#that’s my two cents on things

[stagefoureddiediaz]

I am having thoughts though - as people seem to have ave decided to theorise about the will being brought up to Tommy 🙄 and that being the hurdle they need to deal with.

I’m actually thinking its more likely to be the sperm donor baby, although I feel like there’s plenty of other stuff more 118 connected that could and would work just as well!

The thing with the sperm donor and tommy being weirded out by it, is the way that it would juxtapose so perfectly if the will was brought up as part of the Buck/Eddie stuff that’s going to happen in 806 - the sitting in silence - because it works on so many levels.

It creates a clear and obvious contrast between Eddie and Tommy while not making Eddie part of the bt plot in any way (which is very good and what the show has been doing so far - nothing buddie has happened with Tommy present - it’s always been separate and they’ve always taken tommy out of the equation at the start leading into buddie stuff - even the birthday stuff in 801 - 2 lines and then step out of camera so we can focus on buck and Eddie’s faces in tandem!)

It creates a potential hurdle in that it brings in a wanting kids/ not wanting kids conversation and that can then spiral out into the way Buck sacrifices his body constantly for others (which plays back into the will of it all without it being about the will of it all) Tommy being weirded out by the donor thing but then saying that other forms of self sacrifice are ok could be interesting - the idea that Tommy thinks it’s a good thing to be ‘expendable’ on the job as saving others is more important than one’s own life.

It would even let Tim play on the death of it all - have the arc that Natalia would’ve had if she’d stuck around. We already saw her weirded out by the sperm donor thing, then come back only to be told she constantly wanted to talk about bucks death. They’ve also already planted the lightning strike into the bt plot - at the hanger in 704 - so it all would make sense if Tommy is down for dying or Buck dying on the job (like not literally dying but stating that he doesn’t see dying on the job - sacrificing himself for others as a bad thing)

That would get Buck thinking about who he is and what he wants and allow for his death and rebirth to be explored a bit more than it was in 6b, and it would also play into the saving Gerrard/ meaning to hurt him thing as well - and Bucks struggles with that.

It would be very interesting as a way to deal with all Bucks baggage (as Oliver mentioned!) and get him to deal with it - whilst setting him up to realise his feelings for Eddie in an organic way that separate from Tommy!

I can see them taking that route and I’d actually love it if they did, and not only because it plays very heavily into my tommy is alt buck theory, but also because it really and truly would get buck off all of the various hamster wheels he’s been on and actually moving forward rather than flirting with moving forward!

[symphonyofsilence]

What drives me even more insane about this scene is how you'd expect Gojo to imagine High school era! Geto in the crowd. Or at least not the cult leader, worst of all the curse users Geto Suguru. But no, it's the cult leader Geto. It's Geto as Gojo last remembered him. As Geto last was. Whatever choices Geto made, wherever his choices led him and them, however he was, whoever he was, traumas and messed up ideas and bad choices and ill reputations and scorns and all. Gojo wanted Geto Suguru there. Not any ideal version. Not any "what if" version. Not any "at some point in time before things went downhill" version. Not any "when your hands weren't stained with innocent blood" version. He knew very well what he wanted. And he wanted it all the same. He wanted Geto Suguru. However he was. He just wanted him to be there. He just wanted him to be.

And he didn't want him to help him, he didn't want him to fight with him even if they were strongest together and always fought together for a while. He just wanted him to be there in the crowd and cheer him on. He just wanted him to stand there and give him one of his sweet, heartwarming smiles that shaped his eyes into crescent moons. He just wanted him to be. Then even if Gojo had died in the end anyway, he would have been satisfied. It would have been worth it. Only if Geto was there.

[royal-misfit]

The main reason I think Goncharov worked better as a piece of mass produced fiction over Zepotha really does come down to the basic concepts of each piece. Goncharov had a concrete idea from the start, it was a lost 1973 mafia film directed by Martin Scorsese. Meaning that people new to the joke could more easily understand how to add to the story. Martin Scorsese has an unique style to his films, he has directed multiple mafia/crime dramas that people could pull from to create a cohesive story that sounds plausible for him to have made. People were able to come up with characters (and the actors who played them) and an actual plot by just studying the genre and finding what would work. Zepotha is just marketing a single artist's work under the idea of "an 80's horror film", no director, no actual genre other than "horror" (what kind of horror? Slasher seems to be the most popular, but Zepotha sounds more like a giallo style supernatural horror to me). There's no director listed, so no one knows how this film would play out or look. Because horror is such a vague descriptor here, people are throwing just about everything to the wall to see what sticks, which slows down the actual storytelling potential. People are making up characters first, before a plot leading to there being like 50 named characters, but any actual story is lost. Tldr; Goncharov found it's footing much easier and faster by starting out with a concrete idea, while Zepotha is stumbling because it's vagueness makes it hard for anyone to agree on basic things like story or characters.

[drmelking]

A consistent theme of this show is exploring how people react when they are pushed past their limits, and it’s something we saw a lot of in this episode in particular. The two women getting into a fight in the waiting room, the man blowing up and then punching Dana, McKay seemingly going over Robby’s head and reporting the kid with a hit list, Mel shutting down after that little girl died. Hell, this show opened with Robby having to talk a colleague off of a literal ledge. And so now we’re seeing it with Langdon too—after a day of Santos defying orders at every turn, being second guessed constantly by an intern, and then losing a little kid, he just completely lost it. Understandable? Definitely. But that still doesn’t make it okay. Langdon’s outburst went way beyond the realm of reprimanding a subordinate —he yelled at and berated Santos on a deeply personal level in front of a room full of colleagues, not to mention a patient. And that doesn’t make him irredeemably evil or a terrible mentor, and I don’t think this show is in anyway trying to villainize him and woobify Santos or vice versa, but people are not perfect and they make mistakes and they can have extreme emotional reactions in high stress environments. It makes them human. That’s the whole point of the show imo

[bi-bi-buckleys]

I can see Buck and Tommy deciding to give it another go by the end of the season.

I think Tommy will be there for Buck, and assure him that he’s not trying to make a move on him and take advantage of his grief. And Buck will realize he doesn’t want to lose another person, he doesn’t want to miss an opportunity to say everything he wants to say to the people he cares about.

So he tells Tommy he still has feelings for him, he’s missed him, there’s no competition it’s only him, and that he wants to make things work.

Tommy asks him if he’s sure, and Buck will say he is, and Tommy will be like thank god cause I’ve missed you so much. They’ll agree to go not at Buck’s pace but their pace. They’ll agree to talk and work through their issues.

Then season nine will pick up with them being settled and in love. It’s what they both deserve.

[bees-pees]

this is all snufmin related i am so sorry

[inbabylontheywept]

seeing republicans attack legal structures that make it easier to register for voting always seems like a weird gamble to me. whose side has the laziest voters? whose side is willing to jump through the most hoops to vote? and how likely is that trend to continue into the future?

these aren't rhetorical questions. i don't know. and i don't think the republican party knows either. i can tell you, as a college student, i once got confused and registered to vote three times in one day. there are a lot of redundant programs to help young people vote. i don't know if there's as much of an effort to involve the old.

there's also something to be said about noticing when people take coin flip odds of success. the implied message is that they had less than coinflip odds of winning before. and i can believe that. the republican party has no idea what it's going to do in four years, least of all ten. if they seem busy and organized and scary right now, it's because they are cornered and fighting for their lives. who are they gonna run next? everyone that ran against trump the first time got humiliated. there's no one that he's currently training and grooming into a future leader. all the competency got driven out because trump viewed competency, correctly, as a threat.

like, they might pull a rabbit out of a hat, but i'm strangely optimistic. i can't even imagine what the republican primary will look like in 2029, least of all 2033.

we are looking at the republican party's last stand. and if it's messy and chaotic and insane, it's because they have nothing left to lose.

[i-know-the-endss]

i think the most frustrating part about tbosas is the fact that you want to root for coryo. you want him to be a better man for lucy gray. you want him and sejanus to become closer, to become the best friends sejanus believes them to be. you want him to run away and find a way to relearn all the oppressive and tyrannical ideals the capitol instilled in him.

but that’s not what happens.

coriolanus isn’t necessarily a good person. he’s not a bad person either, not yet, but he’s no where near good. and rather than try to be good, he gives up, he lets himself “go bad”, he rats out sejanus, he lets his anger get the best of him and loses lucy gray.

the idea that coryo could be a good person but chooses not to be is exactly the reason this book and this character are brilliant.

[valyrfia]

while i sympathise that james vowles had a tricky decision to make, i can’t pretend to understand it. he’s effectively hammered the final nail in the coffin of logan’s f1 career with his decision to run alex over logan, even though alex is responsible for crashing the car. if williams doesn’t believe in logan and his experience, why would they re-sign him? and why would any other team want to take a chance on him over a rookie?

it doesn’t bode well for alex either, this decision only makes sense if alex is able to put williams in the points this weekend, if he doesn’t, it’ll open him up to scrutiny about why he was chosen to drive over his teammate. all round, unless alex and the team is literally able to perform a miracle, i don’t see how anyone wins as a result of this decision.

[likea-black-widow-baby]

None of the Agathario fic writers can seem to agree on which one of them is the serial killer and which one is the detective chasing them when the answer is clearly that neither of them is the detective and they’re rival serial killers trying to one up each other

[daincrediblegg]

No you know what. I thought Joker 2 was good. And I’m tired of pretending that it wasn’t. Reasons under the cut bc of spoilers.

Because the thing is… Arthur was never the incel power fantasy that a lot of people made him out to be the first time around. He was never a true figure of “white male rage” because fundamentally he was a figure of an extraordinary level of social/classist and interpersonal abuse that led him to violence that liberated him from that (as is the case with MANY mentally ill and socially disenfranchised people in the world), but the violence was absolutely never the thing that defined him as a character, but that’s always the first thing that people miss when a character is reduced to black and white elements in the zeitgeist. But this movie definitively proved that all of the incel dude filmbros, as well as average detractors who reduced him to that “white male rage” narrative the first time around were not reflective of him as a character because in the end, even ARTHUR HIMSELF held himself accountable for his crimes, even fessing up to killing his mother in the eleventh hour. And his subsequent death after this revelation even further drives home the point that how he exists as a figure of nuance could never survive in the world that created him OR the world that allegedly “embraced” him. And I think that’s kind of beautiful from a meta-narrative standpoint and VERY faithful to how the first film operated.

[leoholzer]

Hast du nicht aufgehört? Ja. Habe ich.

[lauronk]

REVIEW🧟 REVIEW🧟‍♀️ REVIEW🧟‍♂️

(pretty please)

hi friendo, glad to see you! buckle up for this one, it's...a lot lmao like literally a wall of text, i tried to break it up so that it's a more manageable read but i was so wordy i do not think i succeeded.

lemme just get the elephant out of the way, the bit that's had so many tumblr girlies (gn) up in arms all day: joel's experimenting comment and his talk to me when you're more yourself bit. 🚨🚨if you don't care to read that part, skip down to the next star banner for thoughts on the rest of the episode🚨🚨

and let me say right off, i do not think that joel's reaction was right but i think it was understandable. i think some people have been living with soft fic dad joel too long and have idealized the fuck out of him (which, tbf, i do too) and some of the less favorable aspects of his character have been forgotten because, believe it or not, he is not the perfect man/dad we all like to pretend he is. that being said:

for one, i need people to stop saying "he's from austin! he would be liberal!" my sweet precious little summer children. i have lived in and around central texas, including austin, travis county, and various parts of the hill country, for 25 of my 33 years on this planet. austin is liberal, yes, especially compared to surrounding cities and counties, but travis county voted for bush in 2000. and homophobia (and conservatism and hate crimes and all of it) still exists in and around the whole area, there is not some magical anti-homophobe bubble over the city that automatically makes everyone who lives there an ally. joel and tommy are also canonically from arlington (game versions at least), and tarrant county is significantly more conservative than travis county. stop treating austin like a liberal monolith because it is not that any more than texas as a whole is a conservative monolith.

show!tlou outbreak was in 2003. pre-obergefell, in the midst of DADT, when straight was seen as the default and anything remotely outside that was other, weird, unacceptable. i am not gonna say that just because joel lives in texas he is a bigot. but i am also not gonna say that living in austin automatically makes him liberal either, which is the conclusion so many people seem to be jumping to. especially because liberal in 2003 was farrrrr different than liberal today. lgbtq+ rights were nowhere in al gore's presidential campaign. john kerry (the democratic nom in 2004) was flatout opposed to same-sex marriage and thought it should be decided by the states. you cannot look at joel miller with a 2025 understanding of queerness because we never get past 2003 and society was too busy trying to fight fungus monsters to work on their societal and cultural mindsets.

yes, joel is friends with bill and frank and yes, he seems to not care one way or the other that they're gay. but (unfortunately) for some people it is a vastly different thing when it is your friends (and when it comes to bill and joel i use the word very loosely) vs when it is your kid. my best friend came out to his conservative parents and while they reiterated that they loved him no matter what, they still had to "work through" accepting that it meant not getting the exact future they had envisioned for him, and they still went through a period of denial even though he was in his mid-20s and had known this about himself for some time before working up the nerve to tell them.

joel walks in on his teenage kid not just fooling around with a partner of the same sex, he walks in on her fooling around with, in his eyes, an adult. cat & ellie may not see 17 and 19 as all that different, because they are in a time where the rather arbitrary 18yo = adult line has been erased, but that line is likely very much still there in joel's head. he sees an adult woman in his teenaged daughter's room, tattooing her, giving her drugs, and fooling around with her. any parent would have flipped their lid, MY parents who were lesbians would have flipped their lid. to quote judy gellar on friends: "that's a lot of information to get in thirty seconds."

should he have said experimenting? no. should he have implied that the 17yo didn't know herself well enough to know what she's saying about herself? no. but to joel - she is high, she is a kid, she is mad at him now for interrupting and embarrassing her in front of cat. and let's be so for real, joel miller does NOT have a good record of thinking before he speaks, nor has he really been shown to acknowledge and share his emotions more than a handful of times.

this has all been a very long-winded way of saying i think slapping a blanket homophobe label on joel is utterly lacking in nuance, context, and literally any critical thought. i think saying his behavior is OOC is lacking those things as well because at the end of the day he is an emotionally damaged/emotionally constipated old man from Texas who probably internalized some of those ideals whether he meant to or not.

and i think it is very clear that despite that misstep, he loves and accepts ellie for who she is. he shoves a man who calls her a slur, he asks about dina with the same awkwardness that my dad has ever asked me about a significant other with, he says dina would be lucky to have her, and he still sees her as his daughter at the end of it all.

for the rest of the episode:

honestly, top to bottom, fucking loved it. joel making her guitar rather than finding it? carving the moth in himself? infodumping about the tools? sheer perfection.

ellie being a little gremlin and digging her hand straight into a cake, joel/pedro singing (even if pedro wasn't actually playing lol), the SPACE CAPSULE AND THE TAPE, we got a baby girl and a forehead kiss, we got a joel and ellie who are as domestic as it gets, it was all incredible.

i loved the changes made as well (for the most part): eugene being the trigger for ellie's realization; the delayed timeline on her moving to the garage and their estrangement; seeing some things unwind from joel's pov as opposed to ellie's; the little joel and maria convo (GIVE ME MORE) and uncle grumpyyyyyyyyy; also i would happily watch joel shove seth a thousand times over. i loved ellie trying to work through her logical list of questions and then immediately panicking and shoving them in a drawer when joel knocks.

PORCH SCENE PORCH SCENE PORCH SCENEEEEEEEE i'll be so honest at first i was like why the fuck are they giving this to us now? but i loved the scene so much i don't care lol and i do think, in the end, it was good placement for it. i think it gave us everything we needed to see to make ellie's behavior thus far make sense (her reaction to the pregnancy, her wanting to do daddy-daughter patrol). AND JOEL SAID I LOVE YOUUUUUUUU i cannot believe we got that.

honestly one of my favorite things about this season has been how just upfront about what exactly joel & ellie's relationship is in a way the game (to my admittedly limited knowledge) never was.

also at the end of it all, just absolutely top notch performances by pedro and bella, as always. all of it was just fucking incredible, i cannot believe we are so blessed to live in a timeline where they are our joel and ellie, and they love each other so deeply offscreen too.

issues? needs more tommy and maria. needs more minutes per episode. needs more episodes in the season. and also the museum needed to be longer really. that's such a big chunk of the game and i know they gave us fresh new stuff but also...dinosaurs with hats 😭

[phantom-of-the-501st]

Why I think Sam has a right to be annoyed

Okay, waffle time! 🧇

I've been thinking about this since I watched Thunderbolts, but I've been thinking about it even more when it comes to the way some people have been placing the majority of the blame of the Sambucky Divorce™ on Sam (keyword there being some).

Honestly, if I was Sam, I'd be mad too. Sam has had to do a lot of work to be seen as being worthy of taking on the mantle of Captain America. It wasn't as simple as just taking the shield and the title, he had to show people that he was capable. And then he was tasked with rebuilding the Avengers, with, as far as I can tell, little outside help. I'm sure there are people who will give him a hand (like Joaquin), but for the most part, this is Sam's job to do. He somehow has to try and reconstruct a group that honours the legacy of not just the people who many see as heroes, but the legacy of many of Sam's own friends. That's not an easy task to do.

So, I don't imagine he's too thrilled that while he's working on trying to piece together this team, Valentina comes swanning in, in the middle of people trying to impeach her for experimenting on people, and simply goes "I have the New Avengers" and for the government to just... accept that? Sure, the public reaction wasn't great, but I imagine there would have been some pushback on whatever team Sam brought together too because they're never going to be what the original Avengers were. But for Sam, who is putting in all this work to take on the mantel of Captain America, to build a team who can help protect anyone, and to honour the legacy of his friends, this is a kick in the teeth.

And on top of all of that, the New Avengers are in the hands of the government, which is exactly what Steve didn't want. Steve fought against the Sokovia accords so that this wouldn't happen and Sam stood by him through all of that. The New Avengers being government-operated is a dishonour to Steve's legacy, and to the legacy of the rest of Sam's friends, so of course he's going to be upset with it all.

And obviously he's going to have issues with Bucky being involved! Bucky knew what Steve was fighting for with the Sokovia accords and yet he's going against all of that with this new group. Not to mention he now works for the person he was trying to help to impeach!

Sure, Bucky is going to have his reasonings for why he's doing all of this, but to say that Sam is wrong for having an issue with this is missing a huge part of Sam's character. Additionally, I don't think Sam suing for copyright infringement is a bad idea either. As far as we're aware, his team of Avengers doesn't exist yet, so he can't just ask the government to scrap the New Avengers because he'd have to justify the removal of a group of people who are currently in place to protect the people of Earth when he, at this point in time, doesn't have anything to offer up in its place. Suing for copyright isn't asking to dismantle the team, it's just asking to not dishonour the legacy of the Avengers by using their name for a government-owned group led by someone who was being pushed towards federal prison.

I've seen people getting annoyed at Sam for having an issue with the New Avengers being composed of ex-assassins/criminals (and how that's also disrespectful to Bucky considering Sam knows what Bucky has been through) but there's nothing in the end-credit scene to suggest that that is the problem he has with it. Admittedly, there's no concrete evidence that his issue is anything that I have stated above either, but I'd argue that it makes more sense, and is more in character for those to be his reasonings behind it than to assume he's suing just because he doesn't want criminals in the Avengers. The original Avengers were also composed of ex-assassins/criminals! Sam knows this and it would be downright hypocritical of him to use that argument against the current group.

We don't know how the conversation between Sam and Bucky panned out, just that it went poorly. Honestly, I think Sam has reasonable grounds to be annoyed, just like I think Bucky likely has some reasonings as to why he's staying with the New Avengers. I don't think it's as simple as one side being right and one side being wrong here, but I do think Sam's frustration is justified.

Do I think this is the end of Sam and Bucky's relationship as we know it? No. They've been through worse together, so I'm sure they'll sort things out. They're just going through a rocky patch for reasons that, to me, make a lot of sense.

[Side note: I also disagree with the whole "Bucky now has a family" mentality that people have been pushing following Thunderbolts* because what about the time he spent with Sam, Sarah, and the boys in their community? I'm not saying that the Thunderbolts don't count, because obviously they play a huge part in his life now, but they certainly aren't the first family he's been a part of in recent years.]

[gojosbf]

what is also interesting about yuuji's domain expansion is that sukuna looks more like when he was in yuuji's body, it is not his real form neither how he looked when he was in megumi's body, it's almost like he's a part of yuuji and we are seeing sukuna through his eyes, that yuuji will always associate sukuna with himself. it almost tells you the amount of guilt, blame and responsibility he's been carrying, also maybe through this dissection he means to set megumi's soul and body free.

[smartestmammalintheuniverse]

How did Prime decide on Diane being killed using the Omega Device? The bomb that killed C-137 Diane and Beth was aimed at Rick C-137. The bomb only takes out the garage and doesn’t reach the rest of the house or neighboring houses. Rick survived because the car shields him. It would’ve taken time for him to make the device, a long time, based on size, alone. Beth Prime talks about her mother like she hated her. Prime mocks other Rick’s for even loving her. It does show his obsession when he says, “our wife.” Rick C-137 talks about having a bad marriage whilst pretending to be Prime.

So why kill Diane in every universe? As his marriage failed, he saw how much Rick loved his wife and how all of these other Rick’s refused him because of their families. His hatred for Diane mixed with his narcissism(which is why he didn’t kill Beth) and insecurities from Ricks denying him sent him into a spiral where he created the Omega Device. A device that could kill his wife over and over again and also punish every Rick who denied him…