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milehighmegs · 5 days

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Good Omens Playlists

So I've seen some pretty wonderful Good Omens playlists on Pinterest, most of which are based on music in the show (especially Queen, natch), songs that say how Zira & Crowley feel about one another or describe them as characters.

In the wake (double meaning totally intended) of S2, I wondered: how do they feel about each other NOW? We've all been there. The sad love songs, the sleeping all day, entire pints of ice cream while watching romcoms... but mostly the recounting of how it all could've gone so wrong, what we wished we'd said & done, and what we wish we could say now.

Since Zira & Crowley definitely have communication issues (Nina & Maggie were SPOT ON in their convo with Crowley), I imagine they would have an easier time telling each other their feelings through other means. I'll admit, there's a bias here: this is what I would do, so of course I project onto these characters. But isn't that the beauty of fan art? We put ourselves into the work/live vicariously through them because we have such a damned hard time saying want we want & need and how we feel in plain language? Mostly because such complex feelings are REALLY REALLY hard to explain to ourselves, let alone to another person. But art- writing, music, imagery- can say what we struggle to put into more direct words. Music is an enormous part of who I am, so I often find that the songs of others say perfectly what I feel I never could.

On that note (pun only slightly intended), I've created 3 playlists: one for Crowley, one for Zira, and one for the both of them. The individual playlists are meant to reflect the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. There are elements of other stages within the songs meant to correspond to a particular stage, even coming full circle (it seems like acceptance, but there's a hint of denial in there, etc.). The joint playlist is of songs I imagine would make the memories of each other start to creep in (or totally gobsmack them in the feels) when they hear them, or things they wished they'd said/want to say to each other.

So without further ado, here are the playlists:

Crowley's Heartbroken Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6LyYnip9XuZqcRIEsiDSwz

Zira's Heartbroken Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3YUi13sTfPSR99R1dB2XVY

AziraCrow's Heartbroken Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/48NpfV42Y8LTVSFsui8zl2

For those of you who don't have Spotify, here's what's on the playlists:

Crowley 'Never Tear Us Apart' - INXS 'Bad Romance' - Lady Gaga 'Love Don't Live Here Anymore' - Madonna 'Cosmic Love' - Florence + the Machine 'As It Was' - Hozier 'I Found' - Amber Run 'Wicked Game' - Chris Isaac 'Dancing On My Own' - Calum Scott 'Halo' - Depeche Mode 'Falling' - The Civil Wars

Zira 'i love you' - Billie Eilish 'And I Am Telling You' - Jennifer Hudson 'You'll See' - Madonna 'Somebody That I Used To Know' - Gotye 'Someone Like You' - Adele 'Boys Don't Cry' - The Cure 'Un-break My Heart' - Toni Braxton 'For No One' - The Beatles 'Comfort' - Julia Jacklin 'I Will Always Love You' - Whitney Houston

AziraCrow 'I Have Nothing' - Whitney Houston 'Nothing Compares 2 U' - Sinead O'Connor 'Torn' - Natalie Imbruglia 'Hopelessly Devoted to You' - Olivia Newton John 'In A Lonely Place' - Bush, the Tricky Remix 'With Or Without You' - U2 'Don't Let Go (Love)' - En Vogue

'Don't Speak' - No Doubt 'Here With Me' - Dido

A note on the playlists: I know that Zira wouldn't listen to most of this if any, and Crowley would outwardly cringe just thinking about some of these. The point wasn't to choose songs that they'd go out of their way to hear, it was to capture the feelings they'd be going through. Crowley's songs are a bit darker: more minor keys, moodier atmosphere, etc., while Zira's are more sad but lighter & gentler (except maybe 'And I Am Telling You'; that's a straight-up "aww HELL NO YOU AIN'T GONNA FUCK THIS UP THIS IS HAPPENING YOU KNOW WE BELONG TOGETHER"... well, the song says it pretty well).

I 'd love to hear any thoughts about this, agree or disagree, love or loathe, hate that you love it... What would you put into a ZiraCrow playlist?

Hope you enjoy it!

#good omens #aziracrow #crowley #aziraphale #aziraphale x crowley #ineffable #good omens fandom #creators on tumblr #fan music #ineffable lovers #ineffable breakup #ineffable playlist

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catwyk · 1 month

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happy sibling rane stuesday. thinkin bout rane/carpenter parallels... they conpliment and contrast each other so much and the point of divergence seems to be nothing but age

as young faithful, they are (or were, in carp's case)

related to elders of the faith (nana glass/rane's great aunt)

despite that ^ grew up not super well off (implied for carp/stated for rane in The Soup Monologue)

zealous

but bc carpenter is older, she gets time to develop away from that stuff and she becomes the opposite of rane

disillusioned with the Parish

sees straight through faulkner's behaviour

changes her name to disassociate from nana glass

and sorry to bring up faulkner (i am his number one fan idk what to tell you) but imo the gulf between them is REALLY visible in their relationships to him. carpenter is his big sister - he looks up to her and she smiles down on him, despite what they may say about each other - and rane is his acolyte - they look up to him, while he stares straight ahead at the future he wants for the parish. carpenter has no time for his theatrics, and at the end of s2 they even have a little conspiratorial chuckle about how faulkner has untruthfully written carpenter into the silt verses, but rane is quite literally portrayed as his stage manager.

i dont have a point here beyond GOD i wish we'd seen more of rane, and i wish their story had continued further. itdve been interesting to see how their life mirrored or opposed carpenter's

#this is not coherent but i dont care i love them both so much and i wish theyd met #the silt verses #the silt verses.txt #catwyk.txt #sister carpenter #sibling rane #sibling rane realness #brother faulkner #tsv #tsv spoilers #the silt verses spoilers

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oodlyenough · 3 months

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Re:DW, I liked the final well enough but I agree with you that the shorter series really hurt the development of team Tardis. I wish they kept Ruby as the companion for two series, would have solved a lot of issues I had.

I also have so many questions still? I absolutely don't understand why it keeps snowing around Ruby? That's just...a normal thing that happens?

Also did the grandma not mention to the Doctor that their neighbour was acting real weird?

I'm also very intrigued by Roger ap Gwillam returning - is that going to be an ongoing thing or just a nice throwback to 73 yards?

Anyway. I've enjoyed reading your commentary because we feel very similar about this show in that the way RTD writes just works for us.

Yeah, I know we're getting some Ruby in the next season, but she's at least sharing the screentime as companion, so it doesn't quite solve it. I don't mind a break over the holiday special I suppose, lmfao esp because it's Moffat writing it so whatever he can write some one-off idc... but with how little development the team TARDIS got in s1 I worry that the problem will be compounded when you've got three people in s2. I don't want Ruby to finish an arc at the expense of Varada getting one y'know.

I'm not entirely sure what the scifi answer about snow etc was meant to be. I think something about the communal belief that the woman MUST be mysterious (incl. Sutekh) infusing it with godlike power or something... I mean... it's all a bit conjecturey lol. I like the idea of "surprise, it was just a normal woman" but I think they could've offered more explanations around the supernatural stuff like the snow or the "shifting memories" the Doctor mentioned. I've seen a number of fan answers and even RTD joking in commentary "time shrouded her" (re: her cloak) like, just pick any one of those and give a couple lines to Ncuti.

(Somewhat related -- an explanation (of sorts) for the pointing, to me, was that she didn't point in the original timeline and did point when the Doctor was there, bc he was the only other person around, she's pointing for him. (Whether or not pointing at the sign makes any sense is a different issue to "but no one was around anyway".) So I thought that basic fact (didn't point in timeline A; did in timeline B) works. But it wasn't explained in the show, it's just how my brain connected the dots, so.... ?)

Not sure about Roger! I didn't expect we'd see him after 73 Yards, or for 73 Yards to be relevant in the finale at all, which was a really nice touch I thought. I liked that this episode explains what happens to Roger in the regular universe (the Doctor being part of the "overthrow") VS in Ruby's universe where she did it, since that was a question people had. I also loved the idea that the 73 yards is the perception filter distance... I don't need an explicit explanation, just that connection (and the camera with the mother) works once you add in fae magic imo.

Overall, as a big RTD fan, not my fave finale. His scifi nonsense and handwaves are always saved for me by the great character stuff, and the character stuff in this season was only so-so. Moments of brilliance (Ruby and Louise in the cafe!) and some great performances (Millie is SO good) but... in a way this season felt to me like he tried to get out of his regular wheelhouse (huge emphasis on the mystery box stuff) and then the finale was like, a return to his roots (who cares about the mystery! ordinary people 4 ever, etc), but the two don't quite jive. And an extra four episodes would've done wonders.

#dw spoilers #anon #you've got questions we've got answers #doctor who

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cookinguptales · 4 months

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Out of curiosity, do you have any theories for why the bizarre narrative shift wwdits had circa late s4 happened?

I've gotten some uh. Pretty intense anons for saying what I'm about to say, for some reason, but sure, yeah. I'll talk about it. This will be pretty long because I haven't written wwdits meta in a long time, but. Oh well.

For s4 specifically... There's something that Anoop Desai, the actor who plays the Djinn, said in an interview once that I thought was really interesting. He said that they initially only wanted him to be in a few episodes of s4 and told him they'd go from there. As we all know, he ended up doing a great job with the part, the Djinn ended up becoming wildly popular, and the role was expanded.

But when you think about it... a lot of things in the back half of s4 only happened because the Djinn was around, right? The wish for Marwa to like whatever Nandor liked (and its subsequent issues), the wish for Marwa to become a Freddie clone... Those can only happen the way they did because the Djinn's wishes were available as a plot device. It's entirely possible that they were going to happen anyway, just another way, but... I don't think it's really going too far to say that there had to be rewrites of late season s4 in order to incorporate the Djinn, and we just have no way of knowing how extensive those rewrites turned out to be.

I think certain aspects of the end of s4 still had to have been there (a boyfriend for Guillermo, the wedding going poorly) but the exact way that things played out? Well, it did kind of smack of last-minute rewrites to me. We know there was also a lot of confusion about episode order, too, with the wedding seeming to have been originally placed closer to the end of the season... (Based on slates seen on IG.)

So... it really does make you wonder if things might have gone very differently if not for the Djinn's presence. I always kind of felt like I got monkey pawed because I love the Djinn, I really wanted him to be around longer, but then... oof.

s4 was kind of bewildering because it had some truly wonderful episodes, but there was a sense that they were building up to something that just never happened. A lot of themes, like Guillermo learning he can't lie to his loved ones and still keep a strong relationship with them, were really emphasized only to be dropped when they should have been very important with Freddie and all of s5.

Even what I'd argue was the most successful part of s4, the relationship between Laszlo and Colin, was really kind of unceremoniously dumped in s5.

I feel like s4 was where we really started to see a lack of payoff in long-running arcs. s2 was really the last time a season finale cliffhanger had much of any impact on the long-term events of the show (and s3 was when there was a showrunner change, so that could partially be why) and I think that fans were hoping that we'd still see those long-term arcs for characters, especially when s3 on seemed to focus more on characterization and relationship-building.

But what's actually ended up happening is that we constantly get these build-ups that either fizzle out, go nowhere, or worse, get retconned altogether. There's been a real lack of canon consistency the last few seasons, and what felt like small momentary lapses in consistency (like Nandor suddenly being better at hypnotism than Laszlo when the opposite was true in s2) suddenly felt much more dire when fundamental character changes seemed to happen with characters like Guillermo.

I've noticed a real divide between s1-s2 Guillermo and s3, s4, and s5 Guillermo, with him starting to get... almost Flanderized, honestly, with his whole uwu I could never hurt anyone thing. It seems to get worse every season, and this last season making it canon that he feels no guilt towards killing vampires but could ~never~ kill a human (despite being totally blase about it in early seasons) really seems to turn the whole conceit that he loves supernatural creatures (and can't meaningfully connect with humans due to his social otheredness) on its head. Personally, I'd consider that a core aspect of not only Guillermo's characterization but the overarching themes of the show, so it really kind of shocked me.

(In other words, I'm not actually disappointed that he didn't become a vampire. I always kind of thought that was how things were going to happen. But to make it be because he's too gentle?? Because he values human life over vampire lives??? Oof! That lack of character consistency is rough!)

I guess... the reason why I thought the end of s4 was rough was the rewrites. It really did feel rushed, and often themes/characters/relationships seemed to be chucked out in favor of jokes that weren't even all that funny. But I think the overall quality dip (imo) of the last season and a half are due to larger problems. There's a lack of commitment to things established in early seasons that I find troubling, and a total inability to commit to the arcs they're writing now, too.

It's odd. I feel like the first two seasons were more episodic and were less concerned with big arcs, but they still pulled off slowly growing character changes well -- Guillermo finding out he's a slayer especially. Since the showrunner change, they've been much more ambitious about characters, relationships, and long-running arcs -- but they never seem to stick the damn landing! They're aiming higher (building expectations) and landing lower. Which is a bad combination.

So then you have s5, which kind of feels like a culmination of all this. Characterization choices that don't always make sense, season-long arcs that don't go fucking anywhere and ignore previous canon (Laszlo was particularly egregious here), important characterization moments being thrown out in favor of jokes that no one fucking liked. (God, those fucking hybrid creatures.) And in the end, they again refuse to commit and instead send things back to a status quo, now made even shittier because they've closed off a narrative path.

I would hope that this season finale would mean something and we'd see the characters dealing with everything it brings up for the next season, but that didn't fucking happen the last two times, so... I have low hopes. I'd love to be proven wrong, but. I do feel very tired.

Finally... In retrospect, I actually think the death knell came very early on in s4. It was the time jump. Instead of really dealing with the way that any of these characters would have to function with the set-up they created in s3, they skipped all that. I'm not sure Guillermo ever really made that much sense after that, especially, and I think it's because they simply didn't think about what that year would mean to him very much. In interviews, we've seen that Harvey had to make up a lot of backstory himself, we've seen that Harvey and Al independently came up with two very different backstories for how Guillermo and Freddie met and how long they knew each other, we know that the writers often didn't really seem to know what Guillermo was doing in London...

Like. I hate to say it, but that's lazy writing. A time skip doesn't have to be lazy writing, but it often is. It's often used to skip the hard work of getting from characters from A to B, and the only way to do one well is to still know what happened during it. But once they did that, we started to increasingly get these [scene (and characterization) missing here] periods that really brought down the momentum every single time.

So... I guess I think that's been the overarching problem. Rewrites, a lack of loyalty to early canon and worse, a lack of loyalty to the stories they're writing now. If they're not invested in the story arcs they're making, why should we get invested? The way that the whole Laszlo and Colin thing was barely ever mentioned again in s5 was egregious. It was treated as lasting trauma in s4 and then Laszlo seemed totally fine in s5, even going so far as to have sex with the man he'd seen as his son like... two weeks before. For a while, we kept thinking that his weird behavior towards Guillermo was a form of transference, but that never really amounted to anything, either. I think we were just putting too much faith in the writers, maybe.

I guess, in the end, that's probably the biggest problem of all. The writers did some really amazing stuff in the first three seasons. They had a lot of long cons, so to speak, and it was hugely fun to see those pay off. We came to trust the writers, and now we keep thinking that these confusing plot arcs are just one more long con.

But they're not.

So we just get annoyed and let down every single time because we keep expecting payoffs that never come anymore, and in the end we just get kinda bitter.

That's just my two cents, anyway. And it really is still possible to turn things around! But uh. There's not much more time to do it. lmao

Fingers crossed, I guess. (But not around the vampires.)

#replies #wwdits tag #wwdits meta

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edoro · 1 year

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What do you think of "Watching and Dreaming"?

oooh thank you for asking! took me a bit to get to it but today i am MEDICATED and MOSTLY FINISHED WITH CLEANING so let's see what i can shake out of the ol' brainpan

gonna put this under a cut because it's probably going to get long, but overall: i liked it! i think it wrapped everything up pretty well, did not leave any major plot points unaddressed, and i found the timeskip epilogue to be sweet and hopeful but not saccharine or cloying.

in more detail:

seeing the three episodes we got for season 3 makes me wish so badly that we'd gotten the full run of the show that the crew wanted. i've seen word from the last post-hoot that they found out the show was canceled right before the mid-s2 hiatus, which tracks with the overall pacing and direction of the back half of s2, and it's just a tragedy. i think they did a really good job with what they had, considering the insanely compressed runtime they were given to work with.

i'm a little disappointed that the other kids didn't get more screentime in the final episode. it makes sense but i wish we had gotten more of them and their interactions with each other outside of Luz - and their interactions with Camila, too.

i honestly really loved the whole thing with the Collector. i know a lot of people don't for various reasons, but, Shrug Emoji. some of the criticisms of his whole arc really don't make sense to me - i feel like the people who are mad that they did turn out to be a misguided kid who didn't understand the gravity of what they were doing or how it affected others for various reasons (such as: being a child, having been isolated for centuries with only Philip for company, being immortal and having incredible reality-warping powers) and changed their tune when it was explained to them just, uh... were not really paying attention? lmao?

like it was pretty obvious from his first appearance that he was a child or at least very childlike, and we can easily infer from those scenes that he's been held captive and manipulated by Philip under the guise of friendship and 'letting him free to play', so everything else follows pretty naturally from that.

i liked how it was Luz, with her own childhood experience of death and grief, who recognized what was going on here and sought to explain it to them. she's always been an empathetic person who tries to see the best in others and give them the benefit of the doubt. sometimes, like with Philip, this comes back to bite her, but most of the time it's good and helpful.

i really like how we had someone just outright tell her "lmao no" to her whole "but am i JUST AS BAD as Philip???" thing. like honey, no, you have made some clumsy mistakes while meaning well, and the thing you're the most guilty about is literally just 'helping a guy who manipulated and lied to you without realizing he was manipulating and lying to you', which is not even your fault, because HE LIED TO YOU. Philip has spent centuries carefully engineering his way into being able to commit genocide. these two things are not the same.

speaking of Philip: i also know a lot of people have been upset with his ending. honestly, i'm not! i think that it tracks very well with the kind of person he's always been - a stubborn, manipulative liar who sees himself as a victim and blames everyone else around him for the tragedies that he's experienced, many of which he's directly personally caused, and who has been given chance after chance to change his mind, change his behavior, change his beliefs, and simply refuses to.

like... some people are just assholes! i don't think that the fact that he ended up lying, manipulating, treating humans as supreme, and trying to commit witch genocide to the very bitter end means that he was like, Born Evil, i think it means that he was once a sweet kid who loved his brother who grew into a cruel, hateful, manipulative man who only saw certain people as Fully Persons and therefore deserving of existence, and felt like he had the authority to decide who is or is not a person.

and honestly like... The Owl House is a children's cartoon. it's rated Y7. it is for children and part of its purpose IS to teach children things, and i actually think that "sometimes, people will hurt you, and they'll lie and say they're doing it for your own good or for the greater good, or they'll have a sympathetic reason for doing it, but that doesn't actually matter because they keep hurting you and you do not owe them infinite chances to keep doing that" is a really good lesson to teach children.

Philip's story is a tragedy and the tragedy is that he easily COULD have done literally any other thing, but he refused to. he had chances! he refused to take them! he had centuries to go, "wait, am i the baddie?" and he did not. he murdered Caleb himself and then blamed witches for that. instead of treating the grimwalkers like family, he treated them like disposable toys to take his anger at Caleb out on. he lied, manipulated, killed, stole, and hurt countless people because he felt like they deserved it because of his own unhappiness.

some people are like this! it happens! i have met them and personally been harmed by them in ways that are going to impact me for the rest of my life and have, if not exactly ruined my life, made it a hell of a lot harder than it would have been otherwise.

so for me, seeing that the ultimate resolution of Philip's story is that he refused to change, he refused to admit any fault, he kept lying and manipulating and trying to hurt people, and eventually everyone he tried to hurt and lie to turned on him and got rid of him so he couldn't keep hurting them is very satisfying.

The Owl House is a show about how people have the capability to change, but the flip side of that is that it means they have to choose to do so, and some people won't. so what do you do then? what happens when someone is hateful, cruel, and dangerous, and won't stop trying to exterminate an entire race of people because he blames them for his own self-inflicted problems? what do you owe someone like that? how many chances should you give them? how often should you let them have the opportunity to hurt you or others again?

i think the fact that he went out so pathetically is also very fitting. to the very end he wouldn't own up to anything. he just kept trying to lie and manipulate. and like many people who act this way, when his manipulation didn't work, he dropped the mask and got mad.

so yeah! i liked that aspect of it, and i feel like a lot of the criticisms are honestly just... expecting Philip to have played a very different role in the story than imo he was set up to play. he was the contrast to people like Alador or Hunter or Amity or the Collector. he was the example of what happens when someone REFUSES to change and uses any chance you give them as a foothold to do more damage. so the ending where it's just, "sometimes you have to do what you can to protect yourself from people like that" is imo quite narratively cohesive, and i think that it also fits into the overall theme of "your character is determined by your actions." Philip COULD HAVE ended differently, but he didn't, because of his own actions.

let's see... i feel very (seesawing hand motion) about the scene with Luz and Papa Titan. overall i think i like it.

i like the idea that Luz found everything through her own ingenuity and Philip didn't because he didn't treat the Isles as worth studying!

but that being said, i think there's something quite powerful about the idea of the land itself as a being with some limited level of agency, able to open itself and its resources up to someone who approaches it with respect and able to reject someone who comes in to rapaciously plunder it in order to kill those who live on it, ESPECIALLY given the fact that Philip is, literally, a white Puritan.

like that's definitely also a very meaningful narrative to me!

i don't really talk about this a whole lot here, for various reasons, but half of my family is native (Osage, specifically.) i'm not connected to that side of my family or that aspect of my own heritage for Complicated Reasons including abuse and the ongoing effects of white supremacy and colonial violence causing those members of my family themselves to be disconnected from their heritage in a way that meant that i was, basically, raised as a white person who is visually Ethnically Ambiguous depending on how familiar the people looking at me are with what mixed native people look like.

however, as someone who has perhaps a more personal connection than some others in the fandom might to the idea of "white man from a colonizer culture comes into a land foreign to him, views them all as backwards evil savages who must be purged for the safety of the good white Christians, proceeds to plunder and misuse their resources for his own gains, destroys their connection to their own history and culture and installs himself as a figurehead leading them into death" as like, a narrative, i don't think that the idea that the Titan was watching what happened and subtly nudging or influencing events to the degree that he was able to (which was ultimately a very, very small one) is like... meaningless.

and i don't think that what he said to Luz negates any of the messaging of the series. he didn't say, "you were special All Along, so you deserve my powers." he said, "you're the one who's here right now, and you seem good enough."

like... she proved herself, by her actions, to be an open and caring person who wants to do good, and specifically cares deeply for the Isles and the people on them, to the point where she is willing to sacrifice herself for them. and she's the one who is here, right now, in this moment. and she is not a perfect person, but she's Good Enough.

i actually really like that! she's here and she's good enough. she's the one in a position to do something about it and she seems okay. i don't think that it does retroactively make her into a "chosen one", because she didn't get it through her birthright or anything, she was given it because she ended up there (because she sacrificed herself to save the Collector) and she had previously shown herself to be someone the Titan thought would use it well.

so i liked that! i think that, like with "you actually do not have to keep giving someone chances to hurt you when they are a shitty liar, even if they're also sad", "you're here and you're good enough" is a pretty good lesson!

what else, what else... loved the whole bit with Philip possessing Raine and them fighting him off. loved the sequence of the two of them duking it out in the throne room and the fact that Philip just BIT them - little brother behavior for sure. Raine is a stone-cold fucking badass.

one little detail i liked a lot is the bit where they're stuck in the goop in the throne room basically waiting to die, and Eda comes in - i specifically really love how the crew got the look of soft, fuzzy, unfocused confusion in their eyes because they don't have their glasses and can't see. there's a particular way that people who need glasses to see often look when they don't have them, and they got it really well, and i just really liked that detail!

the final fight was indeed Cool As Fuck. i love how anime TOH is.

i liked the epilogue! it was very sweet. i like that it showed how people grew and changed and repaired the Isles, while not completely erasing the damage that was done. i also think it did a good job of wrapping stuff up while still leaving a lot open - it did not, imo, fall into the "jobs and babies forever" trap of something like, say, the Harry Potter epilogue, but it showed us how things went and gave us a lot of room to imagine where they'll go from there.

also love everyone's new designs. Good For All Of Them. Amity got so fucking gay and Gus is so HANDSOME now!

also of course i was ecstatic over the Huntlow lmao - i can't believe i used to dislike it! i love how often she just kind of casually and fondly manhandles him. my friend Sharo said something to the effect of, "i like how the scene where they're sliding and he stumbles and she catches him shows that it's been so long since he had to do child soldier shit that his hot jock gf is now way stronger and more athletic and nimble than him" and i haven't been normal about it since! he's SOFT now!!

so, overall, i feel positively about it! there are a lot of small threads that got dropped, no doubt due to the series being canceled, but i think they wrapped everything up well, and i feel like everything that happened actually was pretty thematically on point. i am satisfied with it! i wish we'd gotten more, but i enjoy what we did get.

#the owl house #asks #meta

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wntrpeachmp3 · 2 days

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thoughts on s2 of LOST:

first off, this is just excellent television !

those last few episodes had me on the edge of my seat.

why am I so into the ana lucia & jack pairing? they just *work* for me and I wish we'd have gotten to see more of them together.

ana lucia really bugged me in the beginning, but more so because of the acting. she just felt intense in every single moment without nuance. I just needed her to stop and breathe for a moment, and she did, and I love her for it! wish she was around a bit longer.

and the tailies had it so, so rough. the losties were basically in paradise compared to them. no wonder ana lucia was so on edge.

the jack/kate/sawyer love triangle could've been worse, but I like all three of them for the most part so it's not super frustrating and i'm not torn between teams/pro one pairing and anti the other. I also find it much juicier if I think of jack as the apex and not kate. like, jack's obsessed with them, and they're obsessed with Jack and they're all obsessed with each other, and it works???

rousseau, come back . . .

and alex . . . i'm never gonna think tania raymonde isn't gorgeous. ever since I saw her on that one s1 episode of that's so raven with her cute telekinetic weirdo vibes, I've been in awe every time I've seen her.

charlie & claire . . . what are we doing? as characters, they're just not doing it for me, though at least charlie's allowed to have fun dynamics with other characters. i'm gonna need claire to be more involved, like in her flashback episode with ethan where she was with on a mission with kate & rousseau.

saw a reddit comment that said mr eko was more john locke than john himself was (at the moment, at least) and fair.

interesting things happen when desmond's onscreen.

michael . . . disappears for 5+ episodes for that to happen . . . felt the fear, but not the guilt. and the guilt would mean some form of remorse. but that doesn't seem to be all there.

hurley was cool, i guess. and libby's cute.

jin + sun = smiley face from me.

rose & bernard were somehow cuter when they were apart.

ms klugh: "for someoone who wants their child back so badly, you don't seem to know much about him" how could I not stan? she got him so good, damn. had me shook and everything.

"henry" was played so well and i'm very, very intrigued.

sayid's likely to have 75% of the brain cells at all given times.

oh, shannon, bestie . . . #neverforget

what is the dharma initiative exactly and what do they do?? who are the others, and what are they doing???

won't lie, i was bored of some of the flashbacks. but when they're good, the episode is so rich with interesting character work.

that's all !

#lost #wntrpeachmp3 watches lost for the first time #jack shephard #kate austen #james sawyer ford #lost 2004

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starstruckpurpledragon · 10 months

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Super curious, if you're willing to share, about what your favorite Dr. Who relationships (platonic, romantic, whatever) are. DW is such a huge canon that there's so many options for what people love! (I am admittedly a sucker for mixing eras and placing companions with Doctors other than their own incarnation. Particularly Modern/Classic pair ups, but I also definitely have my favorite canon dynamics.)

Donna and the Doctor are definitely my favorite platonic ship and favorite DW ship overall. I may not have had the language for describing a QPR when I first encountered them, but that's the vibe their ship has to me. I just want Donna to keep showing up to randomly traveling with the Doctor once a season going forward from here on out. Don't care who is playing the Doctor, I have faith that Catherine Tate can forge an instant connection with any actor. (So obviously I've been super pleased by this year's specials.)

I have really enjoyed the one-sided Jack/Doctor ship too. Jack and the Doctor's relationship has been messy, but the Doctor does care about Jack (as a friend) and Jack's accepted that as enough. Him being devoted to someone without feeling entitled to having romantic attraction return is a sort of love story that doesn't get told a lot so... I think maybe that's precisely why it means so much to me.

Ace and any version of the Doctor. That is her father figure and even when she's pissed off at the Doctor for being a cagey jerk, she loves them very much. And the Doctor, no matter which version, always loves Ace as their daughter.

I really like the Doctor in mentor/mentee relationships, though obviously Ace in the father/daughter dynamic is my favorite. But Bill is definitely a close second. I would have loved for Bill to meet other versions of the Doctor and having to grapple with finding her weird grandpa hot as the two lady Doctor versions we've seen thus far would have been funny. Like, Thirteen and The Fugitive Doctor are still very much her weird grandfather person, but... Twelve would also be annoyed by this but only because Bill is making it weird and definitely not because the Doctor can't ever get along with themself. (Really, he'd be the one making it weird, let's face it.)

Sarah-Jane and Luke are a wonderful mother/son relationship and it's so lovely how quickly she comes to love this kid as her own. And then she also not-quite-adopts (but totally would if they needed it) three more kids and actually adopts one more. She is an excellent mom and mentor and I will forever be a little sad about what could have been with the show if Elizabeth Sladen hadn't passed away.

So clearly my favorite Whoniverse ships are platonic ones, but I do have a soft spot for Any Doctor/Rose as a romantic ship because they really were very cute together. They did not always bring out the best in each other, but Rose was very much someone the Doctor needed in their life, especially after the Time War. While these days I personally see the Doctor as being aromantic (or arospec) and their relationship with Rose as being a sort of romantic-coded QPR, I do enjoy it written as a straight up romantic ship when I read fic.

Ianto/Jack is my overall favorite romantic ship in the Whoniverse though. They're just adorable and I wish we'd gotten more of them instead of a nonsensical death in a third season I prefer to pretend didn't happen. (It's not so much that Ianto died that bothers me about it either. It's that it was such a poorly written death, especially after how Tosh and Owen's deaths were handled in S2.)

#starstruckpurpledragon answers #doctor who #doctor who ships #the whoniverse #starstruckpurpledragon rambles

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revelisms · 3 months

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👀 vander (arcane) for the “give me a character” thingy?

Oh, Vander. Big Van. Hound of the Underground. Do I have thoughts about this fella.

How I feel about this character:

I really wish we'd seen more of him, and I'm interested to see what we get in Season 2—but my only assumption is that Vi is following right in her dad's footsteps in terms of her own character flip and regrets.

I headcanon him as self-loathing as much as he is prideful, as built by wrath as he is by kindness; a once power-hungry, blood-thirsty, have you spitting teeth for squinting at him wrong brute who either a) laid down his prejudices for love (Grayson and Caitlyn parallels?) or b) had his hand forced and fessed up the cause (aka: Silco got him in deep shit). Maybe a bit of both.

Overall, I think he's a man shackled by his own guilt, who carried more pressure than he likely deserved, and who resented the monster he watched himself become—and the one he, ultimately, enabled in Silco.

All the people I ship romantically with this character:

As aforementioned a bit, Grayson and Vander's dynamic has really grown on me. I think there's something there that could be akin to Silco and Sevika—whether they've truly crossed the line of romantic is up for interpretation, but it's clear that they've spent enough years in each others' back pockets to know their ways around their edges.

I read him and Silco as having an extremely gray line—but again, I think that's up for interpretation. I personally think Vander only ever viewed Silco as a brother (or was in deep denial of anything else), while Silco had a borderline obsessive admiration, even idolization of him that definitely toed the waters of something deeper. (Cue the venom on his end at being called brother, and nothing more, because ouch.)

Out of pocket rarepair I could see him with? Cassandra Kiramman. (Tell me this man wouldn't swoon at having a gun pointed in his face.)

In that vein...what if he had had a thing with Sevika?

(Options are endless.)

My non-romantic OTP for this character:

Again, I really read Grayson and Silco as toeing the line here.

There's a clear camaraderie in the brief scenes we get with Grayson and Vander that have platonic chemistry bursting at the seams. I can absolutely see them tearing bars down with laughter over (several) rounds of whiskey.

Silco and Vander's what-could-have-been will eat me raw every time. The BRIDGE SCENE. *banging my fist on the table* You see a teenage love and heartbreak in one fell swoop, a prodigy and a mentor, a lackey and a superior, an underdog and the head of the pack, two incredibly jaded men who have sliced out their humanity and left half-beating things on the table. The layers of them are fascinating. I would take an origin story on these two in any and every flavor.

My unpopular opinion about this character:

There's a lot of Silco Bad / Vander Good takes in terms of their parenting qualities, but I think a lot of people paint too broadly over Vander's flaws.

He puts the weight of the world on Vi's shoulders, and projects onto her as strongly as Silco projects onto Jinx (but whereas Silco projects his view of self-reclamation and survival, Vander projects his guilt and resentments). They both see each other completely in these kids, for better or worse. And as much as Vander enables Vi's violence, puts inherent pressure on her to be the protector of the family in his absence, he simultaneously shames her for following in his footsteps (because he is scolding his younger self—not seeing her as an individual).

He's also shown to be fairly tough with the boys, and someone who perhaps struggles somewhat to connect with Powder, though he tries. Vi is really his clear favorite, and where the breadth of his expectations lie.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:

I'm holding out for early Silco and Vander flashbacks in S2. Honestly top of my list for things I would have loved to see.

I also would have loved to see more of an exploration of him raising the kids after finding Vi and Powder, and showing the transformation from the "Hound" into the man who laid down the gauntlets. If we're getting early Powder/Jinx flashbacks with Silco, I'd actually be curious if we may get any with Vander on Vi's side, as well. Fingers crossed!

#vander is one of my belated favorites of the show so this was a treat #thanks for the ask! 🖤#ask game: character breakdown #asks #arcane #vander #rambles

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ginevralinton · 5 months

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2, 6 & 12 for the ask game? 💖

thank you!!!

2. Who are your 3 favourite minor ghosts?

Annie!! I loved all of her appearances!

Jemima! I wish we could have seen more of her!

Maddocks! His simultaneous patience and despair at the ghosts and also his friendship with Robin was great

6. What is your favourite moment from each series?

s1: the bit in Moonah Ston where Alison and Mike are trying to host and the ghosts come in chanting

s2: the whole second half of The Thomas Thorne Affair

s3: the whole of the woodworm men. no. i will not narrow it down

s4: Poached Guests - Alison asking Julian for help.

s5: line dancing scene

12. Is there a flashback scene you wish we'd gotten?

is it cheating to say I wish we'd got a series of flashbacks of Mike and Alison visiting the hotel over the years? because I feel like it would have served the finale well.

alternatively, flashbacks to Fanny's life?

#tag #ghosts #sorry these answers are getting shorter

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cvldbones · 3 months

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okay so just binged bridgerton s3 p2 so as promised, here are my thoughts about the season in totality (which, bear in mind, this is the kind of show that i'm not always watching with a fine-toothed comb so if i'm missing stuff, that's on me!)

i've seen people say this felt less like pen x colin's season and more like penelope's season, and i think i agree with that. this was much more a journey about penelope learning to accept herself and gain confidence, which she did through mending her friendship with eloise and exploring her new relationship with colin, but it didn't feel quite as rooted in the "romance" the way seasons 1 & 2 did. this wasn't necessarily a con for me because i wasn't supremely invested in polin as a couple, but i can see why this would be frustrating!

i also saw someone say they felt like penelope didn't fight for colin enough - that it was only colin doing the fighting, and penelope picking everything (LW) and everyone (including eloise) over him. and, respectfully - i think that's the point! s1 and s2 all we see are penelope being pretty single-mindedly in love / obsessed with colin. she views him as perfect, flawless, and completely out of her league. she views LW as a tool for her to take ownership over her life because she doesn't think she has anything to offer as penelope featherington. and in s3, that changes! she abandons pretense and calls colin out on his bullshit ("you miss me but you would never court me, is that correct?") and acknowledges that LW is power, but it is also something she has worked hard for and something she wants ("and who were you protecting?" / "myself!")

part 2 felt way more seamless than part 1 to me. one of my most consistent criticisms of bridgerton is that they struggle with the balance of the ensemble cast, but they were able to really manage those conflicting storylines more seamlessly in part 2 in a way they have not in any previous season; they gave pen & colin some really great dialogue moments that made me see why they work, because they talked about things - they were honest, direct, clear, and, yes, angry, but the emotion was real. i wish we'd gotten more of that in part 1, because i frankly struggled to believe colin's feelings, too! they felt more tangible and real in part 2.

what the fuck are they doing with my boy benedict. we completely ignored his frustrations from the end of s2, we sidled him with another plotline revolving around sex / not feeling ready for a relationship. this at least had the great payoff of him unpacking his sexuality, but they seem to be teasing him as the lead for s4 and it does not feel clear at all how they're hoping to actually launch that? the throwaway "the next thing i learn may just change me forever" or whatever he said on the swings? the reason anthony's season worked so well in my opinion was because they set it up so clearly at the end of s1 - you entered s2 knowing what the expectations would be, you had an image of anthony in your mind, and then they could circumvent it. that's why it would have been perfect to place benedict as s3, based on how they ended s2. but anyway i digress we're already here so -

overall, i think it was pretty good. the actual romance of s2 will forever hold me heart, but i do think s3 p2 is a stronger set of episodes in terms of plot. it's more consistent, there's real stakes (that wind up being nothing, but ya know, we come to this place for magic), and there is some great ensemble work happening. i'm excited to see where they take the group in s4!

#bridgerton #bridgerton meta #bridgerton review #bridgerton spoilers #personal

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lysteriaposts · 2 years

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OBX 3 TIER LIST

i wanted to make a review but um... it took me like a week to finish the whole thing.. which should say enough.. and honestly i don't really feel like rewatching the majority of the episodes lol. i'll just give my reasons for the tiers instead.

this is probably my most unpopular one yet.

the only emotional journeys i connected with this season was topper, rafe and pope.

cleo could've been there if they actually focused more on her as a person rather than being thrown into a relationship and having that be the focus of her arc, same with kiara. still, i find cleo / pope duo way more watchable than jj / kiara. and she is a nice character.

i actually wished we'd seen kiara be kidnapped half of the season at singh's so that, a) the reunion actually feels more earned b) her and rafe's scenes were gold and probably the most interesting things for her character this season c) we could learn more about the "new, evil villain" and his motives. instead he felt out of place.

as for singh, he could cut it with the "you knows" ....

topper and kiara delivered on the comedy this season though, which is one reason they placed higher.

CAN'T FORGET BARRY

jj's whole "i don't want to be loved" thing felt half assed and he didn't crack me up the way he did s1-2... the humor felt kind of cartoonish (crabs 🫥). i still don't like how they dumb him down to an actual caricature, it was endearing and believable in s1 but it's just gotten worse each season for cheap slapstick. it's not funny.

i wanted more conflict between him and pope and their friendship

i didn't need jj / kiara to be honest... had no relevance to what was going on, and felt very dry. like they were trying to churn out something that just isn't there, and i didn't recognise the characters either.

rafe just elevates any scene he's in and any character he's with. i give props to drew 'cause even though the writing feels more serious for his character than the others, it probably wouldn't come across as good as it does without a good enough actor. luckily enough he's been spared from most of the corniness on this show.

the john b/sarah/topper thing is repetitive but i'm glad we got to see a story where topper isn't villainised (in the show, just by the pogues). he saved sarah's life, yet gets used and discarded. she keeps making the same mistakes, and the john b/big john stuff was just atrocious. he suddenly trusts the dad who abandoned him for years over his ride or die friends? the gf who sacrificed everything for him?? yeah ok dude.

the complete absence of rose but wheezie especially is unrealistic as hell. i don't understand why new, annoying characters are introduced (limbray.... singh... jb's dad) when they don't amount to anything in the end and there is no investment in them. we could've seen so many good family relationships and dynamics, how does the completely overlooked youngest sibling view everything? actually an episode from her POV would've been hilarious and also insanely interesting.

as much as i prefer ward over jb's dad and liked him as a villain... he didn't play a big enough part in this season to keep (he is also irredeemable). i think they could've killed him off in s2. and rafe could've dealt with the aftermath of that this season instead of s4.

the treasure thing felt contrived and way too much for one season. i don't really get the pacing, they don't need to find something new each season they can take a break once in a while and have like every other season be more obx / character focused. and the rest plot. that way when they do find something it feels much greater! what they did over the course of these three seasons could've easily been stretched to six seasons with better writing and giving the story room to breathe, develop a lot of other things etc... instead of making up "blackbeard" 💀

there's much more to say, and a lot of issues with the production and more nitpicky faults, but these are probably my biggest issues with the story. in the end it was a very disjointed season, probably my least favorite so far.

#obx3 #obx s3 #obx season 3 #outer banks #review #obx spoilers #rafe cameron #kiara carrera #john b routledge #pope heyward #jj maybank #sarah cameron #topper thornton #outer banks season 3 #outer banks spoilers #thoughts #discourse #anti jiara

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muninnhuginn · 7 months

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L M N and O for the askmeme?

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves. (Characters you’re neutral about are fair game, as are characters you merely dislike. Characters that you absolutely loathe with the fire of ten thousand suns are exempt, as there is no point in giving yourself an aneurysm over a character that you hate.)

I know for a fact I'm not the first nor will I be the last to say this, but I did think it independently before I saw anyone else thought the same thing, so! Fushiguro Megumi is like a much better written version of Sasuke.

M - Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

This is so tricky. No one from Utena, that's for sure. I think the problem is every character I find fascinating I'd either not want to be near irl because they (or the universe they're from) tend to be fatal (and I'm too redshirt-coded to survive this) *or* they're too similar to me in the specific ways where we'd just make each other worse. Hmmmmm, I think I'll go for Han Yeo-jin (Stranger/Secret Forest), mainly because I've seen how she acts with Hwang Simok in terms of persistently getting him to open up without overdoing it like a lot of people do and I think a lot of the aggressively extroverted characters I could pick would be too overwhelming for me. Whilst more introverted characters make me struggle to see who would make the first move in even initiating a friendship. So, being gently coaxed out of my shell by a woman who doodles terribly, spams cute emotes, and likes animanga sounds good. She's also straight up legitimately a good person in a sea of corrupt individuals, trying to keep her own morals afloat the best she can, because it's all she can do. Someone like that is someone I'd like to befriend.

N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice).

Genuinely not sure what I consider my "main" fandom rn, but I know for Link Click, one thing I'd love would be more long fic. By which I literally mean "more fic above 5k in length". There are some really solid one-shots out there, but you rarely get multi-chapter fic, case fic, those kinds of things. I do think the English side of the fandom has taken off since s2 started airing so I'm holding out hope there'll be more, but for now, just gotta be patient, I guess.

O - Choose a song at random. Which ship or character does it remind you of?

Gonna link to my response on this one from here.

#ask meme #asks #apolloandellipses #thanks for asking and again sorry for taking so long!

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shrinkthisviolet · 1 year

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also cisco x hartley for the ask game as well lol

Ship It!

What made you ship it?

Fics, honestly 😂 the show doesn't give us much beyond the animosity. I wish we'd seen more of s2 Hartley though, Hartmon could definitely work with that as a jumping-off point!

What are your favorite things about the ship

The enemies to lovers appeal is strong with this one imo! And I like to think they bond in the wake of Barry rewriting the timeline in s2, become friends, then roommates, then realize they've fallen for each other 💞

Is there an unpopular opinion you have about your ship?

If a ship fic doesn't include Hartley apologizing to Cisco for how he initially treated him, or a mention that he's apologized and Cisco forgave him, I'm side-eyeing that fic

ship ask game!

#the flash #cisco ramon #hartley rathaway #hartmon #ship ask game

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oodlyenough · 2 years

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the last of us 1x06: kin

surprisingly don't think i have a ton to say about this ep of the last of us but i feel like i should continue posting for posterity at this point lol. (eta: i said that, then started writing my thoughts, and wrote a gazillion words anyway.)

side note: any canadians watching on crave? isn't it fucking terrible. trash service

anyway: 1x06!

continuing to enjoy joel and ellie a lot. the further we get into the show i think the more they've come into the roles and evolved into their own versions of the characters, which is fine. good even. i think bella ramsey and pedro pascal have very fun chemistry together, and i think bella carries the comedy beats really well, which means i've been enjoying seeing more and more of those. i also really like those scenes because they feel familiar without being complete retreads of the game dialogue (which inherently invites me to make comparisons on delivery, etc)

so this joel is much more openly vulnerable. i think this change works to go with what we've seen in the show so far and places where the show is presumably going. and, i'll be honest, i find show joel a much more likable character. 🤷🏼‍♀️

the "not my daughter" scene hit differently... tbh i think it hit less, but not really through any fault of the show's, if that makes sense. it's just one where beat by beat i know the words as delivered by troy and ashley and my brain is super imposing them

loved the opening with the Indigenous couple, they were so funny, and the idea of florence seeing joel puffed up like an angry bird and identifying zero threat and making him soup lmfaoooooo hkghlkg. honestly w game joel i don't think that would work, lol, but w show joel it did. such a funny way to use the map easter egg, and the "there are firefly people?" followed by the couple laughing at their own joke killed me lol

also loved ellie's indignation about how they probably don't know anything because they're "a thousand" and they don't even know the fireflies, who are probably a total nonentity outside select QZs. extreme kid energy. they haven't even HEARD of paw patrol can you believe it. what do they know. also, congrats to them escaping joel and ellie mostly unscathed... minus a rabbit. (rude, ellie.)

show maria was great idc. imo game maria is not much of a character, so the show had plenty of room to expand, and i liked how they did it. i see some people reacting badly to her skepticism of joel and forgiveness of tommy, but we also don't really know what exactly she's been told by tommy. maria being pregnant is also a more solid reason for why tommy can't take ellie than we got in the game.

i can't really evaluate tommy or maria as characters without factoring in part 2 and at this point there's enough difference that who knows where the show will go with tommy and maria in s2, so, it's all kinda fair game imo

the university scene felt a bit rushed but i guess there really isn't that much to do there when you're not rearranging dumpsters and killing infected. it was the first time the show felt notably rushed to me, and i suspect that feeling will get worse in the back third of the show. ah well.

joel's injury and the fight felt anticlimatic compared to the big action set piece of the game, BUT i think it worked much better in context (joel's explicit fears in this ep becoming manifest), and also, game joel's injury is sooooooooooo ludicrous and video game it just wouldn't work on tv lmao. i kind of wish we'd seen ellie land any of her shots on those guys, but i have my theories as to why we didn't. tbd

misc other thoughts:

diva cup scene... excellent. was worried about those musty tampons.

SALLY FUCKIN' RIDE lmaoooooo ellie. u lesbian. ilu

like everyone i was beyonce.gif DINA?!?!?!? in the cafeteria scene. 100% that was dina, there's no way it wasn't. it might not be the final cast actress (i can see them not wanting to cast a major role so far in advance for a cameo, and they have a time skip to justify any appearance changes), but as a character that was surely meant to be dina. ellie that's ur WOMAN

we're 10000% getting some other cameos in the finale. i'm ready 👀👀👀👀👀

lastly: can't wait for this weekend's episode. the one i've most anticipated. left behind DLC my beloved...

#the last of us hbo #the last of us

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