#mystery begins

[sasstrid-and-dorkcup]

I don't think we talk enough about the fact that the very first ghost Jack actually saw was his own son

[meerphanim]

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Follyyyy!!! 😊😊😊😊😊🥴💕💕💕💕💕💕 Been wanting to try making art gifs, here's a simple one. I used Capcut and Ezgif dot com.

Here's two still images of said gif!

[lucabyte]

Happy PMD Red is on NSO day. Sadly I don't think King the Skitty and Muse the Cyndaquil will be returning to finish up their adventure regardless.

[milyoasis]

murderous

pilot V had a charm to her

mfw I can't pick a single version so I shove them all in

[agentc0rn]

oh man...2 decades on earth...wow.

[no-where-new-hero]

I am actually going to talk about what I call images, or symbols. It seems to me that in our present great drive—fiction-wise—toward the spare, clean, direct kind of story, we are somehow leaving behind the most useful tools of the writer, the small devices that separate fiction from reporting, the work of the imagination from the everyday account. Of these the far most important, and the most neglected, is the use of symbols; I am using the word loosely, because it has altogether different meanings elsewhere, and yet I hardly know what other word to use ... There must be at least one basic image, or set of images, for each character in a story, a fundamental symbol the writer keeps always in mind; as these images grow the character grows, and the accumulation of material and information about the image slowly makes up the character in the story. Various things belong to a character—a manner of speaking, a manner of moving, a particular emphasis, a group of small physical things—and each of these must take on, like a perfume, the essence of the character they belong to. Just as a tune or a scent can evoke for most of us an entire scene, so the basic image of the character must evoke that entire character and his place in the story. As a result of this, of course, the characters themselves grow apart in the writer’s mind, become entirely separate people, and by the end of a book or a story the writer can no more mistake one for another than he can mistake a can of beans for a pearl necklace.

--Shirley Jackson, "Garlic in Fiction"

[muffinlance]

A Dark Night at the University, Chapter 2: Zuko Chases Some Tail

In which we investigate the offices of a certain missing Head of Anthropology. Where could he be.

Latest chapter || Read from the beginning

Summary:

accidentalGuard!Zuko AU. A Ba Sing Se crime noir where, instead of totally ignoring that Zuko stole a guard's swords to fight Jet, the guards gang press this crazy-good-swordfighter who is the nephew of this crazy-good-teamaker into helping out around the station. They quickly learn that the tea skills are not hereditary, and trouble follows this kid.

[welcome-to-green-hills]

The official image description calls them "long-lost siblings"… 😢

Oh….🥺

[keirientez]

Pokemon trainer AU, Reborn is the champion meanwhile Tsuna is his apprentice. Tsuna’s design belongs to my friend @Cloud_Knee (Twt or X)

[giantchasm]

Replayed Gates to Infinity recently. I really enjoy the fact that half of the characters in it are like malevolent nihilists.

[columboscreens]

[084392]

together

[kimberleyjean]

The Ineffable Detective Agency Presents: What Happened in Before the Beginning?

Hello Good Omens clue hunters and detectives! I’m super excited to share what we’ve discovered in Before the Beginning. Read on if you want to see what no one else has spotted yet!

To put a long story short, something is “up” about Good Omens - Season 2 in particular. While the eagle-eyed have documented a number of odd things in Season 2 already (summarised here), I’ve never seen anyone call into question what was presented during the Before the Beginning scene. Let’s take a closer look shall we?

Remember this scroll to start the nebula? Well, guess what - it changes!

Here’s the first scroll we see on screen, I’m going to call this the “new” scroll. Note the straight edges and completely pristine look, like brand new paper:

Then suddenly, here’s what it looks like as they start up the nebula:

Whoa, that’s looking pretty old and ragged! It’s got rips, a bit of discolouration, several wavy bends running through it. That’s a significantly more worn scroll than we were just shown. Let’s show that in close up just to be sure:

Yup, that’s certainly not meant to be the same scroll!

During this scene, the old scroll is seen again during the close up of Aziraphale holding it. However, once Crowley instructs him to put it down, it’s the new scroll again. (And then at this point it disappears into hammerspace like in a cartoon, or drifts off into space, never to be seen again).

So... there's TWO scrolls?

Well, yes, but also, no. If you're wondering, “Are they both real scrolls? Are you telling me they had two on set?” the short answer is no, this was done with VFX. To explain why we know this, I’m going to hand over to our resident Art Director, @noneorother:

Hi all, @noneorother here. Sure. So it's mostly to do with the shadow inside the scroll curls and under the right hand side curl. You can see when it's the real scroll that the shadows are all orange or brown, because of sub-surface scattering:

It happens when light partially passes through a thin porous object like skin or paper. So when the scroll is new, it's real. Where they've added "scroll is old now" VFX on top of the shots, it's very well tracked, but there's no more sub-surface scattering because it's VFX, not filmed. So the shadows are now base-black inside the curl and to the right hand side of the image. This is the VFX scroll here:

They already perfectly tracked the astronomy animation into the center of the scroll, so they had all that tracking info just sitting around. It wouldn't have been very expensive to add the "old scroll" the way they did it (the cheap and dirty way).

Thanks @noneorother! So there we have it folks, the Good Omens team have intentionally designed some shots with the old-looking VFX scroll and some without. They had the assets created for the old scroll and the tracking to place it correctly, so how could they possibly make the “mistake” of adding it sometimes but not others? This wasn’t a budget thing. If it were budget related, they wouldn’t have created the old scroll VFX in the first place.

Personally, I think this discontinuity was to tell us, the dedicated rewatchers, that what we initially saw in S2 was not the whole story. There is something else at play during S2. Something that, depending on what we find, may make S3 even more enjoyable.

So, why do this? Is this scene being conveyed from different perspectives? Are we viewing different characters’ memories of the same event? If so, why would that be important? Is someone tampering with past events? Did “Before the Beginning” happen multiple times and we’ve seen a spliced together version? What do you think?

One More Question...

The other question worth asking here (which Aziraphale helpfully asks for us) is “which way up” does the scroll go? Look closely at the central rings.

Is it the top version (small rings to the right)?

Or the lower version (small rings to the left)?

... and what happens if you create a nebula upside down, I wonder? Here I’m reminded of the Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square lyrics:

The moon that lingered over London Town Poor puzzled moon, he wore a frown How could he know we two were so in love The whole darn world seemed upside down

In a season where something is going "Down in the Up", and the answer to Gabriel’s mystery is achieved by turning the delivery box upside down, this is yet another up-down reversal we can add to the list!

..................................................................................

If you’ve been following our Good Omens posts up until now, you’ll be aware that this is not the only time scenes have been inconsistent or discontinuous. If this is new to you, please check out my summary post on Season 2 discontinuity here. For more of our posts, plus a collection of Clues and metas from all over the fandom, see here.

However, there is still more to come, so watch out for future updates. If you’re not currently puzzling over Good Omens and would like to join in, please do! We’d love to hear what you find - you can use the tag #ineffable mystery.

Special thanks to @noneorother, @embracing-the-ineffable, and to all the other lovely people at @ineffable-detective-agency (@theastrophysicistnextdoor, @ghstptats, @somehow-a-human, @lookingatacupoftea, @dunkthebiscuit @havemyheartaziraphale, @komorezuki, @251-dmr, @maufungi).

[fictionadventurer]

This AV Club comment is making me so desperate to write a romcom, you have no idea.

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

it could be that I’m just missing the subsection of the fandom that likes to play around with this concept, but I’m a little surprised I haven’t seen more people pulling at Vash’s fear and confusion at his own body and its transformations for angst material

it’s really unique to me, in the way that usually body angst and physical changing is accompanied by self-hatred of the body itself - but Vash doesn’t actually hate his body. He doesn’t hate that he’s a Plant. His self-hatred comes from the actions he is forced or stressed into performing when he no longer has any control over himself; when control is wrest away from him, often violently - and this is all signified by physical changes in his body; literally being shaped into a gun to be fired

and here’s the thing. Wolfwood is so special to me because he has to learn who Vash is and remind himself several times of his character in the face of his fear and of being in the presence of a being incomprehensibly more powerful than him. but Vash is scared too.

he didn’t understand what was happening to him in July. his own plantness is just as much a mystery to him as it is to most humans. he had no guide. he has no mother.

vash and wolfwood spend much of their journey in mutual fear - wolfwood for having no control, and vash for having already seen the consequences of losing it. because it really is about control in the end - and the way that Vash constantly has his stripped from him, the way that his scars (which he doesn’t hate either btw!) are the only proof he had for the longest time that his choices were his own, the way Vash cannot confront his brother for as long as his own body is the linchpin of Knives’ control over him.

and that’s why it’s significant that Vash’s triumph over his body was not an overcoming of self-hatred for being a plant (this was never an issue), but actually his ability to take control over his own transformation - to assert himself with a goal much stronger than resisting another’s influence, or preserving the memory of the dead - that Vash and Wolfwood overcome their mutual fear in volume 8 in order to save each other is the pinnacle of their shared development before the end, and there is so much more I could say to elaborate on this godDAMN

But yeah. The way Vash’s body transformations are a mystery to himself and symbolic of his lack of control is absolutely one of my favourite things about this manga

[n1blakelover]

i’ve gotten to the point of over-analyzing the trailer where i am now zooming in on every character’s eyes to see if we can see anything or anyone in the reflections of them