#they were trying to persuade me that cannibalism is morally wrong

[i-have-41-protons]

Ah yes, me and my friends: discussing whether or not Ezra Squall would mew, in the group chat. Perfectly reasonable, mhm

[travllingbunny]

The 100 rewatch: 5x04 Pandora’s Box

Another excellent episode, maybe a little less action-packed than Sleeping Giants but still fast, full of tension, new information, and many warm reunions and nice character moments - which are important to see before all these characters start having conflicts and many of these relationships get strained to the point of almost breaking later in the season. 

This one picks up immediately after the last scenes of both 5x02 (the bunker - cliffhanger with Kane as one of the fighters in the pit) and 5x03 (Eden with Bellamy, Clarke and the prisoners after Bellamy has negotiated with Diyoza, Raven and Murphy on Eligius 4), brings everyone together*, as the prisoners open the bunker and Wonkru finally gets out - and ends with the conflict that means that war between Wonkru and the Eligius prisoners is imminent. The Pandora’s Box has been opened, to use another one of Bellamy’s Greek mythology references. (Oddly enough, he makes that reference in the next episode, not in this one.)

(*Well, not everyone - Monty, Harper, Emori, Echo and Madi are MIA this episode. hiding somewhere in Eden, before they also reunite with the rest of Spacekru plus Clarke plus Wonkru in the next episode.)

If I hadn’t seen season 5 before, I’d be thinking “Will this be the best season of the show?” It is by far the season with the strongest beginning - before the plot starts to drag, building conflicts within both camps. so that war would not happen until the two-part finale. Strong beginning, strong ending, poor middle part.

After the epic Bellarke scene at the end of 5x03, this episode delivers their actual reunion, with another one of those incredibly intimate and intense hugs that Bellamy and Clarke are known for. They tend to grow in intensity, and I’ll just say this: when Tumblr flagged gifs of this hug as “explicit”, well - for once I could see why poor Tumblr bots were getting confused:

A reunion after 6 years, during which Bellamy believed Clarke to be dead, while Clarke didn’t know if Bellamy was alive but still called him on the radio and talked to him every day for 2199 days, has to be pretty epic, and this scene delivers. It seems almost like Clarke - who had been badly tortured - wasn’t entirely sure if that was really Bellamy who emerged out of the darkness to save her, of if she was imagining it, with the way she says “You are really here!”, while crying out of happiness. The intimacy in the body language and the way they look at each other is also reflected in Clarke telling him “And now you’re home!” This goes way beyond how platonic partners and non-romantic best friends interact with each other. The scene is not just acted but directed and shot in such a way that anyone who would see it without knowing Clarke and Bellamy’s actual relationship status, would get the wrong (?) idea. For a moment, they even look like people who have been caught making out, like they don’t want these strangers to witness such an intimate moment.

Even if she did not see this scene in particular, it’s no surprise that Diyoza assumed Clarke and Bellamy were a couple (“the hostage taker and his girlfriend”) after what she saw of their interactions. Really, who wouldn’t?

Bellamy quickly updates Clarke on how everyone is - Madi, Spacekru, acknowledges that Clarke has saved them all (something multiple people do in this early part of the season) and that all of the people who went to space are safe. (”Murphy, Monty, Raven?” “Echo and Emori”. - But why the Harper erasure? This is one of the very few lines in this episode that feel wrong. She’ one of the Delinquents both of them have known since they landed on Earth and Clarke would logically care about her more than Echo, who, she barely knew and who was her enemy 90% of the time. )

Another beautiful reunion happens by radio - Murphy and Raven learn that Clarke is alive. Murphy smiles the moment he hears her voice, and Raven, teary-eyed, thanks Clarke for saving their lives. The Spacekru have been criticized a lot in the fandom for not appreciating Clarke’s sacrifice, but it has to be said that, right after they learned she was alive, they all acknowledged it and expressed gratitude. (Some of them were just later angry at her and not so ready to try to understand her perspective after living isolated for 6 years.) This is one of the very few moments of happiness in season 5 (whenever I see that screenshot of Clarke and Bellamy’s big smiles, I mistake it for a moment for a BTS photo. That’s how rare it is to see characters looking happy on the actual show.)

…………………….

Meanwhile, over in the bunker, no one is happy. and everything is dark, sad and disturbing. Octavia is full Blodreina and acting like a Roman Emperor, deciding if gladiators get to earn their freedom or not. because even being “the last” doesn’t necessarily earn you freedom now - it all comes down to the Queen’s whim. Kane is forced to fight in the pit again tomorrow. I suppose they already have the next batch of fighters ready - it would be a bit weird if she expected a bunch of new “crimes” tomorrow. But things must have gotten progressively worse if they’re now having death matches every day. If they had been condemning people to the pits at that pace throughout those 6 years, even more than 1/3 of the Wonkru would be dead. 

One thing I had not noticed before - there is a singer, singing an anthem or ceremonial song before the fights start, and it is the same woman who sang the Coalition anthem in 3x03. This somewhat changes my views of the way Grounder clans chose 100 people to survive the bunker. At least one of the clans was smart enough to include a musician, rather than a bunch of warriors. There should have been even more musicians and other entertainers (you’d expect a culture like Grounders to have some sort of epic poetry!), as that would’ve helped the life in the bunker much more than warriors (and there could have been entertainment that does not include killing). But this was probably an exception, because this person probably had a high status as a ceremonial singer.

Our first look at Abby after the time jump - and she is obviously in a bad state and pill-addicted, and both she and Kane look tired and worn down. He is protecting her and taking the guilt for her crime - stealing pills, since Abby is obviously in no state to fight - and on her part, Abby wants to confess and spare him. But Indra - who has been helping them and is clearly unhappy with the way Blodreina is ruling - is more rational and knows Kane winning is the only way to save them both. Kane, however, is choosing to take a stand and refuse to fight.

Kane and Abby got a lot of flak from the fandom and were accused of hypocrisy for their attitude to Octavia later in the season - with the argument that Abby was the one who persuaded Octavia to go through with cannibalism and killing people for refusing to ear, and that Kane knew Abby’s role in it but blamed Octavia. All these arguments presume that they were blaming Octavia for the cannibalism and everything else that happened the Dark Year. But in fact, there’s zero indication that this is what they blamed her for, and it’s pretty clear that the reason why they - and others - have issues with Blodreina is that she’s been ruling by fear and throwing people into fighting pits for all sorts of reasons, and generally being a scary tyrant/leader of a cult of death and violence. Yes, as we learn later, Abby was a crucial part of how Octavia turned into that person, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is that person now, that she has absolute power in the bunker, and people have been living in fear of her. 

Kane tries to plead with Octavia when she comes to tell him he has to fight, and at this point, he seems to still believe she could change and start making better decisions. What feels a bit off to me is that he says he’s been silent for too long - this can’t be the first time he’s tried to change her mind? He would have probably had a lot more chance to succeed if he tried much earlier.  We get the first mention of the infamous “Dark Year” (this is also the episode where we first hear “All of me for all of us”) and see Octavia getting upset at its very mention (a reveal will be dragged out for 6 more episodes). It’s interesting that Jaha and Kane both mentioned Aurora Blake’s fate in their speeches to Octavia, but they used it to say completely different things. Jaha was saying that this is what you have to do, execute everyone who is the “enemy” because they endanger your survival in any way, even if it’s having one more child. Kane was saying that’s what they shouldn’t be doing anymore, she shouldn’t be doing what they did on the Ark, but do better. Octavia ended up taking Jaha’s advice, which shaped her as leader, for better or worse. (Mostly worse, IMO.) She could have maybe taken Kane’s advice years ago, but now it’s clearly too late. 

If anything, Kane’s refusal to fight makes her more determined than ever to break him - she doesn’t want to condemn him to death, she wants to break his resistance and his stubborn insistence on morality. I don’t approve of all of Kane’s later actions in season 5, but it’s really not hard to see why, after these experiences and everything in the bunker, he thought Blodreina’s rule was the worst thing that could happen.

And then - like a Deus ex machina, the bunker door opens and Bellamy is literally coming down from above, into the darkness of Octavia’s underground realm, as the savior, bathed in light, It’s the second episode in a row where he comes as a Big Damn Hero in almost dreamlike scene, from a POV of a woman in his life, this time his sister. For a moment, Blodreina is Octavia again and hugs her brother. Clarke comes down a moment later (but she is not bathed in light - she looks at the Blake siblings from the shadows.)

Instead of hugging, Clarke and Octavia greet each other with a forearm handshake - which is quite an interesting choice, particularly since (thanks @jeanie205) this is apparently a type of greeting associated with Roman generals greeting each other. (But only in Hollywood movies, It wasn’t a thing in actual Roman history.)

In addition to all the reunions, some characters meet for the first time - such as Octavia and Diyoza, who are about to become rival leaders on two sides of the war. Who could have known what their relationship would turn into in season 6 and season 7?

I love the way that everyone - Bellamy, Clarke, Diyoza and the rest of the prisoners - have the “WTF is this” look when they see the fighting pit (which is all covered in blood - apparently, they don’t wash it. It’s an aesthetic, I guess.) Bellamy soon asks Octavia what the heck she’s doing (and guesses exactly what inspired her: “Someone must have read Ovid one too many times). It’s an experience she hasn’t had in years - to have her decisions questioned by someone who’s not one of her subjects and not afraid of her.

More reunions follow: Clarke and Abby, Bellamy and Miller (another relationship that will turn sour in the rest of the season), Clarke and Kane. 

Meanwhile, on Eligius 4, Raven finds more info about Diyoza backstory - Colonel Diyoza was "something called Navy SEAL" (it makes sense that Arkers wouldn’t know about such things), decorated for valor three times, before turning into a rebel/terrorist, and leader of a movement called United Liberation Army. As we see in these articles, civilians died in these attacks, which is something Diyoza regrets in season 7 - even if her cause was right, her means were wrong.

Raven and Murphy have some fun playing soccer, but they’re also worried about the fact they may need to murder 283 people. Raven finds it hard, so Murphy offers to do it to spare her. It’s typical for their relationship that Murphy tends to see Raven as someone better and more moral than himself (in spite of the fact that she once tried to sacrifice him instead of Fin), while Raven often says disparaging things about him, even though she is fond of him.

One thing I found a bit odd that Murphy at one point says: “Why do you have to always be the one to sacrifice?” - even though this was just the second time Raven has decided to sacrifice herself, and he wasn’t even around for the first time - trying to blow the bridge in 1x10. But Murphy seems to have a somewhat idealized view of Raven, driven by his guilt over crippling her and his self-loathing. Or maybe he meant the others in the group in general. as he sees himself as the selfish cockroach as opposed to them. (Note: I initially wrote this in my 5x03 review, before I realized it was actually said in this episode. That’s what happens when you finalize posts after having seen two episodes ahead.)

Raven and her future love interest Shaw try to outsmart each other in hacking (Raven even kind of flips a bird at Shaw at one point - it’s like they are having a digital meet cute without having even met.) 

But when Diyoza finds a way to outsmart Spacekru by suffocating Raven and Murphy - Raven tells Murphy to pull the lever (usually Clarke’s job) and kill the prisoners; and when he hesitates, she goes into her fierce/ruthless mode and goes “Fine, I’ll do it”, before Murphy comes up with the smart solution that prioritizes survival and also doesn’t include mass murder - a win-win, except it also takes away Bellamy’s leverage. 

I wonder where the standoff between Wonkru and the Eligius prisoners would have led after Diyoza took Abby and Kane with her and announced her people were taking over Eden? Would war still have been inevitable? I can’t see Octavia giving up on Eden so easily. In any case, the war here was started by an idiot who shot an incredibly destructive weapon at Octavia just because her arrogant Blodreina grin pissed her off. (This guy, called Szybunka, is a part of McCreary’s faction, and here we first learn that they are preparing a rebellion against Diyoza, though McCreary thinks it’s still not time for it.)

A lot more deaths were prevented by Shaw, Major props for him in this episode both for that, and because he is the first person to finally make the point that there are so few people left of the human race and that it is incredibly stupid to kill more of them

Octavia immediately blames Bellamy for everything - even though he was the reason why she and Wonkru got out of the bunker instead of being stuck there forever/  And this time, I’m sure this was 100% meant to highlight that she has a habit of unfairly placing blame on Bellamy whenever something goes wrong in her life. 

Body count: I haven’t been doing these for a while, but now I’m doing the body count for the entire season 5 so far:

Wonkru - we learn in this episode that, out of the 1200 people in the bunker, there are 814 remaining. So, 386 - almost a third - died during those 6 years. That includes 3 people who died in the fighting pit. An additional Wonkru member is killed by the idiot Szybunka while protecting Octavia, leaving 813.

Eligius prisoners - two of the party on Earth were killed by Madi and Clarke in 5x01, Four more were killed in 5x03 - one shot by Clarke, another one mercy killed by Diyoza after getting into one of Clarke’s traps, two more shot by Madi to save Bellamy, Monty, Harper, Emori and Echo. On the ship, Kodiak, the big guy Diyoza activated as a weapon (”activate Kodiak!”) was killed in self-defense by Bellamy with help from Echo and Raven. And in 5x04, Szybunka is killed by McCreary for his stupidity. This leaves 282 prisoners on the ship and an unknown smaller number on Earth. 

Rating: 8/10

[xxladylovexx]

What cheeses me off is, if you want to be free, if you want to live “off grid” without government, if you want to grow your own food and barter hens and nanny goats for potatoes and butter, go do it. What’s stopping you? It’s a big world and easy to get lost in. Sure, there’s never any guarantee that you’ll be safe from the long arm of the state—Randy Weaver found that out the hard way when he and his wife made the logical decision to drop out of society rather than try to change it to suit their beliefs—but still, living off grid (which I’ve done several times in my life) is way easier than getting 300 million people to agree in unison, “We’re going to dismantle government and live as medieval farmers and tradesmen.”

The anti-government ideologues act like they can’t go and “be free” until they’ve persuaded the rest of us to follow suit. Essentially, they’ve made their freedom quest dependent upon me coming along for the ride, even though it’s a trip they could easily take solo.

And that, right there, is why trannies annoy the hell out of me. A tranny is someone who claims, “I was ‘assigned’ the wrong gender at birth, and I need to be the real me.” Okay, fine. Go be whatever the hell you want to be! Go be a chick with a dick, or a man with a cooter. It’s absolutely none of my business how any adult decides to express him/her/itself sexually. But the thing is, these days trannies are not content to just go be trannies; they insist that we become accomplices to their fantasy. We have to pretend to see what they see. We have to use pronouns that we know are misapplied. We have to allow dudes with dirlywangers to shower, change, and go to the bathroom alongside our daughters. We have to foot the bill for sex change surgeries. To even suggest that sex change operations are elective and not a “medical necessity” is to challenge the tranny illusion. This is at the heart of the controversy surrounding President Trump’s announcement that trans folk will no longer be allowed to serve in the military. Trannies, their leftist allies, and “moderate Republicans” think soldiers are as entitled to state-funded sex change operations as they are to first aid on the battlefront.

In Sweden, the trans lobby has been able to bully the medical establishment into changing the official term for sex change (or sex reassignment) surgery. The new authorized term is “könskorrigering”—“gender correction.” A perfectly healthy organ (a penis) is now seen as a congenital defect to be surgically lopped off, no different from when doctors are forced to remove the left atrial appendage to save the life of someone with a congenital heart defect.

“Sorry, but you can’t make your mental health dependent on everyone else seeing you as you see yourself.”

Tranny-mania is an assault on language, common sense, and science. It’s also an assault on the very concept of aesthetics, and the right of every human being to have sexual preferences (an irony, considering that queer activism used to be all about championing the individual’s right to sexual preferences). Straight men are now told that it’s “transphobic” to prefer their women penis-free. The tranny argument is “If I think I’m a woman, you need to see me as one, even if I have a wiener.” Straight men are no longer allowed to find penises sexually unattractive, because trans activism is about changing human nature itself. It’s nothing more than the newest iteration of the New Soviet Man, that 20th-century fallacy in which communist ideologues claimed that with enough reeducation and coercion, mankind could overcome every natural instinct the state considered counterrevolutionary. Well, New Soviet Man is back, now wearing a skirt and fighting for trans acceptance rather than an end to self-interest and private property.

I have absolutely nothing against trannies. Honestly, there’s no “phobia” here. What I don’t like is the compulsion, the insistence that I play along. With the gay marriage issue, wherever you stand on it, the fact is it really doesn’t affect non-gays. Oh sure, Christian conservatives and “traditionalists” will make the “slippery slope” argument (“If you allow gays to wed, it might not impact your life immediately, but over time it will erode the moral fabric of our nation and one day a satanist cannibal will eat your sister”), and there have indeed been individual cases of compulsion involving wedding cakes, but still, it’s just a fact: Two men in Miami tying the knot has absolutely zero bearing on my life or yours. What’s odious about the tranny agenda is that it’s all about affecting non-trannies—you, me, your neighbor, your child, your unborn child, hell, even your pets. The tranny agenda is nothing but intrusiveness.

Why do trans folk so obsessively insist that the rest of us have to feed their fantasy? Recently, the LGBT community successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association into changing how it refers to trans folk in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Previously, trannies were said to have gender identity disorder. In 2012, “disorder” was dropped in favor of “dysphoria.” This is not a small difference. Gender identity disorder made clear that trans people have a condition. Gender dysphoria (GD) merely indicates that they suffer discontent. The change was primarily made in order to separate trannies from people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). People with BDD see themselves as fat even though they’re skinny, or they see their face as hideous when in fact it’s fine. They may see a particular limb, like an arm or a hand, as disfigured or “alien,” and they’ll either hide the limb or try to remove it.

Regarding the latter, medical science considers it unethical to assist in the removal of a healthy limb or organ if the patient has BDD. By removing the “disorder” from transgenderism, by defining it by the symptom (dysphoria) rather than the cause (a disorder), the APA has essentially decided to normalize a mental illness via creative wordplay (people with BDD experience dysphoria as well, but that doesn’t change the fact that they also have a disorder). In attempting to explain the difference between body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria, trans activist Austen Hartke states, “Body dysmorphia causes someone to believe their body is a certain way, while gender dysphoria is a sense that the body should be a different way.” But that’s simply not true. People with BDD also believe that their body should be a different way (skinnier, for example, or minus an offending hand or arm). At the core, people with BDD and GD are in the same boat: They view themselves in a way the rest of us don’t (a skinny person saying, “I’m so fat,” a man saying, “I’m a woman”).

To be clear, if BDD and GD are both disorders (an opinion still held by many experts in the fields of science and pediatrics), BDD is much more severe than GD. Starving yourself to death because you think you’re too fat is much worse than wanting to live like a member of the opposite sex. But having the freedom to live like the opposite sex is never enough; trannies continue to suffer from dysphoria because, subconsciously, they know they aren’t the thing they’re trying to be, and they know that the rest of us see that. Hypnotherapy is often used to treat people with body dysmorphic disorder. And whether they admit it or not, people with gender dysphoria are essentially forcing us to use hypnotherapy on them. We, the non-trannies, are expected to reinforce their false reality by soothing them with a steady stream of positive reinforcement. We’re expected to shower them with false pronouns, undress next to them and pretend that we don’t see genitalia that obviously belongs in the other locker room, and rewrite science books because the old ones hurt their feelings. Trannies want to turn the entire world into one huge hypnotherapy session for their benefit, a world in which we’re reluctantly cast as the therapists.