I wanna get around to doing some small story beats for the "Main Six Takes Manhattan" story. It'd be a good chance for me to play around with different art styles too.

I'm really excited about this story too because it'd be splitting everyone up into pairs for their own little arc.

Rarity attends a fashion showcase in upper Manhattan, with April-Jacqueline in tow as her "attendant." The two get swept up in industry drama as they uncover the abuse faced by amateur designer Carol Cho under the American fashion house "Polomare."

Pinkie and Thea head to Harlem for a rent party, hosted by Thea's city friends. Despite Thea's protestations, Pinkie can't help but be the life of the party as its tenants and musicians attempt to raise enough money to fight their landlords and demand housing justice.

Dash and Félicie navigate NYC's transportation system to go to a ball game: the New York Wonderbolts vs. the Washington Senators. While Dash meets her heroes, Félicie can't help but feel homesick and smothered by the big city.

Avatar in my head and I was thinking about Maiko and Mai.

Now, Mai's character arc in Avatar, from my interpretation, is rediscovering herself and her wants and personhood that has been stripped from her as a noblewoman part of a family that submitted to the Fire Nation Imperialist structure and Ozai. We see in Book 2 set up for this. Mai in early Book 2 does not resist Azula's will aside from brief sparks of rebellion where she isn't present. "Of course not, Princess Azula" she notes formally and apathetically when Azula asks if she "minds", knowing she has no choice as Azula 'just' ponders if Mai's hostage brother is worth an Earth King like Bumi. Mai is always aware that Azula, as Princess in an authoritarian nation where the Fire Lord is God, can have her executed and her family punished. The unequal power dynamic is surprisingly consistent in the show.

Mai can't even insult Azula back in Zuko Alone as a child. She just lets Azula put an apple on her head (as Ty Lee loyally sniggers along), set it on fire, and when Zuko pushes her into the fountain to put it out, Mai, drenched, glares and says "You two are such… ugh". We know Mai can have an acid tongue, yet her fear of Azula prevents her from using it. Her most rebellious act in Book 2 is when she says "She can shoot all the lightning she wants at me. I am not getting in that wall sludge juice". Mai actually has self-respect, but she can't express it in the presence of greater threats, meanwhile Ty Lee merely says "Come on! Azula said we have to follow them", because Ty Lee follows Azula's will even when she isn't there.

Even when Mai gets with Zuko, she falls into a subservient role. When Azula interrupts Maiko's smooching, lazily dismissing Mai with "Oh Mai, Ty Lee needs help untangling her braid" Mai responds quickly "Sounds pretty serious" with only a touch of dryness and leaves, only able to muster throwing Azula a dirty look a split second after passing her. However, this little ember of rebellion will grow.

Mai has continued difficulty understanding Zuko's anger and reactiveness, or how to even function in a relationship. She initially tries to joke in a dismissive fashion, as if saying 'ugh, feelings are lame, right?', but that would only work with Azula logically. The Beach episode is a key Mai episode. She continues to be emotionally repressed, to the point Zuko, Ty Lee and Azula comment on it. However, Zuko's insecurity at her talking to Ruon-Jian to the point he physically removes him from her presence, and his accusative comments like "You like him, don't you?", also makes Mai feel a little boxed in, controlled, and that does irritated her given her history. However, at the Beach's emotional narrative climax, Mai is able to finally express herself at the rest of the group (Azula included) for the first time, telling them to "Leave her alone" and that she's "still mad". After Zuko explosively reveals the extent of his pain and confusion, we see a 'smoothing' effect on her attitude. She realises her and Zuko are dealing with pain in different ways and his way is understandable.

Mai says softly, "I know one thing I care about, I care about you". This is the one thing Mai can grasp in the confusion. This is where Mai betraying Azula becomes inevitable. We see Mai continue to be more supportive with Zuko, more actively trying to cheer him up in Nightmares and Daydreams with big smiles and jokes while Zuko remains shut down over the War meeting and is acting irritated and repressed due to his family trauma. When Zuko later leaves and joins the Avatar, Mai is hurt and angry, which shows in the Boiling Rock, saying "All I get is a letter? You could have at least looked me in the eye when you ripped out my heart". They have a tense conversation, but it's their most honest one. I actually think Mai already made up her mind in this scene to support Zuko over Azula, and she doesn't quite realise it. "Save it? You're betraying your country" she accuses, to which Zuko replies, resolute, "That's not how I see it", and in response Mai just folds her arms and turns her head away in an almost defeat.

I find it very telling she doesn't respond. It's because she realises Zuko is more passionate and resolute about his mission than she is hers. It's because she knows the Fire Nation under its current authority is not exactly great. Sometimes in life we fall into a box and we need someone to give us that little push so we can realise we can climb out of it, that the toxic space we're in isn't normal, and we don't have to tolerate it. I like to think Mai was thinking in that moment where Zuko locked her in the cell and he and she gazed into each others' eyes, what she was really thinking about was what life she actually wanted to live. She was thinking of Azula and being under her thumb, and she was thinking of all those moments with Zuko, like when they were lounging on the sofa together, smiling and joking in Nightmares & Daydreams, and she realised how ridiculous it was to be afraid of Azula killing her when the real fear should be being Azula's servant until her dying days, decades of repression and misery.

After all, what does Mai have left to fight for? Fear of Azula? Hah, what a joke. She remembers "I know one thing I care about. I care about you" and when she sees Zuko about to die she has to intervene.

"I guess you just don't know people as well as you think you do. You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you" Mai says to an increasingly-enraged Azula's speak of 'consequences', because Mai did fear Azula, but now in her love for Zuko she has found a purpose she has been lacking, her feelings and wants over Azula's will. Zuko being true to himself is contagious. Iroh's love for Zuko puts him on the right path, and in turn the love Mai has for Zuko saves her. As a consequence Ty Lee chooses Mai and their friendship over Azula's toxic, fear-based one and even later bonds with former enemies like the Kyoshi Warriors. Like Zuko says to Ozai, "an era of peace and kindness" will replace an "era of fear". In the face of fear, love and empathy win.

okay i like the 'wei wuxian is adopted' jokes as much as anybody, but i do see people taking that premise seriously and like

it's kind of pivotal to the narrative that he wasn't, actually?

adoption is, within the setting, a specific, deliberate process with legal repercussions. people can be formally adopted. that exists. he was not.

adopted wei wuxian would have been in a vastly more secure situation; his ambiguous hovering position where he's simultaneously a nobody-orphan with no formal connections and part of the upper echelon of society is definitional. it's what allowed things to fall out the exact way they did.

adopted wei wuxian could not have walked away from jiang sect so easily; he would have been jiang wuxian. adopted wei wuxian would have been a sect leader candidate, when jiang cheng was out of the running because of wen zhuliu. adopted wei wuxian would have had actual status.

the fact that he's their brother but not on paper drives a significant amount of his jiang-sibling-related plotlines!

adoption would have made a huge difference at a whole bunch of junctures, and it was technically an option on the table that was not taken.

i bring this up for a lot of reasons but also because like. adoption and marriage have a lot in common, as formalized transfers of someone into a family.

there were good reasons for wei wuxian to not get adopted! (also shitty reasons that nevertheless presented valid constraints.)

there are much better reasons of a similar nature for lan wangji not to marry him. to deflect, to try to have it both ways. but they get married anyway.

the fact that our MC is coming into this from a lifetime of his familial bonds being informal and unrecognized and lacking any legal status and vulnerable to summary dissolution while still of passionate importance is not, i think, irrelevant to the novel culminating in a fuck-the-haters gay marriage.

Obsessed with the POV choice in Imperial Radch as well, both because Leckie does some really wild stuff with how expansive the strict first-person is able to become due to the worldbuilding and who her narrator is, and because it's SO entangled with the central thematic concepts of identity. In the first book flashbacks when the narrator is still a warship, "I" can encompass so many things, and sometimes explicitly refers to different facets in the narration--is "I" Justice of Toren, or One Esk, or a specific segment, or Breq narrating from twenty years in the future? "I" isn't simple, isn't unified, and while this is most literal and obvious with Breq/One Esk/Justice of Toren and Anaander Mianaai's split factions it's true constantly throughout the work at every level of scope. Individual characters struggle with internal conflicts and hit their breaking points--what is it that makes someone decide they have to disobey orders and make a stand or they won't be themself anymore? How do you know who you are if you've been forcibly changed (Tisarwat) or if the world you knew has moved on and become unrecognizable (Seivarden)? How does a character on a colonized world navigate the split identity that comes from the pressure to assimilate to the dominant culture? And then there's the Radch writ large, all the Radchaai so deeply invested in the idea that there is only one true concept of Radchaai society, of civilization, but of course there isn't! It changes based on location and over time, and Breq muses that the Radchaai empire would be largely unrecognizable to the isolated sphere of the Radch itself. In these books, even if you aren't the last remnant of a destroyed spaceship and its legion of bodies, "I" is such a complicated concept and the narrative never lets you forget it.

I keep thinking about Hell's words: "This is the only way it should have ended."

Should. Not could. *Should*.

Like V1 should have been mass produced, obliterated all the Earth Movers, and then the next machine should have come along to counter it in turn and continue the war. Like all that fighting and the cycle of violence should have been perpetuated.

Like Mankind should never have finally gotten their act together, and tried to continue on even in the absence of divinity and in the face of total climate collapse.

There's a notable difference between 'could' and 'should', and the fact that those words are spoken by the only one who would've been *extremely disappointed* by this outcome has me raising eyebrows.

ok so i just finished reading this gay furry visual novel called Adastra, and i have to say.

it didn’t have the devastating emotional effect that i’ve heard it tends to have on many other readers, but then again i’m pretty sure that’s just because i’m attracted to large buff sword-wielding women and not large buff wolf boys.

and then i realized

thinking about this. thinking

Ekalu's just like "This is my girlfriend Seivarden and her girlfriend Breq and her girlfriend Ship (Mercy of Kalr)" and all of that is canon

Okay I want to try out making polls, so for this poll I just took all my current obsessions

*familiar as in has read some of the books/stories in these series

I'm making a note about medici, because I tried to watch it but found it so dull I could hardly get through the first season. Can you reccomend any historical shows or films that do pass the vibe check?

off the top of my head, some personal favorites are: season one of Kingdom (킹덤) 2019 (period horror set in the Joseon era)

Barbarians (Barbaren) 2020 (arminius, baby!)

Heneral Luna & Goyo (philippine revolution)

Showtime’s The Borgias (all time favorite forever)

Wolf Hall (2015) (an adaption of Hilary Mantel’s novels)

Thought I'd share on here the menu theme for Emperor Sigma.

underrated bit of rogue one is how it really holds back on the imperial march in favor of its own (also very cool) imperial theme that evokes it. it makes its uses of imperial march a lot more effective when it does happen, while still having a strong musical sound for imperials without using it all the time

Lockwood's talent meaning he can't communicate with the dead but sees them in more frightening detail goes a long way to explaining his attitude versus Lucy's, and obviously his talent is a direct representation of his PTSD (constantly seeing the aftereffects of violence, viewing everything as more of a threat, etc.) but he's really like "see that sad man missing his wife? we gotta hit him with explosives Lucy. don't be an emotional girl about this"

Been trying my very best to not talk about the Timeless Child but I hate myself and enough time as passed so this post will be buried but why does the Doctor say they were abandoned?

DOCTOR: I'm adopted. RUBY: Are you? DOCTOR: Yeah, yeah. I, er... I only found out recently. CARLA: That's a coincidence. RUBY: Oh, don't be saying that! CARLA: So do you know who your parents are? DOCTOR: No, no, I was... I was abandoned. CARLA: Oh, you were a foundling, just like Ruby. Even bigger coincidence.

It's an obvious attempt to make Ruby and the Doctor parallel but it feels a bit... conflicting? In not a fun way either due to how the Doctor not knowing why the Child was in that very spot when Tecteun found them was the biggest point of tension between them:

DOCTOR: You assumed I came through that wormhole, but you don't know. What if I was waiting there to collected? What if I was supposed to be taken through it? What if whoever left me there was taken by that wormhole? TECTEUN: What if, what if, what if? DOCTOR: You denied me my life! TECTEUN: I gave you a life. Everything you are is because of me. But I understand. You think you could have been something else, someone else. DOCTOR: Maybe. I'll never know. TECTEUN: You judge me for giving you the journey of your lifetime

Going with the word 'abandoned' seems to be pushing more weight to the life the Child had before being found than to the life they had with the Time Lords and Tecteun. The Timeless Child is a story about adoption but it's also a story about medical abuse. It feels it's trying to hide the second part.

BUT I know that in the alternative timeline, there's an attempt to compare Carla to Tecteun which is baffling?

CARLA: I've never had children, mate. DOCTOR: No. You adopted her. CARLA: I foster. Now don't be so stupid. I'm a foster mother. Just do it now and then, that's all. I've had about five or six kids. DOCTOR: No, no, no, no. You had… They've gone. CARLA: Who has? DOCTOR: Your children. All those lives. You fostered 33. CARLA: How many? Not me, darling. Don't be so stupid. That's too much like hard work. No way. I just put my name on the list when I need a bit of money. DOCTOR: No, you don't. CARLA: Eight hundred quid per child. DOCTOR: Don't say that.

Are we really comparing Tecteun, a woman who clearly had a high position in an advanced society to Carla, who seems to be a woman from a working class background? Are we really doing that? She could've just not been a foster mum and it would still work. We didn't have to go the 'lower class person uses adoption for monetary bonuses' route.

Ugh.

.

ganondorf gets on his knees after a military defeat and somehow still holds all the power in the foreign throne room where a god-king speaks to him as one would to a child, wearing weapons of mass destruction as jewlery while demanding his complete submission and the willing annexation of his lands into the holy realm that has been a realm for five seconds