#logh tag

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OF COURSE BORIS KONEV THINKS OF YANG AS “THAT SMART KID WHO TOTALLY BLEW IT AS AN ADULT AND ENDED UP IN WASHED-UP MILITARY JOB”

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They really had me w Ansbach glowup! I was on a tenterhook! And then they recycled this frame ONE more time

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dnt 23:

inspirational framing-lichtenlade music. oh I really enjoyed the fleet shedding numbers with every warp on the breakneck flight back to the capital but also I did not understand it. were people actively deserting in the confusion as Mittermeyer suggests or were they just. carsick

I’ve probably remarked on this before, but I appreciate that Kircheis telling Reinhard to make the universe his is the repressed hufflepuff equivalent of a Lancer/Mercutio-style dying curse

MOST LOW-KEY ANNEROSE ABANDONMENT EVER, AMAZING, IT SOUNDED LIKE SHE WANTED HIM TO LET GO OF HER ON HIS FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. “YOU MUSTN’T GET TIRED TOO SOON.”

but the little convulsive orchestral hand gestures on “His heart was starved” were really well done..........

:(

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DNT S2 has made just enough good choices to really frustrate me with its continued basic mediocrity, but the most laser-targeted of these was the decision to make Boris Konev into kind of a hot weasel

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How do you think a Reuenthal genderbend would work?

Uh... I’m not sure it would, but I guess like, “unattached and scandalous young noblewoman [               THIS SPACE MARKS WHERE I TRIED TO FIND A QUICK N DIRTY FEMININE FORM OF ‘OSCAR’ AND INSTEAD RAN HEADFIRST INTO THE FACT THAT THE GIRL NAME I FOUND THAT STARTS WITH AN O- AND HAS A ROUGHLY EQUIVALENT MEANING IS “OPRAH”] uh, Oke von Reuenthal baits Mittermeyer into an ill-advised affair which! surprise! attracts the attention of his jealous aristocratic rivals---conceivably he even gets arrested on trumped up charges of rape, if her father gets wind of it and notices the uncanny resemblance between Mittermeyer and that one beau of Reuenthal's mom. So Reuenthal... goes to Annerose to get a pardon/reduced sentence? LMAO. SORRY THAT'S SO FUNNY I LOVE IT. Annerose: Being treated as a person with influence worth courting is such a novelty, I'll indulge you? Would you keep an eye on my brother though I'm worried literally anyone at court, myself included, is going to notice he's gay.

So that's how Reuenthal and Reinhard end up engaged! And Mittermeyer gets called back from soft exile or whatever after young von Musel throws his weight around, and Mitts is like, wow, it was noble of you to sacrifice your independence for me out of a deeply-held sense of justice, even though you didn't love me, I think you're the bravest person I know, and Reuenthal is like [gritted teeth] HAVE YOU HEARD OF A LAVENDER MARRIAGE and Mittermeyer is like "sorry I can't hear you over the sound of me proposing to my childhood sweetheart, inspired to do well by at least one woman I CAN do well by" and Reuenthal cracks the stem of her wine glass by squeezing.

I could extend this on to Reuenthal puppetmastering the Lichtenlade coup and then ending up in an unhappy regency on Odin while Reinhard invades the FPA, and maybe she starts the uprising WAY early and the war ends up being Reuenthal with control of the old empire vs Reinhard in a shitty mocked up alliance with the FPA, just so he can retake his own base??? Wow. I was initially skeptical about this AU; actually, it is amazing. Turning gay ships into frustrated het adultery is SUCH bad praxis, you've really got me out here living my best life

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Drabble me a femme fatale. I don't care which.

OK sorry you get a never to be finished wip for a show you’re not into just because it was, technically, noir

*

There was a woman in his office, which explained why Julian had blocked his path to the door, hissing, “There’s a woman in your office!” Yang had been too absorbed in the morning’s first cup of tea to interpret this strange oracle; he waved Julian off with what—in retrospect—must have seemed like foreknowledge, rather than temporary sobriety-induced deafness. But he didn’t know the woman picking over his desk.

If he’d had to put a label on her—and he was told that as a private eye, that was his responsibility—he would have said, “ice queen with a cold.” She was short, in sensible ankle boots that put her probably at eye level with him: even if not, the pillbox hat would give her an edge. Between hat and boots hung a wonderful coat, spring green: he didn’t like to think of himself as an envious personality, but it was hard when others went around in enviable coats.

She seemed uncomfortable in the getup, but like an old hand at discomfort. As he watched, she made to flip the fascinator out of her eyes, where he was almost sure fascinators were supposed to be. But she was fingering the stopwatch on his desk and must have wanted a better view.

“It’s slow,” Yang offered.

The fascinator sank sadly back down. She had very light eyes, even in the shadow of the veil. It was a gloomy morning even for winter on Phezzan, but she was the coldest thing in it. Her nose was a little pink, too.

“It was a gift from a friend who wanted me to be more punctual,” he went on. “I’m afraid it backfired; now I just blame the watch.”

“This is a stopwatch,” she said. “It doesn’t tell time.”

“Oh, really? I must have gotten confused. Speaking of which, I’m sorry—do we have an appointment?”

“I couldn’t get ahold of your secretary up to now.”

“Well, it was Sunday. I’m surprised you got by him this morning, to be honest. He can be a little eager to scare off paying customers.”

She offered up the watch. He put down his tea, instead. “So what brings Lady Goldenlöwe to my agency…?”

She looked relieved that he had made some effort to impress her. “My friend died,” she said. “I want you to investigate.”

Yang felt a little queasy. ‘Missing,’ as euphemisms went, he was prepared for; ‘died’ implied it had left a smear. “Wait, do you have the body?”

He winced at her expression, and tried to gesture her, without touching, into the office’s less ratty chair; he must have gotten comfortable, if he was fitting foot to mouth like that, though he couldn’t think why. Maybe her awful restlessness had made him relax in self-defense. “I’m sorry. Sorry to hear about your friend, that is. How did he die?”

“She,” said Lady Goldenlöwe, when she was breathing normally again. “She gave her life for mine.”

Faintly: “Oh?”

“Except,” said the terror of Phezzan’s old crime families, “I think she faked it. I don’t know how. I don’t care how. All I want—all I want is to see her again. Can you arrange it, Miracle Yang?”

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reflections from today’s hike:

maybe yang’s mom isn’t dead but she faked her own death with his dad’s full consent bc 1) divorce is hard and 2) didn’t want to explain it to their silent, evil baby. they are both where he got it from

how did i not realize yang/cao cao is my crossover ship. yang in the garden dropping the chopsticks............... expectantly dropping them again

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ooh ooh. can you dvd commentary "the wine we fought for" from "Are you a masochist, Schonkopf?" to "Schonkopf felt a fleeting moment of pity for that one other person, whose life and honor the firebombing must have saved"?

MY PLEASURE, THANKS. sorry this is super long because you picked a fresh ‘un.

“Are you a masochist, Schonkopf?” he said.

“Who, me?”

I obviously love Yang and Schonkopf’s stupid conversations in-show for a lot of reasons, but one is that Yang is a little less sure of his footing around Schonkopf than e.g. academy friends (and has reason to be!), so he puts more effort into actively turning the tables when he’s uncomfortable. He also spends less time playing dumb, I think because he finds Schonkopf’s incitement-to-revolt genuinely worrying and doesn’t want to give it any quarter—Schonkopf seems willing to take anything less than a flat denial as encouragement, so this makes some sense. Actually, Schonkopf might take encouragement from a flat denial, which is presumably why Yang always hears him out first, to make a point out of “it’s not that I don’t trust you enough to share my secret ambitions, it’s that I trust you and I DON’T HAVE SECRET AMBITIONS.” I also like that Yang’s efforts to wrongfoot him often work, at least a little, although he’s a recovery artist. But his recoveries involve digging himself deeper in/showing more of his hand, as far as personal investment is concerned. 

“Well, take this. I can’t imagine you’d enjoy seeing me paired off. It would offend your sense of justice—and rightly so. How can a man like me go courting?” With his free hand he drew a line across his neck. For the guillotine? “As for your other demands… If I seized control of the government, your life would become very boring. Subduing the populace, night raids—for a man of your talents, it’s a snore. We’d never go to war again. And yet you go on asking me to take up the mantle of power.”

I do think Yang kind of equates “Schonkopf urging dictatorship upon me” and “Schonkopf meddling in my love life.” Which is interesting, because… in some ways the show wants to set up the desire for a happy private life and the pressure to seize power (and protect himself) as opposing drives in Yang’s life, but obviously for Yang himself they both represent an unconscionable turn toward self-interest—toward self-interest and away from his obligation to, uh, all the people he’s blown up. I don’t know that Vermilion is really about Overcoming The Guilt so much as it is discovering a little humility; in targeting Reinhard and proposing to Frederica he’s slightly overriding the control freak instinct that says “you hold the ultimate power here and will fuck everything up personally.” But it’s charming to me when people are like “??? why doesn’t Yang ignore the order for the sake of the greater good,” when it’s made pretty explicit that if Yang were following his idea of a straight consequentialist agenda, he wouldn’t fight Reinhard at all…….. Well, and there’s more to it than that, because part of Yang’s brand of consequentialism is trying to force himself out of the headspace that believes perfectly informed decisions can ever be made by fumbling individuals. Still.

That said, I feel “your job would suck under the Yang Regime” is a pretty compelling argument and one Schonkopf should lend further consideration

“You’ve confused me with yourself,” Schonkopf said, after a pause. “A man so afraid of being bored, he closes his eyes to everything that might disappoint him.”

Yang blinked. But Schonkopf had warmed to his subject. “Now, me—though it might involve some personal sacrifice, I would find matters to interest me in your dictatorship. And if you were in love… ‘Yang Wen-li, laid low by passion!’ I admit, you’re not a natural. Is there any part you’re a natural for? But as we’ve discussed—you’re not a bad student.”

The most unrealistic part of this fic is the idea that this would in any way strike Yang as an odd or unprofessional thing for Schonkopf to say. But as I discovered while editing this scene, there’s actually no line weird enough that it DOES make sense as a trigger for Yang’s realization. I made the sort of boring decision while writing that… characterization-wise I am okay with Yang moving things along here, on the basis that Yang is interested in letting off some steam and has entered into that kind of self-soothing mindset he’ll increasingly show on the road to Vermilion. And I think if Yang were going to choose any time to hit on Schonkopf, or better yet blindside Schonkopf by arbitrarily declaring Schonkopf to have hit on him, it would certainly be as part of a high-level deflection away from one (1) question he doesn’t want to answer about Frederica and/or himself as a person who experiences positive desire. In this case actually it wasn’t a question, it was just Schonkopf suggesting he reach out to a grieving friend. Yang: What? No!!

Yang is also kind of the Aslan of LOGH in that whenever a person comes to him about a third party’s possible crush on him, he’s like, “no, I’m going to tell you about your crush now. no one is told any incriminating details but their own.”   

He leaned forward; and for once, Yang didn’t shrink away. Emboldened, Schonkopf wiggled his fingers in Yang’s face, invoking the spirit of a fairy godmother over a pumpkin. Yang moved his head to one side and squinted. “Are you making a pass at me?”

With the body language I did want to convey that Schonkopf has overshot his normal careful boundary-testing, partly because he’s feeling “vulnerable” about the one-sidedness of his investment—that’s part of what him ordering the autopsy under his own authority and then feeling weird about it is supposed to set up, though I don’t know if it works. 

It was natural to lower his hand. It was natural to smile pedantically, as if letting himself in on the joke.

I’m happy with this line because for me it immediately evokes OVA Schonkopf’s whole face situation. 

“I can’t say I’d thought of it. But for you, Admiral, I would make an exception…”

One question that it might be reasonable to address, now that I’ve gotten into it about all these… characterization considerations, for a very short and unimpassioned relationship upgrade scene… is why I didn’t just have Schonkopf initiate. And the answer is, because Schonkopf is a cowardly opportunist! Of sorts. I mean, he’s not Yang-level, but we see with Katerose how unwilling he is to go out of his way to do anything that might involve inconvenience for him, and I don’t think he’s so attracted to Yang he’d consider it worth the risk. Maybe. I mean, in general he’s not the sort of person who “risks” things for sex. It depends how you picture both FPA culture and the culture within the military, but I think especially in the first half of the show Schonkopf doesn’t seem confident enough about where to place Yang in any of that, even just as an “unsoldierly” person with all these performative civilian aspirations, that he’d put himself out there without some sign of interest from Yang. I think also with both Yang and Frederica he has this pre-emptive sour grapes thing of like, I don’t have a chance so I’m going to sublimate all my energy into weird interrogations of their joint ward, which Julian calls him out on in the one target practice scene, lol.

“No, really.” Schonkopf eased his weight off the desk and raised an eyebrow, a half a beat too late. Yang was practically glowing. His eyes had popped open. Disgusted, Schonkopf understood that he was ignoring any implications: he had the silly, brazen look he got when alone with an ideal puzzle. “I thought you were sour Frederica turned you down,” Yang stage-whispered, putting his hand flat on the desk in a covert slap of triumph. “I was too narrowminded. General, if you have a complaint—”

Yang is so dumb lol. None of the above commentary is meant to imply that this isn’t a genuine lightbulb moment for him, at least on a conscious level. Yang: “huh, this hot guy is constantly up in my business, I guess I can leverage his curiosity as loyalty” —> “ohhhhh he cares about me as a PERSON i can use him for SEX”

He paused. I should have timed it, Schonkopf thought, and folded his arms.

“How curious,” said Yang, leaning back. “I seem to have lost my head. I apologize if I said something in bad taste. It was a joke. Uh, a test?”

I wrote a less halfassed version of this and then had to ask myself whether Yang would put any effort whatsoever into offering someone ELSE a graceful exit.

Schonkopf shook his head. His arms stayed crossed. Yang stared up at him, and stifled a yawn. When the silence had gone on another moment, he appeared to sag. “This is difficult. Usually, the other person makes a move, and we’re interrupted by a firebombing,” he offered. “Well, I say usually. It’s only happened the once…”

“How would you know?” Schonkopf said, kissing him.

He felt Yang tense. The change was harsh. But, equally quickly, he relaxed, and even moved with the kiss. His hands settled on Schonkopf’s shoulders. Schonkopf felt a fleeting moment of pity for that one other person, whose life and honor the firebombing must have saved.

Anyway, my favorite thing about writing this scene was just that Schonkopf doesn’t know who Jessica Edwards is. Could Yang pull this line on Frederica? He could not! But Schonkopf, while a stalker, isn’t one of those weird stalkers who knows your dead friends’ names. Here, that puts him at a disadvantage.

“life and honor” — I like this bit because, although it’s just a joke, I enjoyed making Schonkopf be wrong in this fic, in general, as a dramatic irony thing but also because I like when characters are wryly, ruefully, or resignedly wrong. Like, they put some thought into this! Still wrong. And often the way in which they are wrong shows a real lack of imagination about how many different things can fail terribly—sure, getting emotionally involved with Yang is a bad idea and about to become a much worse one, but disengaging didn’t save Jessica. Yang is not the be-all and end-all of horrors awaiting anyone in LOGH universe, and it’s important that Schonkopf can’t see beyond that for even a second.