#he would haw found a way to justify it to himself

[acequinz]

Hey do you think pre-sunshot LXC was so supportive of LWJ getting along with WWX, so he would have at least one friend who isn't outright intimidated by him because he didn't want LWJ to be as lonely as he was?

Because while LWJ was also an heir, it was very much fixed that LXC would be the next sect leader, so obviously they beat down on him harsher than they would LWJ.

Every time we see LXC pre-sunshot is either him with LQR or on a night hunt or preparing for some sect related things and unlike LWJ who is comfortable by himself he clearly does not exactly love it.

Of course he's still gonna do it because of responsibility but that doesn't mean LWJ has to suffer the same loneliness he does.

So what I am thinking it pre-sunshot LXC doing the typical eldest sibling stuck in a strict family not wanting his younger sibling to have to put up with the same frustrations and giving him a way out.

Like yes, go on befriend that little chaotic boy who is actually very talented and adept and can hold his ground in front of you. You know you finally met someone who is your match so don't be afraid to get close, you have the option so don't waste it.

And then do you think LXC felt like he met his own match when he met Meng Yao on the run? Not just because he saved him but because they could understand each other's defense mechanisms where they both politely smile even when they want to stab people.

[fluffyhawks]

unravel

“Mt. La-”

“Holy shit,  are you watching the news?”  No honorifics, no ‘senpai’, no small talk.  Alarm bells started to go off in Kamui’s head.

“No- didn��t I tell you I was-”

“Turn it on, right now.”   The shaky note in Mt. Lady’s voice froze him in his tracks.

Kamui Woods was having a nice day until Mt. Lady called to tell him hero society was crashing down around them. Again.

Team Edgeshot + Best Jeanist watch the news coverage on Endeavor and Hawks' battle with High-End.

my first real contribution to the bnha fandom :,)

(Gen, G, fic beneath the cut)

Kamui took a deep, cleansing breath of the forest air.  He had only been walking down the path for a few minutes, but just being surrounded by forest, seeing trees instead of the familiar skyline of his precinct, was soothing.  Another half-mile in, and he would be out of cell service, and away from the reach of the world.  He could already feel the weight of the past weeks lifting from his shoulders.

Until his phone began to buzz.

He almost ignored it.  The responsibilities of his new ranking and unstable times made stints in the wild more and more difficult to justify, more and more irresponsible.  Because of that, the time he spent reconnecting with the forest that had been his only real home for so long had been whittled down to once a week, and then once a month, and currently was sitting at ‘the rare moments when nothing was in the process of collapsing and nothing was threatening to’.  This was a rare escape.

But it might be Edgeshot.  He was a man of few words, but when he had something to say, it was usually important.  And despite their team-up, Kamui couldn’t shake the lingering feeling he had failed Edgeshot- failed everyone, really- when he had let the League of Villains slip through his lacquered prison.

He pulled out his phone, and was met by a familiar incandescent smile plastered across his screen.  Mt. Lady had set her own contact image- insisted on it- when they had teamed up, so he had to endure her marketing whenever she called him.  Which was often.

He almost ignored it, on principle, but he couldn’t quite ignore the lingering tweek of his conscience.

“Mt. La-”

“Holy shit,  are you watching the news?”  No honorifics, no ‘senpai’, no small talk.  Alarm bells started to go off in Kamui’s head.

“No- didn’t I tell you I was-”

“Turn it on, right now.”   The shaky note in Mt. Lady’s voice froze him in his tracks.  He’d never heard her so serious before, not even after Kamino.  He turned back towards the edges of the forest and started walking.  Mt. Lady could be excitable, self-centered, and vain, but she was no coward.

As he walked, he heard Mt. Lady make a little exclamation of horror on the other side of the phone.  “What is it?  What’s happening?” he asked, fumbling with the news app on his phone.  Even after years of living in civilization, he still had a bit of trouble with technology.

“Those… those Nomu things… from Kamino,” Mt. Lady said, her voice hushed.  “The ones… he… was making…”

“What?”  The dark seed of the fears that had taken root in Kamui’s chest that night in Kamino reared their its head again.  All for One.  In one fell swoop, their society had lost its greatest hero, and Kamui’s convictions about himself and his place in society had been shaken to the core.  Unable to do anything but watch the League of Villains slip from his grasp, unable to secure the kid’s safety, unable to come in time to save Mt. Lady and Jeanist and the others from harm, and helpless in front of the sheer horror of power that was All for One.

“Endeavor… and Hawks…” Mt. Lady said, but the news stream had finally loaded.  Kamui stared in horror as a creature, far more twisted and strange than the horrors they had dredged from All for One’s laboratory, dragged their number one hero through a building.

Suddenly, the woods around him did nothing for his peace of mind.

Mt. Lady’s hands curled around the phone, well-manicured nails scraping against the service as she stared at the television.

It had been shaping up to be an uneventful day, with Kamui out communing with nature and Edgeshot doing… whatever Edgeshot did when he wasn’t on duty.  Alone in their hero office, without any pressing matters on hand, Mt. Lady had been planning to put her feet up, order a pizza, and watch tv until someone called for her.

But as she soon as she flipped on the tv, she was met with a maelstrom of fire and debris.  And two familiar figures in the middle of it, looking much smaller than they had ever seemed in real life.

Instantly, the destruction, and the strange, twisted Nomu wrecking it brought her back to Kamino, lying dazed in the aftermath of the blast that could have killed her.  Would have killed her, if it hadn’t been for Jeanist’s reflexes.

She stared, glued to the television as the two heroes fought the monstrosity.  For a few heart-pounding moments, she might as well have been back in Kamino, with how her chest tightened and the same blinding, crushing dread crashed down on her, pinning her to the couch and rendering her unable to move- again- as the horror unfolded before her eyes.

And then she’d pried herself out of her own ass, checked Endeavor and Hawks’ location- too far away to be of any immediate use- and called Kamui.

“That creature,” he breathed.  “It’s far beyond the capabilities of the Nomus you and the others captured in Kamino.”  

The sound of her teammate’s voice, even if he was just as perturbed as her, calmed Mt. Lady a little.  Forced her to gather herself.  It would be no good to fall apart in front of Kamui; he would tease her ruthlessly for it the next time their rivalry came up.  She pursed her lips.  “Yeah.  Well, I mean, the ones we captured were, like… deactivated?  Or something.  I don’t know.  They were gross, but not any threat.”  A sick feeling crawled up into her throat as she watched the creature fly across the television screen, its flesh rippling strangely with every beat of its arm-like wings, before it opened and poured more, pale, writhing Nomus onto the streets below.  Hawks was a tiny, almost frail figure, darting among them, like a raptor among elephants.  One blow would be all it took.

Kamui exhaled.  “I had hoped this was over.”

“We knew it wasn’t,” Mt. Lady snapped.  “We hardly won, last time.  Don’t tell me you forgot just because you didn’t end up in the hospital.”

And now, without All Might…  She cut the thought off.  That was defeatist talk, not the sort of thing that got a hero into the top ten.  Or even twenty-third place.  All Might was the older generation; she and Kamui were the newbies, smashing onto the scene, undefeatable.  The only people who could get in their way were each other.

… At least, that was how it had been before Kamino.

They were quiet for a few heartbeats, watching the fight unfold.  Watching the press of civilians fleeing the scene, terror written across their features.  It was a far cry from the cheerful spectators of villains fights just a few months back.

“It’s chaos,” Kamui breathed.  

“I’m not sure they can win,” Mt. Lady said.

“If they can’t…”  before Kamui could finish the thought, Mt. Lady heard a beep on his end.  “One moment.  Edgeshot’s calling.  I’m adding him to the call.”

‘Sensei!” Mt. Lady’s voice burst through the phone.  

“Edgeshot-sensei.”  Kamui’s voice followed a moment later, more restrained, but fearful all the same.  “I trust you’ve been following the news.”

Edgeshot leaned back against the rickety hospital chair, exchanging a look with Jeanist.  Honestly, much like Kamui, on his days off he preferred solitude, and to be as cut off from the outside world as possible; it was one of the reasons he guarded his civilian identity so closely.  Even now, visiting another hero who he trusted and considered a friend, he was wrapped from head to toe in concealing garments.  If he hadn’t been paying a visit to Best Jeanist, who probably found it physically painful to not have his hand on the pulse of the country, he might not have heard the news nearly so fast.

“Of course,” he said, switching the phone to speaker so Jeanist could hear his team as well.  The two of them turned back to the television in the far wall, watching the Nomu wreck havoc on Hawk’s city.

“There’s no way we could help them?  No one has a quirk that could get us there?” Mt. Lady said.  

“None I can think of,” Edgeshot said, exchanging a look with Jeanist.   Recovery Girl had done her best- without her, Jeanist would have almost certainly have died- but after three months convalescence, Edgeshot’s friend was still far from mended from the injuries he had sustained at Kamino.  It would be a while yet before he would be fit to step back onto the stage.  

Jeanist’s eyes narrowed, his long fingers clenching into frustrated fists over the hospital sheets.  Edgeshot sympathized; having to sit on the sidelines and watch the cracks in the foundations of their society spread, effectively helpless, couldn’t have been easy.

Well, now they were both in that position.  Again.  The spector of All Might’s fight with All for One rose in Edgeshot’s mind.

On the screen, a maelstrom of fire exploded from Endeavor.  For a moment, hope leapt into Edgeshot’s throat as the Nomu’s flesh was incinerated in the blast.

“Yes, Endeavor!” Mt. Lady called, laughing with relief.

Her laughter died a moment later, when the little dark mass of flesh that had fallen from the Nomu’s form writhed and spread, regenerating into.. Into.. the creature itself, unescathed.

A moment later, blood sprayed outwards as the Nomu struck, and Endeavor fell.

Edgeshot swore.  

Jeanist sat up straighter, leaning forward as if to try to confirm what he was seeing.  After a moment, the news cut away, to more shots of the frantic crowd, fleeing the wreckage.

“The fabric of society is unravelling,” Jeanist said, quietly, leaning back against the headboard of the bed.  His face had gone several shades paler than the unhealthy shade it had already been.

Edgeshot couldn’t disagree.

“Uhm…” Mt. Lady’s voice crackled through the phone again.  “If Endeavor and Hawks bite it, will that make Edgeshot-sensei number one?”

Edgeshot sat up, eyes widening.  He hadn’t even thought about it; he’d been too horrified by the fight to think beyond it.  He didn’t want to think about it.  But… Endeavor was down, and if the Nomu got Hawks, too…

“No, because Best Jeanist is still number three,” Kamui answered.  “I know you don’t like him, but-”

“I like Jeanist!” Mt. Lady protested.  “He saved my life!  I thanked him, and everything!”  

Faintly, Edgeshot realized he’d not made any mention of where he was, who he was with, or the fact he’d put his teammates on speakerphone.  Luckily, Best Jeanist seemed too absorbed by the scene to have any other reaction other than looking grimly amused.

Her tone grew serious.  “But… he’s not in any condition to fill All Might’s shoes.”

“Neither is Endeavor, apparently.”

“Quiet,” Edgeshot snapped, and instantly his teammates shut up.

“They’re right,” Jeanist said softly, still staring at the wreckage onscreen.  “If we loose Endeavor and Hawks so soon after Kamino…”  He shook his head.  “I don’t think either of us could pick up the slack, not even if I was in fighting trim.”  

Edgeshot wanted to argue, but he couldn’t find the words.  Jeanist was right.  They had all felt it, that day in Kamino; their absolute uselessness against a force stronger than anything they had ever imagined.  It had stripped away all their notions of the safety they brought Japan.

Endeavor had been the only man who had even tried to come close to Allmight, and he was lying bleeding out on in the wreckage miles and miles away.

“Look!” Jeanist said suddenly, sitting up and pointing.  “There!”

A flash of fire on the screen.  Edgeshot heard Mt. Lady and Kamui gasp in unison.

“Endeavor!”

He rose like flaming beacon in the sky, aloft on Hawks’ wings.  Burning.

[governmentofficial]

@toprotectandscrve  continued from [x]

           A sudden abrasiveness filled Jasper’s throat, causing him to lurch forward and swallow thickly against his body’s wishes as though fire were charring its way down his esophagus. It wasn’t Mycroft’s fault; his angle of vision made it so he had no idea that Jasper was taking another sip of his served scotch just as the words were spoken. The resulting wince, harsh and sudden, likely had an unintended impression but it was a good couple seconds before Jasper could regain the ability to justify the awkward reaction.

Even then, his struggle to do so was obvious as the words just barely crawled out. “—Sorry, I—not you, the drink—” Two coughs and another moment of recuperation and saliva once again found its function, and he wasted no time in filling the air with nervous hemming and hawing. “Um, last night after our talk?” There had been nothing particularly suggestive in their words over the phone; in fact, it had been a particularly short conversation. “About me? I see, well—” And like that, the man who could likely talk Mycroft to sleep should either of them wish found himself without words, mouth hanging open and eyes blinking.

           He fell back on his instincts: insincere humor. “—I hope I wasn’t too horrifying.”

The reaction was, in all honesty, what Mycroft had expected. It was not a topic that he would usually bring up - he knew that. The problem was, it had lingered in Mycroft’s mind and, well, discussing unusual thoughts was part of being in a relationship, no?

“If I am honest, it rather confused me,” Mycroft admitted. “I don’t usually have the imagination for such fantasies when I am awake, but I suppose the subconscious wants what the subconscious wants.” And, in this situation, it appeared that it wanted Jasper. Was that surprising? Probably not. They had been seeing each other for quite a while now - it was surely inevitable that they would eventually begin craving certain things.

[class-wom]

Our hero committed sexual assault.

There’s no getting around this fact. It happened. We watched it happen. Sydney explicitly says it in the final minutes of the episode: “You drugged me and had sex with me.” It feels important to say it up front, before anything else. I must have started and re-started this review a half-dozen times, and there’s no other way to address David’s act without seeming to minimize the impact of what took place.  There are ways the show can deal with this next season, and there are stories that can be told, but as it turns out, it wasn’t just a comic-book conceit to have the characters imply David might be the villain of this story. David is the villain. And to quote Syd, maybe he always was.

This is upsetting, disturbing stuff, and for the first time since I began watching this weird and often wonderful show, I’m not convinced Legion is capable of telling the story it just waded into. To understand why is to pull at the messy threads of narrative convention. I spoke at length in last week’s review about what has made this such a polarizing season of television. Legion has been shedding viewers, and I think it has a lot to do with the willfully alienating nature of the story. It became positively Brechtian in its refusal to allow the audience a point of identification, or a way to trust the show. Not just in the sense that we couldn’t necessarily trust our own eyes—we’ve known from the start that reality is malleable when it comes to the powers of David Haller and the Shadow King—but in not providing us with protagonists in whom we can believe. We can’t trust David, we can’t really trust anyone, not with delusion creatures roaming free.

Legion stripped away our ability to look to its characters for reassurance, which is a foundational building block of humanism and empathy. One of the reasons the Loudermilks have become so appealing this season is because their guilelessness makes them some of the only people that convey a sense of reliability. I can believe in them—or at least, the show hasn’t given me much reason to actively not believe in them, which is something I can no longer say with much confidence about any other character, really.

A second issue is about the implicit contract between audience and show. When we’re given a protagonist, we plan to follow them on their journey, and we have certain expectations that accompany such a journey, for good or ill. A key expectation is that we will be given entry into a character’s point of view. We need to know who a person is, and if we’re given that, we can follow them anywhere. Good guys like Leslie Knope, antiheroes like Tony Soprano, grouchy bastards like Gregory House, even good-to-bad characters like Walter White—they can lie, cheat, steal, hell, even poison a child in Walter’s case, and as long as we know their motivations, their point of view, and the perspective of those around them, we can go on that journey. We don’t need our characters to be heroes.

But this is Legion, a Marvel superhero show. What has made it consistently fascinating is the way that Noah Hawley and his creative team have repeatedly pushed back against those expectations, not caring that it would alienate people looking for a certain familiar structure in their TV series. Yet when it comes to character, there might be certain rules that work better unbroken. Removing our ability to relate to characters, and stripping away the humanism that undergirds our identification with the people whose lives we’re watching unfold, is a fundamentally avant-garde move, because it severs the basic premise of narrative drama: Namely, that we can understand who this person is and why they do what they do.

If you’re halfway through watching Out Of Africa, you know you’re not going to have a sudden smash cut to a pornographic, throbbing sex scene between Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and another person, because that would violate a basic understanding of the world that’s been established, what a mainstream movie provides, and also how these characters would behave. Similarly, Legion has established that there are many facets to David, but despite the depictions of a malevolent David, or a homeless crazy David, or even the fears of our primary David about the violence he’s capable of inflicting (something that wasn’t even introduced until the last couple of episodes), we had been given a fundamentally good person. Naive, even, in his sincere belief in true love, admirable in his loyalty to his friends, and—above all—steadfast in his refusal to accept evil or unhappiness as the outcome. When Syd brooded over their likely unhappy ending, David was the one to say he believed in a better one. Even when he was torturing Oliver last week, we may not have liked it, but we understood doing something bad to achieve something good. He was trying to save Syd.

Transforming David from a fundamentally decent person with a troubled mind into someone capable of committing sexual assault in the course of a single episode is the needle scratch on the record player. It’s the porn scene in the middle of Out Of Africa. It’s edgy and unpredictable, but that doesn’t make it good. It changes the show on a fundamental level—and more than that, it pulls the rug out from under its viewers, scorning them for thinking they were watching one kind of show when in fact they were watching a very different one. It’s one thing to have a show’s characters lie to us. It’s quite another when a show lies to its audience. 

There’s an argument to be made that these kinds of stories should be told. From the perspective of a show looking to tell difficult tales about difficult people, the decision to have David do this to Syd probably felt like an all-too-accurate and believable version of how these events play out in everyday life, albeit aided by psychic powers instead of roofies. But I’m not sure a show where guys with baskets on their heads and kung-fu fight scenes set to Jane’s Addiction has earned that story beat. When someone on a Marvel superhero show—even one as odd as Legion—tells us a character might become a villain, we allow for powers, and betrayal, and even violence. But abruptly pivoting to a painful and common reality feels like a betrayal of the narrative contract the series spent two seasons establishing. Farouk is a rapist—he is the villain and has been clearly established as such, so we accept it. I don’t know if I can accept David’s actions, not when they haven’t been properly set up narratively and justified psychologically, both on our end and his. 

David defeats the Shadow King (thanks to Lenny’s bullet and the Choke) and starts pounding him senseless, but before he can land a fatal blow, Syd shows up and tries to shoot him, having been convinced by Farouk-Melanie that her beau was indeed becoming a monster who must be stopped. It’s understandable David would feel betrayed; he had just done a bunch of ugly stuff, all in the name of protecting his love. (“It’s what we have to save,” he again echoed in his words to Oliver.) And he’s not that person—not yet, anyway. It’s actually very easy to feel for David in that moment, as he’s so hurt: “Don’t you trust me?”

So when he wakes up in his own basement, and proceeds to have the three-way argument with himself, you can see why these new versions of David have erupted. He’s wounded, and the one person he truly loved has somehow rejected him in the most clear-cut manner imaginable, so a part of him tries to make sense of it in any way he can. Hence the disagreement—she’s his parasite, her love is the delusion, they all owe David everything and he should just take charge as a superior being. The episode continually returns to the God metaphor, from his quick aside to Lenny (“God has plans for you”) to Clark’s season-ending words: “Now we pray.”

Even Farouk is sounding like the voice of reason in that regard. David’s late night debate with his tormentor hinged on the Shadow King making David see how his actions weren’t all that different from Farouk’s. The moment that Farouk makes David realize how his efforts will backfire—and we learn just what David did to Syd—is a brutal one. The decision to suppress her memories is indeed a form of drugging her—he’s altering her perception to get what he wants, and once Farouk is safely contained, and Syd’s in her room, he projects himself in there, tells her everything’s fine, and proceeds to sleep with her. It’s vile stuff—there’s a reason that when Buffy The Vampire Slayer pulled a lesser but quite similar move, it made sure to have the victim discover she’d been magically drugged before any intimacy happened. Because that’s a line that can’t really be walked back, character-wise.

And part of the problem is that the show itself doesn’t seem to understand the severity of that breach. “The Trial Of The Shadow King,” with its text-based reflections on the nature of truth, muses that perhaps the competing realities of the situation should give us pause. That perhaps everyone has been swayed by the Shadow King’s machinations, which is why poor David has been found crazy and in need of either medicated imprisonment or death. And hey, that would’ve been a great place to end the season—with a knotty ambiguous debate over reality itself. But Syd’s statement of what David has done isn’t something you can muck about with, hemming and hawing over whether reality is being distorted. And it’s a disservice to the intensity of that choice—and the legitimacy of Syd’s assault—to fold it into the show’s usual “who can say what truth is?” philosophizing.

And maybe that’s the big problem with the second-season finale of Legion: Certain acts don’t get to be up for debate, and it’s a cheat on the show’s part to think sexual assault can just be part of the furniture. When nothing can be spared from getting walked back, when we are potentially being lied to about everything, then our sense of investment, our stakes in this world, go out the window. Acts need to have meaning, not be idly ruminated on with quotes from Plato. Does Legion really think there are competing truths about what David did, regardless of whether the Shadow King has everyone in his thrall? If so, then the closing words of the Tori Amos cover that ends the season are apt in more ways than one: “This is not real / This is not really happening, hey.” It’s not until the credits roll that the next line arrives—“You bet your life it is.”

Stray observations

Legion significant music cues of the week: They all pretty much pale compared to that opening version of The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes” that David and Farouk are singing, with its spot-on lyrics. (“No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man, to be the sad man...my love is vengeance.”) But the others are the aforementioned show-closing cover of “Cornflake Girl” (if you want a great rock cover of that one, here it is), and when David’s in his own room, about to go back on the plan the other Davids apparently concocted, a similarly dark cover of The Kinks’ “Nothing In This World” is playing.

“I’m a good person. I deserve love.” This would’ve landed so much harder if David hadn’t just done what he did.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Loudermilks have been our most reliable source of identification and Cary is the one who discovers what David did to Syd.

When the mouse first showed up in Farouk’s cell, was anyone else thinking it was going to start singing Bryan Ferry?

Oliver and Melanie’s flash-forward, with them living in the ice cube three years after the events of this episode, was a rare and much-valued moment of levity.

“You really believe that? God loves sinners best?” Methinks we’re going to find out. Dan Stevens’ performance this year has been stellar.

Thanks, everyone, for watching and reading. I’ve enjoyed hearing all the theories and discussions of this very unusual season of television. Sorry it had to end on a down note—I can certainly say I’ll be curious to see where Legion tries to go from here.