#and its even more fucked imo to question their allegiance to 'the scene' because it just warps into

[sendmyresignation]

something I've been thinking about lately. i do think it's incredibly telling that almost 80 percent of the conversations around 'gatekeeping' and 'posers' and shit end up just becoming vitriolic hatred of 'alt girls' like i hate shit spotify playlists and dollskill fake leather edge and tiktok recommendations as much as the next person but this is a very big attitude coming from a website full of people who spent their formative middle school years shopping at hot topic for multi-colored skinny jeans while listening to like. falling in reverse or 21p unironically (this is a self-own btw). first of all teenagers having shit taste isn't killing punk music. but also why is the object of your hatred always boil down to a woman faking it? as if it isn't the single oldest stereotype in heavy music? like am i insane for thinking this is an issue

[bettsfic]

Please bestow is with your Dark thoughts Betts. When they used Hozier’s ‘somewhere in the woods’....put a fork in me I’m done.

when i had to pause the show to google “quantum superposition” i realized that i wasn’t enjoying the direction it had taken. 

mostly, i have questions.

where did the fifth martha come from? the one adam killed with the god particle? she wasn’t on the same path as eva’s martha and never got the face scar but she died? 

what were magnus and franziska doing when bartosz and jonas were being cranky in the nineteenth century?

bartosz says that jonas’ appearance got all fucked up because of traveling but? where did he travel? how did he get the god particle to work?

where did those fucking round time/world machines come from and how does everyone know how to use them without being taught?

if young noah sees agnes kill older noah, doesn’t he already know that jonas betrays him, before he even betrays him? (i might be remembering that wrong)

if there’s an original world that deviates in 1986, am i supposed to believe that every single character born from time travel just doesn’t exist in the original world? and if that’s true, doesn’t there mean there would have to have been a first loop to tie the rest of the knot, and if that’s the case, then the first iteration would be distinctly different from the rest? this is the biggest plot hole in the entire show 

am i supposed to believe that jonas’ existence is such a bad influence on bartosz that he’s a burnout in adam’s world but a goddamn nuclear physicist in eva’s?

if both eva and adam’s world came from the same initial point, what set off the differences? why are there so many color differences and architectural mirroring, which implies the architects and designers across both worlds are the same but prefer mirrored layouts and different color palettes?

did eva want the loop to continue and adam wanted it to stop? for all they reiterated what both of them wanted, i still can’t tell how they were in conflict? 

where did the third claudia come from, when we watched claudia prime shoot her in the head?

how is everyone suddenly able to travel at any point in time and presumably any space, when before they could only go in 33 year intervals?

where did the broken time machine come from that claudia gives to adult jonas, who gives it to tanhaus who then discovers time travel?

what was the result of tanhaus’ experiment that split the original world? did he see any results or was he just like “damn that was a bust” and have no idea he superimposed 3 realities on top of one another?

why is the bunker a bunker all of the time except for 1986 when it suddenly turns into a fully furnished boy’s bedroom complete with a television set? and why did the first time machine require killing boys when technically the time machine itself is a paradox, because it has always existed? (but again, the ending implies there was a first time loop, so it can’t have always existed)

why did eva’s apocalypse result in a bunch of sand??

adam presumably spends 33 years trying to figure out the god particle or whatever, but eva in her world just...has it already? who figured it out?

how does the noah in eva’s world exist if there’s no jonas to take bartosz back in time to meet silja, who wouldn’t have been born anyway if hannah didn’t go back in time to spite fuck egon?

who fucked helge? 

am i the only one who thought noah was going to start making out with jonas after charlotte kidnaps herself?

in the original world, regina isn’t with aleksander. does this mean boris doesn’t murder anyone in the original world, and does that mean the murder was a result of time travel? and since the murder happened outside winden, are we supposed to believe that the time travel that happened within winden had a greater affect on the entire planet? or did he only not show up so that bartozs couldn’t be born and therefore fuck adam’s sister and have agnes, who fucks adam’s son, and have tronte?

if tronte isn’t regina’s father, who is?

why does charlotte spend so long in s1 and 2 developing her character as a sharp-witted skeptic only to immediately begin doing adam’s bidding? 

when egon arrives in eva’s world to help hannah give birth, do they just both die in the apocalypse? and if so, why did eva bother to send egon back at all? and also, in eva’s world egon doesn’t even know hannah so why tf would he care?

what is katharina’s name in the original world if hannah isn’t in 1954 to inspire helena?

if adam and eva’s rhetoric revolves around “if you don’t work for me, everyone will die” why is it then suddenly okay to make sure most of the characters never existed at all? 

are we sure the apocalypse doesn’t happen in the original world? does that imply that the apocalypse is the result of time travel? did claudia travel to the original world to confirm for absolute certain the apocalypse didn’t happen? since it was kind of her fault in both worlds?? and does adam-world claudia meet up with original-world claudia at all to tell her the situation? if not, why wouldn’t she??

am i supposed to believe agnes voluntarily fucked the original, or is this a coercion situation in order to have tronte? 

am i also supposed to believe agnes would never go back for doris? that she put her allegiance to adam above everything?

why did they spend all of s2 trying to solve the detective’s brother’s murder if they only mentioned it in passing in s3? just, aleksander admits to bartosz that it happened, and that’s it? 

why are there so many people who hit other people with rocks (and a fire extinguisher)?

why is everyone crying in nearly every scene?

lastly and most importantly, WHAT HAPPENED TO WOLLER’S EYE?

i have more questions probably but they’re impossible to answer because they’re either plot holes or rhetorical. i still love the first two seasons, but the third fell prey to what i feared would happen, which is that the ambition of the conflict became too unwieldy for its container. my biggest disappointment is the major time travel plot hole, which had otherwise been so seamless. i found myself this season not really caring about the characters at all, because everything was so focused on plot, which imo is what made s1 and 2 so special, a show that values its characters over the ingenuity of its plot. s3 does not hold that same standard. there’s a bizarre amount of crying that does not at all add to the emotional stakes. i wasn’t bored while watching, but i definitely was not as compelled as the first two seasons.

i know this show will never have a lot of fic, but here’s an incomplete list of fics i’d die to read:

noah/elisabeth falling in love after the apocalypse 

jonas/noah post-apocalypse friends to lovers to enemies 

jonas/bartosz 19th c. friends to lovers to enemies

agnes/doris reunion and HEA

egon/hannah 1950s unrequited angsty love 

adult!jonas/hannah s2 mother/son time travel shenanigans

adult!jonas/teen!martha 19th c. sad angst

literally anything that addresses and fixes some of the plot holes

ultimately i think the show ended on the right and inevitable beat, but the path it took to get there didn’t make any sense, and i think would have been better utilized if the writer stuck to honoring the characters rather than exploring the thematic implications of time travel. 

[kinetic-elaboration]

February 2: Thoughts on 4x01 Echoes

Mmmmkay, literally JUST finished watching 4x01. I’m very proud of myself because I completely avoided ALL spoilers and I’m not going to unblock tumblr until I finish this reaction post so I can write down my totally spontaneous and unadulterated thoughts.

My general reaction: I actually kind of liked it. I wouldn’t say I liked it as much as Seasons 1 and 2 and I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic about the season and frankly I still have a lot of complaints, most of which are so general I don’t think they’ll ever be resolved BUT I would undoubtedly say that 4x01 was better than 3x01 and I’m actually looking forward to 4x02; it looks like just the kind of plot I like: tense, self-contained, lots of delinquents.

(loooong reaction under the read more)

So some things I didn’t like first so I can get my negativity out of the way:

I never fully believed that either Jarod Joseph or Chelsey Reist were going to be regulars because I thought that people were reading a lot into kind of vague tweets but I wanted to believe it, especially with Jarod Joseph and honestly even though I don’t like Harper…they both deserve main status by now. I mean they’ve lasted this fucking long. I cannot believe Zack McGowan gets main status and Jarod and Chelsey don’t.

I don’t give a fuck about the Grounders. I don’t! I don’t care!! And I will never care. So all this Polis shit, Grounder politics, Echo yammering on, blah blah blah. I can’t follow it and I don’t even want to follow it. In my incredibly subjective opinion, it really weighs the show down.

Roan constantly sounds like he’s having a * Tina Fey voice * talking like this contest. I have no idea what his real voice sounds like but if this is at all a put on accent he needs to tone it down for realsies I cannot take him seriously.

Monty/Harper. Get it away get it away. (I’m not going to go into why I hate them but rest assured every reaction I write this entire season will have some variation of this point, if the episode in question features them as a couple at all. Having a canon NoTP is such a fannish burden so I’m going to whine about it at top volume all the time.)

NO MILLER. A TRAVESTY.

This isn’t entirely the show’s fault but I roll my eyes every time I hear L*xa’s name, like some kind of Pavlovian dog, so obviously I did a lot of eye rolling and now my eyes kind of hurt. In particular, Clarke’s overwrought sadness about her was just so… I’m done, I’m tired of it, I don’t care. I know I’m not being fair, because in the timeline of the show obviously L’s death is very close. But, first off, I don’t think Clarke loved her at all—I think she thinks she did but she did not, and I don’t think that line would even have been included if it weren’t for RL events. Second, and relatedly, I think that little scene with Abby and the Dramatic Single Tear TM when she hands over the chip were so clearly about appeasing fans and doing penance for daring to kill a lesbian that they took me out of the show. I wasn’t watching Clarke in Polis, I was watching Eliza Taylor acting on a set. I hope that’s the end of that, and we never have to deal with that shit again.

I didn’t like Kane’s line to Bellamy about eventually deserving to survive. I know why it’s in there, both in an in-universe and in a line-to-the-fans way, but frankly my initial thought is: all human beings deserve survival. It’s not like only good people should be allowed to live a radiation free life lol. And second, can we just leave him the fuck alone already? I’m done with the Bellamy dogpile. Let’s hope that shit’s done too.

Speaking of lines I didn’t like, Bellamy calling Clarke Princess is basically the definition of Do Not Want. It’s the sort of thing that, small as it is, makes me think that the writers don’t know their own creation and it makes me lose faith in them again. That name was an insult—it was always a fucking insult, it’s not cute, it’s not a pet name, and it has no place in the Bellarke relationship anymore. Such an unnecessary false note. (I probably seem/am disproportionately mad about it…but I hate it.)

I could have done without that last scene. It just looked so….fake. Again it just took me out of the show completely. Was it supposed to show us how dire everything is? I got that message the last 20 times lol.

The stuff I did like:

BELLAMY. There wasn’t enough of him, but he was A FUCKING STAR in the scenes he did get, especially the negotiation scene. Like I could list every line I liked and every moment I liked and that would probably be more proportional to the degree I liked them but it’s probably faster and more efficient to say that I loved it all. I loved that he and Clarke acted like (mostly) equal co-leaders. I liked that they looked to each other all the time, and had all of these silent eye-communication moments. I liked the scene with him and Kane and Indra before the meeting with Echo, I loved that Echo views him as the only Sky Person she’ll talk to, and I loved…basically all of it but I guess what I’m trying to say is I loved both how he handled the negotiation and that HE was the one doing it.

Indra was killing it in this ep too. I loved the hug with Kane of course. I loved her and Murphy in the pre-negotiation scene (“I never agreed to [guns].” / “That’s because you’re not stupid.”) (She and Murphy need their own show like I would watch it.) I like how she’s basically chilling with the Sky People now—like the little scene in the temple had such a cool collection of characters, I was digging it. (Except for Octavia…who I really don’t know what to make of this season yet so.)

Speaking of Murphy…. Okay, I wasn’t impressed by Murphy/Emori in Season 3 but I did like their scenes in this episode. Unfortunately, I was really looking forward to them joining up with the Sky People in Arkadia; I want to see another Grounder trying to find a place in Arkadia (since Lincoln was brutally murdered and all) and I want to see Murphy re-integrate himself because tbh he really is at his best when he has people to play off of. People who aren’t Emori. So I was a little bummed when they ran off into the night together because I really don’t care to watch the two of them in a vacuum and also…we already saw that? But anyway I did like their scenes in this ep so they’re in the positive column. I also like that we finally got an explanation as to why Emori took the chip.

I’ve had sort of mixed feelings about Jaha because I’m not sure whether or not I can follow his story line/character progression or not but I will say: I am 100% Team Jaha as of right now. I do think that, whatever he was on the Ark or in S1, his late S1/early S2 transformation was genuine, and he really is trying to be a good person who helps people. I hope he finds the salvation and the purpose he’s been looking for. And his role in the little ploy with Octavia and the shroud was great.

That whole sequence was probably the strongest in the episode. I think one of The 100’s greatest weaknesses at this point is the complexity of its various allegiances and all the old bad blood that’s been spilled everywhere. I haven’t seen S3 since it aired and so even as a pretty big fan I still find some stuff hard to follow—it’s hard to remember who betrayed who when and all this shit and even though some Obvious Exposition is peppered in to help us along, it’s not enough for me sometimes. But this spider web of interconnected relationships, both good and bad, is also an asset of the show and I thought that middle sequence, from the “we surrender” line to Roan waking up, really played all of that up in a good way. It brought a lot of characters and a lot of history together in a way that generally worked very well. I liked the shroud ploy (though omg the Azgeda warriors are dumb AF—how could Octavia just get up and walk around and no one noticed her? Like they’re all looking outward and no one’s looking at the big ol’ empty middle of the room? And then she, a child who lived sixteen very unhealthy years under the floor and has been on Earth probably less than a year with only a handful of months of warrior training if that is able to take out a whole room of the most fearsome warriors in the post-apocalypse? It defies belief I’m sorry). I liked the Griffins operating together. I loved the tension. (Lessened somewhat by knowing Roan would live, what with him being a main and all.) Loved the whole goshdarn thing.

Most of the Arkadia stuff was pretty eh but only in that there wasn’t much of it, and what there was, we’d seen before in promotional clips and stuff (though I will say: they did better with the promotional stuff this year; I think last year they gave away some of their surprises in a way that made the scenes ring very false on a first viewing imo). But obviously I loved my boy Jasper. I would have found his almost-suicide very hard to watch if I hadn’t known it was coming but as it was, I could be more detached about it. I wish we’d seen more of his room but what we did see was interesting (I have an obsession with the Ark/Arkadia sets okay): his art—not just Maya’s favorite painting but another one near the door; his goggles with the plastic over the eyes knocked out—like him, just a shell of their former selves; all his random tools on his desk like why does he have those?; his notebooks. And, oh, that he left a suicide note to Monty. And even just their small interaction at the door was great.

Also… while in a way I find it an odd beat for him to go from his last scene with Monty in 3x16 to almost killing himself in 4x01, mere hours later in the canon timeline… I believe it, and I’m glad that my previous fears, that the show would just forget what he’d gone through and do a Jasper re-set in the new season, can be put to rest. I liked and believed in his transition from really-ready-to-die, to well-the-world’s-gonna-kill-me-and-make-it-easy-might-as-well-enjoy-Earth.

But the best Arkadia scene was the one between Jasper and Raven. First of all because I FUCKING CALLED IT that Raven shouldn’t have the sort of coding/computer abilities that she has. I hypothesized that she might have improved her skills at some point during the S2-S3 hiatus because her disability lessened her ability to do legwork, but I also mentioned that it could have been ALIE which still means I WAS RIGHT BOOM. (I just like being right a lot okay.) Also the “upgrade” talk reminded me of Dollhouse. Which was exciting but also made me all bitter and mad because Dollhouse did the idea of artificial upgrades to your brain so much better. Made me feel inspired for my Dollhouse AU though so there’s that.

I don’t ship Jasper/Raven but I do friend-ship them and I hope they bond over having been ALIE-d.

Also speaking of being AlIE-d, I don’t think Harper forgives Jasper for what his chipped self did. And she probably shouldn’t honestly because my theory is still that ALIE pulled from the real feelings and thoughts of chipped people and maybe someday I’ll write a full explanation of why I think that—which isn’t to say that Jasper wants to hurt Harper but just to say that ‘pleading the chip’ isn’t as straightforward as all that. Still, even though it makes sense narratively, because I will pick Jasper over pretty much everyone this is sorta another reason to unfairly dislike Harper. If there is anything even remotely like a Monty having to choose scenario I will be very perturbed though.  (This isn’t something I especially liked or disliked, the thought just occurred to me while I was talking about Arkadia stuff.)

It’s pretty early to say anything about her at all but Unnamed Possible Priestess (Kenza??) is looking so promising. First, we know from the trailer she’s gorgeous and I’m always here for that. Second and to be less shallow for a second, Indra seems to know her, maybe, so that could be cool. And third, while I have yet to be impressed by Grounder religion, I am very curious to see if she’s going to be bringing in a different aspect to their spirituality. I don’t know her but I already want to see her go head to head with Roan.

I had a bit of a discussion/ramble with my mom yesterday when she was telling me a bit about the episode in a vague spoiler-free way and I was trying to explain when I like Clarke (when she’s a co-leader with a reasonably sized head, when she’s cunning and imaginative like in early S2) (early S2 Clarke is my favorite Clarke fyi) and when I don’t like her (when she’s arrogant, when she thinks she can do everything herself, when she doesn’t listen to others—basically season 2B Clarke and Clarke in parts of S3), and she said I thought I would like her in this ep. I was on the fence. I liked her with Bellamy. And she had moments that objectively I probably should have liked but I’ve just been so tired of her shit for so long it’s hard for me not to feel Tired Of Her in general. But… I guess I’ll say I think Clarke looks promising.

I kind of loved how at the end of the episode when Kabby were saying goodbye to their children and story-line heirs Bellarke, Abby says “Okay let’s do this” or some such, and then the first thing she does is hug Clarke. I know she means “okay, let’s accomplish the plan, which means separating, so I gotta say goodbye to my daughter first” but it looked a little like the “this” was hugging. Which is sort of sweet.

…Um wow I’ve written a lot and I can’t think of anything so I guess I’m done FOR NOW.

Looking forward to lots of delinquents, some hopefully cool tense scenes, more Miller and Bryan, and Clarke in a better outfit next time.