#has someone said this before?
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Arcane does a fun thing with its narrative Darkest Hour.
Or: yet another post about how insanely smart this show is and how absolutely genius its writers are (and how jealous of them I am).
For the uninitiated, the Darkest Hour is the moment just before the climax in which the heroes are at their lowest point. When the Avengers are scattered and Loki opens the portal in NYC, when the Falcon has escaped the Death Star but lost Obi-Wan, when the Fire Nation is set to annihilate the Earth Kingdom, when Frodo fails to destroy the Ring at the Crack of Doom. The heroes must confront their flaws and change for the better for a happy ending.
Arcane’s darkest hour is, of course, in Act 3. One might place it at the very end of episode 9, and that’s certainly where the story is at its most hopeless. But I’d contend it starts as early as the end of episode 8 and carries on through the entirety of episode 9.
After all, that’s when Caitlyn and Vi have separated, lost all hope, and Cait is kidnapped by Jinx. Jinx’s mind is fully gone and throughout the episode everything falls apart around her. Silco is losing control of his chembarons and may well have lost his daughter, the thing most precious to him, and is only barely keeping his powerful façade in line. Zaun has realized how ridiculously outmatched they are in a war with Piltover and the revolutionary cause has become almost impossible. Viktor has manslaughtered his assistant and may never be cured. Jayce has manslaughtered a child and finally realizes how quickly he’s losing his morals. Mel and her mother are fully separating and she is struggling with her warlike destiny. Sevika gets the absolute snot beat out of her and limps to an empty office without a boss.
So yeah. Lot of personal Darkest Hours going on.
“But what’s the interesting thing?” I hear you ask in my ear. I don’t know why I hear you. Shut up. I’m writing. Are you even real?
Excuse me.
Arcane’s interesting twist on the Darkest Hour lies in part of the trope that I didn’t mention. That’s in the villain.
Most stories with a clear-cut villain have a plot structure something like this:
Whether things are going well for one side is inversely proportional to the other. During the Darkest Hour, when the hero is at their weakest, the villain is at their most dominant.
Wait… isn’t Silco the villain of Arcane? Not to be too blunt, but he’s having a shit time. Things are falling apart for him just as badly as for everyone else.
That's the trick. Caitlyn and Vi are suffering. Jinx is suffering. Silco is suffering. Jayce is suffering. Viktor is suffering. Zaun as a whole is suffering. There is only one party in the whole story that isn't suffering, that actually is benefitting from this horrid state of affairs...
EKKO AND HEIMERDINGER
Kidding. They're not really a part of this dance. A big part of Arcane's theming is that acting to help people without an agenda is simply more virtuous than fighting for any invariably-flawed nation that innately perpetuates the cycle of violence.
No, the side that is doing fine is the other that is conspicuously absent from my two prior lists. While the characters that make up its leadership are experiencing personal Darkest Hours, the organization itself is essentially on top of the world, having just scored a huge victory and getting set to bring the war to an end before it even begins. I mentioned how poor the situation for the Undercity looks, but not its counterpart.
Piltover.
Wasn't it so that Piltover started this whole mess? Didn't their oppression cause the revolt that orphaned Vi and Powder's parents? Isn't it their actions that drive Silco to ever greater extremes? Isn't it their normalized political backstabbing that causes Jayce to sacrifice his principles because that's the only way to get ahead? Isn't it their corrupt police force that lets Silco operate his drug empire with impunity?
Silco might look the part. He might be the most personally evil character, might be the one who causes the most misery for our main protagonists Vi and Powder.
But structurally, the shining city of Piltover, its political machine, and its Enforcers are the actual villains of Arcane.
#arcane#darkest hour#writing#silco#piltover#zaun#piltover and zaun#heroes and villains#good writing#just realized this#still noticing new things#even two full years later#i love this show#has someone said this before?#long post
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Phoenix Wright parents headcanon:
His mom is the luckiest person alive while his dad is a trouble magnet, and that's why he's always getting into the craziest accidents but always manages to come out alive while being almost unscathed.
Also that's why he always gets the worst cases and bluff his way through and actually win
#has someone said this before?#Also they're probably living their best life at Bahamas or smh#Because the dad probably caused some accident that made the mom buy a lottery ticket#And she won ofc#So they paid college for Phoenix and then boom gone on a trip around the world#headcanon#Phoenix Wright#naruhodo ryuichi#ryuichi naruhodo#Who do you think is the bi parent?#ace attorney
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a dongle is like a strap on for robot girls
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you guys can hate daishou all u want but he’s the only hq boy who canonically gets bitches
#has someone said this before?#also#oikawa doesn’t count bc all the girls confessing don’t know that he’s actually rotten#daishou suguru#haikyuu!!#reymbles
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Fez smoking weed on his couch and Lexi wants to try, but hesitates, so Fez leans in, his eyes finding hers in a heartbeat, and he crashes his lips on her, causing her to gasp in wonder - he exhales the smoke into her throat, genuinely laughing about her trying to hide her astonishment and little coughs. Feeling a sudden rush of confidence, Lexi’s hand meets the back of his head, pulling him into a deep kiss <3
#fexi thoughts#fexi#fexi vibes#does that make any sense lol#has someone said this before?#kinda want to write it
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Adelard Dekker out of context be like “that’s conk crete babey!!1!!”
#tma#the Magnus archives#adelard dekker#has someone said this before?#probably.#sorry about that#I’m as good at coming up with jokes as Jonny is at naming characters#anyways
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Immortal Caretaker who doesn't sleep, but sits by whumpees bed every night to make sure they don't have nightmares.
#has someone said this before?#whump community#whump prompt#whump blog#whump tropes#whump things#writing#whump senario
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something about how when mike tried to encourage el to fight vecna during the i love you scene it didn’t work in the end and they were unsuccessful in defeating his army, whereas when he had to encourage will to fight vecna during the shed scene he was successful, he got through to will, will was able to tell them how to (temporarily) defeat vecna. not to mention in both scenarios mike used memories to try to communicate. not to mention in both scenarios mike was crying. not to mention in both scenarios his encouragement was conveyed in monologue form.
this may imply that mike can no longer connect with el. but with will, it’s easy.
#i’ve connected the dots#you didnt connect shit#i’ve connected them#has someone said this before?#idk im exhausted#byler#stranger things#stranger things 4#will byers#mike wheeler#byler theory
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nanami seems way older than 27/28 and it's probably bcuz every time he has to even *think* about gojo he ages five years
#jjk#has someone said this before?#someone has probably said this before#but still#joke??????#nanami kento#i thought he was at least. like. 30...#love him
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we were always told reggie numbered the siblings in order of how useful they were to him but like. in what world is luther more powerful than like. ben.
what if he ordered them in reverse of how big a threat they were to him so he could keep them in line
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Someone needs to take El to El Paso /j
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love when ppl defend the aggressive monetization of the internet with "what, do you just expect it to be free and them not make a profit???" like. yeah that would be really nice actually i would love that:)! thanks for asking
#yes i want things to be free like ??? that is not a weird desire#'but but it costs money to keep up' ok and? how is that my problem#the government has plenty of murder dollars they could reallocate a few to make internet services universal if they wanted#also these companies were perfectly capable of supporting themselves before the internet got drowned with ads so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯#edit: muting notifs on this post bc new additions have kind of petered out#so no one feel bad about adding something someone else has said‚ it is not bothering me im just trying to keep my#notifs page cleanish lol#also since i saw some people are being redirected to read my tags: firstly hiiiiii this is a special secret message for you:3#secondly i have learned since making this that the reason they were able to support themselves previously was because#of investors bankrolling everything#and theyre now finally realizing that theyre never going to actually make a profit and arent as willing to invest#however thats just a minor correction and doesnt change my overall point#once again. so many murder dollars#so thats why im just adding it here in the tags rather than making an actual correction#anyways . love yall 💕#origibberish#bigger gibbers
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"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.
but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)
mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…
the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.
every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.
first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic
which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.
which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.
the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.
walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?
well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.
you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?
it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.
when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.
and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.
kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.
yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.
#dungeon meshi spoilers#mithrun#dungeon meshi#this has been rotating for a while but i wanted to check my evidence before getting into it thanks user angelspenance for posting that meme#half of this is just the text and the other half i'm sure has been said before but it's making my brain [radio static] so here this is#someone did for sure mention this but i do find it very cute that in his fucked up conjured world meant to portray his ideal reality#his teammates came to visit him. like part of the fantasy was then explicitly that they cared about him and were his friends. even though#he says he tried to see the worst in them.#hm it does feel important to note that i do also believe 100% in mithrun suicidality--his desire to be eaten does seem to focus a lot on#wanting it to be Over. wanting not to be left incomplete and empty anymore.#but that loops back around a bit to the hole in your heart that appears when you feel unloved. it's many things and the same thing at once#snakes#long post#severe problems#meshy
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the Miya twins were backpack leash kids
#has someone said this before?#someone must’ve said this already#reymbles#miya twins#miya osamu#miya atsumu
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what if I was a little drawing on a page instead what would you think would you still like me or would you crumple up the paper
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