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#//even if what it shows us is a flawed monarchy its still SOMETHING

horizon-verizon · 10 months

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The power imbalance excuse doesn’t work because Rhaenyra didn’t punished or fired Criston when he refused to be her “whore”.

*EDITED POST* (9/23/23)

Anon talks about THIS POST.

Primarily, it's the green stans not accepting the Dance is a tale of misogyny, and of they can get Criston's predatory behavior justified through him being PoC (which he is not, and even if he was Dornish, the Dornish are not PoC), they can argue that his lowborn, PoCness & whatever racism he experiences at court has made his rise into highborn "white" circles that much harder. And that it makes him more vulnerable to Rhaenyra's white privilege. Meanwhile, we all saw the episode where he never really pushed to leave AND he thoroughly enjoyed and enthusiastically participated in the one-night stand. His struggle was more between his desire and his vows of celibacy, Rhaenyra did not force him or threaten hi with either words, actions, or looks. That's not how SA goes even with women against men.

So, the implication is that if a PoC man seeks to rape or SA or even just to demand sex, bc white women can & have called out rape to avoid censure or punishment themselves, it's fine if it's a white woman being made the victim or being demanded to give herself to the man regardless of her personal feelings, aspirations, limitations, psyche, desires. And/Or, in this case, the man's flawed need to "prove" something through that sex and marriage. Regardless of who these people are and what kind of person Rhaenyra SHOWS herself to be instead of mere racial guesswork overriding what we see of her on screen and what Criston himself would have known after years of guarding her closely.

The fact that she didn't seek out Criston's punishment or dismissal specifically for rejecting her doesn't mean that there isn't a power imbalance based on class, but that she herself chooses to not be petty or use her power against him. And the power imbalance that exists is still not strong enough even when we bring up their very different classes (below), so it still isn't an abusive relationship...but the show certainly encourages us to think so despite this (I explain in sections 1a & 1b of the post I listed above).

To clarify, it is not the carrying out of an action/termination that defines a power imbalance but the possibility of it and the power one wields "passively" and actively over someone according to their respective social roles/how those roles relate to another.

This power imbalance was not as dire or predatory for Criston as some people think it was AND while the show included both book versions of what happened b/t Criston & Rhaenyra, it didn't include her question about Criston Cole's loyalty/his own willingness to keep to his own vows. Which comes with its own implications.

Power imbalances do not automatically equal rape and rape does not automatically exist b/t socioeconomically or sociopolitically nonequals during sex.

Rape or sexual assault is about someone disregarding consent, not asking/caring about willful "yes"es. If a person uses their power to coerce someone into having any sort of sex with them, then that is an abuse of power, SA, and likely rape. But If simply having power over someone makes sex rape then any relationship where one has any kind of power over the other person in any way is rape, which is a false deduction.

Also, Criston very much wanted this:

Yeah, you can argue that there is a "power imbalance" for every single relationship or relationship-to-be in this world, because that's how monarchial [from "feudal"] hierarchies work. Even within one's family/house, especially when you are royal. Viserys outranks Rhaenyra and is her "boss", a Queen Consort or Queen Regnant outranks any lover she may have that is not her husband, a King outranks all and any of his mistresses, etc. Rhaenyra outranked Harwin, AND Daemon. Aegon IV outpowered/outranked Naerys AND outranked Barbra Bracken. Ned Stark is the "boss" of his own wife (she provides him heirs and "works" at making sure the education of their kids is well enough/directs those who maintain the household) and even if any of his kids became warriors he is/would be their commander, their lord. His kids belong to him, and his wife customarily owes obedience to him. The "work" is landowning and military organization while the "workplace" are ancestral lands and the castles.

We can't really make modern power imbalances exactly equal to feudal hierarchies, the whole thing makes the family unit and sexual reproduction a business. The end-all-be-all. Unless you're in similar ranks or both leaders of your respective houses, you're not necessarily "equals". And then you factor in material wealth and reputation, ugh, it can get a bit messier

With this in mind, Rhaenyra is not unlike many other aristocrats who begin a relationship with someone they have a power imbalance with. And she-Criston have a special case because Criston happens to be Kingsguard with vows of celibacy. In theory (or at first glance), the imbalance is greater in most senses. One is that he is politically bound into being a sort of servant with only one single purpose which is to defend her while not having the ability to draw up armies of his own, on his own, from his own house. Or have others do it in his own name.

Once again, noble women also have affairs, but because they are female they keep that under wraps just as Rhaenyra was going to with Criston, before he rejected the "mistress" proposal.

A big incentive behind her choice is that as a woman Rhaenyra would have a lot more to lose or risk than if she were a man/male heir going after any statused-woman. Since women are usually sociopolitically disadvantaged in comparison to men within classes and/or castes. At the same time, it's obviously not in Rhaenyra's character to do something actually predatory anyway, which he would have known from their years-long acquaintance--him following/hearing/observing her all that time.

This is supposed to present a problem to us viewers who were never in the original tale (if you're reading right) or if you haven't been paying attention to show!Rhaenyra's actions leading up to her and Criston:

Rhaenyra's disadvantage as a noblewoman-and/or-one-who-becomes-heir is undermined, even canceled out, erased & invalidated by this change. in making her (the 17yr old in canon, and 19 yr old in show) seducer of a "pure" (late 20s-30s) man, who supposedly takes his vows of celibacy seriously. (Yet he's contradicting himself and his faithfulness to his vows by espousing that he loves her enough to run away with her and have them both abandon their duties.)

Criston was her supposed victim due to the very presence of their different stations and him risking his life more than he would if he weren't Kingsguard. So Cole is responsible for himself...but Rhaenyra is responsible for his decisions and his attraction to her. She must make his decision to sleep with her right by marrying him and "cleansing" his sin. So he does have agency, and his sleeping with rhaenyra wasn't coercive?

Choose your fighter. But you can't b/c the show doesn't really want you to, it wants you to see Rahenyra as this decisive, unconfused woman-child forced to suppress more than even what we see her let out. The show overcomplicates a very simple dynamic by trying to make Rhaenyra into the bad guy and downplaying or erasing her own vulnerabilities.

That is somewhat alinahams was getting to, I think, in their post HERE. (Couldn't attach the original link.)

Finally, again, Croton was a Kingsguard, so the only person who could "fire" him from the overall service to the royal family and remove him from the Kingsguard is Viserys. He has more power than people might believe.

#criston cole's characterization #rhaenyra and criston #rhaenyra targaryen #asoiaf asks to me #hotd comment #westerosi society #westerosi history #hotd episode 4 #hotd #asoiaf #criston cole

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inky-duchess · 4 years

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Lessons Writers can learn from Hamilton

Guess who finally watched Hamilton? I love historical dramas and films and now historical musicals. I am a bigger nerd than before and I can't stop singing My Shot. So what can we learn about writing from Hamilton?

Aaron Burr, Sir

I really feel for Aaron Burr during the beginning of the story. Most of us have dealt with a similar issue: working hard yet somebody is always better than you. Even though Burr is technically the antagonist by story's end, most of the audience does get his point. But the problem with Burr, both by the audience's view and Hamilton's is the fact that he doesn't say what he believes in. La Fayette wants the fall of monarchy and better equality. Hamilton wants to make a place for himself in the world. Eliza wants her family to be happy. Burr tells Hamilton to keep his opinions to himself leading to Hamilton to ask, "Burr, the revolution's imminent. What do you stall for? If you stand for nothing, Burr, what'll you fall for?" Every character should have something they fight for. It endears them to the audience and allows us to stand behind them. Without goals and principles, a character will always just remain a name on a page and a collection of actions without meaning.

A different PoV- a different story.

During the Helpless section of the story, we witness the scene through Eliza Schuyler's eyes. We see her sister Angelica crossing the room to Alexander Hamilton to get him to dance with Eliza. Eliza sees Alexander as an honourable gallant, who has stolen her heart. Then in Satisfied, we see the scene from Angelica's PoV. Angelica is less naïve. She notes Hamilton's recognition of their last name, realizing that he's out to get a rich wife. She also realises that Hamilton will never be satisfied in life and that he's not a great catch socially or financially. "I asked about his fam'ly, did you see his answer? His hands started fidgeting, he looked askance He's penniless, he's flying by the seat of his pants". By showing this scene in dual PoV, we are awaken to both sides of Hamilton, the romantic version and the shrewd politician climbing his way up. By choosing a PoV character to tell a particular part of the story, you are moulding the events to the character's preconceived notions and opinions.

Foreshadowing

Hamilton does one thing exceptionally well. It foreshadows the ending very well. Hamilton repeatedly tells us that he isn't going to throw away his shot. We think it means his shot at rising up from poverty and his chance at notoriety in the Revolution. It starts becoming literal as Philip goes off to his first duel, with Hamilton almost begging Philip to fire his weapon away from his opponent. It doesn't do Philip any good. Later on during the duel against Burr, Hamilton intentionally misses his shot just as his son had only to die when his opponent discharged his weapon, killing him. Burr even called back to Philip's duel while describing Hamilton's affect before their own duel. You only begin to realise how profound the echo of My Shot is.

Alluding to a bigger picture

Hamilton may be a musical with no dialogue but that does not mean that there is no tell in the story. The actors do a great job of alluding to a deeper story behind the lyrics. During his last corporeal scene with Eliza, Hamilton's affect tells us that he at least very much suspects that he is not going to make it back this time. Lin Manuel Miranda's subtle expressions are just masterful. His mouth is saying one thing and his eyes are saying something completely else. In another brilliant Lin moment, the scene where Alexander blows up at Washington after the very first duel, you can see how angry Hamilton is. He is shaking despite his polite, yet curt replies. We don't even have to have the "Don't call me son" exchange. Lin's face tells us everything. Hamilton loves Washington like a father and resents him for rejecting his attempt to defend his name. We do not even have to be told, they showed us. There is always a deeper meaning to what a character does or says.

Your Protagonist is allowed do shitty things

A protagonist is not perfect. Most of the stories we read are narrated by people, who are by definition imperfect. If you look at any story the narrator/protagonist is usually a good person but has flaws or has done some questionable things. Hamilton is the good guy of the story, the protagonist, the hero. He's pro-Revolution, anti-slavery and has a troubled past. Even still Hamilton has an affair. It is not his best move or even the most savoury thing. There is no redeeming reason for him to cheat but even still, the audience either forgives him outright or takes it in their stride. Your protagonist does not have to be squeaky clean. They are allowed to make dumb decisions.

Remember History has its eyes on you

The one thing I often find missing in stories and worldbuilding is the media's/public's opinion on your characters or even the world around them. Hamilton hits the nail on the head. Your characters have no say on how they are perceived by their peers or the world around them. It is an interesting component to add in any narrative. What does the public say about your characters and world? "And when you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story? Who tells your story? Who tells your story?"

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justalads · 3 years

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this is an essay post that was written in response to an in-depth discussion i was having with another person on a lot of topics. that’s why it’s written like it’s addressing someone. because of that, it is a little confusing on its own (because the things in quotes are responding to things the other person said) but me and the person who runs this blog thought it would be better to make this a separate post, so that people who want to see this response can see it without it being attached to the person i was having the discussion with. we spoke to the person and they said that would be fine. with that being said, this is a very long post. if anyone finds parts of it useful, it will have served its original purpose.

so what i mean about it “making sense” that dream became like that is that it kind of does, you know? i’m saying that the desires were always there. not that he was always willing to go so far for them, or even that they were as strong as they ended up being! after all, there’s a difference between declaring war to reclaim land and people, and making a vault in order to take things that were important to people.

what he always did possess is a sort of “ownership” of the server. and this was probably founded from the fact that it was, you know, his server. he wanted l’manburg back because he didn’t like that people came onto his server and then said he couldn’t have something. and that’s one of his primary points in his conversation with skeppy: the analogy he uses of someone coming into his house and saying he can’t have a table.

and later, in the vault, this is the reason he gives for wanting control: that it is his server. he tells tommy it isn’t supposed to be fair, it doesn’t need to be fair, because fairness implies equality, and he doesn’t see everyone else as having equal claim to the server. so that’s what i mean when i say the signs were always there: his statements match upand paint a path through the story. true, you don’t just “become” a bad person. there’s no reason for him to suddenly get all weird and want ultimate control, if he was completely neutral and peaceful in the beginning. this is why his character is decently written!

and since the potential was there in the first place, that’s what gave him the ability to or put him in danger of doing what he did.

so yeah, it’s true that his spiral was not only his fault, because even someone who thinks they own something is not going to just jump to the lengths that he did. he had other experiences, and saw how other people worked, and then was met by pushback from people when he wanted them all to do what he said. because his house analogy is lacking something: he owns the house, but everyone else lives there too.

it may be “his” server in that he pays upkeep fees, but that doesn’t mean he deserves control over everything that happens on it! if your roommate goes “i want this table and you can’t have it”, even if the house belongs to you, it’s kind of weird to go “no you can’t have it, it’s mine”. especially if all the roommate wants the table for is so they can play monopoly or something with their group. and even more so if the roommate will let you play monopoly if you want to (remember the embassy?), and if you can just buy a new table then what’s the point in getting upset over the one?

i just think you put a lot more of the responsibility on other characters. saying that all they did was villainize him and treat him as pure evil and break his boundaries is wrong because one, no, that’s not all they did, it’s exaggerated, and two, he was also doing things to them! it did not come out of nowhere! and clearly, his mindset didn’t come from nothing, so a personal flaw contributed to it! people who are innocent and care too much about others and are then mistreated do not do what dream did, and we know this because there is a character very similar to that: ranboo.

(i could talk about this for a super long time honestly. it’s very interesting how close they are, and since enderwalk ranboo is just ranboo with all his memories and he helped dream... there’s clearly something that happened that he’s forgotten that’s very important.)

hates conflict, tries to mediate things, cares about the people he loves to a fault. and we don’t see him running around and telling people they can’t build nations because it “divides people”! he has also been hurt and betrayed, but he still recognizes his responsibility to respect others and their agency. the difference between dream and ranboo is that one, dream has a spine, and two, dream thinks of the server as his. dream’s belief is one of the driving causes of his actions.

it’s true that nobody deserves to lose half their friends at once. it’s also true that before he declared war, nobody had any actual negative feelings towards him. they made fun of him for saying his side had more women. he made fun of them for having none. it was playful banter. that’s the thing about the hot dog stream: the tone is incredibly light. wilbur soot, known dramatic idiot, decided he was going to go play capitalism on a minecraft server. both tommy and wilbur at that point had been making various stupid attempts to gain “power”. and none of this was treated seriously, because others were doing the same kinds of things.

you know how many times tommy logged on and got involved in small petty conflicts? pretty much none of them are mentioned in canon again, because at this point, there wasn’t even much of a canon to get involved in. the smp at this point was a place for people to go and do bits. and invoking wilbur’s joke hatred of tommy and those like him seems a little unfair. wilbur’s main bit was calling tommy an annoying child. when wilbur was stealing the blaze rods, it was not an actual attempt to get power because it was not treated as such by anyone, it was treated with the exact seriousness that it deserved: sapnap and tubbo declared themselves the “police”.

what kind of actual control is going to come from taking blaze rods, especially on a server where you can just go get more? and it’s not like theft is really a crime on the server. everyone else chose to play into the bit.

it’s like now, when tommy shows up with a new idea and people who don’t like him start claiming that this is proof that he never learned anything and he was actually bad all along. the church prime thing, l’sandburg, any time he steals something or is rude to jack manifold. because although semi-lore is fun, sometimes people treat it as serious lore when parts of it are not intended to be and then use it to imply things about the characters that don’t line up with canon.

that’s kinda off topic and not really about dream, so i’ll move on

“i’d like to ask you to once again watch the actual stream.”

i mean, yeah. i did watch the stream. i don’t know a lot about george, and i prefaced my thoughts at the start by saying that. obviously attempting to catch up after isn’t as good as knowing the context and plot, (this sounds sarcastic but it is genuine i’m sorry sjhksjs) but i do want to offer this: it’s an opportunity to look at the plot in a different way. you say that you are on dream’s side in this scene, and while having that bias alone isn’t bad, i think it’s a good idea to attempt to see the other side. that’s what i’ve been doing while going back and forth with you; examining my own bias and attempting to look past it, and explain why it’s there.so dream kicks george off the throne. and you say that it’s not bad that dream does it, because george’s monarchy was already a figurehead. you know, i don’t see this as being any better? this means that when dream made george king, he already did it with the fact that george wasn’t really in charge in dream’s mind, meaning that dream was, you know, the ultimate authority. that is a power dynamic. dream has control over who is king of his faction.

when you watch the stream where dream makes george king originally, dream doesn’t really let him know that his power isn’t real. that’s the problem with this situation: the presence of a power dynamic alone is not the issue, it’s the fact that dream was misleading about its presence. dream just tells him “you’re king.” in fact, dream demonstrates more control over eret, by telling them just that they can’t be in charge anymore and george is king now. he tells them to take off their crown, to which they protest because it’s a layer on their skin and it would show their eyes, something they’re uncomfortable with. dream says “i need you to do it. you gotta do it. i mean, i’m not asking you, we have three of us here.”

they physically threaten eret. and by the way, the reason that dream thought eret had “betrayed” the greater smp? eret was attempting to help pogtopia and make things right with the people of l’manburg, something you claim was also dream’s wish during this time (he had switched over to manburg at this point). dream told eret that the king had a duty to remain neutral.

it is only then, when dream tells eret to remain neutral on things, that dream tells eret that the act of being king means nothing. this is where the “what makes you king” quote coms from, by the way. dream has the ultimate control over who is king. but whenever he makes someone king, he doesn’t tell them that. and when dream leaves, eret fully realizes this and admits that dream’s right: they don’t have any power. so what was the point of betraying l’manburg?

if there was no power with being king, why did george accept it? why was there even a king in the first place? the only reason eret agreed to betray l’manburg in the first place was because dream offered them power.

when dream confronts eret about remaining neutral, dream says “my plan is that there’s no manburg, there’s no l’manburg, there’s no pogtopia, there’s just dream smp and there’s dream smp everywhere. and that’s been my plan since the very beginning, i’ve never wavered on that. that’s why i had you betray them, and that’s why i gave you kingship, because i felt like you’d be a good king because you’re neutral.”

ignoring the fact that he’s twisting why he made eret king (they were on the side of l’manburg and he tempted them away), he also claims that his faction only has been his goal since the beginning. this will be important later.

cc!eret confirmed in a twitter thread on their alt that their character was possibly the longest victim of dream’s manipulation.

and finally, watching the stream where dream dethrones george, the thing sticking out to me is how dream is phrasing it. he says that george should step down because people are attacking him, and dream isn’t always going to be able to protect him. and then he says this.

“and i think you’ll just be targeted if you’re the king. and you want to be able to like, get revenge on tommy and stuff, right? so we can work together.”

i kind of wish he didn’t bring up tommy. i kind of wish his main goal at this time wasn’t just going after tommy because he thought tommy was the root of all the problems. and i think this kind of highlights a little bit that when dream built the walls around l’manburg again, it wasn’t just because he was “defending george” or anything, because i don’t think george really cared that much? dream was using the fact that it was george’s house that blew up in order to go after tommy.

after this line, the others all kind of gang up on dream, true. it’s partially for the joke, as evidenced by quackity’s “THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTING!”, but it’s also kind of them being, you know, legitimately angry at his character. and it’s funny that it’s sapnap who leads it. sapnap brings up what dream said, that he doesn’t care about anything except for the disks. dream says that he didn’t mean it, and then george says “then why did you say it?” so dream saying that clearly hurt them, and he can’t just push it off by saying he didn’t mean it once.

and in the end, george doesn’t even agree before dream makes eret king again! george and sapnap are trying to have a conversation with dream about how they feel they’ve been treated, and dream brushes it off with “maybe this isn’t a good time to bring it up,” before ultimately ignoring what they’re both saying because in his mind he has a good enough reason and it doesn’t matter what george thinks.

dream is in the act of passing power over to eret, and george says “i’m still king. i’m literally right here.” dream shushes him. dream also implies that the reason george is getting attacked is because he backs up everything dream says, reducing george down to an extension of his own will or calling him a follower. dream accuses sapnap of trying to divide him and george, and sapnap says this: “i’m not dividing anyone, i stand by george. he’s my king but most importantly he’s my friend.” dream replies that george is his friend but not his king.

i just sort of want to show you the other side here. george and sapnap weren’t just running around instigating conflict any more than dream was. and although george didn’t do anything as king, it meant something to him, because it was a symbol of the trust he thought dream had for him. dream saying he was taking it away for his own good meant he didn’t even trust george to protect himself. he was treating him like a child.

and then when george is silent, listening to everyone debate whether he deserves this or not, dream accuses him of only pretending to be sad. it’s true that he was pretending to cry, but i don’t think that warranted dream telling him he’s “acting like a baby” and that he was a bad king.

sapnap and george had a real point, and dream ignored them. he hadn’t addressed the things he had said that hurt them, and so they raised legitimate grievances with him! dream doesn’t treat their concerns as important, and talks down to george in particular.

ignoring the fact that sapnap and george were also hurting is kind of hypocritical. you’re right, “abandonment hurts you, no matter if the people have good reasons for it or not”. dream said the spirit thing before sapnap did any sort of real leaving him. and dream’s reasons were definitely not good.

i have no idea why you got the idea that george is so awful. he was walking around with his head down. the only one also calling him things like manipulative and a drama queen is, well, dream.

basically: (/hj)

george: :(

dream: you are attempting to emotionally manipulate me

butternut is a master of psychological manipulation

anyway

so sapnap, george and quackity felt betrayed there. they left, and went to mexican l’manburg to try and console george. and then dream shoots quackity and kills him, and tries to attack the others as well. it’s worth noting that quackity also had a reason to be upset at dream: dream’s treatment of l’manburg. dream then shows up and calls george a tyrant. dream never listens to what george says during this, he just continues saying what he already said. dream taking the kingship away from george hurt him more than letting him stay would have.

watching this is painful, because it’s making me realize just how much dream doesn’t actually care what his friends think! he says he cares, and he might think he cares, but then he calls them babies and liars and tyrants. his argument with george here reads like something awful. he’s using the excuse of “caring about him” in order to undermine and insult him, and take the moral high ground. dream essentially tells george that he didn’t make george king out of any respect for him, it was just random. he doesn’t treat his friends well during this scene. i don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to get angry.

when quackity, after sitting in silence for the entire conversation, says he disagrees, dream tells him that he’s just dumb. doesn’t wait to hear his reasons, doesn’t value his opinion, because dream is so sure that he’s right and he knows what’s best for the server, and by extension, everyone.

other interesting things: dream brings tommy into it again by saying he’s what causes all the problems on the server. dream tells quackity to think about what tubbo would think about him picking this fight. dream says that george would probably do anything he told him to do. his entire position is “you guys can think whatever you want, but it won’t change anything.” genuinely, tell me how this is them abandoning him? and when they do drift away later, tell me why they don’t have a reason to? dream doesn’t respect them! he takes their friendship for granted!

“would you consider it justified for all of tommy’s friends (even tubbo who he’s been close with for so long) to abandon him just because he’s said basically the same thing about the discs - like three times?”

thank you for bringing up the disk thing. do you really think that tommy and dream acted the same when saying that an item held more worth than their friends?

think about what the disks symbolize. control over tommy. tommy wants them back because they are a sign of dream having power over him! tommy doesn’t want his abuser having power over him! and yeah! it was a messed up thing for him to say to tubbo that the disks were worth more than him, but he apologized! he understood that what he said hurt tubbo, and he tried to rebuild the relationship! tommy took responsibility for what he said, and tried to be better. notice how afterwards, he was willing to sacrifice anything for the safety of his friends? notice how in the vault he told dream to take the disks and do whatever he wanted with them, when dream switched from threatening the disks to threatening the life of tubbo?

and what do the disks mean to dream? they mean power over tommy. the disks have no power over dream. they are a tool that he can use to hurt and control tommy. and he never apologized for this, because he wasn’t sorry. sapnap told dream that this hurt him, and all dream said was that he didn’t mean it. who is he lying to, then? tommy or sapnap? it was so important to dream that he had ultimate control over the life of someone else that he almost drove them to take their own life. i’m sorry, but this comparison sucks.

people gave dream a chance. people gave him a lot of chances. the disregard he showed for others is disgusting, especially towards his friends, and even more so towards those who he didn’t like. my problem is that though you repeat that you don’t “blame” others for what they did, you still hold them to more responsibility than you’re willing to hold him to, or at least that’s what it seems like. i’ve been investigating the other side through this whole process. and yeah, there are definitely places where i was wrong. but sometimes i do not understand, and maybe that means i should just give up on trying to understand those places. if other people can see things i can’t, maybe we agree to disagree.

i legitimately cannot see dream being the person who was treated the worst here, but let me know if i’m misrepresenting you.

i’m sorry that i sound angry, and i’m not really upset at you, but the comparison of what dream said and what tommy said set me off.

“no one having respect for him as a person”

people did respect dream, man. he was the leader of his faction. he had a lot of power. his friends trusted him to be a good friend to them. but he didn’t feel like he had an obligation to do that, yeah? and you only get respect if you give it, so they stopped respecting them because he hurt them. he didn’t learn any hard lessons about violence being the only way because he never stopped to consider another way. when faced with a problem, his options were for the problem to go away or he would make it go away: surrender or die.

during the stream where he sets up the walls with sapnap, his message is the same throughout: wipe them out. no mercy. burn their land to the ground, leave no survivors. there’s no love in war. children get hurt in war. this is a warning shot, he says, as he fires into their land. as sapnap burns down tubbo’s house and chat spams “no mercy”. they don’t show mercy because mercy is weak, and they are powerful.

one day i’m gonna write a thing that talks about the greater smp like how people talk about early l’manburg because oh boy

i’d like to see evidence of dream learning that violence is the only way, and only being able to protect himself through fighting. i don’t remember this happening, i remember him generally choosing violence as the first option.

“dream didn’t have an arising god complex.”

a god complex means more than just saying “i’m a god.” there was buildup because that’s how characters work. tommy was also trapped in the prison, and he didn’t suddenly get a god complex at the slightest bit of power, did he? the definition of a god complex is “an unshakable belief characterized by consistently inflated feelings of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility.” dream cannot admit when he is wrong. he feels as if he has a right to the control of the server, and that grows into a state of obsession. and when he’s taking tubbo and tommy down into the vault, he mocks them for thinking he was weak or that he didn’t think ahead.

once dream knew he had control over death, the complex reached its peak, and that’s when he actually admits it. characters that antagonize others already possess traits that contribute to their arc.

and hey, i know that cc!dream says his character is blocked off emotionally. i also know that he’s been given a lot of chances to apologize to people, to be sorry, to admit fault, even in small situations. did dream show remorse during exile? did dream sound like he was being “forced” to isolate and control tommy, or did he sound like an abusive parent scolding a kid for something? when dream beat tommy and tubbo and took them down to the vault, did he sound sorry? the thing about subtext is that it has to actually be there, no matter how quiet, at least a little bit. listen to dream arguing with quackity after george was dethroned and tell me he sees himself as anything other than right.

a few one off lines are not enough evidence to wipe out the rest of his character’s development.

he sounds sorry once he is faced with direct consequences, because that is the only time he is held responsible for his actions.

it’s also a weak argument to say that something is happening when, as you said, we don’t see his pov. it is fair to say that i don’t know if it’s not happening, and that’s a good point. cc!dream’s comments about his character being closed off emotionally can mean a lot of things. for instance, they could mean that his character is willing to do this to himself in order to get control. or it could mean something else entirely, i don’t know. basing an entire fact about a character off something we don’t see at all doesn’t tell us anything useful about the character, and i apologize for doing that.

i guess my reason for saying that was that i don’t see evidence of him trying to get better during pogtopia. if we don’t see signs of him being sorry or attempting to treat other people better, why should we assume that he was doing those things?

“yes, and none of c!dream’s “friends” ever did.”

dream’s friends supported him until he abandoned them and disrespected them. his time in the prison is a consequence of his time out of the prison, albeit an unfair one.

“dream didn’t hurt george.”

dream’s disrespect of george is what hurt him. dream didn’t apologize for it, he didn’t attempt to understand what george was feeling, and he didn’t look for a compromise. and yeah, it was beckerson in the vault. he had a space for mars, he just hadn’t collected it yet. so yes, dream did betray sapnap. if you have legitimate evidence of sapnap doing something that made dream actually upset, before the vault, i’d like to see it. (there might be something lol i’m sorry i’m Very Bad on his lore but from what i’ve investigated i didn’t find anything really important.)

i don’t think puffy saying “this person does bad things” is her dismissing their trauma. and the eggpire and her have both hurt each other. puffy isn’t the Trauma Designator of the server. if there’s an instance of her straight up saying that someone doesn’t have trauma then i missed it.

“she’s another one c!dream was attached to and who failed to ever reach out to him”

i don’t see evidence of this? there was the one stream where the relationship was established, but after that he never tried to seek her out. he doesn’t even talk about her. it’s not a failure from her to not reach out to him, if their connection is light at best. i honestly feel like she was more attached to him than he was to her.

“like she’s doing something extra by being a decent person.”

she’s saying he didn’t deserve to see her because he did bad things! she still cares about someone who has done bad things, but she recognizes that those things are bad. she’s saying the punishment for what he’s done should involve not seeing her, personally, and i think she should be able to make that decision? she doesn’t endorse the rest of his punishment, because she doesn’t know what it entails.

she helped him by thinking he was in the right. she helped him by even trying to understand him, when everyone else could not. she gave him the help that she could by being on his side, by being friendly to him, and after she realized he was wrong she could not do that because he was off preparing the vault! and she had other things to worry about! “could have” is useless because it can mean anything! tommy “could have” not burned george’s house down. would it have mattered, when dream already had it out for him? no!

dream took anyone being close to him for granted. he did not give anything back to them once he started going down the path. if he did something bad to them, and they were angry, that was it for him. he did not attempt to fix the bond, like other characters do when they hurt someone they care about.

“i never said anything negative about them other than describing things they did that had a negative effect.”

here’s my main point: we don’t know they had a negative effect.

you criticize the characters for not taking an action that we do not know the implications of. everyone could have been super nice and worried about dream and that could have changed nothing. that’s why i think the criticism is unwarranted.

their crime is inattention to a situation that some of them did not even know was happening. that’s like saying that techno is “responsible” for some of the pain of tommy’s exile, because he did nothing to stop it. that’s like saying that quackity or tommy “should have” removed the tnt from the button room under l’manburg.

i just don’t get the point of the criticism. because it can apply to any character in any situation, you know? we could say that eret taking back the kingship from george enabled dream into taking more control over his friends, and that eret should have stopped him. we could say that skeppy telling dream he was wrong about l’manburg pushed him further into the role of the bad guy. if you aren’t being negative about the characters, then why bring it up in the first place?

“truly believe they did all those things” they didn’t do anything. if you’re talking about the “actual consequences and effect it had on him as a character”, you have to look at what affects his character.

we can say “sapnap should not have said this to dream”. because that is something sapnap actually did, directly to dream’s face, and it is something that visibly affected dream. considering the conditions of the prison, it is an inhumane thing to say. that’s something i would call reasonable to consider when analyzing dream’s character.

but puffy talking to herself, writing her own thoughts and reactions down? that does not impact dream in any way! and i think puffy thinking internally that dream is a bad person (when she has been given adequate reason to think so) has a lot less impact on Real Plot Events than the stuff that dream actually did.

what is her “fault” here? what harm did she do? what am i excusing? what did she do wrong, and how is the effect of her specifically visible in dream’s actions? he hasn’t mentioned her in months, and it’s my perspective that if he cared, we would know.

if a tree falls in the forest when nobody is around, does it make any noise?

(the person i was responding to linked a thread about how the prison isn’t helping dream and how puffy and sapnap saying he deserves it is inhumane)

that thread doesn’t actually seem to be assigning any fault to puffy, it’s just saying that hearing that kind of thing hurts.

(also, the person who wrote the thread saying “i told you so” is going to have nobody to tell it to. we all already know dream is going to be violent when he gets out, because he told tommy he would hunt down and take revenge on the things he loves. but he’s not going to be violent because puffy didn’t visit him.)

“another person he cared about who didn’t prove to care about him enough to stop him from spiralling or try help at all.”

how did puffy not care about him? what did she do before the vault that showed that? how did she specifically abandon him, by actions of her own will and not of consequences of his? for supposedly caring about her, dream did pretty much nothing to show it.

“if “they don’t owe him anything” is your base argument against someone being hurt via being left by people they care about over and over again until they’re utterly alone with no support system and unhealthy mindsets, we might have to agree to disagree”

we would disagree if that was my point, but it’s not. because that’s not what the characters did. they didn’t all abandon him, as i’ve said. he says that he cut ties with them, but if you say he’s lying when he says that you can disregard it, i guess. and five to six people are definitely not responsible for him. again, you’re critical of them for an action they didn’t take, and in some cases it was impossible for them to take like with tommy, who certainly didn’t abandon him, as hard as he tried to.

“his (dream’s) manipulation is the clumsiest thing i’ve ever seen”

i mean i don’t really find it funny that dream was “bad” at manipulation. and clearly it was powerful enough to work on multiple people, and if he was that ineffective at it it wouldn’t have worked. but i understand what you’re saying, although i disagree with your take on wilbur.

it’s true that wilbur’s smart, but this is again saying things about stuff we can’t prove. if you look at the context of wilbur’s actions next to everyone else’s, they seem pretty tame. and he can play a morally grey character without the intent being that the character was seriously manipulative all along. although i guess it’s nice to think that you’ve solved the code, if “solving the code” means “the majority of everyone else is wrong” then you may want to take a step back.

i think the principle of occam’s razor sort of applies here, and especially applies later to the conversion between dream and wilbur. unless there is strong, strong evidence for a theory that sort of goes against stuff, there may be a better explanation. i’ve scrapped like fifty theories because of this dude hskhdksjsthe things i said at the start about tommy and wilbur’s grabs for power not being serious still do apply, and so does the fact that at the start of the roleplay, the cc’s didn’t see their characters as that separate from themselves. i think it would be kind of weird for cc!wilbur’s intent to be genuine manipulation of his actual friends all along, especially when he wasn’t playing it as a bit.

“that’s precisely what he did and how he got them to side with him in the war.”

nope. he didn’t tell anyone they “needed” to to anything. anyone who joined the country joined of their own free will, and nobody joined during the war, just before and after.

wilbur didn’t really “recruit” tommy so much as they were on a team of causing small arguments. wilbur joined and he and tommy went to go scam people together, while tommy told him about the various other little schemes he had been running. and i don’t really think he was intending to do a real takeover, which is why i called it “weak”. the man told people that potions give you diarrhea. does that sound like the work of a mastermind? no, because it’s the self proclaimed “crime boy”. and that “drug empire” got shut down pretty quick for something that was supposed to last a long time.

“just put “revolution” instead of “business” as a guise of what he was actually doing.”

l’manburg was not the drug empire under a different name. l’manburg was about separation from the greater smp, admittedly because they felt that being stopped from selling drugs was a bad thing, but then they pretty much completely dropped the drugs and the empire throughout the wall vod.

so when he was recruiting people like fundy, he was doing it with the intent of getting them to make drugs with him. he says nothing about dream when fundy joins his drug empire. and yeah, he lied to him originally, but it didn’t work. fundy visited the van and saw through wilbur (and tommy)’s story, and then he decided to join, on his own. because he wanted to make drugs.

a quote from the wall vod:

“we’re starting a revolution, not a war.”

there was no targeted hatred towards dream until he approached them. and i would say the most “evidence” that wilbur was trying to go after dream in any way is the infamous “what’s tyrannical mean” moment. the thing about that moment is that taking a single moment and using it to define an entire period is unfair. it’s not like that’s a turning point, and after that they solely go after dream. they don’t. i agree that you have to watch the actions of wilbur, and his actions at the time were geared towards becoming independent and progressing the condition of l’manburg.

wilbur is honest with eret when they join that they are committing crimes. eret joins because “haha americans bad”. meanwhile, dream is in chat telling eret that there are “three defectors from the kingdom”.

“the only reason people disbelieve this is not because it doesn’t align with canon, but because they assume he’s lying for the sole reason that it doesn’t align with the way they see canon.”

if what revivedbur said agreed with canon, people wouldn’t be pointing out that it doesn’t. watch back the hot dog stream, the wall stream, the first war stream, even the stream after that when niki joins. look at how wilbur speaks, and also look at how he acts. it does not match up with all of what revivedbur says.

early wilbur is naive. he thinks he’s doing the right thing, so he therefore concludes the people against him are wrong. the only fighting back that l’manburg does before war is declared is killing alyssa (and this was tommy’s idea, wilbur was discouraging killing her), because they thought she set the fire. once she told them she didn’t, they gave her back the stuff they thought they had. tubbo still had her pickaxe, but didn’t realize. and for this? the people of the greater smp hunted him down, trapped him in a box, and killed him as well as killing tommy, who tried to save tubbo.

wilbur scolded tommy for killing alyssa. wilbur wanted to focus on building the nation, on declaring independence, and actively ignored the other side. he writes the declaration and he believes in everything it stands for! half the things in there are things that the other people of l’manburg yelled out, that he wrote in as they were being fired on by the greater smp. it comes from all the people.

the declaration of war from the greater smp pretty much says “sometimes you just gotta kill some people, you know?”

i am not disagreeing with you that after the first war, wilbur fell into corruption. it’s implied greatly that this is partially a consequence of the first war, and also partially stems from his fierce protectiveness of l’manburg.

also, if you’re saying that you have never and will never believe wilbur, i would urge you to re-examine that. it’s hard to avoid bias when you refuse to take most things that someone says as truth. i am also curious how you came to this conclusion as you began to watch the smp (if you never believed him at all) and who’s perspective you were watching.

“according to his actions and all known laws of logic” according to the streams and vods that very much still exist, and his actions in them, no, he wasn’t lying since the beginning. did he tell lies? yes, everyone did. was he being untruthful about his devotion to l’manburg when he took arrows for it and died for it? no. it’s pretty clear to see when you watch the vod. his actions speak louder than his words.

so no, it doesn’t make sense for him to be lying since the beginning. it doesn’t make sense that revivedbur’s ideals are a switch from how he was even right before he died, so we cannot trust his memory and his morals to remain intact! the man was alone for thirteen years, speaking of torture.

“he thought l'manberg his and no one else’s, a weapon of power for him to use however he pleases. unlike dream who destroyed himself bit by bit trying to take back what he cares about, because it was not power, but people - wilbur saw no more worth in it and destroyed it instead.”

hmm. i’ll come back to this later.

a point- not everything cc!wilbur says about his character is negative.

a lot of his commentary on his character came after his death, so it encompasses his spiral. i will again suggest that you listen to “eight” by sleeping at last. it’s true he can play a morally complex character, because he does, but he does not play an intentional antagonist the entire time, even in “secret”.

“i was just talking about how hypocritical and downright ridiculous his later accusations are, which you didn’t address.”

how are his later accusations hypocritical? wilbur calls him a tyrant in the moment, yeah. wilbur thinks that he should be able to do whatever he wants, and since it’s the dream smp, he assumes dream is the leader. dream never contradicts this, by the way. wilbur writes in the declaration of independence that “in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one to dissolve the bonds which bind us. disregarding of this truth is nothing short of tyranny.” so that’s what he considers tyranny. when he got stopped from selling drugs and tommy got arrested, he didn’t yell “tyranny”.

mistreatment of citizens by authority and denial of independence is tyranny.

dream and the people of the greater smp hurt and attack the people of l’manburg throughout the wall stream. importantly, since they denied l’manburg independence, the people they were firing and attacking were their own citizens in their eyes. mistreatment of citizens is cruel. upon hearing that l’manburg existed, they became even more tyrannical. thus when wilbur writes this in the book, as they are being fired on, he believes this to be true because it is.

“despite there being no evidence” watch the wall vod. think about the definition of tyranny, and even the different definitions of tyranny.

“a capitalistic empire on dream’s land” so wilbur did have reason for thinking dream was the leader, yes? because it was his land? his “house”? how dream said they were taking back the land that was rightfully theirs? how he called them “traitors to the kingdom”? ignoring the fact that once again, wilbur did not say anything negative towards dream until dream showed up and insulted l’manburg.

wilbur’s form of lying and deception for the drug empire was the norm for the server at the time. we don’t see him pulling this sort of exaggerated bit once he gets into l’manburg, because he’s idealistic and he really believes in it. if you watch tommy’s stream where wilbur first proposes the country, he jokingly says the reason he’s making it is because “americans ruin bits”. also during that stream, tommy asks if they’re making a drug empire, and wilbur says that no, they’re making a nation where drugs are legal.

“didn’t even do that much” hmm. no, i’m pretty sure dream and the people of the greater smp did do the stuff wilbur accused them of. one, he wasn’t directly accusing dream, (because. his problem wasn’t with dream specifically.) and two, the things he said in the declaration did happen?

“they have robbed us.”

to be fair everyone on the server did that lol

“imprisoned us.”

tommy was imprisoned for the drugs and for other things he was involved in, and tubbo was trapped and murdered for a thing he didn’t even know he had.

“threatened us.”

they were fired on multiple times when building l’manburg, they were threatened with consequences for the drug stuff, they told them in pretty clear terms that they were prepared to kill them instead of letting them be independent. the day of the war, dream and sapnap burned down all the trees around l’manburg and lavacast walls around it, saying it was a “warning”.

“killed many of our men.”

again, true. tommy and tubbo in particular died a lot during this time.

so since these things really did happen, how is wilbur lying about them?

“the people he was accusing of being tyrannical were very selective”

one, he accused sapnap of being an american, and it was the americans that were going for them. you don’t need to protect people that aren’t being hurt. most of his reasoning for “no americans” during this time was that anti-mask protests were happening in america, and he was making fun of them. two, the others imprisoned tommy, which does not count as “self defense in an anarchist society”. they accepted tubbo because he was european, and because he was willing to work for the nation like the rest of them. sapnap just wanted a drug dealer.

“dream’s “no factions” thing he had going on also included no government by default, showcased by him having problems with people starting countries.”

if there was no government, why did dream never point this out when wilbur said he was seceding? the server is dream’s faction! he doesn’t want “no factions”, he wants only his faction. dream refers to the server multiple times as a nation, and even a kingdom. anarchist societies don’t have prisons. the prison and the police is a system. if you have an anarchist society, but two specific people are going around arresting people, them going “oh but there’s no government” doesn’t take away the fact that they’re creating a hierarchy, using their own power? they also never claimed that there was no government.

everything that dream said later in the conversation with skeppy also lines up with this. ignoring the fact that there was a monarchy established because it “didn’t have any real power” is disregarding the fact that one, it was there, and two, that there was someone around with enough power to establish it in the first place. i don’t know how to say this any clearer. anarchist places do not have kings.

and anarchy is not the only thing that fits. it wasn’t designed to be a geopolitical drama, they just made the mistake of letting wilbur soot onto the server. so they didn’t need to have a name for the system, because the system was “do whatever you want”, including establishing authority.

“dream had all the reasons to believe they were aggressive and was fully justified in declaring war.”

dream didn’t declare war because alyssa was attacked. he had done stuff to them before that happened, and they got back all of her stuff (again, not by asking and trying to work it out, but by kidnapping someone who genuinely believed they were innocent and killing them as they begged for help.) dream started the official conflict because he declared war. he also started the unofficial conflict. he didn’t think they were aggressive, he thought they were weak.

“if he (wilbur) thought he was being mistreated he could just stop trying to mistreat others”

what, because he had any sort of power? he did stop mistreating others. l’manburg legitimately did nothing to intentionally hurt anyone, and tommy killing alyssa doesn’t count because that was his decision and revenge was already paid out for that. so wilbur stopped scamming people, built the walls to contain his country (he said that they needed nothing outside the walls at some point) and then was attacked multiple times. his mistreatment didn’t stop.

“it was supposed to be his l'manberg.”

wilbur didn’t destroy it because it was supposed to be his and it got away from him, that’s why he held the election: to try and restore peace through attempting to rig the election. he destroyed it because “the thing i built this nation for doesn’t exist anymore”, meaning the freedom it originally granted to its citizens was gone under schlatt. meaning the policy of no violence and using words was ruined. if the thing he built this nation for was power, this would make no sense. he could have taken power so easily. he passed off the presidency.

“something worth having power over” is something important. it is something that can be good for lots of people, and the power over it is what makes it safe. it’s worth having power over because when others, like schlatt, take that power, it is no longer safe.

violence and tyranny had become so much a part of l’manburg that wilbur felt the freedom and peace was gone. so when he blows it up, and says “my l’manburg”, he means it can no longer be used for evil. “my unfinished symphony, forever unfinished”. he saves it for himself by destroying it. so yes, he is being selfish, but not to ruin it for other people. he takes it into his own hands to weed out the fighting, and by doing so takes himself with it. his vision was never complete, because the wars had taught him that the only true freedom, the only true victory (“i won.”) for him was in death. (and then that turned out to be wrong.)

there’s a reddit post that cc!wilbur approved

that explains this a little better than i can, and cc!wilbur commented on it “any truers???” so i think it can be counted as reliable.

this full quote from cc!wilbur about his character (from his hey and stuff podcast) is very interesting. i’ll transcribe it here:

“i decided i was going to make a breaking bad style roleplay, where me and tommy would be drug dealers. and uh, one thing lead to another and i’m the president of a nation losing it due to my own insolence and uh, short sighted naivety. basically disregard for my fellow citizens who i claim to love so much. and a, and a dark, twisted understanding of what is possession. and what is, what is my right.”

i like this quote a lot because it highlights the initial traits that caused his spiral. it also places him as kind of similar to dream. the reason he lost the presidency is that he got too cocky. and the reason his spiral was so selfish is that it was all he could see— when his earlier vision of freedom was shattered by the first war, he didn’t know how to adapt and so became attached to power as it now felt like the only way to keep what mattered to him.

this is emphasized in his conversation with quackity during his second lore stream: that there was a drastic change between the person who made l’manburg and the person running for president. this quote matches up very well with the election arc. wilbur’s motives were different before the election, and they were different after.

once he had the freedom that he wanted, he became scared of losing it and that is what pushed him down. “if i can’t have it, no one can” is on the surface about the power, but the lament for what he once had (freedom in a country without tyranny) is there. that’s why he became so power-oriented. if he did not have control of l’manburg, it could be used to go against his original vision and it would be better off gone.

another good piece of information is cc!wilbur’s comment on his dnd alignment post, where he says this:

“wilbur is on the border of chaotic and neutral evil. wilbur, in his chaotic sense, is a crazy man who wants to blow up his old nation and kill his friends. but, more realistically, in his neutral sense, wilbur is the archetype of a man who had great power and who lost it all due to his own poor choices and negligence who sees destruction as his ratification.”

note the “realistically”.

he feels as if he owes it to l’manburg at the end to blow it up, and he didn’t mind taking himself with it as he thought that nobody cared about him anymore and he didn’t have any more to give.

(related to this, in the dnd alignment post, cc!wilbur places season 1 dream as chaotic evil and says his only motive is chaos. firstly, this would only apply to season one, and although cc!wilbur was working with cc!dream and everyone else to write the plot here, i wonder why he says this instead of saying anything else about dream’s motives. this seems to disagree pretty severely with what you think, but it also disagrees with what even i think about dream during this time.)

revivedbur comes back and has plans because he regrets his past. he hates that he gave up that easily. and he could absolutely lie about his past actions! there is no reason to ignore the contents of an entire war because someone who was alone for thirteen years says it!

“shouldn’t have it” doesn’t mean he was lying when he said he wanted it. he was just wrong, which he knew when he blew up l’manburg and that’s part of why he did it.

“they said they “fought with words”, like that doesn’t sound like a peaceful solution, more like a different approach, and it was because that is what they did”

they said the words thing a lot of times, and most of the time it was used as a “tommy don’t attack that person.” and “fighting with words” is arguing, it is replacing the trauma of real battle with talking it out. l’manburg did stick very closely to their motto of words over violence. look at the contents of the first war.

and once war was declared, wilbur was enthusiastic for it. sounds suspicious from someone claiming to not want war, right? he said it was a chance for them to prove themselves, to prove they could rule themselves. he also said that if they could defend themselves it would be proof. he never went “time to attack them”, and when he said he didn’t want a war in the past he meant that he didn’t want to start one. his being enthusiastic about the war ties into his naivety about running a country. it was also an acceptance in a way, no? it meant that the greater smp saw them as something worth declaring war on.

and it’s heartbreaking seeing him so excited to prove himself, because we know that the experience of the war is what lead to his spiral and his cynicism as president. we know that a few weeks later, he’s going to be crying into his pillow every night.

for the clip (the “something worth having power over and then you get killed by your dad” clip), i kind of don’t know what to say. i don’t think this is a clear condemnation of the entirety of l’manburg’s beginnings, but i do think that i was probably reaching a bit with trying to interpret it. there are definitely a lot of ways to see that, though.

no, he showed it in the first war and he clearly said it. i don’t think somebody who wants to mess with dream is going to not even think about him until he shows up, and even after then largely ignore him until he declares war.

“yes, it was worth something to wilbur, and that worth was power.”

question: power over what? power for what purpose? how did he use that power?

if it was only worth having power over, then why did he give it up? why didn’t he just kill schlatt in the first place? again i think the reddit post addresses a lot of this. original l’manburg was worth more to wilbur than power because he was willing to surrender when his life and his friend’s lives were threatened, and he told tommy it was not worth it to enter a duel and sacrifice his own life for it. after the war, he cared about power over it in order to keep peace, and then he realized that his own desire for power caused him to abandon his morals and he attempted to destroy it all.

“the greater smp did represent anarchy and peace.”

i just don’t think the ideals of the early smp line up with anarchy, and especially not dream’s actions later. he believes in forced peace, and unity under his terms although that belief is more gradual.

“see you tell me you didn’t fall for propaganda and then say this.”

it’s not “falling for propaganda” to watch the streams and interpret them. “propaganda” is defined as an attempt to spread information, often of a misleading nature. it’s what wilbur used during his presidential campaign, it’s what everyone used during the election. i do not base my opinion of his character off things that have been said about him after the fact. i watched the content when it happened.

so what about the facts that one, he wanted peace at the start, and two, that he cared about protecting his nation and the people he cared about is propaganda? it is information that i believe to be true based on my own analyzing of his actions during that time.

wilbur never says this as an attempt to lie to anyone. he wanted peace if it meant he could have freedom, but he would not attack anyone for freedom, he would defend it once he had established it. he wasn’t trying to establish an empire after the drug van stream (he says this in the vod where he discusses his plans for l’manburg with tommy) and the actions of the greater smp were tyrannical. what happened is that later, after the first war, he lost faith in peace because people continued to attack him!

“he did create division for his own benefit the way i see it.”

can you explain the “benefit” that division would give him? because like i said, his goal was his own personal freedom. he wasn’t attempting to divide people, he was reacting to mistreatment, whether perceived or real. and more often than not, people asked to join him, he didn’t try to convince them.

“yeah wilbur said it genuinely to tubbo when he first brought him armor”

as i was going through the old vods, i did find the origin of that quote (the quote where wilbur says “we go in with no armor and then stab them in the back” or something along those lines)! there’s something funny about it though. notice how he says it and then never does anything about it? and how nobody from l’manburg acts on it? because you have to look at his actions, something you emphasized that i agree with. they have more weight than his words. he also said “wanna kiss” to dream, so i don’t think this really counts as “proof” of an ulterior motive, because he said a lot of things.

“you see a pattern already?”

the “pattern” i see of his reactions to conflict in his nation is that he didn’t want to assert control in order to oppress people, he wanted to assert control to keep the peace, by rigging the election so that he had “legitimate” authority. was it a hypocritical? yeah! it reminds me of what dream was doing, too: placing his goal of peace over his wish for freedom of everyone.

the difference is that dream didn’t have any reserves about “starting an army and asserting dominance over his own people because they didn’t respect his authority and he was irritated by it”. weird that that can be used to describe dream as well, huh? and before it can be used to describe wilbur?

this is also after the first war, where wilbur learned a very important lesson! and it’s right before he realizes he’d become what he had tried to destroy. the other person who acts like this never realized this, though. it’s because he was never trying to destroy it. just saying.

“the friendships inside of it could’ve existed without, and would’ve probably been better off without being stained by war”

wilbur did not consider making l’manburg as a severing of relationships between the two nations. he even expresses neutrality towards some members of the greater smp. wilbur didn’t “make people think” they needed l’manburg, he saw it as a thing to devote yourself to, an ideology. he did not force others to think this way, although he encouraged it. people ended up sacrificing a lot for that (against their will sometimes), and so they became attached to it.

“the original dream smp was this but actually true instead of just being a front.”

ah yes, the dream smp with absolutely no hierarchies. nothing like mister “my house” at all. no “my land”, no “my server”, no “the king has no power”, no “it’s the dream smp”. /s

“wilbur didn’t fear for anyone’s safety”

hmm, no, wilbur did fear for everyone’s safety. you know, when they were being attacked continuously throughout the war? and when he finally surrendered because they were being threatened and killed?

“the dream smp was already safe”

dream and sapnap need better ways to “keep the server safe” than by blowing up people who wanted to go off and do their own thing and posed no threat to the greater server.

i don’t know how to provide “evidence” that dream and the others attacked l’manburg? the evidence is the fact that they did. again, wilbur’s initial goal was not conflict with the greater smp, it was emancipation. when tubbo was taken hostage and killed, shot at, robbed multiple times of materials it had taken him hours to get, and had his old house burned down simply because he was part of l’manburg, those were the reasons that tubbo ever fired a shot at them in the first place!

when wilbur lead his people out on the first day of the war, it was to negotiate. they dodged the arrows and went to the embassy, where they were then trapped and driven back into tommy’s house. it was then that they fought back. self defense. i don’t know what else to tell you.

“trying to end the war as soon as he could” is kind of misleading, because it implies that dream hated the violence. he just wanted to win as soon as he could. he didn’t care what he had to do to win it. no mercy.

the dream smp was not freedom because when you try to leave freedom, it doesn’t hunt you down and try to destroy you. anarchy doesn’t call you a traitor when you leave. and yeah, dream was real friendly to tommy when he continued the disk war when it first settled. and of course when your friends join a different nation, the most logical course of action is to murder them repeatedly! /s

the definition of anarchy includes personal freedom, the exact thing wilbur wanted. anarchy does not include authority, it is firmly opposed to it. i think i would place the early greater smp as more of a stateless society, if i had to put a name on it (again, i am extremely wary to do that because it wasn’t written as anything with a name. this is also a mediocre take that i don’t really believe because dream had his own faction.). a stateless society is one of the goals of anarchism, but does not encompass the entire belief.

dream’s main motivation was that he didn’t want anyone being independent. it didn’t matter who was leading it.

and i’m sorry, but you can’t just take away evidence by saying “he was lying” when there is no proof he is? if you take this conversation at face value it makes more sense! (this is about the conversation between wilbur and dream right before the “independence or death” scene)

“both sides had their losses and were ready to harm the other” what did the greater smp lose. its people? its land? there was other land, and the people could still remain friends. some of them did. dream even says before this that yeah, l’manburg is losing. and wilbur here is attempting to downplay that loss, claiming they’re on even ground because that’s what he wants to happen. he is trying to appear stronger than he really is. he’s bluffing, but it doesn’t work.

i don’t like saying “nobody’s the victim” here when one side was getting absolutely whaled on by the other. wilbur has the ability to be genuine, and he does. if he was trying to “play” the victim, he would exaggerate the damage his side had suffered. his words and his actions match up, and this is a pretty different circumstance from him doing a bit. he is a victim. that’s just straight up true.

i’m not surprised that you think this way, as you’ve said you were on dream’s side since the start, but i’d like to once again ask you to examine where you got these perceptions.

dream offering them “chances” was just offering them surrender. that’s not merciful, and it’s not fair, either. and he may not have wanted to hurt them, but he sure didn’t mind doing it. wilbur wasn’t sewing some kind of anti-dream propaganda in his nation while the battle was going on, the hatred for dream came from the fact that he was attacking all of them.

“colonize” is a bad word choice for what l’manburg was. nobody was living on that land before they got there. the land should have belonged to nobody, so why did dream get so mad about “his” land being taken? what about that specific area was so important to him, when he did have the ability to visit?

wilbur was pacifist, he was not the instigator, again i have to say i can’t offer up proof if you’re convinced that he was lying. when he fought back later it was in self defense. please watch the vods. and recognize that wilbur’s actions election era are consequences of his experiences revolution era.

i genuinely don’t understand what you mean by comparing this to exile. please rephrase your point. if you’re comparing what dream did to tommy to wilbur trying to stop dream from hurting him and his people more i have to say that’s a... questionable take. it’s probably a bad idea to make exile comparisons if you’re going to use them to victim-blame, as that’s very antithetical to exile as a whole and kid of ironic.

“i mean, what other choice was there?”

no, dream had a lot of choices. he did not offer them a peaceful way out. he declared war and then he attacked. it was then that he told them many times to surrender. and no, wilbur didn’t push them to go and die, evidenced again by the times he used himself as a distraction so that they could run, and that he didn’t want tommy to do the duel but ultimately respected his decision and his freedom.

“dream constantly asked them to give up instead of fighting.”

dream has a responsibility to not attack kids. dream also has a responsibility to attempt any sort of peaceful negotiation. tubbo was boxed and murdered before war was declared, and tubbo personally had done straight up nothing to the people of the greater smp, and he didn’t even know why he died until tommy saw that alyssa’s pickaxe was mixed in with his stuff.

if wilbur claimed to wish to prevent violence, and then he did, or at least attempted to, i don’t know why you think it’s untrue. calling someone a rude name is not equal to murder. “verbally violent” means pretty much nothing and was coming from both sides.

(this next part is about the “let me be your vassal” scene in pogtopia)

“there’s a theory wilbur legitimately thinks dream selfish”

i mean, yeah. i think that kind of sums it up. wilbur was appealing to dream’s personal goals. i don’t see how he was shut down though. he already helped pogtopia, so him being asked to further help someone from pogtopia shows that they trusted him enough to tell him the plan.

i’ve watched the clip a lot of times and i think that the meaning can be ambiguous. i am using dream’s other actions during that time to determine how much of an effect i think it had on him. i don’t think he got “shut down” in any sort of meaningful way here.

“he didn’t seem to hold even that against him as he tried to help get back l’manberg with him.”

if dream didn’t hold the disk thing against tommy then, he sure decided to get mad about it later (he brings it up when arguing with quackity), despite the fact that he had also re-opened the conflict in the past.

“i believe they (dream and tommy) had genuinely been friends once.”

sure, i think they were friends before dream did what he did with the disks, and allies during early pogtopia. dream still decided to switch sides and team with manburg because schlatt offered him the book. this is, ironically, dream abandoning tommy.

“he has a sense of responsibility (not control) over the people on his smp.”

i think it can be responsibility and control. most of the responsibility is misguided, and lots of it is just actual control. i don’t know where you’re getting a lot of this.

and i do not know where you got that his fatal flaw was caring too much? he “cares” in the way of having control! he doesn’t care about the well being of others as long as he thinks he’s right. i’m just saying that he sure could have walked away, because he did just that later when he sided with schlatt. it’s not a speculation about his character when it’s something that he did.

him walking away did not entail complete surrender to wilbur. there were a lot of other things he could have done, but i don’t want to get into “could have”’s as i don’t really think there’s a point. wilbur was attempting to convince him, yeah, but that didn’t mean it was true. we know that wilbur was lying about wanting ambition.

also, i don’t think dream was allied with pogtopia because he liked them or he was trying to be better or anything. he said in “tyrant” that it’s because schlatt was worse, and wilbur didn’t have any ambition to expand.

“maybe you misunderstood something i said, but no, he definitely didn’t.”

okay, so since dream didn’t think wilbur was a villain, wilbur was not “pressuring him” into becoming one by helping him. my point was that dream didn’t think that, and wilbur didn’t care. sorry for not making that clear, i was asking a rhetorical question.

(i said here that “someone calling someone else out for hurting them is not the same thing as villanizing them,” and they responded with this)

“yeah, they are. and dream was villanized.”

oh boy.

vilify: to utter slanderous and abusive statements against, to defame.

(i probably should have been saying vilify instead of villainize because they mean the same thing but i straight up did not know it was a word, sorry lol)

slanderous means false and malicious. abusive means offensive and insulting. defamation is things that are not true.

if somebody says, “this guy punched me.” that would not be vilifying them. it is a true statement with a neutral tone. if they add “he is a bad person”, that could possibly be seen as abusive, as it is insulting, but the point of vilifying someone is that you are making them out to be someone they’re not. it involves the use of lies and continuous exaggerated language. slanderous and abusive. abusive only is not enough to classify something as vilifying.

someone reacting to something dream did by calling him a name is not vilifying him. it is true that he did the thing, and it is also true that the person saying it believes it. it is rare that someone criticizes him without real reason or goes overboard (the person who really does this as far as i can remember is tommy), and when tommy does so it is almost always reciprocated. so we have dream and tommy constantly vilifying each other, and other people saying negative things about dream and sometimes vilifying him, if they lie about it. he sometimes vilifies them.

my point is that vilification is not wilbur telling niki, “dream burnt tubbo’s house down”, despite the fact that he calls dream a bad guy. it’s not slanderous because it is true. dream assisted sapnap with the act. vilification is not tommy explaining to ranboo what was happening during exile, or telling dream that dream makes him worse. “someone calling someone out for hurting them” implies truth, and it doesn’t necessarily imply abusive language, but it doesn’t matter because it’s true.

maybe we were going off different definitions of vilify. but when we’re accusing characters who are victims of abuse and manipulation, we need to be careful with what we accuse them of.

anyway

wilbur saying he wanted to use the tommys of the world was left in the drug van stream. tommy himself was pushing a lot of the “dream bad” stuff because he had more experience with him. when tommy was confused during those two scenes (vassal scene and revivedbur calling dream his hero)it was because he believed that wilbur respected him, and wilbur working with or idolizing someone who had hurt tommy in the past was a contradiction to that belief. wilbur does not question tommy’s anger during the vassal scene because he doesn’t care that dream is bad, and when he is revived he either does not believe it or does not want to acknowledge it. revivedbur cares a whole lot more about power for the sake of power than wilbur ever did.

again, tommy isn’t stupid. he has his own reasons for not liking dream, and the disconnect comes from a place of trusting wilbur.

by the way, wilbur left the vc before saying that tommy didn’t care. he was talking to himself (and chat). and he was more fearful that tommy was leaving than angry. plus, he didn’t actually force tommy to give up his house: there was miscommunication between them and the embassy was the power tower in the end. wilbur just wanted confirmation that tommy would spend time in l’manburg. it’s true that he went about it in a bad way, though.

he didn’t push patriotism onto them, they were also excited about the country. there were other scenes beside the tyrant scene, and the amount of times wilbur had to tell tommy to shut up about how great the country is is a lot higher than the one time he had them call dream a tyrant.

true, that scene (scene where wilbur asserts his authority as president) is before pogtopia. it’s also after the war for independence. i am not saying that wilbur should have said any of that stuff. i’m just pointing out that it wasn’t always like that.

also i do not really see “you’re never gonna be president” as a taunt or manipulation or anything. i think wilbur genuinely believed that having tommy in charge of the country would one, get them into more conflicts, and two, mess up tommy mentally. being the president sucked and wilbur knew that. wilbur was not kind to tommy. but a lot of stuff that’s pointed at as manipulative is pretty clearly wilbur’s own paranoia spilling over in a desire to protect tommy, ie saying that tubbo would betray them. wilbur genuinely thought that and he was trying to warn tommy.

“tommy, when i said you’d never be president, it wasn’t a challenge. it’s true. you’re never going to be president.”

tommy’s life has been hard, that’s true. not disagreeing with you there. but not every adult has been using him the whole time. and if you’re looking for fault, i would personally look at the guy who killed him three times first, just saying. other things had impacts but there’s a clear scale.

“tommy formed an attachment to them as a result of the disc war, not the other way around.”

so yeah, initially it was a shallow trade: the disks for the armor. once that conflict was resolved, and tommy apologized, that should have been the end of it, yeah? especially since tommy now had a stronger connection to the disks? that would have been nice.

the problem is that dream took them back for no reason. because he did, he went back and dug up tommy’s whole front yard and spawned months of conflict after. having “leverage” over someone like that is kinda messed up! it’s not like tommy was going around committing mass murder every tuesday, he got in scraps with other people on the server who also committed petty crimes. so i can’t really blame tommy for wanting them back, even though he stole them.

and if dream didn’t care about the disks, why did he later use it as “proof” that tommy caused all the trouble on the server? if they were so worthless to him that he gave them to skeppy, why did it matter that tommy stole them?

i don’t know what you mean about this being the only way dream could control people. the amount of genuine fear other characters felt when he logged on was there for a long time. he held a lot of power on the server, and a lot of his control was physical, evidenced by exile in particular but also the wars.

when he did ultimately use connections to control people, that was still a bad thing.

“his friend’s house got burnt down and he wanted the person who did it to be held accountable?”

okay, george’s house got burned down. do you remember the initial punishment that dream proposed? probation for tommy until he was eighteen. and when dream was arguing with his friends, he pointed out that the only reason l’manburg was being held hostage for tommy’s crime was that tommy was involved in the government. he said that if tommy hadn’t been involved in the government, he probably would have just hunted him down and killed him.

also, someone responding to this pointed out that dream was trying to frame tommy for things at the time. dream was intentionally creating other conflict in order to get to tommy. dream did not care about the house. he burnt down other people’s houses.

that’s not “holding someone accountable”. that’s not even close.

“he was taught this from experience”

the leather from the horse was used to blackmail him after he had already started doing that to people. you know how tommy mimicks him? that’s what was going on (still bad that he did it but like. come on.) so that may have been the push that caused dream to cut his own connections (so that nobody could ever do that to him again, and he would have no chance of failure), but it didn’t just happen to him for no reason: it was a behavior he taught someone else.

“he did genuinely think he was a villain before the war”

tommy called dream a lot of stuff before the war, and most of it was unprompted by wilbur. a lot of it was also, like you said, two friends joking around. just because wilbur taught him a new word (he didn’t really tell him what it meant though) doesn’t mean he was manipulated into using it all the time or something. and i’m pretty sure tommy got a decent definition of tyranny later, when the greater smp decided to attack l’manburg before anything went down.

“it’s just a character acknowledging what people who looked deeper into the narrative already knew.”

what i’m saying is that narratively, wilbur has an extremely good reason to be biased right now. taking anything he says as truth doesn’t solidify an interpretation as truth. there has to be enough evidence to actually back the entire thing up in the first place, and i’m just not seeing “wilbur was always going for power and division” as solidified by his actions during the first war.

and again, tommy’s not stupid, and the entire time tommy is yelling at him! tommy knows something is off! if people also in the story are saying “this isn’t right”, i feel like they’d know? tommy was also part of l’manburg, he has an opinion too. so when he says “we founded l’manburg because we knew dream was the bad guy”, he’s talking about why he did it. and he brings up a good point: “you say you did it to stick it to the man, but you’re idolizing dream, who is the man”. (paraphrased i don’t know his exact words but this was his point) this shows that wilbur’s motives have changed, even from what revivedbur will say.

(they linked three twitter threads here. i don’t know if relinking them here is a good idea as the whole point of this separate post is to disconnect the two sides, but the threads were by dr3amofagame on twitter, for reference purposes. i’m not going to link the independent threads but i think people can tell which ones i was responding to.

if this is wrong to say who made them please let me know, i do not know how Any of these websites work. if you’ve read this far, please don’t try to like,,, look up who any of these people are (especially the person i was debating with. don’t do that /srs) and send anything bad to them. that’s the whole point of this separate post. if anyone sends negativity directly towards people because of this post i’ll bite you)

that first analysis has some Opinions. oh man.

i don’t know man i’m just going to point some things out:

-the person who wrote the thread pulling the ��child” card makes me laugh because tommy had committed more crimes than wilbur at that point. ah yes tommy innit innocent child being horribly dragged into a giant war by evil wilbur /s

-wilbur did not call dream a tyrant before dream showed up and made fun of their land

-wilbur did not legitimately think dream a tyrant when he told tommy and tubbo to call him that. neither, really, did tommy and tubbo. it was a joke. like infinite women. like dream saying “i’m evil” when he was blowing up creepers on their land before the battle. like dream and sapnap being all “down with the british”.

-their attitude on that changed when the greater smp begin exhibiting tyrannical behavior (before war was declared!).

-“having tommy and tubbo fight his battles and build his walls” is just untrue

-the l’manburg anthem was, one, not written by wilbur (he commissioned someone to do it on fiver), and two, was written after the first war. they sing it in the stream where niki joins. so yeah, at that point, they did emancipate from the brutality and tyranny of their rulers! it doesn’t say who the rulers are (therefore it’s. not blaming solely dream.) but pretty much all of them were brutal!

-also oh my god this thread has a lot of things that wilbur just straight up didn’t say (or do).

-“would rather die than submit to your tyrannical rule” is a quote from the speech wilbur gives before dream lights the tnt. dream had done stuff to them at that point. this is out of context.

-i don’t want to seriously critique this thread because a lot of it seems more like something emotional than an attempt to start conversation, and i can’t really go against that.

-the main argument, that dream did nothing before being irreversibly forced into the role of the villain does not really match up with what happened.

-there’s a lot less of people calling dream a villain than people seem to remember.

-and also, dream was lying about wanting l’manburg to be something. he says to eret a few days later the quote that i included a while back, that his goal has always been for there to be one faction: the dream smp. note that at this point he’s officially on manburg’s “side” now. he also says he has never wavered on this from the beginning. so he’s either continuing his manipulation of eret and lying to them, or he’s just saying that he wants l’manburg to be something to wilbur and tommy to try to get them to trust him. and hearing him yell “YES!” after the explosion? i’m inclined to think it’s the latter.

okay, so then looking at the second analysis:

-once again, calling wilbur a colonizer? there is a definition of that word that matches up with his actions, but that definition is something establishing itself in a place. by that definition, everyone on the server is a colonizer. so calling just wilbur that seems... a bit weird, considering that the common definition does not match up with what he did.

-“got his (wilbur’s) entire side killed” ignores the fact that it was Dream And His Friends Who Killed Them hghfnjgnfm

dream: wow wilbur you’re bad at this war thing

wilbur: please stop killing us

dream: how could you do this to your people

wilbur: you??? declared war???

dream: no you don’t understand. i had a really good reas—

sorry sorry i’m just. yeah

-also this thread reminded me that “tyrant” (the book) exists and yeah, i do see your point that dream did care about tommy (a little bit). i just wonder why he turned against him again? and why dream is willing to admit here that l’manburg was peaceful, and also that wilbur was not like schlatt in some key ways?

-and again i don’t see wilbur calling dream a villain during the vassal scene.

-some of this thread is just speculation. i’m not going to consider “wilbur may manipulate dream in the future because they had a conversation in the past”, especially because revivedbur’s mental state right now is godawful, because i don’t think it holds any value to examining the past. the important part is the breakdown of the vassal scene.

-i’ve already said what i think about the vassal scene. dream wasn’t getting tossed around during that. just because he’s quiet doesn’t mean he’s being manipulated? and wilbur isn’t going “you think this”, he’s asking dream what he thinks by paraphrasing what wilbur’s heard from him before, and adjusts it once dream corrects him. i do think this one is more open to interpretation though; this is just my opinion and it doesn’t have a lot of stuff to back it up lol but i’m not convinced either side has much evidence

and the third analysis:

-dream had no idea what kind of government they were setting up there. he didn’t ask, so he wouldn’t know if it was a dictatorship. and again he was allowed on the land, he just never built the embassy. the “no americans” rule was weakly enforced during the first war, and the reason wilbur got so serious about it later is that the americans were the ones who went after him and killed everyone during the war! so he had a reason to want them off. objectively a bad reason? maybe

-it would be cool if dream said “hey don’t do this here’s why” instead of stomping off during negotiations and then coming back to beat them up and declare war. he didn’t though

-the problem people have with greater smp vs. l’manburg is scale. the greater smp was quite literally infinite, and l’manburg was a small space. there wasn’t anything important in l’manburg that other server members needed to get to. people could still leave to visit their friends. they didn’t legitimately hate americans. but nooo, you can’t have the table because it’s my table. what if you do something bad with the table? remember when you tried to sell people “better air” for three dollars and then took someone’s air conditioning? you just want power! i’m going to go bring back rubber bands to pelt you with.

anywAys moving on

no, i do agree with you on the sam stuff. for some reason i was under the impression that cc!sam was uncomfortable with being depicted as torturing dream a while back, but with the stuff happening with quackity now, i’m reasonably sure that doesn’t apply. they don’t retcon stuff that was intentional but there may have been something taken back a few months ago before they planned this.

but yeah, clearly the prison stuff is awful and messed up. that’s why i noted the thing at the start of the reply: i am in no way saying that anything sam or quackity have done to dream since prison hasn’t affected him. these are things that i see as having visible impacts on the character.

(i pointed out that dream originally commissioned the prison)

i understand that it’s frustrating to hear that used as an excuse, but i wasn’t using it that way. i was pointing out that neither of them deserve it. during the vault stream, dream tells tommy that his plan is to put him in the prison. he says that exile was “perfect”, and the only issue was that tommy could get away. putting him in the prison fixes that.

so yeah, what dream was planning to do to tommy is different than what’s happening to him. but the reasons that other people wanted dream in the prison match why he wanted tommy in there: like you said, it’s a vault. it’s so he can store him and use him later, to give attachments and thus power and control over others.

tommy’s original plan was to kill dream. ultimately, he didn’t want him to suffer more, he wanted him gone. nobody on the server knew yet that death was limbo, and tommy probably thought it was mercy for someone like dream. dream was the one who brought up the book, as an attempt to save himself. he will say whatever he needs to say to avoid death, because anyone would (except someone like wilbur who’s. accepted his role. you know?) so he’s the one who reduced himself down the the book, saying if he goes, so does it. that’s when sam suggests the prison.

true, the arc is dark. this is where sam’s actions become corrupted and he loses sight of some of the responsibility he claims to have. it’s also the arc where dream lied to tommy that he had changed, and pressured him into staying by saying he was his friend. it’s the arc where dream kills tommy, and doesn’t allow sam to come get his body for days. it’s the arc where dream gets even worse, whether because of his time in the prison or because of his peaked god complex, probably both.

and again, my problem is that criticizing characters for actions they didn’t take is pointless. it tells you not much about the character, and considering the circumstances of what dream had done it does make sense for none of them to step in! they are looking at the fact that dream had an entire vault dedicated to controlling them. they are seeing that dream was fully prepared to murder tubbo and lock tommy away forever to be used. they are witnessing tommy giving dream exactly what he got.

so “acknowledging” this does nothing useful! we do not see these actions (or lack of) specifically affecting dream. i can tell you what dream told people he was doing, and it matches up with things he had done in the past, and there are moments he denies the narrative that you say drove him to do this. but i can’t really prove anything when you say he’s lying here because it fits how you interpret the story.

it’s what you’re saying people are doing to revivedbur: saying he’s lying without any proof, when with him there is evidence and he has the motive to lie. when revivedbur lies, tommy calls him on it. tommy doesn’t call dream on it. i’ve laid out why i think it’s not true, and i’ve seen stuff in early canon that directly contradicts what revivedbur says. occam’s razor! many pieces of evidence versus a few statements from someone who at that point commonly lied about things like that.

dream standing by while tommy and the other citizens get killed in l’manburg by his own orders isn’t very peaceful or non-tyrannical of him. tommy was enforcing an eye for an eye, and to be honest? i don’t think “kill your abuser” is such a terrible message to send, despite the fact that we know that tommy’s coping mechanisms come from a bad source. and tommy was far from free of what dream did to him, as evidenced by later when he again attempts to mirror what dream had done to him in the past.

yeah, i read your analysis of the interaction (skeppy and dream arguing over l’manburg). that’s not the only interpretation. skeppy doesn’t call him the villain. he is repeating back to dream the actions that dream took, and dream tells him he’s making him sound bad. skeppy wasn’t influenced by any “propaganda” you think l’manburg was putting out while they were getting murdered. skeppy was an outsider who was calling it as he saw it.

and if other people saw what dream was doing as bad, maybe he was... doing bad things? for bad reasons? skeppy was critical of dream for his actions. talking over somebody does not certify it as “twisting words”. skeppy was accusing him of doing the actions, like “so you did this? you started the war?”. dream was defending the logic behind his actions, like “well i did it because.”

basically

skeppy: hey it’s kind of. messed up that you killed a bunch of people. you know? you kind of just attacked them out of nowhere

dream: no no no you don’t understand. i had a really good reason

skeppy: i don’t see a reason?

dream: you’re making it seem like i didn’t have to do this

skeppy: you d i d n ‘ t

and skeppy didn’t finish the conversation with “you’re lying” or “you don’t know what you’re talking about”, he just told him he was wrong! as in his actions were cruel and needless! “people must have hated coming to your house”.

(they asked me to name one person who dream cut off first)

okay, name one? puffy. sam. punz? he did cut them off, he straight up told tommy he did it, and making a place in the vault for fran when sam had done nothing but work with him? and they didn’t “show up ready to kill him”, they showed up to see what he was doing. so he tells tommy he abandoned them, and indirectly tells them with the spirit scene. sapnap and george noticed this, and called him on it, but he just said he didn’t mean it?

if dream “wasn’t as close” with sam/puffy/punz, why are we putting responsibility on them for his actions.

so sapnap and george walked away from him, but because he did something to them. and puffy didn’t abandon him. punz didn’t abandon him, punz got paid off because that’s what punz cares about: money. he’s a mercenary.

using “they left him first” for sapnap and george doesn’t allow for why they left him: because he wasn’t treating them fairly. he isn’t their parent, he’s their friend, and he wasn’t acting like it.

“he was hurt and abandoned to the point” “he ended up hurting people doesn’t negate the fact he was hurt himself first” “the environment they all were a part of pushed him this far, and that’s just what happened”

so you’re saying it’s right that the reason dream did bad things to people is because bad things were done to him first? because dream was definitely the one who got attacked first during l’manburg. because he just cared so much about george that he kicked someone out of society just to defend his honor. /s and then, because his real purpose was protecting george, he went back and tried to make things right with george because it wasn’t about tommy? oh wait, he didn’t. he focused on only tommy. because george’s house was an excuse.

“that’s just what happened” is a bad take on “people got abused”. the fact is that dream started a lot of the conflict. looking at the retaliation and self-defense that people did towards him and saying “he got hurt a bunch that’s why he did the later bad stuff” completely negates that he started it? and his “retribution” was always exponentially worse than the actual crime committed?

dude, i’m just trying to point out that the story says he cut people off. yeah, he was hurt at times, but that is not an explanation for what he did. it’s not even a logical cause, because we do not see it affect his character. the subtext has gotta be there. the fact that he was hurt does not make him any more justified.

“circle of violence” does apply (not all of them, though). but in this situation, it’s a kid stealing someone’s lunch money, and then the other kid breaks their nose. the first kid punches the kid, the second kid puts them in the hospital. when the retribution dream gave was always worse than whatever happened to him, the issue is not “look at the people hurting him”, it’s “stop him from hurting people”!

so clearly dream needs some kind of therapy (not from puffy though i’m not letting him near her /hj), because just killing him would be a permanent solution but it would upset people who like his character. the prison is awful and not going to work. my personal solution for him is to send him out somewhere a long way away, so that nobody he’s hurt has to see him again. maybe people that wanted to go with him could, and it would be like a new smp. but when that idea was proposed, tommy said darkly that he was always going to come back. maybe it’ll be the solution in the future. who knows.

if the mistakes were unintentional, why criticize the characters for them? and what about “the environment” besides the other people changed how dream thought? a lot of it was internal.

we have him exiling tommy as a weird, desperate plea for friends (not really) when he very much could have gone back and spoken to the people who were his friends. we have him continuously saying that tommy causes all the problems, and he needs to be “restrained” or “controlled” or whatever other excuse he came up with for taking away a person’s free will.

we have him obsessing over the disks, and we know it’s not about the disks, it’s about power over tommy and power in general. he says this in the vault. he says this at the community house scene. his progression is towards a twisted sense of possession, same as wilbur, oddly enough. but they are different in that wilbur is possessive over the idea of freedom that he created with l’manburg (and having power over that) and dream is possessive over control over all.

wilbur’s idea is ruined. he tied his sense of self to the nation and when it was used for corruption (kind of by him and mostly by others) he saw himself as corrupted and decided to take them both out so that they couldn’t hurt anyone. he admits his own fault to the point of self destruction.

dream’s idea is threatened. other people live there, other people want to do things, and so he becomes so attached to the idea that it’s his server and he will do anything to control opposition. he cannot admit his fault unless forced to.

wilbur would do anything to control a tool of power, because he wanted to not use it as that tool. wilbur wanted anarchy at the end. he says so in his last presidential speech. his naive views about freedom from the start of the server had worn off, as he saw people use power as a tool in a way that he had never intended or meant to use it.

wilbur created the election so that he would have an actual authority over the land, and he could stop the fighting of its citizens. he thought he knew better, kind of like dream did. this is when his motives get the most twisted and selfish, he wanted peace so bad that he would take away freedom for it (like dream). but when he lost, he accepted it, and that’s the difference. he saw the desire for control in his own actions, and hated himself for it. that’s why he wanted to blow up l’manburg, to take away the tool for power and the person who had been tempted to use it.

wilbur was a good leader in the political sense (dream admits this in “tyrant”) but when he stands before the rubble of l’manburg and calls it his, he’s saying that his rule would only lead to destruction. anyone’s rule would. power corrupts. l’manburg ruined is his l’manburg, it’s his original vision of complete freedom laid out before him, and tracked to its inevitable end.

so then, you would say, dream was right, yeah? he didn’t want l’manburg. but wilbur before he explodes l’manburg doesn’t like dream. he thinks dream’s right in that factions lead to oppression, no matter how good the intentions, but he also knows that dream was a little too willing to hurt them and that dream doesn’t believe this. dream does not want anarchy, he wants chaos but only if it gives him control. he treats the smp like his country, and once again, power corrupts.

went off there, sorry. dream and wilbur are similar but different in some very important ways.

sapnap had been hurt by dream before the vault, and as dream didn’t see himself as in the wrong, he didn’t reach out. sapnap was with pogtopia (wait this might be wrong i do not remember but he was definitely on l’manburg’s side during doomsday) because tommy had shown him more kindness than dream, and that was originally dream’s side. dream just turned on them for the book.

and sapnap also witnessed dream mocking tubbo, making fun of tommy, exposing ranboo. he heard dream going off about how tubbo was so stupid for thinking dream was his friend, for thinking dream cared about him. why would sapnap side with dream if dream was showing no signs of even wanting him?

sapnap accused dream of that, and dream did not listen to him. he could not see the other side: he was so convinced that he was right. we do not know if sapnap went into the vault with the intent of killing dream. i’m pretty sure most of them were there to see if what tommy had said was true. and then, sapnap saw that it was.

nobody abandoned him because of the vault because he had already abandoned them. they just made it mutual. it being a “consequence” of stuff doesn’t make it any less of a messed up, power hungry thing to do, and some of them had done nothing to him before he decided he needed to control them. he was planning to use friend to control ghostbur, who he had already taken advantage of and tried to kill once.

“people do not decide to isolate themselves for no reason.”

true, people don’t cut themselves off for no reason. the reason was power and control. i once again have to emphasize that nobody forced him into this: it was a spiral. other people didn’t do everything “first”. the small taste he got of his own medicine was a poor mimic thrown at him by someone he had done terrible things to. he started spiraling before the spirit scene happened. and if people are telling him he can’t achieve peace, maybe they’re just... right? did he go up to someone and go “i don’t know how to make this server peaceful :(“? because if he did, and if they then pointed at his long list of war crimes and told him not like this, i don’t really see that as anything more than a consequence for things he had already done.

someone can lie about what they want. maybe he did originally want peace, or maybe he was lying to himself that he did. l’manburg did not invite war. he wanted unity above peace, and that “unity” dissolved into “control”.

it was a defense so that nobody could control him the way he was going to control them. cutting himself off was out of fear, yeah. collecting everyone else’s items? power and control. he says this a ton of times, sometimes not even out loud.

i did rewatch the vault vod. that’s how i got all the quotes of him stating his motives. i’m not saying it was a healthy thing to do at all. i never said dream was mentally healthy, i said he had a god complex and he was obsessed with control. someone’s bad mental state can hurt others as well as themself, and they’re still responsible for the others and for trying to be a better and more respectful person. that’s why revivedbur’s “apologies” mean nothing right now.

“he lists his reason for starting the war as them declaring independence, so i don’t think it really matters when the official document was sent.”

it does matter a little bit, actually. they were already attacking l’manburg before official war was declared. they also attacked them during the peace period. wilbur wrote the declaration as he was standing on the roof of the caravan, being shot at by the greater smp.

a country becomes independent when it officially declares itself to be independent. they were still united; it was tyranny.

when dream saw that l’manburg was writing the declaration, he scrambled to declare war. he had reopened and started other conflicts in the past, and involved himself in places he did not need to be. it’s true that a response is a response, but you cannot treat all responses the same way. quackity’s “response” to the things dream had done (killing tommy among those) was to torture him. we do not consider that good, or fair, or “just a response”, we consider it cruel and unusual punishment.

the greater smp fulfilled the words that wilbur had not yet written in the document, and that’s because they weren’t a prophesy, they were a history.

“...would be completely honest about (dream’s motivations in the vault) in front of his biggest enemy. /s”

i don’t see evidence that dream wasn’t being honest. what did he have to lose by it? tommy could do nothing to hurt him. so yep, he would be honest about it. and he’s listed his reasons as power before. he also has the ability to tell the truth about his motives.

dream does not see tommy that way. he sees him as someone whose only positive contribution to the server is attachment. he tells tommy that evil is relative, and to dream, tommy is the evil one. in fact, he says that tommy is evil lots of times. he only says that tommy sees himself as a hero when he’s trying to convince him to let him kill his friend. dream is using tommy’s black and white perception to get him to do what dream wants. he only says tommy sees himself as the hero, not that dream sees him that way. dream does not care about who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy, because he’s not idealistic like wilbur and he’s not a kid like tommy.

him making a joke about building the prison with a “little bit of evil” doesn’t matter because next line he says that tommy’s evil to him. dream isn’t playing the villain, cc!dream is. cc!dream is playing a character that is antagonistic towards others, and he plays into it and jokes around with it, as other people playing antagonistic roles have in the past. cc!wilbur does this a lot during the election and pogtopia. cc!techno hints at it with his “ah yes, blowing up a country, we must be the good guys”.

it may sound like a character because someone’s playing it, but it’s not dream.

this video matches up with some of my points here, but it’s also framed like an english class. it is an interesting meta argument, and one that i would say i partially agree with, but as we’re not really arguing on terms of meta it does not act as a general opposition to your argument. the intent of the authors does not dictate how you see the story, but it can help with interpretation of it.

dream’s words during the vault scene sure do line up with his actions for the months before that. so yeah, no discredit to cc!dream. he’s playing his character. and it’s not like he’s unwilling to make him sympathetic. he’s done so in the past (and is doing so now) and the fact that he does not do it during the vault, and downplays the tragic part of it (him losing his friends) sure makes it seem like the main point here isn’t “poor dream”, it’s “poor tommy”. they’re telling a story. it has a moral.

dream being reserved about his plans may be shown in the fact that nobody knew about the vault (except punz i think?) until dream was ready to put it into play. he generally is quiet about what he wants, he just cares a lot about it and will do a lot to get it. he’s not one for speeches unless he’s trying to make a point. the point here being that tommy is trapped. dream’s capable of explaining his thoughts. tommy asks him why and invites him to share, so he does.

this isn’t really a “nobody can interpret it like this”, it’s just pointing out that the events of canon are there and should be fully considered. character dream’s perspective of the story is biased, so people can look at it and be correct in how dream sees the situation, but “how dream sees it” and “how the story goes” do not necessarily line up.

conflicts dream has started besides the vault? okay.

-reopening the disk war by digging up the hidden disks

-declaring war on l’manburg the first time

-burning down other buildings in order to frame tommy

-blowing up the community house (or having it done for him)

-attacking l’manburg again with techno and phil

(didn’t start really, but inserted himself into when it wasn’t his business:)

-helped pogtopia

-gave wilbur tnt

-sided with manburg in the fight

-built walls around l’manburg

-demanded tommy be punished

-took personal responsibility for exile and used it as a way to isolate tommy

there’s also this post that describes things dream has done in general. the tone of the post is biased, but the actions were canon. some of these may be “retribution” but they sure were uncalled for.

so when he exiled tommy, that was about “unity”? big happy family except for one guy because “he causes all the problems”? it doesn’t matter whether he believed he was in the right for his motives. the vault does not make sense for peace or unity. it is a twisted, controlled unity. what i’m saying is that he uses peace as an excuse for his actions. he had to exile tommy, tommy would have just gotten worse. he had to declare war on l’manburg, it was a necessary evil. because nothing screams “peace” like declaring war and killing the other side, right?

those may be his actual motives in the early scenes, and he thinks he’s doing the right thing. this changes with the vault. he no longer uses this as an excuse, his “excuse” is that he has a right to it. his self proclaimed motive is power and control, and unity through that. so why not accept that as his motive when he says it there?

“becoming a control freak as a result of feeling the loss of control over your own circumstances isn’t equal to dehumanizing the people you’re trying to control.”

nah dude he absolutely dehumanized them and took away their agency? he describes tommy as a pet and a tool, minutes before he switches and describes himself as the book. this could also be used to make an interesting point on how he sees people as their values, in item form. so he’s using one item to control another. tubbo’s a pawn, tommy’s a tool, techno’s a weapon, he’s the book.

he calls george a baby, and makes decisions for him. by planning to using the items to control the people, he was prepared to take away their freedom and agency by emotionally manipulating them. he did this to tommy. agency is the capacity of someone to act. he takes away that ability in order to have control.

he’s not just a control freak over his own life, the problem is that he does it to others. again, we’re talking true freedom here: the ability to do anything, even things that we would consider morally wrong. he takes away george’s power, which is revealed to be nothing. he then swiftly turns and tells him that if he tries to overthrow eret, he would be a tyrant. not acknowledging that dream just overthrew a king and stated in a new one, he hypocritically calls george the tyrant for planning to do that.

(i didn’t even notice this until now, but it’s actually interesting: dream is extremely hypocritical here, unless, of course, he sees himself as having more claim to who is king. now why would he think that? a hierarchy, perhaps?)

“which is understandable seeing as you’ve said already you never tried to look deeper into him, but it’s incorrect nonetheless.”

i said that before this i had not attempted to examine his character in a sympathetic light. that’s what i’ve been doing. his wish to “fix” his home is really just a wish to control his home, which is pretty evident when you look at right before exile. the smp was peaceful then. tommy had committed petty crimes before, and george didn’t even really care about the house. it was minimal damage. dream jumped at the opportunity to convince everyone else that tommy was the real problem (speaking of propaganda and vilifying).

and “he was getting better until the sixteenth” disregards that he threatened eret, enabled wilbur (however you interpret that, he still enabled him), and sided with schlatt for power reasons even though he said he would help pogtopia. giving pogtopia some stuff doesn’t make him the “good guy” because pogtopia were not the good guys! that’s the point! he sided with them because wilbur had less ambition than schlatt, and therefore posed less of a threat to the greater smp! he wasn’t helping them just purely out of the goodness of his heart. he didn’t think schlatt was right, he abandoned him very quickly, but he could have just taken the book and dipped. he fought in the war. he took the book for personal gain and he placed that above the trust of pogtopia.

“he wasn’t on a power trip at all, he didn’t have a god complex up until the prison stripped him of all his dignity and then threw an opportunity at him, and he wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone.”

power trip: an activity or way of behaving that makes a person feel powerful

exile and the vault, arguably before that a few times as well. there are a few quotes that emphasize this.

dream’s god complex was already there in the vault. that’s why he was scared enough of being controlled that he shut everyone else away: he wanted to secure himself even more as the sole power.

and exactly. he wasn’t proving anything to anyone else, he was proving it to himself. therefore he also wasn’t trying to “prove” he was big and bad and evil and irredeemable, he was trying to feel confident about his own power!

if he doesn’t care if he’s thought as of evil, why did it supposedly drive him into the spiral? if he stopped caring about it, that would also explain why he was indifferent towards it (because he was indifferent towards it, every time someone called him that, indifferent or angry). he didn’t think he was evil because he thought he had a right to what he was doing. so he pushed himself into wanting more control, after seeing something he identified as a problem: tommy. you’re right that that’s part of what makes him tragic: that he stopped caring about what he owed to anyone else. that’s why he hurt them.

“it’s likely and fits perfectly into his character arc in canon.”

people who are emotionally repressed still show emotions, they just don’t show them as often. dream shows emotions but he does not show the specific emotion that would give evidence to this theory. i’m saying that claiming something is deeply rooted in his character (not the emotional repression, that’s confirmed) when he shows no sign of it doesn’t line up with canon. it’s more of a theory than an analysis.

“it is good storytelling because cc!wilbur pulls it off brilliantly.”

cc!wilbur still played a complex character! his behavior changed significantly after the war, but there is evidence that he was a certain way during the war. his character grew from that point but my argument is that he was not always a liar about important things and that he genuinely believed in the values he formed l’manburg for. if you want to watch wilbur being power hungry and hypocritical, rewatch the election arc.

actions, not words. cc!wilbur pointed out hypocritical things his character said, but that just shows he was playing a flawed character. people using the wall thing as some kind of proof that he was evil is stupid because part of the idea behind the wall was poking fun at america. it was “look, this is what you guys do”.

his early character was passionate and naive. cc!wilbur was aware of this. he was still a chaotic crimeboy, the nation was founded on drugs. but not everything he did was “for chaos” because again, he played a multi-dimensional character. he can make jokes about politics.

“his main support system left by themselves.”

i’ve already explained why i think dream broke most of his own bonds. again, there’s textual evidence to support this and actions as well that line up with it. and lots of people were willing to help dream. he didn’t murder all those people by himself.

“it also seems you’re strongly biased against c!dream, which, to be fair, the majority of the fandom is.”

it’s true my bias is against dream. it’s also true that my reasons for that bias are backed up by moments in the story where he clearly states his intentions, and a lot of the evidence to the contrary is, to me, one-off moments that can be interpreted in many ways. a lot of the bias also comes from the fact that he did pretty bad things and i’ve been watching this for a long time.

this post is pretty much what i’m saying, i guess.

alright @flypaw here it is :]

~ Lad 2

#c!dream critical #ask to tag

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gwynsplainer · 3 years

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On The Grinning Man and the De-Politicization of L'Homme Qui Rit (a Spontaneous Essay)

Since I watched The Grinning Man I’ve been meaning to write a post comparing it to The Man Who Laughs but I have a lot of opinions and analysis I wanted to do so I have been putting it off for ages. So here goes! If I were to make a post where I explain everything the musical changes it would definitely go over the word limit, so I’ll mostly stick to the thematic. Let me know if that’s a post you’d like to see, though!

Ultimately, The Grinning Man isn’t really an adaptation of the Man Who Laughs. It keeps some of the major plot beats (a disfigured young man with a mysterious past raised by a man and his wolf to perform to make a living alongside the blind girl he rescued from the snow, restored to his aristocratic past by chance after their show is seen by Lord David and Duchess Josiana, and the interference of the scheming Barkilphedro…. well, that’s just about it). The problem I had with the show, however, wasn’t the plot points not syncing up, it was the thematic inconsistency with the book. By replacing the book’s antagonistic act—the existence of a privileged ruling class—with the actions of one or two individuals from the lower class, transforming the societal tragedy into a revenge plot, and reducing the pain of dehumanization and abuse to the pain of a physical wound, The Grinning Man is a sanitized, thematically weak failure to adapt The Man Who Laughs.

I think the main change is related to the reason I posit the book never made it in the English-speaking world. The musical was made in England, the setting of the book which was so critical of its monarchy, it’s aristocracy, and the failings of its society in ways that really haven’t been remedied so far. It might be a bit of a jump to assume this is connected, but I have evidence. They refer to it as a place somewhat like our own, but change King James to King Clarence, and Queen Anne to Angelica. Obviously, the events of the book are fictional, and it was a weird move for Hugo to implicate real historical figures as responsible for the torture of a child, but it clearly served a purpose in his political criticism that the creative team made a choice to erase. They didn’t just change the names, though, they replaced the responsibility completely. In the book, Gwynplaine’s disfigurement—I will be referring to him as Gwynplaine because I think the musical calling him Grinpayne was an incredibly stupid and cruel choice—was done to him very deliberately, with malice aforethought, at the order of the king. The king represents the oppression of the privileged, and having the fault be all Barkilphédro loses a lot thematically. The antagonism of the rich is replaced by the cruelty of an upwardly mobile poor man (Barkilphédro), and the complicity of another poor man.

The other “villain” of the original story is the way that Gwynplaine is treated. I think for 1869, this was a very ahead-of-its-time approach to disability, which almost resembles the contemporary understanding of the Social Model of disability. (Sidenote: I can’t argue on Déa’s behalf. Hugo really dropped the ball with her. I’m going to take a moment to shout out the musical for the strength and agency they gave Déa.) The way the public treats Gwynplaine was kind of absent from the show. I thought it was a very interesting and potentially good choice to have the audience enter the role of Gwynplaine’s audience (the first they see of him is onstage, performing as the Grinning Man) rather than the role of the reader (where we first see him as a child, fleeing a storm). If done right, this could have explored the story’s theme of our tendency to place our empathy on hold in order to be distracted and feel good, eventually returning to critique the audience’s complicity in Gwynplaine’s treatment. However, since Grinpayne’s suffering is primarily based in the angst caused by his missing past and the physical pain of his wound (long-healed into a network of scars in the book) [a quick side-note: I think it was refreshing to see chronic pain appear in media, you almost never see that, but I wish it wasn’t in place of the depth of the original story], the audience does not have to confront their role in his pain. They hardly play one. Instead, it is Barkilphédro, the singular villain, who is responsible for Grinpayne’s suffering. Absolving the audience and the systems of power which put us comfortably in our seats to watch the show of pain and misery by relegating responsibility to one character, the audience gets to go home feeling good.

If you want to stretch, the villain of the Grinning Man could be two people and not one. It doesn’t really matter, since it still comes back to individual fault, not even the individual fault of a person of high status, but one or two poor people. Musical!Ursus is an infinitely shittier person than his literary counterpart. In the book, Gwynplaine is still forced to perform spectacles that show off his appearance, but they’re a lot less personal and a lot less retraumatizing. In the musical, they randomly decided that not only would the role of the rich in the suffering of the poor be minimized, but also it would be poor people that hurt Grinpayne the most. Musical!Ursus idly allows a boy to be mutilated and then takes him in and forces him to perform a sanitized version of his own trauma while trying to convince him that he just needs to move on. In the book, he is much kinder. Their show, Chaos Vanquished, also allows him to show off as an acrobat and a singer, along with Déa, whose blindness isn’t exploited for the show at all. He performs because he needs to for them all to survive. He lives a complex life like real people do, of misery and joy. He’s not obsessed with “descanting on his own deformity” (dark shoutout to William Shakespeare for that little…infuriating line from Richard III), but rather thoughtfully aware of what it means. He deeply feels the reality of how he is seen and treated. Gwynplaine understands that he was hurt by the people who discarded him for looking different and for being poor, and he fucking goes off about it in the Parliament Confrontation scene (more to come on this). It is not a lesson he has to learn but a lesson he has to teach.

Grinpayne, on the other hand, spends his days in agony over his inability to recall who disfigured him, and his burning need to seek revenge. To me, this feels more than a little reminiscent of the trope of the Search for a Cure which is so pervasive in media portrayals of disability, in which disabled characters are able to think of nothing but how terribly wrong their lives went upon becoming disabled and plan out how they might rectify this. Grinpayne wants to avenge his mutilation. Gwynplaine wants to fix society. Sure, he decides to take the high road and not do this, and his learning is a valuable part of the musical’s story, but I think there’s something so awesome about how the book shows a disabled man who understands his life better than any abled mentor-philosophers who try to tell him how to feel. Nor is Gwynplaine fixed by Déa or vice versa, they merely find solace and strength in each other’s company and solidarity. The musical uses a lot of language about love making their bodies whole which feels off-base to me.

I must also note how deeply subversive the book was for making him actually happy: despite the pain he feels, he is able to enjoy his life in the company and solidarity he finds with Déa and takes pride in his ability to provide for her. The assumption that he should want to change his lot in life is not only directly addressed, but also stated outright as a failure of the audience: “You may think that had the offer been made to him to remove his deformity he would have grasped at it. Yet he would have refused it emphatically…Without his rictus… Déa would perhaps not have had bread every day”

He has a found family that he loves and that loves him. I thought having him come from a loving ~Noble~ family that meant more to him than Ursus did rather than having Ursus, a poor old man, be the most he had of a family in all his memory and having Déa end up being Ursus’ biological daughter really undercut the found family aspect of the book in a disappointing way.

Most important to me was the fundamental change that came from the removal of the Parliament Confrontation scene, on both the themes of the show and the character of Gwynplaine. When Gwyn’s heritage is revealed and his peerage is restored to him, he gets the opportunity to confront society’s problems in the House of Parliament. When Gwynplaine arrives in the House of Parliament, the Peers of England are voting on what inordinate sum to allow as income to the husband of the Queen. The Peers expect any patriotic member of their ranks to blithely agree to this vote: in essence, it is a courtesy. Having grown up in extreme poverty, Gwynplaine is outraged by the pettiness of this vote and votes no. The Peers, shocked by this transgression, allow him to take the stand and explain himself. In this scene, Gwynplaine brilliantly and profoundly confronts the evils of society. He shows the Peers their own shame, recounting how in his darkest times a “pauper nourished him” while a “king mutilated him.” Even though he says nothing remotely funny, he is received with howling laughter. This scene does a really good job framing disability as a problem of a corrupt, compassionless society rather than something wrong with the disabled individual (again, see the Social Model of disability, which is obviously flawed, but does a good job recognizing society that denies access, understanding and compassion—the kind not built on pity—as a central problem faced by disabled communities). It is the central moment of Hugo’s story thematically, which calls out the injustices in a system and forces the reader to reckon with it.

It is so radical and interesting and full that Gwynplaine is as brilliant and aware as he is. He sees himself as a part of a system of cruelty and seeks justice for it. He is an empathic, sharp-minded person who seeks to make things better not just for himself and his family, but for all who suffer as he did at the hands of Kings. Grinpayne’s rallying cry is “I will find and kill the man who crucified my face.” He later gets wise to the nature of life and abandons this, but in that he never actually gets to control his own relationship to his life. When I took a class about disability in the media one of the things that seemed to stand out to me most is that disabled people should be treated as the experts on their own experiences, which Gwynplaine is. Again, for a book written in 1869 that is radical. Grinpayne is soothed into understanding by the memory of his (rich) mother’s kindness.

I’ll give one more point of credit. I loved that there was a happy ending. But maybe that’s just me. The cast was stellar, and the puppetry was magnificent. I wanted to like the show so badly, but I just couldn’t get behind what it did to the story I loved.

#the grinning man #the man who laughs #tgm musical #l'homme qui rit #victor hugo #gwynplaine's parliament rambles #long post /

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listless-brainrot · 3 years

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the post in question

@advena-perditus thank you for bringing up your takeaway on the narrative, it’s an entirely reasonable deduction to make and i understand where you’re coming from.

i wanted to expand a bit more in detail on this if you don’t mind, because that’s really where the heart of the issue lies.

your takeaway is what i believe the writers were trying to attempt.

as stated in the concept books, the point of showing other sides of the fire nation was because they wanted to show that the nation was more than just militaristic and strict. they wanted to focus more on the cultural aspects of the nation, and portray more than just a faceless big bad.

i don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with wanting to humanize the enemy. when done right, it can serve the narrative purpose immensely, and can add dimension to characters not previously given depth. we can see other perspectives and consider them, thus giving the story moral ambiguity and all around thoroughness.

we see this done with zuko. we see his circumstances and sympathize, we can see the results of of his upbringing and culture and why they influence his actions to the sheer degree they do, we actively want to root for him despite being the enemy. that’s fine and intended, and again, his arc is good.

the issue is, though, as the narrative draws closer and closer to zuko’s inevitable redemption, the show also shifts in favor of the fire nation.

the narrative and its framing begin to shift in such a way that garners the fire nation sympathy, especially in season 3. there are two main episodes that i think of when it comes to humanizing the fire nation, and they are: the painted lady, and the headband. i’m not going to summarize these in whole nor analyze them way too deep, but i will say what i believe the intended takeaways were.

the painted lady is a katara episode, intended to show how the poorer villages far from the capital that don’t active service the war can also be hurt by their own nation. the fire nation fishing village is filled with sick and dying as a result of pollution caused by a factory that sits on their coast, which pollutes their water and stifles their way of living.

the headband is an aang episode, intended to show the results of propaganda and indoctrination through education and the rewriting of history. the young presumably middle class children in the fire nation bazaar have access to education, which is used to glorify the fire nation’s history and justify their actions and war, as well as how cultural preservation and roots are suppressed in an environment where the war takes precedence.

both of these episodes, while having these entirely understandable takeaways and lessons, leave the viewer sympathizing with the fire nation. we see that there are some aspects of the war that aren’t entirely the citizens’ fault. we see the fire nation manipulating and "oppressing” its own citizens, and we, as the audience, are pushed to actively sympathize with them and their suffering.

we are pushed to see the fire nation as human and flawed in the same sense that we see zuko as human and flawed. the two become interchangeable.

it implies that, through redeeming zuko, the rest of the fire nation is inherently redeemable and “good all along”.

you can write the narrative in such a way that doesn’t shift in favor of the oppressors, while also writing a solid redemption arc. the problem isn’t entirely class- it’s with writing both zuko and the fire nation in the way that the writers did. the narrative goes from “showing other sides of the enemy” to “showing that the entire fire nation is flawed, human, and sympathetic in some regard”. we see less of the fire nation being actively imperialist, we see less consequences for their actions, if there are any at all. the comics continue this trend in “redeeming the fire nation” through earth kingdom characters willingly joining and protecting the monarchy as it tries to “improve itself” under zuko’s reign.

the show, unfortunately, does humanize the colonizers to an absurd degree as it continues, and is even praised for it.

whether it was intentional to paint a narrative in favor of the imperialist nation or not, it’s still something really important to keep in mind as one watches the show.

#thank you very much for being reasonable and i hope this makes my point clearer #i actually liked writing this so thank you #zuko #atla zuko #zuko atla #atla #avatar the last airbender #atla meta #atla analysis #atla crit #character analysis #original

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moderatelysociallymaladjusted · 3 years

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I have another take. Bear with me while I try to articulate. Okay. One of the things that really upset me about the movie was the emphasis on Jim. I know. He's my bestest boy and he's been my favorite throughout the series. But. The movie made him so self centered and so woe is me. That it got annoying. I could have made a drinking game out of how many times he asked if he was even still the trollhunter without the amulet. The thing is. Jim already dealt with that trauma and learned from it in unbecoming. "Amulet or not. I'm the trollhunter" now. Here's the thing. The series was Trollhunters. And even Jim called the whole group that several times. For all Jim could be reckless and do stupid things on his own. That wasn't selfishness or trying to steal glory for himself. That's just because Jim is selfless. And wants to protect people. He is often called out on this. It's not necessarily shown as a flaw but it's also shown it's not great either. He cares too much and he puts himself and accidentally others at risk doing things alone. These things are addressed. Many times. And I think Jim gets better about it as time goes on. A big thing the series. All of them really has been about. Is teamwork. Friends. And not doing things alone. It's trollhunters. 3below. And wizards. Emphasis multiple people. Now I get Jim would absolutely have trauma relating to soooo many things. But so would a lot of the characters. These are things I absolutely think would need to be explored. But putting so much emphasis on Jim and how he's moping about not having the amulet was a massive let down. Because that's not Jim. At all. All the series were about working together. We are shown so much that when they all did things as a group. They worked out better. The movie had everyone bickering. Jim whining. And just nerfed everyone. Claire should have absolutely been stronger than she was shown. My girl didn't so anything like I know she was shown to be capable of. Toby deserved better and to be more involved. He was in the show. I'm not saying he wasn't occasionally sidelined but let's be fair. Toby did a lot in the series. And the movie kind of ruined that. Douxie was nerfed. My boy did the same spell several times and wasn't allowed to show everything he'd become and learned since wizards when he was mad an actual master wizard. Like come on. Krel and Aja were side lined badly. Steves plot and character growth were. Well I'm not even touching it. Eli was there to be a glow up and nothing else of any substance. And then everything they did with Strickler and Nomura. Look. The series was supposed to be about teamwork. The tag line of the movie even teased it. All three series were a setup of a team up. And everyone but Jim got demoted so badly. And then Jim just became someone he wasn't. Look. I'm so mad at the movie. But I also think there was potential in some things they just didn't follow through with. And one thing. What this whole post is about really. Excalibur. Okay I was excited for Jim to wield it. He's my boy. I love him. And I wanted him to prove himself. But again. This movie was supposed to be a team up. They really went and said. Everyone has to be involved to get the sword out.

So. My thought. Why couldn't they all wield it? Wouldn't that have been interesting? If they all had to put themselves into it. Then by that they should have all gotten to use it. And this should have been done closer to the beginning. But really. In the midst of battle. Someone yells out to someone else. "Give me the sword" and the sword gets flung across the battlefield. And it automatically finds its target and into the hands of the one who called it. And so on and so forth that they all share it. Because screw the whole monarchy "the true king" shit about who wields it. Nah. I think if they wanted to emphasis a group up so much that they all had to put their hands on it to make it work. Then that would have been a great opportunity to have everyone use it.

Though my friend also pointed out a fun thing given the name change from Sturges in the book to Lake in the show. If Barbara had been the one to remove the sword and in lady of the lake fashion, after panicking that she didn't want the sword is nudged in the direction of bestowing it to a champion herself. Now I'm certain it would have gone to Jim but. Could have been an interesting twist. I think it's also the whole being miffed they did change their last name and then did nothing with it. I know it reflected the Arthurian myth stuff but it also really didn't play any kind of role over all.

Point is. I think the movie mostly just needs to be tossed in the garbage. I don't think much is salvagable. Bits and pieces. Small dialogue. But over all I just didn't like it. I didn't like the characterizations. I didn't like how much was hyped for a team up proper and then we get something that's a cry fest for Jim. Sort of feels like after the first Avengers when we all were excited for team ups and the group to actually do things together and then. They just didn't. I'm not saying in a way Jim isn't the main character but. He kind of only was in his own show. And even then it was Trollhunters. Not Trollhunter. It was never supposed to be just Jim. And that really disappoints me.

One more thing. I mentioned how Jim really seemed to be freaking out about losing the amulet and being the trollhunter. But. The thing is. The amulet was made to defeat gunmar. When that was done. The trollhunter didn't really need to be emphasized. The order and Titans were a whole different thing. The amount of constant emphasis and mention of trollhunter this trollhunter that in relation to him being supposed to beat the order. About how the trollhunter alone would remember the things at the end. I got really tired of hearing trollhunter by the end. Because that was a title for a specific thing. And it should have had zero bearing on anything to do with fighting any other bad guys. There was no destiny or prophecy stuff to do with the trollhunter having anything to do with any other catastrophe. So Jim being so insistent on being the trollhunter just got so old and so over done. I have never wanted to slap him so much but lord. He got on my nerves. And that makes me so sad because I love Jim. But the writers really dropped the ball. And retconned so much of what they taught us in the series.

#trollhunters #tales of arcadia #rise of the titans #rott spoilers

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hoefette · 3 years

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All the petty things I hate about fate!winx and their shitty universe/world building because

I'd added most if these in tags of other posts but I'm still so mad lmao

The way characters, Aisha and Mrs Dowling specifically make references to explicitly human or American things like instagram and Harry Potter

These people are from a different dimension for ffs why are they concerned with or are even aware of this very earth-specific shit? Do they teach earth classes at school over there?

I understand not wanting to have them be oblivious so Bloom wouldn't have to explain it to them, but it simply could be ✨omitted✨

Why would you go out of your way to date your work like this lmao ew

Ms. Dowling calling Tinkerbell an air fairy.. I cannot breeve with the stupidity why did they keep that in there

Why is Ms. Dowling.. the headmistress.. teaching classes? Where are the other teachers?

We ended up with a trio of antagonists (I guess you could call them that?) by the end of the season anyway so why not give us the trix, why have the characters play double roles as friends of our protagonists and also the villains/bullies? They clearly wanted a delinquent trio, in which case they could've gender bent the trix if they wanted to keep all the unnecessary sexual tension.

It just feels like the production team was lazy, they didn't want to hire more actors, they didn't want to bother with making the world immersive or lived in or believable at best, they just didn't give enough of a fuck

They wanted to make this show and attatch Winx to it for.. what? Like did you even google the main plot points? The abridged version or sparknotes to get details on the very literal, basic characteristics of our main characters or their roles or the world they inhabit????

It lacks wonder and intrigue.. I mean Bloom moves to another dimension, a school for fairies and we don't see her marvel once at anything.. and that's because she might as well have been in Switzerland because she's in exactly the same environment she would've been in over there anyway.

They could've said Alfea was in Europe and I'd believe it because nothing about the setting makes it feel otherworldly. I'm sorry but I'm not impressed.

Why do the teachers and graduated specialists communicate via facetime ?? In the magic dimension. ??? Why do they text each other and those texts then appear on screen like .. oh look, like a bad netflix teen movie ????? HELLO ??? it's the way technology and magic could've blended in so seamless into the world THE WAY IT WAS ALREADY DONE/SHOWN. Missed opportunity. it just takes you out of it imo every time you see the ugly, bland, gray text bar. Some fucking flavour pls I'm begging

How stupid the specialist must feel clonking around with the skinniest shreds of armor, plastic swords on their backs and battery powered flashlights and cellphones in their bags. R we larping?? I know I'd be laughing and asking why we hadn't already come up with something more effective .. idk like guns. I'm surprised I ain't see one gun in there.

In the beginning Ms. Dowling says some nonsense about fairies having lost the ability to transform to explain why there are no wings, which means they could've transformed before. So are we to assume that this supposed to be set in the time proceeding the original then?? Because something is not adding up with where they should be as a magical society technologically if that's the case

How does the production team want to keep the dark academia vibes with torches lining the walls and also want them to be face timing each other, presumably from miles and miles away in the dark forest???

Pls pick an aesthetic and stick to it everything was so unnecessarily dark. Where do they charge their phones since it's the only device we see that is the slightest bit modern and dont fucking tell me they charge it with magic I will punch you in the face

Why is there only one major monarchy that we are shown? Why are Solaria the only ones contributing to the efforts to defend the school and where is this mysterious battalion we never see lmaoo it's all so bad its laughable.

Is this set in the kingdom of Solaria? And why does the queen of an alleged interdimensional superpower monarchy pull up in black SUVs??????????? Why does she pull up with Andreas?? Is he not the king of Erakleon?? Where are his soldiers and his battalion and just?? Huh!? The world just feels empty like nobody lives here fr

Are we supposed to believe that the specialists get paired up with fairies just as a normal occurence and that they have to 'trust each other' and not because the plot demands it suddenly half way through when all we've seen so far are the fairies doing normalish school and homework, and the specialists outside, being physical everyday all day. This was never even implied that they'd have to work together apart from when we see the faculty as youngins with Rosalind. But even then.. it's like well why are they even together lmao? Is this a special team formed from Rosalind’s protégées? Were they formed after graduating from Alfea or what is this?? Are they the ONLY team of specialist/fairies hunting every single burned one?? What?

Are we now supposed to buy that Musa is being switched to 'support' because that's where her strengths lie and not in combat?? Are we supposed to believe that these girls know hand to hand combat?? When was this established? We see Terra wrapping some baby vines around a dude and I'm sorry is that the practical application of her power? Is this what the fairies are supposed to do once they graduate? Or is it just a switch in curriculum because of the threats outside the barrier?? This is never made clear.

Because if not then what's the point of this?? Why do they suddenly have endless classes together when the expectation was never set for the fairies to be like soldiers or out in the field fighting ?

Where exactly are they supposed to be what was the purpose of including Aster Dell and why is it a joy ride away from Alfea lmao?? Where Bloom is from and also not from?? Plot pls make it make sense

Why are fairies from another dimension vaping or smoking weed?? They are not human so why are they engaging in specifically human vices, yol couldn't come up with anything else to characterize 'delinquents'?? Very lazy very como se dices.. no effort. Nothing a little more spicy yol could invent, at least change the name and some properties holy shit did yol even try ??

So its fairies everywhere, having a lil party in the east wing of a phat castle.. and they are playing beer pong and dressed in t shirts and jeans..

Can you hear me screaming? Can you hear me vibrating with rage?

Not one floating decoration or magical anything in sight. Just purple lights and subpar vibes

Stella's costume design: tragic. I won't discuss further because we don't have the space or time but just know that it was absolutely atrocious and I hated it. Giving very debutante vibes

The entire budget going to that lame transformation sequence that was not a transformation sequence and those horrible, barely-there fire wings

Edgelord bloom and all her fucking leather jackets. Why do 30 yo, white cis men think girls exist in a binary? They could keep her earlier characterization and make her a hothead.. Bloom literally screamed herself into a couple power upgrades in the original come ooonnnn

Let girls be feminine without it being a character flaw what is wrong with yol its 2021. They could make her more mature, more angsty or whatever the hell else and not style her like that

The way Aisha's abilities flipflop between episodes and scenes. Very inconsistent. One minute she's struggling with a drop of water and the next she is moving an entire body of water for her bestie Bloom to fake transform because the plot demands it. Why even add in her struggles at all if you're just going to ignore it?

Why was Stella with them in that scene? She didn't do anything literally.. Aisha pulled the water and she did .. nothing.

Who the fuck is Rosalind? Why would they add her in,, to add nothing to story? The company of light was a thing, they could've plucked one of them hoes to be the antagonist. Why did the winx club need their own Delores Umbridge? Valtor was right there if you wanted an evil educator type character.

The camera work was so bland during the down beats, stagnant and fixed during a fairy party and erratic and ugly and disorienting during the fight scenes

I'm not getting over the fairy party because it was a good opportunity for the production and everyone else to show the differences between where Bloom was and where she is now but instead it just looks like a regular teen high school party?? This could have been set in Switzerland fr.

Everyone's just kind of standing?? You mean to tell me these people are from all different places in the magical dimension and their customs are all the same? They all throw parties like this ??

White and flavorless I am very bored

I guess the main question or takeaway I have is just.. who is this for? Because everyone, including the showrunners keep saying that it's for us, the fans of the original. But apart from the characters sharing some names, there are really no other similarities. So again, who was this supposed to appease or placate or satisfy? Because it sure as hell wasn't the winx club fans.

Overall, this feels very much like something I wrote and probably published on ff.net when I was 13 because I thought girls couldn't be taken seriously if they liked pink, and injected angst into everything that didn't need it and had no idea how to structure scenes or dialogue. It's just bad, objectively and N*tflix will keep making shit like this because apparently some people have bad taste??? Idk yol, be easy

#im never gonna stop i dont care i dont care #and i dont even usually make my own posts i just be reblogging and vibing #but im passionate abt this because he originak was the reason i wanted to learn how to draw #it was the reason i wanted to learn how to write and tell stories #it shaped a lot of shit for me because it was the very first one of its kind id ever seen #i ran home from school to watch it and argued with my friends about who got to be flora #i forced them to make cardboard wings with me and to perform the opening song during a school talent show #thank god we didnt get to perform otherwise we would all have died of embarrassment in hindsight #but ye i just hate to see things that obviously are very dear to a lot of people be treated with such casual indignity and its a disservice #a disservice to the fans and to the people who had probably want to create it as a passion project #to the people who spent hours and hours in rewrites and fanart amazing fanart and post series continuations #no one is saying the original is sacred and cannot be touch #this fandom actively calls out the bullshit rainbow has done and continues to do to the characters we love.. i havent spoken to one fan who #doesnt have an alter dedicated to their downfall. we found a piece of ourselves in these gorls and they were stripped and caricatured and #played for laughs so netfilx can make money and its just very upsetting to see.#so again fuck you brian young fuck you ignio and rainbow and fuck whoever the costume designer was #mine #text #fate winx club #fate: the winx saga #f:tws #winx club

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strrwbrrryjam · 3 years

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Iroh

In reference to @volkswagonblues poll on the Avatar: The Last Airbender Fandom. So I thought I’d give my own two cents. Throughout my blog, you can read that I have only ever said positive things about both Zuko and Iroh, most of it being so that they are my comfort characters, but I know that they have flaws and that it is their flaws that make them who they are.

To me, Iroh is one of the most morally grey characters in the show, his good and bad qualities balance each other out, he most definitely has his flaws and can come across as one-minded and hypocritical of certain characters, most of it coming down to his treatment of his niece, each of which I will talk about in this character analysis, if that is what you can call it.

Iroh’s Relationship with Azula

Iroh’s relationship with Azula is one of the reasons that many seem to hate him, most of who in fact criticize him for his famous line, “She’s crazy and she needs to go down,” from Bitter Work, Season 2 Episode 9. But, people seem to forget that she almost killed him, using lightning, which many do not survive from. There are many instances in the real world where teenage girls are charged with attempted murder, who can and do go to jail, Such as:

Recently, a fourteen-year-old girl charged with attempted murder on the Isle of Wight, where she can be sentenced to a maximum term of life imprisonment with a starting point of 6 years in custody.

The famous Slender Man stabbing where two twelve-year-old girls were found not guilty of stabbing another girl nineteen times, both of who had been found not guilty but sent to a mental institution of twenty-five to sixty-five years respectively.

In Florida, a fourteen-year-old boy was charged with attempted murder of three police deputies and is fleeing from the law, being charged with three counts of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, armed burglary, and theft of a firearm.

But listen, the context of this line is critically important, as he is with one child, who has been repeatedly tormented throughout his childhood, who, again, has almost been killed by the same child several times prior, asking whether he still should get along with his sister who is actively trying to do harm to him. If he tries to get along with Azula, he is repeatedly putting himself in harm's way because Azula is not above manipulating him into believing that his father can love him, that he has to constantly remind himself, that she always lies. Azula may be a child, a child who has been emotionally abused her whole life and has been propagandized to believe that what she was doing is right. She showed no doubt to this, wholeheartedly believing that the only way to survive in this world is that others have to fall. But she is still responsible for her own actions, just as anyone else is, no matter the age.

Their relationship is none existent, Iroh does not know Azula. Iroh does not know Zuko or Azula at this age, being a general at the time, plotting for the Siege of Ba Sing Se. Azula has repeatedly shown distaste to Iroh, actively wishing death on him at a young age to pave way for her own father, Ozai. When learning of her own cousin's death, and how Iroh crumpled in relief, she calls him a “quitter” and a “loser,” saying that a real general would “burn Ba Sing Se to the ground.”

Azula is Ozai’s favored child, the golden child. She is everything Ozai wants in a child, so, therefore, he would not let Iroh, who is actively one of Ozai’s threats to the claim to the throne, even corrupt his perfect pawn for his plan of world domination, he does not care for Zuko, believing that he is lesser for not being a child prodigy, which is why he likely has no qualms about Iroh joining Zuko. Azula actively dismisses Iroh when he shows her one of his tricks, in the Crossroads of Destiny, Season 2 Episode 20, while Zuko, knows exactly what his Uncle is talking about. While yes, Azula’s situation is downright dreadful, and Ursa should have most definitely done better in parenting Azula, actively being there for her, teaching her the right from wrong, and not letting her daughter think that her mother thinks of her as being a monster. “Uncle” Iroh has no chances to do so. Yes, he could have tried, yes, he should have tried, but during this time in the show, Azula is under the watchful eye of Ozai and he has no chance to.

Side Note: Out of anyone in the show, I would think of it being Iroh who knows when their younger siblings are going down a dark path, considering who his younger brother is.

Iroh’s Treatment of Women

This is most definitely a valid reason to dislike him. As a person who presents as a female, sometimes. Whenever I see Iroh, flirt, or for lack of a better word, perv and flirt his way out of situations, has always creeped me out, this doesn’t even have to be an old man, like Iroh, I get actively creeped out when Lucifer, played by Tom Ellis, does so. Please, please stop this trope of men and women actively flirting their way out of situations, showing the respective sex as nothing but a piece of meat. I always cringe when anyone does so, especially Iroh. I couldn’t even watch it when June had fallen and Iroh had faked paralysis because of how utterly disgusting it was.

Iroh is a War Criminal

This is an utterly undeniable fact. It is also one of the reasons why Iroh cannot and should not rule the Fire Nation. He had redeemed himself to an extent, but he should have and could have done more. Yes, he was grieving, and yes, he lost his son. But so had many others, people who worked for him, had lost their lives, and he had done nothing once he returned from his two-year spiritual journey. He could actively afford to do nothing while the people of the Fire Nation couldn’t because he had wealth while they did not. Also, his retreat at the Fire Nation, is a tragedy but also one of the many reasons why the people of the Fire Nation could not have Iroh on the throne. Because, imagine, the only reason why they retreated was that someone more important than their sons and daughters, thousands had lost their lives to the greed of this one man. It makes him not only actively hated throughout the Earth Kingdom but the Fire Nation too.

Iroh’s Decision in the Comics

Listen, I myself am a firm believer that comics, do not exist. They have their own issues and the Promise, to me, is utterly horrible. It fails as a continuation of the beloved series that is Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Iroh’s decision to have Zuko as the Fire Lord has its own faults, yes, leaving a sixteen-year-old on the throne to a country that has devoted itself to war sounds like a terrible idea, and it is, but I understand why Zuko was a perfect choice, and why they cannot abolish the monarchy this soon after the war.

Zuko is the Perfect Choice™ for Fire Lord.

They cannot abolish the Monarchy.

Zuko has the perfect story, for the rest of the world. He loves his people, does not care for the noble class, and actively spoke out against the war, albeit for his own people. He was banished and branded for his compassion and love, actively succeeded in the impossible task he was sent out to do, but in doing so learns of the fact that what his nation is doing is wrong and has the veil of propaganda lifted from his eyes. Leaving his nation he worked so hard to fight against the world and return to his nation as Fire Lord Zuko, Bender of Dragon Fire. He has shown compassion, dedication, and yes, unquestionable honor. He has been trained for this his whole life, as the replacement heir, and while ‘Zuko only having a thirteen-year-old education’ is a fun thought, I highly doubt that Iroh, who sounded so sure of Zuko being the Fire Lord would let him slip on his education.

People in a country, those who are sane, do not actively wish for war. When they have children and grandchildren that they wish to see grow and have their own families, they have no reason to go to war, which is why you have fed your nations lies and propaganda to believe that war is beneficial to them, which is what Sozin had done. When your president is ‘chosen’ by your patient spirit, who speaks through your Fire Lord, who are you to question them? They went to war because they believed it was right, they were being told it was right, they trust their spirit, therefore, they trust their Fire Lord. To abolish the monarchy so soon after the war, would lead them down a downward spiral to destruction, for them and the other nations.

However, despite this, Iroh’s decision to stay in Ba Sing Se while his beloved nephew is actively suicidal and leading another war on the Earth Kingdom while he serves goddam tea is utterly despicable and devastating. Yes, I understand having Iroh being watched in the Earth Kingdom so Zuko is not seen as a Puppet King is a valid complaint, but having one traumatized nephew, from a lifetime of abuse, death, abandonment and leave him alone on a thrown with nobles who actively hate him for ending the war? It is one of the stupidest things in the world, Iroh should at least have stepped up as regent or something, just staying there with his so-called “son” so Zuko doesn’t plunge to his death, is pretty good idea.

Iroh’s Relationship with Zuko

Iroh’s relationship with Zuko is one of the most heart-warming and -wrenching relationships in the series. It pulls at the heartstrings in all the right ways. Here is an Uncle who lost his son, and a Nephew who never had a father and they find each other.

Even in Season One, where Zuko is at his worst, he still shows that he cares for his Uncle by, yes, despite having a small tantrum, he still concedes with Iroh’s request, no matter how silly it is. He shouts, shoots fire, yells insults, but he still does so. Iroh’s silly requests are ways to delay Zuko going back to his father, who doesn’t want him, he respects him, knows that it is good in his heart. He is so attuned to him that he knows what is thinking, he calls him ‘honorable’ and instead of bringing it up again to Zuko’s question, he talks about tea, which tells Zuko that his honor was always unquestionable. Zuko gives up his chance to go after them to save his Uncle, and Iroh doesn’t even doubt that Zuko will choose him. He takes care of him and nurtures this broken boy into something wonderful.

In Season Two, they are forced into an uncomfortable situation where they hit the lowest of the lows, yet they still care for each other, yes Iroh disapproves of Zuko’s highway robbery streak, he knows this is how Zuko needs to cope with this. When someone assaults Iroh, Zuko works on his revenge to steal from him. Their relationship is tested, they still need each other and very much care for each other. He isn’t happy in Ba Sing Se, but he goes along with what his Uncle wants because it makes him happy. But, he isn’t ready yet, as an example in “Hello, Future Me,” video on On Writing: Redemption Arcs his view of the world has changed, his view of himself has changed, but he hasn’t had the capability to change his stakes because he isn’t ready to redeem himself because he still believes that there is a chance that his dad still loves him.

We don’t get much of Iroh and Zuko together in Season Three, for very good reasons, yet Zuko’s continuous visits to Iroh, he still values his opinion. His stakes are changing and his Uncle is the person he goes to when he doesn’t know of his place in the world. When he leaves, he works his way to breaking Iroh out of jail, but he’s too late. When he begins to join the others, he’s still in enemy territory, but he still becomes the missing piece Team Avatar needs, Iroh is regularly mentioned despite never being there because Zuko both loves and misses him so much that it doesn’t matter the company that he is in, whether in a group of technically enemies or friends. That apology scene is one of the best scenes in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Zuko got Iroh locked up and possibly marked for death, as Iroh committed Treason for helping the Avatar and Zuko still receives unconditional love, many of whom will not be received with such.

Conclusion

Listen, Iroh has many qualities to like and has many that he doesn’t. Both opinions of him being a hypocrite war criminal who peeves on women and a man who is working to redeem himself. He is both of them and that's what makes it great, Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of those shows that all characters have flaws, even Mentor characters who take as in children who have lost everything and had none of it in the beginning. You can love him and hate him and that's okay.

I love Iroh, despite his faults, because as someone whose childhood has been far from ideal due to parents and siblings, having a lonely childhood, full of depression and neglect, I would have loved someone like Iroh to take me in and help me.

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theniftycat · 3 years

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I feel like not enough people know that as of 1858, more than 1/3 of all people in the Russian Empire were serfs.

The difference between serfs and slaves is very thin. Like, true, if you just randomly killed or tortured your serfs en masse, you’d probably get in trouble. But you could punish them by beating them up or send them to Siberia, aka, thousands of miles away, leaving them to work for their food in very harsh conditions.

Serfs could be sold and used as card bets. They were not seen as people, and in some places they were 70% of an area population.

If a serf ran away, they were seen as criminal and would get returned to their master if caught. History knows of a serf named Shipov who became quite rich thanks to his talents. He ran away and led a very fascinating life, but his master went nearly bankrupt trying to catch him and sending people to find him all around Russia. Just because he hated that Shipov got rich.

Serfs were to pay produce or money to their masters. Otherwise they were to feed themselves and lived in their villages for literal centuries without knowing any other life. And what they were supposed to pay was often enough to leave them just poor enough not to die.

Now, in 1861 serfdom was abolished. But ex-serfs were supposed to buy plots of land from their ex-masters and pay it out in 49 years. Which basically means they remained serfs for decades more.

The Russian Empire wasn’t an uwu pretty European monarchy, it was rotten to its core. That’s one of the reasons why the revolution happened.

Once again, 1/3 of Russian people were serfs up to 1861.

Many paesants became citizens in full meaning only in the 1970s when they were given ids. Millions of people lived in the same villages never leaving them for centuries.

The USSR was a flawed state, but the fact that it existed is very easy to justify. Plus, knowing what its people were, it’s easier to see why it got so bad so quickly.

And knowing of the past will even show you why now we still have a dictatorship. It’s easier. It feels safe. It’s what people are used to.

Nobody really apologised for the serfdom. Nobody keeps reminding people how bad it was, except for the history teachers. This is not something we processed as a nation. But it was very real and recent.

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zuzuslastbraincell · 3 years

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For the salty ask game: 6, 10 and 16? <3

6: Has fandom ever made you enjoy a pairing you previously hated?

I never used to like kataang or maiko much, but I’m good with the former and really like the latter now.

while I’m still not a big fan of the kataang (without wanting to write an essay: ember island players ruins it for me), I’ve softened on it a lot largely just from seeing the content for it on here. they’re just honestly very sweet? I don’t know if it’ll last for practical reasons, but the idea of aang & katara offering each other hope from the beginning and until the end is just lovely.

as for maiko, I absolutely love the strength of mai & zuko’s dynamic (platonic or romantic) just from their boiling rock interactions alone. I feel like a lot of early s3 maiko very much demonstrates that they have some communication difficulties to work through together (thinking about the beach in particular here, but also the ‘are you cold?’ scene, as well as the break-up via letter interaction, that’s the big one) and in a sense mai represents part of zuko’s ‘ideal’ life as a perfect prince that he realises that he has to break from in the first half of s3, but I’ve come around to the idea that if they spent some time working through their communication issues they could really have something lovely? I do also think mai deserves a short break from the stifling culture of nobility/time to explore herself first, but after that? totally could work. like, i’m personally really attached to the gay zuko headcanon and always have been but a lot recent mutuals are maiko shippers and i’ve become very attached to maiko as well because of them (in parallel universes of course).

16: If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

so many things....

1. less racist, more sensitive worldbuilding. crucially better south asian rep, clear south asian rep. this also means including removing the caricature of guru pathik and changing the design of combustion man (and p’li) not to include a reference to shiva. the show’s philosophies and vocabulary owes so much to south asian culture and the lack of representation in that aspect alone is shocking.

2. references to the fact that there are some air nomad survivors / descendents in hiding in various and that being a late s2 / s3 subplot. (maybe aang is still the last airbender tho? but certainly his culture won’t die with him). the culture isn’t perfectly preserved / has changed with time and enduring hardships, some things have been lost, but there are still survivors clinging on, proud. maybe it’s this community that helps with him the avatar state, not a random guru? or they could help him with his s3e1 dilemma about ‘blending in’, as many of them have discarded certain aspects of appearance in order to hide? i feel like this could add so much to aang’s arc in the latter half of the show.

3. better writing of the white lotus, with the white lotus as a international resistance org that operates in all nations, that uses old man’s pai sho club as a front. they’re introduced as opposing the dai li in ba sing se, as trying to organise resistance in secret, have ties to some local revolutionary/radical factions as they have a long standing rivalry with the dai li (& part of the reason the dai li side with azula is to crush the white lotus and resistance to their reign). iroh is not grand lotus but merely gets recruited in s2, as part of a redemption arc.

4. a subtle iroh redemption arc where iroh realises he cannot simply be passive and perhaps let the treasonous thought ”hm, maybe it would have been better if the avatar fought sozin” cross his mind - he needs to take a more active role in opposing the fire nation, and he joins the white lotus. i think he also needs to reckon quite specifically with the cost of the siege of ba sing se, he needs to make amends to those hurt from it on both sides - be confronted by fire nation defectors who left after the siege because why were their deaths less important that his son’s? as well as encounter how the siege left scars on the lower ring, in a less visible way (untrained lower ring residents formed resistance militia and generally died in huge numbers; plague and starvation greatly affected the lower ring, etc.). no iroh as a moral authority here - he’s morally grey trying to become good. also he doesn’t stick around in ba sing se, he realises the jasmine dragon, as lovely as it is, isn’t true redemption either, and at the end of the series he stays in the fire nation.

5. leading into point 3 (and 4): in s3 the gaang encounters and works with grassroots underground resistance in the fire nation. i think this is a better message than ‘oh the fire nation is a soceity ridden by class division that exploits its poorer / less privileged people and its own environment as long as it doesn’t affect the elite, and turns even its most privileged children into traumatised child soldiers and is indirectly hurt by its own colonialism and imperialistic culture, and that’s deeply sad’ - i think a better message is ‘the fire nation is a society with all those problems and you can do something about it. you can stand up. even though that’s scary.’ this resistance group is around for day of black sun (in fact they’re vital to it) and then you see a key member in boiling rock too.

6. no combustion man. honestly? weak writing. would much prefer zuko attempting to ‘stealthily’ track the gaang on the false premise of a ‘welcome home tour’ where he slips out under night to try and chase them down - this would mostly be alluded to in a few scenes. i also think this would get zuko to realise how much the fire nation itself has been hurt from war. i think the main early s3 plot points e.g. the beach episode still happens, as does the war meeting. i feel like zuko would need extra firepower to be a decent s3 threat - maybe he takes mai and ty lee with him? zuko ultimate lesbian ally takes bored lesbians from the palace for a knife throwing chi blocking field trip kjfshdj i’m joking. but seriously we could also have a combustion bender on board as well as a potential new character (i’m imagining someone like a younger p’li if i’m honest, same age range as zuko), as long as they have a character beyond being a scary assassin. maybe they defect early to the resistance group before the day of black sun, tell zuko they should too (but zuko doesn’t listen)? that’d be rad.

7. the existence of grassroots resistance would basically allow for the series to end with zuko being offerred the crown, but deciding to give it up / end the royal line. rather than a power vacuum, or iroh, the existance of resistance means there are clearly people (i.e. adults) who can fill that space. maybe this is a bit optimistic of me but i would just love to set up a scenario where zuko doesn’t become a boy-king of an imperialist nation and where absolute monarchy doesn’t continue, where there’s a clear shift in system. i understand the narrative power of zuko acknowledges he has inherited wealth and power that has been gained through exploitation and imperialism, and dedicating his whole life to undoing the damage his family has done, but i think he can do this without being the fire lord? in fact not being the fire lord is a good first step. zuko finds another way of doing exactly this.

8. talked about this a lot recently but better toph s3 representation & greater ties to the earth kingdom. also, i’d just appreciate a lot more flavour from the earth kingdom as a whole, and more prominent characters from there?

9. okay i’m not sure there is quite honestly space in the narrative for an azula redemption clearly on screen in as much depth as zuko’s but 1. i’d like iroh not to treat her horribly, thanks, and maybe even try to reach out to her at appropriate moments, maybe we see him (comically) say a lovely warm hello during her s2 appearances, maybe we see her play pai sho with him in s3 while he’s in prison in return for some secret info he’s not actually giving her while he’s not-so-subtly suggesting she should defy her father (but it’s too little too late, he already *chose* zuko in her eyes, and perhaps he did and is only just beginning to realise that) 2. i would like some hope and optimism at the end for azula. her breakdown is truly tragic but it feels like pain for pain’s sake in a sense - i would have loved for the finale scene with zuko & ozai replaced with a scene where someone visits azula and tells them they’ll be there for her and/or they love her. perhaps iroh, perhaps zuko (though i think that one would be more complicated obviously). i would love a post-finale scene where iroh sets up a tea shop somewhere in the fire nation where we see azula out the back, finishing up wiping down/mopping the patio, and before aang goes inside to say hi to his friends, we see them bump into each other - azula bows deeply, a clear apology, and aang accepts it. then we see azula runs off to go hang out with some friends before we follow aang inside as he encounters his own friends.

basically i’d rewrite a lot of s3. i’m dearly, dearly attached to s3, especially the second half, which has some of my favourite episodes of the entire season, but i think it’s flawed.

#drowning-in-cacophony #long post #sorry this ended up being REALLY long

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seddm · 4 years

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I know the show has some flaws like on how it can be better explained with it's story, but Star's actions you know with destroying the magic in the finale, imo, didn't come off as selfish, she didn't want the stress of her family's magic and decided to put and end to her family's monarchy for the good of the people she loved, in a way, I mean for example, the Magical Spells from Star's wand have poofed and disappeared at will before, and this no exception.

I won’t go over all the issues I recognize the finale has again, and focus on the good stuff / what the writers wanted to convey: Star wasn’t being selfish in the slightest with her decision to destroy magic. Sure, her initial reaction to Moon’s betrayal was largely knee jerk, but she was still going in the right direction.

Star always trusted her instinct and guts way more than most other queens - this reflected both on her magic, as evidenced multiple times throughout the show, and on her innovative decisions as a princess / queen.

Later in the episode, and in the finale, Star follows on her first instincts, and realizes that she wasn’t wrong during her “tantrum”, and magic did damage people and monsters for centuries on Mewni (and in other dimensions as well, apparently, given the reactions of some of the patrons in the tavern, but that’s beside the point and probably a clumsy att- NO I SAID I’D HAVE FOCUSED ON THE GOOD THINGS ONLY).

The current situation with Mina is just another entry on the long list of times magic threatened to destroy stuff, and the corruption spreading through the Realm of Magic (once again thanks to Queens using and abusing the power) was just the cherry on top. Sure, maybe the crazed solarian warrior could have been defeated, but that wouldn’t have changed anything, something else would have popped out sooner or later, at the expense of the common folk on Mewni (and possibly throughout the Universe) once again.

Also it’d be disingenuous to ignore that the show has always been, even if in its own fantasy way, "socially involved”, and that the idea of magic being a privilege held but an extremely limited amount of people, as the idea of Monarchy itself, could have poorly matched with themes of equality and whatnot, so it becomes evident that, given the scope of the series as far as Mewni is concerned, destroying magic was the right choice: Eclipsa was by far the best suited queen to bring some change to Mewni under the limits of the current system, and it failed. It’s clear that the system as a whole had to change, then, and said system was symbolized by magic, what first allowed humans to settle on Mewni and oppress monsters for centuries.

As for anyone who throws around the words “selfish”, “Star” and “boyfriend” in the same sentence, they’re dumb and it’s not even worth to debate it since it’s clear & the driving plot behind the last 13 minutes in the series that Star was ready to lose Marco if that meant saving Mewni, the monsters, and bringing true change to her world. Something that she set out to do explicitly around S3 episode 11, and less explicitly-but-the-seed-was-there around S1 episode 11. Not exactly a last moment whim because she somehow selfishly decided she didn’t like magic anymore.

I said I wouldn’t have talked about the bad parts so I’ll ignore the usual problems with having given spells identities with three different episodes in three different seasons.

#seddm answers #svtfoe #star vs the forces of evil #seddm ramblings #Anonymous

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aqours-remade-again · 4 years

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So I mostly really loved SU Future but boy oh boy do I have some Opinions on Rose’s writing :))))))! (don’t we all though)

OK before I go on, full disclosure: for the most part I loved this premiere of Steven Universe Future. In particular, the episode with the Roses (and especially Chill Rose) and Pink Pearl in general is easily my favorite thing to come from SU in a very long time; far more so than the movie, actually. But oh my God; I’m so fucking sick and tired of this shit with Rose Quartz doing everything wrong.

Rose’s character arc, if... er... debatable, makes sense. Pink was born into the highest echelons of power within her society, with three elder sisters who were tyrannical and neglectful towards her. When given the opportunity Pink finally understood that their empire was built on genocide and destruction, and devoted herself to Earth’s freedom, and begged her sisters to not let this planet be destroyed. She faked her own death in a hopeful attempt this colony was just something to appease her and the Diamonds would lose interest afterwards; this resulted in a war with horrific consequences, and Pink/Rose spent the rest of her life, thousands of years atoning for this mistake. Even if it wasn’t a perfect narrative, its one that makes sense.

But this franchise and its writers seem hellbent to just pile it on, like every single bad thing that’s ever happened was Rose’s fault; and its getting really frustrating. I fucking HATED that the SU Movie basically boiled down to “lol this was all Rose’s fault :))))” Rose understood she made mistakes. Rose made a lot of mistakes. But again; she spent thousands of years atoning for them, and its because of that the Earth still exists at all. Earth would have been destroyed thousands of years ago if she didn’t chose to own her mistakes and fight for Earth’s liberation. And now we have a narrative about Pink’s “destructive tantrums” that physically maimed Volleyball? What the fuck is that? We literally saw in one of Steven’s dreams White Diamond reaching for a non-damaged Volleyball. The whole reason the Diamonds had a redemption arc (one that was EXTREMELY rushed btw) was because they did really horrible things and they needed to become better people if this universe was going to change; that’s the whole point of a redemption arc! Villains did bad things that needed redeeming! They did bad things in the past! That’s what a redemption arc is for! Why is it so hard to say that White did SOMETHING bad to Volleyball? What’s with this show’s fucking obsession with piling every single bad thing onto Rose’s name? What’s next? Did Rose do Chernobyl?

Rose saved the world, just as her son would thousands of years later. No matter how you look at it, no matter her mistakes, Rose is the second most important character to this universe other than its titular character, her son; perhaps THE most important. All this shit we see with the school for gems on Earth, the theme of how liberating and beautiful and wonderful the planet Earth is and why everyone fought so hard to protect it? That is owed to Rose who rejected the power of her birthright and her right to monarchy to preserve it; none of this would be possible without Rose’s rebellion. But it really feels like the narrative has forgotten that. Ever since Bismuth this narrative has been on a really bad downwards slope with this and its getting worse, and although we haven’t finished this miniseries... does anyone have any real hope they can fix it after this? It honestly disappointed me that Rose’s portrait is just gathering dust somewhere now; I was really hoping in the episode with the Rose Quartzes they’d find some common ground and take pride in their mother’s legacy, only to be immediately bombarded with this. And no, that Pink USED to be destructive but became a healer as part of her redemption arc, which in the narrative was resolved nicely a very long time ago doesn’t make it better. I was already on my last straw with Spinel’s backstory, this shit just reaks of “Oh shit uhhh what do we do now...? OK! Pink did ANOTHER bad thing! OK that’s the conflict now.”

And everyone, I love Steven Universe. Its one of my favorite shows ever. That’s why I get so upset about this. This narrative that Pink changed doesn’t make it better. It was touching when the fusion said about how Pearl always tried to see how Pink was changing and how Volleyball never understood Pink could never change; but after seeing that episode, how is any viewer supposed to reasonably feel other than piling onto the idea Pink was the worst person to ever exist? This idea of a “reverse redemption arc” doesn’t work when all that is ever added to Pink’s character now is more reasons to hate her. By the end of this, Rose’s portrait is gone. We are not being given more reasons to cared about a flawed character; just more and more to dislike her.

“I can’t even deal with one more horrible thing she did!” yeah me too Steven the writing surrounding your mom is getting really fucking obnoxious and I’m sorry the story can’t assign literally one bad thing to her sisters at this point. I’m sorry your mom has to be responsible for Literally Every Bad Thing That Happens Now and the entire narrative of her saving the world is almost nonexistent at this point.

anyways to end this on a positive note: the Pearls gay. this is Good

#rose quartz #pink diamond #su #su future #su critical #su spoilers #suf spoilers #long post #sorry if i'm Going Off but this is like #really starting to annoy me #steven universe spoilers #steven universe future spoilers

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sciencelings-writes · 4 years

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The Golden Birdcage

A quick fic of my ocs in my fantasy au type of thing - This one features Rose and Adisa mainly but if there is any interest at all, I’ll write in more of my ocs

***

Rose dreaded the coming day, more than she dreaded any normal day. Today she cemented her place in the monarchy of the high fae. Before she was just a princess, an heiress, a disappointment. But today she was forced to step up to start taking power over the people she was destined to rule.

She was sure that she wasn’t the only one to dread it, she’d never really been popular among her people. She wasn’t born with a power that was seen as honorable or anything. While her mother could create massive crystalline spherical shields that protect the thousands of miles of their kingdom and her father could harness the power of their sun with powerful blasts of energy that could decimate armies, Rose could only heal. Sure, healing was an important and necessary power, but for a royal sunborn fairy? It was incredibly weak for the royal line, which was known to be the most powerful of the fae. There were rumors of her not being a true heir, being adopted, or a product of infidelity, but they were false, and there was no conceivable reason that she was born the way that she was.

For years she held her head up high and ignored those who looked at her like she was less than anyone else. She could not retaliate or express how she felt about it to anyone, not even her family. But it got so tiring. The only time she could rest was after she was dismissed for the day and could be herself alone in her room without any serving fae. She would take off her corset and release the tightest parts of her elaborate braids. She would let out the pent up emotions that she had been keeping inside all day, usually by writing which would be promptly burned with a candle or she would release her frustrations by sparring with a dummy. She always felt better with a sword in her hands.

But today would be worse than any of the days before. Not only would she not be alone for a single second, but it was one of the biggest days of her life and there was a lot of pressure on her. She had spent weeks preparing herself. Writing and memorizing a speech that she would have to recite in front of thousands of very important people, rehearsing the ceremony a dozen times with her mother pointing out a flaw every time. Sometimes it was something small like a hair out of place or a break in her facial expression, or a wrinkle in her dress, and sometimes it was detrimental like when she forgot a word or she stuttered causing her mother to yell at her. A stutter meant weakness and a mistake in words meant a lack of preparation, both of which were not a good sign in a new leader. Rose had always been sick of the perfection demanded of her.

Since the moment she woke up, she had been attended to with a handful of her servants focused on different parts of her appearance. Three doing her hair, two doing her makeup, and two more working with her clothes. She didn’t love being crowded at the best of times but this was definitely not comfortable for her in the slightest. She could barely breathe, her skin was covered in golden paints and powders, and the heeled shoes she had to wear everywhere was just the tip of the iceberg. She already deeply anticipated the end of the day when it would all be over and she would be free.

What made the day more bearable was that she was friendly with her servants. She wouldn’t call them friends but they respected each other and gossiped about anything that was going on in the palace. They were some of the only people who talked to her like she was a person and not a princess under the protection of the most powerful fae in the lands. They learned not to be afraid to joke around with her and be upfront with her as they were fully aware that she had no plans to punish them for not agreeing with her at every point. She knew that not all of them were on board with her becoming the queen but they still encouraged her and let her be at least slightly open about her feelings about things like food and music. She wouldn’t dare let their conversations stray close to topics she was more passionate about where she might let something more unsavory slip.

They arrived early in the morning when the shields were still dark. They were much more excited about the day than she was. Their excited chatter echoed throughout the pale stone halls enough to wake her several minutes before they even arrived. She relished her few moments alone before she was to be swarmed with familiar faces.

The handful of assorted fae scrambled in, a man adorned in indigo who was in charge of her dress and was the best at tying up her corset all nice and tight with barely enough room to breathe, a few older women in orange and violet respectively who would weave her hair like it was a decadent tapestry to place in the throne room to be showed off to prestigious guests, a young woman and a young man tasked with turning her face from pale and freckly to a work of art.

Rose was embarrassed to say that she didn’t know their names, not because she didn’t care to know but because she was just horrible at that kind of thing and had forgotten. Now after years of service, she was too afraid to ask. She remembered that the older women had grandchildren that worked in the kitchens and at the market and that one of them used to sing as the castle bard but pairing them with names was harder for Rose to remember. She was pretty sure that one of them was named Hesta but she could never remember which one it was.

“Good morning!” One of the elder fae sing-songed, “Today is the day!”

“It sure is isn’t it…” Rose said less than enthusiastically.

“Well now, don’t be nervous!” The serving fae collectively dragged her to get to work. She did her best to follow along and work with them but with all the chaos, she had a bit of trouble. Within seconds there were brushes passing through her orange and white hair and powder already being applied to her face. She rested her hands on the poles on both of her sides in anticipation for when the corset was to start its asphyxiating process.

“I’m not nervous…” She gained a few trivial stares when she said it, “Okay, yeah, I’m a little anxious this isn’t exactly a small thing.” She sighed.

“Of course, but you’ll do fine. You’ve prepared so much, I’d frankly be surprised if you managed to breathe at an imperfect moment.” The older fairy chuckled.

“Yeah, I know…” Rose took a couple of deep breaths, it didn’t help but it made her look more in control. She gripped the posts tightly and planted her feet on the ground as the white corset started to squeeze her organs. “It won’t all be bad, I guess I’m going to have to start to get used to being stared at.” She grunted at a particularly violent pull of the threads.

“You’ll do fine princess. You’re much stronger than they say that you are. Believe me.”

***

After several painstaking hours, Rose emerged for the pre-coordination ball in the ceremonial flowy iridescent white and gold gown. Her pearlescent pale segmented wings emerged from the openings in the white drapery that trailed behind her. She wore her small gold winged crown that would be replaced with a bigger more elaborate one during the ceremony. Her hair was braided tightly in a beautiful if a little painful bun style with ribbons coming from a flowery hairpiece made of pink and gold lilies and full white roses. Her makeup was filled with warm pinks with gold details framing a golden sun painted on her forehead. Her pointed ears were adorned with gold earrings linked with chains and dangling white opals.

She had to admit, the look was impressive. She looked like a celestial sun goddess and it made her feel better from how painful it was to achieve. She fluttered through the air to the dark chamber for the hour of meditation before the first ball. She was only left alone to wait for a few seconds before a voice broke through along with the sudden sounds of muffled crowds from the nearby rooms as the door opened and closed.

“You’re slouching.” Roses mother announced from behind her.

“I don’t think it’s possible to do so your highness. This corset feels like it’s made of steel and melded to my body.” She said bluntly.

“Your posture includes your neck darling.” The red-haired queen of the sun fae walked around her daughter as if she was inspecting her for a single piece of lint.

“If I had my neck any more vertical I wouldn’t be able to see the floor.” She sighed. When her mother looked satisfied she placed herself in front of her.

“You look…” Rose waited for her mother to nitpick something, saying that she looked like a golden pig or a crane in a dress. “Like a queen.” Rose raised her eyebrows in shock. That was probably the most positive thing she had said in weeks.

“Don’t mess up your makeup!” Her mother demanded, back to her old attitude again, nothing good could last for very long apparently.

“I could sit through a hurricane and my makeup wouldn’t even smear.”

“It’s almost time. I have guests to attend to, do not be caught off-guard.” Her mother demanded, “We have practiced this a hundred times, you would have to be an idiot to get something wrong.” Rose tried not to feel hurt from the comment.

“Thanks.” She grumbled.

“Do not miss your cue!”

“How would I miss it, Someone literally yells my name.”

“I’m sure you’d find a way.” And with that, her mother traded places with a guard in golden armor.

Rose closed her eyes to start the hour of meditation. Others in her place have claimed to see visions or deceased members of the royal family or even the sun herself. For the first half-hour, she just saw the back of her eyelids. Pure darkness. She had to let her mind wander or she would fall asleep or worse, get bored. She focused on the warmth of her magic through her veins, it was the warmest at her palms, like she was holding hands with someone. The comforting warmth combated the unnatural darkness around her.

After an eternity of all-encompassing silence, she heard a voice. It was quiet but in the impossibly silent room, it was as clear as day.

“You’re being wasted here.” the voice was deep and female. Blunt, like she was stating a fact. “They can’t help you. This place is killing you.”

Rose wanted to answer out loud but she knew the voice was in her head and she was acutely aware that she wasn’t alone in the room. She didn’t expect the things she would hear in there to be so… real.

“She’s suffocating you. You were meant to be free.”

‘I want to be free.’ Rose tried to manifest the pure yearning through her thoughts to whoever was speaking to her.

“You will be freed. Are you willing to pay the price?”

‘I’m going to be free if I have to do it myself. I’m sick of not having any control over my own life! I don’t care about your price.’ Anger started to bubble in her chest, the normal heat generated from her powers was amplified by the years and years of rage that had built up.

“I like you, princess,” The voice chuckled, “I feel like you’re going to be a great ally.”

Rose heard something beyond the voice, like in the world outside of her mind. She opened her eyes and the dark room was no longer dark in the slightest. Glowing gold and pink clouds swirled around her and she emitted a golden light from her skin and eyes. The guard was huddled in the corner with his eyes wide. He looked afraid. For some reason, this gave Rose a powerful sense of euphoria.

Unfortunately, as soon as she had realized her power around her, it started to regress. The swirling clouds started to slow and her skin started to fade. Not before the door opened though. The chamber’s main door opened to the ballroom, filled with every important fae in the Dawn and Dusk kingdoms. They all saw the thick clouds exit the room as she did and even more bazaar, she was smiling. Not like the polite smile she had practiced all her life but one of true genuine delight. Even her mother was staring.

Rose walked out of the dark room and to the balcony for all to see. The room was quiet. The music had stopped playing. Not out of respect but out of shock. After a long enough moment, someone very familiar spoke. The voice front the dark chamber.

“Now that was quite the entrance, Princess.” A fairy approached from the crowd dressed in black and green wearing a white mask that featured a long beak.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Rose's mother announced as she stood up from her golden throne.

“Don’t interrupt your majesty.” The strange fae spat. “I’m sure you’ll want to hear me out.” The queen managed to control herself and she sat back down. The dark room fairy waved her hand which caused a green intricate witches circle to appear at her feet and dark black clouds to swirl around it. Gasps erupted from the room. This wasn’t a fairy at all. A witch had snuck into one of the most important fae places. The natural enemies of the fairies were the magic folk and one had managed to slip into a major fae event.

The witch’s dark thunder clouds expanded throughout the massive room and her glamour faded. Her green butterfly wings turned into huge black feathered wings. Her curly brown hair cascaded off of her shoulders from their hiding spot and a black cloak waterfalled from her shoulders. A black staff topped in a birdlike skull appeared in her hands. Rose thought that she was so incredibly beautiful in the most unorthodox way.

“Relax relax,” The witch bellowed. “I’ve come bearing a gift for the princess. Better than any gift the fae could hope to offer her.” She disappeared in black smoke and appeared right next to Rose. But she wasn’t afraid in the slightest. Both the king and the queen stood abruptly at this action.

“I have a purpose for you. The lost Fae Princess needs to be found, and who better to find her than her sister! The caged bird will be trapped no longer.” The witch grinned. “Oh, and if you refuse-” she pointed her staff at the king and queen and they were covered in smoke. Once the smoke lifted it looked like nothing had changed but by the look on the monarch’s faces, something certainly had. “Your kingdom will remain unguarded and unprotected by the most powerful among you.” Surely enough, when Rose looked out the glass windows, the crystalline shielding around the palace was gone, without the shields, there was no night and day. Only the eternal light of the sun blazing onto the lands. “I’m sure my kind would be enthused to know of your newfound vulnerability.”

Rose stayed silent. She wasn’t afraid of the witch, she had been taught that the magic folk were wicked and scheming. But though the appearance of this witch was sinister and destructive, she was giving Rose exactly what she wanted under the guise of it being to lift a curse. She wasn’t just giving Rose a way out, but also a purpose, a quest, an adventure, a sister? Rose had only heard rumors of a lost princess but she thought they were just that, rumors. Like she was not her father's daughter despite having his white hair woven through the red she had inherited from her mother.

“You won’t even be alone on your journey. For a price, I will give you an object that summons me whenever you need me. I am nothing if not giving.”

“What kind of price?” Rose raised her eyebrow, speaking for the first time since the witch appeared.

“A small price for my help. All I ask for is a kiss.” The witch smirked, as if she didn’t expect Rose to take up the offer. The crowd had gasped, a kiss from a witch was said to be cursed. It was like signing a contract with the devil. But Rose didn’t need the promise of help from the woman, she would’ve kissed her anyway for freeing her.

“Deal.” The witch looked a little surprised but she laughed as all the onlookers looked horrified. Rose however was not remorseful in the slightest. The sooner she could leave her mother's presence, the better. Rose knew the corrupt nature of the fae more than anyone and she was sure that they wouldn’t even miss her.

“Wonderful. Now, you can’t go on a quest looking like that!” The witch spoke directly to her instead of projecting to fill the whole room. She gently lifted Rose’s chin with a dark claw-like finger and their lips met.

Around her, the decadent white gown started to get covered in smoke and changing dramatically. Rose felt the corset loosen and the skirt tighten and wrap around her legs to form pants. The smoke rose to her hair where the tight braids fell around her shoulders and unwove into freshly curled locks. She felt weight on her back of her small assortment of weapons that were forged by the fire giants for sunborn royalty. A sword with a golden hilt adorned with a triple set of feathered wings, a matching bow and a quiver full of arrows and a golden dagger to finish the set. Her heels were replaced with practical laced up boots that were a hundred times more comfortable. Even her makeup was affected. The layers and layers of powders and paints lifting in an instant leaving only the flaked remains of the sun imagery on her forehead and her golden lips.

Throughout her transformation, her lips were still firmly planted on the witches. She probably lingered for too long as the kiss made her heart flutter and she tried her best to preserve the feeling.

They parted, and the witch held out a dark metal object. A razor sharp knife with the imagery of a white bird skull carved to it’s hilt.

“Point it to the sky and say my name and I will come to you.” The witch assured.

“What is your name?” Rose took the knife and examined it before looking upwards at the witch.

“Adisa. Adisa Crow.”

#This is basically a first draft of a few scenes in my original series that im working on #at least the fantasy one #Rosalia Scarlett Dawn #Adisa Crow #Doctor Plague #my ocs #my writing #original writing #original content #original character #original characters #oc #ocs

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garreaus-a · 4 years

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hi, everyone ! it’s jessie again. i couldn’t help myself, ok ? i had to bring in my Chaotic Good, espionage-elite, French son samuel ... i hope u like him :’). he’s a character i’ve had awhile from a previous rpg / my indie ( aka the Archive ) so i adjusted his backstory a lil’ to fit here. again, please hmu on discord if you’d like to plot !! <3

⌠ BEN BARNES, 36, CISMALE, HE/HIM ⌡ welcome back to gallagher academy, SAMUEL GARREAU ! originally hailing from BLACKTHORNE, this alum specializes in THREAT ELIMINATION. when i see them walking around in the halls, i usually see a flash of ( complacent smirks paired with attentive eyes; the aroma of expensive, but fresh cologne; the decision to just “wing it”; a cigarette between lips ). it’s the ( leo )’s birthday on 08/14/1983, and when they were still in school their most requested dish was BOUILLABAISSE from the school’s chefs. hopefully their presence can help ease the minds of gallagher students.

𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙱𝙰𝙲𝙺𝚂𝚃𝙾𝚁𝚈.

in the late 1970s-80s, there were a string of infamous art robberies and trafficking occurring around france, which linked to notorious art thieves from both france and america. french-american cia agent matthieu garreau was assigned to assist the central directorate of the judicial police and the dgse in their investigation. french art curator adeyln legrand ( her fam is Old Money rich bc they own museums across the country ) was involved in the case as well, helping the agencies identify the stolen art pieces and their worth. as soon as matthieu laid eyes on her, it was love at first sight !

samuel elias garreau was born in paris, france — just before matthieu was sent back to washington d.c. he was raised by his mother and maternal grandparents ( who lived in marseille ) for most of his childhood. his childhood was filled with love, art, linguistics & french cuisine. he became a polyglot at a very young age, knowing how to speak french, english and spanish fluently. his father visited his wife and son as much as he could in france, but eventually, the two moved to washington d.c. when samuel was 10-years-old.

a bit of context on the garreau family: the garreau family name has been involved in espionage for a VERY long time. lineages stem back to being loyal spies for the french monarchy for many generations before the surviving garreaus immigrated to america to escape WWII. many relatives eventually returned to france, but samuel’s paternal great-grandparents decided to continue to raise their children in the united states & establish connections with american intelligence agencies.

immediately, matthieu wanted to begin espionage training ( already samuel was a couple years behind in hand-to-hand combat / weaponry training, so he’s eager ). adelyn was a bit Conflicted but ... lil’ energetic, happy-go-lucky samuel was ECSTATIC !! what better way to bond with your father, am i right ??

those 4 years before spy prep high school was full of father-son bonding, grueling combat training, & survival skill training. but, samuel was also a normal, private elementary / middle school student in washington d.c. it was a lot of pressure — juggling school, his blossoming social life, and keeping the whole “ i’m training to become a spy ” thing a secret bc sam CANNOT stop talking

before samuel busted at the seams, he was sent off to a prestigious spy prep school on the east coast to truly hone his skills and begin to identify what he may excel at as a spy; however, sam didn’t take it seriously ... like at ALL. it was mostly because he was so bored — he needed something stimulating / challenging. often samuel was being a Sneaky jerk, pulling pranks & being a kleptomaniac; however, his grades showed the opposite of his delinquent behavior. he was excelling in all of his classes.

the garreaus did not know what to do with samuel. literally, they had a whole damn family meeting about where he’s headed in his spy career bc there’s NO WAY any spy university would be willing to take him. the plan would be to utilize their connections in france and get him enrolled in an academy there until ...

blackthorne academy showed up outta nowhere and was like “ hey, we’ll whip his ass into shape. give him to us. ” the garreaus were reluctant due to the academy’s reputation and suspicious as to HOW blackthorne caught wind of their samuel; however, maybe this is what he needed. the most against this was his mother, but her voice held no authority.

samuel was in for a RUDE awakening at blackthorne. maybe it was for the better ? he majored in THREAT ELIMINATION + LINGUISTICS, CULTURE, & ASSIMILATION ( whatever was blackthorne’s version of those were ).

his first year there practically BROKE him, but by his sophomore year, his flaws became refined skills. somehow, his extrovert / devil-may-care and shrewd personality still shined amongst his callous and/or sadistic peers.

the codename HERMES seemed to be used by his instructors sometimes to “ make fun ” of samuel, the label representing his ability to outwit his peers, mischievous and intrepid nature, proficient adaptability, and most importantly, he mastered the art of infiltration & extraction — just as the god of thieves would ( the ONLY time he’s the quietest compared to his peers tbh ) u know ... also stole lives too ... i know that’s cheesy SHHH

of course ... we all know the whole deal about blackthorne. he was molded into the perfect assassin, not a sophisticated spy that could have a drink with james bond or ... with his prestigious, royal spy family.

throughout his many years of fieldwork across the globe, samuel was many things for both private clients and espionage / government agencies ( mostly doing a lot of infiltration / extraction & surveillance undercover missions ), even sometimes an actual thief for the right price.

however, despite samuel’s slight identity crisis, he earned quite the name for himself in the espionage world and solidified himself as a reliable secret agent. but he’s still a pain in the butt :-P

during blackthorne’s last years, samuel often was asked to come by as a guest instructor, a desperate attempt to liven things back up to relive its better days. despite the absolute DEMONS his students were being, it surprised him that he actually enjoyed teaching.

so, he was a bit shocked ( and ecstatic ) to hear that gallagher requested HIM out of the many blackthorne alumni to be a part of the faculty, let alone the threat elimination instructor. who would be a better teacher to teach future spy how to take down an assassin than an ACTUAL assassin ( and one who made quite a Reputation at blackthorne for outsmarting his upperclassmen and instructors ) ?

𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙿𝙴𝚁𝚂𝙾𝙽𝙰𝙻𝙸𝚃𝚈.

tbh, samuel is the epitome of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

he lives for the adrenaline rush; he will go out of his way and even risk his life sometimes to make missions more exciting ... but obviously, with a little planning beforehand to make sure missions are completed successfully

sam surprisingly is cooperative ( even if he really wants to do the opposite, he’d listen unless his quick-wit is essential for the situation ). his many years of experiences have made him realize how important intel and medical agents are to missions. he has a lot of respect for his fellow agents and students who aren’t concentrating their studies in the more physical combative majors

samuel likes being a nuisance. he’s quite devious and gets away with it a lot LMAO

he’s such a thespian it’s Unreal ... he’s so dramatic. but, this makes him excel at undercover missions bc this man enjoys acting way too much

samuel LOVES his students and it really cracks him up because if blackthorne student sam heard he’d be a mentor in the future, he’d laugh in your face

aka he’s the Cool Teacher at gallagher ok :’)

𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙳𝙾𝚂𝚂𝙸𝙴𝚁 / 𝙵𝚄𝙽 𝙵𝙰𝙲𝚃𝚂.

he still has the slightest french accent when he speaks, mostly to latch on to a remaining attachment he has to his mother and previous “ normal life ”

an excellent cook ... obviously he enjoys cooking french cuisine the most

he also is an avid art enthusiast and also loves fashion and architecture. he spends the majority of his salary on designer clothes and art pieces

if the faculty have to become normal professors, samuel is definitely up for teaching anything world history related !!

randomly knows a lot of natural history trivia thanks to his maternal grandmother, who was a botanist

the languages samuel currently knows is: french, english, spanish, italian, russian, german, arabic, japanese, and chinese ( mandarin & cantonese )

and that’s it !! im exhuasted and i can’t think of any wcs atm so pls if u guys have anything in mine PLEASE let me know :’)

#『 ✰ ｡ . * » ┇ 𝙢𝙞𝙨𝙘𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙣𝙚𝙤𝙪𝙨 ╱ ooc. 』#gallagher:intro #this is So Long ... im SORRY

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scoutception · 5 years

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Final Fantasy Type-0 review: Depression central

If there’s one Final Fantasy subseries whose fate gets me feeling down, it’s the Fabula Nova Crystallis series, a novel and ambitious concept based around various games and stories of different settings and casts of characters, but sharing common themes and mythos, putting them in different contexts in each. While a fascinating idea, it ran into nothing but trouble with each of its entries, with Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels being very divisive, to say the least, Final Fantasy Versus XIII running into an infamously extended development hell, only to finally emerge as Final Fantasy XV, now almost completely separate from its original concept, and the final big entry, Final Fantasy Type-0, vanishing until 5 years after its announcement in 2006, as a PSP exclusive that only came out in Japan, a rarity for the series when it comes to its higher profile spinoffs. Thankfully, in 2015, Type-0 got a remaster on the PS4, Xbox One, and PC, finally allowing other audiences to enjoy it. Was it worth the almost 10 year wait? Well, that’s something we’re about to find out now.

Story:

Final Fantasy Type-0 takes place on the world of Orience, divided into 4 great nations blessed with Crystals: the Dominion of Rubrum, a place for the study and teaching of magic granted by the Vermilion Bird crystal, the Kingdom of Concordia, a female led monarchy able to communicate and control monsters and, more importantly, dragons, and home to the Azure Dragon crystal, the Militesi Empire, a technologically advanced state able to produce great machines of war known as Magitek Armors, or MAs, through the power of their White Tiger crystal, and the Lorican Alliance, whose citizens are much larger and powerful than any other in Orience thanks to their more direct connection to their Black Tortoise crystal. Orience is, unfortunately, not a place of peace, with each of the 4 crystal states wishing to unite Orience under them, and making plenty of attempts to in the past. The motive behind this is the legend of the Agito, a messiah said to appear during Tempus Finis, an apocalyptic event prophesied in the somewhat dubious, yet widely believed, Nameless Tome, with every crystal state seeing it as their divine duty to create Agito, to the point of Rubrum training so called Agito cadets from its brightest and most magically adept citizens.

The story opens with yet another war being started in the year 842 by Milites, whose emperor has been deposed by the brilliant and ambitious Imperial Marshall Cid Aulstyne (Final Fantasy games have a tradition of having a character named Cid somewhere, and finally, he made it as main antagonist), who immediately sets out to attack Rubrum. What would otherwise be a “normal” invasion quickly turns disastrous for Rubrum when Milites unleashed a new device called a crystal jammer, which cuts Rubrum’s legionnaires from their connection to the crystal, rendering them helpless before the Militesi invaders. Even worse, Milites also deploys a l’cie, a human chosen by their nation’s crystal to become its direct servant, in exchange for immense power and near immortality, the use of which in warfare was mutually banned by each of the 4 nations. Just when Rubrum seems doomed, the mysterious Class Zero arrives, 12 cadets who are unaffected by the crystal jammer, raised by Rubrum’s even more mysterious archsorceress, Arecia Al-Rashia, who proceed to liberate the capital, Akademia. Now, with the addition of two promising but otherwise normal cadets, Machina Kunagiri and Rem Tokimiya, Class Zero becomes a vital part in Rubrum’s efforts to reclaim their lost land and defeat Milites, once and for all.

To just come out and say it, the story’s biggest weakness is the cast, or, more specifically, its use of the cast. While the playable cast alone is certainly large, at 14 characters, and the supporting cast only grows from there, almost nobody gets proper focus. The main 12 members of Class Zero, named after playing cards, consists of Ace, Deuce, Trey, Cater, Cinque, Sice, Seven, Eight, Nine, Jack, Queen, and King, and despite being the “proper” members of Class Zero, they all only have a few character traits each. Trey is a knowledgeable type that tends to ramble, Sice is an arrogant loner, Nine is a violent muscle head, Cinque is nice, but downright weird, and so on. While after a while they all grew on me, it’s still pretty unsatisfying, especially when Ace, the face of the game, gets neglected just as badly. The supporting cast gets it even worse, as outside of Arecia and Class Zero’s commanding officer, Kurasame, most of everyone else that’s notable either has minimal at best story presence, or doesn’t show up in the story, period, being relegated to sidequests. Ultimately, the most focused on characters are the two “normal” people in Class Zero, Machina and Rem, which kinda makes sense, giving a more grounded air compared to off how putting the others can be to begin with, but even they don’t work out quite well. While Rem is fine, she doesn’t do very much interesting with the time she gets, while Machina, on the other hand, is very, very unlikeable to the point of hurting the story, whether it be his own cold attitude or broodiness to put the usual RPG protagonist stereotype to shame, he ends up way more unsympathetic than near anyone else in the story, even most of the antagonists. While the cast overall is definitely flawed, though, they’re definitely entertaining at a lot of points, whether they come from the main cast, mostly Trey or Cinque, or from some of the side characters, mainly the extremely greedy Carla and, most memorably to me, the paranoid, bombing throwing Mutsuki.

Since the story doesn’t focus on the characters very much, the main focus is instead the war itself. While it definitely has a few twists and turns, especially starting in chapter 4, overall, the battles and events of the war aren’t the most interesting subject by itself. More interesting is the elements around the war. This is by far one of, if not the darkest game in the franchise, and it doesn’t shy away from showing just how messed up Orience is. Rubrum’s main strength comes in the form of its Agito cadets, meaning, teenagers, as young as 14, at that, and the tactics the military uses means they tend to die in droves. Even when it’s technically pragmatic, between magic proficiency peaking at teen years and decreasing with age, plus not having many other means to resistance, it’s still very uncomfortable, and keep in mind, this is what the good guys, or the relative ones, get up to. Milites, meanwhile, is all too happy to deploy superweapons, such as literal nukes, and its soldiers are disturbingly fanatic, being more than happy to massacre towns, and even refer to Class Zero as demons. Class Zero themselves were raised to be soliders, and feel almost nothing in battle, and Rubrum’s leadership are paranoid and petty, to the point of the military commander actively trying to get Class Zero killed out of pure spite. Eidolons, extremely powerful monsters able to be summoned by mages, demand the lives of their summoners, and there are outright suicide squads of cadets who are only meant to summon more powerful Eidolons. Additionally, a very important plot point is that the crystals automatically erase the memories of anyone who dies from everyone’s minds, to the point Rubrum’s citizens need to wear dog tags just so it can be confirmed they even existed after they die. While they try to justify it as a blessing from the crystals that allows people to move on and not be held back by the dead, all it’s done is completely desensitize Orience to death, and having characters casually talk about being informed of their friends or family dying, and not feeling a single thing, is pretty disturbing, especially when it’s named character involved. It does a very good job of showing how constant warring and lack of reverence for the dead has corrupted this world, even when many of the characters affected still remain sympathetic.

Unfortunately, the biggest flaw of the story to me is that there simply isn’t a lot of it to be found, at least in regards to the main story. While the game is comprised of 8 chapters, that’s more than a little inaccurate, as half of those consist of a short introduction and a singular mission, rather than the 2 or 3 missions in the rest of the chapters. The story only really gets moving in chapter 4, and even then, many important points aren’t addressed until chapter 8, which is a downright bizarre and sudden change of subject and tone compared to the rest of the game, to the point a second playthrough is required because of how many holes are left otherwise, and even then, it can be a bit difficult to figure out just what is going on. The biggest achievement of the writing, on the other hand, is the lore of the setting. Orience is a fascinating world, with a detailed history of each nation, plenty of info to find on the various characters, and examinations of the various enemies of the game, all stored in a book in the hub called the Rubicus. It’s also quite interesting seeing the perspective flip compared to Final Fantasy XIII; instead of l’cie “merely” being granted the use of magic, and quickly going through their usefulness, at least by their masters’ consideration, along with the main cast being comprised of them, l’cie in Type-0 are near demigods who often live hundreds of years, and are just as fearsome to the party as to everyone else, for instance. Overall, though, while there are certainly many problems with the writing, I can’t help but say it works quite well regardless. Even with the limited time for both the story itself and the characters, it still builds a cast worth rooting for throughout the horrible situations, and an effective atmosphere that’s quite good at leaving you feeling somber. Moments like the entirety of the opening chapter, showing the utter devastation inflicted on Akademia in a mere three hours, and the various costly, large battles are very effective moments, and the ending is easily one of the saddest endings I’ve seen in a video game, for all the right reasons. Even the final chapter, odd as it is, has a lot of cool revelations and setpieces to me, at least now that I comprehend it.

Gameplay:

Type-0 is an action RPG that has you control the 14 members of Class Zero on various missions, each one possessing a different weapon. Ace uses cards, Deuce uses a flute (I swear they aren’t all this weird), Trey uses a bow, Cater uses a magic infused pistol, Cinque uses a mace, Sice uses a scythe, Seven uses a whipblade, Eight fights with his bare hands, Nine uses a lance, Jack uses a katana, Queen uses a longsword, King uses dual revolvers, Machina uses dual rapiers, and Rem uses dual daggers. Each one possesses a vastly different moveset and playstyle, such as Cinque being slow, but strong and tanky, Sice encouraging an aggressive hit and run style of play, even getting stronger for the more enemies she defeats while taking minimal hits, Trey excelling at range to a much degree than anyone else, while being near helpless up close, and Deuce being more of a supporter, having great support abilities, while her attacks are fairly weird to get used to, though effective on their own once you understand them. Despite the huge amount of characters, they’re actually fairly well balanced, all of them having important strengths and weaknesses, and while some can definitely be better than others, with Trey in particular coming to mind, possessing absurd range and the ability to charge his shots, it’s never quite game breaking. You can have up to three characters in your party, though their AI isn’t exactly great. They can certainly distract enemies well, and will make sure to heal you if your HP gets low, they don’t tend to be aggressive, and are terrible at avoiding the attacks of most enemies more complex than your average imperial trooper, and are near guaranteed to die to bosses. Speaking of which, the main wrinkle is that, while it varies, overall, your characters are not very durable, and in fact take hits about as well as wet toilet paper when faced with most enemies. This is balanced by the sheer amount of people you have. One person dies on a mission, don’t sweat it, you’ve got 13 backups. Of course, this also encourages training them all up and learning to play them as well, which is complicated by only characters in the active party gaining experience. Leveling up, in addition to granting the usual stat boosts, also grants ability points, which you can use to purchase or upgrade command or passive abilities and moves.

While just attacking enemies normally is decently effective, it can put you in unnecessary danger, and while you do have items like potions you can use to restore your health quickly, the most efficient way to fight is to use breaksights and killsights. Every enemy has at least one attack that leaves them vulnerable for a short time either before or after using said attacking. Hitting them during this period will trigger a break, or, if their health is low enough, killsight. Breaksights take a good chunk of their health away and stuns them, giving you a chance to attack them freely, while killsights just kill them outright. This one mechanic adds a lot to the gameplay, encouraging you to learn enemy patterns and attacks to see when they are vulnerable, and getting the timing down can make otherwise fearsome enemies easy to take care of. Of course, some enemies won’t take this very well, and may counterattack or even go into berserk states after recovering from breaksights, so you still have to be careful. Every character has 4 commands: regular attacks with their weapons, 2 slots that can either hold abilities or offensive magic spells, and a defensive command, whether it be the cure spell to restore health, putting up a magic wall to nullify some attacks, or just flat out blocking, which, while still causing you to suffer damage, prevents being knocked down, letting you score breaksights easier than if you were to simply dodge. Magic can be upgraded by harvesting phantoma from dead enemies, coming in various types like red for fire magic, green for defensive magic, and purple for unique spells. While powerful, magic usually takes a large chunk out of your magic points, meaning it’s better to save it for more dire situations, though harvesting phantoma restores small amounts of MP. As for equipment, aside from weapons, you have access to accessories that do things such as increasing HP by a certain percentage, giving immunity to status effects, or raising defense, though everyone can only have 2 accessories at a time. You also have three different squad commands: triad maneuver, which simply causes the party to do 3 powerful, rapid attacks, Eidolon, which summons an Eidolon you can control for a short time, in exchange for KOing the character that summoned it, and Vermilion Bird, a powerful spell that, to actually become powerful, has to be upgraded using crystal shards, which, while fairly easy to get most of the time, aren’t very numerous.

Type-0 uses a mission system, throwing you into various locations to complete objectives, though it usually equates to to reach the end of the area and kill an enemy commander. Most locations are pretty linear, though they all have a few side areas you can go to, usually for more items. You get graded based on how fast you completed the mission, how much phantoma you harvested, and how many party members got KOed during the mission, with getting the best rank on all three categories getting you an S rank, which gives a bonus item. Beating each mission on a difficulty above easy also unlocks other bonuses, whether they be additional items up for purchase or unlocking new spells or Eidolons, or just flat giving you a rare item. Completing missions also gives you money, with more the higher the difficulty and the higher your rank. Speaking of difficulties, there are 4 of them: cadet, which is just easy mode, officer, normal mode, Agito mode, which is a hard mode that makes every enemy 30 levels higher than on cadet and officer, and Finis, which is only available after completing the game once, and is, just plain absurd. All enemies have their levels increased by 50, they’re in permanent rage mode, causing them to move twice as fast and hurt twice as much, and you’re restricted to only being able to use one person per mission. It’s not much worth the effort. Aside from completing missions, your main source of items, magic, and Eidolons is from completing special orders, optional objectives that can pop up in various areas. While there’s various generic, white orders that only give items at the end of the mission for doing stuff like not getting hit for 30 seconds or not using magic for a few minutes, there are also specific, red ones with more specific objectives like taking out certain enemies, that give out better rewards. The main problem with accepting them is that, if you fail to complete them, you risk instant being killed over it, though you can avoid it you’re fast enough, as it’s delivered through portals on the ground.

In between missions, you’re allowed to explore Akademia, chatting with NPCs or party members, or engaging in “free time events” which are either conversations with random people, or cutscenes that tend to have much more interesting information. You only have a limited amount of hours until the next story mission starts, with each event taking two hours away, though time doesn’t pass just running around and talking to people without events. While a neat concept that could easily be like Persona, in practice, it doesn’t add much. While you can get some interesting information at times, and doing events also gives you items, it’s not very in depth otherwise. Even the sidequests with the more prominent side characters just consist doing their events whenever they’re available and doing a sidequest for them, eventually getting admittedly very good bonuses at the end of their little storylines. The other thing you can do with your free time is go out into the world map, where you can visit extremely small towns, get into random encounters, visit dungeons, and... not much else. While the world map isn’t tiny, there’s just not much to find. While there’s many towns, they are, again, tiny, only consisting of a single small area with a shop or two, a sidequest, and a little unofficial side quest to get a l’cie stone, which can be traded into a certain NPC to unlock lore entries in the Rubicus. There’s just not much of interest, and you’re very heavily restricted in where you’re allowed to even go on the world map, only being able to go to areas officially reclaimed by Rubrum, or that are the destination of the current story mission. Only in chapter 7 do you finally get some kind of freedom, to the point of being able to gain an airship to allow easy traversal of the world. Plus, most dungeons aren’t even meant to be explored on a first playthrough, with only about one or two being reasonable at that point, not that there’s even much to find besides l’cie stones and a chance at a rare item, emphasis on chance, since they’re always in a specific chest at the end that can only be opened once without reloading your save, and the chance of getting the most valuable item from them is rather low.

As for other activities, you can train in the arena, for downright piddly gains, or take on sidequests, most of which just contain of going out and defeating a certain amount of specific enemies, giving over items, and so forth. Most rewards aren’t great, but a few, namely from the more notable characters like the leaders of Rubrum, Kurasame, and Arecia, give very notable rewards. Sidequests don’t take time to do, but often require you to leave Akademia, meaning you need to weigh the time lost going out to do the quests against the time you could use doing events, which is difficult when you don’t know just what rewards either give out. When it comes mission time, though, you gotta venture out on the world map to your next destination. Speaking of the world map, along with the regular missions, there are also RTS style missions, where you, controlling a party member on the world map, help the dominion army reclaim forts and towns by taking out enemies and having units generated by controlled areas weaken said areas until you can invade them in a regular mission style. Instead of being graded on phantoma harvested, you’re instead graded on objectives completed, as occasionally you’ll get orders to do stuff like defend a fort for a specific amount of time or taking out a large enemy. While technically optional, you get bonuses for completing them beyond mission grade, such as access to “hero units” and direct control of certain areas. There’s a decent amount of these missions in the game, and they do make for an interest change of pace, but they aren’t much notable. You’re even allowed to skip participating in them, though obviously you miss out on rewards.

The highlights of the game are, rather sensibly, the end of chapter missions. Not only are they much longer than typical missions, they have much more unique settings, and, of course, bosses. This game has some very enjoyable, if difficult, bosses, ranging from the giant mech Brionac that is more than capable of wiping you out in a single attack, to the highly mobile mech of Qator Bashtar, Cid’s second in command, to several fights with the near invincible Gilgamesh (another recurring character in the series). My personal favorite is the boss of chapter 5, the dragon Shinryu, which is also all too happy to instantly kill you with most of its attacks, even more so than Brionac, and spend most of the fight enveloped in the darkness surrounding the arena you’re in, only being visible by the lights of its glowing red eyes. It makes for an amazing setpiece, and losing to it is almost more enjoyable than winning simply due to the failsafe implemented since the devs expected most players to lost, the details of which I simply cannot spoil. Finally, on a second playthrough, two new types of missions are available for you: expert trials, and Code Crimson missions. Expert trials are optional missions you can do during your free time, which you’ll likely have a lot of since events you see on a previous playthrough can be viewed again at no time cost on repeat playthroughs. While technically available in the first playthrough as well, they are way too difficult for the average player, i.e who isn’t insane like me. Code Crimson missions, on the other hand, are replacements for the end of chapter missions, consisting of you going off to do other stuff. While an interesting concept, in practice, they aren’t anything special, especially when they’re replacing the most interesting parts of the game, and they barely give any more story context either. The chapter 7 mission is the one exception, being very short, but an interesting concept and adding a bit more to the story. Plus, completing them all on one playthrough unlocks an interesting alternate ending, so that alone makes them worth a go.

As for the hardest challenges to be found, they’re a bit lacking. Aside from the regular optional dungeons, there’s one notable bonus dungeon and two notable superbosses. The bonus dungeon is the Tower of Agito, which can only be reached by airship, which consists of 5 floors where you need to fight 100 specific enemies, such as tonberries and behemoths, with plenty of chests to open in between, ending off on an extremely disappointing end boss that is just a Malboro that happens to be massive. While it certain sounds difficult, and pretty much everything is capable of one shotting you, once you get into a good pattern, it’s really just boring. Most of the time, they just spawn so slowly, and while after a while more of them come out at a time, it takes about an hour and a half at best to get through even if you’re otherwise efficient. As for the superbosses, there’s Nox Suzaku, only available in a second playthrough and onward, who has a chance of appearing whenever you harvest phantoma, stealing everything you try to harvest until it decides to go away. Aside from making it go away on its own, you can beat it up, which is quite a doozy. Instead of fighting you directly, it summons phantoms of various enemies to fight you, and while you could just defeat them all, this doesn’t do anything to Nox itself. Instead, you have to let the enemies defeat you, causing Nox to appear for a short time, allowing you to attack it until it retreats. Rinse and repeat, it’s not that difficult, and the rewards aren’t that great, so the main reason to beat it up is just to make it go away, because it stealing your phantoma is extremely annoying, especially when it can show up during missions, since you can’t just leave to fight it, and it’s entirely possible for it to flat make it impossible to get an S rank on that mission it decides it doesn’t want to leave. Not exactly a fun mechanic. The other superboss is, per tradition, Gilgamesh, in a stronger form than in the story. He only shows up on a third playthrough, at a few different locations on the world map, in the form of a portal. Entering said portals causes him to randomly select one of your characters to challenge. If you win, you get that character’s ultimate weapon, but if he wins, he steals your character’s current weapon. The ultimate weapons are kinda underwhelming, especially considering you may well have everything else done after a second playthrough, and it’s annoying getting specific people picked, but it’s actually a fun and fair fight, if easy to figure out.

Overall, Type-0 has some of the tightest gameplay among all the Final Fantasy spinoffs, and is the main thing that holds it together. It has a fast, hectic pace to it, interesting enemies to tackle, and a wide variety of people to try out. Really, the main criticism I have is the actual missions you have with which to try them out. The other main story missions aren’t much to look at, and same goes for the expert trials and Code Crimson missions. I’m sure this is at least partially due to originating on the PSP, and having to deal with its limitations, something that’s about become a theme in this review. Overall, though, it’s still more than satisfactory.

Graphics:

The visuals of Type-0 are a very mixed big, unfortunately leaning more towards negative. More than anything else, they make it very apparent that Type-0 was originally a PSP game. While the members of Class Zero themselves have decent looking models, if rather unemotive, everyone else, except a few important characters like Arecia, are much lower quality, especially the faces. Here’s a comparison between Ace and Carla.

The textures don’t fare much better, looking very blatantly stretched and blurry, especially on the world map, where bridges are just one long, hideous texture. Most locations outside of, again, the end of chapter missions don’t look anything special, and so many areas are just reused over and over. You go into a town, it’ll look like every other town, at least of that region. You invade a fort, it’ll look like every other fort. Repeat for almost every mission in the game. Thankfully, the big story missions look quite impressive and creative, my favorites being chapter 5′s, taking place on frozen clouds that end up near breathtaking, and especially the setting of the very final mission, which is, to avoid anything too specific, downright insane, in a good way. Another positive are the enemy designs, more specifically, the actual monsters, with enemies such as bombs and flans resembling their earlier FF designs much more than most modern entries. Unfortunately, there’s just one problem: the actual variety of enemy designs is rather lacking, with the majority of enemies being slight alterations or palette swaps. It’s a more minor point than most, but still something. The original enemy designs are quite inventive though, and overall, this is a game that excels more in general design than actual fidelity, like the spiraling Concordian capital surrounded by a sea of clouds.

Sound:

The music of Type-0 is plain great, as is usual for the series. The boss themes especially are fantastic, along with the main theme, The Beginning of the End. It also sounds quite distinctive compared to most of the rest of the series, having a greater focus on metal, fitting the more modern aesthetic. The English voice acting, on the other hand, isn’t quite great. It’s pretty obvious the dub was a rush job, considering Type-0 lacked the simultaneous localization process of the main series games, resulting in it being very lackluster overall. There are some notable voice acting names in it, like Cristina Vee as Cinque, Bryce Papenbrook as Machina, Danielle Judovits as Carla, Cassandra Lee as Mutsuki, and even Matthew Mercer as Trey, and they all do good jobs, but the rest of the cast varies, especially Class Zero itself. Ironically enough, the side characters tend to have much more solid performances, with special props going to Steve Blum as Cid, giving a very menacing perfomance, as well as other characters like Aria, Class Zero’s orderly, and Kazusa, the resident mad scientist. Corri English as Sice and Heather Hogan Watson as Queen also fair quite well. Beyond that though, the performances can be rather forced, like Nine and Cater, or just weak overall, like Rem and Deuce. This is not helped by the normal, in game cutscenes themselves, with their structure causing many long, awkward pauses nearly every sentence. It does, however, improve as the game goes on, to the point of the final cutscenes not being hurt by it near at all.

Conclusion:

Overall, this is a solid recommended by me. Even with the weakness of elements like the graphics and the short, underdeveloped story, the core gameplay just holds up that well, and there’s quite a bit to enjoy in the weaker elements even beyond that. Overall, this is one of my favorite Final Fantasy spinoffs, and the fact that it will most likely never get a sequel due to the departure of its director, Hajime Tabata, makes me very sad. With that unneeded note, this shall be the last of the Final Fantasy spinoffs I play in some time. The next time the name Final Fantasy pops up as the subject of one of my reviews, it shall be about the main series. Till next time.

-Scout

#Final Fantasy #final fantasy type 0 #game review #long post #action rpg #JRPG

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