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I love how the two big mastermind characters both ultimately fucked up their plans because they got too exited and wanted to gloat.

Dedra could have caught Luthen if she'd just walked in with a space taser hidden behind her back and tased him while his back was turned. But noooo, she wanted to interact with him and see the very moment he knew he was caught. (The way she couldn't keep a smile off her face while talking with him!!)

And Luthen! He just had to let her think she'd won so he could pull the rug out from under her feet. He fucking showed her the weapon he was going to stab himself with!! And then failed badly enough that Kleya had to break into the hospital to finish the job.

If either of them were less of a fucking diva the other's plan would have fallen apart.

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Ooooh.

Even more so if the dead come back a little bit fucked up.

need this in sentryagent fics asap

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Watched The Prestige. It's pretty good! A 2007 movie about two rival magicians in the 1800s, featuring: Wolverine, Batman, Batman's butler Alfred, Black Widow, Gollum, and David Bowie.

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Kyle Soller as Syril Karn in Andor — 2.07 "Messenger" — 2.08 "Who Are You?"

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i'm so obsessed with how little syril and dedra actually talk in episode 3. hear me out. all their dialogue is to/with eedy except for dedra saying "it's fine" when syril freaks out about the dripping, and when she makes him get more cakes.

but the thing is that they're so in tune with each other that they don't need to talk all that much. their dinner prep montage is dialogue-less (which, side note, is the music diegetic or are they doing this in total silence lmao??), they work around each other in the kitchen in total sync. then when they're waiting for eedy they just stand around in more total silence.

and it's not exactly comfortable but it's not uncomfortable either. because they are communicating, it's just all in the eyes. in those little back and forth glances, and side-eyeing, and "i can't believe this is actually happening" looks they both exchange. they're "saying" so much more to each other without speaking, then either of them actually say to eedy.

anyways in conclusion, who's going to write that 2012-style wattpad-esque fic where they're somehow exchanging detailed and specific information with just their orbs.

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Sport. Written by W. Bromley-Davenport. Illustrated by Henry Hope Crealock. 1888.

Internet Archive

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Finished my latest work!

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Truth, by Megan Lara.

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hi wicked fandom is this anything

i don’t know why i wanted to refer to nessa and boq as toxic yuri but it felt right, they’re yuri to me

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I'm sorry WHAT

HER NAME LITERALLY MEANS BROKEN-HEARTED??? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? TONY GILROY WHAT THE FUCK????

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I finished Andor! Recommended. People were not lying when they said this was a good show. It's the sort of show where I watch certain scenes over and over on YouTube because the dialog is so layered and so drenched in characterization. Like, "early seasons of Game of Thrones" level dialog.

Expanding on my thoughts here: https://www.tumblr.com/rovingotter/789356051321552896/im-eight-episodes-deep-into-andor-spoilers?source=share

The last four episodes basically reinforced the thoughts I had here and the feeling of determinism in the show's themes and aesthetic. I do have a few additional thoughts.

More spoilers, obviously!

As mentioned in the comments, I did think of one exception to the "characters don't switch sides or change their fundamental worldview" rule, and that is Kino Loy.

He never exactly seems to like the Empire, but when we first meet him, he still trusts it enough that he's actively upholding the system within the prison because he believes that if he plays by the rules, he and the others will eventually be rewarded with their freedom. But the evidence continually piles up that this is not the case, because the Empire can and does change the rules whenever it wants to. Those numbers on their cages mean nothing. They are arbitrary. So he decides to fight, even knowing this will likely mean his death. And it's strongly implied that he doesn't survive, which does reinforce the "if you change your mind and start to have a redemption arch the writers of this universe will put you down like Old Yeller" feeling I got from Syril's death, but Kino at least gets to deal the system a blow and help the others escape, so it hits different.

And I think that showing this is really important for the show's themes. Bad systems ultimately change because enough people change their minds (obviously that's a bit of an oversimplification, but I do think it's a thing that matters). That's why the prison break plotline works so well. It's a microcosm of that. Revolutions are built out of countless small redemption arcs.

Dedra is an interesting case because, like...as stated, she feels very much like the Empire's creature, someone who never had a choice in what sort of person she ultimately became. She was orphaned by them at age three and raised on Imperial propaganda. No close family bonds, nothing except duty. She was never going to join the rebellion, and even if she tried, the rebels would never trust or accept her. And she knows enough secrets at this point that if she ever tried to leave the ISB, they'd just kill her. But I do think there was a brief moment when she could have plausibly turned against the Empire.

Her bosses order her to take on the Ghorman Project, which she doesn't want (possibly just disinterest but possibly because it's nasty even by her ethical standards), and then they force her to maintain a years-long deception that results in her losing Syril, possibly the only person who she genuinely loved and who genuinely loved her. After Syril's death, when she was left emotionally shattered and alone, I think it would have been in character for her to say, "fuck it, I'm not surviving this but I'll hurt them on my way out" and gone down Kino Loy style.

But then...fast forward a year, and she hasn't really changed from these experiences at all. Instead, she reverts back to her pre-Syril state like a machine being rebooted, with the only difference being that her eyes are a little deader now.

Did she choose to keep serving the Empire out of fear, or perhaps out of the simple inability to conceptualize a life outside of it? Was turning against them ever even an option for her? Was the programming just too deep? Is she a coward, a zealot, or a tragic victim?

A show that makes people think about these questions is a good show, and this is also a dense show, one with so many characters and plots that I feel it needs to be rewatched to be fully understood, but there was still something about the ending that left me a bit...I don't want to say "empty." Like, it left me with a lot of thoughts and feelings but I can't really say I found the ending "inspiring," whatever that even means. Probably lots of people did feel inspired, and what's "inspiring" is so subjective anyway, I feel like that's kind of a reductive criteria to judge it by. Just this feeling of "rebels gonna rebel and Imperialists gonna Empire." Natural phenomena, like tides.

I guess all I can say is that Dedra deciding to turn against the Empire and go out alone but with guns blazing would have been more personally inspiring to me than Nemik's abstract Reddit-post-style manifesto (sorry, Nemik. Nothing personal. You were a good kid).

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My assessment

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Uncharacteristically careless of Dedra to get distracted by some smoke and let Luthen, the guy she's been obsessed with catching this entire time, stab himself with the convenient stone dagger. Like girl you had Axis and you didn't restrain him right away? Yeah, the building was surrounded but so what? You just let him wander around like a toddler at the mall? I know you've been having a rough time but you fumbled that one so hard.

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cult!AU so, first I watched Under the Banner of Heaven, then I watched We Are What We Are, then Salem’s Lot, then The Starling girl…and then I saw THIS post, aaaaand here we are

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I'm eight episodes deep into Andor (Spoilers Ahead!), and an interesting thing about the show and its world (neither a criticism nor praise, just an observation) is that there are no characters who switch sides or change their ideals, either from Imperialist to rebel or the other way around. It might be that I'm forgetting something, and also I have four episodes to go so this might change, but whatever changes the characters experience just kind of involve them leaning harder or less hard into what they already are.

From the beginning, Cassian is a rebel in spirit (same with Bix, Maarva and the rest) it's just a matter of him getting the extra push he needs to really take that leap into action. He doesn't need to change, simply to embrace who he already is.

Dedra was practically grown in a lab to serve the Empire. The writers have done a lot to humanize her, but ain't no way she's joining the rebellion. I don't think there's any way to make that feel in-character, especially with four episodes to go.

For a while, Syril seemed like the character most likely to change his alignment because he was growing genuinely conflicted due to living among the Ghormans (it also seems to be an unspoken aesthetic rule of fiction that people grow their hair longer when they're becoming less fascist and cut it shorter or slick it down when they're becoming more fascist, and he grew it out).

But the very moment he realizes how horrible the Empire is and how flawed his own way of living has been, he dies. Which, from a kind of meta-narrative standpoint, gives the impression that these characters are existentially incapable of changing their core ideals: once that core becomes destabilized, they cannot continue. They dissolve in a puff of smoke.

All of this has the effect of making the show feel kind of...deterministic, I guess? I mean, it never feels detached or nihilistic, because it deeply humanizes all its characters and shows their pain and triumphs, but at the same time there's this sense in which they don't feel morally agentic to me, or at least less agentic than I'm accustomed to with fictional characters. There's this sense that all of them, even the characters with power, are just pieces of a bigger thing that they have little to no control over. Even Nemik's manifesto seems to reinforce the idea that freedom is kind of a force of nature that erupts forth when the conditions are right, that even if it is created by human (er, sentient being) actions, those actions are themselves the product of a person's circumstances.

Idk, I guess I'll have to see the ending before I fully form a perspective about this.

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Hey don't cry, okay? We just found Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a species thought to be extinct for the past 60 years.