maybe i'm reading too much into this (and i probably am) but it's such an interesting choice for hori to make it so izuku's rightful place during this final war arc was for him to be at katsuki's side, but he gets STOLEN from that rightful place to hear?? what honestly is a very noticeably out of place/ill-timed hetero love confession (i think even tsu is like THIS AINT THE TIME FOR THIS) and then katsuki DIES because of that. like forced heterosexuality directly leads to katsuki getting killed. izuku doesn't belong in this forced heterosexual love confession he belongs with katsuki and being taken away from katsuki leads to him almost losing katsuki forever.
so i've been hooking up with this guy since august and he not only looks SO MUCH like george but he also has an eerily similar personality to him. he's really sarcastic, cute, and charming. our personalities mash together pretty well and i like him very much. ANYWAYS we had sex for the first time three weeks ago and honestly, it wasn't that great. he had some problems with yknow... getting it UP but i don't really mind it since neither of us has a lot of sexual experience and we're comfortable with each other enough to talk about it. however, in the past three weeks, he has given me MULTIPLE hints about wanting ME to fuck HIM. he's been talking so much about gay sex, fingering, anal, etc., and one time i made a joke about pegging him and he suddenly got so flustered. it was kinda cute but like DO I REALLY WANT TO PEG HIM? i guess i do bc i've been thinking about it so much? idk it could be kinda hot
he's coming back from a trip on sunday AND i think i'm going to ask him if he wants to do it once we meet up????????????????? if he says yes i'll be pegging my own personalized canadian (also potentially bi) georgenotfound???????? i doubt we'll ever have a serious thing but i'm here for a good time. he's such a great guy btw i hope he'll find his dream one day. he genuinely deserves a good dick but until then i'm taking on the job which is... honestly kind of an honor
I’m rereading Po3 and despite its flaws I really enjoyed the introduction to the three. Jaykit isn’t mentioned to be blind in the first few chapters and instead they chose to show how much MORE capable he is compared to his littermates; until at the end of chapter 3, he brings up his blindness on his own. It makes forcing him to be a medicine cat SO much more frustrating because it really feels like they’re setting him up to be a warrior and choose his own fate (note i haven’t finished the reread this is just my first impression)
I like how you seem to take that path in BB regardless! It makes his arc so much more enjoyable
His arc in canon is super frustrating because he's such an independent character who clearly wants to make his own decisions in life, but then he just gets shoved into the medcat den. I LIKE that he ultimately goes there and that he enjoys it; but it was still really fucked up that they stripped away his autonomy in the process.
Re: they are not real, they are writing choices. Taking away the choices a disabled character can make over their own life, forcing them into a celibate nun role, and then going "awwwww dont worry see? he likes it! This was the best thing for him :)" was fucked up.
And imo it didn't have to be that way! You wouldn't have to go the FULL route I did with big changes, he could just be more involved in the descision to stop being a warrior apprentice and it would be fine. Minor change that would make a world of difference.
I do also have to interject to say though... blindness should really not be an extremely severe impairment for a ThunderClan cat.
I'm dead serious.
Whiskers are built-in sensors that tell you the exact position of everything within several inches of your head, ears swerve to pick up sound, and the jacobson's organ provides a sense of smell so keen that I have an entire Clanmew expansion draft because I needed to make WORDS describing the power of this sense that humans do not have. I cannot stress enough how delicate their other senses are, felines do not rely on their sight like primates do
ThunderClan lives in a mixed-oak woodland, where sight is already often obscured by foliage, objects are close together (for whiskers to feel), and nearly every movement makes noise against the leaf litter. RiverClan and (moor-running) WindClan cats would have a harder time with this disability than Thunder or Shadow.
Cat sight SUCKS to begin with. It sucks BADDD. They don't have color vision, they're significantly nearsighted, and they can't track up-and-down movements well. WC doesn't write realistic cats (more like small fuzzy people really) and I also work with more humanesque eyesight, but the only thing Jay should really lose is an ability to rapidly track a small animal swerving fast. Blind cats are often still excellent hunters in spite of that!
So it's an extra big waste that they railroaded him into a position he didn't choose, saying he couldn't be a warrior. This is the perfect disability to write, if you want to explore how ableism can impact the characters in this society who ARE legitimately still capable of nearly full independence, but still need to find accommodations for what they can't do.
In the same arc they're doing the dumb Cinder Reincarnation Plotline, no less!! Where SHE is also feeling like she has no choice over her "destiny," and gets a conflict over a potentially disabling injury
"Oh nooo if cinderpaw breaks her leg she wont be a warrior!"
"What the f-- Im Jaypaw and im reporting live from the scene where a Category 1 Idiot Moment is taking place. Woman breaks leg, suddenly everyone believes she is a horse, more at 11."
One of these days I should really make "herb guides" just covering how various sensory disabilities impact the lives of Clan cats and some tips for writing them as warriors, especially between Clans. Stuff you wouldn't usually consider, like how much noise deaf cats tend to make, how RiverClan would get a ton of sinus infections and lose their sense of smell, being blind in Sky vs Thunder, etc.
not to get all "actually☝️" about it but. the whole point of this is the fact that it isn't at all eddie's fault and buck just doesn't know how to properly process or recognize his feelings and know what he's missing *until* he gets presented with a specific situation. in truth buck has no right to be mad at eddie for building bonds with other ppl and it's why he has to do some introspection. this is not a "oh no poor buck eddie apologize to him!!!" thing, it's about buck getting, for lack of a better term, a good emotional humbling. eddie deserves good friendships and relationships, full stop. and if he likes the way he feels when he hangs out with tommy then great!! he's his own person and not a tool to further buck's character. but you also can't expect buck to immediately recognize that because, again, and for the millionth time, the whole POINT is that he doesn't. so if it has to get ugly and uncomfortable and embarrassing for him to do so then that is what will happen and that doesn't make either of them bad people. this is not a blame to be passing around. it's just them being human beings
no of fence to jon snow fans who for some reason care about his exact age, but these discussions just annoy me no end. not only bc there's no way any weirwood flashbacks bran has to rhaegar/lyanna will come with time/datestamps, but also bc there's always comments like this:
SEVERAL turns of the moon (ie, months)?! have these people never seen a human baby before or just have no concept of their ages? even if we take into account travel time from the toj to wf, meaning jon was not a newborn too fresh out the oven when catelyn and robb arrived, there's still a difference between a newborn and a 3mo and an even bigger difference between those infants and an older baby 5-7mo. there's very good reasons these lines were cut. whatever birthdates can be worked out internally for jon and robb from when they're first mentioned as 15 and 16 don't matter in the end, bc grrm doesn't care about a consistent timeline and the actual text of catelyn's pov and ned's convo with robert about cheating on her should outweigh any guesstimates about jon's official nameday wrt robb's. catelyn may not have cared for jon, but she would sure as hell have noticed his nameday if it came before robb's and made him ned's firstborn. if jon's birthday canonically came before robb's then either ned's cover story would not involve adultery (not impossible for him to sire a bastard before his wedding), or he'd just give jon a new nameday along with his new name to fit the adultery lie. it makes no sense for him to lie about one and not the other, undermining the big lie with a little public clue of his story not adding up. whatever else she was as a stepmother, cat wasn't stupid and a bastard who was actually the eldest son being raised alongside her trueborn heir could be an even bigger insult than whether he was born of adultery or not.
BUT, the unknowability of jon's true birthday is not the only reason this annoys me, it's bc this is all based on the assumption that jon must be older since rhaegar/lyanna ran off together before ned married cat, as if both boys must have been conceived asap as robb canonically was when his parents consummated their marriage. and that's not how human reproduction works! even if you don't understand how fast babies grow in the first year, you should know that people who get pregnant do so through ovulation cycles and a lucky sperm finding an egg and all that, not just immediately getting knocked up as soon as one has p-in-v sex for the first time. not unless you only know mean girls sex ed where if you have sex you will get pregnant and die. (even tho lyanna did die, there's plenty of canon examples where pregnancy did not lead straight to death. also examples of people who did not get pregnant right away and even some who are/were sexually active and childless without always having moon tea on hand.) we can't know how long lyanna was having sex before that sperm+egg match happened or even how long she was with rhaegar before losing her technical virginity. if they were married, doesn't it make sense to think they didn't consummate their relationship until the wedding night either? that's the only leverage there is to ensure a status as wife rather than just mistress.
and while i just said grrm doesn't care about exact timelines and a lot is still foggy surrounding the rebellion and esp rhaegar, there is one timemarker wrt robert's rebellion he voluntarily threw in, time and time again: that stannis was besieged at storm's end for almost a whole year. that siege, which mind you, did not match the duration of the entire war. it only started after robert won his battles at gulltown and summerhall, returned to storm's end, and then went out and lost the battle of ashford, leaving his homeland open to the reachermen. the same siege which only ended when ned made a detour there after the sack of king's landing, before going to the toj. even if lyanna may not have given birth that exact day ned found her, she could only be waiting in that bloody bed for weeks at the most, not months. so if rhaegar knocked her up the very same night he carried her off and jon was still a newborn when ned found her after the siege of storm's end had ended, wouldn't that mean lyanna was pregnant for well over a year? that's not how human pregnancy works either! so, maybe that's proof that jon and robb, whichever order they were actually born in, were actually very close in age as babies, much closer than if they were both conceived asap.
and really, jon's actual birthdate does not matter imho, when he was raised not just as the bastard to robb's trueborn heir, but with robb also known by catelyn and the world as ned's firstborn (which he was, in any case, as jon was ned's nephew by birth). what difference could a birthdate before robb's make (even were there some means of discovery) after ned, cat, and robb are all dead? if one is looking only at his birth parents then he's only a firstborn child on lyanna's side, but definitely a second son on rhaegar's side. maybe he was always meant to be a second son with a not much older half-brother! even if the aegon fka young griff is not in fact rhaegar's son, he'll still be known as aegon vi targaryen, meaning jon will never be known as any father's elder son. if i may reference mean girls again, it's not going to happen.
a doctor turned serial killer turned doctor again, an actor who paints, a gang leader, a mining baron, and a vice overseer walk into the room.
oh yeah and they lead karnaca now.
dishonored 2 is my fav game but i think it's mid, story-wise. here's why dh1 works and why dh2's overarching story sorta misses
tl;dr: story integration is critical for gameplay that offers audience payoff, but emily's personal arc from dishonor to honor is inconsistently demonstrated in the story, and is not an interactive part of the gameplay.
essay/long version under cut >
recap: what's dishonored's deal
[skip if you want]
dh1 is an underdog story: corvo is an honorable man swept up in the machinations of a callous city, so his canonical ending being 'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation being restored in a more hopeful city, due to his & the player's rejection of the violent connotations of the tagline 'revenge solves everything.'
similarly, in dh1 DLCs, daud's story arc is that of an anti-hero: a dishonorable man who realises too late he has done irreparable harm. he sees the error of his ways after a single monumental death, and eventually a single life redeems him when he/the player stepped in to circumvent a terrible fate for a child, enabling her to rule unfettered.
daud & corvo come to a satisfying conclusion within the extent of their narrative arcs. it doesn't matter that a child on a throne isn't really a fix for a decaying empire - the player's actions throughout the city of dunwall was what mattered - and these stories could be framed as parables. in that sense, young emily as a ruler is a metaphor for a hopeful future for the city & empire.
dishonored 1 & its DLCs are also great examples of storytelling with perfectly integrated gameplay - you, the player, worked towards the outcome that redeemed the protagonists.
in your efforts to save young emily, you either achieved a good outcome (corvo) or prevented a worse outcome (daud).
bringing us to dh2 -
what's emily's arc
emily's arc is a coming of age: we're introduced to a reigning empress who questions her role & skillset ("am i the empress my mother wanted me to be?"), then her titular fall from grace occurs. from there, she learns to reject the violent, selfish connotations in 'take back whats yours' tagline (a la daud & corvo!) while rediscovering why her rule is critical to the empire.
emily's rule is no longer metaphorical, but:
a literal thing for audience assessment (is emily a good ruler?) AND
the crux of her storyline.
at the beginning of dh2, emily is introduced as a disengaged leader ("i wish i could just run away from all this;" "i dont know if whether i should sail to the opposite side of the world, or have everyone around me executed"). the antihero has a precedent for the dishonored series in daud, so it's not at first glance an issue*, however, the fact that emily has ruled poorly reframes corvo & daud's endings as being less than ideal (a moralistic retcon) *we could talk here about how ready an audience was in 2016 for a flawed women as a protagonist, hell, even in 2023,,,
throwback to the beginning of this essay when i said:
'this child will rule over an empire' isn't about the child's rule but rather about corvo's reputation
emily's story arc, unlike for daud & corvo, is literally about the quality of her rule. we're no longer in metaphor territory (ironic phrase): a parable-style ending doesn't work.
does emily become a good ruler
we know she becomes a good ruler because the game says so. it is narrated to the audience via a (literal) word of god in the space of 30 seconds, after the final boss. the outsider tells us that emily becomes known as Just & Clever.
drawing a distinction here - this narration is not the same as the player actively being involved.
the player does not throughout the game become aware that emily has made political allies. during the game, she doesn't talk to these characters about saving karnaca or being a better ruler to the empire (there's a few lines might imply it, but you need to be actively looking and being careful to wait for every voice line. it's a far cry from daud & corvo's fight to save emily being unmissable - even though daud doesn't know at the beginning that's the goal).
how does the game show it
you can coincidentally not kill most of your subjects and never be aware that emily is looking to restore karnaca by means of instating a council - it's never brought up. it *couldn't* be brought up, because that council serves under the fake duke (armando), who is the last person she speaks to before she leaves for dunwall. its her suggestion that he rules karnaca, but armando's condition is that he will rule as he sees fit.
to back up a bit, emily's canonical method of restoring karnaca is by banding together key allies - hypatia, stilton, [byrne &or paolo], pastor, under a council beneath the duke's body double. they are passionate people who would each individually make worthwhile advisors, but if you think about those characters sitting at a table trying to reach an agreement, it feels like an assortment of people that emily didn't kill along the way and doesn't feel organic (up to interpretation). it's not stated if emily herself banded this council together, but logically she must have (worth a mention these are mostly characters that you as the player had reasonable rationale to kill during a high chaos run, except pastor). the underlying concept may be that karnaca's power is returned to its people - which is interesting given that the monarchy remains and armando's decision is final.
this overarching solution could also be taken as a critique to dh1's 'put your kid on the throne,' which is another reason its worthwhile looking at how emily was shown to be a better leader. obviously my point isn't that her solution was bad given the circumstance, but i mean she has very little agency here in all. if emily was shown to be more controlling as a leader, this could be interpreted as character growth, but that's not the case.
coming of age
how do you learn & grow when you can't specify your failings? emily doesn't really touch on her shortcomings as an empress. she non-specifically worries delilah makes a better empress than her. it's hard to argue her worries are meaningful when someone good at their job will still worry when lives are in the balance.
emily's best 'aha' moments (eg. crack in the slab comment about gaining perspective) are consistently undercut by a conversation with sokolov or meagan afterwards in which she demonstrates she hasn't learned anything (before the grand palace, emily condemns 'toadies sucking up to me' and is reminded by meagan that she's part of the problem). the story is confused about what it's trying to say about emily's progress, and when she's meant to show progress, if she was meant to show any progress at all. it could be argued that emily was never even a bad ruler, she had just been fed misinformation about the problems in karnaca and been the victim of slander by her political enemies. the game doesn't make this clear - it's easier to argue that the opposite is true given that her allies only have criticism.
worth a mention here that the heart quotes about armando - a fake ruler - interestingly mirror emily's character concerns. "see how he sighs? his life is a gilded cage." but this essay is already long.
while corvo & daud spend their games (and through the gameplay) 'earning' their redemption, emily is being led by the NPCs around her to a conclusion and a fix for the political mess in karnaca: meagan & sokolov guide emily to her missions, and there's no recurring quest for emily to investigate possible allies. she is able to gather the people she hasn't killed to herself by manner of... post-game narration. during the game, she's primarily concerned with getting her throne back.
an easy fix: if there had been less dialogue & narrative focus on emily's failings perhaps the ending would have felt more satisfying. it has the feel of cut content, but i don't know what was cut to be able to comment on it.
so what went wrong?
i can't help but wonder if arkane were worried they would lose a certain demographic if corvo wasn't playable (may have been deemed too much of a risk - 2013 was a different time), and so they had to take out story elements that were unique to emily's growth as a character/empress, because the usual storyline/gameplay integration had to work for both characters - in other words, gameplay that made sense for both corvo & emily was prioritised before emily's story & character development. which is a silly problem to have in a game that added character voices for the sake of improving characterisation - maybe emily's tale would have felt more akin to a parable if she had less lines that betrayed her ignorance (to the disdain of those around her).
i wish more care had been taken with emily's story. most players will never really notice the large variety of different endings - they're not particularly satisfying in and of themselves.
it's ironic that one of Emily's complaints is about her father/protector being overbearing, when his (parallel universe) presence in the gameplay may be one of the reasons her own narrative arc falls flat.
what are the upsides here
changing tune from what didn't work - don't you think the concept is fantastic? it's a great idea overall - can you imagine if the coming of age storyline was better integrated into the game?
it's valuable to talk about the integration of story and gameplay and characterisation from a craft perspective. dh2 genuinely is my favourite game - it's beautiful, the imm-sim design philosophy makes the world a delight to explore, the combat gives endless creative options for tackling any fight, there is a far greater diversity of cast in an in-text canonical way. there's loads to love!
i love emily as a dodgy leader, to me it adds interesting dimensionality to the outsider's narrations - of course in dunwall there's never a neat happily ever after! emily, like the outsider, both work well as characters who hold ultimate power but aren't necessarily worthy of it - and this makes perfect sense for the dishonored universe's morality & critiques of power. however, within this grey area there's still plenty of room for a satisfying ending, which isn't what we ended up with, whatever the true reason for that was. and also, damn, emily's a marked assassin empress, if she can't lead well then who can?
while dh1 was criticised for its narrative simplicity, dh2 in contrast and in hindsight shows us that simplicity isn't so bad - there's satisfaction in gameplay achieves a clear, simple narrative goal.
why did laurent start dating / having sex with maxime, even before nicaise found out? maybe this is something we find out in ch. 20, but throughout hiuh i’ve really struggled to understand or empathize with laurent in this area. you’ve mentioned him being self-destructive, or how it was good for his ego to bring a date in front of damen. but why did he feel the need to throw it in damen’s face when damen was the one who got dumped? why would he let maxime call him baby and walk all over his boundaries when this guy is a total stranger? i know some people have speculated that maxime is a uncle-stand in, but to me that doesn’t parallel bc there the abuse happened because laurent did (unfortunately) love and trust his uncle at the beginning, which enabled his uncle to abuse him. i’m honestly really trying to see where this sexual self-harm aspect of laurent comes from when it’s with a complete stranger who doesn’t seem to like laurent as a person or give him any real affection. he said sex was the foundation of their relationship, which seems odd for an ascetic person like laurent who even in hiuh canon doesn’t seem to have engaged in that kind of relationship before dating damen, when he was in a way worse physical and emotional state, unless i’m wrong.
i really, really hope this doesn’t come off as criticizing or accusatory in any way — it is your story and you can characterize laurent any way you want! to me it’s felt like this is the one area so far where laurent has been extremely defensive and refuses to take responsibility, even though it really hurt damen — not just being jealous, but being compared to maxime over and over again by laurent’s friends and implicitly by laurent himself — not to mention how it hurt nicaise. yes, damen had flings, but he didn’t try to replace laurent after two months or ever shove it in laurent’s face. and yet it feels like damen over-apologizes for ever asking about maxime or suggesting laurent’s behavior was harmful. i don’t see how damen could get over this massive insecurity when laurent appears to ridicule or dismiss him for bringing it up, like with the condom conversation or the pet name issue.
feel free to ignore this message, but always appreciate hearing why you chose a particular characterization!
hello! i get this question every once in a while so i thought i'd answer it today since we're about to be done with the story. i didn't take it as an attack or anything and it's a very cool question!
but why did he feel the need to throw it in damen’s face when damen was the one who got dumped?
in a way, reading your ask, i think you answered some of these things yourself. why did he bring maxime to a bunch of events knowing damen would be there? because he wanted the upper hand, he wanted to be seen as having moved on (remember that he thinks damen has moved on, too), because it's an ego thing. but why do it if he was the one who dumped damen? same answers, but i'd add that it's implied in the story that laurent was surprised and hurt by how easily damen went along with the break up. laurent brings it up, says he can't do it anymore, and damen just goes to work and never comes back. once again, in a toxic and insecure way, there was a part of laurent that wanted damen to fight for it, to say "wait, let's turn things around" or something. obviously, that didn't happen, and laurent interpreted that as confirmation of a lot of negative thoughts he was already dealing with (damen wants out of this but he doesn't know how to do it, damen's too "nice" to say that he wants out, damen is looking for excuses to start arguments bc he's trying to get me to end this, etc.)
this is not me justifying laurent in any way. was it childish and immature to bring maxime to events bc he knew damen would be there and he wanted, along with all the reasons listed above, to make damen jealous? yes, probably. is it petty? yes. is it ooc? i don't know. i think laurent does exhibit some pettiness in the books.
why would he let maxime call him baby and walk all over his boundaries when this guy is a total stranger? i know some people have speculated that maxime is a uncle-stand in, but to me that doesn’t parallel bc there the abuse happened because laurent did (unfortunately) love and trust his uncle at the beginning, which enabled his uncle to abuse him. i’m honestly really trying to see where this sexual self-harm aspect of laurent comes from when it’s with a complete stranger who doesn’t seem to like laurent as a person or give him any real affection.
this part of the question is a bit more complicated for me to explain. i 100% agree with people's complaints that in this aspect hiuh laurent is ooc (compared to canon laurent). in the books, he doesn't sleep with anyone but damen, so everything regarding laurent/other men is always going to be ooc in some way (unless it's non con, i suppose).
maxime has to be a stranger. maxime has to be someone laurent doesn't care about, doesn't value, doesn't respect. it would never work between them if maxime was not a stranger, which is ultimately what happens in the fic (let's, for a second, ignore the fact that they also don't work out bc lamen are in love lol). when maxime wants more, laurent cuts him out.
why does he have to be a stranger? because hiuh laurent's biggest issue in this story is that he can't be vulnerable enough to be loved and accept that love. he loved damen, but he couldn't get to a level of vulnerability that allowed him to explain himself, to show himself to damen as he really is, and without that a relationship can't last. when you feel like you have to hide parts of yourself from the person you love, eventually that turns into resentment and anger and hurt.
when he starts sleeping with maxime, he's not looking for another boyfriend. he's not looking for love. he's not sleeping with maxime because he's too horny to function either. he lets maxime fuck him because there is something to prove. and here I have to apologize because to me this detail was so clear during my writing process that I'm only now realizing I did not do a good enough job of integrating it EXPLICITLY into the story. what is there to prove? laurent has only ever slept with two people in his life and only damen was a pleasurable, consensual situation. so, here's the setting: laurent and damen break up, they go no contact, months pass, laurent is STRUGGLING (nicaise mentions this time and time and time again in the fic), laurent has no way of knowing that damen is also miserable, laurent has no way of knowing that damen hasn't moved on (damen is, actually, at this point in time, fucking other people). laurent isn't looking for love or dates or romance, but then maxime shows up and he gives laurent an opportunity to prove to himself several things:
he has effectively moved on from damen (in his mind, having sex with other people = the ultimate 'i'm done with damen" move)
he is in control. he has only had consensual sex with one person in his life, which gives damen symbolic power over him in a weird, fucked up way. or... maybe the word isn't power, but status. damen has a status in laurent's mind and memories because he's the first person laurent CHOSE to have sex with, the first person he loved and showed him it could be good, etc. as long as damen maintains that status, laurent will never stop thinking about him, will never have anything to compare damen to and say "see, it wasn't that big of a deal". which brings me to...
he wants to minimize damen. he wants dismiss what damen meant to him, what their entire relationship meant, so it can be easier to move on. how do you move on if you're thinking "oh I broke up with the love of my life lol"? laurent needs to tell himself what he had with damen wasn't unique, wasn't that special. he can have it again (the SEXUAL part).
needless to say, this fails. he has sex with maxime and finds that it's nothing like it was with damen because it's WORSE, because having sex with damen was having sex with someone who knew him and loved him and respected him. laurent has sex with maxime but he's still thinking about damen, he's still in love with damen, the same way damen is having sex with kyra or trying to date iris while thinking and missing laurent.
once this realization sort of sinks in (yes, he can have sex with other people, yet that doesn't erase damen's status in his brain bc damen was special for a bunch of reasons I'm not gonna type in here - THEY'RE IN LOVE, YOUR HONOR) that's when the self-harm comes into the picture. (this is discussed a bit in ch20 so SPOILERS but)
what kind of sex are maxime and laurent having? it's not the slow, gentle, love making stuff damen knows laurent was into. it's rough, it's degrading, it's not as pleasurable, it's a chore, it leaves marks. does laurent want those marks? we don't know. does maxime ask him if he does? we don't know. you can make it as non con as you want because the text doesn't go into detail.
the petnames. "why does laurent like it when maxime says it but not damen?" I don't think he does. he never gives damen a straight answer on this, but he does say that it makes him feel like a bimbo. it makes him feel slightly degraded. he says it wasn't terrible, but he never says he wanted it or that it was good. it's implied that damen tried it once or twice at the very beginning of their relationship, and I think we can all tell why laurent didn't like it back then with him either (bimbo feelings, laurent using him for money, the power imbalance, etc.)
uncle parallels. okay, this one's a bit tricky. yes, you're right to think that the abuse laurent's uncle subjected him to is nothing like his relationship with maxime for a plethora of reasons, but I think the narrative supports some people's opinions that maxime does resemble uncle in some ways (older, brunette, has a beard). i did not write maxime as a literal uncle stand in, so of course it's not going to be a perfect comparison. i wouldn't even call maxime and laurent's relationship abusive.
he said sex was the foundation of their relationship, which seems odd for an ascetic person like laurent who even in hiuh canon doesn’t seem to have engaged in that kind of relationship before dating damen, when he was in a way worse physical and emotional state, unless i’m wrong.
i tried to mirror canon in hiuh when it comes to laurent's... choices? in canon, damen is the first person he's with after his uncle because he's the only one laurent trusts. i don't have any doubts that canon laurent was terribly lonely and probably wanted to be loved waaaaay before damen came into the picture (post uncle, I mean) but his context and environment were so violent and dangerous that he couldn't let his guard down. similarly, in hiuh, laurent leaves his uncle's house without any money and in a very vulnerable position. he's not exactly carefree and happy and able to be like "oh I wanna date and fool around!! explore my sexuality!!!!" - in fact, this is a pretty big plot point in hiuh: laurent did contact damen out of pure necessity.
and yes, sex is the foundation of maxime/laurent for all the reasons I stated above, but at the same time it's not all about sex. it's not even about sex. it's about control and self-punishment. it's about self-hatred. we also don't know what state laurent was in when he started seeing maxime because we don't have his pov, but we do have nicaise's testimony. again, this is briefly mentioned in ch20, but it wasn't exactly pretty.
however, having said all of this, i'm not blind or dumb enough to think oh hiuh laurent is sooooo canon laurent, not a trace of ooc-ness. i get where the characterization issues are coming from. at the end of the day, I have to say that this post summarizes a tiny bit of what went into creating hiuh laurent. i tried to make him as canon as possible, but I'm not pacat and so my characterization is different. my setting is different. the modern au is different. it is completely fair to read hiuh and think as a reader "i would not have gone in this direction, i don't think laurent would ever be with someone who isn't damen, i don't think it's consistent with his canon self". i accept those comments in the same way i accept those that say they love this laurent bc of XYZ.
this is the one area so far where laurent has been extremely defensive and refuses to take responsibility, even though it really hurt damen
i understand this, but at the same time i don't know how much responsibility laurent can take over that when it's... just dating/fucking someone else after a break up. he should apologize for making damen feel bad on purpose (perhaps taking maxime places), but the rest of it... damen also fucked and thought about dating other people. the comparisons you mention were cruel, but they were made, for example, by characters like aimeric (removed from the narrative entirely later on) and ancel (who tells damen he was wrong, who tells damen he thinks laurent made a mistake letting him go).
i don’t see how damen could get over this massive insecurity when laurent appears to ridicule or dismiss him for bringing it up, like with the condom conversation or the pet name issue.
i understand that, but i also think damen's insecurity wasn't born just from this issue. he is an insecure person throughout the fic. his toxic masculinity is one way this insecurity and lack of self-confidence manifest, for example. his fixation on penetrative sex. his fixation on performance. his fixation on parenting like laurent because his own way is wrong. his fixation on never thinking about the things and people he lacks because he can't take it.
yes, laurent played a huge role in feeding that insecurity, but I'm failing to see where he is ridiculing damen. during the condom conversation, laurent snaps because he feels judged and attacked, not because he's making fun of damen's pain. during the pet name conversation, the same thing happens. and in both instances, damen is judging laurent. he judges laurent really harshly in other scenes, too, like when they find out about claude.
some of these issues are talked about in ch20, but I don't think there is a scene where laurent addresses everything. perhaps he should. i just didn't write it.
sorry to be doing mcu throwback complaints again and EXTRA sorry for it to be about cacw and aou, sorry, i just am thinking again that if marvel had. in aou. committed to letting steve rogers see that captain america graffiti calling him a fascist with his own two eyes i would have forgiven many of their subsequent deeds and crimes
the one thing i feel pretty certain about for this episode is that america will not decide the election. a decision will be made, a president will be elected, but america will not be the deciding factor.
succession can’t mimic 2016 or 2020 point blank, that would be boring and have nothing to say. it can’t try to outdo trump because it’ll go too whacky and fall flat like veep’s last season (sorry conheads, no way he’s winning). but what it CAN do is illustrate the immensely corrupt, often arbitrary, and hugely influential nature of news media and conglomerations on political processes. i think probably jimenez will be in the lead, then atn/waystar does something to, i don’t know, discount votes or cast suspicion on jimenez or call the election for mencken early, and the tide will shift, even though the votes are already in. the votes don’t actually matter. the actual result doesn’t actually matter. that’s the power logan (and as an extension, billionaires and CEOs in general) hold. shiv says it herself to logan in s4e2: “just cause you say it’s true doesn’t make it true. everyone just fucking agrees with you and believes you, so it becomes true and then you can turn around and say like, 'oh, you see? see? i was right.'” but it doesn’t matter that logan’s “a human fucking gaslight,” everything he says comes true anyways. not because he was right, but because that’s how it works. he says things and then they happen, regardless of what the truth is or what should actually come to pass. that’s been one of the key throughlines since the very first episode of the entire show when, in response to kendall calling logan out of touch because times are changing and logan isn't changing with them, logan hisses that everyone always says you’re wrong until you do it and prove you were right: “you make your own reality.” you can't miss the bus if you're the one driving it. the election, the votes, the political process? none of that matters. it was always going to come down to the roys and their ilk (allies or enemies, just the top 1%) — that was the whole point of “what it takes” (the mencken episode) last season, after all.
i’ve seen lots of theories about what america will choose and how the candidates will respond and all that and i just don’t think that’s the show’s focus; i think the whole point is to demonstrate the lack of agency, the illusion of democracy. because, i mean, we’ve already seen the fall of democracy via fascist election and fascist election-denial, both in real life and in the countless (usually mid) satires created afterwards. it would be disappointing to see succession use the election to reiterate that same point of 'ohhh alt-right ahhhhh!!!' i don’t think it’ll be about ‘fascism’ at all — at least, not ‘trump-y’ fascism. it’ll be about fascism in the broader sense, the kind that doesn't sport a KKK hood (even when it keeps one tucked away in the attic). it's the fascism that every single roy (very much including shiv and kendall) aid and abet -- the fascism that so many succession fans don't seem to regard as fascism, despite it quite literally being the definition of fascism. trump wasn’t the entrance of fascism into our political process. he wasn’t the lone sign of the failing of american democracy. democracy in america has long been illusory, trump just made it more blatantly evident with his particular brand of hate-speech-ridden masculinist in-your-face fascism.
so i think that’s what this episode will hopefully focus on — america will not decide. corporations, news media, and the roys will. thus, the president will most likely become president not because the country supports his policies the most, but because he’s likely to agree to help block a business deal for a major media empire, and the other candidate is unlikely to. and this will likely come to pass due to said major media empire's interference and influence: they create their own reality. they say it, and everyone agrees with them and believes them, so it becomes true.