So. Mister vessel the fourth has this. How do i call it. Keychain(?) hanging from his sleeve sometimes. With some tmbte runes. And it's pink, which is totally irrelevant to this post, but i felt the need to mention that. (Edit: people have told me it's actually red, but hey. Thank you, stage lighting, for making it look pink.) I could never find a photo clear enough to read them though. So I've done some serious CSI work to decipher them. AND THEY JUST SAY 'WORSHIP', BECAUSE OF COURSE THEY DO.
Bonus: he has another one with "IV" on the other sleeve. Personally i think it's endearing.
My struggles under the cut
I've tried editing the black and white photo above on my phone, trying to make it more clear and this is what i've got lmao
I've made it hella grainy but hey, at least i could (more or less) see the outline of some of the runes (and make up some new ones in the process lol). Idk why the doodles added later got also saved grainy...
Then I've checked the alphabet for possible choices
And realised it's just 'WORSHIP'. Weeks of asking myself what could that be. And it's. JUST THE EASIEST THING TO GUESS.
Initially i thought there's less letters, but nope. It's 7. It's worship.
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hi! i always love your MDZS/CQL takes; can i ask what are the questions you think CQL is asking, as compared to MDZS?
I haven't actually revisited either canon in ages, which is making me nervous. what questions the novel is interested in can be pretty contentious all on its own! @mikkeneko has an excellent answer in the notes here which I reccomend to everyone. My own thoughts are honestly pretty scattered- I keep on deleting things and going hm, that's not quite right.
So, for the obvious-to-me example, people reasonably zero in on the creation of innocent doctors/radish farmers who Wen Ruohan is holding hostage. In CQL it's easy to infer that Wen Qing and Wen Ning are maybe the only cultivators and almost certainly the only combatants among the Wen remnants, and their status is much more ambiguous in the novel, which I personally think is asking, essentially, "and so what? were they wrong to run, when they had a chance? Do they deserve what Jin Guangshan will do to them if they go back? Aren't they just people, actually?" Whereas the question that CQL is asking is more to the effect of "What does Wen Qing owe these people, when she is their only defence? What is she entitled to do to save them, at other people's expense? If she fucks up that moral calculus, what then? Does it matter if she's personally fond of some of the outsiders who are going to get hurt? If one of them saved her brother? Later, this question will flip to what Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, and the parallel to Jiang Cheng's situation in particular is, I think, genuinely pretty fun. You're giving up the Wen as soldiers who've laid down their arms in exchange for Wen Qing also grappling with leadership and the question of how many horrors she can stand to look the other way on to protect her own people. one reason I keep deleting so much is that a lot cql's changes were motivated at least in part by censorship, which I think we mostly share a general and justified distaste for! but I also think that within the bounds of that censorship the creative team put a lot of work into actually doing something interesting with those changes. Or, for another example- nieyao! There's a much greater emphasis on the nmj-jgy relationship, it's unambiguously very close and they are clearly extremely important to one another, and I think that's because the cql team has a lot to say about love, trust, power, and the ways those things interact, and that reflects back on all of the other relationships in play, including Wangxian. Almost every time, when CQL chooses change a relationship they make the characters in question closer- that's true for Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, for Wen Qing and the Yunmeng contingent, for Zixuan and Mianmian, and Huaisang and Meng Yao. It's even true for Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian, who have a close and trusting relationship in first life! CQL puts a much greater emphasis on "all right, so you care, what next?" How do you choose someone and then choose to be good to them? What if there's a massive power disparity between you? What if you seriously disagree about your priorities and morals? How do you trust someone who's betrayed you? When is it a stupid choice to trust at all? How do you have faith that you know someone well enough for that trust to be meaningful?
for legal reasons i would like to specify that it's not that mdzs isn't interested in these problems. i do remember wangxian's literal trust fall. cql is asking these questions all the time about everyone. also for legal purposes i'm not suggesting that cql lwj and jc love each other. but! they establish a three month wartime partnership looking for wwx and then jc immediately drops him on wwx's say-so despite apparently having a positive enough opinion of him to tell wwx he thinks they should make up twice. lan wangji will later tell wwx he thinks he should loop jc in on the second flautist! these are people trying to navigate some kind of relationship/shared interest/community, as opposed to a hateful void. cql wants to say hey, how do you go about this? while I'm here and rambling cql also puts a lot of emphasis on wwx's connection to yunmeng and changes things up so instead of feeling alienated right before he leaves our last glimpse of him there is happily picking lotuses and playing with a kid! in both stories the narrative is asking who do you protect? who do you leave behind? can you ever get it back? but the angles are very different.
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thinking about floyd and riddle spending their first halloween as a couple together... i think floyd absolutely loves how varied and lively all of the different halloween traditions he's learned about since coming to live on land are, and he wants to try out as many of them as he can each year. so when riddle tells him that his mother always made him stay in his room studying on halloween, and that the only halloween activities he's ever done were those that NRC students were required to participate in, floyd decides that the two of them are just going to have to spend the day doing everything they possibly can. riddle tries to say he's far too busy for such things, but floyd will not let it go and honestly riddle is only half-heartedly protesting anyway because he secretly did always dream of doing the things that other kids got to do on halloween, and maybe it wouldn't be such a big deal to take one day off and spend time with his boyfriend.
so, riddle never got to make jack-o-lanterns? floyd decides to "borrow" about half a dozen of the pumpkins jade and azul had bought for mostro lounge and takes them to riddle's dorm room. riddle is terrible at trying to carve them at first and floyd can't help but laugh at him a little, but since he knows it's not riddle's fault he's never gotten to do this before, he says he'll show him how to do it. unfortunately floyd isn't nearly as good as he thinks he is on account of having lived in the ocean for almost his whole life and now riddle gets to laugh right back at him. they probably both get the hang of it right as they're down to their last two pumpkins.
riddle never got to go trick-or-treating with his childhood friends? floyd texts trey and convinces him to get in touch with chenya as well so that they can all go together. when they approach the first house, in the costumes they had prepared for each of their school's halloween events, riddle starts to get nervous and asks if they aren't all a little too old to be doing this. floyd shoves several huge handfuls of candy from that person's bowl into his and riddle's pumpkin-shaped buckets and tells him it's not like there's any rule that says they can't, and besides, riddle is such a cute little goldfish that he practically looks like a kid in his costume anyway! chenya stifles a laugh while trey has to stop riddle from committing murder that night.
riddle's never gone to a haunted house before? floyd and chenya both think it would be hilarious to make him go to one, so they do. riddle absolutely hates it, but it honestly does make him happy to see everyone else enjoying it--even if floyd and chenya both keep trying to egg him and trey on and get them to go down creepy corridors and check around corners by themselves, and even if floyd keeps running off to different parts of the haunted house and then coming back and hugging or even lifting riddle from behind knowing full well that he'll get freaked out by it.
riddle never got to play the apple bobbing game that's traditional in the queendom of roses? turns out there's a place right by the haunted house where they can go to do it! predictably, floyd is great at it while riddle ends up drenched without getting any apples, but just giving it a try is more fun than riddle expected.
riddle's never gotten to make candy apples before? luckily, trey knows an amazing recipe as well as what combinations of toppings work the best, and he's willing to teach them both! riddle gets very confused at imprecise directions such as being told to use "a few" drops of food coloring on the syrup or to drizzle "a little" white chocolate over it, and keeps asking trey exactly how much he should use. floyd thinks this is adorable. he also thinks it's adorable when riddle tries to scold him for ignoring half of trey's directions and just doing whatever he thinks sounds good.
riddle's never done a horror movie marathon before, or even seen any halloween movies in general? floyd insists that they marathon at least 3 movies together. after the experiences he had at the haunted house, riddle doesn't think he'll enjoy horror movies, but he tries to keep his cool throughout the first one anyway... which does not work out, because he really can't handle jumpscares or excessive gore. during the first movie they watch, floyd (who loves slasher films so much that he laughs and cheers every time the monster gets a kill) is happy to let his goldfishie cuddle up to him and grip onto his arm to keep himself from knocking the popcorn bowl onto the floor, but you know that once it's over riddle is getting teased relentlessly about how scared he was. floyd decides to be nice and put on something tamer for their next two movies, and riddle actually ends up really enjoying coraline and especially beetlejuice.
by the end of the night riddle realizes that they've stayed up way too late at night and a small part of him wants to scold floyd for keeping him up so late, insisting on having him do all of these silly activities and eat all of these terribly unhealthy snacks. another part of him wishes he could scold his mother for keeping him from doing any of these things as a kid, with his friends and the other kids in his hometown, the way you're supposed to do it... and another part of him still is just incredibly happy and grateful to floyd for finally giving him the chance.
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LOVED your response to the ichihime ask about ichigo's feelings, and i guess i wanted to add to it by asking how you would envision ichigo's crush on her, what kind of thoughts he would think, because he's very hard to read in the romance department lol
i got another ask similar to this one about ichigo's feelings, but my inbox seems to have eaten it up because i don't see it here anymore (even though the number of unread asks it says i have still hasn't changed...), so i guess i'll answer them both here
i mean, we know their first meeting had a big impact on ichigo, even if orihime herself doesn't remember the encounter, and we also know based on what he says to rukia that he'd kind of been keeping an eye on her ever since their paths crossed in high school, so i'd say it began as a kindred soul thing: she lost someone close to her, he lost someone close to him, he knows what it's like, so he can't help but keep an eye out for her, worry about her, etc. he notes that she gets hurt every day, so i'm guessing it was a kind of situation where he'd be minding his own business or going his own way and then out of the corner of his eye, he hears/catches sight of her getting into something clumsy as usual. a dropped book here, a loud crash there.
i'd say his feelings at this time are pretty similar to orihime's feelings in the 'one way sympathies' chapter. he begins to understand her or feel closer to her because of this loss, but they're not necessarily close friends so he can't explain why he feels close to her. he mostly just ignores it all as background noise unless she's directly in front of him. we also know that she told him about her brother and her hairpins some time pre-canon, so maybe she brought it up in casual conversation once ("i never go anywhere without them" etc etc) and ichigo remembered it because he remembers seeing her and sora at the clinic and he knows how much sora meant to her. it's not unreasonable to guess that, having sisters of his own, he could kind of put himself in that situation and feel vehement about that happening to his own sisters. who would take care of them if he died? little sisters need big brothers, and having lost hers, ichigo probably couldn't help but really feel for her.
i think it's important to remember that ichigo ends up caring about people deeply very easily. after orihime encourages him to save rukia, and after she accompanies him with his other friends to help him fight a battle that has nothing to do with her, i think it's safe to say he's touched and he considers her a friend–and a cherished one at that, since she ends the arc by telling him she's sorry she couldn't protect him. ichigo doesn't get to hear people say things like that to him often, because he's....usually the one saying them. so his face in that moment speaks of fondness, tenderness, maybe even a little gratitude as orihime cries about his well-being.
ichihime really gets its push in the HM arc, though, i mean it's no surprise that the amount of ichihime fanfics probably tripled in number after the arc began. and for good reason! it's kind of incredible how many times orihime gets singled out this arc even before she gets kidnapped, like the time ichigo promised to protect her, even though chad and tatsuki were also there and also injured. it's clear that he feels like he's got something to prove in front of her, and i think, at the time, he justifies it to himself as needing to make it up to her because he let his own insecurities about his hollow get in the way of protecting her from yammy. and i don't think he's even lying to himself about it. ichigo was very, very occupied with his own trauma and the plot constantly happening all the time so i think he was satisfied with surface-level reasons of, "she's a pacifist, she has trauma with her brother and THAT'S why i've got to personally make it up to her."
but i do think, deep down, he has this tendency to only ever want to look good and strong and kind in orihime's eyes, because he likes the way she looks at him when she lets some of that love and admiration shine through. he's seen it before and i think he's a little addicted to it, because when he later remembers moments where he was proud to be a shinigami, orihime shows up there twice, both times crying about how much she cares about him lol. he clearly loves it whenever she expresses her feelings for him, though i don't think he's examining it as anything deeper than the simple joy of making his friends happy.
the repeated hand motif is another thing that i think is an important indicator of how ichigo feels at the time. here's a post i made about it a while ago that never came out of the drafts:
all this to say, i think ichigo has a feeling all throughout the HM arc that orihime left her heart with him when she said goodbye. he doesn't know how to justify this feeling, just that it exists and it's strong and he needs to prove to her that he won't be letting her down. the anime surprisingly rounds this out nicely by having ichigo hold her hand after the grimmjow fight, but so much of ichigo's behavior this arc feels like the narrative's response to orihime's insecurities about their bond in chapter 199. ichigo does some pretty balls-to-the-walls crazy things this arc for orihime, so it's kind of like he's responding to her confession with magnanimous action of his own (though he doesn't know that's what he's doing; it's subconscious behavior, coming from the part of him that heard her even when he himself was asleep—his heart. this repeats for a second time when he dies at the tower but his heart hears her again. not the physical, beating thing of course, but the metaphysical thing that transcends physical form). what does orihime mean to him at this point in the story? he would say she's his friend, of course, but to us it's clear that their bond continually reminds him of what he's fighting for. he sealed his promise to her with the kanji that makes up his name. his life's purpose lies in protecting people, and as long as there's someone to protect, someone he promised to protect, he'll never die.
fullbring arc shakes things up by a) having them get closer as friends who share mundane interests, like reading the same manga or sharing mutual friends (esp tatsuki, who he seems to have made up with) or just chilling and hanging out in his room and b) having him actually acknowledge that orihime wants to protect him, too, and is now actually capable of doing that. before, ichigo could easily brush her under the wing of his protection, but it's here that he's got to contend with the fact that he might have an equal soon—a potential battle partner, which is something he's never had before going into horn of salvation.
which brings us to the 10-year-timeskip. i've said it before, but once the surface-level reason of wanting to protect her, just like he wants to protect everyone, is swept away, i do think he's got time and space to consider the fact that he might actually have a crush on her. AKA, this, to me, is the first time he realizes it for what it is and says it out loud to himself. he's always been able to distract himself or justify his feelings to himself using plot events before, but they're in a period of peace now and that's when i think he realizes that he wants to be with her. i don't think he could have ever had that realization if he was still paranoid about her safety, because duty comes first to him, but now that he's not, i think he realizes that he just likes spending time with her and spending hours in his room, with or without their friends, just talking and relaxing. they grew up together and she's seen every side of him—pre-powers, shinigami, hollow, quincy, powerless, what have you—so i think it moves him, knowing that she's been by his side through it all, seeing him up close in all his forms and versions, and maybe he's ready now for her to see what he's like as a lover too. if she'd love that version of him, just like she did with everything else! he's sensitive and protective of his own feelings, so he'd only make that move once he had a guarantee that it would be accepted. that he would be accepted. and orihime has obviously always tried to accept him for who he is, even when he was at his worst, so he feels safe in giving this side to her too!
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