#CLEARLY I LOST GDAMN!

[askspookyfox]

If you'll excuse me, I am in desperate need of a shower. 🤢

[shield-and-saber]

some thoughts on this episode + s3 so far (tbb and rebels spoilers):

we fucking lost fireball, i'm so gdamn sad 😭😭😭 we had him for almost an entire year and now he's dead, i'm so fucking unwell

OMEGA AND HER TOOTHPICK. SHE LOVES HER LITTLEBIG BROTHER SO MUCH, I WANT TO SCREAM (that used to be hunter, it used to be hunter she looked at like that and now it's crosshair, and i can't help wondering if that makes hunter hurt as much as i think it might)

does anyone else think that one of the clone assassins is cody. everyone's so concerned it's tech (to the point i've started calling every clone x "tech", i don't even like that theory yet here we are), but what if it's cody. huh?????????????

WHO ELSE IS CONCERNED ABOUT OMEGA. bc when she was on tantiss, yes she was clearly depressed, but she was managing to keep her head up for crosshair, for emerie even, because she was so hopeful and so determined. and now she's not even eating. she's constantly shrouded in shadow. someone please, for the love of god, get this girl on some anti-depressants

wolffe rex gregor wolffe rex gregor wolffe rex gregor, we had the entire fucking seelos squad together in the same place for a half a second, oh my god the end is near (do u ever just. realize that this is the beginning of the end. and it kills you inside. because yeah, those 3 make it out, but not even gregor makes it out alive in the end. we still keep losing clones. it doesn't stop with rots or tcw, it doesn't stop with tbb, it doesn't even stop in rebels. we just. keep. losing them.)

why the fuck do the writers not give a shit about echo. huh??? the writing for him has been LAZY since fucking last season. they sent him away halfway through, and yes it makes sense for his character, but at the same time you're trying to tell me that omega was taken and he ditched the batch? that omega was returned to them alive and he didn't cry upon seeing her?? WHY ARE HIS EMOTIONS SO MUTED. WHY DO THEY KEEP SENDING HIM AWAY. WHY CAN'T HE BE ON THE SCREEN FOR MORE THAN 2 SECONDS AT A TIME, WHAT IS THE DEAL

because i would get it if they showed that maybe he's got some ptsd, maybe he's struggling with showing his feelings bc of the stress and the fear and the constant fighting and losing brothers. y'know, like a show is supposed to imo. but they're not doing that???

the lazy ass writing with hunter this episode is driving me insane. someone else said it too, but why in the fuck did crosshair react to the clone assassin faster than fucking hunter. hunter exists to be a tracking god, like nothing and no one can escape him bc he's just that good. he's a gdamn commando with a major in tracking and hunting, HIS NAME IS HUNTER FOR FUCK'S SAKE, AND YOU'RE TELLING ME HE COULDN'T PICK UP ON CLONE X TRACKING THEM BEFORE FUCKING BATCHER OR CROSSHAIR???????

lazy ass writing is what that is

ugh

also, can we talk about clone commando hilo in wolffe's lil imperial squad?? FINALLY. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN WHAT, LIKE 12? 20 YEARS? WE FINALLY HAVE A CLONE WITH A VAGUELY POLYNESIAN NAME (it's not even a māori name, it's a hawaiian name, but i will take the scraps i can get because i literally never never ever expected something like that outside of my own headcanons, thanks for literally nothing disney). my 2 seconds of research tell me that hilo means "to twist" in ʻōlelo, do with that what you will~

[bellaslilpapercut]

Oh boy New Moon! I've got some Thoughts a brewin' babey:

1. Smeyer: you do not need to remind your audience what happened last book, they aren't stupid. Imagine if SC started catching fire with ANOTHER explanation of what the hunger games are and that's the vibe of the first chapters of new moon. We remember james, we know what vampires are, we know that Bella is white, stop reminding us!

2. Bella has the worst self esteem of all time. Every bad thing that has happened to her since the Van Incident has been Edward's fault but she still blames herself and idk if this is Intentional Insecurity or if smeyer is protecting edward's "character" or both but gdamn it's depressing.

3. The reason I said Jasper was Inconsistently Written jumped out at me again. Smeyer dedicated a whole paragraph to pointing out how terrible jasper is at the diet or whatever but in the guide, smeyer tells us jasper actively tried to starve himself in the past because of how difficult his gift made feeding. He was one of only two Cullens to show bella empathy, he smelled her blood before, why does he attack her? The weakness of this decision is pointed out in the exposition: if it really were likely that Jasper would attack Bella, she wouldn't have needed a superfluous paragraph dedicated to telling us how bad he is at self control. If the story had convinced us of that beforehand, we would have believed the attack without the addendum.

4. The party is my least favorite part of the whole series and I will die on this hill: edward should have attacked bella. Bella should have tripped into something glass and edward should have lost it because he tasted her blood before and couldn't help himself. That way: edwards self loathing makes sense and he's forced to recon with his superiority complex from the ending chapters of twilight AND bella's self blame makes sense. A vamp who was able to starve himself before he even heard of the cullens should not have lost it around someone he spent days in close quarters with, building rapport and friendship. Edward got too high and mighty after he fed from Bella in Twilight, that should have had real consequence.

5. The writing is getting a little better as we near Edward leaving. "Better" isn't a good word actually but it's getting closer to the prose in twilight (which was flowery and annoying but at least it didn't constantly feel like being spoonfed exposition every paragraph). Hm wrote this blurb while I was still on chapter 3 and the vibe of being spoonfed reminders has not really dissipated lmfao.

We remember Sam Uley, smeyer, you introduced him four chapters ago. Just quick question: did anyone proofread this?? I think it's fair to say: when she isn't reminding us of things that we remember the prose is more similar to twilight. A little annoying but interesting enough to forgive the errors (or at least move past them easily enough lol).

6. I'm on chapter 8 now (I'm gonna break this up into three parts so I don't forget stuff like I did during the twilight reread) and there's a very heavy Vibe that smeyer is setting Jake up to be a parallel for twilight-era Bella. This line here is a pretty clear parallel for Bella telling Edward not to hold his breath in Twilight when he tells her she might get tired of him.

7. This line here "almost happy in a shallow kind of way" really jumped out. What Bella's narration says about Jacob versus her conversations with him (and her one paragraph about his happiness being effortlessly contagious) are at odds. It doesn't read like shallow happiness when she's with Jake. However, Smeyer is also a bad writer, she thinks the story she's telling us is literally what the narration says and not what the action shows and I think she realizes this in Eclipse (but obviously I'm not there yet so I can't say for sure).

8. I really can't get over the drop in writing quality. I know that she had already mostly finished Forever Dawn by the time Twilight was published (or was halfway done, I think her website said she had over 300 pages of forever dawn complete when she found out Twilight was getting published). I think the writing quality really reveals that she was not prepared to write New Moon. It's sloppier than Twilight in a way I'm not able to articulate (by that I mean I personally have a more intuitive than technical understanding of grammar and syntax so I don't have the language to break down the differences). Twilight itself is ripe with technical errors and plot errors and awkward exposition so it's not an overt drop in quality but I think it very much reads like a rushed writing job. She was committed to forever dawn, her publishers wanted New Moon, it shows.

9. I think New Moon was when I first started physically editing my copies of the saga lol. Even reading it now I'm so tempted to open up a word document and cut half of the useless shit out and fix all the grammatical mistakes. I can't even talk shit because I am also a comma-abuser but I hoped an editor would at least catch the errors before publishing. Guess not! Brevity is very clearly not meyers strong suit and this would have been a much stronger sequel if she had been able to reign herself in a bit. New Moon isn't supposed to be as narration heavy as twilight, there's already more action in the first seven chapters than the there was in the first 19 of twilight but she always delivers exposition via awkward dialogue or Bella's narration. Again, we already got a lot of the exposition in twilight, we know how vampires work et cetera. You can show us how bella feels instead of making her tell us and the story would run a lot more smoothly.

10. I'll end on a nice note! Little treat!

This is my favorite part of the book so far. I whited-out the useless dialogue tag because the line reads better without it ( line originally ends with "I emphasized" but she could have been brief and just ended the dialogue with an exclamation point for the same effect). The dialogue is natural and shows the J/B relationship that lives in my head way better than anything else I've seen on the page at this point. Like, I literally love this line more than any dialogue that preceded it (including twilight) lol.