please please go on about EAH! I adored reading your raven x darling post (I shipped them together before I even knew rapple was a thing and u articulated why so elegantly) and now I wanna know more of your thoughts regarding it (esp cuz ur takes are peak)
OKAY YAAAAAAAYYYYYY 💖
thank you for indulging me, you KNOW i was churning out blocks and blocks of eah meta and hurling them at some poor unsuspecting friends over discord during the summer of obsession just bc there is so much Meat and Juice and Meat Juice in what is essentially just marketing material for fashion dolls it's honestly crazy. character-wise lizzie aka miss hedgehog's dilemma was the one who got me firing on all cylinders the hardest.
but ☝ the concept of Destiny(TM) itself was among the most fun to rotate and refine bc lbh, the source material never gives us a definite answer and i wanted to craft one for myself that played to some of my favourite narrative tropes, enriched my experience of the source media, and served as the framework for all of my spiraling. i first talked about it here, but essentially, my take is:
destiny is real
you are not born with it
you must prove yourself to it to be chosen as its conduit; destiny is a lightning storm (it will happen. it will happen. you cannot stop it. it is coming and it will raze the earth where it strikes) and you must become the rod (it must strike you. you were made for it. it must choose you)
sometimes lightning decides there are faster routes to the ground. sometimes the destiny you were promised from birth passes over you.
grimm ain't saying SHIT about this, everybody has to believe that destiny is absolute and predictable and controlled or ever after is FUCKED bc a) wdym any one of us could be butchered and made into a stew by our stepmother and b) hey wait if the ruling class isn't actually uniquely divinely chosen why are we like. being ruled by them
the storybook of legends is an attempt to formalize and influence the choosing process (sort of pinging destiny like heyyy boo, here's your path of least resistance, ready and waiting to enact your will), but it's not 100% effective either
(this uh. this got really long. so we're putting a cut here out of courtesy. rappling incoming i prommy)
i like this bc it pretty handily explains a lot of the weird mechanics abt destiny and the curveballs it throws in canon, including but not limited to:
duchess believing she can steal another person's destiny in the webisodes
grimm keeping duchess in his back pocket as a potential evil queen candidate should raven be fully off the table in the next top villain
justine only being declared the twelfth dancing princess when she started sleep-dancing despite all her older sisters having already been chosen
8 billion charmings training to be stock heroes and damsels for other tales from the cradle
raven signing the real actual storybook of legends in way too wonderland yet actually playing the role of one of the seven dwarves when the snow white tale was retold in dragon games
darling being chosen as apple's true love by virtue of her chivalry
daring being chosen as the beast by virtue of his vanity
(i do remember the whole "ripping the storybook up and giving everybody power over their own destiny" bit in way too wonderland, but the fact that despite that the snow white tale still repeated and cast unconventional characters (who each have their own legacies!) in its essential roles supports the idea that destiny is a force that can neither be controlled nor broken by manmade instruments like the storybook of legends, and that most likely has existed long before the means to control it were wrought.)
plus, i think there's something really compelling in the truth being neither You Have Absolutely No Choice In The Matter or All You Had Were Choices And You Could have Chosen Differently If Only You Knew, but rather something in between. something like pitting your will against something bigger and older and more powerful than you, and hopingprayingwilling that it will turn out your way.
now, there is the issue of descendants of legacy tales accruing supernatural curses/powers related to their tales over time (briar beauty's sleeping spells and ability to hear for extended distances while asleep, ashlynn ella's clothes turning into rags at the stroke of twelve, locks immediately yielding to blondie's presence, etc.) but hey man ┐(´ー｀)┌ if some ancient, fundamental force of the universe you inhabit deems your bloodline worthy enough to work through repeatedly enough times i think you're entitled to the magical side-effects. maybe it's something of a positive feedback loop that helps reinforce the narrative of, well, the narrative having chosen its protagonists from birth? destiny chooses its most suitable vessels, and its most suitable vessels are those from the line of the already-chosen.
wrt to dappling, it would then follow that True Love's Kiss Of Life wasn't the singular predestined correct course of fate, but rather that destiny set the wheels of the snow white tale in motion, found the first prince charming offered for the tale's completion lacking and so rejected him, but deemed princess charming fitting and snapped the denouement into place the moment darling's lips touched apple's.
(sidenote: i was a big school for good and evil fan in my early teens and i still stand by it. or at least the first few books, i have no clear idea abt the happenings post-book three. but anyway i really really loved agatha's encounters with the halfway bridge dividing the titular schools and the Fulfillment Of Fairytale Requirements Through Technicality of it all itched my brain sooo fucking good. my favourite instance was in book two, where she convinced the bridge to let her through to the princes' side bc she counted as a prince--by virtue of having kissed a maiden back to life, like all the best princes do.
(stemming from this is the equally tasty idea of averting your fate by sacrificing another person who fits the bill just enough to it in your place.
(i'm probably never going to fully write out the wicked eah au in my head, but if i did the way to their happily ever canon-divergent after would probably lie in exploiting this.)
anyway. dappling. rappling. what to do after you've fulfilled your destiny. what to do when destiny has vindicated you by granting you the role you always wanted but never hoped to have. what to do when you thought you'd finally escaped the clutches of destiny, only to be tricked back into your tale, even if not in the role you always feared.
like apple. apple. got what she wanted. what she primped and posed and plotted for. what people tutted and fretted she wasn't suited for, with that singular, physical imperfection. what she had begun to fear would not come to pass. her fairytale, her true love's kiss, her guarantee to a life that will never be plagued by danger that she cannot be rescued from, never ever again. (no more treading water with stubby child legs, no more scrabbling at smooth slick stone walls, no more terror at the finality of death. because she is snow white, and snow white always wakes up.
(it's just. she expected a different charming to kiss her back to life.)
darling. got what she wanted too, didn't she? acknowledgement of her heroism and her chivalry from the closest thing to divinity they have, yes, but perhaps, more importantly, permission--because the thing about darling is that her mother can still shut her up with a look. that she can only be the white knight in a set of armor that renders her unrecognizable. that she will give up the glory for her deeds to her brother and to her little boy cousin, because she has to tell herself that it is enough to have been able to do the deed at all. but now the god that turns the pages on ever after has named her Hero-Knight-Prince, and nobody can deny her the sword or the shield any longer.
(it's just. she'd already pledged her heart to another Queen. and there's a bitter taste in her mouth at the thought of swearing fealty to a princess who would see the world destroyed by the greatest evil in the land just to get her happy ending.)
and raven. didn't get what she wanted at all, did she? oh sure, she didn't become the evil queen, didn't poison her friend, wasn't banished or condemned or made to dance in red-hot shoes, but more than not inheriting her mother's destiny, what raven wanted was to be free. yet here she is, head of the Seven Dragon-Riders, standing guard around the coffin of a girl with a poisoned fucking apple lodged in her throat. it feels like a joke. it feels like a reminder. she can rage and rebel and rally the troops all she likes--destiny always gets the last laugh.
(somewhere, in that soft, sweet heart of hers, she is thinking of her first pet, and her mother, and the girl who was her friend, who told her she only opposed her because she cared for her, who grew to see things her way, become her partner in crime, her steadfast ally--and she is feeling, once again, something tender and dear curdle in her arms into a creature that cannot love her, not in any way that matters.)
so where this leaves us, in my ideal post-dg rappling fic, is raven in the process of falling out of love with apple and pulling back from her budding friendship with darling bc of The Complications (TM), darling driven deeper into love with and idolization of raven due to her burgeoning distaste for and resentment of apple, and apple still unaware that her feelings for raven are not just #BestFrenemesisThingz while trying to make it work with darling because she is nothing if not a slave to destiny, even though she's spent her whole life anticipating a perfectly fairytale-standard heterosexual marriage with a boy she doesn't particularly like that way for reasons that can only be because he was never her True Love after all, and absolutely nothing else.
in some lights, this would be the funniest shit ever.
au where raven, apple, and darling all follow their story until the end, where I insert my darlven agenda and make darkingeave apple and run off with raven
Angst ensues, relationships are broken, and amends must be made
And idk how it happens but they all end up kissing each other in the end
