I rarely draw teru with this hairstyle

People who write andreil breakup fics are a different breed. I put those two through hell but they’re in hell together

Your Heart snippet

He didn’t move. Ragged, to her cheek, Eris said, “Not angry. Not”-   The bitten off word echoed, cleaved the ringing in her ears. For the space of a second Nesta couldn’t fathom, couldn’t think- there was only the burning imprint of Eris’s mouth, smeared across her skin.   “I’m not angry,” she heard herself say, small.   Eris exhaled. Eris leaned back, blown out black eyes searching her face. When it came, the depth of his voice was like a tide, carrying her away into quiet. “You are all that I desire. But I will not have you, when you taste of fury and fear.”   Nesta stared.   Nesta watched his bruise red lips curl, deprecating, a whole barren truth painted across his face for just her see. To feel, like looking in a mirror.   A light in the dark, a thousand sparks, the bond. Eris, his bared throat. Eris, cleaning, gentle, blood from her shaking hands. Eris laughing with Gwyn and chatting with Emerie. Eris, beside her, with her, her’s-   Nesta Archeron’s feelings had been too big for her mortal body, felt even now like they might break right free of her rising and falling ribs, expand outside herself until nothing else existed.   Eris existed, a whole second sea.

one more thing about the teen wolf movie, because i’m still not over how bad it was, and i’m taking these few things i liked:

there’s no evidence which would say that derek and stiles aren’t communicating together, on the contrary. when i watched this scene:

“you should be calling your son”, it sounds like a thing derek says more often, - possibly hearing it from stiles, (for my headcanon part - it could be that stiles and his dad had some small argument and aren’t speaking to each other, or avoiding talking.)

And later we even see sheriff's phone, where it seems the past few days hes been in contact with derek and other people, but there’s no stiles -

and that’s why it would be funny to think derek has to listen to both of their sides of their whatever-disagreement,

stiles would be every time like, “he still hasnt called”, so derek could be telling sheriff hes tired of his shit and “can you just call your son? not any fbi agents but specifically your son? thanks, yeah he will be visiting next week, im not gonna say more, you both need to sort it out, at least for eli, so you dont argue in front of him”.

-

and another thing is the jeep, of course, the jeep.

which ofc, derek doesn’t hate it at all, and we find out in the end how much he doesn’t hate it.

(istill can’t believe this is a real line they said in the movie, but given what other things they’ve said and done in this movie, okay..)

-

this part in 4x1 is probably the last thing i watched and remembered from the plot, so i will take it as stiles’ decision to never abandon the jeep, and how much it means to him, even with whatever happened in the other two later seasons:

like, tell me stiles knew he wasn’t going to be around in the town for a while bc of his internship, so he left it at home, thinking it will just.. stay there.

but derek thought otherwise - he wanted to keep it running, to fix it.

it’s like this important thing, the jeep, that connects their family, and now it’s eli’s, and derek is still annoyed about it (because he’s alive), but also amused that really that car is eli’s favorite thing just like it was for stiles (and just like derek in that metaphor, it won’t stay down, it keeps running, because again, derek is alive in this version, and everyone is happy and okay. ♥)

Fic Snippet!

“Are you out of your mind?” Zuko rushed across the courtyard and bore down on Aang with an intense, almost palpable fury. “Do you know how badly you could’ve hurt her?”

“I was just…I didn’t mean to-“ Aang stammered.

“Fire is not a toy!” Zuko bellowed at him. He turned to Katara, examining her for injuries. “Are you okay?”

“I’m alright,” she assured him, her voice shaking. “I’m fine.” She was trembling visibly, and there were singe marks on her clothes, but she otherwise seemed unharmed. Zuko turned back to Aang, how was looking down at his feet in shame.

“What were you thinking?” Zuko demanded.

“I don’t know,” Aang mumbled, kicking at the ground. “I was…mad.”

“About what?” Zuko was absolutely bewildered. “What could Katara possibly have done that you thought it was a good idea to do that?”

“Nothing,” Aang admitted sullenly. He didn’t say anything after that. Zuko glowered at him, took a few deep breaths to quell his own anger.

“You’re going to clean this mess up,” he said gesturing to the torn up stones, dirt and cooling lava. “Then you’re going to do 100 fire squats. Then you’re going to work on your forms for an hour. And I don’t want to see so much as a curl of smoke out of you. You’re not responsible enough for fire. Understood?” 

“What? That’s not-“ Aang’s protests died on his lips when he saw Zuko’s expression.  He huffed, kicked at stone, and finally nodded.

“Get started,” Zuko ordered through clenched teeth. He turned back to Katara, who was watching the exchange. She was still shaking a bit. Zuko draped his arm protectively around her back and guided her away. He glanced back once more at Aang, and almost rolled his eyes when he saw the younger boy still moping at the ground. It was hard sometimes to reconcile the awesome might and eminence of the Avatar with the reality of Aang, the child.

“I’ll be back,” he warned Aang. “Have this mess cleaned up. And don’t even think about asking Toph to help.” 

I know canonically, the Lava Fissure Incident takes place while Zuko and Sokka are rescuing Hakoda, but I wanted to have Zuko see and react to it. Personally, I think it was another accidentally accurate depiction of how unready Aang is to be the Avatar. And it is also another incident that the narrative decides not to call Aang out for, so the chances of him growing from it are...well, we all know how things turned out in LoK.

Roy loves to hold hands

Absolutely adores it

It makes him feel close to his partner, let’s him feel connected and soothes his protective instincts when out amongst crowds.

It’s not about whether his partner needs that protection, Roy just needs to provide it and being allowed to hold their hand lets him keep them close and move them when necessary.

Keeley had understood intrinsically what his holding his hand out meant, they hadn’t even needed a conversation about it, she’d just taken his hand or his arm, or both, and stayed close.

He has to chase Jamie anywhere they go

Not just because of his knee, but because Jamie is a butterfly. Socially and in his flitting rapid movements as his mind leaps from one thought to another

Amsterdam had given him a taste, but they’d just been friends then, and barely at that, now, as boyfriends, (they’re keeping it quiet for now, though all the important people know) he’s chasing Jamie so much he debates getting him a leash for outside the bedroom

He can recognize that holding hands in public isn’t keeping anything quiet, but he longs for the feeling of Jamie’s fingers slotted with his, the warmth of his body against his side as they walk and Jamie chatters about whatever that days hyperfixation is.

So he starts holding his hand out. Quietly, never remarking on it, or demanding anything, just waiting to see what Jamie will do.

It takes a few days before Jamie starts handing him things, a flower, his ticket for the movie, and on one memorable occasion a wad of cash to pay for dinner

They’d genuinely fought about that one, Roy is a provider at heart, and he always pays. Always.

Then slowly, carefully, Jamie starts to inch closer when they’re out.

Lingers at Roy’s side a little longer, and then a little longer than that.

He naturally moves to the interior side of the sidewalk now, let’s Roy open doors, pull out chairs, and Roy just steadily holds out his hand, waiting.

Jamie brushes their pinkies together, links them for a moment that nearly stops Roy’s heart before he’s distracted by a window display and then off rambling about a topic Roy didn’t catch, feeling like all his blood rushed to that one finger.

Jamie is never shy when they’re alone, or amongst the team, but out in public, out amongst strangers, he’s skittish.

Roy understands and it’s still infuriating, he’s not as chill about keeping their relationship “quiet” as he once thought

He’s proud of Jamie, that’s his lad, and he wants people to know that they’re together, that Jamie is not in fact up for a quick tumble, and will never be again.

(That ring in his sock drawer feels like a physical weight sometimes, but it’s too soon, he’s going to do this right)

But he’s trying not to pressure, not to move on his own timeline and run over Jamie’s.

So he just holds out his hand and (not so) patiently waits.

It’s after a match, they’d been nearly beaten off the field, pulled a win by the skin of their teeth and they’re all stiff and exhausted as they make their way home.

The crowds are still thick, Jamie still had his muddy kit on, got caught up with Beard and Rojas and just laughingly said he’d shower at home.

Roy is a few steps ahead of him, even though they’re going to the same place, and on a whim holds his hand out behind him.

Jamie locks onto his hand like Mjolnir to Thor, and their fingers lock together with an almost audible click, Roy’s heart nearly leaps from his chest, and Jamie uses the leverage to pull himself to Roy’s side, holding his hand and leaning into him, sweaty and muddy and grinning, and Roy can see the flashes of cameras and the click of phones and he can’t care, because Jamie is holding his hand and grinning up at him like he set the sun, and Roy is absolutely going to break out the bedroom leash when they get home.

Maybe even that ring in his drawer.

Oooo starstruck dee has little stars at the bottom of her feet! Are they just aesthetic or would they make imprints into the ground? (like pawprints)

exactly like that! though she's not the only one...

edit: might need to add some additional dialogue to this to make it more clear, but a clarification in the interim; he knows about his own footprints. he's just surprised to see something similar already there when he knows he's only just landed. he lifts his own shoe to confirm that they're not identical (and also to reveal this to the viewer). seems his stoicism beat off the clarity in this one, sorry 😭

Big fan of how Farcille as a ship is undercut by Marcille's issues with aging/death and her own elven biases and Falin's issues with undercutting her own autonomy to mask and the challenges faced by trying to break away from that mindset. Especially how these two facets of these characters ultimately serve as a blockage for the development of a legitimate romantic relationship. It's an interesting development in a ship that by-and-by is pretty vanilla all things considered (dark magic aside). The fact that Ryoko Kui portays that level of complexity in this relationship not only highlights her mastery of character development and worldbuilding but also is a great example of how something "vanilla" can be made complex or interesting if done in a way that is interesting.

does near every single post-canon DE fic out there need to be tagged ‘Sober Harry Du Bois’? i’m getting so tired of it.

do i expect every single piece of fan content to have to fully delve into the often-depressing always-complex topic of addiction? not really. sometimes you just want to write/read a silly fluffy romance one-shot, whatever. i get it. but i think my issue is specifically with the fact that for nearly every sillyfluffy au out there, there almost must be a ‘sober harry du bois’ tag. and it does feel very slapped-on more often than not.

i think to me it is an unconscious statement that nothing *good* can ever happen to harry du bois until he is completely and permanently sober. before solving the next big case, he has to be sober. before quitting the force, he has to be sober. before falling in love with kim, he has to be sober. before accomplishing anything, starting any sort of recovery, making any life improvement, he must first be sober.

sobriety as a goal, as a journey, and honestly as a concept in of itself is not as cut and dry as so many people think it is. and i think it would serve a lot of people well if they did some introspection on the implications of how nearly every single post-canon fic that isn’t dealing directly with harry’s addiction have him as completely sober instead.

if the plot of the fic isn’t going to touch directly on harry’s substance use (and again, i’m not demanding that every single fic should), why does that mean that sober!harry must be the default?

i think i am just tired of reading a casefic, a smutty one-shot, a fantasy au, whatever, where it almost seems that before getting on with the plot, the author feels obligated to first assure us that the harry we’re reading about is a Sober Harry. it’s established with a couple lines in the exposition, probably about his improved appearance, a tag up top, and then never brought up again; a checkmarked box. like the societal image of An Addict has completely prevented people from being able to imagine a person just, continuing to live life, while still struggling with addiction.

life happens, with all of its backslides and achievements, mundanity and changes, to people with drug addictions just as much as people who don’t. is a post-canon harry who isn’t sober not worth writing about?

i think so. i think the game we all played thinks so too. in fact i think that sentiment is woven into the game’s very core. i just wish i saw that reflected in our fan content more.

clown hours

new deltarune newsletter. i dont know how many characters are featured across the 50-ish valentines but i want it on record i only got queen and rouxls among mine. you will look at them

obviously toby fox knows my email personally somehow and knew exactly who to send me (joke. but also what are the odds)

Autistic Sherlock and Jonk Watson. What a pair they are.

Danyal Al Ghul's missed potential - this kid is not gonna behave like his canon self if he's with the league of assassins until his late formative years, and my reasoning why

(feel free to take this all with a grain of salt this is just my thoughts on it, this is all mostly amusing to me and isn't trying to be negative towards anyone else)

similar to how i was talking about how danny growing up in crime alley would affect him, demon twin aus with danyal al ghul make me laugh a lot (affectionate) because... whose teaching danny to unlearn all the ecofascism he picked up from the league of assassins? whose teaching him to be kind? to be gentle? Not the LoA thats for certain.

(you could plausibly say Jazz but she's only 2 years older than Danny and do you really expect a fellow child to properly explain why X is wrong to another child and have it be 100% effective? i don't doubt it'd help to an extent, but not in the same way an adult explaining it would)

plus a ton of other things, like whose teaching him to value human life? not the LoA. Whose teaching him how to adjust to living with American society after he ends up with the Fentons when he's 8-9-10? Who teaches him that killing is wrong, whose enforcing that?

(not the Fentons if you're going the neglectful parent route, and Jazz can try but i really don't think Danny is going to listen to her, a stranger who isn't even part of his grandfather's league)

How do you teach a child to value human life when the greatest development window for that opportunity has closed and he's already formed his own opinions?

You're not gonna get a Danny whose exactly like his canon attitude if he's staying with the league during his formative years (0-8 years old). you're not. You could get someone LIKE it, potentially, or someone who has traces of it or is similar -- like danny's wit and jokes and sarcasm, and on some level his kindness. but you're not gonna have a carbon copy. Development doesn't work that way. "nature" can only do so much in the face of nurture.

If anything, it doesn't even have to be a major change -- in the league he cans till be kind, but it's probably going to manifest in a different way than what is considered normal. Tough love, for one. But there's gonna be something that affects him negatively. Why make him 'always good/kind' when you can make him a brat who develops into a kinder (if spikier than in canon) person?

TLDR: Danyal Al Ghul would not be like how he is in canon if he's with the league until his late formative years -- not without any lasting pr permanent impacts from the league at least. Missed potential to make him an absolute nightmare like damian was -- especially in his early years when he first arrived to the Fenton house.

(this doesn't apply to danyal al ghul aus where he's either given to the fentons as a baby/is reincarnated/etc. this is mostly aimed for danyal al ghul aus where he fakes his death at like, 7-10 and somehow ends up, personality-wise like his completely canon self by 14 without any differences.)

(and even then if he's five or four, or even three, he would still be traumatized and influenced by the league. he'll just have more time to adjust. the sooner he leaves the league the more likely he is to be like his canon self, but not like an exact copy)

(more under the cut)

Anyways what I'm saying is that there is prime missed Danyal al Ghul potential to make him an absolute NIGHTMARE to the Fentons however way he ends up with them, just like Damian was with the Waynes! Cuz why does Damian get all the fun? Danny got the same training and endoctrine as him! He is also an ex-assassin! Why is Danny the only one who is 'well adjusted and non-violent' hm? Hmm?

Why can't he also be mean, and stabby, and a total stuck-up in some way or another? Have fun with his characterization, its prime opportunity to play play-doh and clay with him! If he starts out as X how does he get the personality traits of Y, and thus become XY?

Like take this with a grain of salt if you will, but make him arrogant. Make him an asshole! Make him a bad person at first! Because he will be! He's the blood son of the batman and you mean to tell me that damian is the only one arrogant about it at first? Make him stabby and mean even at 14 when he's begun to chill out! Have fun with it! If he's with the Fentons at any point past the age of four or five then he's gonna be a nightmare to handle because he still remembers the league and his time there.

(and while it gives him more time to chill the hell out, his time at the league is still gonna leave an impact on him.)

also what im saying as well is have him and sam potentially get along like a house on FIRE. Again, Danny grew up under the views of an ecofascist cult and nobody to challenge those views to him until he got to amity park at whatever age in late formative years he was at. He could be about as intense or even MORE intense about environmental awareness/rights than Sam is!

(also him being supremely unimpressed with Sam's wealth. he gave up a palace in the mountains for this town. because that's funny to me - like let his past have more influence on him! it'll be fun!)

you could have a danny who doesn't kill but doesn't fully understand the value of human life because jazz is like two years older than him and isn't that good at explaining why people's lives are important. he won't kill but he's not morally opposed to it. there's very little chance he actually gets bullied at school because he nearly killed Dash the first time he tried anything.

Danny could have scars, physical ones, because its implied in multiple canon that training starts at toddling (my best bet is 3 at minimum and ~maybe~ 2 but only on the later side of 2. Good fucking luck getting any infant under 2 to do anything you ask, ESPECIALLY assassin training. They're gonna stick the weapon in their mouth sooner than they're gonna do katas. This is coming from a daycare teacher.)

there's more examples of how danny being at the league during his formative years would affect him, but those are just some of them. he could have a sword! An appreciation for weaponry and nature. Maybe he still speaks all shakespearan and formal, does he still make bodily threats to people? If Damian is still threatening people at 14 why can't danny?

would you be able to give examples/explain more about how race only impacts gideon in the tlt-universe? not being facetious or condescending, genuinely asking. thank you!

Hi anon! If you mean my tags to this post, I wrote

#earth conception of race doesn't impact any character in the series except the canonically brown main antagonist

By which I mean my Worstie and main antagonist of the series, John Gaius (PhD).

I don’t think TLT as a series engages with race in any especially meaningful ways. It’s set in a post-Earth society with entirely different social norms, and there’s no concept of race and ethnicity within the population of the Nine Houses. Physical descriptions of the characters are scarce to say the least, and they rarely spell out the kind of features that suggest specific racial connotations, because the POV characters don’t seem to think it’s something worth remarking upon. iirc, it takes until halfway through HtN for the narrative to confirm that Harrow has brown skin.

[See also Tamsyn’s GtN characters description post. It quotes passages from the book, and you can see how minimal the descriptions are, and she repeats several times that her characters’ appearances are up to the readers’ interpretations. It just doesn’t seem to be a big concern of hers]

Then there’s John, who grew up in twenty-first-century New Zealand and IS explicitly Māori in a way that absolutely impacted his character arc. It's not A major theme of his Nona chapters, but it’s there if you read between the lines. The boarding school he went to, which IRL had a high percentage of low-income Māori students on scholarship. The depth of his climate anxiety, his uncompromising “Nobody left behind” stance before the cryo project was halted, and his fervent hatred of ‘the trillionaires’ afterwards... these are all informed to some extent by his background as an indigenous man imo, and so was the global reaction to his developing powers. The “We were going to put you fellas in jail, weren’t we?” the way his initial attempts at publications are all flat-out ignored by the scientific community and dismissed as culty gimmicky faith healing until he leans into it.

John being Māori is just one of the many pieces of his backstory, and far from the most impactful to what eventually went down, but my point remains that he is the ONLY character in TLT whose racial background 1) affects his story arc and 2) is relatable to the audience. Everyone else is ten thousand years removed from Earth, and I’m just not very interested in using racial identifiers when exploring these characters and their dynamics, because the characters themselves don’t care and neither does the narrative.

Some creatures are more difficult to perceive than others

This is coming up with Orym, and it came up with Yasha and to an extent Keyleth too (as well as many other characters; see tags). Anyway: there is never going to be a moment when those characters are not grieving. If you wait for them to stop grieving, you will wait until they themselves die - and to be clear I do not mean this in the sense of “the grieving spouse clearly seeks death so that they may be reunited”; I mean “that loss will always exist in their lives, and they will grow around it and find other joy and love, but there is no moment when the hole that person left closes and is gone.” You can interpret where those characters are in their grieving process, which is a complex and nonlinear one, and you may perhaps feel they’re not ready, but if you do, it’s worth asking yourself what “ready” would look like because it will not look like an absence of grief. More specifically to Orym, if you are rethinking this because there was a scene at Will’s grave, that’s a big part of the nonlinear aspect - how someone will speak about the death graveside, or how they may speak about it in specific places, or on anniversaries, is very different to their day-to-day experience with grief.

Which isn’t to say you can’t interpret Orym as still in, for lack of a better term, the full mourning period; I’m noting it both because it is a pattern in the fandom for characters who have lost spouses, and because within that pattern, the discussion seems to treat life after the death of a partner as a dichotomy of “grieving” and “not grieving”, in which romantic love is only possible when one is in the "not grieving" state, which is fundamentally untrue to life.

i find discourse around the rdr women so...fascinating and infuriating at the same time. because a lot of the time it doesn't seem like rdr fans want to apply the same level of complex analysis to the women like they do for the men, but when they do, it still doesnt seem all that well-intentioned or that it does right by their characters.

this is a very long analysis/spam/defense so be warned :,)

even though the majority of sadie's character revolves around the fact she not only lost her home and her husband and was thrust into a new life of crime, but was actively struggling with robberies BEFORE the events of the game, people instead choose to focus on whether or not she had feelings for arthur or whether he actions in the game were actually impactful. she helped saved abigail and john when no else would, she fought alongside the men against the army, she helped john set up a stable life, she helped rob the payroll train, helped ensure colm’s death, she fought alongside arthur TIME AGAIN and took over in a leadership role when half the gang was absent in the guarma chapter. to say that she did nothing more except “be badass” undermines all of these contributions to the story that she was either at the forefront of or helped bring to fruition.

in my opinion, abigail is the EASIEST character to defend out of any of the women, and yet somehow she receives the most backlash from dudebros. I lose ten braincells every time i have to read a theory post over whether or not she slept with other camp members besides john, whether or not she was a rat, and about how much shes a nag. the woman has not known a moment's rest in her entire life. by the age of eight she was working in a cathouse. she was a child prior to then scrapping whatever money she could earn at her young age in saloons and dive bars as a woman and child just to survive as a orphan. jack's birth was clearly not planned, and she has voiced multiple times her grievances at the circumstances of his upbringing. everything she does is for a better life for her son: a life she never had. her constant nagging to get john to man up and be a father is for her son's benefit, not her own. she even says so herself when she tells him that she doesn't mind if a relationship between them doesn't work out, but to at least try being there for jack. she can't work a job because she is a mother living a life of crime and danger; she can't afford to leave the camp and her son unsupervised. she still does her share around camp. why would anyone blame her for not wanting to return to a life that has made her miserable, especially now that she has a child who she wants to model a good life for? many people seem to somehow also forget that she herself was a child when she gave birth to jack; only 17-18. she is 22 in the game in a bad situation with the father of her child and financially. she is doing her best to raise her son when she is not fully equipped to do so. how can anyone even blame her for being skeptical of john when hes affectionate in the epilogue when for so long hes been distant? she does not even ask much of john--just to be there for him sometimes, and to live honestly. she is also incredibly kindhearted. comforting other women in the camp, offering a listening ear, taking care of john when hes injured. she puts in her share of effort when it comes to finding a job in the epilogue and maintaining beechers hope.

molly is a young woman who is presumably incredibly far from her home where her family is, and trying to navigate a way of life completely unfamiliar to her. her stuck up nature comes not only from the way she was raised, but also dutch's uplifting affection and presumed lovebombing in the early stages of their relationship. shes even been suggested to be somewhat sociable until dutch and her became somewhat of an official item, in which she grew somewhat of a bigger ego with a mentality that she was his right hand. she deeply depended on dutch for her stability in every way, and its evident in her eventual spiral. she hated being seen as weak and pitiful as somewhat of an outsider among outsiders. she seemed to be close to no one besides dutch, who repeatedly cut her off when she attempted to talk to him about her growing feelings of anxiety, paranoia and sadness. the loss of the one thing that had built her up, coupled with immense tragedy she just wasnt used to, and desperate for a semblance of respect and dignity that she had presumably been all too accustomed to, of course she was going to come off brash and confront dutch about his distant, high and mighty attitude. it's why by the end, she doesnt care if she is killed: there is nothing left for her. karen's comment about her pretending to rat them out for the sake of attention is also interesting in terms of their relationship and parallels, which i dont see ANYONE talk about.

karen very clearly struggles with...a lot. she has even said so herself when talking with molly. she struggles to accept help, evident in pieces of dialogue where she brushes off concerned gang members about her drinking (mary-beth, arthur, javier), and when she seems somewhat ashamed and embarrassed having to have been rescued by arthur in the valentine mission (SAYING EXPLICITLY "i dont much like being saved"). she struggles with believing people have good intentions/feelings toward her, illustrated in the way she's constantly rejecting sean, yet seemingly disappeared further down the bottle after his death, and her conversation with mary beth and tilly about the world having no equal and fair place for women. her negative experiences in the world as a woman could also influence her view of the world, perhaps being why she finds herself somewhat hostile toward feminist mindsets and why she, for a while, enjoyed the outlaw lifestyle: it was her little slice of freedom. her hatred for the rich can also be because she has experiences as a poor woman, perhaps some direct experiences in which rich people have negatively impacted her life. though molly and karen don't get along through most of the game, karen actually tries to step in and help her near the end, and its this action + defending her after her death that shows she was sympathetic toward her situation and on some level able to relate to it, both craving some kind of love beyond superficial things.

@/cryptidcr3ature said it very well in a post i reblogged recently: mary is essentially "her brother's keeper and her father's caretaker". she herself lives somewhere middle class with traditional notions of the time impacting her views on arthur's lifestyle and anything below those middle class standards being deemed as socially unacceptable (which is evident from the very first letter mary sends to arthur, in which she seems confused on what a polite term would be to refer to prostitutes, who were obviously thought very lowly of in the time). i also don't think its fair to criticise her condemnation of arthur's lifestyle when pretty much all audiences, contemporary and not, including members of the gang, acknowledge that it isnt anything pretty. killing is not fun. running from the law is not fun. mary was not only influenced by her father's views of arthur (a person that, despite being horrible, she still deeply loves), but looking after her own family, herself, and arthur's wellbeing when she ended their relationship + suggested they run away. she had given him an opportunity at compromise. perhaps the first time, scared and unfamiliar with his lifestyle, she had offered arthur an ultimatum: her or his outlaw life, but later was willing to also leave behind her brother and father, two figures that tie her down and make her life more miserable than need be despite loving them very much, in order to settle somewhere with arthur and start over. her asking for arthur's help comes from a place of desperation and excuse to allow herself some semblance of stability when she hadn't had it; at least not since her mother and husband passed. if arthur refuses to help her, she is incredibly understanding and sympathetic. she does not lash out. if arthur does help, she is immensely grateful, and even tries to bond with him despite their years apart.

this post isnt to excuse some of their more negative behaviours and aspects of their characters'-- but im saying that they deserve to be fairly treated and analyzed just like any of the rdr men. many of them are young. many of them have unique challenges as women. that isn’t to say the men have it easier, but their struggles and less prettier aspects of their characters are always met with more sympathy than the women. why do arthur and john get passes as reformed absent fathers and criminals? why does sean receive sympathy when karen rejects his pushy advances? why does hosea get a pass at being better than dutch when he still groomed younger members of the gang for a life of crime alongside dutch? why does dutch get a pass by having his downfall be justified by tough circumstances? lets just be fair