#also shoutouts to rda

[artzchao]

This is how dragons will look at you while there's a face-up Field Spell on the field.

[emeraldhypothesis]

for the ask meme: jack atlas!

Oh Jack's a good one. This now means I got half the rivals done in day 1, yay me!

Why I like them/why I don’t

Jack to me is the writers fully realizing how they want to handle the Kaiba Rival archetype as a singular character. If Edo, Manjoume and Ryo were all a shared trial run across GX, Jack is the finished prototype. He's one of the few rivals I think is fully allowed to embrace how Kaiba wasn't just an antagonist, he was an actively malicious person when we meet him in the manga, willing to do anything for power and glory. Jack in contrast to the GX Rivals, is allowed to be like that, which especially stands out after Manjoume was just a school bully. He steals Yusei's ace, straps Rally to a boat and betrays all of his friends to get out of the Satellite and escape his past, and it doesn't really eat at him that he did this until Yusei reappears and makes him face his sins by stripping his mantle of King away from him in front of the whole city.

I love his arc especially after Carly basically beats him over the head to be a better person, which has notable effects on how Jack talks to people afterwards and pays off with him trying to save her in turn when she's a Dark Signer. It gives Jack a really profound arc that visibly moves him and changes his perspective on why he fights, allowing him to fight Godwin with Yusei and Crow not just as allies, but as reforged friends.

And then he's made very silly and that's when Jack becomes the best character in the entire fucking show. No joke, I love how Jack is made a silly idiot in the fluff episodes, it really expands his character and helps make a lot of the domestic slice of life stuff land. (maybe that's what Arc-V Jack was missing)

What I like about their appearance

I love that his riding suit is much more sophisticated and sleek than Yusei and Crow's gear. I read once that an analysis of Jack's clothes indicates that Neo Domino racer suits were made to more resemble F1 racers and their suits, while Satelite characters like Crow and Yusei more resemble traditional bike racer gear with the bigger emphasis on leather and crash pads.

I love his stupid bike too, that you wouldn't be able to see out of unless you were a madman like Jack.

Do I prefer their dub names or original names?

Same in both languages. Performance wise, I think I'd have to give it to the Japanese, but Ted Lewis does great as Jack- incomprehensible accent and all, and he's very charming in the role, but holy crap Takanori Hoshino leaves no crumbs in his wake. He gives Jack the full emotional range across his arc, and his "ORE NO TUUUUUUUURN" cry is always legendary.

OTP

It's Scoop. Come on, no contest here, they're basically as canon as this franchise can let them be by the time of Dark Signers. They're very adorable together and I do wish Carly got to be more involved in Jack's slice of life episodes because seeing them contrast would have been everything.

NOTP

Don't really have one.

OT3

Even if I don't think a lot of Jack and Crow's chemistry beyond them being the team's comic relief, I think that the boys all live together in a single shared living space for the entire second half of the show writes the doujins for me.

Favourite card they use

RDA would be cheating (shoutout to Scarlight though, I have a Royal of that in Master DUel), so I'll just say Vision Resonator is very cute.

Favourite moment they were in

It's really gotta be either Jack fighting Dark Signer Carly, or him facing the Crimson Devil to seize the power of Red Nova Dragon for himself. I'm also fond of him blowing up the garage that one time and his job-hunting montage. Jack in general benefits the most I think from the slice of life episodes post-Dark Signers.

Least favourite moment

Did we really need Jack to duel Yuya again near the end of Arc-V? It's not even like Jack gets a Level 12 Synchro out of it or anything to show his own journey. I'm a bit colder on Arc-V Jack.

Would I fuck, marry or kill them

Carly tired killing him, it didn't stick, and then I like to imagine she put a ring on it as a result, so he's unfortunately spoken for.

[nattikay]

Shoutout to my mom who let me dump a bunch of spoilers on her so I could cry about Neteyam. Finally had the chance to get all that sobbing that dehydration robbed me of yesterday out of my system, and I’m feeling a little better now. I mean, the situation still makes me sad, but I don’t think I’ll continue to have my eyes suddenly start leaking every other hour like they did for most of today. :’)

so uuuhhh now that I’ve more or less gotten over that hurdle, I can finally sit down and make a post about all the other stuff from the movie! So here’s a list of some of the other thoughts and observations I had, not exactly comprehensive cuz this is all coming after 24 hours of grieving so I may not remember every single little thought I had, but here we go anyways (also tagging @tenebrius-excellium cuz you said you wanted to hear my thoughts):

-I just want to watch the first five or so minutes on loop for a while (although maybe without the cuts to Neytiri singing the songcord because 🥲, good golly the moment I saw that shot I, already being familiar with the lore behind songcords, was like oh NOOOOO), just the scenes of those ~14 peaceful years where the kids are growing up and the RDA is gone and everyone is happy together and it’s all just so sweet, this is the content I want, I want more of it, please pretty please, I know it’ll be a while before all the gif-makers are able to get a hold of those scenes but man as soon as they do goodness gracious I’m just gonna stare at it all for hours 😭

-While I was already assuming that the Metkayina didn’t actually know English and that we the audience were only hearing English for convenience, I was expecting that issue not to be directly addressed. So I was pleasantly surprised when it was subtly addressed with Jake’s voiceover about now being familiar enough with the Na’vi language to understand it as easily English as the audio of the kids bickering swapped from Na’vi to English. Theory confirmed!

-Speaking of the Na’vi language, I did feel very excited because I was able to understand some of the unsubtitled lines, which was a goal! so yay!! I mean, I didn’t understand every Na’vi line spoken (some of the longer ones I’ll definitely have to listen to more than once to piece together), but to even understand any of it at all, especially the ones without subtitles, felt very awesome!! dopamine rush babey!!!

-And on that note, the fact that Quaritch of all characters was making an effort to learn the language really surprised me! He struck me as the type of character to not give two craps about that sort of thing but hey. I definitely got a kick of out of Spider absolutely roasting him for his lack of skills hrh (note, I very most certainly do not condone actually mocking new learners making mistakes, obviously, but seeing as this is Quaritch we’re talking about...^^”) Spider’s line here was also a place I even managed to catch a subtitle discrepancy -- iirc, the subtitles read “You sound like a three-year-old!” but the actual line was nga plltxe na ‘eveng ahì’i! you speak like a small child! Which, I mean, y’know, same gist, but it was cool to be able to understand the actual words!! I also greatly enjoyed Spider trying to teach Quaritch the distinction between na and nga, just because man that’s one of those things every learner has been through, idk it was delightful to watch it go down between canon characters hrh

-Speaking of Quaritch and Spider....wow, I was surprised just how early they dropped the “Quartich’s son” bomb. That had been a pretty popular and plausible theory for a while, but I was expecting it to either be left up to interpretation or used as a bombshell later in the film. But nope, from the get-go it’s pretty heavily implied that not only is Quaritch Spider’s biological father, but that they’re both aware of this. So. Yeah, that was certainly a surprise.

-Kiri “I would rather drink acid than have Norm be my biological father” good gracious girl! like I mean yes the idea that Norm and Grace were secretly hookin’ up is obviously preposterous, but what did Norm ever do to you to deserve that reaction ^^; haha

-I mentioned in my High Ground post the three primary theories on Kiri’s origins. Having now seen the movie, I now think the mystical-Eywa-conception theory is by far the most likely. However, canonically it still remains a mystery/up to interpretation. Perhaps we’ll get more answers in movie 3...

-Y’know what, vulgarity is not typically my type of humor, but Lo’ak flippin’ Quaritch the double bird when asked to let him see his fingers did get a chuckle out of me hrh

-hey um yo the Metkayina kids were absolute JERKS, what the heck?? like good golly heckin’ rude. Except for Tsireya she’s chill I like her :)

-Personally I don’t think the story of this movie is a total rehash of the first one overall, but I can very mostly definitely see how people would consider it so. There were several lines in two scenes in particular, the one where the Sullies arrive at the Metkayina clan and the one with the tulkun hunters, that were just soooooo similar to lines from the first movie, not quite verbatim but certainly awkwardly close. I can absolutely see this becoming a common complaint from internet critics.

-Tuk pretty much solely exists to make the audience go d’awwwww!!, and y’know what, that’s ok because boy did she succeed :’)

-unfortunately, Quaritch’s ikran has by far the coolest design of all the ikrans, like bruh that color palette is heckin’ dope. what a shame ur now stuck with this jerk lol. Though I did snicker at Quaritch feeling the need to bond with the ikran “the hard way” solely because he couldn’t stand to be outdone by Jake lol

-I liked Lo’ak and Payakan’s friendship, it was very sweet. Also very interesting design-wise that a tulkun’s queue is in his mouth, and that the mouth has more of those bioluminescent patterns on the inside.

-The fact that the tulkun hunters are 100% aware that the species they’re hunting is fully sapient feels very ick to me. Sir that’s...that’s murder. Good gracious. and um “tulkun brain juice stops human aging” wh...what?? can uh...can we get some more explanation on that??? like is that gonna be somehow relevant to later movies or is it just some arbitrary thing to make the brain juice valuable, valuable enough to attempt to justify murder idk but uh....yyyyyyeah 😬

-minor thing, but I was surprised that the swimming baby from the trailer was, in fact, not Ronal’s. In fact, we never actually meet Ronal’s baby, which, again, surprised me. Why make her pregnant if we don’t get to see the baby, it feels kinda random ^^; to link her to her spirit tulkun who just had a calf I guess?? idk. once again, maybe it’ll become more relevant in movie 3.

-until proven otherwise, I am heretofore declaring that final “a son for a son” line to be Spider’s official adoption into the Sully family 😭😭😭

anyways, I guess that’ll do for now. I’m sure there was other stuff but I’ve been sitting here typing for over an hour already. Perhaps later I’ll come back with more comments, idk. I’ll be seeing the movie again next week with the rest of my family, so maybe I’ll notice different things/remember stuff that got swallowed up in the feels. Will I cry more than I did on my first viewing because I’m gonna try not to go in dehydrated again, or less because by then I’ll have had a week to process and accept everything? I have literally no idea. Guess we’ll have to just wait and see...