#anyways for clarity's sake this is about people who only think about a character as part of a ship dynamic and not as their own person

[quaintpanic]

"oh i really love xyz character-" really? outside the context of shipping?

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

never have I played any nights at Freddy fazbears

pls explain the whole plot and all lore to me as if I were small and slightly stupid

oh great timing i literally JUST explained this to my asoue discord

this is a VERY simple summary, but things to keep in mind while reading:

very very VERY little of this is directly spelled out for us. the creator, scott cawthon, LOVES to confuse people on purpose and the vast majority of the lore is gleaned from hidden minigames, secret cutscenes, and easter eggs. this makes things very confusing and controversial within the fanbase, so im gonna try to explain where there are differing opinions

really, there's two main stories: the first main story was completed with FNAF6 and Ultimate Custom Night, the story going on rn is the second and it is still ongoing. as such, a lot of the lore is still a mystery to all of us.

For clarity's sake, I will divide this between: THE AFTON STORY, the one the movie's gonna tell a part of, and THE GLITCH STORY, which the games are going through

dont worry i will make it fun to go through so it doesnt feel like school

ok lets go

THE AFTON STORY

First, let's get a visual chart in here. don't worry it's just for show

These are the important families we will be talking about; the Emily family, with father Henry and daughter Charlie, and the Afton Family, with father William, two sons (Michael and a boy who is still unnamed, he might get named on friday? We call him Crying Child "CC") and a daughter, Elizabeth. Don't worry about the mothers they're not important

Okay so here's the thing: of these four children, all but Michael die VERY early on in the timeline

The problem is we do NOT know THE ORDER each of them died. There's a lot of arguments on all sides but I personally think the order is sad boi->charlie->baby so imma present it in that order. But keep in mind that we don't actually know because of the confusing way the lore is dropped.

okay so for starters.

Backstory/FNAF4

purple guy is william afton and he and this guy vcalled henry start opening a restaurant chain starring freddy fazbear

in the original location they've got two animatronic suits, fredbear and spring bonnie. the other location has freddy, bonnie, foxy, chica

the og location suits are ~special~ tho, bc henry and william are crazy inventor dudes. these suits are called "springlock suits". they function as full animatronics but you can wind all the wires and gears and endoskeleton and shit back and step into the costume yourself. only problem is the safety is jackshit and if you like. cry or sweat or breathe wrong the springlocks will fail and the metal will come crashing back and crush u to death. u should have enough time to get to the back room so u dont bleed out in front of the customers tho. springlock suits are important remember those

michael is in his early teens and has just learned how to be a shit to his siblings and is trying out this hot new bullying thing. he's picking a lot on CC because CC is terrified of the freddy animatronics. it is said that he "saw something" that scared him, it could be anything as benign as "saw someone go into the suit and got freaked out" to something as serious as "saw one of those aforementioned springlock failures and person bleeding out." could also be charlie or elizabeth's death if those happen earlier in the timeline. again we dont know bc cawthon likes to confuse us

CC is not scared of the freddy characters tho, he has all the plushies and calls them his friends. he's just scared of the animtronics. unfortunately his dad works there so he has to be there like 90% of the time so he's having a wonderful time. hence the moniker "crying child". bc he cries all the time

anyway at his birthday party, michael decides it would be really funny to shove CC up into the animatronic's mouth for kicks. this goes about as well as you'd expect cause the mouth closes and fuckin. crushes his head

kid goes into a coma for a while but eventually flatlines. while he's in the coma we hear michael tearfully apologizing, and his fredbear plush talks to him (presumed to be william) saying he will "put him back together"

anyway that was fun. so next up charlie emily gets FUCKING MURDERED

Backstory/FNAF1-2

for some reason charlie gets locked outside the pizzeria. william's driving by and decides to stab her bc why not

honestly most of us believe that this occured after CC just bc it gives william motivation to be pissy at his business partner and kill his kid abt it, but also a book that released a month ago implies that william might have been nightmare gassing his kids for shits and giggles so. who knows. dont worry about that btw its not relevant rn

anyway the thing is willie and henry had an animatronic designed to protect the children called the puppet. the puppet sees charlie outside and goes out to help her but it's raining so it fries up the puppet's circuits and it crashes on top of her dead body. cheery!

except this is where it gets wild bc charlie proceeds to like. possess the puppet

possession is really complicated in this universe but basically there's no real way to communicate openly with people and the possesser might not even be aware of who or where they are or anything really but. yeah the lil girl def possesses the puppet

its after this that william starts killing kids for funsies. a lot of us presume that he saw the puppet getting possessed and was like "holy shit a way to bring crying kid back" but again he might've just decided this was fun

anyway he lures five kids into the Secret Freddy's Backroom That Is Not On The Maps by wearing the spring bonnie costume. after killing them he shoves them into the other animatronic suits (freddy, bonnie, chica, foxy, fredbear "golden freddy") and yeah they start gettin possessed

the fifth missing kid was stuffed in fredbear and here's where it gets veeery theoretical cause we dont have straight confirmation of this but just some theories. it's VERY likely that crying child was also haunting fredbear at this point, and shoving another kid in there got two kids haunting the same bitch and it causes fredbear (golden freddy) to be really fucking weird and glitchy and eldritch or w/e. anyway you dont have to worry about that rn cause golden freddy doesnt show up much they're too busy ascending or smth

now this is where the lore gets confusing-- the first game claims that after the last two were lured, someone was caught on camera, arrested and charged. however we know for a fact willie-boi wasnt caught so either 1) this got retconned when cawthon decided to actually make lore, 2) he wasnt convicted and somehow still kept a hold on the fazbear empire during this, or 3) a lot of us theorize that henry was framed for the crimes and thats why he disappears from the timeline until the sixth game. cause yeah he disappears from the timeline until the sixth game. personally i believe the third it makes a lot of sense but yeah willie-boi stops killing at about five kids

anyway will is going full scientist with all these animatronics and he's like. ripping parts off them and putting them on other animatronics to see what happens. we THINK. again this is really vague but this is just kinda the most logical explanation here.

anyway this is what happens in fnaf2 and what it does is like. split the souls and shit. and he's like "oh this is sick" except this makes all the suits act erratic as hell and very angry towards adults (theyre cool with kids tho) and eventually one of them causes the infamous Bite of 87. we're not entirely sure what it was but one of the animatronics bit off the frontal lobe of someone in 1987. this caused this location to get shut down and willie boi just puts the pieces back on the og animatronics and is like "well shit what do we do now boys"

FNAF5: Sister Location

anyway so this is where we think elizabeth dies in the timeline. william makes these things called the "funtime animatronics"-- we know they are made after a fnaf location shuts down, though it's not specified which. these animatronics are built SPECIFICALLY to kidnap children. ballora is built as a distraction for parents, the other two are built to only move when not seen, and then Circus Baby™ has an arm that can grab kids and drag thtem into her until willie lets em out. she is programmed to only do this when a child is alone in the room so william tells elizabeth "do not go see baby when you are alone in the room"

so elizabeth is like 6 and she goes to see baby when she is alone in the room and baby grabs her but the arm is fucked up and the kid dies p badly

funtime's location is then immediately closed due to "gas leaks" and william rents out the funtimes for parties. at the same time he starts shoving some haunted parts into the funtime animatronics to see what happens. we THINK.

important location here btw is the "scooping room." it's actually very good horror but basically it's a bitch that is supposed to rip the endoskeletons out of the suit whenever theyre malfunctioning. super smart idea that will cause no nightmares going forwards.

anyway the animatronics all kinda know that william killed them so after a while (a few years??? who knows) they start trying to kill him and he's like "hmm. i cannot go into this bunker anymore. let me send michael, my last surviving kid who i hate." this is where michael, now an adult, re-enters the timeline.

mikey boy is told by his dad that he can bring his baby sis back to life if he goes down into this bunker and does some shit. michael is like "oh sweet" bc honestly he probably still feels guilty about literally killing his bro and so he goes down to the bunker.

the animatronics eventually tell him "go into the scooping room it'll be totes mcgotes" and when he gets there he finds out that the animatronics have killed all the other employees, scooped themselves, and fused their endoskeletons into one conglomerate called ennard

ennard is like "yeah we cant escape here cause they just bring us back so we're gonna use you as a skinsuit k thnx" and they scoop him and use him as a skinsuit

it's really good horror i promise

BUT this turned out to be a bad plan because Humans Decay so after like a week ennard gets puked up by the MikeSuit and escapes into the sewers.

here, meanwhile, is where mike pulls a reverse uno card and possesses his own decaying corpse

LIKE A FUCKING BADASS

he then calls up his dad and is like "hey dad :) elizabeth's fine now :) BUT :) they fucking killed me :) because they thought i was you :) you sure sent me down here to die huh :) anyway :) im gonna come find you :) you have a ten minute head start start running :)"

actor really fucking sold that monologue too ngl

so he's like. PISSSSSSED and rightfully so he is walking around in his own corpse. so he goes to find his dad

Backstory/FNAF3

this is about when peepaw willie goes back to the original fnaf location (we THINK) and is like "ok im just gonna take apart all the animatronics and do something with these"

only when he destroys the suits the missing kids' ghosts show up and spook him. so this guy who's been studying ghosts is like "oh fuckshit there's ghosts here" and tries to hide in the spring bonnie suit. only he laughs and this causes the springlocks to malfunction and FUCKING VIOLENTLY KILL HIM. get springlocked idiot

except then HE possesses the spring bonnie suit and this is springtrap. but also he's in a super secret back room while this happens so he is trapped there for a while

FNAF6

so ennard, michael and william are fuckin around for a couple years. at some point ennard decides that elizabeth is kinda a freak actually and kicks her out of the hivemind so she just rebuilds herself a circus baby suit and keeps wanderin around so now we got four bitches doing who knows what

eventually it's been 30 years since the last freddy's closed and someone opens up a haunted house parody of it. mike goes to work there as a security guard* and guess what they found springtrap and bring him to the attraction thinking he's just an animatronic. after five nights of fucking with him mike sets the place on fire to try and finally kill his dad fr. it does not work

*note that this isnt confirmed to be michael but we kinda. all know it's probably him. it really seems to be him

anyway then michael finds out that an actual fazbear's is opening and needs an owner so he goes and becomes owner of the restaraunt. while some guy on a cassette tape is giving him tutorial instructions he sets up the place and also collects several animatronics. these are:

scraptrap (peepaw post-fire and really pissed)

scrapbaby (elizabeth now thinking that maybe if she kills things her dad will pay attention to her)

molten freddy (remains of ennard still not entirely sure what's going on)

lefty (a bear solely built to capture the puppet, who was still fuckin around the fnaf2 location i guess. anyway now the puppet is here thats important)

so after our five nights scrapbaby comes on the speaker system and is like "omg dad if we kill people will you love me. we're gonna kill soooo many people it's my passion actually" and that's when the cassette tutorial guy interrupts her

and he just goes "yeah. you're not doing that"

anyway he's like "hi guys. you remember me??? henry??? from 30 years ago?? i owned half this business? you killed my daughter and stuffed her soul in a puppet? lmao yeah i literally lured you all here and you came like the fucking idiots you are. im setting the place on fire, we're all gonna die and go to heaven. except for YOU, WILL. you are not going there. lmao bye" and he sets the place on fire and they all burn. it's more epic when he says it tbh

now henry mentions that he had an escape route ready for the building owner but he figured out the owner was michael and was like "i feel like you wanna stay and burn with us" and michael's like "fuck yeah"

you might think that wraps up the story nicely but OH NO THERE'S MORE

Ultimate Custom Night

see, the next game is ultimate custom night where you can choose which animatronics hunt you and their level of difficulty. it is through hidden messages and shit that we find out that ucn is, canonically, william being tortured in hell. which is sick af

anyway the tormentor is a spirit labelled "the vengeful spirit" in the files, and "the one you should not have killed" by the animatronics. we sometimes hear either a light voice behind the other animatronic lines (could be either a woman with a light voice, a little girl, or a little boy), and the pic that sometimes shows up as a hallucination is a distorted photo of scott cawthon's son. we know for a FACT this spirit is someone from the fnaf6 fire cause they reference the fire more than once while poking willie with a stick. it's probably not elizabeth cause she was just tryin to get her dad's attention. it's not charlie/puppet bc one of her lines is like "ffs just stay out of my way for ONCE." we also know for a fact it's not henry cause they were like "henry sure tried to release us huh. not happening im not letting you go that easily bitch haha" so that narrows it down to michael and the missing kids

now here's the thing.

the vaaaaast majority of the fandom is convinced that the vengeful spirit is cassidy, the missing child that was stuffed inside golden freddy with cc. this is because golden freddy is in a looot of ultimate custom night and if you beat the hardest mode you just get a quick cutscene of him glitching and then everything fades to black

however. i have seen legiterally no convincing evidence that this is the case. all we know about cassidy is she is the golden freddy missing kid and was talking to cc through the logbook. and we BARELY know this. in the alternate universe book she first showed up in (the silver eyes) she wasn't even the golden freddy kid. people point out a similar situation to her and cc in fazbear frights where one of the kids was tormenting william (stitchwraith) but that's literally a whole separate universe and completely separate characters with separate backstories and personalities

there's a sprite in security breach who fights glitchtrap (explained below) who was named in the files as "cassidy" so ppl point to that but 1) they changed that name after people made a deal out of it, 2) that could mean literally anything, 3) the protag of the next game was named "cassie" and her story kinda paralleled the sprite's first game so uuhhhh anyway

honestly i think it's WAY more likely the vengeful spirit is mr michael "i'm going to come find you and set you on fire twice" afton, using his childhood likeness to fuck with his dad. this is strengthened by one of the easter egg cutscenes in ucn, where the vengeful spirit talks to a benevolent spirit who tells them to "leave the demon to his demons. there is nothing for you here." the audio in the background is someone distortedly screaming "HENRY" and "MICHAEL"

one of the animatronic lines also says "is this a prison for you or for me? perhaps both" implying that the vengeful spirit feels like they belong in hell, which would fit with mike's "i killed my brother" self-loathing. the golden freddy glitch could very easily be his mental anguish as well as william's, with the optional cutscene telling us that while michael is self-harming by torturing his dad in hell, he has the ability to move on and find peace if he can forgive himself. honestly i really like that open ending there

another point towards "vengeful mike" theory is that we play as him for most of the games (definitely 5 and 6, most likely 1 and 3, some theorize 4) and so him being the vengeful spirit is way more emotionally impactful than "random kid #5"

however every time i bring this up to the fnaf fandom they get really really pissy at me because y'all love ur angry lil girl cassidy headcanons and honestly that is completely fair i also love angry lil girls. im just saying this bc we're going over whats canon rn and i firmly believe in vengeful mike (thank @birdsareblooming for that) but yknow. cassidy is also fun as hell

i wrote a whole essay on this btw these are just the cliffnotes. do you guys wanna see the essay

anyway that's where the afton story ends but OHHH NO MR CAWTHON CANNOT STOP

if you just want a quick catchup before the movie you can stop here but anyway. let's talk mimicry

THE GLITCH STORY

the games coming out recently are kinda a sequel-story and bc theyre still coming out we are still very confused about what the fuck is canon and what is not so this one will be a lot more guessing. i digress let's talk about

Help Wanted

so back on earth, it's the 2020s-2030s. turns out the fazbear company is still functional and they're like "well shit guys what the FUCK do we do about all of That"

so they decide they need a brand cleansing and what they do is they secretly hire an "indie game developer" to make the fnaf games in-universe, to make light of the tragedies and make people take them less seriously. they pretend to have beef with this indie dev but eventually put all of his games into a VR game as a show of "good faith." somehow this actually does work in revitalizing the brand image

also sidenote but the books imply that the indie dev was kidnapped and gaslit into making the games but thats not important

now see there's a glitch in the game and the beta-tester jeremy mentions it and then gets increasingly withdrawn and obsessive. because it turns out there is a Bitch in here

now. the identity of the Bitch is uh. controversial in the fandom rn. i will say for clarity that i am in Party Two and will probably be biased towards that but here's the thing. the Bitch is either:

a digital upload of william afton's soul (somehow escaping hell)

THE MIMIC

Help Wanted Interlude: The Mimic

see, the other books (silver eyes, fazbear frights) are set in a parallel universe-ish to the books, similar rules and worldbuilding but cawthon can fuck around all he wants with no consequences. there were charliebots and springtrap mpreg at one point it was nuts. but the thing is right now they're kinda trying to tell us that the current series, tales from the pizzaplex, is game-canon. god only knows if they'll stick to that so some people think the books are in the game's universe, others think they're parallels to the games and not 1-1 exact much like the others

but anyway they give us crucial lore on The Mimic so here we go

some guy named edwin (some think he's a parallel to henry or william, but rn we're just gonna assume he's canon) is a single dad to a toddler. however he's working for fazbear making all these animatronics and he's sooo busy and needs something to distract the toddler so he creates a fucked up nightmare animatronic called The Mimic, whose programming is extremely basic: "copy whatever you see being done"

the toddler actually loves the fucked up nightmare animatronic and teaches him to play patty-cake and carry around stuffed animals or w/e. anyway then the toddler runs out into the street and gets hit by a car

edwin is still grieving and the mimic comes up carrying the toddler's stuffed animal and still copying him and when the mimic that edwin programmed to copy things is still copying things edwin snaps and just beats the fuck out of it bc he needs a grief outlet. he then abandons the thing but however the mimic has just learned Violence

some employees come by to see where edwin's animatronics are and the mimic just starts killing all of them bc. well. it's supposed to copy things. it will copy things

there's a BIG GAP here in what happens to it next but it disappears for the next 30 years. however it is heavily, HEAVILY implied that it witnessed at least one of the missing children incidents

fazbear actually has a Lot of mimic endoskeletons but bc they start copying violent shit they shut them all down. however they all run on the same program, "mimic1" and fazbear keeps that tech around cause you know it could be helpful

Back to Help Wanted

now here is where the "we only THINK this is canon we dont knkow yet" comes in

back to the vr game, they are just shoving random old pieces of code in there to speefd up the process of making the game cause capitalism doesnt like long development times. this puts the mimic1 program into the program and it immediately sees All Of Afton's Crimes In 4K. it decides "oh yeah i can mimic this but i should probably get a physical body in order to do that"

so beta tester jeremy sees the mimic program, which takes the form of Spring Bonnie Suit. this is Glitchtrap

now keep in mind that some people do still believe that all this aint happenin and the spring bonnie glitch is just william. again i personally believe the mimic cause it makes more sense than "william escaped hell somehow" but w/e

anyway, glitchtrap is fuckin around. it tries to possess beta tester jeremy and in order to stop it, jeremy does the sensible thing and cuts his own face off

so glitchtrap is like "hmm. that didn't work out" and decides to go for the more subtle approach. the next beta tester, currently unnamed, starts recording tapes inside the game to send to the next beta tester so they dont fuck with glitchtrap. glitchtrap however seals itself inside the tapes so that when the beta testers try to delete it, it'll instead be inside the tapes and cant be removed lmao. it then "mimics" tape girl's voice and adds a last tape saying "let him possess you its ok i promise"

it also mimics her intro of "hello can you hear me" in the one time it speaks so. mimic

anyway the next beta tester is this gal named vanessa and she gets possessed like suuuper quickly and glitchtrap is like "oh fucking FINALLY"

Security Breach Therapy Tapes

vanessa's acting weird at work so company requires her to go to therapy, however she has the same therapist as Another Patient. this patient will be named later however right now we're calling them Patient 46. they do not talk but have the same therapist as Vanessa and is creepy about it. anyway whenever a therapist prods too much into either Vanessa or P46's life, or discovers them fucking with fazbear tech, the therapist mysteriously goes missing and shows up later dead and mangled by machinery

they go through like five of these bitches at least, but it's clear P46 is another bitch possessed by glitchtrap but they're like more possessed than vanessa is so glitchtrap likes them better

BUT THAT'S ALL BORING, WE'VE GOT A PIZZAPLEX NOW!!!

Security Breach

fazbear opens a giant 80s-style mall with a ton of attractions like disneyland or w/e and call it the Mega Pizzaplex. There's state-of-the-art animatronics in here that are basically sentient ai. they might be possessed but we're not actually sure rn they might just be advanced robots

they start with "glamrock" freddy, bonnie and chica, along with roxy wolf instead of foxy. we're not sure why rn. anyway at some point something suspicious happens and bonnie is found mangled and he's replaced with montgomery gator, a c-list animatronic they had to run the golf course. he doesnt seem to take the spotlight well and has started breaking things but its probably fine

anyway they eventually realize they can automate the staff and stop paying human beings and they jump on that cause they love cutting costs. they've got staffbots everywhere except for ONE person- vanessa, who is hired as the security guard. we find a note saying that her interviewer found her too inexperienced for the position, but someone "very" high up in the company pushed her into the role. this is implied to be glitchtrap taking over the systems

so vanessa and P46 are shoving glitchtrap into the systems because, well, guess what? the pizzaplex is built on top of the fnaf6 location. the one where henry set them all on fire, and they're trying to do some sort of shit with the burnt remains of springtrap. if you believe in william!glitchtrap he's trying to get his body back; if you believe in mimic!glitchtrap he's trying to fuse himself to afton's corpse in order to gain a corporeal form. it also helps that there is The OG Mimic Endoskeleton in this area (its explained in the books im not going into it) but it's pretty fuckin damaged so they gotta spend some time fixing it before fusing it with peepaw's corpse

but the night they're supposed to do that, something goes wrong: a child is loose in the pizzaplex

glamrock freddy had a malfunction onstage, and when he wakes up in his room, there is a child hiding in his stomach compartment (used for oversized piñatas and cakes). this child is named gregory and he looks suspiciously like the crying child and we dont have an explanation for that but no, matpat, he's not a robot, it's probably just symbolism

anyway gregory actually has like very little memory of what's going on and barely remembers his own name but he says that vanessa the security guard is trying to fuckin kill him so he needs to get tf out of the pizzaplex. freddy's like "well you're shit out of luck cause the doors close and seal until 6am but that's fine we can make it til then" and gregory's like "fucking JOY"

long story short gregory has to run around the pizzaplex while every animatronic but freddy is trying to kill him. freddy is not trying to kill him bc his malfunction caused him to enter Safe Mode and it turns out that Safe Mode is safe from the glitchtrap virus. everyone else, however, gets glitchtrapped and is trying to kill this kid

you dont find out why until like laaaate in the game and even THEN you're confused until one of the goosebumps-knockoff short stories confirms a thing, and that thing is:

gregory is patient 46

oh shit

turns out gregory was possessed by glitchtrap for FUCK knows how long and was used as its body for like the entire time. and when he eventually wakes up un-possessed (no idea how that happened) he has no memory of whats going on at ALL and is understandably fucking terrified. doesnt remember being possessed or killing ppl or anything he just wakes up and runs. glam freddy likely malfunctioned cause glitchtrap was like "oh my god go GET that stupid kid" and glam freddy was like "but???? protecc????" and entered safe mode

so gregory eventually fuckin DEMOLISHES all the other animatronics and uses their parts to upgrade freddy. freddy is like "hey where'd you get these parts" and gregory's like "uhhhhhhhhh dont worry about it" "hey where are my friends" "DONT WORRY ABOUT IT"

while this is happening, a possessed vanessa is in a bunny suit calling herself vanny and also trying to kill him. this is just as confusing to us as it is to you

anyway there are six endings to security breach. according to the most recent game, there is a chance that two of them are canon. WE DO NOT KNOW which of the two is canon. these are the endings:

Princess Quest Ending: greg and freddy try to confront vanny and she gets freddy ripped apart by staffbots. gregory then finds an arcade game in her room and plays and beats it which sets her soul free (presumably he knew how to do this cause he's remembering bits and pieces of being possessed??? idk). anyway once the game is beat she is unpossessed and takes gregory and freddy's decapitated head out of the pizzaplex

Burntrap Ending: gregory and freddy avoid vanny and go to the fnaf6 basement where freddy starts acting all fucked up and then thtey find the Springtrap corpse, now Burntrap (fused with the mimic? glitchtrap? yknow). it tries to kill them so you have to Boss Fight everything and then set him on fire again. THEN a tangled mess of animatronic wires with a funtime freddy head (remains of ennard???) shows up and drags him off. again, just as confusing for us as it is for you. freddy and gregory escape. no idea where vanessa is

ONE of these is canon. we do not know which. this is making the fanbase super chill and normal /lying

Evidence for Princess Quest: in ruin, we see a headless glamrock freddy in the exact same area he is in pq. we also have no sign of vanny trying to help glitchtrap. you can collect gregory's fanart of his own game and pq is the only one he didn't draw. princess quest arcade game has sword sticking out of it

Evidence against Princess Quest: aforementioned headless freddy is labelled a prototype on his foot and we know for a fact that our freddy does not have that stamp. he also has a gift inside his stomach when freddy gave his stomach gift to gregory already (and it was a diff color). the pq arcade game has sword sticking out of it BUT that could symbolize the princess being skewered, and surrounding the game is art of the escaped glitchbunny

Evidence for Burntrap: labelled as "true ending" in the files, only ending to be FULLY animated instead of switching to comic form and also only one with boss fight, the tangled animatronic mess is definitely canon (we see it, gregory draws it so he saw it too which means he went in the basement where it was), while vanny isn't seen her grafitti is everywhere and appears to be recent

Evidence against Burntrap: the "true ending" label, like cassidy, could mean literally fucking anything. also if vanessa is still under his control why the fuck doesnt she help him where is she

so yeah we're having fun figuring THAT out

Ruin (the end so far thank god)

the most recent game we got, then, was the dlc for the above game, this dlc is called ruin. a few months after this, a lil girl named cassie wanders into the ruins of the pizzaplex cause her best friend gregory told her to meet him there. when she gets there she finds a walkie-talkie and he's like "girl im trapped under the pizzaplex you need to shut down the security and come get me" and she's like "sounds great"

she finds vanny's mask and puts it on and enters an AR world where a glitched bunny is trying to kill her (this one isnt glitchtrap actually) and a friendly little AR bear is telling her to keep going she's doing a great job (this one IS glitchtrap probably)

anyway it turns out her backstory is her dad worked for the pizzaplex and she had a birthday party there with her Favorite Character Roxy and literally none of her friends showed up. she was sad about it until gregory showed up and became her friend. then gregory went missing and she was sad

anyway the last security node is favorite character Roxy and roxy recognizes her and is nice to her and its very sad

cassie eventually goes down to the fnaf6 basement and is like "ok gregory i opened the door are you okay" and PSYCH, IT'S NOT GREGORY

IT'S

THE

MIMIC

the mimic immediately tries to kill her bc it likes violence but roxy shows up to save her. the real gregory calls her on the walkie-talkie and is like "bITCH GET OUT OF THERE" and she's like "IM TRYING" and gregory's "friend" (whose pronouns are very specifically blurred out, so it could be either freddy or vanessa) uses the building maps to help her to an elevator. however when she gets in the elevator gregory's like "yeahhhhh sorry we cant let you be followed :(" and drops the elevator, trapping her there

it's like a 99% chance this last bit was not gregory but it was the mimic, seeing as gregory is not even in the pizzaplex and the mimic lost cassie right next to the elevator fuse box that it could easily rip out. so you know

anyway we end with either roxy finding cassie or the mimic using roxy's voice finding her so this kid's fucked lmao

also other questions about if mimic is burntrap is that we see the mimic p naked in this game and not in a fun corpse skinsuit so where did bunny go??? however i will also mention that there is a secret ending that shows us that the FUCKING SCOOPER is here so. personally i think that answers that question. get scooped idiot

oh also if you noticed "hey 'cassie' sounds a lot like 'cassidy,' the golden freddy kid who was sharing a body with the crying child, who has a similar design to gregory," congrats! we've noticed that too! we have no fucking idea what it means! :D

and thaaaaat's five nights at freddy's

that didnt take too long did it

[zxaxel]

Going on for (too long) about how X isn't a soft crybaby. Sorry.

The way people mischaracterize X as a character is so sad to me. There are a couple instances where he is vulnerable his feelings and suddenly everybody makes him out to be a crybaby who can't fight. I think his portrayal in X7 was really detrimental to many people's perception of his character; I believe it should have instead reinforced his humanity and strength, and I'm going to attempt to explain why.

For clarity, in X7, X chooses to opt out of fighting as he has had enough and needs a mental break from it all. From a gameplay perspective, this was made to make players put more emphasis on Axl, but I'm looking from a story angle here so please bear with me. I should also mention that the endings of some of the other MMX games also tell that X doesn't like to fight and wishes he didn't have to, but yet he always does anyways. That is really important to note since people seem to portray him as if he doesn't fight, but he quite literally always shoves his personal feelings aside in favour of helping others.

It is heavily implied that X feels extremely complex emotions compared to many of his peers, with Dr. Cain in MHX saying his tendency to worry makes him stronger than characters such as Sigma (I know MHX isn't considered canon to the main MMX games but I assume X's personality is remotely the same). MHX also shows that X was affiliated with many characters that went maverick.

Of course, X needing to fight the reploids he once called his own friends must put a lot of emotional turmoil on him. He is seeing those he was recently friends with become corrupt and is required by his job to kill or defeat them. It is likely very hard on X to have to face this. His worry is displayed even more in the ending of X4 where he discusses the possibility of him going maverick to Zero. Seeing his former colleagues change clearly resonates with him. Yet he always pushes his worries aside and destroys the mavericks.

By the time X7 occurs, X has been fighting for many, many years and has needed to destroy a lot of mavericks without much option. Anybody who has dealt with something really stressful understands that feeling of needing a break. A lot of people seen this as some sort of implication that X is weak and not really a fighter, while ignoring every other time X has ignored his feelings in favour of helping others. It is extremely understandable that he would need a break, and I wish it wouldn't dictate his whole character in the way a lot of people interpret him. It is a display of his human emotion, and shows that he isn't invincible. I think that it is good to show that even strong heros have weak moments and times where they need rest.

A lot of people seem to ignore what happens outside of this event. He still got up and fought despite his feelings. X continued to take down mavericks after his break. After the events of MMX, He fought in the elf wars for an entire century alone. He sacrificed his body to seal away the Mother Elf, leaving him to live out his life as a cyber elf. Even as a cyber elf he goes out of his way to help the Resistance in any capacity he can. Becoming a cyber elf was a perfect chance to escape and finally stop fighting, but he still chooses to go and help everyone he can.

Overall, X is not the crybaby, gentle, weak character so many people portray him as. He is a selfless fighter and incredibly strong. He has taken down so many people he once cared about for the sake of others. He continued to fight despite his outlook on the battles he needed to face. He is an extremely caring person who puts others before him at all costs. His emotions only show that he feels like any human would, and should not indicate how strong he is. The fact that he still fights despite what he deals with internally is actually pretty great and displays how much of a leader he is.

[that-ari-blogger]

The Cooler She-Ra (Huntara)

Let me clear something up.

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power doesn't get good, and it doesn't go places. It is good, and it has been in those places since day one. The first story discusses the cost of war with considerable nuance, lest we forget. Yes, the quality of the writing, animation, and debatably the acting increases as the series goes on as the crew finds their feet. But the themes of this series are explicit from the jump and do not change. 

Reading that back, that was a bit more confrontational than I intended, so let me try and phrase it a different way.

For a lot of episodic stories, good and bad, the overwhelming vibe is of acceleration. The themes start out slow, then get piled in over time. Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, for example, starts with the basic idea of friendship and secrecy, but matures to discussion of family, history, and legacy over time. This isn’t a flaw with the writing of Mystery Inc. at all, it’s just a way of writing.

Watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is like being in a single roomed house with a few small windows. You can see the outside world and the story through those windows, its clear enough to know there’s something interesting, but you can’t see the whole thing.

Then in season three, the walls start falling down and you start to realise where you have been the whole time.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD: (She-Ra and the Princesses of Power)

I’m going to start with something small that isn’t particularly related to the rest of the post, but I think it’s of equal importance and can’t be ignored. Huntara is gay.

This may not seem like a big deal, but it kinda reframes the rest of the series. Because up until this point, the queer coding we have seen has been a few background characters, and Spinnarella and Netossa, who have an implied relationship.

That’s just what it is, coding. They are coded together, but it isn’t dwelled upon. If it had only been season one that got made, I guarantee you there would be eejits online who would argue that they were platonic friends.

But Huntara explicitly flirts with another woman in a bar. This is a named character, who is casually queer, and that is what sets the precedent retroactively. Now it can no-longer be argued that this series isn’t interested in showing queer stories. Now Spinnerella and Netossa’s relationship is essentially confirmed, as the series has made itself and its stance abundantly clear. This is a show with queer people, it isn’t subtext, and it hasn’t been subtext this whole time.

Let me be clear, I am not arguing that Spinnarella and Netossa aren’t married in the first season at all. They are together, end of argument. But on a literary level, it is coding in that season, and it stops being coding retroactively.

The reason for the coding angle is actually linked to the casualness of Huntara’s sexuality.

Unfortunately, in popular culture and mainstream storytelling, the idea that a character is straight unless proven otherwise is a general attitude. This often means that a queer character isn’t queer unless proven so.

But Huntara establishes a different precedent, casualness. Huntara is just gay, there is no fanfare about it. The episode doesn’t dwell on it. But at the same time, it’s undeniable. This is a series where people are just queer, there doesn’t need to be confirmation, you can assume.

Anyway, Huntara, the episode, is still early on in season two, so it is still setting up what ideas the series will focus on. I mentioned earlier that the series as a whole has themes that it has been discussing from the get go, and I stick by that, but every season and every episode has to zero in on something (with exceptions) for clarity’s sake. In this case, Huntara centres around the idea of revelations, hence this post. Nothing in this episode is what it seems.

Worldbuilding is a key storytelling concept that is rarely dwelled upon except by Game Masters for TTRPGs, and Necrit. But it’s actually one of the most important elements of any work of fiction. Stories are based around vibes, and the easiest and most effective way to set up a specific feeling is to evoke that through the setting.

For a few key examples, Bloodborne is a story about injustice, horror, and monsters hiding in plain sight, so what better place to put it than the false civility of Victorian London? Similarly, The Magnus Archives is a story about injustice, horror, and monsters hiding in plain sight, so it is set in modern London. As a contrasting example, Robert Galbraith’s series, “Harold Pots and the Magicky Magic Stuff”, is about how the status quo is fine, actually, and that any attempts to change that is tantamount to murder, so it is set in a British boarding school. I disagree with the premise of one of these stories, can you tell which one?

The Crimson Wastes is an area where nothing is what it seems and everything wants to kill you. The ground could easily be quicksand, or deadly bushes, or a pile of snakes.

The opening scene is a phenomenal way of establishing the new territory. Not the dialogue, but what it shows you. Enormous skeletons of creatures that couldn’t handle the environment litter the ground, fossils that stand as a testament to life that had to adapt to survive

A bird drifts past the characters, landing on a plant. It’s peaceful. Then the bird literally iced, and falls from view, leaving the camera to focus only on the plant itself and all of that terrifying glory. This is telling you a few things. One, look twice at things before jumping in, not everything is as it seems. Two, this story is dangerous, and not even a cute little bird is safe from death. Three, nature and magic are one and the same. I wonder what that will mean going forward.

Also, there is a reason that the Horde hasn’t managed to conquer this area. I think praise needs to be given to the sound design of this episode. The scratching noise that accompanies the skeleton is unsettling, and it exists to make you remember that image. This area is dangerous in a different way to anything you have seen before. Not even the villains of this story can reach you here.

However, there is humanoid life here, which comes back to the theme of revelations and things not being what they seem. Making a living in the Wastes is possible, and that bar being literally inside an enormous skeleton is about as blunt of a metaphor as you are going to get. Surrounded by death, there is life.

Enter Huntara’s eponym, and let's take her apart, starting with her character design.

Huntara is practical, first and foremost. She carries a weapon that can double as a stick to poke things with from a distance (remember this), in case they turn out to be dangerous. She is dressed in simple clothes, not too heavy as to cause her to overheat, but enough to protect her from the sun. She is partially armoured (remember this too), and wears the exact same shoes as Adora, hinting at her background, although she has reinforced and repaired them, again, she’s practical.

But there are two things that I’m missing, and they are the two most obvious things about her. She’s built like a brick privvy, and she’s cool as all hell.

The coolness thing is partly based on her sense of self image. This is someone with a distinct sense of style, utilitarian as it may be. She has styled her hair, wears clawed earrings, and has that tattoo across her head, as well as the torn crop top. Despite her surroundings, Huntara has taken effort to make herself look good. She’s confident in herself.

The strength thing, on top of being the other seventy percent of her coolness factor, leads me into something weird about her design: she looks like Adora. Bear with me on this one.

This isn’t exact. Don’t get me wrong, the designs aren’t a one-to-one thing. Her design just has the same energy as Adora’s. The short jacket, with its jagged collar, kinda matches Adora’s jacket. But where Huntara’s is open (remember this too), showing off her strength and confidence, Adora’s is closed in, restricting her and keeping her polished and refined. I mean “polished and refined” here in less of a mark of quality, but more in the sense that she has a lot holding her back and holding her down. 

Similarly, Adora has those shoulder pauldrons, making herself look bigger, like a prey animal with false eyes. But Huntara has boxy shoulders that form a shape language, as she has actually developed the defences Adora pretends to have. In that way, she acts as a more completed version of Adora, which is interesting.

Finally, there is that hair, which is put up in a similar way to Adora’s, not the same, but alike enough to make the silhouettes echo. The shot below is about as much proof I have for this crackpot theory.

But she’s not exactly a good role model, is she? She’s duplicitous, which harks back to those ideas of revelations and second glances that I mentioned earlier. But she’s also standoffish, at which point I will bring back those elements of her design I said to remember, the spear, the partial armour, and the open jacket.

Huntara isn’t emotionally healthy, she has just dealt with PTSD in a different way to Adora, she has run. She has adapted to keeping things at a distance, and not letting people get close, exemplified by the polearm that doubles as a long range weapon. She is also terrifying, which also helps her stay isolated.

This all covers up for the fact that she has very few emotional defences. She is only partially armoured, and despite her best efforts, she has nothing protecting her heart. Adora brings up something that is a little too close to Huntara for comfort, then asks her about it, and her only reaction is to make a threat.

She does this twice in this episode. She feels emotionally vulnerable, and immediately pins the cause of that vulnerability to the closest wall. It's as if it's a stock reaction.

“Huntara doesn’t run from anything. I want to be here.”

I call bollocks on that. It’s a mantra, a myth, not an actual response. It’s like saying “haven’t you heard the legend”. But I actually want to talk about the vernacular a bit here.

The second sentence is reminiscent of a character not yet mentioned in this episode. She has intellectually acknowledged that things are bad, but she has convinced herself, emotionally, that this is where she wants to be. She wants this, this is her life, she cannot be out of control. Similarly, if things go wrong, it’s what she deserves, because she wanted this. If the phrasing of that and the need for a feeling of control doesn’t sound exactly like Catra, I don’t know what does.

On a different note, the third person thing isn’t done by many other people in this series, but isn’t it a funny coincidence that two of the people who do it are in the same place at the same time? Who could have foreseen this?

Putting it mildly, Adora, throughout the series, has an identity crisis going on. She cannot decide if she is Adora or She-Ra, and it leads into a true Jeckyl and Hyde plot that I discussed in more detail in this post, which manifests most acutely as her referring to herself in third person. When she is most powerful, she is She-Ra, and Adora is a different person. But when she is feeling weak, she is Adora, and She-Ra will save her.

Although, in another weird twist of fate, Huntara knows more about She-Ra than anyone else besides Razz and Light Hope, because she has heard of the legends and has studied what Mara left behind, she gives us a summary of what this whole She-Ra thing is, through all the biases of Adora and Mara. So don’t think this line escaped me:

“She-Ra is a person?”

From everything that Huntara has seen and heard, nothing has told her that She-Ra is an individual. Instead, it's a thing to be revered, a concept rather than an identity and this is… correct?

She-Ra isn’t another person who Adora becomes, it isn’t an identity for Adora to assume, its something to be, like a hero, or a friend. It’s a facet of Adora, rather than her whole being. But Adora can’t see that, because of the aforementioned identity crisis.

I mentioned in my last post that season three gets as close as this series gets to evading the tragic format without actually breaking free, and I think that the talk of identity is a good place to explain where Adora fits into this.

Adora’s tragic flaw is also her greatest strength. She thinks incredibly quickly. This makes her a phenomenal tactician in the short term but causes her to be incredibly shortsighted. This is in contrast to Catra, who is always about ten steps ahead of everyone, ut can’t see the forest for the trees most of the time.

So, Adora internalises things quickly, and a majour side effect of this is that she doesn’t always complete things rationally. Her identity problem isn’t so much this incarnate as just this problem exactly.

She has been given a magic sword and told a bunch of things about it, and she has taken that at face value and moved on, internalising this in a way that isn’t accurate. She is She-Ra, but that doesn’t remove everything else about her.

Adora has been tossing up the idea of giving up her past and embracing this new identity that she has been given, and season three presents her moving away from that idea. Huntara is an example of that extreme, and it isn’t enviable.

But at the end of the season… well, you will just have to wait for more of my blog to see how that works out.

Or you could just watch the show.

Lastly, I would like to talk about Hordack and Entrapta, because their scenes in this episode are both really cute and really thematic.

The reveal of Hordack’s frailty plays into that idea of revelations that I have been talking about, but it also plays into his and Entrapta’s themes of failure and self worth and sets up those themes in Horde Prime.

Stylisation is something that this series plays around with a lot when it comes to backstories and asides (I conveniently have a post talking about this idea in detail), and that comes back for Hordack’s flashback.

This is simple, incredibly so. There are simple shapes, and very few colours on display. It is flat, but in a way that is very clearly intentional. Hordak has an extremely simple worldview. He isn’t a two dimensional character, but like Glimmer, he sees the world in an overly reductive way.

The colouration also sets Horde Prime out from the rest of the scene here, holding him up on a pedestal. Hordak and everything around him is a shade of red, orange, or yellow. It’s warm in tone, but also blends together with the purple to make Hordak look at home, and one with his surroundings. But Horde Prime stands out, and the eye of the viewer is drawn to him because of that abrasive green. He is at the centre of Hordak’s mind.

The flashback does this multiple times, using that green like a highlighter to focus the viewer's eye on the most important part of the image.

Also, this looks like a political poster, doesn’t it? It’s propaganda, and Hordak has taken it, hook line and sinker. That actually serves to explain the flat stylisation, it’s conveying simple ideas. Horde Prime doesn’t get any detail to what he actually looks like other than “he probably looks like Hordak” and “he’s got a cape and that collar thing”. This is the idea of Horde Prime, not the actual guy. We are looking at the pedestal this character stands upon, rather than the character itself.

That collar thing is actually a neat little character design element that is reflected in Hordak until this episode. Entrapta replaces it with her armour, and I think its important that Entrapta and Horde Prime are immediately presented as opposites.

The literal only thing we learn about Horde Prime’s personality in this episode is that he doesn’t particularly like individuality. Failure, defects, and deviations are all worthy of being killed for. You have to prove your worth, instead of it being assumed. And even then, I am inclined to doubt whether Hordak will be able to prove himself, no matter what he does.

Entrapta is villainous, kinda. She is aligned with a machine of war and death, which isn’t the most ethically sound of activities. But, she opposes the main villain of this story on principle.

“Everybody needs help sometimes. And you shouldn't be upset that you're not perfect. Take Emily! Her programming is glitchy, the left leg sticks, and she's loud. Emily's got quirks, but that's why I like her. Imperfection is what makes scientific experimentation possible. Imperfection is beautiful. At least to me. … And you're really too obsessed with this whole failure thing, I mean, I'm a failure... I don't fit in. I became friends with Adora, but she abandoned me. Then, I became friends with Catra, but she doesn't talk to me anymore. But that doesn't mean I give up. I scrounged up a few more pieces of First Ones Tech, and I can't think of a better use for it than this.”

Imperfection is beautiful.

There is also the scientific aspect of Entrapta, which I think hasn’t been discussed that much. She-ra makes a point of equating the natural with the good, and the artificial with the bad. But Entrapta is a scientist and an inventor, where does she fit into that?

Curiosity. Science is the study of the world. It is a means of learning more about nature, and to create things from that nature. She experiments, and understands. Imperfection is beautiful, and if there is one thing nature is good at, it’s variation.

Entrapta doesn’t exist in contrast to nature, but parallel to it. All she does is express the natural aspect of this story in a different way to everyone else.

Final Thoughts

The sound design of this episode is unrivalled so far in the series, and it will get better over time. The sting at the start with the skeleton is perfectly unsettling, and the ambience of the Wastes is superb.

Also, the cinematography of the fight in this episode is really well done, filled with motion and dynamism and tactical expressions of character. The sword duel is cool, and the fact that Glimmer is out for blood isn’t really dwelled upon, but it's notable that both of the goons she fights survive the experience through sheer force of luck.

However, Huntara figuring out Adora was from the Horde because of how she fights was a little weak to me. “I recognise that training”, really? Not the boots? Not the fact that she keeps bringing up the Horde? Ok.

Next week, I will be looking at One Upon A Time In The Wastes, so stick if that interests you.

Previous - Next

[neptune-scythe]

one thing about me is I will headcanon any and every character as some form of asexual, aromantic, or aplatonic because let's face it, there just isn't enough representation and canon content to satisfy

and because honestly any character, regardless of their canon interactions with sex or romance or friendship can still be on any of the spectrums, so there's literally no character that couldn't be a-spec

BUT

asexual Buck

i've got two headcanons that bounce around inside my head and make me feral

so first is fraysexual Buck who is only interested in sexing it up with strangers, people he doesn't know all that well or have any type of emotional connection or attachment to. This Buck probably doesn't put much thought into it or know enough about it to use the label, and even when the relationship does go farther and that attraction fades, he probably ignores that and just does it anyway because the romantic attraction is still there and he doesn't know enough to understand the nature of his attraction and accept it. So he just keeps at it for the sake of his partners even though he has no desire to do so for his own self.

I like to think this Buck also doesn't separate romantic and sexual attraction, so to him they're the same thing, which is why in a romantic buddie scenario, he doesn't understand those feelings (I prefer them as queerplatonic/alterous but there's something about them being romantic in this scenario that makes my brain go brrrr). Because whatever sexual attraction he had towards Eddie he turned into jealousy and was convinced was actually just all negative feelings and dislike (and complicated more by him not understanding his bisexuality yet and that he could even be attracted to a man in that way), and then they got close so fast, their emotional bond and connection formed so quickly that the attraction faded very soon as well, too soon to put much thought into it or realize what it actually was. And because in his mind, romance and sex are one and the same, he can't be romantically attracted to Eddie because he is definitely not sexually attracted to him.

Thus why even upon realizing he's bisexual and capable of being attracted to men romanticly or sexually, he doesn't include Eddie in that revelation at all, or have any clarity there.

but my personal favourite headcanon

asexual Buck who never knew that was something people could be or that it was okay to be that, so he just did it because he thought that's what people were "supposed" to do, and even though he didn't like it, never felt the desire to do it, somehow it made him feel normal because he was doing what everyone else was.

And somewhere deep in the back of his mind he knew he was asexual, knew he was different, and he felt broken and wrong because of it. So even though he didn't actually enjoy it, it calmed that fear in the back of his mind that there was something fundamentally wrong with him, so he just pushed aside whatever discomfort he had in the process in favour of being "normal". But he over compensates, he's searching so desperately to be normal and ok that he goes to far, he throws himself at strangers and anyone who will have him, anything to silence that voice in the back of his mind that knows that's not who he is.

And to make matters worse, its attention, what he always wanted but rarely got, it's the feeling that he matters, that he can make other people happy, that he'll have value.

It's not just that he throws himself into those situations, it's that people welcome him into it, they choose him. So yet again, even though he doesn't actually like it, doesn't really want to be doing it, he does ... because the feeling of being wanted, being chosen, and accepted if even for a moment is better than his physical discomfort and the voice in the back of his mind that begs to just be true to himself. But he can't listen because this is the only way people want or need him.

Maybe this Buck is greysexual, or aceflux ... or even apothisexual, but he definitely doesn't feel that attraction, he has no desire for that relationship other than for the attention and the fleeting feeling of being important to someone, or that his life has value because he's letting himself be used for the benefit of those around him.

And one day he'll realize he isn't broken because he doesn't want that type of relationship or never feels that attraction, that he doesn't have to fit some mold or perform a fake life to be okay and normal and acceptable.

[imminent-danger-came]

Anon chilling on the precipice of madness again, and I’m so glad you liked that last ask! Truly, there is much joy to be found in discussing how much we enjoy (*cough* are dealt immense emotional damage on a daily basis by *cough*) the monkey show. Also, since I apparently can’t stop bugging you, for clarity’s sake I’m going to call myself Unhinged Anon if I submit any future asks lol. 

As always you make excellent points, and I am very normal about you bringing up the ‘MK smiling at his reflection’ thing because the motif of reflections in this show (see also: S2E5, S3E4, some others I’m probably missing, and especially S4E1) doesn’t make me even the tiniest bit insane. Nope! Not at all. But this time, it’s actually something you said in the tags that launched my marbles into the stratosphere for me to never find, because now I can’t stop thinking about how badly I want, like… a Sandy spinoff series or something. 

And I don’t mean a lore-heavy, epic adventure rich in heavy themes and conflicts like we have in the main series, just with Sandy at the center instead of MK. I want Sandy's series to be almost exclusively season one-style laid back episodes. But the good kind of laid back episodes, you know? Stuff like S1E6&7, that a lot of people dismiss, especially on a first watch, as nothing more than filler but actually serve as a subtle expansion/exploration of characters (“I also summoned monster trees with my stress, so. Should I see a doctor? We’ll worry about that later” still haunts me) and dynamics hidden under the guise of a silly little adventure with funny jokes, great animation, and fairly low stakes. 

I want to see what an appointment with Sandy’s therapist looks like, or even just the shenanigans he gets up to during those episodes where he’s mysteriously absent and only Tang seems to notice. 

I want to see Sandy teach Tang how to make tea, and maybe nerd out about those theories Sandy mentioned having about the gang's whole deal with the OG Companions.

I want to see Sandy’s endless teddy bear energy clash with Red-wants to seem intimidating but will also grab his new friends warm milk if they ask-Son. 

I want to see Wukong forced to have an extended conversation with Sandy, or really anyone from the team that isn’t MK or actively yelling at him, and getting to really see how they work off of each other. 

I want to see the secret ‘how do we help our clearly not okay friend?’ talks Mei and Sandy have behind MK’s back whenever he starts acting weird, and all the gossip that goes on during the yoga sessions they start doing together after Mei gets the Samadhi fire. 

I want to see Sandy talking with the little girl that LBD possessed, especially since something kind of similar happened to him during season 4, and accidentally becoming her new (and favorite) giant blue uncle. 

I want an episode of MK and Sandy hanging out. Just chilling on the boat, playing with Mo, going for a little walk around town until BOOM! Sandy brings MK to his unsuspecting therapist, who’s about to get the most interesting case of their career. And maybe, if we’re allowed a little angst, a discussion about how scary it is to be born with a lot of power that not only can, but will, hurt a lot of people if it isn't carefully controlled. About how they’ve tried, and failed, to avoid causing pain. About wanting to never cause pain, and how the futility of that sentiment almost outweighs the importance of trying anyways. 

And above all, I DEMAND a Pigsy-Sandy origin story! 

Anyways, this is basically just me edging ever closer to the brink of madness after you accidently inflicted No Thoughts, Only Sandy syndrome upon me with your last response. But, it's also an invitation to gush about Sandy some more, if you want, and also share anything you would want to see in a hypothetical Sandy show!

Unhinged Anon I got you, here's a motif post where I have every MK reflection in the whole show.

AND “I also summoned monster trees with my stress, so. Should I see a doctor? We’ll worry about that later” HAUNTS ME TOO. There's something about the way those shots are set up, cracking from blue to gold:

MK also becoming a "master of focus" in this ep, with focus becoming important later in episodes like 1x09 and 3x11/12 with Mei.

BUT ANON.

Imma use this ask as a spring board for one of my fav personal theories, which is this: OG Sandy, from the original jttw pilgrimage, is also our current day Sandy!

I'll probably throw this into an official theory post later, but for now I'll go into this theory underneath the cut:

First, let's start with 2x08 To Catch a Leaf, during which Sandy has several PTSD flashbacks:

So, the first one is some sort of battlefield, and the second one...

Is of Zhu Bajie?

Now, we know Pigsy has never worn an outfit like this based off of this comment in 4x05:

Pigsy: "Blue ain't really my color, but it beats looking like that monster, Zhu Ganglie."

-

The Pig Demon in that flashback from 2x08 HAS to be Zhu Bajie of the original jttw pilgrimage. But why would Sandy have a memory like that?

Next is the fact that while everyone else in 4x09 Roast of the Monkie Kids is compared to their past life, Sandy notably isn't.

Tang knows friendship, but unlike Tang Sanzang isn't studious.

Mei is bold and brave, but lacks Ao Lie's caution.

Pigsy like Zhu Bajie is stubborn, but he has the heart his predecessor originally lacked.

Yet this is all Subodhi has to say to Sandy:

Subdohi: "You have nothing more to learn my hilariously blue student! Another star for you!" Sandy: "Dooww thank you wise master!" Subodhi: "But! You're far too nice for your own good." Sandy: "Uh huh, you noticed!"

(4x09 Roast of the Monkie Kids)

-

It's exceedingly strange that in an episode where Subodhi breaks down everyone's character arcs, Sandy is told he's all good. He has nothing more to learn, and no more character development to go through.

Unless of course...Subodhi quite simply couldn't compare Sandy to his past life because there was no past life to compare him to.

Another detail in s4 that's always intrigued me is how Sandy is brought back to himself from Sha Wujing in 4x06.

Pigsy's heartfelt speech on the legacy of their past lives not defining their current one, or how they're not monsters, doesn't work. It's instead Mo offering Sandy wholehearted love that brings Sandy back:

Which, of course Sandy has a close bond with Mo, but Pigsy's speech wasn't anything to scoff at either:

Pigsy: "No. No! Just cause we look a certain way, cause our monster ancestors were, well, monsters, none of that matters! I won't let his legacy define mine, and neither should you! Your the strongest, the biggest, the bluest guy I know! But all you've ever used those muscles for is to help people in need—your friends. That don't sound like a monster to me." (4x06 Show Me the Monster)

As far as we know, that should have been the exact thing Sandy needed to be freed from his past life, and yet it wasn't.

That would be because, at least under the confines of this theory, the guy Pigsy is saying Sandy wasn't like was indeed who Sandy used to be. Yes, Sandy has far outgrown the person who fought to establish his own place in the world, learning that "hurting others isn't a measure of one's strength". But here's the thing, who you used to be matters. Unlike Pigsy's relationship with Zhu Bajie, Sandy's relationship with who he was in the past can't as easily be written off. It's still a part of him.

There are also certain other details. like the fact that Sandy knows his way to Flower Fruit Mountain in "A Hero is Born", or how he's so knowledgeable on ancient powerful remedies like the crimson jimson weed. Of course these details could be chalked up to plot convenience—which is by no means a flaw or complaint—but I've always wondered if there was anything more to it.

But, Sandy's more laid back reaction to most things has always intrigued me, and it would re-contextualize certain scenes like this one from 2x10 in a fun way:

Pigsy: "No! What could have been so important that you'd leave MK alone to face that- that thing! You're supposed to be his mentor-"

Sandy: "ENOUGH!" "I think we should give Mr. Monkey King, a chance to explain."

(2x10 This is the End!)

Of course with this theory comes a few questions, like why Sandy didn't meet the same fate as the other pilgrims, or why he wouldn't let Sun Wukong know he was alive, or why he would bother to pretend he wasn't the OG Sha Wujing at all. And honestly? I don't have an answer to these questions!

But what I do know is that Sandy's friends are greatly important to him-

Sandy: "Hurting others isn't a measure of one's strength—took me a really long time to realize that. As long as I'm doing something to help out a friend, I don't mind what it is! I just want to be there for 'em when they need me. Cause at the end of the day, helping my friends is more important than anything else in the world!" (2x08 To Catch a Leaf)

-and losing them would affect him greatly.

Whatever happened to the og jttw crew, that could very easily be the reason Sandy was "the most dangerous, deadly, rage filled warrior [Pigsy] ever [knew]". Based off of that 2x08 Zhu Bajie flashback, Sandy could very well have watched his friend die.

But, now that Sandy has his friends back in his life? Of course he's going to do whatever he can for them!

Which would include anything from making tea to breaking his vow to never fight again.

And please for the love of god give us a Pigsy - Sandy origin story. I'm begging. WHAT IS THEIR HISTORY MAN. WHY DID PIGSY KNOW HOW TO COMMIT A JAILBREAK.

[antiqua-lugar]

empty plate, snowfall?

Thank you for the ask!

❄️ (Snowfall) - Backseat drive one of the conflicts in this show. (e.g. whether or not to tell the men about the spoiled rations immediately, whether to abandon Erebus, etc.) What would you have done? Do you think it would have worked? (Assume you have the same amount of information about the situation as the characters did at the time.)

I think realistically speaking there are only two conflicts I could do anything about, either protest Silna's father burial (and make sure she got the amulets back) or try to stop Hickey from murdering the Inuit family (simply because I think I could have run away faster and alerted them and Irving before he got me).

The problem with the first one is that solving the Tuunbaq's problem doesn't really solve anything else AND if the Tuunbaq doesn't go after Sir John then Sir John is still alive and frankly no one needs that.

HOWEVER with Sir John alive Crozier would have deserted to look for rescue AND without the Tuunbaq they had a bigger chance to get it, especially if they run into more of Silna's people and they decided to help them.

But also I don't know if Silna would have had full control of the Tuunbaq in that scenario, nor if that would have meant no attacks - they still killed her father, she did not know any of those people and her father was very clear that he wanted them gone. Also with Sir John in charge it was only a matter of time before they went and pissed off the Tuunbaq again.

I think the second one would have not worked because I fully believe Hickey would have found a different way to twist things even if Irving and I dragged him back to camp, also murder or no murder the Inuit could have not helped them even if they wanted to because they were struggling already to feed themselves.

But the Inuit family would have lived.

As a secret third option, since we need to have an execution with inspirational speeches to preserve our idea of human society at the end of Earth so I can't really tell Captain Crozier to maybe hurry the fuck up and execute Hickey faster, I pressure everyone to build the whole thing quicker so we have a chance to hang everyone before getting mauled by the Tuunbaq. This once again solves nothing and the people will mutineer anyway (Gibbson truly was his Queen) BUT maybe at a slightly slower peace so at least Silna can rescue some of the people she actually likes during her march of doom later AND the Tuunbaq survives because Goodsir does not feel the need to poison himself AND she does not get exiled so at least the Inuit get their happy ending.

(This assumes the Tuunbaq didn't purposefully wait to attack during the hanging because he has excellent dramatic timing).

🍽️ (Empty plate) - List some characters you think you’d have an interesting dynamic with, if you were on the expedition with them. They don’t all have to be from the same ship, the relationships do not have to be romantic or sexual (but could be!), and for the sake of clarity we’re going off the interpretation of these characters as they exist in the AMC show. Would you fall for anyone? Would they reciprocate? Would you butt heads with anyone? Why?

Okay so, to address the big elephant in the room first I am light skinned but visibly Brown which I think it's going to automatically give me a lot of interesting dynamics whether I want it or not, but more specifically I am half Latino which I think if nothing else is giving me a very interesting dynamic with Fitzjames because what if I can sense with my magical latino powers that he is half Brazilian?

Also I know myself and I would definitely be one of the men who cannot resist Crozier's Crozier-ness, and I feel pretty confident that they would assign me to help out with Silna and Goodsir when I am not on my regular duties because I "understand these people", so now it's like great, The Not English are unionising.

This all assuming that this being Victorian England I do not try to pass off as Spanish or Italian and go hard on the other direction like Fitzjames, which is always a possibility, guys trust me I am One Of The Good Ones.

In any case I would be obviously suspected of being secretly Catholic which is going to give me some great weird conversations with Hodgson. I am envisioning some very confused scenario where he is trying to wrestle his feelings on religion while I think he's hitting on me.

At least once I make it clear that while I am also a fellow appreciator of the Greeks I mean it platonically, I get at least to talk books with Peglar and Bridgens. I think. I hope, I need nerd friends and all the nerds on Terror are science nerds!

Romantically speaking I once again know myself and I think Thomas Jopson' perfect efficiency would bewitch me (it's either that or Goodsir's enthusiasm but once Silna enters the show I can tell I got no chance). I do not think he even has the time of thinking to reciprocate and because it's about Crozier, I get it.

I wonder at my relationship with Silna, I think it would depend entirely on how well I managed to learn Inuktitut on previous voyages - IF, once again, I am not pulling a Fitzjames about how totes European I am. Same with Goodsir.

I feel like at some point I get dragged into Hickey's conspiracy theories schemes because I am clearly helping the Esquimaeux witch and MAYBE this was actually our plan ALL ALONG and the call was coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE.

[dark-jellyfish]

Random masturbation HCs for some characters I love/like:

🌸 Spain - definitely prefers sex over masturbation, but won't really try to fight the urge when it occurs, unless he's in public. He likes it best while he's sitting on a chair or laying down on a couch/bench/hammock, especially if he's outside in the privacy of his garden. While sessions themselves don't last long, he likes to take it slow and usually masturbates on lazy afternoons between some work and a nap. Most of the time he only stimulates his front and sees masturbation more as a stress relief and means to relax rather than a sexual act with himself.

🌸 Austria - doesn't masturbate often, but when he does it's usually at night or in the morning, in his bed. Not much of a fan of toys, prefers to use his hands (also because he lowkey enjoys leaving himself not fully satisfied and craving his partner more, whether he's in a relationship or not). He's not really attracted to humans sexually, so p°rn is not something he'd crave to see ... He mostly gets off to memories of his partner/s or exes anyway, or fantasizes about other Nations. He's on the quiet side and mostly just gasps, breathes out and moans softly.

🌸 France - he sees it as an act of love and intimacy towards himself and puts quite the effort in it to spoil and pamper himself. He loves to set up the right atmosphere, warm dim lights, clean bedsheets, scented candles/oils and anything else he sees fit and comfy for his mood. He's very moany and somewhat exaggerates his reactions because he gets off the sound of his own voice. He has a big mirror facing his bed for the same reason and while in general he's easily turned on, he's pretty specific with what to look at during these sessions. He prefers erotic pictures and literature over p°rn videos, he likes to imagine his own scenarios instead of looking at real people who are acting for the camera.

🌸 Prussia - masturbates pretty rarely, and begrudgingly so, sees it more of a bother than a treat. It's mostly quick and a little rough. Even if he does enjoy the pleasure it gives him, he still sees it more as a task to get done rather than a time for himself to relax. Might look at sexy magazines in the process if he has one nearby, but often gets distracted by fantasies that have little to do with what he was looking at. Once he's done, he cleans himself up and moves on with his schedule like nothing happened.

🌸 Germany - one of the few Nations to actually consume p°rn, but like his brother he still sees masturbation more like a task and pays a little too much attention to what's happening in the video in the hope of learning something, more than for the sake of it. Once he's aroused enough and loses any rationality over what he's doing or thinking, he speeds up and gets a bit rougher, barely holding back the growls and moans he desperately tries to keep in out of shame. Once he's done and clarity comes back to him, he feels ashamed for how he acted and switches back to work or anything else as quickly as possible to forget about it ... Despite that, he'll later take note of anything insightful he saw or thought about, for future reference just in case it'd turn out to be useful with his potential partner.

🌸 Feli - like Spain, he sees masturbation more as a means to relax and relieve stress, but prefers to do it in his bed or on his couch rather than outside. He loves to be completely naked with bedsheets wrapped around his legs, or feeling the couch pillows with his legs and feet. His favorite moments are in the morning and at around sunset time, when natural light can filter into his room and make everything glow warmly or coldly depending on the season. He likes to touch, feel and stimulate various parts of his body like his thighs and chest as he slowly gets off with soft and sort of whiny moans.

🌸 Greece - he loves masturbating while he's naked and outside, laying or sitting down on the ground, and has definitely done so in risky places before (though he makes sure to be far enough from people to avoid being caught). Often times he's not even having specific sexual fantasies, he's mostly just kind of dozing off and feeling attuned with the nature around him.

[dogcasino]

the old song coming from the sea (deltarune theory post)

i never expected onionsan of all characters to be the one whose dialog i'm hinging this theory upon, but utdr is full of surprises. also as a note before we start: all of these images are described! other note, the quality of them varies as some are my own screenshots, my friend's, or sourced from youtube videos. i have also had to splice some of them together into one image due to tumblr's image per post limit. this will be a long one so read the whole thing under the cut.

if you talk with onionsan in chapter one of deltarune, they will tell you they have something they need to tell you tomorrow. they've also, interestingly enough, forgot their own name. during the course of conversation, they also forget kris' name and the name you try to give them. this was not part of their character in undertale.

we'll talk about what onionsan has to say in deltarune chapter 2 in a bit, but first let's go into who shows up if you don't talk to onionsan in chapter one.

it's clamgirl! or at least it appears to be until you talk to them.

the character's idle sprite is clamgirl's but when you talk to them, they have the clamguy's talking sprites. i've taken to calling them clamindividual. anyway clamindividual here has something to tell you about a weird thing they saw yesterday.

wow, too bad you can't go back to when it was yesterday, huh player? (wink wink nudge nudge) . Ok, you're saying. Very cool , Cosmo, but why in the world would Mr. Fox want us to talk to onionsan of all people? why would he be worried about people missing that?

this is why. behold, onionsan's chapter 2 dialog. (some lines i have skipped over for sake of time and clarity, i'd urge people to go get the onionsan dialogs themselves since who knows where this plot thread is going honestly.)

well that's weird. onionsan sure seems like they need to stop forgetting things! my advice to them: don't do it! and speaking of things you've probably forgotten, this isn't the first time this "not new" sea song has been mentioned in these games.

to be fair, it's a pretty easily forgettable (or just plain missable!) throwaway line, just a little flavor text to make your journey to your next destination a little more flavorful. its also in good company with other "throwaway" lines such as: "beware the man who speaks in hands" and "beware the man who came from another world." riverperson clearly knows shit.

(side note: the delta rune itself is also pretty dang old, given its existed so long monsters have forgotten its original meaning. just thought that was interesting.)

and now for a clamgirl detour, aka: why it matters that clamindividual shows up if you miss onionsan.

well for starters, it makes yet another connection between suzy and the end credits song, don't forget. clamgirl is the only character in all of undertale who mentions suzy.

after having this exchange, a mysterious photo album appears in sans' workshop. and inside the photo album...

so that's one thing connecting suzy to don't forget. and deltarune chapter 2 provides the second thing. if you don't talk to onionsan about the mysterious song they've been hearing, you get basically told to by someone wearing the appearance of clamgirl, the one who originally told you about suzy. i think suzy is singing "don't forget." the phrase was already linked to her, but with onionsan's memory loss, i feel the song they are hearing sung might be don't forget. there's also another thing, suzy is very likely an aquatic monster.

the aquatic monsters in the city live in a crowded aquarium. for a child about frisk's age, suzy most likely lives with her parent, clamgirl's neighbor. clamgirl is an aquatic monster from the city so she likely lives in a crowded aquarium, for suzy to clamgirl's neighbor, she would need to be an aquatic monster as well. (perhaps some kind of marine lizard? susie also seems to relate herself to godzilla, who comes from the sea. maybe suzy's a godzilla?) either way though, she is underwater and there is a song that onionsan is hearing coming from underwater and there is one song that we hear in deltarune which just so happens to have a phrase strongly associated with suzy in it. it's not conclusive yet but this is why i think suzy is the singer of don't forget. i've also talked about this before but i don't believe suzy is susie! i think similar to catty and catti they may be related in some way but i don't think they're the same character or toby somehow misspelled her name in undertale (yes i've really seen people say that.)

i think the fact that suzy probably used to live in waterfall is also significant, waterfall is the only place where you can find a certain man who doesn't exist, after all. tell me what you think! i wrote all this in one sitting so i hope it makes sense haha =)

[bendarius]

the way the initial reaction to s4 was blown to be because of brooklynn and kenji. not saying it isn’t justified as i get ppl can be uncomfortable w it, but the fact is that it wasn’t about how darius wasn’t really given the space to show emotion even as the main character. he’s the youngest and has the overwhelming pressure of being leader while dealing with loss and the season told us no he did not notice other people having nightmares implying that he doesn’t have them (they could’ve said “wait, the others are having nightmares *too*?” but they didn’t). for gods sake dreamwork’s post about “this is what a natural born leader looks like” That boy is traumatized beyond belief

why are they so afraid to show us him suffering the traumatic effects of the events that have happened so far. And anyways i started off with mentioning the fan reaction at first because when i first watched it i didn’t notice it until someone pointed it out. and man, when that was brought to my attention…the proportion of people angry over the ship vs over how darius was treated in writing. like i like camp cretaceous for diversity. i love the fact they have a black character as the main one. but they’ve been treating darius like he’s indestructible. He’s 12/13 how are you going to treat the main kid like this

1.) the responsibility of keeping 5 other people alive. he’s just a kid and even older people would have that eating away at him. did no one try and comfort darius about ben aside from yaz. no one just asking how he was doing sure they brought ben up but more as a “we all think about him” moment. knowing how critical darius is of himself why weren’t we given moments where it focused more on his guilt. we got one nightmare in the first episode and it being brought up in the reunion but…the lack of clarity we have on his feelings aside from the one-off Yeah he feels guilty okay back to survival really bugs me the more i think about it bc it clearly stuck w him enough to affect his self sacrificing mindset

2.) nearly died on the boat! he almost drowned and got eaten by a mosasaurus and i know the boat ship wrecked immediately after and they’re all “used to being at risk for death” but why did they all agree to let this kid down. no one but kenji jumping in to save him like it’s nice that they show him as not the one that always saves people but. Him being the first to ask if they’re alright when they wash up on the island. no one asking if he’s okay after suffering the water (honestly howd they all get on the island without drowning or getting eaten they were pretty far but that’s another thing).

3.) bringing up his dad only to have darius use him as a device in his lie and having kash discount that as a lie! i get that man is terrible but doing that to darius esp w us knowing he’s still grieving (cause there’s no way he’s gotten over it even if it’s been 6 months. stacked trauma on grief = Not Processed Properly!). and having darius only bring his dad up for that purpose when grief is still fresh. Man. Man i just think about it and i get pissed

4.) was held hostage by a white man. i get it. he’s bad but the amount of times darius had to appease that man made me so sick. the simple act of being held hostage is traumatizing in itself and he was with this horrible ass man who tortures dinosaurs (one of the last connections he has to his father), being watched over by robots nonstop even when he’s trying to sleep, knowing that if he makes one wrong move kash could easily decide to kill him; this emotionally volatile man, Almost having to contribute to the project before brooklynn hacked BRAD-X. it’s like they can only show him be vulnerable if he’s in physically precarious situations where his knowledge can’t save him

5.) during that part we dont see darius process the situation in his own time. sure there might’ve been a crunch where it would’ve interrupted the plot but you know what? we didn’t need all those brooklynn and kenji scenes either. s3 worked so well bc we had equal time in all the dynamics they wanted to show us and from the start of s4 that was clearly skewed (the fact that romance wasn’t ever a big factor in jwcc and just. the amt of screentime). we didn’t get to see darius being comforted by someone other than brooklynn for less than a minute about the tension between kenji and him, and we don’t even see ben and darius interact. not even through ship goggles. yaz and sammy were shown talking aside from the large chunk that brooklyn and kenji took up. Why not darius feeling distraught over how kenji is treating him. i’m just saying if there was a time issue and bc of that not being able to focus on how darius is feeling, MAKE TIME. that’s how i’d understand b/k being brought up as much as it did; bc it intrudes on darius’ time and the equal spread of dynamics. they couldve added in a moment where darius had time to himself in his designated bedroom while hostage (which we don’t get to see. why) and thinking to himself. What was he eating during his time there. all we are shown is how much he’s suffering bc of the things he’s forced to do to survive under kash but he still doesn’t break. he has to keep going

6.) i’m hoping this overt treatment was only for this season bc they did show his dad feelings (if only for a little s1-2) and his feelings of guilt toward ben (s2-3) but while this can be interpreted as him repressing his emotions for the sake of keeping the group going, we haven’t been shown that in a specific moment. this is all still speculation even as obvious as it seems to me as a viewer i’m just trying to make sense of what they’ve given us in canon. can we have darius show us how he himself is feeling without having it based off another person

the one thing i enjoyed is darius having been given space to finally have to choose between dinos and his friends. he may have had his eyes set on the obvious choice back when he was arguing with sammy about releasing that dinosaur, and i can see how he’d be stuck between the big picture of the right thing vs the local right thing (although it’s strange how thatd usually be a choice made in a healthier mindset where you’re given the space to think abt morals rather than a need to survive in which the obvious choice would be to save your friends. perhaps it can be explored as a way for darius to hold onto his sense of self/his father) but i’m glad they showed there’s not always a compromise which is what they had darius do in the past 3 seasons. that was a nice moment, i had thought….until immediately hes in the hostage situation, having to lie about his father, and deciding to stay in the hostage situation (seriously. ben and yaz the only ones logical enough to say NO to his plan…my favorite trio for real). and you know it’s nice that they gave us ben and darius’ arcs reflecting off one another, but the fact that ben feels like he progressed more than darius (from his identity confusion to finding himself, and from “i don’t want to hurt by leaving dinos behind again” to “i will open up despite the vulnerability”) having two different starts and endings…i don’t know. feels really off. technically all the kids are main characters but darius was introduced as the main main one. s3 gave us some emotional vulnerability when he was fighting to save ben, desperate not to repeat his mistakes, and this was one of the times where he gets to confide in someone (the other being sammy while he was being critical of himself before she tries to say it isn’t his fault and he immediately counters her with Get to the boat. so. not rly) and while it’s a Woo ben and darius bonding moment giving fuel to how they can understand and confide in one another, i just wish that wasn’t the only instance and we had another one where darius got to talk about his dad and all the complex feelings he must be having. it makes sense for him to repress it to keep moving forward in fear of not being able to function but that’s all speculation. as a kid whose brain is still malleable (like the others but since he’s the youngest) he should NOT be left to do this i just know he’s fighting inner demons

my point is: even if he wasn’t a COMPLETE plot device in this season like how people are saying (not complete bc as little as they were we got peeks into his psyche. Even if it was only for a minute total adding up), i totally get why they do say that because the ratio of his inner struggles vs what the show focuses on is so skewed. as the main character, shouldn’t we have more insight on how he’s feeling aside from having to speculate off things given to us in s1? and from the way the fanbase treats this boy sometimes, like multiple people saying they didn’t know that darius was the main character because of how much of the fandom is focused on other things…yeah. alright. like 2 people i saw talking abt his treatment this season whats w that. maybe this fandom treatment in itself is a sign of how much the show itself doesn’t flesh him out as much as it should, but i can easily counter that considering how much the fanbase fills in the blanks with other topics. i’m holding out for s5’s treatment in hopes they actually spend some time exploring his feelings and that this was just so they could have space to introduce elements, but it’s a flimsy hope because they had the space to explore other campers feelings and just. urghhhhhh.

[euphoniouspandemonium]

Now I'm quite curious about Leslie, Percy, and Florence (yes I do know more about Percy than I do about Leslie and Florence, but there's no such thing as "knowing too much about Percy")

Oh yes. Ohohoho yes. Thank you for asking and you are so right, there's no such thing as knowing too much about Percy, like I still feel like I don't know enough about Percy and I'm the author who has three (3) WIPs with him in it, one of which is almost a sort of biography, and is incapable of thinking about anything else.

Okay okay so! Leslie first, because I am currently having a lot of brainrot:

Leslie is a character in Clarity Is Blood On A Murder Weapon and I want to hit them with a brick. Affectionately. They suck but it's okay because I love them and I think they're hot.

Also they are my pronouns buddy (they use they/he/she as well, though I'll be using they/them for this ramble for the sake of clarity) <3

The rest is under the cut!

You see, they were raised in a very "queer people gross only Feminine Woman In Kitchen and Manly Macho Man Dude Bro" because it was mid 20th century America so what can you expect. That was, of course, a problem, cause they're nonbinary and bisexual. So of course they left once they turned like 19. Also they have a younger sister - Roq - who got kicked out for being gay like a year later (when she was 17 oop) but that's another story. They did take her in, of course.

After they left, they met Kevin and Stephen and then a while later Roq started living with Leslie so The Friend Group was created. Stephen in the early days of their friendship was recovering from Very Bad Terrible trauma and later on a few other peeps were abducted into this friendship, but that is probably a story for another day.

Anyways! That's enough for their backstory! Tis time for... *drumroll* ... their personality! And such!

As I said, they suck (affectionate). They're a selfish dumbass honestly, and they just kinda act like they don't give a fuck about anyone's feelings but they absolutely do and they want the people they care about (*cough* their friends and their little sister and their boyfriend *cough*) to be safe and well and happy. But most importantly they always wear heart shaped sunglasses and of course in the scene where they are most vulnerable they are not in fact wearing said sunglasses. In fact they are broken. Do with that what you will.

But other than being a fool and an asshole they are an absolute darling of a person. They get so so hype every time their friends or partners get happy, ESPECIALLY if they're the one that made them happy. They are obsessed with everything heart-shaped. They know all of their friends' favourite songs. They're still a piece of shit but. A darling piece of shit <3

Also they fuck around with gender A Lot <3 because they can <3 and honestly they are really fucking gender in literally anything, ranging from dresses to shirts with giant sleeves to ridiculous pattern combos, like oh lord the gender envy. Also did I mention they're hot. And pretty. Actually I have a drawing of them, if you'd like to see.

And now! Florence!:

She's from the Earl/Edith WIP and honestly she could kill me and I'd thank her. I haven't developed her much yet, but all you need to know is that she says "Well, well, well. I have found a pretty little thief in my room" at one point. She has a really ethereal vibe and it seems like she draws moths and butterflies towards her~ and Edith is but a foolish little moth~ oh and I am implying some romantic emotions between Florence and Edith cause like. She was literally in a polycule with Edith and their husband Jonathan but then Something Happened. Don't even ask me what the something is because I don't know either. Also Florence is the antagonist's sister. Oh oh and she has two borzoi dogs, Frankie and Lola <3

And since I have talked about Percy A Lot I will make this a lil list of fun facts:

- named himself after Percy Shelley

- has watched Different From The Others - aka what is probably the first pro-gay film ever - in a cinema in Berlin in 1919. Makes me wish I was him.

- knows oh so many languages

- loves warm milk. It makes him feel very safe and comfy

- he falls asleep EVERYWHERE including but not limited to sofas, chairs, the ground, Oscar's lap, beds, tables, meadows, trains etc, and if you try to move him he just makes sad pathetic little noises and continues sleeping.

- has a birthmark near his nose

- he never lives in one place for too long but he always leaves something that will forever puzzle and haunt the person who's gonna live there next. Small boxes filled with weird old objects, like vintage pictures, teeth, children's toys. He can in fact be a bit of an odd boy sometimes. I would sell my soul to find such a box by the way.

[woodohwanedandproud]

seamayweed #i think you did talk about their contrasting fighting styles before and how it reflects their characterization too #so thanks for elaborating on that in this amazing comprehensive analysis now #this is going straight into the mctna meta masterlist!! #love how seon-ho is pure raw force throwing himself with everything he has into everything he does #the most emotional man in joseon indeed! #i also thought he might have learned to fight dirty in the slave quarters #it's interesting that the social classes they were born into/were in as children #figure so strongly into their respective fighting styles #and how seon-ho is shown to be perpetually inferior to both hwi and bang-won #and - if only with bang-won as we saw in both the gate fight and the second strife - as explicitly physically weaker too #(seon-ho having to use both hands on his sword vs. bang-won only having to use one) #i like to think that hwi taught seon-ho some fighting skills too so their styles do resemble each other to a certain degree #like he spins since from what i remember seon-ho spins around a lot too #and also appears pretty agile and light on his feet in the beginning even if it develops more into pure raw force as the show progresses #i think hwi has more berserker moments than just with seon-ho in the first strife too #like when he hacks and slashes away at sung-rok after seon-ho takes a stab for him #or maws through nam jeon's men after [redacted] #we see him throw plenty of spears/swords as well and put pressure on seon-ho with pure strength during the exam fight #and i think their movements tend to mirror each other when they fight? #(whether they fight side by side or against each other) #anyway what i want to say is that while i agree with the fundamental differences of their fighting styles #and how it corresponds to their characterization #i think the delineation isn't quite so clear and they have plenty of similarities too nubreed73 We agree! I think maybe I should have been clearer in what I said about Hwi’s outbursts because that is when I feel like he does lose control of his composure and fights more impulsively and more like berserker style (and I also did mention the Strife of Princes fight as an example of that too!) I think the clear difference is that Hwi only loses that composure on occasion and only when he is emotional which he only ever is when it is Seon-ho/Yeon/his dad’s reputation on the line. and of course Seon-ho is capable of fighting like Hwi but also I do think it’s a neat character note that when he goes full on brutal that is him and not his training if that makes sense? Like more of an inherent physicality than learned behaviour seamayweed yes, we do agree! and i think i did acknowledge you mentioning the strife of princes fight by saying “more berserker moments than just with seon-ho in the first strife too” i.e. “yes this, but also…”? and yeah, i thought that was what you might have meant, but wasn’t sure, so thanks for clarifying that! and you are right, that is totally the difference between them! i also agree that his later fighting style reflects more of his true self, but i would be cautious about saying that it’s “not his training” because i think there are already enough people who see seon-ho as incompetent or just a bad archer/swordsman. the way he fights is most definitely not something that lacks training, and for clarity’s sake i’d like to emphasize that his more agile style in the beginning is not *just* an imitation of hwi while it might be a large part of it, he always had his father’s tutors too, not to mention the dirty fighting we both headcanon him acquiring as a slave. later on he was also influenced by his time with the jurchens. he seems to retain elements of each even until the end, which fits with how he is unable to let go of anything. ever. as such, i think it may be more accurate to formulate it like this: seon-ho may not be the son of the greatest swordsman in goryeo or the fifth son of yi seong-gye who will be the future king taejong, but he still finds his own fighting style among the pool of everything he has ever learned, along with his own self in all its unleashed glorious brutality and violence, much like a patchwork or yeon’s ribbon that he stitches back together, which - while perhaps not the most elegant or graceful - i think is beautiful. mctna2019 I agree. Hwi is at his most powerful when he is angry, while Seon-ho's anger and emotions prevent him from manifesting his power. Seon-ho's most invincible state is when he wants to protect a loved one at any cost (such as when he fought alone to protect Yeon or when he stood to the last strength to protect Hwi from Bang-won's men and even allowed not one person passed him) seamayweed #this makes me think of that fic talking about how stillness is an art that bang-won has mastered #everything he does is so controlled and precise convenientalias #really so it has to do with the actors too #super interesting!!! #characterization and practical purpose at the same time

if anything one day im going to talk about the mctna characters’ fighting styles and how much i love how characteristic they are and you’re gonna deal with it i do nawt care like the weaponry is kind of made obvious by the show imho but im still going to talk about it (meaning hwi’s arrows contrasted with seon ho’s spears during a lot of pivotal moments; the ending and the beginning especially) but today it is 4 am

[theregoesmylurkerstatus]

So... I have a lot of thoughts on the finale. I've deliberately kept my mouth shut, more or less, on the campaign overall because I'm a firm believer that you can't pass judgement -- at least not complete judgement -- on stories until they're over and done with.

Well, it's done! Kind of crazy. I've been watching Critical Role with almost insane consistency, viewing almost every single episode live, with maybe five-ish exceptions, since episode 19, and I've been blogging it for, what, two and a half years?

It's a weird feeling. It's been such a constant thing for me that I'm always gonna have love for it and remember with a lot of fondness.

...Which is in spite of the fact that I can now comfortably say I'm pretty eh on the ending. I know not being positive about something most of us have loved a lot for a very long time can sting a bit, but I personally think it also stings when people relentlessly crow over how good they think it is or want it to be, to the point where you feel you can't voice your absolutely valid upsets or dissatisfactions. So, here goes, if anyone's interested! I'd be curious to see other opinions, too!

I actually drafted a post talking about my overall frustrations with the campaign a whole two weeks ago, and then scrapped most of it when 140 blew me out of the water. I was really touched, and really happy. I hadn't expected it, but it shockingly felt right, you know?

Unfortunately 141 robbed me of most of that satisfaction and brought me right back to neutral.

The blanket statement you have to make, of course, is that you can’t criticise this as a DnD game, and you can’t be mad at the cast for playing it in a way they think is best for them. They’re the players, Matt’s the DM, and in the end it makes no sense for them to try to make themselves act how they think the audience wants them to, and I’m sure most of the audience wouldn’t like the result anyway.

That said, there is an audience. And that’s where I see this clash coming in. As a DnD game, as long as the players and DM have all enjoyed it and been satisfied, it’s a successful game! But for us, it’s not a DnD game. For us, we’re watching a story be written in real time through the medium of an RPG. And while as a DnD game you can’t fault it, as a piece of media, I completely get why the way things have gone has sat weirdly for a lot of people.

It's not satisfying to see so many character hooks dealt with so quickly or left as an offscreen "and then you do it." If they don't want to keep playing to dive into it, absolutely, but for us who have been watching this as a story with all these character elements get so built up, it's a huge anti-climax.

Which is a lot of what this campaign has been, really.

Oh, Nott’s cursed! But through a really cool character moment that problem is completely taken care of with no consequences we see. Yay, I want her to be Veth and that was an iconic move from Jester! Still, it kind of feels like this was built up to be a big problem and at the first success it was let go... Caleb's got a really intense frightening past he tries to hide, I wonder how the Mighty Nein will respond? Oh, they found out, but it's not a difficult revelation for anyone. Looks like it's easy for them to move past it and forgive. Yeah, that's healthiest for the characters, but huh, kinda undercuts it as a storyline or point of interest. Oooh, Avantika’s back! Ah, they’ve killed her and grabbed the eye again. I mean I don’t want them to die or for Uk’otoa to be free, but I’m starting to feel like that’s not much of a threat anyway. The Traveler’s been kidnapped! Nah he hasn’t, he tried to save Jester so he was let go with no further issue, and also he wasn’t actually in any danger anyway. Oh... Cool. So... Why should I care or be worried?

And these are just the biggest ones I remember being kind of let down by. I wanted to see them STRUGGLE for the successes to have meaning. To my view, threats of failure -- real failure -- really decreased the more the campaign went on, with a few exceptions.

Because don't get me wrong, we've definitely had struggles, and those have made for some of the best moments! Molly’s death, Yasha’s kidnapping, Yeza’s imprisonment. When failures that were threatened are allowed to occur, it’s far more gratifying when it’s followed by success, because you understand that that success was actually necessary. It shows us that what they do really means something.

Honestly, that's why the final battle really shut me up, because nothing makes you quite feel stakes and failure like having two PCs die, and having a resurrection ritual fail -- AND knowing that failure would be delivered on, had it not been for a seemingly miraculous roll of the dice to turn it around. One of the greatest failure's -- Molly's death -- made the success of his resurrection put a lot of my other issues to rest immediately, because to be honest? Molly's resurrection was the biggest success of the campaign, exactly because it was originally the biggest failure.

But this episode, we got to see the other side of making threats and successes feel disappointing -- when you get the impression that success was robbed from you. Again, their characters, their choices, but to have them roll an intervention to get Molly's soul, to convince Molly to come back with his own possessions they've so loved, after so long and so many struggles... only to apparently not get Molly at all?

Changed, of course. Memories, maybe he'd never get them back, though that seems inconsistent to how the initial resurrection was played and Matt's hints. It even makes sense that not having his memories and being a bit different, he might forge a new identity, but insisting Molly was a different person entirely after such a supposed hard won success to get Molly back, especially after what his death meant to the audience and potentially healing that old wound? It robs the narrative of a LOT of catharsis, at least for me and I know many others.

Trent, too, I'm very up and down on. He was so built up -- and what fun that build up had -- and I very much disagreed with the idea that the best story would be dealing with him offscreen.

It's true that you don’t need to explicitly address, confront, or explore every big aspect of character's story hooks and background ties for PCs to move past them and grow healthily. But that does not make it a satisfying viewing experience. People quietly healing in real life is healthy. People quietly healing in an explosive fantasy setting is frustrating for the audience.

What on earth is the point of a story if you don’t get to SEE THE ESTABLISHED CONFLICTS go anywhere? A lot of the characters got distant, quiet resolutions, if that, to everything we wanted to see.

Except, we did get to see Trent. It was a really fun, inventive battle, from opening to conclusion, but much like Travelercon, much like Nott's/Veth's problem with the hag, these were things that the audience in general wanted to see be really dug into and explored, and every single one of them got, in my opinion, quickly tidied up instead. Trent got beaten in the first and only proper battle they had with him, which, after all his build up, is pretty disappointing for a villain many of us wanted to see be a big deal. It really just felt like they were trying to tidy up to get on with the epilogue, which is not what a lot of us were looking for with Trent especially.

And that's how most of their endings felt to me. It didn't feel like any of them had reached a comfortable conclusion. Literally all of them, bar Veth and Caduceus, continued on their character journey threads, without each other and very quickly. Meeting Yasha's tribe and Vandran, Caleb finally openly debating changing time for his parents, Trent and Zeenoth's trials and the changing of the guard at the Assembly... All were things it would have been so fun to have all the PCs react to and explore together, and instead they were fleeting encounters in the latter half of a seven hour finale.

Is all this, from Molly not really coming back to Trent being a finale side plot to the Nein continuing on their individual journeys, potentially realistic to how these fantastical things might go down in real life? Sure! But that's not necessarily a good thing.

Stories THRIVE on conflict and resolution. That’s what makes them FUN! Conflict isn’t nearly so fun in real life and resolutions are often frustrating question marks, so no, past a certain point I don’t WANT stories to be realistic. I want stories to be SATISFYING.

And campaign 2 has fallen far short of the mark.

I haven’t spoken... Basically a word of this for most of the campaign, because as I said I’m a firm believer that you can’t necessarily judge something until it’s over, and because I ALSO firmly believe that being negative WHILE trying to enjoy something is counterproductive. I have had no interest in spoiling or naysaying the fun of the campaign for anyone, least of all myself.

But it's done now, and all I can say is... I really have had fun. I love the characters. I love their relationships. I’m pretty okay with where they’ve ended up. I’m not mad, really, and I’m still going to think of this campaign with a lot of affection. But it hasn’t been a satisfying story, even though for a week following episode 140 I thought, despite all the brushed over story threads, it might be.

So... to try and reclaim some of that satisfaction for myself, I might ignore some aspects of the finale proper. Namely Kingsley specifically. Taliesin's choice -- but to me, it's pretty clear that who we saw at the end of 140 was Molly, and the tags on my posts will reflect that, just as my 141 tags will be for both Kingsley and Molly, for clarity's sake. I personally want to believe Molly did come back, however others might want to interpret it. The victory in 140 that meant so much to me is hollow otherwise, and it just kind of hurts that we would lose Molly after everything. I was okay with him being dead -- I'm not so okay with his resurrection being stolen.

Kingsley will always be canon, but Molly is what I choose to acknowledge. I get if you don't like that take, and that's okay! I didn't care for canon's in the end. That's the good thing about storytelling, is that no one can stop you from making your own versions.

For the people who are hopefully hyped for campaign 3, heck yeah have fun! I’m on the fence. My investment, which... I think I can objectively say was pretty substantive as this blog will attest, doesn't feel rewarded, so I’m not convinced I can faithfully keep up for over three years all over again with a strong possibility that I will once again be left disappointed. It's been a huge chunk of my life, and... yeah!

I’ll take a break, probably, view (and liveblog, if people want!) campaign 1 when I’ve had a mental stretch and vacation, and then... I might start campaign 3. I definitely won’t be able to put the same time in it I did campaign 2 (my first love no matter what), knowing that it’s likely to not be so vindicated, in the end.

I swear I’m actually writing this in fairly good humour, but I totally get its always disappointing when the people you come to for fandom enjoyment just aren't sharing your fun. Honestly I’m half tempted to write all those frigging AUs I have sitting around! But I wanted to say my piece, and try and logically outline why this ending has been lacklustre for so many people, ultimately myself included.

Episode 140 felt right because it felt like a natural conclusion -- these disparate people coming together and finally being whole, finally soothing the hurt that MADE them so long ago. Episode 141 spat on that sentiment -- they all scattered to the winds, not as happy people to live out their dreams, but as confused people chasing up loose threads towards an unknown future, with the friend they thought returned still lost to them, ultimately.

It doesn't feel like the ending we should have gotten for the Mighty Nine, who were finally, finally all together. Until they weren't. So to me? I choose to acknowledge that they were, even if I have to force it to happen post-epilogue in my head.

[lewis-winters]

Hi but I actually really want your detailed character analysis for each guy in the Craver interrogation scene 👀

Oh anon, the monster you have unleashed.

Ok so like. This is only one of many of my (often contradicting, bc if I am anything I am a flip-flopping bitch #taurus-gemini cusp) readings of this scene. But it certainly is the most interesting:

Ok, so let's start with the three boys outside of the beating room. Namely, Floyd Talbert, Ron Speirs, and George Luz.

There is only one agitated fella in this frame, and it's not George Luz. George is very secure in himself here-- there's tension lining him and making him stiff and his attempts at humor fall flat, but the fact that he is making attempts at all is a sign that he knows who he is in this moment and he knows what he is being called to do. And that's to distract Tab.

Tab, on the other hand, is struggling with two sides of him. One is the vindictive side that wants to be in the room with the other guys. But that side is largely trumped by his very rational, very Company 1st Sergeant side. He isn't agitated because he wants to join in. He's agitated because he knows he should stop them, and he's right. He should. Though the beating is "justified", the Military Police will most likely not think so. He's 1st Sergeant, he's in charge of most, if not all of the men in there. If the MPs investigate this incident, he will have to be the one to answer for them. And also I just think he doesn't want to see anybody get into trouble. Except he can't go in there and stop them because they have a point, or at least, they think they do. Craver hurt one of their own, and now there is no reasoning with them. Look at who's inside: Bull and Martin and Malarkey. NCOs, just like Tab. None of them outrank him, but they are still leaders in their own right. And if Tab were to go in there and stop them, they'd chew him out for it.

Tab is waiting for someone like Ron to come in and stop it. Because Tab knows he himself can't.

Except. Except. Except.

Ron doesn't stop it. Ron, in fact, enables it.

And this is where we also see Tab start to lose respect for Speirs.

IRL, Winters said that Tab resigned as 1st Sergeant because he kept comparing Speirs' leadership to Winters' leadership, and though the show itself doesn't actually make that the official reason for Tab's resignation in the next scene ("I miss being back amongst the men"), there are traces of it in this scene.

When Ron enters the room, the first thing Tab asks him is "How's Grant? Is he dead?" Speirs bypasses that question entirely for the sake of joining in on the beating, gun drawn.

From Tab's point of view, that means Ron has every intention to kill Craver.

And, of course, if we apply what we know from what IRL Winters told us, that means Tab is also thinking, in that moment; "No, Dick would never do this. Dick would never let it get this far."

And you can actually see that moment of clarity + subsequent disappointment (as well as relief at finding out Grant will live and disbelief that this just fucking happened) on his face here:

Furthermore, this is also the moment Tab (and, by extension, every body else in the room) finds out that Grant is going to make it after Ron tells them.

So not only is Tab thinking; "Dick would never do this. Dick would never let it get this far," he is also thinking "Why the fuck didn't he tell us that in the first place?! If Dick had been handling the situation, we would have gotten the news immediately! He wouldn't have allowed something as risky as this happen!"

And he's right.

But in fairness to Ron, this is probably the first time any of Easy has seen him lose his cool.

Because Ron is actually losing his cool here. This is his "it's my dog!" moment. He let the anger get to him, and therefore he made a terrible miscalculation.

I've already talked about this in this Grant/Speirs ask, but let me reiterate it here:

We (and Easy Company) are very used to thinking that Ron acts without compassion, mercy, or remorse, therefore when we first view this scene, we think that what is out of character for him is not shooting the replacement. We (and Easy, but especially Tab) are wrong. That is probably the most in character thing about Ron in this scene. What is truly out of character for him here is him drawing out the gun with the intention of shooting this motherfucker in the face.

See, one of the reasons why we think he doesn’t act with compassion, mercy, or remorse is because in the first half of the series, we don’t see him outside of the glimpses Easy company gets or the stories they exchange. But after episode 7, he’s suddenly with us all the time, and we see that his advice to Blithe was more of a… miscommunication, in a way.

Act with no compassion, no mercy, and no remorse toward the people you want to protect your men from. But this is where this scene gets complicated. At first glance, we think "ah, yes, he's protecting his men from this replacement."

Except-- there is literally 1 replacement vs. at least 1 squad of men (roughly 9 to 11 men). Why the fuck does a squad of soldiers (veterans too!) need protection against 1 replacement who has not had the same training and combat experience as them? They don't need protection here, they can handle themselves.

Oh, and another thing that adds to this predicament: Ron knows that Chuck is going to live.

Out of everyone in that room, Ron is the only one who knows that Chuck is actually going to live. So his internal struggle isn’t so much “oh I should act with no compassion, mercy, or remorse– but easy company has ~changed~ me.” In my opinion, his internal struggle in this moment, the reason why his hand trembles as he's preparing to shoot Craver, is this: “If I shoot him, I'm not protecting my men. I'm taking revenge.”

Which isn’t in his moral code.

Ron acts with no compassion, no mercy, and no remorse, yes, but there’s a certain level-headedness to him that keeps him in line at all times: only against those he's protecting his men from. Sure, he’s prone to bouts of petty anger sometimes (see in the next scene: More and his photo album), but he never lets that get in the way of his judgement (see: More didn’t back down, but neither did he do so in a disrespectful way and Ron recognized that, therefore he conceded his own defeat and didn’t punish More). He does what is necessary in the moment and never takes it beyond that.

But Chuck’s shooting drives him to the point of wanting to take revenge. He enters that room, gun drawn, with all the intention of shooting this motherfucker in the face. He knows it's a bad move. But he does it anyway. And him entering the room with his gun drawn enables everybody else. We, as an audience, have to remember that what they are doing is illegal and is very, very punishable by military law. Also: beating someone up like this, no matter how fucking vile, isn't the right thing to do, either. But sure, the MPs might be gracious enough (or if a certain Nixon is generous enough to tip them to look the other way), to let them probably get away with it on account of saying that the replacement tried to fight them and they simply fought back (yes, that does sound like rhetoric used to excuse police brutality; isn't that what this is in a way?). But if Ron pulled the trigger? If Ron had actually killed him? That would have been fucking bad.

It's not a Captain's job to enable his soldiers to do something illegal that'll most likely get them court martialled and/or killed. It's a Captain's job to protect his men. From their opponents, as well as from themselves.

In this moment, Ron is not doing that.

I know we like to get all vindictive and be all like "yeah that's what he deserves, this is justice!" but this isn't justice. This is revenge. And, again, revenge is not part of Ron's moral code. If only because revenge, more often than not, gets people killed instead of keeping them protected. If he shoots Craver, that will not only implicate him. It will implicate everyone else in the room.

He realizes it here:

Ron only comes to his senses when he already has the gun trained on Craver's face. Portrayed beautifully by Settle, might I add.

... This is a reach on my part, but I think his next movement is very powerful-- idk if it was written into the script or if this is just something Settle decided to do, but after he wipes the blood off and he turns away, Ron then takes his hat off. Which to me invokes in me the image of a king taking off his crown, or an executioner taking off his hood. It's almost as if he's relinquishing his authority in this moment-- not over Easy (since he does give them an order literally seconds after he takes it off), but over the right to be judge, jury, and executioner.

He recognizes that he did a whoopsie.

You know who I think also recognizes it?

George fucking Luz.

Look at his face. Look at his fucking expression here:

This is the face of a man who knows the what ifs and the could haves. He's put two and two together and he's pissed.

That's why I think another layer of him staying outside isn't just to comfort Tab. It was self-preservation. He still had his wits around him at this time-- arguably he and Tab are the only ones thinking straight in this moment; it's no coincidence that it looks like he's looking at Tab here-- and a part of him believed that Ron would, too. Except, he didn't. That's why he's angry. Ron came up short.

Or idk, I could be projecting, I mean I would be pretty pissed off in his position. Pissed at Craver, but also pissed at Speirs-- if my Captain, my leader, the guy I trusted decided to do something reckless like that and put all the lives of my fellow soldiers on the line simply because he wanted revenge or simply because he wanted to scare people and therefore get a grip over the situation, I would be angry, too. Remember, Speirs has a layer of protection, somewhat. Probably wealthy family, some wealth squirreled away. Not to mention he's a commissioned officer less likely to be used as a scapegoat. These men, everyone in that room, are enlisted working class men. Most likely, they don't get the luxury of a scapegoat or a tip off or bail. Had Speirs gone through with it, they'd have a body on their hands. And if the family of this replacement pushed, the MPs will no doubt pick someone in this room and pin it on them. Or hell, they'll take everyone, punish all of them, and then execute several. They were just lucky this replacement didn't actually have anybody on his side.

This was dangerous. But Ron let it happen. He didn't protect them like he promised he would. And to some degree, George and Tab know that.

Although, I can argue, everybody in this room realizes that. Except, they realize it too late.

They realize it the second Ron pulls the gun.

I've said it before, in this ask right here, that Liebgott flinches in this scene. Which is funny, considering when Ron enters the room, he's the one who's most in Craver's face. Him and Babe. Which is understandable, considering the three of them were close, as can be gleaned from the Last Patrol. Of course Lieb and Babe would get dibs on Carver's face. Of course they're the ones who get to bloody them up good. Carver shot their best friend-- of course they're angry. Liebgott especially-- I feel like this is the episode where he lets all his anger out. For ep 1 - 9, he's fine. He's funny and jovial-- a little irritable, especially in the Last Patrol, but only at Web, really. And not even by that much. What he mostly is, is tired. And that's it.

But this is after Landsberg and after the mountain top, too. He's angry and he has no outlet. So of course he's the one getting the most hits on Craver. And when Speirs enters the picture, he's delighted in some way. But it doesn't last.

At first he's watching Speirs (as beautifully depicted in this gif set), he is the only one watching Speirs. Then, Craver is pistol whipped and held at gun point and what does Joe do?

He flinches. Babe also flinches. And then they, and the rest of the room, look away. They all look away. From Bull to Babe to Johnny to even Pat and Popeye. Frank physically steps back. Malarkey literally closes his eyes. The only one looking is More. It's almost like the weight of what they have done has finally sunk in for all of them.

But, it's not enough to spur them to stop Speirs. In fact, except for Malarkey, they turn back to look.

Because, like Speirs, the need for revenge is pulling them toward this need to see this replacement die. But unlike Speirs, they don't know if Chuck is alive or not.

And that's where it gets Yikes. And in a way, maybe Tab is right. If Dick had been in Ron's position, 1) this replacement would have been given to the MPs immediately, and; 2) Grant's safety and the news of Grant's safety would have been the top priority. And though that would have not quelled their anger, they would have at least been comforted by the knowledge that Grant was going to live.

Listen, Ron abides by the same code of honor Dick and all the other officers abide by, and he has held up that same code of honor many times. In different ways and through different methods, yes, but always with the same goal in mind: protect. Always protect.

But not here.

Ron did not give them the comfort of knowing Grant's status and he put them in a dangerous situation. He did not think of them first. No doubt spurred on by his own trauma and his own simmering anger and lack of a proper outlet, a proper enemy to take it out on, he was blinded by his rage and simply thought of himself and his revenge. Not his men.

Ron slipped up. They're just lucky he caught himself before it got any worse.

[flowerbloom-arts]

@0toomuchflaws Oh dear fellow Tumblr user, you are asking for a sizzling hot take that'll make people very much uncomfortable but I'll keep it short for the sake of... Clarity and brevity.

But in short, I like canon Joxter, he is a soft round man and being a recent cat owner I see alot of my cat within Joxter, but he also a man of little worry but actual care especially towards Muddler for some reason (cough cough), other than that he's been so thoroughly explored by everyone else that I don't quite feel as attached to him as many others do. You might say I like him a little less than the next guy.

[Continue reading for the hottest take on fanon Joxter you've ever read on this website, I'm just warning you because I don't want you to feel bad for liking Joxter but I really need to get my less than stellar feelings off my chest]

Fanon Joxter, oh boy, in my opinion people would make him too important, edgy or... Cat. Or atleast stereotypical trouble cat. I'm going to avoid alot of topics when it comes to fan interpretation incase that would make me the pot calling the kettle black (when it comes to how I myself treat the Muddler as opposed to how others treat the Joxter) but simply put that I think people easily make him too much of a big deal in the main characters' lives, they "protagonise" him, they turn him into the Onceler when he's supposed to be a Sans (but also people kinda made Sans a Onceler? I'm just talking about canon Sans the Skeleton, though). And on the flip side we get the Joxter who is overly troublesome and comedic, someone who is based on the stereotype of a cat and for all intents and purposes is a cat rather than also a humanoid person with a regular moral compass that leans toward anarchistic tendencies. And none of those interpretations represent his actual body shape, making him a skinny Onceler rather than a short round Sans with a dump in the trunk.

It's gotten to the point where I get irrationally annoyed whenever Joxter headcanons or discussions pop up in my Tumblr dash, and it really sucks for me because I want to like Joxter as much as the next guy but he feels so far removed and main characterized that I can't help but feel the eyebags under my eyes whenever the mere mention of his name is brought up randomly. Hell, people call him a mumrik rather than a joxter when Joxter is supposed to be a species name in and of itself and that bugs me alot. People project Joxter and Snufkin onto eachother so much like an echo that they become 2 different fusions of the characters rather than their own individuals that happen to have a blood relation and Mymble's personality gets completely left out of the picture unless it comes to Snufkin with kids.

But that's just me as someone who got cursed with being interested in the less popular characters that haven't been explored or dismissed as something they aren't or just plain left behind. I get that the cat person is easy to project onto and easily some kind of personality goal they want to achieve but sometimes overexposure is exhausting and I'm left being the only person left of the fandom who understands a ratdog as being actually traumatized rather than just anxious and wanting to explore that and then hug him afterwards, or as the only person left in the fandom who realizes Hodgkins has a real mysterious backstory, or that Inspector is an actual nice cop and not a vessel to put ACAB stereotypes into (his nephew [whose name is Henry by the way] and the jailer hemulen from Moominsummer Madness are for that if you really need any, but oh wait, you either didn't know or forgot they existed, didn't you?)

Anyway that's my sizzling hot take on Mr. Joxter, I'll continue to ship him with Muddler because the thought of a romantic relationship between them makes me warm and soft.

[lgbtlunaverse]

Op i hope you feel SO vindicated right now because you are right and the manga is in the process of explicitly proving it.

Anyway, remember how aizawa got convincd kurogiri was really shirakumo because he was concerned about Tomura's wellbeing? And then immediately thinks back to Oboro saving a stray kiten that he walked past?

Remember how Tomura's entire backstory is centered around how everyone simply walked past him?

Oboro specifically being positioned as a hero who would stop and help a stray who even other heroes would have ignored, and then being canoncially and explicitly connected to the villain who's whole deal is that he was ignored?? The subtext is so loud it might as well be jumping out of the page and screaming at you.

We also, for a fact, know that Oboro remembers everything Kurogiri does. (Using them as seperate entities only for argument's sake) He knows Tomura and Ujiko are in the hospital during his one second moment of clarity. If the mind control over him gets broken, he will still retain all his memories of his experiences as Kurogiri.

An "awoken" version of shirakumo is still going to be kurogiri, just with his memories of being shirakumo restored, and all for one's control over him removed. He's not going to be the same as he was as a highschool student.

People do this with tenko and shigaraki too. It's why i hate the "Shigaraki can't be saved but Tenko can" take. Or the "shigaraki should go back to being a badass i hate the tenko backstory he doesn't need to be saved" take. They are the same person! They're not seperate entities! To wish for tenko to be saved only as a 5 year old with no memoroes of any of his trauma (essentaly erasing the hurt hero spcoery caused him instead of actually dealing with it) or for shigaraki to remain as he was while actively being groomed by all for one because you thought he was cooler that way, is to ignore essential parts of his character. It doesn't work that way.

tbh I don’t think kurogiri and shirakumo are quite as separate as most people seem to believe so it’s a little annoying see fans trying to have a “character war” over them…kurogiri is essentially shirakumo’s reanimated, heavily modified, brainwashed corpse. “shirakumo is still in there” being treated like some kind of split personality thing when there’s nothing indicating as much honestly makes me kind of uncomfortable(a lot of people talk about it like it’s one of those weird offensive sort-of portrayals of dissociative identity disorder, and fiction already has enough of those. we don’t need to fabricate more). 

not a perfect analogy, but it feels kind of like if some people were stanning the winter soldier and saying he shouldn’t get unbrainwashed because that would kill their favorite character so bucky could exist. I don’t know, if I like a character I’m not going to root for them to stay brainwashed while insisting the brainwashed version is their “real self.” that’s weird! I’d want their autonomy and sense of self restored or for them staying brainwashed to be framed tragically. even if the character would never be the same after that, it’s a good thing to try and improve the situation. doing so wouldn’t make all the experiences they had while brainwashed just go away. they’re still a part of that character now. 

on the shirakumo-only fan side of things, it feels like some of them think of kurogiri as a totally separate entity so he can be restored and remain “untainted” by what happened to him and the villainous acts he would have been compelled to perform. it’s also very offputting to see canon emphasize that him caring deeply for shigaraki was his original personality shining through, not the brainwashing, then run into a lot of content for him that demonizes shigaraki as the villain of his story. shigaraki was a child. all for one and dr. ujiko are the villains of shirakumo’s story–the same way they are ultimately villains to shigaraki, who all for one abused and ujiko aided in the abuse of. 

ultimately, he is probably going to serve as a bridge between the hero and villain characters. his ties to both aizawa+mic and shigaraki are going to be important to his role in the story. aizawa in particular is also heavily narratively tied to shigaraki, and shirakumo is going to be what pulls together whatever payoff that’s going to have. it’s silly to fight over sides of his character instead of reconcile them with each other.