#paragonrobits

[ckret2]

I feel that bit about zim and love as destructive loyalty perfectly sums up amost possible ships and canon dynamics he has

"love to the point of destruction" with any other ship: somebody being so devoted that they're willing to sacrifice themselves and ruin their own lives for their beloved

"love to the point of destruction" with zim: the mushroom cloud is visible from orbit

[succubusboyfriend]

I've been mulling over how to depict the fae in my own stories so how what might you suggest would be a few good ways to write them instead of making them basically just elves, like you criticized?

you sent this right before i made another post in that thread, but i'll copy-paste what i put there and add some more on/elaborate!

complete, magically enforced inability to lie. this doesn't mean they can't be deceitful! i love fae that have to be VERY careful with their choice of words; it puts a fun obstacle in place when writing them.

in that vein, inability to go back on deals or not follow through with them. if they make an agreement with someone, they have to adhere to it. this is another place where being careful with your words comes into play; some fae that do want to come out on top can promise something that sounds good, but when interpreted literally it's not very great at all for the person they're bargaining with.

strict adherence to a ruleset that does not come naturally to mortal folk, often to the point of getting the mortals they interact with in trouble with them. this can involve rules regarding hospitality, etiquette, and daily living, as well as whatever else you could come up with. perhaps the "never take food from a fae" rule isn't so much that they'll entrap you, but that accepting their hospitality means accepting something else you might not otherwise agree to. maybe you should never say "thank you" a fae, otherwise you'll owe them.

use of “glamour”. as in, the more humanoid appearance you’re seeing and interacting with isn’t what they actually look like, there’s a big monstrous beastie under there. this is one of my favorites. maybe they can look very similar to elves! ...but that's not actually what they look like. i have an OC that's like this; elven-seeming at first glance, but underneath he looks like a bipedal mixture of a stag and a barn owl. you could incorporate the idea of seeing stones with this; rocks with a hole in the center that if you peer through you can see a fae for what they really are. there is also the folklore around seeing a fae's true form when you look at them out of the corner of your eye, or the one where they never quite get their humanoid disguises right, so you can spot them if you know the tells. there's a lot of possibilities, and use of this trope makes them feel way more uncanny and alien.

embodying whatever court they’re a part of, in the sense that they are more like manifestations of the forces of nature associated with their seasons than they are people sometimes. this isn't as limiting as one might think. winter fae can be ruthless and cruel, yes, but they can also embody the feeling of togetherness winter can bring around the holidays. perhaps there's a difference between a summer fae who embodies the beginning of summer, one who embodies the dog days of summer, and one who embodies the transition into fall.

on this vein, actual attention being paid to the court system if it exists at all. if they're broken up into courts, why? are they just the seelie and unseelie courts, the seasonal courts, a combination of the two, or a different court system entirely? i'm partial to two "main" courts, seelie and unseelie, which are further broken into the seasonal courts; seelie is summer and spring, unseelie is autumn and winter. but there's a lot of ways you could do it. what do these courts mean for the identity of a given fae? what does it change about them? the issue i take w a lot of writing that uses the courts is that it doesn't use them to the fullest extent, which makes them functionally the same as human kingdoms. these aren't humans! that's why i mention them embodying their courts. they don't have to, but i think if you want to use the courts at all you should have good reason for it!

extreme! heightened! emotions! when they love someone they are MADLY in love with them! when they hate someone they are MORTAL ENEMIES! sadness becomes a deep depression, happiness becomes utter elation. it's hard for them to contain it! this has some ties to folklore and i really love it a lot; maybe the fae just don't process emotions the same way humans do. maybe they're acting completely reasonable by their standards!

not knowing or understanding the limitations mortals have. sometimes they do things out of kindness and are genuinely well-meaning but they’re so alien to mortals that they can really really hurt them with this kindness. this can be part of why the fae are seen as dangerous; even the "good" ones can and will hurt you, they just don't know they're doing it.

“fae” being an umbrella term for multiple kinds of creatures! high fae and elves and pixies and hobgoblins can all be kinds of fae! brownies are a kind of fae! there's so many things that have been called faeries over the course of history, i don't see why not take full advantage of that.

not something based strictly in folklore, but an interpretation i'm partial to: fae being the physical manifestation of the very existence of magic and/or chaos in the world. without magic, there are no fae. without fae, there is no magic. combine this with the seasonal court system, and fae become the reason why the seasons change at all. any disruption to their people could have disastrous consequences for the mortal world.

in general i recommend looking into fairy folklore and stories and seeing what interests you most, because these are just the tropes and questions that are most interesting to me! there's a lot of stuff you can do with them to differentiate them from typical depictions of elves.

[aangarchy]

the capacity for these people to hate Aang so much for essentially not being a super serious grouch despite the series implicitly associating wisdom with not being hung up over looking silly just, it amazes me. they're just so ANGRY that Aang isn't like every other generic hero archetype

Aang's entire personality was clearly cemented as "fun loving" since episode one and ppl are angry at Aang for *checks notes* loving fun?

Also idk how miserable you need to be to watch a full 61 episodes of a show where you hate the main character. Is that a form of self harm lol

[fyeahmeddy]

here's a thought; do you think Finn and Marceline would ever get married if they wound up together, or do you think they're the type to dislike or just not find it necessary?

nah, I don't really think either Finn or Marceline are up to that kind of thing, Finn less than Marceline.

Marceline didn't grow up in the socialized world where getting married is seen as a great life achievement but she does know a little bit of it. and she's a softie deep down! although I can see her getting "married" with PB (that is, start calling each other "my wife" and wearing matching rings), I don't think they would see it as our current society does.

Finn most likely is in a mutual smooching agreement with several people, including (but not limited to) PB, Flame Princess, Huntress Wizard and Marceline herself. Finn most definitely doesn't understand the weight and social expectations of marriage and prefers to just let himself go with the current of whatever he feels.

I think Finn's and Marceline's relationship is closer to one of friends with benefits, probably with a little more of depth. they do love and care for each other but their relationship isn't "romantic" per se. they just enjoy their moments together being silly or fucking hard.

[orangedodge]

so by chance I happened upon your comment about no one who writes Shadowcat really reads her character at all so i was legitimately disturbed by the possibiltiy her attempted murder of Douglock was done by Claremont (as far as I know, the writer who codifed her character), so i cross referenced but best as I can tell that event happened over sixty issues after the left Excalibur so at least that particulat 'what he heck writing team' was not done by the writer who codified her character!

Right, I'm not sure of the exact issue either, but I'm almost certain that scene occurs circa issue 79 of Excalibur--near the start of the Douglock Chronicles-- which was written by Scott Lodbell and Chris Cooper. Cooper's name doesn't really mean anything to me (he seems to have been primarily a scripter for a few years in the early-mid 90s before vanishing), but I know Lodbell has spoken in the past with regards to being forced by editorial to write both Nightcrawler and Shadowcat, and having in turn resented not being able to use his own characters in their place. I think it really shows. I'm not overly fond of any of his X-Men work, but with Excalibur in particular he always seems as though he'd rather be writing about anyone else than the cast he was left with.

By the time Lodbell had taken over on Excalibur, Chris Claremont was years departed from Marvel, and his collaborator, Al Davis, had recently also departed after tying up the last lingering threads of their run together. Claremont was Kitty's co-creator alongside John Byrne, who named the character, and with whom he seemed to argue over her development frequently. If I'm not confusing Byrne-Claremont tension with Wein-Claremont tension, he had hated that Claremont characterized Kitty as the team genius, when he meant for her to be what he saw as an average girl. Parsing out his complaints against the Days of Future Past script, he seems also to have objected to any queer subtext. (A strange comic to object to on that note, but that's John Byrne for you). Claremont would later go on to substantially retool the character as Shadowcat after Byrne left Marvel.

I think as the decades have gone by, the various stewards of the X-Men comics legacy have tended to focus exclusively on those early Byrne issues when characterizing Kitty, and downplay or erase the Shadowcat era entirely. Or rather, they hew to the version of the John Byrne era that exists in collective imagining, and not the one that actually existed. Byrne created a character who was inexperienced, but also brave and competent. Often times, his imitators end up producing a take on the character that's deeply naive about the world around her, inexperienced in her field, paralyzed by the unfamiliar, and in need of being put in what the author imagines to be her place by her (worldy, male) teammates which is notably not at all what Byrne/Claremont wrote in those issues, and arguably a lot heavier on the casual misogyny than Byrne on his own would have stood for.

[zenosanalytic]

yknow it occurs to me that Zapp Brannigan is less of a parody of Kirk SPECIFICALLY, both in terms of pop culture impact and the actual character, in that while he spoofs the speaking patterns of Kirk's actor, he seems to be SPECIFICALLY a parody of the 'captain space defender of earth' character archetype, taken to its most logical extreme?

There's definitely something to this!

I mean: there are clear Kirk or Kirk-adjacent elements -the speech pattern as you say, the paunch(tho that's more movie-era Kirk), the Star Fleet miniskirt- but there's more than a little of Flash Gordon and the many, MANY Pulp SciFi Space Captains in Brannigan.

I'd also like to add that Groening's work has always been satirical at heart so, while def being done in the language of SciFi and certainly poking fun at certain characters and tropes in the genre, he might have also been hoping to poke holes in all the Hero-Generals and political chickenhawks of that era.

[589ish]

from what i hear, supposedly in the fallout tv show they had it so that the NCR was completely destroyed, which functionally FEELS like Bethesda being incredibly spiteful at the fandom vastly preferring the societies and plot threads from 1, 2 and New Vegas and just going 'no they're all dead, while implicitly getting rid of just about everything done by the original creators of Fallout before Bethesda bought it. And if its done to keep resetting the societies of Fallout so the post apocalyptic struggling scavenger theme isn't lost, it honestly makes any kind of in universe progress feel completely pointless if they're just going to keep doing that to perserve the status quo. Funnily enough, Chris Avellone (one of the main writers of New Vegas and the original two games) has ALSO said something similar, but I didn't care for when he said it then and definitely not now. (Not the least because apparently he really hated the sapient deathclaws from 2, and I still insist that THEY would be a better pick for ultimately being the new inhabitants of the world instead of humanity. They figured out pacifism from first principles, humanity has been rediscovering new and exciting ways to murder each other over ideology in virtually every game.)

To be fair the NCR as a faction isn’t really interesting for me, they’re basically the sane version of the Enclave, remnants of the old US government that is a hundred times worse than the real life one.

Surprisingly my brother was excited Shady Sands got nuked in the show’s first plot twists because he thought of Ulysses firing the missiles at the NCR in Lonesome Road DLC was the canon event, and if the writers are smart they’ll reference that as well, and could ease feathers to the hardcore fans (and by hardcore I meant the loud fnv gamers who never played the black isle games). And this story shows how easy a civilization dies because a petty asshole is angry about something Courier Six may or may not even do.

And yes on the smart talking deathclaws. Can’t believe they were never referenced again in the main games.

Am I sad the NCR is gone? Maybe? I was with Cass in her opinion that the country is the dumbass brother that can’t get his shit together living aimlessly with no direction so I was hoping their leadership gets better after the events of the game.

Or I can ignore the show and just move on and in my headcanon they got better.

[taffybuns]

with the feeling about how people feel like they missed 85 percent of this year, the emotion expressed by your avatar is more accurate than ever!

o the full pic is even better context