#you cannot tell me timelines change that easily and they don't get a strange feeling

[maitanii]

@colored-tr-panels made a post some time ago about how the tokrev characters would have flashbacks about them dying, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.

imagine ... (278 spoilers, i guess) current timeline!

Akane and Seishu having an irrational fear of fire.

Kazutora getting goosebumps everytime he goes inside of Shinichiro's shop.

Draken waking up in cold sweat after having another nightmare where Emma dies.

Haru always scratching the sides of his mouth.

Kisaki being extra careful when he crosses the street.

Shinichiro making sure that his shop has the best alarm system because his sixth sense told him to do so.

Senju always thinking that Haruchiyo is mad at her even if they do everything together.

Kakucho being extra worried about Izana when they're with Kisaki.

Ran experiencing a strange feeling of embarrassment everytime he looks at kakucho

[bloodgulchblog]

fuck it i woke up and thought about halo and can't get back to sleep.

i really genuinely truly, from the bottom of my heart, think that sergeant johnson is a critical character for a halo adaptation and creates a lot of opportunities.yes, he's dead. yes, he's been dead for longer than we had that character in the first place. but if halo wants to return to the story of the original three games, johnson is so so valuable.

bear with me and pretend i know a damn thing about tv for a second.

everybody loves our boy master chief, but chief is an obnoxiously difficult character to portray directly as a leading man in a medium where you cannot easily get inside his head. chief's quiet and private and focused on his work. because of that, chief's personality is a negative space that you demonstrate the most through the characters around him. the people you put around chief and have talking to him, telling him stuff, and asking him to do things are the tools you have for illustrating him so they gotta be good. cortana is the best of them, obviously, but cortana is also an AI so her perspective on the world is also very weird.

of the human characters who interact the most with chief in that period of time, johnson is by far the best and the one who has the most layers. on the top layer, johnson is charming and funny and competent and tough. game fans love and remember him because he's likable. on the deeper layers, johnson is a long-experienced participant in this war and the war that came before the aliens showed up. he knows a lot of secrets, including the vital secrets about the chief, and has conflicted feelings he carries around. he keeps his head down and his ears up, and plays dumb jarhead to protect himself and others. he has just as much crazy shit in his backstory as chief and cortana, but chief's chief and cortana is like 3 years old tops and also an ai. johnson is our adultiest adult. johnson's pretty stable, he knows who he is and what's going on, and his perspective is much less strange.

chief needs handler characters with perspectives that are easier to grasp than his. johnson is an amazing handler character for chief because johnson knows him, johnson knows why he's fucked up, and johnson is a decent dude who cares about him even though he cannot save him. if you dilate the timeline to let these two characters talk, it is easy to have johnson check on chief and have chief report back that he's fine in a way that totally shows oh, this dude's priorities are insane. you establish that johnson knows the chief and is looking out for him, and then you do a flashback that shows he has known chief since he was a teenaged child soldier? jesus, suddenly so many things click together. you don't even have to get into the details of johnson's own status as a spartan-i grad for it to work.

it doesn't stop there! johnson's also a key character if you're working with the arbiter! johnson's the first human the arbiter ever has a chance to have respect for, and johnson's smart and able to figure out how to work with him! it also makes for great parallels because johnson was there when the war with the covenant started. you don't have to shoehorn him into a situation to create a bookend, it's just there.

johnson is a likable character with a rich backstory and a nuanced perspective on events and a complex relationship to them. (oh avery johnson, you have been victim of and complicit in so much shit, how's that going for you buddy?) he's a capable action character who also works well on the quieter end, is known and involved in secrets, and can draw out interesting and important details in the original trilogy's two main characters.

also, johnson is just a genuinely cool character who deserves more and on the one hand it's probably ultimately better for the character that he hasn't changed hands a dozen times like everyone else, but on the other his death still feels like a gutpunch and a loss. so like. idk. give him something cool to do in an adaptation from the time where he's alive.

....

anyway, the punchline of this whole thing is that i think johnson is a vital character. so of course he wasn't in that tv show.