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seventeendeer · 11 months

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TF2 analysis - on cultural references, context as characterization, and how to analyze comedy

-taps mic- HELLO, TEAM FORTRESS 2 COMMUNITY !

A while back, I received an ask requesting analysis of one of my favorite video games of all time and special interest of 12+ years, and you know I just had to go and turn that into a several thousand word essay for the reading pleasure of the people.

Because that shit got way too long, I’ve decided to put it into a post of its own. Hopefully a big title and no previous context being necessary will give more people an incentive to read it. I spent a long time on it and I think it’s pretty cool, and I would love some nice attention for my effort. ;w;

The ask I received went a little something like this:

Below the cut, I will be replying to these questions individually. It touches on everything from Cold War propaganda to the media landscape at the game’s launch in 2007 to first-person shooters as a genre - all to gain a better understanding of author intent, expected audience reaction, characterization and themes.

Anon previously requested help writing more accurate fanfiction, and damn it, that is what they are going to get!! and MORE

Introductory disclaimer:

First of all, for clarity's sake: this analysis is going to specifically talk about TF2 as seen through a fandom lens. I'm going to be talking about the game as a piece of media, creator intention, and the fandom's reactions to the game and extended canon - that is, the slice of the TF2 fandom that is interested in the characters, in the world and in doing at least semi-faithful fanworks.

I will not be touching on TF2's wider playerbase or meme culture. I greatly enjoy both, but they are not relevant to the post I made that sparked this anon's questions (I will link this post in the replies, in case anyone is curious).

I also have to disclaim that any references I make to real world history in this post have to be taken with a hard grain of salt. I've done my best to fact-check everything, but I am not infallible! For a better understanding of the historical elements I talk about here, please do your own research, and approach my claims with a healthy amount of scepticism, same as you would any unsourced social media post. (Readers may notice examples I give below primarily feature Soldier, Spy and Scout. This is because I feel I have the most solid grasp on the historical events and media that informs their characters, compared to the other classes. All the classes contain these contexts and meta complexities, but in an effort to not talk out of my ass too much, I have decided to focus on the characters I feel the most confident dissecting.)

>1) What tropes was the game parodying/what cultural contexts would you say are essential to understand, in order to better understand the game?

The characters of TF2 were specifically designed as satiric takes on national stereotypes depicted in American propaganda media during the Cold War. Two easy-to-explain examples to illustrate:

- Soldier embodies the ideal of a "red-blooded American" who is strong, brave, hyper-masculine, hates foreign superpowers, loves the vague ideal of "freedom" and firmly believes America is the greatest nation in the world. He prides himself on having personally murdered nazis in the past, despite actually having accomplished no such thing (comparable to the US taking a disproportionate amount of credit for defeating Nazi Germany in World War 2; at the time, WW2 was a very recent cultural memory that made for good propaganda fodder). He fears, hates and dehumanizes communists (as Soviet Russia was the US's highly-villified opponent during the Cold War). The satiric angle: he is depicted as so brainwashed by propaganda that he has become immune to facts and logic. He is horribly sadistic, brutal, paranoid and xenophobic. The ideal he is based on is portrayed as shockingly and disproportionally violent and illogical to the point of being laughable.

- Spy is based on how the US viewed France during the Cold War: as a weak, cowardly, “unmanly” nation. At the time, France was depicted this way because they were perceived to have surrendered to Nazi Germany early on in World War 2 out of cowardice. Spy is one of the least macho of the mercs, he is ineffective when fighting enemies head on, and his main method of attack is reliant on trickery and “not fighting fair.” The satiric angle: Spy isn't actually much of a coward - he is more intelligent, more tactical and more resourceful than many of the others, and simply doesn’t feel the need to risk his neck when he could be working smarter, not harder. The other characters are portrayed as a bunch of meatheads for picking on him. The negative stereotype he is based on is portrayed as largely unearned and ridiculous. (Though note that Spy is also depicted as an upperclass prick to contrast with Engineer being working class; in that dynamic, Spy is depicted as a pompous asshole, while Engie is depicted in a more favorable light. The characters are multi-faceted and no class is universally “better” or “worse” than the others, but right now I'm specifically focusing on the "Cold War stereotype" aspect.)

Notice how, while these two characters have different nationalities in-universe, they are both based on stereotypes seen through an American lens. Notice the way the American character is based on a comedically deconstructed ideal, while the character from a nation the US did not view favorably at the time is depicted as falsely judged by an unfair and ridiculous metric.

The entire TF2 cast and universe revolves on this axis! It takes old American ideals and prejudices and uses them for comedy, adding exaggeration and caveats to make those ideals look absurd.

It’s a parody of media produced in the US during the Cold War, which contained massive amounts of propaganda. It satirizes the political ideals that were glorified in said propaganda media.

Very important extra cultural context: this satiric depiction of old war propaganda was specifically designed to be instantly recognizable to TF2's central demographic at the time of release in 2007.

Older Valve games like TF2 were very specifically made to appeal to pop culture-savvy, nerdy young adult gamers. This demographic was expected to see the characters and think "oh hey, it's like a funny version of X character type I've seen in movies!"

Because those kinds of movies were still everywhere at the time. The Cold War ended in 1991. TF2 was released only 16 years later. To put this into perspective: the Legally Blonde movie came out 22 years ago, in 2001. Think about how many Legally Blonde memes are still floating around the web today, how fondly remembered this one movie is and how often it’s still referenced in contemporary media. Now consider that media produced during the Cold War was fresher in the cultural memory at the time of TF2′s release than Legally Blonde is for us today.

TF2 was never meant to be seen in a vacuum. It was always meant to be in conversation with old media that it expected everyone playing to be extremely familiar with.

I'll say that again: the cast of TF2 are based on Cold War stereotypes - comedically exaggerated - so they would clearly read as parodies to people in 2007.

Those are 3 different overlapping lenses to consider when approaching the characters.

The characters are more than just funny cartoon men with guns and an unusual amount of differing accents. They are commentary on older media trends.

Now, someone might ask - why did the developers choose this specific aesthetic and tone for their online shooter video game?

The developers have stated multiple reasons, including wanting the characters to be immediately recognizable both physically (they generally look like the stereotypical depictions they're based on) and audibly (the differing accents and regional dialects make it easy to identify which class is yelling in your ear mid-combat during gameplay).

However, I also have another theory:

It's been confirmed TF2's comedic tone was designed to combat a lot of negative aspects of shooters in the genre at the time of its creation. I have seen developers discuss that they were going for a lighthearted atmosphere to discourage player hostility.

I, personally, also think it is extremely likely the developers opted for satirizing old war propaganda partially in order to combat the tendency of other shooters often being war propaganda. Valve has always been a politically left-leaning company, with a history of depicting military-like forces and unchecked capitalism in a negative light (see the Half-Life and Portal series, respectively).

By depicting the cast of TF2 as generally unhinged, illogical and clownish, they were able to communicate to players: "War is dumb, nationalism is dumb, whatever Call of Duty has been telling you is cool is actually illogical and copying it makes you look like like an idiot. That being said, we all sometimes wish we could beat the shit out of other people in the desert with a shovel, so let's get our aggressions out in a safe, non-serious environment with no consequences. Come play pretend you're a murderous sadist blowing up equally unhinged people with us, it's silly, but it's so fun."

I believe everything from the cartoonishly over-the-top, non-permanent deaths to the deserted, remote environments, to the lack of any truly innocent or defenseless characters was all a carefully crafted foundation made to encourage players to make the informed decision to leave their inhibitions and moral hangups at the door. They wanted players to have fun and go nuts engaging in military-like violence, without encouraging pro-military attitudes in their playerbase.

For an example of a game that royally screwed up doing the same thing, just look at Overwatch - it tried to preach a "wholesome" vibe that was completely mismatched with its gameplay. Overwatch tries to justify extreme violence as Okay When Good Guys Do It To Bad Guys, which ... yeah, again, that is straight up modern military propaganda, on purpose or not (and knowing the US military’s tendency to pour money into video games that glorify war, “on purpose” isn’t as much of a stretch as one might think). Paradoxically, TF2 comes out both looking and feeling better to play, because it handles aligning player emotions VS in-game actions much more elegantly. It accounts for common pitfalls in its genre. OW jumps into those pitfalls with both legs and instead ends up looking shallow and nauseatingly twee.

Of course, all of this is personal speculation. Whether or not this was the reading that Valve intended, I do believe it's a big reason why TF2 has remained so profoundly loveable over the years - it uses its writing and art direction to put the player in the perfect mindspace to Fuck Shit Up.

It's a fantastic example of how to carefully and artfully craft something extremely stupid for maximum intended effect. It uses the strengths of comedy as a genre to its absolute fullest.

Unfortunately, because of cultural shifts since the game's release, newer fans do end up missing out on a lot of what makes this game so expertly done. Many newer fans don't come into the game with the base cultural knowledge it expected of its original audience. To gain a better grasp on the characters and enjoy this piece of media as it was intended, I think it will be extremely helpful to familiarize yourself with the material it is referencing.

For an introduction to media produced and influenced by the Cold War, I would recommend the Wikipedia article Culture during the Cold War as a starting point.

(I have skimmed, but not read, the full article; I encourage readers to be especially source-critical when engaging with pages like this that detail themes of history and propaganda - it's a starting point, not a finish line!)

>2) What themes/layers do you feel the fandom has lost sight of, over time? (or never really managed to acknowledge to begin with?)

Some of this is covered in the previous section, but I'll use this question as an opportunity to talk about another thing I feel is overlooked by fans (and, frankly, the writers of the newer comics too), especially when creating fanworks:

The fact that the characters are extremely dependent on their setup and narrative context to be likeable.

Something I think fandom culture struggles with in general is interpreting and handling fictional characters not as real, independent people who exist in a vacuum, but as the sum total of countless moving parts inside a narrative all working together to create the impression of a real person.

In a comedy, characters are especially dependent on presentation to feel like themselves. It is not enough to loyally recreate an arbitrary list of personality traits in order to create accurate fanworks - recreating the sorts of situations they get into, the kinds of people they interact with, and cherry-picking the information they have access to is neccessary for bringing out what makes the characters so charming!

This is especially important when interpreting and handling a cast made up exclusively of characters who are mean people with bad intentions, bad opinions and a complete lack of adequate self-reflection across the board.

Canon makes them all come off amazingly likeable, but this is because the writers were manipulating tone, relationship dynamics, setting, and much more to show off the characters at their most distinct, least detestable and absolute funniest.

Overlooking this aspect of writing comedy characters often leads to a very common pitfall in many, many fandoms out there - following the logic of a character's canon personality to a place they don't like, and getting rid of those personality traits to combat their own discomfort.

Making characters too kind, too understanding, too progressive, etc., is an endless source of micharacterization in fandoms in general, but especially in fandoms of media where the characters are a bunch of dicks in canon.

To be clear, I fully understand where this is coming from. Fans get attached to characters like these because they're funny (and intended to be loved!) - realizing that a character you really like would logically react in an unlikeable way if you put them into certain situations feels bad. No one wants to turn a character they love into something they find they don't love anymore.

But this is where carefully engineering your setup and narrative comes into play.

Example:

A lot of TF2 fans are queer. Queers flock to TF2 because let’s face it, the campy vibes and silly fun masculinity and weird women are like catnip to us.

But a lot of queer fans go into the fandom aspect of the game and find that ... wait, shit, these characters are not exactly pillars of progressiveness. Reconciling some of the extremist political views of the characters with queer narratives, with queer values, seems a daunting task to some. Because what’s a queer fan to do? Portray a character they love in a way that makes them unloveable? Painstakingly depict shitty, uncomfortable characterization in the name of “realism” that ultimately detracts from their own and other people’s enjoyment of the story? That’s not fun. Fandom is supposed to be fun. So, what, do they just portray the characters as miraculously having perfectly amicable social politics by the standards of the larger queer community in 2023?

Some do, of course, for their own comfort, and it’s understandable, but it’s not good storytelling. It’s an excessively shallow way of interacting with media - the fanfiction equivalent of confidently sitting down to write an in-depth, flowery review of a horror movie you watched with your hands over your eyes during all the scary parts. You cannot create fanworks that are even remotely faithful to the spirit of the canon while deliberately ignoring the core themes and author intention of the canon you’re working with. These things are, unfortunately, mutually exclusive. TF2 characters are meant to be wrong about most things politically. Hopefully my reply to the first question in this post adequately illustrates why that’s so important.

But the good news is that bastardizing canon in order to avoid making characters unlikeable also isn’t necessary.

There’s a reason Soldier, in canon mocks his enemies for everything from failing at masculinity to being disabled, yet doesn’t have a single homophobic line:

The people writing his lines figured it would detract from the character. It would hurt real people’s feelings and make the character less fun to play as, so they didn’t include it. No excuses, no explanation; it is simply omitted for the sake of likeability.

(For contrast, notice that the writers did not extend the same kindness to certain other minorities, like fat people - playing as Heavy fucking sucks when you’re fat, because every other class hurls fatphobic abuse at him. This is a fuck-up on the writers’ side; they failed to identify this type of humor as meaningfully detracting from the experience for a significant amount of players, and so ignorantly decided to include it.)

This is what I mean by “setup and narrative context.” I also like to call this “maneuvering”, because it involves selectively portraying a character in contexts and situations where they shine and instill the intended audience reaction, while steering them away from situations where they would logically act in ways that counteract how the audience is intended to feel about them.

Fanworks can absolutely do the same thing! Fanworks can even take the technique further, because they’re not bound by limited time and focus, the way the original work is!

Sticking with the above example of wondering What The Hell To Do when portraying a character who, due to the ideal he’s satirizing, should by all rights be on the wrong side of history in relation to queer rights, let me make a bold statement:

Soldier TF2 is not homophobic. He's a nationalist, a right-winger, a sexist, a xenophobe - but he's not homophobic.

Why? Because he just so happens to never encounter any gay people in canon. They happen to never cross his mind. He's thinking about other shit. If there's a Pride riot in Teufort, he just so happens to be looking the other way.

Soldier TF2 is not homophobic, because he can't think for himself. He's an idea, a fraction of a bigger narrative that he does not exist outside of.

And if he needs to encounter gay people in a fanfiction, don’t just passively follow the logic of his character to that uncomfortable place none of us enjoy going to - use that maneuvering! Make him misinformed, make him misunderstand, give him incomplete information - the character is not only a face with personality traits attached, his soul is also in the context of the story!

Make him homophobic, but he's pretty sure only Europeans can be gay (just look at them!), and it's already so damn sad that they weren't born in beautiful, paradisical AMERICA, so he pities them instead of hating them. Make him think he's successfully being homophobic, but he has misunderstood what a gay person is and thinks it's a particularly venomous type of snake (men who kiss other men are fine, why would he care about that when there are HORRIBLE HOMOSEXUALS slithering around in the desert that he needs to go blow up right now before they bring this glorious nation to ruin). Make him homophobic, but literally "phobic" - he's shaking and crying hiding inside a cupboard, and his newly-outed gay friends have to lure him out with canned meat and a trail of small American flags, treating him like a feral cat that needs a little time and space to get used to people.

That's funny. It's likeable, it's charming. He isn't portrayed as a good person, or woke in a way that clashes with the themes of his character, but with a little maneuvering, he is faithful to what makes him such a legendary character in canon - being a silly caricature that brings us joy.

If Soldier himself needs to be gay? There are ways to make it happen. Same approach. Get creative. Make it silly. Go for thematically appropriate comedic explanations, not cop-outs or realism*.

That is what I think the TF2 fandom is lacking - understanding of how to manipulate context to make a character feel like their own unique, lovable selves.

Characters are not just visuals and personality traits. They are also what happens to them, what they conveniently find out, what they happen to miss.

This is the same for every story, but it is especially important to understand in a comedy. Doubly so in a whimsical, hyper-violent, morbid comedy like TF2.

It's one of the most important layers to be able to recognize, and an even more important one to be willing to try to recreate.

*Unless you feel like doing a deliberate deconstruction, in which case, go ham, sometimes actively engaging with canon means doing some real weird stuff to it to make a certain point on a meta level. This is obviously different from the issues I described above.

>3) "even the newer official comics don't even seem to really "get" the original game" … I've had a nagging sense for years now that the TF2 comics don't really match the game, tonally -- which has admittedly soured my enjoyment of them -- but I've never been able to put two and two together and fully determine why that is. What would you say they've failed to "get" about the work they're based off of?

While I very much love the newer comics on their own merits, I do think they are wildly removed from the game, and lack a lot of depth by comparison.

I believe the greatest failing of the comics, especially the long-form comic, is that the writers do not seem to be aware of either of the subjects I covered above.

They do not handle the satirical aspect well. The newer comic writers don't even really seem to be aware that there is a satirical aspect - they treat the world as just a silly version of mid-1900′s media, with a narrow focus on silver age comics (which were primarily superhero comics, not an easy genre to match with TF2′s more grounded setting - see the comic’s limp attempt at doing a Superman parody with Sniper) + a dash of the Man’s Life magazines (would have been a good match, if not for the fact that it’s primarily used as aesthetics, with no attention given to themes the way the game does with its own media references). They attempt to write parody only, and even the parody aspect is a hollow effort. Crucially, the writers don't seem to have much of an opinion of the old media properties they're parodying, and without opinions to guide a parody, it becomes shallow and lifeless. "Mid-1900′s media was a bit silly, right?" isn't enough of a hot take to justify its existence. It needs an axis on which to spin to feel complete.

Reiterating the point I made in my answer to question 1: the game's satirical aspect circled the point that was "American media made during the Cold War pushed a narrative that was illogical and ridiculously misaligned with reality."

Its absurd humor is grounded in reality and follows a thematic red thread that the comic does not. As a result, the comic (again, primarily later entries) loses a lot of the sting and edge of the game.

Even though the comic attempts to be more serious and "dark" at certain points, the much more silly and easy-going game (and Meet the Team videos, not to mention) comes out looking more mature, interesting and layered, even though many of the layers remain subtextual. The game is fully married to comedy and has no intention of "getting real", but it is loyal to the spirit of satire. It has opinions. It has bite.

In the game and early supplementary material, there is a dread and horror in the subtext that the comics tried to bring to light later on, but the comic writers didn't know what the scary thing behind the curtain was.

The scary thing was - is - the Cold War.

The scary thing is the dread injected into the genre it's satirizing by people who wanted American readers and movie-goers to be afraid. Scaring people into compliance, into finding a sense of safety and comfort in their national identity, was the entire purpose of many, many pieces of media released at the time.

The comic writers didn't notice the subtext and figured they had to make up their own reasons for why the world of TF2 is so utterly fucked.

They didn't understand the cultural context, and they missed the mark entirely.

This also hindered the comic writers' ability to reproduce the game's humor and characterization. Without understanding where exactly the game's humor was coming from or why the characters were so likeable despite being horrible people, they lacked direction. They made the characters at the same time too impassionate, too stupid, too uncaring, and too nice. All together, the characters became less interesting, less likeable.

Example:

- In the game, Spy was not intended to be Scout's father. Spy having a relationship with Scout's mother emphasized Spy's craftiness and intelligence (undermining the enemy team not only through brute force, but through infiltrating their personal lives), and showed off the strengths of his aforementioned "softness" and sentimentality (he's the only mercenary shown to have consistent luck with women). It also emphasized the flaws in Scout's worldview, and his status as the team underdog, and showed a clear contrast to Scout's non-existent love life. Spy came out of the situation funny and likeable because he 1. was portrayed as cool and capable in a way the other mercs aren't, and 2. his softer side is simultaneously humorously endearing, consistent with the rest of his characterization, and highly informed by the satirical aspect of his character in a way that clicks perfectly thematically. Scout comes out of the situation likeable because his ego is balanced out by his bad luck - you can simultaneously see that he's trying too hard and why he's trying too hard. Spy and Scout's dynamic in-game is also fun and interesting, because you have a tough, hyper-violent, wannabe-macho young man who is desperate to gain the respect of both his team and his enemies getting freaking owned by a guy who is nowhere near the impressive-tough-guy ideal Scout strives to embody. The game's satirical points inform the characters and their actions, which gives the comedy depth and nuance, which in turn makes all characters involved fun to watch and easy to get invested in. It is the establishing of and subsequent pointing-and-laughing-at an ideal that produces engaging, character-driven comedy in this situation.

- By contrast, the comics decided that Spy was Scout's father. Spy's motives for getting involved with Scout's mother is no longer about gaining intel on his enemies. In this version of events, his motives are reduced to merely wanting to reconnect with an old flame. This completely undermines the dynamic described above, for multiple reasons: the situation no longer shows Spy as having a particular skillset that sets him apart from the other mercs, he is no longer portrayed as emotionally "softer" than the others (in fact, having left a poor woman to raise and feed 8 kids on her own while he was off enjoying his upperclass life makes him look incredibly cold in a way that is distinctly unfunny; I don’t think the writers thought this part through), Scout's comedic poor luck is no longer on display, and the "macho character is humiliated by the type of guy he respects the least" satirical aspect no longer works. There is an attempt to replace it with a mutual "ugh, I'm related to this guy?" running gag, but it's a very pale substitute for the layered, strongly characterized, thematically appropriate dynamic present in the original game. Spy comes out of it looking like more of a cowardly, cold-hearted fuck-up than a hilariously brilliant tactician with a heart. Scout comes off way too pitiable, because he is not responsible for his own misery here, and the person horribly bullying him and picking apart his self-esteem on the battlefield is his absent father who abandoned him as a child. He's not an objectively badass character who nonetheless fucks himself over in humorous ways trying to chase an ideal that objectively sucks - he's just a regular shitty guy who ended up in bad circumstances because of things outside of his control.

The comic writers didn't understand what Spy and Scout respectively represented in the game, and because of this, they didn't realize they were taking the characters off the rails and making them much less interesting as a result. They didn't realize they were killing off an endless source of comedy that supported the game's satirical angle in a fun, unique, dynamic way.

It resulted in a flat, flavorless subplot. It had some superficial attempts at "heartwarming" moments ...

... but here's my take: if the writers wanted to include more warmth and sincerity in the comics, wouldn't it have been way more heartwarming if Spy started treating Scout as his son even though he wasn't?

Would it not have been way more endearing to see him look out for his girlfriend's child, not because he has any personal ties to him himself, but because he knew if anything happened to Scout, his mother would be devastated?

Why not build from there? Why not make it an active choice? Why not preserve the existing dynamic and themes, and just follow that narrative thread to its logical conclusion?

Spy has an established sentimental side. Scout is desperate for approval. The reluctant surrogate father/son development practically writes itself. It would have been such a good way to explore TF2's themes more explicitly, too!

But again, the comic writers did not seem to realize the game even had themes.

I do like the newer comics. I do think they're really fun, and I did even enjoy the "Spy is Scout's father" subplot in its own way. But this complete inability to identify the game's themes, and thus the source of all its comedy, and thus the red thread defining characterization - it resulted in supplemental material that was lackluster, directionless and unable to scratch the same itch the game does.

They're good comics, but they're hardly TF2 comics.

>4a) … Sheerly out of curiosity, how do you feel Expiration Date holds up, in comparison?

Similar to the way I dislike Spy being revealed to be Scout’s biological father for coming off as a stilted, superficial attempt at being “heartwarming,” I also immensely dislike later supplementary material trying to promote Ms. Pauling to Scout’s recurring love interest for the exact same reason. Expiration Date pushes this subplot way past its breaking point and shows off extremely well why the “jerk characters are secretly a bunch of softies” treatment is so deeply, deeply out of place in TF2.

Back in the early comics, Scout hitting on Miss Pauling was played as a joke at his expense. He was an idiotic, sexist guy incapable of talking to a pretty woman without trying to fuck - she was a highly skilled and deviously manipulative minor character who mostly existed to show off how dangerously competent the Administrator and her people were. Scout acting like an utter dumbass too entrenched in his own limited worldview to notice what was happening right in front of him was important characterization for him, Miss Pauling’s quiet, calculating efficiency was important characterization for her boss, and their clashing personalities set the tone for the dynamic between the entire team of mercenaries and the conspiracy going on right under their noses.

Expiration Date chose to eliminate these layers and invent a completely new conflict for these two specific characters to go play with in a corner, which had nothing to do with their original characterization or the larger plot. Scout is now portrayed as being genuinely in love with Pauling, even noticing small details about her mannerisms and knowing about some of her interests, even though the entire point of their original interactions were that Scout was so busy trying to live his tough-guy-with-a-pretty-girl-on-his-arm fantasy he did not bother to listen to or learn anything about the women unfortunate enough to cross his path, allowing Pauling to carry out her job without causing suspicion.

Instead, Scout’s sexist approach to interacting with women is played for sympathy (”he’s actually a romantic underdog because the lady he likes accurately clocked him as an idiot!”) and inadvertently validated (”once she gave him a chance, she found out he’s actually a pretty okay guy!”).

In the process, Miss Pauling loses far too much of her usual competence, being visibly freaked out over having to perform a job she’s been shown to handle with grace in the past, and being taken aback by what should by all rights be routine weirdness in this world, all so she can have an eye-roll-worthy forced positive reaction to the entire experience at the end of the short, in a weak attempt to justify why she comes to like Scout more despite all the trouble he’s caused for her and wants to spend more time with him in the future.

The romance subplot is only made possible because the characters are heavily edited compared to their past portrayals, is only able to develop in the direction it does by aligning itself with the values of a character who existed to be a laughable, obviously-mistaken caricature, and is only able to distill a happy ending to the whole mess by stripping the other character of personal standards and agency.

Scout and Pauling are frankly two halves of a whole shitshow in Expiration Date, because the writers either didn’t notice or didn’t care about what older works were gunning for - all they saw was that Boy Liked Girl, Girl Did Not Like Boy, and that just wouldn’t stand! After all, everyone likes romance, right?

Scout, as he is portrayed in the game and in the early supplementary material, is one of my absolute favorites of the mercs. I find him incredibly funny, and the way his hyperactive, fun-loving, jokey traits overlap with his intense bloodlust (literally - he’s the class with the most weapons available that cause bleed damage!) and barely-suppressed rage makes him fun and fascinating. The little man has so much unchecked ADHD and cultural trauma he just has to go and kill people about it, which is just so intensely relatable in the “forbidden mood” way TF2 handles so well.

Unfortunately, I get the impression he has in later years fallen victim to the curse of being a skinny young white guy character, making him a target for writers who think every series needs a relatable everyman protagonist for either themselves or the audience to project onto (and who think skinny young white guys are the most relatable people around, for reasons you can probably imagine I’m not personally very fond of).

TF2 absolutely does not need a character like that, and butchering Scout’s established personality in the name of “relatable” and “wholesome” is first of all Some Bullshit, and second of all a lost cause. The character simply has too much baggage as an over-the-top caricature to be comfortably rewired into an author- or audience-surrogate. He’s always going to come out looking like an asshole - whether this aspect of his character turns out likeable or unlikeable is entirely controlled by whether the story itself acknowledges it.

I did find Scout and Spy's dynamic to be quite well done, though, especially if you ignore the "Spy is Scout's father" reveal from the later comics.

The idea that Spy didn't have to go and do all that, but has grown a soft spot for Scout purely because his girlfriend clearly loves her incredibly annoying boy and her happiness is his happiness, is perfectly in-character. Scout has also long been established to desperately crave approval from his teammates, and on paper, the idea of putting him in a situation where he had to let go of some of his macho man dignity, imitate Spy more closely and ultimately win a tiny bit of that approval he's been looking for is interesting and plays well with the game's existing themes.

It's just a shame Scout's motivations ended up being conjured out of thin air, in direct conflict with past characterization, for the purpose of enabling a schmaltzy, tonally dissonant romantic subplot.

tl;dr, I'm conflicted on the subject of Expiration Date. It's funny, it's cute when it's not trying too hard, and seeing the mercs dick around off the clock getting into stupid shenanigans together is something I've always wanted to see in a longer animated format. It’s largely a good time and a fun watch, despite its questionable gender politics and trope-y execution.

However, like the newer comics, it suffers immensely from writers who are simply unable to identify the themes, characterization and comedy style of older material, and thus, in my opinion, falls way, way short of its potential.

>4b) I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on Emesis Blue, should you end up watching it.

I'll be sure to share my opinions if I ever get around to watching it!! I'm super curious about it. As I mentioned in another post, what little I've heard of it seems much more on-point thematically, and even with the characters being so far removed from their official characterization, I really get the impression this is a deliberate, informed choice, in stark contrast to the newer official supplementary material. I’ll be sure to drop some words on it if I ever get around to watching the full thing!

Anyway, that about wraps up my thoughts! If you’ve read this far, thank you for sticking with it, and please do consider reblogging - I’ve spent an insane amount of time writing and re-writing and fact-checking this, and I would love for it to reach just half of all the people who were curious about my initial posts on the subject. :’)

Follow-up questions are very welcome, though to be clear: I’m not really interested in “debating” the subjects I’ve talked about here. I know I posit a lot of hard opinions in this post and not everyone is going to agree with me and that’s fine - if you feel differently, I invite you to simply ignore me and write your own take on your own blog. No hard feelings, I just don’t enjoy those kinds of discussions. (Corrections on any factual mistakes I’ve made are of course encouraged).

#team fortress 2 #tf2 #tf2 analysis #tf2 meta #tf2 comics #soldier tf2 #spy tf2 #analyzing comedy #analyzing satire #deerchatter

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kinetic-elaboration · 2 years

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June 24: Finishing Jane Eyre

Finally finished Jane Eyre this week, though since I still have the book and it’s a critical edition, I’m keeping it a little longer to read some of the essays and stuff in the back. I feel like my brain is... not rotted, but way too stuffed full with fannish analysis, since that’s most of the media-response type stuff I read nowadays, post English-dgree, and while there’s nothing BAD about that and I’ve read some very smart things written by fans on the internet, it’s obviously not the SAME as critical essays. So I think this will be good for me. Also, while Jane Eyre didn’t leave me feeling confused, this was the first time I’ve read it and I was largely just fun reading. I wasn’t thinking too deep. I just want someone to explain the nuances and themes to me lol.

And it does kinda worry me that most of the analysis I was able to do, or did easily at least, was very...relationship-y, I suppose. I mean that is a lot of the book. But I felt like it was very inflected by the way I analyze relationships through fandom.

As I read the ending, and I got to the description of the fire and Rochester’s injuries and for some reason it upset me disproportionately. But I’ve had weird feelings recently, like a greater susceptibility to feeling just sad or melancholy, so it might be that. I just felt kind of sick but I don’t know why. It then became clearer to me that the injuries, especially the blindness, were ways of quickly fixing Rochester and Jane’s problems, just as much as Bertha’s death was necessary to allow them to marry legally. Blinded, he needs assistance; he can’t be the arrogant and controlling person he was during their first engagement; the negative traits he perhaps hasn’t fixed or worked through are at the very least harder to lean into or display.

The essay I was skimming was talking about the equality of Jane and Rochester: the initial implications of that equality, the underlying lie of it, and how it is necessary for their happy ending, and now I can’t remember my thoughts without this vocabulary. It is really helpful though!

I just felt like... this is such an I-Can-Fix-Him Fantasy. His power over her, stemming from his position and his wealth and his age but primarily from his sex, has to be taken away for him to be her happy ending husband. But that power is so deep rooted, it’s hard to think of anything that could upend it, even Jane’s new wealth. Rochester by the end is still appealing in his devotion but he can never force her into a life she isn’t interested in or lord his knowledge, secrets, wealth, or physical stature over her. A defanged man.

I did think that one of his glaring faults was that he relied too much on Jane to be a Savior for him; he saw her as nearly magical, the person who would solve all his problems including the problems of his own personality and moral dissolution. That’s not healthy, bro. That also wasn’t solved by the end really except, first, he did kinda find his religious faith without her (through his trials etc.) and, second, his reliance on her literally and physically was cast in a positive light. It’s good that he relies on her for everything! Because she wants to be helpful! Maybe his obsession with her was always part of the fantasy. I found it to be a bit of a red flag in and of itself.

The end of the penultimate chapter, where he “holds out his hand to be led” really got me. It distilled in one sentence the same sentiment as the “defeated eagle” passage, which also affected me a lot. What used to be a manic devotion and need for her that was creepily obsessive and unrealistic, that transformed her into an idealized object without recognizing her as a complete and flawed human, was transformed into a literal reliance on her, which is both softer and more objectively reasonable, and also more easily controlled--a submissive reliance, in a way.

I’ve had such a tough day and I’m 95% sure this is incoherent or, at least, really shallow as a book reaction. But I don’t care! Vacation time!

#the year 2022 #2022: reading #i'm traveling tomorrow and then writing frantically to finish troped on sunday #end of plans

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beth-march · 2 years

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just sitting in a cloud, oh wow

Summary:

Fez would do anything to make Lexi happy. Apparently, this includes adopting four cats.

For @earnmysong, thank you for the request! Also inspired by a post by @fexilovebot

Read under the cut, or on Ao3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/36897967

Once, when they were first talking, and their bond felt so precarious it was prone to the occasional bout of awkward silence, Fez had broken a lapse in conversation by asking about her favourite animal.

“Cats,” he remembers her saying. So quickly, her answer comes, like this isn’t a matter that has room for debate, like Lexi has been rigid in this forever.

“Word.”

A minimal answer, but a distinct sense of hope unfurls on her face.

“You like cats?” Lexi asks.

“Hell yeah I like cats. We used to have a stray hangin’ around the store, he was good company. Minded his business, only hung out if he wanted. Not like dogs, dogs love anyone, they fuckin’ fools.”

Laughter spills from her, and it’s breathless and happy. She’s beaming, and Fez thinks that it’s a disproportionate reaction to an expression of fondness for cats, but he’ll take it. Every time he elicits her smile, it feels like a gift.

“Yeah, exactly!” she exclaims, like vindication, like something long sought finally found. “Their temperaments are so cool, they’re so deliberate in everything they do. And they just have the sweetest little paws, you know, with the little toe beans, and don’t even get me started on their noses - ”

Fez is grinning in earnest, by now. There’s nothing quite like listening to Lexi talk about something she’s passionate about.

“You got a cat?”

“No, I wish,” Lexi sighs. “I’ve always wished.”

“You know you talking about a cat, right? Not some fucking illegal wildlife or somethin’. Like, shit, we can go down to the pet store right now, I’ll shout you the two hundred bucks.”

“That’s really nice of you,” Lexi says, and he smiles all the more when he realises she’s squirming with just how nice she finds this, fingers wringing together. “But my mom doesn’t want pets in the house, so that’s that.”

It might strike another person as silly, the way that dejection overcomes her. Not Fez, who is already so far gone it hurts him to see Lexi like this, sad because she doesn’t have the pet she wants, and has clearly wanted for a long time.

“Someday, Lexi,” he says softly.

He doesn’t realise that he’s making her a promise.

Someday arrives, and falls on the day before Lexi turns nineteen.

It feels long overdue, though it’s barely been two years since she confessed her love for cats, and it isn’t as though he could have hosted a pet in a drug house in good conscience. Things have changed since meeting Lexi - somehow, he’s found himself out of the town that ruined him, severed from the business that strangled him. He’s working a terrible job for terrible money so he can cover rent for their apartment and medical bills for his grandma and send his brother to a proper school, and Ash is still angry at him for uprooting their lives to try to act like they’re people they can’t be, but Fez doesn’t care. Maybe he’s playing a fool’s game, but isn’t that what all people do? Fake it ‘til you make it , he remembers Lexi advising the people in her play during her junior year.

For the first time in his life, he looks at the future and the picture is not blurry. It is not smeared in blood, it is not framed by metal bars.

It shouldn’t be significant, that Fez feels secure enough in his life to decide to buy his girlfriend a cat for her birthday. But it is. The freedom is staggering.

He wants to surprise her, but there is a problem in this idea, in that he’ll have to choose the cat himself. He assumes it will be a difficult decision to make in his first glimpse of the kittens wriggling in the glass, some cuddled together, others swatting at toys, others leaping about. They blur together for him, a heaving mass of fluff, a cacophony of sweet meows - but then, he spots a kitten the colour of honey sitting in the corner, and his mind is made up.

There’s something about the little cat that reminds him of Lexi. Maybe it’s the way that she sits perched in the corner, spectating, something knowing in her gaze. Maybe it’s the quiet dignity of her stance, the delicate graze of her tail where it is woven around her soft paws. Maybe it’s how pretty her pale green eyes are.

Whatever it is, Fez looks at the little cat, and he knows she was always meant to end up with Lexi - and, by extension, him. Not twenty minutes later, she’s in his car, hooking her claws on a loose thread in the passenger seat and yanking until it pulls apart, a little tear appearing in the cushioning.

“C’mon, man, don’t pull that shit,” he huffs, plucking up the kitten by her tiny shoulders, setting her atop his knee. “How you gon’ play me like that?”

It seems very rude, considering what he’s saved her from. A glass tank full of annoying brothers and sisters, or maybe a future with a family of young children who might tug on her tail too hard. Instead, she gets to have Lexi Howard as her owner, which makes her the luckiest cat in the world.

He explains this to her, while he sets her things up. Bowls of food and water in the kitchen, litter box in the laundry, a squashed pillow of a bed and a pile of toys in the corner of the living room. He tells her all about Lexi - “You don’t even know, cat, you in for the time of your life, your mama’s the best, she’s gonna spoil you like you wouldn’t believe,” he mutters - and he doesn’t really register how insane this is until Ashtray gets home from school.

“Who the fuck are you talkin’ to?” Ashtray asks, when he steps through the front door. “I know Lexi ain’t here, you’ve been bitchin’ about not being able to wake up with her on her birthday for like two weeks straight.”

“Yo, kid, how was school?” Fez asks, ignoring his tirade.

“What you think? That institution’s fucked, glorified babysitting, the way they treat us like preschoolers who ain’t got a clue about - what the fuck is that?”

Ash stops dead in his tracks when he takes stock of the tiny ball of fuzz streaking across the living room. The kitten does her best to leap atop the sofa, but she’s too small, and she comes crashing down to the carpet, rolling around and shaking her head to straighten herself out. Fez can already hear Lexi cooing - and he can already hear Ash cursing. There’s a gleam in his eyes that suggests he’s not far from it, from breaking out in furious protests.

“C’mon, you know this one,” Fez says. “Says meow, starts with a C?”

“Why the fuck is there a cat here?” Ash thunders. “You best tell me that little fucker’s out by tomorrow, Fez, I ain’t playin’ around. I don’t want no cat.”

“You liked that street cat who came by the corner store!”

“Yeah, but he didn’t live with us! You outta your fucking mind if you think I’m ‘bout to clean up after your girlfriend’s cat, that shit is nasty, literally - ”

“I ain’t askin’ you to do shit. Just ignore her, aight, and be nice? For Lexi.”

Ash grumbles and storms off to his bedroom, but Fez knows his brother well enough to recognise acquiescence. For Lexi is a compelling argument in this house. So much so that Fez doesn’t even have to decorate the place by himself - Ash stands on a chair on the other side of the living room and holds the banner straight while Fez pins it in place, his face only mildly murderous.

In the morning, Ash even agrees to keep an eye on the cat while Fez leaves to pick up Lexi from her dorm room. If he notices Ash dangling a toy mouse by its tail for the cat to swat at, Fez says nothing, only smiles to himself on the way out.

When he reaches Lexi’s college, he finds her already in the parking lot. She’s decked out in her usual eyelet lace, her hair in a low bun and her red lipstick pristine. She looks beautiful, and her smile is radiant.

He gets out of the car and Lexi twines herself around him, her arms fierce around his neck, her face powdery in his neck, her hair soft beneath his nose, and he soaks all of her in, he whispers tenderly, “Happy birthday, Lexi.”

“Thanks,” she giggles, hands twiddling at his nape.

“It’s been good, so far?”

“It just got perfect,” Lexi confides.

“I think it’s ‘bout to get a whole lot fuckin’ better,” Fez admits, his smile impish.

“That’s impossible,” she sing-songs.

Fez imagines this might be among the rare occasions that he is right and Lexi is wrong, and he relishes in it, because it’s a wonderful sort of thing to be right about. Indeed, they get inside, and the first thing Lexi reacts to are the decorations - the blue and purple balloons he’s hung by the banner wishing her a happy birthday, a minimal effort that has her gushing with gratitude.

Fez barely acknowledges it in his haste to ask, “You want your present?”

“There’s more?” Lexi’s voice sounds weak. He’s not sure why - this is the second birthday of hers they’ve shared since they’ve been a couple, and he certainly hadn’t held back the first time, though the pressure to make it nice was more evenly distributed between him and Cassie for her eighteenth. That could really be the reason, he supposes - he knows she’s been lonely without her family, however adamant she is about her relief to have him with her.

“More’s a fuckin’ understatement,” Ash scoffs, from his corner.

This draws a look of curiosity over Lexi. She follows with wonder as Fez guides her to his bedroom. It looks unassuming, neat as always, one nightstand table covered in his things and the other stacked in hers.

There’s no sign of the cat, which makes Fez frown, especially when he notices a pucker of confusion in Lexi. He releases her hand and crouches on the ground, checking the most obvious spot - and finds what he’s looking for. The cat is huddled beneath the bed, legs tucked under her like she’s a loaf of bread. She regards Fez with curious eyes, and doesn’t protest when he reaches under the bed and slips her into his hands, pulling her into the open.

The gasp that flows from Lexi is definitely reminiscent of her theatre days. Fez watches with a grin as she folds her hands over her mouth, her eyes shining.

“Oh my god,” she whispers. “Fez, are you serious? Is this real?”

“Real as all hell,” Fez assures her, bringing the kitten closer. Lexi dusts three careful fingers over the little cat’s forehead, and he swears that there are tears glazing her eyes. She looks up at him and laughs wetly, incredulity clear.

“Fez, I don’t know what to say,” she bumbles. “You really remember me telling you how much I’ve always wanted a cat? We weren’t even officially together, back then!”

“For sure I remember. I remember everything,” Fez says.

Lexi bops up on her toes to kiss him, and she’s sort of crying, sort of laughing, but Fez leans in as close as he can, cupping her face with his spare hand.

“This is the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever gotten,” she admits, stroking the kitten’s face. “But, Fez… I can’t keep a pet in my dorm room, you know.”

“Nah, she’ll stay here. I already got her set up, got her some toys and shit.”

“You’re going to look after a cat? For me?” Lexi asks, dumbfounded.

“You think it’s hard?”

“I think it’s inconvenient! It’s, like, a lot to ask of you.”

“You haven’t asked me for a fuckin’ thing,” Fez says. “I didn’t see you in the pet shop or nothin’. Anyway, you’ll be here next year to help me out, won’t you?”

That’s when her mother will relent on the importance of living a proper college life, and Lexi will be free to move in with Fez and Ash. They’ve alluded to it before but never made formal plans, and Fez has no idea why he hasn’t spoken to her about it outright, because her happiness is an abundant outpour, filling the room with light.

“Yes,” she says, nodding, grinning. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“I’ll be aight ‘til then. She’s only small,” Fez says, freeing one of his hands so that he can unspool Lexi’s fingers and settle the kitten in her palms.

“Oh,” she mumbles, pulling the cat close to her chest, cradling her. “She’s a girl?”

“Yeah. Shit, I hope you didn’t have a preference.”

“She’s perfect,” Lexi assures him. “You chose perfectly. What’s her name?”

Fez scoffs. “You think I got you a cat for your birthday and then fuckin’ named her myself? That’s on you, Lex, you gotta think of something good.”

“Well, she’ll be your cat too, really,” Lexi says. “We should decide together.”

“No way, this one’s all you. I know you got somethin’ in mind. You’ve been dreaming of having a cat how long, again?”

He’s surprised when she bites her lip.

“Actually, I do have something in mind, something I chose when I was really little and watching a Barbie movie…” she says, sounding sheepish.

“Mm?”

“I don’t think you’ll like it,” Lexi says.

“I don’t give a fuck. Whatever you want, for real.”

“I want to name her Serafina.”

Fez blinks. “How the fuck you spell that?”

Lexi giggles and spells it out for him, and Fez lets the letters uncurl in his mind, nodding slowly. “Serafina,” he repeats. “That shit’s dope. I think it suits her.”

“Really?” Lexi asks, brightening. Serafina squirms in her hold, abruptly darting away, leaping atop the bedsheets with a graceful curve of her tail.

“She’s a wily motherfucker, I’ll tell you that much,” Fez says, scooping the kitten back up and bundling her in Lexi’s arms again. “This is Lexi. I been tellin’ you ‘bout her, what the fuck is wrong with you, tryna leave her? That’s the best place in the world, those arms, best take advantage, you dumbass cat.”

“Don’t be mean to her,” Lexi scolds, bringing Serafina close, so she can nuzzle her cheek against the cat’s soft face. It only takes a moment for Serafina to realise just how lovely this situation is, and she breaks into high pitched purrs, a look of curious contentment dancing along her little face.

Fez doesn’t think twice about it - he tugs his phone out of his pockets and snaps a photo. Realising what he’s doing, Lexi tilts around so the angle is better, so Serafina is more visible, and makes her smile wider.

It’s the sweetest picture Fez thinks he’s ever seen. He hates social media with a passion, but an odd compulsion rises in him every so often, like his blood remembers that he’s Gen Z and insists that he has to do something to remind the world that he exists, and it usually coincides with a desire to brag about how stupidly lucky he is to have Lexi.

So Fez posts the picture to Instagram, captioning it something vague about it being his girl’s birthday. It slips nicely alongside all the other squares depicting Lexi in various positions - across the table on a date last month, a blurry selfie where she’s laughing and snuggled in his arms, standing with Ash at her high school graduation, a candid of her with sunshine making her hair glisten.

Rue has called his Instagram a Lexi fan account before, and Fez doesn’t dispute this claim. He’s even changed his bio accordingly, much to Rue’s chagrin, and Lexi’s pleased embarrassment.

Some time later, a chime from his phone informs him that the picture has been commented on.

@casshoward: oh my god it happened @lexihoward you finally got your serafina! please tell me you actually named her serafina!

That makes Fez laugh out loud. He joins Lexi on the floor, where she’s dragging a shoestring along the floorboards in the kitchen, giggling with delight as Serafina pounces at the shapes she traces on the ground.

When he shows her the screen, Lexi offers him a flat look.

“It’s a good name!” she insists.

“I love you,” is all he can say. And he does. He thinks of her tiny and wishing for a cat and deciding she wants to name her cat after a Barbie character and telling her sister about it, holding onto that wish for over ten years, and he cannot believe how much he loves her, loves that little girl and the woman she has become, the woman in his arms, the woman whose wishes he gets to grant.

Whatever dim embarrassment marred her a moment ago is long gone.

“I love you, too,” she confesses, with such ardour to suggest novelty, though it’s anything but - she tells him this every day, she shows him every moment.

They’re halfway to a kiss before Ash smacks them with one of the balloons. It goes careening between them, and Serafina eagerly bumps her head against the lilac globe, nudging it along the kitchen floor.

“Yo, what the fuck, Ash?” Fez grumbles, frowning at his brother.

“Y’all make me fuckin’ sick,” he declares. “Happy birthday and all, Lex, but seriously, I curse the day you came to visit our old store.”

With that, he leaves, stomping away to his bedroom. And Lexi and Fez dissolve into laughter, curled together on the kitchen floor, awash with bliss.

“Hey, you’re into cats, right?”

The question comes unexpectedly, about midway through their shift at the convenience store. Fez glances up from the shelves he’s stacking with a surprised look. This coworker is a nice kid, just a bit younger than Lexi, taking a gap year before he starts at college - but he’s rarely chatty. Fez thinks the kid might be intimidated by him. Lexi keeps telling him that he should make an effort to make his niceness more obvious, because he can be intimidating from afar, with his air of mystery and his foul language and the big scar on his head.

So Fez nods, and tries to make his posture as open as possible.

“More my girl who loves them, but yeah, I fuck with cats. Why you ask?”

“It’s just, my mom’s cat had kittens, and we’re trying to get rid of the runt.”

Fez can’t help scoffing at this. “Way to sell it to me, bro.”

“Shit, I mean - we’ve got one left, that needs a good home. And he’s cute, I swear, real cute. You wanna see a picture?”

There’s no real chance to offer a response before the kid has descended upon him, phone in hand. If he could refuse him, Fez thinks he might have - he adores Serafina, truly, loves to wake in the middle of the night and find that she’s tucked herself in the groove of his legs, loves to scratch behind her ears when she wanders into the kitchen to meow at him with demands for food, loves how happy Lexi gets whenever Serafina indulges her with cuddles. But he isn’t sure if he wants to have two cats, even if it would be a lot easier to manage looking after them, now that Lexi is living with him.

Seeing the cat in question doesn’t exactly convince Fez. The little kitten is pathetic, really, skinny and tiny, a black and brown tabby cat with thick white fluff protruding from his ears. He’s visibly smaller than his siblings - his paws are ridiculous, like little twigs, and he’s curled in on himself, his eyes bleary.

“Do they stay that fucked forever?” Fez wonders aloud.

“No, man,” the kid laughs. “No, runts almost always catch up. He might be a little bit smaller, but that’s no big deal, and he’ll be just as strong. He’ll be running around with your other cat someday.”

“That’s mad presumptuous of you, homeboy. I ain’t agreed to nothin’.”

The kid falters, which makes Fez feel bad. “No, I know, it’s just - I don’t know, I’ve got you on Instagram, you know? It’s obvious you and your girlfriend really love your cat, so I thought you might be interested in having another.”

There’s some insight in that. Fez has no doubt that Lexi would be thrilled to have a second cat, and the idea of coming home with a little cat, watching surprise steal her away in a rush of delight, holds a tremendous appeal. He knows the tenderhearted part of her would take great thrill in nurturing a little runt, so tiny he’s been left unchosen among his more robust siblings.

If Fez is honest, there’s even some appeal in this notion for him. Get rid of him, he hears again, and realises that he wants better for the little guy. It’s not his fault he’s so weak and ugly, after all.

“I’ll talk to Lex,” he tells his coworker. Which is really as good as yes, something self aware in Fez can acknowledge, but he dismisses the thought, because the sheer amount of power Lexi has over him is old news, this many years in.

Predictably, Lexi takes one look at the picture of the kitten and is utterly dazzled.

“He’s the runt of the litter?” Lexi asks.

“That shit’s not obvious?” Fez asks, laughing. “Look at them fuckin’ alien eyes!”

“I can’t believe nobody’s picked him just because he’s the runt,” she says. “He’s adorable, and he’s sure to grow. Look at those pretty markings on his forehead!”

There’s already something that resembles love in the way Lexi talks about the little cat. Fez looks at what shines in her eyes and realises, for the umpeenth time, that he would do anything, anything at all, to make her happy.

“You want to take him, then?”

“I mean…” Lexi trails off, chuckling. “Of course I do. But only if you want to keep him, too. I know you’ll say yes to me, and I don’t want to take advantage…”

Fez squeezes her hand, because Lexi really isn’t the sort to wield power in such a way, and that’s exactly why she has so much of it over him.

“Anything you want, baby,” he murmurs.

A few days later, they pick up Alfred. Lexi has picked another weird old timey name, and Fez doesn’t even blink, just says, “Cool. I’mma call him Alfie.”

Alfie the alien, Fez decides, when he realises that the kitten is even weirder looking in real life, with bulging eyes and spindly legs. Fez actually kind of likes it, how he’s so small that he can fit into even Lexi’s frail palm.

“Fez, that’s our son,” Lexi whispers, as they watch him shuffle headfirst into a cushion, bouncing backwards onto the blankets with a little wheeze.

“And he can’t even walk in a straight line,” Fez says, booping Alfred’s grey pink nose. “We chose real fuckin’ well.”

“We sure did,” Lexi says, without a trace of irony. She weaves her fingers around Alfred’s scraggly frame, flips over and lifts him into the air, giggling as she watches his legs kicking about, as though paddling through invisible water.

Fez takes a photo - Lexi sprawled on her back, grinning up at the ball of fluff in her hands - and in what he hopes isn’t becoming a tradition, posts the picture to Instagram.

Fez has no idea how they’ve ended up here. One moment, they were in the supermarket parking lot, unloading bags into the car. The next, Lexi has dragged him across the street, to the neighbourhood park, which is decked out in streamers and balloons, a massive banner announcing PET ADOPTION FAIR!

“What the fuck we doin’ here? I wanna go home, for real,” Fez grumbles.

“Okay, Ashtray,” Lexi says, laughing. “Remind me which brother I’m with?”

“We ain’t got no reason to be here,” he insists. “We ain’t getting no more pets. I cannot deal with another cat dragging dead mice and shit into my house.”

“No, I know we’re not, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look!”

It might be the reason why he’s so reluctant to go along - he can see how this is most likely to unfold. Indeed, Lexi finds her way to the corner of cats, and from there, it doesn’t take long for her to latch onto yet another cat.

Cat, and not kitten. A big cat with fluffy, dark ginger fur, and bright amber eyes, white on his chin and the toes of his paws. He seems curious about Lexi - she crouches by the cage, and he pokes his nose through the gaps, nuzzling her fingers.

“Oh, hello, beautiful,” she greets, slipping her fingers through so that she can pat his head. This cat clearly knows his stuff - he ruts into her palm, purring loudly, and the happy sound that slips from Lexi makes Fez groan.

“Fez…” she says, turning on him with pleading eyes.

“Hell the fuck no,” Fez says.

“No, but look at him! Look how sweet he is!”

“Look, Lexi, I ain’t playin’. You know I love you more than anything, but we ain’t gettin’ no more fucking cats, I already got them two bitches at home getting into fights with the street cats at three o’clock in the fuckin’ morning - ”

“I thought you liked that they could hold their own against the street cats!”

“Not as much as I like stayin’ the fuck asleep.”

“Maybe he won’t get into as many fights. He doesn’t seem like the type.”

Fez doesn’t know how Lexi has managed to find the single most manipulative cat he’s ever seen - the cat is fixating him with wide, hopeful eyes, and he turns around with a huff. “Motherfucker, damn it all to hell. Fine.”

Relenting is the time that Lexi backtracks, mumbling worries about it being his choice as well, but Fez shakes it aside, joins her to kneel in the grass.

“Hey, bro,” he says, grazing the cat’s face with his fingers. The cat seems to like him, too, licking at his knuckles with his prickly, bumpy tongue. “You right, Lex. He’s a good one. Shit, I think he’ll be runnin’ circles around our poor little alien.”

“Alfie is literally normal now, you need to stop calling him that,” Lexi says, laughing.

The way she walks back to the car with the ginger cat clutched to her chest reminds Fez of children leaving carnivals with stuffed toys. He’s a very placid cat, the one they’ve chosen, content to curl up into her throat and purr.

This is the picture he takes, of Lexi kissing her latest little love’s forehead, against the backdrop of an azure sky. Fez swears it’s the last time he’ll have a picture to post, and this time around he feels the sentiment is less hollow, because he is very much aware of how awed Lexi is by his relenting, how grateful she is.

“I’m so happy,” she tells him, burying her face in the cat’s thick ginger fur. It’s weird, how he’s reminded of Rue, of a life so long past it seems detached from everything Fez now knows - but it’s good for Lexi, because it spurs gratitude in him, and he leans in to touch his forehead to hers, brushing the cat, too.

“I’m glad, Lex,” Fez murmurs. “What name you thinkin’ of, this time?”

“You don’t want to name even one of our cats?” Lexi asks.

“I don’t got anything in mind. Do you?”

“Yeah, what do you think of Humphrey?”

This is the last straw for Fez. He pulls away from her and offers her an incredulous look. There’s old fashioned names, and then there’s Humphrey.

“Humphrey?” he repeats, staring at her in shock.

“It’s cute!” Lexi insists. “That guy on the Great British Bake Off had a rabbit named Humphrey, remember!?”

For a moment, Fez allows the information to wash over him, that if anyone ever asks him about his cats, he’s going to have to look them in the eye and explain that their names are Serafina, Alfred and Humphrey. He accepts it with a sigh.

“Anyone ever tell you how fuckin’ weird you are, baby?” he asks.

“Yeah, you, every chance you get,” Lexi huffs, but she’s laughing with joy.

(For a fledgling moment, a bizarre thought crosses his mind - a wonder, about what kind of funny names Lexi might pick for their actual children. Once he realises what’s occurred to him, his stomach lurches, and he banishes the thought with insistence, because they’ve never talked about kids before, he’s never even thought about having kids before. That it’s even grazed his mind seems like a miracle - evidence of how things have changed, how the prospect of that future is becoming less inconceivable all the time.

Still, he stops himself from thinking about it. It’s crazy enough that he shares three cats with Lexi, impossible enough that he has confidence that they’re going to share a life. If he stops to imagine what she might look like pregnant, what she might look like holding a baby, his baby, he thinks he’ll lose his mind.)

The fourth time it happens, the fight is entirely drained from Fez.

Lexi comes home, and she makes for a very melodramatic picture, with the rain splaying her hair in wet splotches on her cheeks, and a filthy cat smearing dirt all over her blouse. Fez has never seen a dirtier cat - he thinks that the kitten is a pale grey, but there’s so much mud obscuring the fur it’s difficult to tell.

“I know what you’re thinking, but this is an emergency,” Lexi blurts, as she rushes to the bathroom, knowing that Fez will follow her. He does, not bothering to release his hold of Humphrey as he does. Alfred is perched atop the toilet seat, so he sets Humphrey to sit alongside them, and both cats watch with curiosity as Lexi carefully sets the mewling little creature in the sink.

“An emergency? Is that it?” Fez asks, eyebrows raised.

“I’m not going to keep her, I just want to help her,” Lexi says, frazzled, running a tablecloth in warm water. Fez watches the movement of Lexi’s deft fingers, the tremendous caution she employs, as she runs the cloth into the kitten’s body, soothing away the dirt in gentle motions.

Rosy blood trickles into the bath, and Lexi makes a noise not dissimilar to a whimper. Fez takes over, gently brushing her aside, inspecting the mark - it’s only a shallow cut on the bottom of her foot. He suspects a shard of glass is to blame, and he knows that her paws will cease seeping soon.

“It ain’t deep,” Fez assures Lexi. “It’ll stop soon.”

“She seemed so distressed,” Lexi admits. She wipes a hand on her face and smears mud all over her forehead. Fez takes a moment to remove the face washer from the cat, folding it in half and pressing it to Lexi, instead. He makes quick work of washing the dirt off her face, and then returns to the sink.

man whatever just fuck me up, Fez captions his new Instagram post. The one where Lexi is beaming and holding all four cats in her arms.

Ivy, the grey one, named for a Taylor Swift song Fez recognises from the bathroom while Lexi does her makeup in the mornings, is noticeably smaller than her siblings. She’s squeezed between Humphrey and Serafina, looking much fluffier now that she’s been clean and dried, her grey coat almost snowy.

The comment section is quick to swirl with chaos.

@baddiemaddy: LMAOOOOOOOOOOO

@rueruebennett: dude you got another fucking cat?

@fezcoz: @rueruebennett lexi gets what lexi wants, you know how it is

@casshoward: my brother in law is the only man ever tbh

@fezcoz: @casshoward you a real one lil sis

@ashttrayz: i hate this fucking family

@lexihoward: @ashttrayz you know what, you’re in time out, get on top of the fridge

@rueruebennett: lexi coming in hot with a vine reference in 2023…

@lexihoward: @rueruebennett the joke’s on you, you got it!

@jules.vaughn: cat number five when?

@lexihoward: @jules.vaughn fez is lucky i’m not that mean :-)

“If only they knew the fuckin’ truth,” Fez says, and pulls Lexi into his embrace, so that their cats squirm between them. The extent can’t be emphasised enough - Fez is beyond lucky that Lexi isn’t mean, because they both know that Fez would do absolutely anything to make Lexi happy.

There’s something cyclical about the way that Rue falls apart.

Being clean, feeling stable, it’ll last for a few months, and then something will happen, some reminder, or seasonal depression will strike, and she’ll find herself in shambles on the floor. This year, Jules doesn’t want to deal with it, and nobody really begrudges that, after how hard she’s tried to make it work during their college years. Rue doesn’t want to call her mom, and nobody really begrudges that, because nobody wants to burden family with things like this.

This year, Fez and Lexi are the ones called upon. It upsets Lexi that she can’t come along for the drive to pick Rue up, but as Fez points out to her, someone has to see Ash off to school, and the cats aren’t going to feed themselves. (Really, Ash can take care of himself, and while he mostly hates the cats, he wouldn’t ever let them starve - but Fez makes it firm that Lexi needs to stay, because he wants to gauge Rue’s mindset before he imposes her on Lexi. Lexi can be pretty fragile when it comes to Rue, and Fez needs to make sure Rue will behave herself.)

It’s been some time since Fez had to deal with an addict. Rue is the only trace of his old life that still comes up in the present - everything else is a tangle of memories, something that rises up constantly, troubles him perpetually, but it only exists inside his own mind.

But when he finds Rue, slumped on a park bench in a random city halfway between her apartment with Jules and his apartment with Lexi, his old world comes crashing back, twisting back to frightful life. Frightful, real life.

“How’s it goin’, kid?” Fez calls, as Rue pulls her bag over her shoulder and shuffles over. He gets out of the car to help her with the duffel, placing it neatly in the backseat before he pulls his sister into a brief, one armed hug.

“I’m alright,” Rue says, even while she sniffles, starts crying. “I’m so fucking sorry, Fez. I’m so embarrassed to be burdening you and Lexi like this. I wish it hadn’t come to this, I really, really wish it hadn’t.”

“Nah, c’mon now,” he says, patting her back. “You ain’t no burden. Not to us.”

“God,” she mumbles, fumbling to swipe at her cheeks. “I just remembered something that happened fucking forever ago… Something Lexi said to me when she was dressed up like Bob fucking Ross…”

“That’s a sensitive subject, Rue. That’s the fuckin’ tragedy of my life, that I never got to see her in that getup,” Fez says, hoping to elicit a laugh.

When Rue’s laugh comes, it’s an unthinkable relief for Fez. They climb into the car, and the tone has already changed. Rue is desperate to hide her vulnerabilities under a veneer of something untouchable, so she lets herself laugh, lets herself joke, lets herself be the annoying little sister Fez always thinks of her as.

Fez doesn’t even protest when she steals his phone.

“Yo, how you know my password?” Fez huffs.

“I made an educated guess,” Rue snorts.

If Fez weren’t almost four years into his relationship with Lexi, he thinks he might be more embarrassed about the fact that Rue could so easily guess his passcode - 5394, numbers coordinating with letters to spell out Lexi’s name.

“Holy shit,” Rue says, a moment later, looking truly baffled. “There’s literally nothing in your phone but pictures of Lexi and the cats.”

“What about it?”

“I just… can’t believe that this is your life,” she admits, laughing. “How many cats do you have again? Five?”

“Four.”

“And their names are fuckin’ weird as shit, right?”

“No doubt.”

Rue tilts the screen at him, an amused smile on her face. “Tell me the story behind this one?”

The picture depicts Lexi and Alfred, wearing matching crochet bonnets, soft ivory trimmed by green. Both of their expressions are grumpy, because Alfred had been less than cooperative with his birthday treat, and Lexi had been disappointed by how reluctant he had been, when she found the idea to be so sweet.

“Lexi got them matching hats for Alfie’s birthday. He looks like he wants to kill himself, but it’s the cutest shit ever, right?”

What unfolds in Rue’s face seems bewildered. As though experimenting, she flips to another picture, one of Lexi in a pink and yellow tie dyed jumper, Serafina cradled in her hold while they sit on the sofa. “And this one?”

“Man, I dunno. They just chillin’.”

She shows some more pictures, waiting for Fez’s responses.

“That was before we left for Ash’s middle school graduation,” Fez remembers, when Rue shows him a picture of Lexi in a gentle purple dress, her crimson lipstick smile beautiful, her hair woven in braids like from the night they first met. She holds Serafina beneath her arms, so that her fluffy belly hangs on display.

“Humphrey was bein’ a bitch, which he’s not usually,” he explains, for a picture where the ginger cat is swatting at Lexi’s face.

“Serafina’s a good study buddy,” he says, for a picture where Lexi is decked out in green and has the honey coloured cat peeking from the blankets, gazing at the computer balanced on Lexi’s knees.

“That’s a pic she sent of her and Ivy when I was at work,” he says, for a picture where the girls are on the bed, and Ivy is nestled close to Lexi’s cheek, and Lexi is smiling brightly, her eyes closed so her eyelashes fan over her cheeks.

“And so, you think all of these pictures are like, so important to take?”

“Rue, will you put the fuckin’ phone down?” Fez asks, finally losing his patience.

Rue acquiesces, setting it atop the centre console with a clatter. She glances between the phone and him, several times over, before she speaks up again.

“Remember when you were a gangster? Those were the days, man.”

Fez throws her a wry smile. “If you think I miss doin’ shit like this, then you trippin’.”

That makes Rue avert her eyes. Embarrassed, overwhelmed, she turns to the window, where the world streams by in a blur. The colours blend together, and Fez wonders what she makes of it, wonders how sober she is, wonders just how many more years she’s going to be stuck in this terrible dance.

It could be forever. For a lot of addicts, it’s forever. For every addict, in fact, but Fez always hoped that Rue would be one of the ones who could smile a tired, triumphant smile, and talk about five years clean, ten years clean.

Fez still has hope, though the years are starting to wear on, and Rue has yet to yank herself from her eternal spiralling, her endless suffering.

“I don’t think I’m like you, Fez,” Rue admits, quietly.

“What you talkin’ about?”

“I just… I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get my shit together like you.”

“I don’t think anyone has their shit together, kid. That’s like a myth. We all just doin’ our best, you know? Making it up on the spot.”

“Lexi has her shit together.”

“Not exactly. She got shit to deal with, same as anyone.”

Rue sighs. She presses her temple to the window. “Yeah, but why is her version of shit to deal with - your version of shit to deal with - I don’t know. I don’t even fucking know what I’m talking about. I mean, her life was fucked, too, right? Her dad ran out on her, her mom’s drunk more often than she’s not, her sister’s basically a blowup doll… And you , you were stuck dealing drugs when you were still in fucking elementary school… And what, I’m the disaster, because my dad died? Neither of you have dads either but you’re good, selfless people. And you’re living this, like, pseudo normal life, by now. What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“You ain’t gonna accomplish nothin’ by thinking like that, Rue,” Fez says softly, his heart awash with secondhand sadness. “You got wires crossed in your mind, you an addict, whatever the fuck. It is what it is. Me and Lexi aren’t addicts, we got different shit to deal with. Ain’t no point in comparing yourself to us.”

“What is there point in doing?” Rue mumbles. “What am I supposed to do ?”

“Shit, kid, why you think I know?” he tries for a laugh, but nothing feels very funny. He considers the anguish edging Rue, how it has always been there but hasn’t shown this blatantly until now, and he pauses for a moment.

“It snuck on me. Whatever changed, whatever made me... grow up. I ain’t never thought I’d have an apartment, and my GED finished, and Ash in school, and someone like Lexi…”

“And a bunch of cats,” Rue adds, with an impish smile.

“Yeah, a bunch of fuckin’ cats,” Fez says, with a sigh. “What a trip, bro. It was right outta left field… Maybe it’ll be the same for you.”

“Yeah,” she mumbles. “I hope so.”

#fexi fic

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spockandawe · 3 years

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So I saw this ask/response about Xue Yang’s backstory go by on my dash, and it gave me some thoughts, which felt off-topic/speculative enough I didn’t want to just reblog, but were too long for a tumblr comment, so here we go. First, from the asker:

it was never just about a finger, but a child who had nothing vs adults who knew better and still took more from him and humiliated him

And everything @veliseraptor said (as with all lise xue yang posts) is also excellent, but this line hit me in the same place as that line from the ask:

I really am getting sick of the idea that it’s ~just a finger~ and not like…what it means, the surrounding trauma and implications of it. it’s the death of the last of his innocence and trust in people.

I’ve written about Xue Yang and Xiao Xingchen’s last conversation before (I’m never not thinking about it, basically), and I’ve especially dug into the way that Xue Yang is fairly chill (despite being stabbed) and puts out the story, Xiao Xingchen doesn’t respond the way he’s hoping for, and Xue Yang’s takes it VERY badly and starts actively burning everything down.

Now, in those posts, I focused a lot on the way Xue Yang’s present emotions, if that makes sense, not what it all meant in light of his childhood. And here’s where we get speculative, but I don’t think I’ve wandered too far off into the woods, even if the text doesn’t explicitly support it.

So here’s where I’m at: Xiao Xingchen slowly, gradually, won a lot of Xue Yang’s trust. It started with the rescue when Xue Yang was unconscious and bleeding in a field, continued with Xiao Xingchen not pushing his boundaries, and extended into three years of accidental domestic bliss. By the end, Xue Yang, despite his everything, is happily living in the yizhuang and running errands to the market to buy vegetables. He’s not a naturally trusting person, which makes plenty of sense, all things considered, but he’s still reached this point, and Xiao Xingchen is something special and precious to him. The fact that he tells him the end of the story about how he lost his finger is significant.

When Xue Yang tells Xiao Xingchen an important personal story about a child who had nothing and adults who should have known better and took more from him, and a story about trauma and the death of the last of his innocence... Xiao Xingchen’s response is both Kinda Not Great, and also misses the point of what Xue Yang was trying to communicate (for understandable reasons on both counts, but I’m focusing on the emotional world Xue Yang was living in at this moment)

“Chang Ci’an broke one of your fingers. If you sought revenge, you could have simply broken one of his fingers in return. If you really took the matter to heart, you could have broken two, or even all ten! Even if you had cut off his arm, things wouldn’t have been like this.”

A critical point in here is that Xiao Xingchen skips right past what that injury meant to a seven-year-old street child who tried to run an errand in exchange for some sweets, and instead had three adults viciously take out their bad mood on him. Look up what a seven year old child looks like, he was so young. And probably don’t look up crush damage, because it’s nasty stuff, but after three adults slapped this small child around, a cart ran over his entire hand. The missing finger is the only thing that’s obvious now, but

“ He was seven! The bones of his left hand were crushed, and one finger was ground into battered flesh on the spot!”

And lets not even talk about how complicated hand bones are to set correctly, how bad old timey medicine was at preventing infection, or whether this small street child even had anyone who cared enough to feed him, or to make sure he was still breathing.

When Xue Yang tells this story and Xiao Xingchen focuses on how disproportionate his revenge was, that’s when Xue Yang gets cruel. It’s very shortly after this when he tells Xiao Xingchen that if he wasn’t capable of understanding the world, he never should have left the mountain in the first place. If you’re watching the show, he looks devastated, for all the good it does him when he’s talking to a blind man.

That’s a long time to reach my final point, but here we go: Despite Xue Yang’s approach to life and his own intentions, over the course of three years, Xiao Xingchen built up a lot of trust with him. With Song Lan dead, things are already doomed to fall apart, but the moment Xue Yang starts trying to hurt Xiao Xingchen is when Xiao Xingchen has this reaction to his story. My speculative conclusion is that Xue Yang reacts so badly because in this moment, Xiao Xingchen, his favorite person, proves to Xue Yang that he can’t be trusted with that little seven-year-old Xue Yang who was used, mistreated, and maimed.

Xue Yang tells Xiao Xingchen the story of when he was most vulnerable and suffering, and the first thing out of Xiao Xingchen’s mouth is that Xue Yang could have broken the man’s finger in return. Xue Yang took it pretty reasonably when Xiao Xingchen stabbed him in the stomach, but this is the point where things really deteriorate. I think that a significant part of that whiplash is that Xue Yang has begun to trust Xiao Xingchen, and Xiao Xingchen effectively tells him that he was wrong, and Xiao Xingchen can’t be trusted with justice for that mistreated child any more than the rest of the world. When Xiao Xingchen tells him that murdering the man’s whole family was excessive, what Xue Yang hears is ‘that child didn’t deserve the justice you gave him.’ Neither of them is really interpreting the other one’s words and intentions fairly at this point in the conversation, which, again, is understandable. But I do think that the things Xue Yang says following this point have a lot to do with the betrayal he feels when he decides that Xiao Xingchen couldn’t have been trusted with Xue Yang’s innocent, abused childhood self.

#xue yang #xiao xingchen #the untamed #mdzs #meta #child abuse/#maybe the story woulda gone over better if you hadn't just murdered his bff buddy #idk #just saying

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the-sound-of-her-wings · 3 years

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I Am Not Starfire, And That's Okay

I recently read I Am Not Starfire and I had lots of thoughts, which are under the cut. It is spoiler-heavy and an analysis of the main character, who I find to be a charming, flawed, and incredibly human character.

Mandy is a fascinating character and a great look at a teenage girl who feels ostracized by the people around her and who feels disconnected from her parent. Mandy is by no means flawless, and that's what makes her very interesting. It also makes her relatable.

Mandy starts by talking about how she's noticeably different from her mom, being the "Anti-Starfire". She's a regular kid, can't fly, and doesn't own a swimsuit, while her mom is a superhero, can fly, and always wears bikinis.

On page 11 she mentions "her mom hasn't liked how I looked since I was twelve. She wears less than a yard of fabric every day, yet somehow, I'm the one who's dressing weird". While I understand people who call this slut-shaming, and I'm inclined to agree, but I think it's a little more nuanced than that. The next page reads, "My friend Lincoln convinced me this is the cultural divide that happens between family generations born in different countries or universes. His parents were born in Vietnam." This tells me that the authors intended to point out the difference in dress more as another difference between Starfire and Mandy, and less as a reason to blatantly slut-shame Starfire. I think there's absolutely a conversation to be had about why the authors decided to use this language instead of conveying the point differently. I also think it speaks to how Starfire has more or less been sexualized from inception, and how people look down upon her character because of that. In the context of this book, though, it's one of Mandy's character flaws that I think fits her both as a character and reflects what I've seen from actual teenage girls. Our society coaches us to view women who dress a certain way as less than women who don't and unlearning that takes time and effort. I don't think this comment about her mom should have been put in there by the authors, but I do think it fits in with the values American society in particular teaches about women.

Page 15, 16, and 17 all point to a far more complicated state of existence than Mandy points out within the first few pages. For one thing, Mandy has to deal with people who love her mother and only want to use her to get information about her mom and the other teen titans. This is shown by the "Titan groupies" who ask her to tell Starfire what they say about her. Another thing she has to deal with is the expectation to be a superhero and have powers like her mom, and the questions about who her dad might be. She gains her first real friend, Lincoln, because he tells the people asking about her parentage that they are assholes.

It is revealed that Mandy has a crush on Claire after she gets assigned a group project with her. Mandy is in denial over the crush. She thinks about the fact she's meeting Mandy at the end of the day throughout the rest of the school day, causing her to explode something in Chemistry Class. I find this to be highly relatable and gives her character a softer side to the edginess she desperately tries to portray herself as.

While talking about the project with Claire, it is revealed that Mandy ran out of her SATs and didn't complete them. While Mandy tries to paint this as a cool badass moment, the way the comic artist portrays the scene makes me think Mandy had an anxiety attack. Mandy didn't run out of her SAT because she's some kind of alternative badass who doesn't need to take them. Mandy ran out because she got overwhelmed by the sounds of people chewing and the pressure of the test. While she frames it differently, it's clear to me that Mandy is avoiding taking the SAT again because she doesn't want that to happen again.

When Claire invites her to hang out with her friends, Mandy gets treated like she isn't there, or as some kind of unwanted outsider. The topics they discuss seem to be specifically made to make Mandy uncomfortable, like mentioning how stretchy jeans are only made for fat people, and asking if aliens don't go to college. Jaded by this, Mandy makes up that aliens actually have to go through this huge blood right and battle to the death, but tells Claire's two friends she was joking before leaving. This tells me that Mandy deflects her pain by using humor to cope and has no issue clowning on people who are trying to belittle her for being an alien.

Starfire tries to bring up going to college after this, and Mandy just flees to her room. She hasn't told her mom she didn't take the SAT yet or that she isn't going to college. She feels distant from her mom, which is explained further through a montage of birthdays where she never got her powers. Her mom expects a lot from her, and Mandy thinks Starfire is disappointed about her lack of powers.

Later, Mandy invites Claire over to her house to complete the project they are working on. The Titans are still there when Claire arrives, but she seems to ignore them, as they leave shortly after. Mandy and Claire bond as they continue the project. Mandy reveals to the reader that she's never had a girlfriend, except for one time at sleep-away camp where she kind of dated a girl for four weeks. She didn't tell her who her mom was because she was tired of living in the shadow of a superhero. But the relationship ended because Mandy had lied about who her mom was, and the girl she was dating didn't understand why she would lie. I think this really shows just how much Mandy actually wants to be a normal girl like everyone else, to the extent that she'd lie about who her mom was. Her edgy demeanor at school and around town where her mom is known to be her mom is a defense mechanism to having lived under the shadow of a superhero her entire life.

When it's revealed that Claire took a photo with the Titans at Mandy's house, Mandy is understandable heartbroken, and furious. She thought she had been making a real connection with Claire, but this photo makes her think she's been used, again. Claire seems genuinely baffled by Mandy's reaction to this, thinking little of it. But to Mandy, it is a breach of trust from someone she thought cared about her. I think her angry reaction to Claire makes sense because of this, even if it might have been disproportionate to the offense.

On top of this, Starfire has discovered that Mandy walked out of the SAT and doesn't plan to go to college. After a heated conversation, she runs away, but her mom finds her. And then Blackfire finds her. Turns out the fake story she told Claire's friends earlier in the story was actually true, even though Mandy didn't know it.

Since Claire actually cares about Mandy, she tracks down Lincoln who explains to her why Mandy reacted badly, and that she should probably apologize for taking the photo. Claire also admits that one of the friends from earlier, Deb, actually dared her to take the photo. Claire is a good person at heart, but this action shows that she can still be influenced to do something that would hurt another person. And while she might not have known it would hurt Mandy, Deb probably did.

Starfire and Blackfire fight since Mandy has no powers, but Starfire gets injured causing Mandy to realize just how much she loves and cares about her mom, even though they don't see eye to eye on most things. This finally unlocks her powers, as she's let go of most of the resentment she's held against her mom. She even gets asked for an autograph by someone in the audience after the battle.

The story ends with Mandy training her powers, studying for the SAT, and reconciling with Claire, sharing a kiss, and becoming girlfriends.

I've seen a lot of discourse that frames Mandy as being "not like other girls". I don't believe this framing actually fits Mandy very well. The only girl Mandy ever says she is not like explicitly is her mom. She is the only woman she compares herself too, and the only person who she seems to have a lot of resentment for, aside from people who use her to get to Starfire. Additionally, Mandy falls for someone who is what a stereotypical, normal popular girl is often portrayed as. She's preppy, wears makeup, gets good grades, has friends, and runs a fairly popular Instagram account. If Mandy was extremely into the "Not like other girls" rhetoric, she would've made fun of Claire for all those things. Instead, she admires her for them. Mandy is fat, has acne/freckles, dresses goth, and wears a nose ring. If this is the reason people are identifying her as a "Not like other girls" girl, then they don't understand that trope. Simply dressing differently from your peers, being fat, and hating your mom does not make her the "not like other girls" trope. It actually makes her like other, real-life girls who dress and act similarly, because that's who they are, not because they somehow think they are better than other women.

I'd also make the argument that, fundamentally, Mandy IS different from other girls on the account of having a superhero mother and potentially a superhero father. Her life is completely altered by Starfire's existence as her mom and is likely only relatable to the children of other superheroes and celebrities. She is not like other girls because of her mom, and that still doesn't make her someone who falls in line with the conception of being "not like other girls".

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and hope others do too. I read Mandy as a flawed character who was trying to figure out how to exist outside the Shadow of her mom- and eventually succeeds, by learning to embrace her mom. I would've preferred if Mandy had a slightly darker skin tone, as her features seem black-coded to me and Starfire is also often black-coded. Otherwise, I do think this was one of the best DC Graphic Novels for Young Adults I've read, alongside Teen Titans: Beast Boy and Teen Titans: Raven.

#i am not starfire #mandy koriand'r #mandy anders #i am not starfire spoilers #starfire

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papa-rhys · 3 years

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Thoughts on Jack and His Borderline Personality Disorder and How It Shows Through His Behaviour - Because I Cannot Stop Analysing Things That Ultimately Aren’t Important

Symptoms/behaviours under the cut because holy hell this guy has a lot of them. Like, honey, are you okay?

Okay, so I’m pretty sure I can trace Jack’s BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) back to his grandmother. His mum abandoned him, which shows a reckless/irresponsible behaviour and her mum had fits of rage that didn’t correlate at all with the trigger (ie; drowning Jack’s cat because he didn’t make his bed). So I think he has a family history of it, with both his mother and grandmother having BPD and passing it down to him.

Either way, Jack definitely has it. In fact, he’s a textbook case of it.

Impulsivity

Spending sprees: he bought a pony made of diamonds because he was bored and throws money at all kinds of ventures to keep him occupied and because he wants to. I really don’t know how else to describe this one lol. He bought a pony. Made of diamonds. Because he could.

Gambling: won some of the things on his trophy shelf through poker and owns an entire casino. Hunting the Vaults themselves were a huge gamble too, especially the first two, since he wasn’t truly sure that they existed. He was prepared to sacrifice a lot in order to come out on top in both his career and his social standing. All in all, he’s reckless.

Binge eating: he doesn’t even like pretzels, but still eats them because he’s either bored or stressed. Talks about food quite a bit in conversation, too, especially his cravings.

Substance abuse: admits to being high on uppers for the duration of the pre sequel (and his time on Elpis as a whole) and tells further anecdotes about drugs and getting high in tftbl.

Promiscuity/unsafe sex: nothing about having sex with Nisha is safe lol. But in all seriousness, there’s no way to prove this one. He does strike me as the reckless sex sort though. No proof, just 7 years of knowing him as a character.

Emotional instability

Inappropriate trigger response: he strangles a man to death for simply mentioning his wife, stabs Lilith for talking about Angel, and tries to kill Rhys for not being sure about his grand plan (more on this later). His response to triggers is disproportionate, often resulting in extreme anger over small things that don’t warrant that intense of a reaction. He gets big angry about almost everything; there’s no middle ground. His reaction is never really “you’re annoying me a lot” or “don’t talk about that, I don’t like it.” His reaction to almost everything is “oh my god I will murder your first born child how dare you-”

Quickly changing mood: aside from being prone to fits of rage at the flick of a switch, Jack also flicks back to “normal” pretty quickly, too. He flips between telling you to kill yourself after surviving the train and then talks casually about his day. He’ll be filled with rage after Angel’s death and then suddenly he’s laughing about you jumping into lava and having fun tricking you into visiting his grandmother. He can be intensely angry or sorrowful one moment and then nonchalant and sociable the next. His moods don’t last very long.

Idolisation/devaluation

Jack does this with numerous people across the games, but the two shining examples are Moxxi and Rhys; Rhys being the most notable. He idolises Moxxi, complimenting her on how attractive she is and how smart she is and including her in his circle of close friends/teammates. Then the inevitable happens and she lets him down and he instantly changes his opinion on her as if he’d never thought she was good to begin with. The same happens with Rhys. Throughout tftbl, Jack is best friends with Rhys and seems to form a one-sided connection with him where he idolises him and thinks they’re going to be best friends for ever and that they’re the perfect team. You cannot make him mad at you in tftbl (trust me, I’ve tried). He’s encouraging to Rhys the whole way through, like they’re brothers. Then the second Rhys displays doubts about something Jack is passionate about, Jack reacts violently and completely devalues Rhys, claiming him to be his mortal enemy and trying to kill him. People with BPD do this often. They have strong convictions and have a tendency to feel betrayed by people who go against those convictions. Jack does this regularly and it leads to the breakup of a lot of his relationships.

Paranoia

He vented a room full of scientists into space, just in case. I mean, that pretty much sums it up, really. Jack is under a lot of stress at this point in the game and stress-induced paranoia is a particularly difficult symptom of BPD. With him already feeling the pressure, the mention of a possible mole is a huge trigger for Jack. Especially since he’s reeling from the recent betrayal from a friend. His brain is already working over time, planting uneasy feelings of distrust and being unsafe. So when he’s presented with the idea from an outside source, he runs with it. Betrayal goes on to become a big button to push in Jack’s life to the extent that he actively betrays people before they get a chance to betray him (ie; killing Wilhelm). Paranoia feeds into a lot of Jack’s bad decisions, particularly in the pre sequel era.

Delusion

Jack wasn’t lying when he told us that he’s the hero. He absolutely was not the hero at all, but he wasn’t lying about it. Because lying about something implies that you know it’s not true, and Jack genuinely believes he’s a good person. The best person, in fact. It’s not a lie because in his mind, it’s the god given truth. He’s massively delusional, even before the events of the pre sequel. He’ll spout all the cheesy 80s movie lines about saving the moon and being the hero and he thinks he’s the protagonist of his own big adventure. We know that’s not what’s happening, but Jack doesn’t see it that way. Another delusion is the idea he has about how much everyone loves him. He thinks Moxxi is obsessed with him and he thinks Angel is being forced to work against him. He cannot conceive of a world in which people don’t like him or agree with him. Because why wouldn’t they agree with him? He’s the hero. Everybody loves the hero...

Intense but unstable relationships

Moxxi, Angel, Lilith, the Vault Hunter; I could go on. Jack’s relationships with people are volatile and rocky, even when they’re seemingly on the same side like with Moxxi or even Nisha (who he forms a tight bond with very quickly). People with BPD feel all emotions intensely, which causes a roller coaster. Jack really likes Moxxi, but then he doesn’t want to talk to her, but then he wants her on the team, but then he gets mad at her for calling him a pet name and beign friendly, and then he’s telling her she’s sexy, and then he’s cursing her, and then he’s hanging pictures of her in his casino. It’s the same with Angel - he subjects her to physical torture, then he loves her, then he’s mad at her for helping the Vault Hunter, then he’s doting on her, then he’s manipulating her, then he’s grieving for her. Everything is a whirlwind.

Distorted self-image

Oh boy. Jack has this physically and mentally. Mentally in the sense that he thinks he’s a good person when he actions are abhorrent and also because he’s massively insecure. BPD often comes with a lack of identity, which causes insecurity to begin with. Throw that in a pot alongside some childhood abuse, betrayal, work place bullying, and grief, and you got yourself a big pot of insecurity soup. Put plainly, Jack doesn’t really know who he is at his baseline. His personality and interests and ideas and needs all change on an hourly basis. He morphs to suit his circumstances. He can be open, honest and down to earth when he’s trying to trick Rhys. He can be full of worry and desperation when he needs you to head to grandma’s house. He can be cunning and clever when he’s tricking you into killing Wilhelm. He can be fatherly, he can be nasty, he can be torturous, he can be laid back, he can be clever, he can be ignorant, he can be sheepish, he can be cocky. He’s everyone and no one all at once and this probably leaves him feeling very hollow and empty; which is another symptom of BPD. In the physical sense, Jack issues with self image are pretty clear. He wears a face over his face to hide his face. Yup. And he does this because he thinks he’s disgracefully ugly. This scar he’s so vehemently protective of is something that defines his whole persona going forward. He literally claims himself as Handsome Jack, forcing people to adhere to the idea that he’s so attractive that it should be his title. Even though he doesn’t feel that way and does everything he can to hide the real him. He thinks he’s hideous and he struggles between loving himself and hating himself because of it.

Fear of abandonment

Aaaand here we are at the crux of the problem. BPD boils down to the intense fear of abandonment and this is probably what guides Jack for most of his life. His father died, his mother literally abandoned him, his grandmother neglected him, his first wife died, second wife left, girlfriend and friends betrayed him, and daughter killed herself to get away from him. Abandonment is practically coded into Jack’s DNA at this point and every time it happens, it confirms his fears more. He clings to Moxxi after she betrays him - taking her ideas to try and rile her up and even going as far as to recreate her entire bar in his casino because he wants to keep her presence around. He fights tooth and claw against Angel’s rebellion, begging both her and you to stop what you’re doing and leave. The only time he begs you is when he’s facing perceived abandonment, that’s how strong the fear is. His final words to Angel are “I’ll still forgive you.” Jack isn’t a forgiving man by any stretch, but he’ll say anything he has to in order to prevent her from leaving him. He’ll stalk people, he’ll manipulate them, he’ll lie to them or keep them physically locked up - all to prevent them from abandoning him. The worst possible thing that could happen to Jack is that, and we see the spiral he slips into after Angel. After Moxxi. After the Meriff. After his wife. He can’t bare the thought of someone leaving him and he’ll do anything and everything to prevent his fears becoming a reality.

So yeah! There it is, I finally got around to posting it lol. There’s probably a lot more little details that I’ve forgotten, but I cannot think of them right now. I’ll probably update if I think of any more! The tl;dr is that almost all of Jack’s behaviour can be linked to massively untreated BPD. He needed meds and therapy, but he didn’t get them and he spiralled as a result.

#handsome jack #borderlands #borderlands 2 #borderlands the pre sequel #bl headcanons

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teawaffles · 3 years

Text

The Conspiratorial Bullet: Chapter 2

“Oh my…… I thought this would be nothing more than a war game, but it’s certainly more nerve-wracking than I expected.”

The participants had taken their places, and around five minutes had passed since the game began. Kevin was whispering to Albert beside him as they walked, while pointing the gun he’d received in every direction around him. But in contrast to the jittery man, Albert had the relaxed air of a soldier.

“Certainly, this is a feeling of tension one wouldn’t normally get to experience. In fact, the enemy might just be around that corner.”

“What!? Really?”

Panicked, Kevin’s eyes darted all around them in a fluster. That disproportionate reaction elicited a wry laugh from Albert.

“Although it’s important to be aware of your surroundings, if you’re that stiff, your movements will be slow when it’s time to fight. Please relax a little.”

“I-I see. Yes, you’re right……”

Kevin nodded. Beside him, Albert’s guard was impeccable as he watched the leaves swaying in the slight breeze.

The playing field encompassed the entire forest. That said, as it wasn’t a vast area, there was no danger of getting lost. In addition, there was a little cabin in the woods, used on a daily basis by the gamekeeper who managed the hunting grounds; as they had obtained permission to use it during the game, indoor battles were also an option.

For the purposes of safety, all players were obliged to wear spectacles shaped to resemble goggles, as well as bulletproof vests. The guns they had been issued fell into two categories: revolvers and sniper rifles. As a forfeit, and also to pass the time, eliminated players were tasked to feed pheasant chicks at a game bird nursery a good distance away.

Incidentally, Herder had also wanted to impose a severe punishment in the event a gun was damaged. Foreseeing that this would create needless worry, Moran and the others had swiftly hushed him before the words left his mouth.

Thinking back to the explanation of the rules, Kevin looked at the revolver in his hand.

“In any case, this gun is exquisitely crafted. As it was mentioned earlier that the guns used fake bullets, I imagined it would resemble a toy, but it looks exactly like the real thing.”

“I’m pleased to hear that, though it’s all due to Herder’s exceptional skill. I heard he oversaw the creation of these weapons down to the finest details.”

Kevin looked at the card attached to his gun with string. Written on it was a number 8.

“I see: so this is a measure to prevent the guns from getting lost. But if they are so important, I thought it would be safer to carve the numbers directly onto them.”

“You may be right; in which case, we may’ve caused everyone some inconvenience.”

Albert said that with a slightly apologetic tone, and Kevin waved it off.

“No, no — if anything, it reflects his passion, and I honestly respect that. Even though I work in a different field, I have a lot to learn from him as a professional.”

“Thank you very much. I’m sure Herder would be delighted to hear that,” Albert replied, with sincere joy.

However, in an instant, Kevin’s expression seemed to grow a little darker.

“Still, maybe I shouldn’t have brought Helena here after all. She absolutely insisted on coming, so I relented, but with the guns looking so real, that…… I wonder if it’ll remind her of that incident.”

Albert could sense what he was trying to say.

“For that, I sincerely apologise. This event must seem somewhat inappropriate after what she went through.”

Hearing Albert take his remark so seriously, Kevin tried to explain himself in a fluster.

“N-No, it’s alright, I did not mean it as criticism. Besides, Helena seemed to be especially enjoying herself too.”

“Nonetheless, please allow me to apologise, for it may be the case that she’s simply putting up a strong front.”

At that, Kevin cocked his head in confusion.

“……Then, why did you decide to hold this game?”

Albert’s reply sounded almost as if he was speaking to himself.

“——Because it’s part of our ‘plan’.”

“Huh?”

Unsure of the meaning behind that word, the question fell from his lips before he could stop himself. But Albert did not elaborate further.

The conversation had unwittingly ground to a halt. Just as Kevin was searching for a different topic to talk about, Albert’s sharp gaze landed on a nearby thicket.

“There’s someone there.”

“Huh? Really?”

Bewildered, Kevin looked in the same direction. Then they heard the sound of leaves rustling, and the undergrowth parted to reveal an elderly nobleman.

Seeing the person before them, Albert lowered his gun. A warm smile rose to his face.

“……So it was you, Lord Andy. I thought you were the enemy.” [1]

“Hello, Albert-kun. Just for fun, I thought I’d hide and see how long it took you both to spot me, but it seems you discovered me instantly. As expected of the young, your perceptiveness is incredibly sharp,” he laughed, ruffling his own short white hair. He was also on the same team as Albert and Kevin.

The elderly nobleman was Andy Krueger, whose estate extended across the surrounding lands; he also owned the hunting grounds on which the game was being held. Today’s game had been brought into reality after Albert proposed the idea to him.

For such an important gathering on the social calendar, one would normally be hesitant to transform it into an unorthodox event like this. But Andy had jumped at the offer, and even offered his opinions on the finer points of the game. Because of this generous and broad-minded nature of his, he also had the trust of the other nobles.

At the man’s arrival, for some reason, Kevin sighed in relief.

“Please don’t surprise me like that — unlike Lord Albert, I was frightened half to death.”

“Sorry about that, Kevin-kun. But aren’t you being too timid? Have a little more nerve!”

“I’ll do my best.”

At their friendly banter, Albert seemed curious.

“Are both of you already acquainted?”

“Yes,” Kevin affirmed. “We got to know each other when Helena’s father and I were gaining recognition in London. Ever since that time, the nobility had not looked fondly upon us, and only Lord Andy treated us as equals.”

Kevin looked gratefully at the nobleman as he said this, and Andy clapped his shoulder heartily.

“Those aristocrats are really quite averse to the changing times, it seems. But I have no interest in such dreadful traditions. Even at the gathering earlier, they were keeping their distance and saying such rude things that I had to tell them off. Although I hadn’t seen them in a while, because of that, I didn’t even get a chance to say hello— Ah, apologies.”

“No, it’s fine, Lord Andy. You don’t have to apologise,” Kevin said, waving both hands in the air. “Rather, after hearing that you went to such lengths for a good-for-nothing like me, I’m truly grateful.”

“What’s this? Timid as ever, I see,” Andy barked. “You’re an excellent businessman, so why not act like it?”

Then the elderly nobleman’s expression, which had been cheerful thus far, clouded over just a little.

“Nevertheless, I still feel sorry for your friend. At least, his daughter Helena seems to be doing well…… Have there been no clues even now?”

Kevin’s tone also grew heavy.

“……None at all. Helena believes he’s alive, but personally, I think he’s no longer……”

“He’d suddenly vanished, didn’t he?”

Out of the blue, Albert cut in. The two men were startled, but Albert continued with a somewhat knowing look.

“After the incident at the department store, I became curious, and tried doing some research into it myself. It seems there are various peculiarities about this case. For one, the store Helena’s father opened with Mr Kevin had been a success, but one day, he simply disappeared without warning. On the night he was thought to have disappeared, when he was having dinner at home, a friend testified that nothing had seemed particularly off about him.”

“Moreover, that was the last time I saw him. I never thought it would be the last conversation we’d have together……”

Kevin — the friend who’d testified — said so in a thin voice, the corners of his mouth twitching as if in self-mockery.

“Of course, at first, the police suspected that I had something to do with it. They even went to the trouble of thinking up a motive: that as a co-owner, I would stand to gain all the store’s profits if he were to disappear.”

Thinking back to that false accusation, Kevin’s shoulders drooped. Seeing that, Andy addressed him in a droll voice.

“Come now, you never know — one day he might just come home all of a sudden. I’ve told you before: there’s nothing we can do at present, and on top of that, worrying unnecessarily will only injure your health.”

“……You’re right. Besides, we’re supposed to be having fun right now: if I’m the only one being so grave, I’ll just be putting a damper on things.”

“Exactly, exactly. Well then, let’s get back to the game,” Andy urged, thumping him on the back.

Albert, who had been watching their exchange with a calm gaze, smiled gently.

“Indeed; let us focus on the competition first. By the way, it’s about time for us to get our blood pumping…… I’d like to advance deeper into enemy territory. What say you two?”

At his invitation, Kevin quickly shook his head.

“No no no! Frankly, since the start of the game, my heart’s felt like it’s about to explode! Anything more than this and it’ll stop altogether!”

But the elderly nobleman threw his head back in hearty laughter.

“You young people have so much energy, it’s making me jealous. Kevin-kun, you’ve got to watch and learn as well.”

“No…… When I think about what lies ahead, somehow my legs can’t stop shaking,” Kevin murmured weakly. His legs were indeed trembling pitifully, so much so it wouldn’t be surprising for them to give out any moment now.

Andy sighed, as if astonished.

“It can’t be helped then. Sorry, Albert-kun — it seems he can’t go on. I’d like to say that I’ll go with you in his stead, but…… for some reason, my legs have been hurting for a while now. Despite my high spirits, my years have bested me today,” he laughed wryly, his expression weak.

Albert nodded firmly.

“I understand. Well then, let’s part ways here. I wish you both the best of luck.”

“T-Take care……”

Watching Albert’s brave figure as he walked gallantly into the depths of the forest, Kevin felt ashamed at his own cowardice once again.

Scoreboard

🔹 Blue team: Albert, Jack, Fred, William, Kevin, Andy

🔺 Red team: Moran, Bond, Louis, Helena

Footnotes:

[1] Andy’s title is not formally given in the story, but judging from the amount of land he owns, I think it’s safe to say that he’s a member of the peerage like Albert, and hence should be addressed as “Lord Andy”. (Wikipedia)

#moriarty the patriot #yuukoku no moriarty #yuumori #english translation #the girl who sees rainbows

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no--envies · 3 years

Text

Nightless City – An analysis of Wei Wuxian’s accountability

I’ve come across several takes about the bloodbath of Nightless City that don’t really sit well with me. Some people say Wei Wuxian is totally to blame, others that he’s totally blameless, and I personally disagree with both. I think that, like in many other events in the novel, what really happened is more complex.

(All the translations are by Exiled Rebels Scanlations)

First of all, the text shows us that Wei Wuxian wasn’t completely clear-headed even before going to Nightless City, which is normal considering what he was going through. His whole world had crumbled in just a few hours. Everything he’d done until that moment – the sacrifices he had made for what he believed was right – appeared to be for nothing. He ended up hurting the people most dear to him, and he couldn’t even protect those he had wanted to protect. When he could move again after the three days he spent in the cave immobilized by Wen Qing’s needle, for a while he didn’t even know what to do or where to go.

After he got down the mountain, he stood amid the bushes, catching his breath. Bent down, he propped his hands against his knees for a long while before he stood up straight again. Yet, looking at the wild grasses that covered many of the mountain paths, he didn’t know where to go.

Burial Mound—he’d just gone down from there.

Lotus Pier—he hadn’t been back in over a year.

Koi Tower? Three days had passed already. If he went now, it was likely that Wen Qing’s corpse and Wen Ning’s ashes were the only things left.

He stood blankly. Suddenly, he felt that the world had no place for him, despite how large it was. He didn’t know what to do either.

(Chapter 77)

It’s rare to see Wei Wuxian so utterly lost and miserable. What happened was too much for even someone like him – who always tends to look at the bright side of any situation – to be able to deal with it. Since he doesn’t know where else to go, he decides to go to Koi Tower to retrieve the Wen siblings’ ashes, but he doesn’t manage to do anything before he’s discovered and forced to flee. He wanders without purpose for a long time until he arrives at a city gate where he hears a group of cultivators talking about him with contempt, which triggers his anger.

The longer Wei WuXian listened, the colder his expression grew.

He should’ve understood long ago. No matter what he did, not a single good word would come out of these people’s mouths. When he won, others feared; when he lost, others rejoiced.

He was cultivating the crooked path either way, so what exactly did the years of persistence mean? What exactly were they for?

However, the colder his eyes were, the brighter the raging fire within his heart burned.

(Chapter 77)

We see him come to a very bitter realization: no matter his noble intentions and moral integrity, everyone has already made up their mind about him, he would be made into a villain no matter what he does. Before what happened at Qiongqi Path he had managed to keep a positive mindset, since he was doing fine in the Burial Mounds with the Wen remnants. It wasn’t an easy life, but they were safe, they didn’t starve and Wei Wuxian was free to focus on his research and inventions in peace, creating the Compass of Evil and the Spirit-Attraction Flag. He missed his family, but he also found another one. He had people who loved him and valued him, and whom he loved and valued in turn. All in all, he was content. He thought that as long as he didn’t actively seek trouble, the world would leave him alone. But he was wrong. Jin Zixun ambushed him accusing him of something he didn’t do, and everything spiraled down so quickly he couldn’t do anything to prevent it, until he lost control of his demonic cultivation and killed Jin Zixuan.

In this moment, Wei Wuxian feels completely alone. The Wen siblings are gone, his beloved shijie might hate him for killing her husband and the cultivation world as a whole can’t wait to besiege him. If it had been another time, he wouldn’t have beaten up those random cultivators. It’s not like it was the first time he heard awful rumors about himself. The fact that he reacts so violently here says a lot about the state of mind he’s in. Wei Wuxian is clearly looking for a way to vent his anger, so he takes it out on the cultivators who are speaking ill of him. His rage is justified: not only were they saying malicious things about him without even knowing the full story, but they were doing it cowardly behind his back. However, his reaction is somewhat disproportionate to their offense: one of them gets kicked in the face until he passes out from the pain, while another gets his legs broken for daring to speak up. Although he doesn’t kill them, he does terrorize them and in the end he leaves them there immobilized by the spirits he had summoned (if Lan Wangji hadn’t been looking for Wei Wuxian, who knows how long they would have had to wait to be freed).

After this, Wei Wuxian sees the announcement of the pledge conference and goes to Nightless City. I’ve seen people argue that he was only trying to protect the Wen remnants and that the people who were there had already pledged to kill him, so it was self-defense. But is it really the case? Personally, I don’t think what he did was self-defense. Sure, he tried to discuss first and didn’t attack until he was attacked, but defending himself and the Wen remnants wasn’t the main reason he was there in the first place.

The crowd flung curses at him, but Wei WuXian accepted all of them.

Anger was the only thing that could suppress the other feelings within his heart.

(Chapter 78)

All of his pain, desperation and guilt were too much to handle at once, so he tried to suppress them all with anger, and directed that anger at the people who hated him. Wei Wuxian didn’t go to the pledge conference to try to prevent the siege from happening (since he thought it wouldn’t change anything anyway) or to weaken the Sects’ forces. He went there to vent his anger and frustration. Wei Wuxian is not clear-headed here, as highlighted by this passage:

Wei WuXian spun around to dodge the attack and laughed, “Fine, fine. I knew since the start that we’d have to fight a real fight like this one sooner or later. You’ve always found me disagreeable no matter what. Come on!”

Hearing this, Lan WangJi’s movements paused, “Wei Ying!”

Although he shouted the words, any sane person would be able to tell that Lan WangJi’s voice was clearly shaking. However, right now, Wei WuXian had already lost his judgement. He was already half-mad, half-unconscious. All evil was being augmented by him. He felt that everyone loathed him and he loathed everyone as well. He wouldn’t be scared no matter who came at him. It wouldn’t matter no matter who came at him. It was all the same anyway.

(Chapter 78)

In this moment Wei Wuxian believes everyone hates him and there’s no use trying to convince them otherwise – there’s no use trying to reason with them in a diplomatic way because no matter what he says or does, his words will be twisted to fit the opinions of the crowd. He almost welcomes the attack because this way he can attack them back and vent all his pent-up anger. Wei Wuxian is not behaving like his usual self here. He can’t see Lan Wangji isn’t trying to hurt him because his mind is not lucid. This is why he loses control of his demonic cultivation for the second time, injuring Jiang Yanli.

His shijie is the only one who manages to calm him down a little despite his chaotic state of mind. He manages to stop the corpses from attacking everyone and waits for her to tell him what she thinks of him, if she forgives him or not. However, she dies to save his life before being able to say anything, and the whole situation becomes simply too much for him to bear. All of his emotions crush him at once, so in his already half-unconscious state he activates the Tiger Seal, effectively erasing any chance he might have had to redeem himself in the eyes of society.

The point of this analysis isn’t to blame or absolve Wei Wuxian. It’s very easy to empathize with his anguish in these scenes. What he was going through was incredibly stressful and the root cause (the ambush at Qiongqi Path) wasn’t his fault. Even Lan Wangji says he can neither condemn nor justify his actions, but he’s willing to face all the consequences with him anyway.

I told [Wangji] when I went to see him, Young Master Wei had already made a grave mistake, there was no use augmenting it. But he said… that he could not say with certainty whether what you did was right or wrong, but no matter what, he was willing to be responsible for all of the consequences alongside you.

(Chapter 99)

Wei Wuxian isn’t blameless for what happened at Nightless City. I don’t think he’s proud of what he did and all the people he killed, either. The fact that he destroyed the Tiger Seal after returning to the Burial Mounds is quite telling. He definitely didn’t act in the most rational and clear-headed way, which resulted in a lot of people – including his shijie – to lose their lives, but the point of all this is that Wei Wuxian is human. He makes mistakes because no one is infallible, no matter how heroic, selfless and virtuous. Not even he can be totally immune to all the criticism and accusasions, even though he often acts like he is. Wei Wuxian is a fundamentally positive person, so most of the time he can ignore the bad things that happen to him and focus on the good, but this time his situation was simply too extreme for anyone to be able to stand it.

#mdzs #wei wuxian #wei ying #mdzs meta #nightless city

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kjack89 · 3 years

Text

1B+

Man, I don’t even know. Established E/R, modern AU. CW for COVID and vaccine discussions.

“It’s redlining!”

Enjolras’s raised voice was the first thing anyone heard as soon as they got on the weekly Zoom call, and Combeferre winced, reaching to turn down the volume on his laptop. The chat was already blowing up with everyone asking everyone else – besides Enjolras and Grantaire, for obvious reasons – what was the source of the argument this week.

Combeferre sent various versions of ‘I have no idea’ to everyone as Enjolras and Grantaire glared at each other through their respective computer screens. “I understand that,” Grantaire started, sounding angrier than usual, since he had a tendency to sound like he was enjoying his weekly arguments with Enjolras, “but I don’t think—”

“Look at the zip code map for the city,” Enjolras interrupted, also unusually angry, as Combeferre suspected (but would never, ever vocalize) that he also enjoyed his verbal spars with Grantaire. “It matches up almost exactly with historical redlining!”

“And I’m not denying that,” Grantaire snapped. “But that doesn’t mean—”

Marius had the misfortune of logging on right then, and had the even greater misfortune of not knowing immediately that he stepped right into the middle of a fight as he cheerfully said, “How’s everyone’s day going?” He broke off as he apparently spotted the desperate hand gestures that Courfeyrac was making. “Oh, um, sorry. Did I interrupt?”

“No,” Grantaire said stiffly. “We’re done here.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes but didn’t appear to want to argue further, and Combeferre waited for a beat before unmuting himself. “Do either of you want to catch us up to speed?” he asked carefully.

Grantaire shook his head as he stood, disappearing from his camera’s view, and Enjolras scowled. “We’re talking about the vaccine,” he said, a little sourly, hesitating before adding, “Grantaire got vaccinated today.”

Courfeyrac whooped. “R, you got your Fauci ouchie?” he asked, delighted.

“Which did you get?” Joly asked, more curious than elated. “Moderna? Pfizer? Johnson & Johnson?”

Bossuet nudged him. “Does it matter?” he asked, sounding amused.

“No, of course not, and I’ll take whatever they want to stick in me—”

“Yeah you will,” Courfeyrac snickered.

“—but I’m keeping track of anecdotal data about reactions to the various vaccines,” Joly continued, giving Courfeyrac the finger.

“It was the Pfizer vaccine, but I think you’re all missing the broader point,” Enjolras said stiffly.

Grantaire reappeared on screen, a drink in hand. “Pretty sure the only one missing the point is you,” he said. “And Joly, before you ask, thus far the only negative reaction I’ve had is from Enjolras.”

Joly frowned. “That’s not what—”

“Oh, I’m sorry that I’m less than ecstatic that you, a white man who lives in one of the most affluent zip codes in our city, was able to get vaccinated, while vaccine rates in low income and majority minority zips remain among the lowest in the nation,” Enjolras snapped, the impetus of his argument with Grantaire finally becoming clear for everyone else on the Zoom call. “Forgive me for not celebrating that Black and brown folks remain disproportionately at risk while you get to go back to wasting your life drinking in bars until all hours of the night.”

Grantaire rolled his eyes so hard that Combeferre was half-afraid he’d pulled a muscle. “Right, because I forgot, in addition to apparently being an alcoholic, I’m also so incredibly selfish that I would put low income workers at risk just so that I can sit by myself indoors at a bar during a pandemic.”

“Hey, not by yourself,” Bahorel interjected with the sort of threatening cheerfulness he used when he was aggressively trying to change the topic. “Don’t forget, Feuilly got poked a few weeks ago, so he could join you.”

Feuilly looked very much like he wanted to be left out of the conversation entirely. “Ah, yes, the perks of being essential to keeping capitalism running,” he muttered.

But Bahorel’s attempt at humor had seemingly only made Enjolras angrier. “Yes, Feuilly got his vaccine because he’s essential,” he said icily. “Not to mention because he’s been risking his life for over a year now while the rest of us got to stay home.”

“Not to pull a Taylor Swift but I would really like to be excluded from this narrative,” Feuilly said.

Enjolras and Grantaire both ignored him. “I’m sorry that I can’t be as ideal as Feuilly,” Grantaire all but spat, “but me taking the vaccine because I’m eligible and was able to has exactly zero impact on the failures of equitable rollout.”

“Right, one less vaccine going to someone who actually needs it has no impact on anything,” Enjolras shot back. “Of course, I don’t know why I’m surprised. It’s not like you’ve ever been willing to sacrifice anything for someone else.”

There was a sudden intake of breath from the collective group at that, and even Enjolras looked a little shamefaced. Grantaire’s expression was stony. “You really want to talk about sacrifice?” he asked quietly. “After everything this past year?”

Enjolras winced. “I didn’t mean—”

“Because while you were working at home this past year, some of us lost our jobs.” Grantaire’s voice was sharp. “And some of us have since stepped up to more or less become the primary caretaker for someone who’s too fucking stubborn to get the damn vaccine for himself, even though he’s also eligible!” Enjolras looked like he wanted to refute at least part of that, but Grantaire didn’t give him a chance. “But you know what? I’m done with that now. You can get your own damn groceries, even though you don’t have a car and refuse to use instacart. Or you can have takeout delivered without using third party delivery apps. Hell, you can figure out how to get anything delivered to you without using Amazon! I’m sure you and your moral superiority and your goddamned heart defect will have a gay ol’ time waiting for some arbitrary measure of equity.”

With that, he left the Zoom, leaving absolute silence in his wake. Enjolras looked too stunned to talk, so Combeferre took over. “Alright, everyone,” he said, “let’s take a quick break. I’ll send a text when we’re ready to get back online.” Everyone else quickly left, most likely relieved to not have to sit there in the awkward silence. Combeferre cleared his throat. “Enjolras?” he asked.

Enjolras blinked. “What?”

“Are you ok?”

“Fine.”

Combeferre frowned. “I mean, with what Grantaire said…”

Enjolras suddenly seemed very engaged with scrolling through his phone and not making eye contact with Combeferre. “You know Grantaire as well as I do,” he said dismissively. “He’s a drama queen.”

“Sure, and known to exaggerate. But not generally to outright lie.” Enjolras made a face but didn’t argue and Combeferre sighed. “Look, you’re not obligated to share any personal medical information—”

“Tell that to Grantaire,” Enjolras muttered.

“—but if there is something you want to tell us about…”

He trailed off and Enjolras sighed. “It’s really nothing,” he said grudgingly. “I have a small, congenital heart defect. “

Combeferre’s eyes narrowed. “How small?”

“Just, a tiny little hole. In the wall of my heart.”

“Atrial septal defect?” Combeferre asked sharply.

Enjolras snorted a laugh. “You’re a freak, you know that, right?” he asked good-naturedly. “Yes, an atrial septal defect. So I’m at slightly higher risk for COVID complications than the average adult.” He made a face. “And because Grantaire knows about it, he’s been absolutely insufferable.”

Combeferre nodded slowly. “Dare I ask how it is that Grantaire knows about this when you and I have been friends for years and this is the first I’m hearing of it?”

Enjolras squirmed uncomfortably. “Well, I sort of told him about it. But in my defense, I wasn’t exactly anticipating a pandemic at the time.”

“What were you anticipating?

Enjolras looked even more uncomfortable. “Um, more sex?”

Combeferre blinked. “I’m honestly afraid to ask.”

Enjolras rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not even a good story,” he mumbled. “It was back when we first got together…”

----------

Enjolras and Grantaire lay in silence next to each other, both of their chests still heaving. Grantaire was the first to break the silence, glancing over at him. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“Uh-huh,” Grantaire said skeptically, propping himself up on his elbow. “I can always tell when you’re thinking. You get that wrinkle between your eyebrows.”

Enjolras scowled, reaching up to rub his forehead. “Playing to my vanity?” he asked.

Grantaire grinned, brushing Enjolras’s hand aside and leaning in to kiss Enjolras’s forehead. “I’ll take whatever advantage I can get,” he said. “So what are you thinking about? Other than the best orgasm of your life, courtesy of me?”

“In fairness, the bar for that was pretty low,” Enjolras said, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth before it faded. “Just...shouldn’t we talk about this? About what we’re doing here?”

Making a face, Grantaire flopped over onto his stomach, burying his face in the pillow. “Normally I require at least a half hour after sex before we do the ‘what are we’ conversation,” he said, his voice muffled before he turned his head to look over at Enjolras. “It’s like how you’re not supposed to swim for a half hour after you eat.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s an old wives tale.”

Grantaire shifted in what might have been an attempt at a shrug. “Maybe, but I’m not willing to take that risk.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes and sat up. “Fine, then what do you want to talk about?”

“Who says we need to talk about anything?”

“Isn’t that normally what you do after having sex with someone?” Enjolras asked.

Grantaire smirked. “I mean, I’m hardly an expert but normally around this time I’m fishing around for my boxers so I can do the walk of shame home.”

Enjolras gave him a look. “Keep it up and you will be.”

Grantaire laughed. “Look, this isn’t exactly normal for either of us. I mean, at least I don’t have to worry about forgetting your name, so that’s a step up.”

“You are, as always, classy.”

Enjolras made as if to stand up but Grantaire reached out and caught his hand, keeping him in place. “Well, I mean, c’mon, we’ve known each other for years. This isn’t like a regular hookup. I don’t have to pretend to care about learning what you do for a living or what familial issues you brought with you into adulthood, mainly because I already know.”

Enjolras’s eyes narrowed. “You think you know everything about me?”

“I know I know everything about you,” Grantaire said, a little smugly. “I mean, besides your social security number and family medical history, but we can save those for the second date.”

“I don’t know, I think my congenital heart defect makes for fascinating post-coital conversation,” Enjolras said with a grin. But Grantaire just stared at him, eyes wide, and his smile disappeared. “I was kidding.”

“So you don’t have a heart defect?”

Grantaire’s voice was even but Enjolras winced. “Well, I didn’t say that.”

“What’s wrong with your heart?” Grantaire asked quietly.

“A great many things, as I’m sure any of my few exes could attest,” Enjolras joked, but when Grantaire’s expression didn’t change, he sighed and elaborated, “I was born with a small hole in the wall of my heart. It’s called an atrial septal defect. Quite possibly caused by the cocaine habit my mother likes to pretend she didn’t have in the 80s.”

Grantaire didn’t laugh. “Is it serious?”

“No. Not really.” Enjolras shrugged. “I’m at higher risk for some heart and lung complications, but mostly it’s just something for my cardiologist to keep an eye on.”

For one long moment, Grantaire was silent, as if he was struggling with something to say. Then he managed a small smile of his own. “Well, at least it’s proof that you have a heart,” he said lightly.

Enjolras’s eyes narrowed. “An Iron Man reference? Really?”

“Of course, I forgot that you hate the MCU.”

Enjolras made a face. “That’s a bit of a stretch. But Tony Stark is a war criminal so I’m not exactly thrilled with the comparison.”

Grantaire laughed. “Fair enough,” he said.

“Besides,” Enjolras said, his smirk returning as he moved closer to Grantaire, “wasn’t this enough proof that I have a heart?”

“Mm,” Grantaire said, his eyes half-closed as Enjolras traced his fingers down his back, “I’d say it’s more proof that you like sex. Which was also in doubt, for what it’s worth.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “Then what about this?” he asked, closing the space between them and kissing Grantaire, a slow, heady kiss that had Grantaire tugging him down onto the bed with him.

When they broke apart, it wasn’t to go far, their noses brushing against each other as they lay tangled up in each other. “That’s closer at least,” Grantaire murmured, his expression soft. “But I’ll keep the heart defect in mind, just in case you give me reason to doubt that you have a heart in the future.”

“I don’t plan to,” Enjolras told him.

Grantaire half-smiled. “I’m not sure this is the kind of thing that ever really is planned.”

“I know. But I want you to know that I’m…” Enjolras trailed off, looking for the right words. “I’m not going into this with the expectation that it’s a one and done kind of thing.”

Grantaire looked taken aback for a moment before his expression evened out. “Why, Monsieur, what sweet words for one such as me,” he said with a fake accent, fluttering his eyelashes at Enjolras, who rolled his eyes.

“Be serious,” he scoffed, adding warningly, “And don’t even say it.”

“Say what?” Grantaire asked innocently, not able to stop his grin.

“You know what.”

Grantaire’s grin widened. “Even if it’s true?”

Enjolras just gave him a look. “You’re less wild than you think.”

Grantaire laughed and stretched. “Yeah, well, I blame my 30s for that.” He waggled his eyebrows at Enjolras. “Besides, if we want to talk about wild, I want to hear more about your mother’s suspected cocaine habit.”

Enjolras shook his head, his eyes darkening as he looked at Grantaire. “How about we do something that doesn’t require any talking?”

“Oh, do you have a ball gag hidden somewhere that I don’t know about?”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras sighed exasperatedly.

Grantaire grinned, running his hands down Enjolras’s sides. “I’m just saying, you’re a pretty mouthy lay.”

Enjolras pressed a hand against his chest “As opposed to you, who is known for his ability to be silent.”

“Exactly.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “Just shut up and kiss me.”

Grantaire leaned in to kiss him but paused, his lips barely brushing Enjolras’s. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “Is your heart healthy enough for sex?”

“It’s healthier than you’ll be if you don’t kiss me,” Enjolras said warningly.

“God, you’re bossy,” Grantaire sighed, but he was grinning again, and this time, he didn’t hesitate before kissing Enjolras once more.

----------

“And then about three weeks later, the world went to hell and all of a sudden, what I had told Grantaire mostly as a joke was somewhat more relevant,” Enjolras finished.

Combeferre nodded slowly. “Because COVID could cause problems?”

Enjolras shrugged. “Possibly.”

“But enough to put you in the 1B+ priority group.”

Combeferre didn’t pitch it as a question and Enjolras scowled. “Theoretically, yes, but these phases are bullshit, and besides, I’m not getting vaccinated until—”

“Enjolras,” Combeferre interrupted, exasperated and wishing for not the first time that he could reach through the computer screen to knock some sense into his best friend. “Get the damn shot.”

Enjolras looked taken aback. “What?”

“The rollout is never going to be perfect, but this is the dumbest hill that I’ve ever seen you choose to die on.” Combeferre gave him a look. “And that’s saying something because I remember the time you took a stand in favor of school uniforms in junior high.”

“They can be an equalizer for students who can’t afford expensive clothes,” Enjolras muttered.

“Enjolras.”

“I’m just saying,” Enjolras said stubbornly. “Besides, I don’t think this is a dumb hill to die on, considering the affluent folks who are exploiting every trick in the book to cut in line!”

Combeferre shook his head. “But you’re not cutting in line. You’re eligible.”

“Sure, but I also have excellent health insurance, and can take time off work if I get sick, so even if I were to catch it—”

Combeferre gave him a look. “And if you don’t eat your vegetables, there are poor, starving children in Africa…”

Enjolras matched his look with one of his own. “I’m more concerned about the poor starving children in our own neighborhood,” he snapped.

But Combeferre was undeterred. “And you refusing to get vaccinated helps them how, exactly?” Enjolras said nothing, just crossing his arms in front of his chest, and Combeferre managed a small, grim smile. “That’s what I thought.”

“It’s a matter of principle,” Enjolras said, just a little petulantly.

“So is getting vaccinated so that you can keep doing the important work that you do.” Combeferre sighed. “Look, I can’t make you get vaccinated any more than Grantaire can. But you being mad at Grantaire just because you feel guilty—”

“That’s not—” Combeferre raised both eyebrows and Enjolras winced. “I guess that is sort of what happened.”

Combeferre tactfully chose not to pile on to that. “Getting the vaccine keeps people safe,” he said instead. “And while Grantaire may claim not to care about anything, we both know he would do anything to keep you safe.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that he got the vaccine to keep you safe. And because he was eligible to.” Combeferre paused before adding, “And you owe him an apology.”

“And to schedule a vaccine appointment for myself?” Enjolras asked.

Combeferre shrugged. “Again, that’s your decision. But yes.”

Enjolras shook his head slowly, but he no longer looked angry. Instead, something contemplative stole across his expression. “Did you ever imagine, a year ago, that we’d be talking about this?”

“About you and Grantaire getting into some asinine fight and me talking you down from being a stubborn asshole?”

“Ok, well, when you put it like that…” Combeferre laughed and Enjolras managed a smile as well. “Thank you.”

Combeferre gave him a look. “The best way to thank me is to never make me play referee again.”

“Yes, but that’s just unrealistic, so…”

Combeferre laughed again and shook his head. “Talk to Grantaire,” he ordered. “In the meantime, I’ll get the meeting started again. You two can join us after you’ve talked.”

Enjolras sighed. “Yes sir,” he muttered sourly. “But there’s just one thing I need to do first.”

“Use an exploitative third party delivery app to send a bottle of whiskey to Grantaire as an apology?” Combeferre guessed.

Enjolras made a face. “Ok, two things.”

Combeferre grinned. “You’re making your vaccine appointment, aren’t you.”

Enjolras shrugged. “What can I say, you made some good points.”

“So did Grantaire,” Combeferre said pointedly. “And I suspect he’d much rather hear you say that than I.”

Enjolras waved a dismissive hand. “Go,” he ordered. “We’ll be back on the zoom shortly.”

Combeferre hesitated. “Just one more thing.”

“Now what?” Enjolras asked, exasperated.

“Make sure to tell Grantaire that you understand.”

Enjolras’s brow furrowed. “Understand what?”

“That he got the vaccine because he loves you.” He leveled a look at Enjolras. “Enough for him to forgive you for accusing him of cutting the line just so he can drink at a bar.”

Enjolras winced. “Not my finest moment,” he admitted.

“Not so much,” Combeferre agreed.

“Think he’ll forgive me?”

Combeferre didn’t even have to pretend to think about it. “I know he will.”

#enjolras #grantaire #enjolras x grantaire #exr #enjoltaire #combeferre #all the amis #too lazy to tag them all #fanfiction #les miserables #modern au #established relationship #covid cw #vaccine cw #just struggling with the year anniversary like one does

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mego42 · 3 years

Note

I know it’s the writers fault, and I feel like this season rio is a different person than seasons 1,2 and even 3. But if I ignore my opinions on the writers and the odd choices they’ve made for him, and just watch the show as a normal viewer, rio is fucking pissing me off. Like all he had to do was tell Beth she was being followed. He made the mess. And he’s such a dick. Like at this point kill her or don’t. But this whole “Rio can’t hurt Beth/rio has love for her/brio love triangle” thing? Like nah I’m not seeing it. He’s being literally stupid for no reason.

i'm v sorry he's pissing you off and you’re super entitled to feel that way! but tbh, personally i don't totally agree that he's different or that he's being stupid for no reason (though, if you're not buying into the idea that he's genuinely into beth than yeah, i can v much see why you would feel that way, i think that's a p significant puzzle piece).

imo, the primary difference between the rio of s4 and the rio of previous seasons isn't in the character, but how much more context/insight/backstory we're getting for him. we’ve seen bits and pieces before, but they’ve been very sporadic (something that’s been a p consistent complaint since i joined the fandom) and i think s4 has really dug into shading rio’s character and backstory in with much more detail and depth than we’ve seen so far. i also think the show's p steadily developed the idea that he has some degree of genuine feeling for beth (and that they make him act rashly and stupidly) along the same pace.

putting the rest of this below the cut bc it got long and should you continue, do so with the caveat that i’m not here to change anyone’s mind, i’m just breaking down why i disagree.

in s1, rio was a p one-dimensional character (like, on paper he's basically a walking first page google search result for "mexican gang banger stereotypes") and it's a testament to how much manny brought to his performance and the way he sparks with his scene partners (particularly christina and jim) that he came across so engagingly and elevated the character far enough that people so easily overlook that. over the course of s2, they peeled back the curtain a little bit and rounded him out more in ways that (imo and ymmv) really efficiently counteracted that stereotypical portrayal like introducing marcus, being softer with beth, and the different faceted glimpses of him we saw through his personal and business spaces (the club, his loft and bar). in terms of his feelings, while a lot of the softness with beth was him working an angle, we still caught glimpses that hinted at something real developing in his reactions to her that either served no purpose for keeping her in line (the way the camera lingered on his face falling in 209 after beth had turned away and couldn't see him) or, most significantly imo, doing things for her that actively undermined his authority (retrieving!!!!!!!! the!!!!!!!!!! dubby!!!!!!!!!!!!).

and speaking of 209, we also saw him react in increasingly more irrational and outlandish ways (ignoring her calls/texts about the fbi closing in on a business he’s somewhat tied up in, sending her body parts in the mail, kidnapping her) in reaction to beth quitting him, underscoring both the idea that 209 (and beth) meant something to him and that he gets real dramatic and questionably intelligent when he’s in his feelings.

there's nothing to really say any of this was a swerve from s1 bc s1 left p much everything on the table. s3 built that out a bit more both in terms of what we know about him (thinking specifically of fitz's rundown of what he gets up to when beth's not around) and his feelings for beth (how he handled the wake of 213 was, uh, illuminating and it’s been made even more illuminating with the context s4 added with nick’s involvement in rio’s business and the fact that nick knew nothing about lucy).

s4, to me, is building on all of that (see the above comment about the new layer of context to lucy and repeat, for one). we’ve met his family (who they’ve already hinted he’s very close to through the photos in his loft), we’ve found out how he got involved in crime in the first place (and i've seen criticism of the tragedy aspect of it and how that disproportionately applies to characters of color and that’s super valid, though i do think there’d also be a lot of valid criticism if they’d gone the opposite route and written rio as knowingly and gleefully deciding to be a criminal. the show kind of put itself in an impossible position there, but that’s something that goes back to s1 and the entire concept of his character. i’m not saying there isn’t a nuanced way to tell this story but, i don’t think anyone in the fandom would argue the gg team doesn’t often do so well with narrowly threaded needles, hahaha), and we’ve also seen that rio’s got some kind of big, complicated feelings for beth that result in him making moves and choices that both are and aren’t in his best interest/at her expense and the dichotomy is sloppy bc, as established, those kinds of feelings make rio sloppy.

honestly, i think one of the biggest reasons rio’s deepening characterization is so controversial is bc by holding off for so long (a choice that i admire conceptually from a storytelling angle—keeping him shrouded in mystery keeps the audience firmly rooted in the girls’ POVs which is where they want us to be—but v understand how it hasn’t worked for a lot of people and do think they’ve fumbled it at a couple of key steps), it allowed people to sort of choose their own rio and now that the show’s committing to their vision, it’s demolishing a lot of people’s personal versions and that sucks! if the show ever canonically says rio and mick haven’t been friends since they were kids, i, for one, am going to elect to ignore it bc FALSE!!!!!! but this phenomenon is also, you know, part of watching tv. someone else writes it, you ultimately have no say in it, you can really only decide for yourself when it no longer sparks joy enough that it’s a dealbreaker and you walk.

BUT yeah, i guess to wrap it all up, i do think s4 rio tracks with and has been directly built on the rios that have come before, but also think that accepting that he has big messy feelings for beth is a crucial part in understanding the choices he’s making, and if that’s not working for you, i don’t see this trajectory ultimately being v satisfying bc uh, yeah, i think it’s only going to get exponentially messier as we go.

#MY B THIS GOT LONG #i know i talk a lot of shit about rio but that's bc gently roasting is my love language #and i really do love him and think a lot about him #i mean imo you have to to satisfyingly write his pov #which i hope i do #at least somewhat #ANYWAY #rio good girls #nbc good girls #i refuse to start a meta tag #gg spoilers #i mean not really but it's fresh after an ep so just being safe i guess

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p-redux · 3 years

Text

PSA:

Yes, I know about the podcast where a disgruntled would be lady friend of Sam's bashes him.

When I first was alerted to it, I didn't bother paying attention to what she was posting on social media leading up to her podcast because I was busy in RL and hadn't had time. Besides, I already knew, like I've been saying since 2014, that Sam is a heterosexual man who dates multiple women, and is not ready to settle down. I don't see anything wrong with that. Meh. This is NOT news.

Then today, I got a ton of DMs on here and some on Twitter, and I got a couple of Anon Asks about it asking me what my opinion is. I literally worked a 10 hour day today and then had some RL stuff to do after. I'm exhausted.

But I finally plopped on the couch and listened to her podcast because people were SO insistent about it. I guess at this point, my followers are wondering why I haven't said anything, and are looking to me to post what I think of it. TBH, I'm SO tired, brain function is slowing down. I'll probably write something when I gather my thoughts and have some time, and some coffee.

But here is my off the cuff initial reaction. Besides anything to do with what happened or didn't happen between Sam and the woman who did the podcast, my MAIN focus while listening to it tonight was: that what she posted sunk the SamCait ship for the millionth time, the "Sam is gay" false narrative got debunked AGAIN, AND we inadvertently got full CONFIRMATION that Sam DID date Georgia Ellenwood (athlete at track meet) and Danielle Kling (girl already living in Hawaii), Gia (new girl he met in Los Angeles and took to Hawaii during quarantine), and that Sam was thinking of rekindling with an ex (Mackenzie Mauzy, pic of her at Comic Con post break up wearing the Barbour jacket he gave her, and I was asked not to post the pic) HAHAHA. Just like I told the fandom. I LOVE when my info gets CONFIRMED. And THAT is and will always be what gets me off in this fandom. The only thing that keeps me here (besides my friends, of course). Sorry if you expected something more lofty...

Bottom line: Sam's a heterosexual human man who is not ready to settle down with one woman. Alert the presses! Lord.

Sam saying to her "Let's get together the next time I'm in town" is not a promise of a date, it's not a promise of anything, it's literally a flashing neon sign meaning "let's leave things open ended," "maybe," "let's play it by ear." And anyone and everyone who has dated enough human males knows this. Did she not get the Man Code Manual? I thought everyone knew this. When a man wants to see you, he doesn't say things like that, he makes CONCRETE plans with you and FOLLOWS THROUGH with them.

PROTIP: an actor who slides into your DMs and says let's get together when we're in the same town, and then doesn't, isn't "ghosting" or "gaslighting" you, he's letting you know without being direct that "he's just not that into you," but doesn't want to hurt your feelings. It seems to me that when the podcast woman figured out that there were women Sam WAS actually into and DID see in person, she got pissed...and got even. It really is a slap in the face to Sam that he helped her with raising funds and she went and badmouthed him publicly. Petty, petty.

MORE PROTIPS: When a man is into you, he, *taps chin* makes the effort to SEE you in person. Simple as that. The fact that Sam didn't, should have been the one and only clue needed to "move on" and find a man who is into you and will want to spend time with you in person. No need to keep waiting around, continuing to DM with or interact with a man who won't SEE you. Me, forever and ever 'splainin the facts of life.

I'm sorry she feels hurt, but it's way over the top that she now has taken it upon herself to "warn" women about Sam. Helloooo, he's not Shia LaBeouf or Armie Hammer FFS. By ALL accounts, pretty much EVERYONE who gets to know Sam says what a nice guy he is, including the women who dated him. Even his ex Cody Kennedy's MOM, Jinx said she didn't have anything bad to say about him, and said he was a "gentleman," and Sam broke up with Cody because, according to what Jinx publicly confirmed on Instagram, "he went back to his old girlfriend in London." (Abbie Salt in 2015)...just like I said sources told me months prior. :-). Sam broke up with her daughter and Jinx said nothing but nice things about Sam.

Is Sam a saint...or Jamie Fraser? NOPE. But, he's not a bad dude, and especially in Hollywood, he's, what I would call, one of the good ones. It's unfortunate that his name is getting smeared over something like this. Her reaction is totally disproportionate to what he actually did. Date a true Hollywood douche and then come back and talk to me. That's not Sam. Sam giving a woman his ubiquitous line "let's get together for a wee dram when you're in town" and then flaking, or flirting in DMs, and not having it lead to anything more did not warrant the bad press she is giving him. But I guess his fans can take solace in the fact that people who actually know Sam know who he really is, and his good heart.

Anyhoo, Imma pour myself a second glass of wine and I'll write something tonight or tomorrow or actually...I don't think I will...I kind of already did. :-).

Pssst: "He's just not that into you." Deal with it.

#samheughan #monicaaskamit #georgiaellenwood #daniellekling #gia #podcast #extremeshippers #mackenziemauzy #abbie salt #codykennedy #jinx kennedy

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madam-melon-meow · 3 years

Text

Bisexual Kyoshi is something that can be so personal, actually

Panel edit by @flagellasturbation

[image I.D. : An edit of a comic panel of avatar Kyoshi. On the left in the image is a close-up of Kyoshi from the torso up, contained within an upside-down trapezoid shape. She wears her full battle uniform of olive and emerald robes, dark gloves and bracers, and a golden headpiece in a fan-like shape. Her eyes are the same emerald shade as her robes, she has black hair billowing to the left edge of the image, and her black eyebrows have been dramatically lengthened by black face paint. Her face and neck are artificially whitened with chalky makeup, she has black winged eyeliner, red eyeshadow that sweeps upwards to her temples and down the sides of her nose, and red lipstick outlined in black. This is the classic Kyoshi makeup. Her arms are crossed, the left arm behind her head pointing a golden fan away from the viewer, the right arm extended in front of her face, another golden fan pointed towards the viewer. She appears to be looking upwards and towards the right of the image. Above Kyoshi’s eye level and in the top right of the image is a comic text box. It reads in all caps: “even avatar Kyoshi- who by all accounts loved men and women- was unable to effect any kind of real progress.” The background art and color has been replaced with the Bisexual Flag, a thick horizontal line of pink on top, stopping at Kyoshi’s cheek level, then a thinner line of purple ending at her shoulders, and a thick line of blue that extends to the bottom of the image. End I.D.]

(If someone does not find my image I.D. sufficient, please let me know. This is my first time trying to make such a thing, as i am a lurker, not a poster)

Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee, page 99 (text copy / pasted from the b&n ebook version)

““Are those . . . fire lilies?” he said, a wide, knowing grin spreading across his face.

Kyoshi flushed beet red. “Stop it,” she said.

“That’s right,” Yun said. “The Ember Island tourism minister brought a bunch when he visited two weeks ago. I can’t believe you simply shred the flowers once they dry out. I guess nothing goes to waste in this house.”

“Knock it off,” Kyoshi snapped. But it was too hard keeping the corners of her lips from curling upward.

“Knock what off?” he said, enjoying her reaction. “I’m just commenting on a fragrance I’ve come to particularly enjoy.”

It was an inside reference that only the two of them shared. Rangi didn’t know. She hadn’t been there in the gifting room eight months ago while Kyoshi arranged a vast quantity of fire lilies sent by an admiral in the Fire Navy, one of Hei-Ran’s friends.

Yun had spent the afternoon watching Kyoshi work. Against every scrap of her better judgment, she’d allowed him to lie down on the floor and rest his head in her lap while she plucked deformed leaves and trimmed stems to the right length. Had anyone caught the two of them like that, there would have been a scandal that not even the Avatar could have recovered from.

That day, entranced by Yun’s upside-down features dappled with the flower petals she’d teasingly sprinkled over his face, she’d almost leaned down and kissed him. And he knew it. Because he’d almost reached up and kissed her.

They never spoke of it afterward, the shared impulse that had nearly crashed both of their carriages. It was too . . . well, they each had their duties was a good way to put it. That moment did not fit anywhere among their responsibilities.

But since then, whenever the two of them were in the presence of fire lilies, Yun’s eyes would dart toward the flowers repeatedly until he was sure Kyoshi noticed. She would try unsuccessfully to keep a straight face, the heat coloring her neck, and he’d sigh as if to mourn what could have been.

Today was no different. With a wistful blush on his own cheeks, Yun stared her down until her defenses broke and she let out a giggle through her nose.

“There’s that beautiful smile,” he said. He pressed his heels into the floor, sliding up against the wall, and straightened his rumpled shirt. “Kyoshi, trust me when I say this: If it turns out not to be me, I’ll be glad it’s you.”

~~~~~~~~~

Rise of Kyoshi by F.C. Yee, page 210 (text copy / pasted from the b&n ebook version)

“You think you don’t deserve peace and happiness and good things, but you do!” Rangi yelled. “You, Kyoshi! Not the Avatar, but you!”

She closed the distance and wrapped her arms around Kyoshi’s waist. The embrace was a clever way to hide her face.

“Do you have any idea how painful it’s been for me to follow you on this journey where you’re so determined to punish yourself?” she said. “Watching you treat yourself like an empty vessel for revenge, when I’ve known you since you were a servant girl who couldn’t bend a pebble? The Avatar can be reborn. But you can’t, Kyoshi. I don’t want to give you up to the next generation. I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

Kyoshi realized she’d had it all wrong. Rangi was a true believer. But her greatest faith had been for her friends, not her assignment. She pulled Rangi in closer. She thought she heard a slight, contented sigh come from the other girl.

“I wish I could give you your due,” Rangi muttered after some time had passed. “The wisest teachers. Armies to defend you. A palace to live in.”

Kyoshi raised an eyebrow. “The Avatar gets a palace?”

“No, but you deserve one.”

“I don’t need it,” Kyoshi said. She smiled into Rangi’s hair, the soft strands caressing her lips. “And I don’t need an army. I have you.”

Psh,” Rangi scoffed. “A lot of good I’ve been so far. If I were better at my job you would never feel scared. Only loved. Adored by all.”

Kyoshi gently nudged Rangi’s chin upward. She could no more prevent herself from doing this than she could keep from breathing, living, fearing.

“I do feel loved,” she declared.

Rangi’s beautiful face shone in reflection. Kyoshi leaned in and kissed her.

A warm glow mapped Kyoshi’s veins. Eternity distilled in a single brush of skin. She thought she would never be more alive than now.

And then—

The shock of hands pushing her away. Kyoshi snapped out of her trance, aghast.

Rangi had flinched at the contact. Repelled her. Viscerally, reflexively.

Oh no. Oh no.

This couldn’t—not after everything they’d been through—this couldn’t be how it—

Kyoshi shut her eyes until they hurt. She wanted to shrink until she vanished within the cracks of the earth. She wanted to become dust and blow away in the wind.

But the sound of laughter pulled her back. Rangi was coughing, drowning herself with her own tears and mirth. She caught her breath and retook Kyoshi by the hips, turning to the side, offering up the smooth, unblemished skin of her throat.

“That side of my face is busted up, stupid,” she whispered in the darkness. “Kiss me where I’m not hurt.”

~~~~~

I include both these quotes because i've seen a few posts about the “gigantic lesbian” avatar, and although i am glad my sapphic sisters feel connected to Kyoshi (as well they should!), that doesn't mean i wish to simply be quiet on the matter of her textual bisexuality. I understand that not everyone has read her novels, nor has everyone read legend of Korra comics, but Kyoshi is *textually* bisexual.

Kyoshi had a loving romantic relationship with her firebending friend Rangi, but this does not erase her feelings for her earthbending friend Yun, even if neither of them were able to properly express it due to their respective “status”. (For context if you haven’t read, the masters believed that Yun was the avatar, and though he was bodyguarded by Rangi, and though Kyoshi was his servent, the three of them were simiar ages and thus close friends until the discovery of Kyoshi’s true ability destroyed their former lives). Hell, Kyoshi and Rangi do not become intimate until after fleeing their former lives. Who is to say what would have happened, had Yun not been captured by father glowworm ?

I know that there is a chance you will scoff at this, will write this off as comphet, accuse me of disproportionately weighting an almost-kiss with a true relationship, but these above quotes (as well as the comic panel from “the legend of korra: turf wars- part 1”) serve as proof that Kyoshi, “by all accounts loved men and women” (see panel directly below)

[image I.D. : the same comic panel as the edit above, this one without the bisexual flag edited in. Directly behind Kyoshi, within the upside-down trapezoid shape, is an olive to lime gradient, darker around her head and lighter near the bottom. Around and to the right in the image, outside of the trapezoid, is an aerial shot of buildings within an Earth Kingdom city, and what appears to be the lines of troops on the ground far below. the text box in the image is the same, but I have underlined the word “men” in blue, the word “and” in purple, and the word “women” in pink, to reflect the bisexual flag. End I.D.]

I am making such a big deal over this because Kyoshi is a massive figure, her long shadow cast over Aang’s life alongside Roku’s, and even before her novels came out there were often jokes about her “bloodthirsty” nature. I implore you to read the novels and see why Kyoshi believed in deadly justice at times, but also so you can see what a dynamic, loving, and beautiful character she is.

Some members of fandom have taken a “step on me” attitude towards Kyoshi, who has, even if the 7 feet tall thing is more fanon than canon, been explicitly described as “exceptionally tall”, and “towering” over others. This “strong woman who will break me and I thank them” attitude is one that butch &/or physically imposing sapphics, as well as trans women with similar statures to Kyoshi have expressed discomfort when applied to themselves and characters like them. I would love for more people to acknowledge her flaws and multi-faceted nature, that she is more than a “warrior goddess”, just as Aang is more than a living relic. Flattening her out to the easily-fetishable parts erases the depth of her character and the complexity of circumstances that led to the instances of deadly force.

There are very few bisexual characters in media, especially women, and especially in children’s media. Bisexual women have often been caricatured as loose, promiscuous, good for a threesome and not much else. (This is mot to say that i think any lesser of my fellow bisexuals who are proudly promiscious, nor can an actual live bisexual person be considered a stereotype for living their life, but media’s portayal of us as obsessed with desire is incredibly harmful). Knowing that a strong, beautiful, and important character in the avatar universe is a bisexual woman is amazing, even more so to have her first lady-love described in the novels with such care. F. C. Yee, the author of these novels, has my eternal gratitude. I sincerely hope that the new generation of fans, whether they are drawn to the cartoon or even the hypothetical live action show, will pick up these novels and discover the kind of bisexual character that I wish existed in my early days as a reader, and if a small fraction of them resonate with Kyoshi’s reciprocal on Yun and love for Rangi, then the world becomes a little bit brighter for it.

I mentioned her importance for the simple reason that Kyoshi IS important with the text of ATLA. As one of the avatars, she is one of the most historically important figures in that universe, one of the few avatars that Aang knows by name, and one of the only avatars to speak through his body. The fact that she has two whole novels to herself testifies to that effect, making her bisexual representation all the more important than a simple background character might be.

If or when the ATLA live action tv show occurs, we can expect some mention of Kyoshi. After all, there is a whole episode dedicated to exploring one of her missions, and the way that the descendants of her enemy have recolored history. It is my sincere desire that enough discussion is made about her canon bisexuality , that fandom trumphets it from the roof with as much force as crackshipping zukka, that when she does make it to the screen, there is some subtle nod in her bisexuality’s direction, even if it is something as meta as casting a bisexual actress for her. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

edit by @flagellasturbation

[image I.D. : An edit of a comic panel of avatar Kyoshi. This is like the first image, Kyoshi and the text box of the comic panel untouched, the background color and art replaced with the bisexual flag. However, this version has the words “by all accounts” blown up large and placed diagonally in the image, directly under Kyoshi’s face and stretching from one side of the image to the other. The bottom third of the image is similarly obscured, the words “men” , “and” , “women” blown up large enough to fill the panel and cover most of Kyoshi’s torso, as well as the purple and blue areas of the background flag. End I.D.]

#Avatar Kyoshi #Rangi #Yun #The Rise of Kyoshi #The Shadow of Kyoshi #father glowworm #bisexual

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tlbodine · 3 years

Text

The Great Content Warning Debate

Horror Twitter has been aflame for a few days now with heated discourse about trigger/content warnings, and I keep seeing the same arguments and questions and points come up repeatedly so I wanted to collect all of it into one place because I feel like discourse can only get so far if people keep reinventing the wheel -- so perhaps having the full discussion laid out in one place could be helpful.

Of course, the folks arguing probably won’t see this post, but perhaps there can be some benefit from talking about it anyway. This is intended to be more of an overview of arguments and counter-arguments, collected and displayed as impartially as possible, but of course my own opinions are going to leak in and color some of this.

NOTE: This is written specifically from the perspective of the horror book community, a genre that traditionally is associated with troubling, transgressive, risk-taking and shocking works. There are discussions to be had for content labels on other types of fiction, but as I’m unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of, say, romance, I’m not going to wade too deeply into that here.

So without further ado, the arguments and counter-arguments and discussion points that I keep seeing hashed and rehashed and circled around when the issue of trigger warnings comes up!

If you’re sensitive, you shouldn’t be reading horror

“Horror is supposed to be horrifying! It’s not fluffy bunnies and kittens! You’re supposed to be made uncomfortable!”

There are a few problems with this:

“Uncomfortable” is not the same as “Sent into a panic attack/flashback/relapse” (ie, triggered)

People with PTSD and other issues can and do engage with horror all the time and often love the genre for entertainment or therapeutic purposes

Many people are fine with some types of content but not others; blood and guts won’t affect them the same as rape, or they’re fine with adults dying but can’t handle child death, and so on and so forth

Knowing what you’re getting into can help you prepare/brace yourself so you’re not taken unaware; people with the right warnings can mentally prepare themselves and enjoy a book that they would not have been able to read if they were confronted with it unexpectedly

Trigger warnings are censorship

Some folks have an implicit/kneejerk reaction that “trigger = bad thing” and respond to the request to put warnings on a book as a moral value judgment on the book’s contents. I can see why they might fear that, especially because at a glance it’s easy to conflate the groups asking for warnings with the groups who say things like “if your characters have underage sex then you the writer are literally a pedophile.” But by and large the folks asking for warnings do not seem to be asking for folks to stop writing certain difficult themes, only to provide a heads up for readers about the type of experience those readers can expect from the book.

There is an argument to be made that warnings could affect the sales of a book, in much the same way that an NC-17 film doesn’t get the same distribution opportunities as an R-rated or PG-13 film, and that authors/publishers will make marketing decisions to include or exclude certain types of content in order to avoid this.

Trigger warnings will spoil the book

While some readers will benefit from content warnings, others might have their reading experience ruined by knowing about major twists. This seems especially relevant with a warning like “child death.” It’s very important that people who have, for example, recently lost a child not be unexpectedly re-traumatized by reading about a child dying without warning. But it’s also important that people who want to enjoy the full, shocking impact of such a scene have the opportunity to do so without having it dulled by forewarning.

Any kind of warning system needs to be opt-in for a reader. Some suggestions include:

Placing warnings at the end of a book, where readers can flip to that page to look (not helpful if you’re ordering online)

Placing warnings on the author’s website, where readers can search (not helpful if you’re buying in person)

Given the limitations, a combination of those strategies seems to make sense. It may also be unfortunately true that someone looking for one type of warning (ie, rape) will have their experience ruined if they spoiler themselves for another warning (child death). This may be unavoidable collateral damage.

Authors/Publishers should be responsible for putting warnings in their books

There seems to be some debate over whether the onus of responsibility for providing warnings rests on the author or the publisher. It should be acknowledged that authors may not always have the power to make this choice -- and if the presence or absence of warnings becomes a factor for judging the quality/moral fiber of authors, those authors could be punished by the reader community for a choice that was largely out of their hands (although, there’s still nothing keeping the author from hosting those warnings externally - how successfully that is implemented is another matter).

Additionally, the demand for warnings will be placed more consistently on small presses simply because those presses are more likely to heed the request. This could create a double standard where readers might be more forgiving of large pub works that forego warnings because there’s no expectation that they would have implemented them anyway. On the other hand, this could be a way for indie publishers to differentiate themselves on the market and appeal more to certain subsets of readers.

External groups or communities should be responsible for warnings

There’s a line of reasoning that an author or publisher may not be sensitive to the potentially triggering/damaging things in their work, and some kind of external governing body should manage this work instead. This does sound a lot more like the censorship argument that people are worried about.

Wiki-style sites and places where people can freely tag books (such as Storygraph) also fit this bill to an extent. They would presumably have less power over the market than a ratings board like the MPAA, but could still exert influence over how a book is received.

Demanding warnings will negatively impact marginalized authors

We’re already seeing some evidence that BIPOC and LGBTQ authors are affected more by user-generated trigger warnings on sites like Storygraph, and that these warnings can be weaponized against marginalized authors. Much like review-bombing a book before it comes out can affect its launch, labeling a book with inaccurate trigger warnings could damage its sales.

Similarly, lists of “safe” and “unsafe” authors have already begun to circulate among some groups, and there seems to be a disproportionate number of marginalized creators on that “unsafe” list -- at least according to the anecdotal reports I’ve seen.

Historically, it is true that any attempts at censorship or content moderation will be more harshly applied to marginalized groups (see: film ratings for gay sex vs straight sex).

It’s impossible to warn for everything

One hesitancy that some authors have with tagging their work is they’re not sure what to tag for. Triggers are highly personal, and there’s no way you can possibly guess what might upset a reader.

Here’s a list of commonly agreed-upon things that might make sense to tag for in a given work:

Violence/gore

Suicide/self-harm

Rape/sexual assault

Domestic violence

Child death/endangerment

Animal death/abuse

Drug use/substance abuse

Racism/slurs

That said, it’s still difficult to account for context. At what stage do you warn for something? If a character is drinking a beer, do you need to tag for that? Do you distinguish between the tone things are written in, such as being played for laughs vs seriously? If the rape scene is written artistically/metaphorically, does the same warning apply as if it were described act-by-act in a clinical sense? What if your blanket list of warnings gives readers a false sense of what the book will be like -- is it actually helpful at all, or is it just posturing/virtue signaling to include warnings that won’t actually be effective?

Some would argue that this is dramatically overthinking it, but this does seem to cause a great deal of distress to authors who want to do the right thing but worry about getting it wrong. An argument could be made that trying and failing might be worse than doing nothing, especially if your attempts get you labeled as a “trustworthy” or “safe” author only for that trust to be “betrayed” by a warning you used incorrectly.

On the other hand, many would argue that we all “pretty much know” what needs to be warned for, and that warnings are intuitive. These granular questions could be viewed as a distraction from more common sense issues.

Readers are responsible for managing their own safety

Ultimately, because it’s impossible for every potential trigger to be identified and warned for, readers will need to remain vigilant. Of course, there are already ways to identify the content of a book without any kind of established warning system -- such as, for example, reading posted book reviews, asking a question on a book’s Goodreads page, reaching out to the author directly, asking about the book in a reading group online or having a friend/parent/spouse/trusted person read the book first and report back with their findings.

This is the system we’ve pretty much used as readers for years, before “trigger warning” became part of the common vernacular, and it does have some distinct advantages just because you can get a lot more specific information this way.

It is possible that if warnings become more commonplace for books that readers may become less vigilant about their own safety, which could paradoxically put them at greater risk of finding troubling content unexpectedly.

There’s also the issue of “safe” and “unsafe” author lists. At the moment, while the discourse is hot, it’s perhaps more natural to pick sides and disregard some authors for reasons that may be unfair -- for example, marking an author as unsafe or boycotting her work because she doesn’t want to include warnings, but she wants to avoid warnings because she strongly believes they will be detrimental to a reader’s safety. A reader may or may not agree with that perspective, but it’s certainly not the same motive as an author who would do something actively malicious to a reader (like, idk, emailing a screamer to a reviewer or something. that’s a made up example.)

In the end, trigger warnings are a good idea, but the issue is complex to implement and some people do still have reservations about their overall efficacy.

We simply won’t know one way or another until we try to implement it. But in the meantime, I do think it’s valuable to continue talking about this, as long as everyone involved remains civil and engages in good faith. Once people’s perspectives start getting thrown out the window in the heat of the moment, or strawmen arguments are erected that don’t reflect what anyone involved actually believes, the discussion ceases to be helpful.

#trigger warnings #discourse #twitter nonsense #authors behaving badly #writing advice #writeblr #writing #publishing

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spockandawe · 4 years

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So this morning, I tripped across this excellent post about Xue Yang and classism, and it shook something loose in my head. Specifically, it got me thinking about the idea of Xue Yang taking revenge for ‘only’ losing a finger. Xiao Xingchen doesn’t say anything as directly dismissive as saying he only lost a finger, but I do think that is at least partially the way that Xue Yang takes the argument.

And I’ve thought a lot and said a lot of words about the way Xue Yang feels hurt and betrayed and frustrated as he tries to explain himself to someone, for once, and that person completely misses his point. And I’ve said words about how in the three years in Yi City, Xue Yang gets hooked on the quiet comfort of domesticity, even if he and Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing are still, objectively, poor. But I’d never thought about this particular angle of their last argument before now.

This is going to be long, I can tell, so let’s throw a spoiler cut in here

Now, I do think it’s important that Xiao Xingchen doesn’t say directly that it was only a finger. I think it would have been cruel of him to say that. But I also think that his upbringing and position in the world make him a bit… oblivious to the implications of Xue Yang’s story, and what he’s trying to communicate, and that leads to him saying some things that are more insensitive than he would have chosen to if he’d realized.

From a very early point, he knew that Xue Yang grew up without parents or money.

Unhurried, Xue Yang began, “Once upon a time, there was a child.”

“The child really liked eating sweet things. But because he had no parents or money, he could rarely eat them.”

And he was told how that child was exploited, and how hard he was beat up and used even before things reached the point where he lost a finger

[The huge, brawny man] took over the paper and looked at it, and he gave the child a slap so hard that his nose started bleeding. The man pulled the child’s hair and asked, ‘Who told you to take such a thing over?’”

[…]

“[seven-year-old Xue Yang] felt scared and pointed the direction. The man went to the liquor shop, carrying the child by pulling his hair.”

[…]

“The store was in a mess and the waiter was feeling quite cross. He slapped the child a few times, so hard that his ears were even buzzing, and chased him out the door. He crawled up and walked for a while.”

[…]

What do you think happened? Just a few more slaps and a few more kicks.”

(It’s interesting to me that he dodges even mentioning his hand being run over in this version of the story, but later goes into a lot of detail about his hand later with Xiao Xingchen, even though Xiao Xingchen has completely turned against him)

And, something that I hadn’t really noticed until I went to collect these quotes, is how Xiao Xingchen reacts to this story.

After Xiao XingChen tucked her, he walked a few steps, then asked, “What happened afterward?”

Xue Yang, “Guess. There was no afterward. You didn’t continue telling your story either, did you?”

Xiao XingChen, “No matter what happened afterward, since right now your life is fairly adequate, there’s no need for you to dwell too much on the past.”

That’s… a very high-minded approach to take, where I can see the good intentions, but I’m also kind of wincing at the accidental implications.

And then, to mix it up, let’s have some screencaps for the second half of the story, because these actors seriously knocked this scene out of the park

“The wheels of the cart milled over the child’s hand, one finger at a time. He was seven!”

And then another book quote, because it’s fascinating to me how directly he begs Xiao Xingchen to empathize with the child who was used so poorly and lost a finger in the process.

“Is it that, since the fingers weren’t yours, you guys were incapable of feeling the pain?! You guys didn’t know how horrifying screams sounded like out of your own mouths? Why didn’t you ask him why he decided to amuse himself with me without a single reason?!”

Only, right after he does this, Xiao Xingchen talks about how disproportionate Xue Yang’s revenge was. This really kills me, honestly, because this is the point where Xue Yang stops trying to appeal to him and explain himself, and takes a sharp turn towards losing control over his emotions instead.

Xiao XingChen spoke as though he couldn’t believe Xue Yang’s words, “Chang Ci’An broke one of your fingers in the past. If you sought revenge, you could’ve simply broken one of his fingers as well. If you really took the matter to heart, you could’ve broken two, or even all ten! Even if you had cut off an entire arm of his, things wouldn’t have been like this. Why did you have to kill his entire clan? Don’t tell me that a single finger of yours was equal to more than fifty human lives!”

I always just accepted that this was enough to hurt Xue Yang that much. But also… Xiao Xingchen knows that Xue Yang was a poor, parentless child, and he’s heard about how this child was callously exploited and mistreated by three separate adults. And there’s a couple class-related details in here that I want to touch on.

One, Xue Yang was again, a poor, parentless child, and I imagine he was living on the streets in a situation like that. Chang Ci’an broke (amputated) one of his fingers. And ran over the whole rest of his hand, which I have to imagine did other significant damage. Okay, so he wrecked this seven-year-old child’s hand. Now…. how much did this child have? What did he have besides his body? Did he even have a home to retreat to and recover? Because I have to imagine he didn’t. He didn’t have money for medical treatment, it’s not even clear if he knew anyone he could go to for basic medical help. Let’s not even talk about setting the bones in a shattered hand, did he even have access to anything to prevent infection? If he had any means of making a living (at age, again, seven), it would almost have had to be either begging or stealing. Having one ruined hand would have done awful things to this parentless child’s ability to survive. He made it through, clearly, but god.

And Xiao Xingchen isn’t approaching this from a position like most of our main characters, who grew up wealthy and privileged. He’s not approaching this in a way like how Jiang Cheng scolded Wei Wuxian for breaking his arm, because he had to get it all plastered up and spend weeks recovering, and that was super inconvenient. Xiao Xingchen was never wealthy, and he grew up as a feral mountain child with Baoshan Sanren. But that means that he wasn’t subject to the same social forces as a city child like Xue Yang. Even if he was injured as a child, even if he was badly injured, it wasn’t probably an act of cruelty or callousness on the part of an adult. And if he was injured, he might not have had access to formally trained doctors, but he had a teacher who was highly trained spiritually, and who would at least care for him.

In a way, I think that makes it all hurt… more for Xue Yang. Because Xiao Xingchen isn’t gentry, he never was affiliated with the great cultivation sects, and he and Xue Yang and A-Qing have been living together in a city in fairly poor circumstances for three years now. But Xiao Xingchen is an adult, and one who’s used to making his own way in the world. He has no personal understanding of what it’s like to be a powerless child in similar circumstances, without anyone. And in this moment, he’s not able to understand how awful and how serious this was for a child like Xue Yang to experience.

Like, compare and contrast. When the Wens are starting to move against Lotus Pier, there’s half a moment where Wei Wuxian makes his peace with losing a hand. He’s like ‘yeah, that sucks, but i’ll deal. i’ll just learn to fight with my other hand, whatever!’ But just imagine how serious that would have been before Jiang Fengmian found him. Without money, without a home, without anyone to care for you, without access to any real medical care, how dire an injury would that have been? Xue Yang might not have lost his hand altogether, but the cart ran over his whole hand, and hands are just full o’ bones. The consequences of that injury were significant.

And Xiao Xingchen’s initial reaction is ‘okay, so this wealthy cultivator broke your finger. why didn’t you just break his finger?’ and then he manages to escalate his way up to ‘idk, you could have even cut off his arm???’

In retrospect, it’s completely unsurprising to me that this is the moment where Xue Yang totally shuts down and starts asking why Xiao Xingchen even got involved, if he wasn’t capable of understanding.

“You shouldn’t have meddled in other people’s business. Right or wrong, kindness or hatred are not clearly distinguished, so how could an outsider possibly understand?”

“Your martial mentor, Baoshan Sanren, was indeed insightful. Why didn’t you listen to her and obediently cultivate in the mountain? If you couldn’t understand the human affairs and this world, then you shouldn’t have come!”

It makes me wonder what would have happened, if Xue Yang had leaned harder into what kind of suffering and hardship an injury like that meant for a street child, but considering how reluctant he was to share in the first place, I’m not exactly surprised he didn’t go there.

Incidentally, it’s interesting to me that when Xiao Xingchen calls Xue Yang ‘disgusting’, that’s when Xue Yang pivots into really trying to hurt him. I think it would hurt, coming from Xiao Xingchen, no matter what, but I have to wonder if he takes it extra hard in light of the way he’s just been trying to explain his history as a mistreated street child.

I’d been idly wondering if I was reading too far into this dynamic (not that that was going to stop me, but still, wondering :P), but this last addition to the conversation really caught my attention

“The people I hate the most are ones like you who say they’re righteous, who think they’re virtuous. Stupid, naive, dumb idiots like you who think the world’s better just because you did something good!”

And then I was like no, I’ve been right this whole time, haha :V

Xue Yang’s anger and hurt sense on a purely personal level, especially with the extra pain of trying to explain himself, for once, and Xiao Xingchen missing the point. But the extra frustration on behalf of his younger self makes so much additional sense.��

Xue Yang likes Xiao Xingchen, he likes living with Xiao Xingchen, or he wouldn’t still be there three years after a chance encounter. It would be a whole other meta to source this claim, but it very much feels like there are things he admires about Xiao Xingchen, even if it’s kind of a condescending, indulgent fondness for his foolish, naive innocence instead of a straightforward admiration. Until it tips over here, and becomes personal.

And I think there were a lot of ways where he was prepared to disagree with Xiao Xingchen on a deep, fundamental level. They have very different values. But I don’t think he was prepared for Xiao Xingchen to be so oblivious to the class-based aspect of Xue Yang’s history. I don’t think Xiao Xingchen intended to be cruel, and I also think he had other significant things on his mind, but the seriousness of this incident doesn’t seem to occur to him. For someone with money, for someone with a skilled martial family, for even someone with a family, period, this would have been a traumatic experience, but one that could be dealt with. But then Xiao Xingchen equates the finger of this wealthy, purposefully cruel cultivator to the finger of a poor, parentless street child, and Xue Yang begins to lose control.

I already didn’t blame him for how upset he gets in this conversation, but now, even more than before, I find his reaction incredibly understandable. I mean, yes, their whole relationship is built on a foundation of sand, but he thought that he and Xiao Xingchen… supported each other, at least. They mattered to each other. And when Xiao Xingchen rejects him in the present, well, sure, that was going to happen if anyone was stupid enough to tell Xiao Xingchen the truth, that was understandable. But when Xiao Xingchen casually brushes aside the suffering of little innocent seven-year-old Xue Yang, that hurts Xue Yang more than he could have ever anticipated.

#the untamed #mo dao zu shi #xue yang #xiao xingchen #long post/#meta #xue yang: is it that since the fingers weren't yours you were incapable of feeling the pain?!#further speculation: xiao xingchen and lack of experience with *untreated* injuries #i really want to do something more with xue yang and bones that didn't heal right and an amputated finger that got infected #but heck if i know what

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