theoldgvard

[theoldgvard]

perhaps the craziest thing about bbc merlin is that the main character is lowkey the best character. merlin is the fan fav from merlin. that literally never happens.

[theoldgvard]

if the old guard sequel doesn’t have the same level of obtrusive and on the nose cw soundtrack as the first one i will be so upset and the creators would be cowards

[theoldgvard]

ALSO another reason why the old guard hits so hard is that it uses stereotypical romantic tropes for family too. They see each other in their dreams until they meet, they're meant to be together (it's like destiny), they mourn the ones they lose for centuries etc.

[theoldgvard]

i know nicky has long hair in the sequel, but it is my personal belief that once crusader era nicolò realised there was no reason not to anymore he immediately grabbed the nearest blade and just started hacking at his hair because he was sick to death of having it long.

the end result is a complete disaster but it’s not long or in his way and that’s what he wanted. yusuf almost dies of laughter before softening and offering to tidy it up as best he can.

they’ll go through a million and one different hairstyles over the years to help blend in, and nicky makes his peace with this easily enough. but the second trends grow lax or they have a break it’s back to basics (i take this to be a slightly shorter version of his hair in the first movie). he just looks so damn comfortable in it. like is it fashionable or even just any sort of style not really but it’s his and he likes it that way.

he grows it out after merrick in order to lie low, and joe says it’s nice and loves to play with it - but the second something changes…

[theoldgvard]

no because i think this would change the whole trajectory of their conversations about their deaths, shifting the question away from ‘how’ and towards specifics - if nile has a huge scar across her throat, the question isn’t how she died, so naturally becomes who, why etc.

booker has a rope burn ring around his throat. nile asks ‘what for?’. he shakes his head, mumbling something about stealing. she won’t find out about his desertion for a long time, and when she does it’ll sting.

nile seeing that nicky has a very similar neck-wound scar and asking who killed him. nicky smiling sheepishly and pointing to joe.

The Old Guard, but the injury that killed them the first time leaves a scar

[theoldgvard]

I believe in TWO instances of homophrosyne:

The OGs, Odysseus and Penelope

Joe and Nicky from The Old Guard

[theoldgvard]

Luca Marinelli as Nicolo Di Genova (Nicky) in The Old Guard

[theoldgvard]

the old guard 2 is going to be my personality for months when it drops lmao

[theoldgvard]

Do You Know This (non-canon) Autistic Character?

Propaganda:

Based on this gif set.

Hyperfocusses

Has ritualistic sleeping patterns

Conventional fighting styles

Literal communication

Hyperaware of those around him

Sensory friendly clothing

Sensitive to emotionally charged conversations

Hyperempathy

Any other details:

He and his husband Joe are Autism4ADHD and perfect together.

[theoldgvard]

thinking about nicky's small smile in the helicopter

[theoldgvard]

to celebrate the Old Guard 2 release date/clip I wanna write about them again! If anyone has any prompts or ideas for me to attempt please let me know - I’ve written a fair bit of TOG over the last three years so I’d love the challenge of trying to create from an exterior idea rather than just writing what I know!

(I tend to be kaysanova/nicky centric in my writing, but I’m more than happy to work from any pov or focus!)

[theoldgvard]

The Old Guard (comics + movie) Comprehensive Timeline

I spent way too much time spent researching the comics one night resulting in this, my TOG magnum opus, including every confirmed event up until the beginning of the movie. If there's anything I missed let me know (I did misplace my copy of Force Multiplied but I don't think they did many flashbacks iirc). This is mostly for my own purposes, but absolutely feel free to use it for your own fics/art/meta/etc

Also thank you @yumekuimono for the putting together the photographs on Copley's hyperfixation board, which inspired me to make this.

It's long, so it's all under the cut. Enjoy!

4500s BCE: Andromache is born in the Western Steppe, later known as Scythia, now known as the Ural region, mostly. Fifteen or so years later her mother(figure) gifts her an axe, naming Andy as her successor instead of her sisters. Five or so years later Andy's mother plans to have her killed out of jealously. Andy doesn't die, though her mother is killed in the conflict. Andy kills her attackers in revenge, then goes back to lead her people as a pseudo-god for an unspecified number of years.

500s BCE: Quỳnh (Noriko) is born in modern day Vietnam (Noriko in Japan).

330ish BCE: Lykon is killed for the first time following Alexander The Great to Judea. Andy meets him not long after (comic only canon, the movie doesn't specify when Andy and Lyon meet except to say it's after she meets Quynh).

630s CE: Andy meets Quynh in Alexandria while fighting with Amir ibn al-As. They become inseparable and travel with Lykon and Yitzhak for a time as roaming soldiers (anything about Yitzhak, so far, is comics only canon)

Note- There's no firmer information on Yitzhak aka Isaac Blue at this time, apart from him being Jewish, a contemporary of Lykon, having been with Andy in the year 1950, and now living in Alaska. There's a wonderful analysis of his likely timeline by @nevermindirah who places him around the time of the Second Temple, somewhere between 500 BCE and 70 CE.

1066: Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysani called al-Tayyib is born in Maghreb, North Africa, to a family of merchants

1069: Nicolò di Genova is born in Genoa, Italy

1099: Joe and Nicky meet and kill each other and, according to word of god (aka Greg Rucka), get on to the more pleasurable type of physical relationship very quickly after.

1100-1230: Andy and Quynh are spotted around the crusades, likely to find Nicky + Joe

1200s: Noriko (comics only canon) is killed many times fighting rogue samurai around feudal Japan

1550-1600 (Renaissance): Lykon dies for the last time, Joe saves a young artist from a fire in Genoa, forcing them to avoid Italy for 100 years

1500s (late): Quynh and Andy attempt to free people from the witch trials and are caught themselves, leading to Quynh's underwater imprisonment

1700s (late): The Guard are in London for a time. Joe saves a coffee shop owner from the stocks, Andy gets a new axe (that is still very much the same axe, to her).

1770: Sébastien LeLivre is born in Marseilles, France.

1790s: Andy meets a former West Indies slave turned British soldier turned highway robber named Achilles. Andy follows him to Australia, starts a life in a small town.

1789-95: Andy, Nicky, and Joe are at the Paris Commune. Nicky and Joe aren't speaking at the time.

1812: Booker dies in Russia while following Napoleon. He's hanged for desertion. The Guard meets up with him a few years later. (Note, it's very likely Booker was conscripted in the place of a richer man in exchange for a fee, or as blackmail material, given that married men were exempt from the Grande Armée and even the Imperial Army's levée en masse. My theory is he was caught by a banker or shop owner for his forgeries, and was therefore forced to take the man's place in the army).

1830s: Booker hangs out with his youngest son Jean-Pierre, likely towards the end of his son's life, at a Parisian restaurant. Andy leaves Achilles for an extended amount of time to go to Jamaica, likely for the Baptist War. She comes back to find him dead, killed by their neighbors. She then razes the entire town in retaliation.

1834: São Paulo. Joe jumps through a window as a distraction for reasons as yet unknown.

1853: Joe and Nicky spotted on the ground of the Crimean War

1863: Nicky goes undercover of sorts in the American Civil War as a Confederate soldier in Pennsylvania. Joe is helping the slaves Nicky frees along with the Quakers in York. The Guard appear at the Battle of Gettysburg

1870, September: Booker and Andy meet in San Francisco after Booker unknowingly saves Merrick's great grandfather in a frontier town because of an inexplicable feeling he should stay to help

1887: Nicky and Joe save a young person in Zanzibar, presumably the victim of a hate crime

1904: The Guard prevent a coup in Haiti

1914-18: The Guard fight in The Great War. Joe saves a little girl who becomes the youngest Nobel Laureate in Medicine. Andy fights in the Gallipoli campaign and in France

1916: Andy saves a refugee family in Montenegro, one of whom goes on to develop early diabetes detection.

1917: Andy takes part in a battle in Passchedaele, Belgium, and adopts an orphaned boy, Zeus

1932, November: Joe and Nicky go to a bar in Berlin, run into the person they saved in Zanzibar, and punch a Nazi.

1944: Andy is involved in the French Resistance in WWII

1945, August: The Guard prevent a third atomic bomb

1950: Andy and Yitzhak eat a meal made for them by Zeus somewhere not in the US

1956-59: Joe, Nicky, and Booker are spotted helping the Cuban Revolution

1968: Nicky and Andy appear at MLK speeches separately. Joe and Nicky rescue a man from a cave (poss. Onyx Cave, AZ in Oct. or Gory Hole, IN in Nov. -US cave incidents are very well recorded)

1969, July: The Guard take down a pedophilic serial killer in Minnesota (possibly based on Stanley Rice). Nicky and Booker stay to track down everyone who knowingly let the killer go free. Joe and Andy head on to San Francisco to watch the moon landing at a bar.

1975, April: Andy helps in Operation Babylift in Vietnam

late 1970's: Andy lands in Cleveland, not knowing where she is after a job. Coincidentally, she cleans herself up in a restaurant owned by Zeus, who she hadn't seen in decades.

1978: Booker gets captured by a cult of murder- and sex-obsessed nuns in NYC. Three months later Andy rescues a reluctant Booker from the nuns' compound in Guyana

1989: Andy helps people escape East Germany

1992: Booker serves as a combat medic in Sarajevo. Nicky attends university under the name N Smith (likely a graduate school given the wording of the ID. My guess, either for medicine or computer science, both of which were rapidly evolving at the time)

1994: Nile Freeman born, South Side of Chicago, IL

2000s: The Guard rescue children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They are also linked to the US 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan.

2005: Nile's dad killed in action on the ground as a Marine

2012: The Guard take a CIA assignment in Surabaya, Indonesia, with Copley and Booker as the point persons

2013: Andy goes by the alias Alexandra Black in the Czech Republic

2014: Joe goes by the alias Joseph Jones in Germany. The Guard is seen in Syria near an USAF F-22 bombing site.

2019: Andy takes a break to travel. Joe and Nicky travel to Eastern Turkey. Booker is contacted by Copley on behalf of Merrick Industries.

2020: Nile dies for the first time in Afghanistan at the hands of an enemy insurgent. Official record has her killed in action. The events of the movie (aka comics Opening Fire 1-5). Booker returns to Paris in his exile, where he is contacted by Quynh.

[theoldgvard]

never forget those two men were destined to kill each other in a war but something made it impossible for them to die and so they fell in love instead. they were supposed to die at each others hands and now they have been in love for a millennium. "he's all and he's more" i'm sick just thinking about it

[theoldgvard]

a date ????????? we used to pray for days like this

[theoldgvard]

hello I need to say absolutely love your pfp that's the sweetest nicky has looked

thank you! i agree, it’s one of my favourite moments. nicky in my opinion is the one who’s most considerate for nile’s feelings throughout the film and i think this moment of him running to help her even though he knows she’s almost certainly okay is a big show of the kind of person he is.

[theoldgvard]

it really do be like that.

[theoldgvard]

twenty years across the sea