#Macaque never has and will ever speculate this question | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

shypitaya · 4 years ago

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Six Eared Shadow

Do you remember the analysis about Mei and Red Son? That was me, and I'm doing this again, but now about Macaque and Sun Wukong

Because what the heck why do they hate each other so much

Ok, so this... This is such a messy chaotic really chaotic mix of a few headcanons and theories I made up and it SOMEHOW turned into a fanfic that I wrote so long that other people made many similar things in meanwhile and now this sounds not original at all, but I wrote it not to keep it in my deep hidden shelf so here we go

(It's based on what I know from the lmk series. I've started to read JTTW, but I'm still not so far to get to know anything about Macaque, but I won't change anything about this theory from now on)

Let's gather some basic information for the start.

-> Macaque is made with a shadow or even he is a shadow (kinda shadow demon, the demon of shadow). I mean, shadow is not only his power, he literally is made with shadow matter. We know that because he can not only manipulate shadows but also go through walls and turn yourself into a shadow.

-> I'm not sure if someone made him or he just "poof" out of nowhere just like Sun Wukong, but according to the story he told about how close he and Monkey King used to be, there's no doubt they had some master/student relationship which later turned into almost equal partnership. What is said, Macaque followed Sun Wukong for a long time, learning a lot from him, 'being his shadow'. They grew in power together, fought together, and (as it is said) Macaque started casting as Sun Wukong shadow, which (surprisingly) looks like he did willingly. Just look at the picture - the shadow is big and bright, it’s powerful and smiling, proud of his strength. He doesn’t look like someone forced to be Sun Wukong’s shadow. It shows how much Macaque admired Monkey King, that he wasn't just a friend for him, he was his idol.

-> We all know Macaque is a shadow demon, he can easily change his appearance, he does not have to look like an evil clone of Monkey King, especially if he hates him now or something, SO even if he used to look up at Sun as his ex-student or ex-partner, and now we know he is NOT, he would prefer to not look so similar any more.

He can choose any other look, but he doesn't. Why? Well, maybe he actually cannot. Maybe this isn't an appearance he has specifically chosen, maybe this is his 'basic' comfy form and any other form would just take too much energy to keep up. And looking at the really tiny probability of two very similar monkeys just "poofing" out of nowhere, I dare to say, Macaque wasn't born (I mean like Sun Wukong or any other demon), but he was specifically created. And here is a question: on someone's purpose or not? Maybe the power of great Monkey King was so strong so the part of it just jumped from him and formed into another similar creature, but let me say it's just weird and I prefer the theory of Sun Wukong being so bored and lonely after his master's (Tripitaka) death, and he created a brother for himself from his own shadow. Just to have someone, anyone.

So Wukong created Macaque and then what? He trained him, he taught him everything he knew, maybe even he shared his powers with him. Some great great bonding time. But as Macaque said, something drew them apart. It is visible that Macaque blamed Monkey King for this, for 'forgetting him'. Before speculation of what happened then between them, let's focus on what Macaque showed us what he wants now.

We have two episodes, both show different sides of him. In season 1, Macaque's main goal is to steal Monkey King's power from Mk, and then to very specifically revenge. He visibly does not want to defeat Sun Wukong, he wants to hurt him as much as possible. Look: when Monkey King showed up, Macaque totally forgot about Mk. And then, when he's so close to defeat him, instead of that he turned to Mk and tried to kill the teenager. Mk is just a tool to hurt Sun Wukong.

And we can't forget how Macaque constantly pointed out all the weak sides of Sun, he's basically just saying on and on "you're weak, you're weak, you're so weak, I'm so strong, I'm strong, you are so weak". Which really fits the feeling of being forgotten because he was weaker and Monkey King was stronger, better, glorious and famous. Macaque really feels like that, he really tried to make Sun Wukong feel his pain by dominating him.

On the other hand, we see that Sun constantly striked off him. He said almost nothing to him, just "Aren't you bored of keep being in my shadow? It's time to give back what you've stolen" and that was fricking all. For Monkey King, Macaque is a just shadow, always behind him, something you turn around and leave behind to not see it and to forget, like an unwanted past. An unnecessary problem, that irritatingly keeps returning to him. He does not want to interact to not make even a slight more bond between them, he wants to delete him from his life forever, and omg WHY. At this end of the ep, Sun Wukong did not even mention Macaque. He really doesn't care at all (or extremely tries to not care). His HATE is almost touchable, ouch.

In season 2, Sun Wukong LEFT US ALL ALONE. Macaque showed up again, he played with Mk a bit, and... Left? That's the thing, you see, he doesn't need to hurt or kill Mk. All we see is Macaque talking about his past and then letting Mk experience something the 'hero' in the story should have felt. The guilt. When Mk interpreted his story differently, seeing himself as the warrior, Macaque corrected him. Cause he doesn't care about Mk at all. He heard how Mk told him about what hurt him, and here is a funny point, because if Macaque needs to be understood, listening to Mk and talking with him (such a simple act of empathy, they both needed it then, guh) should have been enough. Mk really felt the 'warrior' character in the story, so he understood what Macaque felt. But surprisingly, that was not what the demon carved.

Macaque chose to make Mk feel like Monkey King at the moment something drew the demons apart. He wanted to force Mk to be sorry, to apologize, to regret his mistakes, cause he failed with forcing Monkey King to feel that. But! Maybe he is not as purely innocent and poorly forlorn. We see the flashback for a half of second before Mk hit him with Staff:

We see Sun Wukong attacking Macaque who's in his demon (true) form.

Let's repeat this: Macaque felt as if a friend left him in the past. He said a friend did this to have all the "hero's glory" for themselves. We know Sun Wukong could do such a thing, especially before he met Tripitaka, but 1. In my theory Macaque is created after Tripitaka's death and 2. If (as my theory said) Sun created Macaque to not feel so lonely, he would never leave him for such a thing. So Macaque hides something for sure, something he did, something so terrible that made Sun Wukong attack him and not want to know him anymore. How horrendous thing Macaque did that made Sun Wukong choose to be alone again and to forget his dear brother he created by himself?

Back to the great bonding time, repeating speculation of "oh maybe they even share the powers" and comparing it to Macaque wanting to steal Mk's power, my theory here is saying:

Sun Wukong taught Macaque the technique of the same powers as he knew, but Macaque overused it (probably wanting to see how powerful he is, probably showing off and killing so many harmless people) doing terrible terrible things. So Monkey King took all of the powers from him and left him alone, powerless, with the last painful words: "Dont you dare to show in front of my eyes ever again". Of course Macaque was hurt, of course he didn't see why he's the bad guy, because he did not care about people at all. And of course Sun Wukong was hurt too.

Maybe he came back to the village Macaque had destroyed and following a quiet crying he found a little baby with a heart so clear and he put into him all Macaque's powers, making them sleep until the time will be right... But back to the series!

Yes exactly. Why did he destroy the lantern and leave? Why did he suddenly lose interest in teasing Mk and stop forcing him to feel guilty?

First thing, he saw Mk is ready to fight for his friends seriously. He still cared so much about them, not like Monkey King about Macaque. That was hard to swallow, that was hard to watch for the demon. That was't the thing he wanted to see. And second, the flashback. Maybe the sudden realization that he actually did something bad. Cause Sun Wukong didn’t just leave him, he cast him out. It was hard to admit that he actually deserved this (or maybe much more), it’s much easier to blame others, not yourself. So Macaque felt “that’s enough” and left. Mk brought him to this uncomfortable point of admitting the truth. Which he didn’t want to. Maybe in the following eps, he will see it, but now Macaque just isn’t ready yet. But the last talk with Mk gives me a little hope. He stopped treating him like a tool or toy, he was actually talking with him like with a person, he even warned him about Lady Bone Demon.

Maybe (maybe) one day he'll see that humans aren't just useless creatures he can carelessly kill, maybe Mk will make him care and realize what he's done, but that's just speculation in speculation, he could die before he reaches that point, maybe he is already dead....

And that's it. That is all I wrote on ao3, but in the fanfic I put much more details and I build those characters up much more than here. This is only rough rough short-saying, I'm really sorry if you read it all

Oh and here is a link if you liked this above i'd love if you read the fanfic thank you

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jobsearchtips02 · 5 years ago

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This Company Boasted to Trump About Its Covid-19 Vaccine. Experts Are Skeptical.

Inovio, a Pennsylvania biotech company, has spent years claiming to be on the cusp of important vaccines. It has never brought one to market.

Shares of Inovio, led by J. Joseph Kim, have soared as the company announced progress on its coronavirus vaccine.Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Aug. 9, 2020, 7: 00 a.m. ET

As the deadly new virus spread globally, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech company in Pennsylvania, rushed to develop a vaccine. After announcing promising early results, Inovio’s stock soared more than 1,000 percent. Riding the momentum, the company sold more shares to the public.

That was 2009, when H1N1, better known as swine flu, was stoking fears of a devastating pandemic. In the years since, Inovio has announced encouraging news about its work on vaccines for malaria, the Zika virus and even a “cancer vaccine.” The upbeat declarations have caused the company’s stock price to leap, enriching investors and senior executives.

There’s only one catch: Inovio has never actually brought a vaccine to market.

Now, with a new pandemic raging, Inovio is working on a new vaccine: for the novel coronavirus. A flurry of positive news releases about its funding and preliminary results have sent Inovio’s shares up by as much as 963 percent — and helped the company attract money from the government and investors. At the same time, Inovio insiders have sold stock.

But some scientists and financial analysts question the viability of Inovio’s technology. While there are some early signs of promise with the company’s vaccine, Inovio has only released bare-bones data from the first phase of clinical trials. It is locked in a legal battle with a key manufacturing partner that claims Inovio stole its technology.

Shareholders have sued Inovio, claiming it has exaggerated its progress on a coronavirus vaccine to inflate its stock price. Adding to the challenges, Inovio’s potential vaccine will have to be administered by a gadget — it resembles an electric nose-hair trimmer and is called the Cellectra — that would direct genetic material into millions of patients.

And while the company has said that it is part of Operation Warp Speed — the flagship federal effort to quickly produce treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus — Inovio is not on the list of companies selected to receive financial support to mass-produce vaccines.

“The absence of that funding, coupled with their ongoing litigation, coupled with the need to scale a device, coupled with the absence of complete Phase 1 data, makes people skeptical,” said Stephen Willey, an analyst at Stifel, an investment firm.

As it tries to defuse the coronavirus crisis, the Trump administration is wagering, in part, on companies — like Moderna and Novavax — with spotty track records and penchants for self-promotion. In June, Inovio received $71 million from the Department of Defense to manufacture its battery-operated Cellectras.

Some medical experts worry that taxpayer backing for unproven companies could erode the public’s already tenuous faith in vaccines.

“If you dry up trust, you’ll have almost a self-defeating proposition with vaccine uptake,” said Arthur L. Caplan, a bioethicist at the New York University School of Medicine. “The more you’re hype and less you’re reality, the more you are taking funds away from things that are cheaper, closer or both,” he added.

Inovio could provide an update on its progress with the vaccine when it releases its second-quarter financial results on Monday.

Developing vaccines is hard. In addition to coming up with an effective formula and the funding to produce it, drug makers need to navigate an obstacle course of government safety checks and rigorous scientific review on a fast enough timeline to stay competitive. The fact that a company like Inovio has never brought a vaccine to market is not necessarily an indictment of its underlying approach to creating vaccines. Otherwise, scientists say, the world would never have technological breakthroughs.

Inovio’s specialty is attempting to develop DNA-based vaccines, which use a virus’s own genes to provoke an immune response. But the company’s decade of attempts have not borne fruit.

In fact, no DNA-based vaccine has ever made it to market. While some have produced encouraging results in small animals, they have not proven effective in humans — against the coronavirus or any other disease.

Nonetheless, the scientific community continues to believe the technology is promising in part because such gene-based vaccines can be designed quickly. Companies in Korea, India and Japan are pursuing similar DNA-based coronavirus vaccines.

Inovio’s chief executive, J. Joseph Kim, has said that when the DNA sequence of the coronavirus became public in January, the company was able to immediately engineer a vaccine. Later that month, Inovio secured a $9 million grant from the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a leading funder of vaccine research.

In March, Dr. Kim — an immunologist who became chief executive of Inovio in 2009 — was invited to participate in a meeting in the White House’s Cabinet Room with President Trump and pharmaceutical executives.

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President Trump held a meeting in March with pharmaceutical executives, including Inovio’s Dr. Kim.Credit…Drew Angerer/Getty Images

At the public meeting, Dr. Kim described Inovio as “the leader in coronavirus vaccine development in the world,” adding that it had its own manufacturing capabilities.

Mr. Kim said that, thanks to “our very innovative, 21st-century platform,” Inovio had been “able to fully construct our vaccine within three hours.” All the company needed now, he told Mr. Trump, was the federal government’s support to help scale up manufacturing.

Inovio’s stock shot up 220 percent over the coming days. Its market value has gone from less than $500 million at the start of the year to more than $3 billion today.

Shortly after the White House meeting, Inovio announced that it had received a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The money would help Inovio test the Cellectra. The devices use electrical pulses to direct DNA into patients’ cells — a technique that experts said is grounded in legitimate science.

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Inovio’s Cellectra gadget for directing genetic material into patients’ cells.Credit…Inovio

Some investors, though, had grown skeptical.

On March 9, Andrew Left of Citron Capital, which is shorting Inovio’s stock and stands to profit if it declines, began publicly questioning Inovio’s approach to devising a coronavirus vaccine and accusing it of engaging in “serial stock promotion.” He later issued a report comparing the company to Theranos, the disgraced blood-testing company, and cataloging Inovio’s history of promoting and then failing to produce vaccines.

Inovio’s stock price plunged 66 percent, though it would soon soar to new heights thanks to optimism about its potential vaccine.

Days later, shareholders sued Inovio in federal court in Pennsylvania. Citing Dr. Kim’s remarks at the White House and earlier comments he made on Fox Business Network about having created a vaccine, the suit claimed that the company had “capitalized on widespread Covid-19 fears by falsely claiming that Inovio had developed a vaccine.” In April, another group of shareholders filed a separate suit in the same court, accusing Dr. Kim and Inovio’s board of mismanagement and unjustly enriching themselves, among other things.

Inovio has disputed Mr. Left’s critiques, but the company publicly clarified that it had developed a vaccine construct — essentially a road map — not an actual vaccine. Inovio has not publicly responded to the pending shareholder lawsuits.

Over the past 10 years, insiders at Inovio have sold more than $25 million in stock, according to the financial data provider Equilar. Last year, Dr. Kim was forced to sell about half his Inovio shares — causing the stock price to drop by more than a third — after he used his shares as collateral to borrow money and was caught in a so-called margin call, requiring him to immediately repay his loan.

This year, following steep run-ups in Inovio’s stock price, insiders have sold $3.8 million in shares. (Earlier this year, Inovio banned executives from “engaging in short-term or speculative transactions in the company’s securities, including pledging and purchasing company securities on margin.”)

Hoping to raise money to fund its vaccine efforts, Inovio said this year that it planned to sell some $150 million in new stock to investors.

In April, Inovio began trials of its potential vaccine, testing it on 36 people. (A volunteer in the trial said that getting zapped with the Cellectra didn’t hurt. “It just feels strange,” she said.)

On the last day of June, Inovio reported encouraging results in the 36-person trial. Inovio said its vaccine was “generally safe and well-tolerated” and generated an immune response.

But the company did not disclose any data about the magnitude of that response. Scientists said that made it impossible to gauge whether the vaccine would protect anyone.

Jeff Richardson, an Inovio spokesman, said the company would release more data soon.

When it announced the study results, Inovio also claimed that its vaccine had been “selected for the U.S. Government’s Operation Warp Speed.” But Inovio was not given federal funding to produce vaccines. Instead, its vaccine candidate had been chosen for inclusion in a preliminary study on rhesus macaque monkeys that had been organized by Warp Speed. (Vaxart, another company participating in the monkey trial, similarly claimed to have been selected for Warp Speed, drawing criticism from the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Asked about Inovio’s claim to be part of Warp Speed, Mr. Richardson said: “It depends on what you call Warp Speed.” He declined further comment.

At the White House, Dr. Kim had talked up Inovio’s manufacturing capabilities. While the company does manufacture its Cellectra, it has relied on another company, VGX International, to manufacture its vaccine candidate.

Now, Inovio and VGX are in a legal fight. In June, Inovio sued, claiming that VGX was refusing to share technology needed to produce the Inovio vaccine with other companies and was endangering public health. The case, along with a countersuit by VGX, is pending in state court in Pennsylvania.

In court filings, VGX accused Inovio of stealing trade secrets and challenged its claim that there is a public interest in Inovio’s work.

“Although the Covid-19 pandemic is horrible, Inovio is unlikely to win the race for the vaccine,” VGX lawyers wrote. Despite Inovio’s years of work, “it has never developed an F.D.A.-approved product.”

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/this-company-boasted-to-trump-about-its-covid-19-vaccine-experts-are-skeptical/

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