It's here everybody! Dungeons and Daddies the Manga is now possible for you to buy and to hold!
I'll have this store open for a few months to let orders build up before I place my own order to get the books made (I don't want to order 100 books in advance and only get 50 orders, leaving me with a ton of leftovers, y'know?), so be prepared to wait a while before it's actually in your hands.
Dungeons and Daddies the Manga is over 250 pages, and costs $25 CAD (~$18 USD) before shipping, which is about $2 less than the manga I most recently bought!
While you're over there, I also have a leftover sale for the stickers I made for the anniversary some months ago, so if you missed out on those, now is the time to grab them while supplies last! They're $10 CAD a pack (~$7 USD).
if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.
this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.
incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?
Legend turning into a rabbit or a merman in front of the rest of the Chain
It hadn't exactly been intentional, nor was it remotely desired, but when Wild had nearly drowned himself, Legend hadn't had much of a choice.
What he hadn't expected was Hyrule immediately pulling out a flute and playing a tune upon seeing him swim up the river with Wild in tow.
"What are you doing?" Legend asked, genuinely baffled.
Hyrule yelped. "This one talks!"
"Do shapeshifting merfolk usually talk?" Four asked nervously.
Sky squinted, his harp already pulled out, before he cocked his head to the side. "...Vet? Is that actually you?"
"Why wouldn't it be me?!" Legend threw his hands in the air, nearly letting go of Wild, who yelped. "Shapeshifting merfolk?? What kind of insanity have you guys run into?"
Warriors burst out laughing. "Aren't you the prettiest thing?"
Legend's face turned redder than his tail. "Shut up! This item comes in handy, thank you very much! We'd be down a cook if it weren't for me!"
Wild sank into the water so only his eyes were visible, the tips of his ears tinged pink in apologetic embarrassment.
"It's certainly a very useful item," Time commented with a smile.
"I'll stick to my Zora armor," Twilight muttered as he chuckled.
"Can I try it?" Wind asked eagerly, running towards the shore.
Legend sighed, dragging Wild to the others. "Sure."
Legend really should have known better. The tidal wave that crashed upon the entire group from Wind's splashing soaked everyone to the bone, and the ensuing water war caused such rivalries that it took a week before the war had settled.
That parallel and the 4x11 shadowpeach fight as a whole:
Macaque: "No that's YOU! You're the one always running off! Looking for more power, more sources of immortality—you're the one who wouldn't quit while were were ahead! Not the great sage, he's got to drag EVERYONE else into his mess!"
Sun Wukong: "You're not in this mess, you're still free! Everything I did was for us!"
Macaque: "You did it for yourself! You've become like this, obsessive demon! I told you going against the Jade Emperor was a bad idea, but no, Wukong doesn't listen to anyone! He just does whatever he wants! You put yourself here, not me."
(4x11 A Lifetime of Mistakes)
-
A large part of Wukong's motivation to keep getting more power was the freedom of it—the more power you have the easier it is to do whatever you want. It's easier to ignore everyone else and focus solely on yourself. It's also easier to ensure yourself and your loved one's are protected and have the ability to do what they want.
So, a punishment where the great Monkey King is imprisoned and trapped for hundreds of years? It's effective and tragic and fitting. Wukong wanted to have the freedom to protect the people he cared about, and in trying to reach for the power to do that, he completely had his freedom removed. He went from the mountain, to then the circlet, and then all of a sudden he had morals and was bound to those.
And then I think about his end of s3 choice to go face the Lady Bone Demon alone. Once again Wukong was trying to protect his loved ones (not to mention the whole reason he went after the Samadhi fire to begin with was to have the power, the freedom to stop LBD (which in itself is another case of SWK believing he needed to be stronger for such freedom)), but he also wanted to make sure MK and himself both had agency. He didn't want MK to have to fight LBD, and he didn't want LBD to end the world.
This is exactly the sentiment he tells Macaque in the 4x11 flashback:
Sun Wukong: "It's so we don't have to worry about anything or anyone ever again! Just living a lazy life, sitting in the sun, eatin' fruit, and doing whatever we want!"
But where does it all lead him?
To possession, imprisonment. Once again Wukong no longer had the freedom to do what he wanted (which is to protect the people he cares about). Once again in his attempts to help his loved one's, he only hurt them.
This can be applied to his relationship with Macaque, to MK in s2, hell, even Wukong trying to get the map in the first place left him powerless, which then led to him and the gang being imprisoned in 3x02. It's a familiar pattern, one we see with antagonist and protagonist alike.
MK in s2 trained to become more powerful, which in the end only strengthened LBD and forced him and his friends on the run. Mei in 3x12 protects MK by letting herself get captured and placed into LBD's crystal. Mei in 4x05 goes to protect MK, breaking her sword and leaving her vulnerable to being captured by Kui Mulang ("How am I supposed to protect everyone without my sword?"). DBK reached for more power and then became possessed by LBD, hurting his wife and son. Azure reached for the Jade Emperor's power and bound himself to that role, jeopardizing Peng and Yellowtusk in the process.
It's a cycle of reaching for power, endangering others, and then being imprisoned.
So anyways, here's why MK is going to lose control (his agency) next season and hurt his friends with his own- *get's shot*
qiao wanmian and di feisheng's first appearances in the present-day narrative are mirrors of each other, orbiting the presence of li xiangyi and li lianhua. episode 5 introduces them both in the same way, stepping back into li lianhua's life while he watches from out of sight. di feisheng emerges from seclusion, qiao wanmian meets xiao zijin in yucheng. and what other information this episode gives us about these characters is the inverse of what we would've expected. where we assumed qiao wanmian might be the ex-lover, still mourning after ten years of missing li xiangyi, the first thing we (and li lianhua) see is that she's happy with someone else. it comes to be more nuanced than that, but the first impression we get is that qiao wanmian has moved on. di feisheng's first moment he gets by himself, meanwhile, is him drinking his grief over li xiangyi's absence away. he has jinyuanmeng bowing to his feet and and a tremendous amount of power in the jianghu he could use against anyone, yet here is, seemingly, above many other things, lonely.
the next arc serves to reinforce this idea, that where qiao wanmian by normal genre conventions should be the one who couldn't get over li xiangyi, it's di feisheng who continues to cling onto his history with him instead. during the liansanjiao's trip to baichuanyuan and pudu temple, we see qiao wanmian trying to work through her lingering emotions about li xiangyi over and over, and eventually (thanks to li lianhua's intervention) achieves some kind of tenuous closure on that part of her past. all of we see of di feisheng, on the other hand, is him becoming increasingly obsessed with what he views as unresolved events, until he finally chokes li lianhua against a wall to interrogate him about it. mysterious lotus casebook swapped what might be more typical framing of these characters. qiao wanmian is not a sad figure waiting for her sweetheart to return, but someone who realizes she was more attached to what he represents than to him, and in finding him as a person manages to become friends in this new life of the present. di feisheng isn't someone who moves on from an existence measured against li xiangyi and finds a new way to define himself, but rather a person who wound up isolated and frozen in time for ten years after losing him, and still struggles to leave their relationship behind or allow it to evolve.
tl;dr the real jilted lover of li xiangyi by the choices of the story is di feisheng, not qiao wanmian
Headcanon #113: Even when not arguing, Heart & Mind will still banter quite a bit. It can lead to an argument, but its mainly just lighthearted jokes & quips.
Transphobes get off my blog, transandrophobes especially. In fact go hate queers with the evangelical white moms who have coincidentally the same talking points as you about trans men.
So. I love this. The way Yuri snickers at Flynn showing his real self. The way he, without hesitation, says "yeah" to the idea that he would die in Flynn's place.
But the most important part of this entire thing, which was changed in the dub, is how Yuri specifically jokes that Flynn is trying to abandon him, and Flynn returns and tells Don he had no intention of abandoning Yuri.
Yuri does not hear this. Flynn knows that. But Flynn uses the exact same term Yuri used earlier, as if it's his answer to Yuri and saying no, I would never abandon you.
For reference:
Personally I just... love the weight of it. How Flynn will say something about Yuri that Yuri won't hear, but he still speaks it out into existence because it's how he really feels.
Just because Yuri won't hear it doesn't mean he won't say it, and in a way that's even more powerful. He's not looking for the credit of saying it. He's not looking to be recognized for saying it. He's not only expressing how he feels about Yuri somewhere that Yuri himself will hear him.
They're just his real, honest feelings, and he'll admit them even if Yuri's not within earshot.