#I HAVE TO SAY this remains platonic since its not very relevant to the plot but later on the feelings are implied.do with that as you will

[ohitslen]

✨New Vashwood fanfic incoming!✨

I just love the idea of Vash and his emotions being somewhat difficult to handle with all the bottling up he does and his plant characteristics impacting on his reactions :Dc

This fanfic has been beta read by the amazing @molten-rainbows ! (check his fanfics out too in here!)

Thank you so much for your patience and support man, without it I wouldn't have been improving so much ever since you read this and gave me advice for it <3

[ranboo5]

whats 'the clip' and knifetrick?

Augh. Under the cut for shipping discourse and p/dophilia ment (nothing graphic or specific). Gets long bc I discuss my thoughts on DSMP shipping in general. You are setting me up fr anon

Some quick vocab -

intimacy here is used to refer to. Well. Any kind of intimacy between characters, of any sort, as an umbrella term /r, /p, and /qp here are used as shorteners to denote "romantic," "platonic," and "queerplatonic," both as adjectives And as verbs ("to /r" = "to portray romantically") shipping here is used to refer to any focused examination of intimacy between characters

And some clarity that Should follow from the essay next but may not - """anti-antis"""" and RPF writers delete forever

The Clip is from one of if not the? most recent Discord stage(s) Mr Live has done (which I missed when it was live RIP) wherein he issues a hard ban on shipping him ("do not ship me, in any way, with anyone!") which would less influence c!beeduo (which has been portrayed/stated to be romantic AND nonromantic both conflictingly for a while until being confirmed unconfirmed several months ago, that being the last was heard) without its direct invocation if he hadn't also cited for the reason as being underage ("'Cause, one, it's straight up pedophilia") which is! a) immediately applicable to At Least his DSMP character, Partially and b) while not Strictly True (should b obvious that portraying a relationship within the bounds of what it is in canon and in a nonsexual way is not That, and /r-ing c!beeduo etc was possible to do Appropriately again by remaining w/in the bounds of canon) is Clearly Indicative of the fact that baggage-wise it IS associated with people being fucking creeps

This Really complicates things bc like okay the apparent solution is "lol just don't /r it" but it's really like. A Worse issue than that bc like.

Okay the reason shipping in terms of fictional characters is a Different Bar is bc it's an examination of Intimacy and certain lines exist in certain dynamics of intimacy that Isn't Shown (which is the whole Within The Bounds Of Canon thing) which is important in a medium like DSMP because of the smaller gap + more personal relationship b/w character and streamer. Examining intimacy beyond th bounds of the consent that has been established in that regard is Weird at best and Violating And Creepy more often and, As Mentioned In Ranb's Stage, Literally Evil at worst

Which is why writing abt like. QPR or platonically intimate Techno and Philza (characters) is smth that is fine because that's smth that has been shown and repeatedly stated onscreen; it's in the bounds of canon n thus within th bounds of what the streamers've consented 2 be done with their characters. But writing T3chza making out or whatever is fucked up because it's smth that's beyond those consent barriers

And the thing is right

Slapping a /p on T3chza makeout doesn't. Make it less violating

Like what you CALL romantic is not the measure or whether it's past those barriers yk? And if it's indistinguishable, if it's in extrapolative territory that is Past The Bounds, it Does Not Matter how much you /p it EVEN IF IT IS TECHNICALLY PLATONIC y feel? Like at the end of the day placing a moratorium on some/all forms of shipping is placing a moratorium on certain examinings of intimacy

And okay 2 go back to Mr Live and his character. What it implies taken in context w/ older portrayals of c!beeduo and said by invoking smth that both evokes Really fucked up baggage (that does unfortunately exist btw I'm sorry if you didn't know that but People Really Do B Fucked Up Abt Beeduo) AND applies to his character is a revocation of consent to examining deep intimacies:tm: with his character, which is gonna apply regardless of the nature of that intimacy (even if nonromantic)

Like I don't /r c!beeduo myself, do not, never have, but I talk to people who have and have consumed content where they r background /r; I also don't think it matters. Like I don't Actively /r it and I don't Actively Not /r it because imho w/ the intimacy regarding c!beeduo that is plot relevant and character important whether that intimacy is /p /qp or /r doesn't really matter. I don't consider myself Less of a c!beeduo shipper than someone who /rs them because that would be dumb as hell and while none of the content I've made* is Intrinsically or Intentionally /r it certainly can be read tht way as much as it can be read /qp or /p. It's be dumb and hypocritical of me to like, dunk on ppl for /r-ing c!beeduo when I'm also invested in these two and my tonetags r not gonna suddenly Delete the picking apart I've done of the dynamic @ hand

Which Has Been. Within Bounds Of Canon. It's been what's been shown (sometimes to my great distress. There is a reason that the :canon_beeduo: emote looks the way it does) Directly Onscreen and in general keeping with the tone n intensity/directions of what they've Done With The Characters

HOWEVER

As mentioned up there. Revocation of consent

It makes. Full sense 2 me that Mr Live wants to place a moratorium or fullon ban on shipping his characters perhaps where he wouldn't have before because of the Unfortunately Very Extant trends of people being Fucking Weird about shipping his characters AND of using them as a Thinly Veiled Excuse to ship HIM, which. I should not have to explain why shipping real people is fucking abhorrent

THIS creates a problem which is a. Bit of a vacuum in interacting with what is a facet of c!Ranboo's arc, decision making, and character. Like you CAN have c!Ranboo w/o cbeeduo but you Can't Really have his plotline without examining c!beeduo. And as I mentioned earlier: even if your examination of c!beeduo is fully platonic, the significance of it To the plotline means that any examination of it and its relevance to the plotline and characters IS gonna be an examination of intimacy, which. Regardless of it's platonic, Is Still Shipping

Unless some HARD retconning happens it leaves this like. Hole in an aspect of c!Ranboo's arc and decisionmaking and it's very. Uncertain? God. Fucking months ago I was already kind of :huh. Does he know what the fuck he's doing: irt c!beeduo and desperately wishing for things to be cleared up and now it's only That Much Stronger

NOW. KNIFETRICK, FINALLY

Knifetrick (or, as it’s actually listed, Bishop’s Knife Trick) is a fic about "Ran and Jackie from The Pit TFTSMP" in a "canon-typical ambiguously romantic relationship." As you can tell from the scare quotes, especially if you've seen me vague, both of these are, to put it politely, Doubtful. I've read the fic; I will not be sharing my opinions because that would be neither productive nor responsible (I will just say I can't recommend it and leave it at that) but I WILL say the following that Is relevant to the conversation:

Ran's and Jackie's characterizations respectively have very little to do with characterizations from The Pit, and bear a dollar-store-version resemblance to tropes and personality motifs found in ESPECIALLY fanon c!beeduo, especially later in the fic. I would not go so far as to say they are Intentionally Literally Ranboo and Tubbo but they are transparent expies and were clearly written at LEAST unintentionally w/ c!beeduo in mind (esp since. Ran and Jackie barely interacted in The Pit), and for a readerbase that, as far as I can tell, is HUGELY dominated by /r c!beeduo shippers. Like. Sorry. This is off-brand c!beeduo.

The dynamic between the two is pretty unambiguously romantic, also; despite what the fic's white knights claim, romantic tropes and implications/motifs/imagery from at LEAST chapter two, and is very much explicitly romantic by the most recent chapter.

FROM CH1:

"And now, with raised eyebrows and a pursed lip, the newly named General Jackie observes Ran in such a way that makes the enderman’s skin crawl. Ran reminds himself that this kid, as short and harmless as he may look, is trained to kill. [...] Jackie narrows his eyes and tilts his head a little, as if he’s trying to read in between every one of Ran’s imperfect scales."

FROM CH2:

"It makes Ran’s skin itch with discomfort. [...] 'That actually doesn’t explain much of anything at all,' complains Jackie, and he pops a few croutons into his mouth with one hand. 'Tell me what you’re thinking, pretty-boy.'

"Ran feels his face flush, no doubt mildly glowing green.

"Yes, that was the other thing. The unnecessary compliments to his physical appearance.

"They don’t happen very often, and don’t seem to have very much meaning or intention behind them— Jackie often speaks like an unthinking kid— but when they do happen… they’re embarrassing. [...] It’s annoying how the rug is pulled out from under his feet in these moments when he’s 'embarrassed'. Like the conversation see-saw has temporarily shifted weight in the general’s favor."

I am not going to include excerpts from Chapter 6 because it's just the entire chapter.

I WILL SAY, HOWEVER, STEPPING ON THIS SCORPION BEFORE IT STINGS: they are not written in an RPFy manner and I don't think there's any grounds, including Vibes, of accusing Knifetrick of being like. Closet truthing or whatever. Also, while I think there's certainly Some Weirdness ESPECIALLY around the reaction, the romance itself is Not written in any way I'd call weird or problematic pre-clip; it's nothing inappropriate or like Weirdly Fetishy or whatever. Knifetrick is not #problematic or anything and I don't have beef with like the concept of liking it intrinsically; if I thought it was like. Abhorrent I wouldn't be sharing excerpts lmao dhjfnhdsbvdnfjh. Hence: if anyone uses this post or anyth like it to send harassment or bad faith ANYTHING to anyone involved with Knifetrick I will hunt you down in the fucking night even if it WAS #problematic that'd be the LITERAL OPPOSITE of productive and as it stands it's Literally Not. Essentially: Knifetrick is a (questionably-written /mean) fic using Ran and Jackie from The Pit as a vessel for a large chunk of the dynamics and headcanons of fanon /r c!beeduo in particular

And again, I would not call it problematic in any way (aside from the disingenuity of the insistence that it's TOTALLY UNRELATED TO BEEDUO and TOOOTALLY WASN'T INTENDED TO BE ROMANTIC GUYS like own your shit please)... IF it weren't for the advent of The Clip, which is calling in2 question the Entirety of the problem of /r-ing any variant of c!beeduo or any of Ranboo's characters at all

I really do not have an answer for this tbh. I genuinely wanna hear from the streamer on this more specifically because I like,,, I got no clue where 2 go from here? Do I just consider an arc retconned? Was it an issue of speaking abt a troubling subject kneejerk wise and I'm reading too much in2 it?

I just. I dunno

Tl;dr (AT LONG LAST)

- The Clip is a clip of a Discord stage where Ranboo (streamer) loudly explicitly decried shipping in a way that implicitly applies to characters he plays - This would be all well and good but is rendered complicated by the plot relevance of c!beeduo, which does not stop being shipping if it's /p'd due to it still necessarily being an examination of a particular intimacy in a way that is in canon hard to distinguish the /p, /qp, or /r nature of - Bishop's Knife Trick is an AO3 fic centered around using TFTSMP characters as /r c!beeduo expies which is not a bad thing in and of itself unless it also is covered under this moratorium - Things remain unclear until and unless we get clearer word from streamer, but considering Mr Live seems to be allergic to clarifying anything abt c!beeduo this is doubtful

*very little if any of the content I personally have made 4 c!beeduo has been posted publicly, for related reasons. You May have seen it if you're in servers w/ me, depending on Which Ones

[piccolina-mina]

The entire One Chicago franchise is a mess when it comes to the romantic components of the series. But Chicago PD continues to be the most uninspired, boring, and redundant mess when it comes to their romantic ships and how they display them.

It's as if someone holds a gun to their head and says "let's choose the most basic, young, white heteronormative relationships and smack a cutesy name on them. Fandom will eat it up!" And without fail, fandom always does.

It's bad enough that half the Intelligence Unit thinks they can only date or sleep with each other. It's also bad enough that it further contributes to Chicago PD's ongoing issue with rarely knowing what to do with its female characters beyond specific plots I've come to call the "traditionally feminine womanly plots" and tying them in with a male character where everything about them hinges on their connection to a male. And also that "there can only be one" issue where only one of the female characters can serve as the primary one while the others duke it out for screentime, plot, and relevancy (congrats on always winning Lindsay and Hailey).

But they recycle the same things ad nauseum. For eight seasons, they would rather devote all of their time cooking up romantic subplots that exclusively feature a constant rotation of Ruzek and Halstead. I get it, they're attractive, hell, I'm no stranger to thirsting over Ruz myself, but they're the lotharios of the unit as if only they can be desirable, and it's gotten so old. My God.

They would rather give us these two involved with mostly young and white women, especially their squad mates, then devote screentime to literally any alternative couple.

I mean they have SHARED a love interest. Why? The only ships they have ever devoted significant screentime or development to: Halstead and Erin, Halstead and Upton, Ruzek and Burgess, Ruzek and Upton, Burgess and Roman. Qwhite shocking, I know.

Trudy and Mouch have one of the sweetest crossover romances from the franchise, and it's so refreshing to see a middle-aged couple find love, and yet, they've all but cooled off showing them, rarely give that ship screentime, and it tends to stay in the peripheral compared to the big ships.

Dawson had a romance with Brett from Chicago Fire (another character who gets passed around to the point of absurdity), but they did very little with it, and most of THAT even took place on CF.

They gave Dawson something troubling with another law enforcement officer or whatever for like a single episode, but hell, they still devoted more time and actual arcs to the two or three times where they put Halsted in similar relationships because of course they did.

Never forget that the first relationship that dates pre-series was Chicago Fire's Gabby with *spins wheel* you guessed it, Jay Halstead.

And of course there was Erin and Severide. So pretty. So ... basic.

Yet they never attempted to give us more of Dawson and his wife or Olinsky and his. The women were barely characters on the series. It would've been something.

I don't mind Burzek. Out of all the ships, I enjoy them most more often than not, but it has been eight seasons of will they/won't they bullcrap that they've drawn out. All of these ups and downs. The one non-cop related romance Burgess had lasted all of a second and ended in tragedy because heaven forbid they DON'T put that woman through endless pain.

But they've always remained the second place ship of the series, and it's just... enough. Meanwhile, we started the series with Erin and Halstead monopolizing screentime with their romantic situationship drama, and instead of giving it a rest and changing things up when she left, they switched it out with the Halstead and Hailey will they/won't they. Why?

Heaven forbid Halstead or Ruzek don't have a piece of ass.

Ruzek was even Trudy's choice for a relationship ruse to dupe her father.

In the meantime, one of the most outlandish and unrealistic parts of this series is that Kevin Atwater-- young, smart, just as hot as Chicago PD's golden, pretty, white boys hasn't had a real, significant romantic storyline in the eight years this series has been on air.

In what universe does that make sense? Single, eligible, employed, decent black man? Da faq?

Pardon my bluntness but Kevin Atwater should be seeing more ass than a toilet seat. The fact that he isn't batting folks off with a stick is ludicrous.

He had ONE fkd up romantic storyline in his one "very special black Kevin" episode in season SIX and that's it. Pardon me? Do you know how many of those Jay has had? Twice or more than Kevin.

On a series that pairs up colleagues like it's their mission, they never once even considered taking the Burgess and Atwater relationship in any other direction beyond platonic (and even that is underused these days). I'm not even saying I would've wanted that. I'm just pointing out that it made no sense given their track record to not even tease it. But Kevin is only good for platonic purposes, I suppose.

The fact that they put all their eggs in a potential Atwater and Rojas ship, that never even came to fruition, in season SEVEN of a series Atwater has been in since the beginning when characters like Adam and Jay have already had two relationships or more under their belts by then is ridiculous.

And then there's Voight. He's the lead character and never once had a romantic storyline. If he were younger, you already know they would've went there a few times over.

Yet the closest Hank has come to one is an ambiguous scene with him talking to a sex worker in a hotel room back in, like, season two. Are we to believe that he has never once developed feelings for or even had sex with anyone else since his wife died? He's never moved on after that?

They could easily allude to him being on an ace or demi spectrum if they want, even if I would side eye them for choosing the older character to do it, but if that's the case, they should do something with that.

Even a storyline with a widowed, middle- aged hardass finding love or getting some would be infinitely more interesting and at the very least something different than the same old same old Ruzek & Halstead merry-go-round. Damn, the 50 and over crowd need love too.

And yet Chicago PD keeps feeding us the same bland diet repackaged.

Fine. Burzek has been a thing from the beginning. But after Jay and Erin WHY did they need Hailey and Jay? And if they were going to do Jay and Hailey, why in the mother loving fk did we need Hailey and Adam?

The good sis bagged not one but both of the coveted white boys.

I mean, just for variety, Dawson was right there. Kevin was right there. I wouldn't have been a fan, but hell, it would at least be something different. Much better than acting as if Halstead and Ruzek are the only viable romantic options.

Why subject her to that?

Isn't it bad enough that she's more often than not reduced to being Lindsay Lite anyway? They struggle to give her a presence that deviates and distinguishes her from Erin as is. From her troubled past, and her stage of being mini- Voight and challenging his authority, to this thing with Jay.

Hell, they even repeated a whole job offer thing.

Mind you, don't get me started on how they missed what should've been the obvious chance to make Hailey queer. If I'm stepping on toes, my bad, but everything about Hailey screamed bi or lesbian. She radiated queer energy, but INSTEAD they chose to pair her with not one but both of CPD's romantic male leads.

Why beat this well-tread path yet again?

Of all the possibilities, and all the different avenues they can explore, they just keep dipping into that same well, and it's so tiresome. It's so unoriginal and uninspired. Yes, it's just so basic. I'm talking 20th century shipping... CPD is so outdated with this and it makes it hard to invest or care about any of them, especially if you already aren't inclined to ship within the series as is.

Shock me. Thrill me. Intrigue me. Bloody hell.

[travllingbunny]

The 100: 7x08 Anaconda

The mini-rewatch of season 7 that @jeanie205 and me did during this mini-hiatus is finished, and with that, I’m going to finally post my reviews of 7x08 and 7x09, hopefully before the show returns.

I’m tempted to start talking about the opening scene without any introduction, just like the episode itself started with no “Previously on” and no cold open (the latter, I believe, for the first time since season 1, when the show still did not have any opening titles).. but I’m going to still say a few general things before going into details under the cut. 

When it was first announced that an episode of The 100′s final season would be the backdoor pilot for a prequel show, that info was met with a lot of hostility (to the effect of “why waste a full episode on new characters instead of those we know”), which didn’t surprise me much. What did surprise me was that people mostly seemed to expect the episode to be 100% set in the past and unrelated to anything from season 7 - which, as far as I know, is not how backdoor pilots normally work, they still have to fit within the season they’re a part of. The structure of the episode is more in line with what I expected - while most of the episode is set in the past, the framing device is a scene of Clarke confronting Bill Cadogan in the Stone Room on Bardo, and the long flashback is both setting up a possible prequel, and revealing things relevant to the plot of season 7. The biggest connecting points are the Anomaly Stone on Earth, the importance of the Flame for Cadogan and the Disciples, and Cadogan himself, who is clearly not going to be a character in the prequel except possibly in flashbacks, but who is one of the main antagonists of season 7. The episode works as a backdoor pilot but is also interesting as a part of the backstory of The 100. 

I really enjoyed the episode - and as it turns out, I enjoyed it even more on rewatch, when I could stop and soak in all the new info and details - and I hope the prequel does picked up, as it has a lot of potential to be interesting, though there is one big concern I have about it. More about that at the end of this post under “Prequel speculation”.

So no Previously on this time (unsurprisingly), no cold open - and we get a brand new version of the opening titles - since this episode technically fully takes place on Bardo, these opening titles start with the Bardo Stone Room and end with another shot of the Stone Room we haven’t seen before in the OT, one with the Stone. The Stone Room is where they begin and end, just like the episode itself. And just like Clarke and the rest of her group have been stuck in this Stone Room for 4 episodes.

But I actually don’t mind it in this episode. At least Clarke is in the focus of these few minutes we spend in the present, and I really like these few minutes. We start with an expanded version of Clarke's response to the news of Bellamy's "death", with slow motion, distorted angles and close-ups of Clarke’s face showing shock and grief and numbness (and I’m going to post another screenshot of that, because I want to savor the moments when the show focuses on characters’ grief before going back to the action - and not just the type of grief that results in going off the rails and murdering people.) We also see Raven on the verge of tears, and Miller choking a little - the other two people who have been Bellamy’s friends for a long time. Clarke being Clarke, she picks herself up the moment she sees someone else in pain (Raven) and focuses on honoring Bellamy’s memory, just as Bellamy did in 4x13 when he believed Clarke was dead, and tells Raven they need to save Octavia and Echo: “We do this for him. We do this for our family” - acknowledging that saving them is something of particular importance as they were people important to Bellamy, and also including them in the “family”, as the term these people use to describe their group and the bonds that have formed over time. (Family is bond closer and less close than friendship. You can be someone’s friend and their family, but you can also be a part of someone’s family without necessarily having developed a friendship with that person, due to the overall bonds and loyalty.)

Then we get the first meeting between Clarke and probably the season’s main antagonist, Bill Cadogan, who comes to another wrong conclusion when he thinks she recognized him because she has the Flame (and, he hopes, Callie’s memories), when it's actually from a video Jaha showed her.

Gabriel has another moment where he helps Clarke (as when he covered for her in 5x13) and silently communicates with her to let her know that the Disciples believe she still has the Flame, so she could keep up that pretense. These two work well as a team.

The bulk of the episode is the flashback framed as Bill telling a story to Clarke - though we don’t actually see the flashback from his POV, and he doesn’t even appear in many of the scenes. In fact, it is almost all from Callie’s POV, and some of it from Reese’s.

And we get back to Clarke and the Stone Room in the end, with the shocking “twist” of Clarke and the Nakara group seeing Octavia, Echo and Diyoza as Disciples. Shocking for them, not for us - we know they had no choice. 

Clarke saying “You killed my best friend!” has caused some pointless (but in this fandom, expected) drama, where some fans saw that as “confirmation” that Bellarke is and will remain completely ‘platonic” - even though that makes no sense. What did anyone expect her to call him? My boyfriend? He wasn’t that. The man I love? My soulmate? Someone expected her to say that to an enemy she’s never met before, in front of a bunch of her friends and other people?  Very unlikely, even if he hadn’t still been Echo’s boyfriend when he “died”. Some thought “Bellamy” or “him” would have been better, but what would that mean to Cadogan? He’s never met her and knows nothing about her, and she was trying to make it clear how much Bellamy meant to her. If anything, the fact that she’s singled him out as her best friend is a big progress from their usual habit of never defining their relationship to each other - except for Clarke including Bellamy in the collective designation of her “friends” or “family”.

I love the way the Chromatics cover of Neil Young’s “Into the Black” was used in the ending montage - so I made two gifsets about the use of the song for the Cadogan family scenes, and for the scene with Clarke:

https://travllingbunny.tumblr.com/post/623186143096307712/its-better-to-burn-out-than-to-fade-away-the

https://travllingbunny.tumblr.com/post/623186346138370048/its-better-to-burn-out-than-it-is-to-rust-the

Flashback

This is our second look at the world pre-apocalypse - after the brief scene of Josephine’s memory in 6x07, where we saw Josephine and her friend in the diner. But that scene took place several years before the apocalypse (depending on how much time was needed to get from Earth to Sanctum on Eligius 3, which did not have damaged engines as Eligius 4 did after the uprising), since Josephine and her family and the rest of Mission Team Alpha were already on Sanctum 7 years before the apocalypse. And Josephine and her friend were far less interested in the current events than Callie or August, so we only got a few outside references, including the magazine covers which showed that Diyoza’s capture was the main national news, and that Becca was already very high profile and on the cover of a technology/science magazine.

This, however, is the very day of the apocalypse. In the first scene - Callie Cadogan and her friend Lucy in Callie’s and her mother’s home, after participating in a protest as parts of environmentalist group with the familiar name Tree Crew -  we get lots of info about just how crappy this world was even before ALIE started a nuclear apocalypse, through various news items on TV (see this post) - and it is like 2020, only taken to the 10th degree:

natural disasters as a result of global warming (a deathly heath wave is mentioned), new diseases (Coronavirus “Russian Ankovirus” outbreak), economic inequality (one of the news is that measures aimed at poverty relief haven’t met with support in Congress), internment camps in USA, anti-government protests in the USA that end up with riot police beating up protestors, together with technological developments, such as the first orbiting hotel (I wonder if anyone was already using it - if they were, there would be more survivors in space, but it doesn’t seem this ever became a part of the Ark), or the first brain transplant. a medical development which begs some ethical questions (since I’m pretty sure that a person with a functioning brain is still alive... I cant think of several different scenarios, disturbing to various degrees). 

The world’s population has risen to 11 billion - I guess that’s why ALIE thought there were “too many people” (but her reasoning was as flawed as Thanos’ - instead of killing people, how about increasing or just better redistributing resources?). 

It’s also confirmed that a Wallace was the POTUS at the time, meaning that the President and the administration went to the underground bunker at Mount Weather to survive the apocalypse (after which, as we know, they did the North Korean thing where they nominally live in a republic but their leaders are really hereditary).

Callie calls the US regime at the time “fascistic”, echoing how Diyoza characterized it in season 5.

Callie,her friend Lucy and August were all members of the environmentalist group Tree Crew (who already had the same symbol we later see Trikru the clan using), apparently declared illegal or terrorist or something by the Wallace administration.

Callie and Grace Cadogan also used to be members of the Second Dawn cult, led by her father Bill, together with her brother Reese. August also used to be a member. Possibly as a child of some other members. 

Becca Franko - described as “tech tycoon” and “reclusive billionaire” - had not been seen in public for a year, since she went to her Polaris space station (to work on the Flame, as we know), a year after she created the first ALIE (and quickly realized ALIE had a fatal flaw). She also owned her own network.

One other piece of info about this world: they had holograms as a means of communication.

Something that was not in the news and not known to the public: it seems that quite a few people were “in the know” about the fact that a nuclear apocalypse may happen (whether they suspected it would be ALIE, or thought there would be a nuclear war) - and even had a code word for it, “Anaconda”. Bill Cadogan was one of the people who knew it. The POTUS and his administration obviously had enough time to evacuate. It’s mentioned that a lot of people immediately started trying to get to the bunkers. 

Cadogan and Becca did not personally know each other before the apocalypse, but he apparently had “friends” in many of the space stations. This explains how she knew where the real Second Dawn bunker was located. But whoever these “friends” were, they clearly did not pass on that knowledge to the future generations on the Ark, since even Jaha, who researched Second Dawn, was only able to find public info - articles, Cadogan’s biography - and didn’t even know where the decoy bunker was, let alone the real one.

The most important thing the backdoor pilot needs to do, of course, is introduce compelling, interesting characters. It did pretty well in that regard - Callie is a likable protagonist, and the fact that the antagonists - Bill and Reese Cadogan - are her father and brother, gives more emotional resonance by putting family relationships at the center. The new characters have some similarities to the main characters from The 100, but are at the same time different enough. 

The comparison between Callie and Clarke is the most obvious. Oddly enough, Jason tried to draw a difference between them by saying Callie is focused on saving “everyone” rather than “her people” - which makes me scratch my head, unless he means that Callie will always remain absolutely the same through the prequel show, since Clarke also started off by wanting to save everyone - and that was her driving motive for a long time, until the plot kept putting her in situations where she had to choose between her friends and family and strangers, where the latter would often be aggressors attacking her people. What strikes me as the biggest difference i- not just between Callie and Clarke but between all these prequel characters and the main characters of The 100 - is their background and the world they have grown up in. Clarke and Callie are both “princesses” - from the privileged background, but in Clarke’s case, it’s privileged relative to the majority of other people from the Ark, like the Blakes or Raven (which meant things like, nicer living quarters, opportunity to watch recordings of old soccer matches as entertainment, probably less worry about not getting the medicine you need), but in comparison with the way the most of the viewers live... definitely not. The world Clarke was born in is a post-apocalyptic world of scarce resources and constant fight for survival, and even her happy (by those standards)’ life in that world ends a year before the Pilot, when her father is executed and she has spent a year in solitary confinement, expecting to be executed herself - before she’ and 99 teenagers are sent to Earth as “expendable”. On the other hand, Callie, Reese, August, Tristan and others grew up in a world similar to our own. There are, of course, many people in our world who also have to fight for their own day-to-day survival every day, but the Cadogans are rich, and the rest of the Second Dawn members and their families are no doubt not far off. This is Callie’s house:

Some of these middle-class and upper middle-class kids are rebellious, idealistic and optimistic and worry about the fate of the world, like Callie, Lucy and August.  On the other hand, there’s Reese, whose driving motivation is to impress his father and gain his love. He’s a rich boy with daddy issues, but he’s also a victim of emotional abuse - maybe physical, too (if we take into account a cut scene  showing a training session where his father injures him, under the explanation of making him tougher or whatever). Callie and Reese are only the second sibling dynamic we see explored on the show (I’m not counting Emori and Otan, since the latter appeared very shortly), and this dynamic - a sibling rivalry between a rebellious girl who is her father’s favorite even while she opposes and rejects him, and her jealous brother who wants to impress his father - is completely different from the Blakes. (It reminds me a bit of Gamora amd Nebula - and I’ve just realized this is the second time in this review I’ve referenced MCU.)

Watching this family dynamic, I was reminded of another family that paralleled and contrasted the Griffins: the Lightbournes. Particularly when Grace called Bill a narcissist with psychopathic tendencies and he was entertained by that, In the flashback in 6x02. Simone called Russell a megalomaniac - but that was really said as a cute joke, as the Lightbournes were happily married, and Simone was just as bad as Russell, and even more ruthless than him. But in both cases, we have destructive rich white guy megalomaniacs who made themselves into gods, and want to bring back their dead daughters. Daughters are both extremely intelligent, brilliant and charismatic, but completely different in personality. (The mothers, while all very different, seem all to have been medical professionals - I’m not sure about Grace, but Callie does mention learning how to stitch a wound from her.) Callie sees that her father is an a-hole and rejects his values, and is an idealist and altruist who wants to do the right thing and save people (while Josephine was a selfish narcissist). Her mother Grace is somewhere in between, as she also left Second Dawn and doesn’t fully agree with Bill - but will often go along with him, and tries to keep peace between the other family members, and thinks their family needs to “set an example”. With the Griffins, we had an idealistic, altruistic father and a daughter with similar characteristics, who adored him and misses him after losing him, and a mother who was similarly concerned with helping others, and the conflicts between them were about how to go about these solutions. With the Lightbourne, we had the evil version of the Griffins, and the Cadogans have a more complicated dynamic. Callie is more comparable to Clarke, and Bill to Russell. 

But one aspect in which Bill Cadogan is much worse than Russell is - where Russell loved his family, maybe a bit too much, considering what he did to bring them back, Bill loves himself and his “savior” role more than anything. Maybe his love for Callie comes close - and I get the impression that one of the main reasons he loves her is because he respects her and she challenges him - but it is still not his main motive.  He is ready to punish his ex-wife for disobeying him by leaving her to die. Reese is an a-hole, but it’s hard not to feel sorry for him when he thinks for a moment that his father is worried for him (when Bill runs up to Reese, who's injured) but Bill immediately shows that all he cares about is getting the Flame, so he can get the final code for the Anomaly.

Another issue is, of course, that Callie, Reese and Grace are POC, but I don’t know if race - or sexuality, or gender - will ever be raised as an issue on the prequel show itself - or if the world pre-apocalypse and right after it is supposed to be as post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender as the current timeline of The 100 is. On The 100, for instance, Thelonius and Wells Jaha being black or Clarke being bisexual or a woman, were not issues that affected their status - only class issues existed; if the pre-apocalypse society was different, then the show could explore Callie, Reese and Grace being very privileged in terms of class and status in SD as Cadogan’s family, and lack of privilege in other respects.

I’m not sure I fully buy the way Callie easily goes along with her mother and leaves her best friend to die. It seems to go against the rest of her characterization. But maybe it shows that she still wasn’t a full-blown rebel at this point, in spite of participating in the protests against the government and in spite of rebelling against her father - maybe she still wasn’t able to really rebel against her mother, too. 

Interesting line - as Callie stitches Lucy's injuries, Lucy says: "I don't want to be scarred for life" - which may be foreshadowing for Callie being scarred and haunted by the fact she left Lucy to die? Unless Lucy turns out to somehow be alive - but worse for wear. Which would again haunt Callie, too.

I guess Callie’s failure to at least try harder is supposed to be what drives her to try and save other people, after she learns that there was still room and resources for almost 100 more people in the bunker - and when she sees August fighting tooth and nail to save his girlfriend, when she is barred from the bunker because she’s not “Level 12″. August is clearly a character the show is setting us up to like - these scenes are reminiscent of Bellamy fighting to open the door for his sister, and his name evokes the Blakes (Octavia was named after Octavian August’s sister)..

(Sidenote: Callie mentions a high suicide rate (20 suicides in the last 6 months, twice as many attempts) - and this is something that would realistically happen in such a dire situation. It’s a bit unrealistic that it apparently never happened with Wonkru.)

The SciFi plot points relevant to the overall plot make an appearance when we see the Anomaly Stone on Earth, which Bill found in Machu Picchu and brought to the bunker (and we get an explanation why he didn’t use it right after the apocalypse but spent two years in the bunker instead - he didn’t know how to activate it - not being able to find the last two symbols)... and when, two years later, Becca Franko arrives from Polaris in her pod, as we saw in 3x07, with Nightblood as the cure against radiation she’s about to offer everyone, and the Flame in her head.

A few words about how I feel about Becca. While she is here positioned in opposition to Bill Cadogan - who is definitely a megalomaniac a-hole and a villain - I can’t see her as a pure unambiguous and unproblematic good guy we should stan, as Callie stans her. For starters, Becca is also a megalomaniac - she calls her second AI “the Flame”, comparing herself to Prometheus! (But she makes me think of Dr Frankenstein, and the full title of Mary Shelley’s novel was Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.) She is, of course, as a genius scientist, a lot more capable and competent than Cadogan,but she also has a huge savior complex (only she is focused on the idea of her AI being the savior, rather than herself), and is also another big capitalist - a “tech tycoon” who owns her own space station and her own network (and was so powerful and politically relevant that the Chinese and the Russian space station were refusing to join the rest of the stations until the US station destroyed Polaris -  Becca was apparently seen as a rival strong enough to challenge the US government?). She worked for a big corporation (Eligius) which colonized other planets and used people - prisoners - as “expendable” work force that can be left to die if necessary. And knowing that she had Nightblood developed more than 7 years before the apocalypse, and that she was worried about what ALIE could do  - I wonder why she didn’t offer Nightblood as the solution for a potential apocalypse before it happened, rather than isolating herself on Polaris to work on the Flame. That was one questionable decision - another one was putting the people on Polaris in danger and letting them die, so she could get the Flame to Earth. I could be more understanding of this decision if I could embrace the idea of the Flame as more important than anything, the one thing needed to save the world, as Becca believed it was. But her idea of a sole savior who will help everyone after being enhanced through an AI is something I find pretty questionable and a bit disturbing in general. To be fair the Flame definitely did fulfill its role once and help a person with a good mind use it to save the world - Clarke in season 3. But that was one time, to save the world from ALIE. This, however, doesn’t really justify passing the Flame on and on and giving people political power with it - even without knowing how distorted her initial idea would become in the Grounder society, surely anyone can see the potential for tyranny there? And Becca was aware that 1) the Flame could also make a bad person become even worse and powerful (as it has with Sheidheda) and 2) someone like Bill could use it to destroy the world, according to Becca herself. Seems like a way too big a risk to take.

There are apparently 744 different Anomaly symbols, which means an “infinite” number of combinations, according to Becca (err, not really; it’s a really, really huge number, but it’s not “infinite”, which bugged me a little, since I wouldn’t expect a scientist, especially one who uses the Infinity symbol as her logo, to use the word “infinity” as an exaggeration).

Becca manages to activate the Stone, not because of any scientific knowledge she has, but because the Flame, apparently, gives her enhanced hearing - allowing her to hear the sounds of the Stone, where each sound stands for a symbol. (Dogs can apparently also hear those rather unpleasant sounds.) Everything in this episode makes it clear that it is the Flame itself that Bill needs to find the code, it's always been about that. (Him thinking Callie is in there is just a bonus - emotional connection.) The Flame had no one's memories/spirit in this episode before Becca died, and Becca made it clear to Callie that it’s all about the Flame itself. If the Disciples knew Clarke didn’t have the Flame anymore, they wouldn’t need Madi or Sheidheda - it’s not about the memories, not even Becca’s., it’s that piece of plastic that's buried on Sanctum, if it can still work. (Or maybe they need Picasso :p.)

The most mysterious moment and the biggest question of the episode is - where (when?) did Becca go and what did she see when she activated the Stone the second time and when she and Callie saw the white light coming from the Anomaly? This is different from the green light we see when the Anomaly takes you to other planets. The white light is probably connected to transcendence and/or the Judgment Day that Becca said she saw - which Cadogan, with his typical arrogance, believes he is ready for. but Becca believes no one is. 

"It wasn't to open the bridge to another world, it was to remake this one" - this line would make me think that our protagonists are meant to rebuild the Earth - but at this point, I find it hard to see how this could happen over in just 7 episodes, with how the current storylines are going. So maybe they’ll focus on rebuilding Sanctum, after all.

For opposing Bill’s plans, Becca is locked up for 5 days, tied to a pipe (geez!) and, guessing what’s about to happen, she explains the Flame to Callie and tells her to take it and never allow Cadogan to have it, as she believes he could destroy the world with it. (Another often asked question was how the Flame survived Becca’s burning - we learn that it can and that it’s programmed to save itself.)

Becca is burned by Second Dawn Disciples led by Reese Cadogan, presumably at his dad’s orders. Which maybe was supposed to evoke the popular idea of “burning a witch”, but the historical fact that burning at the stake was the traditional punishment for heresy fits even better. There’s been speculation that the memory we saw in 5x10 was his - but that’s incorrect: Madi experienced that memory, she felt being burned, screamed and yelled what Becca was yelling, and we saw it from her POV - the Second Dawn members that were around her and herself reflected in their helmets.

Another memory we saw from Madi, the one we saw her draw in 7x09 (and which I initially mistook seems to be a memory of Becca or other people going into the Anomaly) seems to actually be a memory of the moment when Becca first interacted with the Anomaly Stone and talked about it with the other people in the room - Bill, Grace, Callie and Reese. In other words, every one of the Flame memories from this period may be Becca’s - we have no evidence that would help us learn who else took the Flame after her death. It could be any of the characters who stayed on Earth - Bill is the only one who definitely has never gotten his hands on it.

Retcons and Easter Eggs

I’ve always thought that the world-building, especially when it comes to the Grounder society and culture, was the weakest part of the show. Jason obviously followed some of the common tropes of post-apocalyptic fiction when it comes to the portrayal of Grounders, but didn’t think things through - and at some point, probably realized and/or heard/read all the criticism of the show and thought: “This really doesn’t make any sense”,  came up with the Second Dawn backstory, and eventually came up with this expanded backstory, which gives many new explanations. Even though we still don’t have the answer to the biggest question: how a society made of bunch of modern people, survivors, could deteriorate into a tribal society with a medieval level of technological development and lack of knowledge about science and the past culture and history - over a few decades. I guess we need to see the prequel for that, but there are some ideas how it could have happened.  I liked most of the retcons in this episode, such as:

Trigedaslang was devised by Callie as a child. The idea of a new language developing naturally over less than 100 years never made sense. (The “it’s a pidgin” explanation never worked either - as Trig apparently developed without the influence of any other language or necessity to communicate with people who don’t speak English. It’s just distorted/changed English.) The only reasonable explanation was always that it was an artificial language - we just didn’t know when it was made.

Finally we get an explanation about the fact that Grounders originated from the Second Dawn survivors and were influenced by their mottoes (”From the ashes, we will rise”), but at the same time, worship Becca as “Pramheda” and make their leaders take the Flame - in spite of the fact that Cadogan and Becca were rivals and that the latter was burned by the Second Dawn members. 

The fact that two factions already exist - Callie’s (adores Becca, wants to save as many people as possible by using Nightblood, clearly trusts in science) and Reese’s (Second Dawn true believer, burned Becca, needs the Flame for other purposes) may start to explain how things started going wrong and the society fractured.

Speaking of which, the Conclave seems to have originated from Reese Cadogan’s obsession with the fights his father made him have with him and his sister, and his dumbass idea of using a duel to determine who gets the Flame. This is a better explanation than “it is after an apocalypse, so they just started having death tournaments for reasons”. Callie, on the other hand, is much more pragmatic and doesn’t seem to care much about tournaments as a way to prove oneself - because she doesn’t need to, so she does the Indiana Jones/Harrison Ford thing and just pulls the gun and shoots him in the shoulder. One of my favorite moments in this episode. 

“Tree Crew” gets the award as the least expected and funniest new piece of info/retcon, though that begs the question of how the other clans got their names. I’ve joked that Ice Nation were a group of ice hockey fans... but for all I know, maybe that’s true! :D Or maybe the “Trikru” name was later misinterpreted as something to do with living in the woods, so the other clans started having names like “Boat people” or “Shallow Valley people”.

August made up the term Nightblood.  

"You must choose wisely" comes from something Becca said to Callie, about choosing the person to give the Flame to. Too bad that later Commanders didn’t know it meant “find the most qualified person” and instead got the weird idea that it meant making a bunch of kids fight each other and that one of them winning somehow means the dead Commander’s spirit “chose” their successor.

One thing that definitely makes a lot more sense now is the Grounder’s bizarre fashion sense, I can easily see a bunch of 21st century upper middle class/rich teenagers thinking it would be super cool to wear warpaint, tattoos and dreadlocks (even if you’re as white as the original Sheidheda), and some later Commander going: “I want to wear a crown! No, you know what would be cool? That thing Indian women wear on their foreheads? You know that thing? I could wear that!” 

Easter Egg: Callie was reading Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” at home just before the news of the nuclear apocalypse came - the same book that Niylah gave as a gift to Octavia not long after they went into the bunker (5x02). And maybe it is literally the same book - they sure weren’t printing any new books and someone had to bring that book initially to the Second Dawn bunker during the first apocalypse. In 5x02, it was symbolic of Octavia’s transformation into Blodreina. Here, it may be symbolic of Callie becoming a leader, or the transformation of the entire society.

But some other retcons don’t work well:

The Flame’s abilities have been retconed so many times, but this is the first time we learn that it enhances the Commanders’ senses - which is a big plot point, as it allowed Becca to hear the sounds of the Stone. We have never heard about that before or seen any indication that Lexa or S5/6 Madi had any enhanced sight or Matt Murdock-like super-hearing. 

So why was Becca called the Commander aka Heda? I don’t mean the fact that she was never one - Callie could have decided to call her the first Commander as an homage. But why that term? The flashback in 3x07 made it look like it was because Becca was wearing a suit with the word “Commander” (because she took the actual Commander’s suit before she left Polaris) - but since everyone knew who she was, why would that make them start calling her Commander?

Prequel speculation

There’s a lot of reasons why I’d like to see the prequel picked up. Firstly, because Callie is a likable and charismatic protagonist. Reese could be an interesting antagonist as he is her brother - and while he has been a grade A a-hole so far, there’s room there for character development, especially with his relationship with his sister, backstory of abuse by their father and the probability that he’ll understand at some point that he won’t be able to get the Flame to his dad even if he gets it. There’s also the fact that their mother will need saving at the start of the new show (if it gets picked up), and certainly a lot of other possibilities for family drama. And we’d probably also see Callie change and be faced with difficult and morally ambiguous situations that test her, much as we’ve seen with Clarke over the seasons.

Several other things mentioned by Jason in his interviews sound quite exciting:

Lost-style flashbacks to the characters’ lives pre-apocalypse: I’d love this. It would present a contrast before and after the apocalypse, and flesh out characters, and let us learn more about things like, what the Battle of San Francisco was, which wars was Diyoza in, more about Diyoza’s role as a freedom fighter/terrorist... can we get more Diyoza backstory?

the possibility of seeing the origins of the Ark and ancestors of our main characters like Clarke, Bellamy and Octavia (and we know we would see the ancestors of these characters, Jason mentioned that - the guy clearly does know what the fandom likes and wants), immediately doubled my interest. I just hope there’s a good idea how to do that without 1) the two stories looking completely disconnected (it seems this won’t be the case as Jason mentioned that Callie’s people will have to go to space to make more Nightblood and this will allow crossovers) and 2) with a good explanation how the people on the Ark, 97 years later, did not know about the survivors on the ground, about the Earth being survivable, or about the Nightblood, which had been used by Eligius years before. The line  "Dad had friends on more than one space station. They already know we're here" also begs for an explanation.

on the ground, we’ll see Callie and co. looking for more survivors (after all, there were more bunkers and other shelters) and offering them Nightblood as a “cure” - which could lead to a lot of interesting situations (and potentially pretty current commentary, if there are people who refuse it)... On the other hand, this could also lead to some more moral dilemmas when they run out of the Nightblood shots (they have 2,000 at the moment, and again, Jason has indicated that they will run out of NB and will have to create more).

Some of the big questions include - who becomes the actual first Commander? How does the society develop from there? When and how is the Anomaly Stone deactivated on Earth, and where is it now? How does Becca’s knowledge eventually get lost? We’ve heard it’s because the data got corrupted/deteriorated over time, but it’s a little too convenient that even Madi still had Becca’s memories, but the scientific and technological all other knowledge was gone during the following 95 years.

I have some ideas how it could go. A lot of people (including, obviously, Bill himself in-universe) wonder if Callie became a Commander and would like to see her be the first Commander. But Callie is the first Flamekeeper, and I don’t see her going “I’m the best and most qualified person, I should have it”. This doesn’t preclude the possibility - she may finally take it for similar reasons Clarke did in season 3, because she has to in order to do something important and there are no other candidates around. But that would be too optimistic an option. Maybe Reese manages to get his hands on the Flame, but Callie or August or someone from her faction manages to disconnect the Stone so he wouldn’t be able to get it to Bill? Or maybe someone else - say, Tristan, who so far can be summed up as “that while guy a-hole who hangs out with Reese” - managed to get his hands on it and then make himself Commander? If people like Tristan or Reese become the Commander, that would work better in terms of explaining how things went so wrong with the Grounder society.

There have been speculations if these characters are ancestors of this or that character we know. Maybe Tristan is an ancestor of this Tristan from season 1 (the guy who was sent to ‘slaughter’ the 100 and was killed by Kane in 2x01)? People are often named after their grandparents, sometimes even after their parents, or celebrated ancestors - names can get passed on like that, and Tristan isn’t exactly the most common name. Or, if Tristan manages to become a Commander - that would make it a popular name.

In any case, the prequel needs to provide a convincing explanation how the society of these survivors and their descendants went from what we see in this episode to the Grounder society we know. But this is my big concern about the prequel - and it’s the problem that many prequels have: however they get there, we know how things turn out; we know it all somehow goes wrong, and that not only will the antagonist fail in their initial goal (getting the Flame to Bill), but the protagonist, Callie, will ultimately fail in her attempts to create a better society. Instead, the Grounder society will descend into tribalism, worship of violence, and constant wars between a bunch of clans, the Flame won’t be given to the person chosen as most qualified but will be fought over by a bunch of children selected on the basis of “special blood” (as Nightblood becomes rarer over time) and forced to kill each other, and most of Becca’s knowledge will be forgotten, as Grounders become technologically underdeveloped and unable to really defend themselves from the Mountain Men, who will learn about them in a few decades and start using them as blood supply.

On the other hand, knowing that the protagonists will fail and that everything will go wrong is often the case with prequels (e.g. regardless of their quality, Star Wars prequels were certainly watched by many people), or, for that matter, with some period dramas (e.g. Babylon Berlin, which I love - set in the Weimar Republic, which means that we know all the time while watching the show that things will go horribly wrong on the level of the society). Sometimes that sense of doom doesn’t turn me off as viewer and actually makes the story more compelling in a way. But that would certainly be a difference from The 100 - no matter how dark, we can still hope things will turn out well and a good solution will be found. Or maybe everything will go even worse. We don’t know how things turn out with the humanity in general. In this prequel, we would know.

Body count for this episode: in the present day, no one. in the flashbacks... over 10 billion people.

Rating: 9/10

[justlvckyviral-archive]

Hey all, so it’s Alex again this time bring you my little angry chihuahua Lucky. It’s been a hot minute since I last wrote him and I’ve made a couple of changes to make him fit the RP’s premise better so I’m still trying to work out a few of the new details. He’s kind of the worst and I hate him already but he’s also one of my all time favourite muses to write so please come love him. Also if you’re looking for angst, look no further since he’s basically a vessel for all of those plots. As always like this post if you want to plot or anything and I’ll come bother you, or just pop up in my IMs or on Discord!

「 LEE MINHYUK, CISMALE, 26, BRING ME THE HORIZON 」┈ did you read that latest viral gossip issue on JIHUN ‘LUCKY’ PARK?  he is the LEAD GUITARIST/BACKING VOCALIST in DAYBREAKER, one of my favorite ALTERNATIVE ROCK groups. they’ve been releasing music for EIGHT YEARS now, but viral gossip has only been talking about them for the last THREE YEARS. get this, i think i heard HE ANONYMOUSLY LEAKS STORIES (INCLUDING OCCASIONAL FAKES) ABOUT HIMSELF TO THE MEDIA IN ORDER TO KEEP HIS BAND RELEVANT. they’re known as the FIREBRAND of the music industry, since they have a rep for being  LOYAL but QUICK TEMPERED, but who knows. maybe that will change once they become #1. 

TW: Alcohol, Addiction, Traffic Accident, Loss of Limb

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I’ve accidentally written a small novel again, so I’m going to split it down into four key sections. Personality, Personal History, Career History and Other. I’ll also just throw a tl;dr at the top because good grief is this a lot. His plots page is here if anyone is interested, so if something catches your eye please come shout at me!

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tl;dr

Kind of antisocial guitarist in a metalcore turned alt-rock band. Raised in the UK. Punk af. Really short fuse that gets him into a lot of trouble. Sees the music industry as a game and knows how to play. Every move and response is calculated. Plays up to the media perception of him as some sort of villain. Doesn’t really trust people, especially if they’re famous. Super jaded, super bitter, super cynical. Rich parents who were never around. developed a drinking problem after being signed. Involved in a serious traffic accident shortly after third albums release that led to the loss of his left leg. parents paid to bury the story. relocated to america and checked himself into a rehab clinic. first album was a flop. second and third better. fourth blew them up. really doesn’t like where the sound is heading for five, but feels like he owes his band mates so is sticking it out. has a three piece side project that is highly political (27club VC: The Fever 333).

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PERSONALITY:

Firstly, and most importantly, Luck doesn’t like you. Lucky has never liked you, and he probably never will. He might respect you, or even be kind of neutral towards you, but never more than that.

There are very few exceptions to that rule, with the main ones being his bandmates and his siblings.

Has some serious self loathing that he’d never actually admit to.

Lucky considers himself a punk, an activist and a musician. In that order.

Has been describes as a journalist’s wet dream and a lawyers nightmare.

Values authenticity above all else. Both his and other peoples. Despises people who are fake (lol irony) and hates it eve more when other people call him fake.

Calling him a sell out or anything along those lines is probably not a good idea.

His first instinct is that people are only trying to get close to him to take advantage of his success and popularity. Probably because he does exactly the same thing to everyone else.

Loyal to a fault. If by some miracle you make it into his inner circle he’d actually take a bullet for you. He’ll always have your back.

The fact that he is so short tempered causes him so many problems? It doesn’t take much to light the fuse, and when he explodes things tend to get messy.

Which means that a lot of people are kind of scared off? And the ones that aren’t are just as volatile as him.

Absolutely no filter. Lucky will tell you exactly what he’s thinking or what he means with no regards for the consequences or your feelings.

Voted most likely to start a fistfight over something dumb five years in a row. Still holds the title.

Comes across as kind of frosty and callous even when he’s trying not to.

Has a serious problem with people taking advantage of others.

He is painted as kind of a villain type character in the media? But like, the villain you love to hate. I don’t know what the international equivalent is, but I’m thinking sort of like Trent Reznor in the 90s?  Kind of plays up to that trope, but he pretty much fits the label without trying.

Does not know what a healthy relationship looks like. Platonic, romantic, even familial: there’s always a catch.

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PERSONAL HISTORY:

Brace yourself for this because my boy has not had a smooth ride.

Jihun was born is Daegu, South Korea but moved to the UK (Specifically Sheffield) before he was old enough to start retaining memories. 

The second eldest child of two property tycoons with more time and concern for their business than their family, he was never close to his parents.

Childhood wasn’t exactly unhappy. His grades were decent enough to get by and having seven siblings meant that he was never without company. Despite hiring staff to watch over them, Lucky kind of grew up fast and felt a sort of almost parental responsibilty

As time went on and their parents became more and more distant from him and his siblings, he slowly grew to resent them.

By the time he reached his teenage years, Jihun began to see exactly how his parents did business. Shady backroom deals. Questionable partners. Bullying or bribing their way out of any trouble. 

They weren’t exactly good people.

He’d become increasingly jaded, bitter and cynical beyond his years and isolated himself from the few friends he had outside of the family.

He was convinced that they were only trying to get close to him because of his family’s money: After seeing how corrupt his parents were he’d lost a lot of faith in most people.

It was around this time that he also discovered his love of punk rock.

The scene in Sheffield was pretty small, but he instantly connected with the anti-establishment values and aesthetics. He threw himself in head first.

It didn’t take long for him to teach himself guitar (Four chords and the truth) and form the band that would go on to become Daybreaker. [See: Career History]

Though things started off well enough. They played shows, eventually got signed to a new small imprint of Universal and began releasing material.

Over the course of several years however, Lucky got himself involved in some pretty serious stuff. What started as casual drink quickly transformed into a cru to help deal with his new found fame. He developed a serious problem with alcohol.

Between the pressures of effectively raising his family, maintaining a career as a full time musician and trying to fit into a scene that was, he now realise, extremely toxic, he struggled to cope.

The sheer catharsis of punk rock had proved to be an effective coping mechanism, but for Lucky it had already reached its limits and so he sought solace elsewhere.

It reached a point where he was having his stomach pumped on a regular basis.

The turning point came one night in November 2014. Lucky was considerably over the blood-alcohol limit, and shouldn’t have been walking let alone driving.

And yet he found himself behind the wheel of their tour van with a member of their road crew in the passenger seat.

They were involved in a serious collision: a head-on crash with an oncoming truck. Frankly neither of them should have survived, but the passenger escaped with a few broken bones.

Jihun wasn’t quite so fortunate. As well as several broken ribs and a skull fracture, his left leg had to be amputated below the knee. With the aid of a prosthetic was eventually able to walk again, but it was the hardest period of his life.

He didn’t talk to anyone for the first three weeks of his recovery. Just sat there expressionless. 

When he’d first come around after the surgery and he was informed of what had happened he was told that he was lucky to be alive, let alone that he would be able to walk again. It was a them that kept resurfacing throughout the recovery process and one that has stuck with him ever since Hence why he goes by Lucky.

Once he was back in the world, something began to bother him. There had been no coverage of the accident despite him being a relatively prominent public figure.

As it turns out, that was his parents doing. They’d paid to get the story buried as well as any and all charges that could have been levelled against him. 

They would later claim that this was for the benefit of his career, but Lucky remained fairly certain it was to keep their names away from the bad press.

Since then his relationship with them has been complicated. He still doesn’t approve of their methods, but they also potentially saved his career. And could ruin it at any moment.

Needless to say it proved quite the sobering experience. Lucky knew that he needed to get clean, and so checked himself into a rehab clinic in LA. This was probably the second most difficult period of his life.

He completed the program and decided to relocate to America permanently. Hollywood was probably not the best place for him, but it was a damn sight better than Sheffield.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

CAREER HISTORY:

And now that all the trauma and angst is out of the way, lets talk about angry music.

Lucky’s first band, RedBtn, were awful. I mean truly terrible. Sure they were only 14 at the time, but the bassist could barely play and the vocalist couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

Needless to say they were not together for very long. It was long enough to spark a passion for performance in Lucky, and two years later he went on to form the group later known as Daybreaker.

They were marginally better. Gathering a small following in their hometown, their scrappy, rough around the edges take on metalcore was heavier than most other bands on the market.

Something else that set them aside was their aesthetics. It made them almost like black sheep of the scene. They looked too polished to be accepted by the hardcore kids, but sounded far too aggressive for a more mainstream audience.

This was a pattern that would continue until late into their career. 

Someone saw something in them though, and it didn’t take long before they were signed to  a small imprint of Universal.

Despite having some devoted fans, including Lucky), their first record (A proxy of Count Your Blessings) was almost universally panned. It was a Christmas miracle that they weren't immediately dropped.

By the time the second album (A proxy of Suicide Season) came around they were widely regarded as posers and dismissed by the rock community at large.

It was around this time that Lucky realized that the music industry was one big game, and in order to get anywhere they’d need to learn how to play.

From that moment on every action and potential response was calculated with a ruthless efficiency.

Every friendship, relationship, public appearance, quote, photograph. Everything was optimized to increase their presence and make them more visible.

And so Lucky decided that the best way to get more eyes on them was to cause controversy. As the defacto spokesperson he started showing a more confrontational side to the press, calling out critics and fans alike.

He would leak stories about himself anonymously.

Eventually he would take this characterization t the extreme. He has been pictured in physical altercations as well as the subject of a defamation suit all to keep their brand relevant.

The media began to paint them as villains: a band turning on their own scene with no regard for their peers or their fanbase.

He’d taken complete control of the narrative, and they were eating out of the palm of his hand.

It tended to divide people. You either loved Lucky, or you hated him.

It definitely worked though. The album received (Admittedly still muted) praise and secured their future for at least one ore album cycle.

It was during the production of their third album (A proxy  for the one with the stupidly long title) that Lucky went through his dark phase. The rest of the band remained mostly sober whilst he struggled.

He doesn’t remember much of the recording process and doesn’t really know the songs. If they ever slip one into the setlist, he has to go back and re learn it.

This was also the point in time where his relationship with the press began to sour. Whereas he had previously tried to pull attention towards him, at this point he hated the invasiveness.

They began reporting that he may have had a problem, and he furiously denied it, going so far as to issue take down notices and cease and desist orders.

Of course it only served to boost their infamy, and the album was their first to be widely lauded. They were on their way to major league success.

And then, one night in the middle of a November UK tour, the accident happened.

The tour was cancelled due to a ‘family emergency’ and the band went into a media blackout. Despite his insistence that they simply replace him and carry on, they waited until he had recovered before emerging into the spotlight once more.

After Lucky decided to permanently relocate to the US he was sure that, as much as he’d valued his time with the band, their time together was over. Imagine his shock then, when some of them decided to follow him.

Shortly after completing rehab, Lucky locked himself away in the studio, working on what would later be dubbed the crown jewel of their discography (A proxy for Sempiternal). The album detailed a lot of his struggles in a very coded way.

With lost time to make up for, Lucky returned to the character of the music industry’s cartoon super villain. He once again began leaking stories about himself to the press anonymously, fabricating many of the details.

There were certain topics that remained off limits. The accident. His addiction. His stint in rehab. Anything and everything else was fair game.

The record relaunched them into public consciousness in a bigger way than ever before.

Currently the band are at work on their fifth album (A proxy of That’s The Spirit) which is shaping up to become an even more commercial sounding album.

Lucky isn’t entirely on board. In fact he hates it, and considers it to be selling out their core values. But at the same time, he feels an obligation to see it out. 

His bandmates had risked their careers and stuck their necks on the line for him: who was he to throw that away because a guitar tone isn’t distorted enough

Because of this, Lucky decided to put together a side project. A supergroup of sorts (Although if he were to hear you call it that he’d seriously kick off.). A three piece punk rock band, 27club are a super high energy, extremely political group combining straight up hardcore with rap influences (VC: The Fever 333) [SIDEBAR: If y’all haven’t listened to letlive or The Fever 333 and you like rock music you're missing out. Jason Butler is the best singer of this generation Change my mind.]

Daybreaker will always take priority, but this gives him an outlet for angrier music, as well as a place to air his political leanings outside of interviews.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________

OTHER:

Strong sense of social justice and regularly exercises that. Has a tendency of taking his activism a step too far.

Considers himself bisexual, but has never officially labelled it. Has been in public ‘relationships’ with both male and female partners

Has a boat load of tattoo, including the straight edge x’s on the backs of his hands

Vegan.

Rides a motorcycle which he loves more than he would his first born child.

Has three dogs. Two Pomeranians named Rollins and MacKaye, and a Boxer named Atticus

[mbcorvo-author]

11/11/11 Tag Game

Thank you @dotr-rose-love​ for tagging me!

Rules: answer 11 questions, write your own 11, tag 11 people

1. Did you have alternate ideas for a wip that eventually didn’t make it in the story or were exchanged with a better scene or sth? If yes, tell us one or a few that you left out (could be just a character too, or a name) I think that for every wip I have a lot of alternates ideas that got shoved into the trashbin or didn't even got added into the story because they didn't fit. The most evident example is my Sci-Fi wip. It's the one that has changed the most during its long years of being a work in progress. From an idea of story for an rpg was reworked to became a novel, then that plot has changed to remove everything that was connected to other's work (since it started as setting for an rpg, I took some races and planets from sci-fi movies and such), then changed again to fit a better idea, and changed again to be then shoved in the corner after hitting a MajorPlotHoleTM that made the story go down the drain. In all these years and reworks only the characters kept to be all the same, maybe I changed partially them to fit the new idea but they still were the original ones.

2. Do you have a specific audience in mind for your wip? I have to admit that I don't have a specific audience in mind for Beyond the Veil, even if the story could fall into "new adult" genre since most of the characters age from 20 years up. But for what I'm thinking for the story, it will fit every one that love fantasy stories (or specifically urban fantasy ones) and that are searching something "lighter" than the dark-ish/gothic/gloomy ones I'm often seeing in bookshop shelves. While for a wip that I have in the backburner I think that it would be better for a grown-up audience since it (at least in my ideas) will be more on the horror side of mythpunk with biblical figures like devils, angels and whatnot.

3. Is it important to you that your wip has a moral or a message? I think that it could be nice if a novel has a moral or a message for the readers. I'm not good with morals and messages...like, I know I'd love to put some of them in my story but I'm not sure if I'll be able to mix them well in the story so everyone could find them. But for Beyond the Veil I'm trying hard to plan everything to give the message that everything will be better and...welp not saying anything else because it could be spoiler!

4. What kinds of relationships do you like writing the most (romantic, platonic, familial, etc)? I love writing friendships. The healty kind of friendships where each friend really care about the other. I was in a lot of unhealty friendships in which I gave everything and I got nothing except being laughed at when I wasn't there...so writing friends that are really caring about each other makes me feel good. In my stories you won't find only that kind of friendship, though. Life isn't always peaches and cream, so in my stories I try to reflect it.

5. What kind of research have you done for your wip? what have you learned? I love learning, so I love doing researches even when I find myself a couple of hours later learning about something not relevant for any wip. For my sci-fi I ended up collecting a bunch of scientific magazines, but this maybe it's not really relevant because I was always a science nerd and there always been some scientific-oriented stuff at home, but sometimes getting something new could help remaining up to date with new discoveries and such. For Beyond the Veil I'm mostly bounching back and forth from Wikipedia to some websites found while googling, but going into the next town library hoping to find something about local/Italian folklore I found a couple of books that are transcriptions of trials of witches and similar. For the horror-ish wip in the backburner I weirdly have to do less research...either because when I was a teen I tried to write an horror and got weird stares when I asked the librarian if they had something about torture and then left renting a book about black masses...and then proceeded to do some research online, I think that I still have a pdf copy of the "Bible of Satan" by LaVey somewhere in my laptop...and also because in the last years I did some research while playing in a homebrew urban fantasy rpg set in the Purgatory. I learnt...quite a lot of stuff I think? Maybe not the useful kind of stuff, but stuff that I could use in my works and that could be interesting or weird random notions that I could tell to someone.

6. If your wip became very successful, would you want to make a movie adaptation? why or why not? I think I already answered this in another version of the tag game, so I'm going to copy-paste it because heck yes.

"Gosh, yes! But I’d like to have a big part in realizing them choosing how to adapt the story, who to cast and so on, like Neil Gaiman with the Good Omens series and such. Also, screenwriting is one of my dream jobs."

7. Did you have any alternate title ideas for your wip? if so, what are they? The sci-fi, in its many reworks, has never changed its title: Otherverse. Maybe for some time had some variants like "Chronicles from the Otherverse" but usually I ended up keeping the original title. Beyond the Veil actually is a placeholder title, but looks like it could become the actual title since I never found anything else that I liked as title. Maybe when (and if) I'll complete it I'll know if I want to keep this or change it. The horror in the backburner has a title. And now I'm struggling to find a good plot that could fit the title (sorry, I'm not telling it since I never "officially" announced this new wip since as for now it's only a pinterest board and a mix of ideas in my head) or changing it and making it a chapter title.

8. What has been the hardest part about writing your wip so far? The plot. As I said in the past, for Beyond the Veil I came up first with the characters, then the generic setting and an even more generic plot for them. Now I'm facing some difficulties to make everything connect correctly and, most importantly, interesting. The plot was also a big part of the failure of my sci-fi, so I'm afraid that Beyond the Veil could face the same fate.

9. Do you prefer writing action or description? Description. I re-read one of my old writings, one that was an actual attempt to write something original and not fanfiction, and the chapters where full of detailed descriptions because I remebered that I was trying to put on paper the picture I had in my head. But, as a reader, I'm not really fond of too leghty descriptions so I'm always keeping myself in check to not over-describe stuff and - at least - describe stuff only when it's necessary and for how much is necessary to know. I feel that I'm not really good at writing action, but after years of text-based rpgs where in some you had to nail the action description correctly to have more probabilty of good results during quests, I think that now I have at least the basics for them.

10. What do you want your readers to come away with after reading your story? Uhhh...I think that this question could be linked to the previous one about the moral and message in the wip since my answer for that one could also answer this one...

11. What’s your favorite part about your wip? what makes you excited to write it? The characters. I love writing and seeing them interact with each other and seeing how they evolve during the story. You already know that I'm fond in particular of Luciel the Genie, but this is because they are a rework of the character I played for years in the rpg I previously talked, but I'm fond of all the characters I create. There are also some scenes in my mind that I can't wait to write...but the most important thing, apart from characters, is that Beyond the Veil is a wip that I started after years of writer's block and time spent (or wasted) on the sci-fi that never worked.

The heatwave today has gotten me and my brain is a bit fried by the heat, so the questions will remain the same and...I'm not tagging anyone. If you see this and want to do it, feel free to do so and tag me so I can read it! :D