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[aristaspark]

Brooklynn has a ao3 account... do you think she writes fanfics? Probably from her favorite show, but what your hcs abt her fics?

I wasn't going to include Kenji here, but you think he also reads fics?

Actually, sorry to disappoint, but she doesn't strike me as a fanfiction writer AT ALL. She's always been way too busy being out into the world to put her time into writing fanfics or to really engage with fandom activities. But reading them? Yeah, absolutely. She finds comfort in her favorite shows but since they all eventually stop she started reading fanfiction. Yk, not only does she get to choose what she wants to read but it's also free and easily accessible on her phone so she loves to read them. Often it's before she goes to sleep. She gets so excited she always leaves comments sharing what she liked and her theories to the author (as a AO3 fanfic writer I just love those type of readers).

And I actually could picture Kenji writing fics, but being extremely bad at it 😭 It's just that everytime he watches something he has thousands of ideas, different scenarios that come to his mind and he thinks they're too great not to be shared with the world but he's simply terrible at writing so they kinda flop 😭 And you know, he's posting a chapter once every 3 months when he remembers it so that doesn't help. Of course he mostly writes about Esther Stone (the first fic is about her complicated relationship with her father).

Once in a while he gets encouraging comments so to him it's worth it 🫠 (most of them are Brooklynn's and Sammy's, but he doesn't know. And of course the one reader who always calls him out on his typos or plot holes is Yasmina, but he doesn't know either 😂)

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I can't wait 😆

😏 ehe

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Kenji and Brooklynn seem to be very incompatible right now. So why and how will their relationship work if they're so different? In jwcc those two were similar, but now, not even their hobbies aren the same.

Can u tell us what in common they have in CT?

I think this argument is flawed and might be influenced by your dislike of the ship (i assume you don't ship them).

Because we literally don't know ANY of the Nublar 6 hobbies, only their jobs. We never got to see them in their everyday lives before everything went down. Like, would you be able to tell me what Ben's hobbies were before he started invastigating Brooklynn's death? Or Darius before he started hunting down the allosaurus?

The same could be said about Yaz and Sammy. Like, from what's in the show, would you be able to tell what they have in common, their shared hobbies? No, because it's not integral to the plot, the only thing we know is that they love each other and that's all we need to know.

Because the show isn't a romcom about the romantic/everyday lives of six friends, it's a show about the lives of six friends who have to deal with deadly dinosaurs and corrupted human beings ruining their lives. So that's normal that we don't really know what their lives look like when everything is "normal", because it's not what the show's about.

And I actually think that the show is telling us that what broke up Brooklynn and Kenji was anything but a compatibility problem.

They were together for 6 years, and in the few flashbacks we have, we're shown that they were nothing but happy together during these six years. They went on picnics, on hikes, lived together, the only picture Brooklynn had at her secret appartment was of them (printed and framed, on her desk, where she spent most of her time), she had cute cringy videos of them on her phone, they still looked smitten with each other in the few scenes we got...

Neither of them actually wanted to break up.

But I can see the point you're trying to make, in that Brooklynn's investigation could be considered a "hobby" like any other that'd make her incompatible with Kenji.

But it's clearly not. It's not explicitly said, but it's in the subtext that things only started going awry when she started working on the Broker case after Ben introduced Dark Jurassic to her (she said it to Kenji, "I've been all over the place lately, I'm just working on something super important").

Before that, it seemed she had a healthy balance between her personal life and her work.

This shows that this is not a "Kenji and Brooklynn are not compatible" problem, but rather a "Brooklynn developed an unhealthy obsession with catching the broker" problem. The proof of that is that she didn't neglect only Kenji, but all her friends (as shown in the facetime), not even doing the bare minimum anymore to maintain her relationships (weekly facetimes).

At that point Brooklynn wasn't compatible with ANYONE, but that was because she lost herself and started neglecting herself by neglecting her personal life. We're shown times and times again. She's devastated when Kenji breaks up with her but the bag of money from Daniel is enough to make it instantly disappear from her mind, same with Darius' confession, she hears that her best friend is in love with her, that should be a life-shattering news, and yet immediately after she goes back to her investigation as if nothing even happened and expects Darius to do the same and still help her with her investigation. This is not normal, this is not healthy, and this is not who we are told Brooklynn was during these six years.

Her obsession is not shown as a "natural" evolution of her character, as part of her normal behavior, it's something that happened to her and that basically ruined every aspect of her life. There's a lesson she needs to learn. She's not supposed to still be this Brooklynn at the end of the show, because it's not the real Brooklynn.

So I think that when she manages to get out of that self-destructing obsession, she'll be able to repair her relationships, she will want to. And, as I said, a lack of compatibility was never a thing for her and Kenji. They were compatible before she "lost herself", and they loved each other.

I think she already got rid of her unhealthy obsession, but is now continuing solely because she thinks she doesn't have a choice. That she already sacrificed too much to stop before she achieves her goal, that what awaits her if she was to get back to her loved ones now is too scary for her, and that she genuinely does it to protect her friends because she knows that now, they're in the Broker's radar because of her.

As for what they have in common...as I said, we don't know that about any of the characters.

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Howdy, Heidi! You said that some fans picked up things that were done on accident… Were there more scenes like that? Also, were there scenes that you guys made on purpose but fans didn’t pick up / were aware of them? In shipping terms (hihi) and in general terms. Thanks!

I think in every type of media you will inevitably see versions of 'authorial' intent vs audience interpretation that overlap and differ from each other in many ways. (Authorial intent in quotes because in collaborative mediums like film and animation every single person on the pipeline who touches the work probably has a slightly different personal interpretation they're contributing to the final work, even under someone like a showrunner or a director).

Humans are smart and it's in our nature to look for connections and find explainations to questions, so most of the time if someone is putting something down, someone is going to pick it up, so to speak, and a lot of things ARE on purpose.

But this same phenomenon can also lead to us seeing connections in places that even the 'authors' might not have originally thought of while creating the work, and I think that can be pretty neat actually! I don't necessarily think reading alternate interpretations of works is wrong-- it can be very healthy to explore multiple reads of a narrative or a character/character dynamic. On Chaos Theory there were definitely times when we were like 'fans are probably gonna ship this even if it's not the text' haha. Sometimes fans latch onto headcanons you really have no control over. Sometimes things were animated slightly differently from how they were conceived (which is also a natural part of things).

But yes, sometimes I have seen a few other things that were interpreted in slightly different ways from how they were directed or written verbally, but I'm personally of the opinion that it's more fun to leave some things visual and open to a little interpretation rather than beating the words over the audience's head and having the characters constantly announcing 'I'm feeling this because of this!' And going 'this is the only way to interpret the show and the characters and if you don't you're wrong!'

It's usually not a huge deal. I think even as we were working sometimes I'd make connections to myself that weren't necessarily spelled out to us and go 'oh, this is a throughline for this character actually!'

Like for example- if I remember correctly, the original direction behind how Kenji reacted to Ben's apparent death was that it was supposed to the first time he'd ever seen someone he really KNEW seemingly die right front of him, and being unable to do anything about it deeply affected him. Ben is a very important turning point in his character development regardless of which way you read it.

And I think this is actually something that just continued to stack onto his character throughout both shows whenever any of his friends lives are seriously in danger. In Camp when he's still unable to do anything but comfort Sammy while she's poisoned, to deciding it's too dangerous not to trade Wu's laptop for Brooklynn, to eventually throwing himself between the spinosaurus his dad is about to kill Darius with and choosing his friends over his own father and being willing to die with/for them... and then in Chaos Theory it kind of reboots all over again with Brooklynn dying and then his dad dying right in front of him, and his complex of not wanting to be useless and trying to do whatever he can at the expense of even himself to keep the loved ones he has left safe is kicked into overdrive.

I think there are a lot of things like that where the intent is not always verbally spelled out, but the more important thing is that it's still (hopefully) making you feel something.

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How do you think Kenji's process to forgive Brooklynn will go? Because he said: "I'm not fluent in betrayal" and "once you lose my trust, you lose it. Forever"

Ok, I'm going to go off on a little tangent here (as I always do) because your question just made me think back on a moment of clarity I had recently, and it has to do with the reason they had Brooklynn and Kenji break up in the first place. But it'll make sense I swear.

But if I had to summarize my "argument": I think Kenji won't have to "forgive" her because she's not actually betraying him (any of them for that matter) and he knows it. He doesn't see what she's doing as a betrayal.

Now, the long thought process, grab your pop corn.

(Sorry, I had a lot of thoughts and it's a mess but who's surprised?)

You see, I was asking myself, if they're gonna make Kenlynn endgame like I think they are, why have them break up in the first place, taking the risk of making them messy in the process? It didn't make sense to me at first, it was one of the only things I couldn't get behind.

And then the answer, like, revealed itself to me and it was so evident I wondered how I didn't click before 😂

If they wanted to make Kenlynn endgame, breaking them up was the ONLY option they had, the only way they could do it.

Let me elaborate. In an interview Scott Kreamer more or less said that when Chaos Theory was greenlit, one of the first "storyline" they "baked" for the show was Brooklynn's (her faking her death). So they kind of had to articulate all of the other storylines around that.

Which leads me to my point.

Kenji would have NEVER been able to forgive her had she done all this while still being his girlfriend.

That's straight up treason. That's choosing a life of misery over his love. That's not telling your partner who's suffering and grieving you that you're alive. That's choosing your investigation over him when you finally reunite. That's torturing him. That's like EVIL.

But that's not what happened. Because Kenji broke up with her. That changes everything when we think about it, it changes the status quo.

She wasn't hiding the fact that she was alive from her partner, she was hiding it from her ex who was probably better off without her in his life anyway since he broke up with her.

She's no longer choosing a dangerous life of misery over him, because she doesn't even have him.

We have to keep in mind that she has no idea whether Kenji still loves her or not. She most likely thinks he doesn't (he broke up with her and after that she was "dead" for six months).

So she really got to choose between two evils:

Going back to her friends and being forced to deal with everything she didn't want to have to deal with : having to face Darius after everything that happened (confession+abandonning her), having to deal with the consequences of her actions on her relationship with her friends (feeling like she no longer belongs in the group), but above all having to deal with the fact that she'll be alone for the first time in six years (having no idea what her and Kenji have anymore). Idk, I'd be Brooklynn I wouldn't want to come back either.

Or, continuing her mission. Sure, it's lonely and dangerous. Sure, it'll hurt her friends. Sure, it'll make her miserable, but so does the other option. Choosing to pursue Soyona makes the most sense for her. She sacrificed too much to stop midway (her arm, her relationship(s), her place in the world (she literaly faked her death). If she stops before it's over it would all have been for nothing. And sure, she'll be miserable, but at least it gives her the opportunity to do good (getting rid of the threat on her life and on her friends' lives, saving innocent dinos).

So now, what about Kenji in all that? As you said, he made a point of saying he doesn't forgive easily.

But the thing is, I'm not even sure Kenji has to "forgive" her.

He broke up with her and after that they never spoke again because she died, their relationship remained "unresolved".

She's not "abandoning him" by doing all this because he was the one who abandoned her first (don't get me wrong, he had every right to break up, but it was still extremely violent and painful for Brooklynn).

I think there's so many layers to their relationship, but the fact is that they're the ones who have suffered the most out of all the camp fam.

And Kenji's aware of that (at least he will be when he'll know everything that happened to her). There's a scene which already kind of hints at this, where we can see Kenji been hit with the realization/fact that she must have suffered more than he could ever comprehend, empathizing with her.

I saw some people putting Kenji in the same bag as Ben and Soyona when it comes to them noticing Brooklynn's arm, but as I touched on in the "analysis" I did of that particular scene, the scene with Kenji is very different from the other two. Kenji does not look at her arm because he can't help looking at it. He's consciously looking at it and wants her to be aware that he's looking at it, he's asking a thousands questions with his eyes alone. It's a look of sadness, of compassion, of hurt. He's hurting for her.

He doesn't get mad at her for her "betrayal", never confronts her, never makes it about him, because it's not. Although he doesn't know why she's doing what she's doing, he knows that she suffered at least as much as he did simply by looking at her arm.

I think that Kenji will try to understand her, not to forgive her, because as I said it's not a betrayal. His reaction to her leaving doesn't look like the reaction of someone who feels "betrayed" and who's rightfully mad at the person. It looks like the reaction of someone who's hurt, sad, heart-broken, regretful, lost, but never mad.

I don't think Kenji sees any of what she's doing as a betrayal because she's not actually doing anything to him. HE was the one who removed himself from Brooklynn's "considerations". This isn't another instance of her neglecting their relationship (or him) anymore because with where things had been left off, as far as she knew, they didn't have any kind of relationship anymore. Not a romantic one, not friendship, nothing, just a big question mark. Kenji most likely still loves her and regretted breaking up with her, but she's not aware of any of that, only Kenji is. To her, it's too late, a lost cause.

So, she's not doing anything to Kenji. It was the case when they were a couple (when she neglected him), because when you're in a relationship you sorta become one with the other person and your every action impacts them, so you must take that into consideration everytime you do something. But as I said, Kenji took himself out of the equation.

She's not doing anything to Kenji, if anything she's doing everything to herself.

I think a lot of people who see Brooklynn as *almost* irredeemable also underestimate everything that happened to her and the role other characters also played in her "demise". Kenji broke up with her, Darius abandonned her. They also hurt her.

She's the one who caused the chain of tragic events that happened to her by giving in to her obsession with her investigation, sure, but that does not mean that she was prepared for any of what happened to her.

My argumentation is a little all over the place sorry 😂.

But, yeah, my main take out from this is that Brooklynn's not betraying any of them. She's following her own path, one they don't understand or agree with, sure, but she doesn't owe them anything. She's her own person, living her life the way she wants to live it, making her own choices. The only one she would have "betrayed" is Kenji, but as I said, that was when they were in a relationship. I think he might get mad at her for having kept so many secrets, but he will eventually forgive her if she's willing to change, if she owns up to her faults (and I feel like after everything she went through she will be willing to). After all, although he said he never "forgives", he forgave Darius.

Congrats if you made it to the end and if you somehow managed to understand 😂

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The way I was ALWAYS confused as to why so many of the fandom shipped them when I read every of their interactions as a big brother/annoying little brother dynamic but people kept insisting they had been set up 😭 When in reality you had no idea people were gonna ship them 🤣

for those who missed the stream- here's the panel I drew from Camp Cretaceous that still haunts me to this day lol-- Meg Lloyd did the rough staging thumbnail and I finished it.

I do feel a little bad how often fans read this shot as 'oh no, Ben is heartbroken!' because the original intention was for Ben to have more of a 'wtf, some of us are dating now? You have time to date? And of all people it's you two???' reaction here asdfafsd

But this was actually boarded before the show had even premiered, and nobody knew fans were going to ship Ben and Kenji haha. This is a prime example of how sometimes... fans pick up things that were done on accident.

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Do you believe Brooklynn has feelings for Darius?

Hellooo, I really don't think she does! (who's surprised honestly?) No but fr I need to stop writing essays on this topic 😂 Thank god i'm an insomniac.

I know people are convinced she loves him back because she didn't *actually* reject him and instead said "I'm not really ready for..." but if you look closely at the sequence, the way they animated her body language and facial expressions is much more telling than her words (at least to me), and it led to me agreeing with Darius' recollection of this moment (she tried to be nice about it but it was clear she didn't feel the same).

Like, I don't see how anyone can see that and think she's in love 😭 THAT'S the face of love according to this fandom???? She looks horrified at the mere possibility that Darius could feel anything other than friendship towards her.

Also important to note that she started saying "I just don't think..." before changing her choice of words, and to me it's a clear sign she was about to reject him more directly, but couldn't do it, so instead she went for an answer that would spare his feelings.

And when you add the shot of her putting distance btw them by moving her feet away from him as if she suddenly felt uncomfortable with their proximity... Why would you physically recoil as the person you *supposedly* love confesses to you?

To me if the writers had wanted to indicate that deep down she wanted to be with Darius, but couldn't in this moment because it was too soon (as she said)/for Kenji's sake, they would have had her say the same thing, but have her body instinctively move closer to him as a physical manifestation of her "true feelings" (...which it is, but it moved away, you do the math).

Also the fact that right after that she still asks him to meet with her for her investigation. I don't know, I think that if she felt anything towards him she would have been as embarrassed/uncomfortable as him, but here she brushed it off as if it was nothing. She had no problem with the idea that she would see him later that day, as if to her there was nothing more to be said/this "incident"/chapter was closed.

I already talked about the look during the plane scene so I'm not going to do it again.

From a story standpoint, it would be really questionnable writing if she suddenly fell in love with someone a week after her partner of 6 years dumped her.

And I absolutely cannot see them throw the "she was in love with Darius while dating Kenji" excuse at us, like, that's straight up character assassination. I know they made Brook morally grey but you can't come back from that 😂. Also, it would go against what they showed in the two first seasons because she looked really in love with Kenji (how devastated she looked when he broke up, how happy they were on the video on her phone, how physically affectionate she was with him in episode 3, the picture of them in her secret apartment...).

And this.

I didn't think my biggest evidence for Kenlynn would be some scribbles on a notebook, but oh well 😂

Like, one simply cannot explain this away. This was her attempt at telling them she was alive, and she only wrote to Kenji, not Darius. And it's not like she had to censore herself or to, idk, force herself to write to Kenji to keep up the appearances because those are only, as I said, scribbles on a paper, her raw feelings and thoughts, something she was never going to send anyway.

Like, if they want to make dinostar canon, why post that? Why not take this opportunity to add content/substance to the ship they *supposedly* want to make endgame? Having that letter addressed to Kenji only serves the purpose of showing us that Kenji's the one on her mind, because otherwise that was unnecessary. They could have had her write to the whole camp fam, but instead they decided to show us that she wanted to tell Kenji she was alive above everyone else, including Darius, the one who confessed to her right before her "death" and who Brooklynn most likely knew felt incredibly guilty for not showing up/for her death (Ronnie probably told her).

If she was in love with Darius she would have adressed the "letter" to him, I can't see any argument against that. Or maybe it's more that if she wasn't in love with Kenji anymore, she wouldn't have written to him, but to all of them.

Honestly, the most I can see them giving Dinostar as far as Brooklynn's feelings for Darius go is to have her admit that she used to have a little crush on him when they were on Nublar but that it completely disappeared once she started getting coser to Kenji. I have nothing to back up this theory, but I don't know, I thought that much wouldn't be too far fetched.

(oh, and I almost forgot but this goes without saying... pretty sure her getting attacked, alone at night, mauled by a dino and loosing her arm partly because he set her up would have killed any potential blooming feeling in her).

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Hi, it's me again... since you answered my last question about Kenlynn so well, I'm going to ask you one more, because I'd like to know if you've thought about it. I've never seen anyone come up with the answer to this: why does Darius know Brooklynn's password and not Kenji? We know that B stayed at Darius' house for about a week, but still, Brooklynn trusted him enough to give him the password - but not Kenji. Why would the writers put this in if it's not going anywhere?

I actually thought about it and I have two theories (as well as some thoughts):

- She didn't actually give it to him. But since he was constantly watching her and she was constantly on her phone, he couldn't help but come to know it even if he didn't mean to.

- She gave it to him in a casual manner. For example she was busy but needed to check something on her phone so she asked Darius and gave him her password.

Like, I can't picture anything other than that. That'd be hella weird if she sat Darius down and told him "Listen, Darius, I'm going to give you my new password. Why, you ask? Well, as a proof of my trust in you, of our amazing relationship. What do you do with it? I don't know, I didn't think that far ahead." That doesn't happen, you don't give your password to someone without an actual reason/a necessity.

I understand why some might think it means more, but we need to take a few things into consideration.

Brooklynn was never the type of person to be secretive about the contents of her phone, quite the contrary actually. In camp cretaceous everybody used her phone all the time.

And it's not because she somewhat trusted Darius more, because while she was with Kenji, he knew her password too, despite all the shady stuff on it (I hope it was because she knew Kenji would never actually snoop on her phone, because if not she's just a terrible investigator 😂). People knowing her password was never a big deal to her, even with the shady stuff.

I think I need to adress it but I really don't think she changed her password before Kenji broke up with her/to hide her investigation from him. Her investigation was a long one, it took months, so I think Kenji would have noticed if she had suddenly changed her password out of nowhere since the fact that they knew each other passwords in the first place implies they had no problem using each other phones, it was a casual thing they did during their relationship.

And I mean, Darius knew her new password, but knew nothing about her investigation either, so she didn't give him access to anything Kenji didn't have access to when they were together. And the fact that it didn't even play a role in the flashback with Darius kinds of confirms that it wasn't an important plot point.

I think what happened is that she changed it out of spite after Kenji broke up with her because it was a date relating to their relationship.

Now, why was it in the show in the first place?

This scene had a purpose. Until that scene (and the one right before where both Kenji and Darius try to grab the phone), Darius' feelings had never been outwardly teased, only left to interpretation (his grief could still have been the result of a man mourning his best friend).

But with this scene, we were shown that Darius felt guilty about knowing her password (not because it meant anything deep, but because it reminded him of the fact that he'd spent enough time with her to come to know it, and to "fall in love" with her).

But more importantly, we were shown that Kenji didn't like the fact that he knew her password, which was the first sign to the audience that something weird was going on, since even Kenji was jealous.

They needed scenes to lead up to the reveal that Darius liked Brooklynn, and the password one was one of them. You know, setup/payoff.

And as always... I might be totally wrong since I'm not a mind-reader and can't see the future yet, so chances are season 3 will make me look like a clown... no, the whole damn circus. Like, it's highly possible the writers of the show are reading my posts thinking "girl, you deserve some credit for trying but I beg you to stop embarrassing yourself" 😂. Just to say that these are merely theories.

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What if Brooklynn and Kenji adopt a cat/dog (maybe both)? I need someone to do hc's abt what would happen---

No need to ask me twice.

- They're DEFINETLY dog people (especially Brooklynn) so when they decide to get a pet they immediately agree on a dog. (I wrote that as a headcanon then remembered that Kenji told his dad he's always wanted a dog in season 5 😂).

- Brooklynn hates small dogs, they irritate her, so that wasn't even an option.

- They hesitate btw a few breeds but eventually agree on a Saint-Bernard since they live near montains and love its big bear appearance.

- When they went to choose which puppy they wanted to adopt, one of them peed on Kenji when he picked it up, so Brooklynn insisted they chose this one, and strangely enough Kenji agreed (he took it as a sign the dog liked him).

- It's a female, of course they name her Esther.

- To mess with the camp fam they told them they were having a daughter, so for a whole week the others thought they were having a real baby. They hadn't predicted Sammy would send them a year's worth of baby clothes by the mail.

- At first they tried to get the puppy to sleep on the floor, but gave up after the first night because it wouldn't stop crying, so she slept at their feet. But after a few months she'd grown so much that she barely fit inside the trailer anymore, so they made her a huge kennel right next to them (it reminded them of when they built the camp on Nublar). They often joke about the fact that the kennel is fancier and more comfortable than their trailer.

- They put a camera (baby monitor) inside the kennel because they were so worried the first night she slept inside that they didn't sleep at all.

- Kenji wanted to take dog training classes, terrified of the idea that they might be doing anything wrong, but left before the end of the first lesson. He hated being told that his daughter wasn't perfect.

- Brooklynn, as the independant queen she is, predicted Kenji would be the one petting the dog all day but turns out she can't keep her hands off of it's furr for more than two minutes, and Kenji teases her about it all the time. He can't help but be endeared when she talks to Esther with her baby voice.

- Brooklynn has thousands of pictures of Esther on her phone and can't stop showing them off to everyone they know.

- They celebrate her adoption day every year with a cake with candles for them, and fancy dog biscuits for Esther.

- Kenji often takes Esther with him on his hikes, and of course when Brooklynn has the time she joins them.

- He sometimes also takes her with him when he teaches rock climbing. She has her own little spot and gets to be pet by his students.

- They're the annoying proud dogs parents who won't shut up about it.

- The funny thing is that they tried to make other dog-owner friends but found them annoying and overbearing as heck.

- During summer they often take her to the river near their trailer and play in the water with her.

- Everytime they had their weekly meetings with the camp fam she tried to get on the table to see the screen so they started putting the computer somewhere she could see, that way the others could also get to see her.

- She has a habit of stealing Brooklynn's phone when she's not looking and hiding it.

- Kenji's absolutely incapable of scolding her so Brooklynn always has to play the bad cop. Everytime she scolds her because she misbehaved, Esther goes to Kenji thinking she will get away with what she did which annoys Brooklynn to no ends.

- Brooklynn always teases Kenji, telling him that Esther reminds her of him (too much energy, loud, drooling when they sleep).

- They often argue over who they think Esther likes the most, but always end up agreeing on the fact that she'd pick food over the both of them any day. Or uncle Ben.

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I'm calling her Brooklynn Kon...🫢

Do we just not have a last name for Brooklyn? Like we know the last names for all the other nublar 6, but not B??

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Omg I just found the ultimate proof Kenlynn is endgame, it's mindblowing. This is so much better than everything I've written until now.

.

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You're like, the greatest Kenlynn shipper I know. You have any idea of why do Darius love Brooklynn if they're not going to be canon? That kind of plot is very common and Kenlynn already break up. So why? I know Brooklynn didn't wanted their relationship to end, but I don't see how they will keep going... You said something like "Darius learning how to deal with rejection is a mature theme they would bring here". But Kenji learning to let go wouldn't be a mature theme too? Or Kenlynn realizing it can't work is also a mature theme...

Hello, well, first things first thanks for the compliment 😭 (?)

So to adress your point, me saying that Darius's arc being about dealing with rejection (and his guilt) makes for a compelling storyline doesn't mean that I think the same can't be said for Kenji and Brooklynn.

That's why I wasn't even mad when they introduced the storyline in season one, because it was believable that Darius could fall in love with her and it was very in character for Brooklynn to be obsessed with an investigation to the point where she neglected Kenji, it made sense and was simply very good writing. So, yeah, coming into season 2 I was sure they were going to take the "kenji/brooklynn both realize they could never work" route and shove dinostar down our throats to build them up, because looking at the story as a media with a fandom, that was what seemed more likely.

But then there was the promotional material in which Brooklynn only wrote to Kenji, which made me really doubt my conviction. And then season 2.

I think I already listed pretty much everything that suggested, at least to me, that the writers were going for Kenlynn, or AT LEAST that dinostar would remain platonic.

I wouldn't have been mad if they had made dinostar canon (still possible), it was kind of expected since they had Darius fall in love with her. But season 2 suggests it's not the direction they're heading towards (according to me at least) and honestly, I'm glad.

I'm happy because they really stepped up the writing and character conflicts since jwcc, and to me having Brooklynn reciprocate his feelings would be REALLY questionnable writing at best and straight up fanservice at worse.

In universe Brooklynn has been with Kenji for 6 years. They have being a couple for far longer than they have ever been friends. And it was Kenji who broke up. And you want me to believe she would fall for her a guy she has always seen as her best friend only a week after her break up? 😭 Mind you, a best friend she only visited because she was still obsessed with her investigation, not because she wanted to see him (proof she was like that with everyone, her relationship with Kenji wasn't the problem, it was her).

My take on Darius's arc was basically me trying to understand where they were taking his character, why they had introduced this storyline in the first place if it wasn't gonna go "anywhere" as everyone puts it.

But that's the point, we're so obsessed with shipping that we basically forget that it's not all that makes a story, and IT SHOULDN'T BE.

Darius having this arc wouldn't have been in vain even if he doesn't end up with Brooklynn. It gave him his entire arc in season 1, with him being filled with grief and guilt over her death, and it also gave him his conflict with Kenji. It made his character compelling, relatable, interesting. Like, shipping isn't all that matters, whether they end up together or not it's such a compelling story, so why would they refrain for telling it simply because of fandom culture? And to me it's just a testament of how better the writing has gotten since jwcc. The characters no longer have one dimensional relationships/conflicts with each other but have real conflicts/problematics. I'm not only speaking in terms of shipping, but also other storylines. Sammy not speaking to her family, her and yaz struggling with their long-distance relationship, Ben's paranoia, Kenji loosing two of the two most important people in his life back to back, having a death wish, Brooklynn loosing a limb, being cut from all the people she loves for months...

It's clear the writers are putting the characters in very uncomfortable situations, like, death wish and the loss of a limb, please ???

So why would Darius be any different? Why would they refrain from tackling the subject of unrequited love, of messy feelings and confusing friendship with love?

I think that what I'm trying to say is that it's a mistake to look at jwct the same as jwcc/as a kids show cattering to the fans. They're clearly not writing storylines to please the fans, but want to tackle very real subjects, and treat their characters as real people and I respect them so much for that.

I'm gonna stop here because I feel like I'm repeating myself (which I totally am, I'm sure I already wrote that in my endless ramblings). Sorry if I got carried away 😂

And (because I feel like I need to say it) I could be TOTALLY wrong. I'm only making theories on my account, I don't know sh*t except from what's in the show, so it's totally possible dinostar will end up together making me look like a clown 😂

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People just straight up looked for any reason to justify their hatred of the ship. From the age gap to the the "sibling-coded" discourse, although they're the only pair where one character outwardly demonstrated some attraction going as far as season 1 (Kenji hitting on her). But the way the fandom harrassed the creators as if they had committed a crime when the only reason they were mad was because their ship wasn't canon was straight up embarrassing 😭

I find it both funny and concerning that so many people in the fandom flipped out over the age gap between a 13 year old girl and a 15 year old boy who were close friends before dating, without even having birthdays to go off of, but now practically no one is saying anything when that same girl is now 19 and being shipped with the woman in her 30s/40s that has tried to kill her multiple times an tortured her.

People were straight up nasty to Brooklynn x Kenji shippers over the age gap, but her and Santos are fine apparently despite there being a massive in canon age difference and power/experience/maturity imbalance. (Not that I want them to be nasty to shippers, it’s just that the difference in reactions is striking.)

Shippers be crazy

[aristaspark]

Not sure if I posted it here already, but I started making JWCC/JWCT edits recently if anyone's interested in following me there 👀

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Guess who got their hands on S2 crew memes

Two of these were gifs that just could not be transferred over.

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JWCT: How I think the love triangle will go down: Kenlynn endgame, Dinostar friendship restored.

So, as I teased in a post I don’t remember how long ago, I’m going to explain my theory on what I think the writers are planning to do with Kenji, Brooklynn and Darius, and what led me to think that. I don’t claim to know what’s going through their heads, I’m only a girl who loves to write and who has taken classes on the process of film-making, narratology and cinematic analysis…and also the biggest Kenlynn shipper, so even though I try to be the least biased possible, it will probably still shine through, I’m human. Oh, and that’s only a theory of course, chances are I’m wrong. It goes without saying, but I had a blast writing this, I love to dissect the stories I love to find meaning in it.

I split my thought process in different parts, so pick and choose what you're interested in reading, I know that's freaking long, but I can't help it, I LOVE TO ANALYZE EVERYTHING OK (especially fiction).

(also don't mind the typos there are a lot of atrocious ones but it was too long to check correctly)

Dinostar is (too much of) a mess:

2: They could have killed Kenlynn, but chose not to:

3: They're putting a suscpisiously large amount of effort into Kenlynn

4: Darius’s arc with Brooklynn is not about romance:

5: Brooklynn was in the wrong: she had everything

6: Kenji has suffered enough:

7: The way she looked at Darius (plane scene):

8: An example of what could happen (purely going off of vibes):

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Some more memes from season 2, Ft. the origin of Sad Kenji that we never posted (bc it had season 2 spoilers) and Earnest's parents (?