#we don’t even see him draw as a background scene and not even a throwaway line said abt one of his sketches or smth?????

[castelled-away]

So now that we know the marriage market/schemes of the ton are not Benedict‘s cup of tea & he spends the better part of s3 running away from debutantes who want to marry him… I need Sophie (or whoever is going to be his love interest in his season) to be the incarnation of the word no. I need this lovely lady to be absolutely uninterested in this jokester puppy of a Bridgerton so that he HE has to run after HER. And she’s just like no thanks & completely uninterested & pragmatic/down-to-earth all the time until he like…cries & begs her to marry her I guess?

[donotalwaysbebatman]

Nightwing #104 (A)

This writer needs to be thrown into the sun. It’s like the more freedom they give him, the more special he thinks he is, and the more pointless and terrible his stories become. I mean, you can even see it in the artist - who’s usually flawless - and how clearly bored he is of the entire script, drawing all these characters to be so stiff and emotionless, not even bothering to have fun with action scenes, which are usually his favorite. Every single time, everyone is just kind of standing there. Not that there’s much room in the script for anything except people standing around, for a lot of the panels.

So Dick gets handed superpowers, just because the writer was like, hurhur, it would be so cool if Dick had superpowers, which like, no? The entire point of the Batfamily is that they don’t have superpowers and have to solve the same problems without them. If you wanted a character with superpowers, it should’ve been one of the other ones, you know, the ones who do have superpowers. Okay, well, because he doesn’t usually have them, obviously Dick will do something new and interesting with them, right? No. He just does the exact same thing that would happen in the background of a random superhero’s comic to illustrate them having a normal day, and it has about the same emotional impact.

(More racist, though. I mean I know this author fucking hates asians, but like. Why did it need to be Americans specifically ‘saving the poor oppressed asians from themselves!!’ when it could easily have been set in an unspecified location, or multiple world locations could’ve been used, or it could’ve been somewhere in America where yeah actually bad things do happen, or just. Skip that entire page completely. It added nothing. Except maybe to prove to us that the writer knows what country Bangkok is in?)

Yeah so it’s just. What would Dick do if he had superpowers. Which, maybe if it weren’t trying to also have three other storylines in one fucking comic, could’ve been interesting. Except probably not, because the answer seems to be, “normal superhero things that would be boring in Superman comics also” and that’s the other thing. Who reads Nightwing for it to constantly be all about Superman??? Stop putting them in there!!! And that’s not even the only time Dick is sidelined in his own story, putting way too much about other characters in a story that already has a main character, it’s in the title. If it isn’t from his perspective, you’re not doing it right!!!

I would say, if you want to write about Superman, write Superman, and if you want to write about the Titans multiperspective, write Titans, but they already let him do that, and he keeps making those ones about Nightwing instead, like learn to write, dude.

Also there was this whole intentionally cliffhanger moment where Dick adopted a baby, which annoyed me because I was like, Dick already has plenty of children pick one of those (he can’t stand nonwhite characters unless he made them up and controls their entire backstory that’s why), and also, why do we need stories where Dick just identically mimics Bruce’s story? Except then she’s immediately written out and Dick isn’t even going to pretend to be her parent. So what was the point? Not to mention it’s a throwaway line instead of an actual conclusion to the arc, because, surprise surprise, this guy doesn’t care about the feelings of a black girl or think of her as more than a prop. At least give us something. But no, she’s just passive and okay with whatever random thing happens and let’s never think about her again because who cares. Why write the story at all, then?

Way too much of it is a leadin to Titans, which I don’t plan to read, because I do not trust this writer at all at this point. Like it’s cool to leave breadcrumbs, but if you can’t put the story where the story is meant to go, maybe put down a few projects and concentrate on what you can do. Or just. Stop writing forever! That would be super cool too!

But the superpowers thing is concluded “and then he easily defeated everyone with his superpowers” okay? Why didn’t you just not give him superpowers, and he easily defeated them with his preparedness, logic, extreme tactical prowess, observation, elite training, technology, etc. like he usually does? If fighting them wasn’t the point, why include it? It’s not like there’s any emotional turmoil. If Dick wanted superpowers there’s been plenty of places he could’ve gotten them, except that would be boring.

Nope, we don’t even have the most basic ass boring conclusion, like superpowers go to someone’s head. Or someone still has to be in touch with regular people. Or I have skills on my own, and I’m proud of them, and I’m good enough all by myself. Or there are downsides to superpowers. Or anything! He just has them and then he doesn’t! Nothing happened at either point! Also the fucking writer forgot his own fucking OC also has powers! She’s so inconsistently characterized because he literally doesn’t care about her!

It all culminates in a big moving speech except that the speech is short and not moving! Like if you were building up to that, why didn’t you even write the part you clearly designed the whole story just so you could write a boring speech to make Nightwing seem special!!

In conclusion, literally every part of this issue could’ve just been tossed and you wouldn’t lose anything from the arc.

[naancypants]

1x13 “The Whisper Box” analysis

“I am stuck in a dream of my perfect life” 

This is one of the first things Nancy says after realizing she is in an alternate reality, confirming for the audience that what we’re seeing is essentially, in Nancy’s mind, what would be a perfect world. If she could take the life she currently has and turn it into what she considers her perfect reality - this is how everything would look.

That established, let’s dive in.

The first and most obvious difference is that Kate Drew is still alive and cancer-free. What I find fascinating is that in Nancy’s ideal reality, her mom does still have a cancer scare - but what makes this so great for our heroine is how it draws upon the most earth-shattering event of her life and alters the ending. It’s much more poignant for her this way, because instead of eliminating a negative situation altogether, this scenario rectifies it, vicariously allowing Nancy to relish in the flood of relief she always wanted.

This universe sheds some light not only on Nancy's emotional attachment to Kate, but also her attachment to Kate’s death. Ever since she lost her mom there was a dark cloud over her life. Nancy’s key to escaping this head trip of hers (and moving forward from her grief) was to say a final goodbye to her mother - something she never got to do in real life - and this, in an ironic and bittersweet fashion, grants Nancy closure and peace. She had to let go of her heart to find her way home.

Carson is only painted in a positive light here, because at this point in the show she has finally arrived at a good place with her dad. She feels grateful for that and would not change anything about him or their relationship.

We learn that in this universe she doesn’t even know Nick yet, let alone have a romantic history with him; they do, however, still exhibit their prior pattern of experiencing and acting on their chemistry. This is not a surprise given Nancy’s emotional state in real life. Nick was the one to initiate their break-up, so while he still cares deeply for Nancy, Nancy is the one who was blindsided/rocked the hardest by their split. The show makes it clear she isn’t over Nick at this point in the timeline, so it’s not surprising that being with him is part of her ideal reality. Their never having met in the beginning is symbolic of Nancy’s desire to start over with him. She has a lot of regret regarding how she handled things with Nick and would love a clean slate to conduct a do-over.

Another notable point - in the real world, Nancy has recently caught Nick and George together in some 👀 moments. Given that she still has feelings for Nick, it makes sense that his fast-tracked bonding with George might bother her on some level. Hence, in her perfect life, Nick and George have already dated and ended things on a sour note. One less thing for Nancy to worry about.

In Nancy’s perfect life, George is more open and affectionate. I find this super sweet. By now Nancy has really come to value George’s friendship and she simply wishes that George wasn’t so weighed down with stress and emotional walls. Therefore this version of George is happy, carefree, and fully comfortable in her own skin - they also appear to be much closer in terms of friendship.

I’d like to reiterate now that Nancy’s perfect world is first and foremost founded on her reality. With that in mind, rather than changing all the details of Bess’s life to grant her something more favorable than living out of a van, she simply wishes for her friend to make the most of the situation. In this universe we see Bess living it up, embracing her unusual lifestyle for everything that it is, and also having become a social media star. Here she is positively glowing. Nancy’s greatest wish for Bess is to be happy, thriving, and free from anxiety.

On multiple occasions in this episode it’s mentioned that Ace is pretty much the same. This show in its earlier stages often treated Ace as the ‘comic relief’, so a very shallow reading of this episode could dismiss these as throwaway lines; but given Nancy’s psychological revelations regarding literally everyone else, I truly don’t believe his role would be so trivial. Therefore, without getting TOO dramatic or shippy about it 😜, I think what we can take from this is that there’s genuinely nothing about Ace that Nancy wishes were any different. From where she’s standing, he seems content with who he is and has become an important part of her inner circle (per 1x08, she considers him her friend). I think that Ace is still maybe a bit of a background player for her at this point (remember this is pre-library scene), but he’s such a steady and dependable one that there’s nothing about him she would want to change.

Ryan Hudson is a charitable man who is doing The Most for Horseshoe Bay, using his power and influence only for good. This is the man Nancy wishes Ryan was, instead of the one who’s made countless destructive decisions and caused far more harm than good. Plus, a smaller detail, but Ryan’s hair is much more natural and un-moussed in this reality because he is unconcerned with upholding a certain image per his family name (and, if we expand our thinking here, this version of Ryan may have cut ties with his family completely). Ryan is more comfortable with himself here, as there is no overhanging sense of guilt re: Lucy Sable or even Tiffany.

Lucy is still present via the ghost under the sheet, taking the form of Hannah Gruen and dropping Nancy the clues she needs to further her investigation. Nancy’s connection with Lucy is far too strong to be broken by any universe - but since both Kate Drew AND Tiffany Hudson are alive in this timeline, it’s unlikely that Nancy would know much at all about Lucy Sable. Therefore she doesn’t make any physical appearances.

It says a lot about Nancy at her core that so much of her ‘perfect life’ is about everyone around her being happier, healthier. And based on Nancy’s surprise at the idea that “you all like me” in this universe, it appears that she does still struggle with some of the anxiety her mother said she had. Of COURSE her friends like her, but it tells us a little something about Nancy’s inner world and psychology. I think that detail is a GREAT take on the Nancy Drew character. It makes her a little more vulnerable without removing any of her courage, her boldness, or her strength.

[gwyns]

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone draw parallels between Feyre leaving Tamlin for her Mate to Elain leaving Azriel for her Mate. (Ignoring the fact I hate Rhysand, the books obviously want me to think he's the best person ever so I'll just pretend). Because that's what I see happening.

Elain and Azriel are so clearly rebounds for one another. Elain's still grieving her human love and life, and Azriel is still hung up on Mor. They're both quiet and available, so they jump to each other. That's it. The Azriel POV was purely about what he wants. How he wants to fuck her and taste her. He's just sex to her.

Even if E/riels had a more convincing case, it's not like SJM hasn't pulled a SIKE on us before. If she goes anywhere with E/riel, she'll undoubtedly pull it back. SJM doesn't take Mating bonds lightly, and she's stated that she loves Lucien. And if anyone deserves the happiness of a bond, it's him.

Feyre and Rhys, and Cassian and Nesta, all had relationships/lovers before Mating. Elain "liking" Az now, (which we're not even clear on), doesn't really mean much.

I'd like to hear your thoughts! You're so good at this, and you always explain my thoughts so perfectly. Love and light 💕💕💕

honestly there are quite a few feysand/elucien parallels that people either don't see or choose to ignore.

rhysand was first presented as a villain to feyre, the same could be applied to lucien just bc of his envolvement with tamlin (that he wrongfully gets blamed for btw idk why e/riels love blaming tamlin's mistakes on lucien). feyre was engaged before she went to rhys, elain was engaged before she met lucien. both were/are? still hung up on their former fiances. feysand as a couple represents the night, elucien would represent (at least in part) day. it's literally night and day with them. they're similar but also wholly their own pairing, it's fascinating to me.

anyway i think i will use this ask to spill some of my e/riel opinions sorry about that! alright let's start off with this controversial statement: i don't think e/riel was ever meant to be endgame.

i've seen it said a few times over the years that sarah changed her mind about elucien and while that's possible bc she also previously changed her mind on lucien and nesta one has to ask themselves..... if she wanted to write a mate bond rejection why didn't she stick with her original plan of lucien and nesta being mates? she's said herself that they wouldn't work but she chose to change lucien's mate to someone who compliments him better, and it's to feyre's other sister no less. that tells me lucien is important and powerful, he's mated to one of the sisters, one of the key players of the entire series.

another point is we can assume (and we could be wrong, let me put this here before someone yells at me or vague blogs about it) that sjm had an elucien endgame in mind when writing acowar, right? and when she was touring for that book hadn't she already started work on acofas? and we know that she's never on social media, so if she had an elucien endgame in mind when she wrote all of the supposed e/riel "evidence" where does that leave us?

drama. tension. conflict. angst.

i think that's what it all comes down to. people will say that elucien was a front while e/riel is the true endgame but... it all seems a bit easy, doesn't it? e/riel is right in your face while elucien is silently brewing in the background. what if the bait and switch isn't elucien, but e/riel?

sarah has shown us before that she likes to use her characters as ways for her other characters to end up with their endgame matches. for example, without tamlin, feyre wouldn't have met rhys. and moving over to throne of glass for a second, if not for chaol, aelin wouldn't have met rowan. and in turn, if aelin hadn't given yrene the money she needed in tab, chaol wouldn't have met her.

are the e/riel scenes romantically coded? yes, probably. i'm not saying they aren't, some people picked up on it but i personally didn't get that vibe myself, especially in acowar, but acofas kinda blurred the lines a bit. but even then, i didn't think they'd work out and i still don't understand the arguments that are supposed to be in their favor from that book. elain says she doesn't want a male so that excludes lucien but not azriel somehow? that line means she doesn't want any fae, she wants a human man, she wants graysen. then we have lucien saying he can't even stand to be in the same room as elain which i never read as a "oh i hate this person" kinda way. no, it's bc the whole situation between them is awkward and it obviously makes both of them uncomfortable. it doesn't help when literally all of the inner circle is constantly around them, and being in the night court in general doesn't give them the privacy to get to know each other.

some people like to ask why build e/riel up at all if they're not going to be together? one thing i've always loved about sjm's books is how she can write relationships. now, let's say you meet someone irl and you like them, eventually maybe fall in love with them, and fail to notice how they're not good for you. maybe everyone around you can see it, but you don't. you want a relationship and you're in a decent one, it should work out. like they're not a bad person, this relationship just isn't right for you in the long run. why waste your time? it's life. sometimes things are good for you at a certain point in time but not later on. sometimes you just end up in a relationship that was never good for you. sometimes you fall out of love with someone. you're constantly learning and adapting to things and that's my stance on e/riel. i think they're both looking for companionship and they're the "safest" and most available option.

taking it back to acofas, azriel was relived to not have to get elain a gift and was still gazing longingly at mor. now in acosf he's avoiding talking about her while wanting to fuck elain and getting defensive when helion mentions mor. he's not over her. he's not going to just completely forget 500 years of pining bc elain showed up, especially when they haven't even helped one another to move on. if they had, we would have seen the proof of that. not just "oh she's hot we both want sex", that doesn't make a healthy relationship.

as for elain, she's been taught she has to act a certain way her entire life. she has to downplay her trauma and emotions to appease others so they don't worry about her. maybe she's even had visions involving lucien that upset/scare her somehow and she's reaching out for something else. i think they're both lonely and desperate (at least on az's end) for someone that they ultimately are drawn to the wrong people.

as for the lack of elucien development... this is how i see it. if they're endgame, why would sarah have all of their big moments happen off screen or as a throwaway line in acosf? elain is getting a book, we know this, and with how much of the story is tied to lucien and how much is left unresolved with him, we can also assume he'd get a pov at some point. so imo it makes sense for the fact we got little to no development for them in acosf. no, she wants a huge wedge between them so we can watch them come together. the payoff will be that much sweeter. kinda similar to how she put a wedge between nessian before acosf, sure they had more development in acowar than elucien but i think that's bc sarah knew they'd get the first spinoff. she had to give them that development whereas elucien can wait, a bit longer. it's frustrating yes but i do think we'll get something in acotar 5.

maybe i'm an optimistic fool, maybe sarah did at one point have an endgame in mind for them, but i find it hard to believe she wouldn't see how wrong they are for each other in the long run. she's very good at showing us how well characters fit together with just a few lines.

[sortasirius]

“The Heroes’ Journey” and What Sam Knows

Bro holy fuck.

This season is just????  So good????

Before we get into the Sam Knows meta I promised you all...it was just really nice to have a funny episode that wasn’t like weirdly offensive or sad or ended horribly, this was just a bumbling episode that, while still connected to the main plot, was sort of a one off.  Garth is such a gift, it was so great to be able to see him thriving, and it was absolutely hilarious to see the boys be normal.  And that tap number???????  Hello???????

Aight, let’s get into it.

Ok listen.  Y’all know I’ve talked a lot about what Sam knows (here and here), or how fucking obvious it is that he knows, whatever, but there was something in this episode that could be seen as throwaway, but I think Dabb is too smart for that.

So, like, he obviously draws attention to the fact that one twin’s name is Sam and the other one is named Cas (aka NOT named Dean), which is super funny, Dean’s face was great in that scene, but to me, it put everyone’s eyes on Garth’s twins, kinda made them the focal point when they were onscreen, and if there’s no reason to do that, why bother?

I’ve said time and time again that Andrew Dabb is one of the most detailed oriented writers in the room, and it shows with how many plotlines he’s able to seamlessly tie together throughout a season as a showrunner, but he does it as a standalone writer as well, which is why he’s always been so good at writing young Sam and Dean, he takes the time to put in little details with their characters as boys that makes sense with their characters as men.  He doesn’t do things on accident, or do things just to throw them away, especially not now, when we’re ten episodes away from the actual end of the show, and he is the showrunner.  Everything has a purpose.  Everything means something, as Rowena might say.

So, we get to the end of the episode, everyone lives, Sam and Dean are still very much “normal” and Garth is the one who went on the hero’s journey.  Sam and Dean end up holding the twins, Sam holding his namesake, being as cute as can be, and Dean just sorta stares at baby Cas, and then we get the line:

“This Cas keeps looking at me weird.”

“So, kinda like the real Cas.”

Okay yeah, ha ha, Cas looks at people weird.  But....no...let’s think about it...why would Sam say that?  Why would he say that Cas looks at Dean weird, when they make jokes about Cas (which, to be honest, they haven’t done in years) it was always along the lines of oh Cas is just a weird guy, that’s just how Cas is, whatever, but this was specifically, singularly, directed at Dean.  Cas looks at Dean, and Dean alone, weird.  Hm.  Much to think about.

Why put that line there?  Why?  This episode isn’t about Cas, but he’s still there, Garth named one of his kids after him, instead of Dean, and then Dean draws attention to the fact that, obviously, this baby is not Cas.  Once again, Cas occupies the negative space of the episode so it constantly feels like he’s missing.

Listen, we can argue semantics and what that line is supposed to mean all day long, but for real, even when he’s not there Cas is included, he’s thought about, discussed, a part of the family. 

Details are important in any show’s finale season, but I feel like they’re especially important for a showrunner like Andrew Dabb, almost all of his core writers thrive on details, on drawing attention to little things that end up being bigger plot points later, and this little, throwaway line from Sam?  Doesn’t feel so little to me, especially with Cas mentioned in the background, drawing attention, once again to the fact that he’s not there, that he should be there, that they’re separated.

In my opinion, Sam had known ~something~ for years, we’ve always had those little moments of too-long looks between Dean and Cas, Sam awkwardly clearing his throat, loudly entering the room, lest we ever forget the iconic “And you’re gonna storm in riiiiight now.”  Sam isn’t an idiot, and he’s not blind either, but I think this might be the first time that he’s actually addressed it, and in a way where there isn’t much room to interpret.  It’s just an accepted part of life for Sam, that Dean and Cas look at each other weird, that he sometimes needs to remind them that he’s in the room, that their looks are long and sometimes awkward for him.  I mean......how much more clear does it need to be?

And to have this right after the completely unresolved prayer thing?  We don’t even know what happened after that, but we’d be fools to assume that it’s all resolved.  I saw a post, and, apologies, I can’t credit bc I can’t seem to find the original post, where the poster was saying that there’s no way the DeanCas tension is resolved.  We’re halfway through the season, and even though Cas said “I heard your prayer,” there’s no way this almost full season conflict is over ten episodes before the end.

Once again, Dean and Cas are the focal point, even in details, and it’s not something that we should discount.

.....also, just as a reminder.....Sam knows. :)

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 12: Three Men in a Boat [TFP 2/3]

[This was completely missing from my tumblr, via every search function and everything! So I’ve reuploaded - thanks anon for letting me know!!]

This section of the meta is going to deal with the events at Sherrinford – I’ve broken TFP up into three sections to try and get the most out of it. This isn’t just a read through like the first part of the meta, it has a specific structure, much like Eurus’s trials for the boys, so it’s really important to take this bit in one chapter. My hypothesis is thus – that each episode of s4 has been a different obstacle to be broken through in Sherlock’s mind, and that each of them is represented by one of the different Sherrinford tasks. It’s essentially an illumination of Sherlock’s progress through his mind – but it’s set up by Eurus, who is Sherlock’s mental barrier, so these are going to represent Sherlock’s darkest fears about each of the obstacles. Ready? Let’s go.

We take up the episode at the pirate hijacking, which is quite BAMF, but also illuminates a couple of things that we should bear in mind going into this episode. The first is that the transition from a blown up Baker Street to Sherlock and John hijacking a boat without a scratch on them is absolutely bizarre and leaves SO many questions – it’s dream-jumping of the most obvious kind. The second is that water has played a long role as a metaphor through the show, particularly in the EMP sequence, and it’s climaxing now – we are in the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind.

Mycroft and John working together in the disguise sequence is metaphorically lovely – in the Oscar Wilde scene of the last part we saw Sherlock’s brain and heart finally coming together, and here for the first time they’re working together to give Sherlock the ability to go and confront Eurus. This is what makes Mycroft’s line so powerful. He says:

Say thank you to Doctor Watson. […] He talked me out of Lady Bracknell – this could have been very different.

Comic throwaway? Maybe. But given what we know about Lady Bracknell from the first part, this also has a more powerful meaning – heart!John finally stopped brain!Mycroft from being an obstructive force in Sherlock’s psyche, and they started working together instead to save him. This could have been very different is far more loaded than it sounds. All this whilst creating an image of Mark Gatiss as a Victorian aunt – wonderful.

When we first meet Eurus proper, her similarity to Sherlock is striking. She plays the violin – this isn’t a Holmes thing, because Mycroft doesn’t – it’s Sherlock’s motif throughout. Her hair is like a feminine Sherlock, her pallor and cheekbones match Cumberbatch. For reference, this is a picture of Sian Brooke and Benedict Cumberbatch together in real life.

I’ve done a section on why I think Eurus is the most repressed part of Sherlock’s psyche, and his traumatic barrier to love and life – I sometimes glibly refer to this as gay trauma, but that’s its essence. The similarity between Brooke and Cumberbatch in this scene is really compelling, looking the same but lit and dressed in opposite colours. Similarity and difference both highlighted. Even nicer, the white of Sherlock’s shirt is the same notable brightness as Eurus’s uniform, but it’s hidden under his jacket – a visual metaphor for her being hidden inside him.

Eurus gives Sherlock a Stradivarius as a gift. This should set alarm bells ringing for anybody who has seen TPLoSH. If you haven’t seen The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, please do so immediately because my God you are missing out, but TLDR – a Russian ballerina offers Holmes a Stradivarius to have sex with her so she can have a brainy child, and he declines because he’s gay. (This is not just my interpretation, this is genuinely what happens, just to be clear.) Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius is a deliberate callback to the film which Mofftiss cite as their biggest inspiration; just like the ballerina tempted Holmes to feign heterosexuality, so does Eurus – and both make clear that it’s not without its rewards, which is unfortunately true for real life as well. This moment in Sherlock’s psyche also recalls the desperate unrequitedness of Holmes’s love for Watson in TPLoSH, a reference to our Sherlock’s deepest fear at the moment – he has realised his importance but not John’s romantic/sexual love for him, as we’ll see. So here, trauma!Eurus isn’t just referencing closetedness, but is actively drawing on a history of character repression with which to torment Sherlock – metafictionality at its finest.

The Stradivarius is specifically associated with closetedness, but violins more generally in the show are used to show expressions of love that can’t be voiced out loud – think of John and Mary’s wedding, or the desperate bowing of ASiB. So Eurus, gay trauma that she is, telling Sherlock that she taught him to play is a moment of distinct pain – she is the reason he can’t speak his love aloud, but instead has to speak in signs.

When Sherlock plays ‘him’, rather than Bach, to Eurus (he has a big Bach thing with Moriarty in s2, take from that what you will because I don’t know!), he’s playing Irene Adler’s theme. As a fandom, we’ve generally agreed on associating Irene’s theme with sexual love, which ties in nicely with Eurus’s question – has Sherlock had sex? It’s unanswered. At the end of ASiB, Irene calls Sherlock the virgin, suggesting that he hasn’t.

My favourite moment in s4 without a doubt is Jim dancing to I Want To Break Free. I know it’s the most boring thing to say, but my two greatest loves are Andrew Scott and Freddie Mercury, so it was like Christmas. Here it is also Christmas, but there are two possible timelines. I hypothesise that this refers to Christmas 2010, but it’s absolutely conceivable that it could be Christmas 2009. If we acknowledge that Sherlock is in a coma in 2014, then five years ago is Christmas 2009; however, given that we’ve jumped to 2015 in dream time, I’m going to make the guess that Jim’s visit to Sherrinford is supposed to take place in 2010. This ties up with the idea that this is when Moriarty first started taking an interest in Sherlock, who had never heard of him before ASiP, particularly as this is all in the EMP.

I firmly believe that Jim represents the fear that John is in danger – I highlight this in the chapter on HLV, where you’ll recall we first encounter Jim in the EMP and he sends Sherlock on his journey through the EMP with the words John Watson is definitely in danger – a pretty big sign. Even without this, though, his biggest threat to Sherlock has always been hurting John, whether in TRF or with the idea of burning the heart out of him with Semtex. It’s not unreasonable then to assume that MP!Jim first getting inside Sherlock’s subconscious to represent this fear happens in 2010, when he first meets John. He slips in and stays there, and he melds with Eurus. We see this in the powerful visual of the two of them dancing in front of the glass as Jim’s image slowly becomes Eurus’s reflection – the fear of John dying embeds itself into the gay trauma that Sherlock has stored up, even without him realising it. This ties in nicely with the choice of I Want to Break Free, which is famous for its use of drag in the music video – Jim melding into Eurus is the dark side of queer genderbending that we hate to see. It’s also a pretty fitting song name for an intensifying of repressed gay trauma, even without the association with queer king Mercury.

[A side note to all of this – there were wonderful TEH metas about trains in tunnels being sexual, which isn’t just a tjlc thing but is a well-established idea in cinema – Moriarty’s consistent train noises here seem like a horrifyingly inverted version of that sexual longing.]

Task 1 – The Six Thatchers

The governor is set up as a mirror for John in this task, which provides some helpful context for the episode as a whole. Heart!John makes this comparison himself, by drawing out the similarity between the situation with the governor’s wife and his with Mary, though in this case the governor does kill himself because of his wife – or so it seems. The suicidal instinct matches with everything we’ve learned about John in s4, but I want to hypothesise, perhaps tenuously, that he’s more connected with Eurus than we might think. We know that Eurus has had control of the governor for quite some time, and one of the things we hear her saying to the governor in the background of the interrogations is that he shouldn’t trust his wife. This is an odd thing to pepper into the background when he’s about to commit suicide for her, and perhaps suggests that he’s more of Eurus’s pawn than he lets on, though I grant this may be spurious.

The idea that he distrusts his wife because of Eurus is important, however, because we’ve already seen John engage with Eurus in various forms, but this seems like an extension of E; Eurus, aka Sherlock’s hidden self, has been making John doubt Mary, even before she shoots Sherlock. John cannot know she’s a spy at this point, so it’s unlikely he’s doubting her goodwill; he’s simply doubting her.

Before we look at how the actual task impacts the governor and how that illustrates what’s really going on in TST, it’s worth pointing out that it is the governor’s engagement with Eurus which prompts the entire shutdown of Sherrinford and forces Sherlock (with brain!Mycroft and heart!John ever at his side, of course) to engage once and for all with Eurus. This points to everything that s4 has been telling us – that Sherlock’s understanding of the relationship between him and John, including his power to save him (we’re going to see the governor play the foil here) is what sends his brain into stay-alive-overdrive. Sherrinford is the peak of this.

Summary of the task, for those who hate TFP: Sherlock is given a gun and told he can pick either John or Mycroft to kill the governor, otherwise the governor’s wife will be killed by Eurus. As I’ve written about in its chapters, TST is about Sherlock trying to get to the bottom of Mary and why she tried to kill him – and, of course, the impact this will have on John. In brief, by displacing the shot onto Mary in his mind, he’s discounting his own importance and instead thinking about what it will mean for John to lose Mary. His greatest fear is that losing Mary will break John, and it isn’t until the end of TLD that he recognises that the return of John’s suicidal ideation isn’t over Mary, but over him. TFP presents the horror version, the version of TST that Sherlock’s trauma wants him to believe but which he has to overcome. In this case, Mycroft and John resolve to keep the governor alive in their passivity, but that passivity – Sherlock’s coma – is not enough to keep the governor from killing himself over Mary. This is the most feared outcome from Mary’s death that Sherlock can think of – his fear of losing John combined with John’s love of Mary, which in TST Sherlock is still taking as read.

Double naming in this show should never be neglected, and in this case we learn shortly before the governor dies that his name is David. Again, the dramatic manner in which we learn this (on the moment of execution) draws our attention to it – we know another David in this show.

Yup – Mary's ex who’s still in love with her from TSoT. So even though Sherlock is experiencing the panic of John killing himself for loss of Mary, his subconscious is still pointing out to him that that’s not what’s happening here. This mirror version of John that he has set up, who is broken by the loss of Mary as Sherlock fears in TST, is actually the other man in Mary’s life – even with Eurus forcing the worst possible scenario onto him, this still can’t quite fit John’s character. And so we move onto the second task.

Task 2 – The Lying Detective

This section of the Sherrinford saga is the three Garridebs, the closest thing that the fandom has ever got to a collective trauma. I do think, however, that it’s fully reclaimable for tjlc and means the same as we always wanted it to; I also think that it’s possibly the most gutting part of Eurus’s metatfictional power play.

If you haven’t read The Adventure of the Three Garridebs, it’s quite short and the most johnlocky of the Holmes canon, so I’d thoroughly recommend. For the purposes of mapping bbc!verse onto acd!verse, however, here’s the incredibly short version. A man called Evans wants to burgle Nathan Garrideb, so he calls himself John Garrideb and writes an advertisement from a man called Alexander Hamilton Garrideb (make of that what you will, hamilstans) declaring that he wants to bequeath his fortune to three Garridebs. “John” gets someone to pretend to be a Howard Garrideb to get Nathan out of the house to meet him – he comes to burgle the house but Holmes and Watson are lying in wait. He shoots Watson, and Holmes thinks Watson is seriously injured and so we have this wonderful section:

“You’re not hurt, Watson? For God’s sake, say you are not hurt!”

It was worth a wound–it was worth many wounds–to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.

“It’s nothing, Holmes. It’s a mere scratch.”

He had ripped up my trousers with his pocket-knife.

“You are right,” he cried with an immense sigh of relief. “It is quite superficial.” His face set like flint as he glared at our prisoner, who was sitting up with a dazed face. “By the Lord, it is as well for you. If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive. Now, sir, what have you to say for yourself?”

Mofftiss have referenced this moment as being the greatest in the Holmes canon for them, the moment when we see the depth of Holmes’s affection for Watson, and so it seems odd to waste it on such a tiny moment in TFP. Many fans, myself included, were really upset to see Eurus drop all three Garridebs into the sea, the implication being that tjlc would never be real, and it was that moment that caused many (including me) to walk away. I came back, obviously, but I completely understand why you wouldn’t. However, I want to map one Garridebs story onto the other to show how they might match up.

The Garridebs that Eurus presents us with are not the three Garridebs from the story. In the story, there are three physically present Garridebs – Nathan, John and Howard – although admittedly only Nathan is an actual Garrideb. Alexander was completely invented by John and existed only in a newspaper advertisement. Evans, alias John Garrideb, is the criminal in the Garridebs story; Alexander is an invention.

So – what happens if we substitute John for Alex in bbc!verse, as in canon they are the same person? This is interesting, because double-naming means that John becomes the killer. Whilst it’s true that John Garrideb is known as Killer Evans for his murder of a counterfeiter back in America, in canon he is done for attempted murder – of John Watson, of course. Here we have a situation where a John is set up killing John. This is exacerbated by the victim in bbc!verse being called Evans; Roger Prescott, the counterfeiter, would have been a much more canonical nod to the books, so we can assume that the choice of Evans is therefore significant. It should be noted that Evans and John/Alex Garrideb are the same person in acd!canon - so killing Evans is a representation of suicide. But, in case we weren’t there yet, the reason that Evans took the name ‘John’ is acd!canon is very likely to be because Evan is Welsh for John – so whatever way you look at this situation, you have Sherlock deducing John killing John.

This is, of course, exactly what Sherlock deduces at the end of TLD, far too slow, when we see Eurus shoot John in an exact mirror of the shot from TST – I explained in a previous chapter why this means that John is suicidal without Sherlock. However, much like the passivity of Sherlock, John and Mycroft in the first task, here we see that Sherlock’s act of deduction is good, but can’t actually save anyone; Eurus kills off our Garridebs moment as Sherlock is left to watch, and it’s notable that heart!John is the most distressed about this. Remember, in the first task Eurus left Sherlock with an image of a John who was suicidally devoted to Mary, and although the Garridebs moment is one which metafictionally highlights the relationship between Sherlock and John, she’s still presenting him with a Garridebs moment in which he is fundamentally unable to save John. This is a direct result of the Redbeard trauma that Sherlock has experienced – helplessness is key to that, and this is what Eurus has come to represent in his psyche. But – Eurus isn’t real, Eurus is testing Sherlock, trauma trying to bring him down, and Sherlock’s job in TFP is to break through the walls that his consciousness has set up for him.

The power in Sherlock saying I condemn Alex Garrideb is heartbreaking, then, because it is Sherlock recognising that he is the reason that John is going to die. Eurus is there to make him confront that reality, which she explicitly makes him do. We get the split-second moment where he thinks he’s saved Alex, and then he’s plunged into the sea – but remember, this is Eurus taunting Sherlock, presenting him with worst-possible-scenarios. TFP is set up as a game for a reason – it is a series of hypotheses cast in Sherlock’s mind by his trauma that he has to break through one by one. Remember, although she’s ostensibly trying to hurt Sherlock, Eurus’s ‘extra’ murders in the first two tasks are aimed at hurting John, which wouldn’t make sense if he weren’t the mp version of Sherlock’s heart.

Task 3 – The Final Problem

Pretty much straight after this episode aired, people were pointing out that Molly is a clear John mirror and that pretty much all of the deductions Sherlock makes here could be about John. Again, we’re seeing Sherlock’s emotions being resolved in a heterosexual context – the presence of Eurus means that he’s unable to process them in their real, queer form. However, if we take Molly to be a stand-in for John in this scene, it may tell us what TFP is about – and the scenario that Eurus presents will be the worst one, the thing that is causing Sherlock the most pain.

TLD/the previous task have shown us that John is in imminent danger, so the transition to Molly Hooper’s flat being rigged with bombs is not a difficult one; we must assume this to be the suicidal ideation that we’ve just deduced. The time limit suggests that Sherlock is running out of time to save him (fucking right he fell into a coma SIX YEARS AGO). Putting Molly in a bad mood isn’t really necessary for this scene – they make her seem a lot more depressed than she would necessarily need to be, and they emphasise her aloneness and her ability to push people away, which isn’t something we know Molly to do. These traits are all much more important in the context of a suicidal John – they paint a much clearer picture of someone who is depressed and alone than we really need for this scene, where it’s not relevant to the surface plot.

Sherlock and the audience believe he has won this task, but of course he hasn’t - there were never any explosives rigged up in Molly’s flat, and it was a ruse to destroy his relationship with Molly. This is what he fears then – what if he’s wrong? What if coming back to life because he loves John won’t save him – it will destroy him and their relationship? The problem to be wrestled with is how to save John – according to the symmetry of these tasks, that is the final problem. We know that the scenario Eurus has presented isn’t real, but Sherlock doesn’t; he is being held up by his inability to cope with interpersonal relationships, and to get to the bottom of that we’re going to need to understand what he’s been repressing – part 3 of this meta.

There’s a wonderful shot just as Sherlock is destroying Molly’s coffin which zooms up and out through a ceiling window, all the way above Sherrinford, as though to emphasise not how remote Sherrinford is but just how deep inside it Sherlock is. Given what we know about the height metaphor as well as the water metaphor, this shot is a pretty clear way of telling us – this is as deep inside Sherlock’s mind as we go, this is the nub. But Sherlock smashing up the coffin has another powerful connotation – he's refusing death. In terms of metaphor, he’s refusing John’s death – there will be no small coffin, because he will not let it happen – but the visual of him smashing the coffin also suggests that he is rejecting his own death. The two are, of course, inextricably linked. Our boys’ lives are tied together.

Epilogue: The Hunger Games

I can’t watch this without thinking of The Hunger Games, I just can’t! But regardless of how much Sherlock seems like Katniss in this section, let’s press on. I don’t count this as one of the typical tasks, because this isn’t Eurus presenting a ‘haha I tricked you scenario’ - far from it. This is Sherlock’s way into unlocking his repression. The key takeaway from this scene, as we’ll see is that trauma has hurt Sherlock, and it’s going to try pretty hard here to mutilate him – but it can’t kill him.

We get a great line from Sherlock at the beginning of this, where he tells John that the way Eurus is treating him isn’t torture, it’s vivisection. Because it’s an experiment? Perhaps. But the more logical way to phrase this would be that it isn’t vivisection, it’s torture. Torture is much more emotionally charged than vivisection as a phrase – from a writer’s perspective, this phrasing is strange because it seems to negate rather than intensify the pain our characters are undergoing. Why, then, would vivisection be more important than torture? Well, put simply, vivisection is the act of cutting someone open and seeing what’s inside – and that’s what we’re doing. This isn’t just an analogy for experimenting on people, it’s an analogy for going literally inside somebody. In EMP world, then, these words are well chosen.

Sherlock is offered the choice – John or Mycroft? Heart or brain? We might initially think that this is Eurus pressuring Sherlock into death, but that’s not the case at all – we know from the early series that Sherlock has survived before (although very unhappily) with just one of these two dominating the other. It has taken his EMP journey to unite them into a functioning entity, and Eurus is bent on destroying that, mutilating either his emotional capacity or his reasoning, the two parts that make him human. This is a good sign, as well, that trauma has been acting on Sherlock through the first three series, when his psyche was dominated by brain!Mycroft - Eurus is keen to revert to that state, when trauma had control. It is touching, then, that brain!Mycroft is willing to relinquish that control and leave Sherlock with his heart, perhaps because this new unity allows him to recognise how damaged the Sherlock he created was. We should also note that this diminishing of Sherlock’s heart is compared to his Lady Bracknell, which we know to be his repression of all Sherlock’s romantic/sexual impulses – except this time it’s less convincing, because his brain doesn’t believe it anymore. What is also devastating is heart!John’s lack of self-esteem or knowledge, the sense that he isn’t useful to Sherlock, which of course will be proven wrong.

[if anyone has thoughts on the white rectangle on the floor, do let me know. It’s bugging me!]

Mycroft says that he acknowledges there is a heart somewhere inside of him – again, this is emotionally powerful in the context of the brain/heart wrangling that we’ve seen inside the EMP. Just as Sherlock’s psyche has tried to compartmentalise them all this time and they’re finally working together, now there’s an acknowledgement that the compartmentalisation into personae is maybe inaccurate as well – brain!Mycroft’s pretence to be emotionally detached is not in fact correct, as we’ve been suspecting for a long time.

Brain!Mycroft also states that it’s his fault that this has all happened because he let Eurus converse with Jim. If you spend any time thinking about the Eurus + Jim meeting, like many elements of this show it doesn’t make sense. There isn’t a feasible way this could have been planned, recorded etc in five minutes, and although it’s true that Jim could have come back to shoot the videos under the governor’s supervision, it’s not clear why he’s so important. Unless he takes on the metaphorical significance that we’ve assigned him, letting Jim see Eurus seems pretty unimportant – he is only the garnishing on Eurus’s plan. Instead, Mycroft is at fault for letting John be in danger – not only did Sherlock misdeduce Mary (although we can lay the blame for that at the feet of heart!John - see meta on TST), his reasoning was blinded and so he missed John’s suicidal urges and the danger to his life. Brain!Mycroft holds himself responsible – all of these EMP deductions are way late, comprised of things Sherlock should have noticed when his brain wasn’t letting his heart in.

Five minutes. It took her five minutes to do this to all of us.

The lighting is dramatic, so I can’t properly gauge Ben’s expression at this moment, but his eyes look crinkled in confusion, just like they are at the moments when a sense of unreality starts to set in in TAB. Indeed, these aren’t very appropriate words for when you’re about to kill your brother; it’s like he’s being distracted, like there’s something important that he’s missing. Mofftiss are drawing attention to the sheer impossibility of the situation – and Sherlock’s nearly there. His Katniss Everdeen move, threatening to kill himself, is the recognition that his trauma doesn’t have that power – it can hurt him and deform him by twisting his psyche into unbalance, like it has before and like Eurus is trying to here, but it cannot kill him. We can see that Sherlock has risen above the one-sided dominance that he began the entire show with when Eurus shouts at him that he doesn’t know about Redbeard yet – that’s not going to change his mind today, but it’s a direct throwback to the days when it would have, in ASiP with the cabbie. Character development, folks.

The shot of Sherlock falling backwards into the dark water links to two aspects of the EMP. One is the continued metaphor of water to represent sinking into the depths of his mind. The water is so dark it looks oily – it could be argued that this is the oil that is corrupting the waters of his mind as we finally cut to the repressed memories. I quite like this reading, though I have little other oil imagery to link it to in the show. The other notable point is the slow-motion fall backwards – instead of showing Sherlock, John and Mycroft all falling, we cut to Sherlock falling backwards exactly like he did in HLV when he was shot by Mary. This is a really clear visual callback. Even though we’re going deeper, we’re linking back to the original shooting, back in reality, suggesting that this depth is paradoxically going to lead us back to the start. To go back to the oil imagery, don’t forget that oil floats on water – although it looks like we’re sinking, there’s a real sense that these repressed memories are actually pulling us to the surface of Sherlock’s subconscious, quite unlike the deep zoom out we saw when Sherlock was destroying the coffin.

And that’s it for part 2 of the TFP meta! Part 3/3 will deal with such highlights as John not being able to recognise bones and presumably getting his feet pulled off by chains. Good thing this is just a dream. See you then!

[nellie-elizabeth]

Supernatural: Carry On (15x20)

Oh my god. Lol. So... did Andrew Dabb forget to read back through his finale script one final time before deciding it was finished? Because like... Dean says "if we don't keep living, all that sacrifice (Cas and Jack) will be for nothing." Cut to a comically short time later, where Dean dies and is just like "time to go, let's not keep fighting, I'm tired lol."

Like WHAT did I just witness. I'm so grateful, in this moment, to a little show called The Magicians, because in April of 2019 they ended their fourth season with such an egregiously terrible decision that I literally couldn't sleep for a week, I was shaking and intermittently sobbing, I had never felt so betrayed and devastated over any piece of media before. After that, I've sort of become numb to bad endings, and this is no exception. This episode was absolutely terrible and I'm just sort of like... meh. I'll ignore it. Whatever.

I do want to forego the usual "pro" and "con" sections in this review, and do a more traditional full-on ramble about my thoughts, because they're kind of convoluted, if I'm gonna be honest.

The first thing I want to say, is that this wasn't the worst finale I've ever seen. Objectively, it was a terrible episode of TV and an insulting wrap-up to a fifteen-year-show. But I have a very specific category for the worst finales ever, and those are the ones that provide endgame states for the characters that are... unfixable in a post-canon but still-canon-compliant world. So, for example, the How I Met Your Mother finale killed off the titular mother and betrayed years of buildup, and that's a real-world sitcom. There's no resurrecting people from that shit. Or like. Game of Thrones being an obvious recent example. The Rise of Skywalker is a good movie example.

This? It's a little different. The endgame state of Sam and Dean and Cas is that they all die and spend eternity in Heaven, where they get to be with all their loved ones. I mean, sure, we don't get to see that, we only get a throwaway line to imply that Cas made it out of Super Turbo Hell The Empty, but that's the endgame state of the characters. And that's more or less what I would have wanted, as like a... years after canon situation. Right? So yeah, this was a bad episode, but if I edit in the shit I wanted to see, none of it contradicts the canon in a way that's not workable. It's a sad world we've come to where this is all I can really grasp at, but there is a perverse sort of comfort in that.

So, should we talk now about how Dean dying is a betrayal of what they said this whole season, and maybe whole show was about? Ha. It's so ridiculous. It's embarrassing. I watched Dean's final moments and I was embarrassed for Jensen. For Dean. For all of us watching.

Just. Watch the end of 15x19 again, okay? Watch it, and hear what they're saying. Yay, we killed God, we killed the author of the story, which means we get to write our own stories, finally. We get to do that. After all this time, we're finally free. And what does freedom look like? It looks like Dean dying on a run of the mill hunt.

We get this little montage of Sam and Dean at the Bunker, you know? They're doing laundry and going on jogs and cuddling with Miracle the dog, and they're brushing their teeth and going on hunts, I guess. And the emotional resonance from that scene was just kind of... ennui? And boredom? And that's what's so terrible and depressing about this ending. It's so empty, because Dean didn't get to do the thing he said he was fighting for. Sure, he was always fighting for Sam, but he should have been able to fight for himself, too, right? He should have been able to fight for a life after the years of programming. He should have gotten to be a rock star or a chef or worked at an animal shelter or become a foster parent or grown old as Sam's brother, as an uncle to his kid. He should have been able to find love, if he wanted that.

Look, I'm not even mad that Dean died in a "mundane" way. It's not like "nooo Dean is too coooool to die in such a laaaame way, he's a bad-ass and he should have gone out in a blaze of glory!" That's actually not what I'm mad about at all. Sam died old in his bed, and Dean should have been able to do that too. This whole season, since finding out that Chuck was the ultimate big bad, was supposed to be about free will, and Dean never got to figure out a way to be happy and find peace. That's fucking dour and stupid.

I kept saying, in the buildup to this finale, that a depressing, grim-dark ending to this show would be a failing of the themes they set up, and, hey, they didn't go grim-dark, because the writers did not think this was grim-dark. They thought it was powerful and emotional and resonant. You can tell they thought that, even though they're... uh... what's the word. Wrong? Yeah. Wrong. You know what I realized while watching this? It was just a lamer, less resonant and appropriate version of Sam's sacrifice at the end of season five.

Right? Because after Sam yeets himself into hell to save the world, Dean just has to keep going, and as Cas says, "you got what you wanted, more of the same." Just... more of the same. And Dean couldn't hack it, he was miserable without Sam, and Sam came back and we got ten more years of the fucking show. And now... what, we just get that in the other direction? Because Sam is the strong one and can soldier on without Dean because his codependency was a little less crippling? Wow, what a great ending for him, I guess. It doesn't work because we've seen Sam without Dean, and he falls apart too.

And now the show ends with Sam alone. Sure, he gets married to a blur in the background and has a kid, but let me ask you a question, here. Did Sam... want to be a father? I didn't know that was a thing he wanted, that would make him happy, honestly. I had no idea. So this doesn't seem like it works as something even remotely satisfying as an endgame state for him either. It's bleak.

And it's bleaker because there's nobody else in this fucking episode, y'all. The other big theme in all of Supernatural, after "free will" would be "family don't end in blood." And guess what? Apparently it does? Apparently Sam and Dean are each other's whole worlds and nothing else matters? We get... an implied wider world but we don't get to see it. We don't get to see Eileen, Jody, Donna, anybody left alive for Sam. So from the standpoint of characters that we know and give a shit about, Sam loses Cas, Jack, and Dean and lives the rest of his life lonely and sad. Nobody else even comes to Dean's funeral. It's just Sam alone with the dog. Like... that's bleak.

This ending gave the fucking Wincest shippers everything their hearts could desire, for fuck's sake. Like. Why did they cater to that and not follow through on the idea that they had created a family and community beyond each other? You know, this thing called character growth?

To take a brief break from the negativity, I will say something here about Sam and Dean. In the weird hysterical euphoria of the whole Destiel thing a couple weeks ago, I lost sight of something, which is that for me, the draw of this show has always been the relationship between Sam and Dean. I was never a brothers-only person, but it was their fucked up codependent bond that drew me to the show over the years. I loved the idea of Destiel, but I never thought it was going anywhere, so really I loved Castiel, the character, separate from the context of his relationships. Having a big dramatic death scene where Dean says "I love you so much" and there's a forehead touch and Dean saying "it's always been you and me" and confesses that he was scared to get Sam at Stanford because he didn't know how to survive if he didn't have him, and to have Sam say "don't leave me" and then give Dean permission to go... I mean, all of this is catnip, right? All of this is great, like, in isolation, it was such an amazing "broment," as the fandom says. I mean, it made no sense with context, it was utterly insulting in every way, but Jensen and Jared acted their lil' hearts out and I could tell they were really in the moment.

So let's talk about Cas for a second, while I have you here... they never should have done the big gay confession. They just shouldn't have even fucking bothered. I'm telling you, that makes this whole thing worse. It felt completely intentional and weird that Dean never acknowledged the confession, never told Sam, never had a moment where he specifically reckoned with Cas' loss. But that's what I knew would happen. I knew it in my blood and bones, and as the meta started pouring in, I knew people were getting their hopes up for nothing. See, Cas saying "goodbye Dean" and the handprint on the arm... I knew that was their catharsis, that was the writers' and Misha's big goodbye to the character of Castiel. They thought they fucking nailed it. I knew we wouldn't see him again.

Like I said before, I have to be satisfied with an endgame state that doesn't totally suck, right? So, we get this throwaway line from Bobby that Jack fixed Heaven and made it not suck, and that Cas helped. This implies a multitude of things that are... comforting. At least Cas doesn't get that dour, dark, helpless oblivion that I worried he'd get. We can assume Jack plucked him out of the Empty, that he gets to be with his son, and that, if the fic writers so choose, Dean and Cas can have lots of gay sex up in Heaven. I think Misha not being in this finale was frankly a slap in the face to one of the biggest and most important characters the show has ever seen, you know? And I think that they kept him out of it so we could have Schrodinger's Destiel. Because if we'd seen Cas in heaven, and he hadn't confessed his big gay love, Dean could have been like: "hey Cas! Buddy! Good to see you, my friend." But since we did have the love confession, whatever Dean did upon seeing Cas would have to mean something in that context. So instead we didn't get to see him at all.

Which is stupid.

Also stupid is that the big sacrifice was to save Dean's life and then a couple weeks later he gets impaled on a rusty nail and dies anyway. Thanks for making the whole thing feel so utterly pointless and empty. No pun intended. Wow, they did Misha dirty, here, didn't they.

Turning back to Sam's ending, let's just talk about that for a minute. Like I said, I'm happy he got to live a long life and die an old man, what Dean always wanted for him. But nothing about that ending was more poignant because Dean was gone. In fact, it just made it super duper depressing and lame. There was no reason Dean couldn't have gotten a happy life, too. It adds nothing that he died young and unfulfilled. Like, you know how people joke about the end of the Titanic, where you see that Rose's Heaven is reuniting with Jack and everyone else on the ship, and people will say "well, gosh, that's kind of a slap in the face to Rose's family" since she clearly got married and had kids and grandkids? This is literally that! Like, having an ending where a young-again Sam Winchester gets to Heaven, and his whole Heaven, the thing that he needed to find peace after death, was a return to his brother... look, I'm not mad about that, but what the fuck about nameless blurry wife that we couldn't even confirm to be Eileen for some reason? What about everyone else?

And did Sam... keep hunting? Did he go to law school? Maybe there were background details that confirmed what he ended up doing with the rest of his life besides becoming a husband and father, but I didn't see evidence of it because I was too busy rolling my eyes out of my skull at how dumb this all was. So Sam just gets a generic "raking leaves in the yard" ending, like we saw for Dean at the end of season five, with nothing to challenge that. Even though we've seen why life outside of hunting, life without Dean, isn't satisfying for Sam, we're now supposed to accept it as how he spends the rest of his life, without seeing him put the work in to get there?

One thing I realized watching this episode is that it tries to play the middle. Like, with the Cas thing, they didn't want to make his noble gay sacrifice totally meaningless, so they couldn't just pop him back into the story, but they did give us one single throwaway line to reassure fans that he's not still in The Empty. So, people who don't give a shit about Cas can assume he's off being Jack's assistant and doesn't really interact with humans in Heaven. People who do give a shit about one of the show's main characters can assume that he has a home in Dean's little Heaven neighborhood too, and they all get to buddy around for eternity. People who don't like Eileen? Well, Sam married some nobody who we never got to meet. People who liked her? Well, you can't prove that wasn't Eileen, can you? Even Dean driving around in the impala waiting for Sam to die so he could finally be happy with his fucking soulmate or whatever. Time in Heaven is weird, Bobby says. It's metaphorical. You could assume that the driving montage was actually intercut with other moments, with Dean getting to see dear old mom (and dad, I guess, but ugh), and spending time with Bobby, with OG Charlie, with other familiar faces, and new ones as they finally reach their own deaths on Earth and come up to party with the rest of the gang.

Like, in a better show, in a world without Covid, maybe they had plans along these lines, to get more guest characters back and show Dean getting sappy hellos to a bunch of side characters in Heaven. To be quite honest, I would not have been mad about that. If you're going to make Dean die young and never give him the chance to find out who he could have been when the choices were all his own, which is, in case I haven't made that clear, a horrendous and insulting ending for his character... at the very least you could have given us the cheesiness of seeing him hug his friends in Heaven. Jeezus.

I want to hammer in this point one more time before I wrap up: they ended the show by saying that character development didn't matter. They had Dean's dying speech be a meta reference to the pilot episode of the show, they had him saying "it's always been you and me" and then they confirmed that with everything they had. Sam became a father, but did he have a happy life? Seems like he pined away for his dead brother for decades and then died. If the pilot had never happened, if Sam had stayed at Stanford and Dean had gone on hunting by himself, you know what would have happened? Sam would have had a "normal" life and married a woman and had a kid, I guess, and grown old, and Dean would have died fighting some vampires in a barn. This show has been on for fifteen years, and the ending did not honor anything about the journey the characters had been on.

A particularly egregious example is the early scene with the pie festival, where Sam is like "I'm sad about Cas and Jack" and Dean is like "if we don't go on living it won't honor their sacrifice" like... yeah, I get it, bringing people back from the dead time and time again is supposed to be a bad thing that Sam and Dean did for each other because they were selfish. So Sam giving Dean permission to go was supposed to be a growth moment. Sam and Dean accepting that Cas was gone and not even asking Jack to make sure he got sent to a happy eternity instead of oblivion, that's supposed to mean they've learned their lesson. And what a fucking lesson to leave things off on. Jesus, this is grim.

So like. As I try to figure out what to say at the end of this review, I will point out one glimmer of light in the darkness, which is that this finale isn't going to ruin the rewatchability of the show for me. I can still come back and re-watch without feeling like the whole thing is ruined by the ending. It's more than I can say for some other shows.

But honestly, if this was the ending we were going to get? Why the fuck not leave it open-ended? I did not enjoy 15x19 particularly well, but at least that episode left them on the open road, with a wide future ahead of them. Anything might have happened. It's their turn to write the story, right? Chuck is dead, the writer is "dead", the show is over, and now the possibilities are endless. That would have been an anticlimactic ending, for sure. But this ending just turns around and slaps the whole point of that first ending in the face and says "haha bitch you thought". They don't get to write their own stories. We see exactly how those stories end, and it's lame. Leave something to the imagination, yo. Leave it vague how and when they died, what their lives turned into. Show them in Heaven, getting to their peace at last, reuniting with their friends, including Cas. Put in a significant glance between Dean and Cas, and leave it to the internet to go wild about what it could mean. And never answer when fans ask "so what happened, when did they die? Did they keep hunting?" Just leave it vague. If this was the only ending they could come up with, I'd rather be left with questions.

This finale gets a low score from me, because they couldn't even pull on the right heartstrings to make me sentimental...

4/10

But the show as a whole? Well, it was a mess, and it had some seriously high highs and some devastatingly low lows. It's a bummer that the lowest low came in how they tried to wrap up the whole shebang, but like I said, this ending isn't going to ruin the whole fifteen-year run for me. We get to make up what happens next, and we can make Jack's new and improved Heaven our post-canon fix-it haven. I don't think there's ever been a show in my life quite like Supernatural. The fandom is so bonkers. The meta narrative of the show is so convoluted and twisty and goes in so many unexpected directions. I liked watching this show for its own sake, and also as like... an anthropologist trying to discover something about humanity and American values specifically. It wasn't always a pleasant experience, but it was one I know I'll never forget. My heart tells me to give the show as a whole a high score, representing the many, many hours of joy and dread and delight and horror I got over the near decade I've personally been watching. How do you wrap up fifteen years in a score out of ten?

9/10

[panharmonium]

what kind of research did you do for your will and merlin fic? (i would absolutely love just,,, an in-depth explanation)

Oh, man, this is such a nice ask!  I think anybody who ever writes anything would probably love the opportunity to ramble about their process, and I am no exception, so thank you! 

I can definitely give you the in-depth explanation - I’ll just pop it under a cut here, so that anyone who’s not interested can just scroll past. :)

So when I first began working on the thing that turned into Wheel of the Year, I just started writing, without worrying about research.  And that was good to begin with, just to get a handle on the characters, but before I’d even finished the first section I knew that I needed to do a LOT of research if I was going to be able to continue writing the story at all.  It was kind of a situation where like - if you asked me to write a story that takes place in a school or a veterinary hospital, I could do that with a high degree of accuracy/believability, and without any prep work, because I’ve worked as a teacher and a veterinary technician.  But writing about a medieval farming village was going to be impossible to do in a way that felt real/convincing without me doing a lot of reading.  

I’ve never been a medieval peasant farmer, you know?  I lived and worked on a small farm for a brief period of time, so I had a teeny bit of background on large animal work, but it was still minimal, and it lacked all of the historical context.  So even the most basic scenes felt impossible for me to start, because it was like - ‘well, what would this person even be doing on this day?  How would they be spending their time?’  It’s hard to write characters doing anything when you don’t even know what the possibilities are.

I wanted to make my Ealdor into a place that felt real, specific, and convincing.  And I couldn’t do that with just sort of a foggy, movie-type image of ‘it’s a Medieval Village™ with Crops and some Cows.’  So I just decided that I was going to do the research.  I wasn’t going to follow an exact historical profile, obviously, because it’s a fantasy show, but I really did want to have a basic understanding of the context of that general era; otherwise there was no way I could ground my story in reality.

So!  My approach was basically two-pronged, encompassing a) character/show prep and b) historical/context prep.

Character/Show Prep

I started off by doing a close watch of 1.10.  This included lots of screencap-taking of the village exterior, the house interiors, and the villagers.  (This is the point where I realized that Will was a woodworker, from looking more closely at his home and the tools he was consistently shown carrying, and that ended up really shaping a number of parts of the story, so it just goes to show how helpful this step was.)

I knew from the beginning that this fic was, by necessity, going to include a number of characters who didn’t exist in the show (or, I mean, they existed, but they existed as extras, not characters in their own right).  Ealdor is too small for these people not to show up - Merlin would be working in close proximity with them every day.  He knows every single one of his neighbors.  They see each constantly.  It would be unrealistic to write this story with them being only vague and out-of-focus.

And this was a little bit of an intimidating thought, because the idea of coming up with that many original characters is just...well, you know, it’s enough to make a person hesitate, but it had to be done.  So, I decided I wanted to base everybody on an actual extra who appears in the episode - I took a lot of screenshots of all the villagers, starting with the people Merlin’s age (because they would be the people with whom Merlin had the most contact), and I gave them names.  And then I began to build out the rest of the village from those characters - parents, grandparents, siblings, friendships, who gets along, who doesn’t get along, etc.  I have a bunch of screencaps in my folder that have all the characters labeled with everybody’s name, and then another folder of family trees that I built - most of which didn’t even end up featuring in the story, obviously, but it helped me in terms of feeling like I had a solid context for who lived in the village and how they all related to each other.

I tried to draw as much info from the background canon as I could.  For example, there’s a blonde girl in the background of the final battle who drags a bandit off his horse and then just DECKS him with one punch, absolutely clobbers him - so I took that small moment of characterization and used it to help me create one of Merlin’s agemates.  

(And this wasn’t all done in one go, obviously; I’m more of a ‘let things emerge naturally’ kind of writer, so as characters came to me in the course of writing, I was matching them with actual faces in the show and continuing to build out the world.)  And ultimately, the result now is that when I watch 1.10, it’s a funny experience, because I feel like I “know” every character onscreen - most of them have names and stories for me, because any character that appears in the fic is based on an actual face that appeared in the show - I could point at them and say ‘yeah that’s Ellinor/Peter/Margoret/etc.’

I also combed the rest of the show for every single reference to Ealdor or Cenred’s kingdom, in order to get a solid understanding of the geography surrounding Merlin’s home (hence my recent post summarizing what we know about Ealdor and why the BBC’s supplemental map is incorrect).  I did the same thing with Cenred himself - I rewatched everything that included him and took notes on particular things that he said or that were said about him.  This helped in terms of figuring out what the political state of Camelot/Cenred’s kingdom was at various points - ie, in 1.10, there’s a throwaway line saying that 'our treaty with Cenred was years in the making’ indicating that the two kingdoms have recently made peace but have previously been at war for a long time, and that affected parts of my story.

I also did a lot of character prep for Will specifically.  I started a document full of notes about everything we knew about him (and about his relationship with Merlin), and then I kept expanding on it with a detailed analysis of the canon in which he appeared and the person who I understood him to be - it grew to be very, very long (I ended up cleaning it up and posting it over a year later, after the fic was finished), and it was very helpful in terms of feeling like I really knew him inside and out.

And those were the most important things I did in terms of working with the show/characters!  

At the same time, I was doing a lot of work on the historical prep.

Historical/Context Prep:

I needed to learn more about Will and Merlin’s daily context in order to write about them with any degree of believability.  I’m an old-fashioned nerd, so I started with books.

I read six books before and during the writing process of this fic, with scattered pieces of others.  The ones I read fully were the following:

Life in a Medieval Village (Frances and Joseph Gies)

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England (Ian Mortimer)

Life on the English Manor 1150-1400 (H.S. Bennett)

Daily Life in the Middle Ages (Paul B. Newman)

The Middle Ages Unlocked (Gillian Polack and Katrin Kania)

Chaucer’s People: Everyday Lives in Medieval England (Liza Picard)

Those Who Worked: An Anthology of Medieval Sources (edited by Peter Speed)

The first four were the most helpful, but all six had useful info in them.  And basically what I did was I just sat down with the book and a pencil, and as I read, I took in-book notes on all the things I thought would be relevant/important/interesting/helpful:

And as I went, I was filling in that diagram I posted the other day about the medieval agricultural year.

This was all extremely helpful in so many ways...just - by giving me the context of what various tasks actually looked like and what the flow of the year was and various other daily life things.  I could not have written this fic without doing the research.  It wouldn’t have worked for me.

So that was where I got my foundation, but as I was writing, a thousand smaller instances came up where I needed more specialized information, and that’s where I utilized lots of internet resources.  My bookmarks folder for this fic has 200 items in it, and those are just the things I remembered to save.  

Some sample titles of articles I actually read, in case I haven’t embarrassed myself enough already:

“Temporary freedoms? Ethnoarchaeology of female herders at seasonal sites in northern Europe”

“Five Early European Winterings in the Atlantic Arctic (1596-1635): A Comparison”

“English Peasant Buildings in the Later Middle Ages (1200-1500)”

“The Cost of Doing Scribal Business: Prices of Manuscript Books in England, 1300–1483″

“Seasonal Management of Cattle in the Booleying System: New Insights from Connemara, Western Ireland"

And so on.

I watched absurd amounts of videos on how to do specific things - how to carve thatching spars, how to build a wheel, how to thatch a roof, how to build willow hurdles, how to use a drop spindle, how to shear a sheep, how to use a hand quern, etc.  I can’t begin to list the number of topics I typed into Google or the number of research holes I fell into.  The littlest thing could take hours to figure out - the fic would take me to a place where the characters were going down to the cow byre, but then I’d have to stop, because ‘what would a cow byre even reasonably look like?’, and then I’d do a day of research on different types of barns/byres in England throughout history and ultimately hardly any of this information would even make it into the fic but I just.  Needed.  To Know.  (And I’m not complaining at all; I’m glad I did it, and I had a lot of fun with it.  But it was a Process.)

I also used a lot of primary sources.  I used this site for primary source images, to get an idea of what things looked like.  I spent a lot of time on this site reading Old English and Middle English songs/poetry/texts + their accompanying analysis.  I spent too much time reading Pliny’s The Natural History, for one chapter.  And a lot of these sources were adapted and used in-fic for various purposes (hence my desire to include a bibliography, heh).

I used this Old English dictionary and this Middle English dictionary a lot (I took both of these subjects in college, but I have forgotten literally every shred of OE I ever knew, which wasn’t much to begin with.  My ME reading is better, but…still. XD)  I used this resource on period carpentry frequently, as well as a number of others.  And a myriad of other sites.

And that was kind of how it would go.  After the initial ramp-up (reading all the books and doing the basic research/character work) I would write until I encountered something that needed more specialized knowledge (...which happened basically every couple of pages, ha) and then I would research again. 

…looking back, I’m suddenly not surprised this took me over a year to finish.  I’m a slow writer anyway, but…yeah there was actually a lot going on here. XD

Ultimately, did any of this need to happen?  No, absolutely not.  Fanfic 100% does not require this kind of thing, and I honestly think most of the time it’s better to write fic without worrying about this kind of stuff, just to have fun.  I only did it because I felt like in this particular situation, I needed to do it in order to be able to write about this subject at all.  Before I did this, I felt stuck, like I couldn’t move forward because I just didn’t know enough.  The only things I could see with any clarity were Will and Merlin themselves - everything else about their context felt like looking at a video game’s world map when I hadn’t explored anywhere yet, so the whole universe was still masked by clouds.  But afterwards, I could see what I was doing, and I felt free to move around, like I had more places to go.  

So overall, I’m glad I did it.  And since then, I’ve read many more history books on different subjects, because as it turns out I am not done writing Merlin fanfiction, and therefore I am not done researching, either. XD

Thank you so much for asking this - I hope this answers your question!

[jcmorrigan]

A while ago, I promised a Tales of Berseria headcanon dump, and this is all incredibly specific and based on my own reading, and I know no one else is going to agree with these exact interps or even the ships that built their foundation, but hey, here I go anyway

SEXUALITY/ROMANTIC ORIENTATION

Velvet Crowe: Lesbian. I first got an inkling she liked women in the prologue, when she was teasing around with Niko about “If you were a boy, I’d be in love.” True, she said it was a good thing neither was a boy at the time, but given how much the citizens of Aball drill ideas about marriage into Velvet’s head, it seems like a very heteronormative society and not that progressive. It’s a rural village in the middle of nowhere; what do you expect? Later on, Velvet would grieve heavily for Niko, in a way that I feel is reminiscent of a lover, and when it comes to Eleanor, she participates in “Women are mysterious creatures” rhetoric about her - the kind men usually say about women. Also has a fair share of soul-bonding moments with Magilou. I personally find more ship chemistry for her with any number of the women in ToB than any of the men.

Magilou: Bisexual. Seems to have an interest in Velvet. One particular victory screen has her joking with Phi about how if you can’t touch Velvet’s sword, everything else on her is fair game to touch. That’s wlw at least. However, her relationship with Bienfu of all things is where I get the impression she’s attracted to men - her talk of “punishing” him physically during nights at the inn read a little like innuendo to me. (Yeah, I just implied she has a sexual past with the Normin.) She also welcomes attention from all genders in general as to how amazing she is.

Eleanor Hume: WLW asexual. I don’t really have definitive subtext to point me toward ace, but I recall my own experience thinking I was morally upstanding because I wasn’t sexually active when my teenage peers were, and Eleanor, given her devotion to the Abbey and her pride in meeting its standards, just seems like she could have the same story: thinking she’s morally upstanding because she doesn’t act on any sexual urges, only to realize that’s because she doesn’t have them the way her teammates do. I already mentioned the subtext tension between Eleanor and Velvet - Velvet is the only person I can really pick out potential romantic chemistry for Eleanor with. Because of that, I’m not certain if she could also be attracted to men or not, as I don’t have any good samples.

Rokurou Rangetsu: MLM. I went back and forth between gay and bisexual for a while. For one, Rokurou has that scene when he talks about how women can break your heart worse than any danger in the field (and Eizen agrees), implying he’s had a past dating women. He also at least feigns interest in knowing about Velvet in the hot-spring bath. But this is underscored by a punchline of just wanting to make Phi sweat. Rokurou’s archetype of the heavy-drinking, optimistic idiot often comes paired with “womanizer,” but that wasn’t present here. And there was also the scene where he commented on how Velvet’s ragged outfit must be cold in Figahl only for her to scold him on ogling her - which I suppose can be read as him discreetly ogling her, but I see it more as him looking at Velvet in skimpy clothing and having the go-to reaction of how practical it must be in the weather. His chemistry with Eizen drips romantic to me, given how they share drinks and argue for fun.

Eizen: MLM. Same case as Rokurou - mentioned having his heart broken by women, and joined in on the Velvet-in-the-hot-spring discussion, but also expresses lots of affection toward Rokurou that was likely written to be platonic but comes across as very close. I’ve also seen the popularity of the Eizen/Zaveid ship, and given that Eizen told Zaveid his true name, which “can be seen as a confession of love,” there’s definitely subtext for that as well. So, again, whether gay or bi (or pan), I am not certain yet.

Laphicet: Bisexual. Obviously is attracted to the illusion of Edna and, to an extent, Velvet in the inn scene in Meirchio, but bonds with Videl intensely and devotes a major part of his life to making Videl’s dreams come true.

GENDER IDENTITY

Magilou: Transgender, identifies as very female. This was actually something I got an inkling on very early when some of her victory screens had her making jokes about her weapon in the way that some might view as phallic (I’m thinking especially of the one where Eleanor and Rokurou are talking about the benefits of short weapons, and Magilou says “Mine can be as long as I want!”). So I was of the mind that Magilou perhaps did possess a dick, and that actually got weirdly reinforced when she lifted her book-skirt to fluster Phi and he said “I wasn’t expecting that” - the joke is he was more interested in the books, but in the subtext, I’m reading that despite him definitely knowing what a cis woman’s nether regions would look like (Eleanor is his vessel), he didn’t expect something about Magilou’s lower half. So I was thinking either pre-op transgender or intersex (I’m not certain what types of gender reassignment surgery or artes would be available in Desolation). When all of a sudden, her backstory was revealed that as Legate Magillanica, she had a whole identity and a name that she erased (going so far as to say “Magillanica” is dead), as well as a background growing up in a conservative/religious household with Melchior, and, before that, being passed around to guardians who didn’t love her, leading to her feeling emotionally repressed. And all of a sudden it all fell into place: her story really parallels transitioning. So now I love to just complete the analogy. We know she was going by she/her pronouns at a young age in her traveling show, but we also know that she was exhibited at a “freak show” due to her high resonance. It’s possible she was also advertised as (insert a horrible slur about androgyny here). If she was already well-known going by she/her, Melchior would probably have wanted to keep that intact so as not to cause a stink in the Abbey. But, Melchior being the horrible person he is, he probably also thought Magilou was fit to stand as a legate where no other woman was because she was “male” to him. Anyway, by now, at least the other women on her team have seen her naked and have nothing negative to say on the subject - the party knows and they love her.

Laphicet: I actually see him as a little genderfluid based on a couple of throwaway things. For one, when the party discovers the “unicorn horn” (narwhal tusk), there’s a big discussion about how only a “maiden” pure of heart should be able to pick it up. Velvet offhandedly says Phi should pick it up anyway because it’s his quest. In the end, the myth was dismissed, but I rather like the thought that Phi sometimes identifies more female and therefore could fill the bill of being a maiden pure of heart. His/her personality also influences Innominat, whose outfit of choice is androgynous as far as gender-specific fashion conventions go (and also really spiffy). Most days, Phi is male, but some days, not as much. With his status at game’s end, it also feels a little more fitting to say that such a guardian of the world should be less adhered to one side of the binary.

NEURODIVERGENCE

Eleanor Hume: OCD and anxiety. It’s outright mentioned how she takes responsibility and guilt for everything, even things that have nothing to do with her and aren’t her fault - a telltale marker of OCD. She’s also introduced as being emotional and teased for being a “crybaby,” showing that ordinary situations can easily push her over the edge. I’m only talking main party, else Kamoana would be her own entry, but Kamoana canonically has panic attacks that manifest as fevers according to Mahina’s note, and can be “cured” with placebos. Eleanor’s arc is linked to Kamoana throughout, and the moment where this is revealed is one in which Eleanor is outlining her similarities to Kamoana and how that should mean Kamoana would resent her. I feel like this draws a pretty blatant parallel between Kamoana’s rampant anxiety and Eleanor’s, and how Eleanor jumped to the worst-case scenario only to be shown that the child she worries about has something very big in common with her that might actually be a bridge between them rather than a wall.

Eizen: Autistic. Infodumping is a major character trait of his, and there’s an entire skit dedicated to talking about how “picky” he is about his routine, needing to wear his clothing in specific ways and dock at the same place every time in Port Zekson.

[jacksmusesdrv3]

"The 'horse twins' clue was just an arbitrary thing placed by Monokuma that the devs threw in for fun. There's no way it connects to Ouma since it bears no actual context relevance. You can’t draw out any meaning from it anyway, it’s not even meant for him in the first place, much less placed by him." 

Okay. Let's get to grips with the 'horse (a) twins (b)' clue then: what’s it doing there, and why is it brushed over in the narrative if it’s actually important and not just a background detail? Why should you care at all?

Well, I’ll tell you. But be warned, this is long, and very image heavy. I’m going to break this down as best as I can, so take a seat.

First thing’s first, it’s established that Monokuma placed the split clue horse a, twins b. There’s no question about that, at all. But it's also no coincidence that it signifies Ouma's name and star sign, both. So the issue becomes 'how is the clue relevant to Ouma, besides this'?

If it’s not taken into the context, it does appear to be background noise. No more than an asset. That is, unless it has a connecting point.

The question is though, are we really given enough reason to believe that it does not?

I think in this case, it helps to turn your thinking around when approaching the detail. Instead of asking 'how can this possibly be relevant to Ouma when it’s not even meant for him, or something he placed?', consider: 'how is something significant to Ouma also significant to Monokuma, who placed it?'

With that in mind, if you look to Ouma's lab, you see not one, but two clues significant to Monokuma.

One, a bunch of monitors identical to the control panel in DR1, which… evidently, didn't get a clear examination by Shuichi, thus were not verified...

And two, the Complete History of Hope's Peak Academy, from which distorted information was peppered into a Flashback Light scene. What’s more, the book is even something noted in context of the narrative as strange for being in Ouma's lab, and yet, another thing which wasn’t fully verified.

So we can see by the protagonist’s fault, by lack of attention to detail and follow-up, that makes not one, not two, but *THREE* major clues that were canonically not properly verified, rather than simply... one throwaway asset that could mean anything. No one in their right mind would consider the Complete History of Hope’s Peak to be unimportant to the plot given the circumstances of the game, but if you take even that on its own, you don’t have the ammo to draw out the implications of it being in Ouma’s lab.

Combined with a specific control panel, and a clue denoting Ouma placed on the vault however, it’s an entirely different matter. But that’s not all.

With these in place, there are even more curious implications of a script bearing the Danganronpa V3 logo, especially when it’s supposed to be the ringleader who has that kind of a script. Why... is such a thing in Ouma’s possession? On top of that, why gather evidence in his room, as well as use a whiteboard to display events in sequence…? Yet more vitally important things not verified!

In any event, with the how of the rather dire and recurring decontextualisation issue established, now there’s the matter of how the star sign Gemini could possibly be significant to Monokuma, as well as Ouma.

The answer of course, lies in Ouma’s report card.

What we see here, is what we believe to be our ingame Ouma, however Mukuro’s report card was also riddled with a critical lie, and report cards are not strictly speaking verifiable. After all, Maki’s own did end up changing during the course of this story.

Basically, the idea is that this boy here is the real Kokichi Ouma, while the ingame one is an imposter posing as him, same as Mukuro-Junko, but indistinguishable from one another, i.e identical. (Appropriately, the theme is ‘truth and lies’, and you can’t tell which is which on the surface!)

Now again, on its own this doesn’t really amount to much, but once again, that’s not all!

So let’s have a look at a few other things: namely, ‘This world is mine. Kokichi Ouma’.

What’s interesting about this, is it’s an extension of the clue that Monokuma initially gave, what we are led to see as a ‘diversion’. But what’s more…

...Monokuma himself said something very similar, in Chapter 2. He talks a bit about how he is ‘the ruler of this world’, that nothing is beyond his power. It was taken as a ridiculous, even arrogant declaration, by those who seem to be in denial over the implications.

Strangely, this precise detail even extends to Ouma’s talk in the Salmon mode - a canon-world based, alternative route mode at that - in which he says he took out the country. Shuichi’s remarks are that he could be lying about lying, suggesting he might be telling some form of hidden truth.

This throws the ‘mere diversion’ suggestion into a fair bit of scrutiny, to say the least. But still, I’m not just taking this detail on its own.

When Ouma meets with Monokuma in Chapter 4, he says that he would ‘commit evil’ on the world, seemingly out of nowhere for the situation. So, there’s a fair bit of talk of the Supreme Leader wreaking havoc on the world, and Ouma makes a point of dragging this up to Monokuma personally, who declared such a wish earlier in the game.

Let’s contextualise it a bit more. What kind of power for evil do we know that Monokuma has?

Judging from the Love Hotel, he has a powerful hypnosis with which he brainwashes students. Something that with a broadcast - that we know is inherent to this game - could accomplish exactly what Ouma is suggesting in his persona.

With that in mind, it’s time for more on Ouma’s comments.

Ouma notes in his FTE a piece of his history, that of a brother. The bottom line being (setting aside that this is a ‘bonus mode’ for all intents and purposes, it’s still suggesting relevant history and therefore viable, at the very least), a certain other connected to him does exist, which gives that much more weight to his relationship with Monokuma - besides the temporary cooperation in Chapter 4, of course - and what’s more, the personal agenda he has with him in Chapter 5.

It also gives weight to an Ouma connected to a truly grand, evil organisation, rather than a ‘mild one characterised by humourous exploits’ (of... which we don’t actually get much information, on its situation or its overall goals besides a couple of rules and their eventual capture, but this isn’t the time for that). Before you get into the ‘yeah well, what if he’s just lying about the brother shtick’, hold your horses. I’m getting to more reasons why you should care, first.

And what’s more, some evidence to show it.

See, you may note that the organisation is very similar to an organisation noted in DR1…

...and that even Ouma’s speech on common sense is strikingly similar to Byakuya’s. Something he persisted on telling Kaede and Shuichi, and for a reason. Something that may well be affecting their situation as they speak, as its shadowy presence was in Hope’s Peak from the start!

But what’s even more concerning…

…are these books that the Ultimate Detective doesn’t even glance at. Considering the library back room that Byakuya has is demonstrably connected to the secret council, and also the gravity of what Shuichi has overlooked, noted earlier, this is... strikingly suspicious.

At the very least, it’s difficult to make any sort of argument that the books have no relevance to anything, given that Shuichi’s talent is connected to the police.

It’s already enough that a whole bunch of cases are right there in front of his nose, with there also being files denoting the Hope’s Peak era, at that... but for now, let’s move along from the organisation, as the implications should more than speak for themselves at this point!

So as for the game, Ouma uses a very specific term early on in the game (sadly, lost in translation...) to denote Monokuma himself, the same term given on the Flashback Light panel, and exclusive to Monokuma, as opposed to ‘kuromaku’ (which while used for the one behind Monokuma, is also used by Tsumugi to denote er, ‘the audience’). 

This is significant, given that Ouma will talk about Flashback Lights in rather knowing terms, such as ‘we probably need one more to connect everything’...

...even nudging Shuichi along to find a Flashback Light, working in-sync with Monokuma to this end. Popping up just ever so slightly suspiciously, after he finds it.

As for Monokuma himself, he happily denotes symbolism of Ouma’s lab on top of his Supreme Leader-like persona, hat included. What’s more, the face direction of the eagle’s head is a match, as well as the bold line.

Returning to the matter of Gemini’s relevance though, a hallmark of Castor and Pollux’s twinhood - two snakes (tongues) - is given on Ouma’s emblem, while the checkered scarf denotes the black and white theming of Monokuma and the duality of his role: the ‘double agent’. (Another curious detail of Gemini is that one of the twins, Castor, was killed, and the two were immortalised... while Monokuma refers to himself as a ‘god’)

What’s also interesting is that although checkered clothing is oft associated with clowns, and Ouma bears clown mask imagery on his motive video, it’s also associated with Danganronpa, and with games in general (a game board), while clown masks can double as incognito masks.

A symbolic detail though this is, it’s more like the icing on the cake, along with the straitjacket-like outfit denoting insanity. And since we’re on the topic of those outfits, let’s finally get a look at the organisation known as DICE.

Rather, a particularly weird detail of it.

Ouma’s mask, and the flipped D on the DICE logo. (Plus, a handy little Monokuma for comparison.) While that left eye is a plus and not a characteristic glare, the upturned grin and split face is concerning. As if the D possibly stands for Danganronpa.

The flame on the mask doesn’t look like a perfect match or anything, but for one, it’s symbolic enough of what it depicts, and for another, there’s an even more weird property that it has:

A nigh perfect match to the strange flamed masks in Danganronpa 1, worn by Mukuro and Junko! Of course, since even the basic connection of the flame on the mask wasn’t made outright in narrative, we don’t even get to analyse this in context. Just… a little concerning, considering there are a total of 11 members in DICE, with one of them being missing from the video.

It’s strange enough already that they have gas masks and handcuffs in the lab, what on earth were they actually doing? You can be sure from the rule Do Not Kill, that DICE weren’t up to evil organisation stuff, and they definitely had limits, but it doesn’t look too benign or safe, either.

But whatever the case, DICE were caught and slammed up eventually, and there’s much we are left in the lurch about regarding their activity. Not to mention, the missing member... and the consequences of DICE’s capture.

-

So to wrap this absurdly heavy spiel up, those are a few basic connecting points, their context, and how they were pointedly shoved out of the context, just the same as ‘horse twins’ was. The real question is, why is this the case? What does that have to do with us?

Naturally, it’s to make Ouma’s character and situation that much more difficult for you to understand.

Even though there is strange evidence and dialogue that connects Ouma and Monokuma in the context of the game itself, as long as the underlying connection is lost on account of uncertain clues…

... it's easy to treat it as a mere misdirection instead. As ‘just another lie, in Ouma’s web of lies’.

At that point, you can no longer compartmentalise his odd behaviour and comments, or even any evidence connected to him, and are in fact, encouraged to paint it with a broad brush. This in turn, means it’s harder to justify even looking at him and his situation deeper than the surface. Doing so even carries risk, with disturbing imagery and a mixed overall understanding of his actions.

What’s more, as Shuichi’s faults result in important issues being carelessly dismissed - even setting aside the labs - this means we consider Ouma’s perspective to be less important than Shuichi’s. This results in losing the truth of Ouma, which results in the player feeling just as lost as the protagonist, when he is eventually bombarded by the psychological assault of the final trial. The loss of even the history you understood was real, loss of meaning, loss of reality.

“It’s all just a lie, anyway.”

But though it’s this way for Shuichi’s perspective, is it truly the same for us? After all, the implication of the ‘horse twins’ clue - and the others I mentioned since the beginning - is that there’s a truth hidden in plain sight, a basic core lost in a sea of lies, omissions, misdirection, resulting in the cumulative distortion of context. 

Something that eventually becomes fiction.

And if Shuichi doesn’t follow up with the mystery to its fullest, then it’s up to those who really want the answers to do battle with this game.

[fromdirectorlanawachowski]

honest and unmerciful endgame thoughts

a sequel to this post

this is deadass one of the worst movies i’ve ever seen.

a few brief thoughts before i get into the more or less play by play.

- making jokes about how time travel in movies isn’t really how time travel works doesn’t work if you’re a fucking movie dude

- fat thor was a fucking disgrace

- professor hulk has to have been 80% ad-libbed because there’s no way someone actually wrote that garbage dialogue

- using a past thanos was a mistake because we don’t actually give a shit about him

OKAY LETS GO

actually fuck it i was gonna do plot point by plot point but i’m just so exhausted i don’t have the strength to do it. i’m gonna go in broad strokes and if you want me to elaborate on WHY something was bad feel free to yell at me in the DMs

okay lets go

right away the whole thing with clint fucking turning on the spot as his family disappears was goofy as all hell. i know exactly what they were going for but having him literally turn on the spot instead of go into the house or go into the shed just draws attention to the absolute hilarity of how fast they vanished compared to others.

why the fuck was tony skin and bones when he got back to earth. i know he was in space for three weeks but they clearly show him eating during the montage of him and nebula doing.... things?

also everyone just kind of trusts nebula? okay? i’d be wary of purple aliens in light of what just happens but inclusivity i guess

also you mean to tell me that in three weeks they scanned the entire universe for gamma radiation? also enough gamma radiation that would show up on a scan from light years away but not fry everyone nearby when thanos snapped?

as soon as they killed thanos i knew the climax of this movie was gonna suck ass.

the writers have no idea how fast human hair grows if five years later natasha still has that godawful blonde dye on her tips

a fucking rat got scott lang out of the quantum realm. i don’t have any commentary for this because this scene speaks for itself. a rat.

moreover how did they even get the van down from the rooftop it was on at the end of ant man 2

fat thor. i don’t have any commentary about this either. the whole thing reeks of the russos looking at taika and going “you wanna be a funny man? you want thor to be fucking funny? you think he’s hilarious? fuck you”

oh i guess i did have commentary on that after all

i’m glossing right over the gay scene because again, taika fought tooth and nail to get bisexual valkyrie and now the russo shitters get to say they had the first canon lgbt character and it’s a couple of throwaway lines that can be redubbed for china. seriously. i don’t think there’s ever a scene where he says “he” or “him” while his lips are on screen.

apparently i am doing this relatively plot point by plot point but i digress

if i was keeping points like cinemasins (ew) i’d take a few off for morgan stark. i’m an bitch but not that much of one.

oh yeah pepper potts’ first of, i believe, four lines in this movie is “yeah i’m reading about compost”. i have no commentary for this either. it speaks for itself.

tony hits upon time travel in a day

i’m so glad we couldn’t get any real character development for anyone but we had time for the four minute “ant man becomes various aged forms of himself and then makes a peeing your pants joke in 2019″ scene.

“that’s how time travel works in movies this is real life” that’s great except that joke falls flat cause you’re a fuckin movie bro

i’m skipping over the entirety of the battle of new york thing because that was just fucking.... *benny hill music*

oh no i’m addressing the ancient one thing. love to have characters retconned into previous movies so they can try and explain the time travel in a way that actually makes it more confusing and also isn’t the way the movie follows

steve leering at peggy through the blinds was creepy, i’m sorry. actually the way he was suddenly obsessed with her this whole movie was really creepy.

howard potts

tony meeting his dad was so awkward and uncomfortable and they really meant for it to be heartwarming but i’m sorry it was fucking hilarious and i was howling with laughter in the theater

likewise thor with frigga. a really nice, emotional moment where thor gets closure with his mom and she overtly says she knows she’s going to die soon but she loves him and she’s so proud of him....

..... and then tops it off with a fat joke. the russos can’t let any kind of emotion hang without making a joke.

when they killed natasha a guy three rows down said “if they were killing her here why the fuck did they greenlight her movie then”

why did thanos get a scene confronting the cost of the stone but clint just wakes up in a puddle? are you gonna tell me thanos cared more about gamora than clint did about natasha? ok.

okay i’ll admit seeing quill dancing on morag without the background music was funny as fuck. rhodey explaining the punchline was not funny as fuck though

three cheers for nebula inexplicably having new abilities

as soon as they brought in past thanos i knew the climax of this movie was gonna suck a big ass

hulk snaps the iron infinity gauntlet because he’s the only one that can withstand the gamma radiation that it allegedly emits and has been mentioned only once before in this movie

the fact that it works is demonstrated by not anyone coming back, but ant man looking out the window at some birds. yeah. gee.

okay i have a question here that may take a little bit to explain.

earlier in the movie it’s explicitly stated they only have enough pym particles for one round trip each. that’s why steve and tony had to go back to 197X to get the tesseract and more particles. 

so.

past-nebula takes current-nebula’s place and uses her particles to travel back to the present, leaving current-nebula with no particles

so how did past-thanos bring his ship to the present with no pym particles

anyway past-gamora and current-nebula kill past-nebula to get the iron infinity gauntlet back

the final battle was whatever. i couldn’t for the life of me tell you what happened or where anyone was in relation to anyone else because it was cut so poorly

everyone comes back. remember at the end of my infinity war thoughts when i said the end had no stakes because obviously everyone snapped came back and you all got mad at me? everyone comes back.

the ladies all running the gauntlet would be cool if it wasn’t encompassed by shots of all the men running the gauntlet, drawing attention to the fact there’s literally only like seven ladies and one of them isn’t even a hero

joss whedon was the cinematographer the day they shot wanda fighting thanos, judging from all the gratuitous shots down her shirt. i know elizabeth olsen has nice boobs. believe me, i do. i’m envious. but for the love of christ stop being creepy voyeurs about it

also “you took everything from me” “i don’t even know who you are???” that was a great setup for her to use her mind powers and make thanos experience some suffering but they just didn’t do that so those lines are hilarious

tony gets the stones and snaps, killing thanos and all his army. thanos fades away into dust while a woman vocalizes in the background in a manner that’s less satisfying than when voldemort did the exact same thing in deathly hallows part 2

tony dies because i guess?

at the funeral everyone is there and there’s shots lingering on everyone including this weird kid who looks like he’d microwave a gerbil? i had to google him and it’s supposed to be the kid from iron man 3. i feel like seven years later you should probably put in a line like “thanks for coming <whatever that kid’s name was>

okay we’ve reached the part i have the absolute most beef with.

steve’s ending

from the start of this movie he’s been inexplicably obsessed with peggy. the ending is telegraphed from a mile away and i was still shocked and stunned that they actually did this.

so steve just gives up everything, all his friends and family, to go back in time to be with a woman he knew for max a year, in the heat of war, where emotions run high and they may very well have latched onto each other in case they died.

steve rogers, the man who wielded mjolnir, the man who broke his friend’s mental conditioning just be refusing to fight him, just sits back through the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. the cuban missile crisis, the LA riots, the assassination of JFK, the death of howard and maria stark, the infiltration of shield, the berlin wall, 9/11, the war on terror, and he just.... did nothing?

what the fuck was that

sam is captain america now though so i’m down with that

but i’m still so angry

this is beyond character assassination for steve. it’s... outright brutal murder and mutilation. anywhere i can, i give endgame a half star review FOR THIS ALONE. setting aside fat thor and how they treat Ragnarok, the fact they think steve rogers would, after everything he’s done and learned, go back into the past where there was still a chance he could help his friends in his own way, and do NOTHING, is the most infuriating thing about this barely-polished turd of a movie.

IN CONCLUSION i said infinity war was the worst movie marvel had ever put out and marvel went “haha we can do you one better”

endgame is just three hours of setpiece, gag, setpiece, gag, setpiece, gag, occasionally punctuated with emotional moments that aren’t allowed to hang long enough for the emotion to sink in before a joke is made, usually at thor’s expense.

[koganphrancis]

WE ARE FINALLY, TRULY CAMLESS!

Season 9 Episode 6 Recap

First and foremost, I want to single out Noel Fisher for being a truly class act and returning to this demon show to give fans what happiness he could-the ONLY happiness a lot of fans have found here, myself included, in a very long time.

Next a serious piece of appreciation to Cameron Monaghan.  I know he worked hard on what little they gave him to do in the past few years, and I’m thankful he had Gotham to work on to actually use his talent while mired down in the stinky swamp this show has become.  In another actor’s hands, I don’t know that Gallavich would’ve been as captivating as it was-without Noel I know it wouldn’t have been, but Cam does deserve credit for bringing the other half of the couple to life-when they were on screen together, they had an undeniable magic happening.

Finally to any of the “fans” that are thinking or posting that we got this actually pretty shitty prison endgame because people pestered the show producers, writers, and actors too much to “bring Mickey back” may I please direct you to watch the early episode (I believe it was in Season 1, but certainly no later than S2) where Lip tells Ian prison must be a gay man’s dream with all the tattoos and unlimited sex partners.  THAT is John Wells’ perception of gay men and it has been since long before he even thought of breaking Ian and Mickey up, let alone bringing Mickey back.  

Personally I’m supremely disappointed this gay couple, like so many others, did not get a free and truly happy ending in canon, even though my friends know I predicted this could very well be all we got in the end.  FFS it’s the year twenty gayteen-couldn’t ONE iconic gay couple be given a nice, normal happy ending?  John Wells is a fucking dinosaur.  He needs to go to a sensitivity training camp run by Dan Levy, Emily Andras, and Ryan Murphy.  

Anyway-my last recap (baring a miracle) of this shit show is under the cut

(screen cap credit: justmikhailothings)

This episode was brought to us by White Castle.  I’d like to think they gave every dime they got from them to pay Noel, but I’m sure it went to the other “big name” guest stars.

Also the show was (disappointingly) written by Nancy “Ratfucker” Pimental, so you know it’s gonna be bad.

The show begins with Ian putting his stuff away up in the attic and claiming he wants to eat a shitload of White Castle.  Sure, whatever.  Everyone is trying to offer ideas of what they should all do on his last day of freedom, but suddenly THIS Ian is talking and making decisions for himself.  WHERE HAS HE BEEN THE PAST 4 SEASONS?  He only appears when Mickey’s about...

Debbie offers to bring him to a gay bar to “get laid” (flashing back to Monica in S3, ugh-it was a bad idea then, it’s a bad idea now), Ian says, “Pretty sure I’ll get laid a lot in prison.”  He says it with a grim expression, but considering how they end the show/who his cellmate is, he should be so lucky.  

Frank pretty much ignores Ian in the scene, and they certainly don’t interact.  Frank recommends Ian should read James Joyce’s Ulysses in prison, but other than the fact that it’s by an Irish writer and it’s extremely long and dense to get through (aka it’ll take Ian some time to do it), I don’t know if there’s any significance to his suggesting it.  

This scene with just a throwaway send off from Macy seems to be in line with John Wells’ vision to have the series fade away with the characters going about their daily lives rather than end, but I really think both Cam and WHM were screwed out of not having a final scene together with just the two of them.  Their comedy timing was always the best out of Macy and all the Gallagher kids.  The lack of respect is just astounding-especially since the show wasted so much time on rando actors/characters we’re never going to see again.

The rest of Frank’s story this week takes place with Liam in tow again and it’s just dumb and boring.

The next scene shows Fiona and Bored looking at an apartment-they’re going to move in together (why?  And when was this decided?  Not that I care, but they could’ve cut a scene of them bickering to show a scene where they arrived at a decision together for once).  It makes absolutely no sense-they have Fiona’s whole place to themselves, why waste $3000 a month living in some other apartment all to themselves?  Just because it has two bathrooms?  Do they shit that much?

And then, ooh, bad news for Fiona-her business partners require her to kick in another 25 grand or their investment will be dead in the water.  I still don’t know how she went from having $50K to invest to $100K, so this new twist is just more bullshit that I can’t care about.  

Then there’s a scene where we have to see Carl’s new girlfriend’s head in Ian’s lap.  WTF.  We need to see Mickey’s head there-or better yet, Ian using Mickey’s perfect thighs as a pillow.  

There’s a couple of boring, unfunny bits of the nun and then the priest (is it supposed to be hilarious that the dad from Full House is spewing out sex scenario names Nancy must’ve googled?) from Kev and Vee’s kids’ preschool with a dildo.  Seriously, Nance, not even close to funny, probably time to put yourself out to pasture, old girl.  This show has used dildos as a sight gag so many times at this point there’s just nothing more to do with them except maybe shove them up the writers’ asses.

Lip’s storyline this week is something out of very, very bad fan fiction: A movie star comes to their house!  Cuz, that happens, okay?  I’m sure studios and billion dollar make up companies don’t run any kind of background check on people they hire to babysit their clients-why would they?  It’s not like a crazed fan would rape/maim/kill the object of their obsession or anything.  ANYONE can be a star minder for one day, surely.  

BORING ALERT: Lip has a couple more running scenes this week, because no one got enough of that last episode.  This week the least they could’ve done was play the Friends theme song over the endless footage where he’s chasing Courtney Cox around on location in Chicago.  

While watching, I was wondering if Courtney’s role was written for her or they just settled for her when Roseanne Barr was suddenly unavailable-the stuff they had her say and do (except for the sprinting) seemed like it was written for a more jaded motherly type-but I’m jumping ahead.  Since we DID get CC, here’s a couple of stray observations.  1. She looks like a rich man’s Emmy Rossum, and 2. was part of the purpose of her storyline to throw shade at Jennifer Aniston?  Her character is named Jen Wagner, and there’s this whole dumb thing where Nancy’s trying to make, “Face it, you’re gorgeous” happen as her make up commercials’ tag line-which was reminiscent of Aniston’s ads for L’Oreal that stated “I’m/you’re worth it”.  

Meanwhile, after Fi gets the devastating news that she needs to come up with more money she tries to get out of taking the new apartment with Bored by lying to him and telling him she smelled mold there-HE RESTORES OLD HOUSES/BUILDINGS FOR A LIVING why does Nancy think that was a clever lie for Fiona to come up with?  How stupid is Fi supposed to be?

Back at the Gallaghers, Ian is practicing self defense moves with Carl and Kelly to prevent someone from raping him at knife point.  Everyone’s flipping each other in these scenes and it just felt like they wanted to give their stunt coordinator (and Cam’s double) a lot of (boring) shit to do this week...Ian’s final scenes being played out with this meaningless newbie (who Carl will probably wind up killing or dumping or both) made me very sad.  I guess maybe it was to build dramatic tension for when Ian’s in his cell later and the door slides open before he turns around.  But it’s lame because the scenes play like he’s JUST realizing prison’s rapey.  

Someone knocks at the door-my heart started racing but it wasn’t Mickey.  A guy who wasn’t in the jail scenes tells Ian Joselito sent him.  Ian starts asking him about the guys he was in county lock up with-WHO CARES.  The guy tells him the couple he’s asking about broke up when one of them got out and Nancy throws in a line about long distance relationships not working.  Joselito sent this Antonio guy to give Ian an “in-depth safety orientation about Beckman Correctional” before they send him up.   

Antonio draws Ian a map of the facility and tells him the areas to avoid, then draws a big circle with Mickey Mouse ears on it and tells him that’s “Disneyland” and he can get all good things there-smooth blowies, weed, Snickers...I’m sure ol’ Nancy thought she was being clever, but it just took me out of the scene hearing Antonio say “Disney” at least three times-reminded me of Cam’s publicity stunt “coming out date” there last year.  

Fi comes in and asks if anyone has any money (shades of S4 when Ian gave her his Fairy Tail tips) and that she needs 25 grand.  She’s so stupid.  And she’s honestly that out of touch with the family that she thinks maybe one of them has thousands of dollars they could give her?  (although, if she had only gotten to Lip before he tried to buy Xan...)

Fiona tells Ian, “Don’t forget, I’m driving you to prison tomorrow.”  And that’s the last time they see each other.  So much for family, eh, Nance?

A huge time waster of a scene where Kev and Vee pack up all their sex toys and then another drawn out scene of them throwing the stuff off a bridge happen.  Seriously, these are Cameron’s final moments on this shit show-they couldn’t think of anything for him to do?  This was all screen time Cam and Noel could have had, SHOULD have had!

I have to recap this next bit because it was beyond belief unrealistic-Frank steals a bicycle and goes following Katey Sagal and her ex-husband when they leave the hospital in an Audi-and Frank manages to keep up with them all the way to their nice neighborhood that must be some distance away since it was daylight when they left and dark when they get to their door.  Frank.  On a bicycle.  Kept up.  YOU’RE SUCH A DUMB FUCK, NANCY.

Then there’s more White Castle with the money shot of the food and packaging all over the Gallagher kitchen table.  Courtney gets to make a bulimia joke Nancy wrote into the scene.  Hope you weren’t looking for a Guest Starring Emmy, CC.  

Ian tells a “Carl story” about him puncturing his scrotum (on purpose) with a screwdriver when he was a kid.  Carl must have the most mangled dick and scrotum on the planet between his several botched circumcisions and now this.  Kelly asks him if that’s why he has “that scar”.  You know what, Nance?  While some people do in fact find scars sexy, self inflicted ones on scrotums don’t make that list.  

Debbie comes in, recognizes “the chick from the make up ads” having dinner with them.  I’m sorry-having WHITE CASTLE with them.  Now everyone else sees it too, and Kelly insists that CC says “the” line that Nancy made up to make happen-why do they keep trying to make meaningless things A Thing?  

After dinner, Jen is giving Ian advice about prison: “Find a hobby, it makes time go so much faster.”  Ian asks, “Did you learn that from one of your movies?” and she says she did 48 hours for DUI (hey, just like Ethan, Nancy!).  Jen really needed to get into making TP paper mache to get through 2 days?  

Debbie, desperate to make shit about her says, “Maybe I should go to prison too.  It seems like the only way I’ll find a real relationship.”  WHY are they acting like Ian’s going away on a single’s cruise?

Jen says to Debs that’s not true and Debbie says it is, that she’s unlucky in love (when the fuck has she ever been “in love”?)...”men, women...”  

Jen tells her she’s a special woman (how the fuck does she know?) and that she doesn’t want just anyone, she wants somebody “who gets you” and then for the second time in two weeks an older woman, without determining if Debbie is of age, pulls her into a kiss and the others (Ian, Lip, Carl, Kelly) stare like, “WTF?”  The kiss ends and Debbie looks all amazed like she did after the Mel kiss, but then Jen looks at everyone and says, “I played a lesbian once in a movie.”  And that’s what your research into that role led you to believe lesbians do?  Kiss random teens when they’re whining?  Lip starts the “Face it” line and everyone else chips in with “you’re gorgeous” and everyone laughs and I don’t get why it’s funny or even why it’s supposed to be funny.  Seemed like they were trying to drive home the point that ACTORS only PLAY gay characters, but no matter how convincing they seem, they are in reality the much more “preferable” heterosexuals we can feel safe with and really want them to be.  Fuck you, Shameless.

Also, Courtney/Jen is three times older than Debbie-CC is 54 irl and Debs is forever 17 now, so more Kash vibes for anyone who was missing those.  Also perpetuates the writer room’s fantasy that hot young actors would find middle and past middle age folks suitable sex partners.

Fi goes to Patsy’s Pies and there’s another hysterically lame scene where she opens the office safe and is counting out money-I don’t know how much a place like Patsy’s rakes in (or keeps in their safe) but I would think it would take a long time to accumulate 25K in CASH in this day and age of debit and credit cards.  She abandons that bad idea and winds up going down to the docks and drinking with a Patsy’s employee and reciting all her “mo money” problems while he counters with the facts that his car’s been repossessed and that he and his moms are being evicted from the projects.  Then the guy kisses drunk Fi but she tells him she has a boyfriend and that she has to apologize for lying to him (although, really, the underlying implication is she has to apologizing for never seeing that he’s always right about her being a dumb woman who has no head for business decisions).  

Lip and Ian have their last one on one scene.  After the movie star mom for a day leaves, Ian’s fake smoking on the front steps and Lip joins him.  Lip gives him money for his commissary account and Ian says, “I’ll pay you back,” (but not thank you) and Lip says, “No you won’t,” and I’m at home saying, “Lip, why are you being such a dick?”  Ian goes to hand him the lit cigarette, but pulls it away when Lip reaches for it, but then gives it to him and rubs his shoulder.  I guess this is supposed to signal to us that they’ve said everything that’s needed to be said?  Except we’ve been watching and we know Lip is supposed to be a mouthy motherfucker and in the old days they would’ve had actual conversations that they DID NOT have at all-all their conversations this season have been short and awkward.  Ian’s been made into a fucking mute now, even in these final moments.

Their last scene should’ve been in their room, in their beds-Ian can’t sleep and they talk things out in the dark like the brothers they used to be, but no.  Can’t have that.  

The Fiona drama finding out Bored has a wife, kid, and house and then drunkenly smashing up her leased vehicle is so “bad soap opera” I can’t believe this show is still on the air.  If we were supposed to cry for Fiona as her make up  and fake blood ran down her face after her millionth time of being let down by a guy everyone else could see was an ass from the start-well, we just didn’t.  

Next day the Gallaghers are waiting in the living room for Fiona to take Ian to prison.  Kev steps up to drive them all in his truck.

They get there, get out, and Ian looks around, then says to his family, “All right.  I thought Geneva and some of the others would be here but...”  Thank christ they weren’t!!!  The show/Ian wasted too much time on those randos as it was.  However, credit where credit is due-the show got us all the way through this swan song arc without bringing up Terror once!  But I digress, back to our scene.  Carl says, “You can only count on family, dude.”  I scream BULLSHIT at my TV screen.  

Debbie says, “I’m gonna miss you.” 

Group hug.  Kev says, “Don’t get too raped in there, aight?”  Everybody breaks apart, the moment ruined.  Kev says he doesn’t know what to say in these situations (and clearly no one can improvise but Noel).  Vee says, “How about goodbye and I love you?”  

Kev says, “Goodbye, man. I love you.”  

Ian says, “I love you guys too.”  Wasting it on the wrong fucking people!  All of them-except Kev and Vee who never voiced an opinion-didn’t care if went to prison!  

Ian looks at Lip, walks over to him.  “Hey, uh, thanks for being my brother.”

Lip, still a dick, says, “Never had a choice.”  That’s right, bitch-you didn’t get to choose to play the interesting gay brother, you got cast as the dick know-it-all who never cared about anyone but himself.  

During this entire farewell scene I was sitting at home, strangely unmoved.  I felt nothing watching it, probably because everyone was such an asshole about Ian going to prison all season, plus never caring about what he was doing all last season, plus the fact that none of these characters are the characters we first got to know.  It hasn’t been a case of character growth and development, it’s been character assassination and retconning.  

Ian breaks the hug.  “All right.  See you guys.”  He goes to the gate, shows his papers, gets let in through the gate, waves to his family as he walks past the fence, walks into the prison, slaps his phone (wouldn’t he just give that to Lip to hold on to?  Battery’s gonna be dead by the time he gets out) and watch (probably ditto on the watch battery) onto a counter, strips down so we see one last quick shot of his naked ass (what, no cavity search?  And just how long has it been since we’ve seen his unclothed ass anyway?), and a glimpse of the boob tattoo.  

Next we see him in his yellow “I Love You, Philip Morris” jumpsuit, carrying his bedding through the GP.  He’s attracting “fresh meat” attention and Cam actually does a really good job of looking a bit scared while trying to look tough and “don’t fuck with me”-there’s a vulnerability there, but he’s not overplaying it, and he’s certainly not overplaying the fronting.  His acting was really powerful in that scene.  

They put him in his cell and slam the door and he winces a little at the sound, then he sadly looks at his 6X8 foot (or whatever the dimensions are) room, puts his bedding pile on the top bunk and leaves his hands up there and lets his head hang down.  He hears the door slide open behind him again and gets this, “Ugh, here we go,” expression on his face and turns around to see it’s Mickey standing there.

Me at home: Not what I wanted for end game but I’m still thrilled to see the man, the myth, the legend again anyway.  He’s all beefy still from when he was shooting Fonzo and looking good.  

Ian’s looking at him like he’s not sure he’s really there.

Mickey mildly says, “I rolled on the cartel I was working for and in exchange guess who gets to pick where he gets locked up?”  

Ian’s got tears in his eyes now and says, “Holy fuck.”

“Oh hey-I got bottom,” Mickey says as he points to the lower bunk.  Then he walks past Ian and says, “So...you’re on top,” in a bit of a sing-songy voice. 

He flops down onto the bunk, puts his hand behind his head-and check out the gifs closely, especially on Twitter-in the jumpsuit you can see the outline of his dick and it “twitches in interest” as the fan fics say (don’t know if Noel did it by adjusting his thigh, don’t know if it was intentional or what-but it was a sight to see whatever the case).  He does a lip lick/bite combination, Ian’s face lights up a bit and he gives a smile, he crawls onto the bunk on top of Mickey, pinning his hand down while Mickey smiles softly, they gaze at each other a beat, Ian gently strokes Mickey’s cheek, Mickey wraps his free hand behind Ian’s neck, their noses boop, and Ian sort of gently thrusts into a kiss (it was good-definitely had a bit of a sexual vibe to it), which Mickey expertly returns.  It was a very good kiss, tender and loving, but that scene needed words, needed Ian to say SOMETHING to Mickey-needed an “I’m sorry” and a “thank you for always being here for me” and exchanged I love yous.  Neither of these boys are ever told they’re loved!  JFC, nine seasons and the show couldn’t manage to work mutual ILYs in ONCE?  Fuck you, Shameless.  They didn’t even say each other’s NAMES!  

Mickey (and Noel) looked so fucking good lying there-relaxed and happy, finally back with his love where he’s always belonged.  Even when his eyes are closed, they’re perfect.  The angle the scene was shot at, we see more of Mickey’s microexpressions than Ian’s.  

An after the credits began scene of them lying in an afterglow embrace would’ve been nice.  Mickey could’ve mocked Ian’s hair (give us one last “Fire Crotch” you cowards!) and boob tattoo (or offered to fix that for him while they’re in the joint).  

Mickey’s got new ink on his forearm we never see clearly.  Until and unless we’re told otherwise, I’m saying it’s a big ginger root ;)  Bam.  

On a personal note, and not to rain on anybody’s parade, while I believe 100% in Drunk Crew Guy and what he said, I really don’t see us getting another scene in the finale.  This show’s attention span is down to nothing now, and I can’t see them dragging these guys back out now that they’ve given us (shitty) endgame. I don’t think enough time will have passed to let them out of prison by then, I think those final episodes are going to be about Fiona leaving and not Ian and Mickey getting to Mexico-and I can’t really see Mickey being able to go back there now that he’s crossed a cartel.  My feeling is the show filmed 2 possible endings using Noel to choose from-one ending with them in Mexico and the other being the one we got.  They probably ripped off The Shawshank Redemption too much with a Mexico ending and decided to go with this “original” idea instead.  I’d love nothing more than to be wrong, and to get one more scene of these two free and happy.  Cam’s question mark at the end of his farewell post and the fact that I do trust everything DCG said leaves a spark of hope burning in my heart, but hopefully I can back away from endless online speculation and theories about it over the next 5 months.  If it happens, beautiful.  If it doesn’t, at least we got one last look at Mickey and he’s getting dicked down and the love he’s always deserved, even if I hate the fact they’re locked up and will be in danger whenever they’re not in their cell-not to mention this is the shitty way gay love stories get handled in general, but I must not go down that path again in this recap.  

I want to add that Mickey didn’t sound all that “Mickey” in his scene, but maybe he didn’t need his swagger and was being more “real” to let Ian know he had a choice (as always, Mickey didn’t force himself on Ian-he let him come to him).  And kudos to Cam for not doing his hideous Chicago accent for most of the episode.  

There WAS love and chemistry in that final scene.  Just sucks that we don’t get it anywhere else in the show and they wasted so much time last night that could’ve been given to Cameron and Noel.  

But hey, I’m finally free of recapping ;)  While I’m sorry the Gallavich parts are now over, I’m not sorry I can finally quit missing what we used to get while watching what the show now does.  Mickey and Ian are back together now, so, fuck you, Shameless.  

[douxreviews]

Manifest - ‘Upgrade’ Review

"Faith is compromised by pessimism, Alice.  Let's be optimistic.  Put the gun down."

In the first 90 seconds or so of this episode, both Zeke and Cal have the same calling, a vivid vision of a very unfriendly black wolf.  It's a metaphor, but a metaphor for what? or who?

While Ben and Michaela and Zeke are discussing the wolf metaphor, Saanvi gets a visit at her office from a lady named Alice who bears no small resemblance to Kathy Bates.  Alice's husband Jacob has cancer, they've been told it's not treatable, and she's desperate and obviously distraught.  Even though Saanvi is a researcher and doesn't normally treat adults, she takes pity on Alice and agrees to go see Jacob.

Jacob's cancer is too far gone, but Alice is a Believer and is convinced that Saanvi has mystical Flight 828 powers that allow her to cure the incurable.  Alice also has misinterpreted Stephen King's Misery as a how-to book, and when Saanvi tries to leave Alice whacks her across the face and then pulls a gun on her.  (It also has apparently not occurred to her that beating up or shooting one of the 828 passengers might be the Believer equivalent of sacrilege.)   Jacob, to his credit, tries to talk his wife into releasing Saanvi, but Alice is too emotionally overclocked to listen to reason.

When he hears that workaholic Saanvi can't be found in the hospital and is missing appointments, Ben's spider senses kick in.  He manages to identify Alice as Saanvi's last visitor, and tie her in to The Church of the Returned.  The Church is a storefront congregation of Believers presided over by fellow 828 passenger Adrian, last seen a few episodes ago, who has started a new career as an object of worship.  Based on his conversations with Ben, it's pretty obvious to us in the audience that Adrian is deliberately running a scam.

With a little help from the search tools in the NYPD database, Ben and Michaela locate Alice's apartment.  Ben rather cleverly talks his way in and, by pretending to be there to help Saanvi perform an 828 miracle, distracts Alice enough that Michaela can disarm her and end the standoff.

On the romantic triangle front, Lourdes notices a certain lack of enthusiasm on Jared's part (IYKWIMAITTYD) and deduces that he had a dalliance with Michaela.  She goes to the police station to confront her now-former friend, and it goes about as badly as you'd expect.

While all this is going on, Zeke tries to make sense of the wolf by talking to Cal.  Cal is in a bit of a funk because he is worried that the callings come true because of his drawings.  Zeke and Grace help set him straight by, among other things, having him draw a picture of a pile of money on the family dining table.  After the cash fails to materialize, Cal draws a picture of the wolf jumping at Michaela.

As the episode ends, Michaela is called to the river.  Four days earlier, while our protagonists were up in the Catskills looking for Cal, there was an armored car robbery, followed by a high-speed chase, followed by the getaway vehicle plunging into the East River.  The divers have finally located the van in question, and a crane fishes it out of the river.  When Michaela opens the driver's door, expecting to find a corpse, the driver lunges at her.

"828" Watch

The arc number is all over the Church of the Returned, of course.  Lourdes and Jared's house number is 3528, which if you add the first two digits (3+5) is an "828" sighting.

Also on the manifest...

This week's gold star for acting goes to Parveen Kaur for a short scene near the end of the episode where Saanvi's post-Alice PTSD hits her like a ton of bricks.

The black wolf is obviously a CGI visual effect, just not-real enough to take up residence in the Uncanny Valley. Where's this Uncanny Valley, you might ask?  TV Tropes explains:

In 1970 Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed in "The Uncanny Valley" that the more human a robot acted or looked, the more endearing it would be to a human being. . . . However, at some point, the likeness seems too strong and yet somehow, fundamentally different — and it just comes across as a very strange human being. At this point, the acceptance drops suddenly, changing to a powerful negative reaction.

That's why zombies are more frightening than Daleks.  It's also why the human characters in the Incredibles and Toy Story films are stylized and cartoony even though the settings and other objects on screen are rendered realistically: stylizing the CGI people keeps them from falling into the Uncanny Valley and alienating the audience.

Might the Wolf of Uncanny Valley have been a deliberate choice on the part of the VFX crew, and not a special effects fail?  If they'd simply rented a trained wolf and had it look menacing and growl in front of the camera, it would have looked like . . . a trained wolf growling.  Your mileage may vary, of course, but for me the Uncanny Valley effect makes the CGI wolf more unsettling than a live wolf would be.

(It also occurs to me that "The Wolf of Uncanny Valley" would be a good name for a heavy metal song or a Twilight-wanabee young adult book series.)

There were some throwaway references to the armored car robbery in the last two episodes--a background radio news broadcast in "Vanishing Point," for example--which established it in-universe without being too obvious as foreshadowing.

We need to have a talk about your recent behavior, Jared.  Asking your ex-fiancee/crush to stay the night just a few hours after your wife leaves you because you cheated on her with that very same ex-fiancee/crush?  Not to put too fine a point on it, that's so tacky that it needs a "Wet Paint" sign.

If Adrian, the fraudulent pastor of the Church of the Returned, and Cody Weber, the wannabe demagogue behind SprayPaint828ersHouses.com 828DemandtheTruth.com introduced in the previous episode, were to come into physical contact with each other, would the result be mutual annihilation like with matter and antimatter?  That would be a wonderfully convenient solution to both problems.

Quotes

Ben: "Cal had a calling last night, too.  We found him on the floor .  He said 'It's coming.'" Michaela: "What's coming, a wolf?" Zeke: "I know I've been gone a while. We get a lot of those in Queens?"

Ben: "Adrian is a false prophet, a wolf in sheep's clothing.  Matthew 7:15." Michaela: "Look at the atheist remembering Bible verses." (A beat.)  "You looked it up, didn't you?"

Conclusion

While traditional faith communities (and the other "little platoons" that hold societies together) have declined in influence in recent years, the human need to find meaning in life hasn't gone anywhere.  As both G.K. Chesterton and John Cougar Mellencamp observed, if you don't believe in something, you'll believe anything.  If something like Flight 828 happened in real life, it's all but inevitable that some sort of "movement" would form around the event or the participants, and it would probably take about 45 seconds after that before some charlatan starts exploiting the phenomenon for personal profit.  All that being said, I can't shake the feeling that the Believers, and the Church of Lining Adrian's Pockets, are a little too one-dimensional and should have been fleshed out better.  Aside from that complaint, it was a good episode with a lot of good character moments.

Three out of four submerged getaway vehicles.

Cookie the Dog, who is Baby M's immediate supervisor, is a descendant of wolves.

[peanutdracolich]

Peanut Dracolich Watches Horror: Ju-On

Oh after the old Hammer Horror films this was a breath of fresh air. It was a legitimately scary film (The Descent beat it out for fear factor I think, but Ju-On might have a longer impact and burn). The film made good use of music and the absence of music, good use of angles to cast things as ‘off’. It was in total a good well made creepy and scary film.

I’d actually say that it might be the best horror film I’ve watched this month. I didn’t enjoy it as much as a good watching of Alien or Evil Dead nor as much as Psycho but it is very much a pure film, a film of scares and creeps and terror that clenches at you. I would suggest it (with caveats but horror is a large enough genre, and one with enough things that can be major ‘nos’, there will always be caveats). That said I don’t feel it’s a film I will want to rewatch; the ghost story was enjoyable once, but it doesn’t have anything to draw me back to it. Which rewatchability while a plus in a film is far from a requirement.

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Play by Play below the cut.

The Good:

The Overall Effect: It’s actually hard to say ‘this was good’ because the film was overall good. They used silence and then sound early in the film to wonderful effect (sometimes it bordered on ‘you should be scared now’ but that faded as the movie drew you in). I can’t even say ‘this section was best’ because while the first two felt generally weaker, a large part of that was that the effect needed time to build, and grow.

The Covers Scene: If you’ve seen the film you hopefully know what I’m talking about if you haven’t I don’t want to spoil it (the play by play will but).

The Bad:

Early Tomio: The make up job was... It took a bit of extra buy in and suspension the first time he showed up full ghost. In generally the ghosts took a bit of extra buy in and could have ruined the film if I had not been willing to let it go and enjoy and believe. I don’t have a huge problem with these moments (I believe some investment of imagination is deserved by a film), but once or twice in the film it did get to me more than most I mention it for. I could put this in the Ugly (as it’s a visual failing) but as it’s got more stuff in the ‘necessary evil’ category I’m putting it here because it did feel like a legit flaw.

The Ugly:

Temporal Confusion: It jumps around a lot in time. I’d actually say it really ought to have had a X years later with the one section but I don’t think it’d have gotten to me in an English speaking film; subtitles add an extra layer of mental involvement (you’re reading) and that aggravated it. And it did use the confusion to good effect and it’s a legit effect in horror. Still bothered me a bit.

There are no rules: The ghost really does seem to have no real rules. I mean everyone targeted theoretically visits the house (ignoring the implications in the final scene as just artistic license). But we never really learn any rules, and there’s no real meaningful interactions with the ghost. It works, it makes it scarier, but this is a large part of why I don’t really want to rewatch (or I’m sure there’s some folk lore from Japan that adds a little, and small details I could get on a rewatch, but at the amount of effort it’d be more fun to just read up online). It’s a reason I’m not super interested in the sequels in the franchise; despite the film possibly being the best I watched I am not that intrigued by the umpteen sequels. I am certain at some point they add lore, and at some point they contradict that lore, but in a way I’d rather leave it with its lawless purity than see what they do. Still it feels like the curse doesn’t function on any rules other than ‘to an audience this would be scary/freaky’ which makes the suspension of disbelief a bit harder and leaves a subtly bad aftertaste. Again I can’t say this is truly the Bad, because it’s what makes the film work, but it is a double edged sword.

The Ordering of the Last Two Sections: The final section is really a final section, but a throwaway line in the section before it in addition to causing much of the temporal confusion tells you how it ends. The second to last section is the only one where you sort of feel hope for the human’s escape, someone actually doing something to fight the curse and who has been built up in the last section... but this only works if you aren’t paying attention to the time (my thoughts at the time were ‘if there’s 10-20 minutes left in the film she’ll make it, if there’s 30 she’s sure dead’ there were going back later to check 27 at that time of thought). In the end I think the ordering the film used is better, but it is still just a bit bothersome.

The Play by Play:

Ju-On is on to a good creepy start. I am sort of regretting... don't hurt the cat! Ok this is a good creepy start. Lots of blood lots of implied murder. Good start. I am regretting making hot chocolate because my appetite is damaged now. Of artistic note is that they made the opening have washed out and faded colors, not actually black and white but still creating a certain surreal feeling and appearance. Still it's stuff like this, stuff that makes use of music and visuals to create an effect that makes horror movies worth watching. I watch horror because it creates visceral reactions that few other movies do; I might get engaged and energized watching a heroic tale, but that's just one hit and horror can get that sort of energy, but it offers a plethora more.

 We then get actual characters at the social welfare center. Someone is handing off a hard case to a volunteer who doesn't want it, and then using it as an excuse to take her to dinner. I feel sorry for her already.

 And then we get 'haunted' sound screech. Not trying to create the feeling of terror with it alone, but using the music and fiddling with angles and shots to create a creepy feeling as our volunteer approaches the old lady's house. The house where she gets no response, finds it an absolute sty with everything scatter about, and the old lady unable to get up out of bed to meet her simply clawing at the glass door.

 Nishina Rika. We have her name and I'm writing it down because I don't want to call her 'volunteer girl' or 'protag girl'. Rika is just so much easier.

 Now this movie knows how to mix eroticism with horror, she's giving the old lady a sponge bath. Forgive me I've watched too many vampire movies of late.

 The movie has not been using music outside of that creepy start. It has had minor sounds, and it is using them to good effect. We hear growling, no something scratching at the back of a sealed door and it is creepy. She goes in and we start finally getting some background music and the sudden inclusion after the lack is all the creepier. A cat yowls and we can believe a cat is behind the taped up door. Rika removes the tap to open and see inside... and it's just a cat sitting there peaceful. CREEPY SOUND and then a boy appears in the taped up closet. Rika freaks.

 She seems to think she simply missed the child before leaning in to get the cat. I guess that's reasonable, after all children don't suddenly appear. They aren't birds and she wasn't hearing any name.

 She starts up the stairs and CREEPY SOUND The boy is looking down at her. I'll admit I sort of jumped at the sound. It is reminiscent to Saw's laugh track except a hundred times more effective since the things are creepy and not 'dude tied up'.

 Old lady is talking to ghosts and we have music again. The music rises to really creepy as a shadow demon thing attacks the old lady and then opens its eyes, the child's eyes I think, and looks at Rika. Rika faints.

 We get the next part and a name for the hero of this part, but I'm bad with names and was writing the above it is not written down in time.

 Same house. Same mess... but it's not quite, there's a couple living in the house, her son and daughter in law. I know I should be creeped, the tension should be holding, but... I'm still a bit burnt out I guess. And then something falls over the, younger old lady, awakens. So it would seem this is either a different family or the past. The ghost child is still there looking down from above, his black cat with him. House wife is sort of freaked out that there's someone and a cat in her house. She doesn't have a cat. In my mind she and her husband have been trying to have a child, but that's just my mind.

 Good use of sound, good use of camera. Cat screams, woman screams, we do not see. It's the past, Hitomi and Kazumi, the names that were dropped in the first segment. Everything has been knocked around. The man's been blaming his mom. It's not. It's the ghost, the demonic spirit that has now stolen his wife's soul. Alright she finally reacts to his screaming and shaking, her eyes moving, and her mouth trembling, it did not steal his soul.

 It walks behind him as he's calling an ambulance and he doesn't quite see it but he senses something. It's a nice moment. My feet are poised to jump up onto the seat with me. The child isn't there when he's looking, he can't see it, but he can tell there's something.

 Now he finally finds it. I must be willing to be afraid, the monster is a child with some pale make up and it's just. It doesn't quite get my feet up... even as his wife dies from the curse. A dark look overcomes his face as his sister arrives.

 My feet feel vulnerable still, though.

 The son seems to be crazy. I'm getting Jack Nicholson vibes from him. He's lying about where his wife is. He's trying to literally push his sister out of the door, and now is talking about his wife having an affair, how that's not his child. They didn't have a child. There is something wrong here and his sister is just confused.

 Possession claims him and he goes to murder his wife as the child smiles like an evil imp.

 The next section is Hitomi (the sister/daughter). And we see her making a phone call (I neglected to mention) from the first part. She's NOT in the house. That doesn't mean she's safe. Something is following her. There are strange, scraping footsteps, like something is shuffling. She even sees the shadow move into the stall next to her in the bathroom.

 She gets a call from her brother, but all that she gets is the creepy sound of a door creaking. She drops a stuffed bear, and then leans to grab it and a dark haired ghost presents its head. Wisely she runs. Foolishly she sends the building's security guard up after it to his death. But it is not in vain, she watches on CC tv and gets to see... she runs away before she can see and we just know he vanishes after a bit of darkness was creeping up him. Very politely she closes the elevator door in a lady's face, meaning she's alone, alone isn't safe. Alone is where the ghost child watches you. Alone is how he follows you. Every floor. Watching you.

 I can already say this is probably the best scare movie I've watched this month. It may not be the scariest, but I've enjoyed it more than the Descent.

 And she got a call from her brother asking her apartment number, went to the door, saw him there, opened it and he was gone and the phone made the noise of the ghost. She's run inside, unplugged the phone and ... is hiding under the covers. I'm not sure about that, but now she's trying to watch TV and the TV is freaking out and... She is rightfully scared.

 CREEPY STUFF HAPPENS, GHOST IS IN HER COVERS FEET ARE UP

 Toyama section. I think Toyama is the jerk from the Rika section.

 The old lady is dead now. She had aged much in the short time since something happened to her daughter-in-law, and Rika is completely non-responsive.

 How long was it before he checked on Rika and the old lady I wonder?

 Still the house is murdering now and they've got a whole bunch of people in it (the cops have been called). They find the son and daughter in law dead in the attic.

 I should put my feet down, but the ghost child might get them (and this is more comfy on current chair).

 We also have a name Toshio. Toshio is the ghost child. But we've seen two ghosts I think.

 Feet are down. Feet are down is scarier. Kayako, Takeo, and Toshio. The family from the beginning. Husband killed wife then found dead. That's how it began. Or so it seems.

 The detective who was in charge of the original investigation quit the force and is the only survivor who was involved. That's nice.

 Creepy stuff happens. I am glad there is no one jumping out to say boo. Welfare Bully (not Toyama but something that I failed to catch; Hirohashi) is dead. Toyama is the old detective. He is doomed now; his name is the section title. Actually Rika survived and she was a woman and in the house but.

 Still we have two ghosts. Small child ghost (Toshio). And shadow lady demon ghost (Kayako) who is capable of looking at you through security footage. That's creepy. I am liking this movie.

 They've come for Rika my feet are up.

 Toyama has decided to burn the house down. I think this is gonna fail. After all there are sequels, also it just feels too early in the film for that. The house is fucking with him. Showing him scenes from some past. Toyama has been distracted and the cops are looking for her. Still he has to make sure there's not teenager upstairs before burning the house down with schoolgirls inside. Actually they might really have been there, but it feels wrong... and I think the girl who left had the same name as his daughter.

 I hear a cat in the other room, it adds to the creep. The ghost lady is crawling around in a crabwalk, and Toyama is found by the cops in the midst of unintelligible panic. They see why and he runs. They are paralyzed with fear as the ghost comes and that close-up is too close.

 The new section is the schoolgirl who ran Izumi. Her friends are missing. Her last name is Toyama. So this is the future? Or was Izumi the girl's older sister? Rika just went missing... or was her mom listening to a recording from when her dad went missing too. I miss something in his conversation with small child that would tell. Izumi has taped up her windows to keep the ghosts out and her schoolgirl friends think she's crazy.

 She believes the three missing girls are looking in on her. And she is wearing a hidey hoodie.

 Feet are back down.

 Izumi is crazy. I am not blaming her. But she's gone off the deep end.

 Her mom starts talking about that being how her husband was before he died; that he did the same thing with the windows and curtains. She is a broken shell and fears her daughter will die the same way. So yeah house showed him the future. House exists outside of time and space. Izumi is a demon in pictures having pure black eyes... so do the three missing girls. It is the curse.

 I am rooting for Izumi to survive. The despair hoodie bring out my sympathies. I like hoodies. Plus the time is about right that it's possible, and she's seeing the ghost of her father. As for the time I feel it's in the last third of the movie, and they're developing Izumi more in that she was important in the last section and this seems to be taking longer to get to the haunting. So it's possible, though far from assured; I'd have to check the time, 30 minutes remaining and she's dead, even 20 and it's a tossup, 10 and she's probably going to live.

 Something has torn off her taped up newspapers of window blocking, forming a tiny hole for the ghosts of her friends to watch her through. They're coming for her. Feet are still down. And chief ghost lady has grabbed her head. She's dead. Pulled into the little altar her mother was praying for her dead husband at.

 New section is Kayako... the first victim? And we still have ~20 minutes left (after Izumi's death I had to check). We also have Rika again? I thought she got grabbed... I guess she didn't get grabbed till about when Rika did.

 A cat touched her leg and Toshio is under the table. She looks older than in the first section, which is well done.

 Rika's friend is at the house. Less ghostly Toshio is there. Rika is returning to the house, passing the police tape, to try and save her. Mariko's footsteps are in the dust. The bright, sunny house she saw is not the one we are now.

 CREEPY STUFF HAPPENS.

 Feet are up.

 They're in your reflection you can't escape now. And coming out of your shirt!

 I am torn between scared and almost laughing at the blood drenched crab walking ghost. Like she's been scary doing this before, but coming down the stairs in fake blood it manages to cross some line and I lightly lose the ability to take it serious. Off the steps it gets better, and we get every scene of Kayako it feels like, before Rika is alone in the house. But we heard the news of her disappearance. Ah Kayako's husband is coming. Kayako isn't killing he is? At least Rika he's going to kill as Toshio watches.

 No one survives. We see an empty town, flyers for the missing littering it. No one survives. Final Creep. Ending Credits. Upbeat music to help recover from creep.

 I want the lights on. I have to walk through a cluttered path in the dark for that. Fire and Brimstone.

[jaylos]

Rant - Rise of the Isle of the Lost

(alternative title: i read rise of the isle of the lost so you don’t have to)

first off i’m probably biased but if you got something out of my opinions in the past then maybe you’ll find this interesting as well.

there are spoilers, obviously, but if you ask me, you really don’t have to read the book, save your money. (i put a short summary under the cut so you know what’s going on)

i’m gonna be honest this turned more into “i’m picking this book apart” than just a rant lmao. i blame the excessive amount of cinemasins i’ve been watching over the past few days.

and be warned - this is gonna be LONG and not very nice.

~summary if you haven’t read the book~ Arabella (Ariel’s niece) snatched the trident to fuck around, causes a storm, and loses it in the ocean. Waves carry it through the barrier to isle territory, because the barrier is penetrable for a short amount of time due to Arabella’s magic fuckery i think.

Uma hears a rumor that the trident is here, but she has no way to get to it before someone else finds it.

Captain Hook hosts a race where everyone can enter with anything that can swim, the price is a pirate ship. Uma wins the race and now has a ship and a pirate crew consisting of Harry, Gil and a few others.

Through Sophie (Yen Sid’s apprentice) they learn that Ursula’s golden seashell necklace is on the Isle of the Doomed (where Maleficent’s castle is) and they sail there to find it, because there’s enough magic left in it to guide them to the trident or something.

They find the trident but then Mal&Co show up.

While all this is happening Arabella tells the rotten four that she lost the trident, and through the magic mirror they find out where it is, and that a lot of people on the isle of the lost are looking for it, so they set out to find it first. FGM catches them as they try to steal a boat that belongs to Ben’s family, but Ben shows up to convince FGM that it was fine. The five of them then drive the boat to the barrier, where Mal pokes a hole and calls the trident to her, just as Uma is about to get her hands on it, overpowering Uma.

There’s also a sideplot where Ben goes to the great wall of China with Lonnie to solve a conflict between two villages but this is all totally irrelevant.

~end of summary~

and just to get this out of the way - don’t give me that “it’s a book for children” bs. just because it’s for a younger demographic doesn’t mean it can’t be good.

ok let’s start with the things i liked:

- Lonnie has a sword (which is a clear sign of lesbianism)

- Jane wants to do magic and she wants to help people fairy godmother style. i love this because 1. it gives her more personality and 2. it’s exactly how i imagined her lmao.

- Mal uses magic despite the magic ban.

- i like Gil, he’s kinda cute. and Harry too, and the dynamic between him and Uma and Gil. (ot3 anyone?)

now to the cons:

- Harry has this obsession with his hook (which he has to hold in his hand cause he still has both hands) which i find interesting, it has so much angst potential but i already know i’m gonna have to write a fic about that myself cause it’s gonna be hella disappointing in the movie because either 1. it’s not talked about at all or 2. it’s only good for a joke or two. (”oh no! my hook!” cue sitcom laugh track)

- the use of the word “guyliner”

- CJ is Harry’s younger sister, Harriet is his older sister. the gastons twins are gil’s brothers. Melissa de la Cruz *grasping at straws*: conSisTEnCy

- speaking of consistency, the anti-heroes club isn’t mentioned once, in case you were wondering.

- there’s another school besides dragon hall on the isle, it’s called Serpent Prep. like, i know there are characters (mostly Uma) who appear now for the first time without being mentioned before, ever. i can forgive that. but making up a whole new school just adds to the confusion of how big the isle actually is, and it’s also completely redundant.  this world just feels like a car accident where more cars keep crashing into the wrecks that are already blocking the street.

- carlos being in favor of the magic ban. what. remember how he was a slave for the better part of his life? “people should learn to live without magic” suck my toe (i made another post about what i think of the magic ban here)

- idk if this is on melissa de la cruz or what but the writing is just. not good. the sentences are boring, the use of adverbs is weird, the characters are shallow, the worldbuilding is.. idk how to describe it. it’s like when you look at the window of a shop and it looks nice, but when you enter it’s empty. or like a cardboard facade.

- all the characters do and say the things that are most obvious for them, but nothing beyond that. there’s no life in the characters and the world doesn’t draw you in.

- also the pacing is awful. in my first reading session i read about a third but it felt like nothing had happened. there’s so much setting up (and most of it is boring, it feels like every character just appears for their mandatory line but it has no relevance) and i’m just waiting for the plot.

- janelos. if you’re a janelos shipper than good for you, but i’m not and i’m salty. they could have such a great platonic relationship, why why why does it have to be romantic? (don’t bother, i already know the answer) they had a scene together, which was kinda sweet (through my platonic goggles), but “her laugh is cute” is not fucking enough to make a romantic relationship believable. 

their entire romantic relationship is built on “he was a boy, she was a girl” and nothing else.

- also devie. i’m pretty indifferent to this ship in general but the way it’s portrayed is so lackluster, like. doug shows up (for no other reason than showing up at least once in this book), is called evie’s boyfriend and that’s kinda it. we didn’t see how they got together, we don’t see what their relationship is like (except doug sorta putting evie on a pedestal), it’s just.. kinda there. wow. so much feeling.

there’s so much time wasted on meaningless worldbuilding that there’s no time left for giving life to the characters and their relationships. (actually there would be time, the book is not that long)

- (safe for uma, harry and gil) this book doesn’t even try to get me to like the main characters and completely relies on the fact that i already know and like them from preceding works.

- there’s always a parallel plot with Ben going on in every book, which is.. not terrible, but especially in this one it’s very distracting from the main plot, besides, what he’s doing is rarely all that interesting.  he’s travelling with lonnie and they had a nice scene together but it ended before it got anywhere near interesting. (Lonnie was about to get character development but then it was about Ben the end)

- not that i dislike ben, or that i don’t care for what he’s doing, but his sideplot is kinda just there so that is already short book isn’t even shorter. in the last book it had at least something to do with what the others were doing, but this time it doesn’t have any significance to the main storyline whatsoever. imo they should’ve just cut the whole bit out and put this content somewhere else, idk, give him his own diary or something, but now it’s just annoyingly strewn throughout the actual story.

(edit: you know what nevermind, this whole plotline is bullshit i’m not even gonna go into it but they punch a whole into the great wall of china and i crave Death™)

- the room that is taken up by ben’s sideplot could’ve been used to elaborate the relationships between the characters, or the characters’ inner lives. this book does so much tell not show that everything feels flat. “they’re best friends, they’re boyfriend/girlfriend, they love each other very much” ya thanks for telling me but is anything gonna happen to back these statements up or

- there’s an entire page that’s basically a montage of the pirate crew repairing Uma’s ship and it’s hella redundant (just like 50% of the book tbh)

- somehow interesting scenes are left out and when the plot is picked up again it’s “this happened and now we’re somewhere else”.

- the other characters get a sideplot too, which would be nice except they all have like 1 character trait and it’s all pretty meaningless. plus, the chapters are all super short and jumping between plotlines all the damn time is annoying.

- new characters appear just to be a plot device. happened with freddie and maddie in book 2, happens now with Arabella in book 3. she’s the niece of Ariel, but we don’t know who her mother is (based on her being described as wearing purple i’m gonna guess it’s Alana) which is excuable because i guess you can’t expect the readers to know all the names of Ariel’s sisters, but it just adds to her being a throwaway character. $100 that Arabella won’t appear in dd2. 

- actually, going off on a tangent about maddie here, wasn’t her background story basically the same as uma’s? that she was a friend of Mal’s when they were little? whatever happened to her, guess well never know cause she’s never gonna appear again.

- new things are made up just for convenience, or idk maybe it’s supposed to flesh out the world but it all feels so disjointed and loveless.  the annual seaside festival (i think it’s called?) where king triton whips out the old trident to give Arabella an opportunity to lose the trident in the first place, the R.O.A.R. competiotion (i forgot what that’s short for too, but it’s a mix of parcour and fencing, whatever) just to give Jay some other purpose besides “is also there” instead of, idk, an actual personality and inner life (but the VK’s dealing with the aftermath of growing up on the Isle is probably too serious and scawy uwu) like idk it’s probably the same in a lot of other stories, but instead of giving life to this world it all feels meaningless (like 98% of wicked world tbh)

- Lonnie has an older brother who wants to launch a hiphop career, and his name is Li’l Shang, which is an absolute fucking joke and takes the cake for worst name in this franchise.

- Ursula’s golden seashell is on the isle because for some reason it didn’t make it to Auradon where it was supposed to be displayed at the museum. i get that they want to use what they can from disney movies but this is just bullshit. the seashell being on the isle makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

- the critical overuse of the word “swaggered”

- seriously it’s like de la cruz saw one of those “words to use instead of walked”- tumblr posts and picked two (swaggered and sauntered)

- almost halfway through, wondering if there’s gonna be a plot

the things in this story just sorta happen, there’s no real suspense curve.

- ok this is really subjective but “Lost Revenge” for a name for a ship is so unnecessarily edgy lmao

- i’m writing most of this stuff as i come across it and at this point i’m just groaning in agony. they just introduced a new character, Sophie, who is Yen Sid’s sorcerer’s intern. intern for sorcery. on the isle of the lost. sure. also, apparently yen sid brought her with him when he moved to the isle like???? i mean the people of auradon already didn’t give a shit about the children that were born on the isle, but they just let yen sid take a little girl with him??? what the fffffffff (also sophie is another throwaway character that will never appear again. i’m blaming this on the fact that there are approximately 462 different canons in this franchise and we don’t get the chance to get attatched to characters that only function as plot devices in whatever canon they appear in)

- a new character called Charlie is introduced as the village elder of Stone Village (china, next to the wall) and he’s only a few years older than ben. he’s the descendant of ??? (molly and arthur weasly, probably) (seriously this is a throwaway character if i’ve ever seen one)

- mal’s morals are inconsistent. she has no problem using her spellbook for minor inconveniences but doesn’t want to steal a boat because it’s not the auRaDOn wAy.

- evie scolding mal for using the spellbook too often because that way she’ll never learn to live without magic (yadda yadda) but she also does this when mal opens a gate with magic in order to get to the boat they are going to steal, even though the matter is pretty time-sensitive and they had no other way of getting around that gate. like i get the idea of “solving problems without magic”, but this was really not the time to play moralizer, evie.

- there’s a yacht club building and FGM is giving it a new coat of paint with her wand solving problems without magic eat my entire ass.

she keeps using her wand!!! what the fuck!!!!

- i’m not going to go into detail over this but everything falls into place so conveniently that there aren’t really any obstacles to overcome and every conflict is solved within a matter of sentences.

- there are small cliffhangers every 200 words because it keeps jumping between plotlines. before you even get the chance to get into one of the plotlines it’s over again and it takes ages for anything to move along cause the stories keep interrupting each other.

- i’m losing my fucking mind over here as we speak. FGM catches the rotten four trying to steal a boat and she seriously thinks sending them back to the isle is an appropriate punishment. this is absolutely ludicrous and completely disproportionate. “this is exactly what we feared when we let villains into Auradon” they! are! children! (i know technically they’re teens but this doesn’t change the fact that imprisoning them on the isle again is super fucking cruel) i can’t believe how terribly literally everything is handled in this goodforsaken fantasy world. (not to mention that this is an insult to the character of FGM)

- so it’s been established that Mal can turn back time and she uses it when Uma reaches the trident. mal turns back time, uma doesn’t have the trident yet. so far so good, right?

look, i know time travel stuff is always prone to plotholes, but this is just ridiculous. 1. when she first uses it she comes to the conclusion “those with villain blood appear to be immune”, because evie wasn’t affected by it. it works on uma (though she remembers reaching the trident but doesn’t understand what happened) and it’s not made clear how it actually affects someone with villain blood. the setup for this whole shtick was weak. idk if i explained that well enough but you can ask me if you want a more detailed explanation i still have salt left lmao. 2. through carlos we know the others felt it happending, but what about ben? they don’t explain it to him even though he should have no memory of mal turning back time. 3. this book had all the time in the world to make this universe’s rules of time travel a little more clear (like why did nothing happen to both uma’s row boat and the speedboat? do objects not get set back in time too?) 4. one rule was explained tho: “it only turns back time to the top of the hour, and only if it’s been less than fifteen minutes” so mal might only have turned back time for like 1 minute, which would explain why the boats remain in the same spot, but it doesn’t change the fact that everything conveniently falls into place again because it just so happens to be *just* the right time for it to work (meaning no more than 15 minutes after a full hour) which in turn makes me wonder why this “top of the hour” rule was established in the first place. they could’ve just left that bit out and this whole thing wouldn’t be another case of dumb luck for the protagonists. i guess i’ll just go fuck myself.

- ok safe for that time travelling bs the last third is actually a lot okay-er than the rest. there was a cool scene where harry fell down a hole and was scared an panicking. this and the whole pirate-crew-escapes-from-a-trap-filled-cave was the best part of the book imo.

- after the great showdown between uma and mal (where they’re not actually face to face due to the barrier and thick fog, which is kind of a cool way to safe their encounter for the movie, i’ll give them that) mal stumbles backwards when she caught the trident and accidentally knocks evie overboard, which is completely unnecessarily dramatic, because the climax is already over, and is just there to show once again how gay mal and evie are for each other, without actually delivering. same old. (there’s also a scene where evie looks at mal “with a fond smile” while she’s sleeping like come on. those two scenes contain more feeling than any interaction between ben and mal ever. and at the end there is an exchange between the two that literally, like word for word, draws parallels to an interaction between ben an mal like are you kidding me)

- Evie says several times that Mal shouldn’t use magic, which is not too out of character i guess, i mean Evie has enough baggage concerning magic that this is believable.

she did use her mirror a lot, which is clearly magic, but somehow this is different from mal solving a problem with her spellbook?? hypocritical much. and it kinda retcons on the whole setup of her not being comfortable with magic.

in the end she gives her mirror to the museum, but it wasn’t her idea. it would’ve tied in with her previous statements a lot better if she herself had been like “i should give up my mirror so i have consistent characterization”

- Audrey dumps Chad for reasons unknown. not that i care all that much about that ship (i do think it’s interesting tho) but idk is this just so the movie doesn’t have to explain why they aren’t together anymore? (would be kinda lazy) felt like it was just there for cheap laughs.

- i’m surprised Jay didn’t get an Obligatory Love Interest™ but actually i’m not surprised because none of the writers care about jay.

- you might remember R.O.A.R. (the fencing/sword fighting-parcour-clusterfuck-sport). so chad was the captain of the team and has practised sword fighting all his life, but jay manages to beat him after a total amount of? 3? or so hours of training? and immediately becomes the new captain? bull

- also jay is supposedly really good at parcour, right? but he needed to practise wall jumps cuz his technique was bad or something for some reason. why tho. isn’t parcour his forte and why did carlos make the team before jay did. like not saying he can’t do roar but come on.

honestly tho, i kinda set myself up for this. i mean i already didn’t like the second book but for some reason i thought this one was going to be different.

the writing, characterization, worldbuilding etc. is just really lazy to me, and tbh i think it just exists to squeeze more money out of this franchise.

other people with different expectations and lower standards for writing might enjoy this tho idk

[drink-n-watch]

Irina: We are continuing this fun, odd little trip into the genre mashing experiment that is Zombieland Saga. The audience for this show seems rather divided. Crow (crowsworldofanime.com) and I made our first impressions stand pretty clear but let’s see if the enthusiasm keeps up.

I generally prefer my cute girl shows to have a genre beside “cute” but I realize that the balancing act isn’t always easy to pull off. Being only 3 episodes in, it’s much too early to judge but we can at least try to see where this is going. Yeah…I’m trying to analyze Zombieland Saga, I took a wrong turn somewhere. Scratch that, let’s just have fun!

Crow: I think you’re onto something with the balancing act. The show veered perilously close to normal this week, and that’s scary! But I think it’s part of a larger plot — more on that later.

go on…

The GooD:

Now that I’ve seen it again, I really love that OP. It has a fun old school TV show Batman feel to it. It just makes me happy when I see it.

The episode wasn’t as goofy as previous ones but Yuguri’s scene was pure comedy gold to me. When she slapped Sakura so dismissively right in the middle of her inspirational speech, I was already cracking up (because I’m pure evil). There was just something in the way that slap was animated that was both satisfying and hilarious to watch. This show really knows how to draw an impact!

At first, I figured they were just mocking the usual optimistic cute girl trope. I was happy with that. But when Yuguri subverts even that by blatantly stealing Sakura’s speech and spotlight and claiming all the glory for herself. Like I said – pure comedy gold. Yuguri just skyrocketed as favourite Zombie girl.

just brilliant!

And what about Sakura’s faceplant? Tae had the merry-go-round going so fast that when she abruptly stopped it, Sakura went flying to land face first. I was like, “Oh, no! She’s a zombie! What happened her face — she can’t heal!” Then the camera hesitated to show her face. Was I the only one half afraid she’d turn around to reveal a new face made entirely of dirt? I think the director was messing with us…

Gorilla idol shows remind me of flash mobs and I really wish my life had more of both.

Once again, we have the pervy (He’s not actually pervy, just in my head) cop character making a comeback. And I still am enjoying seeing what should be throwaway characters serve as a through-line in the narrative. It’s a little shaky but it’s still a device I enjoy.

Surprisingly, I feel like manager had one of the best lines in the episode: “…they are trying to live, how long do you intend to just rot?” I wasn’t expecting anything so poignant from him.

That made me almost feel sympathy for him. Almost! But it was a suspiciously great line. I wonder if we’ll learn more about his back story?

They did bring us classic pop this week, continuing the changing trend and I’m all for it but…

this looks like both the best and worst show ever

The BaD:

This episode really played out much more like a traditional CGDCT episode. Despite the name of this section, I don’t think that’s a bad thing per see, it’s just not really what I was looking for in this show.

I think it’s a set up. Really!

The actual idol performance was bad. I mean it was supposed to be, that was part of the plot. The dance moves were actually pretty fun and seemed simple enough to recreate at home. They really did look like a real idol show as opposed to anime one. However, there was some type of CG during that scene that just didn’t mesh completely. I was making faces at my screen trying not to tumble into the uncanny valley the whole time. Am I the only one? Was I seeing things? Don’t you hate it when that happens?

It didn’t mesh perfectly, that’s for sure! To me, it looked like a cross between the kind of CG I’m used to (and like!) from Arpeggio of Blue Steel or BBK/BRNK, and standard animation. It looked like they tried to soften the edges of the CG to mesh. After I saw what they were doing, I went with it, but yeah, the uncanny valley was calling!

I take it back it was a great performance

Franchouchou is really fun to say but it’s still my least favourite band name so far. I wish they had let her write in with Kanji.

I’m wondering when the last girl will awaken. I’m afraid she’ll stay Zombie forever. That’s also not a bad thing in the show structure. I just think it’s a little sad for her…

Although Manager was still a bit too much in the first act for me and that delivery gets grating, I think he improved from last week so I’m bumping him up from Ugly to Bad… My rating system is pretty random.

At least he’s moving up in the world!

they really are quite cute

The UglY:

This is more of a sinking suspicion that a failure of the episode itself. I have this uneasy feeling that with the girls choosing a name for themselves and an actual authentic idol performance where everyone practice, this will mean an end to the musical genre hopping and name changing. And this will make me very very sad.

The slight tonal shift away from Zombie comedy and decidedly towards cute girl idols also makes me think that the show is about to settle down into a much more classical idol show with the idea of Zombies as just a background quirk for flavour. I really hope I’m wrong as that would strip away all the zany, frantic weirdness I particularly enjoy.

If the show had to settle, I would have preferred if they had chosen a more unusual musical genre than idol pop…

Don’t get me wrong, the episode itself was still mostly charming. I do like idols and I enjoyed the show in all it’s cheesy glory. Part of me is simply afraid that they are about to sanitize the more unusual elements and that will leave us with a rather run of the mill show, which would be a shame. What do you think Crow?

see- it’s weird

This is where I think the writer’s setting us up! Just look at the wonderful OP — do you think the crew that brought us that satirical masterpiece will settle for a standard CGDCT show?

Would the writers who had Yuguri slap Sakura just to perform a two-level parody be happy with repeating this episode’s formula every week?

I think (okay, I hope) that they gave us this episode to lull us into a false sense of complacency! Not only that, but wasn’t it kinda of triumphant when Junko and Ai finally came to the rescue? Yeah, it was corny, and yeah, it came awfully close to cliche, but it was still fun.

What do you think, Irina? Another case of me being too optimistic?

Actually Crow, you have an excellent point! I’m so glad you’re here. Alright, can’t wait to see what next week brings!

Also, I’m a sucker for these things so of course I cheered when Ai and Junko showed up and even more when the little girl was dancing….

you go little girl! find your bliss

And here are some more screencaps:

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Irina and Crow in Zombieland (Saga) ep3: Guts and Glory Irina: We are continuing this fun, odd little trip into the genre mashing experiment that is Zombieland Saga.