#like.. how can I expect someone to commit to me when I'm incapable of committing back?

[neverendingford]

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[adhd-fandom-hyperfocus]

Here's hoping recent events go smoothly, with peace and a bright outcome. With all my love and best wishes, here's a prompt as a distraction:

What goes through a Primarch's (mainly Ras') mind, when they commit a social fumble, fail a simple task or make an accidental slight against a respected figure? Always liked the internal dialogue of Robu when around the Lion, how oddly cute, petty and insecure he can be.

Thank you! And I am so sorry for not getting to this sooner. I've just been tired with treatments. Also I love this question!

Ras (since you mainly were asking for him):

How am I supposed to look more alive?! I'm breathing, am I not?! I am responding to these stupid questions...How was I supposed to know they wanted me to ask how their day was? I do not care, so why would I ask?

All this power, all this strength, a demigod if gods were real....and yet I am incapable of opening this damnable jar without shattering it! Child proof? I just watched a toddler open this, and I could not!

They really think I care that they're offended...they keep complaining and I will swallow them whole.

Lion (30k):

He's so autistic he's not even having thoughts, just looking over at his sons to see how he should be acting. Then use their reaction to see how badly other people THINK he fucked up. Because obviously he didn't fuck up, and everyone else is stupid.

The Lion doesn't fail in tasks, you didn't see him fail, the was the outcome he wanted.

They're angry with me?! I am the first son of the Emperor; they should be grateful I bother listening to their petty grievances.

Dorn:

At least I am not known for my social graces, but I should strive to better accommodate the humans. I forget many cannot read micro expressions or note the slight inflection changes in my voice.

I cannot let this failure happen again. I need write this down and plan how to avoid this in the future. I cannot fail to live up to what is expected of me.

How did I offend? I answered their question honestly; those pillars do not match with the type of tiles used for the roof.

Guilliman:

Throne look at me fumbling around like I'm a child again. Mother would be having a giggle fit over this. Lord of Ultramar forgot his tongue, it seems.

If I keep this up the ecclesiarchy will likely implode from realizing how human I really am. The silver lining to this all, I suppose.

It's just his mind rapid spitfiring practicals and theoreticals on what the best outcome would be to smooth things over if the figure was someone who's good side he needed/wanted to stay on. If they were someone who didn't fall into those two categories than it's likely he meant to offend. He may be a good statesman and understands politicking, but in the 41st man is tired of everyone's shit.

[antialiasis]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuco's introduction

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

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

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

Angel Eyes' introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blondie's introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuco why are you eating the cigar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angel Eyes and Maria

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

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

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

Tuco returns to town

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

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

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

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

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

The cave

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

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

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

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

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

The inn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fort

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

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

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

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

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

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

The desert

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuco's cute pink parasol is such a choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The carriage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[404daydreams]

"I never even deserved all the things you put me through. I guess, for my own sake and peace I should now stop looking for the good in you which doesn't even exist in the first place. I deserve the kind of love I give away. I don't even give a flying fuck about your body count addiction. I'm into depth. Taking and talking online are easy when in reality you couldn't even furnish your responsibilities, commitments or anything. You're so selfish that you not only wasted my time and emotions but also my families. You measure people through inches, you let another man do it all, where's your attitude then when you even lack the basic self control and boundaries? You're nothing more than a keyboard warrior in reality your actions have proved everything. No one cares about your online persona, when in reality I know who you are. I'm throwing the rose tinted glasses. You'll drain a man and make him feel worthless, that's who you are. You lack basic human decency, you take without any hesitation and when you are supposed to give, you'll run away like a coward and post "quotes" online that you yourself don't emaculate in reality. You need people to complete you, and then find another for something else that you lack. You don't have an identity of your own. Show is over, keep that cowardly attitude of yours online, we all know who you are in reality. Your boundaries are so blurred that for your own selfish desires, you will put another person at stake. You do it all on others expense. A woman who is supposed to settle down with a man does not allow another man inside their house, doesn't have multiple social accounts or sleep around because you're incapable of working things in your own relationship. You want all the perks and comfort without working for it. All of this tells who you are. You chose everything over me, so now I choose myself because I deserve none of this. I deserve the world in love because what I have tolerated just to save our so called marriage, no man would tolerate it. Keep that persona for the people you have to put a show on for, I strip you naked in reality. What I had to go through that I know. I don't deserve to be treated such a way. You chose what broke us, you sleep with the same guy because of whom our relationship died, you still fuck around with the same guy - You never even loved me. If you did, this is not what I had to encounter. If in a year nothing has changed, it never will. You chose the same habits, they don't even fall under the category of mistakes anymore. Go live your keyboard activism, you yourself know who you are and you have no remorse for any of it. I don't believe one more lie of yours. If you can sleep around everywhere all day long, you could have definitely come back, but you think whatever you did is not even wrong, so be in that belief. You couldn't even furnish the bare minimum, you chose what was the reason of my nemesis. You showed me through your actions what you prioritize and thankyou for that. You revealed how fake you are. Not one promise of yours turned out to be true. A man who killed his soul just to keep you deserves a lot more than all of this. I deserve someone who knows her boundaries and won't let me go through paths of gravel. I know what I give, so I have all the rights to expect. You fell short on everything and I am not wrong for standing up for myself. Thankyou so much. And congrats on your easy way out. Relationships require work, you were an insecure as hell with a non existant self esteem and self worth person. I stayed, never betrayed for looks, weight or your inability to bend down properly. I didn't choose mere pleasure over you. I choose to throw the glasses and choose myself for my sake. You showed me how much you value me, love me and respect me. You showed me how you perceive me, how small I am in your books. That's my closure. Your actions, not words."

[misanthropicvampire]

6. 13. 14. 16. 30. 43.

<3

sexy.

Age you get mistaken for? - varies wildly and depends who's doing the mistaking. when I was younger I was able to pass as 16-18 because of my height, now most people get my age right except particularly hammered bar dwellers who assume that I'm in uni. fake id serves me well

Biggest turn ons? - I'm assuming that the answer here should be different from what I find most attractive (physically) in a man/woman so. submissiveness, obviously. but also a willingness not to be easily pushed around, some amount of conflict/resistance. I like people that I'm able to fluster and that can be easily embarrassed, masochistic tendencies, eager to explore new spaces and trusts my judgement. I'm very attracted to people who don't play it cool/hard to get and are open about when they want something and how much they want it - nothing that's more of a turn on than someone who isn't ashamed to be a little desperate

Biggest turn offs? - over-apologeticness and the need to hide whatever we do out of shame. fickleness, constantly changing their mind about what they want out of our encounters, extreme jealousy/possessiveness that prevents me from having my freedom, jumping the gun and assuming that certain actions = certain commitments without discussing it with me first, engaging in petty relationship dramatics

I'll love you if... you respect my need for a private life and making my own decisions, you neither idealise nor demonise me and accept my good and bad aspects as essential parts of my personality. you take a genuine interest in my passions instead of engaging me only out of politeness. you have a flexible perspective of the world and consider different viewpoints/take on board new insights. you don't play mindgames and are very direct with how you feel and what you want/don't want. you let me play a protective role and know that I do this not because I think you're incapable, but because it's how I best connect with others and demonstrate that I care

What I hate the most about work/school? - of many things, the expectation to obey without question and the assumption that authority figure's viewpoints are the only correct ones/that I'm too uneducated to have a worthy perspective

Sexiest person that comes to my mind immediately? - while I'm exclusively attracted to women in my real life the number of attractive female characters/celebrities that I can list off the top of my head is appallingly low. coming immediately to mind is trent reznor in the '90s when he'd throw himself around the stage floor in next to nothing sweating bullets and screaming lyrics along the lines of being beaten and cut up

[baltimorebullets]

MOVIES I SAW TODAY:

Opus, Black Bag, The Assessment. Spoilers and personal posting if I feel like it always.

these were all like fine to good but not really groundbreaking so i'm Trying to do this quickly. alright. here we go.

OPUS - i try not to read other reviews before writing these but i did anyway and a lot of people are comparing this unfavorably to blink twice and get out which is like very okay for a dollar name Three black horror/thriller movies. and also the menu. i think these comparisons are missing what Actually made this movie unique. like yes the characters of opus commit the horror movie cliche of allowing themselves to be isolated by a cult but that's like. the setup. and blink twice + get out + the menu (+ ready or not (+ midsommar!!!)) were all about The Horrors of Being Marginalized And Exploited. opus is not that. opus is a self-deprecating takedown of The Ego Of The Artist.

like this movie starts ayo's character (ariel) not engaging in or respecting her craft for #TheRightReasons. she's in it for the power and attention. like textually. which isn't to say she's unskilled or incapable or ambition is inherently evil. but. like. That's The Whole Thing. and talking about The Value of Art can be hard when we are in a society that deeply undervalues art and artists. but there's also the reality that a lot of artists are assholes and hacks and take themselves too seriously for what they quantifiably add to the world. and sometimes it's because they are truly so in love with Their Craft they lose perspective. see: the architect. but plenty of times it's just ego. and there has to be some amount of ego in trying to create something, with the knowledge that potentially becoming truly good at creating something comes with the potential of being transcendent. but godlike? truly worthy of that attention and respect? lol. come on dawg.

and then we end on ariel not being in the cult but in realizing her sell-out goals. she's Adding To The Spectacle. like that's again spelled out for us. it'd say Too spelled out even but people seem to be missing that angle.

anyway it was a directorial debut as i understand it i think mr green will do well given the opportunity. do recommend.

BLACK BAG - it was fine. good. idk. in theory i like spy movies but maybe i actually like action movies.

in the pros column: as much as i love cheating and divorce and mess, the level of dedication and trust this movie is built around is also pretty sexy, actually. perhaps especially because the main couple are true equals, and the mutual well-placed respect there cut through a lot of noise.

THE ASSESSMENT - what is going on in france for this movie and le bete (2023) to come out this close together. ik i just said 2023 but i'm reasonably sure i saw it IN THEATERS last summerrr maybe.

and as with le bete idk if i really enjoyed this movie much but i think it'll stick in my head for awhile. it was very beautiful. it's very much like reaching the logical conclusion of ecofascist eugenics versus adapting to sustainable lifestyles. which i kinda expected but i also thought it'd be. idk. a little different. it got a bit allegory of the cave about how Having Children fits into living A Natural Life which is like. idk. it's a movie about reproductive freedom which is Not the time to be in your feelings about being absolutely sure you don't want kids ever + how that leaves you Outside Of Things. but again w/e we move. send me to the space beach i'm such ethical population control.

sidenote it's also like. such an #online moment to watch this movie and just be like yeah being dragged into someone's one-sided nonconsensual littlespace roleplay sure does suck. lol.

[nanovaland]

12/2/24

A life without an audience is pretty worthless, I think. I'm not my own person, so I depend on the energy I get from other people. I feel like a waste. I feel like a parasite. Most days I spend alone, and I get to let those feelings of inadequacy and a lack of "person-ness" simmer. I don't depend on others because I'm incapable, I depend on others because it's the only thing I live for. Maybe I was co-dependent, but I'd rather live like that than alone. Selfishness; that's what it is succinctly. Because a person can't live like that. Nobody would be able to bear the stress of it, the stress of me. It was a fluke, anyhow. I won't meet a girl in the library, on the campus, at a bar, on an app. Those sorts of things are reserved for the attractive. For the intelligent. For the worthwhile. For the personable. For the people. Categories I don't fit neatly into. She loved me out of pity. Maybe she just pitied me. My mom feels the need to lie to me about the ways that I am. They're not destructive, they're not a burden, they're not ugly. A fluke. That's the life I lead. Basic decisions paralyze me and I couldn't tell you the reason. My friendships are comfortable, but vapid. My love is unreciprocated and self-destructive. My self-worth rides entirely on how people perceive me, because I can't even view myself as something independent from others. I don't eat in public. I don't cry in public. I try to fix my hair incessantly. I cover up. I don't talk loud, if I talk at all. I want the world to view me inoffensively. I fit the bill for the sort of gross and ugly person that people view unfavorably. The sort of person that might rob a convenience store at gun-point. The sort of person that might threaten to shoot up a school. The sort of person to prey on women. I've never wanted to hurt a person in my life outside of myself. But I see how they look at me sometimes. The more attentive people look past the things that I don't do and look to the sort of stuff I look like I would do. I register those scowls I get. I can't let it show. Emotions just don't come to me very well. I care a lot. About everything. About everybody. I don't hold hate for the people that have hurt me. I say I do. Those emotions come out wrong, if they come out at all. I'm miserable, but I can't even stomach letting the people close to me know. Someone asks me "how are you?" and I just feel compelled to pretend everything is fine. It's not fine, though. I'm running out of cash, I hate my life, nothing I do is worthwhile or fun, I miss my ex, I miss my friends, I miss my dad, I miss my life, I miss the boring days I could live through without having to cry about it, I miss feeling like I had my life under control. I miss not feeling like committing suicide. I know I don't even have the strength for it. It's my greatest embarrassment.

My ex tried to kill herself when she was younger, before she really met me. I couldn't really ever say I wanted to to her before. She would see right through me. I'm all talk. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I can't. Like a mental block. It's probably a good thing for the people that care. It's not a good thing for me. My life is already characterized by selfishness; suicide is the ultimate selfish act. It wouldn't be outside of what's expected for me. I always told people I was a screw-up. People always tried to defend that with comments like: "you're a good person", "you've got your whole life ahead of you", "you've successful." If I was, I wouldn't feel like this would I? I think being a screw-up extends past what I've done with my life. I could be doing worse, but truthfully, the screw-up was me being born at all. A cosmic sort of screw-up. If we're all made of stardust, my particular batch was bad. The molecules and the chemistry that comprises my being made something that doesn't really want to exist. That, in the context of the universe as a whole, can be chalked up as a failure. Maybe it'd be better if I was smart, and kind, and had things to offer this world, but I don't. I hurt every person I come into contact with. It might be immediate, it might take years. But it's one of the only things I've ever truly been good at.

[polillastoryarchive]

...CONTINUATION

"You did this behind my back, Mel. This isn't gonna fly and you know it."

"Listen, I really don't think it's a big deal..." the singer answered, pulling away, suddenly disinterested.

"It's a big deal to me! And you knew it would be. You're crossing a line here."

Mel got up, defensive. "What did you expect me to do exactly?"

"Respect me. Respect my work."

"You would have wanted me to just sit back and watch you waste this track?"

"This isn't only about the song and you should know that."

"What is it about then?"

"It's about you not believing in me. It's about you always seeing me as a project, as a lost puppy you can give scraps to and expect me to be happy about it." The unfairness of the situation was getting to Isi and now she was also standing.

"You know that's not how I see you, don't make me the bad guy here."

Isidora was good at standing up for herself. And she knew that this whole situation could have been prevented if Mel had considered how she would feel about all this before charging ahead with it.

"Oh please. How do you explain going against my wishes, knowing fully I'd be against this when you agreed to it?"

"You know what, if you're going to be like this, then maybe we shouldn't have collab'd in the first place. And shouldn't, ever again."

"Actually, maybe we shouldn't even be together." Mel added, taking her hands out of Isidora's.

Once again, silence fell. They were incapable of communicating. Had always been. Isi's heart skipped a beat. She wasn't ready for this to end. Not like this.

"Mel..."

"I'm sorry you don't feel like it's fair, but I'll release that song. The fact that you don't want me to have it, it feels like you don't want me to succeed." She said.

"But you have succeeded. You're literally already a star. You don't need this!"

"You've already got a legion of fans who adore you. I don't understand. And now you want us to break up?"

"This whole thing just proves you don't trust me, you know. And I can't be with someone that doesn't trust me. Not again."

"Mel."

"And it's not just this... I've been thinking about her a lot lately..."

Isidora took a step back. She knew Mel and her ex-wife had a lot of unresolved issues, but she had always promised that she was over it.

"I think I want to try again with her. Give it another chance."

Her breath went shallow. Her eyes blurring for a second. Say what now?

"We're done?" The words were hard to pronounce, but some kind of relief was growing inside her.

"Yeah... I'm sorry." Again, the words didn't match the tone.

"Bullshit."

"Isi, I don't want us to end on bad terms -" Mel started, before Isidora cut her off.

"Nah, I don't want to hear it. You were never serious about us. I gave it my all. I tried so hard. I opened myself up. I was starting to fall for you. How could you?"

"Hey, it's not like I planned for this, I also tried my best!"

"Really? Is this trying your best? Always having me come to you, never the other way around. Never going official because you were scared of what people would think."

"You know it wasn't like that..."

"All the way up to now, stealing my song, not apologising for it. You fooled me Mel. I really fell for your act. I let myself down. But don't think I'll go down quietly. You go back to her. You said you can't be with someone who doesn't trust you, yet you want her again. Liar."

"You know what Isi, if you want to believe that, go ahead. I can't stop you. But just know that I didn't plan this. I truly tried to commit to you."

Mel turned around, probably to hide her own emotions, while Isidora's were written all over her face.

"Just tell me this." Her voice was shaking from the tears held back, but she needed to hear the truth from Melody. "How long? How long have you known we weren't gonna work? How long have you been pretending?"

Mel shook her head but no sound came out of her mouth.

A minute went by. Then two. Neither of them said anything else. Melody kept her eyes on the window. Isidora turned away, unwilling to give anything more of hers to the person who had already taken so much. She didn't slam the door, but the sound of it closing was loud enough.

[nikibogwater]

Disclaimer: I meet neither of the qualifications you specified. But this is a topic of interest to me, and I've made a few observations over the years that I figured it couldn't hurt to share. Worst thing that can happen is I'm so off the mark in my conclusions that it's actually hilarious, and you get a bit of free entertainment.

First observation: some folks are just Built Different. My maternal grandparents met when they were fifteen, immediately recognized each other as The One (at least, that's how they tell it), and got married straight out of high school. They've been together for almost 70 years now, and never had any kind of relationship drama. Meanwhile, my parents knew each other for years before they decided to start dating, and they didn't actually tie the knot until they were both in their thirties. They've also never had any relationship drama (unless you count bickering about the best way to fix a leak in the basement). Since both marriages ended up being equally happy, I think it's relatively safe to conclude that it really just depends on the individuals involved. It's not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. If you can't imagine committing to someone you've only been dating for a year, odds are good that that's just something you can't and shouldn't be expected to do. It doesn't mean you're incapable of having a serious relationship and getting married (assuming you want to, of course). Just that your process of getting there needs to be the slower, more methodical kind, because that's just how God made your brain work.

Second observation (unfortunately this one isn't nearly as nice as the first one): In some Fundamentalist/Evangelical Christian communities, marriage (and more specifically, having children) is more or less treated as the Ultimate Life Goal, an absolute necessity to living a good and God-honoring life. Whether or not it's ever directly stated, there is an expectation for young folks to get hitched and start cranking out kids asap. I have a friend who got tangled up in one of these groups (luckily she got untangled from it pretty quick), and the general expectation was that if you couldn't find a husband by the time you were 25, then you had to become a nun (trust me, I wish I was joking).

Obviously, as a Christian, marriage is inextricably linked to your faith and your relationship with God. But some (not all--probably not even most, if I'm being honest) Christian communities get a little....too hyperfixated on that link between marriage and God, to the point that it's more about marriage for its own sake, and not so much about a mutually uplifting union that draws two people closer to each other and to God.

So....yeah, I don't think I ever actually answered your question there, and tbh, I don't think I could, because I'm in the same boat as you. I guess all I wanted to get across is that love looks different for different people because God is very creative like that, and also beware the pitfalls of certain schools of thought that come from certain well-meaning but still very much mistaken Christian communities.

╮(￣▽￣"")╭

Genuine question for people who are married or in a serious relationship. I've never been in a relationship myself, so I really struggle to understand why someone would become so committed to another person so quickly. Especially in Christian circles where overall, the dating period tends to be shorter than it is for non-Christians. It just seems so foreign to me that a person's romantic interest becomes their entire world so quickly, even though they have friends who have usually known them for longer, know more about them, or have supported them through some of the hardest parts of their life. Does the romantic interest just earn your trust super quickly? And you just decide "yeah, this person, who I've been dating for a year, is the one person on the earth I'm going to be completely and utterly vulnerable with" ?

[beautifulpersonpeach]

BPP,

TWO WORDS - PARK JIMIN!!

Look I know you're still processing what we've seen so far right now but I feel like you're the only one that can explain what it really means when a producer like PDogg says

"Park Jimin will end K-pop in 2023"

That is a statement! I mean no pressure, Jimin because he is definitely up to the task, but for that to be said by PDOGG! Please can you use your eloquence to break down fo us how much of a statement that really is in Kpop (or maybe I'm overrating the significance??)

We're down to hours and counting.

*

Ask 2: The new teaser yt short is even more insane than yesterdays?! How is this possiblr?! My hype is so real and my expectations are so high I’m actually scared of beinh disappointed and not liking the full song BPP 😭😭😭 This has never happened to me before ?!! How do I do this how will I cope 😭😭😭 JIMIN WHY ARE UOU SO GOOD AT THIS 😭😭

*

Ask 3: Someone sent you this ask ages ago - on why you don’t bias Jimin when he clearly is you find his visuals the best and you love his dance and his voice.

I’m going to ask again - BPP, are you ready to Bias Jimin now? 😄

But on a serious note, that itsy bitsy teaser is Jimin declaring war. The beat, the drums, the dancers stomping and the Jimin battle cry at the end. It’s a declaration that he is coming for us, not to dominate or conquer us (even though that is going to happen), but instead to make us see, to set US free.

Jimin knows what it means to be an idol. He knows how the Kpop stans are; and I don’t mean the internationally fans. No. I mean the locals, Japanese, Thai, Chinese…I mean, those who consume Kpop content way more than international (US/UK) fans do. He knows the restrictions of the industry. He knows how he is expected to be a certain way. He probably knows everything written about him, reads it, has internalised and battled it. Lived with it, cried about it.

Hence, I suspect this Album is a way to respond to those expectations, for those who will seek a deeper meaning/understanding to it. It his his way to Set Us (his fans, the audience, the people who consume Kpop content) free, From the preconceptions and perceptions we have of him, from the ideas we want to shove on him, from the lenses we see him through. He wants to show us his face, so that we can face him.

I suspect this is Jimin drawing his boundaries through his music.

*

Ask 4: 1) twitter com/jjimlove1013/status/1635659805653352448,,, Fudge! Park Jimin, you're unreal! Can't stop listening to the teaser. It's SO good. 2) I need to give a standing ovation to bts's commitment to dance and synchronization. The unimaginable amount of bs&t (lol) that must've costed them. The dancers in the teaser were ok but I couldn't help noticing their unsynchronized limbs and angles. Reminded me of the dancers in JK's Dreamers stage. Really, I'm in awe of bts every time.

*

Ask 5: Tu sais quoi, tu as toujours eu raison. Personne ne devrait sous estimé Jimin. Et cela se voit très bien durant ces dernières semaines. A dancer today said : the king is coming” et je te jure tout le monde devrait avoir peur.

*

Ask 6: Do you know what the date in the mv teaser or other mvs mean?

Like for Set Me Free teaser it says 2023.03.06 but it was released today and the mv won't be released until Friday.

Also, I live in those 32 seconds now.

Thank you.

***

Hi @ejassy and Anon(s),

Your link, Anon in ask 4.

You know, I don't do this often, but I am prepared to listen to Set Me Free Pt 2, in two states of being today - sober and not. Not to dull my senses but to split or fracture them. With this release, Jimin deserves to have our full attention, and every inch of my consciousness for the first few listens will be focused on Jimin.

I want to be completely and brutally mindfucked by Park Jimin. I'm expecting maximum damage to whatever ideas I've had of him till now. I need his voice of honey-coated serrated steel, of glass and velvet, to render me incapable of speech for 1.4 hours, at least.

@ejassy, it's out of character for PDogg to fanboy like that. That's all I can say, because it's not like he said something we don't already know.

"Park Jimin will end K-pop in 2023."

We know. He's fucking Jimin. The Park Jimin.

PDogg just lost control of his emotions for a sec. That's it.

And maybe, maybe the man is feeling a bit proud of himself. Proud to have created what already sounds like a masterpiece, with Jimin. Maybe it means he is proud of Jimin, proud to know and have worked with him till this point. Sometimes I think about the first promotional clips of FACE, of Jimin lounging about and working on the melody and lyrics, sometimes with PDogg.

(Killer moment for me is 0:44 btw)

*

The above footage includes scenes older than the past year. Which is to say, Jimin has been writing music for a long time. He's had experiences where he "...has internalised and battled it. Lived with it, cried about it." as you say Anon in ask 3. PDogg has been watching this process in Jimin for years, been present for a lot of it, and this album is the result of a relationship they've cultivated for a decade.

I've said before that I rate PDogg as a producer and enjoy his stylistic choices, with some exceptions. He's going to do an exceptional job in FACE, so good in fact that he believes nobody in the industry will beat it for the rest of the year.

And that's a ballsy thing to say. But it's more than doable, because the artist is Jimin.

And so, he might as well have been saying "water is wet."

Anon in ask 6, I don't know what those dates mean. I've seen situations where the date coincides with the release date, but most times that date on screen differs from the release date. I think it's possible for the artist to choose what date shows on screen, but I also think it could be linked to recording or intended distribution dates. But really I have no idea. If any of my followers know please say what it is in the replies.

*

Anon in ask 3, this was so well said:

"He knows the restrictions of the industry. He knows how he is expected to be a certain way. He probably knows everything written about him, reads it, has internalised and battled it. Lived with it, cried about it.

Hence, I suspect this Album is a way to respond to those expectations, for those who will seek a deeper meaning/understanding to it. It his his way to Set Us (his fans, the audience, the people who consume Kpop content) free, From the preconceptions and perceptions we have of him, from the ideas we want to shove on him, from the lenses we see him through. He wants to show us his face, so that we can face him.

I suspect this is Jimin drawing his boundaries through his music."

I agree with you. In this album he's going to describe the world through his eyes. Jimin is the Jimin of BTS - the biggest band in the world. And Jimin is nothing if not direct. That he's using a prison - the most severe and most universally understood representation of 'loss of freedom' - as the metaphor in Set Me Free Pt 2, is already the first indication he isn't here to play around. In the last 10 years Jimin has experienced a life, a world of changes, only a handful of people have ever experienced, and they have happened to someone with as interesting a temperament as his. This song and the rest of his album is a sonic expression of what that world looks like to him now.

It will be beautiful.

I so can't wait.

[tomwambsgans]

i'm not saying that tom doesn't *actually* love shiv but what i am saying is that there is genuinely an isolated sort of sadness to the end of a relationship, literally no matter what happened in that relationship. like look at how many couples repeatedly cheat on each other and fight and break up and just keep getting back together bc regardless of the strife, to so many people, it simply feels worth it to Be Together. to have a partner. i spent a good half of a 2+ years long relationship thinking (albeit on and off) about how much i wanted out of it and how inevitable a breakup was, and wished that i could just one day wake up into the reality where it wasn't a thing - only to be inexplicably shocked when he broke up with me, and to try to fix it and convince him that the relationship was fine, and then be depressed about that breakup and incapable of pursuing other relationships for basically a whole year after. like, attachment to a person (and subsequently the love of them) is very often rooted in the stability that they bring to your life, whether much happiness is part of that stability or not. that's what tom means by the sad with shiv vs the sad without shiv. actual happiness isn't a promised part of either option, but in one of them he has a partner, someone he's known for years.

as far as the love he has for shiv as its own independent concept, i'd just really love to see it get deconstructed, since we can mean so many different things when we say love, and our cultural expectations for how it's expressed and the relationships we grew up seeing as an ideal are so incredibly wrapped up in that. you could say people love simply when they want to, and the definition of it is subjective due to being immeasurable, that for each person love is whatever they decide in any moment to call love - and further, there's all the factors that can even go into that Decision alone. this also of course means that the *feeling* of love in and of itself is not a good reason or justification for anything as it relates to yourself and other people who feel love differently, least of all huge committments. like marriage. it's just far from enough.

love is romanticized as a feeling but it's also a choice, because emotions are fluid and mutable and some people/cultures understand this more intuitively than others. i think tom is one of those people, as it seems pretty clear that "this person makes me happy" is not a prerequisite for him to say that he loves someone. meanwhile shiv, i think, grapples a lot with this. she loves tom because she clearly does make those choices, but because she doesn't love tom in the way that he needs her to - the passionate, romantic western ideal, that is, aka the way the average person wants it - she probably sometimes wonders whether or not she actually does, and it makes her feel bad about herself. she tries to deflect, to decide that actually no it's LOVE that IS the problem, love is bullshit, it's made up, etc. the main thing that she has ever clung to re: defining her relationship with tom as a positive one is their history together, and the subsequent fact that tom uniquely understands her and is/was capable of comforting her.

all this to say that I really do think that a bit of the thesis of tomshiv IS the fact that love is not enough, exemplified by shiv's monologue about love on their wedding night. shiv was right that love is a million different things, but (i'd argue) she's wrong that thats a bad thing. what both tom and shiv missed, too, was that there's affection, there's desire, there's commitment, and most importantly there's compatibility. and the lack of those things between them consistently is why they simply cannot and should not work.

[beevean]

Lenore: Oh sush you were having fun :P

When a single sentence can generate so much rage it could single handedly result in your beast of darkness manifesting. And people shit on Nina for being a bad character

FUCK.

it's. it's genuinely upsetting.

I can get past S3E9. I would have made an effort to accept that whole plotline of Lenore manipulating Hector. While it's still lousy writing because it's basically the same arc he went through in S2, it could have lead to some organic character development, which is what pretty much everyone was expecting after S3 aired: you know, Hector gets tired of looking for love everywhere and learns to not trust people that easily, and he gets his revenge on Lenore finally showcasing why he is a coveted Devil Forgemaster, that sort of thing.

But S4 was a personal insult. The banter that they have is meant to be funny, it's meant to build chemistry, it's meant to convince the viewer that now they have a caring, comfortable relationship, and apparently it worked because some people (a lot of them actually) really like how Hector "forgave" Lenore, I'm sorry how can you be okay with Lenore joking about rape? That she committed??

Lenore: It's leaving me feeling a bit lost. Like my place in our system has been erased. I think you were the last problem I had to solve.

Hector: Yes. Thanks again for that.

Lenore: Oh, shush. You were having fun.

Hector: Well, right up until almost the end. But you're making another point.

Lenore: This is why I like you. You're capable of actually listening to me.

the absolute balls of this exchange. Lenore feeling sorry for herself because boohoo the diplomat is now useless, calling Hector a problem to be solved (that she solved through rape and manipulation, I have to insist because i think someone here forgot that), Hector understandably getting snarky, Lenore doubling down with a disgusting "oh but you were enjoying yourself, it's not rape if you were enjoying yourself right? :)", and Hector not actually protesting that it doesn't matter if he was liking the sex if it ended with him being enslaved like he should have done logically, so that Lenore could be all sweet to him, "aww you're capable of listening to me"? THAT IS THE WHOLE PROBLEM THAT IS HOW YOU TOOK ADVANTAGE OF HIM I AM GOING TO EXPLODE YOU WITH MY MIND

forget about Nina, I hate Lenore more than I hate Griffith. Griffith at least was honest about how he became incapable of feeling anything after he became Femto (more or less) - he didn't fucking gloat about raping Casca to insanity and pretended the two were so sweet together.

just piss on my face next time, I would feel less mocked.

[little-miss-moonshine]

flying too close to the sun

(tiny note, I wrote this in late february and didn't post it. a month later, I wrote about the flowers again, but I think I should validate my initial emotions and post this. )

the flowers you gave me on tuesday stand straight and proud on my desk, in the apple juice bottle you bought me on thursday, rinsed and dried on friday. their purple petals glare down at me as I cry at my desk, loud sobs and soft whimpers permeating the stale air of my room. I have often given, but never gotten, flowers. in our relationship, you gave me many things, but never flowers, and never your heart.

the flowers, like you, are slightly oxymoronic. someone once told me that when flowers are given with love, they take longer to wilt than ordinary flowers. the flowers you gave me rest atop dried, crumbling, rotting stems, but the flowers themselves are as perfect and purple and pristine as the day you gave them to me. the colors seared themselves into my memory when you handed them to me, the fallen angel: skin shadowed, blue eyes alight, golden hair made into a halo by the lamplight. like the flowers, simultaneously dead and alive, you are simultaneously beautiful and terrible. my greek god, a force of nature, a being of kindness and cruelty in equal measure.

indeed, that is how I loved you: as something to be awed by, to be worshipped. I worshipped you like holy light, loving you without condition, without limit, and without expectation. you looked down at me from the pedestal I raised you on, something like pity in your eyes. you protected me, I cherished you, and we called that enough. that, in itself, is an impossibility; people go where they find love, and rarely love without receiving it in equal measure. as such, my love, although I treasured you as a crown jewel, it is now your turn to treasure the nuggets of gold, of my love, in your memory, as the world treats you the same way that you treated me. indeed, I still love you, but now, I open my arms and embrace the hellfire of your gaze. you know what they say, the hottest fires burn blue.

so what do your oxymoronic flowers have in common with you? like the flowers, you show me love and care right alongside your casual indifference. holding me, caring for me, forehead rested against mine to calm me down, but telling your friends that I was just another girl. brushing the hair from my face, kissing my cheeks while I called out your name in nightmarish sleep, yet scrolling through bumble as I clung to you for dear life, seeking you even when unconscious. you kept telling me you weren't ready for the commitment of love, but that you care for me so, so much. here's what I think: you loved me silently. subconsciously. you can push it down, run away from it, and hurt me in the process, but you can't escape it. no matter now incapable of commitment you think you are, you can't deny how you feel. the sad part is that it was enough for some time, but just as you're starting to understand, I'm starting to lose hope.

you left this morning without a word, just wrapping me in your arms for the briefest of moments. some would call me stupid, in the throes of illness, coughing blood onto my floor, calling you in the night just to ask if I can sleep on your floor, knowing full well you'd come to check on me out of concern. call me if you need anything, and I'll be there, you said, and you probably meant it. I hate seeing you hurt, you said, but why would you do as you did if that was true?

I hate to be helpless, my love, but I love being with you. I wish you'd throw me a lifeline, tell me everything I want to hear, but I know you won't. doesn't stop me wishing, though.

I wish it ended there. I wish I was the kind of person who could get closure like that. yet, here I am, at midnight on a sunday, unable to move because of the pain in her legs and stomach, and I am calling you.

[alirhi]

10 Sebastian roles as boyfriends

Because... I'm bored and I feel like it. 😂 Probably some spoilers for, like... everything? So yeah... That.

Putting it under here for easy scrolling:

10: Chase Collins

Who doesn't love a goofball? In the first half of the movie, Chase is basically perfect. He's sweet, funny, not all caught up in his ego, and actually pays attention to what the girls around him are saying, not just to what he wants to hear. If not for the whole... it was all an act to get close to Caleb and try to steal his magic thing, Chase would actually be a damn good high school boyfriend. He's adorable and would be a fun date, but he's also only 18 so best not to start making long-term plans lol. Also, y'know... the whole psycho revenge/power grab thing.

9 Jack Benjamin

Y'all. Y'all. Words cannot describe how much I love Jack. Pretty sure I've made this clear. As a person/character in general, he's absolutely in my Top 3 - not just of Sebastian's characters, but any character ever. ❤ But as a boyfriend? Boy's got baggage. It's what makes me so protective of him, but seeing as how he's trapped in the closet thanks to his overbearing homophobic family and the insane expectations heaped on him, as the show left him, he can't handle an honest relationship. He's too easily influenced by all the wrong people, poor babe.

8 Chris (Destroyer)

On paper, undercover cop sounds cool and exciting, but even if you ignore the fact that he, y'know, dies... Chris got in too deep and kinda lost the mission, so to speak. Best case scenario, you're his sexy partner and in on it all with him and end up on the lam for the rest of your lives. Worst case, this man lies for a living, so can you even trust him? And... yeah. The whole dead thing. Chris is hot af but getting involved with him is a recipe for disaster.

7 Ben

Min and Hathor have mercy, I love Ben! He's smart, he's snarky, he's caring and loyal... he's an absolute disaster. He's another one who seems allergic to honesty, until his lying and avoiding nearly kill his girlfriend. Not exactly relationship goals lol. Everything before totally was, though! Ben's adorable, and I love how he stayed up all night to protect his girlfriend (from a ghost/demon thing... with a baseball bat. I said he was smart, not perfect, okay? XD points for effort lol)

6 Mickey Henry

I. LOVE. MICKEY. Oml I love Mickey. He's a spazz and - even more so than Ben - an absolute disaster of a human being, but I love him. Pros for dating Mickey Henry: he's fun, he's carefree, he'll cook for you even though he's kinda bad at it lol, he loves his son and wants to be a good dad, he wants his partner to be happy and to love life as much as he does. Cons, and the reason he's not higher on the list: He's a pushover; easily influenced by the toxic people in his life, and it gets him into a lot of trouble. Being easily influenced by toxic dumpster fire of a human being Chloe almost lost him the partial custody of his son that he barely even had. He's an absolute sweetheart, but he's a complete man-child, and dating him would often feel more like raising him.

5 Frank "Suffer Buddy"

Come on! You know he and Mickey had to be back-to-back - they're practically the same character! 😂 Frank is Mickey... slightly more grown up. He's still a disaster, but he's respectful of boundaries, he's caring, he's funny in a dry, witty way that I just adore, and hoo lordy that man is a giver! 🥴🥵 Honestly, if he didn't smoke and didn't ditch Daphne in the middle of a party hours away from everything familiar to her surrounded by strangers to go do drugs, I'd call Frank perfect. He listened, he respected her wishes, he tried to keep some distance between them when he found out she'd gone on a date with his best friend (it failed utterly and brought us to the "damn that man's good with his mouth" portion of the movie lmao but still)... I don't have a whole lot of experience with men who actually give a shit, okay? So Frank is like a goddamn unicorn to me lmao. But that drug thing... That keeps him at the bottom of the Top 5 for me. Sorry, bb

4 Bucky

I can already hear everyone on here raging at me for placing Bucky so low on this list, but hear me out: I love this man. I love all four iterations of this man. Flirty 40s Bucky was a doll (fun date, not commitment material). Post-POW camp 40s Bucky had a fire to him that set me on fire. The Winter Soldier can choke me any damn day. Unf. And TFATWS Bucky... Oh, lady above, 2023 Bucky is a gem! He's sweet, snarky, and broken. He feels utterly, wretchedly alone in the world, and everyone around him, including his only friend, is telling him to "man up" and "make amends" for shit that was never his fault to begin with, rather than helping him come to terms with all that he's suffered and all that he's survived. Bucky needs and deserves love. A relationship with him would be so solid, if he found the right person... But it would take a fuck ton of work. He needs someone strong, patient, and more stubborn than he is to prod him until he finds a better therapist and actually opens up, and to keep him on track because even good therapy comes with homework. He does have to "do the work," Sam was right about that much, but he was way off base with what that "work" is. Bucky needs help and understanding, and he would be an amazing boyfriend... if he found someone with the strength to help him weather his nightmares and flashbacks, and help pull him out of this PTSD pit he's been in since 1943.

3 Chris Beck

Big brains turn me on, okay? 😂This man is an astronaut and a surgeon! Yes, please! Come here, you sexy genius! He's smart, he's funny - pretty sure Sebastian is incapable of playing anyone who's not delightfully snarky lol. He's pragmatic when he needs to be but there's also nothing he wouldn't do or risk for the ones he loves. This man is husband material and I cannot be convinced otherwise! So why isn't he #1? Cuz of the whole... spending years in space, thing. Super cool job and I'd be his biggest fan on the ground, but god damn, I would miss him while he's away!

2 TJ Hammond

Look, I'm gender fluid and he's a little bit bi 😂😂😂 Let me have my fantasy, okay? TJ's definitely got a lot of shit to work through, but love brings out the best in him. Before that fucking closeted shitbag broke his heart and stomped on it for good measure, TJ was clean and sober for months, he was happy, he was playing piano again, he was pulling himself together. Not only would he be an amazing boyfriend, but his partner would get the extra joy of getting to watch their love and devotion to him be the thing that saves this beautiful man's life. It's not healthy overall to tie your self worth and will to live to a relationship, but if he found the right person who would be there for him through all of life's shit and stick it out, I think he'd be okay. Even after his lowest point and without the support of his family, TJ still had a dream and he still chased it. He's not just the sweetest person to ever grace our screens, but he's ambitious and business-savvy, too. Keep him off drugs and watch this man take over the world, I'm telling you!

So why is TJ only #2? Well, besides the fact that he's like 99% gay and I have no bits he'd be interested in lmao, there's also the fact that this guy owns my heart:

1 Will Franklyn

And not just because we get to see him wet and mostly naked lol. Will is fucking perfect. I would die for this man... because he's already shown that he would die for his love. He almost fucking did, and they weren't even together yet! He's smart and very aware, he's a writer so we'd get to bond/geek out over books together, he's not all full of himself (self-deprecating humor ftw!) and he's willing to help a total stranger despite actual mortal peril, just because it's the right thing to do. Fierce, intelligent, sassy, strong-willed, and a flawless moral compass? YESYESYESYESYES! Forget boyfriend - let me MARRY this man! 😍🥰

[bokettochild]

That drabble was amazing, I love it. I'm also a greedy little crow and want to see the rest of the chain reacting to Leg's insane Leg Strenght. You don't have to make an entire drabble for it unless you want to, I'm just curious.

Not exactly where I was headed with this, but it happened, and I like it well enough.

I hope you enjoy, Anon!

Legend Thunderfoot Part 1

Four hasn’t stopped grinning like a mad man ever since the Yiga incident.

They have switched Hyrules twice since then, and Four still can’t look at him without a grin stealing over his face.

He’d like hat to stop.

So what, he can kill a man with his legs, everyone can do that! Okay, maybe not Four, but the smithy is short (Legend is too, but that’s beside the point) so it makes sense that he hasn’t done so before. But Twilight? The man who could probably sling Epona over his shoulder and still manage a light jog? Legend has no doubt in all of Hyrule and the lands beyond that Twilight could probably kill him just by knocking into him wrong.

Oh heavens, the mere thought of Time or Twilight accidentally knowing into him when they’re in battle is something he fears more than anything. He knows he’s weak, knows that he can’t lift a pot of soup or basket of washing without the use of an item. He knows that every muscle in his arm will scream if he picks something up, knows to never let the others touch his sword because they’ll probably launch it into space just by trying to pick it up.

But Four seems convinced that this isn’t the case. The smithy doesn’t even know how weak he is, in fact, he’s convinced himself that Legend is strong, for whatever reason, and as much as it’s nice not to have any of the others mock him, and to have someone admire him, he knows it will only last so long.

He hoped it would last a little longer though.

“Seriously?” Warriors rattles the bar of their cell. “Why even- why?”

“The royal guards hate me.” Legend drawls in response. He doesn’t even bother looking up from where he’s seated on the stone floor. “It happens from time to time.”

There are looks sent his way, but they aren’t anything he hasn’t seen before. “How do you get out?”

He shrugs. “Wait for them to be stupid, an item, sometimes I just chill until Ravio bails me out, it’s the closest thing you can get to a vacation around here.”

And he’s going to ignore the concern and pity in the gazes of the others as Twilight and Time both make worried noises.

“Considering those are not options,” Time muses. “What else do we have?”

The rancher kneels before the door, looking across the floor and the door itself. Legend wonders what he’s looking for; a passage? A dropped key? Such things aren’t likely in these circumstances, and the last time it had happened it had been because his guard dropped a lockpick for him on purpose (heaven’s bless Raven).

“No good.” Twilight sighs at last. “Last time I broke out of prison I-” The rancher cuts himself off sharply as heads spin his way, and Warriors graces him with a disbelieving and yet also disappointed look.

“Prison? You too, rancher?” Warriors crossed his arms and leans back on his heels. “I thought better of you honestly. Why?”

Twilight’s face says everything and nothing, eyes exhausted and full of regret as Wild and Wind both stare up at him with curiosity. “War of Twilight. I was captured in the war. I wasn’t in prison for committing a crime, Warriors, honest.”

“What kind of lock do we have?” Wind interjects, only for his face to fall and a light swear to escape at the answer he’s given. “I haven’t learned that one yet.”

Disregarding that statement, one that’s both worrying and comforting (because kids shouldn’t need to know these things but he’s glad Wind does anyway) he turns his gaze around them to stare at the rest of the cell. It’s been a while since he’s last tried to escape one of these, and the castle guards haven’t actually caught him in years, so things have changed since the last time.

His attention is drawn back to the group when Warriors shakes his head and motions at the bars. “Any chance of budging those? Smithy, you know about metal and stone, right? Care to take a peek?”

Never mind that Four isn’t the only smith in their group, but honestly, he doesn’t need that title as well.

“It’s moveable,” Four responds, after a few minutes of poking about and peering closely at where the metal rests in the earth. “A hard enough blow and it should move.”

He hates that Four’s eyes travel to him, but the others don’t seem to notice, instead each taking a turn and trying their hand at pushing and pulling against the metal bars. There’s harsh screeching as the metal drags across the ground. Slow, oh so painfully slow as Twilight pushed with all his might, only to fall back with a strained frown on his face and sweat pouring off his brow. “Anyone else got anything?”

Four’s voice is slow and expectant and, at the moment, entirely unwelcome. “Legend, how about you try?”

And seven sets of eyes turn to him expectantly, joining with the weight of Four’s blue as Legend glares back at all of them, a flush rising up his neck and dusting his cheeks as an irritated squeak escapes (he hates not being able to growl like Twilight can, he really does).

“Can’t.”

“Why not? Can’t hurt anything.” Wind pushes, oblivious to the shame that’s overtaken his companion.

Legend glares at Four, who looks positively smug as he grins back. “I’m-” He hesitates to say it, he really doesn’t want to admit it, he really doesn’t. But there are eyes on him, and they are waiting, expectant and not a little frustrated as they wait for him to answer already.

A huff breaks past his lips as he pointed grabs at one of the chains lying loose on the floor and fails to effectively pick it up.

He hates making a display of it, hates showing how weak he is, but it’s better than admitting it out loud, even though his face reddens and sweat beads as he finally heft the links of chain up a few inches off the ground.

“Har har.” Warriors mocks. “We’re being serious, Legend, we need out There's a whole camp of monsters we left unattended to out there and the longer we’re in here the more work it will be to find th-” Indigo hues cut him off as Legend glares.

He hates being weak, but being disbelieved is arguably worse. “I. Can’t” He raps out, sharp and pointed and angry. “I’m freaking incapable of lifting Wind, much less moving that shit. I-”

“Kick it.”

Sven sets of eyes and Time’s single eye all turn to a very smug looking Four, who has eyes only for Legend as he motions towards the bars.

“What?” He has no words, no answers, why would Four tell him to kick a bar he’s already said he can’t move?

“There’s no harm in trying, right?” The smithy presses, eyes twinkling indigo themselves, the faintest hint of plum at their edges. “Kick it.”

And, well... he can’t really compete with that.

It’s embarrassing as shit to walk up to the bars he can’t move, that he knows he can’t move, and still know he has to try. It’s worse that the others are watching, but Legend has never been one to do things half-assed, so he swings all the force he can into his kick and watches in absolute astonishment, along with all the others, as the bar comes crashing down to the ground with an echoing clatter.

Eight heroes stare in shock as Four calmly makes his way through the new exit, a smirk on his features. “See? Told you it would work.”

Legend appreciates the confidence Four has in him, but the ‘have Legend kick it” jokes didn’t stop for weeks and he’s going to make sure Four knows just how irritated he is with him for that.

Drop kicking the smithy across a cavern makes up for it though.

[loki-darkprince-odinson]

King Loki, I apologize for the rant but I would like some advice.

My father always makes me feel like complete garbage. He is always putting me down, never appreciates me, and makes my depression so much worse. I'm fixing up a house to move in with my friends but I'm still stuck at the house since my parents won't help me get my license or a car, much less a job. I cook, do dishes, take care of the pets, take out the trash, get the mail, do my laundry, wash towels, and help with their laundry. I also take care of my sick mother and while I'm currently on summer break, I'm going to college to become a clinical psychologist. Even then, my father will point out other things that I don't do, and expects me to clean the entire house every day. He always talks about how he needs to do everything around the house yet all he does is sleep, play video games, and watch television. He also says he works hard yet on many occasions he says he sits on his ass all day on his tablet. He also yells so much. I get scared every day when he starts yelling because I worry he may leave us, which he has threatened before, or he may actually hit us. He never has hit either my mother or I yet, and says he never would but he slams and throws things when angry at us so it's his way of showing us how much he wants to hit us, even if he doesn't realize it. However, not only do I have many responsibilities, My depression makes it difficult for me to do much, and he makes it worse. Even when I do try to clean the house he always makes comments such as: "About time." or "How long until it gets cleaned next time?" or "This was half assed, you didn't do it right." I have tried so hard to have a connection with him but I'm so tired of fighting for a relationship that he doesn't care about. I can't address my concerns with him because he will threaten to not take me to college and pay the bills. Do you have any advice to help me deal with my father until I can escape?

Best regards, Catrina.

“Catrina,” Loki drawls, in his smooth resonate voice. “I firstly must commend your good work. For caring for your ill mother, minding the household needs, and that you get up in the morning even if your soul is weary and your bones ache for a rest; that you keep on living even if you do not know how to anymore. Secondly, you have my deepest sympathies for your grievances. I am all too familiar with what it is like to seek the approval of a parent; only for there to be none in return.” His eyes were completely unfocused, yet his pallid features bore the most intense concentration as memories flowed unbidden.

He says nothing for a moment. Then, something in the edge of his mouth—and the corner of his eyes—resembled the ghost of a sad smile.

“Those whom I knew and called my mother and father are dead. That much is beyond dispute. They were not my real parents, but they raised me as their own. I daresay they loved me. That had been in dispute, at least in my own mind for awhile. I found out very late that my identity was a lie. Not Asgardian, not a son of Odin, I was completely unmade. That was how I felt when I learned of my true parentage. I was a fraud, a monster; it explained so much. It explained why I never felt like I fit in, why I would never be my brother's equal, why I would never get what I'd been promised my whole life.” His voice was soft, hoarse. Intent.

Loki raises his left hand and rests his forefinger against his lips as a line forms between his own eyebrows in thought.

“I have lingered around Midgard long enough to come to an understanding of how your minds tick. I shall do my best to give advice where I can.

Try, if you will, to put things into perspective. The most loving parents commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force one to destroy the person they really are: a subtle kind of murder. Even the most loving parents damage their children with the best intentions—to protect them, to guide them, to better them. In most cases, it would appear they do it by imprinting their own fears and prejudices on them.

The point is, parents are mere, imperfect people.

They have flaws, struggles and impaired judgement. They have both emotional and intellectual handicaps. Regardless of their parental role, they are afflicted by personal blockages and limitations.

But most of all, they are people who make mistakes, and who are terrified of being judged by their children.

Learn to see your difficult parent as just that; human. Learn to see their emotional immaturity as a type of disability.

With that in mind, you would do well to keep your expectations of them low.

In many ways the effect a difficult parent has on ones self is fueled by their feelings of injustice and the belief that things could be different, or ought to be different.

In other words, your expectations dictate how you feel.

You need to let go of your expectations and accept your parent for who they are.

You cannot expect someone with, say, a narcissistic personality, to act with empathy and kindness. No more than you can expect a scorpion not to sting.

Difficult parents are much easier to deal with when you accept that they will not change. So do not expect of them more than they are capable of, and you will not be disappointed or hurt.

Do not fall into the illusion of guilt, Catrina.” He warns. “A difficult parent loves nothing more than to make you feel like you’ve hurt them. Or, in a different scenario, like you’re a bad person if you do not do something they ask.

Do not fall for it. If they’re setting a guilt trap, calmly tell them that you do not appreciate being emotionally manipulated, and you will not tolerate it anymore.

Manipulators, and I should know, detest being called out on their dirty tricks.

If they continue to harass you, reiterate that you cannot do what they’re asking you to do this time, and you need them to respect that.

The trick is agreeing with everything they’re saying (how can they argue when you agree with them?) and re-stating your decision over and over again.

Now this part I find to be… far more easier said than done. You must let go of the need for your father's approval, Catrina. It goes without saying that every child needs and wants their parents’ approval. It is normal to want it, and it is normal to receive it.

Yet so many have to accept the fact that this is not going to happen. For whatever reason, their parent has chosen to withhold their approval. Some difficult parents do it as a form of punishment. While others hope to influence their child in the “right” direction.

Most likely, your father loves you, but they have a very warped idea of what parental love is.

In their misguided quest to make you into a version of themselves, they missed the chance to get to know you. And so they cannot appreciate you for the wonderful being that you are.”

He shrugs elegantly. “It is their loss. When you realize this and let go of the need for their approval, you will be able to start living your life in a whole new way.

When confronting your father, be direct and calm without expecting a specific response. That is the part you cannot control. The part that is within your control is letting your thoughts and feelings known, which is empowering.

Stick to the facts and use “I” statements such as, “I feel like my words do not matter to you when you constantly interrupt me” or “I feel scared and misunderstood when you yell at me”

Remember that manipulative parents are not known for their empathy. They will try to confuse you, go on the offensive, or assume the role of a victim.

Do not allow them to bully you into submission by invoking guilt or pity. State your case in a calm and polite manner, and stay cool regardless of their response.

Your goal is to be honest about your feelings, and to make it clear that you will not tolerate certain behaviors.” He softly clears his throat.

“Last but not least, an unhappy alternative is forgoing the relationship that is too harmful. I know, a parent is not someone you can so easily cut out of your life. But if all else fails and your father continues to cause you psychological harm, then this may very well need to be taken into considerable consideration; at least for the foreseeable future. Sometimes it is the only logical recourse.

A parent that is fundamentally incapable of showing love and support, unable to see the error of their ways after numerous attempts to communicate how their behavior or words affect you, consistently dismissive, demeaning or critical, manipulative in a habitual manner, punishing and cruel whenever you disobey, are disrespectful of your boundaries and using threats and intimidation to get what they want is a destructive force that will continue to tear you down until you put a stop to it.

It is not an easy feat, my dear. The parent-child bond is hardwired into the brain, which means children get attached to even the most awful of parents.

But consider the cost of having that toxic relationship in your life—stress breeds anxiety, depression, internalized feelings of inadequacy, and failed personal relationships.

I wish you all the best, Catrina. I truly do.”