she/her
ao3 by the same name
I have a lot of thoughts about a bunch of random stuff
Most of it is fandom-related but every now and then I'll post about life or mental health or something of that nature
I do my best to tag everything consistently so hopefully it's easy to navigate and filter stuff out
"Doomed yaoi" this "doomed yuri" that what about doomed found family. What about finding comfort in these new people after going through so much on your own—a community, a solace, a home to come back to. Caring for them with all you've got, only to realize that it wasn't going to work, ever, no matter what you tried. Only to have it ripped apart, no matter how much you tried to hold them close. Found family that becomes lost family. Found family that takes your heart with it when they go.
Today, please post your final thoughts on anything to do with Cassandra, what did you enjoyed most about this month?, would you like to do this again or would you like a yearly appreciation week?
I want to thank each and everyone of you for all your contributions for this month! It has been fantastic running this event! And I really hope you all enjoyed the last month!
I have come to the realization that Lance is the only truly good parent in Tangled.
*Gestures indicating Lance to other Tangled parents* Do you see this man. This man right here. This is what you should aspire to. You should all aim to be like this man. This man outshines you all.
"Varian brought it on himself by getting involved with the black rocks and experimenting on them, he should have listened to Quirin when he told him to stay away."
WE COLLECTIVELY ARE GOING TO FIGURE IT OUT 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
and in “queen for a day”, she says “i haven’t forgotten our agreement”.
which, 1: looks so doubtful due to the amount of non-plot-relevant episodes.
2: that was part of the promise varian mentioned. it wasn’t just the promise she made during that episode, but the one before. she led him to believe that he wouldn’t be the only one trying to stop the rocks from taking over the kingdom.
(this is not rapunzel hate! the writing casts her in a bad light without acknowledging her real flaws. besides, she did try to work on the problem eventually, but the time it took her to do so does matter and have consequences.)
There's also the fact that Varian can't afford to put off the rock issue the way Rapunzel can (for a while at least). The rocks were always going to reach his village first, and by the time Rapunzel tells him the rocks are a serious problem and that she'll help him figure them out, they are already right outside the village. The show follows Rapunzel's life in which the rocks are something she has to deal with at some point and in the meantime she's got mini-adventures to go on, so solving the mystery of the rocks is never presented as something urgent until they become impossible for her to ignore. But Varian's home is being invaded by the rocks the entire time Rapunzel's having mini-adventures. He's watching these unbreakable spikes tear up his land (which he and his father depend on for their livelihood), destroy people's houses, and almost certainly impale some of his neighbors, having no way of knowing when or where a new rock will pop up and potentially kill him or someone he cares about. And the only guarantee he has that someone in power cares enough to solve the problem is a vague assurance from Rapunzel that she'll "figure it out". Of course he can't just wait for her to do something. Of course he wants to prove that he's holding up his end of the deal by doing all the research he can. Action is needed right now, right this very minute, and if the princess has more important things to do then it's up to the person she trusted with the super-secret mystery of these invading rocks. And maybe if he shows her that she was right to trust him, she'll be able to use his findings to put an end to this major threat to his existence.
Varian never had the option not to get involved. The rocks came to his doorstep and he was told not to talk to anyone about them lest he face the king's wrath. And as previously established, he believed he had support from the princess in researching them quietly. There is no world where he could reasonably have "[left] those rocks alone."
(To be clear, I do think there are reasons for Rapunzel's avoidance of the rock problem—namely her fear of damaging her relationship with her dad and the fear that she might find out he's not actually a good person and not wanting to confront her fear that the rocks are invading because of her—and those reasons could have made for a really compelling character arc. The issue is that it never gets addressed because it wasn't actually intended to be a character moment for her, the writers just didn't want to deal with Varian while they were focusing on other things.)
I'm actually hoping Lilith doesn't turn out to be a villain (though I do hope and firmly believe that she won't be what Charlie's expecting) but if she does and she and Lucifer end up on different sides I'm going to make the greatest Nothing Left to Lose AMV the world has ever seen
Do you have any thoughts/headcanons about human Velvette?
Not many, but a few.
The main thing is that I think she had (and maybe still has) internalized racism, because I saw someone comment once that she rarely wears her hair in Black styles. She's definitely the kind of person who would have chosen being popular and trendy over anything else, so if her environment said white trends were the most desirable, that's what she'd have internalized.
I also headcanon that fashion is something she wanted to get into from a young age, but for whatever reason she wasn't able to. Spent a lot of time playing dress up with and making outfits for dolls, though (I have no idea why her sinner form is a doll, I just like the parallel).
I also have no idea what she did to end up in Hell. I've seen backstories where she bullied peers into suicide, which would make sense for her, but I don't know if I vibe with that.
Bit of a minor thing, but a recent headcanon I'm attached to is that her human name didn't start with a V. Partly because there's no way every demon who changed their name would have kept the same initial, but for Velvette specifically, I like the idea that she was going by her human name for a while after arriving in Hell. And then after joining Vox and Valentino (who may have already been known colloquially as the Vees), she decided they should make that an official part of their branding and took a new name to match.
Your entire thread about “Let’s send these Saporians back where they came from” makes me even more glad that I wrote a fic where Rapunzel basically declared cultural war on racism.
That does sound very cool. I definitely think it would make the show way stronger if it just took Corona's racism and classism seriously, like at all. Because in addition to those topics being really important to handle respectfully, it also wouldn't have left the show feeling like it had so many loose ends. And it would've been great for Rapunzel's arc, because while I still maintain that she does have an arc in the show it lacks a real payoff where she makes a decision that she wouldn't have in the beginning to show how much she's grown. And her taking a stand against the terrible things her family has done, both to her and to the many different people who make up their kingdom, just feels so right as an ending for her.
I will say it definitely brings me comfort to know that a good amount of the fandom is actually interested in exploring those areas where the show didn't follow through.
Honestly it really felt like the show and Rapunzel's character were just missing this arc. Like it would have solved everything (well, almost- I would still need the Saporians to be given their own POV and importance in the story outside of how Rapunzel perceives them, but I do think that would be much more likely to happen if the main character's story involved recognizing what they've been through). There are just so many times when she's shown the messed up things her father and his predecessors have done and chosen to look the other way or tell herself it's not that bad because she needs to believe she's in a better place than before, even if turning a blind eye to corruption goes completely against her desire to help and bring out the best in people, and you would think the natural conclusion to that would be her having to choose between her people's well-being and the propaganda she hides behind, which would also tie in with the whole Making Hard Choices vs. A Comfortable Prison conflict she has going on. You would think. But then it just doesn't happen.
Very random little word vomit, but I wanted to share something.
Back when I was first dreaming up this story, especially the ages of our duo, I knew I wanted Alastor to be born in 1900. The turn of the century is this big hinge moment, the old 19th-century world dying and the modern one being born. Alastor arrives right at that break but, as he grows up, refuses to actually cross into it. He’s an old-world guy clinging to the past while everything keeps modernizing around him, which suits his mixed heritage too, since he already straddles worlds anyway.
That refusal is his whole deal at the start of the story. He looks like he’s moving forward with the rituals and his plan to travel into Hell with power, but it’s not really progress. He’s just attempting to control how he gets damned instead of healing or, you know, actually enjoying his life lol. What he truly wants is his mom back (and the love and safety she gave him), and she’s the one place he can never reach. So he’s written off this life and poured everything into the next. Hell becomes a fantasy of control over the one thing NO ONE controls, death and what’s on the other side of it.
But that’s exactly what the new ritual flips on its head. His first attempt was solo: arrive in Hell alone and strong and keep doing his thing forever, just like canon. Vince and Al’s version, however, needs a bond formed while living, one that carries over (in a way).
To die the way he wants, he has to let someone matter while he’s still breathing, whether he refuses to see it or not. Vincent becomes that someone, pulling him back toward a present he’d already abandoned, making him feel and want and risk actually caring about something again right when he thought he was done with all of it. And he despises it.
The absolute funniest thing to me about autistic!Vox headcanons is that when I first saw them, I thought people were focusing too much on the sharks. Like, okay, he likes sharks. But if you’d asked me then, I’d have said he was one of the most obviously neurotypical characters in the show.
Then it occurred to me that standing on furniture is. Not really neurotypical behavior. So I went back with a fresh perspective and you know what, he definitely has a few quirks that stood out from the rest of the cast. Time to start looking for patterns.
Yeah, so turns out, he’s one of the most obviously neurodivergent characters in the show. And I have no explanation for how I drew exactly the opposite conclusion beyond my brain going, “this is all perfectly normal behavior and requires no further thought”. Except I myself am AuDHD, so if my brain is glossing over a character as “normal”, that’s. Probably an indicator that they’re not neurotypical. So.
Anyway, I have never seen a single post where anyone goes into any detail about his autistic traits, so I’m going to do that now! You’re welcome.
Let’s start with the sensory processing differences, because I’ve already waxed poetic about Vox being a tactile seeker. The really short version is that he touches everything he can get his hands on, up to and including people, because his nervous system needs more tactile input to be satisfied.
He’s also a vestibular seeker, which refers to movement that engages his sense of balance and spacial awareness. He spins, he jumps, he climbs (or jumps) onto furniture, and sometimes he does things like walk sideways and hop backwards - up stairs. “Standing” with his wires also counts, since the addition of vertical movement gives the vestibular system more to process. Regardless of what he’s doing, he never seems to get dizzy, which is typical of vestibular seekers.
On the other side of the coin we have sensory aversions, which Vox doesn’t explicitly demonstrate. But the rooms where he spends most of his time are markedly different from the rest of Vee Tower: big open spaces with low lighting and cool colors, or else random grids of solid red or blue-white panels. There’s no clutter, minimal decoration, and most of the rooms have aquarium glass instead of windows.
He’s not avoiding visual stimuli, by any means, but he does seem to prefer visually quiet environments; not necessarily dark, but with few patterns and little movement apart from whatever he’s focused on. There could be a few reasons for this, but since he doesn’t seem to have a problem with any specific form of visual stimulus, it’s probably more an issue of how much information he can process at one time.
Vox also limits how much visual input he receives during conversations. He's continually turning his back on and moving behind people while he's talking, and when he does face them, his eye contact is sporadic; sometimes it's unrelenting, other times he's glancing away every few words. Conversely, when someone else is speaking, he generally (though not always) turns towards them and makes fairly steady eye contact.
Again, there are a few possible explanations for this. But given that Vox is also someone who talks with his hands (which can help to organize thoughts and maintain fluent speech), and he can make eye contact just fine when he’s not the one speaking, we can actually narrow it down to a likely answer: neurotypical speech simply takes more cognitive resources than he has available.
Talking to people takes a lot of mental coordination. You’re organizing your thoughts, forming them into words, paying attention to the other person's nonverbal language, processing the sensory input from said language, converting that input into meaning, and monitoring your own behavior, and you’re doing it all in real time. And that’s just the act of talking. If you can’t do all of it at once, something has to give, and the only non-essential part of the process is looking at people.
Understanding other peoples’ speech takes a lot of cognitive work too, but it also uses different parts of the brain. So while some autistic people struggle to make eye contact at any point during a conversation, others can do so if they find one skill or the other easier. Rather ironically, Vox appears to have a harder time speaking than listening.
On the topic of nonverbal language, autistic people tend not to use gestures the same way as allistics. Some use fewer, some use more, and they don't always serve a communicative purpose (that is, they aren’t meant to convey information). Vox very much uses more, and while some of them mimic allistic communication, many don't. They might help him communicate (again, talking with his hands), but they’re often meaningless when matched with what he’s actually saying.
Additionally, some autistic gestures are actually stims (aka self-stimulatory behaviors), and Vox seems to have at least a few of those. The most common is pressing his palms together and/or interlacing his fingers, but other repeated movements include waving his hands, moving them in circles, and tapping his fingers. All of these are general-purpose and can occur at any time, though he tends not to use them in front of a crowd.
He also has what appear to be primarily self-soothing behaviors: he spends a lot of time adjusting his lapels or bowtie when he's trying to compose himself, whether because he’s irritated, flustered, or just in an especially good mood. If he's more on edge he might cross his arms instead, or outright hug himself if he's excited, and he does something similar by dejectedly holding one arm when Alastor rejects his offer (crossing one's arms is a common action, but that doesn’t make it any less of a pattern. Especially given how Vox is with touch in general).
When it comes to other people, Vox obviously has issues with appropriate social touch and respecting personal space, which could be attributed to his tactile seeking behaviors. It could also be a sign of low empathy; he likes touch and physical closeness, and either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that others might not share in that enjoyment (considering his reaction to Alastor calling him out on it, my money is on him not realizing). Either way, he definitely missed the signs that Alastor was merely tolerating it, and he never seems to notice other people reacting when he touches them (though Alastor, specifically, is so theatrical about disliking touch that if Vox had ever seen him physically interact with anyone, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume that a lack of such a reaction meant it was fine when he did it).
His attitude towards touch aside, Vox does generally appear to have relatively low emotional empathy. Beyond irritation, he isn't emotionally affected by Velvette's studio being wrecked or Valentino's upset over Angel leaving, and even before Alastor gets into his head, it’s implied that he regularly acts without consideration for either of them (such as leaving Velvette behind when he electroports, which seems to be a common occurrence). And that’s his behavior towards people he likes.
On the other hand, he can understand other people’s thoughts and feelings to some extent, even if he mostly uses that knowledge to hurt and manipulate them. So he is capable of cognitive empathy, and probably pretty good at it; he’s not infallible, especially if he’s not given anything to work with, but he can figure people out.
He also demonstrates compassionate empathy (taking action to help others) on multiple occasions: he answers Velvette's summons despite not wanting to deal with Valentino, pays attention to what Val is saying, and offers him something to make him feel better. He leaves out a pen and paper so Val can draw during the Take Over Heaven presentation and gets all of his requested foods "just in case". He's willing to put himself in harm's way to protect the other two. Even if it’s a matter of practicality from his perspective, it’s still a form of caring, and comes from a place of genuine affection.
That being said, Vox has a friend circle of two. He has gotten close to three people in seventy years (and he's known Valentino for around fifty of those years, so it's not just because Alastor traumatized him). He also has a room dedicated entirely to hiding away from the world with his sharks and watching spying on people through screens instead of talking to anyone.
For all that he loves performing and being the center of attention, he doesn't show much desire for one-on-one social interaction. He certainly wants the option, and does enjoy the company of those he's close to, but he also wants to be left alone. And even when he doesn't want to be alone, spending time with someone doesn't mean interacting with them directly. Sometimes it looks like having tea together while they work on separate tasks.
When he does interact directly with people, whether through desire or necessity, Vox is a "take the topic and run with it at full speed until forced to stop" type of guy. He can literally have entire conversations all by himself: when he calls Charlie to "invite" her to his party, she only speaks when she realizes who's calling and right before he hangs up. In the flashback, Vox does all of the talking for nearly a full minute while Alastor makes two remarks (one of which is permission for Vox to keep going). He can have a proper back and forth exchange, and sometimes even wants to (he's disappointed when Alastor refuses to engage with him after surrendering), but his conversations do tend to be one-sided.
I could keep going (full disclosure: I consider everything I’ve said so far to be a general overview). But this is getting long, so I want to wrap up by saying that fictional characters are not diagnosable. Buuut Vox does legitimately meet the behavioral criteria.
He has difficulties with social-emotional reciprocity (the “back and forth” of social interactions, empathy and emotional responsiveness, approach to communication, etc).
He has differences in nonverbal communication.
He has difficulties with developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships (which includes a lack of interest in doing so).
He has “repetitive or stereotyped movements, use of objects, or speech”, aka stimming.
He has sensory processing differences.
He has “highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus” (I don’t need to get into the sharks. Everybody knows about the sharks).
The first three are all required. The latter three come from a cluster of four traits where only two are required. The only trait out of the seven he hasn’t definitively demonstrated is “insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns”. So like.
As headcanons go, you don’t get much closer to canon. He could literally be diagnosable in-universe.
clark growing up on earth and eventually getting a kryptonian dog that connects him to the home he never got to experience + kara losing krypton and taking in a stray earth cat that connects her to the planet that took her in is just too good and every writer who has pushed the "krypto is kara's dog" agenda will PAY for what they've DONE
Now that today's Cassandra Appreciation Month entry is complete, time to rant about the Saporians and how they're clearly a lower class minority but Sonnenburg refused to acknowledge it!!
Yes I know my followers have heard this before.
Tagging @toastedmarshmallowrose and my mutuals @majorabbey @whosbex @th3p0rtalmaker @noodlecruncher @frozenwolftemplar @rapunzelshorizon cause they expressed interest
Okay so for starters, this right here? Big Nose's story at the beginning of Under Raps?
Yeah I don’t buy it for a second.
It feels too...fairytale. Even for Disney. Shampanier was invested enough in the fight that she personally led her men and ransacked Corona herself in a full scale invasion.
And it's easier to see in the storyboards than in the actual show cause they ended up using the paper cutouts for the whole story but look at Shampanier's expression here.
That is a woman on the warpath. She is out to make him BLEED. and then she just somehow accidentally manages to knock his journal just right to find the page that declares undying love for her and up and changes her mind? After a war that's lasted for years? After hours of fighting him?
And look at her face here as she's reading the journal entry. That's not a face of "Oh my god my crush likes me back???" That's confusion and borderline disgust. You can kinda still see it in the paper cutout but it's way more prominent here in the sketches and storyboards.
And despite this "peaceful unification"...we see none of Saporia in the show. No Saporian people, no architecture, no stories, no music. Nothing. it's all just Coronan. Even the Saporian language is dead. In Lost Lagoon, Cassandra says this:
"Hundreds of years ago, Corona was two different lands—Old Corona
and Saporia. The fact that this is written half in Saporian means that this book is genuinely ancient. No one speaks Saporian anymore except a few scholars.”
This heavily implies that after the Unifciation, people just slowly stopped speaking Saporian. That doesn't happen normally, languages don't just naturally die out. Even gradual assimilation doesn't usually wipe out an entire language like this, if Corona was unified then it should be a multilingual kingdom.
Lost Lagoon even states that there was even supposedly a whole "Era of Unity" where Shampanier and Herz der Sonne worked to blend their kingdoms and cultures together....where's the fruits of those labors?
Even in the royal library there's only a handful of Saporian books!!
And moving a little further into Under Raps
Now obviously the Separatists are a terrorist cult. They don’t represent the entirety of Saporians.
But two things
1- why did they feel so betrayed over this supposed Unification? If they were keeping their culture they have no real reason to be angry. But they’re still around.
And 2- if this is such a small sect, why are the Separatists all we see of actual Saporians?
Oooh Saporia is such a icky barbarian hippie culture and they all wanna hurt Corona! If they don’t wanna identify as Coronan that’s BAD!
Yeah, convenient, right?
And it's especially weird that the Separatist crest even appears on Herz der Sonne's tomb, what is up with that???
Next, let's take a little trip over to season 2. Rapunzel Day One.
This is a Saporian village. And how do we know this?
There's the Seperatist Crest, right there.
There's tents and wagons and even a building. Even with all the ruins and black rocks everywhere this is clearly a semi-permanent structure. A RECENT semi-permanent structure, MILES away from Corona. In fact it looks like the only reason they left was because the black rocks drove them out.
If you take away the Separatist propaganda there's only two things that we really know about Saporian culture.
The first is that they practice magic/witchcraft
Even in the show magic is very rare. In fact, besides Rapunzel and Cassandra and Zhan Tiri's followers Clementine is the only person we see using magic that we know where the magic comes from. Clearly a Wand of Oblivium is a Saporian invention, Rapunzel even says as much. And it's clearly an item of common use, so magic/witchcraft has to be a common staple of Saporian culture.
And sadly as anyone who knows history knows, witches have been a massive target pretty much since the dawn of western civilization. And based on the fact that we don't see any witch villagers or like a witch school anywhere in Corona, Saporia seems to be no exception. At the very least Frederic is anti-magic thanks to his sundrop shenanigans, but there could've easily been other Coronan kings who were prejudice against magic.
And it's not just the wands either, let's take a look at the old crest on Shampanier's shield
Remind you of anything?
It CANNOT be a coincidence that the old crest looks eerily close to the Sundrop Flower.
And the second bit of Saporian culture that we know about is that they have airships
This might have been such a pain for the animators (I don't know how hard it is to design and animate ships) but I wish we got to see these ships more cause they look so cool.
This is definitely a new ship but it seems that Saporians have made airships for a while since the Separatists are cultural purists. Where Coronans sailed the seas, Saporians sailed the skies.
And we might have seen these ships before.
They look a little different obviously but Vardaros is full of ships and ship parts, despite being a city stuck in a canyon miles away from any coast or large body of water. But if those ships are airships, then this would be a perfect spot to build and test them due to the high winds that canyons create.
So Vardaros may very well be a pre-Unification Saporian town. And if that's the case then that means there's a whole Saporian slum town on the outskirts of Corona that's being run by a criminal empire and neither the crown nor the royal guard is doing anything to help.
~~~~~
So who in the show is Saporian, besides the Separatists?
Well if Vardaros is indeed a Saporian town, then Lance and Eugene had to have been raised Saporian. And that means that Quaid and Vex and Miss Clare and everyone else in Vardaros is Saporian as well.
By ancestry, technically Rapunzel and Frederic are Saporian.
And it makes perfect sense for Cassandra to be Saporian as well. She and Gothel look a LOT like Shampanier. And people have said this before, but Saporian!Cass would make for an even stronger parallel between her and Rapunzel. Their conflict reflecting the conflict of the kingdoms that make up Corona.
Feldspar is another big candidate in my opinion to be Saporian
I think the "Every cobbler worth his shoehorn" is a bit of a fib. I don't think it's false, per se, but I doubt it's the only reason.
And another one that I think is Saporian is Xavier, just because he knows way too much about Saporian history and legend.
What was your first in depth analysis (if you remember)?
Any fandom! Any character! I just want to see what it was like and if it differs from now ^^
honestly, i’d have to say tangled: the series was my first big fandom.
i know. it’s sad. tts made me like this. who knows what i could have been if i hadn’t fallen in love with such a poorly written show.
that being said, it was the beginning of me learning to separate what the narrative of a story wanted me to think versus what the events of the story actually were. my first in-depth analysis was something like: “wait, but… why wouldn’t she check up on the fourteen-year-old? sure, yeah, he sang a Scary Song, but she wasn’t around to hear that. and it’d be one thing if he sang the Scary Song and immediately advanced upon a baby with a knife and a murderous gleam in his eye, but he just… made an elaborate plan to steal a dead flower. and the truth serum wore off after a couple days. and, again, rapunzel had no idea about any of this, so she still should have checked on him. because even if she couldn’t do anything for quirin right then, we’re all unanimously agreed that it’s a good idea not to leave a child alone, right? right? surely there isn’t anyone who genuinely believes she made the right call in not checking on him!” (this was before i got on tumblr.)
whereas, now, if i were to analyze that, i’d go on a whole spiel about rapunzel’s ptsd and how she didn’t want to see another death after gothel and how she’s scared of all this responsibility and how that still is the wrong choice, but could have been way more compelling had there been an actual conversation & exchange of apologies in season 3.
Thanks to @toastedmarshmallowrose this line won’t leave my head so get ready for a rant tomorrow about the Saporian representation in the show and why it makes sense for some of the characters to be Saporian
