An Aleph

However, he replied to said email within five minutes, asking a question that required an answer. So I answered and was like "Also, I was going to apologize for answering emails during this call, but I see we're both here at the Devil's Sacrament, so I don't think an apology is necessary."

I watched him read that on screen and try not to laugh. And then at the end of the call as everyone started saying goodbye, he goes, "Hey, MJ, I meant to tell you. I like your shoelaces."

And I looked straight into my camera, stone cold serious, and said, "Thanks. I stole them from the president."

And the rest of the team was like, "What...the fuck...?" before he abruptly ended the call for everyone.

Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.

Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.

Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!

Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.

No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.

It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.

The most obvious change is that Tarvek could be dead before the story starts and that is very likely but it’s also possible that Aaronev might care too much about having one viable heir because nobility are weird like that. So in this scenario Anekva was closest when he finally crossed the line and after that he needed Tarvek to continue the line.

This also adds the element that there is the constant threat of the summoning engine hanging over Tarvek’s head if he changes his mind which is particularly awful. It also adds the element that Aaronev would be very happy to have sex with Lucrezia in her body just like with Anekva which is so extremely fucked up.

Tarvek is obviously intensely feminine in a way that she tends to use to appear non threatening and it works even better than it does for canon Tarvek.

The Storm King thing is a lot harder for her but if she’s clever about it she can work around it with certain factions who support her line and think she would be easier to control.

It is expected she will have a top tier arranged marriage at some point, grandmother said she would take care of it personally which is rare but probably due to her not trusting such an important bloodline with Aaronev. Tarvek knows she prefers women for a long time and equally knows that it doesn’t especially matter because she’ll be marrying a man anyway.

Gil’s story would probably change very little if she was a girl. While most people in Europa would think the Baron having a daughter is a very different thing to the Baron having a son, Klaus doesn’t really see the difference in terms of what Gil’s role in the empire will be.

Basically Gil is still the heir, Klaus is still testing her all the time and obsessive about her training and the relationship is still complicated with undercurrents of annoyed affection.

Something that would change is that Klaus has a very different outlook on female Sparks. In canon he has his own issues with them but a lot of it roots from his concern of Gil making the same mistakes he did, whereas if Gil was one he’d be a lot more worried about where they’re all going.

a little while back i had the kinda random idea that lucrezia might be/inspired/hijacked the mythos of the skifandrian goddess eshkigax, and now it looks like my theory might have legs to stand on!

additional reasoning:

lucrezia already is/inspired/hijacked the mythos of the geisterdamen's goddess, so it's totally something she would do

she clearly has knowledge about skifander. [though admittedly this particular point is somewhat weak, as barry also knows stuff about skifander, and lucrezia presumably learned about skifander prior to becoming the other since she knew enough to exile klaus there (unless she just set the mirror to a random destination). it seems very possible that the heterodyne boys, et al. travelled there on an adventure, though why that contact never became well known in either europa or skifander is something of a mystery, but i digress.]

more significantly, the geisterdamen have knowledge of skifander. given that both are underground, its possible that they have had some amount of contact and/or cultural exchange, which could include religion

I have my own little hypothesis about Tarvek. Because here’s his version of events, in which he meets Agatha and she was SO WONDERFUL! And like… was she?

She’s charming, sure. She’s playing the part of Olga, an actress, summoned for dinner, so sure, she’s got her Charming mask on. Tarvek is charmed, but also presumably aware of his father’s plans for her. They flirt over the beautiful Spinet, while he knows she’s about to be killed.

They’re not even really talking, they’re both just playing parts. Olga the charming actress and Tarvek the guy who thinks she’s going to be dead in an hour but still has to be here. That lasts until they get to dinner.

THIS might be when she becomes “so wonderful”. Suddenly Tarvek wants to save her, but he has no plan to do it, and so desperately tries to buy time instead:

Tarvek’s a master plotter, but “Uh, um, shouldn’t we do anything else first?” is the best he can come up with at the moment, because he’s improving here, very quickly. He hasn’t stopped his father from frying any of those other girls, and he hadn’t been planning on stopping this one.

At this point, Agatha’s drugged and then unconscious for most of their acquaintance. So very wonderful. But at this point, he also knows she’s the Heterodyne.

To be clear, I’m not blaming him for what his father’s been doing. He’s trapped. But what, none of the other victims were charming? Playing the spinet was a big game changer for him? Nah.

They then do get two whole pages together:

Masks off, talking about personal things, well done these kids! Maybe this is when she becomes Wonderful to him… except this is already mid-escape. He was getting her out before this conversation happened, and presumably that plan would have continued even if she’d interacted with Tarvek the way most people do and stabbed him.

And then, well…

Tarvek’s immediate reaction to her waking back up is this:

LATER they have time together to scheme and spark out and all that good stuff, but they just HAVEN’T yet. But Tarvek is DEVOTED.

My hypothesis: Tarvek isn’t in love with her yet. His motivation to save her wasn’t love. What Tarvek sees in her is A WAY OUT.

So. This raises four general categories of questions for me.

1) Logistical:

How did Mechanicsburg manage for so long, without trade or raiding or outlying farms? Is this when they developed their tradition of snail cuisine? Did the Heterodynes just super-science supplies into existence?

2) Authorial:

Is this going to be relevant to the larger plot? It could be just an anecdote of Mechanicsburg weirdness, like magnetizing all the children, but given how important temporal mechanics have been in this story, that seems unlikely.

3) Chronological:

When did this happen? When Franz says four hundred years, is he counting by Mechanicsburg-internal or Europa-external time? How many other dates in the story does this call into question?

4) Existential:

Oh, they'll happily accept the description, if you're yelling at them, but they never really grasped the idea of "this child is born out of wedlock and therefore a lesser heir".

Klaus is running for their lives with the total supplies of one (1) sword and one (1) baby.

If we're feeling generous, they also have one (1) baby blanket. But only one. (Skifander may be warm, but caves - sorry, Jules Verne - are not.) He doesn't have anything to carry baby Gil in (or put baby Gil on) if he needs two hands for something. If he wants to take that torch with him, he's going to have to put the sword away. He doesn't have so much as a water bottle, much less a baby bottle. No supplies, no backup, no plan, no nothing. This man looks like he's lucky he's got shoes on.

That doesn't sound like the Klaus we know now.

And that tells me that whatever happened in Skifander, there was no warning. None. Zero. Not even a rumor. Klaus didn't have time to think about this. He didn't see it coming. He didn't have time to plan for it. He didn't have time to consider other options. He didn't even have ten seconds to throw baby stuff into a bag.

He just grabbed baby Gil - maybe the only baby in reach - and he ran.

I'm convinced he didn't mean to leave Skifander. I'm coming around to the idea that he might not have left baby Zeetha behind on purpose - he just didn't have a baby sling to hand.

No wonder this man is such an absolute control maniac. Emperor of Europa in all but name, and all because back in Skifander, he got blindsided by something he wasn't prepared for.

I imagine that this is the thing driving Klaus. This fear. This moment he had nothing, and he was the only thing keeping his son alive.

Self:

Mechanicsburg had two generations (let's say fifty years) of consorts who hated them. And then Agatha came home, and she brought Gil and Tarvek with her. And.

And Teodora was there against her will, and she raised her sons to reject Mechanicsburg's monsters so badly that one of the first things they did was burn down the Guildhall. And Mechanicsburg's people trusted them so little that according to the novels, they considered, for one of the few times in the town's history, rebellion.

And Bill married Lucrezia, and Lucrezia scorned them. Treated them as pawns and servants and furniture, and alienated the Jägers so badly they were determinedly marking time until she was gone, because time would get her if something didn't. Despised them so regularly that Piotr knows her from a few words and nothing more.

And then the family was gone. And consorts aren't the Heterodynes, but they are part of the family.

...

And then Agatha comes home.

And Gil walks out before the gate and calls down lightning to defend their Lady's town. And comes back out of the Castle fighting, blazing war through the skies in her name, even against his own people.

And Tarvek falls in with the Jägers and fights beside them. And is on the ground with all of them throughout the siege, up on the wall with the Lady, running laughing and working through the streets with her.

gil instant 'not letting tarvek dies' is way earlier than tarvek letting the "i'm only protecting him for practical reasons" mask slip

and honesly. as soon as tarvek and gil meet each other we go straight into the si vales valeo, and.

look at them.

anyway.

For those who only know the movies, or who imprinted on the movies first, it’s almost a tragedy how wrong PJ got that scene; it’s one of a couple things that he seems to have fundamentally misunderstood what was going on, what a moment or confrontation was actually about, and almost by habit (as far as I can tell) leaned on making it Eldritch and Scary, and by doing so actually … totally undercut the actual power (and terror) of the scene.

Because here’s the thing about Nerwen Artanis Alatiriel, the princess of the Noldor we know by the Sindarinization of her epessë, the name given by her husband the first time he saw her and went “her hair is absolutely fucking amazing, I love her” (I’m not joking!): she is old. 

[cut for length]

This, of course, has significant Doylistic considerations attached to it, including the fact that it was 1999 when the films started being made and to say that high-quality high-production-values fantasy storytelling was not something of established pedigree in film or TV would be understating it considerably, so there are other reasons I think they came down on the (unfortunate) side of, effectively, brute-forcing and overemphasizing certain aspects of the text, spoon-feeding things to the audience, and assuming they needed more Flashy, Eye-Catching ~*SPECTACLE*~ over trusting the story to carry itself.

But it’s still unfortunate, to my mind.