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acourtofthought · 9 months

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Would you prefer Elucien in Spring Court or Day Court??

I'm so torn. On one hand, I'd like for Elain and Lucien to bring the magic back to Spring and unify its people. Lucien knows it's people, but he's lost their trust (because of what happened with Feyre, but I think he could overcome it, and I think that's where Elain comes in, she's described as someone who can light up a room and people naturally like her.

I think the spring court would love Elain.

But what draws me to Day Court is just new location and worldbuiding, we already read about Spring, I want to read about other courts so bad lol, but I can do see SJM bringing things full circle in the series and concluding with Spring with Elucien. But if Lucien is the heir of Day, why set up that plot if he isn't going to be HL,

But no matter what I love that SJM has given Elucien TWO possible outcomes based on canon evidence and possible foreshadowing, three if you count the continent 🤗🤗🤗

Either way, SJM has set up their story.

I would prefer Elain and Lucien in Day Court for all the reasons you mentioned and the aesthetic (how incredible is Elucien Day Court fanart, right?). Not to mention the Spring Court is a reminder of unpleasant times for Lucien while the Day Court is a new beginning.

But......if SJM is keeping Helion around then I'm not sure what they'd be doing in Day.

For me it's not enough to say, "well, just let them chill and relax for a few centuries". Lucien has been the sidekick for far too long, the right hand man, the "son of a High Lord" waiting to have purpose, and I think it's time for him to step into being a leader. I don't really like the thought of him as the Crown Prince in waiting in Day and I feel the same for Elain, where she ends her book waiting for a greater purpose that won't come about for centuries.

Feyre ended her series as the High Lady of the Night Court.

Nesta ended her book knowing she's the leader of a group of female warriors.

Their stories both ended with them in a clearly defined role and not, "well someday when this character dies, they'll step into that role".

I want Elucien's book to end with them reaching their potential and not just left open ended for what they'll someday accomplish. Things could change in the next book but as it stands, there's no place for Elucien in Day at this time, there's no void needing filled. Helion is an extremely likeable character, SJM said she's obsessed with him and he and the LoA have an unfinished love story so I don't think he's going anywhere or expendable.

But when you look at Spring....it's current High Lord killed his own sentries back when Mor took Feyre away from there. He allied with Hybern which caused his people to lose trust in him. He chose Ianthe time and again, causing further uncertainty in him within his court. In the novella and SF, we're told he no longer cares for his people at all, leaving his borders unattended, refusing Rhys's help for guards to be stationed at his borders (sorry but no matter how much he hates Rhys, he should care more about the safety of his lands and accept the help. Even Rhys would have allowed Amarantha to continue using him if it meant saving their world), turning a blind eye to the lawlessness within Spring.

I have no doubt that Elain and Lucien are going to be the ones to turn Spring around.

But is that so Tamlin can find his way back as ruler? Would it be believable that his people would even WANT to follow him again at this point? In my opinion the answer to that is no. I think he's abandoned his people and been too volatile for far too long for anyone to respect him again as a ruler.

But Elain and Lucien......

Not only was there the major hint that Spring had been MADE for someone like Elain but Lucien is also tied to the magic of the land through the Great Rite. Lucien expressed sorrow at not being able to return to the lands outside of Tamlin's manor because the people believed him complicit in the lies Feyre told. He also expressed sadness over Tamlin's court not turning out the way he once hoped it would.

But he and Elain could turn the court into everything the people need and everything he wanted.

I also don't think SJM just casually threw in that the position of HL can jump bloodlines when necessary for no reason at all unless she plans on replacing Rhys and Feyre in the NC (which I don't see as happening especially as they now have Nyx).

As Lucien is Helion's bloodline, it doesn't apply for Day.

I'm pretty sure Eris is going to be HL of Autumn and he's the rightful son of Beron.

I can't imagine Tarquin going anywhere either, he's likeable and a new HL set on making the world a better place.

And the other courts aren't a major focus at this time.

So why would SJM have given us that information unless she was building up what's going to happen in Spring. Tamlin is the only HL (outside of Beron) that really needs to go.

I think SJM, being a girl power author, is probably looking to shake up the system of the HL too. Why couldn't the magic choose a High Lady for once? Elain is not ready to rule over a court on her own of course but Lucien, as her mate, could easily stand beside her and help her. Just like Rhys walked Feyre through the process of High Lady of the NC. Lucien has literally trained for the role his entire life and spent centuries beside Tamlin in what was basically an apprentice like role.

If you think back on ACOTAR, Tamlin was no more fit to be a High Lord than Elain would be High Lady (though Elain's natural ability with people already sets her apart from him). Tamlin never wanted to be HL so he turned his back on the teachings of how to rule yet ended up in the role whether he wanted it or not.

And maybe, Lucien will also add the High King role to his bag of tricks. I don't think it's a role that one steps into unless it's during times of extreme unrest, I don't think he gets to command other courts during times of peace but he does seems to be best suited to unify all the courts and the human lands when there are major issues threatening them all.

Centuries later when Helion is ready to step down maybe Lucien will step into his role of High Lord of Day. By that time I imagine he and Elain will have children, one of who might be ready to come into power in Spring.

For me, that's the scenario that makes the most sense with what we've been given and knowing that she loves Helion. Maybe some new information will be introduced in the next book and it'll change my stance but as it stands I can't imagine her killing off Helion and I can't imagine Tamlin being redeemed to the point that his court is happily ready to accept him as their leader once again.

#high lady elain #high king lucien #pro elain archeron #pro lucien vanserra #elucien #pro elucien #acotar theory #anti tamlain #elain archeron #lucien vanerra #lucien spell cleaver #elucien supremacy

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eruden-writes · 2 years

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Slow Burn - 2 (Endeavor x OC)

WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR CURRENT CANON STORY. TITLE SUBJECT TO CHANGE. Months have passed since the war. The heroes won, but there's still rebuilding efforts to be completed. And not just buildings and cities. Maemi Ono is one therapist, among many from her US-based agency, who is chosen to treat Class 2-A (previously Class 1-A) as a group and Dabi, of the former League of Villains, individually. However, with the war still fresh in his head and suspicions high, Endeavor isn't so sure Miss Ono's intentions are entirely as good as they seem. When Maemi's past rears its head, will it prove Endeavor correct? Or will it pull Maemi further into Endeavor's orbit?

---

Part 2: The Amusement Park Episode

The day was sunny, bright, and warm. Students milled along the sidewalk with their class and friends, backpacks in tow and uniforms stowed away from the day. A little further away from the throngs of colleagues and students, Maemi fussed over her open bag. She was in the middle of double-checking her own supplies for the trip when a shadow fell over her.

She looked up, expecting to find one of the students or co-workers who could dwarf her. Registering who it was, her eyes widened, eyebrows arching upward. “Oh, Mr. Todoroki, I didn’t expect to see you here.”

The last time the two of them interacted was a month ago, when she’d called him to her office. An apprehensive itch crawled over her skin. She was completely unprepared for this interaction.

Endeavor stared down at Miss Ono, his trademark scowl in place. It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t wearing his pro-hero gear. No, he wore jeans and a white short-sleeved button-up. And a ‘school volunteer’ ID, hanging on a lanyard around his neck. Definitely weird to see him in anything other than his gear, even tattered, or a professional suit. Especially with that ID.

Faintly, she felt rather underdressed under his leer. But shorts, a tank top, and sneakers were perfectly fine field trip attire! Especially with the hoodie tied around her waist! Although, her outfit did make her feel a wee bit less professional under a parent’s attention. Even if that parent was wearing similar casual wear.

Endeavor caught Miss Ono’s brief moment of shock, only to bristle to himself as that placid smile quickly curved over her lips. “Principal Nezu informed me you needed more chaperones for the trip.”

“That we do.” Maemi chuckled, ignoring her own sense of unease as she zipped up her bag and hoisted it to her shoulder. She inclined her head to the man, invoking all of her customer service skills into power to remain cool and polite. “Knowing how trouble follows these kids, your presence certainly won’t hurt.”

He gave a throaty ‘hn’ in return, crossing his arms and glancing to the boisterous hordes of teenagers. His brows furrowed, a less-than-pleasant part of him bemoaning how this field trip was a waste of time. Not turning to face Maemi, he asked, “Why an amusement park?”

Apparently, the whole park had been booked by UA for this multi-class trip. Which meant no tourists and concessions were supplied. A pretty big bill for the school, but it wasn’t as if they didn’t have alumni with deep pockets and resources. He should know, being one such alumni.

“This year, UA wanted to emphasize self-care, therapy, and healthy work-life boundaries,” started Maemi, trying not to flinch under Endeavor’s returned gaze. Unprepared for his presence, she realized just how intimidating the man could be. It had been different in her office, spending hours readying herself. Hoping he’d understand her point, her sunny tone dimmed a little. “The world was and will continue to be put on these kids’ shoulders, especially with the rebuilding efforts. Teaching them to take time for themselves, allowing them to be kids, is very important.”

“Uh-huh.”

He didn’t sound convinced. Maemi frowned at his reaction, until she realized his attention was turned elsewhere once again. Following his line of sight, she found he was sullenly staring at his son, who was very obviously ignoring the behemoth of a man as he spoke with his own peers.

“Shoto has some very good friends,” she commented, hoping to assuage the man’s radiating concerns.

Endeavor blew out a huff of a breath. “And he doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

“You’re his dad, Mr. Todoroki,” Maemi snorted, fighting the urge to roll her eyes at him. Of all of the things to be concerned with, it was such a parent problem. “Of course he’d want to spend a day at the amusement park with his peers.”

Maemi’s reaction caught his attention, his gaze turning back to her. There was another tense moment of staring, assessing the woman, before he asked, “Do you have kids, Miss Ono?”

For a brief second, something flickered in Maemi’s face. A crack in her ever-present - if annoyingly poised - smile, with eyes that always seemed to be more knowing than she let on. Even as she recovered, there was a faint shadow to her features. “Nope, no children of my own.”

Before he could press the matter, Maemi slipped into ‘school staff’ mode and clapped her hands. Approaching the teenagers, she called out over the dwindling chatter, “Alright, everyone ready? Got your sunscreen? Your water bottles? Your cellphones? Your buddy?”

Various affirmative chimes chorused up from the students as they lined up with their chosen buddy or buddies. A few did scramble to more well-prepared classmates for last-minute replacements of items, before another school therapist - Aria Daae, if Endeavor remembered correctly from the files - assured them they had extras on the bus. Hustling the classes onto the convoy of large tourist buses began with much shouting and chaos.

When the bulk of the disarray calmed, teachers and staff and volunteers began loading onto the buses as well. Maemi paused in the doorway of the bus, turning back to Endeavor. The man still waited on the sidewalk, arms crossed and waiting. Vaguely, she wondered if they drove off without him, if he’d still be standing there waiting when they returned.

Shoving the tempting thought aside, Maemi nodded to the bus. “You riding with us, Mr. Todoroki? Or do you have other transportation?”

Endeavor stared at her, considering his options. She waited patiently as he weighed between a bus filled with rowdy teenagers or the quiet of his own, chaperoned, car.

Considering his therapist had suggested he try to put himself among people more often, Endeavor - grudgingly - stepped toward the bus. Much to the varying delight and horror of the students inside, if their whoops and groans were any indication.

—

Thrillventure was like any other amusement Maemi had been too. Not that she had been to many.

Broad expanses of hard pavement, that nearly sizzled on hot days, topped with all manner of mechanical rides. Some benches lined the walkways and islands of dirt for necessary shade–providing trees broke up the monotony of grey concrete or industrial metal. Here and there, vendors sold ice cream or sodas or whatever else they could host in their carts. The students hadn’t taken long to disperse, maps of the Thrillventure park unfolded in front of their faces. Likewise, chaperones spread out, equipped with walkie talkies, supplies for an array of emergencies, and their own delight.

Maemi trailed after Endeavor, trying to mute the sensations of excitement and nervousness that filled the air and her senses. It was going to be a long day for her. Even if this had been a regular trip to an amusement park, strong emotions from so many people would take a toll. She wondered if she should take an aspirin, before the intensity got worse.

“Is there a reason you’re following me?”

The gruff question from Endeavor startled Maemi from her inner debate. She blinked, staring up at the large man, who merely leered down at her. Annoyance and suspicion wafted off him.

“We’re doing a buddy system,” she coolly explained, even as Endeavor’s frown deepened. He hadn’t really interacted with the other chaperones thus far. Which left Maemi to fill in the gap. They had an odd number of adults before he joined, so she would’ve been the odd one out if he hadn’t shown up.

When Endeavor opened his mouth, no doubt to assert he didn’t need a buddy, Maemi cut him off.

“Besides, my Quirk is called ‘emotional sponge’ for a reason. With so many teenagers around, and little reprieve, I’m at risk of acting as rash and giddy as them.” With her hands, she motioned her words as she spoke, from a smooth gesture to her fingers abruptly wiggling in a poor imitation of an explosion. “Relatively speaking, you’re like a sea of calm among many emotionally charged volcanoes.”

He was quiet for a moment, staring at her wiggling fingers, before harrumphing, “So you’re using me as a buffer.”

“Yes.” Maemi grinned, relieved to feel him relent a little. Though what she said was true, his acquiescence also affirmed Endeavor had some form of compassion under his stoicism. Pretty much all decent heroes did, Maemi had come to learn over her lifetime. Most didn’t hide it under layers of intense unfriendliness, though.

Endeavor raised an eyebrow, still not completely delighted with the situation. “What were you going to do if I hadn’t arrived?”

Maemi flashed a bright smile and, in a tone that was both joking and serious, informed him, “Oh, I planned to suffer through it.”

Endeavor’s frown once again deepened, not entirely sure if Miss Ono was poking fun at him somehow or was being genuine. Feeling others’ emotions didn’t really sound all that taxing to him. “It wouldn’t have been that bad.”

Something in the air around Maemi changed, stilled, became a tinge colder. She stared up at him, something sharp in her gaze. It caught Endeavor’s attention, a faint sense he’d said something wrong bubbling up in his thoughts. Only his steely discipline kept him from taking a step back as Maemi closed the distance between them.

“Imagine walking through a crowd and feeling every person’s happiness, anger, rage, sadness, curiosity, delight, confusion…” She jabbed her index finger into Endeavor’s chest with every mentioned emotion.

“Some of it is faint and quick,” she said, as her digit slammed hard and sharp into him. Then, her touch lingered, all five fingertips pushing into his chest. “Some of it is heavy and lingers.”

She must have had a death wish, Endeavor faintly thought, keeping his eyes locked to hers. If she sensed his outrage - which she did - Maemi didn’t blink an eye. As her hand withdrew, something inside him relaxed.

But Maemi wasn’t done with her explanation. With a sweeping gesture of her arm, she motioned to the park and the students milling about the front. “Now imagine that crowd is full of people who have extremely intense emotions that can change so fast, it causes whiplash. It’s exhausting.“

He followed the motion of her arms, eye catching on the teenagers still present. A quick calculation came up with sixteen students and, vaguely, he wondered just how disparate their feelings were at the moment. Just from body language, he could pinpoint a litany of demeanors.

His gaze flickered back to Miss Ono, who stared up at him, expectant and waiting. Endeavor bristled under that look. She wanted confirmation she was right and he was wrong. Instead of apologizing or admitting her Quirk sounded tiring, he found himself grumbling, “Sounds like you should find a new job if it’s that hard on you.”

“I enjoy my job and I’m good at it. Thank you very much.” Maemi rolled her eyes at Endeavor’s words, not entirely sure if he meant them as a jab or as a sincere - if badly poised - suggestion. Before he could find something even less polite to say, Maemi refocused attention to a different topic. “Anyway, let’s hit some rides.”

“I wasn’t aware chaperoning meant goofing off.” He didn’t even move as the woman took a step toward one of the rides.

“How does our duty interfere with us having fun, as well?” She turned to him, her eyebrows raised and lips pursed in a pout. Unamused, he stared down at her, his arms crossed tight across his chest. At his somber expression, Maemi sighed and rolled her eyes once again. Compromise was the path to least resistance. “Fine, you can sit out and I’ll ride rides. That’s close enough to the buddy system for us adults.”

A rebuttal lined up on Endeavor’s lips, just as one of the many student’s voices cut him off. “Hey, Miss Ono! Wanna ride the carousel with us?”

“Sure!” Without another look, Maemi turned to the students, a smile on her lips as she trotted to them.

Endeavor watched as she took off, then he eyed the aforementioned carousel. Faint memories of times with his family flickered at the back of his head. A younger Rei sitting with a small Toya or Fuyumi or Natsuo. Muscles tensed in his jaw, a sense of guilt swelling inside him. Whatever thoughts Endeavor was having were interrupted as Miss Ono yelled for him to hurry up.

Focusing back on the present, Endeavor’s gaze found Maemi, already in line with the students for the carousel. With immense grudging, he followed after her.

#endeavor fanfic #bnha fanfic #mha fanfic #enji todoroki #endeavor x oc #fanfic #slow burn #hurt/comfort #whump #eventually #but I do put them through ridiculous shit for a bit #because I find it funny #maemi ono

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duskodair · 5 months

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hello. it is very late at night and I am tired, which means it is the perfect time to formulate a response to the deep bitterness I feel about the 'the curtains were blue' haha english lit is useless line of japery. I can be very verbose when I'm passionate so I'm going to break this down into three bullet points so let's go

'the curtains were blue'. Ok let's take the joke itself. It's a mockery of the concept of close reading, which is one of the fundamental skills of critical thinking. Let me explain; critical thinking is the ability to read a text and then assess it based on your own knowledge and inferences as to whether it is bullshit or not, and whether it is trying to convince you of something (and whether you agree with that). Close reading is the art of diving into a text and taking note of its constituent parts to see how it has been built. Taking 'the curtains were blue' as an example (it is a shite sentence btw), you can see that it uses 'were' instead of 'are', positioning it in the past tense - from that the curtains are relegated to history. Depending on the context of the sentence, historical blueness to curtains may be significant. For example, if the sentence is pulled into politics and expands to 'with the labour leader's 2023 kiss-arsing to Thatcher's ghost, for all that he claimed his house was red, it was very clear that the curtains were blue'. In this context it becomes satire and the mention of the blue curtains aligns his previous policies with the right wing Tory blue. Close reading is simply the art of pulling intentional and unintentional bits of language from a text and evaluating how they contribute to the function of the overall piece.

Ok. So what. The curtains are blue. What does English lit matter in the real world? this is the piss on the poor website. Every day we read and write shit. If we can all see what the language we are playing with is doing, we will be much better equipped to actually talk to each other. The curtains are a scapegoat for the transferable skills that literature lessons are meant to teach (the birth of English lit is that it is classics in the vernacular, so that commoners who did not speak greek and Latin could still benefit from studying texts (more on this later)). The difference between English lit and English lang is a mirror to methods of mathematics and applications of mathematics. Johnny bought 14 bottles of dish soap, applications tells us, trying to get us to apply the mathematic methods to real world problems - the same for the curtains. They are a training exercise for the real world, wherein you face daily text and what you reblog or tweet or email or post is a representation of your opinion. If you cannot look beyond the surface language, there could be a whole other game in play that you are missing (i.e. dogwhistles, bigoted propaganda, other fucked up assumptions) (it's like counting fingers in images these days).

Fine. Cool. So English lit teaches close reading and critical thinking which can be used to evaluate text in the real world. Why the fuck did they make me read Of Mice and Men and Romeo and Juliet??? Good fucking question (hey exam boards, sort it out bro). Let's talk about the idea of the canon. So English is a baby discipline (came in pretty late as a commoner's alternative to classics, as I said earlier). People hated it (there's one dude who is now only taught on English lit courses who fucking hated it and thought it was worthless (after all, everyone knew that there were no good texts in English because they all wanted to snog homer)). Anyway, it was posited that it was a Worthwhile Subject because it could teach ThE iMpoRtanTesT bOokS fOR bUiLding MoRal ChaRacTer to YoN PleBs (read: books by posh white men). The shakespeare thing is tied into this, but also into English nation building (trying to get the homer snogging gang on board because, hey, the only thing they hated more than poor people was foreigners, so having a homegrown bard really offered some bragging rights (another win for English xenophobia (please note the sarcasm)) (please do not take this as a statement that there is no value in Shakespeare because that is not true and my undergrad tutor would kill me and i like her very much). Anyway the original concept of the canon was that academics would put together a list of Good Books (TM), and those were the good ones to teach. Obviously, that orginal list was Mega Fucked Up. But the purpose of Modern English Academia is to beat the notion of the canon up with boxing gloves. Feminism, Postcolonialism, Queer Theory, Marxism, Ecocritism, the schools go on and on, and their function is to uncover lost texts from history and to bring them to light. For example, Frankenstein was popularised by the study of English literature (because before we were just reading Percy Shelly instead of Mary Shelly and the feminist critics went oi, shut up about the wet lettuce one minute and read this). English Literature is about adding voices to history through literature, about close reading what the texts are saying, and then using critical thinking to assess the impact that they may have on today.

This is a bit of a ramble and I'm not saying English is always taught well in schools (I have issues with syllabuses etc. ( particularly as the notion of the canon is inherently problematic)). But what I am saying is that English Literature (or as a more Postcolonial approach posits it, Literature in English), is a valuable subject. The application of language to both art and the everyday is inescapable. It is vital that we have the tools to understand and interpret what language is doing and how literature functions. Because once you start deconstructing every sentence you read, you start wanting to fist fight every journalist on the planet for the way that they frame their articles. You start noticing how language is used around you to make people respond in certain ways. You start evaluating the significance of the language you use. You start noticing that you're not immune to propaganda (taps the sign).

And it just makes me so sad when people talk about english lit as if it is worthless, because that kind of language cuts funding, cuts interest, cuts our ability to dismantle propaganda, and to enable others to dismantle propaganda. My specialism is Ecocritism and my academic work has largely centred on how language is weaponised against the environment in both colonialism and capitalism, and ohhh buddy, those curtains are blue

#chill to reblog

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gallpall · 3 years

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canaan bubble redux as a womb for story/character arcs

I’m sure most of this has been posted about before but: ever since my initial read I’ve been obsessed with the gross bodily/gorey stuff in the Canaan redux and I wanted to organize some of my constant+chaotic thoughts!!

TM has said that a lot of the motifs/events in the bubbles are actually “Silent Hill stand-ins” for story elements and she hopes we pick up on stuff, so here’s my Attempt!

At the same time that Harrow’s mind is being made a tomb for Gideon Nav Wake’s subconscious is pulled in to act as a womb for certain plot elements right alongside it. The chronology/time period of HtN mimics a full nine-month gestation. There’s a lot of very literal imagery here (which is below the cut), but I also think we’re meant to see it as metaphorical: we’re able to glean some things about character arcs based on how everything in the bubble goes down.

I’m particularly interested right now in those ‘side’ characters in the bubble who aren’t actually dead, who barely appear in the bubble at all except to get summarily offed, all in very distinctive ways. Judith, Camilla, Palamedes, and Coronabeth.

(cw below cut for some pregnancy/insemination imagery, canonical body horror and gruesome bubble deaths rehashed)

First of all just some quotes showing some of the imagery that I’ve attributed to being Wake manifesting pregnancy trauma stuff (there’s possibly some of Harrow’s conception trauma here, too) seeping through, for the purposes of this line of speculation.

This isn’t nearly all of it, but some things that stood out to me as possibly comparing Canaan House 2.0 to a functioning reproductive system:

(ch. 21) a “collection of large, rusted pipette needles” -- turkey basters?

(ch. 35) “great, slithering, pulsing tubes” which contain “whitish-pearl bubbled globules”-- this perhaps recalls ovaries/fallopian tubes, with the ‘globules’ being follicles produced by superovulation for insemination, or corpus luteum that supply progesterone to maintain a pregnancy.

(ch. 45) “stretched webs of organ [...] like nets of sticky venous spiderweb” --uterine walls, maybe; it’s all over the windows, totally encasing them in Canaan’s rooms, and arguably even contracting like a uterus would: “every so often they would tremble uncertainly and erupt in floods of bloody, foamy water.”

in the next pgh we get some more of the tools Wake would have used to conceive/upkeep the pregnancy: “pipettes, broken glass-fronted containers filled with dark fluid,” skeletons sitting atop piles of “capsules or pills” perhaps hormones/supplements. (also holding Drearburh tools, the way Wake’s skelly would have been doomed to do)

(ch. 43) “from that hole emerged a clattering pile of plex scope slides, the type you would preserve a cell sample between“ -- Wake would’ve had to carry out the IVF process for implantation, this also seems like apparatus for that

(ch. 47) there’s the “libation” Abigail uses to summon Wake which is... well. It’s a “thin, milky, whitish liquid pooled at the base, sluggish in the cold,” and the summoning involves a bunch of ‘come’ commands, which I think might be Muir making a very elaborate jizz-adjacent “silly buggers with the emissions” joke.

Just a note, cause I’m hopeless about Pyrrwake: the Seconds’ quarters are almost completely preserved from the leaky body horror (though it’s still cold in there)--as if they represented a sanctuary in Wake’s subconscious. There are also letters in the nonagonal coffin room which spell out an anagram of “PYRRHA” (ch. 47).

So with all that in mind, I’d posit that the fake-ghost deaths are all metaphorical “rebirths” of various characters arcs for ATN. I haven’t delved into what this imagery might mean for Harrow or Gideon specifically because I know there’s a LOT and it’s probably above my theoretical paygrade (I would love for someone to tack on with that though!!) but I can talk about ‘side’ chars on a very big-picture level.

Judith’s simulacrum gets knocked off first (ch. 18); shot through the heart (both atria) while she and Marta’s ghost are trying to complete the winnowing trial. The Sleeper shoots her 7 more times after that, I guess partly just ‘cause she can, but Ortus notes that it seems like there was an element of "Anger” to it. It’s possible Wake wasn’t pleased to have someone messing around with Pyrrha’s lyctoral trial, infuriated that anyone would be attempting to replicate G1d/Pyr’s original downfall. She then ignores Marta entirely and climbs back in the coffin (now with the sword) once Judith’s out of the way.

[Marta’s] scarlet necktie looked redder too—by the time they’d gotten hold of Judith Deuteros the blood had dried hers nearly black.

Cohort red-and-whites being stained black with blood, like a certain high-collared BOE uniform... could be another little clue to Judith’s "heart” for the Emperor (and for Marta, and pretty much everything else she knew) being lost and her realigning--though not willingly, at least at first--with the other side.

Cam and Pal’s simulacrums are plainly executed (ch. 21), they have their “faces obliterated” each by a single gunshot, and it’s as if they just stood there and let it happen. In the bubble, “Harrow had never seen Sextus or Hect except from afar.” These simulacrums totally avoid having their features revealed to Harrow. I’m willing to bet their faces being obscured and then exploded is one of the clues we get to their eyes being swapped around the next time we see them in the epilogue and in ATN.

Regarding the twins: They are essentially non-extant in the bubble. Ianthe never appears because she’s still kicking and, in her own words, “doesn’t live alternate histories” (GtN ch. 15).

Coronabeth’s simulacrum scene (ch. 37) is SO vivid and cryptic. It fascinates me because it definitely is, in part, trying to tell us something poignant about the initiation of Corona’s “worse twin” arc in ATN.

[Corona] was turned away from Harrow, and her riot of hair—half-caught in a fillet, half-escaping—was soaking wet, a dark and crinkling amber in the rain. She was not fighting or arguing. She was still as a statue, and ready and waiting as a dog.

Sounds like the fake ghost preparing for that major shift in allegiance. Silas is the one to ‘dismiss’ her, with his “may the blood of your blood suffer,” which perhaps is a really Templar-y way of saying ‘now go wreck ianthe’s SHIT.’ When Harrow accuses him of sending Corona to her death, Silas asks “Death?”--as if he sees that what’s really just happened, at least metaphorically, is (re)Birth.

[Harrow] thought she saw, absurdly, a sudden gush of watery blood, as though the fog itself had been knifed; but it was gone almost as soon as she had seen it.

Sounds a bit like amniotic fluid/water breaking? Coronabeth doesn’t ever seem to hit the ocean (bodies of water=necromancy and that’s not her deal), she instead just kinda poofs, and Silas says she would have ended up “on her feet.” Coronabeth is ditching her family ties and is out for blood, and I think her charisma, willpower, and sheer desire for revenge will move her a long way in the ranks of Eden--probably even to the point of echoing Commander Wake’s ambitions and actions. I could delve into that damn portrait mirroring Ianthe’s obsession w/ Cyrus’ paintings on the Mithraeum... but that is a whole other post!

So all of these are fairly baseline observations and I think there’s a LOT more to be expounded on, if y’all wanna reply/reblog/DM with additions I would freaking love that, every time I open a page of this book I find something I missed before and it’s such a delight. Thanks for reading if you got this far!!

#the locked tomb trilogy #gideon the ninth #harrow the ninth #htn spoilers #shoutout to kallistoi and rusty-k for bouncing ideas around w me

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dogtoling · 3 years

Text

What is a Special Weapon? (a speculation)

So let's get straight into the post. (LONG post under the cut)

A Special Weapon is: - the weapon itself: a powerful ink battling weapon manufactured and regulated specifically for this purpose (Bubble Blower, Sting Ray, Inkstrike, Inkzooka etc.) OR - a specialized attack or response treated as a special weapon (Kraken, Splashdown, Booyah Bomb etc.) - Supposedly uses the Inkling's own ink - debatable, but highly likely based on evidence

Before we can get deeper into the special weapon lore, we must look into what comes BEFORE a special weapon. That's the special gauge.

There are multiple ways to fill up a special gauge: - Inking turf - Having control over an objective in Ranked Battle - Being in an underdog situation in a match (Tenacity) - Equipping a Canned Special What happens when the special is then activated? The meter slowly depletes, and once it is fully drained, the special ends. In practice, what IS the special meter? Now, when looking at the meter objectively, it looks as if it's filled with ink. That alongside its function in powering Special Weapons, as well as draining like an actual Ink Tank, can give the impression that it is LITERALLY a secondary ink reserve the player is filling up. This is in order to then use all of that ink as ammo for the special. And this actually makes a lot of sense. well now it's time to open a whole new can of worms (or weapons i guess)

CANNED SPECIALS Canned specials are literally, well, canned specials that make an appearance in Splatoon's single player modes as well as the Battle Dojo from the first game.

(From the splash screen of the first game, we can see that they are approximately the size of an actual tuna can.) Upon obtaining a canned special, your special gauge immediately fills up and you gain the ability to use said special weapon, which heavily suggests that the special weapon itself is stored inside.... the tiny can. You know, stuff like a force field, or a 7ft ink cannon. Or a pressure washer that includes more ink than the volume of an Inkling. Yeah. Right. So this implies insane hammerspace technology if it IS to be taken at face value - although i find it odd that there's not a single official art or tidbit of lore that acknowledges that inklings in fact obtain their specials from tiny hammerspace tins. (Even sub weapons and their inner workings make a tiny appearance in official art. Specials are never elaborated on too much, unfortunately...)

As an alternative, there is the concept of the cans holding a specific amount of condensed ink enough to power any of the included specials that you could then pop inside the weapon. That is not at all how it's implied to work, but it's a cool alternate explanation that makes slightly more sense - and if we take some liberties and assume that the cans are a LIIITTLE bit bigger, we could even argue that the cans could be THE special gauge itself. Looking at the special gauge, it IS designed to be round, just like a tin. I don't recall what it was modeled after if anything, or if it's just a coincidence, but food for thought.

Oh yeah also here's a picture of a NORMAL main weapon can that you can get at Kamabo Co. They have one for like every weapon type as well as some bombs which implies that weapons are oftentimes stored inside cans (although these might be bigger cans). Either way, the ink tank idea might be down the drain considering the implications of this one.

Anyway, moving on. Hi guys! I brought you guys all the way through that wall of text... just to dunk on that literal ink tank theory and dump it in the trash because there is another theory that makes more sense on like every scale possible. I'm so sorry. (But I also really like the idea of the special gauge being a literal ink tank that you fill up, so I had to include it, because it's not like it doesn't hold a lot of ground.) I'll get straight to the point. The other theory is that the special gauge is only a hypothetical concept created for the sake of gameplay and balancing, and in reality, it is simply the buildup to what I'll refer to as the "special rush" state of an Inkling. It has no physical value, varies between Inklings, and has no ties to actual points at all. Observe these bits from the art books 1 and 2:

1. Some Inkzooka trivia. Although the entry refers to SPECIFICALLY this weapon, it is very likely that the same is true for all special weapons - or at least the ones that primarily use ink (so not necessarily things such as the Bubbler and Echolocator).

(Ignore the random lines. Those are my notes lol) This Baller entry tells us a LOT and i mean a LOT of what we needed to know. First of all, the Inklings' ink output breaks the laws of physics there is no way a single inkling has enough ink inside it to even fill THAT ball at least 4 times the volume of its body NOT TO MENTION producing enough ink to fill one SEVEN TIMES THAT SIZE anyway the important part is the one where it confirms that Inklings produce an abnormal amount of ink while they are using a special weapon. Because the Baller was specifically developed for the purpose of containing all the excess ink, there is a big implication that the ink is originating from the user itself, specifically in the moment of using a Special. Then why is this? Well now we get to the concept of the "special rush" that I mentioned before. It refers to this state that we see Inklings enter when their special gauge fills up:

Their tentacles will glow, bubble up as if boiling, and they will look as if caught in an epic dramatic action movie wind at all times. This is when they're able to use their Special.

I think it's safe to say that this is "a heightened emotional state". As opposed to for example the Kraken which could be a repurposed panic response (if you haven't seen my post about that, that exists too) the special rush is likely a similar all-out response, although caused by getting really in the zone of battle. So to put it simply, a POSITIVE chemical response, in which the Inkling's body starts pumping more ink through channeling one's fighting spirit and yadda yadda yadda.

To put it shortly here; this "rush" likely evolved as a response to intense territory disputes or even hunting. More ink means more defense AND more offensive power. In Turf Wars, reaching this rush means that Inklings can - and probably have to - channel this excess ink elsewhere, which in this case is into special weapons that quickly gobble up all of the excess ink (with part of it going in the ink tank).

A lot of the weapons second this excess ink theory by including a heightened coating of ink across the user's whole body (Ink Armor, Booyah Bomb, Splashdown) or even rounding up the excess ink that's built up into an offensive endeavor (Splashdown, Booyah Bomb, other specials utilize it as ammo). Once all the ink is used up, the Inkling's emotional state stabilizes and the cycle soon starts over again until they hit the high mark again. (For a second ignoring the fact that it is physically impossible for them to produce this much ink. I guess I'm not ignoring it since I'm drawing attention to it here but it bothers me so much. My work is never done lol) So I guess this theory makes sense, but why is it inherently BETTER than the "special gauge is an ink reserve" one? Let's see the arguments for the ink tank version: 1. The Special Gauge is literally filled up with ink as the game is played. This is potentially something that happens as the weapon is shot, and some of the ink is channeled into the special gauge instead.

> It doesn't make much sense for this to be the case. The ink is being SHOT OUT, not stored; at least not stored anywhere visible and although you really have to have room for imagination when trying to draw logic for this game, i would really assume the developers would include a physical indicator of the gauge if it was meant to be literal.

2. There is potential for the Canned Specials to BE the gauge itself, as something that attaches or "fuels" the special. The gauge could be designed the way it is to reflect this.

> The canned specials are a weirdly inconsistent thing in the world of Splatoon, appearing ONLY as insta-fills in single player campaigns and the Splatoon 1 battle dojo. True, there are some on the player's desk in the splash screen of the first game, but we also don't know if those are for Turf War, or the dojo, or from Hero Mode. There's not even any for sale at Ammo Knights, whereas entire special weapons outside of cans very much are. Even if the special gauge isn't a can, it also doesn't mean that a can as an ink tank can't essentially serve the same purpose of providing the ink needed for a special. 3. The gauge fills up with a very distinct ink graphic, so it could literally mean it's ink!

> This one is true! But taking into consideration one thing; as a hypothetical gauge, the connection with ink is STILL there, as by the time the gauge is finished, the Inkling is basically overflowing with excess Ink. So rather than an external tank being filled with ink, the player itself is. 4. The gauge fills, then it's full, and it slowly depletes as a special is used. Basically the perfect flow; and a perfect reasoning for where all the ink comes from, and WHY you need to fill up the gauge to be able to use a special.

> This same reasoning still makes complete sense for the hypothetical gauge. The graphic goes up to indicate how close the Inkling is getting to the rush state, clearly shows when they are IN the rush state, and then the state slowly wears off as the ink is used. Where the ink comes from is directly explained in canon at this point; an Inkling in its special weapon state emits a crazy amount of ink - according to what the art book shows, more than like 10 times the volume of the inkling itself. Which makes zero sense whatsoever but, well, it does explain where the ink comes from. 5. The special meter being hypothetical wouldn't be good because it wouldn't be consistent at all. Some people surely get way more pumped WAY faster and use way more specials than others! No balance!

> The special meters aren't consistent to begin with, even in the game. People who stack Special Charge Up will sometimes use a special upwards of five times per 3-minute-game. People who get splatted a lot may literally never get to use a special once. Just like people's personalities in real life, the rates at which different Inklings would "charge up" can vary by a mile. And furthermore...

We see examples of the "special rush" outside of the gameplay!

Pearl, in the ending of Octo Expansion, enters a special rush mode seemingly out of nowhere (though you could also maybe say she might have used a canned special) after getting pumped to literally save the world. So does Agent 3; DOZENS OF TIMES, in both iterations of battles against them. They use a bunch of special weapons completely out of left field, take way more hits than the player and continuously use Splashdowns. This is because they're continuously triggering their Rush in the midst of intense combat, and especially under mind control, during which most of what they probably have is survival instinct, which means drastically raised ink production upping both offensive and defensive capabilities. But wait, there's actually even more that supports the theory of the special gauge referring to a buildup to a rush state: - Tenacity as an ability. This ability makes it so that your special gauge will automatically fill itself up if your team has fewer players on the field than the enemy team. This ability makes very little sense in the situation that the special gauge is literally an ink tank, as you're not actually shooting ink at all for it to fill up. However, as an emotional thing, a player that is also an underdog is SURE to be really giving their all in the competition and thus building up their rush faster. - Your special gauge supposedly fills up passively while your team has control of the objective in Ranked (I literally didn't know this because I barely play ranked ever). Again, this has nothing to do with actual inking. But what it DOES have to do with is potentially winning the game, and that totally gets you pumped. - Again, the inconsistencies in a special gauge. If it was an ink tank, you would assume the amount of ink needed for each special weapon was a very specific amount. Instead, players fill their special gauge at different rates, and getting splatted cuts down the gauge... again, depending on your abilities. Losing ink from a pre-filled ink tank that is being specifically saved up for a weapon doesn't really make sense as one gets splatted, but getting demoralized and frustrated when getting splatted makes a whole lot of sense, which would also set you back in reaching your special rush.

In conclusion: The Special Gauge is a hypothetical meter that exists for gameplay purposes; in practice, it only conveys how close or far a player is to their "special rush" state, in which their senses and emotions are heightened and their ink production is greatly increased due to a surge in fighting spirit.

1. When a battle starts, no one has their rush going on because everyone is only just warming up. Different people with different objectives and personalities may get their rush very quickly, very slowly, very frequently or only once. You get the picture.

2. As players find themselves doing intense physical activities, participating in tense combat and so on, they build up towards their rush state (likely building up endorphins, dopamine and adrenaline or the like), which increases the body's ink production. It is likely that contact with ink also naturally increases one's ink production.

3. When players hit this rush state and the "special meter" is filled, they can channel all the excess ink into a special weapon. Once the ink is used up, the rush subsides into a less intense emotional state, until the cycle may start again soon after.

Well, there's my thoughts on specials and mostly the special gauge and what it means. Thanks for reading yet another one of these essays.

#squidthoughts #splatoon #splatoon headcanons #special weapon #specials

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cherrynojutsu · 3 years

Text

Title: Like Silver

Summary: A companion series for Like Gold.

Sakura misses him so much. She misses the faint smell of woodsmoke and sage, and mismatched eyes captivating in their intensity and unfathomable depths. The Rinnegan is beautiful, soft lavender ringed by hypnotizing layers of circle and tomoe, but flecks of silver dance in his right, tiny asterisms bewitching in nature, if one gets close enough; she’d first noticed it when they were children at the Academy. She knows they're Itachi's now, a slightly different scattering of luminaries aglow in the deep pitch of obsidian, but they're still as enthralling to her as they had been back then. She dreams of that silver sometimes, recalls it any time she sees something similar in color or reflet.

Blank period, canon-compliant, Sakura-centric, some expanded plot points from Like Gold, fluff and pining, eventually becomes a smut fest with feelings.

Disclaimer: I did not write Naruto. This is a fan-made piece solely created for entertainment purposes.

Rating: M (eventual nsfw-ness)

AO3 Link - FF.net Link - includes beginning/ending author's notes

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Chapter 1/?: An Introduction to Electrocardiography

Sakura gazes out the window of her office, a pile of paperwork set aside for a poetic sort of procrastination, trying to indulge for once in a Konoha spring, though she's finding it arduous.

As pretty as it is this time of year, all she can manage to feel is wistful.

Hanami has come and gone already for the most part, though there are a few stubborn cherry blossom trees lingering at the tail end of their blooming. She can see one here from her window, up on the hillside that slopes towards Hokage Rock, clinging to the uneven land. She’s sure its roots have to be all twisted, a labyrinth of gnarled wood clinging to any scrap of land it can wind itself around as its branches and petals try against all odds to reach upwards into the open sky that she can’t take her eyes off of.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but it’s one she doesn’t care to unpack.

This year was her twentieth viewing of her namesake, though Sakura obviously doesn't remember the first few. Her parents take great pride in the retelling of tales from those first few years of her life, the ones she was too little to remember. The highlights come up annually on her birthday without fail, how she grasped at the petals like they were something precious, clutched in her sticky little hands the entire day.

A framed photograph is perched on one of the built-in shelves of her parents' living room, of her and her father on her first birthday. He was holding her up on unsteady legs, ridiculously proud and pointing towards the camera where her mother had been trying to get her to look. Her short pink hair was flying absolutely everywhere, matching the fluttering petals and in-bloom cherry blossom tree in the background, chubby hands grasping upwards. Strawberry cake and frosting were smeared all over her cheeks. They’d had a picnic for her, at the park nearest to their house.

“We came home and cleaned you up, and then your father helped you water your tree for the first time, in the little pink watering pail you unwrapped earlier. You were so cute.” That’s what her mom says every year. Sakura has the sentence memorized at this point, could recite it on cue, if she needed to.

Her parents had planted a cherry blossom sapling in their backyard a few days after they brought her home from the hospital as a newborn, so the tree is around the same age she is. She used to spend time under it often, as a kid, and some of her earliest memories involve sprawling beneath it to study the heavens while her mother gardened. She would also sneak berries from the patch when her back was turned. Sometimes her dad would join in her pilferage, and they would sit beneath the tree like a couple of bandits with stained lips, though those first few years she can remember he barely fit underneath it, as tall as he is. Many a tickle fight had been had, shaded by those branches. She would read books there on nice afternoons, when she was a little older.

The tree is fully grown now, also on the final cusp of its blooming for the year, floriferous wood expanded outwards to drape her childhood stomping grounds in a sea of soft pink. They have a picnic under it every year, in her family’s backyard, when they celebrate her birthday together. Her actual birthday has come and gone, but her birthday dinner is two days from now. Her parents swung by her apartment on Sunday afternoon for a bit with outlandishly large cupcakes, but her mom had mentioned they’d do dinner and a gift on their usual night, Thursday, since it works so well with their schedules every other week.

“We have to have your picnic, under your tree, like always. It’s a tradition! My beautiful girl. I can’t believe you’re twenty. It seems like just yesterday you were only yay high,” her dad had told her, gesturing below his knees before hugging her too tightly, ruffling the hair she'd inherited from him before they left. The cupcakes were strawberry with cream cheese frosting, one of her favorite treats. They’d left her with four extra to enjoy between then and Thursday, one for each day if she wanted it, turning her birthday into more of a week-long affair than a one-day celebration.

She and Ino had demolished two of them while watching some of the terrible movies they love to hate together, later that evening. It had been a smorgasbord of strawberries, really, because they'd washed them down with strawberry daiquiris, sugary sweetness topped with ridiculous amounts of whipped cream. They'd sat on her balcony, after, sipping a little tipsily and just looking.

"You should try to enjoy your namesake more this year, Forehead. You're so busy that I'm not sure you've realized, but you've really grown into it," Ino had said, beckoning vaguely towards a Konoha beginning to bloom, renewed with a warm breeze, spring ushered in by a fluttering of pink petals. Ino likes to give compliments in roundabout ways, she’s learned over the course of their friendship; crass as the blonde can be, she does have her moments. Her words meant a lot to Sakura, so she’s trying to take them to heart, to stop and smell the cherry blossoms, so to speak. It won’t be long before Konoha crescendos into the sweltering heat of the summer.

She loves her parents and her friends. She really does.

But birthdays are weird, Sakura thinks.

Last year, Sasuke had sent her a letter on her birthday. She’s reread it so many times that she has it more than memorized; it’s stitched into the muscle tissue of her heart at this point, or maybe scarred into the lining of her aortic valve, sempiternal markings adorning the tunnels that sustain her, causing her breath to catch every time.

Sakura,

Hanami has come to the wilderness in the Land of Honey. Bees are awakening and foraging for the first pollen of the season, with which to begin again. Cherry blossom petals are everywhere, lining the pathways and floating on the water.

Happy birthday.

-Sasuke

It had been short, simple, and even a little poetic; she had cherished it, as she does all of his other letters. She’d cherished the pressed flower with it just as much; a cherry blossom, neatly flattened with a precision that screamed Sasuke, near exactly the same shade of pink as her hair.

Sakura had started crying when she unfolded the paper to reveal it sitting atop his words. His hawk had waited patiently at her office window for a response to be written and tied to its leg, perched atop the windowsill and watching the goings-on of the village below, absolutely no concept in its predator brain of how much she delights in seeing it fly, a graceful tether to the boy - now man - she has been in love with for ages.

Cherry blossom petals are everywhere. Is there a hidden meaning there, or is she making a mountain out of a molehill?

She’s tried not to read too much into the letters. She's not sure if he sends any to Naruto or not; she's too afraid to ask, because she'll either get a heart-pounding hope if he doesn't get them, or a soul-crushing disappointment if he does. She can't imagine him sending a yellow flower to Naruto, but he may very well have sent him a different gift for his birthday.

Maybe he just thought she would like a flower, which she did - it’s pressed for safekeeping, along with all of his other correspondence to her, sporadically and chronologically throughout a book she keeps on her nightstand, An Introduction to Electrocardiography. It is her take on an album of small things she holds close to her own heart, things she wishes she could read in his. Sakura didn’t want to buy an actual album for such a thing; that felt too formal, for something as ambiguous as her ties to Sasuke, overflowing on her end as they may be. So she’d settled on a book about deciphering the heart’s tells based on science only, electrical impulses and repolarization, the sizes and positions of the chambers, how to diagnose conditions utilizing one’s findings. It’s one she doesn’t need access to anymore, extremely familiar with EKGs after years of study. She’d wanted it to be something no-nonsense, all hard facts and data on how to read activity plotted over time.

Evidence-based. Are letters evidence, though? She’s not sure that would hold up as empirical proof in any of the scholarly journals she’s studied or submitted work to since beginning her research. She thinks wryly, though, based on what she has witnessed get published, that scientific verification doesn’t always matter if you know the right people.

She’s thought many times sifting through it that perhaps it is too optimistic, too hopeful of a book subject for such a thing. Sakura has agonized over it, frankly, wondering whether it was an inappropriate choice.

...But now that they’re in there, it might ache worse to move them somewhere else.

It’s the last day of March now, and she didn’t get a letter this month, which is unusual, because she’s gotten one near each month in the time that he’s been away. She’s paged through the book a few times over the past several days, rereading and admiring the preserved sakura blossom, frozen in suspended animation indefinitely on a page about precordial leads.

Sakura hadn’t really expected anything from him for her birthday, other than a monthly letter like he usually sends... but this year she didn’t even get that. She’s trying really hard to not be disappointed. She has so much to be thankful for, in the grand scheme of things...

...But the petals of the cherry blossom from last year have faded over time, she’d evaluated yesterday, sitting in her bedroom. It might be like her, always pressed in a book, fading whilst stuck indefinitely between the boundless teeth of academia. There is always more data to record, more evidence, with which one can prove or disprove their findings.

No letter this month, though. Nothing to record, no new evidence.

It might be time to move the letters somewhere else, she thinks pensively. Maybe a place where she’s not tempted to look at them all the time; their placement in the book, small scraps of paper that stick out in only a couple of places, makes it easy to go back and reread them. She’s pretty sure she has an empty shoebox in her closet that she could move them to, in a pile rather than catalogued between pages rife with information and a fragile sort of hope. Maybe she’ll do it tonight, put it up in the far right corner of the upper shelf, shoved towards the back so she can’t reach it without the stool, so she’s not tempted whenever the next bout of heartsickness slams into her like one of Tsunade-shishou’s fists used to. She needs to go by the library after work first, to return some things, but maybe when she gets home, she’ll do it. She could eat a cupcake, too; that might make it a little easier.

She dreams of that silver sometimes, recalls it any time she sees something similar in color or reflet. There’s an extremely unique necklace in an antique shop she visits with Ino and Sai from time to time, and occasionally on her own, over on the northeast side of town. It’s a salt-and-pepper diamond, dark grey with inclusions, dainty and set in what must be a hand-fabricated setting. It hangs from a silver chain, towards the back of a display case filled with other vintage and distinctive pieces, but it’s the only one she ever finds herself drawn to. It is so similar to his right eye, dark smoke near black, speckled with beguiling silver startling in its clarity. The bevel cut reveals new flecks dependent on the angle at which you view it.

Sakura studies it closely on each visit, because it is so hauntingly breathtaking and it reminds her of him.

Ino has said it’s not her color, and that she should stick to warm tones and gold, for which she is better suited; Sakura has not confessed to her why it catches her eye so much. Sai has agreed with his girlfriend on the coloring note, sensitive as he is to such things, but the way he studies her every time she tears herself away from it makes her suspect he knows exactly why it captivates her so. It’s been sitting there for years at this point; she has to mentally talk herself out of buying it on each visit. It’s beautiful, but she would spend far too much time gawking at it, and it might hurt more with extended study than the gentle tugging at her heart she experiences when she’s in that old building throughout tiny fragments of lackadaisical afternoons.

Sasuke has been gone for a long time. She hopes he's finding the peace he's been seeking, that he's seeing the world with new eyes just as he'd imagined. She thinks of him every day, sends out little orisons like petals in the breeze in the hopes that they’ll find him, wherever he is.

I wonder where he is now.

Try as she does to enjoy the breath of spring Konoha is right now, and her namesake as Ino said, all she can seem to do is shift her vision to the sky, hoping against hope for a glimpse of a familiar bird-of-prey that will stay an ample amount of time for her to craft a response, before it abvolates away for another month.

Sakura smiles, then, close to laughing at the absurdity of it all, because she is so predictable. She loves this village despite its many flaws and challenges, despite the things about it she and Naruto and Kakashi-sensei and Ino and even Tsunade-shishou, off in the Land of Wind, are trying to change, but even after so many years, she’s still pining for something beyond it, something in the wilds of the sky just beyond her reach.

There’s always next year, she supposes, pupils drawn again towards the outstretched branches of the cherry blossom tree on the hill, before trailing her eyes along further. She can grow a little more to try to reach him. When she was little, she had wanted to grow tall so she could try to touch a star, like the branches of the tree in her backyard did when she and her father laid beneath them on balmy summer nights. He would tell her ridiculous stories about all of the constellations, things she knew had to be untrue, even at the ripe age of five. Precocious, he’d always called her, but in the loving, joking manner he had.

Her gaze follows the horizon, leisurely taking in the rest of her home. It really is a lovely day, despite her yearning. Spring is here again, and today's is a gentle sunset, one last little bit of sunlight with which to conclude March. The temperature is already spiking, unusually warm for early spring, but summers in the Land of Fire are always hot. She really should finish her paperwork, but it’s hard to find the motivation just yet.

Something possesses her, then, to turn her neck more, take in more of the skyline's continuation. She wants to see all of it.

And then Sakura’s eyes fall on an achingly familiar figure cloaked all in black, perched only a roof away and observing her, and she thinks she must have nodded off, because she has to be dreaming.

She subtly pinches herself in the millisecond of time that follows, but she is very much awake.

The words are blooming out of her throat before she can even process what’s happening, exultation sinking into her every vein. “Sasuke-kun!” She moves to crank her window open the rest of the way, and he hops from the neighboring roof down into her office, all nimble legerity that she still thinks has to be a mere mirage conjured from her memories. When he straightens to his full height, she muses that he has to have grown taller. The mere sound of his footsteps on the tile flooring, as familiar a refrain to her as if he’d just walked out of the village yesterday, are a treasure beyond price.

“Sakura.” His voice is a rich timbre that she has desperately felt the absence of; hearing him say her name almost makes her want to cry. She smiles wider instead, to the extent that it almost hurts, and her gaze latches hungrily onto the very eye she was just daydreaming about. A storm of soot and silver, beveled into countless fragments like some kind of dark, rustic diamond, and so staggeringly beautiful that she’s pretty sure she’s blushing just from beholding it. Gods, it's not fair for someone to be so handsome.

“When did you get back?” She asks, utterly overcome with joy. This is better than a letter or any birthday gift she could have received, brighter than any star she’s beheld.

“Just now.” He’s smiling, a small and subtle upturn of lips that is so characteristic of him. Then his words hit her, and her face must be getting redder.

Just now? As in…

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday,” he adds before she can simmer on that for too long, and she has to blink in bewilderment, because that is the absolute last thing she expected him to say. Sakura wonders how much heat can creep into one’s face before they spontaneously combust.

Then she realizes she should probably respond, as humans tend to do in conversations. “Oh! Um… it’s okay.” She folds her hands in front of her shyly, grinning like an idiot. “Thank you for remembering.”

There is a lengthy moment in which she just soaks him in, hoping he can read in her eyes how much she’s missed him. He is still so beautiful, prized eyes and aristocratic angles that have solidified a bit more into the face of a man in the time that’s passed. His hair is different now, covering his Rinnegan eye. His cloak is a little more threadbare, too. He’s tall.

His expression, normally unreadable, is calm. Content, even.

There’s a question nagging at her that she knows she needs to ask. She tries not to bite her lip as she asks it, braces herself for the possibility of not liking the answer.

“Are you… just back for a little while?”

Did you find what you were searching for?

He gazes at her for so long that she thinks he may be glimpsing her soul, peeking into her ventricles to see his own words immortalized there, seared into her core to be felt each time her blood pumps.

“...For more than a while.” And she smiles the biggest she ever has. Oh, this is so much better than a letter or a gift.

“Well, welcome back, Sasuke-kun. It’s… very good to see you again.” It feels as if a piece of her heart has been returned to her, something of the divine stitched back into her chest and full to bursting in omneity.

There is a pause, and then he’s reaching his hand out towards hers, initiating physical contact with a touch that is feather light, so gentle she thinks she is going to start sobbing.

She can’t help it; she pulls him into a hug, tinged with elation. She hopes he doesn’t mind too much; he stiffens for a brief moment, but then settles, wrapping his arm around her and settling his head atop of hers, and she could die happy right there, embracing him with feelings momentarily set free from where they’ve been whelved into her chest.

He smells faintly like sage and smoked cedar, just as she remembered. She can hear his heart thumping, a strong cadence, and it grounds her. Oh, she’s missed him.

“...I’m home, Sakura.” Soft words float above her head, and she can feel the vibration of them through his chest, right by her ear.

Oh, she’s crying.

Sasuke lets her embrace him for a long time, for which she is so grateful. She knows he’s not one for physical contact; it’s a privilege to be allowed into his space even for a single second, let alone for an extended period.

She draws back eventually, glancing up at him again through the tears still collecting in her eyes. Her face blazes when he reaches to wipe them away tenderly with a calloused hand, careful and with a lenity that she’s always known was there, hidden under the surface.

She could just stare at him for hours, she thinks as he lowers his hand. He’s still looking down at her with one of the softest expressions she has ever seen him wear. She really hopes she’s not dreaming.

It’s tremendously hard to get it together, but she tries, because she doesn’t want to spend the entire time crying, not when he's finally back. There are so many questions she’d like to ask him that she’s finding it a challenge to pick one with which to lead.

He surprises her by speaking first, quietly. “I… had something made for you.”

It takes a moment for the words to compute.

Made for me?

Her processing speed must be exceptionally slow, stuck in the utter mush her insides have become, because he adds, “...For your birthday.”

Sakura blinks, and furrows her brows in confusion. “Made… for me?”

He nods. “...I’m sorry it’s late.” The way he speaks it is cryptic, like the apology weighs more than one needed for a tardy gift. Doesn’t he know she doesn’t care? He could have showed up in July with something for her, and it still would have made her knees weak and her heart thump furiously in her chest.

Made for me? She’s still stuck on that sentiment as he breaks eye contact and turns to rummage through his satchel, beneath his cloak.

Sasuke pulls out a medium-sized flat box, a simple white, and she doesn’t know what she expected, but it wasn’t that. Something that comes in a box is a lot more formal than a pressed cherry blossom, something more… permanent.

She reaches out to take it on autopilot, and is stupidly distracted by the way his hand brushes against hers, a small spark that makes something in her quake. She wonders if he felt it, too.

Sakura clutches the box with both hands like her life depends on it, murmuring softly, “Thank you, Sasuke-kun.” She’ll wait until later to open it, after he’s left; whatever it is, she doesn’t want to embarrass him, and she also isn’t sure she can tear her eyes away from him just yet, anyways.

Is it just the lighting in her office, or are his ears a little flushed? She didn’t notice that before; maybe he’s had a drawn-out journey back. She wonders how much ground he covered today, if he’s still winded. He might need to rest.

But then he mumbles, voice husky with what she assumes is disuse, “...You should open it.”

His words echo in her head again. I… had something made for you.

“Okay,” she answers in a hushed voice, so she doesn’t scare him away, shifting slightly to set the box on her desk carefully. Suddenly she is very nervous, anticipation settling into her gut.

When she lifts the lid, she swears her heart ceases beating.

The most exquisitely intricate uchiwa fan she has ever laid eyes upon is placed in the box before her.

It’s carved into a likeness of a cherry blossom tree, branches twisting lissomely into bamboo framework, impossibly fine. A different set of words is reverberating in her head now.

You should try to enjoy your namesake more this year, Forehead. You're so busy that I'm not sure you've realized, but you've really grown into it.

Made for me?

“O-oh.” Sakura is not sure what she expected, but it wasn’t this. She fights back the tears, biting her lip and wide eyes soaking it all in, enjoying her namesake in a way that is entirely unprecedented in its sheer severity. The amount of time it would have taken for someone to sculpt and bind and sew is unimaginable; every detail is finely wrought, flawless down to the silk and stitching, lacquered and carved pale wood shifting effortlessly into eighty slivers of bamboo, intricately webbing silk together with the lithe grace of gossamer. It’s a cherry blossom tree, petals and all, pearlescent thread shifting slightly, gorgeously in the light, unimaginable detail. She has stitched people back together countless times over the course of years, but even her expert dexterity would look like a child’s first embroidery stitching in comparison. The stamen within the petals are nearly more detailed and finely milled than an actual, real life cherry blossom, plexure sutured in a fashion so baronial that it’s impossible to believe human hands were even responsible for it.

The silk. Oh, the silk. The color shift bears a striking resemblance to the Uchiha insignia. This is not a gift one gives to a teammate.

Oh, she's crying.

This has to be a dream, some kind of paracosm her heart thought up to give her brain the high of a lifetime. Hope burgeons and unfolds in her chest cavity, bleeding into her extremities like the pale pink shifting into red before her eyes. She’s never, ever going to forget this, not even if she lives to be one hundred years old.

Made for me?

She picks it up with disbelieving hands, grasping it more carefully than she’s ever held anything in her entire life, as if she’s going to wake up at any moment and it will dissolve into synapse, lost in the hazy juncture of morning the way one tends to lose awareness of the contents of a dream upon coming to lucidity. To her absolute bewilderment, it stays solid in her hands, a finery made even more unbelievable by touch. The grooves of the carving are as gentle as his hand had been on hers earlier. She thinks it would have had to be commissioned at least a few months in advance, outlandishly expensive. She’s never seen silk like this. She doesn't know; she's smart, but she's no artisan. Maybe she should ask Sai. She's crying.

She adores it.

Tears won’t stop welling in her eyes; she thinks they may be escaping from a tender spot inside her chest that’s been reserved for him since she was a child, a leak in a metaphorical dam. She takes a steadying breath, blinks, almost has them conquered. Get a grip, Sakura.

Then Sasuke’s hand is on hers, gently turning the handle over.

Her name is carved into the pale wood, on the back in formal calligraphy, Sakura daintier and more perfect than she could ever write it, as if it had just been uncovered in one of the inner layers rather than whittled there manually. Sasuke presses her fingers to it before loosening his grip, and in that second it feels as though his lost hand is in the wood, caressing her from split atoms in the grooves from the other side.

The tears spill over her cheeks - she admits defeat - intricacy of the entire thing blurring out of focus but still somehow burned into her retinas for all eternity.

Made for me, made for me, made for me-

Her voice finds her after a few more tears fall. “It’s beautiful.” Her voice is barely above a whisper, overwhelmed with complete and utter awe, trying desperately to choke down a sob. “Thank you, Sasuke-kun. I… I’ll treasure it. Always.” She cradles the fan closer to her chest, her heart - maybe An Introduction to Electrocardiography wasn’t a poorly-chosen book, after all; there is much to be read from something this precious - and regards him with watery eyes. She wishes she wasn’t crying; the distortion of the tears is making it hard to see the silver she’s loved and missed so much.

His hand lifts to her face after a moment, and to her surprise, he wipes away her tears again. She barely catches the something-more in his eyes, then, through the waterworks, precious metal flashing and pouring into the words scarred into her ventricles to live there forever, fortified in silver, but he is looking at her so -

“...Always,” he agrees, voice a little breathless, sparking scintilla near hypnotizing her in their luster, and he seems so happy -

Then he leans down to press his lips gently to hers, and this is better than her heart stopping, like when she opened the box. This time, her heart soars, and she touches a star she’s been dreaming of for eons.

#naruto #sasusaku #ssfanfiction #cherry writes #like silver #fanfiction #i'm really out here with just hundreds of pages of fanfiction in my google doc drafts huh

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cienie-isengardu · 3 years

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A bit about Jaster Mereel

Anyone who follows / visits my blog for Mandalorians most likely noticed by now I don’t talk much about Jaster Mereel, even though he is, Legends-wise, an important figure in their history. In general, I’m not a big fan of him or True Mandalorians and for sure I hate how tie-in materials glorified Jaster even though, from my perspective, he didn’t show anything that special in the main source (Jango Fett: Open Seasons).

Anyone may argue how comics is a very limited medium to present everything in great details, that the story was about Jango’s past, so it makes sense that Jaster, Montross and Tor were the supportive characters driving the plot and fulfilling important roles in Jango’s life (a mentor/father, rival/betrayer and enemy). But at the same time, even with limited space, Tor managed to lay two devastating traps (and one by using Jedi as a tool of doom, something that rarely happens, even less for Mandalorians), outmaneuvering both Jaster and Jango at some point in the story and showing good fighting & tactical skills. You don’t need to like him, you may disagree with his philosophy of life, behaviour and etc, but the comics built Tor as someone’s that leaves a strong impression based on his action that we actually could see with our own eyes while Jaster is mainly praised by tie-in materials as a great leader and some sort of reformator (what for me seems to argue with original source a lot) and sometimes, if remembered at all, by other Mandalorians. At the same time, comics didn’t show much Jaster in favorable circuments. I mean, we met him on the run from Death Watch and hiding in field crops that belonged to Fetts, then saving Jango only to almost die in fire and in the end being saved by Jango’s quick thinking. With the help of orphaned boy, he scored one victory on Concord Dawn then timeskip happened (sadly omitting the years of raising Jango) and finally Jaster led his men straight into trap, got betrayed by his own man and was killed on Korda VI. Understandable, Tor and Jaster played different roles thus comics made Vizsla the “active” character while Mereel was more “passive”.

And you know what? Even with my despiste for the biased source materials that treat Jaster as some epic character while demonizing Tor and tons of personal jokes about Jaster / True Mandalorians shared with my close friend and fellow Tor fan (and god knows, we joke about them as much as we joke about Jedi), I do think that Jaster Mereel has a great potential as character and it is a true shame his story is not exploited beyond few basic informations. I mean, a former Journeyman Protector (a man of law) joining Mandalorian Mercenaries that kill for money / personal ambitions on right and left? The term a “reformed murderer” sounds intriguing on its own and there is the whole conflict with Tor Vizsla, the uneasy(?) relationship with Montross and family bond with Jango to explore.

And the sad thing about Jaster Mereel is how, despite the cult of True Mandalorians, he is almost forgotten. I know, hoping for New Canon to bring Legends Mandalorians to life is too much to ask when Jango Fett (and Boba) is barely recognised as Mandalorian in the first place but there is some irony that right now the true Mandalorians are tightly tied to Death Watch and TCW additional materials at least mentioned that Pre’s relatives / clan members were warriors of Death Watch and there was Bounty Hunter Code with Tor Vizsla’s Manifesto.So, Tor’s existence is/was to some degree confirmed even despite the drastic changes that happened to Mandalorian lore thanks to The Clone Wars & Disney.

And yeah, BHC did mention Jaster Mereel and True Mandalorians but in all fairness? The Bounty Hunter Code was so great but wasted opportunity to flesh out Jaster, who had/lead a company actually called “HeadHunter”on Korda VI

which may suggest Mereel’s True Mandalorians also took more typical bounty hunter jobs (and seeing how both Jango and Montross went into business, it seems logical to assume they both already had some experience in this field). This in turn could nicely connect Jango’s past to the career of Bounty Hunter, as in a way to explore the time he spent with Jaster Mereel, what he learned from his mentor/father figure and would absolutely make sense for Jango to pass the book/notes to young Boba. Especially since he wanted a clone for himself to pass the Jaster’s Legacy.

I understand that the Death Watch’s Manifesto was a means to connect the old lore with changes made by TCW. Even as a non-objective source, it has its own value but frankly, including it into stricte book about bounty hunters feels a bit off. Jaster’s own notes could give the fans the same information about Mandalorian history and even about the conflict between Death Watch and New Mandalorians, as a third (less involved?) party and it would make sense for Jango to have it in the first place (as a memento because Jango was sentimental enough to keep Jaster’s stuff years after his death) and pass it to Boba who from the start was meant to carry on Jaster’s Legacy.

And yeah, sure, it was possible for Jango to get hold of a top secret Death Watch book and pass it to Boba “to know your enemy”, but I personally think that Jaster’s notes would carry more emotional impulse. And well, I’m curious about Jaster’s mindset. And I’m saying that as a fan of Tor Vizsla because frankly, the manifesto doesn’t sound much like him (or at least the impression of him built for me by comics) and even Jango shares similar doubts about the authenticity of the author. So yeah, in regard to this one source, I would rather have Jaster’s POV than one dictated for TCW for Tor.

The other wasted opportunity happened in the latest Marvel comics (what is the real reason for the rant). You know, the War of the Bounty Hunters - in one of the issues, Boba had a sidequest and worked under the name of Jango.

And I know this was supposed to be an emotional scene, a son using father’s name and canon remembering about elder Fett and so on. But the only thing I felt at that moment was how Jaster Mereel felt from grace and how it was easy to make a callback to all the older Legends sources (retcon?) of both Jango and Boba using Jaster Mereel’s name while working undercover. As you know, keeping the memory of a man supposed to mean so much to Jango and Mandalorian history - and by that allowing Boba to fulfil his own father’s desire.

Yeah, I know, I wish too much and hope is overrated anyway. It is just bizarre how the perception of Mandalorian lore changed in the last 20 years.

I never thought there would come a day to say this, but Jaster Mereel deserves better than being some idealized symbol or obscure character forgotten at every turn.

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jgfiles · 3 years

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hello. idk if you're still active or not, but im still asking after all since im really really curious. i wanna know your opinion about the difference skill between Miyoshi and Kaminaga, like their strength and weakness. i hope you read and answer this omg please. thank you!

Sorry, for the late reply, when I'm on holiday I've hard time accessing to my pc...

As for your question... hum... it's a bit difficult to figure out the differences in abilities between Kaminaga and Miyoshi as everyone's main abilities aren't specifically referred, nor they're compared.

D Agency clearly gave them all the same preparation, although it's reasonable to assume as each of them is a different person, they probably have strongest and weakest points.

I can give you my headcanons for them based on what the anime, the manga and the novel seemed to focus on, but I've really no way to know if those are their stronger or weakest points.

I tend to think Miyoshi is the best at D Agency at using guns (with Sakuma being the best at using Katana) due to the following official image (though the image's purpose might be just to repreaent the clash between the two of them, Sakuma tall and broad in uniform and with a traditional Japanese sword, Miyoshi, much smaller, in a suit and with a modern gun).

I also assume Miyoshi also has a deep knowledge of arts, not just because he played the role of an art dealer in "Coffin" but also because he looked at Millais' Ophelia on an art book and, according to the movie he was born in Paris and raised in Venice, both cities of art.

Both him and Kaminaga are pretty good at swimming.

I can't really tell if Miyoshi and Jitsui got there before Kaminaga and Amari or viceversa but I'll place them in the group of the 4 fastest swimmers.

Miyoshi, Amari and Fukumoto are the three who're best at dancing.

As far as my headcanon go Kaminaga is good at fencing (along with Tazaki)...

...resistant to drugs and good at acting he can make up the most outrageous things.

He likes litterature (Yuuki gives him a book and the reference to vampires is possibly tied to Bram Stoker's "Dracula"). He's good with a camera and with machinaries.

One of the official cards for JG implied Kaminaga likes to drink and behave in a not appropriate manner when he does. Considering though how he can handle well being drugged and his characterization in the drama cd I think it's more than Kaminaga has fun pretending he loses control while he's drunk than that he actually loses it.

Miyoshi instead likes to remain always calm and collected.

The drama cd implied Kaminaga is more popular with girls than Miyoshi (and very prone at flirting).

The drama cd depicts a younger Kaminaga who was more prone at believing at things than Miyoshi, so it's possible to speculate that while Miyoshi is and was always a cynical person, Kaminaga merely became a realist growing up. Miyoshi cures his own person much more (he's canonically stated as a narcissist, with scenes in whcih he fusses over his hair and his waistcoat is a more elegant model than Kaminaga's), while Kaminaga is canonically more mischievous.

While in Joker Game vests are always a colour slightly different from the suit (it’s usually slightly darker), in Kaminaga’s case this is much more obvious as his suit is brown but his vest is yellow. A suit with an unmatched vest was considered a rare and more casual look.

A manga cover implied both Kaminaga and Miyoshi like to play billiard (the settei for the anime showed there was meant to be a billard in D Agency).

...and official info said they're both willing to take leadership of the other D Agency members.

In a drama cd, when the cast is divided in two teams, Sakuma’s team which has Sakuma, Fukumoto, Odagiri and Hatano is defined as far superior in terms of physical strength and unity to Miyoshi’s team which has Miyoshi, Kaminaga, Jitsui and Amari. While it’s hard to exactly establish how strong Kaminaga and Miyoshi are just with this, this might mean strength isn’t their strongest point.

In the movie Kaminaga is Yuuki's secretary while Miwa Shiro speculated Kaminaga would become the new D Agency boss after Yuuki (though as Miyoshi by then is dead this doesn't tell us if Kaminaga is better than him or not).

Overall, I think they're mean to be more or less evenly matched and most is left to headcanons and speculations so it's hard to say for sure which are their real strenght and weaknesses therefore, as I said, most of what I listed is based on my headcanons.

Sorry if I couldn't be more useful than this and thank you for your ask!

#Joker Game #Kaminaga #Miyoshi #Ask

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perfectharmonyloveschaos · 4 years

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Sora Is the Master of Masters All Evidence

Part 1:

Kingdom Hearts 2.8 Backcover is the first instance that we meet the Master of Masters ourselves without anyone else’s perspective of events and see him as an individual character. From the get-go, the Master of Masters (or MoM as I will be addressing him throughout this theory for simplicity sake) is immediately addressed with heavy respect from his title alone. But, Chirithy also makes sure to mention his “mischievous” nature that we see a lot of throughout all of his appearances from here on. Due to the Master of Masters only being included and planned from Backcover onwards, it definitely seems more than coincidental that all of his similarities to Sora take place in the games technically made after Backcover which I will discuss; Backcover itself, KHX and KHUX, 0.2, KH3 and ReMind.

Both Sora and MoM are introduced as joker, light-hearted characters who use humour to lighten dark situations and comfort people. They hold themselves lightly and make fun of themselves to make others laugh or to lighten the dark of a situation. Sora did this when he comforted Riku by pulling a funny face (“how am I going to face everyone?!”/“like this?”) in KH2 while MoM pretended to question if Invi cared about him when she was overthinking things and getting worried about the events to come (“do you… want me to go?!”)

Both characters share several of the same gestures and body movements, with Sora copying a lot of MoM’s gestures especially in KH3 and ReMind. Both hold their arms behind their heads, tilt their heads or even bodies sideways playfully and poke things to name a few shows off their playful, animated gestures. Both use their right hands when using the Keyblade with Sora holding his in his right hand and MoM summons No Name with his right hand to give it to Luxu.

Along with these personality and movement similarities, we also have the infamous Gazing Eye' glitch found in KH ReMind that 'definitely calls this theory into question. Why does a glitch like this only happen with Young Xehanort, whom we know MoM interacted and met with? Why does it only happen when Young Xehanort uses his time alteration powers if this was simply a glitch in the texture of Sora and the Gazing Eye's eye? Would that not mean that this could be triggered at any other time? And why is it so cleanly done if not to be intentional? This 'glitch' appears perfectly on Sora's eye and doesn't affect any other texture on Sora. If Sora was in fact MoM, would it not make sense for his possibly clairvoyant/prediction abilities to be affected by Young Xehanort affecting time? This would be too difficult go be a simple visual glitch or error of the engine given how the texture of the Gazing Eye appears in both of Sora's eyes perfectly, as well as appearing bloodshot since there would be no reason for Sora's eyes to use the bloodshot texture AND the Gazing eye texture together.

Speaking of Sora’s eyes, this also brings me back to the pre-KH3 release conspiracy theory about Sora’s eye colour changing to green throughout the trailers which people passed off as being the reflections of the environment. This happened several times throughout the game and seemingly meant nothing, but when you consider who Sora was interacting his eye colour changed, him possibly being the MoM explains this. The first time we see this is in Mount Olympus, when Sora meets with Xigbar for the first time since DDD and we see Sora’s eyes have strong green tint compared to Hercules, who also has bright blue eyes that don’t seem to be affected by the lighting. Maybe only the KH original models are affected for some reason? Xigbar’s eyes are also not affected, while yellow, which would definitely show given how intense Sora’s are. Xigbar, is Luxu, so one could assume that anyone connected to MoM would make Sora’s eyes react, yes? Again, we see Sora’s eye go green with others as well. In Kingdom Of Corona, Sora’s eyes are once again green and while it it way greener here than Olympus, Marluxia’s—or Lauriam, who MoM choose as a Dandelion leader and survivor of the war—eyes once again are not affected, nor are any other characters’ like Rapunzel, Flynn, or Mother Gothel. Only Sora. We see this again with Ven when Vanitas is going to kill Aqua in the land of Departure and Sora wakes Ventus up from inside him, Sora’s eyes go green while no one else’s, including Ven and Aqua both of whom have blue eyes, have their eyes affected. And the final past character that is directly tied to the MoM through the dandelions and Sora whose presence affects Sora’s eyes is Ephemer in the Keyblade Graveyard. Ephemer has no reason to come to Sora here, compared to Ventus who he knew in canon and had every reason to help but let die in the previous ending, given that they do not know one another beyond Ventus. And as the camera zooms into Sora, Sora’s eyes gain a slight green tint to his eyes before the centre of his eyes change to a light, greenish blue that is very similar to another Name’s Gazing eye and focuses on his eye not only here, but once Sora snaps back to reality and focuses on the reflection of all the dead keyblades helping them. Here, Sora’s eyes are green again the exact same way that his eyes were green interacting with Xigbar/Luxu and Marluxia/Lauriam, both of whom were tied to the MoM. The green tint and highlight of the colour around his iris is identical to that of the Gazing Eye in No Name, with the environments and how others reacting to them in each of these worlds showing that these events and only these affect solely Sora’s eyes, proving that this is not just a simple light reflection but something done intentionally to Sora’s eyes.

Beyond physical and personality similarities, both Sora and MoM share another quality with only one other individual in the entirety of the KH cast; they are the only ones aside from Xehanort to have held and been the apparent wielder of the X-Blade. While we never see him with it, Nomura confirmed that MoM had had the X-Blade at one point and studied it to create the Keyblade that everyone in KHX used. He used the X-Blade as an example and managed to figure out, through studying it, how to extract the light/power from people’s hearts and shaped their Keyblades which he then trained the Foretellers with. As well as the X-Blade, MoM also had a sort of authority over Kingdom Hearts as well as Ira mentioned that he had given them Keyblades to protect Kingdom Hearts and Ava tried to warn Gula away from summoning Kingdom Hearts since MoM had said it was “forbidden”. Gula decided to try and summon Kingdom Hearts in order to force the MoM to return to set them straight, showing that he held a sense of cautious as well towards it and decided to not use it and lock it away instead. Given that the MoM’s word was seen as gospel, this was more than likely a serious warning and order. And what do we see by the end of Kingdom Hearts 3? Sora, earning the X-Blade and telling Xehanort that using it is wrong and that no one should use its power to change destiny, before closing it to keep the worlds safe. Both characters—with only Xehanort as the other wielder of the X-Blade and exception of this mindset—had this power and chose to not use it but instead locked it away from using it for their own gains.

Both of these characters also shared the same philosophy of destiny despite the power they hold; Sora, who has challenged and even changed his friends’ doomed fates claims that a true leader knows that destiny “beyond his control” and “accepts that”, something that makes no sense with how much he has changed his own destiny and the events written in the Book Of Prophecy. However, the Master of Masters shares these ideals and believes not in changing what is meant to happen, but rather in preparing for what happens after that in order to secure the best aftermath. Why would Sora believe in this given his past, if not to draw similarities between himself and MoM?

The Book Of Prophecies, as depicted in Backcover, also shares connections to what we assume to be the timeline of events surrounding not the the events of Backcover and the Keyblade war, but rather the events of the entire game series timeline. We see MoM looking at the Book of Prophecies through the Cases of the different Foretellers and Luxu, as well as Ira later on in the movie which we can use to create a basic ‘timeline’ of events based on imagery depicted.

We see the MoM look through throughout Backcover, with the ‘Case of Gula’ showing what seems to be the earliest part of the book we see with an illustration of a darkside heartless and a keyblade which would either be the Kingdom Key or Kingdom Key D, placing the beginning of the book at the first Kingdom Hearts game. The reason I think this takes place during KH1 rather than 0.2 is the Sora’s crown emblem being on the page previous to a Darkside heartless, seeming to signify Sora and then his first battle against the darkness either on his Station of Awakening or Destiny Islands, as well as these pages appearing to be nearing the middle of the book which would make sense given that Sora only entered the canon timeline after the whole Fairytale Saga, BBS and 0.2 took place. Then, we see the next page with an image of a shadow heartless, both which Sora fights on Destiny Islands after getting the keyblade and then in Traverse Town where he learns about the darkness or could simply represent all heartless as the most recognisable heartless. The page after this shows another Keyblade which looks like the Kingdom Key again, while the next page is the infamous ‘traitor’ that the MoM rips out and gives to Gula and the page after holding another illustration of Sora’s crown emblem. Given the pacing of events based on the concept of this book depicting the events of Sora’s experiences in KH1, the page detailing the ‘traitor’ may in fact be talking about Riku and his betrayal of Sora by accepting Maleficent's help. The MoM’s wording seems to support this, by telling Gula to “find the traitor hidden among you and stop them before it’s too late”, through Sora eventually learning of Riku’s fall to darkness and possession by Ansem before stopping Riku-Ansem and saving the worlds.

This causes us to question exactly how would the MoM know of Sora's first adventure given that his eye, at this point, hasn't even seen Sora yet? The only logical answer? Because he lived it.

During the ‘Case of Aced’; when Aced, who acts a lot like Sora in KH1, is angry at Ira being chosen to be the new leader and was constantly in Ira's shadow, much like how Sora was undermined by Riku who was seen as the better of the two and originally chosen first by the keyblade. These corresponding at the same time suggests a connection to KH1, Sora, and Aced. Even their whole discussion over why Aced shouldn't be leader seems to, much like his discussion with Invi over keeping up "otherwise you'll be left behind, all alone" seems to cause an unconscious reaction from the MoM. "I know you want it, but that just isn't enough. Any chump can say, 'You! Here's a huge promotion. Good job!' and make you head honcho, but enthusiasm alone doesn't make a great leader." The way this is worded, especially with "great" and not just "good" suggests he has a basis for it, similar to how Sora saw Riku as being better than him. His following line "Ira needs someone like you to give him a push in the right direction" is spoken with anger or bitterness, as if the MoM understood Aced's annoyance at being considered second and feeling similarly in the past, as if he had to act supportive and push someone who was considered better than him in the 'right direction' before. But, his "you need to support Ira'' line is spoken sternly, acting as though he knows from experience that someone like Ira would need the more emotional support of someone like Aced, who uses his heart to decide things rather than "always just thinking and thinking and thinking behind that Unicorn mask of his" as Ira does. Everything said in this scene definitely parallels Sora and his emotions in the first KH game up until Sora decided that his friends were his power and that he didn’t need the keyblade to be strong, something that the MoM understands and acts sympathetic towards Aced about while trying to push him towards the same idea; "you might not be entirely happy with your role, but just know that it's the most important one." There is also a sense of symbolism in this scene with the MoM using his hand to cover the Kingdom Key when telling Aced that he will be Ira’s right hand man, possibly paralleling back to Sora’s own sense of being overshadowed by Riku.

Other connections these two share include the emphasis of their bond with Dream eaters and the Wreck-It Ralph summon from KH3. Both of these two characters show a stronger connection to Dream Eaters than any other characters, with MoM being the ‘creator’ of the Chirithy dream eaters which hold a deep connection to their owners’ hearts and are affected by their owners’ state given that these dreams eaters, like when Sora fell into darkness, fall into darkness with their masters and become nightmares. And what is Sora’s nightmare in DDD? A figure in a dark coat with purple and pink colours and a dark dream eater symbol on their back, much like the MoM and his black coat and the Chirithy nightmare we see in Backcover and KHUX.

#kingdom hearts #KH #kingdom hearts theory #kingdom hearts 3 spoilers #kingdom hearts 3 #master of masters #KH sora #kingdom hearts sora #kh master of masters #MoM!Sora #mom!sora #sora is the master of masters theory

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callonpeevesie · 2 years

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I don't know what I'm going to unleash with this question, but I'm asking it anyway — what are your opinions on Charmurti (1978)?

Oh man you unleashed all my petty rage and nitpicking, god bless. Heads up for anyone who likes it, I'm going to BITCH. And disclaimer that I haven't watched the movie in a couple of years and I'm going off memory.

So. To start off I'm super nitpicky about adaptations especially when the source material is something so important to me so I rarely like any adaptations of Tenida. And my criticisms are possibly too harsh. I don't mind changes to minor story details, I really don't. Satyajit Ray's Feluda movies did that. Minor adaptations don't bother me as long as the general essence is faithful and changes are often necessary for book-to-film adaptation. My problem with Charmurti is that Umanath Bhattacharya does not seem to Get the essence of the story and characters.

First of all What was that ending oh my god. I don't remember exactly what happened but there were some dumbass fight sequences which. what was the point? The book had a perfect climax, it was dramatic and funny but not over the top, it was Handed to you on a Platter and you choose to drag it longer for no reason? Eijonyo desher kichhu hoy na. Even more than the disservice to the canon ending, what bothers me about the ending is that. they're not meant to be op. They're literally just kids who want to have a good time. They're not meant to like, fistfight criminals while cops uselessly hang around in the background. I cannot stress this enough, they're average humans. Chaotic and dumbass yes, but they're not Fight Sequence people. Adaptation directors be like "this generally peaceful domestic character can fistfight. As a treat." (Byomkesh Gotro I'm looking at you)

Anyway moving on. Manna Dey's intro song was nice though the other songs were So random. The comedy was. well. I don't exactly remember why I'm not a fan of the comedy but it seems like the sort of easy-flowing humour of the books translated to pointless yelling and slapstick comedy in the movie? I think it ties in with the director not Getting It but I don't remember these things very well so I'll give it the benefit of doubt.

Now my favourite part: the characters. I did not like Chinmoy Roy's casting At All. I don't get why he's so hyped up in that role because it was objectively bad casting? I mean I know why, it's because people interpret Tenida as slapstick comedy with no depth, but I don't understand. He just didn't have that Personality or even look the part tbh. And you know what? Prabhat Mukhopadhyay whom Tenida was based on didn't much like his portrayal either. Validation right there. (I wish I could link the article I read that in but I can't find it rip)

Habul, Pyala and Kyabla were good appearance wise. Vibe wise not so much. Kyabla was. Idk he's so chill in the books, but he was just? yelling all the time in the movie? He honestly felt kind of dull compared to book Kyabla's bright personality. I really wish I could appreciate the part with Kyabla being emo about Habul being kidnapped but I can't, it's just so over the top. Like the movie does show that they care about each other but it's hard to take seriously because everything is so extra, unlike how in the books there are wholesome parts and they seriously Experience Things even though the style is lighthearted.

And speaking of Kyabla, why are the filmmakers so obsessed with his mother and if they are why don't they show her properly? They rushed through the main plot while wasting half the time on her. The 2012 movie did that too, she's there in the movie all the time and serves no purpose except moping around. She's Not Like That. She was super chill in the books (Kyabla came from somewhere right?). She's the only functional character in the series imo but that's just my opinion. I just? If you must drag her into the story for no reason then do it properly jeez.

Habul was one of the few redeeming qualities of the movie though. And Santosh Dutta. Shantosh Dutta being in the cast is always a good thing. Jhonturam was great, and as far as I remember I liked Satya Bandopadhyay and Rabi Ghosh. I don't remember anyone else rip. Habul was accurate to the books, they somehow miraculously retained his subtle humour and the actor did a Wonderful job with the whole joking with a straight face thing. Genuinely made me laugh in the same way book Habul does, love him for that.

I saved Pyala for last because ofc I'm most passionate about him. He was SO UNDERPLAYED. He comes across as just super try-hardy and extra™ and all he does is whine and get dunked on all the time? Not that I'm surprised, he's always underplayed everywhere. If I were to voice all my grievances about his misinterpretations we'd be here all day but my biases aside: Pyala is super important in the books right? The plot follows him because he's the narrator obviously and that's enjoyable because the reader has that extra connection with him. He affects the narration so much. Sometimes he has more protagonist energy than Tenida and that's fine, Tenida is not meant to be More Capable than the rest like Feluda is.

This is what adaptations go wrong with. They always hold up Tenida as the MVP and don't bother to establish the relationship between Pyala and the viewer. Yet the plot follows Pyala anyway even though he's not established as that special. Why? Why would anyone care so much about him? Either give him the importance he has in the books or nerf him and change the narration accordingly. This is just lazy.

Adapting books with first person narration to movies without first person narration is hard. Afaik some of the Byomkesh movies keep Ajit the narrator and that works. Feluda movies don't keep Topshe the narrator and that also works because the narration is adapted accordingly. In case of Tenida I honestly feel the best way is to keep the first person narration just because the narration affects the story so much.

Yeah I think that's all I have. All that being said, I don't actively hate it, I'm mostly meh on it (especially after seeing the 2012 movie, the 1978 one seems like heaven by comparison) and I guess I only have so many grievances because I'm extra possessive about the books. I don't think it can be judged separately from the books either because it's Supposed to be a direct adaptation. The plot mostly follows the book (other than that ending) so that's good. Overall I guess it's fun but lacks a lot of nuance of the books. THANK YOU for the ask, it was super fun to let off all this steam.

#i legit had a blast writing this #abar-ashbe-basanto #dakbaksho #tenida #pyala #kyabla #habul #damn i haven't tagged them in ages #i guess i should make a tag for the movie #charmurti 1978 #also this is so long 😭#long post

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ninjastormhawkkat · 3 years

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My Crazy Wordgirl Theory #2

I will get to writing stories for my version of the Becky Boxleitner au. I just really need to get this out of the way. After going through sites for the canon facts of the Wordgirl television series and re-watching old Wordgirl episodes to help me write some stories for my version of the au, I sort of discovered something interesting. In a scene from “The Rise of Miss Power” we see an image of a male and female Lexiconian superhero duo painted on the ceiling of the room in the episode special. Now about everyone in the fandom has speculated that image is a painting of her biological parents, or an idea of what her parents would look like. But what if that were not true? What if that painting was just a symbolic image of what the humanoid people on Lexicon typically looked like? Back in the episode, “Wordgirl Makes A Mistake”, Becky mentions that she accidentally crawled onto the ship of Captain Huggy Face, a famous (Lexiconian) Air Force Pilot when she was really little. For about 10 or 11 years, Bob and Becky have been raised on earth with no attempts to get back to Lexicon, and no one from Lexicon has come to find them. I am not trying to paint Becky’s biological parents in a bad light, but why was no Lexiconian searching for their lost child? From looking at Wordgirl’s Spaceship Hideout, it appears that people from Lexicon have the technological resources to track down the crashed ship of a famous pilot and find him and a lost child. This would take them only a few years. Also looking at Wordgirl’s origin story, it seems that Lexicon is not lightyears away from Earth or Becky and Bob would have been a bit older than when they were found in the origin flashback. (I know it is a cartoon, but some rules of science still apply to the show). I don’t know how far the planets are from each other but I think they exist in the same solar system if indicated by the alien tech that Lexiconians are able to travel faster to planets without aging much. Again I ask if this is possible, then why has no one come to rescue Becky and Bob? What if it was because Becky was meant to have crawled onto Huggy’s ship and never be found? We don't know the strength of Lexiconian’s memory at a young age. We know they can remember everything they read since Becky knows every word in the dictionary, but we don’t know how early they maintain a photographic memory. I believe that Bob may have told Becky the story about how they came to earth when she was old enough. From watching that scene, we can assume Becky only has memories of crawling onto a ship and falling asleep, then waking up to a startled pilot. Bob even has no clue how a child with no business being near a spaceship about to take off so he tells her what he only knows. Could it be Becky was never meant to be found by anyone else from Lexicon? Why so? Why hide from a planet of heroes? Here is where the conspiracy I formulated in my head starts. Let’s consider this question: What if Becky was only half Lexiconian?

We first need to look at Lexicon’s political structure. About everyone who has watched or watches the show must have thought at one point that Lexicon was a planet of heroes which is why Becky wanted to use her powers for good and become a superhero at an early age. What we may not realize is that the term hero could apply differently on Lexicon than on Earth. In the flashback of Wordgirl’s origin, Becky refers to Huggy as a famous air force pilot. He is even called Captain Huggy Face. Also in the special, “The Rise of Miss Power”, Huggy gives Wordgirl a book titled Super Advanced Secret Battle Moves of the Planet Lexicon in order to help her in the final battle against Miss Power. Now I don’t know about you, but this makes me think that Lexicon had some type of military control and the term hero on their planet was a military term. One of the statues of a Lexiconian in that special was wearing a Roman-style helmet, something a soldier in the Roman army would wear. I don’t know if Lexicon has a military government or just a government with a strong military influence. I don’t know what type of rule Lexicon has, but it definitely has a military of some sort. From the statues and painting we seen of Lexiconians, Wordgirl’s outfit is typical outer clothing for Lexicon. This also sparks an idea of a common uniform for Lexicons which would make sense if there is some type of military influence on the planet. This ties into my theory about Becky. Now from what I have learned about aliens from all the sci-fi themed shows and movies such as Doctor Who and Monsters Vs. Aliens, most aliens seem to view the human race as a lesser species compared to them. We can see that with how Miss Power acted toward the villains and the citizens. Even though she was not a Lexiconian, Miss Power still viewed everyone as lesser and as servants to herself. In my opinion with Kid Math, before Wordgirl set him straight, he seemed to view heroics as a game or something interesting that he could copy for himself. He was friendly, but he appeared to take what Becky was teaching him about being a normal kid as a learning experience at first. I don’t know if this also applied to Lexiconians, but I think that due to the implications of military themes shown in the series, there are some that might have had a purity complex. There could have been Lexiconians might have wanted only their species to be the “heroes” and keep that in their own bloodline. I don’t think every Lexiconian held that belief since in one episode we see Bob on a date with Bosco, but maybe some in higher social classes strongly believed in purity, or would never consider marrying a human. With the evidence of military themes, it is possible they have class structures on Lexicon. Now what if a high class Lexiconian, broke that purity thinking and mated with a human. Here is my theory on Becky’s Parentage.

A woman from Lexicon, someone with military training like huggy has and in a high position, was put in an arranged marriage with someone she did not love at all nor could ever love. This person, a military man, possibly with a higher rank than the woman and have strong familial ties on Lexicon, was a corrupt person. She tried everything she could to get out this arranged marriage, but even her family was pushing her to do it because of reasons such as tradition or importance of appearance or something that only concerns them and not the woman. The woman soon takes an exploration opportunity and uses it to get away from all the drama she is facing and for her own mental and emotional health. She soon lands on planet earth, specifically a place called Fair City, and explores around for a while. This woman soon spots a distracted human male about to cross onto a busy road. This woman already has a good nature and quickly pulls the man out of danger without anyone noticing her unusual super speed. The man, grateful, turns to thank the woman. According to how love works from the Hotel Transylvania movies, they immediately zinged. This man and woman get to know each other a little bit more over the time the women was allowed to stay away from Lexicon. She does not give every detail about herself (her alien background), but she feels free with this man who respects her emotions and loves her for her. They get more intimate over months and everything is going great. Then she feels ill one day and under the guise of going to a hospital, the woman goes back to her ship for a medical scan. To her surprise, she is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. This is bad because her time on exploration is about to be up and if she returns any time later, they will find about about her hybrid offspring and her corrupt fiance may kill her and her child as “punishment” for finding true love. She doesn’t have the option to not come back because they can and will do anything to find her and this would put her lover in danger as well. With a heavy heart she soon leaves her lover and returns to Lexicon and marries her corrupt fiance. She does this to protect her lover and child. This woman soon gives birth to a daughter that has her human father’s eyes with her mother’s facial features, hair color and style. The top parted bangs is a possible mixture of her human father’s and Lexiconian mother’s hair style. Her husband soon becomes suspicious about his wife’s time away and “their” child. About a year later, her husband discovers the child’s human lineage and goes into a dark rage. This woman hurries and escapes the dome city she lived in and soon encounters Captain Huggy Face about to take off. She sees that her husband and his men are about to catch up with her. She puts down her child and urges her to walk towards the ship. In a last ditch effort to save her child, she sacrifices herself and holds back her husband and his men long enough so the ship takes off and there is nothing that can be done. The fate of the woman is unknown.

In regards to Becky’s human father, let’s go over some canonical evidence. It says on the Wordgirl wiki that Becky has light brown skin. I believe Becky might be biracial. She could possibly be an offspring of an African American Woman and a white ethnic man. I googled what biracial kids look like and Becky looks similar to a biracial child born of a African American parent and a white ethnic parent. (I don’t know the what proper term I should use for referring to White ethnicity and I do not want to offend anyone by accident.) (I am just basing my conspiracy theory on visual evidence and scientific fact.) For about everyone, except one person, on Wordgirl, they have black eyes. I have seen fanart of the characters with different eye colors. For Becky’s dad, while I agree he could have blue eyes, it is also possible for him to have brown eyes as well, the eye color Becky inherited. Another thing I noticed that Becky could have inherited from her human father is his personality. Let’s review Becky’s personality and behaviors. Becky does not enjoy her family singing on the road or doing about any family car activity on a constant loop. Though not often, Becky is able to use gadgets and seems to have an understanding of how each part should work in a machine. She was able to make sure the egg and apple slicer that was entered in the Young Inventor’s competition was able to still function as intended after pressing them together using her super strength. Another thing is that she gets irritated when the spotlight is taken off her every time she accomplishes something as Wordgirl such as with Tiny Big and Granny May when she was an undefeated bingo champion. Wordgirl/Becky also tends to get a bit sassy when she is irritated just like her dad. She also acts proud of herself and her accomplishments as Becky and Wordgirl which border on the line between humble and prideful. Like her dad she does get distracted and a little absentminded such as when she leaves Huggy behind after a crime or when she gets too focused on her interests such as Pretty Princess and boy crushes. There are times when Becky wants to accomplish something, either for her own desires or to just impress people, she will become inconsiderate of others. Examples include Becky interrupting Violet’s rehearsal for the Romeo and Juliet play and revealing Scoop’s personal tooth secret when she took over running the school’s paper for a day. Becky also sometimes feels she “needs to always be the winner”. It can be assumed that she copies that behavior from Tim Botsford who gets very competitive and upset when his family does not win. The thing is that Tim is almost immediately humbled afterwords when he puts into perspective that he did his best and is a winner in his family’s and his own eyes. Becky may also share that perspective sometimes, but she will still tend to fret over her mistakes until someone calms her down. As I said, Becky sometimes still needs to feel as the winner, more so in her battles as Wordgirl against villains. We have also seen Becky feel upset when people don’t like her work such as when Violet and Bob hid Becky’s horrible painting in the janitor’s closet when they were decorating the school gym for a dance while Becky was fighting evil as Wordgirl. Becky is also seen to be clever and tricky when she needs to such as in the episode “Bend It Like Becky” when she was trying to get Dr. Two Brains to agree with a soccer match that would determine which group was going to enjoy the field for the next 3 months.

One final thing before I finish is that throughout some episodes, we can see Becky similarly imitate her human dad’s facial features and body gestures when he is there. Now I leave off with this question. Do Becky’s personality and behaviors I mentioned remind you of any cheese loving, villain scientist? I will let you think about it.

#wordgirl #dr two brains #lexicon #i may have gotten carried away #i tend to over analyze #i like to cause drama

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ingravinoveritas · 3 years

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Your discussion of Subby!David makes me wonder if you ever saw his skit on the Friday Night Project years ago where he pranks some estate agents by posing as being kidnapped by an uber-fan tied up to a bed in his underwear? It's truly a sight to behold. (If you've never seen it, you can look up "David Tennant Pranks Real Estate Agent on FNP" on Youtube and that should get you there)

Hi, Anon! Oh, yes, I absolutely did see that skit of David’s on the Friday Night Project (for those who haven’t seen it, it’s here) and have enjoyed watching it repeatedly, for reasons that will soon be very obvious...

The skit is essentially a prank setup that is a spoof of the movie Misery (based on the book by Stephen King), which stars James Caan as a novelist and Kathy Bates as an obsessed/deranged fan of his. In this instance, David is the kidnap victim of a crazy fan, and when the person being pranked goes into a creepy house, this is what they find:

Yes, ladies and gentlemen and all members of the nonbinary nation: That is one David John Tennant (McDonald) gagged and tied to a bed in his underwear.

Now...if we lived in the reality where David Tennant isn’t a giant slut who had most definitely been tied up before this, he probably (probably) would have had the decency to look...at least mildly out of sorts. (As would anyone who is supposed to be in a skit where they’ve been kidnapped and tied to a bed by a psychopath with an entire shrine dedicated to them.) Yet David looks not only completely comfortable tied up, but like he is quite actively enjoying himself.

I was already having oodles of subby David-themed head canons before I saw this skit, but the sight of him tied up and gagged--as well as how utterly natural he looks in such a position--absolutely took my breath away. I don’t always see him as totally submissive, though, and I think a scenario such as this lends itself to David playing the role of a bratty sub...fighting and sassing his Dom just to get him (or her) to be rough with him.

I also think he wouldn’t (hasn’t) let himself be tied up by just anyone, and needs to trust the person implicitly to allow them to do something like this. Which is, of course, why I can so easily see David asking Michael to tie him up and gag him, because he’d be one of the few people David trusts enough to do it. (And because Michael would have so much reverence for such a lovely sight...)

So, yes, this FNP skit is fantastic--though I do wonder if anyone has ever pointed out the fact that the fictional deranged fan who kidnapped David was meant to be a man, rather than a woman (”He’s had me tied up here for two days”). Was that the hosts’ doing, or was that David’s choice? Very, very curious indeed. I still don’t know how this even made it onto the air (along with half the interviews David did in 2008, because he was saying and doing kinky shit all over the British airwaves for a solid two years), but we can all be thankful that it did...

#anonymous #reply post #david tennant #soft scottish hipster gigolo #friday night project #'pretty' and 'submissive' is a good look for him #still think DT is a switch at heart though #but i am enjoying the thought that he likes to be tied up and Dom'ed by a man #kinky head canons: confirmed #there's something slutty in the state of Denmark #fully going on national TV tied to a bed in his fucking underwear #and it's David Tennant #this is why i love this man #amazing

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thusatlas · 3 years

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I have been wondering how to answer this for a few days now. For reference, the post and the subsequent question (feel free to ask for more):

Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

The obvious one story to go to is the Crownless. But I've been scratching my head on how to answer this without giving any spoilers because most of the stuff that I'm like 'aljnglajbgklrbgl' about, has been planted, but has not yet come to fruition.

So, I'm going to say that there will be spoilers in this post up to Chapter 20 if you have not caught up yet, and the rest is going to be a massive tease for what's to come.

(Which I think is rather fitting as we enter the last few chapters of part 1.)

Continue past this point at your own peril.

Hidden References

There are loads. I was brought up as a gamer, finding Easter Eggs is my crack. I'd love to go on about how, with the theme of wanting to fully embed the world in magical realism, I have incorporated a number of Easter Eggs from real life to enrich the text in a meta way - but that just simply isn't true.

I'm just a fiend who has a lot of fun with the freedom of fanfiction.

The most obvious one that near enough everyone who has commented has picked up on, is the Pirates of the Caribbean reference in Lucius' chapter.

My favourite Easter Egg of them all is that I have actually given away Raine's true identity and further hinted and the lore that goes with that identity. It's buried within the text, hidden in plain sight, which is in keeping with the theme of the story.

There's a fair few references to the Grimm Brother's, especially where the Black Forrest is concerned.

The narration style of 'describing the wallpaper' is a homage to Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, who have greatly influenced the humour and style of this entire fic. In particular here, the items that Hermione carries on her person is a direct callback to 'Hitch Hiker's Guide to Galaxy'.

There's a reference to Deborah Harkness' 'All Saints Trilogy' (highly recommend these books). I read these and fell down the alchemical rabbit hole that led me to the Voynich.

There are all sorts of popular culture references, from Marvel to Jane Austin hidden within the text, simply because they were on my mind as I wrote them and it brought me great joy to have the freedom to write them.

Not everything is serious. However, I am seriously considering going through and making an Easter Egg masterlist, and anyone who can name them all will get a cookie.

Characters, relationships and hidden foreshadowing (because I love spinning webs)

There are loads, every character has an arc, whether it be big or small. Someone once commented that they weren't sure whether some details was a red-herring and what was real, while another commented that every detail given is a clue.

Both are right, unfortunately - all details mean something but whether they're there for worldbuilding or character development is only something that can be seen when the point comes to light.

The two characters who show this the best are Theo and Raine.

With Theo, we start with this roguish, glib, charming character, who's a touch flamboyant but generally a smooth white-collar criminal.

With Raine, we start with a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde character - Dr Jekyll being quirky, weird and unassuming. In the beginning, we only see brief touches of Mr Hyde - the serious, cold and calculating General. The overall effect is a character that I am pleased to see no one trusts.

But the clues are in the names. They always have been, they always will be.

Just the same way that Fear was a foreshadowing from chapter 1...

For Theo, the reader has had some indication of his character arc since Chapter 2. This was re-affirmed in Chapter 13 and again recently in Chapter 20. Theo is closely tied to my favourite Easter Egg, whose name ties into this whole thing, and further builds upon Harry's canon identity, as we see in Deathly Hallows. I shan't say more, because spoilers. But you will find out soon.

For Raine, it's trickier. Again, it's all in the names, and as I've stated, I dropped that Easter Egg a while ago. But then the reader is told that 'Raine Willows' is infact a careless name, thought up in the spur of a moment. A name is an identity, ergo, what sort of Being cares little about that? Further to this, his journey is closely tied with Hermione's - always has been. The more Hermione has fallen down the rabbit hole, the more Raine has moved away from Dr Jekyll and become Mr Hyde.

The crux of their arcs is closely tied to the heart of the story. For Raine, he is Hermione's mentor. The other characters - Draco included - move around Hermione. She is the constant.

Much the same as the central plot. No matter how many side plots or whatever there are, it's all a helix towards the same focus point.

Part 2

It is my hope, that by the time we begin part 2, all the pieces will be lined up, ready to go. The Fuckening is one really really long introduction, setting the scene and laying the foundation. In order for the plot to exist and for our characters to go on the journeys that they will in part 2, everything has to break.

The allegory

Don't mind me whilst I put on my pretentious hat and dust off my critical thinking robes.

There is a fuck tonne of symbolism, sometimes in the staging of a scene, sometimes in the character's behaviour - Narcissa and Draco chapter 20, the character development of a Messiah.

But by now, if you've been following me or have spoken to me for more than 5 minutes, inevitably 'worldviews' would have cropped up. I sincerely apologise, I am aware that I am a broken record.

I started this fic in a really uncertain time in the world. As a STEM social science researcher, it's my job to look at the big picture and at the time (and still relevant to me now) the question was, wtf is going on?

So for me, along with it being a conversation about the psychology of love and friendship in a deterministic world, I wanted to highlight the importance of belief systems. I wanted to show from a psychological perspective how civilisation is built upon a very fragile network of beliefs both individual and collective, and the agreed-upon social norms only continue to exist, because we as a collective continue to perpetuate them.

I wanted to show how easily those belief systems can break which is why we begin with the disappearance of a horse and a somewhat intelligent cat. And the only way I could do that was to base canon in magical realism. A norm so adjacent to the ones we accept today, is one that will fracture everything so thoroughly and so quickly, that I won't have to write a tome to get my point across.

The Crownless is a story told from multiple perspectives, seeing and living the same long and winding conspiracy. And in worldbuilding, I have tried to show perspectives of different stakeholders, how politics is again, a delicate promise spun from beliefs. The Crownless is not meant to be a serious piece of literature, but it's my way of showing the hypocrisy of claiming Absolute Good and Evil in any situation.

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thinkingisadangerouspastime · 3 years

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I just want to say, before I say anything, I'm not accusing you of saying this and I understand that you feel how you feel. I'm just asking this in a very general way and was wondering your thoughts. Why is it so verboten to think Zuko might have had a slight crush on Katara? There seems to be a rush to not just deny it but to treat it like it's some sort of horrible thing to even suggest it and I'm not sure why that is?

Katara is presented as a beautiful, lively girl who is a powerful bender. Why wouldn’t Zuko be a little starry eyed over that? It doesn’t mean she likes him back. Idk, I’m not exactly sure where my point is, except that being shouted down for just advancing the idea that maybe Zuko had the hots for Katara is a little frustrating? I’m not saying he was wacking off in his bunk thinking about her or expected to get some while they were hunting Yon Rha.

Also, unrequited crushes happen in ATLA-verse? Toph/Sokka anyone? Why does that never get screeched on but saying “Hey, Zuko loved Mai but he was probably looking at Katara and thinking ‘noice!’ a couple of times” the worst thing in the world? Is it the Water Tribe/Fire Nation thing? I mean, if it’s that, I wish people would just say that and stop screaming at people for their headcanons and whatnot. [theend]

Lol do not worry anon I know this isn’t an accusation!! Not only have I myself never perpetuated this rhetoric, but I don’t think I’ve really heard it before! Maybe once or twice?? I might just keep to chill parts of fandom, lmao, and that’s why I’m not very familiar with it. But I’ll do my best to theorize what may spark conflict based on the info you provided me!

(I’ve talked very briefly here about Zuko having/not having a crush on Katara before, if you were wondering.)

My main guess is that it’s not the headcanon itself that makes people frustrated, but how some shippers probably treat the HEADcanon as canon-canon (not an issue exclusive to Zvtara, btw; all big fanon ships have this problem - Zvkka, anyone? lmao). I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with headcanoning that Zuko had a crush on Katara! But in that same vein, there’s nothing inherently wrong with others acknowledging that the headcanon has no basis in canon either, if that makes sense. And headcanons don’t need canon basis! Headcanons are fanon! That’s why they’re so much fun! I ship Kuzaang like there’s no tomorrow, but I can also acknowledge that there wasn’t anything in canon that demonstrated Aang having a crush on Kuzon. Kuzaang is strictly fanon, and I love that about the pairing! It means I have incredible free reign, hehe.

But yeah. I don’t think it has anything to do with their different nations! Like I said - it’s probably solely an issue of some shippers (and undoubtedly just a loud minority) treating the headcanon as canon.

I don’t think saying “Hey, Zuko loved Mai but he was probably looking at Katara and thinking ‘noice!’ a couple of times” is the worst thing in the world, lmao. I do want to make a distinction here, though; this example you provide is actually an example of aesthetic attraction, which is not the same as a crush (crushes are indicative of romantic attraction)! So saying/headcanoning that Zuko thought Katara was pretty (as anyone with a brain would say, let’s be real) does not actually equate to him having a crush on her.

But back to the crush headcanon. I mentioned that I (personally!) don’t think it has canon basis. I will admit that I am not alloromantic, so crushes in themselves are a little confusing to me (I mean,, people just randomly like someone?? based on their appearance?? without even knowing them?? hell nah), but even disregarding that, I don’t think it would make much sense within canon for Zuko to have had a crush on Katara.

Again, disclaimer: there’s nothing wrong with the headcanon! Fanon is meant to contradict canon! To expand canon! To rewrite canon! Fanon is transformative. That’s the entire purpose of fanon. Go wild with that headcanon!! Make art!! Produce fics!! Support content creators!! Hell yeah!!

So what do I mean when I say that I personally feel there’s no canon basis for Zuko having a crush on Katara? Well, for one, he joined the Gaang in episode 12 of Book 3. That’s episode 52 of 61 overall. So in everything prior to that, Zuko not only has no idea who Katara is but he is also neck-deep in imperialistic rhetoric (you know, racism, superiority complexes, all that jazz. not fun for anyone non-FN). No possible crush there. In “The Western Air Temple” episode itself, Katara (understandably) threatens Zuko. She means what she says, and I think Zuko recognizes that. A crush there wouldn’t make sense - they’ve only properly met this second time and Katara (understandably) hates Zuko’s guts for what he’s done to the Gaang and to her personally.

Episode 53 is “The Firebending Masters” - Zuko’s too hung up on his firebending not working to think about anything else (Katara obviously still does not trust him yet, either, meaning Zuko is pretty much on edge around her. again, she threatened him, and Zuko no doubt took her threat seriously).

54 and 55 are “The Boiling Rock” episodes; not only are these Maiko-heavy but also in general… I mean, Katara’s not really in them. At least not from Zuko’s POV. So nothing implies a crush there. And then after those episodes, it’s worth considering that Zuko probably thinks Mai is dead. That he left her, the girl he loves, to die at Azula’s hands. We know Zuko tends to hold guilt to his chest, so concluding he blamed himself for Mai’s “death” is not illogical. Why would he all of sudden switch his sights to Katara, even if it was just a simple crush? While he’s grieving? That doesn’t track to me.

And then, of course, “The Southern Raiders.” This episode has been talked about to death, so I’ll keep it brief, lmao. I will draw attention to only one line, spoken by Zuko:

This isn’t fair! Everyone else seems to trust me now! What is it with you?

As we all know, TSR was not a flattering episode for Zuko. He was a racist asshole to Aang and - as aforementioned - acted as if he was entitled to Katara’s trust. Obviously, Zuko grows through the episode, and we see by the end that he respects Aang’s wisdom and respects Katara’s decision to walk away from Yon Rha (which is awesome!! I adore this brief but incredibly crucial arc of his!!). But my point is that nothing demonstrates romantic interest from Zuko to Katara. If anything, his initial motives are pretty damn selfish (i.e. demanding her to trust him because he feels like he “deserves” it already).

Emphasis on “initial” motives, of course. Obviously he grows more sincere!! (Tis the point of the episode for Zuko.)

So they end TSR on new, peaceful terms. Personally, I don’t think their relationship would be magically sunshine and roses after that (Zuko did some fucked up shit to the Gaang, lmao), but I do think things are getting better between them! Still, there is nothing indicative of a canon crush.

Next episode, in EIP, they scoot away from each other at the possibility of being together, yk? That doesn’t mean they hate each other’s guts, lmfao, but EIP is meant to depict imperialist Fire Nation propaganda - who wouldn’t be uncomfortable with that? Like, the entire Gaang is demeaned in that play. There’s nothing romantic about it. It’s a similar situation later with June - this is a lady that doesn’t know anything remotely personal about Zuko or Katara. Of course they’d react in a horrified and flustered manner when this - for all intents and purposes - total stranger suggests that they’re together! That’s creepy as hell! Definitely not indicative of a crush, lmao. And considering that the Gaang never teases Zuko about having a crush on Katara (compared to how I think Toph teases Katara about Haru?), i.e. the people who know them the best, there’s no reason for the audience to think anything is going on between them.

For other references, here are a few addressing EIP, June, etc.

And after all that… Well, now we’re in the finale. What time is there for romance? There’s a reason the canon couples don’t reunite until after the war is won! (Minus Sukka, I guess, but they’re not professing their love on the battlefield, per se, lmao.) Zuko chooses Katara to go with him because she’s a powerful waterbender and the only person who’s been able to handle Azula in the past (besides Aang, arguably, who’s obviously occupied with Ozai), not because he “likes” her in a romantic sense.

All of this is to say that to me, Zuko having a crush on Katara is strictly fanon. Which is awesome! Fanon is fantastic, and I actually really like these types of headcanons (like, Teo having a crush on Aang? GOOD SHIT). Some people are just jerks about it. That said, I can still understand why people might get frustrated by those who preach this headcanon as if it’s pulled straight from the text itself. I absolutely think it’s ridiculous to harass others over a headcanon (which unfortunately you see on both sides of the ship war), but in that same vein - of course it’s frustrating when those loud few act like their fanon is canon and proceed to shove it down others’ throats, lmao. It’s an imperfect situation, basically.

TL;DR - The headcanon in itself is great, and no one should be getting freaking harassed over it. But it is strictly fanon, so when some shippers treat it like canon, that’s understandably going to frustrate the rest of the fandom. Headcanons are a double-edged sword, lmao.

So that’s my personal theory as to why people get pressed over this headcanon. If anyone else has a different idea, please feel free to rb/comment with it!

#also anon you 100% do not have to agree with any of this!! tis just my own thoughts and theory 🥰#amy answers #anon #amy analyzes

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