#theorypost

[greenleaf4stuff]

"Sun Duty" is such a cool name/concept/idea - like of course there will be uruk who will have guard duties during the day. I like the idea of it being called "Sun Duty" (would it be opposed to regular duty? Night Duty?)

@inappropriatemetalfilth , the answer from Luke Hawker on Instagram (Magrot & Fury Ûruks). So they are Grûgzûk and Vrath, congratulations ! 👏👏👏

#uruk #weprefer #uruks #Grugzûk #vrath #magrot #fury #adar #orcs #ringofpower

[jdragsky]

when you create an incentive system in an RPG you have to be careful because you warp player behavior around that incentive system and actions are now taken in relation to the system

if i give you XP every time you laughed at someone else's joke, ive changed how you relate to other people at the table and how they view laughter, jokes, and authenticity. was that joke actually funny or are you laughing for a reward?

and this isnt necessarily bad! but a rule presents people with the choice to either follow it or reject it, and both actions sculpt how they play.

[yllvmi]

As promised, here is my bingo card! I'm posting it now (and I'll probably feel very foolish later when it turns out none of my predictions were right LMAO)

I'm encouraging all of you to make bingos too!! Put your theories and predictions there!! I really want to see what other fans think will happen in ep 5!!!!!!!!!

[lucabyte]

I dunno if you’ve seen what’s in the isat artbook yet but there’s a mention in there of id5’s support of she/her Loop which made me think of that great post you made a while ago on Loop gender!!! Just thought I’d let ya know since that post was absolutely foundational to my personal Loop thoughts lol!

ok goofs aside lol hi. first of all: really funny that more than one of you thought of me for this. my powers. and second of all: okay ill actually give my thoughts.

alright so for the uninitiated (THIS POST) (+bonus link to it with extra additions i like) is what these two anons are talking about. It's about 8k words on my like, puzzled-out hard textual read of what i think is up with Siffrin/Loop's gender.

So, re: the artbook content (READMORE ON ACCOUNT OF ME GETTING LONGWINDED AGAIN)

The relevant passages here are pages 113, 38 and 39 (with a sidebar i want to bring up on 89).

I'm going to crop it down to only what is necessary to get to my point because adrienne doesn't want big chunks or full pages posting, so here's my little collage.

113: The page is primarily about finding ways to disguise Loop's true identity, and that's what most of the visuals on the page are about. The note I've cropped [Loop using she/her...] is on the most siffrin looking of these images, just being them sans cloak, eyepatch and hat.

This, to me, reads like the intent at the time was what eventually evolved into Loop's "Royal We" joke misdirect and their they/them only status. Consideration of, 'would just showing off a character nigh identical to sif but with "opposite" pronouns be enough to throw people off the trail?' that I would imagine evolved into just dropping the he/him, since that's more than enough to do so when you also change their appearence to be more ethereal.

*But* ArtbookCommentary!Adrienne is the one saying "She/her Loop is an incredible idea." owing to some level of affinity toward the concept in retrospect. Lends it some creator-branded 'cool points', which aren't worth *much* in terms of Quality of Textual Evidence, but certainly lends it points against being a *bad* read.

So I read this as like, while on it's own, not much more than conjecture when it comes to supporting the idea of transfemme loop-- I think as another arrow in the overall quiver it strengthens that idea that Siffrin is sticking by their he/hims as a like... side effect of how he was born/raised and sees change as something they can't do. It's less a point in support, and more a point *against* it being wrong. (It's like how in science you try to falsify things in order to prove them, y'know? Evidence *against* it being false is different to evidence *for* it being true, but it's almost better that way, sometimes??) Speaks to the idea that Loop would see those pronouns as a Disguise in some way, which to me, when paired with pages 38-39 and the dress* gives the implication that femininity is an untapped well for them. That it's new, and not something they'd do without a plausibly deniable excuse. Which continues to feed into my readings of Siffrin being amab and uncomfortable with change, even if (especially if) they want it in some way. It kind of has to be forced onto them to allow them to try it, because then it's not their choice, now is it?

*The dress is absolutely in reference to the prologue line, isn't it? it being grafted to their skin unlike the other considerations for clothes shown on the page too, aligns with this idea of Loop's body being informed by their wants/feelings about themselves in some way (distinctly inhuman, no need to eat, no need to smile anymore, yet still blind). But where canon!loop has no gendered traits to hold them down anymore, dress!loop would be more of a giveaway of their desires to at least express *some* femininity. (See: my prior essay for further thoughts on how i think that manifests, and my thoughts on it being a somewhat doylist read of the game's themes that i stand by)

(god buddy. you get deeper into the timeloop and it makes you . forget everything . about fucking everything . but the want that bubbles to the surface harder is this? loop. christ im repeating myself again go read my previously linked essay if you arent these two anons i go into way more detail.)

BUT YEAH. yeah.

I think it's a stretch to say things that aren't literally in game, and are still at most discarded exploration of character really count as Evidence for in-game reads, as they are paratext at best-- But. buttttttt buttttttt they do offer a good insight into the intent with which some things were most likely approached. like i say, it's not evidence /for/ my theory, just evidence /against/ me being on the wrong track. But yes i do feel pretty vindicated that this aligns so well with my amab nb siffrin/transfem loop trutherism. Which makes sense, given that the Whole Point of that read was to try and sleuth out the authorial intent, rather than anything else.

Like, i was following a framework in specific of (posts wikipedia screenshot for 'authorial intent')

as opposed to the equally valid Reader-Response framework (under which death of the author also falls)

which is why in that thing i stress so hard that i'm trying to abstain from my own bias (whether or not i succeed? idk. i do break my own rule for a second when pointing out how hard siffrin's fear of change resembles transfem repression in specific as i relate it to my friends and wider observations). but yeah. it was very nice that the artbook aligned so nicely since pairing my readings against the author's own literal words was always going to be the Ultimate Test™ for an authorial-intent based reading.

... oh ! and the sidebar i said i'd have.

Page 89:

get forcibly changed idiot. fucking themes lol (this was also vindicating as a 'loop stays as a star' truther which is something i tie into my themes of gender/sif not accepting change until its forced upon them. but it's not the mostest relevant to the convo without that context. but whee!)

[greenleaf4stuff]

This is such a good question @varda-star-queen, and something I have been contemplating myself for quite a while. In my fics, I usually give him blue eyes as well, because that is what the color looks like to me.

The only thing that might speak against this is a close-up from the prosthetics/makeup being done on him, which makes it look like Adar actually has green eyes - and therefore, definitely wears contacts. (You are right though, the stills from the series don't help to figure out what color it is, esp since the scenes are having a green tint at times.)

(Pictures taken from this post; I want to note that Adar's skin is much pinker than in the series, so its possible they worked with color filters of some kind in the series, aka, this eyecolor in these pics might not be 1:1 what it is meant to be in-universe either)

That being said, Joseph Mawle's S1!Adar definitely had blue or blue-green eyes:

(screenshot by cap-that.com)

And as we likely all agree, Sam Hazeldine has very beautiful blue eyes as well. (I am also noting with interest that the dark rim around the blue iris is as thick as that of the contacts, which makes it even harder to tell which is which.)

(picture source)

My personal interpretation/opinion thus far has been this: Since Sam Hazeldine has very pretty blue eyes, and for the sake of consistency with S1!Adar's blue or blue-green eyes, I gave him blue eyes in my fics thus far, and I'll likely continue to stick with that choice.

However, there is room for creative interpretations, and other ppl might rather like to give him green eyes. Or - give him green eyes as an uruk, and blue as an elf. Lots of fun options to play with!

...And considering that a certain other character has a lot of green clothes and lots of green plants in his city, this little post might have given me some fun ideas for future fics. Ahem.

After an interesting discussion about Adar's eyes, I spent some time looking at screenshots to see if we think his eye colour is Sam's natural blue or if he's wearing contacts.

I think it's his natural blue, but his scenes are always in the dark and so desaturated that it's hard to tell...

I pulled up the brightness on these shots on Photoshop with using any colour filters and I can still see blue in his eyes...

What do we think? (Other than we just like looking at pictures of him 🤷🏻‍♀️😍)

@itwillbeourswansong & @meadhalfempty

[hyperrealisticblood]

random thing i noticed while going through the character bios again: wally's bio now gives information about how his puppet was handled

there isn't any kind of sneaky wording here that would imply he was operated different from the others either, as frank is described the exact same way in his bio.

if it's true that wally WAS in fact puppeteered by someone and wasn't running around the studio by himself like some horrible gay homunculus, he was most likely puppeteered by ronald dorlaine, the creator of welcome home. wally is kind of the "kermit" of welcome home, and kermit was puppeteered by jim henson until his death in 1990. kermit was also referred to as henson's "alter ego" at times, his co-stars saying that it became hard to tell where kermit ended and henson started at times.

i think clown's mentioned the relationship between a puppet and their puppeteers being a topic explored in welcome home at some point (one of these mentions was pre-overhaul, so i'm not sure if it's still true), and has stated that there are going to be more human characters introduced. and since welcome home takes a lot of inspiration from the history of the muppets (and is why we need more horror media written by people really autistic about the topic covered), and "dorlaine" sounds so similar to "darling", it's possible wally may have been ronald dorlaine's "alter ego" in the same way that kermit was for jim henson.

i don't what what any of this implies or if any of this makes sense. i went on this whole rant because of one line of text. is anyone reading this. did anyone see that gnome run by. its so dark in here

[springtrappd]

on one hand i think charlie's 'masculinity' (being into. sighs. boy things, not getting relationships, dressing practically & without much care for her appearance, etc) is very intentionally set up against henry's idealised version of her being a literal doll -- always waiting for him with a smile, dressed to the frilliest nines imaginable, safe and sidelined far away from the grit and grease of his workshop -- and meant to contrast against elizabeth, who is aware of her objectification and indulges in the performance of a 'femininity' that she desperately needs to feel like it will make her enough(; elizabeth specifically mentions trying to imitate circus baby using makeup, while charlie experiences dysphoria seeing her own eternal smile in the mirror). on the other hand if there is anyone in this franchise who deserves to pull a sadako it is absolutely charlie emily

[molathesunfish]

So we all saw this coming (that's right...! the ocs intro was all an elaborate ruse to unleash this upon you all!!)

[actualbird]

cant believe that between "groomed military recruit" and "depressed art student" it's the latter who the tops

[ct-multifandom]

Do you think Lila knows Nath's identity?

I feel like she might know Marc's aswell after the identity reveal. Like, the way they did it, thats gonna have big consequences.

I’m guessing you’re talking about this scene. That was def my first thought, and it doesn’t help that Nath kept transforming in front of big windows and for improper reasons.

The reveal scene gave me the impression that their actions will have consequences, but then again, what happened with Alya and Nino in s4 was resolved sort of anticlimactically. Like you’d think there’d be big drama over it, and then whoops Nino just used his knowledge of Alya’s identity to try and protect her one time, and everyone acted like this was a bad thing for some reason, but nothing actually came of it. I expect this season to be better about actions having consequences based on how things have been going. I also think more people will have reveals, including most definitely Mylene and Ivan (based on their poses in the intro, but also reminder that Ivan canonically can’t lie to save his life).

I wouldn’t be so hasty as to say she knows both their identities for sure, though. That would imply she’s staring through Nath’s bedroom window and I don’t think anything suggested that. If anything, she’s probably just suspicious of everyone who’s close friends with the heroes who got exposed in s3.

Talking about that screenshotted scene in particular, Lila is asking a question. She wants to investigate something deeper because she doesn’t know the answer.

Her wording is odd. If she was talking about his hero identity, asking, “Nath, what is your true face?” feels off. That means she thinks Caprikid is Nath’s “true self”, and I don’t see why she would. Wouldn’t it make more sense, then, to say, “Caprikid, what is your true face?”

I think there’s a good chance that what she’s talking about isn’t related to hero identities. Maybe she has some crazy dirt on him like whatever’s going on with Ray and Zoe, but I’m seeing some other things going on here (or maybe not going on), so I’d like to propose another possibility.

I think it’s possible she’s referring to his mental state, like the toxic idea that people who have anger issues or low impulse control are “showing their real face” when they do something bad. She might be implying that he’s masking and she wants to see the full extent of whatever issues he has.

To support this, I want to point out something I noticed in this episode: Lila didn’t even try to akumatize Nathaniel. In Daddycop, the problem at hand primarily impacted Sabrina, and Lila tried to akumatize her over it. It was only after Sabrina’s rejection that Lila went after Roger, who was upset about the same thing. In El Toro de Piedra, Lila was stalking Ivan throughout the Louvre scene, but decided to akumatize Raul instead of him. I think this makes sense since Raul is more unstable than Ivan, being more explosive and less mature about the situation, which makes for a better akuma.

But in this episode, Lila only akumatized Shirel when she found out Nath illustrated the script. I’d argue Shirel wasn’t too much angrier in that moment than when she found the script in the first place, but in that scene Nathaniel was completely devastated. He immediately sprinted out of his house crying, ran all the way to school without calming down, and started wrecking his own hard work. Wouldn’t you think that’s the perfect time to send out an akuma?

I suspect Lila may want to try and akumatize Nath another time. She might set up some plan to make him really upset during a time/situation that’s perfect for her. She might also just try to use his strong emotional reactions against him and his friends without magic, like manipulating him into making other people upset or doing something that hurts the team. She was silent for most of this episode, and we didn’t see any shadowy creepy stalker figures this time, but she’s still filling up a notebook. Her main goal may have been observing the situation closer to help form a bigger plan.

We saw that Hawkmoth could sense people’s troubles psychically, so it’s possible for Lila to be observing how people feel in negative situations without physically following them around or watching them closely enough to find out they’re a superhero.

I support the hc that Nath has BPD, but if he actually has a diagnosis behind the problems canon has shown him to have, especially if it’s stigmatized, I could see that as being enough for Lila to act like he’s hiding his “true face”. (If she can meddle with school documents she can prob get into medical records too).

So yeah TLDR I think Lila may be suspicious of most of the superheroes including Marc and Nath, but probably doesn’t have enough info to prove it’s them for sure yet. That could very well change and cause problems later on. Either way, I think whatever she was talking about with Nath and his “true face” might have more to do with him personally rather than his hero identity. Namely, she might be referring to his volatile emotions or some underlying psych problem he has.

Bonus, in honor of pride month have this stupid meme that I made

[curly4830]

very unsound theory-post but this is relating to KnightDess stuff. I think Kris might be in their own snowgrave equivalent with Dess. because of a few reasons but let's get some assumptions out of the way first i'm assuming that the weird text boxes(see: ch4 soul segment on a non-snowgrave run. the one that comes out of Kris' phone) are The Knight. and i'm assuming that Dess is The Knight which is all but confirmed to me at this point Kris opens the shelter at the end of CH3, it might only be after defeating The Knight but i know they know the codes. after defeating The Knight in CH3 they get knighted, going along with their already knight-like appearance in the dark worlds Kris and Dess are/were definitely friends, and there's already the whiffle bat incident(which actually comes from chapter 1. the last post was wrong) The Knight drops a weapon only Kris can use, addresses Kris directly if we're assuming that the character speaking in Mantle is The Knight Kris doesn't want us to see the code in Dess' guitar. whether that be out of not wanting us messing with it or not wanting us to get the code remains to be seen it's not the most sound theory, doesn't have a whole lot of evidence going for it but i just have to get it out of my head. i think at some point this friendly rivalry turned into pushing Kris to become stronger. whether that be to stop the roaring or to cause it.

[i-do-not-know-what-it-is]

tmagp episode 10 theory::

what if, and hear me out, what if the heavy breathing paired with the tape recorder at the end of the episode is the OG sasha??? like, the last we saw of her wasn't necessarily in the archives per say but it was in artifact storage with a tape recorder in hand as well. not to mention that throughout the rest of tma they never actually confirm that she's /dead/ necessarily, just that she's "gone"... what if the NotThem doesn't actually kill its victims...?

just some food for thought...

[comrade-slugcat]

why the hell is saints time so cold?!?

this is one of the things that had been bothering me since downpour came out, and its explaination in the iterator chatlogs bothered me even more: what do you mean the suns light isnt warming the planet anymore?

After all, water vapor doesnt prevent warming, actually the opposite; its technically a greenhouse gas

Well fear not, for after agonizing over this for several months i have realized something

The (we're calling them benefactors now right..) benefactors had a sulfur problem, as evidenced in a white pearl:

This is the genome of a sulfur-processing microbe. In my opinion these were used far too late to have any effect.*

now. The sulfur could have been in the ground or water, but that wouldnt have been quite as big of a problem and it most likely wouldnt lead to the extinction of most creatures

What would though, is if you had massive amounts of it in the air

One of sulfurs properties is that it causes global cooling by reflecting the suns light back out to space, this is one of the reasons gobal temperatures drop after a volcano erupts

And compared to carbon it needs very little sulfur to cause noticeable effects

So if you put mass amounts of it into the atmosphere it could possibly block the stars heat causing the iterators to be the only thing keeping the world warm

and that is why saints time has so much snow, its because of the atmospheric sulfur!

[ashkav]

red herring lucy

I don't think this Lucy:

is the same Lucy that Sam married. for one thing, Neil talks about smuggling brain dead pregnant women, which makes me believe this is during the BB experiment phase of Bridges, or the end of that and the beginning of mass BB production, during which time Sam himself would be a BB or freshly born.

even in the clothes - they're just too normal. it reminds me of Cliff's sections in DS1. Early into the Death Stranding timeline, people still wore modern western clothing in a way we recognise from current day, and the further along we go in the timeline, the more the clothing style changes and evolves.

others have said it seems like she is conducting a therapy session here, but i don't think that's right. it seems more like she is a scientist and a person Neil trusts, and he is admitting to her what BRIDGES is paying him to do to try and get her to turn away from the company that employs her. why would BRIDGES assign Neil a psychiatrist (or at least a psychiatrist who hasn't been briefed about this before hand who in that case shouldn't be shocked by human trafficking) when they know he has sensitive information that shouldn't be released to the rest of the company? why would they care particularly about his mental health in any case when they are show interrogating him roughly at the start of the trailer?

maybe i'm huffing copium and there will actually just be a cheating plotline with Sam's dead wife, but.... idk. i have my doubts.

[yllvmi]

I am so mad that it would actually make sense to theorize that Sybil created current zombified Wayne.

That she made an agreement with the Entity, told it to possess a body and to watch over MC and encourage them to dig up all the dirt that exists on the Scarlet family so that they would turn their back on Tabitha. To get revenge on the Scarlets.

That she chose Sam Wayne as a vessel specifically. Tabitha's ex. The one she would be terrified to face. Because the breakup was not too long ago, because Tabitha had a lingering fear that Pearlanne might've done something to her ex boyfriend. Tabitha wouldn't even want to question what is wrong with Wayne, wouldn't want to see him at all, which suits Sybil just fine: Tabitha would never find out about the secret plan that Wayne and Sybil are working on.

(PS. I do think Wayne has a personal secret agenda of his own, apart from whatever agreement he has with Sybil. I think he wants to do... something... with MC. Bond. Whatever that means. And that THAT has nothing to do with Sybil's revenge plan, and she actually does not know (or care) about that.)

[mellori]

I just can't shake the image in my head of Anastasia as a hyper-competent businesswoman (except the business is necromancy) with Samael as her hot young "personal assistant" type following her around fetching things she needs and getting her coffee (among, ahem, other things).

There's literally zero evidence for this mental image I've constructed of them, except that Jod killed Samael right fucking in front of her and still somehow assumed she cared so little about him that he trusted her to help him build not only literally the most holy and important tomb possible, but also the vault in which he planned to store his single source of power and immortality.

So as I was trying to reason out how the question of her loyalty never occurred to Jod, I guess I decided he just apologized for killing her assistant, offered to recommend some new hires and moved right on, totally missing the years long office romance they'd been carrying on.