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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Ultimatum”

Welcome back, everyone! We had an unexpected break last week due to the horror going on in Texas. I'm glad we did. Not because of any salty "RWBY is bad right now yay free Saturday" feelings, but because keeping to a schedule for a fictional webseries should never take precedence over peoples' safety. I can't believe I need to type that sentence out, but it's true! Over the last seven days I've seen fans who are not merely disappointed by the mini hiatus (understandable) but outright hostile towards the crew because they... were ensuring everyone survived during an unprecedented emergency? Yeah. Given the highly critical nature of these recaps — including today's! — I want to be clear that my thoughts towards Rooster Teeth's creative choices are distinct from any thoughts about the crew itself, including the most basic forms of compassion like, “I sure hope everyone is okay over there.” In an age where it has become horrifically common to harass creators and even send them death threats over stories, it has likewise become necessary to remind people: Don't do that shit. Never do that shit. If I can teach anyone anything at all, let it be that!

Anyway, dark fandom reminders out of the way, let's dive straight into our delayed episode. It was certainly a doozy. Titled "Ultimatum," we open on a trigger warning for flashing lights. Good on Rooster Teeth for including that, though I do wonder if creators shouldn't be including time stamps as well? Or perhaps a note that you can find those time stamps in the credits, avoiding any (minor) spoilers for everyone else? I'm not photosensitive myself, so I certainly don't mean to speak for that group, but my first thought was, "So how would I watch this episode if I was? Hand on the pause button, hoping I stop fast enough as soon as the lights start?" Hard to do given the surprise nature of the scene. Really, my answer would be, "Wait for the fandom to post warnings of their own, likely including where it happens so I know when to skip" which is perhaps an indication that this information that should be included from the get-go.

But I am glad the warning exists, regardless. The episode itself begins with a shot of Ironwood looking down at the kingdom. He's used his windows as a vantage point since Volume 7, so that's nothing new, but something about this particular shot reminded me of Ozpin, looking down from his tower. I'm sure the response from many would be simply, "Ah yes, the two power hungry dictators watching over their victims," but I think there's a much more nuanced reading here about leaders being expected to fix the literally unfixable and what that responsibility does to an individual. Of course, it's a nuance that is absolutely obliterated by the episode’s end, but the implication existed for a hot second!

Two other soldiers are in the room with Ironwood, reporting that Cinder has helped Watts escape. They try to soften this with news that they still have Jacques in custody, but receive only a, "I don't give a damn about Jacques Schnee." Which, fair. He's pretty useless at this point. It's when Ironwood learns that both Qrow and Robin escaped too that he really gets mad, something his subordinates have been expecting given their scared expressions.

Now, I'm treading lightly here because I realize how this is going to sound given the end of our episode, but I still want to note that outside of that ending... this is a weird take? Just hear me out. Since Volume 7 the show has worked very hard to make Ironwood seem scary and unstable — bad setup for what we end with today — but the problem is that none of it works in context and it certainly doesn't work when compared to other characters' actions. They are literally in the midst of an unwinnable battle and thousands of his people are dying. If the audience wants a human being — who also just lost a limb and was betrayed by half his allies — o remain perfectly poised and polite during that, sorry, but that's not how human beings work. But even beyond this, what’s the message here? Ironwood raises his voice, so does Yang. Ironwood hits his desk, Qrow hits a child. If we're going to examine how Ironwood handles his stress and anger, he often handles it better than many of our heroes. Namely, by continually taking that anger out on inanimate objects. I kept waiting for him to attack his subordinates or attack Winter this episode, especially given where we end up, but it never came. Ironwood always has enough control to break the desk or punch the wall, not the person in front of him. Which, of course, would not be a good thing in the real world. I want to be clear given these sensitive subjects that if someone is breaking things in your presence that's a major problem to address. But this isn't the real world. This is a fantasy world in the middle of a war, populated by other characters who express their anger by punching people, slamming them into walls, or screaming at them until they run away. The story wants us to fear Ironwood long before he makes his objectively horrific choices and it tries to achieve that by showing us characters who are clearly terrified in his presence, by giving us a string of broken objects in his wake. But those details don't land well when we compare them to other instances of stress. In the same volume I have watched Ironwood take a deep breath to calm himself down when things have gone horribly wrong. I've also watched Weiss start a conversation by threatening her defenseless brother. So again, what’s the message here? It can’t be that acting violently towards someone = villainous behavior because, as established since Volume 6, that’s common for the heroes. Why are these subordinates terrified about Ironwood slamming his fist on a table, but Whitley has no problem hugging the woman who threatened him? Obviously there is a HUGE difference between our main group and Ironwood when it comes to other actions (cough-bomb threats-cough), but these day-to-day moments don't match up. The show wants to use violence as a way for us to easily identify the Bad Guy while ignoring all the times when our heroes do the same thing.

All of which isn't meant to be a defense of Ironwood. As we'll see in a bit, there is no defense for what he's done. Rather, it's a way of acknowledging just how badly he's been written. Why does a man who consistently reins in his anger and takes it out on objects suddenly shoot a councilman for literally no reason? Why does a man defined by wanting to save as many people as he can suddenly threaten to bomb his city? Ironwood's characterization is all over the place, in the sense that they keep writing him as the morally gray, sometimes harsh, but ultimately compassionate man he started out as... up until they need a villain. Salem isn't here yet, so Ironwood can shoot Oscar. Salem isn't attacking yet, so Ironwood can shoot the councilman. Salem is currently reforming, so Ironwood can threaten YJR and Mantle. He's the B-plot villain whenever Salem is out of commission, which is a problem for both their characterizations. This filler doesn't make sense for Ironwood and it severely undermines the threat of Salem. You finally introduce the Magical Big Bad and our heroes are facing more of a threat from a guy with a broken army and three loyal allies left? Hmmm.

The tl;dr is that Ironwood's arc is a disaster and, frankly, it's gotten old reading simplified takes of, "It's just a realistic look at what white U.S. men will do in power sweetie :) " RWBY does not have the context capable of conveying that sort of critical take because our world is not besieged by literal monsters and an immortal witch, to say nothing of how real life good guys do not get deus ex machina canes that fix the problem instantaneously. Ironwood is not an example of anti-U.S. imperialism, he's an example of writers who don't know how to write.

Anyway, I'm getting severely off topic. Obviously Ironwood is a major part of this episode, but the problems demonstrated here are two years in the making. This is the culmination of things I've been discussing for months across hundreds of posts... so I should probably stop trying to summarize it all in a few paragraphs lol. Perhaps when RWBY is over — or Ironwood has died — I'll do a single meta on his character, try to pull everything into one, unified argument.

For now though, we have an episode to analyze.

While Ironwood is receiving this news we get flashbacks to Qrow and Robyn. Qrow attacks a soldier in his bird form, which is hilarious. Someone GIF that please. It does raise some interesting questions about this magic though: does Qrow retain his aura and strength in this form (something I thought given his choice to transform during the explosion), or was that soldier just so shocked at being attacked by a crow that he went down easy? We'll never know, because that would require establishing concrete rules for this world. The point is Qrow is going feral in his freedom, throwing punches left and right — did he kill that guard? — while Robyn watches it all from under a rock. They're apparently still somewhere in the facility since all the exits are guarded, but that's not the good thing Ironwood seems to think it is. After all, Qrow is out to murder him. He wants to be there.

We all see where this is going, right? The show is going to ignore Qrow's crazy belief that Ironwood got Clover killed in favor of a "Qrow saved Mantle by murdering Ironwood"/“Qrow got revenge for Mantle by murdering Ironwood” ending. Who cares why Qrow wanted to kill him in the first place now that Ironwood has his finger on the trigger? If RWBY is good at anything, it's writing moments that encourage you to ignore everything that came before it. We'll be seeing more of that in just a bit.

"Damn it!" Ironwood yells, because the show is leaning into its cursing. He orders that the subordinates not return until "you have Qrow Branwen in custody." Here we have another great example of the show conflating what the audience knows with what other characters know. See, we know Qrow has a vendetta against Ironwood. We know their relationship is the important one to the story and that Robyn is incidental. Ironwood doesn't know that. There's no reason for him, as a character, to specify that they only bring Qrow back, but it makes sense for the audience who has the whole, thematic picture. Our understanding of the situation is influencing Ironwood's dialogue, which is... not great.

This entire scene we've had creepy music to hammer home just how evil Ironwood is. Except, as said, he takes a breath to calm down and the music fades. Instead of flying into a rage, hurting someone, or doing anything the music suggests he might, Ironwood calmly calls in for an update — which is when the explosion hits.

It's MASSIVE, seeming to originate from a lightning strike, which is weird, since it's coming from inside the whale, but whatever. The animation is very dramatic and pretty, as we've come to expect of RWBY, but the actual plot is lackluster at best. It's funny though because I thought for a hot second, when Winter and the Ace Ops were caught in the blast, that RWBY had actually done something exciting. I mean, holy shit! There are the deaths we expect from a battle like this. My god, what is everyone going to do when they realize that Oscar's needless attack took out five characters, including Weiss' sister —

No wait, never mind. They're fine.

Let's talk about that "needless" descriptor for a moment though. Do you all remember, two weeks ago, when I went, "Hey, why isn't anyone telling Oscar that that Ace Ops are approaching with a bomb? They're on a time limit! If someone would just mention that Very Important Information then Oscar wouldn't keep standing around to fight Salem." See, at the time I was frustrated because of how the plot was needlessly allowing Oscar to put himself in danger (especially when the whole point of this mission was to rescue him). Now, I'm frustrated because that same plot needlessly wasted the most powerful weapon the group had. There was no reason for Oscar to use literal lifetimes worth of stored energy when the heroes already had a bomb to do the same job! What was the point of that? I guess he took out the other grimm too, but without the whale that still would have been a challenge with a finite end, one Ironwood's army and the remaining huntsmen should have been able to handle. It doesn't feel justified to have Oscar use a weapon kept on the bench for lifetimes when there was another option literally minutes away.

There's so much wrong with this I need another list. So:

Ozpin's cane supposedly stores kinetic energy, which may contradict what we've seen from it before. Regardless, we’ve never heard about this. The all powerful weapon comes out of nowhere

It also begs the question of why Ozpin wouldn't use that power at Beacon and why he wouldn't insist that they try to get their cane back while captured. You had an out this whole time! But we’re going to ignore that because Oscar is a little hesitant?

Which makes YJR's presence even more useless than it originally was, which was already pretty useless. Oscar essentially rescued himself

This kinetic energy miraculously doesn't hurt any people or buildings, just grimm

So what is the point of Silver Eyes? That's been their MO since they were first introduced. Sure, Silver Eyes can be used far more often than Ozpin's cane, but it still feels like a let down to learn that the Big Secret behind this weapon is... the exact same thing Ruby has been doing for years

Like Ruby, Oscar likewise didn't need any practice or training. He just set off this massive attack perfectly and without issue

We have now eliminated the biggest threat to the cast instantaneously — the whale and the other grimm — with no effort from the rest of the heroes. Like the Hound, the stakes are obliterated with no satisfying work on the part of our protagonists

Instead, as said, the actual plan already in place never happened. The bomb just... goes back. Kind of like how Cinder attacked and then just went back to Salem. Penny woke up and then just got knocked out again. We continue to go in circles

This is because no one took two seconds to tell Oscar, "There's a bomb on the way"

Because this threat is gone the show needs a new one, hence Ironwood randomly threatening Mantle with said bomb

The one way we might have justified Oscar blowing up the whale instead of Winter is if he did it to save Hazel, but Hazel is implied to be dead

Maybe he's alive, but if he's not that happened off screen and we're not sure how. It couldn't have been because of the blast itself — everyone else is fine — so what, Salem somehow killed him before she was blasted to bits? While he was holding her?

And there's no body?

Salem was torn apart multiple times during that fight and reformed instantaneously, yet now, conveniently, she's taking her time

None of the characters mention the issues above. None of them admit that there was no reason for Oscar to waste LIFETIMES worth of power when they already had a solution in the works. Fantastic

I need to take a moment to acknowledge that so far this recap feels... bad. Disjointed. Bit all over the place. Which makes a certain amount of sense because that's where my thoughts are at. There's so much going on in this episode — so much wrong with it — that I don't know how to boil it all down into a few, neat claims. This episode is a mess! We're barely a few minutes in and the combined issues of Ironwood's characterization and Oscar's choice have left me reeling. So if you're still reading this, bless your patience, I think we'll both need it for the rest of this journey.

Let's snag a neater plot-point to discuss. Amidst all the chaos Neo literally skips away with the Lamp, clearly thrilled at how her own life is going. Later in the episode she'll text Cinder with the obvious: Salem is going to be pretty pissed when she realizes this is gone. “If you want her name you know what you owe me."

So wait... what is Neo leveraging here? Is she agreeing to give the Lamp back so Cinder doesn't get in trouble with Salem? Give Salem the password she's been looking for? Or give Cinder the password to use the Lamp for herself? What would Cinder even want the Lamp for when she's after the Maiden powers? I'm confused about what Cinder is being blackmailed with. Regardless, she needs the lamp for something and presumably what she "owes" Neo is Ruby. We get a cut to her just to hammer that home.

(Side note: both pictures of Neo are hilarious.)

Before that though, back at the whale, everyone is taking stock of the situation when Marrow cries, "Hey, they were still in there!" I feel like this is another scene meant to make him look like the one good guy in the group — he cares about YJOR while the others can’t be bothered — but as always, that reading doesn't fit well with the situation as a whole. The others have barely had time to realize they're alive. I don't think it's a moral failing that they didn't instinctually worry about four betrayers, one of whom attacked them, while they're still checking that they have all their limbs intact. Besides, why does Marrow assume they're dead? The Ace Ops were caught in the blast as well, yet miraculously came out unharmed. They clearly didn't set their own bomb off, so it's logical to assume that YJOR did something themselves. It feels weird to have a "Marrow mourns them and Winter is the only other character who cares" moment when everyone is recovering from bomb shock and no one even knows if the others are dead. But, of course, the show is out to portray only two of these characters as good people, so ignore the logic and run with the emotion of the scene.

All of which is bolstered by Elm pulling away when Vine puts a hand on her shoulder. Why is she acting cold towards him now? Because they're not friends, remember?

While we get more ridiculous relationship dynamics, Ironwood calls in and congratulates them on the bomb working, but tells them to get back because they have another problem in the works. That would be Qrow and Robyn. Winter decides to tell him about the bomb in person.

We cut to Watts and Cinder watching the remnants of the blast from a rooftop. Cinder has tried calling, but no one answered. Unsurprising, given that Salem doesn't have any other allies left. Cinder says that the plan hasn't changed, she's still going to take the Winter Maiden's power for herself, and Watts can help her by bringing Penny here. He explains that he doesn't have full control over her. Rather, he implemented a virus that is setting her on a single path: open the vault, then self-destruct. Cinder, as one might expect, is furious.

She snags Watts by her grimm arm and threatens to toss him over the side of the building. Thus begins the best part of the episode, hands down. Despite the danger he's in, Watts throws common sense out the window in favor of dragging Cinder in the most satisfying manner possible.

“You think you’re entitled to everything just because you suffered, but suffering isn’t enough. You can’t just be strong, you have to be smart. You can’t just be deserving, you have to be worthy! But all you have ever been is a bloody migraine!”

It's true! You know what else is true? This speech could apply to our heroes as well. Accusations of entitlement and reminders to be smart as opposed to just strong hit hard, considering those are the same flaws our protagonists are struggling with. The difference is that Cinder, miraculously, listens, pulling Watts back to safety and going to cry by herself. That moment is simultaneously more growth than Ruby has gotten and more sympathy than Ironwood has gotten. The woman who murdered Pyrrha is treated more kindly by the narrative than one of our initial heroes and our very first villain has taken more time to reconsider her choices than our title character. You know a show is falling apart when excellent choices are applied to the worst possible character.

So Cinder is crying while Watts looks guilty and we cut back to YJOR's group post-blast. Yang is finally able to answer a call from Blake who is obviously overjoyed to see her. Weiss gives them directions to the mansion and they ask what in the world they'll do with Emerald, currently on her knees, mourning Hazel.

Thus begins the third most frustrating part of this episode. See, on the way back the group continues the conversation about what to do with Emerald, with Yang and Jaune distrusting her vs. Ren and Oscar encouraging cooperation. I can't believe I'm saying this after's Ren's speech and Oscar's entire existence... but I'm team Jaune and Yang here. Look, what Oscar and Ren say — the literal words coming out of their mouth — is nonsense. Ren goes, “We can’t let all of our actions stem from fear," as if Yang and Jaune are being ridiculous for mistrusting Emerald, one of the established villains, after years worth of harm from her. It’s weird that Yang points to her arm as something Emerald is responsible for, rather than being framed or the deaths at Beacon, but the general sentiment of, “She’s done horrible things!” is true. Ren’s perspective is the same simplification that was applied to Ironwood last volume, wherein everyone acted as if he was crazy for fearing an attack on his kingdom... post an attack on another kingdom and pre an attack on his kingdom. Putting generic lines in Ren's mouth about not being afraid makes him sound willfully ignorant, as if choosing to believe that someone is good will magically make them so, to say nothing of thinking it will erase all the harm they've already done.

Oscar at least acknowledges the difficulty here, but then follows this up with, “You don’t have to forgive her… just give her a second chance."

Oscar, honey, that amounts to the same thing in this situation. Allowing Emerald a second chance means working with her, which means trust, which means emotionally reaching a point where these characters can put aside the harm she's done them in an effort to give her that chance in the first place. This actually ties into a post I saw last night, one I've come across before, that claims redemption arcs don't require any suffering on the part of the person who has done wrong. I agree in theory, that prolonged suffering doesn't help anyone, but the problem is that people tend to conflate suffering with consequences and someone who has done this level of harm should face consequences for their actions. The problem with redemption arcs is not that the bad people suffer too much — emotionally and physically beating on them as a form of revenge — but that the people they've harmed are put into situations like this one. If Yang and Jaune let Emerald go like she suggests, they are agreeing that she doesn't have to face any consequences for the damage she's done (which, keep in mind, involves multiple deaths, not including all the lost lives here in Atlas). If they agree to give her a second chance, they are forced to jump straight to some level of forgiveness. We might claim they don't have to forgive Emerald to work with her, but from a practical perspective how are they meant to function, especially during a warzone? Anything she provides them with — information, watching their back in a fight, undertaking missions, etc. — requires trusting her enough to allow those things to happen: working with that info, letting her protect them, allowing her that responsibility. It's all about trust, trust she has yet to earn. In order for a redemption arc to be successful, the power has to be in the hands of the victims. They need to be able to see some justice for what was done to them, be offered some proof that the person in question has truly changed, and have the ability to walk away if they decide no, I don't forgive you, glad to hear you've improved, but please stay out of my life. Jaune and Yang have none of that. There are currently no systems in place for Emerald to face consequences for her choices, she has offered them no proof of her remorse or true motivations, and the other half of the group is pressuring them to give her that second chance without closure or reassurance. None of that makes for a good redemption arc and reducing that to, "So you want to see poor Emerald suffer, huh?" ignores the suffering she has already caused. The group are her victims and they are under no obligation to give her a second chance, particularly under these circumstances, which makes the story's choice to have Ren and Oscar act like Yang and Jaune are being stubborn or inconsiderate a problem. The conversation boils down to, "Give the woman you know to be a liar, manipulator, murder accomplice, and servant of our enemy a second chance based entirely on unfounded faith. If you don't you're letting yourself be ruled by fear."

RWBY's touchy-feely themes really don't sit well within its realistic, morally gray premise. We cannot continually have these characters go through hell one moment and then have others accuse them of being paranoid the next. The fact that all of this is wrapped up in the group trusting Robyn, Emerald, and Hazel over their established allies remains beyond frustrating.

Because yeah, you know how Oscar finishes his speech? “I’ve already gotten a lot of help today from someone I don’t exactly trust right now." Meaning Ozpin.

The story is trying to compare Emerald and Hazel to Ozpin.

"Oh hey, I kept a secret from you after lifetimes of watching that secret lead to betrayal and death. I keep apologizing for my mistakes while ignoring that I had no reason to trust a bunch of kids with such world-shattering information and also that you tore it from me in the most traumatic way possible."

"Oh hey, I willingly joined our world's version of the devil and helped her destroy your school, leading to numerous deaths including your friend and headmaster. It was his death that put Oscar in this position in the first place! I then continued to attack your group, leading to another near death of a friend, and a kidnapping, and the destruction of Amity, until I became scared enough to make a run for it."

Which one of these characters is granted an instant second chance? You'll never guess who!

And I do think the word "instant" is important here because just like Jaune and Yang have the right to have distance and justice from Emerald, they had that right with Ozpin too. The difference is they got it. They had the power in the situation, as evidenced by their use of the Lamp and physically attacking him. Ozpin heard what they needed from him — leave us alone — and did that without complaint. They were given months to come to terms with the secrets he kept. They were offered apologies and acts of service to demonstrate intent: saving them in the airship and continually saving Oscar. I don't believe Ozpin ever needed a redemption arc, but even if we think he did, he had it. After three volumes of material Oscar's perspective is still "I don't exactly trust [him] right now" but Hazel and Emerald have earned at least the same amount of trust in a matter of hours? They're really having my boy look at the guy who has tried desperately to do right by him despite unimaginable circumstances, and the guy who tortured him to get information for Salem, and went, "That first guy. He's the one we need to watch out for."

To make things even worse, Oscar tells the others that Ozpin took on all the torture so he wouldn't have to. So he did that and they still don't trust him? If you had told me back in Volume 6 that two years later the group would still be hostile towards Ozpin, while simultaneously urging one another to trust Emerald, I would have said you were lying. RWBY has its problems, but it's not that bad. Yet here we are. I suppose the one silver lining here is that Ren smiles when he realizes Ozpin is back? So at least one of them isn't prepared to draw their weapon at the mere mention of his name.

Both these moments raise more questions though. How in the world did Ozpin take on that torture when we clearly saw Oscar getting pummeled for a good portion of the kidnapping? Is that a weird merge thing the story hasn't bothered to explain? I wouldn't be surprised, considering Oscar said last episode he didn't want to use magic because it hastened the merge, he uses the biggest explosion of magic we've ever seen, and nothing has changed. Ozpin is still in the back of his head, thanking him for the tinniest shreds of decency they get. Ren, meanwhile, seems to be back to mindreading. How in the world does he know that Ozpin is back? I assume it has something to do with his semblance, but we don't know what. They could have shown us Oscar from Ren's perspective, perhaps with two distinct emotions swilling around to imply that he sees two different people now, not a useless shot of Emerald with purple flower petals, whatever purple means.

Oh, but no, we shouldn't have gotten either of these scenes. Remember that Ren's aura broke a very, very short time ago? Is it back already? Can he use this part of his semblance without it? Considering it was near impossible to see Ironwood's aura breaking in the Watts fight and we were then mistakenly told he used his semblance in the office, I'm going to go with, "The writers forgot."

Oscar explains that the cane had "lifetime after lifetime" of power in it and though there's still some left, "we have to be careful with how we use the rest." He says that Ozpin trusted his judgement and of course he did! Ozpin also didn’t know that there was a bomb on the way. Yet funnily enough, no one else mentions that, whoops, your choice made in ignorance was a waste and that's due entirely to us prioritizing hugs over basic mission information.

Also, all these explanations take place in front of Emerald. Half the group doesn't trust her, but they'll freely discuss their powers and limitations here. Remember how the group once wanted to talk about magical relics in front of the old lady they'd just met? Yeah, they've learned nothing.

Combine all this insanity with the fact that Ozpin's magic saved the day before Ironwood's bomb could do the same... while Ruby sat in a mansion drinking tea. Who's our hero again?

So things are a hot mess, to put it lightly. Their conversation finally ends when they hear voices and round the corner to find all the Atlas citizens huddled in the subway. For once the show actually writes them in a sympathetic manner, emphasizing how terrified and helpless they are. This image doesn't lead the group to any revelations though, certainly not anything that would tie back to Ren's earlier speech in the snow. No, once again the justified criticisms here are ignored as we hear that “However this fight ends, we could really use someone like you, [Emerald.]” That's it then. Discussion over. We knew as soon as it started that blindly trusting her was being presented as the "right" thing to do and now here we are, deciding that conclusively, despite Jaune and Yang's complaints. By the time the group reaches the mansion, Oscar is defending Emerald from Ruby. We're supposed to just accept that she's a part of the group now, only minimal pushback allowed.

Before that though we return to Ironwood getting news that their bomb never went off. He briefly wonders who else could have done that, but puts the currently unanswerable question aside for what he does know. They still have the bomb and it could be "useful." See, this moment — like shooting Oscar and the councilman — is when Ironwood just randomly goes off the deep end. One minute he's talking about what they've lost and cradling his new arm,

the next he's saying that he should have tortured Qrow to get Penny to obey him! Which doesn't even make sense since I'm pretty sure Penny hasn't ever spoken to Qrow. She wouldn't want anyone to suffer, true, but it's not like Ironwood had a close friend like Ruby to use as leverage. Qrow is just Some Guy to her. Regardless, he thinks Yang, Jaune, and Ren are decent replacements, despite Penny also having no relationships with them. This is what happens when your characters only start breaking up their teams eight years into the story, the response to Ironwood wanting to torture Ren to hurt Penny is, “Does Penny know Ren exists?” But, you know, torture is torture, right? Maybe. Probably not. I mean, if they're going to turn Ironwood into a cartoon villain, they could at least keep him smart.

Because all of this is just the height of stupidity. Ironwood wants to torture people Penny barely knows to make her listen (so just grab some civilians? It would do the same job...). Ironwood wants to shoot down empty ships, even though no one, including us, knows where in the world those ships would have gone. Ironwood wants to destroy an entire city to try and save another city. He wants to use a bomb meant for a comparatively small whale and acts like that alone will take out the majority of a kingdom. None of it makes sense! And I know the easy comeback for that is, "Well yeah, Ironwood is crazy and evil" but he's not. I mean he is. Threatening torture and bombings is obviously evil, but he's never been insane, or stupid. As said before, his arc (or lack thereof) is an absolute disaster. The fandom assumes so many things about Ironwood given the opportunity — the whale is a suicide mission. He expects the Ace Ops to die on his order — and the writing hints at so many things that never happen — he's going to hurt his subordinates, attack Winter for disobeying him — and every time what we actually get is a far more compassionate, level-headed character... until he randomly does a 180 and goes, "Let's murder a whole city now!" I never wanted Ironwood to be the bad guy, but they could have at least given me a persuasive decent into this level of horror.

So... yeah. Ironwood has got to die by the end of the volume, yeah? Between Ruby warning the whole world about him and him going into full villain mode, there's no coming back from this.

Neo sends her text to Cinder and the group makes it back to the mansion. Remember Yang's criticisms of Ruby's leadership? The ones she conveniently forgot about when Ren started to agree with her? Yeah, those are entirely gone as the sisters hug it out and, presumably, forgive one another for... daring to admit that things are bad? Look, I'm not going to deny that Ironwood's scene with Winter was creepy as fuck,

but I'm not of the opinion that the heroes are any better when it comes to the theme of obedience. They've attacked one another, screamed at one another, and any dissent from Ruby's leadership results in the questioner being left behind in the snow. We'll accept you again when you fall back in line. I used to adore the relationships in this show, but watching them now is just discomforting. The show might be 100% more obvious with Ironwood, using creepy music, a smile, and that hand on Winter's shoulder, but the concept of, "Sorry I dared to question you before! We won't ever do it again :)" isn't healthy either. The fact that the show keeps erasing theses problems with hugs — Weiss hugs Whitley now, Yang hugs Ruby, someone will probably hug Emerald soon — doesn't make the circumstances any less uncomfortable.

None of this even gets into the Blake and Yang hug. First of all, why is Blake acting like they had a fight and Yang might not want to see her? She's hiding inside rather than rushing to greet them, ears down in a devastated expression until Yang touches her. Combine this with Yang's "Do you think she's mad at me?" and it feels like the writers cut a fight in the final script and then didn't bother to remove the fallout from that. Seriously, where did any of this come from? You can't just have characters act like they've been fighting when they haven’t.

Also, can't forget this.

At this point there's nothing more I can say in regards to RWBY's almost-queer baiting. Is touching foreheads more intimate than the hugs Yang gave the others? Absolutely. Is that an appropriate stand-in for overt representation? Absolutely not. This would have been a perfect time for them to kiss. Take out Blake's nonsensical fear and replace it with them both reuniting after their first separation since Volume 5, working under the knowledge that either one could have been killed, finally admitting their feelings. Hell, they don't actually have to kiss. Not all girlfriends are interested in kissing! But they could use the terminology that makes things unequivocally canon. Another forehead touch when we got that in Volume 6? It's not enough, especially not when our straight couples have all been allowed their rep.

Ren at least wants to know where Nora is. He's presumably told what happened off screen as Oscar tells Ruby that Emerald is their friend now.

Then an emergency call from May interrupts the reunion and the group learns that Ironwood is bombing the Schnee ships. “Those ships… they were going to save people” Weiss whispers. How? Tell me how they were going to save anyone. Where were you going to take these people where they would be safer than where they are now? RWBY continually asserts things without explaining them, meaning there is precisely zero emotional weight here. Again, Ironwood is far past the point of defense, but I'd be a whole lot more critical of this particular action if I had a better sense of why it's bad. He appears to be endangering the people given May's shout to run — falling debris? — but the further implication is that Ironwood has doomed the people of Mantle by denying them these ships. It's that part that makes no sense based on what we've been told.

Which finally comes to the ultimatum of our episode title: Penny opens the vault, or Ironwood bombs Mantle. Great! So glad this plan is wicked smart and works well for his characterization. It's definitely not a nonsensical, unfounded, overblown change that feels like it belongs in a child's cartoon, complete with dramatic spotlight. Nope. Excellent writing choices all around.

Our final line of the episode is, “I hope you live up to the title I gave you," referring to Penny's job as the Protector of Mantle, and you know what? That line could have been very cool if it was delivered by an Ironwood with a persuasive fall and a halfway decent plan in place. I love that we've twisted the concept of a protector and turned the title into a horrifying, rather than honorable responsibility... I just hate everything surrounding those details.

So, usual RWBY fare.

(At least we get to see that Nora is awake!)

Will things get better over the next four episodes? I doubt it. We're still expecting the rest of the Ace Ops + Winter to ditch Ironwood, someone getting the vault open, the fall of Atlas, now the potential destruction of Mantle, and none of that includes Salem who should reform at any moment. Frankly, I'm not looking forward to any of it. The final leg of a season should make its audience excited to see how everything turns out, not dreading it. I've heard from multiple people that this is the volume that finally got them to drop the show and honestly? I'm not surprised.

As a final (happier?) note: we've finally got a bingo! I completely forgot our board last time, which was a terrible oversight, but we can update it now.

Our army of grimm can't kill anyone now that it got KOed by Oscar (that is the third one hit defeat of a major enemy we've seen this volume. Yes, I'm including the Hound considering it was obviously on its last legs after Ruby's eyes.)

I'm likewise including "Ozpin apologizes for everything including his existence" because he's done nothing but apologize since he came back. The emotion is there even if the literal words are not. Oscar reminded everyone of how untrustworthy he is, but kept the group from jumping them again. And Ozpin thanked him for it.

Neo didn't literally backstab Cinder (shame), but the Relic still counts.

So a triple bingo! Is that how bingo works? Idk, I've never played. I feel like I should have thought up some sort of humorous prize, but sadly I've got nothing. If you think of anything, let me know lol

That’s all then, folks. Until next week! 💜

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #rwby ultimatum #rwby recaps #mymetas

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naceisonthecase · 3 years

Text

Summary: Basically, red string of fate but make it supernatural.

Word Count: 5,218

[Read on AO3]

@aceandnancy @bughead-bones @ismokechurros @nacegolden @nocturne-alley

🔎

The Red String of Fate: Fact or Fiction? The title of the article read. Nancy couldn’t read anymore, not even if it was Bess who had sent it and was most likely going to broach the subject as soon as she came downstairs. Grabbing her bag off the hook she left her room and headed down the stairs.

“Good morning Nancy!” Her dad and Ryan echoed as she entered the kitchen. This was still taking some time to get used to, her two dads side by side drinking coffee and cooking breakfast as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Which, Nancy thought, would explain the state and smell of the kitchen.

“Morning,” Nancy replied. She moved through the kitchen toward Carson, letting him wrap his arms around her. As he moved away Nancy spied a circle of red around his pinky finger. “What happened to your finger?” Her eyes wandered away from the mark on his finger, the same size and shape of his wedding ring, scanning his face for any sort of incriminating clues.

“Must have burned it when helping Ryan cook.” He said, nonchalantly. He shook his hand as if that would erase the mark.

“That’s unusual for a burn. It’s a perfect circle.” Nancy had grabbed her father’s hand and was turning it back and forth to observe it more completely. “Does it hurt?”

Carson wrestled his hand back. Placing both hands on Nancy’s shoulders he held his daughter at arm’s length. “It’s just a burn, Nancy. Nothing serious, nothing supernatural.” Another thing that would take some getting used to -- her dad knowing about the weird, paranormal happenings around their seaside town. “And, no it doesn’t hurt. Not even a little.”

Nancy nodded at her father, not quite convinced, and he released her. She wandered over to a cabinet and grabbed a mug to pour herself a cup of coffee. The action caused a small red object to be knocked off the countertop. Her coffee momentarily forgotten, Nancy bent down and picked it up. A spool of red thread. How did it get there? Who did it belong to?

“What’s this?” She showed the spool to Carson. He had started dishing himself up a plate of food and squinted at the object in Nancy’s hand.

“It's a spool of thread. Probably belonged to your mother.”

“Mom didn’t sew.”

Carson shrugged. “We’ve reached our before breakfast question quota. Can we discuss it after we eat?”

Nancy put the spool back on the counter and turned to Ryan. He was wearing an apron and a gaudy chef’s hat standing by the stove with a spatula in hand.

It would have been comical if it wasn’t so disastrous.

“You want some,” Ryan asked proudly, showcasing his burnt scrambled eggs as if they were a masterpiece.

Nancy screwed up her face. “I think I’ll pass.” She said, finally pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“They aren’t as bad as they look or smell.” Nancy turned to see Bess seated at the breakfast table. She had a plate of burnt eggs, bacon, and toast in front of her and was smiling around a mouthful of food.

“Nancy, you have to eat something,” Carson said, passing by Nancy to seat himself down by Bess.

“I’m fine with just coffee. I’ll just get something at The Claw,” she said, shrugging off her father’s recommendation. She snuck a look at her phone to check the time. “Speaking of, Bess, I think we should get a move on. You know how George is when we’re late.”

“You think it’s a good idea to go back to work so soon after…” The rest of Carson’s sentence faded away, the implication of after hanging heavy in the air.

“Yeah, Nancy, George ok’d your extended absence. Just as she did Ace’s.” Bess was quick to add, filling the silence.

At the mention of his name, Nancy’s hand tightened around her mug, her stomach spinning. She put the mug back down on the counter. She hadn’t mentioned her dreamscape or the part each of them played in the journey to any of her friends. The closest she had come was Ace, and that hadn’t gone as planned.

“It's been weeks. I need some semblance of normalcy back in my life, and that means,” Nancy swung her bag over her shoulder so it hung across her body, “returning for my usual shift at The Claw.”

“Remember, you can come home at any time.”

The smoke alarm chose then to blare its angry head. Carson rushed off to the smoke alarm, ordering Ryan to begin opening windows around the house.

“And, I think that’s our cue to leave,” Nancy said to Bess, speaking louder over the wails going off in her house.

Bess nodded, just as happy to escape the chaoticness of the household as Nancy was. She reached for a napkin that was laying on her lap, dabbing at her lips politely as if she were dining at a fancy restaurant, and quickly went off to get her belongings.

🔎

“Don’t you think it’s quite romantic though?” Bess said, continuing the conversation they were having on the ride over about the article she had sent Nancy.

“It sure is something.”

Bess gasped, a hand flying to her chest in shock. “You don’t believe in soulmates?” She nearly screeched.

“Love I believe in,” Nancy said, approaching the door to The Claw, “but soulmates…there’s no proof.” Nancy pushed open the door to The Claw. Her gaze travelled over the room -- she spotted George and Nick at the bar. With Ace.

Ace was home? He wasn’t supposed to be home for another two weeks.

Nancy felt her throat constrict, she stood frozen in place. She thought facing him with these new fully realized feelings would be difficult enough standing on his front stoop, a rehearsed speech at the ready, but that didn’t hold a candle to seeing him unexpectedly here amongst their friends in a familiar environment and completely lost for words.

Ace looked up at the door at the sound of the chime. He beamed when he saw his two friends but his eyes remained on Nancy longer, Bess having already sauntered into the restaurant and over to the bar, wrapping her arms around Ace from behind, Ace’s hand coming up to pat her arm. His concentration broke off Nancy for the time being.

Nancy took a deep breath, then crossed the threshold.

Out of Bess’s hold, Ace was off his stool and was coming towards her before Nancy was even halfway across the restaurant. She froze in her tracks.

“Hey, Nancy!”

“Hey, Ace! Uh, how was your trip? How is...how is Amanda?” She felt a sudden prick against her finger, nothing more than a needlepoint but it made her look down anyway. Her finger was snagged in her bag buckle and she yanked it free.

“It was great.” She heard Ace saying And looked back up. “Amanda is good too.” It was as if he wanted to say more but shut his mouth instead.

They were such simple answers but it made her heart ache. The throbbing in her finger intensified and she jammed her hands into her coat pockets, slowly moving away.

“I should put my things in the back,” Nancy announced, walking away.

“Wait, Nancy.” He reached out a hand to stop her progress, his hand lingering on her arm. “How are you doing?”

She took a deep breath in before answering. “I’m alright.” She nodded, a faint smile tracing her lips. “Just recovering from nearly dying. So, you know, the usual.”

Ace nodded, not taking his hand or eyes off her. The pain in her finger had subsided, it was nothing more than pinched flesh after all. She was only thinking about it because she couldn’t allow her thoughts to settle on how Ace’s touch felt on her arm. Like his touch was meant to be there.

She gulped, trying to find her voice, and pulled away. “Ace, I need to go.”

She saw visible disappointment, concern, and curiosity flash through his eyes. Then she turned and disappeared into the kitchen. He stood there watching after her until Bess called him back to the bar to fill them in on his romantic getaway, and as a loyal platanchor he willingly obliged.

🔎

Nancy sat on the bench in front of the set of lockers. The kitchen was empty and she could spend the short time before her shift alone. And, Ace wasn’t yet in the kitchen, watching her from above.

He was with Amanda, and according to him, they were doing good. She couldn’t have these thoughts. She had to forget about this crush, or whatever it was, and move on. No matter how much she wanted to run her fingers through his gorgeous locks, again, or kiss him, and not an almost dreamscape kiss this time, she couldn’t act on it. She wouldn’t. She would just have to figure out a way to get through this shift without these feelings interfering and then figure out how to get over him.

“Drew, get your ass out here. We need you.” George called from the dining area signalling that her shift had begun.

She stood from the bench and smoothed down the front of her uniform, composing herself before heading out into the thick of it. Her first day back in weeks.

Ace was entering the kitchen as she was leaving, the two were in a dance for access to the door. He moved to his left, she moved to her right. Then vice versa. Eventually Ace allowed her enough room to scoot by, laughing. She felt his eyes on her back as she moved past. What greeted her on the other side was the typical Saturday lunch rush. She did want normalcy, she remembered, as she dug into her pocket for her notebook and flipped it open to a clean sheet to begin taking orders.

From there the hours became a blur of jotting down orders, filling and refilling water glasses, and polite smiles that she didn’t wholeheartedly feel. It was filled with lobster rolls, fried calamari, fish and chips, and The Claw’s famous clam chowder being passed from the kitchen to the awaiting customers. She was more or less in a state of workflow uncommon to her gig as a waitress when Nick stopped her, pulling her aside.

“Nancy, your hand looks serious.”

It had begun to hurt more, a constant pounding but she continued to play off as best she could even though the pain was getting to her. She looked down and saw that her finger was scratched up and bleeding, and a rash was beginning to spread through her entire hand.

“I must have been itching it. Not a big deal.”

George and Bess had gravitated towards her too and Ace had moved to the serving hatch, a cloth hung over his shoulder and his arms resting on the ledge. Great a full audience!

“I know first aid,” Ace piped up eagerly from the hatch, “I was a Boy Scout”

Nancy’s heartbeat quickened but she kept her voice steady as she said, “as much as I appreciate your concern, and I do, it’s just a few scratches. I can easily wash it up in the bathroom and be back in a minute.”

“You are not serving food with that,” George pointed in the direction of Nancy’s hand, a look of horror on her face.

“Oh, Nancy, it’s dripping!” Bess exclaimed, hands fluttering to her mouth. A few patrons close enough to be in earshot turned to see what the commotion was about.

Sure enough, during the few seconds of the conversation, it had gotten worse and now a green goo was emanating from the wound.

“Oh, ew,” Nancy said, extending her other hand quickly just in time to catch a glob before it fell to the floor.

“Take Ace up on his offer,” George ordered, nodding towards the kitchen, “then go home. The rest of you back to work.”

Nancy sighed. Keeping her mind preoccupied and not focusing on her crush on Ace hadn’t worked and now she was going to be in a room alone with him. Unprepared and in unknown territory. Then she winced and pulled her hand toward her chest. Her hand was in excruciating pain and she had to admit that it needed tending to. So, with a groan, she turned to meet him.

🔎

Ace was sitting on the bench searching around in the first aid kit when Nancy arrived in the back room.

“Let me take a closer look,” he said when he saw her paused at the top of the steps. He tucked his hair behind his ear, watching her descend the stairs and closing the distance between them.’God, that hair!’ she thought as she sat down beside him and extended her hand for him to inspect. “It looks like an infection. A gnarly one.”

“Gnarly?” Nancy said an awkward laugh in her voice. He smiled. She looked away. She couldn’t fall back into their usual behaviour no matter how easy and familiar it was.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing we can’t fix.” Ace said, picking up and ripping into the small packet, unfolding the wipe into the perfect square with such care.

She found herself staring too long at his hands as he took her own and wiped away the blood and grime from her skin. She flinched, shaking herself away from the memory of those fingers entwined in hers.

“Does it sting?” Ace’s hands slowed. Nancy shook her head. “Good,” he said, ripping into another packet. “Because this isn’t a one-and-done job.”

In the end, it took seven of the tiny wipes to clean the blood and green goopy mess. During which, Nancy had gone through all the symptoms she’d experienced with the lust butterflies, many times over. Although, fortunately for her, under better control. By the time Ace was applying a thin layer of an antibiotic ointment to the scratches she was wondering if he could feel how fast her pulse was racing, how sweaty her hand was in his or if he could see the heat upon her cheeks, and if he did, did he assume it was just a side effect from the infection or something more? After he secured the bandage in place he dropped his hands to his lap.

“All done.” He said, proudly. He admired his handiwork for a moment then looked up, meeting Nancy’s eye.

The two of them shared an extended moment of eye contact, his eyes so blue and portraying a deepness that many didn’t know the extent of, an ocean she was falling into. She scrambled to her feet at once conscious of how close she had gravitated to him. She had been practically sitting in his lap.

“Uh, thanks, Ace. It feels better already.” She felt herself falling back into those eyes, and pulled away before it could last any longer by heading for her locker. “I should be getting home.”

“I can give you a ride.” Ace said. Nancy popped off her lock and turned to look behind her. Ace was still on the bench, his hands balled together in his lap. He was rubbing his thumb against his other hand, watching her, eager for her to accept.

“It’s fine, Ace,” Nancy said. “I can walk. Bess can drive my car home.” She proceeded to shimmy into her jacket, careful not to upset her bandaged finger and fanned out her hair that had been trapped behind the collar. She then reached into her pocket for her car keys, putting them into her empty locker and writing a quick note, slipping it through the slates of Bess’s locker.

“Are you mad at me?”

Nancy faced Ace, her hands stilled on her coat buttons. “No--no I’m not mad at you.” She couldn’t take that sad, puppy dog-eyed look and busied herself with her coat.

“Then why have you been avoiding me all day?”

Nancy thought back on her shift as she continued with the buttons. When Ace was at the serving hatch she would wait until he was back at the sink before continuing her job. When she was in the kitchen she would ignore his calls and waves for her attention, And, if he was out in the dining area fetching something or chatting with George, Nick, or Bess she would take the longer route to where she was going. It hurt to stay away. It almost felt as if she was being pulled in his direction but she fought against that feeling.

“I--I wasn’t -- I haven’t been avoiding you.” Nancy lied.

“And, you’re letting Bess drive your car? She still drives on the wrong side of the road.”

“You should keep Florence here,” Nancy said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “For when you pick up Amanda from the hotel.”

“Um, Nancy, actually about that.” Ace started. He stood from the bench in an attempt to stop her but she had already made her exit through the back door.

Outside, Nancy leaned back on the wall of The Claw. Her eyes shut.

When did this become so hard?

Ace was her best friend. But she had to put a kibosh on these thoughts before it ruined what they had. And, luckily for her, she had a mystery on her hands to do just that. Literally.

🔎

Nancy hadn’t walked home. Instead, she had made the trek to The Historical Society. She had let herself in and found Hannah doing inventory.

“I need your help,” Nancy said after acquiring Hannah’s attention. She had her bandaged hand raised. When she had left The Claw it was, as she had told Ace, feeling significantly better but by the time she had reached The Historical Society the pain level was off the charts and the green goo was seeping through the bandaging. And, she was beginning to feel faint.

Hannah was at her side at once, immediately leading her over to a chair. She re-cleaned and bandaged the wound and handed Nancy a high-strength painkiller and a glass of water, which dulled the pain a bit. Hannah sat down across from her to hear the events that lead to this predicament.

“Hand me your bag.” Hannah requested after Nancy finished detailing the story. “I’m going to test the buckle for any supernatural or natural causes of this infection.” Nancy did as she was told, but the short litmus paper-type test turned up nothing of concern.

“Could it be something from the lockboxes, something I let out when I got the shroud? Which, again, I profusely apologize for.”

Hannah was silent for a moment, in thought. “This is nothing like anything I recall seeing or hearing about before. But we can take a look.” Hannah got up from the table and returned with an armload of gathered papers, records, and books that could be of use.

That had been four hours ago and still, there were no answers. And, her finger was again protesting loudly.

“I’m sorry, Nancy.” Hannah placed a hand on the younger woman's uninfected hand and squeezed it.

“It’s alright. We tried.” Nancy reassured her. “Actually, Hannah, while I’m here could we discuss something else?”

“Anything.”

Right now Nancy needed motherly advice. And, after losing a mother, a grandmother, a potential step-mother, and learning about her biological mother’s death all in less than a year, Hannah Gruen was the last maternal figure she had.

Nancy took a deep breath, letting it out in a slow exhale. “Have you ever had a crush on someone that wasn’t available?”

“Yes, I have. My best friend.”

“What did you do about it?”

“I told them.”

Nancy’s eyebrows shot up. “You told them?” She said in disbelief. “Even though there was no chance you’d be together? Weren’t you worried you were risking your friendship?”

Hannah shook her head. “I was at the beginning. But, it ended up being better for the both of us that I told the truth. The truth holds power.”

The truth holds power, that was something Nancy believed too.

“Thanks.” Hannah gave Nancy’s hand another squeeze, then she got up from the table to return to her work.

Nancy felt a sudden weight in her coat pocket. Reaching in she pulled out the spool she had found in her kitchen that morning. She stared at it for a few seconds in bewilderment. How had it magically appeared in her pocket when she had left it on the counter before she left for The Claw? The longer she stared at it the object and the colour became familiar for some reason, something that Bess was talking about. Nancy dug her phone out of her other pocket and opened it. The article that Bess had sent her was still on the screen. The red string of fate. Nancy scanned the article.

‘According to Japanese legend,’ she read, ‘there is a thread that originates from the heart and extends through our pinky finger connecting us to those that we are fated to meet.’ Nancy looked down at her finger. The infected finger, the one now covered in bandages, was her pinky. The red mark her dad swore was a burn wound its way around his pinky. ‘It is said that no matter how much you stretch or tangle the invisible red string it can never be broken.’

Nancy recalled how her finger felt better when feelings of attraction were coursing through her body when she was in the back room with Ace and had gotten worse when that attraction was being suppressed, as she was trying to do the entire day. How she had felt that strange pull whenever she was near him as if being pulled closer by a thread.

So much for forgetting these feelings. They were as much a part of her as her traumas.

“Hannah,” Nancy called, and the owner of The Historical Society appeared in her office doorway, “I think I know what this is.”

Nancy placed the spool on the table and handed her phone to Hannah so she could read through the article herself. She recounted for Hannah finding the mark on her dad’s finger. Him downplaying it as a burn.

Nancy’s eyes widened, as a thought occurred to her. “I need to see if he’s alright.”

“You check on your dad, and I’ll look further into this,” Hannah said, handing Nancy her phone back. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

Nancy grabbed her bag off the table and ran out of The Historical Society. Her phone clutched in her hand, she dialled her home number. Carson didn’t answer after the first or second ring and the worry began to build in Nancy until her stomach ached. When he did pick up on the third ring he could hear him talking to someone in the background. Ryan she presumed.

“Did you happen to touch the spool? The one I knocked off the counter this morning.”

“Hello to you too,” Carson replied sarcastically. He covered the receiver but she could still make out him saying “It’s Nancy.” to Ryan. They had a snippet of a side conversation and then she could hear the sound of the speakerphone being turned on.

This wasn’t the time for the speakerphone.

“What were you saying?” Carson asked and Nancy repeated herself. “I kicked it off the stairs by accident, picked it up and put it on the kitchen counter. Is this important for something sleuthing-related?”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” Nancy said, putting an end to that line of conversation. She decided to change her tactic to avoid his growing suspicion. “Hey, by the way, how’s your hand?”

“Same as the last time you asked.”

“Alright then, I’ll see you soon.”

“You’re coming home?”

“Yeah, I’ve had a long day.” Nancy ended the call and dropped her phone into her pocket. She slowed her pace, suddenly feeling weak and dizzy. Her worry catching up to her.

She had nothing to worry about. Her dad was fine. Good even, he seemed to enjoy having Ryan around. Maybe she was wrong about this lead and the spool hadn’t caused the infection. But that still brought to mind why she had found it in her pocket. Nancy caught herself itching her finger over the bandage as she thought this over. The wound had begun leaking through the bandages again and she stopped her itching.

Suddenly her phone began ringing and she took it back out to answer the call.

“Hello?”

“Nancy,” it was Nick who answered the phone, “you have to return to The Claw ASAP.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

There was a shuffling as the phone was passed between hands. Now it was George’s voice on the other end. “It’s Ace, he’s caught whatever weird finger fungus you have.”

No, this was definitely the spool.

🔎

Nancy got back to The Claw in record time. Although it was not yet eight o’clock the restaurant was empty of patrons and only Nick and George could be seen in the dining area.

“They’re in the back,” Nick called as soon as Nancy passed through The Claw’s doors.

Ace was sitting on the bench, Bess knelt in front of him pressing a damp cloth to his face. “Oh, Nancy, you’re back!” She exclaimed once she saw her.

Ace turned. He was pale, too pale, showing off dark bags under his eyes and a sheen of sweat glistened on his skin, soaking through his clothes. And, his pinky was just as green and goopy as hers was. Despite this, he smiled at the sight of her. Nancy threw her bag to the side and knelt beside Bess.

“I’ll give you two some time alone,” Bess said, handing Nancy the wet cloth, then she exited the backroom.

Her phone then decided to ring. She snuck a look at the caller ID. “It’s Hannah.” She said to Ace. “I should take it.” Getting to her feet she walked a few paces away to take the call.

“I was looking through my photocopies of the Women in White’s spellbook,” Hannah explained after Nancy accepted the call, “and found a spell similar to this red string of fate curse.”

“This isn’t exactly the Women in White’s MO.” The moment she voiced it she knew. “It’s Temperance’s.”

“I was thinking the same thing. She’s changed the spell in some way. To only hex those who haven’t found or confessed to their destined partner. If they have it shows up only as a red mark around their pinky, no infection.”

The red mark showed her dad had met his soulmate, her mom, and even though she was gone she was still his soulmate.

“The bad news does remain the same,” Hannah continued, “when the infection gets to the heart both destined partners die.”

Nancy swallowed hard and looked back at Ace. He was looking back at her. This time when they shared a long moment of eye contact she didn’t avert her eyes. Her heart pounded. “Is there a cure?” Nancy felt her voice crack on the final word.

“Nothing that I’ve found yet, but I’ll keep looking.”

There was no discernable cure. Ace was running out of time. And, because this curse had connected the two of them, so was she.

Nancy thanked Hannah and hung up, gravitating back to Ace, and sitting by his side. She entwined her hands with his cold, clammy ones. Not caring how the goop squelched between their fingers. It had made her feel better when she was at her worst when they were unattaching the wraith from feeding on her life force, and she wanted to show the same compassion to him. The longer they sat there, the worse her symptoms got until she was the same feverish mess that he was.

She held his hand as tight as she could, ignoring all the butterflies fluttering inside her. “This is my fault,” Ace parted his chapped lips to protest but Nancy silenced him. “No, that’s the truth.”

This reminded her of what Hannah had told her back at The Historical Society. Truth has power. Maybe confessing would lessen the curse.

She couldn’t look at him as she spoke instead looking over his shoulder as she recited a modified version of the script she had planned weeks previously. “In New York, I had this dreamscape experience with you at the bluffs. It was -- it was powerful and I felt things. For you. At first, I thought that it was the wraith manipulating how I felt but it wasn’t. I-- I know that now. And, I know you’re with Amanda and I don’t want to ruin that. And, right now I should be my first priority and put relationships on the backburner. And, I know this could risk everything we have, but, I needed -- I needed to tell you.”

Ace was silent, and he removed his hands from hers. Nancy was preparing herself for the worst, for Ace to say that he didn’t want to be friends with her anymore. That she should stay out of his and Amanda’s relationship. She frantically wiped at her eyes, trying to compose herself for what was coming.

“And, you don’t need to reciprocate. You’ve--you’ve become very special to me and I--I can’t lose you.”

“Nancy, slow down,” Nancy looked tearfully into his eyes, stopping her unconscious stream of thought, and he grabbed her hand again. Some of his colour had returned and the dark circles under his eyes weren’t as pronounced. “Amanda broke up with me.

Nancy gulped. “She did what now?” She hadn’t expected this.

“She said I wasn’t all in. And, she’s right. I’m not. So, she stayed behind in Portland.” Ace squeezed their conjoined hands. “And, you’re right too. Your first priority should be yourself right now. You shouldn’t be jumping into a relationship with me or anyone else until you're ready. But, I’m always going to be by your side. Nothing will change that.”

A sudden green smoke filled the room making Nancy and Ace cough. When enough smoke cleared away, and they were able to get a good look at each other, Nancy noticed Ace’s pinky had healed, good as new, and quickly removed her bandages. Except for the line of scratches, it was as if nothing had happened in the first place.

George, Nick, and Bess rushed into the back room, waving the smoke away with their hands that was drifting towards them as it drifted to the kitchen windows.

“What the hell is going on back here?” George said, “We smelled smoke.”

“It’s the tail-end of Temperance’s soulmate curse,” Nancy responded.

When each of her friends looked back at her with confused and shocked expressions she unclasped her hands from Ace’s and stood to face her friends. She had another truth to reveal.

“Temperance is back. She used my blood from her machine to return. Now, she’s somewhere in Horseshoe Bay. Waiting. Trying to learn about me. About us. About this town. So she can destroy it.”

“So, what’s the plan?” Ace said, coming up to join her. “How are we going to kick this bitch out of our house?”

Nancy smiled at him.

Maybe there was something about this soulmate thing after all.

#Nace #Nancy Drew CW #Nace fanfiction #ndcentral #ahhhh my first Nancy Drew fic #I hope this is good and that people like it

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bloodgulchblog · 2 years

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Glasslands, Pt 3, Final

I suppose it was inevitable that at some point, I would have to talk about my opinion on Halo’s political/moral implications. Everyone congratulate my past self for this prank I played on my present self by deciding to discuss Halo at length to people.

I’ll keep it brief:

Halo is one of those stories that gives us permission to imagine a justified war in which the entire human species faces extinction at the hands of an implacable, nonhuman enemy. Halo also tells the story of an empire being challenged by rebellion in its colonies, these rebels are Bad Enough Dudes to be punished with violence, and these are colonies which did not require the subjugation of pre-existing native peoples in order to form.

None of these things is unique to Halo. It borrows a pile of classic science fiction tropes in order to create a world in which it can tell stories about cool space gun shoot times and Hard Decisions (TM) without it being too unpalatable for its intended audience. It does this by avoiding the real problems inherent in real war, empire, and colonialism.

I do my best to be an anti-war, anti-colonialist person, and it is my hope that some of the problems in these tropes are self-evident enough that I can get on with this post without having to belabor them. Is it weird that I’m into Halo like this? I don’t know, probably. The brain chemicals move in mysterious ways.

I don’t generally take being a fan of Halo, or even being a writer for Halo, as a red flag about a person’s beliefs. I think most people engaging with Halo also find something compelling in it (possibly just a paycheck) and I think it’s irresponsible to try to judge the inner lives of others based solely on the fiction they consume or produce. I mean, if Halo has problems and liking Halo is a red flag in and of itself, where does that leave me?

But that’s not to say one can learn nothing about what someone might be like from their fiction.

This brings me back around to our subject today.

Sometimes, in the course of reading someone’s work, something gives you such powerful bad vibes that you can’t help but start having suspicions. Glasslands is, for me, one of those books.

(It gets long here, folks.)

After reading Karen Traviss’s attempt to convince me that somehow ONI’s pile of war crimes were the cool and good war crimes, as opposed to Dr. Halsey’s bad and evil war crimes, I began to question whether or not the author... how shall we say, has a distinct taste for rubber soles and boot leather. This gave me pause, as all I know about her is one book and one short story. However, I have always heard rumors of her being a terror in another fandom.

So, I conferred with some Star Wars nerds. What did Karen Traviss do in Star Wars, and (importantly) was it more than just bros being nerdmad that a woman wrote a story they didn’t like?

Given that this is not my particular nerd lit poison, I can only tell you about it secondhand. Based upon my research, these are the things Traviss is most notorious for:

Passionately hating the Jedi (and talking about how Order 66 was deserved) while lionizing the Mandalorians (who had just as many problems, but they were her special favorites)

Giving people “ah, she’s a military fetishist with a bit of the fash” vibes

Ignoring canon details and especially bending pre-existing lore to make people she likes look good and people she hates look bad

Showing no respect for characters/lore other writers had created (including killing off a major character from another author such that he only found out about it after the book was published)

Bragging about not reading the work of other people working on the same canon

Flouncing from Star Wars when she felt like her contributions were being disrespected

Calling fans who didn’t like her the “Talifans” (as in the Taliban), meanwhile fans who liked her were the “Fandalorians”

Some of these antics absolutely form a pattern when one looks at what she has done in Halo as of Glasslands. To whit:

Passionately hating Dr. Halsey while lionizing Admiral Parangosky and ONI

Ignoring prior canon in order to make Halsey look bad and ONI look good (to her, anyway)

Importing her pet drama from Star Wars to Halo and ignoring prior canon to make it fit

What was her pet Star Wars drama? From what I can tell, two things: Believing the Jedi are evil elitist eugenicists, and that they are vicious slavemaster monsters because of the clone army. She had an FAQ page about hating the Jedi on her website for years where she claimed not to hate the Jedi, but drew parallels between fans defending the Jedi and actual Nazis. In an interview, she once said that Order 66 was deserved and that the only Jedi characters she didn’t want to “shoot on sight” were her own OCs.

It’s very weird compartmentalized thinking, honestly. In the same interview as the legendary Order 66 quote she talks about how she doesn’t believe in writing characters to be “villains” and how it’s important to her to make all her characters make sense internally to her, and to hear everyone’s side, but several paragraphs later she just goes off on a specific class of character that is totally okay to just violently hate. Her Jedi FAQ page had her talking about how it would be ridiculous to hate fictional things because they’re not real, and good grief was that rich of her based on the other evidence.

I don’t know enough EU lore to really talk about the contents of her work, given that Jaws was never my scene and I don’t like Star Wars. However, “the person I hate is an evil eugenicist because the Spartan program had genetic compatibility requirements, I am going to focus really heavily on the fact there was a kind of cloning, and I am going to make up a ton of shit and ignore details to make fetch happen” is absolutely her MO in Halo.

Let’s not pretend that Halsey is an innocent baby angel and the Spartan program was anything less than awful, but here’s the thing: Traviss wants us to sympathize with ONI (which has done even more and even worse bad things than Dr. Halsey) for being cool and necessary while hating Dr. Halsey for the Spartan program. She wants us to sympathize with a guy fantasizing about murdering her (when she is by this point completely repentant and cooperative) and comparing her to Dr. Mengele (an actual literal IRL Nazi whose crimes were nothing like this stupid shootmans game fictional character’s crimes.) Traviss pays lip service to more sympathetic points and has things like Admiral Parangosky talking about how she herself is going to burn in hell, but there is so much venom in this book. The framing of these scenes is so clear. We are supposed to like Parangosky and Vaz, we are supposed to hate Dr. Halsey, Traviss wants us to feel that so badly.

Halo has always had serious problems when you think about the ethics of what’s going on inside it, but for the most part? Halo doesn’t usually ask the audience to wrangle with them like this. A lot of the Halo experience is Halo going “Hey kid, you wanna hear about a fucked up situation? It’ll be fun for a couple hours,” and you go “Yeah, sure.” It’s not deep. Sometimes someone can get into real feelings when they engage with Halo sincerely, but for the most part I feel like Halo knows that Halo is on thin fucking ice when dealing with the origins of the Spartans and it behooves it to keep moving quickly.

The problem Traviss has is that Traviss wants you to take her seriously in Glasslands. Traviss wants to give you a real indictment of the bad shit in the heart of Halo, she means it.

The problem I have is that when I take Traviss up on her dare and hit it as hard as I can, it just flies apart for me. She does have some ideas that are enjoyable and some scenes that are fun. There are much weaker writers in Halo canon, lots of them. But what it comes down to is: they don’t ask me to actually think about important human things that matter for real when I’m reading them.

She tells me to look into Halo for the darkness inside of Halo, but it sure as hell feels like this author showing me the darkness inside of her instead.

When Halsey asks Parangosky what makes her so much worse, Parangosky tells her: Halsey lied to her about the clones. Let’s ignore that Halsey somehow successfully lying about the cloning to ONI is stupid and doesn’t make sense, and entertain this for a moment. Traviss throws up a smokescreen of going on about how bad and evil the cloning is, but it’s the lying. The lying is how she couches the final knife Parangosky is driving in, the particulars of the evil don’t actually matter that much compared to the lie.

ONI does evil every day of the week and twice on Tuesdays, but Halsey lied to the organization. Halsey was disloyal to ONI. When Halsey finally abandons ONI because she can no longer stand it, this is treated by Traviss as a despicable, self-deluding bitch martyring her conscience. She can’t actually mean it, she’s a self-serving disloyal monster that can convince herself of anything. Otherwise, she would have remained loyal to ONI: the sanctioned authority of doing horrible shit for “the greater good.”

The authority. The organization. It’s not ONI’s fault one of its actors did something beyond the pale (such as the pale apparently is for Traviss’s ONI), it’s one bad apple. Her manhandling of canon details is all about setting up this conclusion for us, and that’s because the institutional authority of ONI and the UNSC matters to Traviss.

And this is adjacent enough to some real world things to leave one with some very serious questions about who the person writing this stuff is. Laying aside anything else that’s gross in Glasslands (describing shooting an Engineer as feeling like shooting an autistic child absolutely comes to mind), this is the shit that eats me.

What kind of person’s work am I reading?

Well.

When I was talking to friends and working through my feelings about Glasslands and its author, one of my friends casually mentioned to me that Traviss’s twitter behavior (before she mostly quit using it in 2021) had demonstrated her to be a Brexit-supporting, transphobic asshole with bad opinions about covid. So, I went looking to see what her current Twitter likes are.

Here are some examples.

(Did I mention that she apparently has a ship named after Thatcher in one of her books? Yes? Sorry, gotta do it again.)

Much like I don’t think this about Halo as a whole, I don’t think that enjoying the Kilo Five trilogy is a sign that someone is a bad person. I don’t think it’s enough information to have to know anything of significance about somebody.

I also don’t think I could appropriately say I know, with certainty, who this author is on the inside just based on all the internet bullshit I could dig up.

But I certainly feel confident that I know enough about her writing and her behavior in social internet spaces that I think I would prefer not to have anything to do with her.

I’m updating my Halo author shitlist, Traviss absolutely takes the cake at the top now. Denning’s merely irritating to me by comparison, Traviss is actively gross.

Links:

The SWEU subreddit talks about Traviss

The legendary "Order 66 was long overdue" interview

The Jedi Hating FAQ Page

A Hobby Drama post in which Traviss features

#halo: glasslands #summaries of things #jesus fucking christ #karen traviss

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maddiebiscuits · 4 years

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Personal Opinions on FFXIV Villains (in general order of appearance)

As a note, I will not be including any pre-A Realm Reborn villains (as I did not play the original Final Fantasy XIV) nor will I be including any one-off primals, raid bosses, etc. I will be trying to focus on villains as they appear in main or side storylines, in cut scenes, that have some over-arching influence on the story they participate in with something akin to a clear presence - Garleans, Ascians, and so on. Also SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS.

Rhitahtyn sas Arvina

Rhitahtyn gets the shaft out of Gaius’ three main players in A Realm Reborn. A conscript from a Empire-conquered land who rose to power and respect, directly honored by Gaius himself, and possessing an even temper and noble ambition really helped to level out Nero and Livia’s general nonsense. Unfortunately, Rhitahtyn is provided almost no screen-time, development or exploration, and as years have passed, his in-game 8-man trial can now be completed in a regular synced party in mere seconds. He deserved a lot better than what he got, yet remained too sidelined to really leave me feeling invested in wanting to see what sort of story this character could be used to tell.

Livia sas Junius

When first playing through A Realm Reborn my feelings on Livia were...tepid, but optimistic. Of Gaius’ three main players, Livia was easily the most active and ruthless, lacking the shady “long game” and self-serving ambitions of Nero or the more honorable, measured personality of Rhitahtyn. Suffice to say, the dawning (and then confirmed) realization that Livia’s sole motivation seeing the plan of the man she loved through to completion by any means, to the point of tunnel-visioned, murderous intent, was...disappointing. Add to that Livia was raised by Gaius in her backstory, the man being a father figure to her, and the romance motivation becomes even more unhinged (especially since it is largely considered to be a reciprocated romance, at least physically, by Gaius - barf)

Nero tol Scaeva

Nero has become a fan favourite character over the years, thanks to his continued development into Cid’s boyfriend foil rather than outright villain of the main storyline. This development was easy to spot early enough though, as it was clear Nero’s fealty to Gaius was largely self-serving. He didn’t care much about conquering Eorzea or felling primals/eikons - he just wanted to show that he possessed the brilliance to build weapons capable of doing so. His speech/squabble with Cid during the Praetorium sequence paints that picture even more clearly if the players missed the not-so-subtle implications for Nero’s character already. The man lived, breathed and seethed with inferiority when compared to Cid, and in the end he did ultimately prove his engineering mastery, even if the Warrior of Light took it (and him) down. Ultimately though, Nero serves as a much better supporting and “redeemed” character than a villain, so I do have to rank him pretty low.

Gaius van Baelsar

Aside from whatever...weird...thing was going on between him and Livia (again - barf), Gaius in A Realm Reborn was a pretty solid villain, with clear-cut motivations that I actually understood, and begrudgingly agreed with to a small extent. As legatus, Gaius was still the tyrannical arm of the Garlean Empire, but a level-headed one who was more interested with the purging of the primal/eikon threat from Eorzea than subjugating other peoples. Further development of this character into something of an anti-hero and glimpses of how other characters viewed him in flashbacks in later expansions ends up providing his A Realm Reborn rendition with more strength in retrospect. The heads of the three city-states deciding to accept Gaius off to willingly join the Empire is a pretty good sticking point for the validity of his plan as well. Ultima Weapon is...you know, pretty impossible for Ul’dah, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa to face down if they refuse, but more enticing is its ability to, indeed, single-handedly defeat primals/eikons - something the city-states desperately need at their disposal, having been plagued by such threats constantly, for years and years.

Gaius cuts a pretty direct swath to the truth of the Twelve as well - they’re no different than the primals/eikons he seeks to eradicate, and the more stock Eorzeans put into them, the more empowered they become should someone ever try to summon one, making Eorzeans no better than the beastmen and their ‘gods’. Join the Empire and have protection from such powers, and put faith into the leadership of man, versus that of fictional deities that can be given terrifying form...in the world of Final Fantasy XIV, that’s not a terrible proposition. But it would still subject thousands of people to the Empire’s tyranny, so even if Gaius has the oft-coveted ‘Point’ that most villains wish they had, he still must be stopped. Eorzea will simply find other ways to endure the primal/eikon threat rather than bend the knee, and I like that defiant angle the Warrior of Light represents to counter Gaius’ character. Also, Ascian meddling and Hydaelyn shenanigans, sure, but I don’t feel that takes away from the core conflict that Gaius presents. He was a good villain, and I’m happy to see him return and go through the motions of penance for his past deeds and aid the supporting cast now, elevating him even higher into a good character, in general.

Lahabrea

I admit I have a soft spot for Lahabrea, only because he seems to be a universal punching bag for heroes and villains alike in Final Fantasy XIV. He lacks the more subdued, long-term planning of Elidibus or the explored nuance and sympathy of Emet-Selch - he’s sort of the odd one out between the trifecta that make up the unsundered Ascians. Just a blindly-tempered zealot of Zodiark, seemingly more enthused by the ancient primal’s return than the promise of the world being set back to how it was before The Final Days. Even the other Ascians don’t seem to like Lahabrea that much - Elidibus seems keenly aware that Lahabrea has gone off the deep end, constantly needing reminders and wrangling-in to keep the plan in motion. But I will admit, he serves his purpose well enough, and the additional side-story that reveals that Lahabrea was a brilliant scholar unmatched in the Amaurotine field of ‘phantom creation’ was a nice touch to explain why he’s pretty dang good at getting people to try and summon primals and conjuring or corrupting monsters himself. By no effort of Square Enix themselves, I sort of feel bad for the guy. He really was just Doing His Best, and getting no respect for it. His end was also anti-climatic, but by the time it happened, there were far more interesting characters and stories to tell, and he was unnecessary - it was just better this way, Lahabrea.

Nabriales

This one-bit player served one substantial purpose, and it was to see an Ascian get obliterated permanently and thus provide the means and understanding to battle Ascians in the future. Except that the cost to do so was a throw-away villain, a throw-away damsel-in-distress 8-man trial, and turning Moenbrya, a character with a lot of potential to be great, into a throw-away character who has to make an untimely sacrifice because the script says so. Nabriales you’re boring, you’re bad, you’re a waste of time and your mutton chops are dumb as hell.

Ilberd Feare

You know what, I like this villain. I absolutely want to punch his face in, but I figure getting that sort of rise out of me on sight is intended, since, you know: villain. His motivations aren’t bad either, even if his methods are deplorable. The speech he gives at the very end of A Realm Reborn to rile up Raubahn is pretty effective too. Despite both being refugees of Ala Mhigo, Raubahn fought his way to wealth and status, and Ilberd was never afforded that chance, or at least never quite managed. Raubahn pledged himself more to Ul’dah and the Immortal Flames with his new privileges, however, and Ilberd was perhaps right to resent that, with Ala Mhigo still under the yoke of the Empire, and so many refugees left to flounder in The Black Shroud and Thanalan both, Raubahn seemingly unwilling to step in. Ilberd saw the opportunity to change the status quo and took it, and proceeded to rally others to reclaim Ala Mhigo. If the city-states would not help, then they would be forced to help, and for all his dirty tactics, punch-able face and Shinryu-summoning finale, Ilberd’s plan did work: he forced the hand of the city-states to fight against the Empire to reclaim Ala Mhigo, and did indeed remind Raubahn and other passive Ala Mhigans that there was still an important job to do. So, good job Ilberd. Gold star. Now perish.

Teledji Adeledji

I thought the politics at the very end of A Realm Reborn were intriguing, and Teledji’s heel-turn pretty fun, since of all the Monetarists, he seemed to be painted as the most reasonable. Though I found his game plan a bit...suspect. Yes, a poisoned goblet assassination attempt on the Sultana that he could frame on someone else, while usurping control of the Crystal Braves so he could make a bid for full Monetarist control of Ul’dah (with him at the helm) makes sense on paper, but I’m not sure why he sought to frame the Warrior of Light for it, and implicate the Scions either. While it’s true that the Warrior and the Scions would be an obstacle and want to investigate the death, and would prove tenacious foes, if you think about the scenario a bit more, it seems unnecessary. The Warrior and Scion efforts were likely going to start swinging towards Ishgard and the Dragonsong War, to better embellish the northern city-state’s relations with the Eorzean Alliance, nor are the Warrior or Scions people you’d want to make an enemy, especially with the Warrior being one of the only people who can defeat primals (a very active threat in Thanalan).

Framing Lolorito would have been a wiser idea, as he was already disliked and untrustworthy in the eyes of many, powerful and dangerous to compete with though he is. If Lolorito had been framed, Raubahn and the Scions may not have questioned it, and Teledji could have enjoyed planting himself in the eye of the power vacuum that was to come while the Warrior of Light focused their energy up north. Instead, Teledji bet on the wrong chocobo and paid dearly for it - his plan fell apart (and so did he) in more ways than he could anticipate, but on the whole? This was a pretty intriguing and entertaining storyline, I enjoyed it.

Lady Iceheart / Ysayle Dangoulain

I debated putting Ysayle on this list because by the first act of Heavensward, she’s not a villain - but, she certainly was in A Realm Reborn and going into Heavensward, so we might as well just keep representing how good Heavensward is and include her here. Aside from Minfillia, this is one of the only ever characters you meet early(ish) who shares The Echo with the Warrior of Light. Unlike Minfillia or the Warrior, though, Ysayle doesn’t really adhere to the call of Hydaelyn. Instead, her powers allowed her to hear and learn the truth of Ishgard’s history: that it was a lie, and that King Thordan broke the peace in a bid for power for Ishgard, turning Nidhogg to rage and setting the Dragonsong War into motion. Having witnessed Ishgard’s cruelty at a young age when her home was destroyed by snow and ice after the Seventh Umbral Calamity, and knowing what she knew and maintaining close bonds with dragons throughout her life, it’s sort of easy to see why Ysayle would be set upon the path she is. She wishes to end the war much like how Thordan does: ending it, with the dragons as the victors.

Her slap in the face is when she confronts Hraesvelgr though, her bid to sort of not only take the form of Saint Shiva but embody her memory being dismissed as a pale imitation. Saint Shiva wished for true peace, whereas Ysayle demands it through bloodshed - she realizes this, and changes her current course. This is why I debated to list her as a villain, because her gradual change into a supporting character and hero is a logical conclusion as she and Heavensward’s story develops. She starts a villain and dies a hero.

Igeyorhm

Full disclosure: I completely forgot this character existed. And I still don’t actually know why they exist. They’re a second to Lahabrea during the events of Heavensward, and is easily shut down by the Warrior of Light before being annihilated permanently by Thordan. Despite this, I don’t find their existence as offensive as Nabriales’, so...that counts for something.

Archbishop Thordan VII

When I first encountered Thordan (”pope grandpa”, if you will), I thought “oh, he’s evil”, because “church bad” isn’t exactly and uncommon trope and it’s apparent that Ishgard is a broken and unjust society, with this man sitting at the highest seat of power and consorting with Ascians. Yet to my surprise Thordan was...pretty reasonable. At least to start. He makes his audience with the Ascians known and seems unaffected by them and their schemes, is polite and cordial to the Warrior of Light...he doesn’t seem so bad. But the gut feeling remains, and slowly builds as Thordan’s true plan is revealed, becoming a primal-esque deity. And much like Nidhogg, I do get his motivations. Trying to broker peace with the dragons, to him, is just not going to happen - in fact, it’s insulting to ask dragons and Ishgardians both to make a bid for it, when so many people have died and live with the burden of hatred and grief. His solution is more direct: end the war entirely, by winning it for Ishgard.

After assuming his new form and powers, him and his Heavensward have the power to thwart any dragons that oppose them, perhaps even Nidhogg himself if the dreadwrym were to re-appear. Fueled by the generations’-worth of prayers from the Ishgardian population, Thordan was set on ending the war and ousting the dragons from the land, ushering in peace and prosperity. But the Ishgard he sought to protect and defend was built on a history spun of bloodshed and lies, and the dragons were not the true enemy and did not deserve to be put to the sword. Thordan’s plan would have worked in the way he envisioned it, and he made a good argument for it, even if it was ultimately wrong, and that’s a good villain.

Nidhogg

Having come to Final Fantasy XIV from World of Warcraft, a giant, scary black dragon that rants on and on about suffering and misery and pain and vengeance was something of a red flag for a Very Bad Story. Imagine my surprise when Nidhogg was given the screen-time to be properly fleshed out and explored, his motivations and hatred more sympathetically-human than his giant dragon body would have one believe, his presence menacing and well-paced, and his overall being representing the true, dark heart of the Dragonsong War: the cycle of hatred. For dragons, centuries are like days, and the pain Nidhogg feels is no less than what he felt when the Ishgardians brutally broke their pact. Because of this, with each re-emergence of him and his brood, the wheel of suffering turns anew, breathing new hate-filled life into the ongoing Dragonsong War, generation to generation. Time has no effect on his turmoil, and his existence ensures that no other Ishgardians will ever be able to move on from the war either, even as generations continue on.

I find Estinien being consumed by Nidhogg’s rage very thematic as well, Estinien truly embodying the countering hatred the Ishgardians feel towards the dragons, and it makes the final trial with Nidhogg bittersweet. He defeats Hraesvelgr, because as long as Nidhogg exists even the brightest hope for peace will be squashed under the cycle of malice and war. The Warrior of Light must put him down because he cannot be saved - but Estinien still can, and can choose to move on and pursue the peace that Nihogg strived to prevent and Ysayle died to see come to fruition. And he does, and it’s touching, and Heavensward is SO FUCKING GOOD I LOVE THIS EXPANSION.

Quickthinx Allthoughts

I don’t care much for timey-wimey storylines, but I found the Alexander plot easy enough to follow, and the timeloop it creates to be manageable. The truth about the Enigma Codex and the journal Quickthinx has isn’t exactly hard to figure out though once time travel becomes a part of the plot, and beyond beind a fun goblin with a cute kitty cat friend...there’s just not much in the way of compelling character writing here for this gobbo.

Diabolos

Big ancient demon is revived and wants to wreak havoc. Uninspiring, but its also not necessary for Diabolos to be anything more than what he is either. The heart of the Void Ark storyline is the tribulations of Cait Sith, the sky pirates and the history of the Mhachi, Diabolos just being an excuse to explore those characters and lore.

Regula van Hydrus

Regula deserved better damnit. This is the last Garlean villain with nuance and humanity before Stormblood turns everyone who is so much as associated with the Garlean Empire into a cartoonishly-evil, absolutely twisted, reprehensible confusing mess of a person.

Fordola rem Lupis

Stormblood has a lot of story, pacing and character problems. A lot. It has its moments and some people love this expansion, but I do not and its villains are a very large reason why that is. Fordola, for example, had the potential to be quite interesting. She was raised to believe in what her father did: that Gaius and the Empire were not all bad, and then watched her father die trying to protect her from angry, almost barbaric Ala Mhigans who decided that pelting a little girl with rocks because her parents were Empire-sympathizers and supporters was an okay thing to do (as the Garlean soldiers just watched on and let it happen without intervening because they didn’t feel like it - a fact that Fordola knows and remembers). You would think this event would have a sort of polarizing effect on her, feeling betrayed by both her people and the Empire her father believed in, feeling caught in the middle, in need of finding her identity and sense of self. Instead she...basically throws her entire stock in with the Empire, deciding that if she’s a good little soldier for the Empire, then Garleans will have to change their minds about Ala Mhigans and respect them because, see, look: an Ala Mhigan is a respected Garlean asset.

Except this backfires over, and over, her Ala Mhigan team nothing more than vicious dogs that never bite the hand that feeds them, turning their teeth on their own people instead. Fordola is constantly belittled and ridiculed for her heritage and even her gender by the Garleans, and at no point does she ever stop and go “wow maybe the Empire sucks hot ass and I’ve been terribly wrong about my motives this whole time”. And yet, no...Zenos offers her power in some magitek-aether experiment, she kills her own Skulls team, she finished the expansion jailed for her crimes, believing until the very end that the Garleans will win (they did not). She utilizes her anti-primal abilities once, and vanishes from the plot entirely, only to re-appear in a bad side-story where the Immortal Flames have her hooked up to some penalty-of-death submission collar so she doesn’t act out so they can use her synthetic Echo abilities to fight a re-summoned Ifrit.

Bad character, bad writing, and a waste of her new, game-changing anti-primal abilities.

Grynewaht pyr Arvina

This is such...a stupid character. His design, his voice and dialogue...I can’t tell what Grynewaht is supposed to be. Is he comedic relief? Because he’s not funny. Is he a character that you’re supposed to pity or despise? Because I felt nothing towards him. Is he supposed to be a rival? Because...no. I had to look up what his name was. The only thing I can clearly remember about him is that he was the final boss of the Doma Castle 4-man dungeon. That’s it. If you removed him from the plot entirely, nothing of value would be lost.

Yotsuyu goe Brutus

Between the two female villains of Stormblood, Yotsuyu is the more popular. It’s easy to see why: she has a cool design and a lot more screen-time and development, with a big 8-man trial to finish things off. But like Fordola, something is just off about her writing.

I don’t understand her motives or how she even came to feel the way she does about Doma, specificially. And anything bad that could happen to her, has happened to her. She suffered an abusive childhood under her adoptive parents, was sold off to an abusive husband, then sold off again to a brothel after her husband died to repay his debts. She later became a spy for the Garleans, rose in rank and was appointed acting viceroy of Doma, to keep the masses terrified and under her heel. At first, it seems pretty reasonable for her to turn against Doma, and lash out as she does on its people - her Doman upbringing left her used, abused and powerless, and with the Garleans she found power and strength. But this reading falls apart when you quickly realize that Doma was already occupied by the Garleans during the course of her upbringing, her family obedient to the Empire and her suffering just as much the fault of the Garleans. There’s an argument to also be made that not enough time was really spent portraying Doma as the disgusting place Yotsuyu sees it, as from the onset of Stormblood’s story journey into the Far East, Domans are only ever portrayed as a terrified, broken people, scared of the Garleans and Yotsuyu. I also don’t personally care for “character was abused, so now they’re sadistic and crazy” clichés either.

What does work well for Yotsuyu is the theme of power and control. Yotsuyu is a woman who lived a life not her own, weak and frail, until she obtained power. Now that she has it, her drive is to do anything to maintain it and survive - yet for some reason the story is written in such a way as to downplay this much stronger theme of her character, and play up this slightly confusing, all-consuming hatred for Doma instead. Her transformation into Tsukiyomi is also a bit odd (though decently thematic, with her ‘cold, uncaring and distant as the moon’ comparison), with not enough time paid to explore her understanding of Doman deities and why the mirror would trigger this change (and why would she even keep Doman deities in her mind, with her supposed hatred of Doma?)

I also take some issue with her “Tsuyu” arc, where she reverts back to the last time she was ever truly good or innocent, and has the personality of a child while still being an adult woman (and suffering amnesia). I find these infantilizing tropes pretty offensive, especially when Yotsuyu’s arc here is largely just to reinforce and reiterate what cartoonishly terrible people her family were, and provide Gosetsu with some development instead. Aside from killing Asahi and having a cathartic death herself, everything about Yotsuyu just baffles me. Every time I think I like something about her, athe bad writing twists it around.

Zenos yae Galvus

I don’t like Zenos, he’s a bad character, and I hate that Square Enix decided this limp-haired sullen-faced clown was going to be their poster-boy villain for Final Fantasy XIV.

What is the appeal of this character? Yeah, some people find him attractive. I don’t, but I also didn’t find Sephiroth attractive so, okay, whatever - like what you like I guess. But what else does Zenos have going on besides people seeming to think he’s their buff bishonen thicc daddy or whatever the kids are saying these days? His entire character can be summed up in one sentence:

“While the Warrior of Light was practicing empathy, Zenos studied The Blade.”

He’s a Garlean lordling with a bland and cold upbringing who likes katanas and blood sport. That’s it. He’s a sociopath, finding no joy or meaning in life for whatever reason: he just wants to collect Cool Swords and push his bizarre love-hate fight narrative on the Warrior of Light. Because they are opposites, you see: the Warrior of Light is a cardboard cut out of a Good Guy and Zenos is a cardboard cut out of a Bad Guy. He’s not even entertaining about it. He doesn’t want to watch the world burn, he just wants to fight the Warrior because the battle will make him Feel Something. Meanwhile, all I feel whenever I see him in-game, either in a cut-scene or when I’m locked in an unskippable “survive the drawn-out battle!” sequence with him, is a groan coming on. And sometimes villains who are evil just for the sake of it can be fun! But Zenos is not fun - he’s dull, he doesn’t get me hyped up for a fight...I feel nothing.

When he died after using his uber-synthetic Echo to possess Shinryu by taking his own life I thought, “well, at least that’s over” and I felt relieved. And then he came back, bigger and worse than ever! Yippee! I love confusing, unrelatable, boring villains who are recurring. Whatever Square Enix wants to do with Zenos, they need to hurry up and get it done. I care so little about him and just want to explore other stories and characters. I’m assuming he’s going to like, possess Zodiark or something, and then the Warrior will possess Hydaelyn, and there will be some big anime light fight showdown where Zodiark and Hydaelyn both shatter for good and Zenos dies and the Warrior lives another day and uuuugggghhh. How the hell did an expansion like Stormblood follow up Heavensward? Who let this happen?

Asahi sas Brutus

Bowl-cut twink hates his sister because he’s a Zenos fanboy and is angry Yotsuyu got all of Zenos’ attention instead of him. Filled with spite and piss, cartoonishly evil just like everyone associated with Yotsuyu or the Empire in Stormblood. Rest in pieces you little shit.

Varis zos Galvus

I’m lukewarm on Varis. He’s a better villain than Zenos, but that’s like saying a flat three-day-old glass of soda is better than sewage water. The bar is set very, very low. He’s ruthless, but not entirely unfair in his thought processes. Hell, he doesn’t even seem to like his own son (and really, if Zenos was my kid, I wouldn’t like him either). But Varis is a bit too...static, in my opinion. He doesn’t feel like a major player, and his batshit “let’s all just burn so the world resets and we can stick it to the Ascians” is pretty asinine and plays so transparently into the Ascian’s hands. I was originally bummed that Zenos killed him pretty unspectacularly, but...like with Lahabrea, it was probably better this way.

Omega

I don’t have much to say about this villain, really. The heart of the Omegascape storyline hinges on Cid, Nero, Alpha and the abstract concept of free will and accepting imperfection. It’s almost hard to say if Omega really is a villain, simply acting out a series of programs and statistics in a cold, robotic way, not really with malicious intent, so I think where Omega sort of shines is just as a being to build this sort of story off of, and provide a lot of fun boss fights as well.

Ran’jit

I had no strong opinions on Ran’jit for a long time, so I guess he improved for me as I now have An Opinion of him. He’s fine. He’s an okay villain. His Zenos-esque “survive the timer” encounters are annoying, but I find his persistence and presence more inspiring than any time crummy ol’ Zenos showed up. The biggest issue with Ran’jit is the lack of time devoted to developing him. This is a man who lost his home in the Flood of Light (which was the First’s equivalent to the Source’s Far East), and has essentially trained and raised numerous Minfillia reincarnations to battle Sin Eaters, just to watch these poor girls he saw as his own daughters die and die and die again. That cycle of loss would break down anyone, and make Vauthry’s postulations of paradise in Eulmore until the end finally comes appealing. Ran’jit pursues the Scions and Minfillia/Ryne not because he’s resolute in following orders, but because he just wants to bring this one psuedo-daughter back and keep her safe - something he could never do for the others who came and went in his tenure.

Naturally, this protectiveness leads to giving in to Vauthry’s nihilistic promises and stifles Minfillia/Ryne as a person. Thancred eventually learns to let the Minfillia he knew go so that Ryne could floruish into her own person - she was not ‘his’ Minfillia and it was terrible of him to ever impose that upon her. But where Thancred can move on and let Ryne develop into the wonderful person she is, Ran’jit cannot. And I’m disappointed this aspect of his character couldn’t be more at the forefront of his narrative.

Vauthry

If you ask me, this is more in line with how I figured Zenos might be. Vauthry lived a life or privilege and power, a child born of divine providence with no true regard for life, just his own desires. He’s spoiled and unreasonable, but his nihilism isn’t really nonsensical in the world of the First. All but a fraction of the world is destroyed, and Sin Eaters are a constant, devastating threat, so why not just relax in luxury, in the safety of Vauthry’s control over the monsters, and live in peace until the world truly ends? The battle against the Sin Eaters is exhausting and has no hope of victory anyway (until the Warrior of Light/Darkness arrives, that is). Even without the meol subplot, it makes sense why so many would flock to Eulmore once Vauthry takes over. Goofy as he can be, I do think Vauthry’s embodiment of just giving in to nihilism, hedonism and annihilation stands as a good thematic contrast to Shadowbringers strong themes of stubbornly striving for hope in even the darkest, bleakest hour. His trial is also fun and a slight swerve. All the Light Wardens up to that point had been monstrous, and Sin Eater transformations the thing of nightmares (Tesleen), so to see Vauthry take on the form of Innocence (ironically appropriate, as he truly believes he is blameless in all he has done) and become a golden-haired, angelic being of beauty - how he likely has always seen himself - is very entertaining, and defeating him feels great.

Emet-Selch / Solus zos Galvus / Hades

Ah yes. The Big One. Most people like Emet-Selch and his involvement in Shadowbringers. He’s sardonic, he’s entertaining, he’s honest, he’s explored, and he’s even sympathetic. The revelation of how Zodiark (and Hydaelyn) came to be, Amaurot and The Final Days is truly tragic. Emet and the rest of the Convocation were trying to save their world, and the cost was staggering - the lives of so many of their own, their minds, and eventually even their own world in the Amaurotine schism that followed. Being able to see a shadow of what Amaurot and its people were like really helps drive home the sorrow of it all, and Emet himself admits that he did try to learn to appreciate what the fragmented world had become. He’s also one of the most “successful” villains in Final Fantasy XIV - his intertwined association with death and masterful ability to raise up and lead empires like the ancient Allagans and modern Garleans to their self-destructing, Calamity-inducing downfalls (of which he was almost successful did with Varis and the Black Rose in the latter’s case) is pretty impressive as far as villainous plans and activity is concerned. Being forced to work alongside him in Shadowbringers because your goals are aligned while attempting to guard yourself from his inevitable schemes - which he’s pretty blunt about admitting he has - is an interesting way to develop him as a villain too. He spends most of Shadowbringers actually helping you rather than outright antagonizing you.

His conundrum is sympathetic as well, if not entirely relatable. If you had the ability to bring back your world, your friends and loved ones, at the cost of countless lives that are trivial in the grand scheme of the cosmos and start again, anew, in a better world that could repair and rebuild, would you do it? Tempered by Zodiark or not, Emet would, and while I don’t agree with him, I don’t entirely blame him either, for feeling how he does. Similar to Ran’jit and Vauthry too, Emet is nihilistic: he clings to something long-gone and will burn the current world down to get it back. To him, the Rejoining and Zodiark’s return is inevitable, and people like the Warrior of Light/Darkness are futile, frustating obstacles that cannot understand not only his plans, but just how he feels. They don’t remember what they lost. Emet does.

And yet in his final moments, Emet seems at peace. He seems to realize, as he is fading into oblivion, that the Warrior of Light/Darkness isn’t just the reincarnation of Azem, but what Azem believed in that made Azem part from the Convocation. Fractured life is still life, and Azem believed that the world and its beings was worth learning about, loving and protecting, capable of great things even when faced with insurmountable odds. The last act of good will Emet can do after requesting that the Warrior not forget about Amaurot, is to free the Warrior from Elidibus’ binds so that the last unsundered Ascian can be put to rest at last. It’s a very emotional throughline for Emet’s character, rather than a more logical one, but it works very, very well and really helps push Shadowbringers into that amazing high its story can get to.

Elidibus

I never liked Elidibus all that much for the longest time. It’s not that his character was “bad’, per se - he’s polite, diplomatic, and enigmatic, providing a much more leveled, intriguing villain to counter-act Lahabrea’s more active plays and cackling. But Elidibus’ long game always left me sort of wanting: I was never really sure what he was trying to accomplish expansion to expansion and how it related to the Rejoining that would bring about Zodiark. His plans also seemed to just regularly...fall through. Sending the Warriors of Darkness to antagonize the Warrior of Light in the Source ended up bringing about the halt of the Flood of Light on the First entirely. Picking up Zenos’ body and squashing Garlemald uprisings while nudging Varis to make and use the Black Rose was promptly halted by the true Zenos making an unspectacular return. I don’t know, I just feel like any plan Elidibus sets into motion gets stopped before it really gets started.

My opinion of him did change, however, during the course of the Shadowbringers expansion. Being the heart of Zodiark, manifesting as the First’s...uhh, first, Warrior of Light, summoning them from across the other shards to wreak havoc and empower himself, only to finally be put out of his misery not just be the true Warrior of Light/Darkness, but Emet-Selch’s last act of will and revealing that he had been an over-working, sad youth who just wanted to save the world he knew was...well, sad. And his first (and last) real gameplay with the various hero summonings was a pretty amazing set piece too, though it also tells me how devastating Elidibus could have been earlier on if he’d taken a more pro-active approach, access to the Crystal Tower notwithstanding.

Valens van Varro

Much like how I wanted to punch Ilberd, because Ilberd is a deplorable person but an effective villain with decent motivations, Valens is just...I just want to punch him, in general. He’s just Disgusting On Purpose. And since we still haven’t shaken Stormblood’s insistence that Garleans are Evil So Evil Oh My God Evil You Guys they’re trotted out a demented borderline sex-offender who forces his child wards to brand subjects who are out of line with red-hot irons. Valens is...entertaining, I guess, in that regard. And Valens does serve as an appropriate counter-part to Gaius in this storyline, the themes of which seem to largely deal with fatherhood and penance for past misdeeds. I just...really miss Garlean villains with nuance.

Fandaniel

Oh god damnit Asahi is back. Square Enix stop doing this, stop bringing back bad characters. Though it is unfair to say Fandaniel is anything like Asahi. Oh sure, he’s using Asahi’s body (and therefore the Brutus’ family inheritance to fund his machinations), he fawns over Zenos, and he’s cartoonishly evil, but at least this go around there’s a certain...goofy charm to it. Fandaniel is a sundered Ascian - he doesn’t care about the Rejoining or Zodiark, he’s aware that he’s a broken being and he is, quite frankly, loving it. He lays his intent out pretty plainly to the Warrior of Light/Darkness: he’s evil, he loves destruction, and he’s doing it because that’s just what he feels like doing. Don’t reason with him, don’t try to understand him, just fight back and cry about it. On some basic level I appreciate that brutal honesty, so much so that I’m comfortable writing my thoughts about him now because I don’t think they’re going to change. What you see is what you get with Fandaniel, and he’s just having such a good time. He’s a terribly-written villain but gosh darnit I just can’t bring myself to hate him.

#don't @ me zenos fans or i will always win need rolls on mount drops by one point in your queues #ffxiv

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scrimmification · 3 years

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taking a self care day and was instantly hit with temptation so u know what. here’s that dhurkemara essay. but it’ll be under a cut because i’m polite like that

the following is some canon facts sprinkled in with mostly my own headcanons and opinions. but i’m right about everything. cw for mentions of trauma and aa6 spoilers.

i should actually start this by saying that i see a lot of polycule dhurke/amara/jove or dhurke/amara/datz and while it is cute i feel a bit weird about using a poly relationship as just a “oh he has two hands” solution to love triangles. not that poly relationships aren’t valid, but it’s usually just people putting characters together without thinking about how the dynamic would even function. as if a polycule is a band-aid solution.

but that’s not important because this essay is about why dhurke and amara should just be friends (post SOJ)

i do not respect capcom or its canon, but here’s a bunch of canonical soj facts that are kinda fucked up; - when nahyuta is born, amara is 19 and dhurke is 20 - when the palace fire breaks out, amara is 21 and dhurke is 22 - there’s a gap of approximately 8 years of time where dhurke thinks amara is dead before they reunite and have rayfa (they’re each around the age of 30 at the time) - there’s a period of time anywhere from 9 months - 1 year that they’re living together again before rayfa and amara are both kidnapped - following this, dhurke never sees his wife ever again

because i have extreme brainrot, i sat down and feasibly considered the amount of time they would’ve been together. like, genuinely face to face together. if you only take into account the numbers the game gives you, then that means out of 25 years of marriage, they only see each other for about 3 of them. i tend to tack on an extra year or so for dating, but that’s still a really short amount of time, with almost all of it being before the palace fire ever happened. not to mention, they married incredibly young, and amara is royalty. typically royal families will push for children to be wed as soon as they come of age.

there’s also the fact that canonically, dhurke was not wealthy to any degree. he mentions in a throw away line having a bunch of weird odd jobs including both farmer and street performer (side note, street performer dhurke is hilarious). considering amara was basically hailed as a goddess by virtue of existing, i kind of doubt they were childhood friends or anything before that. my own hcs for how they met and got married initially tend to fall into a romeo and juliet style of mushy romance. plucky lawyer steals the heart of the queen with his humble charm and promises to whisk her away kind of thing. idk i do actually think they were very in love when they were younger, and maybe like... TOO in love, but my essay and thoughts tend to skew towards characterization through how the two of them grow through their traumas. so let’s just go in order of events here;

the palace fire

i do not care what capcom tries to tell me, dhurke has burns. if amara has a giant chest mark from being in the fire for a very short amount of time, dhurke would have full body burns from literally breaking into and out of a burning building. do you know how hot fire is? it’s fucking hot. it’s also genuinely terrifying. my point is i hc dhurke has some form of pyrophobia.

the years after the palace fire and before rayfa is born aren’t given much canon information, but it is stated that amara is convinced dhurke was out to kill her and willingly lives in the palace outside of the public eye. she’s convinced that dhurke is evil and was trying to kill her for at least twice as long as they were married. that kind of skews your perception of a person, no matter how much you might have once loved them. even if you STILL love them, it’s different. feelings change with time, and i think that’s a really fun thing to explore in fiction.

the rescue/rayfa’s birth

so here’s where i add the drama. just sprinkle it in. there’s a very sneaky line in the game that they kind of slip in during dhurke’s recounting of events around the time rayfa was born, and i have not stopped thinking about it for 2 years.

so plot wise, when apollo presses dhurke about lying about amara being dead, he talks about how he (somehow) got a tip that amara was alive and still being held in the palace. he broke in to save her and potentially run away with her, datz, and and nahyuta into safety, but they add something else in there. dhurke has a moment where he says she didn’t initially believe his innocence. and it’s kind of just played as a joke.

but because i like conflict and i do not write dhurke the same hyper-toxic-masculine way they do in canon because i think Men Should Be Allowed To Have Feelings i thought. man that must fucking suck. everyone in the entire kingdom thinks he’s the devil, and the one person he’s been doing it all for the sake of - his wife - initially doubts his innocence. of course this is obviously an understandable response. she was basically trapped and gaslit for nearly a full decade over an event that nearly cost her her own life (and would have to instead come to terms with the fact her own sister wanted her dead) but like it still. it would still suck to hear that from your spouse?

they were together for under a year, and in this time rayfa was born. this is probably my favorite window of time to explore a dhurke and amara relationship adapting because they would be such different people now. time already effects how you personally grow and adapt, but the kind of horrors they went to would drastically change them both. neither of them would be the same kids they fell in love with, and dhurke had just shipped one of his kids to america in an attempt to protect him. he’d already be down bad, but to have to deal with that, his wife not fully trusting him, nahyuta not knowing their own mother and most likely not trusting her initially, and also an entire pregnancy... that’d be an incredible amount of stress, on top of the fact they’re both living under the law.

(sidebar; because of how weird they had to twist the timeline to make it so apollo was gone before rayfa was born so they never met, i tend to headcanon this as dhurke trying to send both his kids to america to protect them, but not being able to initially send nahyuta because of their royalty status, and it quickly becoming too late.)

something else that confused me was why the hell they’d even have another kid while they’re both trying to save themselves, and that... uh. okay maybe this is an unpopular thing to say in terms of headcanon, but i actually believe rayfa was an accidental birth. like logistically, if you see your wife for the first time in almost a decade, you’re going to do Something. and you don’t have protection in the mountains. i’m just. i’m just saying.

but all of that being said, more than anything, i think they’d still be in love during this point. or more accurately, i think they’d be trying to convince themselves they’re still in love. they wouldn’t be the same people anymore, but the only thing dhurke has left is his family. it’s the thing he’s fighting for, and amara would have just been told she can’t go back to her sister for her own safety. there’s this kind of pressure to stay together for both themselves and their kids. there’s also a part where dhurke implies that the two of them were planning on trying to escape khura’in together and cross country lines before shit hits the fan.

turnabout revolution

so if you’re a coward who actually considers canon, after rayfa and amara get kidnapped, dhurke never sees them again. sure, he gets spirit channeled by amara in the final trial, but he never sees her face to face, or gets a chance to speak with her. if you’re like me and simply refuse to believe your favorite characters die, then that means there’s a 14 year gap between the next time dhurke and amara speak to each other.

what’s the first thing amara does when they see each other again? accuse him of murder.

in fairness, she’s under threat of blackmail to do so. she’s trying to protect both her children at this point, and clearly had a role to play in inga’s murder herself that she doesn’t want to admit to. but at the same time, when apollo reveals that dhurke was actively hiding evidence because he still loved her, she seemed genuinely surprised. this revelation is the thing that gets her to actually go against ga’ran’s plot. there’s also the obvious point of her picking her children’s safety over dhurke’s entire revolution, and what he’s been working on for her sake for most of his life. and honestly I thinks she made the right and most understandable choice. the real part that makes me think they wouldn’t get back together after the events of soj (provided dhurke isn’t an epic ghost guy) is,

amara chooses her own safety over dhurke’s, while dhurke chooses her safety over his own.

dhurke’s a very hopeful character, a very jovial one. throughout all his screen time, there’s no point where he genuinely thinks nahyuta has betrayed him. there’s no point where he thinks apollo isn’t capable of handling the case without him. he clearly cares a lot about his family, and would do anything for them. this includes amara. he’s not asked to hide evidence for her sake, he just does it. at the risk of undermining his entire revolution and destroying it entirely, he tries to hide evidence that’d implicate his wife of murder.

amara’s more of a realist. she doesn’t give up information until she absolutely has to. she doesn’t even admit to loving dhurke until the last moment she’s on screen. the only lines in the game she has as herself are during the trial, and half the time she’s just telling everyone how horrible and awful and terrible her husband was. and again, i must say, this would probably suck to hear.

the aftermath

the country is kind of a little fucked after soj. sure, it ends on a positive note, kind of, but there’s both a lot of political stuff to fix. and a lot of family stuff to fix. dhurke basically has to rebuild his relationship with every single one of his family members (and in rayfa’s case, from scratch). while I do think marriage is important and stuff, I don’t think it’d be... the most important.

what i’m saying is i think they’d be friends. even if they stayed married, they’d have to relearn almost everything about each other. they haven’t seen each other in forever, and also amara just threw dhurke under the bus. that’d sting! i think he’d forgive her for that, but it’d sting. knowing your partner would have willingly let you and your entire cause go up in flames sucks. it all sucks. soj is a very downer aa game.

and also i value m/f friendship a lot. i value older adult relationships a lot. i value exploring unfortunate and uncomfortable themes in learning to grow as a person and dealing with your own trauma a lot. i think there’s a lot to explore in characters like dhurke and amara. alot of people prefer thinking about the relationships between nahyuta and apollo and rayfa as siblings, which is great! but... i don’t know. i really like fictional dads. i like thinking about him getting more time with his kids. i like thinking about amara learning to become a person instead of a revered goddess. i like them becoming real people instead of just figureheads in a political war.

also i think dhurke and datz should kiss because they raised kids together in the mountains for 20 years

#thanks for coming to. something #i think about dead side character so you don't have to #dhurke sahdmadhi #amara sigatar khura'in #soj spoilers

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alewyren · 3 years

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I dislike redemption arc culture.

I hate seeing arguments over which characters are “irredeemable,” and this notion that every villain story has to be a morally didactic narrative in which the bad guy gets punished, the end.

I’m almost tempted to say we were all spoiled by having Zuko as a formative experience, because he’s really just the picture perfect redemption arc. He started out as a legit villain, but he never did anything too atrocious, had a tragic backstory that explained why he was like that, and went through three whole seasons of gradual character development. Like, Zuko was an amazing character. That’s the problem, though; he set our expectations too high for what “the perfect redemption arc” should be. Everyone expects their “reformed villain” characters to follow those same beats, but not every story is that cut and dry. There are lines between redemption and reformation, reformation and rehabilitation, rehabilitation and just... continuing to exist but no longer hurting anyone, and there’s a lot of nuance lost when people try to cram all that into the box of “redemption arc.”

Gonna be bringing a lot of different examples to the table here, but let’s start with Azula for ease of transition. She went through the same abuse that Zuko did, but she never got a redemption arc in ATLA proper. Some people say this isn’t fair. I disagree. This is not to say I don’t think she should be afforded the opportunity for post-canon character growth, because I absolutely do. I fully think she is capable of Getting Better, and spinoff media has consistently portrayed her as a sympathetic character. But like... she’s done some shit. She was a straight up war criminal, and emotionally abusive towards basically everyone in her social circle. I understand why. She was a 14 year old raised in an environment that rewarded that behavior, and never given a healthy outlet for her aggression.

The difference, in my opinion, is this: Zuko was fundamentally a good person from the start. Far from perfect, but he has a strong sense of values even as a child. Azula is not. Redemption for someone like Azula would look much different than it did for Zuko. Besides, in ATLA proper she was already filling an important villain role. She’d need her own show. (Which would be awesome, actually.)

But I think that’s where you have to ask the question: what even is a redemption arc? Is it any story where a villain stops being a villain? Is there a scale for like, “must do X amount of good deeds equal to Y bad deeds to qualify for redemption”? Must they be sufficiently punished for their bad deeds? What if reformation is possible without punishment--is punishment for its own sake truly justice? The focus people have on penance and atonement feels very baked in Christian moral philosophy. People don’t work like that. There’s not a cosmic scale of right and wrong, or a cosmic sin counter, there’s just... actions and their immediate impact. Bad people being let off the hook too easily can leave a bad taste in your mouth, and there are of course things with unfortunate real world implications which can’t be divorced from real-world context which are... irresponsible to allow in the hands of Certain Groups, but I hate this notion of “villains must be punished appropriately for their crimes, always, even if they have extenuating circumstances, even if they have demonstrated the capacity for personal growth, because that personal growth will never negate their misdeeds.”

In real life, it’s different. In real life, you can never be sure what’s going on in another person’s head. But the prison system of justice is fundamentally broken. People are rarely fundamentally evil, but there are some people who are too twisted and dangerous to society to be allowed to live without, at the very least, constant supervision. True evil is banal, rooted in social systems, not individual “bad people.” People have individual will, but ultimately they’re just the products of the environment and systems that fostered them. Setting aside the questions of whether people can be born evil or at what age you become personally responsible for your actions, you will get bad apples in any sufficiently large group of people. If someone has to be punished and removed from society, that’s not a success of justice. The fact that they reached that point in the first place is a failure of society in and of itself.

In fiction, technically everyone is redeemable. You can get into the heads of the bad guys and do basically whatever you want with them. Fiction should be responsible when dealing with real-world issues that affect real people, but it does not have to be morally didactic. Sometimes there just... isn’t an easy, morally didactic answer for dealing with morally complicated characters or situations. And more importantly, sometimes the morally didactic answer isn’t the narratively interesting answer. 9 out of 10 times, what’s more interesting to read about? A horrible villain being put to death, or a horrible villain being forced to live and grow?

Some hypothetical examples to ponder, purely in the context of fiction.

Horrible war criminal villain with a body count in the millions has all memories of their crimes wiped, or is forcibly brainwashed into being a better person. Setting aside the ethics of brainwashing: are they still required to “repent”? Would a victim still be justified in seeking penance from this guilt-free shell? Would this change at all depending on who was responsible for the mind-wipe?

More realistic: horrible war criminal villain with a body count in the millions straight up retires. Gets older. Bloodlust, national zeal, whatever once motivated them to do such evil loses its edge. They fall in love. Start a family. As they grow as a person, learn the value of life, the weight of their crimes starts to sink in. They atone in little ways, through little random acts of kindness and helping the people around them, but for one reason or another (not wanting to risk harm to their family, knowing they’ll be tortured for information? you decide) don’t turn themselves into the proper justice system and are never punished. Should they be punished, or allowed to continue existing? Would this change at all depending on the surrounding political circumstances, i.e.: whether their public execution would hold any symbolic value, whether affected groups are calling for their death? Does it matter at all in deciding justice whether this hypothetical villain feels personal guilt or regret over their war crimes? Why or why not?

Child villains. IRL there are documented cases of violent crime in children as young as grade school age, not all of whom had violent backgrounds. Should they be held to the same standards as adult villains, even if the scale of their crimes are the same? What’s the cutoff age? Are all villains under 18 capable of rehabilitation, no matter how horrible their crimes? How about 16? 14? 12? What about villains whose ages aren’t really clear, ie Cell from DBZ being like, six?

How much does backstory matter? Should it matter if there’s a good reason someone is Like That, or should their actions be judged as-is? It doesn’t matter to the victims whether or not the villain had a bad childhood, right? Moreover, does it matter at all whether someone is “fundamentally a good person,” at least insofar as genuinely caring about the people around them and caring about a moral code? People do evil things for reasons other than “being evil people.”

Morally bankrupt person who regularly fantasizes violent harm on the people around them, wholly selfish with no love for any other human being, fundamentally incapable of meaningful self-reflection or growth. Just a complete piece of shit all around. But they never have, and never will, commit any crimes, either due to some divine ordinance or just plain self-preservation/fear of getting caught. They might, at worst, just be a toxic asshole, but not one who holds any power over others. Should they be punished solely for their moral character, rather than actions?

There aren’t always easy answers. It’s okay to acknowledge that, and it’s okay to tackle hard moral questions like this in fiction. And I hate seeing this boiled down to “stop trying to redeem villains who are Actually Horrible People” or whatever. Especially in kids’ media which takes an optimistic stance on people being capable of change in the first place. Y’all gotta stop holding it to the same level of moral realism as gritty stuff for adults.

On the whole, I think we should do away with the term “redemption” in the context of morality entirely. Like redemption arc, redemption equals death, what does that mean? It implies one has sufficiently made up for their past deeds, that that’s the gold standard, but is that really ever possible? Like I said, there’s not a cosmic good deeds | bad deeds counter for every person, or at least not one that living people have any way of knowing about. And that’s a flawed way of thinking to begin with. Those bad deeds can never be erased, ever. There plenty of examples of villains who commit crimes they can never realistically atone for. Regardless of whether they want to atone in the first place, it’s like I said: in fiction, it’s often just... more fun to force them to live and deal with the consequences. But on the flipside, there are so, so many people who see themselves as “good” and use that to justify their own bad deeds. Which ties back into what I said about the whole discourse reeking of Christian moral philosophy, because lmfao @ corruption in the catholic church.

The point is. There are shades of grey. Not everything has to be a full-blown bad guy to good guy redemption arc. You don’t need to “properly atone for your sins” to be worthy of life or love.

Here are some better questions to ask than “is this character redeemable”:

Is it believable, from what we know of this villain as a character, that they are capable of becoming a good, law-abiding citizen?

How about capable of love?

Guilt?

Are they capable of any personal growth whatsoever?

Are they capable of being a positive impact on the lives of the people around them?

Is it actively harmful to leave them alive, even with clipped wings?

Is it interesting to leave them alive?

How morally didactic is the narrative as a whole?

How much forgiveness are they offered, versus how much could they possibly ever deserve?

How abstracted is this character from reality, ie: are there any real world parallels that make it uncomfortable to frame this character in a sympathetic light? (be careful not to fall into a black and white abuser/victim dichotomy)

Would further punishment or suffering be productive? (Productive, not justified, that’s a key distinction--punishment for its own sake is just pointless cruelty.)

Even the most vile, irredeemable bastards can still be dragged like... an inch. And that’s still a fun and valuable story in and of itself, even if it’s nothing remotely approaching a redemption arc and they’d very much still deserve to rot in Hell by the end of it. I don’t believe Hell is real, as much as I personally wish it were sometimes, but like. If it were, or in fictional universes where it is.

But also, there really are some characters and botched “redemption arcs” that just come off insanely uncomfortable. And there is a subjective aspect to that as well, but more than once I’ve seen people say “X villain did not deserve redemption/forgiveness” and 9 times out of 10 I’m like “that’s... really not what they got, though?”

It’s complicated.

#idk how coherent it is #i just saw a tweet that annoyed me #''villains deserve happiness and redemption arcs *guy who murdered 20 million people* no not him''#i don't even entirely disagree but it's... complicated #musings

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cautelous · 3 years

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arcane bellyaching & whatnot feel free to look away it’s mostly rambling and the result of me being up early for other reasons. also talking about politics i guess if that isn’t your thing

damn they really did pull the “what side are you on? the oppressors or the oppressed? both sides are weighted as the same by this statement, and also here’s some animated police brutality!” thing huh

like yeah sure of course i’m not saying that piltover pre-the-present-day has to be perfect and whatnot (nor does present-day piltover have to be perfect either, but... idk, not a fan of this direction!) and of course that is me speaking about old, independent, single-city piltover - i guess this new one can be as corrupt as it wants for as long as it wants - but like, insanely uncomfortable to have just talked about the way that caitlyn’s outfits and abilities and general thing have become less “detective” and more “militarized cop” and how everyone is eating that up because it’s hot that she has more clothes and it’s hot that she has a SWAT outfit only for. ok here is our trailer with a scene of policemen physically breaking up protests! (of course people do seem to be cringing somewhat at that, which is good, and i am not saying that a work of art/piece of media can’t talk about such things, but like. do we trust riot to?)

like even if that scene is from the past (which considering that arcane seems to be both in the past and present, eh, 50/50) then the implication is just that current piltover hasn’t solved whatever issue caused said protest and also hasn’t stopped brutalizing, because current piltover lore has such delightful color stories as “caitlyn electrocutes someone with a bola net” and “vi lectures rich pilties and physically threatens them for breaking windows for the ~zaunite cause~”. the latter is literally just repeating the message that all property damage in protests is the work of outside forces and actually good real actual protesters are completely peaceful :), you see, and so any property damage during a protest immediately discounts its legitimacy. so like. (and secondarily, child of zaun portrays zaunites as easily swayed by a demagogue, unlike those Very Smart Piltovians and Vi, Who’s Not Really Accepted As Fully Zaunite Anymore You See And That’s Her Character Struggle.)

so either a) nothing has gotten better since however many years in the past that scene in arcane was or b) this is the present, and the present in this work of fiction is just. mirroring reality’s present, which is just... i dunno. i think that a fictional world so apart from our own (to the extent that there’s no homophobia, at least from word-of-god, but idk i also have thoughts on that declaration) can do better than 1:1 mirror our world’s police brutality and class struggles. but i’m always an idealist who’d like to see media do more than darkness for the sake of darkness, or repeat reality for the sake of repeating reality and nothing more.

anyways idk man hope they don’t impart absolutely horrid themes in their multi-million-dollar project (or however much this ended up costing) but considering this starting point i am not very sure of that!

anyways idk x2 there’s totally a way to do a piltover-zaun "cities at war” narrative in old lore framing that shows both the struggles of piltover and zaun and compares and contrasts them. piltover “wins” in that framework because zaun is a hypercapitalist hellhole and old piltover’s implications are closer to a steampunk utopia than anything else, but i think the point of that narrative wouldn’t be “see, both sides are bad! and good! equally! just a big old moral perfectly-balanced scale!” like this seems to be shaping up to be, but like. showing that there is goodness and good people even under the most soul-crushing of states (zaun. and also a narrative that i think is important, considering how often we confuse being a citizen of a country for being a follower of that country’s government’s ideology) and that a good nation* and good lives for its citizens has to be worked for with blood, sweat, and tears - and even then it is so easy to fall back into old patterns of behavior and fall upon old prejudices and backslide into a “more comfortable” (for some), but worse society (piltover. and, again, also a narrative that i think is important).

*i have many thoughts about if a nation can be “truly good”, but i would be mad if i thought league or most media would touch the idea of a stateless society with a ten-foot pole. so we’re just working within reason here.

i dunno. tl;dr not very excited at riot choosing to tackle police brutality in their fun animated series for fans when their track record with revolutionaries is what it is. (yes xayah and rakan are portrayed in a positive light yes that’s the gottem everyone uses for when people bring up how xerath and sylas are treated. there are multiple types of revolutionaries and the lovebirds are of a stripe (a feather?) that is easier to market.) not very excited (still, what a surprise) about zaun being squeezed into entirely being the poor underclass, because i feel like that nukes a lot of narratives you could have done with old zaun that would, you know, be directly critical of capitalism and whatnot. there are very interesting stories to tell with these two cities, and i’ve told some of them and my friends have told some of them, and i am just tired of this... bottom-of-the-barrel gritty-to-be-gritty low-hanging-fruit take that riot has chosen. i think that a company, even one making a mass-market game, who tries so hard to convince everyone that they have serious lore for serious people can and should do better than this.

what do i close this ramble with. go play disco elysium? yeah. let’s go with that. go play disco elysium. i like it and think it does a variety of complex themes that other works can only dream of.

#OOC ∵ ( outside the frame. )

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wordsnstuff · 6 years

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20 Mistakes To Avoid In Science Fiction

This is also available on wordsnstuffblog.com!

– This is a continuation of a series that began with 20 Mistakes To Avoid In Young Adult Fiction/Romance. I included a couple exterior sources throughout the article that covers certain points in more detail for those who would like further advice. I hope this is helpful. Happy writing!

–Patreon || Ko-Fi || Masterlists || Work In Progress || Studyblr || Studygram

Referencing Current Culture Inappropriately

Not all references to pop culture are misplaced in sci fi. For instance, in Ready Player One, it’s integral to the plot. However, it’s random references to political things or important people that do not have anything to do with the movement of the plot or are misplaced within the context of the universe. This can bring your reader out of the story and confuse them in terms of world building and basic information about the history of your constructed universe.

Not Understanding Space & How It Differs From Earth

Do your research about space if you’re writing about space, and learn about how different planets work, the rules of physics, the laws of gravity, the conditions in other parts of the galaxy, etc. This information is available to you in may places and in many formats that are broken down simply for you to understand, especially for writers. You just have to look for it. I actually have a resource master post called “Resources For Writing Science Fiction” that would be really, really useful for this.

Putting No Thought Into Aliens

Aliens shouldn’t just be modified versions of humans. Coloring a human purple doesn’t make them interesting. Think about the environmental factors on the alien’s home planet and how those conditions would affect their biological makeup and physical/mental features. Take the time to do this, because readers appreciate it when it’s done well.

Technobabble

This is just a word for technological-sounding gibberish that writers put into their book to make it sound legitimate. However, what a lot of them do not realize is that science fiction readers are often interested in science, and therefore know that it’s 3 sentences full of nothing. This is okay in some circumstances, but it can never hurt to do 10 minutes of googling to maybe learn a bit about what you’re about to feed to the reader before writing it. Technobabble is really useful for writing the first draft (where you’re just telling yourself the story to have something to develop), but it shouldn’t live past that point.

Conlangs (Unless You’re A Linguist)

Do not take on constructed languages if you aren’t ready for years and years of study and practice with linguistics, because your conlang will flop. J.R.R. Tolkien, who is famous for not only his series Lord of The Rings and his novel The Hobbit, but also the invented languages within them. He had a long career in linguistics and was well-versed in it, and that is why they’re such a sticking point of his works. It took years of study and practice to create the conlangs in those books. Conlangs are no game.

Prologues

Most authors do not like prologues for a plethora of reasons, but with science fiction there’s really not a good justification for having one. Start where the action is and input the important highlights from the past as they become important to the reader’s understanding of the present.

Info-Dumping

Long paragraphs or pages upon pages describing the setting or the way the character is feeling and so-on has no place in any book, let alone science fiction which is already packed to the brim with detail no matter what. Sprinkle detail in as it becomes relevant instead of getting it all out in one spot and then expecting the reader to see the significance in every one.

Over-Explanation

It’s good practice to avoid over-description of things that don’t matter. The general rule of thumb is show, don’t tell, but also, don’t bore the reader with 3 sentences describing each button on a control panel that the main character walks past once and never appears again.

Overly-Complicated Names

This is simply a pet-peeve of a lot of people, and it doesn’t really add anything to your story. It’s cliche and kind of laughable when a writer names their character “Celeste Apollo Saturn” or something like that. Sure, it makes you feel original, but it doesn’t add to the reader’s experience much. It’s okay to have unique, space-themed names, just don’t overdo it.

Not Exploring

Overthink your world. Overthink your characters. Overthink the details. Explore all the possibilities. The better you know your world and everything in it, the more vivid your storytelling will be, even if 80% of the details you’ve explored are left out. You should be an expert in your story, because that will make you tell it better.

Regurgitating Popular Sci-Fi

Please don’t rewrite Star Trek, Star Wars, The Avengers, etc. and just change the names. There’s a difference between taking a trope or a popular type of science fiction story and putting your own twist or speculation on it, and handing your reader a book version of an existing story.

Not Thinking Critically About Fictional Elements

"Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works."

- Terry Pratchett

Underestimating The Audience

Your audience can deduce things, and doesn’t need every implication explained to them. You don’t need to beat the symbolism and implications into their brain by constantly alluding to it or reiterating it in a million different ways. Subtext is important, and it should be left as subtext, otherwise there’s no need for thinking about the story and your reader will forget it (or worse, be irritated by it).

Leaving Plot Holes Because You Think Nobody Will Notice

Don’t do this. Just don’t. There’s always going to be someone who notices even the most minute details that are not explained when they should be, and then shares with a friend, and then it becomes a thing. If the thought “eh, I don’t have to include this detail because nobody will notice that this whole scene is ridiculous without it” crosses your mind, kill it. However, there’s a difference between a plot hole and a detail that was cut due to irrelevance, and that’s explained in the next point.

Forgetting To Actually Deliver Information

You, after months or even years of planning, may forget to include important details for the reader’s understanding due to the fact that overtime they seem so obvious to you. Be careful about this, and make sure that every scene you write is set up with the information the reader needs to know in order to understand what’s going on. This is easy to do as long as you have someone on the outside who can tell you where things get confusing and where the holes are.

Putting World Building Before Storytelling

You’re telling a story, and it’s important that you have an actual story to tell before you develop the world around it. Not every detail you plan out will be relevant to the story and won’t make it to the final draft, and that’s okay. Put the story first, and don’t sacrifice the reader’s focus to add detail that doesn’t enhance the story, because it will take away from it instead.

Poor Choice Of Writing Style

point of view, tense, person You should be very careful about the stylistic decisions you make about the way in which you will deliver your story to the reader, because this is often what makes sci-fi convoluted and boring. The three main details you need to decide on carefully are which point of view you tell the story from, so which character you’re choosing to focus on, the tense (past, present, or future), and person(first, second, or third). Most stories are told in third person surrounding the main character in past tense. Future tense and second person are pretty rare, but can be pulled off by authors who are willing to take on the challenge (though I don’t recommend it if you’re not willing to do a lot of problem solving and workshopping in following drafts).

Ignoring The Speculative Aspect

When your story deals with something like, say, time travel, you need to not only imagine the implications for your characters’ present, but their future along with everyone else’s. You also have to recognize that small changes may have a butterfly effect, but the universe has a way of straightening history out, and not all of them will have eternal lasting effects on the future. You’re speculating, and speculating doesn’t stop at how your characters’ situations change at the immediate moment, but also in the long run, as well as what implications come with each new detail you change between your world and ours.

Not Planning

This genre is not for the writers who identify as pantsers rather than planners. This genre is very, very difficult to approach as even a very organized author, and its readers are typically very observant and nit-picky. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s a great thing, as long as you’re prepared for what you’re in for.

Historical Absolutes

Mark Vorenkamp actually explained this really well in this article, so I recommend heading over there because he articulates it way better than I ever could.

You’re Not A Scientist (And That’s Okay)

Accept that you’re not a world-famous scientist and that you don’t have all the answers or all the research to back up the speculation and estimation that comes with science fiction. That’s okay, and as long as you do your best to know what you’re talking about and do as much research as possible to add substance to detail, you’re fine. This is fiction, after all. Not a dissertation.

This article is really, really detailed and extensive, and it’s a good continuation of what I’ve covered in this article. I recommend giving it a read if you’re about to sink your teeth into the editing or second-draft onward of your story, because it further examines things like the use of passive voice in sci-fi, and other, more advanced details of writing for this genre specifically.

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theelderkittens · 4 years

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Title: The Endless War 1/?

Pairing: Female Altmer Vestige & Estre

Rating: 16+ please, minor depictions of violence, implied/referenced assault. there is talk of death, murder and minor depictions of gore.

Summary: Estre meets the Vestige, again, on the Cliffs of Failure.

After the first dozen rounds, Estre gave up counting. There was no real purpose to it, other than the vague hope that Naemon might have, slightly, cared about her enough to find and save her. Maybe, if she had been more affectionate, or humble, or attentive, or less prickly on her bad days. She catches herself wondering what day it must be. Fredas, she hopes, because Naemon allows loved their afternoon walks on Fredas. Or Morndas, because she loved waking up with him and gossiping about the who’s and whys while they held hands; she hopes he remembers them like that too.

But she is glad he’s not here. It means she can pretend he’s alright and that he wasn’t implicated in anything she did.

“When I am victorious,” She repeats at Thallik, mind wondering back now that they’re in the most exciting part of the conversation, “and you grovel before me, I will remind you of this moment and how wrong you were.”

Thallik is a simple creature. He is, like all men, consumed by want and violence. That which Ayrenn thought to bring to the Isles has manifested in Thallik like it has in every fictional horror she’s ever read. He lunges when he thinks she isn’t expecting it; brutish hands seeking her neck like a clairvoyance spell poorly cast. She yelps, reservedly she assures herself, bringing her palms up. Still, she’s knocked back.

Her shock spell makes it worth the small indignation, even if the front of her dress has dirt stains on it now. Estre wipes her nose and hates herself for jumping at the sparks that tickle her nose.

Because its her, golden and stout and wearing a bright, burning blue. She hates being seen with such an unseemly stain on the front of her dress.

…

“Isn’t my court jester just dashing?”

Valinnaire’s gaze never wonders from the battlefield. Her hairs cropped enough to brush against her chin, and it drags out the harsh, hawkish features of her face. Despite the starved, withered look she’s gained, humour dances along her expression, plain as ever, “I’ve no interest in shadow puppets any longer.”

“Well, Auri-El strike me blind, I didn’t realise you were ancient,” Estre scoffs, “Aren't you going to ask me why I’ve graced you with my presence?”

“I thought you’d monologue long enough to get to that.”

“Honestly! I come here to thank you and you insult me. What have I ever done—”

“—Stop stalling, kinlady.”

She freezes mid gesture. She never thought she would miss those old toady Firsthold bureaucrats but at least they appreciated her performance. Her killer didn’t even try; no sly leaning in, or tilt of the head, nor even a hand clasped around another! Valinnaire stands stiff as a statue, shoulders even, hands loose and stance ready to jump into action.

“You know, monologuing is one of my best features,” She pouts, crossing her arms, “The Observer thought you’d be dead by now, not running around saving everyone.”

“What does that matter?” Valinnaire asks in breezy altmeris, hand resting casually on the hilt of her scabbard.

“Because this is a team game,” Estre enunciates each word clearly, “and he won’t let you run around like a headless imp for much longer. Outside of your spy games, organisation has proper structure.”

Valinnaire gives her an amused, scolding look and she can’t help the upwards quirk her lips give. “Let me guess, ‘we are not so different you and I?’”

She gestured vaguely, “If you want to put it that way. But I really must attend to poor, dear Relmus. Think about an alliance between us two tall powerful creatures.”

…

“So,” She throws in her most polite smile, flipping her little flame ball between her hands, “you return unscathed. The hero of the cliffs, one might say.”

Valinnaire raised a hand, “A moment before you start, thank you.”

Her armour looks as beaten as the sad fabric Estre still calls a dress is, three deep gouges slashing the links of her chainmail through her cuirass. Gore coats one of her legs like paint, reeking of half eaten meat and open innards, dragging down onto the floor like blood. Maybe it is blood rather than stomach acid, and maybe it isn’t reeking of open stomach but instead of iron and maybe they aren’t out in the open. Maybe it’s a cave and its her feet bleeding and the Seducers are getting closer, more eager, more—

“Why a sailor’s braid?” Valinnaire asks. She doesn’t even notice that her flame is now in Valinnaire’s hands.

“I— what?”

“Your hair is done in a Direnni style braid and fastened into a bun, which is a style that was first brought to the Isles by Balfieran sailors. Its not typical among the nobility, why do you wear it?”

“It’s not like I have much of a choice.” She snaps.

And hates the patient smile she’s given, “It’s crooked, is all.” Valinnaire tilts her head. Estre squints in return, one hand flying to her hair in a moment of pure, unadulterated vanity. its fine, a little too messy but perfectly aligned.

Valinnaire offers the flame, glowing green and blue and purple, the colours reflected in the clear shining amber of her eyes. “I would pledge myself to help you leave this place alongside the mages, Estre.”

What irony. The one mer she wanted, more than anything, to swap places with in this bleak place is now her one chance of escape. It seems good, too good, and too good is always impossible. Yet…

She takes the flame.

#i know shes pretty much irredemable but i love her and will never stop #high kinlady estre #my writing #elder scrolls online #female altmer vestige #oc: valinnaire of sunhold

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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Pluralistic: 02 Mar 2020 (Disasters vs dystopias, meet me in Kelowna, Cool Mules, astrosovkitsch, drug policy)

Today's links

My new podcast, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia": Tired: Look for the helpers. Wired: Be the helper.

The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time: It's how we'll stop ISIS, apparently.

I'm coming to Kelowna on March 5: It's my first-ever trip to the BC interior and more than half the (free) tickets are gone. RSVP now!

Cool Mules, an investigative series on a Vice editor's cocaine-smuggling ring: From the people who brought you the stunning "Thunder Bay."

Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR.

Apple, Nike and Dell's supply chain includes enslaved Uyghurs: Xinjiang Phase II.

Drugs Without the Hot Air: The best book I've ever read on drugs and drug policy, in an expanded new edition.

This day in history: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2019

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

My new podcast, "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia" (permalink)

I just posted a new podcast! "Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopia" is an essay I wrote for Wired about the ways that the stories we tell ourselves make the difference between rising to meet a crisis and devolving into catastrophe.

The podcast is here:

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

The Wired essay is here:

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/cory-doctorow-walkaway/

Though I wrote it in 2017, it really applies today. Our beliefs about whether we can trust our neighbors to have our back in times of crisis informs whether we behave in a way that shows THEY can trust US in times of crisis.

And since every crisis is (eventually) overcome by people pitching in to get things fixed, the belief that our fellow humans are untrustworthy means that crises are more likely to turn into disasters – and the stories we write can instil or dispel that belief.

I know that there's some controversy about Mr Rogers' famous "Look for the helpers" speech – that it's advice for children, not adults.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/look-for-the-helpers-mr-rogers-is-bad-for-adults/574210/

But the adult version is "BE the helper." That is, prepared to run towards the emergency, not to cower in a luxury bunker while better people than you get the machine started again.

The next frontier for school censorware is spying on kids all the time (permalink)

We spend a lot of time bemoaning the lack of privacy-consciousness among kids, and then we spy on them at school with censorware and punish them for taking any action that might protect their privacy from us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGjNe1YhMA

Meanwhile, censorware companies – whose primary customers have always been oppressive regimes seeking to control political oppositions – have morphed into full-on student surveillance companies, and their sales pitch is a terrifying slurry of war-on-terror/active shooter FUD.

When companies like Gaggle and Securely pitch school-boards on their products, they claim that they can detect incipient in-school ISIS attacks and the like, and use that as justification to spy on kids in-school and out-of-school online activities. These companies are mini-NSAs-for-hire, tracking social media usage and every keystroke and click on school networks and devices, storing it (insecurely) for years, if not decades.

https://www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/staff-columnist/iowa-city-schools-student-social-media-monitoring-surveillance-gaggle-securly-20200302

They make bizarre claims ("the average 7th grader has 6 Instagram accounts" – which would make 7th graders 25% of the entire IG user-base). And they find terrified parents to endorse spying ("If it's going to protect my child, I don't care how you get the info, just get it"). People who sell security need to sell fear. If we want our kids to care about their privacy, we can't make them "safe" by spying on them all the time and banning any steps they take to make us stop.

I'm coming to Kelowna on March 5 (permalink)

I'm coming to the BC interior for the first time ever, talking about my book Radicalized at the Kelowna library as part of Canada Reads. I'm being hosted by the CBC's Sarah Penton from 6-8PM! It's free to attend but it's ticketed, and the majority of tickets are already gone — if you want to come, now's the time to RSVP.

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

(and if you can't make it, it's OK! The CBC will broadcast the audio and I'll put it my podcast, too)

Cool Mules, an investigative series on a Vice editor's cocaine-smuggling ring (permalink)

Back in 2015, Slava Pastuk was an editor at Vice, and he abused his position there to pressure young, desperate would-be journalists into smuggling suitcases full of millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into Australia.

https://nationalpost.com/news/former-vice-editor-gets-nine-year-sentence-for-recruiting-young-drug-mules-for-massive-cocaine-smuggling-ring

Five of them went to prison, but Slava Pastuk did not (at first). When Pastuk's role in the affair became public and he was indicted and tried, he refused to talk to the press at all, making the whole thing something of a non-story cipher (despite its spectacular details).

Incredibly, though, Canadaland got Slava to talk. At length. And they got the other side of the story, too, both from Slava's victims and those who risked career suicide by turning him down. The result is a new, six-part investigative series called Cool Mules, hosted by Kasia Mychajlowycz, whose work I discovered through the spectacular On The Media.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/shows/cool-mules/

It's modeled on Canadaland's last, spectacular miniseries, Thunder Bay, easily the best investigative series I ever listened to.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/shows/thunder-bay/

This morning's Canadaland features an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the series between Mychajlowycz and Jesse Brown, and it has me licking my chops for the series itself.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/315-the-cocaine-smuggling-ring-at-vice/

Soviet Space Graphics (permalink)

When my grandmother was 12, she was inducted into the Leningrad civil defense corps during the 900 day siege of Leningrad (I wrote a science fiction novella about this called "After the Siege").

http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/after-the-siege.html

The story is also available as a five-part audiobook reading by Mary Robinette Kowal:

http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege1.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege2.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege3.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege4.mp3 http://scalzi.com/atseige/afterthesiege5.mp3

Eventually (years later) my grandmother was evacuated with the women and children across the winter ice and ended up in Siberia, where she met my grandfather, got pregnant, fled to Azerbaijan and birthed my father. They made their way to Canada over six years, through a series of refugee adventures and crises that could each be a novella of its own (the part where she married my grandfather's one-armed partisan fighter brother, for example, and got caught in a pogrom).

My grandmother completely lost contact with her family in Leningrad, for years. More than a decade. My father vividly recounts how he, as a little boy, heard his mother in Toronto answer the phone and say, "Mama, mama" and begin to cry for the family she thought was dead.

Over the years that followed, my grandmother and grandfather traveled to the USSR several times to see her family, and my Leningrad family came often to visit us in Toronto. Whenever they came, the brought Soviet space-program memoribilia.

There was SO MUCH of this stuff (in the early 90s, Russian sf fans used to pay their way to US conventions by shlepping suitcases full of astrosovkitsch to sell at the event), and it was gorgeous and magical. Some of the best art of the Soviet era was produced to celebrate the space program, and my most cherished toys and knickkacks growing up featured Sputnik, Gagarin, and Valentina Tereshkova. Today, much of that stuff is in our home, thanks in part to Ukrainian Ebay sellers who've taken over the astrosovkitsch market from Russian sf fans.

I'm awfully excited, therefore, by the news that Phaidon is bringing out "Soviet Space Graphics: Cosmic Visions from the USSR." It's a lavishly illustrated volume, produced in collaboration with the Moscow Design Museum.

https://www.phaidon.com/store/design/soviet-space-graphics-9781838660536/

If you're ever in St Petersburg and you want to see some amazing historical examples of Soviet space and tech materials, visit the Popov Museum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.S._Popov_Central_Museum_of_Communications

Incidentally, my grandmother's baby brother Bora, who stayed behind in Leningrad, grew up to be curator of the Popov. I last saw Uncle Bora in 2005, shortly before his death, and he gave us a curator's behind-the-scenes tour of the museum. You can see my photos from the visit here:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=37996580417%40N01&sort=date-taken-desc&text=popov&view_all=1

Apple, Nike and Dell's supply chain includes enslaved Uyghurs (permalink)

Phase II of China's Xinjiang concentration camps for ethno-religious minorities (mostly Uyghurs but also other Muslim minorities) is creating slave-labor factories that serve major US brands.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51697800

Nike, Apple and Dell's supply chains are all implicated.

As a reminder, the Xinjiang concentration camps used torture, punitive rape, brainwashing, forced medical experimentation and other tactics to "retrain" a disfavored minority.

"Between 2017 and 2019, the ASPI think tank estimates that more than 80,000 Uighurs were transferred out of the far western Xinjiang autonomous region to work in factories across China. It said some were sent directly from detention camps."

The revelations come from a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute:

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

The workers enslaved in these factories spend their off-hours in brainwashing sessions, living "in segregated dormitories, with Mandarin lessons and 'ideological training', subjected to constant surveillance and banned from observing religious practices."

Drugs Without the Hot Air (permalink)

I first read "Drugs Without the Hot Air," David Nutt's astoundingly good book about drug policy back in 2012; in the eight years since, hardly a month has gone by without my thinking about it. Now, there's a new, updated edition, extensively revised, and it's an absolute must-read.

Nutt came to fame when he served as the UK "Drugs Czar" under the Labour Government in the late 2000s; especially when Home Secretary Jacqui Smith fired him for his refusal to lie and say that marijuana was more harmful than alcohol, despite the extensive evidence to the contrary (Smith also threatened Nutt for publishing a paper in Nature that compared the neurological harms of recreational horseback riding to harms from recreational MDMA use, a paper that concluded that if horses came in pill form we might call them "Equasy").

Since then, Nutt — an eminent psychopharmacologist researcher and practioner — has continued to campaign, research, and write about evidence-based drugs policy that takes as its central mission to reduce harm and preserve therapeutic benefits from drugs.

Like the first edition of Drugs Without the Hot Air, the new edition serves three missions:

First, to describe how a wide variety of drugs — benzos, cocaine, opoiods, cannabis, etc, but also alcohol, caffeine and nicotine — work in the body, in clear, nontechnical language that anyone can follow.

Next, to describe the harms and benefits of drugs, considered both on individual and societal levels — and also to describe what the best medical evidence tells us about maximizing those benefits and minimizing those harms.

Finally, to recount how governments — mainly in the UK but also in the USA and elsewhere — have responded to the evidence on drug mechanisms, harms and benefits.

Inevitably, part 3 becomes an indictment, as Nutt describes in eye-watering, frustrating, brutal detail how harmful, incoherent, self-serving and cowardly government responses to drugs have been, and how many lives they have ruined — through criminalizing harmless conduct, through treating medical problems as criminal ones, and through badly thought-through policies that caused relatively benign substances to be replaced with far more harmful ones (for example, Nutt traces the lethal rise in fentanyl partly to the successful global interdiction of opium poppies).

One important difference between the new edition and the original is visible progress on this last. In the years since Nutt was fired for refusing to lie about science, he has founded Drugscience, a research and advocacy nonprofit that has scored significant policy wins and made real therapeutic breakthroughs through hard work and rigour.

I don't think you could ask for a more sensible, clear-eyed, and useful book about drugs, from the ones your doctor prescribes to the ones your bartender serves you to the ones you can go to jail for possessing. Nutt is not just a great and principled campaigner, nor merely a talented and dedicated scientist — he's also a superb communicator.

Drugs Without the Hot Air is part of an outstanding series of technical books — mostly about climate change — that have greatly influenced my thinking. The publisher, UIT Cambridge, has several more that I recommend.

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Media professors' SCOTUS brief on why P2P should be legal https://web.archive.org/web/20050910210056/http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/mediagrokster.pdf

#15yrsago Study: Used hard-drives full of juicy blackmail material https://web.archive.org/web/20051223054039/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1487674,00.html

#15yrsago Revolved: Beatles mashup album https://web.archive.org/web/20050221212052/http://www.hearingdouble.co.uk/ccc/

#15yrsago 1121 phrases you can't put on personalized jerseys at nfl.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050304035349/https://www.outsports.com/nfl/2005/0301nflshopnaughtywords.htm

#10yrsago Brits: tell the LibDem Peers not to bring web-censorship to Britain! https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/lib-dems-seek-web-blocking

#10yrsago If chess were redesigned by MMORPG developers https://akma.disseminary.org/2010/03/if-chess-were-invented-by-mmog-developers/

#5yrsago America's growing gangs of armed, arrest-making, untrained rent-a-cops https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/private-police-carry-guns-and-make-arrests-and-their-ranks-are-swelling/2015/02/28/29f6e02e-8f79-11e4-a900-9960214d4cd7_story.html

#5yrsago Bruce Schneier's Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World https://boingboing.net/2015/03/02/bruce-schneiers-data-and-gol.html

#1yrago Man-Eaters: Handmaid's Tale meets Cat People in a comic where girls turn into man-eating were-panthers when they get their periods https://boingboing.net/2019/03/02/lycanthropes-v-patriarchy.html

#1yrago Massive study finds strong correlation between "early affluence" and "faster cognitive drop" in old age https://www.pnas.org/content/116/12/5478

#1yrago Comcast assigned every mobile customer the same unchangeable PIN to protect against SIM hijack attacks: 0000 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/a-comcast-security-flub-helped-attackers-steal-mobile-phone-numbers/

#1yrago Improbably, a Black activist is now the owner and leader of the "National Socialist Movement," which he is turning into an anti-racist group https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/03/01/how-black-man-outsmarted-neo-nazi-group-became-their-new-leader/?utm_term=.e5eb80c543cb

#1yrago Study that claimed majority of Copyright Directive opposition came from the US assumed all English-language tweets came from Washington, DC https://webschauder.de/wer-zwitschert-zum-eu-urheberrecht/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Dark Roasted Blend (https://www.darkroastedblend.com/) and Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Disasters Don't Have to End in Dystopias: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/03/01/disasters-dont-have-to-end-in-dystopias/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

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