#shurri

[jiubilant]

young shurri and friends (fura morrard, rambunctious daughter of perfumer angeline morrard; rafe foy, clerk's apprentice whose ingratitude will be answered with some other prank)

[unspecified-expectations]

Older siblings in media aren't always my favorite.

To be honest, I sometimes have a l,ot of trouble sympathizing with older siblings in media. Likely do to some sort of f-ed up projection that I've decided to do as an older sibling myself.

And recently, I've noticed that the few times I am able to actually like an older sibling as my favorite or as a tolerable character only seems to happen when they

Are being a good older sibling to the younger (by this I mean exceptionally good)

basically sacrifice everything about themselves (and I mean everything) to help their siblings or family.

It's not fair. But honestly its a pattern I couldn't help but notice.

And of course it's not always that way, I do have some exceptions I think, but it's just interesting to see, because I'm not a great older sister.

Up until recent years I actually kind of sucked. A lot.

But I do care about my siblings, and I wish I knew that earlier, and part of that seems to reflect in my media taste lmao.

Because if you take the few examples of my favorite older siblings it's

Han Yoojin, Ace and Sabo, Jiang Yanli, Shurri(who technically doesn't count), leonardo from tmnt 2012, and probably a few more.

But out of these characters the only ones who are my 'favorites' are Shurri, Leo, and Han Yoojin.

Notably, for one thing, Shurri was technically their mother or at least stepmother and basically thought they hated her for years.

Leonardo is basically a quadrouplet and was raised in the sewers in isolation.

And Han yoojin basically raised his younger brother then went back in time for him when things went wrong.

And it's not to say that I don't think the others are great, but i don't connect with them seemingly at all unless it's related to the younger siblings and it's just.

I feel like it's because part of me thinks they failed. Not necessarily as an older sibling but at least in these three examples (Ace, Sabo, JYL-) they Died. Like, they couldn't control that and Sabo isn't technically dead but in my eyes death although a noble sacrifice contributed nothing to the younger sibling aside from trauma and living another day.

And while I would (to my best ability) die if my siblings needed me to to survive, it would be a failure on my part if it got that far. Or if they were in that danger to begin with.

More over, the fact that I left them alone, and without my help in the future?

They are alive, yes, but I shouldn't need to die for them to be alive. They should be alive with me, or without me if necessary, and only if necessary (or if they really wanted me to leave.)

(i know this doesn't make sense T-T)

So while I love these characters, I can't connect as well. (even if I really get Ace with how he originally treated Luffy and the guilt)

---

As for other older siblings, I guess I don't connect as much because often times they just don't really compare to the younger siblings.

Like with Dick Grayson, I get him, he's great, but he's not my favorite.

And I love his character, I love his character especially as a kid!

But with siblings, he really seems to fall flat to me and it's not even his fault.

Idk lmao. I think I just hate the fact that i failed at my most important role in life and take it out on them lmao.

Anyway anyone can add thoughts I don't mind.

[somestorythoughts]

So we started here:

With M'Baku challenging T'Challa in a fight to the death for kingship and dismissing SHurri's role as an inventor. And then M'Baku became someone T'Challa trusted to fight beside him:

And at some point between then and Wakanda Forever, T'challa trusted him enough that he asked him to look out for his sister because he trusted and respected him enough to know he would do that and have good advice as well:

And in the end, we come back to the waterfall, and T'chlla's sister has decided that the man who once would have fought her brother to death is worthy of taking his place. It's a very cool arc.

The ending is also hilarious because Shurri could have announced her decision but she went "you know what would be better" and M'baku went with it.

[mass-convergence]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I want to compare the Girl Power(TM) moments of Infinity War vs Endgame and explore why I felt one was better than the other. (Typing this on my phone so I’m gonna be using a few acronyms here to depict hero names)

Aka: dear marvel, putting more women in a shot does nothing if there’s no organic reason for them to suddenly be buddy buddy or even suddenly end up on the same spot of an incredibly chaotic battlefield at the same time. I get that this is a comic book movie with purple aliens and glowing stones of destiny but still, the scene felt forced.

In Infinity War there was a moment when Scarlet Witch entered the battle and Proxima Midnight (who I kept mistaking her voice for ScarJo’s but that’s another story) was all like “Kay I’m gonna kill you now you’re all alone” then from off screen we hear “she’s not alone” and cut to Black Widow and Okoye standing there about to fuck a bitch up. Enter a rather intimate (in terms of it being mostly hand-to-hand close quarters, nothing much was distracting them as they were isolated from the rest of the battle being in a trench) fight scene and a “that was gross” quip from BW covered in blue alien blood after the battle. It felt like a good scene. BW and Okoye have interacted before, BW and SW are both Avengers and I’m guessing friends because of that. They know each other, they have rapport. Most importantly, they had a reason to interact and it would make sense that they could have met up on the battle field, the battle was concentrated around that one shield wall Black Panther ordered down. They were women being there for each other and it made sense in the context of the battle. They were already spatially close enough to each other to notice if one was in trouble and be able to assist.

And then came Endgame. The battle was chaotic with essentially two armies duking it out on a large scale in the crater of the Avengers compound. Portals everywhere, lasers flying around, explosions, chitauri and whatever those other alien monsters were are like killing and being killed in droves. I have no idea where anyone is. Captain America is swinging around Mjolnir, Iron Man and Pepper Pots/RESCUE are like being the ultimate battle couple, Ant Man and Wasp were doing something idk I’ve only seen this movie once, but you get the point - This battle was HUGE, spread out, and very chaotic.

Oh and they were playing Keep Away with the infinity gauntlet. Enter Captain Marvel who destroys the ship, has a brief moment of levity with Peter Parker, and That Moment comes. “I don’t know how you’re going to get past all that” “she’s got help”. No idea who said it, only seen this movie once so i forgot. Suddenly all the women of the battle had converged on this one point like moths to a light (I mean Carol DOES glow). Decided to just look at each other like “yeah we got a job to do” and off they went kicking ass or something. Parker completely drops out, none of the other hundreds of people on that battle field come to help. Lasted maybe a few minutes before Grape Man came back to center stage and that moment felt so forced. They didn’t really accomplish anything. Like legit, take that scene out and just have Captain Marvel actual Running Back for the Avengers Football Team taking that gauntlet by herself in all her glowing glory and like, nothing would have changed? The scene was forced in there to make a Girl Power moment and for me, while in the movie I was caught up in the moment and was like “fuck yeah” I still felt bothered by it because it felt so forced. I know it meant a lot to people and honestly it meant something to me too. I want to see these women team up more, i want them to be friends, I want them to save the day and not be in a throw away scene, i want an A-Force movie. I want enough women representation in the MCU that a) all the named female characters don’t fit into one shot and b) it doesn’t feel like some kind of “hey we’re progressive” token scene. I loved and hated that scene. The feeling is very much ambivalent

To very VERY loosely paraphrase Lindsay Ellis in her video about Pocahontas vs Moana: Am I going to say that we should sacrifice some little girl seeing this scene of powerful women working together and feeling empowered by it? Not really. But that’s why we need more positive respresentation and not just throw away scenes like this.

In conclusion: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ don’t get me started on Black Widow in this movie (though tbh, I think the death was okay for her arc, I’m just not happy with how the MCU’s treated her character in the past). Gamora’s death in IW was stupider.

[jiubilant]

I heard this story from my mother, who heard it from her mother, who heard it from a spider that whispered in her ear—and the spider told it best, because spiders, you know, spin stories as strong as their silk. But I’ll tell it to you now as best I can, so that none will forget how Tiro Dirnamat kindled the first fire.

Long ago, before the dead spoke to the living and the living spoke to the dead—

* * *

“S’this a ghost story?” the clerk’s youngest apprentice interrupts, watching him with wary anticipation. “Rusty clanks and ottomies and all?”

Rusty clanks, thinks the clerk with amused despair, is probably self-explanatory. The rest is beyond him. “Ottomies?”

“S’what they do to millers in Colovy.” The child perks up, delighted to know something he doesn’t. “First they stretch you for it, then they sell your corpus to some wizard, and then you get ottomized.”

The clerk, darning a shirt in the scant light of the fireplace, blinks at the small, earnest face staring up at him from the rug. She sleeps there, poor urchin. He’d first tried to lodge her with Rafe’s mother, who had six daughters for the child to befriend; she’d bitten one, the little Boethite, and taught the other five to pick pockets. In a sennight she was back on his front stoop scratching fleas. He ought to find her somewhere else to stay.

In the meantime, they’ve gotten used to each other. Few others understand the child’s cant.

“Millers,” he murmurs, half to himself, “rhymes with killers. And to stretch, I expect, is to—”

The child clutches her throat, makes a grotesque face, and flops with a theatrical twitch onto her pallet by the fire.

“—yes, that,” says the clerk, “thank you, which leaves ottomized.” He thinks about what a Colovy wizard might do with someone’s corpus. “Ottomized. Ot—anatomized?”

The child, with blithe unconcern, rises from the dead. “S’what I said.”

The Empire, the clerk reflects, does sell the corpses of its murderers to Legion necromancers. That the child knows this does not surprise him. She’d come to Haafingar with mange, and a shirt more hole than wool, and a hairbrush-handle whittled to a point.

She itches her throat where her fur, dark as a sable’s, is at last growing back. Only a twitch of her tail betrays her interest—and then her eyes, bright in the firelight, sneaking a thief’s furtive glance up. “Did you really hear it from a spider?”

“My grandmother heard it from the spider.” The clerk tries not to smile. “Pay attention.”

* * *

Long ago, before the dead spoke to the living and the living spoke to the dead, Tiro Dirnamat was born in the land of Veloth. In those days that land was as frigid as this one. The people of Veloth shivered all day and wept all night, for they were starving as well as freezing; their ploughs and spades were more useless than their tears, for no seed they tried to sow would grow. Many of Veloth’s people perished. The Pilgrim himself lived on, but he was old and cold and full of grief, and in his secret heart he yearned for the warmth of the homeland he’d spurned.

But Tiro Dirnamat had never known warmth. She grew up cold and hungry, as children of hardship do. And when she’d grown as tall as you, or thereabouts, she sought out Boethiah.

“I’m cold,” she told the goddess. “I’m hungry.”

“Hunt,” said Boethiah, and tore a shred of gristle from her terrible teeth. She and her son Moves-Like-This were squatting in the snow, gnawing a leg of goat each. “Light a fire.”

Tiro Dirnamat didn’t know what a fire was, and she saw no game to hunt. She did see that Moves-Like-This hadn’t noticed her, so she knocked him down and snatched his leg of goat—

* * *

“How’d he cook it?” asks the child.

The clerk blinks. “What?”

“You said Tiro Doormat—”

“Dirnamat.”

“Dearmat,” says the child, apologetic. “You said she lit the first glim. So how’d any cove in those days roast his goat?”

“In those days,” says the clerk, “you left your hearthpan out and waited for a star to fall in it. Then you cooked your supper over the star.” He smiles at the look on the child’s face. “Where was I?”

* * *

Yes, the leg of goat. Well, Moves-Like-This tried to catch Tiro Dirnamat. He moved like a torrent in spate, like heat-lightning, like wind in reeds. But Tiro Dirnamat was hungrier than he. She danced and ducked and dodged his many strikes, tearing bites from his supper all the while, until the leg of goat was quite, ah, ottomized. Then Boethiah grabbed her by the hair.

“Fool,” she said, though she looked pleased. “Do all of Veloth’s children squabble like alit for scraps?”

“We’re cold,” said Tiro Dirnamat—and tried to hit the goddess, oh, yes, with the legbone of the goat. “We’re hungry.”

Boethiah smiled with all her sharpest teeth.

“Leave the shadow of the mountains, alitla,” she said. “Climb to the peak where the midmorning sun sits. And give me that.”

She took the legbone of the goat from Tiro Dirnamat and threw it to the ground, and it became a golden spear. She threw Tiro Dirnamat to the ground, too. And Tiro Dirnamat snatched the spear and ran, but not before making a face at Moves-Like-This—or Fa-Nuit-Hen, as he’s properly named—who stuck out his tongue at her.

So the lowliest of Veloth’s children, with only her spear and her daring, traveled east—and east, and east, farther than anyone had walked since feet were invented. When she left the shadow of the mountains, as the goddess had told her to do, she discovered something strange: the snow that she trudged through was gray, not white, and didn’t melt. Nor did it fall from the sky, where Azura spins her fate-threads from the wool of clouds. Instead it rose from a peak where the midmorning sun sat.

Up that peak climbed Tiro Dirnamat. When she reached the mountaintop, the sun had gone to sit somewhere else—but it had squashed a dent in the summit, it seemed. Tiro Dirnamat slid down into the crater of the mountain, and leaned on her spear, and thought. Boethiah hadn’t told her what to do next. It is she who gives the spear, and we who cast it.

But Tiro Dirnamat was weary from her travels, and hungry, and had never known warmth. She could think of no way to pass the goddess’s test. At last, in her frustration, she raised her golden spear and stabbed at the mountain.

The very stone cracked beneath her feet. So strong was the strike of hardship’s daughter, so driven by her wrath and will to thrive, that it pricked the Heart of the World that beat beneath the earth. The blood of the world welled molten from the wound. And when Tiro Dirnamat tugged her spear from the crack in the stone, it came up hot, hotter than an iron, and aflame—which is why we call it Goldbrand.

Then the crack widened, and the mountain shook, and Tiro Dirnamat thought she’d better get out of there. She scrambled down the peak and away, outrunning the world’s-blood that ran behind—she’d bested Fa-Nuit-Hen, after all, who was much faster. West she ran, and west, and west, with the fire of her spear streaking on the wind.

The people of Veloth saw her coming and hid away their children, because Tiro Dirnamat liked to bite them—are you sorry? Then they cried out in wonder and fear, for the snow melted before Tiro Dirnamat’s flaming spear. She cast it at the feet of Veloth, and the prophet’s grief melted, too.

“A door thou hast brought us, Bringer of Fire,” he said. “And we shall walk through it, at suffering’s end, to the house of Boethiah.”

And he led his people from the shadow of the mountains—but Tiro Firebringer, who knew the way, led him. And Veloth’s people thrived in the Heartland, and were not cold, for ever after they had fire—and they weren’t hungry, either, for Mephala taught them to cook with it. So the spider told my grandmother, who told my mother, who told me.

* * *

“Of course,” the clerk adds, his brow furrowing, “my mother always put in a bit about Tiro battling a ghoul—who shared his name with the Imperial proconsul, as it happens. There.” He flicks the mended shirt at the child, who catches it with a startled cat’s chirp. “Try it on, hla, and tell me if I missed any holes. Damned if I know where my spectacles are.”

His apprentice stares at it for a moment, sweeping the hearthstones with her tail, then tugs it over her nightclothes. He suspects it’s her favorite shirt. Since he taught her to backstitch, she’s decorated its hem with a web of wobbly lines.

“What happened then?” she asks, her voice muffled by the shirt. Her head’s still in it. She emerges at last with bent whiskers and staticky fur. “To Tiro Dirnamat.”

“She had supper, I suppose,” says the clerk, tucking needle and string away, “and sat by the hearth.”

Not a thrilling conclusion, he thinks. But the little cutthroat, a snug silhouette against the fire, looks satisfied—and falls asleep soon after, still in the shirt.

[jiubilant]

For the ask meme: how does Ayo handle That Was Always There and Ill Met By Moonlight?

It’s a plain old thing, the ring, but has the heft of solid gold; the s’wit who’d pawned it two days back had bitten it first, smiling, and the tidy profit in his teeth had flashed at Revyn Sadri like a kind of wink. He should have known then to turn it down. Idiotic fetcher. Careless, thoughtless—

“There’s been looting in the Stone Quarter and the Place of Kings,” he hears a thin, miserable voice explain. That’s not him, surely, pouring out his woes to a perfect stranger who’d only ducked in to buy bootblack. His father would die of shame. Too late, he remembers who he’s talking to. “Not—I don’t mean—the Legion’s conduct these past months has been unimpeachable, of course—”

The legionary’s voice is hoarse and wry. “‘Course.”

“But this ring”—blessed saints, Sadri, stop talking—“the man who sold it to me said it was an heirloom. I should have asked whose.” He rubs his wretched face. “Viola Giordano is missing one that looks just like it.”

"And you're no fence, nuncle." A furred hand closes over the thrice-cursed ring. "Sera, I mean. Sorry. No'ffence."

Revyn blinks up at her. The legionary—a Khajiit who talks like a Riftling rogue, who knows Velothi honorifics—stares back at him with the intensity of a hunting cat. She flips the pilfered ring like a coin, catches it, dances it across her knuckles.

Then she nods, decisive, and pockets it. "S'pose I'll put it back."

"I—" It's Revyn's turn to stare. His mind, wherever it's been, at last catches up with his mouth. "I'm sorry?"

"Better to suffer a wrong than do one," quotes the girl in unimpeachable Velothis, standing up pious and straight as a child questioned by a priest. Her eyes, too, like a child's, gleam with Boethiah's own mischief. "But best to right it. That's me own addition."

Revyn stares with relief and consternation at the drawstring purse in which the ring had gone. It's her problem, now. Maybe he'd blathered on about the thing because some instinctive part of him had seen, in the legionary's far-too-guileless face, that she was born under the stars of the Thief—

"And I en't gone on the dub in awhile." The Riftling rogue in Legion ringmail, buoyant as an Armiger with the prospect of breaking and entering, rattles cheerfully to the door. "Can I bilk the bootblack, sera?"

"The—yes, bless you, of course—" He'll give her the keys to the shop if she gets him out of this. She's already halfway out the door; he scrambles around the counter and, for prudence's sake, calls after her in Velothis. "Don't let Viola catch you in her house!"

Over her shoulder, the legionary flashes a wink and the sign of She-Who-Erases. Revyn, increasingly baffled, watches the door swing shut. Who in Azura's name had taught her that?

[jiubilant]

outfit ref sheet with design notes for shurri <3

most khajiit smile by squinting or closing their eyes. if you see an ohmes friend smiling with their mouth, it’s likely a learned habit

[jiubilant]

If you feel like expounding about it I'm really curious about Shurri's decision to join the Legion and her early days there! (Disclaimer I don't think I've read quite all her microfics yet, sorry if this has already been thoroughly elaborated upon)

hey welcome to tesblr! 💖

answer got long so it's under the cut

even at her happiest, shurri grows up with the distinct feeling that she doesn't belong anywhere. she resonates strongly with the velothi maxim "i am alive because that one is dead" (x) because it speaks to her own lived experience—out of every miserable urchin in riften, why was she the one lifted from poverty and clothed and educated and cared about? why does she get to eat while her old friends go hungry in the ratway? she sees herself as occupying the place of a thousand unfortunates who are just as deserving of comfort as she is, but are denied it because she and others like her are enjoying all the luxuries that would otherwise have been their portion. add that strange guilt that she can't find the words to talk about to the sorts of looks she gets in haafingar as a tojay who talks like a riftling nord and is being raised by a hlaalu company clerk—khajiit pity her, nords mistrust her, dunmer disdain her (and tend to hate her father, and she lacks the cultural context that would help her understand this at all), and no one imagines bright prospects for someone who grew up a pickpocket—

—until she starts loitering around the legionaries garrisoned at castle dour, who praise her more martial inclinations and sell her a life of travel and adventure and camaraderie (and protecting her friends and family from the stormcloaks she saw trampling marketgoers in the street the day that torygg was shouted apart). it all promises more than her life as a dockhand paid piecemeal. she feels as though she's finally found where she fits in. she sneaks out in the dead of night without saying her goodbyes to anyone, joins up, and is somewhat disillusioned to find that the legion is the rest of the judgmental world writ small + now she's got to kill people—but at least she's good at killing people

that's the gist of it anyway. i plan to write much more about her because (as a young adult in particular) she's a character with a lot going on in her head that's difficult to distill into pieces as short as the ones i usually write