Agent RIVER stan account

Her hair was damp, and she wore a black silk bathrobe.

“…What?” I asked her.

“Towels.”

“What about the towels?”

“Are you using the black towels?”

“Yes,” I said. “You had the white, your sister had the black, and she’s gone now, so I started using the black.”

“It fundamentally stands to reason I’d default to black.”

“Does it?” I asked. I debated if I wanted to argue the point. “I’ll use white from now on, then.”

Taylor kissed Rachel to cure bonesaw's miasma (wildbow 2012, part 14.11)

Taylor could have spit on a bug and had it fly into Rachel's mouth to cure the miasma (@ty-bayonet-betteridge, 2023)

Wildbow has stated numerous times that neither of these characters are supposed to be taken as queer.

Taylor kissing a girl on the lips in a scenario when there were other options she likely would have thought of to cure her is Gay

These three observations all seem to contradict with each other, such that we cannot take them seriously without one of them giving. Most would place their doubt on 3, claiming that wildbow intentionally created a yuri moment for his readers and then backed away from the implications this would have on the larger story. However, careful reasoning reveals that there is no necessary contradiction:

A normally gay action isn't actually gay if all your alternatives in the situation would be more gay.

The most-often stated alternative for what Taylor could have done involved flying a bug down Rachel's throat.

Taylor's swarm is noted numerous times to be an extension of her body.

We can thus conclude there is no contradiction between are initial quartet of observations as long as we accept the following: Taylor having a bug fly down a girl's throat is more gay than simply kissing them.

With this out of the way, we can turn our attention to a section from 19.7:

recently I've been thinking about how I think some (I repeat some, not all, not even most) of the reason behind why it's harder for female characters to get popular enough to achieve real blorbo/The Character status is a kind of overcompensating reaction to a certain type of male gazey voyeurism in mainstream media. in my horror/tragedy niche I'm seeing six posts a day on my dash along the lines of "mmm I need that brunette bisexual man writhing around crying out in pain," and, yknow, love that, strong agree, but I absolutely never see that kind of blorbo sadism posting where the vague character figure is a woman. the most discussion I ever see of female characters suffering beautifully/sexily is people making fun of booktok m/f dark romance; wanting to see a woman as that kind of "chew toy experiencing the horrors and accidentally being kinda hot about it" protagonist is treated as completely off limits. at best it's laughable and at worst it's a sign of rising fascism.

Alec is perfectly symbolized by the happy/bored mask.

Brian’s mask is almost cartoonishly intimidating to hide himself underneath.

Lisa’s character surrounds the roles she plays and the lack of a solid identity underneath. Sarah, even if having once been her identity, is now just another discarded mask.

Rachel’s mask is cheap and almost there just to check a box as an expression for her lack of control over anything. There isn’t any real thought behind her mask because she didn’t get the chance to think any of this through, being a villain was forced on her. And maybe I’m just making this up but I feel like she wears it less through the book as she gets more agency and footing as she heals.

Why is Theo so underrated? This was one of the hardest lines in the series