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angsty-nerd · 3 years

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Meta: Echo’s Big Fight in 3x09

Let's talk about the Big Echo fight. Because wandering around in the fandom this past week, I’ve seen a lot of very specific conclusions as far as what they were or weren't arguing about, and I’m not sure my take on that scene really aligns with other folks. So let me try to break it down a bit and give y’all an alternative perspective on it.

To start with, the scene opens with Max on edge because they're breaking and entering. Liz is singularly focused on the mission, and he's kinda freaking out. Instead of responding to his concerns, Liz gets straight to business.

"Ooh, ooh, this is interesting. Heath left Genoryx two days after I did. Must have realized he didn't need to be working underneath their corporate thumb."

Liz is kinda projecting here. Heath never once displayed any discomfort with Genoryx as a company the way that she did. He wanted her to stay. He wanted the resources there. We know these things as an audience, and Liz would too if she was thinking through the big picture at this point in time.

Max, on the other hand, doesn't know any of that. Here's what Max hears from Liz: he hears surprise. He hears Liz acknowledge that this is unexpected news. And right as he’s processing this unexpected reveal...Max sees Heath's Wild Pony t-shirt.

Weird coincidence #1 from Max's POV was Heath (the guy who is currently so pissed at Liz that he won't take her calls) supposedly rescuing Liz's science out of the good of his heart so that Genoryx doesn’t get their hands on it? This doesn't add up.

Weird coincidence #2 was Heath quitting Genoryx - a decision Heath made that Liz wasn't expecting.

The Wild Pony t-shirt is now the 3rd thing that doesn't add up. And if the t-shirt clue isn't adding up for you, see my post about it here:

The T-shirt is strike 3 for Max. He can't really pretend that he's not suspicious of Heath anymore. So he broaches the subject with her.

"How much do you know about this guy, Heath? How close were you?"

Max is feeling uncomfortable and looking for more information. He's trying to make the clue make sense. Why would Heath have the T-shirt? Does he have a connection to Roswell that Liz doesn't know about? And Liz doesn’t listen.

"This isn't the time to be jealous about a boy I met."

For all that Liz is clinical and on mission, she jumps very quickly to assuming that Max is NOT on mission. Yes, Max is inherently more emotional than she is. But throughout the episode he's been asking questions about Heath and NOT JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS. That's one of the keys to me here. Max really is trying to give her the benefit of the doubt about him.

At Liz's house, he asked about "the boyfriend" but he wasn't doing it in a jealous or judgy way. If anything it could almost be interpreted as concern. He started with "were you happy" and only when Liz kind of metaphorically admitted that any happiness was a façade...that's when he brought Heath into it. And yeah, Liz says that he impacted her life and helped her grow, but she didn't exactly express romantic feelings that would make Max jealous. So when she basically jumped straight to the jealousy assumption instead of actually discussing this with him, he starts getting worked up. Because she is not hearing him. She is not acknowledging that the facts they have found during this investigation are not adding up. So he is honest and blunt about what he's thinking.

"I'm just saying it's possible that he took your one-of-a-kind alien spores and quit, so that, just like you, he could use the research himself, free of Genoryx."

Max is the one who brings the science into this conversation. Not Liz. And he's not criticizing or questioning HER application of the science. He's questioning the trustworthiness of Heath. Because the lies are starting to jump out at him like a friggin’ neon light.

BUT — now that he's specifically brought up the science, he has her attention. Because Max questioning her science is HER sore spot. So what does she say back to him? Something kinda judgy.

"That grand trust speech certainly had a short shelf life."

Side note: I really don't think there actually was a "grand trust speech" in this episode. I can think of a few scenes where there might have been an opportunity for one. In particular during the milkshake scene when he admits to saving her tapes. But they actually don't talk about trust in that scene. They talk about having hard conversations. They talk about moving forward instead of looking backwards. But they don't talk about trust. My guess is that there might have been content cut for time at some point in this episode, that may have included some grand declaration from Max, but that's really just speculation on my part.

Regardless…Liz's response to Max bringing up the science is to basically accuse him of not trusting her. Which is not what he was saying. He was not questioning her use of the science. He was questioning her trust in Heath through the context of her science. So he elaborates on what he IS saying, and as he does, he's getting more and more worked up...because this does relate directly to his personal fears, and, frankly, his buried trauma that he's never properly addressed.

"I trust you. Okay? But I don't trust some guy I have barely met with a secret that could endanger me, could endanger my family and break the frickin' Internet if it came out."

Max doesn't know Heath, and he doesn't trust Heath with a secret that could endanger Michael and Isobel. His emotions are escalating, because now he's thinking about the science that scares him in the hands of a guy that all signs points to being potentially untrustworthy, and he's triggered.

BUT he doesn't back up his argument. He doesn't point out the very specific evidence he's identified that Heath is probably lying to Liz.

And Liz is inherently reactive and sometimes overly defensive (see 1x09 list of Liz's flaws). So even though he's focused on Heath, she immediately reacts defensively and takes it as a criticism of HER.

"You think I would let myself be conned?"

"No, I think you came out here looking for a partner, and it could blind you."

*deep breath* and this is where it starts to get personal. And rough. Max isn't entirely wrong here. But he also kind of is. Liz didn't choose Genoryx for partnership. She was looking for resources, freedom to do the science she wanted to do, and to save her father from deportation.

But partnership? Yeah, Liz wanted that. But she wanted that from MAX. She was looking for partnership in life, not in science.

And now that Max has thrown that direct criticism out there, Liz is going to throw a bomb right back at him.

"Just because you sabotaged me when I thought you were mine does not mean that Heath would take the same path."

Ouch. This is the hardest line in this whole scene for me to work with. Because it is combative. And purposefully hurtful.

BUT…she is NOT TALKING ABOUT HER SCIENCE. She has not said a single word about her science in this argument. She moved past that. She had the epiphany that she was wrong and she apologized (3x03). That is in the past for her.

This argument, for Liz, is about betrayal. This is about her believing that they were going to be partners and move their lives forward together (2x12), and right when she believed in that future, Max made another massive decision that directly impacted her life (just like he did in 1x13) instead of working with her to make big decisions together.

"And just because you changed the wallpaper doesn't mean you've mended your blind spots."

I really hate this "change the wallpaper" line. It feels like they're mixing metaphors. Liz called her life a commercial. Max is saying that she's changed her decor. Like...pick one and stick with it.

That aside… I think this barb is about her arrogance. Earlier in the scene, she seemed baffled at the idea that Max believes she could have been conned by Heath, because Liz is used to always being the smartest person in the room. She thought she was smarter than Diego and he figured her out. She believed her lab was secure, but Diego (possibly) got in. Sometimes, like most scientists, Liz is so bogged down in the complicated, brilliant details she’s thinking through, that she misses simple things that contribute to the big picture. And I think that's what Max is getting at here. In her arrogance, she believes that she can control the Heath situation. But she's not acknowledging the human factor here - that Heath is a person who may have his own unspoken ulterior motives driving him. Just like Diego did. She's just not seeing what Max is seeing.

BUT - again I'll say. Max is also not communicating the scope of the evidence he is collecting. They're both wrong here.

"I have learned my lessons, but you... oh, my God, you sound an awful lot like the guy who blew up my lab. So forgive me, but you're making it perfectly clear why I felt like I had to go and change the wallpaper."

This is the only line where Liz even comes close to talking about her science, but again, she's talking about his betrayal. She's talking about him undermining their partnership. She's talking about her need for a change of scenery from HIM.

And that’s when Max blows out the safe and they put the fight on hold to finish their investigation.

But, to sum it up…the fight was all about trust and betrayal. It was necessary for them to work through it, though frankly? I wish they could have finished the discussion. Because instead of them coming to some sort of peace with their trust in each other, the truth came out about Heath, Liz realized that she was wrong, she apologized, and they moved forward together, on mission.

I can’t help pointing out though…after the fight and Liz's epiphany about Heath, Max and Liz spent at least 15 hours in a car together. And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that they didn't talk about anything important for 15 hours. Fic writers assemble? 😆

Many thanks to @ober-affen-geil for doing a quick review and checking me on opinions vs facts. Very important.

And for my next trick… road trips, life choices, and Robert Frost! Coming soon to a Tumblr near you…

#rnm echo #rnm season 3 #roswell new mexico #max&liz #my meta #max evans #liz ortecho #rnm meta

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mittensmorgul · 3 years

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I feel like I should be posting more original content. I’ve been here for so long, posting original content analyzing every detail of this show, and posting literally millions of words on the subject, and the show has gone and done exactly the thing I’ve been writing about, confirmed in text that the story I’ve been watching in the subtext is really the story they were telling all along.

And I could be posting gleefully about the beauty of the most intense metanarrative, the absolute bananapants layers of meta in any piece of media I’ve ever consumed in my 46 years. From the self-referential and universe-bending plotlines to just how deeply embedded ALL of this has become as the central core narrative of the final season, as the characters grapple with what is even real when they’ve been characters in a story beyond their control or understanding for so long only to come so close to earning their freedom and “becoming real” by using their OWN words and declaring for themselves their truth and their happiness and their love.

It’s... mind boggling that everything I’ve ever written about this show is coming back around in a final grand swoop of the narrative arcs that I honestly don’t know what else I can do aside from waving one hand at canon and inviting everyone to just read the entirety of this stupid blog while looking smugly satisfied with myself.

It’s about love. The whole story is, was, and always will be about love. And not just destiel, but the whole damn show. The character of Dean Winchester, for all the jokes about being emotionally constipated, is essentially the embodiment of selfless love and has been since the start of the show. But because of the story itself, he had to become hardened to it, to accept that it wasn’t something he could have for himself if he lived the life he did. And yet he never let that destroy him, despite now understanding that that’s exactly what Chuck spent the last 15 years (and really the entirety of Dean’s life) attempting to do-- to break him for the sake of the story.

Cas’s confession in 15.18 wasn’t just about how Cas loves Dean, but why. Cas, the only version of Castiel in any of Chuck’s infinite universes who broke free of Heaven’s command, did so because of the love he saw in this selfless but self-hating man. Years of crack posts about Dean breaking angels cannot even begin to touch how deep this goes.

One line in Cas’s monologue about Dean thinking of himself as “daddy’s blunt instrument” was a line from season THREE, before Cas ever even MET Dean Winchester and began to know him. It was a phrase that had never been spoken aloud in reality. It happened literally inside Dean’s dream, where he knew he was doomed to go to hell and was confronted by the demon version of himself. Dean said this line TO HIMSELF, IN A DREAM, TWELVE SEASONS AGO. And then yelled down that demon-dream version of himself with this:

DREAM DEAN: Dad knew who you really were. A good soldier and nothing else. Daddy's blunt little instrument. Your own father didn't care whether you lived or died. Why should you?

DEAN: Son of a bitch!

DEAN pushes DREAM DEAN hard, knocking him into the wall above the desk.

DEAN: (screaming angrily) My father was an obsessed bastard!

DREAM DEAN tries to get up and DEAN kicks him down on the desk again. DEAN holds the weapon as a bat and hits DREAM DEAN once and then pins him to the wall with it.

DEAN: All that crap he dumped on me, about protecting Sam! That was his crap. He's the one who couldn't protect his family. He-

DEAN steps back and swings the weapon again, hitting DREAM DEAN twice.

DEAN: He's the one who let Mom die. who wasn't there for Sam. I always was! He wasn't fair! I didn't deserve what he put on me. And I don't deserve to go to Hell!

DEAN shoots DREAM DEAN twice in the chest. As he lowers the weapon and looking at DREAM DEAN, we see the latter is dead. Blood is splattered on DREAM DEAN's face and his eyes are closed.

And then after that, spoiler alert, he went to hell and Cas pulled him out.

Dean: Right. And why would an angel rescue me from Hell? Castiel: Good things do happen, Dean. Dean: Not in my experience. Castiel: What's the matter? You don't think you deserve to be saved?

It took him YEARS to truly get past this. He didn’t really get to confront his own father until season 14, in a sort of “It’s A Wonderful Life” sort of episode where he could see what his life might’ve been like if things had turned out differently. And oh, Cas isn’t in his life. But he gets to confront John with his own self-acceptance, his own confidence in the life he’s made for himself and the people (including Cas) who have become his family. He gets to hear from John that he never wanted that life for Dean, and Dean gets to say, well I would choose this life anyway.

Until Chuck’s revelation pulled that rug out from under him. Dean had been-- if not deliriously happy, at least content with his life. Because it was HIS. And then he found out it wasn’t, that Chuck had always been writing the broad strokes of his life, had always been the one throwing catastrophe after apocalypse after cosmic crisis directly in his path because he wanted to watch Dean struggle to save the world yet again, and finally give him the ending to the story that Chuck wanted-- a broken and devastated Dean who’d sacrificed everything for the story yet again. And suddenly NOTHING about anything made sense to Dean anymore, and even Cas showing up in his life and then weirdly sticking around all these years was suspect to him. He trusted nothing, not his choices or his feelings or his own happiness.

But now? We know (and Dean knows) that Cas was one thing Chuck just couldn’t control. That he was never supposed to think for himself and rebel and fall in love with Dean. And Dean knows that too. He knows all of it. And ALL of that just went wooshing through Dean’s central processing unit in the span of two minutes and came up error messages, because it was too late now and Cas was gone again, and there might not be any getting him back this time.

So unless Dabb era has been entirely about destroying everything that was ever good about this show, and about their own storytelling, and the metanarrative and the subtext and the character arcs, making Dean and Cas’s relationship the main emotional arc of the entire season demands that Dean get a chance to answer to this.

If love is truly the ultimate weapon of their salvation, as the show has been screaming since s11, then Dean gets to keep Cas. Because anything less is failure at this point.

I’m sorry I haven’t been replying to many people in my inbox, but honestly I’m too tired to deal with anxiety over how the story will end. I only care about the story, and I’ve written more about it in the last howeverlong I’ve been at this than I can possibly reiterate before the next episode airs. All I can do is point and gawp at the fact that the story is what I have always thought it was, and be content.

Revenge of the Subtext, indeed.

#spn 15.18 #destiel #the scheherazade of supernatural #revenge of the subtext #it's spirals all the way down #order vs chaos and darkness vs light #using your words #grand unification via love theory #there's probably 3000 posts across those tags and more in other tags linked to those if you wanna know how i feel about this show #i feel like i've written everything bar the shouting at the end at this point #lol including Revenge of the Subtext aka my first dcbb fic back in 2015 so like... *eternal shrug emojis*#i don't know what else to say at this point other than you either read anything i've written in the last 8 years or so or like...#nothing i say now is really gonna help i guess #lol i even wrote about how chuck was controlling the story way back in s11 so like...#i think i was one of the few holdouts in s11 who was convinced that amara didn't need to be killed but reunited with chuck #from like two days after 10.23 aired and before we knew she was amara or that chuck would ever come back #or that he was god lol... i was calling them darkness and light or creation and destruction #i wrote a lot of wackadoo sounding shit because we had no context to define them yet but ALL of it held up all season #and then dabb era ushered in the age of the metanarrative where the story unfolded on at least six levels simultaneously #and i get that's not every casual fan's cup of tea but for someone invested in the characters it ws GLORIOUS #they laid this whole trail of subtext and meta breadcrumbs all the way up to this point circling around a huge pole holding up the entire #story... and the center of it all is LOVE and it's an angel's love of a single human that the show has been pointing at forever #you draped yourself in the flag of heaven but really you did it all to save one human... hello season 9!#and a broken human's love of an angel he feared he could never deserve... and that's the love that can defeat every cosmic power out there #that's what we have left to watch in the final two episodes and i honestly don't know what else to say #love wins

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it-fits-i-ships · 3 years

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Combing through every single episode of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous for Yasammy moments to write meta analysis about part 4 (parts 1, 2, and 3)

Once Yaz is inside the lab we see her frantically looking for the antidote, getting more and more panicked the longer it takes her, we even see her get so frustrated that she starts throwing things and when she sinks to the floor she looks ready to have a full-on breakdown, it’s only when she notices the medical case and has that spark of hope that she gets up to continue her search, this combined with the sheer relief she experiences when she doubtfully opens the case to find that it does in fact hold the antidote really goes to show just how seriously Yaz takes this mission, I think that Yaz would take this kind of mission seriously if it were any other member of the group as well but not to this degree, it’s clear she cares very deeply about Sammy, she collapses in on herself and starts crying a little bit as she clutches that case to her chest, her world has been in danger of completely falling apart and she just found the one thing that can save it Yaz is a real ride-or-die, especially when it comes to Sammy, she is willing to put herself in so much danger just to make sure that Sammy is safe, she jumps the river in one go (despite the realized risk of her landing wrong on her bad ankle), as she’s sitting there cradling her injured ankle she remembers the first time Sammy offered her meaningful support, encouragement, and affection, she remembers how Sammy says she never gives up when it comes to friendship, Yaz knows deep down that Sammy would never give up on her and she sure as hell isn’t going to give up on Sammy, this reminds her what she’s fighting for and she gets back up, Yaz yells at the scorpius rex, basically telling it, “Come at me, bro,” Yaz is done taking shit from anyone, nothing is going to stop her from getting back to Sammy with that antidote, not even a freak of nature franken-dino with venomous spikes, during the final stretch of her journey, tired, injured, and terrified, Yaz trips and has several more flashes of memory in a row of moments where Sammy was saving her or hugging her or telling her that she’s her best friend in the whole world As I said in the last post, the term best friend is often used in children’s media to reference closer relationships between same-gender pairings in a way that adds queer subtext so it makes sense that this last part of Yaz’s flashbacks feels like a love confession from Sammy (albeit an indirect one) Yaz clearly loves Sammy too (even if she hasn’t consciously realized it yet) as she is willing to risk everything to save her and fix their relationship, when she gets back near the fort and sees how grim and somber the atmosphere is she musters every last bit of strength she has and pushes herself to the finish line, she is immeasurably worried that she will be (or already is) too late and she’ll lose Sammy forever, even after Brooklyn administers the antidote it takes a while for Sammy to show any kind of improvement so Yaz gets even more anxious and desperate, she even admits that she really does care about Sammy and she didn’t mean what she said before, she needs Sammy to know that, this scene reminds me a lot of the scenes in shows and movies where someone’s significant other is in the hospital and the healthy one gets very upset and refuses to leave the injured/sick one’s side When Sammy does wake up we are again treated to her perspective, the first person she looks over to is Yaz and the first thing she does is casually great Yaz (which is just adorable, as is Yaz’s genuine relieved smile after finding out that Sammy’s going to live), Yaz does everything she can to help and support Sammy, from checking on her when she first starts sitting up to supporting her while she’s walking to trying (and failing) to improve general morale in Sammy’s stead, ultimately Yaz’s plan to improve morale just freaks everyone out but the fact that she’s trying for Sammy’s sake is really sweet Also, can we just talk about the fact that Yaz has her hand fully on Sammy’s thigh when she asks how Sammy’s feeling? Or the way Yaz practically melts into the hug Sammy gives her?

Or the way she keeps taking, like, every opportunity to touch Sammy (rubbing her shoulder and her back, wiping the extra water off her face, etc.)? I’m sorry, there’s no heterosexual explanation for that combo The way that Yaz holds and protects Sammy during the stampede, the way that Sammy clings to Yaz with both hands (fingers tense and digging into Yaz’s arm), and the way they huddle close to each other suggest that they are both dealing with some direct trauma, Sammy just narrowly escaped the clutches of death at the hands (spikes?) of a dinosaur and now here they are possibly about get trampled (again), she still doesn’t feel good and she turns to Yaz for comfort, likewise Yaz is still very much aware that she almost lost Sammy and she had to leave her in order to get the antidote so she wants to make double damn sure that Sammy knows she’s there and that she’ll protect her, when it comes time for them to run Sammy has a moment of self-doubt, Yaz knows that Sammy needs her to snap her out of it in her own Yaz way (as opposed to trying to be overly cheery and positive like she was earlier) Yaz continues to offer gentle touches to comfort Sammy on the boat and when Sammy finds out that Ben plans to stay on the island instead of coming with them on the boat, she also uses physical touch to share Sammy’s excitement when Ben decides he actually does want to come with the rest of them on the boat, she also continues to protect Sammy from the onslaught of dinosaurs they have to unleash to get rid of the shady guy working with Dr. Wu who made them leave the boat, Yaz pulls Sammy out of the way of multiple dinos and holds her close Last but certainly not least, when they finally get back to the boat and leave the island we get this absolutely precious moment where Sammy is sleeping and Yaz comes over, looks at her, gives a contented/relieved sigh, and smiles one of the warmest smiles we have ever seen her smile, if that’s not the face of someone in love I don’t know what is, here they are finally safe, Sammy can rest, Yaz doesn’t have to worry about being immediately by Sammy’s side all the time to protect her from danger and she can just enjoy being around her I suspect that in season 4 we will likely see their relationship develop further because of them having some time and space on the boat (and possibly wherever they go next) to process and confront their feelings and, given that Brooklyn canonically asked if Sammy has a crush on Yaz, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that they might even canonically end up in a romantic relationship Anyway, Yaz and Sammy are in love, thank you for coming to my TED Talk

#jwcc #yasammy #longpost

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mybg3notebook · 3 years

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Gale Extensive analysis

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were written up to the game version v4.1.104.3536 (Early access). . As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information. Written in May 2021.

The majority of sources used for this article are in the game itself (this includes my Gale-solo playthroughs as well as a combination of the videos by munmomuu and selphie1999), and the dev’s notes provided by pjenn. Gale as origin is not taken into account since it’s not finished and has little Gale-related content. There will be little datamining content as well since pjenn said the game contained almost no gale-related notes (only in theWeave and in the Revelation scene).

The itemised list will show some instances of approval or disapproval as they are seen in the game. To make the reading of this article easier and shorter, you can skip them since they are basically the proof I use to sustain the introductory concept of each block.

We can infer a lot of Gale by analysing what he approves and disapproves of. Sometimes, we can even lightly infer some information from his neutral reactions, but let’s be honest: this way of analysing a char is pretty poor since it leaves everything to speculation. Neutral reactions can only be analysed by contrasting the same situation in other contexts, and seeing what other options Gale approves or disapproves of. With these considerations in mind, we can proceed to describe this character.

Disclaimer: this is a meta with my personal interpretation of the character, sticking as much as possible to the facts and leaving little to “desires” or “projections” of what I want him to be. If I do so, I will state it explicitly in the text for the sake of analysis honesty. I want to be clear about what is canon (facts shown in bg3 EA), from what’s personal interpretation with little proof.

Also, this list is extensive, gathering as much as I could in my many playthroughs, but I’m sure it’s not absolutely complete. Some details may have escaped me, but honestly, I believe that any new approval will be easily fit in these blocks once the pattern has been seen.

Understanding Gale by enumerating his reactions and approvals

What we can do is combine what we know and make our deductions.

---Gale

[[1]] The most notorious aspect we see about his approval is that Gale supports all actions that prevent, via persuasion, intimidation, or deception, the unnecessary violence and bloodshed. His attitude can be summarized as “the means (as long as they don’t kill gratuitously) hardly matter if the end is worthy”. He will always prefer diplomatic and persuasive approaches, but he can be flexible when his main objective is to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

He approves of using intimidation, deception, or persuasion against Gimblebock, in the ruins of the Jergal Temple.

He approves of intimidation or deception against the tieflings that have Lae’zel in a cage.

Gale approves of diffusing the tension between Zevlor and Aradin, using intimidation or persuasion. He keeps neutral if Tav uses violence to knock out one of the two. Once more, this shows he prefers any verbal approach before heading into physical violence.

He approves of dealing with Nettie without bloodshed after she poisoned Tav. Gale even has an extra comment on the matter praising such an approach since he says he would have not been able to do it himself. This is also the first time we see a glimpse of his support for the philosophy of “giving people their own medicine”. However, it's a comment made in the heat of the moment. He ends up praising a peaceful resolution of the situation.

He approves of saving Lae’Zel’s life when she attacks Tav in the camp. This can be done via deception, persuasion or knowledge [medicine] as long as it spares Lae’Zel’s life when she is feeling the first symptoms of the transformation.

He approves of any means that allow a peaceful entrance to the Blighted Village.

Gale approves of using persuasion/intimidation/deception against the goblins to avoid combat with all of them and to save the deep gnome tied to the windmill.

Gale approves of paying for Oskar’s freedom or using persuasion/intimidation, and then setting him free.

He approves of intimidating Spike (the goblin who is torturing Liam) to cooperate with you.

Gale approves of persuasion/intimidation options to pretend to be a True Soul in front of Dror Ragzlin, avoiding combat with him and all his goblin lackeys.

Gale approves of the persuasive approach with the githyanki patrol, promising to help them to find this weapon they are looking for. It’s clear that any other approach will end up in a fight and therefore, bloodshed.

He also approves if you tell Lae’Zel to deal with her brethren while “playing along”. Again, the goal is to avoid fighting/bloodshed.

He approves of intimidating Karlach, saying that “I heard you are dangerous, so I am”. Since Karlach is aiming at the group, he approves of diffusing the imminent violence.

In similar fashion, Gale approves of intimidating Rugan, once he presents himself as Zhentarim, to give you the chest. This can be interpreted as a way to prevent further violence from a Zhentarim. Since there is no approval when you use persuasion to have the chest, one is more inclined to think this approval is about danger-control than curiosity. Or it’s just a bug.

[[2]] As it was said before, we can assume that diplomatic approaches are the best ones in his opinion. They not only have a positive effect in the short term but also are means that may guarantee useful resources for the future:

Gale approves of ensuring an encounter with Lorroakan in Baldur’s Gate via Rolan, establishing diplomatic relationships with what could potentially be a powerful useful ally.

Gale approves of promising to rescue the Duke Ravengard in the Moonrise, one of the most important figures in Baldur’s Gate.

Gale approves of managing a peaceful entrance to the Myconid colony. He highlights in a comment afterwards how useful it could be to have the Myconid as allies.

[[3]] Gale certainly is a great protector of life. Gale is against killing people just for fun, whether they are innocent or not. He will defend and respect the life of innocents without question, but he even will defend the life of dubious characters.

Gale approves of helping the tieflings to get rid of Lae’Zel because “she is dangerous to innocent people ''. We can see here that like any human, he has his own (reasonable) biases about Githyanki, considering them dangerous. Only after meeting Lae’Zel he recognises a good ally with the possibility of access to a cure to their tadpole problem.

He approves of convincing Rolan to stay in the Grove and defend it. This can be interpreted as gathering resources to reduce the bloodshed and therefore, the loss of life when facing the goblin attack. After all, Gale believes that “a wizard is a mighty weapon to have in your arsenal”

He approves of stepping in front of Arka whose crossbow is aimed at the caged goblin Sazza. Due to the anecdote he shares after, we know explicitly that his approval is due to the prevention of murder.

In his anecdote on the Yawning Portal, we know he prevented murder of three humanoids: a dragonborn, a drow, and a cleric of Cyric. The last two are highly morally dubious due to lore reasons, reinforcing this concept that Gale protects life whether they are innocent or not.

He approves of inviting Wyll to their camp and team. He is a fighter and a good resource to add in order to protect the team’s life.

He also approves of helping Zevlor when he comments about the Blade of Frontier’s plan of killing the goblin leaders.

He approves of helping the tiefling called Guex to improve his technique with the sword. More chances for him not to lose his own life.

Approves of helping Auntie Ethel when she's confronted by Mayrina’s brothers when Tav’s perception check fails. This is because neither Tav nor Gale perceived her as a Hag until the brothers called her such.

Gale approves saving Mayrina from the hag’s clutches. If Tav deals with the Hag, accepting her power and saving Mayrina, Gale will remain neutral (he is displeased with sparing the hag, but it’s nullified with the fact that Tav ended up rescuing Mayrina.) He will disapprove of giving Mayrina to the hag and accepting her powers instead. He is always approving of saving Mayrina’s life and killing the Hag, saving more potential innocents in the future. He explicitly says that hags should be extinct due to their malice.

He approves of avoiding a fight by convincing the man to let the party pass into the Zhentarim hideout.

He approves of saving Rugan’s life in the hideout. This reinforces again the concept that Gale values life including the morally dubious ones’.

Gale approves of saving Benryn’s life, the man screaming during the fire in the inn at Waukeen’s Rest.

Gale approves of accepting to rescue the Duke Ravengard, and probably saving his life.

Gale approves of saving the deep gnome in the windmill without asking compensation, just for the sake of saving his life.

Gale approves of attacking the goblins that are throwing stones to the caged bear. (He does it whether he knows that bear is Halsin or not)

Gale approves when Tav shields their memory and denies the access of the location of the grove to Minthara.

Gale approves of killing Minthara, the greatest danger for the tieflings and all lives in the Grove.

Gale approves of killing the Duergar slavers Gekh Coal and his company.

He approves of killing the dying hyena which is giving birth to a gnoll. This is a way to protect innocent lives in the long term.

He approves of using the tadpole against Flind, commanding her to devour the other gnolls. Gale approves again if Tav orders her to kill herself.

He approves of helping Baelen from escaping the trap of poisonous inflammable flowers he is surrounded in the Underdark.

[[4]] He dislikes greed and likes offering help without asking for a reward, just for the sake of helping.

Gale approves of helping Zevlor with the refugee situation.

Gale approves of incorporating Wyll in the group and of helping to get rid of the problems of the grove.

Gale approves helping Alfira in composing her song.

Gale approves of saving the tiefling kid Mirkon from the harpies.

Gale encourages Tav and approves of meddling into Mayrina's troubles when they see her being mistreated by the Hag.

He disapproves of asking for compensation after saving the deep gnome at the windmill. Gale approves of saving him and telling him “you owe me nothing”.

[[5 ]] He has a consistent approval of treating kids in a compassionate and forgiving way. There is a line he says after Arabella’s scene that sums up his position with kids (and adults too): “She was not innocent, but that doesn’t mean she is guilty.”

Gale disapproves of not interfering in Meli’s situation, the tiefling child who stole Barth’s medallion. Using intimidation against Barth at this moment doesn’t give approval penalties. Not doing anything does.

When Tav’s perception prevents them from being pickpocketed by one of Mattis' associates, the child immediately starts crying. Gale Approves of telling this child “Relax. I won’t get angry. You didn’t manage to steal anything from me”.

He approves of telling Arabella's parents that the druids overreacted. This approval is explicitly explained later by gale: one should be more kind and forgiving with the transgressions of youth. Here there is a bit of self-projection of Gale on the situation.

He approves of saving Arabella with active persuasion/intimidation. He disapproves of not doing anything during the tense situation with Teela.

He approves of choosing the option “Only a monster would threaten/kill a child” when speaking with Kagha the first time.

Gale approves of helping Mirkon. He disapproves of scaring him.

Gale approves of telling “I’m sorry for your loss” to a goblin kid whose parents were killed by the adventurer they are kicking.

[[6]] He is an animal lover in general, so treating animals in a good way will always earn his approval.

We know he has a cat. When he was a child, he used to have a Tressym (winged cat).

He approves of convincing Scratch of joining the camp via speak with animals.

Gale approves of petting Scratch.

Gale approves of leaving the cave of the Owlbear mother and her cub without combat. Or he approves if Tav can speak with animals and convinces her not to kill them.

After killing the owlbear mother, Gale approves of sparing the owlbear cub’s life.

Gale approves of convincing the goblin Krolla to hand over the Owlbear cub. Paying for it will not earn his approval.

Gale approves of feeding the owlbear cub at the camp. However, Gale will state that it's a dangerous pet. Gale approves of feeding the owl afterwards, offering a funny phrase that may be more meaningful for his character: “The hand that feeds is the hand that’s loved, now he wont leave your side”. I personally found it funny since he is the char that Tav is feeding with artefacts.

Gale approves of petting the owlbear.

Gale approves of attempting to heal the Owlbear cub in camp.

He disapproves of shooing the Owlbear cub.

Gale approves of freeing the spiders in the goblin camp. This can be interpreted as well as a tactical advantage for the battle.

Gale disapproves of suggesting to the goblins to use sharp stones at the caged bear so they can inflict more damage. He also disapproves again if Tav joins them in throwing stones.

He approves of helping the bear to attack the goblins. (This happens whether Gale knows that the bear is Halsin or not)

Gale approves of leaving flowers at the grave of the dog Myrna in the Underdark.

[[7]] Therefore it is only natural to see that he disaproves of animal cruelty

He disapproves of kicking and killing the squirrel Timber when entering the Grove.

He disapproves of prodding to death the bird that Nettie was healing

He disapproves of killing the owlbear cub once the mother was killed.

Gale disapproves of suggesting the goblin kids to use sharp stones to hurt the caged bear.

He disapproves of Tav throwing stones at the bear.

Gale disapproves of attacking the owlbear cub once it went to the camp.

[[8]] Since life is valuable for him in general, he will always disapprove of gratuitous killing, murder, and bloodshed. In short, he disapproves of unnecessary death.

Gale disapproves of asking the fishermen to hand over their values. This situation ends up in bloodshed.

He disapproves of joining Lae'Zel against the Tieflings that had her caged.

Gale disapproves of not helping Zevlor, knowing the tieflings will be massacred by the goblins.

He disapproves of telling Rolan to leave the grove before the arrival of the goblins. Without this wizard the tieflings have more chances of failing at the resistance.

He disapproves of helping the goblin Sazza to escape. This will guarantee that Minthara knows the location of the Grove.

He disapproves of telling Zevlor that Tav won’t help the Blade of Frontiers against the imminent massacre of the tieflings.

He disapproves of not doing anything to help Arabella

He disapproves of Tav ignoring his need for artefacts because “there is more at stake than his own meager life alone”. He disapproves of this decision that puts many innocents in danger, but he keeps appealing to Tav’s good side, encouraging them to do the “right thing”.

He also disapproves of killing Crusher when he is begging for his life after the “pungent poetic justice” of kissing Tav’s feet.

Gale disapproves of killing Rugan in the Zhentarim hideout when Zarys orders to.

Gale disapproves of killing Ellyka, the tiefling who was watching the githyanki patrol from a distance.

He disapproves of opening the gate for the goblin raiders.

Gale disapproves of joining the goblins in massacring the tieflings. During the party he will attempt to leave the group. Only a high persuasion or insight roll will keep him in the group. It requires a DC 15.

Gale disapproves of helping Glut to destroy Spaw, the peaceful leader of the current Myconid colony. Doing this will end up in the massacre of the Myconid.

He disapproves of abandoning Baelan surrounded by poisonous inflammable flowers in the Underdark.

[[9]] He doesn’t like gratuitous humiliation or torture of any kind, whether psychological or physical. Once more, it’s shown that he disapproves gestures of cruelty and unprovoked violence.

Gale disapproves of telling Elegis (tiefling on the gates of the grove) that she is pathetic for fearing the goblins.

He disapproves of pocketing the ring when Mattis (tiefling kid) asks you to choose heads or tails.

He disapproves of using intimidation against Pardima, threatening her to break her neck (she is the tiefling who is paralysed inside the small building).

He disapproves of smashing Alfira’s lute

He disapproves of telling Kagha that Arabella’s death was “quite a show”. This is related to Astarion’s concept of “fun” that Gale will bring into conversation subtly in an option during Mayrina’s quest.

Gale disapproves of psychologically torturing Lorin (wood elf trapped in Ethel’s house).

When Tav kills Connor, Gale will lament about the tragedy of the couple. He is sad for the story of lovers being over due to the whim of a hag.

Gale disapproves if after reviving Connor, Tav decides to keep him as a combat pet.

In the post before the Goblin camp, Gale disapproves of Tav smearing dung on their face. Gale has a sense of confidence and pride that he prefers to see in Tav as well. He is neutral if Tav throws dung against the goblin guards. On one side he probably approves of Tav’s pride transpired in that rebel action, but on the other hand, he doesn’t approve of provoking the goblins, since in the beginning of the scene he warned Tav that they come by the dozen, implying that they likely will be outnumbered.

He disapproves of obeying Crusher and kissing his foot, or licking it as a prank.

Gale disproves of volunteering to torture Liam inside the defiled temple of Selune.

Gale disapproves of siding with the Goblins in general. Once done, in the party, he disapproves of telling him to stop whining after the massacre when he is sharing his regret of having participated in it. He answers "You really are heartless".

(Datamining) In the Duergar encampment, Gale disapproves of killing the slave gnomes under the command of the True Soul Nere.

[[10]] Despite showing some signs that he may support some bias commonly spread in Faerun, he keeps open minded and quite self-critical about his own slips on different races.

During the meeting he uses the Rashemi group as a synonym for lack of intelligence. I personally see this as a foreshadowing detail of future frictions with Minsc.

He approves killing Lae’Zel in the cage if Tav supports the fact that she is dangerous to innocent people. This situation may suggest that Gale considers most Githyanki as dangerous (acceptable conception lore wise)

When talking with Aaron (the halfling merchant of the grove), Gale disapproves of saying that the tieflings can deal with their problems because they have devil powers.

Despite goblinoid races being despised by most people in Faerun, Gale recognises their powers, culture, magic, and ability to bond and love.

He is a human of Waterdeep, his human-centric vision slips in his line (with a non-human Tav): “Now more than ever, it's important to recall what makes us human. Well- you know what I mean.” He immediately noticed it and acknowledged it.

[[11]]He is against slavery:

Gale disapproves if Tav pays Oskar’s freedom to get him as a slave. He approves of leaving him free by any means: paying for him, intimidation, or persuasion.

Gale disapproves of helping Gekh Coal (Duergar) to find the slave gnome who stole the boots in the Underdark.

Gale disapproves of handing over Astarion to Gandrel. This action can be interpreted as a way to not support slavery (because the story of Cazador), even though a better interpretation is related to Gale’s abandonment issues (see bellow).

(Datamining) In the Duergar encampment, Gale approves of helping Beldron in using the explosives to get free of the Duergar slavers.

[[12]] There are several elements related to acceptance, forgiveness, compassion, kindness and acknowledging of mistakes deeply entangled in his character. Gale wants these values for himself as well as for others. Examples of this can be seen in the following approvals:

[[12a]] Acceptance: of his persona, which means respecting his privacy, boundaries, and needs

[Privacy/Boundaries] He disapproves of every use of the tadpole on him. He has been more than clear from the first moment about his privacy and secrets, promising that he will eventually share, given the circumstances (he clearly leaves open the possibility of trusting in Tav and never denies having secrets). This behaviour of him is also understood later not as a whim but as part of his abandonment issues: he explicitly says several times that “some truths are more difficult to share than others”. We need to remember that his secret is directly entangled with Mystra, her abandonment, and the mistake of the orb. See the post about "Gale Hypotheses- Part 1", section: "Abandonment Issues" for further interpretation.

[Privacy/Boundaries] During the scene of the stew, he disapproves of using the tadpole again. He attempts to leave the group for the breach of trust. A persuasive or insightful comment will keep him in the group, excusing the natural mistrust in Tav (Gale will always respond better to reasoning and negotiations than anything else). Once more, Gale forgives Tav’s intrusion.

[Privacy/Boundaries] During the death protocol, he approves of telling him that he can keep his secrets until he is ready to share them, despite the many questions that the whole event arose.

[Privacy/Boundaries] During the scene of Loss, he approves of letting the topic of the loss rest. However, at this point, even if Tav keeps pushing, Gale will approve and will share a bit more about his folly with Mystra.

[Needs] He approves of Tav with each artefact he receives. This can be understood as an action of caring for Gale and his life as well as for preventing the death of innocents.

[Acceptance] Accepting to share the experience of the Weave with him is key in his relationships with Tav. Magic equals Weave, and Magic is his life, so he is sharing in that moment a strongly meaningful part of him with Tav. Acceptance of the event is a direct acceptance of Gale as a person for a future deep friendship or romance.

[Acceptance] If Tav is a Wizard or a Cleric of Mystra, Gale approves the praise options: "I quite agree. There is no greater deity than Mystra" and “Praise be that Mystryl was reborn as Mystra.” Despite the abandonment, Gale still remains a great devotee of her, and accepting her is an indirect way to accept a big part of his own life.

[Acceptance] He approves even more if this acceptance has romantic connotations (this means, options of kiss/holding hands in the Weave or “more than friends” during Loss).

[Acceptance] When Tav resurrects Gale, he doesn’t approve the resurrection per se, but the “welcome back” comment, implying that he values the action a bit more when Tav is glad for his own persona to be back.

[Forgiveness] He will approve acceptance of his own persona and forgiveness of his secrecy after the party.

[[12b]] Forgiveness for others: He approves of forgiving kids [5] or all those adults who show honest regret by their past mistakes. This can be understood as a projection.

When Tav first meets Gale, he states he is a reserved person. He disapproves of the use of the tadpole even though he understands the drive of curiosity. He forgives Tav who acknowledged their mistake.

Gale approves of telling Arabella’s parents that the Druids overreacted, that Arabella “is just a child”. Once Arabella is saved, Gale will explicitly emphasise later about forgiving the transgressions of youth.

After finding evidence that Kagha is working with Shadow Druids, Gale approves of exposing her while making her see her own mistakes. A path to redemption is granted with this action, and this resounds deeply in Gale.

Gale himself wishes Mystra’s forgiveness for the mistake done in his youth. Despite wishing for it, he is quite resigned to never receiving it.

If Tav uses the parasite powers a third time despite having agreed with the rest of the group not to, Gale will approve a sincere apology, as long as Tav acknowledges the mistake. He will answer that he knows about weaknesses and will recommend to stay stronger from that moment on. He forgives and passes no judgement, understanding Tav’s mistakes due to his own experience (to be fair: all companions with the exception of Astarion forgive this slip into the powers of the tadpole).

Taking Silvanus' idol may potentially end up in killing the druids. If this is the case, Gale will be affected by this tragedy since it was a lot of unnecessary death he doesn't like [1,3,8], and shares the burden that those deaths caused him since he suggested taking the idol as last resort, expecting to save more lives due to his bomb-condition. We see that he wants to survive and protect others from the orb, but not “at whatever cost”. He reflects with a heavy heart “at what cost” a greater evil was prevented. He speaks about “what’s wrong is wrong”, implying with all this scene that forgiveness, in this case, may be not possible.

He approves of being forgiven/supported in his friendship/romance despite the mistake of holding the information of the orb and Mystra. At this point it is strange that Tav has not realised all of this alone, unless the player had a bug that prevented them from seeing Gale’s scenes. (Gale’s scenes suffer the lowest priority in the triggering list).

When Gale explicitly apologies in the morning after, he approves of telling him “It's fine. In the end I'm glad you told me.” The other options have no approval penalties. Once more it’s seen that a compassionate, forgiving attitude increases his approval. This can be seen as a direct result of his traumatic and constant present fear for abandonment (Check the post of "Gale Hypotheses- Part 1", section: "Abandonment Issues").

[[12c]] Compassion and kindness: He approves of most actions based on compassion and kindness (on him or others) and disapproves quick judgement on others when the whole story related to them is not completely known.

Gale disapproves of telling Arabella's parents that the situation is their fault. This can be interpreted as a quick judgement when they still did not listen to the other side.

After saving Arabella, Gale has a special comment related to the “transgressions of the youth”, about mistakes, and about innocence and guilt.

In Waukeen’s rest, Gale is neutral about keeping the dowry as a payment, but he approves of giving it to Benryn (the man rescued from the fire who found his wife dead). This could be considered a gesture of compassion.

He approves of most compassionate options when he is speaking of Mystra during the scene of Loss. It doesn’t matter if Tav doesn’t understand the whole situation; he always appreciates receiving support.

Instead, he disapproves if Tav considers arrogance as the cause for his pain and loss (later we will know his folly was not because of arrogance but because of young love/devotion). He doesn’t approve judgement in this instance (since the whole story has not been said yet) but he will not disapprove Tav’s judgements later during the scene of the Revelation, where he receives the most aggressive words without approval penalties.

Curiously, during the goblin party, he explicitly says that these two aspects of his persona (compassion and kindness) are affected by the shadow within (the orb) and the shadow without (the revealed Evil-Tav).

[[13]] Gale is a man of the City who indulges in the fine pleasures that urban life and some degree of privilege can offer. This is quite reasonable in terms of lore, since he is from Waterdeep, where humans hold the political and social power, plus his wizard profession. Wizards tend to come (even though it’s not exclusive) from high income families or from nobility since wizardry studies are quite expensive:

He comments about the hardness of the wilderness.

He missed the civilisation: soft beds, home cooked meals, minstrels, and scented baths.

Gale approves of giving Oskar (the slave painter in the Zhentarim hideout) 200 gold to fight the “discomforts of the road”. He is the only companion who approves this action.

Gale disapproves of participating in the pain ritual with Abdirak. I personally prefer to interpret it in relation to his dislike for evil entities, but it can be also interpreted as a statement: pain “is not his cup of tea”.

In the same way, during the Weave, he disapproves of the image of being kicked in the gut.I know this should be common sense: if someone kicks you, you disapprove. The detail I see here is that, judging by his reaction, it seems to hurt him more than the image of the severed head. Maybe he has an extra sensibility to pain as the result of living with the orb stuck in his chest. The orb seems to be an ever present fear/pain (one can assume pain due to the extreme facial gesticulation in Gale when the process of absorption happens)

[[14]] He may disapprove of worshipping dubious or evil gods. This seems coherent since Mystra is a neutral good entity.

Gale disapproves of participating in the pain ritual with Abdirak. He explicitly says that pain is not “his cup of tea”, but it’s possible to interpret this scene as a disapproval to worshiping evil gods. Loviatar is one whose followers offer pain to celebrate her. In all options of this dialogue Abdirak explicitly says this is a ritual to offer pain to Loviatar, so it can be understood as a form of worshipping her in the moment.

Gale disapproves if Tav accepts to be a Chosen of Booal.

He approves of Tav claiming that they don’t need of Booal’s powers, “I'll just kill you and claim it for myself”

When Shadowheart confesses being a worshipper of Shar, Gale will share a comment that displays his discomfort.

Gale approves of purging the evil in the dying hyena when a good-aligned Cleric blesses them.

[[15]] Gale is a scholar, and therefore, quite an open-minded char, who advocates for unconventional ways to solve problems:

He approves of considering the Creche solution for their tadpole’s problem, incorporating a githyanki to their group.

Gale approves of considering Gut the Priestess as another option.

Despite his years studying The Arts, he is not judgemental or dismissive to Warlock/Cleric/Paladin Tavs who acquired the ability to cast magic thanks to the gift granted by superior entities.

Gale approves of saying “Then fix it, or die at my hand” to Raphael, quite an aggressive option for his usual style.

Gale suggests outsmarting Raphael; his logic is reasonable: these tadpoles are powerful and unusual, and Raphael probably wants them instead of their souls. If he is right, a good deal can be established. He knows that cambion’s deals tend to be unfair but he wants to exploit the fallible (human) side of Raphael for their benefit.

He is neutral when accepting the solution offered by the Hag. He probably doesn’t disapprove completely because, like a good scholar, he is waiting for the empirical result. He knows beforehand that Hags are twisted and evil entities that hardly could give them a good deal. In this case, he is not even proposing to outsmart her.

Gale approves of giving the wand of control of Connor to Mayrina so she can find a solution in Baldur’s Gate. Despite this is an unconventional way to fix this situation, I personally feel there is a bug around, since his following comment is more consistent with a disapproval.

[[16]] He doesn’t like rushed decisions without thinking about all the possibilities. He encourages logical and reasonable discussions, free of biases or misconceptions as a scholar does. This aspect can be also understood as a reflection of his own past mistakes. Taking the orb after Mystra’s abandonment was a rushed decision of his youth which made him pay a big price.

During Raphael’s scene, he disapproves of the option “I’ll do anything to get rid of the tadpole”. That fast answer would only cause troubles.

He approves during Raphael’s scene the option that allows reflection: “I need to think this over.”

He encourages Tav to not discard the option of looking for the priestess Gut so quickly. He knows how magic is called among the goblinoid races and how much they value healing for being a culture of war.

Although he disapproves of the intrusion into his mind with the tadpole during the scene of the stew, reasonable arguments using persuasion/insight can be enough to prevent him from leaving the party. He reinforces the idea that he “may have spoken in haste” and he has reconsidered to stay despite Tav’s transgressions.

[[17]] He usually disapproves of using unknown magic in an irresponsible or careless way. This can be interpreted as a way to prevent mistakes similar to the one he did with the orb.

Gale disapproves of Tav reading the book of necromancy or giving it to Astarion. The reader will have access to the “forbidden knowledge” tag. Gale thinks himself more adequate for it since he is wiser than before, his experience with the orb book has taught him a great deal. He approves of giving the book to him.

Gale disapproves of accepting the brand of the Absolute. In the moment Tav accepts it, they learn that it has a unique magical effect that only True Souls can notice. Gale suspects this magic may cause mind control on goblins. "Charged with magic? Perhaps that explains the ease with which these goblins submit to True souls."

He approves of being cautious with the powers of the tadpole once they start seeing that its usage has physical and psychological (dreams) effects.

He disapproves of using the tadpoles after seeing a dangerous pattern with the dreams.

[[18]] He approves of poetic justice, and he seems to follow the philosophy of “give others their own medicine” when he is attacked or harassed.

Gale approves of dealing with the situation with Nettie without bloodshed. However, Gale states that having been him, he would have handled it in a different way, recognising that he may have forced Nettie to pay with the same coin. “A taste of her own medicine is what she deserves.”

Gale encourages and approves of reinforcing a “pungent poetic justice”, making Crusher kiss Tav’s foot.

Gale approves of helping the Myconid in killing the Duergars. “Wicked killers deserve wicked ends”

[[19]] He supports or at least doesn’t easily judge acts of self-preservation, but not at any cost. This follows his line “one respects life by fighting for it, and one respects death by fearing it”

Gale disapproves of keeping Astarion in the party after the bite scene. This happens if you use two options: “you can leave option” or “he won't hurt us”. Keeping Astarion is a danger in his eyes.

Gale approves of convincing/deceiving Lae’Zel not to kill the party during the night of apparent transformation into mind flayers. If those rolls fail and Tav kills Lae’Zel, Gale will remain neutral in the forced action that they had to take due to self-preservation. He describes the situation as “brutal” and shows pity and sadness for the tragedy. Then he asks Tav how they are doing with the experience: he is sympathising with Tav, not judging them.

Gale approves of dealing with Nettie without bloodshed but he states that he would have fought in order to preserve his own life.

When Tav speaks to Kagha after Arabella’s death, Gale keeps neutral to the comment “You protected your own without hesitation - my compliments.” However, Gale would only approve expressions related to calling out Kagha. Gale can understand the self-preservation sentiments, but his line is drawn when life is taken gratuitously.

Gale approves of pretending to be a True Soul in front of Dror Ragzlin and avoiding a fight when they are outnumbered.

He approves of being cautious with the powers of the tadpole once they start showing that they can endanger their own lives.

He suggests stealing the idol of Silvanus as a way to keep his condition in check (which is more than just self-preservation due to the massive destruction it may cause). If Tav killed the druids to obtain it, Gale shows regret. He embodies the sense of survival, but not at any cost. He suffers with the consequences, but he also endures them since they are the lesser evil. He prefers to cause the least harm possible if there is no choice in avoiding to hurt a side.

This can be better seen during the goblin party. The only arguments that Tav can use to convince Gale to stay in the team are those related to self-preservation: “We make each other survive” and “You don't stand a chance alone”, both statements that Gale can accept only after a high DC 15, but always regretting his need and the excess of blood.

[[20]] Gale’s secrecy about Mystra and the orb have a clear source: he has serious abandonment issues that can be easily seen in his most apparent “strange” approvals/disapprovals:

Gale disapproves of handing over Astarion to Gangrel, even though he dislikes and mistrusts keeping Astarion as part of the group during the bite scene. This is quite surprising since Astarion is seen by Gale as a danger.

Gale approves twice defending Astarion against Gangrel. If Astarion is not in the group, the first approval happens when Tav recognises that Astarion is part of their companions/friends (therefore, they care about them). The second approval is when Tav reinforces their loyalty to Astarion insisting that they won’t give his location. Although Gale will explicitly question if this decision was right, he secretly approved it (meta-knowledge that only the player sees). We can interpret this as Gale seeing in Tav a person who will never abandon someone they care for, even if that person endangers them.

During the scene of Revelation, Gale approves of not being abandoned/pushed away by Tav despite his “secrecy”.

This post was written in May 2021. → For more Gale: Analysis Series Index

#bg3 meta #bg3 early access #gale of waterdeep #bg3 gale #gale #bg3

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jonsa101 · 3 years

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Yes, There’s Only 14 Episodes in Season 3 But Sharpwin is On Track and Progressing How They’re Supposed To.

There has been so much talk about this season’s writing and the lack of Sharpwin scenes that I thought I would just address everything in this post.

First, the writing this season is NOT BAD! In my honest opinion I actually think this season has some of the best writing in the series. Compared to season two, the writing is head and shoulders above what we got last year. More than ever before we are diving into these characters stories, seeing friendships form, getting a better look into their home life and seeing secondary characters shine! This is a good thing! These were the things that were so desperately needed in season 2 but we didn’t see this play out. I’ve said this before in my infamous season 2 rant and I’ll say it again, a show can’t solely depend on a ship! It has to have great storytelling and good character development for all of it’s main characters. This is what New Amsterdam failed to do in season two and they’re now making it up for it in season 3. The only area I would say the storyline suffered was the Cassian, Helen and Max “love triangle.” There was definitely more intent with that plot before the pandemic. Cassian was not only supposed to be a catalyst for Jealous Max and Sharpwin but he was also supposed to come in and challenge the way Max did things. Cassian’s whole thing was self care first=great patient care which was the complete opposite of Max and the two of them were supposed to clash. Obviously this completely changed due to the pandemic. You can’t have a storyline about a doctor prioritizing himself first for “better patient care”in the midst of thousands of doctors globally throwing themselves on the frontlines and even loosing their lives to COVID-19. It would have been a terrible look to have that storyline so they clearly scrapped it! What we saw was probably them trying to salvage whatever was left from the original plot while they still had Daniel Dae Kim in the limited amount of episodes for season 3.

Apart from that, I think the writers are doing a fantastic job in terms of character development this season. Arguably I would say that Iggy probably has the best storyline so far and that’s incredible for his character. Tyler Labine is acting his ass off and Iggy’s scenes with Lauren, Vijay and Martin were top tier!!! We are finally getting a Max and Reynolds bromance that was teased in season one but literally know where to be found in season two! It’s great seeing them bond on screen and I hope we get more moments with these two. We’re also seeing Reynold’s “life plan” blow up in his face and we finally have some closure with Bloom. They kept us in limbo for so long! We didn’t know if him and Bloom were truly over but now we finally know. Also, it seems like he and Evie are officially done as well and he might have a new love interest on the horizon. For Lauren, she’s clearly seems to be having a coming out story which is something I didn’t see coming at all. I’m really curious how they’re going to play this out for her and can’t wait to see it unfold. Last but not least, for Max and Helen they are both going through massive character development phases which leads me to my second point.

I love a good Max and Helen scene as much as the next person. To me they’re the ultimate ship and I want to see them thrive and flourish but just because we don’t see Max and Helen interact doesn’t mean that the show isn’t properly developing or investing in their relationship!!!!!!!!The relationship between Max and Helen is so nuanced that their relationship doesn’t hang in the balance because they don’t have more witty, flirtatious, or emotional dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, I adore those moments. Those scenes between them make us the passionate sharwpin shippers we are. At the same time though, we have to truly take a look at why the state of their relationship is where its at now and why from a narrative perspective their current interactions make sense. In order to do this, we have to take a look at where Max and Helen left off last year.

At the end of season 2, Max made a move on Helen and almost kissed her in her office. After this moment occurred he never addressed it and at the time he was still dating Alice. There’s no doubt in my mind that this was the catalyst for why Helen started dating Cassian in the first place. She had practically laid her feelings out there and told Max he was the reason she gave up half of her department. After this revelation and the massive, intimate moment he initiated in her office, he didn’t even have the decency to address it. He swept it under the rug and wanted to keep the same relationship that he had with her like nothing ever happened. Even though Helen was aware about Alice, we now know from season 3 that Helen felt a type away that Max never “officially” told Helen that he was dating her. This is IMPORTANT!!! Max and Helen did not end on a high note in season 2. In fact, the very last scenes we see of season 2 is Helen blowing off Max to go on a date with Cassian and Max breaking off things with Alice. I know this wasn’t intentional due to the season being cut short but it definitely contributes to where they are now.

Fast forward a year later, and not only do we still have a massive almost kissed elephant in the room between Max and Helen but also the trauma of being on the frontlines of a pandemic and going through the biggest social justice movement the world has seen. This is something I’ve said many times over but I’m not sure the fandom recognizes how much these events have permanently altered these characters and changed the dynamics of this show. COVID-19 changed everything. The Black Live Matter Movement for the first time grabbed the attention of the world and changed everything too! Max and Helen are in the process of trying to heal and rebuild their lives the best they can as individuals after such a tumultuous year. At the same time, they are acutely aware of the feelings they have for each other and the UST between them and are carrying the weight of that as well. Naturally guys, the combination of all this is going to change most dynamics in a relationship. Things are awkward and distant because Max and Helen are awkward and distant!! They have a lot of shit that they’re going through as individuals and subconsciously as a “couple.” They are clearly not in a healthy place to be as vulnerable as they once were to each other. And how can they be when their feelings have literally been eating at them for over year?! It’s hard to ignore that and try to force yourself to go back to the way things were. Especially when their feelings have “technically” been out in the open since the end of season 2. They both know what it is! They were steps away from unleashing years of built up sexual tension between them and they went on with their lives like it never even happened. Max walking in on her and Cassian kissing in HER OFFICE and subsequently having that convo with Helen was not for shits and giggles. It triggered the BEAST of his feelings that he had fought so hard to suppress. There is no doubt in my mind that when he saw them in her office kissing, he was having some serious dejavu to their almost kissing affair last year. He‘s in love with her and she’s in love with him but this what happens when you continuously try and run away from those feelings and let it fester instead of trying to deal with it head on. The dynamic were seeing between them now is a result of their unresolved issues and it absolutely plays into Sharpwin’s story. It doesn’t take away from it. It makes sense for where they are NOW!

If we look at season three holistically, you’ll realize that a momentum for something significant happening for Sharpwin has been set through the acting and writing. I got to give it to Ryan Eggold. He has that fire and desire, Mr. Darcy type level acting down to a tee so far. It is so satisfying seeing Max so overcome with his feelings that you can tangibly see it in his body language and hear it in his voice. We have seen Max taken aback by Helen before but we have NEVER seen him like this. I keep on saying it but this is different guys. Something has shifted and it seems like Max is on the verge of exploding. His feeling are burning hot right underneath the surface and it’s a beautiful thing to behold. Last night’s episode was ripe with this type of content and Ryan was in his acting bag! It wasn’t an overtly “Sharpwin” episode but the writing and the acting is so clever and methodical, it will have you thinking otherwise. At the beginning of season 3 Max told Helen that he wants to build something better for Luna and something better for her. Was last night not a beautiful reflection of that? One question asking Max if he has ever loved a black woman put him in the shoes of his patient’s husband and had Max advocating for his wife like he would advocate for Helen if it was her! If that’s not fucking romantic I don’t know what it is and if the alarm bells aren’t going off that there is something deeper at play here with a huge payoff around the corner I don’t know what to tell you! Another moment that sticks out to me like a sore thumb is when Helen was telling Cassian that her brother died. I wrote about this in a previous meta of mind but Helen at her most vulnerable telling Cassian that she feels like she’s running out of time is SO SIGNIFICANT guys!!! It’s not only tell us that she fears that she’s missing out on the windows of opportunities for the wants and needs in her life but it literally sets the pacing of how quickly Sharpwin is going to progress. It is the beautiful freudian slip that tells us exactly where things are headed for these two. To me this is equivalent to Max telling Helen “I love my doctor” and “what if I want you?” in season 1. This episode had no interaction between Max and Helen but it was a MASSIVE Sharpwin indicator through and through! These are just a couple of examples but even their respective journeys in parenting is so Sharpwin driven. So in all I’m not mad in the direction the show has taken to showcase their relationship this season because Sharpwin is deeply interwoven in the storyline this year even if it’s not overtly obvious through emotional dialogue/ interactions.

Also, one thing you have to realize is this, season three is wrapping up a lot of loose ends from season 2 and when it comes to Max and Helen these two points will be/ have to be addressed in the next six episodes.

The Almost Kiss

Whether or Not They Want To Be Together

The showrunners know without a shadow of doubt that the resolution for these two points is owed! If Sharpwin is talking about their almost kiss, there is no way that they aren’t talking about what they mean to each other and what their future looks like together. Both solutions literally go hand in hand and I promise you they are not delaying the resolution for that till season 4. It’s not happening fam. We will see this play out within the next six episodes. So in hindsight, more Sharpwin interaction are on the horizon.

When I was making predictions about this season I wasn’t aware that this season would only be 14 episodes. I’m sad that season 3 is so short but that still doesn’t change my mind for where I think the story is going. Call me crazy but I’m sticking to my guns. There is something about how Ryan is portraying Max that is signaling something huge. Also I just trust the context clues that i believe the show is giving. I trust it! Anyway y’all! If you have any sharpwin question just DM here or message me on Twitter! my username is @oyindaodewale.

Love you guys! ❤️

#sharpwin #new amsterdam #max goodwin #helen sharpe #max x helen #sharpwin meta #new amsterdam meta

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skipps-writes-for-gojo-satoru · 3 years

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Someone made an incredible animation of the scene in hidden inventory where Gojo gets screamed at by teen girls fawning over him, and it's beautiful ✨

https://youtu.be/5l9_O51-YYs

Also, it highlights my previous point that when Gojo's confronted by women flirting with him, he doesn't really do... Anything. He's just chill about it. And the little °^° face he makes and the little confused "hm?" from the manga panel in the beginning could indicate that Gojo might not be hit on by girls as often as we think- Jujutsu sorcerers are busy and have even their time off interrupted on the regular. Other than being mildly amused, we don't see Gojo actively bask or pursue attention from women (other than Utahime ofc, which could be because she's as straight-laced as Nanami).

The little content smile he gives at the end basically says it all: Gojo enjoys the attention, but most likely isn't interested in pursuing anything more than that, including sexual relations (with more reasons from my previous posts).

I could see Gojo being the type to allow himself to appreciate just a bit of affection from random women he encounters on missions and then casually walking off with a lazy wave of his hand- just like he did with Miwa.

The man's on a mission (literally) with the goal to change the world. Virgin Gojo is very possible seeing how unaffected he is by women throwing themselves at him- or at least, he allows himself a moment to enjoy the attention but is quick to dismiss the thought from his mind to focus on his duty.

Honestly, non virgin Gojo is still possible, but unless we see Gojo actually show interest or actively flirt with someone (which seems unlikely), we may never know. To me, analyzing Gojo with his interactions with other characters (not his antics) makes me think it's more likely Gojo is a virgin than not, simply bc the argument for Gojo being a non virgin is his looks and immaturity (or his act of immaturity, we know Gojo thinks in a much more complex way than he lets on) which I'd argue is not an accurate description of his character, because that's only a part of it, and is in fact only what Gojo shows on the surface. And there's plenty of reasons why his lifestyle would make such getaways difficult. Also, Gojo's lack of enthusiasm for it. Gojo allows girls to fawn over him, but he hardly stokes the fire more than just taking off his glasses when they asked him to.

If Gojo was more like Osamu Dazai from Bungou Stray Dogs who flirts with every women he sees, I would have an easier time believing he would not be a virgin, but his lifestyle, behavior, and even his Six Eyes and his goal makes me think he wouldn't choose to constantly go on small getaways like that. Personally, I'd say Gojo spends more of his time plotting and maximizing his efforts on recreating Jujutsu Society.

Really, when Gege said he couldn't see Gojo being faithful to a woman could be because he's already committed to his job. Not because he's out womanizing, but even because the type of woman he'd commit to is so rare. And even if he did find a woman he'd commit to, being the ENTP he is means he's incapable of immediately recognizing and acting on his emotions- not because he doesn't have them, but because they're not really his forté. He'd rather rationalize his behavior than attempt to understand his own feelings. It'll take time and patience, but Gojo committing is still a possibility.

Honestly, I'd like to hear why people would think Gojo's a cheater/womanizer to begin with? Besides him teasing Utahime, Gojo's been pretty respectful to Shoko and Mei Mei. He even complimented and recognized Mei Mei's strength as a sorcerer. He didn't flirt once with the hoard of girls fawning over him. In fact, he was quick to focus on his mission despite the attention. I don't think Gojo's ever even teased Shoko about anything (other than commenting on her terrible way of explaining things, which is more of a fact than teasing). Though, correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, I haven't mentioned Riko much in previous posts and idrk why lol. But while Gojo is dominated by logical thinking, he's emotionally inept enough to notice Riko's mood. He may seem cold in how he comforted her by saying he'd leave her behind, but it's more of his ENTP personality that has him expressing his emotions in a more objective manner- even if it hurts, it's the truth, and that's fine isn't it? (Typical ENTP way of thinking).

Also slight tangent I read that one long meta about Gojo's interaction with Riko someone linked, and I'm completely appalled that they would think Gojo is only "pretending" to have emotions, "mimicking" them even! That he's incapable of truly feeling when in fact it's inherently characteristic of any ENTP to express themselves in a way that, to others, would be considered "cold" and unempathetic. It just goes to show just how misunderstood ENTPs are. They only make up 3% of the world so are often confused for socios/narcs/psychos which is understandable-

But I wanna make one thing clear: all sociopaths could be considered ENTPs. But not all ENTPs are sociopaths. (Switch Socio with psycho/narc/etc and it still works). Why?

Purpose.

Arrogance, boastfulness, unrefined emotional sensitivity, recklessness, impulsiveness- all of those fall below the importance of Purpose. Regardless of how Gojo "acts," it's been expressed time and time again- Gojo acts for the sake of the next generation. Sociopaths/Antisocial Personality Disorder/Psychopaths have one most common defining starting point: "it all starts with cruelty to animals and lack of response to their own actions, or actions of other people."

Let's make it more simple: regardless of whatever end of the spectrum sociopathy can be- high functioning, low functioning- antisocial personality disorder, in it's most simple terms, along with psychopathy and narcissism, condensed into one common trait is very clear: Their actions, while easily blendible into society, are for the sole purpose of pleasuring themselves.

Why don't people notice those with these disorders? Because their *behavior* is so similar to not just the typical ENTP, but also the ISTP AND ESTP. They can easily be mistaken for common members of society, but again: their sole purpose is the pursuit of pleasure themselves, while acting with complete disregard for the consequences of not just their own actions but others'. Staying in one job for extended periods of time is especially rare for a sociopath in particular, and this is one very clear difference between Gojo and a sociopath.

Gojo is willing to spend the rest of his life as a Jujutsu Sorcerer for the sake of others. This sentence alone defies any inclination that he could be a sociopath regardless of any other symptoms commonly associated with sociopathy, such as emotional insensitivity, hostility, risk taking behavior, lack of restraint, and impulsivity- there's a reason such people blend in with society, and that's because such symptoms are common with *any* person, regardless of personality type. Other than with the higher ups, Gojo hardly shows the anger, irritability, or general discontent that a sociopath is most commonly is associated with as their established mood - and even if he did, would being easily irritatable while in the position of the Strongest, the one who carries the burden of establishing a new future of Jujutsu Society on his shoulders alone be so unrealistic? That is why Purpose is so important.

If Gojo truly was a Sociopath, he would have dipped long before Jujutsu Kaisen had even started.

And I apologize for yet another tangent! Someone said Gojo sees his students as weapons or tools to be used in furthering his agenda. While that is not necessarily untrue, the implication is hardly close to reality. Like someone else commented, Gojo goes far and beyond for his students. While he is undoubtedly lacking in his ability to show affection in the most traditional of ways, it's clear that Gojo cares for his students-and others- deeply, whether that be when he went to see Yuta on his business trip to ensure Yuji would be safely taken care of in his absence, when he goes out of his way to personally supervise his students, when he willingly spends a whole day with Nanami just to ask him to mentor Yuji for him (in the Light Novel) regardless of Nanami's disdain, when he turned his Infinity off to allow Yaga to punish him (Gege made it clear in the manga that Gojo had done so to be a good role model for his students and that he recognizes his behavior deserves punishment), and when Gojo commented that he didn't want to think any of his students would be the traitor. Gojo does not express himself as most people do- he's only one of the most misunderstood personality types (on record, along with a few other personalites if you've researched them) and to say people have misinterpreted his character is much more plausible when even in real life, people who behave like Gojo are statistically reported to be misapprehended more often than more populated personality types. When inspected closely, there are so many ways Gojo himself expresses his care for other people, only hidden thinly behind the surface of his lofty attitude and uncaring demeanor. It only takes a few looks at his behavior, not his mouth, to recognize how much he goes out of his way for his students, doing he things that don't necessarily help further his agenda simply because he wants to, not because he has to. Changing the world isn't even something the average person would strive to do, yet Gojo makes it his life goal to accomplish. How could a heartless, emotion mimicking person possibly endure the strife necessary to accomplish such a task? It's appalling.

Gojo is more charitable than most people on the earth, simply because of the perseverance and diligence he takes to withstand the stress and hardships of Jujutsu Society for others. Remember that he chose to become the Strongest, it didn't happen overnight, and in becoming the Strongest, he carries the heaviest burden.

That's without mentioning that even though Gojo is the Strongest, and while to most he seems to proudly state so, it's clear that despite Gojo's antics, he recognizes his weaknesses as a sorcerer and is able to rely on others to make up for them. He had asked Nanami to mentor Yuji because he acknowledged his own flaws as a teacher and that Nanami would have a better capacity than him in that area (in Light Novel). He travelled to see Yuta to ask him to care for Yuji in case something happened to him- and Gojo knows that it's possible that he could be defeated somehow, someway. He's not so deluded to think he's untouchable, even despite his playfulnesses. He is always thinking ahead, calculating his next move while understanding his own shortcomings, acting prudently to ensure a better future.

He is a much deeper and complex character if one only takes the time to look past his antics and analyze his behavior- Something many people in real life seem to miss, and that is the true reason why Gojo struggles to commit.

Sorry for the long tangent and repetitiveness in the beginning lol! Back to the main issue!

Tl;dr there's more evidence of Gojo being a virgin who's more focused on work than pleasure. There's plenty of handsome men who don't seek out sex for reprieve but seek mental stimulation instead for relief. It's totally normal. Gojo could even spend his free time playing video games. He did admit to spending long hours beating 99 years of Momotarou Dentetsu to Geto. He's a gamer, and we know how gamers are commonly known for being virgins lol. Gojo could even be asexual for all we know. He could even be demisexual- someone who doesn't pursue sexual pleasure unless he's made an emotional connection with then. He doesn't necessarily have to even be straight or bi. Therefore, Gojo is very likely to be 28 year old virgin, and there's nothing wrong or strange about that.

Sources: ENTP articles, statistics on mbti rarity, other mbti articles, some quick Google searches, articles on sociopathy, psychopathy, narcissism, and antisocial disorders, etc, the manga, light novels, other metas in threads I remember reading, the anime, graphic organizers

Thanks for reading! 🙏

- 🤔

AHHHH CAN I JUST SAY THE ANIMATION IS DAMN GOOD 🔥🔥🔥 this scene in the manga is absolutely iconic prepare yourselves for season 2 😤 I literally had to stop the video and stare at him...I think one of the reasons Gojo behaved that way is becuz during childhood he probably didn't go out and be around people hence his confused reaction with the screaming teens. I mean everyone enjoys being complimented and getting attention from time to time and gojo is not an exception to this. Yes I definitely agree that when Gege said that he probably meant he's too busy for a relationship. The way it was translated made alot of people confused hence the player/cheater gojo was born. But then also the remember the comment he made when Gojo won the popularity poll? "Pick Nanami instead" ahhh hilarious

MY GAWD 🤔 ANON CAN I JUST SAY THAT YOU'RE AMAZING?! You explained in a way that easy to understand and you made statements backing it up with evidence. I learned from your ask than I ever did in university 😂 wow its truly fascinating though I never knew much personality types especially ENTPs I DON'T BELIEVE FOR ONE SEC GOJO IS A SOCIOPATH OR PSYCHOPATH fight me if you do. Exactly exactly just as anon said "He is a much deeper and complex character if one only takes the time to look past his antics and analyze his behavior." I COULDN'T AGREE MORE 😤 thank you so much for once again educating the community I'm a fan of you 🤔 anon ❤

#gojo discussions #virgin or not?#gojou satoru #jujutsu kaisen #jujutsu kaisen gojo #jjk gojo #gojo satoru #skipps chat

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potteresque-ire · 3 years

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can I ask you why people act like yibo and xiao zhan for sure are together and its just a matter of time for "not nice" people to find out?

Happy 2021 Anon! I think... this may be a question to ask them! I can’t speak for anyone except myself. This is fandom, after all, and fannish behaviour ultimately comes from the heart in equal parts as the mind, if not more -- fans can debate all day long about certain aspects of a canon -- the plot and writing for a book fandom, if the stars fit the characters for a TV fandom etc etc... but it isn’t the content of those debates and metas that decide who the fans are. Academics and professional critics can pen the same things. Fans are fans not because they’re especially bored / argumentative, but because they’re willing to dedicate their time and effort to investigate and get emotional over things others don’t care about, specific things that something in them * believes * to be especially unique, especially precious to be worth the time and effort.

BJYX is the first RP fandom I watch, and so far, I don’t see it as so different ~ turtles can go around in circles, get into heated arguments into which candy is real and which is “too hard”, come up with lists of evidence on why it’s SZD... but ultimately, IMO, at least, what makes a turtle isn’t the done-for-free-FBI work or the candy production. Instead, it’s the something inside the turtle shell -- the same complex wiring in the neurons and heartstrings that no scientists can explain and also draw the turtle into other fandoms -- that deems this relationship as unique, worth the time and effort to investigate / support.

I don’t remember where I read this or in what language, but I remember something similar to this being said about BJYX ~ each turtle will tell you a somewhat different version of gg and dd’s story, but somehow, they’ve all reached the same conclusion (SZD). The different versions, I’d imagine, stems as much from personality as from logic ~ which type of candies speak to them. Some turtles therefore spend most of their time fitting RL events to plot elements commonly found in classic love stories, patching the holes with fake rumours (rings in the pocket, for example); some put a magnifying glass over every pixel of their images; some listen to background vocals and The Demonic Chant (banyun-biss banyun-biss banyun-biss…) over and over again; some become experts of fashion to dissect their wardrobe. Personally, I'm very, very partial to gg’s designs and drawings -- not the hidden words or messages, but the general style and tone. Do I think they’re particularly strong evidence, something that proves SZD? Not at all. It’s just that I’m a visual person and these candies are sweet to me, and so I choose to incorporate them in my own version of BJYX canon ~ something that today, I’d still hesitate to call reality; I’d much prefer to call it a love story collectively written, in real-time, by its 2 leads + their millions of fans, that mixes fiction with some truth unknown, that takes place in fundamentally cruel, volatile world when such collaboration should have been impossible.

Still, I count myself a turtle. Even if I don’t go out there trying to convince anyone SZD; even if I won’t get upset if I turn out to be totally wrong. You ask, Anon, why people act like gg and dd are for sure together; here’s my reason, and there’s probably many more out there. I do it because I personally do believe SZD, with the understanding that the conclusion comes as much from the heart as from logic, that it may not be the truth and the details from which I drew my conclusion may not match reality. I do it because I respect the fandoms I’m in ~ it’d be disrespectful to come in here and throw doubts here and there. I do it because I love the fact that all the candies exist, even if I can’t taste the majority of them (I’m a very, very picky candy eater). I love the fact that, if each turtle has written their own ... gospel to this truth, this reality unknown -- after all, we don’t know gg and dd, and everything we’ve seen are nanosized facets of their lives -- there are millions of these gospels out there right now. Millions of tiny parcels of fannish, turtle-ish love that comes in the form of a story, told in a way that is the most romantic to the turtle brain it comes from.

That’s a lot of love added to the world. I like fandom because I like love.

To wrap this up, Anon, once the SZD belief sets in, attitudes are filtered through it no matter how objective its owner strives to be. I try, but I know I’ll be a failure before I even start -- I’m only human, and it’s okay. There will be a part of me that’ll assume others will see what I see -- the “others”, in this case, including the people who’re “not nice”.

#BJYX #Anonymous #yizhan #pie answers

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famouskittychild · 3 years

Text

Cheeky Mandos - ...and we're off

(Sorry I had a terrible writer’s block in the past 6-ish weeks - I went from reading fanfiction and being inspired by other’s visions to “I’ll never be able to write anything like these and I’m useless” in a single day :( I’m getting back into the groove finally, so I’m hoping to post more soon.)

There will be 18+ content (in the coming chapters soon) so if you are a minor, please don't read further.

Also the characters will be quite open and relaxed about things like gender, attraction, sexual activities, relationships etc, so if you prefer your Din (and their partner) possessive and/or monogamous , this won’t be a good read for you!

***

This pairing is Din Djarin x gn reader / tall reader. I’m short (and cis and woman). There’s so many short (and female) reader stuff out there, I wanted to write for people on the other end of the “why is your height not normal” / "definitely female" spectrum. If I make mistakes or you have advice, or ideas you'd like to see, please tell me!

Word count: 4267

Summary: You’re an armourer and some shiny guy just showed up.

First full piece/chapter/course! In which people seem to catch things. Thoughts? Viruses? Dropped facts? Who knows!?? Also contains a dilettante’s attempt at space electronics and some barely-canon-reminiscent Mando world-building. Still no spiciness sorry, marinating is a long process :P

Rating: T for some mentions of heavier topics.

CW: Mentions of mandalorian history, playing somewhat loose with canon lore (as in, my SW knowledge is patchy. sorry.)

Author’s note: I tried to find more info but it seems like the mandalorian alphabet doesn’t have names for the individual letters so I used aurebesh (also I liked the little Dorn(e) meta in there). And sorry for the bad puns. They’ll keep coming.

Prologue

One - ...and we're off

***

You aren’t worried about taking a stranger on board, you’ve done that plenty of times before. You hope he’s willing to put in the effort himself, too, just as he promised at the assembly.

The stranger leaves behind his ship, saying a friend will come to pick it up together with whoever might want to join the cause. You spot him from the cockpit as he walks over with a repulsor pallet in tow. He stops for a moment when your droids surge past him, busy at their pre-flight tasks, before moving on towards the ramp.

All his baggage is a satchel at his hip and a small bag on his shoulder, and two large crates of weaponry. You put him up in the spare cabin, the one that had been Sal’ee’s, your former apprentice, before she went on to be a journeyman. He stands in the middle of the room, staring at the two cots on opposite sides of the room, the lockers, the fresher in the corner.

“All mine? Where will you sleep?”

You don’t understand the surprise in his voice.

“Over there” you show him, pointing at the cabin opposite from his. It’s much more lived in, some of the blankets and trinkets and pillows visible through it’s open door. “There’s a third cabin that I mostly use for storage but has more fold-up bunks in case I need to transport more people. That’s rare though.”

“Ohh.” He nods, then turns to look around his room again. “Okay. I thought all of these rooms were cargo space.”

You smile, and quickly think through your to-do list. You’ll have to rearrange your schedule somewhat but it’s not that big of a bother.

“Come on, I’ll show you around the ship.” Before he gets lost in its cavernous interiors, you might add - but you don’t. If his reaction to a separate cabin and his current ship - an old ARC170 - is any indication, he must be used to very cramped quarters.

***

Your trusty Brick, a beat-up YV 929, is armed to the teeth and ugly, just as you like it. The ship is a scavenged one, gutted from most of its original factory issue armaments, engines, and even wiring. It was perfect for your former master when she found it at a scrap heap: she wanted to rebuild it herself, deliberately piecemeal; panels sourced form here, engines from there, concealments added. She modified the inner workings of the engines so that the power lines could be redirected to a concealed forge.

That forge is your pride and the main reason you haven’t settled at a permanent place yourself. When your master retired from travelling, the ship passed to you, and you continued her mission of offering your knowledge and expertise to those of your people who otherwise had no access to an armourer.

…

The next standard month is spent with adjusting, both for yourself after getting used travelling alone again since Sal’ee left, and for the stranger who found himself a passenger on someone else’s ship. Apparently he used to live a very similar life to yours, with the exception that he was a hunter not a craftsman.

You travel together, share meals, research the places you are directed to. He joins in the effort that is maintaining the ship. Still - he is very taciturn at the beginning, keeping his words to the bare minimum. The first few days it feels as if you are still on your own aside of your droids. By the middle of the month, he progresses from short answers, through sharing information, to willingly starting to tell stories; but you know that chatting will never be his defining feature.

His armour seems to fill the spaces of the Brick’s corridors. You feel as if it’s not him who has the presence, but that set of glinting, perfectly made handwork of an armourer you already admire. Some of the pieces were sourced elsewhere, you can tell by the different shapes and designs; they seem haphazard and mismatched compared to the rest. Most of the set is the work of a single person. On those, there’s not a single uneven line, a broken curve, an edge at the wrong place. The angle of the panes of the metal, the ridges, the simplicity and elegance of them all - you have to hold yourself back from touching them, to admire them. You would give a lot to hold those pieces in your hand, to study them, to analyse them with your eyes and hands and with your tools.

You’re a master, yes. But so much knowledge was lost. So many masters gone, with their knowledge and their workshops. Apprentices became heads of Forges in the absence of the more skilled. The survivors still to this day have to piece together half-remembered lessons and forgotten details, experiment with techniques that were known before but the methods got lost as decades of civil war and occupation and murder kept eroding your heritage.

Sometimes a set of armour comes along that is just made in a way you never had an opportunity to learn. Often the person who forged them is long gone. Not the stranger’s armourer though. As far you can tell, she’s alive. Or at least was, when he last saw her. Not too long ago; though your usual method for guessing forging dates is mostly useless as it is based on the condition of the suit’s paintwork. Which he doesn’t have, so you can only guess from the small amount of scratches. You try to ask once, but whilst he’s forthcoming with general stories, he doesn’t go into details.

It’s a common theme with him. He talks about people and planets and events, and leaves out a lot - and you don’t even notice it first. Only when you try to glean information about his armour do you realize how well he fuzzes over those facts and nuances. It’s only up to the peculiarities of Basic and its use of gendered pronouns that you know his Armourer is a woman, or at least he considers them so. He doesn’t even tells you his own name, and when you ask your Elder in one of your communications, she tells you he didn’t gave it to them either. You keep introducing him as a friend, and that is the end of it for a while.

***

The visits to this first few coverts with him are… interesting. You can see him fidgeting from the corner of your eye. He always follows half a step behind and off to a side, as if not wanting to be in your way. He keeps quiet and doesn’t mix much, and around small children and droids, he is positively withdrawn. He only comes alive when he talks about his mission.

You had learned early on during your apprenticeship that keeping the helmet on is a safe bet when meeting with unfamiliar mandalorians. That led to later getting in contact with his type of believers too, despite their notorious secrecy even from the rest of the People. When you tell the stranger about that, he immediately showers you with questions, but you can’t give an answer to most of them. You never met with anyone from his particular covert, or heard of it. No name, no description seems familiar. It’s painful to watch his shoulders slump after daring to hope.

During the course of the month spent travelling, he gradually comes to be more social. He starts to stand and walk beside you. He doesn’t withdraw to the background anymore; he can actually be quite chatty if approached the right way. Droids still make him stop, though he warms up to kids in his own way. He’s good with them, at least in your opinion, though you know some would still call him aloof and distant. He isn’t a cuddler, nor does he crouch down to ask cutesy questions. He juts sits nearby them, and in that way of children having a good sense about adults, they know he’s trustworthy. They go up to him to chatter, to hand him a toy to hold, to ask him to fix a latch on their boots; than they go back to play.

He teaches you too, inadvertently at first during everyday conversations and later by his own volition, about his Way. About his Creed. It keeps throwing you off how much it differs from most that you had met before. Not even meeting briefly with people who followed the same Way as him could prepare you for the details that he does share. The degree of strictness, the loyalty, the barest bones Old Tradition beliefs and their willingness to follow them is very rare amongst the People as far as you can tell. Their devotion earns your respect.

At other times, your jaw hangs open and you can’t believe you are talking to an adult roughly around the same age as yourself, who by his own admission had spent three decades living as a follower of the Creed - not knowing about things children are thought through plays and songtime. His ignorance is so staggering, your admiration towards his unknown Armourer wavers. How could she keep so many things hidden from them? Why not talk about your own history? Your greats? Your artefacts?

About the many other who would call them vod’e, siblings?

You are an armourer, a craftsman, a person who makes a living by making things with your hand. You’re not a leader, or a scholar, or someone who decides what to tell your people. You do have a status within the community, but that is a status of service. From what the stranger says, their Armourer was a leader in every aspect: elder and lorekeeper and moral guide and more. All in one. It is something you can see developing from the old songs and histories amongst groups who take tradition more literally.

You are good at observing people, even at copying their habits to make them feel more comfortable with you, but less good at determining their underlying motives. The reason you think of him as “the stranger” even after travelling with him is because it’s so hard to figure out what drives him. There’s a melancholy to him that overrides the more typical mandalorian fight-readiness or aggression. You see how he gazes off to the distance sometimes, turning his head to the side and freezing. How he keeps to himself when he can. But you can’t tell why. Grief? Regrets? Determination to change? Planning something greater and being preoccupied with that?

He doesn’t pick fights to test you. He spars with you when you invite him to, he helps when you ask, and often even without it. He’s polite and considerate; he keeps conversation to practicalities and interesting stories, and doesn’t bother you with anecdotes or insistent questions about trivialities or your private life. He even does the dishes.

He’s deadly boring in his reliableness.

You are used to being on your toes around people all the time. When you meet a new group, it’s all unknown people. With ones you had already visited, the problem is having to remember them. They remember you of course, the ‘wandering armourer’; and surely you remember them too.

What is worse, when people stay the same but you don’t remember them, or when they change and you just can’t place them?

He becomes a good excuse after you’ve been to several coverts together. It’s interesting to notice how your dynamics change even further once you two get into a comfortable routine. You start to retreat to your forge and tools, and let him take all the attention. And he doesn’t just talk about his mission anymore, or lets little ones play around him whilst he’s quiet. He converses with people about news, about their children, about weaponry. You have more time to focus on your work.

Sometimes, people ask you what do you think of his mission. You tell them that you will follow what your clan decides, and that’s mostly true. It is something people don’t often debate, at least.

He quickly becomes a part of your everyday life. You are content with your usually solitary travels. You know that your family, your clan and your friends wait for you at home. They message you and you can find the time that suits you to message back. You don’t miss the constant hubbub of the covert most of the time. But now that you have someone that is not a droid, someone who is your equal in every aspect, on board again, it’s not even lonely anymore.

***

“So what’s up with you and droids?” you ask one day, after you got back from a covert and are safely in hyperspace to the next destination. You tinker with your astromech’s navigational systems. Poor 2-T keeps bumping into walls and crates. Again.

The stranger looks at you and your droid, than over at Mouse who for a change isn’t zooming around at foot level.

“Bad memories.”

“Gunk sat on you?” You tease. You hope it’s just something silly and not him having some sort of snobbish organics-are-better philosophy. He is quiet, and you focus on your work. He’ll talk if he wants to, that much you know already about him.

Inside the body of your astromech, a rivet from stars knows where is stuck between two circuit boards and blocks the access to a short-circuited piece of wire.

“Kriff. Toots, this will take a while, sweetie. Can’t access that kriffing panel.” He chirps back something and you read the translation on the small display. “No, it’s not that. My hand can’t fit in that small space. Let me find those pliers… should be in that other drawer somewhere.”

You search in the chest of tools, and despite your usually good organization, you can’t find them amongst the droids’ tools where their place is.

“Let me help.” The stranger’s voice beside you makes you jump. He can be awfully quiet. “Sorry. I think I might’ve put them back into the wrong drawer. I used them the other day when I fine-tuned that scope.”

He points at another drawer, where you keep your fine electronics stuff. No wonder he mixed them up. He stands beside Tootee a bit awkwardly until you find the tool.

“Here! No problem by the way. “ You turn back to him and to the droid, than have an idea. “Do you mind a bit more help? You can say no if you don’t want to work with the droid, I’ll understand.”

He doesn’t object yet, so you go back to 2-T and show the stranger the area you’re working on. You see him lean closer in your peripheral vision.

“That’s where I need to get that burned piece of wire out and install a new one, but first, I need to get that rivet out of the way.” You point at the root of the problem, than explain your plan, pointing out each part in turn. ”If you could hold those using this, than I could get here, remove this, with that tool, than have to get those bundles out of the way too, so than that wire there could come out. Easy.”

You look up at him, and his helmet is way closer than you expected. You can almost see your reflection in that black visor as it stares back at you for a second, and you almost apologize again, when the stranger starts to speak.

“Just have to hold the wires to the casing, or pull them like…” he moves his hand in the air, showing what he means.

“Hold them to that panel, there, with the pliers, so I have room to access the rest.”

He thinks for a moment, than he starts to tug one of his gloves off.

“You don’t need to take that off, just hold the pliers” you tell him, but he shakes his head.

“No, I can fit my hand in there, I’m pretty sure. If not we can try it with the tool.”

You realize that this is the first time you see his skin. Than it occurs to you that he might very well misunderstand this whole situation. You just asked him to hang his hand inches from yours in an enclosed space; inside a droid nonetheless, just after you basically told him you noticed he has a problem with them. It would be so easy to get caught up in there, to touch his hand, and hush it up as coincidence. Especially now that he took his glove off as well. He might even think that it was a careful plan of yours: have an area to work with were your slightly larger hands don’t fit but his might.

Your fingertips already tingle from knowing you can’t make mistakes. Which means you’ll probably do. He reaches between the panels and gets to the part where you got stuck. He wiggles his fingers a bit and scrapes around.

“Ha, found some wires. Are these the ones you need out of the way?”

You peer down into the quagmire of electronics, trying to find the best angle to see everything.

“Yes, those are the ones. Just hold them like that.” You try to focus on what you are doing, but after those earlier thoughts, your hands are jittery. You somehow manage to remove the obstructing rivet, than find the burned out part and replace it without accident, the stranger patiently holding things out of your way. You direct him here and there, occasionally stumbling as it’s a lot of instructions, or at least a lot of “could you please” and “thank you”. It gets particularly awkward when you stumble over the lack of name spectacularly.

“Could you pull those the other way, so they aren't that taut, please? Thank you, you. I mean thank you.”

“Din. Din Djarin.” Your head snaps up while the rest of your body freezes. “I should have told you my name sooner, but I’m so used to not telling it… and it just became more awkward to bring it up as time passed. I apologize.”

You close your mouth that of course was hanging open in surprise, than shake your head.

“I thought at first that I missed it when you said it so I was ashamed that I didn’t remember.” That did happen before, and it was one of your greatest worries about meeting new people. “I actually asked my elder. Sent her a comm. So when she told me you went nameless, I didn’t wanted to demand it.”

He doesn't answer right away. His voice is softer when he speaks a bit later.

“Thank you. For being considerate.”

You smile and try to wave it off. Which results in your hand slipping and pawing at his, still motionless and stuck in the inside of the astromech.

“Oh shucks, I’m sorry… didn’t meant to.” You withdraw your hand quickly, and start to look for your tools to cover your mistake.

He doesn’t seem bothered, luckily. You calm down, reminding yourself not to behave like you drank one too many glasses of your cousin Ree’s home-made tihaar, and finish the repair.

“You can let those go now, I’ll finish from here. Thanks for your help.”

“You’re welcome, any time.”

He sits back on a nearby crate and watches you work for a while, ignoring Mouse zooming around the room. You’re surprised a bit: you didn't expected him to stick around. And than he starts to ask about 2-T. How long you had him, is he temperamental, can you install a vocoder on astromechs, and why not. His tone is somewhat cautious, his voice stiff, like someone asking about a dangerous predator. You remember how you asked him about his distance with droids, but don’t want to push that question. He already told you his name today.

…

By the time you finish with the rest of the repairs, clean Tootee up and tidy around your workplace, interrupted by having to leave hyperspace and land at a spaceport, it’s the middle of the night in local time. You planned to have a nap and search out the local covert just before dawn.

You go to the galley to have a bite before turning in, and the stranger - Din, you remember, although his last name is less clear - is cleaning up some dishes. There’s another bowl in the middle of the small table, covered by a plate.

“That’s for you, if you’d like to have it. Used up the last of that spice mix we got” he tells you as you enter. You sit down and stretch your legs out one side. As you take the plate off from the steaming bowl, you think about how nice it is to find warm food on the table and not having to cook your own all the time.

“Thank you.” You pull the bowl close and take the spoon that he put beside it. You swirl the soup - it looks very good: clear broth with lots of veggies and other fillers in it - and gather your thoughts. “So ummm… I want to ask something before it gets awkward again.“

He finishes piling the bowls and cups and sits down on the seat opposite. You blurt the question out before you might change your mind.

“What was your name again? Din, that was clear, but the rest… sorry but it sounded something like “jarring”?”

He chuckles, and it’s a clear sound even with a vocoder, no snort or sigh to distort it.

“It’s Djarin. Dorn-jenth-aurek-resh-isk-nern. Djarin.” You nod, a bit embarrassed, and he continues. “Don’t worry, you aren't the first to ask. Probably not the last either.”

“Thanks for being patient. I’m not the best with names, to be honest.”

He tilts his head.

“Is that why you are always so focused when someone introduces themselves? I can ask them to repeat their names for me too if you want to, than both of us can try to remember them.”

You blink at him.

“That’d be…” Unnecessary, and don’t bother, and it’s not your job, you think - but stop yourself. That would actually help. No shame in accepting it. ”That would be nice. Thanks.” You are good at a few things, like making things with your own two hands. Not gaping when something surprises you, or remembering faces or names, any names, not just people? Nah.

You tuck into your soup, and the two of you sit in companionable silence. You wander if Djarin sits there because he wants to, or if he’s waiting for more questions from you. You asked a lot from him during the last few hours, and he was really kind with all his help and telling you his name and not being bothered when you misremembered it.

You are halfway done with your meal when he stirs. He leans forward with his lower arms on the table, and takes a deep breath. You wonder what his question will be - you commit to answer whatever it might be. He deserves that after today.

“So you asked earlier about me and… droids, right?”

Your hand with the spoon stops in the air. You weren’t expecting this question, at all.

“Yes…” You want to say he didn’t have to answer. But you already told him that. You’re sure he remembers that too - since he brought the topic up again. “Yes, I did.”

He shuffles on his seat a bit, and looks out to the side like he sometimes does. You lower your spoon and eat, letting him gather his thoughts.

“When I was a kid… I don’t know how old you were then, but during the war. The Clone wars.” You nod, understanding what he’s getting at, and he continues. “We were… the place I lived came under attack. Some separatist battle droids. Mandalorians saved me.”

You swallow your soup. That was the shortest possible description of someone having their entire life and probably everyone they knew ripped away from them and finding a new way of life for the decades to come.

“I’m sorry” you say, because really, what else is there to say. He nods, and gazes off again. Than he shrugs his shoulders, as if he wants to shake the weight of the past from them.

He gets up, and walks around the table on his way out. He stops beside you for a moment and hesitates, and you almost turn towards him to ask what he needs when you feel him squeeze your shoulder. Than he straightens and steps away.

It’s warm where he squeezed it, and you remember how long ago it was that someone touched you.

You need to talk to your friends asap, and hug at least some of them. He turns back from the door.

“Get some sleep before dawn, all right? Have to be sharp to remember all those new names.” You don’t see him wink but you’d bet he does behind his visor. You scrunch your nose at him and pout before smiling, and he dips out of the galley.

Your hand is still hovering in the air, holding the spoon, while you listen to his footsteps getting more distant as he walks down the corridor to his cabin.

It’s just your luck that you don’t need your wits the next place. It’s only two people with the same, simple name and you met both of them before.

#din djarin x reader #din djarin x tall reader #din djarin x gn!reader #post season 2 #mandalorian oc #armourer oc #cheeky mandos #my writing

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panharmonium · 4 years

Text

okay.

i realize this might be a kind of a weird thing for me to devote time to when i’m one episode from the end but honestly? i just have to. i have to. i have a longer piece of meta in this vein that i’ll deal with some other time when i’m less focused on the end of season 5, but given the content of the last couple episodes i just - cannot restrain myself. the stunning level of deliberate, unnecessary cruelty i witnessed in that one moment yesterday (guess i was WRONG omg i STILL can’t believe i heard that with my own two ears...i probably have the lowest expectations of arthur pendragon out of anybody in this fandom but even i was shocked) - it tipped me right over the edge. it threw me for an entire loop.

so, what i have to do right now is take a second to acknowledge the one character who a) predicted this bullshit a long time ago, and b) could have been relied upon to react to it appropriately, that is to say by punching arthur pendragon in the mouth.

fig. A: my Son, ‘I Would Sell Arthur Pendragon to Satan for One Corn Chip’

i love him.

i know we only saw him once. i don’t care. he’s the only non-villain across five entire seasons of this show who ever told arthur pendragon to get fucked, and that makes him an absolute hero.

this kid snuck up on me and became my most beloved minor character. when i first met him, i liked him a normal amount, but i wasn’t as deeply invested in him as i am now. it wasn’t until i got a little further along in the show and started to see how truly painful merlin’s situation becomes without a friend who knows him that i started thinking about him again, and realized how much i actually appreciated him.

so. will.

will occupies a...fairly unique position in merlin’s circle. all of merlin’s other friends eventually become knights, or become queen, and they all hop aboard the arthur pendragon train as they get deeper entwined in camelot’s renaissance. even gwaine, who is a little iffy about arthur in the very beginning, becomes as loyal a knight as camelot has ever seen, and he’s just as invested in camelot’s flourishing as anyone. and i don’t say this to throw shade at him, or at lancelot, or anybody; those two in particular have absolutely always been true friends to merlin, regardless of the vows they took to camelot. but there is just something to be said for like - merlin does not have a single person in his life right now who cares about him without also being beholden to arthur. gwen and gaius and all of the knights are sworn to serve and protect the king. they are all fully aboard the arthur pendragon train, and on board with merlin’s mission to aid arthur and keep him safe. gwen, gwaine, gaius, lancelot - even merlin’s own mother is on that train, when she tells merlin he has to go back to camelot at the end of 1.10, saying “you belong at arthur’s side. i’ve seen how much he needs you.”

these people would not argue with merlin over the merits of sacrificing things for arthur, because they, too, would do anything for their king. they wouldn’t necessarily challenge merlin on statements like “his life is worth a hundred of mine,” because they understand what merlin means. they’re on that same page.

and that’s nice and all, but given recent events (and forthcoming events, i suspect) i suppose i just am feeling. a little tired of that.

i’m tired of the arthur pendragon train. i want to get off. i want MERLIN to get off. and the only other person in the world who ever believed that merlin deserved to get off the arthur pendragon train was will.

all the most recent episodes i’m watching are highlighting for me once again how little merlin settles for in his life. he can’t be known. he can’t be seen. he can’t be accepted. he can’t be listened to. he can’t be believed. he can’t be respected. he can’t be safe. he can’t be loved. he can’t say ‘i am sorry that i can’t go with you to this place’ (for the first time in HOW many years?) without receiving a deliberately nasty, cutting slap across the face.

and we try to rationalize this away; we try to look at the good parts (and yes, there are good parts, of course there are good parts; of course arthur and merlin care about each other) but the ultimate truth is that arthur isn’t merlin’s real friend, not yet. he thinks he is. but he isn’t. a real friend isn’t someone who might kill you if they knew who you were. a real friend isn’t someone who makes you feel like you have to pretend to be someone you’re not.

you cannot be loved if you aren’t safe.

the only person who ever acknowledges this dynamic is will. will sees the parts of arthur that merlin tries not to look at, and will loves merlin enough to say ‘this situation you are in is messed up.’ he’s the only one, across five seasons of this show, who ever comes right out and says that merlin is fooling himself when it comes to this ‘friendship.’ merlin might have other people who care about him, later, but all of them are as wrapped up in arthur’s well-being as merlin is. they don’t tell merlin he deserves better. they don’t tell merlin ‘this is shitty. this is a shitty situation you’re settling for. you deserve more than this.’

five seasons, and will is the only person who ever says this. merlin’s own mother won’t tell him this.

i’ve been thinking about will kind of a lot as i watch these episodes.

i think...i think will would lose his mind if he could see merlin at the end of this show. at ANY point in this show, practically. he would be so devastatingly angry. if he ever heard “his life is worth a hundred of mine” come out of merlin’s mouth - i mean. he’d kill somebody. he'd thump merlin upside the head and then go kill somebody.

will was only ever in this for merlin. he didn’t save arthur’s life because he’d started to like the guy; he did it because that’s just who he is. he saw someone about to get shot and his first instinct was to get in the way. he’s not riding the arthur pendragon train, and he’s certainly not riding the camelot train, but he still makes sure merlin can go safely back to the citadel, because for some unfathomable reason, merlin seems to feel that it’s important.

because - and this is so important here - will doesn’t even know anything about merlin’s ‘destiny.’ they didn’t have time to talk about dragons or destinies or any of that. all will knows is that it’s important to merlin, for whatever reason, and that’s enough to make it important to will. even though he doesn’t understand it. even though he doesn’t agree with it. even though he personally thinks arthur’s a loser. he does what he does so that merlin can have what he wants, so that merlin can be safe and happy in the city of his choice.

SAFE and HAPPY. and merlin isn’t either of those things. merlin has never been less safe than he is now. and merlin hasn’t been happy for a very long time.

will would be rolling over in his grave if he could see merlin now. he would have fought against the sort of...slow self-immolation we see merlin surrendering himself to here every step of the way. will told a prince to fuck off in front of the entire population of ealdor; he wouldn’t have any qualms about telling ‘destiny’ to get stuffed, either. and i find myself missing that single-minded devotion, that uncompromising affirmation of merlin’s intrinsic worth, as opposed to merlin’s importance as a prophesied figure out of myth, as the skies darken over merlin’s head and i see him getting ready to (i think) do something that would send will into an absolute rage.

none of merlin’s friends or family have ever wanted him to suffer, but will was the only one who saw where this was going, a long, long time ago. he knew from the beginning that it wasn’t right. and like...people can complain about him refusing to jump on board the arthur+merlin ship all they want, but the reason he doesn’t get on that boat is because he’s always been captain and sole passenger of the HMS Merlin, and he is the only one who has ever understood that these two boats, with the way the world works right now, just can’t sail together. so much would have to change first.

so like...i miss this kid. i really do. and i think merlin misses him, too, but not in a way that he can afford to let himself think about. how can a person in merlin’s position afford to remember someone who always thought that merlin’s happiness and safety were more important than anything, when merlin has, by necessity, spent all these years forcing himself to finally accept that his own happiness and safety will always have to be his last priority? how can he handle being reminded of a time when someone unconditionally believed that merlin deserved to live in this world and be happy, not because of what merlin could do or what great purpose he would serve, but simply because he is. just because he exists. because he’s enough as he is. he matters just as he is. he deserves to be safe and happy just because he is, not because of what he can do for his majesty the prince.

i don’t think someone in merlin’s position can afford to think like that, especially now. i think it’s like - when you’re overwhelmed or stressed or upset and you’re holding it together but then somebody does one simple nice thing for you or gives you a hug and that’s when you lose it and start bawling - it feels like that. i don’t think merlin could handle being gentled in that way. i think it would be similar to when gwaine tells him “not arthur” - that inability to conceive of somebody who only cares about him, who puts him first. i think if merlin allowed himself to remember that there was in fact a time in his life when he was someone’s first priority, if he remembered what that felt like - he would crack right down the middle.

i think if someone were to really remind him of what he deserves from this life, to remind him of what he used to hope he would one day have, he would never be able to do what he thinks he needs to do.

anyway.

the point of all this is just that as i enter the very end of this show and see merlin still - still - being deliberately gutted by someone who is supposed to love him, someone for whom merlin has been totally willing to give up his life a hundred times over, despite never being recognized and never being accepted and never being free - it is making me appreciate even more keenly the very few people in merlin’s life who chose not to treat him that way. the very, very few people who knew him and loved him just the way he was. and in particular it makes me appreciate will, who never had eyes for anybody but merlin, and who, uniquely among merlin’s friends, could not care less about arthur pendragon if you paid him.

after the last episode, i’m just really feeling his energy.

#the once and future slowburn #no kings no masters #meta #anyway i love this boy #more and more every day #esp. now that i've become suspicious that he and lancelot might end up being the only ones whose honest friendship merlin ever gets to enjoy #i used to think (back when i first started this show and assumed it would someday have a happy ending)#that people like will were the 'first' people who gave merlin the gift of honest friendship #and that eventually things would change and everyone would find out and merlin would be able to live openly #now i am starting to worry that they may not be 'first'#i am starting to worry that they might in fact be 'only'#the only ones #in twenty-something years #not that i'm saying no one will ever know #but i'm not sure merlin will be able to benefit from it if you know what i mean #it would be nice to be wrong #because this would be criminal #but whether i'm wrong or not #the one thing you can be sure of is that i will never stop singing these people's praises #they've earned it #they've earned it in a way that arthur pendragon hasn't #they've given merlin something arthur pendragon never could #and to be 100% honest they've treated merlin better than arthur pendragon ever did #their absence is felt - severely - in how merlin's life starts disintegrating once lancelot dies and all of them are gone #merlin has been alone for a long long time #i hate to think he's going to die or be otherwise taken out of the game before that changes #but i suppose i'll just have to see #either way i'm gonna be channeling will's energy of 'i am here for merlin and the rest of you can go jump in a lake'#(ACTUALLY UHHHH poor choice of words omg; they really might lol)#GUESS WE'LL SEE ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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im-the-punk-who · 3 years

Note

Could you post some more malex thoughts? What about that song? Or thoughts on them being endgame? Or season 3 malex thoughts?

Baby’s first RNM meta request 😭

ABSOLUTELY I can.

So I am gonna start with my S3 thoughts and endgame thoughts because everything else will tie into that.

From what I’ve seen, Roswell had 5 seasons originally planned, which is still what it feels like it needs to me. Which is cool! It also means we’re probably(hopefully, actually) not gonna get canon malex in s3.

The show has set them up as the ‘will-they-won’t they’ couple - most of their tension together focuses on *whether or not they get together* instead of if they’ll stay together. To me at least, it’s pretty clear the show’s assumption is that if they end up actually getting together in a healthy way(which they both seem to want in their relationships now), they will stay together.

If the show actually does it’s job right and takes the time to let both of them heal, grow, and experience other things that likely won’t happen until at least mid s4. It would make a nice dramatic midpoint for the season, they could play out a bit of that relief of finally being together in the late s4, and then whether or not they renew s5 they’ve told the story they wanted to. But if they do get a fifth season they can play with some hurt/comfort with Michael and Alex actually building/cementing their relationship.

As we’re seeing with Liz and Max, tension has to come from somewhere and where RNM(as most shows do) fails is thinking it needs to come from the relationship, which is what I’m afraid would happen if malex get together so soon after making the(at least private) commitment to get better for each other. There won’t be enough time for growth and dramatic build to sustain the afterglow and they’ll have to find something else to torment the poor boys with.

I don’t hold out a *super* large amount of hope for it, because like...this is the CW. But I do think either way malex will likely be endgame. Just from everything the show has told us and set up, I would be extremely surprised and honestly really fucking angry if they don’t. Not necessarily because they’re My Ship, or because it would be any sort of queer baiting - they’d both still be undeniably queer and I assume Alex would end up with Forrest or someone else in that scenario.

Honestly it would just be bad storytelling to set up your characters as having this deep cosmic connection, setting them up directly in parallel with our other pairs of starcrossed lovers Max/Liz and Nora/Tripp, dropping all the hints in the music choices(Holy Moly being the big one when linked with the Would You Come Home scene, but there are other small parallels in song choices - ‘Through Your Eyes’ as Alex walks away in 2x06 for example.) Especially with the literal confirmation that they both still *want* to be with each other (Alex’s song saying ‘if I got better and worked through my issues can we be together’ and Michael recognizing he’s got to give Alex the space to do that work so that maybe someday they can be together. ‘It’s not our time right now.“ “But it will be.” “I hope so.”)

Anyway! So, I would count a Not-Malex-Endgame as a bad ending, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if we get zero canon Malex content in S3. In fact given where the characters are, I think it would be an AMAZING choice to have these characters who are fan favorites and who everyone *wants* to be endgame - stay apart and work on themselves, and build all that TENSION( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) for an entire season in order to cash in for an s4 payoff.

Also, I really want to see Alex grow as a person.

Michael really started to change in Season 2 - we’ve seen him start trying to be better, dealing with his emotions more, recognizing how bad his relationship with Alex is and trying to improve with Maria as well as building his other relationships, too. To me, Michael is already very different than he was in S1 and honestly, Alex has some catch up to do in terms of working on his fears and how they relate to how he cannot stand to be around Michael in stressful situations.

To that end, I really want to see how Alex and Forrest interact, and how a relationship with Forrest might change Alex. We heard before that Alex doesn’t really consider himself to have had a real relationship, and Forrest does *not* seem the type to be up for a fast and easy thing, so I think he could really push Alex to face his issues around commitment and his tendency to cut and run.

Which would actually be really cool! I am not a Forrest-endgame person at all, mostly because he seems both way too put together and way too needy for Alex long term, but I do think they would be really fun to see played against each other and also just .... nice things for Alex Manes please.

Also then we get lots of Michael making sad eyes at Alex which is just *chefs kiss*.

For Alex, his personal conflict has always centered around his trauma, his father, being ashamed and afraid of being openly gay, and having enough faith in people to believe he personally is worth fighting for and my main wish for Alex is to finally fucking learn how to love and be loved in return.

So in that vein and especially if we see Malex as endgame, it only makes sense that Michael’s journey needs to be a parallel one of him finding something worth staying on earth for. He’s started to build a family for himself fucking finally - Maria, Isobel, Sanders, hell I think there is even the potential for Liz, Max, and Kyle to be family. And of course, Alex has always been his family. But previously no one has ever had his back in the way he’s had theirs.

From what we’ve seen, Michael has always been the one who gives with his whole self - both Maria and Alex comment on it - “I don’t doubt your capacity for love” & “He keeps secrets because of how much he loves Max and Isobel, not because of how much he loves you.” He is a character who has spent his life throwing affection and emotion at the wall and seeing what(if anything) sticks.

He took the crayon from Max at the orphanage, told Isobel he killed the girls, dropped his plans to leave Roswell for her, he both defended Alex from his father and didn’t stop him from leaving a place he was in danger, he let Liz experiment with his blood for Isobel’s antidote. He tells Alex once that he was glad that Max and Isobel had an easier time, even if it meant he didn’t. Michael’s biggest character flaw is that he believes he has to be useful to be wanted. That he, as he is, is unloveable. Or, maybe better put, that he is not worthy of the kind of love others have.

In S3 I want this challenged, CW I will fight you. I *REALLY* want to see him have to face head on his assumption that he’s going to leave Earth at some point and everyone is going to be fine with that. I want him to realize he’s become core in someone’s life again. I want to see someone grab hold and refuse to let go. I want it to get messy, and I want them to stay, damnnit!

I want to see Michael start making plans to stay again.

I said in a previous meta that I thought the growth Michael has gone through already would lead to him being approached by Jones with an offer to leave (so that Jones can separate the pod squad, so that he can use Michael to get to Max, something like that) and I really want to see what decision a more grounded Michael might make in a situation like that.

And what my tiny shriveled shipper heart REALLY wants is a scene where Michael is put to this choice of being able to leave and - despite being offered everything he has been working towards for his entire life - the relationships he’s built are strong enough to make him stay(again.)

(Hint, I REALLY want this to be Alex, for the plot resolution for them in S3 not to be ‘we get together’ but to be ‘we are able to recognize that we can BE there for each other even if we aren’t together’, which would lead spectacularly into an early/mid s4 get together after some light angst :)

I have a lot more thoughts re: what I want from everyone else and what I’d love to see from the non pod-squad squad (MARIA ALEX LIZ ROSA PICNIC DATE WHEN) (CENTERING YOUR MAIN CHARACTERS OF COLOR WHEN) (TRY MAKING YOUR VILLAIN NOT A FUCKING PERSON OF COLOR!) Also like, Generyx, Deep Sky, Mr. Jones, possible connections between them and characters who aren’t pod squad oh my god can we for one episode focus on someone else, etc, but like.....this is already so long so maybe that’s for another time xD

Also as stated like....this is a CW show so this isn’t what’s going to happen, but it’s what a I *DESPERATELY WANT* to happen. My interaction with RNM is VERY much dead-plot-do-not-eat until proven otherwise and I’m just here to no-thoughts-head-empty enjoy the parts of Malex I like and ignore everything else :)

I’m gonna use this image that Diana made me because honestly this should be a disclaimer to any RNM post I make.

#LMAOOOOOOOO SORRY FOR THE GIANT POST #this should probably be readmore'd but uhhhh your assasins failed to kill me during the night #and you must now suffer another day of my insanely long meta #long post #malex #roswell new mexico #rnm meta #roswell new mexico meta #michael guerin #alex manes #Anonymous #milo answers

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johannas-motivational-insults · 4 years

Text

Catra’s refusal to admit mistakes

Something that seems to baffle much of the SPOP fandom is why Catra can’t just admit her mistakes and try to do better instead of continuing to dig herself a deeper and deeper hole. To be fair, the situation is very baffling. It’s complex. There are a ton of psychological issues in play, and when they interact things can get very messy. I’m going to do my best to explain Catra’s thought processes and hang ups and hopefully not write a fucking novel in the process. (But if you do want a novel that analyzes these concepts in a lot of depth, go check out my fanfic Demons. Shameless self-promotion, whaaaaat?)

I have already gone into how Catra’s external locus of control comes into play, so I’m not going to break it down in as much detail here. To sum it up, though, Catra has an internalized belief that she can’t really control anything and isn’t responsible for her behavior since it’s not her fault she was put in a shitty situation in the first place. She doesn’t believe she had any choice but to be the villain. This is deeply rooted in her fearful and abusive upbringing where she had little to no control over what happened to her. A large part of that is how consequences didn’t match behavior, i.e. she wasn’t rewarded for being good and her punishments were overly harsh as well as inconsistent, affected by external factors.

There’s also the sunk cost fallacy to consider. That’s the idea that you have to get something out of your investments (of time, money, effort, etc.), even if the costs keep piling up. (In terms of money, think of people who gamble larger and larger sums of money out of determination to win back their initial bet.) For Catra, this fallacy has convinced her that if she changes course and gives up on her goals, then everything she suffered in the Horde and all the effort she put into moving up in the ranks would be for nothing. She thinks getting to the top and proving her worth/winning respect would be the ulitmate triumph. Of course, we see her struggle with disillusionment over this in season 4, which helps set the table for what we hope will be a redemption arc.

These are only two examples of the ways Catra’s abusive upbringing affected her ability to admit her mistakes. The effects of abuse (especially in one’s childhood) are pervasive, affecting your thought processes and perception of the world in a million little ways that are hard to undo. I’m going to dig deeper now into some of the other reasons Catra struggles with this. They include an authoritarian environment, scapegoating, toxic leadership, poor behavioral modelling, an exaggerated fear of punishment, and the resentment of injustice.

(Please note: in this meta I’m not trying to make excuses for Catra and say she should not have to accept responsibility for her mistakes because she was abused. My aim here is to explain why it’s so difficult for her to shoulder blame in hopes that people will better understand her.)

Also under the cut, I’m going to finish this meta by examining how Angella and Glimmer are foils to Shadow Weaver and Catra, how Glimmer had a better example set for her and has now set an example for Catra.

Authoritarianism, injustice, and fear

It’s important to understand that Catra was raised to believe that apologizing or changing course makes someone a weak person or, worse, a bad leader. As Adora says, displays of weakness are strongly discouraged in the Horde. And in an authoritarian, militarized environment like the Horde, admitting mistakes is seen as a sign of weakness. You will very rarely, if ever, see authority figures admit they were wrong, let alone try to make amends for it. And since rank/pecking order is so important in these environments, that behavior filters down because no one wants to be at the bottom.

Fact is, no one who was raised in the Horde is good at admitting they were wrong (except maybe Scorpia, but she’s Scorpia). Even Adora is bad at this. She takes on responsibility for everything and blames herself when things go wrong, but that self-flaggellating catastrophizing is not the same as critically evaluating one’s actions and their effects on other people. That in particular is something she struggles with.

This may be a problem in the Horde at large, but it’s even harder for Catra to admit her mistakes because she has been blamed for a lot of things unjustly, as well as bullied by her peers and abused by her superiors. Accepting blame for anything feels unfair because she has already suffered the consequences of many things she did not do. In her mind, hasn’t the world punished her enough already without humiliating her over the mistakes she has made? Her defensiveness makes sense, in this regard.

Not only do abuse survivors tend to be defensive and angry at the world for the unfair lot it gave us, we have a very hard time being vulnerable with anyone. Because what if they hurt us too? Admitting mistakes and accepting their consequences puts you in a very vulnerable position, and when you are used to being punished unnecessarily harshly and/or undeservingly, submitting yourself to someone else’s judgment is terrifying. These experiences (especially when they occur at a young age) wire people a certain way, make you constantly afraid even when there is no need.

Toxic leadership and poor behavioral modelling

Returning to the environment factor, where do you think Catra learned this behavior of shirking responsibility for her actions? Fact is, Catra never had anyone model to her how to say, “I was wrong, I’m sorry, and I will try to fix it.” Militarized environment or not, Shadow Weaver and Hordak aren’t the type of people who are willing to admit their own mistakes and failures. They come up with excuses or pass the blame off to other people, usually Catra. Whenever something goes wrong, Hordak blames it on Catra and all her “failings.” Whenever Adora disappointed, Shadow Weaver assumed it was because Catra was holding her back. Catra is their scapegoat. They do not apologize to her, acknowledge any harm they’ve done to her, or make any attempt to fix it.

This is especially true of Shadow Weaver, who raised Catra and was the main adult in her life throughout her childhood. Even when confronted with the damage she has done to Catra, she refuses to accept responsibility or acknowledge any wrongdoing. We have seen this in literally every season in which they interact. Catra is rightfully salty about her unjust treatment but Shadow Weaver brushes off her anger, making excuses or sidestepping the accusations.

In 1x10, Catra throws Shadow Weaver a bit of shade while comforting her after Hordak gives her a scathing lecture. Shadow Weaver immediately deflects with an insult before acknowledging her own behavior but not its detrimental effects or her responsibility for it.

Catra: Don’t worry about that thing with Hordak. I've got loads of experience being yelled at. Mostly by you, actually. You get used to it.

SW: I will not get used to mediocrity like you, and I certainly don’t need your pity! ...I was hard on you, I won't deny it, and I won't apologize. I just wanted to prepare you for the world. I wanted you to be strong.

In 2x06, Catra flat out confronts her about it, and she offers a justification for her behavior, still refusing to show any remorse. When Catra persists, she sidesteps it by responding to another part of her outburst.

Catra: Why did you treat me the way you did? Why was I never good enough for you? Really, I wanna know.

SW: Because you remind me of myself. You always have. Nothing was ever easy for me, either. I wasn’t born to power like Adora and... others. I had to earn my power, fight for it. Why should it be any different for you?

Catra: I was a child when you took me in! What could I have possibly done to deserve the way you treated me? I am nothing like you! You are old, and bitter, and weak!

SW: Ah, but you are like me. And just like me, you’re losing your position with Hordak, I can see that even from my cell.

In 3x04, Catra has all but lost hope, throwing shade and heavy accusations at Shadow Weaver. But she does make one last desperate plea for acknowledgment of the harm done to her, right before she’s hit by the crushing realization that she has once again been pushed aside for Adora. Here, Shadow Weaver doesn’t even react to the emotional content of Catra’s statement.

SW: Catra, there’s no need for us to be enemies. I can help you. I can offer you a way out.

Catra: So, what? You’re on the side of good now? You made me this way, and you get to be the good guy? Do you know what happened to me after you escaped? Do you even care? You couldn’t wait to get away from here, from me! ...But you came back for Adora.

SW: I came back to stop Hordak. I will make sure he’s destroyed. Don’t make me destroy you too.

Saying she came back to stop Hordak is sort of an excuse, but Shadow Weaver doesn’t say it like she’s trying to appeal to Catra, unlike the two earlier conversations. Once Catra rejects her offer (which we know is disengenuous, to boot) she doesn’t even bother pretending to care. Catra’s resisting her manipulation and is no longer someone she can use, so why bother?

Notably, this is right before Catra learns about the dangers of the portal (i.e. that she made a mistake when she resolved to open it) and tasers Entrapta for trying to stop her, then immediately doubles down on that mistake by sending her to Beast Island. She got one more example of refusing to acknowledge her mistakes or accept accountability right before she does it herself. The statement “Adora was right” definitely gets to her too, but she was already in an unhinged state after being tortured by Shadow Weaver, once again with no apologies. Just something to consider.

So, Catra came from this environment where she got blamed unfairly all the time yet never got any sign of remorse from the people who hurt her. As I alluded to above, in this kind of situation it’s really easy to slip into the mindset of “why should I apologize when no one ever apologized to me?” (Especially if you’ve been through a lot of forced apologies, which are always humiliating, but particularly so when you are being unfairly blamed.) This is not an easy cycle to break. When you have this constant sense of injustice weighing on you, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the world owes you something as payback and therefore you shouldn’t have to try to better yourself or move past it.

This also ties into Catra’s obsession with getting a win when she is someone who seems fated to always lose, no matter what she does. It’s not just about getting back at Adora, it’s about settling her score with an unjust universe that has always given her the short end of the stick. It’s pride and indignation and pain all mixed up in one toxic soup that pollutes the minds of the abused, and it is not easy to get over. Watching Catra hopefully start to do that in the final 13 episodes is going to be incredibly cathartic.

Glimmer and Angella as foils and examples

Full disclosure, I am writing this meta partly in response to people shitting on Catra and acting like Glimmer is so much better than her after I made a gifset contrasting their reactions to realizing their mistakes. So, I want to finish by comparing all of these observations about Catra’s upbringing with Glimmer’s upbringing. Angella is by no means a perfect parent, but she loves her daughter and tries to do what’s best for her. Most relevant to this discussion, she’s willing to admit her mistakes or change her mind when presented with new information.

For instance, Angella flips at Glimmer over the invasion by the Horde soldier in 1x03, but once she learns said soldier is She-Ra she listens and puts faith in Glimmer’s judgment, despite her misgivings. In 1x10 (in a great parallel scene to the Catra/SW one mentioned above), Angella surprises Glimmer by caring more about her well-being than her mistakes, and she admits some of her own: she ordered the battle that got Micah ‘killed’, and she gave up on the first alliance. She literally says, “I am the one who failed.” And in 3x06, she sacrifices herself in an attempt to make up for all the times she failed to act and protect people she loves.

Angella has enough humility to admit her own flaws and consider other viewpoints, and she’s not afraid to change her mind or say she’s sorry. That set a much better example for Glimmer growing up than Shadow Weaver did for Catra and Adora. And now, Glimmer has set an example for Catra. When Catra is at her lowest in 4x13, drowning in her mistakes and self-hatred and wanting to die, Glimmer shows her that she too can change course and try to correct her mistakes.

Like, did you all see the look on Catra’s face when Glimmer says she can’t use the weapon and needs to try and stop it? When Glimmer gets up Catra follows her, because this is such a compelling sight to her, something she’s never seen before. It was almost like she was thinking, “Wait, you can do that? You don’t have to double down on your mistakes?”

This is something Catra has to see, not only for its novelty but because it could give her guidance, and hope. If Glimmer can change course and atone, maybe she can too.

#spop #she ra #catra #child abuse #meta #she-ra #catra and shadow weaver #catra and hordak #locus of control #sunk cost fallacy

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ignitification · 3 years

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Hi so I like your BNHA metas and your take on the villains’ redemptions. The only thing I disagree with is you thinking Shigaraki will die.

Okay so yes I am hoping hard that he doesn’t die, but that’s not the only reason I say this. I wholeheartedly believe that Shigaraki will survive his redemption.

The number one reason is: this is a story about how Deku becomes the greatest hero who ever lived. We already know Deku is going to be the greatest hero ever-the question is how? Well, if Shigaraki dies, Deku has not accomplished anything that past heroes haven’t. Deku can’t the greatest hero who ever lived if he can’t save his very obvious parallel/counterpart. Just like Shoto is going to save Touya, and Ochaco probably will save Toga, Deku has to save Shigaraki. If he doesn’t, then he isn’t the greatest hero who ever lived, he’s a great hero—but he’s no different than All Might, who failed to save Shigaraki the first time. I believe this story is going to show us how Deku and his classmates (mostly Shoto Bakugo and Ochaco) are going to raise the standard for heroes, show us what true heroes are, and show how Deku and Shigaraki are going to put an end to the long battle between AFO and OFA—together. The set up for Shigaraki to play a huge part on defeating AFO is very obviously there, and we already know that OFA was created to defeat AFO-so there’s those two major set ups.

The number two reason: time and time again throughout the story the students have shown that you aren’t saved if you’re dead. Ending wanted to die, but during their fight Bakugo stated that that wasn’t going to happen. So what does this tell us? BNHA’s definition of saving includes being physically saved. And Nana’s definition in All Might’s flashback during his fight with AFO shows that hers and his definition of saving is saving the heart and body. Also, Shigaraki being Nana’s grandson is a huge part in his survival. Nana’s son already died prematurely, why should her grandson? It just seems like cheap writing.

Number three: BNHA is happy and hopeful and optimistic, and the heroes have hardly failed at anything throughout the story. Deku saying he wants to save Shigaraki, that was such a HUGE moment in the story. It would be dumb and wasteful for Horikoshi to just throw that obviously important moment away by killing Shigaraki off.

ANYWAY I like your metas and your blog, but I really hope you might have more faith in Shigaraki’s survival! I didn’t even dive into all my reasons for believing wholeheartedly he’ll survive, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

HI! Thank you so much for taking your time to read and like everything I posted, makes me extremely happy!

However, onto the content of the post, while I do agree to some degree with what you said - I am also very skeptical of it. You set very good reasons for Shigaraki's survival, that is for sure! But it might be just my perspective, and sixth sense, that screams at me hard that exactly because of the reasons you pointed out, Shigaraki is likely to die.

I’ll explain myself a bit better illustrating what I mean.

First things first, we have the whole narrative around Shigaraki. Or rather, Shimura Tenko. He is an extremely sad child who likes playing hero in secret. His father does not want to acknowledge his son’s ambition and his mother does nothing that might help him in the long run. However, this refusal to being accepted, as a child, as a future potential hero and a little kid who wants nothing more than his parents finally noticing that he is there, gnaws at him so hard that he starts scratching all over. And it fuels up his internal scratch, and by the time that peace breaks out, he killed his entire family and finally does not hate being himself anymore. Only that, this feeling lasts about an instant, and then Tenko is back again being an unhappy child with a scratch, painful memories and a quirk which he does not know at what degree can be harmful. Then, we are catapulted in his 20s, where Shigaraki looks pale, sick, consumed and frail at best, and decayed at the worst. He loses Kurogiri. He fails in his plans again and again. His body has exhausted itself beyond recognition, and he is being tested on by a mad scientist, while the person he thought was the closest thing to his father figure is actually using him.

Shigaraki, at its core, is a lost character, trialing and making error after error to understand what goddamn he wants and what is feeling day after day. What does he wake up for?

I hate saying this because Shigaraki is genuinely the first character I liked in BNHA, but he looks tired. He looks like he needs some rest. He looks like he needs a hug from his grandmother and her saying to him that he is not alone, and that it is okay for him to let go.

I know this sound like sad words, which not even be true, but Shigaraki has been thrown to hell and back in these years and months and whatever he wants now is gone. He has nothing left but AfO’s will and the pure feeling of wanting to see everything decay. I believe that everything hurts him. Shigaraki has no tough skin, he is a bared soul to the world who has wronged him in so many ways, and once he gets his revenge nothing will be left anymore. Not in him, not for him. Because when he said he won’t forgive anyone, he meant it.

My fear, however, stems mostly from the fact that AfO has gained control of Shigaraki’s consciousness. Not in all moments, but likely a lot of the time - which confirms my theory that Shigaraki is exhausted (going through the motions of whatever the doctor put him in) but still he is not ready yet to be the weapon AfO intended him to be. Which is why, as well, when AfO’s objective to gain Shigaraki’s body has been only partially succeeded, my alarms started blaring off. If, by chance, AfO does get Tomura under his total control, Shigaraki is as good as dead. It would be amazing, however, if the set up of him rebelling against AfO and making allies with Izuku into defeating him would come through. Point is: how is that going to happen?

Which brings me to a further point I want to address: I want to have hope in Deku and Shigaraki himself, but as I said, I really do not see it happening. It would be utterly unrealistic and would bring a lot of misunderstanding even if the story is set up for exactly that. I think that Deku, nonetheless, will try to save him, like he always does. Izuku is precious and yes, he would sacrifice himself every damn time again if that would bring everyone to safety.

Another thing which I wanted to address (I am trying to keep it short) is how you made parallels between Shouto-Touya, Deku-Shigaraki and Ochako-Toga. I am genuinely kind of unhappy on the writing of the women of BNHA. Maybe it is just me, but I do find most of them to be bland and with no appeal (which is no surprise, as the only interesting female character so far has been Rei for me). Ochako in particular, is very much the epitome of ‘Wanted to do loads - Accomplishment still in progress’ which relegates her to a very grey zone in my opinion, to the point that she seems instrumental to only express her gratitude and love for Deku by trying to get better, in which she mimics Toga (funnily enough). On the contrary, I dislike Toga. I really do not like her character, but I appreciate her behaviour toward the other League members and Twice in particular. Which is why, I am hoping that the two get a development soon (is Uraraka the traitor after all?). So as far as it regards them both, I hope this dichotomy between the two of them gets further explained and explored and that in the end we can really see Ochako evolving and Toga accepting herself as she is, instead of running toward fruitless horizons.

Last things last, I do not agree with the fact that if Deku fails to save Shigaraki he will not become the Greatest Hero. Why? Simply because Deku’s accomplishments so far already put him in another league to everyone else, and I genuinely do not think that only because he fails to save him, he will lose his spot. However, I do agree that this is maybe the strongest argument toward Shigaraki not dying (surprisingly), because after all, this is still a shounen and the redemption theme is very strong so it might be that Shigaraki’s death might not be in character with all that has been planned so far.

I am sorry if this post is a bit sad and/or confused. I just want everyone to survive and be happy, I just know that it’s not realistically possible. But thanks for not agreeing with me on this. I hope we can both hope for better days this way.

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maariarogers · 3 years

Text

flash review for episode 13

where can i start? i absolutely adore it

i felt like, in all honesty, the k-drama got much better towards the end for some reason? like everything started coming together; each of their personalities seemed to mash well and idk, i love the later episodes (hopefully i wont retract these statements in the future)

suho is so dedicated, so loyal, so loving like,,,, can this man get the boyfriend award of the year or....

i love LOVE the parallel between jugyeong running for suho in past episodes being played again by suho being the one to run after jugyeong. absolutely breathtaking

when suho was running and he remembered jugyeong wanting to commit suicide? please just end me right now

seojun was superb all throughout

i feel like it’s so appropriate, yet so fitting, that suho mainly goes to care for jugyeong and seojun steps back, understands this, and decides to handle things at their school instead

like maybe it’s their bond as friends doing its work and seojun becoming increasingly respectful of his friend’s relationship, but it’s so *chef’s kiss* to see seojun doing the aggressive work

like, i talked abt this in my meta, but seojun’s short-tempered personality worked so well especially in events like this and it shows. he’s a fucking boss throughout and he aint takin no shit

what a damn man 👏👏👏

seojun, gowoon, and juyeong aren’t the trio i expected to like so much but jesus i’ve proven wrong!!!!!!

juyeong 👏punching 👏someone 👏 who talked 👏 shit 👏 about 👏 jugyeong 👏

gowoon 👏 throwing hands 👏 over the 👏 same 👏 fact 👏

WE RESPECT THE #TEAMJUGYEONG SQUAD

i was fucking crying laughing at mr han throughout the whole time like,,, dude,,, pls,,,, this aint about u my guy 😭😭😭

I CRIED WHEN JUGYEONG’S MOM CRIED NO DONT @ ME

ppl can come at me for this but i actually really like jugyeong’s mom. yeah, she has her worser moments and shes not winning any awards for best mom soon but??? i feel like??? thats the point??? thats how most asian moms are??? and i relate to that so much???

like, there’d be moments where they put so much traditional expectations on children that it can become burdening and/or unhealthy, just like jugyeong’s mom consistently displayed (and then she mentioned “do u wanna be like me” like god that fucking hit me), but u can tell they dont fuck with u if u fuck with their family or people they care about and thats just it

like idk how to even properly explain it but i guess we just built different is all lmao

when jugyeong was crying and then her make up faded and all her acnes popped up, like bitch,,,, i felt that SO BAD 😭thats me every day at work

jugyeong’s dad camped a whole ass smol kitchen in front of jugyeong’s room just so she’d eat 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

again when will the lim family not win in an episode WHEN

“the one who uploaded the video” “i know” FUCKING ENDED ME!!!!

can we just talk about the absolute grace jugyeong and suho have in the face of knowing sujin did this to them? like they didn’t slander her once. they didn’t start shit. they just take care of their own damage.

ppl are also gonna come at me probs but ............. sujin and seojun look so good next to one another,,, like if park yuna and hwang in yeop is ever in a drama together? pls call me, have my soul

suho having juyeong’s phone number,,, suho and juyeong bonding,,, juyeong comforting suho even tho he couldn’t do much and convincing suho to go to school,,,,, babes i love found-family trope that is all

when suho admits that taehoon is his friend, i just. died. webtoon suho would kill for a friend like taehoon and i know it

nope still not fucking with the mr. lee jaehoon being innocent at least not over the affair, sir get out of my face

also not fucking with suho being interested in MUSIC, my guy he is gonna be a CHEF (webtoon reference)

legit i was fucking yelling at jugyeong to “defend his mans” during that toilet scene because i just felt like suho had done so much for her, especially given recent events, and then she did??????????????

BABY GIRL........ NOT ONLY DID U DEFEND HIM BUT UR SPEECH WAS POWER???? HONEY...........

“from now on come and talk to me in person. i’ll answer your question one by one” I DIDN’T KNOW YOU HAD IT IN YOU????? YOURE SO BEAUTIFUL BABE 😭

suho already worshipped the ground u walk on now he’s probably thinking about kissing u under a willow tree with one knee on the floor and a ring in one hand smh

feel a little bad for the food her mom made tho ngl

overall: i feel like its an 8/10, im probably deducting the marks because of suho’s dad cause i still feel it’s a bit unfair if they want to reverse the fact that his dad did have an affair and lied to him and selena (in the webtoon he did) cause even the first affair like, the one 8 year old suho caught him in? i feel like theyre gonna probs reverse that too BUT IM NOT TALKING ABOUT THEORIES NOW point is i love nearly all aspects of it, can’t wait for more soft suhoxjugyeong content before the writers fuck us all up xoxo

#True Beauty #i have WORK tomorrow #but imma spew all of these #also yes i know im a whole ass 24 hours late #still love them tho

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akurathereaper · 4 years

Text

An insignificant rant on HoT&PoF

As everyone knows, yady yady ya, everyone prefers HoT, whatever

I’m one of those people and I’m about to rant about this too.

THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE RANT

I will be talking about story elements and stuff that happens in both DLCs.

I like Path of Fire, I really do, it gave me Elona, it gave me agent Kito whom I wholeheartedly pity cuz he has to deal with the Commander, it gave me more of Aurene (and it gave me Joko on whom I can shit on when I feel bad)

But, it didn’t give me maps I like (and I will tell you why) (please note I am no game designer, or designer in general. In fact, maps designed by me would be probably shit, but I still believe my opinion is valid, because I am a person with eyes that can see)

This is going to be a small rant when it comes to maps, now mark, english isn’t my first language so there may be nonsensical sentences, and I am no professional critic so all of this is coming from my heart, not my brain.

Ready? Let’s go

So I’m going to do a little comparison (nothing too much in depth) of the four maps from each DLC (plus Domain of Vabbi but I don’t have much to say on it if I’m honest).

We have Verdant Brink, Auric Basin, Tangled Depths and Dragon’s stand from Heart of Thorns, and Crystal Oasis, Desert Highlands, The Desolation, Elon Riverlands and Domain of Vabbi.

Let me start with HoT, because it makes logical sense.

When you first start the Heart of Thorns campaign, you’re told to go from Silverwastes to... Verdant Brink. You get a small taste of it right before you enter it, in that cave where the injured pact members are talking about it. And then you load in (hopefully, if your pc doesn’t reenact an atomic blast), and first thing you see, when you walk in on that VERY SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED LEDGE

is absolute carnage.

Ships are strewn about, hanging in pieces torn apart by Mordremoth’s vines, smoke and fire is everywhere, that part of the jungle is ravaged not only by Mordremoth, but also by you. Your Pact. And in that moment you exactly realize what happened (if it wasn’t obvious from the cutscene that played before it *cough cough*)

But now you see it. The map tells you a very obvious story, and you don’t need to be a genius to figure it out. It tells you and SHOWS you exactly how strong and dangerous the Dragon you’re hunting is. It shows you what you have to overcome. (And if you’re me, you’re crying cuz Trahearne got kidnapped)

I’m going to skip the storyparts of this map, but will instead focus on the meta of it (since i’ve done it like trillion times). There’s five main crashpoints. Each has to bring their all to successfuly make this map “safe”. The nobles, the Pale Reavers, the quaggan and her soldiers. Everyone. I’m guessing that after you kill all the five champions, the area becomes safe enough for you to move on, after all, you’re the Commander, and you cannot leave everyone to die in the middle of the Jungle. Once again, the map tells you a story through the gameplay)

And then you move onto Auric Basin (I’m guessing it’s a lot of people’s fav map)

Oh, Auric Basin... The map instantly breathes “something”, something different. You KNOW you’re somewhere else, the whole atmosphere tells you that you’re somewhere forgotten, somewhere where the touches of humans, sylvari, charr, whatever main race, have not reached.

Your first instance of it is most likely the story instance, so you get introduced to the place pretty quickly. I don’t have to say how gorgeous the city actually is, right?

The whole place is an archaeologist’s wet dream. And again, the map tells you, it shows you, it’s story, it’s history (the Priory people are wetting themselves over the whole thing), and sometimes it’s the Exalted themselves who tell you the story. But you can gauge a lot of it just from observing. It’s not the most effective of cities, I’ll be honest, but it’s a damn impressive one. After all, Tarir was build for Glint’s scion.

And the meta? It’s about PROTECTING the city. Protecting it from Mordremoth, from destroying it, from destroying the safe place for a dragon’s egg. You stop Mordremoth from leaching the place with Octovines (or an exalted does it for you. Kudos to you, immortal and endless exalted), and you don’t rly realize the importance of this place until the whole Aurene thing happens.

And oof, Tangled Depths.

Tangled Depths, one of the most hated maps in the entire expansion, a thing (imho) that can be very much blamed on the map limitation (I’m talking about your map, where you see where you are and where the waypoints are, etc.) Like, honestly, wouldn’t it be a WHOLE lot easier to traverse if your map made actual damn sense? But I digress.

Tangled Depths is probably one of the lesser impressive maps? Overall, I very like it, although it’s story has to be unearthed and explored actively. It’s more of a bland looking pie with delicious filling.

Tangled Depths is quite...a good map. In a way. Don’t throw trash at me, please. I also hated it when I had to walk through it, but I learnt the shortcuts and then traversed with relative ease, so I stopped seeing the whole map as a nuisance and started seeing it for what it was.

Such an untouched piece of history... The Rata Novus? Rata Novus? Hello? Asura lived here?

The Ogres, making their village there? The Nuhoch, fighting for their survival with the Zintl hyleks and the Chak? The Chak? Such new and interesting creatures who literally eat magic! In the middle of the jungle, you see such life, such vivacity, even in the midst of Mordremoth’s reign of terror.

And the story of the meta is tying in so nicely to the overall thing! You’re literally tunneling into Dragon’s stand, to reach old Papa Mordremoth, and you’re doing it with the help of everyone on the map! The Ogres, the asuras (well they dead, so their robots lol), the Chak (yeah, Chak bois be helping, not rly it’s just the lane lol), and the useless easy line! You’re charging a thingimajig that blasts a hole through the ley-line empowered wall and bam, you’re in DS. (Excuse me it has been a while since I was in TD) And Chak bois are on your ass trying to eat it cuz magic but that’s so the meta is interesting.

And then... My favourite map. Dragon’s stand.

I played this map... probably more than I should’ve, but... the way it is structured is simply so interesting! Three lines, for three leaders, each battling their way through the jungle to get to the Generals, to get to the Mouth of Mordremoth. And along the way, you gain more and more allies, more and more people to help you fight this noodle! You get the ogres, the itzel, the nuhoch, the skritt(!), the exalted, the... THE NIGHTMARE COURT? *cough cough* cut content *cough cough*. Yeah, some don’t get an explanation, but you see everything that you have done, everyone you have helped in the previous map, go help you out in this one? You see them and protect them at the last island (and the whole map is just one giant meta and I LOVE IT (it can be a point of criticism as well, since it’s quite hard to explore if the meta ain’t done and the last few pois are impossible to get if MoM isn’t dead)) and it’s just so epic

Everything you did was leading up to this moment, this last battle, this last stand, the DRAGON’S STAND. And the battle was just... epic. Epic, is all I can say about this map and it’s story. (Shame the Commanders/Generals were cut out, as we have no clue who they were, and knowing something about them would make it a bit more meaningful in fighting them)

To conclude.

HoT is focused as hell. You got a goal: Pop a cap in Mordremoth. And you’re going to do it. You got twice the motivation if you’re a sylvari. Each map is designed to give you the build up of the fight, first you see what Mordremoth can do, then you see what’s at stake, and then you gotta fight for it. The fact the maps are gorgeous (If a little (bit a lot) laggy) only helps the overall feel. Anything and Everything can and will murder your ass, and you gotta be ready for it.

Now onto PoF maps. This segment is going to be shorter, because in all honesty? PoF, I like you, but you’re just... well, you’ll see. Hopefully. This is after all just my opinion lol.

Oh and if you got this far? Kudos lol I ramble a lot. <3

Anyway, PoF maps.

So the opening to PoF is... quite good? It’s a bit out of your control but it does it’s job imo.

You come in on an airship, and you see the land spread before you. You see a pyramind, and you think “Oh hell yeah, pyramids.” I would LOVE to just be able to explore the area, you know, have a chill opening, but PoF is about FIRE and FIGHT so, you fight and try to save the people and it’s very chaotic and everything is on FIRE OH GODS.

So you chase this mysterious person, you get introduced to the raptor village, all goes well or bad, and then you are directed to the city of Amnoon (since we’re still in a story instance), so you go. Amnoon is very pretty, and following the tradition of MMO cities very impractical, but hey, rule of cool. The whole time you’re not rly allowed to explore anywhere or look at anything, you’re focused, sure, but you’re also very distracted, you get me?

You want to look around, you want to explore, but you’ve just been attacked by this Herald woman and you’re tired of politics. The opening of PoF isn’t bad, but it is very different from HoT, as in HoT you first SAW the carnage Mordy did and THEN you went on down to help the remaining survivals, whereas here, in Oasis, you kinda.. live through it? You see it first hand what Balthy is doing, while in HoT you only chased the aftermaths of the massacres. This works differently for everyone, and I personally prefer the HoT approach.

PoF is very open when it comes to the story, as in you are not AS limited to instances as it was with HoT, sometimes it works to its advantage, sometimes.. it doesn’t.

The way PoF maps jerk you around is very confusing to me. You explore Crystal Oasis, then you go to Desert Highlands, then to Elon riverlands, and you gotta go back down through the Oasis to get there, so you are already trudging through the land you already know (and since you have mounts they took full advantage of making the maps bigger, but it makes them feel... emptier? Like I get it, it’s the Desert, but still...) so you get to Elon riverlands, you do your thing there, then you go to Desolation, then to Vabbi. Nice. Okay.

In none of these maps, there is a story meta. None. No impressive whole-map meta where you gotta all cooperate to keep the map stable. Nothing. There is no use in me trying to analyze these maps, for they are just... backdrop to what’s happening. Balthazar this, Balthazar that. Oh no Kralky is awake, and oh look we met Vlast for like 2 seconds and then he immediately ded.

I’ll be honest... I don’t remember much of PoF before chapter 9 The Departing (because that chapter was fire. Lol. get it), which saddens me immensely. I remember most of HoT. Where what happened when it happened how it happened, I know, and if I don’t know immediately, in few minutes my brain serves me the entire instance. I could probably play HoT blindfolded.

This is a very shallow look into why I probably don’t like PoF as much as I like HoT.

To try and conclude my very messy terrible rant essay:

Heart of Thorns used its maps in a way that showed you with gameplay what’s in store for you. It used maps in a way to help you build that anticipation of the fight, of everything you sacrificed along the way. The maps are smartly connected in a way where with each map you delve deeper into the jungle, deeper into the mouth of the beast. Sure, they lag as fuck, but the PoF maps do so too, don’t lie to yourselves. With each map you meet new allies that help you along the way.

In Path of Fire I just... don’t get that feeling. I run from map to map, mindlessly following the green star, hoping I will stumble upon something interesting on the way. In Heart of Thorns it was the opposite. I was walking around the map, breathing in the atmosphere of the place, and stumbling upon the green story star. I feel like the Elona desert did not get such justice as it deserved. I trudge around the maps, I complete the maps to get the reward, then I move onto the story. My interest in the whole thing only started to pick up once I freaking DIED for gods’ sake.

My hopes for the End of Dragons, which is happening in Cantha, is that I get more of that focused map design. That story in gameplay, that map-wide meta that will have me grind my teeth at 10pm on a work/school night. I don’t need Drizzlewood metas (an inferior Dragon’s stand, mind you) that are like 2-3 hours long. A 30 min prelude and 30 min metas are fine. An hour long meta if you have the idea for it, but... give me map stories, Anet.

Feel free to share your own feels about the different feels between the DLCs. I will GLADLY take in PoF preferrers. What did you prefer in PoF? What did you like in it? Give me your opinions, give me your take on everything.

And thank you for reading my overly long rant essay, hah.

#gw2 #guild wars 2 #Path of Fire #Heart of Thorns #guild wars 2 Path of Fire #guild wars 2 Heart of Thorns #If you open the rant #there is a sort of a tl:dr at the bottom #to try and conclude my very messy terrible rant essay it is called #feel free to reblog and comment on #or just ignore lol

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austarus · 4 years

Text

HR Wells x Reader Hidden Among The Fairy Lights (Part 1 of 3)

**A/N: The picture/edit/gif does not belong to me. It belongs to its rightful owner.

*Just taking a small break from my Crisis of Infinite Wells reader insert series. Plus, I miss HR and I’m still baffled how they always dismiss him and Harry and all the Wells as if they mean nothing to the audiences. They mean just as much as Barry and Cisco and Iris. A reminder, the beginning dialogue is from the HR scene in 3x05.

Word Count: 4389

Part 2 Part 3

“You were named Entrepreneur of the Decade by “Tech Magazine”?” Cisco read off the monitor, arms folded as he maintained a look of doubt on his features. Iris sat on a chair; one leg crossed over the other as she rested her head against the palm of her hand. Barry stood right behind where his love sat, glancing from the screen back to the Wells doppelganger and crossed his arms like his best friend. Caitlin leaned against the main Cortex desk with both hands on her hips and a tired expression on her face. Wally hung back a bit on the other end of the main monitor desk.

You were at the main desk, sitting back with your hands folded in your lap. With pursed lips, you would glance down at your fingers ever so often at this supposed trial. He lied to us, but so did Harry when he first came to Earth-1 and he didn’t turn out as bad. Just prickly at times and soft in others. When this meeting was called to confront HR, you had decided in your head that you’d want the full story from HR before judging his course of action to lie to you all.

“That's right,” HR confirm with a drumstick pointed at his entire resume, eyes avoiding your gaze. He had calmed his breathing, but when his eyes met yours, he felt the tension climb within himself. He hadn’t wanted you of all people to find out like this. If only my charade had gone on for a few more weeks, I would probably have entrusted my truth to you. You had been the one cutie on the Team to not look at him oddly, especially when he made minor errors during his charade. A voice at the back of his mind told him that you had probably already figured out that HR wasn’t who he proclaimed that he was, but then again, you hadn’t questioned him. So, he left it at that… until the team called for him to fess up.

“Is any of what's on here true?”

“All of it.” With a pocketed hand, HR waved a drumstick to the screen for emphasis. His electric blue eyes caught you looking off to the side. HR didn’t need to know what you were thinking to hazard a guess of what you thought of him right now. What everyone thought of him when they learned his truth.

“How? You can barely turn on a computer.” Barry quipped up, nodding his head towards a random computer.

“There are two parts to every idea. There is the inception and the execution. I provide the former.”

“So, you come up with the ideas?” Iris clarified while Barry kept a dubious look on his face directed at the dark-haired doppelganger.

“Yeah, I don't know how to implement them. I'm the idea man.”

“So, you didn't actually solve the cryptogram that we sent you?” Caitlin asked, knowing that she had already answered her own question.

“No, that was my partner at STAR Labs on my Earth. I'm the face of the company.” HR responded making a photograph gesture of his face before fiddling with his drumsticks once more. Caitlin gave him an incredulous look at his response. You moved your gaze up, taking a peek to the rest of the contents on the screen before looking back at HR. The drumstick fiddling had caught your attention more than once since his arrival here and you’re more than convinced that HR does it when he’s nervous. Especially when he’s been caught red-handed. “I'm more of the inspiration behind the company. Then I was exposed.” His tone had softened, glancing at you from the peripheral before dipping his head down. Your heart caught in your throat at his dejected body language. Iris and Barry locked gazes with each other before listening HR’s continuation. “Well, people thought that I was something that I... I guess I wasn't. Anyway, it... it kind of all fell apart for me.” HR let out a little breath, before continuing. Your heart fell a bit at the amount of hurt that had been laced with his voice. “But then I got your message. My partner brought me your message. I realized he's bringing me an opportunity to come to this Earth to write this book.” HR’s face gradually lit up as he finished, a true novelist articulating his emotions through his words and gestures.

“So many planets in the multiverse,” Cisco mused in disbelief to himself while everyone glanced to one another, “and we happen to pick the one Wells who's not a scientist.” You made eye contact with Caitlin, who shook her head while you did a subtle shrug of the shoulders.

“You're right. I wasn't completely honest with you- with all of you.” HR took a seat as he spoke, rolling a bit closer. HR let out a breath, swinging the drumstick around. He couldn’t look at you in fear of what he might find. “I feel badly about that. I regret that. But let me ask you a question, has there been none amongst you that has ever shaded the truth for what you believe to be the greater good?” He’s right, we all try to hide our demons, our own terrible truths from hurting others. Barry from telling Iris that he was the Flash, Cisco when he first found out he was a meta, and so on. I’m no different either.

“It sounds to me like you're a con man.” Wally interjected in the silence. Murmurs of agreement rang out through the members of Team Flash while you only raised a confused eyebrow at Wally’s conclusion. Then I guess we’re all con men? I mean, we’ve all kept the truth from each other before. You kept your comments to yourself as you watched the others and HR. You already had your verdict, setting your chin in the palm of your hand as you rested your elbow on the cool surface of the desk.

HR got up towards Cisco, readily defending himself, “Was I a con man when I showed San Francisco here how to track the beast using car alarms? Was I a con man when I showed him how to fashion a rope using carbon fiber?” You held in a snicker when he referred to Cisco as ‘San Francisco’. I guess that’s one thing we have in common with his Earth.

“I came up with those ideas!”

“You were prompted by my suggestions.”

“Oh?” Cisco shook his head slightly at HR.

“That is how ideas work! People, you need a muse! I can be your muse,” HR pointed to himself, hoping to any higher power that the Team would accept that role for him to at least do. You gave him a soft smile at his suggestion.

“What about stopping all the metas on your Earth?” Wally asked, gesturing to the doppelganger before taking a step forward. Barry and Wally exchanged looks before shaking their heads at one another as HR started speaking.

“More of an advisory role for me, but I was there. I remembered how we- you don’t think that's something? Let me present you with a scenario. You're confronted with something, a threat that you've never seen before. You don't know how to stop it. Who does?” He pointed his drumstick towards himself. The novelist needed them to reconsider whatever decision that they already had. To reconsider booting him off this Earth and to give him a chance. “That's value to you. Let me prove my worth to you. If I fail, I will pfft right back to my Earth, but if I succeed, I will have succeeded not just in redeeming myself but also… will have done some good with my life,” he quickly mumbled the latter part, feeling sheepishly embarrassed, maybe even humiliated by the last statement, but if this is the way to go for redemption then it was certainly worth trying for.

“You know, you're lucky we're pretty big on redemption and doing good here,” Barry spoke on behalf of the team, gesturing to you all with a hand, “so I think you can- I don't know stay for a few weeks, try to prove yourself, but if not, fyoo, back to your Earth.” You watched with a quizzical look as Caitlin left the room. Must be the exhaustion from today. I hope she’s alright.

“Thank you,” HR sighed in relief, clapping his hands together in thanks towards Barry. He couldn’t help the fact that his eyes took a quick glimpse of you. He told himself he wasn’t sure why anymore; he had been exposed as a fraud once more. You wouldn’t want anything to do with him. Simple as that.

“Hey,” Cisco had stopped HR with a pointed look and finger, “no more repackaging.”

“Word is bond.”

“That- just- no more of that.” Wally and Cisco started heading out from the Cortex.

“All right, HR,” Barry and Iris were the last pair to go, bidding their ‘goodnights’. You had gotten up with them, knowing there was nothing else left to say, but to go home for the night to rest up for any more of the new timeline metas. Walking halfway through the corridor towards the elevator and trailing behind the West-Allen Gold Standard, a thought stopped you. Maybe… he just needs someone to teach him- You weren’t able to finish the thought as your feet silently carried you back to the Cortex. There HR sat with his back towards you, a drumstick in hand and his other hand rubbing the back of his neck as he stared at the screen that held his resume and qualifications. While he was given a chance, you knew that he would have to effectively and efficiently find a way to prove himself before his time ran out.

“Word is bond, that’s a cute saying,” you softly spoke out, leaning against the metal frame of the Cortex entrance. HR let out a little “ah!” at the suddenness of your voice, accidentally throwing one of his drumsticks backwards. It sailed back towards your general area. You giggled at the reaction, picking up the instrument piece and handing it over to him when he had turned around. HR had let out a word of relief with a hand over his heart when he realized it was you. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

“For a little birdy, you sure do know how to be as silent and sneaky as a snail.” His cheeks felt warm when he heard you giggle; a bright smile had graced your features when you approached him. HR hoped you wouldn’t notice.

“Don’t you mean a mouse?”

“Snails can be silent.”

“I know, but the saying is ‘silent as a mouse’.” You pulled up a chair to sit beside him. The now dimmed lights of the Cortex had eased your headaches. “I guess that’s just another comparison between our Earths.”

HR looked at you oddly, running his fingers over both drumsticks that he held in one hand, “It doesn’t bother you?”

“Hm? What would?”

“How- How I say words and phrases differently? Do things differently from the people here on Earth-1?”

“I just think that makes you really unique,” you shrugged your shoulders a bit, giving him a soft grin. HR felt the heat returning to his cheeks again and now spread up to his ears. No one has really called him unique, certainly not in a good way either.

“But the others think its peculiar, just too much.”

“Well, I think it’s cool that there’s some form of variation from our Earth’s. Give the others some time, they’ll get used to you, I promise.” You secretly prided yourself with the ability to give people of various backgrounds and characters the benefit of the doubt. Open-mindedness as well as kind acts can go a long way, after all.

A deep chuckle left HR’s lips and you felt something jump in your stomach. HR glanced up to the monitor before looking back at you. “I’m guessing you’re not here just to chatter-chitter, huh.”

“You’re right, I’m not.” You folded your hands together in your lap, intertwining you fingers as you crossed one leg over the other. Almost looking business-like. “I have a proposition for you, HR.”

“Oh really?” The novelist quirked an eyebrow at you, he sat back to match your body language as if the both of you were associates discussing a business transaction.

“Yes sir, but you have to keep this a secret between us, ok? Word is bond?”

A smile laced itself onto HR’s ruggedly handsome features at your iteration of his Earth’s phrase. You swore the room lit up a little bit at his smile. “Word is bond.”

You nibbled on your bottom lip, choosing your words wisely before speaking up again. “… I also want something in return.”

“Naturally, an eye for an eye, but it’ll depend on the prize that you want. What’s your proposition, little birdy?”

“I want to help you realize your worth and value to the team. You know, find a way for you to be helpful with the time that you have here. And starting with teaching you the basics of turning on a computer.”

“At what cost?”

“Three questions.” You simply held up three fingers.

“I’m sorry?”

“You’d need to answer a total of three questions that I could have at any point of your stay here. No resisting and no shading of the truth. No avoidance, either. Just the honest to God truth.”

“…” HR remained silent, contemplating your proposition and the costs. Wondering your true intentions and if you would be the type of person to betray him. Like so many others have in my life. HR took one took at your smug-ish face before a sigh left his mouth. Your smile had twisted into a grin.

“Well?”

“Do you promise on your soul not to blackmail me?”

“Word is bond,” you repeated gingerly. HR reluctantly agreed with raspy voice, blue eyes holding some form of trust in you.

A cheeky laugh left your lips as HR relaxed a bit in his seat, sort of contemplating what he had just gotten himself into as he watched you stand up from your seat. You offered a hand to him, that grin on your face turning into a slightly mischievous one as your other hand had held your tablet close to your chest.

“Let’s get started.”

***

The next few weeks you would hang out with HR, teaching him the basics of scanning the city for metas, understanding the basics of how a computer works, and so on. He really had been putting in a lot of effort, asking to take notes which you thought was sweet, even if some of the others didn’t welcome it at the time. HR had gone to the extent of re-reading old meta case files that the team had stored and would go on coffee runs every morning just to make sure the team was awake for the next meta sent by Alchemy. You found out about the files one morning when you found him in his pre-caffeinated sleep state in the Cortex with the files littering the computer screens. You had gotten a spare blanket and draped it over him so he wouldn’t be cold.

It wasn’t until you heard some yelling and soft curse words being thrown around from within the Cortex, that your feet picked up their pace from where you were in the corridor. You tilted your head, standing at the door-frame as you can sense the frustration emitting from Cisco towards HR. Caitlin was rubbing her temples while Barry was just running a hand through his hair as he tried to keep his irritation off his face.

“Good afternoon?” Your greeting was more in the form of a question as you knocked on the metal door-frame to alert the others of your attention. Barry and Caitlin had breathed a sigh of relief at your presence, sending you gracious smiles towards you. Cisco had shut his eyes, massaging his temples. “I brought homemade goods?” You held up the bag that had been filled with sugar cookies, sweet berry tarts, and brownies.” A small smile was on your face, glancing at everyone before setting the goods down. HR lowered his drumsticks and internally felt at ease that you had come at just the right time before Cisco’s berating would soon turn even nastier. With swift feet, the author left the room, probably going to make a new cup of coffee that he’s gotten so attached to.

“Finally, someone sensible around here,” Cisco grumbled to himself, making his way to where you placed the goods in hopes that delicate pastries from your hands would calm his spiked-up mood. “Please keep him out of the labs today,” the mechanical genius leaned into you, holding up a brownie.

“He’s just trying to help, Cisco,” You whispered back to Cisco, giving your friend a side-glance.

“I know, but we really have a lead on all these husks, and we don’t want him distracting us from that,” Cisco stated almost desperately. “Please, just this once.”

“You’re lucky that I’m a good friend.”

“Yes, I am. And,” Cisco pulled out a paper from his pocket, handing it over to you, “I have a list for you.” You gave him a quizzical look as you took the paper and unfolded it, to which Cisco spoke again. “We’re going to need a few items for the break room and from Star City, mainly Felicity.”

“Why can’t Barry speed over to get these?”

“Because CCPD, specifically Barry’s new partner, needs him to be on time whenever they call or else, he gets reported to Sighn. Again.” Caitlin spoke up, taking a sip from her cup of lemonade.

Barry sheepishly looked over at you, a tart half-eaten in his mouth as he waved at you with a cookie in hand. “Uh huh,” you rolled your eyes, not really liking doing errand work, but at least you get to see Felicity again, “just do me a favor, don’t touch my algorithms.”

“No promises. Oh, and one more thing.”

“Yes, San Francisco?”

“Don’t call me that.” He rolled his eyes. “Make sure you crazy kids don’t stay out for too long,” Cisco winked at you, hinting towards something he and Caitlin had confronted you about earlier that week. Barry looked confused as ever, mumbling out a huh ‘huh?’ with his mouth still full. The blood rushed to your cheeks before you flipped him off, earning a cheeky look from your friends who just smirked at your reaction. You left the room, throwing Cisco one more pointed look about your coding and algorithms before striding to the breakroom to find HR, who’s probably sulking with his heavily caffeinated cup of coffee.

***

“Hey HR,” you entered the breakroom, spotting the broad back of the dark-haired doppelganger, “why don’t you come run some errands with me?”

HR was silent for a moment; the only sound was the clinking of the coffeemaker as it began to hibernate once more. “Did they want me out of the labs today?” You heard the hurt in his voice as he finished brewing his perfect blend, turning around with a dejected expression. You nodded a bit as you looked down, taking a step closer towards him and resting a hand on his forearm. You squeezed it slightly, feeling incapable of lying to him about… anything really. His shoulders fell, shaking his head as he pulled away from your warm touch.

“Give them some time to cool off,” You spoke softly in a low tone. “In the meantime, we’ve got a few places to visit. And I’m definitely going to need a strong hand.”

HR chuckled a bit, holding his cup of java close to him. “I’m sure you can handle it on your own. You’re a strong, independent, and intelligent female.” His comments made the blood rush to your cheeks. You gently took a hold of his free hand, feeling stubbornness wash over you.

“Yes, but I want your help. I want you to come out with me today.” You pouted at him. The both of you stared at each other. “And I’m not going to take no for an answer.” You poked his shoulder as you stated that.

“…”

You smiled widely when he sighed in defeat, rolling his eyes slightly before setting his coffee down. You both knew his answer. HR couldn’t deny the amount of light that he saw twinkle in your eyes at how he gave in. He liked to think it was because he agreed to accompany you today, but… He pushed his thoughts aside as you giddily pulled him along as you grabbed one of his dark jackets that he had left on one of the couches. He hastily snatched up his drumsticks as well.

“Where are we going, little birdy?”

“We, my dear bookworm, are going to visit an old friend in Star City.”

***

After finishing up with Felicity in the Arrow Cave, you and HR bid her goodbye with the materials that Cisco had noted down for you, but not before she pulled you close and whispered “Go get’em tiger” in your ear, pushing you in HR’s general direction which caused you to stumble forward with pink cheeks. Said man looked confused at the exchange, you stuttered out that it was nothing. Felicity and HR had gotten along well enough, causing something to stir slightly inside you. But you shook those feelings away. Felicity sent Cisco a quick text message once the two of you left, feeling happy for her close friend, who sadly remains oblivious to the signs of love. HR seems like a nice enough guy, not as shady as Eobard Thawne. I just hope he doesn’t break her like all the other guys she’s been with before. Even Felicity had noticed the way HR had looked at you. The genius hacker pursed her lips and went back to monitoring the city.

He does have to admit that leaving the labs today was a good change in scenery. HR didn’t feel as cooped up as he initially did. Leaving Star City, a thought came to you as you and HR entered downtown Central City. Cisco had also given you a grocery list to complete since him and a certain speedster were always running out of things to eat in the breakroom. I swear they have bottomless pits in their stomachs. A literal void of absolute emptiness that’ll never be satisfied. And how many freaking things do we need to buy??? HR and you had both agreed to drop off the tech pieces at the Labs for Cisco before completing the errand run.

“HR?”

“Yes, little birdy?”

“Why do you always call me ‘little birdy’?”

“Is that the first question you wish to use?” He perked an eyebrow up at you. I feel like a Djinn about to grant three wishes to the one who released me from my lamp prison.

“… No.”

“Then I guess, my secrets shall remain in the depths of my being.” HR watched a pout form on your face, and he had to force himself to look away. Clearing his throat, HR asked, “Where to next?” HR made sure the leather backpack of tech Cisco needed was securely on his back.

“Apparently, we have to do the Team’s grocery shopping today,” you sighed in annoyance, running a hand through your locks. Checking the time on your phone, you chewed on the inside of your cheek. “I was hoping to at least have some time today to drop by CSMC.”

The CSMC? HR furrowed his eyebrows in confusion. “What do you do exactly?”

“Me? Well I’m a Computer Scientist, guess you figured out that part from my expertise with computers.” You laughed a little at yourself, not noticing the graying of the clouds. “Felicity’s two years my senior back in grad school, she taught me all the ropes in coding and hacking. When I finally graduated, we both had big dreams for the future, one of mine was to fund an establishing tutoring program to encourage more girls into careers involving computer science, robotics, and mathematics.” HR grinned at the notion, readjusting the strap of the backpack. “Felicity soon joined me in my endeavors with advocating for younger girls while pursuing her own and ever since then we’ve been visiting CSMC when we can. Society is changing and people are beginning to understand that these fields aren’t just for men, but for all people of various backgrounds. Central City and Star City work in collaboration to keep the centers running.”

HR was a bit speechless, the capability of your thoughtfulness seemed to know no bounds. “I shouldn’t have expected any less from someone as intellectually gifted as you.”

You glanced up at the taller man, a slightly humorous look on your face, “HR, I’m not smart. I just try to work really hard. I finished school at the bottom of my class actually. Hell, Cisco catches my mistakes still. It’s a miracle that I even got hired at STAR Labs. I’m not perfect really.”

“But you’re good enough that you’re able to work wonders with Team Flash. Saving lives, disabling villainous security systems. You really are an incredible soul.” I can’t do any of that…

I bet you’re incredible too, you just don’t know it yet. You pursed your lips smiling up at him, one that he returned before nudging you with his elbow. You giggled and nudged him back before walking in silence once more. “I think I know what I want to ask for my first question.” HR quirked a pesky eyebrow at you, his smile turning into a wry smirk. He pocketed his hands as you both seemed to lose track of time.

“What was your life like back on Earth-19?”

HR felt his blood freeze in his veins at your question. HR had stopped, causing you to stop as you found yourselves a few blocks away from STAR Labs. *The truth would come out sooner or later. A haunting voice echoed at the back of his mind, mentally presenting his nighttime demons that revealed themselves in his dreams. All of it.

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