stories-and-coffee

[stories-and-coffee]

A very batty Christmas! Featuring: decorating the tree, trying to take a decent family photo, Christmas bedtime stories, and opening presents!

[stories-and-coffee]

♥ Dick and Dami

[stories-and-coffee]

So I know I said I wanted to do quick sketches, but it felt so empty without a background!!!

Thank you anon for the great idea and the kind words! :)

[stories-and-coffee]

Day 3 🍭

Getting out of school early after a class costume party!

[stories-and-coffee]

Father daughter tea party! (◕ᴗ◕✿)

[stories-and-coffee]

[stories-and-coffee]

On my rewatch of TLOU it emerged that there were some details that I missed before that help to paint this huge picture about the importance of the preceding Tess/Joel relationship. The first and most obvious is that Joel mentions passingly that he and Tommy met Tess pretty early on, and it sounds like she stayed with him when every other group they were in fell apart, and even when his own brother left. So they’ve been surviving together for at LEAST 15 years, probably longer than his daughter was even alive, which is a length of time I just didn’t fully process before.

We never hear the full goodbye/suicide letter from Bill, but a lot of people have pointed out that over Joel’s shoulder you can see Tess’s name mentioned at least twice at the end — including something about her deciding what to do. We know that basically every time we saw Tess directly interacting with Joel before she died, she was the one giving him directives and making the final decisions. She says outright that he listens to her. This is not a man who trusts fucking anybody after everything he’s been through. But he trusts Tess. She comes up behind him in bed while he’s sleeping, and in a world of raiders and robbers where hypervigilance is a necessity, he barely even stirs.

Now, one of her last lines before she dies is “I never asked you for anything, not to feel the way I felt—“ and he tries to say something and she shuts him down. But here’s what gets me: before that, before they realize she was bit, she turns around and in her dying frantic anger she yells “that is NOT MY HOME!” about the QZ. And it’s like okay… where else could she be thinking about, if she’s spent all these years on the road with different groups, with Joel, and then at least a decade in the QZ? What is she defining as home right now? Why is this correction so intense? And it could be about Detroit, about where she came from and isn’t (apparently) attempting to go back to. But then. But then she turns and she looks directly at Joel. And she’s got the most tragic expression on her face. And I wonder if in that moment Joel knew she meant that he was her home, even if she had never said it that openly before. Wherever he went, she would go. Haring off on a wild chase after his brother across the country? She’s there. She’ll do anything to make it happen. She’ll beg and barter and kill for this truck battery, for a mission she doesn’t even have half the same stakes in. She was his direction and his driving force and a safe place for him, but he was her home.

Thinking about this almost changed the tenor of the remaining story with Joel and Ellie to me. The hospital massacre felt perfectly in character the first time I watched, but when I rewatched with both the Sarah and the Tess story in the forefront of my mind it felt even more fucking inevitable. Joel is Orpheus. This couldn’t have gone any other way. He could never have done anything else. He has failed the two most important women in his life. He has failed a daughter and he has failed a life partner twice over- first by letting her die, and second by letting her die believing she was unloved. How can he fail Ellie now? He has to burn the entire world, tell any lie, just to keep her alive. There is no other option, no other outcome. There is no living Joel post-canon without the hospital massacre.

And the revenge for it will be what kills him.

[stories-and-coffee]

Okay I don't know if this has already been mentioned but you know this scene:

Sarah teases him about his age and he responds back with sarcasm, clearly endeared by his sassy daughter. Tommy comes in and teases him too and he just keeps on talking, like this is an everyday occurence and he gets greeted with "you old fucker". What I mean is that he loves the sarcasm and teasing.(By the way the following scene is such a nice parallel back to the first episode)

Tommy does the old teasing age again and this time his smile fades, because this time his age has become his biggest insecurity, proven by

He says "I'm weak", he mentions that in the past he had been much stronger. Now his age has stolen his physical strength from him and it terrifies him, "too slow and too fucking deaf to hear him coming". I guess that comment from Tommy hit him right where it hurt, the thing he had been thinking about after leaving henry and sam, the fact that he wasn't fast enough anymore to save and protect Ellie.

[stories-and-coffee]

I’M SO ALONE OUT HERE WITHOUT YOU, BABY.

[stories-and-coffee]

“Is it… a new pair of sneakers? How many of those do you have? Not enough.”

THE LAST OF US 1x07 | Part II

[stories-and-coffee]

I had a friend who knew everything about this game. There’s this one character named Mileena who takes off her mask, and she has monster teeth and then she swallows you whole and barfs out your bones! THE LAST OF US 1.07 “Left Behind”

[stories-and-coffee]

But you know where to go. So we’re gonna be okay. Yeah.

[stories-and-coffee]

so glad the episode ended there and nothing bad ever happened to them🥰

[stories-and-coffee]

post canon board games

[stories-and-coffee]

"No matter what we do, we can't change the way people see us." "You changed the way you see me... didn't you?"

found family and some of the allegory in NIMONA (2023)

[stories-and-coffee]

"I'm not a people. I'm many things. I'm! Nimona!" "I see you, Nimona." | NIMONA (2023)

[stories-and-coffee]

#how to take down an oppressive government 🤘