#watched damsel last night and while the plot was fairly predictable

[clonerightsagenda]

Since I finished Scavengers Reign I should continue my adult animation binge and watch Blue Eyed Samurai next

[ernmark]

If you spend enough time looking really critically at stories, and eventually you start noticing the patterns, and then you start noticing that you can predict where they’re going to go based on little clues. If you can figure out a character’s archetype and the trajectory of their character arc, you have a pretty good idea of where the story is going.  

But sometimes I’m off. Like, way, way off. 

(This pleases me. I love being surprised by good writing.)

So I thought I’d share with you one of the predictions I made that wound up completely debunked, much to my delight.

Before Angel of Brahma hit, I was 100% sure that Peter was still working for Miasma.

Peter is identified by the creators of the show as a Homme Fatale, and I based a lot of my theories off that.

Femme Fatales traditionally are all about deception, and particularly tricking the intrepid hero into doing their dirty work for them through their sexy, sexy wiles. We obviously already saw this in Murderous Mask, but I expected that we weren’t done with that pattern of behavior.

So the way I watched the story unfold:

The sexy Homme Fatale shows up at the intrepid Hero’s apartment in the middle of the night, probably sprawled out all sexily in the dark to surprise him when he turns on the light. He’s tired, surprised, and probably sporting a boner: he won’t be thinking clearly when he’s whisked away on a grand adventure.

He’s thrown into first a card game and then a robbery, all the while being fed as little information as humanly possible. And all the while he’s given the single shadiest fetch quest prompt I’ve ever heard:

She wants what’s on that train, and she’s paid me to procure it for her – but I am of the opinion that we’re all better off if she never receives it. We must board that train, take the artifact, and destroy it – all before she realizes I’ve left her employ.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. We’re totally gonna steal the thing you’re being paid to steal from the impossible-to-steal-from place that you, the most skilled thief in the galaxy, couldn’t possibly break into without my help, and totally not going to give it to the person paying you to steal it. Because it would be safer in a city of criminals than in an impenetrable vault. Right. Exactly. 

The second those words came out of his mouth, I started the countdown timer to his sudden but inevitable betrayal.

Then the car that Peter sent away comes back to him at the exact time and place that he told it to, now carrying his supposedly betrayed employer. She aims a gun at Nureyev (a gun, we’re all aware at this point, which is capable of nonlethal fire). And poor, dear Juno, Hero that he is, predictably surrenders and agrees to cooperate in order to save his damsel in distress, not realizing that Peter was never in any real danger to begin with.

(If this sounds familiar, it should: it was a plot point in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)  

But wait, you say. Juno can read her mind! He would have known about the deception!

Except that everybody involved is 100% aware that Juno swallowed the pill and knows what he’s capable of. Miasma’s projected a deliberate, direct message at him once already. She could be doing the same when Juno reads her mind in the desert.

There’d be a twist, of course. There always is. And since Juno’s a Noir Hero and Peter’s a Homme Fatale, clearly that twist was gonna be caused by Peter’s heart and/or Juno’s pants. 

I anticipated that Peter was the architect of this whole charade. That by using Juno to beat Engstrom and rob the train, he was demonstrating that Juno was more valuable alive than he was dead-- after all, Miasma had just sworn to murder him a few episodes before-- and that so long as he was in love with Peter, he could be easily controlled. Just put Peter in a room far enough away that his mind can’t be read, strap some dummy electrodes to him, and let him grimace and shriek a bit, and Juno will do whatever you say. 

His talk of protecting Juno from the Kanagawas, then, would have been foreshadowing that his intention was to save Juno all along. Getting Juno to trust him would have been essential for keeping him under Miasma’s thumb (and therefore alive), and Juno finally deciding that he does trust Peter in the car ride would have been bittersweetly ironic in hindsight. 

The big reveal would happen eventually. Juno would find out that it was all just a sham. Peter would insist that he did it all to save Juno from certain death. Juno would be heartbroken and hurt, and decide that he really can’t trust anyone ever again (what else is new?). 

It’s not a bad plot, by any means, but it’s fairly basic, and you’ve probably seen a few others just like it. So I was absolutely thrilled when the story went somewhere else entirely.