#this ep is really going to kill me

[fandomfairyuniverse]

I need the ep right now because I NEED to know what the hell happens that leads to them CUDDLING

[dizzybizz]

"this is regrettably the best kiss of your life, you understand?"

[mwagneto]

i have a lot of things to say but to keep it short moffat's writing so often completely lacks emotional weight, either because he fails to insert it or because he removes it without realising

as an example of the former, both the women in this episode have scenes where the sad music swells and everyone's crying and you're meant to be sad along with them, her mum died, the doctor's leaving, they're sad conceptually but i couldn't help sitting there and thinking... i just don't care about this. you've failed to write characters or scenes i can get emotionally invested in and instead reached for the cheapest tricks available (universally relatable sad concepts such as dying parent or ending friendship) and figured that would be enough to elicit a reaction. this is something he comes back to countless times, which i don't want to dwell on here but once you notice he's doing it, it's everywhere.

as for the latter, take the death of trev. he's a likable guy and watching him slowly dying would be quite sad but my immediate thought wasn't "aw oh no :( " it was that i have seen an unfortunate amount of moffat media and all his doctor who episodes so i am 100% certain that this isn't trev's actual end, that somehow his consciousness is gonna get uploaded to a database and live on, so there's no point being sad for him. and what do you know, like 20 minutes later they confirm i was right, which the doctor and the audience learns at the same time (except the doctor learns he's alive before he even learns he died, so he never even has to mourn). moffat's completely removed any kind of weight regarding the character's lives since he never actually just up and kills anyone so his stakes are impossible to take seriously.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

End of Empathy (time for violence)

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[muninnhuginn]

The thought that goes into the fake science in dungeon meshi can be something so special actually. Using golems to explain crop rotation and how removing predators from an ecosystem can have knock-on effects. Talking about symbiotic relationships and parasites too! And characters are actually interested in the science so they keep explaining about it. Finally, some exposition I can get behind.

[silvermeww]

okay, when was someone going to tell me that

oh, idk, steven started at 19, burgh has a younger sister, clay actually isn't born american, skyla's whole fam thing and ELESA IS 15???? (even younger than skyla like wtf???)

(also the 'alder' at the bottom is supposed to be drayden lol)

and that's not all

say hello to:

viola being 18??? 'black whirlwind' korrina, RAMOS MEETING AZ'S FLOETTE AS A KID, genderfluid and apparently also age-fluid olympia, CLEMONT?? AND HIS WHOLE THING DOWN TO BEING 12 OF ALL AGES???

(you know what, marlon being 30 definitely makes sense with the hippie vibes)

wikstrom SAYING that he only wears that suit in pokemon battles but i've never seen his casual wear, malva being pr for flare lol, drasna selling dragon merch + great family lore if you want to know, siebold having to third-wheel lysandre and sycamore while eating (move aside malva, you're not the only elite 4 dealing with this) and 20?? YEARS OLD?? DIANTHA????????????

(way too many men in kalos are getting ladies, c'mon)

ethan being into history is such a neat detail hmmm, idk much of the frontier brains ngl, and we've finally got the region for looker and it's... hoenn??? you know what, makes sense with his chaotic vibes so i'll take it (throws away unova taped to a rock behind my back). also he's abolsutely cheating we all see that he's just relying on knowing us as protags, should've known smh

(um i think someone said that 'caitlin' should've been anabel but idk)

oh and the last one is charon, if we care about how much of a loser he really is. forget about birch and the poochyena, this guy is the lowest heh. imagine being charon (please don't).

(when the protags of johto are the same age as clemont lol) (yeah i know there are years between those events just let me have this)

and last but not least:

aaron 🤝 valerie: wanting to be pokemon (and ig gotta toss in shauntal with the ao3 writer gift heh, don't know if they would commission her or stay away), bertha's description???? i love flint just saying, cynthia 👀👀 is absolutely doing something illegal 👀👀, roark is WHAT??? (child labour laws in sinnoh must be lax ngl), maylene as well???? fantina watching scary movies is something i'll have to incorporate into my worldview and bryon?? are you okay??

so yeah. credit goes to @/KuroBlitz96 on the twitter/x for having this up, i'm just here to project sheer surprise at this massive dump of ages... my thoughts on pokemon have completely turned on its head once more lol (this is fine)

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[sskk-manifesto]

┐(￣ヘ￣)┌

[just-a-funny-little-brain]

They’re not going to get a happy ending, are they

[tchaikovskym]

"Let's just kill all the entities; they're just evil, so it's ok." Martin. Martin! Listen. Look at your boyfriend. Who is he?

[callieponders]

genuinely i think (one of) the biggest problems about the finale of fopanw is that nobody is willing to understand what dev is going through or gives him sympathy, and any sympathy that IS shown or anytime their thoughts are challenged, its undercut with jokes constantly. its so frustrating having the adults around him constantly being like yep you suck and if youre good its buried way deep i guess <3 as if he isnt like, a 10 year old being influence by an adult that is a criminal

its just so weird tonally because its like they want you to sympathize with dev and are absolutely aware hes a sad case, but still make jokes and put so much blame fully on him for his behavior as if every adult around him didnt fail him, INCLUDING peri

[slumbering-shadows]

If you've never seen the behind the scenes/bloopers/commentaries etc on Bones just know that David Boreanaz is actually so funny

[peppermintpegis]

netflix one piece live action feels a little like fanfic in that it makes sure it hits all the important notes but doesnt do all the work to make them hit which works in fic where the reader is supposed to bring all the emotional story investment from the original but doesnt work in a multi million adaptation that is supposed to be able to stand on its own or even serve as an intro to the series. it even does this in service to have more koby and helmeppo gay moments in this essay i w

[gunpowder-gemini]

FINALLY have wrestled my brain into sitting down and watching Good Omens and it is, in fact, very good!! Incredibly good!! Absolutely in love with it ♥️♥️♥️

It does, however, hurt terribly

[sheathnknife]

the vampire diaries 8.16 // louise gluck, crossroads

“and damon, like the voiceover tell us, he was worried he would never see stefan again. it was just elena assuring him that there would be peace. that we’ve dealt with this other side of darkness for several seasons, but there’s also light out there and there’s peace, and damon will find it. if you search for it, you will find it. and we wanted to get that last moment to see that [...] damon found it too, and it looked just like his brother.” — kevin williamson

[nick-cassidy]

24 hours of Le Mans review from Dries and Laurens Vanthoor