#i might just be biased given the subject matter but. idk i think it's nice

[deepfriedpaddymayne]

The Dead Poet, by Lord Alfred Douglas (1901) / Paddy Mayne & Eoin McGonigal in SAS: Rogue Heroes 2x06 (2025)

[bloatsome]

Why R*wling failed to make Lily Evans a Mary Sue:

Moral superiority

Lily was a Gryffindor, and there is enough proof that everyone else thought less of Slytherins. The author has tried to convey that Lily was better than everyone else because she was friends with a Slytherin. However there is more than enough evidence of Lily being friends with Severus because they went way back and there is NO WAY they would be friends if they didn't know each other from their childhood. One, the Gryffindors didn't interact with the Slytherins and two, EVERY DAMN thing Snape did was questioned, and shown to be horrible by Lily. She didn't look at things from his perspective. (More on that later)

Lily also made it seem like she was doing him a favour by giving him her companionship.

She shows disdain towards Snape's likes and dislikes, and doesn't even treat him as a normal person should be treated. It was almost as if her friend was the scum of the earth and she was assigned to look after him for a bit.

Selectively forgiving

Plenty of instances of Lily being biased towards Gryffindor house in general, and the Marauders in specific. She tells Snape she can't ignore the fact that his friends used dark magic on Mary which we are not given context about (it could've been making her tap dance, for all we know). But what we are given context about is the Marauders sexually assaulting Snape. However that is okay with Lily, she even goes as far to smile (and possibly laugh) at it.

Maybe because they didn't use dark magic to choke and pantse Snape, or maybe, as the rest of the school would agree, it doesn't matter because it's a poor, ugly Slytherin.

Hypocritical

Lily says "I don't understand how you could hang around Avery and Mulciber" but befriends the Marauders (who were not just pranksters, they were BULLIES). She tells Snape to ditch his friends, the only people he could talk to without getting hurt, but cannot ditch her own friends to be there for him, implying a hypocritical and as mentioned, seemingly superior nature.

Not compassionate

Contrary to what is usually said about Lily:

"Your mother was not only a singularly gifted witch, but also an uncommonly kind person. She saw the best in everyone, even when they didn't see it in themselves"

Lupin's famous quote about Lily holds true, but only in HIS case.

Lily did not see the best in Severus. She was always telling him he was obsessed with the Marauders and he should be thankful James saved his life, after putting him in peril. She said he can't make her think otherwise (because she was always in the right, wasn't she?) and was mad at him when he said he wouldn't just leave it at Potter's version of the story. She deliberately ignores Severus' pain and worry.

Also the SWM incident. If Lily was really a badass queen who wouldn't stand for discrimination of any sort, then, after Snape called her a mudblood, Lily would NOT have retaliated with a low blow comment about his underwear, shaming his lower class status.

Not really intelligent

I'm not saying Lily was stupid, it's just that her intelligence is overblown in the series. We have several points that can lead us to believe this.

She was supposed to be a potions prodigy. However we know the text book was horse shit and you couldn't properly prepare a potion without diverging from the text. (As shown in HBP) Lily, like Hermione in HBP, couldn't have come too close to perfecting a potion practically, while she might be good at theory.

Maybe I could take her intelligence more seriously if it were in another subject.

Then about her non-academic intelligence, her street smarts, we see that Lily does not find out about James regularly hexing Snape, despite her having many friends and well, the gift of sight. Either she chose to be blissfully ignorant or she really did have no clue what went on around her.

She can't stay friends with someone who called her an offensive term, but can marry a guy who threatened to hex her? (Magical equivalent of hit) Not the smartest move.

Egoistic

Lily knew Severus respected her and held her on a pedestal. She didn't leave his side. James Potter, on the other hand, threatened to hex her and didn't treat her as she (or anyone, really) would want to be treated.

We see that Lily knows Snape's friends (and possibly Snape himself) call people of her birth "mudblood". She still doesn't leave. However, she does leave at a particular point, and that point is when Snape calls her a mudblood.

She befriends the Marauders soon after, as they treat her well enough now that the threat (her friend, Severus) is out of the way.

Superficial OR too deep

Why would Lily Evans, the "nice girl" agree to go out with the school bully? Two possibilities:

1. She thinks it doesn't really matter as he's treated her alright after the SWM incident. He's a popular Gryffindor guy, plays Quidditch, doesn't look bad either, stuff dreams are made of etc etc.

2. She thinks she can "change" him, what every teen girl thinks when you meet a bad boy type, shown in the lines "after he deflated his head a little bit".

Oh my god!! He did it for me! I'm gonna make him a better person and give him all my love.

Honey, spare us the swooning and realize people don't change because you agree to go to Hogsmead with them. But you wanna get pregnant with his child at 19/20? Oh okay then.

Straight up mean

This point only holds true if my one of my earlier ones about her low EQ and street smarts do not.

Lily Evans had an inkling to what went around in the Snape household, but couldn't conjure up enough compassion to be empathetic.

She thinks she can't trust Snape on his word about the werewolf incident when that's what friends do. Why? Because Slytherin = bad.

I don't blame her for leaving Snape friendless after he called her a mudblood (frustrated and humiliated as he was, it was wrong of him) but atleast she could have stopped herself from insulting him BACK. And then, idk, dating his bully maybe? Who threatened to HEX you miss?

It's never made sense to me to be badgered a person till you say yes and then actually falling in love with them.

What does make sense to me is that Lily Evans said yes to James Potter to get back at her former friend. And then fell in love.

All in all, Lily is not only a horrible "friend", but also a uncompelling character to me.

[dkettchen]

Today we’re having our first Ally Book Club! This fortnight we watched Disclosure (2020), the new documentary about trans representation in Hollywood starring Laverne Cox, among many others.

I’ll ask you all to focus primarily on the black trans representation discussed (and other links between how trans/gender diverse people as well as black people were othered since the dawn of cinema f.e.) rather than the trans aspects primarily, as we are focused on black lives matter and anti-racism at the moment. (And also cause I’m trans and nonbinary and I had a lot of feelings abt that whole aspect of it and this is not the place to discuss that (this is for allyship only and I will not be an educator about my own stuff today), I already made a post about that if any fellow nonbinaries would like to go vent about it over there lol) However if you are cis and would also like to share some trans stuff you learnt, you are welcome to ;)

This post is a space to share what you learnt from the media we watch, stuff it’s made you think about, and any progress you feel you’ve made in your own personal allyship journey following it. 

It is meant to be a positive space for allies to support each other in their learning, so trolling, harassment, hate/discriminatory behaviour (related to our subject’s group(s) or otherwise) or shaming will not be tolerated. (Read: I am not afraid to ban anyone from my blog who doesn’t follow these rules)  This doesn’t mean you can’t discuss the demons and biases you’re fighting with on this journey, it merely means ‘don’t be a dick about it.’ I know it’s the internet, but there’s other ppl with feelings and deserving of empathy behind those screennames and this is an exercise in empathy to begin with, so be a decent human being, please. (This also goes for the defenders of the innocent out there, there’s two sides to any argument gotten out of hand.) We’re here to encourage and learn, not to argue and alienate.

I’ll go first! 

The thing with documentaries (and video essays (I would know lol)) is they love to present themselves as factual and unbiased, when, really, anything is biased always. And in a society where they’re usually made by the people with privilege/the majority, it’s always the same status quo POV and we stop questionning it at some point, until a documentary made by disadvantaged/minority voices comes along and scews it in a new direction that we’re not used to.

Because I was paying Extra Attention to the black representation, and because I work in several London trans spaces, I noticed the disparity between numbers of black trans folks I saw on screen vs the ones I know irl (not as many as there were in this doc), and like- my numbers might be scewed by my own experience too, ya know, I prolly know less trans POC than a trans POC would, just like I prolly know more nonbinaries than a trans binary would (also idk what differences in ethnicity groups’ percentages there are between the US & UK population in the first place). But because the documentary presented itself as talking about representation in media at large, I was expecting a similar lack of black voices that I know happens irl in a lot of the world and that I know happens in media, and like- they talked about the lack of representation, but at the same time, they made sure to HAVE representation in their actual film.

I already think way too much about representation in media in general, but basically there’s a few different schools of thought on how you can approach it in any given media: 

-you can represent reality by representing the percentages of different groups among the population, so f.e. in this case you would try and match the percentage of POC and binaries/nonbinaries in the real life trans community to represent it (the BFI’s current diversity goals follow this principle f.e.). In practice though, this tends to lend itself to tokenism and ultimately minorities still end up with less or lesser-quality rep than the majorities, because we are minorities.

-alternatively you can represent reality by the clusters that happen irl. People of a given minority group tend to flock together so if you have one of them it’s highly likely that there’ll be more of the same group in their immediate social circle, so representing a bunch of them together makes sense and accurately represents reality. 

The issue my brain ran into here was that I was expecting the former and it ended up being the latter. Representing the way trans people are portrayed in Hollywood would’ve implied the population overview approach, but Laverne (as one of the producers) and the bunch, instead of kind of- rehashing the depressing statistical reality of how little rep trans people of colour get, they focused on their own experience as trans people of colour, and how they experience representation, whether it’s black rep or otherwise. They left out a lot of white trans rep that is around, because it’s not much different from the examples they used (you can have an argument about also leaving out a lot of what little nonbinary and other genderqueer rep we have in the process, and the unexplored stereotypes associated with that rather than trans binaries, as well as the generational thing where The Youth today prolly would pick different examples of media that impacted them, but still). It is very interesting and refreshing to see a format that is usually very white-cishet-normatively scewed instead being scewed toward the experience of a middle-aged black trans woman. (wow I didn’t know she was in her 40s, I thought she was like a good 10 years younger, good on you Laverne (@cis ppl: yes, even me, who literally works with trans ppl can’t fucking tell what age anyone is, it’s like a 20 year gap of a guess usually x’D))

Please write your own thoughts & stuff you learnt from the doc in the replies! (note: you don’t all have to write half an essay like this lol)  Be nice to one another, my banning hammer and I will check in on the responses later :P

Last post <<<>>> Next post

The next piece of media we’ll watch is the first season (or as many episodes you can manage, but we’ll suppose the whole first season so spoiler alert! :)) of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, a fun cartoon show with an all-POC (and mostly black) main cast (characters as well as their voice actors)!

[cs-discourse]

here we go

https://cs-discourse.tumblr.com/post/179953845684/uuuuwuu-every1-whos-concerned-abt-biased-judging

ok this attitude has been pissing me off long enough that it's time for one of my Big Ole Posts (tm) about how shitty this is! thanks. 

uuuuwuu every1 whos concerned abt biased judging in comps is just soooow entitled !!!1 i cant bewieve ppl wouldnt want some1 whos literally explicitly stating at this point that they trust their friends more to "demonstrate dedication to the character" they assign to a design to b an influence in judging comps !!!!!11 bc artists Never weigh in on other artist's comps, so obviously thes ppl just want fwee merc designs !!!1!!1 also my last braincell just died pleas h

so here's the og post in question for quick reference

i honestly have no idea why people keep bringing up this idea of bias in judging competitions because, while i do think there is a type of bias that certainly exists, i think a lot of so-called "bias" that people have is ... not whatsoever like what people think it is lol. artists are people and there's always going to be SOME kind of bias no matter what you do, because it's literally fuckin impossible to NOT be biased. by that i mean:

your taste in plots/types of characters/medias influence your judging

quality of writing or art can influence your judging

the person who's applying for the adopt you may have previous judgement about

even if you say you aren't biased, you STILL have preferences and tastes in things that you prefer more than others, which in of itself is a kind of bias

people who know you (friends for example) will naturally know what your taste is. 

a competition is judged based on what form the artist thinks is best, right? 

NEWSFLASH EVERYONE'S IDEA OF "WHAT'S BEST" IS DIFFERENT FROM PERSON TO PERSON ..... "BEST" is literally the most subjective thing there is, and while i agree that there are certain aspects of art and writing that you can use as objective measurements of tangible skill, it's... still subjective. what people think is "best" will vary from person to person because we all have different tastes. so, essentially, this boils down to the idea that the winner of an adopt competition will ALWAYS be the form the artist liked best, because that is what the artist perceives as best. so like. when people appear biased in adopt competitions towards friends or certain circles, it's probably because they're literally friends because they have similar tastes in things, and therefore the form the artist likes best is naturally going to be from someone who shares similar tastes. 

so whenever i hear about """bias""" in competitions i just kind of roll my eyes tbqh because it's usually followed by complaints of "BUT I PUT IN SO MUCH EFFORT" or "I WROTE SO MUCH MORE THAN THE WINNER" uhhhh. if adopt contests were won by effort alone it wouldn't be a contest, it'd be an endurance test lol. literally just "who has the most time to waste writing out 60000k words of absolute meaningless fluff"... because, i hate to break it to you, but ANYONE can write 5000 words of mindless drivel that has literally no substance to it. 

now in caps for emphasis. takes a deep breath

THERE IS NO SKILL NEEDED TO BLOAT YOUR WORD COUNT. 

YOU DO NOT NEED TO KNOW HOW TO WRITE WELL TO WRITE 5000 WORDS.

YOU JUST NEED TO KNOW HOW TO TYPE AND PUT SENTENCES TOGETHER.

quality > quantity, always. like, i'm sorry you put in so many hours of effort but, those people who win with MUCH smaller wordcounts... did they not work to get as good as they did with writing? you put in 5 hours into one tryout. but others, take me for example: i have been writing for over 10 bloody years. i've worked hard to improve my writing, so you can't tell me i "didn't put in as much effort" as you because i did. i put in YEARS of work to get better so doing simple things would take me LESS time now. inb4 IT'S UNFAIR! dude, the literal definition of a contest is for the best to win. it wouldn't be a contest if it wasn't like that lol. it'd just be charity. what you should be doing instead of complaining about it is ASKING FOR CRIT and WORKING TO IMPROVE like a good sport? i get that it's discouraging but you should be prepared to lose when you join a contest. it's valid to be upset about but the moment you say you deserve it more than others JUST because of your effort, then i have a problem. 

and you know, there's gonna be times where i think a comp winner is objectively less skilled than other tryouts. honestly i just kind of shrug that off on account of different taste lol. sometimes that's just how it be, bc of those predetermined biases i mentioned before, and maybe a judge and i are just in completely stages of life so what i call quality might not appeal to the judge. that's also fine. anyway this really got off on a tangent but i'm leaving it in bc i think it needs saying. back to the og post

 > i cant bewieve ppl wouldnt want some1 whos literally explicitly stating at this point that they trust their friends more to "demonstrate dedication to the character" they assign to a design to b an influence in judging comps !!!!!11

wtf didn't i address this in a different post

here let me link it for you

https://cs-discourse.tumblr.com/post/179841459154/post179838988303-the-difference-is-that-you-have

which was replying to this: https://cs-discourse.tumblr.com/post/179838988303/179837734509-idk-anon-i-kinda-agree-with-the

i said it once but i'll say it again: artist entries aren't main adopts lol. people don't work for artist entries. all you fucking do is post on one like "can i have this pls" .. there is... no effort put into that lol. main adopts you WORK for. it's a CONTEST. claiming an artist entry is NOT a contest. if a bunch of little nasty gremlins come running up to me like a hungry horde trying to be the first one to claim my design, i think giving friends first pick is COMPLETELY FINE, BECAUSE WHAT DID ANYONE ELSE DO TO "DESERVE" THAT DESIGN? nothing. you did. nothing. you're literally coming here with this attitude that NOT GIVING THINGS AWAY TO STRANGERS FOR FREE SOMEHOW EQUALS BIAS? i literally do not understand your logic whatsoever. like. i'm trying really fucking hard. at least with main adopts the "payment" is the effort you put in trying to answer the artist's prompt. i know i sound super dumb repeating myself but i don't know how much simpler i can make this concept tbh

and this is EXACTLY why i say ya'll are fucking entitled because merc and any of the kal artists could be making REAL $$$$ selling their own designs and adoptables and art and NOT deal with all the bs ya'll throw at them. they're literally here because the ENJOY MAKING ((( FREE ))) CONTENT for you, and they're not obligated to do this. they can stop whenever they want. if you had to pay per hour for the length of time collectively worked by ANY species artist staff, the lot of you would be fucking broke. i'm actually constantly shocked that species artists work like, 8 hours or more on some of these gorgeous designs just to give them away for free in a contest. 

so, yeah, as someone who hasn't spent my entire life on CS (i've only been here for a year and a half), ya'll seem pretty fucking entitled to me lol. the world outside CS rarely gives out such gorgeous designs in write-to-adopt contests so i'm honestly baffled at the amount of bloody entitlement i see

>bc artists Never weigh in on other artist's comps, so obviously thes ppl just want fwee merc designs !!!1!!1 

this part i don't actually understand what you mean. do you mean they... help judge other comps? or like, enter them? i don't get what you mean by "weigh in" but listen, lol. just because something DOES happen doesn't mean it gives you a good reason to assume the worst. i mean... of course it happens. it's statistically impossible for skewed contests and bias to NOT happen, because there's always going to be cases of it happening. but like, what proof do you have that merc will be biased lol? like, real proof? because your main point i've basically debunked and don't believe in at all. do better than "i cant bewieve ppl wouldnt want some1 whos literally explicitly stating at this point that they trust their friends more to "demonstrate dedication to the character" they assign to a design to b an influence in judging comps !!!!!11" because this doesn't make any sense to me for the reasons i already listed above lmao. if artist entries were supposed to be contests they'd be contests. what the hell makes you important enough to get first dibs on a stranger's work. ARTIST ENTRIES AREN'T EVEN MADE TO BE GIVEN AWAY, THEY'RE MADE AS ARTIST ENTRIES.... LIKE.... JESUS i struggle to understand ya'll

anyway im done here, if you wanna actually talk and debate this hmu on discord at lysander#9229 bc if you actually talk to me instead of spew this hot mess on the blog i might actually listen to you and change my mind and be nice about it instead of being a condescending bitch. 

wait one more thing

>also my last braincell just died pleas h

yea clearly

p.s., why do you ppl keep going to the blog to give critique on merc's designs when on literally every other design merc makes there's this:

https://www.chickensmoothie.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3950980

here i even linked it for you. idk why it's so hard for yall to give constructive crit like decent human beings

[bliphany]

(cw: rant because i really don’t understand Harold-hate.)

I hope people stop calling Harold Finch a dick or claiming that he doesn’t care about people because he decided to separate the relevant and irrelevant lists and programmed the Machine to delete the latter.

This always reminded me of all those times when my friends and I were on the street for a protest or petition and some people passing by would yell at us calling us selfish bitches because we dared to say we cared about A but didn’t also mention B C D E F no matter if those were in the same topic or field or beyond our limitations since we said we cared but failed to care about everything happened in this country or on this planet we were clearly hypocrites.

Back to the context of Finch’s choice. That was an American government’s project aiming to prevent events like the 911. The feeds were from the government. They just needed a machine to process and make the prediction. So to build the machine the creator - if they EVEN care - had to balance between two things. To achieve the aim while to make sure some lines are not going to be crossed too much. The government’s feeds meant useful information but also people’s privacy. If they let people know about they were being watched the government would have to shut the program down. Hence they would fail to achieve the first aim which was also the project’s only aim.

If Finch didn’t separate the two lists, the Machine aka the Northern Light wouldn’t be functional in the first place. The government would then buy someone else’s machine who might not even care about the privacy thing and would make it an open system so the government could track ANYONE they wanted no matter which purpose the government had.

Deleting the irrelevant list was a move that definitely caused sentimental reactions we can see it from Nathan and the audience. A move that later Finch also considered a “Mistake” of his when he had to witness his best friend’s death. And then he did what he could to live with the mistake while trying to do something about it. But it didn’t mean it was “Wrong.”

Making a mistake doesn’t make you a bad person. Making a mistake doesn’t automatically prove what value you had in mind while making the decision is wrong. It only means the way you choose to face the consequences speaks your character as a human. We all make mistakes caused by the right decisions/mindsets. That’s where the value of humanity lies. And judging people by the outcomes of their decisions despite the contexts and situations and the reality is, sorry I really have to say, utterly and upsettingly utilitarianism, by which I mean it really rings the “I adore you BECAUSE everything you do is perfect you’re good at everything you never makes a mistake you’re not a human you’re perfect that’s why I love you.”

And even the Machine made mistakes. And who are we to decide a person’s value by judging how perfect they are or how many mistakes they’ve made even when they caused those because of sensible decisions but no because the outcome was bad “they should have known better or I hate them.” It rings the opposite of the show’s value. Not a machine learned to love like humans. But that “humans can only be loved when they’re such a flawless, perfect machine.”

A person who makes no mistake and hence claiming they’re perfect or the smartest of us all is actually someone never cares enough to act.

And I don’t even mention that most of the time when a story is highly plot-driven of course characters’ good intentions always turn bad to serve the plot because that is a trope?????? In stories, there’s always a dynamic balance between characters and the plot and sometimes to benefit one the writer has to compromise the other a bit but as long as it isn’t overwhelmingly biased that is good writing. And to hate a character for a writing choice is really too hard for me to understand. It was like when I was a kid, and my friend claimed she hated Sherlock Holmes he was such an asshole, and I was curious and asked which story she read, and she told me oh that one with Arsene Lupin and I was like????? But it was a story written by Maurice Leblanc??? And it was natural that he wanted to show how good his own character was??? And if the plot was set like that and you judged a character’s value and personality by that one material??? But no, I failed to convince her because since writers wrote a certain character in a certain way then no matter who the writer was which purpose the plot was serving and which pov the story was written in, what was shown on papers must be the only truth.

Sorry back to the subject. Nathan’s reaction was relatable, and I love to see it as pure goodness in humanity. But that still didn’t make Finch a dick because on the spectrum between sensible and sentimental Finch was closer to the sensible end than Nathan. It only made them two different characters who were relatable in different ways. A thing they might consider to do at that time was to hand the irrelevant list to the police department. WELL BUT COULD THEY REALLY? The American government only wanted a machine to prevent another 911. And giving the list to anyone would harm the privacy dilemma discussed earlier.

Nathan decided to save people one at a time was a noble act. That still didn’t make the choice of deleting it cruel. We might donate our time and money to help a nearby neighborhood/location/country damaged in an earthquake, we probably won’t and can’t do it beyond a certain scale. We help the world by helping whom our road crossed with in our lives. That’s called being a kind person. That’s called a realistic way to improve the world to become better.

And there was no evidence in the show that showed Harold Finch didn’t give a fuck about people’s lives when their roads crossed. Back before the ferry accident, he tried to talk Nathan out of the thing he planned to do because it would get Nathan himself killed in the end. Although he didn’t approve, he went to meet Nathan to face the thing together because he cared and tried to help him. After then, also with his own character arc but really I don’t think his character changed to a totally opposite it was more like since he now chose this full time helping numbers life he allocated more time and energy into this field. He asked John and Shaw to bring Root with them so she’d not be killed. He confesses he built the machine so Collier would kill him and not someone else. He argued if it was necessary when John went to help Riley because John as a friend was closer to him than Riley who had just shot John at the moment. The fact that he wanted anyone harmed Grace to be killed was on the revenge topic so I won’t go into that here, but it still aligned to the traits we humans have, that we care about those who are friends/families/closer to us.

But really, time and time again in fanfictions we wrote about how in the heat of the moment John chose to protect Harold over someone else. Or time and time again people in the fandom adored shoot relationship saying how Root came to care about few people over the rest of humanity or saying how beautiful it was when Shaw avenged Root. Deleting the list was the same thing. It’s called priority and the only one doesn’t need to consider priority is God because they have no limitations and can be everywhere at the same time. Deleting the list didn’t equal to killing people. It meant those who might have died in another 911 would be saved. Before the Machine those killed in an attack and those victims on the irrelevant list would just all die. The Machine Finch and Nathan worked together to bring to the world, its aim was to save those would have been dead in an attack. That’s the meaning when he said “save everyone not someone.” And the priority here felt cruel wasn’t because the one who called the decision was evil. It was because he was not God and the fact humans have limitations IS CRUEL. Just like John couldn’t save Jessica when he was on the other side of the planet. Just like if you only got one shot you can only choose to save a person. Just like every character in the show had to choose between this and that. And we called it beautiful because while it showed limitations it also showed connections.

But somehow Harold Finch was not allowed. He was not allowed to be a human. He was not allowed to be a decent and reasonable person by considering “I really want to do something to help my country and people but given my ability and life plans/choices and resources I picked this specific project I wanted to devote to.” He was not allowed to make mistakes. He was not worthy of love and acceptance and forgiveness even when everything he did all had good and sensible reasons. We said that Harold had hubris issue and god-complex which I agree. But this specific kind of Harold-hate hates him because he was a human and he had to choose or he couldn’t finish the Machine in the first place was actually expecting him to be a god. He was expected to have no limitations. He was expected to save every single person on the planet if he did half way omg what a dick. He was expected to devote and lose everything if he even dared to do a thing to save people in the world. (Which he did, btw)

By hating Finch for being a limited human who just tried to do a thing to help his country which he also succeed was in fact giving his an un achievable standard. It rings so many bad memories like “if you can’t convince me that you also care about B C D E F or you fail to do A to 100% you’re such a lame activist you don’t really care about this world.”

And yes “everyone is relevant to someone.” I love this line, too. And I adore how the writer did the delicate “replacing and advancing the meaning behind a word to charge emotional effects” and probably they did it too well it seems people really believe that Harold Finch used to believe some people were “irrelevant” so apparently he was a dick and didn’t care about humanity, unlike Nathan. But No? Friendly reminder that the full sentence/context of “relevant and irrelevant lists” is actually “relevant and irrelevant to terrorist attacks”?????

And yes about the opening theme. I laughed at Harold after I knew it was him who separated the two lists and deleted one of them, too. The funny part is seeing how in the tv show writing and prompting process sometimes the writer will give something for them can tell/sell a story first but after a while, some things might conflict each other a bit. It’s like the writer might just put some hint as a foreshadow and if in the later episode there’s a chance to pick it up and develop then nice but if by some reason maybe the actor’s scheduled or there’s some plot change then the hint will remain an unexplained detail or even a tiny plot hole but as far as it’s tiny it’s fine. And the show introduced the whole world setting by introducing Finch who at first functioned as not only a character but also a device to tell us/the main character aka John everything the writer wanted us to know at the moment so we could enjoy the story. And when the story just began and there were only two main casts to make the fictional world work it was entirely workable to instead of giving us the simplified but informative enough opening they let Finch say “I build it and actually it was me who separated the lists because brah brah brah and it backfired and I wanted to live with that, so I need a partner.” In this way, the show would be so appealing.

Idk just... I don’t like a bunch of characters for so many different reasons, but I try to separate which ones are the character’s personalities and flaws and weaknesses and which ones are byproducts of a writing choice so that the plot will continue.

:(((