Alicornutopia

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*fetches the poof basket* *and the tissues*

I hope there are enough poofs.

*grabs several and makes a poofpile and burrows*

I hope that when the peal shows up and Beila has more options she will decide to let Spider come back, because I feel super bad for everyone involved.

I think that Beila will decide that Spider may come back after she meets more Jokers and Stevens. At that point you go beyond amateur psychology into more evidence than even non-amateur psychologists could gather.

I’m more worried that he won’t be able to come back easily, because of Weird Afterlife Reasons

*Takes some of the poofs back to the Effulgence thread because they’re still needed there*
*Leaves another box of tissues*
*Comes back and makes his own poofpile to snuggle, and falls asleep there*

*replenishes the poof basket*

Here are tears for you to feast upon.

I thought all the characters were going to get to live and be happy and not murder people and that maybe Dao and Spider would be dating and it was going to be really cute and heartbreaking. And I thought Jun and Spider were going to get to be friends and I was preparing a little mental box of sad warmfuzzies and looking forward to vague ideas about Spider healing people and being happy and okay about it and not killing people and it was going to be really cute. :(

The original plan was actually for Dao to get kidnapped and rescued. And then I thought of the idea of a StevenChainsaw template blend, and I realized how well a Steven and a Chainsaw would click, and figured out that Dao would probably be able to talk Spider around. And then I was like "wouldn't it be great if rescue arrived JUST AT THAT EXACT POINT IN THE CONVERSATION". We actually didn't know for sure ahead of time what Beila was going to decide, but we had the various possible avenues worked out to our satisfaction. I'm really proud of how it turned out!

Eeee I love knowing about behind the scenes stuff!

As much as I love it when Bells do Heroic Rescuing, the way it actually ended up turning out is really well-written and feels-inducing.

Yeah, I agree that it was well-written. I even agree with Chi that she shouldn’t just arbitrarily have let him go based on amateur psychology. I don’t know enough about Spirit law enforcement to know whether they made the right decision in not turning him over to them. I feel like the Avatar has enough pull that they could have gotten non-amateur psychological analysis, and then either death sentence or some sort of mutually-acceptable probation. I don’t know if Spider would be willing to be in the legal system in the first place, though. I feel like they should have explored that option more, at least, even if Spider eventually vetoed it and they ended up with the same outcome.

I thought of that, too, but I figured that Spider being an apocalyptic-level bloodbender would complicate things? Like, I don't know how the Republic City law enforcement/prison system would actually deal with someone with his power level.

As a first thought, go with their “guarded by Jun” plan but have a deadman switch on Jun. Alternately, get a professional psychologist to say that Spider really only needs Jun even though Jun sometimes sleeps. There are glaring problems with these plans, but at least some of those can be patched and other plans exist. If nobody has ideas that work, they could give him the death penalty and he’d be no worse off.

My point is that Chali and the rest of the law enforcement framework have resources that Chi, Jun, Dao, and Spider don’t. Chi has enough political power to make sure those resources are used to help or at least not cause further problems.