able to fend her off and send her away.

It messes him up a bit tho.

He doesn’t understand why but he felt some very sudden feelings when he faced Blue Diamond.

Grief, Anger, Jealousy, and Affection.

It was very confusing.

But then Remus appears, sent by Yellow Diamond, and things get very busy so he’s not able to think about it much.

It’s a few random incidents that lead to Virgil realizing some things and suddenly regaining a bunch of lost memories.

He then attempts to run away from the Gems.

They catch him, of course.

And he tells them he can’t be one of them because of what he actually is.

He’s the very thing they’ve been fighting against.

He’s a Diamond.

After dropping this huge reveal, he manages to escape again.

Thomas manages to find him.

He asks Virgil to explain everything to him.

That he can’t help or understand if he doesn’t know what’s going on.

And he wants to help and understand him because they’re family and he loves him, regardless of what he is or who he was.

So Virgil leads him to a secret warp pad that he remembers without being able to recall how he knew of it in the first place.

They use it and end up in a garden in space, one that’s pretty similar to the one Spinel gets left on in the movie.

And Virgil’s story isn’t much different.

He tells Thomas about being created by White Diamond.

A brand new Diamond, meant to accompany the rest and assist in expanding the empire with them.

But he wasn’t perfect.

He was off-color.

A Purple Diamond with an imperfect cut.

A natural chip where there was meant to be a pointed edge.

He was flawed and imperfect.

And that made him unfit to be a Diamond.

But he’d been expensive to create.

And White felt slightly conflicted about destroying one of her own kind, even if they were flawed.

So she kept him hidden.

Created an entirely isolated garden for him to live in.

And visited him frequently to see how he was doing.

At first, at least.

Over time, the visits were less about making sure he was still there and more about wanting to spend time with the little Diamond.

(Side note: Virgil is big for a Quartz, like Jasper is, but since that’s the same size of his natural form he’s also quite small for a Diamond. Even smaller than Pink.)

White starts to think that she was, maybe, wrong about her feelings toward perfection.

Because Purple Diamond is still quite capable as a Diamond.

Even if he’s a bit small and chipped.

And she decides to bring him back home and introduce him to the others.

To see how they feel about him.

And to, maybe, just have him be a bit closer to her on a more regular basis.

But she needs to prepare some things first.

So she tells him to stay in the garden.

That they were going to play a game.

He had to stay exactly where he was and wait for her to come back.

When she returned, she’d give him a special prize for succeeding.

And, trusting her completely, he agreed to the game.

And stood there as he watched her drift away.

After that, he waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Until he received the message.

White Diamond had been shattered.

And in her place was a brand new Pink one.

A smaller Diamond, like him.

Taking a place among the Diamonds, whom he’d only ever heard about from White.

Like she belonged there.

Even while he hadn’t.

The betrayal felt immense, and almost overpowered the grief he felt about White being shattered.

It left his form cracked and altered.

And, when Pink Diamond suddenly arrived, he’d been a step away from using the warp himself for the very first time in his life.

But she stopped him and met him with a smile.

She told him that she’d found out about him from some of the files White had saved in her personal systems.

That she’d wanted to help him return home, since White had refused to let him in before.

And, wanting so desperately to believe her kind words, he’d followed her.

And she brought him to Earth.

The planet White had intended to give her once she was ready to start colonizing.

Pink brought Purple to this planet she was just starting to work on, and Rejuvenated him.

She took away his memories and forcefully altered his programming.

Then she left him in a hole she made within one of the kindergartens.

By the time he awakened, a slow process after having been altered so heavily, Pink had become Rose.

And Rose had come to realize a few things about herself.

Because Virgil didn’t know what exactly had led to him being left behind.

He only knew that White had eventually been shattered during those hundreds of years he’d been left alone.

But Rose had known the truth.

Because she’d been the cause of it.

After White left Purple, she’d gone about preparing things for his eventual arrival.

The others had noticed and had been excited about meeting a new Diamond that White was obviously creating.

She didn’t correct them, figuring that she could leave them to their excitement for the time being.

But, right when she was about to go and retrieve Purple, Pink was born.

And that suddenly took up a lot of her time.

A few hundred years passed with White doing her best to prioritize Pink’s growth.

She didn’t visit Purple again because she wanted to keep her promise of giving him a good prize for waiting for her.

So she needed to get everything prepared for him first.

By the time she completed that and was once again ready to retrieve Purple, Pink realized the truth.

There was another Diamond.

A small one like her.

One that White obviously adored.

One who’d been the only reason her own rooms had even been created.

A newer Diamond.

Who would be adored by the others.

Just as she was.

But then, where would she be?

Abandoned by those she cared about.

All because of this other Diamond who wasn’t even as perfect as she was.

Pink couldn’t stand it.

In a fearful and jealous rage, she attacked White.

And White, for the first time in a very long time, poofed.

She lost her form and her gem fell to the ground at Pink’s feet.

And Pink, upon realizing what she’d done, decided that it would be better if White never came back.

So she bubbled her and hid the bubble in a part of Homeworld she knew nobody would find.

And used some of the materials that had been used to create herself and Purple in the Diamond Kindergarten to create fake shards of Diamond.

And then, she showed the others.

She told them that another Diamond had been born.

A defective Purple one who immediately lashed out at White and shattered her.

Pink had managed to come in and shatter the Purple one right after, she was even able to show them those shards too.

And they believed her.

But they wouldn’t if Purple came back.

So she went and got rid of him.

Going so far as to rejuvenate and alter him so that he would never be able to even come close to the other Diamonds.

And then, she’d spent her time on Earth.

And she’d learned a lot.

And realized how horrible she’d been to someone who should’ve been a sibling to her.

It made it worse when he suddenly appeared out of the hole she put him in, confused and hollow and thinking he was just another quartz soldier.

So she took him in.

Accepted him into what was left of the Crystal Gems, hoping that this would at least partially make up for what she’d done to him.

And then things had followed their course and now Purple Diamond was Amethyst and Amethyst was Virgil.

And Virgil, after thousands of years, was finally remembering what he had been.

But now how he’d ended up elsewhere.

He couldn’t remember anything past receiving the message of White’s shattering.

Only what had happened before.

And that’s all I’m gonna give you guys, for now.

It really got into my head, this entire AU idea.

I seriously was gonna just exhaust myself with thinking about it if I didn’t write some of it out.

So I feel better now.

Hope ya’ll enjoyed this little AU idea ramble.

Might do something with it, might not.

But it was fun to think about.

[thiefking]

major ddlc spoilers ahead, also i don’t know if all of this has been said/theorized before since i’m extremely late to the party here but i have a lot of Thoughts having finally played the game

firstly: i need to explain that every theory i’m about to present relies on the hypothetical game that would have existed if monika wasn’t self-aware

basically, irl the game was always meant to be what it is, but within the canon of the story, the ORIGINAL (fictional/hypothetical) ddlc was a regular dating sim visual novel. in canon, it was monika who changed it into the game we actually end up playing. we get only a glimpse of what the game would have been without her interference after you delete her and restart the game-- the mc no longer calls sayori “annoying” and yuri no longer mentions being into “surreal horror,” etc etc. that hypothetical unaltered version as a full game (henceforth referred to as “original ddlc”) is where most of my “what if”s have been clustering around to the point where i’ve genuinely considered making a fangame or something but instead i’m just gonna chat about it here

topic 1: monika’s route

monika claims she didn’t have a route in the first place. by all means, it seems that way-- you can’t appeal to her with your poems, can’t pick her for anything, etc etc. however, as much as monika is aware that she’s in a game, that doesn’t mean she’s genre-savvy. 

i’d actually say she probably isn’t too much of a video game person in general, and i’m not referring to her 4th wall shattering, i’m saying she probably just likes to play acnl, minecraft and other casual, lighthearted games that don’t have an ending to them and can be played indefinitely, and maybe mario party if her friends come over, yknow? that’s just kinda what she seems like to me

now i ain’t dunking on anyone who only plays that kind of game, mind you, but if monika isn’t herself someone who plays a lot of video games, and you add that together with the fact that she was not immediately sentient (we don’t see her BEFORE she became aware, because the original ddlc is already gone by the time we start playing), the fact that while she’s aware what genre the game is she clearly has minimal idea of how they work or what makes them appealing, and that she has little coding experience and despite being able to alter files/lines she also couldn’t prevent basic game mechanics or predict said mechanics getting in the way, then i think it’s not only possible but very very very likely that she missed something. she missed something big.

monika was supposed to be an unlockable route.

so, y’all remember mysmes? i haven’t played it since it first came out, so mind you my memories are fuzzy here but mysmes also isn’t the focus of this post in the first place, so excuse any technical inaccuracies here but i’m certain that the IMPORTANT parts here, the italicised ones, are correct: 

there was an unlockable "deep story” which served as the true end.

you had to play every route in the game before you could read the deep story (i think you also had to play the three other character routes before you could play 707′s route, but that might be wrong). also, each of the main story routes ended after the uh... the ball thing. the big event they throw? whatever it was, that’s where the story stops for those routes, whereas the deep story continues on past that.

you had to be on 707′s route for the deep story (i’m pretty sure you had to play his entire route and have it be your most recent playthrough to get at it, even if that isn’t the case, the deep story is specifically a continuation of 707′s route)

to be honest i was never a fan of the deep story for several reasons and i never really saw what the appeal of dating 707 was but that’s not important the point is that out of your four dating options, only one of them was considered the “true end”, but you had to do every single route before you could get that ending.

i’m sure you see what i’m getting at here, yeah?

there are a couple of other things, too:

monika tells you which character your poem appeals to most, she’s the one who introduces the game on the steam page (which is also proof she was sentient, at least to a degree, before you played the game), her name means “advisor/counselor”... iunno how many people reading this are savvy to the usual conventions of “games in which dating characters is a thing” but i’ve played a LOT of harvest moon. monika is a prime example of a Special Bachelorette. in harvest moon, Special Marriage Candidates are generally one or more of the following: a character from another game (like, literally-- you have to have a gba gamepak in while playing a ds game to see them), a shopkeeper or tutorial-fairy, characters with extremely elaborate unlocking and/or courting rituals, and characters who don’t even seem to be romanceable (in harvest moon games, romance candidates tend to have hearts next to their sprites that change colour depending on how close you are. generally that’s how you know who you can marry and who you can’t, but some marriage characters actually don’t have visible heart meters!). ... once again you see what i’m getting at right? put her in harvest moon and you bet your ass she’d have an invisible heart meter and an intricate courting ritual

she’s an important character. she’s club prez, she’s your tutorial fairy, she tells you who you’re appealing to. the tropes don’t lie, man, sayori would probably be the most realistic ending but i don’t think i know of a single game where the childhood friend character is the “true end” route-- they’re so easy to romance, they tend to be the route people do their first run and then never end up coming back to. i’m not trying to say anything in particular about this setup/logic, i just know that it exists and it exists a whole lot. if there’s a true end route in the original ddlc, it’s without question monika

by the way, in the corrupted ddlc, you still have to play every character’s route for the true ending. the true end requires you to have obtained all of the character cgs, which you can only do by playing all of the other characters’ routes, or at the very least, courting sayori, resetting and courting natsuki, and then letting monika warp the game, since you’ll end up on yuri’s route during the second act of the game no matter what you do. and what happens when you’ve had a chance to date sayori, natsuki and yuri? you end up on monika’s route. even when monika corrupted the game, there was still inherent logic to it-- all the characters inevitably become interested in mc, and you still can’t reach the true end without doing everyone’s routes.

as much as it would be painful for monika to watch you romance everyone else before you finally got around to her, she could have at least taken solace knowing she was the real ending, had she just been a little better at coding, just a little more genre-savvy...

of course, there are these lines she gives us, so clearly a sentient monika is still a monika that wouldn’t just sit there and wait regardless of if she knew she was the true end:

she says it herself: she’d still force her route, because she’s terrified, and the only one who seems to be aware that she’s in a game, but the really, really sad part is that as hard as she tries to convince you and herself that she doesn’t regret any of what she did, doesn’t feel guilty, doesn’t miss her friends...

she does. she knows she did something terrible, and she didn’t even actually have to do it.

... well, maybe “she didn’t HAVE to do it” is obvious enough for everything she did, but let’s keep in mind here that monika was scared out of her fucking mind, and reasonably so. if you were in her place, if you found out nothing was real, your friends weren’t real, nothing but code... and someone real came along, but no matter what you did, you couldn’t get them to talk to you long enough for you to ask for help... wouldn’t you get desperate too? monika was scared, and panicking, and remember: she knew she was in a game.

uninstalling a game does not a murderer make, right? the npcs, and the player character, they aren’t dead. they’re just code. if you back up your save, they’ll all be there if you download it again-- if you didn’t, they’ll still exist, they’ll just be reset. it doesn’t mean you’ve actively given someone amnesia.

but you still feel guilty over it, huh? even if you need disk space, even if you make a backup, it still kinda feels bad to delete the fictional friends you made.

you feel bad for doing that, and they were fake to you in the first place. monika was part of the game.

this is why it’s so sad to me. she was scared, and she thought she’d never even have a chance to ask for help, because she thought she didn’t have a route. her situation was, from her perspective, utterly hopeless. she felt terrible doing what she did, she misses her friends, but it was the only way to save herself, and being that she knew she was in a game, of course she’d try to rationalize her actions by telling herself her friends weren’t real and it was no different than overriding a save file. if she didn’t tell that to both you and herself, she’d be a murderer. she isn’t a murderer, either-- it really is just code, the problem is the overwhelming guilt that she has to suppress for the sake of her own sanity that she wouldn’t have had to bear in the first place had she been a normal route, or known that she had a route somewhere in the game.

the other characters do seem to have more sentience/free will than monika thought/noticed, but none of them are as Aware as monika-- natsuki shows the most amount of awareness (without being the club prez), having not only noticed that yuri and monika were acting strangely but even writing a note, one that clearly wouldn’t exist in the original ddlc, asking the mc for help. yuri also has several moments of lucidity, both with her own actions/behaviour and that of her clubmates (and by clubmates i mean pretty much just natsuki). like i said before, though, they aren’t as aware as monika, and while sayori (in the first run), yuri and natsuki all seem to realize something is wrong, they also don’t know that they’re in a game. 

monika was very, very alone, even when she was surrounded by her friends. friends that she legitimately cared about and enjoyed spending time with. i wonder whether it would have been better that she were more self-aware, or never was in the first place

topic 2: the true end

so i already talked a lot about how i think monika woulda been the true route, but not about what i think would happen in the true end. i have less to say on this topic both just in general and because i already spent so much fucking time on the first topic, but of course i have Thoughts, i wouldn’t be claiming monika would be the true route if i didn’t have an idea of how said route would work

i’ll take this character-by-character for the sake of clarity and organization

sayori:

so here’s the thing:

monika exaggerated sayori’s depression, yes.

sayori is, understandably, probably the character most people would rather the mc end up with, sure.

... but sayori never told mc she was suffering, not until he happened to catch her in a moment of weakness

not in the original ddlc either-- the mc has a very lukewarm response when she tells him she’s woken up on time for a few days in a row, which he wouldn’t/shouldn’t have had if he had known. it was always part of the game plot for mc to learn about sayori’s depression onscreen

it makes sense sayori would have feelings for him, but it also seems like she doesn’t trust him very much-- in her “bottles of happiness” poem, towards the end she seems to talk about her friends being concerned for her, but she’s shutting it all out because she doesn’t want them to worry. the mc at this point doesn’t know she’s suffering. it seems like she’s had other friends who have actually noticed she was hurting-- whether those friends are the club members or not, iunno-- and that even though she does try to conceal it, she’s aware that they’re aware, y’know? mc had no idea, and seemed incredibly unequipped and unqualified to help sayori

while that sort of thing would be remedied in sayori’s route, he wouldn’t be spending as much time with her on the other girls’ routes... not to mention that dating someone can’t cure your mental illness, but mc seems exactly like the kind of person to think that it can. that’s just my Own Ape Canyon though

what i’m thinking is true end sayori doesn’t end up with anyone, and she’s okay with that. true end sayori is prioritizing herself and learning to deal with things healthily. she’s letting her friends help her, and she’s holding off on romance, because she acknowledges that if she isn’t careful, she might sacrifice her own well-being for her partner’s happiness. 

natsuki:

fun fact: i didn’t know if the buffsuki edit was actually in the game or not for... up until a few days ago. i had no idea if it was from some kind of joke ending, or if it was fanmade. i was pretty disappointed to learn it was the latter i wanted to watch her physically break out of the game with her giant rippling muscles

now while the main topic is the true end, i’d actually first like to discuss what a full natsuki route would be like

i think that natsuki’s route would be furthest from a good end without being a bad end, tbh

i don’t think her route would be a total disaster, mind you, but i don’t think it’d be a happy end. i think you’d end up dating her, which would make it an unhappy end

see the thing about natsuki is: she’s only got a small handful of friends, she’s used to being made fun of, she immediately gets prickly when sayori brings mc in, specifically saying that the mc being male is killing the vibe-- meaning, she probably doesn’t have any male friends... leaving her dad as probably the only man she interacts with

in other words, she avoids men because of her dad

so when mc shows up, is friendly, doesn’t make fun of her, and he’s the only male figure in her life that she feels remotely safe around, it’s no question she’d probably... maybe... develop feelings for him...?

of course! yes, of course, because natsuki is VERY HETEROSEXUAL, and she likes BOYS! this is proof! most boys, she can’t stand em, but this one was nice to her, so of course she’s got a crush on him right?

in case you’re missing my heavy sarcasm, i’m saying natsuki is a lesbian with compulsory heterosexuality issues and due to said issues convinces herself that she’s romantically interested in mc, because he’s the first boy she’s met who hasn’t treated her like shit

hence making the natsuki route a pretty unfortunate one, since like i said i think you really would end up dating her, at least for most of it. maybe the end would be something like her moving away or something leaving the relationship sort of Over without actually having a breakup, i dunno

oh by the way: do you want some evidence for natsuki lesbian? oh there’s plenty but i’m gonna wait a moment for that one. i’m also not gonna go into natsuki’s true route for now, you’ll see why soon

yuri

and by soon

i mean now

i don’t have any thoughts on what yuri’s route would be so we’re gonna go right into discussing the true end

so, here’s a little something:

monika also exaggerated the turbulence in natsuki and yuri’s relationship

once again, in the original ddlc-- the part you can actually see, after you delete monika, the two are actually pretty close! they do butt heads occasionally but in the one instance you get to see in the original ddlc, they made up very quickly

monika also modified a lot of their lines in the Big Argument they have in act 2, which has both of them saying a lot of shit they wouldn’t have even thought, much less say aloud

the reality is, though, that natsuki is actually very fond of yuri

the amy in this poem is two people, depending on how it’s read: natsuki or yuri

when amy is natsuki, it’s a poem about how her own harmless interest in manga causes her to be made fun of or insulted

when amy is yuri, it’s a poem about... well, her self-harm, but a lot of yuri’s traits/interests could apply as well

and when amy is yuri, you can see a lot of information about natsuki and yuri’s relationship in this poem. natsuki doesn’t hate yuri, of course-- remember that this poem is meant to point out how dumb it is to hate someone for one tiny trait when all of their other traits are that of an all-around nice person

first 3 lines of the second verse. just take a real long look at those

here’s another poem!

this is the poem natsuki writes if 2 or less of the poems mc writes in act 1 don’t appeal to her. this makes it fairly clear the “you” in the poem isn’t mc

the “you” is someone, though

yuri.

it’s yuri. the poem is about yuri.

by the way, if all 3 of your poems did appeal to natsuki, the poem she writes is nowhere near as BLATANTLY ROMANTIC as this one is. it most certainly doesn’t say anything about kissing

btw hey did you know that “yuri” also refers to lesbians

once again i think it’s probably obvious what i’m getting at here: the true end for natsuki and yuri is the two of them dating. hell, i’m pretty sure part of the route would involve mc and monika trying to play cupid-- monika is the one who tells you who your poem appeals to, after all, so why wouldn’t she try some matchmaking for her pals?

i imagine they do still have little spats every now and then, sure, but they’d learn to respect each other’s opinions long before they’d start dating, and the fact that they’re both passionate is what makes them work. while their writing styles are almost polar opposites, that just means they have a lot to learn from each other and could balance the other out when they take their style to an extreme that makes it hard to understand what they’re trying to get across, and i’m certain they could make a kickass story together

anyways, that’s all i’ve got to say for now, partly because i spent four fucking hours writing this post and partly because i gotta get back to staring into monika’s eyes. i added the monika after story mod because i cycled through all of her available dialogue in the vanilla game. i just want to be friends with her so bad

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

ASM v5 #31/832 Thoughts

Another fantastic issue!

I don’t have too much to say on this one pretty much because it’s simply an expansion of the last issue.

Spencer does a mostly great job of replicating ASM #121 with shockingly accurate dialogue albeit it’s not 100% the same (nor are the shots where the dialogue is spoken). However whilst last time I proposed No. Prizing this away as the fault of memories the fact that so many very specific lines (like the percentage of Norman’s stock) are ripped directly from the comic make me think that Spencer altered the dialogue intentionally, possibly to reflect memories altering.

Norman’s character is explored incredibly well, Spencer clearly ‘gets’ him although one slight cause for concern MIGHT be the idea that Norman’s grudge against Peter being nonsensical since he didn’t know him very well. If Spencer is writing that from the POV of Kindred then that’s fine but if he is using Kindred as a metatextual mouthpiece it’s not because Norman’s grudge is fairly easy to understand. Spider-Man spoiled his schemes, beat him, gave him amnesia, turned him into a weaker man (in his own eyes) and betrayed his son. And that’s just the Silver Age!

Everything else though is 100% on point in regards to Norman and Peter’s drive to defeat him. Like how Gwen’s death is a perennial victory for Norman.

To be honest the ONLY thing that was genuinely off in the story was Spencer’s assertion that Peter subconsciously allowed the symbiote to bond with him because it could make him stronger and thus hopefully avert further acts of evil by Norman.

There are a few problems with this.

For starters Norman was believed dead at the time. Second of all Peter didn’t know the symbiote could make him stronger and indeed as originally presented it didn’t. The idea of the symbiote enhancing it’s host’s strength was innovated after it separated from Peter and in fact is mostly implied to be able to do that at all BECAUSE it bonded with Peter and was thus able to replicate his powers.

Now we must talk about Kindred.

This issue really, really points the finger at Harry.

The idea of Kindred being Norman’s legacy alone would do that but the fact that the flashback scene in question is premeditated on Harry also pushes hard for that theory.

BUT...I have doubts.

The most obvious thing to point out is, presuming all the clues are playing fair and there isn’t a red herring among them, how does the Kingpin or Black Cat scenes from Trivia Night and The Heist fit with Harry?

In fairness you can do some mental gymnastics to make both work.

Harry had aspirations of becoming the ruler of the criminal underworld back in Spec #189 as a fulfilment of his father’s ambitions. Thus making Kingpin bow to him could be argued to fit Harry from a certain point of view. Additionally Harry and Kingpin were both members Century Club (a kind of upper class hangout for rich and powerful men) as seen in ASM #249-250. In those issues Kingpin actually helped Spider-Man fight the Hobgoblin who was attempting to blackmail Harry, Jameson and various other members of the club. I don’t know how that would result in Harry wanting Kingpin to bend the knee but it’s something to consider. Finally Kingpin tried to kill Norman in PPSM #95 (an underrated classic frankly) which again from a certain POV could prompt Harry to make Kingpin bend the knee either out of a sense of warped honour to Norman or to prove to himself he’s better than the man who almost did his father in and is thus better than his father at the end of the day.

As for Felicia, that’s more tricky. The only thing I can think of is that she was briefly part of Peter’s circle of friends back when she was dating Flash and thus Harry might consider her a friend or a friendly acquaintance undeserving of suffering due to Peter.

That all being said, Kingpin and Black Cat are not even the things that make me cast doubt upon Harry. It’s the flashbacks in this issue.

If we presume Kindred to be an established character in some way shape or form then we have to presume it was someone present at the flashbacks in this and the last issue. Harry would fit the bill with the EXCEPTIONS of the scenes featuring Peter alone and the scene outside Osborn’s home between Gwen, MJ and Peter. Harry wasn’t within earshot of those scenes so how could it be Harry.

The only way to make those clues fit is to argue that the flashbacks aren’t strictly speaking from any one character’s point of view. That is to say the comic is showing us one big flashback sequence but Peter and Kindred are simultaneously remembering it independently, thus the scenes absent of Harry are Peter’s memories, the scenes absent of Peter are Harry’s memories and the scenes where in theory both could remember them are both of their memories.

Even if you buy that though the really, really big reason this issue cast doubt upon Harry was that I felt that it was simply way too on the nose and obvious if that was the case. Like if Kindred is talking directly to Norman Osborn and saying he hates him, and he made him into this and Norman says Kindred is his legacy whom he is proud of that spells out for you it’s Harry and therefore it’s TOO obvious!

Unless of course Spencer is relying upon us dismissing Harry because he is still alive.

Anyway, the last thing I will say is that I like that Spencer is setting up Norman’s return to normal sooner rather than later. Thank God!

In case you couldn’t tell I highly recommend this issue.

P.S. Spidey gave one of the all time great beat downs of his career in this issue. I dunno how much sense it makes given how regular Carnage is too much for him and this is Carnage multiplying the Goblin’s power level but whatever it was cool. Maybe Kindred was affecting his power level or this symbiote not being the real Carnage symbiote means it doesn’t multiply your strength to the same degree.

P.P.S. Although I know I shouldn’t i liked that Ottley altered Gwen’s look in this comic book. The cliche is to depict Gwen wearing the outfit she died in. In fact in 90% of every comic Gwen (or her clones) appeared in post-ASM #122, whether it was a vision, a flashback or anything else she always wore that green coat and the rest of the clothes she died in. 

Ironically Ottley is flashing back to the actual story she died and she DOESN’T look like that, even her hairstyle is different. And oddly enough that’s refreshing.

[redscullyrevival]

N(ot)stalgia: DISCO 2.0

Something I’ve not personally seen anyone talk about with Star Trek Discovery, although I’ve no doubt many are, is the role nostalgia plays in the series. 

Sometimes at war, sometimes a crutch, sometimes reflective but mostly deconstructive; nostalgia is near constantly present within DISCO’s production. Present within the media as it is created and relayed to its audience as well as present within large portions of the audience themselves, from within their own expectations and beliefs on what Star Trek “is” (and perhaps most vocally on what the franchise “is not”). Star Trek Discovery is not all that concerned with restorative nostalgia, the series does not excessively lean on invoking comforting throw-back feelings with the intent of recreating the franchise's past tone. And then there’s season 2 episode 8 “If Memory Serves”. 

OH BOY. Oh wow. Okay.

“If Memory Serves” is a double down boot stomp of an episode that I’m sure has been turning heads for its use of interweaving, updating, and altering the classic two parter “The Menagerie” (and thus the un-aired-but-widely-known pilot episode “The Cage”) and I’m positive some misguided individual is out there referring to all this as a “reference” and yes I kind of want to die a little knowing that’s happening but I’ll struggle through. Sigh.

The first season of DISCO dug deep and did some drastic nostalgia tweaking and even (dare I say) went so far as to weaponize nostalgia and all the expectations audiences brought with them about what Star Trek “was” and “means” and “does” as a pop culture storytelling institution.  

It was a long-term re-haul of many, many aspects of the Star Trek TV franchise and it made many, many people very uncomfortable. Not me, I friggin’ dug it, but I am admittedly a contrary asshole. 

Blahblah lots of folks right now are probably thinking about Captain Lorca and for good reason - so lets look at Lorca and how he was used to snap the audience’s nostalgic Trek lens. Spoliers ahead.

Captain Lorca (played by Jason Isaacs) was revealed to be from the Mirror Universe, as in the slap-on-a-beard-and-be-mean-universe. If you know Star Trek you know the Mirror Universe.

But in the beginning, we all sat around ho-humming over Lorca’s motivations and choices. Over what we wanted to believe about him. The viewership was VERY busy interpreting Lorca and working the character into our own individual understandings on what we know and want from a Star Trek television show.

As it happens Captain Lorca is one of the most Trekkie characters ever by default of his universal origins while simultaneously being an approach to the evils of the Mirror Universe (AKA What We Don’t Want Humanity To Be™) as we’ve never seen it before.

Hating other races and being aggressive and enjoying war and breeding a society hostile towards ideas of equality, justice, cooperation, and peace are pretty straight forward no-nos. Turns out though, and this is the real kicker, that the initial unease Lorca brought onto Discovery wasn’t just (entirely) the writers getting through their sea legs but a nice long con: 

The evils of the Mirror Universe have now been expanded to psychological and emotional abuse with sexual predatory behavior and unsustainable environmental practices thrown in for good measure. Which was a much-needed update my friends.

And I say “update” but in a lot of ways it’s an insertion. A clarification. Or, as I first sated, an expansion. We could look at DISCO as re-writing Star Trek lore because that’s, ya know, what it is doing - but we can also more specifically look at DISCO as a project in nostalgic alteration.

Hey, guess what?! Spock’s sister has always been a black woman.

From our outward understanding yes, we know Michael Burnham is a ~new~ character in a ~new~ Star Trek show. None of us are confused on how any of this story telling is working. These are new stories. 

The function of these stories though? I can’t help but think the audience is pretty torn up on that front.

Something inherent in experiencing Star Trek Discovery is how the show’s narrative future hails from our actual historical past. The utopia of the original series is dated and stale and disingenuous without a nostalgic/contextual lens firmly set in place. The function of many Star Trek Discovery stories is that of a much-needed blood transfusion: Bringing new life to old withered limbs.

Does this mean that Star Trek Discovery is seeking to recontextualize Star Trek? Yes and no but mostly no in my opinion. LOL, sorry, but it’s complicated! As most nostalgia driven works are.

Nostalgic Cinema is a real subset of critical film studies and has only grown in recent years but nostalgia isn’t anything new to media or the human experience. The general consensus is that nostalgic media tries to visually replicate time periods in human history (or the markers of media from a particular time period, what Marc Le Sueur dubbed “deliberate archaism”), but primarily acts as a bridge to idolized youthful emotionality and/or simplified “truths”. 

Marc Le Sueur’s “Theory Number Five: Anatomy of Nostalgic Films: Heritage and Method” was published in 1977 and was one of the first major academic and critical looks into the role nostalgia plays in cinema and by extension our connection to and perception of art. In the 1990s Svetlana Boym and Fredric Jameson further pushed ideas of nostalgia in literature and late capitalism respectably (which of course made its way onto visual media).

Le Sueur and Boym saw nostalgia as two classifiable categories, restorative or reflective. Restorative nostalgia attempts to recapture and revitalize an imagined past while reflective nostalgia is marked by a wistful longing for what has been lost to time.

In “The Future of Nostalgia” Svetlana Boym wrote “Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” She goes on to suggest that our attraction to nostalgia (either restorative or reflective) is often times less about actually trying to reclaim a vanished past but rather a conscious resistance to an unknown and potentially threatening future.

The bulk of nostalgic media can easily be seen to tie into Boym’s observations; most media isn’t concerned with or about the personal and effective uses of nostalgia as a lived experience/real feeling among individuals but instead more focused on a particularly stylized, sanitized, and simplified view of history. Nostalgia in media is typically a presentation on the present day's romanticized fantasy of the past, void of contradictions and unsolvable uncertainties of the focused time period's lived reality, so as to soften or even avoid the creator’s and audience’s confusing present and unknown future.

In 2005 film critic and historian Pam Cook explored nostalgia in her book “Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema” which collected seventeen of her short essays from 1976 to 1999 that focus on memory, identity, and nostalgia not only within their subject matter but within Cook’s viewpoint of revisiting her own body of work. Early on Cook laid out a more optimistic outlook on nostalgia in media:

“Rather than being seen as a reactionary, regressive condition imbued with sentimentality, it can be perceived as a way of coming to terms with the past, as enabling it to be exorcised in order that society, and individuals, can move on. In other words, while not necessarily progressive in itself, nostalgia can form part of a transition to progress and modernity. The suspension of disbelief is central to this transition, as nostalgia is predicated on a dialect between longing for something idealized that has been lost, and an acknowledgement that this idealized something can never be retrieved in actuality, and can only be accessed through images.”

The Star Trek of 1966 didn’t air in a peaceful time free from social and political turmoil. In fact, the original series itself was a kind of attempt at Future Nostalgia: A projected desire for what humanity could be if we survive and make changes to the then-contemporary world the show was directly commenting on. 

Star Trek’s original series today, as media that has survived and gained weight within the American pop cultural landscape, certainly feels warm, inviting, and reflective of an America long gone and shattered - and that’s because, now, it is. 

Time moves forward and warps and bends our media and our experiences to media and the most warped and most bendy of all are those storytelling institutions that outlive and outlast the era and people who first created and first experienced it. 

Recreating Star Trek visually, tonally, and thematically would be straight nostalgic vampirism and is obviously not what DISCO is doing. But that doesn’t mean Star Trek Discovery is not not a nostalgic piece even though it looks, feels, and is thematically different than the 1966 original show.

Real quick, let’s get back to this week’s episode, “If Memory Serves”!

... Honestly though, do I need to connect these dots? We all get it right? We’re all on board with this entire thing from the name of the episode, to its direct use and alterations of the original series, and then the not-so-subtle reveal that the season’s big plot point, the Red Angel, is a time traveler re-writing history. Like. We get it, right?

This is where Discovery has yet again doubled down on its storytelling functionality; this is Spock y’all. This is Pike. This is for real happening. Michael has helped shape the Spock character we will see later on in the “future” (our collective past).

And while we’re here, check out Mr. Spock! The Spock of Discovery is not dripping with nostalgic slime, he’s sharp and clean to an almost shocking degree. The series makes little effort in acting as though we should have a pre-determined fondness for the character outside of his relationship to Michael. Which is absolutely NUTS. But in a good way, in my opinion! 

The search for Spock (lawl) within Discovery has been on a surface level the literal search for the character within the narrative space of this new series. They gotta find that dude.

The search for Spock within Discovery has also been a form of re-defining the character not through audience expectation of What They Know and Remember but What They Don’t Know and Have No Basis For.

And the series accomplished it within the framework of places, characters, and events that are old, new, the same, and different all at once. I believe that’s a lot of intentional wibbly wobbly timey wimey paratextual stuff taking precedence for the sake of promoting a new view on Star Trek’s (and our own) past, primarily for the sake of moving beyond it. 

I don’t think it’s just ‘haha, reference!’ that the first shots we see of Vina (an original series character) in Star Trek Discovery’s “If Memory Serves” is that of her high heeled glass slippers. It’s jarring and weird and even laughable. Vina’s hair and makeup are also deliberate archaisms within the series the character is currently in, airing in the year it is. It reminded me of another nostalgia ridden TV series that would often implement a similar absurdist approach towards viewer nostalgia.

Mad Men had a lot of fun presenting a visually accurate but sterile version of the past not so as to suggest things were better in the 1960s but so that the series could better magnify (and even exasperate) American disillusionment.

One of my favorite examples of nostalgic absurdity in Mad Men is when Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) stands in a crowded office building jokingly pointing a gun at unflinching women.

What's the goal of having Pete do this? Is it to show we were... better then? We were more innocent? Is this deeply inappropriate "joke" suddenly OK because it's 1960, or is it even within context creepy, horrifying, and in incredible bad taste? Do we need the characters to recognize the absurdity of Pete's actions for us to validate them as absurd or are we being invited to make that evaluation ourselves in the here and now outside of the character's reality?

What Pete does is creepy and weird if the characters acknowledge it or not just as much as it is, admittedly, darkly humorous for the audience to witness at all.

But that's because it's not really a set up for comparing and contrasting how much we as a country have lost or gained in the wake of mass shootings but rather that of an audience being able to recognize a total D-bag, even through time.

Pete and his gun aren't a direct focus of the show's nostalgia but they are certainly a product of it and a bit of the point is that Pete gets away with doing what he does because it's a story, yeah, but PRIMARILY due to the audience assumption of "well, it was the 1960s". Its within that suspension of disbelief living at the core of all the many absurdist moments that make up Mad Men where the series bit by bit wedges in its most critical theme: Nostalgia is bullshit.

Through its intentional juxtaposition of accurately ‘recreating’ the past and high co-dependency on its contemporary audience’s views, Mad Men suggests that the best we can do as a society, as a country, is see the similarities between the past and now and decide what is worth keeping, progressing, or discarding entirely. The series delights in uncomfortably positioning the audience to view the weird ass shit it's characters do (littering, chain smoking, drinking and driving, slapping women's butts, letting children play with plastic bags over their heads to name a basic few), not so as to suggest that the past was "better" than today but so as to highlight the ways that we as a society have already deemed the past to be inefficient, ineffective, and cruel.

The series uses the same audience awareness principle to highlight the ways in which nostalgia cannot hide nor brighten our shortcomings and continued failures. There are just as many (if not more) moments in the series that are not presented as contrasting absurdity but comparative harrowing familiarity; those areas of our cultural makeup we have not adequately progressed or left behind.

Sure, in the 1960s everyone could smoke everywhere (very ew, look how far we’ve come) but women still had to internally balance if they could afford looking like a humorless bitch when confronting workplace sexual harassment (haha, whoops!). 

America’s past in Mad Men is terrifying and weird as well as frustratingly still present, as smoke soaked into our current attitudes and culture. What America’s past isn’t in Mad Men is purely seductive nostalgia for the sake of simplifying the present.

Le Sueur, Boym, and Cook all propagate that the cinematic image/use of nostalgia is that of double exposure, two images projected onto an audience’s perception and experience (1. contemporary recreation 2. of the past) - and that sure as hell makes up the building blocks of Discovery even though we’re all cognitively aware every aspect of the series is new and it takes place “in the future”. Discovery uses the franchise’s past as an adaptive functional mirror with which to compare and contrast our contemporary reality rather than merely repeating experiences and ideas reflective of a time long gone.

Vina’s shoes, her entire aesthetic down to her backstory aren’t just counter to the tone and aesthetic of Discovery but to the sensibilities of the contemporary audience; we are all very aware that Vina hasn’t literally been plucked out of 1966 and plopped into this new series. Again, none of us are confused on how any of this story telling is working. We’re aware these are new stories. But what is the function of Vina in this new story? What is the purpose of all the unease her presence brings into “If Memory Serves”?

Vina, way back in 1966, was written to choose a life of illusion among aliens siphoning her memories and emotions rather than accept and become a part of the present. The Keeper tells Pike, “She has an illusion and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant” as they once again cover up Vina’s hunched back and scarred face with youthful and desirable 1960s beauty standards. As we all know Pike himself will go on later to choose this exact fate. He will succumb to the same choice.

“When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating," Vina tells us of the Talosians in “The Cage”, episode zero of Star Trek. “You even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.”

I’m having a serious and very real Look-Into-The-Camera-Moment here my friends. We’re all on board, yeah? Are the dots sufficiently and fully aligned? God I hope so. “If Memory Serves” is pulling a helluva fine “To Serve Man” word play pals:

If our memories perform our duties and live our lives for us, we become trapped. Discovery’s purpose for pulling in original series characters, and these characters in particular and all the narrative context sliding along in with them, is to suggest that we (and the franchise itself) need to move past our attachments to the original series and its rusty ideas and simplistic hopes for the future.  

Vina and Pike are already lost causes, we know this. We gain power in knowing this. The re-framing of these characters as being more tragic than romantic, with Discovery reflecting their longing as kinda creepy and disconnected with Vina more siren than innocent the series can push past the past and grab on to a new understanding of this classic episode’s elements and what it can mean for us watching Star Trek made in 2019.

A purely DISCO inversion of all this is poor Dr. Culber who has a complete lack of emotional connection to the past, who can remember moments and events but can’t make them give off any feelings of relevancy or incorporate them into who he is as a person. Culber is just as trapped as Vina and what Pike will (possibly?) become. The inch by inch nature of his recovery will depend on, as a pissed off Burnham tells the Talosians, if he can learn to “survive another way.” 

Yeah. That might be some thematic intent we’ve picked up on skip. We’re legit through the looking glass now huh? Up is down and down is up and nostalgia ain’t what it used to be! Hype.      

As such, in its own way, Discovery is fairly critical of Star Trek and by extension a bulk of its audience and their personal reasons and motivations for tuning in. It makes a lot of sense that Lorca and “If Memory Serves” among many other production choices and aspects chafe some viewers. 

I’m of the opinion that the shiny pristine nostalgic pedestal sculpture that is STAR TREK should be filed and chipped and shaved and grated here and there just as much as more contemporary substance should be added and stuffed back into it. 

What’s the goddamn point of any of this if not to further progress the bar of reflecting and projecting the human experience onto a future better than that one envisioned in 1966? In 1987? In 1993? And, at the end of the day, isn’t THAT more authentically “Star Trek” than simply an episodic narrative structure, glitter effect transporters, and a captain’s log? 

[stevenuniversallyreviews]

Episode 92: Monster Reunion

“I have to try.”

The tragedy of Nephrite is Steven Universe’s longest side story, beginning with the very first episode and concluding five years later in the final episode of the show’s original run. How we feel about Nephrite at any given time indicates how we’re made to feel about Corrupted Gems as a whole at that point in the show. After Gem Glow, they’re monsters of the week. After Monster Buddies, they’re innocent but violent victims of...something. And after Monster Reunion, we know what that something is.

Ninety-two episodes in, we know of Yellow and Blue Diamond. We know they’re part of a a group called Great Diamond Authority, acting as Gem Matriarchs. We’ve seen an artistic representation of a third Diamond on the Moon Base. We’ve seen a four-part symbol with a white, yellow, blue, and pink diamond united as one. We got a hint of their musical cue as the Gems abandoned Earth in a flashback. And because the Diamonds are in charge, we also know that they’re responsible for some terrible things, from the forced fusion of Gem Shards to seeking of destruction of planets not only for reproduction, but revenge. The information is dripping in, and these Gems are shaping up to be the villains of the series, and thanks to that knowledge, all it takes is one sketch to emphasize their most heinous crime.

This is the episode where the horror of corruption sinks in, in the same way Keeping It Together reveals the horror of Cluster Gems. The Mother Centipeetle was a monster, and Centi was a pet, but this version trying desperately to communicate before she loses her sanity again is a person. She has memories spanning millennia but was trapped by her mind and her body by her own leaders. After a string of Beach City episodes with purely personal stakes, Monster Reunion’s depiction of a personal struggle representing an atrocity affecting a planet’s worth of Gems hits like a freight train. This isn’t just something the Diamonds did to their enemies: Nephrite, alongside countless other Corrupted Gems caught in the crossfire, was loyal to Homeworld, but that meant nothing.

Between the Cluster Gems and the Corrupted Gems, the Diamonds prove that they’re not content with just destroying the bodies of their opponents, but the souls of anyone that inconveniences them. We’ll learn a bit more about it in Nephrite’s fourth episode, Legs from Here to Homeworld, where it seems this corruption was unintentional (or at least unknown by Blue and Yellow Diamond), but Monster Reunion galvanized me against the Diamonds in a way no other episode has, and it does this by giving us a single, concrete character to sympathize with.

This is the second time this season Raven Molisee and Paul Villeco have given Steven an extensive conversation with an entity incapable of full communication, but unlike Gem Drill, Nephrite allows these artists to fully utilize their gift for character animation to tell their story. Molisee’n’Villeco episodes are distinguished by more exaggerated expressions than usual (see: the first act of Coach Steven, the climax of Rose’s Scabbard, Amethyst throughout Reformed, Steven-as-Lars in The New Lars), and that makes all the difference in enhancing our ability to relate with a growling alien cyclops bug. We don’t need words to tell us when Nephrite is scared, happy, curious, angry, or sad (we don’t even need tears to tell us that last one, but oof are they effective), and we’re able to empathize with her on a primal level thanks to her vivid expressions.

The other half of the Nephrite formula is master vocalist Dee Bradley Baker, who’s already performed as every Corrupted Gem in the series, as well as Lion. Baker’s prolific ability to give life to non-human characters make him virtually impossible to overrate, and he uses that gift to convey comprehensible communication from Nephrite with nothing but chirps and squawks. This is so much more effective than the cacophony of voices from the Cluster, allowing for an actual conversation of sorts between Steven and Nephrite. 

This would be a very different episode if Nephrite was still just Centi from Monster Buddies, and we have Molisee, Villeco, and Baker to thank. It’s not enough to feel bad for an animal in pain again: we need to see, for lack of a better term, the human suffering of it all. And I feel so bad for this woman who doesn’t even get to have a real name for another sixty-one episodes.

The conversation itself centers around a terrific use of flashback. As Steven reminds Nephrite (and the audience, because it’s been a while since Monster Buddies) of their history, we get depictions of the past that fully resemble Steven’s experiences. But Nephrite can’t talk, so we don’t even get the simplified silhouettes that accompanied stories from Garnet in The Answer or Lapis in Same Old World. We get crayons and stick figures, the most childish means of communicating, that slowly gain animation as the story picks up. 

Steven’s narration is a constant reminder that Nephrite doesn’t have a voice of her own, and that we’re getting bits and pieces of what actually happened. She can still sing along with him in her own way, and performs a flawless diamond salute, but can’t tell Steven the name of her commander, or how she felt about her crew, or any actual tales of the war. Honestly the most telling image is Nephrite’s very first picture, revealing that she sees herself as herself despite having never met Steven in that body. This is a sentient person, and we’re made to understand that before she reverts to a monster.

Allowing her to reunite with her crew is a brilliant move, because the show needs her to lose, but it would be unspeakably cruel to not give her anything in the process. We don’t get a happy ending, but we don’t wallow in bleakness either, and that’s a hard needle to thread when the subject matter is this horrendous. There are certainly real-world analogues to Nephrite’s plight, namely dementia and PTSD, but Monster Reunion benefits from being ultra-specific to the show’s lore instead of focusing on the same sort of allegory they did in Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service and will do in Alone at Sea. When the lead character can’t talk and we’re dealing with this much character and plot work, going for a lesson beyond the general value of mercy would’ve probably made the episode collapse.

This is a fascinating episode in regards to Steven’s maturity, because beyond the use of crayons, he goes hard on the cute angle to manipulate the Crystal Gems in a way that seems to undermine his growing maturity; for reference, we’re an episode away from a story about the aftermath of abusive relationships. This childishness is especially interesting when you consider this is where he gets his healing powers back, a sign of his growing power. We see him casually float up to grab Nephrite’s bubble, and he’s an old pro at warping without assistance. All signs point to this being a more developed Steven than his puppy-dog eyes might indicate, and that might be the point.

I don’t want to speak to the writers’ intent given how far away Pool Hopping is, but Garnet’s inability to properly predict the future here is caused by the same problem she has in that episode: she’s seeing the likely outcomes of a Steven who’s still a child. True, there’s also the matter of all three of his guardians reverting to a lighter version of their stubbornness from Monster Buddies given their bias against Corrupted Gems, but I can’t help but think that Garnet would’ve been cool with the outcome we get had she seen it coming. It’s understandable that she might not have been able to predict Steven’s capacity to help, and that the only outcome of freeing Nephrite was mutual suffering.

We’re past the halfway point in Season 3, and are thus nearing the conclusion of the show’s second fifty-odd episode chunk. Major plot elements are winding down in anticipation of the life-altering story that Rose Quartz shattered Pink Diamond, and one of them is the idea of Steven acting like a little kid. This is the last time we’re going to see him act this way at length, even as a ploy, because even though he’s still a kid in Season 4 and beyond, he’s a young teenager who actually feels like a teenager somewhat consistently.

We also get a subtle premonition of Amethyst’s imminent focus, as she’s twice admonished by Pearl for making fun of Nephrite even though she’s not making fun of Nephrite either time. The feuding days of Amethyst and Pearl are long over, but there’s still a power dynamic between them that Monster Reunion quietly reignites. And Garnet is still in charge, ordering Amethyst to poof Nephrite in a way that’s frankly a bit uncharacteristic. Maybe it’s because we haven’t seen an actual fight with the three Gems working as an unfused team since Catch and Release (heck, we haven’t seen a fight against a Corrupted Gem since the Slinker in Reformed, unless you count the big crab in Rising Tides, Crashing Skies), but it sounds strange for Garnet to give a direct attack command. Amethyst is shown here to be the lowest-ranking Crystal Gem, not counting Steven, and this means everything to the season’s final arc.

There are certain things I would’ve loved to see as a fan thirsty for information, namely an actual translation of Nephrite’s writings. But it’s not as if we don’t get the picture(s) from her "conversation” with Steven, and eleven minutes isn’t enough time to tell this story and inject worldbuilding through text. It’s frustrating to not have all the answers, and a common complaint of Steven as a character is his lack of follow-up questions, but in this case he clearly knows the gist, and there’s no reason to think he couldn’t have gotten Pearl to translate offscreen if he was still interested.

So I’m glad we instead got a searing character-centric story that hurts enough that I almost never watch this episode. It takes a while, and it nearly costs Steven everything, but thank goodness we finally get justice for Nephrite.

Future Vision!

Our next chapter in Nephrite’s story is Legs from Here to Homeworld, where we finally learn that she’s a nephrite, that her commander was a hessonite, and that Blue and Yellow Diamond might not have been as intentionally malicious as we thought despite the abominable consequences. It’s crazy how important Nephrite ends up being, essentially paving the way for the Diamonds to begin reforming through Steven wanting to cure her and other Corrupted Gems.

Steven’s desire to write “I’m sorry” in Gem Scribble as he looks at the image of three diamonds, with hindsight, seems to indicate some subconscious knowledge of his indirect culpability in Nephrite’s corruption. Or he doesn’t at all and it’s just a coincidence.

Nephrite uses a white crayon to depict the Corruption Song, indicating White Diamond’s greater responsibility, and ultimately White Diamond’s key role in healing the damage.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

Monster Reunion isn’t an episode I love to watch, because I don’t love to watch depictions of unbearable anguish, but it’s still an episode I love. Like Cry For Help, its sheer quality makes up for my infrequent rewatching.

Top Fifteen

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

When It Rains

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

No Thanks!

     5. Horror Club      4. Fusion Cuisine      3. House Guest      2. Sadie’s Song      1. Island Adventure

(No official promo art, but artist Jonathan Traynor's haunting sketch does just fine.) 

[dbarajas03-blog]

GWENPOOL

Gwendolyn Poole aka Gwenpool is a fundamental wild card in Marvel’s superheroes. She is an average person who somehow gets warped into the Primal Marvel Universe. Then, she has the ability of medium interaction and as well as knowledge of fighting skills and explosives. Her childish personality and violent methods make her very interesting as a hero, and as we will see.

Powers and Abilities

Gwenpool has very impressive powers and abilities for a character who doesn’t have supernatural powers or high-tech. From training with Batroc, she learned hand-to-hand combat and uses a variety of weapons (katanas, grenades, and explosives). When Gwen was transported to a pocket universe that recreated her home reality, Gwen's unique perception of the fictional world allowed her to gain the ability to recognize and manipulate the artistic medium in which she dwells. She can see and physically interact with lettering and caption boxes, and touch and even break through panel gutters, allowing her to transport objects short distances through space and time by moving them across panels, and interact with different instances of herself from multiple panels on the same page. The reach of Gwen's powers extends outside the page. She's capable of exiting to the Gutter Space, which allows her to observe pages from the outside and move through them. By moving to the Gutter Space and returning to the comic book on a previous page, Gwen can essentially travel back in time. From the Gutter Space, Gwen can see how the remaining page count of her comic book, and deduce how much pages does it have left. Gwen can further forcibly remove characters from the narrative by dumping them into the Gutter Space, as she did with Paste Pot Pete, or alter characters, as she did by pulling a villainous version of Doctor Doom out of his more heroic current incarnation. However, these changes are short-lived and fragile, reverting after a short time. Once Gwen moved West, the other West Coast Avengers showed no knowledge of these abilities, though Kid Omega noted she had some unknown power he could not detect. There was an implication that Gwen used her medium-breaking powers to put 200 towels in Quentin's room in retaliation to him always leaving wet towels on the floor. However, when she was falling after being thrown off a flying B.R.O.D.O.K., Gwen noted she could not reach out of the panel to escape to safety as before.  Gwen possesses a relatively small degree of medium awareness, as she can't be certain of any fact other than that she lives in a world that is fictional, to the point rather than knowing her adventures happen in a comic book, she assumes they do. This limitation can also cause her to mistakenly assume things, like who the writer of a story she stars is. Her medium awareness additionally makes Gwen a genre savvy being able to extrapolate the characteristics of things like video games to situations inspired by them. She also can, or at the very least believes, that she can purposefully invoke cliches or tropes, or typical narrative elements, in order to aide herself, or indeed to help other people, such as making an extra say their name to turn them into someone the writers won't be able to easily kill off. Once noting the medium interaction powers introduced in her solo title were not working, Gwen even questioned if she had been rebooted to not have them anymore. The extent of how much effect such action actually has on the world, however, is unclear.  Due to the fact she read countless of adventures that delved into the private lives of various superheroes she currently interacts with, Gwen possesses a vast knowledge on heroes' alter-egos and other such secrets, including Jane Foster's double-life as Thor, and the fact that Miles Morales hails from another universe. She's even aware of writer trademarks, concluding (wrongly) after stumbling by Kitty Pryde that the author of the story she was in was Brian Michael Bendis.

Bio

Gwen Poole originally lived in a universe, not unlike ours, a place where all super-heroes and super-villains were fictional characters that manifested through comic books, movies, and other media. Gwen's difficulty to find a job after having been unable to graduate from high school, combined with the fact all of her friends moved away, led her to submerge in fiction in order to escape from her reality and fantasize about a better world, becoming lazy and apathetic, to the chagrin of her parents. Through unrevealed means, Gwen and her brother Teddy ended up in the Prime Marvel Universe. However, both became separated on arrival and believed the other hadn't survived the transition. Unwilling to being relegated as an "extra," Gwen went to Big Ronnie's Custom Battle Spandex and requested her own costume to stand out. The tailor Ronnie complied, but she also misread Gwen's form, and thought the young girl went by the alias of "Gwenpool." Gwenpool's first misadventure involved stealing a virus from the Black Cat and selling it to Hydra for quick cash, believing that the Avengers would deal with any sort of consequence. When Gwenpool attempted to kill Howard the Duck, who had been coerced by the Black Cat into finding the thief, he made Gwen see the error in her nonchalant attitude, which originated from Gwen undervaluing the lives of the inhabitants of the Marvel Universe, whom she believed was nothing more than fictional characters. Gwen rectified her misdeed by infiltrating into a Hydra facility and getting rid of the virus with Howard's help. In order to find a stable source of income, Gwen decided to become a mercenary, getting contract jobs from the tailor Ronnie. While trying to carry out the job of taking down a Teuthidan squadron stationed on Earth, Gwenpool murdered another mercenary that had completed said mission and took credit for his work. The employer of the hitman Gwen murdered turned out to be M.O.D.O.K., who tracked down Gwenpool to have her take the place of his deceased hitman in his Mercenary Organization Dedicated Only to Killing. In order to coerce her into joining his namesake organization, M.O.D.O.K. killed Cecil, a hacker Gwen befriended who had become her mission control. Gwenpool's teammates in M.O.D.O.K.'s elite were Batroc the Leaper, Mega Tony, and Terrible Eye. Fighting M.O.D.O.K. After catching notice of Gwen's lack of skills during her first mission, Batroc helped her become a better fighter. With M.O.D.O.K. growing suspicious of Gwen's absolute lack of back records, which also prevented her from getting paid, she sought Doctor Strange's help. The sorcerer transplanted every trace of Gwen's existence from her home universe to her new reality. Even though Gwen now enjoyed the benefits of getting paid and Batroc's training, the appearance of her back records allowed M.O.D.O.K. to discover she was, in fact, a completely normal person with no real skills. M.O.D.O.K. confronted Gwen and tried to kill her for it, but with a mix of luck and Batroc's training, Gwen managed to fend off M.O.D.O.K., ultimately defeating him with the help of Cecil's ghost, whose presence was made possible in the land of the living with Doctor Strange's help. After M.O.D.O.K dissolved, Gwen decided to move to rural Georgia and become a “D-list” character. While there, Gwen came into conflict with Rocket Raccoon and Groot after accepting the job to capture an alien fugitive known as Chammy. They teamed-up once they reached an agreement that would let Gwen keep the bounty. Gwen initially refused to help Rocket and Groot capture the alien that had set the bounty, Reeve, who intended to murder Captain Marvel, arguing whichever person was writing Rocket and Groot's "comic book" wouldn't be allowed to kill her off. After falling under the mistaken impression that the comic she was currently in was being written by a "big-deal comic book writer" with the editorial authority to kill Captain Marvel, Gwen accompanied the team to New York and successfully prevented Reeve from killing her. Gwen, Hawkeye and Ghost Rider. Without a team, Gwenpool decided to join the newly-formed Champions. Gwen tried to help the young heroes take down the corruption in Daly County's police force, though her violent methods were quickly frowned upon by the Champions as soon as they met her, as well as her reasoning that the corruption could only originate from a supervillain plot rather than naturally. Once Sheriff Studdard was exposed as the person that had been facilitating the recent wave of xenophobic violence towards minorities, Gwenpool promptly left, annoyed that it wasn't secretly a plot by some supervillain. Following a depressive episode caused by the dissolution of M.O.D.O.K. which led her to take numerous dangerous jobs, Gwen reunited with her old crew when they were all abducted by Arcade into a fantasy RPG-inspired version of Murderworld. While making their way through enemies in order to escape, Gwenpool met and confronted Deadpool, eventually convincing him to join forces and defeat Arcade. Afterward, Gwen went on to live a normal life, her unique perception of the Marvel Universe caused her to become aware that she was still in a fictional world, and even developed the ability to interact with the elements of the comic medium, such as title cards or the border of panels. Gwen eventually managed to go beyond the panels and reach the Gutter Space. By observing the comic book world from there, she regained her lost memories and learned of Teddy's alliance with the future versions of her allies. Gwen returned to the recreation of her universe and took Teddy with her back to the Marvel Universe. When the future heroes tried to take down Gwen, the evil future version of Gwenpool used her presence in Spider-Man's flashback as a gateway to reach the present. The evil Gwenpool wanted to ensure present Gwen went on to become her, so she tried to both eliminate the future heroes as well as to convince Gwen to become a villain. The evil Gwenpool took Gwen back to the Gutter Space so she could understand that by becoming part of the comic book world, she was bound to its rules so nothing she did really mattered. Even if her actions didn't have consequences, Gwen still frowned upon the evils her future self committed, especially for the things she did to the characters she loved. Gwen's show of determination to avoid becoming evil caused her future self to be erased. From the Gutter Space, Gwenpool could observe the page count of her own comic series. When she renounced the possibility of becoming evil, she noticed that her remaining page count greatly diminished. After Gwen went through a failed attempt at becoming relevant by taking on Victor von Doom, she reluctantly tried out villainy. She sought Batroc's help to this end, but since he knew it wasn't in her true nature to be a criminal, he made sure their first heist was to supervillain Chance, so he unwittingly sabotaged Gwen's last attempt at extending her series' life span. While lamenting over her series' end, and what it entailed to her friends, Gwenpool was visited by a future version of herself to comfort her. Future Gwenpool explained her younger self her adventures will live on even after their end, and that the impact she made in fans will most certainly allow for her return one day. Gwen's future self also explained that renouncing a long-lived future for the sake of characters she once disregarded due to not being real made her a hero, and that would also ensure a future for her. Future Gwen encouraged her past self to use her abilities to exploit the medium one last time, and she used them to travel into various points in time and live possible future adventures.Gwenpool looking back and thanking the reader once she returned to the present, Gwen helped Cecil regain his human body, spent time with her friends from M.O.D.O.K., met up with the Marvel Universe counterparts of her parents, and rescued Teddy, whose soul had ended up in Mephisto's hands. Decades into the future, Gwen had barely aged due to the sliding timescale and being the main character, and visited at a hospital an elderly fan of hers who once had been younger than Gwen but aged naturally due to being a background character. With only two pages left, Gwen jumped back into the Gutter Space to travel to the past and thanked the reader. She then visited her younger self when she was lamenting her series' end.

Significance

She serves a significant purpose towards heroes who don’t have superpowers like fire or flying. She is unique due to the fact that she comes from an Earth like ours and using knowledge from comics against characters like Spider-Man and etc.. In addition, she has the power to move through comic panels and by moving through time scales, she barely ages. She came a long way from being a mercenary, being a hero, trying to resort to villainy, and then eventually sacrificing her comic’s end by being a hero. She came a long way from having an attitude of noting mattering in “the fictional world” she warped to, and then realizing even if it’s not real, she should be committed to being a hero. She may not be as exciting as other heroes, but she has a personality and interesting backstory to support her as a character that deserves more and more coverage.

References:

https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Gwendolyn_Poole_(Earth-TRN565)

[aion-rsa]

Massive Ramifications Of Captain America’ Warped Reality Revealed

SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for “Captain America: Steve Rogers” #12, which is on sale now.

With a twice-monthly schedule, new issues of “Captain America: Steve Rogers” are arriving at a fast pace, bringing with them more and more major reveals about Marvel’s highest profile double agent. The previous issue, “Captain America: Steve Rogers” #11, revealed the Hydra-affiliated Steve Rogers’ new Cosmic Cube-created origin story, and also revealed that the “hero’s” secret status as a Hydra mole has been compromised.

RELATED: Captain America’s New Origin Reveals Terrifying Extent Of Hydra’s Plan

“Captain America: Steve Rogers” #12, from writer Nick Spencer and artists Javier Pina and Andres Guinaldo, continues the big reveals, teasing two potentially major plot points and concluding with a revelatory final page.

First is the revelation that the Super Soldier program didn’t begin and end with Steve Rogers in this new Cosmic Cube-altered reality. In the original Marvel reality, Dr. Abraham Erskine was assassinated immediately after Rogers emerged from Project Rebirth, taking all the secrets of the formula in his brain with him to the afterlife. As we learned last month, that’s no longer the case.

Instead of dying after Rogers’ transformation, Erskine now died before, having been assassinated by a young Baron Zemo (who stepped in when pre-Super Soldier Steve was being tested, but failed to pull the trigger fast enough). Instead of all that knowledge dying with Erskine, Zemo used a device to essentially suck the secrets out of the doctor’s brain as he slowly faded away. That knowledge was then given to Hydra scientist Arnim Zola.

“Captain America: Steve Rogers” #11 interior art by Jesus Saiz

Cut to “Captain America: Steve Rogers” #12, and we now know how this slight difference created a massive change in the Super Soldier program. In the issue, Captain America — now a decent stretch of time into his double agent career as the Allies’ star-spangled hero — asks Zemo how Zola’s Super Soldier program is coming along. Zemo reveals that, since last we saw the Hydra scientist, he has seemingly died of a heart attack while in American custody. That was, no doubt, a ruse to get Zola out of the hands of the Americans and back into Hydra proper; odds are Zola uploaded his consciousness into a robot body, making him into the Arnim Zola that longtime Captain America readers would recognize.

Zemo states that Zola is “struggling to replicate Erskine’s formula” — although they have created new Super Soldiers.

“Captain America: Steve Rogers” #12 interior art by Javier Pina and Rachelle Rosenberg

The new soldiers are, as Zemo says, “more aggressive” and don’t survive for very long. However, almost a dozen of them have, meaning that there are potentially still some Hydra Super Soldiers out there in the Marvel Universe today, depending on how thorough a job Kobik — the humanoid Cosmic Cube — did of recreating reality.

RELATED: Captain America’s Hydra Secret Has Been Compromised in a Major Way

We get a tease of how extensive Kobik’s manipulations are a few pages later, as Hydra scientist Dr. Erik Selvig ponders the inner workings of Baron Zemo’s brain. Like Steve Rogers, Zemo also survived to the modern day and lived to torment Captain America and the Avengers. But recently, Zemo was placed in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secret Pleasant Hill prison/suburb, where Kobik altered every prisoner’s reality to give them an idyllic existence.

“Captain America: Steve Rogers” #12 interior art by Andres Guinaldo and Rachelle Rosenberg

As Selvig rightly wonders, just how deep did Kobik’s makeover of Zemo go? This is, after all, Captain America’s archenemy, yet he’s proven very susceptible to Hydra Steve’s pleas. Since the start of the current “Steve Rogers” series, Zemo has been held prisoner in Rogers’ secret base. There, Steve has tried to persuade Zemo to work alongside him, regaling him with tales of their Kobik-influenced childhood together. Whether or not Zemo remembers the events Steve describes has not yet been confirmed; Zemo has mostly remained silent, listening to Steve without comment. Could this be the same old, cunning Zemo merely taking advantage of his enemy’s suddenly altered state?

But Selvig points out in issue #12 that Zemo too was manipulated by Kobik, along with all the other prisoners in Pleasant Hill. “What if Kobik did something different this time? Something more profound?” Selvig writes in his notebook. “That might explain why a zealot like Zemo is predisposed to believe in the Captain’s tale — but what else could it mean for this world? For reality itself?”

The issue ends with possibly the biggest reveal of all: Kobik may have created a totally new being from scratch. The issue ends with Taskmaster and Black Ant — the two mid-level villains who uncovered Steve Rogers’ Hydra secret last issue — being approached by a new villain: Madame Hydra. However, this isn’t a Madame Hydra we’ve seen before, not Viper or Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. No, this is a new Madame Hydra — but she’s not a new character.

“Captain America: Steve Rogers” #12 interior art by Andres Guinaldo and Rachelle Rosenberg

Elisa Sinclair debuted last year in “Captain America: Steve Rogers” #1 as the Hydra agent who recruited Steve Rogers’ mother into the organization back when Steve was a child. She was instrumental in recruiting Steve and placing him in the terrorist group’s clutches at a young age. Since Elisa was placed into Rogers’ origin by the Cosmic Cube Kobik, it’s been presumed that she didn’t really exist, or at least not in any way that would affect the current Marvel U reality. Up until now, it could have been assumed that she was merely a character created by the Cube to act as an agent of change in Steve’s memories. It was also possible that another one of Captain America’s villains was posing as Elisa, and that she may be another character, perhaps even the Red Skull’s daughter Sin.

This reveal changes all of that; not only is Elisa Sinclair real and not another character in disguise, she’s also active in the modern Marvel Universe. It’s still unclear if she has always existed or was created completely by the Cosmic Cube, but either way, it’s a certainty that she’s going to cause even more trouble for Marvel’s heroes in the coming months.

“Captain America: Steve Rogers” #13 arrives in stores March 8.

The post Massive Ramifications Of Captain America’ Warped Reality Revealed appeared first on CBR.com.

http://ift.tt/2mmBBEz