#everything trope and never does anything wrong or selfish or make mistakes' trope and i can't fucking stand it man
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elise critics annoy the fuck out of me tbh
#vent#thinking about this today#'her character is too flat / one dimensional' no it isn't you're just not paying enough attention or considering WHY she is the way she is#'she's selfish she wanted to choose sonic over the world!' and so what if she is selfish? she's a princess of a royal family#who never had a real friend in her life and never got a chance to actually LIVE and be a girl until she met sonic!#and on TOP of that - she's already lost her mother and her father. she's tired of losing people that are important to her!#she's a flawed character who has moments of vulnerability and impulsivity because she never was allowed to HAVE emotions!#and it grinds my freakin' gears when people try to come along and 'fix' her character - as if there was anything that needed to be changed#in the first place#no there isn't! you're misunderstanding her!#having characters - especially female characters - be flawed in media is so important#because 9 times out of 10 they always fall victim to the 'perfect girl who gets it right and is so much better than the male lead at#everything trope and never does anything wrong or selfish or make mistakes' trope and i can't fucking stand it man#its why i didnt really like princess peach all that much in the super mario movie. now THERE'S a one dimensional character imo#anyway i love when fictional women are allowed to be broken and flawed and ugly and be selfish and make mistakes and learn and grow from#said mistakes#i will defend canon elise until the day i die i stg#she's just a human being who was thrusted into an unhappy life and never knew real joy until she got a chance to experience it#and didn't wanna let it go
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I’m sorry to say this, but I wasn’t really impressed with S4 since I think the writers are pandering to a few ships and haven’t really looked at the broader picture... I’m not the best with words and sometimes struggle to put my thoughts into words, but I’ll try to make this as clear as I can...
Right off the bat, Tory and Robby SHOULD NOT BE TOGETHER just because they’ve both had trauma in their past and present, I felt like I was watching a re-run of the whole trope of Miguel/Sam and Miguel/Tory and it seemed anything but genuine... it’s too easy just to put that in.
I hate that we basically got a S2 S3 Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso when there could have been more character development there instead of feeling like it was like watching a broken record and they haven’t learned anything. It just feels like they’re going in circles and nothing will ever be fixed because they can’t grow up and make peace with the past.
I was also disappointed in Daniel’s lack of parenting skills in S4 (actually you know what, in the whole series) he was the same as in S3 and bypassed or detoured actually getting to the root of the problem with both Sam and Anthony, instead hiding behind the image of Mr. Miyagi and not actually talking to Anthony about why he feels the way he does, I felt like he never actually listens and tries to give advice that never really helps in the matter, and having had this throughout my life with one individual in particular (he’d give me advice about what I should do, but never listened to me about my problems or why I felt that way,) I have to say that it never fixed anything... also, Daniel talking to Anthony about Mr. Miyagi was just super annoying since Anthony was a baby then and would not remember, so that he still feels out of the loop and still doesn’t know Mr. Miyagi like Sam did... also, Daniel completely steps away from parenting when he side steps Sam’s trauma, forcing her into situations that at that level of trauma should possibly make Daniel think that maybe forcing Sam into situations involving or reminding her of things isn’t a good idea. Honestly I’d go as far as saying that, while I know Daniel wants the best for his kids, he’s acted in a selfish manner, putting aside his own family to fight his own ‘demons’ from his past... there were many times throughout the show where he could have at least taken the time out to understand Sam or Anthony’s points of views and he failed at it. Then in S4 he becomes a little controlling and puts borderline helicopter parent to shame with his hovering over Anthony and trying to control everything Sam does, because he cares and doesn’t want her to make the same mistakes he has... totally disregarding the fact that Sam is her own person and can think for herself... all in all, I think that Daniel’s real problem is Daniel himself...
Also, I hate when people demonize or degrade Robby for having his feelings about his dad just suddenly having a new family... for all you people who can’t imagine how that would feel, I can tell you it’s a complete and continual punch to the gut, it’s painful and confusing,you feel like you’re being replaced and what’s wrong with you if they’re wanting to do that? Robby is completely entitled to his anger and the pain he feels. Also, because of Johnny’s mistakes, he was robbed of a father and that bond that he probably craved as a kid, but he had to grow up to the sad reality that his dad was nothing but a disappointment. Robby’s constantly dealing with his trauma from both sides, his mom’s absent a lot, while his father is continuously abandoning him for others and his own personal struggles... Robby can’t catch a breath. The apology at the end of S4 was not enough, I feel Johnny skated around all of Robby’s issues that he was the root cause of. Robby deserves to feel the way he does, because his trauma is real and keeps getting slammed back into his face by everyone around him, and he’s working so hard at not becoming his dad, that he can’t ever catch a breath. Abandonment is a type of abuse, and Johnny has years of that to answer for, if he can put aside his own feelings and personal trauma, and just listen to Robby enough to truly understand. Johnny’s apology just seems hollow and I’ve heard those before. I can only hope that S5 will put to sleep the Absentee Parent Trope.
Another thing is the sidelining of the female character’s stories to just focus on the continual spiraling same old same old love hate rivalry between LaRusso and Lawrence. If Aisha came back to S4 she should have come back to the Karate or had a different story rather than being the occasional wise Yoda to Sam’s Luke. In other words, Aisha was a badass and Karate was part of her and her story... I feel like adding her in for one scene was just an afterthought and did not further her or her story, and they just put her in to further Sam’s rivalry with Tory. Also, that... I am SO sick of seeing the female rivalry started over a man... in a world where woman are subjected to this ancient male dominated society bull crap about having to be one thing and not the other, when we are told that we are strong but also that that strength comes from only our sexuality, and that women must fight to make anything of herself in this patriarchal society, the female rivalry trope is a cop out to the bigger problem... in a world where women are subjected to live as relatively second class citizens and have less rights to their bodies and other things, women should be raising each other up, not reliving this antiquated bull shit, and tearing each other down for a man. Women have worked too hard to just be a prop for the too patriarchal society and their societal values and beliefs. All the women in TKK and Cobra Kai (Ali, Carmen, Amanda, Tory, Sam, Aisha, Moon, Yasmine, Shannon,) are just used as ‘props’ to further the male dominated story... enough is enough. The show needs more female character arcs and plots.
A minor complaint is the absence of mentioning Tommy, no one, not even Johnny has even said anything about the fact that one of his best friends died. No one has given Johnny any sort of condolence or anything, there’s nothing... I’m not saying anyone has to, but it just seems to me like anything that was Tommy and the actor’s TKK and Cobra Kai legacy has been wiped away or that Tommy never existed... It saddens me to watch Cobra Kai without at least a mention of him as someone who meant something in Johnny’s life... while it was a bittersweet goodbye in Take a Right, I feel they also lost out on giving us a little more of that character. All in all, I wish someone would at least mention something about him. I get that they’re probably trying to make it a ‘Cobra Kai Never Dies’ moment, but not mentioning him just makes it seem like he never existed, and Tommy’s character deserves better. At least a mention.
I hate hate hate the fact that Daniel downplayed what Robby and his fellow Cobras did to Eli! First off, that is assault which Daniel, I guess, having had some of that same trouble in the past, just takes lightly... Eli deserves better than this. Daniel just casually mentions it before going right into the ‘I don’t blame you,’ thing, while basically totally excusing Robby’s part in all of it.
Also, Terry Silver really messed Daniel up, viciously manipulating him, hurting him, and abusing him... it’s no wonder why Daniel has all the trauma and PTSD from what he went through at the hands of one maniac. But I guess, it’s ‘no problem’ and that it ‘completely doesn’t affect Daniel in any way whatsoever.’ In fact it does... Daniel’s own trauma should not be so easily overlooked in the series.
Also, where are Jimmy and Bobby? I for my part would have liked to see Miguel or Hawk get karate instruction from Bobby or Jimmy, since I think they both need someone a lot calmer to teach them. Also, I think Bobby could have stepped in and possibly helped Robby, since he’s a calming presence in Robby’s all over bat shit crazy world... thanks Sensei’s with your childish rivalry and submerged psychological trauma that nobody tries to look at in depth...
What about Miguel!? Both Johnny and Daniel dropped the ball here...
If I think about more things, I’ll write them down...
#tkk#the karate kid#Cobra Kai#Cobra Kai S4#cobra kai#credit goes to the wonderful @wanderingspiritys for bringing Tommy up
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What are your opinions on the whole Rapunzel-Varian drama in S1 post Queen For A Day, especially with the whole "Rapunzel should've checked on Varian after the snowstorm" or whose fault it was for their conflict?
tbh… if i had to pick one single representative example of the tts fandom’s general inability to handle nuance in fictional conflict, it’d be the QFAD discourse™
because! while this isn’t to rag on anyone, if you pick a random person with an opinion on this question, chances are they will fall into one of two camps. either: 1) corona’s treatment of varian was horrifically unjust and everyone involved except him is a terrible person, or 2) rapunzel did what she had to do and varian’s anger is irrational, unfounded, and fundamentally unfair.
people in camp #1 tend to believe that rapunzel was simply being selfish and acting like a sulky child when she failed to check up on varian after the storm. people in camp #2 tend to point out that rapunzel was traumatized by the events of QFAD too, and believe that this justifies her failure to check up on varian.
but the thing is imo the conflict in QFAD + the rest of s1 is just as complex and messy as the argument cassandra and rapunzel have in RATGT, in that there is no One True Right Answer and no person who is one hundred percent “at fault.” the question of blame is… honestly sort of beside the point if you ask me. to break this down:
#1: rapunzel is a sheltered teenager with minimal social skills dealing with a national emergency halfway through her first unsupervised couple days on the job.
the girl has had like eight months tops of training for the monumental task of ruling a country. she grew up in a situation where the only choice available to her was how she would wile away her free time inside her tower; gothel exerted total control over every other facet of her life. and while she has a little more wiggle room now that she’s out of the tower, she is still basically living her life with all the big, consequential choices made for her.
QFAD was intended to be her first taste of true authority, while still being ultimately inconsequential. if all had gone according to plan, corona would have ticked along more or less on autopilot—just as frederic left it—while rapunzel got in a little practice making judgment calls about minor, unimportant things, like mediating small interpersonal disputes between her subjects.
nobody expected, and rapunzel was absolutely not prepared for, a legitimate national crisis to explode in her face out of nowhere. this was supposed to be pedaling by herself for the first time with training wheels and what she got instead is careening down the freeway on a motorbike at 95mph with zero warning. it is a miracle that she held things together as well as she did.
#2: varian is a child with an emotionally distant, unsupportive father who sets him up for failure.
he’s smart but he’s also fourteen. he has little if any formal training in alchemy, he’s figuring stuff out by trial and error, and he has zero adult supervision. his efforts have caused significant levels of destruction twice in only a few months—the exploding boilers in WTH, and his invention going haywire (with a little help from st. croix) in GE—and it’s implied that this is a fairly regular occurrence with him.
and yet quirin does nothing. he shouts at varian, shuts him down, and at several points orders him point blank to stop messing with alchemy… but he makes no effort to connect with his son or understand where he’s coming from; he doesn’t try to impose reasonable restrictions (like “don’t mess with volatile chemicals unless i’m there to help”) that would allow varian to pursue his passion while minimizing the danger; and he doesn’t create an environment where varian feels able to turn to his father for help. and then with the black rocks, he lets varian come along to see the king, but refuses to explain why he “lied” (/spoke in code) to the king, destroying any credibility he had in varian’s eyes and making varian panicky and desperate because it seemed like no one else cared.
so the end result is that varian feels like he has no choice but to sneak around behind quirin’s back. he can’t rely on his dad for help if anything goes wrong, but the situation is so dire that doing nothing also isn’t an option. he tries his best to be careful (before quirin barges in on him, varian is attempting to put just one drop of the amber serum on the rock) but even if quirin hadn’t startled him, a terrible accident was bound to happen sooner or later, and the responsibility for that lays just as much if not more on quirin’s shoulders—the adult in this situation—as on varian’s. the kid is FOURTEEN.
(i think a neat argument could be made for varian as a deconstruction of the teen/YA fantasy trope of the hyper-competent teenager with absentee parents whose absence allows the teen to get on with the important work of the high-stakes fantasy plot; but that’s a whole different post)
#3: rapunzel did the right thing, but lost control over the situation due to lack of experience.
it would have been wrong to abandon everybody in corona to run off into the blizzard with varian, and frankly it wouldn’t have helped quirin anyway. he was already encased in amber by the time varian got back to old corona, and rapunzel couldn’t have done anything in the moment had she been with varian then. the only benefit to her presence would have been to comfort varian—which is not a small thing, obviously, but it’s not in any way a reasonable exchange for the hundreds or thousands of lives that would have been lost if she left corona completely without a leader in the middle of a crisis. so broadly speaking, staying in corona was the right call.
however.
rapunzel was not in control during that scene in the palace. varian bursts in, panicking, explains his situation and begs for her help—and rapunzel just says, basically, “i can’t help you, there’s an emergency.” then nigel comes in and reinforces that, which makes varian freak out; he grabs rapunzel and shakes her, nigel signals for the guards in response, and varian gets dragged out of the palace while rapunzel pleads with the guards not to hurt him.
(sidebar: the hate nigel gets for describing varian as “attacking” rapunzel is unfounded. varian grabs her and shakes her roughly back and forth and that is, in fact, assault. nigel is not wrong to describe it as such.)
anyway, notice two the things that DON’T happen here:
1) rapunzel doesn’t offer up any alternative solutions. a more experienced or better prepared leader could have responded to varian’s plea with a plan of action, like: i need to stay in corona to oversee the evacuation, so we can’t leave right this minute, but cassandra will take you to ask xavier for advice right now and the minute it’s safe to leave we’ll go together to help your father. or whatever—the point is to engage proactively with varian’s problem, make him feel heard, and give him something productive to do so he isn’t just sitting around fretting in the palace or struggling back home by himself in the middle of a blizzard.
2) raps doesn’t challenge nigel’s decision when he summons the guards to throw varian out of the palace, which is something she absolutely could have done. she could have said no, i can’t go to old corona right this minute to help him, but we are not throwing him out into the storm again, he stays here with me. this is, again, a sign of her inexperience; she’s not used to being an authority, she’s never been in a situation like this before, and she’s under a ton of pressure—so when an older adult whom she sees as an authority (he’s her father’s advisor!) makes a judgment call, it probably doesn’t even occur to her that she can challenge it.
this is why i say that rapunzel lost control over the situation—because even though she made the Right Decision, she got a kind of awful outcome, ie varian being tossed out into the blizzard to struggle home by himself to deal with his problem without any support, and rapunzel inadvertently breaking her promise from earlier.
#4: rapunzel doesn’t immediately go to check on varian after the storm because she’s traumatized, busy, and trusts her father.
painter’s block is all about how the trauma rapunzel feels as a direct result of her decisions during the storm destroys her ability to choose anything. she feels so debilitated by the fear that she will make the wrong choice—because she worries that she chose wrong when she allowed varian to be sent away—that she can’t do anything at all, let alone find the emotional strength to go to old corona and confront her mistakes. and while she tries to process and move past this trauma, mrs sugarby exploits it in an attempt to force her to free zhan tiri.
the next episode, not in the mood, involves rapunzel being put under enormous pressure to entertain an irascible ally of corona’s while he and her father negotiate a trade deal with the threat of a war breaking out if they fail. NITM is a silly episode, but it has the highest non-magical stakes of any episode in the entire series. this isn’t an event rapunzel could have reasonably skipped out on for the sake of one person, no matter how much she cares. she’s slammed. she’s still being forced to prioritize just like she was in QFAD.
and in the third episode after QFAD, rapunzel is tormented by nightmares about varian and what happened to his father, so she presses frederic for information about the rocks and varian’s safety. and frederic assures her that everything is fine. he lies to her face about the rocks having been removed, and rapunzel has no reason to doubt him, so she relaxes… until varian contacts her directly, and she immediately jumps to help him.
#5: at the same time, varian has been forced into hiding because frederic is attempting to cover up the rock problem.
what happens to varian after QFAD is plainly unfair and unjust. his father is trapped in amber, the rocks have completely destroyed old corona, most of the villagers have presumably moved to the new land frederic set aside for them, and frederic’s secret police are crawling all over the village trying to suppress information about the rocks (and fred’s role in creating them). the blame for this lies squarely at frederic’s feet, and varian is right to be angry.
i believe that varian interprets rapunzel’s absence as a sign that she’s complicit in what frederic is doing, making his anger at her justified as well. he doesn’t have access to the information we do about why rapunzel doesn’t seek varian out immediately—he doesn’t see how distraught and shattered she is after the storm, or the high-stakes political nonsense she has to deal with, and he certainly doesn’t see her trying to pursue the matter of the rocks and varian’s safety with her father and being flatly lied to to convince her to stay put in corona. all he knows is that rapunzel kicked him out and now she’s ignoring him and her father’s agents keep chasing him away from his home, and he draws the conclusion that makes the most sense to him, ie rapunzel must be okay with all of this because otherwise she would be here.
and once he has that idea in his head, the fact that rapunzel immediately jumps to help him when he contacts her isn’t enough to dislodge it. he’s a scared, lonely fourteen year old boy looking at this situation through a purely interpersonal lens while rapunzel is an overwhelmed eighteen year old doing the best she can while juggling about a million things at once and putting varian low on her priority list because she’s been told by a trusted source that varian is fine.
they both make mistakes, they’re both missing important contextual information, and neither of them handles this situation in the best possible way. but neither of them is “at fault” in the sense of being purely in the wrong, and—imo—frederic and quirin hold the lion’s share of the blame here, because they had all the information, and they refused and refused and refused to deal with the black rock problem until it overwhelmed them both. varian and rapunzel are both just kids scrambling to deal with something that should not be their problem to solve, and both of them fuck up! (and even then—the best fred and quirin could’ve done was just be honest and upfront about what the problem was. neither of them had the means to fix anything, and neither of them was responsible for the very unfortunate timing of the blizzard. so it’s not as clear cut as everything bad in s1 happens because fred and quirin stuck their heads in the sand. a lot of it honestly was just sheer bad luck.)
a n y w a y, i think by s3 and after a lot of introspection, varian has figured a lot of this out, and that’s why he’s so quick to let go of his lingering grudge against rapunzel. he’s realized that at the end of the day, rapunzel was just as unprepared and lost in that situation as he was, that she’s not responsible for (and wasn’t complicit in) her father’s decisions, etc, etc.
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MAN. okay. i have to talk about this okay wow (spoilers for s1 & s2 of la casa de papel)
i usually don’t like characters like nairobi, or tokyo.
tough female characters are so often terribly written. soooooooo terribly written. they usually have little dimension beyond “tough woman who beats up people and flirts a lot”, and even if they don’t match the femme fatale archetype 100%, the “i’m a capable warrior but also a woman” trope can feel so tired imo. in a lot of entertainment, the empowered woman character is rarely very empowering. she’s hamfisted at best, and a caricature with no depth at worst.
but the women in la casa de papel? so far (and unless something goes very wrong midway through s3 lol) they’re all amazing.
nairobi? tough as nails who doesn’t stand for being demeaned or pushed around. she demands respect and doesn’t hesitate to call out anyone who mistreats her (or the people she cares about). but she’s compassionate, too. she’s a mother with regrets and mountains of guilt. she’s made mistakes, she’s not perfect, and her greed is why the police get so close to them at the end of the first heist, and why berlin dies (and had he not stayed, she could have been the reason more of them died).
she’s beautiful and headstrong and capable but she’s flawed and selfish too, sometimes in damaging ways. even the whole matriarchy scene, and her complaining about the patriarchy, could have felt really annoying and pandering, but it doesn’t. it’s not unnatural. it’s written in a way that makes sense for her character, and it gets the point across without beating you over the head with it. it’s totally organic.
tokyo? here’s a character that took me a little while to like but never could properly dislike either. she’s at the highest risk of falling into the femme fatale for the sake of being a femme fatale trap. she’s action hero levels of tough, kind of insane, and has that (excuse my language) “cold bitch” thing going on. she and rio cause 90% of the problems in s1 and so far s2.
tokyo is everything i usually dislike in female characters, like, to the letter. but weird thing about tokyo that makes her work for me is that she’s high-key SO unhinged that the crazy stunts she pulls feel right. she’s outrageous to the point that i can’t hate her, no matter how insane it gets, or how mean she is. she’s a delightful stick of dynamite and the moments when she is vulnerable are beautiful. you can see just how broken she is. i don’t quite know what makes her different from the femme fatales i dislike, i just know that something about her really works.
then there’s inspector raquel. like nairobi, her presence demands respect. she’s authoritative and clear-headed and what i love most about her is that she could have easily been the competent detective who gets bested by her personal moriarty. and, yes, she does fall in love with the professor, and, yes, again, her plans do get foiled many times by the professor, but it’s often because they’re situationally working on different playing fields. the professor had the time to be prepared for most anything while raquel has to figure out the game as she goes. she’s still extremely intelligent and capable and manages to get the upper hand by the end. the best part, though? her romance with the professor doesn’t define her.
she didn’t switch sides because she was in love with the professor. she would have thrown him in prison no matter how much he loved her, i’m certain. but she switched because she had begun to question just who she was protecting.. and i think that a character like her switching sides for the sake of morality is so, so, so much more powerful.
and finally there’s mónica who, on the flip side, did join the robbers out of love (or... stockholm syndrome, but lmao we’ll say it’s love, because i believe it was). imo she’s the weakest out of the primary female characters so far in terms of development, but even this doesn’t feel forced, and her personality isn’t sacrificed for the sake of being with denver. she still is her own person who makes her own decisions, and stands up for herself.
all this to say... basically, i think what lcdp does right is that these characters all still feel like people. they’re not filling a slot, or checking boxes. they’re fleshed out and they are people first before they’re anything else. it’s refreshing.
idk i started writing this hours ago, had to step away from the keyboard, and forgot a lot of my points. if you read this entire word dump, congrats! that’s amazing lol.
#big ol' word dump under the cut#bun watches la casa de papel#anyways nairobi could shoot me and i'd thank her#personal
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how do i ignore all the misogyny in the witcher books? they're much better than the netflix show storywise but there is so much gross stuff compared to what i usually read/watch
hi!! thank you for the ask, this is a very important topic to address, though i believe you are asking the wrong question. the matter is not how to ignore the misogyny in the witcher and other pieces of media, but rather how to confront it and face it head-on.
i don’t believe in making excuses for the media i consume when it has “problematic elements” to it. this isn’t meant to be taken as an excuse to “consume anything you like,” because i would not engage with something insidious in its nature (such as media that revolves around and is based upon harmful stereotypes or insensitive jokes and cannot exist without this, some examples of this are infamous things that i’ve seen discussed on this site like captive prince, cmbyn, and hazbin hotel). instead this is about when a piece of media is good overall in nature (the witcher has many anti-war, anti-violence, anti-imperialist themes and messages relating to family, childhood, friendship, and love) but has elements that are the results of the author’s personal biases.
i think before i address how to deal with the misogyny, i’ll actually define what misogyny exists within the witcher books, to be more specific about what we are talking about, and also to do the work of addressing the misogyny in the books:
how the women in the witcher are treated as characters and how they are depicted by the author.
there are a few good points in this subject. characters such as yennefer and ciri are very strong characters who receive a lot of development over the course of the series, and are main characters that are integral to the plot. they demonstrate both strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices. they have depth and are not one-dimensional characters, especially as they become more and more complex over the course of the series.
blatant sexualization of women when it’s inappropriate or irrelevant, descriptions of female characters’ looks or bodies that male characters would not have received.
bizzare standards for what is beautiful for a woman, including body descriptions (“triss’s waist measured 22”) and extreme focus on youth and the age cusp of around 15 to 18 as being the most attractive for a woman (stated in-universe, even though this could be excused as being what is normal in the 1200s, keep in mind that this is the author’s decision to impliment this standard into their society).
descriptions and scenarios of extreme violence towards woman that are gratuitous in nature and do not add to the story or have any relevance. (geralt being paralyzed with his knee during the stampede at the refugee camp in bof is NOT on the same level as yennefer being extremely tortured at stygga or ciri meeting “forest gramps” in lotl). some of this violence towards women is related to the male antagonists being misogynistic (such as leo bonhart) but a lot of it is just pure filler and is not necessary for the story.
majority of female characters do not get the depth they deserve, and some are pretty one-dimensional. the sorceresses are a good example of this, as the majority of them are shallow and manipulative. female characters are also just generally not given as much “page time” as male characters, for example compare how much depth and backstory regis and cahir receive to how much milva and angouleme receive. regis’ backstory is entirely irrelevant to the main plot but it’s extremely long, and angouleme’s backstory is more relevant to the main plot (she was born of cintrian nobility) yet it is extremely short. (one could make the argument that this is an effect of their characters because regis talks a lot and angouleme is still processing her trauma, but more could have been given to angouleme even if she is not extremely talkative).
the only canon lesbians in the witcher are not good people and are manipulative in nature, and the only canon f/f relationship (ciri/mistle) is representative of a turmultous, vicious time of violence, and is based upon sexual assault.
the gender non-conforming female characters who ARE good people,never have their gnc-ness treated with any depth, and it is insinuated that they are heterosexual.
male protagonists such as geralt and dandelion are both misogynistic at various times in the books, especially in the short stories. this is unlike when male antagonists are misogynistic, because it is represented as something wrong and is intended to characterize them as vile people. instead, geralt and dandelion say or do misogynistic things and it is treated like a joke or something normal, and not a flaw or something repulsive.
how to confront all of this?
the first step is to address it, just as the above list does, and discuss things that stood out to you and are definitively wrong, that the author should not have put in the story because it is useless and only serves to further misogyny in the real world. it would be a grave mistake to think of these things as “fine” and continue to view the witcher books as some kinds of perfect scripture. so many people feel that just because they enjoy something, they are not allowed to critique it and discuss parts of it that are uncomfortable or plain wrong.
to continue with this point, i think it is important to put the witcher into context as a fantasy series written in the 1990s by a white man who did not (to my knowledge) intend this series for such a broad audience and franchise that it has become. this is not an excuse for sapkowski at all, but rather i think it’s important to understand the origins of the witcher and how it came to be in the first place. this wasn’t a series made to be inclusive and diverse, it wasn’t intended to be “for us” in the first place.
i do not believe that there is MEANT to be any “positive representation” in the witcher because i don’t believe it is something that sapkowski was actively considering when he wrote the books. just because there isn’t good representation in the books does not mean they and everything related to them are not worth your time, but if you are someone desperately searching for good positive representation or someone who NEEDS to see representation of someone like them in every piece of media they consume, i don’t think the witcher books are necessarily a good place to start. this isn’t meant to deter you from reading or interacting with the books/book canon, but rather a fair warning about what the intentions of the books are.
i don’t think the books are a groundshaking work of art that are meant to inspire concepts such as diversity, rather it is a very specific work that in its true nature is an argument of a critique of popular fantasy tropes with additional commentary on themes of violence and family. so this is basically meant to say ‘understand what you are getting into.’
how to move on?
the main question which i answer is “is the root of this thing (a piece of media/a character/etc) something that revolves around the bad part, or was the bad part just thrown in there and is incongruent with the rest of the thing?”
the biggest example i think of tackling the misogyny in the witcher and still managing to enjoy it is with dandelion (lol). i think it’s every day that i have to reconcile with the fact that i genuinely enjoy dandelion as a character and hold a conversation with myself about which parts from canon i enjoy and which parts i don’t. his character at its core is not a bad person, he is meant to be an inversion of the trope of the slovenly and lecherous comic relief, and sapkowski succeeds in turning the trope on its head. dandelion is very loyal and committed, he demonstrates his worth in the narrative and doesn’t act with pure selfishness and greed. he is an inversion of all of the negative traits of his trope, but sapkowski also wrote in, like, a literal rape joke for him to say in the bounds of reason. how do you get over that? personally, i just go back to “is this congruent with the rest of the character or not,” and my answer at least for dandelion is no. the rape joke in the bounds of reason seemed entirely out of place to me, it doesn’t fit in with the rest of his character.
similarly, why does geralt sleep with girls who are barely 18 within the events of the witcher? how do you get over that? well, i don’t believe that’s congruent to the rest of his character, the POINT of his character, which is to protect young girls.
so i go back on my word of what i begun this answer with, and i tell you that i indeed DO ignore some parts about the witcher. but it is not a blind ignorance, an ignorance in which i do not consider the effects and i pretend like they do not exist at all. it’s a choice which i make and a process of logical steps that i follow, an understanding and an agreement i come to with myself and the media i interact with. i acknowledge the context surrounding the creation of the media, i acknowledge the effects that these elements had on their readers and how they relate to the real world, and how i know that these things are objectively wrong. i understand why they exist in the canon, and why i feel justified for choosing to take them out of what i regard as part of my experience.
it’s tempting to proclaim “canon is dead and we have killed the author,” but understand how the author’s personal experiences and biases have influenced the media that they created and which you now consume. you can’t take the personal biases completely out of the writing of the witcher and you have to acknowledge that they still exist in the text. even if you make up your own headcanons, it is still imperative to consider the issues that originate in canon.
what does this look like?
complaining to your friends who also like the witcher / on social media that you hate these parts of the books and explain why you hate them and why they are unnecessary
thinking about why these parts were written in and the context surrounding them
making your own rewrites / headcanons around these parts (ex: my idea for the rewrite of a little sacrifice)
making your own headcanons to establish what was not (ex: my headcanons for angouleme’s trauma and how it affects her in the present, headcanons about how the hansa becomes a family)
tldr: acknowledge why these elements exist in canon. choose to follow a process that will allow you to salvage the parts which speak to you while still understanding that these elements exist in canon and will never disappear. continue to like the canon without the parts that you understand are rotten.
edit: also the netflix show has some pretty misogynistic parts to it as well, yennefer and ciri have way less agency as characters than they do in the books. geralt literally coerces yennefer into sex in twn and treats her with absolutely no respect, and ran from fathering ciri solely because he was a dick. obviously this isn’t the point of the ask, but i think it’s important to acknowledge that twn has misogynistic elements as well and not pretend like just because twn was led in 2020 by a wealthy white woman that it’s progressive in any way.
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The world is cruel and unfair. My thoughts about the end of SnK.
This is a post about my feelings re: the end of SnK. I try to mix a bit of analysis and express where, in my opinion, it went wrong.
I’ve only read the last chapter once for now. Managed to avoid every spoiler until the official release. What can I say? I think this ending is disappointing and unsatisfying, despite not being The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Read. It’s serviceable at best, which by default is underwhelming in a work that has almost always tried to go above what we usually see in comparable pieces of fiction. Over almost 140 chapters, SnK offered its readers genuine emotions, either positive or negative, and, until this final chapter, managed to stay true to its themes. But this final chapter is basically a 4/10 or 5/10 ending in an overall 9.5/10 story.
I hope that, after the initial shock of the ending, I’ll be able to look back on it, not fondly, but with a bit more appreciation for some of its (too few) genuinely good moments. I also hope it won’t sour the experience of reading SnK too much for me. Of course, I accept the ending, I accepted it literally the moment I read it even though I saw it go further and further from my expectations and understanding of the story by the second. And obviously, I respect Isayama as a writer and genuinely cherish some parts of this manga.
But I won’t ever think this ending was good, and am going to try to explain why.
First, something quite subjective. I think the chapter lacked genuine emotion. I didn’t feel much of anything, except a crushing sentiment of sadness and a bit of anger when I saw Mikasa alone by Eren’s grave at the end. A lot of what happened felt either incomplete or forced, and often both. For example, I had imagined the moment the curse of Ymir broke would be the most beautiful moment in the manga, but instead it just... happened? This was supposed to be the peak of this story, the miracle that all these terrible sacrifices were made in the name of. I keep thinking about the moment the curse breaks at the end of Fruits Basket (a great read btw) and how genuinely emotional this chapter is even though the genre is different from SnK’s. Considering Isayama’s talent when portraying emotions, I can’t help but feel terribly underwhelmed by his version of this moment, which should have made us feel like everything was worth it, but didn’t.
Second, the pacing in this last arc (and especially post 123) was messy. I know it’s easy to criticize as a reader, but objectively, spending 7 chapters on the alliance going from point X to point Y and not giving the main character the spotlight he deserves is a major mistake. I kept holding hope that all of the buildup since chapter 130 was going to amount to the last 2-3 chapters slapping extremely hard (like, say, the Grisha-centered chapters in return to Shiganshina, or the Reiner-Eren conversation in Marley), but for the first time, Isayama disappointed me in that regard.
While mostly uninteresting fights got dragged out, some plot points were almost forgotten. Some setups never got a proper conclusion. Eren barely got the time to explain his motivations or what he saw. Historia’s conversation from chapter 130 never got an ending. The parasite and Ymir literally disappeared even though they were the focus of the last two chapters before this one. Some memory shards went unexplained. We never got to see Grisha’s death even when this panel exists?
Regardless of the actual things I don’t like in the ending, I think it would have been more palatable if this last stretch of chapters had been given time to breathe, if only to expand on the characters’ motivations or give us more interactions (for example, Eren’s talks with Annie, Reiner, Connie...).
Third, characterisation and themes. Oh boy. My favourite character is Eren, and my other favourites are Mikasa, Armin, Reiner and Zeke. I think that among these five, the only one who got a true, complete character arc was Armin (and arguably Zeke as well, though the lack of resolution between him and Eren is a hate crime towards me, specifically). Reiner had a great character arc overall but his last appearance in the manga was distateful and a regression. I won’t expand on it.
Mikasa... my poor girl. My most charitable take about her ending is that Isayama wanted to portray her inner strength, the fact she can always live on in the face of adversity and cherish her own life despite the setbacks while remembering those she loves. Well, I guess he succeeded. But in a weirdly unsatisfying way, because this renders her character arc entirely cyclical. Those qualities have characterised Mikasa since the start. It’s established since the very first arc that she’s prideful, brave, and that she has the inner strength to live without Eren if he ever disappears from this world. But the way Isayama made it happen? Having her kill him and then cry next to his grave in the final panels of the manga is what her arc amounted to? I had always hoped that Mikasa could actually save Eren from himself and show him how to live and share his burdens with him (all things that have been foreshadowed in the manga itself, btw). I thought her tattoo would hold some significance, either by
A/ being transmitted to her potential child with Eren were he to survive (didn’t happen)
B/ foreshadowing a future political role for her as a bridge between Hizuru and Paradis (didn’t happen, and furthermore she’s the only alliance member living in Shiganshina and is deliberately separated from the rest of them)
C/ having some kind of supernatural power that would allow her to change the game, were she to enter paths or reach the coordinate (didn’t happen).
So what? In the end, Mikasa’s Big Choice amounted to giving up on her love (but also not really because she’s never going to be able to move on and isn’t allowed to feel anything else but pain), resulting in her losing her family for the third time and never being able to welcome Eren home. This is horrifyingly sad. I’m also frankly disturbed by the sort of ~parallel Eren establishes in this chapter between Ymir and Mikasa, about the topic of love. So the message of SnK was that... love is a chain? Everything happened because Ymir was too attached to the King and couldn’t leave this world, so Mikasa had to show her that she could give up on love for the greater good by killing Eren? I wish I just misunderstood this but that’s what I got from the chapter and I hate it. Also, I really thought Isayama was above the traditional “female character who sacrifices everything and never reaches happiness but stays quiet and endures for the common good” trope. I was wrong.
Mikasa might have been the centerpiece of the story, but she got the short end of the stick. At this point, the writing pretty much does the opposite of what it is supposed to by inadvertently justifying the validity of Mikasa and Eren’s “selfish” dream in chapter 138. Initially, I thought that their dream was wrong and not something truly enviable because in it, they led a life of guilt and regret while knowing full well that Eren would end up dying anyway, leaving Mikasa behind, alone. Naively, I thought that surely choosing the responsible path would be more rewarding for Mikasa, one way or the other. But as it turns out, the path of selflessness also led her to a life of solitude, except now she carries her burdens all on her own without having tasted happiness. Amazing. I genuinely do not know how I am supposed to root for this.
Finally... Eren. Oh boy. Oh, good lord. I’ll admit I wanted him to live, but I was also ready to accept an ending where he dies. But... not like this. I already said I don’t like the fact Mikasa killed him, but what I like even less is the lack of general resolution his character received. He’s the MC for god’s sake! But post-chapter 123, he has received second, if not third-grade treatment, save from chapter 131, which was brilliant.
Overall, his motivations are a mess, which I get. Him getting confused because of all his powers and memories is understandable. Him having conflicting motivations is actually appealing to me. He wanted to save Eldia, but was also disappointed in the outside world (when he says “I would have done it anyway”, I thought about what he said to Ramzi and the "scenery” in 131) , and wished for his friends to become heroes. I get it, it’s fine.
But Isayama went too far with the tragic aspect of his character. As in, there is no catharsis, just crushing pain. Isayama deliberately went overkill by stating that Eren killed 80% of humanity (what the hell), and, even worse, actually drove Dina to Carla. I literally couldn’t believe this. I have seen people theorize about this months ago and immediately discarded it by thinking it was ridiculous and amount to character assassination. To make things clear, I’m not discussing Eren’s actions in the last arc from a moralistic point of view, because this would be another topic entirely, I’m talking about what makes sense in the narrative that has been presented to us since the Paths chapters started and Eren’s plan was revealed. For example, however awful the contents of the scene was, Eren manipulating Grisha to kill the Reiss family was not only amazingly written and drawn in chapter 121 but also narratively motivated by the fact he needed the Founding Titan’s power. This scene also had other functions, such as revealing the Attack Titan’s premonition powers or making Zeke interact with Grisha and understand the truth about his father. Compared to this, the “moment” we have in 139, this abrupt, absurd revelation about him indirectly killing his mother is rushed and nonsensical. Even if this was to kickstart the whole story by awakening his hatred for the titans, I can’t help but feel shaken by how... gratuitous a “plot-twist” it is. What does it say about the attachment Eren had to his mother and her words to him? (”because he was born into this world”). This nullifies one of the most impactful scenes of the manga, because the ending makes it clear that in the end, existing as a human being by the simple virtue of being born wasn’t enough for him. It just couldn’t be, for some reason that I’m yet to fully understand. Instead, he endured and endured, and never got to experience the simple, humane existence Carla wished for him. So were these beautiful words a lie all along? Why did Isayama go to such an extreme with Dina? The only conclusion I can come to is that it’s because he needed Eren to be absolutely, totally irredeemeable. Eren needed, storywise, to be this unstoppable extremist who would get burned to ashes by his uncontrollable desires.
Because yes, apparently, Eren had to die. There was no escape. Worst of all, Eren died a slave. A slave to his desire for freedom. A slave to the destiny he saw at age 15. A slave to his titan powers. This is what I truly can’t forgive about this ending. I won’t stand for the “but he chose this” answer, because it was a choice made out of despair, and all the alternatives are presented as non viable by the narrative (are they really though? or is it just a cope-out to justify the last arc of the manga unfolding as it did?). In short, Isayama justifies this “choice” that was forced on Eren by telling us: his life was destined to be short, he had a violent side he just wouldn’t repress, Mikasa didn’t give him the answer he wanted, he was overwhelmed by what he saw, and their enemies were zeroing in on them. Canonically, all of this made him start the Rumbling. Fine. But I always thought that, at the end of it all, even if Eren were to die, this narrative would be challenged. That Eren would at least have a big cathartic moment, and that he would make another choice upon realising that the freedom he looked for was illusory, and that he would fight to the bitter end for what was right, what he truly wanted, before finally either going to rest or living on with the burden of his actions but the support of his loved ones. I wished for the perfect blend of bitterness and hope. The tragedy of irredeemeable actions completed by the powerful liberation of free will. The idea that change is possible.
But what did we get instead? Eren reaffirming that the Rumbling would have happened anyway while feeling tremendous guilt, as usual (living a life with regrets, and consequently, a death with regrets), refusing the support Armin was ready to lend him (refusing to even try to defy what he thinks is his destiny and pushing others away again) and erasing the memories of all his friends after having manipulated them into ending him against their wishes (going against the most basic concept of freedom). And because we as readers and he as a character have to suffer until the very end, Eren finally clearly expressed his wish to live, to stay with Mikasa and his friends. Only to die 5 pages later, for good.
The main character of this story truly died as a disembodied head, in a titan’s mouth, killed by the person he loved the most before being buried in a nameless grave. One of his mottos was “fight”, but in the end, he didn’t. He let fate happen. In a story about freedom, this is unfathomable. This is beyond the realm of sadness for me, and I’m leaning more and more towards indignation. Where was his dignity as a character? I know that Mikasa, Armin and the others know “the truth about him” but I’m sorry, this isn’t enough. Now, if I ever get the strength to re-read SnK, I won’t be able to look at Eren without thinking about all the things he sacrificed: love, friendship, happiness, humanity, morals, principles, justice, freedom, the lives of countless others, the peace of mind of the person he loves, and his own life. A sacrifice so great should have gotten us a reward as great, if not greater. But we only got the end of the titan curse, without even an apparition or a word from Ymir, the one who actually started all of this, and now Paradis is ruled by the Yeagerists or something. The wings of freedom defaced by two rifles. How great. How satisfying.
In the end, I can’t really fathom what Isayama wanted to say with this chapter. The story itself, the 138 chapters that preceded it seemed clear to me. The world is cruel but also very beautiful. But after having read 139, I don’t know where the freedom the characters chased is. I don’t know why love was portrayed as something so precious but also something that in the end was predestined to be discarded. I don’t know why characters such as Mikasa went against fate only to be crushed by it further down the road.
I never thought that SnK would go into this almost grimdark direction, but it did. I can barely find the beauty in this chapter. Mikasa’s last panels are heartbreaking, but even the strength of her love can’t shine through the countless sacrifices the characters - and especially she and Eren - made, for the sake of a future that already seems extremely compromised. I guess that all in all, the world’s cruelty overshadows everything, and those who make the greatest sacrifices also are those who never get repaid. The world is unfair. I know that, but it was my naive wish that reading a piece of fiction would help me take my mind off this reality by showing me there is also more to it.
PS: the best moment in the chapter was those panels:
Finally, even if it was too little and too late, someone showed Eren he wasn’t alone, and didn’t need to be. RIP, my beautiful boy. You truly did deserve better than what this story allowed you to be.
#SnK#SnK 139#Armin Arlert#Mikasa Ackerman#Eren Yeager#Eren Jäger#I don't really expect anybody to read this but I needed to write it#I don't know what to feel about this#mostly because I don't feel much#that's the problem#I just feel like I've been robbed of a satisfying ending#The art is beautiful and some of the dialogue hits but#I can't be happy with this#the last words of SnK are just a repeat of chapter 50? why does it have to be so underwhelming#while it could have been so beautiful#also pet peeve: Eren and Mikasa not even being able to share a real hug once in this series is a robbery of epic proportions#anyway#I'm done now i think#goodbye SnK it was a pretty nice 11 months#now onto other things
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1, 4, 9, 16, 22, and 35 please :) you don't have to answer them all though!
You asked for it - you got it ;)
(This is a long post and I’m on mobile so I’m not sure how to do a cut, I’m sorry everybody)
1. From one to five stars, how would you rate your writing? (No downplaying yourself!)
I’m a solid three, rising to four when it comes to smut. (The Max/Ideal Max/Pearl fic may be a five).
4. Are there any writers that inspire you?
@funkypoacher has been a huge inspiration to me in this fandom. Hers was the first TOW fic I read. And talking to her has helped so much in terms of thinking about character and motivation. I’ve never written an oc the way I am now and that’s down to her.
@paliseizy and @vairasmythe ‘s writing really encouraged me to let my own freak flag fly. I love you guys.
In terms of published authors, Kazuo Ishiguro, Annie Proulx and David Mitchell just blow me away with what they can do with words and I dream of one day being able to do a fraction of what they can.
9. Which character(s) do you find most difficult to write?
Characters whom I consider bad or wrong but like, in a mundane way? To use examples from the Outer Worlds, I’ve written Rockwell cause he’s hugely entertaining, cutting about the place high on space cocaine laughing at the suckers who are gonna get iced. I haven’t, but I feel like I could write Akande, cause I feel she’s a paladin, a true believer and that’s fascinating even though her beliefs as I perceive them are diametrically opposed to my own. Ellie is just kinda selfish? And she makes a big deal out of rejecting Byzantium but her values are kind of exactly the same? I feel like if I ever wrote a character gettting into a debate with her it would just end up as a mouthpiece for me arguing with her as the embodiment of all too many real life people. And I don’t know if writing myself as winning or losing would be worse.
Pearl just told her that if she wants the big cabin that badly she can fight her for it, and that shut her up.
16. Any guilty pleasure trope(s)?
I really like when characters who pride themselves on being in control are forced to get overwhelmingly horny. So sex pollen, heat/rut fic, alien sex rays etc. I don’t like ABO though, it’s subtly different in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.
22. Do you listen to anything while you write?
I’m pretty much always listening to music, and if I hear something that really reminds me of a character or situation, I’ll save it and listen to it again while I’m writing. Characters I really vibe with get their own playlists, but I don’t have a specific writing playlist
35. Ramble about any fic-related thing you want!
I am gonna take the opportunity and point out that I dropped one of my oc’s into Terror on Typhon as an Easter egg and no one has asked about him!
The man Nyoka is arguing with and then kisses at the start is Aloysious Millstone, a professional gambler and con artist and her future husband. His mother was a Rizzo’s secretary, his father was an executive who was visiting Cascadia. He never acknowledged his son, hence Millstone.
Unlike Nyoka, Aloysious was evacuated from Monarch when it was abandoned by the Board, but he resented everything about Byzantium and fled back to Monarch as soon as he was able by talking his way onto the catering crew of a space yacht headed for Fallbrook. Once there, he abandoned ship and got a job in Fallbrook tending bar. He is able to ‘code switch’ between Monarch native and Byzantium elite, and he uses this ability to scam the patrons out of some extra bits.
One time however, he makes the mistake of trying to scam Lilya Hagen - he’s never met her, has no clue who she is, and she does seem kind of absent minded. He is locked up while the SubLight management debate whether or not to feed him to Mini Malin, but ultimately they decide that he adds a touch of authentic seedy glamour to the image Fallbrook projects, so he becomes a professional gambler and card sharp in residence, under Catherine Malin’s protection in return for a cut of his takings.
Nyoka initially despises him because she thinks he’s a phoney through and through. But she comes to see that he loves the thrill of the hunt just as much as she does, only his prey is different. They both want to see a strong independent Monarch. And he doesn’t lie about himself to her - he’s very honest about who he is and what he wants, and unlike her previous partners he would never exaggerate his skill on the trail to impress her. He couldn’t kill a rapt to save his life, but he does look very fetching in a pair of rapt skin boots, and she likes being the one who hunted them for him.
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Hurt People
Pairing: Loki x reader
Request: I was wondering if you'll ever do the trope with human reader and basically immortal s/o (cough. Loki. Cough) where it's super soft but angsty with them being established/knowing about their feelings but the reader pushes themselves away because they have a short life and they don't want to hurt the other person when they'll inevitably die? It's super sad but you do angst so well, I was wondering if you'd consider it?
Warnings: Angst but there is some fluff in there!
Word Count: 2.9k
A/N: Thank you so much to @randomidiot4444 for this angsty but wonderful request! I had my sad playlist going the entire time I wrote it and I hope this was the angst you were looking for! I had a lot of fun writing it and I hope you enjoy it! <3
Hurt People
You pulled your coat up higher, trying to shield your face from the biting wind. Yesterday had been a gorgeous day; warm and sunny, the weather’s last hoorah before giving in for the fall. It had also been the day you realized you loved him. And not only a little bit. The kind of love that filled you with terror because you realized no emotion you’d ever felt had come close to it; the kind that felt like staring out at a still lake in the morning before everyone else woke.
But you hadn’t said anything to let him know how you felt. He’d been standing at your kitchen counter, hair falling into his eyes as he tried to figure out how to use the can opener. After having promised to make you lunch, he had battled with the can opener for five minutes, refusing to let you show him how to use it properly. You had watched him struggle in silence, those nimble fingers useless against the simple Midgardian technology - his words.
Ironically, he’d been wearing human clothes that day; a fitted black tee and dark jeans that Tony had given him at the Compound. And yet, despite the human appearance, there was no mistaking the raw, unearthly energy rolling off him in waves as he grew more and more frustrated with the can opener. You had only looked down at your phone for a second, but when you’d looked up, he had a wide, triumphant grin on his face.
For a moment you had forgotten how to breath.
Then you’d seen the can. Somehow, you still weren’t sure how, he’d managed to take the entire metal portion off the top half of the can, leaving a dangerously jagged rim.
He’d lifted the can to make sure you could see it and drawled, “Like I said, simple.”
But in his eyes, you’d seen doubt. Worry. Fear that despite all of his trying that he wasn’t good enough. And that was the thing with Loki. He tried. He kept trying, despite and because, he never thought he was good enough. Around you, he had hope that he was. You’d smiled back at him, realizing that there was no else you’d want more in your corner, as your friend, your backup, as your partner. He was unlike any other person you’d met, in more ways than one, and that was when the realizing hit you.
You’d unwittingly, hopeless, stupidly fallen in love with him.
And you’d been avoiding him all day because of it.
Instead of waking up feeling madly in love, you’d woken to the realization that, as much as you wanted him at your side, you couldn’t be at his. How could you promise him that you’d always be there for him when your lifespan was a blip compared to his. How could you say you loved him and put him through the heartbreak of watching you die?
The only logical answer was for you to break up with him, which was the exact reason you were still avoiding him hours later. It didn’t matter that you knew you’d cause each other pain by breaking up with him now. It was the merciful thing to do in the long run; the lesser evil.
“If I didn’t know any better, darling, I’d say you’re avoiding me,” His cool voice drawled as if you’d conjured him from thought alone.
Still too afraid to do anything, you turned around and gave your boyfriend a smile. At the sight of yours, his smile grew, almost as if he had been putting on front until he was sure hi suspicions were wrong. The sight broke your heart. You were going to be another person that would leave him. Your decision would only be for the better if he didn’t blame himself for you leaving. You were going to do this, but you were going to have to do it right.
He pushed off the doorframe and followed you into the compound, long lazy steps easily matching yours. Being with Loki felt deceptively easy, but you knew that as good as it was now, it wouldn’t outweigh the inevitable pain. This thing between you two had to stop and it had to stop now. Even if the thought made you feel sick to your stomach, you knew you couldn’t back out.
“I imagine that I’m not going to like what you’re about to say,” He mused, stopping so that you would too.
From the moment you’d met, Loki had always had a way of reading you the way no other person could, and now was no different. His intense green eyes scanned you from head to toe as if he could pull the words from you so that you didn’t have to say them aloud. You really wished you didn’t have to, but you had to do this for him.
“I don’t think this hallway is the place for me to say it,” You whispered, unable to manage more than that.
The air cooled and you watched a mask slide over his face, banishing all emotion from the surface, but you knew it wasn’t all gone. His eyes spoke volumes, revealing everything, and yet you were too cowardly to hold his stare.
“Say it,” He whispered.
“Loki-”
“Just say it,” His voice was ice.
You’d never heard that tone used with you, but it was a good sign if you wanted this to work.
You rolled your shoulders back, mustering all your strength and false confidence, “This isn’t working out. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
He blinked slowly, as if he’d been expecting the words but not the pain that came with them. He didn’t look like he was about to say anything, so you pushed on.
“I don’t think we’re a good fit and I don’t think it’s worth continuing this any longer.”
You didn’t know how your voice didn’t crack or how you’d gotten through the words, but somehow, you’d gotten through two sentences with indifference even if you were crumbling inside at the sound of your own voice.
“I understand,” He nodded, accepting your lies too easily.
He had to have felt whatever this thing was between you, and yet, he’d accepted your lies as if he’d been imagining it all; as if he believed, above all things, that love wasn’t meant for him because it never had been.
You wanted to tell him that he was meant for love, but that he didn’t deserve to get hurt by it. Instead, you took a step back.
“Thank you for understanding,” You voice was too formal, like it belonged to someone else, “I guess I’ll see you around.”
He only nodded, watching as you pushed past him and hurried to the safety of your room where you could let the tears flow freely.
One Year Ago
You’d heard that Thor’s brother was being brought to Earth to help with the Avengers’ next big mission, but you hadn’t believed it until he’d walked right up to you and said, “I beg your pardon, I’m looking for a tall, blond man, about the size of a refrigerator and a deep attachment to a magical hammer. Have you seen him?”
“You must be looking for your brother,” You replied, motioning for him to follow you.
“Adopted,” He clarified, “And I’m not looking for him. Rather, I’m doing my best to avoid him.”
You paused and looked up at him, “Should I be concerned?”
He shook his head, motioning for you to keep walking, “Not at all. I was simply hoping to have a bit of freedom before being wrapped up in this whole superhero business he now thinks I’m a part of.”
You slid your gaze over to him, “What did you do to convince him of that?”
“You sound skeptical,” He smirked, “But to answer your question; I picked his side.”
“Seems to me like that makes you a hero now,” You turned the corner away from where you knew Thor would be waiting.
You weren’t sure why, but you didn’t want to end the conversation just yet. There was something about him that was far too ingraining to leave the conversation at that.
“Maybe it does,” He mused, “Then does it make you one too?”
“A superhero?” You asked, confused.
He nodded.
You shook your head, “Just an ex-military medic now working for SHIELD.”
“You keep superheroes alive then,” A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, “Then it would seem that makes you one too.”
“Maybe that means we’ll cross paths again, Thor’s brother,” You said, coming to a stop down the hall from where you knew Thor and a few of the other Avengers would be waiting.
He extended his hand, “Loki, please. And I most certainly hope so.”
“It was nice meeting you, Loki,” You shook his hand. “Enjoy your stay here.”
You turned to go, wondering if this was the last you’d see of Loki.
“Pardon my intrusion,” He called after you, “But why didn’t you lead me straight to Thor?”
You turned around, “What makes you think we took the long way?”
“I don’t walk in somewhere, not knowing how to get back out,” He shrugged, the gesture at odds with his serious tone.
You shot him a smile, “I don’t know, but I’m glad I didn’t.”
It had been a month since you’d broken up with Loki, but your heart didn’t seem to care. Every day seemed to hurt just as much as much as the last, but at least this way you shared the pain. This way, both of you could move on, Loki to someone who would live as long as he would, and you, to some human.
You’d avoided him since that day, and the only reason you knew he was doing as miserably as you were was because Thor told you so in the hopes that you’d hash it out. But you’d refused to listen. You refused to listen to any of them because you knew that loving him was selfish and that, if you really did love him, you had to stop.
A knock on your door caught your attention, and you looked up to find Captain Rogers standing in the doorway. Despite the number of missions you’d accompanied the Avengers on, you’d only spoken to Steve a handful of times, which made it all that much stranger to find him practically in your room.
“Can I help you, Captain?” You asked, putting your book down, knowing it hadn’t done much to distract you in the first place.
He ran a hand through his hair, “Steve is fine, you know…On and off the field.”
You nodded.
“Can I come in?” He asked.
You nodded again, unsure of what else to say.
He walked in but didn’t go far, choosing to lean up against your kitchen table. For a long moment, he said nothing, observing the studio apartment / room they’d given you at the compound. When his eyes fell upon you again, he sucked in a little breath.
“I know why you did it,” He said.
Although you were pretty sure you knew what he was talking about, you weren’t willing to give anything away just yet, “What are you talking about?”
He smiled, soft and sad, “I know you’re trying to do what’s best for him.”
“But maybe I should have asked him?” You snapped, cutting him off with the words of doubt that had been constantly floating through your mind, “He wouldn’t have agreed to it.”
Steve crossed his arms over his chest, “You’re probably right. But your ex-boyfriend, despite the fact that we don’t always get along, thoroughly plans out his decisions before he makes them. He’s thought this through.”
“And how does he see this ending any way other than badly?”
“Maybe he thinks the time you have together is worth more than the ending,” You were about to speak but he kept going, “I outlived the woman I loved, and I didn’t get to spend any time with her. I can tell you, from experience, that there’s no perfect option in your situation, but remaining apart is only going to cause regret and pain.”
You knew he was right but you were angry about it, so you snapped, “I want to be a dodged bullet to him, not a regret.”
Steve didn’t raise his voice, didn’t seem perplexed by your outburst, only said, “Have you ever considered the fact that you might outlive him?”
This caught your attention and everything in you stilled.
“In our line of work there’s never a guarantee that any of us come back out of it alive, no matter how strong,” He shrugged, and pushed off the wall, “Certainly doesn’t mean we should stop living because of it.”
He left without another word, almost as if he hadn’t been there at all. You stared at the wall beside the doorframe, unable to move. Had you made a horrible mistake? Was Steve right? Did the good really outweigh the bad?
You were out the door, bare feet slapping against the cool tiles, taking you exactly where you wanted to go before you mind could catch up and think the better of it. Every step closer sent your heart racing even faster, and you were terrified, but hopeful for the first time in a month.
You burst through his door, charging into the living room as if you were running out of time. And you guessed in some way you were because you’d already wasted a month of it.
Loki looked up at you, eyes widening in surprise.
“YN,” He breathed as if he wasn’t sure you were real.
“I’m sorry,” You blurted, a little breathless, “I wanted you to be okay.”
He only blinked slowly so you took it as a sign to let the words keep tumbling out.
“I never wanted to cause you pain…actually that was the whole point of this…but I did…but I …” You groaned, hating the way the words seemed to be working against you, “Loki I’m going to die.”
You winced. That sounded worse. At your blunt outburst, he opened his mouth then shut it again, those intense green eyes staring at you in confusion.
You sucked in a deep breath, “I didn’t think I could love you and be with you knowing that in less than a hundred years I’d be dead. That’s nothing for you. And how could you ever be ready for something like that?” You demanded, flinging your hands up in the air in desperation because you were so confused, and you still weren’t sure what you wanted from coming here.
“Why are you here?” He asked, standing but staying at the other end of the room.
You felt like tearing you hair out but forced yourself to keep your hands at your sides, “I don’t know…But I do know that I’ve been miserable.”
“You broke up with me,” He replied, his voice cold.
“I did,” You sighed, deflating at his words, “And I’m sorry. I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness and I know that my explanation won’t make anything better, but you have to know that the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you. The only way I could think to lessen the pain was to cause a little. I still don’t know if that was the right thing to do. But I do know you should be with someone who won’t cause you pain by simply being a human being.”
He took a few steps closer, stopping about a foot away, “And what if I don’t want to be with someone like that?”
“But it’s for the best,” You whispered, aching to wrap yourself in his arms.
He raised a brow, “Seems that’s something I should have had a say in.”
“Would it have changed anything?” You asked.
“It most certainly would have,” He said firmly, stepping closer so that you were only an inch apart.
You shook your head and murmured, “I just wanted to make sure you were happy.”
“I already was.”
He pressed his lips to yours, gentle but firm, trying to get his point across. Any resolve you’d had disappeared and you melted into his touch.
“You can’t blame yourself,” He whispered, forehead against yours, “I’m choosing to be here - with you. If the pain is the cost I have to pay for this time with you, I’ll gladly pay it.”
You shook your head, knowing you couldn’t believe his words just yet but that maybe eventually you’d get there. He cupped your face, lifting your eyes to his.
“That’s the truth,” He continued, “No matter how short.”
“How did I get so lucky?” You asked, staring into his beautiful face.
A smirk pulled at the corner of his lips, and he pressed a featherlight kiss to your lips before saying, “I’ve been asking myself the same thing for a long time now.”
#loki#Loki Laufeyson#loki fanfic#loki fanfiction#Loki Angst#MCU fic#MCU fanfiction#fan fiction#fanfic#angst#loki x reader#loki x you#reader insert
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So my last late night Carry On post got a few notes so here’s some of my late night ramblings on Carry On.
I love Agatha Wellbelove so damn much. To be honest, I didn’t like her that much when I first read it but as I thought about the book and read it again, I started to love her.
Spoilers and a ramble-filled essay on why Agatha is awesome under the cut. Sorry if it doesn’t work. I’m on my phone and I’ll fix it when it’s not 430 in the morning
[[MORE]]
One of my favorite things about Carry On is how much Rowell uses inverted tropes and Agatha is a prime example of that. She’s the girl at the end of the world, the damsel in distress. Simon straight up calls her out as basically the prize he gets when he saves the world. Agatha is well aware that her job is to look pretty, cry on command, and date the Chosen One.
But. She’s so much more than that. She’s bitchy and selfish and so damn human. Penny is my role model but god if I didn’t relate to Agatha. Yeah, she chases after Baz when he seems so clearly uninterested, but you have to remember: he seems uninterested from his point of view. In every other perspective, it looks like he’s flirting with her. Can you really blame her for going along with it when she’s well aware her boyfriend is only dating her out of convenience and the guy she likes seems to be blatantly flirting with her? Maybe. Does it matter? No. Because you can understand her motivation. And on top of all that, dating Baz would be the one thing she could get at her parents with. She tried to have friends that she actually liked and her dad wiped their memories. Remember Minty? Well she doesn’t remember Agatha. So of course she chases after the one boy who would piss her parents off but they couldn’t say anything because his family is magically and politically powerful and who’s also showing a hell of a lot more interest than her so-called boyfriend.
Maybe it’s selfish, but she’s what 16? 17? She doesn’t want to be sitting around waiting for the boy who’s running around like a chicken with his head cut off to turn into the man she’s supposed to marry. I love Simon, I really do, but I can see why Agatha doesn’t. She wants to have fun. She wants to be someone’s right now instead of their happily ever after. She wants to make stupid mistakes and live her life.
So I went on a rant I wasn’t planning to justifying Agatha’s thing with Baz, but there was something else about her that really drew me personally in: her monologue on love.
I just don’t love Simon enough. I don’t love him the right way. Maybe I don’t have that sort of love in me—maybe I’m defective
That killed me as an asexual. That’s the kind of shit we don’t see. Agatha is ace or aro or both and that is a hill I will die on. That bit of not knowing if the way you love is right or enough and wondering if maybe there’s something wrong with you because you wanted this fairy tale as much as anyone else but now it’s here and everything’s wrong and here isn’t right and you can’t even love him and this isn’t a fairy tale at all? That was the line that made me fall for Agatha. That was the turning point for me. She realizes that the world she lives in is never going to be enough for her and she’s never going to be enough for it. So she starts to shape her own destiny, one where she’s the main character, not the side character in Simon’s disaster.
Dear god, I love Agatha. I love that she left. She looked at the world around her and said “this is not enough. This can’t make me as happy as I deserve to be so I’ll find somewhere that will.” And then she did it. That’s a badass bitch.
One last thing I love about Agatha. I kinda like that she’s vain. She’s pretty, okay. What I like is that she thinks she’s pretty. Penny’s the feminist. She doesn’t care about looks, just intelligence. Agatha likes being pretty and lucky. I liked her because her character was a reminder that there’s not one right way to be a strong female. Being strong is about loving yourself. Agatha wasn’t better or worse because she was pretty. She was better because she loved herself and to hell with anyone who told her she wasn’t enough. Let kids feel pretty. Pretty isn’t weak. Self-confidence is inner strength and that is the last of my three part essay on why I fucking love Agatha Wellbelove.
See you next time on My Insomnia!
#carry on#agatha wellbelove#agatha wellbelove appreciation#love my girl#simon snow#baz pitch#penny bunce
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Fate: The Winx Saga - My Thoughts and Critique - Part 1: Characters
Be warned: The following post will be quite long as I have a lot to say. Please note that this is all my personal opinion and this is just the thoughts and critique of someone that has watched the original Winx Club several time and I have watched the new Winx Saga, and this is in no way a blind hatred based on only word of mouth and seeing half a trailer. Enjoy
I will be comparing this new series to the original 4Kids version, as this is the version I hold close to my heart and grew up watching. So if there are any plot differences I describe from the animation, it is probably due to the slight changes made in the Nick Dub, which some people will know best (example, in 4Kids dub, Aisha’s name is Layla, and Sparks is known as Domino in the Nick dub)
CHARACTERS
Well, I have a lot to say about the characters, just like anyone else.
I’ll break down, the casting, compare the character to the animation, and their personality in the Netflix series.
Bloom
The actress chosen in my opinion was a good choice. The problem I have, is her personality. They got the determination and hot-head traits right, of course. But in the animation, Bloom is warm, friendly and bubbly. Easy-going and popular among her peers. I don’t know if they were trying to appeal to the oh-so-angsty teenagers that don’t want to go outside and have few friends. The typical “I’m not like other girls” trope. Tropes are popular, and as someone who has written stories in the past, I have used that trope once, but usually it’s a trope I like when it’s to show the character’s beauty compared to others who may be catty and selfish; not so beautiful on the inside.
Here, to me, Bloom is just unlikable. She may be angsty and a rebellious teen, blah blah blah, but she was so rude to people like her Earth mother, and inconsiderate of her own actions and how it could affect those around her. Even if Aisha told her “That is a bad idea, you’re going to regret it” she runs along and does it anyway, and then she gets into a bad situation which also affects everyone, Even if she helps clean up the mess, damage is still done.
In Fate, Bloom’s relationship with her parents is not amazing. Yes, she’s an angsty, rebellious teen who almost kills them because she lost control of her power, but I found this cold, rude relationship so unnecessary.
As a teen, sometimes it may seem like no one is listening nor can understand, parents just seem nosy and overbearing, but communication is key. That’s what I find so many shows are missing now: communication.
Looking at Bloom’s relationship with her parents in the animation, it’s not only simpler for them to know from the start that she has powers, but it makes the communication between both parties better. This strong relationship Bloom and her parents have is always present, but we see the beauty of it in Season 1, episode 13, “Meant to Be” when Mike and Vanessa sit her down and talk to her about how they realised she had magic before that fateful meeting with Stella.
There is none of that warmth and love now. Bloom curses at her mother, gives her attitude and is overall just a brat. Bloom may feel remorse towards herself for burning her mother, but then, why is the attitude towards her so ugly? I really don’t like it.
Aisha/Layla
Next is Aisha, who is the only character that was not whitewashed from the original. The only reason I think she wasn’t is because the creators of Winx Saga knew there would be a true uproar if they dared to replace her with someone non-black.
She is the general voice of reason in the group, and the babysitter of Bloom and company. She will support and be the shoulder for Bloom to lean on in a few cases, but generally she’s the only one calling Bloom out for being rash and insensible, but then she gets ignored or sneered at for it, despite rbeing the only one with awareness for consequences.
There isn’t much to compare to with her animated version except for her being athletic; made very obvious in episode one where she says “I swim twice a day, every day”. (Even though that is the only episode we see her following said routine.)
Other than that, her backstory is not expanded upon like the animation, obviously due to the lack of screen time and actual length of the Netflix series, therefore for me, I didn’t really bond with her character like in the original.
Stella
The actress is pretty. Not too hard to cast a pretty blonde in a series. Moving on.
In the original Winx, I adore Stella. She’s bubbly, she’s fun, she’s bright. Literally the sunshine of the group.
Yes, she has her snooty privileged princess moments, but she is a likable snooty, privileged princess. Why? She showed that she really does care for her friends. Stella can be self-centered and insecure, but she’s never afraid to say that she’s wrong when she realises her mistakes. This is shown several times, but right now I can speak of two instances: Season 1, Episode 8 “Spelled”. Technically, she was under a spell that made her moody and rude, but she still knew she had to set things right after upsetting Musa. Another memorable moment for me when she showed her caring side was during the girls’ stay at the no-magic resort in Season 2, episode 21 ““Trouble in Paradise”. She went after Aisha/ Layla to check if she was all right, they connected and Stella earned her Charmix.
Overall, Stella in the animation has her flaws, but she is loved by all and she herself loves the people she’s close to.
However, Stella in Winx Saga, I detest. I was really disappointed with what they did to her character. Honestly, it would have made more sense if she was Diaspro (Sky’s ex-fiance from season 1 and 3) and not Stella. She’s a snob, rude and dismissive of others’ feelings.
They did try to toss a sympathy card at our faces later when they eplained the reason why Winx Saga Stella is so - her toxic, overbearing and abusive mother - but honestly, maybe it was because it happened so fast because of the limited time, butI was not feeling any sympathy towards her. I felt like I should have, but I couldn’t. I hope her character changes in Season 2, if I even bother watching it, because I was enormously disappointed with Stella’s new persona for this first season. The Solaria ring was nice enough though.
Musa
Well, here we go. One of the infamous whitewashing cases. To tell the truth, I'm not surprised but disappointed that it acueallyhappened. You mean to tell me they couldn't find any capable Asian actresses for Musa? Yes, small production and low budget, but still. If you are going to make a live action for a cast that is well loved, respected and recognised for the diversity, you should keep it. It just feels like they do it on purpose at this point.
Winx Club Musa I like a lot. I love all the girls, but she's just so laid-back and cool, but she's not afraid to call someone out for being unfair or on their attitude (namely Stella most times). She cares for her friends and she cares for Riven. She's family oriented and she's so passionate about music.
In Winx Saga, she's a mind fairy who used to be a dancer and listens to music with headphones to block out the emotions of people around her when she gets overwhelmed. Interesting new concept and it comes in handy for the new show material. I wouldn't say she was completely unlikable in the WS series but there wasn't anything much besides her ability and that she and Sam (Terra's brother) had somehting more than a fling going on. They were a nice couple. Good chemistry in kisses. I don't know why they decided to not make Riven her man - who knows what the plan is. Riven was not hers in the beginning of the animation either, but we saw a great bond form later on. Their relationship had problems unlike the other Winx couples, but they still are a fan favourite. Let's see how this new match goes I guess?
Flora/Terra
Terra We all know she's supposed to be Flora, no matter how they try to spin it. Before anyone says she's a different character so it's not whitewashing, I have seen a video on Youtube where a girl explains that in actuality, it was supposed to be Flora because there are (now deleted) clips of characters talking to Flora, not Terra. And the adresses portfolio said she was to play Flora. They seemed to change it to avoid heating up the hot water they had already landed themselves into.
Therefore, I will be comparing Terra and Flora.
I was extremely disappointed when I saw the trailer and realised Flora was clearly not there. I am not usually one to care whether or not someone looks like me in a show, but I do relate to Flora. I may not always be one that likes to get close to nature honestly, but everything else about her I relate to. I love pink a lot, I am a mixed race person so her looks are what I identify with the most, and our personalities are quite similar.
Terra, on the other hand, is obviously white. The love of plants is there and her sweet and gentle personality is there. Though, it doesn’t get much time to shine because whenever she speaks, she’s either cut off or ignored, unless she’s spouting information the others want to hear at the moment. They did make her quite chatty, and at times even I was a bit annoyed, not because she was chatty, but because that trait just seemed to be a gateway for the scriptwriters to hit you with details about Alfea and its history, and information about fairies without making much effort.
Terra didn’t have much screen time, but whenever she was on screen, she was always the butt of a joke and treated poorly. When the situation became dire, she did have some moments of strength, but then the other characters still treated her the same so it seems meaningless.
One main reason Terra stands out to the audience is the fact that she’s the only plus-sized character. I’m all for representation, but I don’t like where they went with Terra. She’s shown to be insecure about her body (shown when she avoids her roommates to change alone). Yes, she’s supposed to be a teen who has heard non-directed comments about weight by other characters, but why couldn’t they make her a confident plus-sized girl? I have plenty of friends that are plus-sized and confident about themselves, older or younger. In media, it’s rare enough to see a plus-sized person, but also one that has confidence. This show is directed to teens, and those who may look and feel the same as Terra won’t have a good example set for themselves to be more confident.
If you’re going to include a certain figure in your story, yes, everyone has insecurities and all, but if you have the power to shine light and empower, do it right!
Sky
One reason why I bothered watching the show. Danny Griffin. The man playing Sky. Iin the original Winx, I did not really care for Sky as I’m not really into the long blonde hair, I prefer shorter hair. So I was quite pleased to see this casting as it fits more into my personal type.
Anyways, let’s continue.
I found that the casting was done well for Sky. A hot blonde warrior that can wield weapons well? They nailed it.
However, that’s kind of where it ended for me. Due to the plot, his character was pretty much ruined for me. Winx Saga Sky was sadly unremarkable personality-wise. The story didn’t allow for much expansion for him besides having the hots for Bloom and the whole boo-hoo story about his father. There was something of a nice relationship with his mentor, but I’ll get to that later.
Danny Griffin’s performance was quite good. My only issue was one part of his first appearance where his first few lines. . .sounded like lines. Not so much the result of bad acting, but it just was another case of sounding like lines written for a script than natural conversation. But I only really saw that in the first episode, and since everyone would have been getting into character at that time I can let it pass. Otherwise, he performed well as an actor.
Riven
Winx Club Riven does not have the best first impression. According to Musa, he’s “a little rough around the edges, but that’s kind of his charm”. He’s a troubled, moody guy who falls for the wrong girl. He has a very competitive side, especially with Sky, who always manages to beat him in combat. He is indeed often arrogant of his abilities, but he proved himself to not be just all talk during his escape from imprisonment in Cloud Tower during Season 1, and even Sky admitted to being impressed with his knowledge of survival and strategies, even going so far as to say he always thought Riven was the “Red Fountain Slacker”.
Animated Riven also has a sweet side that was displayed in season 2 when he comforted Musa during the girls’ first mission to Shadowhaunt, and much more so after they started dating. He expressed how much he cared for Musa in shy but blunt ways. Flawed, but a character that developed throughout the series.
Winx Saga completely threw that out of the window.
Riven is now just a clown that does bad boy things. He’s clearly still being portrayed as the “edgy” character with troubles and insecurities, but the rest of the show is so aggressively dark and edgy that he really has no way to stand out anymore. I don’t know what they’re planning to do with his characterr later on, but I really dislike what they did to him. The only thing done right is his competitive nature towards Sky.
Side note, this is also my personal preference, but I must add that I am not feeling the minimal facial hair. I’d prefer a clean shaven face. The little spikes just looks messy. But then, facial hair always looks messy to me.
Faragonda
Faragonda. Or as she is known now, Farah Dowling. I’m not sure what to say for her. The actress did well, I can say that. The problem always lies with the characters themselves.
Faragonda is a beloved headmistress that always has an eye out for her students, whether she watches them through her magic mirror in her office or just personally. She gives them enough guidance so they can grow on their own and helps them when she sees the need to. However, she is also strict when needed and will not condone disobedience; this was seen in season 1 when the Winx were punished for breaking into Cloud Tower to get Stella’s ring from the Trix. She is a brave, just and kind woman, well suited for a principal position.
Farah Dowling does not have much besides her position. She’s very secretive and those secrets seem to be there to cause drama when it could have ben avoided. It could be an irrational thought process that humans have, but I’d expect that from someone who hasn’t experienced much in life. The type of past Farah has, she should know better than to keep secrets if she knows it can put the whole school in danger.
Her lack of disciplinary action was evident, whether it was the scene of a villain making their move or Bloom blatantly disobeying orders and making choices that moved the plot forward a bit. It was odd to see that even if she knew this person went dilly-dallying in her office or broke a rule, ut wasn’t met with discipline unless something really bad happened. Whereas, we all know that in a school setting, small rule breaking is also punished.
I did like the part in the last episode when she and Bloom finally had a warm interaction, I found it very sweet and it was nice to finally have her interact with Bloom without having to expect some impending doom to arise in the next scene.
Beatrix
We did not get the stylish trio we know and love for Winx Saga, but I must say, I was not disappointed by Sadie Soverall. She portrayed the character really well.
She’s a blending of the famous Trix. She’s cunning and does not let anyone get in her way, much like Icy. Seductive like Darcy and I’d say she has Stormy’s malicious nature. (I mean the Trix are all malicious but Stormy generally could let her viciousness rule her judgement). As well as the fact that her power kind of looks like electric bolts, like Stormy’s.
A manipulator that was being manipulated.
She’s icy cold, cunning and she knows who she should attach herself to in order to reach her goals.
Just a sub-villain I say, but I enjoyed the character. Minus the odd little plots her character was mixed into, which I will discuss later.
Rosalind
A new character who so far seems like the puppet master of all the characters - both good and evil sides. A master manipulator and charismatic. Very enjoyable to watch despite her short screen time. She was the one person that actually had me excited to know what was going to happen next.
Very well performed in my opinion.
Mike
The only time I saw this actor truly in character was in the last episode when he was wearing this blue shirt. He really looked like Mike.
It may always be necessary to dress a character exactly like the original, but some things are just subtle and yet iconic. Imagine Shaggy from Scooby-Doo without his green shirt and brown pants combo. It wouldn’t feel like him.
Otherwise he’s quite a basic looking man so not too hard to cast. I do think this actor really matched Mike though - looks wise, at least.
With Mike, there are less interactions with Bloom besides having very basic “How are you doing?”conversations. There’s a lame joke here and there but nothing really worth commenting over.here now The focus when it came to mentioning the parents in Winx Saga was mostly to Vanessa.
Vanessa
Vanessa in the original series is warm, loving and a good mother. She and Bloom have a strong relationship and have great communication between them, and Bloom not only respects her but also goes to Vanessa when she needs advice and support. The ideal mother-daughter bond.
Date’s Vanessa is more. . .trying to be a good mother but not quite nailing it. As I mentioned during Bloom’s analysis, she’s met with hostility or downright rudeness if she even mentions going out and making friends to her daughter.
There were a few moments when it could have been touching to see thieir interactions, but apart from the scene when Bloom was feeling homesick, it felt a bit rushed. Perhaps it was the acting, perhaps it was that the awkward interactions overruled the positive ones, but the Winx Saga relationship between Bloom and Vanessa didn’t feel as connected.
In conclusion, mot of the acting was well done. The issues I have were mostly due to the writing of the characters, not the ability of the actors.
Other minor characters will be analysed during the plot discussion.
#winx club#winx saga#fate winx club#bloom#sky#musa#flora#terra#aisha#layla#riven#4kids dub#netflix#2021#winx alfea
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I really want to ask for stevetony + Exes AU? I'm so weak for the pining and angst of the getting back together trope
same??? I know I shouldn’t but I am nothing if not weak. I hope you like it! I want to say this is 616, because Tony’s self-loathing here feels like peak 616!Tony to me, but not set at any specific point in time.
- - -
For six months, nobody knew that Tony Stark and Steve Rogers were dating.
Which means no one knows they broke up six weeks ago.
Looking back on it now, those six months were just stolen time, a pocket-life Tony knew he’d never get to live out to its fullest, but he likes to think he took advantage of every second of it.
That’s a lie. He wasted it. He knows that now, better than he’s known anything in his entire life, and that includes JARVIS’s coding and what it felt like when Obie forcibly removed the arc reactor from his chest. He spent six incredible, heartwarming, spine-melting, almost-picture-perfect months in a relationship with Steve Rogers, a man he’d been in love with for years before that, and no one knew about it.
Because as it turns out, Tony Stark is a coward.
Tony puts down the razor and stares at himself in the mirror. A mask of dread with a freshly sculpted goatee stares back. It’s too early for that much feeling, but this is the position he’s put himself in.
It’s also his first day back in the city after spending the past six weeks in Malibu, “to make sure SI feels equally loved,” as he told the team at their last group dinner (while pointedly ignoring Steve sitting across from him at the table and the fact that even then he couldn’t not see the way the man’s face fell at the news).
Obviously that’s only half of the story, but no one needs to know about how Tony spent most of those six weeks moping around in that big empty house wearing grubby shirts and eating pints of half-melted Half Baked ice cream out of the container (and then exercising himself sick to make up for it).
Now, he’s got a fresh full-body tan from time spent in the sun, a slew of new tech ideas for the team (including an infinitely better low-profile tracking device for Natasha, because who says he doesn’t do nice things for people), a mostly-rested brain, and a packed schedule that will allow for very little—if any—interaction with Steve.
It’ll be fine, he tells himself, watching condensation streak through the remnants of steam on the mirror. This is just like any other breakup, only slightly complicated by the fact that he leads a team of superheroes with his ex, and was best friends with his ex for years before they got together, and still thinks the world of his ex, and still wants his ex, and is still madly in love with his ex.
Just like he did in California, Tony doesn’t think about the bottomless pit of empty taking up valuable real estate in his stomach as he wanders from the bathroom and starts arranging himself into a vaguely Tony Stark-shaped person.
Autopilot is as useful a function in the Iron Man suit as it is in the rest of his life, especially these past six weeks—buttoning his shirt, Tony notices but doesn’t worry about how he can’t feel the fabric under his fingers, or the pinch of his dress shoes as he pulls those on; the world has been slightly out of focus ever since he and Steve broke up, and the feeling of walking through life with only half the lights on upstairs and a black hole where his viscera used to be is all too familiar.
It’s how he felt years ago, dying slowly, then quickly—not quickly enough—of palladium poisoning.
The device that is keeping you alive is also killing you.
He chooses a pair of gunmetal grey sunglasses with fluorescent red lenses to go with the Tom Ford suit he somehow managed to put on right. Before walking out the penthouse door, Tony checks himself in the massive, frameless mirror: everything is in its right place. He looks like had a nice vacation and came home without a care in the world. He doesn’t look like a man who broke his own heart out of cowardice and is now walking through life with self-inflicted blood poisoning.
If he tries hard enough, harder than he did back then, no one will notice anything is wrong.
It’s just Tony’s luck that the first person he runs into is Steve, glowing from a workout (it’s Thursday, Tony remembers, which mea ns cardio and time on the heavy bag) and just as beautiful as the last time Tony saw him.
“I’ll give you space, as much as you need, I promise. Trust me, this is for the best.”
Steve’s not crying, but it sounds like a near thing. His face is drawn, flush with emotions Tony doesn’t want to read into, but even distraught Steve is still the most gorgeous thing Tony’s ever seen. Then Steve is reaching out with both hands and he has to back away. “Tony, just, wait—”
He looks almost small, vulnerable in a way Tony isn’t used to, and the only thing he really wants to do in that moment, standing in Steve’s bedroom surrounded by moving boxes (an hour ago they were getting ready to move in together—funny, how quickly things change), is take Steve into his arms and keep him there where it’s safe. But that vaguely possessive urge living constantly under his skin is what led to this, this crossroads which finds Tony doing the one thing he never wanted to do: “I can’t, Steve, I’m…I asked you for all the wrong things and now you’re miserable, and you—God, you of all people deserve happiness. The least I can do now is let you go so you can find it.”
Tony manages to say it without dying, which might be a miracle. He’ll call the pope later and ask. When he leaves Steve’s room, it’s to the miserable sound of Steve’s voice breaking in the middle of Tony’s name. By the time he shuts the door behind him, it’s too late to wonder if this is all a huge mistake, but Tony still feels part of his heart splinter off to stay behind with Steve, where it belongs.
Funny how after six weeks away with no contact of any kind, all that R&R and R&D and B&Js and G&Ts, one look at Steve is enough to put Tony right back where he started, heartsore and winded like the hurt is forcing the air from his lungs.
Steve looks—he looks good, of course he does, but Tony was always especially weak for slightly disheveled and endearingly domestic Steve Rogers wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. It doesn’t help that Steve looks happy, like the past six weeks have done exactly what Tony dreaded and hoped they’d do when he broke up with him, like Steve’s had time to finally breathe freely, spread his wings a bit, experience the world in ways he never got to with Tony when they were together.
He looks lighter. Younger. Fuller. More. It’s enough to crush something in Tony that feels remarkably like one last ember of hope, the bitterly selfish hope that Steve was as wrecked by the breakup as Tony.
“Welcome back!” Steve says with a bright smile, wiping sweat from his brow with an end of the towel hanging around his neck. “How was California?”
Tony is distantly aware of his mouth hanging open, but he’s too caught up in how awful he feels seeing that smile on Steve’s face to respond. He shouldn’t be surprised, after all, that Steve is happier not dating Tony—it’s why Tony broke up with him in the first place. Steve was miserable, and now he’s not. Mission accomplished.
“Hey,” he finally manages to respond, even as he ducks out of Steve’s path toward the kitchen to make coffee (he’s already had a cup, but he needs to busy his hands and have something to look at that’s not Steve’s perfect fucking face). “California’s the same as it ever was. Rhodey says hi.”
Behind him, Steve hums thoughtfully. “Hi, Rhodey,” he says, knowing Tony will pass it on, because of course Steve would, and of course Tony will. Tony scoops ground coffee from a bag, not caring which one he’s dipping into, and fills the bottom of the French press as the electric kettle comes to a hissing boil.
“Anything happen while I was gone?”
When Steve speaks again, he’s much, much closer, and Tony wishes like hell that that didn’t make every single hair on his arms stand on end, that the low baritone of Steve’s voice didn’t make Tony shudder and want to bend himself over the counter. That part of their relationship is over. He has to move on.
“Not much,” Steve replies, easygoing, like having this conversation isn’t the last thing he wants to be doing this morning. Tony knows deep down that this is just Steve playing nice, doing his best to mend fences for the sake of the team. If possible, the knowledge just makes Tony feel worse, which he didn’t think was possible. “I’ve been working on putting together intel on possible new recruits, like we discussed. Want to take a look?”
Like we discussed, he says, Tony thinks to himself as the kettle clicks off, ready to pour. Steve’s sense of diplomacy is truly on another level, considering how this exact topic of conversation came up in the first place.
“I’m not saying we’re not enough, Steve,” he says, willing his hands to stay at his sides, “I’m just saying it wouldn’t hurt to have more bodies on the team so that the next time we get hit with a Galactus or something like it, we’re not scrambling for reinforcements at the last minute.”
Steve, still sitting at the now-empty conference table, pinches the bridge of his nose and frowns.
“What we need is for the team—our team—to work together better. We need to cultivate what we have, not pad the ranks and hope for the best.”
“And we will! But we can also think ahead and save ourselves a lot of stress and pain and suffering down the line.” Tony knows his frustration has reached its boiling point the moment he snaps: “I mean for fuck’s sake, Steve, I thought you were good at multitasking.”
The look Steve gives him is dark, but not exactly angry. It’s the kind of look he gets whenever he wants to make Tony listen to something Tony thinks he doesn’t want to hear. Usually it involves compliments or Steve verbally placing value on Tony’s life. It also usually involves—
Tony isn’t surprised when he blinks and finds himself pinned to the wall, Steve fitting himself in the space between his thighs like he belongs there (which he does. He absolutely does). One month in and the experience of Steve manhandling him like a pro still hasn’t lost its electric thrill; if anything, it’s only gotten headier, more dizzying, the best high Tony’s ever experienced, and it’s heightened by the fact that he’s the only one who gets to have it.
He opens up for Steve’s bruising kiss like he’ll die without it. Groaning, Tony falls deep into the pleasure of it, of Steve’s tongue fucking into his mouth like he owns the place, hot, wet suction unraveling any lingering arguments Tony might have. He throws his arms around Steve’s neck and a leg around his waist, a question in the gesture that gets answered immediately when Steve picks Tony up by his thighs and wraps both legs around his hips.
Everything is heat and the raw, jagged edge of their mutual frustration, Steve scrambling at the zips on Tony’s undersuit with fumbling fingers even as his clever tongue continues its single-minded precision assault on Tony’s. Tony whines when he feels the skin of his ass and thighs meet the open air of the conference room. They’re thousands of feet above ground aboard the helicarrier, about to fuck in a public space, and even as Tony moans lewdly at the thought of being discovered in flagrante delicto with Steve Rogers, a small and insidious part of him reels at it, desperate to keep this whole thing under wraps and to themselves.
Steve is the best thing—person—Tony’s ever had. He’s been half in love with him for years and now, having him like this, Tony can’t believe how much time he wasted. Sometimes he catches himself thinking about how it’ll be when they’re old and grey and married, the soft domesticity of their well-deserved retirement, Tony working on vintage cars in the garage while Steve fills the top floor of a house with paintings, and it doesn’t scare him as much as it probably should.
But he hasn’t told Steve how much the thought of going public scares him. How terrified he is of losing Steve to the rest of the world, which will tear them limb from limb the moment it learns of their relationship. The Stark PR machine will kick into overdrive to smooth things over, and on the surface everything will appear fine, but it won’t change the fact that they will never know privacy again; every photo taken of them in battle, out in the world, together or separate, will be subject to a level of scrutiny Tony knows only too well, but which Steve has never experienced. It’s horrible. Infuriating. Invasive, demoralizing, and not a little bit traumatizing. When Tony told Steve about Princess Diana’s death, long before any of this—them—started, he couldn’t wipe the memory of Steve’s devastated and furious expression from his mind for weeks.
They’ll talk, eventually. For now, Steve takes Tony apart with his fingers, slick with lube he keeps in his belt, his other hand curled over Tony’s mouth so he can press up hard against him and whisper things in his ear, dirty promises that make Tony’s toes curl: “Always like riling me up, don’t you, Stark,” he grunts, fucking his fingers up into Tony like it’s his job, slicking him inside and out and grinding the heel of his palm against the sensitive spot behind his balls on every third thrust until the only coherent thought running through Tony’s mind is Steve’s name.
Silenced by the hand over his mouth, Tony expresses his feelings by pushing back against Steve’s hand in perfect synchrony as he squeezes his bared thighs against Steve’s waist, which, fuck, he’s still wearing the suit, they need to have post-mission arguments more often. “Yeah, that’s it,” Steve rumbles against his cheek, burying a third finger, thick and dripping into Tony’s ass as he does, “you just want me to fuck you like this all the time, don’t you? Keep you pinned and open so I can slide in any time I want.” Tony keens against Steve’s palm, nodding so hard he dizzies himself; Steve groans and moves his hand to open Tony’s mouth with his thumb. “Say it, Tony,” he orders, and that’s definitely his Captain America voice, fuck—
“Want you to keep me open,” he gasps, helpless to stop from drooling all over Steve’s thumb still perched on his bottom lip as his other hand drives Tony into a frenzy, hard and insistent but not hitting him where he needs it, it’s not enough, “never want you to stop fucking me, want you to fill me up until I leak, plug me u-up—ungh, fuck, Steve…”
“I would,” Steve says before kissing Tony again, slow and sensual the way his fingers aren’t, fanning out and plunging in again and again and again until Tony can feel how exposed he is, gaping and trembling and so, so wet. Steve’s still kissing him when he pulls his hand out and, after a moment’s fumbling, drops his belt and opens the front of his uniform pants.
Tony moans into the scorching kiss when Steve drags the head of his massive cock through the lube dripping out of him, fisting the rest of his length with what’s left on his hand from fingering Tony open. “Can’t imagine a world where I wouldn’t want to,” he whispers, covering Tony’s mouth with his hand again as he guides his dick into that too-empty place inside Tony. He slides in, watching Tony’s face with a possessive gleam in his eye, cheeks and ears red with arousal and exertion. That hot, slick slide makes his head spin every time, the stretch an incontrovertible reminder that this is Steve, Steve who slots so perfectly into place like he belongs there, who fills Tony to absolute capacity and then fucks him so good it’s any wonder Tony can keep quiet. He holds Steve’s hand over his mouth and presses down to smother the noises leaking out him, high-pitched whines and gasps as Steve drives in deep and pulls out to the tip, looking down to admire the view with a dangerous smile before plunging back in hard and fast, pinging Tony’s prostate spot-on every time like it was a fucking doorbell. He does it once, twice, slow and steady as he considers the angle and the pace, watching his dick glisten before disappearing back into Tony’s all-too-willing-body, and then he gives Tony a look, and Tony knows he’s doomed.
It’s quick and dirty and wet and Steve has to bite Tony’s neck to keep himself quiet; Tony hangs on for dear life as Steve bounces him ruthlessly on his cock, holding him up against the wall by the strength of his chest against Tony’s and his broad, heavy hand over Tony’s mouth and the constant, driving force of his hips as he fucks him. The belly of Steve’s uniform brushing up against the head of Tony’s otherwise untouched dick every time Steve plunges into him is the most erotic kiss, a damp buss of sweat and pre-come against kevlar and leather that sets every one of Tony’s nerve endings on edge.
“So good, Tony, oh, fuck—” Steve groans under his breath, palming Tony’s thigh before pulling the leg out wide to better accommodate his bulk. Tony can’t think; he can only barely remember to breathe. He might be making a noise, but if he is only dogs and supersoldiers can hear it, probably. What were they fighting about again? What’s his last name? The only word in his head is Steve, SteveSteveSteveSteveohfuckSteve…
“Take it so good, Tony, yes, baby, yes, yes…” Steve holds Tony close in his powerful grip as he comes, shaking and gasping, inside Tony’s ass. Tony can feel the throb of it against his rim, the heat and heft of Steve’s dick inescapably everywhere inside him, and then he keeps going, fucking Tony with his big, beautiful cock in a rapid battery of thrusts, loud and sloppy with his come, never letting up on Tony’s prostate even as he trembles and gasps against Tony’s shoulder like he’s just run a marathon. Tony’s eyes roll up inside his head. Everything is buzzing, his blood pure fire with the need to come; he hasn’t shot off untouched in years, but trust Steve Rogers to surprise Tony every which way from Sunday. Steve is whispering in his ear again, praising him as the fingers of his free hand drift down to feel where they’re connected, the froth of Steve’s come easing the roughness of that touch. Tony chokes on a cry. The knot of orgasm is right there in his pelvis—all Steve has to do is fuck him, there, right, there, yes, oh, fuck…
“So beautiful, Tony. Love watching you come for me.”
Steve pulls his hand away as Tony comes and kisses him, swallows the desperate sounds of his orgasm like he’s starved for them. He keeps Tony pinned safely to the wall as Tony’s legs give out and shoots ropes of come all over his own chest. He’s shaking like a leaf from head to toe and can’t even muster enough bandwidth to feel shame—Steve loves it, after all, and says so, kissing the words one by one into his mouth like tiny prayers. Loves the way Tony lets go, loves how he trusts Steve like this, how he looks when all he can feel is the pleasure Steve gives him.
“Could hold you like this forever,” he says, once Tony can open his eyes. Tony smiles, his bruised and tender lips straining: there’s a drop of come on the underside of Steve’s jaw. He brushes it off with a sigh and sucks it off his thumb. The glimmer of interest in Steve’s eye is echoed by the twitch of his cock, still buried hilt-deep in Tony’s ass.
“Deal,” Tony hums, leaning forward to kiss Steve long and heartily, one last time before they have to go back out into the world and pretend this—their relationship—isn’t a thing that exists.
They’ll talk, eventually.
Tony pours the hot water into the press and watches the grounds float up and swirl around in the dark.
“Sure,” he says, not turning around to look at Steve, as much as he wants to. It’s for the best, he reminds himself for the thousandth time that day. The less he looks at Steve, the easier this will be for him. For both of them. “Send ’em through the server so JARVIS can throw them up for me when I get back to the lab tonight.”
There’s a moment of silence so immense it’s any wonder Tony can’t hear his own heartbeat. Then:
“Tony.” Oh, no. He knows that ‘Tony,’ and it’s everything he can do to not shut his eyes as he braces himself for what comes next: “Could you—turn around?”
Steve doesn’t even have to use his Captain America voice to get Tony to do as he asks. By the end, it was like that all the time: Steve would ask, and Tony would oblige, and the ease with which they learned to communicate as a couple was unlike anything Tony could have hoped for, except for the part where Tony didn’t want to go public with their relationship and could never get Steve to understand why.
Looking at Steve now, Tony withers, wishing the kitchen floor would open up and swallow him whole. Steve still looks a million times better than Tony feels, but there’s a pinching around his eyes that Tony recognizes as concern, and it shouldn’t make his heart sing to know Steve can still feel that about him, but it does. Backlit by the morning sun coming in unobscured through the mansion’s massive windows, Steve looks like an angel come to earth, bright and warm and golden. Tony feels small and twisted and hollow in comparison. Weak. A coward, who let this man slip through his fingers for fear of losing him later on down the line.
“Are you doing okay? I know we—things kind of…ended, abruptly.” Steve says the word ‘ended’ like it tastes bad. His face screws up like he’s sucked a rancid lemon. It’d be endearing if it wasn’t directed at Tony for Tony’s sake. “I’ve been worried about you.”
Tony waves a hand at him, smiling beatifically like the words don’t make him want to drop to his knees and beg Steve’s forgiveness.
“I’m fine, Cap,” he replies, not Steve, and even Tony can tell Steve is pained by the change of address by the way his fingers clench around the towel in his hands. “You?”
Steve visibly swallows. “I’m fine,” he says, and he sounds like it. He certainly looks like it, smiling like the free man he is. Fine might actually be the truth, in Steve’s case, even if it isn’t in Tony’s.
“Glad to hear it!” Tony almost shouts as he pivots back to his coffee, pressing down on the plunger too soon, but he’s so harried by being there in the kitchen with Steve on his first day back to worry about a weak brew.
“Sir, I’m being told to remind you that your ten o’ clock is waiting for you at your office.”
Tony winces. “What time is it, J?”
“The time is currently ten twenty-nine.”
“I’ll let you go, then,” Steve says, already leaving the kitchen before Tony can respond with anything. He manages to catch Steve’s eye as he waves back at Tony on his way out. He looks happy, Tony reminds himself. You let him go so he could be happy. You have to let him be happy.
The coffee scalds when he drinks it, but the burn is good. It reorients the pain currently trying to wring the blood out of Tony’s heart, gives him something to focus on that isn’t this unbearable, overwhelming sense of regret. Heat to burn away the creeping chill that breaking up with Steve was the biggest mistake Tony’s ever made in his life.
After four months of pushing the conversation off for another day, four months of dating in secret—sneaking touches when the others have their backs turned, never spending the night in each other’s beds even after bouts of sex so intense they can’t remember how their legs work, pretending not to care more than is reasonable when one of them goes down in a fight—Steve finally sits Tony down and asks him why.
Or, more accurately, he makes love to Tony slowly and sweetly for what feels like hours, until Tony is literally crying from pleasure and the overwhelming need to come, and then when Tony finally, finally breaks and whispers that magic word, “Please,” Steve bends him almost in half with a groan that shakes the bed and then plows home until Tony is sobbing and tearing the sheets as he comes.
Then, when they’re both sated and clean and curled up on the dry side of Tony’s California King, Steve places a hand on Tony’s stomach. Tony can feel it shaking, and he knows what Steve’s about to say.
“I want to tell the team.”
Tony closes his eyes and groans. “Steve…”
“Please, Tony. We need to have this conversation. We should have had it ages ago.”
So much for enjoying the afterglow. Tony sits upright in bed, warmed by Steve’s hand coming to rest on his thigh. The other man stays laid out next to him, looking up at Tony like he’s his guiding light when all Tony’s done is drive him to this point: Steve, nervous, looking guilty for asking for something of Tony he doesn’t have the courage to give.
“I just…you remember, when I told you about Princess Diana?”
Steve looks confused for a moment. When understanding sets in, smoothing his features out to an expression of wary comprehension, Tony feels a rush of love so intense he has to lie back down just to keep the blood from rushing to his head. Steve Rogers is so much smarter than anyone gives him credit for. It’s Tony’s second favorite thing about him.
“You’re worried I’m going to get killed being chased by paparazzi?” He says, moving in close and reaching out for Tony’s hand. Tony takes it, weaves their fingers together in a perfect fit. He stares at Steve’s fingers instead of looking him in the eye. Steve’s fingers are his fifth favorite thing about his boyfriend.
“In a sense,” Tony replies. “I’m worried about what happens to us when ‘us’ no longer involves you and me, but everyone—the team, Pepper, the board, the government, our enemies…I’m worried that once the press gets a hit of us, they’re going to drain us dry, and all of it—the gossip, the speculation, the invasiveness…it’s going to drive us apart.”
“Tony,” Steve sighs, leaning forward to kiss Tony’s forehead. Tony can’t help but press into the gesture. He can feel Steve’s lips curve up in a smile when he does. “You’ve been holding on to this all this time?”
“It’s a valid concern, Steve.”
“Maybe,” he replies. “And maybe it’s something you could have discussed with me before unilaterally deciding to keep our relationship a secret.”
There’s a deep undercurrent of hurt in Steve’s voice, and Tony would beat himself with the Hulk’s fist if Steve would let him for putting it there. Tony wills himself to meet Steve’s gaze then—even in the semi-darkness of his bedroom, light seems to spill out of Steve. His eyes are bright and focused, tracking Tony’s face like he’s reading a tactical map. Naked, post-coital glow is a good look on Steve, as is pretty much anything, if Tony’s being honest.
“Can you blame me?”
“Tony,” Steve sighs again, like it pains him, and Tony winces at that tone coming out of Steve’s mouth. “I wish you loved yourself half as much as you love me.”
Wow. “Wow,” Tony says, jerking backward like Steve just gut-punched him. Already Steve is scrambling, tangling his legs up in Tony’s expensive sheets as he sits upright.
“That’s not—hell, Tony, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”
“And how did you mean it, Steve?”
“I just…you think this hasn’t crossed my mind before? Going public and losing our privacy in the process? You’re talking like you’ve already decided that the end of our relationship is inevitable because the world is going to drive us apart, and I know the reality is something else, something you feel like would be your fault, and I don’t like you thinking so little of yourself that I would let that happen.”
Tony gapes up at Steve, floundering like a fish for words that won’t come. Steve bends over him, brushing their lips together in the gentlest caress of a kiss in order to kickstart Tony’s brain.
“Just talk to me, Tony.”
Tony places a hand over Steve’s heart to feel it beating. It’s comforting in a way nothing else is. His heart’s far and away Tony’s favorite thing about Steve Rogers.
“It’s—this is my whole life, Steve,” he says. At Steve’s confused expression, he goes on: “The press. The world, thinking its owed every piece of your life story, including and especially the things you’re still trying to work through.” He thinks back to when he read an article about Sunset Bain shortly after her betrayal, an “investigative exposé” on their relationship and her seemingly-overnight rise to success. It was tabloid pablum, at best, but it still scraped at something raw and vulnerable in Tony. Or, even worse, the explosion of press following his parents’ death, the countless headlines, the day-in, day-out of it all, phone calls and bell ringers and paparazzi camped outside the tower. The cumulative effect put a stop to a healing process that had barely begun, and Tony was still dealing with the fallout of that.
“I’m also terrified you’ll wake up one day, look out the window and see a throng of paparazzi outside waiting to grill you about the latest cheating scandal or accuse you of abusing me because someone saw bruises on me after I fought a Skrull wearing your face, and you’ll decide you don’t want to put up with any of it anymore.” Tony takes a deep breath. “But all of that? That comes with me, Steve. I wish it didn’t. You can’t know how much I wish it didn’t. But that’s the reality we live in, and I wanted—I just wanted to keep you to myself for as long as possible, before they got their hooks in you and you decided I wasn’t worth it.”
Steve looks at him for a long time and doesn’t touch. He stays in place, leaning over Tony, one hand next to Tony’s head, the other trapped underneath it, and just reads Tony like the open book he’s revealed himself to be, cowardice and all. When the silence reaches the point of suffocation, Tony lets his hand fall from Steve’s chest.
That’s that, then.
“I’ll let you get some sleep,” he says, moving to work his way out from under Steve when the other man stops him with a hand on his hip. Tony pauses and looks up, sees Steve staring down at him with all the love and consternation Tony’s used to seeing there in his smiling blue eyes.
“Stay,” Steve whispers before leaning down for a kiss. Tony gives it to him. He’d give him everything if he could. He’s helpless to do anything else, not when he loves Steve Rogers this much.
Tony finishes his meeting with the clean energy consultant—an engaging, exciting discussion about bringing arc reactor tech and associated jobs to underserved communities in the mid-west and Appalachia, for starters—just in time for a text from Rhodey: Don’t turn on the news.
He’d just managed to scrounge up a good mood during that meeting. It would be a shame to ruin it so soon. Naturally, he does exactly what Rhodey told him not to do and turns on the TV in his office. He does it expecting reports of a stock drop, or Stark weapons being sold on the black market. He doesn’t expect to come face to face with footage of Steve laughing freely with his arm around Sam Wilson’s shoulders, Sam’s hand wrapped snug around Steve’s bony hip, the two of them walking together down 5th Avenue in the sunshine.
The entertainment “news” “reporter” says this footage was taken minutes ago on a bystander’s cellphone. Tony sinks into a chair in front of the widescreen TV, helpless to stare as he watches the 15 second clip repeat itself over and over as the airbrushed talking heads gush and gossip about Sam and Steve, two all-American good guys making up the hottest couple since sliced bread.
Of course Steve would end up with Sam, Tony thinks. Sam is the kind of good Tony could never hope to be—no blood on his hands, at least not like Tony has and can never wash off, no matter how many lives he saves. He’s Steve’s age, and smart, and stable, and trustworthy down to his core. He’s also hot as hell, Tony can easily admit, even if Steve burns hotter than anyone who enters his orbit. Tony once joked with Steve that Tony was the ugly one in their relationship, but Steve’s sour expression had stopped Tony from expanding on that particular line of self-deprecating humor.
And, god, when did Steve ever laugh like that with Tony? Sometimes he got close, coming up with little bon mots that made Steve throw his head back and guffaw, but that beaming smile and the way his laugh booms and echoes across bustling 5th Avenue is unlike anything Tony ever saw when he and Steve were together.
He looks relaxed and happy in all the ways he never was with Tony. Because you never let the world see you together, a little voice reminds him. It sounds remarkably like JARVIS. Steve deserves happiness. It’s why Tony let him go. After their heavy-duty pillow talk (and another memorable round of lovemaking, with Tony taking the reins and fucking Steve on his stomach through the mattress until he was crying and begging for release), he’d asked for a little more time to work through his issues. Steve, ever the patient boyfriend, had granted it to him. Tony had offered up moving in together as a compromise, which had thrilled Steve endlessly. But when two weeks became a month, and a month became two, and Steve’s mood only soured further and further until every conversation became an argument and every argument ended in slammed doors and heavy silence, it became clear to Tony that this wasn’t an issue he was going to be able to work through in time to keep Steve, keep him happy, keep him his.
So he let him go. And now Steve’s with Sam, who’s seized the opportunity to show Steve off to the world, and who can blame him? If Tony had been stronger, more self-assured, more defiant of the assumptions placed on him by the world around him—if he’d loved himself even half as much as he loved Steve Rogers—that would be him taking Steve shopping, making him laugh and smile as he tucked his hand around that lovely hip and held him close while the world watched on in envy.
But he was a coward, and now he’s watching footage of Sam on a date with Steve play on a loop while vapid, boneheaded commentators speculate about their relationship.
Tony’s phone buzzes again with another text from Rhodey. I told you not to watch.
He tosses the phone away and buries his face in his hands with the beginnings of a sob, a sound he chokes down like the booze he kind of wishes he still drank. He’s not proud of the thought, but the misery of truly losing Steve—and any hope of fixing what he broke between them—has opened a window to everything he’d ignored while in Malibu, sunning himself and pretending he hadn’t wounded himself beyond repair.
Tony leaves the TV on, hunches over on himself, and just as he’s about to let the tears fall, an obnoxious beeping rouses him.
“Wha—?”
“Sir, there are reports of an attack on 5th Avenue,” JARVIS announces. Dread drops a block of ice down Tony’s throat, so cold and horrible it almost freezes him in place. What if Steve…
Tony is up and calling the suit before the thought can finish itself. It’s waiting for him in the lobby by the time he steps off the elevator, rushing to fill the vacancy as panic claws at his throat. “J, cross-streets.”
“The Wrecking Crew are currently being engaged at the intersection of 5th and 26th.”
Engaged is a nice euphemism for attacking, and Tony knows without having to ask JARVIS that the focus of the attack was on Steve and Sam, whose location was just broadcast to the entire world.
He flies faster than he’s technically allowed within city limits, but the law can wait. Steve’s life can’t. Unlike the armor, Steve can’t call his uniform to himself, nor can Sam sprout wings and fly them out of there at the drop of a hat; they’re two against four heavy hitters, and as much faith as Tony has in Steve and Sam’s abilities, those are odds he’s not willing to gamble on.
“For the last time, Tony, I’m alright.”
“Oh yeah, Cap? Tell that to the eighteen inches of rebar SHIELD medical just had to surgically remove from your thigh.”
Steve is struggling to sit upright in his hospital bed, one leg fixed firmly in place by a mummy’s worth of bandages. Tony keeps himself to the far wall so he can look at Steve—alive, thank Odin and Thor and any other Asgardians whose names Tony can’t remember—and not be tempted to touch him, hold him, kiss him like he wants to, has wanted to for years and has never admitted to. It’s hard to keep himself away when Steve almost just died, but he manages. He always does.
“Did everyone make it out okay?” Steve grunts. Tony knocks his head back against the wall hard enough to hurt.
“You got everyone out before you let the building fall on you, remember? Oh, of course you don’t, because a whole building fucking fell on you while you were still in it!”
“Tony…” Steve is squinting and holds a hand up to his head. Tony didn’t even consider Steve’s concussion when he started shouting, fuck.
“I’m sorry, Cap—fuck.” He wipes a hand down his face. “That rebar missed your femoral artery by a quarter of an inch. You’ve got a concussion and broken ribs and the only reason you’re still alive is because of the serum. Watching—ugh, I need to sit down for this.”
Tony takes the shitty plastic chair next to Steve’s bed and sits down hard enough he wonders if it will break. He’s close enough now to see the mottled bruising that’s made an Impressionist painting out of Steve’s handsome, perfect face, but somehow the discoloration doesn’t detract from the beauty of this man. It just makes him seem more human—precious, even. Tony folds his hands in his lap and does not look at Steve’s hand hanging over the side of the bed in front of him.
He draws a deep breath and lets it out with a rush of words: “Watching you almost bleed out on the street was the most awful thing I’ve ever seen, Steve. The thought of losing you was even worse. So don’t tell me you’re alright when you’re not, because I’m definitely not alright, and I wasn’t just shish kabab’ed by a rusty piece of metal through the thigh.”
Steve hums thoughtfully, like he always does when he’s thinking something new and meaningful for the first time. Tony looks up and catches his eye, or rather Steve catches his—like a fish on a hook. When his lips turn up in a knowing smile, Tony knows something is up.
“You called me Steve.”
“Uh,” Tony frowns, “Yeah, ‘cause it’s your name.”
“You must have been really scared if you’re upset enough to use my name.”
“Don’t tease me, Cap. I don’t respond well to teasing.”
Steve’s eyes light up with something Tony might hazard to call joy.
“And what do you respond well to?”
Tony looks at Steve, then at Steve’s hand, which has turned upside down, fingers hooked ever so slightly inward—an invitation if Tony’s ever seen one, and he’s seen more than his fair share. He stands up from his crap chair and steps in close enough to breathe Steve’s air and feel the warmth—the life—radiating off of him like rays off the sun. Steve looks like hell, beaten and bruised and only a couple hours removed from standing at Death’s door, and Tony has never seen anything more beautiful. Steve’s resilience is a wonder to behold, let alone draw from. It’s his…fourth favorite thing about him.
But can it really be this easy?
Tony opens his mouth and says it. “Positive reinforcement?”
Steve’s answering smile cracks his lips again from where they split during the battle, but Tony is too caught up in kissing them—kissing Steve—to care. And then Steve takes his hand and holds it, and Tony vows then and there to never, ever let go.
The HUD is a brightly colored mess of information: live police reports from the ground, vital signs of wounded civilians, schematics of every building between 28th and the Flatiron, but all Tony needs to know is where Steve is, and if he’s okay.
Please, please be okay.
He dials into the Avengers main comm line as he scans each building for heat signatures. “Cap, pick up.”
“Tony!” Steve’s voice comes through loud and clear and audibly relieved, which melts some of that frozen terror still lodged in Tony’s chest. “124 5th Avenue—we managed to lure the Crew down to the basement, but—” Steve’s report cuts off with a startled, agonized cry. Tony curses and heads for the address, flying right through the front entrance (which isn’t really an entrance anymore so much as a giant hole in the wall) and dropping down through the gaping hole in the center of top floor all the way to the basement. The Wrecking Crew did some heavy damage in a short amount of time, as is their way, but Tony isn’t worried about the bill right now.
“Cap!”
A sound like a hammer on an anvil echoes through the basement, followed shortly by another cry. Angry, this time, not at all like Steve’s. Tony floods the place with light from the armor, both arms up and ready for action, drawing the attention of the four behemoths fighting blind all the way in the back.
“Candygram for Mongo,” Tony chirps as Thunderball takes a running start at him. He brings him down with a power-dampening electric net, which drops him like a sealed sausage onto the cold basement floor. Bulldozer is next, rushing Tony on his left flank while his hand is down. Classic mistake, thinking that just because Iron Man’s gauntlet is down he’s defenseless: Bulldozer takes a swing and clips Tony’s shoulder, which only unbalances Tony for a moment before he recovers and fires a volley of flares right into Bulldozer’s masked face.
Bulldozer roars and backs away, tears streaming as he tries to see his way past the fiery sparks.
“Cap, report!”
“Over here, To—agh!”
Fuck, no. Tony shackles Bulldozer with twin sets of reinforced power-dampening manacle and leaves him writhing on the floor in pain next to Thunderball before going off into the dark expanse of the old basement in search of Steve. Sam he finds on the way, locked in hand-to-hand combat with Wrecker—Tony pauses on his way to Steve to knock Sam’s opponent out with an iron hand to the back of the skull.
“I had him!” Sam shouts, even as relief washes over his strained features. Iron Man shrugs, hovering a few inches above concrete.
“You can take all the credit,” Tony says. He tells himself it doesn’t come out as bitter and envious as he feels, knowing that Sam has what Tony was fool enough to let go of, but now’s not the time for any of that. He jets off to look for Steve, Sam in hot pursuit; the basement is a labyrinth the further in they go. Old brownstones and their ridiculous planning are the bane of Tony’s existence, both as a landlord and as a superhero currently trying to find his ex-boyfriend in the maze of bricks.
He banks hard around a corner when he hears Steve curse, gauntlets up so he can see: Piledriver at Steve’s back with an arm around his neck, and even against Steve’s considerable size the guy looms large, threatening the choke the life out of Steve with a smile on his face.
“Ah, there’s your knight in shining armor!” Piledriver cackles, squeezing his arm harder around Steve’s neck. Steve is turning purple, scratching and kicking at the body behind him to no avail. It’s hard to get a good shot in a dark, contained space like this—a bullet might ricochet and hit Steve, or Sam, and absolutely no way in hell is he firing off a bomb down here. Tony doesn’t linger on the knight in shining armor comment. He lowers his hands, repulsors whining as they power down.
“What do you want, Piledriver?” God, seriously, the names these schmucks come up with…
“Just waiting for the cavalry to arrive!” With a bloody grin, Piledriver reveals his other hand: in it, an old Stark bomb that went off the market years ago.
That cold block in Tony’s chest spreads to his extremities. Oh no.
“Alright, Piledriver. You let Captain America and Falcon go, you can have me. Deal?”
Steve struggles harder, gritting his teeth against the pressure cutting off his air supply. Piledriver holds the bomb out to his side, cackling again—that manic laugh always unsettles something in Tony. All he has to do is drop the bomb on its tail to hit the pressurized switch and in seconds, they’re all goners. The only good news is that the blast radius itself isn’t significant: if he can get Steve and Sam far enough out of the way, that should be enough to save them.
“JARVIS,” he says, switching over to private comms, “single shot to the head should do it.”
“Sir—”
“Now, J.”
The concealed gun in Iron Man’s shoulder appears with a hiss of metal—the bullet is out in less than a second, hitting Piledriver square in the center of the head. It’s not enough to kill him, but it dazes him long enough for Steve to escape his grasp and knock him back with an elbow to the sternum. Tony rockets forward and grabs Steve, one eye still on Piledriver behind him.
“Tony!” Steve rasps, holding onto the suit like a lifeline.
“Falcon!” Tony shouts. Sam appears from behind the corner. “Go long, and take care of him.”
Even in the HUD display, Steve is the most beautiful thing Tony’s ever seen.
“Tony, what—”
Without another word and with all the grace of a major league pitcher, Tony pivots and launches Steve bodily at Sam, who catches him in his arms in a full bear hug before hauling him around the corner behind the brick wall. By the time Tony turns around, Piledriver’s hand has gone slack.
The bomb drops. In the spare second he has to react, Tony grabs Piledriver and hurls him across the room, mostly out of harm’s way, then launches himself on the bomb just as it hits the floor.
Even as the world whites out in a deafening blast of fire and stone, Tony thinks he hears Steve screaming his name.
I really do love him, Tony realizes, watching from his spot at the breakfast bar as Steve busies himself removing an entire cookie sheet’s worth of bacon from the oven. The oven mitts are the same shade of blue as Steve’s uniform and dotted with little shields, a novelty gift he bought Steve years ago that apparently has yet to yield the desired levels of embarrassment Tony had originally hoped for. He’s also wearing nothing but boxers and a white cotton tank, showing off the mountain range that is Steve’s shoulders to their fullest effect.
“How many pieces do you want?”
“How many you got?”
Steve laughs. “Enough for you, anyways.” He’s still glowing with happiness, hair mussed, pillow lines still etched into his cheek. They took a risk last night—slept together in Tony’s big bed and woke up to the sun shining through the bedroom window and an empty mansion. Steve was so excited, he could hardly wait for Tony to get his bearings before he was slipping underneath the covers and taking Tony into his mouth.
For once, Tony didn’t worry about how much noise he made in bed.
Now, he gets to reap the benefits of one of his favorite aspects of Steve Rogers: his enviable cooking skills. There’s bacon and eggs and waffles and whipped cream and homemade blackberry jam and lemon butter and toast. It’s enough to feed the Avengers twice over, which means it’s just enough for Steve, and more than enough for Tony.
They eat together side by side, playing footsie under the counter even though there’s no one here to see them, giggling like naughty schoolboys as they lick cream and jam off each other’s lips and fingers between bites of actual food. Steve still has a lot of eating to do even as Tony’s finishes, but that doesn’t mean Tony has to leave his mouth unoccupied in the meantime.
He says as much, and Steve’s eyes darken to that perfect shade of dark blue. He spins his seat around just enough for Tony to fit between his legs and still be able to eat off his plate. Before Tony starts to kneel, Steve drags him in for a buttery lemon kiss that almost makes Tony think twice about going anywhere that isn’t Steve’s lips. He steadies himself with both hands on Steve’s massive thighs, being careful of Steve’s freshly-healed puncture wound, before using one hand to take Steve’s cock out. Steve’s had two orgasms this morning already, but he’s hard and hot and leaking like they never stopped.
“God, I love you,” Tony gasps before licking into Steve’s mouth. He fits in Tony’s hand like he belongs there, big and hard, hot and wet. Tony works him slowly, firmly, the way he’s learned Steve likes: thumbing the frenulum in little circles until Steve is shuddering and making soft little ‘uhn-uhn-uhn’ sounds in the back of his throat, then slicking the shaft with pre-come with long passes of his palm and then taking him fully in hand to fuck him hard and fast within the tight circle of his fingers. Tony’s calluses bump over the gorgeous, pronounced vein in Steve’s dick, and Steve whimpers like he’s being driven out of his mind with pleasure every time they do, right into Tony’s waiting mouth.
Finally, Tony starts to pull away from Steve so he can kneel and put his lips to better use, but Steve groans and wraps a hand around Tony’s wrist as he jacks him, stopping his descent by pressing a desperate kiss against Tony’s lips with a whine and gasping: “Please—stay up here. Stay with me.”
Steve is so sweet like this, rumpled and needy and moving his hips into Tony’s touch with little hitching breaths, faster and faster as Tony speeds up his strokes. Tony says it, says I love you Steve, always loved you, always will, love you, love you, his hand a noisy blur over Steve’s big, slick cock, his own head cradled delicately in Steve’s big, soft hands as Steve kisses him and kisses him and kisses him like this is everything he’s ever wanted, ever needed, ever will.
His thigh is shaking violently under Tony’s hand. Steve’s cock swells and he moans into Tony’s mouth, pulling his face even closer to him by the scalp. “Love—oh god, Tony, I love—I love you,” he says, voice watery, breaking as he tips over the brink headfirst into orgasm, “Don’t stop, fuck, don’t stop, don’t stop, I love you, love you, love you—”
One day, Tony will let Steve shout it from the rooftops—when he does, he’ll be right there next to him.
If there’s beeping, Tony thinks, he must be in Hell. That’s the only possible explanation for it. It doesn’t cross his mind that he’s in a hospital until he hears a sound like a relieved gasp somewhere out there where the world isn’t pain and nausea and everything spinning in the wrong direction.
“Augh, fuck.”
“Try—oh thank God, try not to move, Tony, hold on.” There’s a hand cradling the back of his head, all of a sudden, and a cold plastic cup is being pressed to his lips. Ice chips, he realizes. He remembers cold, a freezing sensation, terror, Sam, Steve—
“Steve…”
“I’m here, sweetheart. I’m here.” Steve urges him to eat some of the ice chips with gentle nudges of the cup against his mouth. Tony obliges him, because of course he does. The water soothes his sore throat and clears the fog from his brain a little, enough to get a better sense of his surroundings.
He’s in a SHIELD recovery room. Nothing is immobilized, which means nothing’s broken, which is a relief. He can hear and see, but his head hurts like a building fell on it.
“That’s because it did,” Steve tells him.
Oh. “Was I talking out loud again?”
God, he missed Steve’s laugh, especially his Yes, I’m laughing AT you, Tony chuckle. He also missed that gentle brush of fingers against his forehead, right under his hairline, the way Steve knew exactly how to gentle Tony with his touch and voice and presence.
“I missed you too,” Steve says. Tony blinks but still can’t really see straight. Those bricks really packed a wallop. “Rest, Tony. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
True to his word, when Tony wakes again, Steve is there, sitting in the same crappy plastic chair Tony sat in last time and holding Tony’s hand, watching him come to like Tony is something magical to behold.
“Hey, mister,” Steve smiles. His eyes are red but otherwise clear. “How’s your head?”
Tony winces. “Harder than it looks.” Steve laughs, so, mission accomplished there, but he won’t let go of Tony’s hand. If anything, Steve just draws closer, brushing his thumb against the back of Tony’s hand like a metronome.
“Doctor says you can come home in the morning,” he says in a low voice. The lights are dim, Tony notices, and the blinds are shut. There are more ice chips on the table next to the bed, which Steve hands to him without prompting.
Swallowing around the nameless knot in his throat, Tony blinks up at Steve and asks, “How’s Sam?”
Steve smiles. “Sam’s fine. A little pissed off at you for not giving him enough of a heads up before you threw me at him like a glorified football, but he’ll live.”
Tony’s relieved, of course he is, but the knot in his throat starts to taste sour the longer he thinks about Sam waiting up at home for Steve while Steve fusses over Tony, who only has a concussion and a broken heart to show for having a building dropped on his head.
This time, he manages to keep all that to himself. Instead, Tony cracks a little smile and says, “Good. That’s…that’s good.”
Steve, however, looks puzzled. “You told him to take care of me.”
“I did? When?” Tony wheezes. He occupies himself and his mouth with ice chips and doesn’t look Steve in the eye when he answers:
“Right before you launched me at him.”
“Like a glorified football?”
Funny, the room has stopped spinning, but Tony still feels off-kilter, like everything is a little unbalanced. Or maybe that’s just Steve, and the way he’s looking at Tony, hard and scrutinizing but relieved. Tony’s felt the same relief before, with Steve—the knowledge that despite a dangerously close call, the man he loves most in the world is still alive, and is here with him, despite everything.
“Tony,” Steve says, leaning closer, squeezing Tony’s hand, “I’m not with Sam.”
Oh. “Oh. No?”
“No, Tony. And to spare you the suspense, I think the cat’s out of the bag in terms of you and me.”
“Uh. What?”
That cold feeling floods him again, freezing his heart in place as Steve reaches for the TV remote. The screen flickers on, vibrant colors taking shape as a reporter recounts the events of that afternoon’s attack by the Wrecking Crew and how Iron Man saved the day. The footage captures the moment the bomb exploded, windows blowing out onto the street and the structure collapsing into a heap of rubble and brick dust; it had been fully evacuated by the time Tony showed up on the scene, apparently, and thank goodness.
But what steals the show isn’t the bad guys being paraded out into the waiting SHIELD trucks, still immobilized by Tony’s tech—it’s Steve, carrying Iron Man out onto the street in a bridal carry while Sam waves bystanders back. Both of them are covered in dust, but Steve catches the camera’s particular attention: it zooms in on his dusty face, which is streaked with crisp lines of tears as Steve lowers Iron Man onto the pavement and rips off his faceplate. The camera is too far away and there’s too much ambient noise to hear it, but Tony can see Steve’s mouth shaping itself around Tony’s name, can see him gritting his teeth as he begs Tony to wake up and cries all the while like his world is ending.
Paramedics rush in even as Steve bows his head to Tony’s chest, palm covering the arc reactor in a vice as they try to pull Tony away from him. They’re trying to move him away gently, but Steve is inconsolable, throwing hands and spitting mad, all but launching himself at anyone who dares put a hand on Tony.
Unwittingly, Tony squeezes Steve’s hand, just to know he’s okay. They’re okay.
The reporter is breathless as she gives the play-by-play of everything that happens next on screen: Tony’s helmet coming off in Steve’s hands, Steve sobbing openly over his unresponsive body, Steve leaning down and kissing him like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do, right before Sam and Thor come up behind him and pull him away so the paramedics can get to work.
Steve turns off the TV with a sigh. “It’s been playing nonstop for almost twenty-four hours,” he says. He won’t look Tony in the eye. “I’m sorry.”
“What—” Tony’s brain is still rebooting, recovering from the concussion and now trying to parse what he thinks his eyes just saw. “Why are you sorry?”
Steve looks at their hands where they’re joined next to Tony’s thigh on the hospital bed. Tony can’t help but think how much better it would be if they were at home, in bed, together.
“We broke up because you didn’t want the world to know about us,” Steve grumbles. “Now everyone definitely knows, and it took you almost dying for them to find out.”
He sounds—god, he sounds miserable, is what he sounds like. Tony can sympathize, since he feels just as awful, and that was before he jumped on a bomb to save Steve’s life.
The good news is, he and Sam aren’t dating. So.
“I’m sorry, Steve.”
“Don’t be, it’s my fault for losing my head. Heat of the moment, you know how it goes.”
“Yeah, I do.” Tony squeezes his hand again, hard so Steve will look at him. He loves it when Steve looks at him—no one’s ever looked at Tony the way Steve does. He can’t even quantify it with words. There’s just Steve, and the way Steve looks at him, and Tony knows he’d do anything to keep Steve looking at him like that. Like Tony is everything, the way Steve is to Tony. “But I’m sorry, because I should have told the world about us ages ago.”
Steve blinks. Even struck speechless and dumbfounded, Steve is the most gorgeous thing Tony’s ever seen.
“What about your issues?”
Tony husks a laugh. When the coughing subsides and the ice chips ease a path down his throat, he says, “I’ll probably always have them. The press is awful and it’ll only get worse. Just means I’ll need you to reassure me more often.”
Steve leans forward. “Reassure you of what, Tony?” he asks, like it’s important that Tony says the words outright.
Tony lifts Steve’s hand and kisses his knuckles. He has so much making up to do, but now’s as good a time to start as any.
“That you love me,” he says, “as much as I love you.”
He can’t even finish grinning before Steve is on top of him, kissing every last trace of cold right out of Tony’s heart.
- - -
read it on AO3!
#ishipallthings#prompt fill#steve rogers#tony stark#stevetony#stony#superhusbands#nsfk#EYES EMOJI#wow I hope this doesn't suck I wrote it in a marathon session today and did absolutely nothing else I should have done#NO RAGRETS#rachel writes fic#I also just realized that I definitely quote IM2 even though I said it was 616#because I LOVE MESS
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A List of Reasons Why I Hate the ‘Sea Salt Family’
AKA It’s Sunday Tuesday and I’m back at it again at Krispie-Kremes
(Abuse tw; violence tw; salt tw; suicide tw)
I have mentioned, in passing, my problems with the prevalence of the Sea Salt Family in fandom and my problems with it. I’ve never written a comprehensive post on it before. It’s Sunday though, I have the salt, so let’s do it.
The Sea Salt Family is roughly presented, but not explicitly laid-out, in canon. At the end of KH3, Xion, Roxas, Lea, and Isa are shown sharing ice cream on the clock tower together. Since the introduction of Xion and Roxas’ character, ‘sharing ice cream’ has been a declarative statement of friendship and camaraderie. It was the origin of their friendship. Thus, the inclusion of Isa is a signal of his admittance into the reformed friend group. The intention of this scene was to show the reconciliation and unification of these characters. To cement this, it seems that Nomura has bundled Roxas, Xion, Lea, Isa, and the Twilight Trio, into a shared plot. They are mentioned in Re:Mind, by Riku, as searching for Sora through Roxas and Xion’s memories.
Common fandom interpretation takes this one step farther. The assumption is that Lea and Isa have adopted Xion and Roxas. This puts Lea and Isa in a parental role over the kids. Often times, this is done in a shipping context for Lea and Isa. Sometimes Lea and Isa have a good relationship, with two lovingly adopted children. Other times Xion and Roxas become contention points for the main ship-- Isa’s punishment for being a jerk is taking care of the kids.
Fandom does take into account that the canon scene itself in KH3 is flawed. Lets overview Lea and Isa’s relationship, with both of the kids.
Roxas spent the majority of 358/2 Days oblivious to the machinations going on around him. However, he identified a rift between Axel and Xion that developed in the midpoint of the year. He recognized that Axel had done something to estrange her and by the end of the game, blamed him for it. He was also angry at him for attacking Xion the first time. When Xion ran away for the second time, Roxas confronted Axel and forced the truth. Axel had been lying about Xion --sometimes intentionally to assuage Roxas’ concerns-- and then attempted to justify his actions to Roxas.The revelations of Axel’s lies --and outright manipulation, diverting Roxas from finding the truth-- causes Roxas to leave the Organization. Axel later attacks Roxas (twice) when Xemnas orders him to do so. At this point, Axel makes no attempt to find an alternate solution. Axel is enraged at Roxas for leaving and even forgetting him (which is a weird thing for an adult man to feel about a child, I might add). He is mocking of Roxas’ confusion in the data Twilight Town. Axel then attacks Roxas with the implicit intention to kill Roxas. Thus, we see that Axel’s relationship to Roxas is manipulative and built on lies, instead of trust. Axel also shows little regard for Roxas’ autonomy (”You’re coming with me, conscious or not.”). Roxas knows that Axel will lie to him. Roxas knows that Axel will assault him. If Roxas enters the post-KH3 relationship with no reservations then he is an oblivious moron.
When it comes to Xion I do not give Axel the benefit of the doubt. Axel is introduced to Xion, by Roxas. At the beginning of their friendship he does not see her face. He becomes aware that she is a replica but decides to give her a fair shake, due to his experience with Repliku. Eventually, he does see her face. They seem to get along for the first part of the game. However, when Xion goes to Castle Oblivion to learn the truth about herself-- Axel moves to block her. He gaslights her (’there’s nothing to see here’) and grabs her to stop her (a violation of her physical autonomy btw). She goes on into the castle and Axel does not mention the incident to Roxas (a lack of transparency and honesty in relationships). Xion is missing for almost a month. She returns, speaks with Roxas (who also grabs her and violates her physical autonomy smh), and is then attacked by Axel. Axel kidnaps Xion and returns her to the Organization against her will. Xion did not want to return to the Organization. Roxas requests that she return with him and she moves away from him. Before Axel attacked her she was going to leave. (Later, Nomura attempts to feebly justify Axel’s behavior by saying Xion is glad he did this. We’ll call that Xion attempting to assuage Roxas’ worries). Xion later goes to Axel for advice about what to do. Axel implies that she’s ‘stealing more than her share’ from Roxas. We are, as a reminder, talking about Xion killing herself here. Later, Axel lets her leave, and then still follows Xemnas’ order to attack her and kidnap her again. I do not believe there is any love loss between Axel and Xion. He betrayed her, gaslit her, attacked and assaulted her, kidnapped her (twice), and showed a cruel disregard for her autonomy. There is no reason for her to trust, or even like him. Their ‘friendship’ ended around day 255 in Castle Oblivion, and any attempt for Nomura to convince you otherwise is deliberate attempt to write over the real trauma that Axel caused her.
Saïx and Roxas have few interactions. However, I read Roxas and Xion as child soldiers. They are slaves, they are working for no payment. Saïx is the man in charge of them. He hands out the missions. We are shown that Saïx primary concern is their efficiency in collecting hearts. Roxas and Saïx interactions include Saïx telling him what his mission is, and how to prepare. Saïx, however, outright pits Roxas and Xion against each other. Even at one point, attempting to have them murder each other. (If you read the manga, and want to consider it for analysis, Saïx even attacks Roxas). Their relationship is cold, hostile, and interlaced with the knowledge of Saïx obvious emotional abuse of Xion. No reason for Roxas to trust, or even like, Saïx.
Take everything above about Saïx and double it for Xion. The profesional and cold demeanor of Saïx is stripped away to reveal an openly hostile, cruel personality. Saïx insults and degrades Xion (”You were a mistake we never should have made”.) Xion refers to him with fear and wariness, often fearing his retribution for failures. He misgenders her and disregards her personhood. He does this out of a self-stated jealousy. He sees Axel growing close to the kids and then lashes out at the easy targets. Saïx outright abuses Xion, and the threat of harm is as effective as the actual action of doing harm. Saïx wanted Xion dead, and as best as I can tell, she knew it. I have no reason to believe that his opinion of her would change from 358 to KH3. It does not make sense that Saïx after KH2 would attempt to ‘save’ Xion. He doesn’t remember her and he wouldn’t remember her all the way until the Keyblade Graveyard. Vexen’s notes would not include Xion’s personality or any of her relationships, she was, at best, two weeks old when he left for Castle Oblivion. Saïx is not shown interacting with Xion in any manner in KH3. In fact, the ‘Xion’ introduced in the Keyblade Graveyard is not Xion. Xion is in Sora’s heart. So, not only is their relationship confusing in KH3, it’s also not meaningful. Vexen mentioned Saïx wished to ‘atone’ but we never hear Saïx true intentions from the horse’s mouth. Or, if he just did it to make nice with Lea. He still refers to the kids as ‘Lea’s friends.’There is no established development between Xion and Saïx proper. Xion would have no reason to believe that Isa no longer wants to kill her, and Isa would have no reason to no longer want to kill Xion.
Despite all of this, Nomura wants us to believe that all of these characters are reconciled. The text offers little to believe that this is the case. There is not a single scene where any of Isa and Lea’s past behavior is addressed, or an apology made. Nomura’s reading of his own text fails to recognize the abuse and trauma that he wrote Xion and Roxas’ experiencing. He has a fundamental lack of understanding of the consequences and psychology of his own characters. Furthermore, he believes that the friendship they built in the Organization stands on its own. Even though Axel: gaslit, assaulted, kidnapped, and manipulated both. For example, Nomura reads his threat to Xion (”No matter what, I’ll always bring you back.” = ”I will always return your to your abusers, regardless of your wishes, even if I have to assault you to do so.”) as a promise and declaration of friendship. Why else would Xion tell Roxas that Axel kidnapping her is a good thing? Nomura believes that the Organization -- even though we’re talking about the group of people who abused, enslaved, and murdered them-- is good for Xion and Roxas. Why else would the ‘symbol of their friendship’ be the Recusant Symbol in Re: Mind? Thus, their friendship with Axel is good for them. Why else is it romanticized in KH3? Therefore, there is no reason to confront or discuss previous acts of abuse, manipulation, gaslighting, or assault.
The story of 358/2 Days is not a story of two children shaking free of the shackles of their abusers and oppressors as they grow into their own, independent, unique personalities. It is a story of two children who are abused and manipulated by the adults in their lives. Who are then murdered and discarded as soon as they hold no use for the plot. Xion’s entire character is written with the intention to motivate Roxas to leave the Organization. That is why 358/2 Days was created as a game. That is why her character was introduced. The systematic stripping of her autonomy and personhood is present in the text itself, and the meta-text. She is fridged, and then that death is milked for man pain of Roxas and Axel. Nomura’s own sexism created and destroyed her character. So, much to the point that when fan consensus demanded she be brought back: he gave her no lines and no personality. He couldn’t even muster the spine to give her an original moveset for her Re:Mind data fight-- she’s just a copy of Roxas. That’s all she is to him and that is all she will ever be to him.
And the fandom seems, for the most part, to be in concurrence with Nomura. We have asked Xion and Roxas to be in a healthy relationship with the two adults who have overtly abused them. The problem is not the writing of the Sea Salt Family. That trope, on its own, is fine. The true problem is the fandom’s failure to address the abuse in the Kingdom Hearts story.
Saïx actions, as poignant as they may or may not be in the rescue of Xion and Roxas, do not absolve him. Saïx used his position of authority and power over them to cause them tangible harm. Emotional abuse hurts as much as physical abuse and the effects are long lasting. Especially, when we know that Xion and Roxas were completely subject to Saïx. As far as Xion was aware, if she disobeyed or failed him-- her life was forfeit. What Saïx did in KH3 was take the first step of reconciliation. He fixed his most obvious mistake which included being complicit in the murder of children. Good for him. Now, he has to make tangible changes in his behavior. He must make apologies that shows he understands what and how he was wrong. This apology should be voluntary and not forced by Lea, or whittled out of him by the kids. He must take responsibility for his actions and preform further restitution. He can’t shove blame on the kids, he can’t say ‘Xemnas made me do it.’ No, Saïx caused them harm, and he has to be responsible. Anything less is in an incomplete, false apology that does not match the severity of his actions. And even if he executes a perfect apology, guess what?
Xion and Roxas do not have to feel grateful to Saïx. They do not have to forgive him. They do not owe him anything. He was their abuser. If they do not feel ready to forgive, they don’t have to. Furthermore, forgiveness and healing is a process. One and done will not realistically fix the level of trauma that these children have experienced. I have seen the expressed attitude that of course Xion and Roxas would forgive Isa. They’re good kids! To which I ask, would bad kids not forgive their abuser? Xion and Roxas would still be good kids, even if they don’t forgive the man who abused them. That’s not how this works. They are the victims here, they have been done harm, and they deserve the space to heal. If they do not want Isa in that space, then that is their right. Maybe, Roxas and Xion decide to forgive Isa, maybe it takes time, maybe they never do. It depends on how they work through their pain and trauma. Of course, repeat all this with Lea. Because as much as the fandom likes to give him a free pass for his ‘good intentions.’ Those ‘good intentions’ still hurt Roxas and Xion. You could say his actions are justified given his circumstances. That does not change their impact. Xion and Roxas know --based on Axel’s own behavior-- that he will throw them under the bus if it’s convenient. They have not met Lea. They do not know him. They have no reason to trust him. It is Lea who must do the work to fix that. Not Xion, not Roxas, it is Lea who has to prove himself trustworthy again.
It’s alright to draw Xion, Roxas, Isa, and Lea having ice cream together, or living a happy life. However, it is also necessary to address the problems. How does Xion feel living with Isa, who misgendered and emotionally abused her? Does Roxas feel at all threatened by Lea, knowing that he once attacked him? How did Lea and Isa work to address their mistakes, and reconcile with the kids? How are they addressing the real trauma that Xion and Roxas have experienced, especially the stuff at their own hands? Most depictions of ‘The Sea Salt Family’ skip past all the hard work and jump to the fun part. We’re shown Lea ‘forgiving’ Isa, when it is not Lea’s place to do so. We’re shown Lea bringing Isa, Roxas, and Xion, into his home, with little regard for how this may affect the kids. I feel as though in most depictions, Xion and Roxas are accessories to Isa and Lea’s romantic relationship. Another point of conflict or a source of fluff. This ignores the autonomy of Xion and Roxas, it ignores their struggles and character. Worse yet, it echoes Nomura’s own erasure of their trauma. Don’t write Lea and Isa adopting Xion and Roxas if you’re not prepared to talk about everything that comes with it.
Also consider that Xion and Roxas are extremely vulnerable. They have between them, total, two whole years of experience. They have never gone to school. They have never had friends outside of the Organization. (The Data Twilight Trio are not their actual ‘friends’ and Nomura makes no sense, I’ll die on that hill). I cannot state how easy it would be for Lea or Isa to continue a pattern of abuse with them. You say, Lea and Isa would never do that! To which I say, they have done that, and we have little canon proof that they wouldn’t do that.
Are you catching my problem here?
Do you see why having Roxas and Xion get a happily ever after with their two abusers is not a good idea? Because Nomura did not write a true redemption arc for either Isa or Lea, we do not see any fundamental changes in their character. Axel has been showing willing to commit cold blooded murder. Can you show me how he is now prepared to take care of two extremely vulnerable, traumatized, and abused children? Maybe, in your own writing you don’t think Lea is prepared to take care fo the kids. Okay, that’s fine, there’s some nuance-- but do you still write him taking care of them? Why do you think that is the best situation for Xion and Roxas? Because they have nowhere else to go. How is that acceptable? Knowing that the two children who have been abused have so few resources available to them that they have no choice but to stay with their abusers? Maybe, as a fandom, we need to stop caring so much about Isa and Lea’s feelings, and start caring about their victims.
I don’t want my reader to leave this essay and think, ‘I can’t write Sea Salt Family.’
You can write Sea Salt Family, but you have to order some nuance.
Think about the best Redemption Arc in living memory: Zuko. Zuko was shown kidnapping and attacking Katara in Season 1. Yet, I am perfectly fine with Zutara as a ship, why?
1. Katara is shown capable of standing-up to Zuko, defending herself, and challenging him. In Siege of the North Part 1, she is shown equal to, if not superior to, him in skill and power. Katara can kick Zuko’s ass and he knows it. By the end of Season 1, there is no longer a power imbalance between them. Abuse requires a power imbalance and Katara and Zuko are shown standing on equal footing.
2. Zuko and Katara then have a change in their relationship. Zuko has his change of heart in Ba Sing Se. In the crystal catacombs he shows empathy to Katara that she responds to. He even takes this point to issue his first apology. However, he betrays this budding trust by following Azula in attacking Aang.
3. Zuko reconciles with Katara and builds a friendship with her. This includes Zuko apologizing for his past actions. But also doing what he can to fix his mistakes. He works to understand and listen to her anger and pain. He helps her find the man who killed her mother, on her request. He allows her to take the space and time she needed to address her trauma. Not just what he did to her, but what the fire nation did to her. He shows a clear change of behavior and remorse for his past actions. Katara and Zuko, by the end of the series are friends who trust each other. I can believe it because of the intentional work and time the show put into the relationship.
Now look at the above. You tell me where Isa and Lea did all that in canon? Think about point 1, Katara and Zuko are pretty much the same age, as two years of difference between adolescents is not a significant age gap. Xion and Roxas, are literal toddlers, and Lea and Isa are in their late-twenties. There is a natural power imbalance between these characters caused by age and experience. Which means it’s even more on Lea and Isa to take responsibility. Furthermore, what about point 1 or 2? Xion barely has any lines in KH 3. We do not hear her story, we do not hear her experience, and we do not hear her accepting the apology Lea did not make. Canon is flawed in its execution of the Sea Salt Family. Fandom has a real chance to step-in where Nomura failed and succeeded. Yet, over a year since KH3′s release, I have seen few attempts to do so.
Abuse in relationships can be addressed. Abusers can take responsibility, apologize, and make amends for their actions. I do believe that Xion and Roxas can forgive Lea and Isa, if and only if, Lea and Isa earn that forgiveness. I believe that in theory the Sea Salt Family could be a wonderful example of found family, forgiveness, love, and healing in media. However, in practice, most examples of it fall short. The challenge there-in, is to write and portray the nuance, complexity, and triumph of a real relationship. Not a superfluous, weak, or shallow one, that looks pretty and is heartwarming, but instead a deep story, that is deserving of the characters it attempts to represents.
#✰*✦ This is the idiot speaking ⎧OOC⎫#✰*✦More than a mannequin on the strings⎧Headcanon⎫#salt tw#abuse tw#violence tw#xion#lea#isa#roxas#yeah i'll tag character names i'm not a coward
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A love letter to The Wombats
First, a brief background about The Wombats: The Wombats is an interesting English Indie Rock Band. They started back in 2003 in Liverpool, United Kingdom. The most interesting thing about them is how experimental they are with their albums — considering their vast range. One might think that The Wombats don’t care about what you and I think. They care about their art and what that represents. This is what makes them free to do whatever they want. Now, the album that I want to talk about is some of their earlier work. It was released back in 2007. Damn, that feels like an eternity ago. So let’s begin our journey.
The first track: Tales of Girls, Boys and Marsupials. For me, this track prepares you for what’s to come. It is a good melody and relatively simple. I’ve always enjoyed it because of how strange it is. From this, we move onto the second track.
Kill the Director. This is the song that brought me to the album, and for a long time, it was one of the most played songs for me on Spotify. When I think of this song, I think of the music video which you should watch. The song is different from the first track, and it is faster and has a lot of content. My favourite things are British pop culture references. The nods to Bridget Jones’s Diary and EastEnders make this a quintessentially British song.
Track 3: Moving to New York, this song has always been close to my heart because it is edgy. It tells us what the British think of American cities like New York. I have always had trouble understanding this song due to multiple reasons. Even right now while I’m reading the lyrics and thinking about what to write about them, I am confused. If you look at it literally, the song talks about sleeplessness and Christmas for some reason. Now, let me tell you what I feel about it. This has always been a song to which I headbang and do the air guitar. I never really understood the lyrics. I probably never will. Though, my favourite part has been these lines.
“I put one foot forward and ended up 30 yards back.
Am I losing touch, or am I just completely off the track?
And I don’t know why I want to voice this out loud.
It’s therapeutic somehow.”
Especially the line, “Am I losing touch or am I just completely off track”. Back when I first heard this song, the pandemic was at its peak. I was preparing for entrances, and life was a mess. I related to this, and I’m sure you guys will as well. This song will make you feel things and reconsider life as a whole.
Now, moving onto track 4, Lost in the Post. This is the most popular song on the album. The song sounds surprisingly happy, but when you pay attention, the lyrics are depressing. It is my kind of music because it tells us a story with a catchy chorus. The line that has stuck with me is “She Wanted Mary Poppins but I took her to King Lear”. It represents so much more than you and I can comprehend. It represents not being enough and a theme of overcompensation followed by under-compensation. Its a simple song but the Wombats have done a good job of packing it with references. It is a song about insecurities and love, the two things that are fundamental to any artist.
Track 5: Party in a Forest(Where’s Laura?). Laura, oh, Laura. I will never truly understand this song. Is it a love letter to Laura or is it a desperate man singing for a girl who will never love him back? Throughout the song, he keeps calling out to Laura, but there’s no response. By the end of it, it seems like he has almost given up. Maybe I’m just reading too much into music, or perhaps this boy is writing songs about a gender he doesn’t understand.
Track 6 is something most of us can relate to. Titled “Schools Uniform”, it is literally from the perspective of a teenage boy going through puberty. It is not the typical “Oh. I miss school” song, but maybe a more realistic approach to what school was. Those uniforms, which most of us claim to miss, perhaps made a joke of us. He sings about a girl he likes and who he used to be friends with, but now she has an older boyfriend. The most important thing about this song is how teens romanticise/think that smoking is cool. It’s the whole trope of doing something because someone else is doing it. After all, someone has deemed it cool. The song does an excellent job of talking about how teenagers try their best to fit in to get the validation they so desperately want. This is generally executed by doing things that most of the time is not good for them, and here ends track 6.
Moving on to track 7, the song I’m most excited to write about. Here Comes the Anxiety is the epitome of a cry for help. It is probably the most painful to listen to because it doesn’t even hide that it is sad. I have to give it credit for being honest about its message. In a messed up way, this taught me how to be honest about myself. The song starts by calling out what I think is all music where creators hide the real message behind catchy hooks and other techniques. The essence of the song is hypocritical; it has a catchy hook line(It is literally in the title). The song is just lying to you; it tries to sell an honest image, but it is not. Don’t get me wrong, it is a good song, but it is just like everything else. It is a dark song like it claims to be. It is a song about a lonely man who doesn’t want to be alone, and that’s about it for track 7.
Let’s Dance to Joy Division is one of my favourite songs. So, I have a sort of personal bias towards it. It is happy and real but also quite sad. The lines
“Everything is going wrong but we’re so happy” perfectly captures the essence of this kind of music. It is happy music, so don’t question it. You don’t need to be comfortable while listening to it, maybe sing along and pretend that your life isn’t going to shit. My interpretation of this song is, you shouldn’t question life while it is happening. If something has to go wrong, it probably will, so why even worry about it. Just be happy and maybe play this on a loop.
Track 9 is Backfire at the Disco. It describes a heterosexual first date. A guy gets ready at 8 pm, meets the girl and then gets slapped. The story is pretty straightforward. The guy makes a move at the wrong time. The girl slaps him in response and has to go back home alone at 3 am. What’s important to me isn’t the story but how it’s told. The song starts with how everything is fine and how it is all going okay. It sounds like the girl is in the wrong and that we should feel bad for the guy. The song gets pretty misogynistic when he calls her dress whorish. To give him some credit, he does admit his mistake by the end, but then it is too late, and the narrative has been set. This victimisation of the perpetrator is extremely harmful. It creates a story that men don’t know what to do and how it is an honest mistake. This message is toxic, and anyone listening to this should keep this in mind.
Little Miss Pipedream describes a toxic one-sided relationship. The song is comparatively slower-paced, where the stress is on the lyrics. The song expects us to feel sympathy for this man who is madly in love with this girl. The protagonist is portrayed as a friendly guy who is willing to wait for this girl. This man has selfish ideas of love, and he’s trying to convince the listeners to sympathise with him. These ideas are selfish because they are all based around him. Lyrics like, “Don’t leave miss pipedream cause I love you.” is an example of what is incorrect with this song. Pop culture has often romanticised these ideas and portrayed these men as heroes.
Track 11 is about a therapist named Dr Susan. It is clear that Dr Susan is treating and is prescribing him narcotics. He is infatuated with her and is willing to do anything for her. This is clearly some toxic behaviour. The singer keeps repeating “This Time” which means that he has done this before. The most concerning thing is “Help Me Help Help Me, Susan”. We can see a theme where he asks for help but no one gives it to him and there ends track 11.
Track 12 is about loving a woman who doesn’t want to be loved. The singer has fallen in love with a stripper and is willing to do anything to be with her. His behaviour indicates that he has lost track of reality. In his head, his actions are part of a grander love story but it is psychotic behaviour. This is ironic cause the last song was about a therapist. He clearly knows what he is doing is wrong but he still continues to do so. This entire song does a good job of showing a messed up, toxic relationship between a desperate man and a stripper.
The story of Track 13 is set at the wedding of the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend. It does something unusual by portraying alcoholic tendencies at a wedding. The lyrics make it clear that he still has some feelings for his ex-girlfriend. I don’t know where the blame lies on this one because of the conflicting narratives. The repetition of the line, “She’s not that beautiful” shows us his hatred towards the bride and how our emotions are more complex than they seem. One would assume that after all this time he wouldn’t resent his old partner but he does. This is because humans are complicated and irrational and there’s nothing we can do about it. This also shows how when we are with someone everything seems romantic but when they leave we criticise all their actions. To conclude, the song is quite entertaining and definitely worth listening to.
If you have read this until now and not skimmed as most people will, you must be thinking that all these songs sound somewhat similar. It’s a simple boy loves girl plot which is portrayed in multiple different settings. Before I started writing this, I thought that I would have something unique to write about each song, but I don’t. As I moved on from track to track, I realised that most of these are about the same thing. Does this mean the songs are not great? No, of course not, they are amazing. Each track is unique and has a storyline, the music is good, and that’s why people enjoy it. Music is subjective, and at the end of the day, my opinion means jackshit. Yeah, enjoy the music; I hope what I wrote made you think and introspect about the music you listen to.
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A Re-evaluation of Laurel Lance: Season 2
Intro
Season 2 actually gives Laurel her own arc. The first time I watched the show, I HATED Laurel this season, and found her insufferable. But over subsequent re-watches, I found myself not hating this Laurel, and was even sometimes emotionally moved by some of her scenes.
For the first time in the series, Laurel has her own arc! She drives plots! She is a character who stands on her own (kind of), separate from Oliver and Lance! For the first time, she also has flaws, and makes mistakes. For her character, the season is about her downward spiral and then her recovery--a clear arc that is only about her. Now, a lot of her story doesn’t work, but hey, at least there is a “her story.”
Falling From The Pedestal
The Laurel of this season is very different from the Laurel of season 1. Season 1 Laurel was on a pedestal, and Season 2 Laurel fell off it hard. I wonder if that’s why I, and many other fans, hated Laurel so much in season 2. The higher you are, the harder you fall. And in season 1, Laurel was perfect, and had a penchant for self-righteousness. Even the slightest mistake or unlikable characteristic could cause her to face harsher judgement and criticism because of how high up Season 1 held Laurel. Laurel does make a lot of mistakes this season, but watching it, I at least found her to be human, which is more than I can say for her in Season 1.
Still, the writing for Laurel’s character this season is not great; I still wouldn’t say she is a well-written character. Her character is too often isolated from everything else, and her episode storylines are often repetitive. BUT, this season’s Laurel is worlds better than the Laurel of season 1. She is finally more than a love interest; she has flaws, has arcs that are about her. This is VERY basic stuff, and just having them does not make her a well-written character, but it is more than she had last season.
Oliver and Laurel’s Relationship
Perhaps, Laurel’s character is is better this season because her romantic relationship with Oliver is over. Between Seasons 1 and 2, it seems like the writers decided (rightly in my opinion) that they didn’t work together. In the very first episode of the season, they both agree that they can’t be together. And while, it doesn’t become clear to the viewers until the end of the Season that they are definitively over and are likely never getting back together--and we certainly see the fact that they had feelings for each other and see them try to navigate their new friendship in light of that--it seems that the writers knew that they were over and knew that they have to give Laurel more of a character separate from Oliver if they wanted to keep her on the show. The season is better for her character because she is actually allowed to her own character rather than just a love interest.
Flaws & her own Arcs
Finally, a flaw emerges in her character in the first episode. She is misplacing blame. In the first few episodes, she blames the Arrow for Tommy’s death, not wanting to deal with her own feelings of guilt. It may not be rational, but it is at least a flaw, as irritable as it is. And her refusal to admit this scapegoating for a few episodes, even when Lance calls her out on it is another flaw. And over the first few episodes, it is clear that she is desperate to escape that guilt. Laurel’s antagonism to the Arrow is at least different from the pure, perfect girlfriend she was in season 1. While it it frustrating to see her irrationally place blame on The Arrow, at least it shows she has flaws. And the show is smart not too overstay it’s welcome with this dynamic; it only lasts about about three episodes.
In “Broken Dolls,” Laurel admits her guilt about Tommy’s death to Lance; Oliver told her to stay out of the Glades, and she didn’t listen, resulting in Tommy dying to save her. Even if her blaming the Arrow still breeds disbelief, this scene is actually pretty affecting and emotional. And for the first time in the series, Laurel feels human. And it it all about her, her feelings, and her trauma. The show is acknowledging it and taking it seriously for the first time.
Laurel also an addiction storyline, her biggest of the season. This story is kind hit and miss for me. It gets very repetitive, and it goes on for a long time with too little to say. The plot also leaves her isolated from the other characters and often the main plot, which does no favors for her character. But it is nice that they are making her character messy and flawed. It brings her down to earth and makes her more human. In exploring her addiction, it gives her even more flaws, as she refuses to admit she has a problem, rebuffs Oliver and Lance’s attempts to help, and is cruel to people she cares about. In her scenes with Oliver and Lance, for the first time ever, it feels like they are a part of her story, rather than just her only being a part of theirs like in season 1. Her substance issues is about a season long arc, which she didn’t have in season one. At times her substance abuse issues makes her unlikable. She is petulant, rude selfish, and seems to feel like she has a monopoly on pain and suffering. But taken on it’s own, it makes her human, and the show is actually exploring her struggles, inner thoughts, and conflict. But, when taken with Season 1 Laurel, is when this arc really becomes an issue. Because in Season 1, Laurel barely had a personality. So she goes from almost having no personality to having an unlikable one. And there isn’t much in between these two characterizations to make the viewer care about Laurel. So when she does become unlikable, its harder to take and harder to empathize with it would have been if they had done a better job building her character in season 1.
The season generally shows Laurel’s side of things in her addiction storyline, and offers her empathy and understanding. The one time it struggles to do so is the Lance family dinner with Oliver, where it frames Laurel as completely in the wrong. She is mostly in the wrong, and Oliver is right when he accuses of her blaming everyone but herself, and being self-centered in her pain, ignoring the pain and struggles of others. But Laurel is right to be mad at Oliver and Sara. Oliver should have never had come to that dinner. Even if he and Sara were not together, he should not have come. Even if Sara and Oliver thought that Laurel wouldn’t realize that they are together, he still should not have come. It was callous and thoughtless. And Laurel is absolutely entitled to feel upset that they are together, especially since, in her mind, Sara’s only been back a week. Imagine how shitty that would feel. And I think the show is wrong in invalidating these feelings, and not framing Oliver and Sara’s decision to have him come as insensitive, thoughtless, and wrong.
Separated from Main Plot
One of the main problems with Laurel’s addiction storyline is that it is so separated from the main plot of the season, and often, the main plot of the episodes that it is in. Because of this, her character and storyline can sometimes seem like an afterthought or like it’s tertiary to everything else. And in the context of the episodes, these scenes seem to drag because they have so little to do with the main plot, which is given more way more importance. And the difference in level of importance of the main plots and Laurels addiction storyline is keenly felt. As the AV Club states, “The problem is that Laurel’s storyline is now once again isolated from what’s going on with the Arrow; she has given up her vendetta, but that just means she gets to drink and drive away from the main action,” and “[the episode] very consciously isolates her from the main storyline, which effectively makes her a distraction from more interesting things going on elsewhere; even when Oliver finds Al-Owal’s knife in Laurel’s wall, he basically just tells her to sit the rest of the episode out.”
Laurel is also separated from the main action by rarely ever knowing anything, a problem that was also in the first season. As The AV Club stated, “Arrow can instantly make a character appear powerful by giving her knowledge and, alternatively, it can make a character appear weak by leaving her in the dark about all that is unfolding around her. Those respective descriptions apply to Sara and Laurel pretty much perfectly.” Laurel’s lack of knowledge for most of the season makes her passive and reactive, just being placed in events that she doesn’t understand. It’s also a sexist trope to keep secrets from women “for their own good,” and because “they can’t handle it.”
Laurel and Sara relationship
Laurel’s relationship with Sara is her best one in the series. It is the most complex, and effectively emotional one. It is also the only female relationship Laurel has with anyone at this point in the series. Laurel’s feelings toward Sara are complex and justified. After Sara’s death, she had to deal with both anger towards Sara and grief. That is hard to deal with--being angry at someone who’s died. One feeling doesn’t make the other go away. These feelings are hard to wrestle with, and while I don’t think the show does the best job of exploring it, the show does try and does acknowledge it.
Some of Earth 1 Laurel’s best moments in the entire show come from her relationship with Sara. For instance, in “Time of Death,” after the big blow-up at the Lance family dinner, Laurel comes to Verdant. She first sees Oliver, but tells him that she is not here for him, she’s here for Sara. It is her first priority to reconcile with Sara. Sara is the one who is more important to Laurel The show, and her character, are prioritizing her relationship with Sara over her relationship with Oliver. In reconciling with Sara, Laurel explains how Sara’s death has affected her; that she feels she went on the boat with Sara too, and that she has been slowly drowning since. While this is not the best written scene, it feels like the first time the show really dealt with the trauma Laurel experienced losing Sara (and Oliver, to an extent). In the first season, it seemed like she was mostly fine, a little sad and a little angry, but fine. Sara’s death and Sara and Oliver’s affair was just a complication in and obstacle to Laurel and Oliver’s relationship; it was not really used much to explore Laurel’s characters and her feelings.
A few other great moments come in “Birds of Prey.” Laurel goes to drink again but The Black Canary (who Laurel doesn’t know is Sara) convinces her not too. Later, Sara wants to leave with Laurel, leaving the hostages behind. But Laurel refuses, wanting to show that Black Canary and herself that she can be strong. This is a great, strong character moment for Laurel. It is her doing good and putting herself in danger for her own character and her own arc, rather than in service of other characters, although it does serve as conflict for Sara and Oliver, it still feels like its a lot about Laurel. Later, similar to how Sara convinced Laurel not to drink, Laurel convinces the Black Canary not to kill Helena. Laurel was able to get through to Sara when Oliver was unable to. In the final episodes of the season, it is Laurel, not Oliver, who convinces Sara to be a hero.
Less Screen Time & Reverting back
However, disappointingly, Laurel reverts back to her season 1 role in the last few episodes of Season 2. Oliver is prepared to turn himself over to Slade to die. But it is Laurel, kinda, who talks him out of it. She doesn’t really get through to him, as what actually gets through to him is the revelation about Sebastian Blood that she tells him. But before she tells him that, Laurel tries to convince him on other merits not to turn himself in to die. This is also the moment when Laurel reveals that she knows that Oliver is the Arrow. However, this important moment, is eclipsed by Laurel propping Oliver up. This confrontation should be a big moment, both for the show, and especially for Laurel’s character. Instead, it falls on the season 1 line that Laurel knows Oliver to his bones, even in light of this huge secret. It just feels so false, and brushes over any feelings Laurel should have about finding out Oliver is the Arrow. This is all about Oliver, a little bit about Oliver and Laurel, and not about Laurel at all. Laurel confronting Oliver about his identity should have been about her, but instead its about her supporting Oliver and getting him to take action, and not even through her words or something special about her, but through a piece of information she delivers.
And in the season finale, she is kidnapped in order to get to Oliver. And... that is all that she does. Again, she does nothing in the season finale, similar to Season 1 finale. Its frustrating that she is again reduced to someone who needs to be saved, to someone who’s is kidnapped and put in danger to get to Oliver. Especially, as this season has treated her character better than it did in season 1. And Laurel is not even an active part of taking Slade down, not like Felicity, who is also kidnapped but is brave and instrumental in taking Slade down, in numerous ways.
Laurel also has a bunch of undeveloped threads. When Laurel is kidnapped by The Mask, she ends up shooting and killing The Mask in order to save The Arrow’s life. The fact that Laurel killed someone is never addressed. Yes, it was justified and in defense of another person, but still, you’d think Laurel would have some emotional reaction or some feelings about it. But it is never shown or addressed. She also never reckons with the discovery that Oliver killed people. We see her spend a whole episode reckoning and coming to terms with the fact that Oliver is the Arrow, but not that he killed people. You would think that would be a big deal. This is someone who she has known for so long and has been in love with, so finding out that he was killed people, especially since Season 1 Laurel was the “morality” of the show, should have been a big deal. Yes, she worked with The Hood when he was killing people. But her feelings about The Hood have always been inconsistent, with her attitude towards what he does going back and forth. Even if she is okay with The Hood/The Arrow killing people, its got to be different when its someone she knows. It’s got to change how Laurel sees Oliver, even if not necessarily in a bad way. By not addressing this, the show really undercut Laurel’s character.
Laurel has less screen time and narrative prominence this season.There are multiple episodes that Laurel’s not in this season, and others in which she is barely in. This is the transition season for her character from female lead to supporting character. She is still arguably the female lead in this season, but her decreased screentime shows that she is on her way out in this role, and that she is transitioning to a supporting player, which definitively happens in season 3 .
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Oh yeah that reminds me of another question I've been meaning to ask (sorry to jump on you like this haha) but which vampire canon change in B&W annoys you the most? For me it's the whole 'even touching silver will harm a vampire' (when it's explained that Syanna figured out Dettlaff was a vampire because he wouldn't directly touch a silver candlestick). I just choose to ignore that detail bc I don't think it makes much sense haha
omg this is such a good ask im so excited to answer
first of all, i really agree with you, even when i hadn’t read the books fully i had read that one passage in lady of the lake where regis gestures with a silver fork at the banquet, and blood and wine tries to make it so like regis and dettlaff are the same “kind” of vampire, so this obviously doesn’t make any sense, and since it’s just such a small detail i tried to ignore it, like, maybe dettlaff just wanted to keep the silver candlestick fingerprint-free, ever consider that, syanna? you’re gonna pawn something, you don’t want like a billion fingerprints mucking it all up... and then syanna thought this made him a vampire, when in reality he was a vampire but the candlestick had fuckall to do with it
but yeah i think i’m gonna do like a top 5 style: TOP 5 THINGS CDPR GOT WRONG ABOUT THE VAMPIRES. im not gonna do a countdown because im a very direct person and think its best to get the worst out of the way.
1. their society and relationship with humans.
the thing that upsets me the most that cdpr changed is how vampires exist on the continent. stuff like tesham mutna and the unseen elder breaks canon lore so hard it makes me physically upset.
this is a bad thing because not only is the trope of “vampires control everything from the shadows as a secret society so they can feed on human blood” incredibly boring and overdone (it’s a trope, so it’s something that the witcher should stand to invert since that’s pretty much the purpose of the witcher), but it also has origins in antisemitism (the myth of the illuminati or “reptilians/secret societies controlling the world”, blood libel), so it’s super gross! i don’t want the vampires to be that trope, that’s completely unfair.
they already were something other than that trope, they already HAD their own society (or lack thereof) as part of the canon lore. maybe it is personal preference, but i think that their “anti-society” is super interesting. how does something like that function with no rules or figures of authority or customs? it’s incredibly different to the ways humans function in this universe, who are mostly bound around their nation, city/town/village, and home unit, and abide by strict custom and systems of authority. it’s really something to be explored from a lore perspective, there wasn’t a whole lot explained in canon (for good reason: see #2) so it has perfect potential to be elaborated upon in the adaptational spinoff that is the witcher games.
it makes them super boring and trope-y to have them all kowtow to One Figure Of Authority in the area. plus CDPR states that the reason toussaint is so perfect is that this secret society controls toussaint as an area to perfect blood, when toussaint literally existed as a fairy-tale duchy to be an OBSTACLE to geralt and his hansa in the saga. it was the “leave-your-quest” test. think of the island of the lotus eaters from the odyssey. it’s a perfect place, there’s no reason as to why it is perfect, it just is, and it keeps the company hostage there for months so they will get distracted and eventually forget what they came there for.
in canon as well, vampires do not seem to care much about humans. regis certainly does, but he is regis :). there was little conversation about how vampires view humans, rather about how humans view vampires and project their innermost fears and desires to them. further breaking some vampire tropes. in blood & wine. instead of that trope-flipping, we get... “vampires tortured humans out of curiosity and selfishness.” what? why would they do this? there is not much to gain, and it would take a lot of cooperation and effort to get to this point, which leads me to ask, HOW could they do this? as regis says in bof, there were only about 1,200 vampires when they arrived on the continent, so they were completely and utterly outnumbered as they were likely scattered around. they wouldn’t be able to build a castle and re-engineer toussaint to fit their needs. i understand that he is massively biased, but i feel like regis calls these first vampires “hapless survivors” for a reason, and also since regis is regis, i do not feel like he would feel this way about them if they committed massive crimes against humanity.
tl;dr for this point: not only is it fucked up for no reason but to be gross/shocking to the audience, but it also removes their purpose as a metaphor, which is #2.
2. the removal of their purpose as a metaphor in the story.
originally, the vampires are not meant to be the focus of the witcher series or even a smaller part of the series at all. they are simply a metaphor for aspects of human society so that regis can have a backstory. the vampires are nothing more than a fictional means of exploring the effects of alcoholism, and a thought experiment as to what an authority-less, family-less, custom-less society would be like. the question “what do youth do when they have no support and no guidance?” already is one of the witcher’s major questions as a saga, the vampires and regis’s backstory serves to be another one of the stories within it that fits this theme. except we add more conditions to the thought experiment this time, like “what if these youth never aged and were powerful enough to survive on their own?” there would be no reason for them to ever change or grow out of their behavior. it’s quite interesting, because it’s meant to reflect upon human nature, the vampires are metaphorically humans. there is no reason for regis to even be a vampire, except that he needs to be able to survive death and learn from his mistakes. a human would have died had he hit rock bottom like regis did, but since regis wasn’t human and could rise from the grave, he had the chance at a new life. humans don’t get second chances. this is the point of the entire story being about vampires.
now, i understand that the purpose of the witcher games is to entertain, unlike the point of the witcher book series, which are like any other books and serve an author’s message. so, it stands to reason that the vampires do not have to prove a strong point here, but they should retain their essential traits and serve as the metaphor which was already really interesting and deserves more explanation and thought. i think using a fictional lens to take a look at real-world issues can be helpful sometimes, when done respectfully and when still using creativity. even if it’s just to entertain, that doesn’t mean it should be brainless and throw all of the commentary out of the window.
the vampires as a subject for the game to focus on should really be a vessel for thought and critique. it should mean SOMETHING for them to be there, because they were originally a message and a metaphor.
but in blood & wine, they are incredibly shallow, only there to exist for the attention-getter of gore.
does it MEAN anything that dettlaff regenerated regis from his own flesh and blood? or does that just happen because we needed a convienient way to bring regis back and tie him to the antagonist? does it MEAN anything that dettlaff cuts off his own hand? or is that just because it’s cool and kinda gross. does it MEAN anything that the vampires attack beauclair? or is that just because there needed to be some violence and conflict.
there is no deeper meaning! it’s all just flashiness to shock the audience! it’s incredibly shallow and because it is shallow, it becomes boring and forgettable.
blood & wine focuses on details about the vampires that are gross, gorey or bloody, uncomfortable because of how nasty they are. and these elements have NO PURPOSE to the story other than to gross you out, like regis being regenerated, dettlaff skewering regis like a kebab, dettlaff cutting off his hand and that hand being handled by the bruxa, geralt, and regis, regis going crazy in a cage, syanna also getting skewered, etc. ... it’s this focus on the physical action that is happening on screen with little thought as to any deeper meaning that makes me tired and nauseous. why treat the vampires as savage animals?
as a mention in this topic, i am going to comment on how they deliberately changed the lore to “make childrens’ blood taste better than adults’ blood,” because that is mega-gross. why change it to focus on child endangerment? that’s nasty! why make orianna feed on children when it was LITERALLY canon that the “best” blood was that of strong adults? if you want to make orianna morally grey, she could have owned any other kind of place to get blood from. see #2 for more discussion of this.
3. their focus on the conjunction of the spheres.
the vampires never had this obsession with “returning home.” i... have no idea where this comes from. remember how i just said that i appreciate a metaphor for real-life when it is done respectfully? CDPR gave us this awkward metaphor for the vampires “wanting to go home” because they have to “assimilate” in this new world, apparently every vampire ever misses their homeland. ... it’s the story of immigrants who didn’t have a choice to be born in The New Land, but they were anyways, and now they want to go home. and it’s the story of minority groups, who are overshadowed by the society they live in, but cannot be themselves in, because it would mean violence.
this is an incredibly awkward metaphor just because it’s not done well, but also CDPR literally just focused on how extremely violent the vampires are, and how they also control everything so they can use the humans they were thrown in with to their own fancies. this is... i didn’t know that the metaphors for fantasy racism in the witcher could get any worse than sapkowski’s were.
also, there’s some weird lore-breaking moments when regis says he misses the vampire homeworld or whatever, and i just am left staring at my laptop like. you’re only like, 4 centuries old, regis. the conjunction of the spheres occured more than 3 times your age in the past. plus the fact that regis in baptism of fire calls himself a “descendant,” it’s obvious that someone at cdpr just didn’t do their research when writing those lines.
4. their power level and exactly how powerful they are.
let’s take a moment to think about a grain of truth. the second story in the witcher books, it was written before sapkowski had a lot of the vampire lore down-pat. geralt says things like “it’s silver, this blade is silver” and “an ordinary vampire couldn’t come out in the sun,” which are incongruent with what we learn in baptism of fire about vampires. but nevertheless, there’s a lot which is still accurate to the vampires, such as that VEREENA ABSOLUTELY KICKS GERALT’S ASS. geralt very nearly DIED in that fight, he was ABOUT to die, but nivellen saved him at the last split-second. geralt finds out that vereena is a bruxa, and he is alarmed, he shouts and then falls on his ass. he scrambles, he’s unprepared to deal with a foe THIS powerful. he manages to land his sword on her during the fight, but it barely harms her. she dodges incredibly, and swipes of his sword that should have hit do not. she screams terribly, and geralt is in incredible, writhing pain. he uses his signs to help him, this is no normal fight with a normal foe. flash forward to in baptism of fire, when geralt meets another vampire, one that is considerably more powerful and unique than vereena was. dandelion asks geralt, if ... potentially... maybe... and geralt responds that he sincerely doubts that he could beat regis in a fight, and he really does not want to have to try.
geralt was BESTED by vampires in the books. he was as close as a witcher can get to being INTIMIDATED by their power. but what happens in blood & wine? there’s like 8 bruxae and alpors ganging up on you and you can easily vanquish all of them with your silver sword and by knocking back maybe a glass of black blood and white raffard’s decoction. it’s fine, it’s easy to kill vampires. geralt doesn’t hesitate to fight dettlaff. he doesn’t worry, he doesn’t tell anyone that he sincerely doubts that he could beat him in a fight, that he doesn’t want to have to try. instead, it’s regis talking geralt out of the fight, trying to advocate for peace.
CDPR massively nerfed the vampires just to make them easier targets for the player. i think this is unfair to how the vampires were powerful threats to be reckoned with in the books, foes that even geralt, a witcher, did not want to face. not even out of geralt’s pacifism and apprehension to slay innocent and/or sentient beings, but out of not wanting to fucking hit that die button
i also understand that regis was supposedly less powerful now because he was just tired from being regenerated, but vampires like bruxae should have been able to turn into giant bats. there’s nothing stopping them besides cdpr not wanting to code it in, just like how they didn’t want to code in bruxae or alpors wearing clothes (because vampires do wear clothes in canon).
5. their classification: adding new vampire species, distinguishing between “higher vampires” and “TRUE higher vampires”
just plain annoying to me. there’s only seven types of vampires, as regis says in baptism of fire:
“In the case of higher vampires, never, I agree,” Emiel Regis said softly. “From what I know alpors, katakans, moolas, bruxas, and nosferats don’t mutilate their victims. On the other hand, fleders and ekimmas are pretty brutal with their victim’s remains.”
“Bravo,” Geralt said, looking at him in genuine admiration. “You didn’t leave out a single class of vampire, Nor did you mention any of the imaginary ones, which only exist in fairy-tales.”
so there are seven classes... five of which are higher vampires which can probably be classified by having sentient thought and not harming their victims, two of which are lesser vampires, which are quite violent with their victims and more animalistic for this reason.
also i am confused as to why CDPR made fleders the least likely to sustain flight, when their name i’m pretty certain is taken from fledermaus, the german word for bat, which just means flying mouse (feel free to correct me if i’m wrong, idk german), so “fleder” should just mean “flutter,” or “to fly.”
SO. it’s total bullshit to be like “there’s some higher vampires and then TRUE/REAL higher vampires, which cannot be killed...” and it confuses everyone as to who is ACTUALLY a higher vampire and who is not, when the system we had before wasn’t broken at all!
BONUS. general changes to vampire powers
it annoys me how they turn into puffs of mist/smoke instead of vanishing, simply vanishing. no deeper reason why, it just bothers me because you’re not supposed to be able to see them at all, that’s the point of turning invisible/incorporeal.
there was no mention or demonstration of how regis can hypnotize people, even though that was probably his most frequently used vampire power in the books asides from turning invisible/incorporeal. it showed that even though he was very powerful, he opted to use his passive powers and nonviolent routes of dealing with people.
i think it also makes the vampires way overpowered to be able to regenerate each other with each other’s blood ... and it takes away from the finality of stygga... also them just flying and turning into bats whenever they want, as if regis didn’t say that he can only turn into a bat during a full moon. they made them overpowered and still made it super easy for geralt to kill them. alright
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Episode 129: Stuck Together
“I’m afraid right now.”
And here, after almost a hundred and thirty episodes of waiting, do we finally see that Lars can make a change.
The Good Lars was a great start, with Lars opening up enough to suggest that he might take a risk and let the Cool Kids know something real about himself. But he never makes it to the party, and as we learn here, it wasn’t because he was abducted. I Am My Mom proves that those events didn’t transform Lars, as when the going gets tough his instinct is self-preservation over all else. But these two incidents in quick succession, combined with his capture and uncertain future, yank him kicking and screaming into the realm of sincerity.
But not at first. After Aquamarine starts the episode off with Steven, reminding us of the recent plot and her all-around awfulness, Lars is discovered just in time to prove that he’s frustrating as well. It’s a different shade, as Aquamarine is a bully at every opportunity while Lars lashes out as a reaction to feeling pathetic, but he has the chance to be an ally when Steven needs one the most, and it’s lousy that he chooses spite.
Don’t get me wrong, Aquamarine is worse for sure: there’s no reason to further ensnare her captives now that they’re on the ship, and the process is uncomfortable for the humans and Topaz, but she orders it anyway. She goes back on her word by refusing to return Lars, which is predictable given they’re already in space, but still displays her lack of honor. She’s not even good at telling jokes, unhelpfully explaining that her fake tear is her gem. And while Lars evolves over the course of the episode, the idea that she would do likewise is silly enough to fuel the episode’s best sight gag.
Still, I’ll give her this: considering how she revels in lording over Topaz, and considering Topaz not only disobeys her but attacks her, Aquamarine has a single quiet moment of empathy when she chooses to let bygones be bygones. It’s the lowest of bars, as she only does so after breaking Topaz’s will and on the condition that Topaz follow her commands, and saying that “we’ll never speak of this again” shows that she wants this toxic status quo to remain forever, but this is a character who takes glee in cruelty, so it’s fascinating that she doesn’t leap at the chance to punish Topaz further. It’s the tiniest speck of affection you could hope for, and it doesn’t come close to “redeeming” Aquamarine, but it’s there, showing that even this little monster has an ounce of depth.
While Lars might have similar jerk vibes, railing against Steven and refusing to even try and break free, it’s just his starting point. Stuck Together crystallizes the loop that has defined Lars up to this point: he’s mean, then he gets some sympathy, then he seems ready to change, then he’s mean again. But there’s a big difference this time, and it’s not just the setting: after putting up with it for the entire series, Steven is done with Lars’s nonsense.
When Lars blames Steven for the alien invasion, Steven doesn’t even apologize, instead saying that of course he’s the reason aliens invaded, but he did everything he could to help and Lars should’ve escaped better. This is huge, as it not only breaks with Steven’s usual patience for Lars’s behavior, but comes at a time when Steven is feeling so low that we might expect more than ever for him to wallow in his failure. We then get into miscommunication: first Steven calls Lars worthless, meaning well but feeding into Lars’s insecurities, then Steven does a shoddy job of explaining a shoddy plan (how the heck was Lars supposed to lasso anything on the other side of the room?). This is not his best self, but if he was thinking things through he probably wouldn’t be on a ship hurtling towards the Diamonds in the first place.
Between the stress of recent events and his frustration with Lars, Steven snaps in a way that’s reminiscent of, well, Lars: short-tempered and impulsive and frazzled and loud. Lars admits at last that he’s always been driven by fear, and that Steven’s enduring faith in him only makes the problem worse. In the same way Lars thinks baking is lame because he likes doing it and he’s lame, he takes it as a given that he’s a wuss, so hearing anyone say otherwise is annoying rather than encouraging. But by explaining it aloud, the flip of personalities begins to form: now Lars is pepping up an ornery Steven, and Steven completes the puzzle by admitting his own fear.
It’s not as simple as Lars becoming Steven and Steven becoming Lars, but both take major cues from the other. And when Lars goes further in his tentative enthusiasm, Steven cuts him off by revealing a brilliant new wrinkle in their relationship: because he’s an optimistic kid with parent figures who have always sugarcoated the bitterness of life, he appreciates the one person who's willing to talk about how much things can suck. And in this new era of his life, where it’s become clear that the sugarcoating extends past white lies and into major secret territory, it’s more important than ever to have a friend who tells it like it is. There’s been an underlying notion in their entire relationship that Steven wants to help Lars out, but it’s so much more meaningful to hear that Steven hangs out with Lars because Lars is a crank.
This doesn’t mean Lars was perfect the way he was, or else his arc wouldn’t involve him changing. But there’s a huge difference between changing because it’s what makes other people comfortable and changing because it’s good for your soul, and this would be a very different story if Lars only grew to make Steven’s life better. Instead, it takes Steven showing Lars the value of his flaws for Lars to see enough value in himself to want to improve.
We wait just long enough on Topaz for her voice to matter most, threading the needle between emotional beat and punchline. Martha Higareda sells her change of heart in no time, showing the first instance of a same-Gem fusion having the deep relationship we’ve seen from cross-Gem fusions like Garnet; perhaps our ornery rubies are closer than we think when they form Big Ole Ruby, but we haven’t seen any evidence of it.
In lesser hands it might be hackneyed for the stoic character to reveal a soft heart, because the gentle giant is a bog-standard “don’t judge a book by its cover” trope. But this is our fifth episode in a row featuring Topaz as a wordless brute, first as a silhouette and then contrasted with a talkative brat of a partner. Are You My Dad in takes her into monster movie territory, complete with bloodcurdling music and tree-clearing stomps when she reveals her body full of writhing captives, and squeezing Jamie’s head in I Am My Mom is the most visceral threat we’ve seen a human face on the show. This isn’t just some big galoot opening up, it’s a Terminator showing she was a real girl all along.
A big reason why this works is that we don’t go full cloying, instead tempering the reveal with humor that’s both inherent (we don’t expect Topaz to get this emotional) and specific (using Steven’s pants to wipe the tears away). Instead of swinging for a Big Moment that exposes Topaz’s turmoil in a dramatic fashion, the mood is quiet and sweet. Topaz isn’t just a softy, she’s sort of a dork, and that extra bit of characterization for someone we’ll never see again in the original series is what makes Steven Universe so great. Effort always matters!
After seeing Steven help not one but two people begin to change, we see that he’s still stuck in his own rut of martyrdom: he plans to send Lars back alone and continue along his sacrificial path. Perhaps there’s a level of rationality to this, as if they both escaped then the ship would turn right back around to Earth. But Steven isn’t operating on rational thought, and he hasn’t been since his friends were first endangered: going to the Diamonds as Rose Quartz might secure his friends’ safety, but at the cost of near-certain death, so from a pure odds perspective it’d be better to go to the Zoo incognito where known allies like the Zoomans and Famethyst could help out. But he’s acting out of a misguided sense of duty, so he doesn’t express any tactical purpose for sending Lars away, instead repeating the idea that he must pay for Rose’s actions.
The perfect response to the downside of Steven’s selflessness is Lars presenting the upside of his selfishness. It might not be brave to run away, and Lars might only be on the ship in the first place because he ran away, but he’s right: if Steven doesn’t want to be punished for his mother’s mistakes, he shouldn’t have to be. It might be the easy way out, but we just saw Steven praise Lars’s ability to cut through the BS and find the truth, and here we see a prime example. And for just a second, Steven thinks about it.
But then Aquamarine barges in, because Steven isn’t allowed to learn his lesson quite yet. In the same way corruption is the Diamonds’ greatest sin, attacking many of their own troops to spite their foes, this is perhaps Aquamarine at her worst: it’s one thing to bully your enemies, but cruelty to a partner is a step beyond. Contrast has defined Topaz and Aquamarine from the moment we saw their shadows, and this is the final stage. We already knew one was big and the other was small, one was quiet and the other was chatty, but both acted as a single front with different but united antagonism. Now one is an ally and the other is an opponent, one is cute and the other is vicious, and while Topaz might have the upper hand in a physical fight and the heart to do the right thing, Aquamarine only needs her words and her ruthlessness to win the day.
This is the last we’ll see of Topaz and Aquamarine until the time jump, and it’s surprisingly brutal. We got a test-run of this story with Holly Blue Agate, another cerulean tyrant dominating a larger, friendlier force (this time in terms of size as well as numbers), and it ended with our new friends overcoming their oppressor. Not this time. Aquamarine emerges victorious, while Topaz splits up and slumps away in defeat, and that’s it until Steven Universe Future gives the latter a happy ending at Little Homeschool and the former a new role as Team Rocket villain.
Topaz getting her brief burst of joy snatched away sets the mood for our Homeworld adventure. We’ve long known that the Crystal Gems are a stubborn group of rocks, but at least they have the freedom to change if they wish. Homeworld Gem stubbornness is reinforced by a society that persecutes anyone that doesn’t fall in line, from the outcast Off Colors to the Diamonds themselves.
But the mood of this arc is also set by Lars, because like the ending of Stuck Together, this is a story about Lars being taken away from Steven. But it’s also a story where Steven helps Lars change, and with change comes a glimmer of hope.
We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!
A great showcase for Steven and Lars, and a great coda for Aquamarine and Topaz. There’s not quite enough going on for it to make my favorites list, but it’s up there.
Top Twenty-Five
Steven and the Stevens
Hit the Diamond
Mirror Gem
Lion 3: Straight to Video
Alone Together
Last One Out of Beach City
The Return
Jailbreak
The Answer
Mindful Education
Sworn to the Sword
Rose’s Scabbard
Earthlings
Mr. Greg
Coach Steven
Giant Woman
Beach City Drift
Winter Forecast
Bismuth
Steven’s Dream
When It Rains
The Good Lars
Catch and Release
Chille Tid
I Am My Mom
Love ‘em
Laser Light Cannon
Bubble Buddies
Tiger Millionaire
Lion 2: The Movie
Rose’s Room
An Indirect Kiss
Ocean Gem
Space Race
Garnet’s Universe
Warp Tour
The Test
Future Vision
On the Run
Maximum Capacity
Marble Madness
Political Power
Full Disclosure
Joy Ride
Keeping It Together
We Need to Talk
Cry for Help
Keystone Motel
Back to the Barn
Steven’s Birthday
It Could’ve Been Great
Message Received
Log Date 7 15 2
Same Old World
The New Lars
Monster Reunion
Alone at Sea
Crack the Whip
Beta
Back to the Moon
Kindergarten Kid
Buddy’s Book
Gem Harvest
Three Gems and a Baby
That Will Be All
The New Crystal Gems
Storm in the Room
Room for Ruby
Lion 4: Alternate Ending
Doug Out
Are You My Dad?
Stuck Together
Like ‘em
Gem Glow
Frybo
Arcade Mania
So Many Birthdays
Lars and the Cool Kids
Onion Trade
Steven the Sword Fighter
Beach Party
Monster Buddies
Keep Beach City Weird
Watermelon Steven
The Message
Open Book
Story for Steven
Shirt Club
Love Letters
Reformed
Rising Tides, Crashing Tides
Onion Friend
Historical Friction
Friend Ship
Nightmare Hospital
Too Far
Barn Mates
Steven Floats
Drop Beat Dad
Too Short to Ride
Restaurant Wars
Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service
Greg the Babysitter
Gem Hunt
Steven vs. Amethyst
Bubbled
Adventures in Light Distortion
Gem Heist
The Zoo
Rocknaldo
Enh
Cheeseburger Backpack
Together Breakfast
Cat Fingers
Serious Steven
Steven’s Lion
Joking Victim
Secret Team
Say Uncle
Super Watermelon Island
Gem Drill
Know Your Fusion
Future Boy Zoltron
Tiger Philanthropist
No Thanks!
6. Horror Club
5. Fusion Cuisine
4. House Guest
3. Onion Gang
2. Sadie’s Song
1. Island Adventure
(No promo art for this one, so I went with Jastea’s gorgeous take on Topaz.)
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