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Warning spoilers!!!

Good lord the dialogue is this game is suspicious…

The writers really really put the SUB in subtext with this one…

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hi it’s skully i can’t believe you like franco :,) would franco in some proper mob attire that fits him instead of his oversized stuff be possible? maybe a zoot suit in a dark red/black or whatever you want ^^

tried my best ;u;

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I got done with Hulao Gate earlier and I already have to say DW Origins is the most fun I remember having in a musou game in years, and I'm begging the forces that be that the developers will take all the right lessons from this game. If we got a SW instalment with this same quality and effort put into it I think my soul would actually ascend. After DW9 my hopes were very low but this might really be the single best game in the series and this is something I would actually recommend for everyone to play.

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Markiplier representing my feelings on twd ships canon and non canon

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Alpha is by far my favorite villain in TWD and she is terribly underappreciated. All the other villains in the show have some crippling fear of emasculation and only operate to inflate their egos and delusional world views, meanwhile Alpha is just "Our communities are clearly a mutual danger to each others' existence so I've set up a border so we can coexist, you can very easily memorise it by the decapitated heads of your friends and family members that I left there, and just in case you have trouble finding it don't worry I made sure to leave one of your friends alive so he can just show you the spot". Honest and concise woman. Not to mention her right-hand is a slasher movie villain who has probably sold his soul to her in some kind of blood pact, the Governor and Negan are literally surrounded by people who only feel obligated to tolerate them.

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one of my biggest unpopular TWD opinions (aside from the fact that I actually love the female characters that everyone else seems to hate) is the fact that I actually really like the episodes about the Governor in Season 4

because I love Tara so much, I love seeing her origin, and I love how even though they showed a more emotionally vulnerable side to 'Brian', they make no effort to redeem him or actually make him pitiable (at this point, the writers actually had brains in their heads with this shit, unlike with Negan's backstory and 'redemption' arc)

they hit all the points that could make him redeemed - have him take care of a child (have him be the thing that helps her recover from severe trauma induced mutism), they have him save the lives of our newly introduced, weak characters even though he's not obligated to, they have him volunteer to take care of a disabled man

but none of those things matter when he is introduced to a new community of survivors and his psychopathic tendencies take over. it is shown that he was never truly capable of being a good man. he had the opportunity to be a humble follower and prioritise taking care of his new family, but instead - he starts lying and murdering people in order to gain power and seek revenge on those he believed have wronged him long ago, starting a war he knows he can't win (a war he lost before, sacrificing a lot of innocent people) - because he's not a good, humble man. he's a power hungry psychopath

and I love how the episodes show this instead of actively trying to redeem him or trying to milk sympathy from the audience

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#when the boys have stare at you as long as possible

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I’m deep in the King Ezekiel brainrot

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the grip this show has had on me since 2012 should be studied

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just know that if you hide

it doesn't go away

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Angela Moss makes me insane, her mental decline was so genuine. She tried to play by the rules, fix it from within, she was so lost, everyone was so disappointed with her, she lost her father, labeled as a monster working for a monster, and all she wants is her mother back--more than revenge, she just wants to dream, believe, and speak it into existence, and all she got in return was crushing, mind-breaking guilt and betrayal.

The comment to Elliot about how sometimes she's jealous that he can still see his dad only resonates louder the more we get into the series, how we get almost a hopeful feeling when she's talking to herself in season 3, how we think that maybe she found a way to communicate this grief of hers, only for it to be revealed she's just talking to QWERTY.

We want her madness to be similar to Elliot's, because as he demonstrated, there is hope in his illness, but Angela is given no such mercy.

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Spoilers: Eggers' Nosferatu

There's a lot of debate right now on if Count Orlok represents Ellen's shame/trauma/abuse, or if he represents her repressed erotic desires, and in turn there's debate on whether or not viewers who find the Ellen/Orlok dynamic alluring are "missing the point." Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp have both said in interviews that there's a mutual pull between Ellen and Orlok, and even that there's a love triangle element, but obviously the experience is terrifying for Ellen. How can we reconcile the sexual tension and the horror?

I think the broader theme is that Orlok represents everything in a woman's inner world that men refuse to acknowledge and accept - fear and shame and trauma, yes, but also our appetites . After the prologue, the story starts with Ellen begging Thomas to stay in bed with her; she says "the honeymoon was yet too short" and tries to pull him in and kiss him (obviously trying to start some nuptial bliss). But Thomas is anxious to meet with his boss and get his promotion, because he has a narrative he's going to fulfill: he's going to pay Friedrich back, buy a house, and then start having kids (he and Friedrich touch on this a bit later. Notably, Friedrich discloses Anna's pregnancy to Thomas before Anna has made it public.)

It's the start of Ellen and Thomas' married life and she just wants him to prioritize her sexual desire, but he chooses to focus on his ideal of success, which sets him on this path to confronting Orlok. We know Ellen doesn't care about having a house or fine things and she begs him not to go, but Thomas listens to Herr Knock and Friedrich, who tell him that as a husband he has to provide materially. He ignores Ellen's stated desires, and so fails to provide sexually and emotionally. When Thomas gaslights her about her nightmares and calls them childish fancies, he shuts down her vulnerability, which kills the intimacy she was enjoying in the literal honeymoon phase.

On a related note, there's a defence in here for Aaron Taylor Johnson's performance, which I've seen a few male critics call "over acting." In this story Friedrich represents the masculine ideal of the time, he's a rich business owner with a beautiful wife and kids. Thomas clearly looks up to him and wants to emulate him - he wants to give Ellen the life "she deserves." But Friedrich's elevated masculine status is why he refuses to listen to Ellen's "hysterical, sentimental" worries, he's too rational for all that of course. And his stubborn "rationality" leads to the death of his entire family. Friedrich IS the patriarchal ideal that crumbles when confronted with nuance and uncertainty. Some people see Friedrich and assume that a character like him is meant to come across as dignified, and that Aaron Taylor Johnson is messing up by making him look annoying, but really he is giving a great portrayal of a really common, annoying kind of guy. The kind of guy who melts down and has childish tantrums whenever they lose control of a situation, or their manly skills and values are shown to be irrelevant.

The men in the movie (excluding Professor von Franz) frame Ellen as childish for speaking about her dreams candidly, but their own childishness is revealed when her dreams manifest in the form of Orlok and become unavoidable. Ellen (partially? possessed in the moment by Orlok) tells Thomas how "foolish and like a child" he was in Orlok's castle. In the literal context that's cruel, and obviously that shit was scary as hell, but it hits on Thomas' failure in the metaphorical reading. He was a child playing house: 'I'll be the husband and make money, you be the wife and make babies.' When it came time to confront his wife's inner world and all the scary, traumatized, lustful complexity of it, he was completely inept. The message isn't that Orlok is what Ellen really needs, or that Thomas is a wimp, but he's not a perfect husband either. I think "the point" is that a real healthy marriage with sexual, emotional, and spiritual mutuality is impossible in that society with Thomas/Friedrich's ideals. In that kind of society, a spiritually and sexually potent woman like Ellen ("in heathen times you might have been a Priestess of Isis") will always be caught in a "love triangle" with her husband and her own inner world.

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You put it perfectly by pointing out how the female characters in TWD are constantly pitted against each other. I agree with everything you say about Lori here and I especially feel the same way about Andrea. It's funny how these are the same people who always talk about how "complex and deep" Shane is; but female characters can only be justified if they turn into some amazing guardian angels like Carol, Michonne and Maggie. Characters like Lori and Andrea are the most like regular everyday people, but because they're women they get hate thrown at them for not being written to be fan favorites. You know most fans don't spend any time analysing the show for themselves and just parrot stuff they hear in popular video essays, because even all these years later TWD is full of characters with depth and interesting traits who everyone just passes off as garbage- and the most notable ones just somehow happen to be the women.

In Defense of Lori Grimes

"Michonne is so much better than Lori because she searched for Rick for years while thinking he might be dead when Lori got together with Shane after a few days of Rick being dead"

Something I am so disgustingly sick of seeing in The Walking Dead fandom is the intense sexism in comparing the female characters to each other and pitting them against each other (especially on the basis of those female characters being love interests to the same man or potential love interests to the same man) - the kind of misogynist mindset that the show itself tried to take apart and guide us away from in the most hand-holding way.

I am so sick of seeing characters like Beth and Lori being shit on for being "weak" and seeing characters like Lori and Andrea have their deaths literally celebrated and cheered on by fans just because they were in a relationship with a male character that you didn't approve of.

And genuinely, I think it is intensely unfair to compare Lori and Michonne when their circumstances were so entirely different.

(Potential TW for discussion of Shane's canon assault on Lori.)

Can you genuinely imagine Lori - someone with 0 weapons training, whose ultimate priority was to take care of her young child, marching into a place that was full of Walkers (and active chaos because the outbreak was still so new) and was shown to be full of military personnel actively shooting at innocent civilians because they were afraid that people were infected - just because she herself had to check that Rick was alive and somehow had to rescue him. Rather than trusting the word of someone she had known for years who had no reason to lie to her about Rick's death, and, as far as he was concerned, fully believed that Rick was dead.

And I know that a lot of people get pissy because they think that Lori and Shane engaging in a sexual and/or romantic relationship so soon after Rick's death was tasteless - and I think you are fucking annoying and braindead for having this take. First of all, mourning looks like a lot of different things for a lot of different people. For Hershel, it was drinking, for Beth, it was wanting to take her own life, for Rick after Lori's death, it was experiencing hallucinations - and for some people, mourning might mean seeking comfort in another person.

And I don't understand why people seem to blame Lori for this inappropriate relationship more so than they do Shane? I think Shane is a fascinating character to dissect, and right from the get to, his very first speech shows how he is inherently sexist, and one of the core parts of his character is how he views Lori and Carl as a prize. He never truly loved them as people - which is why he finds it so easily to sexually assault Lori out of anger rather than leaving her alone, trying to claim her as a piece of property he feels rightful to, and later in Season 2 when he is further emotionally devolving, he doesn't truly care to watch over Carl and care for his safety, he only runs around talking about the things he has already done to keep Carl safe.

During 18 Miles Out, Shane says to Rick "I swear I never looked at her before that, man" - talking about how (supposedly) he never had romantic interest in Lori before Rick's 'death', and I think that the only reason this line was put into the script is because Shane is lying here. Because he knows Rick is suspicious that it was a long term affair or at least, that it was a some kind of scheme on Shane's part, and Shane is trying to exonerate himself - especially because he's trying to lure Rick into a false sense of security right before he kills him.

I do genuinely believe that Shane admired Lori from afar for a long time, not only because she's attractive, but because she represents everything he wanted in a woman - she is a stay at home mom, she's a house wife. She fits very easily into that little box that Shane wants to put all women into. Especially because during his opening speech, he says "every woman I ever let have a key" - he denotes the women in his life as roommates. He's clearly never gotten past the stage in a relationship where he lives with a woman for more than a few weeks because he wants a cooking, cleaning house wife - but nobody will put up with him and his attitude for long enough to give him that.

And then there's the fact that he purposefully kept Lori close after Rick 'died'. When (who they don't know is Rick) comes through on the CB, Lori asks if she can go off by herself to put up signs on the highway to warn people away from the city (and she doesn't know it, but doing this would have guided Rick to their camp a lot faster and easier). And Shane refuses to let her go off by herself. He claims that it's because he doesn't want to leave Carl as an orphan, but he ends the conversation with a kiss - cementing that he is her caregiver, her authority and that she needs him.

Imagine how intensely vulnerable Lori was after Rick had just 'died' and in her mind, she was a widow. Her son would never have a father again and she was now living in a scary, dangerous world where her protector was dead. And Shane is lingering around her, keeping her close by - we do not get to see their first kiss in the show, but every single romantic touch between the two of them is initiated by Shane. And I think it is a bit of a psychological power imbalance that she was mourning and scared and he was straight headed enough to lead the entire quarry group, and somehow they ended up in a sexual relationship together.

I would be willing to bet that Shane is the one who started that first romantic/sexual encounter. (And for the record, I am not calling all of their encounters rape or assault, I am just saying that he took advantage of her vulnerable emotional state.)

And comparing that to Michonne - who (when Rick 'died' on the bridge) was someone intensely skilled in combat and survival and perfectly okay to go out on her own to search for him, and had someone else to take care of her children in the meantime in a steady, stable community while she was gone... I feel like it's a totally unfair comparison. Especially because Michonne didn't have a predator that she already had a trusting established relationship with waiting over her shoulder to bounce on her vulnerable emotions.

I love Michonne and Lori both so much, but saying that Michonne better because she searched for Rick and Lori didn't is SO UNFAIR.

Also if you are one of those people who cheers when Lori dies, I am severely judging you