#for mentions of the epilogue

[fuckyeahkarlach]

"Yours Faithfully" is a Heartforge (Karlach x Dammon) comic created by Claire O’Reilly. You can follow updates from FidzyO on her twitter. [ 1 / 2 / 3 ]

The artist has a tumblr but it appears to be inactive: @claireor

[moffnat]

#HE'S SO SAD???? #no listen #this man has NOBODY #his family is dead #the grove was a burden #his homeland is swallowed in shadow #he turned to alcohol in his grief #a grief so palpable that it fused itself to a weapon #he brushes off his trauma in the underdark like it's nothing #BECAUSE HONESTLY? WHEN DOES HE ACTUALLY LET HIMSELF BE VULNERABLE #PROBABLY NEVER #UNTIL NOW #'I've taken many lovers. My heart does not stir lightly.' #sounds a lot like a man using sex to cope #the same way he used alcohol i bet #grief is easily one of the top causes of addiction #and if you let him down here he says 'but i was sure we had a connection...' #case in point: halsin decides in this moment that he will be vulnerable for you #you are not just a lay to him. you are someone worth fighting his own grief for. #he wants to love and be loved no matter how scary it might be #and larian had better give me more options to show him bc i swear to god #if i have to sit here and listen to the 'i only want you, but you can be with whoever!' line one more time WITHOUT the option to tell him that he's all i want too #i will be sad forever #/endrant

[skitskatdacat63]

2009 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix - Sebastian Vettel(ft. Mark Webber & Jenson Button)

[white-weasel]

I am SO ecstatic about Buddy believing so hard in Bakarath that she became real became the plot hook for the hypothetical senior year season, y’all have no idea

[calware]

i don't think it's accurate to call jane a "girlboss"

[madness-and-folly]

and then they lived happily ever after <3

[plumbus-central]

i finally finished the porn magazine comic!!!

i originally drew this like 2 years ago but i lost it when my computer crashed so i redid it so i could post it this time

[youruinedmylifebynotbeingreal]

The last time Nora thought she saw her leader alive versus the first time she sees him after he fell

[rawr-mortgage]

i still can't form coherent thoughts but just know that this ending...

(ESPECIALLY THAT LAST LINE) had me feeling like this:

LIKE WDYM HE'S SCARED OF THE SHEER WEIGHT OF HIS ATTACHMENT TO HER AND THAT HE WANTS TO CRY AT THE FEELING OF FINALLY HAVING SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO KNOW HIM FULLY AND LOVES HIM UNCONDITIONALLY? WDYM HE ONCE TOLD HER THAT IF SHE DECIDES TO GO BACK, IT'S ENOUGH THAT SHE'S OUT THERE IN THE WORLD HAPPY, CONTENTED, AND SAFE BECAUSE HER STAYING TRUE TO HERSELF AND INSPIRING HIM TO DO THE SAME GIVES HIM MEANING AND SUFFICIENT MOTIVATION TO CONTINUE LIVING? WDYM HE TRIES SO HARD TO COME OFF AS ALOOF AND NONCHALANT WHEN IN REALITY, HE FEELS HIS EMOTIONS SO STRONGLY AT TIMES THAT HE'S AT RISK OF BEING UNDONE BY THEM AND THAT LOVE DRIVES HIM TO ACT SELFLESS LIKE HE DID WITH HIS FATHER, WITH JUDE, AND NOW WITH MC? WDYM CYBIRD WDYM

[luxsea]

ITS A GREAT DAY TO BE A KARLACH ROMANCER 😳 IM VERY HAPPY W THE NEW PATCH

[bottlehawk]

imagine being as goth as rose lalonde and finding out that you had to wear orange for the rest of your life. and not just orange but orange and yellow and bright fucking. blue ballerina shoes. and that's what everyone in your new universe remembered you in. and commemorated your image as. forever. would lowkey kill myself

[lakesbian]

i'm not a doll person or stuffed animal person to be clear however if an alec ball-jointed doll or plushie existed nothing could stop me from going doomguy mode to get my hands on it. i would help him change into his antiquated nightgown and sleep mask and tuck him into bed with me every night and leave him in random places so he could startle pe-hm. i've just realized i'm channeling aisha laborn here

[taylortruther]

Personally I don’t believe for a second that taylor had matty in her mind for years. It minimizes what she had with joe and what even matty had with other people. This whole idea that they were into each other for 10 years, writing about the other seems like a reach and a fantasy. Which is literally what taylor says in ttpd. I’m sure she loved matty, maybe she thought he was the one, but it was lowkey a fantasy. An obsession. She made up a lot of stuff due to her ideas of fate, star crossed lovers and twin flames. And in her head, it made sense. But in paper?. Oh, the reality is there. A lot of us been there. I don’t want to undermine what she had with matty bc that’s up to her but from ttpd.. a lot of the pain was self inflicted because of her own ideas, beliefs and projections. She wanted matty to be the one so she couldn’t think about losing the one she thought it was her endgame. And thats the tragedy of it.

and that's the tragedy of it

[dostoyevskyuri]

[heyclickadee]

Because I still think they’re bringing Tech back one way or another (in the immortal words of the late great Kanan Jarrus, “I’m being optimistic.”) and because I actually do need an explanation for why CX-2 was like that (because you cannot tell me we spent between 30 and 55 minutes, most of which was spent with just us watching him do stuff and not him interacting with the batch, on a symbolic construct—even if it’s not Tech, that’s an entire character at that point), here is another “CX-2 was Tech, but not physically” theory:

1. Hemlock captured and attempted to CX Tech. But, Tech being Tech, he resisted for months, and even once mostly CXd retained quite a bit of his personality in a way Hemlock found both interesting and a little worrying. Because of this, Tech became something of a special project. This is one of the reasons Hemlock never used Tech to threaten Omega—he wanted this particular CX-candidate under lock and key, and he thought that Tech had just enough personality while still in progress that he might relapse if he saw Omega, should Omega find her way to wherever Tech was being held the way she found her way down to Crosshair’s cell.

2. Since Tech was a special project, since finally well and truly CXing him (or at least getting him subdued enough to be under control, which I think is more likely) took time and effort, and since CXs don’t exactly have the best survival rate (Rex implies that he’s run into a slew of them, meaning they all probably died), Hemlock didn’t really want to send CX-Tech out just to have him die in two seconds. Alternatively: Hemlock CXd Tech just to see if he could work out a way to CX a defective clone, since it wasn’t working with Crosshair, but Tech was too badly injured to be sent out into the field without extensive cybernetics (if, say, his legs were toast after the fall or if he had a spinal chord injury that caused him chronic pain) that Hemlock didn’t want to spend money on only for him to die out in the field anyway. Or, maybe, he wanted to keep playing with Tech, because he’s Royce Hemlock and he’s a monster.

Then, either while looking for a solution for what to do with a CX project he didn’t want to waste, or as a motivation for why he worked so hard to CX Tech in the first place, Hemlock looked through Clone Force 99’s military records at one point or another and was struck by how effective a team of people with unique traits could be while working in together as a single unit. And, being the terrible mad scientist Silicon Valley startup CEO that he is, Hemlock decided to see if he could take that concept to a horrifying extreme.

3. So what he ends up doing with Tech is not that dissimilar from what Wat Tambor does with Echo. CX-Tech’s unconscious somewhere, down at the bottom of Tantiss, heavily brainwashed and sedated but still himself somewhere deep down, hooked up to some kind of apparatus, and Hemlock started using him to try to “drive” the other CXs with some kind of Avatar-style link. It becomes part of Hemlock’s updated CX process. That way the CXs can be really, truly interchangeable. (Bonus points if Tech was also the partially successful midichlorian transfer and Hemlock is taking advantage of that somehow to make this work. It’s bullshit Star Wars fantasy science—don’t think about it too hard.)

4. Though Hemlock may have tried this with others, the first CXs we see that he’s tried this with are CX-1 and CX-2. It marginally works with CX-1, to the point that Tech is there as an influence, but isn’t really in charge. He’s influential enough, however, that that’s why CX-1 reacts to Crosshair the way he does. CX-1 does know Crosshair from various conditioning sessions, but the weird beef CX-1 has with Crosshair, “If you want answers so badly, then why aren’t you asking him? Isn’t that right, brother?” and that weird warning he gives them, is all that little bit of Tech that’s sitting there in the back of CX-1’s head.

With CX-2, however, the link works so well that that’s just CX-Tech in another body.

5. Sidebar, but in this theory, it’s CX-1 who’s staring Crosshair down in Shadows of Tantiss. Or, it’s Tech staring Crosshair down through CX-1’s eyes. (One thing that has always bugged me about that shot is that the pose is 100% Tech, and we’re visually being told that it’s Tech with the armor and the lines on the wall, but that guy’s legs are proportionally just a little too short for it to BE Tech. Which could be explained multiple other ways, of course—Tech could have cybernetic legs that are shorter now, Hemlock could have gone in and surgically made his legs shorter to make him blend in with the other CXs better, they didn’t have the budget to make a Tech-specific CX model, who knows. But—I still like it being Tech without it physically being him in this shot.)

6. Another sidebar, but in this theory the reason the CX tracker isn’t something that will be picked up by a scanner is because the signal or link or whatever it is that Hemlock’s using to enable CX-Tech to drive the other CXs IS the tracker. Or the link is being established through the other CX’s inhibitor chips (which a scanner won’t pick up) or something. And when they die, the tracking signal goes dead, too.

7. Extra sidebar: Hemlock was originally going to use Crosshair for this. These were the “other plans despite his resistance to re-education” he mentions to Omega in Confined. Crosshair may or may not know this. Hemlock may have also point blank told Crosshair that he put Tech through the CX process and that Tech is “dead” in an attempt to break Crosshair, despite that not being literally true (in much the same way Wat Tambor said, “Your friend is dead,” about Echo to Rex in the TBB arc). Which just wigs out Crosshair even more when multiple CXs and especially CX-2 show up and start acting like Tech.

8. This was Hemlock’s plan for the Worst Batch CXs—basically, to have a group of CXs with unique traits all being controlled by a single mind. That mind being Tech, who he’s already got successfully “driving” CX-2.

9. Fast forward to the finale, Hemlock lets the whole worst batch out at once. This ends up being why the Worst Batch CXs have no personality, why Hemlock hesitated on sending them out at all (he wasn’t sure they would all even operate at the same time, and was so, so smug when they did), why CX-2 has so much less personality in the finale and only manages that one line, why they aren’t that big of a threat once the batch gets backup and aren’t being caught by surprise; why the worst batch CXs are so hard to kill and keep getting up, zombie-like, after they’ve been shot, why that one guy who gets his helmet knocked off walks around like he’s sleepwalking, and why the sword CX hands the sword over to CX-2. CX-2 gets more attention than the others because he’s the CX that Tech’s been driving the longest, so it takes less of an effort, but all of them collectively activated at the same time? Tech is having to drive all of them, and he’s just one guy. He’s stretched too thin and it’s almost too much to keep them moving. So they’re barely conscious and only half aware of what’s happening to them.

10. This would means that every single POV shot we got from either a tube or from a CX—because we get two from tubes, several POV shots from CX-2 including in the finale, and one significant one from CX-1—in season three is from Tech’s perspective, because he’s looking through all of them to one extent or another.

11. Whether some of the CXs survived or not—and I hope some of them did—Tech coming back and recovering in a later (possible follow up) showwould mean getting a some in-universe sympathy for the CXs that was mentioned in interviews but sorely lacking in the final product. They still would have been people under all of that, Tech would have “operated” them all to their deaths, and Tech would have been in their heads going through all of that with them as they died or got hurt. All of them, at the same time. And he would have been CX-2 (just operating in a body that wasn’t his) and done everything CX-2 did. That’s a lot to deal with. Bonus points if Tech mentioning that he was all of the CXs in the final fight and being in multiple bodies at once leads to Echo talking about what it’s like to scomp in from an internal perspective. Even if it’s just one line.

(For the record, I would actually quite like it if Tech was just CX-2 straight up and survived being impaled, and if the explanation was just, “CX-2 had to “die” and the pod that kept turning him into this had to be killed for Tech to start living again,” because it’s VERY Star Wars, but I’d be okay with this, too.)

[wikitpowers]

everybody tough as hell until i mention the clockwork princess epilogue…