#they think of him like an icon more than a beloved book character

[null-doesnothing]

being into sherlock holmes is so stupid like. yeah here's my blorbo, you don't know him. you think you do, but unless you've systematically fallen in love with him through the personal writings of his retired army doctor best friend you really don't. yeah. he's one of the most popular and well known characters in the world. I have interacted with at least 60% of the current fans. hey do you think he associates the sounds of waterfalls with death? do you think he'll ever get over that? I won't. good talk

[thefirstknife]

The Thread Unfurls Against the Clocks: Saint-14 and how we saved him

Hello. It's time. I already did one summary of how we saved Saint, but I want to go even more in-depth because I later realised that so much of this is unavailable and also happened so long ago that most people don't even know where to look for it and what to look for. I also want to address all the adjacent lore like the stuff about the Sundial and also how it all relates to the current plot.

Finally, I want this to serve as an explanation that there's something very weird going on and that the Saint we have is the real Saint. I've seen people already super resigned after this week's story, simply accepting that there was a reveal that he is truly the "wrong" Saint. I want to analyse all we have on Saint in-depth and focus on how we saved him to show the level of detail involved because I think it's important to understand things in the episode.

Obviously, really compelling lore changes can happen and work out, but in this case I'm just not feeling it, for various reasons. We'll see, but I still think this is worth putting together and that we have plenty of indications that we saved him "correctly" so to speak.

Saint is a unanimously beloved character and one that is so closely linked to our player character as well. The setup for his return was established so long ago and was kept consistent the entire time. I feel like the stuff in Echoes is almost like a culmination of it all, as well as a reminder about what we've done. We'll suffer for a bit for sure but there is no doubt in my mind that Saint will come from this safe and healed. No matter what ends up being revealed, I believe he will be fine.

Contents! Long post under. Spoilers for Echoes Act 2, mostly just in the Echoes section.

Intro

Curse of Osiris quest

Season of Dawn

What's up with the Sundial?

Echoes

Intro

I'm not sure how familiar people are with the full scope of Saint-14, but he's been a character since the beginning. We didn't know much about him at all; the first mention was in vanilla D1 in this grimoire about the Darkness, listing what various characters think about it. Saint's thoughts:

Saint-14's Position argues that the Darkness was an invading armada, an alien force of incredible - but tangible - power. Some adherents believe that this armada sprang from species rejected or discarded by the Traveler for their sins.

All things considered, he wasn't that far off! Really cool detail, but this lore was referenced in TFS, in the lore book Chirality, and especially Saint's bit:

* Saint-14's Position is the most eminently practical of the bunch, no matter how the man himself protests that such an obvious facet of the truth doesn't require a formal philosophical stance to be named for him.

There's 10 years separating these lore pieces! But they're still being referenced because there are some incredible nerds writing this.

This doesn't tell us much about Saint, besides that he's thinking in very practical terms. He views the Darkness as something that can be fought back. Note that at the start we don't know anything else about him, not even if he's a Guardian. In House of Wolves, we get this lore where the author (the Speaker) is going off about Osiris. We get a little piece about Saint; Saint-14 suggested that Osiris should become Vanguard Commander and also vouched for Osiris. This was the first piece of info that these two are familiar with each other. How far we've come since!

After that, we get his helmet as an exotic in The Taken King (though it has no lore other than the flavour text) and a little bit of insight into him with the first proper lore tab that actually features him as a character. It shows his iconic headbutt and ends with him deciding to follow Osiris to Mercury. A few little details are mentioned in flavour text on the following items, mostly quotes about or from Saint: 1, 2, 3, 4. Number 3 is interesting:

"Stand with your back to the Wall, and not even the Darkness itself will move you." —Saint-14

Remember that!

There's a few more in Rise of Iron, again, just flavour text. He's really funny here, and being his usual heroic self here. That's it for his stuff in D1. Saint-14 was some sort of historic figure, he was a Titan, he fought in historic battles, he fought against the Eliksni and he had some sort of connection with the Speaker and Osiris. He was a practical man, a warrior and a protector.

He wasn't really a full character or anything and only had a few quotes and one lore tab where he actually does something. But the stage was set! He was clearly a character they wanted to explore and they did, in Curse of Osiris.

Curse of Osiris quest

Curse of Osiris returned his helmet as an exotic item and immediately gave us hints about the expansion of Saint-14's character and where they're leading him. The lore tab on the exotic is a conversation between Cayde-6 and Lord Shaxx where Cayde-6 insists that Saint is not dead, while Shaxx is just kind of resigned to it. Cayde also notes that Saint was a "weirdo:"

C6: No one ever put down a Kell faster than he could. But man, he was a real weirdo. SX: Eccentricity was his strength. C6: Talking about the Speaker like you're related to him is eccentric. Claiming he's seen the future, that he fought Six Fronts fueled on the idea that some Guardian savior is coming? That's insane.

Wait a minute. Saint-14 claimed he's seen the future and that he believed in "some Guardian savior"? What's that about? Wink wink. Nudge nudge. To make things even more obvious, the remaining conversation is... about the Young Wolf:

SX: Belief is a hell of a thing. C6: Sure, yeah. One Guardian's going to fix everything. Kick Crota off the Moon. Make it look like us Vanguard know our head from our hindquarters. Hey, where are you going? SX: One of the new recruits from Old Russia I've had my eye on—entering the Crucible for the first time. C6: Hey, maybe they're the one. We'll call 'em Crota's End.

Maybe Cayde should've started making prophecies too! But yeah. This was the first proper hint about what they cooked up for Saint's story. Saint has apparently seen the future and believed in a "Guardian savior" and he fought for the City fuelled by this belief. Very interesting! To make things weirder, there's Saint-14's Gray Pigeon which also features some strange lore at the end where Saint addresses an unknown person:

To my inspiration. Your final gift to me I now send back to you. It will be good to see you again.

This was wild to read at the time because it clearly references something that we don't know about, but that's incredibly important to Saint. The theory was that he might be talking to us, the Young Wolf, but how?

That's where the quest comes in. Curse famously didn't have a lot of content, but it did have the post-campaign quest with Lost Prophecies. They were a set of quests where we essentially had to collect items to transform "prophecy tablets" into weapons in the Infinite Forge which was a sort of interactable area in the Lighthouse on Mercury:

There were a total of 11 of these, with the final one being to acquire the Perfect Paradox. Each weapon came with a prophecy in the flavour text and a lore tab. The final one however, Perfect Paradox, triggered a whole separate quest in two parts. In part one, we discover an old Vanguard comm signal coming from the Forest which we follow and analyse to discover that the signal is from Saint-14.

Detecting traces of familiar Light up here. Wait… Saint-14? He's been missing for decades. Saint was one of the greatest Titans who ever lived. Hero of Six Fronts. All that power and he just… vanished. The City's still looking for him.

This quest also features this conversation from Osiris and Sagira:

Osiris: If Saint-14 is lost in the Infinite Forest, it's because he came here to find us. Sagira: You can't blame yourself for every missing Guardian, Osiris. Osiris: For him I can.

If you're lucky (or unlucky, depending on how many emotions this gives you), you can hear this line from Sagira in Presage. This is where it comes from!

The quest is kinda set up in a way to make you think we'll actually be saving Saint here. We finally found his comm signal and it's leading us into the Forest. He's clearly affected the Vex and the Forest with his Light and he's fighting back. Osiris gets involved and urges us to find him. The whole thing feels like we're doing what we usually do; find a problem and fix it.

Part two of the quest continues in a similar vein. The quest is called "Not even the Darkness," btw. Remember that quote from Saint from The Taken King? Yeah. Anyway, we go back to following the trace leading us to Saint, into the Infinite Forest, this time into a simulated future. There, the Vex get alerted and summon a big Minotaur; Hagios, Reverent Mind (whose name means "sacred" in Greek, so essentially... Saint). We kill the Minotaur and then the area behind it opens; it appears to have been guarding it.

When it opens, we're treated to a bittersweet sight:

The area is beautiful, but it's a tomb. Saint-14's body is laid out like this in a pillar of light, surrounded by piles and piles of dead Vex. The Vex fought him for an unknown amount of time and they ended up respecting him; enough to create a tomb and seal his body and set a whole Vex mind to guard it, and apparently, revere it. Despite how hopeful we've been about saving him, he is dead.

As we approach his body, we take the remains of his personal weapon. Back at the Lighthouse, we use these remains and the prophecy to craft the weapon as it was; Perfect Paradox shotgun. The prophecy attached to it:

A tale that's different from the rest: the thread unfurls against the clocks. The one the Speaker loved the best must have a perfect paradox.

The prophecy is from Osiris, of course, which means that at some point when he was making them, he already knew about the strange fate of Saint-14. Not that he is dead; Osiris hoped to find him in the Forest. But his prophecy talks about time travel and a paradox. In the lore tab itself, Saint attached a letter to the gun in which he once again addresses a mysterious person. This person is now definitively identified as us:

All I have left is this weapon. The Cryptarchs say you crafted it yourself, built it out of scraps and Light and sheer will, inside the Infinite Forge. I'll make sure it finds its way back to you.

Well that's correct. We crafted the weapon in the Infinite Forge. But we only did so after recovering its remains from Saint's body, so how could he have had the gun in the first place? Almost like... there's some sort of a time travel paradox involved. This was naturally bizarre at the time; we had nothing else on Saint or any of this during this quest, just these vague baffling hints that there's more to the story. Especially since it involves our character; Saint repeatedly talks as if he had already met us. He says so in the letter as well:

I mourn that I will never reach the heights you have. To me, you represent everything a Guardian can become. Yours is a thriving City. So different from mine. My whole fourteenth life I fought to make my City yours. I never finished.

He knows that our City is thriving and that we are "everything a Guardian can become." But we've never seen him before. This was really confusing and there was also not even a promise that it would be resolved. But it felt like something that they cared about deeply.

It would take 3 years until we got the resolution.

Season of Dawn

This is a big one in general because they really wanted to be as attentive to all details as possible. Even before the season started, they released several weblore pieces to remind us of Saint and bring up some important information.

The first one was The Accolade, about Saint's past and heroic deeds revolving around saving people. The weblore focuses on explaining what his "accolades" are; aka his purple ribbons on his armour and ship. They're gifts from people he saved; tokens of appreciation that turned into a type of a ritual with Saint. If you're saved by Saint, you have to give him something purple and he will wear it with him and remember your name. It ends with Osiris shortly after we found Saint's grave. Osiris went to see it for himself, to check, to make sure. He also laments that he never asked about the ribbons.

The next one is a glimpse into the past, a conversation between Osiris and Saint as Saint hands him the Vanguard Commander title. It's a good look into how that all happened, as well as the differences in approach and beliefs between Osiris and Saint.

And then they released The Sundial weblore (TW for suicide if you're reading the full weblore. One of his Echoes does not have a good time). Osiris is found on Mercury with a machine he built, putting finishing touches on it. It's called the Sundial. Osiris built it in response to Saint being dead, the implication very much being that he intends to use some form of time travel or some other time shenanigans to change the outcome and save him. Osiris never recovered from learning that he's dead and from seeing his dead body in the tomb. The design is Sagira's, and he's also helped by Drifter, who shows up to check the math. I'll go more into the Sundial later.

Osiris wraps up his work on it and turns it on. He splits into his Echoes and enters the machine to start searching through Saint's timeline on Mercury with the intent to find the right moment with the right Saint to save him; he is specifically looking for the moment when they drain his Light.

Osiris’s Echoes scour Saint-14’s timeline on Mercury. But the corridors of time refuse to give way to the moment they need: Saint and the Martyr Mind in the depths of the Infinite Forest. The Echoes work tirelessly for weeks, then months in the space between moments. In desperation, he splits the dozen copies into many thousands more as the work continues fruitlessly.

Osiris experiences what the kids these days call "epic fail."

None of the Echoes ever approaches a Saint. They never find the right one.

Despite all the work put into this machine and all of his knowledge and skill, Osiris doesn't manage to use the Sundial successfully. He never finds the right moment and he never saves him. It's worth noting that when Osiris used thousands of his Echoes, he experienced the time and life of every single one. But for Osiris outside the Sundial, it's only been a few moments. In those few moments, he essentially lived thousands of lifetimes. And died thousands of times. I need people to understand the amount of effort he put into this and what kind of an emotional toll it had.

Completely defeated, he gives up and hides the Sundial. He moves on with his life, doing what he always does, until stuff suddenly changes, which is explored in the next weblore: Actions of Mutual Friends. Us killing the Undying Mind in the season before Dawn changed everything, for the Vex and everyone else. We essentially created a point of divergence. The Vex suddenly had to change their projections of the future; Osiris noticed this and got very concerned.

While he wasn't looking, his Sundial was found, by Psion sisters. They figure out the potential of the Sundial and work to reactivate it, which they succeed in. The Red Legion descends on Mercury, looking to use the Sundial to essentially rewrite the course of the Red War and win.

Osiris finds out and goes to Ikora, to the City, to ask for help. This is the topic of the next weblore: Desperate Times. Osiris defends his choice to make the Sundial to save Saint, despite everybody else basically trying to explain to him that the universe might implode because of it.

This is a lot of setup, but it's necessary. It all leads into what happens in the season and what the season revolves around; saving Saint. It wasn't even a secret, as they very clearly showed it right away in the trailer (best trailer they've ever done). The seasonal gameplay revolved around us using the Sundial to defeat the Red Legion and stop them from trying to figure out how to essentially change the course of history. We had to fight three different Psion bosses, one of each of the sisters, until the end, when the three of them joined together into a single Psion entity for us to defeat.

As we were using the Sundial for this, Osiris also told us about what he made it for originally. He explains a little bit about it and about his failure to succeed, then warns us against using it for ourselves, but doesn't stop us.

I told you before - I tried to save Saint-14. I bent the rules of time using a prototype of the Sundial. It allowed me to walk the corridors of time here on Mercury. But I failed. I never found Saint's final moment against the Vex. I encountered younger versions from his first mission to Mercury, among others. But none were the right Saint. The prototype Sundial still exists, accessible off the main deck. And it can still travel through Saint's personal timeline on this planet. But venture there at your own peril. He cannot be saved. I have walked every permutation of those corridors with a hundred thousand of my Echoes and found nothing. Saint-14 is lost.

Despite this, we make the attempt and then the first part of the quest starts. When we use it, the Sundial reacts. It reacts specifically to the Perfect Paradox:

The Shotgun you crafted in the Infinite Forge is reacting to the Sundial! An onboard transponder is broadcasting coordinates: a path through the Sundial, crossing two time periods. The prophecy blueprint you used to create the Perfect Paradox must have included this broadcast. If you can open up the initial chamber, I can align us to the first time period the broadcast is referencing.

The two time periods are two points in time where it's relevant that we meed with Saint. The first one is in the Dark Age, when he came to Mercury with civilians in an attempt to reclaim the planet and help the struggling population of Earth with resources and possibly old Golden Age technologies. We connect to Saint via comms. He is devastated and demoralised. He failed to protect his people and he's also under siege by the Eliksni and is more or less resigned to dying. Lucky for him, we get there in time to help him out of this situation.

After the battle, we talk to him. Our Ghost hesitates a little but then decides to do it anyway; he shows Saint the projection of the Last City from the future, to prove to him that the everything will be fine if he continues to fight and stays hopeful. We also give him the Perfect Paradox, to help him fight. The loop is set! This gun was crafted in the future and was brought to the past. In time, Saint will die with it and we will pick up its remains from his body, allowing us to craft it in the first place.

Saint-14: What is this? Ghost: The Perfect Paradox. Built by my Guardian out of spare parts and Light and sheer will to aid you.

More importantly, this is the moment that Saint spoke of to other people that made him seem crazy. As we've seen in lore from years before, Saint kept saying that he saw a thriving City and that there's some sort of Guardian savior coming and that he's seen this future. He also wrote in that letter how we gave him the shotgun and how we saved him. This part of the quest is constructed around this lore. This moment is what Saint remembered and talked about. We saved him and invigorated his will to keep going. This is why he is the way he is.

We part ways and leave the Sundial. Ghost immediately goes to check if we messed anything up and to let us know that there's one more point in time to go to:

Okay, let's check the Tower databases to make sure we didn't just wreck the entire timeline. Queuing "Saint-14"… Records state he was a former Commander of the Tower. He vanished on a final mission to Mercury in search of the exiled Warlock Osiris. Well, those are the big beats. Timeline intact. Good job, Saint. But our trip's not over. That broadcast I picked off the Perfect Paradox marked one more set of coordinates within the Sundial.

The second part of the quest started a bit later, but it doesn't waste any time once it does. We're immediately linked up to the other point in time that Perfect Paradox reacted to and we're back in simulated future, in the same area where back in Curse we fought Hagios who guarded the entry to Saint's tomb. Except now, we find Saint who has just had his Light drained from him by another Vex mind; Agioktis, Martyr Mind (note that the name is more or less in the same vein as "hagios," aka "sacred," dedicated to Saint). This is the moment Osiris was looking for, but couldn't find it, because he didn't have the Perfect Paradox.

This is the Vex mind they built to destroy Saint and we find him as his Light has already been taken. But Saint is still eager to fight and greets us happily. Unfortunately Saint is then restrained, the Vex doing everything in their power to kill him. However, this time he's not alone. We're there and we fight in his stead. We manage to piss off the Martyr Mind enough for it to now move to restrain us, which frees Saint, returning his Light to him as well. Saint then delivers the final blow to the Martyr Mind which frees us!

Saint-14: It's been a long time, my friends. I've chased your memory for centuries. You should go now. Those who could kill me are dead. You've made sure of that. Ghost: And what if the Vex take your Light again? Saint-14: Impossible. It cost them everything to build the Martyr Mind. When you crushed it, they were doomed. Ghost: You want us to leave you? You'll be stuck here for years. Saint-14: You've both done plenty. Just open the Infinite Forest gate for me. I'll meet you the long way around, at the entrance. Saint-14: What's a few more years of fighting Vex?

Saint decides to stay in the Forest and wait until we open it from the outside for him, in the future. This is how he leaves in the right time, instead of too early for his timeline, so nothing else is really affected. He waits it out and then exits the Forest at the time of Season of Dawn. This gives us one of the shortest but also the best cutscenes ever. As a note, in the cutscene, when Saint leaves, the Forest gate looks new, like from Mercury's past. This is because of the Sundial's effects on the surface of Mercury at the time, splitting the surface through time, so the Forest gate looked like it's from the past, but it's not. It's present day Mercury.

When we report this to Osiris, to say that he's amazed would be an understatement. I often quoted this from him, especially when people were being weird about Osiris and claiming he doesn't like us or whatever:

In his youth, he talked often about the Guardian who inspired him. I should have guessed it would be you.

We've done the impossible. Literally. The quest is called "Impossible Task." Osiris did everything and he couldn't do it and he lost hope that it would be done. But we did it, because we created the time loop; a connection with Saint that allowed us to use the Sundial in a way Osiris could not.

Saint has been saved! After this, he settled in the Tower. He had a series of minor quests and errands, the best one being the quest for the Devil's Ruin exotic which featured a really long and funny conversation between Saint and Shaxx. Another one is obviously the Corridors of Time quest which is genuinely cannot be compared to anything else as it was a community puzzle of epic proportions. An article that showcases just a little bit of how bonkers it was.

The important part of it is that the culmination of the quest featured us finding our own grave and Saint narrating a eulogy for us. This is important to us now for two reasons: 1) on our grave was a sword, a sword we received as an actual item in TFS, directly from the Traveler to fight the Witness 2) it's possibly a different timeline. The second one is unclear because we simply can't know when we die, but the eulogy specifies that the sword was shattered in the final confrontation where we died. Our current sword is chipped, and it wasn't when we originally got it in the campaign. So either this is a different timeline where it didn't shatter or this isn't that confrontation when we die and it will shatter at some other point in the future.

In this post I also noted how the music that plays in our grave scene and the music that played in TFS when we get the sword is the same. A very clear and deliberate choice. This is a very cool link to Season of Dawn that they brought back over 4 years later.

With the Corridors of Time puzzle ending and the Corridors closing, that concluded the Saint stuff. He was finally saved and he could rest in the Tower! And we know everything that has happened since.

Okay. So...

What's up with the Sundial?

We don't know! But I want to get into it because it's one of those things that they made sure to hint about, without fully explaining it so obviously every weird nerd online (me) wants to figure it out.

Back in The Sundial weblore, there are some peculiar and never explained details about the Sundial that have been kinda concerning and just intriguing to think about. There are a few lines essentially saying that whatever is at its core, it's not good. First is Sagira's:

“That work was theoretical! If the Vanguard find out what you did to build it—“

What did he do to build it? No clue. The infamous core is described only as:

He turned to look at the fluctuating glow of the exposed chronometric core.

When the Drifter shows up, he immediately reacts to this, fairly negatively which makes things more ominous since Drifter tangles with a lot of weird and bad stuff himself. So if he's disturbed about this...:

Drifter walked to the central spire and put his ear up against it. “This core…” he said, leaning close. His eyes darted back to Osiris. “It’s whispering.” Osiris’s expression didn’t change; his arms didn’t uncross. “We’ll seal the core away. I understand the ramifications.” “Good luck keeping that contained. Not something I would bargain with, hotshot.”

The core "whispers." Osiris understands the ramifications. They're both so frustratingly vague so the only thing we're left with is this ominous vibe of something bad being at the center of the Sundial.

This whispering, alongside a few other concerning descriptions and implications of the Sundial is mentioned in yet another weblore that I only briefly mentioned earlier because it wasn't relevant to Saint stuff; Sisters. It's about the Psions finding the machine.

The Psions could somehow feel the Sundial. Or perhaps just the effects it had on time on Mercury, even while it was powered down and hidden.

“Small disturbances,” said oldest Ozletc, the wisest. “Little currents in this timeline. Can you see them, sister?” “I can taste them,” said second-born Tazaroc, the hungriest of her sisters. “I can feel the edges.” Third-born Niruul, the quietest among them, reached her hand out to test the air. “As can I,” said she. “And something else. The source is disguised. The technology is Human, but refined. Surprisingly so.”

They also note the whispering, as well as its potential:

A strange device shimmered into existence around them. They looked up the length of an enormous, golden spire. “It whispers,” said Tazaroc. “Then block your ears,” said Ozletc. “Do you see the potential in this?” “Chaos,” said Niruul. “No,” said Ozletc. “Opportunity. See how it tugs at the fabric of our time? Can you see the seams?”

They also make the strange comparison to the OXA:

“It is so clear,” said Niruul, reverent. “An unobstructed glimpse into what was and what will be.” “Not the troubled ramblings of a mad thing, like the OXA,” said Tazaroc.

The Sundial offered something more and better than the OXA ever could, implying, perhaps, that these machines have something in common; possibly something beyond simply Vex technology. My insanity about this has been going on for a long time and also helped with the TFS CE lore. A bit of a tangent, but also possibly related, depending on what the core is.

Furthermore, Osiris refused to tell Saint about details of the Sundial, including remaining vague about its core in this weblore:

[u.2:13] One is a manifestation of Light. The other… reserved for Taken Kings. Better suited for traversing the Sundial because of what lies at its core. [u.1:14] One day you’ll have to tell me exactly what you and the Guardian did to bring me back. [u.2:14] We did what we had to. Trust me.

So what is it? Well, we know:

It whispers (very obvious and easily detected, both by Drifter and the Psions)

It's something bad (Drifter's reaction to it is uncharacteristic for a man who tangles with the Taken for a living and deals with strange dangerous artifacts all the time)

Osiris' Echoes are better suited for the Sundial because of its core, and Echoes are something "reserved for Taken Kings." Bizarre way of saying it to avoid explaining it

Similar to the OXA, and possibly any other time/prediction machines based on Vex tech (because the OXA itself is confirmed to be more or less the same as the FWC Device, for example)

To recharge it, we needed to feed it Light. This is particularly concerning with what Osiris says about it: "The Sundial is my greatest creation and my greatest regret. What I had to do to forge it I can never take back. As a result, it has components that consume Light. And if you're serious about operating it again, you'll need to feed it. Nothing is free. Ever."

What this points to, to me at least, is Darkness. The core is a Darkness artifact of some sort, merged with Vex tech. This only gained more proof to me with all the new lore about the Darkness and how it governs the mind and memory, especially when the Vex are involved. To the Vex, the future is memory. Merging Darkness artifacts with the Vex might be able to create dangerous time travel machines or machines that displace consciousness through time and timelines, like the OXA and the Device, allowing the user to "predict."

To make things even more convoluted (and me more insane), there's an almost perfect explanation for what this artifact might be. So perfect that I feel like it's too good to be true, tbh. It's a Nezarec relic. I will now list everything that connects this:

It would explain the Darkness artifact. Nezarec's relics were full of Darkness and were being used by utilising that Darkness

Drifter's involvement and experience with it. Hell, the Drifter may have even provided this relic to Osiris, since he had one and did not particularly enjoy having it, which was detailed in Lightfall when they showed us how he got it. Plunder was also rich on this, showing us that the Drifter immediately recognised the relics and understood what they were.

Whispering. Darkness in general has a whispering thing; the Veiled statues, the Witness, the old stories about Dredgen Yor, there's a lot of whispering going on here. But it's really super connected to Nezarec. His relics were whispering to us in the H.E.L.M.. The glaive? Nezarec's Whisper. Another disciple also called him a "whispering Nightmare." All of Root of Nightmares armour lore has it as well, with Nezarec tormenting his victims with whispers; for example here, and here, and maybe even here. I could go on. He's the whisper guy. Literally, Nimbus called him Mr. Whispers.

Psions. The Psion sisters found and reactivated the Sundial... Somehow. They especially were able to almost instinctively locate it despite Osiris hiding it well enough. The Psions also needed quite a lot of time to activate it again and admired the complexity of the encryption, despite it being human, so we can't really say that they found it easily because Osiris' did a poor job of hiding it. Were they drawn to it? Were they drawn to it because of its core? Psions are inherently linked to Nezarec. It's been confirmed back in Lightfall, but also curiously mentioned again in TFS with the Lost Ghosts quest (timestamped here). I'm definitely hoping for some Psion content in the future but this is fairly interesting in this context. Season of Dawn was really the only proper Psion-focused storyline.

Osiris' coma. His coma appears to have been somehow paracausal. At least strange! The scans were showing that he has "no residual activity" in his brain, despite us having lore from his POV showing us that he had a very vivid and visceral activity. He was able to feel some external stimuli, but was mostly drifting through strange visions, seemingly hopping between his... Reflections. Or possibly Echoes. His final thoughts here are also of the Sundial; as if his mind was somehow stuck in there, or lost, trying to find his way out of it. This could just be a consequence of his memories constructing something for him to experience so obviously it's just cycling through what he knows, but...

Waking Osiris up from his coma happens with the use of Nezarec's relics. An important point to note here is that this wasn't so much about it being Nezarec's relics; it had more to do with the inherent Darkness they consist of and Darkness can help the mind and consciousness move or awaken. However, given all of this and given his POV from the coma and the possibility that his mind might have been stuck somewhere with his Echoes in the Sundial, if the Sundial's core is a Nezarec relic, then a Nezarec relic had more chance to bring him back. It's such a perfect connection that I feel insane thinking about it and it feels like I'm constructing a fanfic, but also. I think it's worth considering. Cutscene of him waking up + article from Bungie that details on the whole idea of waking him up with Darkness and why that's important for understanding Darkness.

I have to mention the other theory, especially in comparison with all the above to try and illustrate why it never made sense to me and that is the popular theory that the core of the Sundial is an Ahamkara bone and that the Sundial worked on wish magic.

I'm not quite sure why this was even a theory to be honest. Even back in the day of Dawn, this never really resonated with me because it seems that the only reason this was a theory was Drifter saying "not something I would bargain with" and... Possibly whispers? Obviously a lot of things can whisper, and Ahamkara have been also mentioned doing so, but I don't find this significant to Ahamkara enough for identification just through that. I also don't think that one mention of the word "bargain" is enough either. Many have bargained with Darkness too. There's simply an overlap between Darkness and Ahamkara here, but there are also other pieces that are more closely linked to Darkness like eating Light. We could go even further, if we're considering Ahamkara; we could also consider Worm Gods, for example. The point is that several things can fit here, but I feel like there's overall more things pointing at Darkness.

What gets me the most is that they alluded to this in Season of the Wish, in what seems fairly obvious as disproving this theory to me. Riven and Osiris talk:

Riven: Isn’t it unfortunate your City hunted down all of my kind, Osiris? You might have wished for Saint-14’s return from the Forest. Osiris: And have him trade the Vex’s torment for yours? Riven: Perhaps you simply didn’t want him back badly enough to pay the price. Osiris: Save the bait for someone naïve enough to take it.

I talked about this earlier, but there's several layers of why the moment I heard this, it sounded like it's here to disprove Osiris using an Ahamkara. First, Ahamkara wish magic would be felt by Riven. If Osiris put an Ahamkara into the Sundial, then he did use wish magic and she would know about it. In that case she would not have said this; perhaps she would've teased him about using her powers to save Saint, but that would be a completely different sentence.

Second, Osiris is well aware and wary of wish magic. He knows that had he done so, he would've probably put some form of torment (wish magic backfire) on Saint. This, to me, indicates that not only did he not do this, he didn't even consider it as an option.

Third, if Osiris had an Ahamkara bone and was considering to use it, he could've just done so without building the Sundial. Why bother with the machine if you can just instantly make a wish and the wish doing exactly as you want? Obviously with a caveat, but still. It would've worked right away. Perhaps the Sundial was an attempt to contain the backfire, mixing wish magic with Vex tech to try and prevent the whole thing from going backwards, but even then; Osiris knew there are possible consquences.

And fourth, even if he did all that, it just didn't work, which would be quite uncharacteristic for wish magic. It's paracausal; it should override any Vex tech in the Sundial. If he made a wish, he should ask for a refund! The Sundial worked only because of the paracausal loop we created with the Perfect Paradox and it had nothing to do with anyone's wishes; definitely not ours.

One interesting thing for this theory is the way they said how similar wishing and simulations are. It happened in Wish and now again in Echoes. Here's a freebie for the Ahamkara theory enthusiasts.

Personally though, I simply feel like there's much more connecting and sensible explanation with it being a Darkness relic, rather than Ahamkara.

HOWEVER. The truth is that we simply don't know. I am personally more into it being Darkness (and Nezzy specifically), but I could be wrong and the Ahamkara theory could be proven correct somehow. Hell, it could be something completely different. It could also be nothing; as in, we will never know because they won't tell us because it doesn't matter.

And technically, it doesn't! Nothing really changes if this doesn't get answered. I want that to be clear. This isn't some sort of lore breaking detail. But you know. The nerds would love to know. I really wanted to get into this now that we've had a resurgence in interest about Saint and how we saved him.

Echoes

Okay, so why this monster of an essay? Well, because Echoes revolves around Saint and the Conductor trying to convince him that he's the wrong Saint. That Osiris acted out of grief and pulled a random Saint from the timelines, that he's simply satisfied with what he got because he couldn't get his original Saint because that Saint died.

Saint is convinced in this; that he's some sort of an aberration in the timeline, a simulation or a copy or just the wrong Saint from the wrong timeline. Even an error that must be corrected.

And I simply think that people are too quick to jump to the conclusion that this is the story being told, especially because of the radio message this week where we're shown that Saint and Osiris suddenly have different memories. But I feel like people have already forgotten the other radio message, from week 1. You know, the one where Saint and Osiris talk about their memories and the memories match perfectly:

Saint-14: Osiris. Do you remember when we knew? Osiris: Knew what? Saint-14: That we were meant to be together. There was one moment... though, it took us time to get to it. Oh, but our Hunter Vanguard, so smart, Tallulah... she knew before we did. All our little squabbles and bickering. She saw it first. Osiris: it, uh — ah, well, I was — obtuse. Stubborn. I couldn't recognize my own emotions. Then, Tallulah told me to.. "Be serious". Saint-14: Haha! I remember. So yes, she told me later. Was good laugh. Osiris: Well, I'm glad you found it so amusing. Saint-14: Who could not look back and smile? And I remember your smile, then. So knowing, and so full of our future together. Osiris: What brought these memories on? Saint-14: Hmm. I think about others who will have those same moments now that they know they will a future free from the Black Fleet. Now they have a chance to find love and be happy, like us. We can look behind, but also forward. We cannot see what is coming, but we know it is good. Osiris: You're certain? Saint-14: About us? Yes. Since the beginning. Now, and always.

We have this memory as a lore tab as well. I think this was given to us deliberately, to show us that Saint and Osiris have identical memories and that Saint's memories were never in question and that their history is perfectly aligned... Until he got yoked. Something changed when he got yoked, not when he was saved. This is a new development, which tells me that the Conductor did something to him, rather than Osiris saving the wrong Saint. Because until now, this was never a problem. Saint never had discrepancies in his memories before, with anyone he ever interacted with.

If we take a look at the whole story of how he was returned, it's beyond clear that Osiris was very fixated on saving his Saint, not a random one, and that we went to great lengths to do just that. We only ever interacted with one Saint, the same one, and we linked each other with the Perfect Paradox. It cannot be any other Saint, even with the existence of other timelines. This Saint and this Perfect Paradox are ours, from our timeline, the originals.

However, other timelines do exist. And some entities can access them. The Vex are obviously first on the list. Characters like Elsie and Osiris have also seen them. And clearly, the Conductor should be capable of this as well. It's beyond clear now that the Conductor is Maya Sundaresh. Maya, who was simulated 227 times by the Vex and had those 227 copies of her wandering the Vex network and different timelines.

If the Conductor knows where to look and how, she could see these timelines, including these other Saints, and she could've fed Saint false information while he was yoked. Implanting memories of other Saints perhaps, or something similar.

I know a lot of people weren't there for Dawn, let alone Curse. There's a lot of information about Saint here and a lot of really interesting clues from the past about what's happening now. It's also really interesting how many little details have been transferred through the story over time, showing that this is a plotline they care about very much and want to make sure doesn't get messed up.

There's probably a lot more stuff we could get into for speculation and explanations because there's still more stuff that plays a role in this. The Infinite Forest is a big one, and I suspect the Perfect Paradox is as well, as we're likely to get it next week or the week after as part of the story. Because it should be relevant to the story! It's an inherent part of Saint's story and why he's with us now in the first place.

So what's really going on? We're not entirely sure yet, but assuming that the Conductor is correct and that her messing with Saint is revealing something about Saint's legitimacy is I believe wrong. I think she's using him as an experiment and that she's messing with him, and by extension, with us as well. There's no way that we've had a "wrong" Saint this whole time and that nobody ever had any issues with him. That nobody had any discrepancies between memories with him. Not Osiris, not Ikora, not Shaxx, not Saladin, not Zavala or anyone else Saint interacted with since he's been back. As I mentioned, literally the first radio message shows us Saint and Osiris with matching memories.

It only started after he was yoked. Which means that the yoke and the Conductor did something to him, possibly shown him some other timelines or fed him false information.

Can't wait to see where this is going. I'm not sure how much this Act will cover and if we'll get a resolution to this right now or if it will stretch to Act 3, though if it doesn't get stretched, then I wonder what will the draw of Act 3 even be. Possibly just dealing with the Conductor? I'm very excited. This episode being so focused on Saint and Osiris and the whole throwbacks to Dawn and other past content has been really good. I'm enjoying it very much, this is my entire jam. I had high hopes for Echoes and so far it's been going great.

I'm super excited to see how they solve this and what comes of it and how much of this information will be relevant. And of course, if it will end up being correct! Because as much as I have my theories and as much as I'm convinced that there's something off here and that our Saint cannot be the wrong Saint, I could still be wrong. Looking forward to finding out!

[duckprintspress]

Genderfluid Characters for Genderfluid Visibility Week!

This week, October 17th to 24th, is Genderfluid Visibility Week! There are depressingly few books out with genderfluid rep, and even then it’s often open to interpretation whether a character is genderfluid or not, but we’ve done our best to gather a modest list. (btw, if you’re wondering why it’s 7 reads and 5 covers, it’s cause our anthology Aether Beyond the Binary has three short stories with genderfluid characters!) The contributors to this list are Meera S., Shannon and 2 anonymous contributors.

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A Flame in the Night (New Age Gothic series) by Morgan Dante

The start of bloody decadence…

The definition of marriage: Two people and their silver-haired vampire.

In 1924, Paris is a bastion of sexual freedom, even for shell-shocked Leon Laflamme, the most dramatic blond this side of the Seine. After years of loneliness and secrecy, he’s married the clever and sumptuous burlesque dancer Claire. However, Leon truly finds liberation when he meets the stoic, intriguing, and silver-haired Count Matthias, who offers true freedom in his dark gift: immortality.

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Both Can Be True by Jules Machias

Ash is no stranger to feeling like an outcast. For someone who cycles through genders, it’s a daily struggle to feel in control of how people perceive you. Some days Ash is undoubtedly girl, but other times, 100 percent guy. Daniel lacks control too—of his emotions. He’s been told he’s overly sensitive more times than he can count. He can’t help the way he is, and he sure wishes someone would accept him for it.

So when Daniel’s big heart leads him to rescue a dog that’s about to be euthanized, he’s relieved to find Ash willing to help. The two bond over their four-legged secret. When they start catching feelings for each other, however, things go from cute to complicated. Daniel thinks Ash is all girl . . . what happens when he finds out there’s more to Ash’s story?

With so much on the line—truth, identity, acceptance, and the life of an adorable pup named Chewbarka—will Ash and Daniel forever feel at war with themselves because they don’t fit into the world’s binaries? Or will their friendship help them embrace the beauty of living in between?

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The Brilliant Death (The Brilliant Death series) by Amy Rose Capetta

For Teodora DiSangro, a mafia don’s daughter, family is fate.

All her life, Teodora has hidden the fact that she secretly turns her family’s enemies into music boxes, mirrors, and other decorative objects. After all, everyone in Vinalia knows that stregas—wielders of magic—are figures out of fairytales. Nobody believes they’re real.

Then the Capo, the land’s new ruler, sends poisoned letters to the heads of the Five Families that have long controlled Vinalia. Four lie dead and Teo’s beloved father is gravely ill. To save him, Teo must travel to the capital as a DiSangro son—not merely disguised as a boy, but transformed into one.

Enter Cielo, a strega who can switch back and forth between male and female as effortlessly as turning a page in a book. Teo and Cielo journey together to the capital, and Teo struggles to master her powers and to keep her growing feelings for Cielo locked in her heart. As she falls in love with witty, irascible Cielo, Teo realizes how much of life she’s missed by hiding her true nature. But she can’t forget her mission, and the closer they get to the palace, the more sinister secrets they uncover about what’s really going on in their beloved country—and the more determined Teo becomes to save her family at any cost.

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The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang

Paris, at the dawn of the modern age: 

Prince Sebastian is looking for a bride–or rather, his parents are looking for one for him. Sebastian is too busy hiding his secret life from everyone. At night he puts on daring dresses and takes Paris by storm as the fabulous Lady Crystallia–the hottest fashion icon in the world capital of fashion 

Sebastian’s secret weapon (and best friend) is the brilliant dressmaker Frances–one of only two people who know the truth: sometimes this boy wears dresses. But Frances dreams of greatness, and being someone’s secret weapon means being a secret. Forever. How long can Frances defer her dreams to protect a friend? Jen Wang weaves an exuberantly romantic tale of identity, young love, art, and family. A fairy tale for any age, The Prince and the Dressmaker will steal your heart.

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Aether Beyond the Binary Anthology

The core concept of Aether Beyond the Binary is simple and compelling: create intriguing main characters outside the gender binary and set them loose to explore the modern world twisted or unchanged, enhanced or destroyed by magical aether. This power source may replace technology, supplement it, or oppose it. These characters may be agender, genderfluid, bigender, or any other non-binary identity. The thread that unites these tales is exploration: of the world around them and of the self. We propose no final conclusions; instead, we demonstrate how far-reaching the questions are and how expansive the range of possible answers can be, thereby broadening the discussion about the nature of gender and the place of genderqueer characters in fantasy fiction. We hope you’ll join us to explore the endless possibilities of these magical worlds. 

How Your Garden Grows by Nicola Kapron, True by Kelas Lloyd, and N(ae)ghbours by Scarlett Gale have genderfluid characters!

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What are your favorite books with genderfluid characters?

View all the books from this year’s and last year’s Genderfluid Visibility Week lists by visiting our shelf on Goodreads!

Browse this book as a rec list on Bookshop.org!

[mostlyvoid-partiallyflowers]

Okay I just speedran The Sunshine Court in like 12 hours. I will be rereading it soonly and giving more coherent thoughts but here’s my main takeaways:

- Thought #1: Holy fuck holy fuck holy fuck this book exists. I am on the floor I’m so fucking excited.

Spoilers below the cut

- I absolutely love that we get both Jean and Jeremy POVs. It’s great especially because Jean is an oblivious and traumatized and if we just see things through his eyes we would never get to see Jeremy PINING like an absolute icon. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it’s about the pining, the waiting, the yearning. I’m simple man, I like my books gay, angsty, and with tension you could cut with a knife. This delivers on all accounts.

- I love getting to see the end of tkm from Jean’s perspective. Getting to see him watch the Foxes v Ravens game was incredible. I’m a very big fan.

- Renee and Jean time! Renee giving Jean her cross necklace. I’m in tears, I’m dead, I’m on the floor. It’s not the right time for us ���. Excuse me? I’m unwell.

- Kevin Day, queen of my heart! Getting to see how someone other than Neil canonically sees Kevin is an absolute treat for me. Jean’s weakness for beautiful men has become known. Me too Jean, me too.

- Jeremy, light of my life, I can’t believe you’re rich. At least your family sucks because I don’t think I could take it if your family was wealthy and nice.

- Jeremy + Jean meeting for the first time. Jeremy trying and failing to play with a yo-yo. I’d die for you. They are ADHD 🤝 Autism solidarity me thinks.

- Montana has a pro Exy team which is not at all plausible but I’ll let it slide because one Montana mention for the win and two the team is called the Rustics which is absolutely what we’d call a pro sports team if we had one. The only reason Montanan’s at large would commit to indoor lacrosse is that Kayleigh Day was Irish and so solidarity.

- Laila and Cat, my beloveds. The description of their apartment has me yearning for the same. They have a bay window with a window seat okay. That’s like in my top three desires for a home.

- Carboard cutout dog with a classic Nora pet name. I’ll love Mister B forever. I love how Jeremy keeps moving him around. I love how Jean hates it.

- Trans characters! Poly characters! Nonbinary characters! Nora, my birthday has come a little late but damn this was a gift!

- I am absolutely pronouncing Jean wrong in my head probably 70% of the time.

- I’m so fucking angry at the Ravens. My blood is boiling and I want to cry. Jean deserved better, Kevin deserved better, Riko deserved better. All the Ravens deserved better. I want to put Tetsugi Moriyama into a blender and feed him to the crows.

- Jean was 16. I’m absolutely incandescent with rage.

- Jeremy is so patient with Jean and I will forever love him for that.

- This book was a lot shorter time frame than I was expecting, mainly because I keep forgetting there’s going to be another one.

- The food control but is driving me crazy. It makes me so fucking mad. Let my boy eat. I want him to be happy.

- Jeremy has seen Jean looking 👀 ummmmmm hello? “More exclusively than you do, I think.” I’m on the floor.

- Laila buying Jean a sex toy?!? Oh my god. What would she even get him? I feel like he deserves a vibrating cock ring or something fun like that. That way service top™️ Jeremy Knox can use it on him when they finally get together.

- I love seeing Neil from Jean’s perspective. It’s funny how different he is from my perspective and Jean’s/everyone else’s. I’ve spent so much time thinking about him from Andrew’s pov that it’s weird seeing him through anyone else’s. Everyone is like this scrappy irritating son of bitch is gonna get what’s coming to him, and Andrew is like, well I can’t not fuck him.

- The second Jean mentions Drake to Neil. And then Neil immediately calls a hit out on Gr@yson. Neil, you will always be famous to me.

- Jean-Yves! I hope he starts using his full name again at some point.

- Elodie :(((((( I can imagine what Jean’s going through and I am so afraid for him. If he keeps pushing all these feelings down he’s going to break sooner or later, but probably sooner.

- Jeremy’s unconditional support of Jean has my whole heart. Jean has friends now. I’m crying.

[humbledragon669]

S1E5 – The Doomsday Option Write Up P3 - Saturday (The last day of the World) from "He was waving"

Let’s have a go at getting this episode wrapped up, shall we? I have less than a page of notes to write up from my rewatch so it must be possible, surely.

The first thing I want to talk about is the scripting for Adam’s character. Throughout the season, we’ve come to learn that he is capable of great love, for his surroundings and the people in his life. This scene is no different. Notice how he has no desire to rule over anywhere other than his beloved Hogback Woods? To the extent that he’s happy to give entire continents over to other people for them to do the ruling. He also appears to be making the offering based on what he thinks will make them happy, so even though his birthright and resulting powers are well established by this point, his true human nature is still motivating his decisions. And even though the Satanic part of him wants not to care about his childhood friends, he’s physically incapable of letting them leave without following them and trying to convince them to stay. You can see how devastated he is when they finally do leave:

I find it interesting that the one thing that seems to really spur on his despair is Dog abandoning him, which I suspect represents the loss of all the love that he has in his life. I think that the following montage, complete with an emotional string-heavy soundtrack, subtextually conveys the choice he has to make for himself – stay as Adam, the little boy who loves, or follow his destiny and become the Destroyer of Worlds. It’s clearly not an easy choice – the fact that the playing card background that commences the montage is of the Great Beast shows where his thought process at the beginning of this sequence – and the last thing we see in the montage is the playing card being covered up, leaving us in doubt about what his choice he has made.

If you look very carefully, you can see the King of Hearts icons on the bottom left corner of the card on the table, which tells us his decision but the outcome of his decision is represented more clearly in the script and soundtrack, where the last word he hears in his memory sequence is his human name, melting his dual tone scream into the single tone of a child. And just in case you were in any doubt, his eyes lose their demonic red glow – his choice is complete. It pays off too – Dog returns to him instantly, and again I think this represents the return of love to his life. It revives him and makes him fully human again. It’s a pretty beautiful analogy really.

I didn’t find an awful lot to talk about of note in the next few scenes – they’re incredibly focussed on the narrative, and very purposefully bringing all the threads together, so just to sum up we have the following main character groups coming in to land (get it? Because they’re all going to an airbase landing strip… *tumbleweed* Yeah, yeah, I’ll get my coat…):

Adam and the rest of The Them.

Aziraphale, Madame Tracy and Shadwell.

Anathema and Newt.

The Four Horsemen.

Crowley and his flaming Bentley.

Fast forward to our first little Easter Egg for this section – the book that the soldier is reading in his watch station office is another one of Neil’s:

I have had a few, very inconsequential niggly questions about the sequence of scenes prior to the Horsemen’s arrival at the air base (like why does R.P. Tyler pick his dog up when the Horsemen arrive instead of just continuing across the road?), but this one has bothered me more than I would like to admit. Who is the extra person in the car that the Horsemen arrive in?

Even the Script Book is no help here (or even the original book) – it specifically states there the car has four people in it, each one of them a Horseman. So who is he? Where does he come from? Where does he go? I did remember to check the FAQ master list for this one, but I couldn’t see it referenced there anywhere.

The next thing of note I could pick out is that Adam refers to the Horsemen as “them”:

Not if you’re them.

Perhaps this is just a necessity of language, but it stood out to me because of the nickname that his own gang has allocated to themselves. There are more parallels to come when the two groups meet on the tarmac at the air base (not least the fact that each one has four members, and that both groups show up on bikes), but this was the first time I felt like the comparison was being made explicitly.

Two more niggly questions about the next couple of scenes:

I know R.P. Tyler’s sole purpose in this story is to act as a satirical NIMBY, but why does he stop The Them on their way to the airbase? Those kids were legitimately not doing anything wrong and he gives them a hard time for it. Not only that, he doesn’t seem to give two shits that they’re happily cycling off to a classified military site when he does find out where they’re going. Such a weird man.

Why does the soldier ask for a screwdriver to fix a computer? I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years, and I could count the number of times I’ve had to use a screwdriver for troubleshooting on one hand, and I certainly wouldn’t have said that responsibility would fall to a “muggle”, rather than an IT professional.

Still, when it comes to unanswered questions, Death has got it nailed:

SOLDIER: Who the hell are you? DEATH: I am neither of Hell nor Heaven.

Uh, right. Pretty sure that’s not what he asked but what does it matter? All the people in that room aren’t paying attention to the Horsemen after that anyway. According to the Script Book, they’re simply unconscious at this point, rather than dead, but that feels quite inconsistent to me. Why would the Horsemen leave them alive? They’re all going to die in 31 minutes anyway. And can we just take a moment to appreciate how poignant this line is?

Except the dying. When it comes to some things, machines will never replace people.

Deep. And really fucking dark. Did someone say this was supposed to be a comedy show? And does anybody else find the real-life foreshadowing of the Russia-Ukraine conflict really creepy?

I know the two countries were in a very precarious political position for a long time before war actually broke out, this exchange just gives me a bit of a chill.

I find it interesting to see that the corporeal representations of Famine, Pollution, and War are all disintegrating in front of our eyes as Armageddon approaches. Personally I would have thought that the opposite would be more appropriate – that they get stronger and more powerful as their presence in the world starts to take hold. I wonder if the idea instead is that they are disintegrating as corporeal beings with the result being that they disseminate into the atmosphere.

I have no idea if this is intentional, or even if anybody else will see the same thing, but there’s a split second in the Bentley where, to my mind, it looks like Crowley has a small pair of horns:

It happens so quickly before he turns and faces forward ahead again, and his hair is looking pretty dishevelled (unsurprising, given his journey up to this point, although it looks pretty well styled in the next shot). If it’s intentional, I give serious credit to the people that snuck that one in – the subtlety and attention to detail is astounding. And if it’s pure coincidence? I think it’s brilliant all the same.

At this point, I want to give a bit of consideration to the music for this episode in particular, and it was the music playing on Aziraphale’s arrival at the airbase that drew my attention to it. It made me realise that each group of people, or storyline thread if you’d prefer, have their own style of music, and that each of those styles has been playing during their respective scenes throughout the episode. Sometimes the music doesn’t even stop when moving from one scene to the next, but simply blends into the relevant style required by the characters. There’s very little of this episode that is without a musical backdrop, and the fact that we have been moving so rapidly through musical genres without it being uncomfortable to the audience is absolutely incredible.

And speaking of music, we have the return of a song that’s actually already been used once in the season before – Bohemian Rhapsody. We first heard its use way back in episode 1 when Crowley arrives at the graveyard to meet Hastur and Ligur, but the lyrics we hear this time are different, and don’t seem to have as much meaning. Makes for a pretty epic entrance though, doesn’t it? And if you couldn’t tell how delighted Aziraphale is (as Madame Tracy, obviously) when he realises that Crowley has showed up (bearing compliments no less) by the way he speaks his name, check out this swoon:

I love how nonchalant Crowley is when he gets out of the car here, and with the perfect line to announce his arrival too. It makes me wonder how long he’s been thinking about what he’s going to say when he finally arrives at the airbase, and how many other punchlines he’s already rejected. I also wonder how much of that swagger is him desperately trying to make up for the emotional wreck of a display Aziraphale was witness to earlier that afternoon. To be fair, it totally works – he oozes cool as he saunters towards the gates of the airbase and, oh so comfortably, takes his place beside Aziraphale, with reassurances that he’s going to save the day.

That. Was. Hot. Just me? Perhaps I’m just too hung up on the idea that I think Crowley feels he has a lot of ground to make up for, having failed to rescue Aziraphale in the book shop. That growl though… It’s almost enough to make you miss the fact that Crowley talks to the “army human” without his glasses, and openly refers to Aziraphale as his “friend”. There’s a pretty obvious statement being made here – no more hiding. He also points out that they’ve “come a long way”. I can’t believe that he’s referring to the physical distance travelled by them both at this point – as the crow flies I would make it to be about 40 miles. There’s more to his sentence that we don’t get to hear (something of a running theme in this show I think) because The Them are about to turn up, giving their own rendition of a Queen song credit.

Sounds rather like the middle section of Bicycle Race, don’t you think? And there’s one more thing to note before we wrap this episode up: Adam’s treatment of the soldiers that turn up on the tarmac is a mirror image of what Death did to the soldiers inside the bunker, causing them all to pass out at his will. As I said earlier, we’ll see some more of those parallels in the final episode for the season.

And that’s it for this episode. As always, questions, comments, discussion – all welcome. See you next time 😊

[evenmyhivemindisempty]

Hi! Do you have a favorite ship for each Boyd character?

I am sorry this one took me so long!! Couldn’t be helped - I’m such a multi-shipper in general, and it was so tough narrowing these down! (And I still cheated a bit!😅 But here we go!!)

Steve Murphy: Oh man, it’s gotta be Javi. They’re coworkers with baggage!! There’s so many trust issues and the occasional bad blood but it’s clear this is also the most intimate relationship in both of their lives. These are lonely, obsessed workaholics who can only really take solace in each other. Plus, Holbrook staring longingly at Pedro Pascal will never get old. But I gotta give an honorable mention to Steve/Pacho Herrera. I mean - sexy, openly gay narco kidnaps DEA agent, proceeds to greet him soaking wet and shirtless, fresh off a swim. He made him a cocktail! Steve said they were good!!! How long did you stay there after, Steve?? Be honest with us!!

Donald Pierce: I am a HUGE multi-shipper for Pierce. I don’t think I’ve seen a Pierce ship that I don’t like! I like them all! But my all-time favorite has gotta be Gabby/Pierce. There really is an entire story with those two we only get little glimpses of – she calls him her boyfriend (although it’s unclear how honest she’s being in that scene), but more than that, they were *friends*! They were both comic book nerds! She managed to steal 20k in cash from him! They were probably so close at one point, and it implies *so much* about what Pierce is probably like in his private life, with people he trusts, because I cannot see Gabriela Lopez being good friends with somebody who exclusively acts like an overly masc mercenary asshole. Never gonna get over how the original script calls for Pierce to leeringly describe Gabby’s “long legs” and “long hair” to Logan, but Holbrook notably nixes that bit. There’s respect there! There’s love! There’s betrayal! It’s so good!!

Cap Hatfield: Aww so a friend of mine turned me onto Nancy/Cap! It really is interesting how this loyal little murder bunny decides to straight up tackle his beloved uncle for whipping her, and I do adore the idea of them getting together in some capacity later. I bet stone butch, maybe virginal, Cap would have a hell of an interesting time following the commands of a woman who absolutely knows what she wants.

Clement Mansell: Oh, Raylan/Clement for sure. Clement has a massive daddy kink and a need to prove himself to male authority figures in his life! Sweety/Clement has some similar potential, as Clement does really respect Sweety and wants to impress him, but ultimately Sweety is just not capable of handling Clement in the way he needs. Clement’s a brat that secretly yearns for someone to be able to just put him on his back and show him his place, and that’s Raylan!

The Corinthian: Oof, this one is so hard. I wanna ship this pansexual icon with all the characters!! Dream(both Morph and Danny)/Corinthian, Gault/Corinthian and Hob/Corinthian all really intrigue me for different reasons, but for some reason I keep gravitating back to Calliope/Corinthian and Rose/Corinthian, cuz I think Corinthian deserves a better god to worship than Dream!! I honestly can’t decide which one I ship more between those, *but* I’ll probably go with Rose/Corinthian just because of the sexy threesome potential if you add in Carl or the Good Doctor. (Rose and GD both topping Corinthian together?? GD sexily teaching baby dom Rose a thing or two??)

Eli Klaber: Oh Klaber/Voller for sure. Klaber is absolutely unhealthily obsessed with his boss, and there’s so much good fucked up potential there, especially how Holbrook describes Klaber as almost being suckered in by Voller offering him unconditional love for the first time in his life.

Ty Shaw: I’m in two camps here. For the sweet stuff, Sancholo/Ty is the way to go. They’re grieving together! They both played up how much they *totes hate each other*, but Sancholo was in on the whole bit with Ty the entire time! Sancholo probably had a puppy crush on Abby’s older brother when they were younger. It’s cute! Now, that’s all well and good, but god, in the fucked-up and dark column, Abby/Ty??? LOOK, the Shaw’s are welcoming and kind, but that family was also dysfunctional as hell. The mom didn’t really seem like she was parenting much - Ty and Abby seemed like they were almost the “mom and dad” of the household, and I love them developing this intense and unhealthy attachment/codependency.

Quinn McKenna: Nebraska!! No question. All those *looks* Nebraska was shooting his way?? Adoring and soft but hungry at the same time?? Nebraska thought he was cute and precious, and I love that Quinn pretty quickly starts getting attached to him, too. That conversation they had by the pool…! But you know, Predator/Quinn is spicy too 😌

[bestieriker]

i have thoughts about the pjo tv show but they might not be beloved... (long post, mostly just for myself but feel free to read my thoughts) (also lmk your thoughts! im curious if my experiences are universal) (also obv spoilers for ep8)

now i recognize i am watching this show through the lens of a much older person than i was when i read the books. percy is no longer older than me - he is now just a baby to me. and the actors are so young. so that might be the cause of some of my feelings. also i realize that a tv adaption is not going to be identical to the book. but what is tumblr if not a place to vent my frustrations, despite how irrational they may be?

i'll start with the good because there were some things i liked. i thought the actors mostly did a good job. the effects and sets and lighting and design was all very good, visually i think it was great. i like the gods i think theyre mostly well cast. I don't really have many problems with grover.

ok now lets talk about my frustrations. this isn't going to be super organized or logical. first of all, i had a problem with the characterization. most characters were actually not bad, but percy didn't really feel like percy to me. he seemed kinda darker? (whats he gonna be like when its dark!percy time??). like book percy obviously was not happy all the time, but he seemed light and he made jokes and he was a little goofier and i feel like in my mind he smiled more. tv percy kinda just seems sad all the time. and this might be a controversial take, but i feel like they gave some of percy's best traits to annabeth?? like annabeth was the one beefing with ares the most when he showed up. and a lot of the time she'd have a line that seemed so percy like!!! don't get me wrong - i love annabeth and the actress did a really great job! but i feel like she was kinda percy and annabeth at the same time in a way. i missed percy. also hades was different. they made hades fun which is cute but in the first book at least hes supposed to be kinda scary!!! i wasn't scared of hades at all. hades seems like he'd be a fun drinking buddy in this. those aren't the vibes hades should have, at least not at the first meeting.

ok next!!! where is the fun. pjo was such a fun series and i feel like the show has taken on more of a darker outlook! again i realize its a tv show and it was only an 8 ep run so they probably had time constraints, but i miss the fun little scenes that make the books such a fun read! like the "say hello to the poodle" scene ? or the scene where they're telling charon they died in a bathtub? and don't even get me started on the Crusty's bed scene. they just breezed right through that!!!

and thats another thing!!!! in the book they kept figuring things out while they were in the thick of it. which was fine!!! especially for percy - hes brand new to all of this, he has some knowledge but he makes mistakes because he's a kid and he is in a brand new world! and we get to see him and annabeth and grover get out of these tricky situations and figure things out!!! but in the show they know everything basically instantly. like the lotus casino or crustys scheme. i like seeing them make mistakes and fix it!! i don't think i was ever stressed watching this show (good stressed, like suspense stress) which i guess is in part because ive read the books but also because they were never in too terrible a position. and the kronos thing!!! percy knew right away. he was like oh word big pit? must be kronos. he did everything. like that is way too quick for early percy.

and then this is just me being nitpicky but i don't like how they changed things. like the luke betrayal reveal? where was the scorpion. that was so iconic and they just completely scrapped it! i thought it made luke's character kinda scary! like this guy fully just summoned a scorpion to kill percy. instead in the show hes like swinging at percy and percy manages to hurt him. i'm not scared of this luke. young percy, away from the sea, manages to hurt him? little annabeth scares him off? he runs away? ok big man try showing up again we won't be scared. idk it frustrates me.

one more thing before i wrap up the longest (and only) post i've made in ages. Sally Jackson using Medusa's head to turn gabe to stone was SO iconic. and what a great way for her to show us and the world and the gods how powerful she is. like she went from being sally jackson, mother and protector of percy (who was already pretty sick) to Sally Jackson, Capable of Basically Murder in a Super Cool Way!!!!!! i loved that. but in the show they just have gabe snooping and accidentally getting turned to stone? if i had never read the books and was watching this show with no knowledge of the books, i'd think it was just kinda a lazy way to wrap up a loose end. kinda felt like they took sally's power away (i know she divorced him but it doesn't really have the same gravitas).

ok i do have other thoughts but this is so long already and its bedtime. is it weird that i'm worried the younger cast might come across this? they probably won't care what i have to say but incase they do come across my super long post and read it (i would if i was 15 and starred in a show with a built in fanbase), i hope they take it with the biggest grain of salt. bc at the end of the day people like the show, its profitable (i assume), and i'm just a cranky old lady who doesn't like change. most of the changes i understand why they did it and i respect it. i'm just venting here. and you know what? if they release a second season (and third and fourth and fifth) i will be watching.

i guess i just wish they maybe had more episodes, or longer episodes, so they didn't have to rush it as much as (i felt) they did. overall it made people happy so who cares. have a good night tumblr.

[anghraine]

your blog is great, and you talk about your interests in such a compelling way! out of curiosity, who would you say are your top 10 fictional characters of all time? also, do you use twitter?

Thank you very much! It's hard to be entirely accurate about my personal top ten, but I still enjoyed thinking about it rather than about being sick and miserable, lol, so here's my attempt to come up with a Faves of Ultimate Destiny list.

(This isn't necessarily about evaluating their worth as characters or even as people, but just how much raw affection I feel. It's also not ranked, just the order in which I thought of them!)

Fitzwilliam Darcy from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (the book character specifically) — I know, nobody is surprised. He actually is my #1 choice.

Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars original trilogy — it's always hard for me to choose between him, his father, and his sister, but ultimately, I feel the most powerfully about Luke. I'm not here for soft, sunshiny fanon Luke, but I am super here for a Luke whose personal kindness, strength, and powerful loyalties mingle with his struggle against rage, fear, even hatred, and an inclination to idealize martial violence and solve his problems with it, yet who comes out the other side as the kind of Jedi that Anakin might have been rather than the authorities around Luke succeeding in forging him into something alien to his true nature.

Faramir from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (very definitely the book character specifically) — again, I'm not super into soft and accommodating mundane guy Faramir, but very into the interplay of his basic compassion and gentleness with the repeated descriptions of him as stern, commanding, willful, and just really fucking strange. I love others a lot but no one can take his crown. (He may be uncrowned in canon but not in my heart!)

Gwen Thackeray from Guild Wars: Prophecies and Guild Wars: Eye of the North, games which most of you haven't played and I suspect would not enjoy for dated mechanics reasons, but which won my heart in the original tutorial zone. I have an explanation about Gwen's greatness here.

Attolia Irene from Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief books, but especially The Queen of Attolia. She's so precisely tailored to my tastes in female characters that I was kind of astounded, even though I read the books specifically for her based on my friends' TQT blogging. I mostly don't talk about her on this blog, but my feelings are really strong!

Aravis Tarkheena from CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy. I know everything wrong with Narnia and specifically with THHB, but Aravis, what an icon.

Tarrlok from Avatar: The Legend of Korra. This is another close competition (with his brother Noatak/Amon along with both members of my beloved OTP, Korra/Kuvira), but if I'm being honest, he's the one who scrapes into the fave Avatar character slot. I've loved a lot of tragic villains, but he's really top tier.

Annabella from John Ford's seventeenth-century revenge tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. The title is quasi-ironic; it comes from a dismissive description of her by a super corrupt Catholic cardinal. Both the title and subject matter (murder, consensual sibling incest, a ton of misogyny) can make it a difficult play for some. But for me, Annabella is really what makes the play succeed on its own terms and outshine its Shakespearean inspiration.

Cesare Borgia from Showtime's The Borgias. In my heart this slot goes to both him and his sister Lucrezia (where #8 is definitely Annabella's alone, although I like Giovanni; if only S1 existed this slot would be rightfully Lucrezia's). But if I have to choose between them in the context of the show, I felt his arc was smoother and more coherent and satisfying throughout the show as a whole, so my love for him is less impeded by frustration.

I wasn't actively trying to only choose one character per canon, though it's wound out that way, but here's the exception: Cassian Andor from the 2016 Star Wars film Rogue One (and only that film—I'm not here for the novelization or other EU depictions or Andor or anything except what's in the movie). He's a gift of a character I never expected Star Wars to provide, and half of the only romance in SW that seriously matters to me.

Honorable "rewired my brain" mentions: Moiraine Damodred from Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time (also in the show!), Sandrilene fa Toren from Tamora Pierce's Emelan books, and Lessa from Anne McCaffrey's Pern books were all deeply formative.

As for Twitter:

I definitely don't use it any more. I used to have multiple accounts, though I wasn't super active outside of academia/chatting with RL friends and the occasional random scholar who deigned to notice me. Twitter wasn't really the natural platform for my preferred "LJ fandom expat" style of online writing, and was mostly stuff like this:

[Damn, I had no idea what was coming with "AI" ... anyway.]

I was deciding whether to keep using Twitter as the Elon purchase was going down, and then he immediately did an antisemitism and I immediately cut all use of it. I later got around to locking down all three accounts; I only maintain them to control the usernames. Most of the people I knew on Twitter joined Bluesky around the same time as me, or can be more easily reached on Discord now. I mostly use Bluesky when I feel like microblogging, but it's not a feeling that often besets me.

[mzannthropy]

Sam Claflin's Upcoming Roles

It has been a long dry season for a Sam fan! While we patiently wait for the release of Bagman, allow me to indulge in a bit of rambling about Sam's projects in production, post-production and in development. (As of August 2024)

Bagman - probably a mid horror film, I'm okay with it. Sam plays a father protecting his family from the titular monster. I like his looks in the trailer. The kid who plays his son is cute.

All The Devils Are Here - originally titled Animal. I like this title better. Seems a very low key movie, they seemed to have filmed it without anything being announced about it. The synopsis is: "Secluded in the middle of Dartmoor, four thieves find themselves hiding out with nothing to do but count the money and time to kill." Sounds like it could get quite dark, and I like that! Suki Waterhouse is in it, but I suspect she is not one of the four thieves (although she might be), so it is possible her role is a smaller one. What I'm really hoping for with this one is nice scenery. The director, Barnaby Roper, is also a photographer, so I think the shots of Dartmoor will look gorgeous, even the film will turn out to be bad. I like seeing Sam play villainous/shady characters.

The Count of Monte Cristo - one of the most beloved classics in the world, and Sam as one of the most beloved, iconic heroes! When I first heard of Sam's involvement with this, I refused to believe it for it felt too good to be true! (Silly me--I should know to trust Sam.) I will be counting down time once the release date is confirmed. I will also, more likely than not, go absolutely nuts over it. Bring on all those disguises!

Lazarus - likely a typical Harlan Coben thriller series, (not based on a book but an original idea), you know what to expect from them. It's the nearest thing we get to Sam as a detective. Made more special for me by it being filmed in and around Manchester, where I live. I'll get to see Sam walk the same streets I have! He's also an executive producer, a job he's lately been taking on.

Watch The Skies - this is an animated film, so it's a voice role. It's been in production for a long time (at least 5 years as Sam was still married to Laura Haddock when they recorded, she's also in it). "On a thrilling chase around the earth, an alien castaway and the earth kids who rescue him discover that life, love, and adventure are the same throughout the galaxy." I like that, might turn out to be a really cute kids' film.

Perdition - set in WW2, Sam is an American soldier pursued by a Nazi officer. Getting ahead of myself by tipping it to be his best film yet. (Will go back to this to see how right or wrong I was, lol.)

Barbaric - this is the best fucking thing ever, even though I know almost nothing about it. The description is enough. This is the type of role I've wanted for Sam since forever. A barbarian cursed to do good, with a talking horny axe voiced by Patrick Stewart as his companion? A medieval fantasy with equal measure of gore and humour? Is the universe giving me everything I wished for?

[indigo-scarf]

🎀Pansy, My Beloved Mean Girl🎀

Although her goth-grunge haircut in the PoA film turned fanon!Pansy into an edgy badass, book!Pansy is a caricature of the girly mean girl.

Pansy bursts “[into] tears” over Draco's hippogriff injury, and later “simpers” at him; she wears “very frilly robes of pale pink” to the Yule Ball; she “shrieks” and “giggles” at cruel jokes; she spreads gossip about the Golden Trio's love life.

However, what sets Pansy Parkinson apart from the more celebrated mean girls is that Pansy is completely one-dimensional. While others — Kate Sanders, Sharpay Evans, Regina George, Blair Waldorf — are allowed to be charismatic, attractive, powerful, vulnerable, Pansy is only presented as annoying, “pug-faced” (i.e. an ugly bitch), and “thicker than a concussed troll”.

While other works examine the motives and the secret pains of the mean girl — distant families, insecurities, lack of true friends, pent-up rage — Pansy is simply mean, because she is. You’re not meant to see her as a human being at all; Pansy is an effigy to be burnt.

In the words of JKR herself:

I loathe Pansy Parkinson. [...] She's every girl who ever teased me at school. She's the Anti-Hermione. I loathe her.

So, if Pansy Parkinson is so unlikeable, why do I like her?

🎀 First, because she is girly.

The construction and treatment of Pansy’s character fits what’s termed “demonisation of hyperfemininity”: a trend in media to associate girly girls with villainy, spite, and everything not nice, often in opposition to a virtuous Not Like Other Girls girl (such as Hermione).

If this concept has been used (rightfully, imo) to discuss the mean girls I described above as multi-faceted, then Pansy’s lack of nuance hyperdemonises hyperfemininity. Even her name itself is an insult used to deprecate femininity.

Once you’re aware of this trope, though, it’s not difficult to separate the hyperfeminine wheat from the demonic chaff. There is no doubt that Pansy has condemnable traits, but must every trait of hers be condemned? Is it shameful to pursue your crush, giggle, and like pink frills? Of course not.

For years I thought it was, but now, in the era of bimbocore and barbiecore, I am finally overcoming that internalised prejudice and reviving the girly part of me I had repressed. Now, I really enjoy exploring the positive side of Pansy’s girliness: she’s affectionate, bubbly, interested in cute aesthetics (and in my mind she knows all about beauty products). 💋 Second, because she is mean.

At the same time, observing that a part of Pansy is unjustly maligned doesn’t warrant downplaying her flaws. Just as Sharpay is self-obsessed and manipulative, Pansy is a bigot and a bully. But I love that in a fictional character.

I admit her canon taunts are pretty insipid; you can’t make a “Pansy Parkinson being iconic” quote compilation. Nonetheless, I can only see her wanton meanness towards other girls as a sign of insecurity, which I find sympathetic and relatable — even if JKR refuses to give Pansy any humanity, I simply do not believe that she is the way she is for no reason.

I think Pansy has the need to put others down so much because she doesn’t know how else to feel good about herself — the insipidness of her bullying actually makes her seem even more like someone who lashes out out of desperation for assurance, even if she herself may be in denial about that.

Pansy was probably taught, both by our patriarchal society and by her own individual upbringing, that she had impossible standards to conform to and that other girls were her competitors. 

Indeed, many of Pansy’s insults focus on the appearance of her female peers — beauty standards being the most obvious tool of the system to make women hate themselves and each other.

On top of that, I imagine Pansy’s mother must be overly critical of her and of everyone else too, instilling in Pansy a lack of self-confidence and modelling viciousness as acceptable behaviour — things Mrs. Parkinson herself must have learnt from her own trajectory under patriarchy.

It’s the tragic old cycle of hurt women hurting women, which so many of us end up being part of in one way or another.

Plus, in general, I relate strongly to any character who is an insecure little bastard. I admit it: I have a fragile self-esteem and I’ve always struggled with envy and urges to seek validation in toxic ways. Although I've got a lot better at dealing with these feelings, I love to see a character who makes me feel less alone in my issues.

Lastly, Pansy’s meanness is just fun to write. I find it a fun exercise to come up with the most egregious things for someone to say or do in (fan)fiction. 🌸 Third, because JKR hates her too much.

There are many criticisms Pansy undeniably deserves, but JKR goes beyond those, which makes me feel compassion for the girl.

Exhibit A:

On her old website, JKR once made a post called “For Girls Only, Probably,” which discusses incidents that made her reflect on “being thin”, or “the issue of size and women”.

Besides the hypocrisy of her writing that without addressing the rampant fatphobia in the Harry Potter books, the post itself is full of misogynistic clichés and, once again, demonisation of hyperfemininity.

In the first paragraphs, after assuming (yikes) that a girl on a magazine has an eating disorder and body-shaming her (“her concave stomach, protruding ribs and stick-like arms”), JKR concludes:

This girl needs help, but, the world being what it is, they're sticking her on magazine covers instead.

If you squint, there could be a salvageable point there about toxic beauty standards being pushed by the media, but by the end of the article that is lost in victim-blaming and derision:

[Pink’s] latest single, ‘Stupid Girls’, is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness. ‘Stupid Girls’ satirises the talking toothpicks held up to girls as role models: those celebrities whose greatest achievement is un-chipped nail polish, whose only aspiration seems to be getting photographed in a different outfit nine times a day, whose only function in the world appears to be supporting the trade in overpriced handbags and rat-sized dogs.

[...] I don't want [my daughters] to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I'd rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before 'thin'. And frankly, I'd rather they didn't give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls.

Excessive preoccupation with weight is a ubiquitous feature of a fair few 2000s mean girls — Regina and Blair, of course — but the character JKR’s rhetoric most reminds me of is Shelby Cummings from A Cinderella Story. You know, the one who asks, “What can I get here that has no sugar, no carbs, and is fat free?”

That film puts a lot of emphasis on food as a marker of a woman's morality: while Hilary Duff's Sam is a good-natured, booksmart tomboy who loves greasy cheeseburgers, Shelby is portrayed as a vapid, spiteful girly girl obsessed with dieting.

Hyperfemininity, shallowness, cruelty, and weight concern are all framed as parts of the same contemptible character flaw. Liking beauty and fashion equals being dumb and bitchy; body image issues are an individual moral defect, not a response to hurtful social pressures.

That is exactly the same unfair treatment JKR’s post gives both Pansy and real life “Stupid Girls”, which drives me to side with Pansy. In fact, because of this blog post, I've started headcanoning Pansy as not only being insecure about her appearance, but also struggling specifically with her weight and with disordered eating/an eating disorder — one more element that increases her relatability.

Exhibit B:

The quote cited earlier is from an interview where JKR was asked who Draco had married, and if it had been Pansy. Her full answer:

No! God, it wasn't Pansy Parkinson. I loathe Pansy Parkinson. I don't love Draco but I really dislike her. She's every girl who ever teased me at school. She's the Anti-Hermione. I loathe her. Yeah, sorry! Sidetracked there by my latent bitterness. He married Astoria Greengrass.

Essentially, marrying Pansy is a punishment too harsh even for Draco, because while he is bad, she is worse — but how is Pansy worse than Draco?

As school bullies, they often act together, but Draco’s insults are arguably harsher: Pansy targets appearance and we never see her say “Mudblood”. Draco often mocks Harry’s orphan status and grief, plus uses the word “Mudblood” 15 times (I counted lol). They both abuse their power as prefects, both join the Inquisitorial Squad and try to take down the D.A.

In the war, Pansy clamours for Harry to be handed to Voldemort. Draco enthusiastically becomes a Death Eater, attempts murder twice (necklace, mead), lets Death Eaters and a feral werewolf into Hogwarts, and actually tries to capture Harry to hand him to Voldemort (right before the Fiendfyre).

Not to mention, Pansy is the one always treating Draco like a king and being used or led on — which she puts up with for years. He accepts her affection when it suits him and never reciprocates, yet she remains loyal to him.

If anything, Pansy is too good for Draco. If anything, instead of being sentenced to “not getting the guy”, Pansy should dump Draco.

(Though to me they are both problematic faves & I ship them fixing their relationship <3)

But no, the bad girly girl must remain irredeemable and be punished for it, while the more charismatic bad guy is allowed depth, self-improvement, and happiness.

JKR’s personal trauma with Pansy-like classmates might be a factor in her bias, but the way this bias affects her writing still results in choices that come across as illogical and sexist. 💗 Fourth, because she is a scorned woman.

That said, Pansy’s chasing an emotionally unavailable boy is relatable, and makes for a kind of story I’m interested in (and also contributes to why I believe she has self-esteem issues). However, I have mixed feelings about its canonical ending: on one hand, it’s infuriating; on the other, it’s an effectively moving tragedy.

I don’t like love triangles between a shining Refined Woman and an utterly contemptible Obnoxious Woman, and I tend to root for the latter. I don’t see myself in the glass slippers of the victor; I get horrified at the nightmare of being labelled a despicable failure and being replaced by some perfect, virtuous, better woman.

In Pansy’s specific case, it’s doubly frustrating, because there is some unrecognised good (or at least neutral) in her, and she is flawed in precisely the ways I connect with. Meanwhile, Astoria is much harder for me to like, since her main trait and sole reason to exist is “being better than Pansy” — as per the interview above, JKR was the first to define Drastoria by Pansy bashing.

Astoria is barely a character; she’s a mere tool in Pansy’s punishment and Draco’s redemption, which is doing Astoria dirty, too. Astoria and Pansy are both scenery in Draco's journey — and it’s a bit rich that Pansy is the Corruption-upon-Styx from which he must distance himself, given that his offences are greater than hers.

Another facet of Pansy’s punishment is that she couldn’t marry Draco because she shouldn’t be a mother.

Exaltation of motherhood is a huge theme in Harry Potter: the motherly love of Lily, Molly, and even Narcissa is a great force against evil. Plus, nearly all Light Side women either are (or become) mothers, or have a caretaking role as school teachers.

Being childfree, on the flipside, is stigmatised by its association with the worst female antagonists: Rita Skeeter and Umbridge, who are also hyperfeminine, and Bellatrix — the latter directly defeated by Molly's love for her daughter. The only exception is Petunia, yet another hyperfeminine antagonist, who represents a perversion of motherhood.

So, in this reactionary framework, of course Pansy was forbidden to have children. Childlessness is her burden for being an irredeemably bad woman, which in turn reinforces how bad a woman she is. Inversely, Astoria gets to be a mother because she is a good woman, and motherhood makes her even better (than Pansy).

Paradoxically, though, as much as I hate JKR’s approach to this whole thing, I’m glad my OTP Dransy isn’t canon endgame, because Pansy’s thoroughly whumped figure is even more compelling for it.

I can’t blame anyone if, even considering all this, Pansy is still not their cup of tea — after all, she was created to be as unpalatable as possible. But despite JKR’s efforts to convince me to hate the character, everything about Pansy Parkinson ends up making her very much my cup of pink strawberry hot chocolate.

[space-cat-in-a-teacup]

character ask: lucy, poe, and fitzgerald

Oooh Guild characters, don't mind if I do

Lucy first!

First impression

Anne of Green Gables author! I understand this reference!

Impression now

Best girl, she's just trying to live her life post-Guild arc and exist as best she can. I'm so glad she continues to have a presence in the narrative, and I want to see more of her!

Favorite moment

Guild arc, Moby Dick, Atsushi's prison cell. She bears her scars to Atsushi to show exactly why she hates him (and considering all the other members of the Guild, she's probably used to people who don't understand her pain, who have more to their lives than she could ever dream of) only for Atsushi to reveal he has scars just like hers, that they share this pain that no one else does. And when Atsushi asks if the people on the ground deserve to suffer like she did. GOD.

But a close second is the moment where she drags Atsushi out of the cafe to give Kyouka some peace, explaining to Atsushi why he should give her that peace of mind. It's a cute moment, and I like that it shows Lucy has the deeper emotional understanding in this situation versus Atsushi.

Idea for a story

When I finish that one fic where she becomes a detective thanks to Poe moving to Canada it's over for all of you. And maybe a canon-compliant fic exploring her average every day life at the cafe, how she goes about and what she does with her time

Unpopular opinion

I do not see enough Lucy content to know what opinions of mine would be unpopular or not?

Favorite relationship

Atsulucy is my beloved for a reason... I love they. I would like to explore her dynamic with Kyouka more though, I think they're interesting.

Favorite headcanon

I don't have a specific headcanon, but thanks to some old OC named Lucy I do associate her with ladybugs a lot.

Now, Poe!

First impression

FUCK YEAH I LOVE THE CASK OF AMONTILLADO a shame that isn't his ability BUT HELL YEAH I KNOW POE THIS IS GREAT

Impression now

He's a silly goofy guy who's rivalry with Ranpo is really fun, and the continued use of his ability in present BSD storylines is really cool. As a fan of IRL Poe's writing style and stories, he's an absolute treat. Could use more Cask of Amontillado references though.

Favorite moment

His inroduction is iconic... but the moment where he casually reveals how incredibly wealthy he is and gets to be the one who shocks Ranpo instead of the other way around? Oh, oh that is wonderful.

Idea for a story

As I mentioned above with Lucy, the fic where he fucks off to Canada and accidentally brings her into the mystery business is one I treasure dearly, even if I don't know how to write it just yet. I also have an AU version of him that, while he doesn't have a story yet, is quite an intriguing premise.

Unpopular opinion

I don't have a specific one, but I do feel like the fandom tends to soften him a little bit, make him a little bit too shy and anxious.

Favorite relationship

Ranpoe is iconic, but to be fair it is like... the main one we see in canon. If we're talking about dynamics I'd like to explore with him, I think him getting dragged around by Kenji on a shopping trip or something could be fun (based on that one brief scene in the manga where Kenji tried to help him but couldn't understand him) or a scenario with him and Fukuzawa.

Favorite headcanon

He definitely has an ominous wine cellar in that giant mansion of his. You know why? Cause Cask of Amontillado is-

Now we move on to Fitzgerald himself... oh boy.

First impression

THE GREAT GATSBY???

Impression now

This entire character and the storylines surrounding him are such expertly weaved references to the Great Gatsby that while I don't like the character himself a lot, I do have a secondhand appreciation for him because I love that book.

Favorite moment

The moment he shows up in TJ Eckleburg's house and just casually explains how horrific of a death drinking lighter fluid is kinda funny to be honest?

Idea for a story

...Does that one time I had a Pokemon AU where he got eaten by Reshiram count?

Unpopular opinion

I don't see a lot of content about him so I can't say for sure what is and isn't unpopular?

Favorite relationship

Him with the Guild as an entity, not its individual members. Something really fucked up about how he calls them all his property and that's how he cares about them, not really having much care for their individual cares.

Favorite headcanon

The man is bad at fishing. He likes the idea of it vaguely in that 'white American dads fish' kinda way but he cannot actually fish he's bad at it. If you know you know.

[warmmilk-n-honey]

@isleofgumby made a tier list for kuro characters so I decided to rank the blorbos

I only included the anime versions of the characters that were in the original anime, so even if it's their book of iteration in the picture, it's meant to be rating their original anime iterations. For example, anime Queen Victoria is meant to be lolli Victoria from season 1 despite the image being her book of counterpart. So, if the character only shows up in book of, I didn't bother to include them because their manga and anime counterparts are basically the same.

I only included the kuromyu actors of the musicals I've seen obviously. I think every one of them did a great job, I mainly ranked them based on how iconic I found their performance, how much I felt they embodied their characters, how much I like their characters in general, and how much screen time they got, so some of these actors are at a disadvantage based on how much they were on stage.

my explanation👇

S-Tier- The absolute elite of the elite of kuro characters and actors. I don't just love these characters, these characters make the manga for me, they are the absolute most special guys in the whole world. The actors not only embodied the characters well, but I think brought something new to the table that made their performance exceptional. For example, Madam Red's actor slayed so hard with her singing, but also brought depth to the character that made me like her more than I did originally, she was also really hot.

A-Tier- I love all the characters in A, they are icons they make me smile, they make me love the manga. They might not be quite on the level of S tier, but they are very close. Tanaka's anime counterpart is there because while I think the way he deflates is cursed, he is pretty similar to the Tanaka we know and love and I appreciate his Japanese va a lot. Some of the characters in A tier simply have not had enough screen time to be in S. I was also so conflicted about putting Bard and Tanaka in A instead of S but I decided to because Bard's backstory did leave a slightly bad taste in my mouth, and Tanaka has yet to prove his loyalty to O!Ciel, I'm sorry it had to be this way, but I'm strict.

B-Tier- I feel positive things for these characters, I generally like them, but I don’t love them, I generally like them, but I don't care about them that much. Season 1 Victoria is here because I think she’s hilarious and I do actually like her design. Kelvin’s stage actor is here because I felt he did a rlly good job with the character he was given.

C-Tier- I don't care about these characters whatsoever/they have done something that I don't like. For instance, Pitt would be a lot higher, but he betrayed O!Ciel and his character isn't interesting enough to make up for it so, sorry. The anime iterations of many beloved characters are here because I don't think they were portrayed well and it annoys me, especially the servants.

D-Tier- The absolute bottom of the barrel, characters I actively hate or strongly dislike. Sebastian is mainly here as a joke and would realistically be higher up, but I enjoy hating on him so much and that man deserves to be taken down a peg. Anime Lizzie is here because she was done so dirty it should be considered a crime. Anyway these characters are trash.

This list is subject to change, but yeah. Agni could definitely be on S tier, Jane could be a lot higher than she is since she's very hot, stuff like that.

[adamwatchesmovies]

Misery (1990)

Misery easily ranks as one of the best Stephen King Novel film adaptations. When we look at The Lawnmower Man and Sleepwalkers, that might not sound like much but this is a terrific thriller with high levels of suspense and a showstopping performance by Kathy Bates.

Famed novelist Paul Sheldon (James Caan) has recently sent the last of his successful Misery Chastain Victorian romance novels to the publisher. He is moving on to the next phase of his writing career when he crashes his car during a blizzard. A nurse named Annie Wilkes (Bates) finds him and brings him to her remote home, where she uses her medical skills to help him recuperate. When she discovers that her beloved Misery has been killed in Sheldon’s latest book, she insists he fixes his mistake and refuses to let him leave until he does.

You don’t have to read any behind-the-scenes material to guess where Stephen King got the inspiration for the novel (adapted for the screen by William Goldman). Even if you’re not an author or a creative professional, you can imagine yourself in this scenario. Sheldon is of course grateful to have been rescued. He's even flattered by the way Wilkes gushes over his work. The funny thing is that he’s already moved on from Misery. In fact, he holds a certain contempt for the series, which introduces immediate tension in the situation. You know and he knows, that eventually, Wilkes will learn what he has done. Even before she does, Sheldon could slip. When the truth comes out… how will Wilkes react? Even early on, there are hints that something about her is off. She’s just… too cheery. Something about her demeanor makes you think “This woman is acting all nice and everything, but I need to get away from her”. As time passes, Sheldon’s strength returns but the longer he stays, the closer Wilkes gets to the final chapter of his book. The suspense keeps building until we finally see Wilkes’ true side. Then, this becomes a whole other kind of movie.

It turns out Wilkes is part time bomb and part cuckoo clock. Sheldon needs to escape her care. You feel his terror but as a member of the audience, you're also excited. These kinds of movies draw you in because you do the same thing Sheldon does: you look around the room, looking for tools he can use to escape. Whenever an attempt fails, you're disappointed on his behalf… but inside, you’re also glad because it means the cycle gets to start over.

Bates’ portrayal of Annie Wilkes is one of the all-time great movie villains. The obsessive fan feels so real you can’t imagine anyone else taking on the role. Her voice and mannerisms when she’s calm, the way her temper explodes, the “office” she puts together so Sheldon can work and the changes in her body language/voice when she drops the niceties make her iconic. The memorable skin-crawling scenes that come as her obsession grows instantly burn themselves into your head (the Blu-ray I watched has the most unsettling scene - you know which one - on the cover).

Bates is not the only great performer in the film, however. James Caan makes Sheldon even more relatable than the script and setup already do. You can always tell what he’s thinking and how he’s feeling. If you were in Sheldon's shoes, you’d be doing the exact same thing as him. He's a quick-thinking protagonist, making the ordeal he goes through even more satisfying (and horrifying) to watch. I also want to give a shout-out to Richard Farnsworth as Sheriff Buster and to Frances Sternhagen as his wife and deputy, Virginia. The side story of the authorities searching for Sheldon is essential to the film’s success. Cutting to those scenes gives you some much-needed breathers and cranks up the intensity as the Sheriff gets closer to cracking the case but Buster and Virginia are great characters. Stephen King’s said that many (if not all) of his stories are set in the same universe. I know it’s been more than 30 years so it’s impossible, but it would’ve been awesome if more adaptations featured Buster and Virginia. Not as the main characters, but in fun cameos that got to show off their relationship.

It took me way longer than it should’ve to sit down and watch Misery. The film makes great use of its premise. The performances are phenomenal. It’s got memorable characters and scenes. It’s just a great film, period. (On Blu-ray, May 17, 2024)

[zannolin]

Beloved on the dash. One of my profs was telling the class that he thinks we should watch national treasure. I immediately thought of you. I am inviting you to rant or talk about anything you like about this film and I will most likely be convinced to watch it. The floor is yours 🎤

first, before i go absolutely batshit unhinged about national treasure, i went "aww" being addressed as "beloved on the dash." truly an esteemed title among tumblrinas.

now back to business. ur professor is so fucking correct it's such a silly feel good heist movie. and as i have discussed with my sister i am fully aware that it's something i can enjoy with very little complication bc i am both white and american but at least the first is a bit less like that than the second. all the characters have a boner for america or whatever just be aware but sometimes i'm like damn i wish i lived in whatever fantasy america ben gates believes in bc that sure isn't the one we have here. (if nothing else his speech to the president in book of secrets is good for a laugh especially in a post 2016 america BUT I DIGRESS) okay now that that's out of the way. it's such a wonderful movie. it's batshit unhinged you have nicolas cage playing a little freak who knows way way way too much about american history who looks like he's having a midlife crisis to everyone who doesn't know him and also those who do but actually he's just Like That. he's the fox mulder of treasure hunters with his emotional support nerd and they steal the fucking declaration of independence like. i feel like that alone should convince anyone who even knows what the declaration of independence is to watch it. it's fucking hilarious. they're stealing one of their country's most important/famous historical documents to keep some OTHER british guys from stealing it because there's a treasure map (A TREASURE MAP!!!) on the back. have you ever heard of a more ridiculously delightful premise. i wish every movie was like this.

plus the chemistry is great idk how they pulled that off but i wanna watch these idiots argue for hours. they're all so fucking snarky but in a fun way not in a "i am this year's 928474th marvel movie and i'm incapable of being genuine for even 2 seconds" way. and btw it's stupidly earnest about caring about history and wanting to share it with the world despite its flaws and i can't help it i'm charmed. AND as i've yelled about AT LENGHT it has in my opinion if not hte most iconic at LEAST the most gorgeous score. what the fuck was trevor rabin on in 2004. and also in 2007 for book of secrets. that dude is a musical genius.

it's as quotable as the princess bride (to me, anyway) and like idk man it's genuinely funny and absolutely ridiculous and it knows it's ridiculous and embraces that. and i love that.

also. riley poole 👍

i watched the entire show for one episode him. you know those characters that like you interact with as a child and they alter your entire chemical makeup for the rest of you life? he's one of those for me. that is the best (or perhaps the worst depending on how you feel about me) endorsement i can offer.

[cuntylouis]

i don’t know where to go, but I have to comment on this, I just finished tvl, and yes lestat’s upbringing was brutal,but am I the only one who still find him insufferable most of the time?I feel bad but he gets on my nerves often.another awakening I had is that fandom usually pains him as this effeminate gazel but he is built like a football player, I was confused for a bit. Marius is like a father/mentor to him, surprising. and finally Lesmand, like Lestat clearly was into him and it’s interesting he went to him of all people even after Louis, I’, started to think Lesmand is maybe more deep than fans make it. it’s hilarious Lestat is like I love Louis so much is humiliating,he is so beautiful,what :_____)

I still haven't finished rereading interview with the vampire but i need to reread TVL too at some point. Lestat is an iconic character beloved by many but i found him pretty irritating too even in tvl where he's probably at his most sympathetic. Some book fans also have a tendency to erase his canonical negative qualities like abusiveness and misogyny and make him softer and more gender noncomforming than he is (both in personality and appearance) when he's mostly depicted as a very conventionally masculine character to the point that Akasha calls him the essence of masculinity (derogatory), so it's a whiplash when you actually read the books lol.

With Marius the more i can avoid thinking that character the better. Rice was obsessed with him and put him everywhere and with every character and his every appearance was more boring and repulsing than the one before it. Lesmand have such an interesting and entertaining dynamic though like most relationships in the books it was underdeveloped. But yes it's def deeper than some fans make it out to be and Lestat loves him too in a way i think is a mix of romantic and sibling type of love. Loustat scenes in many books are among the best scenes, Rice often didn't give a shit about Louis and she deteriorated as a writer but still always when it was time to write a little loustat scene she somehow came up with some mindaltering shit it was like she was possessed

[shoezuki]

It me ya boy alcoholic beverage, back again to scream about dungeon meshi XD

Wtf wtf wtf wtf. So much is happenin right now and I simply should not be stayin up so late (early?) to binge it T-T

Firstly Namari is freaking awesome. Love em. Strong dwarf? who knows her way around ore and love to see that she still loves her old party. Goin to check for Falin jus in case. Also love how she 1000% would kill Senshi for turnin mithril into a blade lmfao

Whatever is goin on with the gnomes and the magician blueprint stuff is sketchy as hell n I kinda trust the elves with that info more than them.

Tho tbh, can Marcille have it instead. If I met a dark magic user that was scared of bugs and genuinely loved her party, I wouldn't think twice about trustin em with my life. You can probably destroy the entire world given enough study time but you kickin it with the lads and tryna make a safe dungeon? Based.

Iconic bath scene. Love the sapphics havin a Moment™️. It's what they deserve. Peace and a heartfelt talk before everything comes crashin down around em.

The magician makes me angry!! I mean, they defo hold true to their name. Fully out of their mind. Would happily clock em for exactly 3 pennies. Tho I am hella interested in how they went from lil jester to obsessed with the prince n knowin all the dark arts. I wonder if they tried to resurrect princey n it all spiraled from there. Can't wait to see all that unfold in later episodes.

Also Chilchuck my beloved. Solidified as my fave. Jus barely tho, Laios was gettin pretty close. He acts aloof and disappointed but dude would be completely besides himself if any of em died. Feel like he'll try n scanper off once on the surface but not be able to bring himself to abandon them.

Marcille n the dark arts was a complete surprise like wtf. That's insane. But also hell yes, let the pretty elf lady go absolutely nutso and summon demons or something. She deserves it.

I know what Falin turns into cuz of That One Gif lmfao hut also hyped to see that all turn out.

Ever so slightly disappointed that Laios didn't lose his leg n have to get a cool magic one or something. N am desperate for him to have the sword looked at. Wonder if there's more to the lil critter or if it can help him further. Someone teach this man speak with animals, he needs to connect with the lil guy.

Senshi!!! Grand lad, not much more to say bout him so far but love that he's connected with everyone. N is intent on bein honest about everything he feels.

Love how the orcs went from standoffish to genuine allies. Love the sister's (dammit, I forget her name) attitude to everything. She read Chil like a book and recognises strength regardless of race. Also her fit is very cool lmfao.

Swordsman. Waitin for him to show up because wtf, he wanted to marry Falin?!

I went into this expecting a funny, chill anime. I blame you entirely smh. You made it seem so cool and lighthearted and now I sit at 6am with tears in my eyes because wtf the look on Laios' face when he agrees to go back to the surface. Not been so invested in an anime for a while!!! I stopped after ep 13 cuz my heart can't take much more.

I may have a brain cell when I awaken and come crawling back to cry more about the show as a whole or jus character things. Maybe screech about creatures tbh. I was genuinely distraught when the dragon ham rolled into the blood. Like wtf, I wanna see more dragon meals. I'm bein robbed of cooking content!!!!

~🥃

fuck sorry this has been in drafts for so long but. fuck yes dude i grin ear to ear readin what ur feelin a dunmeshi vsmsdvsudy. its so so so so good. feel free to ramble to me bout it all u want it makes me giddy