MorriganFearn, better known as MF, is proudly from New England, and probably buried in a snowbank as you read this.
This Tumblr is for reblogging, fan art, fanfic, and other sundry semi-creative activities. Major fandoms you will see:
- Hetalia
- Homestuck
- X-Men - No, not X-Men. Mew Mutants 4lyfe
- Hellions ARE life
- Fire Emblem
- The Kingdom of Bern .....
- .... I fell in love with an entire fictional country, OKAY?! It doesn't help that the country took it's name from a real city. I can love a canton in Switzerland, too, I suppose.
If you follow me and it doesn't seem as though your tumblr is about being fannish in any of these categories I will wonder.
MF's Fanfics
MF's Fanart
MF's Tags Page (In progress)
Nagamas is a Fire Emblem exchange for everyone who wants to share fic & art with other fans of the series. Any FE fan is invited to join, regardless of how many games you know or how long you’ve been into the series.
Signups will remain open until November 23 at 11:59 PM EST, and you will receive your matches by the end of that week. Gift deadline will be midnight on New Year’s Eve, and as always, we’ll have plenty of info for you before then about posting and receiving your gifts.
Please reblog to get the word out, and make sure to check out all our links before sending in your form. Thanks and happy prompting!
Three days to go! If you guys are into my FE shenanigans tag, sign up. Maybe we’ll be making something for each other! I got the neatest fan-Bern royals!fanfic from @ladytiresias last time I was in this. It is a good exchange. :)
Nagamas is a Fire Emblem exchange for everyone who wants to share fic & art with other fans of the series. Any FE fan is invited to join, regardless of how many games you know or how long you’ve been into the series.
Signups will remain open until November 23 at 11:59 PM EST, and you will receive your matches by the end of that week. Gift deadline will be midnight on New Year’s Eve, and as always, we’ll have plenty of info for you before then about posting and receiving your gifts.
Please reblog to get the word out, and make sure to check out all our links before sending in your form. Thanks and happy prompting!
Angela Merkel just said she’ll offer Donald Trump cooperation, on the basis that he respects people’s dignity no matter the place of birth, colour of their skin, beliefs, their sex, sexuality or their political convictions.
So….I guess germany and the us just broke up?
Merkel basically said “Cut your racist and sexist bullshit and then maybe I’ll talk to you”.
She’s doing more than that. In the German original she speaks of the Würde des Menschen - The dignity of man. That’s the first line of the German constitution:
Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar- The dignity of man is inviolable.
She’s literally throwing the book at him and reminding him she’ll only work with him on the terms of the constitution.
I mean, I disagree with her on quite a few things, but I’m very happy with her response.
That is actually true in my area rn, which is a problem, as we are really dependent on our near constant sky fall. Weather, weather, weather.
Mostly, though, I have been busy locking myself away to watch Luke Cage over and over again. Look, after I went through it the first time, I had to do a second re-watch for nuances and commentary that I had missed. Annnnd then I had to do a Jessica Jones re-watch.
One thing that I can gladly say is that the marvel TV shows are building on each other--and I don’t mean things like strong universe building, where you get that it’s all part of one big story that jumps around to several different actors, though they do that fantastically. What I mean is that each new series/season takes the strong bones that were tested out in the previous one, and adds their own twist to them to make it an even stronger set of bones to pass on. Each show has it’s weaknesses, too, but I’m so glad to see that the weaknesses aren’t repeated. Of course, when you have different creative teams behind each project, the strengths and weaknesses are inherently different, but there has been great oversight on that, making the over arching strengths of each show into part of a larger whole. You know you’re going to get amazing friendship, down-to-earth mistakes like forgetting to charge cell phones, and stupid-fun action sequences in every Marvel TV offering.
I also had some lock down time with Gotham season 2, and .... that one has been quite a lot more disappointing. There’s still some great stuff. Gotham’s sense of visual style is--for all that people who enjoy computers can see the photoshopped edges--incredible. The number of times I squeal about seeing what is basically Timm’s noir animation come to life must make my housemates think I’m a lost cause. The kids are still written one hundred percent perfectly (though Bruce is growing up very fast XD).
Season 2′s big turn off for me is that it’s heading more and more ‘comic booky’ and the weaknesses of the comic books--race fail and racist short hand, blatant misogyny, and cliched character development (btw, the first two are much much worse than the final one, but now that the final one is there, it’s really hard to enjoy any part of the series)--are more apparent.
Still, as bizzaro-world as it is, I will watch anything that tells the story of this Penguin. The Riddler’s complexities are unfortunately being pushed into ‘too much comic book’ territory, despite the actor’s clear determination to deliver the best god damn performance of a broken person lurching from one identity to the next in an attempt to find some sort of solid ground. Here’s hoping the writers in Gotham’s room get smacked in the face with a newspaper every time they want to write about this weird vision of mental illness that they have somehow developed. Seeing Ed turn into the more detective for hire by the nefarious and not so nefarious version of the Riddler would be grand.
And despite all of this, I still come back to the fact that I apparently am willing to wade through endless mountains of stereotypes I hate just to watch the continuing saga of Oswald Cobblepot.
So on page 72 of my copy of Renegades of Pern (1989 Del Rey Books first edition hardcover) it says that G'ron’s dragon was a blue. Later on, the book says that he was a brown rider. I’d chalk it up to bad copy editing. Goodness knows my Dragonriders of Pern books are chock full of typos, and small errors like this.
BUT. But. This has happened before, and to a much more story sensitive person. In my copy of Dragonflight (2005 Del Rey Books paperback) on page 16 it states that L'tol was green Larth’s rider. In Dragonquest and later books, this was revised to brown, as well. I always thought that this was a copy error as well, or that Anne McCaffrey had simply not bothered to remember Larth’s color from book to book.
That always disappointed me, since we know men who ride greens are almost always gay. Which would be super interesting, as Lytol is such a respected figure, particularly among Lord Holders, who are depicted as being fairly homophobic. Lytol already has a lot of dimensions to his character, but the added layer for someone who survived the death of his dragon, survived Fax, made Ruatha a viable hold, and did it all to benefit Jaxom, before going on to being one of the great leaders of Pern in recovering Southern would have been really cool. Still, Larth is brown in all subsequent books, so I always thought brown was canon.
However, this thing with Giron also erases a probably bi character. Dragonseye states that blue riders tend more toward homosexuality, as well, but for the sake of whatever argument you might want to make against that, let’s just agree that blue riders are by authorial word, not adverse to weyring up with green riders of any gender. So, if G'ron had been a blue rider, he would be definitively somewhere on the spectrum. As a brown rider, he still could be gay, bi, or anything else, but it is never actually confirmed, as browns are expected to be straight (even if later, the author decides that they will fly greens, as well as queens).
It’s really disappointing to think that an option for some complex canonically queer characters was changed either by oversight, or by authorial choice. My take away from this, honestly, is the choice to assume that Larth was green, and G'ron was a blue rider, whatever later text says. Both men are dragonless, and clearly the loss is so much that romantic attachment isn’t a factor for either, but I want my sexuality politics adding a layer onto these two outcasts, as that layer is interesting to think about.
I would like to clarify something about the trophy the athletes are receiving, because I have read things that are not worthy of mention.
The trophy given to athletes is the 3D Olympic logo of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The logo was inspired by the Sugarloaf Mountain curves and the Brazilian & Olympic spirit.
As you can see in the picture the logo ‘fits’ perfectly in the shape of the mountain and looks like it’s being embraced by the three athletes featured on it (yes, each color is the representation of a person): a goal keeper, a rower and a volleyball player.
Not only they embrace the mountain, but each other representing the welcoming spirit of the Brazilian people but also conveys the ideal Olympic spirit.
While for several people is a ‘multicolored mess made by children in crafts’, the logo colors are the ones in the Brazilian flag: yellow, blue and green.
In the logo you can read the word ‘Rio’ (green forms the letter ‘R’, the yellow forms the letter ‘I’ and the union of the yellow and blue you can see the ‘O’, pretty fucking cool if you ask me).
The trophy can also be used as a medal holder.
The logo is a complex visual identity that represents Rio and was created to be universally understood.
why are there so many posts about asexuals being immune to sirens. people. sirens don’t lure you in with sex (necessarily). they sing about whatever it is that you want most. they could sing about mothman or cinnamon toast crunch and guess what then your asexual pirate is fucking dead
Initial backlash against mythical beings could be assumed, like major disapproval on the part of the American public: “Oh, well that ad is only popular because of those Greeks and their use of magical song. There isn’t any real talent there.” Basically, anything you’ve heard about digital art as it was coming into its own prolly applies here: “Oh, well it only looks that good because they used a siren. Anyone can do that.”
And, sure, there might be sirens who rest on their magic allure alone. But you can fucking bet ad agencies would soon be filled with sirens who fucking worked their brains off to produce intensely interesting commercials, while personally dealing with intersectional issues around gender and race and all that jazz, and you’d get people who would appreciate the hell out of what they produce.
Any banning of sirens as advertises couldn’t be legal in the US due to anti-discrimination laws. There could be avenues for states make it illegal if the sirens were not US citizens, as amazingly enough our Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to non-citizens, but there would be American sirens with citizenship. As people with full rights under American laws you can’t ban sirens from holding certain jobs. The US really does not want to get into debates about person-hood due to our “5/8ths of a person” history enshrined in our constitution. Plus, corporate America would want siren talent like everyone’s business. Even in the extreme case of the Supreme Court for some reason ruling that sirens are not people (and while I can see some very unpleasant people making that argument, I can’t imagine the way you’d get that ruling to be made with the current make-up of the court), someone would make the arguement that if sirens aren’t people, then they are tools, and you can’t ‘ban’ tools from being used. But we’re going down a really ugly road here, and I don’t like to think about it.
Bottom line, talented sirens might be exploited in the advertising field, and not recognized for a long time, but recognition would come about. And we might get a pretty interesting AMC series as a side effect.
So, yeah, also been watching lots of DS9 again, because it is a really good show, and I really love it. Also because “Homefront” and “Paradise Lost” are really, really interesting in a “hey, these were written in the 1990s, but really need to be watched in a post 9-11 way.” On a less politically charged re-watch, though, I want to encourage everyone to watch this show because I have done something close onto 11 full seven season re-watches in my life, and I still find new character nuances that I totally missed.
This time MF’s thinky thoughts are brought to you by DS9 Season 3, Episode 19: Through the Looking Glass
So, I love what they did with the Mirror Universe in DS9. It’s one of the reasons I liked DS9′s format: it took one off episode ideas from the earlier shows, and world built around them like there was no tomorrow. Last time I did a DS9 re-watch I was struck by the fact that Mirror!Worf and Mirror!Garak have a very bizarre subtext to their interaction (or not really bizarre, given the universe that they’re in, but there’s no counter to it in the standard universe. Their interaction is totally unique to the brutality of the Mirror Universe, which is different because most of the interactions between people in both universes echo along with each other). Anyway, I promised myself that I’d take a closer look the next time I went on a DS9 binge, and I’m on a binge now, so, I was paying a lot of attention through “Crossover” and “Through the Looking Glass” as the lead-ins to “Shattered Mirror” and “Emperor’s New Cloak.”
Anyway, I realized something while watching “Through the Looking Glass” which gives Mirror!Garak as surprising amount of depth, given that the mirror version is not a nuanced person. Garak is jealous of Sisko’s relationship with the Intendant. Garak’s face throughout “Looking Glass” is a wonderful study, and I recommend you all look at it.
He’s so pleased to tell Kira that Sisko is dead he can’t stop grinning. This is understandable, he spent his first episode establishing that he wanted to kill Intendant Kira to take her place, and also he clearly feels that the Klingon-Cardassian order is perfect just the way it is, so the death of a rebel helps cement his power and keeps the natural order of things going. However, he quickly picks up on Kira’s layers of dissatisfaction with the news. The smile drops right off, and irritation begins to percolate in snippy retorts to Kira’s lack of joyful response.
Now, why should Mirror!Garak be annoyed that his arch rival is upset by the death of a Terran? The fact that she might be deeply emotionally attached to a rebel is a huge point of weakness that he could exploit wide open. Hey, all those plans for her death? Well, he’s just struck an emotional blow, and even if this Garak doesn’t believe that a good insult will cut forever, he certainly has been established as being far too gleeful in torturing people, and emotional pain from Kira of all people should be making him happy as the proverbial clam.
Watch his face, though, when Sisko shows up, and Mirror!Kira gets self-indulgent all over him. Not only is Garak not happy that he can’t kill Ben in front of her, he can’t stop looking as the hottest of makeouts ensues. He’s absolutely furious that the Terran is getting the ‘Mistress’s favorite pet’ treatment. Why? Yes, it is annoying to have all your nice weekend plans pushed to the side for a booty call, but come on, Mirror!Garak has just gotten all the dirt he could possibly want on the Intendant handed to him. She’s emotionally attached to Sisko--not that she won’t kill or torture him as needed, but the necessary measures would hurt her. Also, this Intendant dallying with a jumped up Terran slave turned rebel? Klingon High Command would not like that. Oh no, precious, this goes far past her usual indulgences and into the realm of dishonor and treason.
So why is it that Garak spends the entire episode defending and collaborating with Kira, still keeping a sharp tongue in his head, mind, while doing his damndest to kill Sisko painfully? His feelings on the situation definitely get way out of control and into the realm of serious passionate “I will hunt you down and torture you” at the point when Sisko’s double cross is revealed and Garak shouts “Pursue!” The answer is pretty simple--Garak actually likes his Intendant, a lot. And he is infuriated that she’d still choose a Terran over him any day of the week.
“Destiny” (Season 3 - Episode 15, only 4 episodes before “Looking Glass”) established that Cardassians on the prime universe side see intellectual competition as a pretty damn romantic start to courtship. There’s not much obvious difference between Mirror!Cardassians and Prime!Cardassians, culturally speaking. Mirror!Cardassians seem to be about as brutal as they were during the Occupation of Bajor, and the major differences in Garak seem to be a certain lack of subtlty, but he’s also in a position of assured authority and power, which he has not occupied in the Prime Universe (Garak has always been aware of Tain in the Prime universe, even at the height of his own presumed power within the Obsidian Order, and honestly, we’re never going to know what he was really like, then. We’ve only really seen Garak ‘Brung Low’ and thus in need of every subtly as a weapon). We can assume, then, that Mirror!Cardassians have similar outlooks on romance and courtship, perhaps only a little less subtle, if there is any difference at all.
Enter Mirror!Garak, who has been trying to kill Mirror!Kira, and notably failing at it for as long as they have worked together. He, meanwhile, is treated to verbal tongue lashings about his own excessive enjoyment of torturing others, his lack of imagination, his competence, whatever Mirror!Kira wants to insult him with that day. He’s also her favorite instrument of fear, and he clearly enjoys how her volatile temperment and false sense of friendliness affects the Terrans under her thumb. Basically, she’s been leaving him the Cardassian equivalent of flowers and chocolates, and he’s been trying to make her see his undying dislike and hostility as expressed through assassination attempts. Serious grand romantic gestures, please step up and learn something.
His reactions in “Looking Glass” all make sense when read as unrequited infatuation. Mirror!Garak really loves working with Mirror!Kira, even though they are probably the most dysfunctional team in the quadrant as long as he continues to use power plays to substitute for intimacy, and she continues to totally ignore him. Just saying, any time Kira actually has a use for Garak, he’s wreathed in genuine smiles. Any time she’s overtly flirting with someone else, they suddenly get dragged into horrible plans of his for over turning her rule, or he will sometimes more simply try to kill them.
It’s a complex Mirror!Universe out there, and I really can’t wait to see what my “Oh, so thaaaaaaat’s what’s going on” theory unfolds when I get to “Shattered Mirror” and the ever-interesting: “Mirror!Worf, why exactly did you decide to chain Mirror!Garak to your throne, again?”
@ruingaraf - Oh, I'm sorry that the gameplay was shitty. Graham made it sound fine, but he was playing the PC version, and was saying that the lack of Co-op for the PC without modding was sad, but he liked switching back and forth between charas fine, so at least that worked.
Um, if you wanna see the full game now that I've accidentally spoiled it, here's the link to the version I saw:
Finished the RE:Revelations 2 watch, and damn, Natalia is legit the cutest thing to come out of this series, and she’s competing with The-sweetest-cradle-robber!Sherry for that title folks. I think I nearly broke down when Barry and Natalia were getting away from the Confrontation, and Barry had to help Natalia because of her foot. It was an interesting scene from a game play perspective, because it was very forced: Here, let us conveniently let everyone have a moment of bonding while we Promise you not bad zombies will happen. But it was well placed in the action as a cool down. Just a simple “get from this place to the other place, no pressure” moment helped get the player a breather, and the characters clearly took one.
Good design choices, is what I’m saying. It could have been ruined if that part hadn’t been put to good narrative use. I don’t mean if they had left that whole section dialog free: that could have been satisfying in a different way. I think I’ve mentioned the value of silence in previous #MF’s thinky thoughts often enough. I know I ranted about the lack of it in certain sections of RE6, and tbh as soon as Barry picked up Natalia, I was worried that the game would spring some kind of bullshit fake stealth level, or use the quiet time to rip away all subtext and character motivations through cheesy dialog, but no, serious props, Barry and Natalia had a real conversation that advanced both characters. Props to the dialog team using the narrative moment, and SERIOUS commendation for dealing with the ‘Moira shot her sister’ back story in a really good way.
1. Polly was only injured, not killed for pathos, which is a major show of restraint and good judgement in a writer. It’s easy to believe only the worst case scenario will give rise to the sympathy that you want the audience to feel for your characters, when actually you can ease back and go for the less-overwhelming version, and get a better emotional reaction. Even though Polly’s not dead the incident still tore her family to bits, and maybe because she isn’t dead, the audience can feel more of the utter bitterness and poison that one bad reaction to a crisis can bring between people who are close.
2. Barry admitted that it was his own fucking fault for not locking up his guns with his kids in the house. The game’s narrative is very clear, beginning to end, that shitty gun ownership responsibility cannot and should not be offloaded onto Moira, that Barry’s initial reaction was horrendous, and oh, btw, if you like guns, and want to have them, that’s fine, but you’ve got to be a goddamn responsible adult if you want to own weapons.
3. The final part of this that made it such a marvelous moment for me was Natalia was being written like a normal kid, and Barry was being written as an adult, and they were having a real conversation about serious things, and none of the dialog felt patronizing. Natalia showed she was thinking about things from her perspective. ”Was it because she uses bad words?” - kid knows the way Moira speaks isn’t ‘okay’, but that’s the only bad thing that she can attribute to Moira. You can tell Natalia is trying hard to understand why Barry would ever be angry with Moira because what she knows of both of them is that they are Good A-fucking-Class People. She’s comes up with the direct ‘I know this is the only bad thing about this person’ question because she’s still just a child, and can’t be sure if bad language can be dismissed as a reason for massive familial strife. If she was older she would probably just ask “What do you mean? Moira might swear a lot, but she’s a very good person.” I like the kind of writing that treats kids as though they have minds of their own, which they do, but takes into account that kids are also kids. It’s a really hard kind of dialog to write, and RE:R2 nailed it here.
Anyway, Natalia is smart, and consistently brave, and trying to be helpful through the whole game. Also, her bricking things in the face was clearly helpful for the player several times, so good game design choices. Total treasure.
I suppose the final note is about the stinger, which I kind of want Ruin’s perspective on? The actual text about the cage looking for the bird, and the bird having changed makes the most sense to me if it is interpreted as:
The baggage of being a Wesker is always going to haunt the clone-y discards/family members. Said baggage includes a shocking amount of megalomania, a very unhealthy dose of self-absorption, and a complete-to-eventual shut down of empathy. However, while said baggage may try to entrap remaining shades of Weskers (for now, I guess that’s Jake and Natalia, but there’s a super easy ‘more to come’ that has now been written into the RE metaverse), they’ve changed, and can create their own destiny. Considering that’s 100% the character arc of Sherry and Jake’s campaign in RE6, which is taking place at the exact same time as Natalia is reading the poem, I think that’s what the game writers were getting at.
But.
But.
WHY DID THEY FRAME THAT SMILE FROM NATALIA AS THOUGH IT WAS FUCKING EVIL? Like the final shot was this deep smile, cut the music, we’re going in for some Deus Ex ‘Your friends aren’t who you think they are’ end stinger shit. The idea that Wesker-ettes aren’t going to do what RE has been priming their audience to expect from Weskers (i.e. pure and ridiculous evil) should be a good thing. And yet that final second was set up so that I, the audience, should believe it’s a bad thing that Natalia isn’t going to let herself be trapped by the Wesker-esque shit??? Maybe I’m confused about my interpretation of the bird-cage bit, or maybe I’m confused about the evil smile, and it’s not evil, I’m just primed to think that young girls grinning in horror games mean that children of the corn are gonna pop out of the field. idk.
Anyway, that’s my big takeaway on RE: Revelations 2
