#Best redemption arc ever for a villain into an antihero

[lettherebemonsters]

One thing I love about Jeff Parker's Hulk run is seeing Thaddeus Ross broken and vulnerable. Like he isn't a Boogeyman like he comes off as sometimes.

Imagine being one of the top dogs of the US military, having literal legions under your command.....but you can't even save the only person you have left.

Ross was manipulated into becoming Red Hulk and you can tell he doesn't want to do it. Yeah he talks about coveting power in World War Hulks but he sold his soul to the devil to save his daughter's life.

He doesn't regret saving Betty....but he regrets allowing himself to trust devils. They turned his baby into a monster and it's because of him.

[suzannahnatters]

Trope Talk: Villain Romance

So, I was watching a villain romance cdrama again lately (GOODBYE MY PRINCESS) and it has been forcing me to think about what makes some villain romances work for me so well, and others…not so much.

First of all, a lot of my comments on romance at large, and on enemies-to-lovers as the broader trope to villain romance, apply here. For me, GOODBYE MY PRINCESS failed on a few different levels. It failed as a romance because the male lead so rarely, if ever, allowed himself to be vulnerable to the female lead that I couldn't believe either of them could genuinely be falling for each other. It failed as an enemies-to-lovers story because the female lead didn't feel like a match for the male lead in terms either of power or of morals: he was irredeemably awful and held all the power in the relationship, while she was unquenchably pure and naive, holding no power at all. But then, it also failed for me as a villain romance, and because I eat up villain romance with a spoon (WUTHERING HEIGHTS? THE LAST JEDI? LOVE BETWEEN FAIRY AND DEVIL? TILL THE END OF THE MOON? That ONE SCENE in RICHARD III? yess?) I've spent a lot of time thinking about different kinds of villain romance, how some are easier to "sell" to an audience than others - as a convincing HEA, I mean - and how each of them can and can't be made to work.

So far, I think a lot of it has to do with how the villain is built. First off, how does the villain present himself to the audience and other characters? Second, does the villain get a character arc, and is it for the better, or for the worse? Finally, does the villain have genuine feelings for the heroine, and does he achieve a happily ever after with her? Or, in other words: where does your villain come from, where is he going, and how does he get there?

There are a few different choices awaiting the author here, and some of them are, I believe, easier to sell an audience than others. Let's begin with the villain's character arc over the course of the story.

POSITIVE CHANGE VILLAIN This one is the classic: your villain love interest starts out bad, but gets better. See: Erik from THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Kylo Ren/Ben Solo in the STAR WARS sequels, Nux in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, Dongfang Qingcang in LOVE BETWEEN FAIRY AND DEVIL, Thyme in F4: THAILAND.

Redemption arcs are honestly not easy to write, because they need to satisfy both justice and mercy; and authors, like everyone else, tend to want to prioritise one over the other. It's interesting that of the five examples of this trope I listed above, not one of the three the Western examples end in a HEA; two out of three equate redemption with death. Meanwhile, I could also note how the Asian examples pull their punches when it comes to facing the villain with the consequences of his actions, and these are some of the BEST examples.

Still, audiences can pull for a character who's clearly capable of learning from his mistakes, and we all want to inhabit a fantasy where a terrible man learns better and earns his happy ending. I've written this kind of villain romance a couple of times, notably with Vasily in my gaslamp books. Basically, if you plan to have a HEA as an endgame in your villain romance, a positive arc is the best way to make a longterm relationship convincing.

ANTIHERO WITH IMAGE PROBLEMS This one is a bit more complicated. The love interest starts out well and gets better, but along the way he struggles with a dark side and an unfortunate predilection for angry black clothing and eyeliner. He isn't so much as a villain, as a well-meaning antagonist desperately trying not to live up to his dark reputation. See: Tantai Jin from TILL THE END OF THE MOON, but also Galadriel Higgins from THE SCHOLOMANCE books by Naomi Novik, who is in a very similar predicament though not part of a villain romance.

This one is tricky to write, because there aren't a lot of ways a genuinely well-meaning person is going to convincingly pose as an existential threat to the universe. Both TTEOTM and the SCHOLOMANCE books pull it off by invoking the future, either through time travel or through prophecy: the antihero is going to become the Dark Lord/Lady and destroy the world. This makes them a target in the present, and gives them a threatening dark side to struggle against. In TTEOTM, Tantai Jin is torn between his vindictive impulses to revenge himself on those who have wronged him, and his natural longing for the love of others. In this case, it's not so much that he's a villain intrinsically, as that he plays that role in the heroine's head.

I've never written one of these, except as a stage in a positive change arc, but it's a really fun character type that I'd genuinely love to see more of.

NEGATIVE CHANGE HERO This is another classic: the hero who lives long enough to see himself become the villain. See: Anakin Skywalker from the STAR WARS prequels, Heathcliff from WUTHERING HEIGHTS, or Wang So from SCARLET HEART RYEO. If the Antihero With Image Problems withstands the temptation to become a villain, then this character succumbs with more or less struggle. He ususally also doesn't get the girl. In face, the heroine often doesn't survive this sort of story at all.

Audiences have less trouble with this kind of story, because it can come across as properly cautionary. "If you fall in love with someone who gets a villain arc, you will die, and it is probably your fault." Everyone is happy, except the characters. Personally, I think this is realistic, because I don't think a thorough-going villain CAN be a stable longterm relationship; but just once, instead of dying, I really would like to see the heroine nope out and go to live her life in peace and quiet, as happens in the wonderful Daisy Ridley OPHELIA film.

I've actually never written one of these, either, mostly because I've never been able to bring myself to write a tragedy. But I do love reading them.

UNREPENTANT VILLAIN Or, Bad Man With a Crush. This is another really common iteration of the trope, but it's usually played from the point of view of the male hero, and the heroine usually doesn't reciprocate the villain's interest in any way. The great exception to this, of course, comes in Shakespeare's RICHARD III, where the unrepentant villain convinces the widow of one of his murder victims to marry him because he's THAT GOOD. Watching Laurence Olivier in this role at 13 may have been a formative moment of my life. Other examples are thick on the ground: Frollo from THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Scarpia from TOSCA, the Darkling in SHADOW & BONE. Heck, I've written at least one of these myself.

Again, audiences expect this kind of villain either not to have his feelings returned or, if they are, to see either the heroine or the villain die by the end. In fact, this villain is the sort most likely not to have genuinely romantic feelings for the heroine at all; it's usually simply lust. The only example I mentioned where the villain arguably does have more complicated feelings for the heroine than a mere appetite for sex and power, and where she is tempted to reciprocate, is the one written by a woman, SHADOW & BONE - because a female writer is going to treat her heroine as a more fully orbed person, and insist on male characters treating her the same way.

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The second question to ask when writing a villain romance is: how does the villain present himself to others, including the audience? Again, there are a few options here, but in any case I think one of the most important ingredients, if you're going to make the audience care about the villain, is a sense that the villain COULD be a better person than he is.

SHEEP IN WOLF'S CLOTHING The villain projects a terrifying image, but deep down he has a heart of gold. Note that this is not about character arc (for instance, this describes both Tantai Jin, who is an antihero on a positive arc, and Wang So, who is a hero on a fall arc). Rather, it's about how other characters, and the audience, view the character throughout most of the story.

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing is easier to "redeem" because half the work is done when you show that after all, the character is better than we thought, and doesn't need as much work to be redeemed. For this reason, it's a really good choice in any sort of villain romance, because you get someone who LOOKS bad but is in fact plausible as someone who IS capable of changing and learning.

Vasily from my Miss Dark series is definitely a sheep in wolf's clothing, which is extremely fun to write. Vasily's had a traumatic change of heart which has taken away his taste for blood, treachery, and power. His habits haven't quite caught up with his heart, yet, and his determination to hold onto a semblance of power and terror makes him desperate to playact as a villainous vampire prince even though he's none of those things any longer.

SHEEP IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING I was nearly not going to include this variant at all, because where's the villainy in that? But then I remembered Anakin Skywalker. Anakin has a dark side, like Tantai Jin, which he gives into on occasion, but the prophecy that he will bring balance to the Force seems to predict a bright future for him. And he genuinely is a well-meaning person, who only wants to protect the people he cares about. For most of the story, Anakin is a good person and an upstanding Jedi with a bright future. This only makes his eventual downfall more tragic.

While how the villain presents himself is not always linked to a particular arc, this one is, since it requires a genuine hero to begin with. As I mentioned above, this kind of fall usually spells death for the heroine. I think this particular villain romance tends to be underexplored, because the freaks who like villain romance aren't into the aesthetic of a genuinely good man being corrupted, while those who write the downfall arc usually aren't into the aesthetic of villain romance. Nobody has ever written a romance about the Macbeths, and this strikes me as a missed opportunity.

WOLF IN WOLF'S CLOTHING This villain is exactly as bad as he appears on the outside, but if he's lucky, big changes are coming for him. In LOVE BETWEEN FAIRY AND DEVIL, Dongfang Qingcang is about to have his cold dead heart magically melted. In FALLING FOR INNOCENCE, Kang Min-Ho is literally given a new one. As a Christian, I love seeing fantasy elements used to explain why the wolf in wolf's clothing is suddenly forced to trade a heart of stone for a heart of flesh, because in Christianity the only way this ever happens is through a literal miracle.

And I do think this kind of villain IS difficult to redeem for his HEA without some kind of miracle, because he's genuinely done some dreadful things, and he's determined not to repent for any of them. Kylo Ren from the STAR WARS sequels is a really excellent example of a Wolf in Wolf's Clothing: when Rey spits at him, "You're a monster!" he responds almost proudly, "Yes, I am." In a way, the Wolf in Wolf's Clothing's honesty is his one redeeming feature: he may be terrible in almost every way, but he never pretends to be a good man. This is something that the next option on the list lacks altogether.

WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING This villain looks like a good and upright person, but it's all a facade. In reality, he's conniving, ruthless, and manipulative, and whether he's a "hero" on a negative arc or a straight-up Unrepentant Villain, the story is about to unmask him as the bastard he is.

Western literature has a whole array of this type of character, and they're usually the smooth hypocrites of the canon: TOSCA's Scarpia, HUNCHBACK's Frollo, MEASURE FOR MEASURE's Angelo, KNIVES OUT's Ransom. There's just something particularly evil about someone who sees and experiences true goodness and sees it as his opportunity to mask his evil deeds, and that's why we recognise such people as irredeemable. This is why BLUEBEARD is one of the trickiest fairytales to retell, at least if you're interested in a HEA - because Bluebeard, unlike the Beast or Hades or any of the other dubious bridegrooms of fairytale literature, commits awful crimes while pretending to be an ordinary, upright businessman.

This is also where we find GOODBYE MY PRINCESS's Li Chengyin, who marries this with a corruption/fall arc. Very early on in the story, we see that although Chengyin has genuine feelings for the heroine, he's fully capable of betraying her and murdering her family for purely political motivations. At first, Chengyin is neither experienced nor hardened in evil, but he absolutely will betray anyone in his path if it will benefit his plans.

This sort of villain is particularly difficult to redeem, because he's someone who has approval and love already but chooses to destroy everyone around him anyway. He is also uniquely enraging, because we've all known people this terrible in real life - from high profile teachers and carers being caught in ongoing sexual predation, to that crumby ex-husband who traumatised your good friend. I don't think I've ever seen a character like this be convincingly redeemed, and while I think it COULD be done - I do have a Bluebeard retelling of my own up my sleeve - I do that, as with the Wolf in Wolf's Clothing, it would have to come with some kind of fantastical/miraculous explanation.

And in the end, let's face it, it's always most cathartic to see this sort of person get their comeuppance.

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Third and finally, is your villain romance going to get a happily ever after? I'm one of those people who will get a lot of fun out of a romance that ends badly, like SCARLET HEART RYEO, or even something that isn't a romance at all, like RICHARD III and the ill-fated Anne Neville. But whatever you pick, I'm begging you, be very clear about whether the villain has genuine feelings for the heroine or not, and don't reward some horrible person who's never convincingly expressed care for another, with any kind of romantic validation.

HEA VARIATIONS Maybe your villain and heroine make a match of it. Most of the time this is because the villain undergoes a positive character arc to earn his happy ending, and I've got to say, this is a very sensible choice. I personally do not need to see an unrepentantly terrible person get any kind of longterm romantic relationship, either because he's trapped/deceived the heroine or because he's corrupted her to become as bad as himself; I honestly don't think that terrible people CAN have a successful longterm relationship. That said, I've written a relationship where the villain DOES make the love interest worse, but where ultimately the genuine love, empathy, and trust between them ultimately does drag both of them back to the light.

TRAGIC VARIATIONS There are a great many more options available here. The main thing I would say is that you have to give an ending that is justified by what comes before.

A common choice is to give the villain a positive arc culminating in a heroic death. I've seen this done well (FURY ROAD). I've seen it done terribly (RISE OF SKYWALKER). Personally I feel that unless the themes absolutely demand this, you should avoid it, because too often it comes across as the writers arbitrarily ridding themselves of a character they don't know what to do with.

Another common choice is to give the villain a negative arc culminating in the heroine/love interest's death. I've seen this done in ways I don't hate. In RICHARD III, Richard kills literally everyone he touches. In SCARLET HEART RYEO, death is a realistic result of the heroine's trauma and closes the door definitively on the villain's hopes for reconciliation; but it also returns her to her far better life in the future, so it becomes a glimmer of hope for her (though not quite enough). Too often, however, this choice carries with it sexist overtones. Death becomes the heroine's punishment for the crime of loving a bad man (or something else equally fatuous), while the villain is "punished" only by having to live without her.

What about a negative arc culminating in the villain's death? Well, I strongly disliked the choice made in SHADOW AND BONE, in which the heroine guts the villain while hissing "there is no redemption"; to me it was lacking in either tragic catharsis OR eucatastrophe. I think you CAN have a satisfying ending in which the heroine or somebody else kills the villain, but it needs to be an expression of catharsis or eucatastrophe, and we definitely need to feel that the villain is beyond saving - which, if you've made him a genuine romantic possibility, is often hard to feel.

I love the ending of WUTHERING HEIGHTS, in which the villain dies frustrated after realising that after all, cruelty and abuse DIDN'T have to turn him into a villain; he then reunites with the ghost of his equally terrible love interest. I also love the ending of OPHELIA, in which Ophelia, realising that Hamlet cannot be redeemed from his quest for vengeance, quietly nopes out and goes to live a happy life on her own. And then, there's the gold standard for bittersweet endings, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, in which the villain doesn't get the girl, but neither of them have to die, and her compassion for him causes him to go off and live a better life on his own. I think the thing all these have in common is that even though none of them end with the couple together, they afford the whole story a sense of hope: cycles of abuse are broken, some people get better than they deserve, and even those that don't are doomed by their own actions, rather than being killed off in a way that feels punitive or vindictive. And I feel that this is an essential ingredient of tragedy: that justice arises naturally out of the villain's own actions rather than being imposed by some righteous warrior.

PUTTING IT TOGETHER Some of these options are easier to sell the audience than others. For instance, a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing on an Unrepentant Villain arc is absolutely not good material for a HEA romance, while a Sheep in Wolf's Clothing on a Positive arc is probably your best bet (it's a classic for a reason). Others, like a Wolf in Wolf's Clothing on a positive arc, may require careful handling to ensure that the audience is happy to come along for the ride. Whatever you choose, however, it pays to be conscious of which tropes you're using, where the audience has seen them before, and what they expect to see happen to the characters that enact them. This doesn't mean that you can't defy audience expectations, of course; just that it might take a little more work to bring the audience along with you on the journey that you've planned, and that it might not be wise to pick all the worst possible options and expect the audience to embrace the character in question. (cough Li Chengyin cough).

[sophiaannecarusos]

Sophia Anne Caruso Interviewed for Teen Vogue Sophia Anne Caruso is the star of The School for Good and Evil, but one could say that she’s been a star for years, since she was only nine.

Performing her way from her hometown of Spokane, Washington to New York City, the actress collected a handful of onstage and onscreen credits before she even turned 16. Sophia’s talent as a dynamic stage performer earned her a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for her role as Iris in The Nether and critical acclaim for her hypnotizing presence as Lydia in Broadway’s Beetlejuice: The Musical. Now, the 21-year-old is bringing that talent to the screen for one of her first major film roles as Sophie in the Netflix fantasy film The School for Good and Evil.

Based on the New York Times bestselling series by Soman Chainani, The School for Good and Evil centers on two childhood best friends Sophie and Agatha (played by Sofia Wylie). The duo’s lives are turned upside down when they’re kidnapped from their village and sent to an enchanted institution. At the academy, aspiring heroes and villains are trained to become legendary enough for their own fairytales, and ultimately protect the balance of good and evil.

The regally-dressed students in the School for Good, nicknamed the “Evers,” learn the power of smiling and finding true love’s kiss, while the witchy punk-goth “Nevers” learn how to look menacing and incite chaos.

An avid reader of fairy tales, Sophia’s character Sophie has long dreamt of becoming a princess. Sophie saw attending the school as her ticket out of her “mediocre” provincial village life. But when she winds up being placed in the School for Evil instead of Good, she embarks on a thorny journey of self-discovery. Refusing to accept her new status, Sophie relentlessly tries to prove that she’s a princess, not a witch. But she eventually learns she doesn’t have to be a princess to get what she wants.

“I was excited by [Sophie]... the variety, all of the colors that there is to play in her,” Sophia tells Teen Vogue, admitting that she’d probably be a Never in real life. “When I first looked at the character description, I was like, ‘Hm, princess. Let me read this script.’ And I was like, ‘Oh no, she's not just a princess, she's also kind of a devil.’”

Throughout the film, Sophia’s character teeters between protagonist and antagonist as she tries to take unapologetic reign of her own destiny. Sophie effectively enters her villain era — if that’s what it truly means to forge your own path.

“I think it can be difficult, especially for young women, not knowing exactly who you are and not knowing or not feeling comfortable pushing the boundaries as a young woman, but I think Sophie very clearly does that,” says Sophia. “She pushes everybody. She just crosses every boundary.”

Sophie’s redemptive qualities, from standing up for her outcast best friend to empowering her Never peers, is what makes her an unexpected antihero. According to Sophia, Sophie’s journey across the spectrum good and evil teaches audiences a valuable lesson.

“There's a little bit of both [good and evil] in all of us, and that's okay,” she says. “You don't have to be perfect [or] really good all of the time, because that's just not how humans work. It's not how people work.”

Her complex character arc also shows young women that they don’t have to conform. Like her character, Sophia doesn’t conform to a label either.

“With my fashion choices, with my music, or the work I choose, I want to push boundaries and just be ever-changing and reinventing myself all the time, because it's how you figure out who you are,” she says. “You experiment in all the different versions of yourself. There's a million versions of me and who I am. I'm not just one thing. I'm not completely solved in who I am, [I’m still] figuring that out. I always say to myself, ‘We're all just growing ourselves up all the time.’ We're all still realizing who we are… ever-changing and morphing, and I'm always reinventing myself in search of self.”

Throughout the film, Sophie’s wickedly stylish costumes signaled each stage of her search of self. Sophia explains that the costume her character wears at the start of the film, a quilted patchwork village dress, represents “making the most of what she has.” “She’s trying her hardest,” says Sophia. Once the character unwillingly enters the School for Evil, however, she wears what Sophia calls a “sack dress.”

“[It’s] actually one of my favorite costumes, because I love the ropes that she adds. They symbolize being bound, but it's also like she's trying to make a fashion statement with it, which is so cool… I love that costume, because it's just so badass.”

While Sophie eventually becomes a powerhouse in her own right, Sophia notes that she was surrounded by real-life powerhouses on set. Sophia’s co-stars included high-profile actors like Michelle Yeoh, Charlize Theron, and Kerry Washington. “The women on set really held it together,” says Sophia. “It was really awesome to be in a female-forward story, a story about young girls, and also be surrounded by so many well-established actresses and strong women.”

Ultimately, the truest love in the film is not between a princess and prince but friends Agatha and Sophie — two strong women themselves. Sophie and Agatha formed their friendship at an early age, but behind the scenes, Sophia says her bond with Sofia began with a chemistry test over Zoom. While on set, they deepened their connection by hanging out during lunch breaks and sharing a “mutual love of chocolate.” Soon enough, Sophia and Sofia became real-life friends.

“I love what the girls represent,” Sophia says of Sophie and Aggie. “I hope that it can set a positive example by the end of the movie for girls and their friendships.”

Overall, Sophia aims to continue inspiring girls with her portrayal of realistic young women. “I suppose my whole life I'm going to be looking to play authentic women and represent what that is versus the Hollywood version of what a woman or a teenage girl is,” she says. “I'm sort of anti-that. I'm pro-real-girls and representing them, because that's what the female demographic [wants] and that's what I want to put forward… I hope that it inspires them and they feel like they can relate to it.”

Sophia isn’t entering her villain era — she’s entering her transformation era, inspiring all those watching at home to live our most authentic lives. Good, evil, and everything in between.

[lokiondisneyplus]

No character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has the staying power of Loki. Portrayed with just the right amount of smarm and charm by Tom Hiddleston, the impish trickster with the ability to shapeshift and cast illusions is a favorite among fans despite the fact he's betrayed friends and family multiple times since debuting opposite Chris Hemsworth in 2011's "Thor." The most predictable thing about him might be his unpredictability. And yet no one thought the character would return to the MCU after being killed by the all-mighty Thanos (Josh Brolin) in the opening scene of 2018's "Avengers: Infinity War." However, we're now on the cusp of the character leading his very own show.

Debuting Wednesday, June 9 on Disney+, the six-episode "Loki" follows a past version of the character, though it's not a prequel. This Loki is the man who successfully stole the Tesseract, aka the Space Stone, when the Avengers traveled to the past in 2019's "Avengers: Endgame." His actions that day ultimately created a branched reality — the very thing the Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) warned the Avengers about when they attempted to gather the stones in the past. So when the show picks up, Loki will find himself being forced to work with the Time Variance Authority, an organization dedicated to protecting the proper flow of time, to help restore the main timeline he broke when he fled with the Tesseract in 2012.

It remains to be seen whether or not the series is one of the shows Marvel's Kevin Feige said was developed with additional seasons in mind. But with this particular setup — and assuming the show operates independently of the main overarching narrative of the MCU — this is the type of series that could easily run for multiple seasons should the people involved desire it. And given his comments over the years, Hiddleston definitely seems game to portray Loki until he's too old to do so.

But what is it about the character, a Frost Giant who was adopted by Odin (Anthony Hopkins) as a baby and raised as an Asgardian, that has allowed him to persevere – especially when Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) and even Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) have not? What gives Loki, a character who has been both villain and antihero, such longevity in the MCU? Is it Hiddleston himself? Is he nurturing goodwill with his enchanting performance? Is it the character's unpredictability keeping things fresh? Or is it the potential of a flawed man still searching for an identity and purpose?

Over the last decade, Hiddleston — whose name was once bandied about as a possible James Bond candidate after a stellar turn in "The Night Manager" — has won favor with Marvel and its fans thanks to his continued dedication to the role of Loki and his support of the extended universe. Some actors have been happy to say goodbye after fulfilling their contracts, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an actor who loves his job with Marvel more than Hiddleston. (Never forget the time he dressed up in character and took over Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con in 2013.) But in addition to his acting chops and commitment to the role of Loki, Hiddleston is also just an effortlessly charming individual, and some of that natural charisma bleeds into his performance, making the character a richer and more complex character as a result. And it's a good thing too because a character like Loki — someone ruled by his emotions, whose only allegiance is to himself, and who wouldn't think twice before double-crossing his own brother — runs the risk of becoming either very annoying or quite tired rather quickly. Luckily, Loki is neither.

After learning the truth of his origins in the first Thor film, Loki's anger toward his family and the betrayal he felt put him on a path to finding his purpose, which resulted in him becoming the mouthy and manipulative, power-hungry antagonist of the first Avengers movie. At the time, no one outside of Feige and other decision-making executives likely knew what was in store for the future of the MCU.

But now we can look back and see Hiddleston's captivating turn in "The Avengers," in which he attempts to take control of Earth using an army of Chitauri forces, was more than just the catalyst for the various heroes recruited by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to finally team up. It was also the beginning of what might be the best character arc in the entire MCU. No one save perhaps Sebastian Stan's Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier, has had a more complicated or effective emotional personal journey throughout the entirety of the Infinity Saga (and beyond). Perhaps that is why when Loki was eventually killed several films later in the middle of his redemption arc during the opening scene of "Infinity War," the heartbreak seemed to extend beyond the edges of the frame and into the real world.

The exceptionally fun 2017 film "Thor: Ragnarok," which immediately preceded "Infinity War," saw Loki forced to confront his past and make a decision regarding his future. The death of his father and the return of Hela (Cate Blanchett), the Goddess of Death and the sister neither Loki nor Thor knew existed, ultimately meant the end of life as he knew it. But rather than fleeing at the first chance like everyone assumed he would, Loki accepted his place in his family and returned to his brother's side after the destruction of Asgard. Of course, he also pocketed the Tesseract before the planet was destroyed, a seemingly innocuous decision that would unfortunately lead Thanos right to him. But learning to care about something more than his own immediate wants was a redeeming moment for Loki, as was his attempt to save Thor from Thanos, so his death was both an effectively heartbreaking moment that resonated with fans while serving as a harbinger of what was to come.

It also felt like closure, so when a past version of Loki popped up in "Avengers: Endgame" when Tony, Cap, and Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) traveled to 2012, it was a pleasant surprise. That the new series "Loki" follows this branched-reality version of the character and won't erase the character's original narrative arc is what makes the show such an intriguing new chapter. When the show premieres, Loki hasn't gone through any sort of character evolution. He is still the angry man who tried to force all of humanity to kneel before him in a desperate attempt to find his place in the world. He has yet to go through the events of his mother's death or the destruction of Asgard. He's a man out of time, a man without a home. And it's the chaotic, still-in-progress nature of Loki and the inability to guess what he might do when an organization like the Time Variance Authority, which is dedicated to order, tries to force him to do what they say that makes this new chapter so exciting.

Each episode of the show, which also stars Owen Wilson as Mobius M. Mobius and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Judge Ravonna Lexus Renslayer, will see the character travel through time and space on a mission to restore order to the timeline. But will this Loki follow the same path as the man we know and love? Or will this version make different choices without Thor by his side? More importantly, will he find what he's looking for?

Loki is a man driven by insecurity and an ongoing struggle with his identity, though he deftly covers up his deficiencies with a devious wit and charm. The constantly shifting logo in the show's trailer represents both the character's shapeshifting ability as much as the idea that he doesn't know where he belongs or who he is yet. And although the beats of such a character arc are hardly new territory for Hollywood — you could argue they've even been done to death at this point — the potential for greatness still exists as Loki remains pleasantly unpredictable. It means anything can happen, and with Hiddleston promising a show that is unlike anything Marvel has ever done, there's no reason to believe Loki the man and "Loki" the show won't continue to endure and evolve even beyond this first season. After all, he certainly has the staying power.

"Loki" premieres Wednesday, June 9 on Disney+.

[queenofwordsandnerds]

Quackity Analysis: “Hello My Old Heart”

Hello, my old heart How have you been? Are you still there inside my chest? I've been so worried, you've been so still Barely beating at all

Oh, don't leave me here alone Don't tell me that we've grown For having loved a little while Oh, I don't wanna be alone I wanna find a home And I wanna share it with you

Hello, my old heart It's been so long Since I've given you away And every day, I add another stone To the walls I built around you To keep you safe

Oh, don't leave me here alone Don't tell me that we've grown For having loved a little while Oh, I don't wanna be alone I wanna find a home And I wanna share it with you

Hello, my old heart How have you been? How is it being locked away? Don't you worry, in there you're safe And it's true, you'll never beat But you'll never break

Nothing lasts forever Some things aren't meant to be But you'll never find the answers Until you set your old heart free Until you set your old heart free

Hello, my old heart Hello, my old heart Hello, my old heart Hello, my old heart

-”Hello My Old Heart,” The Oh Hellos

When I listen to this song, one of my favorites (although all TOH music is SUPERB and y’all should go listen to their songs), c!Quackity immediately comes to mind. His character has a lot of heart associations, the most obvious one being that he ate Schlatt’s heart (and the theory that he is being possessed by Schlatt as a result). But c!Quackity has also been shown to keep his emotions at a safe distance, to value head over heart because the heart makes you weak. However, deep down I think that Quackity does value his emotions (Karl and Sapnap after all), he just doesn’t know how to acknowledge and/or honor them too much without getting hurt, a result of the trauma he retains from Schlatt.

“Are you still there inside my chest?”

Running off the theory that Schlatt is possessing Quackity through his heart, this line is very poignant. I imagine the real c!Quackity, uncorrupted by Schlatt, terrified, deep down, that he is losing himself and his humanity. His “old heart” may not even exist anymore. Or maybe it does. Who knows?

“Oh, don't leave me here alone Don't tell me that we've grown For having loved a little while”

c!Quackity is very much alone. He has his allies and enemies, of course, but in terms of intimate, emotional relationships he is both scarred and reluctant to keep those he loves closer than a safe distance. He is emotionally alone. Quackity distances himself from those he loves to keep them safe, but also (I think) because he’s scared of opening himself up and uncovering old wounds. Yet I believe that, deep down, he cries out to not be alone, to connect with others and heal from all the pain he has both suffered and inflicted on others. Quackity is also a realist, he doesn’t want platitudes or cliches. He doesn’t take others’ bullshit, he will do anything to achieve his own goals.

“Oh, I don't wanna be alone I wanna find a home And I wanna share it with you”

The search to find a home is one of the most key features of Quackity’s character. All his life in the SMP lore, he has searched for a home, for a place to belong and make his own. First it was (L’)Manberg, then Pogtopia, then New L’Manberg, then Mexican L’Manberg/El Rapids, Las Nevadas...you get the point. Looking for a home/building a home is one of c!Quackity’s core characteristics. And he wants to share his home with people. He dreams of Las Nevadas as a place to show Karl and Sapnap, he felt like he didn’t belong in Manberg for (among many other reasons) lack of any personal connection or sense of worth.

“And every day, I add another stone To the walls I built around you To keep you safe”

 c!Quackity is paradoxically alone. Aloneness is part of his cunning plan to achieve his goals, and the ends justify the means for him no matter what. Yet he doesn’t want to be alone. He wants a place and people to belong. But he’s afraid of getting hurt again like he was with Schlatt. So he builds walls around his heart just as he builds his countries and his plans. Self-preservation is very high on his priority list. Yet these walls may cost him - in fact, they may have cost him already.

“And it's true, you'll never beat But you'll never break”

This line just breaks my own heart. It’s so poignant and sad yet reflects a deep human truth. We dehumanize ourselves, numb ourselves to emotional sensitivity believing that we will be safe this way, that we won’t suffer. This may be true, but we won’t be truly living. We will just be a shell of ourselves. This reminds me again of the Schlatt possession theory. Quackity may not even be his real self anymore, he could be driven by Schlatt’s spirit and not truly live as himself. This line could practically describe c!Quackity’s character to a T. I’ve already explained most of my reasons for why it reflects Quackity so well, but this line just sums it up in a beautiful, poetic way.

Some people think that Quackity’s heart is dead, physically (consumed by Schlatt) and emotionally (he seems to lack empathy and emotion as time passes). But I don’t think this is true. He is most definitely a morally grey character and/or an antihero. He keeps his softer side locked away out of necessity, but it is not dead. He still cares, he still has desires and I hope that (although Big Q may turn out to be the next big SMP “villain”) he learns to be soft again and gets his own redemption(?) arc, setting his own heart free.

I hope you liked this Quackity analysis! Thank you so much for reading if you made it this far, and please go check out The Oh Hellos, they are one of the best folk bands I’ve ever heard with genius lyrics that could fill a whole poetry book. I will definitely be using their songs in more DSMP analyses. I’m also super sorry if this sucked, Quackity is both my favorite DSMP character and my favorite streamer so I LOVE to analyze his character because he’s so beautifully complex but I’m so terrified of messing it up and not doing him justice lol

-Hamster <3

[aion-rsa]

Venom: Let There Be Carnage – The Comics History of the Symbiote Rivalry

https://ift.tt/3APMTrk

Something that impresses me with a superhero movie like Venom is when it doesn’t rush directly into the expected villain. When there are four different Fantastic Four movies, and they’re all about emphasizing Dr. Doom, it’s a breath of fresh air when, say, Man of Steel only makes an Easter egg reference to Lex Luthor instead of going directly for that confrontation. The MCU Spider-Man has yet to meet an Osborn, guys like Thanos and Darkseid started out as ominous benefactors, and the existence of Heath Ledger Joker was merely a cliffhanger tease in Batman Begins.

Much like how the Justice League movie decided to take its time by giving us Steppenwolf of all people, the first Venom movie had Carlton Drake (who hasn’t appeared in the comics since the early 9’0s) and Riot (the most forgettable of all of Venom’s comic children). By letting Venom build himself up on his own, flanked by some rather mundane villains, it gave more meaning to Cletus Kasady showing up in the post-credits. Carnage, Venom’s main villain, gets more fanfare by appearing in the sequel where our hero is fully formed.

Since Carnage’s first appearance in 1992, the idea has always been to make a darker, scarier Venom. Venom was a villain at the time, sure, but he was also on the border of becoming more. Outside of his personal delusions and anger issues, he still claimed that he wanted to help the innocent and punish the guilty. Even when he was able to accept that Spider-Man was good, they couldn’t co-exist due to their different natures as vigilantes. Carnage was simpler because he was full-on evil and had no potential for redemption. He was something so sinister and malevolent that both Spider-Man and Venom knew it was worth it to put aside their differences and take this creep down.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage has hyped Carnage up as being out of Venom’s league and that was the initial push of the character. Over time, the two became roughly equals as Carnage became the go-to bad guy for Venom to punch.

So let’s take a look at the history of Venom vs. Carnage. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to define “Venom” and “Carnage” as characters wearing their respective symbiotes (excluding Peter Parker), or the symbiotes themselves. I’m not going to count Eddie Brock as Toxin, or Flash Thompson as Agent Anti-Venom or whatever.

Carnage’s Debut

Not counting cameos and build-up, Carnage’s first major appearance was in Amazing Spider-Man #361, starting off a three-parter. Spider-Man came to realize that he wasn’t enough to stop Carnage and he was going to need help. Specifically, he was going to need Venom. This was an awkward decision as Venom was at the time living his best life on an empty island, thinking that he had succeeded in killing Spider-Man.

Once Venom fully understood the situation, he accepted the temporary alliance. In the very first Venom vs. Carnage confrontation, Venom and Spider-Man tackled Carnage, got slammed into each other, then thrown into opposite walls. Carnage then caused a distraction by putting a baby in danger so he could escape. While he was dominant in that very brief scuffle, he still needed to run off, so I’m calling this a draw.

The handicap match continued into the last issue of the arc at a rock concert. In one-on-one exchanges, Carnage had Venom’s number, but Spider-Man was always there for the save. Spider-Man was able to use the sonics from the amplifiers to take out both of them. Technically a draw again, but it’s also a situation where Carnage regularly kicked the shit out of Venom and Venom only survived because he had help.

Maxium Carnage

Insert your Green Jelly cassettes and press play because it’s time for Carnage’s big ’90s crossover story. After the previous story’s popularity, Marvel decided to add more heroes, more villains, and make the whole thing a whopping 14 issues!

As Venom was a San Francisco vigilante at the time, he flew to New York to stop Carnage’s reign of terror. The first fight wasn’t even shown, as after the reveal that Carnage had Shriek and Doppelganger on his side, it cut away. A brutalized Venom was later found passing out while knocking on Peter and MJ’s door.

As Maximum Carnage was filled with so much filler and extra characters, there were various fight scenes of a group of heroes brawling with a group of villains. Venom and Carnage talked smack a lot, but nothing much ever really happened in terms of fighting. The story finally kicked into gear when Venom used a stolen sonic gun and blasted Carnage while Firestar assisted with her microwave blasts. This would have done the job, but Spider-Man got in the way and Shriek simply cut Cletus’ face open, causing his symbiote to respawn and bring him back to 100 percent health. Carnage and Shriek overwhelmed Venom and carried him off, along with the sonic gun.

Venom spent several issues being tortured until coming up with the plan to sneak some of the symbiote into the sonic gun so that Carnage would splatter Venom with more Venom. He punched Carnage down and escaped with gusto, hiding the fact that he was in no condition to fight.

It isn’t until the last issue that we FINALLY got a real Venom vs. Carnage fight. Venom was physically busted a bit, but Carnage was mentally busted. The heroes hit him with some MaGuffin device that caused him to be haunted by those who screwed him up in life. Venom pretty much just kicked Carnage’s ass around the city while Carnage tried in vain to escape. Every now and then, Spider-Man would appear and go, “B-b-but Eddie! Killing is wrong!” for the sake of giving Carnage a second wind.

Eventually, Venom punched Carnage so hard that Carnage’s brain ghosts went away. Knowing Carnage was more of a threat this way, Venom tackled him into a transformer. After the explosion, Cletus was knocked out and Venom got to weakly sneak away. Hey, good for him!

Venom: Carnage Unleashed

Venom was so popular that we got Carnage. Carnage’s initial storyline was so popular that we got Maximum Carnage. Maximum Carnage was so popular that we got a Maximum Carnage video game. Then we got Venom: Carnage Unleashed, a comic based on the popularity of the Maximum Carnage video game. It…wasn’t all too popular.

Still, it did give us the rarely used plot device that symbiotes can travel through phone lines and the internet! Symbiotes really are like pre-Crisis Superman where you can give them whatever power and people will just go with it no matter how ridiculous. As Carnage escaped from Ravencroft and commandeered a security tank, Venom eventually caught up with him and they had a fight on a runaway vehicle through traffic. Carnage eventually won when Venom got slammed by an oncoming train.

Their final battle here is a big pile of “That’s not how any of this works!” The two characters send symbiote tendrils into the internet, which were rendered on the Times Square big screen as the two brawled in cyberspace. Venom destroyed a nearby heatsink, which blasted both and knocked them out of the internet.

Carnage was ready for another go, but his kidnapped psychiatrist set him on fire and caused him to fall out a window. Venom reached through the phone lines and out the window to catch the falling Cletus because dying is WHAT HE WANTS. Which… no, that’s not true at all. Hell, even in Maximum Carnage, Cletus was freaked out about the possibility of dying.

Venom: On Trial

So there was a big Spider-Man/Scarlet Spider/Venom team-up called Planet of the Symbiotes that culminated in a 40-foot-tall Carnage, but there was never a specific Venom vs. Carnage moment, so I won’t go into it. Venom’s ’90s antihero run did have a storyline where Eddie was arrested and put on trial for all of his many crimes. Cletus Kasady was brought in as a star witness, which was an invitation for him to freak out and go on a killing rampage. I mean, seriously, guys. Come on. You should know better.

This story went all-in on Venom wrecking Carnage. Again, Spider-Man would interrupt and give Carnage a chance to turn things around. This time though, Venom decided to ride the wave by sneaking away while Spider-Man and Daredevil took on Carnage. Realizing that the two didn’t have a chance, Venom picked up a couple syringes filled with dopamine blocker and sprung into action. He smacked Carnage around, injected the blocker into his neck, and watched as the symbiote retracted into Cletus’ body.

Venom Triumphant

Howard Mackie wrote Spider-Man comics for a long while and he had an annoying tendency when it came to storytelling. He would come up with an interesting, if nonsensical, idea that would shake up the status quo, but instead of following up on that and using it to tell an actual story, he would just forget about it and move to the next idea that popped into his head. He was one of the main reasons why the Spider-Man Clone Saga was such a mess.

In the 10th issue of Peter Parker, Spider-Man, Venom broke into the prison where Carnage was being held. Despite the legion of heavily armed guards with flamethrowers and sonic guns, Venom killed them all so quickly that the artist didn’t even show it. Cletus, for some reason, figured Venom was trying to break him out of prison, but instead Venom was there to absorb the Carnage symbiote. Carnage barely put up a fight. Pieces of the symbiote were on him, but he didn’t fully transform or try to defend himself. Venom simply pulled the symbiote off of him and ate it, becoming stronger.

After this issue, there was barely any follow-up to this.

Venom vs. Carnage

This miniseries came out at a really weird time for those involved. Carnage was just a couple months away from being torn in half by the Sentry and being written out of comics for years. Venom was appearing in Marvel Knights Spider-Man where Eddie Brock got rid of the symbiote and it bounced around to different hosts until landing on Mac Gargan. Meanwhile there was a Venom ongoing that was more about a symbiote clone where Eddie Brock only appeared for a couple late issues.

In other words, in the Venom vs. Carnage miniseries by Peter Milligan and Clayton Crain, even the creative team had no idea who Venom’s host was supposed to be. Luckily, the story wasn’t about Venom or Carnage, but a new character who would quickly fall into obscurity anyway.

Venom and Carnage swung around New York City, giving the exposition. The Carnage symbiote was pregnant and Venom was explaining that there was nothing to do to stop the creature from going into labor. Venom was all about protecting the new spawn while Carnage wanted to destroy it, immediately. Carnage got the better of Venom by flinging him into the distance. Regardless, the explosive birth wore out Carnage so much that he could only plant the baby onto a nearby cop and escape to rest up.

When the two had a rematch, Venom was there to save the baby symbiote (Toxin) and its host (Pat Mulligan). As if getting revenge for that Carnage Unleashed story, Venom brought the fight to the subway and pushed Carnage into an oncoming train.

And… that’s really all the Venom vs. Carnage we get in Venom vs. Carnage! Once Venom sees that Toxin is a good guy and capable of kicking Carnage’s ass, he gets afraid of Toxin befriending Spider-Man and decides to team up with Carnage for once.

Carnage, USA

Carnage returned from his maiming at the hands of the Sentry, albeit without a bottom half. By then, a lot had happened with Venom. The symbiote was removed from Mac Gargan and joined with war hero Flash Thompson. Agent Venom went on to join the Secret Avengers.

Carnage, USA told the story of Cletus expanding his symbiote to overtake an entire town in the middle of nowhere. When various heroes went to oppose him, the Carnage symbiote ended up taking over Captain America, Wolverine, Hawkeye, and the Thing. When gaining a moment of clarity, Cap called in Agent Venom for help.

Read more

Movies

Venom 2 Trailer Breakdown – All the Marvel and Carnage References

By Gavin Jasper

Comics

Venom: Who is Carnage?

By Gavin Jasper

In their first meeting, Agent Venom easily took down Carnage with some explosive projectiles that came with sonic shrapnel. Then when getting ready for the kill – say it with me everyone – Spider-Man got in his face and went, “No! Don’t kill!” Carnage recovered, and overwhelmed Venom with his army of Carnage’d heroes. Then another obscure symbiote hero, Scorn, popped in to run Venom and Carnage over with a bulldozer and bring them into a facility that would blast their symbiotes off the hosts.

While Cletus and Flash had a fight based around the novelty that both were legless, the Venom symbiote latched onto a gorilla and ran for its life against an entire zoo full of animals with the Carnage symbiote. After almost being taken down by a Carnage lion (Spider-Man with the save), the gorilla returned to Flash and gave him the power to bring Cletus into custody.

As for the town-wide Carnage symbiote, most of it was taken out by an airstrike.

Minimum Carnage

Following up on Agent Venom, he had his own team-up arc with Scarlet Spider (Kaine) with the fun dynamic of a Venom who doesn’t want to kill and a Spider-Man who does. The two chased Carnage into the Microverse, where Carnage was able to create an army of symbiote clones. While Agent Venom was able to decapitate Carnage, the villain had attained some level of power where his body is more overall fluid and animated. In this case, Carnage could just reattach his head with no problem.

Although Flash had sedated his own symbiote and lacked the monstrous advantage, he was able to wipe out a bunch of the clones by amplifying his own inner sorrow outward through the Venom symbiote. Strangely, that’s not the first time Venom was able to do that. What’s left of Carnage slinked away, cackling.

Carnage and the clones returned to Earth and Voltron’d themselves into a giant Carnage. As Carnage tried to devour Agent Venom, Venom shoved a sonic grenade down Carnage’s throat and let the blast do the rest, taking out the enlarged Carnage symbiote almost completely. In the aftermath, Scarlet Spider jabbed one of his claws through Cletus’ eye and lobotomized him.

Venomverse

Venomverse is about a series of Venom hosts from different realities coming together to fight beings called Poisons. Under normal circumstances, Poisons are harmless. If one of them makes physical contact with a symbiote and its host, it transforms them into a nigh-unbeatable crystal-like creature with the Poison in control. By this point, Eddie Brock was Venom again and joined with all sorts of random symbiote heroes to the point that he came off as just a regular dude.

With their back against the wall, Eddie came up with an idea. They brought in Carnage from an alternate universe as a ringer. At first, Carnage fought against the Venoms, but they were reluctant to fight back. Once he saw the Poisons and understood that the Venoms wanted him to kill an army of twisted superheroes, he gladly joined their ranks. He just let them know that once he was done with the Poisons, he’d kill them next.

He ended up being a huge help, especially since the Poisons had a hard time bonding to the Carnage symbiote. Carnage died in an explosion fighting Poisons alongside Poison Deadpool (who was able to bypass his Poison’s mental control).

There was a sequel to this called Venomized where the Poisons returned and tried to invade Earth. They kidnapped Cletus, forced him to bond to an alternate universe Venom, and then bonded that to a Poison. While he was referred to as “Carnage” at times, the Carnage symbiote was never involved, so I’m going to skip this one.

But where was the Carnage symbiote during all of this?

The Red Goblin

At one point, Norman Osborn became the host for Carnage to give us a climactic villain to finish off Dan Slott’s lengthy run on Amazing Spider-Man. Knowing that Spider-Man was out of his league, J. Jonah Jameson decided to fight fire with fire by calling up Eddie Brock and blackmailing him into aiding Spider-Man. This led to a brief fight of Spider-Man, Venom, and repulsor-wielding Mary Jane against the Red Goblin.

Venom and Red Goblin brawled for a bit, but Red Goblin appeared to be immune to the usual symbiote weaknesses, so only Venom took damage. While he got some hits in, Eddie was too exhausted to continue. Instead he offered the symbiote to Spider-Man to give him the extra boost. This brief team-up allowed the two vigilante enemies to finally bury their lengthy rivalry.

Absolute Carnage

Now we get to Donny Cates’ bonkers run on Venom. Cletus had been resurrected and turned back into Carnage via a bunch of cultists who worshipped Knull, God of Symbiotes. Carnage then started going around eating the spines of those who were once host to a symbiote, getting stronger by the meal. Dark Carnage first fought Venom in a subway and easily overpowered him. Still, Venom got the win by grabbing onto the third rail while holding onto Dark Carnage. It was enough to knock Carnage loopy while Venom could get away and seek out help.

Venom and Spider-Man sought out Norman Osborn (who believed himself to be Cletus Kasady after the Red Goblin episode) and were ambushed by an army of inmates possessed by Carnage symbiotes. Overwhelmed, the two heroes broke through a wall and swung off into the night.

Venom got involved in another big fight against an army of Carnages and could have killed Osborn, but instead chose to save a wounded Mac Gargan nearby and brought him to safety. The Venom symbiote wasn’t happy with this and later left Eddie for Bruce Banner, giving us a fight between Venom Hulk and Dark Carnage. This turned out to be a dire choice, as Dark Carnage tore into Hulk’s brain, caused him to shrink back to Banner, then ate his spine. Carnage was stronger than ever.

Meanwhile, mad scientist the Maker had a machine that took the “symbiote codex” stuff Carnage was looking for out of former hosts without the nasty “tearing out their spinal column” part. Eddie unleashed the codex collection onto himself, turning him into a more powerful version of Venom. As he took on Cletus one last time, Carnage made note that Venom was screwed no matter what. Either Carnage killed and ate Eddie’s son Dylan or Eddie killed Carnage, which would wake up Knull and drive him to Earth.

Venom summoned the Necrosword to cut through Carnage, destroying him once and for all. For a time, at least.

Prelude to Knull

Wouldn’t you know it, killing Dark Carnage caused Eddie to absorb the Carnage symbiote into himself. Soon he was separated from Venom and stuck on an island while being bonded against his will to the Carnage symbiote. Dylan was able to remotely control the Venom symbiote and transformed it into a giant Venom T-rex. Like it wasn’t even bonding onto a dinosaur or anything. It was just the size and shape of a tyrannosaurus just because.

Eddie and Dylan had a dreamlike meeting in their minds while Carnage Eddie chopped down at the Venom dino. Eventually, the power of familial love was enough to overpower the Carnage symbiote and blow it up. Eddie rejoined with the Venom symbiote, and a little piece of Carnage latched onto a nearby shark to swim off and fight another day.

Okay, then! Phew! Going by every Venom vs. Carnage fight, I’ve judged them so that there have been six draws, eight victories for Carnage, and nine victories for Venom.

Congratulations, black ooze. Here’s hoping your red offspring doesn’t turn the tide at the box office.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage will be released in theaters on Oct. 1.

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The post Venom: Let There Be Carnage – The Comics History of the Symbiote Rivalry appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[jcmorrigan]

NINE FAVORITE TELEVISION SHOWS IN POSTERS

Got tagged by @gavillain​ again for favorite shows in posters, and this one, the challenge was narrowing them down. I can’t even name HMs because there are too fucking many but anyway, here’s a rundown

1. I think RWBY is my biggest consistent favorite. It grabbed my attention right away upon debut and is only growing stronger and stronger. Listen, if I don’t just throw a bitch tantrum and stop liking something the moment it kills off my favorite villain, you KNOW it’s good stuff, and my boi was dead five volumes ago. Anyway, if you’ll pardon me, I have to go sob in the corner over Qrow and Clover for another thirty minutes, THEY DESERVED SO MUCH BETTERRRRRRR

2. Big Hero 6 is the only other long-running current show that I can really say I’ve committed to whole hog. It’s EXACTLY my brand, which is weird in this day and age. It seems like as things shuffle the idea of “villain of the week” to the back, this is the one series that’s just like “No, let’s give our plucky heroes development by pitting them against a rotating deck of familiar foes.” But really, I can’t just say this without explaining that it feels like a revival of...

3. The more I go on, the more I realize that even if I don’t talk about it, Kim Possible changed me as a human being. My early relationship with villains was...weird. Too long of a story for here. But KP offered me a constant plate of fun baddies I could enjoy without strings. You can tell by now I’m also one for wacky comedy and bold young heroes learning about themselves as they save the world, and those can both be traced right back here.

4. The Huntsman put his blade to my throat and demanded I include American Dragon: Jake Long here. But no, as a young mythology buff, I was captivated by this show’s wide catalog of multicultural magical creatures and creative ways to implement fantasy elements and high stakes into yet another high school coming-of-age comedy.

5. Okay I’m CHEATING because Epithet Erased isn’t technically a show-show but I wanted to include it. Despite certain DRAMA I’VE HAD in this fandom (only ask if you REALLY want to know), I keep coming back to this cast and wanting to declare them all my children. Let Giovanni adopt Molly 2k21. Let Mera have a prison break 2k21. Let me marry Giovanni 2krightfuckingnow. Also this is the kind of off-the-wall humor that I can’t even deal with (”Please, call me Indus. Mr. Barrier is my Epithet!”).

6. BUT IF YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIPS - My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic took a huge dive after S4, and as for the fanbase...uh...we’ll just...we’ll just leave that one alone because it’s way too much to unpack. But even if I did go through several years’ worth of feeling sour on Discord because of That Redemption Arc, he still remains one of my ultimate favorite villains. The girls are a road map for how I want my perfect hero team. And the entire setting is just filled with so much magic and color.

7. Storm Hawks might be one of the fastest binges I’ve ever done in my life because I had to have more. This turned out to be a mistake because the ep “Payback” was extremely triggering and never fucking got followed up on and I just blazed through without processing, but I’ve since made my peace with it. It’s got more unconventional fantasy/sci-fi worldbuilding, and though every stock trope you can imagine is here, that’s what makes it a good comfort series. Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you just need to see the bumbling comedic egomaniac learn humility in a series of madcap shenanigans with pirates. Also: STORK, MY DUDES

8. Mozenrath. Mozenrath, Mozenrath. Mozenrath Mozenrath Mozenrath; Mozenrath. Ayam Aghoul.

9. I intentionally put Gotham last because I wanted you all to read through eight posters of brightly-colored animated series and then crash into it. But the thing is, and I wanna do a longer meta post on this someday, even though Gotham has a noir aesthetic and heavy subject matter, it’s a series for adults that doesn’t forget what we loved about superhero shows as kids. Flamboyant villains of the week, heroes who really try their best, a dash of zany character-driven humor, relationships filled with heart, epic villain team-ups, over-the-top climaxes. Even though this series had its weak points, such as the Galavan arc and all the stuff surrounding Ra’s (though that latter one is more of a matter of opinion), I feel like it ended so strong that it stands out almost as a perfect series to me. In a world where our favorite long-running series just seem to refuse to resolve in a satisfying manner, THIS IS THE ONE that ties up all the plots in the end - the will-they-or-won’t-they straight couple ties the knot, the gay villains go as gay as they can possibly be under contract and FINALLY make peace with each other, the character I thought was absolutely the weakest in S1 managed to loop from sucky hero to badass villain to sassy antihero, you get ONE OF *THOSE* ENDINGS WHERE THE MAIN HEROES AND MAIN VILLAINS TEAM UP TO HOLD THE LINE AGAINST A BIGGER THREAT, I just - I’m not over it and I won’t be. Though the fact that not a single S4 poster I found had the entire J-Squad on it? BOO, YOU WHORES

Tagging no one. Do if you want

[onceuponmystory]

write 10 faves from 10 fandoms and tag 10 people

Oh, man, difficult, much! There are far too many fantastic fandoms. Thanks for tagging me, though, @serendipity336.

1. Daisy Johnson from Agents of SHIELD. I’m in a SHIELD mood lately what with the AoS 30-Day Challenge going around, but man, Daisy has to be one of my absolute favourite characters ever. Stunning, hilarious and badass, there’s not many good adjectives that can’t be attributed to Daisy.

2. Regina Mills from Once Upon A Time. One of the most complex characters on pretty much any TV show, and also one with an almost unparalleled redemption arc, Regina just HAS to make this list. 

3. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter. Yes, cliché, I know, but damn I just really love Hermione’s character. She shows over and over again that you don’t have to be male to be the smartest in, well, pretty much anything, and that’s a lesson that I honestly feel couldn’t be repeated enough.

4. Leia Organa from Star Wars. Does anyone notice a trend here with strong female characters? Well, I have a type, and I’m happy to say it started with Princess Leia. Gorgeous, smart, sassy and badass - honestly, what’s not to love?

5. Artemis Fowl from Artemis Fowl. The only male character to make this list (sorry, guys) Artemis Fowl is fully deserving of this position. Artemis is one of the most complex characters in pretty much any book series, and his journey from villain to antihero to full-on hero was nothing short of remarkable.

6. Annabeth Chase from Percy Jackson. Nothing says “smart” more than “daughter of Athena,” and Annabeth has proved her worth as a heroine and as a genius countless times over.

7. Yelena Zaltana from the Study Series. This series is more unknown as books go, but you really should go read it. It’s complicated and brilliant, with a great cast of characters and a really nice central romance. Yelena, its protagonist, is an interesting and not-always-black-or-white character, and her journey was nothing short of amazing to read. 

8. Cinder Linh-Blackburn from The Lunar Chronicles. Another really excellent book series is The Lunar Chronicles, with a starring cast of reimagined fairy tale characters. Cinder, a Lunar cyborg princess, is a genius mechanic as well as a generally awesome character, and the best reimagined Cinderella you could hope for.

9. Rayla from The Dragon Prince. For a show initially aimed at kids, The Dragon Prince has some damn good storytelling and a really excellent cast of characters. Rayla, a Moonshadow Elf, is a great character because of how her fears are actually represented, but she is badass despite them. 

10. Natasha Romanoff from The Avengers. Technically, I’ve already done a character from the MCU, but I’m choosing to differentiate between the Agents of SHIELD fandom and the Avengers fandom, because I just had to have Nat on this list. Not only is she absolutely awesome, she also has a dark past which she actively works to improve on, which really makes her an inspiration. 

If you couldn’t tell, my thing is strong female characters, the more complex the better. There are countless more of them I haven’t got on this list, and that doesn’t mean I admire them any less - it’s just that listing all my favourite characters from all my favourite fandoms would create a post far longer than anyone would ever read. Ah, well. Fandom life.

Right, I’m tagging @eleonoremerde, @clementinewhy, @naturaldaisaster, @sunalsolove, @fairychamber, @matrixaffiliate, @flowerforyourthought, @sciendere, @petals-to-fish and @gryffindormischief.

[starkidlabs]

Loki vs Kylo redemption arcs

A lot of this is just me try a figure out how I love Loki (well mainly Loki post avengers) whilst hating kylo despite them always being compared as similar. My analysis might be bad but oh well.

I always love a good ‘villain’ redemption arc. Loki redeems himself of his own accord. He redeems himself for ultimately selfish reasons and that’s what people expect of him. Most characters still hate him or don’t trust him. He isn’t put in a relationship because he would likely be manipulative in said relationship. But ultimately he redeems himself because he regains the love of a single person in Thor, it’s familial love, it’s the thing that was there at the beginning and went away because of Loki’s evil deeds. Loki redeemed himself by acting on the right side on 3 separate occasions ultimately sacrificing himself, this was indeed not at the expense of the person he was redeeming himself to, in fact Thor didn’t have to suffer to get Loki to redeem himself. Yes there were the initial fights in which Thor tried to save Loki but they didn’t work but when Loki’s redemption began Thor didn’t have to suffer for it. Thor didn’t lose any of his own character arc. Thor didn’t forget what Loki did but ultimately Loki redeems himself because Thor sees him as a brother again and remembers their relationship before his evil route occurred. Also Loki is still portrayed as an asshole throughout he simply just no longer a villain.

What I hate are bad villain redemption arcs. Kylo redeems himself in private, we don’t get to see the reactions from a single person he has hurt in the past except for the one he is redeeming himself to. There is no scene in the movie in which the viewer is reminded about how awful he has treated any character but Rey (ie there is no scenes like when Valkyrie or Hulk express their hatred of Loki). Instead his torturous actions to Rey and her friends are never really mentioned at all. Kylo like Loki only redeems himself to one person but unlike Loki it is rushed within the last 30 minutes of the film, he only needs to fight with Rey once and he is completely redeemed. With his redemption there is no communication with those he’s hurt there is never a point where Rey notes that he has changed for the better instead he sacrifices himself and he dies, his only true lack of remorse is shown to a memory never to anyone he’s actually hurt. (Although it isn’t perhaps explicit Loki has remorse there are subtle enough moments with Thor that shows his regret for at least betraying him) Also it makes no sense for Rey to be so forgiving just because they fought alongside once. Unlike Thor and Loki Rey only ever knew kylo as a villain she hadn’t had decades by his side as friends, she has only ever known him as a space fascist, yes they have a force connection but surely that shouldn’t mean that there is an assurance that he shouldn’t be like this, like one would have if a family member betrayed them. Rey has no certainty that Kylo would’ve truly changed because there was basically no communication to show this and also Rey barely knew him. Kylo is also given a love interest because there is a failure to recognise that even if he could redeem himself he would still maintain these manipulative qualities which should never be in a relationship. Not only that but for kylo to redeem himself 2 people had to sacrifice themselves and another’s life had to centre around saving him. It may have taken loki losing his mother like kylo to realise he was a shitbag but Loki’s mother did not sacrifice herself for him to be redeemed whereas Kylos mother’s sacrificed herself for such purpose. Not only that but the person he redeemed himself to had to give up most of her growth to him because he would not redeem himself of his own initiative, yes Thor sacrificed some time to Loki’s redemption but ultimately it never effected his own arc, Rey basically had no arc of her own after the first movie. Also there was no mention of kylo after his redemption by any other characters because otherwise we should’ve realistically gotten Poe saying fuck that dude.

Basically Loki is redeemed under hours worth of film and simply only redeemed to one person who already had love for him before he went bad, and he’s basically seen as an asshole antihero at best, ie pretty bad still but won’t hurt any innocent people anymore Kylo is redeemed in half an hour after several sacrifices for his redemption, redeemed to someone who barely knows him and made out to be a hero deserving of the protagonists romantic love with no real justification for such thing

Also just saying Loki didn’t kill his actually abusive father and instead just bonked him on his head

[c-is-for-circinate]

inauspicious-augury replied to your post “Okay look I started my Farscape rewatch last Saturday, and now it is...”

Wait, what's the Roy Mustang effect?

Oh man, so, The Roy Mustang Effect (tm me just now), aka Why I Have So Many Goddamn Feels About Late-Series John Crichton, aka Where In Fiction Is More Of This Plotline Please

is what happens when a reasonably good person--not a saint! but a decent person, someone who loves the specific people they consider their own and also would generally choose to protect life in general, given the opportunity, more or less--finds themselves in the middle of a situation with a great deal of chaos and violence on all sides, with so many institutions and structures supporting it that no one evil person’s death could stop it.  And this decent person just so happens to possess immense, intense destructive power. 

It’s a twist on a ‘hero does terrible things for the Greater Good’ narrative, basically, where there are zero good choices available.  The hero can’t do nothing, because the situation they’re in is too terrible to allow it, and probably would kill the hero anyway.  But anything the hero does choose to do will also kill, and kill, and kill, and maybe the people who die are evil and maybe they’re just doing what they have to and maybe they’re civilians caught in the crossfire and maybe they’re children, because that’s how this power works.

I personally am really into this specific plotline when it gives us a hero (”hero”) who, having done unforgivable things, does not actually seek or think themselves worthy of forgiveness.  There’s a sort of stark practicality to it that I really appreciate: ‘if there is a hell, I know I’m already damned, and that’s a fact I can do nothing about, but I’ve already seen hell here in life--so I’ll make whatever choices I can to give the future something better and bear up under the weight of what I’ve done as best I can’.  I’m not a fan of most redemption arcs, which contain this presupposition that evil acts can be made up for, or somehow cancelled out, but I am really into a story that asks the question, ‘okay, the unthinkable has occurred and the moral event horizon can never be re-crossed--so what now?’  And there’s a twisted, compelling element of heroic sacrifice in there, too: a hero who sacrifices their own soul, their ability to look at themselves in the mirror and sleep without guilt or nightmares, which makes them a hero even as their actions disqualify them from the title.

I haven’t seen this story very much!  (It’s part of why FMA hit such a oh, shit, THIS note with me when I finally first watched it last summer.)  So much more often, we see superhero stories, literally or figuratively--a hero with a great power is thrown in the middle of a muddled mess, and if they figure out the right people to hit they can Make A Difference, and collateral damage is a function of human mistakes and bad luck rather than desperation.  Or you get the hero who used to be a bad guy until they escaped their masters, whose ever evil was only ever a weapon in somebody else’s hand--or until they saw the error of their ways and defected, and always thought they were doing the right thing.

And you see plenty of villains and antiheroes and sometimes even bullheaded main characters who play ‘the end justifies the means’ games with other peoples’ lives, but the general narrative convention is either, that choice was Wrong and this character was Wrong to make it; or, that is a sad regretful price of this situation, a necessary weight to carry, and we’ll move on anyway.  And this isn’t quite that.  This is a story where there is no balance, there is no justification, no Good Choice and Bad Choice.  There’s a sea of bad choices, and all of them end in death, and in some of them, you might survive.  Not to make up for what you’ve done, but to protect other people from more of the same in the future.

It’s Roy Mustang in the desert with a lighter in one hand, and it’s John Crichton wearing a nuclear bomb in a field of flowers.  It’s a really compelling story and I want more of it.

[starklore]

I actually used to buy into the whole “Zuko is the only well-written redemption arc” thing, like I was never an anti as such, but before it was as widespread as it was I would still see the concept floating around and be like “yeah,” and thinking back, the process I went through as a villain fucker looked like this:

-2007, ATLA is airing, I’m in middle school and I’m obsessed and I like zuko. Didn’t care that much about him in s1, then he cut his hair off and I was like “okay, yeah, I feel it.” Sexual awakening happens. I start writing a lot of Zuko/OC fanfiction that is now unfortunately lost to time.

Zuko serves as a gateway drug for hot villains & antiheroes that follows me through my fandom journey. (I was also super gay for Ty Lee, i just didn’t know it yet. This is not relevant.)

-2012, around the time villain wank is starting to spring up due to Loki’s popularity, I realize then that I’m supposed to be ashamed of wanting to get railed by sad murderboys cause it’s cringey (I miss when people didn’t try to label it as “problematic” and just admitted they find it personally annoying.)

I quickly try rebrand myself to myself and others as a Good Villain Fan who never excuses their actions and doesn’t want redemption, I just think they are interesting!!! And sure, the actor is handsome but that doesn’t change the character’s actions ladies!! Remember your fake crushes need to be pure organic home-grown grass fed free range no GMO or else!!  

Except that my love for Zuko, a character who fits that exact archetype only with toned down fictional crimes cause he’s on a kid’s show, is too deeply embedded for me to abandon.

So now I have to retroactively justify why it’s okay to stan him and not Loki and the other murderboys, and luckily some brave bloggers on tunglr dot hell have already done the work for me by declaring that his redemption arc was the Best Ever and your fave will never compare. Great! Glad we got that sorted out.

I proceed to thirst only after the most pure of heart characters. I still think Loki is mad sexy but I pretend I don’t and I only like him for the most sophisticated literary reasons. Secretly I yearn to thirst after fake bad boys. I pray that someday a new murderboy will appear who will have such a good redemption arc that he will be acceptable stan material.

-January 2016, the new Star Wars just came out. I’m already starting to get sick of this bullshit and the Kylo Ren w4nk is the last straw. I don’t even think he’s hot at first, I genuinely just think he’s interesting and I relate to him, but now even that is too impure.

You have to preface every post with an acknowledgement that killing people is Bad Actually and you KNOW this and definitely do NOT want him to have a half-assed redemption arc. If you want him to have a long painful well-written redemption arc full of suffering (just like Zuko’s incidentally, only not as good because it never can be) then you can stay, but you’re on thin fucking ice.

But ideally you only like him as an intellectual exercise in like, the MRA psyche or whatever. You definitely can’t ship him with Rey or find him attractive cause then you’re woobifying him because you think he’s hot and ignoring the MoC in the cast. (Insert the “I have three holes” tweet).

That’s when I call bullshit on the whole thing, there was never an acceptable level of villain stanning, the game was rigged from the beginning and there’s no winning it. It was never about making sure fake people get held accountable for fake crimes, it was always about controlling women’s sexual fantasies.

I start to follow a lot of reylo blogs and accidentally start shipping it. I make this shitpost. It becomes the bane of my existence that haunts me to this day.

2019: I don’t know anything about MCU!Mysterio except that he’s a villain and is played by Jake Gyllenhaal. I stan anyway cause his dumb costume is hot and villains are hot and I want him to rail me until I forget my own name and that’s literally the whole reason. It hurts literally no one and it makes me happy, so who cares? Not this bitch.

Anyways, my point here is that--like, I can’t speak for everyone, but I think probably a lot of people on here are still stuck in the 2012 phase here, where they actually really like villains but are scared to admit it because it’s considered neither cool nor woke (and let’s be real, the second is only valued as an extension of the first on this site) so they pretend they don’t.

And if any of those people are reading this, I would just like to tell them that it’s okay. You can like a bad guy because you think they’re hot, or you relate to them, or you think they’re interesting, or any combination of the above, or completely different reasons. They’re fictional characters. How you engage with them is not a performance for other fans, it’s for your own enjoyment. So enjoy them.

[thecraftgremlin]

The Big Project Venom Redemption Rundown Post

For a little while now, I’ve been vaguely talking about this big weird complicated fan... thing... project that I’ve been wanting to get started. This is that; Project Venom Redemption.

(What is project Venom Redemption? This project is a series of concept art pieces and storyboards exploring how a modern Spiderman cartoon might handle the character of Venom and their shift over the years from villain to antihero. The pieces are meant to represent a series-long arc of the hypothetical cartoon centered on the characters of Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote. The narrative draws inspiration from decades of comic, cartoon, and film depictions of the character as well as fan interpretations.)

It’s a bit of an unwieldy explanation, but it doesn’t really fit into any category of fan work I’m aware of.

Obviously I’m only just getting started on the artwork and boards, but this is a basic outline of the entire story arc:

- Classic Venom origin story episode(s). Spiderman gets a new suit, suit is an alien, Spiderman gets rid of alien, meanwhile Spiderman also leads to Eddie Brock being disgraced, alien’s angry, Eddie’s angry, they team up and make a big angry monster that wants to kill Spiderman, you know the drill.

- Villain!Venom antics. We see a progression between Eddie and the symbiote from two beings grudgingly working together for a common goal to a partnership.

- Day-in-the-life type episode with Eddie and the symbiote. Here we get a glimpse at what they get up to and talk about (mostly) separate from Spiderman and their revenge quest. We get to hear some backstory for the symbiote, mostly about how they were outcast by Klyntar society. We get a better sense that Eddie and the symbiote genuinely do like each other, and some foreshadowing to their building romantic feelings for each other. This is also the episode that introduces Eddie calling the symbiote Vee, which is for all intents and purposes their name for the rest of the series. Also, this is a Valentine’s Day episode. Because it fits the themes and also chocolate.

- Several fights where Venom seems conflicted over trying to kill Spiderman. Similar to Planet of the Symbiotes, Peter picks up on this and assumes that Eddie’s morals have kicked in and he’s having second thoughts. He starts to appeal to Eddie during these fights, trying to split them up. This eventually leads to…

- The break up. Venom gets close to actually killing Spiderman in a fight, but hesitates. They start having a full on Gollum-style argument with themselves, one side saying this is wrong and they need to stop, the other saying Spiderman deserves this. Peter tries again to encourage Eddie to fight the symbiote’s desires, but it seems to be making the situation worse. At the height of the argument, an unfamiliar voice in Venom shouts “LISTEN TO ME!” and Venom de-forms. Eddie lunges to attack Peter, but he’s bound to the ground by the symbiote. Peter realizes that it was never Eddie who was trying to protect him, it was Vee. Eddie and Vee argue more, then Vee unbonds from Eddie completely and leaves. At first Eddie tries to attack Peter, blaming him as he’s wont to do, but he soon collapses in despair over the loss.

- Vee and Peter-centric episode. Peter hears rumors of a “demon” living in the church where Eddie and Vee bonded, thinks that it may be the symbiote, and he turns out to be right. When he finds them, Peter demands to know why they were protecting him and why they left Eddie, but they don’t answer. He figures out that when unbonded, they can’t actually speak, and he tentatively lets them bond with him enough to talk. Vee explains that for their whole life, their hosts have treated them as an object at best and a slave at worst. Peter was the first host who treated them with kindness, so when he rejected them for what they were they wanted revenge just like Eddie. But as they fought with him and heard how he spoke about them, it became clear to Vee that he was never aware that they were sentient with any feelings to hurt. It made less and less sense to them to be angry at Peter, but Eddie still was. They hoped that they could change Eddie’s mind and keep Peter safe from him while they worked through it, but Eddie refused to listen and Vee had to leave. They apologize to Peter for everything they did to hurt him, but Peter apologizes right back. He’s sorry that he was another person to treat them like an object, and that he blamed them when they were trying to keep him safe from Eddie. Uncertain about where to go from here, Peter leaves Vee on their own as a tentative new friend.

- Peter and Eddie team up episode(s). While out doing his Spiderman thing, Peter stumbles on Eddie, who looks like absolute hell. He’s made a full 180 from blaming his mistakes on others to despairing self-pity. Peter doesn’t really know what to do with him in this state. Meanwhile a symbiote-related threat, let’s say Carnage, emerges in the city. Peter’s immediate instinct is to go to Vee for help, but they’ve left the church and he has no real way of finding them. The only other person with symbiote experience he can turn to is Eddie. It’s a huge effort getting him put of his spiral, but Eddie grudgingly agrees to help him. This eventually leads to a confrontation where Eddie and Peter are pretty badly beaten, on the verge of losing. At the last minute, Vee comes in and protects them. The three eliminate the threat together. When everything’s said and done, Vee starts to leave, but Eddie stops them. He literally falls to his knees and begs Vee to forgive him. He tells them that he knew what they were doing was wrong, but he was still so angry that he didn’t care. He knows he’s made so many mistakes, done so many awful things, but he doesn’t want revenge anymore. He doesn’t even want the power they give him. He just wants Vee. (There may or may not be a love confession in there somewhere.) They bond again with a kiss.

- Episode that starts out with Eddie brooding about everything he’s done wrong and how he has no purpose until Vee says “Screw that, let’s be heroes, like Spiderman!” We really get to see Vee’s romanticism about ideals like true love, heroism, and justice here. Eddie on the other hand is more cynical, still in self-pity mode and unable to believe that a screw-up like him could ever do good in the world after everything he’s done. Eddie and Vee try and fail to emulate Spiderman’s “friendly neighborhood hero” style. In the end, Eddie tells Vee that they can’t be a hero like Spiderman, they have to be a hero like Venom.

- Episode where Eddie reconciles with Peter and they become Spider-Allies for real. This is where we really get to see Eddie and Vee trying to build a new life together, transitioning to a more stable, healthy existence with positive relationships with others.

Some other tidbits about the arc:

-Some themes of Eddie’s character arc are personal responsibility and later taking responsibility versus self pity, overcoming toxic masculinity, and rejecting societal “normality” for happiness.

-Some themes of Vee’s character arc are personhood, what truly makes a monster (and why Vee is NOT a monster), the value of romanticism, and finding self-worth as a victim of abuse.

-And of course the big theme of their arc together is

-Eddie’s favorite term of endearment for Vee is “Angel.” Not super relevant to the story, but it’s cute and I wanted to share.

-A few things about symbiotes in this universe:

-They don’t have names. They may use a nickname, but they don’t self-identify with a name like a lot of other species do. I’m aware that the “Vee” nickname is a fanon thing, but I thought it was useful for this context so I shamelessly borrowed it.

-They can’t really communicate with their host unless they’re at least somewhat aware of their presence. This is why Peter wasn’t aware that Vee was sentient, he thought they were just an inanimate suit and didn’t think they could speak to him.

-The Agents of the Cosmos as a group no longer exist in this universe. Klyntar is currently ruled by “parasitic” symbiotes. Vee was born after the Agents were disbanded.

So, yeah, these are my ideas so far. I’m hoping I’ll be able to flesh them out more as I work on the art elements of the project. I can’t guarantee I’ll get every idea out in a polished form, but I figure I can at least try while I’m still excited about it.

[travllingbunny]

The 100 rewatch: 1x12/1x13 We Are Grounders (Part 1&Part 2)

So I’ve come to the end of my rewatch of season 1. (The season 2 opener post will come soon. I’ve already rewatched it.) Overall my opinions on the quality of the season haven’t changed much, though I did like some episodes more and some episodes less this time. It was, however, interesting to see how much foreshadowing there was of later events and how many moments later got callbacks and parallels in later seasons. 

I’ve also tried to now keep track of the timeline and body count in every episode...but I’m now starting to realize, after how confusing the numbers got in 1x11 and in these two episodes, that I’ve probably given it much more thought than the writers ever did. In the end, I had to look up The 100 wiki – but it seems just as confused as I am.

Back when I first binged the show, some 7 months ago, I was posting about it on SpoilerTV in the daily discussion threads. Sometimes I wrote just a few lines, but about this two-parter, I wrote a very detailed post - and I wish I had posted it on Tumblr, too. Maybe I’ll dig it up and post it as an annex or something.  Funny thing, before that, after 1x11, I made my list of predictions for the two-part finale, and all of them turned out to be true. I liked it anyway - predicting things isn’t always bad, it may mean that the storytelling is logical and that plot points were well foreshadowed. But it’s also one of the reasons why I didn’t find it as mind-blowing as the S2 one or S4 , or even S5 one. (But it’s certainly miles better than the S3 finale. Although that’s not saying much, since the latter was pretty anticlimactic and is one of my least favorite episodes.)

I’ve always felt that Part 1 was the stronger episode, and that hasn’t changed.

Ranking and ratings of season 1 episodes:

1x12 We Are Grounders part 1 - 10/10

1x13 We Are Grounders part 2 - 9/10

1x08 Day Trip - 9/10

1x10 I Am Become Death - 9/10

1x05 Twilight's Last Gleaming - 8.5/10

1x06 His Sister's Keeper - 8/10

1x03 Earth Kills - 8/10

1x11 The Calm - 8/10

1x04 Murphy's Law - 7/10

1x07 Contents Under Pressure - 6.5/10

1x09 Unity Day - 6/10

1x02 Earth Skills - 4.5/10

1x01 The Pilot - 4.5/10

 Season 1 overall - 7.54/10

Part 1

One of the few things I didn’t guess about this finale in advance was Ark coming down the way it did. It’s kind of funny that Kane tried to have a sacrificial redemptive death, but Jaha got there first, and had his best and most useful and most heroic moment ever… but then the show didn’t let Jaha have a redemptive death but let him live. And then he went on to make terrible mistakes and be an antagonist for at least 2 seasons, before having a morally grey (and most suited to his character) role in S4.

Every time someone tries to sacrifice themselves on The 100, they live on, and almost every time a major character has a big heroic moment, they are brought low the next season and make terrible mistakes and/or do antiheroic things. 

I like it whenever the show has a flashback of the life on the Ark or goes into the past in some other way. And it’s always nice to have another little reminder of the time when Wells used to exist for 3 episodes, which usually happens through his father’s memories or hallucinations. Here it’s Jaha watching an old video of Wells and Clarke, which helps him figure out the solution to how to bring the Ark to the ground.

And look at Jaha opening a 97 year old bottle of scotch, “The Baton” This bottle is almost a recurring character - doesn’t it also appear in the season 4 finale?

I remember that I Kane and Abby’s chemistry was so obvious in this episode, and their scenes so close and extremely friendly (what a contrast to where they started... like mother, like daughter?) that I made a comment that they seemed like they were going to start making out any moment, LOL. And I wasn’t even shipping them then, it was more like “Wait, is this going to be a thing now?” Well, I wasn’t wrong, it just took them 2 more seasons.

A few bullet points about things first mentioned in this episode: 

First appearance of Tristan, sent by Lexa, who tells Clarke “I’m the man sent to slaughter your people”. Well, at least no one can say the guy is not honest and straightforward. Also the first time we hear about the existence of “the Commander” and learn that Anya isn’t actually the leader of the Grounders. An interesting bit of trivia I’ve learned since is that the Commander was originally supposed to be a child. JRoth must be really In love with this idea, since he went back to it eventually with Madi.

First time we hear about and see the Reapers, and the scenes with them looked like something right out of a horror movie and was genuinely horrifying. Lincoln not answering Finn’s question what they are but simply saying “Pray you never find out” was, of course, a way to keep it a mystery for us a bit longer, but now we know it was really more about, pray you never get to become one, which happens with Lincoln in season 2, while Finn will unleash his inner monster in another way.

 First mention of Luna by name, though Lincoln had already talked about her people to Octavia earlier in the season. I wonder how much of her role was already planned in season 1. With all the Mount Weather mentions and other things like the acid fog, Lincoln’s drawings etc., it’s clear that the main arc of the first 2 seasons was planned since the beginning, with Grounders as secondary antagonists that the 100 mostly deal with in season 1, and the Mountain Men as the main villains, who will get focused on in season 2. But I’m not sure that this was the case with any of the season 3 arcs.

Lincoln finally explains why he is helping the 100 and that it’s not just about Octavia: “What my people are doing to your people isn’t right”. The same reason why Maya and the other rebels in MW will be helping the Delinquents in season 2. In the show where people too often justify their actions by “it was for my people”, it is great to have characters who prioritize what is right. 

And god, how good it feels to hear lines like that again. Maybe JRoth and the rest of the writers should have rewatched season 1 and remember the things that actually happened in their own show? Back when they still hadn’t gotten it into their heads that the 100 were somehow the bad guys in that scenario because they were desperately trying to survive after being forced to go to the ground (sent by the Arker leadership because the Arkers were going to die in space), and that Grounders were somehow the good guys for attacking and trying to kill them all for no reason but paranoia and prejudice?

Two big things that happen to Finn: he has a reaction to having directly  killed someone for the first time (even though it was a Reaper) and then made his big love declaration to Clarke- only to be rejected, in one of my favorite moments of season 1. I’ve always found Clarke’s reactions throughout that storyline and particularly in this scene really relatable - her feelings for him haven’t gone, but she was hurt and couldn’t trust him or go there again. “You broke my heart... I’m sorry. I can’t.” I always thought that she would never give him a chance again, and that, while the feelings were still there, she was slowly starting to move on and that, in any case, he was her past rather than her future, long before he killed a bunch of people and she had to mercy kill him. Overall, while I really didn’t like Finn/Clarke or Finn/Raven as relationships, the atypical way the C/F/R love triangle was resolved (both girls reject Finn, and become friends) was one of my favorite things about S1.

Finn’s line “I should have fought for you” always struck me as odd (that’s not exactly what I’d say was the problem: he should have been honest with her and told her he had a girlfriend, or then he should have been honest with Raven and told her the truth, he shouldn’t have been playing both of them, he should have made up his mind and been honest about it rather than waiting for Raven to dump him…), and I’m not sure what exactly he meant (fought against whom? Or did he just mean, been more decisive and not let passively wait for things to happen?) but I guess it reflects Finn’s state of mind? He was always trying to play a white knight, first to Raven on the Ark, then to Clarke. And in retrospect, this may be one of the first signs that of where he ends up in S2, when he becomes violent and obsessed with the idea that he’s going to find and save Clarke. But the show has never been fully clear on how much his mental state was PTSD due to war and fighting, and how much his increasingly unhealthy obsession with Clarke.

Speaking of saving Clarke, the fact that Bellamy was able to be very rational about the fact Clarke, Finn and Monty were missing and focus on protecting the camp rather than going on a rescue mission, as opposed to the way he acted in 3x02 when he learned Clarke was in danger and immediately got dressed as an Ice Nation warrior and went on his own behind enemy lines to rescue her, says a lot about how much Bellamy’s feelings for Clarke became stronger between the end of season 1 and beginning of season 3.

This was the episode when Bellamy definitely became one of my 2 favorite characters, with how he dealt with the Murphy situation, and showed what a leader he had become. (Which Jasper also recognized, verbally and with a big hug.) If I were to dig up my SpoilerTV post I wrote back then, you’d see a lot of very embarrassing fangirling over Bellamy. ;) 

This time I was able to focus more on Murphy’s motivations and characterization, which I didn’t think that much before.  When  Murphy is trying to taunt Bellamy - after putting a noose around his neck - saying things like “You think you’re so brave”, “You think you’re stronger than me” – I’m pretty sure that’s what Murphy thinks, deep inside. He has a deep inferiority complex. Which is exactly why he wanted revenge on Bellamy in such a way, hoping to see him afraid and brought low. He used to defer to Bellamy in the early days at the ground, so when Bellamy threw him to the wolves, then later tried to kill him in rage, exiled him and showed multiple times how little he respected him or cared for him (compared to, say, a little girl), that must have brought on a lot of resentment. But the whole “I know the truth, you’re a coward” thing would work better if it wasn’t in a situation where Bellamy was risking his life to save Jasper and actually being just as awesome as Murphy was trying to prove he wasn’t, so the whole revenge attempt was a huge, pathetic failure by Murphy. And Murphy going on about how he’s maybe now going to become the leader of the 100 after both “the princess” and “the king” die, now seems less like a villain’s threat, and more like empty bragging that he probably didn’t even believe in himself. He knows he’s not a leader type and he’s much better at making people hate him than follow him.

The speech Bellamy gives at the camp is impassioned and emotion-driven and gets the Delinquents full of passion to stay and fight – for a moment, until Clarke gives her short speech where she simply points out that they’re likely to die if they stay and convinces them to leave. This is a good example why and how the idea of Bellamy as “the Heart” and Clarke as “the Head” makes sense: it’s not that he is all emotion and can’t think rationally or that she’s emotionless – both of these things are obviously untrue – or that he’s always acting on emotion or that she’s always making her decisions rationally (there are plenty of examples of either of them doing the opposite), but it’s how they tend to approach leadership and decision-making and the arguments they used to appeal to people: his tend to be emotional, hers practical.

Part 2

 …And Clarke points that out to Bellamy when she convinces him to go with the others rather than stay on his own to fight, in one of her many pep talks to Bellamy about what a great leader he is. “You inspire them”. (She’ll tell him the same in the S4 finale.)

The Blake siblings scene was beautiful and emotional and one of my favorite scenes in season 1. But now, after that relationship got a lot more dysfunctional in the following seasons, I can’t help but notice that, while Bellamy takes back his statement from 1x06 that his life ended when Octavia was born, saying it was the opposite, Octavia never really took back her accusations that Bellamy was at fault for their mother dying and pretty much everything. (In the following seasons, Octavia will keep the tradition of always blaming Bellamy for everything ever. She does, however, tell him“I love you, big brother”.  I believe she says that two more times, in the S4 finale and the S5 finale. But in the latter, it understandably doesn’t get quite the same response.

And here we go again, Murphy is once more captured and tortured by the Grounders… how many times does Murphy get tortured or has other bad things happen to him during seasons 1-3?

Fans who like Finn more than I do have argued that he jumped in and saved Bellamy during the battle because they are comrades. But since he was earlier willing to let Bellamy stay behind and probably be killed, I think the main reason Finn did it was because Clarke was showing concern for Bellamy and upset about him potentially dying.

 My main problem with Part 2 was always the scene where Clarke has to pull the lever and close the dropship door, before Jasper incinerates everyone outside. Or rather specifically, the scene where she and Finn stare at each other for a couple of seconds during battle, with dramatic music and all, which was weird because he was pretty close by and it looked like she could have yelled at him to get inside, and he could have come inside, so I was never sure if the scene was just badly done, or if it was supposed to be deeply meaningful (Finn starting to lose it and desperate to prove himself as her hero? A reaction to her rejection? PTSD? All of that at once?) but it didn’t quite work because she looked frozen and emotional, but he was just kind of blankly staring at her… And I’m afraid I still don’t have no idea what the scene was supposed to be.

In any case, the entire thing with Clarke’s dramatic and heartbreaking choice to close to door on Finn and Bellamy to save the others should have felt more epic and had more weight, but it kind of does not. It happens quickly, and then there’s more focus on whether the Delinquent crowd will act inhumane and lynch a vastly outnumbered Anya. And, of course, there’s also the fact that I’m pretty sure no one in the audience ever thought Finn or Bellamy were actually dead. But at least the scene where Clarke goes outside and stares at two charred skeletons was good because you really felt what she must have been thinking.  

However, I love the parallel/contrast to this scene in the S5 finale, when Clarke keeps waiting for Bellamy to come inside the ship and doesn’t pull the lever to close the door (while Raven is hurrying her to do it, same as Miller was here).

The visual of the Ark coming down is beautiful - it looks like a ‘falling star’ - a callback to the earlier conversations about making a wish on a star.

Kane and Abby looking at the Earth together kinds of reminds me of Bellamy and Clarke watching the new planet in the S5 finale. (Except the former two at this point aren’t nearly as close to pull each other in an embrace.)

The ending with the Mountain Men is well done, but that was one of the things I predicted at the time: that the finale will mostly be about fighting Grounders, and then the Mountain Men will appear at the end, and they will be very technologically advanced. With so many mentions of them, it wasn’t hard to guess they had to be the S2 antagonists who appear at the very end of S1 in a cliffhanger - shows often do that. (I actually didn’t even make the Mount Weather connection, since I’m not from USA and had no idea what it was. But the mysterious Mountain Men had to be different from Grounders and Reapers, and the opposite of what you’d normally expect from people called ‘mountain men”. Which doesn’t mean it was not a good twist - it’s just hard to fully surprise fans like me who have watched so much TV .)

Timeline: I used to think season 1 lasted about a month, month and a half, but now it seems that it can’t be more than 3 weeks, at most. And even that’s a stretch.

We know for sure that episodes 1-6 lasted 10 days (and a week passed between 1x03 and 1x04), but events in episodes 1x06 to 1x09 were happening very fast, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of days, and ditto for episodes 1x10-1x13. The only possible times when more time could have passed was between 1x9 and 1x10.

Body count:

Part 1: 

1 Delinquent (Myles), wounded last episode and now murdered by Murphy as revenge for the lynching.

1 patient on the Ark that Abby wasn’t able to save.

1 Grounder killed off-screen by Lincoln

2 or 3 Reapers

1 or 2 unfortunate Grounders being eaten or about to be eaten by the Reapers.

Part 2: Lots of people.

About 300 Trikru warriors (and some of the Reapers who had been fighting them, probably) – most of them burned in the ring of fire.

Either 31 or 29 Delinquents – first a redshirt Drew, killed by a scout before the battle, then a bunch of them in battle with the Trikru (or maybe burned). This is where it gets confusing. At the start of Part 2, Bellamy feels he’s failed and says there have been 18 dead, and Clarke tries to comfort him, saying 82 are still alive. But only 16 Delinquents were killed before 1x13. So, either 1) two more died of that illness or were killed by the Grounders off-screen, or 2) he was assuming Monty and Murphy were dead or would soon be dead. And in season 3, Bellamy tells Kane “Trikru killed 37 of my friends before you even touched the ground”. Out of the 16 Delinquents who definitely died in the first 12 episodes, 6 were killed by Grounders (3 directly, 3 by bio warfare/illness). That would mean either 2 more + Drew + 29 in battle, or Drew + 31 in battle.  In any case, in season 2, 48 were captured in Mount Weather, while 6 survived outside of it (Octavia, Murphy, Finn, Monroe, Sterling, and one boy killed by Tristan in 2x01) – which would make 54, plus Bellamy and Raven.

A bunch of people died in the landing of the Ark, but there’s no info how many. In 1x07 they said there were 2,237 people on the Ark. (Which means that, before they sent the 100 to the ground and Raven took the escape pod, there were at least 2339.)  In 1x11, Kane said there were about 1,000 survivors on the Ark. But he also said 1,500 died in the shutdown of the Ark, which definitely doesn’t add up, as it would mean there were about 2,500 people before that, and that’s without the few hundred that died with Diana on the Exodus ship (which Kane may or may not counted?). Either Kane is terrible at math, or the writers got things mixed up. Anyway, let’s say that 1,000 survived, that means about 1,200 died either on Exodus or due to the shutdown on the Ark. But some of the 12 stations probably exploded before touching the ground, so a few hundred more Arkers probably died.

[jakey-beefed-it]

You see heroes of the Imperium, but I see the slaughterers of children. Countless eldar children.

1.) maybe you wanted to send this to my in-character blog, @ask-captain-a-titus-maximus? 

2.) i mean, yeah. yeah, the imperium is fuckening terrible. it’s ‘the worst regime imaginable’. imperial ‘heroes’ are -at best- aware and disgusted by the regime but their opponents are such that the options are ‘fight anyway or be exterminated’. attacking craftworlds and killing civilians is absolutely something the imperium does, but it’s not something that could ever be convincingly billed as even antiheroic imho. so the characters who do that sort of thing are, in fact, villains. anything saying otherwise is propaganda, whether deliberately or not.

3.) i love the elf babies and want to protect them from the horrid brutish mon’keigh. on the flip side of that i love the human babies and want to protect them from the cruel vicious torture elves. civilians > war criminals, duh

4.) the imperial military is full of war criminals, with the incidence increasing along with rank. bob the pdf private defending espandor from the death guard is largely innocent and we can root for him. lt. prig the tempestus scion has probably ordered his troops to take no prisoners at some point. boom, war criminal.

5.) the way to tell stories about this sort of thing responsibly, imo, is to go one of two... two and a half ways. One: Tell the story of largely innocent underlings who are out of their depth and trapped between a relentless foe and their own horrible authorities. Think ‘Enemy at the Gates,’ where you’re rooting not for the Soviet authorities but the poor bastards stuck on the front lines with Nazis in front of them and Commissars behind them. A lot of Imperial Guard stories fall into this mold. 

Two: Tell the story of someone who acknowledges their mistakes, who is haunted by them, and who wants to do better. Think of Zuko’s redemption arc from AtLA. From what I’ve read, the Uriel Ventris novels follow this style. It’s also the path I picked for the aforementioned Captain Alexander Titus.

Two and a Half: The above needs to grow into a story of someone who is in resistance to the authoritarian regime they’re stuck with. Think ‘Schindler’s List,’ or for a darker take on the same notion, ‘Mother Night.’ I was hopeful for some more stuff along these lines with the Guilliman returned arc, to have someone in authority who is appalled by the horrors of the Imperium and wants to dismantle the worst of them while preserving human life at the same time. Bobby’s been a mite slow on the ‘dismantling the ecclesiarchy/inquisition/fascism’ stuff for my taste. Like... yeah, it’s morally grey in that he’s got the choice between ‘take it slow’ and ‘plunge the imperium into another civil war that will kill billions upon billions’ but it’s sorta black and white in the sense that either you oppose that shit, or you’re a collaborator.

anyway i probably had a lot more patience for examining the humanity of people struggling with terrible moral choices in positions of authority prior to, say, november of 2016 but lately? not so much.

anyhow i could probably rant about 40k and its fascism problem all day but nobody wants that; especially not me. i want to have a good day. paint some stormcast. drink too much coffee. support my local black bloc. eat a burrito. so i’m gonna fuck off now.

be excellent to each other, everyone.

[gch1995]

I finally quit watching OUAT after season five because A&E and these writers kept deliberately destroying the beauty and integrity of Rumple and Belle’s individual characterizations and relationship together to prop up Hook/CS. I kept up with spoilers for S6 and S7, and I still just felt angry and bitter with the writing. Even if Rumple and Belle did get a contrived, cheesy, and unhealthy sort of Romeo and Juliet happy ending together, it still didn’t make up for all of the systematic damage A&E and these writers had done to Rumple and Belle’s individual characters and relationship together from the end of 3B-S6 to prop up Hook’s “redemption” arc and Crapstain Swan by bringing Rumple back from the dead after his selfless sacrifice in 3x11, killing off Nealfire, undoing his original redemption arc, butchering much of the beauty of both his and Belle’s original, complex, likable, intelligent, and sympathetic characterizations from S1-3A, and deliberately destroying them for roughly three seasons to turn the audience against them.

I know Adam and Eddy and these writers probably never cared or realized it, but Rumple really did have the most believable, beautiful, consistent, organic, sympathetic, and well-written redemption arc out of their main reforming anti-villains on this show from S1-3A before they brought him back from the dead to deliberately destroy it, so that everyone else could get half-assed ones instead, just because the actors who played them were conventionally attractive, while CS got to become the center of the show.

I know that Adam and Eddy and these writers were ableist, misogynistic, insensitive, deliberately cruel, and shallow vile little men who didn’t understand what Rumbelle meant to so many of us in the fandom because they didn’t think that Robert Carlyle was conventionally attractive to be an antiheroic male lead like Colin O’Donoghue. I know they didn’t care that they had lighting in a bottle with Robert Carlyle and Emilie De Ravin as Rumbelle in “Skin Deep” to the end of 3A, and such a natural organic GA response that CS never got without them deliberately shoving them down the audience’s throat by killing off Neal and systematically destroying every other character remaining to prop up Hook/CS.

I know Adam and Eddy didn’t care that they were deliberately hurting the Rumbelle fandom, the fandom with the most fragile hearts with all of the spitefully OOC character assassinating writing for Rumple and Belle from the end of 3B-S6 to prop up Hook/CS. I know they didn’t care that they were deliberately hurting the fandom full of the outcasts, the “difficult to love,” the abused, the misunderstood, the downtrodden, the mentally ill, the neuroatypical, the traumatized, the bookworms, and the disabled, who saw themselves in Rumple and Belle, and looked to them to find hope in two outcasts bringing out the best in each other in a fairytale world, with their OOC character assassinating toxic bs writing to prop up Hook/CS, and it makes me bitter.

This show should have just ended with “Going Home” because nothing ever made sense again after that episode, everyone’s original characterization/development was undone to prop up Hook/CS, Neal was killed off, and there was no new, compelling, organic, or satisfying growth in these characters after that ever made me feel like this show was worth coming back after 3x11. All the characters just devolved and re-evolved to the exact same point they were at by the end of 3x11 in a way that felt so much less worth it after how much the wildly OOC inorganic character assassinating toxic bs writing tainted them all in canon now.

[lady-eny]

So what's Loki now?

ALERT, SPOILERS!

So, before Thor Ragnarok, for me at least, Loki was more a Sympathetic villain or antagonist with redeemable qualities. Like, his actions in Thor 2 were good, but they were for his own sake, his main motivation was, in a long term, to get the throne, something that he does.

But in Thor Ragnarok his motivations are not clear for me, and that’s the reason why now I don’t know where to place him!!

I mean, when he was acting like Odin his government was all basically about arts and venerating himself (my bet, this guy just loves to be loved and wanted the people of Asgard to love him as a hero lol, and that was to please his own pride) but then we get a scene where we see Odin call Loki “son” and also saying his mother would have been proud of him… That is new, more if we take care of the fact that what Loki apparently wanted in the first Thor installment was the recognition and love of Odin (not in a good way, but we get it) and to be equal as Thor.

Later in Ragnarok we get a conversation between Loki and his brother

Thor: “I thought the world of you.. I thought we were gonna fight side by side forever but.. At the end of the day, you are you and I am me. And now maybe there’s still good in you but let’s be honest, our paths diverged a long time ago”

Loki (surprisedly serious and not looking like, yes I want this!): “Yeah, it’s probably for the best we never see each other again"

And then Loki tries to betray Thor again, but then there’s another new thing now… Thor actually predicted the trick and in this story, that’s a game changer to me, ‘cause it shows that maybe now Thor actually gets Loki.

And then we’re in Asgard again and in the middle of the battle Loki suddenly arrives. Thor doesn’t look even a little surprised, he even says “You’re late”

So what was that? Then obviously Thor knew Loki was going, but how? That’s why he said these things to Loki before?

But, what really is freaking me out, is why did Loki not just came back, but willingly helped Thor and became a Revenger (lol)

Was it to please his pride again? (With all the “Your savior is here”) Was it for a tiny piece of love for Asgard and its people as his home? Was it because he wanted to help Thor, because he loves his brother (I mean, for me he clearly does, at least in his own way)? Did we just see for first time a noble Loki?

Or was it part of a bigger plan where Loki wants to get something bigger for himself (as would be usual in his selfishness)?

He took the tesseract, that’s obvious. But why did he? When he was Odin he had free pass to take it, still he didn’t ‘till that moment. Maybe because everything was gonna get destroyed and leave that destructive thing right there wouldn’t have been a good idea at all (that’s true). Maybe because he thought it could be useful in the future, or maybe just because why not? It’s Loki.

Still I don’t think coming back to Asgard had something to do with the tesseract. He went to that room after Thor suggested his master plan, and he wasn’t going there before that.

At the end he actually looks by Thor’s side (but he has looked like that before!)

So, for me, Loki can still be a sympathetic villain. Or just an anti-hero with the possibility of a good redemption arc.

But that depends on his motivations for saving Asgard’s people… And also depending on whose side he’s gonna take in Infinity War.

When Thor said “I might give you a hug if you were actually here” and then Loki answers “I’m here” for me it screams possible redemption arc in big (also, BROMANCE) and this scene also shows a change, and a big one. Loki is never there, Loki never moves from the same, he doesn’t evolve and keeps being trapped with his past and his problems and for me this scene is meant to show that now there’s a change, now Loki is there. What that means for the future, we only can wait to see.

But all of this  also makes me insanely conscient that This Is Loki™ and even if he gets a redemption arc, he still has to be Loki, unpredictable, tricky Loki. If writers give them an arc like that then it’s gonna be highly interesting to see how our mischievous is being at the good side (if he ever is).

And if they don’t give them that, although that would be disappointing for me, I hope they at least give the character justice. Many are speculating Loki will bring the tesseract to Thanos, etc etc, ant that may be true, maybe he will do an heroic action to save Thor at the end, or maybe not, who knows?!

For now, for me, Loki is a tentative antihero. Because I can’t actually discern his motivations at the end of Ragnarok, and because I don’t know if he would keep himself by Thor’s side or if he’ll change later. So, we’ll see

(Infinity war hurry up, I’m dying here!!)