Ruggie who thinks Leona doesn't really care for him but sees him as more of a pawn to use to get to his goals. But he doesn't question it, because as much as he hates to admit it he cares for Leona
He doesn't question the fact that once he graduated from NRC Leona gave him an opportunity to be his right hand man and manages his schedule or his boring paper work
He doesn't question it when Leona asked him to be his best man for his wedding, he even prepared a corny speech to tease Leona
He doesn't question it when Leona and his wife sat him down in their room and requested that he would be their future child's guardian. Protecting them from harm and teaching them whatever he knows
It was only when Leona requested him-- Not his brother. to hold his first born child. The tiny babe's eye tightly shut, asleep-- Ruggie wonder where they got that trait from. Their tiny hand gripping Ruggie's finger with all the strength it could muster. And for the first time Ruggie saw a genuine smile on Leona's face, he patted his back. Praising him for how quickly his child took a liking to him.
That was the moment Ruggie realized how important he was to Leona.
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I’m thinking more about the “cartoon show about the Ancient descendants starring Princess Cookie” thing I offhandedly mentioned and I just wanted to share some ideas concerning it
In my head, it’s probably closest to the She Ra reboot, but I’m not sure how much since it’s been a few years since I’ve seen it. But the main character is less Adora and far more so Glimmer. And also we don’t exactly have a big cast of royals to work with
So there’s Princess as our main character and Knight as her bodyguard/love interest/best friend (at the very least Knight starts with a crush on her, whether that gets reciprocated or changes later on is up to you I suppose). She lives in the Hollyberry Kingdom with her parents and an absent adventurous grandmother(I mean absent like she is in the game, not so much she’s a deadbeat. Just imagine this setup like the game)
Custard III is pretty much the team baby and is basically like a younger brother to Princess. The plot probably starts with Princess and Knight meeting him and learning he’s the descendant of Pure Vanilla Cookie, king of the long lost Vanilla Kingdom. Not sure what the plot would entail but this seems like the best starting off point for a show. Other than that, Custard III probably lives in the Hollyberry castle with Princess, since he has nowhere else to go
As for Dark Choco, well it depends whether you want him as part of the main supporting cast or not. If he’s part of the hero group, I’d say make him his Young Prince version, and he’s the oldest member of the group and by proxy most experienced, but he still has things to learn. He’s a family friend and already part of the group at the start. Not sure why he’s a frequent cast member but whatever. He’d be the older brother type and probably the group’s main/best fighter. Also he has issues with his father that would probably get worked through throughout the show
If we’re going with him being like he is in current day, then he starts out as part of the antagonist group, but he eventually leaves and gets his redemption arc, possibly via the power of Princess’s trust and friendship, eventually becoming part of the group but more as an older mentor/uncle figure
Though I’ll be honest, with the first scenario I have this neat idea of Dark Choco losing his eye in this series, where instead of how he does in canon, he loses his eye defending his friends, in some sort of scenario similar to the prom night rescue in She Ra (fun fact: this scenario of the prom night rescue but with Cookie Run characters is where this whole idea started). He then has a character arc about his new loss of an eye but he pulls through it and ends up seeing his injury as a symbol of his loyalty to his friends.
He might also have a slight corruption arc in this series with the Strawberry Jam Sword, but it doesn’t have nearly the same ramifications as canon as the team figures out what’s going on pretty quickly, if not immediately (in that he’s not in control), and eventually help free him from this. He probably also doesn’t join the villains in this scenario, at least not while he’s in control, and if he did it’d be after a very long time skip where he’s basically been broken, which I don’t imagine happening
I admit, this first scenario is the one I like more, I just put the second one since it’s the one closer to actual canon
We don’t really have any more “Ancient descendants” to work with (well there are more, I mean more in descendants from other Kingdoms), but they’ll get added once they show up I guess. I mean I know there’s theories for other characters, but since nothing’s currently confirmed for them, I won’t be using them as main characters
Now for Tiger Lily. So she’d show up occasionally throughout the story as a mysterious character, saving the group on occasion but never go back with them, disappearing back into the wild. Or heck, maybe she only shows up when Princess is alone, so nobody else knows who she is, though maybe the others would meet her later. There’d be hints to Tiger Lily and Princess’s true relation, like Jungleberry and references to Princess once having a twin, as well as possibly an episode featuring Tiger Lily and her wondering what this connection she feels towards Princess is, and simultaneously vice versa with Princess, but their true connection wouldn’t be revealed until like, at least a Season 2 (wait no, don’t these sorts of reveals happen at the end of Season 1s? Eh whatever). But there’d probably be an arc much later on of her trying to integrate into normal society and her trying to connect with her family she’s never known. Princess would be the easiest since they already know each other, but her parents are another story
Oh right, I should also mention, since this is in the form of a kid’s cartoon, all the main characters are children/teens. Staring off the show, Princess/Tiger Lily/Knight are around 14, Custard III is somewhere between 7-9, and Dark Choco is around 17-18, in the scenario where he’s part of the supporting cast the whole way through
Clotted Cream and the Creme Republic might show up as a late addition as well, never being made part of the group but more like a guest character that pops in from time to time. Though we might spend more time with him in an introductory arc with the Creme Republic and this being where Custard III’s family is from, though nobody knows until the name Custard is mentioned. Though in the end, Custard III chooses to stay with Princess and friends
The main antagonists would probably be Dark Enchantress and the Cookies of Darkness, and the Ancients would also be featured characters, with Hollyberry eventually appearing again, or perhaps her first showing up as a normal huntress but later being revealed to have been Hollyberry watching the kingdom from the shadows. But the Ancient stuff would really only happen during Plot Time, as I like to call it
And uh yeah, think that’s about it, just thoughts I had. Tempted to make this an au, but I don’t know how considering the characters aren’t different in design or anything and there’s not too much different from canon in a vacuum, it’s just that the story is being told in a different format and with different main characters. It’s more a bunch of neat ideas I like
Also not sure what role the dragons would play. I mean I feel like they should play some role, at least Pitaya, but we already have a group of antagonists and they don’t really fit in with them
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i wanna do a thing where i lay out studies that show things in different primates that show us parts of ourselves as humans. Call it Primates: Through the Looking Glass or The Monkey in the Mirror or something
There are studies and documentaries that show things about Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Baboons, Macaques... that just make sense to me. That if shown right would make sense to a lot of people, i think.
like... they were studying this one group of gorillas --
okay wait. First of all, you know a silverback (the Big Male) of the group is not the leader or in charge or anything, right? He has a role, and it includes a certain amount of control, which i’ll explain briefly, but he’s not, like, in charge.
wait, you know all that Dominance/Alpha theory about wolves is all wrong, right?
wait wait wait, and also that like, the bull or the stag or whatever in a herd is not in charge of anything, right? right?
hold on. the wolves is it’s own post, the herd thing i might get back to, we’re on gorillas, okay. Silverback is basically just the male head of an extended family in which plenty of the leadership is handled by the women of the family.
There are often 2-4 silverbacks, but one, usually the largest, will clearly be senior to the others who are often his sons or brothers. Silverbacks have three main roles
1: defend the group from all physical threats
aside from people, these threats are mostly random male gorillas, chimpanzee baby-snatching gangs, and the occasional leopard. Just his alert presence handles most scenarios, and then maybe a few times a year he has to risk his life fulfilling this responsibility.
It is this role that provides most of whatever actual power he has over the group, namely this: while he isn’t necessarily the one deciding when and where the group goes on a daily basis, if the most powerful/capable silverback does decide to travel a direction, they pretty much have to go with him, the family isn’t safe without him.
2: make babies.
And this is one area where the ladies of the group will sometimes sort of vote with their ovaries, and favor a silverback that isn’t the main one, like “yeah, Frank, you are the biggest, but honestly you’re a dick and we’re going to make sure the next generation of silverbacks isn’t another one of you.” When you see a main large silverback in a group of gorillas, it isn’t, like, his blindly loyal harem, they have to approve of him. Also gorilla females move between groups, and sometimes they take members with them or start new groups and stuff. Anyway i’m getting off track, one of the silverbacks jobs is making babies
3. keep the peace
This functions a lot like being in the back seat with your siblings with your parents up front. Basically any disputes within the group have to be handled within a certain parameter of decorum, because if it gets too out of hand HE’s going to come over, and He’ll be upset, which is low-key terrifying because He’s huge, and there’s no telling who He’ll decide is at fault or what he’ll do about it, so letting a situation get out of hand is a losing scenario for everyone involved really. Tho typically he will favor senior females in disputes, in a “don’t you talk that way to your mom” kind of way.
one last thing, silverbacks don’t actually transfer power between silverbacks via battle every time.
Like i was just reading accounts from a multi-generational observational study of some wild gorillas that featured one big silverback just straight up taking over by performing the silverback duties better and becoming preferred by everyone else in the group. There was no fight, it just became, i do the job better, everyone likes me better, kicking my ass can’t change that, and boom, he was the primary silverback.
And the other silverback might have been a bit dull, or a bit of a bully, but like us their species’ success is largely dependent on social intelligence; once he saw the writing on the wall, that other, slightly larger sivlerback didn’t even bother trying to change the situation with a physical fight, he understood what had happened.
okay so all that was just to tell you all this story. lol. Here’s what i saw in one documentary:
This very big, getting old silverback, who was hugely popular and successful, with a very large and tightly bonded family group, and a couple of his hulking adult sons backing him up. Everybody in his group seemed to love him a lot, he was particularly calm in that gentle giant sort of way, a safe, emotionally steady presence, happy to help raise his sons and daughters with kindness, and who could become a raging nightmare if pressed by a leopard ... exactly what a band of gorillas wants in a silverback.
But one of his adult sons had plenty of silver on his own back, and was getting itchier and itchier to be main man of the group, and this is where we start our little drama
It seems to be coming to a head, and the observers are nervous about a fight for the position. The silverback and his son are both are huge, probably approaching 400lbs, mostly muscle, with long thick fangs and skulls topped with jaw muscles as big as human biceps to wield those teeth, which nature has given them primarily to fight other gorillas with.
But then the next day, the old man leads the fam up the mountain.
it’s winter, which is why they have come down the mountain in the first place. But as we discussed, if he goes somewhere, they have to go, so they all follow behind.
up he goes, and then he sits. And waits. It’s cold and there is much less food up here at this time of year. There’s nothing to do but sit hungry in the cold. His size and metabolism makes him the most able to withstand the cold, but even he is pretty uncomfortable.
And so he sits. And his family, perhaps confused, but loyal, sits around him.
But his son, the other huge silverback, with years of training even as an adult under his wise father, is ready and able to go off on his own. Finally, he stands up, makes clear his intentions to leave this uncomfortable place. A small handful of the other gorillas stand with him -- if he goes down the mountain, then they can safely leave as well. He turns and heads down the mountain. After a moment, a few more gorillas leave the main group to follow. All in all it winds up being nearly half.
The wise older silverback thoughtfully watches his son leave with about half the group. He sits a while longer in the cold, in the company of those most loyal to him, and then takes them along a different path down the mountain
And those two groups still ran into each other sometimes, and were friendly. And sometimes a couple gorillas would change between the two groups. They were still close.
But i just thought that was such an elegant, meaningful way for that gorilla to handle that whole situation. And it makes a completely human sort of sense to me.
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