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I’m gonna throw my first post ever out into the void and see how it goes. The one piece community might eat me alive for this one.
If I have to see one more person say Sabo got his memories back from reading the name Sakazuki in the newspaper in conjunction with Ace’s death, as though it’s not completely headcanon, I’m going to tear my hair out. I had no issue with this headcanon before, hell I thought it was pretty cute, but seeing so many people comment in YouTube reacts with that as an explanation for Sabo getting his memory back is getting out of hand. It’s not even actually supported by canon, but everybody in the community treats it like fact so I’m gonna debunk it.
There are two ways Sabo could’ve heard the name Sakazuki when he found out Ace died; either he read it in the newspaper article itself or he heard the revolutionaries say it out loud. However, neither of those are actually viable and I’m gonna break down why.
The chain of events for Sabo realizing Ace died is hearing the revolutionaries say out loud “fire fist Ace is dead”, Sabo picks up the newspaper, reads only the headline, sees Ace’s picture which immediately worsens his budding panic attack/flashback, the revolutionaries discuss the events of Marineford in the background, then he passes out. Sabo was already starting to have panic attack as he was going to pick the newspaper up, the moment he saw Ace’s picture is when he completely flipped out and started having flashbacks, I highly doubt he was in any state of mind to read the body of the article.
Even if Sabo somehow did read the full article, it goes onto my next point, Sakazuki would not have been referred to as Sakazuki in the article and was never referred to as such by the revolutionaries; he’s only called his admiral title, Akainu, at this time. The names all of the admirals go by are titles, not their actual names; it’s an understandable thing to miss considering Green Bull (Ryokugyu) is the only title translated literally for some reason. Akainu just means red dog (the admirals seem to have a colour and Chinese zodiac theme). I do think part of the misconception comes from some people not realizing his name isn’t actually Akianu, so it’s not like the newspapers are going to be listing his last and first name as something like Akainu Sakazuki . All this is to say that the newspapers would not be using Sakazuki’s actual name until he becomes fleet admiral in a year; the admirals are never referred to by their actual names unless by people they consider close friends or people being disrespectful. The revolutionaries themselves when discussing the events of the war only ever use the name Akainu, there was no way for Sabo to have heard the name Sakazuki while panicking about Ace.
Look, I get that to a lot of people the Sabo amnesia stuff was not handled in a satisfying way, but there’s a difference between using a headcanon to fill in the gaps and treating a headcanon as a canon explanation when discussing the events of the manga.
The Terror Rewatch: episode 3. Does anyone know anything about why they still set Lieut. Gore's place at the wardroom table?
Just seems absolutely peculiar to me that they're setting his place out at the table (nice china & silverware and all) when he's died.
The Number I: Update Schedule
Chapter 59: Monday, March 20th
Chapter 60: Monday, April 3rd
Chapter 61: Monday, April 17th
Chapter 62: Monday, May 1st
Chapter 63: Monday, May 15th
Chapter 64: Monday, May 29th
Chapter 65: Monday, June 5th
Chapter 66: Monday, June 12th
Chapter 67: Thursday, June 15th
I think @runabout-river makes some really excellent fucking points and I wholeheartedly agree. Particularly,It is 100% accurate that JJK is more plot driven than character driven. I want to talk about the characterization a little bit though.
Now I'd like to preface this by saying, I'm actually new to anime and manga on the whole. This is the first time I've gotten into either (I am enjoying myself thoroughly). So maybe this approach to characterization is fairly typical in the genre. Or maybe its a Shonen thing, idk.
From what I've seen, characterization is a really really interesting thing in this series and it's Fandom. If I were to go on canon material alone, I would say there's not much actually characterization so much as an employment of tropes. Characterization often involves creating complex layers for your characters that aren't just generic nobility/villainy or expected set of traits for a certain archetype. I would like to clarify here that archetypes are not a bad thing. Used right, they're awesome. But creating tropes is different from creating characters. Characterization needs to go beyond the trope.
Some might confuse giving a character a backstory with characterization. And that's not necessarily the case. You could give the longest backstory but still have your character be rather predictable and typical for their trope, often the backstory is in order to play right into a certain trope. Now, this isn't an absolute throughout the series, it is relative. Some characters definitely have slightly better characterization than others.
I am NOT saying that the series has bad characterization. Because firstly, it's largely plot driven. And secondly, bad characterization is a whole different ball game. Bad characterization is if you could make a certain character do pretty much anything and it works because there isn't an established sense of "that person would never do that" (example- Black widow from Marvel). Good characterization would be where when you see a characters course of action and in hindsight you have no doubt in your mind that that is exactly what that character would do, no other way of acting would have seemed as right. Exercising tropes instead of in-depth characterization falls somewhere in the middle of the two.
Now here's where things get interesting. There is actually really cool characterization for jjk, but it's not what happens in the series, it's what happens in the fandom. The fandom consumes this content and then read and interpret these characters and often create content and/or discussions surrounding these representations. I think the best example of this is often when people in the fandom read into and create content about Gojo and his grief and trauma and how he chooses to process by suppression. The series does not do this at all because they need to keep Gojo within his trope- the cool, suave, overpowered mentor/man-child. And so we in the fandom often rely on these characterization and think of the series as one that has really good characterization when in reality, it's we the fandom who brought out that aspect.
One thing that bothers me about jujutsu is that the author doesn't know how to develop some characters. 1 Shoko Ieri is an interesting character but I find her apathetic without a cold and superficial personality. 2 itadori yuji doesn't seem to be a protagonist he seems more like a tool than the protagonist of the work. 3 nobara had no development dry and emotionless death. and many other characters. There were only 2 characters that really had development, which was gojo and geto, for me, they were the only ones that had it. Why do you think the author did this, is it because he didn't want to develop the characters that's why he killed many important characters? I would appreciate it if you respond.
This is a lot to answer so sorry if it gets confusing a little.
1.) and you really have to keep this in mind, is that the manga isn't finished yet. It's also not about to finish. We have just reached the beginning of the end and we have at least another 6 months to go if not more. Without the last panel drawn, we can't really talk about the stuff Gege hasn't put into the story yet.
Still, many of your points can be addressed.
Shoko: In both the present and the past storylines, she is a side character without her side of the story being shown too much. Her being cold and apathetic can be a fitting description of her in the present but in the past she was more open and easy-going.
When you say she has a superficial personality that's where your interpretation is a little off. For one, her personality changes and for two, her current personality reflects the cost that living as a sorcerer has on people. We are also shown her inner thoughts on occasion but interestingly, one of those thoughts kind of comments her role in the story.
(This thought also establishes that she has trouble understanding Gojo's point of view on his godlike status)
The thing with Shoko is that we're never shown what she does: heal and save people. That's an aspect of her character that has been completely, and deliberately I say, missing until this point. But she has saved the lives of: Geto, Ino and Angel (plus some others) and she has therefore shaped the entire plot of the manga extremely.
But this I think will change in the most impactful way possible: with her saving Gojo's life by showing us for the first time what her CT is and how she heals people.
On Nobara, you're right. She had little character development and no reflection on her thoughts and beliefs. To this I say, read my post about her coming back because I believe that she will get that character develepoment and reflection when she re-enters the manga.
The same thing goes for Tsumiki. I was really disappointed when Yorozu died and Tsumiki basically disappeared from the story with her role never being more than that of a prop. But it was pointed out to me, that Tsumiki actually had been shown in an active role in the manga 70 chapters ago and that role will definitely be revisited when Megumi gets the spotlight again.
Now to Yuji. Did you realize that you contradicted yourself? You said that Yuji doesn't feel like a protagonist but you also said that Geto and Gojo had the best character developement. You're definitely talking about Hidden Inventory here but HI is and arc where Yuji is removed as the protagonist.
So the main protagonist being removed from the story temporarily has a purpose. You could say that that was a flashback and doesn't really count and that you mostly mean the 4 mini-arcs in Culling Games where Yuji wasn't present + the Sukuna/Yorozu fight + the Gojo/Sukuna fight.
Gojo/Suku we don't even count in this, that's a given, Sukuna/Yorozu is character showing plus setup for the future and Yuki/Choso/Tengen vs Kenjaku we don't count either, because that's a plot progression plus villain fight.
In my experience when people talk about Yuji not being a good protagonist because he isn't present often enough, they mean the arcs where Yuta, Maki and Hakari take centre stage. (The three other mini-arcs add to this)
Why would a mangaka do their story like this?
For world building. To be more precise: for plot building. Yuta, Maki and Hakari have important roles for the endfights and for that they needed character development (Maki), a show of their powers (all) and setups for the future (eg alliances with Kashimo and Uro).
Right from the beginning, JJK always moved the plot forward first. That's why the pace is so fast. The story is plot driven and not character driven, but that doesn't mean that the characters aren't given their time, just that that time isn't an entire chapter.
You can critizese this of course, I too would've liked small character scenes to have been expended on. That Yuji is taken off the picture for world building isn't sth I would critizise though. That's what happened in parts of Attack on Titan, and it also happens constantly in One Piece with Luffy albeit in Flashbacks.
It simply adds to the story when we can see other characters act on their own and while Yuji is back in the centre now, he will most likely take small steps back again to let other characters shine like Megumi eg. It also adds to his personality, but for the end of the manga he will be the centre of attention.
Bayverse glasses
got this idea when I was at a restaurant earlier today, originally just gonna edit Skids and Mudflap but I did the full thing.
Original video:
https://youtu.be/cKJO06CYxdA
🇺🇸 Mr. Name was not too pleased with how I started off my most recent sketchbook. 🇧🇷 O Sr. Nome não se agradou muito com o início do meu novo sketchbook. #MrName #SrNome #sketchbook #sketch #personagemoriginal #originalcharacter #OC #training #drawingtraining #meta #realisticdrawingquestionmark https://www.instagram.com/p/B6dp2FbJe0g/?igshid=1wt77enrtfmqj
🇺🇸 After years of clamoring from the fans, here is Mr. Name’s enigmatic origin story: I wanted a blank character to try out cartoon faces and poses. He came to life and now looms over all my sketches. And the rest is history! 🇧🇷 Depois de anos de clamor dos fãs aqui está a enigmática história de origem do Sr. Nome: Eu queria um personagem genérico para testar caras e poses de cartoon. Ele criou vida e agora orbita todos os meus rascunhos. E o resto é história! #sketchbook #sketch #MrName #originstory #oldbutgold #OC #OriginalCharacter #cartooncharacter #cartoon #cartoonfaces #cartoonposing #characterposing #meta #Ijustcanthelpwantingtotellastiry https://www.instagram.com/p/B6YNPm7Jr30/?igshid=bqpoia8zbzhj
🇺🇸 Looks like it’s the end of the sketchbook for you, Mr. Name! 🇧🇷 Parece que é o fim do sketchbook pra você, Sr. Nome!
I've been obsessed with Jiang Cheng since halfway through my first watch of cql, and here's why. He always keeps doing better than I expect him to.
(wow, this got long. rest is under the cut!)
He's introduced as the brother-killer, the ruthless sect leader with a reputation for being merciless. Then cut to the flashback, a Jiang Cheng who is fifteen, surrounded by his sister and brother and happy about it, occasionally doing stupid teenager things, trying so very hard to be Ideal Heir, while Wei Wuxian is the prodigy that keeps stealing his thunder effortlessly. And you go, "oh, I know this story. It's a tragedy, because these brothers loved each other once, but one's ambition will eventually breed jealousy which will fester into hate and end, tragically, in the death of the better half." It's Cain and Abel! You've seen how it ends, it's the first scene you see, of course that's where it's going!
And then you see how the three siblings help each other survive a frankly horrible and abusive household. They try to do for each other what their parents couldn't; Yanli tries to be their mother, Jiang Cheng doesn't believe the rumours about Wei Wuxian being jfm's illegitimate son or hold it against him as he very easily could've learnt to from his mother, and Wei Wuxian does his darned best to get jfm to acknowledge and love his son as he does for Wei Wuxian.
You keep waiting for the other shoe to drop!! Yunmeng burns, Jiang Cheng chokes his brother in the rain, and you think this is it, this is where it finally breaks. But he sticks with his brother and sister, he makes some stupid decisions in his grief and pays dearly for it. When he wakes up without a core he is broken, his 'ambition' is destroyed, and you remember him choke his brother and think this is it, and then... it isn't. Other than the one grieving rant in the rain, he never blames his brother for their loss, never demands that he fix it all. When Wei Wuxian does come with a solution, Jiang Cheng doesn't act like it's something he was owed. It's his brother, his brilliant genius brother, who miraculously fixed this impossible thing! He's the most Jiang of them all, of course he achieved the impossible!
And then he's the young sect leader in a bloody war, needing to win, needing to prove his worth and his sect's worth at every turn. This is where he becomes the ruthless, powerful man we meet in the first few episodes! Only.... he finds Wen Qing, who is the enemy in the eyes of the Jianghu, and offers to protect her (only her because he knows his limits, he can't protect all her people and his own, and his duty to his sect is first). He goes looking for his brother, months on end, haggard to the bone.
Then Wei Wuxian shows up wielding a power that's the worst taboo in their world, a power frighteningly similar to the power-drunk villain that they war is being waged against! He's doing unspeakable things, terrible torture in the name of revenge! Ah, so this is what it finally is! The moment they finally fall out for good, where Jiang Cheng cannot abide to tarnish his sect's reputation with Wei Wuxian's, and their love turns to hate.
But.... Jiang Cheng sees what he's done, and the first thing he does is to hug him tight. He asks about Wei Wuxian not carrying his sword, but even after the diplomatic nightmare of a war council, Jiang Cheng is just worrying. It's the most open, the most honest we've seen him so far, and he is concerned for his brother. He shuts it down when Jin Zixun tries to pick a fight. He takes responsibility for the person everyone's wary of, because that's his brother and he trusts him! He's hiding things, yes, but one day he will be ready to talk and Jiang Cheng will wait till then.
Then the war's won (by Wei Wuxian, of course!) and he has a sect to rebuild. And his brother is not at his side. First he's slacking off and drinking around town, then he runs away with the Wens to the Burial Mounds. It's terrible for the sect's and Jiang Cheng's own precarious position in Jianghu. Surely, this is the last thread of Jiang Cheng's love for his brother, the beginning of the man we were introduced to? But it's fucking not! Yes, he's frustrated. Yes, he's mad. And yet, he doesn't force his sister into a diplomatically advantageous marriage (which I strongly believe is the bare minimum of being a decent human being, but is something that wouldn't have been a questionable or dishonourable thing for him to do in the culture and world this story is set in) because she is not a pawn and he respects her choice above the politics! He tries to defend his First Disciple, his brother, and is overshadowed by much more powerful leaders who are bigoted and/or afraid of his power. And when it all goes to shit, they fight! This is the end of it, surely? But no! It's all fake! They fight, make up a lie about how the Yunmeng Jiang has supressed Wei Wuxian and his Wens in the Burial Mounds so they can live without being under attack for however long, and then have shady meetups to discuss their nephew's name!!
In the carnage of Nightless City, their sister dies at his hands, and the horrible realisation dawns that this is what pushes them over the brink, literally. And then!! AND THEN!!!!! EVEN THEN IT WASN'T ENOUGH FOR HIM TO KILL HIS BROTHER!!! The first scene was a lie, WEI WUXIAN HAD TO THROW HIMSELF OFF!!!!!! And when he's finally back, what does Jiang Cheng do? Kill him? ban him from ever returning to their home? No! He wants to drag him back home and make him apologise, explain himself!!
A lot of this is very focused on the brothers, but even outside of that, Jiang Cheng keeps subverting the expectations that the story builds for him right in the beginning. For all the talks of 'disciplining' his nephew (which could unquestionably entail some form of corporal punishment, as we see in other parts of the story) and the childhood Jiang Cheng himself had, the idea of his Jiujiu raising his hand against him is unthinkable to the point of incredulity for Jin Ling. When Jin Ling has his breakdown over Suihua on the Lotus Pier docks, I was full bracing myself for Jiang Cheng to yell at him for crying in public without any shame or dignity, but what does he do? Calls his nephew to his side and demands to know who made him cry, so he can fucking wreck them for daring to do that! He has a mere day to process the Golden Core reveal, and after all the yelling, he actually apologises to his brother!!
Then, in the mother of all sucker-punch moments, we find out that the one grief-riddled, frustrating moment of apparent stupidity whose domino effect this entire thing has been, was in fact Jiang Cheng willingly sacrificing himself, sect be damned, to save his brother and sister. And like!! How do you have such a character who simultaneously is and is not what he seems to be!!!
I (and a lot of the audience) immediately played into the simple brotherhood-destroyed-by-jealousy plot that it seems to be at first, but that's the intention! The entire story keeps showing how misleading, how vicious rumours can be and how horribly it can affect who someone is in the eyes of society. We see this happen in the story, of course, but the narrative also relies on the audience to make the same mistake, to take the tropes that seem obviously implied at the start, and then unravels the true complexity of the story as it moves forward. We got played by the narrative and it was so worth it!! Wei Wuxian is the prime example, of course, but cql (and mdzs from what I gather, though I haven't read the books) does it with such nuance and brilliance for Jiang Cheng, how do you not immediately lose your entire mind about it for the rest of forever!!!!!
Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.
Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?
i want more nuance to be entered into the discussion of the green girl sorority and how differently cynthia plays elphaba in comparison to those who came before her because while a lot of people are rightfully like "why was elphaba not black from the beginning" and celebrating that she is now being played by a black woman, i think we need to be careful in just writing off all the elphabas of the past as Random White Girls when the role was championed (and often followed/succeeded) by a jewish woman
the pop culture archetype of the Wicked Witch has deep roots in antisemitism stretching faaaar far back. there is a level of reclamation happening in casting idina menzel, a jewish woman, to play the Misunderstood and Maligned young girl who is branded as exactly that. and stage!Elphaba is also written and acted with jewish stereotypes in mind--she is loud, aggressive, no-nonsense, blunt. she is quick to advocate for herself and shut down the discrimination she faces. all of this is very intentional! her personality is abrasive from years of abuse, and that makes propagandizing her easy. this is literally the thesis statement of the musical--it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed.
cynthia's performance of elphaba is fucking INSPIRED despite going in a completely different direction. she's much more reserved, analytical, one of her key character traits is how well she can read people (see her calling out Galinda as insecure/putting on airs in their first scene together, clocking that Fiyero is using his party guy persona as a shield for his own depression) elphaba's attempts to blend in and make herself smaller all fail simply because of her existence, if not that then because she feels empathy so strongly she often struggles to hold back from acting, protecting.
personality wise, though, cynthia's elphaba is very quiet and closed-off, not at all the bullet-to-the-face that she is in the stage show, and... she still gets propagandized and maligned. though this seems to contradict the other interpretation, it tells of the other end of the spectrum of propaganda, one that black women watching (and many, MANY other marginalized folks) are sure to identify with--it does not matter how "nice," how reserved, how small a black woman makes herself. a racist society will still scrutinize her every action for a way to parse ill intent from it, brand her as an angry black woman who is dangerous and wicked, and write off any humanity she has in the process.
these two very different interpretations tell of the lie of assimilation. the fact of the matter is, when you are marginalized, there is no way to sand down your edges enough to make the people oppressing you "accept" you. that is why wicked is a tragedy at its core. whether loud and aggressive or quiet and unimposing, there is nothing elphaba could have done to make the people of Oz see her as anything other than a scapegoat to blame all their problems on.
so while i definitely appreciate that people are excited for black girl era elphaba, i would encourage us all to still show appreciation for what came before--that was not white girl era elphaba. that was jewish girl era elphaba. two houses, both alike in dignity, two stories both worth being told.
OH, here's something I forgot to mention in my bullet points! The movie is very intentional about when and how other characters touch Nessa's wheelchair.
You know the stage version of Dancing Through Life, where Boq says "Let's dance," and immediately pushes Nessa's wheelchair around as a part of the choreography? None of that here. The movie goes out of its way to have Elphaba and Nessa emphasize that Nessa should be in charge of her own movement. When Boq wants to dance, he gets in front of Nessa and takes her hands. When someone pushes Nessa's chair without asking, that is a bad thing.
I'm not qualified to do more than observe the effort I can see the film making, but I definitely noticed the effort. Especially with the casting of Nessarose being so phenomenal.
"Scrooge only changed because he saw how nobody mourned him after his death" NO NO NO NO. You don't get it! The last spirit only worked because of the spirits that came before softening him up! If the spirits had shown him dead and ungrieved only it would not work. As the night goes on amid the visits Scrooge is already visibly changing. He's different after the first spirit and even more so after the second. And it's because of how much he's already changed that the final spirit is able to succeed
what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.
do you ever think about chuck palahniuk writing “we don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression… the great depression is our lives” in the early 1990s as a young gay man living in america at the peak of the aids epidemic
what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.
what the fuck was wrong with people that Labyrinth was originally a flop. How could they take any aspect of it so for granted. How could they fucking do that to Jim Henson. Newspapers were calling it boring and even ugly. I want to go back in time and beat their asses.
do you ever think about chuck palahniuk writing “we don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression… the great depression is our lives” in the early 1990s as a young gay man living in america at the peak of the aids epidemic
Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That he’s actually quite nice. That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer. It’s to make people sin. And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
It’s subtle, is the thing. That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it. Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it. It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’ He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.” In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.
There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been. Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing. Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.
That’s a compelling story. There’s a reason we keep telling it. The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah. There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone. But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.
I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world. Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations. Somebody who enjoys it, even. Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given. He’s thrived. He is, legitimately, a bad person.
And he tries to save the world anyway.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t. It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. It’s about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
Og post
Being a jayvik fan is a spectrum
All I can say to this is:
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In wwx defense (I don't do that a lot but imma play devil's advocate for a sec) jfm didn't love him for who he was, he loved him for who his parents were, if he were some random kid jfm would have left him on the street to freeze, that's gotta mess with your head. Jyl and jc loved him for who he was, and when he thought he lost that he went searching for someone who would. He's just a guy who wants unconditional love, would he get that from jc if they sat down and talked about their feelings for once? Yeah, but they're both fucked up from their childhood, so wwx replaced that with lwj. Not saying it's a good nice thing and he's done terrible stuff in his life, but I can understand wanting someone to just love you for you, not who they think you should be. Anyways thanks for the jc defense and support you always give, he gets way too much hate in this fandom I'll never understand it
omg I am definitely not saying WWX had it good with the Jiangs, they fucked up all three kids! and the appeal of a relationship like his with LWJ is very clear for his particular personality and traumas-- I just think it's really interesting that so much is left unresolved in favor of that relationship in a way that doesn't feel sustainable
like there are some/many romances where the resolution of the central relationship is the symbolic resolution of both partners' major traumas/issues/questions/whatever, and thus other threads can be left unresolved by the narrative in explicit terms because they've been symbolically resolved by the resolution of the protagonists' emotional journey. but that doesn't feel like the case in MDZS at all!
still kind of insane to me that people talk shit about jiang cheng without fully understanding what he has been through so lets just understand what his mental state is like BEFORE canon begins:
born via a dysfunctional marriage to be the sect heir
father doesnt care for him, mother expects too much from him/everything he does is not enough
has his three dogs just kicked out randomly with no notice because of some kid he's never heard of by the father who never gave him love and/or attention
said father then favours this kid more than him, to the point that the entire world basically thinks that this kid is biologically your father's son as well, which causes even more family dysfunction
despite this still learns to love this kid as his unofficial brother
works his absolute hardest but is always second-best because his new shixiong is naturally talented
nobody appreciates the hard work he puts in at being second place despite the fact wwx literally doesnt work hard for it
masks his emotions with anger as a coping mechanism to minimise the amount of hurt he feels
ok great so now lets actually take all of the above and apply this mental wellbeing to canon events FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE (keep in mind this is literally what jc is seeing/experiencing because he DOESNT KNOW what the reader knows):
brother is off being the protagonist and getting in trouble and gets their sisters marriage ruined
comes home from a year away and then almost immediately has to go and be a hostage where brother continues his protagonist behaviour
gets trapped and nearly dies in a cave with a 400-year-old monster, is in charge of finding a way out and making sure everyone else escapes
brother and a guy who maybe hates him get stuck behind in the cave so now jiang cheng has to boost it home ON FOOT, without food, to get manpower to rescue them, which takes a minimum of a few days likely without any food or sleep
no appreciation or thanks for doing that since brother was more heroic and killed the 400-year-old monster
gets scolded by his father for being annoyed by this
parents immediately get into another fight about father loving wwx more than jc
because of the above shenanigans their sect is targeted next
tries to defend brother against being whipped to death and/or having his hand cut off by mother
witnesses his entire sect being burned and murdered
loses both his parents
decides to sacrifice himself to save his brother's life, instead of dying he is tortured and has his golden core melted
on top of his inferiority issues, the ONE THING he was expected to do was be the sect leader for the yunmeng jiang. the sect that no longer exists. he is now a sect leader with no sect and no golden core. no shit he wants to mcfuckin die
miraculously gets a new golden core but loses his brother
immediately plunged into a war and he's only like 17
spends 3 months trying to find his brother only for his brother to show up doing the Forbidden Magic and necromancy which is Super Disrespectful in their culture like holy shit what are you doing
brother refuses to use his sword in favour of the Forbidden Magics and kind of keeps undermining jc's orders as sect leader which makes jc look weak in front of all the other sect leaders when he's actively trying to rebuild their sect and be respected as a leader
fights a war for [handwaves] an amount of time, certainly a few years minimum, while watching his brother descend further into Unhealthy Behaviour but brother refuses to do anything or talk about it
ends up lowkey being a war hero
the other three great sects (of which there are now only four) swear brotherhood, leaving out ONLY ymj/jiang cheng, which, what the Fuck dude
is now a teenager who has lost his parents who now has to rebuild his sect from scratch with fuck all money, supplies, and support
brother, who promised to always be at his side helping, is not helping, and in fact is actively just getting drunk and being a nuisance and STILL REFUSING TO SAY WHY
entire cultivation world starts to turn on his brother who is now looking like a loose cannon bc he has Forbidden Magics that are Terrifyingly Powerful and also it has been proven that he does not give a fuck about jc's opinion since he's constantly doing whatever the fuck he wants
literally out of nowhere said brother decides to piss off everyone, start fights, and then KILL JIN GUARDS at a camp and MAKE OFF with like fifty people who are part of the family that he just fought a war against and were responsible for slaughtering his family/sect
go to the terrifying haunted mountain where wwx and the wen remnants are and sees that he's essentially starting a new family with a kid and crops, doesn't seem to care that jiang cheng is still trying to keep the ymj afloat and look like they have any strength
brother is still doing Forbidden Magic and refuses to explain why, and now says he'll secede from the ymj so his bad reputation doesn't reflect on jc like he HASNT BEEN DOING THAT THE WHOLE TIME
so now shixiong wants to just abandon jc completely after jc has lost his parents, had to rebuild everything from scratch, while ignoring the promise he's made their whole life? ok fuck you
jc also can't defend him in public because that would turn the ymj into a target and please keep in mind he is a teenager who was expected to do this ONE THING by his parents and he has poured his heart and soul and blood and tears into rebuilding the ymj and they are So Vulnerable Right Now
uhhh what the fuck suddenly wwx kills their sister's husband ?? bro what the FUCK?
everyone rallies to go and attack wwx for this and again jc literally cant do anything about it and refusing to go will just make everyone assume he's on wwx's side and their sect can't afford to be attacked rn
bro what the fuck now THEIR SISTER IS DEAD?????
oh even better now said brother is DEAD
jiang cheng literally has NO ONE LEFT. no friends. no family. no parents, no siblings, everyone he knew growing up is dead. its literally just him and his infant nephew, who by the way, is living with the sect who are the most powerful and also most likely to be super fucking shady so jc has to tread very carefully
so jc spends over a decade raising his nephew ALONE while trying to make ymj powerful and also hunting/killing demonic cultivators that now p much only exist bc his brother invented/popularised the technique
oh yeah and also this whole time the guy who maybe hated his brother is now like EVEN colder and more antagonistic towards jc like it was HIS FAULT that wwx is dead? get fucked lan wangji you didnt even like the guy (or if this is cql/untamed canon: you literally did nothing either so where do you get off on acting like you're better than jc)
over a decade passes and suddenly his dead brother is alive again and causing more problems and acting like the things he did were not major contributors towards jc's entire family and sect dying
More Political Drama Happens and jc has to manage it
suddenly its revealed that the guy he's been co-raising his nephew with is the major villain who caused the entire world to turn on wwx in the first place oh and also it turns out that the fucking miraculous core jc has IS HIS BROTHER'S, WHO NEVER SAID ANYTHING, AND THIS IS THE REASON HE STARTED THE FORBIDDEN MAGICS AND STOPPED HELPING AROUND THE SECT, but he didnt even BOTHER to tell jiang cheng about it
by the way did i mention this was done via an entirely unconsented experimental surgery
and now the brother of the doctor who did the unconsented experimental surgery is ?? mad at jiang cheng about it ???? like he was supposed to KNOW ABOUT THIS when wwx was KEEPING IT FROM HIM ON PURPOSE???
and now theyre all nearly dying in this dumbass temple - and the ONE family member jc still has is literally being threatened with a garotte
oh cool now jc's brother is saying forget the past let's just leave it all behind !!! as though THAT ISNT JC'S ENTIRE LIFE AND TRAUMA and the ONE THING he EVER wanted was for him, wwx, and jyl to be alive and happy, and now wwx is saying just forget it! like FUCK YOU???? does jc truly mean NOTHING???????
oh and now his brother is off gallivanting with the guy who hated him - who it turns out doesn't hate him - and now they're getting married
and jiang cheng is meant to just. pretend all of this never happened and live his life normally. while wwx is out there. being happy and married.
like... if you can read all of this and still treat jc like he's the bad guy, i'm sorry, but you have literally zero empathy. dude had it probably more rough than any of the other main ensemble cast, and i am including jgy in that, because jgy Made His Choices. jc literally just had to let things happen around him helplessly
I feel like JC has some weird gender shit going on. Not even in the normal sense; in the ‘assigned ruined woman by the narrative’ sense. Like. Wow. JC, you really gonna get called childhood sweethearts with your rogueish evil shixiong? JC, you really gonna be left alone with naught but a single child, a widow in all but name? Wangji is out there trying to assign himself widower vibes but JC is getting constant woman scorned and wronged wife energies forced upon him from get-go.
Even his father was like *looking at an eight year old* “I see my nagging wife in you”
THAT'S WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING
his parents really took a glance at that toddler and decided to project the most unhinged gender possible on him. JC, assigned neglected wife at birth.
JC performs it so conscientiously too! It's so so so important to how he is with WWX and how he views himself. 9yo JC after he's known WWX: "there he is. the cad that will break my heart." and can't ever everrrrrr stop loving WWX or break away from the utter grip WWX has on him. JC has known since before WWX came into his life that he was made to be neglected/scorned, by the person supposed to stand by his side and to whom he's supposed to be loyal.
Also lmao at the left with a child thing. It's totally that, except JC WISHES he was a widow!!! He's not even granted that dignity by society! But nah he's the ruined woman who was seduced and abandoned by someone who promised her marriage and then went off and died after making her look for a fool, while she was making excuses for him, and everyone knows what a chump JC was for it! Was WWX lying all along? Was is ever even real ?
(JC gets the answer to that question when WWX breaks it off at the temple by telling him nah, it was only duty to JC's family that made stick by JC's side. Probably not how WWX meant it! But wow, way to put it the least personal possible way. WWX's most intimate organ in JC's body had nothing to do with feelings for JC or JC as a person. Way to make sure JC never, ever reaches out for fear of being that nagging, clingy, shrewish, needy embarrassment of a person)
Hiii! I've read your tags about how wwx wouldn't probably do the core's transfer with lz because in his mind they are equals. So, do you think in some way wwx thinks less of jc? I am just very curious because it seems an interesting interpretation!
I mean, yeah, kinda, he does! He loves Jiang Cheng immensely, but there is absolutely a dynamic between them where Wei Wuxian considers it his job to protect Jiang Cheng from all forms of harm, whether Jiang Cheng wants to be protected or not. It’s complicated, and I think it’s kind of multifaceted. There’s an Older Sibling element to it (although it is canonically unclear exactly what the age difference is between them, and it’s not more than a year at most), there’s a your-father-took-me-in-and-I-owe-him element to it, and there’s the part where WWX has always been a step ahead of JC in all their mutual accomplishments (never mind that JC’s own accomplishments are very impressive! The view looks different from inside a sibling relationship, trust me on this one).
And also, I think there’s also the three-way mutual awareness between him, JC, and Jiang Yanli of how much emotional harm the Jiang parents are managing to inflict on each of them, and a deliberate effort on each of their parts to try to shield one another from that harm—but of the three of them, JC shows those emotional wounds the most overtly, because WWX and JYL repress their unhappiness (out of the shared, destructive belief that showing negative emotions to your loved ones is bad) while JC channels his into anger, yells, stomps off and openly sulks about it, etc, which is more recognizable as unhappiness. I suspect WWX has spent a lot of time doing what he does leading up to the Twin Prides speech/promise to be JC’s right hand man when he’s the sect leader: running after a JC whose feelings have been hurt, and giving him a hug or otherwise trying to cheer him up, because he can’t stand the sight of Jiang Cheng’s open unhappiness, and has to try to fix it.
The core transfer was objectively an insane extreme—so insane no one suspected it, because there was no precedent for it!—and one WWX was driven to not just by fear for JC, but also the overwhelming guilt from the belief that he was responsible for bringing the Wen to Lotus Pier in the first place (wrongly, of course, but Madame Yu spent her final words explicitly blaming him for it, JC repeated those words when he was having his own grief breakdown immediately after seeing his parents’ dead bodies, and then JYL dodged the question when WWX asked her if it was true, so you can understand where WWX’s head’s at at that point), and then guilt that he’d failed Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan in their explicit command to him to protect Jiang Cheng, by letting JC run off all headstrong and get caught by the Wen. The core transfer is both a OTT gesture to Fix Jiang Cheng, The One Who Must Always Be Protected, and a way for WWX to punish himself for failing to protect JC leading up to this moment (getting JC’s family slaughtered and home burned, letting JC get captured and tortured and maimed, because obviously the only person with any agency or control in this situation is Wei Wuxian himself!). There’s really no other character in the whole narrative that could push all the right buttons to get WWX to do something as extreme as the core transfer, not even Jiang Yanli (who on paper is physically softer and squishier than JC, but who is also clearly someone WWX views first and foremost as a caretaker) because Jiang Cheng is the only person he loves that much AND fundamentally insists on viewing as unable to take care of himself.
(In contrast to all this, five minutes after WWX meets Lan Wangji, he’s excitedly declaring that he’s finally met his equal in life. It’ll be a while before Wangxian get to developing the big swoony romantic feelings, but right from the start, WWX affords LWJ a level of personal respect he never shows to Jiang Cheng, Baby Brother.)
I will also add that Jiang Cheng is clearly aware that WWX sees him this way, and it drives him up a fucking wall. He obviously loves WWX and he absolutely wants him around, but I think he also wants an equality in their relationship that WWX consistently denies him, and that that is definitely part of his angst over the core transfer when he finds out—to him, it’s kind of the ultimate statement that WWX thinks JC is too weak to make it without him.
I do think there’s hope for them, post-canon, since they’re now alive and their relationship has the chance to continue to mature! But it’s going to require WWX to take JC out of that mental box he’s constructed for him marked “Fragile: Handle With Care” and to learn to respect JC’s choices and autonomy. Recognizing that JC managed to survive without him and continued to build the Jiang back up from nothing to being a great sect again will probably help!
so i was thinking about lan wangji and how he has this reputation of being righteous while also in my opinion acting like an asshole? like he acts very petty and is ready to pull his sword on people a lot and isn't really involved in politics even in a way that makes sense as a high ranking member of a sect? like the silencing spell on jin ling is uh. bad.
it's like lan wangji has scary dog privilege by virtue of his reputation and his brother and uncle who will wreck you if you do or say anything to/about him. except thats not right because theyre not scary dogs at all, they just protect him. it's like lan wangji is a scary dog and lan xichen and lan qiren smooth things over and stop him from doing something too awful and calm others down after lan wangji does something not too great. and i guess with the reputation for being righteous (second jade of lan) is enough to deter people from saying/doing things like "hey he's a dick" because dude that's hanguang-jun, what are you talking about???".
and the people he saves on night hunts or whatever are random civilians who don't interact with him enough to see him behave badly, and a cool and aloof powerful cultivator saving them gets a lot of leeway on account of being a famous powerful cultivator and also being someone who saved them from fierce corpses or spirits or healed their kid or grandparent or whatever. who cares if theyre quiet and kinda rude they saved their sister!!!!!
so when lan wangji is a dick to jin ling or fucks off from political stuff or is ready to pull his sword on jiang cheng in the jiang ancestral hall or whatever he's doing so with the reputation of hanguang-jun who saves people and also is supported by lan xichen (lan sect leader and brother) and lan qiren (former acting sect leader, uncle, teacher) and they are protective and dare i say overindulgent of lan wangji???? like bro you are a political figure whether you like it or not, your actions have effects on things besides your own direct personal circle. like the heir of gusu lan pulling a sword on sect leader jiang is fucking political incident whether or not theyre both being assholes or not. the adult heir of gusu lan using the lan silencing spell on the teenage heir of lanling jin is a political incident. not engaging with other sects politically, ever, says important things about your priorities and your influence both within the sect and without.
also like. what if something happened to gusu lan? like say lan xichen is injured, and lan qiren is also out of commission for some reason? that means lan wangji is acting sect leader. can you IMAGINE lan wangji as sect leader. imagine it. really visualize it. there's a lot of jokes about lan wangji being a petty bitch and people love it but imagine a petty bitch as a sect leader. the situation would blow up faster than lans get drunk on a glass of wine. like dude. so much stuff would be totally fucked.
anyway lan wangji as he is in mdzs would be a shit sect leader/chief cultivator/etc. he doesn't behave like he's intimately involved in the politics of his world (which he is) and may or may not have training in doing so - maybe he has training and just doesn't do it? which is also really bad, then he would know better and still not do it or help in any way.
ok so your first problem was assuming mdzs is a story where Good People are Rewarded and Bad People are Punished.
your second problem was assuming that MXTX—who goes out of her way to showcase unresolved, tragic, undeserved endings in all of her works—would ever write a story with such a shallow notion of “deserving.”
the only reason wangxian makes it out unscathed is because they’re literally the protagonists. authorial intent and plot armor ensure their happy ending. that’s it.
I keep thinking if WWX had come back and JC had managed to have a kid or two, WWX would be feral about them. He’d be torn between complete adoration because they’re baby JC’s! Look their doing the little pout he did when he was a kid and WWX bullied him! And complete and utter rage at their existence. How dare someone make babies with JC without his approval, what if they’d muddied up his cuteness with their unworthy genes. No one should have even touched JC without WWX’s supervision. I think it’s extra fun when they’re WQ’s kids as well, if only for the killer frowns their kids would have and the confused disgust WWX would feel.
XD glorious!
But on a serious note, I think that he'd be overjoyed to know that JC found himself a wife and has a family that makes him happy. It would sting a bit that the same was denied to him, but WWX would be happy for his shidi and adore his kids.
...unless (and here on a less serious note) it's an omegaverse and JC is the omega in question and that's when WWX will go feral about some strange rude unworthy alpha having their way with his shidi???!! JC was such a finnicky and particular omega, there's no alpha in the world suitable to deal with his quirks and to protect him properly! There was one alpha to do that's but he died, but now he's back and even if Wei Wuxian wasn't in love-love with his shidi, he was prepared to be his alpha (platonically, of course, and for the purest of intentions of course;) and now...
Someone took his place.
They have to go.