Hello. You are asked so many questions, probably because you know the canon according to Arslan well. I came across the pages of their artbook of an artist who worked with Arslan 1991 kamimura sachiko "guardian". Unfortunately, I can not provide a link. Of course, not only Arslan was there, but also many other projects that were visually similar to him. There were illustrations with a clear hint of BL (maybe it does not apply to Arslan, maybe it does). The author of the original novels Tanaka doesn't like yaoi or BL and the romance with the 2015 anime is not how he agreed to it?
I don’t own this artbook, but I know that @colleyuriko does and shared some pictures of the contents (here and here). From what I’ve seen, the Arslan Senki content doesn’t feature anything that hints at particular ships? Are you talking about the illustrations of other characters, ones who may look similar to characters from Arslan Senki? Anyway, there’s no BL in any form of Arslan Senki. I’m sure some of the creators who worked on various adaptations may like particular ships (and there’s nothing wrong with that!) but that’s all, it’s not like anyone has ever added it to the canon.
Hello! Yes, I own both Sachiko Kamimura artbooks that have Arslan Senki content. You will find images like this where characters exist in the same picture, but nothing I could see Yoshiki Tanaka or anyone complaining over.
The artist I would argue who does have a ship is the ‘90′s manga artist Chisato Nakamura: it’s Daryun X Narsus in the extra pages at the back of the manga. But I would agree with @innerchorus that none of the official artists have included obvious ships in official art that could cause the original author to lose sleep over… if there even is a “problem“ in the first place.
Thanks for your input, that’s essentially what I expected!
I can believe that Chisato Nakamura likes Daryun/Narsus. If you take a look at her website (ARU’s House) you can see some of her Arslan Senki illustrations in colour, including the last image in the post linked above, which I’ll share below:
As for other artists, Ai Yokoyama definitely has a thing for Arslan and Daryun, I’m not sure whether she outright ships them or whether it’s just loyalty kink. I’m not the biggest fan of her portrayal of it, whichever it is.
as someone with experience in the discord console, unfortunately they made it a little trickier than just ctrl + shift + i about four years ago, i believe.
specifically what you're going to want to do is find settings.json in %appdata%/discord or the mac equivalent which is found with finder > go > go to folder. there is a setting there titled "DANGEROUS_ENABLE_DEVTOOLS_ONLY_ENABLE_IF_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOURE_DOING": and if it is not, copy and paste "DANGEROUS_ENABLE_DEVTOOLS_ONLY_ENABLE_IF_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOURE_DOING": true into the .json and then, only then you can do crtl + shift + i or command + option + i on mac.
from all i can gather this is entirely cannon except the fellowship hobbits didnt invent it, its been a traditional hobbit game on par with humans and ‘tag’ for about 500 plus years to the point the average human will routinely fail to notice an entire picnic of hobbits at ten feet, blanket and potato salad included
like hobbits dont realize they legit have a supernatural ability to not be noticed on par with elves physics bending sniper scope vision
So yeah, it’s canon that hobbits are the stealthiest of the races of Middle-Earth, even more so than elves. Which is an amusing trivia fact, until you start realizing how much of the plot of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is based on this.
Why did Gandalf randomly decide that a plump gentle-hobbit was the right person to be a burglar for an adventuring party? It seems like wizardly eccentricity, until you realize Bilbo’s got a racial bonus to Stealth of like +20. Why does he get the Ring? In text, it’s partly coincidence, but also - which party member do you give your Ring of Invisibility to? The Rogue with a crazy Stealth bonus, of course. Bilbo uses his Stealth, boosted by the Ring, constantly, and the dwarves would have been dead a dozen times over without it. He’s able to get the Ring in the first place because he stealthed out of the middle of a horde of goblins. Then he’s sneaking up inches from trolls, secretly living inside the elves’ freakin palace (with Legolas) for months, rescuing a whole pack of dwarves from under the elves’ noses, regularly pick-pocketing people including elves, sneaking past a dragon, sneaking to deliver the Arkenstone.
Then we follow up into Lord of the Rings. Gandalf’s now bred up a second-generation Rogue. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry have that same massive racial Stealth bonus, and Frodo also has been raised by an adventurer. He speaks Elvish fluently, he’s friends with dwarves, he studies maps obsessively. Then he inherits Bilbo’s Stealth-boosting magic item - now upgraded to cursed McGuffin. When Gandalf decides it’s time, he collects Frodo and assembles a party. Their goal isn’t to march into Mordor, or to battle the Boss: it’s to sneak through enemy lines, past an entire army (or two).
The humans, elf, dwarf, and wizard angel keep drawing too much attention and getting them attacked (plus admittedly Pippin, the low-WIS darling), so eventually Frodo and Sam ditch them and head off on a pure stealth run. They can’t use the Ring of Invisibility anymore, but fortunately Galadriel gave them another Stealth-boosting magic item, the cloaks. They sneak halfway across Middle-Earth, past armies, through miles and miles of enemy territory, while being hunted by every evil being on the planet, particularly a literal giant All-Seeing Eye. Not to mention the Palantiri, extremely powerful divination items which are being actively used by three different groups of enemies/competitors.
The other main canonical Hobbit power is that they’re “very hardy folk”, meaning they have incredibly high resistance to various things from poison to mental influence. So they can survive the literally poisonous air and water of Mordor, which was designed to kill every species but orcs. And they can survive close contact with the Ring for decades or centuries, not only physically but also maintaining some degree of mental independence, when any other race would succumb in minutes to hours. (Note the most “powerful” characters - Elrond, Galadriel, the literal angel Gandalf - refuse to even touch the Ring, as do the most morally sound, Aragorn and Faramir.)
Why did Gandalf choose a minor member of the country gentry, the size of a toddler, with no combat training, to save Middle-Earth? Because absolutely no other creature on the planet could have done the task. Frodo was all but created as a weapon against Sauron. He, and he alone (with Sam), was capable of saving Middle-Earth.
TL;DR: Legolas would get jump-scared by Frodo every single time, because Frodo is the greatest Rogue in Middle-Earth, and the plot of the entire series depends on that fact.
Gonna print this out and staple it to the face of the next person who asks why they didn’t just give the ring to the eagles to drop into the volcano. BECAUSE POISONOUS AIR AND AN ARMY WITH TREBUCHETS YOU TWIT.
Also Sméagol/Gollum, mentioned by Gandalf to be a hobbit or close relative of hobbits. The elves can’t catch him in Mirkwood, and this is after he lost the Ring and is out in the open for the first time in ~500 years.
It bugs me a little bit that The Ring canonically turned Isildur invisible.
Canonically, The Ring’s whole thing is that it enhances the pre-existing abilities of whomever wears it, in addition to driving them insane. This is why it would be so devastating for Gandalf, or Galadriel, etc to get their hands on it. They’re already super powerful, the buff would make them unstoppable.
And the stealth thing is established really early on in the Hobbit as the thing hobbits were amazing at. It would kick ass as a detail for The Ring to only turn Hobbits invisible. Among other points, it enhances the plot-point of Gandalf not being able to recognize the thing and then after his suspicions were raised taking so much time studying ring-lore before he could. If The Ring only turned Hobbits invisible, then Gandalf literally has nothing to go off of for identifying the damn thing until he’s gotten his PHD in Ring-ology. Which is canonically what it took for him to figure it out.
This is still plausible without the alteration to The Ring’s exact properties, but I feel that the narrative is a bit stronger with it.
Amusingly, as far as I can tell its also canon-compliant.
What the fuck does that mean, didn’t I already say that Isildur is canonically turned invisible by The Ring? Ah, but you misunderstand the nature of Tolkien’s canon. The Hobbit exists within the fiction of The Hobbit. It is written by Bilbo, with Tolkien himself merely translating it from Westron to modern English. The Lord of The Rings is compiled by Frodo, the Silmarillion is a Noldor history book.
We know that The Ring turned Isildur invisible because of how he died; his party was ambushed on the road by orcs. Isildur donned The Ring and leapt into the river to escape. But The Ring betrayed him, enlarging itself on his finger and falling off, thus allowing the orcs to see him and fill him with arrows.
Except.
That’s the translation of what happened, and we don’t know how reliable the original source was in any case. Recall that ordinary humans are already remarkably resistant to death by injuries that would fell other creatures, and Isidur was a full-blooded Numenorean besides. It is entirely plausible that The Rings enhancement of these properties would make Isildur very difficult to kill indeed. Maybe he was already full of arrows when he went into the River, but his wounds only became fatal retroactively, with the loss of The Ring.
Perhaps the “original text” Watsonian-Tolkien was translating more simply indicated that Isildur went into the river, was betrayed by The Ring, and this caused his immediate death-by-arrows. Watsonian-Tolkien could, in this case, be forgiven for assuming that it was a matter of loosing the invisibility which The Ring emparts to so many Hobbits in the texts Watsonian-Tolkien has read which led to Isildur’s death.
Alternatively, it could have been the mistake of an earlier chronicler or transcriber whose error Watsonian-Tolkien was simply passing on.
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
I truly am obsessed with how Knives Out was like. Hello Daniel Craig, man who has spent the past two decades of his career being alternately beaten up and objectified playing an action hero with no personality. Would you like to please put on a shirt and an incomprehensible vaguely Texan accent and flex your character acting dark comedy muscles as well as your pecs for a while. And he’s like BOY WOULD I and they made a work of art. Also love that they put Chris Evans in sweaters. Get your beefcakes then dress them nice make them soft and give them some bonkers character work to do it’s what cinema needs more of
I love that several people have responded to this with “op I forgive you cause you’re Scottish but that’s not a Texan accent” which is fair thank you I appreciate it but no two people have agreed on what accent it is which is also Absolutely fair and hilarious as a reaction to this film
Cannot stress enough that I do not know what the fuck a foghorn leghorn is but literally a hundred people have said it to me so far so I’m assuming it’s important to, like, Americans
Presumably, it’s less that Foghorn Leghorn is a Rhode Island Rooster and more that he’s a Rooster who lives in Rhode Island, possibly a Central Virginian Leghorn Rooster living in Rhode Island, though that implies a complicated and interesting life story that took him from Central Virginia all the way to Rhode Island
I would not rely on TV Tropes as an unbiased source. Wikipedia simple says his species is officially “rooster” and mentions a Leghorn being a breed of chicken. TV Tropes probably thinks the Cornflakes chicken is a RIR too.
I am potentially willing to concede he is a “barnyard mix” (cross between breeds) and his father, Harold Leghorn, was a leghorn and his unnamed mother was a RIR or other dark variety.
Sometimes it’s 1:30 am and you own chickens and you’re drinking whiskey in the bath tub and accuracy about iconic fictional chickens is the hill to die on, ok, and that’s why I love Tumblr.
This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.”
A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.
So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?
(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)
(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)
A scene taking place several months after Vader saved Luke. Luke’s force energy has healed Vader enough so he can breath without his mask and the two are trying to find a suitable place to hide from basically everyone and everything.
But not this planet. Both Skywalkers have definitely have had their fill of Sand.
I FINALLY FOUND OUT WHY THIS HAPPENS. You see this all the time when there’s a fight or a scrum and suddenly everyone pairs up with a member of the opposite team and they just sort of …hold each other.
Someone on reddit asked about it. And it turns out there’s a logical-ish reason:
all of the other players pair off with their man to prevent anyone else entering into the fight … so it’s a form of self policing.
[…] The players basically want to prevent 2 on 1, etc. fights and by finding a “hugging” partner so there’s no ganging up on one guy, even on accident. They do it because it’s fair. And it’s kind of cute sometimes.
I literally just watched this episode, and I'm sorry, but there's one thing funnier:
Zuko couldn't speak during this whole fight/escape in case someone recognized his voice. Can you imagine the frustration he must have felt having to go through an entire fight without yelling? Zuko???
It gets funnier when you think that he could absolutely, no problem go through a battle without yelling once, as seen here and yet chooses to be a dramatic gay and holler at the top of his lungs at every opportunity.
That says a lot about how he firebends vs how he fights with the dao blades.
He actually can't, at this point, fight without yelling if he's using firebending. In The Firebending Masters, he says he's been relying on anger and rage to fuel his bending, so yeah, in every firebending fight, he's drawing on rage and hyping that up by yelling. Someone has pointed out that after he finds the original source of firebending, he stops yelling all the time - I haven't checked that personally but it does seem accurate.
But he doesn't need to draw on fury to firebend hen he's the Blue Spirit. He can fight in total silence when he's working with a weapon he's more in touch with, when he doesn't need to draw on hate or anger to fuel it.
Imagine he does speak with a fake voice, but because he's in the middle of something and has a shit memory, he forgets which one he used the first time he spoke, so it's like
Zuko, in a mickey mouse voice: I'm here to rescue you.
Later
Zuko, in a deep Russian accent: we must get up into courtyard and lie low
Aang: did you have an accent before?
Zuko: no talking
Even later
Zuko, sounding like foghorn leghorn: now I say what am I holdin' these here ladders for?
Aang, making fun of him: it's a surprise tool that will help us later, ha-HAH!
NHS ghost travels to the past and the only ones who can see him clearly are baby!NHS & NMJ
on ao3
“Would you believe that I’m a saber spirit?” the ghost asked. “Or maybe an ancestor?”
“No,” Nie Mingjue said. He did not put down the exorcism talisman.
The ghost sighed. “Well, it was worth a shot.”
Before Nie Mingjue could do anything more, the ghost rushed at him – taken aback, Nie Mingjue flinched, and when he opened his eyes again the ghost was gone.
He still pinned the talisman onto the swaddling wrapped around his baby brother, who was grumbling in sleepy dissatisfaction at having been nearly woken up.
He wasn’t taking any chances with his brother’s health.
-
“I’m actually not dangerous,” the ghost argued. He’d figured out that if he hovered high enough, Nie Mingjue wouldn’t be able to get at him – though he still flinched whenever Nie Mingjue threw rocks at him. He must be a relatively new ghost. “I know it’s difficult to believe, but I’m here to help.”
“Sure,” Nie Mingjue said. There were plenty of pebbles next to the place where laundry got done, and he could grab one without being spotted whenever he dunked the clothing in. “I believe you. Come down here a little closer, I’ll believe you some more.”
The ghost sighed.
-
“Just give me a chance, okay?”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.”
“I have good reasons –”
“Don’t care.”
-
“If you come any closer, I’ll douse you in a male virgin’s urine,” Nie Mingjue said. “Ghosts are supposed to hate that.”
The ghost huffed. “Like I’m dumb enough come near you when you’re swaddling the baby anyway.”
-
“I’m leaving, I’m leaving! Just put Baxia down already!”
-
“You need more salt.”
“I thought ghosts hated that, too?”
“Maybe it’s rock salt ghosts hate?” the ghost asked, floating over Nie Mingjue’s shoulder. “I don’t think I have anything against proper seasoning.”
Nie Mingjue huffed, rolling his eyes, but he did add a little more salt.
“Ah ha!” the ghost exclaimed. “You are starting to listen to me!”
“That’s when the recipes says to put it in,” Nie Mingjue said. “I was always going to add some more of it in then.”
“I don’t believe you! You were definitely listening!”
-
“Listen, if I was a normal ghost, your father would have totally gotten rid of me, right?”
“Never said I thought you were normal,” Nie Mingjue said, soothing his brother to sleep in his arms with soft murmurs and a gentle voice that did not come naturally to him. “I said you were a pest. Did I ever say anything about being normal?”
“…no, I guess not,” the ghost conceded. “Damnit, I thought I was onto something with that. Also, shouldn’t a nursemaid be doing that?”
“Can’t be trusted,” Nie Mingjue said.
The ghost frowned, then blanched. “Right, right,” he murmured. “I nearly forgot, what happened with – uh, what happened right around that time. That would have been recently, too, wouldn’t it? You’ve always remembered it better.”
Nie Mingjue didn’t say anything.
“Still, you’re only seven. Even if they were scared to hire a nursemaid for fear of letting in another assassin, shouldn’t someone else be doing this?”
“I’m eight,” Nie Mingjue said.
“The point still stands. Surely one of the servants..?”
Nie Mingjue sighed. “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we’re at war,” he explained. “Everyone who can swing a saber is out fighting it, and that includes the servants.”
“I thought it was too quiet,” the ghost said, half to himself. “I haven’t seen anyone else in – okay, actually, now that I think about it, I haven’t seen anyone.”
“War,” Nie Mingjue said.
“You’re eight,” the ghost said. He looked upset. “How could they leave you alone like this? You make your own food, you do the laundry, you take care of – this is ridiculous! There must be people who are too old to go that could help…there must be other children! Where are the other children?”
Nie Mingjue didn’t say anything.
Nie Huaisang needed his sleep, after all.
-
“I refuse to let this go,” the ghost said. “Even if – especially if – a whole bunch of the other kids died or something, even if all of them died, which they didn’t, there’s absolutely no reason for you to be left alone like this.”
Nie Mingjue sighed. He’d hoped that the ghost would let it drop, but apparently, no.
Apparently, he was going to have to engage.
(Nie Huaisang waving his hands at the ghost, burbling happily, had nothing to do with that decision.)
“You assume they left me,” he said. “You have it backwards.”
“…what?”
“I ran away,” Nie Mingjue explained, and the ghost’s jaw dropped. “This place was abandoned because of the war – too awkward an outpost to be worth it for either side – and I took my brother and we came here, just me and him and Baxia. I’m planning on staying until the war’s over.”
“But why? You’re the heir.”
“Yeah,” Nie Mingjue said. “That’s why.”
“…what?”
“It’s ‘sang’ as in mulberry leaves, right?” he asked. “For his name? I heard you whispering it to him.”
“I - yeah, it’s mulberry,” the ghost said, blinking at him. “And ‘huai’ as in ‘to hold’…but you know that already, surely?”
Nie Mingjue shrugged.
The ghost stared at him. He didn’t blink, which was typical of ghosts, but still a bit unnerving.
“You named the child, didn’t you,” the ghost said. It wasn’t a question. “You take care of him, you raise him, you’re refusing to return home…it’s war, you said. Because of the massacre of the junior generation that everyone pretended was an accident but wasn’t, because of Mother’s death from that assassin pretending to be a nursemaid. People do things when they get angry, during war. What was going to happen to – to the baby?”
“Massacre at his conception, declaration of war at his quickening, assassination at his birth,” Nie Mingjue recited. “That’s three bad things; bad luck comes in fours, and we really can’t afford to lose this war. Newborns die easy as flipping over your hand, and maybe the next one won’t be so unlucky, won’t be a calamity star – that sort of thing. It was too dangerous.”
“Oh,” the ghost said. “I never knew.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Nie Mingjue said. “Who would have told you? I would’ve killed them, first.”
The ghost twitched, and stared at him.
“I like Huaisang,” Nie Mingjue said. “It’s a good name. Even if how you got it is a bit circular.”
-
“Someone murders you,” the ghost – Nie Huaisang of the future, as Nie Mingjue had long ago figured out, but it was easier to keep thinking of him as ‘the ghost’ – said, sitting with his back against the wall and his knees pulled up to his chest. It’d be a sad and pathetic sight, except for the way he was sitting on the ceiling. “I was trying to come back to stop it from happening…maybe even prevent our father’s murder, too, if I could. That happens when you’re fifteen, by the way. You have to inherit, and spend the rest of your life avenging him.”
“Do I succeed?”
“…yes.”
“That’s good, then,” Nie Mingjue said.
“Don’t you want to know more?”
“Why? Are you planning on going somewhere?”
The ghost uncurled himself from his dramatic misery to float down until his head (still upside down) was floating in front of Nie Mingjue. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Ghosts that resolve their business are liberated,” Nie Mingjue said. “Maybe I like having you around.”
“…oh.”
-
“One day you’re going to save the world,” the ghost told him.
“Today, you already have,” Nie Mingjue replied.
-
“Maybe I never went back in time,” the ghost said. “Maybe I’m just dead, and this is one of the eighteen hells, punishing me for everything I’ve done.”
“Are you having a bad time?” Nie Mingjue asked. He himself was having a good time: Nie Huaisang wasn’t crying, for once, and he had him sitting in his lap, a stick wrapped in his little baby hand (supported by Nie Mingjue, of course) waiving in the air in the rudimentary beginnings of proper saber forms.
“Well, no. But then again, ‘everything I’ve done’ wasn’t that bad, and all done in the name of filial piety – I even bought already-dead cats – well, except for little Mo Xuanyu. He deserved better than he got from everyone, me included.”
“None of that made even the slightest bit of sense to me, you know,” Nie Mingjue said. “But if you feel so bad about it, I promise to change it this time around.”
“No, you don’t understand,” the ghost said. “If this is the underworld, then you wouldn’t have the chance to change it. We’d just repeat this over and over again, forever!”
“How many times has it been for you, then?”
“Well, only one. But it could be the beginning of many times! Or – or – maybe I’ve forgotten the previous times!”
“Seems like a pretty stupid punishment if you just forget about it,” Nie Mingjue said.
“…hmm. Good point.”
“You’re prone to anxiety, aren’t you?” Nie Mingjue said to the Nie Huaisang in his arms, who made an expression that was clearly his best effort at smiling. He was still building up those facial muscles. “We’ll have to work on that, in this life.”
“Hey!”
-
“Okay, so, positing that this whole living in an abandoned outpost is a real thing that is happened and is still happening, which I’m still not convinced of –”
“I don’t seem like the type to run away?”
“…you were always very righteous.”
“Sometimes, righteous people do stupid things,” Nie Mingjue said.
“Remind me to tell you about someone called Wei Wuxian,” the ghost said, now thoroughly distracted. “He’s more or less the walking, talking incarnation of that…”
“Did he have a sad childhood?”
“What? I mean, I guess so? His parents died, he lived on the streets for a while, developed a fear of dogs, but then he got rescued by Jiang Fengmian and adopted, so – are you taking notes?”
“How else am I supposed to keep track of all these names?”
-
“Maybe you should go pick up Meng Yao. If you’re planning on changing things, I mean.”
Nie Mingjue squinted at the ghost, who was supervising the stew he was making. It was meat, for once – a pheasant that had conveniently gotten scared to death. The ghost had gotten very creative in how he could help out despite his general incorporeality. “Isn’t that the name of the person who eventually kills me?”
“Well, yes.”
“Why would I go help him?”
“…he had a very sad childhood?”
“If I adopt everyone you say had a sad childhood, there won’t be a junior generation anymore,” Nie Mingjue pointed out. “They’ll all be Nie sect.”
“And it would be better for them.”
“Annoying for me, though.”
-
“ – and that’s what demonic cultivation is,” the ghost concluded. “Why do you ask?”
“I have absolutely no reason to be interested in a type of cultivation specifically designed to make dead creatures do what I say, including shutting up whenever they’ve started talking in the middle of the night,” Nie Mingjue said, yawning. “None whatsoever.”
“It’s not that late, it’s only – hmm. Oops.”
-
“It’s not that different from what I do with Baxia,” Nie Mingjue argued.
“What you do with Baxia eventually kills you,” the ghost argued back.
“I thought you said I was murdered?”
“Through an existing weakness!”
“Without which the world will end, so it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine at all!”
“I’m just saying, it would be –”
“No! I am not letting you demonically cultivate with me, and that’s final!”
“Fine!”
“Fine!”
“Your older self is so annoying,” Nie Mingjue told Nie Huaisang after the ghost had stormed off. Through a wall, no less, and that was purely to be especially dramatic about it since Nie Mingjue knew that he knew where the doors were. “Such a pest!”
-
“If we’re going to do this – I can’t believe we’re going to do this – we’re doing it slowly,” the ghost said. “You hear me? Slowly. I don’t care how much of a cultivation genius you are.”
Nie Mingjue nodded.
“And no one ever finds out about it, okay? No one. If someone happens to see me, you need to lie and say that I – that I’m –”
“A saber spirit?”
“Shut up.”
-
“Baba!” Nie Huaisang burbled, or at least something that sounded vaguely similar. He was probably a few months too young for actual speech, though.
“Da-ge,” Nie Mingjue corrected, just in case.
The ghost sniggered. “So much of my childhood is suddenly explained, you have no idea.”
“I think I’m going to tell him to call you mama,” Nie Mingjue said thoughtfully. “What do you think that’ll explain?”
-
“You’re depressingly good at this,” the ghost said. “I mean, everyone always said you were a genius, but you’re really good at cultivation.”
Nie Mingjue shrugged.
“I still think you should hold off on the demonic cultivation aspects.”
“We’ve already agreed to disagree,” Nie Mingjue said. “And knowing demonic cultivation helps me refine my cultivation of Baxia as well – I can filter out only the finest resentful energy for her.”
“You make it sound like cat food.”
“Since you also thrive on resentful energy, what does that make you?”
“A mouse, surely.”
“Nah. Hedgehog.”
The ghost acted as if it had been stabbed and fell over backwards.
Dramatic bastard.
-
“There’s a person outside,” the ghost said. “They’re at the edge of the boundaries.”
Nie Mingjue could feel his shoulders stiffen. “What are they wearing?”
“Nie colors. I would’ve taken care of it myself if it was a Wen.”
They’d had an incident with a Wen squad coming too close, once.
The ghost, strengthened by Nie Mingjue’s demonic cultivation and the bond he’d formed between him and Baxia, had ripped the cultivators in the Wen patrol squad to pieces before they’d gotten too close.
Nie Mingjue had told him that he appreciated the enthusiasm, but to try to keep the mess down a bit next time. All that blood had attracted predators willing to feast on human flesh, and Nie Huaisang was still small.
“What boundary?” he asked, and went to go look down at it from one of the windows. “Oh.”
“Is this going to be a problem?” the ghost wanted to know.
Nie Mingjue looked at the man walking up. “No,” he said. “No problem.”
“What does he want? Is he going to make trouble for Sangsang?”
“No,” Nie Mingjue said. “Just for me.”
He waited outside the door, Baxia in his hand.
His father came to a stop a reasonable distance away. “What will it cost for you to return?” he asked.
It was about what Nie Mingjue had expected. They were a practical family.
Nie Mingjue didn’t have memories of his future life, and the ghost didn’t remember this period of his previous life: the months they had spent together in this abandoned fortress, the way Nie Mingjue taught him to smile and to crawl, fed him and changed him and slept with him to calm him, the life they had shared in the world without the ghost.
Still, he had asked the ghost the questions he had wanted answered, casually dropping names into conversation with the ghost to judge his response, and he figured out what his answer must have been in that life before.
He’d asked for the heads of those that had directly threatened Nie Huaisang, and an oath that the sect would honor Nie Huaisang as the heir, that he would be sect leader following Nie Mingjue. He’d gotten what he’d asked for, but what had been meant as a gift had in the end only been a burden – the ghost wouldn’t have been so desperate to come back to this time if it wasn’t.
He wouldn’t make that mistake twice.
He smiled.
“I’d like to make some changes,” he said, thinking of all the people that the ghost had talked about – all the ones who had sad childhoods. Many were the children of the other Great Sects, which would make things tricky to start – most people didn’t want their children raised by outsiders – but he’d thought of ways to make it work, and he knew the investment would ultimately bear fruit. His father, ruthless as he was, would understand that part of it, at least, even if he didn’t understand the rest. “Back me in full, or lose me forever.”
This was even more of a gamble than what he had asked for in his past life. A few heads, even of loyal servants, didn’t matter much, compared to blood – a blank slate was a far more dangerous request.
His father looked him over, and Nie Mingjue knew that he was calculating whether it was worth it. Whether it was Nie Mingjue’s head that he should take, this time, since he himself was still young enough to have more sons. But Nie Mingjue had learned from the ghost all the secrets he’d known about his own future cultivation, added to it the demonic cultivation he’d deduced, and he was, in the end, a genius.
There was a reason he was confident enough to make the request.
“Very well,” his father said. “I will back you.”
-
They told everyone that the ghost was an ancestor.
I…I recognize the joke, but these are totally different kinds of bows, each with its own benefits and suited to its user.
Bard’s using a longbow.
Longbows are awesome and take a fuckton of regular practice to use, because the muscle strain required to be a longbowman(/woman) actually deforms the arms and back of the user.
“Bard the Bowman” is still known by that sobriquet even though he’s low status, his family’s life and profession changed when the dragon attacked. Why would he be called that, if not that he’s still in regular practice and people see him using the thing over and over and over?
Longbows are less-damaged by damp than composites, being made of once single piece of wood rather than layers of material, which is handy if one lives in the middle of a freaking lake.
The longbow changed the face of warfare in real life, esp. for England. They’re effective killing machines over long distance, even against armored enemies.
Conclusion: Bard’s a tank-muscled distance shot used to fighting with good sightlines.
Legolas and Tauriel use recurve bows, albeit in different styles.
Legolas’ looks like a Turkish bow, though I don’t recall seeing him use a thumb draw (which is not mandatory if you’ve got super strong elf-fingers, I guess).
Tauriel’s looks to be a Scythian composite bow by the shape.
Composite recurve bows are much easier to use in confined spaces and at odd angles.
They have been historically used by folks who specialize in archer tricks like multiple arrow shots (a thing we have seen Legolas do).
Because of the curves, composites pack heavy draw weight (the factor that determines with what force, i.e. how fast and far, the arrow will travel) into limited space.
Short draw (the distance you have to pull back the arrow to shoot it) means a quicker release time and quicker time to get your next arrow on the string.
Legolas and Tauriel fight in a forest, not know for long sight lines or easy travel, nor for enemies who can be seen coming. They need weapons that won’t be getting caught on a bush at an inopportune time. Likewise, you see fewer spears and longswords among the elves of the Greenwood.
Conclusion: Legolas and Tauriel are guerrilla fighters from a heavily-forested territory and their weapons reflect that.
Kili also uses a composite recurve bow.
For practical purposes, note that Kili has significantly shorter arms than any of the other archers here mentioned. Long draws, like on Bard’s longbow, are not feasible and that means he’s not going to get the power he is capable of producing.
Dwarves are fucking strong, all right? That wee little bow looks very like the Mongolian horse-bow in size and shape that my friend used with a draw weight of 55 lbs. (I’m not a weakling and I can draw 35 for a decent length of time when in practice). Kili’s could easily be upwards of 75-100 lbs.
Kili’s a hunter. Likely, his main concern with a bow (when not following his uncle on an inadvisable quest) is the procurement of dinner for his family. To do that with a bow you need to be very quiet or very quick on the draw. Dwarves are not known for being super-quiet, though I believe I remember something about Fili and Kili being better at that than is typical.
Anything that can kill a deer can probably kill a person (or an orc). That little horse-bow can easily kill or maim.
Conclusion: Kili is a hunter. He uses a bow that allows for the production of a lot of power at short notice and is suited to his size and strength.
Bigger is not always most effective. Your medieval weaponry rant has concluded for the day, unless someone wants to talk to me about swords.
Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.
The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.)
I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)
This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.
The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor.
When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).
This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.
I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.
Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.
…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.
Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.
As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.
covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.
Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.
One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.
This also explains my whole pet name thing too. Over here in the land down under (at least where I live specifically), we call everyone some variation of a pet name.
Love, darling, hun and darl’ are all very common to hear from a stranger that you’re never gonna meet again. Men call me mate or love, depending on how they perceive my gender, and women call me any of the above pet names, as well as honey or sweetheart/sweetie. My high school group (comprised of all girls at the time) called each other “babe” all the time so that’s another thing.
