#i don't know the right order

[demaparbat-hp]

Izumi (steambaby) sketches.

[cynical-canidae]

One thing Chibs did that was literally peak was whatever that telepathy contact thing the Doctor and the Master had going on. Like yeah Time Lords are telepathic; we knew that. LOVED seeing them have a little conversation!! I know they abused the fuck out of that in school!! I KNOW THE DECA GOSSIP WAS CRAZY!!!!

[cloysterbell]

Pete, I need you to stay here.

[canisalbus]

To me, Machete kind of has the energy of a secondary villain/coldhearted side character in someone else's story that a lot of fans latch onto, moreso than the protagonist. Question is, would he be the villain in anyone's story?

Why, thank you! I'm actually glad to hear he gives off that vibe. I don't think he set out to become a villain but a lot of people certainly view him as one.

[androids-insides]

can I hug the narrator? I’ve had a shitty week :(

P.S: tell him I love his voice 🥰

[littlefankingdom]

~ A Night in the Life of a Bat in Gotham

This is such a cute short story! The bat following Batman around, copying him, and being a detective with him! Bruce caring about stopping animal abuse and trafficking! Bruce saying that the bats of Gotham aren't his pets, they are their family! And he knows each one of them! I didn't know I needed Bruce gently holding a bat and calling it "my hero" until now, it's fucking adorable!

And the whole thing is a metaphor about the Batfam! About how they cannot be kept in captivity, how their falily is important and they need it, but each of them comes and goes as they wish and they respect it, and each have their own story to tell.

[leavethebagelalone]

is this anything

[wonder-worker]

Thinking about Elizabeth Woodville as a gothic heroine is making me go insane. She entered the story by overturning existing social structures, provoking both ire and fascination. She married into a dynasty doomed to eat itself alive. She was repeatedly associated with the supernatural, both in terms of love and death. Her life was shaped entirely by uncanny repetitions - two marriages, two widowhoods, two depositions, two flights to sanctuary, two ultimate reclamations, all paralleling and ricocheting off each other. Her plight after 1483 exposed the true rot at the heart of the monarchy - the trappings of royalty pulled away to reveal nothing, a never-ending cycle of betrayal and war, the price of power being the (literal) blood of children. She lived past the end of her family name, she lived past the end of her myth. She ended her life in a deeply anomalous position, half-in and half-out of royal society. She was both a haunting tragedy and the ultimate survivor who was finally free.

[the-labyrinth-of-me]

Wait did both Alice and Zane record Alan when he was at his lowest point? Didn't Alice make her exhibition to show the world what she sees? To show Alan the truth about himself? That it never was Scratch visiting and terrorizing her, but Alan himself? Did she depict his "self" and Zane depicted his "persona"? The two sides of him that he wishes he can eliminate bc they brought him into trouble (Scratch representing anger and the fallouts with paparazzi and stuff, Zane representing his self-destructive behavior with alcohol and drugs and the party nights)? The both sides that caused his marriage to start falling apart? Was that the reason Zane made that video of Alan when they were on that booze and drug-fueled bender while working on the Return manuscript? Is this party video the companion piece?? Alan's downward spiral, same as Alice's photos? Do they fucking work together aasdffjfjfkfk

[posletsvet]

Death Is a Mirror, or How Death Is Linked to the Sense of Self in Jujutsu Kaisen

Death is a fulcrum of Jujutsu Kaisen's message, a major point of reference for both the audience and the characters within the story. Death is a mirror that catches and reflects the last light of a life reaching its end, a moment of full disclosure that overcomes all distances and renders all defenses permeable. Death is a mirror as it asks one question: who are we when there's no more need to lie?

The thread that binds together all major characters' deaths in Jujutsu Kaisen is how, despite multiple characters trying in an unreliable-narrator-sort of fashion to convince us otherwise, no one's truly alone in death. The connections that people forge with others throughout their lives become their tethers to the world -- and then reach even further, transcending death itself. This is how humans, using Jogo's words, can still linger after they die: through the loving memory of those they held dear.

No human exists in a vacuum. We live in the context of our relationships with the world, of getting to know and getting to be known in return. Our lives, in a sense, are a dialogue -- that's why we give and are given names. We shape the images of ourselves through establishing connections with others; our self-recognition and sense of self come from recognizing those connections. Once again, we learn the outllines of our souls by bumping into others.

These two concepts, recollecting your 'tethers' before death and acquiring self-reflection in others, are consistently brought together in the story. Before everything else, it's reflected in Yuuji's (who the story's focal point as its protagonist) idea of a meaningful death, one gone surrounded by those you love. Nobara, who possesses arguably the strongest sense of self with her loud proclamation 'I'm Nobara Kugisaki!' and who's highly conscious about her relationships with other people. Megumi, whose overarching struggle for self-determination has him relying on others to define his own worth and leaves him passively suicidal. Toji, who in his last moments thinks about his family and understands that by leaving them behind he deviated from his true self. Nanami, whose fading mind conjures the image of his closest friend and who, guided by that, chooses to go south and stay true to himself. Kokichi is yet another example, and actually quite an interesting one. His character is explored primarily through the juxtaposition between the concept of 'the body within the world' and his forced isolation, but who still contextualizes the world through his connections with his friends. It's no coincidence that Kokichi's character arc is closely linked to Mahito, who is dubbed a mirror of death.

In short, there's a plethora of instances where death and one's sense of self are tied to one another like that. I'll ramble a bit about how this correlation is discovered in both Gojo and Geto's characters below the cut.

The lack of self

Gojo is somebody who's essentially lacking both connections to others and a sense of self-identity. His entire personality is shaped around the notion that he's The Strongest, the very thing which prevents him, even if in his own mind, from building meaningful relationships with the people around him.

Not having to challenge or change his self-image, Gojo has little to no recognition of himself as a person outside of his title. He has never faced a need to discover himself in relation to the world; he was given a foundation to construct his identity on upon birth. Did he really need to grow past that and redefine himself? Satoru lacks self-reflection -- most literally.

With Gojo's face obscured by the gaping void, we do not get to see his reflection. I'd say it's quite an apt visualization of Gojo's identity crisis. Who are you if not The Strongest? As Gojo's position is challenged with his Infinity suddenly overcome, this question is forced onto him.

But as he's spent over a decade trying to escape answering it, he never got a chance to acquire a definitive answer. So now, in Shibuya, he flees from it once more.

It's painfully ironic and at the same time fully logical that it is Geto who exposes this issue to Satoru as Gojo's sense of self is arguably connected to him more than anyone else. During their student years Suguru was the one who persistently rejected treating Gojo as a title and not a person, who looked through decorum and actively chose to see him not as Gojo Satoru, The Strongest but rather as Gojo Satoru, a teenage boy. For Gojo, it was through Geto recognizing him as a person that he was able to reach that recognition, too.

But after Toji Gojo is forced to seek self-affirmation and validate his ego by reclaiming his position, which was threatened by him losing to somebody for the first time. He tries to reinforce his self-image by separating himself from the world, which ultimately leads not only to his now automatic Infinity rendering him unreachable (= disconnected), but also to a loss of his sense of self as he loses his one and only connection.

As I've already said, with the Prison Realm breaching the defenses of Gojo's technique, this issue, his lack of a firm sense of identity beyond his title, is exposed to him once more. It's reflected in the way Satoru places his priorities post-unsealing. He fights Sukuna with seemingly a single purpose of cementing his position as the strongest sorcerer alive and thus regaining his uderstanding of who he is. The answer to this question has never lain in the plane of strength alone, though, and that is why Satoru fails utterly.

But in death, as the relevance of his Infinity is eliminated, Gojo is finally able to reconnect with his sense of self. He's reverted to his teenage self, to the time he could still relate to somebody on a personal level and get stronger for it. The entirety of the 236 chapter, in a sense, is written as an affirmative: he is The Strongest because he is Satoru Gojo, not the opposite, but it's his death which makes him finally recognize this.

The deviation from self

Now, this image could not be intended as a visual parallel to Gojo's reflection, or lack of thereof, in the Prison Realm's eye. Nonetheless seeing that scene in Shibuya animated immediately reminded me of it, and I think there potentially might be some thematic similarities between the two as well.

Talking about how our identities are defined by our connections to other people as much as our relationship with ourselves, it'd be only logical to assume that Geto should have a firm grasp on who he is. Not only is he a deeply self-reflective character, but also one who actively relates to others.

However, Geto's reflection in Gojo's eyes is unclear and uncertain, almost indistinguishable. It might be a neat way to convey how, finally taking a moment to look at his best friend for the first time since SPVI, Gojo doesn't really recognize him for how much he's changed. But it also could hint at how Geto, driven to the point where he bends and warps his beliefs to justify his actions, also bends and warps his sense of self.

At least how I see it, the image above calls to mind this panel:

The moment Geto tells Satoru he's decided on 'his true feelings' which would define him as a person. Isn't it ironic how in the exact same conversation he talks about how the goal he's settled upon is only possible for Gojo, meaning striving to achieve it would be akin to trying to become someone he's not? The light novel outright tells us as much:

This was the final confession of a man who could only choose to warp himself, who had erased himself in pursuit of his goals. The only person who could bear such a curse was Gojo Satoru.

In this light it's interesting how Gojo's struggle with his sense of self makes itself known through something which threatens his position as The Strongest, whereas Geto's is reflected in the eyes of someone to whom he refers while saying 'If I could become you...', deviating from himself.

A major factor of overcoming trauma is embracing the inadequacy of what happened. So, to a certain extent, by becoming an enemy to the system Suguru wants to prove the world of jujutsu sorcerers wrong and himself -- right. It once again reminds me of Toji's dying thoughts.

The flip side of 'deciding on your true feelings' is ultimately anchoring your entire identity to what is just a single aspect of it. People exist in motion, and our personalities are in actuality as dynamic and complex as our relationships. But Geto bound his self-definition to what was rather simply a reactive feeling, so in the end he inevitably failed to live up to it.

And once again, it's exposed at the moment of Suguru's death. In his case, though, this failure is also what leads to his defeat and consequent death in the first place. I also find it curious how Geto's face is the first thing Gojo sees in the afterlife, while Gojo's face is the last thing Geto sees and acknowledges in his life. And just like Gojo, in his last moments Suguru reminisces about their shared past.

The image almost mirrors what we saw in the chapter 236, suggesting how Geto's true self is in turn tied to Satoru. Despite how vague and uncertain their relationship's come to be, the two are rendered inseperable even in death -- or rather, in death especially.

[m-a-r-i--c-h-a-t]

but who told them all my distorted thoughts lmao

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[lily-lilou]

Aaravos and his grand plan

Hi everyone, it's my yearly apparition on Tumblr after s6 finally being released. Hope you're all doing okay since last time I was here :D

Hehe! (... sorry I only ever come here every 7th tuesday of the month T.T)

So! Guess you'll have noticed our dear Startouch never actually said anything about his "new purpose" after that trial and its ghastly conclusion, and I'll also guess you (like Terry) can already say it's not something pleasant.

I mean, we all knew, to some extent, that he had to do what he was doing for a "good" reason. I think I remember saying (ages ago >_>’’’) that if he really wanted power, he could have taken it or something. Or more likely that it was uselesss because he already had that power : he was respected, powerful, practically a god amongst mortal.

Now we know why:

First, we have a motive, the cutest little bean ever :

(the art guys! The ART!!! Leola bring adorableness to new hight and Aaravos is such a dad and it hurts my poor heart u_u)

(also, I'll totally admit I had many ideas but I really didn't see that one coming. I should have, this IS a story about relationships, especially between parents and children)

Second : he acted the way he did, only moving from the shadows, always pushing others to do what he wanted, very probably to avoid triggering the eyes of the cosmic order. They're all about seeing the grand scheme of things, the general picture (Callum's book and also their arguments during Leola's trial are proof of it). Aaravos more than anyone would know their flaws, especially them missing tiny little details.

Anyway! We can guess that whatever happened with Luna Tenebris, Queen Aditi, Sol Regem and a lot of other people was either for vengeance, or, at the very least, a way to remove potential obstacle in said vengeance. And I'm impressed with his way of killing two birds with one stone, like we saw with Sol Regem : Aaravos made him kill his own mate, allowing him to avoid being noticed/reprimanded by the cosmic order by interfering, AND ensuring a hard vengeance on the archdragon (because losing someone you love is hard, learning you killed them yourself is worse).

(We'll have a minute of silence for Mr Witness and the hell of a price he paid for what he did... and we'll remove at least 50 seconds because I had HOPE for him, when he refused the Sun Seed to heal his eyes… and then he went about healing his wings and I thought “Just go die already!” And guess what? He did!)

But now, what about his "new purpose"? His Grand Plan?

Ooooh, nothing, really...

...

Well, guys... everything is the title.

I mean, the title's panel!

What?

We learned with the last episode that, apparently, stars can fall, nah?

And in our dear picture above, we have a LOT of stars falling, don't you think so?

[psychomusic]

so. I've been reading some posts on the jedi order tag AND i won't talk about my opinion on "are jedi good or bad discourse" BUT i wanna point out some lore to everyone who's complaining about the jedi taking kids into their order: (in the EU) it wasn't always like this.

if you take swtor era (more than 3000 years before the prequels) there were many jedi who joined at an older age. like, for example there was a guy who broke his engagement to become one. most jedi remember their families because they were old enough when they decided to go.

THEN in darth bane's book trilogy (circa 1000 yesrs before the prequels) there is a passage where two sith lords are talking about taking bane, already an adult, to study at korriban. one doubted him because he was too old, ans the other told him he sounded like a jedi, and that ONE DAY jedi will have to accept only kids into their ranks if they really want to find "pure" people that can learn their lessons quicker.

one day!! so it wasn't always like that!! the ongoing wars with the sith, who corrupted and killed many of them, had pressured them into taking always younger people into their ranks.

also, consider a thing that this video explains super well: training to become a jedi is not like exercising, because there is a transformative lesson at the end of the training that changes everything. you can't just do as much as you can, but not finish.

the transformative lesson, as the video explains, is that through the force, everything is the same - from rocks and ships to life and death. at the end of the training you have to understand this fundamental truth.

yoda says "you have to unlearn what you have learned". during times where they were constantly killed off or corrupted by the dark side (and if you haven't learned this lesson you are more susceptible to this corrupting), younger people were taken in to actually finish their training (a training that was ultimately about being a good person AND that you could leave at any point if you weren't sold on that, too)

(remember that for the sith failure = death. like. that was the alternative for force sensitive kids. it's not like sith had any moral problem with taking kids away without consent. sith don't have moral problems: they believe that them being stronger in the force means they can do whatever they want as long as their strong enough to go and do it. there are MANY passages in many different star wars stories, even in different mediums, that say this out loud)

AND (this is more of a critical thought than just stating the lore) the fact that they started doing it out of necessity doesn't mean it's 100% good BUT you know. the whole set up of the prequels is that we're starting off the story in a period of crisis and decadence all around. most of the systems of the times were about to fall. OF COURSE they had problems. if they didn't, we wouldn't have the story to begin with.

that doesn't automatically mean jedi = bad and sith are better, tho. you wouldn't take the last, chaotic and decadent period to jugde something, would you? it's like deciding that the athenian democracy sucked because people at the times of Demosthenes failed at recognizing the new schemes in which the world was evolving into, and still believed that their city would be important as it had been in the previous century. They just didn't fucking expect the Macedons would conquer half the world known and more, and have the subsequent political power. Still, their experiences in the 5th century with democracy were very good, even better than ours on many fronts, if you contextualize a little. the jedi had flaws, and most importantly, they didn't fucking know the future and everything that ever happened, ever, so they made mistakes. that doesn't automatically make the system ill, or bad, or not-working. systems can have setbacks when the world changes. (just like athenian democracy had one when they lost the empire that was funding the democracy. they even had a tyranny for a while and then fixed the problems. that doesn't diminish retrospectively their democracy)

[the-casbah-way]

i’m assuming jamie was written out for real-world logistical reasons but i don’t think he could or should have come back anyway. when the attack dog goes rabid and gnaws through his own fucking leash there's nothing much anyone can do but stand there and watch. you can train a dog to bite for you but once they've got enough of a taste for blood they're going to stop giving a shit about who they've got between their teeth so long as there's something to tear into. maybe malcolm never had jamie on a leash in the first place. maybe jamie didn't bite because malcolm asked him to. maybe he just liked the taste of blood. malcolm hired a loyal dog and got what he paid for because at the end of the day jamie stayed so loyal that it became the death of him. loyal to the party. not malcolm