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aiyexayen · 2 years

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Ships, Word of Honor:

-JBY/ZZS

-Gu Xiang/Gao Xiaolian

with or without poly elements with the canon love interests

(Went to send this and all possible ships instantly fled my brain)

two ships i already ship!

Jing Beiyuan/Zhou Zishu

1. What made you ship it?

seriously, i just can't with these two. of all the things zhou zishu was willing to do and put up with and lose--all the way up to the end--in service of jin-wang, out of loyalty to his word, beiyuan was the exception. to the point of helping him escape, covering his trail, keeping his silence. he cared enough to do that for him, to never falter or go back on it, even if it meant essentially never seeing him again or knowing anything about him again. he never sought information about beiyuan, never risked exposing him for a fraction of a second.

and the amount of trust involved, on beiyuan's end, that this would remain true. the amount of care he, in turn, had to feel, that nothing could budge him from the safety of where he'd fled--except for zishu. zishu could budge him, could get him to come down and risk so much just to be at his side, just for the chance to help save his life.

years have passed, with no word spoken between them. much has changed, much has happened, much has been lost. but beiyuan came, even without zishu reaching out himself. he understood immediately what it meant that zishu hadn't reached out himself.

and though zishu wouldn't've asked it of him, he also didn't write back to prevent beiyuan coming once he knew he was, because he knew how useless that would be. and he even believed that beiyuan (and by extension da wu) wouldn't risk it unless it was worth it. trusting him to that extent.

the things that they would risk for each other, the place they hold in each other's hearts in a way that time can't touch. how well they know one another, and understand one another, in ways that also cannot be touched or changed by the passage of years.

and when they see each other again, without hesitation it's zishu and beiyuan. it's familiarity, and teary eyes, and so few words needed. just a simple greeting in an unsimple circumstance for the sheer joy of being able to use it again and the mutual acknowledging that this is somehow par for the course of their relationship.

2. What are your favourite things about the ship?

the things they'll risk and give up for one another--deeper than recklessness, things that shake the very foundation of themselves. the devotion. the loyalty. the trust, built so strong in such intense circumstances, between people who did not see themselves as good, that neither could imagine it breaking or fading. the mutualness of it all. the lack of jealousy (don't get me wrong i like a good jealousy now and then). the total understanding of each other's natures that they carry so deeply it holds true in spite of time and change, and proves itself so. the acceptance they have for each other's life paths and choices and their acceptance of the things they do for each other, things they'd try to reject if it was anyone else.

it doesn't particularly matter to me what assortment of platonic and nonplatonic it comes in, either, and in what combination with their respective husbands; it's very versatile to me because it's just them, one way or another.

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

i have no idea what the prevailing opinions are on this ship, so i can't say. but i haven't seen anyone really mention them being zhiji. which i basically just take as a given.

Gu Xiang/Gao Xiaolian

1. What made you ship it?

it's very easy to get me to ship anything. i mean, i saw two girls on screen and pointed and went "look, a ship" and then thought about it a bit like, "yeah a good ship actually."

the above pictured scene certainly helped, though. i see one character in bed and another character leaning over them and brushing their hair back and i immediately 👀 but then i see said second character get really, really close, close enough to share the same breath, and the first character is looking at them mere centimetres away as they lean closer and closer in meanwhile they've got a weapon hidden in their hand because this was all a ploy to get rid of them actually but when push comes to shove they find they can't bring their hand around to do it-- 👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

2. What are your favourite things about the ship?

there's a not-dissimilar appeal to this that there is to caoxiang--someone who is very bright, and trusting, and optimistic, and caring, and Upstanding, and good, and prone to seeing the good in others meets... well. a-xiang. who is intense, and spirited, and speaks so freely and carelessly, a wild girl, distrustful herself, but also good in spite of everything and quite in need of someone who can see that.

i particularly like it with xiaolian because unlike fellow lifetime orphan and spoiled babie cao weining, xiaolian carries a lot of responsibility and weight in her sect and that would simultaneously bring out some of the capacity for that in a-xiang as well as give her someone who is simply very good at caretaking for a novel experience of being taken care of.

gao xiaolian in particular looks after her father and does her best to help ease his troubles and be a good thing in his life, balancing her privileged position in high rank and favoured closeness to be able to talk back at him sometimes, with her loyalty and willingness to carry out or convey his orders no matter what. i think a-xiang has a lot of that wrt her zhuren in similar ways, and whether or not they ever commiserated about it they could at least understand each other quite well, and the relationship that has shaped a large part of their respective lives.

i also think xiaolian deserves to set something on fire and a-xiang would a thousand percent get her there.

3. Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

i am deeply unaware of any opinions anyone has on this ship at all. it might be unpopular that they even are a ship. i don't even think i've read any fic about them, i just sit and ship them in my head like a goon.

#jing beiyuan #zhou zishu #gao xiaolian #gu xiang #word of honor #my meta

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therealvinelle · 3 years

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Hi! I was reading through your meta (which is reeeeally interesting) and noticed you said you don't like Eleazar? I was wondering why that was?

Tumblr ate this ask when I had almost finished it and I hate everything. Also, thanks for the compliment, I’m really glad you like my things.

Now to try and remember what I wrote about Eleazar…

I think Eleazar is a disagreeable person whose gift wasn’t useful enough to warrant a place in the Volturi guard, and Aro jumped on the Carmen-shaped excuse to give him an honorable discharge.

To start with the gift, we see him use it twice and neither time is particularly impressive.

Siobhan Siobhan has the power of reality manipulation. Her gift is noticeable enough that Carlisle is certain she has it, so when he gets Eleazar and Siobhan in a room together he pulls Eleazar over to see if he was right. Eleazar squints at Siobhan. And he squints. Finally he says, «I’ve got nothing.» Now, gifts are an iffy, complicated matter everyone has their own theories about, but I think that at the end of the day we can all agree it’s a binary, you’re gifted or you’re not. Some gifts may be weak, but those are still gifts. And maybe someone will touch the gray zone of «is it a gift or is Johnny the vampire just really good at juggling?», but Siobhan has the power to manipulate reality, and she must do it a lot for Carlisle to have come to suspect it in the first place. She has a definitive and powerful gift. And even if I’m wrong about gifts being binary, if Eleazar wants to be useful to Aro he should still be able to say: Yes, this person has a gift, or no, this person does not have a gift. Sadly, he is not. When brought before Siobhan he says «She could have a gift, she could also not have a gift.» This means he hasn’t detected her gift, which is bad enough by itself. Being able to tell if someone has a gift or not should be a dealbreaker. The way he answers, though, that she could very well have a gift he doesn’t know about, makes it clear that people having gifts he couldn’t detect has happened enough for him to be open to the possibility that the gift there, and he can’t see it. In other words, Eleazar isn’t reliable for detecting gifts and will give Aro false negatives.

Bella This is an aside but as it’ll inevitably come up later in my blog I’ll just drop here that I think Bella’s gift is something more complex than a shield. She has prophetic dreams, hallucination!Edward, and there’s a weird inconsistency as to who is blocked by her and who isn’t. I think her gift is self-preservation, and the shield is one of its manifestations. Anyway, onto discrediting Eleazar. (I’ll be pretty closely paraphrasing what happens in chapter 31 of Breaking Dawn, but since the interaction goes on for several pages I’m not going to clutter this post by pasting all of it.) To his credit, he does notice Bella right away, and he identifies her as a shield based on the fact that he gets this sense of nothingness from her. This is all he can do, however, and I can’t stress that enough. He assumes that she can block Edward, but he’s shocked to learn that she can block Aro. He’s just as surprised that she can block Jane and Alec. He has to interview her to deduce exactly what her gift does, which again has nothing to do with his gift. Anyone could ask questions, in fact Aro found all this out two books ago, without the help of Eleazar. Eleazar then starts musing aloud about who-would-win in a Renata vs. Bella showdown (more on that later), which is as tactless as it is revealing. The guy genuinely doesn’t know, and it’s because he doesn’t understand their gifts well enough. Eleazar’s power means he can tell Bella that she has a gift, and he knows roughly what it is. He muses that usually he can’t even tell that much, which again is quite damning. He can’t tell her exactly what she does without a game of 20 questions first. She gives him more information than he gives her, which he then regurgitates back to her with slightly different wording, and everybody claps. «My god, Eleazar, you’ve done it again!» (No, really, this is pretty much what happens. Eleazar brought no new information to the table, yet he blew Bella and Edward’s minds.) It’s all fun and games to do this for Bella and Edward, as they for various reasons genuinely didn’t realize she had a gift. For Aro, who figured this one out on his own, one begins to wonder what Eleazar was bringing to the table.

Carlisle Bonus bullet point! I’ll make this one brief. I believe Carlisle in canon has a gift he’s unaware of (Yes, I have a post planned, but it will get ugly long so god knows when it’ll come), which makes him another one of Eleazar’s gift detection fails. In short, I think he’s extremely charismatic, able to win over anybody. To list a few examples - he has an extremely diverse set of friends who in Breaking Dawn are willing to lay down their lives for him, Jacob muses how his instinctive hostility around vampires doesn’t apply to Carlisle, and vampires are terrifying to humans (don’t be fooled by the movies, people) yet Carlisle is able to work as a successful doctor, meaning his patients don’t mind being exposed to a killing machine even when they’re at their most vulnerable. He’s able to keep his family of sociopaths in line. There’s not a single person in the Twilight ‘verse that dislikes him. (Billy and Caius excepted, but Billy has no direct exposure to him until late Eclipse, and Caius is responding to a coven that’s potentially threatening the Volturi) People are free to disagree with me on this one, but if I’m right (and I have a lot of book quotes as well as a theory on what gifts even are to back me up on this one. I’m right, damnit!) then Carlisle is another gifted vampire Eleazar failed to detect.

So. We’ve established that Eleazar’s gift will yield false negatives, and that he can’t tell you much about the gifts he does detect.

I think his power is to point out the obvious.

Which means that Aro’s eyelid was twitching slightly, but alright, Eleazar could still be useful.

Unfortunately, there is the matter of weighing up your pros with your cons.

The Volturi are, at the end of the day, a group of people who live in a commune together. Coven, guard, evil minions, call them what we like but they’re exposed to each other and some sense of agreeability is required. And Chelsea is not omnipotent.

More, I imagine that in a coven as large and old as the Volturi, they’ve developed a culture of their own. This means that newcomers will need social awareness and a willingness to fit in.

Eleazar, from what we see of him in Breaking Dawn, appears to lack both.

It’s in the way he speaks of the people he used to work with. It’s utterly impersonal. He tells us how their gifts work, no more and no less. When he speaks of Aro, he speaks only of actions Aro took and orders he gave, nothing about the man’s personality. Now, considering the context, he was speaking in a context where Jane’s thoughts and feelings were far from relevant, but it’s still notable.

Also notable is the fact that he has no issue contemplating a Renata vs. Bella scenario, even though this would mean the deaths of two people he worked with for years. Perhaps it’s a thought exercise, but it’s not a thought exercise I would have gotten into when it was days away from becoming reality. If Renata can’t deflect Bella’s power, she and Aro die.

I’ll put it this way - I don’t think he’d do a «who would win» like this involving Carmen.

At no point in the book does Eleazar show any concern for the eventuality that members of a guard he used to be a part of may get killed.

It seems he didn’t form personal relationships with the rest of the guard. I suspect he considered himself... if not quite above them, then still someone who could evaluate them. Their gifts is what he looked at in them. I also think it’s likely he asked Aro not to use Chelsea on him, which in turn would have made him stick out even more as there’s nothing making him and Volturi Guard Member X just click in the way I imagine Chelsea can be very helpful with. Which in turn means that the other guard members will feel close to one another in a way they’re not close to Eleazar.

Also… he’s just a douche. I’m sorry, but I don’t make the rules and the whole guy radiates douche. I can’t even point to a specific quote in the book, it’s just is.

I don’t think this guy never really fit into the Volturi guard, and his gift wasn’t useful enough to keep him. Aro was thrilled to have him at first, but as time went on and Eleazar proved to just not be all that, he eventually realized he had to get rid of him.

Because as others have pointed out before me, the Carmen excuse makes no sense. There would be no problem in one more vampire in the castle, yet Aro wouldn’t let her in and Eleazar had to choose.

It was a solution that sent Eleazar on his way with his ego intact, and no hard feelings towards the Volturi. More, Aro is on record doing this with it’s-not-you thing with at least one other vampire. Laurent wanted to join the Volturi, had nothing to bring to the table, and Aro used past association with the Romanians as an excuse for why Laurent couldn’t join rather than tell him to his face that he was useless. With Marcus, Aro, and Chelsea around, the Romanian connection isn’t a problem, meaning Aro was bullshitting.

TL;DR: Aro is the kind of person who’d lie and say his grandma died if he doesn’t want to go to your party, and Eleazar is the kind of person who’d say «My condolences».

#eleazar #aro #volturi #laurent #siobhan #bella swan #carlisle cullen #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #twilight #long post #Anonymous #ask

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motorcyclegirlfriends · 6 years

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man, i don't understand their insistence on shading lena so much(not her grey moral side, that's pretty cool and shows a yin/yang balance with kara), presenting her like a bomb ready to go off anytime. If they're so intent on making her evil why not actually have Lex show up, make her choose between her beloved brother and Kara so she can choose Kara and let supercorp be endgame like... i'm p sure the writers realize where it leads if they make Lena choose, so they just shade her "evilness"

They’re playing with the morality and darkness of the character because that’s who the character is.

Not who the person is—I’m not trying to say if you pop this person into reality that it’s inevitable that she’ll turn evil or even struggle in the same ways. I’m saying that when you take a character with her history and her issues and her fears you have to explore them for the story to work.

Who the character is defines what their story is about, and vice versa.

Let’s say you’ve started with an interesting premise and an awesome world, and all you need are some characters before you can get to the story. So you take your protagonist and begin throwing some of your favorite traits (and some other traits to play off of them in interesting ways) into a blender to see what sticks.

Perhaps they’re awkward, but funny. Insecure yet ambitious. Smart, but struggle with getting certain things. And then you go a little deeper. Where does the character’s insecurity stem from? Being socially awkward? Perhaps not. Perhaps you don’t feel you have a take on that idea that isn’t cliché.

Maybe the gaps in their intelligence, then. But why? It’s not interesting if it doesn’t go deeper. Absent parents who must be impressed for attention? Critical parents who are disappointed with anything less than brilliance? A formative experience in which the gaps in their intelligence resulted in something truly terrible?

You settle on something, and then you… write a story with nothing to do with their insecurity? I think not. The story is about your character, and your character is about this. (If you want your story to be about something else, instead create characters which are About that journey.)

Lena Luthor is about a deep ache, a need to be good.

Kara Zor-El Danvers is about finding home.

Alex Danvers is about being true to oneself.

We know this because of how they were built, the events which shaped them. Because of the setup before the real story begins:

Kara lost her entire world. Her home, parents, culture. Everyone and everything she knew. How could her story be about anything other than finding a home after that?

Alex had difficulty carving a space for herself as a kid because doing so would often result in Bad Things happening, and a heavy dose of perfectionism left her with very little room to be anything other than what she Had To Be. Do we not now want to watch her learn how to be healthy and to be assertive of her needs and to be imperfect and to just be?

And Lena. Lena Luthor, the emotionally abused kid in a family of terrorists, whose mother made her feel like she was never good enough, and who the world now never sees as good, full stop. Who fears becoming the monsters which hurt her above all else. Isn’t her story meant to be about recognizing and cultivating her own goodness to feel safe in her own skin?

Each of these characters strive to find happiness, but they all have different journeys to go on to get there. And these journeys examine the foundation of those needs to say something about them.

Lena can be good. Kara can feel at home. Alex can be true to herself. But, like in an essay, one must set up and address the counterarguments. This is where the story comes in. The story is the act of addressing the theme of the character’s counterargument.

If you have two characters in a fanfiction who do cute things with each other with no conflict internally, between each other, or otherwise externally, then you don’t have a story. You have a piece of a story (which people do love to consume anyway, because they’ve experienced the set up in canon that makes it feel satisfying).

But trust me, a 50 chapter fanfic of just this is not satisfying. Fluff only goes so far. It’s like eating only candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

The characters must struggle and then surpass these struggles in order for the story to say, with confidence… anything. If you want to say that the intelligence of your character doesn’t matter as much as their heart, you have to prove it. Give them an obstacle they try to solve using their head and show them failing miserably. And then show them getting back up and using their empathy or their will to win the day, instead. Without that first failure, winning in that way falls flat.

And then with each success, offer a different counterargument. Another obstacle.

Your character who lost her world—who you wish to prove that one can overcome great loss through—is happy? In a relationship with a guy from a sister planet to her lost world who makes her feel pretty normal and at home? Rip it apart. Don’t just take it away, but make her feel worse than she was before he came into her life. And then have her build her life back up from scratch, with another angle to the argument.

“What if you tear away that answer? Can she still find a home? If the Romantic Love is destroyed, what is left?” the villain inside all of our brains asks.

Answer the question. Answer it a hundred ways.

Tell us the wrong thing: Supergirl. Just Supergirl.

Tear it down. Offer another: “And if I don’t have Supergirl, what do I have?” “You got me.”

The villain asks another question: “What if her home becomes sick at its heart? What if it becomes foreign to her through its hatred?”

It asks more: “What if her relationships became strained?” “What if someone she loves dies?” “What if she feels she doesn’t deserve her new home?” “What if this physical planet were destroyed?”

Answer them. Answer all of these questions with your story until your audience believes, “Yes, of course. She’s home. She’s home.”

Because once the character wins, really wins forever, the game is over.

If Lena Luthor is good, believes she’s good, is impervious to temptation or moral tests and doubts and the whole world believes in her goodness (or she finally feels free from needing that), her story is over.

Until then, this is the character playground we’re living in. Lena’s issues are about trying to defeat the monsters she fears within and have been since day one. The story can take breaks from tackling this theme so directly (slow burn, baby) but it’s always, always going to come back to this.

But it’s not always going to look the same! And it doesn’t mean she’s Secretly Evil or a time bomb.

The question is, “Can Lena rise above her emotionally abusive and ideologically toxic upbringing and be Good, or is she destined to be evil?”

Sometimes it’ll be about Lena wondering if being intelligent and cunning means she’s like her mother in other, nefarious ways. Or if she is responsible for what her intelligence results in down the line. Or it’ll be about proving to the outside world that she isn’t what they think.

Sometimes it’ll be about making mistakes which hurt people and how she can still be good even if she’s imperfect. Sometimes it’ll be about learning to recognize the parts of herself which need work—emotionally, relationally, and morally—and addressing those without self destructing because of her fears. Sometimes it’ll be about the nature of goodness. Maybe one day, it’ll be about helping someone with similar struggles while staying true to the lessons she’s learned.

Often, it’s about how healthy love can help her be good, and how refusing that kind of love can set her astray.

So, to address what you’ve said, of course the writers know what Lena would choose, in the end.

(Though the question isn’t really about two people, or choosing who she loves more. Even if Supercorp were canon, Lena would still be dealing with this until the story was over. Supercorp itself would be a tool to answer Lena’s goodness question.

And even without the shippy angle, Lena choosing Kara is a no brainer. Their relationship is clearly valued by the show and by Lena, and she has addressed how wrong her brother is already. That’s not her current struggle, nor the hardest one she’d face at this moment in time. Now, throw the perception of betrayal into it via Kara’s secret identity, and you’ve got something a little more interesting.)

It’s just that Lena has to keep making these types of choices until the show is over. Otherwise, she’s just furniture. A setting. Her real story is over.

If you’re not interested in various angles of Goodness™, or if you just love the character so much you can’t stand to see her morality under scrutiny all the time, I feel for you.

Personally, I think certain beats are a bit overdone (and that some of the undertones—like Lena fearing her own intelligence, for instance—could have been highlighted more to make it more dynamic) and that what we’ve seen so far could have been drawn out over more time while other, less obviously core issue-related things are happening.

But generally, I like it. This question of goodness is what drew me to the character to begin with.

Not just because of the Lex comparison—although it is connected to it.

It’s because it’s a story about emotional abuse and how it can get into your head and nurture qualities you abhor but fear you can’t escape emulating. It’s about feeling all twisted up because of what you’ve been through, and the struggle to keep those demons from hurting others while they whisper in your ear that it’s all useless anyway. That you’re just bad.

That’s something I’m interested in seeing, and one I haven’t really seen told this way before?

But it’s not enough to have her fear being evil and then just be good anyway. That doesn’t represent the insidious nature of emotional abuse nor the real work one has to do to overcome it. It’s complicated, and I want to see it be complicated, because when she overcomes all of that it will mean something.

Because the villain in our brains are already asking these questions (doubly so if you relate to Lena).

“What if she does do something bad? Really bad? Does that mean she’s evil? That she was evil all along and can’t escape it?”

I want the show to say, “No. She can come back from this. Goodness is a choice.”

Because I fully believe that their intent isn’t to make Lena evil, it’s to prove that she isn’t. To subvert our expectations set up by what happened between Clark and Lex.

To say “No, this time friendship wins. Hope wins.” To refute that dread of inevitability caused by the familiarity of the story and, for Lena herself, that dread of inevitability because of who her family is and how she was raised.

It’s a hopeful show by design, and so it often has their main character try to get through to people, to change them for the better. Logically, this is the sort of story they’re going to tell, and personally, I’m here for it.

But it’s not going to go away.

#supergirl #lena luthor #long post #analysis: you're gonna suffer but you're gonna be happy about it #Anonymous

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