hi <3
first of all, i wanted to tell you i'm always stalking your blog (in a non creepy way) because i love everything about it. mostly i love how you use your big brain™️ to share some insanely detailed headcanons about some silly dead gay wizards (i mean that in the nicest way possible. i'm a little bit in love with you actually . anyway i'm digressing)
second of all, i wanted to know if you could share some of your thoughts about bartylily🤲🏻 because i'm fairly sure you're the main reason i'm hooked on them
much love <333
ANYTHING for bartylily... lately i've been attached to the idea of a college au where they're Rival Campus Radio Station Hosts.
barty is a spectacularly unmotivated senior who dropped out of a prestigious engineering degree to study practical SFX for horror movies instead. everyone has vague, peripheral knowledge of him after an incident where he was found passed out naked in the campus fountain. his apartment with the slytherins isn't technically a frat house but there's a structure in the kitchen affectionately referred to as the "Leaning Tower of Miller Lite" & barty has a nearly imperceptible crescent-shaped chip in his front tooth from a keg-standing mishap. he wears a lot of chains and has several john carpenter themed tattoos and he REEKS like cigarettes. so many pairs of mystery panties turn up in his laundry hamper that his housemates have started calling it the Lost And Found.
he has a deeply beloved & charmingly unpolished radio show in the primetime spot which mostly consists of him having his friends on, spotlighting terrible underground bands, and making drily ironical, beautifully mean jabs.
lily is an overzealous sophomore who's triple-majoring in three equally unmarketable degrees (it's, like, polisci & international affairs & communications) who's blessed with the gift of taking every single thing that happens on campus WAY too serious. she runs their Model UN like it's the navy. she's the RA who is always marching around her floor in a spaghetti-strap tanktop & bunny slippers with a scrunchie on her wrist, shaking her fist at people. there was a period following her breakup with james where she was literally reading Machiavelli for inspiration. she's right on the precipice of the cool-girl academic meltdown that will lead to Serious Character Growth, but she isn't quite there yet.
her well-made and well-researched radio show is relegated to the midnight timeslot, and even though all her friends listen to it she probably got into a spat with them for saying something along the lines of "obviously i dont care if its just YOU listening to it, remus!!!". she hate-listens to barty's show which she considers (lily voice) An Affront To Collegiate Journalism
they trade barbs at every function and absolutely nobody but the two of them takes their insane imaginary Radio Beef even remotely serious whatsoever. but it's dead serious TO THEM!!! lily is probably camping out in actual bushes with actual binoculars to sabotage his show, and the worst part is that it's actually working. she ISN'T obsessed with him (shut up!!!!!), and barty is mostly just aggravated on principle that the Uptight Lowerclassman Ruining His Life has such nice legs.
and they absolutely bone like crazy about it
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lord its so dark in here the sahara desert of tsaritsa content you are like a shining oasis. your characterisation of her compels me & mihoyo would be hard pressed to top it imo.!! caaaaan i humbly request yr thoughts on her first meeting w a reader of any kind, or maybe even multiple kinds (sagau, sagau god au, isekai, etc) if you so desire...
it really is like a desert here. being the fan of a character we aren't getting until the last damn nation is driving me up a wall but i will persevere bc if nothing else i support morally bankrupt women in media. we r in a severe drought over here but i do my best. unfortunately nothing i say is ever coherent so pull out your translation notes its abt 2 be messy
also this got out of hand but thats bc first meetings w the tsaritsa are tricky to write + a LOT of her characterization lies in deeper exploration then just surface level yknow...NOT A DIG AT YOU this is just my excuse for rambling. gently pats the tsaritsa she can hold so much complexity i do not have the word count to delve into it completely :]
gonna talk cult au for a bit here though because that's 99% of my content. and honestly? she thrives in sub au's of the cult au like villain au + imposter au. it's basically made for her. i mean, early days, the imposter au had been going around for a little while but one of the first few ideas was the Fatui taking reader in so like. it kinda technically actually was. pretty sure cult au Tsaritsa popped up because of the imposter au. a lot of it's writers kinda left though which. man am i getting old or.
anyway.
there isn't much of a chance her first impression is all that positive. at best it's usually neutral, imo, but rarely if ever positive. specifically because i view the Tsaritsa as someone who isn't as fanatical as most of the acolytes typically are towards the creator. she's not exactly going to worship the ground you walk on unlike a certain geo lizard. which is partially why i think she thrives in the sub au's i mentioned.
imposter au, for example. she meets you at your lowest. there's no gaudy extravagance or pampering from the acolytes waiting for you because your own acolytes have turned on you. for all intents and purposes you aren't a "god" at all. which is why i don't think she meshes well with normal cult au reader. the Fatui are made up of outcasts, basically, and imposter au slots right in just perfectly. you're weak, at your lowest, when you meet the Fatui in the imposter au. and the Fatui can help you, too.
a mutual exchange, really. the Tsaritsa sees a tool she can use to one up the rest of the nations and especially Archons, and she has no qualms about you using her and the Fatui in turn. you both want something out of it, after all. whether you just want to be safe from the rest of the acolytes, or you want revenge, or whatever else..she'll give you the power to fulfill it, and she gains the strongest piece on the chessboard when all is said and done.
the best way i can describe the first meeting is "practical", i suppose. she sees an opportunity in you. the ultimate gamble. because if she "saves" you, and you dont trust anyone else because they tried to kill you, well..she holds all the cards, doesn't she?
but the Tsaritsa, imo, is just as capable of being just as fanatical towards you as anyone else. she just won't worship you as the creator. but as yourself? clawing your way back to your divine power and taking back what belongs to you? the Tsaritsa is, to me, a character who's character flourishes in long-term fics more because she changes a LOT between "just met reader" and after having been with reader for some time. she's practically apathetic at the beginning but a lot of her character, in my characterization, shines through LONG after the first meeting.
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lol I love the idea that Clarinette in her “Lime collects weird things I’ll find some weird things for him!” she accidentally finds something SUPER rare and hands it to him and he just casually pockets it. He thinks he can just get away with giving it to Mochi and taking all the credit but then has a mental crisis of LYING????? to MOCHI???????
Funny continuation of this is it’s AM (after Mochi) so he sheepishly confesses that Clarinette is the one who found it and Mochi goes up and thanks her
Sad contunuation of this is it’s BM (before Mochi) is him having a mental crisis of how dare he even think of lying to her. He would never lie to her before she left! What’s changed in me. And then slowly watching it wilt away.
OKAY FOR ALL FOUR OF THESE POINTS I WANNA SAY SOMETHINGS!!!!! first of all i love it and it makes me sad and happy thinking about them :')
1 ) first i think clarinette would think its so cute that lime collects random stuff. everyone says "Ah nice, so the witches cant use it. good thinking" but clarinette sees just a LITTLE bit past it and thinks its a weird and endearing hobby of his. imagine how disillusioned she is when she finds out "Oh, this cute quirky thing he does isnt actually a cute quirky thing, its him thinking of the other woman the whole damn time."
2 ) LIME ACTUALLY LIES TO MOCHI MORE THAN HE SHOULD!!!!!!!! and it SUCKS because its always to save himself from looking like a simp or a dumbass because the truth is embarrassing for him, but it damages her levels of trust in him unfortunately. and she keeps telling him to stop but then another thing comes up where he doesnt want to admit the truth so he lies again (lime flaw). one example is when she asks him why he stays in the m34th, and his answer is "Because they pay well and I'm bored," but no matter how much extra commissions she finds and money she can magic up, he stays anyway. she has to learn from fucking clarinette that he stays because they make him stronger (real lime quote). he doesnt want to tell mochi that he feels so inadequate and inferior when he cant keep up with her, and the m34th is the only way to get his ass up to her level consistently. without it hes back to 16 year old lime who can barely help for shit in the face of magic and monsters
3 ) THAT LAST POINT IS SO TCWG IN NATURE!!!!!!!!!!! lime finding a super rare ingredient and its about to go bad so fuck it, sell it to the merchant. maybe he can keep it fresher than me and i get some money for it. and mochi sees it among the merchants wares and buys it :') bonus points if however shes keeping it fresh with magic, he sees it among her spell ingredients years later. its not IMPOSSIBLE to find one, its just so rare that makes him think if its the same one <3
(and of course the merchant doesnt say shit about where he got it. mochi goes "wow! so rare! where did you get this!" and instead of telling the TRUTH he goes "Industry secret!")
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In Defense Of Mrs. Westenra:
This is going to sound absolutely insane, but I understand why Mrs. Westenra removed the garlic from Lucy's room, and think it was a genuine attempt at kindness rather than a selfish act done entirely foolishly, though regardless of her motives she's still doomed poor Lucy to death.
Let me explain: we're seeing some masterful use of dramatic irony here, I almost wish I could buy Bram Stoker a drink for how positively stunningly he's put the dramatic irony into motion, because it is absolutely sickening and heartwrenching knowing that Lucy is well and truly going to get even sicker and then die, because her mother removed the one thing protecting her from Dracula from her room.
We the audience are fully aware that this is a bad thing Mrs. Westenra has done, that she's doomed her daughter and is putting her directly in danger, that her smugness at the situation is so entirely misplaced that we want to scream and cry and curse and pull our hair out the way Van Hellsing did the instant she left the room, or the way Seward's anger is barely contained as he writes out today's entry. Bravo to the Re: Dracula cast for how downright upsetting this episode was, from hearing a usually silly man weep aloud to almost being able to see Seward's jaw clench from how he recounts what happened. You can almost imagine how Van Hellsing must have wept when his son died, as he loves Lucy as if she were his own daughter.
But here's the thing. Mrs. Westenra has been left out of the loop of what's happening with Lucy, she's unaware that Lucy knows she's sick, and with only a little time left she needs to get Lucy well enough to get married, so that when Mrs. Westenra inevitably dies Lucy is taken care of, she has enough money and a good enough reputation to get the care she needs when Mrs. Westenra can't try to provide it for her anymore. This is a very old-fashioned way of thinking, but Mrs. Westenra was raised in an old-fashioned time, likely when there was a cholera outbreak in London and the bad air theory first started to circulate, while Lucy is being raised in a new and (what must seem to Mrs. Westenra) frightening London, and old people are often set in their ways even now.
How many times have you, the audience, been told by a well-meaning older person in your life to "just hit the streets" when out looking for a job? They don't understand that times have changed, and it's easier to just nod and smile and say "sure thing, you're absolutely right Peepaw, I'll do just that" than to argue with them on it, because they're looking at the world through their lived experiences, the past, rather than how the world is currently.
Mrs. Westenra is also a disabled woman, she has a congenital heart disease that has only recently been fully diagnosed, and her life is slowly dwindling to an end, and she is watching helplessly as her daughter is sick with a disease no one seems able to cure. She has every right to be suspicious of Van Hellsing and Seward, because they can't and won't even tell her what's causing Lucy's illness, won't explain the garlic, and didn't even tell her they'd put garlic in her room.
Van Hellsing knows it's a vampire and can't fill anyone in on it, because that's supernatural hogwash, old-fashioned buffoonery, flying in the face of logic and science and everything the New London is striving for. Nobody would believe him anyways. Lucy thought the garlic was ridiculous, and even Seward himself felt as though Hellsing was being irrational (when Seward was Hellsing's student, and looked up to him as though he knew every secret in the world, but still questioned him on this one thing, fearing Hellsing was turning to Oujia Boards and Crystal Balls instead of Science and Logic,) and both only understood and accepted that Hellsing knew what he was doing from his intense and dead serious response to being questioned, and then seeing for themselves that Lucy had slept well, and had color in her cheeks again.
Mrs. Westenra saw none of this. She does not knows who Hellsing is, doesn't know that Lucy trusts him more than she trusts anyone else in the world save for Mina, and she doesn't know that he's helped Arthur save Lucy's life, nor does she know that Seward is in much the same boat, that he'd given his own blood and sleep and sanity for Lucy's sake out of love for her and his friendship with Arthur and Hellsing, who in turn trusts him with Lucy's health and safety.
Mrs. Westenra does know some things though. She knows that doctors, who rely on science and logic, weren't able to catch her heart problems in time to save her life, that she's dying and becoming rapidly unable to take care of her daughter, who is also sick with an illness doctors previously haven't been able to diagnose and treat. It went away on it's own, and came back again worse than ever before later in life, much like Mrs. Westenra's heart problem. This may seem foolish, but part of why I love Dracula is because every character feels like someone you might meet today, rather than a person almost 100 years ago.
How many times have we, the audience, heard of medical malpractice going unpunished and ignored, especially because the target of the malpractice was a woman? There must be at the very least a handful of you. I know from experience (personal and from being there for friends and family) what it's like to be told you're imagining your pain (in hysterics), you're being over-dramatic, (you're hysterical) it's just normal period pain and will go away (women and the constant fainting at the slightest pain, amiright fellas), have you tried losing weight, have you tried exercise and fresh air, have you tried eating this one diet or another, maybe it's all mental, go to this doctor or that and doing exactly as you're told only to be met with a door to the face, and if you're lucky, eventually getting diagnosed and maybe even given medicine for your ailments instead of just a bill and a smack on the ass. Mrs. Westenra finally got a clear answer for herself as it was revealed she's dying. Lucy has yet to get an answer.
So lets put all of this together. Mrs. Westenra is watching as strange men sneak around her home and into her daughter's room, she's just been diagnosed with a disease that is killing her and there's nothing the doctors can do to fix it, I doubt she trusts any doctors right now even though we the audience know she's dealing with a really wonderful doctor, even Mr. Medical Malpractice Warning himself is doing everything in his power to make Lucy well again, and for the first time since his introduction with his proposal to Lucy, he's putting logic aside to be kind to someone who is relying on him for help, promising to wake Lucy from her sleep if she has nightmares. Mrs. Westenra doesn't know this. She's going to die, her daughter is keeping secrets from her, and her saving grace is that Lucy is going to be married to a good and kind gentleman who will use his wealth to keep her relatively healthy seeing as Lucy is going to be his wife, and she can't have anyone making Lucy seem like an unchaste woman lest her plan falls apart and she's not able to make sure her daughter is wed and thus, safe. Mrs. Westenra knows that even gossip of Lucy sleeping around could make the whole thing fall apart, because Arthur has a reputation to uphold, and so does Lucy. Lucy is a new woman in a society where the old ways are dying or being reborn, and likely doesn't understand her mother's fears, knows that her friends would never hurt her, but that doesn't matter in the eyes of society because at the end of the day she is an unwed woman left alone with a man, a prior suitor no less. She walks into her daughters room and sees these men have left flowers everywhere, and worse is that they stink to high heavens.
Lucy seems better, but Mrs. Westenra has never gotten to see what Lucy looked like after Dracula fed on her, so to Mrs. Westenra these heavily scented flowers are going to look like something doing more harm than good. She knows from being raised in an old-fashioned society that fresh air does a lot of good, that's why Lucy went on that vacation with Mina, and she doesn't know how bad Lucy's sleepwalking got because everyone stopped telling her anything after they found out about her heart, at Lucy's behest no less. She feels like fresh air works, and these idiot doctors trained in the new ways (that have proven unhelpful, they couldn't save her could they, so how would they know what Lucy needs?) have gunked up her daughter's room and are inadvertently making her worse with the foul smelling flowers. Mrs. Westenra was probably alive as well when the cholera pandemic was in full swing and explained as being caused by bad air, and she can see her daughter is sick and wants to help her. So she takes the noxious flowers out of Lucy's room and opens the windows, and tries to get the men-folk to understand that they're no longer needed, not understanding herself that her attempt to rid the room of bad air has instead let what's keeping Lucy sick in rather than keeping it out, and by trying to protect Lucy from being preyed upon she has inadvertently let a very evil thing who is going to prey on Lucy in every meaning of the word into her room, where she should have been safe.
She doesn't know she's in a horror novel, and she only has what she can see as evidence. She made the wrong choice because she loves her daughter and is trying to take care of her, even though she's failing miserably because she's applying a bandaid to a burn wound, so to speak. Right now many people hate Mrs. Westenra for her smug attitude and for letting something evil hurt her daughter, for undoing all the hard work Seward and Hellsing have given up sleep and blood for, but I think it's a little unfounded. She's an old fashioned woman in a new world, doing her best for her daughter's sake, and it's not her fault she doesn't know all of the details, and she can't know the details because it will kill her and possibly make Lucy's situation even more dire.
That's what makes Lucy's death so tragic. To save Lucy they'd need to scare Mrs. Westenra and she would die, which would affect Lucy horribly and more than likely kill her as well. If Lucy dies Mrs. Westenra will follow suit. So they have to keep both alive, and that can't happen as long as Dracula has his sights set on Lucy. It's dramatic irony because only we know that it's Dracula, that the garlic helps, that the supernatural is real, that Dracula is a thinking thing that intends to kill Lucy. Van Hellsing can't tell Seward what's killing Lucy, and even if Seward believed Hellsing, he would never be able to tell the Westenras because their health is caught in such a fragile balancing act, and they'd never believe either of them anyways. The only thing that could save Lucy is Jonathan, and he comes back to London far too late, half out of his mind and trying desperately to live the life he'd always wanted with his new wife.
It makes the scene where Dracula well and truly fucks up by feeding on Mina that much more powerful, because Dracula doesn't understand nor realize that Jonathan will kill him for doing to Mina what he had done to Jonathan, and the Harker's friends, Lucy's suitors, experienced firsthand the suffering of losing someone they love more than life itself. Lucy had to die for Dracula to be vanquished. Lucy's mother had to make the bad decision so the story could end with Dracula's death.
Without her death, Lucy's Polycule wouldn't have had the push they needed to band together for the Harkers (who get to have what Lucy lost. Lucy and Arthur could have been married happily, so entirely in love, and seeing as Seward and Quincey both almost had that with Lucy had they not been rejected and are Arthur's closest and most trusted friends, all of them suffering in unison because of Lucy's death, Lucy is the piece that ties everyone together. Everyone in Dracula loves Lucy. The polycule knows what it's like to lose the love of their lives, and they see Dracula trying to put Jonathan through that same suffering, they see Dracula hurting Mina who Lucy arguably loved the most out of any one of them, and decide they can't let it happen ever again.)
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💫✨ people I’d like to get to know better ✨💫
thanks for the tag @caffernnn !!
last song i listened to: So I'm actually going to plug three songs that I've been absolutely obsessed with over the past weekend and have been listening on repeat as a result, all by the same artist -- Lydia the Bard, over on YouTube.
Lydia makes villain songs for the Disney princesses (among other Disney female characters). Her first handful were just lower pitched versions of their songs (or songs from their movies), but as she progressed she started changing lyrics, and now she's really grown and is making the songs more and more unique, culminating in finally creating a wholly unique villain song for Tinkerbell, which just came out and is my favorite.
"Fall Little Wendy Bird Fall" recontextualizes Tinkerbell's animosity toward Wendy. In this version, Tinkerbell and the other fairies of Pixie Hollow brought Peter Pan and the other Lost Boys there because, due to the nature of fairies' existence depending on humans believing in them, fairies were dying all around them as humans grew up and stopped believing. So the only way to secure their own lives was to make sure their humans never grew up. But Wendy threatens that by making Peter and the others long for human lives. Therefore, Tinkerbell sees her as a threat who must be taken out to save her own and her friends' lives. Not only does this song make Tinkerbell a far more compelling character, but the vocal performance is stunning, and the animatic that goes with it is amazing as well. Literally obsessed.
The other two I'm obsessed with are Meg's (where Hercules betrayed her as well & she kills Hades & takes his power) and Isabela's (where Mirabel doesn't get to her in time, and her resentment over the arranged marriage drives her to snap). Meg's is a bop and has a killer line in "In time they'll say I was cruel 'cause I cared", and I'm sorely tempted to use her final look at the end of the animatic as my Halloween costume this year. Meanwhile, Isabela's is also killer musically of course, and has equally fire lines like, "What could you possibly expect was gonna happen when you made me? / Tend to a plant with poison and expect a flower, are you crazy?" They're both just so good.
favorite color: Purple! Specifically cool shades, and especially cool shades that are more pastel, mixed with grey. I also like blues and greens that are faded like that, too.
currently watching: A little while ago I had started rewatching Sabrina the Teenage Witch since I hadn't watched it since middle school, but once I got to season four it got . . . bad . . . and it has continued to be bad . . . so I've kind of stopped watching lmao. I've lately been rewatching Jenny Nicholson's videos, but I finished that, so now I've gone back to rewatching Jenna Marbles videos. Oh, and I really love this series on YouTube called Bistro Huddy! It's hilarious, and Drew (the guy who portrays all the characters) is fantastic, he really melts into the roles so you almost forget it's one guy doing all of them. Highly recommend checking it out.
spicy/savory/sweet: Honestly depends on my mood, but I do have a strong sweet tooth, so honestly it's hard to go wrong by offering me ice cream or a cookie or something similar.
relationship status: Currently dating the lovely @skimmingthesurfaces 💜 She's actually going to be here this weekend for my birthday! (My birthday is on Tuesday, so I'm very blessed to have her with me for the whole weekend.)
current obsession(s): Aside from the songs mentioned above, I've been really thinking about one OC in particular of mine, and her story / novel . . . she's a character that I first created when I was about 13 or so, and has gone through a lot of development since then, but I've been fleshing out a lot more of her story and how she fits into this new original world I've created (since she was originally created for a Legend of Zelda role play, albeit even back then she came from a country outside of Hyrule). I really love and cherish her a lot, even though most other characters think she fulfills the "girl who is stupid" role in the adventuring party, and on some level she also believes this about herself, and to be fair she's not academically gifted at all, but to be even more fair the school and in fact overall society she was raised in was extraordinarily fucked up and no one actually tried to teach her in a way that would help her learn and in fact learning disabilities were seen as personal failings and --
Ahem. Anyway. I have long since described her as "pure of heart, dumb of ass," and in many ways she is, but for the second half, she's not in the way most everyone around her growing up assumed she was (including herself), or like, even if she is it wasn't 100% her fault (like yeah she slept in class and that was on her, but also she wasn't going to learn whether she was awake or not because her teachers were not going to be able to teach her the material because it was a One Size Fits All approach to teaching even when it really wasn't -- and that's only scratching the surface of the problems in her school / culture, it's a huge systemic thing). But yeah I've just been thinking about her a lot. Karin's my girl and I love her lots.
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