#nomaley

[kineticallyanywhere]

With one word. How's RWBY vol8 going? For you I mean :D

it’s going [yells]

[anneapocalypse]

RVB season 8 episode 20, Wash "I knew you'd do this Meta. I just can't believe... [distracted by the cavalry] I can't believe this." what do you think would wash have said if he wasn't interrupted? This part is really bugging me.

An excellent question with any number of potential answers. I have no hard and fast headcanon for this, but here’s what I think are the two most likely possibilities to play with:

“I knew you would do this, Meta. I just can’t believe you decided to do it now.”

“I knew you would do this, Meta. I just can’t believe it took you this long.”

[kineticallyanywhere]

YOU HAVE A KITTY NAMED OWL????? I LOVE IT!!!! SO CUTE!!!!! AMAZING!!!!

he’s getting slowly bigger and my love grows accordingly 

[kineticallyanywhere]

I don't know where to send you this, but Ozpin's expression in Vol3-Eps3 when Qrow was drinking as Glynda said that he's always drunk. I think it was about 11 minutes in. Yes. That was the most he showed expressions if I remember correctly and I like it!

yes

excellent

I’m still putting together for that RWBY character expression study thing! I’m full up on Ozes, but still open for any of the other characters, especially JNR and Blake!

[kineticallyanywhere]

Try (for the ask game of Mind Over Matter)

Wash keeps trying to remember the grenade bits as he’s cracking open the undercarriage of a warthog by getting leverage with a crooked stick his alien cat mom gave him.

anything to give you guys more of the Cat Mom

[Send me a word and I’ll find it in the next Mind over Matter chapter!]

[kineticallyanywhere]

Do you have any plans for a stream soon?

I hadn’t, really, but what about today? I’ve got a couple DP au asks, still, that I wanna draw responses for. Or I could just draw my ocs? We could listen to TAZ? I have the house to myself tonight lets get wild 

[anneapocalypse]

(i know you're not here much anymore, but until I make a Dreamwidth account) Is project freelancer a story "from the POV of the villain"? or is it a story "where villains are everywhere"? cuz project freelancer and Charon industries are both bad, but we thought PF was good because the story was told from their POV!!

(It’s cool, I’m still vaguely around, though I’m not spending much time on my dash.)

Yes and no. Technically both but narratively neither. 

In terms of individual characters in the Freelancer story arc, no to both–the protagonist of the Freelancer arc is Carolina (even taking into account that her POV is frequently handled clumsily or not at all, it is still her motivations that drive what semblance of a story arc the Freelancer seasons have) and her antagonist is the Director, and Freelancer is very much not from the POV of the Director (to the very literal extent of the camera never showing us his eyes until the very end). And while the present-day portion of season 10 certainly centers Carolina and she is arguably acting as an antagonist to the Reds and Blues at that point, it is not from her point of view until the very end.

I think that taking Malcolm Hargrove’s later villainy into account when looking at the actual story the Freelancer saga is telling is… sticky, because while yeah, we can comfortably say based on later canon that Charon Industries Bad, its badness is not a part of the story that seasons 9 and 10 are telling, and in fact at no point during those seasons do we even find out who the “Insurrectionists” really are. (Which is, incidentally, just really bad writing.) So we may say in hindsight that villains are everywhere in seasons 9 and 10, but I don’t think we can say that the Freelancer story is about villains being everywhere.

Insurrectionists aside, though, did we ever really think Project Freelancer was “good?” The project is kind of painted in an unflattering light from season 1, when Church complains about how Tex’s implantation changed her. This is later confirmed when Tex is not only relieved to be free of Omega, but wants him dead. Out of Mind further explores the complications from AI implantations. And then in Recovery One we meet Agent Washington, kind of presented to us as the ultimate woobie victim of Project Freelancer dealing with the lasting mental trauma of his implantation, and the entire Recollections trilogy is about Wash trying to bring down Project Freelancer.

So the Project (and more specifically the Director) was established as antagonistic long before the prequel seasons took us inside it. It is true that those seasons are from the perspective of those within the Project (and we get a lot of POVs in those seasons). But think how much of those perspectives are dedicated to showing us agents either doubting the project or being harmed by it in some way, or both.

Really, the fake Insurrectionists/Charon Industries are only nominally the villains in the Freelancer story. We actually don’t even see them kill a single Freelancer. The most damage they do is to Maine, and he survived–later developments and with Sigma notwithstanding. The multiple Freelancer deaths we know are coming can be traced to specific chains of events within the project itself–and most of those chains lead back to the Director.

So the Freelancers aren’t the villains of the Freelancer story, and neither is Charon Industries. The villain of the Freelancer story is the Director.

[anneapocalypse]

Why do you think Caboose is so attached to Church? Is it because of "was it my dad? Did my dad die again?" -season 6 chapter 3- (if you know what I mean)?

I think it’s less about Church specifically and more about Caboose’s tendency to attach to a Favorite Person generally. I wrote a bit about that after Caboose’s friendship episode in season 14, which you can find here!