#going down plot point by plot point

[aesteries]

sweetling's last chapter is getting heavy. . . this mf is already on 5k and i'm not even reaching the middle yet. i'm gonna need to cut things out.

[peace-hunter]

tfone au where OP is created as the last of the primes but way after them, a sparkling born at what were thought to be the last days of the war against the quintessons, the beginning of a new generation of peace after eons of war. a child meant to be loved and raised knowing nothing of war nor sacrifice.

he's kept mostly out of the spotlight by his siblings, who don't wish to expose him to everyone's optics so young, and want to wait until the war is done and over to properly introduce him to their people.

except of course the primes are betrayed and murdered by sentinel, the war is lost and everyone who knows and cared for the truth is either banished or outright killed in order to suppress it.

and the high guard, the ones the primes trusted the most, the ones that were supposed to protect them, the ones who failed in their most important duty, have to make a choice. to take the last prime, their last hope, with them to the surface, a hostile environment where there's little to no supplies and where they'll be hunted down by both sentinel and the quintessons as the biggest threat to their regimen.

or hide him in plain sight. place him where sentinel won't think to look for him. one more sparkling among many. and hope it will be enough to keep him alive. pray to primus that he'll protect his last child long enough for them to come back for him when it's safer (even if most of them have already lost their faith on him when he allowed the rest of his children to be massacred like that)

they almost lose their resolve when they realize they will have to take the little one's cog away in order to make him blend in with the rest of the newborns (and oh do they burn with murderous intent when they see what sentinel has done to their people but it's not the time yet-) but in the end they decide an impaired little prime is better than a dead one.

and so in the chaos of thirteen dead primes and a sudden energon crisis, a little sparkling who very few mechs really knew about and even fewer had seen completely vanishes. and in the depths of iacon a mech in charge of a new batch of newborns scratches their helm in confusion as they realize they must have miscounted the first time.

optimus prime is quietly erased from any official records by sentinel, written off as dead when they find a sparkling's frame mangled beyond recognition after an attack on the base of those rebels that insist on being a thorn on his side. killing the sparkling hadn't been precisely in his plans, he probably could've found some use for it after all, but he's not particularly upset about it either.

and orion pax grows up with an ache on his spark that tells him he's missing something far more important than a t-cog and dreams of gentle and loving hands, cradling him against the frames of mechs he cannot recall the faces of.

[sunderwight]

If Tianxi were T4T they'd both have survived.

Especially if the Old Palace Master didn't know about it (and why would he? I don't think Su Xiyan would tell him and TLJ definitely wouldn't). Somehow word gets around that the demon realms are celebrating because Tianlang Jun is going to have a child. OPM, already aware that Su Xiyan has shacked up with him (and furious about it), takes this to mean that Xiyan is pregnant and does his usual thing of locking her up and forcing an abortive on her while plotting to ambush and trap TLJ.

Except of course, Su Xiyan isn't pregnant enough for the abortive to do more than make her somewhat ill, and Tianlang Jun is too busy giving birth to fall for an ambush. Su Xiyan escapes, Tianlang Jun safely delivers Binghe, and they all ride off into the sunset with Zhuzhi Lang and threats of declaring open war if the other sects ally with Huan Hua Palace to try and make any kind of move against them again.

The old palace master never does figure out why his plan didn't work.

[thornescratch]

“Yeah, [Alex Ovechkin] texted me earlier in the day and just asked if I wanted to get sushi once they landed,” Leonard said to the Capitals’ Mike Vogel.

Though, Leonard admitted the message came at a chaotic time.

“I read [the text] in the (Conte Arena) locker room,” Leonard noted, the actual location where he put pen to paper on his new deal. “All the guys were in there. It was probably five to 10 minutes before I actually signed.”

Leonard’s Eagles teammates urged caution when replying to the text, as it came from an unknown number with the sender purporting themselves to be Alex Ovechkin — one of the hockey’s greatest players who is five goals away from breaking the NHL goals record. Perhaps it could be a scam or an early April Fools’ joke.

“They were like, ‘What? I don’t know if you should respond to that,'” Leonard said. “I was like, ‘I kinda have to.’ It was pretty cool.”

Once Leonard was done making his NHL dream a reality, he made the 15-minute drive to meet the Capitals at a Boston-area sushi bar, trading stories and rubbing shoulders with players from the Eastern Conference’s best team.

“Just hanging out with those guys, it was pretty cool,” Leonard said.

But eating raw fish wasn’t all that was on the menu.

“Ovi wanted to see where I went to school, so (we) went there for probably 30 minutes to an hour, just to show him, and he loved it,” Leonard said.

You are Ryan Leonard. You have just been painfully eliminated from your tournament by the same team that eliminated you last time. Some unidentified number claiming to be Alex Ovechkin hits your phone and wants to take you out for sushi. All of your bros see this. You drive out to the sushi bar and it IS Alex Ovechkin. You and your bros eat sushi with him and HIS bros. Now Alex Ovechkin wants you to show him around YOUR school. You take him and the rest of the team to a bar where they drink and sing Bandz A Make Her Dance, and presumably enact some kind of buddy hijinks college comedy film scenario.

You're also supposed to start your first NHL game the next day.

[insomnova]

playing dragon age veilguard is going to be SO fucking funny because me, the person, the player, the real life human being HATES solas but my "canon" inquisitor considered him a confidant and friend and sometimes even a mentor figure. so while my inquisitor is like "maybe i can still convince him... maybe it doesn't need to end in bloodshed" i'm hovering behind him like

[clumsypuppy]

i cant go back to that life man

[clowningcrows]

hot take i guess but when i watch the scene with billy and agatha where she finds out for sure he’s billy maximoff and starts tearing up, i perceive it as being bc she’s still a bit (read: significantly) heartbroken that he isn’t nicky. he isn’t hers. sure, she might’ve known from the beginning to some degree that he was wanda’s, but she doesn’t know for sure. we see that every time she panics because he’s hurt. we see that in the way she refused to leave his side when he was asleep. we see that when rio herself has to shake agatha out of it, saying, “agatha… that boy isn’t yours.” like YES logically i think she knew he wasn’t nicky, that he couldn’t be but we CAN see how painfully, hopelessly desperate agatha is to think that maybe he could be. so in my mind, she sees billy maximoff standing in front of her, finally being met with indisputable proof that he could not possibly be her lost son. how could she not tear up at that?

[lyxchen]

That moment when you kinda have plot armor but only really because the person who is in-universe running the plot is obsessed with you and would rather see you live through hell than have you killed <3

[wackywatchdotcom]

got reminded of it ... but i think about the symbolism of jax' model a lot bc i think its subtle!!! but its there

and i think the crux of it is that jax' model is very much a prey animal, something that contradicts his general tendency for reckless, mean bullshit. there could be something there about him having front-facing eyes too. and iirc gooseworx said the farm was a lie which i do take into account but also i think it helps w his generally very 'natural' or real-world-nature design components and ideas being evoked. he has clothes and these clothes are very minimal and hes a real animal fairly closely associated with farming or hunting and is very humanlike and his pocket just Has Mulch in it. even if the farm isnt real theres definitely something his design is evoking here

that and an idea ive thought of is that rabbits are VERY much animals that operate on instinct. they do a lot of things based on an immediate need, typically for survival, at least in the wild. and i dont know if id describe jax as fearful (some could argue he is in his own way, which i dont disagree with, but i think the implications can be a bit loaded- but theres many ways a person can be fearful) but he definitely operates on what he immediately wants. he wants to have fun. so he DOES. it doesnt matter what that entails. he wants control, so he takes it out on the others. it doesnt matter what that entails. etc etc. hes also running from something and i think the image of a rabbit fits that well

i think its deliberate that jax is the only design that actually revolves around an animal that we see. theres dobby and that worm on a string in the back but of the main cast its ALL humans or items, jax is the only one whos an animal (and probably still intended to be toy-like, but none of the others have distinct animals theyre meant to be). and it feels purposeful in a way i genuinely think about a lot. i cant place what its implying for certain because i genuinely dont think we have enough information on jax to fully understand his thought processes, but it does make him very connected to the real world, but in a distant way

[sonknuxadow]

i genuinely dont get how so many people are uncritically excited for The Movie and have no issue with anything going on here i feel like im losing my mind a little bit . the trailers did not look good to me at all is everyone excited about it posting from an alternate dimension or something what are people seeing in this movie that im not .

[angelsdean]

don't know how people multi-fandom. dipped my toe into another one and immediately backed out bc everyone there was insufferable.

[lambda-core]

I am way too tired/jetlagged to make this post right now, but the reason Armada Starscream is so specifically well done to me actually isn't just the way he's got more depth than just wanting to take over Megatron. It's the way he falls back on this image he has of himself as someone who is solely focused on Megatron. And he is obsessed with Megatron, but the disconnect between Starscream and his image of himself is what gives him actual depth.

The reason this is so cool to me is like, that self-image--that he is single-mindedly obsessed with Megatron and will sacrifice everything else for that goal, no matter who gets hurt--is pretty close to what every other Starscream is. (The selfishness you associate with Starscream is a little more subtle, but it's there in the "no matter who gets hurt" clause imo.)

So if you go into this as a Transformers fan, you're already expecting Starscream to betray Megatron and try to best him and rule the Decepticons. But so does Starscream, even when he's demonstrably proven to both his peers and the audience that he's more than that. It's almost like his past incarnations--or the audience's expectation of him--haunt him. It turns his own internal man-versus-self conflict into this really cool man-versus-narrative conflict.

And what's crazy about this is, through the last moments of this arc, Starscream does grow beyond the narrative we'd expect from other Starscreams! But he never admits that to himself, because it's easier for him to cling to the idea that he's laser-focused on his hatred of Megatron. Every time he helps the minicons--every time he helps the humans--even in his last words, he LIES to himself and everyone around him that everything he did was always about Megatron. Because it's easier to simplify himself than to grasp that he might be a complex character. Because he's a person and he has all the messy conflicts that come with that. He falls back on the same ideas every single other Starscream did, and THAT is his undoing. Not that he is self-centered because he's Starscream. Not that he is obsessed with Megatron because he's Starscream. That he THINKS he is all of those things and he will not LET himself be anything else.

I would argue that that's a bigger theme in Armada, as well. Optimus and Megatron more or less spend their final fight coming to terms with their story roles in Transformers. I really feel like if you sneezed on them, they would realize they do this in every universe and in every timeline. Starscream's is the most interesting example to me, though, because he's such a departure from other versions of Starscream; hell, he acts (and looks, lol) a lot more like some incarnations of Thundercracker. But he's still got classic Starscream in him in this roundabout meta reference. He's like an homage to his namesake. It's so cool! And it works perfectly with the story he's a part of.

[toast-in-a-cowboy-hat]

I like to think that Felix looks exactly like his dad did, there's just so much potential there, from current time on into the future like. Imagine you're a child, a young teen, your dad is your idol, the Most Important Person in the World to you, you meet some of his friends, relatives, and they look at you and they go "Oh, you look just like your dad did at your age!"

And you're thrilled, because of course you are, you look up to your dad so much, you wanna be exactly like him, and now people are telling you that you even look the same as he did, it's great!

Then he dies.

And now, you see those same friends and relatives and they look at you and there's pain there now and they say "You look just like your dad did when he was alive when he was your age."

And they're trying to be nice, and there is comfort to that, he's always with you in that way, but it also means you can never get away from it, no matter where you go, it's always there.

You try to go out with friends, to relax, to try to forget about everything for a little bit, and someone comes up and "Oh, you look just like your dad did."

You go away to college, you come back for holidays, "Oh, Felix, good to see you, its been a while! How are you enjoying school, god, you look just like your dad did back when he was in college..."

You move away, to an entirely different country, no one who knew your dad is here, there's no one to comment on the similarities. One day, you catch sight of someone and, for a few moments, you're very confused, because 'Huh? Why is your dad here? What's going o—Oh.'

That's you. It was just a reflection.

Turns out there is one person here who knew your dad.

Time goes on, one day you're back home for a visit, someone sees you and says "Hey, wow, you look so much like your dad did."

...

So much.

Only so much.

Because you don't look just like your dad did anymore.

You can't.

He never got to this age.

Now they say "You look so much like your dad did" and all you can do is wonder.

Would you have looked just like him?

Would it have still been exact? Would your dad have looked like this? Would his hair have gone grey at the same time, would he have gotten the same wrinkles in the same place at the same time, would he have had the same aches and pains, would he—

It doesn't matter.

He didn't.

He never will.

And you'll never look just like your dad again.

[camcorderrevival]

it's crazy how much elevenamy baby would fix series six

[lucabyte]

transfem loop + siffrin... you agree

i does agree.... i does in fact ... write a 7k word essay on the subject..... if you would like to perhaps click that link and read it if you were not already aware...... kisses u on the forehead......... sorry its that long but i had to cover all of my bases you know how it is with textual analysis when you're trying to draw a distinction between "headcanon" and "reading of the text" because those are different things.... to meeeeeeee.......

[roguelioness]

well the DA ama just reinforces my belief that all of veilguard is the equivalent of a magic fever dream after solas brought down the veil and rook + inky are still out there trying to find him