my ten cents about vriska serket’s “abilities” as a “manipulator”:
i think a lot of the reason people are flabbergasted to see the words “vriska isn’t manipulative” is because first of all, there is a big misunderstanding about the nuance of abuse and abusive situatuations and which harmful aspects of abuse (manipulation, gaslighting, battery, etc) are at play in which instances of abuse. abuse isn’t black and white and not all abuse has the same exact hallmarks – someone can be abusive without being manipulative.
the other big issue i’m seeing is that so much of the fandom has a really poor understanding of vriska’s character.
there are a lot of people in this fandom who believe that vriska is cruel for the sake of cruel, mean because she wants to be, and a master manipulator who destroys the lives of everyone around her and laughs at the wreckage.
in ACTUALITY… vriska is a mess. a lot of the things she does are stupid, impulsive things she later very vocally regrets. she doesn’t actually strive for complete chaos – sadly, she’s very often actually trying to help, but she has poor social skills, no friends who trust her, and a hair trigger temper that often sends her into tantrums. she’s extremely emotional and impulsive.
and it’s not to say vriska can’t be clever – she is a smart girl who sometimes actually does execute plans that work (it happened once!) and the whole situation with jade and prototyping bec (i can’t remember the details exactly) was certainly a time when vriska cleverly executed something she was attempting. it completely fucking failed and blew up in everyone’s faces! but she is clever enough to come up with elaborate schemes in a pinch. they just don’t usually… work, and in most situations she uses brute force or has a meltdown instead of doing anything actually clever
vriska isn’t ACTUALLY a one note villain. that’s why people like her. her motivations are far from one dimensional cartoon villain – in fact, sadly, her motivation for her shitty behavior is either “abused child with no outlet and poor social skills trying to cope” or “my poor temperament flared and now all my friends hate me even more and i have to fix it”
vriska wanting to be a hero is hilarious in the context of the comic, especially when hussie first introduced her and she was absolutely insufferably annoying and pointlessly cruel. but as hussie elaborated on her character she became much deeper and more complex – her wanting to be a hero isn’t just because she’s a glory hound. it’s also because her life circumstances made her a child soldier who could not afford to have friends and whose social skills were too poor for her to ask for help or reach out to others. vriska wants people to respect her for a lot of reasons, but one big one is that she’s an abuse survivor who was starved of positive attention her entire fucking life
of course she wants to be a hero because of mindfang and because she’s a glory hound and etc, but it also boils down to the fact that vriska is literally too. fucking weird to understand “being nice to people” = friends, and probably feels like she’s too far gone for “being nice” to get her anywhere, so she HAS to be the big damn hero. THEN she will have made up for all of her wrongdoings. THEN her friends will truly forgive her. THEN people will like and respect her genuinely instead of hating her and mocking her to her face.
When my godsister and I were kids, her parents got this wolf-shaped cookie jar that howled whenever the lid was opened to prevent her sneaking her hand in and stealing cookies.
I couldn’t wrap my head around why they got that cookie jar in the first place. Sneaking just wasn’t her style. It was my style - I’d wait for the perfect opportunity to strike, create a diversion, plot three excuses in case I got caught, and attempt to calculate the maximum number of cookies I could steal at one time without rousing suspicion and where I could store them safely until I was ready to eat them.
My godsister, on the other hand, was the sort to walk up to the cookie jar, shove her hand in, and stuff her face while staring at you defiantly, as if challenging you to stop her. What are you going to do? The cookies are already in her mouth. They’re hers now. She’s won.
I guess it’s no surprise that she became a pro kickboxer and Muay Thai champion.
Holy shit
how do you know the jar wasn’t meant to stop you instead of her?
‘Cause I never got caught.
Fight her and post it to tumblr it will be funny
You want to see me utterly pulverized? No way dude. I’ve been on the wrong end of her “affectionate” punches even before she learned to fight for real and it was not fun. I don’t want to find out how much she’s improved.
fairy godmother was singing her iconic cover of “i need a hero” during this scene, “livin’ la vida loca” wasn’t performed by puss in boots and donkey until the end of the movie
literally check yourself before you wreck yourself
shrek yourself before you wreck yourself
A. The song title you are looking for is “Holding Out for a Hero” which is a song by Bonnie Tyler, but performed in this film by the incomparable Jennifer Saunders (of AbFab fame).
B. Mongo had a featured line during “Livin’ la Vida Loca”, which he sang from his final resting place in the moat, meaning that it is completely fair to assume that someone would associate the song with his dying moments.
There’s another story that I like about a Chinese general who had to defend a city with only a handful of soldiers from a huge enemy horde that was in all likelihood going to steamroll the place flat within hours of showing up.
So when said horde did arrive, they saw the general sitting outside the city’s open gates, drinking tea. The horde sent a couple of emissaries over to see what was what, and the general greeted them cheerfully and invited them all to come and take tea with him.
The horde decided that this was a scenario that had “MASSIVE FUCKING TRAP” written all over it in beautiful calligraphy and promptly fucked off.
Whoever that general was, he was clearly the Ancient Chinese equivalent of Sam Vimes.
did he just invite us over for tea nah man i’m out
This just keeps getting better
I fucking love history.
ok but tbh that story misses a lot of the subtlety of the situation like ok
so this story is the Romance of Three Kingdoms, and essentially takes place between Zhuge Liang, resident tactician extraordinaire, and Sima Yi… OTHER resident tactician extraordinaire.
The two were both regarded as tactical geniuses and recognized the other as their rival. Zhuge Liang had a reputation for ambushing the SHIT out of his opponents and using the environment to his advantage, thus destroying large armies with a small number of men. Sima Yi (who kind of entered the picture later) was a cautious person whose speciality was unravelling his opponent’s plans before they began. So it was natural that the two would butt heads; however, since Sima Yi tended to have more men and resources, he started winning battles against the former. Which, y’know, kinda sucked.
On to the actual story: Zhuge Liang is all like “shit i gotta defend this city with like 10 men.” Literally if he fights ANY kind of battle here, he WILL lose; his only option for survival is not to fight. And that’s looking more and more impossible until he hears that his rival is leading the opposing army. And then he gets this brilliant idea. He basically opens all the gates, sends his men out in civilian clothes to sweep the streets, and sits on top of the gate drinking tea and chilling out and basically makes the whole thing out to be a trap
When Sima Yi comes he’s all like “yo come on in bro”
and Sima Yi is like “yeah he’s never been that obvious about his traps before. this is definitely a bluff” and he’s about to head in when he realizes
wait. he knows that i think he’s bluffing.
and so he gets it in his head that maybe, just MAYBE, Zhuge Liang has this cunning plan that will wipe out his army - recall that he has a pretty good handle on what his rival is capable of. And after a long period of deliberation (which is just like “he know that I know that he knows that etc.”), being the cautious man he is, SIma Yi eventually decides to turn his entire army around and leave.
Zhuge Liang later points out that the plan was based specifically on the fact that he was facing his rival; if it had been anyone else, there’s no way it would have worked. A dumber or less cautious person would have simply charged in and won without breaking a sweat.
and that’s the real genius here: it was a plan formed entirely just to deceive one man, and it worked.
Zhuge Liang is the most brilliant, sneaky-ass bastard in history. One time his side’s army was out of arrows, which pretty much meant they were screwed. So Zhuge Liang goes and does the logical thing, which is build a fuck ton of scarecrows and put them all on boats. Then he makes the men hide in the boats and sail them out on the river.
Well, that day was super foggy (which Zhuge Liang had predicted. Did I mention he was also a freakishly accurate meteorologist?). So the enemy across the river sees a fleet of boats armed to the teeth with what appears to be half an army of men. They panic! and start firing arrows like crazy.
Zhuge Liang lets this play out for a while, then he’s like, ”Ok guys that’s enough.” They calmly turn the boats around and go back to base, where they dismantle the scarecrows and pull out all the enemy’s arrows.
Zhuge Liang is legend.
I love this post. It just keeps getting better. Like seriously, I would have adored learning about this in World History.
If you want to see this in cinematic glory, watch Red Cliff.
Especially since it makes Zhuge Liang look like this:
Red Cliff is 50% bloody battles and 50% eye candy and about half of that eye-candy is due to Zhuge Liang
I’ll never be able to reconcile Shel Silverstein’s art and stories with his appearance. He looked like he would gladly murder you with a shard of broken glass and then throw your body directly into a shark.
you have odd notions about masculine faces.
real gentle-lookin’ sneer
really gentle looking when not say, in the grainiest over inked newspaper photo you could find.
buddy it’s literally the photo he put on the back of The Giving Tree
