Bear with me, I'm still new at this

Why hello, boys...

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I’m so happy that I found my way back to this fandom last year. I’ll keep on love the G-Team boys in the new year ❤️

How love how utterly tragic Heero looks here.

Relena hasn't seen Heero in who knows how long. In that time, he's been dragged through hell and back. He shows up in her kingdom after weeks of captivity, likely kept in the dark, forced to test pilot an MS. He's lost Trowa. He’s been swallowed by ZERO and nearly lost his mind. He's lost his purpose, his will to fight. He's even gone rogue, fighting without real goals, spiraling. Hours earlier, he was fully prepared to die in battle before Quatre pulled him out.

This man is barely upright, barely surviving gravity. He's lost his reason to fight, his reason to live - as he sees it. He explicitly says later, to Treize, that he feels useless.

This is not the boy Relena last saw in the Arctic earlier in the war.

This is not the boy she found washed up on a beach the day of Operation Meteor.

This is a broken boy who is questioning everything about himself.

So why, in the seven hells, WHY is this how she welcomes him?

She can see he's in pain. Quatre is physically supporting him to the door. She watches him wobble down the stairs, gripping the railing just to stay vertical. Every alarm bell on the planet should be screaming in her head!

And what does she do?

She leans on the railing and swoons.

I'm sorry. No. Just - NO!

What she should have done, what the Relena I love would have done, is exactly what she does later in Endless Waltz. Or what she shows herself capable of as early as episode 2:

Presence. Protection. Immediate concern.

To be fair to her, or rather to the writers, she does eventually address this. The garden scene, where she comments on how hard it must have been for him to return to space, actually reaches him. That moment works. It stirs something real in him.

Which is why this entrance scene drives me up the wall.

It's not that Relena is incapable of understanding his pain. It's that the writing suddenly forgets she can.

So yeah. Maybe what really pisses me off isn't the swooning itself, but the inconsistency. The whiplash between Relena as an emotionally perceptive character and Relena as a symbolic prop reacting to "The He(e)ro's Return" instead of the human in front of her.

I love Relena. Truly.

But swooning over a boy who can barely make it down a flight of stairs without collapsing?

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

'keeping warm'

dw i have you covered, even if no one pays me i will still draw these babies :’ ) 

Chang Wufei 🎩🪄✨

'oh two' 1 of ?

'could he be any cuter?'