#Evolution spoilers

[werefeathers]

i'm sorry for laughing my ass off at this i know we're gonna die and all

[jenny-from-the-bau]

[asleepinawell]

[the-ratronaut]

Failbetter, sometimes you scare me.

[gena-rowlands]

⎯ PAGET BREWSTER as EMILY PRENTISS Criminal Minds: Evolution ''What Doesn't Kill Us' (16x07)

[players-of-intrigue]

Threatened by the Masters fork found in kitchen

[storiesofsvu]

CM 17.3

Alright!! 17e3 here we go!!

(I meant to rewatch the first 2 eps before this but didn’t get around to it, so a more in-depth review/more film student analysis is still to come.)

Enjoy this chaos with no context for now! (a lot of it likely isn’t gonna be fully fleshed out cause I have a full thought/reply and try my hardest to type it all out super fast before the show moves on but I have to stop to pay attention OR something else comes up and im just SCRAMBLING)

Absolutely hate there’s no subtitles right away for this but I mean.. I could wait a couple of days til its on Disney I just have no patience.

GOD why is it so fucking dark.

Thank you Emily for not letting luke spill the beans, like, kinda like Rebecca as a person, but can’t trust her as long as her job goes

Okay, em is in the right here, both in the sense of keeping it quiet originally but also making luke keep hush. Cause im sorry but she’s right. It would’ve 1000% drove the team to the brink and split them apart AND made them spiral so deep about what was on the site/other people seeing them/trying to cleanse the web of them (which obvi is impossible). Esp jj of all people? Like I’m not really sure *what* is on there, but jj is the one with KIDS, a full family, she’s still in contact with her parents (at least the mom?) she’s probably likely known in the circle of the boys friends parents? Like that’s SO much damage control to stress over??

Im so fucking excited for prentiss’ wacko neighbour to come back loool

LOOOOLL em’s “oh.. oh no…” reaction. I love this.

Did pen just say “tik tack” instead of tik tok? or was I not listening properly lol

“what are you gonna do?” “put out fires” that is LITERALLY a boss’ job. This being said as a boss.

“I don’t want to say no to your face…” SAME girl… same

GOD Emily is so fucking beautiful

This back and fourth with Garcia and her opinions on tyler is SO annoying. At first she hates him and doesn’t want to even look at him, then they’re flirting, then they’re fucking. Then she’s all twitterpated and wrapped around his finger. Then she AGAIN wants nothing to do with him?? Even though in the last ep she was all high school girlie about working with an “ex”?? I GET that the writers/showrunners are piling the comic relief onto her/the situation but come ON.

“I didn’t call you” “your landlord did” BRUH. COME ON. I don’t care how crazy things are, you ALWAYS double check that! I once saw a dude backing into my driveway with a ladder and immediately went outside to be all “uh..hello?” he immediately pulled out his phone, named my landlord, pointed out what he was there for (damage to the siding of the house, I hadn’t noticed cause I hadn’t left the house and live in the basement) AND offered to call my landlord. ALWAYS BE SUSPICIOUS.

WHY THE FUCK ARE JJ AND LUKE PAIRED UP!!!!????? Jj’s a profiler, she’s obvi gonna be able to get it outta luke, or press him for details, or whatever. If he’s supposed to keep shit quiet why tf are they off together. (or were they specifically asked to be together by voit? Cause that’s just him playing into his bullshit again)

“Emily practising deception isn’t a lie. It’s good leadership” THANK YOU.

Also...to feed all the jemily shippers out there… if this was a fic written by me.. it would be bundled into the AI shit, but there would be pics of Emily and jj hooking up that were very easily proven to be legit and the entire situation would out them and that’s what the actual issue was/is with the site…

I understand jj is outside with Sydney and luke’s job is to keep the girls distracted inside but of COURSE its himbo’s first reaction to pull out the soccer ball INSIDE.

Okay is that just some weird direction/camera angles or are we eluding to the older sister being a cutter?

Emily’s reactions to brian were perfection.

JFC NO! who’s out there stalking them? Uggghh (though I will say that the moment something clinked in the parking garage I said to myself “pls don’t let her get kidnapped in ep 3…”

I KNEW IT WAS CARBON MONOXIDE!! So smrt

Why does it feel like tyler knows more about gold star than the bau does?

Oooo but he cloned the phone! Good boy!!

Penelope: in charge of tracking down tyler

Tyler: texts Penelope “I need to see you”

Penelope: “NO!” doesn’t reply….

Ah yes.. I was right about the cutting… oof. Uugggh talk about heartbreaking..

LOOOOL tara teasing rossi! “I think I pulled… everything…” HHAH

Im not gonna lie, I absolutely HATE that they went down this AI *porn* route, as if these fucking poor characters haven’t been through enough, and like, again as I said, JJ… she’s got the most damage control to do no matter what, and poor girl hasn’t dealt with more than half her trauma so far…

“but I didn’t exactly get it legally, so you know what rebecca’s gonna say” THANK YOU. But also, like fuck that. cause this show has ALWAYS been above the law in that sense. I can’t remember if I said it in last week’s summary or if it was another random post, but CM vs like, SVU is WILD because we NEVER see things past the cuffs being put on/the unsub getting killed/killing themselves. We never go to court, we never see the legal side of it BECAUSE 99% of them would be not guilty due to mental…defect? LOL I know that’s not the right word/phrase but you know what I mean. CM is about the mind of the criminal and chasing them down and finding out the trigger and stressor and figuring out the pattern, not seeing things through to court and prison.

and while I love the addition of her character (Rebecca), it’s making other characters act in ways they never have before/never would simply because now the show is implicating the legal side of things. again, love having Rebecca and that boundary in line for the team but it is messing with the normal dynamics we are used to. Like..as IF Penelope would have any issue using an illegally cloned phone in the past. She was all “don’t ask questions” “well yes I *could* get access to that record, but it is technically sealed” and hotch would be all “I didn’t hear anything…”

LOL Emily with a full bottle of wine at her desk. Love her. god she’s SO annoyed with brian and I love it.

SEE this is why luke never should have said anything. Cause it doesn’t matter how hard you try not to look, you’re never going to be able to resist being able to look it up, no matter how bad it is, how fake and evil and ugly it is, you’re still gonna want to know and jj didn’t need to see that/know about it. How is she supposed to go home and act ok now??

“okay they’re here… somehow” DUDE YOU KNOW BETTER EM! Doesn’t matter that youre in an fbi parking garage, no cop gets there that fast!!

Also..that red coat is TRENCH COAT. YEESSS

Oh FUCK YOU BRIAN

“FUCKING BRIAN!” thankkkkk you em

THAT’S HOW IT ENDS SEERIOUSLY? Ffs.

Also…in all seriousness. Em was in HER office at the BAU, somewhere you (I assume) need clearance to get on property, much less in the building or into the parking, so WHY/HOW the FUCK were both brian, the guys who beat him up and whoever took the pictures get clearance?? SHOULDN’T QUANTICO HAVE SOME PRETTY FUCKING HIGH SECURITY LEVELS???

[thebrazenshame]

thinking about how the evolution story pretty much goes, "yea your character spent 77 percieved years in that cursed contraption"... like. even if it was not really that long. that must leave marks.

newly gained claustrophobia anyone?

[capn-twitchery]

i don't feel victorious i want my friend back

[esteemed-excellency]

[meffez]

okay okay I KNOW what the writers intended when they wrote the scene where jill was like “you didn’t even come to the funeral” and rossi responds with “I couldn’t bear seeing you” (or something roughly like that) BUT what I took from it (as a rossideon truther):

“I couldn’t bear seeing you.” -> “I couldn’t bear seeing the woman that was married to the man I loved after I walked out on the unit. I tore apart something wonderful [the bsu & his friendship w gideon & jill]. and maybe I did love you. I think I loved you both. but I couldn’t handle that at the time and now look what I’ve done.”

[zeefaring]

when they told him the Second Sacristan is the Prester's right hand man, Yevgeniy didnt really get it, because hes both autistic and not a native english speaker.

so when hes aboard the Delight and the Second Sacristan reveals himself in front of him hes like:

*slaps diving helmet* "ooooh i get it now"

[jenny-from-the-bau]

I genuinely don't know if I'd say the CM accounts are queerbaiting

I understand why people are saying that, but I also think that the accounts have been calling them best friends and besties and talking about their friendship and then the fandom has been like, "friends? Yeah, right!" and now they're mad that they are... actually just friends?

I mean, JJ is married with no signs of trouble or separation. Just because YOU want JJ to be a cheater and Emily to be pathetic, doesn't mean the PR team has ever suggested that that was going to happen. The accounts commenting on jemily ship posts was never "confirmation" of canon jemily.

[wantedbythemasters]

This hit me. I know it was meant to be scary, but I found it comforting. As we know, in the Fallen London world, light is what enforces the hierarchies and 'natural laws'. So the image of reaching out for light and it vanishing while I’m left surrounded by monsters can have the context of escaping the structures and confines to lurk in the margins. Rather rule in hell than serve in heaven and all that too. Love that for me. I don’t belong, and I never will, but that’s okay. It doesn’t matter in the darkness. I’ve struggled a lot with feeling like an “alien” or a “freak” compared to everyone else and I honestly had a huge breakdown over this last night. But. This game helps, and the fandom helps, somehow.

[aturinfortheworse]

extremely normal plan of action in Fallen London today:

need to gain information about the sentient coral gods in order to unlock the secret to immortality / advance my academic standing

need to gamble with/play chess against some angler-cats in order to get information

i am currently a Level 1 player of chess: i cannot beat the angler-cats even though they are blind and also novices.

got to go into the dream world in order to go to the giant chessboard in the dream world in order to get better at chess

gotta zail back to london in order to get into my own dream world

(i hope the pirates don't cover the see in incense and blood again, bc this time i won't have a failed academic to help me set the sea on fire so we can escape)

(but also, to be fair, the main reason i am bothering to zail back to london is so that i can get enough zailing experience to become a pirate)

i will almost certainly be murdered several times while getting better at dream-chess

i believe that winning at dream-chess might involve toppling foreign governments but i wouldn't know because i'm yet to survive that long

[house-of-mirrors]

On Unconscious Bias in Evolution (Under the cut for discussion of racism)

[Disclaimer that I am white]

I know the game doesn't get into time period discrimination, but the story is called Evolution, the protagonist is a Black man, and the Great Chain already functions as a metaphor for Social Darwinism. Instead of this story challenging the Great Chain, the game presents a narrative in which the only way to escape this oppressive system of predeterminism is to go through torture and sacrifice your humanity, and for whatever reason the revolutionaries are on the side of 'fate' on this one. Ignoring everything else that I'm about to discuss, it was jarring for me because the theme of the games in recent years generally has been "Great Chain bad and you have the power to be whatever you want"

I tried to think of how many other named Black men characters there are in the game. I can only think of the Bishop of St Fiacre's off the top of my head, but he isn't human, and… steals faces. How about Black women? Horatia comes to mind right away… and she's in a caretaking/housekeeper role. Hm. Oh yes and the Implacable Detective is a cop

This is a horror game, and most characters will not have a happy ending. However, I feel like the Youthful Naturalist got a much bleaker story than most of the characters in FL. Railway had multiple methods for saving Furnace at the end, but Evolution had powerlessness. The Youthful Naturalist also experiences more visceral body horror than many other characters in the game. If you get down to it, it's a story about a Black man suffering and failing to escape suffering. I might feel different if he wasn't one of the only Black characters. While typing this post, I realized becoming the boatman means being forced into servitude... Yikes™️

When I pick apart work, I try to be gracious and assume ignorance instead of jumping to maliciousness. Given that fbg is mostly white authors, it's likely no one stopped to consider how this would come across. Imagine you're sitting down to write a story, you plot it out and decide a character happens to belong to a certain minority group. Here, we have a story exploring a loose end in HD and the shapeling arts with a main character that happens to be Black. Tropes have vastly different origins and consequences for different demographics, however. A story about being forced into fate and servitude has worse implications and ties to real-world oppression for a Black character than a white character. Once I saw someone describe fbg with "clumsy attempts at diversity" and yeah!

I'm not saying you can't write minorities in horror. The horror genre belongs to all of us and the alternative is only having white dude characters forever. You just gotta be aware of pitfalls, especially when you're writing about a demographic you aren't a part of. Especially when you have hardly any other characters of that demographic.

I'd like not to believe the writers had intention to come across poorly, but that's why it's called unconscious bias. Creators need to do their due diligence with sensitivity and bias training. In 2023, there's no excuse for it in a world where you can quickly google "racist tropes in the horror genre." Stop for a second while writing and reflect on how you're portraying a character from a demographic you aren't a part of. I do it all the time in my own work. As fiction writers, we create a world where anything can happen, and it's essential to carefully consider diversity and inclusion.