#this is my new conspiracy theory

[audible301]

I might be on a weird lil conspiracy but are Mary Ann’s tamagachis and squishmallows magic items?

This is based solely off of Brennan making a point to say Mary Ann checks on her Quokki Pet after initiative has started.

[cluelessbees]

The reason why they needed the vol 1/vol 2 split was because they needed more time to add the cgi hearts in the van scene

[floralquafloral]

i think that there's some sort of secret feature in splatoon where if you get splatted and your special gauge is almost full, it just fills up automatically the moment you die. just so that you'll feel a little extra sad about getting splatted with a full special gauge & losing it all when you respawn. this happens too much to be a coincidence

[fiendfifofum]

It turns out 9/11 was actually a controlled strike by time travellers trying to prevent the Ted movies from ever being made.

[schmope-is-dead]

one of my awful traits is that I thought ezra miller and elliot page were the same person for a while and I still think they look the same

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

*tries to organize my thoughts*

*remembers i'm not in school and therefore beholden to neither heaven nor hell nor any man's grading system*

*joyously shredding & tossing all my carefully arranged 3x5 mental notecards into the air like so much beige confetti. raising my arms in victory, cheering raucously until i accidentally inhale bits of homemade confetti*

(*coughing up itty bits of paper like a cat evicting a hairball with a firm understanding of tenants' rights*) wait wat happens next

[professional-court-jester]

i’m genuinely of the belief that the megamind sequel/tv show was meant to premiere on nickelodeon in like 2011 alongside their other spinoff shows, but then got shelved after the movie flopped financially and has been sitting around in some archive gathering dust until peacock decided to release it as “new content.”

like, can we just look at the visual evidence alone?

he fits right in with this lineup. peacock, i’m onto you

[sassy-pistachy]

(open for full size)

THE MAGNUS PROTOCOL CONSPIRACY BOARD (Ep 27)

(all my theories will probably contain spoilers for all of TMA)

OK so, we can all agree that was Jonah Magnus writing, right? At least a Magnus. "The Institute would not have been founded, nor would my fellows have selected me for its leadership, much less its name"

If Augustus really is the voice of TMA's Jonah, this would be the first instance of someone from the TMA Universe giving voice to it's TMAGP's Universe counterpart. And that's pretty cool.

He also mentions "Boyle's meddling inheritors", pretty sure he's talking about Robert Boyle, founder of the Royal Society. How long has it been since?

The Royal Society was founded in 1660, and Presumably Jonah Magnus writes this in 1845. Saying "we have been undertaking this great work for three decades", does that put the foundation of the Institute around 1810? That's almost two centuries after the foundation of the Royal Society. But both organisations are definitely connected. Perhaps the Insitute was created to take the Royal Society experiments to the next level, to have the philosophers work together.

More things:

-TREVOR fucking HERBERT MP?? Speechless.

-Celia getting an email, and the address looks like "gibberish". That probably rules out Jon? When Sam got Jon's email, he didn't mention the address being gibberish... ARG friends, do we have any suspects?

-Do we think Celia knows what's in Hilltop? She def knows she's not from this universe, but does she know she came through Hilltop's crack in reality? Does she know about it?

[mosneakers]

This one's for Dale ♥

rest in peace legend, Johnny Hardwick

[kaurwreck]

I'm sincere when I say I don't know how y'all have the energy to scrutinize Mori treating his successors like they're competent when the Port Mafia's skill users have been culled thrice over within seven years by men who can't act right (Rimbaud, Verlaine, Shibusawa, Gides, Fyodor), and the longevity of the tripartite framework relies on Mori not patronizing who's left.

Especially considering, like, there are foreign military police in modern Japan, British Somaliland appears to still exist, and Ango has seemingly kept Taneda in a medically induced coma for an irreversible amount of time so that he can unilaterally leverage Taneda's fictional authority within a very-historically-real cabinet in the Japanese government that hasn't existed irl since the Meiji constitution.

Like, I'm not asking anyone to engage with media in any other way than the way they enjoy most. It's just. Has anyone else noticed bsd!Russia appears to have annexed bsd!Abkhazia and bsd!South Ossetia.

All of this to say: you don't really have to beat the same dead horses if you don't want to. If you do, then by all means, lay into Equus with your whole chest. But, also. There's a lot in bsd the fandom scarcely, if at all, touches, and the incongruity between the work's layers and worldbuilding and even niche fandom engagement with the material is stark.

[tmae3114]

So there's this theory I've had bouncing around in my head for *checks notes* about three years now and, well, it does not have nearly the level of evidence I tend to prefer before I make a theory post - it is, in fact, Predominantly Vibes Based - but it has, again, been bouncing around in my head for three years and I refuse to be alone with it any longer

(...also, if I'm right, I wanna be able to go "I KNEW IT" and have a timestamp to point to XD)

OKAY. So. Basically.

I think Alinua might be a twice-born.

Hear me out:

Firstly:

We know that Cloud Elves live pretty much exclusively on the Archipelago Nimbus and are isolationist (Extra Lore: The Three Elder Races - "The Islands have minimal contact or trade with the outside world, [...]" & "These Cloud Elves are unique in many ways, most notably their isolationism [...]" and Page 1.6.12 "I suppose a cloud elf outside of the Archipelago Nimbus is fairly unusual-") but Alinua has been down on the surface since before she can remember

That suggests unusual circumstances. Isolationist people who have minimal contact with the outside world don't just lose a baby in said outside world

Alinua's theory for this is that her birth parents "probably reasonably assumed [she] had the Chimeric Plague and dropped [her] over the edge" (Page 1.6.13) but, crucially, there is no actual evidence of this. It's what she assumes probably happened but she has no memory of the actual events (Page 1.6.23 "I don't even remember it. I've never met my birth parents […]")

Therefore, it is entirely possible that Alinua is wrong about how she ended up not on the Archipelago Nimbus. And I, personally, think it's pretty likely that she's wrong because we know that the Archipelago Nimbus can sometimes be even higher up than the peak of the Throne of the World (this post) and even with it usually being lower down than that, I find it... somewhat doubtful that an infant (toddler, at best) would survive that fall. Not impossible in a fantasy setting but... doubtful.

Secondly:

We know that the Chimeric Plague was Life attempting to connect with a vessel who could be her eyes and give her perspective (Pages 1.20.20 - 1.20.23)

Even before Life finally broke through, Alinua was incredibly unusual for a carrier of the Chimeric Plague. She didn't even find out she was one until she was about ten (Page 1.6.13 "I had a normal life and family for ten years- and then I learned I was a chimera bomb [...]") when most die before they turn five (Page 1.2.10 "I shouldn't have made it past five years old" and Extra Lore: The Chimeric Plague "[...] it is inevitable in every case that the child will lose total control of their magic within the first few years of their life [...]"). She was twice the expected age of a carrier when she found out.

We don't know why Alinua is the successful attempt that finally worked. Not only do we not know, Alinua herself brings it up while talking to Life (Page 1.20.23 "I… don't know if there's anything special about me that kept you from overwhelming me like the others, or if I'm just the lucky one you finally got right."). The question is open: is there something special/unique about Alinua that allowed her to survive where none of the other children did? And if so, what is it?

Thirdly:

So. Carrion crawlers.

We have not actually met any in the story itself yet, only heard Caliban bring them up in the context of an insult (Page 1.12.10 "Twice-born son of a carrion crawler! You had a plan this whole time?!") but fortunately! the Aurora tumblr exists! so we have additional information!

Carrion crawlers eat dead things and sometimes give birth to baby clones of one of their recent meals, which are called twice-born. A twice-born is a healthy infant, identical in every way to how the original would've been as an infant, and age normally for the species they were produced from. Additionally, they have no memories from their source material (so to speak) and develop their own, unique soul, though if they came from a mage, their soul will develop the same channels (this post and this post)

...now, I mentioned at the start that this theory does not have as much evidence as I would like and is mostly Vibes Based, and we have now hit the point where I run out of evidence and switch to vibes. I do not have any evidence which actually points to a connection between any of this.

However, I do still Have Thoughts

We know that Alinua was adopted had a happy (or, at least, "normal") childhood prior to figuring out she was a chimeric carrier (1.6.13, see above) and seemingly doesn't think about her birth family very often. It's entirely possible that she didn't ask questions about where she came from as a child. It's not been brought up yet how her adoptive family found her but, given that she assumes she was thrown off the edge of the Archipelago Nimbus, the possibility that they found a seemingly-abandoned baby just lying around doesn't seem too out there. And if Alinua is a twice-born, yet clearly doesn't know that herself, her family may also not have known that... or may have known and opted to keep it hidden, even from her, given that twice-born are generally considered "deeply unnerving and grotesque" (this post).

As for how Alinua came to be in this theorised scenario, there's two possibilities I've considered.

The first is that an adult life mage cloud elf was outside the Archipelago Nimbus for Some Reason, died somewhere where there are carrion crawlers, and things went from there.

The second, much sadder, possibility is that the "Chimeric Plague carrier baby thrown off the edge of the flying islands" possibility did happen... the baby in question just wasn't Alinua because the fall was, in fact, not a survivable one. And then, just as a twice-born will inherit being-a-mage, Alinua inherited having the Chimeric Plague.

And, in either of these cases, something about being twice-born subsequently protected Alinua from being overwhelmed by Life.

[ifieverweretoloseyou]

anyone want to get matching lobotomies?

[eerna]

Hii wanted to bring this up to you because i love your tfota discussions(and other fandoms as well). i've noticed that a lot of the target audience for this series is very superficial and don't really appreciate and understand the series in its entirety but you always have great points.

so anywaysss with that being said. something that sort of made me side eye tpt a little was jude and cardan. obviously characters change overtime and i think the fact that jude and cardan sort of started to resemble each other in indirect ways is a nice little detail but i felt like some of their interactions were very unnatural. it felt like hb was feeding into how a lot of the audience sees them which isn't terrible but it feels the slightest bit out of character. like what did it for me specifically was in the end when jude excuses herself by saying she was going to go yell at people. i mean jude has always been very sarcastic and witty but it seemed weird for her to say that, it felt like one of those incorrect quotes. like yeah she probably would be yelling at people but would she really say that? like basically it's just very small things that seem like fan service more than intentional writing ya know? now don't get me wrong i love them and i shamelessly enjoyed all of their appearances i also think they were still pretty consistent as characters but it's basically that it seemed like things they said were only there to please the public which fed onto the whole superficial view the general audience has of them.

Hiiii! I definitely miss a lot of stuff so I wouldn't dare claim I get an entirety of anything, but I am very glad you enjoy my discussions nevertheless~

I get what you mean! For me it was that Jude "knife wife" line, and Cardan complaining about the snake thing. Knife-wife could have been funny if it was written smarter and not literally quoting a fandom meme. If we wanted to have a comedic moment where Cardan complains about something gross and Jude shuts him down, it could have been a new thing instead of an event that happened ages ago that we've seen on-page. It reads like a parody, the self aware "haha"s are so awkward. HOWEVER. In theory I wouldn't mind them being written as funnier than they used to be. Like you said, they are a decade older than the last time we've seen them, and they've solved most of the issues that made them not want to joke around during the trilogy. And it's also amusing bc HB said she had problems figuring out what an almost-thirty-years-old Cardan would be like, so the fact that she settled on "clown uncle" is hilarious.

Which leads me to my main problem with it: The things that make them fun aged-up epilogue versions of themselves also make them worse main characters. Jude and Cardan in their late 20s are by default much less interesting than Jude and Cardan in the middle of their young adult angst unsolved trauma roller coaster. They should join Roiben and Severin in the lineup of side characters that are still plot relevant, but no longer the center of attention, which would make their shallower presentation less noticeable.

[uncanny-tranny]

Something I always wonder with the whole: "The lazy populous doesn't want to work!" is if it's only being said to keep minimum wage at the very, very lowest end of 'survivability.'

The "lazy worker" isn't truly a problem. The employers are.

[leverage-ot3]

sorry to keep personal posting but my day fucking SUCKED and ended with me dropping one of my brand new earrings from a set that I just finished cleaning down the drain, took the sink apart and still couldn’t find it 🙃

if y’all feel like asking a leverage/misc question for thoughts or headcanons I’d love to answer them in the morning! or even if you just want to say something about your day- I just like hearing from you guys 💖

[megafreeman]

The worst part is that Volition was on the edge of entering a new golden age. They were getting ready to completely stop with the Saints Row series and delve into new IPs and adventures. There were talks about reviving the Red Faction series too. Even had the original Red Faction's writer on board for this one.

And it looked so great for them too, with Gearbox's help that is. They pretty much cleared the studio of all the bad apples (the upper management that sabotaged Agents of Mayhem), had a lot of the old staff that worked on SR1 and SR2 brought back specifically for reboot that were ready to delve into new franchises too, upgraded several of its departments (they were supposed to finally get their own marketing department. There are people at Volition that got laid off that have worked less than 6 months there), didn't have to answer to crackheads from Deep Silver (check out flippy's latest video on more info about that), even had Randy Pitchford himself give Volition his stamp of approval because "Volition needs to be Volition to make good games".

They were actually getting ready to make a game they were truly passionate about, without any micromanagement from Deep Silver ruining it in order to keep it "market safe".

It sucks how now they'll never get that redemption arc. They'll never get a chance to make a game from start to end. Not even selling millions could've saved them.