ok i have a bone (hehe) to pick with studio bones
why the FUCK did they get rid of his backstory. no wonder half of this fandom cant fucking characterise him right. like if you only watched the anime there was basically none of this it just went desert (vague, implied) to fyodor. none of the fact that he was abused and manipulated by people over and over again for his ability.
like no wonder people think hes just a silly anxious little guy (he is, but yall know the kind of people im talking about). theres none of the context!!! bones just yanked all of the context out and hes just some guy whos really attached to the casino for some reason, with none of the context of the horrible, horrible things he went through and the constant alienation and treatment as subhuman. of course hes so desperate for a home that he'll do anything and kill and endanger anyone despite clearly being someone who doesn't like murder, he thinks this is his only shot of having that.
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Isabel Lovelace My Absolute Beloved
Lovelace is one of my favorite examples of one of my favorite kinds of characters, which is: woman who the world is trying so hard to kill and emerges beat up and spitting out teeth and still going.
(Relatedly, Eva Olivia Moreno is one of the few White Vault characters I really loved and it's on the strength of the joy I felt when i realized that not only had Eva NOT died when a rockslide separated her from the team, but instead dragged herself three days over the mountains, alone, covered in mud and blood and bruises, WITH ALL THE TEAM'S DATA DRIVES, to let the world know what was going on and demand rescue for the others. LOVE HER. Alessandra "Cockroach" Strong of the Penumbra Podcast ALSO falls into this category and I would've loved to see more of her)
Interestingly, I think Lovelace plays a similar role in-universe for Eiffel and Minkowski, in that they first encounter her as a 'character' in old audio logs whose survival they are rooting for at a remove -- when Eiffel and Minkowski listen to her logs but it's unclear whether she made it off the station, Eiffel shushes Minkowski's skepticism and says "let me have my badass space commando chick!!" In the absence of conclusive evidence he clings to the idea that she survived, for what i suspect are two reasons: (1) it means it's possible to survive and gives him and Minkowski a sliver of hope, and (2) it's not fair for her to die after trying so hard to save herself and her crew, and if she survived he can believe that there's some fairness in the universe.
After Kepler shoots Lovelace, Minkowski tells an imagined Lovelace how badly she wanted to get Lovelace home because she wanted to believe that she could go home, which feels like an echo of Eiffel's earlier sentiment--obviously by now Minkowski knows and cares about Lovelace as a person, but she's also a symbol of the ultimate survivor, who will do whatever it takes to get home. If Lovelace, who fought harder and longer, with more skill and fewer limits than Minkowski finds herself capable of, and still didn't survive, what chance is there for Minkowski and her crew?
WHICH MAKES IT SO FUCKING SATISFYING WHEN LOVELACE LIVES AGAIN.
I need you all to know--Lovelace was "dead" for, what, an episode??--in that time my then-roommate and I put up a SHRINE to her memory. She was too cool and tragic and extreme and funny and hot to die!!!
I'm very glad the universe and Gabriel Urbina agreed.
It's not only satisfying because I'm obsessed with her and wanted her back (which I admit freely). It's a riveting development in the story of the unkillable Captain Lovelace where we finally see that she CAN'T be killed because she's already dead. Functionally she's a ghost in the story, haunting the Hephaestus until she finishes her unfinished business, and there's a delightful sheen of destiny to her arc where I was like oh fuck they've already done their worst to her and she's still going. She's going to win this. I don't know what it'll cost her, this could still be a tragedy, but she's GOING to succeed.
What does this mean for the rest of the original crew looking to her as a symbol? Eiffel, Minkowski and Hera do survive, like Lovelace. It is possible. But it costs them a lot. Weeks after Lovelace dies, resurrects, and has the day-ruining revelation that she's actually the alien clone of the dead woman she thought she was haha, she talks about the discomforting effort she makes to be the real Lovelace, not the person that Goddard turned her into. I think once they return to Earth the rest of the crew will struggle in similar ways. Minkowski need to believe that Lovelace could come home, and she did. But none of them could be the same as they were before.
Now, obviously the extremes Lovelace had to go to in pursuit of survival and justice were difficult and upsetting for her. But they were also hot!! SO let's wrap this up with some of the most iconic Lovelace moments according to me:
1. The "run and hide" monologue Eiffel and Minkowski find - HOT. sorry i know this comes on the heels of her describing the harrowing tragedy of her crew members' deaths but like
that's hot!!! go girl, kill em all!!!
2. THE DEAD MAN'S SWITCH. she said im going big AND going home, through the power of insane resourcefulness and this nuclear bomb i made
3. "variations on a theme" is suuuch a good minisode
4. disabling the airlock during the clone jacobi situation without telling anyone
5. NAPALM
6a. broadly, the hostage situation during the coup, where she goads kepler into focusing on her instead of eiffel
6b. SPECIFICALLY the part of the hostage situation where she gets the show's one "fuck"
7. alien possession lovelace!!!! i know it wasn't quite her melting kepler's hand off but god it's a fun scene
8. time loop lovelace. i love a good time loop and the contrast between her yelling and goading and shooting things in the last argument but also being, like, pretty chill and pragmatic about it--this is just her method of causing enough trouble to break the loop--is fun
9. hera's and her intersecting journeys re: what it means to be a person
10. distracting cutter so minkowski can stab him with the harpoon!!!!!!
in conclusion: WHAT A CHARACTER
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