#could be any version of her

[cinammonelles]

I want to talk about this page in particular because the implications here are so riveting.

Lavi is currently 19. Allen is believed to be 16.

Which means that either

The Bookmen are lying

Bookman Jr. did die then and Allen either didn't age the first few years or his age got fucked up multiple times before he met Mana

The first seems highly improbable at this point tbh. If the Bookmen were planning to make Allen take the poison to make him remember his past then lying about when Past!Junior (presumably) died seems counterintuitive and would only make Allen mistrust them more once he was in full possession of his memories.

It doesn't seem like Allen de-aged to an infant. He says his earliest memories are from when he was in the circus. Even if he did age back to an infant, he would've needed caretakers and nothing in the story suggests he had any.

(Note how little Allen doesn't have his Innocence in the last panel. What the fuck does this mean Hoshino.)

Allen looks perhaps 4-5 in both of these panels. If Past!Junior died over 19 years ago and Allen aged linearly since then, then he would have to be 23+ by now. Even considering the possibility that he aged back to an infant, he he should be 19+ by now and he looks barely over 17.

We can assume that he must've aged in a somewhat even fashion once he joined the circus because otherwise the performers would've commented on it at some point of time.

What happened in the years between Junior dying and little Allen getting into the circus? Was he in a child's body till he acquired his Innocence? How did he even acquire his Innocence in the first place?

There's also a final possibility that came to me while I was writing this post— Lavi was born while Past!Junior was still alive. He was born with the 'mark' because Past!Junior was no longer fit to be a Junior. I genuinely have no idea how Hoshino will explain this. Will it be some sort of corruption? Memory loss? Chronic illness?

All of them seem equally unlikely options at this point. But so did the possibility of Allen and Bookman Jr. being different people before this chapter :)

Either ways, this was a very intriguing chapter and I'm looking forward to whatever Hoshino has in store for us.

[joansblondells]

GRACE VAN DIEN attends QTCinderella's Gala for Good

[sunnyside-sunset]

parrotduo as orpheus and eurydice but the version where orpheus gets out and is so excited they made it that he turns around full of joy forgetting that eurydice is half a step behind him

“to love is to look” AUUUGHHHH

[lokh]

WAIT who's the dunmeshi human traffickers?? Someone in the canaries?

its otta!

(from the adventurer's bible)

again ive pointed out that this could mean literally anything as it was never extrapolated on but. just some food for thought

[black-and-yellow]

OJ2 my beloved/hated

[weather-cluddy]

Man, today's question really reminded of how little interest Shidou seems to have in Amane as a person. He says he's frustrated that he doesn't have the time to "do something" about her, but even when she approached him, he didn't even try to reason with her or comfort her.

She tries to warn him that he's committing an unforgivable sin that will damn everybody, he's just like "Now, what could you be talking abooout? Anyways, just stop worrying about it and help me, okay?". And when she insists, his reply is "Ok, wow, you're so spoiled. Your parents must've been real soft on you until now, but that's not gonna fly with me, alright? I'm a responsible adult, I'm going to ignore you no matter how much of a brat you are"

He just dismissed Amane's very obvious mental breakdown as a mere temper tantrum, presuming that Amane doesn't truly care about anything she's espousing and that she's just trying to test boundaries. May I also point out how Shidou makes zero mention of Amane in his voice drama, either as a threat or as somebody who, like Fuuta and Mahiru, is in a precarious mental state?

And that casts a really different light on what "having the other adults deal with Amane" is supposed to mean. Is it really about making her more able to cope with the situation? Or just getting her out of the way? If it's about helping her, why does it matter so much that the adults do it?

Say, Muu and Haruka are in the best physical and mental shape out of everybody, and they have plenty of free time. Since Haruka says they're "sticking close" to Shidou, why doesn't he take a moment to suggest they should try to spend a little time with her, make her feel a bit better? Even if they can't convince her to change her mind, it'd at least useful to know in more detail what she's planning, right? After all, Shidou is willing to put his utmost ideal (dying to atone for his sins) on hold for the sake of the injured prisoners. Surely he must be very concerned about anything that could threaten their care, right?

Even if you take is as meaning "Well, the adults have the duty to care for the younger ones, so everyone under eighteen is exempt for responsibility", it's kind of really weird to put all the responsibility on three people having their own mental and physical breakdowns (Mahiru, Mikoto and Fuuta), one guy who said re:Amane that "we can't worry about that now" and "We'll just wait until the situation changes" last time Shidou spoke to him, and who's carrying the weight of being the only line of defense against Kotoko (Kazui) and one woman who's already taking mental care of Mahiru and also doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with anyone else (Yuno). Does a few years of age really give you that much more capability, such that it outweighs everything else going on?

So the fact that Shidou takes the trouble of specifying that an adult ought to help Amane really sounds like he's, at best, blinded by ideology. Only adults can help Amane because only adults are capable of taking meaningful action on anything, and only they have real ideological commitments that can beat a child's silly whims. At worst, Shidou is annoyed that Amane is threatening his worldview of "adults act, children obey", so he wants somebody to step in and bring her back into line. Of course, that person has to be an adult if they're to truly reinforce his perspective instead of opening a different kind of hole into it.

And this is hardly the first time he dismisses a child's thoughts on the basis of their age. In Molech, when Es tells him to treat them with respect as the warden, Shidou's answer is essentially "But we DO have a big age difference, so everything else is irrelevant. Let me pat your head to show how much I pity you, total stranger who's already annoyed at me for being condescending". At this point, either Shidou is being deliberately obnoxious or he's so thoroughly drunk his own kool-aid that it doesn't even register on the shallowest level when a kid tells him not to do something. Kids just go agoo-goo until they hit eighteen, yeah? No need to listen to their babbling.

And it's not just Shidou treating Es as both warden and child, he doesn't seem to have any respect for their ability to form their own opinion as a warden either. He literally goes "Hey, why go through the trouble of actually looking at evidence? Just take me at my word, way easier and faster". Even though by this point it's also obvious how much pride Es takes on being the guard and carrying out Milgram's mission, and that they don't necessarily trust Shidou. Again, either mockery or a frightful failure of basic pattern-recognition when the pattern doesn't match what Shidou expects from a child.

And to tie this back to Shidou's "my heart goes out to you" comment, sure, he's so concerned about any mental toll being the warden might take on Es… But he's still insisting on being murdered by them. Why? Surely Shidou of all people would know that murder can be hard on the killer. And if he wanted to die so badly, surely he can wait until Milgram is over and kill himself then, right? No need to make it Es' responsibility.

One of his last lines in the VD is "I feel sorry that you had to be given this role. And, I truly apologise for being so insistent about sentencing me to death as well… But, you’re perfect. You’ll give me the ending I’m most suited for." So apparently the thing is that being murdered by a child, specifically, would be very satisfying to Shidou, and Es' pain is secondary to that.

Kinda undermines all that talk about how tragic the situation is, doesn't it? In one of the app conversations, we see him being overwhelmed by sadness while grading Amane's homework, and he says "If everything about MILGRAM is true… why did a child like you have to become a murderer? Just imagining what sort of circumstances must have led to that, it makes me so sad…". But apparently his sadness isn't so strong that it'll stop him from setting up that sort of circumstances.

The only way this makes sense to me if it's he's subsumed Es' choices into his own so utterly that he can't imagine anybody, not even Es, could possibly hold them responsible if they did kill Shidou. It was simply suicide with Es acting as a tool for it, no more guilty than a bullet. I'm sure you can see how utterly dismissive this is of Es' autonomy.

TL;DR: I'm sure Shidou loves the idea of children, but so far he's been severely lacking in empathy for actual children when they deviate from his concept of how they ought to be or when their wellbeing comes in conflict with his ideals.

[sharkneto]

any particular thoughts on how number would react to delores?

Do I! Do I!

The long and short of it is that Number would fucking hate Delores. She represents too much about how bad things could have been for him and begs for self reflection, which he is not going to do.

She's an immediate shorthand to show how desperate and insane Five got living alone in the apocalypse, with the added level of that Number is also Five. Number is also confident and comfortable in his identity as aroace - been there, tried it, didn't like it, he's good to go. And now here's this alternate version of himself that not only went so far off the deep end that he made up a person to love, but he then made that fake person his wife.

We know the nuance of Five and Delores (at least through my headcanon - Five was 13 when he landed in the apocalypse and had very limited examples and vocabulary for what adult relationships are and mean to build his Person with), but Number absolutely is not going to sit down and listen. He's out, it's too close and too real and makes how close he was to being Five too much. Delores' introduction to us in the show was a real What The Fuck; her introduction to Number would be a true mindfuck. She's where he's drawing his line for Too Far.

[aardvaark]

im so glad that we never get a clear picture of sophie’s background in leverage & i hope we never do. however i also really like making up various, often conflicting backstories for her in my head. perhaps they’re all backstories for an alias of hers, ones she laid to rest back in season two.

[batfamhyperfixation]

Damian: I could never bare that horrible music, I have never listened to pop in my life, mother would only allow refined pieces of classical music be played for me

Jason: *flashback to the time when he accidentally walked in at Damian's bedtime, where Damian was in his crib excitedly toddler/baby dancing and making cooing noises as Talia and a whole group of assassin backup singers were preforming Rockabye by Clean Bandit (and Ra doing the Sean Paul rap part)*

Jason: *snorts* sure buddy

[gilliontidestriderchampionoftheu]

smh my head edyn isnt the navys chosen one bcus the navy comms guy who gill overhears says 'fish girl contact' and 'chosen one' as if theyre two different people. but he does imply that the navys chosen one is also from the undersea? because he says "maybe youre all freaks" to gillion while being interrogated. so who the fuck IS it???

[sandinthepipes]

Yes, redemption arcs are good, but have you ever heard of corruption arcs?

[life-winners-liveblog]

Okay, DL!Scott, here comes the promised rant. (p.s., Scar, if you're feeling nice, do you think your Watcher powers could override Scott? I feel like Pearl might need to hear at least some of this)

OKAY!

Pearl didn't mean to leave Scott. She was genuinely looking, and ran into almost nobody. She went to the nether with Martyn because he was the only person she could find, and they wanted to find some stuff for their soulmates. MARTYN was the one running into danger, while Pearl tried to play it as safe as you can in the Nether. Her main focus was getting mushrooms so they could heal any damage. Whenever she did take damage she instantly started shoving food in her mouth while yelling sorry to the air, because even though she knew that her unknown soulmate couldn't hear her, she was still so genuinely sorry. Martyn started pushing to go into a bastion, and she was the one to point out that maybe that wasn't a smart idea. When she and Martyn came back to the overworld, she was excited for like .2 seconds, because while they were angry and Martyn she was happy! Because Cleo and Scott and her were together again! And then it dawned on her that they were leaving her too. When, while I'm sure it looked different from Scott's pov, from her perspective her only crime was going with Martyn, let me reiterate the only other person she could find.

And then Martyn turns around and says "I'm breaking up with you too." And then Ren banishes her from Box calling her a demoness. And then Tilly, the only living thing on that server that had showed her any kindness, died in front of her eyes. Of course she went mad. She wasn't just the crazy ex girlfriend, she was a hurt and lonely and grieving girl who had just watched the only person she cared about die.

And you have the nerve to call her the ignorant one? She is the one that's in the wrong here?

.

You're the least likable version of Scott, you know that? You call the others, who are all much better fighters than you according to the statistics, weak because they were attached. Yeah, maybe you weren't married, maybe you didn't have quite the same relationship as the three G's, maybe you didn't have an ally that you allowed to kill you because you were going to die anyways and if anyone is going to get your time it's them. But you did have Cleo. Don't act like you're above attachments. In the one game where you were supposed to have partners, the single game where the mechanic was designed so that nobody would end up alone, you pushed Pearl away. Martyn and Cleo became on at least decent terms towards the end, you and Pearl did not. No matter how much Pearl wanted to. You went against all of that. And still you think that you are somehow better than the others?? No wonder the Watchers hate you.

You're a b*tch, DL!Scott. I hope you know that

-Luna

(wow that was impressive)

[morninkim]

In 1997, Metropolis got its own superhero, the first costumed crime fighter in decades, a flying man who would call himself Superman.

Later that same year, the Batman of Gotham first appeared, his methods much more brutal than the Man of Steel’s chipper and friendly demeanour.

A year later, in 1998, Diana of Themiscyra, the Wonder Woman, returned to Man’s World after nearly a century away, having aided the allies in the first World War.

Though the three were from very different worlds, their activities and efforts to make the planet better would usher in what many would call the Silver Age of Heroes!

[lesbian-space-fish]

Here's my finished Starfire and Nightwing dolls! For Starfire, I coated her in a light layer of gold glitter paint and did her eyes in glittery green, then I sewed her a whole costume :D. For Nightwing, I painted over the light aqua(?) accents in a deeper, prettier blue and then added fingerstripes and blue soles to his boots and coated him in satin mod podge to look less plastic-y and more supersuit-y.

[ariesbilly]

girls when it doesnt matter what the morgan siblings do or choose, theyre whats wrong, theyre broken

[july-19th-club]

love an ending that is 'happy' in that a desirable outcome is produced, but made complicated by the fact that the protagonist has given up something integral to themself in order to make it so. it's sort of uncool in some circles to admit you LIKE when characters give up something really cool for something pretty basic, but it's all about context and quality of storytelling, right? that sort of conviction - this is a part of my personality that i am permanently renouncing access to, and it's my choice, and i'm going to miss it, but i'm not going to regret it - that's compelling. ending in which a character who loves nothing more than the rush of finding the answer to a question is handed, one day, a puzzle they just don't want to solve. and that part of their life is over, but it's not a bad thing. maybe the answer doesn't need to be known. maybe not knowing it opens you up to a creative mindset you never had before. character who gains some kind of special power chooses to give it up not because they no longer love the ability, not because it hasn't improved their life, but because this thing they love comes with costs, is getting in the way of a life someone they love or loved and lost would want them to live. i'm glad it turned out this way. i miss the missing thing with all my heart. i would let go of it again if i was asked to choose.