#nop is ally now

[staring-at-nothingness]

He has a point here...

But its both of them are at fault here.

Mon bcs she is good heart person and feeling like she is betraying Kirk so she end up keeping the secret which honestly not a good look for her relationship.She keep lying to KS about it,jeopardise their relationship.And Mon,relationship shld come first before anything.and Trust work both ways Mon

Khun Sam got jealous and and insecure, becomes irrational and usually runs her mouth without thinking abt the consequences. She was not willing to hear Mon out,also a flaw in her.and calling her player,not nice.Thus forgetting what happen between them the night before where they belong to each other now😪

Honestly,this ep is a roller coaster just like all the other episodes.aish!!

Funfact:they changed the storyline for Nop a bit from the novel which is better

[life-winners-liveblog]

Watching Last Life - session 9

Part 4

Pearl: So the non-reds chose Etho as their leader? Like, stalker Etho? That same Etho?

Scott: I think that was a joke.

Pearl: It better be.

~~~~~

Pearl: I can't believe you killed other me.

Scott: I didn't! I wasn't the one to do the kill.

Pearl: I can't believe you helped get other me killed.

Grian: Now they can be allies again though.

Pearl: Uh? I guess? Still...

~~~~~

Martyn: And it took five seconds for Last Life Pearl to split the red team.

Grian: That happened, yes, your point being?

Scar: Oh I'm sure he's joking! After all-

Martyn: Nop nop nop nope, any time you start with "after all" you say something ominous for no reason.

Scar: Well then, if you want to be like this-

Martyn: I do.

~~~~~

Scar: Oh no poor Joel.

Scott: He tried to backstab me, he deserves all of it.

Martyn: *wince*...

Pearl: Double Life is a cosmic joke seeing how Last Life Joel made it his whole objective to kill Etho.

~~~~~

Grian: I guess that was efficient?

Martyn: ...

Scott: Yep, one of the easiest part of the game.

Martyn: You walked in the fortress, said to Etho it was yours and they just left.

Scott: ...yes.

Grian: Very efficient.

Pearl: Understatement much.

Scott: Well thats not all that happened.

Martyn: Ah right, Pearl also burned dow a tree and you flirted with Etho.

Scott: What!?! I did not!

Previous

Next

First

[winter-leftovers]

Til The End Of Eternity || Chapter three: Win Lose or Draal (3/?)

(Douxie Casperan x f!reader)

Summary: Y/n is trying to figure her life out but is going to be hard since her brother is the new trollhunter and she is plagued by dreams and feelings she doesn’t understand.

Chapter Summary: Jim wins a new ally.

Word count: 1046

Warnings: nop

(Season 1 Episode 6)

Song?: Glory And Gore by Lorde

Previous — Next

Masterlist

Trollmarket was beautiful. The underground city was full of colorful lights, even with the market empty the place looked alive. Immediately, Y/n’s eyes found the heartstone. The gigantic cristal and it’s warmth light left her completely speechless, even made her forget, for a moment, the possibility of her brother dying.

“Where’s everyone?” Y/n asked. She was excited to meet Jim’s new friends and the creatures his book depicted.

“Probably waiting for the fight” explained Toby.

“Oh, right” she took her eyes from the heartstone and looked at her brother “Don’t worry if you die I’ll bring you back” she joked.

Jim gave her a half smile. They were both terrible at hiding their fear.

“Master Jim! Welco-ah! Witch” Blinky stopped mid greeting.

“Blinky! This is my sister Y/n!”

“Oh! My apologies, I must've confused her with someone else!”

“You know a lot of humans?” Y/n lifted her eyebrow confused.

“Oh…well” Blinky’s arms fell down to his side but he put them back up fast “Come on, master Jim. A…great warrior always…shows up in time…” he started pushing Jim to the hero’s forge.

At the forge all the trolls were already excited, filled with the rush of battle.

“Hey, I… I want you to have this” Jim gave a letter to Y/n and another to Toby.

“What’s this?” Asked Toby.

“It says everything I want to say”

“You promised me tacos”

“Now is not the time for lunch, Tobes” Jim scoffed.

“Last week, the three of us went for tacos. I paid. You said, ‘Next time on me’ You’re going to get this letter back unopened after the fight, and when you get back, we’ll get tacos”

“He’s right, Jim. You owe him tacos” Y/n smiled.

“Tacos sound good” Jim laughed.

—

“Draal, son of Kanjigar, son of Tarigar, Draal “the destroyer”, come forth.” Vendel, the white troll announced.

A spiky blue rock started rolling down a path, jumping in the air transforming into a big blue troll with six horns.

“That’s Draal?” Y/n whispered to Toby “He’s huge”

“Yeah” he sounded as worried as her.

“And now, Draal’s combatant, James Lake Jr, son of…Bar-bu-rah. Come forth human trollhunter”

The crowd started booig the second they saw Jim.

“Fight from your heart, Master Jim. It’s strong, stronger than any rock” screamed Blinky.

They close the arena and Blinky said quietly to himself “And certainly, stronger than mine”

But Y/n heard him.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be fine.” she reassured “He has to”

Y/n could hear Toby, Aaaarrrgghh and Blinky speak but she couldn’t pay attention to anything they were saying, only the troll trying to kill his brother.

“And, I am Jim, son of Barbara and the amulet choose me”

The flying axes send Draal over the edge of the arena.

“Yes! He did it!” Celebrated Toby.

“It’s not over yet” explained Blinky.

“He has to finish the fight” completed Y/n without taking her eyes off her brother. She had studied the book all night alongside Jim. She knew what her brother had to do next, what the crowd was asking him to do next, they were screaming for death.

Jim grabbed his sword and Y/n closed her eyes. She couldn’t look at her brother killing someone.

Suddenly the crowd was booing again. Y/n opened her eyes and saw her brother standing next to Draal.

“Look, I may not have followed your rules, but neither did the amulet when it chose me. Right now, over our heads, changelings are in Arcadia..”

Fear and confusion filled the room.

Blinky and Toby ran to Jim before he could unveal the secret.

“What is he talking about?” Screamed Vendel.

“You’ll need a Trollhunter who doesn’t have to live in the shadows. This is a time to work together. They’re building the Killahead—“

“STOP! Say no more! We must leave this instant!” Blinky grabbed Jim by the arm.

“Killahead” Y/n repeated. The word left a metallic taste in her mouth.

—

“Oh, praise! You’re alive!” Toby hugged Jim like he would disappear

“And sore. Ease up” Jim chuckled

Aaarrrgghh and Blinky were called by Vendel before they could celebrate the trollhunter’s victory.

“He opened the letter” Y/n laughed.

“I can tell”

“I didn’t” Y/n smiled and gave Jim back the envelope “You can tell what you wrote if you want but I can’t read the words you thought would be your last message to me”

Jim took the letter and smiled back at her.

Y/n turned and started walking. The tears were escaping from her eyes and she didn’t want to be seen like that, especially now, when they were celebrating.

—

“Remember just a normal teenager and his older sister and their normal life” Jim said more to himself than to Y/n.

“Hi, mom. We’re back!" said Y/n while she took her jacket off. A shiver ran through her spine.

‘Strickler?’ She thought. The same uneasiness she felt when she met him was running through her spine again.

She walked behind her brother and saw that it wasn’t Strickler with her mother but a woman.

“In here. Jim, guess who brought tea?”

Jim stopped in front of the woman that was accompanying her mother. Y/n recognised fear flashing in her brother’s eyes but his face suddenly shifted back and started kicking Nomura out. Y/n wanted to stop his brother but Barbara passed out before she could do anything.

“Mom?” She ran to her mother.

“That speech was very moving” The woman left the table “Too bad she won’t remember it when she wakes up and find your body”

She grabbed Jim and threw him to the kitchen.

Y/n hug her mother trying to protect her from the fight.

“What’s going on?” She screamed.

“Go upstairs!” Jim told her sister.

“Jim I won’t …”

“Go!” He screamed while grabbing his backpack looking for the amulet.

She went and hid in the bathroom, her brother quickly joined her.

The troll whistled a song letting them know she was close.

“Not creepy at all” whispered Y/n.

“Yes! Thank you!” Jim grabbed the amulet from behind the mirror.

Before the troll could open the bathroom door someone grabbed her. Y/n and Jim shared a look and went out to investigate. In their backyard, Draal was fighting the troll.

“What are you doing here?” Screamed at the woman-troll.

“Delivering you pain again, Nomura” Draal answered, shielding Y/n and Jim “Do not touch the Trollhunter”

“Suddenly you’re honorable? Sorry to hear about daddy. Bular always liked the way he screamed”

The fight started again and quickly finished when Draal threw Nomura through the air.

“You were right”

“So, you’re not here to kill me?” Jim asked with his sword in his hand.

“Not kill. Protect” Draal looked at Y/n. She smiled at him.

Jim thanked the troll.

Draal quickly started to walk around the house looking for a place to stay.

“Since I can’t go back to trollmarker I’ll stay here, guard your home”

“I don’t think my mom would be down for that” said Jim.

Draal went downstairs to the basement. Eating a piece of coal and taking a couple more out of the heater he said “This is nice. Here I shall protect you, your witch and your fleshbag mother, Bar-bu-rah”

“What did you call me?” Y/n started walking up to him half confused and half offended. Why were the trolls calling her a witch?

Jim stopped his sister from fighting his new protector “Mmmh close enough” he laughed.

“Your mother will awaken soon. I protect. I don’t clean”

Y/n rolled her eyes and went upstairs along side Jim.

[fulane-de-tal]

this girl i vaguely know (we met at a protest and later at an improv night) and i were talking about our classes whatever and she compliments my little testosterone voice and im like thanks lmao i love it but my professors keep thinking im a man it’s so awful lmao and she gets this HEARTBROKENNNN look on her face and goes “but you are! don’t say that :(“ and im like thanks for the support but im literally not and she’s like no but you ARE. you’re a

Man

in my eyes.

and i’m looking at her trying to figure out how to convey the fact that the prospect is horrifying and she stops short and so i’m like im really really Not. and she goes don’t you want to be???

- NO!!

and she stops looks at me goes “aren’t you trans?”

“um i guess depending on ur definition”

“but you’re not a man. OHH are you, like, nonbinary?”

“um…. not really? i wouldn’t say that?”

and she’s looking more and more lost im starting to regret not playing along with her cis saviorism she looks like she’s worried im losing my marbles

“… aren’t you on t ?”

-yeah.

she looks at me, brow furrowed, totally lost looking, keeps looking me up and down as if my tits and black jeans hold the answer-

“why?”

idk what to say at this point. i’m just as lost as she is. i’m late for class. i’m confused. i’m tired. im getting my gender questioned out loud in public for the first time in a WHILE and i’m having the strangest time.

- um? i want to? i like it?

- but you’re NOT trans.

-nop

-okay. you’re not trans…?… what are your .. pronouns…?

oh boy. oh boy. oh boy.

-he. or she. you can use both or either i don’t care just not they/them

she looks like a kettle boiling over i can physically see the concept of a he/him she/her dyke on t breaking her entire brain she’s like dead silent before:

WHAT?????

yelled. out loud. i’m both vaguely amused and a little uncomfortable to have my entire identity questioned put loud in public at my college campus but no one asked me so i remain in this bizarre conversation

“those are OPPOSITES! i would understand if you said he/they or she/they but he and she are OPPOSITES..!”

i’m muttering a prayer under my breath.

she’s still confused. i’m now just as confused. we’re walking somewhere and she stops mid-walk and goes.

-just so you know i support you. i’m an ally but a confused one.

-ok. thanks

-so like i need to ask. and you can answer honestly. i’m an ally. are you… actually not trans? like are you legit just on t? you’re not like secretly trans and scared to come out ?

blessed are you lord g-d of the universe who created transsexuality. what the fuck bro

i look at her and am like what??

and she’s so earnest that i have to be like no honey i swear im not scared to come out i’m just not a man… im not about to explain transsexuals to her. but i can say that much i guess

she drops the subject thankfully but i cannot stop thinking about this. like literally what

[psychshalala]

Some..🎶 where..🎶 over the rainbow🎶 I dont get how some think that what hak is doing and going through in this arc is irrelevant. Are u kidding me?

First of all his growth people! The guy who had such hate and anger written all over his face at the site or just mention of sw now literally sympathy. The guy who didnt even wanna hear it now toke it upon himself to find answers. From i wanna kill him to possibly be a means to saving his (sw’s) life. To following yonas every word to nop ur wrong this time and ama do what i think i right. From following to leading both fire and earth tribe army.

As for Right now, hak is in the middle of enemy territory. From next chapter he will literally be in the middle of them surrounded by the enemy alone while his allies are far away in the other side of the battle. One wrong move and he is a goner.

Honestly i cant see how can sw and yonas position right now be more exciting than what hak is going through. Haks side of the story has more relevance and more excitement than any side right now. The potential and the risks in his position right now gives far more than sw and yonas. Sw and yona are where they are “supposed to be” but hak is not, it gives more. What is hak gonna do? Who is he gonna influence? What answers he gonna find? What allies he gonna gain? Will he be discovered? What will he do in that situation? How is he gonna strategies to gain most benefits out of his position? Will he have to face sw and yona? So many possibilities. Im fired up. I dont give a fuck about the front lines anymore 😂 i wanna know what’s happening in the backend. Hak has more possibility facing the boss than anyone at the moment.

Sw is slowly becoming more full of bullshit if u ask me. So high and mighty talking about believing in the people and not needing the gods help. While everytime shit gets hard here comes the dragons to save the day and his ass. Without hak, yona and the dragons support (yoon is a given) he wouldnt have accomplished as much and as sufficient as it turned out. More blood would have been shed and more enemies would have been gained if it was all left in his hands. Now i dont deny his accomplishments and his part in the success and i do believe he is good for the kingdom but definitely not alone. Face the facts, if it wasnt for hak and the dragons support he would have lost the war before it even started. Sometimes he can be too cocky for his own good.

What are ur predictions? And please no negative thoughts, give me something exciting, something to look forward to. 😃

[paranoiacally-anxious]

So here it is my Julie And The Phantoms hc about their sexualities and genders:

• Alex Mercer:

He uses He/Him pronouns and he's gay.

At first he thought he was bisexual because during his highschool years he had a “crush” for this girl. When she kissed him, he was like: “Nop, nothing happened. Guess I'm gay”.

He had a lot of problems at his house because of this. So, after his coming out, he started spending more time at Reggie's (for both own good).

• Reggie Peters:

He uses He/Him pronouns, but he once tried they/them but it didn't feel right. He's so bisexual but in a repressed phase/doesn't-know-it phase.

He actually always have thought he wasn't straight but when he once talked about this with his parents they shouted at him, telling him that he was normal and not a faggot.

When Alex sorta lived in his house two things happened: first, his parents stopped arguing and fighting with each other so that “happy family” could go on; second, he actually had a huge crush on him.

• Luke Patterson:

He uses He/They pronouns but actually he doesn't really care 'bout that, so if you only use “He„ or only “They„ he doesn't mind. He's been questioning his sexuality since Alex's coming out, but he just removed this idea. But recently he started seeing Nick and Reggie in a different way that scares him (Alex told him he's probably omnisexual or pansexual).

He had a LOVELY family, that didn't care about that, even if his dad struggled with using the right pronouns. But Luke didn't care, he loved his dad for trying.

• Julie Molina:

She is omnisexual with a preference for boys, and she uses She/Her pronouns.

Her family didn't actually care, neither Flynn or the boys. Only her tía actually had a little problem with that but the love she proves for her niece is way bigger than her prejudices (she's now a huge lgbtqa+ ally, she also brought Julie to buy a pride flag).

• Flynn:

She uses She/They pronouns and she's aromantic pansexual.

She found out that she was attracted to everyone when a trans girl came out and she fell in love with her at first sight. But she never really liked being in a relationship, even when she and that girl started dating. Sadly that girl moved to another State.

• Willie:

They uses They/Them pronouns, but they're actually afraid to say it so they let people use he/him with them (only Alex does know, and uses the right pronouns). Something they aren't afraid to say is their sexuality: gay (as hell, they say).

Well, a secretly secret is that he kinda had a little crush on Caleb, more like a celebrity crush. But then came Alex and they fell harder than they ever thought.

• Nick:

Nick is transgender ftm so he uses He/Him and he's AroAce.

He kinda like girls/boys but would never to be in any kind of love relationship. He actually discovered this during his “relationship” with Carrie. He never really liked her that way, he thought she was cool but nothing more, nothing less. And then Julie came. But still, it was more admiration than anything.

Also her band mates? Hot, but still. He thought he had a malfunction in his being, but Carrie told him 'bout Asexuality and Aromantic so he found his way to the world.

• Carry Wilson:

She is genderfluid (so They/She/He) and she's Lesbian because girls are too hot (as she says).

Their first real crush was Flynn but she had an affair with that trans girl and so she gave up. Then came Nick.

With Nick was never a “Real Relationship”, it was more a friendship with holding-hands everywhere. And when that new girl in school came, man, she fell head over heels.

• Bobby Shaw:

He uses He/They pronouns and he's Bisexual.

He had a big crush on Luke but he never tried with him because of his fear of rejection. But when Alex introduced Reggie to the band, Bobby flirted with him every single time they could.

• Trevor Wilson:

He uses He/Him pronouns and he's a straight homophobic old man.

After his band mates died, he changed everything and his manager told him that “Faggot don't go far in the music industry”.

And than he became the shit he is.

[coochiequeens]

A woman wrote slogans in chalk. 

Last week, chalk writing reading ““#What is a girl?, #LGB, #NoPride,” and “#What is a Woman?” was discovered outside several Madison businesses. The chalking occurred on the first day of June – the start of Pride month. 

The chalking was done by Mary Jo Walters, who made headlines last year when she withdrew her candidacy for a place on the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education. She gave up the race after making a Facebook post in which she referred to herself as “trans-a-phobic.”

Walters says some of the chalked hashtags refer to a recently-released documentary.

“When it comes to writing ‘what is a woman?’, I did that because it was the first day of pride and it also was the release of the movie What is a Woman? So that’s why I used that hashtag,” Mary Jo said.

The film purports to feature interviews on the topic of womanhood. Produced by far right news outlet The Daily Wire, it features selectively edited interviews with trans activists and academics.

News outlet LGBTQ Nation called the documentary “propaganda” and “full of transphobic lies,” and said that it portrays the concept of gender transition as “threatening [to] the Western Christian way of life.”

The film features conservative commentator Matt Walsh, who identifies himself as a “Theocratic Fascist” in his Twitter bio, and has come under fire for allegedly using images of minors without their permission in the film. Walsh has also been criticized for calling the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse “malicious prosecution,” and for promoting white supremacist “replacement theory.”

I also asked Mary Jo about what she was trying to accomplish politically.

“I’m boycotting Youtube right now because they had a queer ad – an ad about queers at the beginning of the video I wanted to watch. I don’t want to hear about queers before I’m about to watch a video! Ban! I don’t want to hear about ‘queer,’ I don’t want to hear about ‘trans.’ I’m done, I don’t want to hear about it.”

She went on to describe her belief that transgender pride is a conspiracy to indoctrinate children:

“MJW: Why aren’t we making a ban on anything that could be affecting those girls? Because it’s a hemorrhage, and it needs a tourniquet, and the ban is a tourniquet.

AB: do you see the art you did on the sidewalks as a way of accomplishing that?

MJW: Absolutely.”

Fiddlesticks Knits is a queer and woman owned yarn and fiber store on Atwood Avenue. The store, which opened last summer during the pandemic, prides itself on inclusion, accessibility, and sustainably-made items. 

Fiddlesticks was one of several businesses that had these messages chalked outside its shop. 

After finding the chalk, and washing it away, owner Erica Hainz organized what she referred to as a “counter-protest” later in the day. That afternoon, members and allies of Madison’s queer community wrote positive, pro-queer messages down the block:

“It was really good this time to have a really clear way to direct people to be like ‘here’s where you should put your energy, here’s how we can right this wrong and get people out here to show that there are so many more people in this community that want to be inclusive and support and love the trans people of this community, the queer people of this community, and to replace that transphobic nonsense with affirming things, reclaiming the space. It’s really lovely,” Erica said.

In February, Fiddlesticks also had its Progress Flag torn down. The Progress Flag is a rainbow pride flag which incorporates a design symbolizing the trans community.

“Our flag was ripped down. They actually left the flag on the doorstep, but they bent the pole badly enough that we had to replace it. That one was very jarring and disillusioning in a way. It was just so bizarre walking up to my storefront and seeing that someone had done something,” Erica said.

Mary Jo denies being involved in this incident. 

Amanda Haynes – no relation to Erica Hainz – is the president of the Madison Knitters’ Guild. When I talked to her about the chalking, here’s what she said:

“The Madison Knitters’ Guild stands in solidarity of Fiddlesticks Knits and the LGBT+ community. We are committed to making the knitting community in Madison and beyond safe and inclusive for all. There is absolutely no place here for behavior and language that degrades any neighbor in our community,” Amanda said.

These events take place against a national backdrop of rising anti-LGBTQ+ hate incidents. 2021 was the deadliest year for transgender and gender-nonconforming people on record, with trans people of color being especially likely to be targets of violence.

Image courtesy of Erica Hainz.

Granted Mary Jo Walters sounds a little extra but what it comes down to is she wrote slogans in chalk, a medium that can be destroyed in a few minutes with a hose.

[drunk-onsunlight]

Day #1: Beautiful, what's your hurry? 

Chapters: 1/12 Fandom: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Michelle Jones & Peter Parker, Michelle Jones & Ned Leeds & Peter Parker, Happy Hogan/May Parker (Spider-Man), Pepper Potts & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe), spideychelle - Relationship, Betty Brant & Ned Leeds Characters: Michelle Jones, Peter Parker, Ned Leeds, Betty Brant, May Parker (Spider-Man), Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, Happy Hogan, Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) Additional Tags: Spideychelle Promptmas 2020, MJ is Black Cat, Peter Parker is Spider-Man, Iron Dad, Canon? Don't Know Her, Comic Elements, Rhino is causing problems, Prowler is causing problems, Dr. Octopus is causing problems, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Morgan is a smartass, Ned Leeds is a Good Bro, Other Additional Tags to Be Added

Summary:

12 days of promptmas where Peter is having fun being Spider-Man until too many bad guys are around and a certain Cat tries to kiddnap Ned in the middle of a fight (or something like that) and all he can think about is "how is he going to pretend to have a relationship with MJ on that Stark party on Christmas break?"

Notes:

I'm terribly excited and proud of this fic so I hope you have as much fun reading as I had writing it. You will find short chapters and others... not so short, they are hell long (sorry, not sorry). Done with the blablabla and have fun in this 12 Days of Promptmas Remember that every chapter's concept will influence a big plot ;)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Concept 43. Roommates 2. Shopping

Dialogue 56. "Do you wanna built a snowman?" 46. "You do know that Santa's not real, right?"

December 18th - One week before Christmas Peter and MJ have been living together for two years now. They decided it was the best way to not be totally broke because of their attempt to live in NYC while college and being close to their families in Queens. And the best way for Peter to be Spider-Man and be close to the Avengers facilities without anyone knowing, including MJ. Peter didn't knew how he have managed to keep his identity hidden while living with MJ but it was good, she wasn't in danger if she didn't know about his superhero thing. Peter and MJ had strict rules about their privacy and that made everything easier. They never went to the others bedrooms for anything, at least one of them was sick and that wasn't happening frequently. So basically Peter charged his IronSpider suit without worrying about MJ finding it and probably friking out and his three different suits were on the closet or under his bed totally save. MJ had her own secrets and he wasn't the right person to sneak a peek inside her room to find out, so he respected her room, privacy and secrets as much as she respected his. Morgan has called on a Thursday claiming that she needed to spend time with his big brother on Christmas break or she will take him out of work from The Bugle on some fake news that Spider-Man was around a shopping mall she wanted to visit. The ten year old was very persistent, just like her parents. Of course he said yes, he wanted to take some pictures of Manhattan while you can still walk around Central Park, also, some early shopping for Christmas was too perfect to reject. Morgan arrived to MJ and Peter's apartment early in the morning and took a second quick breakfast with her brother and MJ. ---------

"So, Morgan! How's school going?" MJ was familiar now with the little girl and wasn't surprised of Peter's contacts with the Stark. What she never understood was how Peter ended up working for J. Jonah Jameson and not in Stark Industries, maybe his passion for photography was bigger than his love for chemistry and labs. "Pretty good, actually! I'm looking forward to High school, looks exciting" oh poor innocent soul. But she wasn't going to break her little bubble of happiness, definitely not on the holidays! "You're getting old Morgan! High school? That's big!" Peter was always cheering Morgan, no matter what. He was such a good old brother "Then you are even more old because you are in college and you have a job, too" Morgan said with her mouth full of pancakes, that MJ was pretty sure Pepper will not approve. "MJ! You are gonna let her treat us like grannies because we have a job?" Peter always tried to get MJ involved in his conversations but she still had that little observant in her from High school "Well, if we are that old then we can't go shopping today. What if we get a cold? That would be terrible for this two old people" that was the plan, shopping with Morgan but MJ had another plan for her visit to Manhattan, but they didn't need that information "noooo!!!! We have to go shopping! My dad gave me lots of money to spend on everyone’s present! I want to buy something nice for Uncle Happy and Aunt May, for mom and dad and of course for you both! Even for Ned and Betty!" yes, that was their little group now. How on earth Peter was able to keep such a strong relationship with the Starks and his security head, after two years working for their labs, was still a mystery. Well, it wasn't hard to get attached to the Parkers and with Peter always came Ned and now Betty. "Ok Morgan! Then let's go. If we are in Manhattan as soon as the shops are open we will get good presents for everyone" the little girl took her plate when the pancakes were to the kitchen and run to get her coat, scarf and gloves for the cold. "How much money do you think she actually has, Parker?" "She is ten, so maybe not much. But she is a Stark so maybe a couple hundred? Who knows? I'm gonna text Pepper just to check, if I text Tony he will probably encourage her to buy the whole shopping mall" Peter walked to his room while Morgan returned from the living room and started jumping in front on MJ to show her that she was ready to go "Ok, we will go in a few. Can you go to your brother's room for a bit while I look for my things?" "Yeap! Don't take long, MJ!" "Don't worry. I will be fast. Promise!" MJ walked to her room and locked the door. She needed to change something from her outfit without Peter and Morgan knowing. That will bring lots of questions that she wasn't ready to answer, especially to Peter. She took her bag with all the things she needed for the day and checked twice that the leather suit under her clothes wasn't visible. "MJ is back!! We can go! Let's go Pete" Morgan was bubbling with happiness so they finally went out of the little apartment. They went down the five floors and started walking through the cold streets of New York with Morgan in between them. Each holding one of her tiny hands. The girl was talking about her school friends, her new favorite topic in class and her love for science, just like his dad. Peter and Morgan were having a lovely chat about the new tech Stark was designing while MJ was waiting for her moment to leave them for a while. "How do you know all of this, Morgan? Pepper hasn't forbid you from the labs?" "Yeah, but she stopped telling me to not go there after my tenth time sneaking into the labs." "As reasonable as your dad, I see" "And you Pete. That's why you are my brother" Peter had an easy smile on his face when he talked to Morgan. It was nice to see him so relaxed, he was extremely stressed and had been for the last year. College could be a nightmare even being a genius like Peter. "Ammm, I have to go Morgan. Would you forgive me if I go for a few minutes? I promise I will be back" "Nooo!!! Why? I can talk to you more if you want. It’s just that Peter never shuts up" "Its fine Morgan. I love hearing you both talk about nerdy things, but can I tell you a secret?" the girl’s eyes light up and she moved away a little from Peter "I'm very good at keeping secrets, MJ. You can trust me" MJ got to Morgan’s level which means she was almost on her knees. "I'm going to buy Peter's present and he can't see it because it's a surprise. Can you keep that secret?" Morgan's face showed all her excitement and started nodding furiously "Then I will text Peter when I'm done, ok?" she said the last looking at Peter to let him know she was going back with them "Ok! See you MJ!!" Morgan waved at MJ while she crossed the street to a few jewelry stores. She entered one of the stores and checked that Peter and Morgan were gone before leaving to a close ally to change into her leather suit, mask and silver wig. ------ "MJ is really nice. And pretty!" if Peter never closed his mouth, Morgan was just like him, but Peter loved it "Yeah. She is really nice" "And pretty. My dad said he is a little bit afraid of her for all your stories about her in high school but I think that makes her even greater" "Well yes, she is pretty and why I never knew your dad was afraid of MJ? Now I'm gonna mock him for that" "you didn't hear it from me, Pete" "so, what where you and MJ talking about?" "No, no, it's a secret and I don't share secrets even if there are small. Like your secret, does MJ knows, by the way?" "No, she doesn't and you know that's the best thing for her so it's going to be a secret until something terrible happens like she gets in my room and I'm arriving from patrol or something like that" he didn't want to think about the possibility of MJ finding out about him being Spider-Man because patrol ended bad "How's Ned doing? Is he still your Guy in the Chair?" "Nop, he is retired. Now he has proclaimed himself as a FOS" "what's that?" "FOS as Friend of Spider-Man" "so, I'm a FOS too, right?"

"Yes, you are Morgan. That's why you have to be really careful on not speaking about Spidey outside of the labs or the facilities. Ok?" "Yeap. Got it. Don't worry about that. Mom thought me well. She talked about a few bad experiences she had because she is close to my dad and I don't want to go through any of that" Morgan was very young but very intelligent, any other kid would be screaming at the top of their lungs that their adoptive brother was a superhero just like their dad. But she knew better than that. "Hey! Look at all the snow in the park. Do you wanna built a snowman, Morgan?!" he was very excited about the possibility but Morgan not so much "I would love it but can we wait for MJ? I think she will enjoy it as much as we will" "Ok. Let me check my phone for any messages. Maybe she wrote me and we didn't notice" no new messages from MJ, but apparently Black Cat had stolen a few things from a store on the opposite side of Manhattan. The police was taking care of the case but the evidence wasn't much. They never had enough evidence when Black Cat was involved, she was becoming a problem in New York and Peter was going to pay more attention to the new dressed up villain, but first he needed to stop Rhino. He was the big problem, has been for the last year, appearing and disappearing every few months but each time he came back, he was stronger. "Did she say something?" "No yet. What if we go to that shopping mall, do some actual shopping and then back to that snowman?" "Yes! I want to buy some summer clothes to my dad and some beautiful heels to my mom! Maybe some kitchen utensils to Uncle Happy and more nice shoes for Aunt May! What do you think, Pete?" "I think we have lots of things to do then! Let's go before MJ is back. We need to buy her a present too" they walked to the shopping mall and got a few things for everyone. Morgan bought some shorts for Tony, with Iron Man's face on them, some really expensive heels for Pepper and May and different bakery supplies for Happy "I have Ned's present in Stark Industries. It's a new program my dad worked on that I think he will love. But don't tell him! It's a secret" "don't worry peanut, your secret it's save with me" "thanks Pete. Ok, what are we buying to MJ?" "I have an idea... But we have to go find somewhere affordable and that can sell me a very specific object. Santa can't bring that present from the North Pole for her" "You do know that Santa's not real, right?" "What? MORGAN! You can't say that!!" "I'm sorry Pete. Did I ruin your fantasy?" "No... But now that's a big secret you will have to keep. No one can know that Santa is not real" after Peter and Morgan went out of the store they choose for MJ's present, Peter's phone started to sound along to Jingle Bells. "Hey MJ. We done shopping here. Where are you? Do you wanna built a snowman?" "A snowman?" "Yes. Morgan wanted to wait for you to build it in the park a few block away from where we were" "Oh. Yeah. I know where, see you there in ten?" "Perfect. See you in a few" "She's coming to build the snowman?" "Yes she is" "I really like MJ, Peter" "Yeah. Me too" -----

After a small walk and some time to find the best place to build the snowman, MJ, Peter and Morgan reunited and started looking for things to complete the medium sized snowballs that they managed to make. Morgan found a few stones for the eyes, MJ took a few branches for the arms and Peter was trying to find something for the nose of the snowman. After a few minutes he found a branch that wasn't to tin as the snowman's arms but it was too long. He broke the branch in the thicker part and placed it in the snowman face. "Oh Peter! The gym is actually paying! You broke that like it was a pencil!" Morgan’s face screamed at him that that action wasn’t completely normal for a regular person "Yeeaaahhh... The, the gym! Of course!" MJ was looking at him a little bit suspicious. She still managed to hide most her emotions but after living with her, Peter learned to read her more than she thought. "Well, I need to start going to the gym too then, you have been going since high school and it's finally working apparently" Peter knew MJ wasn't stupid, or blind for the matter. She has seen him without a shirt and knew about how his body has changed through the years because of his superhero thing, but for her, and everyone else... He was just going to the gym. That was the logic explanation behind his ripped body and his very useful strength. Peter tried to move away from MJ’s suspicious face while lifting Morgan from the ground.

“I think it’s quite decent. What do you think, Em?” Peter asked MJ

“I don’t look that bad, actually! Morgan, can you rate the snowman?” They were looking at the weird snowballs with the stones for eyes and several branches around his “body”

“I give it a 7 out of 10, something is missing… A SCARF!!! He’s getting cold without a scarf” Ok, Santa wasn’t real but the snowman was getting cold. Peter and MJ shared a look and started laughing, they found funny that the snowballs were cold. Peter took his scarf off from around his neck and placed it on between the top snowball and the middle one.

“There you have it! Now he is fine and won’t get a cold” Morgan looked pleased at the snowman and took MJ’s hand in her right hand and she offered her left had to Peter.

“Ok, now it’s a ten. I think we can go and wrap all this presents on the apartment. Can we Peter?” Morgan looked a little tired

“We definitely should, maybe we can have some hot drink too” MJ wrapped her bag on her shoulder without letting go of Morgan’s hand while Peter took the six different bags from around the snowman and the three of them stared to head home.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks to @spiderman-homecomeme for organising this amazing event!

[staring-at-nothingness]

I'm sorry Kirk. I still dont like you and your attitude.Even though,you didnt out Khun Sam,you are still spineless delusional idiot.He is so worried about upsetting grandmother,that he is betraying KS again.ffs😠

Nop has become a great ally now.He is speaking from our minds now...

Mon again running away,not a good look Mon.You both are married now,communication is important Mon😪.

[soveryanon]

Reviewing time for MAG147 X_X/

- We already knew that Annabelle was interested in stories – she was “the Story Spinner” in MAG123, had Gregory Cox instal a website to fish out what were basically statements. And her statement in itself feels a bit like a… crafted story, in-universe? It’s explicitly addressed to Jon, meant to be read by Jon, and it contained so many details reminiscent of Jon’s own infancy: both lived near the sea (Hunstanton/Bournemouth); both were raised by a female figure who didn’t hide her resentment (Annabelle’s mother for having to take care of a large family, Jon’s grandmother for having to take care of her son’s son); Annabelle tried to run away and Jon used to “explore” too far to the point of being brought back by the police; Annabelle left her home with a book (Five Go Down to the Sea) while Jon had been led outside by one (A Guest for Mr. Spider); both encountered The Web as kids and were presumably led to fit in Her scheme later on in their lives as young adults… but with enough nuances and straight-out differences (Annabelle coming from a large family while Jon was a single child without a close family, etc.) to clearly set them apart. This passage, especially, felt especially Dedicated To Jon?

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “The air was warm and humid as I snuck out of the house, filled with that slight smell of salt that even now… changed as I am… I still sometimes find myself missing here, in the grimy air of London.”

And what to think of the ~coincidence~ of Annabelle, future Web avatar, growing up in a family of eight children, having a distant mother – while her present Patron is referred as Mother-of-Puppets? Was it a genuine story, or a hybrid creation crafted from various other stories with threads interwoven to form other patterns? Annabelle herself raised the possibility, in a terrifying way (“Or perhaps I am simply telling you what you need to hear, in order to behave exactly as the Mother wishes you to. [STATIC, GRADUALLY INCREASING] Perhaps… I have never even seen a beach.”), and, indeed. Annabelle could be unreliable – we know that statement-givers can conceal information if they want:

(MAG121) OLIVER: And about two years before I came to your Institute, something happened – something I didn’t want to talk about. Didn’t even want to think about. I… [SIGH] I started to see them when I was awake. […] Even when I went to your Institute, tried to warn her, I could see them crawling through the corridors towards the Archives.

(“Lying” is a different matter – can you write a lie when making a statement, or would it work as long as you think/are convinced that an event took place a certain way? We’ve had an example, with MAG015, of events being objectively different from the way the statement-giver described them (“Take her, not me”). But with Annabelle… yeah, absolutely no idea if we’re to take what she said at face-value or not.)

And interestingly, I… don’t feel like we learned anything at all about Annabelle Cane’s actions or history: because she didn’t cover at all the parts of her avatar life that we had heard of. She barely scratched the surface of her transformation, with enough doubt to wonder if she had been led there or if it was a coincidence (something she highlighted, as she said that her experience as a kid “is what engendered in me that terror of spiders which eventually led to my volunteering at Surrey University” but it had been stated in MAG069 that… she hadn’t been told that the experiment was about arachnophobia), didn’t say a word about Neil Lagorio, nor what she was planning with the website in 2015. We only know that she has plans. She is. Terrifying.

- What she said about:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “The Mother is the fear of manipulation and lost control made manifest. So perhaps it is our fear that projects Her influence on everything that happens. Like the mind, retrospectively assigning reason to our actions, so we fit whatever occurs into the neatest pattern we can, and declare Her web both intricate… and complete.”

indeed fits a LOT with the pattern we have seen of avatars reminiscing on the events that led them to their current life. Jude had insisted on her “burn-out”; Mike rationalised that he had always been a bit fascinated by falling, hence going for The Vast; Oliver described it precisely too:

(MAG121) OLIVER: I still remember the first time I tried to touch one. In my dreams, the night before, I had found my way back to my own street. I don’t know why I did it. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, walking past my own home in a dream, but I just– … Maybe I wanted it this way, I mean… when I stepped out the building that morning, I… didn’t turn towards the bus stop like I always do. I turned right instead, walked over to the little alleyway where I knew, some time in the next week, a young woman was… going to have a fatal aneurysm. […] So, I did some digging. Found the identity of a few crew members and started to track them down. I told myself that I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I did. Of course I did. […] I had never felt anything as cold as those veins. It was so… hm, patient. It… made me think of those winter mornings, when I was a kid, with no snow; just… frost and frozen mist over everything. Keeping the world in place, curling you up into yourself and… quietly waiting for you to lose your footing, to slip up and fall. Snap.

Annabelle herself insisted on the idea of control and manipulation when she was a kid, and Jon… Jon had insisted on the curiosity for novelty and on seeing. But if he had been touched, let’s say, by The Lonely, would he have retroactively described his exact same childhood as one of isolation, without any meaningful connection…?

- … I feel so stupid to have just assumed, all this time, that somehow, all Web avatars had to be interconnected to their patron, aware of the Big Plans? Because it was The Web and duh? But nop, apparently, Annabelle doesn’t know about The Web’s intentions (… if it has any “intention”, as Gertrude had questioned MAG145) – she could be lying but. Not Knowing What Your Patron Wants Of You seems to be a recurring thing in season 4, Jon had lamented about it in MAG145 too (which. was. worrisome.).

But Annabelle has her own plans, at the very least, and they apparently involve Jon:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “I’m afraid I don’t actually have these answers for you; I’ve simply been… watching. I’m sure you understand that. Maybe I’ve occasionally been nudging something here and there to keep you safe, to keep everything on track.”

… which does NOT make her an ally, what the flying fuck JON:

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: So, she is… watching the Institute. Interfering with things. … [HUFF] Is that reassuring, or… really, really bad…? I can’t say I’m… [HUFF] I can’t say I’m sad to have another ally allegedly on our side, but I don’t like the idea of being important to The Web. … That’s a really bad place to be…

(Especially since he had mentioned he was… ready to get into danger or to die if it means saving someone – Annabelle’s comment seems to give credit to the idea that she was the one who sent Martin to put the tapes around the coffin to get Jon back? So if she needs Jon alive, and especially given the current situation… that’s Bad, actually…?)

(- I’m… astonished that Jon didn’t get into a paranoia fit about The Web’s ritual, then? Since he has no information whatsoever about it, and had been researching about rituals until then. The Web making a move should make him think of the possibility…? Unless he has already accessed a few of Martin’s tapes? Unless he “knows” the content of the recording? (… But given that Annabelle and The Web are not the same thing, I do wonder if it’s not possible to have an avatar trying to bring its patron’s ritual to completion despite said patron not being overly interested in theory…? We’ve had the reverse case, with Jared refusing to participate in The Last Feast, after all…))

(- So, that “nudging”: it strengthens the idea that she was indeed the one who sent Martin helping Jon to get out of the coffin?

(MAG134) PETER: What does puzzle me, though, and I mean that genuinely, is… why you were piling tape recorders onto the coffin, while Jon was in there. [PAUSE] It’s a question, Martin, it’s– it’s not an accusation. MARTIN: I don’t know. And I just… felt like it might help. He’s always recording, I thought… it–it might help him… find his way out. PETER: Interesting. Were you compelled? MARTIN: [SULLEN] … I don’t know. … M–maybe? I–I, I definitely wanted to do it… PETER: But? MARTIN: I’m… I’m not sure where the idea came from. PETER: You should watch out for that. Could be something dangerous. MARTIN: Sure.

(MAG135) ELIAS: I needed a way to force him to harness his ability more acutely than he had before. The coffin was a useful tool; Daisy an adequate bait. BASIRA: Then you messed up. Way he tells it, he doesn’t know how he got out of there. ELIAS: But he did. And his powers were no small part of it. Even if he required some assistance, they were what saved him. And he’s still achieved what no one – mortal, monster, or anything in-between – has ever been able to. He climbed out of The Buried.

1°) Peter Doesn’t Like It

2°) Elias Absolutely Doesn’t Mind It

Elias, that’s the 100th time this season, but what DO YOU KNOW about the spiders in your Institute…)

(- There were so many mentions of watching/seeing in Annabelle’s statement, and she did acknowledge Jon’s confusion over what is coming from The Eye and what could come from The Web… so there is still That Thing again. With the confirmation that Smirke had been extremely arbitrary and couldn’t stand to acknowledge the possibility that he might have been wrong in his “architecture”, it seems that “An infinite amorphous blob of terror bleeding out in every direction at once.” still remains The Most Accurate description of the Fears.)

- That… was such a powerful move…

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: … You hear that? BASIRA: No, I, I don’t hear– ARCHIVIST: Shh, shh! MELANIE: Yes. Room on the left…! ARCHIVIST’S RECORDED VOICE FROM MAG001: “an organisation dedicated to–” DAISY: Is that…? ARCHIVIST: Yes…. ARCHIVIST’S RECORDED VOICE FROM MAG001: “–academic research into the esoteric, and the paranormal.” BASIRA: Don’t touch it. ARCHIVIST’S RECORDED VOICE FROM MAG001: “The head of the Institute–” ARCHIVIST: No. ARCHIVIST’S RECORDED VOICE FROM MAG001: “–Mr Elias Bouchard–” ARCHIVIST: It’s alright. [BREATHING DEEPER] [FOOTSTEPS] ARCHIVIST’S RECORDED VOICE FROM MAG001: “–has employed me to replace the previous Head Archivist, one Gertrude Robinson, who has recently passed away.” ARCHIVIST: [EXHALE] [THE TAPE IS STOPPED.] DAISY: Something underneath it. ARCHIVIST: I see it. Uh, hand me that brush? [RUFFLING SOUND] BASIRA: Is… that what I think it is? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Yeah. [RUSTLING PAPER] Official Institute paper, and everything. BASIRA: Goddamnit…! ARCHIVIST: “Statement of Annabelle Cane.” … She left it for us.

1°) She knew that the assistants were going to The Web’s stronghold for the first time, and she left things that had been taken out from the Institute, The Eye’s stronghold as messages. Meaning she has indeed full access to the Institute and the Archives.

2°) Leaving. A statement. As a gift. Nobody had asked and she left it.

3°) MAG001’s tape, meaning Jon’s whole debut as an unwilling servant of The Eye, potentially meaning that she had been watching all along…

4°) Throwing us into the past, too: because it was the old Jon, pretending he didn’t believe in the supernatural – the Jon who hid and dissimulated (just like he did again with the people he attacked for their statements)… because he was afraid, because he thought that acknowledging them would mean catching their attention. We get to hear this Jon, again, and it’s such. A blow. And a reminder that Jon has been doing that again lately.

(5°) … and they arrived just when Elias was mentioned on the tape, so *squints* Is it because it was just the beginning of the tape, or an invitation to go request Explanations&Answers from that fucker.)

- Same, HHHH that power move of beginning the statement with

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) ““Free will” is a funny old thing – isn’t it, Jon? Can I call you Jon? I’m going to call you Jon.”

… when she revealed a few lines later that she perfectly knew that Jon couldn’t stop reading. So he couldn’t answer anyway because it was an indirect message, but he was forced to read the question and Annabelle’s unilateral decision without being able to agree or protest anyway, and she perfectly knew it. Hhhhh.

(Also, the question was reminiscent of Nikola’s own “Can I call you Elias?” during Jon’s kidnapping&sequestration, and ahahaha, that. Might have been even more triggery for Jon, uh.)

(Aaaand both Oliver, agent of Death, and Annabelle, agent of Web, jumped to a first-name basis with Jon while he was in no position to allow or refuse them – in a “coma” with Oliver, and under compulsion-to-read with Annabelle.

(MAG121) OLIVER: Hum… Hello, Jon. Do you… m–mind if I call you Jon? I… I mean. You don’t actually know me, it’s just… well. “Archivist”, it’s so… formal, isn’t it? And I do kind of know you…? […] The thing is, Jon, right now, you have a choice.

Annabelle and Oliver are definitely kinda-friends, uh.)

(- And the voiceswitch was ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTFUL. Terrifying and wow. Jon felt like someone else, even more than usual.)

- Obligatory squintsquintsquint because:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “I discovered a deep and enduring talent inside myself… for lying. My manipulations were not intricate – but they were far beyond what was expected of a child my age, and I have always believed that the key to controlling people… is to ensure that they always under, or overestimate you. Never reveal your true abilities or plans.”

………… is kinda reminiscent of Martin:

(MAG117) MARTIN: These last couple of years, I’ve always been... running, always hiding, caught in someone else’s trap, but… but now it’s my trap. And, well. I think it will work. I know, I know it’s not exactly intricate, but… it felt good, weaving my own little web. OH, oh Christ, I hope Jon doesn’t actually listen to these. “Good lord, is Martin becoming some sort of spider person?” No, Jon, it’s an expression, chill out. Besides, spiders are fine. I mean, yes, people are scared of them, obviously, but actual spiders, they just… want to help you out with flies!

(And Elias had described his own ability as “weaving” too. And Jon did wonder, in MAG145, if he wasn’t mostly just plainly good at bullshitting. If there are two people we tend to over/under-estimate, it would be Elias and Martin, who both “love manipulating people!”…)

- Obligatory laugh that:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “With any other animal, we talk about “instinct”, we talk about “training”, perhaps if we have spent enough time with them… we talk about “personality”. But we never talk about choice. We never look at a dog racing wildly after a thrown ball and think “What an odd decision that dog has made!”. We talk about the workings of its mind, and its instincts; if it doesn’t chase the ball, we wonder why: is it sick? Is it tired? Perhaps something in the nature of this particular breed, this particular dog, makes it prone to ignoring a game of fetch. The idea of a dog simply… choosing not to chase feels deeply unnatural. Is it even capable of legitimately making a decision? Some would say no.”

Hey, Annabelle. You don’t know cats, uh. And you’re talking to a cat-lover. (Well. A love of The Admiral, at the very least. Who had decided it was time for belly rubs before electing to go on with his day, back in MAG093, in typical cat behaviour.)

- Constant soft static while they were at Hill Top Road, so there is definitely Something Wrong with the place. (However, there was none when Jon read the statement, so did they stop at an inn, or where they back at the Institute already?)

Ivo Lensik had given his statement about Hill Top Road in March 2007, and Jon had mentioned in his follow-up that:

(MAG008) ARCHIVIST: Two families have lived in the house since this statement was originally made but no further manifestations have been reported on Hill Top Road.

Plus, there was Anya Villette’s statement from April 2014 (MAG114), which mentioned:

(MAG114, Anya Villette) “The owners of the house had already filled it with furniture. Not good furniture, of course: just the cheapest IKEA had that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of a textbook. It was all assembled, though […]. It opened to reveal stairs going down into a basement. Nobody had mentioned a basement. Not when they gave me the job, not on the floor plan they’d given me; I’d had absolutely no idea it was there.”

(Anya also mentioned “thick sheets of white plastic, to try and keep the dust off” over the furniture and the fact that she had woken up “in one of the chairs, the dust cover clinging to me like a cocoon”: it sounds a lot like spider web, but she had been able to identify cobwebs as such when trying to reach the basement. So? Is it because The Web’s presence was stronger down there…? Her confusion about things still sounds like textbook Spiral to me, though we learned, since then, that there is the “scar in reality” so… what the heck was happening with Anya.)

By contrast:

(MAG147) MELANIE: When did you say they finished rebuilding? ARCHIVIST: 2008? MELANIE: Hm! ARCHIVIST: Doesn’t look like anyone ever… moved in, though. BASIRA: So this is… ten years of cobwebs? DAISY: More than that. [FOOTSTEPS.] MELANIE: [INHALE] No, I’m sure this is just the normal number of webs that grow up organically…! […] DAISY: Clear. [SHUT THE DOOR.] Looks like nothing downstairs. BASIRA: You wanna… take a moment, before we head up? ARCHIVIST: What about the basement? DAISY: Can’t see one. ARCHIVIST: Huh… DAISY: You want me to take point? ARCHIVIST: Uh… no – no, I’ve, I’ve got it.

So there are Too Many Cobwebs, it looks unoccupied although there used to be furniture, and we still (don’t) have a Schrödinger basement. GREAT.

(And bonus: Annabelle doesn’t want Jon to go there again – or at least, for now.)

- Jon The Tired Young Old Man is back, once again, and it’s been His Season To Shine:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Everything’s changed. … [SIGH] Two days out of a coma, and I’m already tired.

(MAG128) ARCHIVIST: [WEAKLY] Statement… ends. [COLLAPSES] [CLICK.]

(MAG131) MELANIE: You’re going now? ARCHIVIST: [NERVOUS BREATHLESS LAUGHTER] [HISS OF PAIN] No. … No, now, I am going for a lay down. That was… that was not what I’d expected. MELANIE: Come on. You can use Basira’s cot.

(MAG137) ARCHIVIST: Everyone else is… running towards something, or running away, and I… [SIGH] I don’t know what I’m doing. [PAUSE] [SIGH] I’m just tired. Think I might go lie down for a while. Get a cup of tea [HUFF]

(MAG140) BASIRA: You look awful. You tried drinking with Daisy again last night? […] ARCHIVIST: [SLURRING] It’s not a hangover. Well, not… [INHALE] I wasn’t drinking. [SIGH] […] Yesterday, I tried something I… [INHALE] I–I deliberately tried to… Know something, like I did in the coffin, but… there was a lot. Too much [SIGH], and I… […] You drink the whole contents of a bar in three seconds, you don’t remember what the merlot tasted like. [SIGH] It just… hurt.

(MAG145) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] … We’ve been back in London for just over a week, now. I’m… more or less recovered physically. It’s just this nagging sense of unease that won’t leave me.

(MAG147) BASIRA: Jon, focus. Are you getting any “sense” of anything? Can you… “see” anything? ARCHIVIST: No, I’m just… seeing what you’re seeing. Still a bit… weak from my trip North, to be honest. MELANIE: Sorry we couldn’t stop for a snack…! [SHARED SNORTS.] ARCHIVIST: [SIGH]

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: This one really took it out of me. [CLEARER] I need to go lie down…! … E–end recording. [CLICK.]

………………………… except that, given His Pattern, and the mention that he hadn’t absolutely recovered from the Dark trip……………….. it probably means he “needs” a new victim to get fully rested. I. Really. Hope. That the girls will keep a close eye on him, uh…

- The Dasira shines… in small but significant ways… and how they like to throw jokes around Jon in tense situations…

(MAG143) BASIRA: [SIGH] Eyes peeled. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: … Was that a joke? BASIRA: Yeah.

(MAG147) BASIRA: So, where are all the spiders? MELANIE: Ah– I mean, they, they hide. You know, it’s a thing they do, spiders – they hide. DAISY: Perhaps they… bugged out. [FOOTSTEPS.] ARCHIVIST: [WHISPERS] … Was that a joke? BASIRA: Jon, focus.

(Not “bugs” technically, Daisy – Martin would be Offended about it!) I love how both Basira&Daisy are unapologetic about it, how it always takes Jon a moment to realise what Was Just Said, how he used the same tone to ask-what-he-already-knows (this is why people like Melanie like to say you don’t have a sense of humour, Jon.), and how… Basira was the one to demand he go back on track in the last one, instead of Daisy.

- My heart cried a bit about the girls throwing jokes because… yeah, it’s how Team Archives tends to deal with dire situations – and it was… really reminiscent of The Unknowing expedition, with TIM’S JOKES ABOUT THE WAXWORKS orz

(MAG118) TIM: And anyways, it’s not like we're alone in here. Look. There’s Prince Charles. [GROANING] TIM: Oh, if he’d been in an accident. Or the Beatles! If they’d all been in separate accidents, like, like Ringo was in a horrible fire, or Paul was in a car crash, that’s a classic– ARCHIVIST: Yes, Tim. I remember them. The waxworks are… bad. […] BASIRA: So would you say this was supposed to be Churchill or Alfred Hitchcock? ARCHIVIST: Jowls like that, could be either.

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: No, I’m just… seeing what you’re seeing. Still a bit… weak from my trip North, to be honest. MELANIE: Sorry we couldn’t stop for a snack…! [SHARED SNORTS.] ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] […] BASIRA: These flares going to work? DAISY: No idea, but… Jon said The Web doesn’t get on great with fire, and we don’t exactly have a flamethrower, so… BASIRA: I mean, at least until we find the one Gertrude stocked [?? unintelligible, Daisy snorting too hard]. DAISY: [SNORT] BASIRA: Right next to the nukes…! […] ARCHIVIST: Well… [SIGH] We’re here now. Might as well push on. MELANIE: … Famous last words. [HUMOROUS EXHALES.]

It’s the same team, minus Tim, plus Melanie…

(Also, the reminder that Gertrude was all about fireweapons… Elias had taunted Leitner about “arson”, and he was positively seething when Martin had begun to burn statements, soooo… really, was Gertrude’s plan to deal with The Eye to burn down the Institute.)

- I’m sad that Melanie doesn’t get a nickname…

(MAG146) DAISY: [SIGH] Come on, Mel. I’ll see if I’ve got a stab vest in your size. MELANIE: … Yeah. Sure.

(MAG147) DAISY: Here, Mel. MELANIE: What even are these? DAISY: Magnesium flares. Technically not legal anymore; if you need more, just shout. MELANIE: Oh? Hum. Fine. [INHALE] Uh, and… and, please, don’t… call me “Mel”. DAISY: What? Since when? MELANIE: Always. I’m… [SIGH] trying to be more… o–open about this… stuff. DAISY: Roger Wilco, Miss King. MELANIE: Mm! Better.

… but I’m SO glad that:

1°) she has trouble, but clearly expressed that she didn’t like it. Worded her discomfort. Tried to fix something that was bothering her and directly impacting her. It’s hard, but she’s doing it.

2°) I’m so glad that Daisy immediately corrected herself, acknowledged it and didn’t even ask for a reason why Melanie didn’t like it. Melanie doesn’t like it, end of story, no fuss.

So no nickname for Melanie, but Daisy and Melanie sound even closer and good together!! ;w;

- Overall, GUUUUH, I’m. So proud of Melanie??? She’s been doing so much better!

(MAG123) BASIRA: Yeah. I did warn you. She’s not, uh… she’s not been having a good time. ARCHIVIST: Mm! Yeah, I did get that impression. [SIGH] Elias is gone. I thought… I mean, wasn’t that supposed to be… it? But she’s still… BASIRA: It’s not that simple. ARCHIVIST: She needs help, Basira. God, it didn’t even get that bad when I was… … Even Tim never threatened me. Not like that.

(MAG125) BASIRA: Oh, yeah, the stuff she takes is pretty strong these days. She should be out for a while. … What? Sleep is hard.

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: Do–do you think it worked? Is she… BASIRA: I don’t know. She seems more… coherent, I guess. And you did get an apology. ARCHIVIST: Yeah. BASIRA: She said she can cry now, which is, hum… ARCHIVIST: Oh… BASIRA: Progress, I think? ARCHIVIST: Uh… BASIRA: She’s still angry but, she hasn’t attacked anyone. Not even sure she has it in her anymore. ARCHIVIST: Well that’s, that’s good! BASIRA: Hm.

(MAG131) ARCHIVIST: A–at least, it’s out! … Maybe… maybe it’s enough to start healing, start… letting go of the anger. MELANIE: Oh, just stop! Just stop and– listen. ARCHIVIST: Okay. MELANIE: Yes, the, the bullet was bad, right. But it didn’t make me angry. Anger is… Anger’s been all I’ve had for a long time. Years. Maybe since– oh, I, I don’t know, but…! Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve pushed for, was because I was angry! Angry of being past over, being disrespected, ignored… that sort of anger, it, it powers you! … Right until it slips out, and hurts someone. I – hurt someone. And then, one day, I suddenly have this thing that takes all that rage, and it holds it. Tells me it’s right. That it’s me. It didn’t stay in my leg because of some Ghostly Masterplan; it stayed… because I wanted it. ARCHIVIST: … Shit. MELANIE: Yes.

(MAG136) ARCHIVIST: If you don’t mind me asking, [STATIC:] where are you off to…? MELANIE: Therapy. [STATIC ENDS] … Wait. ARCHIVIST: Oh…! Oh, God, Melanie, I’m, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, uh… MELANIE: [EXASPERATED SIGH] It’s fine. I would probably have told you eventually, anyway. ARCHIVIST: Even so, I shouldn’t have– MELANIE: Just… forget it. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] It’s good, though. I–I’m glad you’re getting help. MELANIE: Yes, well. We’ll see. There’s a… a lot of crap therapists out there. ARCHIVIST: I guess. Still, it–it is a good step. MELANIE: I suppose. ARCHIVIST: You want to tell them the truth? MELANIE: I don’t know! It’s all a bit… [SIGH] Y’know? Er… C… can we drop it. ARCHIVIST: Of course.

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: The others are doing… better, I think. Basira’s busy doing research for something secretive, unsurprisingly. But she seems to be adjusting to, uh… the new Daisy. I actually like Daisy now, which is a… really weird feeling. [INHALE] Melanie’s quiet, but I think therapy’s helping.

(MAG145) ARCHIVIST: Oh, uh, therapy! You’re taking her to therapy! GEORGIE: She… told you, then? ARCHIVIST: Uh, yes. Yeah. GEORGIE: … Well, you don’t need to sound quite so psyched about it. She gets… nervous travelling there alone.

(Compare this with Elias’s:

(MAG127) ELIAS: I believe you’ve recently lost Melanie. BASIRA: … We saved Melanie. ELIAS: As a person, yes, but as a defender…

… go rot in jail, Elias. OH WAIT–) (It’s been almost a year for him, I hope it’s getting long and he’s feeling very bored.)

Still unsure whether Melanie’s therapist is Bad News (… even more concerning: I found Jon’s narration of Annabelle’s statement very close to the therapist’s own jumpiness), but… the therapy in itself seems to be working? She’s learning little tricks to improve her life and remain in control and calm? She is expressing boundaries? It’s good? Melanie!!!

- I’mmmmm a bit interrogative about the comment she made about Jon’s ~compulsion~ to read statement right away:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “Of course, that’s not the real crux of the free will question that’s… bothering you at the moment, is it? I think that one probably comes down to whether or not you’re choosing to continue reading this statement out loud. You didn’t mean to, did you? No, I’m sure you told Basira and Melanie that you were going to glance over it and report back. Perhaps they asked you if you were going to record, and you shook your head – “Maybe later”. That sounds like the sort of thing you’d say. But think about it, Jon: when’s the last time you were able to read a statement quietly to yourself without instinctively hitting record and speaking it aloud? It is just instinct? Habit? Or is it a compulsion – a string pulled by the Ceaseless Watcher or the Mother of Puppets? Or both? I know the summaries have started to confuse you. Where did they come from, when you read a statement fresh? How do you just… sort of know what it’s about, before you even start to read it…? But by then, you’re away: the roller coaster is dropping and you’ve no real choice but to hold on and hope that… I don’t crash you.”

Alright, for the summaries, I… had been wondering about it. And we indeed got a demonstration with live-statements that Jon knew the subject and a few key elements even before beginning to hear the story – and alright, it might be how he knew what the tape was about in MAG146, although there couldn’t have been no name written on it (since Martin didn’t know Jess’s name and Jon is the one who reveals it):

(MAG141) ARCHIVIST: [INTERESTEDLY] You… FLOYD: Uh…? BASIRA: Jon? ARCHIVIST: You used to work for Salesa… FLOYD: W–what, you… Who did? I don’t know what you’re talking about. ARCHIVIST: Mikaele Salesa. You used to work on his ship. FLOYD: … I don’t know you. ARCHIVIST: [ARCHLY] But I know you. BASIRA: Jon…? ARCHIVIST: Floyd Matharu. Served on the Dorian from 2011 to 2014. With Salesa. BASIRA: Jon, I’m not sure about this. ARCHIVIST: I am. Tell me what happened. [STATIC INCREASES] FLOYD: W–what…? What is this? ARCHIVIST: Whenever you’re ready. FLOYD: A–a–alright. [STATIC DECREASES] … Sure… [SILENCE] He… he–he w–was a good boss, you know?

(MAG146) BASIRA: Martin left a tape for us. [SHUFFLING NOISE] ARCHIVIST: And what exactly is on this t– … Oh… MELANIE: Yes.

… But for written statements, we got recent examples where Jon… did some follow-up before recording, or apparently got acquainted with a statement without recording it right away? Cases in point:

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: The investigation is tricky, I don’t want to impose on Basira and, obviously, Melanie and… Martin… aren’t available, but I did do some light searching myself on Gregory Cox. … Vanished, unsurprisingly. […] No notes or follow-up here that I can see, just… [SIGH] It looks like the statement came in just after Gertrude disappeared. […]  There’s a small supplemental document with it, though, that is a… bit alarming. I–it’s apparently a list of people whose names appear in the various pieces of text Mr Cox was pasting into the code. It’s unclear if they were meant to be… users or victims, but I cannot help but note that there seem to be the names of several statement-givers who found their way to the Institute, including noted arachnophobe Carlos Vittery.

(MAG125) ARCHIVIST: Regardless, I’ve hit another research dead end with this.

(MAG126) ARCHIVIST: I did do a small bit of follow-up on Deborah Madaki, just for my own curiosity. She didn’t go to Sannikov Land in the end. I don’t know, however, whether that was because she decided not to, or because… shortly after this statement was given, they found the body of one [Mary Randall] in her basement, and she has spent the last nine years in Eastwood Park Prison, where she remains to this day. I can’t find any evidence related to the condition of the body, but I can imagine what a sculptor’s apprentice might be capable of. Even an unwilling one.

(MAG127) BASIRA: And what was that you were doing yesterday? ARCHIVIST: … When…? BASIRA: You were sat on the floor for like four hours. ARCHIVIST: … Oh! Er, n–n–no, I was, er, I was… listening. Y’know, it’s, trying to see if any of the statements… called to me. BASIRA: And? ARCHIVIST: [FLIPS PAPER] BASIRA: Brilliant.

(MAG139) ARCHIVIST: No one’s come seeking vengeance recently, though, and looking at the details for the British Steel Plant in Scunthorpe, it does seem like Eugene is still around. So I can only assume… some sort of equilibrium was found. (MAG145) ARCHIVIST: I did some more digging into Eugene Vanderstock. I thought he was still alive and… working at the steel plant, but it looks like he’s just listed on one of the old directory pages on their website. … I really miss having people who know their way around a computer better than I do…!

So: were those cases of Jon… forcing himself to not read the statements, but already knowing the names/summaries and trying to do some search before he would be compelled to read them, or was this… Annabelle trying to mess him up a bit more, playing on his fears and trying to make him panic even more strongly.

(The fact that Jon felt a compulsion to read the statements out loud is not a novelty: he mentioned it to Georgie in MAG093. What I’m curious about is that Annabelle seems to insist that the recording is on Jon, although Jon claimed in MAG146 that he isn’t the one hitting record anymore. Does he do it unconsciously? I had always wondered about Tim’s comment, in season 3, describing to Martin how he had got mad because Jon and him had tried to talk and Jon had reached for the tape recorder – the way Tim had described it, it… had felt, to me, as if Jon wasn’t really aware of it.

Outside of statements, though: we’ve had had tapes popping up when Jon physically wasn’t in the room, or not yet – so Jon hadn’t manually turned those on. In season 4, there was his encounter with Martin in MAG129 (the tape recorder clicked on when Martin was alone in the room, we heard Jon enter), and his walk in the tunnels with Melanie in MAG131 (we heard them getting closer, and Jon asked her to give him the tape recorder, which she had been unaware of). So. Are the tape recorders a purely Jon thing, whether he activates them manually (consciously or not) or supernaturally? Are they Web and/or Annabelle’s, and she tried to divert his attention there?)

- In the end, I found Annabelle’s statement almost… reassuring? (Oops.) Because, in a way, Basira had already provided a possible Answer to this:

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: I’m sure the flares will work fine. … I mean, un–unless it’s all some… elaborate… plot… to have us… burn this place down again. BASIRA: So what if it is? ARCHIVIST: I don’t follow…? BASIRA: I mean. Anything we do could be part of the “Grand Master Plan”. So – what, we do nothing? Just… sit on our hands, and hope that’s not what the spiders want? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH]

Basira had been presented by Daisy as more action-orientated and in a way… indeed, I’m not sure that “intentions” and “who is controlling” is the most fundamental focus of all? True that uninformed actions can have disastrous consequences (and Jon knows that: axing the Web table liberated the Not!Them, for example), but… Annabelle talked about how influences are numerous and their origins mostly unknown, or unable to be identified – it still leaves room for deciding who/what you want to be and what should matter to you? That you’re “you” as long as you decide? We had the case, in season 4, of Jon explaining his descent into the coffin as his own conscious choice, for his own (partially selfish) reasons, and… he brought some good, with that decision and action? 

(MAG136) DAISY: Jon… when you went into the coffin. Was it you choosing to do that? Did you actually think you could save me, or was… that something telling you to do it? [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: It was me. I was… drawn to it, I’ll admit, but it was my decision. [PAUSE] It wasn’t entirely about you, though. DAISY: What was it? ARCHIVIST: My– [PAUSE] [INHALE] [SIGH] My memories of the coma are not clear. But I know I made a choice; I made a choice to become… something else. Because I was afraid to die. But ever since then, I… I don’t know if I made the right decision; I–I’m stronger now, tougher, I can… … If I do die, now, or get sealed away somewhere forever… I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. And I don’t want to lose anyone else so, if I can maybe stop that happening, and [DRY CHUCKLE] the only danger is to me, I– I’ll do it in a heartbeat; worst case scenario… the universe loses another monster. DAISY: That’s messed up. ARCHIVIST: [LOW SELF-DEPRECATIVE DRY LAUGHTER] … Yeah. I suppose it is. […] Plus, I thought… [PAUSE] W– [SIGH] Well, I didn’t know what being down there had done to you. DAISY: You thought I was gonna kill you? ARCHIVIST: It was a possibility.

And even in season 3, he had made the conscious choice of trusting the others, and of burning Gerry’s page – although both were hard, and he had to force himself to stick to it, but this is what he had chosen and who he wanted to be?

(MAG117) ARCHIVIST: Still, it does sometimes make it hard to… fully trust them, I– [SIGH] You– you know what, no. I’m… I’m done with that. No more paranoia. It’s almost got me killed more than once, and… Georgie was right. If I am… slipping, then I need people I can trust. And I… I don’t think that can happen naturally for me an–anymore, so… I’m making a decision. I trust them. All of them. E– except Elias, obviously, that’s not– I mean… I’ve listened to the tapes. I’ve listened to the tape, I– I know what they talk about behind my back, how much they’ve… suffered, because of… this place… because of me.

(MAG117) ARCHIVIST: That’s it, then. I, I think. Except… [PAPER] I, uh… I haven’t burned it. Gerard’s page. … G–Gerry. I, I… I know there’s more he could tell me. He, he wouldn’t, of course, I, I, I know that, b–but he, he, it would still– b–be– there, that, that, that knowledge. I– It it would, it would still exist, I– I, I, I can’t. I… I want to help. I, I want to. But I… uh… I’m scared. On, on tape, just… just– just do it. [UNCAPPED LIGHTER] [HEAVY BREATHING] [SOUND OF A FLAME] Do it! [HEAVY BREATHING] [CRIES OF PAIN, BURNING SOUND] [HEAVY BREATHING, MUFFLED] I… [CAPPED LIGHTER, SHAKY VOICE] … you owe me one, Gerry. Rest in… … Just rest.

(I get that Annabelle is saying that there is always the idea that you’re never truly “you” because so many things are influencing you – but at the same time, I find it instead, yeah, oddly empowering because… “you” are your influences, too?)

(- Re: Jon, it’s. A really thin line, but at the very least, HE is still not fine with what he’s been doing:

(MAG146) ARCHIVIST: [QUIET] … That’s horrible… HELEN: Is it? We do what we need to do when it comes to feeding, don’t we? … Don’t we, Archivist? ARCHIVIST: … Yes… HELEN: It would be better if you embraced it. ARCHIVIST: … It’s not…

(MAG146) DAISY: And the third was after the coffin. ARCHIVIST: A man rejected by all who knew him, searching ever-darker places for love. When he told me his story, he started… weeping maggots. BASIRA: Enough. ARCHIVIST: … I hope so.

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: What I’ve been doing to these people, it– … It hasn’t been because I was… “puppetted”, or “controlled”, or “possessed”. I wanted to do it. It felt good. … But at least, I know I can stop. I just… [INHALE] don’t know how. I… [INHALE] I don’t… want… to stop… … Goddamn! This… [MUFFLED VOICE, COVERED BY HANDS] This one really took it out of me.

And from blaming to The Web to acknowledging his responsibility, and that it had felt “good”, this is progress; and it’s still something he is not embracing, that he’s not okay with, that upsets him. So yeah. The “I don’t want to stop” bit is worrying but… At the same time, the way he’s handling the situation doesn’t scream “I want to keep doing it” either. And I doubt the girls will allow it to happen.)

  - I wonder if Annabelle’s statement wasn’t technically meant to… give Jon his “Web” scar. I was positing until now that it had happened with A Guest for Mr Spider, as a kid, when he had been mincontrolled and had also watched the book’s effect on his bully, before it had snatched him – the loss of control on himself and on others. We (/I) tend to focus on the injuries-as-a-collection, as the mark of Jon experiencing the Fears, but technically, “experiencing” also happened to be about getting an inner understanding of their essence? I’m mostly thinking about The Unknowing, when he was able to finally pinpoint what was “Nikola” (what made The Stranger itself), and in the coffin, when he suddenly understood the nature of The Buried:

(MAG119) ARCHIVIST: … I see you. NIKOLA: Do you, now? ARCHIVIST: Yes… Yes, I s… I see the sad clown, b–bitter and hateful. I see him finding his way into a ci–circus where nobody knew him. I see him torn apart, becoming the mask, remade by a… a cruel ringmaster. Sometimes a doll, sometimes a mannequin, always hiding in somebody else’s skin. Somebody else’s name.

(MAG132) ARCHIVIST: … Come on… [STATIC] [SHAKY BREATHING] DAISY: Jon? ARCHIVIST: I know… DAISY: Th–the way out? ARCHIVIST: No… I know where we are! There isn’t no out, not here. This is… this is forever deep below creation. Where the weight of existence bears down… This is The Buried, and we are alive… There isn’t even an up.

… and curiously, alongside giving her own example and playing with Jon’s own fears of The Web and the loss of control, Annabelle… gave him a straight breakdown of the nature of The Web?

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “Unless, of course, none of it was intentional. None of it was planned. The Mother is the fear of manipulation, and lost control made manifest. So perhaps it is our fear that projects Her influence on everything that happens. Like the mind, retrospectively assigning reason to our actions, so we fit whatever occurs into the neatest pattern we can, and declare Her web both intricate… and complete. Perhaps She is no more active than Terminus – simply sitting and revelling in the inevitable cascade of paranoia, as those who hold Her in special terror cocoon themselves in red string and theory. Or perhaps I am simply telling you what you need to hear, in order to behave exactly as the Mother wishes you to. [STATIC, GRADUALLY INCREASING] Perhaps… I have never even seen a beach. Don’t… go to Hill Top Road again. [STATIC FADES]”

Basically, Annabelle threw Jon deep into the web by… making him doubt and fear that he could be manipulated (saying he wasn’t, then demonstrating that she could still do it, hence the final order, hence the mentions that she could have been lying all through her statement). So, giving him another paranoia fit while throwing him into the pit re: responsibility and potential guilt because he attacked people and those ones were on him.

- Annabelle’s considerations about “free will” and about Jon’s preoccupations indeed seem to play a lot with his current concerns and fears:

(MAG125) ARCHIVIST: I suppose that’s the question with so much of “violence”, “war”: how much are you really in command of yourself or of others? I’m not sure what scares me more: the idea that deep down, everyone is in complete control of their actions, that everything is, on some level, intentional; or that ultimately, we don’t have any control of ourselves at all, and the rest is just… rationalisation.

(MAG129) ARCHIVIST: I don’t like this. I don’t like… not being sure what’s going to be in my mind. What thoughts are mine and what are from… elsewhere. Why I just know some statements are what I should be reading. I assume this one is related to the coffin. To Daisy.

(MAG136) DAISY: [BREATHING HARDER, FASTER] Yeah, well… What do you think? You think I’m weak, just… [SIGH] ‘cause I’m not already chasing the next kill? You think I’m less me? ARCHIVIST: I… [SIGH] I don’t feel like I’m exactly in the best place to judge the… intersection [CHUCKLE] between free will and humanity. Still trying to figure that out myself.

(MAG145) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] The more I listen and learn, the more it seems to me we’re all just… “groping about”. Trying desperately to find out what we’re actually meant to be doing. [PAUSE] These things that… loom so large over our lives trap us, and push us, and… sometimes kill us. But they never actually tell us what we’re supposed to be doing. So we scheme and we plot, lash out at each other without ever really knowing why. […] But I’m really starting to worry that there aren’t any answers. Not like I want there to be. There aren’t any answers in Ny-Ålesund; there aren’t any answers in the past; I’ve been inside The Buried, and there were no answers there.

(MAG146) ARCHIVIST: There is… nothing in the world more reassuring than ignorance which we can mistake for certainty. But no. Almost every one of those statements, those… people… that poor old man…

… and technically, she didn’t give any answer either, no certainty. So it really feels like the big purpose was to mess with him? (… to feed herself, maybe? She did mention that The Web was about “loss of control made manifest”, too, and that’s… what Jon is experiencing right now, although he’s aware that he is responsible for his own actions, and that he’s entangled in Annabelle’s plans.)

- One thing that Annabelle mentioned regarding how The Web operates:

(MAG147, Annabelle Cane) “Looking back, of course… and remembering the crunch of used syringes beneath my feet, I realise that addiction… is one of the strongest vectors of control there is.”

And as usual, could be an exaggeration/misleading/making you focus on the outside aspects and elements rather than their effects but… it’s indeed true that there is an enormous proportion of addicts, especially smokers, who have come into contact with The Web – I had finally noticed it thanks to MAG136:

(MAG016, Carlos Vittery) “I walked out there one day with the intention of smoking a cigarette, sat on the rusty garden furniture that had come with the place, and looked up. There it was – stretched between two large branches, silhouetted against the sky it sat. […] I leapt up, and started to head back inside, but as I did my eyes flicked wildly around the rest of the garden, and everywhere they came to rest I saw more lurking spiders, more webs. There were dozens that I could see, which meant there must be hundreds more I could not.”

(MAG056, Trevor Herbert) “In the early 80s, I was deep in the grip of my twin addictions. As I mentioned, after a while, The Hunt became an addiction of its own. Of the two, I’ve always found heroin the easier one to quit. […] But The Hunt… The Hunt is a purpose. It’s not just a way to get through the day, it’s a reason for there to be a day at all.” […] “she locked eyes with me. The weirdest sensation began to flow through me; I wanted to leave. It wasn’t like with a vampire, where I would feel like I’d been spoken to. This was just a sudden awareness of my own desire. I’d been sober for three years at that point, but I felt like I desperately wanted to get high, and I knew that the best place to get some was out in the night. Looking back, I think it might have been my own mind rationalising the way I felt my will being tugged out of the room, but it was still very powerful. If I hadn’t had a lifetime’s experience of identifying and fighting off the effect of the vampire’s gaze, I probably would have done it, too.”

(MAG059, Ronald Sinclair) “We never really got into any proper trouble – but the sort of glares we got just for smoking on the street made me want to break a window sometimes. I never did, though. I’m… not quite sure why I didn’t, to be honest. Before I met Ray, I… would have. There were plenty of broken windows in my past. There was something about living there, though, that… dulled the urge. My memories of a lot of my time there are, well… not exactly foggy, but feel almost like I’m watching someone else’s memories. I remember that it sometimes felt like I do things, without actually deciding to do them – like it was just muscle memory moving me, or a… string gently guiding me. It was never bad, or dangerous stuff, just… things I wouldn’t normally have done, like brushing my teeth.”

(MAG112, Alexia Crawley) “Brandon took to the role immediately, with a gravity and a weariness that I don’t think could have been entirely feigned. He was the only one who didn’t seem excited by the movie, and spent his off-hours smoking and reading quietly in one of the trailers. It was a shame because, for whatever reason, he also seemed to be the only one that Dexter would listen to. I only saw them talking once or twice but every time, Dexter would be wrapped, nodding at… whatever Brandon might have to say.”

(MAG136, Alison Killala) “Despite this or, maybe because of it… [Neil Lagorio and I] became friends. I think we bonded on that shoot; sheltering from the rain for hours at a time, watching a sobby animatronic jaguar gradually start to rust. I had to fight every instinct inside me, everything that wanted to burst out in admiration for his work and his… profound effect on my life. But instead I chain-smoked and laughed, trying my best to come across as my hero’s peer…!”

And it obviously put Jon’s smoking to mind. He had told Leitner that he had been quit for “five years” in February 2017 – except, well, he had cigarettes on him, so at this point, no, he was probably actually back to smoking already and presumably had been for a while. After he had opened the lighter’s package and denied smoking (MAG036, Tim+Jon: “You smoke?” “No… And I don’t allow ignition sources in my archive!”), Elias had commented about his smoking on July 29th 2016 (MAG040, “He’s not smoking again, is he?”) in a way that could mean… that either he knew about Jon’s Past As A Smoker, either Jon had been spotted with cigarettes recently (THAT’S CREEPY, CREEPY BOSS, ALL-SEEING OR NOT), and Tim’s snarky remark in February 2017 fit too well to think it was a completely random example (MAG079, “But he’s going to do something, and it’s going to be bad. And I don’t mean like ‘sneaking a cigarette’ bad – like, properly bad.”). Daisy spotted his cigarettes in MAG091 (“SILK CUT”. FOREVER REMINDER THAT HE SMOKES “SILK CUT” OF ALL THINGS.), he offered one to Gerry in MAG111, Daisy pointed out his lighter in MAG136 and Jon apparently Can’t Think About It (static and then changing the subject) so… something is definitely up with the lighter, at the very least.

-> The moment Jon stopped smoking roughly matches the time he joined the Institute (since he had worked there for four years when he began the series, second-half/end of 2015), but also the death of his grandmother (he mentioned in MAG081 that she “peacefully passed away five years ago”) – was it related to one of those two events? Because he’ll definitely need to channel again the Jon from back then who had managed to quit. (… if he ever did. Because uh. Telling Leitner that he had been quit for five years, while he had cigarettes on him, was… Jon. Jon. You had broken your streak a long time ago, you absolute hypocrite disaster.)

-> And it was ~because he had suddenly wanted a cigarette~ that Jon had left Leitner alone in MAG080, giving an opening for Elias to Brutal Pipe Murder him – something that Nikola would later use to toy with him, by mixing it up with guilt:

(MAG119) ARCHIVIST: It is not! It’s not, I didn’t know, it’s not my fault you died! LEITNER: No, I suppose not. Me, on the other hand…  […] I understand, of course. You needed a cigarette! I suppose you should have remembered that smoking kills!

-> So once again: ELIAS, what do you KNOW about the Spiders running wild in your Institute, and about Jon’s lighter.

(- And the smoking/addiction being potentially usable by The Web puts me in mind of a few other people too:

(MAG144, Gary Boylan) “I’d been out easily twice as long as any time before. But my dad didn’t say a word about it – just sat in front of the TV, laughing at some crappy panel show, smoking that… God-awful pipe that left the wallpaper yellow and peeling. I remember thinking he wasn’t content to just destroy himself. He seemed to have to take everything out around him.”

Extinction statement but. Gary’s dad was a vivid picture.

(MAG113, Adelard Dekker) “The deaths were about a fortnight apart, and when the third came in with the same symptoms, Bianca, the coroner, called me in. For the last few years we’ve had an… arrangement. I slip her a bit of cash to feed a nasty habit she has, and if she’s called to any inquest which looks strange, I’m the first to know. Despite her weakness, Bianca is still a damn good coroner, and filled me in on the details quickly.”

………………. Adelard, who had been in possession of The Web Table at some point after its Hill Top Road days, and had been able to use it to bind and trap the Not!Them…

And. And. Technically, I cannot not mention:

(MAG049) ARCHIVIST: Supplemental. Elias Bouchard is a difficult man to pin down, certainly since he became head of the Institute in 1996, taking over from James Wright, who ran the place from ‘73 until he passed away. […] I found an old gossip column in the student newspaper that – sure well – that mentioned him. If I’m not reading too much into it, the implication seems to be that he was… something of a… pothead [CHUCKLE]. Was he… like that when he first came to work here…?

Listen: if I’m haunted by the mental picture of Elias, smoking weed in his office in March-or-May 2015 because the Institute’s budget is getting tight again, and suddenly shouting “You know what? I should totes KILL GERTRUDE to solve my problems. GENIUS!” while a spider scurries away.

then, you have to be inflicted with it, too.)

- Though Trevor had presented The Hunt as an “addiction”, and Jon’s own relationship to the statements had also been presented in such a way:

(MAG107) ARCHIVIST: I’d love to rattle off a lot of potential other reasons for this, nice rational causes of recovery, but… I feel we’re past the point of transparent rationalisations. It looks like the recording of statements has now passed over from psychological compulsion into… a more physical dependence. I don’t whether this is… some sort of classical addiction or something a bit deeper. But either way, this is not the time for experimentation. I’m on a deadline, and if I need to be reading statements to stay well enough, then I suppose that’s what I shall do.

Martin also name-dropped it in his list of potential reasons for Jon’s behaviour and the way he had attacked Jess for her live-statement, and then Jon first tried to blame it on an exterior influence before finally admitting that it was all him, wording it in a way… that indeed matches up with addiction too:

(MAG142) MARTIN: Oh, that can’t– that can’t… I mean, it’s not him, is it? Not, not really? It’s, what, addiction, instinct, maybe mind control, something like that? I… can’t believe he’d choose to do something like that. … No, no, I, I can’t think like that, though, I, I can’t let myself, ‘cause I mean, if, if he’s already gone, then all of this is just…

(MAG146) BASIRA: He knows exactly what he’s doing. ARCHIVIST: I don’t–! Uh, it’s not that simple, it–it feels… [BREATHING QUICKENING] … I don’t know if I can control it, I don’t know if it’s even me doing it…! BASIRA: … So you say you’re being controlled. ARCHIVIST: I–I don’t know. Maybe? Th–The Web, it–

(MAG147) ARCHIVIST: … Annabelle’s right, though. I mean– I can’t trust anything she says to not be another lie to further manipulate and manoeuvre us, but… deep down, I think she’s right. What I’ve been doing to these people, it– … It hasn’t been because I was… “puppetted”, or “controlled”, or “possessed”. I wanted to do it. It felt good. … But at least, I know I can stop. I just… [INHALE] don’t know how. I… [INHALE] I don’t… want… to stop… … Goddamn! This… [MUFFLED VOICE, COVERED BY HANDS] This one really took it out of me.

As of now, I’m not… utterly convinced by the addiction analogy for what is happening with avatars and people’s fears, though, but that’s mostly because I’m thinking in terms of effects, and the fact that in Avatars’ cases, the primary victims are not themselves but other people: here, the main problem is not that Jon has an addiction problem to (live or written) statements, but the fact that extorting live-statements causes pain, distress, fear and overall constant suffering, impacting and destroying the lives of other people (eg Jess). The fact that it makes him feel good or not… is not the most relevant thing as to why he has to stop it; I feel like talking of it solely as an “addiction” might be diminish the gravity of what he does a bit? (Which is why I’m grateful that Basira immediately summed up his actions as a criminal’s: yes, he’s attacked innocent people, yes, he’s acted monstrous, yes, he’s currently a danger.) (But then again… it could be a point to be made, that the statements are actually bad for Jon – that they feel good but that it is… a sort of reprieve, covering up other issues, and that no, fundamentally, these stories are still shattering him.)

However, it is probably the correct analogy to approach how they should get him to stop it or to control the craving – if… it is… even possible… which I’m not even sure about…

(- I am kind of expecting a talk about why the team shouldn’t just try to find a way to kill Jon off, if he can’t or won’t control it? Concretely, of course, it’s not like they would know how to do it: Jon heals fast, can’t harm himself, didn’t manage to get instantly destroyed by the Dark Sun. He has managed to get out of the coffin once and might be able to pull that off again – even if he went back inside willingly, he probably wouldn’t manage to stay inside forever, since he already had “regrets” about going inside after three days. Plus, Daisy had managed to get some distance from The Hunt and to separate herself from it when she was inside of the coffin, but we saw that Jon’s powers had still been active and kicking while inside – so that… doesn’t seem to be exactly an option for him (because The Eye is him/within him? Because The Buried relies on awareness, like The Vast, and it can’t totally be isolated from The Eye?)

But pragmatically, I still feel like the question of what-to-do-with-Jon-and-is-it-really-worth-it-to-ensure-that-he-stays-alive has to be raised…? (Or am I totally heartless for thinking that eh, even if I liked him a lot as a character, if he’s terrorising people and hurting innocents, then no, it’s not worth it, and I’m not interested in hearing him getting glimpses of genuine happiness or jokes or hopes while Jess and probably more are hurt and hurting and their lives utterly messed up because of him.) If Jon is going Monster and can’t/won’t stop, and given how the Assistants reacted, it might cross their mind, and rightfully so? I’m expecting them to at least contain/monitor him, as of now, to prevent further victims, although… it won’t solve anything on the long run. But I want it to stop, arrrrg orz Not solely because I don’t like random people getting hurt, but because it was… the reason… Jess had come to the Institute…

(MAG142) MARTIN: O–okay. Hum. [INHALE] Right, well… [EXHALE] Firstly, I’m re– I’m really sorry that this happened. Hum… in–in terms of next steps… JESS: Just, I just… I don’t know, y–you know, talk to him, I guess? J–just tell him, like, like, I mean that– it’s not okay. You know, right, I’m not… I don’t know what he did, but it– You know, he can’t just go around, and well, you know, just keep doing… MARTIN: Right. I–I understand. JESS: Good! … Well… You… I just, I don’t want to see him again, alright? Ever.

It was hard, it was awful to describe what had happened to her again, she got hit really badly by Institute, but she came because Jon had to be stopped… it was only for this that she came, we probably won’t hear her ever again, and I don’t want it to go to waste………………. ;_;

(YES, I know that we’re potentially heading towards a ritual getting completed and/or many, maaany people dying/getting tortured in the process – but I always find it harder to hear about personal stories than the overall broad picture, and I know that Jess won’t be okay ever (… well, Daisy confirmed the trick of signing up with the Institute to get rid of the dreams/come under The Eye’s protection, but Team Archives has never been… invested in saving/helping people they didn’t personally know), but it’s even worse if her complaint doesn’t mean anything in the end… ;;))

  - Okay, so. Probably off-track and gratuitous long tangent but, eh, that’s what speculation is about, right?

I got a bit of a punch over MAG147’s date, because suddenly, time had moved… very fast towards a few Archives Anniversaries. Annabelle’s statement was dated 20th July, 2018; it’s already one month since the expedition to The Dark (Jon took Manuela’s statement on June 16th, in MAG143) and… we’re getting close to the anniversaries of both:

* Jane Prentiss’s attack on the Archives, July 29th 2016.

* The Unknowing attempt, August 06-07th 2017.

… And Jon is very conscious of the time passing, of the dates – he sighed about his perception of time in MAG123 (realising that two years had passed, and that he… hadn’t “lived” the entirety of them), and even mentioned the Institute’s anniversary as a source of dread:

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: Whatever is happening now… has its origins two hundred years ago. In the work of an evil man. … Exactly two hundred years, in fact. Don’t think that little detail has evaded me. I don’t know the precise date the Institute was founded, but I do know that it was in 1818. … Something’s coming. I know it is. … But I just don’t know what I need to do.

These are of course also the anniversaries of Sasha’s death, Tim’s death. The reminder, too, that Martin is the last one of the original assistants still alive, and so far one has died every summer since Jon was appointed as Head Archivist – if there was a moment to panic over the Assistants “symbolically” being in danger because there is a pattern, it would be now. Daisy mentioned Jon’s PTSD in MAG142, we got a reminder that Jon still had Jane Prentiss’s ashes in his desk in MAG140:

(MAG140) BASIRA: Er… Jon. What’s this. [DRY SOUND] ARCHIVIST: Mm? … Oh. That’s… [SILENCE] That, uh, that’s… my rib? BASIRA: … Right. [PUTS IT DOWN] ARCHIVIST: Yup… BASIRA: And… the jar of ashes. ARCHIVIST: Not– Not mine; I–I mean, it belongs to me, I–I guess, but it’s not… Er, stationery is in the other drawer?

Could have been nothing more than a casual joke but with the anniversary at the corner… I’m not so sure.

But mostly, I’m thinking about Tim.

I’m still… very surprised that Tim was mentioned so little in season 4, when it had been extremely important for Jon that Tim make it back alive?

(MAG118) TIM: You thought you brought me in as a distraction, right? ARCHIVIST: What?! TIM: Let me do it! Go in, maybe you can get some of them– ARCHIVIST: Tim, contrary to what you think, I did not bring you here to indulge your death wish! TIM: It’s not what this is! ARCHIVIST: No?! TIM: No! You knew I might not be coming back! ARCHIVIST: I knew none of us might be coming back, and I’m not gonna let anyone get killed for nothing! TIM: Oh, except for those people in there! ARCHIVIST: They’re already dead! TIM: Not all of them! ARCHIVIST: I am not losing you as well!!

Sasha had been dead for more than six months when Jon realised what had happened, and Tim&Martin learned about it even later – even then, she was… mentioned so much. Nikola pretended to be her during The Unknowing, taunted him about the possibility of her resurrection (“Oh, you caught me~ I’m… Sasha! […] No~! Really, it’s me! Sasha– whatever her name was! Back from the dead, just like you wanted~!”), prompting a visceral reaction from Jon. Sasha was on Martin’s lips, too, when he confronted Elias and his (in)actions. But Tim… from what I recall, this is all we got about Tim this season:

(MAG122) ARCHIVIST: Er, the others. T–Tim? Is he… [SILENCE] Oh… [SILENCE] BASIRA: … Daisy, too. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: … I’m sorry. […] You’re… sure a–about Tim? BASIRA: Yeah, they, er… They found his remains a few days later.

(MAG123) MELANIE: How did you make it out, then, mm? ARCHIVIST: What? MELANIE: Tim is dead. Daisy is dead. And you, what? You’re just fine? ARCHIVIST: No, I’ve been in hospital for six months! […] Melanie, Melanie: it’s… it’s me. MELANIE: Oh! Okay, so what, “Hi Jon, how are you, get anyone killed lately?” ARCHIVIST: … I… MELANIE: Wipe that look off your face. Like you’re not the reason all of this is happening.

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: She needs help, Basira. God, it didn’t even get that bad when I was… … Even Tim never threatened me. Not like that. […] So: we’re under siege; Melanie is aggressively unstable; Martin is working very closely with The Lonely, who is, predictably enough, isolating him; and, oh, yes, Tim and Daisy are still dead. Which is at least easy to keep track of! BASIRA: That isn’t funny, Jon. ARCHIVIST: I know it’s not–! … Sorry. It’s just… it’s a lot.

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: I have no theories on it, no… no sudden insights. [SIGH] I wish I could talk it through with Martin. … Or Tim. [SHORT SAD CHUCKLE] Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we…? … Everything’s changed. … [SIGH]

(MAG126) ARCHIVIST: A “Great Twisting”, that Gertrude stopped at the cost of a single life. … I thought… moving away from my humanity would have made that seem more acceptable. That sort of sacrifice… but it just makes me sad… … I remembered Gertrude’s notebook; we found it alongside the plastic explosives, but it rather got lost amongst the business of… [SIGH] saving the world at the cost of two lives…

(MAG133) BASIRA: Good. As far as I can see, Gertrude Robinson was the most effective person in this place. ARCHIVIST: … That’s what Tim said as well.

Plus, from Martin:

(MAG120) ELIAS: Hello, inspector. Martin. I’m… sorry to hear about Tim. MARTIN: Don’t. ELIAS: And Daisy, I suppose. MARTIN: Don’t. you. dare. ELIAS: I suppose it’s some consolation Basira made it out. And Jon – more or less.

(MAG138) MARTIN: I don’t know what he’s talking about when he mentions Millbank. The old prison, I guess? Tim said the tunnels under the Institute were all that was left of it, but… Jon said he’d checked them pretty thoroughly. [SILENCE] [SIGH] I’m not the one who knows all about this stuff…! I wish– … No. No, it’s fine, I’m… fine, I… [EXHALE] I can do this.

And I’m still sad, and a bit curious?, about the fact that… Jon had heard Tim’s last words to him, but told Basira he couldn’t remember how The Unknowing had gone:

(MAG119) TIM: Back! Get back! That’s right. Jon, I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can… ARCHIVIST: [FAINTLY AND FAR] Tim…? TIM: I don’t forgive you. But thank you for this.

(MAG122) BASIRA: How much do you remember? ARCHIVIST: I don’t… Music. Everything was wrong. Gertrude was there, and then… dancing. I think? Then… pain. And I was somewhere else. Dreaming.

Are the memories truly lost, and they’ll never be aware of the fact that Tim pulled the trigger, took his revenge for Danny’s death, and saved the world – and that Jon was never to be forgiven? Or are they stuck somewhere in Jon’s subconscious? Are they buried and meant to be dug out, or… forgotten?

“Grief” has been surprisingly absent this season. We know that Martin had the added dimension of losing his mother – which had… already been an open wound for a while (her refusing to see him), made worse by Elias (revealing to him that she hated him, and why, and carving “what she was seeing” whenever she looked at him into his mind), until she died two months later, and… he explicitly bore that death alone:

(MAG127) BASIRA: Honestly, I kind of regret not just… grabbing Martin and shaking an explanation out of him. But I didn’t want to push it. He was in a… bad place, what with the attack and his mom and everything, so I didn’t press it. Now, I try and bring it up, he just… disappears. Nothing to be done. ARCHIVIST: So–sorry, you said… What happened with his mother? BASIRA: Oh, yeah. She died. About two months– ARCHIVIST: Oh… BASIRA: –after you, er… … Martin was… … He tried to stay strong. Keep it together but, that sort of thing… ARCHIVIST: [SIGH]

(MAG129) ARCHIVIST: I, er… I heard about your mother. MARTIN: … Yeah. ARCHIVIST: I am… so sorry. [SILENCE] MARTIN: Thank you. [INHALE] It’s… [SHAKY EXHALE] It’s better, this way. ARCHIVIST: If–if you do need to talk, I– MARTIN: I can’t. ARCHIVIST: No. No, o–of course.

It makes a lot of sense, for Martin, to be especially vulnerable to The Lonely: he always had… trouble connecting with others, and his relationships were shown to be ultimately one-sided. He was hovering around and crushing on Jon while Jon was suspecting him of murder; his mother disliked him and refused to let him take care of her, trying to cut ties; even Tim admitted that he didn’t know Martin as well as he used to know Sasha, and avoided him like he did the other new assistants (we didn’t hear them interact again after MAG104, which only happened by accident and chance). He explicitly didn’t like Daisy, in season 3; had been snappy to Basira, and both Basira and Melanie didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about him, although Martin had shown sympathy towards Melanie in MAG108 (and then, Melanie fell deeper to the Slaughter bullet, and Basira began to turn more callous and calculating). Overall, the fact that he was aware that he hadn’t been able to notice that Sasha had been replaced probably didn’t… help.

But it’s mostly that absence of… anything about the loss of Tim that surprises me a bit, and I find it interesting that neither Jon and Martin apparently took the time to grieve. Aside from “addiction” (reminder that Jude used drugs too!), there’s something else that has been present in quite a few avatars’ storylines – depression. Oliver began to dream when he was depressed (MAG011, “I barely made it through a full year before the stress of my new job, not to mention some problems in my personal life, led to me having a full nervous breakdown. I’d broken up with Graham, my boyfriend of six years and had to leave the home we shared, going to stay with some of the few friends that had survived my year of stress-fuelled outbursts and constantly cancelled plans. It was there, sleeping on my friend Anahita’s sofa, in the depths of my misery, that I first started to have the dreams.”), Jude was going through a burn out when she met Agnes (MAG089, “The point was, that I burned through too much of myself, because I didn’t know what else I could burn. My girlfriend saw it, though she had no idea how to help with the deep depression that had settled over me. […] I was burned out in every sense but one. And that was the one that saved me. It was Agnes, of course. I don’t know where she found me, I only remember sitting in a booth with a beautiful young woman who smelled like matches and incense.”). Kinda goes well with “addiction” in the idea that the Fears tend to recruit people when they’re vulnerable? But keeping Jon in mind, Daisy, mostly, had repeatedly pointed out that he hasn’t been fine for a while:

(MAG136) DAISY: You need to stop moping. ARCHIVIST: I what? DAISY: You need to stop swanning around, being all sad. ARCHIVIST: I’m, I’m not “swanning around”– DAISY: “Boo-hoo, I’m so alone and a monster!” ARCHIVIST: I am alone, Martin is– DAISY: Busy. doing. paperwork. Not like he’s dead. Beside, he’s not the only other person here, you know. There’s me; Melanie; Basira– ARCHIVIST: Traumatised; traumatised; and paranoid, because of me. DAISY: Get over yourself! You’re always talking about choices – we all made ours. Now I’m making the choice… to get some drinks in. Coming?

(MAG142) DAISY: I, I mean, it’s pretty standard stuff. MARTIN: What?! DAISY: Used to see it all the time back in the force, especially with the Section’d. Not like there’s… “normal” trauma, you know? But it’s pretty common. The most important thing becomes control, engaging on your own terms. Even when it’s stupid or dangerous. Anything to not feel helpless. MARTIN: Oh, god… DAISY: And of course, for Jon, there’s survivor’s guilt in there, too. He thinks he’s not human. Makes him very… self-destructive. MARTIN: Yeah, well. We’ve all had trauma. DAISY: And everyone’s changed.

(MAG143) HELEN: … How was it? ARCHIVIST: Mm? HELEN: Looking upon The Dark. ARCHIVIST: I thought I was going to die. HELEN: You seem to think that a lot. I remember when you thought you were going to die at my threshold. ARCHIVIST: … Yeah.

And it would’t be surprising if the fact that neither Martin&Jon took the time, nor did work on grieving… contributed, a lot, to put them in such a bad headspace – Jon feeding from people, being in denial over his responsibility and not trying to actively stop it nor warning the others about it, Martin admitting that the temptation of The Lonely is working on him.

At the end of season 3, Tim’s very last scene, very last words… were technically a reference to a joke about depression&therapy:

(MAG119) TIM: You sound stressed. You know, I hear the Great Grimaldi’s in town. You should go see him. Cheer yourself up. NIKOLA: That’s. not. funny. TIM: I know. [LOUD EXPLOSION] [CLICK.]

(And Peter Lukas had offered Martin to go to therapy (MAG120, “And if you want to talk to a counsellor, the Institute will of course cover any cost.”), although… yeaaaah, coming from Peter, it just sounded. Plain bad.)

It introduced the theme a bit; season 4 then made it pretty clear that in this universe, actual therapy is not a bad thing. We saw it with Melanie, though she did express cautiousness about it (it’s not a Miracle Solution, some therapists are bad or don’t fit you). We saw it with Jess:

(MAG142) JESS: So. It… It took a long time to get over that. I mean… That’s not weird, right? I mean, it was a bad time. You know? It–it stays with you. I was signed off for, what, probably about six months, with the injuries? I had pretty bad, uh, nightmares, claustrophobia, I mean… Obviously, right? But, uh, but–but I did my physio, and, you know, talked wi–with the counsellor they gave me? Look, I did everything I was supposed to, and–and yeah, I… I guess I was fine. You know, once the bruises were gone, I… Well, it’s easy to blame memory, right? You know, ha–hallucination, coincidence, all the… classic shite you tell yourself. Look, life went back to… normal, I… I was fine. Until… [CHOKING] about two weeks ago. MARTIN: And that was when you met J– … Er, one of our employees.

Even Gertrude had directed Lucia towards someone – she sounded… very manipulative and lying through her teeth about the nightmares (? She would know that no, Lucia’s wouldn’t stop, especially after giving her statement?), but I have trouble picturing Gertrude doing the extra effort of recommending someone and actively searching for their contact information if it was just to get rid of Lucia (she really didn’t need to do so, the statement was over and Lucia hadn’t asked for anything!); if Gertrude recommended them, it’s probably that she genuinely knew that it could help?

(MAG130) LUCIA: H… uh. Will it help? GERTRUDE: I’m sorry? LUCIA: Telling my story. To you. Will, will it help with the nightmares? GERTRUDE: If that’s your primary goal, my dear, I would suggest you speak to a qualified counsellor. We can suggest one, if you like; that said, I do believe most people find the process of giving a statement to be rather… mm, cathartic. And whatever nightmares your experience has left you with, I’m sure they won’t be bothering you much longer. […] And do you feel any better? LUCIA: No. GERTRUDE: Mm, that’s a shame. Hang on, let me see if I can find you the number for that counselling service. They’re actually quite good.

We’ve had a broad gallery of characters handling their traumas in different ways, this season. Melanie is going to therapy, and whether her therapist is Web/Eye/Lonely or not… it is working to help her get some control over herself. She’s quieter, she expresses her boundaries – far from losing her voice, she is… reappropriating it. Daisy has not sought out professional help, but she’s careful about how she handles herself, the symptoms and how to prevent falling off – she seeks out company, she talks, she communicates, she tries to repair bridges, while remaining overall careful:

(MAG136) DAISY: [QUICKLY] You’re not babysitting me, alright?! I know that’s what the others think, sometimes, but… that’s not it. I just… don’t like…  being on my own if I can help it. You know. Flashbacks, panic attacks, the usual. Just trying to avoid it if I can. ARCHIVIST: I know, Daisy, I–I do. It’s hard.

(MAG144) DAISY: No, I’m ju– [SIGH] Just ignore me. Continue with… whatever. [SILENCE] MARTIN: … Are you alright? DAISY: Yeah. Just a… a bit empty around here. You know? MARTIN: Not really. DAISY: Melanie’s out, and… [EXHALE] Jon and Basira’re still off. Bit worried. But they can take care of themselves, you know?

And on the other side, just like Jon and Martin, Basira just… tried to deal with things on her own, and partially failed and hurt herself in the process:

(MAG128) BASIRA: Do you know how I survived the… The Unknowing? ARCHIVIST: I… No. No, I don’t. BASIRA: No powers, no… magic or… help. I was trapped in that place, and so I tried to figure it out. And I did. A little. So I kept doing it. I kept going through until I got out. I… reasoned my way out of that nightmare. ARCHIVIST: Good lord… BASIRA: Then everything ended, and Daisy was gone. And you were gone. And Tim. And then I got back to the Institute, and Martin send me to meet the new boss. Then I stood alone in an empty office for more than one hour. I can trust me, Jon. That’s it. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH]

And it could be that Jon… should have gone for therapy, too, and never will. But if there was ever a moment for him to try it out as a way to handle himself, I feel like it could be now? He had been constantly adamant about not going for it and… his reject resurfaced very recently with Georgie:

(MAG058) MARTIN: He’s just under a lot of pressure. You know how messed up he’s been since Prentiss. TIM: How messed up he’s been?! MARTIN: Of course, I’m sorry – sorry, I didn’t mean that you weren’t, just– TIM: No! Because I didn’t start stalking my co-workers! MARTIN: Maybe try talking to him. TIM: Sure. Like he doesn’t already look at me like I’m a murderer. MARTIN: Look, look, you just got to let me work through this. Alright? I suggested therapy, but he just says no, so– TIM: Well, we need to do something! MARTIN: Yeah, maybe.

(MAG145) ARCHIVIST: I’m… I’m alright. I’m trying to, uh… rest up a bit. Take it easy. [HUFF] GEORGIE: Really? ‘Cause… I’m pretty sure I heard talking about a screaming headless corpse just now. ARCHIVIST: Oh… Oh. W–were you… listening? GEORGIE: Oh, uh. Didn’t mean to. You know. These… doors are not that thick. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] … Fine. I’m deep in it. Had some… “close calls”. [SILENCE] GEORGIE: I’m sorry to hear that. [PAUSE] … You should probably get some therapy too. ARCHIVIST: [HUFF] Would you go with me as well? GEORGIE: … No. ARCHIVIST: Yeah. … No, I thought as much.

Because concretely, what can they do now, re:Jon, and what can Jon do about this “addiction” of his to destroy people…? Could be that precisely, it’s over, they’re just trying to buy a bit of time, but Jon is Done For, and either he’s dying at the end of this season, either he’s going full monster. But if there is a solution to at least attenuate the problem, my money is on therapy, with how the theme has popped up here and there, together with “control (of yourself)”…? (And it was especially jarring, in this episode, how… I got the feeling that Jon was aiming for Free Therapy in front of the tape recorder? Except it’s a one-sided exchange, it’s him talking to himself, and he’s not equipped for self-analysis.) (And there is something to be said, maybe, about how inflicting Fears and misery on others and the whole “Feed what feeds you, or it will feed on you”, is textbook “hurting others to not hurt yourself/to stop hurting yourself? So, I don’t know. It’s spooks, it’s alien entities, but we’ve always had a mix of supernatural and down-to-earthness when it came to dealing with the entities and their effects… so maybe there would still be a way to unravel Jon’s issues in a positive way, for once.)

(Aaaah, I’m mostly interested in the idea of Melanie and Daisy talking to Jon about the influence of powers and personal responsibility, potentially more… quietly, after a few days, once they’ve all cooled down. Because Daisy might feel grateful for Jon for having pulled her out of the coffin, and I really doubt she would give up on him. Melanie… a bit less, and she used to genuinely dislike Jon, but she still Knows What It’s like. Both would have rightful reasons to feel bitter/annoyed/mad, though, that Jon has been spilling advice here and there, presenting himself as the voice of reason… and was absolutely not following through with his own actions, once again.)

(- Re: Annabelle’s statement. I have no Personal Offended Feelings about the jovial call-out directed towards the red-strings theorist (“simply sitting and revelling in the inevitable cascade of paranoia, as those who hold Her in special terror cocoon themselves in red string and theory.”), because 1°) THAT’S FAIR BUT HOW ‘BOUT I DO IT ANYWAY, 2°) I’m mostly amused because it adds to the pile of things about how I live TMA as I lived Umineko. I already had a list of things they share that I was amused about (tea, comatose love-interest, and (DUCT) tape, etc.), and I can now add to it “writer using a female character to shout at his fanbase when they’re fumbling around trying to understand The Fuck Is Happening”. Spider woman really interested in stories, insufferable/absolutely awful Witch of Theatregoing, Drama and Spectating – same struggle.)

MAG148’s title is out and OOOOOOOH does it. Sound. Like. Another. Beholding episode. Which would be our 4th already this season – it’s… a lot more than previous ones, really making it feel like The Eye is getting more present and threatening. (Could technically be The Web, too, with that weird intertwining of them that we got lately! Or just plainly Annabelle again.) As for the content: there is an obvious joke to make about Elias and the title would also fit him awfully well (sob); obligatory thinking about MAG003’s Graham; Adelard Dekker had referred to half of it in relation to Gertrude back in MAG113… But mostly: it could… accurately describe the Assistants deciding to monitor Jon? And statement-wise, it mainly screams “PANOPTICON” to me. So. Historical statement once again from the Jonah-Smirke era – or even from earlier, from Jeremy Bentham himself…? (Or from Jonathan Fanshawe post-1831, because so far, with what we learned about him, he had gotten away, and I liked him and I can’t have nice things.) Not necessarily read by Jon; we could switch to Martin again, since Peter had stated that he needed the Institute for his plans, and he had already read Smirke’s letter to Jonah Magnus last time. (… Or it could also be from one of Jon’s three other unnamed victims from season 4 orz)

[ragnarssons]

Why is sansa wanting Northern independence such a bad thing? She could have gone at it at differently but she did talk to dany and Jon abt it straight up and they declined her. Why is she the only character not allowed to have wants and desires??

I was all supporting her until she decided that stabbing a member of her own family in the back was “a means to an end”. Jon asked her to keep his secret. He made her promise. You know who else did? Lyanna fucking Stark, begging her brother to protect her son. Jon! And Ned protected his nephew/”son” with his life, going so far as being hated (in some aspects) by his own wife and mocked by half the country because “uwu Ned Stark has a bastard!” He didn’t care about his reputation or his power or how people viewed him, he knew his family was more important than that. Sansa stans seem to ignore than on s7, Daenerys was advised not to go around in Westeros, like riding on horses and all, because as a Targaryen, related to the Mad King - both things that Jon ARE too! - her life was in danger. Because you never know: there still are Baratheon loyalists or even anti Targaryen people, whatever. Sansa - or the writers, idk? - is literally ignoring her brother’s safety, exposing him as a Targaryen to more and more people every minute. Don’t get me started on “well technically it’s Tyrion who snitched!” no it’s Sansa, and D&D say so themselves: she told Tyrion KNOWING he’d tell other people. Jon’s safety in all of that? Seems she didn’t give a fuck! Don’t get me started on her creating discourse around Daenerys and her advisors and Daenerys and Jon (her ALLY) at THAT MOMENT. Why now? Okay she doesn’t want Daenerys on the Throne, but if Daenerys dies before she gets to defeat Cersei, Jon has NO WAY to get to the Throne. He has no army, he has no political ally (outside of Varys but does he have a House?) the Unsullied, Dorne, Yara, the Dothraki, heck even the Second Sons who are basically the only force left, are loyal to Daenerys. The GC has more chances to rally to Daenerys than they’d ever do to Jon- why? Well because they’re from Essos! Who was in Essos being famous up there? Well Daenerys and no one else! So yeah he has his bro Tormund who is literally on the other side of the country, the Knights of the Vale who are??? Nowhere to be seen? Okay the Northerners follow him but they’re basically not enough against the GC. Not to mention that Jon has no dragon. If Dany loses, Jon dies, because he’s literally in King’s Landing, right there, with her. And do you have ANY IDEA (does Sansa?) of what will happen if Cersei learns about Jon’s parentage? I mean, on top of it all, he’s Lyanna’s son. You know, it’s not like Tywin Lannister got Elia Martell butchered because Rhaegar DARED to marry her and not his daughter Cersei. It’s not like the Lannisters can’t be THAT petty. So how is it smart to weaken Daenerys NOW? Also don’t get me started on the xenophobic-root of it all. Why does Sansa want the Northern Independance? Oh well because she doesn’t trust anyone! Fair! She doesn’t even trust someone who’s had half her army butchered and two of her dragons killed for her family/the war of the dawn. She doesn’t even trust someone who came forward with her, admitted “their weakness” (Dany loving Jon) straight forward to her. Sansa is literally exploiting Jon’s love for Daenerys rn to get to her goal, but I guess that’s morally okay because “she should be able to want thiiiings!!!” Want to talk about straight up? Guess what, she never came “straight up” to Jon about the Northern independance, they never talked about it, only about Jon giving up his crown. In fact, Sansa only voiced WHY she wants an Independant North to Daenerys: BECAUSE Daenerys was the one coming to talk to her, not the other way around. Before that, Sansa’s plan was just to act silently petty and full of disdain and that’s it. Had Sansa made ANY EFFORT to try and talk with Dany about it - other than with sheer animosity like in that scene - and Dany would have been like “it’s not even a question!” or whatever, I would have understood Sansa’s plotting better. But no, she never ONCE tried the “honest” road, literally talking to the Queen who was right there, she just plotted behind her back.Yara did it the honest way; she came, she was like “hey you need boats! I’ll give you boats and you help me with my home, okay??” and everything went FINE. How could Sansa not do that? Especially towards someone her brother LOVES! Whether or not Sansa thinks it’s “smart” out of Jon to love someone, he still does! Doesn’t she think killing the woman he loves and breaking his heart for a metal chair will DESTROY their relationship and her family?? And now, she’s plotting as far as planning to have her murdered, all that for HER goals (because jon. does not. want. the throne!). Jon getting the Throne would serve Sansa and all the people who are counting on the oppoprtunity of manipulating Jon’s ass once he’s king (*cough* Varys). All that because Sansa is so paranoid, so sure she’s “right” that she doesn’t even think about any other possibility. Heck, is it really paranoia? Because we literally have David Nutter saying it’s about jealousy and power! Imagine that? Sansa betraying her brother to gain power. That’s literally like Cersei killing Margaery right in front of Tommen’s nose. Even when his brother loves that woman, even when it puts her brother’s life in danger, even when Daenerys never even did anything to appear as an enemy to Sansa. Sansa has a roof over her head rn, because of Daenerys’ army: and her saying “we’ll never forget them!” about men she doesn’t even know to try and sound “thankful” was the fakest shit she’s ever said (she literally forgot about them already and whatever; the Unsullied, the Dothraki, they followed Dany out of love and loyalty, and the Starks are like “we wuv these people who died for the north but FUCK THEIR QUEEN!”). Like?? Do you even stop two seconds to evaluate the shittiness of all of this? The Starks are basically saying “we’re glad we had all this meat to protect our walls but now we don’t care about the woman who came to help us, we want her gone/dead!” WTF?? The Starks? Thinking like this??! It’d be like them throwing Theon’s body in a ditch, saying “welp he helped us but whATEVER!”. No, they somehow honored him. Because “he’s one of them” or whatever bullshit way of thinking they have now. Daenerys didn’t even gain a little bit of their respect, trust or anything, after all she did? Well!I wouldn’t be that mad if I were anti-Sansa. I’m so disappointed in what they did of her because Sansa is meant to be better than that! She’s NOT Littlefinger, she’s NOT Cersei, even tho she learnt from them. Sansa’s kindness of heart was ALWAYS what guided her journey - in the books at least and tbh in the show up until s5 where everything went to shit. I’m disappointed in people being blinded by fucking ships, ignoring what horrible writing this is. I don’t want Sansa to seem like a villain, and at least I thought she’d NEVER betray her brother. She did tho, and the fact that d&d and nutter are confirming that it’s nothing but to grab power gets me… what the fuck. I have a problem with Sansa not caring about human life when she’s thinking about her goals: because that’s NOT canon Sansa. That’s not book!Sansa. That’s not Ned Stark’s - I will not have a young girl butchered because my King sees her as a threat - daughter. She can want whatever she wants, but there are ways of doing things, stomping on other people isn’t a good way to get to your goals. If y’all need that lesson in life: here, take it, it’s free. (to be clear, I’m mad at Sansa like I was mad at Bellamy after ep 5x09, Bellamy wanting to save his friends wasn’t inherently bad, of course. His way of doing things tho, betraying clarke - his canonically best friend who thought died for him like 4 days ago - and using a - HER child - child as a pawn to do so? NOP! Sansa wanting to be free and safe isn’t bad, of course not! But betraying her brother and distrusting - to the point of wanting to kill! - a woman who has never done anything to harm her? NOP!)

[yurireview]

Entrapta is not loyal to rebellion

Many in the fandom think that Entrapta should be "redeemed" because it was "manipulated by Catra"

She is neutral she does not care which side they join, in the chapter 6 when Bow talks about her. She is known as a leader in technological advances and very much admired, but the reality is that Entrapta does not have any conflict with the Horde. she herself has made her subordinates suffer for their experiments ... some details that the fans miss is that she is very cold with people's lives, even with all the "Disaster" that caused her experiment and the near death of several people (including)

She will continue to progress regardless of the results, but I think the most revealing thing is that she does not even do it for the "Rebellion" but for herself she does not care about the sides.

Then we saw her at the party of the Ice Princess (which I do not remember her name) where I try to interact with people and in the end I only connect with Catra ironically someone from the Horde

The next thing we saw of her was in the rescue where more fun in the territories of the Horde in fact fascinated him so much technology that by mistake was left behind and the princesses assumed his death very soon.

Do any of your actions highlight "loyalty" to the Rebellion or hate for the Horde?

Nop, now the next most important question of that character

Catra manipulated?

Again I have to answer with a nop, when Catra interrogates her assuming that she was a "loyalist" to the rebellion she realized that it was not like that, in fact Entrapta was willing to give her information because she did not care ... many claim that here "Catra manipulates it" but the truth is that no scene indicates that.

The princesses left her behind (Catra did not know that the princesses gave her up for dead, so she said the only thing that seemed reasonable) she only said what happened and compared her experience as what happened to Adora ... then Catra mentions that she is not like them, to which Entrapta  keeps thinking like "oh it's true" and technically it's true then she understands that they left it (which is true) ... then she offered to work with them. 

Catra offered what Entrapta wanted, told her that they abandoned her because it is true there was no manipulation or torture ... besides the fact that Entrapta does not give a shit, the Rebelion only joined because her "New friends" asked her it's pretty obvious

Now Entrapta in his stay in the Horde everything done voluntarily ... in fact when Catra had a plan for "weapons or technology" not only did Entrapta agree with her but she increased his plans in something that Catra never imagined and Entrapta did it because she wanted to do it not because they "cheated" her to do it.

All the chaos of chapter 13 was started by Entrapta alone, it was not Catra's idea since her plans were smaller, in fact it could be said that Catra worked to please Entrapta, because her wishes were in accordance with what Catra wanted.

That is called natural allies, not to mention that Entrapta has spent more time with the "bad" than with the princesses.

Even in the final scene she tells Hordak that this has just started, nobody forces her or anything she proposes ideas regardless of the results, eye she knows they are for war and clear against the "Rebellion" but has no no reason to hate the horde.

In fact when she received permission from Hordak they no longer had to keep it secret and it was received again, in fact Entrapta does not have any problem with Hordak until he gave him reverence since he also gave him what she wanted.

This tells us that Entrapta is a neutral character and really has no reason to become "good" is more the Rebelion would not be the appropriate place for her, those who expect "redemption"  what the hell they see because his character was written to not have that Conflict, even when she finds out that they only gave her up for dead does not change almost anything, she made connections in the Horde with people who know her...she has the freedom she wanted. 

What does the Rebelion offer her? since the Princesses only knew her for a short time without mentioning that they did not let her reach what she was looking for, so I suppose it can be said that Entrapta will be one of the Horde for a long time.

[rjzimmerman]

You can see that the number of farmers (shown as number of farms) has been decreasing for 80+ years, but the amount of land devoted to farming has stayed relatively stable. The average farm size has been increasing. What does that tell you? Corporate farming, the industrial-agricultural monster, in one chart.

Basically what this story is telling us is that Whole Foods entered the market. While Whole Foods isn’t named in the article, it become one of those corporate giants, and gamed the system, squeezing out the small, independent organic farmer. Then Whole Foods was bought by Amazon, which wrecks everything.

Want organic dairy or dairy that does good by the cows? You bought Fairlife, even though its carton never said “organic,” but it did tell you filtered, pure, magic formula, etc. Now we learn that Fairlife allowed animal abuse on its farms. OK, so much for faith in the system.

Excerpt from this Truthout story:

The certified organic label has helped save many generational farms and enabled people like me, who do not come from agricultural backgrounds, to become successful farmers. Organic farming has brought environmental benefits—healthier soils, freedom from toxic pesticides and herbicides—to 6.5 million acres in the U.S. Organic shoppers are willing to pay a little extra for food that is free from chemical residues. But the organic label is in trouble after reports of fraudulently labeled food made national news. On top of that, agribusiness pressures and National Organic Program (NOP) actions have weakened standards. Yet at a time when farms are in distress, family-scale farmers need a label with integrity. They need a label that provides public support from people who understand that small-scale farmers are an endangered species. In the 1980s, I was one of the organic farmers who helped launch organic certification. Farming and non-farming members of the Northeast Organic Farming Association worked together to write standards for a label that identified the real organic food that non-farmers wanted to buy—for which they were willing to pay enough to keep the small farms in business.

In retrospect, it has become clear that we were very naïve. It did not occur to us to consider the many ways our clear, simple statements could be twisted by people who were willing to cut corners to increase their bottom line and steal markets by underselling the farmers who observed the standards faithfully. To pass the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in 1990—which established the NOP for organic food production on farms and in processing plants with a National Organic Standards Board of stakeholders to advise USDA, as well as a process for certification and accreditation—organic farming organizations and consumer and environmental groups allied with the Organic Trade Association, which was dominated by organic processors. At that time, there were few processed organic foods on the market, but since the NOP was implemented in 2002, sales of those foods have grown impressively. Cracks in our united front began to appear, as large conventional food corporations bought up independent organic brands and savvy players figured out how to scam the system.

[5hfanfiction]

The Moon Can Only Wait So Long

Author’s notes

Trigger warning: mild drug use, mention of deppresion.

Four times Camila cried because of Lauren and the one time she didn’t cry at all.

A girl can think another girl is pretty, that doesn’t have to mean anything, right?

Camila saw her and she didn’t think much of it. She was pretty but what captivated the young girl was her voice. And she told her mother exactly that. Sinuhe just smiled at her and nodded her head.

 For some reason she approached her. Camila, shy and with a confidence that didn’t even reach her knee, went and talked to this girl. To this day she doesn’t know how she did it. What took upon her to walk to this girl and start a conversation.

As she walked to the girl, she was trying to think on what to say, she managed to plan a whole conversation while walking. Everything she was going to say suddenly became nothing as she saw the girl up close. The girl had the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. To the point they intimidated the brown eyed girl. And Camila’s mind just went blank.

The girl noticed her and smiled down at her, the hole thing was awkward because Camila just stared at her. The other girl just said a quick “hi” with furrowed eyebrows and amused but confused look.

That’s how the first sentence that Camila said to the girl was: ‘I like your shirt’, which really meant I like your eyes, which really meant I like your face. But Camila wasn’t going to say that, so she managed with that, shirt was good enough.

And as they say, the rest was history, Lauren returned the compliment, and some how that started a friendship.

But the word “friendship” has “friend”, and that has “end” incorporated. And maybe some things really aren’t meant to be. In their years of friendship, Camila never really understood the green-eyed girl completely, she was always a mystery for her, and unsolved puzzle that had no real solution. So, it didn’t matter how hard the younger girl tried to find an answer, she was never going to unearth them, but Camila didn’t know that. So, she kept looking for them, even if trying to find these answers would only leave her heartbroken and confused.

She knew she could live with heartbreak and confusion. Unfortunately, that’s not the only thing that trying to solve said puzzle left her with. It not only gave her a broken heart and unleft answers but tears too, a lot of them. Because when Camila cried she sobbed, however, when she loved she gave her all, she would rip her heart out of her chest and hand it in a silver platter for the other person to manipulate and decide what to do with it. To put it other way, like a meal for a critic to judge and miss value on their own personal opinion, as if the chef behind the dish didn’t work hard enough.

And as I said before, when tears fell from Camila’s eyes, it wasn’t just a drizzle, more like rain in a desert…

\\

 The first time she cried because of Lauren was mostly because she was scared, she was just scrolling through Tumblr reblogging everything she thought was cute, but it was different right now, she always did this and didn’t pay mind to it, but this time, every word she read, every cliché quote she would hit the reblog button for she instantly associated with her green-eyed bandmate and the not so sudden realization almost knocked her of her feet, because she was definitely not supposed to feel this way about her best friend. Her girl best friend. She always found the girl beautiful, but by now she stopped saying to herself that it was just a crush. Because a small infatuation towards a person definitely wasn’t supposed to feel this.

 And for so long she tried to ignore her feelings. At first, she would say to herself that it was jealousy of the girl, or just admiration for her. Later it became a crush, and that was it. But Camila couldn’t say that this time, it’s not like she knew what love really felt like but if the number of movies she saw and books she read, said anything, was that she was in love with her best friend.  And maybe that was mistake number one too, compare her life to movie that ended with a happy ending, with a happily ever after.

 When Camila felt the first tear run down her cheek, she didn’t stop them. She wasn’t crying because of the possibility of her being gay, the whole world already thought that, although saying it out loud to her family did sound kind of scary to her, but she really wasn’t scared of that. She was terrified because it was Lauren and she wasn’t supposed to feel like this about her and because of that she cried, against her mother’s chest, and her mom just soothed her, without the knowledge of why she was crying, but still rocking the small girl in her arms and whispering assuring words in her ear.

 Camila didn’t say anything that night. She just kept everything inside.

 \\

 Lauren started talking about this guy she was falling for, and how handsome he was, and Camila just heard her talk, not putting attention because if she listened and paid mind to the older girl’s words her chest would start to hurt. A familiar tug in her rib cage that to her didn’t feel pleasant at all.

 But the girl in front of her said something that she definitely couldn’t ignore.

 “I slept with him. I said I wanted to be in love with the guy that made me lose my virginity, and Camz I’m pretty sure I love him”

 That was her breaking point, but she held the tears back, Lauren’s words just reminded her that she was never going to be hers.

 “What about you. Anyone special, Camz” Lauren asked, her eyebrows suggestive and fortunately she didn’t notice younger girl’s slightly discomfort, Camila nodded her head and Lauren instantly glowed, jump of excitement for the younger girl. “But they don’t love me back” the sentence made the green-eyed girl still her movements and look at the girl in front of her with a sad and confused face.

 Camila’s breaking point wasn’t hearing Lauren say that she slept with him although that felt like a bitch too, but to hear her say that she loved him and then she admitted to the older girl that her feelings were one sided, it made her already broken heart, shed to dust.

So, for second time she cried and the girl she was crying about was currently holding her for comfort, saying that they were stupid not to love her back, and that just made her cry more.

\\

 The girls always liked to talk about boys, that didn’t change with Camila’s not so little crush, mostly because no one knew about it. The other four girls talked about the last guy they saw or their boyfriends, Camila always remained quiet. She never talked about guys with them, chiefly because her interest for boys just didn’t exist.

The girls were in Camila and Lauren’s hotel room, today was the last day of the tour and the last night at the hotel. Tomorrow they had their ‘winter vacations’, the young Cuban was laying on her bed with Dinah, and the others were all nestled in the opposite bed. The movie they were watching was abandoned by everyone except Camila, apparently only her was interested in the film and not the current topic the girls were discussing. That probably was due to the fact that Hailee Steinfeld was in the movie and Camila could admit that her friend was hot, so she kept watching the movie instead of talking with the others about guys.

 That is until Normani said her name, at first, she didn’t hear her, she just heard something that sounded like “Camila”, she took her eyes from the screen to find four pair of eyes on her.

 “Sorry, what” Camila asked.

 Normani just rolled her eyes playfully at the young Cuban and talked again.

 “What about you? Any new crushes, did you finally get a boyfriend”

 Camila got nervous because of the questions, only her mother knew that she was gay, she told her one night when Sinu asked why she had a picture of a naked woman on her woman. And to be fair the girl wasn’t completely nude, she was wearing a bikini and Camila just thought she was beautiful so she saved the picture forgetting the fact that her mother used her phone more than herself. And that’s basically how she told her. But again, only her mother had that knowledge, not even Dinah knew, at least that’s what she thought, but the blonde girl did know, she always did.

 “Nop, no boyfriend. I still only like Lauren, but she doesn’t pay attention to me.”

 Camila had the plan of saying that to see Lauren’s reaction, but as soon as she noticed the look the green-eyed girl gave her, she followed with a quick remark. “I’m joking. You guys know I’m horrible at making jokes. Come on Lauren, you’re supposed to laugh.”

 Dinah had a shocked but knowing look in her eyes, Normani and Ally were just completely taken aback. But the look Lauren gave her, she couldn’t forget.

Lauren laughed, the most forced giggle Camila ever heard come out of her mouth, but she shrugged the comment off and continue the conversation with the girls.

 Camila without wanting to dig herself deeper continued to watch the movie. She wanted to cry, she had that knowing sting in her eyes but before the tears started to fall, Dinah grabbed her hand and squeezed it, Camila looked at her from the corner of her eyes, and the blonde just gave her a sad smile. She rested her head on Dinah’s chest, in a position where the girls in the opposite bed couldn’t see her face. The rest of the night was awkward, at least for her.

 When the other girls left, Camila just stayed in her bed, in this instance she regretted picking Lauren as her roommate. In all honesty it was always like torture for her, but sometimes she got to cuddle Lauren or see her change in front of her, which sounds horrible if she thinks about it. But still she could take the torture any day, just not right now.

 Lauren got up to turn off the lights and Camila closed her eyes, trying to even her breathing so it looked like she was sleeping. “Camila, can we talk for a moment.”

 The way she said her name made Camila flinch, she could still see in her head the look Lauren gave her earlier.

 “I know you’re not sleeping, Camila”

 Camila sighed and opened her eyes, Lauren was staring at her. “Talk about what Lo. I’m tired”

 “About you’re fucking joke earlier”

 For a second time today, her tone made her flinch. “I was just joking” Camila said, her voice felt small and forced, her eyes no longer on the other girl. She really didn’t expect this kind of reaction from her long-time crush.

 “Well I’m pretty sure you’re the only one who thought that!”

 The Lauren she was hearing and seeing right now wasn’t the one she loved, she knew that the green-eyed girl had her temper and was sometimes hot headed, but never towards Camila. Right now, she was being harsh and loud and that scared the younger Cuban to no end.

“What if do like you, would it really be the end of the world if I did” Camila knew that she already screwed up, so in her mind admitting her feelings right now, probably wouldn’t be that bad.

 She was wrong. God, was she wrong.

 “So you do like me”

 Camila tried to talk, or at least nod, but she didn’t. She was now sitting on the bed looking at Lauren with scared and pleading eyes, she opened her mouth again and nothing but a soft breath of air left her lips.

 Apparently not responding to Lauren made her angrier.

 “I’m not a dyke like you, Camila”

 That one hurt. The young Cuban instantly felt the now way to familiar tug at her chest. She was looking down at Lauren’s feet. She also felt the single tear that was now on her cheek. She quickly wiped the tear, but she still couldn’t look at the girl. “Don’t call me that”

 Out of everyone Camila thought that Lauren would be the most accepting. She really didn’t know why the girl was reacting the way she was, but something was clear, it hurt like hell, Camila’s last sentence was said with her eyes shining because of the tears and her voice as broke as can be. The last thing she heard was the door opening and shutting with way too much force, but before that she heard Lauren mutter a quick “You’re pathetic” and then the girl’s exit. Camila closed her eyes trying to hold back the tears that were teasing her for a while now.

 Right after that, not even two seconds later the door opened again and Camila was expecting to hear more of Lauren’s shouts at her. But what she heard was two sets of footsteps heading in her direction, and the she felt the bed shift and dip. She opened her eyes to find Dinah sitting right beside her and Normani standing right next to the bed, they both gave her a sad smile.

\

 Ten minutes later she was still in her bed. But now she was getting cuddled by both girls, for the first minutes they didn’t speak at all. Normani was sitting against the head board with Camila between her legs, and the latter’s head in her chest, while Dinah had the young Cuban’s legs in her lap. The urge to cry was still there but, she was holding them back pretty good. She was used to holding back tears by now. Wow, she really was pathetic. Lauren was right.

Somehow Normani read her mind because the next thing she said was.

 “You’re not pathetic, Mila”

 Camila couldn’t agree with her, she just shrugged and continued to enjoy the boob pillow the girl offered her. But then she realized that if they heard that they probably heard everything else. Her thoughts were proven correctly when Dinah spoke.

 “So, you’re gay?”

 Straight to the point.

 The young Cuban heard how Dinah said those words, with a careful tone and calmful eyes. Camila just nodded her head. No point in denying it now. “And that’s okay, you know that, right?”

 Dinah’s words made her feel better, Camila always knew that there was nothing wrong with her, she just liked girls. Why some people thought of that as a flaw or a disease was a complete shock to her.

 “To be honest I always had a theory about it” to the girls surprise those words came out of Normani, she quickly laughed and the continued, “come on, it was kind of obvious, and I remember you staring at my butt when we showered. You enjoyed that as much as you’re enjoying my boobs right now”

 Camila laughed but blushed furiously, she quickly got up not wanting to make the girl uncomfortable. Normani just ignored her and said that she didn’t care, she even placed the girl in her former position. “If we’re being honest then I still look at your butt.” Camila laughed at her own joke, that quickly brought her back to reality and the other girls realized the sudden change of mood too.

 That night Camila didn’t talk about it even though they already knew because they heard everything, Camila’s mood wasn’t at its best, but both girls were making an effort of keeping her distracted and to be fair it worked for a while, until the girl just broke, she had no idea what caused it, but something did. She was laughing with Dinah and Normani and all of the sudden she started to laugh cry and then just cry. That night and the ones that followed she cried to the point of exhaustion. The girls stayed with her that night.

 The next day they all headed their own way, Lauren and Camila had a flight together to Miami, but apparently the green-eyed girl left earlier today. Of course she did.

 The other girls made sure to hug her and tell her that they loved her. Ally was filled in on the events of the night by Dinah and she made sure to hug Camila tighter than ever. Their rule of not speaking to each other while in holidays went to crap because every night one of the girls called her and made sure she fell asleep, she always fell did, after crying for at least two hours. Her body was always dehydrated because of the number of tears that she shed. She barely ate anything, on Christmas eve she only ate of respect but her stomach couldn’t handle the sudden amount of food, and she ended up vomiting all the food. Fortunately for her, no one saw or heard her. That’s how it went until she realized that her ribs were showing way more than they should. And quickly she realized that she had to get her shit together. And for a while she did.

\\

 2016 was a weird year. She had abs now, that was good. Physically she was amazing, but mentally she was all over the place. Thing with Lauren were awkward, the girl never apologized and as time passed things got better, as better as they could. Apparently, they made it work, because not everyone realized that tension between them.

 But that was it, they didn’t talk, only when they had to. Sometimes the lines got blurry, Lauren would do something that left Camila’s mind sideways.

 Again, 2016 was a weird year. She wasn’t happy, not even okay, she knew that much. Sometimes everything was just too much and she couldn’t take it, she was always tired, her mood horrible and sour.

 The drugs helped for a while, but she wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t putting needles in her arm or something. She smoked weed, mostly because it made her forget and just let go, something she really didn’t know how to do.

 Only Dinah knew how bad she currently was. Then her mother found out about the pot and got Camila a private doctor. She got diagnosed with depression, but the young girl already knew that. Nothing new there.

 It was hard, 2016 was hard. But she got through it. Half alive, but still.

 Then November came, and with it, rain… or tears, a lot of them.

  The last time she remembers the best. Because for so long Camila thought that the she was the problem, that maybe Lauren just couldn’t fall in love with another girl.  

So, you could imagine her surprise when she saw the picture of the green-eyed girl and Lucy kissing. Then came the tweet, she was in the bathroom, sitting with her phone on the toilet when the notification came in. She read it twice, not less or more. Only two times, she threw her phone at the wall in front of her. So, there she was, in a bathroom, with her pants down, crying.

Lauren was right, she was pathetic.

But pathetic or not, heartbroken or not. She sucked her pride and congratulated the girl, told her how proud she was.

And she only got a “thank you”

Pathetic.

 \\

 The Time she didn’t cry…

 She was performing her new song and Fifth Harmony was there. And of course, destiny was a sick sociopath, so they had to at least see each other, and they did.

 She saw her and their eyes immediately met as if Lauren had a sixth sense that told her when Camila was staring at her. Even from this far she could still see the green of her eyes, the color that for so long she loved to see and admire.

 Her eyes were like a time capsule, and not even a second later Camila saw everything, remembered every single moment. Flashing through her eyes. From the moment their eyes first met, to the time they thought was going to be the last.

 She still looked beautiful, Camila thought. The pictures she saw online never made justice to her beauty from eye to eye.

 But she didn’t feel anything. The spark in her stomach, the so-called butterflies weren’t there. She was a stranger at best. What she once felt for the girl was no longer there and suddenly the tears she shed all those times just didn’t feel necessary, Camila spent all that time trying to forget about her. And now, she finally did it.

 And what could be describe as hours of staring at each other, was really just a second. A glance in her direction and that was it.

 She was over Lauren.

 And no tears fell from her eyes that night.

-KA

Thanks for reading. 

Feel free to post this story where ever you want to, this story is mine but feel free to post it where you want to. Just make to sure to leave a “-KA” at the end. 

[nocturna-iv]

I always thought that he had multiple wives at the same time. Gaston has that kind of toxic masculinity. Furthermore, he has the advantage that he can guarantee protection and territory, supplies, and other things to his "wives". Who is going to stop him now? The social norms that expected him to marry a beautiful woman and keep his lovers hidden? No! Because he’s now on an island full of villains and lawless (Let's thank again King Adam for this...). So, he can do whatever he wants. 

Ex-wives or just a new wife to add to the ones he already had, I can theorize a few things about him. And here I speak from my experience as a professional in a vulnerable population:

Gaston must have the key to the houses of his (ex) wives and he enters when he wants there. He will say that it’s with the excuse of protection, to give supplies and things like that. But it’s more because of his toxic ego and power over others.

Ex or wives, Gaston would manipulate everyone into competing for his attention. Because that way he would guarantee the least amount of conflict possible because, in the face of a fight, Gaston would just leave (no protection, no supplies). The poor woman would always welcome him with open arms. And from time to time he would say "I couldn't bring you more because X had a baby and I gave her more." In this way, he would generate enmity between all of them and thus they could not ally against him (If anyone believes that he wouldn’t be smart enough to do this. Let's remember how he manipulated the whole town. And this behavior is inherited toxic masculinity 101).

Gaston isn’t faithful. He constantly has girlfriends, lovers, and wives.

No. He. Is. Not. Polly. NOP. He's just a stupid cissy.

He has children as another aspect of his male egocentrism. He doesn't take care of everyone. Only those that will give him a good name.

Gaston can have lovers, wives, and girlfriends. But not his (ex) wives/lovers/girlfriend! Because he sees women as an object of possession.

He avoids strong (in any sense of this word) women and even more so the female leaders of territories on the island. Because he doesn’t want to be weak in front of others and that his reputation for being strong could be destroyed.

And I could say darker things that he undoubtedly does (because they are too common for people like him and in vulnerable environments), but I don't want to disturb anyone.

Poor Gil. Seriously, he tries to see the best of his father. We can imagine that his mother tells him things about his father in the best possible light.

Its canon that gaston has a wife. Maybe multiple ex wives as well?

[odahlia]

I udapted my DARK MATTER Season 3 SPOILER LIST. It is now a MASTERPOST with links to official episode recaps, the Dark Matter After Dark & Backstage videos (with no region restriction) as well as the spoiler list post I did for each episodes.  

DARK MATTER season 3

MASTERPOST

  August 29, last udapte

  In addition, the spoiler list for episode 310, 311, 312 & 313. It was last udapted a month ago, and as you can see, it was pretty extensive. I'm cleaning house to make a new SPOILER LIST for season 4. Hopefuly, we'll get renewal news soon.  

Episode 310: Built, Not Born [dir. Melanie Orr]

Synopsis: A distress call from the Android’s friend, Victor, leads to answers about Two’s past.

Mallozzi’s summary « This one explores TWO and THE ANDROID’s surprising backstory. We learn THE ANDROID’s origin – and her name! Our feeliest episode ever. »

We get some backstory for TWO and THE ANDROID

In her backstory, THE ANDROID has a name

We will find out what that name is

We learn the fate that befell SHRIKE and JASPER

We go back to Janah-12, where THE ANDROID met VICTOR in 204

Probably because of this communication with VICTOR

There is a character named ANYA

Dr. SHAW’s secret lab (receipt: this genius)

A canister where something of someone (alien?!) was stored

One very shiny pod and « one big-ass charger »

Looks like the pod might be in Dr. SHAW’s lab

Blue guns (Mikkei) next to green guns (Dwarf Star, maybe?)

Roger Cross (SIX) on set in Dr. SHAW’s lab, standing over the Core Room Console

Melissa O’Neil teasing TWO’s origin story « Two. Android. Chicken. Egg. »

+ Random facts & co.

Anthony Lemke’s kid describing a set visit « It was really cool. I saw daddy carry his girlfriend in a little can ! »

A flashback of RYO, which, maybe seen through THE ANDROID’s eye

Episode 311: The Dwarf Star Conspiracy [dir. Steve DiMarco]

Synopsis: One of the Android’s newly discovered memories leads the crew to a suspicious Dwarf Star facility on Nova 17.

Mallozzi’s summary « Many of the narrative pieces we put in play in previous seasons begin to pay off – like this reveal of exactly what ALEXANDER ROOK was up to when he created REBECCA aka PORTIA aka TWO. »

« Meanwhile, director Steve DiMarco starts prep on an episode that will see our anti-villains discover the horrifying truth behind a long-standing mystery.  One crew member will respond in shocking fashion while another will meet a surprising end (of episode?) »

This season we find out why TWO was created by Dwarf Star Technologies.

Even more pods. This time, on racks

With people inside

Those are at the Ore Processing Plant

A security satellites

+ Random facts & co.

« Gateway. Something’s coming. »

A late-season 11th hour surprise. It’s a FTL-capable Marauder

Squid-looking alien killing some dude

Episode 312: My Final Gift To You  [dir. Bruce McDonald]

Synopsis: Ryo invites his former crew to Zairon in a final attempt to secure the Blink Drive and his victory over Pyr.

Mallozzi’s summary « Shocking secrets are revealed.  Deception, betrayal, tragedy and a significant death. »

« Four BIG secrets are revealed! »

There is a big Ishida Palace dinner scene

The crew is invited

THREE drinking and FIVE talking to him

The TRANSIT pods we see in the Raza underbelly in 310, this time in what looks like the Ishida Palace

+ Random facts & co.

Explosion at the Ishida Palace

Episode 313: Nowhere To Go [dir. Ron Murphy]

Synopsis: The crew of the Raza unite Ferrous Corps’ enemies in an effort to end the corporate war.

Mallozzi’s summary « Former enemies become unexpected allied. Friends become unforeseen enemies. And a shocking turn changes everything, setting up a fan-tastic new chapter in the Dark Matter saga. »

This might be where we get the infamous Ferrous Corp shipyard

If so, it’s a Ferrous Corp Destroyer factory

And Commander Nieman is there

There is also a Ferrous corp lab

Where one Dr. SILAS works

Commander TRUFFAULT on board of the Raza

The episode ends on a cliffhanger

+ Random facts & co.

Last day of shooting. Kinda looks like Alex Mallari Jr.

Last line of ADR for Anthony Lemke this season

Space battle between Ishida cruisers and unidentified ships (Pyr?)

The « black ships » - listed by old FIVE in episode 304 - will appear by the end of this season

Random facts & speculations

The League of Autonomous Worlds still has a role to play this season

SIX in a stasis pod. It's his outfit from episode 307. Might be a deleted scene. Might be from an upcoming episode

Aliens. Android revolts. No romance?

ALICIA REYNAUD’s ship (nop, that’s from season 2)

Mallozzi, about the seers « [They] are still out there somewhere »

The man in the mask (one of the men hired by RYO in 303)