#please add more examples of this

[monsterboyblood]

I love you characters who are artificial copies with the full memories and emotions of their original counterparts who want nothing more than to be the only 'them' but have been changed and hurt so drastically by the circumstances of their existence that even if they did take the place of their original selves the person they were supposed to be a perfect copy of would cease to exist altogether. I love you

[makiswirl]

can i just say. and this is probably a niche hill to die on. that i am so gobsmacked every time someone vaguely hints at the idea that jotaro doesn't care meaningfully for the other crusaders, usually particularly kakyoin and joseph, when those two actually tend to be the ones he reacts to being hurt the hardest

like he cares for his loved ones!!!! that literally plays into his character motives in every single part he shows up in!!! stop lying to me!!!!!!!

[oracleofdiscord]

one of my (new) favorite starkid things is their reprises where they've subtly changed the titular phrase

"follow the golden rule" vs "follow the gold and rule"

"bully the bully" vs "bury the bully"

i just think it's neat

[dyingtobehim]

pw tummy save me pw tummy........

[great-tusk]

I’ve made this rb game in the past, but I wanna do it again! Reblog with an F/O (or more than one!), and I’ll give them a Pokémon!

Examples:

[nothinkonlyhannah]

One of my favorite underrated CR bits is just the cast bringing up real world pop culture in reference to something and then Matt having to come up with an in universe explanation for it.

Examples

Nick Jonas

SAM: So I will make my spiritual weapon in the form of Nick Jonas.

TRAVIS: What the fuck. (laughter)

ASHLEY: Who's that? (laughter)

MATT: He's a historical bard who came from the College of the White Duke 40 years ago in Tal'Dorei.

Napoleon

MARISHA: -- really think about the Napoleon hat.

MATT: You watch as gingerly, out of nowhere, it seems, this cartoony Napoleon hat, you know, the great Steve Napoleon of Wildemount--(laughter)

Bruce Banner

TRAVIS: FCG is like Bruce Banner and when shit starts to go a little south for him, there is a kettle boiling over effect that we want to try to avoid.

MATT: Bruce Banner is a known murderer from the Age of Arcanum. 

I just think it's funny

[takemetodragonstone]

in succession 2x08 dundee when logan says “the past is all made up” i really do think that’s the thesis of the entire show btw.

like, the roy kids’ conflicting memories of their childhoods that are never clarified through any kind of flashbacks or confirmation, the entire fucking cruises scandal and the coverups of major crimes, kendall’s accident and how he even tries to rewrite the past in the finale (“that didn’t happen. I made it up”) as logan so often did in both big and small ways (from denying his knowledge of the cruises crimes before congress to small moments of “I told you this already” and “did I even make contact?”)

the fucking poem Dreamsong 29 by John Berryman that all the season finales are named after. this is just the last stanza:

“But never did Henry, as he thought he did, / end anyone and hacks her body up / and hide the pieces, where they may be found. / He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing. / Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. / Nobody is ever missing.”

And we never have real confirmation that logan did know about cruises because the characters (minus kendall) deny it to the last. but we know. we keep our plausible deniability because we don’t know, but we know. the show essentially makes us complicit in the same way that the characters are. most of them don’t know that he knew, because they never had any explicit proof, but as kendall says in season 3 “C’mon. We knew.”

the narrative continually shows us that logan “keeps a watchful eye over his whole empire” with perhaps the best example being how he buries the evidence of kendall’s accident and manslaughter at the end of season 1. that’s a very clear parallel to the cruises situation and that’s so skillfully and subtly woven throughout season 2 when the cruises scandals are coming to light and kendall is still reeling from the accident and his guilt.

and all that’s not even touching on the whole matter of ATN and the debate over how involved logan really is in what news stories and political views his network pushes (which could be a whole separate post of its own). very similar to how the cruises thing is handled, the line is always that logan isn’t involved, while the narrative shows us otherwise.

there are a million other examples both big and small that i could pull but this post is already such a disorganized mess. someday i’ll write an essay about it i swear, or maybe somebody else out there already has, but i just needed to point out how brilliant and subtle the show is about this as i’m rewatching season 2

[heart-eyes-motheracker]

Nevertheless // Gap the series // 23.5 degrees

(insp.)

[small-witch-big-hat]

Monsterfuckers eating good lately, huh

[greeen-bean]

What type of 'Die a hero or live long enough to become a villain' shut is Netflix PULLING RN!!!!!

Either they'll nuke a show after 1/2 good seasons for really no reason, or give it a handful of seasons that progressively get worse until its the most unwatchable shit imaginable

[vimbry-moved]

jumping off the back of the post about genres of song lyrics, another thing about tmbg's lyrics in particular is that even when they write about pleasant themes, they still manage to frequently do so through a sinister lens:

the experience of having children and looking after them:

a nice little nightlight protecting a child muses on the shortcomings it would have outside its assigned responsibility:

fantasising about getting high in the park with your crush:

[lastoneout]

I dunno what to call it but I love when fans come up with clever puns/joke names to call characters who are impostors or alternate versions of other characters. Like Madeline in Celete's anxiety-personification being called "Bad-eline" and the person who impersonates Iosefka in Bloodborne being dubbed "Faux-sefka" and how we all called the evil hologram of the Professor from Puppet History "The Substitute" like give me more of that now and forever please and thank you!!

[skunkes]

also I guess this is just an observation

but what is it with some pixel art games being so low contrast... I was finally going to give in and try out a farming sim lots of ppl enjoy despite the portrait art being not entirely to my tastes and then the pixels and environment are sooooo low contrast it made me change my mind again....like you do not have to be scared of dark colors and borders. Outlines. Smile.

[dyingtobehim]

TUMMY CAM

[i-heart-hxh]

Hi again! I've had this thought in terms of hxh meta that I personally have not seen discussed, so I'm gonna dump it here for you! There's an underlying theme I've noticed of characters throughout the series being one that lost their other halves. Like, most obvious, Leorio and Kurapika lost their childhood best friends. Melody lost her friend to the devil's music. We see Nobunaga lose Uvogin, and so on. So Killua saving Gon instead of letting him die after CAA seems to be a "breaking the cycle" so to speak, although I'm not sure what that would even mean! Nothing much to say besides those details I've noticed, but I wanted to know if you had thoughts? Or perhaps it's just an interesting background detail that is up in the air in terms of being significant?

Hello, thank you so much for sending an ask again! I've put some thought into this topic as well, so I'm happy you brought this up! How I'm answering this is both somewhat abstract and far-reaching in the series so it's a little difficult to summarize and express simply, but I hope you and others might get some meaning out of it!

I strongly believe that one of HxH's great overarching themes is the transformational power of love and how it grants people second chances in life. In this post I'm referring to love in a broader sense, not just romantic love, as of course many different types of love are portrayed and have deep importance in HxH. We see the theme of transformative love in so many different relationships and instances that it's difficult to even summarize them--a few examples are Gon and Killua, Meruem and Komugi, Meruem and his Royal Guard, Ging and Kite, Killua and Ikalgo, even in less major character pairs like Ging and Razor (Razor: "Ging taught me it took only one person, one person in the entire world who will trust you, to save you.") and Kite and Koala, but that's only scraping the surface. I reblogged a previous wonderful meta that pointed out the domino effect of Killua's act of kindness towards Ikalgo, which ended up changing the ultimate trajectory of humanity's war against the Chimera Ants. This is a great example of this theme in action!

But of course, while meeting and loving someone can transform that person's whole life, so also can losing someone significant. It can set someone on a completely different life track than they would have been on had they not lost them--Kurapika, Leorio, Senritsu, the Phantom Troupe (especially with their flashback in recent chapters), Gon and Kite, Kacho and Fugetsu (though this hasn't played out all the way yet) come to mind, but there are many more throughout the series as well. Not all of the losses that fit into this are someone losing their other half/most important person, but there's a solid enough percentage that it certainly seems to be a trend Togashi is establishing and exploring.

It's difficult to explore one of these themes in depth and with honesty without the other--love happens, loss of loved ones happens, both are deeply transformative, and both can ultimately be placed under the broader umbrella of the transformative power of love. After all, if losing a person causes someone's entire life path to change, chances are they loved them a great deal and the force behind the change that occurs in their life is the love and grief they still feel after the loss.

HxH has many tragic elements and Togashi certainly doesn't shy away from the heart-wrenching and long-lasting results of loss, but I think it's fair to say from the 400 chapters we have so far that HxH's themes are not ultimately tragic and hopeless on this topic by any means. In HxH:

Death is not always insurmountable, i.e., Kite, the Chimera Ants in general

The life path one ends up on after a major loss need not be a tragic one, i.e. Leorio deciding to be a doctor and help children in poverty as a result of losing his friend

Death in itself can be an act of love, i.e. Meruem and Komugi, Netero and humanity

Even if one ends up on a dark path as a result of loss, that doesn't mean they can't be saved by someone else's love for them, i.e., Gon and Killua, this could also end up being the trajectory for Kurapika and Leorio potentially?

With Gon and Killua, their whole relationship is based on them transforming each other and giving each other second chances:

Gon saving Killua simply by not judging him, befriending him, and showing him another life path

Gon retrieving Killua from the Zoldyck family when Killua's resolve broke down because of Illumi

Killua pulling the needle of out of his head out of sheer love for and desire to protect Gon

And of course Killua not allowing Gon to die, simultaneously saving him and transforming Alluka's life.

(And Killua's ability to save and help Alluka is of course, a direct result of the kindness Gon extended to Killua and the love Killua has for Gon.)

There's no way to know for certain what will happen in their future, but I definitely think their relationship has one more transformation in it at least, in the form of a reunion and reconciliation.

So, in summary, I think these themes of someone losing a person who was their other half and how one continues to live after that are another way of exploring the broader theme of what it means to love someone and be transformed by meeting them, which I see as a primary theme of HxH. I also think some of these relationships are intended to be comparisons to or foils of Gon and Killua's relationship in a sense (especially Kurapika and Pairo and Kacho and Fugetsu, but others as well), expanding on the themes of their relationship and how a love that deep affects people, both in beautiful and in deeply painful ways.

[fangirlfortress]

Idk why but there's just something that gets to me about someone telling another person that their heart is broken, or something similar. Just that phrase "broken heart" being used as a verbal manifestation of the pain and betrayal that's being felt. I get goosebumps every time Padme tells Ani, "Anakin, you're breaking my heart." as she cries, seeing the man she loves, the father of her children, turned into someone else, look at her like he's never looked at her before. Romeo telling Imitatia/Michelle that the way she took advantage of Lucy is disgusting - "She had just lost her final family member when you came along. Her heart was broken."

I can't think of any more examples right now but just the vulnerability of telling someone that a heart has been broken because of them. You've betrayed me and everything I thought we stood for, and the pain of it has broken my heart. And I am telling you about because despite the wound you've inflicted on me, you're still the person I gave it to in the first place and I want to go back. Please, please, please, let's just go back.