#i genuinely have so much retroactive beef with that show | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

olivemeister · 3 years ago

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OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

#neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #this turned into a behemoth. im so sorry #I CHECKED AND IT'S OVER 11K WORDS #I'M SO FUCKING SORRY

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years ago

Text

13x17 watching notes

*vague muffled noises*

Expectations: got to come down from an all-time great episode but it's Davy so I'm not worried about a huge drop off, and I'm legitimately intrigued, of all things, to meet Asmodeus written by someone other than Buckleming. Davy in season 12 briefly fooled me with 12x15 that the Crowley and Lucifer subplot might be worth watching, alas to no greater end as no one else wrote it for the rest of the year really. But in any case, he gets the honour of writing Gabriel so much better him to sell me on it than Buckleming :P I am therefore far more prepared to have Gabriel back on these terms and conditions...

The MoL recap skipped showing Cas with popcorn and I'm automatically deducting an entire out of ten score. This episode may end up being perfect in every other respect but would only get 9/10

They also didn't show Cas booping Ketch to sleep for no reason other than it being funny. 8/10

NOW: "1925"

This is super illuminati. Aka what Dean was worried about in 8x13 when they were first snooping around the Bunker... to this point, they never discovered anything worse than racist old men, or the weird British chapter. No signs of SERIOUS cult activity among the Americans, rather than it being a supernatural book club with a heroic purpose.

Leave that poor flapper alone.

Er are they literally doing the same spell? Terrified flappers make the WORST interdimensional travellers.

Honestly, though, the illuminati MoL aquarian star is super cool in a really spooky way

TENTACLE

Retroactively makes me wonder about 6x21 and if HP Lovecraft's friends were MoL and up to some nonsense. Obviously that was purgatory not an AU but it's all curiosity and who knows anything about all this stuff :P they all probably just want to see monsters, you know. The show's presentation of Lovecraft definitely made home look like the profile of a MoL they use later when these are a thing.

DEAN, LEAVE YOUR BROTHER ALONE. If he's sleeping on the table he's overworked and doesn't need this nonsense :P

Sam... go to bed.

Since their mom is still in an AU I'm taking over

Considering Dean has coffee he probably came in here with coffee, saw Sam like that, and went to get post it notes. If Sam was alert he'd be questioning that Dean's coffee was already on the table when Dean is pretending to just come into the room.

Oh no re: 6x21 - Dean called it Kryptonite.

How are there always more rooms in the Bunker? ... I have like 9 messages from Trisscar I haven't been looking at but suddenly I can guess :P

It appears to be opposite 7d, meaning this may be 7c, and a boring archive room rather than room 7b, which is the smaller archive room with a DUNGEON behind it

Dean is great in the research montage

Also that implies Sam had the post it notes the entire day, which given the half life of post it note glue is stretching credibility :P

Uh... They need to be more careful about just assuming random glowing rocks people dig up in the holy land are definitely the thing they are looking for.

I mean the cold open seems to imply it genuinely IS, but that's no excuse for being like glowing rock + glowing rock = success

Jinkies!

*sexy driving montage*

Okay this place is both spooky AND unlocked. Maybe because Jensen doesn't have another flip over a fence in him, but it's also pretty ominous about the useage of this place.

I love how in the modern age you just put the coordinates of your creepy destination into your phone and follow it and then get out at the first abandoned building dead on the spot and be like welp google told us to go get murdered by cultists here so

"Ask questions get answers" Are you not going to ask about the EYE?

That's a disturbing lack of concern for something essentially thematically "alter the sigil alter the spell" - the MoL vs the weird cultist chapter which clearly has a difference from the one they're used to because of the different symbol. Whatever level the MoL Sam and Dean know about, knew in turn about these guys, whether they disowned or quietly let them get on with it or what... this is not meant to mean the same as just casually finding another home base...

Just dropping in for a cup of tea and a seal of solomon

Uhoh the books all over the floor don't bode well

"Looks familiar, huh?"

*Sam finally spots an eyeball aquarian star* "Except for that"

you don't say

"Great. More books."

"You love books."

Honestly Dean kinda does and half of this goofing off from earlier was performative... He DOES find some types of research super boring but that doesn't mean he doesn't read for fun and also retain information well from books and hit the books when necessary.

Sam's just much more driven right now, meaning that Dean's being played off in contrast as mostly normal. Aka not wildly driven to do the reading himself, which in turn isn't just a usual character trait but shows how desperately Sam's at it.

uhoh those photos look like kidnappable flapper research

Sandy Porter :D

I hope that's supposed to say "age: 23" but I can't unread it as "eyes: 23" and the handwriting is weird.

SOLOMON 1917

I think we have found the thing... now the question is did this weird cult appear BECAUSE of the seal or was it they were already weird and they ended up bagging it for their experiments?

Their letter header already has the aquarian eye...

Sam/Jared casually breaking everything on the shelf

why did they leave that take in

Oh I guess he had to make noises to make Sandy start yelling for help

(I assume it's her or something that LOOKS like her)

I love Dean's photographic memory. And when we get flashes of him remembering stuff on screen like this

Sam's like What the Fuck

Aha it's Ketchmodeus time

Arthmodeus?

I love how Sam n Dean are wearing grey and they plop Dean's bi plaid over Sandy's grey flapper dress.

(She's called Sandy with blonde hair and Mary's middle name is Sandra)

Query: where WAS Dean keeping the plaid, or did he go up first, get a rope and a shirt and then we skipped all the stuff where they get a lil person who can't just hop up and reach the manhole cover again out of the hole in the ground :P

She's also skipped ahead in time from being a flapper and is now a millenial, possibly possessed by an Elder God hence the long life etc :P But she and Mary share the backstory in a way of being transported out of their right time

Is Ketch reading one of Crowley's old books from when he was raising Amara? Pfft. It's not uncle hoppity but it is obviously for a child, and is a way of demeaning him... He's reading it probably out of both boredom and spite... :P

... But the demons are apparently too fussed about cat videos to pay attention to him...

wha t is this episode

I have to admit at some undisclosed point I went to yoga, fell asleep on the floor in a rec hall and have since eaten my weight in chocolate avacado cake and coffee, so I am fairly addled :P

Oh, yep, Asmodeus is beefing himself up with angel juice, who EVER would have guessed it

it also reads like an addiction, and as this was introduced in season 9 around the time of Crowley's demon blood addiction and Dean with the Mark and Cas eating grace, it's almost surprising the needle was only ever implied to be for extraction.

But now we have Lucifer eating grace, and Asmodeus injecting it - the question is if he's addicted to it or not.

I'd assume as well if this was planned from the start, his colonel sanders look might also have been, social commentary aside, because the wanted a demon dressed all in white and looking clean and shiny like an angel

*demon minion comes blundering in a minute late* "I tried to stop him!"

This is absolutely 100%, no, 1000% vagueblogging Buckleming and how idiotic the Hell plot is and I am living for it

Poor squeaky Gabriel

They take Sandy to the most retro diner they can find... Inside, we meet patrons and staff with names immediately, before the Winchesters enter... The apparent owner, Joanne, amused by "Buck and Amy", one of her staff and a teenage boy, then says she'd hit it with Buck if Amy won't, which is SUPER creepy... Her cook apparently doesn't speak English or speak at all, so she feels free to say horrible things in front of him

Buck looks vaguely Jack-like just because he's a teenage boy with floppy hair

They really are easing her in slow with the modern age, this diner is decrepit, but just this many electric lights is enough for now >.>

Plus, they arrived in a car from the 60s

And she's messing with an ancient jukebox

This is adorable

i mean there's some high level creepiness in the diner, which I assume is Still Too Local and they ought to have crossed state lines...

I wonder at this point if their immediate vicinity to Asmodeus's lair is relevant. They'd know from Cas now that he's still using it. I mean, do you detour in your road trip to an ancient MoL bunker because you know the demon currently running Hell is camped out just down the road?

They're getting Sandy the meatloaf... Pretty sure that was what Mary said she got from the Piggly Wiggly in 12x02

Oh great, people who tattoo the aquarian eye on their arms. "Marco"'s name is in quotation marks.

HE CAN SPEAK

"Wait, these men of letters were the ones who... chained you down there?" Sam, you KNOW the MoL aren't perfect... are you really going to struggle with this? :P She was in THEIR secret Bunker chained up in the secret bunker's secret basement, surrounded by corrupted Aquarian stars. It's like 99% likely this was an inside job, especially as it's the longest pay off for a character defamation fraud ever otherwise :P

More tentacles!

Okay, look, you guys need Mary back and on your side because I swear to god if she goes into the bathroom and gets kidnapped because you're an all dude team then I'm going to scream.

you NEED women to support women because sometimes we really do go to the bathroom in a pack to avoid being kidnapped by cultists who want to feed us to tentacle monsters from another dimension

Oh no, they're all just being poisoned so they can be ritually murdered later

Aw "pet angel" again. Gabriel is overhearing this intel, so he knows the Winchesters are alive, doing shit, and Cas is still alive and doing shit with them... All good basic intel you should probably not let the one angel who cared about them in season TWO know. I mean, Azazel and Gabriel are the ONLY players who cared about them back when the status quo of the world was still in balance - from season 3 onwards everyone wanted a piece of Sam, and Dean's soul was rapidly heading towards breaking the first seal so everyone now had a stake in them. But Gabriel? He's a total hipster about bothering the Winchesters when they were wee little babby hunters to see if they were up to the task... and found they were.

Now he's back in canon I'm going to be evaluating him as carefully as I can with such a retconned and fandom beloved and fanon-bedecked character, and I think in our advantage for having him back, he's in a state we've never seen him before... genuinely in trouble :P

And Gabriel peers curiously through the bars as Asmodeus starts explaining their plans

"It's time we talk about us" please stop trying to make Ketchmodeus happen

A shot of them from a million miles away, a million miles between them, sliced off by a pillar. Ketch standing in the light. Asmodeus in the dark with yellow candles around him.

I am pretty sure this room is 10000x more candle-y than before.

When I was doing my rewatch of the early seasons a few summers ago I was so amused by the bajillion candles, a trend which died out with the colour format of the show changing, and any time a character shows up who needs a billion candles (e.g. Abaddon in 9x02) I get disproportionately excited that they *understand* the show :P

In this case, Asmodeus really needs all the links back to the start he can get, because he's a new, weak demon, one specifically called out in 13x12 of being the weakest of Lucifer's creations, and here shown juicing up on poor Gabriel, all a meta commentary on him being a rubbish character inserted as the last of the retconned princes of hell, his literal strength as a character weak and flimsy when it comes to caring about him, because after all the show has been through, retroactively adding ancient powers is a serious problem about "where were they before?" and so many of them need to have been lost, disinterested, locked away, buried and hidden and forgotten. In Asmodeus's case, possibly just looked over and neglected, and he's been having a pissy sulk about not being invited to the apocalypse for the last 10 years, since we know nothing about where he was before, but he's at least seemed to have his liberty and he waited out every single major player more powerful than him, and is appearing as a desescalation of a threat as a big bad so ridiculous the show is mocking him for being comically weedy, petty and out of touch or useless, or plain stupid. Even *Buckleming* seem aware he's an idiot at times.

And now Perez is writing this fucker and I actually have to character profile him >.>

Anyway Ketch is talking about their relationship, Asmodeus is trying to escalate his control over Ketch to "owning" him and pushing his luck really - Ketch being humiliated with the kid's book is a power play but Asmodeus really sucks at power plays and plans and all round... doing things...

I love watching Ketch get beaten up even if it is Asmodeus

Ah well

Was Asmodeus almost scary?

I mean, I suppose if we were supposed to care about Ketch a bit

After season 12 it's more like... Can we just have everyone beat him up once?

Dean is also stuck on the MoL being tweed wearing and harmless

And Sam avoiding carbohydrates... like... at least he ordered a couple of plates of food but he is a Big Guy, he needs to eat more than this!!

In some ways it reflects their endgame, e.g. Dean is still self-destructing and you could imagine either sticking a middle finger to any higher purpose supposed to affect him, or else bitter that he is never allowed off the ride... away from that, just the belief that it's winning to be killed by food rather than a monster. And he's been killed on the job enough to know the difference.

Sam, keeping himself sharp, suppoesdly (even if he is falling asleep on the table) and keepnig healthy long term, which may or may not be to some eventual endgame, that he plans on winning

I swear if anything skeezy happens to Buck...

Oh good, he's just noticed the cultists first while the professional hunters are busy eating... Maybe we all just get locked in here or something

Aaaand Sam's asleep on the table again. This is why you carb load

I guess no one's sticking post it notes on him this time

ALSO if it's that fast acting and the service is so slow here, you have a problem :P

The cultists' robes are similar colour to the wait staff uniform

I love the new fight coordinator

Cmon Sam, you only had one bite

Whoops he's being kidnapped

where is Sandy???

Nice one, eldritch flapper! :D :D

She has the "i just killed someone" look so I figure that whatever the monster did to her, she's not totally lost to it

Are they just keeping Sam as a hostage exchange? They're still just surrounding the diner...

At least Dean knows how to make a weapon out of anything

oh dear sweet cinnamon roll "we have to call the police!"

... Yep, one of the cultists is part of the local police. At which point me, having written a novel with red-robed cultists running around a town sacrificing girls and secretly being local authority figures is like... welp...

Aw, Dean, don't go charging after Sam. He already was like no don't go to the creepy bunker alone.

At least weigh your options and get a lay of the land first :/

I mean I would assume they want Sandy in exchange which means not happening, but...

Yep, they want the monster/god

Sandy is not very much of either :(

"our family was men of letters" "so was ours..." "kinda"

Okay so they want a clean start with this God, from another dimension, which is exactly what Michael wants, and it's currently in the Mary mirror.

Oh boy

"oh boy" indeed, it ate everyone and they bound it again, but it's still inside Sandy... Glowy purple eyes which is pretty ominous. She's also a Rowena mirror in a sense, including the monster, and there would be an interesting meta after this probably, when it's all said and done, to compare the scale of bound, hungry women

in this case, they accidentally made a devouring mother goddess which is more like... Amara... But it wants a mate

Aaaand the MoL banned all the members who were involved in this nonsense. See, you guys literally have the box of members who were banned... Bit of digging on the history of this chapter house and it would be like, dude, a dozen of these guys were banned for SUMMONING AN ELDRITCH MONSTROSITY

Ow, wow, Asmodeus has 4 vials of archangel grace knocking around... he seems to really have an issue here if he needs that much, constantly

menas stealing Gabriel from him will dry him out quickly, but also motivate him to get him back, unlike how he's just like pfft whatever about losing Cas and Lucifer

He and Ketch are getting deep and philosophical... First of all, I am a little concerned that Asmodeus is OOC for not having the depth of thought of a teaspoon, and very little will get me interested in their inner lives in any case because I refuse to let Ketch be made sympathetic on the grounds that he's a dick and I'm allowed to draw a line.

Anyway they're having a conversation about a MoL code which means these stories sort of metaphorically overlap and that's weird and I'm not certain how to handle thematic balance with them because we're actually exploring what it means to be a legacy here, and all the different toxic threads that each family is upholding etc

Fortunately Asmodeus keeps calling Ketch "boy" so the squicky Ketchmodeus I fear is just enough to keep me on edge through this scene :P

(to be clear, I don't fear it in the show so much as fearing that fandom will Kylux latch onto it and everyone will be shipping the shit out of it to an intolerable level, despite the aforementioned emotional ranges of teaspoons for these boring racist-coded white dudes)

But there's some blah about redeeming Ketch which is making me very nervous they're going to try

The was Asmodeus talks about Ketch belonging to him makes me wonder that whatever deal they struck to get into this partnership, there's some magical connection, more than just this emotional weakness that Asmodeus is talking about exploiting. Mostly because one is nuanced and one will be appropriate for Buckleming to play with, should they choose to acknowledge another writer's continuity.

(And I think half the reason Dabb's banished them to a separate plot is that they disrespect others' attempts to write the story that in leiu of collaboration, he's stuck them over here to do their own thing where they can't mess anything up...)

oh no don't send Buck out there with a kitchen knife

What is Dean doing? Amy and Joanne can't be in control of this situation??

That sounds very un-feminist of me but they did just send Buck out with a tiny weeny knife, like, not even a steak knife

Awhooops, the more the other MoL cultists talk, the more they sound like they're just managing a mistake their grandfather made, and Sam and Dean blundered into it as the bad guys, inadvertently "rescuing" Sandy (WHO I STILL LIKE) in their own quest for personal gain. Aka selfish actions beget consequences

Oh, that's a lot of dead cultists.

Oh, Sandy no don't eat Buck

RIP Buck

Dean is still distracted trying to do whatever to save Sam, and while stockpiling weaponry has missed both Sandy slipping away AND Joanne and Amy sending Buck out to get eaten

AAAH LEAVE DEAN ALONE

Also it's so unsettling having a monster wandering around in one of his most iconic shirts... I'll have to worry about that later but yikes. The imagery is unsettling to say the least. It's a really memorable one.

DRAMATIC EYE CONTACT between Ketch and Gabriel

Trying not to think about how that looked weirdly like the Claire Kaia intro eye contact

To be fair they've looked at each other a bunch and whatever Ketch thinks of Gabriel, they've had time to form their opinions of each other

He presents his undamaged side of his face to Gabriel while realising he has to free him

This is a hilarious rescue. Ketch isn't good at being a convincing good guy and Gabriel is freaked the heck out

Understandably, I wouldn't go with Ketch

Although idk maybe Gabriel is too traumatised to notice that Ketch was having a personal revelation of sorts

I am so disappointed that "if I had half your power" line didn't lead to Ketch being like "... but Asmodeus does" and grabbing the spare vials from the box he was keeping it all in. Maybe he took it with him

should have been a seduce the bad guy to steal the vials while he sleeps thing

... oh shit, they got me

Okay, the archangel blade works on other things... it's clearly potent

Sam nearly got frying panned by creepy Joanne

Meanwhile also in much older women going for young lads (proportionately), Dean has been picked as ideal mate material, in a season where he's already been whammied with a love spell, and just last episode Cas got married.

How comes all this imagery keeps hittnig them?

I ask the void

when today the void is represented by Eldritch Flapper Sandy from the void.

Okay, I don't know how to spell her eldritch name, but "star of madness ravager of galaxies mother of faceless hordes" is hecka cool

I'm sad that Sandy is dead but this eldritch thingy is still sorta badass

Mittens just told me this is set the same place as the open of 6x21, the same place HP Lovecraft is from, so that confirms my musings at the top of this :D I am delighted

She just misses her love from another universe.

"It's like a hallmark movie... with tentacles!"

that is not a deal breaker for Dean, I think

Anyway. Dean being confronted with this sweet love story. Now he will be the host to an epic, galaxy-crushing romance! Awww!!

She's gonna lay eggs in him though

i hope that's a dealbreaker

Also the whole... possession threat... when we've had spoilers jensen's playing something else

I assume not this guy

WHERE DID THE MOL GET THIS ANGEL GRACE BTW?

I feel like this has to be Gabriel again unless Raphael or Michael fucked up at some point and we're gonna find out later, just from the fact only one of them wasn't bound for most of human history or in Heaven, but actually slumming it on earth

We know literally nothing of Gabriel's history except that he dated Kali so there's that

Okay the tentacles are a deal breaker, Dean's grossed out

UHOH SPACE TENTACLES

Bye bye eldritch flapper... you were fun

(RIP Sandy)

Guess they will go back to ravaging stars together in the darkness

ALSO I really hope there's a way to STEER THIS FUCKING SPELL

elizabethrobertajones Huh. Tentacles are the dealbreaker for Dean who knew after 13 years there's something weird and kinky he isn't at least curious about :P

elizabethrobertajones Oh wait never mind "not that there's anything wrong with that" he is a consentacles guy

mittensmorgul BAHAHAHAHA

mittensmorgul He's not gonna kink shame

Also Dean is wondering if there's a way to steer the spell as well

Okay so they actually know how to work it - you can only go to AUs you already have a part of, and a time limit which will be for drama when they finally open this thing...

Do they have to bring this back to them afterwards? I hope so :P

Dean coming down the stairs joking about nearly being an interdimensional booty call after collecting one of the spell ingredients directly mirrors Cas coming down the stairs yelling about how he had to get married to get one of the OTHER ingredients.

I LOVE their Ketch reaction

Okay so Gabriel has said nothing all episode, and I assume Ketch is about to produce him, so the question is... how does Gabriel introduce himself? What's the play? These are the questions I am most curious about because this episode has been defining a lot of characterisation for the previously woefully undercharacterised Asmodeus, fleshing out WTF is Ketch's deal right now, and now Davy has the abilityto set the course (hopefully) for Gabriel.

We have 5 minutes to go

Oh hey he's still bloody and has his mouth sewn

he's just... hauling Gabriel into a chair

Like you do get how this looks suspicious, mate

And Sam and Dean are like uuuuh he's dead so wtf

Which is my reaction too so get to the backstory snap snap

Gabriel's eyes are so panicky I'm worried he's gonna be half-mad

Oh dear, "we need his grace" and Gabriel is like FUCK THAT SHIT YOU'RE NOT EVEN SAVING ME AND IF I'M ACTUAL ME AND NOT AN AU VERSION I FUCKING DIED FOR YOU ASSCLOWNS WHAT THE FUCK. UNSEW MY MOUTH AND LET ME HAVE A BATH

well "HMMM!!! HMM!!!!!!!!! !!!!!"

But I can read subtext

Ketch is just giving them EVERYTHING

they don't even know what that blade IS

Hey, gabriel, just smash your forehead on the grace vial and eat the grace

it's not dignified but who cares :P

Ketch came to the "only safe place he knew" aka a MoL bunker, which, after all, is very very safe. He has to bargain with Sam and Dean, knowing their spell, because "i saved this random archangel I found" isn't probably convincing enough on its own???

LOL "Dibs on the top bunk?"

"no"

"Deal"

Dean... sweetie... you do remember all your subtext with Ketch last year? You know you can't just agree to him taking the top bunk like that?

You're even negotiating either side of the war table again

ALSO WHY IS EVERYONE GETTING KETCH SHIPPING STUFF TODAY? UNSUBSCRIBE

And Dean will let pretty much ANYTHING happen to get Mary and Jack back

the question is, Cas must be at the farmer's market or something all episode because he wasn't there when they were researching and he wasn't there to stop Ketch coming in, so... where is he?

Anyway Dean is speaking on his behalf re: getting Jack back

Sam seems to want to do this on their own and Dean is making compromises again to get what they need

So, uh, Gabriel?

Aw, the Sastiel shippers will be happy, Sam was the one who ended up freeing his mouth, which is probably symbolic regardless, re: giving the Trickster back his main weapon

Omg Dean is ready to go before Gabriel says a word. Dean. Chill. Cas isn't even HERE.

And that makes me feel like whatever Gabriel has to say to break his long silence is even more important that Dean interrupted it (it's gonna not be, now, isn't it?)

"Shouldn't we wait?"

"Why?"

CAS YOU FUCKHEAD

"We have everything we need, everything else is just burning daylight"

Dean is again trying to leave Sam behind to manage things, and go in and do it alone. Dude, you literally nearly had eggs laid in you by an interdimensional flapper, you need to think about this.

LOL Ketch wants to go with them because it's safer than staying here being hunted by Asmodeus

I mean fair enough, and he's scarily competent

But it's making it look to Sam like Dean would rather have Ketch around than Sam???

Also WHERE IS CAS?

"I don't care if he dies. I'm sort of rooting for it."

Crack episode next where because Dean has interdimensionally travelled before, he ends back up in French Mistake Verse where he's Jensen and Ketch is DHJ (again? see also: 13x07 notes) and they have to get back before they can do the dramatic stuff

Anyway Dean is doing the sacrificial play, Sam watches his cholesterol so he has to stay on earth

I can't believe they're just opening a portal in the library and for 24 hours there's just a glowy back and forth hole there

But of course, as long as Dean finds Jack, the time limit doesn't matter

I can't believe Ketch is his BFF for the rest of the season

I can't believe Gabriel didn't SAY anything

What is he going to SAY next? I WANT TO KNOW

I am unbelievably frustrated, because now it passes it on to Buckleming again, and for all I know Davy thinks the whole Gabriel thing is silly, or is nervous of writing the iconic character so he just shoves it all off on them to break canon as they please and he gets something suitably dramatic and tension building and intentionally frustrating out of it but at the end of the day he doesn't have to directly ENGAGE with the Gabriel is back story, and it's all gonna be Bucklemninged next week

Aurgh.

Auuuurgh.

#13x17 #season 13 spoilers #my stuff

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