#finals are driving me crazy

[solace-seekers]

i would be so perfect if it weren’t for the Rage contained in my soul

[accala]

Zack Fair had:

A girl who spent 4 years pining after him to the point she chased an afterimage of him (Aerith)

A girl who looked after his parents and his hometown due to sheer guilt and devotion (Cissnei)

A boy who spent 4 years trying to find him after he went missing (Kunsel)

And a boy who adopted his entire being and became his legacy after his death (Cloud)

Zack Fair was NOT playing.

[occasionally-normal-things-here]

I’m rewatching arcane and season 1 Viktor and Jayce are so cute?? Like the immediate sass between them was so fun to watch, and the banter between them when they don’t know each other is my favorite thing. Like Jayce is about to JUMP OFF A BUILDING and Viktor saunters in, solves his equations, insults him, and then becomes his partner. And then Jayce is like “absolutely, who are you?” THEY DRIVE ME INSANE

[yutamayo]

Is that the same as a level up?

[holy-reference-in-a-username]

Let Tord feel Matt's bite already, he wants it so much, ahah

*SIGH* well okay then, if you insist ;)

Content warning: suggestive content, mild blood

[divorceblogger]

it’s the fantasy of submission!

[xiaq]

I like the bricks in your fireplace! Are they tiles?

They’re actual brick! Just…very thin slices of brick. And I used mortar and grout as one does, but on top of peel and stick tiles so I didn’t damage the floor underneath (in case I want to ditch the fireplace one day).

[zhouxiangs]

I know what you're gonna say, but you don't have to. I know. Even when your dad and mom say something, you don't listen. But I'm really worried about you. I'd like you to be my lovely same old little brother. If there's nothing else, you should go back to you room. You've changed, Ming. You've never been like this.

MY STAND-IN (2024) | Episode 7

[buddiex911]

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize it but there’s something about the fact that eddie gets trapped underground and almost dies and buck is confronted with the the thought of living in a world without him because of a lighting strike and years later buck is struck by lighting and almost dies and eddie is consequently forced to live in a world where buck may never wake up. these two are connected in every single possible way

[blueskittlesart]

finally started my character design final and it's a 3-phase video game boss and protagonist so of course i had to go BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE. here's my first pass stay tuned for more bc this is like a 5 week assignment

[onceuponaneverafter]

Let's Talk About Jacks's Apples

...and especially their COLORS. I wanted to figure out what they could mean, so I made a spreadsheet!

part two

First, DISCLAIMERS:

MAJOR spoilers for OUABH and TBONA + the Caraval series!

This post was written BEFORE ACFTL and does not contain information or spoilers from it.

This post is based on my interpretations and observations, all of them may not be perfectly accurate. The conclusions I make are my theories, not necessarily canon information.

When I reference page numbers, they're from my OUABH UK paperback and TBONA UK hardcover - it's possible they're a bit off for you if you have different editions of the books.

This is a long post, so grab a snack and get comfortable!

I hope you enjoy reading! 🍎

Table Of Contents

Introduction

Why Apples?

A Detailed Look Into The Apples (= explaining everything I say I'll explain later)

The Colors

Where Do The Apples Come From

Conclusions/TL;DR

This is a long post, so here you can see what's coming and skip over to what interests you most :)

Introduction

Throughout the OUABH series, there are 14 scenes in total where Jacks is holding an apple in his hand (sometimes eating them, sometimes not) while Evangeline is there to witness it. All of those apples are unnaturally colored. To look for connections between them, I made a spreadsheet:

For sake of clarity, I will be discussing 13 total apples instead of 14 - I believe the "undescribed" apple (its color is not explicitly stated in the scene) is the same as White Apple #5, but it appears in two separate scenes, so both are included here. I will get into this later.

The spreadsheet contains various details about the apples, such as what Jacks does while holding them, when he picks them up (or if he's already holding them when they're described), what happens to them (dropped somewhere etc.), how he feels during the scene, etc. I will discuss these later in this post.

Then I realized he also has some apples in Legendary and Finale, so I made another list of the ones he has while Tella is present:

Here's a summary of all the apples:

That would make 20 apples in total, half of them being white.

Now let's go over some relevant context! Then I will get to analyzing what these colors mean and what kind of connections I found between the apples, I promise.

Why Apples?

Before we do a deep dive into the details, let's go over the basics on why Jacks keeps eating the apples. The most popular theory (if it can even be called a theory, it's basically canon) is based on what LaLa tells Evangeline in OUABH:

"When we [Fates] feel, it's intense and consuming. It devours us and drives us. And the strongest of our feelings is always the urge to be that which we were made to be." –OUABH page 270

She proceeds to explain that when she sews wedding dresses, it helps her with that urge, and to say that for Jacks it's similar – he has the desire to find his true love, and supposedly that's the one person his kiss doesn't kill. So, according to LaLa's logic, the apples help him with that. It makes a lot of sense, and everything he physically does with the apples makes more sense in light of it.

When Jacks is first introduced to the Caraval series, he is described eating an apple. While I believe the theory above is true, it was also interesting to notice that he seems to already be holding the apple when he meets Tella practically by chance. In fact, there are only four times he ever picks up an apple during a scene, and they are all during the OUABH series. I will get more into it later.

In OUABH, Jacks is described to have countless apples and apple cores in his rooms and offices, so we don't know how many he eats and why when Evangeline isn't around him. However, I found that he almost never touches Evangeline while holding an apple. (With sort of the exception of the silver apple, where he touches his dagger to her lips, and the blue apple, which he was holding before stopping Evangeline from taking the luck stone back from Chaos.)

Now, this could just be for practical reasons, but he touches Evangeline in about 21 of the 25 (I focused on the apples so this may not be the exact count) scenes where he doesn't have an apple and only in 6 of the 14 scenes where he has an apple, and in 2 of them the touch is barely there or brief and initiated by Evangeline.

An interesting comparison is how he does touch Tella while holding an apple (like Blue Apple #1 and White Caraval Apple #2), so it definitely isn't purely about logistics. Maybe it's related to him thinking she's his true love, that's the greatest difference I can think of. It is also noteworthy that he doesn't eat any apples while in the Hollow, which Evangeline also notices (TBONA 284).

With the theory above in mind, the way Jacks touches his apples is pretty straightforward:

He tosses them when he's in a good mood or needs to distract himself

Him biting them is practically his version of self-control

He drops them when things aren't so fun anymore or there's a clear mood shift (I will discuss this a bit more later).

He stabs two apples in total: the Silver Apple and White OUABH Apple #4. the first time he tells Evangeline how Apollo would be eternally heartbroken if she called off the engagement, the second time he tells Evangeline that the Archer ends up killing the Fox. And what unites these? Great heartbreak.

A Detailed Look Into The Apples

Or in other words, let's get into everything I said I would discuss later. After this, we'll look more into the apple colors.

The Undescribed Apple

I believe that White Apple #5, the apple Jacks holds in his hand before he and Evangeline leave to LaLa's engagement party, is the same as the apple that he picks up in the next scene, in the carriage as they travel - its color is not described, but the narration leads to the assumption that this apple is already familiar to the reader:

"Jacks leaned back in his seat and picked up his apple" –TBONA page 184

13 is also a more meaningful number than 14 (and the total count of all apples would be 20 instead of 21), so even though the total number might be purely coincidental, it also could be a fun intentional detail.

Caraval vs. OUABH

There are some very interesting parallels between apples in Legendary/Finale and apples in OUABH/TBONA.

First, we have the blue apple (in Legendary) that Jacks ends up dropping into a fireplace (see chart below). The only other apple that he specifically drops into fire is the very last white apple in TBONA. Before he drops the blue apple, Tella says that nothing could make her fall in love with him. Before he drops the white apple, Evangeline suggests that maybe Jacks could find another true love.

Second, every apple is either last seen still in his hand or dropped on the floor/ground (or fire), except for two: the sparkling white one in Finale (in Tella's dream again) and the pink one in OUABH, which he tosses to Tella and Evangeline. He directly encourages Tella to taste the white apple, and he tells Evangeline that she might need a snack. In terms of color, the sparkling white apple is especially interesting – I will look into the sparkling later along with the colors.

"Jacks picked up his apple"

The main difference between the Caraval and OUABH apples - and the one thing that keeps messing up my theories - is that during the Caraval series, Jacks never picks up an apple during a scene, he is always already holding one when the scene begins (see chart above). However, during OUABH and TBONA, he picks up four apples in total. And they are all white.

White Apple #1: Meeting Evangeline for the first time

White Apple #3: Evangeline says she'd stab Jacks if she got the chance to

White Apple #5: Evangeline forbids Jacks from killing people at LaLa's party

White Apple #7: Jacks lets go of Evangeline and shuts off from her, he's about to tell her the truth about planning to go back in time

All of them are different in terms of why exactly he picks up the apple, but there is more or less a shift in tone/topic of their conversation during all of these scenes.

The Colors

White Apples

I think that white apples are the "default" color, and/or they represent focusing on what's important.

They make up half of the apples Jacks has, and all of the apples he spontaneously picks up are white. So, if something like his emotions or circumstances affect the apple colors (which I think is at least somewhat the case), it makes sense for white to be the basic color – and what would be a better "default" apple than the one who reminds him not to get distracted.

Even though the apple he tosses to Tella is sparkling white, I don't think the color represents her because he was holding a white apple before he met Tella. He couldn't have been thinking of her, but he most likely had plans that he was thinking over as he was hoping to take the throne from Elantine.

Black Apples

I originally thought the black color could mean bad intentions or regret, but I'm now quite sure it represents doing whatever it takes to get what he wants. The context surrounding the black apples highlights this:

Black Apple #1: Jacks offers his help in exchange for controlling Tella's emotions. He wants to find true love more than anything, and this is his last attempt to make Tella fall for him.

Black Apple #2: He's controlling Apollo in order to make him propose to Evangeline. He needs it, again, in order to reach his goal – only this time he's planning to go back in time. Still to find true love, though.

Black Apple #3: This one stands out a bit from the other two. Jacks brings Evangeline to Chaos' castle so she can be healed after Apollo shot her. Here the black apple might symbolize doing anything to keep Evangeline alive (he also needs her alive, so that checks out, but at this point I don't think it's just that), and possibly his reluctance to either ask Chaos for help or put Evangeline through being infected with vampire venom.

Blue Apples

Blue apples seem to represent happiness and success, because we tend to see them after something went just like Jacks wanted. This could also be connected to his eye color.

Blue Apple #1: It's the first apple we see after Tella didn't die of his kiss, and he's obviously more than happy about that.

Blue Apple #2. He got into Tella's dream, for the second time, and he had successfully tricked her into the "marriage thing" before.

Blue Apple #3. He is holding this one right after Evangeline agreed to open the Valory Arch, while the apple he held in the previous scene (only five pages earlier) was white.

The Golden Apple

The apples that there are just one of are the trickiest because there's less context to go by, but I think the golden apple represents Tella. It's the first one we see in his hand after the events of Finale, and Tella's hair color is close enough to it. She is also a princess now, which the color gold could also represent.

It's worth mentioning that it could also be tied to failure, heartbreak, or Jacks's own hair color (as it is often described as golden). He also lives in the North now, known as Lord Jacks, and he's "friends" (?) with Apollo, a prince, so it could be related to that as well.

The Silver Apple

I think the silver apple is like a "milder" version of the blue apple, in which case the apple representing happiness would definitely be intentionally the same color as his eyes: The Caraval Wiki describes his eye color as "silver-blue".

When Jacks has the silver apple, Evangeline has got married to Apollo just like he wanted, but everything isn't perfect yet. He's quite content, but it isn't quite as big satisfaction as when he has a blue apple. However, because Evangeline asked him to meet, the apple's color could also represent for example curiosity.

The Pink Apple

Because of Evangeline's hair color, the pink apple seems to intuitively represent her. Not only that, he's just spent the night holding her before he appears with the pink apple in hand, so it just makes a lot of sense to me. This is also the apple he tossed to her.

The Purple Apple

I've had the most trouble with the purple apple. It being the apple he holds after talking with Scarlett and the scene leading to Tella's discovery that his heart beats, and the only purple apple during any book and scene, I don't even know where to start.

While basic color symbolism is connected to the apple colors loosely at most, purple as a symbol for royalty, nobility, and power could make sense if he wanted to emphasize those qualities while talking to Scarlett. Purple is also associated with mystery, and with us and Tella not finding out immediately why he met with Scarlett, it could also be a storytelling element.

Bonus: Sparkling/shimmering Apples

There are some apples that deserve a special mention, and that's the ones that are described as sparkling or shimmering.

White Caraval Apple #3, "sparkling white": This is the apple that Jacks gives to Tella (in her dream), urging her to taste it.

Black Apple #3, "shimmering black": And this apple is in TBONA, when Jacks brings Evangeline to Chaos' castle to be healed.

The only similarity between them that I've found so far is that they both stand out from the other white and blue apples: the sparkling white apple is the only white apple that Jacks gives to someone else, and the shimmering black apple is the third one that stands out to me (see "Black Apples" above).

Where Do The Apples Come From

A very good and for now unanswered question is where Jacks gets the apples from. Does he pick them from a tree? What tree? What color are they, do they start off as natural apples or maybe white? What makes an apple something other than their default color? For these questions, I don't have solid theories yet, only speculation.

We're all obsessed with how intensely Fates feel when they do feel something (*cough* the end of TBONA *cough*), but I also think that it could have something to do with the apples, at least some of them. When Jacks feels something or spends a lot of time thinking of something, maybe it could somehow affect the apples' colors? Some of the apples seem to be connected to his emotions, such as the blue ones. No apples are seen changing colors and some apples seem to not have a direct connection to his emotions, though, so there is little evidence to support this.

Conclusions

To summarize everything I went over above,

There are 20 apples in total that Jacks is seen holding throughout every scene he is in, seven of them during the Caraval series and 13 during OUABH and TBONA.

What Jacks does with his apples (tossing, biting, picking up, dropping) is connected to his emotions.

The apples have different colors that I believe represent different things: white (10 of 20, focusing on what's important), black (3 of 20, doing whatever it takes), blue (3 of 20, happiness), gold (1 of 20, possibly Tella? multiple possibilities), silver (1 of 20, possibly happiness mixed with something else), pink (1 of 20, Evangeline?), and purple (1 of 20, power? nobility? mystery?).

The origin of the apples is for now unknown, as is the reason for each color (both the colors' meanings and how they take on the different colors).

With all that said, there is quite much room for interpretation, especially in terms of the apple colors. My theories aren't the only correct ones, and I do not wish to present them that way. As I stated in the beginning, I might have overlooked details or noted some down inaccurately. The purpose of this post was to share my findings and to have fun theorizing!

Let's hope that we get some actual answers for these in ACFTL and that the books treat us kindly <3 Please do not give me any spoilers, not on the topic of apples or anything else, I'm actively trying to avoid them!

If you read this far, THANK YOU SO MUCH!! I poured my heart into this research and this analysis, and I'm so happy if at least one person besides myself enjoys looking at my little findings. <3 Here, have an apple as a reward: 🍎

[theweewooshow]

Tommy has run into Sal more than a few times since he left the 118, but it’s infrequent enough that his heart still clenches painfully in his chest when he sees him.

He thinks a part of him will always feel something for Sal. He was the best friend he had for a really long time. He was the first guy Tommy ever let himself do anything with. He was the first guy who broke his heart.

So when he runs into Sal with Evan by his side, at the fucking grocery store of all places, his heart gives a traitorous little lurch in his chest.

And listen, he’s happy. He’s so fucking happy with Evan.

But every single time he’s run into Sal in the past, they’ve ended up in bed together.

If they ran into each other at the badge and ladder bar, Tommy would stick around past when his coworkers left and at the end of the night, he’d end up back at Sal’s place. If they ran into each other on a call, there would be a text on his phone after he got back to the station and he’d find himself letting Sal into his house when their shifts were over.

It helped that none of the times he ran into Sal had been when he was seriously dating someone, but he can’t be one hundred percent positive it would have mattered if he were.

Something about Sal had always made Tommy a little stupid, a little too quick to do things he knew he shouldn't.

The two of them together were electric in a way he wasn’t with anyone else he’d dated.

Until Evan.

[descendant-of-truth]

If I may throw my hat into the ring here, I think the source of a lot of problems in the writing of Miraculous can be boiled down to its confusion over its target demographic.

There are two very clear audiences the show is trying to cater to:

Grade school girls around 5-10

Teens/young adults around 15-20

And this results in some. unique conflicts in the show's internal logic.

Because it's a superhero show for little kids, it's full of fun, bright colors, wacky villain-of-the-week designs, and the characters are all very straightforward with exaggerated personality traits. The cheerful, clumsy, scatterbrained girl protagonist, her utterly charming and goofy (but slightly clueless) love interest, her cool best friend, her mean bully, etc.

This extends to the romance; the show is so comedic that Marinette's nervous crush and Cat Noir's flirting are played up for laughs. Their more "problematic" behaviors read as cartoon shenanigans first and foremost, which I do think was the intention - they're both shown as being more than a little ridiculous for acting this way, so they're not exactly trying to encourage people to emulate them. They're allowed to be genuinely wholesome, too, because it's nice to give the kids something to go "aww!" at, but it's not meant to be more complicated or deep than that.

And of course, it's gotta follow a sweet and simple episodic formula! A conflict in Marinette's civilian life, an inciting incident to get a side character upset enough for Hawk Moth to turn into a villain, Ladybug and Cat Noir show up, there's fun banter, Ladybug uses her Lucky Charm to figure out a wacky solution to the problem, and boom! The day is saved, Marinette and/or someone else learns a moral, and we get a cute little end screen showing all the key players of the episode.

The one aspect of the show's setup that's a little more serious is the fact that Adrien has a super controlling and distant father, but even this is something that doesn't necessarily break the kid-friendly tone for the first season or two. Superhero shows in particular like to put in some stuff that's a little more emotionally challenging for the viewers, even when they're mostly comedic, so it's not totally out of place here.

For example, while they tend to have more grounded tones overall, Spider-Man cartoons are aimed at kids and regularly keep the conflict between Harry Osborn and his father, Norman, intact; often including the plot point of Norman being the Green Goblin, a notorious villain. It's a similar deal with Adrien, and his dad secretly being Hawk Moth.

You can easily anticipate drama coming from this, but the show primes you to expect it to work out fine in the end because every other conflict so far has been wrapped up in a nice little bow once the episode's over. Though I will say, the choice to have Hawk Moth be Gabriel instead of his own, separate character is perhaps the first sign of the tone shift to come.

And, uh. it sure is a shift.

See, Miraculous does not start out with what you'd call a... plot. It vaguely alludes to there being more going on behind the scenes, but the only thing it really tries to get you invested in is the Love Square dynamic. Marinette and Adrien dancing around each other while fighting crime IS the plot, and it's clearly going to end with a cool final confrontation with Hawk Moth.

You expect it to end like... well, like the movie. Identities are revealed, Gabriel realizes the error of his ways when he finds out he's been fighting his son this whole time, and they may or may not make up but he almost definitely gets arrested. Marinette and Adrien kiss, roll credits.

This is not what happens, because the plot the writers actually had in mind is complex in a way that I would argue is meant for the same audience as YA novels. And with that plot comes a lot of darker, weightier traits to these otherwise silly characters.

Marinette isn't just scatterbrained and nervous, she has debilitating anxiety and an increasing need to be in control of everything due to the stress she's under. She has panic attacks on-screen. She's not just great at strategizing, she also knows how to manipulate people, and does so with increasing frequency - and to Cat Noir at times, no less. Her positive traits haven't gone anywhere, she's still loving and creative and sweet and doing her best to help everyone she can, she just. has all of that other stuff going on, now.

Adrien isn't just a charming, goofy, clueless love interest with a gazillion skills and a controlling father, he's like. actively being abused, and in some cases straight-up mind controlled. His tendency to heroically sacrifice himself so that Ladybug can do her Cool Protagonist Thing is gradually but unmistakably reframed as being a sign of suicidal inclinations. He has identity issues out the wazoo and he doesn't even know he's an artificially created human yet, because everyone in his life is keeping secrets from him and/or lying to his face about crucial information.

Information like, uh. how his dad died???

Yeah, so we're at a point in the story now where there was no satisfying conclusion to the Gabriel plot, no team-up, no moment where he realizes he's been fighting his son, none of that. He still has something akin to a change of heart, but he also still kind of gets what he wants - the Miraculous of the Ladybug and Black Cat, which he uses to rewrite the universe with a wish. It's just that instead of reviving his wife, he trades his life for Natalie's. Of course, he was already dying anyway, which was his own fault but he did force Cat Noir's Cataclysm onto himself, so, that's another thing poor Adrien is going to have to deal with at some point.

And because there's all these astronomically messed up things in Adrien's life, and Marinette's the one who got to learn about all of it before him, she decides that maybe it would be better if he just. didn't know about it. Which is understandable, if I was 14 and had all this information about my boyfriend's life that he didn't, I wouldn't know how to begin telling him about it, either.

But. can you see how we've maybe lost the plot, here?

Here's the thing: starting with a simple framework and gradually getting more complex and subverting the audience's expectations for how the main villain is going to be dealt with is not a bad thing. The fact that it gets darker over time is not an issue. I actually think that all these developments are, themselves, pretty cool! I'm a sucker for angst and complex character dynamics and the show is absolutely giving me those things.

The problem is that it didn't just start with a simple framework, it started with the framework for a different demographic entirely, and perhaps just as importantly, it never actually... stopped.

For as much complexity and intensity they're injecting this story with, they're still working under the logic of it being "for young kids." We still get goofy villain-of-the-week designs with equally goofy motivations, and the supporting cast is stuck remaining two-dimensional no matter their circumstances. Chloe is the most blatant example of this - she was made to be a simple bully first, so no matter what else they do with her, she has to remain straightforwardly evil.

This, I think, is the reason that Gabriel is a more nuanced and "sympathetic" antagonist than her, and why so much care goes into Adrien's character as a victim of abuse while Chloe is just a Problem Child despite suffering similar neglect; she wasn't made to be interesting, and so the show is resistant to changing that. Gabriel and Adrien, however, were already made with nuance in mind, and so they're allowed to develop as characters. And at the same time, it's a kid's show! We need to teach the kids what kind of behavior is acceptable, and Chloe's home life isn't an excuse to treat people badly, so--!

...Oh crap we're supposed to be teaching kids about acceptable behavior. Uh. Um. Quick, bring back the ice cream akuma who cares way too much about his ships so that Cat Noir can learn about consent! Uhh, but don't change his character too much afterwards, he's only marketable because of his silly flirting, and we can't lose that.

Yeah, remember when I said that the romance having problematic elements to it used to work well enough because it was clearly just exaggerated cartooniness? It wasn't free from criticism or anything, but you could see how it was intended to be endearing and silly, right? You were supposed to point and laugh at Marinette's convoluted plans to spend time with Adrien, at Cat Noir's dramatic flirting attempts that Ladybug herself fondly rolled her eyes at.

The tonal shift into deep character exploration kinda paints the previous stuff in a worse light, and to an extent, I think the writers know that. It's hard to laugh at Cat Noir being flirty all the time when he's also supposed to be taken completely seriously, and the more Ladybug rejects him, the more it turns into harassment, and it. kinda just stops being funny, even with the comedic framing.

It's also hard to laugh at Marinette's crush being so all-consuming when they try to tell us (in what I can only assume was an attempt to get people to stop complaining) that she's like this because it's fueled by an event in her past, one that made her so scared of loving the wrong person that she now needs to know Everything about them before asking them out. Her cartoon antics aren't funny under that light, it's just concerning, but they're dedicated to keeping it up anyway.

The show runs on straightforward cartoon logic where you're not supposed to think about it too hard just as much as it runs on grounded, closer-to-real-life logic where people are messy and complicated and actions have consequences. It's so divided that you can hand-pick parts of the story that are influenced by one or the other pretty easily, and depending on the episode you can find instances of both in the same 20-minute time span. Maybe even multiple times!

Neither thing they're trying to go for is bad, and neither is a better approach than the other, but forcing them into the same show makes both sides suffer.

It's not just hard to laugh at the parts I mentioned earlier, it's hard to take Gabriel seriously as a villain whenever you rewatch an episode and remember that he has a once-per-episode pun-based speech that he says so self-seriously that you can't help but laugh at. It's hard to take him seriously when you remember that he repeatedly akumatized a Literal Baby and practically threw a tantrum every time it didn't work, or when he randomly steals (and enthusiastically performs) his nephew's musical dance number, or something similar that you would only do for a cartoon villain aimed at five-year-olds.

And I can only imagine this whole show is a marketing nightmare, too. Hey, little girls, here's your cool role model! She's cute and smart and talented and powerful and can fix anything by shouting the title of the show! Hope you're having fun watching her tell her boyfriend that his newly-deceased father (who used deepfakes of him to sell merchandise that's built to enslave the population and then locked him in a solitary confinement chamber in another country) was actually a hero who sacrificed himself to stop the main villain instead of, y'know, being the main villain! Aren't you excited to watch her wrestle with the guilt of this lie for the next season or so? Doesn't it just make you want to buy her merchandise??

Like. what is even happening right now. what am I watching. how did we get here and why did we start where we did if this was what the story was going to be about

[volatile-shorty]

directed at all of you bettyheads out there as well. s hes looking at you. get cursed eediot

n then the effects:

[daylighteclipsed]

While I’m talking, Cloud almost killing Tifa in Gongaga is not just a ‘would that be fucked up or what’ moment or even because Tifa has the true memories/proof to counter Sephiroth’s lies (though, that is part of it). It’s also because killing Tifa is the antithesis of who Cloud is. It’s the antithesis of the little boy who put his life on the line to save her and then dedicated his life to becoming strong enough to protect her. The antithesis of his promise to be there for her and the feelings behind it. “Cloud” and “Tifa’s killer” cannot coexist. “Cloud,” the boy defined by a desire to protect Tifa, cannot survive this. That’s why Sephiroth is trying so hard to get Cloud to kill Tifa. Sephiroth could kill her himself and that would still be majorly bad for Cloud’s true identity as he’d still lose his only tether to reality and the symbol of his conscience. But it wouldn’t be as effective as having Cloud do the honors. Sephiroth needs Cloud to kill the light in his own heart. He needs Cloud to kill his self. And there is no more definitive way than this.

[melasy]