#ESPECIALLY Andy

[luna-the-cretar]

The LOA cast HAS to be actors of some kind. Or at least some of them have to be. There’s no fucking way they aren’t, they’re too good oh my fuck

[capricious-soldes]

only 1 thought after finishing a little life:

of course jude died, no one protected him his whole life

[strangeshapedstone]

[plesiosaurys]

getting emotional over footage of an amateur scuba diver interacting with a coelacanth. they are hunted by large deepwater predators, and here comes a large creature bearing the brightest lights it's ever seen, making strange noises, but it does not shy away. it hovers, calmly, as the diver reaches out and trails a hand down its back. im strongly against the anthropomorphizing of real life animals but the stupid emotional part of me loudly insists this is because it recognizes us, the alternating movements of its four paired limbs matching the diver's four paired limbs, & it is thinking, "hello, cousins, we missed you these 66 million years, it's so good to see you again. welcome back, welcome home."

[skenkyskunk]

[yourstrulynobody]

Keep seeing people wanting the Celestial family to meet Eclipse's family (who I will refer to as the Penumbra family), so why not make some art of it since Ive also been wanting to see some of that—especially after today's eaps ep (CHARLIE NOOO DD:)

(Molten and Solar Flare are bonding with each other trust)

Fun facts about my Eclipse and Solar designs:

1) The more their rays fold, the more stronger their emotions are; usually, the sharper black rays dont fold (+the "stringers" for Eclipse), but they do when their emotions are too intense or they decide relax (since they make an effort to keep their rays up).

2) Their lower eyes are usually shut, but they do open! Usually to keep a closer eye on everything. In addition to that, the lower eyes are more active because theyre often shut! The eyebags are just there to match the upper ones :)

[robertfrobisherslover]

The Star Trek: DS9 Wrap Party, April 1999

[applestorms]

(tw for extensive discussions of dubiously consensual sexual situations, typical to canon. also spoilers for the decay route update)

honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of andrew's psyche that we get to see in the most recent decay route update to me is his nearly unending hesitancy about having sex with ashley, despite both his overwhelming desire to AND her incredibly blasé, Yeah Sure Let's Do It attitude in response to the question.

while the end of the burial route provides some key insight into ashley's point of view regarding this topic (e.g. if you go with the less enthusiastic/more teasing answer to andrew's question of "we're not like that, right? right??"), and the shots & such ending provides even more intrigue into her motivations, i think that decay presents two key reasons as to why andrew has continued to hold back for so long: his two core conflicting desires, and an inability to see ashley as her own full person. notably, both of these parts can easily be connected to his mother's childhood abuse and parentification of him as well.

with regards to the first point: andrew has two main overwhelming desires at the heart of his character that motivate most of his actions, which unfortunately for him are completely incompatible. andrew wants:

to be a normal, average person-- someone who can hold a steady, respectable job, fit in at the block party BBQs, and not attract any negative attention from the neighbors.

to fuck his sister.

to some degree, you could even read the distinction between the two main routes themselves (burial and decay) to be motivated by whether or not andrew can diffuse the tension between these two wants-- in burial, he gives up on his need to fit in with the rest of respectable society, presumably pushing him more towards the fucking-his-sister route; in decay, he struggles significantly to let go of this desire for normalcy, and the stress almost always breaks him. notably, in neither of these routes can he fully give up on the second desire-- really, his relationship with julia and the rest of his life up til the point that ep1 begins has been about him trying and failing to do so, so this makes sense.

(sidenote: i would also like to clarify that i think the Most key distinction between these two routes comes down to the decision you actually have to make to get one or the other-- namely, whether or not the siblings are able to trust one another. but anyways)

this focus on the first desire for normalcy is also interesting in that it seems to be one of the core desires that renee holds as well, as we see her so happily boast about during their interactions in ep2. honestly i could probably write a whole post about how much andrew (consciously or, more often, not) mimics his mother's behavior and takes on her standards and ideals, but the key point to pay attention to here is the fact that andrew has subsumed his mother's viewpoint in such a way that he is either not fully aware of or simply hasn't questioned in all that much depth yet.

we can also see this with the aforementioned parentifiication, which has really interesting consequences on how much andrew does (not) see ashley as her own autonomous person. pretty much every single childhood flashback we get in 3a shows the same terrible cycle:

andrew is told by renee that ashley is His responsibility -> ashley causes problems on purpose -> andrew takes the fall for her

frankly, we don't even really need that first step for andrew to fully internalize the idea that ashley's actions are His to take responsibility for. the horrible consequences of this are also quite obvious: not only is this pressure to take responsibility for someone else's actions an incredibly unfair burden to put on anyone, much less a kid, but it also continually pushes andrew to see ashley as something less than human, or as little more than an extension of himself rather than her own person.

the main conflict in decay really comes down to this conflicting desire between the two of them, where what both andrew and ashley want above all else is Complete and Utter control over the other-- andrew wanting control because he has again been groomed to see ashley as his full responsibility, and ashley wanting control to assuage her own insecurities and fears about being isolated and hated forever. the more sympathetic throughline underlying a lot of this is that what both of them seem to want is safety, to protect both themselves and each other from any and all situations outside of their control-- though, unfortunately, a lot of times those exact external situations are simply the other acting on this mirrored desire for control lol.

anyways, going back to the sex thing-- since andrew doesn't see ashley as her own person, since he sees her as incapable of taking responsibility for her own actions and therefore as someone who cannot make decisions for herself, due in large part to him automatically transferring this burden to himself, andrew also sees ashley's consent as essentially meaningless.

the more sympathetic reading here is that andrew does genuinely want ashley to be at least kinda into it as more than a manipulation tactic/transactional thing-- but i think it's also equally likely that andrew simply doesn't want to have to once again shoulder the full burden of Committing Incest on his own, and he doesn't trust ashley to ever be even capable of taking the fall for her own actions. the fact that andrew still ultimately sees ashley as Leyley and NEVER as Ashley Proper (as he himself recognizes at one point) really just reinforces this to me. he says it himself-- he practically raised this woman. and in this case, even above all others, ashley's actions are quite literally also his own. it all goes back to that initial mistrust, and he carries that resentment with him even after they get around to actually doing it. mutually dubious consent, truly in-fucking-deed.

[grassbreads]

On a scale of Chang Geng to Luo Binghe, how well does your teenage protagonist cope with the realization that he has a massive thing for the guy that's basically raising him?

[graveyard-galaxy]

You know I actually think Douglas Graves is more spineless than Andrew could ever be. Douglas seems to simply view himself as an extension of his wife, I do not think Andrew consistently views himself as an extension of Ashley.

This one’s interesting, because I do conceptually agree, but I also think I have a little more to say than just that.

Where Andrew and Ashley vs Douglas and Renee gets interesting to me is that Douglas isn’t necessarily portrayed as uncomfortable just doing what Renee wants in the same way that if nothing else, just the ____ in a box ending (Choosing Andy ending in episode 3) shows that Andrew is completely miserable just being Ashley’s plaything. It does get a little hard to say, because we are very deliberately shown very little of Douglas, typically, because the story is told from Andrew and Ashley’s perspectives, and he is completely absentee to both of them. (We don’t even get his portraits until we’re in a vision from Renee’s perspectives, for instance) I would say though, that whereas Andrew feels confined and consumed by being under Ashley’s thumb, Douglas seems to be comfortable under Renee’s direction, from what we see.

He won’t stand up to his abusive father, but Renee will do it for him. (They had a plan to kill his parents together, and though we have no idea how much Douglas really liked the idea of this, we know that he was perfectly prepared to go along with the plan before they discovered and decided to keep Renee’s pregnancy.) He doesn’t get the social mind games the surgeon plays with him, but Renee does, and he’s perfectly happy for her to just speak for him entirely in the opposite way to how the surgeon speaks to him for her. And even just in the car on the way to the grandparents! He tries to stammer out to the kids why they shouldn’t ruin the car, but they don’t respond, and then he’s perfectly happy to let Renee bark out the orders. (Only to Andrew, passing that chain of responsibility right along, as well….)

Andrew wouldn’t take this from Ashley. We’ve all known for a while that his ‘doormat extraordinaire’ descriptor is a good bit of unreliable narration, and is exactly what he wants us to think, but it’s still worth noting for that all he does give into Ashley and appear to be that doormat, it’s reluctantly. A lot of the time he’s only battered down into agreeing with her, which is part of why he’s so frustrated and often times verging on nihilistic in episode 3.

So whilst, yep, I do think Douglas would be happy to call himself an extension of Renee, because when he comes home from long hours of work, feeling tired and frustrated and perhaps verging on nihilistic (note, we do not know this, but considering he has to tell Andrew in an episode 2 flashback that he isn’t about to jump off the balcony, it’s not hard to see potential parallels to our very suicidal and nihilistic Shots and Such Andrew) she makes everything right again.

But it really is more complicated for Andrew. Just in this framework, Andrew is both happiest when he has Ashley right beside him, but also at his most miserable when he’s ‘forced’ to put up with her. When he’s apart from Ashley, he feels wrong. But when he’s with Ashley, they so frequently fight and he does things that he doesn’t like. If he thinks of himself as an extension of her, it’s in a very miserable sense; he wants to be more to her than just what she wants to be, and more than just Leyley’s Andy, and feels confined as just her plaything. He views her as fundamentally incapable of drawing any kind of lines between them, so when he is Ashley’s anything, for all that he claims to be happy to be her everything, it isn’t offering any kind of safety or fulfilment in the same way that being Renee’s husband offers something to Douglas.

To put it succinctly, Andrew yearns for an equal partnership; Douglas yearns to be with Renee in any capacity.

Or, well, it’s hard to say exactly how Douglas feels, because we never see his perspective, and because most of the thoughts we have on their relationship are from Renee’s perspective. But we know that they both feel as though they saved each other — it’s just that Renee’s words about this are a lot stronger. She very fervently insists that meeting Douglas is practically the only good thing to happen to her, in her time capsule letter, but Douglas’s is more… wishy-washy, I suppose? He says that being with Renee gives him a reason to stay alive, but practically everything else he says is along the lines of “I want to do this because you do”. Even in Renee’s vision in the vision room, mostly Douglas seems to just test the waters more saying anything concrete, so it’s hard to get his thoughts on things beyond just the obvious “I love my wife”.

What I will say is interesting about that vision is how he does take some actions without Renee’s direct input. He, at the very least, is in tune with her enough to act on her behalf sometimes, as here, he unplugs the phone for her, and is the first to tentatively bring up that they don’t have to do anything about Andrew and Ashley potentially being Nina’s killers. But I think more relevantly here, we also observe he easily he backpedals. He thinks out loud about how the punishment for Andrew and Ashley can’t be that bad if they killed Nina, because they’re both just kids – very apathetic to the situation as he’s apathetic towards the kids – but quickly changes his tune when Renee snaps about not wanting to be seen as the mother of two kids raised so badly they’re murderers. After that, that’s when he starts of his casual avoidance – the “We don’t know that it actually happened, so therefore it probably didn’t” type attitude. (Curiously, this is more of a parallel to Ashley’s line of thinking about Nina with her whole “If you don’t think about something for a really long time, it’ll be like it never happened” type mentality.)

We see Andrew test the waters in similar ways, especially in episode 1, where he lets Ashley dictate a lot of his behaviour for some kind of plausible deniability (“Do we, uhh… Do you want to go check on him?” about the neighbour once on his balcony, and the infamous “Wanna go take a peek?” “Nope. But I’ll come along if you do…” about going to see what the music is about the first time) but I think this comes from a bit of a different place. Douglas tests the waters with what he says because he fundamentally trusts his wife’s judgment over his own, seemingly, and because he doesn’t want to go against her. But Andrew speaks like this because his mask is still so far up in episode 1, especially when we don’t see him from his perspective, so he’s still very much shifting responsibility for what they do onto Ashley because he doesn’t want to accept it. It’s not that Andrew especially trusts Ashley’s judgment, clearly not, given how much he doubts and insults her plans and motives in later episodes, but if she makes the decisions, then it’s just not his fault if things go wrong.

Or once again, to summarise, Douglas lets Renee be responsible for his actions and opinions because he trusts her and because he wants his thoughts to align with hers, whereas Andrew lets Ashley be responsible for his actions and seemingly at fault for his opinions only when it’s both most convenient for him to have her to blame, and when he’s willing to entertain her as actually Ashley – when he’s having enough fun with her to actually want to hear her thoughts.

Because if there’s one big thing that stops Andrew from being an extension of Ashley, it’s that most of the time, he doesn’t see her as her own person. Most of the time, if anyone’s an extension of anyone, she’s just some extension of him, as he’s the stand-in mother, father, boyfriend, whatever the fuck she feels like that day to her, whilst he consistently dehumanises and infantilises her. He can’t be the extension of someone he views as never having grown out being a child at the best of times, and as simply an “it” – some kind of object that can’t be consistent because it doesn’t have its own thoughts – at the worst. And when she attempts to force him into that position – when she chains him up or puts him away in the toy box – he’s miserable, because he is only willing to be Ashley’s if it’s on his terms.

[luna-the-cretar]

If I had a nickel for every time Andy has made a character with anxiety, I’d have 3 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but I appreciate that it’s become a sort of common occurrence

[cult-of-dollbabies]

Andy's sass is so underappreciated

[regina-del-cielo]

Maybe it's a 'study finds water is wet' type of thought, but

considering it's an action movie whose overall plot is "immortal warriors Fuck Shit Up™️", I think it's significant that in The Old Guard the thing that makes Copley pull red strings through his Murder Conspiracy Board and say "[Merrick] doesn't care what [Andy]'s done with [her immortality]" is the people they save, not the ones they kill

Most of the Conspiracy Board is him circling random newspaper headlines and faces on old photographs to (more or less realistically) follow the immortals' treck through the world and big historical events. Which is, in-canon, not much different than putting portraits from different centuries next to a picture of Keanu Reeves and saying "they look the same, clearly Reeves is an immortal!"

But then there are the connections. A little girl holding Joe's hand in WW1 becoming the youngest (and first) woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize for Medicine (suck it, Kozak). Or the grandchild of a family that Andy saved from [something] helping people escape from the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia.

They are warriors. They have fought and been in the midst of countless wars, major or minor, throughout history. They must have killed as many people as they saved... and yet.

It's not them taking out a random warlord or dictator or rabidly hateful politician that has tangible repercussions in history. It's the children and families they get out of war zones, save from accidents, protect from natural disasters. People to whom they give a second chance at life, and grow to change the world (or even just their own world), like a mysterious stranger once changed theirs just by holding out a hand or patching a wound.

I don't know I just think it's particularly neat

[silly-lil-scribbles]

back at it again unfortunately *tosses these at u*

[kindahoping4forever]

More Don't Forget You Love Me promo stills via Universal Music Poland and Kerrang

[vaguely-concerned]

I think the most defining thing about kremy as a person is that he desperately wants to be a man with a mustache -- while being physically, biologically incapable of producing hair follicles lol. like no wonder he takes to drag so much, that's basically most of what he's already doing with his outward identity! and the physical aspect of that is smaller, I feel, than what he's got going on psychologically. he's someone who doesn't want to be -- can't be? -- who and what he is, and who can't be what he wants to be because what he wants to be doesn't really exist, so he lives his life somewhere on the border between them. the almiraj might be no mirage, but the perfectly clever and charming and utterly untouchable version of kremy that kremy would like to be -- instead of the vulnerable neurotic mess of longing and fear and striving for control he clearly actually is -- absolutely is, I'm afraid. it's just a shadow on the wall with nothing real to cast it.

(all of this also goes into the many Gender and trans readings of him too, of course! men will say they’re fighting demons and the demons are trying to live up to a very specific brand of toxic masculinity they've sort of invented for themselves lol)  

the one deep down entrenched assumption we see kremy make again and again especially interpersonally is that if he's open with who he really is and what he feels or thinks at any given time, he would be revealed as fundamentally unacceptable and at best discarded and abandoned, at worst endangered. (it's literally spelled out with the cyclops in the witchlight carnival, but you see him go through this process all the time through the rest of the story too! being unable to lie or dissemble was a catastrophic event in this dude’s inner landscape. I’m sure that means nothing) and because he is also frequently kind of awful this assumption may not be entirely off base some of the time lol (deeply affectionate), but I think it comes from a much deeper place than that. kremy is ashamed of where he's from and who he's been -- that dirt poor wide-eyed kid from the swamp who saw all the fancy gentlemen in town and Wanted. wanted to be that, wanted to have that power, probably some confused sexuality want mixed up with it all as well for spice. wanted more than anything, perhaps, to BE something, because next to that he feels like nothing. which means abandoning the earnest kid who guilelessly loved unicorns and his meemaw and cooking without meaning to impress anyone and silly soft things in the swamp he came from while he went off to the big city and modeled himself after men like garou. (and his relationship with garou surely also had some effects on just how shifty he's become at intimacy too, aside from the building a facade of it all, that might be some secondary damage that was not his fault nor in his control at all)

even when he's acting seemingly shamelessly, he is fundamentally a shame-based psychology, is what I'm trying to get at. the only times he lets his thoughts and emotions out into the world unfiltered is when he's brought to a point of frustration where he throws up his hands and abandons manipulation or subtle machinations as an interpersonal tactic -- see: the several times he argues something with frost or gricko and then finally admits 'I literally don't actually care about this! you guys figure it out and deal with this if it matters so much to you I'm going to bed ffs' haha. his depression shines through when he’s too tired to hide it, especially in the later episodes. every open emotion is an admission he really didn't want to make and thinks is tactically disadvantageous for him. (and sometimes when he's being really for real he'll even admit to being worse than people gave him credit for, like when he admits he suspected mr. witch and mr. light were capable of doing something really really bad to torbek and handed him over anyway. kremy being that blunt and open is like. remarkable and also a sign that he's actually taking it seriously, for all that he's also revealing himself to be even more of an asshole than previously suspected lmao. that's not nothing, for kremy. BUT at the same time he is also the person who cried to see a unicorn broken and abused, and who saw something in gideon upon meeting him that no one else did or cared to at that time and offered him genuine companionship and support — as the story goes on he’s starting to admit to more things about himself, the bad and the good.)

all of which of course also is why he's having such a hard time being honest with gideon about how he feels (and the sheer immensity with which he feels it too, probably) -- that's incredibly vulnerable for a person who’s built himself up around the idea of never being vulnerable. ('i'm just a shadow, nothing you do can really touch or hurt me.') And yet if there’s peace and redemption to be found for kremy, if only within his own soul, between these versions of himself, I feel that discovering and accepting his own capacity for loving someone else so much that it transcends all selfishness or fear would be integral to it. (he loves gideon. So much it makes me a bit dizzy you guys)