#just on benchmark since i'm not gonna change him yet

[neriyon]

Got tired of playing around with the elf boy in the character creator (I think I'll go with wine red hair) and hopped over to benchmark to test what I could do with N'jinh. And I think it turned out pretty nice. Def some changes (it's a completely different base), but I feel like he doesn't look like, too unfamiliar to me. Like I can still recognize that yeah, it's my smug boy, just with a new coat of paint on top and a few structural fixes.

^ Here's how he used to look. I made his blue eye a bit lighter shade, changed the red around eyes to more pink shade, and ofc switched the base. He actually has pvp hair right now, and I thiiiink I'm gonna go stick with that, but he looks good with his old hair too. Only complaint I have is that I reaaaally wanted him to have a scar in different place :/ Don't need the lip scar anymore with his lore changes, but would've loved if face 1 had some scar that runs across the bridge of his nose. He would've absolutely rocked that.

Also hair is different shade. I like the warmer shade old hair has, buuuuut it has the unfortunate effect of looking like this if there's any sun to be found:

So uh, I have to make a choice if I want to go with new hair or get flashbanged every time I try to gpose him outside like I do now.

[thepavementsings-archive]

pierresteban reminds me of that quote about childhood friends being the benchmark of our lives because they have always around each other and competing together

“Childhood friends are the benchmark of our lives, no matter where we go, what we do. They will always come by and take you to the place where you belong.” — Burhan Din Wani

sorry for what is under the cut lol

I just googled this quote anon and I think you're so right! In a way that is more extreme for them because they've always been measuring themselves against each other - they had to. There's one winner. One scholarship. etc etc.

There's a quote from Pierre when he's asked about Esteban not possibly losing his seat in 2019 (I have so much to say about them and 2019 but it is like, unhinged so we won't do that now) where he responds:

"Since i'm 7 years old, I've always fought with him and I'm sure I'm gonna keep fighting with him in the next few years so. I think for sure F1 is pretty tough.... he's doing his job and things [that] are out of his control are not really going his way. So I'm pretty sure he'll keep pushing and we'll see him back on the grid pretty soon. I'm sure we'll keep having some pretty good fights."

and I think that encapsulates it so well. The way they've always been in the periphery. Everything changes yet so much stays the same!! And I think that will be so exciting to see this season. Because I have always been a firm believer that there was no one right or wrong in the breakdown of their relationship. So much of it was circumstance and the environment they were in where it felt like only one could come out of it, and for both of them for so many reasons outside themselves it was a "it can't be both of us, and it has to be me" scenario.

Which is why BOTH of them being in the paddock, BOTH of them being grand prix winners is so bittersweet. Because it could be both of them!! But at that point in their relationship when it fell apart it couldn't be. And what does that mean now!! As teammates. Because they've spent so much time building themselves into who they are away from each other. And now they're at a place - once again, because of circumstance - where it can't be both of them, not really! So what do they do? How do they make it work? How do they give each other the space to each do what they need to do? Because like it or not they're a TEAM now. And they will both be under heavy scrutiny to make the partnership work. It can't be both of us, but it has to be. On the real life basis it will be fascinating.

On the more RPF-y side, what does it mean to be given another chance with someone you once loved!! Because in some type of way, maybe in all types of ways, they did love each other once. Do they even want to take the chance to do it all differently this time? Is it worth it to open all of that back up? I don't know if they both have the same feeling on that to be honest.

Anyways their narrative truly is so rich because it's SO complex. I can talk about it for hours haha.

[formulatrash]

Lewis just got his 7th title. I'm happy for him.

Me too. What Lewis has done is so almost incomprehensibly titanic, in any sport, that it feels like something that needs contextualising again and again.

It’s easy, if you remember Lewis in the hybrid era, in Mercedes, since Rosberg left - whatever the recency is that creates the illusion it’s almost straightforward for him to perform at this extraordinary level - to minimise his achievements, even if you don’t intend to. Lewis now is a force of nature so impossible to rival that it wouldn’t really matter if you gave everyone GP3 cars and told them to go, the rest of the field would just be closer together behind him. 

I am, as Tumblr constantly likes to remind me, very old - nearly as old as Lewis himself - so I remember him arriving in the junior formulas and hoping that he’d get to F1. He was goofy and nerdy and awkward and a bit of a gamer - actually way more like Lando than you’d believe, in retrospect but he had this burning, furious defiance that he was going to get there and win. Because that was what he needed, to overcome the barriers and my god, there were a lot of people openly saying what they try to at least code these days, back then.

Lewis when he was young was a Verstappen-esque firecracker of teammate beef. I don’t know that anyone other than maybe Max could have taken on Alonso, at that point, in his junior year - he’d destroy Nelson Piquet Jr, despite all his weight of racing heritage, the next - and it took a level of pretended self-assurance that I don’t think Lewis had, then, at all.

He’d proven himself all the way up, was still proving it. Licking his and McLaren’s wounds, meekly apologising after the end of the spygate scandal he’d had nothing to do with while Fernando pranced off from the smouldering remnants, there were plenty of people who were so pleased to see Lewis humbled. 

He took the championship, instead. Which made a lot of people very angry, despite really it only being Felipe Massa who had a right to be. It was very underrated, in the British press; made more striking because Jenson Button’s win, the following season, really wasn’t and the ludicrous bar that Lewis would have to jump to prove himself was moved again.

Not just good enough for F1. Not just good enough to take on a two-time champion. Not just good enough to become a champion himself in his second season. Lewis was regarded as a sort of curious celebrity most people barely considered an athlete or British, in the press.

He’s never gone a single season without winning a race. Even in dog cars, biding his time for an opportunity. Olden times McLaren was a different, dysfunctional beast to the one Andreas Seidl has somehow steered back to success and especially the Dennis era was run with a pretty iron fist* so it wasn’t necessarily somewhere the drivers had much ability to steer developing the car and you can see how badly that affected them in the KERS and ERS era. 

Comparatively, joining Mercedes, Lewis walked into an opportunity where instead of having to furiously fight for that, he could work on it as a project for the whole team. People really underestimate how hard he works, in terms of factory hours and how it wasn’t always the fastest car. 

The team pitted him and Nico against each other to force the project forwards and that turned into a destructive mess, backfiring on them quite badly. It’s probably the worst call Mercedes have made, in their modern F1 existence, although a cynic would say: it worked.

Yes, they trod a line of near-implosion for years that was only steadied by Nico’s retirement but they became, unquestionably, the best, in the inter-garage arms race. Lewis didn’t necessarily become a better driver in the sense of having more brilliant race craft for it but things like qualifying laps, at which he is now without doubt the GOAT, became so crucial that he learned to take on more and more feedback from engineers without ever forgetting it. 

When they tell them, on the radio, that their teammate is finding more speed through corner X and braking later - and they’ll show them more detailed telemetry - then Lewis can, like any driver, take that on and do it. But he can also make hundreds of micro-adjustments per lap without ever forgetting them or dropping one - again, they all can do it, sometimes, perfectly but he just doesn’t ever not. 

Since 2016 he’s been able to grow as a driver without being in the pressure-cooker of mind games with his teammate and that shows, too. A more outward-looking, globally-focussed Lewis, a Lewis who’s more comfortable sharing elements of himself, treating himself less like an industrial espionage project.

(some irony, for a man who started his career amidst spy gate)

If Lewis was a white boy from a millionaire or billionaire family, his achievements in sporting terms would still be staggering. He’s neither of those things, so they’re placed on a different scale.

It is now, even for the most racist, the most close-minded alleged fan of the sport, impossible to deny that he has the records on paper. They can’t take away the seven titles and 94 wins, no matter how they try to minimise them. The bar that was constantly set higher has been met and exceeded and a driver who, for a lot of years, looked set to be a one-off champion whose brilliance could be more easily swept away as a footnote to diversity, has become the benchmark against whom other achievements can be measured. 

That Lewis did that despite the odds against him? The racists won’t see that and sadly can and do try to deny it but that is a world-changing, sport-transforming moment that’s been a decade-and-a-half in the making, since F1 started looking achievable for him. 

Lewis has nothing left to prove, so all that furious energy he’s used for years to get this will take other outlets - he still, after all, as everyone, has a lot to change. I am so excited to get to work in the sport during this era, to see what kind of transformative effects he’ll have, has already had. The work shouldn’t be on Lewis and mustn’t be on him alone but you do absolutely fucking love to see it getting done.

Anyway, I’m so proud of him. I’m so astounded by the skill and focus - the relentless pursuit that’s driven him all this time and that isn’t diminished at all by having got here. I truly believe Lewis is gonna carry on awhile yet and it’s fucking exciting just to think about what we’re going to witness this short-ass nerd kid who looked kind of sulky and defensive in press conferences for years do.

(and, of course, the first driver accused of being a social media poseur who didn’t pay enough attention to the sport. Plus ca change...)

*This is a really petty example but you had to wear a tie if you went to MTC, as a visiting journalist, in the beforetime. 

[scuttleboat]

If you're still up for it, i'm curious if you have any thoughts on what Bellamy's overall journey will be this season? Aside from, y'know, his whole (imo, unnecessary) redemption arc.

note: written after 406 

I think we’re in the middle of it, and one of the things that has been somewhat frustrating is that it’s kind of muddy what either Clarke or Bellamy’s character arcs are going to be. We’re halfway through, but neither of them have developed much or changed much since 403.  Octavia’s loss seemed like it would be significant but we still don’t know what the fallout will be for Bellamy.

Redemption in The 100

The concept of redemption is something that I think we as viewers have been hashing over since the first truly terrible things began to happen in season 2. We ask: 

Do these characters need to be redeemed? 

Is a redemption happening on screen?  

Even if we (the fans) may not think a “redemption arc” is required to like a character’s storyline, does that character themselves feel that they need to be redeemed in order to sleep at night?

What are the benchmarks of a “redemption arc” anyway, since it’s a thing that everyone talks about, yet seems to mean radically different things to different viewers.

Do we measure it by the religious ideas of penitence, atonement, etc? Or is there a pop fiction criteria for redemption that is unique to media, such as ‘feeling bad and doing something good so that the viewers are okay rooting for you again’?

Is a “redemption” possible in the accelerated timeline of the show, since on other series such a thing spans seasons or even the run of a series?

Why is everyone so sure that redemption arcs are happening or necessary?

And the one that gets to me:

Does the show even care about redemption as a storytelling trope, or is it enough in this world just to change one’s behavior?

That’s the one i think about a lot, wrt to characters like Bellamy, Lexa, Clarke, Kane, Jaha… who I’ll draw on since they’re some of the people with the highest body counts who are POV characters. With Clarke, she was devastated after 216, and she disappeared into the woods for 3 months. I think it was a conversation I had with @reblogginhood (so informative! she knows things.) last year about whether this period of forced isolation (similar to her year in the skybox) was her atonement for the deaths she allowed or caused in season 2.  In that case, her guilt was such that she seemed to need to punish herself, and the timeline of the series allowed for it.  

Lexa is a different case altogether: she tried to slaughter the kids at the dropship, she betrayed her allies and left them to be cannibalized, including the person she was falling in love with.  And yet, Lexa never displayed any indicators that she was undergoing a redemption arc, or even that she felt obligated to undergo one. I don’t think betraying Skaikru was a light decision for her by any means, and I think when she decided to protect them in s3 that it was a genuine move. Yet she never wept for the loss of life she caused, she never broke down and screamed and cried over her guilt…it wasn’t even clear that she felt any guilt at all. Responsibility yes, guilt no. She was a divine king doing what she need to protect her realm.  

Kane is another character who seems to feel, like Clarke, that atonement is required for ill deeds. He tries to sacrifice himself at the end of season 1, but Jaha “beats him to it”.  So Kane submits himself to the enemy in a dangerous self-sacrificing gesture in season 2, as his way to atone. That can be read as his redemption… maybe. Or is his redemption not the sacrifices, but actually the acts of good works that followed later? Was Kane’s redemption (for being part of a tyrranical Ark government) actually the choice to become a leader who acts in good faith, wisdom, and honor? Maybe he’s living that redemption every day, doing his best.

So maybe a character either thinks they need to atone or they don’t, what does “the narrative” think?  HA. TRICK QUESTION.  No one knows but JR and it’s up to us to read it and think it over. Fuck JR, go with “death of the author” if you want. In fact, I want to throw 2 definitions out here before I continue. These are, of course, overly simplistic explanations for complex theological and philosophical concepts, but it might help:

atonment - noun

satisfaction or reparation for a wrong or injury; amends.

(sometimes initial capital letter) Theology. the doctrine concerning the reconciliation of God and humankind, especially as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Christ.

Archaic. reconciliation; agreement.

redemption - noun

an act of redeeming or atoning for a fault or mistake, or the state of being redeemed.

deliverance; rescue.

Theology. deliverance from sin; salvation.

atonement for guilt.

recovery by payment, as of something pledged.

For a lot of fans on a show this violent and this philosophical, there’s been discussion that a redemption comes “too soon” or isn’t “earned” if there isnt an act of atonement. Or sometimes people say the word “redemption” but they seem to be discussing atonement instead. paying for it, making amends, etc.  And often people talk as if the only way to “be redeemed” is by suffering.  There’s also, however, the concept that redemption comes through good works.  That we make amends for our misdeeds by choosing to do better. There are some acts that are too big to atone for, or there’s no one left to make amends to, and in that case one has to look instead to changing one’s behavior.  Making the choice to change.

And that’s brings me to Bellamy this season… [read more below the cut]

In 401 Kane told Bellamy to take it one day at a time (paraphrasing). Instead of obsessing about the past, make sure you do the right thing going forward, and this will ‘save’ you. While I know the Kane speech didn’t land well with everyone, in the abstract it’s a pretty well travelled philosophical idea. [[I don’t have the education to really get into it, but it’s a big part of some Christian dogma, for sure. I don’t have any education in Judaism but since JR is religious I’m sure that may factor in. And it’s part of American culture, which is where I (raging atheist) have absorbed it by osmosis.]]  When it comes to Bellamy’s character in season 4, especially with regards to a possible redemption… I think Bellamy wants very badly to atone. I think he has wanted that since 311-313 when he finally accepted that his actions were wrong according to his moral perspective. 

However, Bellamy is a very practical person. He doesn’t have time to run into the woods and atone in silent suffering. He doesn’t have time to go on a quest into the desert with 12 disciples looking for the promised land. Bellamy is cognizant of the immediate danger to his loved ones, so he’s going to act to protect them before he’s going to think about indulging in huge dramatic gestures of his sadness. Haters might want him to suffer but that’s just not realistic for this show. The most he can afford right now is to try to talk about his feelings (like to Riley and Echo in 405) or to put others before himself (like not wanting to be on the survivor list). There’s also the pressing matter that even if Bellamy were to do a big sacrificial gesture to atone and to earn redemption through suffering… that won’t help his sister live, and making sure Octavia survives matters a hell of a lot more to Bellamy than his self-image.

So is Bellamy going through a “redemption arc” right now?  Maybe. I don’t think he’s going through atonement, but I do think he’s trying to make wiser choices each day. I think he’s committing, as best he can, to save as many people he can each day (402), and he’s hoping that he’ll find some distant redemption by doing that. (if he’s even consciously thinking of it in those terms, which isn’t at all canon spoken, btw, so he might not be. He’s not trained in ethics or theology.)

What I think Bellamy is going through this season so far is a guilt arc.  He was in it for the back half of season 3, and he’s still in it. As things stand right now, I would like to think that his speech to Useless Riley in 405 was a wrap-up fo that. I felt guilt was pretty appropriate in 3B and starting season 4, since the writers have been trying to write their way back from their dumbfuck execution of his arc in 3a, but if he stays mired guilt for all season 4… that’s pretty one-note. I’m ready for that part of his character to move to the backburner. Not go away (lol this is The 100 after all), but no longer be the first bullet point on his character sheet every episode. I was with it up to a couple weeks ago, but this is mid season now!  I get it, Bellamy feels guilty.  Cool beans, BUT WHAT ELSE?  It’s definitely time for the writers to give him more to do emotionally.  As it is, though, I don’t think the show will let Bellamy move on until they let Octavia move on. That’s how it goes with the Blake siblings– when Octavia forgives Bellamy, he’ll be more able to forgive himself.  And that’s a totally fucked up thing to hinge one’s personal development on someone else…but these are the Blakes. They have a fucked up relationship. And before anyone asks, I’m not gonna get into whether it’s likely for Octavia to have or need a redemption arc because she’s is still in her emotional descent, and we don’t know what the other side is gonna be yet. Her collapse is in process.

To circle back around… I think one could make a really sound argument that  some characters see redemption as necessary (Clarke, Abby) and others don’t (Lexa, Murphy). So I don’t personally think that @the100writers feel it’s necessary every time. I think they’ve written a whole cast of people doing bad things, and some of those people are going to feel they have to make up for their mistakes, while others don’t. Whether or not that matches with what fans want to believe about their faves (Bellamy, Lexa, Murphy, Clarke) is always going to be up in the air.  IMO, it’s in-character for Bellamy to want to make amends, but it’s a fact of their world that he doesn’t have the opportunity. So he’s doing what he can one day at a time. Whether or not other fans think his actions require guilt or amends–and whether or not such things are being successfully shown on screen–is down to how we each interpret the show, and what unique circumstances we bring to our viewing experiences. In that vein, macro perspectives about whether giving a particular storyline to a particular character is an act of contributing to sex- or race-biased storytelling is also going to hugely depend on what what each viewer brings to the table, because not all of us see the same patterns at work.  And it runs into the storytelling reality that characters in spotlight roles means that they’re going to be faced with conflicts, negative circumstances, and ethical dilemmas. There’s supposedly no good guys on this show, so that means all of our faves are gonna do–and endure–terrible things.  Kill the idea that anyone here is a cupcake.*  People are going to die and people are going to kill, even people we think should be portrayed as noble or good. So it’s up to each viewer to look critically at a work of fiction, and talk about it, while at the same time understanding that at the end of the day no individual show or book or film is going to be everything we want, politically.  Whether or not we keep watching when a personal line is crossed is up to each of us to decide.

btw I think a lot of my opinions here about Bellamy’s s4 arc have been shaped by discussion I’ve had this season with other fans, so thanks for talking to me about Bellamy angst. Especially @mego42 and @storyskein and @velvet-tread, and more.  Talking to y’all is enlightening and makes me reconsider things all the time.