#fuck it I'm on board

[secondbeatsongs]

I know most of the fandom is enthralled by how the relationship between Andrey and Goncharov develops (and I am too! it's a beautiful film, with a compelling power dynamic!), but I really think we need to talk more about Ice Pick Joe.

and more specifically, we've gotta talk about his ice pick, and how he uses it.

it's implied that he's killed a lot of people with that ice pick, but only one of those deaths is shown in the film. it's a hard scene to watch, and some people might want to skip over it, but I think the brutality is part of the point. there's a reason that it's played out with such excruciating detail.

see, ice picks are used as weapons all the time in movies, usually with a stab to the throat or ear, leading to a quick but bloody death. but in Goncharov, the scene is played out slowly, with Joe tying Amarro to a chair before almost carefully putting the pick through his eye socket.

sound familiar to anyone? it should. for a lot of reasons.

Amarro Fiamberti was the name of the first psychiatrist to ever perform a transorbital lobotomy. it was only due to his research that Walter Freeman was able to come up with his own lobotomy technique: one involving an ice pick.

Walter Freeman died in 1972, just months before Goncharov went into production.

and then there's the fact that Joe's ice pick is stolen (where did you steal it from, Joe? from whose operating table?) and the implications that he has his own struggles with mental health (the mention of his sister's murder, the humor he uses as a coping mechanism, the camera angles that give a sense of unreality to any scenes that are from his perspective).

I don't think any of that is an accident or a coincidence.

in my opinion, Ice Pick Joe's story is a tale of revenge - not against someone who wronged him, but against a medical procedure that wronged thousands of people.

and murderer though he may be, he's still my favorite character.

[l1li4n]

he looks like your boyfriend who's old money and is too cool for you

[beautifulstorms]

Yuna Aoki, SP Adios Nonino • Skate America 2024

[lostwords-found]

So that last post by Alesis Newman, the one that was locked by "BetterTheNew", was dated January 3 2018. Eight months before her previous post.

The police files on Dr Samuel Webber were dated April 3 2009. Eight months before the date in his journal.

Dr Samuel Webber murdered his ex and then was turned into a tree. We don't know what happened to Alesis Newman's ex before she turned herself into some kind of coral creature, but she was taking bereavement leave at the end. Out of death, something is trying to be born. Or reborn...

...Oh yeah, and let's not even go near this other (lonely, eye-encrusted) rabbithole, let alone down it:

Norris read Dr. Webber's case, about a man who murdered his lover rather than lose her and then was trapped alone in a walled garden, in denial about what he had done and eternally haunted by her voice, with only a small piece of himself remaining aware and perpetually terrified but unable to voice its fear. Cool! Yeah. That's definitely... that's definitely not significant or deeply upsetting in any way.

But Chester... Chester read Alesis Newman's case, about a woman who intentionally destroyed herself in the wake of a lover whom she saw as trying to change her into the person he wanted her to be--and replaced herself with something new and inhuman. Something that has her eyes.

And by post 13, using her paralysis computer, Alesis is writing with her eyes. So is that actually her writing? If it's not, when in that sequence of posts did it stop being her? What does "no longer her" actually mean in this context? Certainly, she's becoming something that the Alesis of eight months earlier, the Alesis of the immediately-deleted fourteenth post, would no longer identify with--if some part of her still existed.

Cool. Yeah. That's definitely not significant... or deeply upsetting... in any way.

OK but I said let's not go down that rabbithole, so let's forget I just said any of that and go back to talking about the post dates, yeah?

Yeah.

So, sometimes some of these cases have some interesting correspondences with TMA statements, so there might be something there. Alesis started that thread, opening up to everyone about her journey to creating a better her, on June 20, 2018. I wonder if there were any TMA statements dated June of 2018?

Case #0181206 (June 12, 2018)

Statement of unknown bystander regarding an encounter with The Archivist.

...Oh.

Okay, well, that's... interesting, but not necessarily meaningful. Let's try this: the last date in her transformation/replacement, the last point where maybe there was still something left of the original "her," was September 3, 2018. Anything interesting happen in TMA in September of 2018?

Case #0182509-A (September 25, 2018)

Original recording of events leading to the disappearances of Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood, Alice Tonner and Peter Lukas.

...Ah. Ha. Um. Well, that could also be an interesting coincidence. What about that deleted 14th post that was somehow eight months earlier, back in January? The one with an Alesis who still tried to cry out against the thing she was becoming?

There's nothing in January, but... oh... right.

Case #0170908 (August 7, 2017 )

Statement of Elias Bouchard, regarding the dreams of Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, currently unresponsive.

...

Case #0181502 (February 15, 2018)

Statement of Oliver Banks, regarding his dreams and trying to run away. Statement given directly to Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, currently unresponsive.

...January of 2018, Jonathan Sims was in a coma. September of 2018, the Archivist received the final mark that would enable Jonah's ritual.

January through September of 2018 in the world of Protocol, something was trying to be born into a physical form, replacing Alesis Newman.

Cool, I say through gritted teeth. Yeah. That's definitely not significant, or deeply upsetting, in. any. way.

[deimcs]

Mystra has dictated the terms of my potential for long enough. The Crown would grant me control of my own destiny at last.

[mars-ipan]

so we all saw @dr2-hell's updated bunnymaeda design right. because i sure as hell did

[babacontainsmultitudes]

I would die for Kelsey btw I need her to beat Tucker over the head and kiss Trudy silly please she's everything Matt THANK YOU for playing an older woman (who's fucking 5'10 and beefy on top of it what a beautiful world)

[orengejoshi]

Flug is such a Golden Retriever man...🦮

[calamitoustide]

thought about remus being the first person james comes out as trans to and remus helping james cut his hair short for the first time and now i feel like crying

[gloriousmonsters]

Going through TGCF for the third time and I'm a little bit obsessed with Qi Rong's insect/insect hive energy. His lair is an underground series of tunnels and caves, his subordinates - drones, soldiers, if you will - all have to appear exactly the same and a significant portion of their time is spent in gathering 'food' and bringing it back to store in the nest for their king, who sits at the center protected where he can strategize and command. The hivemind vibes even bleed into how Qi Rong sees the Xianle rebels and his relationship to them - he sees it as a given that any 'true' citizen of Xianle would hold the same beliefs and serve the royal line, and therefore can (mostly) be treated as an amorphous power to which he plays the (again, protected and hidden) activating intelligence. Because he is the king, he is Xianle, he has the right and need to be served and is only obligated to direct the servants that become faceless and interchangeable in his presence.

Also he's as hard to kill as a cockroach, so there's that.

[mummifiedgoose]

Yeah I'd say ghost hunting for seven years even though you don't believe in ghosts so that your pal will give it his all fighting a puppet is equal exchange

[iambecomeyourvillain]

all for the game is a not a book series it's a mental illness

[curse-of-dming-strahd]

it cracks me up how often the Curse of Strahd module read-aloud flavor text describes the environment as sad:

the wind is bummed out. the torches are bummed out. the dirt is sad that it's dirt. like listen I know it's a realm of eternal despair but I feel like they could have hit the thesaurus a little harder on this one

though shoutout to the flavor text of Wachterhaus, which may actually have diagnosable clinical depression:

[they-didnt-last]

anyone interested in talking about the iconic 2000's middle-grade-bordering-on-ya book series gallagher girls??

[aroaceleovaldez]

it is so extremely underutilized that Nico is heavily implied to have powers of just. anything ghosts are reportedly able to do.

we know canonically that he can drop temperatures to freezing/to the point where it creates frost, and does so involuntarily or unknowingly at times. We know he can project emotions and memories out onto others, just in general and with physical force - both his own memories/emotions and general emotions as well, such as radiating an aura onto his enemies so that they would fear him more. We know it's heavily implied he can straight up create illusions and inflict madness upon others. We know he's eerily silent when he moves and seems to just appear in places. We know he can control/walk through/mess with dreams. We know he can become intangible and pass through solid objects and terrain without even realizing it.

like, that alone is so much! but the fact that it's implied that's not it? there's MORE?

Where's Nico fucking with EVPs and speaking through radios or static or TV. Throwing his voice. Nico remotely setting things on and off, or draining batteries, or making cell service fuzz out. Nico totally turning invisible (also a Hades' Helm of Darkness thing, so double reason for Nico to be able to do that). Where's Nico inflicting sleep paralysis. Where's Nico straight up making the walls bleed. Let him do more ghost stuff!

[pseudophan]

i feel like this goes without saying but just for the record my annual eurovision posting is obviously not happening tomorrow. i was originally going to pirate it and just not post about it at all, but after all the bullshit svt and the ebu have been pulling i don't even want to watch it illegally. fuck all of that bullshit. i will be following the news cause i am very curious to see what's gonna happen, especially because i think israel is very likely to win, which makes sense since unfortunately you can't vote against anyone and MOST anti-israel people are boycotting and so it stands to reason that all the pro-israel assholes will vote as much as they can to make a point about how pro genocide they are.

if you are watching still (illegally i hope! don't give them streams! and don't vote!) you can still send me asks about it but i probably won't post them unless it's specifically anti israel/pro palestine

i delusionally do hope one day we'll be able to watch eurovision again, but as long as israel (and a couple of other countries if we're being real) are in it it's not fucking worth it. and even if they do ban israel, if they don't replace the entire board currently at the ebu, or at least whoever is pushing this bullshit if somehow it's not all of them, i'm out lol. and that sucks so fucking bad because eurovision has been one of my main sources of joy since i was like six years old. but it's not fucking worth it.