*sighs eternally*

i've made this post before but i can't get over the way DBDA shows that charles and edwin feel exactly the same about each other. it's demonstrated in everything they do.

it's the way they echo each other's feelings about their relationship, beat for beat, through the whole first season. the same promises to never be apart, the same jealousy over the other's new date, the same opinion that their other half is "the best person they know."

they both keep serious secrets from each other, offer themselves genuinely as a caring ear, and eventually confess - though not the whole truth. they both bring the same lantern when the other is lost and alone, a comfort to each other. they tell strangers that first and foremost, before they are partners, they are best friends.

"you, edwin payne, are my best mate." / "you, charles rowland, are the best person i know." not just the same words, but both of them soothing their best friend's deepest fear. edwin, that he will be abandoned - charles, that he isn't good enough.

and even without all that, they're mirrors of each other in all sorts of clever ways. the way they move in sync and borrow each other's phrases, and the way they exchange glances that communicate their thoughts without words.

they have felt the same the entire time. i think now that edwin has realized he's in love, it won't take long for charles to realize he feels the same in that, too.

I think K went from online fandom discourser to magical protagonist to rebellious outlaw sharing state secrets so quickly that they never really had the chance to grow up and truly leave behind their habit of breaking the world down into tropes. He has a very genuine and real desire to help and fix the problems she helped cause, but his ideas about heroism and changing the world are all based on stories.

So K finds himself in situations where she can actually help and make a difference but their problem is that they always end choosing to do the big grand thing that makes her feel good and heroic like a protagonist from his favorite series, with very little regard for how helpful that actually is for others until they're faced with the consequences, instead of the less glamorous options that are more helpful and useful but that don't make K feel as important.

Fixing Evan's arm, playing doctor at whatever that hospital was called, even suggesting that Sam and the Weugan should leave the boys brainwashed are all things that make K feel good and heroic and like they're saving people but they're also not actually. . . good for anyone else. They just look good from the outside.

Their decision to refuse trying to control the magic, and to turn back instead of pushing forward, was a huge step for him and I'm so excited to see where K goes from here, especially since she's effectively become a typical scifi protagonist right around the time he started to try to pull away from that mindset.

Anyway, I say this as a primarily C3 only viewer (episode 20 of C2 and a smattering of C1 - I will get there one day!) - I found that episode so incredibly delightful and so fascinating to watch to see what Bell’s Hells would take from M9, especially when contrasted to their interactions with Vox Machina. 

Members of Vox Machina give them quests and bestow them titles and offer aid, but they don’t have the time or the space to dig into their motivations or relationships. They are stewards of Exandria, busy with a bigger picture and responsibilities. Contrast that with the Mighty Nein, who cook them dinner, invite them into their tower, and get straight to the heart of what’s weighing on them and what they emotionally need for this mission (yet still fully putting themselves first and prepared for sacrifice). They’re confident and secure in who they are and what they mean to each other and see through Bell’s Hell’s charismatic facade to find people who maybe just need a moment to evaluate what’s important to them as they go on what could very well be a one way mission. You can give them titles and responsibility, but if Bell’s Hells don’t actually believe in that or themselves, they will, like Fjord and Beau suggest, just end up as fodder.  

Anyway, there’s just something poignant and right about those from Vox Machina giving them responsibility and respect and those from the Mighty Nein giving them comfort and belief (and a night in a tower to just be). I just think that’s neat. 

always always thinking about how Annabeth just wanted someone who would stay with her and Percy just wanted someone who wouldn't send him away

Merry: confused awe

Frodo: confused awe

Sam: confused awe

Pippin: finally i’m getting the respect i deserve from these peasants 

so accurate i am choking on my carrot. this is making me giggle harder than it should. I love Pippin so much.

I don’t think there will come time when I’m not reblogging this. Sorry guys. 

no no no you guys don’t understand, Pippin is someone really important in the Shire! The books don’t talk about it a lot, and the movies won’t touch that stuff with a bargepole, but Pippin will be inheriting land rights to about a quarter of the Shire. He’s second in line to becoming military leader of all Hobbits. His dad is currently in charge of that stuff, but he’s completely aware of it, and educated for it, and that’s why he’s such an over privileged little shit in the books.

I thought it was a shame the movies didn’t talk about class differences in the Shire. Also puts M&P stealing food in an uglier light.

To be fair, at the time of the Party, Pippin would have been 12, which puts it back into a more acceptable light.  And they’re stealing food from Bilbo, a wealthy and eccentric family member, which again makes things a bit different.

But yes, when they call Pippin Ernil i Perrianath - Prince of the Halflings - they are actually completely spot on.

And when Pippin tells Bergil “my father farms the land around Tuckborough” he’s deliberately downplaying his class so that he can greet the boy as an equal rather than a superior.  It’s Pippin’s most adult moment in the series.  Bergil is engaging in a status contest which Pippin can totally win - but instead chooses not to compete.  Pippin is a gilded and spoiled lordling in the Shire, but he becomes a Man of Gondor.

Yeah, to add a bit of unnecessary trivia/level of preciseness, Frodo is the oldest of the four; he was born in 2968, was (obviously) 33 at the time of the Party, and so he’s 51 here. Sam’s second-oldest; born in 2980, he was 21 when Bilbo left and is 39 at this point. Merry’s two years younger than Sam, making him 18 or 19 in 3001, when the Party took place, and Pippin was born in 2990, so he was actually 10 or 11 during the Party, and during this scene they’re ~37 and ~29, respectively.

So yeah, Pippin’s the youngest by a lot. Plus, taking hobbit aging into account, he really is still in the equivalent of his teens; remember the Party was half to celebrate Frodo’s coming-of-age at 33, and Pippin’s around twenty years younger than Frodo. 

This fucked me up. I didn’t read the books and in the movie it was shown like Frodo took off with the ring like 2 days after Bilbo’s gone away, but it was 17 years after that. OMFG.

Also worth noting that “Merry and Pippin stealing food” isn’t in the book - raiding Farmer Maggot’s fields, specifically the mushrooms, is something Frodo used to do when he was a kid, before his parents died and he moved to Hobbiton to live with Bilbo. Frodo’s still afraid of Maggot’s guard dogs, but the farmer himself is sympathetic and helpful when he finds Frodo & Co. cutting through his field.

And this is specifically invoked in the books at the Council of Elrond, where Elrond argues against Pippin in particular going, because  he is so young. He’s okay with Merry going but wants to keep Pippin in Rivendell. Elrond has serious misgivings against sending an early-teenager off to face the Shadow, and given what happens to Pippin in The Two Towers, he was not wrong.

@cyrefinns

@cyrefinns

This is just so great. I just–I can’t.

Merry is also a prince of sorts - his father is Master of Buckland, which is the semi-autonomous boundary community between the Brandywine river and the Old Forest (never, alas, discussed in the movies). Merry and Pippin are friends in the books in part because they’re of relatively equal status and in part because they’re cousins (like all nobs, Shire nobs mostly marry each other).

However, the books also clearly make Merry the Responsible One, even though he’s only been a full adult for four years. (Think early 20s in human terms.) Merry buys and prepares the house at Crickhollow. Merry figures out the secret of the ring before Bilbo even gives it to Frodo, but Merry keeps Bilbo’s secret. Merry convinces Sam to spy on Frodo. Merry explains that they’re all joining Frodo on the Quest, whether Frodo wants them to or not. Merry cautions about the Old Forest and doesn’t go down to drink in the taproom at the Prancing Pony.

So in the books, Merry isn’t Pippin’s partner in pranks - instead, Merry and Pippin spend all their time together on the Quest because Merry’s looking after his younger cousin. Can you imagine what his mother would say if he came home without Pippin? Merry can, and that’s why he takes some pretty absurd personal risks during the books to make sure that doesn’t happen. Like, he literally rides into battle on the back of someone else’s horse, in disguise, because Pippin is probably somewhere in that battle.

Merry is 99%* common sense unless Pippin is involved, and then he is 100% save/rescue/protect/support Pippin. The character growth and maturation we see in Merry in the movies isn’t in the books; instead he has almost the exact opposite arc of becoming an extreme risk-taker, driven by his protective instincts.

(*The other 1% stabbed a ringwraith in the calf that one time, but we can argue that this was due to a natural expansion of Merry’s protective instincts toward Eowyn, with whom he’d bonded quite a lot recently, and toward Theoden, who he deeply respected as being kind of like his dad.)

bonus kleenex moment:

when pippin finds merry stumbling half-blind and sick through the streets of Minas Tirith after killing the Ringwraith, he tells Merry “Poor old fellow! I’ll look after you,” half-carries him to the healing halls, and is worried sick about him until he can finally get Aragorn in to give him medicine.

It’s the first time in the story that Pippin  has looked after Merry, instead of the other way around.

It shows that Pippin has grown up, that he can protect the people who always protected him.

This is also why it’s awesome when they finally come back to the Shire, and Saruman’s made a right mess of things, and it’s Merry and Pippin that kick ass and take names. They’re the closest things the Shire has to princes and military leaders, and they’ve just had adventures that make this look like a minor action. Frodo’s tired, and Sam’s just worried about Frodo, and Merry and Pippin are like hold my pint, I got this.

Well, hold my half-pint.

That’s one of the reasons I say that the movies don’t tell the exact same story as the books. The setting is the same, but the story isn’t, the characterisation differ, the overall tone is changed too.

(Doesn’t mean that the movies are worse - or better. Just different.)

also it hasn't cooked into an actual meta yet but I Am Thinking about the differences between tlovm percy genuinely trying to reach out after a fight that he won, and ripley tricking him, vs percy in a losing fight using his last turn of combat to look her in the eye and say "no matter what today, i forgive you. but i cannot let you leave."

alright, now it has!

and to open completely out of left field, this is the bastard

like, here's that brief exchange with vex:

and now i wanna compare that with the percy of campaign one around this time period, chiefly, his goodbye note. (read by vax, hence the occasional comments, if people haven't seen or don't remember)

these are not the same percy. hell, c1 percy didn't really even consider trying to build his life back up until the very end of the story. the percy we got during the ripley arc (ep 57-69) is one who is terrified what ripley will do with the time and inventions he gave her. one who asked the raven queen if there was any hope of fixing his life and she told him he'd always been broken. and one who had decided to make peace with the fact that the best thing he could do with the rest of his life was go down fighting all his mistakes

he never imagined building a home again because he couldn't imagine a world where he deserved one (or even really a world where he'd live to see his new goals achieved)

and that bleeds into his entire approach with ripley, because she is and always has been his primary character foil

c1 percy's forgiveness is self-focused. it's not even really about ripley, because he knows she's like him, she can't be redeemed, just stopped. he forgives her because of the person he wants to be - no longer the one who would allow countless innocents to be hurt in the name of vengeance, he is only trying to kill ripley to stop her from killing others

he said in the briarwood arc that his quest wasn't a noble one, that even if the briarwoods were helping people he would kill them anyway because he wanted revenge. here he does the opposite - if ripley was helping the world he'd let her go. regardless of what she did to him, the safety of the world is his new priority, above all. and left alone she will mass produce his weapons and kickstart a whole new age of warfare. i cannot let you leave.

(and the fight itself kinda feeds into that worldview, like it's one of the most brutal and harrowing fights vox machina ever faced - this wasn't a solo fight it was all of vm vs ripley and some hired mercenaries, and they barely made it out alive. they were all casting healing spells or taking healing potions every single turn and it still wasn't enough. they pulled out everything they had to keep percy from dying against ripley's onslaught, pike had even previously gifted percy a necklace that would bring him back the next time he died, and ripley managed to burn through that and kill him again two rounds later!)

(which is exactly what percy expected out of this path he'd chosen, he knew it wasn't going to be easy and he knew it was going to kill him, but he'd die knowing he did everything he could)

the tlovm fight is much kinder to him. he's not up against an impossible task anymore, and he has a lot of opportunities in this fight to use what he's good at to gain the upper hand. and he takes them! even up against ripley and her guards alone, he wins pretty easily

but then comes the problem of what to do with ripley. because if this percy has hope for the future, and they are the same, he's always known that, then he has to have hope for her too. and i've speculated in the past that ripley didn't actually want percy dead, that was all orthax, a theory that has now been made incredibly canon by s3, and percy knows it!

if ripley can shake off the influence of orthax here, then he's in no danger. and he managed it! with the help of friends, yes, but maybe that's the only problem, maybe ripley just needs someone to be on her side. and if he's committing to forgiveness, if he has truly decided to shed all the hate and hurt and anger, then the right move for the world, is to be that person on her side. he has to at least try.

and what he doesn't expect is for her to not be so like him after all

i do want jammer to lose his shit a bit. like, in a very real sense, he did not fucking sign up for this. the first time the wizard community reached out to him, it was a crazy political maneuver disguised as an innocent offer of education. he agreed to go to school just to find out these people won't let him go home and won't tell him anything and set him up to fail because they look down at him, so of course he left! fuck that! only now they reached out again, and he's told this is just a quick errand, a quick little magical adventure to deliver something while hanging out with his old friends and he'll be done before spring break ends, and somehow yet again there are wild power struggles that nobody told him about and now people are killing each other. he's been volunteered to save someone else's world while his friends get to party and have fun the way kids his age all do, AND he has no choice because his friends' lives may be in danger AND this fuckass rock doesn't like him even though he doesn't even want to be here. i don't think evan killing philtrum was bad, but i do think jammer deserves to freak out for once

I always forget just how good The Truth is until I reread it. Not just the central mystery but the themes of it! The way it marks such a sharp change from the old Ankh-Morpork to the new one we'd see in the later books, far more than any of the Watch books ever do.

And William! A character of all time. This awkward little man who believes passionately in truth because "don't tell lies" was quite literally beaten into him as a child, who then tells a lie to protect the one who did the beating. This man with very few social skills who earns the loyalty of his coworkers with his sheer passion. William who was raised to be a bigot and is fighting those instincts every step of the way.

When the dark light reveals the spectre of his father looming over his shoulder all the time! When his father threatens to kill him and he is relieved! When Otto compares William's internal struggle to overcome the lessons he was taught as a child, the racist, classist, cruel beliefs of his family, with his own struggle to not drink blood.

I adore this man. I adore how electrified he is when he's trying to solve a conspiracy, how brave, how dedicated - and it never shows up again. In all other books, from the perspective of other characters, he's a stuffy straitlaced stick-in-the-mud. Nobody else ever sees what his coworkers see of him, what his father finally sees of him.

William De Worde is important to me because the only other person who ever truly Gets It, the only character in the whole of Discworld canon who seems to understand him, is Otto. Sacharissa does a little but it's Otto who really knows him. Otto fighting not to be a bloodsucking monster, with the help of cocoa and a singsong, and William fighting not to be a metaphorical bloodsucking monster, with the help of his colleagues and their faith in him.

The foils of Azi's companions as a robot who feels and has empathy versus a group of humans who are cold and calloused and robotic. I'm losing my mind scavengers reign is so good

I have so many feelings about the psychic autism creature from Scavengers Reign.

It's such an interesting idea to have a creature with telepathy but not human level intelligence. Having Kamen in his mind doesn't mean that he now knows everything Kamen knows, but it does change him in really destructive ways. Kamen's complicated feelings about the Demeter filtered through Hollow seem to translate to indiscriminate anger towards all technology - the emotions are there, but not the comprehension.

Another thing I really liked is that mind control is presented as quite bening in its natural context, and also that it's purpose is so simple and so easily achievable by other means. It's so typical of evolution to not only solve the same problem in many different ways, but also to solve it in wildly extravagant ways. Trying to reach food high up? How about claws, flight, mind control, shock waves to shake the branches. Why not. Just irrepressible abundance.

I've been trying to figure out the potential evolutionary function of Hollow's kind absorbing their symbiotic critters. I think this could be super useful if the ecological niches of Hollow and the tripod creatures only partially overlap. And there are times when the tripods are in distress or desperately lack some nutrients or something. Hollow took Kamen in when he was clearly in distress, and after Hollow was completely focused on actions driven by Kamen's feelings, not even feeding. So the critter is kept alive and safe, and through the mental link Hollow knows what it is they're in distress about and can get them to the right place. That is such a neat adaptation! And potentially really flexible, allowing Hollow to create symbiotic relationships with different species. Maybe originally it started as a gestational adaptation. If the environment was unpredictably hostile it could be useful to be able to give birth to young but then, uh, unbirth them I guess, to keep them more safe temporarily.

The problem is, Kamen's needs aren't evolutionarily driven, and Hollow has no way of fully comprehending them or achieving them.

Oh man, the scene where Hollow lies down next to Fiona's body. Kamen doesn't know and Hollow doesn't comprehend, and it's killing them both. It's like Kamen completely abandoned his responsibility to be present in the world and act upon it, but his will is still acting on the world in a blunt and uncomprehending way through Hollow. Which as far as the addiction metaphore goes, yup, that's pretty spot on.

I'm so happy that Hollow got a happy ending. For a moment when he was melting away to reveal Kamen I thought that they were going to treat him as just a container for a human, a violent problem to be solved with violence. I should have trusted the show to be kinder.

Hollow is just a little creature, he shouldn't have been forced to try to understand concepts like self loathing or divorce, and now he never has to ever again.

Scavengers Reign finale spoilers ahead:

There's something about the way Levi was the solution to Hollow, like... Kamen and the creature were in this feedback loop, right, making each other worse, isolated and focused only on each other. I was so unclear about Hollow's behavior and possible "motives" as it grew -- it wasn't behaving like an animal filling a niche in an ecosystem, but it didn't seem to have goals that made sentient sense either -- until I realized the extent to which their psychic bond went both ways. And nowhere was that more breathtakingly clear than when it found Fiona's body, looked at her with what seemed to be deep and genuine sorrow, then laid down beside her. Who knows if it would ever have moved again if she hadn't been destroyed. Like. This was a creature initially in tune and connected with its surroundings -- we see how the other members of its species go about their business -- until it enthralled Kamen and the two of them started feeding this circular obsession with themselves and Fiona, to the point that Hollow left its forest and trekked a vast distance to an alien hunk of metal that offered no sustenance, to go sit alone with a corpse. Completely disconnected from its home and the life on this planet.

And then. And then what breaks it, what boils away the monster, is this massive connection. Levi's deep and profound connection with the vast network of living things all over the planet, all intertwined -- it utterly overwhelms Hollow and Kamen, peels the creature down to a version of itself no longer bloated with the completely self-referential miasma it and Kamen had fostered in the closed system of their psyches.

And it gets another chance! That new little creature gets to go back and become a part of things again -- and so does Kamen. When we see him gently releasing that little green animal into the vibrant forest... That's the least selfish thing we've seen him do in the entire show. It's quite possibly the least selfish thing he's done in years. It's a step outside of himself, finally.

And I think it's interesting that the crucial moment was when the creature tried to enthrall Levi; it tried to suck Levi in the same way it did Kamen but Levi utterly RATIO-ED it through the awesome power of already BEING connected to a degree infinitely greater than the link Hollow was offering. Hollow couldn't contain all that; its capacity was too small. just. MAN!!!!

one of my favourite little things about the murderbot diaries is how present all secunit's friends are even if they're not actually physically present. it doesn't do the annoying thing where it jumps through hoops to bring back characters that aren't really relevant to the narrative but it also doesn't do the other annoying thing where it pretends they never existed either. like secunit talks about art and mensah all the time even when art or mensah aren't in the book. it's clear how bharadwaj has impacted its personal growth even when she's literally on another planet. it complains about gurathin and pin-lee when they're not there. it's still sad about miki and don abene and it mentions tapan and maro and rami even though it only knew them for a few days (because when you're new at being a person every interaction with other people is important even if it's short). iris reminds it of mensah. iris also reminds it of ratthi. its hair is fluffy bc it let amena play hairdresser off-screen and it messages her so she knows it's okay. it doesn't have to worry about protecting volescu anymore because volescu retired thank goodness. it's still using thiago's language module. etc etc etc

it's such good writing because it's such a little thing that gives the characterization and relationships greater depth and also reinforces the running theme of friendship in the series and then also subtly gives this sense of 'the people you love are a part of you/your story' and also reinforces secunit's role as a storyteller because it's constantly telling little stories about all its friends.

I think Charles grins fondly when Edwin's being a bitch because he genuinely thinks it's hilarious and adorable. But I also think he admires the shit out of Edwin's unwillingness to tone himself down or file off his sharp edges. Charles needs to be liked so much, and he spends so much time setting himself aside and tying himself in knots to be what other people need, and Edwin just doesn't. He is exactly and entirely his snippy bitchy self and everyone else can take it or leave it. I think there's something exhilarating in that for Charles - both a sense that by attaching himself to Edwin he can borrow some of that fearlessness about outside judgments, and a thrill of knowing that Edwin can ignore everyone else's opinion because Charles is always, entirely, inarguably enough for him.

And there are downsides to that dynamic. Charles works really hard to manage the vibe, and the fact that Edwin doesn't really do that back (isn't equipped to do it back, because he doesn't read people and intuit what they need from him the way Charles does) sometimes leaves him feeling like he's carrying that weight alone. (who else is gonna keep spirits up? you?)

But also there's a reason Charles is drawn to stubborn difficult people with sharp edges who don't apologise for who they are, and I don't think he'd give up Edwin's bitchiness for anything.

One of the funny things about LotR is that almost every people in it professes to disbelieve in the supernatural, but because they live in a fantasy world their baseline for "natural" is so jacked up. The Rohirrim are like, yeah, there's a wizard in this tower and ancient tradition that we have no reason to doubt says this mountain is full of ghosts, but walking trees? Short people? I don't think so. Galadriel is like, "Listen I heard you describe what I do as magic and look I just gotta clear some things up, okay." Gondorians are like, yeah, of course the Enemy has spectres of men who lived long ago and never died and can now fly above us and incapacitate us with just their voices. This is just a fact of life, okay? But shut up about this magic weed that makes comatose people better. That's an old wives' tale. Royalty? Press X to doubt.

The people group in Tolkien's work who seem most receptive to magic and least restricted by their own notions of what it can do actually seem to be the hobbits. And they use it to avoid meeting people they don't want to talk to

where's that one post somebody made a million years ago about how vax and vex in syngorn would have been surrounded by elves accustomed to 20-hour days. but as half-elves they can't trance and would have had to get 8 hours of sleep, thus limiting their productivity compared to their peers. and making them look worse or lesser by comparison to their dad who already hated them. cause that post fucked me up a little. i'm still haunted by that.

Been thinking abt this quote from end of an era!! It makes me THINK