#I don't know what's his age at the end

[daeley]

Human

Vampire

Old vampire, dark god?

[bromcommie]

so I was digging through the Vast Legally Grey Junkyards of the Internet in search of better quality footage from AoU for my edits, specifically the scene with the CA FASCIST grafitti in Sokovia—which I unfortunately didn't find, but what I DID find was a bunch of deleted/expanded scenes that I didn't know/didn't care enough to pay attention to before. Which is fine. Most of it is techno babble and rushed plot setup. However. This stupid-ass ten second clip makes me literally insane. It makes me. Want to kill and maim and chew on the bars of my enclosure. And not in the sense that the contents make me oh-so-emotional, but because the potential of them could. Because what do you mean.

What do you mean those four and a half lines were cut for pacing/time when it's a ten second difference and the rest of the scene is in the film anyway. What do you mean you cut it because it didn't fit the narrative. It's literally couched in two minutes of plot it could've been so easy to slip it in there. A passing reference that would add at least a smidgen of depth to both the (already fucking incomprehensible) plot + politics of the antagonists, and to one of the main fucking characters. Like you were SO close what do you mean you cut every feeble attempt that was made to scratch the surface of Steve's character outside the whole nightmare scene we're supposed to feel so bad about what do you MEAN.

The fact that this minimal exchange—paired with that graffiti scene where Steve is confronted with the actual legacy of Captain America and what he's come to mean to people around the world and then quite physically discards the identity + him still circling back to the mantle at the end of the film anyway because he doesn't know how to do or be anything else, feels like he's too changed for this idea of a normal life that stems from before the war and the ice and doesn't know how to live without carrying that, without being useful in this one specific way—has more meat on its bones in the whole lead up to Civil War and ultimately Endgame than half of this movie's sledgehammer-over-the-head lines about home and family with Barton's kids laughing in the background or whatever like some fucked up C list hallmark movie is downright infuriating to me because like. You clearly thought about it. It passed through your head. You wrote some version of it into the scene. You shot it and edited it and watched it a few times and then you went "nah off it goes to the cutting room floor, we have enough of that. Add those seven and a half seconds to the 20-minute long, entirely CGI Hulk sequence, that we need more of. Surely that will fix the pacing issue".

Side note: this is me not even getting into the fact that, at this point in the franchise, this would have been one of the few lines we'd get of Maria actually saying something or interacting with anyone in a way that is even marginally removed (which this barely is) from simply delivering plot information. This is the only time we kinda get her view on something or even an inkling that she used to be a goddamn intelligence agent. And how that history informs her view of the situation and how it could possibly clash with Steve's own. And that woman is in every fucking movie. (Not to mention the fact that the two of them were just in a movie together, for Christ's sake, and going through something together you could pretty fairly characterize as traumatic and bond-inspiring to boot—and in AoU we can barely tell they even know each other. I mean the bar is so low and they still managed to limbo right under it.)

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

I'm not ready to shut up about Aveline and Carver--so, when you go see Aveline in Act 1, you can catch up with her a little bit and that's where this conversation can happen:

Aveline: "It's just one more change, though. The real end for me was Ostagar. What about you, Carver? You were there. Do you feel something similar?" Carver: No. Aveline: All right, then. Bit of a tit, your brother.

I wanted to see what she would say if Carver isn't in the party. Instead, she says this:

Aveline: Carver was there. I imagine he feels something similar. If he allows it.

......well, at least she didn't call him a tit?

[moretheta]

im so tireddddd of the "halkenburg is just as bad as benjamin now" hot take. listen a halkenburg villain arc does sound fascinating i won't lie but we are so very far from that point. yes, halkenburg has abandoned pacifism. but also have you ever considered that pacifism could have... flaws.... when you are an (unwilling) part of a fatally unequal system that children are steadily losing their lives to.

sorry you can't handle a radical but i'm still with halkenburg on this. you'll never get me to side with mr. military industrial complex

[mossattack]

if anyone is looking for some inspiration and/or generally wants to feed their emmrich brainrot, consider giving cigar by tamino a listen. not only does it suit our necromancer, it's also a wonderful song in itself :)

[blorbosinmyheadcentral]

Really curious to know where in the heck people got this "Caine is an old man" thing from

[mikesbasementbeets]

to be real for a second, i think there is a moment in the show where mike has a ~realization~ of sorts about his feelings but hasn't quite put two and two together yet.... and it's this:

this realization of "hey my feelings for will are actually maybe different than my feelings for my other friends, but i'm not sure why" happens at the end of season two. and then mike spends the entirety of season three acting sort of strange and different around will while having his relationship with him constantly juxtaposed with his relationship with el. reaching the end of that season which, despite all the supernatural shit going on, took the time to focus so heavily on those two relationships (and how fundamentally different they are), and having mike have the same realization he had at the end of season two makes no sense because it would mean he accomplished absolutely nothing in his emotional arc during the course season three

especially to claim that he still believes he has feelings for el going into season 4. especially to claim he still believes he has feelings for el by the end of season 4. it's to claim that he has not made any emotional progress in his relationships for at least two full seasons, that he's been going through all of this for it to not have made any conscious impact on him, and the changes in the way he acts from s2-3 and from s3-4 aren't a product of his character developing (growing, changing, to quote hopper's letter) but rather..... ? i don't know actually. just him feeling weird but not understanding himself at all. still. it just doesn't make sense to me. he's one of the main characters of the show, and to keep him emotionally stagnant for 4 out of 5 seasons (especially when we can see that his behavior is changing, that he has not been stagnant at all but rather deeply affected by everything) would be a disservice to his character, first of all, but also a disservice to the narrative which has been showing us his (as well as the other characters') struggle with growing up and growing into himself every season. and it simply doesn't align with what we're being shown

mike is already having realizations by the end of season two. but by the end of season three, he's starting to be really honest with himself about what they mean

[bakafurai]

I dunno where some people seem to have gotten the idea that Kenji doesn't like/care for Rio or smth because like. have ya'll actually gone through her social link???

like,,,

and it's at this point Rio's teammates and Yuko run and yell at him, Kenji panics and then runs off. When Yuko grumbles about Kenji comparing Rio to a bowl of ramen, Rio says this:

Ramen is his favourite thing in the world.

Kenji telling Rio he likes her "about as much as ramen" means that he likes about as much as his favourite thing in the world.

I think people also seem not to understand how things seem from Kenji's perspective.

To him, his childhood friend comes up to him and suddenly asks what he thinks of her, if he likes and how much which. is kind of a random thing to suddenly ask your friend that you've known since you were kids??? assuming they were like 5 or 6 when they met, that's basically a whole ass decade? Like it's clear in the way he speaks that he's confused and honestly I would be too???

Another thing to consider is that he and Rio where alone, Kenji likely said it the way he did bc he knew Rio, his childhood friend, would understand what he meant.

Like, I can get that he can sometimes come off as dense or insensitive but tbh I think he's just bad a picking up social cues? (oh he's just likely me for real- what do you mean i'm projecting?).

Like yeah sure Kenji very likely only sees her in a platonic sense (sorry Rio my heart goes out to you honey) but to outright assume he doesn't care about her is. raaggh.

(side note: in reload there's a dialogue from Kenji during the koromaru walks where he says "I mean, I keep telling them that we're just childhood friends, but they won't stop prying about it." and it is very likely he's talking about Rio bc this is 100% "my parents keep asking me if i'm dating my childhood friend that is also a girl" talk. Plus Kenji doesn't seem to be that close to many people so. interesting piece of info though ngl so I thought i'd mention it.)

[comic-sans-chan]

Teenage Garashir is really something special. You know Julian was a crazy son of a bitch as a teen and Garak was a sarcastic stuffy little shit with his nose glued in a book. Julian obsessing over tennis and racquetball with a perpetual middle finger pointed towards his parents and Garak weeping over Cardassian Stephanie Meyer alone in his tiny bedroom while Tain throws knives at his door and Mila shouts at him to do the dishes. Julian's drooling over five different people at once and Garak's thinking hauntedly about that cute guy he had to kill last week while he mows the lawn. They both crave death, but sparks fly the second they lay eyes on each other. Garak's trying to figure out the logistics of balancing a secret agent career and an alien husband while Julian's just daydreaming about stuffing his face in his chest and suffocating. It's a shitshow and it's magnificent.

[bonebabbles]

wait im sorry. ive never read past the first book of dotc and all my knowledge of it really just comes from your blogs. wh. why did the erins decide to include sexual violence in warriors? like. that seems a little. too much? like all im hearing of dotc is just. terrible shit. i like reading more angst/serious stuff (i wanna say darker but not in the way "dark media" usually means on this site) but this feels like WAYYY to much for a book series meant for kids....... what were they thinking??

I legitimately do not understand what people like about DOTC. You can go back to where I started this re-read, and you can visibly watch my charitability drain as the project goes on.

It feels like literally everything that people say they like about this arc is not there, while they've completely forgotten or misremembered SERIOUSLY awful shit

And now, listen. I'm a huge fan of xenofiction, which is a genre that is full of kid's and teen's media, but I do love more adult fiction. I love nuanced themes, dark subjects, and complicated plots.

DOTC's message is just plain odious. None of what it sets out to say is worth saying, and it's borderline incompetent at even saying it to begin with.

What they want to say with Clear Sky and Slash is that Clear Sky isn't "evil." He's a "fundamentally good person," and all of his intentions were good, so he learned a valuable lesson from all the abuse and murder. To say this, they CONTRAST him to Slash, a REAL evil person, who just loves hurting kids and harassing women. Clear Sky is good because he is not "real evil" like this fake, cartoon caricature we just made up.

There was absolutely zero need for them to write Slash the way they did. They really want you to be distressed for Clear Sky as his wife is assaulted in front of him and hauled off while kicking and screaming, and they decided the best way to do that was pregnant woman pinning face licking. Sexual violence is an easy way to disgust and anger an audience, simple as that.

As a kid you may not realize how messed up it is (though the asks I get on this blog are a testament to how many kids did, but didn't have the words to express their discomfort) but as an adult with your critical thinking on? It hits different.

[omo321]

fanart of older Koito with Tsurumi's exact facial hair layout/hairstyle is so thoroughly unnerving, do NOT like do not wanna think about it nope nope nope

[starryalpacasstuff]

Last Twilight; Mee's legacy continues

I know that we're all mad at how episode 11 went. Believe me, I am too. I'm not going to be talking about the issues in the episode, several others have already done so, and far more eloquently than I could. Because despite the episode's failings, there are still some things about this episode that I think deserve to be talked about.

I've loved keeping up with Mee's story as the show has progressed (written about it here and here). I thought that Mee's story ended in episode 9, but it continues to be present in the narrative. The most obvious clue to this is, obviously, Porjai's daughter, whom they named Mee. In addition to that, episode 11 focuses on highlighting the fact that Day 's blindness is not something that can be cured, just as Mee could never return to her life before she was cursed. Just as Mee had hoped that the last twilight would allow her to return to her normal life, Day hoped, even fully believed that the surgery would allow him to become "normal" again (the medical inaccuracies of the process aside). In the end, neither can return to a sense of "normalcy", as Mee turns to stone and Day's surgery fails. Both stories are haunted by a sense of grief, helplessness, and hope that is given and taken away. But the end of Mee's story isn't written as tragic, it's written as joyful. The exact same ending could have been written as tragic and solemn, but it wasn't. In the end, Mee was able to revel in the fact that she would never turn invisible again, despite turning to stone. And that's what I'm hoping that Day's final arc will resemble. Because we know that Day is still insecure about his blindness, and about people's pity for him. His buying that cane was a massive step in the right direction, because it showed that he was willing to "announce to everyone that he's blind", to be less afraid. But, as the breakup showed us, he's still insecure about his blindness. If the theory is right, episode 12 should show us Day accepting his blindness, and maybe even celebrate it as a part of him, as Mee does.

Mee's story has run parallel to Day's since they began to read it. Mee's story is over now, but Day's isn't. We see that Mee continues to have a presence in Day's life, be it metaphorically, through her story predicting his, or literally, through Porjai's daughter. Besides fixing a lot of the damage that was done in episode 11, if there's one thing I'd like from episode 12, it's one final call back to Mee's story.

[vaguely-concerned]

just going about my day idly contemplating how some of the ways hawke can interact with a romanced anders are not at all unlike how they interact with leandra (and a bit of carver too, especially with a purple hawke), and then thought about my hawke in the timeline where he romances anders and was hit straight in the face with 'was he ever actually in love, or was he just desperately trying to renegotiate with his mother's ghost in any way he could' and now i need to lie down. this is the power of dragon age 2

[batsplat]

casey also talks about sepang 2015 what do you think of that

oh in that podcast? uh... lemme listen again...

yeah idk it's not really anything new I'd say? he's said basically all the same stuff in more interesting and extensive ways elsewhere. I think casey inevitably has a very 'well feuding is bad and helps nobody' point of view, has expressed that before in the past, does it here again, and he's also drawn a parallel between himself and marc on several occasions. which... well, of course there's similarities in terms of public discourse or whatever, but the parallel really falls apart whenever casey argues the feuds cost valentino. like, I do think it's sometimes important to just. keep in mind. it's interesting that casey draws this comparison in his mind but that doesn't necessarily means he's right about this. I'm not sure how you'd argue that starting a feud with casey cost valentino anything competitively? you can argue it didn't help him I guess, and then we can have a debate about the ins and outs of the 2008 season. we can also have an argument that in a hypothetical world where casey isn't ill in 2009, valentino doesn't break his leg and casey isn't on a piece of junk in 2010, and valentino isn't on a piece of junk in 2011-12, then actually maybe valentino sparking open animosity with casey COULD have cost him. but we don't know that! didn't happen! I wish we could have found out, but we never got the chance! as it stands, the tally on this is pretty straightforward: casey won the title when things were reasonably civil between them in 2007, and valentino took control of the following season at the exact moment he worsened the relationship between the pair of them in 2008. obviously, it's all more complicated than that and casey would of course argue laguna didn't negatively affect his subsequent performances... but it certainly didn't help them. like, at the very worst valentino escalating tensions in 2008 is a complete net neutral. after 2009, them being bitchy to each other every other tuesday was completely competitively irrelevant beyond maybe affecting how they approached occasionally fighting for a podium position. hey, maybe casey used that feud to fire himself up through sheer spite throughout the later stages of his career, but that doesn't actually support his anti-feud stance - it's basically the exact same thing as what valentino does. they're both quite similar in that regard! always so hungry to prove a point, to show how someone else is wrong. kinda half the point with this feuding business is to get yourself going, get yourself motivated, yeah. he straight up openly admits to using yamaha's repeat rejection of him as a way of giving himself motivation, and at the end of the day that's really not all that different?

anyway, what else does casey say... oh yeah, that him and the other aliens were already kinda prepared for this and had learned vale's tricks. that valentino had only been able to get into the minds of the previous generation. welllllll *wiggles hand* sure, I mean, he did clearly have to change his approach... he couldn't just use the exact same playbook to get to them, either on-track or off-track. but that's why he did change up the playbook... again, whether you want to believe valentino won his final two titles 'in the head' rather than just through pure pace kinda depends on how you assess the evidence, but it is at the very least a debate. and, y'know, it's always worth remembering that valentino's most important mind games with casey didn't happen in a press conference... it was on the track. and the on-track stuff really is just embedded in how valentino approaches winning. speaking of aliens, this is what dani and jorge have said:

like, valentino's entire approach to his riding, even to the way he's setting his bike up, is deliberately about directly fucking with you... he's not actually always trying to be faster than you as much as he's trying to give himself the tools to make your life miserable, to pressure you into mistakes, etc etc... and again, especially with casey (if anything because he was so mentally sturdy), the off-track stuff was really just window dressing. (I know they bicker a lot after 2009 but it's just so fundamentally irrelevant to actual on-track competition.) so you can be aware of those tricks, but it also doesn't necessarily help you when someone's being nasty to you on-track in a way you just fully do not enjoy. which is what it was like for casey! for casey, a lot of this comes back to the truly unpleasant context of how he was perceived by the public, how he was treated as mentally weak or 'broken' or whatever partly because he had the misfortune of coming up against a bloke who had the reputation for breaking rivals. I think it's quite natural to end up with a bit of a hardliner 'actually I've never been mentally affected by a result in my life' stance - and of course casey is a lot tougher than a lot of people give him credit for. that being said. sometimes your rivals affect you, shit happens, it's part of the game. it's fundamentally a nice idea to think that valentino's tactics weren't just morally wrong but also ineffective, which is kind of the appeal of this narrative, right? you want to believe you're above that, you want to believe you were adequately prepared and wise to valentino's tactic. it's unsurprising and understandable that casey does tend to tell the story that way, but again it's *wiggles hand* also hard to describe it as completely factual

uh. what else. oh I'm thrilled casey does canonically know valentino and marc were friends, he has said he wasn't following motogp too much during that time period so you couldn't be sure of that. does this mean anything? does it tell you anything? well, no, but it's just a pleasing thought to me. I like that. oh also 'provoking particularly aggressive riders isn't a good idea' is kinda a funny take from casey? like, he of all people would hate the idea of being cowed by someone's reputation like that... casey's right that provoking fast riders can potentially be dangerous, but y'know I do think that's probably not news to anyone almost nine years later. um. that's all I've got I think

[hanzajesthanza]

Bez krwi nie ma wampira. Jest to substancja, która decyduje o jego istnieniu, podobnie jak o istnieniu człowieka. Without blood there is no vampire. It is this substance which determines his existence, just as it does the existence of a human.

Maria Janion. "6. Krew i ciało," in Wampir: Biografia symboliczna. ("6. Blood and body," in Vampire: A Symbolic Biography.)

[stop-breaking-my-heart-dragonage]

Alistair: So I'm not going with you, I see. Any particular reason? Tabris: I'm not going to risk you getting hurt, Alistair. Alistair: And you think I want you going in there and sacrificing yourself? You think I want you to die!? But there's no use arguing with you, is there? We don't have time... and you are a stubborn, stubborn woman. Tabris: You would do something foolish. Alistair: Maybe… I guess we'll never know now, will we? I guess this is the last chance we'll get… before this is finished, one way or another. Be careful in there. Tabris: I love you, Alistair. Alistair:

Guess who made the ultimate sacrifice...?

Me. It was me.

I made the ultimate sacrifice.

The achievement wasn't worth it.