I feel it's time to make an actual pinned post for the hellsite, huh?
Hello! My name's Adrian, and I'm a writer who loves putting his favorite characters through the horrors. Or having them kiss each other while dealing with the horrors. Or on some occasions even kissing the horrors...I'm versatile like that. 😊
My current interests are Alan Wake and Litchi Hikari Club. I'm a longtime fan of the SMT/Persona series and the Ace Attorney (particularly TGAA) series. And I am utterly captivated by Poets of the Fall...their music is absolutely incredible and I could yap about them all day. Even if I end up talking in circles in the process. 😅
Also, here's your warning: If you have "proship DNI" in your bio and you try to follow me anyway, you're getting blocked. I have absolutely no interest in getting policed over the fiction I create; y'all need to calm the fuck down with that shit. Especially given the current environment we're all living in.
i think as a writer, the older you get and the more you read, the more you realize there are very few actual truly bad ideas. which is a relief. but! the other thing you learn is that stories live and die on the execution and ha ha. lemme tell you. unfortunately. there are lots and lots of bad ways to execute an otherwise fine idea
"The thing is only acting in self defense because it gets attacked first"
The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.
You can imagine anything you want for the unknowns (before the movie starts, whether it can tell animals apart, etc), but you are fully wrong if you characterize its reception as being preemptively attacked. You can interpret things lots of ways, but saying the humans at the camp attack it first is factually wrong.
"None of the men know each other enough to recognize an impersonation."
The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.
There are so, so many completely reasonable ways to read ideas of social disaffectation, queerness, and more into the text of the movie without misrepresenting the factual text. I'm screaming and crying and throwing up blood, what else would everyone like to propose about horror movies that sounds great aside from being entirely spurious? Someone told me psychological thrillers are the only good horror movies an hour and a half ago, we could start there. I want people to think in these ways about horror but also talking about it in a way that depends on the the text of the film does require a certain amount of knowing the actual text of the film.
Actually I think this is important tags that speak to a larger idea about horror conversation:
The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.
That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.
And in a greater capacity, this is where I see things go very wrong when someone unfamiliar with or disdainful of horror tries to expound on the genre. It comes from a place of not wanting bad things to happen - not rose colored glasses or naivete - but not wanting the animal to die, not wanting the house to burn, not wanting the parents to lose a child. Not wanting to feel sick or hurt, a normal and human response to a genre which constantly steps over those lines, and quite often does so artlessly and with nothing but puerile shock at heart. That makes it difficult to examine in good faith, and wanting to see horror as something good for oneself leads most people to look for the places where horror doesn't stray close to the boundaries. Solving the problem of "bad horror" by presenting horror comedy or psychological thrillers as better side of horror, for example. But that's just another case of wanting to solve something that doesn't exist to have a solution. Part of getting the genre is recognizing not only that bad things happen in horror, but the ugly and awful and transgressive side is not a mistaken choice, not an error. It's part of what horror is, like a person, you can't understand it without understanding what you dislike along with what you like. Horror can't be corrected out of a set of flaws, those have to be accepted as part of seeing the genre as a whole.
Controversial, but I think it's harmful to tell people you're never going to write something good on the first try or it's always going to be pure garbage, like that may be helpful for some on some level, but I personally don't think it's a healthy way of thinking, and it causes others to second guess work that is good. Is editing often helpful? Yes. But you're not going to have to Ship of Theseus everything you ever make. Anyway, the phrase "idk, man, it depends" strikes again.
I was talking about my Zera's sexuality shitpost with a friend recently, and we got talking about it a little further, and then the topic of "what does Zera feel for Jaibo, anyways?" came up. I got thinking about that, and I wanted to write a little bit about my interpretation from a canon standpoint. I guess this is basically my first meta/analysis since joining the fandom at the end of last year.
So, without further ado, what does Zera feel for Jaibo, anyways?
I want to start this off with a few quick disclaimers: firstly, because I know there are people in this fandom who hate jaizera, put their wank in the jaizera tag, and will call me a braindead fujo for "smooshing them together like yaoi boys without consequence" (will never stop clowning on that post), yes, I am a jaizera shipper. Furthermore, I like any and every interpretation of it, whether it's completely unrequited, whether it's a power thing, whether one day they learn to be sweet with one another, or regardless of who is in control, I find the two of them extremely fascinating and I have to yet to see an iteration of the ship I don't like. And even further than THAT, I am a fanfiction author, and if you've spent any time in the ao3 in the last six months you've absolutely come across my stuff. The reason I bring that up is because not only do I enjoy any interpretation of them, but my own interpretation will change depending on what I'm working on or what I want to achieve with the piece I'm working on. However, this post is meant to analyze it in its most canon-based iteration and where I generally drift to when I think of the topic outside of being a fan creator.
Let's start with what we know is canon.
Zera despises the idea of having feelings, and if he had it his way, he'd be a machine. Part of this definitely stems from his parents' divorce and living with his mother in the aftermath, who has very strong emotions, which in turn gave him a strong negative association with not only emotion and feelings, but by extension, love. However, despite his disdain for these things, we also know he can be a VERY emotional person, as evidenced by the crashout of all time at the end of LHC.
In terms of sexuality, based on the "so this is the effect of the male hormone androgen" lines, it's clear enough that he does experience sexual attraction, and, I mean, considering the entire plot of LHC, it's pretty safe to say he's sexually attracted to women. The topic of homosexuality doesn't come up for him until he begins researching Elagabalus, following his interaction with the fortune teller. We do know that he has an interest in Elagabalus as a ruler and, in a way, wants to imitate him. If we're talking about what's on-page canon, it's also worthwhile to bring up that when Jaibo and Zera meet, it's actually Zera who propositions Jaibo, not the other way around.
Per Bokura, he has a sexual relationship with Jaibo for 2-3 years up until the events of LHC, which is a long time to, y'know, be fucking someone you're not attracted to. He also makes numerous comments about Jaibo's beauty over the course of both LHC and Bokura, so with that plus the literal on-page sex they have, where he literally gets erect having sex with him, it is safe to infer that he is sexually attracted to Jaibo.
Emotionally or romantically, that's more complicated, and that's when the next section about interpretation comes in, because the reality is that there's so much we just don't know. But here's what we do know:
Among the members of the club, Jaibo is treated with special privileges or favouritism. This is especially evident in Bokura during Litchi's creation, where the rest of the club is working on crafting and Jaibo is allowed to sit on his ass and do nothing. Even when Niko calls this out, Zera defends Jaibo's behaviour, saying he is unfit for labour. Upon Jaibo joining the Hikari Club, Zera also defends his decision to admit him by saying he's the 'living statue' and the club's representation of beauty (not very heterosexual of him but what do I know). Even when Raizou protests this, Zera still holds firm on it.
Building off of this, it's also worthwhile bringing up that for the majority of LHC, Zera absolutely does not suspect that Jaibo could ever be the traitor. When he's listing off club members and their corresponding chess pieces ("Niko, the pawn", etc), he doesn't assign one to Jaibo, which if you've watched the movie adaptation, makes Zera's "you are none of them" comment make more sense. I didn't catch this the first time around, but without opening up my copy to double check, I am positive that it isn't until Zera starts to head to the crashout of no return that he even starts to bring up Jaibo's name when he's listing off potential traitors. Up until the reveal, Zera does not think Jaibo would betray him.
So let's take all of this and talk about my interpretation of it.
There is a stark disconnect between not only Zera and the rest of the people in his life, but a disconnect between Zera and himself. Zera thinks of himself as a machine, cold and calculating, and maybe that's partially true, at least on the outside, but he tells himself that because it's the easiest way to convince himself of it. The moment anything doesn't go his way, he becomes INCREDIBLY emotional - take ordering Kaneda's killing over the chess piece, for example, or sentencing Kanon to execution for biting back at him. Despite this being an objective truth, he still denies it, nearly to the point of delusion. This is to say that if he did experience anything close to love, or affection, or warmth for another person, the chances of him admitting or even recognizing it are slim to none.
It's also pretty not-heterosexual to meet a gay guy who says "I'll do anything for you" and immediately go "okay, blow me about it then", in my honest opinion. Jaibo was pretty up front about being attracted to Zera, but Zera was the one who chose to entertain it. This is where the water gets a little murky for me - did he pursue Jaibo because he wanted to imitate Elagabalus? Well, I kind of waffle on this myself, but I do think that even if that was the case, it wouldn't have carried on until the events of LHC if there wasn't something more to it, otherwise why would Zera have bothered? We'll get to the bit on feelings later, but I think if Zera wasn't benefitting from Jaibo's presence somehow, then he wouldn't have kept him around. Maybe he just liked the sex and money, who knows. But what I do think is that all of Zera's relationships are transactional in some way, and that if he DID pursue Jaibo because of his Emperor fantasies, then there would have to be something else keeping him there (sex and money, if you're a contrarian? idk man).
It's worthwhile to bring up that even Furuya states in the 15th anni collab book that the only time we ever see Zera's less serious side is when he's with Jaibo, and if we're not counting The Crashouts of the later chapters of LHC, then the only time we see him as anything less than perfectly composed is when he's with Jaibo. When Jaibo kills the animals in front of him, we see shock in him in a way that we really don't again. In the scene in the lychee grove with Jaibo, we see him happy. In their sex scenes, we see him more vulnerable than we ever see him again.
Building off of this, Jaibo has a firm hold on Zera's identity. Jaibo literally named him - he didn't have to adapt the Zera moniker, but he did! The "lalalitchi"? Jaibo. His power fantasies? Guess who enabled them the entire way! Zera literally is who he is because Jaibo built him that way. Tsunekawa Hiroyuki? Don't know her. Combine that with the special butt-buddy privileges he gets, Jaibo is practically untouchable to anyone in the Hikari Club.
All of this is to say that ultimately, while I like any and all interpretations of Jaibo and Zera's relationship, when I look at them in their canon iteration, I do believe that Zera feels SOMETHING for Jaibo, whether it's love or not. I'd go so far as to say with all the evidence I've presented, that's probably canon. My interpretation is that yes, he does love Jaibo - but because of his immense disconnect from himself, his own emotions, and the world around him, he will never interpret what he feels as love, nor really anything even remotely positive or significant. I don't think there will ever be a touching "feelings realization" moment, nor do I think that even if there was, he'd end up treating Jaibo any differently regardless. But I do think there is something there, and you'd be hard pressed to convince me otherwise.
...and if you like jaizera check out my ao3 profi--- (user was taken out to pasture for this post)
there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something
take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)
the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it
but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first
comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now
please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection
