#Personality and actual parallels wise? NOTHING ALIKE | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

queen0fm0nsterz · 1 year

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Also guys, about the locations of the podcasts: they are real places. 100%. They are real places somewhere in the Nowhere - most importantely, somewhen.

Prophetic dreams are very real in Little Nightmares and they are things that often happen: however, I do not believe this is yet the case for Noone. She describes feeling sensations and smells multiple times, something that can only happen if the plane of reality one is in is... well. Real. She also describes feeling Jester's presence as she does with Otto's, who is a real person in the real world alongside her. The fact that Noone isn't currently fully there yet doesn't necessarely mean the places aren't real.

Now, whether she's visiting the past versions of some already existing locations is up to debate (COUGH THE BATHHOUSE COUGH), and that locations and habitants of said locations can be parallels to some already existing ones, but the only certainty we have at this point is that these other places that are being described and witnessed by Noone are real places somewhere. After all, the Nowhere is an incredibly vast place of which we have explored incredibly little.

Would it be so surprising if the places Noone visits are separate from the, like, 3 ones we have visited?

(map is from LN II, the school, and is supposedly rappresenting a region of which we only see a single city.)

And another thing, actually: I have seen many compare the Lady to the Woman in Chains, but honestly, after reading through the transcript of the first episode of TSON made by @softichill... the two sound like the complete opposite of each other, appearence and behaviour wise.

The Woman in Chains is described as having a "stretched back face", therefore causing her to have wrinkles due to how her face is structured, which explains Noone talking about her as being "both old and young". There is no concealing, no mask, nothing to hide her face. She doesn't live in secrecy like the Lady does -- quite the contrary, infact.

And about features: in both her forms, the Lady's face looks the opposite of hers. Either completely relaxed, or... nearly like it's melting.

I have also seen some people try to claim that the "familiar outfit" as a reference to the Lady's kimono, but you must remember who the narrator is. The outfit is familiar to Noone. Not us. It is likely that the Woman is wearing either a nun's dress (Noone mentions seeing three laying on a bed in the Prisoner's bedroom) or something Noone might have seen from the institution she's kept in.

While the Lady does thrive in her occupation, she doesn't necessarely take joy in it like the Woman in Chains (Prison Ward, atp) does. For the Lady, it's much more a matter of survival. She is on the Maw because it's convenient, see as she's in a powerful position. The Woman in Chains is instead happily preparing torture devices to haunt the Prisoners with.

Some parallels are certainly there. Referring to them as being, even metaphorically, the same person... it would mean that the team wrote a very bad analogy. They are nothing alike in any other aspect BUT their occupation. Funnily enough, you could say the Thin Man and the Signal Tower operate in a near identical manner to both these places. He's also the living center/battery of his own mechanism.

Noone also mentions that the Workers seem to be made of shadows, similarly to the Shadow Children. However, it is also evident that these beings are different, as they work and can hold objects much like the nomes. Later, when she meets a living child, she notes that they have black goo in their hair that moves like shadows. If that's the same material the Workers are made of, then this would make them some sort of liquid entities.

Lastly, about the inhabitants themselves: no one else in this Prison is here because they want to be. The Prisoners are not like the Guests, who come on the Maw willingly. The Workers are mindless beings, unlike the Nomes who draw and the Shadow Kids who play just like children. The child and Noone want to leave... and that's understandable.

My friend @chorusofkhonshu smartly pointed this out, so I'm just gonna copy and paste what he said word for word.

"So I thought, if these creatures are made of liquid, it has to come from somewhere. So my mind wandered to the prisoners, their purpose. Perhaps like the Maw and Signal Tower need to absorb people. The Signal Towers thru TVs and the Maw thru the Lady. What if those prisoners are only alive to be bled dry so long as they live. Noone smells the prisoner rotting. All those prisoners have to share some purpose, they might be tortured. Some device that the lady there has. She uses straps and cranks. Masks with spikes in the mouth. It runs on tortured souls."

And just as Noone mentions later on:

Swelling.

If anything... rather than paralleling Six's journey, Noone seems to be living it backwards. Completely backwards.

... Mh.

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sofoulandfairaday · 9 months

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Please share all of your Sirius and Bellatrix thoughts ♥️

I have way too many, darling.

The TLDR is it is our choices that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities. The long version is under the cut.

When reading about them I usually prefer stories where their original 8-9 year gap is preserved (it annoys me to no end when people write the Order and the Death Eaters as entirely made up of people in the same couple of years in Hogwarts —really? Was the conflict exclusively waged by child soldiers? Were Dumbledore and Voldemort just chilling before 1977, when they decided to start recruiting?). With that being said, I can also enjoy fics where - for shipping purposes - their ages are more compatible, to make them share time in Hogwarts or during the First Wizarding War.

I think they are very, very alike personality-wise. The narrative draws some delicious writing parallels between them, both physically and in their expressions, vices and virtues, and choices. Directly between them, might I add. The author underlines the difference between Bella and Narcissa more than once, we're meant to see it, and similarly we're meant to see the similarities between Bella & Sirius.

They are haughty, passionate, powerful, competent, arrogant, bright, much more intelligent than the fandom thinks they are. In general, they suffer from the stigmatization that many characters - but some people in real life do too - that someone who is intense and impulsive cannot possibly be as intelligent as people who are meek, soft-spoken, generally more controlled. Think what the fandom does to Sirius vs Remus and Bella vs her sisters, when every arrow points to the fact that they are actually the cleverest in these pairings.

They are both some shade of mentally ill, and not because of the curse of the Blacks - half the Blacks went mad didn't they? What's the saying? Every time a Black is born the gods flip a coin. god the Targaryen-Black parallels are gold - Sirius is very likely horribly depressed in OOTP, something no one around him seems to understand, infuriatingly. The only one that seems to get it is Harry, who has the literal Dark Lord living in his brain (= bigger problems to deal with). Bella is... I don't know what she is, ask me after my psychiatry module next year, but my money is on PTSD after Azkaban - after all, she didn't have the escape of an Animagus form behind bars. She would also very likely be victim-blamed for these different feelings, which would lend itself to a delicious nobody else in the world understands us but us type of post-Azkaban dark!fic which I would love to read.

They are both skilled at magic, and while they might despise each other for their respective political views, they respect each other because of this. Bella is probably above him in terms of magical power and skill, because she's 9 years older and because of Voldemort's training, but Sirius seemed to be keeping up quite well with her during their fight in the DoM.

Speaking of which, I am sure that Bellatrix's scream of triumph was due to her winning their duel, not because she thought she had killed him and that is probably the single thing I love the most about HBC's interpretation of her in the movies. That look. 10/10.

I am of the opinion that Bella is all bark and no bite when it comes to certain members of her family, especially her sisters. Sure, she might say that she wants to prune her family tree but 30 years later in the beginning of DH, she still calls Andromeda sister. I'm sure she would want nothing more than to put him under lock and key for the rest of his life and never let him escape, not kill him. And, to me, the way Sirius speaks of his family is very interesting. I'm sure he firmly believes that he hates them, but his actual feelings are more complex than that. You can hate someone and still desire their love, their respect. You can hate that they are the only people in the world who understand you - and hate yourself more in turn, for it.

Sirius seems to me like someone haunted by his own darkness. He, much like Harry, would be constantly worried that he's becoming like them. I'm sure it's a weak spot for him and I wish we had heard more bickering, or at least a full interaction between Bella and Sirius (I feel like she would claim him as hers, underline how much he cannot escape his own blood, even just to mock him/unsettle him in battle). But what Dumbledore says to Harry is true: it doesn't matter how alike they are, it's their choices that matter much more. And I feel like this is why the two of them would never reconcile in canon. They stand for different things.

I also think there might be some - and I know Freud is controversial nowadays, but bear with me - penis envy, on her part. Because Sirius was born the heir - something she would have given her left hand to be: to be born and die a Black instead of being expected to marry into another family - and he squandered it all away by consorting with werewolves and mudbloods. But no. He got everything and pissed on it, and it's just not fair. And by choosing not to come back, even in the two years after Regulus' death, he made sure that the Black Family name will die with him- and I think that is just something she can never ever forgive him.

Now. Everybody knows I don't like TCC and my preferred view of Bella is someone with fertility issues, even to the point of being sterile.

[I read an amazing fanfic once and a line from it stuck in my brain - "If I can't be life, then I'll be death"]

But. If we do see it as canon. This is also the reason why - despite being overjoyed at Delphi's birth - I am convinced that she wished for a boy when she was pregnant. If she had a boy with the Dark Lord, who couldn't possibly give them his name, the House of Black would have an heir. This is also the reason why I don't thing she was necessarily opposed to having children with Rodolphus - the "spare" would have been her heir.

Bellatrix would say that Regulus was her favourite cousin, but truth be told, it was really Sirius whom she respected more - at her core, in my opinion, Bellatrix is really only someone who respects power. Sirius is like her that way.

But Bellatrix is clearly a cruel person, which Sirius is not (or at least, he tries not to be: Kreacher and Snape are two very particular cases of people who are mean to him back). Also, Sirius' view of the world is much more egalitarian - If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals. Bellatrix is clearly someone who sees the world in terms of hierarchies, and lives within them (see: how she acts around Voldemort and what is implied of her treatment of house-elves who obey their masters: there is a scale and some serve others, and as long as they do so well they have certain rights; disobey, you get punished).

(Bellatrix is somewhat a feminist character but let's be real- she's not a revolutionary. She went to the Dark Lord and showed him just how powerful she was - aka my wand is bigger than all these male DEs' - and he said "okay, fair, I'll give you the Mark", thereby freeing herself. She is not a "equal representation for women inside terrorist organizations!!" type of girlie)

I also love how her death parallels Sirius'. It's thematically beautiful and it excuses her death coming at the hands of one Molly Weasley (who could never ever in a million years have beaten her on skill alone). She dies because she is arrogant. It's one of her traits. Overconfidence. She was always meant to die like that.

[coincidentally one of the reasons why she would not be a hufflepuff like some suggest: this woman is not humble]

I could go on, but I think I've rambled enough.

P.S. Let's not sleep on the fact that the two of them together would be hot.

#sirius black #bellatrix lestrange #bellatrix black #sirius x bellatrix #asks #answered

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maya-matlin · 7 months

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What would you highlight as key similarities and also a few major differences between our beloved Maya and Haley James Scott?!

Okay, I'll have to think about this one. Even though I've always felt their characters were similar, I never thought to break down the similarities and differences.

To start with, both Haley and Maya are passionate about their music. Both view it as one of their life's greatest ambitions. Ultimately, I think Maya's more ambitious than Haley. Or at the least, she has and had different priorities. Before Haley was able to seriously think about pursuing a musical career, she'd married Nathan. Based on that alone as well as inexperienced teens trying to play at being an adult married couple, there were automatically different expectations for what Haley should do and how she should go about it. Maya had no such limitations. While Maya sometimes tried and failed to put her music first, typically allowing boy drama to get in the way, she never stopped trying to make her music happen. In some ways, the Nathan/Haley/Chris and Zig/Maya/Jonah situations parallels, albeit with some differences. Chris was actually interested in Haley (actually in love with her if you believe what Dan says in season 9) and kissed her multiple times, which Haley returned. Although Jonah was very sketchy around Maya and seemed insulted by Zig's mere presence, he never showed any concrete signs of liking Maya, instead going for Frankie. But both Zig and Nathan at least believed these guys were threats to their relationship, attempting to step in and assert themselves. Nathan physically threatened Chris while Zig attempted to lock down his sexual relationship with Maya so that she wouldn't "look elsewhere". The girls' musical ambitions indirectly tore apart their relationships. But due to Zig objectively being far more to blame for his relationship with Maya falling apart in contrast to everything being very grey where Naley were concerned, Maya remains guilt free about putting her music first, never wavering from that. Haley, on the other hand, felt a great deal of guilt for hurting Nathan and for the tour, later downplaying her love for music multiple times, constantly feeling the need to reiterate that her musical career was nothing compared to her love for Nathan. As Maya and Haley look towards their futures after high school, their priorities are once again different. Even before Haley got pregnant, she was prepared to give up the school she'd wanted to attend since she was a kid just to follow Nathan. Maya thought only of herself. Though, Maya was single at the time and had no reason to believe Zig was going to be a possibility again, even if he did get into university. Regardless, I feel confident that Maya wouldn't have attended a lesser school just to be with Zig.

Personality wise, they're pretty similar. Both are wise, sometimes bordering on judgmental, believing that they know what's best for their friends and loved ones. Both are often the moral centers of their friend groups. Both are the younger siblings of older sisters who screwed up their own lives in some way. But while Taylor was more of a party girl and the type to sleep around (nothing wrong with it - it's just the way she was portrayed), Katie held herself to very high standards and eventually crumbled at the first hint of imperfection and a real challenge. In that way, Haley and Katie are probably more alike considering how laidback Maya is the majority of the time. Both Haley and Maya are friendly and supportive towards everyone in their lives. Maya and Haley experience occasional bouts of anxiety. Maya's feels more like a combination of social awkwardness and a direct result of her PTSD over losing Cam. Haley's is more general, in my opinion. It took her longer to become comfortable performing, even in season 6 after she's gone on tour. Maya seems pretty fearless in this way. Both have a thing for "saving" troubled men (Haley with Nathan, Maya with Zig and Miles). But while Haley seems very hesitant to rebel and attempts to hold herself to an unreasonable standard, Maya is pretty comfortable pushing the boundaries of who she is as a person. It's a pretty big deal for Haley to get drunk during the school day. But if Maya decides she wants to pop molly like it's nothing, why not? She's at a party, and she wants to feel closer to her boyfriend. Even before losing her virginity, Maya is comfortable expressing her sexuality. She writes about desiring to do more than talk with her boyfriends in multiple songs (Actions Speak Louder Than Words, Unravel Me, Wanna Get Off). Whereas Haley is very stuck on wanting sex to be something magical and meaningful, I don't think Maya has the same reservations. She wants her first time to mean something ("I sort of wish my first time wasn't high, you know?"), but I don't think she needs anything specific or necessarily a big commitment outside of being in a monogamous relationship to feel ready to take that step.

Then obviously, both girls eventually develop depression and suffer from suicidal ideation, going as far as attempting it or coming close multiple times. Following the death of Haley's mother, she's despondent. Though Haley's closeness with her family members was rarely ever touched on following them literally packing up and moving away the instant Haley's marriage license was dry, apparently Lydia was a constant in Haley's life that she could turn to for advice and emotional support. She has no idea what to do with herself without her mother. Haley's depression manifests in sadness, which we see when she breaks down sobbing alone. We also see Haley becoming angry and feeling numb, unable to care that she's neglecting the people and things in her life. Only Haley snapping at Jamie is able to briefly break her out of this. Still, Haley has Nathan and a support system willing to stick with her through all of this. Maya doesn't. This is a good example of One Tree Hill and Degrassi being very different shows. Not only that, but Degrassi depicts teenagers pretty realistically. By this point in OTH's run, the characters are adults and have a better grasp on how to handle something like this. On Degrassi, all of Maya's warning signs are either misinterpreted, missed completely, or kind of unable to be followed up on due to things like Maya kissing Zig while he has a girlfriend. So, Maya is much more alone than Haley was, with only Saad as a true companion. But even he doesn't fully understand the extent of Maya's pain and suffering. The majority of her depression manifests itself in numbness with her struggling to enjoy even the smallest things. Like Haley, Maya no longer feels like her old self. Her years of burying her grief over Cam and constantly being shat on by life itself, this time temporarily losing even her musical outlet when she breaks her wrist, has left Maya in a dark place. She questions her own existence, wondering why she gets to live, blaming herself for other people's misery. Maya clearly thinks she's cursed. Eventually, both girls attempt suicide, no longer able to take the pain. Haley is rescued by Nathan while Maya is saved by Zig and Esme. Both recover in time. Honestly, the follow up to both arcs could have been better, but things like Haley's pregnancy and Maya preparing to graduate high school obviously took precedence. Interestingly, Haley is never shown to return to pursuing music after this while Maya only reaffirms that a musical career is indeed what she wants.

Anyways, I feel like this was all over the place. So sorry about that!

Edit: I'm so annoyed with myself, but I won't be able to let it go until I also acknowledge Maya's and Haley's respective "not like other girls" issues. Both made comments alluding to looking down on cheerleaders and more popular girls. Though, both seem to identify as feminists. Maya actively seems to unlearn this trait, spending the rest of her time on the show lifting other girls up. Haley continues to perpetuate this from time to time, mostly because the showrunner was a controlling, toxic, sexual harasser who hated women.

#mayamatlinscello #suicide tw #depression tw #Long post

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asknarashikari · 1 year

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Kari, are we sure Geats is not a fanfic of Naruto? Like Ace has a lot of OP! Naruto tropes found in fanfictions.

Neon is like Sakura but a bit more likeable but have more going for than just “Sasuke-kun”

Keiwa has the competency and growth of Naruto, but hides a lot of Sasuke’s qualities.

Buffa is Sasuke full stop.

The DGP is ROOT I know people compared Geats to Gantz… but I see more Naruto parallels tho lol.

Wow this got long... putting answer under a cut

I don't really see them as Naruto tropes per se, just more general shonen manga/shonen manga-adjacent type tropes. Maybe the comparison is more top-of-mind because of certain overt themes, like Naruto and Ace having a kitsune theme.

Tbh, I don't think Ace and Naruto are really that comparable beyond superficial similarities, especially canon Naruto. Personality-wise, they are nothing alike. Ace is hypercompetent to the point of absurdity and getting more powerful is nothing but an advantage for him, whereas Naruto had to work hard to overcome every handicap given to him, even ones granted by him becoming more powerful. Ace chooses to remain distant from his allies whereas Naruto will talk-no-jutsu anyone to his side without even meaning to.

Keiwa I think does have more similarities to Naruto, personality and development wise, though I would say that Naruto always had a specific goal in mind- being Hokage- which expanded into something greater by virtue of him realizing what being Hokage means. Keiwa, on the other hand, seems directionless because he has this lofty goal of "world peace" but he can't quite grasp the path that would lead him to actually achieving it.

I don't think Neon is anything like Sakura. For one thing, most of Neon's character growth is prompted by her desire for self-determination, the ability to decide for herself who she is and what she wants to be. Sakura's is more determined by her desire to catch up to Naruto and Sasuke, to be able to stand by their side as an equal and not just be someone they protect. And Neon is certainly not defined by relationship to her male counterparts in the same way Sakura is.

Azuma is similar to Sasuke in that he's a rival with a weird superiority and inferiority complex to his rival, the main character- thinking that he is morally superior yet is perpetually in their shadow strength-wise. They both cross lines that in real life would never be considered forgivable, and they both use the trauma they endured as an excuse for the pain they inflict on others. However, it seems like Azuma is more cognizant of the fact that he isn't a good person (though he hasn't fully owned up to it), while it took Sasuke years to even realize he was wrong about anything.

As for Root, I may be unqualified to say this but I viewed it more as commentary on certain views about the military. I don't think the DGP is comparable in this sense, though I can see certain similarities in terms of the depth of the conspiracy and the desperate lengths both go to in order to keep their control over their narrative and the people under them.

#kamen rider geats #naruto #ask #cloudaintfair-archive

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niqhtlord01 · 4 years

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Humans are weird: Wise cracks and randomness

( Don’t forget to come see my on my new patreon and support me for early access to stories and personal story requests :D https://www.patreon.com/NiqhtLord )

Alien: What do you mean you're not surprised?! Alien: We brought your dead back to life as monsters! Human: So? Human: We've been doing that since 1968. Alien: But they eat your flesh! Human: Personally I would be disappointed if they didn't. ------------------------- Alien: We can't settle this world. Alien: It gets to -100 at night. Human: Bitch get my Parka. Human: Daddy's going ice fishing. ------------------------- Alien: You were trapped in space alone for 20 years. Alien: How did you not go mad? Human: Well, I had a rubix cube and some imaginary friends. Alien: That's madness. Human: I know. Human: They couldn't solve the damn thing either. ------------------------- Alien: HAHA! Alien: I have infected your hand with a deadly virus that wi- *Human chops off hand* Alien: *Shocked in surprise* Alien: You didn't even try to find the cure? Human: I've seen evil dead; I know how this plays out. ------------------------ Alien: We can't settle this world. Alien: It turns 500 degrees in the day time. Human: Finally. *Strips naked* Human: I will be warm again. Human 2: I turned the AC down two fucking degrees! Human: I nearly died of frost bite! ------------------------ Alien: Your people are turning into monsters! Human: What are we talking here? Demonic possession? Alien: What? Human: No? Human: How about infected with a virus? Human: Plant spores infecting our bodies? Human: Local minerals triggering growth spurts? Human: Scientific experiment gone wrong? Human: parallel universe merging? Human: Time travelers fucking up the past? Human: Damnit, work with me here! Alien: How often does this happen to your people!?! Human: Rather frequently actually. Alien: That's insane! Human: Personally I find our track record impressive. -------------------------- Alien: We shall blot out your sun! Human: Good thing I'm a night owl then. ------------------------- Alien: You are out numbered a hundred to one! Human: Wonderful! Alien: Pardon? Human: There's plenty of ammunition for you all then! *Pulls out mini gun and starts firing* Human: SHARING IS CARING! HAHAHAHAHAHAH ------------------------- Alien: Where are your gods now? Human: You stupid fuck. Human: *Spits blood* Human: I'm atheist; I don't have a god. Alien: I pity you for having not found mine. Human: Where I pity you for finding one at all. -------------------------- Alien: I can move things with my mind! *Proceeds to lift table and move it with mind powers* Human: So can I! *Proceeds to walk over to table, use hands, and drag it back into place* Alien: How was that using your mind? Human: I told my hands what to do and they did it. Alien: That's not special at all! Human: Well now you're just nitpicking. ----------------------- Human: Knowledge is power. Alien: * Laughs* Alien: Oh really? Alien: How do you figure that? *Human proceeds to place two fingers on thorax of alien causing them to collapse* Human: I know where to stop your blood from flowing to your head for starters. ---------------------- Human: We're the same. Alien: We are nothing alike! Alien: You're a cut throat that kills for money. Human: And you're a mad dog who kills for her country. Alien: And you think that gives you the high ground? Human: *chuckles and lights cigarette* Human: When you're standing atop a mound of corpses what difference is there on how you got there? -------------------- Alien: Why did you stab that person!? Human: It was his own fault. Alien: HOW!?!? Human: He said "What are you going to do; stab me?" Alien: So you did?! Human: I thought I was being polite. Alien: What kind of person asks to be stabbed?!?!?!?! Human: Have you ever been to a Piquerism party?

#HUMANS ARE WEIRD #humans are insane #humans are space orcs #humans are space oddities #funny #banter

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dianablackwell · 3 years

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The Loki series does a very good job of establishing parallel structure with its character pairings. I'm not necessarily talking ships here, only how our four main characters interact and relate to each other. (long meta incoming! 😁)

In writing 101 they say you need characters who are have opposing goals to fuel conflict and drama. What’s key for our quartet of Loki, Mobius, Sylvie, and Ravonna is the dramatic conflict comes not only from how they are different, but how alike their motivations are:

Loki/Mobius: you might say, well these two characters are about as dissimilar as you can get, personality-wise, but when you dig into their emotional arcs they are on a common path to find inner truth and external freedom.

As a team, Loki and Mobius are the mutable, flexible characters of the series, who wear their hearts on their sleeves. They are open with and to each other, which is why they become close friends based on mutual trust.

They are willing to change. In a way, change is what they most desire, though in the beginning they were not willing to admit it to themselves.

In the end though, they get their change, and the truth hurts. Mobius shows Loki the truth of his life and the consequences of the choices he made/didn’t make, while Loki is able to also free Mobius from the lies he’s been burdened with and is living under.

This comes at great personal cost to both of them. Mobius is pruned by the person he believed was his closest ally, and Loki is rejected by the first person with whom he has been completely open, vulnerable and honest.

Now, their main dramatic conflict was never with each other; they’re each locked in battle with two other characters.

Loki/Sylvie: there’s two opposite messages the writers are constantly giving us with this pair: “We’re the same” but “This isn’t about you/I’m not you.” These sound like opposing sentiments but are actually connected. By episode 6 we see that Loki has grown past his former self, while Sylvie chooses to continue her role, the single-minded vengeful variant who uses anger to fuel herself and to hide her profound loneliness, pain and sadness.

Because of this, no matter how much Loki wants to reach out to her, she can’t meet him. They are not in the same emotional place, and the relationship can’t continue at that moment, which is what makes it so heartbreaking for him.

And despite how much pain Sylvie is in, no matter how much she may want to end her personal suffering, she can’t not follow through on her life’s mission. Remember she didn’t choose this mission, and so she’s come to believe that there are no choices to be made, only the road she’s been forcibly put upon.

Loki offering her a choice feels wrong to her, just another lie. This is very tragic for her and dooms the potential of her friendship with Loki. As Loki says, he’s been in this exact place before. Her motivation, to be free and complete, is the same as Loki's. But she can't see that.

Mobius/Ravonna: there’s heartbreak here too, as they also experience a painful breach in their relationship. We don’t know the exact nature of their feelings for each other, though at the very least they share a deep professional intimacy. All that goes out the time window when Mobius is pruned by Ravonna.

Despite that, he continues to try to reach her—there’s his willingness to be open. And just like his mirror (Loki) Mobius is confronted with accusations of betrayal after “eons” of friendship. Sound familiar? Yep that brings us to our most mirrored characters of all:

Sylvie/Ravonna: these two characters are single-minded, dogmatic, suspicious, intractable women who are closed off in every way. They will let nothing get in the way of their “mission.” They are both hunters. And they both believe in their right to act as judge, jury and executioner.

This is why in episode 5 they are seen to “shake hands” and agree to “work together.”

In episode 6, we get mirror scenes: they each betray the most important man in their life.

Ravonna wonders how Mobius could “betray” their bond (and thus the TVA); Sylvie wonders why she and Loki aren’t seeing this the same way. Both women refuse the offers given them by Loki and Mobius. And thus both men end up getting shoved out of their pairing’s lives (yeet).

And who is driving this? He Who Remains. He paved the road for both Sylvie and Ravonna.

Since we still haven’t learned what Sylvie’s Nexus event was, we can guess that He Who Remains is directly behind it: Ravonna (as A-23) pruning little girl Sylvie to send her on her journey to him. For such an important pruning, He Who Remains would send his most important agent, a woman he knows will be set on an eventual path to judgehood.

He’s manipulating until the very last moments. And his failsafe is to instruct Miss Minutes to give Ravonna the files which “he thinks will be more useful” in her “search for free will.”

A pairing we overlooked lol! Kang with each of our strong willed women.

So what’s ahead for these pairings? Loki must figure out a way to work within this timeline he’s arrived in, with a different Mobius; our Mobius must work with B-15, a pairing I’d like to see developed because Wunmi Mosaku is so awesome, and as a liberated hunter she can be a close ally to Mobius and Loki.

And Ravonna and Sylvie are on the same mission they were before: looking for Kang. As always, Ravonna has the upper hand, with resources and insider information, and our girl Sylvie is at rock bottom and has to start from the beginning.

#thank you for reading #loki series #loki #loki tv #sylvie #mobius #ravonna renslayer

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catb-fics · 3 years

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ok so yk sometimes when I need comfort I watch some blossoms interviews bc they're really nice and funny af...although it got me thinking...they DO remind me so much of catfish but they have NOTHING in commom (???) they are complete opposites. the sounds couldn't be more different, the style, the visuals, the references !!! but they WEIRDLY give off the same vibe when you watch the interviews as if they belong in the same spectrum SO..............maybe blossoms is catfish and the bottlemen from a parallel dimension that somehow got trapped in this reality. I am losing my mind.

p.s. i just thought about that during a hot shower when I realised tom and van are very alike personality wise but they look extremely different like lorde and taylor swift. Maybe I AM losing it 😭😭😭

I love this, if you’re losing it then you’re doing it in the best possible way! 😂 I do love Blossoms but I’ve not really been listening to their music much recently or watching many interviews but you have prompted me to now, so thank you! I started watching their pub casts a while back too and they’re soooo funny… a really nice bunch of lads, just so down to earth and lovely. I think it definitely gives off early catb vibes how they used to be in interviews, like a little daft and open about stuff and just looked like they were having such a fun time! I’m gonna be on a Blossoms mission now I really do need to devote more time to these guys! I love Tom he’s such a babe 💕

I see so many of you lot talk about Taylor Swift on here and (don’t hate me!) am I the only catb fan on here who isn’t actually a Swifty?! I mean don’t get me wrong I can appreciate she’s an extremely talented lady but her music is just not my vibe at all.

#catfish and the bottlemen #blossoms

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madam-whim · 4 years

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So I don’t know if anyone has talked about this before but decided to post it anyway...

When I first played Summerset and The Bad Thing with Darien happened at the end of the main quest, my first reaction was “Oh no, not this again!” Then I paused and thought, wait, again? Because right then, I wasn’t thinking of him vanishing in Coldharbour, but then, what did this entire scenario remind me of? And then it hit me. We’ve actually seen a lot of this before.

Let me elaborate…

When we first meet Darien, the city of Camlorn is under attack. We find him in the Cathedral, and he promptly refuses to leave until we make sure the civilians can get to safety. And that one moment already tells us so much about who he is and we love him instantly.

Fast forward to Summerset. There’s a Daedric prince invading Nirn, and well, we managed to rescue Darien, but then we lose Dawnbreaker and have to get it back from Veya, who carries it around like she owns it. And once we get it back? Nocturnal’s already there. We can hardly prevent her from really showing up anymore, can we?

But then there’s Darien, who comes to the sudden realization that hey, he can use his own energy to power up the Dawnbreaker.

We barely have the time to ask him what the hell he thinks he is doing before he does this:

And then he’s gone, while we are left with the Dawnbreaker, which we then use to defeat Nocturnal and repair Transparent Law. Everyone’s happy, except the Vestige, of course.

Now, where have we seen that before? Well… have you ever tried ignoring the Kvatch Oblivion Gate and getting Martin Septim out of the city? In case you haven’t, this is what you get:

We obviously also have a bit of a Daedra problem again, so once we close the gate and actually manage to get Martin to safety, we find out that the Amulet of Kings has been stolen. (Seriously, Jauffre?) So we have to get that back from Mankar Camoran. Once we do, we rush back to the Imperial City to relight the Dragonfires, only to run into Mehrunes Dagon himself.

And then Martin gets this absolutely brilliant idea to sacrifice himself and use the Amulet’s power to fight Dagon, because there’s that moment where he realizes that this is what he was meant to do.

We don’t even fully understand what he’s doing until it’s too late and he, too, is gone and we’re left with our grieving characters.

And honestly? These two stories are so similar. I know that there’s more to both of them, of course, and their personalities are nothing alike, and our Vestiges know Darien for a way longer time than our Heroes know Martin, but… there are just a lot of parallels storytelling-wise, regarding these characters. And seriously, I refuse to believe that this wasn’t 100% intentional. They had Darien’s story planned from that first meeting in a besieged city to the showdown at one of the Towers. They did this on purpose and I think it’s just plain evil.

#eso #oblivion #darien gautier #martin septim #long post #im judging the writers here

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fedonciadale · 4 years

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If these people aren't interested in literary analysis, why are they in the fandom of a literary work? Parallels drawn between characters aren't stan activity, it isn't transformative work, it's a matter of literary analysis! I don't personally like Lyanna, she's a non-character in canon, and all fanon interpretations are too much of a mix of NLOG and MPDG for my taste. But I'm not gonna deny there are parallels between her and Sansa's story theme-wise just because I don't like the girl. Sansa fandom is the most Ned-critical fandom. We don't say she's like Ned because we loooove Ned and hate Catelyn or anything. It's just canon. Her and Ned being alike in temperament and how they deal with their trauma isn't a matter of discussion. (Also their blind trust to people that doesn't deserve in AGOT.) Lmao Ned-Sansa isn't even a new thing, it didn't even originate within our fandom iirc, general fandom, neutral bloggers, podcasters, "BNF"s etc have all noted that, because it exists in the text. Jenny is a Riverlander girl who is also descendant of First Men, connected to Ghost of High Heart and via her song to Catelyn. Who else are we gonna draw parallels to? Daenerys? I don't like Alysanne either, Fire & Blood break that illusion of Jae and Aly being Good King & Queen. I know Sansa will be a much better queen than her. But there are some parallels there too.

And none of these has to mean anything, they don't have to lead anywhere. We certainly don't expect Sansa to die in birthing bed trapped in a tower. People point out out these things because they are just there, within the text. What I'm wondering is why this anon and others like them are so threatened by these? If they don't exist according to them, then they turned out to be silly little headcanons, what's the harm in them. Unless of course they see it they know it they just don't like it, and think if no one mentions it, it'll go away. Just because they decided to close their eyes to canon and prefer to drown in their fanon and headcanons doesn't mean we're gonna pander to their delusions.

Remember they got mad at AU fics where Sansa fights or where she has a connection to Nymeria I guess it was something like that, FICS no one claims to be canon. They are that confused about what's canon, what's fanon, what's literary analysis, theorizing and what's creative writing. And then they dare to lecture us 🙄 They are a whole circus 🤡🤡😂

I have the suspicion that they set up a prayer circle, and actually believe that coming into our ask boxes again and again will have a weird effect on GRRM and TWOW.

It’s their superstitions. They actually think they’ll ward off being disappointed by TWOW by repeatedly ‘cursing’ the inboxes of Jonsas.

I don’t have another explanation, because it is as you said. The parallels are there. Nothing will make them suddenly drop out of already published texts.

#anon ask #Sansa Stark defence squad #Fandom foolery

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bau-rookie · 4 years

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finally got around to watching more of S8 and initial Maeve thoughts:

(yes i know her name, i’ve seen gifs of her but i know nothing else so pls don’t spoil)

i am very intrigued, but also confused on how im supposed to feel abt this arrangement.

there’s obviously something more going on than spencer is hiding a ‘girlfriend’

the spencer/alex blake moments about this are so good tho. alex linguistically deducing her way through spencer’s act. and her not sharing spencer’s secret!!

i want to see more of spencer and blake in general

i get that they’re trying to set up this idea that spencer and maeve are connecting on an intellectual level, with them not knowing what the other looks like

but im sorry ‘when i studied the mri you sent me, i said to myself, this is a guy i need to get to know’ is arguably the creepiest thing in an episode where an unsub is cutting off people’s legs

like she looked an image of a brain and was attracted to it?? im exaggerating lol, it’s just a weird image to me

speculations about Maeve’s deal: first thought was she has a stalker/serial killer after her? witness protection?

second, because it’s a Spencer arc... schizophrenia? or some form of a paranoid delusion? Maeve just thinks that someone is after her, and she’s in danger when she isn’t.

none of my theories completely make logical sense. like if she was in witness protection, spencer probably wouldn’t be able to contact her at all. and im not an expert on mental illness, but i don’t think schizophrenia would mean she would have this delusion and be lucid enough to give spencer a geneticist’s opinion on things

they’re definitely setting up a deeper Mystery™️ and im hooked, i just want to know what’s going on!!

also as someone who was deeply obssessed with reading all of Conan Doyle’s works when she was 11, the Sherlock Holmes motif is making me go 👀

Spencer did strike of a Sherlock Holmes-esque character when i first saw him, esp when they made those edits of him big braining his way through a case in s1. He’s a genius with a solid memory, with a knack for deduction and solving crimes.

Personality wise, Spencer and Sherlock are nothing alike, so it’s interesting to see the writers want to draw parallels more overtly now

i mean they did give him a drug problem except you could blink and miss it since they did it so poorly the same way Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock a cocaine addiction

iirc, the book they show Spencer reading, The Sign of Four, was the first time Doyle explicitly shows Sherlock to be an actual drug user. He vividly described him picking up a vial and syringe and shooting himself up. And Holmes justifies it as being only a ‘seven-percent solution’ meant to stave off boredom and escape the world, like it’s not a bad thing.

It makes me wonder how Spencer, a rehabilitated drug addict, would react to reading that scene. idk man, i hope he would’ve somehow gotten a heads up about it!

is Maeve recommending Sherlock Holmes to Spencer because that’s who he reminds her of??

i have half a mind to reread all of Sherlock Holmes, or at least the ones they showed on screen, to write an essay on the thematic significance and any more spencer/sherlock parallels i can find

#criminal minds #charlie watches criminal minds #maeve donovan #spencer reid #alex blake

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imagitory · 5 years

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*exhales heavily*

Okay...I don’t usually go off the deep end in political essays that often. If it’s a quick thing like “f**k Neo-Nazis,” then sure, fine, that’s easy. I don’t have to explain why Neo-Nazis -- especially the cowardly ones that try to label themselves as the “alt-right” in a vain attempt to seem more acceptable to modern society -- can go screw themselves. Everyone already knows they’re awful -- or at least, everyone should already know they’re awful. If you’re the sort of person that wants to try to “teach” me about how the alt-right are not Neo-Nazis, then this post isn’t for you, so kindly don’t interact and keep scrolling.

This post is instead for my Democratic followers, whether you support Bernie, Biden, Warren, whatever. Please feel free to skip over it, though, my dear followers -- I know this whole political season has been very draining, and I have a lot more positive posts on my blog that you can consult instead. If you do want to read my thoughts, though, here’s a cut.

Hi, guys. How’s it going? We really dodged a bullet with Bloomberg dropping out of the race, didn’t we? At least now no one should be able to say Democrats and Republicans are alike, right? The Democrats kicked their racist, sexist, obnoxious, out-of-touch billionaire accused of multiple sexual assaults to the curb, while the Republicans made theirs president.

On that note, though...we still have the Republican version of Michael Bloomberg -- the one and only Donald Trump -- in office. We all remember how he got there...Hillary won the popular vote, but thanks to the ridiculously outdated electoral college rules and Russian interference, the electoral votes went Trump’s way. We could conjure up multiple reasons for Hillary’s loss, but at least in my opinion, I would say we learned a few lessons from the 2016 election that I think we should keep in mind. (Alongside making sure Russians butt the hell out of our elections and fact-checking all the rampant misinformation from our media outlets.)

1) We Democrats have more things in common than we might think, sometimes.

Clinton was infinitely closer to Bernie, politics-wise, than Bernie was to Trump or Gary Johnson. Yet there were those who were so upset about Hillary’s nomination and the role Democratic Party officials had in coaxing delegates to support her that they protest-voted against Hillary, even if that vote wasn’t in their best interest. We don’t have a system that lets us rank who we want for office from most to least, so sometimes we have to accept a bird in the hand rather than reach for two in the bush. You might feel good about voting your conscience in the short term, but you probably won’t when it results in your vote being a drop in the bucket that doesn’t prevent someone like Donald Trump from winning. We’ve already seen this happen not just in the Trump-Clinton election of 2016, but in the Bush-Gore election of 2000.

2) Despite that first point, if we want unity, our Democratic candidate must be aware of how diverse our party is.

Even if we do end up having to settle for a less liberal candidate in order to win an election, that candidate MUST acknowledge that we are not like the Republican Party. We will not march lock-step with people we don’t agree with just because they’re in our party or we agree with some things, and we will certainly not be satisfied with simple pacifism. The Republican Party has been tilting farther and farther to the right over the last three decades, to the point that their policies now involve mass internment of Mexican immigrants and family separation, directly paralleling plans carried out by the THIRD EFFIN’ REICH. We cannot keep begging for civility and peace and trying to reach a compromise -- you cannot compromise with this kind of extremism without sacrificing all of your principles, because those kinds of people do not make concessions.

I remain convinced even after four years that Hillary should’ve chosen Bernie to be her running mate -- if she had, the rift between the centrist and more liberal branches of the Democratic Party might have been healed enough that we could’ve looked at our ticket with excitement and hope, as we had for Obama and Biden back in 2008. Instead Hillary chose Tim Kaine, an inoffensive centrist Democrat who added absolutely nothing to her presidential bid. He couldn’t even help Hillary out by boosting the campaign with youthful energy or natural charm -- Bernie would’ve both boosted morale among younger and/or more liberal voters and lit a fire under those who were anxious about what a Trump presidency could lead to. The same could’ve been true if Bernie had been chosen to be president -- if he’d chosen Hillary, she could’ve better appealed to moderate voters intimidated by the thought of voting for a Democratic Socialist and run on her international experience as Secretary of State.

3) In order to make any difference at all, we must vote, and we must win.

I’m the first person to acknowledge that I hate voting against my convictions. If the Democrats had chosen Michael Bloomberg, I would’ve probably been ready for whole-scale revolution, right then and there. But let’s be frank here -- in 2016, we got complacent. We assumed that Trump would lose. We assumed that America wouldn’t choose racism, or Islamaphobia, or sexism, or Nazism. BUT WE DID. In the end, our country -- like many other countries before us were -- is more afraid of the promise of social change than we are of the threat of fascism. Yes, I called Trump’s vision of the country fascism, and I stand by it. Fascism is defined as far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial authority, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy and often supplemented with government-sanctioned racism -- and yeah, given that Trump clearly wants to do whatever he wants whenever he wants without facing any consequences for his actions, persecute any so-called “enemies,” make money for himself while in office (even using his office and political power to achieve that end), and scapegoat minorities, I think my point is made. And so I will state it again -- America is more afraid of the future and the progress that could come with it than it is of the cruelty, bigotry, and tyranny of our past. It’s an absolute tragedy, but it’s true. Americans were absolutely terrified of Obamacare until it actually became law and people saw how cool it was, not to be booted off your care for preexisting conditions and stuff. Once that happened, Americans were ready to bite off the hand of any Republican who made any move toward repealing it. If it’s something we’ve never done before, it’s beaten back like the plague, but once it’s something we’ve become accustomed to, you can tear it from our cold, dead hands.

In the 1930′s, Germany had a choice between three political parties -- the Communists, the Democratic Socialists, and the Nazis -- and in the end, the reason the Nazis got power was because the Communists and the Socialists could not band together to stop that greater threat. The Nazis were able to paint a pretty picture to the German people of returning their country to its supposedly long lost, mythic greatness, and they won power, even if they were still not the majority when Hitler got into office. And as soon as the Nazis got power, they never let it go and went out of their way to destroy both Communists and Socialists, just like they did with Jewish people, the Romani, and the rest. We are at such a crossroads now. I am deathly afraid that the Republicans will try to find some way to keep power even if Trump were to lose, but we cannot let that happen. We must stand together, strong and united.

The more liberal of us must acknowledge that radical change cannot be put into place quickly. Our system is broken and falling apart thanks to the Republicans’ on-going sabotage, and we cannot hope to remodel our house until our foundation is secure. Even the Republicans were not able to destroy our country in so many ways these last four years without dismantling a lot of other things first -- corrupting our elections with money thanks to the Citizens United ruling -- sparking two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that drained us of money and added to the backlog of veterans that have yet to receive their deserved financial support -- intimidating political officials away from substantive gun control legislation -- chipping away at abortion rights nation-wide -- stacking the courts, both local and Supreme, with unqualified, strongly right-leaning candidates -- gerrymandering districts like crazy so as to split Democratic-leaning areas and puff up Republican-leaning ones -- even spreading misinformation through shows on their own private so-called “News” network. It will take time to repair all of the damage the Republicans have wrought, but we must first win if we are even to have the chance to try.

On the flip side, the more centrist of us must acknowledge that we cannot go back to the way we were because the way we were was WRONG. We might have nostalgic visions of it being more civil and peaceful, but the tremors of war were still rippling under our feet. The Neo-Nazi rats that elected Trump were gathering under us, and we let them. We let them gain enough confidence to come out into the light in large numbers and we stood by, assuming that they wouldn’t succeed in their goals. We ignored the rampant spread of anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamaphobia -- we downplayed the racism, the homophobia, and the sexism. Sometimes it was due to arrogance, and sometimes it was due to flat-out indifference, because those things didn’t directly affect us. We should know by now that that rosy view of our past was not how things were -- just as many of our Founding Fathers were still slave owners, and America interned our own citizens in camps during World War II, and the supposedly great Ronald Reagan turned a blind eye while thousands of Americans died of AIDS, our country saw the signs of racism, xenophobia, and ultranationalism coming out in full again and didn’t fight back. And now that racist, xenophobic ultranationalism is in control of the Oval Office. If we have any chance of stopping them, we can’t simply go backwards -- we must charge ahead. We can’t simply pretend like everything can go back to normal -- we must accept responsibility for what we’ve done and pursue justice in making things right. We must fight back against these far-right, tyrannical policies and we must pay restitution to those our country has hurt. I do not want the Mexican families we have destroyed to be treated the way our Japanese American brethren were after they were released from the internment camps in the 40′s -- dismissed and forgotten, with our flag figuratively slapping them in the face every time some stupid guy crowed his head off about America being the greatest country on earth. I may have hated Trump’s immigration policy -- I might not have voted for him -- but he still represents my country, and therefore me, to the rest of the world, and even if he’ll never apologize for a single damn thing that he’s done, I want my country to make things right.

Maybe once a Democrat -- even if it’s a centrist like Biden -- is in the White House again, we’ll have the chance for real change -- good change. We certainly won’t get it as long as we’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Now of course, even when this whole presidential thing is done, we can’t rest on our laurels. We must get out in force for local elections too -- we must take back the Senate and keep control of the House. We must pressure our lawmakers to get the money out of politics, and fix gerrymandering, and restore environmental protections, and hold corporations accountable, and tax the rich, and abolish the Electoral College, and put term limits on Congresspeople, and impeach Brett Kavanaugh, and fund dismantling the backlog on VA benefits, and cancel student loan debt, and implement universal health care, and pass gun control legislation, and do all the other things we need done.

I really hope that whichever candidate we end up with -- whether it’s Biden (*sighs begrudgingly*), Bernie (*smiles*), or Warren (*wiggles in glee*) -- that candidate will strongly consider choosing a Vice President who is either more centrist (if they’re more liberal) or more liberal (if they’re more centrist) and filling their Cabinet with those other ex-presidential hopefuls who still have something to offer. Kamala Harris was Attorney General of California -- why not have her become Attorney General of the United States next? How about Tom Steyer as Head of the EPA, or Cory Booker as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development?

Here’s the thing about us being more diverse in thought than the Republicans -- it means we have a great swath of very different members with very different skill sets, as well as the ability to learn, critique, rationalize, change, and improve. And if we are to defeat an institution like Trump’s that demands lock-step, mindless obedience and praise, it seems to me that’s something we should use to our advantage.

#excuse me politics coming through #personal #hopefully I won't get too many of my followers upset with this #feel free to ignore this if you're not in the mood for politics I get it #democrats #republicans #i just republiCAN’T #donald trump #joe biden #elizabeth warren #bernie sanders #opinion #oh boy here i go

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mantra4ia · 5 years

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Expectations coming in to Rise of Skywalker: Star Wars appreiation week (5/5)

Things I Want (although I will try to keep actual preconceptions low)

Get Anakin Skywalker in this movie somehow. If it’s the Rise of Skywalker, you need all the Skywalkers. He needs to be brought back into the fold. It might be interesting if Kylo could somehow see Anakin’s fall (in terms of force ghost or voice), or at the very least when he killed the Padawans, perhaps a parallel to when Luke almost cut Ben down. Or put Anakin’s essence imbibed in his helmet mask, which becomes infused with Kylo’s mask as he uses both kinds of fragments to reforge his own helmet and brings Vader back in that tangential way.

Additionally, give me Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, Yoda, Obi Wan. Their wisdom and voices at least. Bonus if you give me some expanded, in-depth Maz Kenata, not just as a narrator for theme and plot development like TFA and TLJ. I think she could have been an interesting character, but her uses so far have been vastly superficial.

Somehow, someway, bring us back to Jakku. If the new trilogy started there, it would be good to have a touchstone to Jakku somewhere in this film. If not Jakku, Naboo. Cuz if Palpatine is playing a key role, we need to the see his home, post Operation Cinder.

References to lore and legends material (ex- use it to explain Snoke’s Obsidian ring). Expand the universe, or rather shine a light on the rest of the universe that is already massive and rich with un-cinematically explored history.

Connect the dots between prequels, original series, and new trilogy. Don’t just Disney canon it.

Make a character-central story. PROBABLY MY NUMBER 1 WISH!

John Williams score. Even if I hate this movie, I know I can AT LEAST rely on the music.

Develop the friendship between Finn, Rey, and Poe. Give us stakes to lose. It doesn’t have to be the Luke-Han-Leia level of friendly back and forth bickering. But it should at least be Anakin-Obi Wan kinship. Give us emotional stakes to win or lose.

If you are going to use Palpatine, do not nerf him or OP Rey

Don’t be afraid to try something new, but use the existing laws of the Star Wars universe as your guide when you ask new questions. Regardless of the fact that I liked the energy of The Force Awakens, I didn’t like how it’s story base was like a cookie cutter remix of A New Hope. However, the parts I most enjoyed of TFA were elements of new what ifs - ie what if a storm trooper turned good? How big of a ripple could that make in a galaxy? Likewise, in TLJ, I like the idea of “what if Luke lost all hope - what would that look like and what would it take to rekindle?” Similarly with Rise of Skywalker, I hope they take the time to fully explore what was teased in the trailer. “I have been every voice you have ever heard inside your head.” If that line is Palpatine to Kylo Ren, think of and illustrate the implication it has on everything we though we knew about his influence and how he uses it to shape future probability so that his force clairvoyance is closer to perfect with each passing day by willing it into being.

Unravel the information naturally through character discovery, not through ancillary exposition.

I hope that “Rise of Skywalker,” if it’s not hinting at Anakin or immediate kin, is an allusion to Ben claiming some ownership to his Skywalker / Solo heritage. I don’t think that he needs to be ‘redeemed,’ in a traditional sense but I do think that somewhere in the course of this film, he needs to embrace who he is for better or worse.

Figure out what is going on between Rey and Kylo, and do it early in the film. I really enjoyed their relationship building, whatever it was, in TLJ. It was interesting. I liked the psychology, the meta. But I don’t want to muddle it throughout this whole new film. Bring it to fruition, and hopefully use it wisely.

Things I Don’t Want

Heavy-handed nostalgia. Yes, acknowledge the past, but don’t make it cheap fan service. I’m not a fan of killing the past, but if it’s a choice between the extremes, I would take letting it die over “same eyes, different people” again. Fans are smart, they appreciate throwbacks more if they aren’t superfluous appeasement, but rather story serving. The former is aesthetic, the latter is Star Wars.

Don’t make it a sci-fi spectacle. Ships are great, battles and lightsabers too, but don’t use the story to serve them, use them to punctate the story of the Force, the mythos. Or think of thing we haven’t seen in a battle before (like wreaking a ship with a Cruiser using hyperdrive to missile at light speed - TLJ). Don’t throw everything all at once against a wall just to get a big but short lived audience reaction

Don’t Disney-fy the villain. If the allegedly deceased Emperor is the big bad of IX, then he’s complex. Be true to the depths of his insidiousness, and do NOT just merc him with a single character.

Killing characters as an act of grand sacrifice to show your appreciation for them. If we learned anything from Luke’s sacrifice in The Last Jedi, it’s that this maneuver does not go over well at all. And while I am at peace with Luke going out that way as long as they continue to grow and use his character in IX (life after death), I would not be okay with this for another character because there’s no next installment to see the ramifications of the sacrifice play out complexly. So if they do this to Kylo (or Poe, etc), I’ll be LIVID.

Ret-conning or undoing the events of TLJ. Whether you like the execution of the plot in Last Jedi, they exist. The best way forward, I believe, is acknowledge, move forward and build. Don’t fixate or plaster over with a new facade.

Things I Expect

Too much action plot, or rather action montage, crammed into too little time. It’s the alleged ending of the core saga, give it time. But I don’t think they will.

I’m reaching for straws, but maybe we’ll see the nightcloak satellites? Maybe that has something to do with the icy clips in the episode IX TV spots. IDK.

I think if this episode pivots on a plot point from TLJ, it’ll be that dark side vision of Rey seeing herself as where she comes from and Kylo later explains as, “your nothing, no one, but not to me.” That scene is one of my favorite moments of Last Jedi visually and metaphorically, but I have a sinking feeling that JJ has rewritten it’s meaning, though I can’t imagine how. Maybe they are going to make Rey a Palpatine or Anakin clone, or some other relation to / pawn manipulated by the Emperor in an attempt to make her extraordinary.That, in my opinion, would be a shame and overkill considering how powerful they’ve written Rey to become in such a short period of time. I like the idea that she comes from nothing, in much the same way as Finn, a trooper among so many alike, could become good.

If I was a betting person, more than likely we’re going to the temple district / Imperial Palace on Coruscant some time in RoS. I’m neither here nor there about that if it serves the stories.

TBC after I actually go to Rise of Skywalker for my post-viewing thoughts.

#star wars ix #sw: the rise of skywalker #rise of skywalker #to be continued #tbc #star wars fan theories #star wars appreciation #tlj #sw: the last jedi #sw: the force awakens #tfa

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ournewoverlords · 5 years

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Some thoughts on Ted Chiang’s Exhalation (2019) - Part I

Ted Chiang is such an interesting writer to me. His stories have such a neutral, impersonal tone — “thinky” scifi, theoretical what-if experiments far from our own space and time — and yet they wrestle with such “base” human questions at their core. I was surprised at how emotional I felt after reading some of them — not during the reading but days afterwards, when I’d watch a kid play in the park and think about the main character in “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, who’d tried very hard to give her digital-child-pet a life in a society that didn’t consider it worthy of one. There’s something about his stories that have an impact on you a long time later, like a stone dropped too clean to make an initial splash, but whose ripples keep echoing in you for a long time after.

Some of these questions are very familiar, if you’ve read his previous collections, most famously Stories of Your Life and Others: how much free will do we really have; how do we go on in a world without it; how the instruments we use (language and writing, as much as any other tech) changes the way we think, feel, and relate to each other; the purpose of science and the purpose of stories, and the lines where they cross, the spaces where they meet. Is it the actual, physical, objective-laws world that shapes who we are, or the stories we tell ourselves about it? What is an individual — a single, measly person, whose only contribution might be to write a good account of the advent of a piece of tech, not even the inventor but a bystander — to the clockwork machinery of the universe? Why are we, in the cosmic scheme of things?

Maybe it’s all the Black-Mirror/Hunger-Games type stuff that’s been so en vogue in the last decade (not to mention a certain orange-y harbinger of the apocalypse sitting in the White House, and the impending existential dread of climate change), but I found this to be a very “hopeful” collection. Optimistic may be too strong a word for it, but it grapples with these dystopian concepts and comes out the other side with the sense that just as the world grows and changes, we will find a way to grow and change, and whether time turns all our great pyramids and gods to dust we are still a species worth saving. The time machines, robots, parallel universes, and knowledge that we have no destiny except the final entropy of all living things will challenge who we are, but not the missive to be kind to one another. Even if our fate is already set, we can still choose what kind of person we will be when we meet it.

In that way, perhaps the way the narrators, men and women and nameless alike, are so detached and analytical in the way they observe the world reflects not a limitation of Chiang’s character range, but a purposeful choice by the author. They’re scientists, struggling with a crisis of faith: whether they’ve made the correct diagnosis, drawn the correct conclusion, stuck to the right course, let go at the right time. Watches, who’ve met their watchmaker. Yet what makes this collection particularly beautiful — particularly scifi — to me is how these mechanical people become not gods in the future, but simply more human.

Some thoughts on the individual stories under the cut, warning for spoilers. I’m splitting this into two parts because I'm a rambler, so this one is the first half, going up to The Lifecyle of Software Objects:

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate

“Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.”

I think it’s so fitting that a short-story collection about the meaning of stories opens with a scifi retelling of Scheherazade’s One Thousand and One Nights, the most famous short-story collection of all. It’s not just the ancient Middle East setting that’s familiar, but the structure: like those fables, this is a nested story-within-a-story, a series of morality tales told to a narrator who has his own secret not yet revealed to the audience. The scifi piece here is the time-machine gate, which, like Arrival, raises questions about the nature of time and free will — what if the future were an unchangeable scroll, the script set in ink before your birth? What does coming to know that future do to the knower?

Some, naturally, use it to enrich themselves, the classic time-travel trope of traveling to the past to give yourself the stock picks (note: buy Apple). Another underestimates the trickery of fate, while the wife uses it to rescue her future husband. But what’s interesting here is that in all these cases, no one actually changes the future; nor did they actually change the past, because the past *must* have happened for the future to happen. The characters merely make the future that was going to happen happen, much as Arrival’s Louise felt obligated “to act precisely as she knew would.”

It’s a theme that Chiang is clearly very interested in, with his most famous demonstration in Stories of Your Life / Arrival. If we already know the future, and we can’t change it no matter what we do, that implies that we don’t have free will. The narrator’s attempt then, to change his future by changing his past must fail: a harsh word spoken and a wife lost can’t be taken back, unless it was meant to be.

But the fact that the narrator tried, I think, and went to great lengths trying, is the human element of this fantasy story. That his first instinct was to try to save his wife says something about him; the fact that it was all futile in the end doesn’t negate the meaning of his attempt. I keep remembering this Vonnegut quote about Lot’s wife, who was warned not to look back at the burning city, and yet couldn’t help doing so as she fled: “but she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.” The merchant didn’t do the wise thing, but he did the human thing — isn’t that the part that hurts?

The one issue I had with this story is that I’m always completely frustrated by time-travel-paradox stories — it doesn’t make sense to me that a universe wouldn’t branch off, so to speak, the moment you step back in time, so I don’t understand *why* both our past and future can’t be changed. I had the same issue with Arrival, where I couldn’t explain to myself why Louise HAD to walk the future she saw. (It doesn’t help that I’ve been watching a lot of Future Man, which has a lot of fun jumping around and sticking its fingers up the timey-wimey stuff.) But I also believe that the technical puzzle really isn’t the point of this story — accepting the premise that the past and future are unchangeable even if we can see them, the idea is that we still have to live them anyways, and it’s through those experiences that we change, grow, become different people. If the merchant hadn’t tried to rescue his wife, would he have found his atonement at the end? Or are there things we have to do anyways, even if we already know the answer?

Exhalation

“But in truth the source of life is a difference in air pressure, the flow of air from spaces where it is thick to those where it is thin.”

A slim little story, with a steampunk texture and some lovely little flourishes of prose in between extremely in-depth explanations of what I can only describe as “mechanical stuff” (you can see the technical writer in Chiang here — he really likes describing machinery). But the thing I really like about his work is that even as he’s a geek fascinated by the technology itself, he’s even more interested in its impact on the people and societies that find themselves confronting it. “How the world works” affects how people think about themselves, and that philosophical bent gives his stories more depth than “wouldn’t it be cool if…” thought experiments to me.

On the one level, “air” here could be a direct substitution for “energy”, where the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system can only go up, never down. Every breath we take adds another little bit of disorder into the universe. That makes sense: none of us are renewable machines, all our civilizations have finite lifespans, and the way we’re treating the planet doesn’t exactly bode well for at least extending what time we have. Hell, we’re literally screwing our own oxygen, and unlike the narrator’s species we don’t need the laws of physics to do it for us.

What I thought was particularly interesting, though, was reading this on a more metaphorical level. I’m stretching it here, but it’s the idea that people don’t really live on the materia itself, but on the immaterial ebbs and flows between them; that it’s the passing of thoughts, energy, love, emotion between us that keeps us alive. When that exchange dies — whether because we all became the same, or because we’ve lost interest in seeking that exchange — so too do we as a species.

Is it language that keeps us alive, or having another person hear it? Is it the having of food, or having someone with whom to share it?

What’s Expected of Us

“My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will.”

Oh ho — I had a thought after reading this that the order of the stories in this collection is really deliberate, because this book is in tension to itself. That is, one story will set out one hypothesis/POV, and then the next will straight-up rebut it, a kind of self-conflict that reminds me both of the history of science and the way I think most conflicts occur in real life: not as wrong vs right, but as different POVs that can all be true at once without being the whole of the answer, if there is one at all.

The previous story ends with a spirited declaration that “the buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable.” This one states exactly the opposite: everything HAS been predicted and you have no choice at all. And unlike the first story, which had the same deterministic view, the conclusion here is not to accept fate but to fight it. (Not that you can choose whether to fight it or not - it’s all been predetermined!)

First of all, this is based on a real, ongoing debate. I was really interested in neuroscience (and in particular, its impact on ethics and law) back in college and it reminded me instantly of those experiments showing that our subconscious brain makes a decision before we become conscious of making it (see Neuroscience of free will), and I’m sure experiments like Libet’s were the inspiration behind the Predictor device here.

The fact that no one’s reacted the same way people do here is probably because we have such a strong perception of our own free will that it just seems too obviously ludicrous, and the experiments so far are nowhere near as iron-tight and replicable as the Predictor. Even so, though, think about all those factors you didn’t have control over that have such an impact on where you are today: where you were born (living at the poverty level in the U.S. still puts you at the top 14% worldwide!), your parents, your genetic temperament, much of your health and innate interests and talents. There’s a lot of that vaunted genetics-plus-environment explanation for behavior that is out of our hands, and what’s left over is all the most interesting — and hardest to define — stuff.

I’m not saying that Chiang is making a social critique here, but I think that’s what this whole collection is grappling with: “the stuff that’s left over.” Keep in mind the narrator’s two assertions at the end that will pop over and over again: the idea that civilization depends on “self-deception” — or what others might call “stories” — and that “some of you will succumb and some of you won’t, and my sending this warning won’t alter those proportions”. Because in the last story, following the narrator’s command to believe in the lie is exactly what alters them.

The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Confession: I’m rarely blown away by Chiang’s prose. It does the job but it doesn’t get me swooning over a sentence or a particularly striking piece of imagery. Reading TLoSO, the piece of fiction I kept thinking of was Philip K Dick’s Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep, a novella whose wordcraft I also thought was workmanly — and yet, I fucking love that book, and this was my favorite story in Exhalation.

I can’t fully articulate why, but it’s the one that’s stuck with me the longest, even as I think The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling is more original and Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom is more satisfying. It’s one of the most “conventional” stories here, along with Anxiety (perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s these two that are being adapted for Hollywood) — actual characters, with actual story arcs, and things happening and people making difficult choices. It has a cinematic vision and a fully-realized world that spans decades in the lives of those characters. It even has bad guys, and an interesting conceit: what if we had these digital pets called “digients” that could learn how to talk, and play, and maybe even learn up to the level of a adolescent while looking like these adorable baby animals that you’ll never have to feed, clean, or scoop poop after? You can just “suspend” them when you’re tired of playing with them; they’re cuter than robots, less pressure than children, and less work than pets!

The length and conventionality of the narrative structure makes it easier to relate to, I think, but it’s not why I love it and keep juxtaposing it by the Philip K Dick book. Like Androids, at the heart of it I think this is a story about empathy. It’s a story about the inherent terror, sorrow, and joy of parenting, of being in charge of another life with no guardrails or handbook on how to do it. It’s about being an adult, with jobs, responsibilities, and obligations to others in constant competition with values inside yourself, and never knowing if you got that balance right.

It’s about being a parent in a society where you’re in constant negotiation with it about the value of that life: where the only worth your child has is how much money they can make someone, how intelligent they are (and therefore how much money they can make someone), how much utility they have as an academic exercise or as a sex partner. No matter how much you love your kid, the only thing the world cares about is whether they have some “use”, and this story is all about that feeling: the heartache of justifying an existence you don’t feel should need justifying. Because whether the digients are actually robots, children, pets, or replicants — that’s probably never going to be proven, in the same way we’ll never know if Deckard really is a replicant, but that’s not really what matters here. What matters is whether you choose to believe these digital-pet-things deserve to be treated like they have value, the kind of value that makes torturing them evil, discarding them cruel, and keeping promises to them matter.

Ana and Derek choose to believe. They’re one of the very few who do, and they raise their digients as children, teaching them how to read, finding them play partners, taking joy in their successes, wrestling with how to discipline their mischief. When disaster strikes — Blue Gamma goes bankrupt, Data Earth becomes obsolete, making obsolete their first-gen digients with it — they shield them from the “finances”, much as many parents do. Then they throw themselves into the only mission that matters anymore: finding a way to give them some semblance of a good life.

Hope after hope turns them down, until at last, there’s only a startup called Binary Desire, who proposes to make the digients sex bots, in the most reasonable language: they won’t be sex slaves, this is a voluntary modification to their circuits plus careful training that will make them genuinely fall in love with their chosen partner. A kind of directed puberty, if you will — after all, none of us asked for our hormones and crushes, right? How is this different from being born with the oxytocin to connect to our family, or Blue Gamma’s initial breeding of the digients to be cute and cuddly? How is it different from being born with a certain set of genes that might predispose us to like certain people — isn’t that even the whole concept of “soul mates” in the first place, an innate connection?

But there’s something so particularly awful about Binary Desire’s proposal, as nicely as they couch it as completely consensual. First of all, as Ana and Derek argue, the digients are still child-like (though this is partly because of Derek’s and especially Ana’s own protectiveness). But even if they had the consciousness and experience of full adults, it’d still feel wrong to me, and I think it’s because of this: forcing a being to remake themselves just for our own convenience feels instinctively wrong. Binary Desire’s customers could find real, living, actually-consensual partners — but they don’t want to, they’d rather pay for a bot hardwired to fall in love with them, and delude themselves that this is “ultimate sexual fulfillment” for both parties.

That’s what feels so wrong about the way the digients are treated in the society of TLoSO in general: it’s not that people are actively torturing the bots a la the Kubrick/Spielberg movie A.I., it’s just that they’re always doing whatever is most convenient for themselves. There’s no friction, no “cost” — and therefore, no weight to any of their relationships either. It’s not that they’re selfish people, any more than us fast-swiping Tinder and all those other dating apps whose entire goal was to remove friction from “the dating market” — the point is that technology has made these options available that were never there before.

What if you could push a button and make your child perfect? What if you could pay a few bucks and make someone love you forever? Binary Sense even tries to get around that by demanding the relationship be built up over months rather than a cheap-and-quick hormonal hit because people want “real” relationships not slaves — but that friction is still artificial, just like how Ana tells Derek at the beginning that it’s weirder to pretend the digients are real animals. Getting things easy, getting things without having to pay any emotional price or sacrificing anything of yourself — that cheapens you.

I think that’s the answer to Binary Desire’s question that tortures Ana: “why can nonsexual relationships with them [like yours and Derek’s] be healthy, while sexual ones can’t?” It’s not really about nonsexual vs sexual — it’s about investing in a relationship honestly, vs trying to take shortcuts. Binary Desire’s emotional training program to get the digient to fall in love is still a shortcut, just a different kind of shortcut. People are always looking for certainty, the certainty that they’ve made the right choice — certain profit, certain success, certain returns for their investment. But relationships aren’t about certainty; at every moment, you might be fucking this all up forever, but it’s that discomfort that you makes you human. It’s about knowing that you might have nothing left to show at the end of years of effort and being willing to make that effort anyway.

The people in Ana and Dereks’ society suck because they’re unwilling to take the risk that might they invest everything, and still be left with nothing. They would never give their whole heart to something, whether that thing was a person or a bot. They want the kind of relationship that you can suspend, rewind, erase, start over if you don’t like it anymore. And that’s no relationship at all.

That’s why Ana and Derek are the heroes here, or at least, as much “hero” as you can be in a Ted Chiang piece — because they do pay a price for their love for Jax and Marco and Polo. They don’t take the easy way out of suspending them even as it costs them relationships, jobs, their statuses in society. At the end, Derek even sacrifices the one thing he discovered he wanted throughout the years— his chance with Ana — to make what he hopes is the right choice for Marco. They’re not the same kind of parents at all — Ana is more protective, Derek more willing to push them, to let them struggle out of the idea that’s needed for growth — but the crucial thing is both put that duty above themselves, the moment they became “parents”: the duty to try to give them a good life.

On the one hand, you can say it’s a sickness, valuing robots that might never gain more intellectual capacity than a 10-year-old over other human beings; on the other you can say they have this kind of fundamental integrity, this will to treat them right. Because Ana promised Jax she wouldn’t suspend him, she won’t. Because Derek can sacrifice neither Marco nor Ana, he lets Marco make his own choice, and lets Ana blame him. Maybe those are all terrible choices, maybe it’s not what you’d think of as a happy life, but — being able to have empathy with something outside yourself, even if it’s a thing not a person, being the kind of person who stands by their promises and doesn’t squirrel out of the hard decisions — isn’t that the kind of life you can live with? And isn’t that all we can ask for in the end?

---

Second half coming up!

#exhalation #ted chiang #exhalation review #book review

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kateis-cakeis · 7 years

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Gared, More Than A Man (Meta)

Based on evidence collected both from in-game and the Game of Thrones wiki, it seems to be suggested by the writers that Gared possesses abilities beyond that of a regular man. He shows signs of being both a Forrester by blood and a greenseer, with evidence scattered throughout all episodes of the game.

First, some definitions from both the Game of Thrones & awoiaf wiki:

Greenseer is the title given to people who possess the magical ability to perceive future, past or distant events in dreams known as Green Dreams. According to legend, greenseers were much respected by the Children of the Forest.

In the A Song of Ice and Fire books, greenseers were the wise men of the Children of the Forest who had magical abilities that included power over nature and prophetic visions. While one in a thousand men is born a skinchanger, one skinchanger in a thousand is born a greenseer.

Below is a compilation of evidence that suggests that Gared has abilities that reach further than that of a normal, lowborn squire.

Gared claims to have been hearing the weirwoods whisper to him since before he “was a man grown”, and that because he didn’t understand the sounds, it frightened him.

If not for this, it could have been suggested that it is only the weirwood specifically outside the North Grove that whispers to those that pass by it, but it’s clear that there is someone or something (the children of the forest?) attempting to contact him each time that he’s close enough to be reached.

Unfortunately, as it seems he was a child when he heard the majority of the whispering, he was perhaps not in a position to attempt to work out what it all meant. This is further backed up by the fact that he appears confused by the whispers he hears by the weirwood outside of the North Grove. Clearly it isn’t every person, or even every Northerner, that can hear the trees contacting them --- so why can Gared?

“Hear the weirwoods whisper.” (Can anyone in possession of the map hear the tree, or is it possible that Gared is uniquely qualified to be the one to complete this mission?)

To listen to the whispers, Gared first has to focus on the tree, before it then begins to speak to him. As he begins to listen, however, he is interrupted by Shadow, leaving it unclear what the weirwood would have said to him if he were able to keep listening. It’s interesting that he is interrupted by a warged animal, a power often held by greenseers. Visual foreshadowing?

It’s also important to note that the Wall is known for being a barrier of magic, and that any magic south of it is significantly weakened. Bran, for example, becomes far more capable of accessing the weirwood’s visions when beyond the Wall. Gared’s power may also have been weakened by living in the North, and only when beyond the Wall can he have full access to it.

This may be why the weirwoods whispers were implied to be much quieter when he was a child, as his ability to hear them was weakened. He swears to have “actually heard them” as a child because it was not loud enough for him to be certain. Therefore, when beyond the Wall, with no barrier to his abilities the whispers are both louder and clearer -- the only reason he still does not hear what he is being told is because he’s interrupted far too early to hear anything of meaning.

Another suggestion that Gared has powers is his ability to control the undead wildlings within the North Grove, something that Elsera was previously only able to do, and only because she used blood magic to achieve this. She also has to use her voice to command them.

Gared, however, only uses a gesture of his own sword to control them, and it’s not even the specialized ironwood knife that he’s gifted by Elsera that he uses to achieve this. Even if Elsera told them to listen to Gared, it still does not explain how he does not need to use his voice like she does. Could this link into the Greenseer’s ability to control nature and their surroundings?

It’s also possible that his powers stem back to the fact that he may be of Forrester blood, which in turn may allow him access to the weirwood’s whispers, and the power of the North Grove. This is arguably first implied in Episode 1, when looking at the tapestry of the Forrester’s. Gared has these words in particular to say about Lady Forrester:

“Lady Forrester. She’s always been kind to me. Treated me like I was a Forrester myself.”

There’s also the fact that, for the most part, Gared seems to possess the facial features of the Forrester’s, as opposed to those of his own family.

A side-by-side comparison of Gared and Lord Forrester. It’s difficult to tell under the beard, but the jawline, cheekbones, ears and nose are of similar structure.

Meanwhile, here’s a comparison of Gared and his father.. who look nothing alike.

As you can see, Gared looks nothing like his father. And I know, I do know that allllll his genetics could come from his mother but... his entire face? Nothing like his father? No way, I’m not buying it.

You know who Gared does look like? Gregor the goddamn Good.

And I know what else you may say, Telltale would re-use assets. But why re-use Gregor’s features? And why make Gared’s father and Duncan have similar features (like their ears) but not make Gared have the same?

See? It makes no sense. Gared looks like Gregor, he looks far too similar to the Forrester children as well.

It’s also telling that Gared survives the season regardless of the player choices, despite not even being a “Forrester” himself, the family that the game is focused on.

There’s also this....

“Ryon. Never easy being the fourth-born son.”

So, fourth-born, ay? Lemme see here, sooo, we have... Josera, Rodrik, Asher and hmmm, who would come next if they were related... Oh! Gared! Of course, and in that case, he’d be the fourth-born. This could be some interesting foreshadowing.

It’s also interesting to note that weirwood and ironwood share a lot of common properties that make them a lot alike. They’re both known for their hardness, durability, being found beyond the Wall, and resistance to flame. This isn’t established in the books in regards to ironwood, so perhaps the writers created this parallel on purpose to even further suggest that the Forrester’s and the weirwood trees are closely linked to one another. Could ironwood also be linked to the children of the forest, and therefore, House Forrester as a whole?

EDIT: So, @blakegamingpage and I were convinced there was something which said that the Children of the Forest taught the Forresters about ironwood. And this entire time, it was a line that was said by either Royland or Duncan. (Although I can’t find where it was said, it was in the files. So, it might not be canon but still, this is a theory). “It's said one of the Children of the Forest taught the first Forrester how to grow ironwood, and how to harvest it so that it keeps its strength.“ This is a final link for the two trees, both are linked to the Children of the Forest.

The Children of the Forest helping the first Forrester cultivate the wood, so it keeps its strength? That seems like a strange thing for the Children to do, unless they had reason to, with the first Forrester being able to hear the weirwoods whisper, maybe. Sure, it could be a myth, but it’s a strange myth to be passed down the generations, over more than 1500 years. Perhaps the first Forrester started out in the North Grove, and they migrated down to the Wolfswood, knowing ironwood would always survive beyond the wall, keeping a promise to the Children to protect the grove?

Another possible visual metaphor is that, enclosed within the Forrester pendant, which has an ironwood tree engraved on it, is a weirwood tree, suggesting that the two are closely linked. It is not just the ironwood trees that are suggested to be linked, but the Forrester’s by extension too.

Side note: is it not strange that Talia just so happened to give Gared the piece of the puzzle he needed to find out exactly where the North Grove could be found? The way she runs up to him suggests that she had to give it to him before he left -- perhaps Lord Forrester once instructed her to make sure Gared had the necklace on him if he were to ever travel to the Wall? The way she says ‘Be safe’ suggests that she knows he’s gonna be on a harder trek than just the Wall. (Also, she doesn’t say goodbye, which I think is even more suspicious).

“You must swear, tell only your Uncle Duncan.”

The way he says that line ^, so seriously... It suggests so much. Tell only Gared’s uncle? Someone who has been friends with Gregor since they were teenagers/kids? Well, who else is gonna know all of Gregor’s secrets? Especially, someone who is as close to an advisor as anyone can get.

(I think I should also mention that, the way Gregor insists, absolutely demands for Gared to go is very telling). *cough, cough* Gared is his son *cough, cough*

Anyhow, I believe this means that Duncan knows a lot more than he’s ever told Gared.

“I can’t say anything more just yet.”

Say, that Gregor knocked a woman up and he was in a spot of bother. He’s married to Lady Forrester, he has Rodrik and Asher (and Josera and Elsera, probably born before he was married). Perhaps even Lady Forrester is pregnant with Mira. But, unfortunately, there’s another pregnant woman in the mix. So, Duncan steps in. He offers up his brother as a way to get out of this mess. So, his brother marries this woman and Gared is born, in wedlock, as a Tuttle. Which means Gregor’s son gets to have the privilege of a legit second name.

Therefore, Gared is slowly worked into the ranks and becomes Gregor’s squire because, that’s the best way to spend time with your illegitimate son, without raising any eyebrows.

Perhaps Duncan didn’t tell Gared everything because the more you know about The North Grove, the more you’d know the whole truth. Perhaps it’s something linked to people with Forrester blood, people with certain abilities (much like Josera and Elsera, who’s to say their powers don’t come from Gregor). I mean, it’s possible that Gregor and the Forrester children have abilities as well. But the magic barrier restricts those abilities from showing in fully-fledged form.

However, if Gared is a Forrester, being sent North of the Wall means his abilities get to develop as they should... perhaps a bit like Josera and Elsera? Maybe the legit Forrester children have to stay south so that they can inherit the Lordship of the House. Perhaps it was the plan all along. That these children, who can’t inherit the house, should be sent North to protect a long held secret, a long held Forrester secret.

All the Forrester children had the necklaces to solve the puzzle. So, it was a thing that more than one of them may have had to leave Ironrath to go to The North Grove. However, with Gared on the scene, maybe they were told if he were to go North, they had to give a necklace to him. Hence, Talia gave hers away. Maybe she didn’t know why she had to, or maybe she did, nevertheless, she gave Gared the guide directly to The North Grove.

Duncan was stupid, if this is correct. If he does know all this, he’s only risked Gared further. What else did he have to lose in telling Gared? Well, other than Gared being in too much shock to continue on his quest. Perhaps those were his motives.

Or perhaps Telltale just wanted a bigger reveal.

Written by Me and @blakegamingpage

#telltale's game of thrones #game of thrones #ttgot #gared tuttle #house forrester #ironrath #long post #hehe voice commanded undead soldiers ;)#meta

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