#give us season 2 now

[nervouspearl]

"Sauron was become now a sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment."

[meansevika]

❝ You gonna do anything about that piece of shit that murdered my boy? ❞

ARCANE (2021—2024)

[raggedy-spaceman]

Still can't believe this is real

[bonjourpeasants]

"we're just mates"

just shut up and make out already omg

[usertoxicyaoi]

"Good job."

TAIKAN YOHOU (2023). Episode 3.

[sylvee4life]

Bro sometimes I somehow stumble on to the mileven side of Pinterest and… I really wonder wtf they are doing

Like can someone tell me why they posted these thinking that really ate us up💀

[ducktracy]

i am a chronic "i need to watch that"-er, and i'm very lucky but also cursed to be surounded by excellent friends always recommending me excellent things. and i finally want to get off my keyster and actually WATCH them, but i have so many different serieseseseses i'm in the middle of that it's really hard to commit to one. so i made a watchlist of every series i'm either watching, beginning to watch, or wanting to watch. and then i decided to do the same with movies. and books i'm reading/want to read. and decided i should keep track of my art ideas and projects too. and this is great because with the shows especially, i've made a system where i watch one (or more if i have the time) episode of a show a day, and then make my way down and alternate between shows every day. and so far this has been working out great for me. but standing back and looking at my list is just making me say Oh, god. if you're wondering what's Eliza watching/reading/needing to work on, i have excellent news for you:

i'd also like to add that this is all on top of a continuation of last year's resolution in which i have thousands of golden age cartoons listed in a google doc, i roll a random number generator, and let it dictate the GAC i watch for the day. i am drowning

[thirddagger]

I'm like so normal about the X Files. I'm so normal about it, I just watched Colony/End Game (s2 e16/e17) and like I am soooo normal about it. A bogey Samantha going straight for Mulder, aka the Saddest Boy Alive ("we knew you could be manipulated" he was Crying last scene and his dad seems like he sucks) and Scully and Mulder barely talking in Colony and then Mulder ditching Scully in End Game only for her to save him (in part thanks to Skinner flagrantly breaking FBI rules to back up Scully, I grow to love this man), and like I am sooooo normal about it and I do not keep rambling about it in the tags because I'm so normal about it

[mejcinta]

Who prayed to the Seven to give us these new Aegon stills??? 😩😩😍😍💚💚🔥🔥

[candied-cae]

I know some folks have been saying “Ed wanted to die in the same place he laid next to Stede-“ WRONG! HE WANTED TO DIE WHERE STEDE LAID NEXT TO HIM!!!

The place Auntie points out as being where his head was crushed by the cannon ball is the exact spot where Stede’s head had been during the arrest and that’s even more insane than the first option. (Anyway, I wanted to correct that assumption. It’s only a matter of like 2 feet, but I still find it an important detail, and figured a visual might help!)

[hauntingblue]

Rewatching act 2.... yeah ISHA WATCH OUT FOR THE CYCLE ISHA!!!!! NOOOOO

[from-here-from-me]

the fact that we did not get Richie or Carmy calling each other cousin even ONCE in season 3 is all you really need to know. not a single instance of the word cousin even found in the present day of the entire season, The Bear showrunners when I catch you!!!!!

[meansevika]

❝ I can't believe you're dead and I'm still mopping up your messes. ❞

ARCANE (2021—2024)

[theatrevampire]

how i sleep cycling through my 100000 theories about iwtv s2 knowing i'm probably wrong about all of them but i'm still gonna enjoy the season anyway

[darkfire359]

What could have been: sympathizing with Ed in season 2

I've talked before about how much I love Ed and all his complexity. I've written more fanfic about him and Izzy than any other characters, in my entire history of fandom. And unlike many people, I wasn't unprepared for the dark direction his arc took in season 2; I wanted him to commit MORE atrocities, and I happily made comparisons between him and another one of my favorite characters, Hannibal Lector.

But one of the key things I wanted after he committed atrocities was for him to feel bad about it. And I thought we'd see that! After all, S1 Ed was so tormented about killing his dad (who was abusive and violent towards) him that he never killed (directly) again! He was so broken up about trying to kill Stede in s1e6 that he ended up crying in a bathtub. Just like he cried in the window sill after committing all the kraken horrors in s1e10. It seemed like this was a guy scared of his own inner darkness, convinced he was a monster, who would go around saying things like "I'm not a good person" and "You were always going to realize who I am."

And so even when s2 went darker than anyone expected—when he cut off more of Izzy's toes, and shot him in the leg, and made crewmen fight to the death for experiencing love, and sailed the entire ship into a storm to murder-suicide his crew—I was still ready to accept all that moral ambiguity and give him a hug afterwards. Because of course, I figured that after Ed was brought out of that dark place and those suicidal urges, he would feel horrible remorse. How could he not?

I was looking forward to seeing him break down crying, convinced he was an irredeemable, unforgivable monster. (Which of course, would make it all the more touching when people inevitably did forgive him, and when he did redeem himself). Maybe Ed would even go too far with trying to atone, like in Mercy, one of my favorite post-s1 fics. Probably, I figured, Ed's quest for redemption would be one of the main themes in the second half of season 2.

So it was strange to watch e4, when Ed looked nothing but annoyed at everyone for chaining him up and banishing him, and then he went to hang out with his old friends like he'd done nothing wrong. When after the crew unanimously voted him out, Stede brought him back to the ship literally that same evening, and Ed saw no problem with that. Okay... maybe he's still processing?

Then e5 came, and that episode was about Ed's redemption. Yay! Except... Ed didn't seem to care? Other people made him wear the bag and the bell. He asked how long it'd take people to get over it, guessing "like a day." He gave an influencer-esque non-apology to the crew. He said "I took a man's leg" rather than calling Izzy by name. He literally doesn't remember the circumstances of pushing Lucius off the boat. He does ultimately give a real apology to Fang—for tormenting him years ago, rather than anything from his actual kraken era. I love e5 for the Izzy+Stede dynamic, but watching Ed be an unrepentant asshole here is painful. There is nothing about this that convinces me Ed wouldn't slide right back to being evil if Stede were to leave again.

And the thing is, it didn't have to be like this! We could have gotten Ed breaking down crying with guilt like in s1e6, and it would have made him much more sympathetic—not to mention the fact that Ed really is just an adorable cryer. Alternatively, we could have had some real deep diving about why Ed never apologizes (is he afraid of seeming weak?) or why he's so uncaring about others' pain (has he seen too many friends die over the years, to the point of going numb?)

By episode 6, it seems like most characters have moved on. Stede says something about Ed turning poison into positivity, which feels completely unearned. He pays for the party—but he'd previously tried to make the crew throw their cut of the loot into the ocean. He makes some attempts to best Ned and protect Stede, but Stede ends up saving the crew instead—from a pirate who only showed up in the first place because Ed was intentionally trying to piss him off. Ed is sad that Stede kills someone, and this would be a great time to again make Ed sympathetic! To have him talk about how he doesn't want that for Stede, because his own violence has weighed on him so deeply. But nope.

E6 does see Ed actually apologize to Izzy—and he's terrible at it. He's just like, "Sorry about your leg," makes no eye contact, and flees immediately afterwards. We do see some hints that this shitty apology isn't really indicative of Ed's true feelings, given how he has those flashbacks to the scenes of hurting Izzy seemingly haunting him; but it's very brief. It would be a great time to address Ed's horrific tendency towards conflict-aversion and avoiding awkward conversations in relationships—the same tendency that made s1 Ed never inform Izzy that the plan to kill Stede and the Revenge crew had changed. This would be another great opportunity to help us sympathize with Ed again—to have us see how it's not that he doesn't want to communicate these things, it's that these conversations are terribly stressful and anxiety-inducing for him. But nah, why would OFMD need to include those things for Ed?

E7 happens, and still nothing. If anything, there was a great opportunity for Ed to at least show himself to be a kind person to Stede—maybe nobly stepping in to save the day, even though he's annoyed that Stede's getting all this attention now. You know, like Stede did for him back in s1e5, when the situation was reversed. But nope, Ed runs off to be a fisherman, not having learned any of the earlier season's lessons about whims. He only stops being a fisherman because he's bad at it.

I was still hoping for something big in e8–some huge selfless, gesture that Ed would do to cover for all of his inability to do the little gestures. Ed is good at grand gestures! Swimming back to the ship after he left, then taking the Act of Grace in s1 was HUGE. Very selfless, very sweet! He could have done something like that for Izzy, Lucius, and the traumatized crew. Some kind of heroic gesture to help others more than himself. But nope. In some sense, Izzy dying is one of the greatest indications of Ed's wasted potential, because we narratively had a great opportunity for Ed to be able to save someone... but he didn't.

(Admittedly, Ed is not a complete dick here—he helps Izzy when he's limping, he says some genuinely apologetic stuff when Izzy's dying, and he finally gives Izzy his attention and care. But then after the funeral, he's still like "Well, that's that.")

It's so frustrating. It's not that I don't want to like Ed, or that I don't want to sympathize with him. I really, REALLY do! I don't even need Ed to successfully do anything to earn forgiveness! I'd take Ed trying and failing. I'd take him wanting to try, but being so convinced of his monstrousness that he never makes the attempt. But give me something. Anything other than the unexamined apathy that he has so much of the time.

The thing is, s2 lost the ability for Ed's mistreatment of people to be just another "of course he's violent, he's a pirate" quirk. They were pretty explicit about how abusive Ed was (Jim's comment in e1, the joke in e4 people assumed Ed had hit Stede) and how much he traumatized people (Lucius and the whole crew very clearly have PTSD in episodes 4 and 5). This is serious stuff, which he did to other main characters, which is going to make a lot of viewers look at him pretty harshly.

And that's manageable—Hannibal Lector managed to be most textbook-abusive asshole in the world, committing atrocities and generally being unrepentant left and right, and viewers STILL found him lovable and sympathetic. You can do that! But you need to:

a. make it clear that anyone with the relevant information calls them out for being awful, even multiple episodes later

b. make it clear that they care deeply and genuinely about their wronged loved ones

c. make them willing to actually make REAL sacrifices

I watched so many people start to dislike or outright hate Ed in season 2. It made me really sad. But I couldn't blame them for feeling that way. For all that Ed is supposedly one of the two protagonists in OFMD—a character whose mistakes should be the most understandable, whose mental state should be the most resonant—the show seemed to entirely drop the ball on writing him as such.

[kariachi]

Just cannot forget that the show had a whole romantic subplot about Kevin being interested in Gwen but not up to making a move and just, never bothered with why. The issue at play was never actually addressed. Instead we just get a steady stream of Kevin not making a move despite his interest, while Gwen pushes him to make a move, and then Gwen finagles a move out of him and the show just, carries on like there was never something keeping him from making a proper move in the first place.

The closest we get is in the third season of AF, where we get a nice look at his mental health issues including some nasty self-worth issues, but even then the focus is less on 'wow Kevin is having A Time and this shows us some things about his character' and more as 'and here's how his response to his situation is affecting Gwen'.

Even in the fandom I've seen it treated more like a case of Kevin being whiny and selfish over nothing, like it didn't lead to him teaming up with Darkstar- something the heroes only ever do otherwise when in desperate need of help dealing with an actual and immediate threat to life.

Just, if you're going to base your drama around something, at least actually fucking resolve or acknowledge the cause of the issue, rather than just brushing it under the rug once you're bored with it.