Nothing Much

[smallishdoggo]

my hot wicanny take is that wick does not have it in him to be a brat tamer. i think he could dom on occasion given sufficient motivation, though i don't imagine it would be his preferred way of going about things, but a brat tamer specifically? no fucking way. that boy would get so overwhelmed and stressed out. he would need a sub who is very plainly cooperating with him or else he'd crumble into dust.

[smallishdoggo]

Yanessa believing Teor kidnapped Wick is actually such an incredible setup for canon fake-dating. It's like. A real possibility that that could be the lie. There are like. Real reasons why they could go that route.

[smallishdoggo]

Underrated element of Wick's disguise is that he is wearing a little bit of rouge and some lip tint.

[smallishdoggo]

i've been feeling really emotionally fragile lately, so i am aware that my feelings are sort of. disproportionate. but i am getting like so bummed about how the fandom is responding to wick in this latest two episodes. it all feels very reductive in a mean spirited sort of way that i am finding very frustrating, alas.

[smallishdoggo]

i like how every time an episode thumbnail drops there's mass speculation about what it could mean, and every single time it turns out to be. These characters are in this one and make this face at one point. It's literally never been anything.

[smallishdoggo]

I don't know why people are so intent on pretending like Wick is a popular target of woobification. He just isn't. He's like middle of the road popular, and the common fandom sentiment is heavily informed by "everyone thinks this guys sucks" being a running gag with the cast. There simply isn't a large group of people pretending Wick has no agency or inflating how abused he is by his family for whump purposes. You're thinking of Bolaire or Occtis, one of the actual fandom darlings.

[smallishdoggo]

thinking thoughts about Wick's tattoos.

they're really just. Such a violation. The fact that he's got a big old one on his neck too. He doesn't have any on his arms or anything, the only ones we see are on such vulnerable parts of his body. Wick willingly submitted to having a bunch of this caustic substance injected around his eye and his neck because he was fed a bunch of lies by people he loved and trusted. It's this permanent physical reminder of that deception that will always visually tie him to the Creed and his family. It'll probably always be the first thing people notice about him.

And they had to be more painful that normal tattoos too. Filament is caustic. It fucking ate that one dude's flesh off. We know they dilute it, and Wick probably has some natural resistance, but still, that shit had to hurt like hell.

[smallishdoggo]

The fun thing about Sam's interest in Teorwick is that he is living in the far flung future. Iirc, they mentioned filming what would be this upcoming spate of episodes before the Schemers' arc started airing. They've got a lot of episodes in the chamber! That man could be sitting on relationship-defining moments you and I can't even conceive of.

[smallishdoggo]

I don't think the theory that Wick was supposed to be the one fake murdered and resurrected is an especially sound one, but the notion that people are theorizing that out of a misogynistic desire to somehow rob Yanessa of her victory is so fucking stupid it's gonna make me throw my full support behind those theorists.

Like, I hate the be the bearer of bad news, but guys. Fellas. Wick /is/ special and important. He's one the the main characters, and he's a player character in a game of DnD which makes him even more main a character than most genres. Yanessa is an NPC who exists in large part to specifically further his personal arc. People are theorizing that he's important to her plans, because he is. Maybe not that specific one, but come the fuck on.

Like, god. Contrasting "the actions of the heroes" with "the absence of the special guy", WICK IS ONE OF OUR HEROES. Wick's absence is a choice one of our heroes made, having acted to foil one of Yanessa's plans! What the fuck is the supposed insult here? Of course his absence is gonna fuck up some of her plans!!

[smallishdoggo]

Disproportionately irritable about bad Wick characterization in a fanfic for some unknowable reason.

For the record, Wick does not proselytize post grandpa reveal. For obvious reasons. He simply would not try and tell someone the good news about the Light when he knows full fucking well it's a sham.

I feel like sometimes people just refuse to believe that Wick has changed in any meaningful way from episode one, and it's just such a bummer, cause he has! Cause, yeah, this earth shattering revelation did in fact make him change some of his behaviors. He has in fact thought through and learned some things even if he is uncertain about other things. U r perhaps missing out on a pretty fun and interesting character by insisting that he's just one note oblivious and incapable of self reflection and all that. perhaps.

[smallishdoggo]

It's crazy just how much meat there is to Occtis/Wicander as a ship despite the two of them only having one total nothingburger of an interaction this campaign.

Like, genuinely, there is so much thematic meat on the bone there. Favorite child x unfavorite. The life and death imagery. The fucking angel bullshit. The sharp contrasts in how they handle the idea of exercising power. Occtis' pledge with Arranessa to restore their Houses vs Wick's pledge to burn his to the ground. Occtis' overt victimization by his family making people immediately sympathetic of him in a way that lets him get away with retaining a number of biases vs the suspicion and irritation that Wick is greeted with forcing his nose to the grindstone. Wick's first arc being a nonstop humiliation ritual vs Occtis losing a lot of his anxiety and getting more and more comfortable with asserting himself. I could go on.

There's really so much potential here, it's gonna be so funny when they never talk.

[smallishdoggo]

It's so funny that when Alex expresses incredulity that Occtis/Kattigan is popular, Sam jumps in immediately to articulate the aesthetic appeal of a big gruff hairy competent older man with a slender coddled pathetic younger man, like. Likely thing for a Teorwick shipper to say.

[tehriel]

[smallishdoggo]

I wonder how much of Wick's obliviousness is, like, willful on his part. With what we know about Wick and the little we have about his home life, I get the sense that he'd be dreadfully unhappy with his situation were he even a little more cognizant of it.

Like, Wick so desperately wants to be useful. I think a really definitional early moment for him is at Thjazi's wake after his confrontation with Hal, when Loza Blade, a total stranger, approaches him with a request, he immediately leaps on it. In the aftermath of a failure to help someone he cares about, where he refuses Hal's comfort and stresses that his failure matters, he immediately leaps at the opportunity to try and help someone else. I think that's very telling about who he is!

And someone like that would probably be pretty unhappy to be held at arms length and not allowed to do things of real importance, which Wick definitely was with Creed business. There is actually some level of awareness Wick has of this, cause when Yanessa mentions there's things she's kept from him, he has a ready framework for what that means. He needs to be "promoted" within the church in order to have access to certain things. He definitely knows that his attempts to "fix" things, like with the "misinterpretations" of the Creed regarding the Fae haven't panned out. There's gotta be some level of him just. Squaring that circle in his brain. Maybe refusing to put things together until he has no other choice.

[smallishdoggo]

some of the ways people respond to Wick as a character I think come down to a failure to reckon with the Creed as a specific ideology. Like, how much of the idea that Wick still believes in the Creed comes down to people seeing Wick's desire to do good and be a good person as just what the Creed is? Not a specific set of tenants, not a set of ideas about what "good" is, just. "Do good. Bring light." What is good? What is light? What brings it?

The Creed has specific answers for all that that can be interrogated, and almost certainly will going forward. Like, Sam wrote all that shit out for a reason, yunno?

[smallishdoggo]

the "Wick is the Worst" running gag was easier to swallow before we had three straight episodes of Bolaire being the most obnoxious person who ever lived.

[smallishdoggo]

I think people are very attached to the idea of Wick as someone whose faith in the Creed is boundless and ultimately redemptive of the Creed as an ideology, and I think that sometimes makes people turn a blind eye to aspects of Wick's character and feelings.

I think a lot of this comes from people who have a perspective on religion that's like. Well, it's obviously fake, but it's fine if you find meaning in it and it compels you to do good, and I think there's a real lack of empathy for the perspective of someone who didn't think that shit was fake. Wick didn't just view the Creed as a guide for doing good, he viewed it as a fundamental truth about how the universe works. It matters to him that it's a lie! The framework surrounding Candle Feast is very much that, it's fake, but it means something to these people, and I think it's very telling that Wick's response to seeing all that celebration was disgust.

I don't think what Wick still has in the aftermath of everything is a faith in the "true" Creed underneath all the lies, I think what he has is a desire to do good. He continually stresses his uncertainty, he lack of understanding about the world around him and "good" even looks like, but he wants to do right by people still. And I dunno, I really think that uncertainty is super fucking interesting. I think his fumbling around in the dark for what "good" even is is fun and cool.