#than direct character parallels

[coldgoldlazarus]

Metroid end credits that play like the ones from Across The Spiderverse

[wodimewoahtime]

the course of ivans life is locked in by sua and i think he understands that a little

its ivan who will follow till, its till who will follow mizi, and its mizi who will follow sua (and sua follows mizi too ofc)

just round and around, they go in a circle till theyre picked off for slaughter

mizi doesnt know that, but sua does!!! sua does!!!!

mizi is unaware of the threat thats coming her way, so its up to sua to leave. she doesnt. theyre stuck. when sua follows mizi, ivan sees a priest digging her grave.

my view of ivan sua is very much "ivan is willing to break the system for till, but till wont follow him"

"ivan watches as sua sacrifices herself for mizi within the system"

"ivan is envious because the person she loves is willing to follow her anywhere but the best she can do is die"

i think it says a lot about suas passive suicidal ideation

[notmoreflippingelves]

Robbing the Royal Treasury

↳ Esteban in "King of the Carnaval" vs. Elena in "Royal Treasury Escape Room" (Scepter Training with Zuzo)

[beautifulterriblequeen]

All that's Left is Aaravos

I realized allasudden that I haven't rolled around in Callum's left-handed possession motif yet, so let's poke it with a stick!

First off, I wrote this meta post about how Viren goes left-handed when Aaravos is directly controlling him some while ago. This is going to be Callum's version.

Let's start way back in the beginning, with the first time Callum cast a dark magic spell:

Callum is right handed - we see him sketching with his right hand - but when he does this dark magic spell, he uses his left. I don't see this as any sort of hard indicator of possession that far back, but he could've cast this spell with either hand, and they chose to animate him doing it with his left. A light bit of foreshadowing about handedness.

The next time this becomes an issue is in S4, when Callum gets possessed by Aaravos, which is only possible because he did cast that spell above. There's some very deliberate mirroring with Callum's and Aaravos's stances and reflections, where right = left. We get to see Aaravos, who is left-handed, deliberately using his right hand so that Callum's left hand is the one that gets used:

Later in S4, Callum tries to drop the Key of Aaravos in the lava with his left hand, but he can't manage it.

Once the Pearl is back in Katolis in S6, Callum has a One Ring-esque staring contest with it and seems to lose:

he immediately starts doing left-handed things near the Pearl:

There's even another left-handed cube moment that gets pretty blatant with its Aaravos coding:

In the moment, it's lighting up because Stella is present. But it's also foreshadowing for Aaravos's trickery with the Pearl switcheroo plan - he's already watching and listening to Callum's secret plan.

When Callum sleepwalks to the dark magic dungeon and picks up the pearl, he reaches to open the painting left handed too:

The shock of being overtaken in his sleep forces Callum to make a new plan for the Pearl, and when he says this line out loud, Aaravos sees some wiggle room for himself:

Aaravos needs the Pearl unswaddled by Callum's anti-magic blankie - which tells me that those stitched spells would have worked, if Callum had the real deal. And he also needs the Pearl defenseless in Katolis. He already has a Pharos-shaped pawn, a blind, human-hating dragon who's about to get his wings healed, and a devastated daughter in need of a new father figure.

All Aaravos needs to do to get his Pearl into Claudia's hands and get free is to trick Callum about which pearl he's really holding. The rest will fall into place like clockwork.

And when the dust of Katolis Castle settles, along with the scorched bones of Sol Regem... all that's left is Aaravos.

[ubedoodles]

turtle headshot!

I love Turtle so much, the animus battle scene in his book was so good!! Also the reveal that he MADE Anenome an animus to cover himself?? Shivers. What are you doing Turtle, respectfully. (to be fair he was four (4) at the time, trying desperately to hide his god powers, so)

I wish the books had gotten more into his feelings/reaction to having his magic taken away for good. Especially after he had a whole arc accepting himself and his magic. Like,,, I get why magic was taken away (and I think it was a good decision, actually, because otherwise how could you possibly have any plot when you could just use magic to solve basically anything) and there wasn't really time in the books to get into it. But Turtle was SO SAD when he got his magic taken away the first time!! I don't think we're ever gonna get this, but it would be so cool to see some kind of short (maybe a winglets?) where we see Turtle (and Anenome too honestly) come to terms with their loss of magic and, for Turtle specifically, realize that they aren't useless without it.

[wowitsverycool]

alphys undertale would play ISAT and become completely bedridden from the resulting carnage

[emblazons]

The post I made was about Will x Imitation Game!Alan Turing yes—

—but don't think it's lost on me that the conversation I pulled (where Joan tells Alan she doesn't want him to be normal/what makes him different is what makes him great) is Alan talking to the woman he said he would marry even knowing he was gay—aka the conformity he (temporarily) agreed to because to do so would make him an outcast /hurt her more....just like someone else we know.

[countdown-til-sanders-take-over]

So hows it going 😀

TMAGP 7 is a WILD ride

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Been trying to write an analysis on Sasaki and the ending of Entrance Exam for days now and it just wasn't turning out so I deleted it... maybe another time when I can formulate a thought properly...

The only part I'll put here for now was the bit about my amusement with Dazai and Sasaki clearly near instantly realizing the other is a threat, which changed the way I read the scene of them chatting in the booth after she stayed the night. It probably boiled down to:

*sweetly smiling at each other* "oh this asshole has got to go"

Actually I went on an unorganized ramble in the tags so read that if you're interested in my Sasaki thoughts. Maybe I'll clean it up one day and make it proper.

[acircusfullofdemons]

fuck it *dials up the aiw vibes for into*

[lasnevadaslaborunion]

I genuinely do love the prison arc and find it fascinating and I wish it was easier to find content and analysis about it that didn't veer to any of the Very Not Fun extremes

[blorbosexterminator]

For all there is negative to say about the spin-off and Berlin I at least have the comfort to know that Pina would never mischaracterize and misrepresent Berlin as the fandom did when everyone just decided to shut their eyes and ears in the Viking Gold scene and instead assumed the exact opposite of what happened. Just completely ignoring what Andrés literally said in the scene so just they would have a "at core Martín and Berlin are actually the opposite uwu and Martin is so much better" when the scenes were literal direct parallels of each other and where Andrés and Martín said the exact same things just about different cultures and different groups of people

[mikesbasementbeets]

what if i said in s3 elmax parallels jancy while lu/max parallels milven

[autisticcassandracain]

I really. Should sit down and figure out what to do with Shilo in my Fourth World canon

[oatmealaddiction]

Okay but the weirdest thing about the whole "Brotherhood is better you should skip 03" discourse that's become commonplace now, it sort of forgets the world Brotherhood came out in and why you should watch the original Fullmetal Alchemist. When Brotherhood came out, the original Fullmetal Alchemist was one of the most beloved and most watched animes of all time. Brotherhood assumes you the audience have already seen it because of course you have, everyone has seen it, so it skips important information and speeds the story up because it doesn't want to bore you with things you already know. Have you ever wondered "hey why does the first episode of Brotherhood kind of suck, and why am I being introduced to like 50 new characters, and why are they acting like I know what the hell an alchemist is?" It's because Brotherhood thinks you've seen 03.

The first 7 or so episodes of Brotherhood constitute dozens of chapters in the manga, and the first 25 or so episodes of the original Fullmetal Alchemist. The Nina Tucker episode in Brotherhood, in FMA 03 takes up nearly three episodes. Yoki gets a backstory in 03 and it's genuinely one of the best episodes and taken directly from the manga and Brotherhood glosses over it because: duh, you've already seen it. And so if you skip the original you miss out on dozens of really great character building episodes like Ed and Al meeting Hughes for the first time and getting to spend a whole episode helping him free a train from terrorists, or Ed and Roy having a duel that expands on the relationship they have, or episodes where the brothers just help out random people in towns before the major story gets going.

The original also paces itself quite a bit better than Brotherhood and is more in line with the mangas storytelling. In the manga we don't find out about The Gate until nearly two dozen chapters in, and the same goes for the original anime. Like, that's a twist reveal in those stories, and it's weird that the most watched series is the one where they tell you all about The Gate in the first two episodes because they assume you've already seen the original show.

What's more, people don't know that Hiromu Arakawa helped write for the anime while she was still in the middle of writing the manga, and as a result was inspired to write scenes in Brotherhood that the anime did first. That scene of Edward getting impaled by a falling beam? Directly inspired by a similar scene in the original anime. There's a lot of little instances of that and they're great when you can recognize parallels and things in Brotherhood that are direct references to the original anime, but people don't notice any of that anymore. Because the original anime is just an automatic skip these days, and it's a bummer because people don't realize what a giant it was back before Brotherhood was released. They treat it as *bad,* not realizing it was one of the most beloved anime of its time and the problems people take issue with have a lot more to do with personal taste than any kind of actual flaw in the writing. Brotherhood was never meant to dethrone it, and the original anime was always supposed to be part of the viewing experience which is why those first few episodes of Brotherhood are so fast paced. So like, please stop telling people Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 is a skip, or it's bad, or you don't need it because Brotherhood is better. Regardless if you think Brotherhood is better or not, the original wrote Brotherhood's check. It was huge, it was beloved, and Brotherhood is *banking* on the knowledge you've seen all of it and loved it. And trust me when I say there is so much to love about the original series. It's still my favorite branch of the FMA franchise, and it's worth your time, I promise you.

[agentravensong]

thinking about how the extra area added on to a pacifist run of undertale, the true lab, is about alphys's past mistakes. how it ends with the story reaffirming that, despite the pain she's caused, the thing that matters is that she has now made the choice to do the right thing. she's still worthy of her friends' love.

thinking about how undertale doesn't expect the player to get a pacifist ending for the first time. how it's more likely than not that the player will kill toriel the first time they battle her, how lots of players don't initially figure out how to end undyne's fight without killing her, etc. what it expects — not even expects, really, but hopes — is that the player, if they care enough, will use their canonically acknowledged power over time to make up for those mistakes.

no matter how many neutral runs a player has done before committing to the pacifist run, the thing that matters to the characters, to the story, is that you've chosen, now, to do the right thing.

compared to alphys, the player honestly gets off lightly, in that you're the only one (other than flowey) who really remembers any harm you might have caused. and any direct guilting the game could have done about it is long past at this point. instead, as undertale often does, it makes its point via parallels: alphys caused harm, and she knows it. she has committed to being better. in doing so, she has unlocked for herself a better ending to her story. and she deserves it. she's forgiven.

those structural narrative parallels are all over undertale, if you know where to look. and that's one of the things that makes it so fuckin' good.