The Griffin's Lair

TWENTY MINUTES BABEY CAN WE HEAR IT FOR TWENTY MINUTES!!

Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people. 

there was once a little boy.

he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.

somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.

the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?

he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.

as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.

he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.

and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.

yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real

but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.

tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child

his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.

tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.

and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.

WITH PLEASURE

(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)

these are hyraxes! they're not rodents or canines or anything like that. they belong to their very own order known as hyracoidea. their closest relatives are elephants and manatees, and these mamas and babies have FREAKY teeth

also important to note that the

and:

Excussse us… have you ever heard of the blunthead slug snake (Aplopeltura boa)? This nocturnal reptile, which can reach lengths of up to 33 in (85 cm), primarily feeds on slugs and snails. Unlike many other snakes, this species eats using a technique called mandibular sawing: To slice off the indigestible parts of prey, the blunthead slug snake slides its jaws back and forth like a saw! It can be found in parts of Southeast Asia including Thailand, Sumatra, and Java.

pt. 1 | pt. 2 | pt. 3 | pt. 5 | pt. 6 | pt. 7

The backlash against calling characters "Mary Sue" is valid — the term is often sexist, racist, and simply unfounded. However. I do think that there's a baby in that bathwater, and that "this character is so perfect it becomes a major flaw in the story" can still be a meaningful criticism.

Argument 4: "Mary Sue" is still a valid criticism to the extent the "Mary Sue" character tends to start out good at everything... which can end up giving them nowhere to grow. And character growth is awesome. It makes for some of our all-time favorite heroes: Spike, Anya, Castiel, Zuko. Edmund Pevensie. Taylor Hebert. T-800. So on. Watching a character become talented or ethical or powerful makes for a great story. But if a character starts out talented/ethical/powerful, then the story often ends up in a trap of throwing ever-bigger Godzillas at a character we've already seen defeat Godzilla several times.

Effort and struggle tend to be what make a character interesting or relatable. It's the all-important difference between fearlessness (boring) and courage (relatable).

One example of how doing something badly often looks more impressive than doing it well: Captain America. He got widely derided as "useless" in Avengers (2012), so for Winter Solider (2014) the writers didn't make him more powerful... they added visible effort.

The moment of hesitation before Steve jumps, and the moment after he lands where he has to stop and go "ow" for a few seconds, do so much to sell this moment, vs. the unreal-looking way Steve does almost everything without effort in Avengers movies:

Example of this problem*: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Protagonist Ender has so many abilities so ridiculously beyond what real six-year-olds can do I can't list them all, but the point is that as of his first day of school, he's already curb-stomping kids twice his size and scoring better at training games than any other person ever measured. What problems Ender does have tend to come from being too good at things — hence John Sclazi among others deriding him as insufferably perfect.

Counter-example: Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. Protagonist Jean Valjean is smart enough to invent a new type of fastener, strong enough to lift a carriage unassisted, moral enough that he's literally meant to be a Catholic saint... and the book gets away with it because when we meet him, he has none of that. He'll become the world's greatest dad, but in his first scene he gets in a shouting match with a small child over a single coin and only realizes too late what an ass he's being. He'll end up running an entire town and its wealthiest business, but first we get a long sequence of him unable to get even a chance to earn enough food to survive because of his criminal record. He can go a long, long way (1500 pages!) and the story can still feel coherent, because he starts out with so little.

Tl;dr: Mary Sue ≠ ultra-talented. BUT if a story has a character start out ultra-talented without showing us how they got there, the character tends to stagnate and the reader may lose interest.

#yeah ender lol#from what I remember card was trying to answer the question “can a good person commit genocide”#or rather he was arguing the answer to the question was yes#and could only do it with a mary sue protagonist#but yeah excellent points

Which is partially achieved by saving a single individual from that species, potentially delaying its extinction by a while and ensuring that when it does happen, the cause will be a genetic bottleneck leaving them massively inbred and vulnerable to disease. You may recognize this as a comically christian fundamentalist view of atonement.

And that's also why I've always pushed back so hard against people bringing it up as an additional example of kids facing moral dilemmas in the style of Animorphs. He literally doesn't know his actions will result in death, ever, at any point in the first book. (How he can be a tactical genius and yet not know that about curb-stomping Bonzo as Bonzo's already lying wounded on the floor is... one of life's great mysteries.) The Animorphs are killing strangers so they won't kill the ones that they love, and then they kill their loved ones as well. And not because they were following orders from some adult.

And after reading it, I was SO GLAD I procrastinated on this one, because young Griff would have loved it, but he would NOT have seen the flaws. No, the bullied young boy whose good grades kept his autism undiagnosed would have projected SO HARD onto Ender and wished that he, too, could kill his bullies with impunity because he was so smart.

You know, given how C. lupus, C. lupus familiaris, and C. latrans can all create perfectly viable hybrids, and that the proto-dogs that domestic dogs descended from much more resembled coyotes than wolves, it's not really a surprise that some yotes are experimenting with domestication.

Goddamn that lady must be fucking shredded to be able to chase down a coyote through a swamp.

"Don't let wild animals into your house, you are not going to make Dogs 2.0, you're going to get injured and the animal killed." is probably obvious enough advice that I don't need to put it in the tags as a reminder.

...I know more than four people on this site that have poisoned themselves trying out 'foraging guides' they found online, two people IRL who tried to keep raccoons at pets, and have a family member who got hospitalized for Cat Scratch Fever after grabbing a feral cat bare-handed. This is apparently, not obvious enough.

This next writeup is a bit longer, since I have a reason to talk about the short timeskip between the USJ and the Sportsfest. My rule for this is exactly One new Move or Technique, I want the improvement from internships to be obvious.

On Ashido's Pokémon:

Ashido’s Nidoran struggles this early; with how young and untrained she is it’s hard to see the Nidoqueen she will grow into. She struggles against two of her Abilities, as Rivalry introduces a new level of inconsistency to attack power while Hustle makes moves miss. Poison Point makes approaching her dangerous at least. Move selection is also poor, as her strongest moves are Fury Swipes and Double Kick.

The fights in the First Lesson Exercise and at the USJ will highlight the need for Hone Claws, which she practices in preparation for the Sportsfest.

A/N: among my assumptions is the Life Orb Sheer Force synergy since the glitch is intentionally left in so that's something for this team to look forward to

The question was what. In the end, I decided that, since it was a common Pokemon that's fairly cute, Nidoran would serve well. Not to mention that the prospective Alien Queen deserves to have a Nidoqueen.

Found the old list of starters and wrote down what I believe they should be capable of for between the start of class and the Sportsfest. Unless stated otherwise I'm assuming they're limited to level up & evolution moves only up to ~lv15 since I don't want these fights to look like Little Cup. Here's the first analysis, for Aoyama's Pokémon:

Aoyama's Vivillon stands out for having a nearly complete kit for its job as support at this point in time, only really missing out on Rage Powder. The biggest threat it expresses comes from Compoundeyes Sleep Powder to immediately subdue any one opponent, while Friend Guard will force enemies into committing more on offense or prioritizing it instead, giving Aoyama time to fire off his Quirk or let allies do the same. Its last Ability, Shield Dust, protects against disruption from the likes of Fake Out and Nuzzle.

Vivillon was chosen for Aoyama because it naturally learns Psybeam and can learn other beam attacks like Hyper Beam, Solar Beam, and, before Game Freak got rid of it, Signal Beam.

I thought of Butterfree for this purpose, but Kalos is Pokémon-France, so their bug got precedence for Aoyama’s first partner. Not to mention that the patterns Vivillon has better match the flamboyant boy.

Speaking of patterns, looking at the patterns involved and where they come from, Aoyama probably has either a Meadow pattern (France) or an Elegant pattern (Japan, except Hokkaido). I’d say Elegant, as that’s what the kanji in “Yuga” means.

Most of the first year UA students don’t have evolved Pokémon, but since Vivillon is one of the early route Bug types that evolve quickly, it makes sense for it to be fully evolved.

Aoyama’s family is rich, so he could have had more Pokemon at the beginning, but, well… he’s also going through a lot.