I’ve meaning to send this ask for ages and finally found the courage to do so :) I started reading lionheart on a whim in the beginning of November and since them after reading everything a couple of times, all I can say is that it is a masterpiece. I am so in love with your writing, especially with how you give Draco the space to be gracious and grow up. I love for example when they are in the Slytherin common room and Draco see for himself that the mermaids are sentient beings just like him. Also, I am completely enamored with the golden quartet (?), the relationships between them feel much more balanced, and I have so much love for Harry, Hermione, and Ron. I do think you does the characters justice, if not written in a better and more honest, human way. Btw, I love your Narcisa because I am such an apologist for her and her crimes. (If Narcisa has million fans, then I'm one of them. If Narcisa has one fan, then I'm THAT ONE. If Narcisa has no fans, that means I'm dead.). This also aplies for hermione. Anyway, all I am trying to do is to put into words what the world you design means to me, but alas I do not seem to have. When the time comes for my unborn children to read the Harry Potter series, I am showing them your books and telling them it is canon.
Now that I am done showering you with complements, I have a couple of questions. First, after reading the last chapter (which I adored), the fight between Draco and Sirius, one of my favorite moments, kept coming to mind. Was it intentional for Draco to give such honest wake up call for Theo basing himself from the talk he had with Sirius years ago? Secondly, I am not sure with you already answer this, if so, feel free to tell me, but if you could choose Poet, Soldier or King for each – Draco, Harry, Hermione, and Ron – which one would they be?
Thank you for taking the time to read. I usually download each chapter because I like to highlight my favorite parts, I will try to be more present on AO3! And sorry for any English mistakes, it is not my first language!
Thank you, my friend! This is a completely lovely ask, and as I often do with lovely asks, I've hoarded it for a while to re-read whenever I want a nice treat. However, I've left the question unanswered long enough.
If we're going to do the Soldier/Poet/King test, I want to complicate it a little. You can either do it by personality (the way we do when we say "I'm soldier!" or "I'm poet!") or you can do it by narrative role, i.e. what you actually do in the context of the story. Those can be different. For instance, you can be a poet-coded soldier (your chosen weapon is your word, but you're pushed by your circumstances to fight), or a soldier-coded king (you carry a mighty sword, but you're forced off the battlefield to rule, i.e. you want to fight but you can't). That opens up the range of ways to fill the role. So it's like:
Obviously, the central axis here is going to be the most satisfied/content with their lot in life, but there's a broad range of happinesses.
If you ask me, Harry is a poet-coded king, because he's incredibly reluctant to take leadership, and he doesn't want anyone to fight for him. He runs away in Deathly Hallows because he can't stand to be at the center of a war (which is going to happen anyway) and has only accepted Ron and Hermione's sacrifice begrudgingly. It's also worth saying that Harry's best moments come when he's trying to talk someone down: he's telling Remus to go back to Tonks, he's telling Slughorn to preserve Lily's memory by being noble for her sake, he's telling Riddle to "try for remorse." Harry is at his best when he's giving consolation and understanding, not when he's fighting; his signature spell is Expelliarmus. Kid's not a soldier. And he hates the idea of being a king. (This is, not coincidentally, one of the unhappiest combinations.)
I read Ron as a true soldier, not because he enjoys fighting, but because that's almost always his knee-jerk reaction to conflict, and it's also where a lot of his strengths lie. Ron is brash and bold and he will swing if you step to him, and that's why people love him (or hate him, if they do). Even in his best moments, when he's being a strategist and tactician, he's employing his skills in the service of battle. And the narrative is happy to put him in positions where that's the skill he has to contribute. He thinks of the basilisk fangs and the house-elves in the kitchens; he's good at tactics, but he doesn't do broad-strokes strategy.
Hermione is king-coded soldier, because I think in a different series of novels, she is absolutely the protagonist, and she kind of thinks she should be. She's proactive, driven, clever, and calculating, and she orders people around like she's the boss of them — usually with good reason, but she still does. She sees herself as the HBIC, and she often gets a bit irritated when other people don't jive with that idea. It's funny how often Harry gets along by just doing what Hermione tells him. That being said, her narrative role is being sworn in Harry's service, and as the books go on, she increasingly embraces that. She defends him and offers to risk her life for him, sacrifices volumes (her parents!!) and compromises her safety (gets tortured!) for his sake, all without complaining or seeming to begrudge Harry at all. He's her king; she's his knight. Which is another way of saying soldier.
Draco is a poet-coded soldier, or possibly a poet-coded king, depending on what direction you take his arc from the source material. In the books, he's kind of a flop, God bless him, he doesn't really manage much in the final days of the war. Besides refusing to identify Harry (after identifying both of Harry's well-known travel companions... booboo you tried), he's basically fit for neither use nor ornament from Book 6 onward. But taken more broadly, he is someone who absolutely does not want to be here — he doesn't want to fight, he doesn't want to be in danger, he doesn't want to risk people — getting conscripted forcibly into a conflict that was running for years before he was born. And he's conscripted, like Harry, because of his heritage; it's a position he was born into. Depending on how you read his relationship to power, and having it, he can either be a soldier or a king, or someone teetering on the cusp between them.
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Thank you so much for the tarot reading you did for me a little while back 💜 i'm sorry it's taken me so long to say that! i do rather think you have prophetic gifts, by the way- it was spookily accurate and helped me a lot 🔮
No problem! I'm glad it was helpful to you!
I do tend to get at least one message like this every time I do a tarot night for my followers, and like... you are totally entitled to that belief! What do I know about psychic phenomena and prophecy anyway? lmao. Maybe I am psychic.
But personally, I believe that tarot has a high likelihood of speaking to us no matter what, if just because the archetypal nature of the cards means that they're dealing with problems that we all struggle with. We all have self-doubt, we all have complicated relationships with money, we all crave love of some kind. We all have trauma in our past and we all want to believe that this time, things could be okay.
One of the reasons I like tarot cards is because they are inanimate objects that we imbue with meaning. They were just playing cards, y'know? We're the ones that gave them power over us, and we did that by filling them with our own stories. We placed a mirror in those cards, and while mirrors can be used for scrying, they can also just be used to take a good hard look at ourselves.
If I say "oh, you've had money troubles in the past," who doesn't that apply to? Maybe I'm thinking about me, when we were homeless for a while when I was a kid. Maybe someone else is thinking about the money they lost to gambling last week. Maybe someone else, someone wildly wealthy, is thinking about a stock market crash that brought their five mansions down to two. Maybe a final person has just never had quite enough to make ends meet. God knows that describes a lot of people.
I like tarot because we can all look at the same spread and see something different. I see a story to tell to the best of my ability, and that's how I do readings. But for the people getting those readings, they're often looking into little mirrors and seeing how they reflect their own personal experiences.
Because, you know, we all see different things in the same mirror! That's how tarot works, I think. Maybe some people are a little better at reading things in that mirror and interpreting what they see there, but we all see something new and different and deeply, deeply personal when we look at those cards.
Love that for us.
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Take the idea that “Bruce Wayne is friends with most of his Rogue Gallery”
and shift it into “Batman doesn’t kill because he believes in second chances”
and then you get something along the lines of “Even when everyone believes they are irredeemable, Bruce personally knows his Rogue Gallery and genuinely cares about them and their well-being, so he’s willing to give the benefit of the doubt and second chances to even the worst of the worst because he can’t be biased and believe the best only of the people he is friends with. Everyone has the potential to do better and do good and be kind even when it’s not obvious because Bruce personally knows the Rogues that have that potential.”
And also “Bruce’s goal later in his career isn’t to pursue revenge but to prevent crime and save as many people as possible, including his rogues. He can’t reverse the damage and the lives taken, but he can try to make things as livable as possible. Batman is a symbol of fear, a deterrent of crime, and a front-line first responder, but Bruce Wayne is the one actively helping Gotham.”
But I also raise you “Gotham is legitimately cursed” and “Joker is the only Rogue who Batman doesn’t know the real identity of. Batman is partly convinced that Joker isn’t even a real person but the physical manifestation of a curse that will forever plague Gotham”
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I’m giving the designers objectively the right amount of credit. I’m a former lego employee :-)
doubt. even if you were, why are you taking personal offense to criticism to the show as a whole and are taking time out in your life to defend something under the mask of anonymity where you have absolutely no claim to your name? wheres your sense of professionalism? taking offense a silly small no name artist questioning a design element. in a caption of bloody fanart no less. and you say youre an ex lego employee! ex! so youre less relevant now. if youre not lying that is. you wont even say what your position was. lego employee is so vague.
anyways. because youre on anon all this claim does is make you sound like the "my uncle works at nintendo!" meme. im sorry to say that as an anon. you are nobody
by the way. by set design im speaking from an entertainment arts perspective. not the sets that kids buy in the store. im talking about sets that are Actually used in the show. this kind of design work.
http://www.cynthiahalley.com/ not ninjago related but this is MY definition of set design. aka. what im seeing in the show. not the simplified little toy models
anyways. looks like youre not done!
shakes out my hands. alright! you wanna play this kinda game? okay sure, ill play along! why not. i have time to procrastinate. you are rude by the way!
lets google that very phrase you gave here
mhm mhm! yup! that sure is the grate that jays prison was based on! but huh..... hm! im kinda curious about what the inside looks like. you know? the inside of the hold that jay is in that this is all about?
lets add a term to the search
huh! huh! interesting. that doesnt look like anything i saw in the show. hmmmm actually this doesnt give me enough sense about the architecture of the ship, so let do the same research that ive been doing for my own curiositys sake
cool..... pretty expansive actually. ehhhh i want a tour. this doesnt sate my curiosity enough. i wanna see what the grates underside looks like because im bored and obsessed with this lego show
i wont waste everyones time. an example is at about 11 minutes in
wow i learned a lot about ships. also i looked at diagrams. not that you ever had the thought to. hm. now how did the hold jay was in look like again
thats fucking stupid. in the few frames we are given of it of the different angles, its clearly just a fucking box. no depth leading to the curve of the hull, no visible door and likely no door whatsoever bc it would complicate things. a box that probably is in the shape of its opening. lets be real. this is a design that was easy and convenient for the cg modeler to make. ive done 3d work for a class. its hell. i dont blame them. but anyways. ppl who worked on this probably just saw the grates on the surface of the deck and was like oh we dont know what that looks like on the inside but its a perfect place to throw poor ole jay in! grab the trusty basic 3d cube. use difference to cut it out. add texture. and to be honest? yeah the story doesnt need an entire storage space to be built for realism sake. why would they do that for a cg lego show. lets get lazy about it, what do the kids know, whats important is that jays life sucks. the sparseness serves more of a purpose the bleak hopelessness of the pit jay has dug himself into
my point still stands. this is just a hole. it aint right. this is not how old ships were built. this cell was made for jays specifically for the sake of simplicity in both the production standpoint and story. its dumb but serviceable for a narrative purpose
but anyways so from this ive learned an important thing or two about you! you! dont know how to research! you! have only ever looked surface level. literally surface level, you saw these images of the deck and never even thought about whats underneath? the very thing ive been questioning? ive been talking about how its just a fucking cube this entire time. its just a hole. you given me more insight about ships so i thank you for that but uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. youre very bad at convincing someone whos right
also you contradicted yourself. you said that "the concepts for the misfortune’s keep were done carefully" but then you go on to say that it "doesn’t require accurate research"? after telling ME, silly ole me who clearly has easily done more research than you, to do a bit research? hello? whats the truth? hm? what are you trying to prove now. doesnt need research because its "basic hollywood tropes" kay so whats been done here is nothing original because theyre copying whats already been done hundreds of times. great argument. dont get me wrong tho i love a good trope. especially when it involves things i enjoy. like jay having the most miserable time. heres the thing tho. what is being brought into question is not what HAPPENS to jay. its the fucking lazy set dressing. am i wrong to point out thats just a hole? its a hole. absolutely no deeper thought has gone into designing that. why are you so mad about it?
i do this for a hobby. criticizing ninjago is literally 75% of the fun for me. thinking soooo much about the shows i like and pointing out the bits that are wack is how i occupy my brain in my spare time. so what are you doing man. is defending ninjagos honor your hobby? get a better one. or at least more thought and consideration and media literacy. like im thinking about the show from a production standpoint as well as writing. this show has So many holes in it btw so theres MUCH to think about and mull over. a lot of stuff for me to play with. its nice in that sense. ninjago is a sandbox if anything. im sure im not alone in thinking this
thanks for the soapbox anon! youve overstayed your welcome! get out of my house! im just a guy with opinions as scathing as they are.
OH WAIT IF YOURE REALLY AN EX LEGO DESIGNER? WHY ARE SO MANY OF THE NINJAS GI'S LAPELS FOLDED RIGHT OVER LEFT? ITS BASIC KNOWLEDGE THAT IN A LOT OF EAST ASIAN CULTURES, TRADITIONAL CLOTHING THAT FOLDED IS FOR DEAD PEOPLE. NINJAGO IS LOOSELY (SO VERY LOOSELY.) BASED ON JAPANESE CULTURE. SO CLEARLY VERY LITTLE RESEARCH GOES INTO DESIGNING THE LITTLE LEGO GUYS OUTFITS THEMSELVES!!!! WHOS THE WHITE GUY WHO DESIGNED THE MINIFIGURES. I HAVE PERSONAL BEEF WITH THEM.
but if youre a nobody. byebye. i dont think you can come back from this. im done here. this was fun. drops the mic
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