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masterhandss · 4 years

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HameFura LN5 - A Lady for Nicol (theory)

While we all love all the harem members for Katarina, but in the end she’s just one person and only one person can reign as the victor of her heart.

One of my most favorite theories/observations that came from the bakarina reddit discord is the importance of the “Lady” from Light Novel Volume 5, who was the main character alongside Nicol is their chapter in that book. The lady isn’t given a name or a physical description in her chapter which could indicate that her role is merely that of a plot device in order to prevent Nicol from giving up on Katarina’s hand. Her constant support and encouragement of Nicol’s feelings is what encourages him to continue pursuing her despite already graduating in the academy by Volume 5, cementing Nicol’s place in the harem, and yet for some people this chapter implied something else; feeling like this lady will be a contender for Nicol’s end-game love interest once Katarina chooses.

A few users on the discord pointed out how wonderful it would be for Nicol to end up with this Lady, given how strong and admirable her personality was build up to despite only appearing for a single chapter. She’s smart, honest, independent and can carry a conversation; which is a lot of traits that Nicol seems to like in a partner.

It is possible that this Lady will never be named and become her own character (unless the Second Season of the anime adapts his chapter and introduces her to everyone as a filler scene), but it is still possible for her to return as a future candidate for Nicol’s partner as the series eliminates the competition for Katarina’s heart.

Despite all this though, who could really say that we don’t know this character yet?

I propose that as of Volume 9 (the most recent JP release of the novels), we already know who the Lady from Volume 5 is!

It’s all just a matter of observation/elimination!

Spoilers for the light novels and a lil bit from the webnovel!

Edit (2/13/21): I added a lil more!

I believe that the identity of the Lady that Nicol met during his matchmaking meetings is none other than Fray Randall, the student council president of the Magic Academy in Volume 6.

Quick note, J-Novels translated Fray’s name to “Fray Landoor”, but its supposed to be Fray Randall. I mean without even pulling out the kanji for Fray’s surname, you read it out loud ‘Landoor’ as “Ran-do-ru” in japanese, in the same way you’d read ‘Randall”. Regardless if you pull out a raw version of the novels or google translate both surnames, you get the same characters of “ランドール“, proving that Fray is from the Marquis of Randall. The connection is even more undeniable considering the fact that Fray is described as a girl with black hair and blue eyes in LN6, just like Suzanna.

Part 1 - Fray and the Lady

First, lets establish what we know about the Lady:

She is from a high ranking family

She is a member of the Student Council in Katarina’s final year in the Academy (an underclassman that is close with Katarina)

She gives an allusive, strong and resilient impression

She is very intelligent, talented and has a high magical aptitude (evident in the fact that she is in the Student Council)

She is very curious and perceptive about other people

She admires Lana Smith (Suzanna Randall)

She is very supportive of Nicol’s feelings for Katarina

She has no intention of marrying and wants to work independently in the Magic Ministry

She is the 5th and last candidate for Nicol’s fiancee

Before going to Fray, I just want to establish something for those who do not know: Light Novel Volume 6 isn’t the first time we’ve seen Fray. She, as well as her best friend Ginger, are already well established characters even before the Volume 5 was published, because those two characters comes from an extra web novel chapter that was not adapted into the first arc (the first two books) of the novels. The extra chapter is called “About the Duke’s Daughter” which tells the tale of Ginger Tucker’s experience of meeting Katarina. The chapter itself doesn’t introduce anything new about Fray, other than the fact that the Randalls are a Marquis Family, but the chapter will come up again later.

Now, lets establish what we know about Fray Randall:

She is from the Marquis of Randall, a high ranking family

She is the next president of the Student Council in Katarina’s final year in the Academy (an underclassman that is close with Katarina)

She is well-mannered, polite and charming

She is very intelligent, talented and has a high magical aptitude (evident in the fact that she is in the Student Council)

She is quite perceptive when it comes to the feelings of her tsundere friend Ginger

She is most likely related to Suzanna Randall (as they share the same last name; either sisters or cousins)

She is very supportive of Ginger’s feelings for Katarina

I probably don’t need to make a chart to emphasize the similarities of these two characters (but i’ll still compare anyways). I know not everything lines up, especially when it comes to their personality. We haven’t seen too much of Fray to write a perfectly accurate description of her, all we know is that she behaves like a perfect noblewoman in front of others but is also quite cheeky when it comes to teasing her friend Ginger about her admiration for their Katarina-senpai.

That isn’t to say that there are no other similarities between them! Nicol has noted a few times how smart sounding and well-mannered the lady is, which while does apply to most ladies, it should still be considered. Both Fray and the Lady have perfect etiquette, but has a more energetic and outspoken personality. The Lady reminds me a lot of Suzanna Randall, and that comparison makes me feel like the Lady could be Fray, because of how likely it is that Suzanna’s little sister/cousin could be as brazen and independent as she is.

Both Fray and the Lady are open minded people. the Lady does not care about the existing culture of high society and wants to act independently. Fray does not care about the culture of high society and accepts Ginger despite her normal appearance and low status.

Both Fray and the Lady as very supportive of another’s characters feelings for Katarina, aka Ginger and Nicol respectively. Both characters insisted that their friends accept their feelings of love/admiration, and to act on them. Anyone who has seen either the web novel chapter knows that Fray and Ginger are very close to Katarina and the harem, which is important because the Lady specifically got all the tea about Nicol liking Katarina from Sophia.

Both Fray and the Lady are from high ranking families. Specifically, Fray is a Marchioness, which is a rank higher than Nicol.

Speaking of the Marquis of Randalls, the Lady has voiced her admiration about her idol: a woman who works for the Magic Ministry but isn’t of a high ranking family. She is most likely talking about Lana Smith (aka Suzanna’s alter ego). The Lady mentions that her family highly opposes her desires to work in the Ministry and insists that she marries instead.

Suzanna in Volume 3 and 4 implies the same things: despite her desires to study magic, she is forced by her parents to attend matchmaking events in order to find a fiancée (which ended up becoming Geoffrey) and it is not hard to surmise that her family is one of the reasons she hides her identity in the Ministry. If Fray is from the same family, then she will most likely be receiving the same treatment.

We cannot say whether of not the Lady admiring Lana Smith is an indication that she knows who Lana is. There is the possibility that the Lady admires Lana but isn’t aware of her identity at all, but there’s also the possibility that the Lady does know who Lana is and gave Lana’s fake story as to not blow her cover. If the Lady really is Fray, then both sides of the theory can do wonders for her character.

Both Fray and the Lady are smart and magically-talented, as you can tell by the fact that they are both in the Student Council. In fact, Fray is so smart and talented that she will eventually succeed Gerald as President in the Magic Academy! Doesn’t that remind anybody of a certain Randall who is also a prodigy?

Part 2 - Katarina’s Underclassmen in the Student Council

Speaking of the Student Council, one of my key arguments as to why I think Fray Randall is Nicol’s Lady from Volume 5 is because of the web novel chapter “About the Duke’s Daughter” featuring Ginger. In the light novels, Fray was introduced in Volume 6 while the Lady is introduced in Volume 5. Since the web novel chapter was never published, LN6 is the new introductions of Fray and Ginger.

In the anime and light novels, it is identified that in Sirius and Nicol’s batch, there were 7 members of the student council (Sirius, Nicol, Girl 1, Girl 2, Boy 1, Boy 2 and Boy 3), and in Katarina’s batch there is 6 student council members (Gerald, Keith, Alan, Mary, Sophia and Maria). With that we can assume that their is typically 6-7 new freshmens to join the student council every year (push it to 6-8 if you want but I’m going with 7)

First draft of my fan designs for Ginger Tucker and Fray Randall btw :DD

I made Fray look too sweet in this doodle, she’s a sass-pants I swear!

Like I already said before, both Fray and the Lady are members of the student council, who are close to Katarina. Knowing only the light novels, one might assume that it is impossible to determine how many members Fray and Ginger’s batch of council freshmens are, but in reality its pretty easy.

I’m not going to say that out of the freshmens, Katarina is only close to Fray and Ginger, since they are the only ones to show up in Volume 6, but I will agree that it is likely. If we go by the estimates of 6-8 council members per batch, we’ll go in the middle and say that Ginger’s batch has 7 student council members as Katarina is in her final year.

In the web novel chapter “About the Duke’s Daughter”, there is a scene where Ginger is being bad mouthed by 3 of her female peers in the student council room. Here’s the scene from the web novel chapter (in Ginger’s POV):

There was something I didn't understand in class that day so after visiting the teacher, I went to the student council room and arrived later than usual. Then some of the same classmates, who were members of the student council seemed to be ahead, and I heard voices talking from inside.

'What's with her attitude! I'm so angry at her, that Ginger Tucker." "Indeed! What can we even do about her?" "Being so prideful just because she's a little smart"

I unintentionally pulled my hand from the door handle. This is a scene I can't enter.

So it can't be helped. It was then that I thought I should wait a little before entering.

"I don't think Ginger is like that at all"

Perhaps she was there the entire time, as now a voice of a third-party spoke in between their angry voices.

"K-Katarina-sama? Were you here this entire time?" In a surprised voice, it turns out the those girls were not aware of Katarina's presence.

With this we can identify 5 out of 7 of the student council members, with the final two we can assume that they are either two guys or one guy and one girl (but its most likely the prior.

We would have <Ginger, Fray, Girl 1, Girl 2, Girl 3, Boy 1 and Boy 2>.

But that begs the question, who is the Lady? Is there only 1 male student in the freshmen batch of the student council, with the Lady filling that last spot, or is the Lady among the 5 girls we’ve established? Or are there 8 student council members instead? I don’t need to answer my own questions, you do the math :))

Of course there’s the possibility that the author is disregarding this webnovel chapter and creates a new freshmen batch from scratch, but while The Lady nor Fray has yet to be adapted into the manga and anime, i’ll take this as a win for me.

Edit (2/13/21): A thought just occurred to me while reading the japanese wiki!

Ginger, in the webnovel chapter, has made it perfectly clear that she wants to join the Ministry to become independent. The “Lady”, in Volume 5, has made it perfectly clear that she wants to join the Ministry to be like her idol, Lana Smith (Suzanna Randall).

With that in mind, doesn’t that increase the chances of the “Lady” being Fray Randall?? because the two best friends want to eventually join the Ministry and join their senpais and idols??? it wouldn’t make sense if it was Ginger and another character from the student council third batch that we don’t know of!

Anyways, that's it for this hamefura theory. I might edit this if there's new information to come around. With the announcement of the Second Season, there’s a very high possibility that this chapter will be adapted as filler. It is possible that we will meet this lady, or maybe even Fray, whichever comes first.

The Lady most likely is just the plot device though, but we do what we can with what we have lol.

Regardless if this theory is correct or not, I think I made a pretty strong case! Thank you for reading!

#mh talks #my next life as a villainess #hamefura #hamehura #bakarina #destruction flag otome #otome game no hametsu flag shika nai akuyaku reijou ni tensei shiteshimatta #nicol ascart #katarina claes #hamefura theory #fray randall #suzanna randall #my next life as a villianess all routes lead to doom

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peterstanslizzie · 4 years

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Reacting To: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (Season 3 Episode 3)

Episode Title: A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing

Spoiler Warning: Kindly proceed if you’ve already seen the episode or are able to handle spoilers

1. After the events of last episode, Emilia and her group are searching for supplies in order to rebuild their lab. Once again, Greta is exhibiting dumbass energy and I’m loving it. Oh and look who we have here; It’s a couple of mute wolves spying on them and one of them is Margot, Wolf’s ex-non-biological sister! Emilia shoots a dart at the other wolf and it looks like Emilia is going to do the same thing to Margot?

2. In the meeting area at Timbercat Village, Kipo is trying to convince the Fitness Raccoons and the mute rats to join HMUFA but they’re too scared to join HMUFA because Scarlemagne is around. Did I just see Benson take off his hat? That’s something rare to see. Kipo tells the mutes she will get Scarlemagne to apologize to them but they all laugh at her since they don’t believe he will have the decency to do so.

3. Kipo goes up to Scarlemagne to try to convince him. However, even he feels like him apologizing doesn’t won’t work because he wouldn’t mean it. Wolf then shows up and serves him crab...again, #crablivesmatter. Anyways, even if he did apologize, the other mutes probably wouldn’t buy it. He has to mean it deep down inside.

4. Down at the forest area, Margot traps Wolf in one of her traps. Wolf immediately goes in on the offence and Kipo is there to back her up just in case. But let’s not trample her Kipo lol. I can’t believe they survived that fall from the sky lol. They’re also talking whilst fighting each other off; Margot actually thinks that Wolf tried to kill her. How so? You and especially your parents, started it. Eventually, Wolf manages to take her down.

5. Wolf, Dave, Benson and Mandu then start interrogating her. Margot mentions that she and her brother were in Deathstalker Territory and that her brother is trapped. Trapped? You mean captured? Speaking of captured, why wasn’t Margot captured come to think of it? Something doesn’t add up here.

6. Margot needs Wolf’s help because she has escaped that place before to which Wolf actually agrees to help. She’s also doing it because she wants to show Scarlemagne that she’s a nice person to others who aren’t nice to her back. Anyways, Wolf and the others needs to watch their backs because Margot appears to be lying to them. So, is it confirmed that she actually killed one of their family members 5 years ago and is wearing their fur. I wonder who’s fur? Probably either the mom or dad wolf.

7. Kipo brings Scarlemagne to the meeting area. Immediately, he’s not welcomed by the mutes. In fact, they’re throwing food (I think) at him. Kipo makes the bold move by opening his glass cell. This causes them to lose their crap and they all flee. Scarlemagne also tries to runs away but luckily Kipo is there to keep him in check.

This will certainly give me nightmares.

8. Wolf, Dave, Benson and Margot are all making their way towards Deathstalker Territory. Wolf and Margot randomly starts to race against each other through the rundown city. I guess that’s one of the habits they didn’t break as ‘sisters’. Margot is impressed by Wolf’s speed.

OMG! I can’t with these two. They don’t want to take their eyes off Margot. So, they agrees that Dave will sneeze while Benson monitors Margot but Benson sneezes too. Because of that, they get worried Margot might pull something on Wolf. The comedy in this show.

9. Kipo is basically forcing Scarlemagne to go on an apology tour. After his attempt with the Timbercats, they approach the Umlaut Snakes to ask them if they want anything from him. They want him to tune their guitar but he just smashes it onto the ground and tries running away only to be caught by Kipo in her Mega Jaguar form. Anyways, we get a montage of him attempting to do good deeds for everyone but he’s always messing things up. He needs to stop.

10. A cute little Timberkitten runs to Kipo and gives her a hug. She passes him on to Scarlemagne and the kitten offers him a daisy. Scarlemagne tries to drop him like all the other objects he smashed and the Timberkitten starts crying. I can’t believe he would even make that attempt. Luckily, he softens up in time. His Achilles’ heel is definitely kids. Even Kipo and Yumyan felt it. By the way, the kids’ voices are so cute.

11. Meanwhile, Wolf and the others enter the valley of the Mega Dogs. Unfortunately, Margot steps on a dog toy and the dogs hear it and starts going after them. Wolf asks Margot to figure out who the alpha dog is and they work together to get to the alpha to trick it in controlling the other dogs. Margot is thrilled that they worked together to accomplish something but Wolf is still upset about their shared past.

12. It’s now time to give an official apology during a special meeting of HMUFA. Scarlemagne asks Kipo why him apologizing is so important to her, to which she says she wants the mutes to get together and go against Emilia. Plus, she also wants him to get a second chance. BTW, isn’t Mandu the best bodyguard ever lol.

13. He tries to give them a speech that’s filled with nature metaphors but the mutes are too dumb thick to understand and they misinterpret him and think that he thinks they’re stupid. They proceed to boo him. Also, I think it’s kind of ironic that in order for Kipo to keep things aligned, she intimidates the mutes by turning into a her jaguar form. I feel like that would send a bad message, especially if I were one of the mutes she’s intimidating lol.

14. Anyways, he continues on with his speech and this time, it sounds very sincere. The mutes felt his apology too but they’re conflicted because they are still scared of him. But anyways, even though they can’t forgive him yet, they all agree to join HMUFA because at least he apologized. Yay for Scarlemagne! This episode certainly marks the beginning of his redemption arc.

Aww, he gets apples this time.

You finally got it lol

15. The alpha dog brings them to the entrance of Deathstalker Territory. Wolf warns them to stay calm as they enter. Margot tries complimenting Wolf again but Wolf shuts it down. She rants to her about how after their family tried to eat her, she felt alone and that nobody had cared about her. Margot tries to explain herself by saying that she felt like she didn’t have a choice because of her parents.

16. Margot must’ve felt bad because she reveals that she was coerced by Emilia to bring them into a trap. She thinks that it’s not too late for them to escape but that’s too bad because Emilia shows up. This doesn’t look good for Margot lol. I hope Wolf doesn’t forgive Margot or become friends with her by the end. She messed up big time in my opinion.

17. Well, that’s the end of my review of episode 3. Stay tuned tomorrow for my review of episode 4. Thanks for reading everybody!

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photolover82 · 3 years

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The Masked Singer Season 5 Episode 5 Recap: Group B Finals ft a plot twist (Commentary & Guesses)

Hi everyone! Welcome (or welcome back) to Ana’s Masked Singer recap, where I, Ana, recap every episode of The Masked Singer. So, this week, we are back to Group B with yet another wildcard and it is the last time we are gonna see the groups on their own since after Group A’s final, we got the Super Eight (yup, it’s 8 this time... much better still than last season’s format). Anyways, let’s get into it (this is gonna be super repetitive from last week guess wise but I am gonna try to keep it interesting and fresh for you guys, don’t you worry):

Alright, so usually I would save the wildcard for the end as like a surprise, but since the wildcard got eliminated, let’s introduce (and say goodbye to at the same time) to the:

Bulldog!! 🐶

Commentary: Ok, he sang Candy Girl by New Edition (which is really funny and ironic for a whole other thing, I’ll explain in a moment I swear) and um how do I say this nicely?... he’s a great dancer, but the singing is, what Randy Jackson would say, “a no from me dawg.” (Get it? Dawg.. bc the bullDOG... oh ok I will stop now). Anyways, yeah no, he was not good, I kind of expected this to happen honestly, so I am not surprised nor disappointed by any means. However, the person under this mask kinda did surprise me lol... even tho I kind of saw this coming.

He was revealed to be, in the biggest plot twist of the century, no voting, just Neicy Nash picking it:

*SURPRISE SHAWTY*

Nick Cannon, our very own host and Ken’s “daddy*”

*which is ironic because he legit just announced he was gonna have another baby

Ok, ok, did I get this right on my own? Nope, but Twitter helped me out so thank you Twitter. I did officially guess him before he was unmasked (but that’s because I had no other guesses sooo can I really count this a win? Hmmm... TBD... you guys let me know). Anyways, BOOM PLOT TWIST BABY, he’s back! Just in case you guys didn’t know (I don’t really talk about the judges or the host here because I watch for the contestants not for them and it would make this already long blog longer and we don’t want that): Nick had COVID so he couldn’t host the first few episodes of the show, but now he’s better and BOOM he’s the host again... Neicy Nash was taking over for him and now he’s back! So yeah this was just a transition for him to be back on the show, but like imma be honest: he might have been married to Mariah Carey but he don’t got any pipes like her, but he’s a good host so he should stick to that.

Anyways, NEXTTTT, let’s talk about the remaining 4 (which are legit the same freaking ones from last week):

1. Black Swan 🖤🦢

Commentary: So she sang Whitney Houston's How Will I Know and I swear she gets better and better each week like she murdered this song, it was absolutely amazing, my favorite performance of the night hands down. I really love Black Swan, she has one of the best voices on the show and I think either her or Robopine could win the entire season tbh.

I think this has to be (tripling down/final answer/insert buzzer sound here):

Jojo

Reasoning/Clues:

10-10-10= She has appeared on multiple singing competition shows (she did a lot of those shows as a kid), she was on America’s Most Talented Kids and was a guest judge on celebrity X Factor

Montana= get this... if you are around my age, this will surprise you. Did you guys know that Jojo was the original person that the producers of Hannah Montana wanted to play Hannah but she turned it down because she wanted to focus on her music

In her physical clue, she talks about a female singer who passed away at a young age that she was friends with= she was referring to fellow R&B singer Aaliyah

2. Crab 🦀

Commentary: He sang Give it to Me Baby by Rick James and it was a very strong performance, it almost took me aback the song choice. I didn’t expect him to go that hard in the beginning, the hip thrusts were a bit uncomfortable for me and he can’t dance for shit (I am sure it’s because he’s a bit older, not faulting him by any means), but it was really strong vocally speaking. He did actually loose his breathe and started hyperventilating under the mask and had to take a break to cool down (literally, because he was burning up under there), which honestly I hope he’s ok, I am not sure if he’s gonna last that long because of that hyperventilating (remember Mickey Rourke?), but tbh it would have been so unfair for him to go because he did an amazing job and I enjoyed his performance. He got soul.... crab’s got soul.

This has got to be (doubling down, like omg even the picture matches w the body type and everything, I am onto something here):

Bobby Brown

Reasoning/Clues:

Mom kept him in the straight and narrow and taught him how to cook= well, he has spoke about how his mother has gotten him away from the gangs and trouble around his neighborhood and into cooking (he even has a food line, hence the Mac and cheese), which also made him take up singing and thus his band New Edition (remember how I said Nick singing Candygirl by New Edition was ironic? Well this is why... because crab is Bobby Brown aka one of the members.... also Black Swan sang his ex wife’s song so yeah this can’t get any more ironic) was formed

Big Ben= Initals, BB aka Bobby Brown and also he had a show in 2005 called Being Bobby Brown and one of the episodes “Bobby Does London” he goes to London

Ribs= he has a line of BBQ sauces and seasonings called Bobby Brown Foods

3. Piglet 🐷

Commentary: This time, he went a bit softer with the song choice which I feel compliments his voice better, with 7 Years by Lukas Graham, which made Jenny, who apparently hasn’t listened to this song before (wtf Jenny, this song was all over the radio in like 2017 and you are like a radio host hun), cry. I mean it was really amazing and ballads actually suit him a lot more than super upbeat songs like last week’s Andy Grammar song and I really enjoyed it, I’ve heard that song a million times so no I didn’t cry but I still loved it. I do think Piglet will go super far, my guess is he will make it to semifinals.

I am a 100%, tripling down sure that this is:

Nick Lachey

Reasoning/Clues:

Genie Lamp= He did a cover of Aladdin’s A Whole New World with his ex Jessica Simpson on Disney Mania 3

The “spider” who made him a family man= referring to Vanessa Lachey, it was supposed to be this whole Charlotte’s Web thing not really referring anything specific about her that she’s a spider, she could have been another pig for all we care

Dog Tags= in the physical clue, there are 3 dog tags, which he has been seen wearing (you can Google those pics) and they represent his 3 kids which his wife gave him before they had their third kid, Phoenix (btw there’s a P on the bottom dog tag shown)

4. Chameleon

Commentary: Ok so he rapped again but this time the song was Hip Hop by Dead Prez (which I have felt like I have heard but I have no idea where) and I usually hate rappers on this show, but like he’s legit. What I mean by that is like he’s an actual rapper (well Bow Wow was too... but Bow Wow only went as far as he did because of his dancing, Chameleon is just pure rap talent) and his flow is insane. I am not a rap fan whatsoever but I can appreciate good rapping and that was good rapping, actually it was great rapping. Sure, he’s the weakest link of the four but he’s also the coolest one could argue.

Mark my words, this is as I said the last 2 types, again tripling down:

Wiz Khalifa

Reasoning/Clues:

His little Chameleon/lizard= he has an 8 year old son named Sebastian (he also says Cam in the package which is his real name... by him I mean Wiz.... his real name is Cameron)

Martial Arts= the dude likes Martial Arts and has been trained in it and Jiu Jitsu, he has mentioned it in interviews, has been spotted training in gyms, it’s no secret at this point that he likes that stuff

Hot wings= he has a wings place called HotBox by Wiz and he was also on Hot Ones (for those unfamiliar, it’s a YouTube show where celebs eat 10 super spicy chicken wings while answering questions) idk if that counts but I am also gonna say it

So that’s it, guys! I hope you enjoyed! Follow me on Twitter because I do live tweet the show, it’s the same username as here @photolover82 and I do some of these in video form on Tik Tok too if you wanna follow, it’s photolover820 (close enough lol). So yeah, see you guys in the next one! Byeeee! 👋🏼👋🏼

#the masked singer #themaskedsinger #music #celebrities #the masked singer season 5 #hollywood #nick cannon

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travllingbunny · 4 years

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The 100: 7x05 Welcome to Bardo

Here’s finally my belated review of 7x05. I was too busy last week (with actual work) so I couldn’t write it before 7x06 aired. Then I got a bit distracted with my Dark rewatch and Dark season 3 dropping. But I’m taking a break from it to finally post this review and then, hopefully, 7x06 not long after. It’s good that I did a couple of rewatches because I could notice more details. (The review was already halfway over a week ago, so I added some remarks in italics that are things I only think now after seeing 7x06.)

This was an episode I was looking forward to and I enjoyed it, because it finally brought us to Bardo, in the belly of the beast so to speak (note: I wrote this sentence before I saw 7x06, and now I want to keep it because it’s just too funny that 7x06 put Clarke and co. in the literal belly of the beast), where the main action is likely to be, advanced the main plot of season 7 quite a lot, tied a few storylines and showed us Octavia in the present for the first time this season, and - not gonna lie - the highlight of the episode, 1 minute appearance of Bellamy, the first one since the first scenes of the season premiere.

However, I have to say that I wasn’t really impressed with the part of the episode that should have been the most interesting - Octavia’s flashbacks showing what happened to her when she was first taken to Bardo. It served its purpose by filling in the blanks, or rather confirming what I had already figured out, but for one thing, I didn’t get too much character focus in this episode, except for a touching Octavia-Hope scene and Echo’s disturbing actions in the end, which made for a pretty strong scene. And this time I was really bothered by the sloppiness of the details: from just how inconsistent the time dilation rules (rules? what rules?) seem at this point (already a problem before, but this episode made it even worse, especially since it focused on the timeline so much) to the messy selection of flashbacks in the Memory Capture scenes (while the timeline is the writers’ fault, this was obviously a case of the editor being really lazy). Maybe this is just nitpicking, but I find it really annoying when I can’t analyze details to come up theories because I have no idea which detail is a part of the plan and which is just a screw-up.

:Like everyone have some theories, including those about what really happened to Bellamy after his “death”. (At least they’re not even trying to make us believe Bellamy is dead on social media and in Inside the Episode features, like they tried last season with Clarke.)

This is why it ended up being an episode I liked less on rewatch, and I rank it behind 7x02, 7x04 and 7x01, although ahead of 7x03 (and, it turns out, 7x06). Even though the Sanctum portion of the episode was really strong and interesting this time.

Prepare for a lot of nitpicking of plot holes, and me about to incur the wrath of many t100 fans by explaining why I really dislike like the idea of an Octavia/Levitt endgame romance (it’s mostly because of their interactions in this episode).

This was the second episode this season where Marie said “Previously on” (I’m curious how many different cast members do it this season) and I think it’s the first time we saw the opening titles that were released before the S7 trailer, the ones that start with the Bardo Stone Room.

Sanctum

The deluded brainwashed folks in Sanctum who still worship the Primes have a name they have given themselves - the Faithful. And it seems that they call the people who aren’t brainwashed ‘the Fallen’. Has the show ever had such an annoying character as Trey, their leader?

I must say I related to Murphy when he suggested that maybe they should just let them burn themselves if that’s what they want, instead of letting them exert control that way. Yes, I know it’s bad. But that’s one of the things Murphy is good for, to sometimes say things that we all kind of think but would feel ashamed of saying aloud - at least if it was real life. However, Murphy - and I’m sure everyone - changed his mind when he saw they were going to burn children. And the father of the child who was about to be sacrificed (who we now know is called Jeremiah) looked confused and terrified. Maybe it’s just Trey and a couple of other fanatical people influencing and manipulating the others. Unfortunately, real life examples of people doing horrible things - even to their own children - in the name of what they believe in, to make me hesitate to call this too extreme to be plausible. But what is going on in the heads of these people? At least before, when the people of Sanctum were sacrificing their children or other loved ones or themselves, they believed it meant living forever and being one with the gods, but this?

Nelson is becoming quite a likable character even though he has only had a brief scene or two here and there. (And then the show goes and does... whatever the hell they’re doing with him in 7x06.) Like this time, when he was the only one who tried to save the Faithful woman who set herself on fire, explaining that the people of Sanctum are still their people, even the Faithful. (Now this is a much nicer face of the Children of Gabriel. Where was he when CoG were killing Nightblood people/potential hosts, even though that’s not the most efficient way to stop the Primes - as opposed to killing the Primes and destroying their mind drives?)

Great little character moment for Emori when she asked Nelson: “Even though they cast you out?” He probably doesn’t even know how much that resonates with her. Is this foreshadowing her storyline this season? Will she have to interact with or do something for the Grounders - or even specifically her clan, Sangedakru (which also happens to be the clan where Sheidheda was from - and the most likely to follow him if/when they find out who he is, since they seem to consider him their “greatest champion’)? (The latter seems slightly less likely now that Indra seems to have made them respect her authority... but I doubt it’s going to be that easy...)

BTW, speaking of Emori. let me just address the speculation that she’s pregnant - apparently based on the fact she threw up?! She threw up because she got radiation poisoning, FFS. If she were pregnant, the fetus would at least be in huge danger of not surviving. Maybe the writers of The 100 didn’t know or didn’t expect the audience to know about the effects of radiation, but come on, they must be aware that everyone has seen Chernobyl.) And Jackson, a doctor, examined her right there.

Murphy being snarky: “I’m tired of being a hero”. Hmm... when was the last time, Murphy, you were a hero without someone roping you in first, or without you following Emori’s lead or making a last moment decision? However, while Murphy likes to claim he doesn’t want to be a hero, Bellamy told him in 5x01 that Murphy’s problem on the Ring was that he actually wanted to be a hero and felt useless because he didn’t have the opportunity. Still, he’s come a long way since season 1, when he wasn’t exactly that protective of children.... Granted, Charlotte was not an innocent, but she was still a child. And he was 17 at the time, now he’s an adult.

I’m enjoying watching Indra in her new leadership role and her stand-offs with RussHeda. It’s very fortunate that Adina is not busy with AHS anymore, and JR Bourne makes for a fantastic villain - in a completely different way than Russell was. Russell was soft and emotional while also pompous and hypocritical and seemed to believe his own BS, which made him all the more annoying. Sheidheda is much smarter and has no delusions about being a good guy. He’s scary and dark but he also knows how to turn the situation to his benefit and has very rational remarks about how ridiculous the Faithful are with their tactic. He clearly has nothing but contempt for them. “My, my, what foolish little lambs you are.” (Which ties into this season’s themes of Shepherd and the flock.)

We learn more about Indra’s backstory, and this is the most I’ve been interested in Grounder history since... ever?

It’s also quite dark how she manipulates Jackson with his desire for revenge, by keeping the truth from him that RussHeda is not Russell. But Jackson’s dark side of his thirst for revenge for Abby has made him the most interesting that he’s ever been as a character.

I think that this storyline will eventually somehow tie with the main storyline. If nothing else then because Sheidheda and Madi are connected to the knowledge from the Flame, which is connected to Becca and ALIE and events from the prequel. Especially since it increasingly seems like the “great war” that’s being talked about may have something to do with AIs...

Bardo

Timeline and time dilation

Let me get this off my chest first... The timeline of this episode was confusing for some viewers in terms of the sequence of events. That isn’t the case for me - the problem is that the amount of time that was supposed to pass makes the time dilation seem really inconsistent.

So, chronologically, things happened like this:

in 6x08 (some 4 or 5 Sanctum days ago): Diyoza goes into the Anomaly; ends up on Skyring

Octavia goes into the Anomaly 6 seconds later, ends up on Skyring, 3 months (Skyring time) after Diyoza arrived. she gives birth.

Octavia and Diyoza spend 10 years there raising Hope.

Octavia sends a message to Bellamy in a bottle, not realizing the bottle ended up on Bardo (apparently, the default setting of the Anomaly, is: you go from Sanctum to Skyring and from Skyring to Bardo). Disciples capture her and Diyoza and take them to Bardo.

While Hope spends 10 more years on Skyring with Dev, before jumping to Bardo, Octavia is taken to Bardo, tried to run away, then is taken to Memory Capture. This is 45 (Bardo) days ago. She resists at first, but 34 Bardo days ago, she allows Levitt access to her memories and he starts watching them in a more coherent and chronological manner. 31 Bardo days ago, after he’s seen her memories up to the season 3 finale, Hope comes to rescue her.

Levitt helps them and Octavia is sent back to Sanctum, losing her memories, and runs back into Gabriel’s arms (no, I don’t mean it like that and I don’t ship them) - 10 Sanctum seconds after she ran into the Anomaly! (This is still 6x08)

7 Bardo days ago (which is some 2 days ago on Sanctum) or 6x13, Hope (who had probably been immediately captured when trying to save her mother - I guess she and the Disciples spent 24 days waiting for Octavia to enter Hope’s mind code into the Anomaly Stone...) is sucked into Sanctum, stabs Octavia with the tag which pulls her to Bardo. Octavia is brought to MCap again, and apparently Levitt talks to her and then she is brought to the Stone Room to talk Bellamy down. Something happens to Bellamy and Octavia is made to believe he’s dead.

in the present, Hope, Echo and Gabriel (after spending 5 years on Skyring, which was somehow 2 days on Sanctum (?)) jump to Bardo, kill some people, pretend to be DIsciples and listen to Anders’ speech, find Octavia, and see the memory of whatever happened or did not happen to Bellamy.

Now this means that the time differentials between planets have been like this:

Sanctum: 6 seconds = Skyring: 3 months

Sanctum:10 seconds = Skyring: over 20 years (because Hope spent 20 years on Skying and at least a few hours on Bardo, all in those 10 Sanctum seconds)

Sanctum: a few seconds (under 10 seconds, probably a lot less) = Bardo: 14 days (from “45 days ago” to “31 days ago”)

Sanctum: about 2 or 3 days = Bardo: 24 days

Sanctum: 2 days = Bardo: 7 days

Sanctum: a little over 1 day = Skyring: 5 years

See the problem here?

@justbecauseyoubelievesomething pointed out before that the time differentials may vary a lot because of planets orbiting their suns (and Sanctum orbiting its planet and the suns) in elliptic orbits, so distances from the black hole change. However, the problem with this is that 1) they haven’t said that on the show and instead keep talking about the time differentials as if they are at least roughly the same or similar all the time, and 2) these fluctuations vary way too much for it to make any sense? If it was just 1:3 and then 1:7, for instance, OK - but how the heck does the time differential between Sanctum and Bardo go from 1:200,000 to 1:3?

How is this supposed to work? Do people on Bardo go:

“We’re sending a team to Sanctum!”

“Understood! We will need just an hour to retrieve the target!” “But Sir... they’ll return in 20 years! We have to wait till next week, then an hour will be just 7 hours here!”

“All right, we have to wait for the next week then!”

And do these fluctuations happen just between Sanctum and Bardo or Sanctum and Skyring, or also between Bardo and Skyring? The latter would make their prison system quite complicated and tricky!

A couple of other pieces of info -

Levitt put the “Trust Bellamy” note in Hope’s arm during his MCap session (because he knew what Bellamy was to Octavia), but Anders apparently did not realize why Hope was bleeding or that it had something to do with Levitt, though he was the only one who could’ve had any contact with her?

One thing I don’t get is the part where Anders says: “it’s why you’re a prisoner dressed like a savage so you can get close to Aunty O”. Why did they have to dress Hope in Grounder-like clothes, exactly?

We also see that Meredith’s team was told to go to Sanctum and find Clarke - though it’s unclear why they waited so long to send them. Or why Meredith’s team waited about a day and a half to contact Clarke. We see Anders telling Meredith: “Because of the time dilation, no one will come for you if you fail” - and I have no idea that’s supposed to mean, especially since I don’t know what time differential it was supposed to be at the time.

Octavia in Memory Capture

...And I’m gonna nitpick some more.

Maybe it’s not a big deal that many of the scenes we saw as Octavia’s memories didn’t make sense, because they were either scenes she wasn’t present for or scenes from the future (relative to the moment when she was on Bardo the first time), but I expected better, after the wonderful attention to detail in last season’s Nevermind and Matryoshka, where neither the prop masters nor editors and sound editors made any mistakes with what we saw and heard of Clarke’s memories.

So, 45 days ago, when Octavia was first brought to Bardo, and Anders and Levitt were seeing random memories against her will, the first thing she’s told is to imagine someone holding out a hand to her to help her, and we see brief flashes of various memories (aka scenes from the previous seasons) before her mind settles of many different images of Bellamy:

Aurora with baby Octavia

Lincoln, just before his death

Indra - when Octavia finds her and talks to Clarke and Lexa (3x05) - of course this is there because of Indra, but I don’t know if Clarke is also supposed to be one of the people O thinks of: we see her quite clearly as she’s saying she must talk to Bellamy to save their people

and then a bunch of images of Bellamy - which is where things start not making sense, because while we see him

in the Pilot on the dropship (that makes sense)

in season 5 when he argued with Octavia (also makes sense)

but we also see him dressed Gabriel’s cardigan, which he only wore after reuniting with Octavia in 6x10, after she came back from Bardo, and one of the images is definitely from 6x13 when Hope came from the Anomaly (future scenes!)l

we also see the scene where Bellamy was looking for Octavia and talked to Clarke in 1x06 (where Octavia was obviously not present for! It’s also the scene right after the Aurora flashback - the editor were obviously being super lazy)

and Bellamy in an anti-radiation suit in 4x13 when he had to leave Clarke (the only way Octavia could remember that is if she had a telepathic link to her brother!)

Other memories include Murphy in Pike’s class (clearly just as a cool transition from a Murphy scene in Sanctum), but it was really funny how horrified Octavia seemed when Levitt asked her if he was her lover. ;) Levitt clearly got a bunch of images of her friends - including Raven, Clarke (from the Pilot!) and Indra, whose images we see on screen in addition to Bellamy - and he finally sees a bunch of memories of Hope on Skyring, which is what she was trying to hide the most.

At this point, Octavia desperately tries to make a deal with Levitt - he doesn’t mention Hope in his report, and lets her go later, and she’ll let him into her memories. Just before Levitt starts watching her memories in the chronological order, we hear some more of Octavia’s memories in her head (they aren’t showing on the screen, where the same flashbacks as before are playing):

banishing Echo in 4x11

Bellamy deciding to leave her in 6x03 (“Are you out of your mind? You didn’t need to kill anyone!”)

Miller saying “Blodreina gave that honor to me!”

Octavia yelling “You’re dead to me!” to Bellamy (in that disturbing scene in 3x10) and...

Hallucination!Pike telling her she caused a world to be destroyed and herself yelling she wanted “REDEMPTION!” - which is another inconsistency, because comes from a red toxin hallucination that she’ll only have after she returns to Sanctum (in 6x09)! At least you could say this was already in her subconsciousness, but these were supposed to her memories!

When she starts cooperating, Levitt basically binges the first 3 seasons of The 100 - or rather, a version of it where Octavia is the main character and everything is only from her POV - ending with 3x16, which is probably pretty significant, as they showed several moments right before Clarke destroyed the City of Light and the moments after she came back. We see Bellamy telling everyone what to do as they were fighting chipped people to protect Clarke, Clarke on the throne in the City of Light, Pike fighting chipped!Jaha, Pike saving Octavia, and, and after the destruction of the COL, Murphy and Emori hugging, and finally - Octavia stabbing Pike.

This is where Levitt goes “Yes!” - which makes me (and Octavia) feel real tonal dissonance. He reveals himself to be a true Octavia stan, the kind who thinks their favorite character simply cannot go wrong and who doesn’t just defend her and have an understanding and empathy for her motives and emotional states (which is great), but cheers even the bad things she did (which is not great). Now, if Levitt is meant to be a representation of a typical stan, that’s great. The show has, this season in particular (and even in S6 to a point - through Jordan) been dealing with the idea of Clarke, Octavia and other main characters as living legends. And a lot of t100 fans - including every single YouTube reactor I’ve seen - always cheers and says they’re happy when she kills Pike. I didn’t feel that way, so there’s that. And sure, some of that is because I didn’t hate Pike. But what’s more important is: that moment was never portrayed as a triumphant one. (It it was meant to be, it would have been Octavia killing Pike in a battle, or something similar to the scene where Lincoln killed Cage Wallace in 2x16, not Octavia stabbing Pike when he didn’t expect it, after they had fought together and right after he had saved her life. It wouldn’t have shown Bellamy and Clarke worried about Octavia, or made it her ‘start of darkness’ moment that led to her becoming a murder-obsessed assassin in season 4. And 6x09 made a point that Octavia herself saw this act as a wrong one - that she thinks she didn’t have the right to murder someone in cold blood even though she had legitimate reasons to hate him. The show generally doesn’t portray revenge-murder as a good thing. And that is true in this scene, too: we see flashbacks of Pike at his most heroic (fighting chipped Jaha and Pike right after he saved Octavia’s life) before the scene of her stabbing him, and while Levitt is like “YES!”, Octavia seems upset to see that moment again and a tear is falling from her eyes.

So why, then, is the show apparently portraying Levitt’s uncritical stanning of everything Octavia does as a great thing, and why are so many fans and reviewers convinced that Levitt is a great new love interest for Octavia, possibly her endgame love interest, because of his adoration of her and the praise her gives her? (And 7x06 has made me think that, yes, the show is definitely portraying him as a potential love interest.) Yes, I agree that Octavia needs someone to help boost her self-esteem and tell her she’s not a monster, that she’s a good person at heart, that she’s worthy of love. But it would mean so much more if it came from someone who was able to relate to her as an equal and also acknowledge her dark side and be critical of the bad things she did. “I understand why you did this and it doesn’t make you a terrible person” is different from “Everything you did is right and awesome.” I liked what he said about her as a child, how she was even then being responsible and protecting her mother and brother and not just herself by hiding. But it’s absurd to tell someone “You’re not a killer, you’re a warrior” right after you’ve seen them murder someone out of revenge in what most definitely wasn’t a battle or a fight. The fact is that Octavia is both a warrior and a killer. They all are - she, Clarke, Bellamy, all of them. Having a good heart and understandable motives doesn’t change that fact.

If Levitt is supposed to just be a Disciple with a crush that makes him help Octavia, fine, but I can’t see a potential romance there - it would be like a relationship between a celebrity and an obsessive fan.

World-building

This episode was full of world-building info, probably what I liked about it the most:

Levitt seemed particularly interested in Clarke and the fact she was in the City of Light, which makes me think that the reason why she is ‘the key’ in the eyes of the Disciples has something to do with Becca’s tech and ALIE in particular, and that the enemy they’re afraid of may be some sort of an AI.

We finally saw Bardo. Not that it was surprising since we already knew from the opening titles and 7x04 that the compound was underground and that it was a dome with artificial atmosphere and that it included an arboretum, Stone Room, which is on the way to the cells, etc. I checked to see if it matched the layout drawn by Orlando. I had assumed that the numbers were levels in the structure, but while Orlando put Arboretum as 1, it is on level 2.

It seems that all the Disciples were either black or white clothes. (Fits with the black and white way of thinking.) From what we’ve seen so far, it seems that the military, so to speak (fighters/those who jump to other planets) wear black, while the Stone Conductors, people who do the Memory Capture, other scientists, as well as other personnel (like janitors or gardeners/groundskeepers) wear white. Anders himself, the First Disciple, wears white, so I suppose he is one of the “civilians’.

Anders claims that the Disciples have risen above “lesser emotions” and learned to value the collective rather than the individuals. But from what we’ve seen of other Disciples, that’s BS. That may be their ideology, but in fact, they’re just the same as anyone else and just as prone to developing feelings of love and bonds of friendship as anyone else.

Levitt is Level 11! Which makes you wonder how hard the Disciples really check how ‘devout’ the Disciples are. But maybe he’s just too important as an expert,

We see the MCap technology at work. But we also see that it’s not easy to extract memories from an unwilling subject. Levitt has apparently mostly done this to the Disciples themselves (you’d think most of them would be willing, but obviously some were not, since they sound like they already have experience with unwilling subjects.) Levitt tries to get Octavia to comply because he’s a Good Cop by telling her that they may get his colleague instead, who will “burn right through” her brain. (But as we see from the Diyoza flashback in 7x06, that’s not true - the other guy, Kirsch, doesn’t do that when Diyoza is uncooperative. I don’t think they are actually able to do that.)

The Disciples usually send teams every 30 minutes (but these 30 minutes are drastically different on Sanctum and on Skyring!)

More about how the Anomaly Stones work: while Dev told Hope that all you need to do Is think where you want to go and the helmet will do the rest, it’s not actually that magical - in fact, you actually need someone (normally the Conductor) to push the buttons on the Anomaly Stone.

According to Levitt, pulling someone from another planet through the Anomaly is “ safe 8 out of 10 times". What happens the other 20% of times? Is it really being “turned inside out” as Hope said in 7x02?

It’s also confirmed that people lose their memories if they travel without the helmets from a faster to a slower time dilated planet (which I had already figured out based on the fact that the danger only seemed to exist when travelling from Skyring/Bardo to Sanctum and from Skyring to Bardo, but not the other way round).

When Hope was about to leave to save her mother, Levitt tried to tell her: “They have helmets, too, that means that…” – what? That they can see her? Meredith’s team didn’t see Raven, so it can’t be that. But do they have some other way of communicating? Do you have to be actively thinking for them to detect you? Whatever it is, she should’ve listened as she quickly got caught.

Eyes are important as it’s through them that the biometric signature/mind code is made. And the Disciples have a very quick way of painting/tattooing the code on someone’s back.

What exactly is the problem with the atmosphere on Bardo? There is a biohazard alert as Octavia is brought in and she’s checked for some sort of an infection (“she’s clean”). It seems that the problem is with some kind of a disease (especially with what we hear from Levitt in 7x06).

In the category of revelations that weren’t a surprise at all since the fandom has figured them out weeks ago, Gabriel realizes that there is a Stone on Earth (as we saw in 7x04 and in the opening titles - it’s the offline planet), by listening to Anders’ speech where he mentions that the Shepherd delivered them by a stone. (Confirming the theory that Disciples are Second Dawn even before that was technically confirmed in 7x06 and that Cadogan led them through the Anomaly some time after the Apocalypse and after burning Becca. I suppose they disconnected the Stone so unbelievers could not follow them.)

There’s a ton of new info about the history of Bardo. According to the Disciples, the compound was built by “Native Bardoans”, who went extinct before the Disciples got there. And they were supposedly giants, but were turned by something called “Gen9″ into “crystal giants”?! Levitt says that the whole min code could fit on a Bardoan’s arm? (How does he know that?) I call BS on that. The rooms and doors in the compound are tall, but wide enough just for a human-sized person to pass through. (And there are plenty of human buildings with very tall doors and ceilings.) The retinal scans are fitted to the human eye, all the technology is human-sized, and, most importantly, the keys on the Anomaly Stone are the size of a human finger. The whole thing reminds of many legends that various big ancient buildings were built by giants. I still think Eligius III people were the ones who built the compound. We still haven’t heard anything of them and where they fit. And with the time dilation, they could’ve been on Bardo for decades or centuries before Second Dawn arrived a few Earth years later.

What is Gen9? I assume it’s a disease (especially with all the mentions of the polluted atmosphere on the surface), but it’s also been suggested it may be a computer program, which would fit with the idea of the enemy being an AI or connected to AIs. I like the theory that it’s not short from “Generation 9″ but “Genesis 9″, which would fit with the religious themes (the Disciples mix and match a lot of pseudo-Christian and pseudo-Buddhist ideas). Genesis 9 is the chapter about God’s Covenant with Noah, where God tells him that humans should go and multiple and feed on plants and animals, but they mustn’t eat what has lifeblood in it still, and they mustn’t shed the blood of another human being. “I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.“

These are the transcripts of all the prayers and speeches of the Disciples from this episode, as much as I was able to hear them:

[prayer] “In the light of the Shepherd, for all mankind. He will save us from the war to end all wars”

[female speaker] "The Shepherd brings us wisdom. The Shepherd brings us love, for all mankind. (...) Humanity (...) (final days)… burned, (...) as bombs launched, your ancestors chose a different path. There will soon be time when we will be tested to a man, and we will be victorious. For all mankind!"

[male introducing Anders]“And now, it is my greatest honor to present the esteemed First Disciple, who will lead us through today’s lesson on the Book of Allness.”

Anders: “Thank you, Emilio. In the light of the Shepherd, for all mankind!

Let’s first take a moment to acknowledge our newest class of Level 9s. You’ve each demonstrated impressive devotion to the Shepherd. Our predecessors on this planet did not share that faith. Like our ancestors on Earth, they destroyed their world. Even before they were wiped out by Gen 9 and turned into crystal giants, their atmosphere was so polluted they were forced to build forests underground in order to breathe. Even the rain that should fall from the sky, falls instead by their technology. For that, we thank them. But where are they now? We know that by the time the Shepherd delivered us with the stone, the Bardoans were gone, extinct. Why is that? [Someone from the crowd: “They didn’t have the Shepherd!” Everyone laughs. Oh, Disciple humor... ] No, they didn’t, did they? They [unintelligible, Gabriel speaks over this part]… they lost their last great war. That same enemy is coming after us now. But, in the light of the Shepherd, we will not lose. [crowd cheers] We’re close now. We’ve located the key. After hundreds of years it has returned to us. Ours is the generation that will win the last war! Our Shepherd will rise [unintelligible] and we will win (?) this fight, for all mankind!”

Hi, Bellamy! Bye, Bellamy! See ya later!

And for the most important thing in this episode: yes, we were blessed with a rare and joyous moment,, a sighting of Bellamy Blake on screen (and not in MCap but in an actual new scene), as occurrence as rare this season as (probably) the Disciples seeing the Shepherd.

While absolutely no one is buying the fake-out death (about as convincing as Clarke’s in 6x04 or Octavia’s in 6x13, though I now wonder if leaving Bellamy out of the poster and Bob out of the Countdown was a part of the fake-out they committed to), there have been many different theories about what really happened there, if the whole scene was staged or if it even happened or was an implanted memory. (The glitch effects between scenes may have contributed to that theory, but the glitch effect occurred at random points, e.g. when Hope remembered her conversation with Anders, and I don’t see why that would be a false memory.)

For a moment, I even wondered if Levitt talking to Octavia was her hallucination (seeing a comforting figure) because it seemed quite implausible that Anders and the others had only then started to figure out that he got too close to her, and that they were still letting her come anywhere near her. But 7x06 proved I was wrong. Well, maybe Anders has realized Levitt had helped Octavia and Hope and it’s all some elaborate trap where he is using Levitt as an unwitting pawn, though that seems a bit convoluted... or maybe Anders just isn’t actually that smart as we assume he should be.

I’ve never believed in the ‘implanted memory’ theory, and people have since pointed out that there’s a sign of damage from the blast in the Stone Room.

The other prevalent theory is that the whole scene was staged by the Disciples and that Bellamy himself was in on it because he’s been brainwashed. The arguments are - it’s unlikely that Bellamy managed to overpower a few Disciples after being captured unconscious, and that there’s supposedly something “off” about him in that scene because he had been crying just before that. I don’t think there’s anything “off”, and he had learned that Octavia was alive, so why do people expect him to be crying rather than fighting to save her? As for it being unlikely that he killed a couple of Disciples immediately, overpowered another and captured the Conductor - I’m sorry, but have you seen the Disciples this season? They are being killed by pretty much every main character. And maybe some fans see Bellamy as a soft sweet teddy bear of a man and think that only women on t100 are allowed to be good fighters, but canon Bellamy is pretty damn badass and really good at fighting. What would be actually hard to believe is that Bellamy could get brainwashed over the course of a few hours. I’m sorry, but no.

People also said the fact that Bellamy asked what the heck Octavia was talking about when she used the opportunity to tell him that Disciples wanted Clarke (”I’ll tell them everything, even about Clarke”) was a sign he had lost his memories or been brainwashed and that he didn’t know who Clarke was - which is a really convoluted argument. The simplest and most obvious answer is that he was surprised and wanted to know what they wanted with Clarke.

There was actually something odd about that scene - but it was Anders’ behavior. after Octavia said that line about Clarke and after Bellamy reacted to it, he got a very strange look on his face, and the camera was focusing on him. The second odd thing is that the Conductor got very upset at that moment and started begging Anders: “Sir, please, no”, before Anders shut him up - which seemed like an overreaction to the possibility of... what? Letting a prisoner go? This makes me think that the Disciple on the floor detonating a grenade was a part of the ploy by Anders. He certainly was never going to send Bellamy to Sanctum - I have an idea where he actually sent him - but what if he was also signalling something to the Disciple - that he should detonate the grenade? Which would be a smoke screen so Octavia, Levitt and others wouldn’t know what really happened to Bellamy and would think he was dead.

But why would Anders want Octavia to think he was dead? It’s certainly not to make her cooperate, because that was only ever likely to have the opposite effect. But also - why would the Disciples focus on making Octavia tell them more about Clarke, when they could try to use Bellamy for the same purpose? From Octavia’s memories, they must have known how close Bellamy and Clarke are. (Or did Levitt tell Anders that? If he did not, that was an additional reason to suspect Levitt and hide information from him. If Anders was only starting to realize there’s a connection between Clarke and Bellamy, that could have changed his plans.) And they could do more with Bellamy than just try to get his memories. They could use him (his life, his safety) to draw in Clarke, the “key”. If Anders has sent Bellamy somewhere and wanted to hide his whereabouts and make people on Bardo think he’s dead for the time being, the blast could be a good distraction, before he plays that card. (All of this, of course, assuming Anders is actually smart.)

Now, where is Bellamy? He certainly wasn’t sent back to Sanctum, and Anders had no reason to send him to Skyring or Nakara (if he needs him alive and under his control, that would defeat the purpose), And there’s no indication that it’s possible for the Anomaly Stone to send a person to another location on the same planet. So, I believe Bellamy has been sent to Etherea. That would be the reason to finally go to the only planet of the 6 that we haven’t seen yet. I’ve also had the theory that Etherea is the slowest of all the planets - because, if you’re using time dilation as a plot point, why wouldn’t you milk it for its worth? And if that’s the case - good news is that Bellamy won’t get almost any older, but the bad news is that he’s lost all his memories. But not too bad of a news, since he’d get them back as soon as he gets to a faster planet.

This would open some juicy story possibilities...

An Echo of Finn (and Octavia?)

This episode continued the trend we’ve already seen in 7x04 - Hope is becoming more of a killer after her first kill on Skyring, Echo is reverting to her identity as as ruthless spy and killer (and occasionally murderer, as at the of this episode), in her 5-year single-minded mission to save Bellamy and now as a result of believing that Bellamy is dead and her mission was for nothing. And Gabriel is getting more and more frustrated with both of them, especially Echo, and constantly going “will you stop killing people, please?” (Well, not in those words.) (And I’m wondering how close he really got to the others, since they spent 5 years together and were preparing to jump to Bardo, but Hope never told Gabriel about Levitt?! )

There was some irony earlier in the episode when Hope seemed almost ready to attack Anders in front of hundreds of Disciples (she really hates him - I guess because she knew they were torturing her mother), and Echo told her to “pull herself together”, since it was Echo later that lost it, murdered Kirsch the memory capture guy in a particularly brutal way, and blew their chances of using him to get to Diyoza, which would’ve been a terrible blow to Hope if Diyoza hadn’t freed herself anyway, as we see in 7x06.

(Kudos to Tasya for being really good in that scene, she made Echo look genuinely scary. I’ve often criticized her acting, but this time she was really on point.)

So let’s talk about this moment and Echo’s arc this season.

Some people say that this is just a normal reaction to “losing the love of your life” and that everyone would react the same. But we’ve seen other characters lose people they deeply loved, and they did not react the same way. We’ve seen Bellamy react to Octavia’s “death” in S4 and Clarke’s “death” in S6. We’ve seen Clarke react to many of her loved ones’ deaths, most recently to her mother’s. Her grief over her mother was shown in detail over several episodes, and we saw her explode in the end, but while she beat up Russell, she stopped herself from killing him (and Russell was the actual person who murdered her mother and had previously tried to murder Clarke herself and stole her body for his daughter). In S6, Bellamy wanted to kill Russell (again, the actual person responsible for Clarke’s death) and burn the Sanctum down, but he stopped himself. In this very episode, we see Octavia react to her brother’s “death”. which she sees as very real, but she hasn’t started going around and killing anyone she gets her hands on.

Now, Octavia of the past, S3 Octavia, was different, far less mature, more violent, and she did react violently to Lincoln’s death, including becoming a murderer - now, the person she murdered was the one directly responsible for Lincoln’s death, but she also went on to become an assassin and became rather murder-happy, before stopping herself just as she was about to kill Ilian the same way Pike killed Lincoln.

Another obvious parallel is to Finn and the way he was losing control and becoming more violent, ruthless and selfish, from murdering a Grounder prisoner, to wanting to leave Mel literally hanging from a cliff because she was unimportant in his eyes compared to his goal of finding and “saving” Clarke (who, it turned out, didn’t even need saving and had saved herself), to completely losing it and killing a bunch of completely innocent people. The guy Echo killed here wasn’t really innocent, but he wasn’t responsible for Bellamy’s “death”, either, and Echo’s behavior on her quest to save Bellamy has been increasingly violent throughout the season. And, while we knew Clarke was alive and well, we don’t know where Bellamy is but he is still alive and will probably eventually meet Echo again, just like Clarke reunited with Finn.

(Mind you: I don’t think Echo’s killing spree is the reason why Becho will fall apart. The relationship was already disintegrating in S6, if you pay any attention. This is more about Echo herself and where she finds herself without that relationship. Finn’s killing spree wasn’t the reason why Flarke fell apart, either. Clarke still had feelings for Finn, but she had rejected him for other reasons, i.e. his earlier behavior. )

What do all these actions have in common? They weren’t romantic, they were f*cking unhealthy. When Finn told Clarke that he killed all those people for her, she was horrified, and I was really angry at him for telling her something that terrible.

In Finn’s case, he may have been suffering from PTSD, and his feelings for Clarke were turning into an obsession and made him look almost like a stalker. In Echo’s case, she has serious identity issues and her childhood trauma and conditioning by Queen Nia. But the show is, in this case, more open about the fact that, for Echo, it’s not all about romantic love. or love in general. She has lost her purpose. Bellamy is not just her boyfriend, he’s her King, like Nia and Roan before him. Echo’s own subconsciousness has been telling her that this is a problem, and that her relationship with Bellamy is very unbalanced. “Without Bellamy, who will you follow? Without someone to follow, who are you?” It also told her that she has remained the same as before she became a part of the Spacekru and his girlfriend: “Once a killer, always a killer.” ““The honorless spy who would do anything for her queen, even betray the man she now claims to love?” In S5 and S6, Bellamy was trying to not “make the same mistakes”, and “do better”, and was always rejecting Echo’s more ruthless suggestions of how to deal with any potential enemies, and she always fell in line as he was the leader/ Without him, she is reverting to her old patterns.

It’s not romantic or a sign of soulmate love to wrap your whole identity over one person. It’s really unhealthy. It was also unhealthy when Octavia said she didn’t have a home and didn’t belong anywhere after Lincoln’s death because he was “her home”. She had to grow out of that. Maybe she could offer some advice to Echo now. Will it work or not? I don’t know.

What I’m sure of is that Becho is doomed, but the writing on the wall has been there at least throughout season 6, if not already in season 5. What I don’t know is how Echo’s own arc this season will end. She will have to forge a new identity, but what will it be? Will she start following someone else? (That would be a pretty depressing arc.) Become independent, but still a ruthless killer? Will she start thinking about the morality of her actions as most other o the major characters do? Will she fail to find any solution and will die? Not every character on the show gets to have an uplifting arc where they solve their issues. Her arc is different from Finn’s because his dark arc was a completely new and shocking development, while Echo is reverting to who she used to be. But I think it’s more likely that she gets a more positive ending than Finn, because the show has been paralleling storylines in seasons 6-7 to storylines of early seasons (like Sanctum-Mount Weather) but with a more positive outcome.

Best moments/lines

While Bellamy’s 1-minute appearance was undoubtedly the highlight of the episode, my favorite scenes were Octavia’s reunion and goodbye with Hope (even with Hope being an adult now, Octavia talks to her as a surrogate aunt: “I love you, little one, don’t you ever forget it”), the scenes with Murphy and the kids and the battle of wills between Indra and Sheidheda.

The best line by far was Hope’s reply to Anders:

“This is what happens when you value individuals above the collective”

Hope: “It’s called love, you son of a bitch,”

Body count:

One Faithful burned herself.

another fanatical suicide: a Disciple who detonated the grenade (at Anders’ orders?) in the flashback scene with Bellamy

a bunch of Disciples killed, again. For a group that’s supposed to be so badass and scary, they really failing to be that, since they’re constantly getting their asses kicked. OK, they are not all Level 12, and Orlando was both Level 12 and a teacher of fighting skills. And yes, Echo and Hope (and Gabriel, who hasn’t killed anyone so far) have had almost 5 years of training by Orlando, while Octavia and Bellamy (and Diyoza, of course) are incredibly badass even without it. But you can’t keep them getting killed so easily and expect me to take them seriously. This time, Bellamy killed a couple in the flashback, and Hope and Echo killed a few, including a particularly sadistic murder of Kirsch the Memory Cap guy.

Rating: 7.5/10

#the 100 #the 100 season 7 #the 100 7x05 #welcome to bardo #octavia blake #bellamy blake #indra kom trikru #indra #sheidheda #john murphy #echo kom azgeda #hope diyoza #gabriel santiago #cadogan #the disciples #bardo #time dilation #the anomaly

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marculees · 4 years

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🌼 Tag 🌼

Tagged by @pikachulein to answer ten of her custom questions, thank you 💖 💖

1. What compliment you've received meant the most to you?

I don’t really believe people when they compliment me rip. Only a few months ago, one of my professors told me I wrote at Masters level during a private meeting and it made me smile for three hours straight. I’ve been considering a career in third-level teaching and research and I hadn’t told him this but he started telling me I would be perfect for it and it was really motivating ;-;

2. Would you rather meet your favourite celebrity/group/bias and realize they're not at all how you imagined them to be like (maybe they're not as kind as you thought, for example) or never meeting them in person but it turning out that they're actually the amazing, kind, sweet, generous, etc. person that you thought they were? (I hope that makes sense hhhh I think the ethics of this question are really interesting)

I’d rather not meet them and have them be lovely. I haven’t met them yet anyway and so I wouldn’t lose anything by not meeting them.

3. What's your current favourite song you always use to get hyped up to or a song currently stuck in your head?

Boss Bitch - Doja Cat

4. If you had to write the book of your life, what genre would it be and what would you choose as a title?

I’d write it in the format of diary entries, very much a ‘slice of life’ type, with illustrations and doodles on the pages for metaphor and viewing pleasure. I think the title would be something simple too but with some depth to it, like a significant date in my life; almost like the ‘climax’ of the book, I could work the reader up to that entry and they would know something is coming up but not what 👀

5. Name your top 5 musical artists and your favourite song of each of them?

mxmtoon - Feelings are Fatal

Hozier - Movement

Kim Petras - Personal Hell

Conan Gray - Comfort Crowd

Kodaline - Ready

6. If you were invited to a big humanitarian event and had to give a speech on a topic you'd want to bring about a huge change for the better, what topic would you choose to speak about and voice your opinions/ideas? (Assume public speaking is one of your strongest assets and you'll ace this no matter what)

Okay so this is literally one of my aspirations in life, no joke, I’d love to be able to speak to a crowd and try to inspire and motivate them to achieve great things! I just really want to see people succeed and realise their potential regardless of who they are :( There are so many topics I would like to address but I think I would go for mental health in development. I study international development so I’m very familiar with humanitarian issues but often times, mental health is ignored when looking at healthcare regardless of where you are in the world.

7. What is something (a skill, personality trait, or something appearance related, it can be whatever) you wish you had and/or you really admire in other people?

I really admire team-players in leadership. People who are genuinely concerned for those around them and want them all to succeed together. They don’t leave anyone behind and remind everyone of their strengths and what they contribute to the team and actively push them to succeed. I try to do the same but sometimes I can sometimes be a bit of a pushover and not strict enough, instead just taking on more work myself rather than trusting a team member to do it... group projects, anyone??? :’)

8. What's your favourite anime/show/youtuber (you can answer whichever you got an answer for, it can be all three options of course :D)?

I don’t watch anime anymore but I enjoyed Ouran High a lot!

I’m waiting for the new season of Line of Duty to come out soon, but my guilty pleasure TV show is Bondi Rescue dsjvkdhlvjhfb I’ve also been watching that new show Five Guys A Week with my mum recently and its such good craic omfg

I tend to flock towards gaming and commentary channels most but Dashie is my fave istg there isn’t a video of his that I don’t wheeze along to 😂

9. In kpop, are you more into vocalists, dancers, rappers, maknaes, leaders, or visuals (or maybe a mix of some/all :'))?

I’ve noticed I like the rappers most!

10. What's your most beautiful/favourite memory?

This is hard...I literally had to answer this question last because I wanted to have a proper think about it. Its been hurting my head for days trying to think tbh and is it bad that I actually can’t pick a particular moment?.I’m genuinely stuck but a recent-ish one I can think of was this time last year when I had to give a presentation in front of my class of 250 people. I was presenting with two groupmates and I remember how hard we practiced and rehearsed for the days coming up to it. We wore coordinating outfits and had our lines memorised and I remember walking up on the stage and immediately feeling ‘powerful’. I don’t usually feel powerful at all but once I started speaking and performing our skit with my groupmates (who were lovely btw it made me really happy seeing the more nervous one do so well!), I seen how the faces of my classmates lit up and it gave me that warmth I had missed for so long. Random people I had never even spoke to before came up and complimented me later and it made me really proud because its what I love to do and it was so lovely knowing they enjoyed it too ;-; The lecturer we had for that class was known for being really intense but she took a shine to me and pulled me aside one of the days to compliment me and then referred to me as “her powerful speaker” in front of the class when we were receiving assignments back weeks later. It was the highlight of my whole semester and second year tbh. I’m really hard on myself but for once, I felt genuinely and I mean TRULY proud of myself and it had been a long ass time since I had felt that way 😭

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Okay, now I tag @wheezing-pterodactyl @jbemin @jenoscity @starryseung @seventiddies @thegirlthatsdancingintherain @leechan-babyboy @angelwonho for the following questions:

1. What comment appeared on your report card most often as a schoolchild?

2. What’s your guilty pleasure?

3. You find a magic lamp and now a genie is here to grant you three wishes! What are you gonna wish for? (you can’t ask for more wishes though lol)

4. Imagine you have the power to control time. Would you rather pause, rewind or fast-forward?

5. When you shop for clothes, what’s the first thing that catches your eye? (could be the colour, pattern, style, price, fabric, etc.)

6. What’s the strangest dream you have had recently?

7. What is your MBTI type?

8. Do you have any unusual talents or party tricks? If so, what are they?

9. If your life were to be recreated through a form of art, which medium would you choose? (examples: painting, film, book, music, video game, etc.)

10. If you could be any mythical creature or figure, what would you like to be?

#i had lots of fun with this!#tagged

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alkja · 5 years

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Well, here we come: Endgame review (spoilers galore)

Endgame is essentially two different movies for me: the one up until the last three minutes and the one that includes those last three minutes.

The first is a decent movie – riddled with stupid crap, plot holes and the occasional nonsense, but on the whole acceptable.

The second is a waterfall of crap that makes me seethe in anger.

If you liked that ending, I seriously discourage you from keeping on reading. Otherwise, let us discuss the good, the bad, the wtf and the “How dare you?”

THE “DID YOU EVEN TRY THINKING ABOUT THIS” DIVISION

Let’s start with the inevitable: time shenanigans equal inevitable fuckery. That is known.

The most egregious example being: Nebula kills her younger self and is apparently fine and dandy. What the shit? I don’t care if you killed her in 2023 (or whenever Endgame happens, I’m going with Infinity War happening in 2018 as released), if Nebula 2014 dies there is no Nebula 2015 and so on to eventually become Nebula 2023. Ergo, she should absolutely have died. Same with Thanos & Co. No matter where you do it, if you kill a past version of someone, there is no one to do the things they would have done in the future. Thanos 2014 dies, so there cannot be a Thanos from after that to do the Snap.

Which is not bad, go ahead and kill past versions of evil shits, but doing so changes the timeline. Period. Rodhey even proposed that and they had a long nerd out about why that would not be possible... and then they went and did that and pretended it didn’t count. That is so goddamn stupid.

Same with all the time travel.

I don’t care if you go and put the Infinity Stones back, because those stupid McGuffins are not the only thing that can mess the timeline. First of all, there is no one to use them anyway since Thanos died before he did the Snap, but we’re supposed to ignore that.

More to the point, in order to put the timeline to right, you have to put the Stones back after the future Avengers have stolen them. Fine, that puts them back in the timeline. However, that doesn’t erase the actions your slightly-past selves have taken trying to grab them. Which means, for example, that Loki fucking escaped with the Tesseract after Avengers 1, which is a MAJOR change.

Or, it should be. But apparently we’re supposed to ignore that because in the Dark World time Loki is in his cell, and wow. NO. If he escapes in Avengers 1 (with the Tesseract to boot), that leads to massive changes in Dark World and Ragnarok. For one thing, without the Tesseract, the Bifrost cannot be repaired. More essential to those plots, Loki should plainly not be there.

Putting the sceptre back also doesn’t erase the fact that Captain America said “Heil Hydra” to a Hydra agent (oh oh oh, such canny comic references!), who apparently never mentioned it again to anyone ever? Not even to his goddamn boss? So, did Sitwell legitimately think Steve was Hydra up until Winter Soldier? And yet come Winter Soldier he never thought to ask Steve “Wait, even if you’re not actually Hydra, you clearly knew about us for years, so why are you now so outraged like this is brand new information for you? Why did it take you this long to move against us and why are you doing it without much in the way of planning or allies? The hell did you do these past years?”

Hell, why did Sitwell – a prominent Hydra agent in SHIELD who would not raise any flags doing so – never approach Steve, Hydra agent to Hydra agent? No, he discovers that Captain America is apparently Hydra and just rolls with it. No “What the hell, sir?” call to Pierce, no secret handshake to Steve. For years. I can handwave him not saying anything to Rumlow and the rest of Strike, because if Steve is Hydra maintaining his deep cover with everyone is more important than anything (even if they were right there when he gave him the scepter, so what did he say to them?), but not mentioning it to Pierce? Cannot buy that. And not having any mention of that in Winter Soldier is pretty damn unbelievable.

The timeline was also changed by having future!Steve fight past!Steve. And no, it doesn’t matter that past!Steve thought it was Loki. It was still a change.

Not to mention, Loki could not have had a Peggy compass or known shit about Bucky, so it stands to reason it’s not Loki. So, what gives? What did past!Steve think it happened? Hell, come Winter Soldier what did he think about that time some guy who looked and fought like himself told him that Bucky was alive and lo and behold, here comes Buckaroo?

In essence, the Avengers fucked the timeline without lube but we’re supposed to pretend they didn’t.

To me, that is shit.

Mess with time all you like, but acknowledge you’re doing so. Either your plan goes off without a hitch (as if!), or the moment where everything goes inevitably to hell and there are changes - and here we are talking about major changes - you say fuck it, pull out all the stops and change away.

[Ok, I admit it, by that I mostly mean: pull out all the stops, take 5 minutes to explain to your past self you come from the future and tell him to get his ass in gear because Hydra is literally running the government and SHIELD and most importantly Bucky has been frozen, tortured and brainwashed for about 70 years, so get to it, save Bucky Bear save the world, and smash Nazis like the fucking Hulk. May the fic gods, as ever, be kinder to me than the canon ones.]

This “pretend nothing has changed even while we change important stuff that should logically have repercussions” approach only works if you think your audience has the reasoning capabilities of concussed goldfishes. Tony’s last bout of genius solving time travel on the fly deserved better than this.

(Also, good luck trying to sell me on any future conflict stakes when our heroes now have the capabilities of fucking going back in time and change things, even if you don’t want to admit it.)

In the “this is so dumb and nonsensical and wow look at those strings” camp, we also have the two Nebulas being connected. That is so stupid and clearly only there for the sake of plot you can literally see the writers going “Uhm... how can we make it so past!Thanos knows what the heroes are doing? What if we make it so past!Nebula gets the memories of future!Nebula from a galaxy away? How? Why? Because!”

Riveting.

About as riveting as the Thor stuff. Here you can see the writers desperately wracking their brain wondering “But how are we gonna have dumb jokes in a serious movies? Where will we go for cheap, juvenile humor? I know! Let’s make Thor a drunk idiot with a beer belly! Oh oh oh, what could be more funny than a parade of fat jokes, we’re comedic geniuses!”

Yawn. Also, offensive much? But really, everything about Thor spits in the face of his three movies long character arc (which was all about responsibility): dudes, do you even know the characters you’re writing about?

Speaking of desperation: no Steve and Bucky reunion post UnSnapping? Seriously? We have Tony and Peter - who have known each other for 5 minutes - tearfully embrace but no scene between two characters who have known each other all their lives and have been through massive shit in those lives? Marvel execs, we know that every time Steve and Bucky shared a scene The Dreadful Spectre of The GAY appeared and made your blood pressure rise but this is ridiculous.

Which is also why you get no cookie for The First Gay Character in the franchise: an unnamed character in a single blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene, truly stellar representation. What made you believe this was a smart move?

That said, there are some good things in this movie.

THE “I DIDN’T NECESSARILY WANT THIS BUT I CAN ACCEPT YOU DID IT. ALSO, OUCH: MY HEART” DIVISION

First of all, Tony Stark.

Never thought I’d say that, because I’m the furthest thing from a Tony fan and spent all of Ultron and Civil War wanting to punch him. And Infinity War being indifferent to him.

But goddamn if I didn’t feel how goddamn much he adored Pepper and their daughter. Goddamn if I didn’t tear up at his heroic sacrifice, going out with the line that started it all (“I am Iron Man”- my heart), goddamn if I didn’t tear up at his goodbye with Pepper and then at his funeral.

For all his many, many faults – which I’m not gonna forget for a second – Tony went out exactly as he should be: a goddamn hero. With a heart big enough, strong enough to give himself up for everyone else even at the moment where he had everything he ever wished to have.

My hat’s off to him.

Never thought I’d ever say this, but I will miss him.

Other MVPs of Endgame: Clint Motherfucking Barton and Natasha “Love is NOT for Children” Romanoff. I know: Natasha, sure, but who would ever have guessed that about Clint? Prior to Endgame, he was just sort of there, not helped by Ultron and his sudden family in a farm.

Endgame managed to make me care about the family I loathed. How? I don’t know, but I am totally down for a Clint + Kate Bishop + Lila show, where everyone is a badass archer and they are all codenamed Hawkeye just because! I am also totally down for Clint’s badass reinvention (after, I’m guessing, mainlining all 7 seasons of Arrow), no matter how heartbreaking the reason or questionable the style choices.

And that Clintasha scene was pretty much worth the whole movie to me.

Because, first of all, that’s how you solve a problem like the Soul Stone: a willing sacrifice. (Which, btw, makes even more disgusting the fact that we are supposed to see this as equally worthy to Thanos murdering his daughter).

Second, because I am a total sucker for characters fighting about who gets to sacrifice themselves. Clint and Natasha beating the crap out of each other just like in Avengers 1 (just one of many delightful callbacks that pepper the movie), this time because they love each other too much to let the other be the one to die is everything.

Third, because it’s just a really good scene, based on one of the better relationships in the MCU. Even those not shipping Clintasha have no doubt that those two are extremely important to one another, and Renner and Johannson acted the hell out of it - just as they did every scene together, from their reunion post-yakuza slaughter, to the giddiness of flying a spaceship. I teared up like a baby at Nat’s sacrifice and I was right there with Clint hoping for a loophole that made it so we could get Nat back and was heartbroken anew when that did not come to pass.

But, again, the Black Widow went out just like she should have: a true hero, loving, strong and unafraid. The red in her ledger was wiped out once and for all.

The “Feels” subdivision

Scott Lang was an integral part of the solution. I mean, never before have we heard about time passing differently in the quantum realm – and in fact Janet Van Dyne aged the 30 years she spent in it, so more plot service crap – but who cares! Still, his desperate checking to see if his daughter was among the Snapped only to find his own name and running like hell to get to Cassie only to be suddenly confronted with a teenager and realizing he missed those 5 years with her and not caring because she was still there was absolutely perfect.

Speaking of families: I have already said it but Tony and Pepper and little Morgan were amazing.

Also, Thor and Frigga! Frigga was an egregious fridging to start with, so it was lovely seeing her again, but especially giving her a wonderful scene with her son that shows her intelligence and strength and exactly why she was Queen of Asgard. Not to mention being the one to restore Thor’s confidence and absolving him of his failures. Sometimes you just really, really need your mom. (Too bad about that stupid salad joke.)

Natasha and Steve. Just... Natasha and Steve being badly messed up by those 5 years post-Snap and yet being so supportive and understanding of each other. Really, after Winter Soldier, this was the best Natasha movie. And rightly so.

In general, the Avengers being not just a team but also friends, fucking finally. Sure, there is the whole “found family-baited” post going around, but memes aside, it is true that we never got to see those people acting like friends and not merely co-workers. Was that so difficult to do before the very last moment?

THE “IN HERE FOR THE HOLY SHIT QUOTIENT” DIVISION

A small but admirable moment for a villain that was otherwise pretty underwhelming no matter how much they tried passing him off as deep: Thanos having the smarts and the metaphorical stones to goddamn destroy the Infinity Stones. Better to accept never using them himself again than run the risk of someone stealing them and undo his work. He may be evil and incapable of properly understanding the concept of proportions (that whole: if you destroy half of the resources along with half of the people using said resources, you are just as screwed as before), but the guy is smart.

Carol was as amazing as she could be in a movie that by design could not be about her kicking Thanos’s ass up and down the whole galaxy but was necessarily the Last Hooray of the Old Guard. Her face seeing Fury among the Snapped, her entrance and towing a fucking spaceship, her pointing out that while the Avengers have been watching (with mixed results) over a single planet she was watching over a lot of them (likely with better results), her second entrance, her goddamn everything. Not as good as her solo movie but what could ever be?

Speaking of ladies, Valkyrie becoming a Literal Queen warms my heart. I have some doubts about Thor just up and leaving what remains of his people, even after everything (read: I don’t buy it, just like I don’t buy anything about Thor in this movie), but considering Heimdall is not around anymore, we can all agree he left them in excellent, badass hands. I want more.

Switching to metaphorical Valkyries... It was a fanservice-y, mostly unearned scene in a series that has historically been pretty low in female friendships or relationships, but goddamn if the optics of all the badass ladies of the MCU banding together weren’t made of FUCKYEAH! Give us a ladies-led movie, Marvel, you fucking cowards: DC is giving us the Birds of Prey (and Harley Quinn), what’s your excuse?

In that vein: Pepper donning an Iron Man armor! Basically everything I ever hoped for, so much so that for a moment I legitimately thought I had imagined it. Now that Tony is gone, let Pepper step up as Rescue or Iron Maiden or whatever, get her to mentor a bright intern named Riri Williams and we’re set to go for maximum awesomeness.

Still, when talking about maximum awesomeness: CAP. WIELDING. MJOLNIR. We Italians don’t have the habit of reacting to movies out loud at the theatre, but you could hear the current of FUCKYEAH!!! coming from all the nerds in the room, and rightly so. Cap fighting with the shield in one hand and Mjolnir in the other was everything every superhero fan could ever have wished for in a movie distilled into the Crowning Moment of Awesome to top all CMOAs. (Too bad this gets incredibly undermined by that ending beacuse I refuse to believe that that guy could be worthy of a fucking shoehorn, much less Mjolnir.)

Thor dual-wielding Mjolnir and Stormbreaker deserves a mention too.

(This as long as we forget Mjolnir being taken away to the future at the start of Dark World makes gaping holes in Ultron e Ragnarok, because past!Thor wouldn’t have it anymore, but whatever LALALALALA what time logic?)

But the moment that threatened to bring down the house in cheers was the sight of all the Unsnapped returning followed by - finally - the call: AVENGERS ASSEMBLE! Every single person visibly restrained themselves from punching the air and shouting along. I think we all regret not doing so, dignity be damned.

So, leaving aside the truck-sized plot holes that are practically a given once you decide to muck around with time travel and the occasional plot-over-character-or-sense stupidity, all in all we have a rather solid movie full of badass moments and with occasionally meaningful emotional beats.

Not my favorite by a long shot, but a mostly fitting end to an insane project no one ever thought could possibly be achieved that ended up sweeping the world and fandom.

Too bad those last five minutes arrive to shit all over that, and incidentally all over a beloved character.

THE “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU GODDAMNED HACKS” DIVISION

Steve – I must suppose SERIOUSLY concussed during the battle to the point of brain damage beyond the repairing capabilities of the superserum – returns the Infinity Stones to the past and, while he’s at it, decides to abscond in the same past to live his life with Peggy, only returning as an old man to pass the shield to Sam.

Awwwwwwwwww... Steve and Peggy living their life together, so heartwarming...

Yeah, except once you think about it, then you want to use that shield to fucking brain the skrull that must be impersonating Steve Rogers.

Because, in order to buy this story, we have to believe that Steve “I don’t like bullies” Rogers, Steve “If I see a situation pointed south, I can't ignore it” Rogers, Steve “On va voir” Rogers, Steve “I can do this all day” Rogers deliberately chose to spend the rest of his fucking life doing exactly nothing, otherwise the timeline would have been SERIOUSLY rebooted.

A life of inaction, hiding the fact of his existence.

Sure, that totally sounds like the Steve Rogers we have been watching up until this point.

Instead of an ending about moving forward no matter what life throws at you, we got one about happiness being literally going backwards.

Because that’s a totally healthy message.

Hell, you decide to go the retirement route, I don’t even necessarily disagree with it. If, after all the trauma of Infinity War + the five years interlude + the shitstorm of Endgame, Steve decided to lay aside the shield for a while and try to make an actual, functional life for himself I would have been all for it. If nothing else, the guy could make do with a lot of therapy. Most crucially, not being Captain America would not mean quitting the fight: he could do just as much good as an artist, a politician, an opinion leader, an activist or what have you. All that is not gonna be possible in the past, because to mantain the timeline he cannot become anyone relevant in any way. Especially since he knows Hydra is still around and attracting notice would mean risking some of that attention coming from them. So no, absconding to the past means by necessity a life not fighting in any way, not doing anything of any particular importance whatsoever.

This is completely antithetical to everything that Steve Rogers, as he was shown up until now, stands for.

And we have yet to touch the morality of it all, or the lack thereof.

Lest I get accused of being a bitter Stucky shipper whose slash goggles cannot make her appreciate a Steggy ending, let me point out that I ship Steggy as much as Stucky and if anything I am a bitter Peggy Carter fangirl: Our Kick-Ass Lady of the No Holds Barred Beatdown unquestionably deserves better than this crap.

By which, I’m not even talking about how this ending shits all over the closure we got before and the entirety of the Agent Carter run, which both show that while Peggy unquestionably loved Steve, she mourned him for a while and then, as healthy people do, moved on to have a perfectly fulfilling life with a rewarding job and eventually a new love and family. I’m not even talking about how this takes her back the “Steve Rogers’ Love Interest” route, Betty Carver-style, instead of letting her be her own woman with her own story that may have started alongside Steve Rogers but then developed on her own terms. I’m not talking about how she was rewinded from a character in her own right to a “hero’s” prize.

I’m talking about how this supposed happy ending to slow dancing and snuggling is based on either Peggy being apparently also brain damaged to the point that, upon hearing that the organization she’s busting her ass to run is a Nazi cesspool, just rolls with it - which, I think we can all agree, is definitely not something our Agent Carter would ever in a million years do - or Steve merrily electing to spend something like 50 years lying like a motherfucker to the supposed love of his life about how the organization she’s busting her ass to run is a Nazi cesspool. True love, everyone!

Fuck you: Peggy Carter fucking deserved better than this.

This also leaving aside the fact that, in this happy ending, Steve knows that while he’s squirreled away in the woods dancing and doing decoupage, his supposed best friend is getting tortured to the point of complete dehumanization. But whatever, he’ll eventually be fine, no use doing anything about it. Oh, JFK got murdered? Nice shot, Buck! Oh, there goes Howard, a smooth operation, buddy: hope the brain-frying won’t be too bad, just hang on until 2014.

End of the line my goddamn ass.

Oh, and since no-one’s memories are rewritten, Bucky also conceivably knows all this. He knows that his supposed best friend voluntarily spent his life doing squat to save him.

Fuck you: Bucky Barnes fucking deserved better than this.

SO, TO RECAP: Steve Rogers is a selfish ass who chose a life of inaction, Peggy Carter is either his accomplice or a dupe and Bucky Barnes lost his best friend all over again. Coherent characterization got sacrificed for a theoretical feel-good moment that doesn’t stand up to the most cursory examination before being revealed as sheer horrifying fuckery.

Sure, Sam gets to be the new Captain America (which, don’t get me wrong: he totally deserves it and at this point he’s more worthy of it than the original), but that’s literally the only good thing in a mountain of shit dumped over characters that deserved much better.

I get that Evans wanted out, but there are ways to do it and then there are ways. Tony went out like a goddamn hero. So did Natasha.

Steve went out quitting - aka the one and only thing Steve Rogers would never ever do - and in addition what can only be called a bastard who shrugged off his best friend’s decades-long torture and quite likely spent his life lying to the woman he loves.

Fuck you: Steve Rogers fucking deserved better than this.

If there could be a worse impression to leave bowing out than this one, I’m honestly unable to imagine it (Well, beside making Steve Hydra for real: but considering that he spent his live blithely pretending they were not still around murdering, torturing and so on, that makes him a collaborationist at best and WOW, at this point it’s kinda splitting hairs, isn’t it?).

Coming into Endgame, I knew this was gonna be Cap’s last waltz and after spending years as a Steve Rogers fan I was dreading watching him die. Now, I wish he could have gone out with the heroism and dignity of Tony or Natasha instead of... whatever this was. I could have mourned him while celebrating him, instead of mourning what he used to be while despising what he was made to become.

This Steve Rogers fan, who spent years loving him while being annoyed and occasionally enraged by Tony Stark, left the theatre feeling deeply moved by Tony and quite honestly hating the guts of whatever was left of Steve. If someone told me this would happen I wouldn’t have believed them and yet here we are.

Personally, in order to actually enjoy the movie and especially to be able to retain any fondness whatsoever for one of my most beloved characters, those last five minutes are gonna join the entirety of Age of Ultron in the realm of “I recognise Marvel Studios have made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it”.

As far as I’m concerned, Endgame ended with Tony Stark’s funeral. A fitting tribute to the fallen hero who started it all, to the road that took us to this moment and all those characters who travelled it with us.

To the end of an era and hope for the next one.

#MCU #avengers endgame #not my steve rogers #endgame spoilers #steve rogers #tony stark #natasha romanoff #clint barton #review #rant #endgame wtf #epic fail

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holy-fate-worse-than-death · 5 years

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If I could make a DC comics character

Just a big + strong lady. No superpowers, she's just fucking jacked. Carries Batman over one shoulder fireman-style when he's knocked unconscious.

But she's not the stereotypical strong woman. She doesn't grunt and she's not portrayed as unintelligent, none of that "gentle giant" trope. She's just like a big strong gay lady who probably thinks Batwoman is a goddess and wears Wonder Woman t-shirts to bed.

You thought Jason Todd had the thickest thighs in Gotham? Well watch out, there's a new contender on the block.

She works with Robin (Damian) one time and he's being stubborn, so she just lifts him above her head like she's playing keep-away and wades through a sea of thugs with him squirming in her arms

Everyone assumes she's pretty young, but she's actually slightly older than Bruce Wayne, and occasionally she drops these deep-cut references to pre-Zero Year Gotham and Batman just frowns as he tries to puzzle out who tf she is

Her patrol route in Gotham primarily encompasses The Narrows, because she has a knack for being able to help the seemingly helpless, and she has a deeper understanding of poverty than the bats ever could

In her day-to-day life, when she isn't doing superhero stuff, she's an activist of some kind. She probably runs one of Gotham's most well-established NGOs, and she's probably been invited to speak at the United Nations at least once. (Wonder Woman was there and she got so excited she cried.)

This means she keeps up with Gotham's current events and has an intense knowledge of the city's socio-political landscape.

She reads every news publication in Gotham: all the usual suspects, plus the Gotham University paper, every Vice-style indie news outlet, even the gossip rags.

But she also trawls social media. She knows every bit of drama that's going down at Gotham Academy, and knows that there are four different tenants in the same apartment building in Lower Gotham all complaining about the same strange odour coming from the 5th floor that sounds a lot like Scarecrow's doing.

Her guilty pleasure is that she has notifications turned on for the accounts of every Wayne family member, and she keeps up with them like they're the Kardashians.

... Even though she's definitely protested outside of Wayne Tower a time or two in her day.

When she finds out Batman is Bruce Wayne, she leverages it to make Gotham a better place. She'll just burst into his office like:

"Mr Wayne, I think it would be very beneficial to the community for you to invest in this black-owned start-up business."

"Mr Wayne, don't you think it would be worthwhile for you to support this Native American organisation, given how much of their land your ancestors took from them?"

She's a ruthless intersectional feminist and she's the leftism to Batman's liberalism

OC: "Bruce, one of Gotham's oldest gay bars is closing down, I think you should buy it."

Bruce: "The optics on that are... complicated."

OC: "Not really, Dick Grayson was photographed there last week."

I like the idea of her being a mental health practitioner of some kind (idk what the proper terms for MH workers are in the US, I'd have to look into it), but I think she should be focused on community service and trauma-informed care. She probably also cares about recovery-oriented MH a lot and would work well with people experiencing addiction, and people experiencing poverty who don't have the money for clinical mental health care (psychologists, psychiatrists, etc).

She's also definitely lobbying for Arkham Asylum to be renamed and restructured (seriously, who still calls them asylums? It's 2019)

Appearance-wise she's jacked and has a tonne of someone-did-this-in-a-kitchen-at-a-party-with-a-sewing-needle-taped-to-the-end-of-a-pencil tattoos that are faded and patchy. It makes people think she's been to prison, and when people ask she never gives an answer one way or another. As a result of said tattoos, she's always dressed in long sleeves and long pants (turtlenecks or button-downs, the occasional blouse), and her superhero suit covers her entire body. It's similar to something like Red Hood's suit, because she values armour and protection over speed, but she still wants a level of manoeuvrability.

I think at some point she figured out Superman was Clark Kent, so in her day-to-day life she wears glasses even though she doesn't need them, she just thinks it's really funny and always chuckles in the mirror when she puts them on.

She probably has really drab, long brown hair (going grey) that she wears in a bun 24/7, and she rolls her sleeves up when things get intense. She's either wearing a button-down (when she's at work) or a checkered flannel shirt (when she's not at work) almost all the time, and watching her carefully and neatly fold up her sleeves around her elbows is the most nerve-wracking thing in the world. It's even been known to make Bruce Wayne flinch on occasion.

Things she said in front of Bruce Wayne once she found out he was Batman:

Batman and Superman have definitely fucked

*detailed explanation of exactly what furries are and why half of the superheroes and villains in Gotham are, in fact, furries, including Batman*

I think she's a bit of a conspiracy theorist, which means her and Red Robin should never be allowed in the same room alone. She's got a vibe similar to The Question in that way, but she's not a full-on, push-pins-and-strings-covering-the-whole-room conspiracy theorist. She's just a bit of a tin foil hatter. Disturbingly, Batman, Nightwing, etc. can't find any evidence to refute a lot of her theories, and their stories together often end in an eerie, open-ended conclusion that implies she could be right about everything.

I like to think she uses old phrases and Gotham-isms that people routinely forget are a thing. E.g. "What in the name of Riddler's left testicle?" (A reference to that time during the Zero Year when Riddler turned his camera on too early and broadcasted his entire scrotum to every citizen of Gotham.) Otherwise, she mostly speaks like Jack McCoy from the early days of the original Law & Order. E.g. "You really screwed the pooch on this one, Batman!" and other obscure North American idioms that haven't been used in 30 years.

I either picture her family-less, or like that part in season 2 of NCIS: LA where Agent Hanna just casually drops that he has two kids and a wife, btw, and up until that point you've been convinced he was single and a workaholic.

Honestly the more I think about it, the more I think this might just be an AU for Susie Su where her character is actually fleshed-out and not just fatphobic and two-dimensional

...

Guess I'll add this to the list of fanfics I gotta write, right behind the one I'm writing right now (*Jake Paul voice* link in bio) and the sequel to Batman Forever /Batman & Robin that's a standalone Nightwing movie lmao why am I like this

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cruddyborderlandstheories · 5 years

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2 big posts in one day? it’s more likely than you think!!!

Moze gameplay breakdown babey here we go

shit sorry i forgot my tl;dr the first time i posted this: the tablet is big important and might have eridian writing on it, it ties into the temple, the loot gun, the tablet in tannis’s infirmary on sanc-iii, and the planet holograms in Eleseer from TPS. also you get a special melee tool to break the purple crystals that i'm like 70% sure are Eridium and also, you’re never gonna believe this, but I talk about Atlas for a little bit because of it.

“lair of the harpy”

ah harpies. I’m shifting into Percy Jackson mode

just putting this out there

anyway as for what “Lair of the Harpy” means in bl3? Well we’ve seen in the We Are Mayhem trailer a bunch of flying Maliwan bots (i am assuming rn that those are Maliwan, anyway)

these green fucks

(u can tell that’s Jakobs Manor cause of the railing on the left) so i imagine that’s why it’s called the Lair of the Harpy. Could also be the lair of some evil woman character, idk lmao.

Far more interesting than the Harpy thing, to me anyway, is this:

i wonder if that’s gonna lead us to the psycho basement with tv heads being hanged where the Hammerlock siblings are standing in front of the fireplace

i wonder...

nah but for real. I would almost bet money that the Vault on Eden-6 is in that giant volcano/mountain area. It just feels right. we’ve seen it both dormant (the leaked footage) and active (the 3rd trailer) so I imagine opening the Vault would cause it to activate. Tho I’m still hoping onto the hope that it’s a moon pool. Just saying, Randy, if you’re reading this... just saying.

we also see this glowing sparkle icon again, which I think pretty much confirms from the We are Mayhem trailer that those will show us where the Moxxi crew quests are.

we see an enemy called “Shredder Fanatic”, personally I’m a fan of Splinter, but to each their own. Uhhh but for realsies they probably deal some blade damage or have a high RoF weapon.

a cool detail I noticed about the minimap is that elevated areas won’t get discovered until you reach that level. Thank god lol

part of this camp is made out of an old sailboat, which i think is pretty fuckin rad

makes me wonder if we’re ever going to see the areas of Pandora affected by the flash freeze again. How long do seasons last on Pandora again? I swear it was like 5 years or smth. oh well lol

i wanna know what this big thing is!! it looks cool. they mentioned that eden-6 was going to have a shitload of broken-down ships, so maybe this is related to it?

another look at what i'm assuming is Jakobs Manor. this is very hard because I keep getting distracted by the gameplay lol I’ve seen this video seven times! it shouldn’t be that enthralling!! and yet!

the combat music in this area is so fucking solid btw i am jamming the hell out

in awe at the size of this place. I’m digging the elevated hallway. i am very much getting a hogwarts vibe from here. the far right looks like an observatory, even.

“Big Donny’s Chop Shop - Open 7 Days” lmao

a gramophone and it looks like we can interact with it! i hope it plays classical music while we go on a murder spree

some sort of bridge? i assume that’s how you actually get up to Jakobs Manor. that may be why our quest is “go to Jakobs Manor”, we gotta fix the bridge before we can.

A Typhon journal!!!

No audio, though :(

From the radio: “catastrophe lead [???] to a lets play (flay?). Craving some meat in a bite sized package? then try festy flesh meats with a bandit on the go. hey, we know you want it, but do you have the time to hunt it down? ...”

-moxxi speaking about her crew challenge i can’t understand the radio here-

[different voice] “... for an exciting announcement from the CoV’s own ministers of murder: Pain and Terror! Those guys are cooking up one hell of a sh-” [player turns off radio] I gonna assume he was about to say “show” cause they’re a Penn and Teller reference. These are the guys from the arena with the giant skull thing, i think i have talked about them before?

Eden-6′s version of the shock cactus?

El Dragon Jr.

OwO are those the same purple rocks as Promethea?

They look like they are growing out of a stone tablet, i mean look at the green light. also they have that same star pattern inside them as Amara’s arms and Maya’s phaselock!!! Which makes me think it’s raw Eridium just... growing out of a stone tablet. which IS WILD!!!

AND WHAT IS MOZE HITTING IT WITH?!

FUCKING ENERGY BLADE

that is not her normal melee weapon, BY THE WAY

she normally uses her Stab! knife!!!

when u try to break the purple rocks on Promethea, iirc the player character can say something to the effect of “have to come back here later”, so it’s possible later in the story we get something (the glowing red/orange/yellow) energy sword to break the purple rocks (eridium???). and yes you KNOW i pointed out the colors because Atlas.

After meleeing it, Moze says “let’s open you up” so im wondering if maybe those stone tablets come into play later? the (eridium?) crystals explode into sparkly purple powder

glowing green!!!! It’s weird, I feel like these are eridian ruins/tablets growing eridium or some shit. we’ve seen the ruins have lines of color across them before, but never strictly on one side. and also never saw them grow eridium. i wonder if that is a reaction to us opening the second vault on pandora? eridium grew on pandora from the 1st one, now it’s spreading because of the second? I deffo think Eridium is from the second dimension (it started growing on pandora after the opening of the Vault) and it’s our key to getting there.

OwO

hey doesn’t that look familiar? I’ll give u like

10 seconds

...

yeah it’s the symbol from the gun

YEAH BABEY

AND GUESS WHAT

YOU KNOW HOW THE GUN WAS TIED TO THE TEMPLE

YOU KNOW HOW I WAS TALKING ABOUT TANNIS’S FLOOR TILE IN HER INFIRMARY ALSO BEING TIED TO THE TEMPLE AREA???

LET ME GO GRAB IT

THE TEMPLE

AND YOU KNOW I WAS REPLAYING TPS THE OTHER DAY FOR MY ANGEL ANALYSIS AND

FUCKING

ASGHDJUYKFDJTYHSRTAGR

THAT’S LABELING A PLANET IN THE HOLOGRAM

AAAAAAAAAAAAA THE ERIDIANS GAVE US A LOOT SPEWING GUN BUT THE GUN MAKES SENSE BECAUSE VAULTS VOMIT UP LOOT ALL THE TIME BUT IT’S NOT LIKE THE LOOT WE GOT WAS AROUND WHEN THE ERIDIANS CREATED THE VAULTS

ALSO I AM VERY CONCERNED THAT CORPSE IN THE TEMPLE IS TYPHON NOW AND THE BOOK IS HIS JOURNAL. WHY WOULD MAYA BE GIVING THE JOURNAL TO THE LITTLE GIRL? IS SHE ALSO RELATED TO TYPHON?

OKAY SORRY I GOT EXCITED but uh yeah idk if that writing/those symbols being the same was intentional or not but it exists and i'm losing my mind over it

i also just wanna know why the rocks are growing eridium and glowing green like what the fuck are your SECRETS

Aurelia shows up as you cross the checkpoint at the bridge, so it’s pretty much 100% confirmed the Hammerlocks are helping us with the jakobs thing. considering Aurelia is contacting us and not Alistar, im REALLY worried about the shot in the We Are Mayhem trailer where he has red eyes. please don’t hurt him. also i love how Aurelia calls herself a rich bitch. she makes that shit rhyme lol

another look at that big tower thing. May be a different one, actually. idk!

round the corner and see a little camp on the left. through that tunnel up ahead leads us here

we head to the right and Zer0 ECHOs us, asking us to kill someone to complete a crew challenge

The target’s name is Heckle (and his rage name is Hyde)

Interestingly he has a megaphone strapped to his mouth

wild.

Lots of stuff! Zer0 sends you mail for killing the target and you are informed that the Crew Challenge is completed. You also get a challenge completed for doing it. You ever notice the actual gameplay of borderlands is very tied to yellow and blue? the color of the title is yellow and the vault symbol for it is red (except for TPS). just odd to me idk

looks like a little envelope icon appears under your minimap when you have mail in your inbox!

we can see some cryo freezing the swamp water here! that’s my favorite thing. the electricity is cool, but ice is cooler.

i love the way this dude runs. also we now know that his pickaxe is to burrow his way into the ground

looks like it will create a huge pink cloud so you know when its about to happen, giving you time to stop it. nice.

getting closer. guess that wasn’t an observatory after all. Awww mannn

lootsplosion from the loot tink

bigger lootsplosion from his bag

i believe this is our first look at an ‘artifact’ which are replacing relics from bl2 and oz kits from tps. and like the interviews said, they’ll be effecting movement! this one turns your slide damage into cryo damage, lets you deal more radiation damage overall, and allows you to slide faster and further. i wonder how broken this can get on a downwards slope with a super high level slide relic. let’s break the sound barrier!

anyway, that’s all i saw that caught my eye. I still haven’t completed my Mask of Mayhem analysis, I was kinda hoping something during E3 would help me figure out who those mystery robed maliwan guys are on it, but alas we got nothing of real substance. oh, i also gotta finish that mural piece... aw fuck

#borderlands #bl3 #borderlands 3 #moze #moze gameplay breakdown

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askthegreenguys · 5 years

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1ST RULE: tag 9 muses you would like to know better. 2ND RULE: BOLD the statements that are true for your muse.

Tagged by: @same-stages-different-players

Tagging: I’m tennis bossing this right back at you @same-stages-different-players and I request Cull and also Rep in @siblings-a-fixin, @kitterahsdollhouse (whichever muse), @askthegreenknight, and @monokuro-adventures (also whichever muse) and whoever else wants to steal

MUSE: *cries* Uh.... Let’s do Song officially but I’ll sneak in the other boys in the notes FC: I personally find faceclaims weird? Here have my avatar of him (you can’t see his pretty green eyes but oh well)

OCCUPATION: High school senior by day, musical hero also by day because time travel

(Sky, Time, Light, and Green were knights, Mini was a blacksmith, Quarters was in Search and Rescue, Wind did whatever the hell he wanted, Sparky was an engineer, Twilight was a stay-at-home dad, and Brown did whatever got him to the next day)

AGE: Ha. Let’s go with 18 (time travel’s a bitch, even he doesn’t know how old he is anymore)

(Because the numbers are funny as hell, Sky is 17.5/81/3,370 Mini is 10/57/2,631 Quarters is 11/52/2,317 Time is 16/48/2,073 Twilight is 16/63/1,701 Wind is 12/57/1,649 Sparky is 13/79/1,596 Light is 14/67/1,402 Brown is 16/132/905 and Green and co are 15/65/512. yes, I do have an actual timeline with all the birth/death/important event dates on it (those are how old they look on the blog/how old they were when they died/how long it’s been since they were born btw))

SEXUALITY: straight. you could call him “Zelda-sexual” because she’s really the only girl he’s been interested in.

(Green and co are ace and Time at least is bi. It ultimately doesn’t matter much because every single one of these idiots is either the “fell in love so gradually they had no idea it had even happened” or “struck by lightning love at first sight” type, so there was little to no dating around before getting married)

PRONOUNS: He/Him

appearance:

i am 5'7" or taller (the shortasses are Mini, Twilight, and Wind, although I think they all do at least hit 5′7″)

i wear glasses

i have at least one tattoo (Wind, Twilight, Sparky, and Light do)

i have at least one piercing (everyone but Light, Brown, and Green)

i have blonde hair (Everyone but Brown (hence the nickname) and kinda sort Light he’s a strawberry blond)

i have brown eyes (Sparky and Brown do)

i have short hair

my abs are at least somewhat defined (This is true of pretty much everyone. They get lots of exercise yo)

i have or have had braces

personality:

i love meeting new people (all the boys are pretty friendly, but Quarters, Wind, and Sparky are the real extroverts)

people tell me that i’m funny (Song and Time both have an unfortunate love of puns, Quarters and Red are pretty goofy, Wind’s sassy side has some real gems)

helping others with their problems is a big priority for me (It’s Link they’re practically the textbook definition of solving other people’s problems)

i enjoy physical challenges (they all do)

i enjoy mental challenges (they also all do, which is good because the dungeons are a doozy sometimes)

i’m playfully rude with people i know well (Time, Wind, Green, and Blue are)

i started saying something ironically and now i can’t stop saying it

there is something i would change about my personality

ability:

i can sing well (Song doesn’t like to, Twilight and Light are also good singers)

i can play an instrument HAHAHA HIS NICKNAME IS SONG FOR A REASON (Sky, Mini, Time, Sparky, and Light can play instruments as well)

i can do over 30 pushups without stopping (ya true of everyone)

i’m a fast runner (Quarters is pretty quick, Sky also but he has lousy stamina)

i can draw well (Brown and Mini)

i have a good memory (most of the boys do. Brown is a bit scatterbrained though)

i’m good at doing math in my head

i can hold my breath underwater for over a minute (Wind eventually got good at this)

i have beaten at least 2 people in arm wrestling (most of the boys have. Twi as a ghost can beat some of the boys as shades)

i know how to cook at least 3 meals from scratch (pretty much all the boys are self sufficient. Time’s cooking skills are a bit sad though)

i know how to throw a proper punch (Light and Green can knock someone out with a single punch)

hobbies: (these will just be Song)

i enjoy playing sports

i’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else (he used to be on a hockey team before he moved in with his grandparents)

i’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else (the only thing he’s not in is choir, much to the teacher’s frustration)

i have learned a new song in the past week

i work out at least once a week

i’ve gone for runs at least once a week in the warmer months

i have drawn something in the past month

i enjoy writing

i do or have done martial arts

experiences: (also just Song)

i have had my first kiss

i have had alcohol

i have scored the winning goal in a sports game

i have watched an entire season of a tv show in one sitting

i have been at an overnight event

i have been in a taxi

i have been in the hospital or er in the past year

i have beaten a video game in one day

i have visited another country (does ancient Hyrule count?)

i have been to one of my favorite band’s concerts

relationships:

i’m in a relationship (ditto for everyone but Green and co)

i have a crush on a celebrity

i have a crush on someone i know

i have been in at least 3 relationships (just Light actually)

i have never been in a relationship (just Green and co. They don’t really care for the romance thing)

i have asked someone out or admitted my feelings to them (most of the boys eventually. A couple like the adult timeline trio it was just mutually understood)

i get crushes easily (no one, surprisingly)

i have had a crush on someone for over a year (remember what I said about the slowest of slow burns? That’s Sky, Wind, and Song)

i have been in a relationship for at least a year

i have had feelings for a friend (with the exception of Mini and Quarters who practically fell in love at first sight, this applies to everyone)

my life: (just Song again)

i have at least one person i consider a “best friend”

i live close to my school

my parents are still together (even though they’re dead...)

i have/had at least one sibling

i live in the united states

there is snow right now where i live

i have hung out with a friend in the past month

i have a smartphone

i have at least 15 cd’s

i share my room with someone

random shit: (just Song again)

i have break-danced

i know a person named jamie

i have had a teacher with a last name that’s hard to pronounce

i have dyed my hair (it used to be bright crayon red during the punk phase)

i’m listening to one song on repeat right now (does whatever he’s practicing count?)

i have punched someone in the past week

i know someone who has gone to jail

i have broken a bone

i have eaten a waffle today

i know what i want to do with my life (He wants to compose movie scores)

i speak at least 2 languages (3! he also is conversational in Hylian Sign Language and Goron)

#tag meme #song #all the guys!

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rikkibelle87 · 5 years

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Decoding the PINS!!

Alright Swifties! Here we go!

1. Selena Gomez: her pin has flowers and she performed with Taylor on her Rep tour at the ROSE Bowl. Collab!

2. Dixie Chicks: for sure a collab with these “cool chicks”.

3. CATS The Musical: in the song Memories, there are lyrical references to ROSES.

4. CALM: upcoming song!?

5. Friends: Season 10 Episode *13* is the one where Joey speaks FRENCH, the Language of Love. Also, the letters from her Scrabble post were IOIE (1013) !? I watched the episode and wonder if are there this many ROSES in other episodes!? Almost in every scene!

6. Oh hi, Meredith!

7. Troye Sivan: he is wearing a shirt that says Portland which is considered to be the ROSE City. He also performed with Taylor at the ROSE Bowl on her Rep tour! Sooo a collab too? Maybe WITH Selena!?

8. You’re My Person/ Meredith and Cristina: shoutout to the Best Friend ROSE, maybe? Which originates from France.

9. Track 5: “Delicate” video shoutout. I think this is her way to represent Joe.

10. Drake: I’m hoping it’s a collab! Drake has a song titles “Sandra’s ROSE” which is about how fame has impacted his personal life. His mom used to be a florist. We all freaked out when Drake posted an Instagram photo of him and Taylor back in 2016, right? In the pic she has golden angel wings on her back.

11. Faith Hill: COLLAB PLEASE!! She has a song called “Bed of ROSES” and there are ROSES in her lyrics to “Take Me As I Am”. In her most recent duet with her husband Tim McGraw “The Rest of our Life“, Faith has a part where she’s sings about their future children and naming their daughter ROSE. Also, Ed Sheeran co-wrote the song.

12. Mister Rogers/Fred Rogers: served as a Grand Marshall of the Tournament of ROSES Parade and tossed the coin for the ROSE Bowl game during his last ever TV appearance.

13. DUN DUN: Law & Order, Episode - End Game? There are some pastel colours in the episode that seem uncommon (ex. The names on the investigation board)

14. Paint palette with pastel hearts: Fans who have been getting merch have posted the confetti hearts that come with their packages. Confetti hearts fell during her Speak Now and RED tours. Could mean we’re gonna see confetti hearts again this tour OR could be referencing a future song lyric.

15. Game Of Thrones: George RR Martin has said that a lot of his inspiration for GOT came from the historical events from England’s War of the ROSES. Also, strong women are badass!

16. AWESOME!: upcoming song

17. Bonjour, Olivia!

18. “I Tried” gravestone with daisy: SO the symbolism of a gravestone and a daisy have this in common: Innocence. The daisy also represents the Goddess of Love (Freya) who BTW, according to Norse mythology... rode a chariot pulled by two CATS! 🙀

@taylorswift @taylornation

#taylor swift #taylor nation #ts7 easter eggs #ts7 #ts7 theories #taylurking

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trumpetnista · 6 years

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CMW2/Trumpetnista: Not You, Too

Summary from FFN: CANON COMPLIANT AU WITH HEAVY SPOILERS FOR THE END OF SEASON 4 AND THE FIRST EPS OF 5. POSSIBLY A FUTURE FIC; Gotham breaks all the rules all the time, especially now. Thankfully, the one about cats having 9 lives? That still holds. Bruce thinks Selina is dead. Everyone does until she walks into the GCPD the next morning.;Rated for language and imagery;1st in my 2019 SSS Project

Words from the Hooded GOTHAMITE: As I said last time, what keeps me watching GOTHAM (other than the awesome writing, dope ass cast, and the lovely fandom...) are Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle. They hooked me like a fish and I fell in love with the rest of the show in the process. Season 5 has been excellent as always yet bittersweet. It’s supposed to be the last one (I hope not. I hope the show gets picked up or we get a movie or something! It can’t be over yet! Come on!) and I have a feeling that B and Grumpy Cat aren’t gonna be together in the endgame. Not outright, anyways. I don’t think they’ll be enemies but together? As in Helena Wayne showing up levels of together? Nah.

That’s what fanfic is for. There is a follow up to Positive planned, BTW.

Anyway, this one is another canon complaint AU set in the current season. All you really need to know is that The Eviler Evil Valeska Twin shot our girl, she was paralyzed and now she’s not thanks to Ivy Pepper Version 3’s reluctant help, and Gotham is now divided up into Zones, most of them insane and wild and chock full of yikes. Oh, and Bruce loves Selina but that’s always been pretty fucking obvious. LOL! Enjoy the latest.

Disclaimer: “Honestly, it’s not mine!”

"What's up, 5-0? Beautiful day, isn't it? The sky is smoggy blue and the birds are singing..."

He was hallucinating.

He had to be.

There was no way that what he was hearing was possible.

No matter how much he ached to, there was no way that he was hearing Selina Kyle's voice.

She was dead. Truly dead. She had gone on one of what she called her "shopping trips" for The Haven and Jeremiah Valeska had finished what he had started that horrible night in the Study. He and his demented girlfriend had trapped her in a warehouse, knocked her out, and blown her up. Not only had they done it, Jeremiah had turned himself in, battered but proud. He claimed that it had been for the best. Selina was nothing but street trash. She was his downfall and utterly unacceptable as a companion for him. Gotham needed its Dark Knight to be with someone who truly understood what reality was. Someone like...

Bruce Wayne hadn't let him finish. Before anyone could stop him, he had picked up a chair and gone after him, much to the shrieking horror of Ecco. It had taken several officers and someone, likely Alfred Pennyworth, sedating him to make him stop. He had woken up in Jim Gordon's office and had stayed on the couch. He didn't want to see anyone. Nobody knew what to say to him. Everyone knew how much Selina meant to him. That was why she had been targeted twice.

Bruce had managed to help her. He had gone straight into the belly of Ivy Pepper's foliage covered beast to get the root to fix her severed spine. Selina had gotten back on her feet immediately and hit the ground running. Shocking everyone, she had opted to wait to get her revenge against Valeska. She was going to play the long game. Valeska wasn't going anywhere. He was just as trapped as everyone else, thanks to the bridges being gone and the Travel Ban.

When asked why, she had sadly explained that Tabitha Galavan, her Mentor turned Sister, had been impatient for revenge and it had taken her life. She had allowed anger and hurt to cloud her judgement. She had dropped her guard and Oswald Cobblepot had promptly murdered her. Bruce had seen it happen. It had been expected. After all, both Galavan siblings had done great harm to the man but hearing Barbara Kean's devastated rage? Knowing that Selina would have to mourn her? It had hurt deeply. It was all a goddamned waste.

Instead of seeking out Valeska or his followers, Selina had opted to use her skills as a thief to help The Haven and its refugees. She would pick a small gang's turf within a Zone, typically Penguin's, and go in for 12-36 hours. She would bring back people, ammunition, medicine, and meaningful things like blankets or feminine hygiene products. She had quickly gained a reputation for being utterly ruthless to any who tried to stop her, which had concerned him greatly. Ivy had warned him that the root would not only fix her spine but amplify the darker aspects of her personality. Bruce had tried to reel her in, leading to several arguments, and eventually, they had reached a stalemate.

She would do what she liked. He would stay out her way or at least keep his judgement to himself while he helped her. Gotham was a madhouse. It always had been but now? It was a free for all. It was survival of the fittest and she would be damned if she let someone who crossed her walk away. She had made that mistake in the past and it had cost her dearly. She had been screwed over one too many times. It would not be happening again. If there was a Hell, she was already going to it so what did it matter, anyways? Self defense wasn't murder, neither was saving people's asses.

Plus, she didn't know about him but she was in no mood to deal with the same group of psychos 10 years from now. She wanted to deal with new psychos.

But, now she wouldn't because she was dead and gone. She was as dead and gone as his parents.

His Selina was gone and Bruce would never see her again, not in this life.

But, the hallucination...she wasn't...she couldn't be...

Could she? Please?

Her mane of golden chestnut curls wasn't singed and pulled up into a messy bun. She wasn't standing in the 12th precinct's main entryway. She wasn't wheezing softly from a partially blocked nose. Her tactical suit wasn't unzipped to reveal a stained gray sports bra and bruised torso. She wasn't looking at the stunned occupants of the room with her usual dismissive amusement, even with a black eye. She wasn't limping and her whip wasn't wrapped around her bruised shoulder like a coil of wire as she drank straight from a bottle of what appeared to be Everclear.

She couldn't be...could she? Was it possible? She couldn't...why was the room spinning? Why was his chest hurting? Bruce stood in the office, speechless and shaking, watching as the Selina hallucination sat on the receptionist desk. It was so real...

"What's the matter? You guys never seen a 7 lives having bitch before?"

"My God..."

"Jesus Christ, Gordon! Get the hell off of me! You, too, Alfred! Bad touch!"

The hallucination looked like her. It definitely sounded like her but it couldn't...she wasn't...but Jim was smiling at it. Alfred was too. Both were still hugging the hallucination and Harvey Bullock had taken its bottle of liquor away, taking a deep swig. She snatched it back from him and shot him a lethal look, making him grin.

"Buzz off, gumshoe. This is mine. I earned it. Plus, it's the closest thing we've got to morphine, which I kinda need right now. I need some morphine, a shower, a nap, maybe take a crap before all of that..."

"Kid, we all thought you were done for. Valeska and his crazy Terminator bitch said you were."

"I'm not a kid. Yeah, I definitely got shanghaied by those goddamned freaks and it sucked but their bomb didn't kill me like they wanted it to. It just made me fly away, which was totally fun until I landed face, ribs, and tits first into the side of a delivery truck. Don't do that, by the way. It hurts. I managed to get it started and it has some good stuff in there. Ammo, some cases of water, and those military TV dinner things and I think there might be meds. I'm not sure. Speaking of meds, I'm still looking for Lee. She was the best, bravest doctor in the city and if I can find her, you can get The Narrows under control real easy. Everybody loved her because she legit gave a shit so they're looking for her. There's a big T.P. and blankets reward for anyone who finds her. She might be across the river, I dunno. Maybe someone could swim over through the subways to go check and to ask for help in person since using the radio obviously doesn't goddamned work..."

"It's too dangerous. The damage from the bridges blocked or flooded the tunnels."

"Dammit. You can't rig something up, Foxy? You're like the better version of that tech dude from the James Bonds movies. The hell's his name again? X? Y?"

"Q."

"Right...whatever. Where's Bruce?"

"Selina..."

"Where. Is. Bruce? Alfred, where is he? Did he...where the hell is he?! What happened?!"

"Valeska showed up here gloating and he snapped. He took a chair to him and...he was in Cap's office but..."

"Get out of my way. Now."

"Selina, I know you're worried but..."

"Harper, I really like you but if you don't get the fuck out of my way, I swear to God, I'll..."

Bruce stepped out of the office and all eyes went to him. All he could see was Selina. He was still shaking and breathing was getting more difficult by the second but he couldn't look away. He didn't even want to blink because then, she would disappear and...

"Oh, no."

As soon as she touched him, reality hit him all at once.

She was real.

She was alive!

"Bruce. Bruce? Come on, baby, look at me...you need to breathe...look at me!"

His first instinct was to obey her and he did just that. His Selina wanted him to breathe. She wanted him to look at her and he was going to. He was going to do any and everything she asked.

Baby? That was new. Selina usually called him B or by his full name. Either that or she called him a douchebag or something else along those lines but fondly. Never a pet name. She had always cringed at pet names and other conventional romantic relationship things like them. But, she was alive. She was alive. She was battered and bruised and didn't smell very good but she was alive. Selina was alive! She wasn't gone. Jeremiah hadn't taken her away from him. Gotham hadn't stolen her away from him. He hadn't lost her. She was alive. She was right in front of him. He wasn't dreaming. He wasn't hallucinating.

"Selina?"

"Hey, Bruce."

"You're alive."

"Barely."

"...y-you're alive?"

"Yeah, I'm alive. I'm right in of- ow!"

Bruce knew that he would have to do some serious groveling later but he didn't care. He hauled Selina flush against him and squeezed as hard as he could, uncaring of her injuries. The noises escaping him could be called crying or maybe screaming, he wasn't sure. As if let loose from a puppeteer's strings, he slumped against the wall and surprising him, Selina wasn't fighting him.

She was holding onto him just as tightly. She was crying like she had after her failed suicide attempt and he loosened his grip enough for her to look up at him. She had to look up at him, now. She had to stand on her tiptoes to give him a proper kiss when they were standing. He remembered when she was taller than him. He remembered when they first met. Every memory he had with her, good and bad, was running through his mind at warp speed.

Cupping his face, she kissed him deeply and he responded immediately, mindful of her cut lip. His second hug was much gentler and he smiled at a beaming Alfred, a crying and grinning Jim. They loved her just as much as he did. They were her family, along with Barbara Kean, and...

"As soon as the Travel Ban lifts, I'm going on vacation and I'm taking you with me. I don't give a shit about your Mission or whatever the hell you call it. We're going someplace warm where we can get falling down fucked up drunk legally and I can have my tits out."

Bruce tried to laugh but he kept sobbing, drinking her in greedily. She was alive. His best friend, his heart, his Selina was alive! She wanted to go someplace warm? Done. She wanted him with her? Done. Whatever she wanted, whatever she needed, he would do it. Even if (when) it compromised his moral compass, he would do it anyway because Selina Kyle was alive. She was alive and he wasn't going to question how. Okay, he would because that was how he was. He always wanted answers but the universe had granted him a most precious gift and...

"...not you, too?"

His voice was small and the smile, the look she gave him was the softest he had ever seen.

"Not me, too. Not today. Not ever. You're stuck with me, Bruce Wayne. Get used to it."

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coolmiddlename · 6 years

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kitty analyses pb again because fuck you

I feel like the finale was a great challenge of Princess Bubblegum’s character.

You have to remember that her past is buried in bloodshed. She made her kingdom on top of ashes old and new, which is pretty fucking metal now I say it out loud. But if you think back to eps like Rattleballs, The Cooler, What Have You Done, maybe even her reaction to being unelected in the s6 finale, it took a lot of growth for PB to get past what she was before. Even after becoming less cold, she still feels vulnerable and makes great efforts to retain either her own life or, more recently, the legacy of her kingdom.

After all her efforts to become a calmer person, to not headway into brash and vindictive decisions, here comes Uncle Gumbald with his miraculous candy city. She’s being taunted by one of her creations who is a great smear against her pride. He’s simultaneously her child, her father figure, and her bloody nemesis! He gets under her skin because he’s a bit like her, but somehow more ambitious, more powerful (the fuck??), more evil, and arguably the stigma for all those furious bloodshed PB carried out in her younger years. She can’t deal with him being around and wants him gone, and it makes her recede back into that vindictive dictator state, trying to justify it all to herself.

Finn protests about her ideas for war, and even Marcy gets involved, and you can see PB is quick to dismiss criticism of the war from Finn but when Marcy gets involved you can see her visually questioning herself a bit more. I really liked that moment. Marcy makes it clear that PB’s idea is going to end in misery for herself, but PB feels backed into a corner, and quietly says they’ll talk about this when it’s over, and basically begs Marceline to wish her luck. PB isn’t sure if she’ll speak to Marceline ever again, because they both sense that any actual war would result quickly in her death.

And when Finn says he’s known her a long time, she sees his robot arm, is reminded of Shoko and just what she did to her during one of her previous attempts at an arms race. Shoko died because of PB overreacting to a challenge and making her weapons a little too deadly.

Of course as soon as Gumbald opens his mouth PB goes fucking 180 again and tries to wreck him. Finn and Jake have already set their trap, however - they bind them together in a dream, where they’re not able to just murder each other with opposing armies and have to deal with this together.

While PB and Gumbald immediately start trying to kill each other in the dream, once they “succeed” in a toothbrush lance battle, they start to hallucinate being in each other’s shoes. Quite fitting - PB at this stage is so filled with bloodthirst she’d be ready to commit the sin her uncle did against her, and she faces the consequences. She sees Gumbald build the candy kingdom around her, is filled with such shock and envy. Gumbald meanwhile experiences the horror he put Bonnie through as a tiny kid, and just how hard it is to follow his dream to keep a kingdom together when it wants to fall apart. When PB wants to help him, she can’t do anything but make a dumb joke, and starts craughing. He does the same. A rather hilarious and dissonant scene that contains a lot to pull apart regarding their characters.

Waking up from the dream PB realises just what the fuck she was doing, she’s snapped out of her revenge stupor, and apologises to her uncle even though she’s got no idea whether he will apologise back.

Gumbald’s “apology” is very inkeeping with the show, to be honest. Sometimes people in AT are just assholes and you have to deal with it. Sometimes AT has abrupt anticlimaxes like that. Think Magic Man’s initial appearance, and every time it looks like Ice King is gonna show a bit of empathy but turns it around into comedically timed selfishness. Aunt Molly doing a 180 makes me glare daggers in suspicion but once again that sort of character change is also extremely common (i mean, think of Lemongrab and how violent and horrible he is, but he’s still hanging with the good guys because there is no reason to fight. It’s a peculiar dissonance but I think AT wants to show that, to show that good people and kinda-evil-but-not-supervillainous people live in the world together).

Anyway, PB rolls with it. TWO CANDY KINGDOMS IT IS!

Of course when Golb attacks, PB has to think on her feet and you can tell by the sweatdrops she’s panicking internally... the Banana Guards are terrified she’s gonna make them attack, but instead in a moment of pragmatic empathy she tells them to flee for their lives or they’ll add to its mass, and gets the Gumball Guardians to attack instead because only they stand a chance at stopping the threat. PB decides to stay on the front lines and tries her best to coordinate the attack but isn’t doing very well, and while everyone else is caught in the battle and her remaining forces are turned against her, she sort of loses all her backup support. The she FACES DEATH ITSELF, which is getting slamdunked by a horrible candy flesh monster. To be honest I thought she’d just turn to mush again, like in the season 2 finale, but while she had an extremely close brush with death her quick thinking emergency shield let her survive.

Marcie coming in to avenge her, the tender moment they have when Marcie realises she’s still alive.. Marcie understands how vulnerable PB is, how she so easily gets over her head and takes so many risks, and PB is taken aback by how much her girlfriend really worries about her wellbeing, even back when they weren’t talking Marcie still cared for her. She reassures her that she’s a tough gum and she’s “nothing’s never happening to me. never.” And admits she might have a concussion. Fucking adorable.

I loved this scene not just for its immediate fluff but because Marcie is ready to admit to PB that even when they were not talking before What was Missing/Sky Witch, even when Peebles was a bit of a monster who had shut off everybody else from her life, Marceline still saw her as a little vulnerable, someone who needed and deserved a bit of protection. This goes so well with how they interacted in Season 7, when Bonnie had ran away from the kingom and was trying to pretend it was all okay but Marcie saw right through her. Marceline has never had the openness to say something like this before and when they spoke in the past during their breakup she had always recoiled or backfired to PB’s cold attitude. Here, Marceline is fully open and expressing herself and her great fears of losing Bonnie. With themselves fully open here, feeling a deep level of affection and appreciation for each other, they fuse kiss. The familiar kiss of two people who have been in love for quite some time. Astonishing moment.

Then they’re basically joined at the hip,they embrace in hopes that they can make it out alive when the fight gets too big for them to be involved, then they notice BMO singing and Bonnie’s nerdiness lets her realise HARMONY was the secret weapon against the chaos. Kinda cool. (BMO’s moment with jake was wonderful btw and i hope lots of people are thinking about it.) I must give credit to Hynden Walch’s beautiful backup singing which stands out as she does so in a different key.

GOLB nonsense aside, she ends the series going up to Finn, no crown on her head, and thanking him for disobeying her with a kiss on the cheek. She says he’s growing taller. PB and Finn having warmer moments like this has been a staple of the past couple seasons, as he got over his fiery passion for her and his childlike rejection, and learned more about who she was... idolised her less and saw her as a friend. They’re able to be far more Real with each other than in season 5 when they were both pretty much loners.

Anyway, as Adventure Time ends, I’m happy with the roles of all the characters in the finale, even if it was a bit of a jumbled fucking mess. Adventure Time as a whole is a jumbled fucking mess, so it fits.I also like that the adventure ends with you not knowing exactly what’s going to happen to the characters in the future, they could pump out a new episode next week following from this one and t would be perfectly fine. I like that we get to see some people being happy and silly in the next post apocalypse, and that we never find out what caused the world to end again but we are able to speculate as to what happened.

I must note that PB is probably still around in this future as hinted by the giant Gumball and the “office” inside it, and has managed to protect her people one last time... If I were a betting lady she’s probably taking a break until things cool off by going on new adventures with her partner. But she could be dead! Maybe there was a great war in the end? Maybe it was just a really bad experiment. Who knows? Who cares? Anything could have happened in Adventure Time.

#adventure time #atimers #princess bubblegum #marceline #uncle gumbald

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travllingbunny · 6 years

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The 100 rewatch: 1x02 Earth Skills

I’m a new fan of The 100, who first binged it last year, August to November. This is my first full rewatch of the show. I was planning to start it anyway and finish it before the season 6 premiere on April 30, and when I saw that Fox Serbia was airing a rerun (Monday to Friday, 40 min. after midnight, with repeats the next day), starting on 1st February, it was a great opportunity to start my rewatch in HDTV on my beautiful new TV. I decided to do write-ups and tag other fans on SpoilerTV website, as I did when I was first watching the show. But my posts turned into full blown essays. So, finally, after over a week, I’ve realized: Why don’t I post them on my Tumblr blog, too? I’ll copy my write-ups of the first 7 episodes, and then I’ll post my rewatch posts after I watch each episode. (The next one, 1x08, is on Monday’Tuesday.)

Spoilers below for all 5 seasons of the show. I go of on a tangents and make a lot of references to future events.

...........................

The first 2 episodes of season 1 are its weakest, just as I remember them. But initially I thought episode 1x02 was worse - I had mixed feelings about the Pilot, but then really disliked the second episode. This time, however, the Pilot was much worse than I remembered it, while this episode was... well, pretty much the same, but I enjoyed it more this time. Because, when I first watched the Pilot, I focused on all the new info on the show's premise, the setting, the universe, the SciFi stuff, and pretty much ignored all the cringey early teen soapy stuff (which I didn't even remember). But then the second episode came, and all the cringey teen soapy stuff in that episode just came right at me and annoyed the heck out of it. So this time, I already remembered it, so I could focus on other things.

BTW, I need to have good laugh at the often stated claim that The 100 doesn't focus on romance or do much romance or set up ships. The show does romance all the time. There are ships all over the place, but most of them pretty much suck, especially since most of them are poorly written insta-romances. And these early episodes are full of various romances and potential romances, and love triangles (which some people say the show has stopped doing... except it never did - *cough season 5 *cough* - but at least it scaled back on it a bit).

Now don't misunderstand me - I don't mind that there's a lot of that, what I did mind is how badly all of that was written in these early episodes. Later, the show did lose most of its early CW-ness and start doing romantic plots better, in some cases at least. (But it also started doing them even worse, in some other cases.)

Rating: 4.5/10

First introduction of Raven, and she immediately shows that she's smart, capable and awesome. At this point, she seems almost perfect, but we know she was just initially meant to be a temporary supporting character and romantic obstacle for Finn/Clarke. We find out that she's the youngest zero G engineer in 52 years. She's also the first person to figure out that the Delinquents aren't dying, but simply taking their trackers off. How come this never crossed the minds of any of the Ark leaders? They came off a bit dumb here.

First meaningful interactions between Abby and Raven - the start of their friendship/pseudo-mother daughter relationship. Abby enlists Raven to fix an old escape pod so she(Abby) could get to the ground. Raven insists she will go, too, since she also has a loved one there. Multiple mentions of her boyfriend, and I can now see the big hints with the origami that Finn is that boyfriend. I missed that the first time, which is lucky, or I would have hated this episode even more, for trying to set up more than one annoying insta-love-triangle involving Finn and Clarke. I think this is the first time we get a mention of a year? But not the year when the show takes place. The escape pod is a 130 year old piece of junk that was found when they rescued MIR-3 in 2102. At least that gives us an idea of what century it is. ( The 100 wiki has a timeline and says the year is 2149, IIRC, but I don't know where that info is from.) I remember that Clarke, Abby and Raven were my favorite characters by far, followed by Monty, and pretty much the only characters I really liked (I was intrigued by Bellamy, and to a lesser extent Octavia, but I didn't exactly like them), since they were the only characters doing smart and good and pragmatic stuff and trying to save people. Then later, during season 1, Raven fell down a few places in my rankings, because I was so frustrated with her moping over Finn. Well, Wells was OK, but I didn't like some things they were doing with him here. One of the things I remembered best from this episode is that it clumsily tried to set up a Wells/Clarke/Finn love triangle, and that it made me roll my eyes so much. And for whatever reason, Bellamy was the one to talk about it to Wells and go on about how Clarke supposedly doesn't see Wells next to Finn, blah blah. Octavia isn't the only Blake with cringey dialogue anymore. Sorry, I'm gonna go on a mini-rant. Why was it necessary for the show to imply that Wells was in love with Clarke? You know how some people claim that the show is so into platonic male/female friendships (which somehow always is all about Clarke and Bellamy, because other male and female characters on the show aren't ever friends or something)? Yeah, right. Clarke and Wells were BFFs from childhood, grew up together - if you're looking for a "sibling-like" relationship between people on the show who are not related, that's the closest thing to it, but apparently, Wells couldn't have done all those sacrifices for Clarke if he wasn't in love with her. Right? But Clarke only sees him as a BFF, and he is so important to her... that the show had her mourn him for about 10 minutes in episode 4 after he was killed, and then never mention him again. If they ever actually wanted a great completely platonic, sibling-like close relationship between a man and a woman, that was a great opportunity. But they obviously didn't care. And speaking of people who grew up together and refer to each other as family, so they would therefore fit the idea of sibling-like relatively well (unlike Clarke and Bellamy, who didn't even know each other or interact with each other till they were 23 and almost 18, respectively)... well, there's also Finn and Raven. Who are also boyfriend and girlfriend. Kinda weird. I wonder when the writers decided to kill of Wells. I think it definitely was only after this episode, because this episode spends a lot of time building up Wells as a heroic character and setting up that love triangle that never goes anywhere, because Wells dies in 1x03. I think that, if the writers were at all planning an "endgame" (though I hate that word) love interest for Clarke, it was probably Wells at this point, because I don't think they were considering Bellamy that way at this point, and Finn, while clearly meant as the initial love interest, has False Romantic Lead written all over him. I sometimes wonder what the show would look like if they hadn't killed off Wells. I think Finn's "peacemaker" role in season 1b was probably planned for Wells. But I'm really relieved that we didn't get a love triangle that's all "Unlucky Childhood Friend/nice guy in unrequited love with a girl who is into another guy who is charming but kind of a jerk/cheater, until she finally realizes he's the one for her", because I hate that trope so much. Sorry, Finn lovers, if any of you are reading this - but Finn comes off even worse on rewatch than he did when I watched it the first time. He was always a guy who's just there and whose only interest seemed to be following Clarke around and flirting with her, but his time I'm noticing things like, even when he does good things, he only does them after he's realized Clarke would like him to do it, and tries to make himself look good and be the guy that she needs in her life. When I first watched this, I just had profound indifference towards him, which grew into active annoyance in this episode. And I didn't even realize at the time that he had a girlfriend on the Ark. Or that, after Clarke shamed him for not wanting to come and help rescue Jasper, he only changed his mind and came after Clarke had made Bellamy join the rescue party. My annoyance was initially mostly because of the scene where they are on the way to finding Jasper and saving him, and Finn decides to instead convince Clarke that she's wound up too tight and should just relax and they should splash each other with water. Which would be OK, if Jasper wasn't potentially dying. Priorities? And there was also his pop psychology where he tells Clarke that she is so desperate to save Jasper because she couldn't save her father, and we're obviously supposed to see it as super--meaningful. Is it just me that thinks that wanting to save people in general, and especially those you know, is a normal human reaction? Which is why Clarke was the character I immediately liked and related to. And also why this scene annoyed me so much. My feelings on it are exactly the same now, except maybe now I'm not sure that the show ever even meant for the Finn/Clarke pairing to be seen as an especially good one. Meanwhile, it seems that the show staff had realized between the Pilot and the second episode that Bob was super hot, so now Bellamy gets to be shirtless and with ruffled hair that looks much better on him, and is just friendly parting from some random Delinquent girl he's had sex with and who never appears again. I guess the casual sex (and later threesomes) were supposed to be a part of his 'bad boy' persona, since it pretty much stopped once the show started making him into a more heroic figure. Even though there's actually nothing wrong about single people having casual sex for pleasure, so it's not like that marks him as 'bad'. (The show, however, seemed less judgy about casual sex in later seasons, so I don't know.) However, he does a lot of other thing in this episode that are actually bad, like making the kids take off their wristbands so they'll have food, or acting dictator-like ("I will not be disobeyed") and over-protective of Octavia, including punishing Atom for making out with her. I didn't hate Bellamy early on as many did, but he frustrated me a lot, and was definitely at his most annoying in 1x02. However, I always had a lot of leeway for both him and Octavia, no matter how annoying they acted at this point, because of their backstory. And now I can even understand his over-protectiveness a bit better, knowing hat happened the last time he tried to let Octavia enjoy life. Much of the episode was about Octavia trying to find a guy to make out with, and specifically trying to make Atom (the guy Bellamy charged with protecting her). make out with her. She's being a huge brat at this point, but it's understandable - she was isolated, under the floor and locked up, all her life, and now she wants to be free and enjoy it. One interesting moment is when she told Atom: "Wall won't stop what's out there, we need weapons" - which is the first time she sounded like later Octavia. But her later love of fighting also makes sense for her character - fighting, especially with bare hands or cold weapons, is an energetic activity that produces an adrenaline rush, kind of like sex/making out. The scene where she chases butterflies in the woods and then makes out with Atom was one of the most visually beautiful. It looked very romantic, in the sense of enjoying life and nature. Not in the sense of actual romance, unless by 'romance' one means 'making out with a random person you met a day ago and barely know.' But to be fair, even Octavia's upcoming big OTP romance with Lincoln began with little more than physical attraction, and she knew him even less than Atom by the time they hooked up. The best interactions Ocfavia had in the episode were with Monty - the start of one of the better, underrated m/f genuinely platonic friendships on the show. This exchange was quite interesting: Monty: "Living under the floor all your life, it's amazing that you're not a complete basket case". Octavia: "Who says I'm not?" Monty was really cool in this episode - while Octavia was having some drama with Atom and some other guy, he was like "quiet, guys, I'm working" and was just calmly working on trying to make radio communications with the Ark possible. A bit more backstory on him and Jasper: they obviously have known each other for a long time, and Monty compares his relationship with Jasper to the Blakes, saying that Jasper may not actually be his brother but they are just as close. However, the Blakes aren't really like a regular sibling relationship, it's one of those sibling relationships (like Katniss/Prim in The Hunger Games) where the elder sibling had to grow up early and take care of the younger, so it's more like a parent/child relationship. Which is really one of the main problems of their relationship - Bellamy sees Octavia almost as his child and is extremely protective and sacrificial (the way we otherwise see parents act towards their children in The 100), and Octavia is constantly rebelling against him as kids rebel against authority. First significant interaction between Monty and Clarke, too. When Wells and Monty volunteer to save Jasper, Clarke tells Monty to stay behind because he's too important for the group's survival - he was raised on a Farm station, trained as an engineer. "food and communications. What's up here (*touches his head*) is going to save us all". (And how right she was!) That's some good, smart, pragmatic thinking - and she also managed to convince him without having to say that he also wouldn't be the most useful in a fight. I notice so many gender stereotypes in how the characters are written in these early episodes, more than the show usually has afterwards. Jasper and Monty were constantly talking about impressing girls in the Pilot, Jasper thought Finn had "game", and in this episode, we constantly have women shaming men into doing things by implying they would look weak or cowardly otherwise. Octavia tries to make Atom let her make out with guys/make out with her by saying he would be her brother's "bitch" otherwise (when did she learn to talk like that? I guess, during those two-three days on Earth?). Clarke tells Finn how disappointed she is that he refuses to join the rescue party, calling him a coward. (Though Monty shames Finn, too, saying "Jasper looked up to you". Which doesn't mean much, since the reason Jasper looked up to him is because he thought Finn was good at impressing girls.) And then Clarke makes Bellamy join the rescue party by implying he will look scared in front of the others/less brave than she is, otherwise (though that was more about Bellamy having to maintain authority in the group - which he needs for his own reasons), Then Bellamy enlists his sidekick Murphy to come, too. Murphy: "What are we doing? I didn't think we were in the rescuing business." Oh, you have no idea. The interactions between Bellamy and Clarke in this episode were quite interesting. I didn't ship them at this point, but I know now that some people already did, and I can see why. The scenes where they are into each other's faces and being antagonistic... well, this is the scene where Clarke says she will never take off the wristband, and Bellamy calls her "Brave princess" sarcastically (?):

What are you doing here, Bellamy? If he means to try to be snarky or antagonistic, he's not doing a good job, because "Brave princess" is not an insult, it sounds like he's impressed by her. (Which he probably is, though I'm not sure he's aware of it yet.) I'm sure he thinks she should hate her, because she is making things difficult for him and she's one of the privileged high class people from the Ark. That's what Bellamy means, at least at first, when he calls her "princess" - he's not using that nickname to flirt with her, like Finn. At least, I'm sure he does't mean to flirt. But... he kind of looks like he's flirting. I think, at this point, he's really, really confused.

And that's exactly the moment when Finn comes along, finally having decided to join the party, and says "Come up with your own nickname". Finn seems very possessive over... that nickname.

Later when they find Jasper, he gets all take-chargey and tells Wells to keep an eye on Bellamy, and Murphy to come help him take Jasper down from the tree. I can't help but think of another, far less successful and very unfortunate rescue mission, in season 2, where Murphy will also end up as Finn's reluctant sidekick.

I love the way that Bellamy acts like he's so ruthless (which he probably believes himself to be, much more than he actually is), when he tells Murphy he will take Clarke's wristband off even if he has to cut off her arm to do it...but then later, when she almost falls into the pit full of spikes, he instinctively grabs her arm and saves her life - and then has the look on his face "What did I just do? What am I doing? Why I am doing this?" He really is confused.

Early season 1 Bellamy is such a hot mess. Kind of like Clarke will end up being a hot mess in season 5, and similarly impulsive, emotionally damaged and preoccupied with just protecting their "child" while ignoring the big picture, while season 1 Clarke/season 5 Bellamy are acting pragmatically while trying to save everybody. They've really switched roles. And I expect season 6 Bellamy to help Clarke to get back to who she used to be, just as Clarke helped him find himself in season 1.

I love the song "Can't Pretend" by Tom Odell, which closes this episode. (I'll be seeing him in concert in a week.) But I didn't initially even notice it in the episode - I only paid attention to it when I saw some The 100 fanvideos with it. It's too emotional and the lyrics don't really fit either of the rather shallow romances (Finn/Clarke and Octavia/Atom) whose scenes it covers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUmtXzuSGu8

#The 100 #the 100 rewatch #the 100 1x02 #earth skills #clarke griffin #bellamy blake #octavia blake #monty green #raven reyes #abby griffin #wells jaha

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