#if anyone has a second and an interest in compelling dynamics...

[anghraine]

I was thinking about my personal "TOS is really its own thing" headcanons for K/S, and also, that one of the things that really surprised me when I actually marathoned the whole series was the acknowledged ethical issue around captain/crew fraternization.

To rewind back to my ship, lol: I definitely think that Spock and Kirk are obsessively in love with each other, and it's pretty obvious that every other relationship and person in their lives pales in comparison, but I don't actually imagine that they've said or done anything about this beyond the kinds of things we've seen onscreen.

I mean. Yes, that includes things like "when Kirk gets a massage on the bridge for his back pain, he just assumes it's Spock and is intensely uncomfortable to discover it's someone else" + the two of them saying breathtaking romantic things with obvious heart eyes while ignoring the existence of everyone around them + Kirk's most compelling and insightful love interest remarking that Spock obviously belongs with him as if he always will be at Kirk's side + everything "Amok Time" chooses to be + mutual seething jealousy/Spock excising his rival from Kirk's mind while he sleeps + Kirk saying Spock is closer to him than anyone in the universe + Spock regularly abandoning his principles when it comes to Kirk etc etc etc. But I don't think they've actually said what they feel or initiated a (physically) sexual relationship during TOS itself.

Taking TOS by itself and ignoring the regular reboots of their characterizations in ... well, everything else, I definitely feel like they're moving inexorably towards that kind of unambiguous romantic relationship in TOS, just that they haven't quite taken that last step yet.

In fact, I suspect that the "You are closer to the captain than anyone in the universe" statement from bodysnatched Kirk to Spock is likely the most explicit statement either has made about how they feel or what their relationship really is, and it carefully stops just short of saying too much. And it's immediately followed by a) a mind-meld, I think the fourth between them, but the first in which Spock effortlessly melds them without a single word to help, and b) one of the most extended periods of physical contact between them, with iirc some 25 seconds of Spock holding Kirk's bare hand/wrist on screen as they try to escape together signifying nothing, with scene cuts suggesting the actual duration may in fact be longer (*gasps in Vulcan*).

The show ends with that episode because of the cancellation, but there's something weirdly apropos about it as a finale on a purely shipping level. I definitely felt like the dynamic between them has reached such a point by "Turnabout Intruder" that there's no going back. But I don't think anything more significant than what we've seen has happened off screen, just that the acknowledgment of the nature of their feelings and the shift to an overtly romantic, sexual relationship seem inevitable at this point. And by "overtly," I mean to each other, not necessarily anyone else.

There are various reasons I feel this way. Partly it's the high-octane yearning and repression that both exhibit in very different ways, which I think make more sense if they haven't acknowledged anything yet or transitioned away from pretending it's platonic. But one reason I envision them as Not Quite There But Definitely Going To Be, that I've rarely seen mentioned thus far, is something I would never have guessed from pop culture or even fandom osmosis.

Early in the series, Kirk explicitly states that he considers his crew completely off-limits in a romantic context. This ethical restriction applies only to him and not any other senior officers. Throughout the rest of the series, we're told and shown that Starfleet does not forbid fraternization among crew members of different ranks. Kirk himself says that it would be fine for Spock to have a romantic relationship with Janice Rand, just not Kirk.

And moreover, Kirk never does voluntarily enter a romantic relationship with any crew member. He and Janice Rand have a mutual infatuation for awhile that both handle with as much professionalism as possible. The closest thing to an openly romantic interaction with a crew member is probably Kirk kissing Helen Noel after Helen and Dr. Adams artificially screwed around with his memories and feelings—but we discover in the process that he was the one who refused to do more than dance at the Christmas party, when he backed off and scrupulously talked about space while Helen was the one with the unsentimental sex fantasy who keeps pushing his boundaries even in the present. That's why he's so unusually hostile; they were never together, even as a fling, and she hasn't taken no for an answer.

I guess Kirk and Mulholl agreeing to be possessed by married aliens for a final goodbye kiss is sort of ...? I mean. You get it, sometimes there's some sci-fi plot device, but nothing real and nothing while he has full control of his body and mind.

Kirk's real exes are all former long-term girlfriends, most of them also part of Starfleet and professionals in science or science-adjacent fields, but never crew members.

It's not 100% clear in TOS if the repeated statements and suggestions about lack of Starfleet restrictions on fraternization except wrt the captain is Starfleet policy, or just Kirk's personal stance. Kirk says he's not allowed to have a relationship of that kind with Janice Rand in "The Naked Time," but he's contracted the disease by then and it's part of a generally unhinged ramble. It's later stated that romance isn't forbidden on Starfleet vessels, but that's about crew romances in general and not the captain in particular. So it's difficult to know the real source of the ethical prohibition. Maybe there are actual regulations around this (makes sense) or maybe it's just a hard ethical line that Kirk has independently chosen for himself (also makes sense), but when he's functional and autonomous enough to be held responsible for his actions, this is a line he does not cross.

The point here is that, while I don't remotely blame other K/S fans for ignoring this inconvenient fraternization detail, Spock is a member of Kirk's crew. Yes, he's a senior officer and the highest-ranking person on the ship after Kirk himself, so maybe it wouldn't be as egregious as with someone else—but then again, maybe Kirk propositioning Spock would be considered even more unethical than propositioning Janice, since Janice at least has other authorities over her, while Spock answers directly to Kirk in the chain of command and will do virtually anything Kirk tells or asks him to do.

Kirk and Spock's relationship is intense and [gestures] everything enough that there are scenarios where I could imagine Kirk dropping this otherwise non-negotiable ethical line (the classic is, of course, "Spock's human heritage makes his pon farr cycle erratic and it comes back early ... oh no..."). I don't think we've seen any such scenario during TOS, though.

In any case, I feel like Kirk is unlikely to proposition Spock either romantically or sexually during the five-year mission. After years of constant proximity and yearning and ostensibly platonic hijinks and assuming it would never happen, I could see his resolve crumbling if Spock tried to initiate a romance with him. But that is also unlikely throughout most of TOS, because of Spock's own hang-ups around emotion and attachment—he's struggling with shame over feeling basic friendly affection, and in reality he feels far more than that.

I also don't think their true preferences when it comes to love, or their sense of what love really is for them, are inclined towards casual/undefined relationships or even poly relationships. So I don't personally envision them as FWBs or in a "they were in love but not taking it that seriously" scenario; I don't think either situation would be all that probable or desirable for them. They're both conspicuously jealous of anything or anyone that could possibly compete with their own absolute centrality in each other's lives; Spock never so much as kisses anyone without being dubconned into it and is guilty about having friends; Kirk's entire sexual history when it's not For The Mission is consistently geared towards long-term and sentimentally romantic relationships. Kirk supplies a very clear, emphatic description of love as he understands it:

Is he important to you, more important than anything? Is he as though he were a part of you? [...] But you can't really love him. You haven't the slightest knowledge of love, the total union of two people.

Kirk understands impossible/forbidden love in terms of some fundamental separation from a single beloved, being perpetually apart from them and unable to achieve the kind of absolute joining of lives and minds that he regards as love. (In some ways, this seems an incredibly Vulcan perspective on love, which, well.)

I think he and Spock are close to crossing the last barriers to that point of absolute union by "Turnabout Intruder," given their extreme intimacy as well as the very real possibility of grafting their lives and minds to each other in the way both pretty clearly crave. But I feel like there are only two ways it can really happen: 1) some wildly fortunate circumstance makes it ethically justifiable for Kirk to approach Spock, or 2) Spock makes the first move, which means that unless they're just randomly very lucky, everything hangs on him coming to terms with himself.

Then again, I also think Spock's arc across the show is building towards a point where he is coming to terms with himself in that way, with asserting what he wants, what bothers him, and what he's willing to reach for or accept. By the finale, I can believe he's truly on the point of getting there.

The movies hit the reset and retcon buttons hard, but taking TOS by itself as aired, the arc of their relationship and its development over the course of the show feels more hopeful to me. I can believe that S3 Spock has grown into himself enough to get to the point he needs to be at to make the first ("first") move before much longer. This is the Spock who essentially told Starfleet to go fuck themselves because they wouldn't let him jeopardize a fraught diplomatic situation to search for Kirk, told Sulu to scan for Kirk for potentially years, then defied explicit orders and tracked him down personally. There is very little he wouldn't do for Kirk by S3.

Kirk, meanwhile, has never been anything but 1000% receptive to whatever Spock is willing to give him; he spends a significant portion of TOS looking like he's about to dissolve into hearts at eye contact and a slight mouth twitch from Spock, if that. By S3, though, he's visibly more ground-down and tired, he's been put through further horrors that he often only escaped via his intimacy with Spock, and he's increasingly desperate for real connection. I can believe that at this point, he'd finally be at "fuck it" if Spock's love was on the table.

So I don't think that during the time period of TOS, their romance is formalized at all, or even acknowledged, or that they have a sexual relationship beyond the turbo-charged UST and frequent physical contact (to a degree that seems likely obscene on Vulcan. but as Spock no doubt justifies to himself, they're not on Vulcan). But I also think that by the end of the show, their dynamic has moved towards a stage where the shift to an unambiguously romantic relationship, even if hidden, feels inevitable and imminent. I genuinely feel like they're so close to full honesty with each other at this point that it can't be long, and that's with over a year of the mission left.

[yearofthesnape]

Meta: Snape and Forms of Address

I was doing some speech analysis for my own writing research and thought I'd share it with all of you. Essentially, I wanted to examine when Snape uses titles (Professor, Mr./Miss) versus full names versus last names only versus first names, and what this might signify.

Using Titles

The most obvious instance that comes to mind is Snape addressing Voldemort as "my Lord," which is also his last usage of any form of a name chronologically. This title was probably required by Voldemort, however, as all the Death Eaters use it, despite their different personalities. Similarly, Snape's use of "the Dark Lord" falls into this category; as Harry observes in OotP, the Death Eaters use this name for Voldemort. Snape reacts in a strongly negative way to Harry's use of "Voldemort," saying by implication that he does not feel secure in using this name. (It is interesting to note that Dumbledore constantly uses "Voldemort" around Snape, and while Snape never corrects him, Snape also never deviates from "the Dark Lord," which Dumbledore also never corrects.)

Snape has a high awareness of titles of respect, both for himself ("This may not be an ordinary class, Potter, but I am still your teacher and you will therefore call me 'sir' or 'Professor' at all times," OotP) and others. Snape himself is never said to call anyone "sir" (or "ma'am"), but he does use "Headmaster" sixteen times (ten as indirectly referring to Dumbledore, six directly addressing Dumbledore), "Headmistress" once (to Umbridge), and "Professor" eleven (once for himself when he's trying to compel the Marauder's Map, four times as direct address, six times to indirectly refer to someone). All of these forms of respectful scholastic address take place in books 2-5. Snape sometimes refers to Dumbledore as "the headmaster" when he is speaking about him to an adult with children apparently not present (as when he speaks to Fudge in PoA), but he only addresses Dumbledore as "Headmaster" when he is expecting to be observed, and he only uses "Professor" as a way of referring to his colleagues when speaking to or in front of children. Conspicuously, while he generally speaks of Lupin as "Professor Lupin" in front of the DADA class in PoA, he speaks to Lupin as only "Lupin" whether students are present or not. In a reversal of this formality dynamic, Snape uses "Minister" when speaking to Fudge, but "Mr. Fudge" when speaking about him. (This might have something to do with the fact that, in the first case, Fudge was helping work against Sirius Black, while in the second, Fudge had just allowed a Dementor to Kiss Barty Crouch Jr.) Filch is "Filch" to his face when students aren't there, "Mr. Filch" when being referred to. Hagrid is always "Hagrid," but that's what everyone seems to do.

When it comes to students, Snape is generally inconsistent about calling them "Mr./Miss" or simply using their last names. "Draco" is the only student we see him use a first name with, and that begins in OotP, after a good deal of "Malfoy" and "Mr. Malfoy" in the books before that. Ron gets both "Weasley" and "Mr. Weasley." Seamus gets both "Finnigan" and "Mr. Finnigan." In general, girls always get "Miss," with the exception of the Ravenclaw girl Snape catches in the rosebushes in GoF (and possibly Hermione, who is referred to as "Granger" in Snape's report to Fudge in PoA, though this might be by parallelism with "Potter" and "Weasley" in the phrase "Potter, Weasley, and Granger." "Finch-Fletchley" is mentioned once with no courtesy marker, as is "Stebbins," but once is too little to establish a pattern. Snape uses "Crabbe and Goyle" without any markers, but everyone does that. Neville and most of all Harry are conspicuously addressed without any "Mr." at any point.

Full Names

Used mostly for emphasis. "Harry Potter" gets this eleven times, mostly to evoke Harry as a concept rather than an individual, often tied to his fame — "the train isn't good enough for the famous Harry Potter," CoS; "famous Harry Potter," PoA — or to speak of Harry in Snape's capacity as Death Eater — "If I had murdered Harry Potter," HBP; "the Order of the Phoenix intends to move Harry Potter," DH; "Have you seen Harry Potter, Minerva?" DH. If Snape's saying "Harry Potter," he is Not Doing Well.

Similarly, Snape uses "Sirius Black" either to report ("Everyone from the Minister of Magic downward has been trying to keep famous Harry Potter safe from Sirius Black," PoA; "it certainly helped dispose of Sirius Black," HBP) or to remind Dumbledore of his trauma ("Sirius Black showed he was capable of murder at the age of sixteen," PoA).

"Barty Crouch" gets an exclamation of surprise using his full name, but only after Snape uses the more familiar last: "Crouch! Barty Crouch!" (GoF). He also gets the full-name treatment in a report to Dumbledore. "Mad-Eye Moody" gets a very unusual usage of a nickname, but his nickname seems to be taken as a first name by nearly everyone. This again happens in a negative context: "Now, Mad-Eye Moody might have joined your fan club," GoF.

"Lucius Malfoy" gets the full-name treatment in the middle of Snape's fight with Sirius in OotP, where it parallels Sirius's own use of Malfoy's full name.

"Albus Dumbledore" and "Emmeline Vance" get the full-name treatment in Snape's conversation at Spinner's End in HBP, which is full of full names and cautious distances.

"Dolores Umbridge" gets her full name used when Snape is talking to Harry, thus showing his distance from her (other professors get their titles or their last names).

Lily gets one "Lily Evans" during Snape's initial distress over the prophecy, one first-name only, and one "Lily Potter," in that order, thus showing the progression of Snape's thinking, as many Snape commentators have pointed out.

Interestingly, Snape gives himself his full name twice, once to invoke his authority over the Marauders' Map and once to distance his inner personhood from betraying Dumbledore in the clause "[Dumbledore] has never stopped trusting Severus Snape, and therein lies my great value to the Dark Lord."

Last Names

Using last names is very much Snape's default. Both Lupin and Karkaroff attempt to address Snape by his first name, thus establishing a less formal relationship than he wants with them; he responds by using their last names instead, though he acquiesces to using "Igor" with Karkaroff when they are not in class. When Sirius calls him "Snivellus" in OotP, Snape responds using his last name too.

Snape's last-name preferences date from childhood, where James and Remus are "Potter" and "that Lupin." Nor are they restricted to enemies only; the last words reported as Snape's in the story (as opposed to his chronological last words) are "Don't worry, Dumbledore. I have a plan..."

First Names

The people Snape addresses or refers to by first name alone are few in number: Igor Karkaroff (the first to be so, in GoF); Draco (the only one in OotP); Narcissa, Bellatrix, Lucius, Nymphadora Tonks (the lack of nickname here has been discussed elsewhere); Alecto, Minerva (the last to be so, chronologically); Lily (the last to be so, in terms of what we see in the story).

Oddly, Snape uses "Aunt Bellatrix" when talking to Draco in HBP; perhaps he is putting things in Draco's terms here? Though it's "Aunt Bellatrix has been teaching you Occlumency, I see," not "Your Aunt Bellatrix..."

Draco gets his first name used the most, 17 times. Narcissa gets it 10 times, all in the Spinner's End conversation; Bellatrix gets 9, 8 of which are in that conversation; Lucius gets 5, three here and two with Dumbledore; Minerva gets twice. The others get once.

Nicknames

"Wormtail" and "Mad-Eye Moody." (And, arguably, "the Dark Lord.") Snape using your nickname is not a good sign. Perhaps this stems from his feelings about his own?

Concluding Thoughts

Snape's uses of different name forms do not follow a straightforward rule, but several things are clear. The name he uses for someone is always intentional, showing the sort of relationship he has with the person in question (or that he wants to project that he has). Snape and McGonagall, for instance, enjoy a mutual "Professor Lastname" status in their dealings in front of students (rarer, for McGonagall), but "Severus" and "Minerva" without students apparently present (which we see in DH — markedly, this is one of the only times Snape responds to his first name by switching everyone to a first-name basis, although he usually reacts to antagonism by taking the distancing road of a last name). Students sometimes get a "Mr." to show they're not "Potter," sometimes merely as a normal form of address when they're not misbehaving (which ups the chances of no "Mr./Miss" for everyone, though not Hermione). Sometimes, though, a last name is just quicker to say. Full names mean more distance; the person is treated as a concept. Nicknames are not friendly. First names show either projected friendliness or genuine friendliness, to an equal or a student (never to Dumbledore); most cases could go either way (though I think Snape has no real fondness for "Alecto").

[artbyblastweave]

I was wondering if youd read Hench yet.

I feel like the premise and the start were solid, and the main character's framing of superheroes through a strict environment cost-benefit analysis was interesting.

But it feels weird that in it's criticism of heroes it just sorta...gave villains a pass. Plus the incredibly loose world building, which early on was a strength in establishing the "you know how this works", vibe, but as the book progresses and the plot hinges increasingly on old interpersonal drama, it's suddenly a big gaping hole.

These are my broad criticisms of it, yeah.

Full disclosure- this is the book I was vagueing about a couple months ago, the one where I got annoyed because the back cover copy was pulling the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" card in relation to working as a henchman, in a way I found disingenuous given that many supervillains are on the face of it much, much worse for the world than the average tech start-up- particularly the kind of supervillain with a staff. But I also thought it would be disingenuous to bitch a book out purely on the grounds of its back-cover marketing department copy, so I bought it and read it. And unfortunately the final roundup on that tension appears to be that villains aren't that bad, are they? Maybe even kinda girlboss even!

Bulleted list under the cut!

The opening is strong, and gave me high hopes, specifically because of how it seemed to be aware of these tensions. Anna, our protagonist, opens as a temp in the employ of a sleazy c-list supervillain who's performative in his interest in his staff's wellbeing but doesn't hesitate to put his interns and temps in the meat-grinder for a leg-up; even a decisive loss to an A-list hero is a way to climb the ladder if you're a C-list villain. On the other side you've got superheroes who are horrifyingly cavalier with the lives of anyone they've deemed to be "on the other side." The protagonist is framed collateral damage in the grand idiot melodrama between two sides that don't give a shit about the lives of the little people in distinct but interlocking ways, and that's pretty compelling- particularly because at this point we're still coloring within the lines of the typical genre paradigm! That mutual self-centered apathy, the ways in which people get pigeonholed into specific roles in the melodrama that define and dehumanize them, drove seven seasons of The Venture Brothers, and now we get the tragicomic spin on that dynamic, we get a story told from the perspective of one of the henchmen or random civilians who get callously offed as part of a sight gag about how awful all of these people are!

That's not where it goes, though. @st-just has a pretty great writeup where they point out that for a story driven by the premise of heroes that cause immense collateral damage and use their institutional influence to dodge the consequences, the story is oddly incurious about the level of damage that Leviathan's enormous criminal organization does in the course of its operations; how many people have died because of all those superweapons he's handing out to lower-level villains? It's all oddly bloodless, and it feels like it keeps pulling back at the last second from the protagonist truly suffering moral injury- or from acknowledging that moral injury. Given how much of her plan involves waging psychological warfare on heroes until they snap publicly, there's a bit of an eric-andre-who-would-do-this vibe coming from then pinning that collateral purely on the heroes. I never got a good read on how self-aware the story is about the fact that Anna very, very quickly becomes attached to real tangible power in a way that makes her underdog framing feel extremely hollow; how quickly she becomes like her former boss, arraigning henchmen in the line of fire for the sake of the Grand Plan. One of those stories where it keeps gesturing but I can't tell the extent to which it intends to commit with a sequel.

The worldbuilding, as you mentioned, is an issue, because there's a failure to clarify quickly enough the larger systems that incentivize the heroes and villains- in fact, it often feels like the characters are operating from within different incentive systems, from different settings. The early sections of the book read like a "Silver-Age-taken-seriously" situation, similar to The Venture Brothers- the casual levels of temp-agency integration, card-carrying supervillain-as-tech-start-up boss, and of course, the myopic violence of free-agent cowboy cop vigilantes-slash-celebrities who never get called to account for it. Halfway through there's a pivot and now there's a Draft, capital-D, and it turns out that this has actually been a superhuman registration setting the whole time? "Supervillains" are actually just any superhumans who don't toe the line? "Superheroes" are screened for in middle schools and separated from their families? That's, uh, not completely incompatible with the aforementioned dynamic but it's a bit of a kludge! There are beats that are really great- Quantum relocating from New Zealand for a chance to partner with Supercollider only to end up subordinated for sexist-marketing reasons, the fucked nuclear family shit going on with Flamethrower and his kids and with the Ocean Four- that imply a level of individual career discretion on the part of the heroes that you'd need to do some work to square with whatever pressures are being exerted by the higher powers. It's actually pretty important who's calling the shots here and to what extent! If the climax is predicated on wanting to overthrow the system you need to make that system consistently visible and legible through the rest of the book!

As you mentioned, the book also pivots into there being a deep interpersonal drama that propels the back half; Leviathan turning out to actually be a former superhero who was dramatically wronged in a morally clear-cut way by Supercollider, who murdered his mentor for inside-baseball cape politics reasons and had this covered up. I've got really mixed feelings on this, because although the seeds of something fascinating are here it feels like one of the ways in which the book is hedging itself. Supercollider's callous but genre-standard disregard for hench lives isn't grounds enough to condemn him, no, he also has to have committed some off-duty murders as well, and he's a shitty boyfriend on top of that, he's a supervillain dressed like a superhero. We get Leviathan's justified grievance, and spectacular violence enacted on agents of an obviously evil system, but no up-close-and-personal villainy- he's functionally a hero with a villainous aesthetic (and a smattering of anecdotes about awful shit that he's done, but the story isn't interested in really making us feel it in the way that it is with Supercollider.) There's a beat that I really liked, where Quantum tells Anna that their respective villainous and heroic bosses care far more about beating each other than they do about the women in their lives or anyone else working under them. I think it was a grave misstep that this turned out to not be where the book went; making it so that there actually is a clear-cut good guy and bad guy in the Leviathan/Supercollider conflict, that they're fighting over something that matters, pushes the entire story dangerously close to what I term "Banal Hatswap" territory.

For more of a vibes-based criticism; and easily my most uncharitable; the entire story is written in a register of self-righteousness, and I have a hard time separating what's meant to be the biased viewpoint of the protagonist from what's meant to be the author Displaying The Correct Applause Lights for Twitter. You've got a protagonist who cracks a one-liner about supporting Penal Abolition.... who also puts out a hit on a guy who slowly dies horribly of sepsis as a result. A one-liner about a female superhero's "suspicious WASP" vibes, right before she emotionally manipulates said hero and arranges to have her kid kidnapped. "It's not my job to kinkshame, buuut," right before proceeding to leverage the embarrassing sexual proclivities of a superhero who's roundly characterized as boorish and misogynistic in conjunction with that. Bemoaning how Quantum, a strong heroine of color, is subordinated and put through the wringer by the patriarchal marketing machine, before acting as the major practical driver in the total collapse of said heroine's life. (This one is the one the protag displays the most self-awareness about, which might be related to the subtext that said superheroine is a potential love-interest.) Grandstanding about and predicating the whole plot on how all human life is valuable and villains don't deserve to receive life-changing brutality.... before being party to Quantum's graphically-detailed levels of payback against her shitty ex Supercollider, I mean we're talking like arc 14 Vicky Dallon levels of body horror and violation here, in borderline pornographic detail. All of this feels like either a very clever reproduction of how the very online know how to say all the right things to launder the fact that they constantly do all the wrong ones.... or it's just. an unreconstructed example of the thing. I can't tell, but the back-and-forth bothers me a lot. It's a situation where it becomes super fucking obvious how much Worm benefited from constant alternate-POV interludes; getting any of this from the head of someone other than Anna would go a long way for me.

Ultimately the book heavily depends on my sympathy for overeducated, temporarily embarrassed white collar computer touchers who throw in with evil worldwrecking conglomerates in exchange for dental. Unfortunately I think we all just axiomatically have it coming and superheroes would ideally pulverize way more of us so there's a level on which I was lost from the word go

Now, for the sake of a balanced assessment I'm going to go over a bunch of the ideas in the book that I did think worked really well:

As mentioned, the opening is extremely strong; the nightmare existence of living paycheck to paycheck as a temp, juiced up by the genre-elements, the slice-of-life hardscrabble existence of a woman at the bottom of the economic totem pole constantly having her attempts at a life worth living blown up by her proximity to this nonsense. Having a date break down because you have to drive your maimed henchman friend to the ER is a fucking amazing beat. Unfortunately the narrative moves away from this low-level approach very quickly, because a lot of what's going on with this thing is that it's a specific strain of power fantasy- a significantly-more-competently-executed version of a kind of villain-falls-for-his-hardworking-assistant Wattpad romance. That's not a pejorative or a criticism, just a kind of power fantasy that requires an end-of-act-one escape from the nightmarish mundanity in order to function. But I like the nightmarish mundanity! Bring back the nightmarish mundanity

The book has some great beats about the intersection of superheroics and women's issues. In a nod to the plight of superheroines from the silver-age and earlier, Quantum Entanglement is a superheroine with reality-warping levels of firepower who's constantly forced to downplay her own presence and individuality in order to help juice up the brand of her male partner Supercollider; in the climax it's revealed that this extended to subtly using telekinesis to create the false impression he's capable of independent flight, which is, implicitly, this settings version of Superman's transition to flight from really big jumps. There's a tendency for superheroines to get big power-bumps in conjunction with an arc about succumbing to a very gendered insanity- Malice and Avengers Disassembled being two prominent examples I can think of- and Quantum's eventual break from the monstrous Supercollider feels like commentary on this. In another one-and-done beat you have the heroine Abyssal, whose career is on the verge of being derailed by her third pregnancy; the catch is that she's a member of what's implied to be a family team (think New Wave or the FF) and her pregnancies are laced through with expectations and hopes that the kids will exhibit powers and be able to pad out the roster. By the end of the book she's mentioned to have been permanently benched, and another member of her team is killed "on-screen-" but that's alright! We've got her three kids waiting in the wings! A deeply grim superheroic spin on a very real kind of patriarchal pressure to set your own career aside to perpetuate your family. Compellingly fucked in all the worst ways.

There's a one-off beat about a nursing home for retired superheroes who are having difficulty controlling their powers in their old age, and it's portrayed as a fucking warzone; dementia-ridden psychics and pyrokinetics constantly inadvertently chewing through the staff and causing gigantic disasters. I think the age-based incontinence of superpeople- and the damage they can cause through no fault of their own- is a really underexplored area for superhero deconstructions, one adjacent to a lot of real-life problems faced by caregivers, and often problems that have no good answers. Near and dear to my heart, this particular problem.

The character of Supercollider is compelling down many of the same lines that Homelander is compelling; a "Superman" figure constructed by marketing-department fiat, with no identity of his own, difficult for the characters to sincerely hate in the end simply because it's impossible to determine where the marketing copy indoctrination stops and the hollow shell of a human begins, Surrounded by a meticulously constructed, rotating "Bat Family" extended cast that are his only semblance of human connection despite how immensely distant he is from them in every way that matters; the designated love interest with whom he's going through the motions, an utterly superfluous sidekick he's implied to be grotesquely co-dependent with to the point that his efforts to keep him safe in the field is a major driver of the collateral damage he does. Most of this we get third hand as Anna is mincing his support-system from the outside in, but the implied inside baseball is genuinely gloriously fucked, and I'd love to have seen some of it go down from the inside.

Anyway, 2.5 out of 5. Good ideas and character concepts that desperately needed more room to breathe, fun worldbuilding beats that desperately needed fleshing out to give those ideas and character concepts that room. Genuinely, this should have been a 1.7 million word web serial.

[alchemistc]

The thing is I understand why there are people who hate this decision, and I don't begrudge anyone for being angry, sad, upset - ready to fucking leave because they feel betrayed by the narrative. Personally I think that Tim decided that in order to make the show fresh and new he needed to break the rule that has kept people tuned in to this show for a long time: Firefam doesn't die got tossed after 8 seasons because Tim wanted to shock the audience and generate intense conversations.

Well it fucking worked.

He isolated every character in those final moments to tell us all nothing is safe or sacred.

He killed off Bobby to tell us no one is safe. Like. If we get down to brass tacks that's his reason.

That's definitely a betrayal of the show of yore, and I cannot blame a single person, GA or fandom, for deciding that that is the moment to tune out.

I hate that Peter didn't want to leave. I hate that.

But I do also see the merit in portraying that immense grief, that loss so Big it feels like you can never fully recover. Bobby was bigger than himself, so much to do many people, and I think most people have someone like that in their lives. So I see the merit in losing him.

In the overarching build of 9-1-1 I can see why Tim decided to melt down a single toy soldier in his sandbox just to figure out how the dynamics of his other toys changes. These are his playthings.

The thing is he's not in the writers room every second dealing with the fallout. He's not on set every day with the actors who also have to grieve the smaller but still significant loss of not having Peter around anymore. He's not out here with the audience day to day listening to the impact certain characters have on a personal level.

Do I still want to see where this is going? Absolutely, grief and loss and healing are all sandboxes I like to play in myself. How do you live a life when a piece of your soul has gone missing? How do you move on from a sacrifice that changes the entire world around you? Will you ever be able to see the colors of a sunset or the sky or the ground he's now under the same way?

That's interesting to explore.

But it's also devastating. Bobby was a presence, a weight, that will still sit heavy on so many shoulders for a long long time. And while Peter found a way to draw meaning from it - the reality of the job he's portraying, the fact that these public servants put their lives on the line every day and sometimes they lose them - it doesn't feel like Tim gave it the same thought. He just wanted shock and awe and despair.

He got it. At whatever cost.

I guess what I'm saying is give people some fucking grace to decide for themselves whether or not they're moving forward with the show. This has been so polarizing and it's been rough for all of us in different and sometimes diametrically opposed ways.

I'm the idiot who tuned in live for the first time in months specifically to have my heart broken, because that's a storyline that compels me. It's the same fucked up reason I'm watching TLOU with bated breath.

Not everyone ticks the same way, and I fully understand and empathize with those of you finding this to be an empty hollow loss.

All this to say if this is it for you, I'll miss seeing your icons in the tags and I'll try my damndest to tag things appropriately so you don't have to see that shit and hope that one day we stumble across another fandom together.

And if you're staying, I just hope you're prepared for the next time Tim decides he needs to Shake Things Up.

[slugtoby]

some ramblings about (mostly) lees character under the cut

bitches be like “the third act ruins the complexity of the topic of neurodivergence by making lee an abusive stalker”. my brother in christ it only adds to the complexity

hes very much implied to be autistic which can actually explain some of the stalking behavior (not understanding social ques, whats socially acceptable or not). besides autism he definitely has something else going on, something that is directly caused by trauma he had to go through in his childhood, perhaps also linked to religion, which also stops him from being able to connect to people properly. and, well, hes also lonely, doesnt have any friends or anyone else to rely on or make healthy connections with.

does it excuse the stalking? of course not, but it explains it. the game goes over neurodivergency a lot, how the exact demographic that needs help cannot get that help because of its behavior, which climaxes with the reveal of lees true nature. what he has is an illness and it needs to be treated as such, but exactly because of the actions he does as a result of that illness is what prevents him from being understood and getting proper help (besides the fact that its implied he will lose his job if he gets a diagnosis.. yet another way the system screws up mentally ill people)

i think its 100% valid to be uncomfortable with the handling of the second ending, but personally i dont like viewing it as a “victim is forced to live with their abuser” kind of situation, because it nullifies the interesting aspects of their relationship. it isnt healthy obviously, it might not be, but real life relationships arent fully healthy either (not saying that dating your stalker should be normalized!! i know for sure someone will interpret me saying it this way, so i need to clarify).

i think the reason why their relationship does work and doesnt follow the “victim has to live with their stalker” narrative is the fact that lee does show that he actually cares about angel and, for the most part, isnt doing it out of selfishness (which is foiled by brandon, who takes advantage of angel purely for his own gain).

lees approach is questionable and bad, and there are moments where he does something out of selfishness (ex. the jacket, manipulating angel into staying with him by saying “dont go to work, where that guy could be” knowing full well that guy has been dead for hours in his own basement, etc). i believe those actions cant be justified or excused or brushed off and he needs to take proper responsibility for it, which, unfortunately, doesnt happen in game.

hes very flawed, but thats why the contrast between his bad actions (ex. manipulation, stalking, the shrine) is so compelling with the genuine care he has towards angel, even if he expresses it badly (he knows angel doesnt have anyone to rely on and he wants to help them, he goes out of his way to kill angels rapist because they didnt want to quit their job and would likely need to interact with him later because of it, he gives them respect, at least in the parts where he knows it directly affects them).

ultimately i dont view the dynamic between angel and lee as an abusive one because, despite the fucked-up-ness of lees actions, hes never cruel to them, as well as the fact that again, some of his actions can be explained by neurodivergence, rather than that cruelty and maliciousness. this brings the topic of “but you can be abusive even when you dont intend to hurt someone” which i agree with, but i think what sets lee apart from it is that hes willing to change for the better and angel does not brush off those tendencies (“this doesnt have to be a deal breaker if you calm down and treat me like normal”), plus, since angel is aware of his feelings now, he doesnt have to cling to his bad coping mechanisms and instead be open about it (tho i do imagine it would take a lot of time and effort).

angel isnt dense and they understand the circumstances theyre in in both routes, they dont brush off any of the bad things he did and they show their discomfort with it, they will not tolerate it. they choose to either give lee a second chance or not, not to either stay in an abusive relationship or leave “like a normal person”. i do feel like some of their understanding comes from self loathing and circumstances, but its completely their choice in the end, they either go back to their previous life or try to fix it and start something new with someone who is willing to change for the better.

to which extent are you allowed to be mentally ill before youre too far gone? theyre both mentally ill and cant find understanding in other people, so they try to understand each other and help each other grow

[klonnieshippersclub]

I love delena and Bamon and I really feel like they wrote Damon to be in the coffin for 3 years because they knew romantic feelings were developing for them. It's frustrating because Elena was gonna be asleep for along time so it would be okay if he developed feelings for Bonnie sure maybe it would make them feel a bit guilty but when has the show ever shyed away from that? I do like Bonnie and Enzo but I wanted Bamon so bad. I realize because of how season 6 ended naturally Damon is going to be with Elena but that's when Bonnie passes. You can have more than 1 epic love and right now it's just him and Bonnie and I would have loved to see them develop romantic feelings it felt clear it was there. Damon was even so jealous of Enzo having Bonnie. Ugh I want Bamon

IBamon had serious potential, but it should not have taken Elena disappearing for the writers to consider Bonnie as a love interest. Damon and Bonnie had undeniable chemistry. Their dynamic was full of trust, tension, and vulnerability. But the show refused to explore it.

I understand the love for Bamon, especially with how jealous Damon was of Enzo. But Enzo never felt like the right match for Bonnie. And Jeremy? He treated her like a second choice. Bonnie, this powerful, self-sacrificing witch, deserved more than being anyone’s backup plan.

That’s what makes Klonnie so compelling. Klaus shares Damon’s intensity, but he respects Bonnie’s strength and is drawn to her power. Their dynamic would be magnetic. Bonnie stands her ground, and Klaus never tries to dim her light. He is captivated by it.

Bonnie deserved someone who chose her fully. Someone who saw her magic and loved her for it. Klonnie gives her that.

[sandyferal]

I genuinely think Tootie’s behavior towards Timmy would improve dramatically like. The second Vicky moves out of the family house. It’s clear that Vicky is severely inhibiting Tootie’s ability to have friends, much less have them come over and spend time with her. And it feels likely that the main reason her crush turned into an obsession is because Timmy had shown himself to be the only person willing to be nice to her. It doesn’t justify the way she acted, but let’s be real it’s not like she has good role models to teach her better.

I feel like once Vicky isn’t around to ruin her social life she’ll be able to have other friends over and like, have someone around to seek comfort in that isn’t her crush. She could actually start growing as a person. Which could happen as soon as like, 1-3 years after the events of the show?

I also really like the idea that even if she isn’t obsessed with Timmy, that Crimson Chin doll he gave her holds a special place in her heart because like. As a sentimental person I gotta be real something like that would never not be sweet to me. I’d thinking about it for years.

And I like to think because of that she eventually got into comics and began to obsess over those instead. Maybe Crimson Chin wasn’t her thing! But she seems to enjoy fantasies and I think it would be so fun to see her find her own interests. If we’re getting into specifics, I get the vibes that she would be into comics following heroes like Superman, or when villainesses get their own comics like Harley or Poison Ivy. Obviously not those exact characters but those are the vibes I get. Not to say I don’t think she wouldn’t still have girly interests and love romance and stuff but man.

Additionally. I fucking hate Tootie from the live action movies. They glorify her as hot and morally perfect while simultaneously treating how she was as a child as weird and ugly. Man people grow up and sometimes get less weird but like some people are just dorks. Tootie is a dork. Keep her as an overenthusiastic, emotional, glasses-wearing, strong-willed dork. You cowards. Women don’t need to be “perfect” to be accepted and loved.

If Tootie and Timmy did eventually get together, personally I think it would be good if Timmy just. Didn’t see her for a while. She gets more into spending time with actual friends, and doesn’t talk to Timmy as much until they meet up again a couple years later at an afterschool comic club/comic con, or something of that sort. I think she deserves to be her own person before she actually ends up with anyone.

And while I normally don’t like “ships” (I say that in quotes bc I don’t particularly feel compelled to ship these children at all) that involves a party who clearly isn’t interested… they’re also. Children. It’s not that serious. They really shouldn’t be together at this age anyway, and they probably will change as they get older.

It doesn’t feel that big of a deal to imagine Tootie and Timmy might be together as adults despite their current dynamic, because the main issues are:

a) Tootie doesn’t respect boundaries and is emotionally unstable, which are both likely caused by isolation, lack of good role models, and being too young to understand things. Very likely she grows out of it.

b) Timmy not liking her. Which, in the context of the early episodes about her, is actually something you could debate?

To clarify, he obviously isn’t interested in a romantic relationship most of the time, but at the same time he clearly has some care for her. The argument could be made that it is because of his fairies influencing him, yes, or it’s just pity. But like. There are episodes where he legit just does something because he wants her to be happy. And he indicates he doesn’t really dislike her or hate spending time with her. He, at least in theory, is actually willing to spend time with her. (“I would’ve gone to her dumb party if she’d invited me.”) That’s not even mentioning how he. Like. Just straight up chose to stick himself with a love arrow because he wanted to enjoy spending a Valentine’s Day with her. Which is a whole thing that could be analyzed but not the point.

If anything his actions point to a young boy who at the moment, only feels attraction through the lense of someone being “pretty” instead of someone they can genuinely get along with. He sees Tootie as weird and embodying the qualities boys find “icky” in girls. It would make sense if he grew out of that.

Although at the end of the day I don’t really care who these kids end up with, I JUST want Tootie to be able to have a happy and healthy social life/relationship with a partner when she grows up, and I hate the idea of completely stripping away her “not pretty” qualities before she’s allowed to have that. She’s a fucking lovely little girl who deserves to be herself, and to be weird, and to be happy. That’s my fucking daughter!!! I love her so much!!!

[taragreenfield]

do you think the story would’ve worked better ( or at least made more sense ) if the Sun Summoner had been Fjerdan instead of Ravkan ??

Here’s my reasoning : throughout the series, Alina constantly questions the Darkling, the other Grisha, and pretty much anyone in power. While some of that is definitely justified, it starts to feel a bit off considering her background. She’s Ravkan, raised in a country that, despite its issues, still reveres the Grisha to some extent at least more than the surrounding nations do… The Grisha might not be universally loved, but they’re institutionalized, accepted within the Second Army, and given a place in Ravkan society.

So Alina’s persistent distance, her suspicion, and her resistance to connecting with other Grisha at the Little Palace feel emotionally true in some ways but narratively, they sometimes lack weight. The books try to explain this with her and Mal’s background ( how they grew up isolated in an orphanage, then joined the military, and so on ) but that’s a pretty fragile justification in my opinion. Her inability to trust, open up, or feel at home among her own people doesn’t always add up. Especially when we consider that she’s supposed to be one of them.

If Alina had been Fjerdan, her distrust and resistance would feel more grounded and complex.

A Fjerdan woman suddenly discovered she was a Grisha, let alone the Sun Summoner, that internal and external conflict would have been so much more compelling. Her mistrust, her moral and emotional struggle, even her resistance to the Darkling’s charisma and the Grisha hierarchy would have made perfect sense.

And from a storytelling perspective, this would’ve opened up so many more layers of political tension, religious trauma, and cultural conflict. It would’ve made the idea of a Grisha “Messiah” rising from Fjerda ( essentially the heart of anti-Grisha ideology ) so much more powerful and complex. Plus her dynamic with the Darkling would have been filled with even more angst, ideological clash and drama.

I’ve asked a couple of other accounts this question, but haven’t gotten any responses yet, and I’m really curious to hear what others think. Would love your take on it !! xx

Hi, anon!

That's certainly an interesting question.

So, one of my issues with Alina is that her backstory is very scarce and vague. She's supposed to be an orphan, not rich, not noble, but she somehow lands a job as a cartographer in the army despite not being any good at drawing maps. You'd expect a lowly orphan kid to be peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors, but no, she apparently got herself a fairly fancy job. She also manifests the behaviour of an entitled, sheltered kid (her scowling at herring, generally sneering at everything and everyone during the first chapters, or her horrified reaction to an animal being killed and eaten). Don't tell me a kid raised in the countryside of the 19th-century pseudo-Russia wasn't familiar with the concept of killing animals for food.

Her orphanage also seems very shady, they are apparently taught how to eat snails? What's even shadier, if Alina arrives at the orphanage at the age of 8, how come she doesn't remember almost anything prior to that? Yes, she even mentions that "memories are the luxury not meant for Keramzin orphans", so I suppose they somehow forced the kids to forget their previous life, but how? And for what? You can't just drop a creepy line like that and never elaborate. We also learn that at the orphanage they were taught a lot of puritan bullshit and were brainwashed "to be grateful". What were they taught about Grisha? Alina mentions a rumour spread by a serf about Darklings being born without souls, and then she said Ana Kuya kicked that serf out and told them it's a stupid superstition. So I guess they were not instilling the belief about Grisha being monsters in the kids? Unclear.

Another problem: the lack of ideology. Alina has no convictions, no principles, no understanding of the sociopolitical situation, and no ability to think about the consequences of her actions. She's running around like a headless chicken, parrotting whatever Baghra tells her, listening to Mal, Nikolai, the Apparat or whoever else is willing to fuel her pre-existing biases. When she argues with Aleksander, her main "counterarguments" are "It's not fair!" and "You are a monster!", which are...not great, to put it lightly. She just doesn't seem to care about anything or anyone but herself and Mal.

So, could those issues be fixed by her being Fjerdan? Well, some moments would certainly make more sense. For example, her persistent inclination to twist everything Aleksander says and does into something malicious and horrifying and the subconscious dehumanization of him and other Grisha would make more sense if those beliefs were drilled into her by Fjerdan anti-Grisha propaganda. Her suppressing her powers because it's actually deathly dangerous for her as a Fjerdan to be found (and because she was taught it's something monstrous) instead of the incessant "what about Maaaaaaal????" also would be better for her characterization. Her running away from the Little Palace because of the internal moral conflict instead of Baghra telling her that Aleksander is a big bad shadow wizard who wants to destroy the world with no proof whatsoever would also be much more interesting to explore. Because "deep in my heart I knew she was right" is just lazy.

Anyway, Fjerdan or not, she should have been given a coherent backstory, a convincing basis for her biases and preconceptions, and actual political motivation and agency. But I like the idea of her being from a hostile nation. In the hands of a competent author who isn't afraid to make their main character get their entire worldview challenged and is competent enough to write out this conflict and transformation with all subsequent political, ideological, religious, and interpersonal implications, that could have been a great story.

Thanks for the ask!

[ofspacecrafts]

Didn’t know if I was going to wade into this territory but you know what , why not ?

I have thoughts about why Buck & Tommy are so appealing to some of us (me) , more than Buck’s other relationships.

I’m going to break it down .

Abby

Abby is introduced first on the show , so the audience has a connection with her. I like Abby & having familiarity with Connie Britton made me like her more.

I enjoyed Abby’s relationship with Buck at first.

I liked both characters separately so on my first watch as a casual viewer of a new show I was like ok this is cute but that’s all it was.

I didn’t really feel chemistry there.

But they never compelled me. I was indifferent to her leaving and wasn’t sad to see their relationship end. (Only felt bad for Buck)

On my rewatch , the relationship felt weird to me. I’m not sure if I was biased knowing how it ended or not but I enjoyed it less the second time around.

Ali

The flirting was cute but we didn’t see enough of them actually together.

Her character existed to be saved by Buck and date him . When it’s obvious that that is a character’s role and they don’t have any individual arc, it doesn’t create a relationship I care about.

I appreciated her honesty in why she broke up with him instead of ghosting or leading him on.

But it was a half hearted portrayal that I don’t think anyone expected to be endgame .

Taylor

Taylor and Buck actually had some chemistry. I loved their flirting and their banter.

I don’t hate Taylor the way a lot of people do.

I thought she was an interesting character and liked how they played off each other.

Taylor was fleshed out and a real fully developed character and I enjoyed her arc.

But as Buck’s love interest I think the seed was planted early on that her ambition would always come first.

And honestly, after he kissed Lucy I’m not sure I blame her?

There was some chemistry but it still wasn’t ever enough for me to root for them .

I wish they stayed friends because I did love their dynamic.

Lucy

There’s not much to say here except that I actually think Buck and Lucy had great chemistry and if their relationship started differently and the show had decided to go that direction when she was introduced I definitely could’ve seen myself rooting for them .

Natalia

Honestly her character just felt so flat to me and it was very very obvious she was filler.

There was no chemistry and I never considered her a legitimate option.

Which brings us to Tommy.

To be honest, before my rewatch I didn’t even remember who Tommy was. So watching 7x03 I thought he was brand new.

He was compelling right away, on his own . The deadpan humor, the fake mouth static , flying into a hurricane for his friends.

In 7x04 right away I was like wait… are they flirting ??? The chemistry was so there.

We find out about Tommy’s interests , see little tidbits of his personality throughout 7x04 culminating in the conversation at Buck’s apartment and the kiss.

The way 7x05 and the date was handled was so interesting to me. The situation was so well thought out and the way we see Buck act here is something I don’t think we’ve seen since Abby. Buck acknowledging his feelings in a very real and nuanced way.

Ever scene Tommy was in from 7x03-05 made me want to get to know him as a character, separately from his relationship with Buck .

In order to actually care about a relationship you have to care about both characters separately first !

The chemistry during their kiss and the coffee scene is so so strong.

Viewing it all again under this lens, knowing who Tommy was and is, honestly made me like him more . Seeing a character grow and change to be able to build better relationships is so entertaining!

The hugs in 7x06 and that kiss just attest to the insane chemistry Lou and Oliver have .

[tubbytarchia]

I feel it’s unjustified and extremely harsh for you to say that Wild Life has “the least tension or meaningful viewer retention or investment in the characters” and “did bare explorations of interesting themes” only because your faves didn’t get to have a narratively satisfying ending or moments. It’s valid to be disappointed about what happened to them/their arc and I get it since I’ve felt that way too about my fave in some of the seasons, but I never blame it on the season’s gimmick or the CCs because I know nothing is scripted and things happen spontaneously. I can’t expect things to go the way it could go or be stuck on it because it’d be unrealistic of me to assume that everyone’s characters will get a spotlight or character development or have their plans for the season fulfilled. While you’re 100% allowed to feel upset and even to list Wild Life as your least favourite, it’s unwarranted to say this season had barely anything to give when it had a fun gimmick, awesome wildcards, new alliances, funny moments and skirmishes, and arguably is the most narratively satisfying season for the winner to win at. I love that you acknowledged this season wasn’t for you, but making blanket statements like those is unnecessarily cruel to the work the CCs have put into their videos.

I didn't blame anything on the CCs either, and all I stated was my opinion. I go out of my way to disclaim that I'm expressing opinion because of responses like this and still I get faulted for "blanket statements" when I don't end every sentence with "in my opinion"

I didn't watch all the POVs but none of them had me invested through to the end personally, not just my favorites. There were a lot of funny moments, it had that in entertainment value, but what I seek from Life Series is the drama and tension first and comedy second, which I acknowledged that this series just may not be trying to cater to anymore, therefore it isn't catering to me, but I can still be sad about it

Of course I'm interested in the characters by default, especially Pearl after seeing her alliance, I really wanted to see where it would go. In the end much of nothing went anywhere for anyone. BigB had a really strong start and kind of fizzled out through no fault of his own, the BAMers were a very cute dynamic and interesting for their kill count alone but then all went kind of unceremoniously and didn't leave me with a lot of emotional attachment, and I feel similarly about Gem and Joel. Scar especially suffered struggling to achieve what he had set out to do since episode 2. The Gs had some very good moments for me to chew on regarding Pearl's and Cleo's dynamic and such but that was a small saving grace. Gem and Pearl didn't get past stage 1 of their dynamic. The idea of untrustworthiness was posed with BigB and Etho pretty strongly regarding the Gs and then they just kinda stopped caring. Team BET were kind of doing their own thing and that worked really well, narratively those guys ended up having me the most intrigued and they were among the least interest for me at the start. So many alliances were proposed in passing eg Ren with Jimmy, BigB and anyone, and then nothing narratively compelling came of them if anything at all

Again, I don't blame the CCs whatsoever for any of my failed enjoyment, but the gimmicks took center stage and interferred with the tension and drama instead of encouraging it like Secret Life, which I think did what it did really well in spite of already being very gimmicky, and I feel confident in placing my problem with the series there. This time around there was just no room to breathe for at least half the episodes, the finale especially when no one was doing much of anything other than walking around deducing the gimmicks and dying to them instead of to each other until they were quite literally forced to. And that hampered the aspect that I enjoy the most and have gotten out of every season before it, hence why my disappointment is so potent. And at least one of the CCs seems to feel similarly about the unsatisfying resolutions and failed developments

Yes the new alliances were cool, yes the player that won deserved the win, etc etc, all fine in a vacuum but I didn't see much chance for them to prosper and wish these alliances and this win were part of a different season. It's my opinion and if you disagree then that's absolutely ok, and I welcome your own opinions but please stop faulting me for it. I wish I could have enjoyed it but I don't get to just change my main draw for the series unfortunately

[the-obnoxious-sibling]

What makes you so interested in kuina?

well, i was a zoro girlie at the start. that he had this complex motivation and backstory that he kept entirely to himself fascinated me. he's loyal to luffy, fond of his crew, but this? this one thing is just for zoro. even after he shows he's willing to die for luffy (which implies luffy has become more important to zoro than his own dream), as far as we know he's yet to say kuina's name, let alone tell her story, to his crew.

his dream involves having his name shouted to the heavens so she can hear that he succeeded in fulfilling their shared goal, but he won't even whisper her name where anyone who matters could hear it. it's a fascinating contradiction.

a few more things below the cut.

second: the closest he's ever come to telling someone anything about kuina is, of course, tashigi. the zoro-tashigi dynamic is one of my favorites in op, but there's a reason i use the tag the ztk thing and not zotash: the ghost of kuina haunts that dynamic. even after the timeskip, when zoro's gotten over the resemblance enough to stop calling tashigi "copycat," tashigi brings up the conversation they had about kuina (though she's misunderstood zoro's meaning). it seems inescapable. it compels me terribly.

third: we know just enough about her to spark speculation. i love all the different takes ppl have on hypothetical adult kuina! she's a butch lesbian, she's no contact with her sexist dad, he's trans masc, she's convinced her dad to train a half-dozen feral little girls, she's trained a half-dozen feral little girls, she's mihawk's student, she's tashigi's rival, she's got a robot spine, she retaught herself how to walk, she faked her death to leave her sexist home, she took over the dojo at an infamously young age, she went to wano and got Big, etc. etc. mutually incompatible but all equally plausible. i love this kind of infinite possibility of character.

fourth: for all the diverse impossible futures we can imagine, her reality is cliche. a girl killed in a flashback to generate manpain and motivation in a main character. you can't even really call it fridging; that would imply she had any story purpose other than dying. but unlike so many other women dead in op backstories, the thing that kills her isn't a wicked man, or a cruel system—it's just an accident. fate, or bad luck, or random chance. nothing zoro can revenge himself on, except through atheism and defiant rejection of defeatist, futile thinking.

fifth: her "futility of wanting to be a female swordsman" angst is interesting. frustrating, not coherently written, but interesting all the same. it makes a common subtext of battle shonen—that girls are too weak to be fighters—text, by way of a young girl hearing others say it so often that she believes it. our dumb hero immediately protests that idea with the very shonen value of You Can Do Anything If You Just Try Hard Enough, and then she dies before we can find out which of them is right.

if we accept zoro's statement as true, but the swordfighting community in op is still 95% men, then we get a new, worse subtext: that girls are too weak-willed to be fighters. this especially seems to be the case for tashigi, who tries and tries and is frustrated by the sexism that surrounds & impedes her, which zoro just sees as her making excuses for her weakness—but isn't the case in wano, which is a much more blatantly, regressively sexist culture, yet produces an impressive number of capable swordswomen.

it makes me wonder how kuina would've actually fared, should she have survived to adulthood.

[nohara-rin-dot-mp3]

i am doubtful that you've found her Compelling enough to really have strong onions about but i'd love to hear your thoughts on Sakura for the ask game anyway!

hiii synnie!!! don't get me wrong here i find sakura incredibly compelling i just also find her incredibly intimidating. i don't really understand her but i do have probably misguided opinions about her!!!!

first impression: mildly indignant on her behalf for all of the atrocities she has to suffer through by nature of being a heroine in naruto

impression now: i love her very badly but i have a hard time wrapping my head around her. she's fascinating on like, so many levels, but the narrative has a very hard time exploring literally anything it brings up about her. it wants her to be normal but she is literally so weird. she should be allowed to kill people. she wants to be self-sufficient but unfortunately that will never happen because the narrative just fucking hates her. so badly. she has a second personality that just gets dropped after the first half of the series. she's just so. there's so much going on there.

favorite thing about that character: i do not actually mind that sakura is a medic. it does fit her. is it annoying in the grand scheme of "all women are medics?" yes. but sakura specifically hitting that balance between violence and healing is very interesting to me.

least favorite thing: the hororrrrs let her out!!!!! every time a "perv on sakura" gag comes up i have to punch a wall it's literally not her fault but good lord!!!! set her free!!!!!!!

favorite line/scene: i really like when she decides to poison everyone and then go kill sasuke on her own it's absolutely deranged behavior. i actually just love everything about that section she's so completely unhinged the entire time and it's like played as romance on her part?? which like yeah i guess. but hear me out that wasn't very normal behavior of her.

favorite interaction that character has with another: i love her dynamic with naruto they bite each other... i like that she's allowed to be feral and kick him around like he is a chew toy. especially when sasuke's gone and the two of them descend into almost perfectly parallel despair alkdsaglfd they're so funny to me... when kakashi like. says his name. and then both of them fall to the ground in tears. that was the good stuff.

character that I wish that character would interact with more: god i WISH sakura/kakashi parallels were like. intentional or elaborated on. they're the people who are left behind. like not only would it be so nice to see sakura get some actual training from that guy i'd also love to see them just INTERACT!!!! least existent inner team seven duo dynamic i would kill to see more canon interactions between them.

character from another fandom that reminds me of that character: kam flower that bloomed nowhere. it's the morals that seem kind of normal until you examine them and realize that they are deranged. and the desperate scramble to be the Normal Sane Girl.

headcanon about that character: her parents die during the orochimaru/suna invasion and she never tells anyone because she just can't find the right way to do it. that'd be awakaaaard plus the rest of them already don't have parents what are they gonna do??? throw her a party?? she also doesn't really see herself as an orphan or believe that she needs sympathy or aid because she's an adult when they die (12. but allowed to kill people!!!)

song that reminds of that character: that's why i gave up on music by yorushika

unpopular opinion about that character: that she's a person?? that she's just a human and not like, evil??? that she's an interesting character underneath the terrible writing? sakura opinions are WILD i went into her tag once and it scarred me for life people will just be saying shit about her... the narrative hates her so so badly for the sin of being a women and she can't even get it to lay off in fanon. tragic. and there's another flavor of depiction that "fixes" her that i ALSO hate because like,,, making her a girlboss/fujoshi/braincell haver is also not great. in terms of hashtag feminism. that is not a interesting character that is a cardboard cut out..... sighs.

favorite image:

really like early sakura she was always making excellent faces and showing her teeth.

[atopvisenyashill]

i’m seeing some discussion of the daemon / alyssa parent child thing invoking your interpretation of the fucked up saera / old man jae dynamic, but also of the alysanne / baelon dynamic, which i had never thought very deeply about. do you have any thoughts? really appreciate how you recontextualized jaehaerys btw, it’s well thought out and compelling and really plausible to me

It's definitely one I find fascinating and interesting, if kind of...opaque I suppose. I think Alysanne is very much projecting onto Baelon and Alyssa, in that she sees herself and her relationship with Jaehaerys in them, but like, she's also purposefully making their relationship into an echo of hers with Jaehaerys.

I think the fact that Alyssa is technically the second daughter is what really helps Alysanne project onto them - Aemon was meant for Daenerys, so when Alysanne sees Alyssa displaying very typical childlike behavior where she wants to play with her brother who is near in age to her, she decides this must mean they are in love the way she was "in love" with Jaehaerys, younger son. I think this is also why she gets so weird about Viserra attempting to seduce Baelon...for her it's almost like someone attempting to seduce Jaehaerys away from her. I think it almost ties back to her conflict with Rhaena and the way it never resolved. Rhaena and her have that argument about how Alysanne stole her crown - and Rhaena isn't wrong because there's no reason Jaehaerys shouldn't have married Rhaena or Aerea if he was so dead set on incest marrying, but he chose Alysanne, the "ugly" sister, just like Baelon "chose" Alyssa, the "uglier" sister...and then Rhaena and Alysanne never make up. Rhaena blames Alysanne for Aerea's death. Rhaena blames Alysanne for her unhappiness. Rhaena is not allowed to truly own Dragonstone. Rhaena retreats to Harrenhal and seems to completely ignore her family for the rest of her life. I think Viserra (and Saera) resemble Rhaena in look, while Alyssa obviously favors her mother, and Baelon likely favors Jaehaerys. So for Alysanne it's like,,, this is how it was meant to be. The "pretty" sister needs to get over herself, it's not the ugly one's fault that the Handsome King chose her, it was love!

For Alysanne, it has to be love! It can't be grooming, it can't be lust, it can't be because anyone wanted the throne. Love absolves her of every bad thing she might have done to make Rhaena's life worse. Baelon is not allowed to have loved another, to have lusted after another, but Alyssa. She has to be his true love, to prove that Alysanne is Jaehaerys' true love, and Alysanne has no responsibility for the way Rhaena's life exploded. This is why I think it makes sense that Baelon would have a bastard he refuses to claim like Ulf - he can't let his mother know that he still feels desire, or even wants companionship, it would break her heart. He has to be a grieving widow forever. I genuinely don't even buy that he wasn't interested in Viserra. I think he rejected her because he knows Alysanne had a plan for her, knows Alysanne would never approve of him remarrying, and doesn't want to let her down.

I wish desperately that we had a glimpse into whether this dynamic changed after he was named heir. As his mother's health is declining, does Baelon reach for her? The mother who resembles his long dead wife? Or does Alysanne perhaps associate him so much with Jaehaerys and with her own projections that she rejects him? After her marital rape, after everything she's worked for regarding Rhaenys inheriting coming crashing down, after Aemon's death, after Baelon doesn't attempt to give the crown to Rhaenys in any way...does Baelon become Jaehaerys in her mind as well? The son she worked so hard to turn into her Perfect White Knight is just like every other man. How can she look him in the eyes again? I've always felt that she cuts him off. Him, Viserys, Daemon, Aemma, I think she writes them all off in her mind and I think she never makes up with any of them. There's no argument, it's just a sudden wall she puts up between them. Baelon doesn't know how to bring it down because he's always taken his cues from her, so he doesn't try. Viserys wants it taken down but every time he tries it makes things worse. Daemon is too young to care, and then too angry to bother. She dies only on speaking terms with Rhaenys and Maegelle and Jocelyn, because she can't stand it, can't live with the fact that maybe these lofty ideals she'd been working towards were an illusion. She's only ever been drawing a charcoal window on the wall of her prison instead of breaking down the walls to be free.

[dasketcherz]

you should tag your cassandra rants as #anti cassandra, anti tags exist for a reason. stay in your lane, and stop preaching about bad writing when your ship is 100% rooted in headcanons and the only time you mention rapunzel is in relation to a man.

okok first of all, comparing a pitched idea (that didnt get past beyond the initial concept stage) to a fully produced tv show (that got greenlit to run for three seasons) about bad writing is c r a z y

second of all, i'm sorry but implying that building a story off of headcanons = bad writing is—in the nicest way i could possibly say this—such an amateur as hell mindset. are you new around here or something?

just because one story was told with a company budget doesnt mean/make the stories that people created in their free time are any lesser than—because compelling written stories can be inspired from anything/anywhere and can be made by anyone (especially in this current era we're living in where lots of indie shows are rising and thriving proves the point i'm making)

the rise of the brave tangled dragon's phenomena being a great example of this. And Imma tell you right now, there were TONS of really good written stories about it simply based purely on people's collaborative headcanons around these set of characters that never even canonically interacted with each other, like at all

if anythin, instances where ships that were built off of headcanons like these forming a whole community dedicated to stories about it is pretty impressive. To have people see potential between two (or more) characters in any way, then doing the work and manifest it ourselves—thats the beauty of being an artist/writer/creative with imaginations babeyyy

third of all, fyi rapunzel is one of my top three favorite disney princess since the inception of the movie before the show even fuckin existed. she is independently interesting as she is as an individual on her own so ig god forbid i explore her character further using the dynamic she has with my fave characters who just happens to be (males and) not your personal fave.

and for the record, all my grievances about Cass in S3 would still be the same even if she was a man cuz all my personal complaints had nothing to do with her being a woman

anyway, if my stuff and opinion arent your cup of tea, thats totally okay. the block button and the exit door is right there you can leave anytime you want soooooo yeh

[antialiasis]

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: all of my thoughts (part 1)

All right, this is me, watching my way through my current obsession The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the umpteenth time and rambling about everything that comes to mind as I go, which ended up with me typing over thirty thousand words because I am incapable of shutting up. Because that is truly excessive, I will be posting my thoughts in three parts; this is part one (covering roughly the first hour and thirteen minutes of the Extended Cut, up through the end of the desert/carriage sequence), and I'll probably post part two in a few days to a week, pending editing and such and some of the other things I should be doing.

Because that's a lot of reading to commit to without knowing what you're getting into, especially if you're here from the tag, here's what to expect in brief:

This is all of my thoughts, simply whatever comes to mind, but my thoughts on fiction tend to be heavy on in-depth analysis of characters, their motivations and how they tick, so a lot of this falls into that general category.

In particular, there will be a whole lot of thoughts on Tuco, Blondie, and their evolving character dynamic, which is my favorite part of the movie. I will not be looking at it through a shippy lens, for what it's worth (romantic shipping is not generally how I personally engage with fiction), but I hope anyone who finds their dynamic compelling in whatever way might still enjoy some of my thoughts on them!

In between, there's also a bunch of other commentary on stuff like the narrative function of scenes (especially on the scenes that were cut in the International Cut of the film and whether the film is better with or without them), directorial or editing or production design or storytelling choices, acting choices, foreshadowing and parallels, as well as some lighter commentary on bits that amuse me or bug me or that I particularly enjoy.

Sometimes I will just be making observations about random things I didn't necessarily notice or pick up on on my first viewing; many of them are probably kind of obvious, but if I didn't pick them up seeing it once, probably there's at least a chance they might be interesting for other people who have only seen it once.

This is not a recap of the movie, but I do try to quote lines or explain bits that I'm commenting on, so hopefully you can follow along if you've seen the movie at all. I don't know how coherent this would be if you haven't seen the movie, but if you choose to read a post like this about a movie you haven't seen anyway, godspeed to you.

Tuco's introduction

The opening scene sure is a microcosm of Sergio Leone's directorial style. Slow, silent close-ups, wide shots, unclear exactly where the scene is going initially, these unnamed characters eventually converge on a saloon -- and then instead of following them inside, Tuco comes crashing through the window and we freeze-frame. It's very drawn out (I had a bit of an "Is the whole movie going to be like this" moment watching it for the first time), but the comic timing of Tuco and the freeze-frame is great; instantly we go from this super slow, dramatic buildup to this fun, humorous subversion that really sets a tone. All that buildup was actually for introducing this guy.

In the process, we learn that 1) Tuco is someone at least three different people want to kill, 2) he's someone skilled and resourceful enough to manage to shoot them first and then make his escape through the window even after being caught unawares during a meal by three people working together, and 3) even in the process of doing that he brings his food with him -- probably actually pretty revealing about his background of poverty, not wanting to waste food when he has it. We'll of course see him introduced further a little later, but this really says a lot for only actually containing about ten silent seconds of him, and also benefits from being funny.

It's kind of amusing how bloodless most gun deaths are in this movie, considering it doesn't shy away from blood in other parts. The surviving bounty hunter does have some blood on his hand as he tries to shoot after Tuco, probably to convey that he's injured despite still being alive, but the others are just cleanly lying there with no signs of damage. Maybe it's paying homage to what other Westerns looked like -- the actual cowboy gunslinging specifically is very idealized, sanitized and almost cartoonish, compared to a lot of the other violence in the film. I remember being a kid and hearing about the trope of people in old Westerns getting shot and dramatically going flying as a result, despite that normal bullets are far too small for their momentum to send a person flying anywhere -- you don't actually see too much of that in modern movies, where everything tends to look much more realistic, but this movie definitely has a lot of very dramatic flailing and spinning around when people get shot in a way that looks pretty distinctly silly and cartoony today. Ultimately it meshes pretty well with the overall tone of the film, though; this movie is gritty in many respects, but it does not aspire to realism.

Angel Eyes' introduction

The way Angel Eyes just silently waltzes into Stevens' home and helps himself to some of his food while maintaining eye contact the whole time is so weird and uncomfortable, it's delightful. What an entrance.

Stevens has a limp. People who have fought in the war tend to be visibly scarred by it in this movie -- truly something that just permeates every background detail, that you don't really think about on a first viewing when you think the Civil War is just a setting backdrop.

There is zero dialogue in this film until more than ten and a half minutes in (though the first three minutes of that are the opening credits, so it's seven and a half minutes of actual movie with no dialogue). I think this is a very fun choice which contributes to the viewer really feeling how unbearable the silence is for Stevens by the time he starts asking Angel Eyes if Baker sent him - half of that silence wasn't even technically part of this scene, but it really intensifies it by making the silence here feel even longer than it is.

When Stevens says, "I know nothing at all about that case of coins!", Angel Eyes looks up with interest from where he'd been casually looking at his food. Evidently he had had no idea there was any case of coins involved, only that he was meant to collect a name, but once Stevens mentions it, his interest is piqued.

Angel Eyes casually offers, "Well, Jackson was here, or Baker's got it all wrong," while cutting off and eating a piece of bread with a large knife, sort of implicitly daring Stevens to try to say Baker's got it all wrong and see what happens. When he's got Tuco captured later, Angel Eyes does a similar thing of staying friendly-threatening as he casually asks questions, but once Tuco actually refuses to talk of his own accord, out come the claws. This time, though, Stevens does not take the bait, probably sensing that that would lead nowhere good for him.

He says, "Maybe Baker would like to know just what you and Jackson had to say about the cash box" -- this isn't the info he came for, but maybe Baker would be interested. Really it's Angel Eyes himself who is intrigued -- he'll go on to tell Baker that that's my bit. But he doesn't really bother pushing Stevens for it, instead moving on to admitting he's being paid for the name specifically. Probably he figures once he gets the name, he'll have all the info he needs to track him down anyway by his usual means (which it turns out he does).

The casual, grinning confidence of Angel Eyes' assertion that if Jackson weren't going by an alias he would've found him already, "That's why they pay me," really makes you believe it, doesn't it. It's exposition about what Angel Eyes does, but is also executed to work as a nice character-establishing moment about his competence.

Christopher Frayling's otherwise fun and informative commentary on the film talked about how Angel Eyes' missing fingertip was provided by a hand double in the final truel -- but you can see in this scene that Lee van Cleef's own right hand is definitely missing that fingertip (though I did not notice it at all until I thought to specifically look for it). Very curious where the notion of a hand double came from -- he even named a specific guy.

Angel Eyes casually announces that when he's paid, he always sees the job through, even though that's just going to make Stevens desperate -- Angel Eyes knows he can shoot first, no big deal.

He shoots Stevens through the table and the food, even. How does he aim.

Angel Eyes grabs his gun and turns around to shoot Stevens' son before he actually comes into view (specifically, we see him start to react to something about ten frames before we can first see the tip of the son's rifle). Presumably, in-universe, he heard him coming, but we don't hear him coming at all over the blaring background chord, so it feels like Angel Eyes just knows he's coming by some sixth sense. Very effective at making him seem even more threatening, especially since there's also generally a conscious decision in this movie to act as if the characters can't see anything that's out of frame for the viewer -- Blondie and Tuco get caught out by that rule a couple of times in amusing ways, but Angel Eyes actively defies the auditory equivalent.

(It's neat how the family photo, used for Angel Eyes obliquely threatening Stevens' family, also serves as foreshadowing for the fact he also has this second, older son we hadn't seen yet at that point.)

The fact Angel Eyes sneaks into Baker's bedroom when he's sleeping to report back is so extra. A normal person would just arrange to meet him the next morning, but no, Angel Eyes does the creepy stalker thing. Probably makes the murdering him in his bed bit a little easier, though, which also suggests he was definitely intending on that bit the whole time and didn't just "almost forget".

Baker's brow furrows and his eyes shift uncomfortably when Angel Eyes mentions the cash box; clearly he was hoping Angel Eyes would never find out about that bit (very reasonably, given what happens next).

All in all, Angel Eyes' introduction is super striking. The casual veneer and smug grins painted over a deeply tense sense of threat; the absolute deadly confidence; the fact he shoots Stevens' son too so easily and presciently, almost as a footnote to it all; casually walking out with the money that Stevens offered him for sparing his life; and then, on the ostensible basis that when he's paid he always sees the job through, casually killing Baker too.

Although he explains the murder of Baker as simply seeing the job through, though, Stevens didn't actually ask him to kill Baker; all he ever suggested he wanted was to be left alone, and all he said about the money was that it's a thousand dollars, after asking what Angel Eyes was being paid for murdering him. I expect Angel Eyes simply chooses to take it as payment for the 'job' of killing Baker for motivated reasons; that way, he can act as if the money is still 'payment' for him even though he rejected Stevens' attempt to bribe him, and it's much easier to go after the cash box himself if Baker's out of the picture, after all.

This creates an interesting ironic sense that while Angel Eyes effectively presents his own introduction as being all about his unassailable professional principles about always performing the job he's been paid for, and I took him at his word on my first viewing, he's not really all about those principles at all -- and as the movie goes on, indeed, he's simply pursuing the cash box for his own reasons rather than because anyone's paying him for it. His 'professional principles' don't come up again, because that's not really what this intro was telling us at all.

Which isn't to say he doesn't always see a job through after being paid (I can definitely believe that; if he has a reputation for getting the job done no matter what, that makes people more likely to pay him in the future, and he sure has no qualms about completing any job), just that that's not at all the main thing driving his character, as you might initially assume. The thing his intro is really telling us about him is that he's ruthless, terrifying, extremely competent, very interested in this cash box, and has absolutely no trouble casually murdering whoever might be standing in the way of accomplishing what he wants. And I think it's very effective at showing that.

Blondie's introduction

This scene opens with Tuco on a galloping horse in a way that naturally invites the viewer to assume this is following directly from when he flees from the saloon in his intro, and that's what I assumed on my first viewing -- but nah, not only does he not have the food and drink, he's wearing different clothing. Given the surviving bounty hunter from the intro will be appearing later and indicating that was eight months ago, and this is decidedly the most obvious place for the bulk of the timeskip to be happening, probably this is actually several months later. This film is not at all big on time indicators -- for the most part, we have no idea how much time is passing, everything feels like it's happening pretty much in sequence, and we can only vaguely infer that there must be longer gaps between particular events.

The straight-up photograph on Tuco's wanted poster is pretty hilarious. There's even a scene later with a little gag about the long exposure times for photographs at the time. Probably this is just a funny prop for two scenes to make it very obvious to the viewer that it is absolutely him on the wanted poster even as he adamantly denies it, but it's also very funny to imagine Tuco patiently posing for his own wanted poster.

Framing through it, all three of the bounty hunters surrounding Tuco when Blondie comes along are in fact going for their guns when Blondie shoots them, which makes sense -- for all that Blondie is not much of a noble hero, he generally does not tend to shoot people until they're at least starting to draw on him. (There's one notable exception, which will come up in part two.)

I enjoy Tuco's weird little nervous, disbelieving grin as he realizes this stranger just shot the bounty hunters but is sparing him. Tuco's own worldview, as shaped by his background, is dominated by self-interest; it's every man for himself, and it's up to him to do whatever it takes, tell whatever lies, betray whoever he has to, to get ahead. And yet, there's this endearing naïveté to him, where he's not really suspicious of other people's motives accordingly -- he's surprised Blondie would save him, but his brain doesn't immediately go to this guy just wants to be the one to collect my bounty. We see this a lot throughout the film.

We cut (with great comic timing) from Blondie sticking a cigar in Tuco's mouth to Tuco spitting out a cigar while tied up on his horse as Blondie takes him into town -- an edit that suggests continuity, like only a short time has passed and it's the same cigar that he just hadn't had the chance to spit out yet (sort of dubious if you really think about it, since surely it would've taken a bit for Blondie to tie him up and get him onto his horse). This reinforces our initial assumptions about what's happening, where Blondie would just have tied him up before riding straight into town, but given the con they turn out to be running, there must have actually been an offscreen conversation about it and the cigar is there as a bit of cheeky misdirection for the audience.

(It probably makes sense that when Blondie put the cigar in his mouth, he was actually about to propose they run this bounty scheme together -- as the movie proceeds, we see that Blondie generally shares cigars in more of a friendly sort of way, after all.)

"I hope you end up in a graveyard!" yells Tuco. They sure do all end up in a graveyard! This is some very cheeky foreshadowing and I love it.

Tuco yelling ineffectual threats about how Blondie can still save himself by letting him go, while actually tied up and completely at his mercy, is just extremely Tuco.

Then he shifts tack very abruptly to saying he feels sick and needs water, only to then spit in Blondie's face. Later he furiously calls the deputy a bastard just for walking out of a building, only to then immediately shift to saying he's just an honest farmer who didn't do anything wrong. Tuco often does this, shifting from one approach to the next in a way that makes it really obvious he's bullshitting, but he keeps doing this, just throwing shit at the wall to see if anything sticks, even when this is counterproductive to the whole effort. He is presumably playing it up a bit here, but it's still in its own way pretty representative of who he is and what he's actually like. He's so characterful.

"Who says so? You can't even read!" says Tuco about whether it's him on the wanted poster, which is some delightful nonsense hypocrisy/projection given we will later see that Tuco himself can only barely read. I love him. (And why would reading even have anything to do with it; he's obviously looking at the plain actual photograph of him right there. Love Tuco's absolute nonsense.)

Another absurd change of tactics: "Hey, everybody, look, look! He's giving him the filthy money!" - as if he's going to rally onlookers against the sheriff and Blondie somehow on the basis that money is exchanging hands, isn't that suspicious.

Tuco calls Blondie Judas for accepting the money (referencing the thirty pieces of silver, of course), which will get a fun echo later.

"You're the son of a thousand fathers, all bastards like you!" I love that Tuco has invented compounding recursive bastardry just for Blondie. Not only is he a bastard, all one thousand men his mother slept with were also bastards. Glorious. (You can see Blondie's amused by this one; he actually smiles a little bit before throwing a match at him.)

I wonder if Blondie actively encouraged him to go quite this hard on the insults, to make them look less associated, or if he just did this. One would think it would be risky, on Tuco's end, to be this over the top in literally spitting in the face of the guy who could just let him hang if he happened to change his mind -- but then again, Tuco genuinely doesn't expect Blondie to double-cross him.

Tuco's crimes, as of this first hanging, are: murder; armed robbery of citizens, state banks and post offices; the theft of sacred objects; arson in a state prison; perjury; bigamy; deserting his wife and children; inciting prostitution; kidnapping; extortion; receiving stolen goods; selling stolen goods; passing counterfeit money; and, contrary to the laws of this state, the condemned is guilty of using marked cards and loaded dice! All this paints a picture of a pretty colorful backstory, but most of it is relatively petty; other than the murder (possibly of people like the bounty hunters we saw him dispose of in the opening), we can gather he's been scrounging up money through anything from cheating at cards up to armed robbery and kidnapping, he lied under oath (checks out), he set a prison on fire (presumably to escape), he ran off from his wife and kids and then married someone else he presumably also ran off from, and then there's "inciting prostitution" which I'm guessing means offering someone not previously engaged in sex work money for sex.

It obviously checks out that he'd do anything for money, and bigamy and deserting his wife and children rhyme with his off-hand mention at the monastery later that he's had lots of wives here and there; in general, it tracks that he would make big commitments and then just break them. So all in all, these seem like probably a bunch of genuine crimes that he actually committed. (He also nods somewhat smugly at the marked cards and loaded dice bit.)

Blondie's MO seems to be to first shoot the whip out of the hand of the guy who's meant to be setting the horse off and then shoot the actual rope (and then random attendees' hats, for good measure). Better hope that first shot doesn't spook the horse.

It really is very reasonable of Tuco to want a bigger cut for being the one running the risks; you wouldn't generally want to do a job with a significant chance of getting you killed without being very well compensated for that. Unfortunately, Blondie doing the cutting means he's the one with all the power here -- if he's dissatisfied with his share, he can just pocket all the money and let Tuco die -- which puts him at the advantage in the negotiation, and he knows it.

I enjoy how in the middle of "If we cut down my percentage, it's liable to interfere with my aim," Blondie offers Tuco a cigar, this casual friendly move in the middle of what is effectively a threat.

Tuco does a little understated, "Hmm," of acknowledgement that makes it feel like this was genuinely unexpected. But then he just returns the threat: "But if you miss, you had better miss very well. Whoever double-crosses me and leaves me alive, he understands nothing about Tuco." Which sets up his quest for revenge on Blondie after the double-cross, obviously, but is also fun to recall during the final scene: Tuco actively advised Blondie not to leave him alive if he was going to double-cross him.

Tuco why are you eating the cigar

Next time he's in the noose, it's for a whole new list of crimes that ends with, "For all these crimes, the accused has made a full, spontaneous confession." Yeah, he probably just went off spewing confessions to a string of colorful invented offenses as Blondie brought him in, didn't he, maybe hoping it would raise the bounty. (At the cinematic screening where I saw it for the first time, I missed the spontaneous confession thing due to no subtitles and spent half the movie experiencing some jarring mental dissonance over Tuco's growing goofy likability versus the offhandedly having been convicted of multiple rapes near the start thing. But it's actually pretty strongly telegraphed that the new crimes here are simply bullshit; a spontaneous confession to a variety of new things that were decidedly not on the earlier list, that he could not possibly have done in the implied presumably not very long timespan between the first and second hanging, mostly distinctly more dramatic crimes than the original set, all sounds strongly like a Tuco throwing shit at the wall thing.)

Tuco looks a lot more restless during the second hanging, where for the first one he was pretty calm -- probably a little bit nervous about Blondie's "liable to interfere with my aim" remark, even though they'd presumably come to an agreement to stick with the 50/50 split.

He notices a woman being scandalized, seems sort of put out for a second, but then growls at her to scare her more. What a Tuco.

Another minor character presumably disabled in the war: Angel Eyes' incidentally legless informant. (Whom he calls Shorty, like the guy Blondie teams up with later, who is definitely a different guy because that guy has legs -- sort of a funny aversion of the usual one Steve limit. Genuinely a bit puzzled by why they did that -- is it like that in the Italian version or just the English dub?) I wonder if the bit where he moves around by holding a couple of bricks and using them to walk on is something inspired by a real person or people at the time.

Calling him a 'half-soldier' is pretty rude, Angel Eyes.

Look, I'll accept that we're calling Blondie Blondie, sounds like that's what you'd call him in Italy, but there's really no excuse for "A golden-haired angel watches over him." The man's hair is brown. It's not even a light brown. What are you talking about, Angel Eyes.

But to not get too distracted by that part of the line: Angel Eyes obviously recognizes the con they're running. I think that's probably because he knows of Blondie and that this is a thing he does (he's presumably done it with others before), so when he notices Blondie's around at a hanging, he's like ah, yes, there's him doing his thing, guess he's running with Tuco now. My own feeling is Blondie and Angel Eyes basically only know of each other, though -- no direct evidence they're not more familiar or anything, but they don't really act like they have a personal history, I think, compared to Tuco and Angel Eyes who obviously do.

After the threat about a pay cut being liable to interfere with his aim, I originally figured Blondie missing the rope (or rather, it seems to have grazed but not severed it) might have been deliberate, meant to scare Tuco a bit and make him think twice about proposing that again. But ultimately, on a closer look, I'm pretty sure he really did just miss, both because his expressions and body language feel more in line with that and because Tuco's rant after they escape indicates that Blondie's explanation to him was that anyone can miss a shot -- if it was meant as a warning, probably he wouldn't then go on to actively make it sound like he'd just happened to miss.

(That line also indicates it probably wasn't that he did hit it dead-on but the rope was just sturdier than expected -- if Blondie said anyone can miss a shot, that sounds like he at least believes it's because he missed, and I don't see any sensible reason he would lie about that here.)

That said, I think it's fun to imagine that the reason for the miss was that that discussion really did interfere with his aim -- that little bit of tension with Tuco led to him being a little careless this time, even though he didn't mean to miss and thought he had it.

The thing that actually prompts Blondie to stop and leave Tuco is Tuco's rant about how nobody misses when I'm at the end of the rope and When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the devil bite your ass. For all that he explains it as being about how there's no future in this with a guy who'll never be worth more than $3000, there's a specific point where he stops his horse and decides to ditch him, and it's when Tuco's complaining turns into guilting him about missing and the experience of being on the other end. Blondie will not be guilted and does not want or need this; just going to ditch him and wash his hands of him and find somebody else. I get the sense that Blondie doesn't really want to think about that miss too hard, at this point, and Tuco won't leave him alone about it, and so he leaves him.

More echoes in Blondie and Tuco's relationship: Blondie specifically says, "Adios," when leaving Tuco in the desert, which Tuco will say back to him at the inn.

Tuco's reaction, once again throwing shit at the wall, goes from insults to angrily ordering him to cut the rope off and get off the horse (as if he has any power to make him do anything, standing there unarmed with his hands tied), to a series of hilariously off-the-wall threats ("I'll hang you up by your thumbs!"), to disbelief/desperation: "Wait a minute, this is only a trick! You wouldn't leave me here! Come back! Wait! Blondie! Listen, Blondie!" before the final ¡Hijo de una gran putaaaa! The last couple stages once again get echoed in the final scene. I enjoy the "You wouldn't" - Blondie's supposed to be better than this, even after he'd threatened his aim might suffer if he got less money. They were supposed to be friends, damn it! (Tuco really wants to believe that people actually like him, and often chooses to live in the world in which they do.)

I truly love the fact Blondie gets the freeze-frame and onscreen caption of "the good" just after ironically admonishing Tuco for his ingratitude after Blondie has double-crossed him, taken the money they were going to split, and left him in the desert with this hands tied. As I wrote in the post with my initial impressions on the movie, this is the most uncalled for, mean-spirited thing he does in the entire movie, and getting the caption right here makes it really drip with irony, which is exactly the right thing to do with it, compared to if they'd put it earlier when it might have looked like it was meant to be played straight. There's no gallant hero here, only this guy, who is kind of a bastard. Blondie genuinely grows to deserve the title more as we go on, and that's one of the fun things about the movie, but we have established that the base point is low.

Blondie's intro tells us a number of things: he's a very good shot, casually confident, silent and stoic and unruffled by most anything, happy to be a conman ripping off bounties by bringing in criminals and then freeing them again to repeat the same scheme elsewhere, willing to make oblique threats to get his way and to shoot first when anyone seems about to pull a gun on him, and enough of a bastard to leave Tuco behind in the desert. But he's definitely the most enigmatic of the three main characters; he doesn't talk or emote much, leaving exactly what's going on in his head pretty vague and open to interpretation, even as some of his actions are pretty striking and interesting. This has nerdsniped me, because I enjoy thinking about what's going on in characters' heads; please be prepared for an excessive amount of analysis of what might be going through his mind in almost every scene he's in.

Angel Eyes and Maria

The choice to open this scene with Maria getting thrown off a carriage with a bunch of drunk Confederates and the choked-up yell of "You filthy rats!" after them is probably largely just to get across the suggestion that she's a prostitute, making it easier to connect that she's the one Angel Eyes' informant told him about. But I appreciate that it gives her a little bit of a tragic existence outside the confines of the plot and makes her sympathetic even before Angel Eyes starts beating on her. (A secondary purpose for this is also probably to show some Confederate soldiers just being assholes; the film makes a point of featuring both sympathetic and asshole moments from both sides of the Civil War.)

Like with Stevens, while Angel Eyes makes his presence very threatening, he starts off nonviolently (well, relatively; the way he pulls her inside is not exactly gentle), just telling her to go on talking about Bill Carson -- but when she refuses to volunteer any information and just says she doesn't know him, the claws come out instantly. There's none of the veneer of casual friendliness he had with Stevens, though, just an intensely scary stare and threatening demands. (The scare chord playing in the background doesn't help.) All in all, Angel Eyes was already terrifying but he is even more so in this scene.

I do also appreciate that while the interrogation is brutal and deeply uncomfortable and thick with the danger of sexual violence, it does not go there -- he's physically but not sexually violent, he's only interested in the information, and once he has it, we see him just leave. This is a completely sexless film, and I think we're all very lucky for that; it's one reason The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has aged relatively well, compared to for instance some of Sergio Leone's other films. (That's not to say I have anything against portrayals of sexuality or even sexual violence in media in principle, but I've gotten the sense that back in the sixties, media that did portray it tended to be profoundly weird about it.)

Tuco returns to town

We don't get to see Tuco suffering in the desert, only making his way across the rope bridge and then stumbling toward the well and finally indulging, but I think it does get across that this was an ordeal for him, and that becomes easier to appreciate on a rewatch, after seeing Blondie go through it later. Tuco's skin has fared a lot better than Blondie's, but his lips are pretty cracked.

The gun seller looks so proud of his little selection of revolvers and is so eager to please him by showing him more. It's painful how long he keeps trying to be helpful in selling him a gun even when Tuco just grabs the bottle of wine out of his hands and dismantles half of his guns to put together a custom revolver. And then Tuco just uses the gun, with a cartridge the owner gave him, to rob him of the money he has in the till, oof.

Man, those targets just casually in the shape of Native Americans.

Sergio Leone just has a thing for characters shoving something in somebody else's mouth unbidden, doesn't he. Blondie sticks his cigar in Tuco's mouth during his intro, then Tuco puts the sign in the shopkeeper's mouth, and then it happens very memorably in Once Upon a Time in the West as well. I forget if it's in A Fistful of Dollars or For a Few Dollars More, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised.

The gun store scene is theoretically skippable (Christopher Frayling's commentary indicated it was cut in British prints of the film, though I gather it survived in the US cut), but it's pretty fun in its audacity, and is also doing some good setup work for Tuco's character. So far, apart from his intro suggesting some degree of scrappy ability to shoot before he gets shot, he's been shown in a pretty ineffectual light, getting ambushed and captured and raging helplessly with his hands tied. But here we get to see that Tuco really knows his way around guns and has implausible trick-shooting skills to rival Blondie's -- and, of course, that he really is an unrepentant bandit who thinks nothing of doing this when he wants a gun and some money, lest we were left too sympathetic to him when Blondie left him.

The cave

Tuco presumably bought the chicken with some of the $200 he robbed from the gun store; he presents it like having a single chicken by itself is amazing riches. Does say a lot.

I enjoy his very blatant talking to himself about how oh, he's so lonely, but he's rich, wonder where his friends are now. He clearly figures that Pedro/Chico/Ramon are there listening and just avoiding him. He talks like they were such great friends, but somehow the fact they don't come out until he starts loudly talking about how if only they were there he'd give them $1000 each doesn't make it seem like they ever had a relationship that went much beyond assisting each other in committing crimes to their mutual advantage -- and Tuco clearly in fact knows this, since he knows exactly what line to go for to lure them out. (But no, Tuco definitely has great friends, because he is a cool and well-liked dude who has definitely made good choices in life.)

I've seen people online suggesting that Blondie and Tuco ran their scam a lot more often than the two times we actually see, but this scene seems to make it explicit that they only did it exactly those two times: Tuco specifically indicates Blondie has $4000, which is simply equal to half of the first $2000 bounty that they split plus the entire $3000 bounty for the second time that he kept for himself.

This is one of the scenes added in the Extended Cut, despite having been cut even from the Italian version of the movie after its original Rome premiere. The primary ostensible purpose of it is just to establish where Pedro/Chico/Ramon came from (the featurette on the restoration makes it explicit that the guy overseeing the Extended Cut, John Kirk, just thought it was a plot hole and decided to reinsert the scene when he discovered it existed because of that, despite Sergio Leone himself having decided to cut it for pacing reasons). It is true I think I would probably ask myself some questions about Tuco's buddies if I'd seen a cut without it; Tuco's seemed like a lone wolf so far, and without it there's no indication at all of who these guys are or why they're working for/with him for this.

On the other hand, the scene kind of sets them up as if they're a lot more important than they are, and its internal coherence feels a little off: them only coming out when Tuco tempts them with money, despite that Tuco's been there for a bit talking at them about what good friends they were, actively suggests they don't actually like or trust him (which makes good sense!), but then it also has this dialogue about how they thought he'd been killed, which feels as if it's randomly offering up an unnecessary and somewhat contradictory second explanation for why we haven't seen them with him up to this point. The bit about them thinking he was dead doesn't actually connect to anything and seems to give undue weight and improperly conserved detail to Tuco's relationship with these guys, who are ultimately just some throwaway goons that exist in one scene before dying and never being mentioned again. I think probably the movie is actually better off without this scene, as Sergio Leone apparently concluded himself.

The inn

More of the war in the background -- this time with the innkeeper privately opining about how those rebels are cowards and it'll be better when the Yankees have beaten them as the Confederate army retreats out of the town, only to then yell "Hurray for Dixie!" as they're passing by. Not the only character in this movie who just pretends to support whichever army he's currently looking at. (We see more injured soldiers in the background here.)

Love the tension of the buildup here. Blondie's gun lying dismantled on the table at the start, the brothers approaching in the midst of all the noise, the close-up of Blondie's hand freezing and eyes narrowing at the clink in the sudden silence, straining to hear as there's nothing (the fact it stopped when the army did actively suggests someone's trying to be sneaky), then frantically loading the revolver with a second-third-fourth bullet as the background noise restarts and then juuuust managing to finish and shoot the three of them in rapid succession as they burst in. These silent close-up shots of his hands and eyes also deliver a rare moment of tangible alarm from Blondie; he's legitimately scared for a bit there and you can feel it, which is greatly appreciated from a character who spends most of the movie being stoic and enigmatic.

Enjoy Blondie choosing to explain how he knew they were coming by going, "Your spurs," just before firing the final shot (just giving this guy a little tip about where he messed up before killing him, as you do), but also I deeply enjoy that him firing that last smug bullet, which he probably didn't really need to when the guy was collapsing anyway, leaves him defenseless when Tuco draws attention to himself at the window. Blondie is very smart and competent, we've just watched him survive three people sneaking up on him while he's cleaning his gun because he managed to notice the tiny sound of a clinking spur and put together what it meant and load his gun in time, but then he makes this near-fatal mistake by getting a little too cocky about it, and that's definitely tastier than if he'd obviously needed all his bullets there.

I have seen it suggested that Tuco intentionally used the brothers as cannon fodder here, but I'm not sure the movie necessarily suggests that; presumably the idea was for them to successfully sneak up on Blondie and catch him completely unawares without the unexpected silence exposing the rogue spur clink, which wouldn't have had to involve any of them getting killed (heck, if they'd happened to be just a little earlier, Blondie would've still been in the middle of cleaning his gun). Tuco and the others had clearly talked about their approach ahead of time, so they were perfectly aware that they'd be going up there by the door and Tuco would be coming in by the window and presumably thought that sounded like a good plan. And we have no idea exactly at what point Tuco managed to make his way in, so we don't have any indication either way on whether he theoretically could have intervened to save them in some manner -- my first assumption would be he got in after Blondie had stood up, which is after he shot them. Sneaking up on him from two different directions makes sense either way. I wouldn't necessarily put it past Tuco to figure the brothers will probably get killed and do it anyway, but I don't think we can say that for sure.

Either way, I enjoy Tuco doing his quick little sign of the cross when he says "Those that come in by the door." He did in fact just get them killed by bringing them here, and while he's not going to say anything about that to Blondie, it shows him acknowledging it in a small way. Tuco's religiosity is a great little character trait that has no impact on the plot but just adds more color and dimension to him as a character -- it adds a really fun bit of visual irony to punctuate some of his various decidedly un-Christian actions, and it has a rich sense of being rooted in his background given his family was presumably religious.

Blondie's shrugging, "It's empty," feels like he's initially kind of expecting them to just talk: he takes Tuco wanting him to remove the pistol belt as a practical thing, just telling him to remove his weapon so he can put his away, and so Blondie removes it but tells him that's not really necessary because he can't shoot him anyway. Tuco could have shot him already if he were here to kill him, right? He probably expects, initially, that Tuco is just here to get his half of the money, or possibly all of it.

Instead, Tuco responds with, "Mine isn't" -- he's deadly serious and he's not putting his gun away at all.

"Even when Judas hanged himself there was a storm, too." There's Judas again! Tuco originally called Blondie that while playing it up for the scam, but as far as he's concerned now, it's true actually. Love the furious energy of him sitting there having found this Biblical parallel and decided this is the specific revenge he wants on this guy and bringing a noose to arrange that. Blondie's never had a rope around his neck, never felt the devil bite his ass? Well, now he will. And he'll make him do it himself, because Judas hanged himself.

Blondie warily (and correctly) suggests the 'storm' is actually cannon fire -- because he decidedly does not want to be anywhere near the war, and by the time cannons are getting fired in the vicinity, he thinks they should probably be getting the hell out of there, and if Tuco agrees, then perhaps pointing that out is a ticket out of this pretty alarming situation he has found himself in. But Tuco, of course, is not really interested in entertaining that just when he has Blondie right where he wants him. He's going to hang him right here if it's the last thing he does.

Blondie goes along with it, slowly, silently, looking kind of wary and skeptical more than anything. When I was first watching this movie, I kept expecting him to do something, to distract him in some clever way and then lunge at him to disarm him or something, like you'd usually expect the main character to do in an action movie. But the thing is that's just not how Blondie operates. He doesn't do bold risky action-hero feats. He can absolutely shoot a gun with the best of them, but he has no particular physical skills, never even throws a punch in this whole movie unless you count the backhand slap on the tied-up Tuco earlier; when unarmed, all he's really got is his brains. Blondie gets by on being smart and careful and analytical. When Blondie finds a gun pointed at him, and has no leverage over the other guy, he will do what he's told, make no sudden movements, and wait until he sees some kind of actual opening, because otherwise he's just going to get shot. He buys what little time he can going along with the hanging while his brain silently whirs away evaluating his options for how he can get out of this, and that's about it for what he can do.

What are his options? He doesn't have a lot. Tuco is standing too far away to reach before he shoots but too close to realistically miss, never takes his eyes off him for more than a second, keeps his gun pointed squarely at him. It wouldn't be hard for him to get out of the noose -- it's a big noose, he's barely in it, his hands are free. But if he did, Tuco would presumably just shoot him instead. Probably his best chance, once Tuco says he's going to shoot the legs off the stool, is to try to make a move just when he fires, slip out of the noose and then probably make some kind of last-ditch attempt to overpower him before he's ready to shoot again, and I imagine Blondie was getting ready to attempt just that before they were interrupted. But even then, it's very questionable whether he could have actually escaped like that. All in all, things are looing pretty dicey for him by the time the rogue cannonball comes to his rescue -- but once it does, he's out of there fast, grabbing his chance now he's got it.

Either way, as little as he gives away as it's happening, Blondie's genuinely staring death in the face here for this whole sequence, and this experience clearly left enough of an impression on him for him to make a point of turning this specifically back on Tuco in the final scene, even though Tuco's going to torment him in a much more extended and agonizing way in the desert, so I'm enjoying the quiet implication there.

The cannonball is kind of interesting because this is absolutely a textbook deus ex machina. Usually I like the rule that a contrived coincidence can get the characters into a situation but ideally not out of it. This is definitely getting Blondie out of a situation, and definitely has that sense of being a little unsatisfying as the answer to how's he going to get out of this one. And yet, the fact Blondie really was helpless to do much about it is kind of the point here. If Blondie had actually won out in this encounter, it wouldn't have nearly the same meaning when he finally ends up turning the situation around in the desert, nor when he tells Tuco to get in the noose at the end -- narratively, we need this to be an instance of Tuco beating out Blondie and then toying with him for it to have the right impact, and hence, since he can't actually die here, he needs to get out without winning.

(It does also help a bit that the ongoing cannon fire was already set up and established, even if it just happening to hit the building is purely coincidental.)

Being saved by a cannonball, of course, is again the constant insistent presence of the war in the background, now coming into the characters' lives just a bit more directly.

Meanwhile, Tuco in this scene, man. He is finally the one in the position of power, just relishing having control and being able to order Blondie to do things and have him actually do them and the grim sense of justice in seeing him be the one in a noose for once. Cheerful lines like, "It's too big for your neck, huh? We fix that right away." Grinning as he explains that he'll shoot the legs off the stool. But then when it comes to actually doing it… he takes an extra breath, with this kind of hesitant expression on his face, before echoing Blondie's "Adios." As he points the gun, it's shaking a bit. Tuco doesn't feel totally right here and I love it a lot.

Tuco does absolutely want to see Blondie suffer right now -- we're about to see him chase him down again so he can torture him in an even more drawn-out and awful way, after all. But once he actually kills him it'll all be over, and he just goes back to his usual shitty bandit life, one more person that he'd once thought was a friend gone. This has been a couple of minutes of mildly satisfying catharsis, but not totally satisfying, too brief, too easy -- and there's probably some basic squirm of empathy there, when he's been in that position, can vividly remember the squeeze of the rope -- but the bastard deserves this for betraying him, so he's doing it anyway.

All in all, this is possibly the scene I have rewatched the most. This is significantly because I happen to have a big dopamine whump button in my brain labeled 'HANGINGS', but it's also just a sequence of masterful tension leading up to this delightfully twisted, tense and thoroughly loaded character interaction following on the previous scenes between Tuco and Blondie in fun specific ways that build up to even more fun things later. What a character dynamic.

The fort

I don't have too much to say about this one. It's a very impressive set, the war is brutal, the sarcasm of the Confederate captain Angel Eyes talks to and the ease of bribing him with some booze is nice foreshadowing and a parallel for the poor Union captain Blondie and Tuco will meet, but ultimately this scene is mostly about filling in how Angel Eyes learns about Batterville. (Or is it Betterville? The subtitles say Batterville and that's what it sounds like everyone's saying, but Christopher Frayling and the subtitles on him say Betterville.) This is a restored scene in the Extended Cut, which exists in the Italian version but was cut from the International Cut.

Angel Eyes pauses and swallows looking at the injured soldiers and later lets the captain keep the booze he brought, vaguely suggesting a glimmer of sympathy for their plight, which is sort of interesting but also a little divorced from the rest of the movie. Villains having different sides to them is neat, but I don't think we get a great sense of why Angel Eyes would be sympathetic to these men but also treat the prisoners at Batterville -- who are soldiers from the Confederate army just like these ones -- how he does later with zero remorse, so I'm not sure this is actually doing much for the movie on a character level in the end, and if anything may be a little counterproductive to the kind of extremely cold-blooded villain that Angel Eyes is otherwise set up to be.

I suppose the idea might be that Angel Eyes is theoretically capable of sympathy, but also capable of simply discarding it the moment it's useful to him. Alternatively, the idea could be that at the moment he feels in some sense that if the war catches up with him he could be in these soldiers' place, but then he goes on to enlist with the Union army to get into Batterville, at which point he's on the winning side so who cares. Angel Eyes does display nerves later at the truel, once he's in a situation he's not in control of where he might very well die, so maybe it checks out that while he feels not totally secure in not winding up like these men himself, their grim conditions get to him a bit.

I do think it is kind of nice to have this scene in terms of keeping Angel Eyes' storyline going and maintaining the sense that he's still out there looking for Carson, even aside from the added plot clarity; without it, he'd just kind of not exist for a very significant chunk of the film.

I've also seen it argued that it brings out the horrors of the war too early, given the film's slow progression from the war as simply backdrop for the plot to eventually spending the leadup to the climax with it in stark focus. I think that's a legitimately interesting point, but also that it didn't stop me absorbing that progression just fine when first seeing the film as the Extended Cut -- soldiers are injured here, yes, but they aren't truly lingered on, and all in all it felt mostly just like a logical part of the established war-as-backdrop at this stage.

All in all, I have some mixed feelings on this scene and what it contributes, but I'm tempted to conclude the film might be better without it overall.

The desert

Tuco tracking down Blondie by finding his cigars at every campfire is pretty hilarious. Imagine what Blondie could have avoided if he just stopped smoking like a chimney.

(It's sort of surprising Blondie got so far ahead of Tuco to begin with -- he wouldn't have had long to get downstairs and to his horse while Tuco was recovering from the fall and getting out of the rubble, so one would've thought Tuco could've been basically right on his heels. I guess Tuco went in the wrong direction initially and had to catch up.)

Tuco forbidding Blondie to shoot down Shorty, oof. Once again Tuco is fundamentally out for himself, and right now he wants to deny Blondie this more than to let this stranger live, so down he goes. (Nonetheless, he flinches watching it, again bit of instinctive empathy despite that he mostly suppresses it -- it hits pretty close to home.)

Blondie continues to comply with the orders of the guy who's pointing a gun at him, but he clearly doesn't feel great about this, apologizing, gaze lingering on Shorty even as he's preparing to stand up. Clearly his moral line lies somewhere between leaving Tuco to fend for himself (where he might die, but sometime later in the desert where Blondie would never know) and letting Shorty hang, dying right in front of him when he was expecting a rescue. Perhaps Blondie didn't even know he had this line until now.

A moment of silence for Blondie's original horse, whom he probably rode out here, but who is presumably just left behind as Tuco takes him away and never seen again. This movie does not really give a damn about individual horses -- the characters' horses repeatedly disappear and go unmentioned only for them to later manage to get a different horse somewhere without comment -- but as a former horse girl this is the sort of thing I notice and wonder about.

Blondie presumably initially figures Tuco's just taking him somewhere a short distance away to try to make him hang himself again or something. But then Tuco shoots the canteen out of his hands, and the hat off his head for good measure (love Tuco casually replicating Blondie's little hat-shooting trick just to rub it in), and it starts to sink in that no, that's not it, is it. Where are they going? On a nice walk of a hundred miles through desert. "What was it you told me the last time? Ah, 'If you save your breath, I feel a man like you would manage it.'" Tuco's not taking him anywhere; this is just torture, once again a very specific torture. Blondie made Tuco walk seventy miles through the desert? Tuco'll make him walk a hundred miles, or however long it takes before he dies a slow and agonizing death, and that'll show him. I deeply enjoy how in this movie, between the two of them, it's never just generic revenge, but always this hyperspecific replication of the other's previous cruelties.

Tuco's cute pink parasol is such a choice.

He's so utterly gleeful watching Blondie helplessly stumbling until he faceplants in the sand. Tuco relishes power and control when he can get it, not only for the Blondie-specific reasons (Blondie had all the power from beginning to end in their bounty scheme, and exercised it to leave Tuco helpless) but probably also because of his background -- poverty sure is a way to feel perpetually helpless and subject to external whims, and escaping it through banditry probably represented a sense of freedom from all that, where he can just go out and take what he wants and other people can be subject to his whims for once.

In the sequence added in the Extended Cut, the collapsed and dehydrated Blondie looks at Tuco's boot right beside his face, swallows, tenses for a heave of effort -- and then grabs the boot, only for it to just be the empty boot, Tuco cheerfully bathing his feet a short distance away. (Blondie is definitely suffering from the "characters can't see anything out of frame" thing here, but I kind of enjoy the literal implication that his eyes can just barely even focus and the boot manages to be all he can make out in his field of vision, even if it stretches plausibility a bit.) I do quite like this bit, not least because this is the one time we actually properly see Blondie attempting resistance. He silently went along with the hanging and he silently goes along with the desert walk, too -- which makes sense, because he's being ordered to at gunpoint, and as I went into earlier, he doesn't have action hero armor that'd let him do much to fight back in these situations without just getting shot, and he's generally too careful to try under the circumstances. But it means that he feels very passive in these sequences, and seeing this moment where he finally does think he has a chance to strike back, and the hate in his eyes and how painstakingly he gathers all of the energy he can muster to grab it, helps a lot to contextualize the rest and make him more tangibly an active character who cares what's happening to him for this. With this bit, it's easy to extrapolate that he has been waiting for any chance to take him down this whole time, and this is the one time he (seemingly) finds one. Without it, his character just has no sense of agency at all the entire time he's being tortured, which would mute the whole thing a bit.

(Well, okay: a little before this, there is this wide shot, where we can see Tuco stationary on his horse and Blondie walking towards him -- then stopping, extending his foot a little further forward and sort of pathetically lunging for that last step, at which point Tuco's horse just moves further away, and Tuco laughs. This might be, and is on closer examination probably meant to be, Blondie making some form of stumbling attempt to sneak up on him. But it's a wide shot so you can barely see him, it goes by in seconds, and it's hard to tell what he's actually doing -- he could just be trying to catch up to Tuco, which is how I think I'd mostly been taking it before I started squinting at this -- which makes it not really serve the same purpose.)

(I gather the script had a bit, which was filmed and possibly in a version of the Italian release in 1966 but lost today apart from a small fragment, where Blondie slides down a hill into an animal skeleton lying there and grabs a bone that he could use as a weapon, but Tuco shoots it out of his hand and warns him not to try that again. That would have also provided that bit of agency, but given that was cut, the boot scene was all that was left, and I do maintain that cutting that too is bad for the movie.)

After he realizes it's just the boot, and of course Tuco's not letting him get close, and he has no hope of getting one over on Tuco at this point, Blondie sort of slumps in defeat for a moment, and then looks up, and then starts to crawl towards the water. It's pretty painful to watch; the utter helpless humiliation of being so thirsty and drained of defiance that he would drink the water Tuco just washed his feet in is its own grotesque flavor of torture, and then Tuco won't even let him have that.

After that, Blondie manages to push himself onto all fours, looks at Tuco for a moment -- probably realizing that even if he tried to rush him right now it would accomplish absolutely nothing other than entertaining Tuco more -- and then just crawls away, finally going somewhere of his own volition. He's not going to make it far at this point, and if it looked like he might Tuco would just shoot him, but maybe he can at least die somewhere a bit further away from him.

Tuco stands up and initially reaches for his gun as Blondie crawls off, but then he just laughs, seeing that there's absolutely no danger of Blondie making it very far or shaking him off -- he can just casually pack up his stuff and then follow him at a leisurely pace.

In the Italian/Extended Cut, Blondie rolling down the hill is continuing from this, whereas in the International Cut, Tuco had just gotten off his horse to approach him after he initially collapsed, suggesting that collapse wasn't quite as bad and that he was just sort of continuing but on all fours -- gives it a little bit of a different air.

I do appreciate just how pathetic Blondie's crawl/roll down the hill is. He sort of picks himself up again after the initial stumble but then just collapses on his back, admitting defeat. He's going to die here and he doesn't have the energy to do anything about it. Tuco lets that bottle roll down and come to a stop by his head and he doesn't even react.

Tuco spends a moment just looking at him down there before bringing out his gun to put him out of his misery. Probably less out of desire to actually put him out of his misery and more out of seeing he's not going to be able to make Blondie walk anywhere further right now, and he's not going to sit around waiting, and definitely not leaving him alive.

Blondie barely moves as Tuco points the gun at him, just closing his eyes again and swallowing and accepting that this is it. At the inn he had a chance but this time is a full-on definitely thought he was going to die here and was powerless to stop it, and this is also something that Blondie turns back on Tuco at the end.

(And yet Tuco keeps pointing his gun to kill him and taking a while to actually fire it, doesn't he. Part of this is just the movie doing dramatic timing but part of it is a genuine slight hesitation on his part, as shown more obviously at the inn.)

But then comes runaway carriage ex machina, just in time! Tuco not just shooting him first before checking on it is another notable moment of hesitation on his part. Once again, we actually need a deus ex machina, because Blondie needs to have been totally helpless here or it would completely change the implications for what's being set up.

This is another good scene that I enjoy a lot, particularly Blondie getting ready to grab the boot, although I'm also just a big fan of exhausted, dehydrated men stumbling around deserts. It's very merciless and ugly (gotta love the energy of getting Clint Eastwood at his handsomest for your movie and then absolutely fucking up his face with the gnarliest-looking sunburn makeup), really thoroughly parses as torture where the hanging scene was more quiet buildup, and Tuco's absolute cruelty here versus Blondie's exhausted helplessness is very important in viscerally setting up why Blondie does what he does at the end. But I also enjoy how strongly Tuco's actions here are still rooted in the specifics of how Blondie treated him. I just really love the twisted, fucked-up way the whole chain of revenge is built up between the two of them, and how interestingly their relationship then develops with all that hanging over it.

The carriage

I appreciate that we see Blondie juuust prop himself up to look as Tuco goes to intercept it -- he goes on to discreetly crawl all the way to it during the sequence that follows while we're focused on Tuco, and briefly seeing that he takes an interest and has mustered a tiny bit of energy again helps set that up.

More of Tuco's religiosity as he does the sign of the cross multiple times over the corpse of the soldier who initially falls out… and then immediately loots the corpse. Oh, Tuco.

I remembered the amputee informant's description of how Bill Carson was missing an eye, so as soon as we saw one of the apparently-dead soldiers in the carriage wearing an eyepatch I was like ohhhhh!! The storylines are connecting!! (And we're more than an hour into the Extended Cut when it happens. This movie very slow-paced compared to a modern film and yet so thoroughly enjoyable.)

You can juuust see Carson starting to blink a bit as Tuco searches him.

Tuco standing there glancing to the right out of the corner of his eye when he hears a noise from the wagon, while by the rules of the movie he can't actually see anything over there, is very funny. He even waits a bit before turning around to point his gun, as if knowing whoever is there can't see him either until he turns.

Tuco interrogating Carson about the $200,000 while the latter begs for water is another truly painful scene; Tuco's only invested in the dollars and anti-invested in saving Carson's life ("Don't die until later!"), straining to get him to talk first for as long as he possibly can, until he figures the guy is going to straight-up croak before talking, at which point of course he switches tack. Presumably he thinks if he actually gives him water Carson's liable to change his mind about telling him anything, so he has to get it out of him first if at all possible.

I also enjoy his annoyance with Carson telling him about his name and having been Jackson before but now Carson; the audience needs him to say his name, and it's probably also helpful to mention he used to be Jackson, but to Tuco it's just a waste of time. "Carson, Carson, yeah, yeah. Glad to meet you, Carson. I'm Lincoln's grandfather. What was that you said about the dollars?"

Tuco repeats the name of the cemetery near the very end of the exchange with Carson: "Sad Hill Cemetery, okay. In the grave, okay. But it must have a name or a number on it, huh? There must be a thousand, five thousand!" - which means that, since Blondie doesn't know the name of the cemetery (unless Blondie did know it the whole time and just pretended not to, which I guess we can't really rule out), he can't have been listening in by this point. Directly after this, Tuco tells Carson not to die and goes to get water. So Blondie pretty much can't have caught any of the stuff about the cash when Carson said it originally, and can't have known the full strategic significance of talking to him beforehand.

Instead, Blondie probably quietly crawled after Tuco with the aim of maybe being able to get the jump on him while he's distracted with whatever this is, and he only got close enough just at the end to see Tuco talking to Carson and telling him to not die. Then, as Tuco ran off for the water, Blondie obviously could not follow him back there, but instead crawled the rest of the way to the back of the wagon to see who Tuco's so desperate to keep alive, where Carson managed to gasp out something about a grave marked 'Unknown', next to Arch Stanton, and that it had money in it (Blondie does definitely learn there's money, since he then knows to use that as leverage). This is supported by how Blondie just refers very nonspecifically to having been told a name on a grave. He's really pulling a bit of a bluff here since he doesn't (presumably) know what cemetery this grave is in, so if Tuco hadn't happened to have learned that bit (which Blondie can't know), this information would not actually be that useful to either of them. But so long as he can make it sound like he can lead Tuco to riches right now, he has an actual shot at surviving.

I enjoy the way Blondie manages the tiniest wisp of a victorious smile to Tuco's "What name?!" just before passing out. The moment he sees Tuco's furious desperation to learn the name he's talking about, he knows he's won and that Tuco's going to do whatever he can to ensure his survival. He can pass out in peace.

Tuco's shifty eyes and expressions as he has to reevaluate everything are great. Eli Wallach really, really just makes this movie with his performance. I love Blondie and all, and Clint Eastwood in his thirties is very attractive, but I think it's criminal that I had heard about this movie and about Clint Eastwood being in it but had never heard Eli Wallach's name. He's so good and singlehandedly makes Tuco the best thing about it. I love him.

And there comes the Tuco tack-switch! He's not just invested in keeping Blondie alive for the money; he's his friend! As if this is somehow going to be persuasive to the man he's just spent hours torturing and toying with.

I love this absolutely bonkers goddamn character dynamic. First Blondie saves Tuco from the bounty hunters, then he apparently turns him in for the bounty, then you learn actually they're running a scam together, then Blondie screws over Tuco in a way that makes you kind of root for Tuco to get back at him, then Tuco painstakingly, cruelly labors to punish him for it in the most specific twisted ways until you're anxious for how Blondie's going to get out of this, then this happens… and because Tuco is the character he is, of course it works. He is already the guy who switches tack on a dime when it seems to serve him in the moment. We've just spent this whole carriage scene building up how singlemindedly fixated he is on this money once he hears about it. There are already so many striking layers going on in the interplay between these two guys and it makes it delicious to realize we've just added yet another layer and the rest of the movie is going to involve them having to work together after all this. And because it's the cash box from the Angel Eyes storyline, we're following up on that too in the process, with the also-delicious implicit promise that that's how they're going to bump into him. This is just such a gleefully fun and satisfying moment where everything comes together and I love it.

(Continued in part two! Thanks for reading if you got this far.)

[lurkingshan]

Hi....If you don't mind, can I ask, what are your top 10 (or top 7) favorite media (can be books/ manga/ anime/movies/tv series)? Why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before......Thanks....

Thank you for the ask, I don't mind a bit! Though I will say that this particular question sent me into a minor existential crisis, because how on earth could I ever pick just 10 things that I love across all media. I don't know if y'all have picked this up about me yet, but I consume vast amounts of media, like...unbelievable amounts of media, it is my great joy in life. I consulted @bengiyo about how to approach this question, and he suggested a frame to help narrow it down: what are my favorites that someone else recommended to me, that I then felt compelled to recommend to others? Hope you don't mind the tweak! As always, keeping this in the realm of Asian media for this blog, here is what I got:

What Did You Eat Yesterday?

When I met @bengiyo and @waitmyturtles I learned very quickly that this was their all-time favorite, and if I didn't like it we were gonna have a problem (jk but not really). I hadn't watched it on my own because until recently (shoutout to our savior Gagaoolala) it was quite inaccessible and I hadn't yet stumbled onto @isaksbestpillow and found her amazing subs. Luckily, I have impeccable taste and WDYEY is in fact a masterpiece, so they watched me watch it, I lost my mind over how unique and brilliant and technically flawless it was, and we are now all bonded for life over our love for this show, which just returned for a second season and will hopefully continue forever. I love it so much I have even started reading the manga, and I am not a manga girlie by nature (I prefer reading prose), so you can be assured I absolutely will not be shutting up about it anytime soon.

Go Ahead

Credit for this one goes to @ginnymoonbeam for watching it first and then sending up a flare for me as a fellow cdrama enjoyer that this one was worth prioritizing immediately. I love big sprawling family stories that unfold over time, I love digging into intergenerational family trauma, I love good dad characters, I love found family dynamics, and I love a well done romance subplot embedded in a much bigger story, so this show hit so many of my sweet spots. It's #1 on my list of modern cdramas and I would recommend it to anyone.

Mo Dao Zu Shi/The Untamed

Speaking of cdramas, I must give a shoutout to @dangermousie who wrote this post summarizing their favorite danmei novels, which I found when I went looking for recommendations and was trying to figure out a way into this segment of Asian media. I admit I am a bit bougie about my reading material and modality, so I really can't deal with machine translations or reading on html pages, and thus I still have not read some of these as I am patiently waiting for official English translations to become available (me and 2HA are gonna have a party in 2024 I tell you what). I had already heard of The Untamed, of course, because I am a human person who lurks in online spaces, but reading the novel got me significantly more interested, and I quickly fell down a months long rabbit hole that included consuming the novel, the show, and copious amounts of fanfiction. This story is so complex and layered and full of fun mysteries and meaty moral quandaries and interesting family relationships and has an A+ second chance romance and one of my all time favorite characters to boot; it really took over my brain for a minute. And while it hardly needs me to recommend it given how popular it already is, I'm still gonna do it whenever I get the chance.

Mo Du/Silent Reading

And while we're on the subject of danmei, let me give a shoutout to my favorite modern danmei novel, which was recommended to me by an IRL friend who is not on tumblr. Mo Du is a sprawling mystery novel that spans five major interconnected cases, and it centers on an exceedingly competent police captain, Luo Wenzhou, and a young business heir/super genius, Fei Du, who start out with an adversarial relationship (but I bet you can guess what happens next!). The crime stories in this are almost shockingly intricate and every detail comes together in the end without a single loose end, which is impressive enough on its own, but somehow the author (Priest, who some of you will know as the writer of Faraway Wanderers aka Word of Honor) manages to also write a perfectly paced, incredibly compelling love story between the two leads that is layered with complex trauma and psychological hot buttons and secrets and lies that unfold organically alongside the mystery. I am in the middle of re-reading it right now and my love for it only grows stronger. The gif above is from a recent attempt to adapt this into a live-action drama that got quickly canceled, but honestly, the less said about that, the better (though Zhang Xin Cheng will absolutely remain the Fei Du of my heart). With China's censorship laws, there will be no faithful live action version of this story, so I highly recommend reading the novel.

Pachinko

While we're on the subject of novels, I must mention another IRL friend recommendation: Pachinko. This one is a sprawling multi-generational family historical fiction epic that tracks the lives of a Korean family that is forced to migrate to Japan during Japanese occupation in the early 20th Century. Y'all, this book is amazing, and it has now been turned into a television show airing on Hulu that is also quite good (though structured quite differently, but that's another post). I learned a ton of real history in the course of reading this, and I found the journey of Sunja and her family so compelling. The book has a real intersectional lens and digs deep into themes of oppression, racism, class disparity, and sexism, and is rooted in Korean values around filial piety, respect for hard work, religion, moral condemnation, and of course, the importance of food to communicate.

The Great Indian Kitchen

Switching gears, let me give a shoutout to this Indian film that my bestie @neuroticbookworm recently recommended to me and @waitmyturtles. This film is about a modern young woman who enters an arranged marriage with a family of high status (though maybe not of the kind you think) and explores her experience of oppression as a woman in a very patriarchal religious setting. The story is really compelling, I learned about a common experience for women in India, the narrative ended in an unexpected place (in a good way), and I really enjoyed the watch. And this film is on YouTube with good subs which I linked above, so it's quite accessible.

Be Melodramatic

Let's get back to dramas, shall we? I credit this one to @kdramaxoxo, who recommends Be Melodramatic constantly, and thank goodness because otherwise this under appreciated gem would have never landed on my radar. This is a beautiful story about a group of friends who move in together in the wake of personal tragedy and tracks their progress as they heal and move on from their hardships. The themes of grief and growth and change are quite poignant, the relationships, both platonic and romantic, are all very compelling, and the music is beautiful. If you haven't seen it yet, what are you waiting for (@nieves-de-sugui this is definitely a good one to add to your list).

Make it Right

Time for @bengiyo to get another shoutout. This is a Thai bl classic that doesn't get the love it deserves, and he is its number one promoter. I don't know when I would have gotten around to watching this if he hadn't recommended it so highly, and I'm so glad I did. I wrote about this one, why I loved it, and why I think it's under appreciated, and I highly encourage others to give it a try.

Coffee Prince

We will end on an OG kdrama classic, which I watched early on in my kdrama journey thanks to a recommendation from an IRL friend who said it was the best version of the well worn Asian drama genderbend trope that they had ever seen, and my god were they right. Not only was this my first Gong Yoo drama (a life changing experience in and of itself) but this one really took me by surprise for how sharp and progressive it was about gender fluidity, sexual identity, and the struggle toward self-acceptance way back when it aired in 2007. I recommend this one to everyone, and its a great entry point for people who prefer queer media and have (justified) suspicion of mainstream kdrama's treatment of queer narratives.