Nick, Before Gatsby's Death: Wow His Smile Is So Beautiful, It Lights Up The Entire Long Island Sound

I'm actually really gay

Poledancer! Yongsun is my new favourite thing

Harumi part 1

I think the reason Harumi ticks me off so much is because she’s a character whose motivations feel skewed. Don’t get me wrong, as a character and as a villain I think she’s fantastic and she definitely ranks high on my list of favorite Ninjago villains, but one of the most interesting things about her (and one of the things I hate most) is that her motivations change all the time. She wants to hurt Lloyd, she wants him to join her side. She wants to save Ninjago, she wants to see it destroyed, she serves Garmadon as her father but runs from him when she sees he’s going to lose, she saves a family that she herself put in danger but then almost immediately goes back to being evil.

So my thought is this - despite being arguably one of the best villains on the show and a master manipulator, we don’t know exactly what she wants. I’m not sure Harumi even knows what she wants. Which is fair, if we understand that she’s a heavily-traumatized 16-20 year old. She’s a brilliant case study in how unhealthy coping mechanisms can develop into unhealthy lines of thinking and desires - essentially, what might’ve happened to Lloyd had he not found a loving support system he could trust.

There’s only a few times we’ve seen Harumi truly vulnerable, usually when she’s alone or away from people she’s putting on a manipulative front for (i.e. Lloyd and the ninja). These times are a) sitting alone on the Bounty looking at pictures of her parents, biological and adopted, b) when she’s asking Garmadon to make her his daughter, and c) when she saves that family at the end of Hunted. Each of these times we get the sense that what Harumi is really looking for is a sense of family and love, which somehow got convoluted with an obsession with Garmadon. Funnily enough, needing to be loved (and not abandoned) is also Lloyd’s driving inner motivation for pretty much everything he does. In s8 we get this back and forth of Harumi trying to destroy Lloyd from the inside out, and then Misako telling Lloyd to not let the good parts of himself go, and then Lloyd himself telling Harumi, “I won’t let it [the death of his family] do to me what it did to you.” On the inside, I think Harumi and Lloyd look very much the same, but they diverge when it comes to action - Lloyd chooses light and compassion, while Harumi chooses manipulation and rage.

Inside, Harumi is a mess of hatred and anger and an intense desire to be loved again - that emptiness she refers to when she puts the Mask of Hatred on. And it’s driven her to a point of near-madness, where at this point all that seems to matter to her is revenge. All of this anger and hatred really is directionless, so she directs it at the ninja, specifically Lloyd. But nevertheless, I cannot wait for the rest of Crystalized to explain to us what headspace Harumi is in these days - but I fully expect it to be far more unhinged than it was back in the Oni arc, as she falls farther and farther and subconsciously (or consciously) realizes what’s happened to her.

What I really want from Harumi before she inevitably kicks the bucket or redeems herself is a realization of what Lloyd told her back in s8: even if she convinced herself she was starting out with the intent to protect Ninjago, she’s actually driven by the chaos of her inner hatred and emptiness and has become the one who destroys families instead of saving them - we all THOUGHT she learned this lesson in Hunted but apparently not.

“male character gets a girlfriend whos just him but a girl” is one of the worst tropes except for grundgetta from sesame street who rules

Someone: So what is your novel? Middle grade? YA? Adult? NA?

Me:

the person i reblogged this from is a precious cinnamon roll.

Batman Returns (1992) | dir. Tim Burton

I wish we got to have them interact more, because my whole heart. 🥺 (I wanted to take him with us on our adventure.)

The Elder Scrolls Online: Elsweyr – Cinematic Announce Trailer