What kind of person do you think lily was? There's a lot said about her in the series, but i have trouble reconciling pure, shining paragon lily with someone who would marry someone that spent years tormenting her friend, 4 on 1.
ooh boy this will be a LOT. i can't even promise it will be coherent but i'll make an attempt to be. (going under a cut to save us all the grief).
first off, i think it's fair to state that one of the biggest drawbacks of lily's character is how she was written. she is a plot device. she exists to boost other characters’ narratives: she's simultaneously the Rich Boy's trophy wife, the self-sacrificing mother of the Boy Who Lived, the best friend slash lost love of the Fallen Hero, and, at the same time, also no one at all. lily is a character with little to no background and character development that she can barely stand on her own two feet without any of the associated (usually male) characters to prop her up. it absolutely sucks but that's how it is. that's how jk wrote her.
given that and working with the scraps that we do have, my opinion of lily is...complex. i try to give her justice by trying to understand her context, the workings of her mind, and the possible pressures she was subjected to, but it can be challenging especially since lack of canon pushes you into a space where you have to put them in Either/Or situations. my opinion of her has also changed as i got older. when i was younger (i read the books waaaay back, as they were getting released in fact) i only saw her as an extra character (i was most interested in snape, if that's not obvious enough, but neither did i think snape was 'obsessed' with her as a lot of hp fans now think). i saw her and snape as good friends who had had a falling out, and that he'd probably had a crush on her at some point, and it got naturally overtaken by guilt etc when she died. then when i reread some chapters containing her, i was quick to put her in the Bad Friend camp. i don't think that now. i think that she, like snape, was a complex human being who made a lot of questionable decisions but shouldn't be entirely vilified for them.
my main thoughts of her that are kind of built on material from canon as well as what jkr has said herself:
- she was not posh. she grew up in cokeworth, in the same town as severus. i don't think she was middle class as a lot of fics portray her. i think the evanses were slightly better off than the snapes but they were all working-class, and living was a day-to-day struggle. the kids spoke in the local accent, their clothes were all worn and patched over, there were no green spaces or public infrastructure for kids to safely play in, and they were all mostly running wild about the town since all their parents had to work. food was something to be thankful for because there was never enough, and sometimes they had to share with their neighbors. that's the kind of setting i think lily and severus grew up in, although severus suffered abuse on top of it all. it's possible that lily did too because of the setting (post-world war 2, poverty, adults dealing with repressed trauma from the war, etc) and it wouldn't even be that surprising if she had been;
- she and petunia got along fairly well up until the point lily found out she was a witch and, as a result, became friends with severus. it's stated in canon that petunia had also wanted to attend hogwarts with them, going as far as writing to dumbledore to allow her admittance. her jealousy upon his rejection had festered and grown into outright hate that she projected onto harry as an adult, but i don't doubt that she continued to love lily even after her death and despite how she treated harry. i think as kids they had stuck together and were very close, but magic had torn them apart. suddenly lily had a world of her own that petunia wasn't welcome in, and that would have hurt. pottermore stated lily attended vernon and petunia's wedding or engagement party but james made a right mess of it. i think lily TRIED to maintain their relationship but external factors always got in the way. i don't doubt she had also loved her sister very much;
- i don't think she had any other friends. she may have had a lot of acquaintances but i think her only real friend, the one who saw her for who she really was, was severus, and i think, at a certain point in their lives, she saw that as a weakness and resented it;
- i think, from the interactions we saw in canon of lily with other people, that lily had a penchant to please people, especially the ones who ranked higher than her in terms of power dynamics - petunia (who was the older sister), professors (sluggy comes to mind, the head of slytherin with a lot of connections), even the marauders whose actions she defended. it's not necessarily a bad thing, but i've always seen it as her being borderline manipulative. i noted that she wasn't the same with severus (based on their conversations, especially the ones in 5th year, before SWM) because he's lower than her in a lot of aspects, being a slytherin and quite likely of a lower social standing. she could boss him around and tell him to piss off and he probably wouldn't have minded. she actually strikes me as someone who could have been in slytherin; a perfect arrangement, save for the fact that she was a muggleborn. i think lily knew her place and the cards she was dealt with more than anyone, but she was also determined not to stay there;
- this brings me to the point as to why she ever went out with james potter in the first place. i think her friendship breakup with severus was inevitable because they were in the middle of a burgeoning war and both of them were being pulled to opposite and opposing ends. as an added complexity, i think she also wanted to be better than being muggleborn lily evans of cokeworth, best friend of the evil greasy slytherin git, and her way out was to associate with housemates who were in the upper echelons of power. like, we don't even know what her life was like in gryffindor tower. ron was poor, but he was also a pureblood, so that may have saved him from ridicule. but what if you were a poor muggleborn, with a northern accent to boot? in the same way severus trained himself to be more posh, lily could have done the same and could have furiously tried to blend in. maintaining a friendship with severus would have ended in heartbreak as there were too many risks and it likely outweighed the gains. this was the wizarding world too which is much much smaller than the muggle world and relied on connections more than anything. openly siding with the marauders would have saved her skin and secured her a future (which, as we all know, was forfeit anyway but whatever);
- jumping to the jily relationship, i honestly think it was also not one that was meant to last. iirc jkr projected a lot onto lily, so i'm surmising jily reflected a lot of her own failed relationships. i think james and lily had a less-than-ideal relationship, one that involved abuse (verbal, emotional, mental, physical, take your pick, but at least one form of it), and i think she may have been unhappy in the last year of her life, living in hiding with none of her own friends (if they even existed) and seeing no one else but james' pals. her only light in that darkness was likely harry as she couldn't even see her own family. i think, during those times, she thought a lot about the home she left behind and, as a consequence, her lost friendship with severus. she probably missed him, and i'm sure she must have been very lonely.
in sum, i don't think she was the Virgin Mary figure a lot of hp fans paint her to be. imho she had her own questionable but utterly human moments, and i just tried to fill in the blanks as to why she would have acted the way she did. i don't think it was easy to be lily evans at all, and majority of the 21 years of her life was likely a struggle.
(( @ketsuchikotetsu somehow both reassuring AND upsetting Jak more! Also mention of @claihn‘s Kincaid because bad news abounds and everything is stressful for Jak lately! Emotions are bad, she wants a refund. ))
It had been momentarily startling, upon waking up, to see him there.
When wakefulness soon chased the fog of sleep away, however, it was...relief? That remained.
She watched his chest rise and fall – and it was relieving.
He was alive, and he'd gone out of his way to assure her that the people hunting him would be little more than sanguine smears when he'd had his way. She...believed him. It wasn't that she'd ever thought him ‘incapable,’ so much as she'd been seized by the fear that these people would be ready for him again – that these worthless pieces of shit would claim blood far too good for their grubby hands.
She didn't know when, exactly, she'd reached out to trace the tapestry of scars that scored his body – but he slept deeply...or seemed to. He'd still managed to sneak out, last time he'd collapsed – never one to linger, her Wolf. This time...it worried her. He insisted he had ways around it, so...what could she do but believe him? Not something he'd lie about, right?
The same way Caid didn't hide his impending death from me?
“Choose, you say.” In the shadows of the early morning, the velvet brush of her voice came as little more than a whisper. He was too far gone to hear, at any rate. Or so she hoped, anyways. “But haven't I? If you'd just...take a look around, Wolf.” Careful, slow, precarious – she felt for his heartbeat. It had become...a habit. She couldn't have told you why, but it reassured her – his heart beat. Solid. Dependable. Furiously, relentlessly alive. But for how long, now?
If it doesn't hurt, it isn't real...or perhaps the faint of heart would call it 'bittersweet.' Bo-shite, if you ask me.
He'd shown up in armor the night before, and she knew why – and from whence he'd come. All the same, it had felt like he didn't want her hands on him. Easier, if her prying little hands met cold, impervious metal.
Like that could stop her.
“I've been choosing. The only other people on this star who matter to me despise you, and would probably sleep easier if you were dead. They'd be glad to be the ones who took you down, even. And I'm still here, aren't I?” What had happened the night prior? Things inevitably got heated quickly, and they'd be on the cusp of...something...and he'd storm out. But she hadn't let him, and...
Well, she wouldn't put all the blame for his current state on herself. Self-pity didn't help, and he was just as much to blame...but she did feel a twinge of...guilt? That she'd contributed to his collapse. There'd been fury, so much...rage. Murder in his eyes, and still she'd held on.
What did her death matter, really? It was taking him, it was taking Caid. She'd chased it for so long, and now death spit on her, and took the people that had begun to matter, instead. So what, if it caught her now, at the hands of the Wolf whose life mattered more than she'd intended it to?
But she hadn't meant to...weaken him? Bring him, quite literally, to his knees? Nor had she expected him to mend her confusing wounds prior, after all the scathing commentary that had...stung, for once; nor that fall of his ears, or the white-hot fury that chased as much; then the theft of her word for him – infuriating! Infuriating man, infuriating Wolf. Sure, she might fear his Demon, but she'd face that down, too, if she had to. She had as boundless a fury as he, if only a fraction of the strength to back it up.
He was impossibly confusing – she 'wasn't getting it wrong, but she wasn't getting it right'? What the fuck was that supposed to mean? What kind of enigmatic bo-shite was that?
He'd say something snarky about how he couldn't just tell her, probably. Jackass.
She watched his scarred chest rise...and fall.
The knot of tension in her chest loosened, if only by degrees. The clocks might be ticking, but there was time, yet, and she wouldn't let fear – or a soul crystal's voice, or even the Wolf, himself - determine what she did with it.
thanks for submitting questions anon!! (’: put them under a readmore bc i cant shut up
3. Favorite case?
I HAVE SO MANY FAVORITES!!! im gonna go with the most predictable answer which is case 3-5 tho, i was SO OVERJOYED when i got to play as edgeworth for the first time *__* also i cried at the end. 3-4 was really good too, terry fawles’ death was Quite a Plot Twist
4. Least favorite case?
i have a confession.... i was bored to tears with the first “real” case of dual destinies EVEN THOUGH I LOVE JINXIE AND DAMIAN TENMA!!! i just could not wait to have it over with idk the writing felt stiff and i was still getting used to the new gameplay style. the game picked up quickly after it tho
27. Has any moment in the game made you cry?
.............. yes im gay
“a lawyer doesnt cry until its all over.” i wept. i was a lawyer. it was over
i legitimately teared up at the end of the themis academy case when all three of the kids were talking abt their friendship like what the fuck i wasnt even that invested (i just wanted to get to the tragedy that is clay terran and aurametis tbh) but i got all teary anyway????? wtf
when maya wrote the letter to phoenix in dual destinies!!! i miss her!!!
also i have a FEELING i will cry whenever i finally get around to watching a playthrough of AAI2 bc i get real damn emotional about the edgeworths
28. Anything made you laugh out loud?
IF U LOOK THROUGH MY DUAL DESTINIES LIVEBLOG TAG U WILL SEE HOW HILARIOUS I FIND THESE GAMES honestly man i love the humor in the ace attorney series like there are too many funny moments to count....
“in west clownadelphia born and raised”
“when i was a kid we would have eaten them all and then died”
“rubbish! we will be out on a stroll”
“you’re lovers!!!”
“no, maya, this is SPARDA”
“well now we know whose milkshake brings the boys to the yard”
“how many panties do you have in your pocket apollo”
So, I rewatched these the same night I watched 2x01 but didn't have the time to write up my notes. Since I have watched "Shadows", I probably won't be able to keep all of my opinions from that from coloring this a bit, but I'm going to do my best to keep it S1-focused.
We really see Trip being such a source of fun in these two episodes, kinda bringing some much needed lightheartedness. And it's such a contrast to the much more subdued way he behaves back in 1x14, when we first met him. This tells us a lot about Garrett. Away from Garrett, Trip is a joy to be around. While working under Garrett, he was much more closed-off and cautious. He was working for Garrett about the same length of time that Ward was with the Bus, and I think we can see that they moved roughly the same distance in that amount of time -- Ward opened up once he was away from Garrett, while Trip closed down and shut himself off. But then you switch their positions again, and the familiarity makes them each snap back into place. Ward shuts down and Trip opens up.
The Ward and Garrett flashbacks are a huge part of "Ragtag", showing us the cliff notes of Ward's previous situation and showing us Garrett's M.O., as Garrett shows his true nature throughout this scene, though Ward is in too much of a vulnerable place to pick up on what an opportunist Garrett is. Not that it likely would have done him much good, considering the circumstances. Garrett really knows what he's doing here, the way he plays Ward, which makes me feel like it's probably something that he's done several times over. He's got a direct line on troubled kids via that 'quartermaster at a military school' deal, and then he sweeps in and promises to fix their problems by making them strong. Basically, it's exactly the kind of targeting that Raina/Centipede did with their super-soldiers. You find someone vulnerable and you promise that you can make them powerful enough not to get hurt again.
Garrett wants Ward because he heard that he has 'off-the-chart hand-eye coordination' but only acted to take him in once Ward burnt down his parents' house. From what I can see, Garrett's assumption at the time was that Ward was 'like him' and that Ward liked doing things like that, rather than it being the act of desperation that it more likely was. We later see Garrett disappointed both in the past and the present by Ward's ability to feel compassion. Ward was not what Garrett wanted him to be, so Garrett proceeds to try to mold Ward into being that ideal spy/soldier, and train out all the parts of Ward that he didn't like.
Garrett is also just such a condescending jerk. He calls Mike "Mikey" here, like he called Agent Hand "Vic" back in 1x14 (or 1x16? One of those. She calls him out for it). He was pretty much always doing that, putting other people below him, placing himself at the top. Garrett also talks here about how they should just enjoy that they've gotten this far, while both Mike and Ward look like they'd rather be doing pretty much anything else in the world.
Skye goes through an emotional transition in her view of Ward between "Ragtag" and the finale. In "Ragtag", she states that Ward is evil. In the finale, she'll call him weak and say that Garrett is evil. The obvious reason why her change in heart is because of what she saw in the feeds that she breaks into at the end of "Ragtag". She saw Ward questioning Garrett's choices (and sanity), questioning HYDRA, and she also saw his behavior when she wasn't around (thus taking the question of whether or not he's acting for her benefit out of the equation), but she also saw him ultimately going along with Garrett's plan -- so, she decides, not evil but 'weak' enough to follow evil's instructions. But she also calls herself 'weak' here in "Ragtag" for not being willing to let Ward die in 1x20.
So, now we have those two counterpoint PoVs, as articulated by the father-figures -- we have Garrett (and Skye and Ward) calling compassion a weakness, and Coulson saying it's not one. This isn't an argument that was settled by the end of the season and so it's likely going to continue to be a factor into S2 and potentially beyond.
Right before Skye's conversation with May, we see that she's looking at Ward's picture on her computer -- the one that she took back in 1x20. She's regretting her compassion and yet still feeling it. That's a large part of what her conversation with May is about -- she sees May as impervious to the kind of hurt that Skye herself has suffered (an assumption May corrects) and wants to be able to be the same kind of strong that May is, in the hopes that doing that means Skye won't be able to get hurt again.
While Skye talks to Coulson and May about Ward, we have a parallel conversation going on with Simmons and Fitz on the same subject. Simmons argues that Ward is a perpetrator, Fitz that he's a victim. Neither considers the possibility of him being both.
Raina, as mentioned earlier, is also an expert manipulator, and she plays Ward like a fiddle in all their conversations. Here, she dangles out a lure -- a secret about Skye. As she suspected he might, Ward doesn't want Garrett to know anything special about Skye. In fact, a little while later, Ward directly lies to Garrett about what Raina wanted to talk to him about.
Ward and HYDRA: so, the very first time he heard of them was when Garrett was telling him about it, right before Ward was set to start SHIELD academy. Garrett frames them as the 'secret good guys' -- SHIELD doesn't look after its people, but HYDRA does. SHIELD will abandon you, HYDRA won't. Once Ward got to SHIELD academy, he would have read the history, like everyone else, but he would have had Garrett's voice in his head reminding him it was all BS and propaganda. And then, after he got out of the academy, it sounds like he was sent right back to Garrett, where he was fed a regular diet of "this is how SHIELD let me down and HYDRA saved me". He's straight-up baffled by what Skye says about HYDRA in 1x20 and, afterwards, we see him questioning Garrett and trying to get him to confirm that, at the very least, neither of them believe any of the terrible things that Skye told him HYDRA believes and advocates.
But simply being unhappy about doing terrible things isn't enough, though, as long as you keep doing those things, and -- to step outside of S1 for the moment -- that's what I think Grant has realized by the time we talk to him in 2x01. Grant is aware of the difference between right and wrong in many cases (we see him judge other people and himself for it plenty over the course of S1). He just also had a belief that his debt to Garrett, and his duty to protect Garrett, was obligated to outweigh any other moral considerations (he also has this compassion=weakness thing that Garrett drilled into him but it's very much against the grain for him to think that way and required constant reinforcement -- because we've seen throughout S1 that he's very quick to judge people for failing to protect others).
And that's what he implies that he's reconsidering in 2x01. He's independently picked out a specific moral line "don't lie (to Skye)" and decided to stick by it. We don't know what else he may have picked out (we'll probably find out in future episodes), but he is doing it on his own now, and I do think that's a necessary step forward if he's ever going to re-create himself into someone he doesn't hate. It helps that Garrett is dead, tbh, though I imagine feeling like he'd failed Garrett so completely was a large part of what motivated his despair in the time in between 1x22 and 2x01.
It is clear that Ward does not want to hurt Fitz and Simmons -- his instinctive response to Garrett's order about it is "What? No!" And what we see him do is try to construct a middle path where he can technically sorta be doing what Garrett said without actually doing what Garrett says. And he lies to Garrett about it or at least lies by implication -- Fitz and Simmons are in danger, but they aren't dead. The whole scene here, with the cuts between FitzSimmons and Buddy, is pretty devastating emotionally.
Raina makes it clear that she (along with everyone else on the ship that actually voices an opinion, tbh) doesn't actually care about HYDRA and their goals. Which... idk, I find kind of funny? That the Bus is currently a HYDRA-ship with no major players on board who actually believe in HYDRA. Garrett is there because he wants to save his own life, Ward is there for Garrett, Mike is there because Ace's life is on the line, and Raina has her evolution obsession and she's just using the HYDRA connection for supplies, people, and money, basically.
And Raina's skills at manipulation are just unparalleled, I think, because in her conversation with Ward, they start out in one place (Ward's concerns over Garrett's sanity) and end up someplace completely different (hey, sure, Skye hates you now, but if ~evolution~ reveals her ~true nature~, maaaaaybe she won't hate you anymore, because she'll be just as monstrous as you believe yourself to be). And I'm basically just... idk. In awe of her ability to turn a conversation to her advantage.
I first saw Jemma's monologue about life and death a way long time ago, because a gorgeous gif-set about it was going around on tumblr. And my immediate reaction was, "yes, that is an absolutely perfect way to describe basically what I believe". And I still feel that way, but it's also so heartbreaking now because I'm much more attached to the characters.
Fitz is always hungry in tense situations. It's very consistent little character-note. He's brave and he's hungry. I wish I could give them both hugs.
I don't really have too much to say about the big climatic battles; they're pretty straight-forward, I think.
Hmm, at the end, Coulson doesn't... seem surprised to have found the particle gun that he uses to kill Garrett (for the second time). That kinda implies that he did know that the Slingshot was a fake-out all along, because that weapon was supposed to be destroyed. So, hmm, yeah.
Fury, Coulson, and May set out SHIELD main ideal here -- protection. Whether that be the world or saving one person from themselves. And it's the personal half of that that we've not really seen them doing in S2 so far (well, all of one episode so far! Things could start looking up for SHIELD at any moment! I guess!). They're so focused on survival and on equipping themselves to hunt down HYDRA that I feel like they aren't giving enough attention to their mission statement. Ultimately, the feeling I came out of S1 with on my first watch-through was "Coulson is going to have to do a lot of work to make new!SHIELD worth creating." Because old!SHIELD -- not just the parts infected by HYDRA, but all of it -- was filled with lies, secrets, ruthlessness.
For all that Garrett takes his bitterness and runs with it to become a terrible person and a monster and to collude with monsters, the seed of that bitterness was justified. SHIELD really did abandon him when he needed them. And we've seen that happen to the team during S1 as well -- Ward and Fitz being left without backup or an extraction plan in "The Hub" would have confirmed to Ward that everything Garrett had ever told him was true (if he still needed that confirmation). Victoria Hand makes a point of mentioning that the reason so much effort is made on Coulson's behalf is because of Fury's favoritism, and that does seem to be the only way to actually get the organization to go out of its way to save you -- to have someone personally care about you enough to bend or break the rules. They weren't standing on principle, but on affection. And that is a set-up that is ripe to breed envy and discontent from anyone who isn't good at creating those personal relationships.
If Coulson wants the new!SHIELD to be better than the old!SHIELD, then he has to work on rooting out that favoritism. You need to be willing to save the people you don't have a 'soft spot' for, too. If they're a member of your team, then you should work to keep them alive even if they aren't adopted family. He needs to stand on principle and not just personal affection. That's really the test of whether or not the new!SHIELD will be any better than the old one. Also, they should make things more transparent and less filled with lies. Those are the two tests, both of which they're kinda failing right now, tbh.
