#ITS SO INCONSISTENT GAH

[cowardlybean]

this is a good handful of months old now but I never posted this sequence so

[hirazuki]

Okay, see, the thing about your story ending on a negative/dystopian/'despite everything that's happened nothing has changed in society' note and doing so successfully? It needs to have been set up for that in the first place, and it needs to be done in an intentional manner.

I have nothing against works that reinforce how cruel/meaningless/pointless/etc. the world is -- I enjoy a fair few! -- but the works themselves need to be some sort of commentary about it; the plot might be demonstrative of the futility of everything, but the story never should. It should take that and build on it and use it to make a statement, underscore a point, etc. to its readers. Having everything carry on business-as-usual without acknowledging it, especially in a genre that's generally meant to conclude on optimistic, uplifting, and hopeful notes, comes off as callous and in direct opposition with the values it extols.

Plus, the story itself should never be futile because, then, well, it never mattered as a work and it makes no difference if you've read it or not. Which... that's just a badly written story lmao.

[smallidarityfan]

hii i don't remember you mentioning it but do you maybe have a smallidarity playlist?? or know a good one cause i need to find more songs that remind me of them <3

GOSHHH if my music taste wasn't so nitpicky and inconsistent i promise you i would build one just for this ask 😭

i do have some individual songs that kind of remind me of smallidarity that's not very consistent in genre nor enough for a playlist im afraid 😭

^ This one is them in Esmp 2 to me (if you dig into the comments somewhere someone posted the lyrics that you can translate)

^ tsundere joel.......

^ the vibe of Laufey's songs don't explicitly remind me of smallidarity but i felt the lyrics of this one kinda do yk

^ This one is both life!series Scarian and limlife!Smallidarity to me (like of Joel realising the canary curse on Jimmy and the impending grief of it) (for Scarian its pretty self-explanatory)

^ ...... ermmmm haha... (this one is jimmy coded for reasons i will not vocalize)

^ GAH........ GOSH........... THIS ONE........

^ two gay people on motorbikes...

^ I remember listening to this song and thinking about smallidarity from Jimmy's end— like this is how Jimmy's side of smallidarity is to me even though none of the lyrics correlate with their specific dynamic. they're cute okay

^ Sorry to send you back to 2016 but GOSH IT WORKS FOR THEM

^ smallidarity aren't really the type to get majorly jealous over each other. but in my head they.. could be okay . . . .

[waitmyturtles]

Well. Okay. The Promise, episode 10 (finale), gave us… stuff to think about. Lots of mismatched, incongruous, random, unconnected, any other synonym — stuff.

I’m in mourning, not for the show ending (I’m so glad it’s over), but for the damn potential of the show. It could have been SO. MUCH. BETTER. Would it have been better if it weren’t a commercial? Likely. Would it have been better if the show cared for its characters? VERY LIKELY.

I was hooked originally for the nostalgia aspect of the show, the reflections on Nan and Phu’s childhood, how Phu stayed in Chiang Mai during those 10 years away, the connection to village life, how that reminded me of my childhood while visiting SE Asia. I was hooked to learn about a slice of Thai food culture in coffee cultivation and how beautifully it was depicted.

The show was filmed gorgeously! Khom Kongkiat, my otherwise dear Uncle Tong, clearly has respect and awe for this slice of Thai rural life.

But, fuck, man. The characters and their stories were clearly secondary to the priority of selling the damn skincare, but ALSO — I’d argue that any sensible journey of emotional growth was rendered secondary to this seeming NEED for these UNNECESSARY spikes of INCONGRUENT DRAMA that, I don’t know, maybe Uncle Tong thought he needed to juice up the show, to mix it up from the commercial aspect?

SO MUCH of the finale was unnecessary. Khunkhao in a knife fight?! Nan’s plane inexplicably disappearing?! And then, PHU (should we be surprised?) having the SHEER. AUDACITY. to scold Nan for trying to surprise Phu on his birthday, and like, LITERALLY getting himself ACCIDENTALLY (not on purpose, PHU) in a disappearing plane situation? Phu — are you my mother? Even in times of utter relief and joy, you’re still gonna be a titchy, whiny B? Get TFOH, PLEASE, MAN.

Mayyyybe I can understand how things reconciled between Phu and Khunkhao, but even that played out inconsistently fast. I mean — they were fighting over the same guy. And then you’re huggin’ it out. Now, I get that finding your missing brother, and finding FAMILY, would be important. That could have been a key point that the show could have leveraged — that, if Nan were to decide to go to China, that Phu would not be alone, as Khunkhao himself said.

But then — the show sends Khunkhao away? And gets him into a knife fight? Only to meet another guy named Nan Fah? Good lord, OKAY.

And then? Nan is throwing ALL THE BONES to Phu for Phu to declare his committed love to Nan, awlll of them. How can Phu POSSIBLY MISS? TELL NAN YOU WANT NAN TO STAY! You two can have a reasonable conversation about careers and whatnot! But, Phu! Nan — FOR ONCE, OMG — wants to hear that YOU, PHU, DO NOT WANT TO BE SEPARATED FROM NAN. Just tell the homeboy, one time!

Phu can’t even pull that off. (As @respectthepetty rightly noted, all of this bullshit is not the actors’ fault — they did fantastically for the crap writing they got.)

And finally, FINALLY (IT TOOK YOU 10 EPISODES!!!), Phu can tell Nan that he promises to wait for Nan, to NOT LEAVE, that he will support Nan in Nan’s career. My gawd. Listen — if the writing was truly meant to indicate that Phu was a whiny, selfish B, at least THAT came off accurately and successfully. GAH.

And then Nan tries to do something sweet for Phu, coming back to surprise Phu — then gets himself lost in the air (???) (with no explanation as to how that all happened!), and Phu SCOLDS him — and then they bonk. OH. KAY.

Jeezus. It’s making me madder as I’m writing about it, ha. (And unfortunately, due to being in public places at the time of this writing, I haven’t even enjoyed the sessy parts — DOUBLE GAH!)

Listen, I LOVED the actors in this show. Take this show with Step By Step, and we’ve had some candy for those of us who really want to see more actors in their 30s and 40s in BLs. I really loved having a show with two fabulous-looking dudes working in work lives, and figuring out their shit in that context.

But The Promise undermined real emotional growth here. Unless Phu, this entire time, was MEANT to be, say, an Arthit-like character from SOTUS — all brick wall, not a single emotional point to give, totally self-absorbed — I mean. Now that I write that, I realize it’s true. He WAS intentionally written like that. I don’t want to believe it, but it has to be that way — for a character to scold his partner after the partner got into a near-death (we assume) plane situation. I’m shaking my damn head.

This show has so much potential. I am absolutely throwing my cup of kopi at the screen. I haven’t felt this negative about a show in a while — and I’m watching SOTUS S. I’m really bummed, because this show could have done so, so much more about internalized fear, maybe even internalized homophobia, and ran with it. It ran away from it.

[hanagatana]

gah i feel so bad about my artstyle and art in general after looking at something with a Very distinct style and aesthetics ..... idk maybe i shoudve quitted my uni to make a noticeable progress but now im at my final year and its kinda too late

i feel like my hands and eyes are malfunctioning in some way like i try to study specific features in faces and such and eradicate mistakes YET they keep reoccuring THE MOMENT i lose my focus and draw with no refs

and yeah i get that some of my pics do in fact look okay and sometimes even good but gosh thats SO inconsistent as there were multiple people inside my head with different drawing skills and i cant control whos taking the turn when i grab my pen. fucking fascinating.

[pattykrabbies]

Thank you @randomslasher​ for giving me permission to read a fic of yours! When I told you about wanting to do a read over of something you wrote, I was torn between two fics: Thesbian and Storms. I decided to read Storms! It’s really hecking adorable and I hope I did it justice haha

You guys are free to listen to the audio of it here, but I definitely recommend listening to it on soundcloud because this is almost 18 minutes long

This is the first time I’ve ever done this so do share your thoughts about this and if you listened to this all the way through I love you 

Stay rad my friends *finger guns*

Storms Fic

Soundcloud

[darwinquark]

I just want to let you know that your fic TKoF is just everything I've ever wanted in a Jeronica fic. Incredibly written - so delicate and at a perfect pace. The complexity you give the characters is so on point; it's still grounded to the way that they are portrayed on the show (so it's easy to picture the characters in the scenes that you write), but you take them to a whole new level of depth - depth that they deserve! Do you have an idea of when your next chapter will be up? :)

gah, what an absolutely gutting message (in the best way!) - thank you so much for this. I'm always convinced I'm either dragging or forcing something when I'm writing those chapters, so it's great to hear that the pace is working for you. I feel like Jughead and Veronica have so much built-in complexity just by nature of all the tropes they inhabit - the ice queen lit snob with a heart of gold and the wrong-side-of-the-tracks outcast who's a total nerd - and the show is just constantly selling them short by having them repeat the same storylines over and over again. I feel like way more effort is put into fleshing out Archie and Betty and giving them all these different flavors (oftentimes in a way that's inconsistent and unbelievable tbh), but Jughead's restricted to the hardboiled obsessive writer and Veronica's restricted to the money-minded girl boss and it makes no sense because they both started out as so much more than that? in any case, I'm happy to dive into all those unexplored complexities and I'm so thrilled you seem to be enjoying the process 😂 thanks again so much for the message, and next chapter is tbd but def on its way.

[mallowstep]

I'd love to hear some ✨StarClan Slander✨ from you

starclan fucking sucks and i'm not afraid to say it.

ugh. where to begin.

okay, starclan sucks in a lot of different ways. like, a lot. it sucks from a narrative perspective, it sucks from a lives-of-cats perpsective, and it sucks from a worldbuilding perspective.

like: starclan is incredibly inconsistent as worldbuilding. it. gah. that part is most in my control when i write, so i try to really like. maximize said control. but if you compare the description of fireheart getting his nine lives to any modern starclan scene, it pisses me off. starclan is so fucking Cool, and now it's not.

i could go on for a while, but it's more of the same.

and then from a narrative perspective like. it causes so many problems. and i don't mean starclan causes problems for the characters, i mean starclan is simultaneously the cause of a lot of problems while the narrative wants us to believe they are the good guys. starclan causing problems? interesting. starclan causing problems but they're Very Good Actually? lazy.

this is a small thing but like it bothered in tbc? okay so. the fact that the clans' relationship to starclan has changed doesn't bother me. it's really interesting. they've been through this time of massive upheaval, something which often correlates with this uptick in spirituality.

i do not need convincing to believe that as the clans have gone through these past ten or fifteen years, with an exodus and the whole great battle (even setting aside the religious implications and just focusing on: big battle, lots of betrayal, lots of death), and everything with skyclan and darktail, yeah!

like, there was a spiritualism wave in the us after the civil war because that's what people/humanized cats do in those times. they latch on to spirituality and religion. why do you think witchcraft is on an uptick again in modern times?

however the problem is the Narrative never acknowledges this, which makes it feel not like an intentional culture change but authors being lazy. i'm not sure what's worse: authors just leaning on starclan because it's interesting and easy, or authors simply failing to convey the nuances of culture change.

whichever makes the erins sound better, pick that one. i have no lost love for them, but i try to keep my criticisms factual.

anyway, i digress, here's my favourite example:

in tbc, it's this Big Deal how the moonpool is the place of the medicine cats, and other cats cannot enter, Nope No Sir, which, like, really fucking confused me.

what?

do leaders not speak with starclan anymore? is that. is that not a thing?

i mean, in tpb, leaders visit the moonstone all the time. apprentices visit it before coming warriors. it's pretty normal.

and i'm fine with the culture of the clans changing for the moonpool to be a medicine cat exclusive: that does not fundamentally bother me. there's even the smallest nod to this idea in po3, during outcast, when they mention that the tradition of going to the moonstone/pool has fallen out of favour, and maybe that's bad.

and like, yeah, okay: i don't really understand Why it fell out of favour, especially in thunderclan. thunderclan had the Longest journey to the moonstone, and now they have either the shortest journey or one of the shortest, so there's really no excuse, but like. that's diaspora, you lose things, i'm okay with that.

what i'm not okay with is the sudden transformation of the moonpool to a Holy Place only Medicine Cats can touch. like, mothwing has been to the moonstone: she knows this isn't how it was. the others are young enough to not know, but then, when did this idea get started? who put it in their heads? why?

jayfeather has had so much pov, it wouldn't be hard to explain. he could've even taught alderpaw about it. or something could've been slipped into an early shadowpaw chapter. it really would not have taken much: a single line in outcast or something was all i needed to accept the moonstone/pool visitation tradition was dead (even if i think it should've continued), but unless i've forgotten, this is just. never explained.

this is how it Always Was (even though it wasn't, and there are cats who should Know it wasn't).

heck! heck! mistystar shared tongues with starclan in her novella. i don't remember where riverclan was during this scene in tbc, but my point is more. someone should've been able to say something. anything.

probably before the actual scene, given how few cats would know about this: bramblestar should since he was made a warrior in the forest territory, but i'll give the other leaders a pass. all i need is like. one line. from one cat. that's it. that's all i need.

finally, starclan obviously is uhhh. evil? it's evil, right, we can all agree? there is no evil starclan au we're In the evil starclan au, i should write a good starclan au.

the thing about this one is like. it's a product of the others. if starclan wasn't Real and Tangible, then like. then like. it wouldn't matter that they gave shitty advice and did terrible things, because now you just have cats dreaming of others, searching for answers in the Strict Code, and that would all make sense.

(did that paragraph like. read? i can't tell. basically, if starclan wasn't confirmed as a real thing with real dead cats, i would be fine with starclan cats being shitty and ooc, because now it's not actual cats we know and love, it's other cats' perceptions, memories, and inferences of them as they search their ancestors for guidance from the warrior code.

so of course their advice is going to be terrible and inconsistent and leafpool is going to decide spottedleaf said she should have kits and then starclan is going to backflip when the kits are born: all of that makes complete sense as long as starclan isn't an actual place. as long as it's just religion, just dreams and omens, there is no problem with that.)

and then if starclan like. if their role in the clans had been covered more thoroughly by the narrative. if how they gave shitty advice a lot was covered. i would also be okay with it.

but the best we get is mothwing's whole "yo uh. starclan doesn't save cats. i save fucking cats. give me my god damn credit for saving your fucking life." like that's a bad thing no. mothwing. queen. please continue ur so right.

and just as a cherry on top, the ableism in starclan is exhausting. it's its own thing, really, but like. i was talking with @foxstride about this. and like. how disabled cats will just have their disabilities erased.

personally, i'm okay with briarlight not being disabled in starclan. i think that makes sense for her character. i think it is Bad that the narrative's response to that was "now that she's dead she's finally happy again!", it should have been "thunderclan failed to give briarlight the actual support she needed to be happy", but the fact that she's not disabled in starclan doesn't actually bother me.

she was sick basically 100% of the time after her accident, and thunderclan was really shitty to her. do you remember how happy she was to "get" to sleep in the warriors' den? she was a fucking warrior that was her right.

thunderclan failed her, but the takeaway is "she couldn't be happy until she was dead and her disability was magicked away." that's bad. that's. i'm not okay with that part of it.

(briarlight deserves so much better than thunderclan.)

but for pretty much every other instance of it, there's none of that. maybe, maybe, you could make a similar argument for cinderpelt, but i would disagree with it.

my cinderpelt opinion is and always has been: she would never have chosen the path of being a medicine cat for herself, but she ultimately finds happiness and fulfillment with it. like, it wasn't right that she was forced to become a medicine cat because of her accident, but it was something she did ultimately enjoy and was happy to dedicate her life to. if she was given the chance to become a warrior after she had been a medicine cat for a while, she wouldn't have taken it.

it's part of why when i'm doing like. big time aus for warriors i still make her a medicine cat. because i like her growing to love it. i like that it's not right, how it happens, but she still loves it eventually. it's a very interesting idea to me that there aren't many characters to explore it through. jayfeather and alderheart are similar, but not in the same way. anyway i'm rambling because these are all the things i thought about when writing stolag, back on topic.

so i don't think cinderpelt should have her disability poofed by starclan, i think she should keep it. i also think that cats who are injured and then aren't disabiled in starclan should be representitve of that. they should be the age before they got injured.

briarlight should be apprentice aged, a hypo-cinderpelt should also be apprentice aged. this is something i'm fine with. i make hollyleaf apprentice aged in starclan because i think she was happiest before the ending of po3.

moving on: snowkit? can apparently hear? wtf?

and y'all already know how much i hate that jayfeather can see in his dreams. i said No that's Not Canon anymore and no one (no one) can stop me.

in conclusion: starclan is bad in a lot of ways, and if it weren't so damn inconsistently bad, i think i wouldn't hate it half as much.

<3

[scribblesandsnark]

“Days Gone Bye” (TWD 1.1)

There’s so much about “Days Gone Bye” that is well done – not least because it operates primarily on silence and visuals rather than the preachy dialogue that takes over down the road. (Yes, season 2, I’m looking at you.) That said, not gonna lie, it took me bloody ages to figure out where the opening scene falls in Rick’s post-hospital, pre-Atlanta adventures. (And when I say ages, what I really mean is it took me about six or eight times watching the episode. Ye gods.)

I feel like Rick might have lucked out in the apocalypse. He’s a cop, so there’s obviously a uniform to wear as he waltzes off into the unknown. What would you opt to put on if you were in his shoes and didn’t have a uniform to default to? (Personally, I’ve realised I have a serious lack of practical apocalypse shoes on hand. Although I’m inclined to think that my high heels would come in handy for breaking dead limbs and stomping in undead brains, so there’s that to consider.)

Burnt out and/or flipped cars are popular for set design in post-apo/dystopian TV and films, as are buildings with blasted out/shattered windows, but until fairly recently I’d always viewed them as sort of abstract decorations without really registering how they might get that way. Indeed, in earlier drafts I spent some time snarking about how the zompocalypse must infect people’s driving abilities (a terrifying thought considering the actual driving ability of your average non-zompocalypse-affected person) and, to quote myself,

Given the amount of fire damaged/cars upturned/miscellaneous damage inflicted on cars, you’d think that fcking flamethrowers and grenades and rocket launchers were being wielded by random Georgian citizens as they frolicked through the streets escaping the dead.

But this year [2020], between the port explosion in Beiruit, which flipped cars with the force of the blast and turned high rises into ghouls with hundreds of gaping mouths, and the fires in California, leaving burnt-out hulks in their wake, it’s really come home to me how easy and careless that kind of destruction can be – and how swiftly it can come to be seen as a norm. No flamethrowers or grenades necessary.

Even the empty streets and the silence we’re greeted with in this opening scene, as Rick drives down a barren street and walks through an abandoned campsite, now has more resonance since the 2020 lockdowns brought that apocalyptic empty street into reality. I don’t think I’d ever really thought to walk down the middle of a street before, because, you know, traffic – and yet for a time, when there were no cars on the road and people were hidden away in their homes, that became a new normal. There was a freedom in knowing you could walk in the middle of the road with almost no risk, because all normal rules had been suspended indefinitely. Why stick to the sidewalk when you know a car’s unlikely to drive through?

I guess apocalyptic fiction only ever seems apocalyptic and unimaginable until the real world catches up.

There are a lot of things I could say about this opening scene, aside from the great visceral pleasure of getting absorbed by the camera work, feeling one with Rick as we witness the destruction, the abandonment, the death… There’s a stillness that I wish we saw more of in the later episodes. The introduction of the little walker girl sets up Rick’s hope and his despair in a wonderful way. Having the first appearance and first death of a walker be a little girl in her jammies really shows us just how much the world has been turned on its head – Rick’s a police officer, whose job is to help people (ideally, at any rate), and the realisation that in this new world the only way to help is to kill those he used to protect sets up a(n albeit inconsistent) through-line for the rest of the series.

So yeah, I could wax lyrical about the excellent beginning of “Days Gone Bye” – but because I’m a snarky arsehole, I’m going to talk about the dead. And I’m going to do so with the caveat that while I’ve read some of the behind-the-scenes commentary etc., I am not actually a Walking Deadhead, and consequently do not have at my fingertips the reasons why certain production decisions were made.

There’s an oddity in the first…two seasons? when it comes to cars and the dead, in that there are a startling number of people who seem to have just…died, while in the driver’s seat of their cars. We see two clear examples in the opening scene, as Rick passes between two cars, facing opposite directions, each with their own definitely dead driver slumped at the wheel. This appears, rather more egregiously, in the traffic snarl at the start of season 2, but for the moment we’ll stick with season 1. The camera’s shown us an abandoned camp, any number of cars that seem to have become part of stationary living. Yet we’ve got two dead people behind the wheel, in cars facing opposite directions. Now, I’m not disputing that people could die at the wheel. As the show later goes on to show us, you can get chomped, die, and resurrect within minutes. The problem is in the fact that a proportionally ridiculous number of people seem to die at the wheel. I suppose the logical conclusion is that said individuals stupidly had their windows down and their arms out, got chomped, and sent away the rest of the car’s occupants or anyone else in the vicinity, and then opted to just hang out in the car until death – at which point zombrain kicks in and any attempt to use a door handle is moot. (See, e.g., the number of zoms hanging out in closed cars.) Combine that with people more likely than this show’s putative heroes to shoot someone who’s been infected in the head before they turn and simply move on… Eh. I suppose it’s plausible. It’s just not very realistic. (Not least because oh my god, there are undead people, roll up your fucking window you fucking idiot. I know it’s hot in Georgia but roll those windows up, babe. You might sweat, but at least a stealth zom won’t use your hand for a snack. Gah.)

…not going to comment on the inconsistent zombehaviour in which a smolzom stops to pick up her teddy (see, later, other zoms climbing ladders, scaling fences, and using rocks to bash through windows – and in one instance, tugging her zip hoodie back up over her arm). Instead, my issue is with smolzom’s slippers. How has she not lost those by now??

(Total aside, but I’ve been bingeing L&O:SVU lately, and boy howdy do a lot of TWD people pop up like daisies there. Daryl, Shane, Noah, Dale, Beth, Lori, Amy, Tyreese, Lizzie, Liza (tbf from FTWD)…)

The fries that Rick and Shane are eating just look sad and wimpy and not worthy of eating. Do better, cops. (Do better, fries.) Really, it’s almost a surprise they’re not nomming doughnuts and coffee. There’s no doubt that the two are meant to be close, though; you have to be close to dab your fry in your partner’s ketchup (oh no, Lori).

Jon Bernthal is a good actor. I just wish they hadn’t given him a character who was so all over the place. (I’ll delve more into this in later episodes.) The first scene he appears in, after the opening credits, clearly sets him up as a chauvinistic dick, in contrast to pauvre Rick, whose relationship with his wife is suffering – and, critically, this is not because of Rick, but because of Lori. Her first introduction as a character is as a woman at odds with her husband – and the fact that her husband is in law enforcement really should not be glossed over here, not given America’s contentious relationship with LEOs. (We’ll get back to Rick and Shane eventually.) It’s no secret that spouses of people in law enforcement, or in the military, often struggle because their partners are always absent. I’m not trying to apply blame, here; law enforcement and military positions require a lot, and there is absolutely a high degree of trauma that can result due to the kind of work in which they engage. That said, the way Lori is set up as the antagonist from the get-go is just…distasteful. Rick is presented as reasonable, as wanting to try to make things right, as trying to do what Lori wants and yet always being the bad guy. The sad thing is that Lori is no one’s favourite character, and yet the character never had a chance. She was fucked over long before she actually turned up on screen, ensuring that our perspective of her is negative from the start.  In a show that takes years to establish strong women, Lori stands out as a particularly egregious example of a woman, wife, and mother who realistically could have been a positive representation of a woman that instead was turned into a caricature everyone loves to hate. (We’ll get to Andrea eventually, I promise.)

I think perhaps, most egregiously, the fact that Rick says something like “It’s like she’s pissed at me and I don’t know why” sets up Lori as being irrational and Rick as being patient and anxious to fix things without knowing why. Lori is fucked in terms of character development from before she ever  appears on screen and never has the opportunity to claw back some of that lost ground. Rick literally labels her as cruel – and cruel in front of their son, to boot. Who doesn’t view a person cruel to their child as a villain? Gah. Lori was absolutely fucked by merit of being Rick’s wife.  And it’s really a shame, because every so often Sarah Wayne Callies absolutely kills it (no pun intended, but leading up to Lori’s death is perhaps the character’s best scene).

Of course, too, the whole convo between Shane and Rick sets up Shane as a “fuck me, women, man” – and yeah, absolutely, this attitude ends up extrapolated to his behaviour towards people in general. Yes, it bonds our two good ol’ boy policemen as lads who love each other and try to jive each other into better moods but are sensitive enough to listen to actual emotional shit… But ultimately it establishes Shane as a dick and Rick as a victim. Shane’s absolute disdain for women’s emotion/women talking about their emotions is in some ways bizarre when you look at his future relationship with Lori – and yet at the same time, that disdain echoes through all of anything he does with Lori, with Carl, and with Rick in future.

Okay, so, let’s move on to the fuckfest in which Rick gets shot. (Twice, Lord help me. These fuckers are alarmingly inept.)

Pro: they fling out the spikey “stop the bad guy” chains.

Con: …well, at least one dude doesn’t know about the safety, so that’s … not ideal. (His death: not surprising.)

Pro: Rick can apparently drive backwards with skill. I can’t even back around a corner.

Con: Leon is a fucking moron.

Pro: Rick and Shane disposed of their hats??

Con: what happens to the Black cop? Why is he the only one we don’t know the fate of? (See TWD’s treatment of Black actors in general…)

Pro: the car does not flip in their general direction.

Con: pretty much everything else in this scene.

I dunno about the average viewer, but I feel like the two apparently competent cops – Shane and Rick – should each be assigned to one of the shitty cops, rather than riding together, because really, do you want cops rolling in to save you when they clearly don’t know the first thing about gun operation? (Yes, as any number of viewers have pointed out, there’s no safety on the gun that Leon is holding, but the fundamental point is to articulate how much of a fuck-up he is as a cop. If you’re out in the field and don’t know how your piece works, should you even be out there? Don’t they give cops gun training? You’d hope so…yikes. Although I guess it does sort of set up the absolute nightmare of season 2’s gun control plot line. (Oh god, season 2. Help.))

Am I the only one amused by the name Leon Basset? He’s a cat and a dog at once!

It takes Rick and Shane and co. an embarrassingly long time to put down the baddies – one of whom manages to hit a cop in a spot not covered by his vest, after having been flipped violently upside down in a car crash. Seriously, the fact these dudes are able to crawl out of the car and start merrily firing away, much less actually hit someone, is fucking insane. Have they trained in post-car crash shooting? I have to conclude they have, because otherwise the fact they have better aim than the multiple cops shooting at them is absurd. (Also hilarious: bad dude #1 crawls out of the completely totalled, upside-down car with, like, a scratch on his cheek. Until bad dude #2 takes a shotgun blast the chest, he appears to have lucked out with almost zero wounds from the crash. Are we sure *they* aren’t actually already dead??) And really, Rick’s an idiot in this scene – his fellow cops are intelligently hanging out by the cop cars, using them for cover, while Rick displays a high degree of absolute idiocy in waltzing straight out into the open; it’s made even worse by the fact that he’s brandishing his cute little Colt Python revolver while at least two of the cops behind him are wielding shotguns.

Bad copping, Rick. Cop better, please.

There are several shots right before Rick gets shot the first time where the camera angle makes it appear that Shane has his shotgun pointed straight at Rick, including the actual frame where he *does* get shot in the vest – when he’s shot in the side closer to Shane than the unnamed assailant. Now, this is probably due to bad blocking, although you’d think Rick would know better than to walk directly between the baddies and his fellow cops when there’s active gunfire, since it makes him a liability (seriously, I doubt the efficacy of the cop training programme in whatever bit of Georgia this is), but with the benefit of hindsight you could also see it as foreshadowing the eventual deterioration of Rick and Shane’s relationship. Think about the scene in “Wildfire,” the penultimate episode of the season, when Shane and Rick are in the woods doing a sweep, and Shane sights down that shotgun at Rick walking through the trees ahead of him for a long moment before Dale turns up. In that later episode (and moving on increasingly through all of Season 2), Shane wants Rick out of the way, but it takes a very long time in terms of screen hours to actually get around to making his final move. Ironically, it’s only ever here in the opening episode, following Shane appearing to be aiming through Rick’s back at the assailants, that Shane ever successfully gets Rick out of the way. Unintentionally, of course, but there is nevertheless an odd parallelism created here due to blocking and weapon of choice.

Dammit, Shane.

You know, on thinking it over, I’m surprised that this police force functions at all. Yes, the dispatcher only noted two individuals in the car, but if I’ve learned anything from watching procedurals it’s that before stopping to chat about anything you clear every possible place an unknown assailant could be hiding. I’d think that would especially be the case for a car chase, because how accurately can you see inside a speeding car? (That’s a legitimate question; I have no idea.) And actually, entirely aside from the possible existence of a third assailant, if you shoot someone with a gun, surely the follow-up after they’ve gone down is to immediately approach, ensure any weapons are out of arms’ reach, ascertain if the individual is dead, and if not, call immediately for medical attention. I know the baddies took several shots to the chest, but come on. They also emerged almost entirely unscathed from a totalled car, so clearly they’re already marked as practically unkillable. And yeah, following procedure wouldn’t have allowed Rick to get dramatically shot for real after the first fake-out, but they could easily have had him get dramatically and unexpectedly shot by the third dude when following procedure and checking to see the other two were dead. Most of the dialogue could have been retained as well. But oh well. I guess the show sets up the failure of authority figures to function effectively from the very start; not following procedure proves to be useful to Rick, considering his future actions as leader of the Merry Undead crew.

Further proof these cops don’t know how to cop: literally no one notices the third dude crawl out of the car, not even to go “hey!” Dude literally has enough time to crawl out on his hands and knees, stand up, point a gun, and actually hit his target before anyone (aka Shane) so much as notices his existence. There are at least three other cop cars in the vicinity – the other car that arrived with Rick and Shane (the “wait what’s a safety” cop and his partner) and the two cars that were chasing the criminals in the first place (four more dudes) – and yet apparently no one noticed a third guy standing up with a gun in his hand. And yeah, I’ll cut some of them a bit of a break on the theory that they probably couldn’t see the guy until he stood up because of the car in the way, but with seven people standing, *someone* should have seen him. Given Shane’s angle when he shoots, the two cops behind him definitely should have noticed something. The fact that someone only shouts to move in after Rick gets shot is just…shoddy copping. Seriously, this is the kind of stupidity that leads you to wish characters would just die. I’m sure someone would miss these people, but the world isn’t likely to notice they’ve gone. (Also, Shane blowing away the third dude on the first shot is pretty much the only time any of these professionals have actually hit their target immediately. Glad to know the safety of the Merry Undead crew is in the hands of people with worse aim than people flung around in a totalled car. Hurray!)

I’ve decided that after Shane goes with Rick to hospital in the ambulance, the rest of the terrible cops get eaten by the reanimated baddie crew. It’s what they deserve, really.

Moving right along…

Rick has a frigging massive hospital room. Either he or Lori is secretly a drug runner, or else the local cops have some pretty sweet health insurance. Lucky for Rick; if he’d been in a shared room or on one of those corridors with multiple beds separated by curtains, he’d have been walker munchies asap. Unforeseen side-effects of the zompocalypse: healthcare edition.

I…am not going to deal with the time issues of Rick being in hospital and then waking up to a hellscape. Suspension of belief, yeah?

I think the weirdest thing in the cut from Shane with the flowers to Rick waking up on the bed is the silence. The background beep of the machines has vanished, telling us the power’s gone off; the off-screen background hospital noise – heard most notably in the undiscernible PA behind Shane talking – has also vanished. Rick’s harsh breathing under Shane’s words also vanishes when the shot does, though I’m not sure if that’s meant to suggest Rick is better, worse, or otherwise. The scene doesn’t show it, but it sounds vaguely like a ventilator is functioning when Shane’s in the room, which would suggest Rick’s still hooked up to breathing support following surgery; if that’s the case, Rick was taken off the ventilator to breathe on his own at some point after that, since he wakes up only with oxygen to his nose. The shift from all that background noise to absolute silence is incredibly effective, because though we can’t register it visually, and may not consciously notice the shift in audible sounds, it nevertheless conveys to the viewer that something has changed before Rick even opens his mouth.

Horrifying thought, though, being stuck in hospital in Georgia without aircon. (I’d melt. Not just in hospital, but in general. Heat and humidity are not my friends.) Frankly, I’m surprised Rick manages to get any words out of his mouth given he’s probably a wee bit on the thirsty side; my mouth goes a bit dry and I might as well be trying to talk through a damn desert for all the words I manage.

It’s kind of amusing that there’s a lingering shot of the clock on the wall. Yeah, it adds to Rick’s confusion and disorientation because dammit, he can’t even tell what time it is – and what is the world without timekeeping?? – but what are the odds it happened to run out of battery in time to inconvenience the last man standing in the zompocalypse? “Oh no! I’ve missed the end of the world! Ah well, better late than never.”

Helpful that Rick woke up during the day – can you imagine how disorienting it would have been to wake up in pitch dark with zero sound? Anyone who lives in a vaguely urban or suburban area is almost entirely unaccustomed to the dominance of both anymore; when I moved back to suburbia after living in a sort of downtown-y bit of an offshoot of the nearest city, I had serious issues for months because at night everything was so quiet and so dark, especially during the period when the house next door was unoccupied. Seriously creepy. (Although I’ve also seen raccoons, deer, and a coyote as well as the ubiquitous squirrels and birds and neighbourhood cats, so that’s exciting. Actually, weirdly, there’s a surprising dearth of animals, to say nothing of pets, floating around in the apocalypse. We see dogs occasionally as time goes on, running about the streets of Atlanta, eating the dead, getting eaten when times are desperate; deer pop up every now and then, and crows alight ominously all over the place, but…where are all the dead goldfish? The cats??)

Does Rick just have a super special water faucet in his private bathroom, or are the utilities still working? (Nice to immediately have a way to quench his thirst. It also apparently gives him super strength, since he doesn’t keel over again despite the probable weeks he’s been flopped out in bed not using his muscles.) Alexandria has running water, but if I recall correctly it was also designed as self-sustaining. Hospitals usually have generators, since if the power cuts for whatever reason (earthquake, hurricane, T-rex attack) you want to make sure a bunch of people don’t cut out as well as a result, but as far as I’m aware that…doesn’t affect the water systems? (I am definitely not a water engineer. Are there water engineers?) And since he later goes down stairs to get out of the hospital, is there really a system still functioning that pumps water up several stories when the electricity appears to be dead? Convenient water is convenient.

Obviously there must be a generator or some kind of power still functioning, since there are some lights on in the hall, complete with requisite horror-themed buzzing and flickering. (Help, I’m having flashbacks of my mother’s kitchen.) Useful, in any case, since otherwise Ricky boy would be tripping over the debris in the hall before he got to the nurse’s station. (I guess we’ll put his continued unclothed state down to disorientation, but if I looked out my door and saw that much of a hallway disaster, I think I’d find some shoes first. Yikes.)

The clock at the nurse’s station has also stopped. These are battery-run, guys, they don’t go off when the power does. Speaking of electronics, though – it’s 2010, right? Why doesn’t the nurse’s station have any computers? I mean, I got my first laptop in 2006 and I think we always had a family computer when I was growing up, so it’s not like this predates the computer era. Actually, that’s a point – in all of the places that the Merry Undead crew break into/crash at, I’m struggling to think of instances of computers, laptops, mobile phones, etc. Rick has an mp3 player at the start of season 4, when he’s in his farming phase, and Olivia in…season 6? still carries her long-dead mobile around, but aside from the CDC and actual hospital-related machinery, there’s a startling lack of technology. I dunno, it just seems odd. Like the lack of feral cats.

I know Rick wants to illuminate the situation (hah), but his first thought is RUMMAGE THROUGH SHIT TO FIND MATCHES. Like, seriously, open a drawer or something, there’s probably a flashlight in there somewhere? I suppose we couldn’t spend too much time on finding lighting resources, though, considering that would delay the DRAMATIC DISCOVERY of Rick’s first dead person.

On which point – what are the walker rules for nomming a corpse, and what are the rules for reanimation? If the only way to actually put down a walker is through the brain, why isn’t our eviscerated lady corpse in the hospital undead? Her head appears entirely intact, although we might be missing a wound on the far side. (Although jeez, given how many facial bites and tears we see throughout this series, including the little girl at the beginning of this episode, how has no one snacked on her delicious face??) A single bite will kill and turn you, and some people do manage to get an initial chomp and then remain unconsumed before turning, like Sophia and the little girl at the start of the episode. But is there a maximum limit of flesh that can be consumed before a person is thoroughly dead and won’t reanimate? A severed head sans body will reanimate, as we see later with Hershel and the Whisperers’ victims, so it seems like percentage of bodily consumption can’t factor in. Certainly bike lady later in this episode is missing her entire lower half without it having affected her walkerdom eternity. Yet we have people like hospital lady corpse and T-Dog in season 3 who get more or less entirely consumed without reanimating. And that’s without even talking about all of the dead who appear to have croaked in their cars without becoming undead despite the lack of a head wound. So where’s the boundary?

At least some of this we can probably attribute to early days inconsistencies, since most shows don’t dive in with all of the rules for new worlds and supernatural creatures laid out and set in stone, but the amount of consumption has always bothered me. From the other side, too, actually, because walkers appear to be wholly driven by a single purpose: consume. So when a walker has a nice juicy item in front of them with plenty of flesh left on it, why would they leave it behind to drift off after something else? Walkers are later shown to be drawn by light, by sound, by smell (operating on the suspension of disbelief that undead would retain any of the senses of sight, hearing, or smell, but never mind), but since the underlying drive remains to consume, why would light, sound, or smell be sufficient to draw them away from a meal directly in front of them? I could see it if, for instance, a corpse were being devoured by a whole bunch of walkers and so those who couldn’t easily get to the body went “welp fuck it, Imma go follow that gunshot I just heard,” or if a body has pretty well been picked to the bones, since then there’s not anything left to consume and the drive would push on to the next. But there are plenty of times over the course of the series when walkers abandon a perfectly delicious human with plenty of meat left on the bones in order to go chase something else. I’m not saying walkers are meant to be intelligent hunters or anything, since as Jenner shows us there’s just some sad little sparkles at the brainstem that are still operating, but if you boil it down to the most basic drive, walkers are driven to consume, and it makes little sense that they’d abandon something consumable in front of them that’s a sure thing to chase something else (I could see maybe abandoning an animal to chase a human, like dropping the pigs’ feet to chase after sirloin). But to leave something not completely eaten… Unless they get full? The human stomach can only contain so much at one time, so maybe there’s a default survival code that overrides the consumption drive to stop a walker eating if continuing to do so would explode the stomach. Although that doesn’t really make much sense, either, since any number of walkers are wandering around with their innards more or less exploded without it being a problem. Hmm. No real answers, there, other than that overriding logic of THE PLOT. I guess the only thing I can say with some confidence is that at least part of the walker digestive system seems to still operate, because when Rick and Daryl gut a walker to make sure it hadn’t eaten Sophia, not only is the woodchuck turned from fur and flesh into nasty black goo, the skull of the woodchuck has also been stripped clean. (Then again, I have difficulty envisioning how a walker manages to swallow an entire woodchuck skull, but that’s neither here nor there. Who’s up for woodchuck chilli??)

Anyway, back to Rick and his terrifying exploration of his new world of doom.

I have to laugh when I look at this disaster of a hospital. Did someone, in the last throes of the world ending, just take medical records and fling them everywhere? When is there ever that much paper floating around loose in a medical facility? Ye gods, Rick could learn confidential patient information! Nooooooo…

Ahem.

Like the episode’s opening scene of Rick working his way through the abandoned streets, silence is used to great effect from the time Rick wakes up through to his encounter with Morgan and Duane. The audience takes in everything along with Rick, unfettered by exposition. The silence, the dark, the emptiness, the dead – it all unfolds through Rick’s shocked and bewildered eyes. I mean, what would you do if you wandered down the hall and suddenly discovered a mostly devoured corpse? (I’d probably hurl. Ew.) Alas that so much of the series later gets bogged down by humans who never shut up. (Yes, Rick, I do mean you.)

Of course, in order to do that, the episode also, to quote CinemaSins, conveniently conveniences a bunch of its walkers. Where are they? Where they can’t hurt Rick before he knows what to do. Which is…kind of ridiculous. Logic be damned! I mean, if there’s one thing this show has been consistent about, it’s the inconsistency of its walkers.

Wait.

Man, I would not want to be walking across that floor barefoot. Ew. And ouch.

I’d be a terrible candidate for the apocalypse. I’m afraid of the dark.

I do like the background details of all the blood spattered on the walls. It’s more quiet filling in the blanks of what happened when Rick was in his coma – all that lovely show, don’t tell that later gets left by the wayside. BUT HE’S WALKING BAREFOOT THROUGH GLASS OH MY GOD PLEASE STOP AND FIND SOME SHOES AAAHHHHHHH.

PUT ON SOME DAMN SHOES.

DON’T DEAD OPEN INSIDE.

The fact that the doors are bound with a chain AND with a slat of wood just makes me laugh. I don’t think that wood’s going to do much if the chain breaks.

That’s a shockingly good manicure for a dead person. She might be stuck in a locked room for eternity but at least her nails look fab.

I know Rick is freaked out by the groaning and dead lady manicure and chained up door and blood all over the place, but charging into a pitch-black stairwell armed only with a fold of matches seems really stupid. This is perhaps the most egregious instance in this episode of convenient walker placement. The fact that Rick not only makes it down the stairs and outside without tripping and smashing his pretty face is one thing, but it’s really stunning that there are no walkers who got trapped between the stairwell doors. I guess maybe that was the military exit route so they cleared as they went (and…took the bodies with them, as well)? Then again, I’d rather rappel out a window using bedsheets than make my way through an endless stairwell of night, so…

I’m going to be *extremely* nitpicky here and wonder why Rick hasn’t noticed the smell. Between lady chewy and the not insubstantial blood puddle he walks by, you’d think there’d be at least a whiff of the smell of decomp, especially if the power and thus the aircon are out and humidity reigns supreme. Blood is a biological hazard, and it…is definitely not odourless, especially after it’s been sitting around for days. Rick does grimace when he first goes into the stairwell, implying he’s caught a whiff of the dead, but he doesn’t encounter anything going down the stairs that seems likely to have caused it (maybe the dead laid out that he encounters outside?). Scent’s an ongoing problem with this show, though; it crops up when it’s a useful narrative point, like smearing yourself with guts to escape detection or realising there’s an ocean of the dead nearby, but otherwise, not so much. Okay, yeah, maybe I can buy that after a while of living in close proximity you’d acclimate – humans are stunningly resilient – but given how quickly humans tend to get tetchy when in forced contact with disgusting smells, are you really telling me that Rick just…doesn’t notice? Or is his own “I’ve been in a coma for an indeterminate period of time” smell so bad that it overpowers the death smell? Yikes.

That said, the moments of tension when Rick’s match goes out and he’s left alone breathing in the dark of the stairwell are lovely. It carries the audience along with Rick’s fear and anxiety and confusion, knowing he knows something is hinky without actually knowing what’s happened and what’s going on, while as a viewer conversant with the horror genre you keep expecting something to happen, to lurch up out of the dark. That nothing does actually is a delightful defiance of expectations. And after a silence and darkness punctuated only by the dim, narrow light of a match and Rick’s harsh breathing, the overwhelming brightness of the outdoors combined with the sawing of the cicadas almost begs you to retreat back into the contained, comparative safety of the stairs rather than venturing out into the huge unknown of the world outside the hospital and its endless supply of the dead.

Shame that the hospital’s flickeringly dodgy power doesn’t include the EXIT sign. Aren’t those supposed to work even if nothing else does? Maybe it was crashed with whatever took out the clocks. (Hah.)

Every barefoot step Rick continues to take hurts. Like, there’s all kinds of shit on the ground, and I’m not just talking bits of wire and other stabby pieces of metal. There’s blood and guts – do you really want to be squishing that between your toes?? Also, I’ve let it go this far, but Rick is wearing his hospital gown backwards, and if he’s been in a coma he…really shouldn’t be wearing boxers (and should have been hooked up to a catheter, but I think watching Rick rip that out instead of pulling the IV from his hand might have been a bit too traumatising for the average viewer). So out here in the open air, with all the wrapped rows of the dead, we get our first obvious sign of decomp in the number of flies buzzing around, and some of the limbs look like they might be mottling from decomp (kind of hard to tell, though). I know I said I wasn’t going to get into the time problems, but I promise I’ll try to keep it to this paragraph. The fact that the hospital and town are both almost entirely deserted, as we’ll go on to see, certainly suggests a decent amount of time has passed, since it takes time for that many people to up and leave somewhere. (I’m really surprised that in this show they only ever seem to encounter major traffic pile-ups on freeways or similar; if the people in my town were trying to skedaddle, we’d all get stuck on the road outside my neighbourhood. Hell, until they put in roundabouts it backed up horrendously just for getting to the schools in the morning! You’re telling me everyone was able to get out of their neighbourhoods to get to the freeway in the first place? Bullshit.) The state of the dead half-lady Rick runs into outside also seems to support that, since she’s pretty decomposed (though weirdly looks more mummified than not, which is odd considering Georgia’s on the humid rather than the dry end of the heat spectrum). On the other hand, though, the state of decomp of the lady in the hospital hallway and the corpses outside the hospital point to not much time having passed; they’re still juicy, if you like. As the following episodes will go on to show via characters’ minimal clothing and copious amounts of sweat, Georgia is hot and humid, and I hate to tell you this, guys, but if you keel over in a climate like that, you decompose quickly. You bloat up and your skin slides right off, and it’s all extremely disgusting. But here there’s a stunning amount of intact left on these corpses considering, again, it’s Georgia. (Disclaimer: I am not a medical doctor, so my observations might not be medically valid. Then again, the very idea that dead people are wandering around eating people is … also not medically valid.) In any case, Rick should be walking through a soupy mess of liquefying human tissue seeping through the sheets wrapped around the dead (yum. One more reason to acquire footwear, mate). The bodies piled in the truck should be sliding over each other as decomposing human makes the sheets slippery. I suppose that’s a major flaw in zombie construction in this particular zompocalypse; it forgot to take account of actual decomposition in the specified climate. (The smell also ought to be enough to pretty well bowl Rick over, but again, everyone apparently has the opposite of super smell in this series, so we’ll let it slide). Of course, if corpses actually decayed like normal, they’d be rid of most of the zombies in no time.

There’s a weirdly small amount of damage that’s been done to this hospital, from what little we’re shown. The hospital scene in “TS-19” suggests that bombing of the hospital, or nearby, has commenced, but all we see is a relatively small chunk of building missing, rather oddly in the middle of a wall, a downed ambulance sign, and then a bit more horizontal damage behind the military encampment when Rick gets up the hill. You’d think they’d have kept bombing, not least to eradicate the piles of corpses, but unfortunately we never really get to see much of the early days and the military reaction; we get snippets about bombing Atlanta and see Shane and Lori watch as Atlanta’s struck, and when Daryl and Carol stalk Grady Memorial there’s at least one shot of the city where it’s clearly suffered aerial bombardment. But there’s really not a lot of engagement with the drastic measures taken to try to control the situation, just the idea that those existed. Fear the Walking Dead, from my understanding, doesn’t really do much to deal with this either, despite ostensibly aiming to initially tackle the very period of time that The Walking Dead skipped over. So that’s a shame.

The military encampment is odd. Surely you’d only bail on things like helicopters and Humvees if you absolutely had to, since otherwise they seem to me like the first thing you’d hop into as an escape route (and certainly in season 3, the Governor indicates that military playthings are highly prized). Sure, maybe your random joe couldn’t commandeer a helo, but surely joe schmo could yoink a Humvee. I mean, if I were fleeing a hospital and there were a whole military encampment hanging out in the back yard that no one was minding, I’d be inclined to hijack something and zoom away. Operation Save the Toes! If a herd had passed through, surely we’d see more damage to what remains (for instance, would that nice tent still be standing?). Points, though, for framing of Rick against the broken military might that both visually and metaphorically shows us how small he is. Okay, so I have to ask: how far away from hospital did Rick and his family live? Because he appears to walk for quite a while – with a bullet wound that’s still healing! – and their house looks like it’s firmly in a nice suburban neighbourhood. So did he walk several miles to dead half-lady and steal her bike, or did he literally just walk down the street? Maybe the unhappiness in the soles of his feet is just being overwhelmed by, well, everything. All I can say is that I ran away from home barefoot around age 8 or 9 and ended up with such bruised and blistered feet – after maybe twenty minutes of walking total – that I couldn’t go to school for several days because I couldn’t walk. And I wasn’t even recovering from a gunshot wound!

(Also, can we talk about that hospital wristlet. That sucker should have waaay more info on it. Really, if nothing else I think we can conclude that the hospital Rick was admitted to post-shooting spent all their money on giant rooms and then forgot about actually hospitalling. Do we blame that on Georgia, America, or bad TV writing?)

CORAAAL!!

Further proof of the rapid adaptation of the human species: Rick spots the bike and goes AH YES MINE, sort of clocking the half of a lady ten feet away without really being fussed; maybe an hour (?) into his re-entry into this waking nightmare of a world, he’s already become so numbed to dead bodies hanging about that it barely registers until she moves. And, mind you, while he’s seen plenty of dead people, and seen undead fingers poking through the crack between doors, this is the first undead person he’s actually seen. His reaction to just…flee is very much in line with his general “holy fuck okay moving on” attitude that we’ve seen thus far; each thing is weirder and worse than the last, layering up the horror as a surreal reality that’s made even more bizarre by the utter lack of any living people to ground him. While his collapse and “is this real?” moment at the Grimes household is, I think, a bit misplaced, it’s also really understandable because everything he’s seen is so far out of the normal realm of expectation that the only logical reaction is to question reality. He’s almost certainly both dehydrated and undernourished, on top of which he’s been utilising muscles that haven’t been used in some time; probably the most unrealistic aspect of his first hours after waking up is that he actually manages to get out of hospital and home so easily, rather than keeling over somewhere in the street and becoming Walker O’s (part of a balanced breakfast!). Although I feel like I would have hit the “wake up” whacking yourself in the head point long before getting home and realising my family wasn’t there. I think I’d be more likely to believe I’d walk through the door and my family would be out than to believe that all of the dead or the moving dead were real. Obviously the latter for Rick makes the fact his family isn’t home that much more surreal and distressing, because thus far he appears to have awoken to a world where there are no living people aside from himself, thus leading to the conclusion that if there are only the dead and himself, Lori and Carl must be dead – but I think I’d crack before getting to that point. (Though I sometimes wake up in the morning and literally can’t tell reality from what happened in my dreams, so who am I to judge?)

Weirdly as well, there’s very little in the Grimes household that tells me anything about any of the family. I know Lori and Carly frolicked off with Shane super fast when everything went to hell and took pictures and photo albums, but this house (as excellent as it is) looks very much like a set. There’s nothing really personal. It’s weird. Who are the Grimes, even? It reminds me of my ex-boyfriend’s flat. No pictures, no posters, no books (!!), nothing on the walls, no trinkets or files or any personal touches at all (please don’t be a serial killer eek). No wonder Carl settles into the apocalypse quickly and Lori has no personality other than being a disaster. They had practically no pre-pocalypse life other than “I’m Rick’s child” and “I’m Rick’s bitchy wife.”

As Rick walks back out of his empty house, you can see that the letterbox appears to be full of envelopes. Do you suppose Lori wrote a bunch of letters to people on the off-chance they’d get picked up after she and Carl left town with Shane, or do you think the post carried on even after everything else collapsed? (Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds… Nor zombies either, apparently. Now I really want a series of shorts following a postman as she strives to deliver every letter she can (well, not the bills, obvs) even as the world continues to collapse around her head.)

Okay, so if you get home and discover your family is not there, and everything is topsy turvy and haywire and omg what the hell is even happening – who just goes and plonks outside to think? Surely you’d think “hmm, okay, maybe I should check the neighbours”?

Are overhead fans on the porch a southern thing? I can’t imagine having one here in the Pacific Northwest.

Can we talk again about how absurdly lucky Rick is when it comes to the existence of walkers in this town? The only ones in the hospital are literally chained behind doors with an explicit warning to piss off. The only one he encounters on his journey from hospital to home has no legs, and thus poses minimal threat to a man able to walk (or cycle, as the case may be). The first mobile walker he sees is in the distance and hasn’t noticed him yet, and before he has a chance to shout out and put himself in danger, Morgan and Duane ex machina themselves into position to not only take out the walker but also provide medical support. (I guess Rick’s just been running on…adrenaline? And yes, I know Rick also takes a shovel to the face – we’ll ignore the fact that there’s no apparent lasting damage from a shovel to the face, good grief – but that’s a far cry from the fate of having his flesh ripped from his bones before he even knew what walkers were. Boy, would that suck.) A whole bevy of walkers turn up that evening, ostensibly because Morgan had fired a gun, but then they all vanish by morning aside from a single walker still skulking around for the convenience of whacking practice. (I wonder what would have happened if the single walker still hanging around had been Morgan’s wife. Somehow I doubt he’d have been as willing for Rick to practise his new world survival skills on her.) Quite aside from his dubious hospital survival, Rick Grimes should be dead. I really wish this could be attributed to his cop training (but we know that shit is dubious as fuck), but unfortunately he’s just a dude wandering aimlessly who gets super lucky. Sigh.

(I can’t be the only one who looks at the walker Rick sees and thinks he must be either a mortician or a goth kid. That much black? When it’s apparently warm enough in Georgia that Rick is totally fine in your not-standard-issue hospital gown and boxers? Also, thanks camera for keeping the walker blurred out so we can’t tell he’s dead (did you save on makeup?), but in retrospect it kind of makes you wonder if Rick has eye problems. Now there’s a real problem in the apocalypse.)

Two things about Duane’s first appearance. First, he was inches away from Rick; how did he get enough room to swing a shovel? Second, wtf is Duane doing shrieking for his dad? He’s been living in this world for at least a month and his mum’s a zom: he has to know that walkers are drawn to noise, yet he’s yelping out like a wounded dog here. Apocalypse better, kiddo.

Rather hilariously, it’s when Rick sees Morgan casually shoot the walker through the head that he starts to panic. OMG HE KILLED A DUDE. I feel like with everything Rick’s seen so far he ought not to jump so quickly to the assumption that Morgan killed another living dude. Then again, he did just get whacked in the face with a shovel and should probably have a concussion, so…

Convenient that Rick passes out when Morgan threatens to kill him if he doesn’t answer, since given his current state I’m not sure he could have done coherently. Note to self: when faced with difficult or awkward questions, keel over. It’ll give you time to think.

The first conversation Rick and Morgan have when Rick first wakes up tied to the bed raises far too many questions related to how long Rick’s been in hospital and how bad his wound is. I…am not going to spend much time on this, because it’s a never-ending chase with no real answers. This is the scene that rips us out of the glorious silent exploration of Rick’s new apocalyptic world and thrusts us into exposition, which at least in this case has a reason given Rick’s total ignorance of the current state of the world – but it’s still exposition.

Anyway, briefly – didn’t Rick get hit from behind, under the armpit? Shouldn’t Morgan have had to change two dressings? But there’s only one, and moreover, Rick’s original bandaging didn’t come close to covering where the original gunshot entry wound was. Magical moving bullets! Mystery wounds! Exposition! Hurray!

Ugh, reasons never to work on The Walking Dead: you have to film in Georgia, and it’s hot and disgusting and everyone sweats, even at night. Blech. Thanks but no.

Morgan’s stupid use of the gun to kill the walker provides helpful exposition, but his reason for why he did it – “it all happened so fast, I didn’t think” – doesn’t make much sense. It was one walker, with no others anywhere in the apparent vicinity, and while his son had potentially whacked down another walker, there wasn’t exactly an urgent need to use the gun. And while I’m not sure that Rick would be able to articulate the idea that what Morgan killed was something other than a living human being, the fact that he’s so insistent that it must have been a man speaks to his desperation to cling to anything resembling normalcy, while unfortunately ignoring his experience since waking up in the hospital. What do you do when you don’t have the vocabulary to articulate what you’ve seen?

As an aside, Rick chained up to the headboard wearing his boxers and hospital gown kiiinda looks like he’s ready for someone’s doctor dom fantasy playtime fetish. Good thing Morgan’s not into that, right?

There’s something deliciously hilarious about Morgan warning/threatening Rick with his tiny little knife when the backdrop is such delightfully mundane floral pillowcases. Laura Ashley does not approve!!!

Why couldn’t Morgan have found Rick a snuggie? Or, I don’t know, slippers? Or socks? Or an actual bathrobe? He’s stuck with blankie chic.

I do love that shot though.

Sidebar, your honour, I have a digression to indulge.

Morgan’s “friend, you need glasses” is kind of hilarious given that now they’re into the apocalypse, sucks to be you if you have non-perfect sight or any medical problems requiring medication or other intervention. There’s a surprising lack of your average American with lots of health problems on TWD, perhaps in part as commentary that many of those individuals would have stood no chance against the relentless people-eating horde. While the introduction of Connie offers a welcome insight into how someone with a disability is able to survive in an apocalyptic situation, the show on the whole oddly glosses over that whole issue. America is not a healthy country (we weren’t pre-Covid and we’re certainly not doing well lately). Nearly half of Americans take prescription drugs, according to a survey from the National Center Health Statistics. Some of these are vital, in that without them the person would die sooner rather than later; others treat conditions that won’t kill you immediately if untreated, but will kill you eventually or will cause significant problems as time goes on; and still others treat conditions that, while usually debilitating, you can usually survive and be at least vaguely functional. Some medications can be substituted by herbal remedies (digitalis, marshmallow root), but many can’t. I have chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, and deal with chronic pain and migraines; I take daily meds to counter both pain and migraine, as well as an assortment of supplements (and hayfever tablets, oh god) that I *can* function without, but which to do so would seriously suck. Where are these people in the apocalypse? There are so many people with disabilities or on medication who would be able to keep functioning as potentially beneficial partners in the post-apo world. Where are they? And where are the characters grappling with the choice of whether to sacrifice themselves or let their family and friends deal with an ongoing and worsening condition? The only times we really encounter that sort of thing are Milton’s test subject Michael Coleman, who ultimately dies of prostate cancer, the vatos’ little senior citizen safe haven, and Lilly and Tara’s father, all of whom are elderly. We only ever get a little blip of each of those instances, as well, in what appear to be relatively comfortable and secure locations, so we really don’t get a sense of how their frailties or differing abilities play into the survival of those around them. Hershel’s worst health problem was the leg amputated post-walker bite, and that ultimately was irrelevant to how he lived and died. I might be missing someone – I probably am – but it’s an oddity, one that I suppose arises out of both a narrative need – the elderly and disabled and sick are often viewed as less capable and thus less interesting except as an emotional zinger – and a practical in-world need that wants to focus on the strongest and most active rather than devoting time to people who’ve not only had to adapt emotionally but also physically and psychologically. I’ve got a main character in a post-apo situation who’s not only hauling herself through cities and forests with a bad lower back and weak hip and reliance on a cane but who also is unquestionably the leader of her group, because while her disability is not ideal in this post-civilised world, it doesn’t negate her value. The apocalypse doesn’t eradicate every non-fit, medicated adult, and leaving them out or using them as plot conveniences isn’t ideal. To get back to Morgan’s glasses comment – a quick google search suggests that around 61 percent of the population is reported to wear reading or visual aids at least occasionally. This probably isn’t nearly as many once you wipe out the need for reading glasses among the older population (and, you know, people in their 30s like me… *sob*), but nevertheless there’s a significant portion of the population who can’t see very well without glasses (and let me tell you, good luck getting contacts during the apocalypse). My sister is pretty well blind as a bat without glasses and has been since she was in middle school. Imagine how differently things might have played out if Carl’s vision had been super shitty.

Sidebar complete.

I like the all-male hand-holding over the meal prayer. There’s something sweet about it, a clinging to old habits even in chaos.

It’s interesting that Morgan asks Rick if he even knows what’s going on, because by this point it must be at least a month into apocalypse (per Morgan’s line later in the episode that the gas mains have been down a month or so) – what are the odds you’d run into a random person so utterly clueless a whole month in? I guess maybe the hospital gown, boxers, and bare feet clued him in.

I’ve been thinking this all episode: Rick’s beard is beautifully trimmed for a dude who’s been in a coma.

Rick’s response to Morgan’s “yep, the undead, they’ll try to eat you” line is so blasé it’s funny. Like he’s just so overwhelmed by everything of the day that zombie cannibals or whatever are hardly worth getting fussed over. He jumps right from sort of reacting “oh dead people” to going “so they’re out there? Okey-day then”. Meanwhile, Morgan’s cool air comment about drawing zoms never occurs again, and there’s such a time gap between the firing of the gun and the walkers skulking around outside the house that it’s odd they’re still hanging around. Actually, you see this too at the end of season 2, when the herd of walkers wanders out of Atlanta and eventually ends up on Hershel’s farm – they turn when they hear the gunshot, but how good are their powers of perception? Like, they’re attracted to sound – fine, whatever, I can buy that, fine – but a gunshot, for instance, is a single instance of noise that then dies away. If you’re not in the immediate vicinity, as a walker, how do you continue knowing where to go? The show suggests that when zoms are drawn by noise it’s like a magnet, pulling them in unerringly to the source of the sound, but how do they continue to know which is the right direction for ages after the sound has ceased? It’s not like they have a compass or GPS.

Aww, we’re still early enough in the apocalypse that car alarms still work.

Morgan’s wife makes me sad in a lot of ways. Obviously she’s undead and roaming around looking for her next snack and her son and husband love and miss her and find her undead state to be traumatic, but it’s not that specifically so much as the consequences down the line. Morgan and Duane stayed in the same house where Mama Morgan died, meaning they’re regularly within eyeshot, thus inflicting pain and anguish, or suffering the threat thereof, long after her actual death. (Yes, of course, they had a secure and safe base in the house and didn’t want to move, but still.) Morgan couldn’t kill his wife when she dies, the first time around (although that makes me wonder at what point she was booted outside, considering she died in the house; did they chuck her dead body out the front door before she turned, or wait until she was ambulatory and forcibly eject her?). This – I guess you could call it weakness – proves tragic. When Rick gives him a rifle, he sets out deliberately to kill her and still can’t. And then, because Morgan repeatedly failed to put her down, she ultimately causes the death of Duane – and Morgan takes the blame, flipping into a state of madness that operates until he meets the cheesemaker. (I’ll come back to Morgan in later posts. I have *thoughts* about him as both killer and pacifist.)

How do you grieve loss or try to move on if you can’t actually lay the dead to rest? It’s a question that I don’t think gets explored enough in the show, because most of the time everyone is so concerned with pressing on and surviving that grieving is set aside. I’m not going to go into this here, because there’s ample opportunity to do so in later episodes without needing to jump seasons ahead.

Early days: walkers attempting to work doorknobs are a thing, rather than just pawing at the door.

Man, I miss having a bat. I have a wok and a kitchen knife to protect against the undead these days…and assorted high heels, should it come to that. (Oh god the humanity. My shoes would be ruined!!)

There’s something adorable about Rick wearing a damn headshield mask as he waltzes out the door in the morning with his wooden baseball bat and WHITE T-SHIRT to whack the undead dude on the front walk to death. Where did the headshield mask come from? Did the Drakes just happen to have one in the back closet in case of a pandemic? (*sad hollow 2020 laughter*) In any case, it’s a laughable contrast with rest of the show; by the end of the season, no one gives a shit about facial protection or protecting the skin. Potential backsplatter? Eh, give it here, I bathe in zomgoo for the health benefits daily.

Lori appears to keep a glass jar of pinecones on a shelf. She also apparently took framed photos from the wall in addition to the photo albums. At least one photo album makes an appearance in this season, but unless Morgan repurposed the empty frames for defensive purposes, there’s no indication ever of what Lori did with those framed photos. (Sadly, the photo album is lost when they flee Hershel’s farm. One assumes, anyway, since Carl later gets hold of a single photo for Judith because there are no others.)

Atlanta as a safe haven/refugee centre is…well, it’s a plot point to get Rick where he needs to go. Realistically, you don’t want to go into an urban centre when there’s a pandemic. In America, Covid is now hitting rural areas with force, but pretty much all of the early outbreaks and spread were in urban areas. And that’s without the added complication of the dead getting back up again! Cities obviously have more resources, but… I dunno. Although, to be fair, unlike Covid or the flu or the common head cold, zombieism appears only to transmit through bites (since we don’t yet know that everyone is infected!), like rabies, rather than being so contagious that if someone breathes on you, you’re sick. But even then – even accepting that people think that it’s passed solely through bites and not any other way – being bitten doesn’t necessarily mean instant death (Carl is perhaps the most obvious example of this, I think, but Jim and Deanna both also survive for a time after being chomped), so you could conceivably be bitten in a non-obvious area (your side, for instance), waltz into a populated area with only minor symptoms or hop on a plane and then be released into the population of another country, only to then actually die and start to nom people. Eh.

How many sets of keys do the Grimeses have??

I’d suck in the apocalypse because without showers I’d be so sad.

Ah, bonding is always best when undertaken half-naked and wrapped in a pristine white towel.

Duane is adorable. Why couldn’t we get a show following Duane and his sass?

This episode is almost entirely about following Rick in his discovery and acceptance of this new, batshit life, but in some ways I wish we’d got a snippet of flashback with Morgan and Duane and Lady Morgan. It wouldn’t really have fit into the episode, but I can dream.

Rick showers and puts his uniform on rather than civvies. The implication here is that the uniform retains a certain power – protect and serve – so anyone living who sees him would know that here’s a person whose job is to help. Contrasts sharply with the police officer in the second episode of Fear the Walking Dead who’s stockpiling water and clearly has already shifted over to an every-man-for-himself mindset. In light of America’s current epidemic of problematic police officers, it’s interesting to contemplate differences had TWD first aired in 2020. Or had it aired, for instance, in the Pacific Northwest or Northeast, which generally tend to have a more left-skewing and police-condemning attitude.

I mentioned guns briefly earlier, but seasons 1 and 2 have this cute “must respect guns” thread underlying any use of a firearm. Here Duane wants to learn to shoot, but both Morgan and Rick make sure to emphasise that he has to respect the weapon – “Yeah, it’s not a toy, son, when you pull the trigger you gotta mean it.” Season 2 has Shane (and Andrea) flouncing about articulating THOUGHTS about gun ownership and use and training. After that? Welp, fuck it. You get a gun! And you get a gun! And you get a gun! To be clear, I do think if you’re going to handle a gun you should know how to do so properly and safely, but in the context of the Walking Dead it’s an early seasons thing that’s totally dropped by season 3 as the zompocalypse marches on and nobody got time for that shit anymore. (I’ll get around to discussing the shooting practice in season 2 later…)

I don’t know if it’s just the camera angles, but when Rick remarks that a lot of the armoury is gone, it seems like a massive understatement – from what we see, almost all of the guns are gone. Which might be a prop issue (although given the number of guns floating around on this show you wouldn’t think that would be a problem), but does sort of make season 3’s trip to the ol’ hometown with Michonne and Carl kind of funny given that all the guns are gone if there were never really any left to begin with. (And, thinking about it, when Rick is trying to justify going back into Atlanta to get Merle, he comments that he cleaned out the armoury, which makes it even odder that Rick decides to go back for weapons against the Governor et al.

“Conserve your ammo. It goes faster than you think, especially at target practice.” Unless you’re in season 2 on Hershel’s farm, in which case everyone has so much ammo that they’ll never run out.

I know Rick is still in early days of understanding the apocalypse, but it’s still sweet, and ridiculous, that he gives Morgan a radio with the expectation they’d continue chatting and catch up with each other. It also highlights Morgan’s downfall: the unwillingness to get involved in others’ business. He could go with Rick and probably be safer, not least because there’s two grown men to protect one boy, but he instead waits – ostensibly to up his and Duane’s shooting proficiency, but ultimately we see that it’s very much about the unfinished business with his wife.

As an aside, it seems the police station was useful for (1) hot showers and (2) guns and ammo. I’ve never been in a police station, but weirdly I’d have thought they’d have supplies stashed away. Rick and co. didn’t even have a gander at what might be there. But again, early days, I suppose!

RIP Leon Basset.

I love how Morgan hammers the shit out of the wood he’s using to barricade the door. I guess the zoms are conveniently faffing about elsewhere. Especially funny given that he then goes upstairs to snipe walkers, none of whom seem to have noticed the hammering. Are hammers just soundproof??

Christ Morgan’s wife is beautiful.

There’s something…poignant about Rick tracking down the first living dead person he ever knew in order to put her to rest. It’s the same kind of early apocalypse care that we see in “Guts,” when he stops to look through the walker’s wallet so they know the life of the undead man they’ve killed. His sorrow and tendency towards mercy are both here clearly indicated and provide a sharp contrast with the man he becomes. The mercy and drive to do what’s right is what results in him feeling he has to go back to Atlanta to get Merle, what makes him so adamant that they don’t kill the living and should strive to go where there might be a cure, what drives him to hop off the road and go after Sophia and to keep optimistically searching for her. There’s a sweet innocence there that still exists because he came to the zompocalypse after the fact and still retains a strong need to do what’s right that time living in zombieland will beat out of him. The parallelism in this section of the episode, which switches between Rick and Morgan’s actions after leaving the police station, also highlights the difference between having to kill someone you love vs. killing someone you don’t know (or, rather, have no personal attachment to; Rick kills Leon Basset with few qualms, but also frames it as mercy).

Rural Georgia looks hot. And sticky. Thank God my sister didn’t end up moving to the south.

Are the cracks in the windshield and the dirty appearance of the glass supposed to be the result of the apocalypse, or just their police department being a bit short on funds? (Also, it’s Rick’s face in a cracked mirror! Premonitions of mad Rick??) At least Rick’s got his windows rolled up like a sensible person.

Initial observations of Camp Outside Atlanta:

Dale is wearing glasses that I *think* never appear again.

Amy is carrying an armful of kind of hilariously long twigs.

WHY IS AMY WEARING WHITE TROUSERS IN THE APOCALYPSE THIS IS A TERRIBLE DECISION.

Who on earth is on watch on the RV? From a distance it looks, frame-wise, like either Shane or Daryl, but Shane makes his appearance to the side and Daryl is off on a hunt, so who’s this? Actually, in general, it’s kind of amusing that there’s a whole slew of other people in this camp (mostly older/heavier people, based on visibility) that are just sort of vaguely there until the walker attack. It’s actually a shame, really that they didn’t do anything other than plonk some irrelevant extras in the background; it means that when they all die, it means pretty much nothing as a viewer. (I’ll come back to this.)

Shane has great hair. Shame he shaves it off later…

It’s difficult to see when you’ve watched the episode multiple times, but we don’t know what either Lori or Carl look like before they appear in the quarry group receiving Rick’s radio call – we only actually realise who they are when Rick flips down his visor. And, actually, despite what I said above, Lori’s first appearance is not that bad. She observes that there are others – Shane sort of dismisses it with “oh well we knew that.” And then she says that they ought to put up warning signs on Highway 85 to warn people away from the city. Which is smart. Yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but as we’ll go on to learn, they’ve sent people to Atlanta with no previous problem, on top of which the road into town is absolutely empty – Glenn’s exit from Atlanta on the same road Rick rode in on tells us that the road Lori is talking about here is the same road Glenn and Rick have been in and out on. And this is the first time that Shane puts forward an argument that’s just plain wrong. He says they’ve had no time. Okay, fair enough – but they have a group of five literally in Atlanta as they speak. And based on Glenn’s exit path on the way back to the quarry, that group of five followed the same route in. Setting aside the question of why the hell their scavenging team apparently couldn’t stop along the road to place a “Stay Away, Walkers Ahead” sign, Shane’s argument is that they can’t spare the time to place the sign, because it’s “a luxury we can’t afford.” This makes no sense. As we’ll go on to see, this isn’t the first time someone from their group has gone into Atlanta (although it turns out that Glenn, their “go to town” man, has previously only gone himself, without anyone else). Everyone else up by the quarry is basically just fucking around doing nothing. The fact of the matter is that putting up a sign to warn people away from the city isn’t a luxury, but rather a helpful, logical, and overwhelmingly safe thing to do. Shane’s objection comes, in the first instance, from a man reluctant to relinquish control; it’s clear that Shane is viewed as a decision maker with practical knowledge the other survivors lack, and as a result of that knowledge is viewed as a leader. It’s an important if subtle moment in which Shane is established as the leader of the camp, a position that he then unwillingly gets shoved out of when Rick turns up. It is interesting, though, that here Lori is gung-ho about leaving their mountain and going down to put up a sign, while she later adamantly vetoes her husband going back to Atlanta. Shane’s argument is that no one goes anywhere alone, but given later events, it seems that Shane’s objection is not that someone wants to go warn people away from Atlanta, or that they want to risk Atlanta itself, as much as it is his desire to not let Lori be in danger. And Lori’s frustration at Shane’s decree is obvious – and yet she relents and gives in once kisses are to be had. Shane following Lori to verbally whack her for even thinking of putting herself in danger just points up Shane’s chauvinism. NOT LEAST BECAUSE, OH MY GOD, HE CALLS HER GIRL. SHE’S A WOMAN, YOU TWAT. If the argument had been made that Lori shouldn’t go because she has a son, and she shouldn’t risk him being an orphan – that I could understand. But Carl is so side-lined here that he’s really just a reason to make Shane and Lori stop kissing. Sigh.

God I wish Lori would have socked Shane in the eye. He does have nice hair, though.

Also, those are some *really* nice giant tents. Although my best friend’s adventures have made clear to me that I have unrealistically small expectations about tents.

I’m a little concerned about the condition of the windows of Rick’s cop car. They’re…disgusting. The driver’s side front and back windows look equally awful – I guess it’s good the apocalypse happened, because good luck seeing traffic out those windows. His windshield doesn’t look much better. Is over-enthusiastic pollen a thing in Georgia??

So, about the dead couple whose farm Rick encounters/steals a horse from. They’re both dead, woe, sadness, etc. What I’m fascinated about is that dude took the time to shoot his wife, and then decided to write a message IN HER BLOOD on the damn wall. I mean, okay, you wanted absolution for killing your wife and being about to kill yourself. But you kill your wife and then use her blood to write on the wall??

Signs that Rick is still in early days acceptance: he doesn’t enter the house with two clearly dead people (and thus likely no walkers) and then has a sit on a bench, throws up, and then goes in search of alternative transportation.

…that poor horse.

Is horse-taming a southern thing? I feel like I’d be terrified enough of the giant heavy horse to…not approach it.

Iconic shot!

It’s stunning that Rick has encountered zero walkers aside from the little girl. Works with the need for the story to move along, but is silly in terms of later walker distribution (ignoring season 2, which is its own special disaster).

Is everything flat in Georgia? Legitimate question. The extent of my knowledge of Georgia is a flight transfer through Atlanta. (Atlanta airport employees are all super nice, though.)

There’s something about the two zomdudes hanging out on a bus that cracks me up. How do walkers decide to just park it somewhere? “Ah yes, I recognise this bus, I’ve taken it to work every day for ten years. Definitely the best place to spend eternity.” It’s also odd but entertaining that the two dudes on the bus are repeatedly seen once Rick is in the horde and then in the tank. Why these two? Yeah, they’re the first Atlanta walkers he passed by, but they’re not exactly presented as special or important enough to appear repeatedly. Rick pops out of the top of the tank and whacks the one across the face, and the other skulks around the base of the tank and makes eye contact.

One of the weirdest and most uncomfortable moments in this episode, for me, is the two crows nomming the dead military officer. Caw caw! There’s a mild horror at the thought of ever being carrion. Though I guess everyone is just food for something else…

I can forgive Rick for a number of odd decisions based on the fact that he’s really only been awake for, what, two days? Maybe three? He’s still adapting to the new world, learning its rules, etc. But he rides a damn horse into a major city and is just generally not concerned. He comments to the horse when they pass the bus with the two walkers that it’s no big deal, they can outrun them – and yet somehow doesn’t think ahead about the existence of the dead in a major city. I guess it can sort of be attributed to the fact that he’s encountered remarkably few dead, plus in his brain Atlanta and its refugee centres are the answer to everything. He just hasn’t actually thought about it.

And, again, I’m stunned at the amount of abandoned military equipment. I guess the moral of the story is “don’t trust the military, don’t trust the government, they can do fuckall to help you.”

So Rick sees a helicopter. When he meets the others after Glenn rescued him, they ridicule the idea that helicopters still exist. Which brings up two instances. Firstly, beginning of season 3, when Andrea and Michonne witness a helicopter crash with military dudes who’ve got others attached to them. Secondly, the helicopter that rescues Rick and has apparently set up Rick Grimes’s future films. I just wish I knew where this particular helicopter was from and where it was going.

For a cop, even one with minimal experience with the world as it is now, Rick is an idiot. He lunges forward as stupidly as he went forward alone in his confrontation with the idiot car guys. Surely you should be thinking ahead? He’s in relatively unknown territory in a relatively new world. I’m not saying he should have anticipated a horde of dead people, but you’d think he’d exercise as least some caution, especially when his nearby décor indicates that the damn military was swamped with the enemy, such that they fucked off elsewhere. But maybe it’s just me.

Ooh, look, an extra drinking water.

I like that the makeup artists decay the walkers more each season. Season 1, most of them are sort of “hai I’m a regular human, I just have some dramatic injuries and some zombie eyes.” They look like people who are mostly dead but haven’t started to decompose. (I’d never be hired as a walker – the longer the show goes, the more they need skinny people so the makeup and prosthetics aren’t so obvious…and I am not skinny.)

That poor horse…

Yet again, Rick seriously lucks out. We see him multiple times with “omg dead people” face, with walkers just sort of lurking/dancing in place because they can’t lunge in or he’d be dead. And then there’s conveniently a tank above him. I’ve never been able to decide whether Rick going “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry” and then putting his gun to his head is a genuine “Oh no, I’m about to die” or if he’d realised the hatch was above him and so it was a “welp if I die, I love you.”

Men have huge feet. Yeek.

It’s stunning how long Rick’s in the tank with a zombot before said zombot wakes up and attempts a menacing growl. Not least because Rick’s so overwhelmed at having been upwardly mobile that he completely fails to take in his surroundings. (Although, as we’ve seen, Rick has never been great at checking his surroundings. Dude should be walkerbait by now.)

Oh no, a walker. Haaalp.

I do appreciate that Rick suffered auditory pain from firing a gun in an enclosed metal space. I also find it funny that one of the buszoms comes into his eyesight, like for some reason he's important.

“Hey, you. Dumbass.” Glenn is fucking amazing and iconic. I wish he'd been the main of this show. No offense to Andrew Lincoln, of course, but Steven Yeun is great, and Glenn's development from a kid into an adult is just lovely.

Anywho, that marks the end of "Days Gone Bye." Good in so many ways, eh in so many others. What's not to love?

love  em

[courage-a-word-of-justice]

Orphen 1 | Bofuri 1 | number24 1

I’m still working on the premieres (and doing episodic impressions for School Days and a few Fate/ series at the moment I type this), so that’s why there’s less episodes than usual in this batch of impressions.

Orphen 1

I remember seeing the 90s series around…but nothing of what happened in it.

(Oh what???? My regional streaming service got rid of the controls it’s had for years…)

I like the look of this injured church…wizard…guy…(whatever you call him).

Wait, the guy I liked the look of…his name is Childman?! Okay, that name’s silly, even for anime standards.

Well, at least there’s man candy around here…LOL.

(Okay, so I spent the rest of this episode laughing while someone who does remember 90s Orphen describes it. That’s why I have no notes for it.)

Bofuri 1

I wasn’t originally planning to watch this, but…the reviews have spoken!

Is that a mochi plushie?! I want one!          

Kaede = maple tree.

How does Maple have standards regarding VRMMOs if she’s never played a game in her life…?

What kinda lame name is “Drag”?

The colours in this show are nice and vibrant.

Wouldn’t it be better to raise speed instead?

What’s that weird sphere in the top right???

The crafter’s name is Izue, actually, not “Izz”.

The friend list said “Iz”, but everything else said Izue…(gah.)

This CGI…it’s not bad, but vaguely noticeable.

That scene where Maple opens the chest…it looks like something you’d use for a reaction GIF.

That only mde me laugh once and not very loudly, so…it’s okay, but I wouldn’t want to stick around with it forever unless I was bored out of my brain.

number24 1

Another series where the reviews are okay at best, but slightly on the better side.

LOL, there’s meant to be a star symbol in the title, but my regional streaming service just changed its entire interface, so now it doesn’t seem to support stars…

Okay, if I scratched my head at that motorcycle accident rather than thinking it got my attention, then…that’s a bad first sign.

I thought the guy’s name was Natsuhisa, but turns out it’s Natsusa…

Wait, I’ve been pronouncing this show’s name “number 24”, but the logo says you need to pronounce it “number two four”…?! I’ve been living my life wrong!

Guys piling on top of each other in a contact sport is not my jam, but the reviews said this was a Stars Align sort of sport anime, so I came running…just so that we’re clear on that, okay?

Natsusa’s eyes remind me of those watermelon-coloured lollies…it’s probably just the colour of his hair and eyes together, but it’s a bit weird considering his friend has black hair and a guy from the OP had white (? Or was that blue?) hair. Then again, this is anime. I can live with it…Update: I’m looking at the character list and the inconsistency of the weird hair colours is weirding me out…

You can tell this is a rugby anime because they list their positions along with their names. It’s like how people list Kuroko as jersey number 11 in Kuroko no Basuke, or how the Generation of Miracles (bar Kuroko) get listed with their positions (e.g. Aomine is listed as a power forward). (Note I had to google the stats up just to make sure they were correct - I don’t know them off the top of my head.)

I checked the website and they list Yasunari’s birthday but not his age…I love how this show is about uni rugby and not high school or middle school sports, by the way. It means I can actually learn some of the university terminology I should’ve learnt years ago.

That guy with the purple hair and blue eyes looks like Kirill…and this manager twist is pretty interesting, ey?

I read on Natsusa’s profile he’s meant to be sold as a Do-S (dominant sadist, as weird as it is for me to know that) and that’s why he has the entire “u mad, bro?” thing down pat. Update: Think Wakura from Boueibu HK…that’s what Natsusa is meant to be.

You can tell Sei is meant to be sold as the “stoic, but nonetheless passionate for rugby” and “Designated Yaoi Partner to Natsusa”.

This Yayoi dude has Io’s hairstyle…

Hmm…so according to Kotori’s profile, he has a complex about how small his body is and is a hybrid of a delinquent and a bishonen. His names (both first and last) sound feminine, to boot, which is why I get that he doesn’t like them. Y’know how I mentioned Kirill though? Kotori is voiced by the same guy (Kohei Amasaki).

*shots which suggest Sei and Natsusa are having sex* *Sei and Natsusa are exercising* - *throws hands into air* See? What did I tell you?! Designated Yaoi Partner!

“I really love rugby!” - *facepalm* Dangit, Mashiro.

How did Natsusa not notice Sei was the-hang on. If Natsusa never turned to look that way, he wouldn’t have noticed, right?

Okay…for a bit, it looked like Natsusa wasn’t really looking at Mashiro, but at the camera. I find that creepy and a little bit like Makura no Danshi (which made me realise anime which imply the character is talking to you when it’s not intended are a little bit creepy) or Truman Show (with its overt advertising).

*Mashiro introduces himself as a manager* - *facepalm* How many managers does one rugby team need? I mean, they have Natsusa and presumably a teacher, right? Right?! Update: Then again, this is uni rugby and uni groups – from my own knowledge – don’t have teachers as members.

So you can have two number 24s…? Okay, I didn’t know that. Updates: Plus reserves?!

Ikuto never said he needed more managers…not when we watchers were privy to Ikuto, anyway. He could’ve said it “off camera”.

Oh, so that’s what that set of tips to Mashiro was for! A huge comic pileup! (small LOL, then big LOL when Natsusa makes an “I pwned y’all!” face) I like troll Natsusa already.

Apparently (according to the profiles) mikan is Natsusa’s favourite food, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Mikan were Natsusa’s choice of name too. Toriten = chicken tempura according to the profiles, so that was Sei’s choice presumably.

It’s hard to believe the two feminine-looking boys in the credits are the same ones we’ve been following this episode…

LOL, the show just admitted they’re not doing much rugby. So in the end, it is my kind of rugby anime…haha.

[adrianfridge]

When I initially created this Tumblr, my preferred name of “whatthefridge” was already taken. I had just started publishing my very first fanfiction ever in my first fandom ever, so I had this idea to call myself fandomfridge, though that felt wrong because it was only going to be for a single fandom. Its how I ended up with fanfictionfridge...

Fast forward to today, and much of my content is visual—gifsets, manips, fanart, etc—which makes my name weirdly inconsistent.

But I refuse to change it because it’s tied up to so many things and I just hate the notion of losing that part of my identity.

With that said... new dilemma: my support system for fanart—Teen Wolf fanart, especially—is nonexistent. I got people to lean on for writing and graphics, but actual illustration? Gah!

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Conquest Part 2

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Conquest Part 1

Chapters 15-20, in which there is finally a goal, and it is stupid.

Chapter 15

a.k.a. the teaser for Revelation.

Don’t get me wrong, I like that Valla has some visible presence outside of its dedicated route, and the otherworldly visuals and shadowy enemies do a lot to sell the mystery of the place and make the player want to learn more about it. Also, this chapter isn’t just randomly dropped into the middle of Conquest’s plot, but rather a culmination of events that begins in Chapter 9 when Azura returns to Nohr. She then meets Garon, tries to exorcise Garon but only succeeds in giving him a really awkward public orgasm, and then turns to Plan B which is apparently to go dimension-hopping for a one-use plot device.

But yeah, that part is absurdly contrived and deserves all the scorn it gets in the fandom, relying as it does on two separate magical plot trinkets - the aforementioned crystal and the Hoshidan throne - and building unearned tension between Corrin and the Nohrian royals via a strange set of contrivances. Azura couldn’t have waited to use the crystal until they were all together...why, exactly? Because it can only be used once, and only at the Bottomless Canyon, and only if someone with special magic or dragon blood touches it, and then you can’t talk about it without vanishing...gah. It’s an epic pileup of lazy writing. FE10′s Blood Pacts have nothing on this moment.

At least the chapter is fun, being a big change of pace that reduces your party to three replicated units and gives you a choice of two objectives. And Gunter’s not dead, and (we assume) not evil on this route even though his situation is basically the same as it is in Revelation. That’s nice of him.

Chapter 16

What an original way of creating a timed chapter - and as a bonus I get the image of Xander and various other guys pinching the cheeks of random Nohrian soldiers! That’s just adorably weird.

What’s not so adorable but still weird is how we’re meant to believe that Shura can pass for a Nohrian until he tells everyone otherwise, because isn’t there supposed to be a noticeable racial difference between the two main regions of Fates’s setting? Maybe not apparent to the player (unless you’re intimately familiar with anime art styles, or so I’ve heard), but it’s logically supposed to be there, so...what’s up with that? Logical inconsistencies aside Shura is an interesting aspect of this chapter and an interesting character in general for how he straddles that regional divide and provides exposition both here and in Birthright that Hoshido’s not all it’s cracked up to be. In this route he reveals that Yukimura contracted him to kidnap Azura in retaliation for Garon kidnapping Corrin, adding a devious dimension to a character who is in other respects extremely underdeveloped. This is also the only route where Shura can potentially get his revenge against Mokushu, so his presence here feels timely...unless you opt to kill him and take his Boots, that is.

More on that next chapter though, because the sting of the previous’s one absurdity lingers in spite of Shura and Xander and some genuinely pleasant sibling banter (tempered by the allusions to the concubine wars and Azura’s rough treatment in Nohr that are mostly reserved for supports). No explanation is ever provided for why Garon decides to commence the invasion of Hoshido now, after devoting his forces’ time and energy to quashing a series of only tangentially-related rebellions. It feels too convenient coming as it does right after Azura explains her plan to Corrin, a means of saving Corrin from having to push for the invasion themselves. I really wish they’d done something to that effect. Corrin would shock Azura even further with their newfound ability to lie while also making a move covertly motivated by a desire to end the war as quickly as possible and so with as few lives lost on both sides. One less contrivance certainly wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Chapter 17

Everyone wants revenge against Kotaro, even NPCs. After slogging through a ninja-infested cave with spikes and a bunch of Dragon Veins that can throw you off if used at the wrong time I sympathize wholeheartedly.

What I have more trouble understanding is the moral position of the lead-up to this chapter. Corrin and co. are fine with accepting help from Kotaro until it’s revealed that he’s captured Kagero in an attempt to force the Hoshidans to surrender. The dialogue doesn’t make it sound as though they plan on killing her, but because Kotaro claims that Garon would approve of his strategy it’s suddenly horrible and deserving of immediate retribution. Corrin’s objection here runs contrary to their desire to end the war quickly by whatever means necessary including subterfuge, so aside from the knowledge gleaned across all routes that Kotaro is a self-centered opportunist who’s personally wronged both Shura and the Christmas ninjas it feels like a stretch that this is what leads to the Nohrians breaking off their strategically useful alliance with Mokushu. It’s a flimsy excuse for a frustrating chapter that doesn’t really come with a payoff later from Saizo, so I can’t say it’s one of my favorites from any angle.

Oh, and Azura apparently soloed a bunch of Hoshidans offscreen. That got a laugh out of me.

Chapter 18

Ship tease and moral dissonance for all! Well, sort of. The Ryoma/Xander stuff is funny (why does Ryoma retort that he’s more attractive? Hmm...) and Camilla gets in a quip in preparation for her final showdown with Hinoka, but all in all it’s a strange, tense moment. The fight against the renegade(?) Nohrians led by Zola provides the moral dissonance, and even though Leo provides a practical explanation for doing his usual thing and killing dark mages in cutscenes it is a bit strange to imagine that Garon wouldn’t notice all these allies and underlings of his mysteriously dying.

I find it interesting that the meeting between royals is something that occurs in Conquest but not in Birthright. As with Chapter 15 this is another example of this route doing substantially more to sell the basic premise of Revelation than its counterpart did, which makes more sense if the two of them were indeed written at about the same time after Birthright. It also provides some necessary development for Corrin’s relationship with the Hoshidan royals, something that can’t be taken for granted as it is with the Nohrians in Birthright as they didn’t grow up together. That’s all the more important to get out of the way now since they all confront Corrin one right after the other in the endgame without much time in between to really explore them as much as they ought to be. Takumi’s arc in Conquest is pretty good, sure, but the sisters are fairly static and Ryoma’s character is plagued with presentation issues on this route. I actually wish this scene could have gone on a bit longer and added a bit more to each of them, but this is what we’ve got.

Don’t really have anything to add about the chapter. It’s a recycled Birthright map that’s only interesting because you have to beat three bosses in a turn limit. Zola’s role here is minimal, as is Izana’s which is entirely a good thing.

Chapter 19

What I like about this chapter: It’s got a pretty autumnal palette not seen anywhere else in Fates that I can think of (exacerbated by the fact that this map is unique to Conquest, meaning you can never use it for skirmishes). The setup is also much stronger than the equivalent wolfskin chapter in Birthright. No Iago here - Kaden outright entraps Corrin’s army and plans to kill them all on the possibility that they might be poachers. Hoshido really benefits from having some viciousness like this of its own.

What I don’t like about the chapter: I don’t know if it’s a mistranslation or I’m just misunderstanding the game’s explanation for this chapter’s gimmick, but it clearly doesn’t work the way I first thought it did. The text blurb states that kitsune illusions (units with the green symbol on them) can neither attack nor be attacked by your units, and while it’s true that your units can’t target them they can and do attack you on the enemy phase. I don’t mind the idea of units with a single turn of player phase immunity, but it’s frustrating to feel misled into thinking it was something else entirely.

Anyway, Corrin kills all the kitsune and is sad about it, and then Azura waxes philosophic on how all routes carry sacrifice and moral greyness and it’s pretty obvious that she’s leaning on the fourth wall here. On the plus side when one considers all the named character deaths in Birthright and even the handful in Revelation it feels less like the game is specifically berating the player for choosing Conquest this time.

Chapter 20

So, uh, quick question: how are the few little huts in the desert seen here and in Birthright and the massive complex of intricately-crafted terraces and stairways that appear in the other two routes both representative of the Wind Tribe? Is Fuga loaded while his people live in squalor? 

He’s certainly a sadist, because this chapter earns its infamous reputation with its frustrating wind manipulation. I find that, not unlike FE4, this is one of several Fates chapters made easier if you’re fielding a bunch of units with holy dragon blood to use the Dragon Veins scattered throughout the map. Behold the power of kinky interspecies sex.

Similar to Azura’s musings in the previous chapter, Fuga provides Corrin with his knowledge of the Yato along with the confidence that they chose a morally righteous path after all.  As with Corrin’s pacifism something like this is near the top of the list of things not to do in a villain campaign, but the writing has long since stopped trying for that angle. It’s been repeatedly reinforced that Garon and his loyal minions are the real enemies of this campaign, and the Hoshidans are the innocent(?) victims who have to be sacrificed in order to expose Garon for what he is and end the war. Fuga sends Corrin off with his blessing to kill however many Hoshidans it takes to earn peace, including potentially all of his late BFF’s children.

...Yeah. Fuga really is kind of an ass when you think about him. 

Next time: Conquest Chapter 21 - Endgame

[eisforeidolon]

I loved reading your response abt Carver butchering Sam in s8 and how it would be artificial to interpret it as sth Sam would do when it was clearly OOC and Jared himself said it sat wrong with him. I love what you said (another response) abt angel powers changing from ep to ep! Nephilims too, apparently! Jack automatically healed himself from benignly inflicted tattoos then in 1304 was beaten and bleeding by the shifter and couldn't heal himself? Gah.

Thanks! 

The thing is, I am willing to give some reasonable leeway in terms of steering the story in a preset direction, especially because television does work on a pretty tight schedule. Yet when the only justification for a development inconsistent with the preceding material is “the writer wants to” or “the script says so”, that’s not asking for reasonable leeway.  Even then, if it was once in a blue moon, well, nothing’s perfect, right? 

Except even after Carver’s so-called “mature” arc for Sam and its criminally boring soft-focus soap flashbacks went down like the nonsensical lead balloon they were?  He refused to backtrack and give us anything that would recontextualize Sam’s behavior into something the audience could find understandable, sympathetic, and in line with how Sam was presented before (and how they obviously wanted us to see him going forward).  Hell, Carver could have just given it to the audience in those same flashbacks and left Dean in the dark for the duration of the season to still get the brotherfighting he had such a boner for! 

When it comes down to it, a lot of the reason I can’t give Carver more of a pass even if his run was less of a mess is because what Dabb and his team are doing now is just a natural progression on from what Carver did.  Whatever they want to have happen, that’s what happens - they’re just doing more of it on an even smaller, more continuous scale.  It does not matter if it makes sense or not, it’s just genre tv!  Throw in a lot of drama and flash and that’s good enough, right?

The writers tell us Mary cares about Sam and Dean, so even though the vast majority of what she does shows the exact opposite, we’re meant to just go with it because because.  The writers need the BMoL to have a super convenient, super powerful McGuffin that does a thing?  BAM! They do!  Even if it would have possibly stopped the world ending a few seasons back, they couldn’t be bothered to take a flight back then for ... uh ... reasons!   Just about anything with power has whatever abilities or weakness as needed by this week’s script.  At least in seasons 4-5, the things Castiel could and couldn’t do were limited by both being under orders and falling.  Now his powers have been nerfed, un-nerfed, and re-nerfed so many times back and forth I can’t even keep track.  Is he supposed to have them all back now?  Fuck if I know.  Which is bad enough, but it’s pretty true of all the other characters with powers, too, from Rowena to the archangels, to the regular angels, to Jack.  There are no rules or the rules are so arbitrary that they make up new ones every single time they need an excuse (grace recharges now!  what downside to stealing other angels’ grace? bringing people back from the dead is how hard, exactly?). 

In the end, what it all adds up to is them asking the audience to continue to invest more effort into caring about what they’re writing than they’re actually putting into writing it. 

[quarterette]

just watched and read planetes and my brain is already going into fanfic mode trying to break down what the anime did differently from the manga (disclosure: was an anime first, read manga afterwards)

anyone know of other hard, near-future sci fi movies/shows that feature space travel? that isn't the martian or interstellar? i'd like to feel small and insignificant in the void of space some more please, thanks

spoilery ramblings after the cut

can i just say i wish the anime didn't caricature ai tanabe? i wanted to punch her a few times in the anime for broken record "love saves everything" vibes - unsurprisingly that was an anime original (along with the love triangle, yeesh)

i did like ai's anime arc of having those ideals actually come into contact when confronting both hachi and claire - legit i was shocked that hachi's line about "giving away my fears" was not directed at ai in the manga

(claire as a whole was a solid addition imo, was able to add dimension to mostly hakim and ai, with hachi as a more distant bonus) still sad that fee? fei? fi? had her manga chapters cut off. the anime's replacement backstory with the whole conglomerate merger stuff was ok, but the manga chapters about her uncle and racism just hits so fricking hard. claire's bit about being an immigrant and trying to fit into different cultures speaks to me on a personal level, but again, it's a different sort of discussion and it took a lot away from fee

ai's manga backstory, while nice, didn't significantly change my perspective on her. she just comes off more meditative in the manga - less brashly naive and a lot more likeable. i ended up ok with anime ai but manga ai is 100x less grating

i actually liked the addition of yuri taking care of all the pets aboard the space station. extra gentle giant vibes.

questioning whether or not hachi's love of bikes was added just so ai and hachi could have some teenage romance shenanigans. the anime really just added a lot of teenage romance shenanigans (gah, love triangle why). i'm such a sucker for hand-drawn machinery though. i think we're finally getting to the point where CGI can imitate the charm of minor-inconsistencies but it just hits different.

edel's arc was ok, the moon ninjas surprisingly hit hard on the last part, i still don't know the chief's name but i don't mind him and lavie per se, the anime ending on the start of the jupiter mission rather than the arrival in the jupiter system was fine imo

also, while the art is beautiful in the manga, i don't think i would have been nearly as in love with the worldbuilding of planetes without the anime. just, the zero-g movement and the background art is so, so compelling. i think the only other show i've encountered with this really hard science, near-future bend was the martian

and now i'm craving more of it

(though lowkey seeing the corporatization of space travel hits different in 2021, it was a reasonable prediction back in the 00s but now that it's actually happening is... weird. i saw some reviews grumbling about how the anime went ham on the corporate politics but ngl i appreciated its addition, it helped hit home the idea the anime was trying to make about space travel becoming more mundane, and being just as vulnerable to corporate bullshit as any other industry helped with that. that, and the idea that space travel is a questionable use of resources given all the human suffering that could be addressed with that amount of manpower and resources.)

i guess it's time to go back to watching vinland saga, i don't even remember where i left off on

[tenrabi]

Undertale Fan-comic: Momdyne Disclaimer - This is purely a fanwork. Undertale belongs to Toby Fox.

MOMent 1 = Next MOMent = = Full MOMent List =

Updates will be irregular, but I’ll try to post a new MOMent weekly.

FINALLY MANAGED TO POST THE PILOT GAH.

My apologies for posting this so late past my promised date, I had issue accessing my Tumblr account for the past few weeks to the point I was about to just make a new account（ｉДｉ）Issue solved though, and to compensate, I’m posting MOMent 2 and MOMent 3 today!

I’ve practiced and made several short fan-comics before, but I’ve never actually launched any series, so this is a first for me. Please bear with this amateur and have patience with inconsistent drawing styles/quality. You’ll need a lot of ‘em since I’ll be experimenting A LOT with this fan-comic (￣▽￣);ノ

That said, I’m excited for this! If you have any ideas you’d like to input with me, or if you have any constructive criticism and/or advice, PLEASE don’t hesitate to share them with me!

And yes I’m calling the chapters to this Momdyne comic ‘MOMent’s, with all its bold font glory, because I’m a huge dork.

[smashkick-archive]

Happy Birthday Izuku! : D

Itaru didn’t even remember how it had gotten there, the stone that marked the spot. The only reason he was able to find it again was because of the shape- almost like a ‘V’, as odd as that was. Who had remarked that it was like All Might’s antennae? Someone… and Itaru had committed the shape to memory, reconciled that with every adjacent tree and the fading dirt path to his back. The house they’d stayed in prior had since fallen into further disrepair, part of the roof caving in entirely now after all this time. 

And here Itaru crouched. The boy looked tired- not an average tired, not an ‘I could use a nap’ tired. This sort of weariness was nothing that sleep could alleviate; this wore into his bones, weighed him down, hooked against the corners of his lips and dragged them downward in tandem with the furrow of his brow. This exhaustion had seeped and pooled into his soul and made a home there. And while he was trying, the smile that he forced was pained if anything. 

He took ten seconds to collect himself… … .   

               … …and took a deep breath. He pushed a small plate of random confections toward the stone. Honestly? He hadn’t really paid attention to what concoction he’d manifested; he knew Izuku didn’t like almonds, knew that he’d handed that one to Itaru before and traded for another, and so on. But it didn’t matter. No one was actually eating it after all. It was a sentiment. 

He flopped down on the haunches, and started digging into his pocket. “Y’know I make a date with you, I expect you to keep it.” He mumbled. From his pocket he withdrew a lighter. Leaning forward, he cupped the wick of the candle behind his hand. One candle. Just the one. And he held the flame there as it caught, watching it dance furiously at the top of the wax that Itaru had found six months prior, kept with him all this time. Because he’d promised… he’d forgotten last year. He’d forgotten last year, his last chance, and he’d- …. He couldn’t have known. How could he have ever known…?

The flame flickered dangerously in the breeze as Itaru released it to the wild, dropping the lighter in the dirt. He rocked back to lean on his hands. This wasn’t right…. Nothing about this- from the silence to the pathetic flame to the solitude… it wasn’t right. But he’d done his cursing. He’d done his crying and shouting, begging; he’d bargained and even tried to right his wrongs; his arm stung in a distant, phantom sensation. But when even that refused to take….

Gingerly, he reached out, tapping the rock with his foot as if he were kicking his brother at his side. “You ditched me. That’s probably the rudest thing a twin can do, y’know? And on such a big day…” And despite himself, his throat was tight; his eyes stung; the talons of grief had embraced him, sunk their talons once more into his heart and were vice there. His smile warbled as his vision started to blur.

With a groan, he clapped himself on the cheeks. “What’m I doing? This isn’t- gah. I came here to tell you-“ No good- the tears had already started to fall. Where did they all come from? People had compared crying to rivers, but it felt like his sprung from an ocean, from something limitless and depthless that would never run dry. He’d never truly face his brother again with a smile, would he? ( wouldn’t face him at all, would he? )

Sniffling, Itaru made quick work of standing. Damn it; he couldn’t stay here long. He’d promised the others he’d be back before morning, and he’d already had to trek so far just to get here. Going alone had been an argument in and of itself ( one he’d technically lost, and it was only a matter of time before the realized he’d wandered off alone again- they didn’t exactly trust him to come back, you see ). He wiped his sleeve over his eyes, taking a deep shaky breath. “I just….” 

And he watched. Watched as the breeze blew against the flame that struggled in its wake. Flickering, he watched as it fought then, moments later, extinguished. Just like that. In an instant, the light was gone. Just like-

“I miss you. Happy birthday, Izuku.”

For a momentary eternity, Itaru stared at the stone, allowing the roots to take hold and hold him in place. He didn’t have to go back. He could stay here. He could… it’d accomplish nothing. It’d do him no good, wouldn’t do Izuku any good. But it’d be much more to his satisfaction, at this point. And why didn’t he? 

A shouted insult, a gentle chiding, a lilted promise….

The path he walked was gilded in falsities and inconsistencies. But at least it was gilded. 

He turned his back to the stone, muttering, “Same time next year, huh? Don’t go anywhere.” At least it gave him something to look forward to…