#it's really fun to go from speculation/theory to more analysis

[bereft-of-frogs]

I'm so glad I have actually stuff to analyze now to defend Indara and I don't have to just keep being like 'um that's not really how narrative storytelling works' and 'I suspect you guys just don't know what to do with reserved female characters who aren't evil' and 'not everyone who isn't a ray of sunshine is a secret Sith lord babes' this is even MORE fun than my reddit crusade over the last few weeks now that I have substance.

anyway, hopping back on the Indara defense train as I have been for a full month, but also talking about her 3 big missteps first:

Mistake #1: not putting her foot down and insisting on going in to talk to the coven alone the first time. Yeah, this was the last moment things could have gone well. I think she was right and going in alone would have looked less intimidating. Also given what she does at the end, she's a pretty strong telepath and wouldn't have had the weak point of Torbin to be exploited. I think if her level head had met Aniseya's level head they could have talked some things out, and the crisis wouldn't have escalated that quickly. There are definitely still some issues - what did Aniseya do to create the twins? why was Koril so afraid of the Jedi finding out? - and things might have come to blows anyway, but I don't think they'd have been as explosive if Indara had had the chance to initially diffuse some of the tension.

Counterpoint: they might have killed her or at least not let her leave actually. If it had JUST been Indara and Aniseya we're talking about, yeah, the fastest solution is a friendly chat between the two of them, I actually think the Jedi would appreciate some of Aniseya's philosophy, they have a nice little cultural exchange and part ways maybe agreeing to disagree on some of the specifics of the Dark vs Light side of the Force, but at least everyone lives. But there's the rest of the coven to consider. Koril particularly. She is DOWN to murder pretty much immediately, as we know from the advisor scene from episode 3, when she's like 'who would miss them?'

Aside: **Book spoilers, I wish tumblr had spoiler tags like Reddit or Discord, don't read this point if you don't want Path of Deceit spoilers** And eep, yeah who WOULD miss them? I sort of jokingly said this after episode 3 like 'lol well it did work for the Path of the Open Hand, that's not that crazy an idea', but now we have the context and oof, they're even MORE off grid than Zallah and Kevmo were. At this point they haven't even contacted Coruscant about finding the coven, right? So while the Council knows the planet they're on, they still think it's uninhabited and evidently the witches are pretty well hidden, they'd just vanish. Jeez, the Council knew the town and precise location of the Path compound and it still took an absurdly long time to figure out what happened after Zallah and Kevmo started missing check-ins, long enough for the Path to escape. I bet they don't check in as much on a peaceful survey mission vs an active investigation too, the four Jedi really could be missing for a long time before anyone realized something was wrong.

But yeah, Koril seems pretty down for murder, so while one Jedi going in alone doesn't look like that much of a threat and might set Aniseya at ease, Koril might have seen it as a weak point available to exploit. Fearing what Indara would report back to the Council about their presence and the twins, Koril might goad the coven into making an attempt on her life, and while Indara is clearly a formidable fighter, she is drastically outnumbered, fighting all the witches alone might have been too much for her. And of course, that makes things so much worse immediately. The leader and the most level head is gone, the Jedi are now grieving and rightfully fear for their lives, tensions explode even earlier. But that's really not much more than an interesting AU idea lol a slight counterpoint though.

Mistake #2: not being the one to go after Torbin when he ran off. This one is just going to come down to clunky writing, I'm sorry. Because there is zero logical reason for her to trust Sol to bring him back. She should have gone herself. Torbin was her responsibility, she's been reticent about how Sol's imbalance was feeding his the whole time, she should have known Sol was never going to deescalate and was only going to drag him further into trouble. But we can sit here arguing over her thought process and blame her but at the end of the day, it was just that the writers needed it to be Sol for the plot and...I don't know, didn't workshop other reasons to divide them like this. But yeah, in universe, there is no reason for it to have been Sol. Things still might have been escalated due to the events inside the fortress and Sol likely sensing Osha's fear when Mae starts the fire, but Indara could (and should) have stopped Torbin's part in it, that was her direct responsibility.

Mistake #3: suggesting the cover up. Yeah this one's not great. I think most of the 'wow Indara did nothing wrong' people are like '.....ok until the cover up'. And like this maybe also is going to get filed under 'clunky writing' but I'm willing to be argued around on that, I just can't quite figure out why they had to lie about the fire to protect Osha's dream of becoming a Jedi? That's the sticking point for me. They're going to have the same arguments with the Council to let her join, I'm not sure what the difference is whether they tell the truth or not.

On the characterization side though, I can also see where it's like....maybe Indara shouldn't have been making decisions at that point because she did just kill at least a couple dozen people with her mind and is probably kind of freaked out. It was an accident, yeah, but I could see being pretty unnerved by what she'd just done and not wanting to reveal that to the Order. I think a big point has been the way each of these characters (on both the Jedi and the coven's side) act out of fear and that being what dooms them, and this is the moment Indara acts out of fear. She's afraid of revealing this frankly kind of frightening telepathic power, she's afraid the Order will blame her as the leader and call into question her ability to lead, or maybe even to have a padawan. I could see in this moment her being like 'well this is technically true and upsets the status quo the least, let's just go with it.' And then gets locked in once Sol tells Osha, so she can't change her mind after she calms down a bit.

ok back to defending her against two things: 1) breaking the spell and killing the coven, 2) her teaching style.

The issue with the conversation around her breaking the spell and killing the coven that I'm having is I think one of 'authorial intent vs what comes through on screen'. Because in the Nerdist interview that confirmed Indara did not intentionally kill the witches, Headland also said that her mistake her was acting out of 'selfish attachment to save her friend' and not worrying about the consequences. And I just...my brain does not make that logical leap. You could maybe argue that if like...a bunch of other things weren't going on. Like the alternative to Indara not breaking the spell is: Kelnacca continues on his puppet rampage and she has to fight him essentially alone (Torbin is knocked out and Sol's tiring) and probably kill him, which could have also killed the witches, she doesn't know that.

I guess if she 100% knew that breaking the spell telepathically would kill the witches and killing Kelnacca physically would not, you could argue she was stuck in a trolley problem and maybe should have just killed Kelnacca, but even then it's like. Eh. So she kills Kelnacca. She's still vastly outnumbered by hostile witches who could just turn their attention to someone else. Maybe they go for Sol next and she has to do the same thing, then Torbin, until she's alone and Koril can re-form from the mist and kill her. (Nerdist interview all but confirmed Koril is not dead.) I think this is where writers get mired in the weeds of attachment, pacifism, and the greater good. Yes, the philosophy of the Jedi asks them to sacrifice possessive attachment to others so they are not fueled by those emotions and they try to find a nonviolent way to resolve conflict first, but this doesn't equal 'you should just lay down and die immediately rather than fight back against someone who's hurting you'.

TWO the teaching style thing. I've seen so many people over the last couple days be like 'wow she's such a shitty teacher' and call her style 'sink or swim' and imply she's letting Torbin drown. And I agree it's not perfect. Seven weeks is a long time to be stuck in a stalemate with your homesick student over whether he understands the grander purpose of your mission. But also I think it makes perfect sense if you consider that she's trying to teach him patience and also not influence his own line of inquiry (...unlike someone else which I'll get to). But first off, this seems like the perfect mission to teach this sort of patience. I'm even hesitant to call it 'sink or swim' which I'd apply more to like, if she brought him into a high-stakes, dangerous environment and was just like 'good luck.' Up until the last 36 hours or so (or less lol we don't know how long the day-night cycle is on this planet, but from when Sol sees the twins to the fire starting is about a day and a half), this was a safe, low-stakes mission. They're essentially doing a mystical ecological survey, on a planet that seems mostly uninhabited and without significant predators or other dangers. Finding the vergence doesn't seem to have any sense of urgency to it. Part of being a Jedi is listening to the Council, even when you have to do something boring or that you don't want to do. You don't really get to choose your assignments, especially when you're an apprentice and are expected to go wherever your master's work takes you. I think it was a fine situation for her to wait out. Yeah, she maybe underestimated how badly Torbin wanted to go home and should have interrogated those emotions earlier but still this is a pretty low stakes mission, I think without the sudden acute pressure of the situation with the coven and Aniseya exploiting that homesickness, they may have found a healthier resolution to those issues.

And, given what she tells Sol about not wanting to give Torbin answers but teach him to seek them for himself, that she might not want to influence his ideas. The masters clearly know what they're looking for is probably a vergence, but Indara might not have wanted to tell Torbin because he's young and inexperienced and then he might start seeing a vergence everywhere, rather than listening to what the Force is really telling them. (This is another thing where like, yeah if they were on Earth in our time with no psychic powers I think it's fair to criticize her for withholding answers that long...but they're psychic space wizards who are supposed to be able to sense things normal people can't, I think some of the pedagogy for that is a little different than what we're used to.) I think Sol was wrong to step in like that, especially considering the outcome, that Torbin does get so fixated on finding the vergence and going home he loses perspective. And I think Indara was right: this wasn't about what Torbin was feeling or needed, this was about what Sol was feeling. It seems like he was done with their stalemate (that exchange around the fire sounded like a conversation that's been had before, and like, not really faulting Sol for that, I would also probably get fed up with a moody teenager) and he thought he knew what Torbin needed better than Indara, so decided to override her and just spill the answer.

I think it's interesting that before Osha even comes into the picture, Indara has already accused Sol of projecting his feelings onto someone else. It does seem like he's feeding into Torbin's anxiety just as much as Torbin's feeding his, I kind of wish they had used that more in the scene where they head off for the fortress, honestly just a couple sequence changes would probably have fixed a bunch of that. (Indara comes and tells them the Council said no, they go over the results of the blood test, Sol says he thinks something is wrong and the girls are in danger, they decide to head off together, would eliminate the nonsensical 'Indara suddenly trusts Sol and Torbin to be alone together and not cause shenanigans' issue.) But yeah, that feels like foreshadowing of how he's projecting his own feelings onto Osha, like his was projecting his own feelings of being imbalanced and restless onto Torbin.

Anyway. Indara was a fine teacher probably, not perfect, but I wouldn't go as far as to say 'she sucks' or even that they were poorly matched. This was just...a long and tiring mission that ended with a literal explosion. Can't wait for the finale! Especially because ack, the 'Indara is the secret Sith' people have not quit on Reddit and there's still like the absolute remotest chance they pull something stupid like a double reverse twist - because for SURE in those early episodes she was being set up to be the 'mean one' vs Sol, and the twist is that she was actually levelheaded and willing to listen and sweet with the twins - and the final shot of the season is a cloaked Sith figured revealed to be Indara. Like there's NO way but...there is the tiniest way so I will not be fully comforted until the finale's out and that theory can be laid to rest. Though I don't think it will be, they could literally show her decaying corpse to definitively prove she's dead and show her spending the 16 years between the flashback and the present cuddling puppies and saving babies and being the lighty-est-side light-sider in the galaxy and I guarantee Reddit would still be like '...ok but here's how that really just proves she's the Sith...'

[orcelito]

I do find it so funny that I will graduate college days away from my birthday. Like my birthday is literally in between the end of the semester ("graduation") and commencement

It really will be like a joint graduation & birthday party for me lmao

[angstflavoured]

A little fiddauthor analysis...

Making this post mostly just to get all of my thoughts out about it regarding how I think it is inherently very toxic on both ends, despite people treating it as more wholesome near the beginning when they were both younger… and the fact that I think it’s very incredibly one-sided. I’m strictly going to be talking about CANON events, not headcanons or speculations or AU’s. If you wanna draw Fiddleford and Ford being cute and hugging and dating, I don’t care, I like a lot of the content for them myself. It isn’t canon to the show and doesn’t affect or harm anybody. That’s what a fandom is and I’m not trying to police anyone, I just think a lot of people misinterpret their relationship and thought it would be fun to talk about it because I find their dynamic really interesting. I’m going to be using a lot of direct quotes and scenes from Ford’s journal, TBOB, and the show, so buckle in baby ! This was supposed to be a quicker and smaller one while I work on my Billford essay, but I had a lot more to say than I thought…

First off, it’s interesting to see how Ford thinks their interaction after so long is going to go. In Journal 3 he says he has “no choice” but to call Fiddleford up to work on the portal because Ford just doesn’t have the smarts to do what he wants to do himself, and he thinks he’s going to have to literally beg Fiddleford to join him. But as we see in the journal and in the show, it hardly takes ANY convincing at all for Fiddleford to drop everything he was doing and leave his wife and kid for months on end to work on a project he knows nothing about. All the info he has he got over a short phone call. It seems like Ford, at this point being so close with Bill and thinking he’s the only one who cares about him, just assumed that most people he used to talk with don’t think about him anymore. He’s had Bill whispering in his ear that he’s the only one who understands him, so it makes sense he doesn’t think Fiddleford will want to do this with him. But from what it looks like, Fiddleford either has been waiting every second for Ford specifically to get back to him, or just has been waiting for any excuse to get the hell away from his family which is… yeesh. Either way, not very healthy regarding his wife and kid. He doesn’t seem to really care all that much about either of them, but more on that later.

Obviously Ford cares about Fiddleford, as soon as he comes down to live with him, Ford hasn’t been so happy in a good while. He missed human connection, despite how good things were going with Bill. Having another person there to talk with was nice. Despite Fiddleford having strange quirks that did irk Ford, he found them endearing and genuinely felt better in his company.

But I think the biggest thing here a lot of people overlook is that Ford only ever refers to Fiddleford as his college buddy in the show, and in the journals as “my assistant.” I’ve seen so many people have Ford call him his partner, but he actually only calls him this like once in the show i think. It’s always my assistant, my research, my theory. Which is funny because Ford didn’t come up with any of this stuff with the portal on his own. Bill was the one that gave him the blueprints. Fiddleford even questions Ford at one point, asking if he had help coming up with them because of how complex they are, and Ford decidedly DOESN’T mention Bill and instead tells him “with hard work, anything is possible.” (Btw he does refer to Bill as his partner multiple times… just sayin.)

The way he talks to and about Fiddleford, Ford is always talking down. He does think that Fiddleford is smart and does think he has a brilliant mind, but he still thinks that he’s below him.

Because Ford has Bill.

And oh my lord, do I not see anyone talk about this. Soooo many comics always depict Fiddleford knowing about Bill existence, but I think the biggest roadblock with their ship and a huge point of contention is that Fiddleford never canonically knows about Ford’s relationship with Bill until after he’s already lost his mind when he’s old. He doesn’t even KNOW that he exists until he’s half sucked through the portal. People ignore this, but it’s so important to their dynamic. Ford doesn’t think that Fiddleford could handle it, and he doesn’t think he necessarily deserves to know. Because Bill is Fords thing. Their relationship is special. Ford is special.

Ford claims he doesn’t tell Fiddleford about Bill because he would throw him in a looney bin, despite their research being so whimsical and ridiculous already. They’re literally building a portal to a different dimension, Fiddleford would’ve believed him. And the way Ford talks about it, you can tell it’s less about Fiddleford thinking he’s crazy and more about something else.

Could F ever truly appreciate the complex fates that brought me and my Muse together?

He doesn’t think Fiddleford could APPRECIATE it. The language he uses, you can tell that Ford knows that Fiddleford would see right through Bill’s facade. And Ford doesn’t want that because he wants to be friends with Bill and he wants to be special, and he’d rather hide Bill and stay in denial than tell his dearest friend, just so he can feel special a little longer.

This is why I think as much as Fiddleford’s romantic feelings for Ford were there, it never ended up going anywhere. Ford would always choose Bill over him. When Fiddleford got him the axolotl pet, Ford quickly threw it out and lied about it to Fiddleford just because Bill told him to. And there’s multiple cases of interactions like this, where Bill will talk down about Fiddleford and Ford will just be like damn… yeah. Here’s a journal excerpt from TBOB around Christmas time. For context, Ford got into a huge fight with a monster and tried to contact Bill to help him, but he didn’t come. And then Bill randomly shows up later when Ford’s at home decorating.

I was almost roasted by Krampus, and where was he? Off inspiring some other scientist? Posing for some tapestry? Were we even partners? He threw the accusation back in my face. “Hey, I’m not the one skipping portal work to carouse with a third-wheel hillbilly with second thoughts about our project!” I started to argue--but he had a point. F has seemed less and less committed to work lately.

Which is INSANE !!! when we see that only a fucking page ago, Fiddleford was explaining how he got in a fight with his wife because he didn’t get her a present for Christmas. After spending multiple weeks and making multiple prototypes for a pair of 6 fingered gloves for Ford.

And if we hop back to Journal 3, there’s a particular interaction with them which is crazy to me. While hiking up a mountain to go to Crash Site Omega, they get into a fight with the Gremloblin, which fucking swoops up Fiddleford into the sky. In Ford’s attempt to get him down, they both end up falling down through the roof of a barn, where Fiddleford gets stuck full of quills and breaks his arm.

Despite our fortune, I have become worried about my assistant. I was able to treat his physical wounds, but I fear there are mental wounds not as easily remedied. For the past several nights, he has been unable to sleep, apparently still haunted by the Gremloblin’s gaze. More alarming is his Cubic’s Cube. It has sat scrambled, unfixed, on his desk for days. I myself have survived many monster attacks without trauma, but perhaps F is more sensitive than I realized…

OH. MY. GOD. The way that Ford talks so condescendingly is enough to make any person's blood boil. It’s the same way when Fiddleford gets sucked through the portal, and when Fiddleford gets pulled back, Ford’s first words out of his mouth are “WHAT DID YOU SEE!”

As much as he cared for Fiddleford… he has no regard at all for Fiddlefords VERY VALID feelings about events that would traumatize literally anyone. But he just pats Fiddlefords back and tells him to get used to it because this is just part of the job and he shouldn’t be whining so much. He does nothing to properly comfort him and scoffs it off like “apparently he’s ‘TRAMATIZED’ or something. I’ve been through so much worse and never had a problem, I don’t get what his issue is.” And then ford is SURPRISED AND APPALLED when Fiddleford creates the memory gun.

Which oohhhhh lord, the memory gun. jesus christ. Such a big example of the distrust between them on both sides. Fiddleford literally canonically lied about destroying the gun and then erased Fords memory about it so that he could erase his own memories in secret without him knowing. And also probably fords sometimes! Not completely canon, but like…. Fiddleford did it once, I wouldn’t put it past the guy. And then when they go to the carnival, Fiddleford hands out his fucking card to Ivan (the leader of the society of the blind eye, who was a teen/early 20s at the time) so that he can erase memories for him that he didn’t like.

Biggest thing we can take away from everything regarding Fiddleford’s character, is that he always takes the easy way out. He ran away from his family he obviously didn’t really care for as much as he should’ve because that was easier than talking it out or divorcing. He pushed it aside for later. Bro was literally looking for a fucken Brokeback Mountain situation, but Ford wasn’t giving anything back to him. So instead Fiddleford constantly made a fool of himself doing things for Ford and tripping over himself to show his gratitude when all the while Ford was entirely focused on Bill. and then he just goes around and starts erasing memories, because it’s easier than having to actually deal with things. Which is why I don’t foresee a reality in which Fiddauthor makes sense, in the way they actually end up doing anything together. Because Fiddleford’s too much of a coward to admit his feelings first, and Ford obviously has his sights on someone else.

And here’s the BIGGEST damning thing, like oh my god.

In Journal 3, Ford goes to a fortune teller (which don’t get me fucking started on how judgy he is to her and how much he talks down about her, DESPITE HER BEING LEGIT AND ACTUALLY WARNING HIM). Long story short, she gives Ford a spiel about how someone close to him is deceiving him. She then gives him a mood ring and says “when this is blue, you may pull through. When this is black, you can’t turn back.”

And LO AND BEHOLD!! OH MY FUCKING GOD, when they’re at the carnival and Fiddleford is talking to Ivan and whispering--

Ford. Looks down. To check if the ring is black.

I took one last look down at my hand and was strangely relieved to find that the palm reader’s ring was still blue. I shoved it in my pocket, collected F, and tried to put the whole experience out of my mind.

FORD LITERALLY THOUGHT ABOUT THE IDEA OF FIDDLEFORD BETRAYING HIM BEFORE BILL. IN FACT, HE LITERALLY NEVER MENTIONS THINKING IT WAS BILL ONCE.

He talks about how they got into a fight at dinner the night before the portal test because Fiddleford was having second thoughts about it being dangerous, and Ford told him to be there or he would get left behind. He’d do it without him.

And when Fiddleford gets pulled through the portal and quits the project, Ford says gooooddd fucking riddance, I never even needed you bro.

F, you weak-willed hayseed! Go back to your doting family and a life of fear and compromise! I weep now not for our failed partnership, but for the golden opportunity thrown away. To think I considered him a friend! I know my true friend. It is my Muse.

One of the few times he ever refers to it as partnership btw. Literally only when they break everything off.

And Ford only starts fighting with Bill about everything after it starts directly hurting him. It literally just seems like Ford is less upset about Bill’s plan being evil, and more upset at the fact that he lied to Ford LMAOOOOO he didn’t like the fact that he was disposable and lesser to Bill, despite Ford treating Fiddleford the exact same way.

At the end of all of this… it may seem like I’m really fighting against this ship, but not in the slightest. I LOVEEEE them so much, but in a way where it would be really toxic and not actually end up with anything happening.

Such a biggg theme when it comes to Ford’s character specifically is yearning. He yearns for success and attention and love and acceptance, but he’s constantly never giving other people those things. Which ends in him not receiving any in return. That is obviously until he gets back from dimension hopping and works on being a better person. When he starts towards healing, that’s when he starts receiving what he always wanted.

There’s so much tension between Ford and Fiddleford it's like disgusting, they were so incredibly gay… but, I hate to say it, it was very one-sided. They did have some fun times together and Ford enjoyed his company for quite a bit, but it was nothing like how Fiddleford felt for him. Fiddleford was always thinking about how Ford was feeling and what he was doing, and Ford never really did that for Fiddleford unless he was prompted to. But he was alwayasyayayss thinking about how Bill felt. And he always chose Bill in the end.

I just see so much of all of this get swept under the rug and never addressed, when it's kind of sad because it’s all so interesting and really adds a lot to both of their characters. They were both so morally gray back in their day, and honestly even more so now that they’re older, and its kinda sad to see that all go ignored. I JUST LOVE TOXIC GAYS SM AND THEY WERE SO TOXIC AND I’D LOVE TO SEE PEOPLE EXPLORE THAT MORE. Hopefully maybe this will prompt some people to think about it like this…….. It’s all so very tragic and their relationship was doomed from the start and i loveeeee shit like that. only misery to be had...

[kyhora]

FRAUD ANALYSIS

(SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO REMAIN BLIND)

"TRUST NOT YOUR EYES, TRUST NOT YOUR EARS."

MY OPENING THOUGHTS

I have... SO MANY THOUGHTS. There was a lot going on here with Fraud and it has absolutely surprised me in its presentation. I'll be talking about specific things to make it easier for me and for you, dear reader, to better understand and process what in the Hell is happening here.

PROVIDENCE

I was stupid and thought it was initially a seraphim because they have similar designs, but yk what Virtues look like Serpahims too so I dunno what I'm on abt LMAO.

I knew from the start the eye in the cover for In Absentia ΛΟΓΟΣ was related to an enemy after following the logic of Hear! The Siren Song Call of Death's preview with the Gutterman's shield. Despite that, oh my goodness this is a really sick design, the transparent, glassy feathers, the eye and how it looks like a slab placed onto the wings, it looks so WEIRD and I love it so much, for our third ever angel enemy, they delivered hard on its design.

I have seen some theories/speculation that Providence looks way too detailed/refined compared to other enemies, inferring that V1 is incapable of processing Providence's appearence. While I'm not opposed to the idea, I don't necessarily subscribe to it, I think Providence is just a really big model which leaves a lot of room for details to be refined. If V1 can process a Virtue, it can process a Providence.

It looks obnoxious with that magenta beam, I don't even wanna know what it does on Brutal LMAO. Surprisingly brittle for an 8th layer enemy though or maybe it retains similar damage multipliers as a Virtues which is why the Electric Railcannon did so much damage to it, idk. I don't have much else to really say about Providence other than the fact it's a visually impressive pain in the asshole, can't wait to see it for the first time and want to kill it harder than every other enemy in a Cybergrind wave.

FRAUD'S AESTHETICS

Fun fact abt myself: I REALLY FUCKING LOVE LIMINAL SPACES. I love liminal spaces with all my heart, they're a really cool form of atmospheric horror (don't confuse this with the backrooms, I hate that shit). Fraud basing itself off of liminal spaces is really damn neat and honestly makes sense, since Hakita even mentioned how during development for 7-1: THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS, he tried out stuff like myhouse.wad and ofc read House of Leaves. Besides his own inspirations, it makes perfect sense to use liminal aesthetics here, vaguely familiar halls and rooms met with a reality that defies logic, very fraud if I do say so myself.

Gonna post some pictues of rooms I really like and add any commentary if need be.

Really sick opening room, I love the weird wallpaper, the lamps, just everything here and how its placed is perfect. It perfectly gives off that liminal vibe that this layer is wanting to play into. I adore liminal spaces that feel like it was something built by something that doesn't know how to be human, it gives off such an errie vibe.

A friend on Discord found a theory on Reddit about this and omg it's actually kinda neat

I was squealling when I saw this for the first time. My friend in the vc I was streaming this too said it was all they could hear throughout the trailer LMFAOOO. If there is one thing I'll mention, it's that I think it's funny how apparently Fraud has television but Lust doesn't. What a bunch of bums /j. i do think Lust is more advanced and prolly have TVs, but this is our first official TV in ULTRAKILL

What a banger fucking opening. I adore this shot so much, and honestly it's reminiscent of those liminal space images of hotel hallways like these:

The transition of the hallway shifting to the checkpoint is so fucking awesome too. fun thing I noticed was that there was a low buzzing sound, like when you press yourself up to the walls of Limbo. Not sure if it implies anything or is an audio indicator of shifting realities.

WHAT A COOL ASS ROOM. I LOVED THE TRANSITION HERE SO MUCH, MY JAW DROPPED WATCHING THE WALLS SHIFT TO MAKE IT BIGGER. I'M SO EXCITED TO SEE IF THIS IS GONNA DO ANYTHING MORE THAN JUST THIS AS THE LAYER GOES ON. After seeing this trailer at least 50 times already, I'm curious about how this room instigates the combat, since there's plenty of shots that have V1 walking back to the room or walking into other rooms from the doors. Fun to think about the frustration of getting lost in this place, finding yourself back, and then BOOM ! ENEMY ENCOUNTER ! ! !

Such a banger shot too, I love these kinda infinite mirror-esque rooms for non-euclidian stuff. An interesting detail are that the lion statues actually have a lion head unlike the one Limbo. I love how much this feels like a hotel, it has that eerie transitional vibe hotels can have but has this "first class" vibe to it all.

Really fun shot too. Love non-euclidian stuff playing with gravity and such.

I know I already said my jaw dropped but like... MY JAW. DROPPED. I mentioned it to my oomfies before but it looks a lot like the The Empyrean from Dante's Inferno:

Will mention this here because I don't wanna post images that are basically the same; but the other side of the skybox is noticably darker. Maybe it's this layer's day/night cycle? Not too sure but feels logical to me. I love how this layer is leaning into the heavenly imagery, I'm so curious about what kinda lore bits we're gonna get, and considering how we got a new angel enemy, we hopefully probably get some new angel lore. If Virtues and Gabriel were the only angels to have resided in Hell, makes me interested in if other angels are coming down from heaven, either to help Gabriel, or avenge the council by killing him.

I love that we're jumping from rooftops to others, nice change of scenery from the claustrophobic, eerie rooms inside the towers. I am happy the layer is still paying homage to the "tower of lies" idea by having us climb up them, jumping between them, and all that stuff.

Once again with the nonsensical prop placement. Why does this room have tables and chairs when there's nothing to eat or any other reason to lounge about here. Really interesting environmental storytelling, I'm confused and I LOVE IT.

Doth my eyes deceive ?

A NEW HOOK POINT ? ? ?

Sick transition but what's with the door on the right ? I wonder if it means anything or is just a visual indicator for where to go... hrmmmm...

"I'M BACK IN THE FUCKING BUILDING AGAIN??????"

Cool transition to the TV again, but I love the sharp contrast of aesthetics here. Again with the nonsensical placement of props but at least all the props share a theme ? ? ? Makes me curious if the next level or the next segment of 8-1: HURTBREAK WONDERLAND is gonna involve the poolrooms. I really hope it does. It's a really cool liminal space aesthetic that I think would be reallly interesting see and makes sense to mesh in with the liminal space inspirations of Fraud.

If curious abt the poolrooms:

with all that trailer analysis done, time to yap abt my thoughts of everything we've seen with some theories and speculation of my own :3

WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON ?

In Dante's Inferno, Fraud has 10 blogias (circles) that had specific punishments for different kinds of fraudulant behavior, but here in this Fraud ? Is the punishment here that the sinner is in a non-euclidian hotel being driven mad by the isolation and non-sensical rooms? It feels too much like Limbo if that is what's being done here, and besides, there's smaller buildings, there's rivers, there's all sorts of pleasant stuff here, what if maybe Fraud had its own renaissance like Lust ? Maybe the angels are doing something here with Fraud ? I'm honestly confused by what is happening here, I have no ideas for what happened to this layer, but for now I have my other thoughts about the explanations for the aesthetics, potential stuff going, on so forth. Just thought I'd bring up my confusion since I don't really have many ideas for the punishments here.

THE INFINITE HOTEL

With Fraud's aesthetics, I believe Fraud is going to be a hotel and each level is us descending into the kinds of rooms that would be in a hotel, like how in the first level we're in the hallways of what is presumably the place where all the rooms, while the second rooms takes us to a place that resembles the pools of hotels (hence why I believe in 8-2 poolrooms), and etc.

I also kinda see Hilbert's Hotel/The Infinite Hotel Paradox to be a form of inspiration for this place, an infinite hotel, houses infinite guests, and since mankind is dead...

explanation of the paradox:

If we look at Wrath, it feels like the logic of the infinite hotel checks here too, since the river styx began to become bigger following The Final War, and instantly became flooded after mankind's mysterious, biblical extinction. After so many new sinners entered the layer of Wrath, the river adapted to be the ocean, nothing changed, just more people in it now, and how the Ferrymen have grown acustomed to the new environment as well. Fraud after mankind's extinction made there have to be more rooms, and yet, all the "guests" have been accounted for.

A FALSE PARADISE

An idea I have is that Hell Itself rennovated Fraud to resemble the Lust Renaissance, to cruely trick the denizens of Fraud that they escaped the layer and found a comforting place in Hell, and in their delusion, unknowingly still roam around the endless halls of Fraud, finding a twisted pleasure in the false senses of hope the sinners are under.

Idk if I really agree with this idea, because why are there statues of Providence, why is there such heavenly imagery in this layer if this idea suggests it wants to be like Lust ? Maybe it instead wants to be a false Heaven ? But if that's the case, why are the towers and their architecture anything but ? I am lost over what this layer is wanting to be, it's obvious that every layer had their own punishments, either the punishments were directly shown to us in the layer (like Heresy's coffins, Wrath's ocean, and Violence's trees), or at least were mentioned, like with Lust's winds. But here in Fraud ? I have no idea what the punishment is here. Like. At all. It leaves me curious for what's in store and what is going to be explained, or maybe some theories are gonna be absolutely banger, who knows.

NEW ENEMIES & LORE

Soooo new enemies are coming, I believe we are either getting one or 2, potentially a new husk and 2 new angels. We already got Providence, a new husk feels right since it's been a while since we got one, and I am a firm believe that the angel statue from Limbo and the other layers is gonna be either our new arm OR new enemy. Plz. Give us more Angel lore. I'm on my hands and knees, Hakita, I need to know what they're like. I know we're in Hell so Heaven has far less involvement than if it was the other way around, but I still have to know. I GOTTA KNOW.

SOON™ (this year)

Also felt like talking about this because it's weirdly kinda confusing ? ? ? Looked into the general "soon" of New Blood and at times it's basically like. TOMORROW ? To which I think is not gonna happen if we read the description of In Absentia ΛΟΓΟΣ and how Hakita says they're still working on it (the first level I'd assume), so I dunno if in ONE MONTH they were able to just create the entirety of the Fraud layer that fast, hence why the (this year) addition makes me feel like they're releasing it maybe before the holiday season ? Who knows ! :P With the understanding that Fraud had troubles in development which led to the ULTRA_REVAMP update, maybe production got much easier after the enemy rework ? I've no idea honestly. But whatever happens, I'm gonna be there the MOMENT it releases.

Yeah erm that's kinda it for now hope you enjoyed reading the delusion of a mad person that squealed like a pathetic person during the trailer and the preview they did before the trailer. If anyone would like to talk by all means, talk to me in dms or message @cyhora on Discord ! ! !

[monosanimegenericzone]

Hunter x Hunter: Being bitched by a dude half your age

okay so can we talk about these two

and i cannot stop laughing how silva fucking zoldyck. in his prime at something like 42. getting his shit absolutely rocked by a "tee hee im not a teenager anymore" chrollo.

anyway. this is a breakapart analysis of how chrollo bitched him for a second time in the fight in yorknew.

side note: omg look its shalnark hiii

anyway

yap ahead. it got really long so proceed at your own risk

so the yorknew fight starts with the two zoldycks walking in on chrollo after tracking him down as fast as possible. and i mean as fast as possible. yes zeno probably could have used his 100m En to flash scan the whole building, but to parse out information from that- considering zeno has never met chrollo- would be pretty much impossible.

plus they had to deal with mafia grunts being idiots.

this is also a viable strategy. if chrollo was a pussy, he could have easily jumped out of a higher story window.

at this point neither the reader nor the zoldycks know what chrollo is doing in the building. they know the merchandise is intact and that they lost contact with 8 assassins so far, that's it.

we find out later that chrollo was playing for time, so if illumi was taking his sweet ass time taking out the 10 dons chrollo could have easily led the two zoldycks on a wild goose chase, but no, he's waiting for them.

getting into speculation territory. we don't know how long the fight actually lasted. the animated fight lasted like an episode and a half, but in hxh, time is irrelevant. the fight could have been 20 seconds tops.

minor point but- slightly relevant.

chrollo probably wanted to wipe out the assassins before making his next move and i cannot tell if he knew it was the zoldycks or not. again, him and zeno have never met, so even if zeno used En, chrollo would have no idea it's him.

point is. chrollo was waiting for the assassins to come to him. he wouldn't waste the time looking for them, so he wasn't even trying to hide as he just. casually meandered up the cemetery building.

but as soon as chrollo sees who it is his face does the iconic dark shadow. that- imma be honest- 2011 did him so dirty with.

for reference. he greets the other assassin like this

dawg is not playing

im giggling bcs its one of those "you can see the exact moment when he locked in" type things. its so funny

now this next part i will just present as a silly moment

but chrollo literally pulled a knife just to shank silva specifically. the grudge here is so real

how petty are you that you're trying to shank the guy and not his dad. this is so disrespectful

(satire)

anyway.

zeno earns chrollo's respect by being an actually seasoned fighter and able to break chrollo down for all he's worth.

those are eyes alright.

chrollo knows that silva is not going to attack him directly anymore, but he will have to keep silva in sight so that he never gets an opening.

chrollo is playing for time.

and- i did not notice this before-

ZENO FIGURED THAT OUT TOO.

THIS OLD MAN IS TOO OP. EXCUSE ME.

i can skip the rest of this fight otherwise i'll be here for 5 years glazing zeno for being the goat he is.

but chrollo's plan was to capture zeno alive. he can't secure abilities otherwise, and we assume fun fun cloth is inescapable once closed.

now picture this for a second. chrollo knows what silva's hatsu is most likely. and if he wanted to, he could have captured silva and gotten a hatsu out of him easily. silva is poisoned, slower than zeno, and the less obvious threat.

but no.

chrollo is more interested in zeno because silva is not worthy of his respect. even if silva had a really useful hatsu, i doubt chrollo would want anything to do with him. he won't even look at silva if he can help it.

also i realized that they were fighting in the basement. j'accuse.

but the really juicy part is what happens after the fight.

so i have a theory.

what if silva didn't know who illumi got a contract from. that would be the best troll ive ever seen out of chrollo in the history of ever

consider: chrollo knows about silva's warning to his kids. he and illumi have known each other for a long time, and because silva fought chrollo at least 3 years ago, i think it's reasonable to assume that chrollo and illumi already knew each other by then.

obviously we don't know for sure, but for my delusion let's go with that.

illumi is suddenly harder to reach, so chrollo tracks him down and illumi being illumi was just like "yeah dad said not to hang out with you anymore" so, chrollo, who knows illumi is a good asset, is like "bitch you aint going anywhere. imma pay you just to hang out. stick it to your old man"

so with that in mind. illumi ringing in asking for his client- who isn't zeno nor silva- and silva realizing in 0.2 seconds that it's chrollo. the immense fatherly sigh that woulda left his old ass man would have been fucking hilarious.

(based on textual evidence i dont think this is canon but its still too funny)

regardless, it's proof that illumi has either gone behind silva's back or got his reluctant permission. assuming the 'no phantom troupe' rule still applies at this time

"JUST BARELY"

SILVA BE FOR REAL I SWEAR TO GOD XDDDD

"JUST BARELY" ALIVE MY ASS.

anyway. real disrespect is chrollo only speaking to zeno. like zeno and chrollo are best buddies after going toe to toe for like 2 minutes and chrollo clearly respects zeno.

but here

right here

THIS RIGHT HERE. THE DISRESPECT IS ABSURD.

chrollo asked this question on purpose.

notice how silva isn't even in that question. SILVA IS NOT A THREAT TO CHROLLO.

AND WHAT'S WORSE.

ZENO CONFIRMED. INDIRECTLY. THAT CHROLLO COULD WIN THAT 1V1. IN FRONT OF HIS POMPOUS ASS CAT EYED SON.

LIKE LOOK AT HOW SILVA LOOKS AT CHROLLO.

HE'S SO MAD AND HE CAN DO FUCKING N O T H I N G

CHROLLO JUST BITCHED SILVA WITHOUT EVEN SAYING A WORD TO HIM, BY DEMONSTRATING THAT HE HAS CONNECTIONS TO AND CAN KILL EVERYONE SILVA RESPECTS IN THE FAMILY.

and chrollo is satisfied. he's done. he's out.

bro hit the deck waiting for his pals to show up.

and we know how pissed he was at the beginning of the fight. to be able to let it go like this- because chrollo's ass petty as hell-- he would not let it go-- means he KNOWS he made silva look like a bitch.

AND GOD DAMN. HE'S RIGHT.

thats my rant for the day. tata

[iteratorsex]

It took me like a year but I got a sideblog now!

My name's Tarigon. Iteratorsex is my pen name

Main is @rna-world

WATCHER SPOILERS ARE ALL TAGGED "Watcher spoilers"

I've gotten some rather off-topic asks, and while I will still answer them, I'm going to be... miffed about it. Please, my inbox is for RAIN WORLD ONLY!!

If I can't answer an ask with any amount of substance, it's going to be ignored. AND DON'T ASK FOR NSFW STUFF EITHER god. This should be common sense, but it has happened before

Anyways, here I'll primarily talk about my thoughts on Rain World, but I'll also RB stuff related to it and post art. I'll post things from shitpost art, to interesting details I want to note about the game

This account will also not involve much OC discussion, unless it's also related to the main lore. But you should still read Light On Tainted Glass, thanks

I used to do mostly iterator spec bio, and while I still love to do that, lately I've been going through madness.

As well as this, I'll talk about the game design aspects within RW and other modded regions, since that's also very fun

I have a repository for RW lore stuff here (CURRENTLY NOT UPDATED FOR WATCHER. I'M LAZY) ->

And I suppose I should also pin my canon designs of the iterators. It feels fitting to go here

TAG INDEX:

beware, I'm not the most careful about this.

textadactyl - Instances where I'm the OP arterator- art tag treasury - Things I really like nma - not my art garbage wastes - shitposts rwr - things I'll add to Rain World Repo

lore - Broad Lore Discussion theory - theories shit i made up - Headcanon things not grounded in lore spec bio - Speculative biology involving iterators, slugcats, or other creatures discussion - Posts with more than 1 person involved character analysis - Discussing characters narrative analysis - Talking about the themes and... narrative of RW game mechanics - The workings of the game itself devlog - Things said by the RW developers file findings - Stuff about the game files or code mod - Involves mods screenshots - In-game screenshots

downpour - Downpour (Only tagged when explicitly downpour lore, and not when MSC slugcats)

watcher dlc - Everything about watcher

All creatures and characters tagged accordingly.

[embracing-the-ineffable]

Hunting for Clues-with-a-capital-C, a meta of Good Omens metas, and GO fun!

*I'm adding to this list as I find new and interesting Clues and theories!

*This post version is dated 19 Jul 2024; the current version is pinned to my profile.

* I maxed out Tumblr's link limit! Here's the Google doc with many of the Clues, links, discontinuities, and metas I've collected from all over the fandom. There's a new section at the top called "Discontinuities and Reports from the Ineffable Detective Agency"! (Inspired by this post from @kimberleyjean!)

Below, you'll find a list of my original posts, most of which are filled with fact-finding, Clue-hunting screenshots that will probably leave you with more questions than answers! Several of these posts are also presented in partnership with the Ineffable Detective Agency:

The Appearing Sign:

The Honolulu Roast sign appears in the middle of a scene?! AND the lamp moves?!

The Bentley:

How to tell the "three" Good Omens Bentleys apart, without talking about color

Ineffable discontinuity and the Bentley's roadtrip transformation: new back doors and other changes (after it was yellow)

The open Bentley window at the end of season 2

Clocks and Time:

The Ineffable Detective Agency Presents: The Main Bookshop Clock's Hands are BACKWARDS and Other Revelations!

The ineffable discontinuity of time in ALL of Good Omens season 2?

Crowley's watch doesn't always have hands

Good Omens season 2 ending and Crowley's (probable) Time Stop

Crowley's sideburns:

Crowley’s sideburns

Crowley's sideburns aren't even consistent in the promo photos.

Extras Behaving Strangely:

Hawaiian Shirt/Pub Table Guy

Marking the Columns

The Demon in an Orange Hoodie

Gabriel's Memory Returns:

The Ineffable Detective Agency presents: Gabriel's memory

Plus, hidden audio in the memory tunnels?

More Assorted Discontinuities:

Edinburgh and the Briefcase, presented by the Ineffable Detective Agency

The disappearing textiles storefront (and Maggie's second sign)

When does Mr Arnold's shop arrive? After season 1, except Neil says it was in the 1970s

Season 1: First Wombat in Space (also, Bentley bullet hole decals)

Set Furnishings:

The circular bookshop rug CHANGES?!

The Good Omens bookshop furniture changes between s1 and s2 (but NOT after Adam reboots reality!)

The s2 Bookshop / s1 Hospital Sink

Other Speculation and Questions:

On Neil's Tumblr asks, Staying Skeptical, and Gravity Falls

Finding hope for s3 and perspective for s2 in Neil's s1 podcast with David Tennant

The BTS parking ticket translation

The S2 Opening Title Sequence: analysis

The Ineffable Detective Agency presents: the origins of the white bust in the bookshop (a really lovely theory, you should read it!)

Parallels with Nightmare in Silver (Doctor Who written by Neil) - multiple Crowleys?

Has Aziraphale been meeting with Floating Head Metatron throughout s2?

Would even vulnerable, heartbroken Crowley try to protect Aziraphale at all costs? A possible hidden transfer in the kiss.

I have questions about Nina and ESPECIALLY about Maggie...

Don't pay the guy with the blue glasses, he doesn't work here!

If you enjoyed my research, stay tuned for future posts, and take a look at my Google doc for even more Clues and metas from all over the fandom!

Some closing bits of encouragement:

A: "You just said it was the only way to prevent something terrible happening!"

G: "Really? What?!"

A: "I don't know!"

G: "Well then, I expect it will be fine. Most things are fine in the end."

Neil: "Tell him that it will all be all right in the end, and that we are not yet at the end."

Plus, for fun:

Good Omens ✨Clues and Detectives✨:

Celebrating lots of milestones, including my 1500th follower! See all the posts here!

Good Omens Day of ✨Dance✨:

Learn all about my GO "Day of Dance" and get a link to all the fandom art I shared, here!

My Fanfiction:

From the GOMM holiday exchange: Cocoa and Fairy Lights, How to Fight Your Chemistry and Lose

GOMM 2024: Orbiting a Memory, featuring a gorgeous illustration of Saraqael by @altonthebard

Fan Fiction Friday: The Universe Might Answer: Broken Moonlight

From the GO Song & Poetry Exchange: The Ineffable Dance

GOMM reverse bang 2024: Silver Screen Solace, featuring a playful book omens theater drawing by @ufofrommarss

[seirei-bh]

Jason Mendal's facade. Deep analysis about him: his past, traumas, ideologies and subsequent development -Theories

I'm going to try to do a deep analysis here about why Jason is the way he is and how he became the person he is now. At least the little info que got about him until ep 5. Before start to read, you have to keep in mind that although there is some canonical data here, there is also a lot of speculation on my part, so these theories may be refuted in future episodes.

I am going to talk here about all the possible reasons for how his behaviour is today, applied to his business, as well as to his relationships of rivalry, friendship and romance. About his ideas, mentality, his heart, and everything related to the little we know about his childhood, personality and way of behaving. It will be a long analysis with many points to discuss.

Backstory and possible traumas

To begin with, another theory about Jason that I have after ep 5 that I'm going to add to my huge list of theories about him (you can read them in some of my previous posts, like this one and others in my Jason's headcanons post) is that, regarding the big number of brief romantic partners he had, and why he doesn't want to have a long and stable romantic relationship with anyone, I think one of the reasons to that fear may also be related to the death of his father and with his own actual “perfect” life in general.

First, I mean the fact that his father died when he was a teenager has made me think that perhaps Jason's emotional situation could be similar to Anthony from Bridgerton series, who after losing his father and seeing how much his mother suffered from that loss, that created a trauma that made him never want to fall in love for fear of losing someone else whom he loves again and suffering for it.

Perhaps his mother had depression after the death of her husband, maybe because of this she neglected her son or even lost her job, so they even had financial problems, and Jason having to deal with tons of responsibilities since he was too young. That also made Jason become a person more focused on getting money and power at any price and as quickly as possible.

We do not know how his father died, it is most likely that it was due to a car accident or some serious illness. About Jason and his mother, I wonder if maybe they never got along, or if their relationship deteriorated after his father died. But regardless of that, the death of one of your parents in your teenage years is something that can affect you greatly. This makes me think about what kind of situation Jason would live in high school, I’ve the feeling that he wasn't very popular, or at least not at first, and that he was one of those people who go from being one of those who suffered bullying to those who end up bullying others as a wrong way to show that he could be stronger and thus create some popularity with which he would stop feeling alone and unprotected. I bet his "charming personality" started to come through here, and the death of his father had a lot to do with it. Being a person who did everything possible to try to fit in, even if he had to destroy others to do so.

I also wrote a long time ago in another post that it is possible that other children made fun of Jason at school for having white locks, and that he perhaps dyed his hair all brown for a long time, and that perhaps his poliosis was also a consequence of Waardenburg syndrome, which can have other consequences. Which would only add more insecurities to that little Jason and cause him to accumulate more resentment.

He saw all those popular boys at high school who were very confident guys, seemingly charming (even though they were really jerks), rich, dating with all the pretty girlfriends they want, and who had everything going well in their lives, while him, being a good and nerdy boy couldn't achieve anything and who felt more vulnerable than ever after losing his father, so he told himself that to succeed and be stronger that was the law of the jungle that prevailed and that he had to be not only like them, but better, imitating them and also later going further than them in life, whatever was the price to pay. Succeeding the unpleasant way.

To add here something more: Chinomiko said originally when New Gen was still in the previous High School ideas, Jason was a character like a “stupid comical villain”, so at least we can imagine he ended been being a jerk in his teenage years for sure. Probably the typical pathetic bully who likes to bother others, but since his character had the best glow up I also guess that now he's more complex than before too.

And all this will also manifest itself in being obsessed with the ideal of perfection and in projecting an image of himself of absolute self-confidence. Which would also make him start faking a perfect image not only at high school, later at work, but among his “friends” and with his romantic partners, so it would be exhausting for him and would end getting bored of them and don’t make him feel happy. But by the other hand, he’s afraid that a woman could find out his true self and be disappointed, so he prefers to hide his insecurity and prevent them from seeing them, ending the relationship as soon as possible.

It could also be possible that Jason's father, before he died, was a very humble and good man who had high expectations for his son and convinced him that he had to reach very high levels professionally, either because he positively supported this and had great dreams and hopes for the future of his son so he could have the better chances in life he couldn't achieve, maybe even his father was the one who had the dream about “Goldreamz” and had the desire to start his own company one day, OR on the contrary, because he was a cold man who put a lot of pressure on him to achieve excellence, because he had no expectation that his son couldn’t achieve anything like him (I think it's more probably the first option than this second one because the second one is too similar to Nathaniel's father, but who knows). Both which also led Jason to want to achieve a high professional goal, either so that his father could have been proud of him and make their dream come true, or because he wanted to show him that he could be better than the low expectations that his father had.

Someone may think that Jason getting "daddy issues" and most of his problems being caused because of this is very cliche or simple, but we have seen that before with other Mcl characters, whether due to negligence and parental abuse (Nathaniel's parents), due to little attention and abandonment (Castiel's parents, Nina's father) or due to the death of their parents or one of the parental figures (Lysander, Armin and Alexy's biological parents, or Violette's mother), so I think it wouldn't be so strange for Jason to have a trauma related to that and that a lot of things that he try to goal in his life were in some way related to that, same about why he has that behaviour in his relationships.

Another thing: Jason mentions in ep 5 that his parents were not millionaires, and his birthday was rather modest. He is quite dry and serious when mentioning this, which makes me think that it is a detail of his life that he doesn’t like to talk about, since he may consider it a weakness. And it doesn't surprise me, since Jason couldn't set up the company alone, he needed the help of various private investors to whom he now owes money and favors. Also in his description he says that he likes expensive brand clothes and numbers (I guess this refers to money, not maths XD) So the fact of appearing to be a man with a lot of money is something that probably has him obsessed, and that it has cost him a lot of sacrifice to achieve, and he may also have still debts to those investors, but he does his best to pretend that everything in life is going very very well. He won’t want his rivals, his companions, or any flirt to find out that there are things in his life that are either not going so well or have not gone well in the past. (I’m not saying he’s broke, but I mean he’s not so rich as Amanda, despite of he tries to do his best to look like that, especially because all his company investors are probably rich men of very high category, high social standards you know), basically about this Jason is a bit like Jordan in The wolf of wall street movie, in the sense of someone who started very low in the social scale and ended up climbing to the top, according to him with clean methods, but who knows if he or any of his investors actually have any illegal secrets about his finances, and I wouldn't be surprised if that were the case and Jason purposely ignored this, since he himself said in ep 5 that he didn't know how some of his workers did their jobs and that he "wasn't interested in knowing it." He said this about Danica, but I think it really implies that he applies it to everyone who works with him and for him.

His business ideology:

There is a saying in Spanish that is quite famous in the world in marketing and great finances and that can be applied perfectly to Jason to explain and summarize his behaviour in business and his way to see the life: it is said that in business you need to have a "mentalidad de tiburón" (literally have a mind like a shark), this refers to a white shark, if it doesn't move it sinks, and means this is the mentality that an ambitious man of business must follow in order not to sink and continue continuing with his goals and dreams, the mentality of a person whose main motivation is money, who does not mind jumping the limits of ethics and morality in order to achieve it.

The equivalent in English here is “wolf-like mentality”, it’s similar to what I’ve explain, but includes too the saying of “divide and conquer” and to clarify this even more to understand Jason’s character, here I add all the main points it includes, something that can perfectly fix in Jason’s character to understand him better, a very Maquiavelo-like:

This can also apply to his personal relationships (romantic ones included), this way of thinking can explain it very well too what could be other of the reasons why he feels he cannot have a long romantic relationship: because his business are the first, and also can explain why perhaps he lost the interest in women very quick, because he’s mostly focused in the mentality of immediate results and thinks maybe the other choice is a lost of time + the fear for the previous trauma about the attacked and losing someone I’ve mentioned before.

And about wolf mentality and his rivalry and work…

Now let’s talk about the matter of his rivalry with Devon.

Maybe the answer is just a simple as: Jason was just frustrated for not be able to achieve his dreams for all the stuff I’ve been wrote before, which led him to steal the project from Devon (whether it was stealing it by himself acting alone and by himself in a desperate act or because some third person manipulated and convinced him to do it), but even if those were the main reasons, I still think there's something more here we still don’t know. Something more that happened between them before or during the town hall project thing, something more personal and complex than what we've been told, or at least that there's something more here that Devon doesn't know.

Maybe could be also for envy too. Devon was a good person and didn't have to pretend to be perfect to achieve his dreams like Jason did to have friends or a romantic partner and Devon seems to had a loving and stable family, maybe they meet each other since they were teenagers, but we still have no confirmation about this, so maybe I’m wrong, the only thing we know for sure is that at least they didn’t meet each other since childhood, since Chinomiko said it on Instagram long ago. But still this doesn’t feel enough (to me at least) to explain Jason’s behaviour.

For now, I also keep other of my old theories about there is possible a third person involved in all this problem. We’ll see what’s the real answer to this question.

Although here I want to add one more point, and that is that Devon and Devenementiel curiously represent the exact opposite of Jason and Goldreamz in the business approach, the called “sheep mentality”, and these are the differences between them:

Ironically, today in the competitiveness of modernity in business, it's considered that in reality the best entrepreneurs are neither one nor the other, but a mix between both types of mentality. Does this mean that there will be a time in the future when both companies find themselves in a delicate situation and decide to collaborate in order to mutually triumph against a greater enemy (Ioann and his company, f*ck Ysa's ex boyfriend, I hope we can punch him, that Ioann is gonna be the new Debrah and main villain mark my words) by overcoming their differences? Well, only time will tell...

Now, about Ysaline-Jason:

There is the small detail that Ysaline comes from a rich family, or at least her mother became rich and famous in her work in recent years, and thanks to that Ysaline was able to do private and expensive studies abroad (and Jason clearly knows this, he's an stalker who got her number and email easily XD and other characters like Thomas and Amanda knew Ysaline's mother was rich too just searching some info about her on internet). And that may also cause some insecurity in Jason, fearing that perhaps Ysaline may be disappointed if she finds out that he's not as perfect as he seems or at least that he was not at all in his past. Maybe he even had an ex girlfriend who, after she found out that, felt disappointed about him and left him, and that made him more superficial and cautious with her subsequent love conquests, or maybe since he only get romances once he started to put on his popular guy facade and succeed, he thinks he needs to impress and seduces her in the same way he did it with other women, because he thinks she will only be seduced by him by superficial stuff like his charms, attractive, money and work. Until Ysaline shows him what she wants is really get to know him, with all his weakness, in heart, mind and body, and until he realizes he really wants to know her better just because he loves to spend time with her and she makes him happy, and we know that will happen.

I've read some theories from different people and social webs that some think that Jason wants to use Ysa's family's money to invest in his own company, but I think his intentions are not in that way, but rather:

I think also one of the reasons why he agreed to help in ep 5 her was not only to seduce her or to show her Goldreamz so that she would want to work there with him, but also because Jason is able to see her potential, since a person with her studies, her family money, all the important contacts her mother has, and with the previous experience of having worked in a big important company and who has also shown him face to face that she has a competitive and brave side, she can undoubtedly go very far, and obviously he wants her to go far having her by his side, but of course he will also have a conflict here since I don't think he is the type of person who is comfortable mixing love with business, not like Ioann, the hell with that shitty man.

Obviously he also wants to manipulate her or at least bother Devenementiel somehow with all this. The little we have seen of Danica in ep 5 is that she is someone very efficient and fast at her job, Jason saw that and brought her to his side, now Jason sees that although Ysaline has failed in one of her projects, she still has potential to become a great event organizer. He also wanted to closely observe how she works when she is motivated and has someone guide her in the right path, when she is herself, and maybe even Jason sees in her the person he was before he achieved excellence. And Ysaline has ambition, she herself told Devon in one of the previous eps (if you follow Devon's route) that she dreamed of one day becoming a big star in the world of events and had the goal of being one of the best at her job. Even in one of the dialogues you can get in ep 2, Jason asks Ysaline "Aren't you willing to do anything to achieve success?" Jason knows that they are both similar in that way, and he wants to take advantage of that.

However Ysaline not only has ambition and a competitive will, but also a certain level of morality and feeling of unity with her co-workers, boss and her family and friends. And although it is still early to assume this, it's quite possible that she is the character that represents the perfect mix between the two business ideologies, both the wolf and the sheep. I'll call that fussion "the kitten mentality" because I can.

Of course, returning to the relationships issue, one thing to try his best to seduce her and make her work for him or at least have her as an ally and briefly as lover, and something very different is what we know will happen: that he will fall in love with her and both will want more, but he will feel that he cannot and shouldn't go further.

So we have here all this matter about his fake perfect facade of rich, charming and popular man of business + his humble origins + wolf-like mentality + his trauma about the losing of his father and more people in the future. A perfect cocktail to be afraid to have a stable relationship.

Greetings to all Jason fans like me who have him as a route and loves to suffer. In this house we love traumatized fictional men with red flags.

And let's add of course there will probably be many more problems that will make him fear having a relationship with Ysaline once he falls in love with her, because problems already numbered in more than 2000 words weren't enough first because he will try to convince himself that he only wants to manipulate her so that she change sides and join to Goldreamz, and to seduce her so that she'd end up in his bed (and she maybe would believe that too), but then when he finds out he's in love with her, and she with him, Jason will have to make the decision about whether to go ahead with his revenge against Devenementiel or not, because he knows that will end up hurting her, since she could suffer if her colleagues and boss find out about her relationship with him and distrust her or if that even ruins her reputation, which is was already bad in her previous company because she slept with her previous boss, and above all because she will never forgive him and will hate him if the Devenementiel closes and all his friends and her loses their jobs because of Jason's actions. And having a relationship with him makes her feels more guilty for what happened, like believing she was part of his plans and she helped him in some way, and then she could believe she was nothing except another more of his conquers and everything was a lie (her ex-boyfriend trauma attacking again here), or at least she wasn't as important to him as she thought.

And perhaps, even if he tries to stop those actions, and not harm Devenementiel further so as not to make her harm her, perhaps, by then, it will be too late to stop those revenge plans...

So he will lose another person that he loves and wants in his life. The only person who accepted him and loved him exactly who he really is and who really knows him. His biggest fears making true, again.

but this is an otome game, guys, everything will be solved at the end and everybody will be happy, don't worry!

[tickldpnk8]

A Morphanna Theory

So it occurred to me as I was rereading A Game of You over the long weekend, that we might have already seen Johanna Constantine replace Thessaly in Season 1.

So bear with me while I put myself at risk of looking like this guy:

What we know

So we know a few things already given the BTS tidbits we've gotten so far.

We know that Season 2 will be significantly compressing the storyline between Season of Mists and Brief Lives. (baring something incredibly surprising such as having filmed a LOT for this season during filming for Season 1 and also filming ahead for Season 3)

A Game of You has to be either cut or significantly shortened/overhauled at this point considering the BTS shots of Wanda's character and the above outline of episode names.

We know (due to @writing-for-life's excellent analysis) that the music themes for both Morpheus and Johanna blend together well.

Pure speculation

So what struck me on this reread (and don't worry: I've got a draft started for my analysis) was just how much the interactions between Thessaly and Morpheus mirror the interactions between Johanna and Morpheus in S01E03.

First we get both women being generally unimpressed by Morpheus' ordering them about. With Johanna, it's in response to Morpheus turning up and demanding she take him to the sand.

With Thessaly, it's over him scolding her for acting rashly in taking the Moon Road to save Barbie.

This one felt more thematic to me than a direct comparison or direct quote.

Next, we get both of them lecturing Morpheus on his inaction where mortals are concerned.

(yes, I did learn how to make gifs just for this post: feel free to use) Johanna's lecture comes when Morpheus is ready to walk away after retrieving the sand...potentially leaving Rachel to her fate. Essentially blaming Johanna for leaving the sand there in the first place.

Thessaly's lecture comes as Morpheus is ready to walk away after removing the Skerry from the Dreaming. Although he hasn't stated his full intention yet, he's clear that he's not going to help them get home or get off the little bit of land that is left.

And finally, you see a bit of them both denying any interest.

(okay, so I made 2 gifs...) When Ric the Vic says that Morpheus is "not unfit", Johanna replies that he's not her man in a tone that makes it sound like she wouldn't consider it.

Meanwhile, Thessaly stews over Morpheus after he scolds her in the panels I posted above, saying that she's not buying his cool act and that he looks too skinny anyways.

So there you have it: scant evidence to be sure, but I found the 3 themes of each of them standing up to him for ordering her around, lecturing him in turn, and then also denying any attraction to be some fun parallels.

Given that we don't see much of Morpheus x Thessaly on-page, it feels like we have ample suggestions of Morpheus x Johanna in comparison. If they do go this direction, I really hope we see much more of it on screen than we did of Thessaly's blink-and-you-miss-it suggestion they were together.

[ms-scarletwings]

Irken senses, and other ponderings

You know, every time I start to wonder if I’ve finally run out of things to coherently say on the whole “speculating about irken biology” matter, a whole something more is induced to hatch out of the dehydrated floam inside my skull. Between you and me, I think the eggs are triggered by ironic timing.

Anywho, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the world hypothetically through Irken eyes, and other sensory organs. Think I’ll go down them piece by piece, and to follow the pattern I’ve kept through my other Irken brain dumps, I will be drawing a huge amount of inspiration from real life arthropods. Yes, I’m very aware that realistically, any resemblance to earth insects would be coincidental from an alien species, and there’s plenty of room to make up whatever somewhat plausible explanation you can for any faucet of their anatomy. Personally, I like to run from the convergent evolution angle, since I find it no less grounded, full of potential connections the show itself all but begs me to draw, and just plain fun. Let’s get into it.

Also like towards the end there’s a whole section on the hypothetical edibility of Irkens because why not

Prelude: If you want to hear a little more behind my theory about the Irken diet revolving around sugar and a small portion of minerals, you can zip onto this analysis I did, in which I touch on some ideas of mine regarding the composition of Irken skin, their reaction to meat, etc. that works from the assumption that Irkens evolved out of an arthropod-like ancestor. Not necessary to get the gist of this one, but it is background context behind my thought process.

Sight

The Irken oculus is perhaps the most striking feature of the species, very much resembling those tiny crawling things they have been inspired by; however, it’s tougher to say exactly how far the similarity of their insides go. The eyes of most arthropods are in fact along the more simple branches of the evolutionary tree. We know that Irkens are not likely to possess compound eyes, like those found in flies and most other insects, because compound eyes are specialized for wide FOV ranges at the sacrifice of visual resolution quality. Instead, I see a much closer match to a fascinating exception or two found in Earth’s arachnids.

While most of them have utterly piss-poor vision, the hunting styles of jumping spiders necessitated a great deal of further specialization of the organs for depth perception, color differentiation, and sharp images. These are the purpose of those two huge shiners at the front (the other 6 boosting their range for detecting blurry peripheral movement and threats), and these are what bring their effective vision on a level much closer to that of familiar binocular mammals than their own six legged prey. Now I really think we are working with the base of what Irken peepers likely developed out of. One of the ways they have really diverged off is in the fact that while jumping spiders can only move their retinas, irkens seem as though they are able to move the lens of the eye themselves- or at the very least, Zim does, else the false pupils in his disguise contacts would not behave quite so convincingly. To speak about the lenses themselves, their eyes are not dry and exposed like most arthropods, speaking to a vulnerable sensitivity. They clearly have blinking eyelids, shed tears, and Zim even complains about the “scratchy” feeling of getting used to that part of his kid disguise.

(Funny sidenote: I’m like 90% sure that Zim did not have those contact lenses designed correctly for himself. Usually, if contacts feel that uncomfortable and keep falling off of the eye as easily as his do, it’s a sign of them being poorly fitted. This could be another symptom of his outdated/lower quality invader tech.)

Not only do Irkens have an assumed base vision resolution that seems more or less on par with human beings, but Invader elites are fitted with ocular implants that grant them a significantly greater advantage in this realm. We don’t know to a certainty how well improved an Irken soldier’s vision is, but Zim was confidently able, within seconds and under pressure, to pick out the area of town he lived in from what was miles away under night hours.

On the topic of night vision, I have a hunch that even without the cybernetics, these guys are adapted to see much better than we in dim to dark environments as well. Most of the early part of their life cycle is lived out in subterranean crèches. On the surface, daytime Irk is cast in a sunset red atmosphere. Oddly, a massive portion of their fashion and architectural aesthetics show a preference for these dark, warmer tones. Ruby is far and away the most common eye color in their kind. All of these facts suggest that warm-spectrum hues and pigments were incredibly common in the homeworld’s history, to point of indicating something about a cultural attraction to them- kind of like how humans put the color blue all over so much corporate branding and elsewhere. Zim’s favorite color has also been revealed to be purple. Most of all, given what I’ve seen of Irk’s, Blorch’s, and Devastis’s surface skies, AND Zim’s reaction to staring directly at the sun for more than a few seconds, I’m assuming that most Irkens are wholly unfamiliar with living in an environment as brightly lit as midday Earth.

I do think Irken eyes “glow” in the dark, but not in the emitting sense. Just more in the reflective one. This they would owe to a well developed tapetum lucidum, as seen in cats and deer and pretty much any animal to give off an eerie eye shine under the right lighting. To point back to arachnids, wolf spiders are speedy nocturnal murder machines with highly developed tapetum lucida, in their secondary eyes, at least. What I love the most about that is it makes it very easy to tell if you’re looking at a mother spider because her babies will give off the same eyeshine if you take a pic of one with the flash on.

Additionally, I won’t forget that sleep is no longer a necessity for our alien subjects. This alone gives them a major edge over any dinural race such as humanity. While Zim has his appearances to keep up during the day, the nighttime on Earth is actually when he is allowed the most free rein to work on his endeavors uninterrupted.

Sound

Ah, so this is the part where I rattle off the common theories we’ve collectively formed about Irken antennae as the replacement for an external ear, eh? Yes, but actually no…. jokes aside, it’s just no. I’ll get to the deal with antennae, but as you might imagine, hearing ability also varies all over the place in the insect world.

It is true that antennae play a large role in the hearing of some critters, such as mosquitoes, whose males use them to pick out the high frequency wing beats of nearby females in a swarm. Crickets, on the other hand, use sensory organs on their legs tuned to much lower sound ranges. There’s no one way to evolutionarily put together a sort-of ear, as well proven by the sheer amount of times it convergently happened in bugs and in how many creative ways.

They literally be designing themselves like me playing around in spore. If we’re not talking about that mosquito or honeybee example, then what we are referring to as an ear and most hearing insects is going to be an external tympanic organ. Most people who have passed high school biology would be able to recognize a visible tympanum in frogs- that circular thing right behind the eyes in most species, and understand it as their version of an ear drum. Many bugs’ tympanums are likewise thin chitinous membranes situated… potentially just about anywhere on the body (again, see above). This is what I think Irkens use as a primary hearing organ, in his case, probably situated on their heads in addition to the feelers. The latter organs I think would also be sensitive to general vibrations and subtler environmental cues, like wind direction and pressure changes, but the bulk of their hearing would be owed to the tympanum.

As far as the quality of their hearing, well, there’s not any sign it differs much from the human experience. Like us, they communicate through verbal language, and the existence of the “Dancing Arcade Game (but for aliens)” confirms at least a similar cultural propensity for music as an entertainment form. Zim is an outlier for the fact that he seems genuinely a little hard of hearing next to his kin, screaming as naturally as he talks and repeatedly mishearing (if hearing at all) people who are speaking directly at him. It’s clear something’s up with his hearing, but there’s no clear answer what and why. At first I was tempted to suggest something about sound passing much differently through the medium of earth’s atmosphere (kind of like how noise on Mars would sound muffled to us), but neither Tak nor Skoodge seemed to pick up the problem when they arrived. It really could be as simple as some kind of birth defect, or even glitches in how his corrupted PAK is processing the inputs it receives. Like many others, I want to imagine that his wig could be interfering too, since it covers the whole top portion of his head; as well, I noticed he has more of those incidents with it on than not.

Smell

Alrighty, NOW we can round back to focusing on the antennae, because this is actually the main thing our insects fine tuned theirs for. And when I say fine tuned- I mean fine tuned. Blood suckers that find their prey through the CO2 of their breath, flies that can pick up on potential food sources from miles away; In the land of the little, scent is everything. Beyond it being their main tool for exploring the environment for what to eat and what to avoid, chemical messages are the backbone of bug-to-bug communication. Pheromones are the divining rod of lonely spiders looking for a mate. They are the bugle of yellow jackets when rallying the nest to attack a threat, and they are the signals that govern about every single action an ant takes from adulthood until death. Obviously, Irkens are much more sight & hearing dependent than these comparisons, but they still have much more bodily specialization dedicated to this sense than we can relate to. For one, they are fastidiously hygienic. Like, “the care-bots from that really creepy episode of the Buzz lightyear cartoon” hygienic. We have yet to see any livable surface of Irk that is not sky to underground terraformed over in all-consuming metal infrastructure. There’s less than no sign of visible life besides the Irkens; ffs, there’s not even soil in sight. Not on Devastis, either. The Organic Sweep sounds like such a nice and pretty euphemism in the face of the actual horror of Blorch’s fate, and all to spare the boots of their military from touching even a speck of “unsavory alien filth”. They live in such a controlled and purified environment that I can’t even imagine the absolute assault on the senses Zim’s every day on our barbaric ball of dirt is. Over and over again he gives off the impression that the constant stink of this place is in fact his chief complaint about living among us. The majority of insults he throws toward humans relate to how they smell or the fact that he finds them “filthy”. We’re flat out nasty to him and I don’t blame him. Even relative to other animals, humans are especially RANK due to the combination of sweat, oils, and bacteria that coat our skin.

And believe it or not, I do think Irkens are in a position to talk shit in this regard. Zim is a really sweaty boi; however, I posed an idea back in that write up about Irken skin before- to summarize- that his kind maintain remarkably sterile cuticles due to the presence of a toxic chemical in their skin. This, I said then, could have been the key to Zim’s lice repelling trait, but I wasn’t so specific at the time about more than that. I got the idea from a group of millipedes that, when disturbed, can secrete hydrogen cyanide as a deterrent to predators. I like to imagine that Irkens can do a similar thing via sweating, not to thermoregulate like us, but as a stress response. It would at least explain why Zim seems like a very nervous sweater. Fun fact if you didn’t know, cyanide’s smell is similar to almonds.

I’m deadass telling you I think Irkens just smell like almond extract. Do with that what you will.

Touch

So, in writing this whole whatever it be, this part was the trickiest to come up with any productive analysis on. I’ve already guessed at what I think Irken skin feels most like (spoiler: hairless caterpillars) in the analysis I referenced up top. Zim being able to pass himself off as a human under the examination of the Skool nurse points to an average body temperature somewhere around our own. What I did find interesting while rewatching the series though was the sheer amount of pain tolerance on these invaders, except in one way. Can I extrapolate this fortitude to Irkens universally? Probably not! Zim is a member of the most elite of the most highly trained members of Irk’s military. I wouldn’t take what a seasoned veteran can handle and assume that’s the human floor in a nutshell, but our invaders CAN tell us quite a bit about their ceiling… starting with the fact that these bastards are ridiculously heat resistant. Irkens are a durable race broadly, but their reactions to extreme temperatures strike me as jaw-droppingly underwhelming, if anything.

Irkens DON’T like being engulfed in flames. It’s still a painful experience to them, but seemingly the kind they can pretty much walk off as soon as it’s over. Through explosions and fire we have seen Zim (and Skoodge) survive in one piece. We’ve seen The Massive take a whole dip into a burning star with no ill effects to the crew within. Most amazing to me was the time in Battle of the Planets when Zim willingly piloted Mars into grazing by the Sun at close range while trying to evade Dib. Totally exposed driver’s seat and he was no worse for wear after this.

Further in the comics we see this touched on in the Zimvoid arc. Zib’s favorite method of torturing the Zims under his training program was to torch them at random for sadistic amusement. Quite interestingly, though, Number 2 implies that their bodies do actually adapt to this treatment over time! Theoretically, Zims further along in the program have become all but invulnerable to fire entirely.

On the other hand, one of the truly most painful things Zim has been shown to experience is to have his skin chemically burned. It’s a strange sort of irony that Earth’s water would prove to be an incapacitating force to them in place of any inferno. He’ll smash his skull into the Voot’s windshield with enough force to pop out an eyeball and it’s whatever. Plenty of other things hurt, but he can power through. You turn a shaken can of soda or a bottle of bbq sauce on him and he’s just left screaming on the ground or screaming and running away. Whatever brutal sort of training he had to go through off world, it didn’t prepare him for this.

Taste

The perceptive side of this I think may not be too hard to figure out. Irken food, as alien as its actual composition could be, has been shown to be heavily analogous to human junk food. I hesitate to call what Irkens are scarfing down “meals” in the proper sense, because I’ve noticed that neither Zim nor his kin intrinsically understand the concept. When he’s trying to blend in as a human being, he puts a LOT of bizarre effort into convincing us that he, just like you inferior creatures, TOTALLY eats “food” on a regular basis like a normal person. When Irkens eat their own products, it’s all and only “snacks”. What follows is the conclusion that their eating habits are not structured into any schedule and that Irkens instead graze throughout the day as they please- and even possibly that eating altogether is more a recreation to them, instead of a necessary function to sustain life. Some fans have speculated that the PAK could provide an Irken with all of the necessary energy to survive absent of nutrition. I kind of want to contest this, given that caloric energy is only one purpose of taking in food… but it’s definitely the most immediate one. Nonetheless, they still eat constantly on screen and it all has to be going somewhere. Whether they need it or not, they still readily digest snacks (and presumably use those chemical building blocks to regenerate tissue damage) with a terrifying metabolic efficiency. Assuming that the resemblance of their snack foods and our leisure treats are not purely coincidental, one gathers that sweetness is the largest dimension of Irken cuisine. They are drawn most enthusiastically to carb-dense synthetic, plant, and possibly fungal matter in the same way that the human brain lights up at the prospect of fat and sugar-loaded meals. The flexible tongues of Irkens to me also resemble the nectar catching, segmented mouthparts of some bees. I would be willing to bet that they can taste salt, but jury’s out if it is something they crave, like us, or are repulsed by, like ants. That would have to come down to the scarcity (or not) of the resource on their home planet and whether or not desiccation was a serious threat in their natural history. In other regards, Zim shows strong negative reactions to most Earth foods, if not physically, than in his expressions. They definitely have powerful vulnerabilities to many human ingredients, and so are very sensitive to the presence of these toxins. I can’t imagine acidic or bitter substances are at all pleasant to them.

Now comes the much more interesting question I’ve thought way too long and hard about in the shower a time or two. Knowing that Irkens are likely a herbivorous breed, ergo, thankfully would have no interest in the consumption of the human race… what about the vise versa??? I don’t just want to know what they taste, but what would they taste like?

So, you’ve decided to mix it up for the thanksgiving dinner and forgo the same boring old bird for an Irken you have vanquished (via what I can only imagine was a freaking miracle of luck). What should you come to expect? Most importantly and I must emphasize this, the secret to preparing their meat is the same as Tolkien dwarves, you have to skin them before anything else. The separation of edible tissues from the cuticle is necessary to avoid ingesting the defensive toxins it contains. Even if the concentration is not enough to provide a danger to you, it could end up contributing an unpleasant, bitter flavor to the final product.

That done, discard the head and digestive organs. True as it may be that Irkens are wholly free of parasites, with a chance that the viscera could be edible, it’s not likely to taste that great and besides, do you really want to take chances with exposing yourself to an entirely foreign gut biome you have no immune adaptations to? And don’t even think about the brain- I don’t care how rare the infection rates are, alien prions are a big no. If you happen to run into any cybernetic implants during the cleaning, however, set them aside! They could be worth a small fortune in the right circles. But, for the purpose of eating we’re really concerned with the muscle tissues, a delicate white meat with a texture similar to fresh crab. The bones need not be wasted, and are fine to leave in, or can be boiled on their own to make a flavorful stock which can be added to soups or a delightful gravy. A surprisingly practical use of Irken bone could also be in the compost bin, being rich in chitosan and other powerful garden fertilizers. The flesh can do well fried, or roasted to a crispy exterior. The oven rule is the same as chicken, low and slow, to prevent drying out. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the gravy idea or marinades. The flavor profile of the meat itself would be utterly unique from what most of us are used to, comparable to a nutty crayfish. Savory, a bit of a sweetness, and a mineral hint that pairs quite well with mushrooms or rice.

I can’t recommend serving this to any guests with shellfish allergies in good conscience. If they insist, do so in caution and with knowledge of the risk of cross reactivity.

And there you have …. certainly a thing I did write and queue up for y’all!

[thedaythatwas]

TW: Hegel.

So, what’s up with Shuake and dialectics? Click below to watch this user (who is not a philosopher) give this (frankly too invested) analysis a shot!

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the fact that most– but not all– of Joker’s confidant routes involve some sort of transaction. Joker does something for someone, Joker gets a favor in return. Joker’s identity revolves around what he can do for others. He’s got a different mask (haha game mechanic is narrative device etc.) for everyone in his life. 

Getting a little bit in my head about this led me to a (not-all-that-novel) realization: Akechi’s confidant route is largely non-transactional. Sure, he says that he wants to meet with you to talk about the Phantom Thieves, but that more or less directly translates to just wanting to hang out with you. The “favor” that you're doing for Akechi, if we follow the logic of some of the other confidant routes, is spending time with him. (Which is of course also about getting close to Joker for metaverse recon purposes… But I’d argue that amounts to more or less the same thing in the long run anyway). Really, that’s what your relationship with him is, up until you realize the heart he needs you to change is actually one of the big-bads of the game. And at that point… Well… 

Where am I going with this? I’ve also been thinking a lot about Hegel (I’ve seen some really fun posting about Akechi and Hegel on here this past week– thank you philosophy P5R tumblr!). Akechi’s paraphrasing of Hegel goes a little something like “advancement cannot occur without both thesis and antithesis.” Hilariously, this is how he frames his desire to talk to you more, his flirting is just like me forreal I understand him etc. etc. BUT! The interesting thing here is that the game is cueing you to view your relationship with Akechi through the lens of Hegel’s dialectics.

More on that to follow, but first, I want to plug the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on Hegel’s Dialectics here– If you haven’t used it before, SEP is a reliable, peer-reviewed source. It’s great. I use it like. All the time. It’s good for getting the gist of big ideas when you don’t have time to read full texts. (Also if I get any of this wrong please know that philosophy is not my field and I’m totally open to constructive criticism.)

Hegel’s dialectical process revolves around three key moments: the moment of understanding, the dialectical moment, and the speculative moment. These moments can also be referred to as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The moment of understanding, thesis, is the point at which an idea is seemingly stable. In the dialectical moment, antithesis, this idea “sublates” itself– the idea is challenged and destabilized because an inherent contradiction in the idea has been made apparent–importantly, part of the idea is preserved. The speculative moment, synthesis, negates the contradiction. A new idea takes form, containing elements of the original idea that was sublated (Marx’s theory of history, anyone?) 

This process continues on and on. Ideas naturally reveal their contradictions, are destabilized, and resolve their contradictions through the creation of a new idea, which is challenged again. This is because the dialectical moment does not come from outside an idea. Antithesis is not an external push against thesis, but rather, the moment when thesis is forced into instability because of its own tightly-bound restriction. 

So back to what I was saying. The game kicks off your relationship with Akechi with a nod to, uh, all of that. Could this be a throwaway comment? Of course! But it’s much more fun to work under the assumption that it isn’t. So bear with me. Akechi is framing himself and Joker as thesis and antithesis. What does that mean? Why do I think it has something to do with Akechi and Joker’s relationship being non-transactional?

Previously, I’ve thought that in the context of their relationship, Akechi represented thesis, and Joker antithesis. This isn’t exactly true (at least per the criteria above) but I do think I was on the right track. 

At the beginning of his story, we can think of Akechi’s worldview as thesis. The world is a stage, and he is a performer. His entire life is dedicated to destroying Shido. It’s a key narrative element of P5 that Akechi doesn’t have confidant relationships (as contrasted by Joker, who has many confidants and becomes stronger through building up those bonds). He views himself as deceiving literally everyone in his life for his goals– his “fans,” his father, the Phantom Thieves. He doesn’t trust, because to him, trust is failure. 

Still, he’s starving for approval, and not just from Shido. You can see the inherent conflict between his desires and beliefs in just about every interaction he has with Joker, particularly those where Akechi overshares about his past. He desperately wants someone to hear him. I don’t think his (primary) aim in that was to strategically win Joker’s trust by showing vulnerability– if that was all he was going for, I doubt Akechi would have been so honest. He omitted information, sure, but he gave Joker the honest-to-god broad strokes of his childhood.  

When Joker comes into his life, Akechi comes to realize that his stable worldview might be wrong. Watching Joker and the rest of the Phantom Thieves reveals the cracks in his own internal logic. Joker has friendships and he is stronger because of them. When Akechi sacrifices himself for the Phantom Thieves on Shido’s ship, we see his moment of synthesis. If Akechi really still internalized all of what he said in his “Teammates? Friends? To hell with that!” monologue, he wouldn’t trust Joker to change Shido’s heart in his stead. To be clear– he probably would have reached this point with or without Joker’s intervention. Joker just happens to push Akechi towards self-sublation a little bit faster.

In Royal, we see a new iteration of Akechi. He doesn’t really regret his actions, and he is still very distinctly Akechi, but we can see that his original perception of the world has made a shift. He is willing to team up with Joker. While he may not place a great deal of faith in all of the PTs, he certainly has real trust in the protagonist. He’s learned that he can be recognized (dare I say loved?) without being perfect, and accordingly, his driving desire for approval has been displaced by his desire to never be so completely under anyone else’s control again.

But ok— that’s kind of an old take. Perhaps a hotter one: I’d also like to propose that Akechi does the same for Joker. 

As mentioned above, Joker’s identity for most of the game is defined by what he can do for the people around him. While a large part of this has to do with the fact that he is a playable character, this is a game, and a game needs to have things for you to do– it wouldn’t be very fun otherwise– it also seems pretty clear that this is part of his characterization. Joker is selfless to a fault. Like Akechi, he is a wildcard who can take on multiple personas. Unlike Akechi, instead of having a handful of personas directly linked to the core of his character development, Joker has as many personas as you want him to. He literally has a mask for every situation. You can equip a persona of the correct arcana to level up your relationships faster– a game mechanic, but also, an interesting meta statement about how Joker bonds with his confidants.

In Royal, however, Joker has the option to do something for himself. His greatest wish isn’t for someone else's happiness– it’s to have Akechi back, for selfish reasons, I would argue. Joker can sacrifice reality to keep him in his life, and depending on the actions you choose to take, sometimes, he does.

Loving Akechi teaches Joker to be selfish. This is especially poignant when you think of how adamantly opposed Akechi is to staying in Maruki's reality. Giving up the true reality to keep Akechi is a wholly selfish act on Joker's part, nothing altruistic about it. And if he doesn't make that choice? Well, don't forget about how Joker spent his wish.

He would have learned how to do this without Akechi– one tends to realize that neverending self-sacrifice is unsustainable sooner rather than later. Again, Akechi just pushes Joker towards effecting that self-sublation a little faster.

By spending time with Joker, Akechi learns that there are people he can truly trust. By spending time with Akechi, Joker learns how to put himself first. Their confidant relationship from this perspective is not only transactional, it’s actually one of the most transactional relationships in the game. Joker actively impacts how Akechi sees himself and the world around him, and vice versa. Their relationship is profoundly transformative for the both of them. To paraphrase Akechi, advancement cannot occur without both thesis and antithesis.

But also, we can forget dialectics for a second. Even without a fun analytical lens, Akechi’s confidant route centers two misunderstood people who find understanding in each other. That’s enough for me!

[lynnbecks-gaming-sideblog]

Three ENA Dream BBQ theories/speculations(?)/whatever with varying levels of actual grounding in stuff from both the game and the series.

Also, since I will be bringing up the webseries, I will be differentiating between the two ENAs by referring to the DBBQ version as "ƎNA", since that's how she's referred to a few times in-game (and also. In the title).

All dialogue in the screenshots is duplicated in the alt text.

1 - the identity of the clown from the trailers, Steam icon, desktop icon and probably some other places.

Ok so you've probably seen. This fucker:

He's all over the game's marketing and other peripheral media, appearing in the Steam "recently played" art (pictured above), the game's desktop icon, and at the end of the announcement trailer. But to my knowledge, he doesn't currently have a canon name, and no-one knows what their deal is...

... or maybe we do? Because there's another character who's in the opposite situation; Piero the Genie. Who has a name (which is important to my point), a defined role (genie of the Crowd Door), and even a vague outline of his personality (having "deviant tastes").

I think the clown and Piero are the same person.

And this isn't just a vague slotting together of puzzle-pieces; there's some more evidence there. If you decide to talk to the Receptionist after the first conversation, you can ask her about the other Doors. This is what she has to say about the Crowd Door:

Kinda evokes the idea of, like. Carnival games, right? Or a gameshow, but that doesn't really fit with my point.

However, this isn't my only point. Because his name. Ohhhhhh his name...

And, if we assume that the number of spikes on the Doors' rings correspond to the order that ƎNA will visit them, then this is the second one, so we'll find out soon.

And on the topic of the Crowd Door...

2 - I think we're going to (at least temporarily) play as someone else in a future chapter.

You notice the "No ƎNA" tape and signs around the Crowd Door, and how, in her dialogue about the Crowd Door, she says that ƎNA isn't allowed in?

And how the Receptionist won't allow ƎNA to go through the big doors on the opposite end of the room?

Yeah I think we're going to, briefly, play as someone else (probably Froggy or Coral Glasses, though Dratula would be fun too) in order to access the Crowd Door, and/or open the big doors. Maybe one of the characters will have to smuggle ƎNA into the Crowd Door, and then end up getting trapped there or something, which will tie into that chapter's endings.

3 - a theory about where "human"!ƎNA's stomach hole might have come from.

This is getting into, like, wild speculation with next-to-no basis in the game itself, but; you know how ƎNA seemingly has war-related trauma? And how the second trailer (that I've seen basically no-one talk about despite seemingly showing potential future chapters and a being which might be The Boss; if anyone's interested I might do a more detailed analysis because there's some other neat stuff in there, including what I believe might be the Vivarium's genie) includes a lot of weapon-related imagery (e.g the silhouette of ƎNA's arm reaching for a barbeque fork which transforms into a revolver, and also a part that includes gameplay footage of her walking in an unknown area while holding a gun)?

Yeah. I think she died in a war. Maybe ƎNA was originally a human, and she got turned into an ENA to save her life, and ended up resembling her original self; this kinda tracks with how the dead ENAs shown in Temptation Stairway all use the webseries design, implying that all ENAs have the webseries design (assuming there are multiple ENAs and the references to other ones aren't timeloop stuff).

(Also, if this area looks familiar to you and you haven't watched the ENA webseries yet, that's because it also appears in the game's ending cutscene, but with all the ENAs replaced by mannequins, which kinda tracks with how the dead ENAs in the episode flicker between their normal appearance and those of the mannequins that appear in the rest of the video, which go on to appear in DBBQ.)

(Also uhhh. Watch the ENA webseries if you haven't yet, it's really good and DBBQ has a lot of neat call-backs to it.)

[bestworstcase]

Always wild to me when people come up with nonsense shipping theories like that because I always consider shipping and canon analysis separate fun things.

Like, I'm a Spicecream aficionado, I enjoy Spicecream like one enjoys airs, but lol @ it being canon at all and if I was doing any major analysis of Cinder or Neo (I have) I wouldn't include or consider that besides via quick infrequent jokes. To me, stuff not being explicitly canon can be part of the fun bc then you can be like "well posit that these feelings do exist, how and where do we go from there", and have fun with scenarios spun off of that and I think it's good to separate that from actual show predictions and theory. I'm not coming up with any conspiracies on how Cinder's future arc will totally involve Neo or anything (though maybe not the perfect comparison bc i think even in the world where they made out on that airship Cinder tossing her into an infinite abyss anyway is perfectly in-character and fine but thats a tangent).

yeah that’s where i’m at, more or less. with the added factor of just not really being a shipper – much as i enjoy the way rwby handles romance and like the canonical pairings the only one i’m #invested in is ozlem (and cinwin if that actually pans out, which would be hysterical), and then non-canon pairings i remotely find interesting i can count on one hand brgdvfkd (<- like… summer/salem, summer/glynda, both conditional on whether the general thrust of my speculation wrt summer being closely on target because it’s the Genuine ideological conviction and commitment to salem’s side that makes both of those interesting; and cinwin which has enough plausibility at this point to have me going “ok but is it really non-canon”)

basically there’s got to be some real thematic meat on the bones for me to care about a ship whatsoever and it has to be a kind of meat that i like, which… is a high bar. so. lmao. it does have the advantage of making it easier to keep shipping separate from analysis when you’re not keen on shipping anyway hrgjgs

but yeah sometimes i look at other theories and go oh man. just write fanfic about it you’ll be so much happier. lol

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

Feel free to not publish this if you don't want the discourse on your blog because I got saltier than I intended but. I personally didn't love the Leslie book. I am uncomfortable with some of his conjecture. I also think he's wrong or overconfident about some stuff in a fairly morally neutral way. That being said, as a queer person some of the criticism I've been seeing has me asking- do we collectively expect good bisexual representation from John Lennon? If John Lennon either had a one sided crush on Paul or believed he had a one sided crush on Paul do we think he would have handled that with grace and maturity? Do we think that hypothetical John navigating his own internalized homophobia, his fear of rejection and abandonment, and the genuine pain of unrequited romantic affection is going to have a thought process that brings honour and glory to the LGBTQ community? Do we think he'd be better at being in love with a man than he was at being in love with women? Unrequited romantic feelings for someone you actually love do not feel great even to the most secure and stable of people! I really don't think we're getting out of this hypothetical without something problematique going down.

Hi, you seem to have sent me two similar asks (I'm assuming because tumblr glitched and you thought the first one got lost), so I'm just going to tack on the bits from the first ask that aren't mentioned here:

"…his apparent belief that he and Paul are psychically linked…" "…His literal wife who loves him and is on his side did say on the record to a biographer that she thought he was disproportionately angry and she thought romantic feelings might have explained it I really don't think we can pin this one entirely on Leslie."

On the whole, I think you're right. As I've said before, I think John was a tragic figure however you cut it. And yes, Yoko is the true originator of this claim. And I personally think it's cope to obfuscate that fact by instead focusing on it being in a book by Philip Norman. Unrelated, but I actually think Norman kind of doesn't actually buy into the non-reciprocation thing, but that's a whole other can of worms.

Also, I feel like you've put a lot of my thoughts into words with "Do we think he'd be better at being in love with a man than he was at being in love with women?"

I sometimes feel like there's an underlying assumption that if John had a fully acknowledged longterm relationship with a man (so, not what most True McLennoners seem to think he had going on with Paul), it would have definitely been healthy. Whenever someone asserts the John Kinsey 6 theory, it feels to me like they're operating under that assumption.

Some more general A Love Story in Songs thoughts below the cut:

I have a lot of thoughts on the bits of the book I've seen and the reaction those bits have garnered.

Most of them boil down to the fact that I never expected that much from a song-focused pop history book in the first place. Like, not to be all "I told you so", but I have always maintained that this type of analysis, while fun, is treacherous when it comes to getting to the truth, so I went into this expecting a fair amount of cut corners and reductiveness. It's almost necessary to write a digestible book with this structure, and this is clearly not trying to be another Tune In. Is that a good thing? Maybe not, but it's the world we live in.

I also think the type of analytical conjecture Leslie employs is definitely not unique to him, and more endemic to Beatles literature as a whole. I read Love and Let Die by John Higgs recently, which is a very cool book tracing the history of the Beatles and James Bond. It also more or less asserted that "I'm So Tired" is about Paul.*

I actually think what's interesting about the "Look At Me" chapter, is that it is actually quite careful in its wording regarding speculation about non-platonic feelings from John's side, but, conversely, very confident about Something™ happening in India.

“Perhaps John was queer, in the modern sense: fluid in his preferences, and more so than Paul. He seemed to dream of an all-consuming relationship that wrapped music and sex and love into one. Whether or not this is so, what matters is that John felt rejected and abandoned by Paul after Rishikesh. The wounding probably took place inside his head, but that, of course, doesn’t make the pain any less real. In fact, knowing that it was inside his head may have made it worse.�� (bolding and italics mine)

To me, it seems more like authors are incredibly comfortable providing vibes-based hot takes on these men's thought processes, but the taboo of queer speculation gives them some pause. Going back to Love and Let Die, in a podcast interview John Higgs gave, he mentioned how he had thought to include John's sexuality struggles in his book (it deals a lot with the evolving concept of masculinity, so it would have fit very well) but ultimately left it out (he did not, to my knowledge, elaborate on why). It's to me undeniable that this topic gets handled with kid gloves meanwhile other assertions tend to get a free pass in this type of book and the "Look At Me" chapter demonstrates this pretty well.

I saw some people felt this chapter was boiling down John and Paul's conflict to only unrequited feelings. I suppose that's what the chapter is doing but I'd need to look at the whole book to decide if that's Leslie's entire thesis. And if it is, I would repeat: I don't know what was to be expected from a book that is using songs to tell the story of John and Paul's relationship.

After getting this ask, I did also check the prologue and first chapter to get a better feel for the book. And while I would have appreciated a more matter-of-fact introduction, clearly stating intentions and limits of this analysis, it became very clear to me that we, tumblr, are simply not the target audience of this book – it's for people who think of John and Paul as principally coworkers-turned-rivals.

It's the reevaluation of JohnandPaul that Get Back triggered in book form. Nothing more, nothing less.

*I went back to this passage and Higgs does actually hedge his statement a little:

“Curiously, these songs do not seem to be about his own marriage or relationship with Cynthia, for all that he would abandon his wife and child after returning from Rishikesh. Many Beatles aficionados suspect that he is depicting his relationship with McCartney.”

However, it is striking to me that he doesn't feel the need to elaborate on this argument, which is why it still feels like he's strongly suggesting the Paul-reading to be the correct one.

[artimeanatheart]

Aaron Character Analysis-Quests Book Five Part Three

Part of what's so much fun about Quests is that it opens a lot of room for speculation and theories. And one of those areas is Nadia Stowe. I originally planned for this to be a kind of addendum at the end of the last part, but then I started typing and discovered that I had a lot more to say about Nadia than I thought I did.

We'll Never Know Nadia Stowe

"She [Frieda] narrowed her eyes. 'Nadia Stowe was not the quiet, demure Necessary she appeared to be.'"

Nadia Stowe is a surprisingly nuanced character for having been dead for over a decade and getting next to no characterization while she was alive. We see little snippets of who she was when she was young from the POV of those who knew her. She's a princess who grew up in a country on the edge of boiling over. She's a girl who was betrayed by her friends, who were forced to turn her over to pirates but she never knew that. She's a captive who was trafficked to the Seven Islands and took her chances in Quill rather than allowing the pirates to enslave her. She's a mage with magic she used in secret, even knowing it could get her killed.

"'She was a pirate who snuck into our world.'"

She also knows that Quill is lying to her. She knows it's an island, she knows that none of the other lands care about it. But is Justine really so wrong? The outside world is dangerous. You can't trust anyone. Give people the benefit of the doubt and they'll take over your kingdom and enslave your family. No, freedom and magic are dangerous. Complete oppression is better. Safer. As long as she plays by the rules and forgets where she came from she'll survive. It's tragic, but it would make complete sense that she bought into Quill's teachings, considering everything she'd been through.

"And it was all Nadia's fault. Later, Frieda often imagined Nadia's reaction to Frieda being called Unwanted. She knew the pirate must have been smug."

She manages to become a Necessary while Frieda is made Unwanted. We only get Frieda's, very biased, perspective on this. She thinks Nadia would have been smug. She might have been, and she might not have been. We have nothing to push us to believe one or the other. By the time we meet her, anything expressive about her has been beaten out of her by her experiences as a child and a life-lived in Quill. She shows no emotion as she sends one of her sons to his death. And to the other son she offers the advice that has gotten her through life: just forget about it. Forget about the world outside the walls, about magic, about the joy of expressing yourself, about the people you thought you loved.

"The girl had been performing actual creative acts in plain sight, and she'd gotten away with it."

In her scene in book one, Nadia comes across as cruelly practical. She wants to reuse 'the Unwanted boy's' clothes and shoes. She understands what has to be done to survive. She won't mourn the son she let get chained and carted off to what she thinks will be a gruesome death. He dug his own grave with a stick in the dirt. Did she watch Alex be dragged off in chains and remember the time when something similar happened to her? Was she grateful that at least his death would be fast? That he wouldn't have to go through the prolonged pain that she did? Did she think being killed quickly was a mercy? We'll never know.

"At the Purge, Nadia was declared a Necessary. And Frieda was named Unwanted."

To her Wanted son, she comes across as afraid. She's keenly aware of his status, that he outranks her in this world. She has to be cautious, watch what she says. Which is really nothing new for her. But there's also a hint of fear for him. He's supposed to have made it through the hard part, with his future guaranteed. He's not supposed to be missing his brother. That could get him in trouble. Caring about others only hurts. Nadia knows that all too well. Did she look at Aaron and see her younger self reflected back at her? Did she see him as scared and lost and lonely, like she was? Did she try to help him avoid the pain she knew? Teach him to wall off his heart and not let anyone see him? We'll never know.

"A few years later, when Nadia had died saving Thisbe and Fifer, Frieda felt a tiny bit of satisfaction. But over time, Nadia was considered some sort of hero."

All we'll know is that, when the wall was coming down on top of her, she protected her daughters as best she could. With that in mind, I suppose it makes sense that she would have tried to protect her sons as best as she knew how. She gave Alex the mercy of a quick death instead of an existence in a world that he would never thrive in. She gave Aaron the tools he needed to claw his way to the top in a world he didn't belong in. She tried to give them what she thought was best for them. She was wrong, but she tried.

"Fifer, who wore her hair long, especially resembled Frieda's old neighbor who had come so abruptly and suspiciously to Quill from a pirate ship."

Most of this is speculation. Unlike with most of the other characters in the series, we never truly get in Nadia's head. The closest we get are the flashes Thisbe sees with the ancestor broth, but even those she's seeing from the outside. Nadia is the absent referent in her own story, the character who set off everything and haunts the narrative but has no say in how it gets told. The only way we can get to know Nadia is through the people who knew her in life and the stories they tell about her. Fifer and Thisbe don't remember her, but they think of her fondly. She saved their lives, after all. Alex had no love for the mother who didn't love him enough to save his life. I wonder if that would have changed if he had lived long enough to learn about her childhood. Aaron remembers the distant mother, the mother who was perfectly average by Quill standards, the mother he mourned when he learned that she died. Frieda remembers the frightening outsider who got her sent to her death. Maiven remembers the spunky little girl, her daughter, who was torn out of her arms. They all remember someone slightly different, so it's hard to piece together who Nadia Stowe actually was.

"Nadia didn't belong there. Frieda had known it from the start when she'd witnessed Nadia speaking to birds in the farm area of Quill."

I wonder if, when Maiven meets Aaron, she sees pieces of Nadia in him. Sure, Fifer and Thisbe are almost the spitting image of their mother. But personality-wise? I wonder if Maiven watches Aaron gently pet a screaming puma and remembers the way her daughter used to coerce birds into her hands. If she sees Aaron's strategical mind in action and is reminded of preparing Nadia to rule a country. If she sees his loneliness and imagines how Nadia must have felt in a country far from home, filled with strangers. If she wishes she could have seen her daughter grow up but is grateful for the pieces of Nadia she finds in Aaron. He's the only person left who knew her, even though he, too, was just a child when Nadia died.

Aaron would have every right to be angry at Nadia. She may have been traumatized and had her reasons for acting the way she did, but she was still a neglectful mother who abandoned one son to death and encouraged the other to destroy himself to fit in. Except he's not. When he thinks of her, he wishes he hadn't been so distracted by his own goals and gotten to know her better. He thinks she would hate him for sending Mr. Stowe to the ancients sector, albeit temporarily. He feels guilty for her death, because the wall that crushed her was coming down on his orders. She never had the chance to get out of Quill, like he did. She never had anyone show her that self-expression and kindness make the world a better place. She never had anyone who cared enough to help her through her pain and trauma. Why did he get a second chance, but his mother didn't?

"'I still can't believe our grandmother is a queen. Did I tell you Aaron flipped out when I introduced him to her?' 'You told me. They have lunch together every day now,' said Thisbe. 'It's very cute.' 'I love that. I can see them getting along really well.'"

It's such a shame that we barely see any of Aaron and Maiven's interactions on page. There's so much to explore with them, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with Nadia.

Instead, that's all left up to our imagination.

[thewertsearch]

Asks Comp 4/8

The thing is, Davesprite's situation is more complicated than an unfulfilled time loop. His timeline isn't an irrelevant offshoot - in fact, it's integral to the existence of the Alpha Timeline, and presumably always was. Davesprite forms part of a weird, fully intact time loop which spans multiple timelines.

And since this is a future Dave, you have to assume he knows about Bro. The two clearly had a complicated relationship, but he's surely shaken by his death - if nothing else, it's a sign of how serious things have become.

That'll be a fun thing to check out when I've finished the comic! It reminds me of those Hunger Games simulators that were doing the rounds a couple of years ago.

That's true. Dave knows how strong the Underlings have become - and yet, he's still confident that Jade can stand up to them. Presumably she finds some sort of workaround for their First Guardian powers?

Sunslammer is so good! A standout song, even in a comic with as many bangers as this one.

Honestly, part of why I'm dragging my feet on the album reviews is because I want to hear these songs for the first time in context. If I'd heard Descend before watching Descend, I feel like it would have robbed the song of some of its dramatic weight.

I assumed it was just because witches are associated with frogs.

That would have explained why they're part of her Land, but I'm pretty sure that Kanaya's glitched planet was also a frog Land, and she's not a Witch, so...?

*The rest of Sal's response has been redacted, lest we fall once more into the Frog Theory Black Hole.*

I'm pretty sure that's a statue of Echidna, the mother of monsters and Jade's Denizen. Dave's probably close to LOFAF's Palace!

The Seer sees all - and sometimes, she understands the implications before we do.

It'd certainly be interesting. I just reread that conversation, and the biggest takeaway would have been that the kids were going to befriend the trolls, and get involved in their personal drama. This would certainly be consistent with the tone established by an Act 1 Hivebent!

Yup. Vriska was only able to 'create' Perfect Jack because Becquerel didn't object.

Really, he could have prototyped anything he liked, no matter what Vriska did. Even if she tried to shut the Entry down by incapacitating Jade, he could simply have activated the piñata himself.

I mean, that's basically what happened!

If any Aspect is geared around survival, then it's Feferi's. There's no breath left in her body, but our girl is still in the game!

Getting back to the trolls will be interesting, especially since - I assume - we'll be zipping back to when Feferi was still alive. The Veil is a much less friendly place, now - but does Feferi know this? What, exactly, is about to happen to the trolls?

I suppose. I guess there's no reason for every Carapacian to be created with knowledge of the Rings.

Actually, Sburb might not want them to know - Jack's probably not the only one who wouldn't respect the Ring's rules. There could be potential ringwielders out there who are far more dangerous.

Thank you! I feel like I've been doing a lot more character analysis in Act 5 versus previous Acts, where most of my speculation was about the lore. It's a fun change of pace.

Damn, I didn't think we'd actually be explaining these!

It's moments like these which really enhance the comic for me - justifications for things that I genuinely thought were just nitpicks on my part. It's really gratifying, honestly.

@thelegendofgreg asked: Here's some commentary from the jade enter flash, theres uh. alot to read but its all neat stuff "I talked about this way back, maybe even in an earlier book? Well, here I go again, so hold on to your ass. There are four entry items: Apple of knowledge, Bottle of wine, Crow's egg, Dog piñata. A, B, C, D. All of them are related to new life or new beginnings. You bite the apple, you fall from grace, enter a new world, begin this wild journey. You smash a bottle to christen a ship. An egg hatches, creating new life. You break a piöata to celebrate a birthday. Each involves breaking or puncturing something. Each involves a form of sustenance, or something to consume (piñatas have candy inside). Two are vessels for the substance (bottle, Piñata), two are the food items themselves (apple, egg), and one arguably counts as both (egg). Two of them drop from the same basic tree template (apple, piñata). They ramp up in complexity. John's is a simple test: bite the forbidden fruit. Not much to it. A single unit of departure, almost conceptually elemental, like an apple, as Rose goes on about later. The challenges get trickier. Rose has to break a bottle. Easy enough idea, but things go wrong, and she has to take a blind leap to get it done. A sacrificial gesture, and one of faith in a friend (Jaspers). Dave's is even more obscure. A simple test of patience, but one that's not clear. He isn't told what to do and just has to wait. Non-action is the key, and in a way it's another gesture of faith under dire circumstances. Finally, Jade's challenge incorporates a lot of these elements. It's another "blind faith" situation. She has to take a shot in the dark. There's a sacrificial gesture, but instead of risking herself (like Rose), Jade must symbolically sacrifice her friend via effigy and cannot complete the sacrifice without help from that friend. (Bec must redirect the bullet. There's no way this works if he doesn't.) It is also a signifier that the pet she knew as a friend her whole life is about to, in a way, become her enemy. Like a good dog gone bad, who now must be put down."

So they are all intended to be foodstuffs! And, apparently, alphabetical - although I think 'Crow's egg' is a bit of a stretch.

There are also themes of sacrifice and faith that I didn't really think about before. Choosing to enter Sburb at all, knowing the stakes, is absolutely a leap of faith - and it's a game which sacrifices your whole planet. Skaia's been telling us the score this whole time.

Homestuck absolutely deals with dark themes - but they start out buried under the surface, and even now, are still in the process of revealing themselves. This makes sense for Homestuck, a coming-of-age-story whose protagonists are slowly coming to terms with some dark truths about their lives.

Awful Hospital, however, immediately says: here's our protagonist. Her baby is dying. She just woke in a strange room. She doesn't know how she got here. Her baby has been stolen. There are monsters inside her brain. By the way, here's a quip, because this is actually a funny comic. It just felt... dissonant, and not in a fun way. I don't really know what it's going for, tonally.

Don't take this as a negative review, though! I only read a couple dozen pages, so I'm really not qualified to rate the comic - I just wasn't feeling it at the time, so I shelved it. I enjoy a lot of Bogleech's writing, and Awful Hospital's lore sounds pretty interesting, so I'll probably give it another shot at some point.

Not for the most part! I'm super into time travel stories, though, so I'm well-Primed to understand their intricacies.

So there might be intermittent stages between the four we've seen in the kids' session? That'd be interesting - I'd love to see the intermediary stage between John's 2D chessboard and Rose's 3D cube.

There are, at this point, too many awesome songs for me to pick favorites. Umbral Ultimatum and Sunslammer are excellent, but what songs aren't, at this point?

I can't imagine what we're in for when we reach the Act 5.2 finale...

Ooh, interesting. Considering how many accidental references Hussie seems to make, it's honestly up in the air whether that was intentional.

That said....

Jack is looking awfully divine these days.

I suppose Tavros has probably logged the most rocket-hours, yeah.

I'm sure all Breath Players probably learn to fly, unless there are some oddball classes which don't let you interact with your Aspect.

Anonymous asked: forwarding this message to you from someone who doesn't have a tumblr account. ~DJ "Important fact. Dave and Aradia both use musical instruments for time travel, but different ones. Aradia’s is a music box, it has a single prerecorded music, the only way to “play” it is to turn it so it plays the music that was always in it. Dave’s is turntables. They contain a preexisting music, but what you do with them is to jump, cut and shuffle this music, creating something new, having full control of it. - RM"

I like it! As Time Players, they both follow the set path of the Alpha Timeline - but Dave gets a little funky with it, multiplying himself with a complex series of time loops.

Aradia, ever the fatalist, instead turns to doomed clones for reinforcements. I don't think we've ever seen her make a stable loop.