on the point of including black people in the show (or any period show), a lot of the outrage can sometimes come across as performative to me. it's one thing to feel upset about how little screentime black characters get compared to white characters (a valid criticism, believe me, I Know! give me an hour and i could talk your ear off about how this constantly annoys me as a black person who's damned to enjoy period pieces), but it's another to Only get upset while not actually creating content for said black characters, Especially when fandom (not just hbo war, but in general) is famous for taking Extremely minor characters and creating entire worlds with them, to the point where you wouldn't know they're minor characters at all until you check out the source yourself. richard macon, alexander jefferson, and robert daniels each have only 20 or less posts about them (at the time of publishing this post). in my own fandom experience (within fandoms both big and small and old and new, whatever), i've seen more content (posts, art pieces, analyses, fics, etc) made for minor white characters in less than a mere week's time (it's not a competiton lol i'm just giving a perspective here). so idk. obviously, there's nothing anyone here can do about a show that's already been filmed and released. we got what we got. thas it. at least in the great wide world of fandom, you can actually do something about it, turning the big into small. there's precedent for that. otherwise it just feels like complaining for the sake of complaining
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i do not want to dig a hole but i am too much of a laura bailey pc enjoyer to not make this post so:
selfishness ≠ a lack of kindness
selfishness is a theme that has come up with all of laura's main campaign pcs. that doesn't mean that her characters are always making selfish choices or that they don't care about the rest of the people they're with or that they're not good. it's just that, for the most part, the first thing they're thinking of when they take action or make choices is themselves.
in jester and vex both it is more typical and obvious selfishness. vex's developed because she needed it to keep herself and vax alive and as safe as possible and it grew into a behaviour that she had to actively work to avoid. it's evident in her greed, her theft of the broom, her reaction to her own death which relied heavily on i'm okay/i survived to which keyleth reminded her that she wasn't the only one who had to witness and reckon with her death. in jester's case, she grew up in an environment that literally trained her to make every decision based on two things - her mother's opinion and her own. so, when she's out in the world without marion for the first time, her choices are those that will benefit her and her actions are those that consider her own thoughts and not really many others' (aside from the traveler's).
it isn't a criticism of either vex or jester to say that they are characters who act selfishly. in fact, i'd argue that to claim otherwise does a great disservice to exactly how immense both of their character arcs are. because the nuance of both jester and vex is that they are selfish, and they also hold extreme room for self-sacrifice and empathy. vex is much more brash than jester is, and jester is much more trusting than vex, but both of them are characters who begin with selfish impulses who grow with them. neither ever truly shed those impulses, but they use them in new ways, typically transforming them into impulses towards things that are in the best interest of the party.
you may have noticed the lack of imogen in this post about laura bailey pcs and that's because of two reasons. one, we are an unknown amount of time into her story, i can't analyse her development the same way i can vex and jester's. two, imogen's selfishness isn't the blatant quasi-self-aware selfishness that we see in things like jester complaining about her lack of money to caleb or vex stealing a broom. instead, imogen's is very internal, like a lot of laura's character work with imogen. it is a bit similar to jester’s in the sense that it comes from a lack of awareness moreso than vex’s practiced behaviour, but imogen’s is a lot more tied to inherent beliefs she has about the world and the people in it.
as a consequence of her powers, imogen sees people's thoughts as their entirety, she holds it above their actions to be the truth of who they are - to act against what they think or to say something that doesn’t cohere with what they’ve thought is akin to lying, so for her to act empathetically is to act in tandem with what someone else’s thoughts are, not how they act, which is typically not all that wanted. the same as vex’s greed and jester’s naivety, this is a trait that makes narrative sense and it’s one i find quite compelling, especially when read in the vein of someone struggling through trauma that has made them assume that the world is against them. imogen’s cynicism is coherent cynicism, i can’t say that in a similar situation i wouldn’t have the same predisposition towards the world.
the part that is particularly self-interested comes in if you look at how imogen has actually been treated in the campaign (quite well) in comparison to the cynicism that she’s developed from her past (something that speaks to a world out to get her). certainly, a bunch of shitty things have happened to imogen in the time we’ve known her, but the same can be said for everyone in bell’s hells and pretty much everyone in exandria at this point in time. but, in a fight to save the aforementioned world, imogen’s focus was getting her mother back on her side. which, while very consistent with her character and a choice that i enjoy, is a very selfish one. the fun thing (to me, obviously) about imogen is that she has, more than most, an insight into the opinions of others and she also tends to seek others’ opinions out and genuinely engages with them and supports their choices. but she still very much acts towards what she thinks is best. it’s one reason i enjoy looking at the dynamic between her and orym as one between foils, as orym tends to be stalwart in his beliefs and doesn’t care too much for other’s opinions if he’s already sure of his own, but his actions tend to favour collaboration and protecting others.
as i mentioned earlier, imogen is a harder case to look at because she is still in the process of her story. however, the circlet is clearly influencing how she interacts with the world and in the wake of the solstice, the hostile reaction towards ruidusborn people has started to become more and more apparent and i’m interested to see what route that ends up leading imogen down and how it will influence her relationship with the rest of bell’s hells. (for better, i think, based on recent conversations, but if it's for worse i will be just as seated and excited).
all of this is just to say, please stop assuming that claiming a character has a trait you think is a bad one is criticism or a hate post. in light of the fact that i know that people who don’t believe this will continue to not believe this, i’ll encourage anyone confused about the ability of a character to be good and kind and selfish all at once to look to what the text itself says, specifically scanlan’s words to pelor when asked what vex means to him:
“Her name is Vex, and she is greedy and mean sometimes, and she can steal a lot. She’s a little bit not the greatest person, but her flaws highlight everything that is right about her, which is she does all these things to protect her friends and her family. She would give her life for any of us and for anyone who was truly in need. And she’s not perfect but she’s the most perfect of all of us.”
would you look at that... an ability to be a multitude of things, some in conflict with one another. i know that's hard for fandoms to believe, especially about female characters with agency, but i promise its true!
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I'm pretty sure that DFF won't go there, especially since there's probably only one 50mins episode left but I would absolutely love it if in the end it turned out that Non was still alive and had decided to move on and all the present suffering and revenge was all New's doing.
And even if Non is really dead, the whole "an eye for an eye" thing and denying people the choice of redemption (or rather: denying them the opportunity of creating good karma for themselves) is such a traditionally Western concept, and that just doesn't make much sense to me.
In many of the Thai horror movies I've watched that had a similar story, at the end it turned out that yes, while the victim was wronged and didn't deserve their fate, the cause also lay in taking revenge and prolonging everyone's suffering. Once they stopped seeking revenge, they could move on (there's more to this but I don't want to go off-topic). It's never really about judgement or punishment at all (except via the law).
This probably isn't very cathartic to most people but it is to me so I'm just throwing this out there. I won't be disappointed if DFF goes the judgement route because it's a valid plot choice (and one that most people seem to favour) but yeah, there is another way of ending this.🙏
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I honestly just think it's funny that so many people have been watching ofmd as a 'comfort show' lmao like I'm over here specifically watching for the angst. I crave pain and suffering. As soon as High On A Rocky Ledge played in the pilot I was hooked because I knew I was in for intense emotional turmoil. Red Flags is now my favorite episode of the entire series. I honestly didn't expect Izzy to survive as long as he did. His fucked up relationship with Blackbeard has fed me so well.
Of course I adore the love story, and the fact that Ed and Stede's love is an absolute, an immutable fact, of the show's premise allows me to enjoy the angst all the more. But I feel like some people need to be reminded: David Jenkins never promised you fluff. He never promised no deaths, no tragedy, no violence, no difficult topics. Personally I think including a fair deal of all of those makes the hope, the love, and the comedy shine all the brighter and have more meaning. You don't have to agree, but you can't assign expectations to a show that never made such promises. There was never false advertising. David set out to tell the story of two troubled, complicated adults navigating love and a long-term relationship in an often harsh and unfair world, finding community and making meaningful gains in self-actualization along the way. Ultimately it is a 'feel good' story but it's a rocky and winding road meant to mirror the messiness of our real world. Maybe you need to step back and re-evaluate where canon ends and your headcanons begin, and what the 'goals' of the show actually are that may differ from what you're looking for in media, and not blame Jenkins et al. for 'betraying you' when they're just telling their story the way they set out to.
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Biting the bars of my enclosure about autistic ford tonight. There's something about him using vocabulary and turns of phrase that seem "outdated" or "pretentious" that feels so painfully genuine to me. When people say he talks like that just to "try to sound smart" I wish I could explain what it's like to be so ostracized from your peers growing up that you spend all your time reading instead, to the point where you pick up your way of speaking from books instead of from people. And then what it's like for people to call you out for "talking weird" over and over again, not able to wrap their heads around why the fuck you would choose more archaic or technical or formal words than the simpler ones that surely come to everyone's minds first. What it's like to have to dedicate a sizable chunk of attention to filtering through every single word you say out loud in real time before you say it, to make absolutely sure that it isn't a word people will judge you for using or make fun of you for using, just so you'll have a chance of being taken seriously. Learning through trial and error how to filter out the words that other people don't think are normal or casual enough for the conversation, even though for you, the word choice that's "natural-sounding" enough for them is the third or fourth word you came up with when searching for the right way to phrase something in your head. I wish I could explain just how long it takes to say fucking anything after spending a lifetime doing that during every single conversation, and how repetitive and long-winded you end up being when you spend so long coming up with alternative ways of saying every little thing you ever think. And I wish people realized that, at the very least for autistic people and autistic-coded characters, speech that's seen as pretentious is really just the way they talk when they're not putting in the extra effort to filter through every word they say just so others will take the time to listen.
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