#look obviously the plot is very different from The Patriot

[lyledebeast]

I just finished Frailty (2001), which is a film I watched so long ago that I forgot the big plot twist at the end until I was watching it, and there are still several details I didn't recall.

It's a about a father who has a vision from God giving him the mission of slaying demons, and he involves his young sons in this mission.

What was in the water in the early 2000's? "You know what would be a great father and sons bonding activity? Murder!"

Bill Paxton's character is still a better father than Benjamin Martin, though. I'm just saying!

[chamomileteainabuttercup]

Thoughts on Episode 4 of The Book of Boba Fett - "On Thin Fucking Ice"

that is not the episode title but it clearly should be

I obviously hope that last week's episode was an aberration and not representative of the series overall. For patriotic reasons, I would like to keep watching this (I mean Temuera Morrison), and for general Boba Fett-liking reasons, I would like this not to suck. So far, we have had one okay episode, one AWESOME episode, and one truly shit episode. It's not exactly encouraging to see a show run such a gamut in its first three episodes; it suggests poor planning and only erratic insight about why viewers will care to watch. I am hoping that this week will be okay. That's all I'm setting my sights on. Okay. Fingers crossed, eh.

The Disney+ blurb for this episode is just "Boba Fett partners with Fennec Shand," which might mean that we finally get some backstory/context for these two, or might alternatively mean that they will dance a fruity samba, and either is fine by me. We have a runtime of 49 minutes, in between the excellent 53 minutes of Chapter 2 and the okay/bloody awful 39 minutes of 1 and 3. I am not sure who directed this one but I hope it's not Robert bloody Rodriguez again.

* ugh taking us straight back to the worst part of the previous spisode in the "previously on"

* I really wondered if Boba's total lack of affect in the discovery and funeral parts of that sequence was some kind of actor protest by Temuera Morrison, like how when Alexander Siddig hated the genetic enhancement plot twist for Julian Bashir on Deep Space Nine (sorry about the spoilers for 1997), he would try to say any lines relating to it in the dullest way he could. The difference here is that I really liked that plot twist (and it did not do what Siddig feared, making Julian too similar to Data - they are both talkative and clever and neurodivergent in some way but have very different vibes overall) whereas this one sucked and made me feel angry and sad. To go right from an episode that was all about Boba finding a connection and a sense of belonging and purpose with these people after spending so long feeling alone, an episode to which Morrison clearly contributed a lot in terms of culture and the whole issue of indigenous rights and sovereignty which is dear to his heart, to then having it all ripped out from under Boba for cheap tragedy that dehumanised the people the previous episode did so much to humanise, surely was not very satisfying for Morrison as a performer. The man can in fact emote, and here he just didn't. So.

* remind us of the stupid briefing scene too

* Stephen Root: no one respects you

* Me: well to be fair, based on last week's shenanigans I don't either

* ugh the Mods

* ugh Krrsantan (it is not Krrsantan's fault he got put into such a stupid scene, he looks like a cool dude)

* ugh the rancor swap makes no sense, why would they give him something so expensive and fuck off without even getting their cool-looking Wookiee back

* they didn't recap the only cute and awesome part of last week, Boba "Horse Girl" Fett deciding he loves the rancor and it will be his baby

* and now... new material

* TRY NOT TO SUCK, SHOW. I AM SO READY TO BE PLEASED.

* ALREADY into the bath and a flashback? Without even a present-day prologue? Also, are they really going to keep using Boba dreaming about his past in the bacta tank every single time they want to do a flashback? Couldn't he talk to a therapist like Tony Soprano? I feel like this guy naps more than he works. Which I can sympathise with, but he could've done all this napping BEFORE trying to take over Mos Espa and started out feeling fresh.

* It was very green in the desert that day - oh wait that's a transition effect.

* okay, so Boba is apparently spying out Jabba's palace; are we actually going to start getting hints of why he decided to go back there? Is it about gaining the power to avenge the Tuskens, or what? Did his childhood experiences teach him anything about the value or likely success of trying to avenge someone you loved? Does he just think this is different because he's strong enough to do it by himself instead of being a traumatised little kid depending on adults who don't have his welfare at heart?

* "Not today, old girl" - okay, I like the continuing notes of Boba's quiet love of animals, but "not today" what. What is your objective, you potato.

* what do banthas eat? Apparently barbecue is okay. I always wondered, because they do look like ungulates, but you clearly can't graze in a desert. The food chain of Tatooine remains very fucking mysterious. I presume it involves, at some level, animals that literally eat and metabolise sand.

* nobody had better kill his fucking bantha this week

* okay, I briefly skipped to the end credits and the director this week was Kevin Tancharoen, of whom I know zip, nothing, nada. Back to five minutes in.

* it is too dark in this scene for me to have any blessed idea what is going on, and I would prefer unconvincing day-for-night to realistic can't-see-a-thing.

* So this is where he finds Fennec near death - which raises some questions for me about the passage of time. He fell into the Sarlacc's maw in 4ABY, and was presumably not in there for more than a few hours, by the state of him. The events of The Mandalorian begin in roughly 9ABY. How long did he live with the Tuskens before the cheap shitty tragedy? Clearly a while, since he learned their language, but nearly five years? How long did he wander around in between the cheap shitty tragedy and finding Fennec where Din left her in around about 9 ABY? You give a guy five years to noodle around in before he has to get back into the plot, and then you don't let him really noodle.

* there are people here with cool cyberpunk eyes - okay, so the whole cyborg body mods thing was a trend on Tatooine well before Boba met the Mods? What does it mean? Anything?

* "I found a gravely wounded woman barely clinging to life in the desert... so I brought her to a nightclub." At least that's what it sounds like.

* So wait, did Boba know that this was a place where people got cyborged up? How did he learn about that? Has he had any sort of social life in between the cheap shitty tragedy and this? Who has he talked to? Why did we skip over so much?

* Anyway I guess this is where Fennec's techno-tummy comes in.

* there were absolutely no emergency healthcare options other than this place? god Tatooine sucks

* and apparently Fennec doesn't need any anaesthetic or life support

* this just... this doesn't make sense

* I never cared that much about how the techno-tummy works, but this was just stupid-looking. There was no sign that this guy did anything about the blood loss she'd already suffered, no sign that there was any hygiene involved, working on Fennec's body this way would make sense only if she was already a cyborg or robot that just needed parts replaced.

* btw where did Boba get the money for this, what has he been doing to earn money? What have been his goals and uses for the money he earned? that seems interesting

* Like the way the Tuskens were so brutally disposed of, this rather feels like "We have to give some kind of explanation for how this character got their new accessories, let's bash it out real quick."

* "Aren't you going to close her up?" "And cover all that beautiful machinery?" SO EVIDENTLY INFECTION IS NOT A THING. PERITONITIS IS NOT A THING.

* what did the guy do with all the damaged innards he would have had to remove?

* so the poor cow wakes up on the sand in the middle of nowhere with some dude offering her a melon; I wouldn't be impressed.

* so... Boba went through her pockets and looked at her ID?

* so here's where the narration from the trailer came from

* One thing that I do find a little strange about Morrison's performance is the really different inflection he gives his voice when he says things like "I am Boba Fett, left for dead on the sands of Tatooine," kind of ponderous and artificial, and when he says things like "He's a tricky little bugger" and "What are we going to call you?" - when he actually sounds like a person. I can justify this as there being an element of Boba putting on a performance, which I think he always has been doing since he put on the helmet and started creating the character of Boba Fett the Bounty Hunter, who is clearly different from Boba Fett who just wants to pet a dog. Perhaps what he's giving Fennec here is a modified, helmetless form of that.

* Okay, Fennec introducing the possibility that at least some of the Tuskens escaped. I HOPE SO. It really didn't look as if there were as many bodies strewn about the destroyed camp as there were dancers in the bonfire scene at the end of episode 2. Fingers still crossed for Tusken Warrior and Tusken Kid.

* Right, and this settles the fact that, at least in this iteration of Star Wars canon, Boba calls his ship Firespray. I will gladly accept it as Boba changing the name of the ship when it became his; Slave One is really a bummer of a name.

* your ship is still where you parked it? are you sure?

* Boba. Baby, the worst he can say is "no, fuck off."

* I know this is turning into kind of a heist, and I've been vocal in my desire for heists, but it's not a very feisty heist.

* Fennec has a tiny baby drone! Okay, tiny baby drone is cute. I really like how it zips around.

* you're just gonna turn your bantha loose? Isn't she, like, domesticated? don't just tell her to go and get pregnant! she loves you!

* Fennec speaks for me, and for people with any common sense. Maybe hold onto your alternative means of transport just for now.

* How do you figure Bib double-crossed you, though? He kept your ship when he entirely reasonably believed you were dead. You haven't approached him to let him know you're alive because... you're afraid of what he might say? You think you're negotiating from a disadvantage? You can't even write the dude a letter to sound him out? Don't be a sook.

* tiny baby drone's back!

* so all you need to do is break into the garage and steal Fett's Vette, right?

* incidentally if Bib Fortuna kept security so tight, how were you able, not many months after this, to just walk right directly into his throne room so that he was surprised (and apparently pleased, until you shot him) to see you? And what did he think had happened to your ship in the meantime?

* it's almost lost because the lighting/colouring is so damn murky, but Fennec gives Boba an adorable smug smile about cutting through the bars to sneak in, and it immediately makes me like her more.

* "Voice of Sous-Chef Droid" would be a great credit to have on your IMDB page.

* General Grievous with cleavers - until Fennec takes his head off. I actually thought she was just going to push an off switch, which I would love even more.

* low comedy as Boba has to destroy the kitchen trying to tackle some little guy

* "Where'd you go?" - again, Boba sounds like a person when he's not sounding ponderous

* why are you telling the little droid who you are? why do you care? do you make this speech to everyone you meet?

* did that droid just do suicide

* I want - GONK DROID

* I want Boba getting back into his starship to be more of a moment, you know?

* sorry green piggy guard guy, you were certainy not paid enough for that

* of course she knows what she's doing, she's Fennec Shand

* She's in good shape - in fact, shipshape.

* and now, they are pals

* okay, so, bikies, zapping bikies

* that feel like vengeance?

* what are you going to do, shoot the sarlacc?

* are you literally going to shoot the sarlacc

* "that's where I was trapped all those years ago" - how have the years between then and now been occupied? because we really haven't seen enough!

* okay, Boba doesn't realise his armour was scavenged/salvaged

* what are you going to do, climb down in there with a rope and a torch?

* of course you can't see a thing! you're looking down an animal's throat underground! you don't even know how long its body is or how far along its gut peristalsis might have moved your armour by this time!

* that's right I said peristalsis

* I know a thing or two about guts

* not three things though, I top out at two

* this is simply silly, silly behaviour

* how is a ship that can blast off out of the atmosphere not grunty enough to escape the grip of an admittedly very large worm

* okay that was a fun sound effect, it always is

* okay, you know Fennec considers Boba her best friend now, or there's no fucking way she'd be hanging around to perform some kind of half-assed autopsy on a worm.

* okay

* okay sorry

* I know I'm starting with "okay" a lot

* but how screamingly absurd is it that Boba Fett is criticising crime lords for not taking the time to think

(and what happened to him is not because a crime lord didn't take the time to think, it's because Han Solo has the luck of the devil and also he, Boba Fett, is kind of a doofus)

* Boba "I didn't think to ask for a briefing on my new territory until like three days after I took it over" Fett

* Boba "I assumed everyone would just pay me tribute" Fett

* Boba "What's recruitment? I just hire disaffected youths I meet on the street" Fett

* Boba "I just sort of bounce around like a dumb pinball reacting to whatever people say" Fett

* Boba "I am surprised every time someone does something sneaky" Fett

* are you genuinely now trying to sell us on the idea that Boba Fett is a man with a plan

* that he's meant to be smart, smarter than the wiseguys

* Dunning-Kruger effect in action folks, except the show has Dunning-Kruger

* has anyone ever in the history of Tatooine before suggested that Tusken culture is soft

* was that literal entire episode a bacta tank flashback - oh okay, we have about a quarter of an hour still to go.

* how did he just walk in without encountering any guards that time, I ask you again

* he is completely healed? How long will that last, one wonders. He gets beaten up a lot.

* oh they're actually in canon called the Mods for goodness' sake, the silly nickname I made up for them is canon

* if Boba is completely healed (at least until his next ass-kicking) is he going to start sleeping in a big-boy bed now?

* Okay, at this point going to the pub is a reasonable decision.

* Krrsantan is not enjoying his evening. Perhaps Krrsantan should go to a movie or something instead.

* I'm complaining a lot, but Boba looks really handsome and I enjoy looking at him looking handsome.

* Garsa is gesturing a lot. Like, almost mind trick levels of gesturing.

* Okay, so I guess Krrsantan still has a bar tab.

* MAX REBO EVERYONE

* Boba, sweetie, darling, last week he (apparently) crushed your spine and bit your hand. He clearly has tremendous anger management issues. Do you really want to call him "mate" and offer him a job? Why not ask Garsa to help you, given that she is actually intelligent and knows people and also already technically works for you as your vassal?

* "when Fortuna claimed to be the heir" - "no right to the throne" - anyone remember Rotta? Jabba's little punky muffin? the actual legitimate heir?

* the idea that Boba got past "guile and treachery" to take out Bib Fortuna is just... absurd. They're having to retcon what was only written as a brief post-credits stinger in which Boba walked right in unchallenged, Bib simply appeared surprised and pleased to see him, and Boba shot him at point-blank range while his guard was down! That or Fennec is just bullshitting because it's the only way to sell this pup.

* "draining Tatooine of its wealth" - what wealth, when the most valuable commodity on the planet is water and the spice is imported? (It's a bit like how, although you can make meth pretty much anywhere with very basic kitchen/lab equipment, the cost and risk of importing the precursor chemicals to New Zealand is such that it's cheaper to just import meth ready-made these days.) Like, we know there are mines on Tatooine, Mos Pelgo is near one, but what they mine is unclear. (I'm ignoring here whether there's EU material that specifies what you mine on Tatooine, because none of that counts until we hear and see it on screen.)

* The rancor is under the table - and either that's a different droid of the same make and model, or that wasn't a suicide earlier.

* Don't just call the rancor "boy"! I demand that you give the baby a cute name!

* Okay, Matt Berry Droid is interpreting, so Matt Berry Droid is a protocol droid, right?

* Why should they join you? You're the only person the Pykes want to attack. They all probably have deals with the Pykes.

* "then I'll do it alone," he said, like a big, brave, dumb, stupid idiot.

* "just pwease don't betway me!"

* BOBA YOU SUCK AT NEGOTIATING SO BAD

* again and again I keep waiting for a twist that shows you're playing dumb... but you're not playing, are you?

* are we really supposed to think Boba pulled something off here

* all he did was get a bunch of dirtbags to make a promise I am sure they feel no obligation at all to keep

* "my deal is a lot better" - what deal?

* "what I'm short on is muscle" - which I don't understand why you didn't begin recruiting much earlier on, and no, the Mods don't count!

* and Fennec... introduces to him the idea that you can, like, hire guys to fight for you? Why was that even written as an exchange between these two characters in particular? "Credits can buy muscle if you know where to look" - "bitch I know, I was muscle for like 25 years." Why would they need to say this to each other. Why. This is "As you know, your father - the king..." levels of cruddy exposition.

* Well. Okay, well. I got my wish. That episode was at the low end of the range I would call "okay." It was pretty dumb throughout but it wasn't actively offensive or distressing. I did not have to look at stupid space Vespas. Ming-Na Wen made a cute face and Temuera Morrison looked hot.

* It still felt like a half-hearted exercise in filling in gaps, moving from one already established point to another as quickly as possible, rather than anyone actually being excited to show us what Boba Fett got up to in his wilderness years (other than in episode 2 which shone precisely because it felt interested in what was going on).

* The thing is, with this show, they got the opportunity to do what fanfic writers do, but with the real actors and budget and facilities. I mean that as 100% a good thing. To flesh out an enigmatic character, to develop an interesting story that was going on in a backwater while the eyes of the galaxy were understandably turned elsewhere, so they have lots of freedom to improvise. What do they actually want to do? I get what Temuera Morrison wants to do and I'm cheering for him, but what John Favreau and Dave Filoni want to do with this is really not clear to me.

[vidavalor]

SamBucky and Bucky's often-misunderstood shield-related meltdown at the start of Ep 2.

I want to talk about Bucky and the shield, particularly at the start of TFATWS, and why I think some people might be misinterpreting his obsession with Sam having it a bit. Consider this some different insight from a trauma-trained trauma survivor here...

It's not all about Steve. It's really about the trauma Bucky's been through and was *still going through* as a result of his situation at the start of TFATWS. Let's talk about this and how it pertains to SamBucky, in particular, as well as the characters individually. Meta/analysis ahead...

The first thing you have to realize is that while the shield is technically the signature symbol of Captain America to the world, it really is, symbolically, the signature symbol of Bucky Barnes. Go back to those pre-serum days in the alleys of Brooklyn and Bucky was acting as Steve's literal human shield. Steve would have died ten times over and never lived to be Captain America without Bucky saving him all those times so, symbolically? That dude who winds up with a vibranium arm is the human embodiment of that vibranium disk that keeps the Caps safe. Bucky doesn't exactly *think* of himself this way consciously but *unconsciously*, he affiliates himself with the shield because both are meant to protect men he's known who have become Captain America. Bucky is very clear on what that means to him and why it's important to him and it's not blind nationalism motivating him.

Bucky follows the man, not the symbol. He followed Steve, not Captain America. That doesn't mean that he doesn't believe in the values that Steve-as-Cap stood for but it means that he knows well that what Captain America is is subject to whoever is holding the shield. This is largely the plot of TFATWS-- two guys who are good men, not good soldiers, just as Steve was, wrestle back this symbol of American patriotism from a man who is the opposite-- a good soldier and a not good man. No matter whatever else you believe about their relationship, Bucky believed in Steve being a good man and that being something worthy of supporting and when Bucky looks back on his life by the time he gets to TFATWS, it's the thing in his life that he's most proud of having done. Bucky is patriotic in a positive, realistic sense; he believes in fighting fascism and defending freedom, in those values that he and Steve stood for. As Bucky tells Karli, though, in TFATWS finale, he signed up to fight for something bigger than himself in doing that but feels that he "failed twice".

He is referring to the two times that he was captured by the Nazis that led to him becoming the complete opposite of everything he stood for-- a Russian-controlled, brainwashed, killing machine-- for decades. This is, objectively, not his fault. Some part of Bucky does know and understand this but we know that he's still working through his guilt over it, as that's a large part of his plot in TFATWS. There is a reason why the show gives us Bucky and Sam's stories separately in the first episode and I think that Sam's tends to land with more clarity by the beginning of the second episode whereas Bucky's can take until Episode 3 to really be more fully understood, which results in fans having kind of a skewed perspective on why Bucky won't stop going on about the shield to Sam in Ep 2.

Obviously, Bucky personally thinks that Sam is perfect for it and would and does back him up when he decides to do this but what Bucky is trying to say to Sam is that he's upset that Walker has it for a variety of reasons, some of which are the same as Sam's and one really important one that is different and Sam won't really understand fully until the police station part of the plot. The reason why we had to have an episode of them apart is so that we can understand how they are *both* in their own heads when it comes to what they think the other is saying at the start of the reunion scene in Ep 2.

When Sam says that Bucky isn't going to come in here in his overextended life and tell Sam what his rights are, Bucky blinks because he hadn't meant what he was saying like that-- and Sam realizes that. Two seconds later, they're literally bantering about The Hobbit. The same guy who just flipped on Bucky as much as Bucky was flipping on Sam is, a heartbeat later, beaming with pride at "a sorcerer is a wizard without a hat!" because he's not really upset *at* Bucky, just as Bucky isn't really upset *at Sam*. They're both pissed off about Walker because this is another case of the government having let them both down. This is a Black man from Katrina-wrecked Louisiana and a soldier who was left behind enemy lines for seven decades here. Neither of them are naive but both of them are always at least hopeful and this is now a problem they know they both have to fix and they aren't sure how to do that or what will happen to them when they try. They're *worried* about one another and about the consequences of Walker having the shield, which is why Sam proceeds to tell Bucky exactly where he's going and Bucky follows him on the plane. This is all in *the same scene*... the fighting, the flirting, the mock-bickering they don't mean that they keep up as a kind of front and a bridge to the beginning of their relationship with one another, and the concern and need to protect each other.

So, why then is Bucky still like SAM THE SHIELD WE HAVE TO FIX THIS NOW IM GONNA DIE IF WE DONT NOW NOW NOW? lol Two reasons:

1. What Bucky is proud of having done in his life-- the things that keep him from blowing his brains out most days and are keeping him going in the face of trying to deal with the aftermath of his Winter Soldier years-- is fighting against the fascists during the war and backing up the ultimate anti-fascist symbol in their universe, Captain America. He's proud of his relationship with the good man who wore that uniform and carried that shield. It's less about *Steve himself* than it is about how this is something Bucky was a part of in his life that makes him feel worthy of still being alive and hopeful that he's not a totally terrible person and can find his way back to doing that kind of good again.

and, the bit that Sam doesn't fully understand until Ep 3...

2. The shield is power. That power was just handed over to someone who will abuse it. Bucky is being abused and is, as a result, powerless.

Let me explain this a bit more. Bucky knows it was not Sam's fault that Walker got the shield. It wasn't like Sam handed it over to Walker and Bucky doesn't see it like that. He knows that Sam did what he thought was right and tried to preserve a legacy of what Steve and the shield meant, gave it to the Smithsonian, all that. It isn't Sam's fault that he didn't foresee that Trumpy elements within the government would then turn around and try to warp it that symbolism for their own fascist agenda (paralleling our own real world and, darkly hilariously, the MAGA idiots who do not understand that Captain America is the definition of anti-fascism & has been since its first comics were written.) Bucky agrees that it isn't Sam's fault. It's also noteworthy that Bucky didn't go running to Sam to bitch after Sam gave the shield *to the Smithsonian*, he only shows up upset when *the shield ends up with Walker* and even though he's saying "you had no right", he doesn't mean it and Sam knows that. He rolls his eyes and is like "great, our mutually iffy communication skills are going to make this morning fun." (Note that Sam entirely knows that Bucky doesn't mean that. He shuts it down with the "my rights" comment but he is flirting with him a heartbeat later. He gets what Bucky is trying to convey because he's upset about it all, too.)

We understand why Sam snaps at Bucky with the "my rights" comment and then looks like he regrets it a bit because he knows Bucky doesn't think like that because we just watched Ep 1 and Sam's story and met Sarah and learned about the family business and had the bank scene and we get that Sam's motivation for giving up the shield is, in part, motivated off of his experiences of being Black in America-- that his conflict over love of a country that has continuously failed people like him is a fundamental part of who he is. He's especially sensitive to it at that moment because he's been living in Sarah's world for awhile between missions, he's failed to get that bank loan and feels like he's failing his family and is angry about it and, to add icing to this awful cake, these assholes then turned around and gave the shield to the anti-Steve.

He knows, though, that Bucky wasn't trying to tell him that he wasn't within in his rights to decide what to do with the shield-- the end of Endgame would prove that any day. But because Sam is understandably thinking about his decisions regarding the shield from just his own perspective, he fails to see that Bucky is coming at it from a place of fear that is making him fixate and lash out about it as a result of trauma he's suffered and is still suffering. Bucky, for his part, is not an idiot-- he knows there are plenty of reasons why Sam wouldn't want the shield and that many of them have to do with his experience as a Black man in America. He's limited in thinking about them in that moment because, like how Sam is only coming at the conversation from his perspective and not seeing the full weight of what is behind Bucky's motivation, Bucky is not seeing the full weight of Sam's motivation because he, too, is coming at it from his perspective.

Bucky is nothing short of panicking in this moment and it's not just because it hurts to see some asshole carrying the shield that belonged to their friend and it's not even just the untold amount of damage this could do to America and the world. Bucky is panicking because his already tentative grasp on control over his life is now going to completely unravel as a result of who is in power.

Jump with me to the police station sequence. This is where Sam really begins to understand that Bucky's sense of freedom is far more limited than Sam realized. Everyone has been telling Bucky that he's free, right? He's not brainwashed anymore, he's not a fugitive. He can live in his hometown of Brooklyn. He can do what he wants. Except, we slowly realize this isn't the case. His pardon is only going to be continued if he follows rules put into place by the same people in government who are behind John Walker's ascension to Captain America. His schedule is controlled by mandated therapy appointments with a therapist he cannot choose, who weaponizes his past (threatens to write in a book when he was controlled by one for years) and controls his present (checks his government-issued phone). Sam is completely floored by a police encounter in a black neighborhood that results in *Bucky* being the one in the back of a squad car. It all comes to ahead when Walker arrives and Sam sees the truth of it in a single scene: Walker controls Dr. Raynor and he's the one with the power to get Bucky out.

Not Sam, not the therapist... the asshole with the shield.

The one who then calls Bucky, to his face, an "asset" that is too important to be "tied up", knowing full well about Bucky's history of being a brainwashed, weaponized asset against his will and using language that evokes his torture and imprisonment.

It's at that moment that Sam realizes that Bucky, back at the start of Episode 2, wasn't just pissed off and concerned for the country-- he was completely and utterly terrified of being forced into being something that was out of his control again, in a way that would have been way worse because there was no brainwashing this time. Just a government-- Bucky's *own*-- treating him inhumanely and like a prisoner.

It's why Sam lays it down so hard with Walker in the parking lot after they leave the station in the scene that I privately think is secretly the most romantic one in TFATWS (yeah, even more than holding hands and gazing into each other's eyes in Ep 5)...

He tells Walker to go pound sand in that calmly badass way that Sam can achieve because he knows better than to rock the boat at this point in time but he does it by specifically saying that they won't work with Walker and Lemar because all that government red tape is for Walker to wade through and it wouldn't make sense for them to team up since he and Bucky? "We're free agents."

*We* are *free* agents.

Sam makes it abundantly clear that it's not just him who is a consultant for the military at this point-- not just Sam's own consulting for the Air Force that he's referring to-- but that Bucky, in Sam's mind, is also not within the jurisdiction of the government in any way. It's Sam's way of saying "listen, asshole, if you ever speak to my husband like that again, you won't like at all what comes next" and Walker knows it. It's what prompts the whole "then get out of my way" and the real sense of war between them, of Walker stopping trying to play the Walker version of nice.

It's also a good portion of why Sam is especially soft with Bucky after the police station. That has another layer as well of how he thinks he stepped out of line during Raynor's mandated therapy session but that's another, connected analysis, really... but notice how Sam tries to keep the bitter mocking banter up when Bucky meets him outside with the whole "well, I feel better" and Bucky is just "I feel awful" with complete, if dry, genuineness and Sam backs it off. He realizes Bucky doesn't want to mock-snipe-fight anymore-- he's tired and feels terrible and wants to be real for awhile. So, after Sam tells Walker to go fuck himself, he and Bucky are just walking together and talking about the next move and Sam listens to what Bucky's idea is.

Bucky's idea is Zemo. The reason why Sam goes along without much issue with Bucky's Zemo plans-- from the idea of it in the first place to accepting that Bucky broke him out of prison-- is because Sam recognizes how much Bucky hasn't been able to really own his own life and recovery from all of this ever since Sam has gotten a glimpse at how trapped he's felt. He's letting Bucky drive the car, metaphorically-speaking, because he sees how much Bucky has still been being controlled and is horrified, so he's trying to be supportive and give him room to deal with his trauma. He's treating Bucky like a person and a partner.

Sam also clearly admires the way that Bucky basically said okay, so, if we're doing this, there's really only way through to solving this problem and that's to go meet with the asshole who tortured and mind-raped me and I'm fully willing to go do that. Sam goes along with that, in part, because he's blown away by how brave that is. This is where Sam's experience with trauma personally and as a therapist (NOT BUCKY'S THERAPIST but just as a therapist in general having treated cases like this) really helps him to understand what Bucky needs. He offers support and lets Bucky choose of it what he feels he needs. Notice how he goes with Bucky to the prison and offers to go in with him instead or alongside him and lets Bucky choose what he feels comfortable with. Bucky, for his part, doesn't want Sam near Zemo as much as possible and needs to do the first confronting of Zemo himself. Sam respects that. Obviously, he's not thrilled when Bucky breaks Zemo out of prison but Bucky knows Sam well enough and knows that Sam trusts him enough that he'll get over it because, for the mission's sake, it actually was the only strategic move to play. Sam folds and goes along with it with barely any fuss because he knows and trusts Bucky and Bucky loves that. He's gone from a person being treated as a prisoner of his own government back to the respected partner of a man who loves him and doesn't have an issue with him having a sense of free will in the span of an episode. He feels safer, which empowers him then to go run the gauntlet of other challenges to his trauma throughout the rest of the season.

The point is that, at the beginning of Episode 2 when Sam and Bucky reunite, they're both still stuck in their own traumas as a result of having been separated for a bit but it's very clear that neither has any desire to let any of it get in the way of their relationship with one another. The same scene that has them bicker-fighting has them switch to flirting and then Sam tells Bucky all about the mission he's going on that he won't admit aloud he's now nervous about, especially after realizing there's a faction of the government who screwed him over about Walker, and Bucky immediately follows him on the plane, insisting on coming with him to protect him. That this is all the same scene just shows you from the very beginning of TFATWS that these two love one another and know one another enough to see through to what each other is really trying to say behind whatever scared, angry thing is said in the moment.

What Bucky winds up showing Sam is that the shield is power. It's transformational power. The thing about TFATWS is that if you look at it closely, you notice that these two guys who seem to have wildly different plots are really having the same paralleling issues within those plots. One of those issues is a pervasive sense of feeling powerless to change their situations. For Bucky, that was tied to the government control we discussed. For Sam, it was about dealing with the aftermath of a government that didn't do enough-- his family's struggling business, the legacy of that alongside the legacy of the shield, the weight of feeling like he was pulled between his family and his country all the time. Sam ultimately chose to retire the shield to the Smithsonian because he didn't see it as something entirely of his world. He told Steve that it felt like it was "someone else's" when he was given it and I don't think that feeling left in the six months of trying to decide what to do with it and how to honor his friendship with Steve and Steve's legacy in the process.

Sam was split even during those six months-- partly consulting for the government, for the Air Force he quit before meeting Steve, working through a lot of trauma related to that or trying to. (The Captain Vanzant mission at the start of Ep 1 is him successfully moving through Riley-related trauma, much like how Bucky gets to do similar things with The Winter Soldier in Madripoor later on.) When he's not on a mission, though, he's in Delacroix, with his sister, feeling guilty about the years she's been alone, trying to save their family business whose struggles financially are no doubt rooted in part from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina years ago and trying to survive that. He's up to his eyeballs in every trauma that he's suffered related to his family-- the losses of his parents, his brother-in-law and I'm willing to guess, his and Sarah's older brother. He's been dumped into a new world where he's a surrogate dad to two young boys he's just really getting to know.

Atop all of that, he's a bit introverted, still full of more anger and trauma than he has been able to fully process, and he's not sure that makes him the best messenger for the ultimate symbol of what America can be. (It actually does but he wasn't sure of that.) I'm also sure that one of his reasons for turning down the shield was, ironically, Bucky himself, even if they weren't really communicating about this. I think that Sam wouldn't give up Bucky for anything, no matter what the nature of their relationship is at any given point, and he felt like Bucky deserved privacy to work through his issues and some peace and quiet after everything and didn't want to shine a spotlight on him by becoming Captain America.

He decided that the shield needed to die with Steve and become part of the museum exhibit and what I love about this is that the setting for all of this at the Smithsonian proves that this is actually impossible-- they leave the shield in the same exhibit that features the still-living, still-trying-to-thrive, human-shield-symbol Bucky Barnes. Instead, the end of the story will go back to the Smithsonian exhibit and see Sam impacting it in a different way by adding Isaiah, making it more balanced and fair and true to a more fully realized sense of history. It's symbolic of recognizing a true past by putting Isaiah into the exhibit but taking back from the exhibit the still present symbol of the shield.

Ultimately, TFATWS give us a love story about two guys who are obsessed with empowering the other one to see themselves the way the other sees them. Taking back the shield from Walker isn't just taking back the sociopolitical power that comes with it-- it's not just impacting the U.S. and the world on that level-- but it's about Sam and Bucky each helping one another to take back their own personal sense of power. Sam helps Bucky get free of the government's grasp enough to really work through his trauma on his own terms. Bucky helps Sam to see that the shield isn't a symbol of the past but a tool for the present and that leaving it behind was just the same as Bucky running in place with his own trauma-- it was giving in to a feeling of powerlessness, instead of claiming what power he had and using it to enact the changes he wants to see in his own life and the world around him.

On the journey through that, they protect one another at every turn and do their best to try to show one another they understand what the other is going through. They aren't perfect at it. Sam gets snappy and impatient and regrets it. Bucky gets snide and angry and regrets it. They know one another well enough to know what to let slide and what the other needs to hear and how to show up for one another. Sam needed Bucky to show up and help him feel less overwhelmed by everything he was dealing with at home. Bucky needed Sam to tell him he sees him as he is and not as an extension of Steve and that he loves him in his own right (which is really what that tough love is all about). What's touching about Sam and Bucky is how much they try for one another, how much effort they put into supporting each other -- how they were thrown together in the world's most traumatic meet-cute and have just been choosing each other, over and over again, ever since.

So, yeah. It's not just Bucky yelling at Sam that he should have taken the shield, it's really about why Bucky's so scared at the idea of a shield that is not with Sam or in the Smithsonian, how that would make him even more of a prisoner of his own government and how that would derail the thing he considers the best thing he's ever done, which is backing up and fighting fascists alongside Steve's Captain America. It's fear and trauma, not racism and intentional aggression, and Sam can recognize that as he's segueing the fight into The Big Three conversation within seconds so I think maybe more of us need to consider it from that perspective, too.

[gwynsplainer]

On The Grinning Man and the De-Politicization of L'Homme Qui Rit (a Spontaneous Essay)

Since I watched The Grinning Man I’ve been meaning to write a post comparing it to The Man Who Laughs but I have a lot of opinions and analysis I wanted to do so I have been putting it off for ages. So here goes! If I were to make a post where I explain everything the musical changes it would definitely go over the word limit, so I’ll mostly stick to the thematic. Let me know if that’s a post you’d like to see, though!

Ultimately, The Grinning Man isn’t really an adaptation of the Man Who Laughs. It keeps some of the major plot beats (a disfigured young man with a mysterious past raised by a man and his wolf to perform to make a living alongside the blind girl he rescued from the snow, restored to his aristocratic past by chance after their show is seen by Lord David and Duchess Josiana, and the interference of the scheming Barkilphedro…. well, that’s just about it). The problem I had with the show, however, wasn’t the plot points not syncing up, it was the thematic inconsistency with the book. By replacing the book’s antagonistic act—the existence of a privileged ruling class—with the actions of one or two individuals from the lower class, transforming the societal tragedy into a revenge plot, and reducing the pain of dehumanization and abuse to the pain of a physical wound, The Grinning Man is a sanitized, thematically weak failure to adapt The Man Who Laughs.

I think the main change is related to the reason I posit the book never made it in the English-speaking world. The musical was made in England, the setting of the book which was so critical of its monarchy, it’s aristocracy, and the failings of its society in ways that really haven’t been remedied so far. It might be a bit of a jump to assume this is connected, but I have evidence. They refer to it as a place somewhat like our own, but change King James to King Clarence, and Queen Anne to Angelica. Obviously, the events of the book are fictional, and it was a weird move for Hugo to implicate real historical figures as responsible for the torture of a child, but it clearly served a purpose in his political criticism that the creative team made a choice to erase. They didn’t just change the names, though, they replaced the responsibility completely. In the book, Gwynplaine’s disfigurement—I will be referring to him as Gwynplaine because I think the musical calling him Grinpayne was an incredibly stupid and cruel choice—was done to him very deliberately, with malice aforethought, at the order of the king. The king represents the oppression of the privileged, and having the fault be all Barkilphédro loses a lot thematically. The antagonism of the rich is replaced by the cruelty of an upwardly mobile poor man (Barkilphédro), and the complicity of another poor man.

The other “villain” of the original story is the way that Gwynplaine is treated. I think for 1869, this was a very ahead-of-its-time approach to disability, which almost resembles the contemporary understanding of the Social Model of disability. (Sidenote: I can’t argue on Déa’s behalf. Hugo really dropped the ball with her. I’m going to take a moment to shout out the musical for the strength and agency they gave Déa.) The way the public treats Gwynplaine was kind of absent from the show. I thought it was a very interesting and potentially good choice to have the audience enter the role of Gwynplaine’s audience (the first they see of him is onstage, performing as the Grinning Man) rather than the role of the reader (where we first see him as a child, fleeing a storm). If done right, this could have explored the story’s theme of our tendency to place our empathy on hold in order to be distracted and feel good, eventually returning to critique the audience’s complicity in Gwynplaine’s treatment. However, since Grinpayne’s suffering is primarily based in the angst caused by his missing past and the physical pain of his wound (long-healed into a network of scars in the book) [a quick side-note: I think it was refreshing to see chronic pain appear in media, you almost never see that, but I wish it wasn’t in place of the depth of the original story], the audience does not have to confront their role in his pain. They hardly play one. Instead, it is Barkilphédro, the singular villain, who is responsible for Grinpayne’s suffering. Absolving the audience and the systems of power which put us comfortably in our seats to watch the show of pain and misery by relegating responsibility to one character, the audience gets to go home feeling good.

If you want to stretch, the villain of the Grinning Man could be two people and not one. It doesn’t really matter, since it still comes back to individual fault, not even the individual fault of a person of high status, but one or two poor people. Musical!Ursus is an infinitely shittier person than his literary counterpart. In the book, Gwynplaine is still forced to perform spectacles that show off his appearance, but they’re a lot less personal and a lot less retraumatizing. In the musical, they randomly decided that not only would the role of the rich in the suffering of the poor be minimized, but also it would be poor people that hurt Grinpayne the most. Musical!Ursus idly allows a boy to be mutilated and then takes him in and forces him to perform a sanitized version of his own trauma while trying to convince him that he just needs to move on. In the book, he is much kinder. Their show, Chaos Vanquished, also allows him to show off as an acrobat and a singer, along with Déa, whose blindness isn’t exploited for the show at all. He performs because he needs to for them all to survive. He lives a complex life like real people do, of misery and joy. He’s not obsessed with “descanting on his own deformity” (dark shoutout to William Shakespeare for that little…infuriating line from Richard III), but rather thoughtfully aware of what it means. He deeply feels the reality of how he is seen and treated. Gwynplaine understands that he was hurt by the people who discarded him for looking different and for being poor, and he fucking goes off about it in the Parliament Confrontation scene (more to come on this). It is not a lesson he has to learn but a lesson he has to teach.

Grinpayne, on the other hand, spends his days in agony over his inability to recall who disfigured him, and his burning need to seek revenge. To me, this feels more than a little reminiscent of the trope of the Search for a Cure which is so pervasive in media portrayals of disability, in which disabled characters are able to think of nothing but how terribly wrong their lives went upon becoming disabled and plan out how they might rectify this. Grinpayne wants to avenge his mutilation. Gwynplaine wants to fix society. Sure, he decides to take the high road and not do this, and his learning is a valuable part of the musical’s story, but I think there’s something so awesome about how the book shows a disabled man who understands his life better than any abled mentor-philosophers who try to tell him how to feel. Nor is Gwynplaine fixed by Déa or vice versa, they merely find solace and strength in each other’s company and solidarity. The musical uses a lot of language about love making their bodies whole which feels off-base to me.

I must also note how deeply subversive the book was for making him actually happy: despite the pain he feels, he is able to enjoy his life in the company and solidarity he finds with Déa and takes pride in his ability to provide for her. The assumption that he should want to change his lot in life is not only directly addressed, but also stated outright as a failure of the audience: “You may think that had the offer been made to him to remove his deformity he would have grasped at it. Yet he would have refused it emphatically…Without his rictus… Déa would perhaps not have had bread every day”

He has a found family that he loves and that loves him. I thought having him come from a loving ~Noble~ family that meant more to him than Ursus did rather than having Ursus, a poor old man, be the most he had of a family in all his memory and having Déa end up being Ursus’ biological daughter really undercut the found family aspect of the book in a disappointing way.

Most important to me was the fundamental change that came from the removal of the Parliament Confrontation scene, on both the themes of the show and the character of Gwynplaine. When Gwyn’s heritage is revealed and his peerage is restored to him, he gets the opportunity to confront society’s problems in the House of Parliament. When Gwynplaine arrives in the House of Parliament, the Peers of England are voting on what inordinate sum to allow as income to the husband of the Queen. The Peers expect any patriotic member of their ranks to blithely agree to this vote: in essence, it is a courtesy. Having grown up in extreme poverty, Gwynplaine is outraged by the pettiness of this vote and votes no. The Peers, shocked by this transgression, allow him to take the stand and explain himself. In this scene, Gwynplaine brilliantly and profoundly confronts the evils of society. He shows the Peers their own shame, recounting how in his darkest times a “pauper nourished him” while a “king mutilated him.” Even though he says nothing remotely funny, he is received with howling laughter. This scene does a really good job framing disability as a problem of a corrupt, compassionless society rather than something wrong with the disabled individual (again, see the Social Model of disability, which is obviously flawed, but does a good job recognizing society that denies access, understanding and compassion—the kind not built on pity—as a central problem faced by disabled communities). It is the central moment of Hugo’s story thematically, which calls out the injustices in a system and forces the reader to reckon with it.

It is so radical and interesting and full that Gwynplaine is as brilliant and aware as he is. He sees himself as a part of a system of cruelty and seeks justice for it. He is an empathic, sharp-minded person who seeks to make things better not just for himself and his family, but for all who suffer as he did at the hands of Kings. Grinpayne’s rallying cry is “I will find and kill the man who crucified my face.” He later gets wise to the nature of life and abandons this, but in that he never actually gets to control his own relationship to his life. When I took a class about disability in the media one of the things that seemed to stand out to me most is that disabled people should be treated as the experts on their own experiences, which Gwynplaine is. Again, for a book written in 1869 that is radical. Grinpayne is soothed into understanding by the memory of his (rich) mother’s kindness.

I’ll give one more point of credit. I loved that there was a happy ending. But maybe that’s just me. The cast was stellar, and the puppetry was magnificent. I wanted to like the show so badly, but I just couldn’t get behind what it did to the story I loved.

[transsexualhamlet]

predictions for yuumori s2 (as a manga reader)

No matter what happens, this is probably gonna end up aging badly, but i’m hyperfixating and I’ve decided to make it everyone else’s problem so I’m going to predict where they’re gonna go with s2 of moriarty the patriot (keep in mind i’m writing this as of episode 2) and what I think would be the ideal scenario, in the likely situation that this is the last season.

So we can tell a lot about what they’re going to cut/include from the opening and ending, and the first two episodes. 

Observations/Conclusions:

-moneypenny and most likely von herder are gone, already evidenced by the first 2 episodes, which is :( but understandable bc there’s only so much space and they’re definitely cutting the arcs where they would be important

-so that means no moran backstory because duh, there’s a point in the backstory and i see value in it, moran slaps when he’s not being an ass lmao, but again, time constraints

-no matter what I can’t see them keeping in the like, child hunting thing 2 electric boogaloo, even tho it did further Fred’s and Louis’ characters, since they’ve previously cut out stuff considering them and. You know. That’s how it be.

-You can see they’re including jack the ripper arc (considering, jack is in the opening) and I have faith that they can downsize the arc without butchering it if they do it right. This is good that they’re keeping it in, considering it’s one of the... main arcs not involving milverton that advances the plot.

-Major thing we can tell is that, yeah, Milverton is nowhere to be seen. It seems like this would fuck things up bad since he’s like, the only kind of “main villain” we get here. But honestly? I agree with that. Fuck Milverton. He has no character or motivation and is like my one and only bone to pick with the manga. He’s just there to suck ass and create plot convenience?? I don’t like him and he never needed to be there if he wasn’t at least going to do something interesting. I support the anime cutting him.

-That DOES fuck over their ability to do the white knight arc, since, well, milverton is the cause of all of that. And this is the one thing I really don’t know what they’re going to do with that to connect jack the ripper directly to the final problem. I can’t predict that, but I do think there are ways it can be done that won’t be Awful.

-So considering that, Mary’s arc is definitely axed, which doesn’t bother me that much since by that point i so impatient for gay people and really didn’t care about watson’s fiance even tho she is a lovely lady. For anime effect, she does not need an arc, though I could see them having her show up a few times so watson doesn’t seem too gay either lmao.

-They’re definitely shooting to end with the final problem, considering without it there’s no big culminating event between moriarty and sherlock, which is obviously the big sell. And well. It’s. Um. The final problem. 

The season says it’s slated to be 13 episodes, since s1 didn’t have enough time for 12. I honestly think they can manage it all, if they play their cards right. 

Outlook:

This whole potential situation does sound familiar, I’ll point out that I just arrived here after the shit show of the promised neverland’s second season. But I don’t think it will get bad like tpn did. Because in Moriarty, they could afford to cut things because there are many stand alone and disposable arcs, whereas tpn really shouldn’t have, since they pretty much all contributed later to Major Main Character Plot Things. And the important points of the arcs that they’ll probably cut can actually be written into existing ones without looking like plot convenience, in my vision of it.

Honestly, I’m pretty optimistic for moriarty, it works better for this kind of adaption than in a lot of other manga that end up getting these most likely two season adaptions. I’d love to get those arcs for the servant’s and other character’s developments of course, but trying to stick that in when there’s really only time to focus on the main characters would suck up time better spent on really getting deep into the main storyline. Even if there are less characters, in a situation like this a streamlined and nuanced story will look elegant, whereas shoving as much content as possible into a few short episodes makes everyone cringe.

The situation does end up looking like the promised neverland, but it has a chance to be significantly less fucked considering,,, well,,, tpn is an insanely low bar, and they will hopefully not make the promised neverland’s same mistakes of Shove Seventeen Plotlines Into One Episode After Realizing Belatedly They Actually Needed Those Parts.

Obviously I don’t know what will happen, and this will be outdated by sunday lmao, but my projection looks something like this for 13 episodes to conclude the show.

Predictions:

(Episodes 1+2: A Scandal in the British Empire)

Episode 3: I’m very anxious for 3 considering this will probably make or break my opinion on the anime. Ideally, this episode would wrap up the scandal arc and go over the whole James Bond thing, it could be pretty baller and fit well into an episode. But though there’s plenty of Irene in the opening, there’s no sight of Bond, so considering anime as a whole is fucking transphobic, they might try to change it, twist around bond’s words or just, gloss over it altogether. If they cut it, they might have time to squeeze in another arc but I don’t think they honestly need to? With what they seem to be keeping in, they’ll have ample time to get to everything, and it would be shorter anyway considering the smaller amount of servants. 

Here, we do definitely need to cover Sherlock’s “receiving the name of the lord of crime and deciding to burn it and find it out himself because he’s extra”, no matter the status of irene/bond’s gender. If they do that right and possibly change a few things so it’s more important, this could play into them moving forward his whole discovery of their secrets.

Episodes 4-7: These will most likely cover jack the ripper arc. There’s a lot to go over here, and I’m confident they can cut it down, because tbh Moriarty is pretty long winded for a manga and cutting things is good to an extent. This covers most of the major expansions on William’s ideas and plans, and definitely has the holes to stuff in more of the points made in the arcs that will be cut out. Though I have my reservations, they could plausibly take most points in white knight and integrate them into here.

Episodes 8-10: These are the ones that are going to take the most work and probably be the most changed. They should finish up the ripper arc in 7, give or take a few episodes, and then here, If Sherlock has a little more figured out from episode 3, he can look deeper. I think it’s honestly a good idea for the one to discover the Incriminating Records to be him, as it again gives them more connection. There needs to be some other reason Moriarty’s secrets are in danger of getting leaked to the paper, but I’m sure they can put something together with scotland yard or something, or even like, Mycroft. I see that. But if that happens, then we can spend an episode or so on the merchant of london, aka little liam commits girlboss, which can be woven into the idea of everything Coming Out.

Episodes 11-13: Final problem. I see this going mostly unchanged, up until 55. Truth is they’ll probably end up cutting something but hmm. I don’t know. They should keep the fred stuff in, since they’ll cut his other development. They should keep the squad asking sherlock for help, since they cut the other parts that highlight the crime squad’s care for him. But I think they could montage most of the William Goes French Revolution On You Hoes, even the part where the kids come in front of one of them, if you see what’s going on right. But everything can proceed as in the manga pretty smoothly, I think, it all makes sense if they put it together in 7-10. You know, you got somehow, the worst case happens, and boom, scandal, final problem enacted. Killing spree. William reveals he’s been emo this whole time but it’s too late now. Everyone scrambling to catch up with his damn plans. Gay boy knocking on 221B with a fucking love letter. Shit gets found out. And then... well, yuh.

Disclaimer I still don’t know everything about this, bc I cannot find a translation of 54, only the raw with no context, and I know there’s content after 55 but I can’t find that either. But I’m sure as hell an english major and can understand where things are probably going. I don’t know what’s involved at that point, and if there’s some plan detailed to save him or something. That’s the main thing I don’t know, and if there is one detailed of course that kind of changes everything, but for now I’m going on the assumption that 54 is “sherlock runs to the bridge and yells at liam to stop being a dramatic whore while london burns around them and the murder squad watches anxiously with mysterious intent, until it is chapter 55″. (IF Y’ALL HAVE THE ENGLISH PLEASE HMU) They better not TOUCH anything in 55 or so help me god.

But as to after 55, things are going to be different. Besties, I’m an optimist, but there’s no way they’ll make a season after this. It does appear that they’ve mostly wrapped up, and they’ve gotten through what Big Revals they plan on doing. The shit hinted from the beginning has happened, and there probably won’t be enough to create another, unless the author plans on fucking shit up again, which I don’t approve of. There are a few things still left unsaid, like, Liam’s real name and everything, but if it’s supposed to be important, things that small can 100 percent be written into this.

And as something that’s intending to finish up a story, depending on what manga canon really is (BESTIE I DO NOT KNOW WHAT IT IS) they might change it. There’s two options, a bittersweet/hopeful and a tragic one, but either one will end up open ended, because of my extensive knowledge of 2 season animes with significantly longer mangas. (done badly: tokyo ghoul and tpn, done well: owari no seraph and mob psycho) Either we have it like well, oh damn, everything was destined to be Sad but well you’re with him now you’re probably dead, but you know there’s something hinted at and you don’t know for sure so that’s the catch. So you get a vague and bittersweet but possibly hopeful ending. OR something that takes,,, whatever ends up happening in the manga or whatever the plan is and turning it into an epilogue infodump.

I can see either going well depending on how they handle the messages of the story. But yeah, as far as to my extent of the understanding of the show, that’s how it’ll probably go, and what my opinion of how it should is.

To What Extent Will The Gay:

You know, this is my ideal scenario within these time limits, but you know they could always go The Wrong Direction if the anime team took a look at some of the later chapters and went “holy shit this is a bit too gay” and try to axe some of the sherliam content, which I wouldn’t put past any corporation.

In the case that they do, I see lot of good shit going. They’re clearly trying to do the final problem, so they obviously can’t cut out 55, which is good :). But though 55 is clearly, uh, really fucking homosexual, the most romantic shit goes down in 53, as far as I can tell? (keeping in mind i still haven’t found 54′s english version, if anyone would like to direct me to a translation, that would be LOVELY.) I unfortunately can see them cutting Liam’s letter almost entirely, and that kind of scares me.

You know, even if i’d hate and slander them for it, cutting out james bond would be something i would understand. But messing with sherliam would fuck them over, not just cause that would be awful, but like, because it’s like... kind of the main point.

So I’m not really too worried about them messing with it, mostly because the content itself is holding them at gunpoint, sherliam holds the whole plot structure in place, especially if you’re shooting for final problem. And even in the manga they never, like, actually say they’re in love with each other even tho historically gay lovers would probably call each other “friends” lmao so it’s not like they have to greenlight gay sex or anything lmao it’s just Very Romantic (No Homo)

And apart from that, yuumori has actually been pretty decent to the gays so far?? Damn shawty, they certainly haven’t toned down the gay yet and it’s clearly their main source of fans, and what they’ve decided to emphasize in both openings and a significant portion of the s2 ending. We’re all here for it, and they’re catering to it, so I can at least give you that.

[thanksjro]

More Than Meets the Eye #4- Man, Talk About Timely, Huh? It’s Time for the Plague Storyline!

Issue #4 opens up with First Aid writing in his diary about the less-than-stellar working conditions at Delphi medical center, and it’s not because Ambulon caught him reading Wreckers fanfic during office hours for the eighth time this week.

So, here’s the thing: you can’t be demoted from doctor to nurse. That’s not how that goes, because doctors and nurses aren’t on the same career path ladder. A doctor can have certain accesses and privileges taken away if their performance slips, or can be moved to a different ward or transferred to another facility, but outright demotion to nurse status isn’t a THING. If anything, First Aid would be performing nurse duties to cover for the fact that Delphi seems to have a grand total of three staff members for the entire outpost. Hell, they’ve had to outsource their mental health checkups to a guy who was in orbit over Cybertron until a couple months ago.

But anyway, something’s up at Delphi, and it all started when they let a couple of Decepticon surrendering combatants inside. These two dudes were running from the Decepticon Justice Division, a group who basically super-murder any Decepticon who’s decided to do a runner from the Cause. The DJD’s base of operations is in the same general area as Delphi, which seems like maybe not the best idea for the Autobots when it came to outpost placement, but it seems to be working out pretty well for the surrendering combatants.

Pharma shows up, and is ready to throw them back outside- he’s the big boss, so he can make that kind of call- but after a little detective works they figure out that the two don’t have their t-cogs anymore, having had them removed for religious purposes. Ambulon sees them as the exact opposite of a threat because of this, not to mention him having a soft spot for surrendering ‘Cons, and manages to convince Pharma to let them stay, and also not violate the Autobot Code, Article 7, which states that all surrendering combatants must be granted safe haven. Ultra Magnus would be proud.

They lock up the Decepticons, slate them for a patch up, then things get complicated as it turns out, they’ve got a branched spark. The last time we saw a branched spark, things didn’t turn out so hot, and it looks like things have started going similarly downhill.

But enough about the horrific deaths of dozens of robots on a frozen planet, it’s time for bar shenanigans!

While Skids prepares to commit an act of violence on a droid that’s done absolutely nothing to him and is just trying to do its friggin’ job, Swerve reveals to Ratchet that he’s decided to follow his dreams after all and open a bar. He doesn’t have all the paperwork turned in yet, per se, but he’s working on it. He hands Ratchet a free drink to celebrate the off-panel event of the Lost Light having found itself on the map again, and Ratchet, who’s apparently never heard of a shot, gripes about the portioning.

Of course, he might have a bit of a point, as the drink seems to shrink more and more as he talks to Swerve about the fact that they’re both giant nerds who were subscribed to Wreckers: Declassified.

Was non-war-related entertainment just not allowed for the last four million years? No wonder the war went on for so long- everyone was so steeped in it they forgot how to function like regular people. Since the logs were beamed directly into the brain, I can only imagine the amount of physic damage that last entry caused.

The reason Ratchet’s brought up everyone’s favorite podcast is that there was a new entry last night- odd, considering that Ironfist’s been dead for a couple years at this point. It was just a series of seemingly random numbers, or at least it would have been, if Ratchet wasn’t a good doctor who kept up-to-date on his medical news.

My my, I do wonder which Wreckers: Declassified subscriber could have sent those statistics on Delphi out into the aether.

As luck would have it, the Lost Light isn’t terribly far away from Messatine at the moment, which is the planet Delphi is on. Ratchet decides it’s time to check things out.

Over in Rodimus’ very pink room, Ultra Magnus wants to have a discussion about Tailgate, and the fact that he wants to be a Decepticon. This is, obviously, a problem, considering the fact that everyone on the ship, who wasn’t stuck in some sort of hole or alternate dimension for the last six millions years, is staunchly anti-Decepticon. Magnus laments on the fact that now that the war is over, he has to start seeing people as people, as opposed to cogs in the machine. Magnus is one of those guys who functions better with structure, which the Lost Light doesn’t really have a ton of.

Rodimus tells Magnus to lighten up a bit, before he pulls something trying to bring military regulation into civilian life, and says that he’ll handle the whole Tailgate thing.

Back down on Messatine, Ratchet’s dragged Drift and Pipes of all people into his little visit to Delphi, and they’re rocking up to the scene on the MARBs- Mobile Autobot Repair Bays. This is Pipe’s first space adventure, and he’s really happy to be here!

We’ll see how he feels a little later in the day.

As the boys make their way over to the plot, Drift and Ratchet lay a bit of groundwork down for future storylines, then arrive outside Delphi to find the door locked and spray painted with a big ol’ X.

Shane McCarthy slipped James Roberts a twenty to set up a slowburn between his OC and Ratchet. Let’s see how that pays off.

Pipes decides to do a thing and crash through the entrance like a hooligan. It goes about as well as one could expect, though we do a pretty sweet and unnecessary flip from Drift out of it.

We’re going to need to soak Pipes in rubbing alcohol for a good hour.

Ratchet yells at Pipes for busting into a medical outpost that clearly wasn’t meant to be cracked open like a cold one, not to mention knocking over at least three hospital beds.

Then a sick guy shows up and Drift flips the hell out and slices up a guy so hard Pipes has to remove his visor to watch the insanity unfold.

The whole “sword murder” thing doesn’t really gel with the idea of “do no harm”, so Ratchet and Drift get into it a bit before First Aid shows up and starts drawing on Pipe’s face.

Back on the Lost Light, Rodimus is keeping his promise and dealing with Tailgate, with the help of Rewind, resident historical archivist and the guy who’s about to rock Tailgate’s fucking world in under 12 seconds.

Okay. So.

The thing about recorded history is everything has a bias. No matter how impartial the recorder attempts to be, no matter how detached, there will ALWAYS be at least a little bleedthough. Now, while it’s unlikely Rewind’s been in direct combat, because he���s friggin’ tiny and turns into a data slug, and while he doesn’t seem the patriotic type, he’s still an Autobot. He’s only been on one side of the war, so most, if all all of his archive, is built from the framework of being surrounded by Autobot mindsets and propaganda. It would appear that this isn’t the first time Rewind’s done something like this, if he already has the upload time committed to memory down to the tens decimal. If he’d been asked to do this prior to the conclusion of the war- very likely, considering it ended a few months ago- what are the odds that he was asked to frame things a little more in favor of his own team? Pretty good, I’d think.

Guys, I don’t think Tailgate is having a good time with the history lesson.

Needless to say, any concern over Tailgate wanting to be a Decepticon is pretty soundly quashed after this.

Back over with the plague plotline, First Aid gives Ratchet the rundown on the symptoms they’ve run into at Delphi.

You fucker, you got that line from Wreckers: Declassified.

Delphi hasn’t been able to call for help, because even if they didn’t have their hands full of liquified robot, communications have been out since something went off and broke pretty much everything in the outpost, general health and well-being included. First Aid suspects a dirty bomb, curtesy of the DJD. The tour of the facility ends in the medical bay proper, where Ambulon is hard at work trying to keep folks alive.

Ratchet looks over the scene, and notes that the older patients in the ward aren’t crying their literal eyeballs out. Weird, that.

Ambulon shows off their super-secret patient, who is kept in shadow for the reader, to keep the suspense going for a bit longer. Mystery patient’s been in an “everlasting coma” since he got here, and while Ambulon and Pharma don’t think anything can be done, First Aid’s willing to get weird with it.

Earlier in the issue, it was mentioned that Ambulon didn’t think First Aid took any initiative. Turns out, First Aid does, and has, just not on things Ambulon agrees with.

It was at that point that Ratchet decided he rather liked First Aid.

Back with Tailgate, he’s returned to his room to confront Cyclonus, who’s busy doing something on the computer. What exactly isn’t revealed, and never will be.

Tailgate is really cross about the fact that Cyclonus let him walk around on a ship full of Autobots claiming he wanted to be a Decepticon. Of course, it’s not like Cyclonus knew he was going to be such a loudmouth about it, otherwise maybe he would have told him to maybe NOT do that, if only to prevent his life getting further muddied up by a war he wasn’t even around for.

Tailgate’s gotten really worked up over this, because that’s just how he is as a person, and even goes so far as to punch Cyclonus in the arm in his frustration. He apologizes almost immediately, but the bear’s already been poked, unfortunately.

Oh, honeybunches, you are going to be regretting that move for the next five years.

But not before the customary “pulling away from the one guy who’ll even talk to you because you don’t know how to properly react to anything anymore" thing.

Back on Messatine, we find out where Pharma got to- he’s been locked into the quarantine room by accident, and will remain there until all technopathogens are completely dead. This will take millions of years.

That seems like poor planning for such a room.

Or, at least, it would be, if Ambulon was still running the show.

How the fuck has Ambulon survived this long without dying of stupidity?

As Ratchet starts trying to get Pharma out of his glass case of emotion, Pipes is starting to not have so much fun on his first-ever field trip.

Yaaay, space adventure!

Ratchet warns Drift not to kill Pipes- repeatedly- and Drift manages to do that, though it looks a little dodgy for a second, as he bonks the little guy on the head and knocks him out. Ratchet’s managed to get Pharma out, and Pharma immediately runs for the prison cells, saying he’s figured it out.

Ambulon carries what’s left of Pipes back to the emergency ward, and Ratchet holds the little dude’s hand while they get him hooked up to some feeds. Drift starts bleeding from the eyes. Awesome.

Enter Pharma.

Today just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?

Turns out those two Decepticons from earlier got out of their cells somehow, and they’ve got guns. Things aren’t looking too good for the Autobots.

Well, I mean, if he says it’s fine, then I guess…

Yep, our mystery patient is none other than Fortress Maximus, warden of Garrus 9, victim of Overlord, and glorified lock-pick for the Aequitas chamber. He’s looking a lot better than the last time we saw him, in that he’s got some limbs attached to that torso of his, and also eyeballs. Good for him.

[aion-rsa]

Why Jack Bauer Is America’s James Bond

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Despite what Marvel might have you believe, not all film franchises are perfectly serialized.

Take, for example, another kind of cinematic superhero: James Bond a.k.a. 007. The MI6 spy created by Ian Fleming and brought to screen by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli is timeless in the most literal sense of the world. Since Sean Connery passed the role of James Bond to Roger Moore for good in 1973’s Live and Let Die (Connery previously gave way to George Lazenby in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service before returning in Diamonds Are Forever), James Bond has become unstuck in time. 

As played in subsequent films over several decades by actors like Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig, Bond remains the same while the world around him changes. Some fans like to theorize that “Agent 007” and “James Bond” are aliases used by different MI6 spies throughout the years. But within the context of the series, there is only one Bond…James Bond. Bond is always middle-aged, looks good in a tux, enjoys stiff drinks and beautiful women. 

Read more

Movies

James Bond Movies Streaming Guide: Where to Watch 007 Online

By Don Kaye

The Cold War ended in the ‘90s and yet Bond, perhap the ultimate cinematic representative of its aesthetic, just kept calm and carried on as usual. Save for a handful of Craig’s latter year depictions, James Bond rarely learns any new tricks. He doesn’t develop. He is what he is – a hero of espionage and action. In that regard, the James Bond series is a surprisingly honest exploration of the occasional propagandistic aims of major blockbuster filmmaking. Bond isn’t a character in a story. He’s the United Kingdom’s idealized version of itself writ large on a canvas widescreen: a suave spy who is welcomed into every country to get laid and save the world. 

But what about the United States’ idealized version of itself? How has the Cold War’s lone surviving superpower let itself go without a similarly iconic (and occasionally nakedly jingoistic) cinematic creation? The answer is that America already does have an outsized action icon…he was just on television. 

Jack Bauer of early 2000s Fox thriller series 24 is American James Bond whether we want him to be or not. Just as Bond is the idealized Englishman, with his martini lunches and quick wit, Bauer is the America’s warped ideal of itself: angry, merciless, focused, and unfailingly effective. 

As portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland (who won an Emmy for the role), Jack Bauer started off as a fairly three-dimensional character in 24’s first season. That season picked up with Jack as a family man and a glorified pencil pusher at the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit’s Los Angeles office. Over the span of the first season’s 24 hours (24’s hook, of course, is that each season takes place over the span of a 24-hour day in real time), Jack slowly lost grip of his humanity, culminating with his friend Nina Myers turning out to be a mole and murdering his wife Teri. 

The death of Teri fundamentally changed Jack. For eight subsequent seasons and a movie, Jack became an Uncle Sam-style cartoon character obsessed with protecting his country from terrorists all over the globe, because his family was already taken away from him. Elisha Cuthbert as Jack’s daughter Kim was a prominent character for a few seasons, but as she was phased out so too was Jack’s grip on reality.

Unlike the James Bond series, 24 was particularly devoted to its chronology, with the very premise of the show meaning it had to have a close relationship with time. Jack Bauer would in theory grow as a character from season to season. But rather than developing, he mostly devolved into the most base version of himself. 

It’s in this way that Bauer actually became more like James Bond than one might initially expect. Regardless of who is playing him or what time period a particular film is set in, Bond’s characteristics remain static. By the end of 24’s run in 2014, Jack was similarly a Bond-ian relic of the past. Though the country was still feeling the effects of it, “The War on Terror” seemed as dramatically quaint for 24 as the Cold War did for James Bond. And yet here was this rugged American in the miniseries 24: Live Another Day, gripping the life out of a pistol and barking at perceived London terrorists in a gravely timber like a psycho.

24: Live Another Day was the last appearance for Jack Bauer and rightfully so at the time. The character had become a bit too anachronistic and his show, quite frankly, was frequently xenophobic. Still, as the continued success of Craig’s Bond films indicate (with No Time to Die finally set to arrive this October) perhaps there is still room for walking anachronisms in the entertainment world, as long as they’re approached correctly.

Fox has repeatedly attempted to rejuvenate the 24 brand. In 2017, the network greenlit a spinoff starring Corey Hawkins called 24: Legacy. Like its forefather, 24: Legacy, utilized a real-time format, only condensing 24 hours into 12 episodes like Live Another Day did. The spinoff was not successful and was quickly canceled following the conclusion of its first season.

Ultimately, Fox (now owned by Disney) hasn’t made any subsequent reboot attempts work yet because it has misidentified the appeal of 24 as a franchise. While the ticking clock aspect of telling a story in real time is novel and interesting, it wasn’t the reason the original series lasted for nine seasons. The real reason for 24’s success was Jack Bauer. Viewers are typically attracted to characters, not concepts. In Jack Bauer, many an American viewer likely found the embodiment of a paranoid nation they recognized.

There’s an undercurrent of anger and indignance in the American psyche. Exactly why is a question best left for sociologists. Perhaps it’s misplaced guilt over displacing a society to create a new one, or maybe it’s just the disappointment of being promised a Manifest Destiny and getting Wyoming. But whatever the reason, Jack Bauer is as apt a cartoonish American avatar as James Bond is a British one.

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So why then doesn’t 20th Television (again, now owned by Disney) just formalize the comparison and make Jack Bauer literally American James Bond? Just as Connery once handed off the baton to Lazenby and Moore, have Sutherland hand the role off to someone else. That actor would preferably represent the American physicality that Sutherland brought to the role (despite Sutherland being a Canadian, which is somewhat fitting given that the Scottish Connery was the first to play Her Majesty’s favorite spy). The new Jack Bauer would be played by someone who is short, stubbly, and angry rather than Bond’s tall, dark, and handsome. Throw the new Jack back into the field in a modern day ticking time bomb plot without bothering to explain why he is still middle-aged after 20 years. 

The answer to why Disney wouldn’t want to do such a thing is almost certainly all that aforementioned racism and torture. That is admittedly a, uh…roadblock. It really can’t be overstated just how xenophoci 24 was at times and how cruel it could be to characters and actors of Middle Eastern descent. Jack Bauer’s reliance on torture wasn’t just a dramatic crutch, 24 co-creator Joel Surnow genuinely believed in the value of torture as a foreign policy tactic. 

Suffice it to say, the series has not aged well. Then again, however, neither have many of the earlier Bond films. To a certain extent that’s the point of the Bond franchise. It understands that making movies is making myths. James Bond is every bit the mythical figure that Captain America or Iron Man are. The fact that Bond is so obviously an exaggerated character now has helped soften some of his more problematic edges. 

Bauer, on the other hand, comes from an era where Americans were both terrified of the looming threat of terrorism and were starting to invest in television as a more “serious” art form. As such, not everyone of the time was prepared to accept Jack Bauer as American James Bond, that is to say a cheesy cultural figure, not a vital supersoldier of freedom. 

In The Atlantic’s 2007 article “Whatever It Takes” about the politics of 24,  U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, recounts Jack Bauer’s effect on enlistees.

“The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about 24?’ The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.”

The world has changed since then, obviously. But even now, it feels like it hasn’t fully set in that Jack Bauer is the American James Bond and should be treated with the same amount of reverence, which is none at all. Perhaps the only responsible move left is, in fact, to continue the increasingly ridiculous stories of the character with new actors.

In the right hands, Jack Bauer could be put to use as a blockbuster magnet and an appropriate critique of American foreign policy. In the end, icons don’t matter so much as what you do with them. 

The post Why Jack Bauer Is America’s James Bond appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[moon-yean]

could u elaborate what was so bad about the barbarians? i saw the show and thought it was ok but i don't have enough knowledge to know what are the ideological implications of it? sorry, just really curious and wanna learn more

*takes a deep breath* oh boy, where to even begin? Thanks for your question as I might finally get this off my chest! Okay, fair’s fair, anyone who likes the show should look away now because I’m not going to mince words. And I want to reiterate that there were things about the show that I liked, mostly on a superficial aesthetical level. Generally you could tell from the get-go though that the writers are hacks who know nothing about history or good storytelling for that matter. I could’ve dealt with a show that was historically inaccurate if only the character drama had been written well. I might also have enjoyed the show more if the character drama had been mediocre but if there had been a sense of historical authenticity (not accuracy, mind; but still something tangibly more substantial than the patina they tried to throw onto their frankly embarrassingly lowbrow attempt by having parts of the dialogue translated into Latin by an expert and by hiring a good crew for the costume and props design - of the Romans at least... putting lipstick on a pig and all that, although pigs are great and the writing here is not).

Since you asked about the ideological implications specifically, I’ll start with that and work my way towards other criticisms (this is going to be LONG):

19th century nationalism: The story of Arminius and his merry band of brothers who defy the big bad Roman empire is a narrative that became especially popular in Germany in the 18th and 19th century, both with liberal patriotic movements that were advocating for the unification of the “German cultural nation” in a modern nation state (spurred by the Wars of Liberation against Napoléon Bonaparte and French occupation) and later with the völkisch movements where that nationalism segued into the pseudo-scientific racial ‘theories’ of a ‘superior German race’ which in turn was part of the ideological foundation of the genocides and atrocities committed by Germany in the 20th century (not only in WWII, see also the colonial genocide of the Herero in 1904). We cannot disentangle this predominantly racist reception history that re-invented Arminius (”Hermann der Cherusker” - “Hermann the Cheruscan” - or, indeed “Hermann the German” ha!) as the founding myth of a German people from the way this story has been depicted in media, entertainment and culture and, as evidenced by Barbarians, continues to be to this day.

Barbarians pays lip service to the fact that actually there was no German people at the time by having the tribes meet at the Ting in the first episode and have someone outright state it. These kinds of tidbits literally voiced by characters give off a strong whiff of the authors googling something, reading something on Wikipedia, and then putting it in there. I’m sorry (actually not sorry) to come down harsh on this but given what we’re talking about here, that’s just not good enough. It’s an embarrassing level of “writing”. The authors clearly have NO idea what they’re talking about or what they’re dealing with because despite their lip services, they actively reproduce the harmful narratives that were spun around this actual historical event and these actual historical figures in the 19th century. No effort was made to depict anything complex or realistic here. Case in point: Even though there’s a pretense that the tribes aren’t part of the same people, they don’t look much different from each other, they all speak the same kind of modern high German that sounds like they’re at a costume party in the year of our lord 2020 (and in the case of Folkwin, drugged out of their mind; he sounds like a guy who’d throw beer cans at passersby). They come across as basically just being separated by the few acres between their villages. And then when the big bad evil Roman empire wants to squash their resistance (Asterix did it better change my mind challenge), freedom fighter Arminius rallies them together with a heroic speech and they charge at the Romans RAAHWWHR! ... no, just no.

There would have been SO MANY ways to reframe and retell this story in a fresh, new, and exciting way that would have made for amazing character drama. The premise is so good. If we were to look at the basics of what is known, there are so many personal AND political complexities in there that just beg to be coloured in with a little imagination. I just... I don’t even know where to begin to fix the choices that the show did go with since most of them don’t make any sense, don’t contribute anything to the narrative and are just. there. Have y’all noticed that there is ZERO dramatic tension in any of the scenes? Like, what? How?? Culture clash, divided loyalties, identity issues, the way that a militaristic upbringing might warp the mind, feelings of home and belonging and displacement, the return of the lost son, the betrayal of a high-ranking officer, just, there are so many themes that the show could have focused on but it botches all of them, nothing of it feels real, earned, or logical. Characters behave in idiotic ways for the sake of the plot (I wanted to like Thusnelda, I really did, I’m always here for female characters but she was so painfully obviously written by 3 dudes who thought that feminism = praying to the good sisters of the forest and slashing your face aöldksfaökdjf plus the actress could not sell any of it, she sounded ridic).

I’m exhausted just thinking about the many ways in which the writing on the show sucked. Impaired character used as a symbol~ for other characters instead of being a character on his own? Check. Weird mystical shit? Check. Earthbound tribal people who are one with nature? Check. Death on the cross to get that Christian imagery in there? Check. Lack of female characters except feisty!badass!Thusnelda, scheming!conniving!pulling-the-strings!wife, weird!mystical!seer? Check. Varus doing a Herod by demanding first-borns to up the Christian persecuted ante? Check. (All he was missing was the mustache to twirl. Was he even a character? He looked vaguely concerned and sceptical. That was his character.)

Look, the actor Arminius was great but even he couldn’t make sense of any of it. The character work was so shoddy, it was shocking. One minute he’s still all-in with the Romans, ordering lashes for “German” mercenaries without being very conflicted about it, reminiscing with fellow Roman soldiers about the good old times in some fireside bonding, asking his foster father to go home to Rome, and then when bad!dad is like “lol no” (surely they would have had that convo before??? surely Arminius would have known how far his career could go???), Arminius turns around and goes “let’s kill 3 Roman legions!! I’M MAD!!” ... lmao dude, just...

Another favourite of mine: The romance between Thusnelda and Folkwin is supposed to be illicit and against her social status. Does anyone even notice? Does anybody even care? Why did the writers come up with Folkwin in the first place? (His name Folkwin Wolfspeer is a hoot and an embarassment in itself. I wonder whether they used some kind of Germanic name generator. They certainly did use a generic speech generator for the battle speech Arminius gives in the last episode lol)

Back to the topic of a lack of tension. Of course there can’t be any tension if the characters suck. But it’s also because of the design of the scenes and plot points. The cliffhangers are so telegraphed and artificially constructed, it’s almost hilarious. My “favourite” has got to be the one of the first episode: The “hi dad” one. Not only does Arminius go to the village with other Romans in tow who then disappear because nothing in this show makes sense but this kind of revelation also goes against everything we know about good storytelling. There’s a famous quote by Hitchcock and I’ll quote it in full because I think it absolutely applies here (and it is valid for character tension as much as it is for suspense):

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

I hope you can see what I mean here. Barbarians continuously springs surprises on its audience but it has absolutely no tension/suspense in any of its scenes. The only time where the show even comes close to having any kind of genuinely dramatic moment is the conversation between Arminius and Varus where Arminius tries to hide his hurt and disappointment, and all the emotion in that scene is completely due to the actor since the dialogue is fairly idiotic for what is supposed to be the turning moment. Let’s go back to the basics and imagine what the show could have done differently, even allowing for the way in which the writers wanted to tell it (which, as I mentioned, is not appropriately sensitized to the misappropriation of the material in the past - but even if we go with THAT kind of freedom fighter / lost child narrative, it ought to be done well). And here now follows my actual essay of grievances:

The premise of the story, in as much as we know from history, is amazing: An officer of the Roman army, delivered to the Romans by his tribe as a child, returns to the "country" of his birth as part of the invading Roman army which oppresses the natives of the lands. He switches sides, unites different tribes and leads them to a decisive victory against the Roman army in a battle in a forest that lasted for several days and was cleverly planned by the "Germans" who end up outsmarting the Romans who are victims of ambush and the terrain, being split up and stumbling through the forest exhausted and without finding a way back to the other troops (love that the show as we have it managed to squeeze in the cliché "two armies standing on opposing sides decide to just start running towards each other, epic clash, chaos" (which is militarily so fucking stupid and nobody ever did that)).

Anyway, that premise is amazing. You could do so much with it. And if you wanted to make a miniseries about it, the biggest question would surely be: Why did Arminius switch sides? That’s the key plot point. And themes of otherness, oppression, exploitation, identity, and so on, would be a good fit. The first problem with the miniseries is that it has nothing to say about any of that. Arminius doesn’t even feel like the main character (aside from his actor being a cut above the rest). We don’t get to see much of his POV. We don’t get many meaningful conversations between him and Varus (actually just one after which he has a total character transplant). Instead, we get to spend lots of time with characters that don’t add anything in particular to the central plot nor to any of the central themes. Literally, why? 6 episodes is already pretty fucking short to make Arminius’ turn believable, so you’d better spend most of them on him. This is not material for an ensemble show (nevermind that the other characters suck and are not well-acted and written to behave stupidly... that’s just ON TOP of the fundamental issue of this show lacking a POV).

Like, you can turn this into a big Hollywood action movie about the battle or you make it a character drama where the battle is also told from a character perspective (i.e. focusing on the mounting fear and desperation of the soldiers as the battle drags on for days etc but more importantly focusing on why the battle takes place and why it’s important to both the Romans and the “Germans”). As it is, in the show, we don’t get any idea why the Romans are even there in the first place and pestering the people by demanding some tributes. And we don’t get any idea why the Germanic tribes are so opposed to this or why others of them might not be. We don’t get any of the broader political implications, we just get some eagle-stealing pranks (defiance!! cool, just agitate them in a completely stupid and arbitrary way, why don’t you) and a few people executed because the “Germans” were being stupid. That’s not the scale that’s needed here. And I don’t mean that we needed to see mass executions. In fact, I would have preferred if there had been no such hackneyed and emotionally manipulative device.

Arminius is basically absent for all the early encounters of the Romans with the “Germans”. So while we suspect that the mistreatment of the “Germans” at the hands of the Romans would be a strong motivational factor for him, we don’t actually see him witness any of few hints in that direction that we get, so it doesn’t actually matter for his character arc. I have so many issues with how his arc is written. In the first episodes, we don’t get any sense that he’s not a happy Roman. When a “Barbarian” mercenary ridicules Rome, he has him whipped and we don’t get much of a sense that he’s very conflicted about it. Even just moments before he ends up destroying his effigies of Roman gods, we see him trying to get Varus to send him back to Rome. Earlier in the same episode, he prays to those Roman gods. I’m sorry but wtf? How the turntables... If you want to make it believable that he would turn on Rome, why not start with him already being frustrated with the way that things in Rome work? With the way the army is run? And why not give him a careerist streak and make him frustrated that he can’t advance much further because of his lowly birth and background? And instead of Varus being an asshole to him about it (he’s supposed to be his foster father, surely Arminius would already know how Varus thinks about his people and surely he’d already know how far he can climb up the ranks), have Varus be sympathetic but basically like “sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

Arminius betraying Rome shouldn’t be about Varus saying something mean~, if anything a personal connection of his with Varus should just make the betrayal harder and be something that he does despite the fact that there are Romans he cares about. If you start out the show with him already having significant doubts about his place in the Roman army and identity issues, you just need to add something to it that will finally breaks the camel’s back. Have him become increasingly agitated by the way the "Germans” are treated by the Romans. Start the show with him making to leave Rome, someone asking him whether he’s excited to return to his place of birth and him joking about it but obviously being conflicted and then overwhelmed when he actually gets there because it totally destroys his sense of self which he has built for himself (and for which we would have needed to see the contrast, even if just for one scene, of how he is treated in Rome – perhaps snobbed by others, not treated equally in some sort of social setting, could be something subtle – to show us and him that as much as he wishes, he is not and will never be accepted as a Roman).

And then when he gets to the provinces, we need to see that from his perspective. What’s his reaction to arriving there? To seeing the familiar landscapes? (Or maybe he was taken as a younger child and doesn’t actually have that many memories of it but feels a sense of belonging anyway.) There are so many scenes in this show that seem to hint at these things but they are completely random and unfocused and interspersed with the stupid village people shenanigans. Varus talks about burning down villages in retribution. Well, why don’t we see any of that? (Nevermind that it’s comic book villain level of evil, but I’m working with a fix here and not a total rewrite as would be better.) Surely it can’t be too expensive to burn down a few huts in the night. And having Arminius ride along / witness it but not say anything even though we can see these things having an effect on him. As mentioned: The worst offense is the scene when he rides to the village (with other Romans in tow!) and announces “hi dad!” just to have that cliffhanger. Wtf?

Characters doling out information that the viewer doesn’t have is the absolute worst way of telling a story and maintaining tension. It should be the other way around. How about instead you have him be part of a Roman delegation that rides into the village and demands [random, whatever, the fucking eagle if you must keep that shit] and when the Reik (whom the audience already knows to be Arminius’ father) doesn’t want to give it (because he’s not actually a weak fucking clown as almost everyone in the actual show is aside from feisty Thusnelda who’s a fierce~ fucking clown rmfe), the Romans begin beating the dad or whipping him or whatever, completely humiliating him and his people, and we see Arminius on his horse watching the show with growing unrest until the realization really hits him that this is his father (cue flashback to a very young Arminius being dragged away) and the tension keeps ratcheting until he shouts in German “that’s enough” before correcting himself to give the same command in Latin (maybe he still thinks in German, would be an interesting idea) and the Romans look at him with suspicion, like wtf was that, and the "Germans” are like, why tf does this Roman officer speak German, and it’s super awkward and shit and maybe Varus is also there and he looks at Arminius like, oh shit I need to protect my boy he’s actually all up in his feels about these wildlings let’s go back to the camp and have a talk, and so the Romans end up leaving and the “Germans” are like “wait, was that... could it have been.. remember lil Ari who you gave up... but it couldn’t be...” and meanwhile the beaten dad doesn’t want to hear any of that because he actually has never dared hope he would see his son again and also he kind of doesn’t want to see him again because he would be too ashamed to meet his eyes.

And then later we see Arminius pacing up and down in his tent because this won’t let him go, even after he had a talk with Varus, and after some agonizing he steals away in the night to go confront his father (if you want to keep that German mercenary noticing shit, have him notice that). And then we see the father in his hut and everything is quiet and we are waiting for Arminius to show up because we know he’s on his way. But we don’t know whether he wants to talk to his father or just kill him in revenge for the trauma he’s caused him. You’d show the dad and if it were a good actor, you could see so much in his unrest, maybe despite not wanting to think that that guy could be his son, he kind of knows in his heart that it must be and he’s unsettled and whatnot and then we hear someone outside the door and the door opens and there stands Arminius in a cloak and there’s none of that ridiculous music that wants to scream “epic” but falls way short. Have it be quiet. Have Arminius enter and pull back the hood and they just look at each other. And the dad looks like he wants to hug him but he doesn’t move. And Arminius looks like he wants to murder him but he actually moves to sit down, all the while they keep an eye on each other because who knows, they might actually end up murdering each other. That’s the kind of confrontation you need with a reunion like this jfc. And then they talk and it’s an important scene and I’m not going to write it all out but I hope y’all know what I mean.

I feel like you’d have to rewrite this whole show to actually give the character drama the weight that it needs and deserves because what’s happening in the show is dramatic af but you wouldn’t know because it’s so unbelievably stupidly written. I CANNOT believe that when Arminius is back in the village, he’s standing around with Thusnelda and Folkwin in a field as if they’re catching up at a high school reunion. “So, how’s it been?” “My name is now Arminius lol” “You’re kidding lol” ... uhm hello ??? Is this show a meme or...???

Actually as a last thought, I would have kept Arminius’ mother alive and killed his dad. His dad is irredeemable. He gave him away. But if we assume that he never had a substitute mother, then meeting his mother again (who was against giving him away) would make for much more interesting scenes and would also have a much stronger impact on Arminius. I’ll stop now but I just wanted to note how much I hate the writing on this show and everything it chooses to be. Thanks.

[twdmusicboxmystery]

TWDTWB 1x07: Truth or Dare

Okay, let's talk about TWB, ep 8. We saw a time of interesting symbols in this episode.

First, we see Huck. She's on her own, scouting ahead. She sees some walkers walking by on an overpass. So, a miniature bridge of sorts. She saw one walker that had a backpack that she wanted to raid for supplies. This walker to me was that it was wearing a dark red jacket. We've seen this symbol pretty often lately. Clothing the color of the cloak in Beth’s cell.

Huck took some boots off the walker. That's important because of the missing foot/shoe symbolism but also @frangipanilove​ has done quite a few posts about how the trunk and boot symbols are similar. It all points to Beth being left in the trunk of the car.

Huck also finds a pin on this walker. This made my jaw drop. It turned out to be the insignia of the Marines, which Huck has a tie to. But what really struck me about it was the bird on top. Look at this. We saw this exact bird in Still and in a shot with Beth.

My fellow theorists and I are always going back and forth about whether this is a Phoenix or Thunderbird or an eagle or something else. Given the blue field, stars, and red banner, I always wondered if it was some sort of American patriotic thing, but maybe this picture represents the marines. Either way, the fact is, we can tie it directly to Beth. Also keep in mind that the Marines are all about water.

They drink Mountain Dew in this episode. @wdway​ reminded me that we saw a Mountain Dew bottle in Still with Beth and Daryl. I also thought they treated the Mountain Dew in this episode a lot like it was alcohol or moonshine. They talked about how long it had been since that had it and made yum noises, saying it was so good, etc.

In one of Huck’s flashbacks, she's in a bar. They have a dart game, and there's a jukebox. All Bethyl symbols.

Later in the episode, Tony has a flask, so we do see some alcohol. And the kids play a drinking game. It’s truth or dare, which is a little different than “I never,” but still. It's a drinking game.

There's definitely an art theme. Iris talks about the Louvre and then Percy sets up a little art room for her. I'll come back to that in a minute.

There’s a dark tunnel moment, when they go in looking for the fuel. (Dark Tunnel Symbolism).

In Huck’s flashback, she and her fellow Marines use thermal vision to discern which of the people in front of them are walkers in which are alive. I thought that was interesting in and of itself, but the thing that jumped out at me is that the walkers, who were obviously cold because they're dead, were blue. Kind of a blues clue as @frangipanilove​ would say.

When Hope and Huck were up on the roof, the stars were very bright and obvious. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it almost felt like an emphasis on the stars to me.

They encounter a guy in the basement who takes Hope prisoner. Lots of important background symbols in this scene. Lots of yellow, which reminded me of the basement of Grady when Beth and Noah try to escape. 

There were blue coolers, and even a fire extinguisher sign, which we’ve often seen in the background of scenes tied to Beth.

We also get a clear shot of Huck’s watch here. It’s hard to see, but I think it matches the grandfather clock in Still. Second hand between the 10 and the 11 (so perhaps at minute 52 or 53) and hour hand on the 3. 

They also had a queen of hearts theme. So, it's the poker queen theme. I won't go too much into that, except to say that it was present.

Then Iris went to meet Percy and he'd set up the back of the truck as though it were the Louvre, so she could look at the art. There were actually quite a few things that stood out to us here. We looked into several of the paintings.

One that @wdway​ pointed out is this famous painting set during the French Revolution called “Liberty Leading the People.” 

We like the idea that it's a revolution being led by a woman. Kind of interesting, no? We’re hoping the woman here Symbolizes Beth rather than Iris, but we'll see. The two books she looks at seem to be fictional, but when I looked up the one about the great masters of art, Caravaggio was always listed as one of them. So, another possible tie to Grady.

Furthermore, Iris falls asleep under the art setup and we see her wake up. This is pretty much an altar or shrine to all things art, and the way she’s laid out, rather than curled up, kinda looks like a Snow White pose. So, we’re thinking this is definitely a resurrection symbol. Especially as it happens under the Mona Lisa (arguably the most famous painting/woman in art) and the painting of Lady Liberty leading a revolution.

And hey, I’ll grant you that, normally, I would say this all represents Iris, and it might in some way. But we already know TWB is a limited, 2 season event. Then it will be done. That doesn’t necessarily mean all the characters will die or anything, but I can’t see them doing anything quite this important, either. Especially given that they’re still teenagers.

I think this represents a revolution against the CRM led by some woman. Three guesses who I think that woman will be, and the first two don’t count.😉

Also, the place they’re staying at is apparently a country club with a pool, as evidenced by this sign that the camera focuses on for several seconds. So more ties to Still and to water in general. (Also remember that in last week’s episode of Fear, Sherry’s group was hanging out in a dry, vacant public pool. Ties and parallels, my friends. 😉)

That's most of the symbolic stuff. We found out some interesting things in this episode, plot-wise. They found some encrypted data from the CRM. I'm definitely curious to find out what that's all about. The episode ended with Tony dying, Percy disappearing, and it looks like Silas might've killed him.

Most of us agree that that's probably not what happened. Or at least there's more to it. It seems a little too obvious that they're trying to make us believe Silas is a killer. I don't think he is. Personally, I feel like Percy is the Lizzie of this situation. But again, we'll just have to wait and see.

Thoughts?

[yeaahishowedupatyourparty]

royals au ♕

Brief outline of who they are! I can’t think of plots just yet. I’ll do that later on. I’m not finished but will update it when I get more ideas

Disney Cosette Hamilton: Crown Princess of France

Disney is the next in line to the throne of France. She has been working her entire life towards it and has been raised to always put the country first. She’s disciplined, polite and formal. There are very few people who know the true her. Her biggest pressure at the moment is that she knows her father’s health is deteriorating and she will also be France’s first Queen. There’s a lot to prepare for and for the first time ever, she’s doubting if she’s ready. 

Park Elias Hamilton: Prince of France 

There are a lot of traditionalists in France who would choose Park to be the next to the throne over Disney in a heartbeat. It’s an age old argument for the country. People who believe Park should be King and people who believe Disney should be Queen as the rule is the oldest is next in line. Not being the heir (technically) means he’s lived his life less disciplined, some might go as far to say that he isn’t professional at all. He’s had a string of affairs with princesses from different courts and has blurred the line between royalty and celebrity; something his parents often critique him for.

Imogen Isla Hamilton: Princess of France 

Park is reckless and at times unruly, but he can be because he’s a prince and not a princess. The standard often shifts for princesses and nobody knows that more than Imogen. She’s lived in the shadows of her older siblings for so long that she went through a phase where she lost her identity. However, now she’s a little older, she speaks out a lot about workers rights and the divide in wealth in lots of countries. She’s an ambassador for many countries and will rarely let anybody silence her. After turning 19 this year, Charles and Eva have been thinking about her future and that obviously includes an appropriate husband. Nobody knows that she’s already dating her driver. 

Florence Ophelia Hamilton: Princess of France 

Florence is the youngest princess and with that, has the least pressure when it comes to her family. That doesn’t stop her from being arguably the most loved of the siblings, though; she’s soft and grounded where Disney is detached and strict, she’s polite and agreeable where Park and Imogen are loud and scandalous. It’s a running joke that life in France would be a lot better if she was the eldest daughter. Like Imogen, she’s yet to be matched with another heir but her naivety towards everything means she doesn’t rebel as hard. She’s extremely passive and relies a lot on her handmaids and staff to guide her through protocol/think for her/tell her what to do.

Anastasia Sylvia Carmichael: Queen of England 

After the death of James Carmichael, Anastasia stepped up to the throne and took her place as Queen of England, making her one of the most famous royals on the planet. She made headlines twice when she ascended to the throne without being married or showing any signs of doing so. However, that is changing. It’s become clear that she knows what she’s doing and has been seen with princes who are very close heirs to their own thrones. What nobody else knows is that James Carmichael is not dead; but he’s also not a woman. He had the most power he possibly could. If Anastasia marries a future King, the English monarchy also has impact and power in their country too. It was a royal power move and what Anastasia’s very good at hiding is that everything she does is. She may be a Disney royal on the surface, but don’t underestimate her. 

Princess Soraya Maria Castillo-Sparks: Crown Princess of Mexico 

Mexico is one of the less powerful or rich countries, but they are very patriotic and adore their crown princess; Soraya. She’s the definition of the peoples princess and is constantly putting her family and country first. Like most heirs to the throne, she’s been raised to take on the responsibility. The last time I left her, she was caught in a love triangle between Levi and Julian (I don’t know if that’s still happening). Regardless though, a lot of her storylines will be based around the fact that Mexico is a poorer country and everything she does is rooted in making a better life for her people.

Princess Zara Calloway: Princess of Sweden 

Zara is the youngest princess of Sweden and is what most would call a ‘free-spirit’, to be kind about it. She’s constantly got her head in the clouds and spends most of her time in her palace; reading, painting, singing. Her parents often keep her sheltered - she doesn’t need to be in the public eye like the older girls, but they don’t want her frequenting with royals with bad intentions...or people with no royal heritage at all (gasp). It’s lonely and only builds her curiosity about everybody she comes across. Last time, she crossed paths with Danny by mistake but now has an infatuation.

Prince Louis Powell: Crown Prince of Greenland 

Louis is an only child and therefore, by default, the crown Prince of Greenland. The country went through turmoil when his parents split and the monarchy was seen as broken. It’s taken his father a few years to rebuild trust from the people but they are now all looking towards Louis to bring a sense of normality back to Greenland. He’s being pressured a lot to propose to a particularly princess/member of the royal court...which will be an open plot.

Prince Drew Bradford: Crown Prince of Lithuania 

Princess Janey Powell: Crown Princess of Iceland 

Prince Jack Coleman: Prince of Germany 

Prince Adrian Cortes: Prince of Colombia  

Colombia

Princess Ruby Rosini: Princess of Slovakia 

Princess Alyssa Rose Amari: Princess of Bahrain 

[vagrantblvrd]

Jeremwood FAHC where battle buddies formed before they joined the crew? Everyone is terrified until they find the pair dead asleep on Gavin or Lindsay, or both, and they just look confused/pleased respectively, and shoo everyone away when they try and wake the pair up? And just, sheer shenanigans between all of them as they all settle into a the full force of the FAHC

Hmm, yes, yes, I see what you’re getting at with this, Anon?

But may I humbly suggest the reason these two Very Scary and Spooky figures choose Team Losers for their respective human pillows has to do with their Tragic Backstories?

For an example:

Before they became the Super Scary duo known throughout all Los Santos (and certain areas outside it, most of which have been reduced to rubble and charred remains because idiots) they were (baby) agents in An Agency somewhere?

Very hush, hush, totally no shady goings on here, no sir Mr. Government overwatch group!

Just patriotic assassinations and the whatnot.

Ryan is all clean-shaven and by the book. Perfect role model for the other baby agents who came after him.

Stellar record and all that, did everything Right.

And then the handler he’s had since graduating the academy retired. (Or is retired, something that plants the initial seed of unrest/suspicion in the back of Ryan’s mind about what he’s been doing all this time, but we’ll get to that later.

Anyway, he gets a shiny new handler in this guy all the way from England, kid with this accent who makes no damn sense and Ryan is >:( because he doesn’t trust him? (Gavin’s a goddamned kid, wet behind the ears and the most ridiculous questions and Ryan’s supposed to trust him to keep him alive?)

But then they get tossed into training exercises and simulations to get used to each other and as annoyed as Ryan is with the ceaseless chatter, Gavin’s always on point when it comes to getting Ryan through the exercise/simulation flawlessly. (Well, okay. There’s a miscommunication or two due to cultural differences but they sort it out before disaster befalls them.)

And at the end of things Ryan’s a little annoyed at the fact he can’t fault Gavin’s expertise at his job. Especially when he’s kind of glowering at Gavin after one of the “cultural differences” arguments and Gavin challenges Ryan to take over Gavin’s job while Gavin runs through the exercise/simulation.

All, “…what?” because his old handler wasn’t a field agent in any form of the word, amazing at her job, sure, but a klutz who only passed the annual certifications because Ryan and her previous agents kept on her about them to make sure she’d pass and all that.

And Gavin, okay. Goddamned twig and just look at him, no way he could pull off an assassination in a controlled setting like this, okay. Gavin just looks at him like he thinks Ryan’s chickening out, because of course he would, and Ryan will be goddmaned if he lets this twig of an asshole get away with that. (Or…something.)

Gavin chortles all the way down to the training room floor, grins up at the cameras he knows Ryan’s watching him through and tosses off a little salute before wading into the training exercise.

Entirely new one the two of them haven’t gone through yet because this is meant to be a test for both of them, right? Gavin going to their superiors and agents and whatevers involved in running these exercises for an official okay from them and all that. (He puts it forward as a bonding exercise, way to gain trust between partners which will up their efficiency rating and all that and of course their superiors are eager to jump at the chance to have the two of them reach active status all the sooner and the whatnot.)

So.

Ryan in Gavin’s little command center realizing he’s maybe made a misstep with this dare/bet? He’d been in the room once or twice before talking to his previous handler, but when Gavin came into the picture he’d had it upgraded. More cameras and gadgets and other bells and whistles Ryan isn’t sure what their function is?

And hes clumsier than he’d like about it, toggling between camera feeds to keep track of Gavin’s progress through the levels. Goddamned mansion the agency had built for this particular exercise and Gavin charming his way through with barely a ripple to mark his passing.

Hasn’t alerted anyone yet and Ryan is struggling to keep up with him and okay, yes, it’s definitely harder than it looks from the outside. (He’s always known it in the back of his head, but it’s different now, isn’t it?)

Things go…okay for a bit, but then their superior threw in a little plot twist towards the end, this Ultimate Test for the two of them they obviously didn’t anticipate and Ryan almost gets Gavin “killed”, sends him down a dead end corridor, guards closing in and they both know he fucked up, and Gavin looks right at the closest camera.

Should, by all rights, be furious with Ryan because he fucked up – but all he does is ask Ryan some simple little question, look up the blueprints on one on the computers and see if there’s a discrepancy with the layout of the area he’s in.

Contractors and clients and other bullshit he doesn’t have time to explain, because Plot Reasons. Mainly due to the fact Gavin got his hands on the real blueprints involved in building the course level they’re using for the exercise because he likes to be thorough like that. (Might be considered cheating, but he’s all about everything he can do to keep his agent alive, even in a supposedly safe environment like the agency training courses.)

Lo and behold there is, some botched bit with the ducts or something hastily covered up, Ryan’s hardly an expert despite all the time he’s spent crawling through various systems in his career to date.

Gavin grins as he backtracks and finds the botched bit of construction hastily covered over. Since the “building” the agency is using for this training exercise is an overblown set piece it’s just been wallpapered over or something else, and Gavin is easily able to get through it and escape that way, because Plot Reasons.

Ryan’s still a bit shaken at the close call and Gavin has to get him back on task of leading him out of the ducts he’s in, which he does. Watching silently as Gavin exits the training level with the McGuffin he was sent to steal and a dead target behind him.

He apologizes to Gavin for almost getting him killed, which Gavin laughs and dismisses because he knows it wasn’t intentional (right, Ryan?), but maybe now he understands Gavin’s up to the job of keeping Ryan alive if he’ll let him.

Their bosses side-eye them for basically Kobayashi Maru-ing their way out of the training exercise, but decide Gavin’s more of an asset than they anticipated and praise him for his thoroughness. (While making a mental note to keep an eye on him because he really shouldn’t have been able to get his hands on those blueprints, you know?)

Anyway, they work together for a year or two until Ryan gets picked for this new agency that’s come along in the meantime. Even shadier doings than his original agency and so sorry, but you’ll be given a new handler and a field partner and really, Agent Haywood, you’ll be doing your country a great service with this new agency.

There’s this whole Thing where they say their goodbyes and Gavin, who has a bad feeling about all of it, warns Ryan to watch hi back out there since Gavin won’t be there to do it for him. Ryan is all ??? and also ditto and a little if Gavin ever needs anything to contact him? Which Gavin promises to do with more vice versa, but honestly they know the odds of them ever meeting again are slim to none.

(And Ryan’s kind of right, when his old agency goes down in flames a half a year or so later. Sabotage and all that and so many dead with Gavin’s name of the list of casualties and okay, right, totally nothing suspect there. Ryan absolutely buys into that load of horseshit after the way he saw their agency being whittled down before Ryan was picked for his current agency, or course. Totally doesn’t have a little side-hobby of untangling that mess to get to the truth, goodness no.)

ANYWAY.

Ryan gets paired up with Jeremy who is obviously a rookie agent out of whatever agency handed him over to their current agency.

Young and inexperienced in the field but eager to learn and smart as hell. Lot of potential and best of all doesn’t take Ryan’s bullshit, which is awesome.

There’s an adjustment period for both of them because their new agency is a bit more lax with the rules and regulations, and Jeremy rubs off on Ryan a little over time and vice versa.

They get this handler who is calm and professional – for the most part.

The three of them don’t really click as a team for their first few missions, but the third or fourth one in things go to shit in the most chaotic, bizarre ways possible?

And their handler, who up to this point has been completely normal proposes a ridiculous plan to get them out of their predicament and the worst thing is it works? Ryan in a goddamned clown suit and Jeremy posing as a cowboy (???) and they get their target and escape without incident somehow?

Get to listen to their handler howling with laughter as they speed away in a speedboat and share this look because what the hell? And Lindsay – of fucking course it’s Lindsay – getting herself under control to coordinate their extraction and whatnot.

Things get better (worse???) after that because their missions tend to go to shit more often than not requiring the most ridiculous plans to succeed and they’re still considered their agency’s top operatives.

Life has never been so strange for any of them.

Ryan loosens up, decides he likes the look of the beard he grew for a mission and keeps it unless there’s another mission that requires he shave it. (And then he goes right back to growing it out, and also just kind of loses his mind in general because no one can stay sane with both Jeremy and Lindsay in the mix, okay, no one.)

Lindsay starts joking around with them when they’re in the field and Jeremy is just. So flabbergasted at half the things she says and it’s all gloriously wonderful shenanigans and chaos and all that for a good long while for the three of them.

Lindsay watches these two idiots she’s responsible doing the Mutual Pining Thing and laughing at them because it’s pretty damn obvious they’re head over heals for one another?

All these little gestures between them in and out of the field, but then it just gets sad, you know?

Close calls thanks to the nature of their line of work, Jeremy sitting beside Ryan’s bed down in medical after a bad mission and vice versa. Longing Looks and Quiet Pining and Lindsay is their confidant and does her best to drops hints without betraying either of their trust in her.

Setting up situations where they have lunch or dinner together. The three of them out to have a dinner to celebrate some team milepost or whatever but she gets called away at the last minute for some minor  problem but no, really, you two enjoy yourselves they can do this again at a later date. (Heavy emphasis on the word date, but they’re too dense to pick up on it.)

And then! Just when she thinks they realize there’s a Mutual Pining Situation going on and might be about to do something about it?

Bad shit happens, because of course it does.

Someone contacts Lindsay, tells her trouble’s headed their way and to look out for her boys because they’re going to be at the heart of it, and Lindsay.

Oh, she knows exactly who sent her that message, the ones that follow because Gavin’s clever, right, but she’s just as good at her job as he is. (There’s this whole Thing where they met years ago, thanks to friendly inter-agency rivalries and Gavin worrying about idiot Ryan and just. Yeah.)

It’s thanks to him the three of them are prepared for the suicide mission meant to get rid of the Battle Buddies (the usual Conspiracy Plot Reasons) that allows them to fake their deaths. Handy little tip telling them a good place to hide out is Los Santos, and hey, take the scenic route just in case, which they do.

Meanwhile, Lindsay has all these files and the whatnot on what their agency have been up to that end up in the right hands, some reputable reporter or whoever and goes to lunch one day and forgets to go back afterwards.

Doesn’t go so far to fake her death, just disappears as far as the rest of the world is concerned while the agency more or less burns to the ground behind her.

She ends up in Los Santos too, gets a nice little apartment somewhere and gets a reputation for being a crazy cat lady with all the strays she looks after, fosters, handing them over to good homes and the like.

Hears rumors going around about this pair of mercs new on the scene a year or two later. Big scary bastard going around wearing a skull mask and his partner with the cowboy ensemble and laughs herself sick when she sees her boys on the news one night, because they haven’t changed a goddamned bit.

Wonders if they ever figured their shit out and makes plans to contact them to ask how they’ve been doing, but she gets a job offer before she can.

Some crew or other with a reputation of their own and this skinny prick of a Brit with the most obnoxious grin and gaudy sunglasses and the Fakes would be interested in someone with your particular skills, and is she interested?

Lindsay just looks at Gavin in his ridiculous get up and decides the hell with it, you know? She’s been on vacation long enough and if someone like him trusts these assholes she’s fine with it.

They hand her control of B-Team and she kind of loves it. The crew is her kind of chaotic and she gets why Gavin chose them out of all the crews in Los Santos.

No brainer when Geoff’s looking to expand the crew and there are these two idiots running around causing chaos without anyone to watch their backs but themselves. (Well, okay. And Gavin and Lindsay from the shadows, but they’re stretching themselves thin watching out for the Fakes and the Battle Buddies and it just makes sense to have them all under the same roof, so to speak.)

And then!

Ryan and Jeremy being ??? and !!! at seeing Gavin and Lindsay – initially suspicious because what are the odds?

Jeremy watching Ryan circling Gavin because it’s been years and he really wants to think he can trust the little shit, but so much has happened he’s not sure he can?(All this time he’s been trying to find out what happened to him only to see Gavin cozied up to the biggest crew in Los Santos???)

But then he realizes Lindsay trusts Gavin implicitly, that Gavin’s the reason the three of them made it out of the agency alive at all, and Gavin’s just giving him this little smile waiting for Ryan to make up his mind the way he did when they met all those years ago.

Various shenanigans as he realizes Gavin’s safe, the Fakes are safe, and Jeremy relaxes because he trusts Ryan’s judgment in this?

The two of them realize the others have no idea the four of them know each other from Before and get a kick out of fucking with them whenever they can, hence the human pillow Thing.

Big scary mercs napping like little kittens on them and everyone else being !!! because what do now??? while Gavin and Lindsay are like, no! They need their sleep, hush up or go away because you have no idea about these idiots and their sleeping habits! >:((((((((((

The slow realization the rest of the crew have that allowing the four of them to Shenanigate was a Terrible Idea as they rain chaos on Los Santos (and occasionally the crew itself).

Also?

Just shenanigans in general with Ryan being a creepy bastard and Jeremy being Jeremy and everyone worrying Gavin and Lindsay are going to be horribly murderized like the idiots they are because they just keep teasing and making fun of Ryan and Jeremy. Like. Mercilessly so the way they do the rest of the crew?

At least until something happens with someone from their old agencies out for Revenge and Gavin and Lindsay get grabbed and the crew going crazy trying to find them?

And then there’s the Battle Buddies all terrifyingly professional about ripping these bastards apart for touching their family – and their Tragic Backstories are revealed in which the crew had no idea about the (former) sekrit agents in their midst this whole time.

Also, also, the bastards who grabbed Gavin and Lindsay are suffering before the rescue party gets to their little hideout because Team Losers is a force to reckoned with on their own, you know?

Supposedly where the baddies want them, but the baddies miscalculated because they’re locked in there with Team Losers and oh God, make it stop, make it stop.

Absolutely no one on the crew’s side of things being surprised by this turn of events and it’s kind of a mercy killing for the baddies once they realize what’s going on.

Gavin and Lindsay just :DDDDDDDDDD “What took you guys so long?” even though they’re a bit bloodied up and kind of hurty feeling and everyone is just fucking Christ, you idiots.

And then shenanigans???

[dream-of-wanting-me]

(Whoops I tried to click "ask" but the mouse hit "Unfollow" instead, that's why there's a note of me following your blog again :D) So yeah, to the "not from the US" ask set: 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 18, 26 and 28. I'm apparently feeling very curious today!

4. favourite dish specific for your country? Probably mussaka - diced potatoes and minced meat, egg and yoghurt topping. But I like tarator too - a cold coup from yoghurt, cucumbers, garlic, ground walnuts and dill.

5. favourite song in your native language? Probably Bulgarian Rose, the one I sent you with my first email. I bet the regime was fond of it because it’s patriotic: “good evening young friend, good evening comrade, we have the Balkan Mountain, the sea, and lots of people with flowers in their hair” :P But it just sound so... sweet.

6. most hated song in your native language? I can’t think of any. I listened to one of our 90s chalga hits a few days ago and I had fun, I can’t even say I disliked it. I mean... Nelina is cute and she sings well. Most of our chalga singers were formally trained for folklore, which is tough. The vibratos are crazy, you need mighty lungs, it’s as serious as opera training. So chalga is about beautiful ladies with amazing voices singing silly songs, this one is abut being chased by a white Mercedes, a guy who wants to be your sugar daddy. And she’s like “My love is not for sale”

13. does your country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions that might seem strange to outsiders? If we want to make you feel very welcome, we’ll give you a rose and some bread. You tear a piece and dip it in ‘colorful salt’ - a mix of spices with salt. And then, when you get on the bus, you get pick-pocketed. Welcome to Bulgaria, comrade.

14. do you enjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV? TV series usually cast the same 25 actors and the plots are boring. But I’m glad that we have an industry like that, finally. One day we’ll make a great TV series. As for movies... I’ve never been super impressed... our new cinema is boring, and the movies from communist times are depressed. People were trying to be as sad as possible because they weren’t allowed to criticize the regime. Some serious hopelessness in those movies.

16. which stereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhat agree with? People say that we shake our heads to say ‘yes’ and nod to say ‘no’. Obviously someone either blind or too drunk came up with this, and then it became popular. Watch our heads before you speak. The fact that we make a move that’s different than yours doesn’t mean that it’s the opposite. One I agree with... we’re warm and welcoming. We’ll feed you well, perhaps too well, with real fruits and vegetables, we’ll tell you stories and legends, we’ll get you drunk, we’ll teach you a dance and a few swearwords. Then we’ll feed you again. And we’re good-looking.

18. do you speak with a dialect of your native language? I speak the eastern, ‘soft’ dialect, which is closest to ‘dictionary’ Bulgarian. And by soft and hard I mean that soft is ‘miaw’ and hard is ‘mao’. Here the bread is ‘hlyap’ and in Sofia, in the west, it’s ‘lep’. Milk is ‘mlyako’ and in Sofia it’s ‘mleko’.

26. does your nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you think about the portrayal? Happily it doesn’t. But it’s stupid enough when they fail at Russian representation. You have real Russians in the US, for Satan’s sake. Find them and cast them for your movies. But when I say that, I forget that so many Americans are racists and nationalists.

28. does your country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites? We have 5 high mountains that are great for tourism. We hosted a few ski championships in Bansko in the last decade. Lots of rivers too. But I haven’t done much travelling in my own country. I remember that Bansko was nice. But the dialect was hard to understand :)

We have a group of lakes high in the Rila mountain called The Seven Rila Lakes. They have cute names like ‘Kidney’, ‘Tear’ and ‘Eye’. We’re trying to keep them clean, but the tourists don’t follow the regulations.

Aaaand I just listened to White Mercedes 5 times while answering this ask.

[the-slut-verses]

you know, the fact that there was an other in the karaoke place reminds me that we still don't know what they actually want? like, we know they killed some soldiers and that the other aliens are scared of them (which, considering their skillset is very valid), but if some of them are just. chilling at a bar? they're obviously not mindless killers or whatever. wait, *that* reminds me that we also don't know who/what was behind that horrific murder that the friendship delegation came across. hm.

Post this is referring to. Yeah! I feel like, it’s very statistically improbable that an entire spacefaring race are all mindless animalistic killers. I think, either the Others we’ve seen are advanced scouts and just trying to learn as much as they can about humans, or it’s not in their nature to make their alien nature known to aliens, they just travel the universe and vibe.The part where Cassandra started testing out pasithea on the Others made me anxious cuz like, if that’s not a war declaration then idk what is. That attack on the Cassandran military ship could be explained away as a miscommunication and some sort of understanding could still be reached, but I feel like using pasithea crossed some sort of line. And if they’re telepathic, I wonder if the range is so great that another Other could’ve heard of that Other’s identity being forced to become Evelyn. From what we heard, it doesn’t seem that the other alien species humanity encountered had problems with the Others, they were scared but they lived.

Oof, and yea, I thought the murder pile was from the Others, but now I don’t think that sounds like their kinda style, granted we know very little about them. Probably a very far out theory, but I wonder if that was planted by the PSA as some sort of harebrained plot to scare the Friendship Delegation. And like them being scared would make the Others on the planet react to them with hostility. And they might die brutally, or survive and return with horror stories, and them being decorated war heroes would lend them some credence. And the PSA/Cassandra/The Powers That Be could use that as justification to make more pasithea powder

it's true that if most cassandrans are as... patriotic as it seems, they'll probably see this as just the queen doing her best to protect her citizens. non cassandrans however... i agree that the medeans are going to profit from the pr disaster this is, and jane would probably be safest there, but i also don't trust the medean government at all. :/ apparently the war started because they assassinated cassandra's king, and their ambassador drugged jane, so i'm not too enthusiastic about them

Yep, so far the Medeans, or at least the Medean government comes across as shady as Cassandra. But the Medean people seem p okay, based on how Sophie described the Medeans in the Friendship Delegation. If Jane were to seek refuge on Medea, I think it would be a very great opportunity to see the war from the other perspective, cuz this podcast is unbelievably good at writing three dimensional fully fleshed out characters with so much depth and nuance and messiness.

yeah the psa is not looking good. aside from, you know, supporting making more pasithea, their vice president's reaction to sophie's concerns really was. bad. there's really no good way to spin how dismissive she was. i also got space un vibes from the psa, and it's highly possible the individual planets' governments didn't know, so they probably couldn't immediately help control the narrative even if they're on board because they didn't know what was going on either

Yep! Tho the fact that it wasn’t recorded/heard in the podcast means that maybe it’ll be easier for the PSA to dismiss the claim as untrue. Also, now that I think about it, I think the PSA sounds more centralized than our UN. Maybe it’s more like, a space EU or space NATO in structure. Tho I think the original point still stands in that the individual member worlds probably had no idea. And I remember Jane mentioning how the PSA cares a lot more about PR than Cassandra or Medea. I think it’s cuz the PSA government has to be very careful in making sure its disparate member worlds and citizens are satisfied. And a PR disaster like this could easily tear it apart if different worlds and factions have different opinions.

i think it's more likely they'll make sophie out to have been used by jane (which,, she has to feel so betrayed.) than to villify her. the government did encourage them to share information, and it's an easier narrative considering how popular she is. i'm worried about the fallout of her threatening the children, though, and her confidence that nothing could happen to her. though maybe that'll be justifiable because she only wanted to find out the truth and didn't plan on going through with it?

Yep I agree! And I think, her threatening those children could probably be easily brushed aside cuz like, think of how many revered historical figures and even modern day public figures have been revealed to have done some shady shit but the worst they got is a slap on the wrist.

[lizzybeth1986]

Quick Thoughts on The Royal Retcon Book 1 Chapter 11

• You've gotta admit, guys. This series spends more time retconning various aspects of their original story than they do on the actual premise.

• The food fight was wild and chaotic, the background history is always welcome, seeing Jess and Blake was nice and the moonlit hot springs scene was a nice change from everything...but my head is spinning from the constant shifts, okay?

• To avoid seeing my QTs in your dash, blacklist the following tags: #trh quick thoughts, #trh qts, #trh qt reblogs, #long post.

• Screenshots:

Hana: The Abhirio YouTube channel

Maxwell: @thethots-plicken and @itsbrindleybinch

Drake: The HIMEME YouTube channel

• Title: The Prodigal Father

Alternative: Most Parents in TRR Shouldn't Have Even Been Parents To Begin With

• The last chapter ended with a surprise twist: the return of Barthelemy Beaumont, father of Bertrand and Maxwell Beaumont. We had a lot of questions. Did Bertrand know he wasn't dead? Did Maxwell not know he wasn't dead? What the hell was he doing all these years and why had he left his sons in such a horrible position?

• Turns out the writers may have taken a leaf out from a Hindi serial or something coz - drumrolls - he was in a coma!

• Why do we never hear much about this so-called illness or even have a name put to it. What mysterious illness caused Barthelemy to deteriorate so much that he was trying out miracle cures from quacks and that he ended up in a coma for years? Why were his next of kin not informed when he came out of it or while he was rehabilitating? Why the heck wasn't Maxwell telling his wife this, or Bertrand his girlfriend? There is so much about this plot that doesn't even make sense.

• How does Barthelemy remember Drake from the court days but not Savannah ("Liam and Drake, you're so grown up now! Miss Savannah, you're lovelier than your reputation..."). Somehow he knows what's been said about Savannah and about Hana's accomplishments - wait if he'd been mostly getting his body back in order, how would he know this stuff? Who is telling him this? (Godfrey?? Is that why he's so faux-patriotic around us now??? Is that his real reason for visiting Cordonia only once a year or something?)

•

In Liam and Drake's cases, Barthelemy says the same thing about how Maxwell outdid himself by bringing the MC to the House, and that she has brought prestige to the Beaumonts. It's in Hana's and Maxwell's cases that the dialogue is different. In Maxwell's it's obviously as his daughter-in-law that he greets you, and in Hana's he speaks of now having two "daughters" in his house.

• Barthelemy then gets to the more serious part of his departure - the fact that Bertrand had to shoulder the responsibilities of being Duke earlier because of Barthelemy's condition, and that now Bertrand can relax while his father takes care of things at the estate. Is that care for his son talking...or his desire for control? I'm leaning towards the second.

• I'm pretty sure Bertrand is leaning towards the second because he's looking pretty resistant about this sudden change. His bride-to-be, Savannah, in the meantime, is super happy to meet her father-in-law and son's namesake. Hah. That'll change.

• Maxwell is nervous. Because he wants his father to see how different he is now, and how responsible he has become, but doesn't know what his old man will think. Don't worry, Esther says, plan this smartly and you'll get a new Pictagram follower!

• In any case, Maxwell's friends promise to help him get through this and support him, except for Drake who thinks he can impose limits (like "no singing"), because, yknow. The universe has to revolve around his comfort zone. Must be a Walker trait.

• More Jess and Blake nuggets! You get an option to ask them how they met, and they tell you about the cruise they first worked in (and presumably where Jess' sister met Liam's brother and (optionally) married him) and how they used to butt heads often. Nice RoE nugget, too bad the writers have so far barely even remembered Liam's brother who is from that series!

•

Yeah yeah I know that Kiara is probably back in Castelserraillian like the other courtly ladies (or chilling in a hotel somewhere in Texas), but if they're all supposed to be there for the wedding Savannah might as well have included her. Not only is Savannah a stinky fiancée and a stinky person in general (not a surprise considering her family), she is also a stinky friend.

• I repeat: my MC Esther has done practically nothing for Savannah. Nor has Hana. Why are we such a huge part of her ceremony again when she already had a long-time friend from court who had actually helped her and actually cared?? Only because we're the ones on an extended holiday in her ranch? Then say that - why do you need to make such a long speech about friendship while snubbing the one woman who made a damned effort to help you? (oh...right. I keep forgetting. Kiara is only remembered when people want to use her 😒).

• At the start of the rehearsals, Savannah tells Jess about the horse-riding-to-the-altar tradition, complete with a saddle that's been a family heirloom. Bianca and Leona, apologetically, inform Savannah that they had to sell it. Savannah tries to mask her disappointment, but fails. Barthelemy in the meantime, jumps in, in what he assumes would be "saving the day" (it's not, Bartie Sr. It really isn't)

Bartie...dude...you just got here. You can't already know what'll make your daughter-in-law happy when you've only spoken to her for all of five seconds. Plant your ass at the back of the congregation where it belongs!

• The girl really really wanted that saddle, okay Bartie Sr? Allow her to grieve that lost dream ffs.

• This scene I guess is helpful because while it still places Bartie Sr rather awkwardly in the "father trying to make amends and be caring" category, it gives you an inkling of why that persona doesn't sit so well on him. Bartie Sr may assume that this is something a caring parent does, except that what he's really doing is taking over, making all the attention revolve around him, believing he knows best and not listening to anyone. Even when he's being "nice".

• That saddle is going to come back some way or other, and it's probably going to be a diamond option, for which the free option is Savannah walking down the aisle with Bartie Sr. Eh. She threw a tantrum at my reception so her boyfriend could marry her, I'm not about to get her her dilapidated saddle. She can make do with her crusty father-in-law.

(The other possibility is that [at the end of the chapter] Bertrand left the house to get it or something idk, and it might be free after all. Is it too late to ask for the entire WEDDING to be a diamond option?)

• So this exchange leads us all to the Beaumont brothers remembering their childhood. Maxwell views it all through rose-coloured spectacles, Bertrand has very different memories of that time. Which is such a change from the previous series! I mean, wasn't Bertrand the one who kept going "my father's legacy, my father's legacy", while Maxwell was the one who didn't have very good memories of that time?

I can always imagine that Bertrand's views on his father must have changed when he started taking on the responsibilities of a father himself (thus making him view his childhood as 'not normal'). And Maxwell may well have come to appreciate Bartie Sr once he began taking House responsibilities. But guess who is breaking their heads to make these "connections". Us. Not the writers. Not the team in charge of this story.

• There are two PoVs to this scene: Maxwell's and Bertrand's. Maxwell's is the one that is lighter, funnier, showing us a wilder side of his brother, Bertrand is given the meatier one, with intrigue and a hint of plot.

- We're taken back to when Bertrand's motorbike was just purchased, and the boys choose to take it for a test ride. The Bertrand shown here is kinda similar to the one in the 6-years-ago flashback in Book 1, just...younger and cuter. Apparently in the time that Bertrand was living alone in a house with Maxwell, he aged like an avocado.

- What's with using this team and using the Waverley kids' faces for the Beaumont brothers??

- Young Bertrand and Maxwell don't mind living on the wild side - taking the Cavilieri Novanta 9S on a test drive through different areas in the estate, planning how they'll debut this beauty at the Beaumont Bash and generally making a racket. Bartie Sr scolds them from the window of his office, then asks them to come up and see him there. Bertrand opts to protect little Maxwell from his father's ire by going there alone, and then telling his brother that their father is "very proud" of them. Maxwell doesn't question this (the writers have forgotten that Young Maxwell was perceptive even as a little boy, so I'm not quite buying that he simply accepted what Bertrand said at face value), and jumps instead into planning a logo for their biker jackets (he suggests a kraken and a tiger). They can also opt to have a special kraken-related handshake.

- Bertrand, however, fills in the blanks, speaking to us about what he witnessed at the office, and what actually transpired.

-

This conversation is the point of the whole scene, and is connected to the Young! Drake scene in the sense that Bartie Sr and Godfrey are from the Great Houses that Constantine mentions are opposing the alliance with Auvernal. While they don't tell us what has disappointed these two so much, we do get the idea that they are displeased esp with the Queen because she has somehow convinced Constantine to not agree with what the two are planning so quickly. It's very possible that their frustration with Eleanor might have gotten them involved in some way with her death, but it's also possible that there are other players involved.

- Bertrand does not focus much on this bit because Bertrand is young and his priorities are different. The interesting thing about using these childhood flashbacks for the characters is that we will always get an incomplete picture, if only because the kids' priorities are different, and for them these side discussions will always count as "adult stuff". Big, scary, too complicated to understand.

- We do get a mention of Maxwell's weight (finally!). The writers frame it as Maxwell losing his weight after his mother's death and getting his regular exercise with his brother. This we get to know by Bartie Sr's fat-shaming comment about not wanted to see Maxwell get back to his "wide suits" (Seriously. Fuck this guy).

• Hypocrite alert! Godfrey who treats his perfectionist daughter as a failure just for existing and being a girl, now thinks he can yap about "being too hard" on one's children. Go fuck yourself Godfrey Not Gao (this nickname was brought to you by @callmetippytumbles).

• The bit that's most important to Bertrand is that he tries to pass an overdue bill to his dad, and his father ignores it to concentrate on "bigger" things. Which kinda leads you to believe that the problem existed waaaaay before Bartie Sr started believing in miracle cures for his mysterious illness. In fact I'm pretty sure both those things might be fabricated.

• So that's what Bertrand is trying to tell us. That Bartie Sr expected his sons to understand responsibility when he was not exactly ready to live up to that example himself. It still doesn't make sense though, considering every time Bertrand spoke about Bartie Sr it was as if he had to uphold the same legacy, and everytime Maxwell spoke about him it was to highlight what a disappointment he was to his father...and funny enough they've now switched roles.

• Anyway, Maxwell is now more inclined to believe Bartie Sr has turned a new leaf, while Bertrand is wary. He is not wrong about the controlling aspect though, even when his dad is trying to be nice he's being a controlling ass.

• Hana comes in and comforts Bertrand, in a scene I found pretty touching. She knows plenty about controlling, overbearing parents who expect plenty from her but fail to measure up to the little that she asks of them. I love how she makes the point that, having support or company of any form, works to lessen the pain of that kind of upbringing...and she knows this because she never had it.

• The bonding that takes place between Hana and Bertrand is lovely, although it's marred by the fact that were we going by the original idea of the Beaumont brothers' lives, Maxwell would be the one she'd be comforting.

• Two bits that stood out to me were where Bertrand offered to make up for all those years of disappointment and pain that Hana suffered, by being a sort of stand-in older brother now - and Hana's response to the whole idea of mending bridges:

I love the fact that she says this even as she still maintains her complicated relationship with her mother. It's small but a lot more than she was allowed to say earlier. In Book 3, a lot of what they had Hana say to Lorelai was more for Lorelai's benefit than her own (constantly educating her and telling the family that the most important thing was that they be happy together). Her responses were centered around Lorelai's comfort, not Hana's conflict. At least here, she gets to state (while safely away from her parents) how complicated her relationship with her parents is. I just hope this is not the last time we hear about it.

• It's now time for the rehearsal dinner! Everyone's seated at a pop-up restaurant Blake and Jess have made for the wedding, and includes the courses for the special day. It's bruschetta, a quiche and the wedding cake for dessert.

•

Auntie Bitch I hope you realize that the biggest freeloaders in this house are your own nephew and niece! Drake doesn't have a job until his wedding is over (unless one counts moaning and griping while enjoying shit that his BFF has paid for, his job (oh...wait...maybe that's why "Constantly Complaining Freeloader" was listed as a job description in his Italian Restaurant scene lmao)). The other biggest freeloader is your niece, who didn't mind accepting money from Maxwell and then turned around and acted towards Bertrand like she didn't need his damn money that she was already using.

• Also for the amount of complaining Leona has been doing for her own niece's wedding she might as well have not hosted them at all. You took the responsibility, you made all the guests you were hosting do work for you and spent all your time mocking them for not having the kind of specific skillsets you grew up with. If you wanted to stay alone with your sister in this crusty dilapidated ranch where you probably don't even pay people fairly, you could have told Savannah to go somewhere else. Like Applewood. Or Ramsford idk. You couldn't even save the saddle your niece would have wanted for the wedding, and if that's not a pointer to what a failure you are, Leona, IDK what is. So maybe stop acting like you're better than the nobles and keep quiet.

• Bianca states that she has never depended on the Crown yet somehow left behind both her children whose well-being was largely being maintained from the Crown coffers???

• But also given the response to Liam I have a feeling we might have a flashback from her next chapter. While she doesn't appear as angry as her sister, there is definitely an underlying bitterness there that I think the narrative might explore before we leave Texas. Idk.

• Bartie Sr focuses his attention on us again, insisting that he is like a father figure to us. You can either firmly refuse (my favourite option), express pride in House Beaumont (which pleases Bartie Sr no end) or be polite (in which case Liam lets out a cryptic "how generous of you" aimed at Bartie Sr it one point, showing us that he's not very impressed. Hmm. Hmm.)

• Bartie Sr is being controlling again, complaining that the quiche is not an elegant main course and insisting to Savannah that she try whatever he is demanding for the wedding. He keeps saying "trust me Savannah, you'll love it!" as if he knows her tastes better than she herself does.

• Chuck tries to offer cake, and Bartie Sr in his eagerness to refuse accidentally tosses it over on Leona's clothes.

• That's kiiind of a breaking point with Leona, and to sum it all up, THIS happens:

Jess has seen and participated in utter chaos, okay. So for her to appear all flummoxed and say "it was...a lot", it really, really has to be a lot.

• My favourite parts have to be Hana and Liam thoroughly enjoying the food fight and finding it cathartic, because they're the two who most need to channel their repressed energies into that kind of catharsis. Drake and Maxwell don't feel this need as much as they do because they already have ways and opportunities to channel it.

• The fight allows both the nobles and the Walkers to meet on common ground - common enough ground that Bertrand can (if we choose) finally tell his father that he and Savannah can manage their own wedding, thank you very much.

• Funny how Bertrand is expected to stand up to his father and ensure that what Savannah wants is not ignored, yet Savannah herself never makes even a quarter of the effort that he does, in making Bertrand comfortable in her home. Why does Bertrand have to do all the work in this relationship? Why do I only see Savannah complaining when Bertrand is not doing things exactly as she wants them to be done, yet not even lifting a finger when he's the one who needs the help and reassurance? Perhaps the best option is if he becomes runaway groom.

• We get to give one (1) solitary fuck about the country we're leading when we're back in the bedroom after this whole skirmish has gone down.

• LI diamond scene! At a moonlit hot spring nearby. The scenes mostly include the mandatory admiration for the lingerie, awe at the scenery and once the sex is done, an exploration into family and children from the would-be parents.

Liam: Calls the MC a "twilight goddess fit for worship" as soon as he sees her with her lacy lingerie in the moonlight. If you've done those scenes, there's a mention of the Forgotten Falls and the Blue Grotto and how Liam has a penchant for whisking the MC away to secluded watery places. (Liam also mentions finding a matching pearl to the first one they got at the Blue Grotto, even though the writers have practically forgotten what has happened to that first one 🙄).

The MC can choose to either go fast or slow in the love scene, and afterwards, Liam wonders aloud whether all families are complicated. The MC can counter this, by telling Liam they can ensure their child never gets to the point that Bertrand or Hana have by ensuring the child has their space to be open about how they feel.

Caption: Spring Fling

Hana: The two women mostly admire each other in silence (Hana tells the MC she would simply like to look at her as the MC gives a twirl) and the MC suggests expanding the "sample size" of Hana's lingerie because Hana in the moonlight is a vision. Hana offers to massage the MC's shoulders, and speaks about wanting to get away from the chaos and check in on her. Hana wants to take as much of their alone time as possible to check if the MC is doing okay, which IMO is her way of maintaining a relationship - by giving her partner space to talk about how they feel, something she rarely had the opportunity to do. She also admits to how exhilarating the food fight was. Hana is playful and teasing in her love scene, and brings the MC to the point where she will beg for more.

Once they are done, the two speak about how being in this place is like being in a fairytale, and there's a particularly lovely line nestled in this bit:

I wished for storybooks with scenes just like this as a kid. Not ones where the princess got rescued by the prince or the knight...but where she found love and happiness on her own...and the freedom to embrace them.

It's...it's so beautiful 😭

Caption: Woodland Nymphs

Maxwell: Now obviously Maxwell has the most personal experience among the four this time, since it's his father that returned home, and it's his family that is now dealing with some tough, complicated questions. Some of that shows in this scene. It begins with Maxwell seeing the MC in her lingerie and confession he almost forgot she had them...which is a good thing otherwise he would never be able to concentrate on anything else. He speaks to her about all the things he loves about her and about their relationship - especially how much they make each other laugh. Underwater, the two let go of their restraint and make love with abandon.

The conversation that follows is the most important, exploring Maxwell's feelings about his father's return. He doesn't have a lot of memories of his father - most of it was from when he was very young, or from Bertrand's eyes. Maxwell is very happy that Bartie Sr has returned, and wants him to see how happy he is with the MC. He speaks of wanting to tell him about the social season, about marrying the MC, about his bestseller book. There is a cute bit where the MC asks whether he would tell Bartie Sr about the hippo tattoo and Maxwell seems almost terrified by that option. But overall, there is nervousness in his scene, and also hope. He definitely is invested in making his old man proud. Proving himself has always been a theme with Maxwell, and that need possibly will increase with the arrival of his father.

Caption: Blue Lagoon

Drake: Calls the MC in her lingerie in the moonlight, "art that should be in a museum". The two admire each other in their new lingerie, and then admire the scenery. Drake has brought the MC to the hot spring mostly because it was rumoured to be called "Makeout Point", and he's always been curious to see what the big deal was. The MC can point out the beauty and romantic potential of the area, mentioning that she can imagine a sixteen year old swooning if her high school sweetheart brought her there, "or a duchess, if her marshmallow brought her here". During the love scene, Drake likens her to a siren, the sex can either be rough or gentle and the MC can either take control or allow him to.

Towards the end, the two talk wonder how their child might be, who they would resemble. There's a bit of banter back and forth about how the world is not ready for their collective sass 😄 I think because Drake is the most comfortable with his own family now, that his conversations with the MC about family focus largely on his memories of good times, and on what their child will be like.

Caption: Spring Fever

• Why the hell are you guys ruining all that nice lingerie in water!!!

• After a few days, and presumably on the day of the wedding, Savannah comes to us, shocked and worried, telling us that Bertrand is gone. This could be either a fakeout leading to him trying to get something nice and romantic done for her, or his insecurities cropping up IDK.

• General Thoughts:

- As much as I'd LOVE for the twist to be that Bertrand has realized this marriage will never work and has called it all off, I know for a fact they won't let that happen. Either his insecurities have come to a head with Bartholemy's return and he needs time to clear his head, or he's gone all heroic and tried to get Savannah's saddle for her, which we then have to pay diamonds to retrieve.

- Some way or the other that saddle is going to feature.

- They'll have Bertrand do something heroic I guess so that Leona will FINALLY stop being a whiny asshole. And Savannah as usual? Will not even lift her little finger.

- I'm more worried about what Bartie Sr will be upto once he's back at Ramsford estate! Esp given that his controlling has already begun at an event as innocuous as a wedding. ALSO given that this man will be back in Cordonia!!

- We're obviously going to get more hints about our pregnancy in the coming chapter, that I'm sure we'll ignore coz we don't want to jump into conclusions like the last time.

- Hana's bonding scene with Bertrand reminds me a little of a scene in Book 2, where she speaks of how Bertrand reminds her a little of her father...in, like, a good way.

- If it turns out that Godfrey and Barthelemy were indeed involved in Eleanor's death, it will be the ultimate irony. It would mean that the present occupants of the duchies that were once undermining the Crown...are now their stanchest allies. Lucretia and Olivia's parents vs Olivia, Godfrey vs Madeleine, and Bartie Sr vs Bertrand and Maxwell. It would be a nice contrast.

- Istg if they try and make HAKIM AND JOELLE suspicious too I will literally throw hands 😡

- Jesus, the amount of retconning going on in this book. That scene would have lost nothing by making Bertrand the guy who was desperate to prove himself to his father and Maxwell the one who had mixed feelings. Having both of them overhear that conversation rather than one would have been fine too. But this is one in a looooooong list of things that the team is shifting around, believing no one will notice. Maybe I should just call this series The Royal Retcon from now on because there is more of that happening than actual babymaking!!

- I'm pretty intrigued by Liam's lukewarm reaction to Bartie Sr personally. What does he know. Why doesn't Liam tell me and why doesn't the MC ask!!

- Bartie Sr spends surprisingly little time with his own namesake, but perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised since Junior's own parents are hardly seen with him either.

- Next chapter is the wedding (if we can find the groom, that is), Savannah getting her dream entry (possibly if we pay the diamonds) and hints that we may be pregnant that will culminate in the big reveal at the end. Yay?

- I know I haven't gotten out a QT for Book 1 in two weeks but those past two weeks have been filled with lots of IRL stuff. Hopefully I'll get back to that soon.

- Until next week, folks!

[tellywoodtrash]

Sanjivani - Weeks 2 + 3

This is now my lunchtime show (replacing random topical news comedy like Late Night with Seth Meyers, Last Week Tonight, Patriot Act, etc.) It’s a nice show to consume that way; I’m not super-involved in it, but it decently holds my interest for a solid 20 minutes as I shove something in my gaping maw.

Overall Plot

Marginal improvement in plot as the show and characters settle in. We learn more about the backgrounds of Ishani and Sid, and their relationship becomes much better. The Shashank/Anjali/Juhi/Vardhan dynamics are also nicely built up, and frankly the more interesting overarching plotline of the show.

The Medical Stuff

They seem to be going for a Grey’s Anatomy type of vibe, I think, focusing on one or two cases over the week. Nothing as interesting as in Grey’s, here it’s more routine kinda cases, but there does seem to be more focus on medicine than there ever was in DMG, which I’m kinda thankful for. While yes, I’m interested in the interpersonal dynamics, I also wanna see these people do their jobs (rather than just canoodling/having angsty fights in stairways and on-call rooms.) With other shows, I really really hate when a day goes on and on for weeks, but in this show, it’s realistic. Residents do often have to do 24 - 36 hour shifts, and each week being about one shift, it’s well-encapsulated; I like how the show flows from one day/shift/case to another.

The Acting

The seniors (Mohnish, Gurdeep, Sayantani) remain the best part, as expected, turning in consistent performances. Surbhi’s performance has toned down considerably, and that’s a big relief. The show would have been unwatchable if she hadn’t. Namit is still weak in some regards (like crying; god that one scene in Week 2 was really bad) but is getting better. He’s best in scenes where he has to be soft and considerate (comforting Anjali/Ishani/Sanya/Neeti etc.) or taking charge of things, coz he plays both these aspects confidently. I also like the chemistry when paired with Surbhi, because he plays off her really well. Only upwards from here, I should hope. The others are.... eh. They’re background characters, so they do what is expected of them.

The Characters

Sid: Sid’s the character that’s grown on me the most compared to the first week. They’ve thankfully toned down his fuckboy-ness waaaaaay down (not sure why they decided to introduce him that way, when it doesn’t even seem to be true of his character aside from in the pilot.) We find out a little more about his social background/family, and it explains why/how he is the way he is. I appreciate his camaraderie with Ishani; he’s obviously fond of her, and attracted to her as well (but in a casual way), but knows she has a lot to learn about how this place works and tries to be a good supporting team member to her, but not to the point where he lets her run amok. He tries to justify his ways to her, but is also willing to let her try her own things in the off case it does pay off; but always has a Plan B in his back pocket, because he knows things don’t work out as expected around here. I like his quiet confidence and integrity, but that he’s also willing to not mince words and/or throw hands if and when absolutely required. Not very realistic of a doctor, but eh, this is Tellywood. Chalta hai.

Ishani: Thankfully, Ishani has mellowed down quite a bit and isn’t as intolerable as she was in the first week. She’s quickly learning that things at Sanjivani are not as they appear and that her initial judgement of Sid was way too hasty/harsh, and has formed a delicate alliance with him. Not to say that she isn’t a stickler for rules anymore, or approves of his on-the-fly, jugaadu/sometimes outright wily ways to skirt around the rules, but she’s trying her best to maintain a balance; in how she tries to help the people who need it, in the most forthright manner. But she’s definitely more comfortable being flexible with “the rules” than she realizes. Her germophobia prevents her from getting comfortable with Sid’s physical proximity whenever he tries to comfort her/express thanks, but I think she appreciates the sentiment.

Shashank: God, I’m so grateful he’s still here. He’s kind of out of sorts due to the surgery, but he’s still very aware and involved in what’s going on in Sanjivani. His gentle battle with Anjali persists, with the latest episode making him give some leeway to her, quite unwillingly though.

Juhi: Beyond Shashank’s surgery, she didn’t really make much of an impression on me in these 2 weeks. She takes the COS job in a spur-of-the-moment decision, purely in an emergency situation, than really actually wanting it. She does a good enough job, stern and smart with the rioting mob/Vardhan, and compassionate and understanding with Ishani, but I do anticipate lots of trouble coming her way in the position. Especially with Rahul lurking mysteriously in the shadows, in cahoots with Vardhan.

Anjali: NOT ENOUGH ANJALI AS I WANT!!!!!! All we do see Anjali doing is either be hysterical during surgery, or sulking over not getting the COS post. For godssake, she’s an HOD, a competent doctor in her own right, can we see her at work too? I want to see her be the kickass boss bitch I know she is; maybe taking a few of these many million juniors under her wing and mentoring them? (She seems to have a good relationship with Sid, it would be nice to see that extend to some others too?) There was one good scene between Shashank and her where they peacefully discuss their issues at the end of this week, but I really need Anjali to DO more than just be standing around feeling bad for herself/manipulated by Vardhan/sniping at Juhi/being passive-aggressive at Shashank. I like that she was upfront enough with Juhi about not liking her, but I don’t like how they’re centering her whole character around just that. You’ve already done this character dirty in one iteration (DMG), please do not waste this chance to showcase the complex personality she is!

Vardhan: A kinda compelling asshole. He has a son that he keeps talking to on the phone, whom seems to dote on and wants to make the best impression on. But harkatein kaafi kameeni. But I also feel marginally sympathetic to him, because he’s trying his best to keep Sanjivani afloat financially. Drs. Shashank and Juhi’s bleeding-heart ways are admirable and all, but the ground realities of running an organization are quite different; and Vardhan is answerable to multiple people above him about it. So yeah I do hate him when he’s doing pettyass evil shit like booting a poor person off a donor list, but in some cases - esp. PR/admin/financial issues, I can see where he’s coming from. I just wish they’d stop making him so caricatureish in his villainy at times and kept him a slick evil, like most corporate types are.

Rishabh: Asshole Jr., but not at all compelling or complex like Vardhan. Just an outright classist asshole, looking to suck up to Vardhan and other richie-rich fuckers and get Sid in trouble. He’s the most annoying part of the show, honestly, constantly lurking around with his phone and filming Sid. Jeez, get a damn life, loser.

Rahil: So sweet and unproblematic, why don’t we see him more (instead of the irritating Rishabh)????? GIVE US MORE RAHIL!!!!!!!

Asha & Aman: They might as well have made them twins, coz they’re so alike (even have matchy-matchy names!) I despise when they unthinkingly run their mouths and blurt out whatever the hell they’re thinking, even to waaaay senior doctors like Juhi and Shashank. Their no-filter admonishments are quite welcome in the case of Ishani though, where they drill some sense into her head. Ultimately, they do have their hearts in the right place and are sincere doctors (if not the most knowledgeable), and I enjoy them in limited amounts; like in the scene where they’re watching Sid and Ishani brawling over the liver.

Asha: Tu idhar mitti ka dher bana khada hai, inki fight rok na??? Aman [watching Sid and Ishani literally bucking at each other while holding an icebox with a liver inside it]: Abbe pagal ho gayi hai ke, baukhlaaye hue saand se ho rakhe hain. Dulatti nahi khaani maine inki!

Neil: Like Rahil, he seems to be sweet and unproblematic, but I get the feeling that he suffers from some kinda health issue? He fainted at the first case out in the field (the bomb blast), Aman mentions he fainted again seeing a corpse that could donate a liver, and he seemed very out of breath when he came to inform Sid/Ishani about another liver donor. I find it hard to believe that a first year resident could be this squeamish about things you get used to by the end of med school, so I really think there’s something else going on here. Is he going to be the Dr. Omi equivalent (the tragically ill character) of this season? I would like to see more of him (than the other jr. residents), because the actor is very measured and likable.

Rahul: We haven’t SEEN him yet, but we have heard him and what we’ve heard......... Does not bode well. I haven’t seen Sanjivani 1, so I don’t know the character as such, but wasn’t he the lead? They’re bringing him back but as an antagonist? Seems quite out-of-character, but I am veryyyyyyyy intrigued about this development, and especially how Juhi fits into all of this.

Overall Rating: 3.5/5

[secretceremvnials-blog]

( daisy ridley, cisfemale ) MARINETTE BEAULIEU, the GIRL ON THE PEDESTAL, is TWENTY-THREE and a SOPHOMORE. She is majoring in LAW. In addition to being Quentin’s UNATTAINABLE FANTASY, they are part of the Imperium Society. Marinette was probably selected because she is a FAMOUS AUTHOR. They remind me of LONG SKIRTS, YELLOW POST-ITS, and A CERTAIN JE NE SAIS QUOI.

I’ve had this baby since about last November, and I’ve written her in many different ways — this particular version is an AU divergent from my novel universe where I’ve primarily written her — but she’s probably my favourite character I’ve ever created and I love her dearly, so I really hope you love her too. 

Why the late start?

Well, some would certainly ask this question, and they’d be right to be curious. Marinette’s late start at university has to do with her writing career, which has included dabbles in screenwriting and an experience assisting with artistic direction on London’s West End. While this has all proven very lucrative, it’s always been Marinette’s goal to find something stable to complement her wife — a highly famous Italian-French actress — and properly ensure they can support her future children; so, while at Ashcroft, she’s working on her next book and a law degree. There are author-politicians, so why not author-lawyers?

RANDOM NOTES

FULL NAME: Marinette Océane Katarin Beaulieu

AGE: Twenty-three

DATE OF BIRTH: 11th October, 1995

PLACE OF BIRTH: Paris, France

ORIENTATIONS: Homosexual / homoromantic

CURRENT RESIDENCE (OUTSIDE TERM DATES): Marseille, France

RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Married

MBTI: ENFJ-T (The Protagonist) — 92% Extroverted, 73% Intuitive, 82% Feeling, 69% Judging, 97% Turbulent

ENNEAGRAM: Two, with a Three Wing (The Hostess)

HOGWARTS HOUSE: Hufflepuff

THEME SONG: The New Great Depression by The Moth & The Flame

ZODIAC SIGN: Libra (sun), Scorpio (moon), Virgo (rising)

PERSONALITY, BACKSTORY + ALL THAT GOOD MCSHIZZLE

- she's the youngest child of five — as far as anyone knows — and known to be the golden child, her father's favourite. if there are a french family comparable to the kardashians, it's this one

- she's twenty-three + a sophomore. she started uni v late because she's been pursuing a career in writing and artistic direction, which has included on the west end, but she's studying law because she wants something that's concrete / totally secure

- she doesn’t need to. her book series (mostly based on her life, though few people have figured this out) are incredibly popular and a company has brought the for-tv rights.

- her connection to quentin is his 'unattainable fantasy.' he knew about her, and she was one of those . . . far-off fantasy crushes who you doubt you're ever really going to meet... until she turned up at ashcroft to study, but also as a married woman, and an out lesbian.

- her wife is a famous actress who's living in london while marinette studies

- this is . . . literally to a fault, she doesn't know how to prioritise herself even for one minute. you'd not know it from looking at her unless you know her really well, but her self-esteem is actually just: none

- she has an absolutely AMAZING facade of happiness a lot of the time

- a lot of it comes from the fact her older siblings very much resent her. her age gap with them is considerable, and she's never had a functional relationship with any one of them.- her father always kind of put her on a pedestal (hence 'the girl on the pedestal') so she's always felt a pressure to impress people, to make them like her.

- but this favouritism... completely fucked over any chance she might have ever had at a proper family relationship.- and if that wasn't enough for her, her mother outright despises her. and isn't exactly quiet about it

.- marinette assumes this was because she was reluctant to have another child, but what no-one of them except her mother knows is it is because marinette is actually the only true-born child of her marriage- the other four are all by her sister's husband, nikolaus, a german ceo who she slept with at her sister's engagement party.

- she's always grown up with this atmosphere of wanting to keep the peace to make up for the turbulence of her home life, and keep her father proud of her, because she is terrified of what life will be like for her if he suddenly wasn't (she's never known anything else.)

- a lot of the time it led to marinette kind of... excluding herself to keep the rest of them happy.- and from all this comes  her tendency for self-blame. if something goes wrong she WILL blame it on herself even if it makes completely no logical sense to do so.

- at one point she was coerced into getting engaged to an english nobleman's son — mostly her mother's idea — but by that point she'd been in a relationship with a girl (her childhood sweetheart) for some years. so she came out and got engaged to her, marrying her at the age of seventeen: the one thing she's ever done just for herself regardless of her father's opinion

- she is the GREATEST french patriot. you literally cannot ignore how incredibly proud of her country this woman is

PLOTS MAYBE?

CRUSHES — obviously, these are unrequited on marinette’s end ( she legitimately refuses to exist without luce ) but i’m totally down for anyone to have a thing for her !

CHILDHOOD BEST FRIEND — marinette’s best friend from when she was growing up. probably the only one who knows the real dark truths of her life, the only one whose shoulder she will cry into when she’s feeling broken. 

EXCITABLE FANS — anyone who might know marinette from her family’s fame, her career as a famous writer, or even from her work on the west end ! these characters would be really eager to be in marinette’s friendship circle.

ANTAGONISTIC PLOTS — marinette really doesn’t respond well to people not liking her, so it’d be interesting to see her squirm.

FAMILY ACQUAINTANCES — people who she knows through her family. they can be really close through this or they can be really stilted, we can work this out !

BAD INFLUENCE — someone who is trying to lead the golden child off the rails. 

ROOMMATE — self-explanatory. ( taken by lissa! )

ACADEMIC RIVAL — especially if they study law, the defence to her prosecution. the competitive element in her quest for success.