#not putting his name because spoilers (and cause everyone calls him captain anyway)

[do-you-know-this-queer-character]

Do you know this queer character?

The Captain is Gay and uses he/him pronouns!

[kokororyuu]

miles apart [levi ackerman x reader]

synopsis: “you’re going to die,” “i know,” “you’re dying,” “i know, levi, i’m sorry,”

warnings ⚠️: major character death(s), SPOILERS up to season three, slight suggestive themes (its brief!!), brief description of gore

word count: 3.8k

author’s note: no, because,,, this was my first levi fanfic, and i’m immensely proud of it ‼️ if we ignore the “suggestive” part 😩😩 anyway, have fun reading, lovebugs <33

PART TWO: once more

whatever just happened, had happened too fast, and now both you and levi were laying side by side, miles apart from everyone else and the chaos that caused this whole mess in the first place.

you’re both injured bad from the war, and the stench of blood, both humans and titans alike, lays thick in the air. you find yourself nearly suffocating in it as you cough up what seems to be more blood, it’s metallic taste coating your lips and tongue in red.

you can barely feel your arms and legs, and you’re pretty sure they’re either broken or torn off from the fight. you pull your heavy lids open and stare blearily at the night sky, how many hours had passed since you two had been laying here like this?

you turn your head slowly, hearing the multiple cracks your joints made in the effort as your eyes trailed to levi’s face. he’s still in the same position, facing the sky with empty, soulless eyes. you reckon he was pondering something, how long were we gonna stay here? when will someone arrive to help us?

“levi?” you croak out, and he lets out a little rumble of acknowledgement. “are you okay?” what a stupid question... with how levi is, he definitely isn’t, but he was sure to make it seem like he was. he nods to the best of his ability, though he isn’t faring much better than you. gashes that gush with blood cut across his body in what seems to be parallel and equal in length, claws, of some sort, you assume. “good,” you whisper so softly that he almost doesn’t catch the murmured word.

your life seems to be flashing before your eyes quite slowly for the amount of time you’ve spent here bleeding out beside the man.

you recall the first time you caught him off guard.

it was a complete accident. as a member of levi’s squadron, you worked under him as a subordinate and did as he said, after all, he had chosen you to be on his team, and you put as much trust in him as he did in you.

you were bringing him some tea after you had dropped off a huge stack of paperwork in his office. you knew he needed it, after all, it had only been a few days after your most recent expedition and paperwork was a bore if you ever knew one.

a simple teapot and cup of black tea rested on the tray in your hands as you made your way from the kitchen to his office, acknowledging a few cadets that would respectfully greet you before going on their way. when you had finally made it to his door, you knocked gently before waiting for his usual question of your name and reason for entering.

a few seconds, maybe minutes passed, and you were beginning to think he wasn’t even there, but you hadn’t want the tea to go to waste, so you hesitantly pushed the door open with your foot, entering the sparkling clean room with tray in hand.

“captain levi?” you nearly bit your tongue (oluo would have laughed in your face if you did before biting down on his own) and froze with your head peeking inside the room at the sight of the man leaning his head against the back of his chair, his eyes closed and his usual frown wiped off his face.

it had you in a wonder, surprised that even humanity’s strongest (and grouchiest) soldier could have a face as calm as the one on his as he slept. you stepped as quietly as you could toward his desk, setting the tea down with care before you nearly jumped out of your skin when a hand wrapped around your wrist.

your eyes traveled up the scarred and rough hand, up the toned arm, and looked straight into narrowed grey eyes. “what are you doing here?”

“got you tea, captain,” your nerves were calm now, and you spoke with a grin, “thought you would need it with all the paperwork commander tosses at you,”

levi’s hand lingered on your wrist a little longer before he pulled away and carried the steaming cup to his lips in his strange cup hold that you’ve tried to mimic yet still can’t get right. he drank a little, his face ever so stoic. “tastes like shit, brat,” he said, though he made no move to drop the cup back into the tray and continued to sip away at the red orange liquid.

“thought you’d say that,” you turned to leave after saluting him, your hand wrapping around the doorknob before a mischievous impulse lit in you once more, “you know, captain,” he didn’t even glance up from the papers on his desk. “you look cute when you’re sleeping,” his gaze snapped up at that, and he was about to chew you out for making the comment, but to his dismay, you were already gone, having gotten the amusing response from him that you wanted.

there were many times after that where you’d make a little comment here and there, only to get an icy glare and a click of the tongue from levi, which wasn’t a problem to you at all, if anything, you found it the best part. the way he’d scowl at you and turn away, only to let you get away with it the very next day. it was like a little game the two of you would play, and you were winning if eye rolls, embarrassed blushes hidden behind callused hands, and, “tch,”’s counted as prizes.

you would’ve never thought he’d bite back, especially this far into the game.

“captain levi~!” you drew out his name with a little hop in your step. he didn’t stop walking, if anything, his pace sped up as he tried to leave you in the hallway. “captain!” you groaned childishly and ran after him. he turned the corner and into his office, leaving the door ajar. you grinned, it seemed he knew well enough you wouldn’t stop for a closed door. you opened it as soon as your hand touched the cool wood, and sang out, “levi~” you saw him standing by his desk and looking down at the papers that littered it. “i’ve got another joke for you—”

“—if you keep this up, i might actually get angry,” you halted in your tracks and clamped your mouth shut, angry? oh no, you weren’t trying to make him angry, only annoy him if anything. you knew, everyone knew to not get on levi’s bad side, and after seeing the man kick the titan shifter boy from the 104th cadets merciless, it’d be terribly stupid of you to try and anger him.

he dragged his fingertips across the tabletop and looked up through hooded eyes, “might even punish you,” you were stuck in a stupor at his words and how they obviously had implications for something else.

“but i guess you’d like that, hm? i wouldn’t want give you that satisfaction,” he seemed pleased with the way your cheeks flamed up and your jaw stayed dropped in shock. after he grabbed whatever he needed from his desk, he walked by you with a sly quirk of his lips, dragging a hand up to close your agape mouth. “close the door after you leave,” he called out before he disappeared out the door and down the hall.

-

from there on, your relationship had changed drastically. this game now had two players, and that new addition was the original target of the game himself. the teasing and playful jokes continued on for days, weeks, and you were having so much fun that you barely realized how much some people were noticing, including a certain bespectacled one.

“hey, hange!” you plopped next to them as you watched them fiddle with a little gadget. “what’s this?” you eyed curiously as hange laughed.

“my new creation! i’m trying to make something erwin asked for to help with his arm. you nodded, understanding immediately. the commander had lost his arm when the scouts went to save eren from a kidnapping. there was a few moments of silence before hange asked, “so… you and levi?”

you opened your mouth to retort but they beat you to it, “don’t deny it! even eren can tell, and he’s as dense as a rock!” you cowered from their accusing finger before huffing out a sigh.

“you know it doesn’t work like that, hange,” the mood dampened with your honest but hurtful words. you were right, it didn’t. with a world of titans and destruction, war like this, there would never be a second of peace, of life, of freedom. you could be alive and happy one day and then die and suddenly gone forever the next. and with levi being an ackerman, he was bound to survive longer than you, you just didn’t want to cause him more unnecessary pain.

hange hummed under their breath, “you’re right, but if it were me, i’d rather die knowing i had the chance and took it, than die letting it slip between my fingers,” they continued to tinker with the gadget as you pondered quietly on their words. they were right, but so were you, and now it was just up to the risk both sides were willing to take. what would happen if you ever confessed these buried feelings of yours to your terribly stoic captain?

-

in the end, you never said anything, at all. the two of you stayed at this sort of flirting and joking around type state. it was comfortable, you concluded, though you had to be honest, there were a few close calls where you felt you blushed too much, said too much, or gasped a little too loud when his touch lingered on you for too long.

you hadn’t said a word about your feelings for the man, and neither did he.

-

levi didn’t know when his heart had decided to let you in.

it was probably after erwin had passed away on a roof of a building with a gaping hole in his side that colored his cape and the white bandages around his abdomen red.

he brought his body back for a proper burial, but even then, levi couldn’t cry, nor let a single tear slip down his cheek. for a few weeks, even if he seemed put together, there was a heavy feeling that resided in his chest. no matter if he tried to sleep it away or drown himself in paperwork, it never left him.

it had been a rough night. there were complications with the imports from a faraway town in sina, and while hange was busy with things as the newly appointed commander, levi had to deal with the papers that came with the conflict.

he didn’t know how long he had been sitting before the fireplace in the mess hall, scratching away at the parchment under the warmth of the flickering fire that casted a warm orange hue around the room.

he clicked his tongue as another wave of aches hit his head before rubbing at his temples. erwin would’ve been better at handling this shit… his brow furrowed at his thoughts, you know better than that, there’s no bringing him back, you made the choice, levi.

levi didn’t regret his choice, but he had guessed the heavy presence of death had just stuck with him a little tighter this time around. it was fine, it would pass, at least, that was what he told himself.

during his turmoil, you had entered the mess hall as quietly as you could, “captain levi?” he looked up from the papers and pulled his hand away from his face with a quirked brow. “i brought you tea,” you spoke softly as to not agitate him any further. “i hope it tastes better than last time, i practiced,” you sent him a lopsided smile that you hoped would ease his frown, but instead, it brought the opposite.

the lines on his face became deeper as he scowled, “i don’t have time right now,” and the grumble of your name right after sounded harsh on both yours and even his ears. it was now your turn to pout. you definitely weren’t trying to mess around with him right now, not with all the stress and the recent death of one of his closest friends.

you sat there across from him at the table in silence for a few moments as he penned the paper. what could make him feel better? you thought quietly to yourself, your eyes raking over levi in search of something, any indicator to help him. a sudden idea popped in your head as you stood, making your way to stand behind him as you watched his eyes never leave the documents. “what are you doing?”

you reached over and plucked the pen from his hand, placing it down on the table and ignoring his glare, “just relax, levi, i’m gonna try and sort out these tense ass muscles of yours,” as soon as the words popped out of your mouth, your hands began to press into his shoulders, eliciting a little sound of surprise from levi. he almost immediately tensed back up at the foreign feeling but relaxed to the best of his abilities after a few pointed words from you.

“i’m not just here to get you tea, you know?” you worked out a knot in his neck, watching as his head lolled to the side to give you more room to work. “i had the same training as you, and i know how to handle paperwork, you could always ask if you need the help,” he hummed at your offer, and you only chuckled before getting back to his tense muscles.

levi let himself relax, more so than he probably ever had. your hands made their way up the base of his neck, and he let out a little sigh. he didn’t think this would feel this good, and he was considering what he could do to pay you back before realizing. what was the need to? you were doing the work of a subordinate for a superior, there was no need for him to treat you to anything.

but there was something that made levi realize that it wasn’t true, no matter how much every fiber in his body wanted to reject the idea. you were different, in your own weird way, and he couldn’t place his finger on it yet, but he decided he’d find out along the way.

“alright, you can work with me starting tomorrow, meet me here after dinner. if you’re late, i’m not letting you help again,” you smiled victoriously and pat his shoulders to signify you were done massaging them.

“alright then! see you tomorrow, captain,” you saluted him and shuffled out of the mess hall to leave him to his work.

the man held back a chuckle, sipping on the now lukewarm tea by his side. he had to admit, you were getting better at brewing his favorite drink.

levi’s heart felt a little lighter that night.

-

the two of you were almost impossibly closer after that. early mornings were spent with hange at important meetings and gatherings, most of the days were spent listening to hange rant about titans and ridiculous (but hilarious) and sometimes even useful plans, and late nights would be spent on paperwork and idle chatter by the warm fireplace in the mess hall.

the two of you would talk about nothing and everything, sometimes levi letting you talk his ear off as he added comments here and there or choosing to bask in each other’s silence as the flames beside you two crackled.

there were nights you fell asleep at the table, only to wake up in the middle of the night with a blanket that looked suspiciously like the one levi refused to share with you the night before around your shoulders that smelled of fresh laundry and lemons.

-

levi remembered all these little moments, including the time he had to yank a paper from under your arm to save it from your impending drool, or the multiple times he draped his cotton blanket over you and pulled it around your shoulders, his hands hesitating to pick off the dust that had resided on your cheek before gently brushing it off you and holding his breath when you’d twitch or move from his touch.

he still couldn’t really understand how it happened really, but spending time with you made him realize how much he liked the way you smiled at him no matter how annoyed he was with you, and the way you talked to him like he wasn’t humanity’s strongest soldier.

he felt normal, and strangely free.

and for some reason, he felt that if you ever disappeared from his sight, he’d lose this light feeling in his chest that outshined the bitter emotions he was always burdened with.

he didn’t want to lose you.

levi huffs, trying to control his unsteady breathing. there’s a feeling of discomfort that settles in his chest, and he’s not sure if it’s from just the cuts and bruises he obtained from the crash. you’re treating him like he’s fragile, like glass, and he hates it, sure, he’s broken, even he knows that, but he hates it.

humanity’s strongest soldier… he scoffs internally at himself, well, he feels pretty pathetic at the moment. he then outwardly scowls, gripping onto the pants of his torn uniform.

“you’re going to die,” he doesn’t mean for his words to sound so sharp, and he’s sure that his tone hurts you more than the gashes that litter your torso.

“i know,” he’s right, it hurts, and they seem to cut deeper than your wounds, as if someone struck your heart with a knife and twisted the blade.

his voice nearly breaks when he says this, but he stays... strong, “you’re dying,”

“i know, levi. i’m sorry,”

you know this man has been through so much, too much. he lost too many, has seen too much, he’s been through so many tragedies, and you still haven’t seen him cry, not once, and not now as you lay beside him, shivering and keeping your eyes open enough to watch him glare up at the night sky.

one last attempt, you think to yourself. you need to get his attention before it’s too late, before you fade away and disappear, but you can already feel your conscious slipping through your fingertips and your eyes drooping.

“levi…” your voice sounds pained when he stays turnt away from you and looks up at the moon, “i’m proud of you,” levi’s heart squeezes and so does his eyes, he doesn’t want to hear your soft voice right now, nor look at your mangled body, or hear the shouts of soldiers swinging around on their odm gear or the battle cries as they slice into titans’ napes.

you bite back a cry at his act of ignorance to your pleas for him to just look at you, and fall silent as your energy drains along with the blood that comes from you and him and soak into the earth. you meant those words, you mean what you said, and you beg him with your eyes focused on his high cheekbones to just spare you a glance while his stay glued to the twinkling stars.

it becomes so quiet, that levi begins to think you’ve already kicked the bucket with how he can barely hear your breathing.

he’s already preparing himself to do what he usually does, steel himself against the terrible emotions of survivor’s guilt and sorrow. every time he feels the twinge of depression and desperation creep up and wrap itself around his heart, he escapes to his mind, the logical part of him. the part that keeps him miles apart from everything, distance, safety.

he does it so much that you know, and you can tell he’s doing it right now with how tense his brow is and how the nails of the hand which lays between you digs into his palm. he’s closing himself off again, even after all these years you’ve spent together as comrades, partners in crimes, and what you hope was as friends.

you try to distract yourself some more, with anything really, the way his hair, though covered in blood seems to flow seamlessly to the sides of his head, revealing his undercut, and his eyes that stare silently into the endless blue sky, or the familiar smell of citrus and fresh laundry that you get from him even with the layers of smoke that are wafting from the ongoing battle burning your lungs or the smell of blood still seeping out from the both of you.

you want to hold onto the lingering hope that he’ll turn to you and at least say one last goodbye, or say those unspoken feelings he’s always hidden behind cool grey eyes, but he doesn’t say a word.

time is running out, and you need to say this, say this before you leave him like everyone else. levi’s fingers twitch when he hears you take in a sudden breath, your voice coming out quiet, weak, frail.

“the moon is beautiful tonight, isn’t it?” levi’s eyes open, and his head snaps toward you, and he regrets it, so bad. he manages to catch the exact moment the light, the life, fades from your very eyes he always thought were so gorgeous.

he’s lost his light.

you’re gone.

levi feels this terrible grip on his heart that makes him lose his breath and his head pound worse than it already is, and he chokes on the blood that gushes from his lips. his hand reaches out to you weakly, his arms, losing their strength, and he barely has the energy to keep his eyes open.

he almost can’t bring himself to do it, but he leans forward to press a shaky and hesitant kiss on the top of your head that he hopes conveys all the unsaid confessions he could’ve showered you with before your passing. his lips are warm, while your body turns pale and blue, and he finds it ironic how someone as kind and bright as you now seems dull in comparison to him.

as unshed tears pool at the corners of his eyes, your lifeless ones bore into his for the last time before he pushes them close with a touch of his hands over your eyes.

his heart, it hurts so bad, more than it ever has, and no matter how much he tries to push down the lump in his throat or the burning of his eyes and heart, it persists. he slowly falls back into his previous position, your corpse beside him losing its warmth and his steel grey eyes facing the moon once more.

the fuzzy lines around the full moon start to blur as he blinks a few times, the hues of white mixing with the blue of the sky, “it is…”

and finally, he lets himself cry.

explanations

“the moon is beautiful tonight, isn’t it?”

this is a more poetic way to say “i love you” in japanese :D

“it is...”

this is essentially “i love you too” in reply to “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?”

[veliseraptor]

Hi! Can you give a brief spoilery summary of the Untamed? I just read [the pretties from your posts] died? Oh no. I tried getting information through google but it’s confusing for someone who doesn’t know the characters.

oh lord. there are all kinds of ‘brief summaries of the Untamed’ out there but I’ve always found them vaguely irritating so...I guess that means it’s time for my comeuppance in the form of having to do it myself? I’ll do my best.

I didn’t know how detailed you wanted me to get so I decided to get pretty detailed, since you did ask for spoilery. so this is like. entirely spoilers. spoilers for everything.

also, you can use, if it’s helpful, my brief character overview (‘brief’) which includes some plot information, and could be useful as cross reference also. I’m playing pretty fast and loose with a lot of terminology for the sake of intelligibility, because otherwise this would get even longer and have a lot more links.

also, because you asked me specifically for this, it’s going to have some bias. I tried to keep my interpretive commentary to a relative minimum? but. uh. yeah.

the briefest basic plot overview is (going off The Untamed canon, which you will also see abbreviated as CQL from the pinyin transliteration of the Chinese title (Chen Qing Ling)):

Wei Wuxian, a cultivation (think, loosely, magic) prodigy and creator of his own particular style of cultivation, dies reviled by most of the known world. Sixteen years later he’s raised from the dead by Mo Xuanyu, an outcast and the bastard son of one of the leaders of the main sects of the cultivation world, in order to take revenge on Mo Xuanyu’s enemies (specifically his abusive family and ~an unknown person~).

And here is where we get into the details.

Pretty much immediately upon Wei Wuxian’s resurrection, people start dying at Mo Manor, before Wei Wuxian has even done anything, because of (it turns out) a very angry spirit of a semi-sentient weapon. Wei Wuxian books it out of town after his old best friend/crush Lan Wangji shows up to help the Lan ducklings he’s shepherding (including most notably Lan Sizhui and Lan Jingyi, the only named characters of that bunch), only to wind up running into him again on the road - and not only him, but his orphaned nephew (shorthand, go with it) Jin Ling (Wei Wuxian was responsible for his parents’ deaths) and Jiang Cheng, his martial brother who (at least according to rumor) killed him sixteen years ago and still bears a hell of a grudge. In order to save Jin Ling, Wei Wuxian summons the “Ghost General” Wen Ning, who was supposed to be destroyed and whose presence confirms his identity to a very pissed off Jiang Cheng. Lan Wangji recognizes Wei Wuxian as well. Wei Wuxian passes out.

followed any of that? no? that’s fine, because now we’re heading into a thirty episode flashback that’ll clarify some things. (but not before you forget a whole bunch of things from the first two episodes.)

I’m going to split this into arcs. I’m also going to put this under a read more, because...yeah, this came out to just a little over 10,500 words. I’m...sorry.

have fun?

Cloud Recesses Summer School Arc

The time card says “sixteen years earlier” but it isn’t sixteen years earlier because that would make no sense, but it’s better to give up on timeline now or you’ll just drive yourself nuts.

This is the part of the show where you meet the main characters, some of whom you saw earlier (notably Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian’s younger sort-of brother), and some of whom you only know from reference (Jiang Yanli, Wei Wuxian’s older sort-of sister) and some of whom are significantly important (Lan Wangji). You also meet Jin Zixuan, the snotty heir to the Jin Sect, who will be important later. Jiang Yanli is clearly into him and he seems to very much not return the feelings.

At this point, there are five main sects that the characters belong to. They are (with the characters you’ve met from them so far: the Jiang Sect (Jiang Cheng, Wei Wuxian, and Jiang Yanli), the Nie Sect (Nie Huaisang, a flighty and sort of feckless fellow), the Jin Sect (Jin Zixuan, his social skills translator Mianmian), the Lan Sect (Lan Wangji, his brother Lan Xichen) as well as the Wen Sect (more on them in a moment). Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian meet and immediately...something. Wei Wuxian wants to make friends, and Lan Wangji seems to emphatically Not.

You also meet Meng Yao, who is Nie Huaisang’s brother Nie Mingjue’s right hand man, and also the bastard son of Jin Guangshan (the leader of Jin Sect). He is also the son of (using the words of literally everyone) a prostitute, which people remind him of at every possible moment, in case he was in danger of forgetting, or something. He and Lan Xichen have kind of a moment. 

Later on, members of the Wen Sect, led by Wen Chao storm in, posturing disrespectfully, and drop off Wen Qing to “learn” (but secretly she has a mission looking for the Yin Iron/Metal). The Wen are ascendant in power and seem to be flexing their muscle looking for trouble. 

Wen Qing comes as a set with her brother Wen Ning - the pair of them are from sort of...a secondary branch of the main Wen family, and she’s being coerced into supporting Wen Ruohan despite being not thrilled about it. Wei Wuxian bonds with Wen Qing’s younger brother Wen Ning, who has a weird situation that makes him vulnerable to possession (this is important later).

At one point Wei Wuxian proposes - in response to a question! He’s just being innovative! - to put it simply, necromancy, which is, to say the least, not a hit. Remember that for later!

Eventually, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian end up falling by accident into some ice caves, where they learn from one of Lan Wangji’s ancestors (Lan Yi, she’s cool) about the Yin Iron, of which she has a piece. It is an spiritually corrupted metal that can’t be destroyed so it was broken into pieces and hidden in different places. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji resolve jointly to find the other pieces.

Wei Wuxian, Jiang Yanli, and Jiang Cheng (henceforth “the Yunmeng siblings”) are picked up early by Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng’s dad (Jiang Fengmian) because Wei Wuxian causes problems both on purpose and not. Wei Wuxian, however, puts together that Lan Wangji is going off on his own chasing the Yin Iron, and ditches the rest of his family to go help.

Yin Iron Hunt Arc

Wei Wuxian meets up with Lan Wangji, who is not thrilled to see him (at least, apparently). They run into Nie Huaisang, who joins them. They come to a town where everyone seems to have vanished and there is nothing fishy going on in the cave with the statue that looks like a dancing lady at all. Meanwhile, Jiang Cheng leaves home to go track down Wei Wuxian and bring him back.

The statue comes to life, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji fight together to defeat it, and then a bunch of...undead villagers (sort of, they get better) attack them, only to be lured away by Wen Qing playing a flute (this ability will never be brought up again). Jiang Cheng reveals himself as having been hanging out watching this go down. Ultimately, by killing the Stygian Pigeon that belongs to Wen Chao, the villagers are freed and they move on.

After a brief stopover in a village, they hear some rumors about a haunted house and take off to go check it out. When they get there, everyone is dead and Xue Yang is on the roof just kind of vibing. Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan manage to get him pinned down and taken captive. This is important and not just because I said so.

Nie Huaisang, who Wei Wuxian, Jiang Cheng, and Lan Wangji ditched in town, arrives here with Meng Yao, who proposes bringing Xue Yang to Nie Mingjue for justice purposes (which when I write it like that sounds...um. moving right along), which is where everyone heads next, less Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan who have their own things to do. Wei Wuxian realizes that Xiao Xingchen had the same master as his mother, and gets really excited about it; it’s adorable.

They go to Nie Mingjue, who is talked out of executing Xue Yang because they’re trying to find out where he put the Yin Iron (which they figure he has, because reasons. there are reasons, I just don’t feel like going into it.) Lan Wangji leaves in the night without saying goodbye, and then Wen Chao arrives. He is accompanied by Wen Zhuliu, who is called the Core-Melting Hand for reasons that will be important later. There’s a fight, Xue Yang gets loose, and Nie Mingjue finds Meng Yao in a very compromising position (killing a captain of the guard and among a bunch of other dead bodies). He kicks Meng Yao out of the Nie Sect.

Meanwhile, the Wens attack Cloud Recesses. Lan Xichen’s uncle makes him leave to preserve himself and the most important texts. Everyone retreats to a cave that’s hidden and walled off; Su She (who was introduced briefly earlier) caves to threats to his life and tells the Wens how to get into the Lan’s cave sanctuary. Lan Wangji returns with Lan Yi’s Yin Iron and gives it and himself up to Wen Chao’s older brother Wen Xu to spare everyone else.

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian leave for home (Lotus Pier). We witness family dynamics, which are terrible. The Wens want everyone to send their kids, specifically their heirs, to be reeducated in Wen territory, but they’re not hostages, we swear. No, really.

Reeducation Camp Arc

To reeducation camp with the Wens we go! Where Lan Wangji is not looking so hot, and Wei Wuxian rapidly causes problems on purpose to try to get to talk to him, but mostly just ends up getting himself tossed in a dungeon where he gets attacked by a very bad puppet of a dog. Wen Qing has told Wen Ning not to associate with Wei Wuxian because they’re on thin ice with their boss (Wen Ruohan), but Wen Ning sneaks him some medicine against Wen Qing’s orders anyway.

They go on a hunt, with the non-Wens featuring as bait. Here is where you meet Wen Chao’s main squeeze Wang Lingjiao, who was formerly a servant. Everyone ends up in a cave that contains a creature whose name is unfortunately translated as “Tortoise of Slaughter.” we’ll go with “Xuanwu of Slaughter” instead, it feels better. Wen Chao and his accompanying entourage make a run for it and ditch everyone else in the cave; they manage to sneak out but Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji end up trapped with no way out. They team up and kill the Xuanwu, partially because Wei Wuxian acquires a very cursed sword. Afterward, he is feverish and asks Lan Wangji to sing - enter Wuji! their theme. You see Lan Wangji mouth that it is called “Wangxian” before Wei Wuxian passes out. (Yes, he did name his composition after their ship name. Aww.)

I’ve skated through that very fast but it is important because it’s like...the point where they seriously bond in a major way and it’s all very...like, there was only one bed only they’re trapped in a cave and injured and forced to rely on each other. So not actually really like that.

Wei Wuxian comes around outside of the cave with Jiang Cheng and Jin Zixuan, who brought help to rescue him and Lan Wangji; Lan Wangji, however, is gone.

Oh Shit Things Went Downhill Fast Arc

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian go back to Lotus Pier, where Wei Wuxian is in big trouble with Jiang Cheng’s mother (Yu Ziyuan, seen later emotionally terrorizing all her children), who already doesn’t like him and accuses him of bringing trouble down on them by defying the Wens. Jiang Cheng’s dad is terrible, Wei Wuxian reaffirms that he and Jiang Cheng will be Together Forever, you, the viewer, know that is absolutely not how that’s going to go.

Word comes that the Wen have attacked one of the smaller sects, and Jiang Cheng’s dad (Jiang Fengmian) goes with Jiang Yanli to talk to Jin Guangshan about how to deal with the Wens.

Then Wang Lingjiao arrives with word that they’re gonna be in big trouble if they don’t punish Wei Wuxian right now. Yu Ziyuan uses her lightning whip to beat the shit out of Wei Wuxian, but Wang Lingjiao wants her to cut off his hand. Then she makes the mistake of saying that they’ll be making Lotus Pier a supervisory office of the Wens, thank you.

Yu Ziyuan reacts...poorly, Wang Lingjiao calls on her backup Wen Zhuliu (and everyone else); seeing the writing on the wall Yu Ziyuan grabs Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, puts them on a boat, and sends them away, bequeathing her sick-ass lightning whip (Zidian) to Jiang Cheng. They run into Jiang Fengmian and Jiang Yanli; Jiang Fengmian adds Jiang Yanli to the boat full of crying children and goes to sail back to Lotus Pier.

Lotus Pier falls, everybody dies, Jiang Cheng goes semi-catatonic and then disappears, having been captured by the Wens after going back for his parents’ bodies. (Which is more important than it probably sounds, from a Western perspective.) Wei Wuxian follows him and finds Wen Ning, who smuggles Jiang Cheng out and takes him, Wei Wuxian, and Jiang Yanli to Wen Qing for safekeeping.

Jiang Cheng wakes up; his golden core (the...thing that lets him do superpowered things, let’s go with that) was destroyed by Wen Zhuliu. Melted, if you will. And it’s not the kind of thing you can just, you know, fix. He descends into absolute despair as Wei Wuxian looks frantically for a way to fix it - and finds one! Though Wen Qing is not happy about it, she still agrees.

at this point we see the return of an old friend! Song Lan, who has a bloody bandage over his eyes, but has eyes that work, despite the fact that he was blinded by Xue Yang who also killed his entire temple. He explains that Xiao Xingchen said that he was taking Song Lan to his master Baoshan Sanren, the immortal who can cure anything, and doesn’t remember anything else.

Wei Wuxian takes Jiang Cheng to Baoshan Sanren to get his core back. Psych! It’s a lie that he totally made up to explain the fact that he’s actually getting his own core transplanted into Jiang Cheng in a highly experimental procedure. Importantly, Wei Wuxian does not tell Jiang Cheng this.

Post-surgery, rather battered Wei Wuxian gets caught by Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao, who torture him and then throw him into a place called the Burial Mounds, which is more or less what it sounds like, is Very Cursed, and from which no one has emerged alive. Then this happens:

(I want you to appreciate how hard I’ve tried to not put any screencaps in here. but I had to do this one. I just had to.)

and you go oh shit and also well that’s sexy.

Jiang Cheng, delighted to have his core back, descends the mountain only to find that Wei Wuxian is...not there.

Cool! That seems fine.

Sunshot Campaign Arc

Timeskip to three months later! The rest of the sects have allied together to take down the Wen Sect (this is what ‘Sunshot Campaign’ refers to, because the symbol of the Wens is a sun). Things aren’t looking good for the Wens, including Wen Chao and Wang Lingjiao. Wang Lingjiao hallucinates to the sound of a flute and ends up killing herself. Meanwhile, Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng have teamed up to look for Wei Wuxian. On their way, they start finding piles of Wen bodies killed in a mysterious and grotesque manner involving an unfamiliar method of cultivation.

(Side note: around now is where Jiang Cheng frees Wen Qing from where she was imprisoned by the Wens for being a dirty traitor during the war and gives her the comb of pining he bought way back in the Cloud Recesses arc, telling her that he will help her if she asks. This isn’t...exactly important, except I wanted to note it.)

Eventually, they find a house where Wen Chao has holed up with Wen Zhuliu, and watch as it’s revealed that he has gone through some nasty shit, is terrified and traumatized and badly injured. Ominous signs: begin to happen! Flames going out: happen! Shots of someone climbing slowly and menacingly up stairs: happen! 

Yeah, it’s Wei Wuxian. New and improved, darker and meaner and very sexy about it, and with a new sick-ass flute. He starts attacking Wen Chao, and when Wen Zhuliu moves to attack Wei Wuxian Jiang Cheng jumps down and hangs Wen Zhuliu with Zidian. Lan Wangji confronts Wei Wuxian about this darker and meaner version and Wei Wuxian breaks up with him; Lan Wangji leaves Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian to kill Wen Chao because the family that murders together stays together!

(They won’t, but.)

The war goes on, but the tides have turned, and the Wens are losing. Both of Wen Ruohan’s sons are dead. Soup drama happens here, which I don’t need to explain fully but it is clear that Wei Wuxian is extremely emotionally unstable, and also will no longer carry his sword despite everyone telling him he needs to carry his sword. All is not well with the Wei Wuxian! But nobody knows why. Lan Wangji’s repeated “LET ME FIX YOU” overtures are not well received. Lan Wangji also has a nice conversation about how the Lan rules did not prepare him for moral complexity.

Eventually Nie Mingjue proposes going to attack Wen Ruohan on his own while the others move on the Wen stronghold at Nightless City (at this point, they have received a map of Wen defenses from a ~mysterious spy~). Nie Mingjue is captured, and it is revealed that Meng Yao decided that after getting kicked out of Qinghe he could find a better boss somewhere else. Outside, an undead army shows up to kick everyone else’s ass. Things don’t look good for our heroes!

Wei Wuxian brings out his secret weapon the Yin Tiger Seal and...takes over the undead army. This is very troubling to everyone involved, but it does bring Wen Ruohan out to see what the deal is. Wei Wuxian delivers one of the sickest lines in the entire show:

(i’m restraining myself! trust me! i am!)

so yeah, that’s a normal and reassuring thing to say.

And then Meng Yao stabs Wen Ruohan in the back. And that’s it for Wen Ruohan! Our major antagonist is dead! Surely everything will be fine now.

Well We Won the War, Now What Arc

[cracks knuckles] and here’s where the politics starts.

Ready and totally psyched to step into the power vacuum left by the fall of the Wens is Jin Guangshan! Leader of the Jin Sect, least impacted by the war by vitue of joining up late. He recognizes Meng Yao as his son now that he’s, like, someone that is valuable to him politically, and Meng Yao gets a commensurate name change > Jin Guangyao. Pretty much immediately Jin Guangshan starts manuevering to consolidate power - pushing to marry Jiang Yanli and Jin Zixuan, pushing to get access to Wei Wuxian’s Yin Tiger Seal, subtly undermining everyone else...the works.

Jin Guangshan is the worst, is what I’m saying here.

Meanwhile, Nie Mingjue is very unhappy about the whole “Meng Yao helping the Wens and fucking with him when he’s captured” thing, but then Lan Xichen (remember, Lan Wangji’s older brother) steps in and reveals that Jin Guangyao was a spy delivering information, actually, and also saved his life when he was on the run from the Wens, so don’t hurt him please. Nie Mingjue is still very suspicious, but he backs off. Subsequently, after agreeing to place the Wen (civilian) captives in a holding camp, Jin Guangyao has them killed (impliedly at the order of his father).

We are given cues that Jin Guangyao is bad news. Like, heavy cues. If you are me this makes you love him.

This is also where Lan Xichen, Nie Mingjue, and Jin Guangyao become sworn brothers, which is a big deal.

Meanwhile, back in Lotus Pier, Wei Wuxian is...not doing so hot! He’s drinking heavily, shirking his responsibilities in a way that is making Jiang Cheng particularly very upset with him, generally being weird and traumatized but nobody knows how to deal with that, or him. Then Jin Zixuan arrives to invite everyone to a special hunt being hosted by his father including Jiang Yanli because he, he means his mom, really wants her to be there.

The hunt goes great! By that I mean Jin Zixuan is a spectacular failure at expressing his feelings to Jiang Yanli, Wei Wuxian almost starts a fight with Jin Zixuan, Jin Zixuan’s enormous asshole cousin gets nasty until Jiang Yanli makes him apologize, in a seriously badass moment. The whole thing comes off with Wei Wuxian really not looking good, including his decision to ditch the celebratory banquet. But also Jiang Yanli getting a liiiiittle closer to something she wants (i.e. Jin Zixuan). Jiang Cheng is like “dude what the fuck” at Wei Wuxian and gets zero percent explanation. Meanwhile everyone in the vicinity pokes at his massive insecurities, because the cultivation world’s favorite activity is actually gossip.

Things only get worse at the very bad after party. This is where we meet Su She again, who has gone and founded his own sect! Lan Xichen and Lan Wangji are sort of bitchy about it. But the real issue comes when Zixun peer pressures Lan Xichen into drinking despite the fact that it’s pretty solidly against the rules of the Lan Sect. Lan Xichen does it with a very “fuck you” smile, despite Jin Guangyao’s attempts to forestall the situation.

(I feel like I have not expressed the relationship between Jin Guangyao and Lan Xichen? It’s a whole thing. Let’s just say that it’s a fairly popular ship for a reason.)

Lan Wangji, however, is not as diplomatic as his brother.

And then Wei Wuxian arrives! To ruin another party. Because he found Wen Qing wandering around in the streets and turns out that Wen Ning was taken prisoner by Jin Zixun and friends and removed to whereabouts unknown. Wei Wuxian proceeds to give the sexiest countdown ever to annihilating Jin Zixun if he doesn’t tell him where Wen Ning is.

Wen Ning, unfortunately, is in a pile of bodies. Because the Jin have been...well, experimenting on Wen prisoners, basically. Wen Ning is...not dead in this universe because censorship, but everything makes more sense if you just say “he’s basically dead and Wei Wuxian resurrects him to fuck up everyone in the vicinity who was responsible for his death, which is...everyone other than the other Wens. Eventually Wei Wuxian stops him by yelling his second (courtesy) name that no one else has used for him in speech up to this point (Wen Qionglin), because love is stored in the name. Wei Wuxian gathers up the survivors and takes off only to run into Lan Wangji standing in his way.

They have a point of no return moment. Wei Wuxian basically says “let me go or you have to kill me” only it’s better than that because what he actually says is like “if I’m going to be killed I should be killed by you, then I would know it was right” and it’s a whole fucking thing and anyway Lan Wangji steps aside and lets them all go and it is quite literally “I’m not crying, it’s just raining on my face” except he is also crying.

So...fuck.

Burial Mounds Arc

Wei Wuxian takes the Wens to the one place nobody’s probably going to follow them: namely, the Burial Mounds. Home sweet home!

Outside in the main world, rumors are flying about the army Wei Wuxian is building and the sect he’s planning to found and how ambitious he is and how he’s disrespecting Jiang Cheng and actually Jiang Cheng he probably never loved you anyway and is better and stronger and what are you good for, but I’m saying this out of concern and to be helpful (paraphrased from Jin Guangshan).

Accordingly, Jiang Cheng agrees to go and check things out and see what’s going on in Chez Burial Mounds. What is going on is basically a bunch of civilians eking out a very depressing living. There is also a child, a-Yuan, who is adorable. This will also be important later.

(are you keeping track of all this?)

Jiang Cheng also goes to see Wen Ning, who is...recovering from being dead/undead and Wei Wuxian is working on fixing him. Jiang Cheng says he has to die, and Wei Wuxian has to come home, and things are really bad, man, so stop worrying about these losers and avoid the entire cultivation world being really pissed with you, maybe?

Wei Wuxian isn’t going for it, and tells Jiang Cheng to cut him out of Jiang Sect in order to protect Jiang Sect’s reputation. It’s upsetting. They stage a very dramatic duel and Jiang Cheng announces that friendship ended with Wei Wuxian, he has no new friend actually.

This is also where Wen Qing significantly returns the comb of pining that Jiang Cheng gave her way back (remember that?) and is like. so you wouldn’t’ve helped me and Wen Ning actually, would you. And that is the end of Chengqing as a sidebar ship that never really sailed. Well done, you two.

Meanwhile, Jin Zixuan gets his shit together and proposes to Jiang Yanli by way of making her a lotus pond at Jinlintai. So that’s nice!

A bit later Lan Wangji comes to visit! Only it’s totally coincidental, he was just passing through, that’s all. He and Wei Wuxian hang out for a little while, pretending things are sort of normal, but they have to rush back to the Burial Mounds because the Wen Ning is out. They manage to get him under control and awaken him to proper consciousness again, though! Great! Things are looking up. :)

Lan Wangji does not stay for dinner, though. :(

In my notes I have written “meanwhile...political shitshow” and that is basically a summation of what’s up in places that aren’t the Burial Mounds. Specifically, Jin Guangshan, who seems to have deputized Jin Guangyao to do his dirty work generally, is making noises about how something needs to be done about that Wei Wuxian, and what about that Yin Tiger Seal anyway, doesn’t it seem Yin Iron-like, shouldn’t something like that not be in the hands of a random person? Probably it should be in someone else’s hands instead. Someone responsible with no ulterior motives. You know.

Also in here...somewhere, Mianmian tries to stand up for Wei Wuxian being maybe right about some things, gets shouted down, and decides to leave the Jin Sect entirely. Like...just walks out. Several people look at her like ‘you can do that?’, Lan Wangji is jealous, it is a total boss move. Mianmian hasn’t been a major character but this is important enough and cool enough that I had to mention it.

Jiang Yanli and Jiang Cheng come to Yiling (by the Burial Mounds) for a very secret rendezvous where Wei Wuxian gets to see Jiang Yanli’s beautiful wedding dress and eat some of her famous soup and it is very sweet and nice and Jiang Cheng is like “so do you have a plan for if everyone attacks you” and Wei Wuxian is like “absolutely. I will kill everyone is my plan.”

also possibly Jiang Yanli is already pregnant at this point??? she and Jiang Cheng are certainly exchanging a lot of conspiratorial smiles when she tells Wei Wuxian to give her future son a courtesy name.

She is for sure pregnant later, because there is a baby named Jin Ling who shows up! (Remember that name? No? He was the bratty teenager from episode 2.)  Jin Guangshan does not allow Jin Guangyao to hold the baby, for which he deserves what he gets. For Jin Ling’s 100 day/three month (again! timelines, fuck em) celebration, Jiang Cheng, Jin Zixuan, and Lan Wangji tag team to get Wei Wuxian invited, where he will come and it will be nice and everyone will discuss this Yin Tiger Seal issue like civilized people.

An invitation is sent for Wei Wuxian to come to the celebration! Wonderful! This is in no way going to go horribly wrong.

Oh Shit, Things Went Downhill Fast (Take Two) Arc

It goes horribly wrong.

On the way to Jinlintai to greet his new baby nephew, accompanied by Wen Ning, Wei Wuxian is confronted by - surprise! - Jin Zixun, accusing Wei Wuxian of putting a curse on him. Wei Wuxian denies it, naturally, since he didn’t. Jin Zixun decides the best way to deal with this situation is to kill Wei Wuxian, which will definitely break the curse that Wei Wuxian definitely cast on him.

He attacks, and Wen Ning goes Ghost General on everyone’s ass, and Wei Wuxian brings out his flute. Things are looking pretty hairy when Jin Zixuan shows up to call off the fight, trying to get Wei Wuxian to back down; he does not back down, because that would just mean getting shot full of arrows.

Wen Ning, who seems to have completely lost his mind, fists Jin Zixuan. Through the chest. This does, in fact, kill him.

His dying words are to say that Jiang Yanli is still waiting for Wei Wuxian to show up, just to make everything worse. Wen Ning kills Jin Zixun as well. This is not actually what Wei Wuxian wanted to happen.

Back at the Burial Mounds! In the wake of Jin Zixuan’s death, an ultimatum has been issued to give up the Wen siblings or else. This is pretty clearly (in my opinion) a pretext that doesn’t mean anything, but Wen Qing and Wen Ning have already decided to sacrifice themselves. Maybe they’re hoping it’ll work? Or at least that it’ll give Wei Wuxian some time? Wen Qing knocks Wei Wuxian out so he can’t stop them. The whole thing is really fucking heartbreaking.

Wei Wuxian comes around and goes to Jinlintai, where he sees Jiang Yanli, who is mourning her dead husband who got killed by her baby brother! Cool! She sees Wei Wuxian but he runs before she can say anything, partly because guards have been sicced on him. He is pretty clearly having a mental breakdown, hallucinations and all!

Cut to a gathering of...pretty much everyone important and all their followers at Nightless City, for a combination commemorating the dead/affirming the deaths of Wen Ning and Wen Qing/gearing up to kill Wei Wuxian.

Who spares them the effort of coming to find him by showing up on the roof! He proceeds to sic dark magic on everyone there except, conspicuously, for the Jiang Sect. Lan Wangji arrives to defuse the situation and fails to defuse the situation until Wei Wuxian hears Jiang Yanli calling for him.

Because she’s arrived on an active battlefield! Not her best idea but it’s not like I can actually blame her considering the week she’s having.

Wei Wuxian goes to look for her, as does Jiang Cheng who also heard her, and...suddenly loses control of his dark magic. Cool! One of the...undead? people there wounds Jiang Yanli. Even better! Jiang Cheng pleads with Wei Wuxian to get things under control, which he can’t! They have a moment while a lot of people around them are dying but you know what, they deserve it.

because like literally a second later Jiang Yanli pushes Wei Wuxian out of the way of a sword meant to stab him in the back and instead takes it herself. And dies.

So. Yeah.

Wei Wuxian loses the last threads of his sanity and destroys the Yin Tiger Seal. While everybody is fighting over it, he goes over to the edge of a cliff, and now we’re back here where we started! With Lan Wangji clinging to Wei Wuxian’s hand as he dangles over the edge of a cliff and tells him to let go.

Jiang Cheng arrives to defuse the situation, by which I mean “he tells Wei Wuxian to go die and stabs down.” He only hits rock; Wei Wuxian breaks himself loose of Lan Wangji’s grip and falls. You are left on the image of Lan Wangji’s absolutely devastated face.

nice! great. well, that brings us up to speed for the flashforward to the future, where you have probably completely forgotten what happened in the first two episodes.

For instance: remember how we saw Wen Ning despite the fact that he’s supposed to be ashes? Yeah.

And We’re Back in the Present Now Arc (Good Times in Qinghe Arc)

For some reason this is the part of the show where I remember the least and it all kind of blurs together with the exception of one scene? so I had to go look at Wikipedia episode summaries to make sure I was putting things in the right order.

Back in the present at the Cloud Recesses, Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji discover that the very angry sword spirit last seen killing people at Mo Manor (remember that?) is pointing them in the direction of Qinghe (the Nie Sect territory). They leave to go there and run into Jin Ling, who semi-accidentally terrorizes Wei Wuxian by way of dog. 

By asking around, they also learn that there are rumors of a man-eating fortress in the woods, and that it hasn’t been dealt with because the leader of the Nie Sect is absolutely useless. The leader of the Nie Sect who is now - hey, been a while! - Nie Huaisang, since his older brother disappeared under mysterious circumstances after losing his mind years ago.

The dynamic duo go off to investigate the man-eating fortress, naturally, and what they find is a tomb full of swords and a wall full of skeletons, and also Jin Ling. 

They remove Jin Ling from the wall, Lan Wangji goes chasing a mysterious attacker, and Wei Wuxian takes Jin Ling to safety only to end up running into - oh boy! - Jiang Cheng. 

They have a calm talk about their feelings and address their dysfunction in a reasonable manner. 

Nope! Jiang Cheng corners Wei Wuxian with Jin Ling’s dog, throws a cup of tea at a wall, and yells at Wei Wuxian about how he both didn’t come home right away and also how he should die ten million times (no, like, actually). Fortunately, Jin Ling arrives, lies out his ass about how he saw Wen Ning to get Jiang Cheng to leave, and lets Wei Wuxian go. 

Back to that mysterious figure Lan Wangji went running after! Turns out it was none other than Nie Huaisang, who confesses - reluctantly - that the man-eating fortress belongs to his family and is a safe home for bloodthirsty swords after their owners die, which is a normal thing to get as a family heirloom. This is also where it becomes increasingly clear that (a) the sword spirit is Baxia, Nie Mingjue’s sword, and (b) Nie Mingjue is most likely hella dead, specifically murdered. 

With this new information, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian move on, tracking the directions of the angry sword spirit. They overhear some very depressing story about Song Lan, Xiao Xingchen, and Xue Yang, specifically how things turned out horribly for them (though without details), which drives Lan Wangji to drink.

Lan Wangji cannot hold his liquor, at all. Wei Wuxian takes his unconsciousness as an opportunity to flute Wen Ning to him again, and removes a massive metal needle from his skull, which fixes the whole “unconscious zombie” issue. Unfortunately, Wen Ning remembers nothing about what happened to him between going to Jinlintai with Wen Qing and when he heard Wei Wuxian calling by way of flute.

And now we have Drunkji, who is the most adorable, hilarious thing ever. He gives Wei Wuxian chickens, with utmost sincerity. They are wedding chickens. It is very important that Wei Wuxian have these chickens.

This interlude is not important to the plot but it is hilarious. There is also a not hilarious interlude of Lan Wangji being very sad about how he didn’t help Wei Wuxian before, and also admitting that he likes rabbits. Again: not plot important. It is adorable. 

Wei Wuxian herds Drunkji back to the inn, where a mysterious masked man attempts to steal the pouch holding the angry sword spirit, but is driven off and teleports away. Remember this guy! He’s important.

The next morning, they set off and hit the road for a place called Yi City, which if you’ve spent any time on this blog you know is deeply important in my heart if not, like, in terms of show space.

Yi City Arc Yi City Arc Yi City Arc

yes this is three episodes but this is my summary post so I get to give it its own section if I want to.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji arrive at Yi City, which is empty, and very spooky. They run into the pack of juniors (Jin Ling, Lan Sizhui, sassmaster Lan Jingyi and consummate romantic Ouyang Zizhen are the named ones), and shortly thereafter into a whole bunch of undead. They also run into a ghost (???) girl who is blind and has no tongue. They also also run into Xiao Xingchen, severely wounded.

Psych! It’s Xue Yang in disguise and he has an undead Song Lan under his control. what a fun twist this is! and he wants one thing specifically: for Wei Wuxian to help him bring someone back to life. Problem is that their soul is in need of some serious super glue and super glue doesn’t work on souls.

Xue Yang informs Wei Wuxian that his consent is optional and he will be participating in Xue Yang’s necromancy experiment fantasies whether he likes it or not. Lan Wangji objects strenuously to this idea. While Lan Wangji is fighting Xue Yang and Wen Ning is fighting Song Lan (corpse fight! corpse fight!) Wei Wuxian herds the juniors into a safe courtyard where the corpses won’t go, led by the aforementioned ghost girl, who shows them a coffin.

the coffin has Xiao Xingchen in it. The actual real one. There’s a bandage over his eyes, because he doesn’t have any.

Wei Wuxian goes into the ghost girl’s memories in order to find out what happened using a technique called Empathy, and the next chunk of things I’m just going to tell in full chronologically even though there’s a break where you don’t see all of it until an episode later.

The ghost girl, a-Qing, is a con artist who pretends to be blind; she runs into Xiao Xingchen (who is actually blind) when she steals his money, and he just gives it to her after stopping someone else whose money she stole from beating him up. A-Qing decides they’re friends now. They’ve been traveling together for...some amount of time when they stumble on a badly injured man on the side of the road. Xiao Xingchen picks him up and takes him home with him (to an abandoned coffin house in Yi City). You get one guess who he’s rescued and who is totally psyched to discover that his life has been saved by Xiao Xingchen, who doesn’t know who he is, because he’s blind.

So you know, everything is coming up Xue Yang.

What follows is three years of domestic bliss, including hits like “entire villages dying by Xiao Xingchen under sort of suspicious circumstances” and “threatening grocers.” And then who should show up but Song Lan! Looking for Xiao Xingchen and he’s so happy to have finally found him.

Only he notices Xue Yang first.

A fight ensues, in which Xue Yang...sort of talks Song Lan to death by digging into the fact that Xiao Xingchen is blind because he gave his eyes to Song Lan, actually, and Song Lan hurt him so bad when they broke up, and because Xiao Xingchen is blind Xue Yang has been able to trick him into killing living people when he thinks he’s killing undead ones, and oooh do you feel bad now, well, guess what, you’re gonna feel worse when I poison you into becoming undead and cut out your tongue. :D

And even worse when this means that Xiao Xingchen stabs him because, you know, undead monster.

Cool! Things are going great.

Or they would be only a-Qing saw everything, reveals it to Xiao Xingchen, who puts it together and greets XueYang coming back from grocery shopping with a sword (rude). They break up, and by “break up” I mean “Xue Yang reveals his tragic backstory, Xiao Xingchen is not convinced that his tragic backstory means all the murder was justified, Xue Yang decides it’s time to make this all go nuclear.” So tells Xiao Xingchen about how he’s been killing people actually! And guess what, bonus, one of those people was your BFF/life partner/whatever, Song Lan. isn’t that amazing, Xiao Xingchen, isn’t that so cool--

Xiao Xingchen kills himself and this is, it turns out, Not What Xue Yang Wanted. So guess who’s in the pouch Xue Yang was hoping to resurrect? Yeah.

Back in the present, with help from a-Qing directing Lan Wangji, Xue Yang gets...hella stabbed, but not before he kills a-Qing. Song Lan, freed from Xue Yang’s control, kills Xue Yang.

Oh yeah, and then we see Xiao Xingchen tenderly laying pieces of candy on a bed, which is symbolically important, and also Xue Yang dies looking at the last piece of candy Xiao Xingchen gave him, and now I’m going to cry. anyway Yi City Arc, you’re welcome. Where the only person who survives did not, in fact, survive!

Oh, yeah, I guess it’s also important that there’s a headless body buried here and it gets...pretty conclusively identified as Nie Mingjue because the sword spirit (remember that?) takes the shape of his very distinctive large sword (Baxia). Also Xue Yang recreated the Yin Tiger Seal but it gets snatched away by the masked man from earlier. There’s also a bunch of stuff about the Yin Iron plot but you can ignore it, it doesn’t actually really matter that much.

Honestly at that point I was crying too much to pay a whole lot of attention to the whole point of them being in Yi City to begin with. So sue me.

The Plot Thickens, and Secrets Are Revealed Arc

Exeunt Yi City, rendezvous with Lan Xichen to discuss, obliquely, who could be responsible for Nie Mingjue’s death. Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji delicately imply that maybe it was Jin Guangyao; Lan Xichen is unconvinced and informs us that there are no curse marks indicating that he’d teleported on Jin Guangyao’s body, he would know, and also they’ve been together every night so he wouldn’t have time to get up to shenanigans anyway.

Hm.

Still, they go ahead together to ruin another party/investigate at Jinlintai, with Wei Wuxian safely in disguise (barely), unfortunately as Mo Xuanyu, who is not exactly welcome in the Jin Sect because he got kicked out of it earlier. Mo Xuanyu is a whole...thing that I’m not really going into here because the show doesn’t really get into it either.

Wei Wuxian ducks out to investigate, and in the form of an animated paper man, to the tune of music we have never heard before in this show and will never hear again (look, it’s just weird to me), goes sneaking into Jin Guangyao’s rooms to do some poking around. His investigations are interrupted when Jin Guangyao’s wife Qin Su, in a state of severe distress, returns, followed shortly by Jin Guangyao. They argue about an unknown revelation in a letter Qin Su received that has resulted in her being disgusted by...something, we don’t know what, and angry with Jin Guangyao. She accuses him of killing their kid.

Eventually he paralyzes her and removes her to a secret room through a mirror, which is a thing everyone has, especially one with a bunch of torture instruments and a body sized table with dried blood on it. Normal!

Remember how the body in Yi City was headless? Yeah, we found the head now.

And it’s time for another Empathy flashback! 

Empathy Flashback feat. Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao’s Bad Relationship Mini Arc

This time with Nie Mingjue (and Jin Guangyao). We see Jin Guangyao very quickly elevated from a servant who is spat upon by the other Nie cultivators to Nie Mingjue’s right hand man, like, literally in two seconds. Flash forward to episode 10 - remember that? - where Jin Guangyao has just been caught in a compromising murder position. Nie Mingjue accuses Jin Guangyao plotting all along and is a conniving little snake who was in league with Xue Yang (which is a thing that does not make sense, actually), and kicks him out.

We next see Nie Mingjue in Nightless City, having been captured and currently being taunted by a very sexy Meng Yao, who kills some other Nie cultivators and threatens to fuck up Nie Mingjue by shattering his sword (which would be catastrophic and is, we are informed, how Nie Mingjue’s dad died). Nie Mingjue is understandably rather displeased by this to the point of probable murder, though Lan Xichen reminds him (as he did in the previous scene) that Meng Yao was acting as a spy and Meng Yao argues that he needed to play his part.

The relationship between the two of them continues to deteriorate as Nie Mingjue becomes more unstable (something that just happens to the Nies by virtue of their cultivation style). That deterioration is being delayed by healing music from Lan Xichen. Lan Xichen teaches Jin Guangyao the healing music. Jin Guangyao seems to be possibly doing something not healing with the healing music.

This all escalates into a confrontation at the top of the stairs of Jinlintai, where Nie Mingjue and Jin Guangyao argue about class politics and justifiable violence (no, really) until Nie Mingjue explodes and kicks Jin Guangyao down the stairs. 

And then proceeds to, as Jin Guangyao looks on, have a qi deviation, which is...well, let’s just call it both a physical and a mental breakdown. Nie Huaisang arrives to see this happening, and while we saw this before and it looked like Nie Mingjue was threatening Nie Huaisang because he didn’t recognize him, this time it is more apparent that he’s directing it at Jin Guangyao.

Next we see, Nie Mingjue is chained to that body sized table in the secret room. Xue Yang is there, and uses Nie Mingjue’s sword to behead Nie Mingjue. He’s psyched as hell about it. If you’re me this is adorable.

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming Arc

Flashback ends! And we are back in Jinlintai. Wei Wuxian goes to get Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen to storm Jin Guangyao’s bedroom, to which Su She objects, but Jin Guangyao eventually allows. They all file together into the secret room and look around, but there is no longer any severed head where Wei Wuxian left it. Whoops. 

Then Qin Su kills herself, Jiang Cheng arrives to defuse the situation while Jin Guangyao pleads innocent, and Wei Wuxian, by way of drawing his sword that nobody else could draw before now, reveals that he is, in fact, Wei Wuxian. Everyone in this room actually already knew this information except for Jin Ling, who is not thrilled to discover that his cool uncle is the guy who murdered his parents. Nobody else does a very good job of faking surprise.

Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian make a run for it only to be cornered on the stairs. Extreme romance ensues where Lan Wangji announces his intent to stand by Wei Wuxian forever against the world. 

This is where the “I was like, SCREAMS” meme kicks in.

Anyway, after that love confession (look, they can’t say ‘I love you’ but basically) in front of everyone, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian fight their way out together and are well on the way to freedom when Jin Ling stabs Wei Wuxian. 

Nobody is happy about this, including Jin Ling.

Wei Wuxian is okay overall, though he does faint and have to get swept off to the Cloud Recesses and undressed and redressed in Lan Wangji’s underwear. Don’t worry about it. And now it’s time to talk to Lan Xichen, who is currently feeling very “what the hell is going on, you have no proof and are accusing a person I trust completely of something horrible without any proof.” 

They still don’t have any proof, but Wei Wuxian reveals that in the flashback he heard Jin Guangyao playing the soothing music but different, and it comes out that there is evil Japanese music that can kill people and be used to poison someone slowly over time. It’s literally this post:

Lan Xichen is not entirely convinced but agrees to investigate; Jin Guangyao comes to Cloud Recesses and has an absolutely heartbreaking conversation with Lan Xichen about how is our friendship over, Zewu--jun :( while Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji eavesdrop.

That conversation isn’t plot important either, I just personally find it very upsetting.

The Burial Mounds, Take Two Arc

Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji leave the Cloud Recesses, heading toward the Burial Mounds because Jin Guangyao mentioned something being up there. But they end up meeting - surprise! - Mianmian, who is living her best life. This is mostly important because she is literally the only female character who makes it out of this show alive. 

She mentions that there’s been some trouble around the Burial Mounds, so they head in that direction, running into Wen Ning along the way, who has been following them around because he loves Wei Wuxian. The Burial Mounds are indeed full of active undead and they fight their way up to the old farming commune location, which is less empty than expected because there are a bunch of kids tied up in Wei Wuxian’s old lair/cave/house. Like, all of them. Including Jin Ling, who really is having a terrible time lately, and I just feel the need to note that sometimes.

As they free the children and start to leave, everyone else arrives with the plan of killing Wei Wuxian again, because once wasn’t enough and obviously he’s Up To No Good, where else would these corpses be coming from, huh? 

Speaking of corpses. 

A small army of them shows up! All the cultivators who aren’t children lose their powers! Everyone has to retreat back into the lair/cave/house where they’ll be safe! So this is all...going well.

Fortunately, everyone being stuck in one place gives Wei Wuxian the opportunity to get his Hercule Poirot on and walk everyone through a series of deductions to get them to a place of realizing that (a) they were poisoned by evil music, (b) the evil music came from Su She, (c) Su She is working for Jin Guangyao who (d) planned all of this whole ‘everyone is going to the Burial Mounds to get killed’ thing.

Su She panics, inadvertently reveals that he alone still has his powers, and teleports out. Wei Wuxian decides that a reasonable solution to all these problems is to make himself bait for all the undead so everyone else can make a run for it, because Wei Wuxian is kind of like that. 

It’s okay, though, he and Lan Wangji make a spectacular battle couple.

(Oh, yeah. Throughout here it is becoming increasingly clear that Lan Sizhui’s identity is Significant and actually we Might Have Seen Him Before.)

Back to Lotus Pier Arc, or Jin Ling Has a Very Bad Day, Continued Arc

Safely out of the Burial Mounds thanks to Wei Wuxian, everybody goes ahead and invites themselves back to Jiang Cheng’s house. To be fair, it is closest. 

My notes here say “Wen Ning figures out that Lan Sizhui is a-Yuan, Jin Ling has an emotional breakdown” which is a more or less accurate summation of the situation. Honestly, though, I feel so bad for Jin Ling at this point, he’s had an absolute nightmare of a month and then today happened and like. I feel for him.

But Wen Ning reuniting with the last remaining member of his family! Though he doesn’t...actally tell Lan Sizhui this, and Lan Sizhui doesn’t have any memories of his early years. 

Jiang Cheng reluctantly allows Wei Wuxian inside. Wen Ning has to stay on the porch, but Lan Sizhui stays with him to keep him company, because he is a good boy.

This next part...hoo boy. It’s a lot of exposition featuring two ladies who appear to relate their stories about Jin Guangyao, featuring the part where he murdered his father by using a bunch of sex workers (who then were murdered in turn, except for one), also involving necrophilia, and the one where Qin Su was Jin Guangyao’s sister, actually, and he knew it and still married her. Sect Leader Bad Takes says that’s probably why Jin Guangyao killed their kid, because children of incest inevitably have developmental problems? Yeah, sure, buddy.

Anyway, everyone starts shouting for Jin Guangyao’s head, which is very familiar to Wei Wuxian, who leaves in some disgust. While wandering with Lan Wangji, they wind up going to the family shrine (which is, to be clear, a pretty sacred place). Which is where Jiang Cheng finds them! And once again they have a reasonable and emotionally steady conversation.

Nope. Jiang Cheng talks shit trying to provoke a fight that Wei Wuxian won’t have. As he and Lan Wangji attempt to leave, Jiang Cheng pursues because he’s not done yelling dammit, lashing out with Zidian. Wei Wuxian faints, and Wen Ning arrives to stand in between him and Lan Wangji and Jiang Cheng, holding Wei Wuxian’s sheathed sword (remember, the one nobody other than Wei Wuxian can draw). Wen Ning proceeds to initiate one of the single best devastating beatdowns of the show without laying a hand on Jiang Cheng, specifically by shoving the sword at Jiang Cheng and telling him to draw it, because hey you can do that now! Wonder why that is? Wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on there, Jiang Wanyin?

Remember way back when Jiang Cheng lost his core and got it back because Wei Wuxian gave him his core? Yeah, this is when he finds out about that. Psych! Your brother loves you and also the only reason you got to be as strong as you are is because he sacrificed himself for you! Which is also the reason why he took up demonic cultivation in the first place! 

Seriously, it’s so good, I love this scene. Probably one of my favorites in the whole show.

Jiang Cheng runs away; Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian have a moment on a lake where Lan Wangji indulges Wei Wuxian by eating stolen lotuses with him. It’s sweeter than it sounds when I put it like that.

Guanyin Temple Arc

oh god, how do I. how do I describe Guanyin Temple. partially this is hard because by virtue of censorship about dead bodies, among probably other things, there are huge gaps that make portions of it make no sense so I’m gonna go ahead and...fill in some of those that are intelligible pretty much only with some knowledge of book plot, imo.

Wen Ning, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian go to a place called Yunping because Jin Guangyao bought some land there for some reason. There they find a slightly suspicious temple (Guanyin Temple). They come back at night, leaving Wen Ning to stand guard, and spy on the courtyard, where a bunch of conspicuously armed monks are there, along with Lan Xichen aaaaand...Jin Guangyao. 

Jin Ling arrives! And decides it’s a good idea to climb over the wall. Wei Wuxian blocks someone from shooting him by using the bamboo flute he’s been using this whole time, so he now functionally has no weapon, and also he and Lan Wangji have been exposed, so now the two of them and also Jin Ling are in the courtyard. Lan Xichen admits he was tricked and doesn’t have any of his powers. Jin Guangyao threatens Lan Wangji into sealing his by threatening Wei Wuxian with a wire. It’s sexy.

Everybody goes inside the temple, where several monks are digging up something ??? under the floor. This is never explained and that is because it is supposed to be Jin Guangyao’s mother’s body, and there are very strict rules I understand about what can be done with dead bodies in dramas like this one. Anyway, Jin Guangyao loved his mom very much and built a temple where she was buried where the statue has her face. He is exhuming her so he can take her body with him when he flees the country, which is what he was planning here. Of course, now he has a bunch of unwanted hostages (and one wanted hostage), which was not actually part of the plan.

The next person to join the party is an unconscious Nie Huaisang, brought in by Su She, who basically says “I have no idea what he was doing here but...here he is” and Jin Guangyao is like. Well, guess he’s here now. 

Next to show up is Jiang Cheng! Making an excellent and extremely dramatic entrance. Unfortunately, he still gets injured and taken down as Jin Guangyao starts poking at his very obvious emotional weak spots, including revealing that Jiang Cheng knows about the golden core thing. Wei Wuxian, who did not know that secret came out because he was unconscious at the time, goes “wait, what?” and thus ensues the epic emotional catharsis crying and yelling conversation I was waiting for for 47 episodes. Seriously, it’s really good. They end up in a place where all is not solved but things are...maybe a little better? 

Of course, they’re still hostages. 

Meanwhile, back at the dig site, something gets unearthed that is not Jin Guangyao’s mother’s body but is in fact a coffin with Nie Mingjue’s body, now complete with head, in it. The reveal also drops here that Su She has the marks that indicate he cast the curse on Jin Zixun that Jin Zixun accused Wei Wuxian of casting.

A very ugly argument ensues where everyone is poking at everyone else’s things that they’re sensitive about, until finally Lan Xichen recovers his powers and turns the tables on Jin Guangyao by putting a sword to his neck. 

The next part is basically...explaining how all the bad things that happened were Jin Guangyao’s fault? Or at least that’s the explanation given. I find it personally very frustrating as a narrative choice and sort of unnecessary, but maybe that’s just me. Anyway, Jin Guangyao is pleading for mercy from Lan Xichen, saying he’ll leave and never return, the whole thing is very emotional. 

We also find out that Jin Guangshan kicked Jin Guangyao down the stairs. People really need to stop doing that.

And now Wen Ning arrives! Punting Lan Sizhui in ahead of him. He is possessed by a very angry sword spirit (namely, Baxia). Lan Wangji cuts off Jin Guangyao’s right arm, because Lan Wangji likes doing that, apparently. Baxia-possessed Wen Ning then targets Jin Ling because Jin Ling has Jin Guangyao’s blood on him - only for Wen Ning to stop the blade with his bare hand and save Jin Ling’s life, because Wen Ning is both a badass and very good. 

Jiang Cheng throws Wei Wuxian his old flute, which he apparently has just been keeping under his bed or something for sixteen years, which is a thing that I will always never be over, and Wei Wuxian flutes the very angry sword into the Nie Mingjue-holding coffin.

Which would be fine, only then Nie Huaisang starts yelling about how Su She totally stabbed him, no, really, look, he’s bleeding. Baxia kills Su She. Then Wei Wuxian manages to put the sword back in the coffin, as well as the Yin Tiger Seal, and locks both away.

Whew.

Everybody’s sitting down and recovering a little as Lan Xichen tends Jin Guangyao’s wounds. He turns around to get medicine from Nie Huaisang, who tells him to look out because Jin Guangyao is attacking you!!! 

Lan Xichen runs Jin Guangyao through. 

Oh boy.

Jin Guangyao is a little impressed about Nie Huaisang having been plotting this all along. Because he was. He absolutely was. He’s absolutely been planning this for years. Everybody needs a hobby.

But it’s Lan Xichen who he really addresses here, telling him that he’d never hurt him. The actual line really hurts but I’m trying to not reproduce lines here, except I am going to say that he drags Lan Xichen - still with a sword through him! - deeper into the temple and says “stay and die with me” as the temple starts to collapse. Lan Xichen, who was about to strike and presumably push himself away, lowers his hand, and Jin Guangyao abruptly pushes him away and out of the collapsing building.

Romance!

(No, but seriously, it’s a lot.)

Thus ends Jin Guangyao. 

Outside in the courtyard, everyone’s taking a breather. Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian stare longingly at each other across the room and say nothing. Jiang Cheng walks away and we learn that - surprise! - the reason Jiang Cheng was caught by the Wens way back when is because he was keeping the Wens from catching Wei Wuxian instead.

Everybody in this family in just a big circle of self sacrifice. In the words of Wen Qing:

(Who misses Wen Qing? I do!)

Anyway, Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian leave with each other, only to be caught on the road by Lan Sizhui and Wen Ning - Lan Sizhui, who has remembered that he was a-Yuan and finally someone tells Wei Wuxian this, and ahhhh, okay, I know what I said about limiting screencaps but I can’t not:

Now that’s what I call a hug!

They part ways again, Lan Sizhui leaving with Wen Ning for some family time and for Wen Ning to find his own way. Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian...seem like they’re going in different directions, but then they’re at Cloud Recesses together, playing music, hanging out, vibing. They talk to Nie Huaisang, but don’t directly confront him about his scheming. Mostly just making sure he’s not, you know, gonna do anything else.

Then Wei Wuxian leaves to go on a roadtrip to find himself. People really do not like this, but I personally really do like this, especially because the last shots of the show are Wei Wuxian playing his and Lan Wangji’s theme song (the one that Lan Wangji wrote, remember, from the cave? It’s come up a lot, I just haven’t mentioned it here), and when he finishes Lan Wangji’s voice says “Wei Ying” and he turns around and just like. Smiles. It’s scrunchy and happy and perfect.

Like this:

aaaaaaand scene! fifty episodes later your life has been ruined and you will never be the same.

and the thing is that this is leaving out, like. a lot, and probably is biased because I focus on different things than another person would, &c &c, but at least it might be a starting point for...the entire plot.

and also congratulations if you made it this far, I am impressed. have a screenshot of wei wuxian as a reward, whose mental breakdown does make him look sexy

you’re welcome.

[sttngfashion]

5.26 and 6.1 - Time’s Arrow

Oh my god. Y’all. It’s a new Fashion It So post. In the year of our Picard 2020. Yes.

For literal years, Charlie and I have been like UGH WE NEED TO DO TIME’S ARROW PARTS 1 AND 2 BUT IT’S JUST SUCH A MONSTER.

Well, I’m doing a complete rewatch of the series with my partner and we just got to these two, so IT IS TIME. 

We open in a cave in San Francisco, where Data and Picard are checking something out:

Rent for the cave is $6,000 per month

Showing them around is this guy in a Science Outfit:

He’s ready to go night biking

We’ve seen this look before in both Silicon Avatar and Devil’s Due, and it’s functional, yet cute. Basically a windbreaker in jumpsuit form. 

They find a couple of items in the cave, including a pocket watch from 1889 and also:

I left my head in San Francisco

IT’S DATA’S HEAD!!! And it’s been there for FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. What could have caused this? And why is Data’s head so absolutely terrifying?

Is that fondant

This head is, in a word, haunting. The 2020 of heads. 

Data and Geordi chat in Ten-Forward about what the presence of Data’s head in the cave means. Data says it means he’s mortal; that someday he will die, and that’s comforting. Spoiler alert: that’s not what it means. But it’s a nice conversation.

Also, Guinan is here!!!

Merlot My God!! 

Or maybe: Burgundy-lightful!! Or perhaps: De-Crimson-alize Sex Work!! Okay that last one was a stretch but I really think I missed my calling as a nail polish shade namer. 

Anyway, she’s here in her classic look of a pizza-sized hat and a flowing gown/coat/top/robe. The collar here is a little too close to a mock turtleneck for my liking and honestly - this is a little staid for our friend Guinan. I want a TEXTURE or a SWEEP or some WIDE RIBBING or some PLEATS. Don’t worry, though...she will get plenty more later.

Then there’s some plot which frankly we DO NOT HAVE TIME to get into but let’s just say: the away team goes to a planet, there’s a temporal disturbance, and Data ends up here:

Huge mood

Where are we? Or should I say WHEN are we??

Well that old-timey font is a good clue...also the horse

Are we in the Old West land of an off-brand Disneyworld? Are we going to ride something called Large Lightning Mesa Train Tracks? What colorful characters will we meet here?

Winner of 1893’s Mustache Medal

This type of ‘stache is called a Fu Manchu, after the character Dr. Fu Manchu. It’s not...a great look? But it is memorable, which is sometimes enough. He’s also wearing a simple black cap, probably made of silk. He’s keeping it cazh.

So where are we?

SAN FRANCISCO, OPEN YOUR GOLDEN GATE / YOU’LL LET NOBODY WAIT / OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR

Yes, it’s San Francisco. And it’s *eyes popping out of head like a cartoon wolf seeing a busty babe* 1893!!!! That temporal disturbance was...disturbing.

So who else do we have hanging out?

Please check out our Vaudeville act, Knit Cap ‘n’ Bowly

These dudes understand those famous Bay Area MICROCLIMATES, amirite? We’ve got a Henley. We’ve got a buttondown. We’ve got a vest. We’ve got a coat. No matter which way the thermometer decides to go, THEY ARE READY. Also loving the pop of forest green on Knit Cap’s knit cap. 

We also have a 49er:

No, it’s not Steve Young. I googled “famous 49ers” to complete this joke so if there is a more famous 49er please let me know

It’s a literal 49er. Since it’s 1893, this guy’s been hanging around in town for a while, and he’s also familiar with the layering techniques one must master if one is to conquer the Bay Area’s climate. He also has a kicky Colonel Sanders-type tie. He asks Data for money and gives him a few panhandling tips. He’s chill. We like him. But don’t get too attached if you know what I mean!!!!

Data decides he needs somewhere to stay, so he finds a hotel:

Brian.

Why is this so funny to me. Brian. Why would you name your hotel Brian. Brian!!!! I know it’s a last name but like...Brian. HOTEL BRIAN. 

This bellhop’s name is not Brian:

Where’s your hat, bro

He’s giving us a classic bellhop look, complete with too many buttons. He gives Data the very important information that there’s a poker game happening in the back of the hotel, which means: Data is about to be RICH rich. 

The poker game includes a few good looks:

Louie Anderson IS Wolverine IN a Lands’ End barn coat

Two plaids? Sir...I salute you

Colonel Sanders Goes to Carnaval

Data, of course, wipes the floor with them so hard that he wins their clothes:

Didn’t get that barn coat tho

Yes, that’s the actual vest and the actual hat of those guys from the previous scene. Oh, I love it. I love Data in a vest over his uniform and I love Data with a feather in his cap. Let’s call it macaroni.

Meanwhile, out on the street, the plot is happening:

Beige: inescapable

This is our first taste of the decadent 1890’s sleeves that appear in this episode, and these aren’t even the best sleeves!! These are an amuse-bouche of sleeves. An armuse-bouche, if you will. 

Anyway, these two are aliens disguised as humans who are here to steal the 49er’s life energy. 

Pew pew pew

I told you not to get attached!!!

Back on the Enterprise, Guinan is doing mixology:

She would never call it something as stupid as mixology though

She tells Picard that he needs to go check out the temporal disturbance, too, even though captains don’t normally go on away missions, and then she gives him this look:

It’s that serious

When Guinan looks at you like this, you do what she says. 

Now this outfit is much better than the earlier one. We have some pleated sleeves, which I didn’t even think was a thing you could DO. We have some sort of functional(?) strap(??) across the front. We even have matching fingerless gloves which always make a look A LOOK. And if Picard wasn’t sure whether he needed to go on this away mission, she then gives him THIS look:

Okay now it’s REALLY serious

Back in 1893, Data is making something:

It’s actually just a really complicated and large music box that plays “I Left My Head in San Francisco”

He’s gotten his hands on some more period-appropriate clothing, including a bow tie and a vest. Since he’s not wearing arm garters and his sleeves appear to be the correct length for his arms, we can conclude that the shirt was custom-made, not ready-made, because Data is now a baller due to his poker earnings. 

Then, Data sees this in the paper:

I know her!! From work!!!!

Yes, it’s Guinan. In 1893. In a hat!!!!

We cut to the literary reception, which is honestly not as well-attended as I thought it would be, considering it got a GIANT photo of Guinan on page THREE of the paper, but okay. And who should we spy there but:

You’ll love my secret blend of 11 herbs and spices

No, it’s not Colonel Sanders. (Sorry, I really have Colonel Sanders on the brain because of that Lifetime movie.) It’s Samuel Clements, AKA Mark Twain. I had an English teacher in high school who explained the origin of his pseudonym (it indicates a mark of two fathoms, aka twelve feet, on a steamboat) and for some reason she shouted MAAAARK TWAAAAAIN when she told us that story so now her delivery of that line is in my head until I die I guess.

Anyway, it’s Mark Twain.

He’s wearing his iconic white linen suit with a black bow tie, and he’s also wearing a lot of prosthetics, because the actor playing him (Jerry Hardin, AKA Deep Throat from The X-Files AKA Melora Hardin AKA Jan Levinson-Gould’s dad) (was that too many AKAs) (you get it, right?) didn’t look enough like Mark Twain, I guess? In conclusion: what if eyebrow wigs were a thing?

Twain is having a chit chat with “Madame Guinan,” who is wearing what can only be called a sumptuous gown:

It’s 11:30 and the gown is sumptin’ sumptin’

There are so many ELEMENTS to this look! First of all: the color. Royal purple. Fit for a queen. Appropriate. 

Then: those sleeves! These sleeves are known as “leg of mutton sleeves” because they KIND OF look like a leg of mutton. Have you ever seen a leg of mutton? I haven’t. I’ve only seen these sleeves. Plus they have a stripe?? No, I don’t know why, but I LOVE IT.

The cuffs and the cravat bring this from “dress” to “lewk.” Top it all off with this hat and you have a true 1893 mood.

What bird is that feather even from

We get a few good extra looks in this scene as well:

Pink Lady is NOT wearing a corset

Look, sometimes you don’t have enough period-appropriate undergarments for all the background people and that’s fine. But I WILL notice.

Is that Loretta Lynn

I am loving all of this! That purple dress is fantastic, those stripes? I die. Military man has some fun flair on his shoulder, and there is a dude in a beautiful turban back there. Plus, another Black lady in addition to Guinan and That One Ensign Who Is On The Bridge Sometimes.

Data rolls in to the literary event in a different suit with a CRAVAT:

Craving a cravat

Data is like “we serve together on the same starship in the 24th century” and Guinan is like “huh” but then she’s like “okay” which...I’m not sure if I would believe that? But let’s just say it’s fine. 

Over in the 24th century, the literal entire bridge crew is checking out the temporal disturbance and I DON’T LIKE THIS AT ALL:

Blue Man Group...on ACID

These beings are like ghosts but also like Dr. Manhattan but also like pure energy. 

Then everyone goes through the temporal disturbance AND THE SEASON ENDS. 

Fortunately for you, this post will continue...right now.

Okay, so we’re back in San Francisco in 1893. You can tell by the horses:

Also the fruit carts

Samuel Clemens is strolling around with a reporter, telling him that he has a great story for him that involves time travelers and, like, protecting the nation.

Here’s the thing about this episode’s version of Mark Twain: he’s kind of a dick. Was the real Mark Twain kind of a dick? I just feel like Mark Twain should be JAZZED about meeting time travelers and not acting like a fuckin’ time cop* and trying to put the Enterprise crew on blast. 

Anyway I love his double-breasted vest.

See my vest

The reporter’s hat is technically period-accurate, but that style is SO associated with the 1930s-1950s that I would have gone with something else. He looks cute though.

Meanwhile, Data is wearing a three-piece suit:

My positronic olfactory synapses are interpreting something as...a fart

I hate brown, but this is fine.

Additionally, the beige baddies from before are back and this time, they’ve got a SNAKE CANE:

Love the snake cane, hate how they suck the life out of people

But we are not here for them, we are here to see our faves in period clothing. Our first look is at Riker, who is dressed as an actual cop, not a time cop like Mark Twain:

The past just had...so many buttons

I guess if you’re a time-traveling white man there are worse disguises than a cop. But WHERE DID HE GET THIS UNIFORM? I choose to believe that he found a cop with a similar large handsome body to his own and beat the shit out of him and stole his clothes. Now we can all enjoy imagining a cop being beat up.

The badge that Riker is wearing is a great historical detail; the SFPD started wearing them in 1886 and are reportedly the first law enforcement agency to have worn the seven-pointed star, which is now a common shape among sheriff’s departments across the United States.

But let’s move on to a better look: Dr. Beverly Crusher:

Curlz MT

Okay, now I have more questions. Beverly obviously wouldn’t beat someone up for their clothes, so where did SHE get HER outfit? And who did her hair? Did she do her OWN hair? Where did she get a curling iron? Does she know how to use a curling iron? Was it one of those ones that’s actually made of iron that you have to heat up in a fireplace? 

We will get answers to zero (0) of these questions.

We actually get a much better look at her dress later, so let’s focus on that cloak!!! I love it and I also love her hat. Okay, I guess I had less to say about those than I thought.

Bev and Will, along with the rest of the officers, have somehow procured a room/apartment in some lady’s lodging house. It’s cute!

They gave it 5 stars on AirBnB

This also raises questions. How did they get this room? How many bedrooms does it have? Are they sharing one large bed? If so, who has to sleep crossways at the foot of the bed and why is it Geordi? We will get zero answers to these questions as well, so let’s move on to arguably the hottest costume in this two-parter:

I’ll be in Holodeck 4

Whewwwwwww. He’s giving us a rolled sleeve. He’s giving us a casual tweed vest. The pants? They’re perfect. And he KNOWS how that slouch is working. It’s working VERY well. But the Irish landlady? She’s having NONE OF IT.

Absolutely NO nonsense

She needs the rent, but Picard charms her and she leaves. So I guess that’s how they got the room. Her look is knitwear-forward:

Eileen Fisher does sound like an Irish name

She’s got a shawl AND a cardigan! The cozy factor is OFF THE CHARTS. She also has a brooch, because a touch of fancy is always welcome. I will say that her hair is a little more fashion-forward than I’d expect for a woman of her age and station. This is straight up 1890s hair, and she would probably still be rocking an 1860s look, which isn’t as sweepy and would likely involve more braids. Still, she looks lovely. 

Geordi is also here looking dapper:

Make the collar as high as you can. I want to be sliced open by my own collar

You CAN go wrong with a three-piece suit, but it’s difficult to. He can’t wear his visor, so he has some kicky shades which we’ll get a better look at in a sec.

Back at the Hotel Brian (lol), the bellboy (who we learn in this scene is Jack London, inspired to be a writer by Mark Twain [citation needed]) lets Mark Twain into Data’s room and allows him to look around unsupervised. This is very bad hotel management. 

Great Scott

Then Data and Guinan show back up, and Mark Twain hides in an armoire.

One short day in the emerald brocade

I think one reason I love Guinan’s looks so much, both in the 24th and the 19th century, is that our color palette is very similar. We’re both winters. Bold jewel tones are the vibe. This one is in a beautiful deep green fabric with what looks like a velvet flocking pattern on it. The collar is also velvet, and I love that sleeve with a flounce on top like there wasn’t already enough fucking fabric on the sleeve so they just added a random piece to be like “yes, bitch. I’m a sleeve.”

Naturally, the hat is also jaunty af:

San Francisco’s hottest milliner is: Madame Guinan

This hat has everything: feathers, netting, a brim, an angle that makes you think it’s going to fall off but it doesn’t. We stan.

Meanwhile, Picard is setting up a sensor in a hospital while wearing a hat:

I’m bowled over

We haven’t even asked where Picard got these clothes, but I would like to point out that he’s dressed as a lower-class guy, while Riker is a cop, and Geordi looks like a gentleman. Was there even a discussion they all had about how they would disguise themselves? Was Picard like “I just really want to wear a beat-up bowler hat” and since he’s the captain, they extrapolated from there? This episode is NOT CONCERNED about any of this. They all have clothes, end of story. 

Bev even has TWO outfits!!

Hello nurse!!!!

I love this look. She still has her unlikely hairstyle happening, which means her nurse’s cap is sitting atop her voluminous hairstyle. (Not very practical, but realistic!) She’s sporting a simple striped dress and a button-on apron. (Look closely and you can see the two buttons holding the apron to the dress.) The fabric underneath might be cotton seersucker, but it’s likely a lightweight cotton or linen twill. You can see how closely her look matches these nurses from a similar time period:

Hello nurses!!!!

Deanna is also in this scene and this episode, but you wouldn’t know it from what she’s given to do. HUGE SHOCKER: TROI NOT GIVEN ENOUGH TO DO IN AN EPISODE. 🙃

She still looks beautiful:

Why aren’t capelets more popular

We never get a really GREAT look at her whole outfit, but I can tell you that it has a capelet, it’s in the red family, and the hat has a lot of business going on. For those reasons: approved. It has a flounce in the back too:

More fabric = more wealth

Sometimes I think about just how much fabric it took to make these old-timey dresses and I’m like...how did anyone get anything done?? It takes me like 4 weeks to finish a pair of leggings and those have like 5 seams and I own a serger. These historical bitches were sewing whole ass dresses in no time at all. 

Okay, so Bev is in this hospital and here come some more energy-stealing aliens, disguised as healthcare professionals this time:

I cannot take a medical professional wearing a LIGHT BROWN TOP HAT seriously, sorry

Bev AND this energy-stealing alien have BOTH managed to get their hands on the SAME nurse’s uniform?? I guess in the case of the alien, she is a shape-shifter, so she got her clothes from...that. And her hair. 

I hate this light brown top hat. If you’re going to wear a top hat, don’t DISRESPECT IT by making it BROWN, but if you’re going to make it brown, make it a good brown, like chocolate. Stupid energy-stealing aliens.

There’s a skirmish, the energy-stealing aliens disappear, and the real cops show up:

MOUSTACHE

Of course, the cops showing up is bad, because when has a cop showing up ever made a bad situation better? Never. Defund the police, but don’t defund handlebar mustaches. Those can stay.

Fortunately, Data has gotten a ping on that machine he was building before and shows up on a motherfucking HORSE:

Brent just wanted to show off

He’s back in his brown striped suit and red tie. Okay.

Everyone returns to the boarding house to suss out the situation, and we get a look at what Riker is rocking underneath his cop jacket:

Suspend me daddy

You can see very clearly here how the collar is not actually attached to the shirt. This was a thing people in the olden days did so they could wear their shirt for multiple days in a row and just switch out the collar and cuffs so they looked clean. As someone who is wearing the same sweatshirt for the third day in a row, I support this method. (If you’re interested on more info about collars, here is a very enjoyable article about them.)

We are also blessed with a better look at Deanna’s sleeves and bodice:

Black lace cuffs? Decadent!!!

You can also see Geordi’s shades, which suit him really nicely. One thing I’ve been enjoying on this rewatch is just how well LeVar Burton can act without having his eyes visible. He’s great. Let’s just all think about how great LeVar Burton is for a second

And also Bev’s dress:

I legitimately want this dress

I don’t think those buttons are functional. Can you imagine how annoying THAT would be? But I am absolutely in love with this dress. Two paisleys, Beverly???? A goddess. I’m also dying for that brooch with the chain. A+ look all around, great work.

Finally, FINALLY, Guinan meets the rest of the crew:

When you meet someone you won’t actually know for 500 years

She is wearing a hat that looks like a toilet paper cozy. Did your grandma have one of these? They’re so stupid and I love them so much. 

Picard and Guinan meet for what is the first time for her, but not the first time for him, and honestly it is...sensual?????

If I got a m’lady from P. Stew I wouldn’t even mind

Patrick and Whoopi truly do some nice work in this ep. But we are here to yell about clothes, so: LOOK AT THIS DRESS ON AN EXTRA:

Gimme dat dress

I just want that dress to wear around my house. I legitimately bought an 18th century costume dress to do just that, so don’t think I won’t literally do this.

OKAY, WE ARE ALMOST TO THE END. 

The crew, plus Guinan, go back to the cave where this all started:

Cave Club, the only club that meets in a cave

We get a nice look at the bodice of Guinan’s dress here and guess what: MORE BUTTONS. Buttons on the lapels, and also buttons on the front panel with the pointy top. I wonder if she has multiple front panels for that dress in different colors, like a Swatch watch. 

Unbeknownst to them, Mark Twain followed them!! Then there’s a scuffle with the energy-stealing aliens during which a few things happen:

Data’s head flies off

Mark Twain gets sucked into the temporal disturbance

Guinan gets hurt

Picard stays behind to make sure Guinan is okay

So we end up with Mark Twain on the Enterprise, where he sees Worf, and he’s like:

Buh-WHAT

Worf is also confused:

This is...extremely perplexing

We have a few more looks back on the Enterprise, including Regular Guinan:

ShoulderSpreads™: The Bed Spread for Your Shoulders

I love love LOVE this outfit. The color is perfect, the shoulderspreads are perfect, the front draping is perfect. It looks like a velvet housedress from the 1960s except FANCY which is kind of my ideal aesthetic. And it’s red (my fave). 

We get a quick glimpse at the barber uniform:

Bitch let me pass, idc if you wrote Huck Finn

This barber does. not. give. a. fuck!!!! 

Geordi reattaches Data’s head, the one they already had, which means this whole thing was a ding dang closed loop. The reattachment also kind of diminishes the whole conversation they had earlier about how Data’s head in the cave meant that Data could die someday, because...he didn’t. He still might, but his head is back and he’s fine now.

Meanwhile, Picard is still back in 1893 and they have to go get him, but only one person can come back through the temporal disturbance, so Mark Twain is like “duh I’ll go get him.” 

And finally Guinan and Picard can talk about how their friendship spans 500 years!!!!

Hey girl

Hey

YOU’RE WELCOME

*abolish the police

[canary3d-obsessed]

Restless Rewatch: The Untamed, Episode 01

(Masterpost) (Next Episode)

Warning: This is **FULL **of spoilers, not just for this episode but for the entire series. If you haven’t finished all 50 episodes, please don’t read it! 

Intro: 2020 continues to be much much too much while also being incredibly boring, and Im done with Shen Wei’s Lewks, so now I’m doing a deep meta dive into the Untamed. Let’s roll! 

Prologue: The Battle of Mordor

The Demise of our Protagonist

Unlike some other shows I won’t name, The Untamed kills its suicidal queer protagonist immediately, rather than waiting four seasons, so we know what we're in for. 

This is Wei Wuxian, who is about to yeet himself off of a cliff. He is having a bad day. 

Note: if mouth blood bothers you...C-Drama might not be your thing. 

Reasons for mouth blood: a sampler

Anyway...cliff time

Note: if (fictional) suicide bothers you...C-Drama might not be your thing. 

To be fair there are hardly any suicides in The Untamed. No more than ...five? As long as you don’t count the entire population of the Wen Corporate Headquarters in Yiling or those wall bandits in Qinghe or Madame Yu or all those Wens who supposedly threw themselves into the mud puddle or that Mo guy who broke his own neck. Plus watching Wei Wuxian’s cliff drop several more times from multiple angles. So, you know. Hardly Any Suicides. 

This is Lan Wangji, who is about to have his first losing encounter with physics. He is having a bad day.

In fact, if it is possible to have a worse day than the guy who is currently falling to his death, Lan Wangji is having that.

This is Jiang Cheng, who is feeling extra stabby from this camera angle. He is having a bad day.

Camera operator: why you gotta take it out on me? 

(Much, much more after the cut!)

The Amulet Situation

This is the Stygian Tiger Amulet. Yes, by all means, (Netflix) subtitles, let's use a 12-dollar word, “Stygian,” that every English speaker who is not a Shelley/Byron shipper will have to look up. Let’s not use a normal word like "deathly" or "corrupt" or you know... "Yin" which is clearly what they are saying on screen.

Why does this tiger amulet look like a chameleon crossed with a remora? Wei Wuxian can paint photorealistic bunnies on a flimsy lantern while sitting in a field having distracting teenage lust, but two months of meditating with super magic gets him a tiger that looks like a chameleon. And don’t try telling me this is a traditional-Chinese-art vibe because this jade tiger from frickin 1000 BCE is way more tigerish than Wei Wuxian’s attempt. 

Try harder next time, Wei Wuxian.

This is thousands of cultivators having a battle.  What do you mean, it looks like about 40-60 dudes?

 Any time someone in The Untamed refers to a number of people, it is like when you do your high school play and look off into the wings at nothing and say “Hark, A Ship Approaches!” and everyone’s parents nod indulgently.

Jin Clan Mountain Hunt:

*viewership nods indulgently*

This is Captain Blowhard, over on the right, courtesy name Clan Leader Yao. His job is to talk smack about Wei Wuxian and stick up for whoever is the biggest asshole in any given scene.  

He represents mainstream cultivation-world values so here he is shanking one of his allies to take the deadly amulet of evilness.

The Present Day

Spilling All That Yiling Laozu Tea

Down at the Exposition Tea Shop, the Lan juniors are chilling and listening to Tea Dude tell the story of Yiling Laozu. 

How did they get permission to take this field trip? “Principal Qiran, we want to go downtown to hang out with the local rabble and learn about your favorite person, Wei Wuxian.”

Waiting in the wings is the man with a fan and a plan, Nie Huaisan(g), who is paying tall loot to get these stories told.  

...Why? Is Mo Xuanyu having tea here and listening? Or is Wei Wuxian being summoned back by hearing all this smack being talked about him? *Shrug.*

Gank Your Soul

Drunk flag guy out here talking about spirits. Wikipedia tells me that In one school of Daoist thought, a human being has a collection of physical souls (魄 pò) and ethereal souls (魂 hún). Drunk flag guy is saying “hún ” at the moment. 

The many types of souls don’t translate well into English, where spiritual vocabulary has always been shackled connected to Christian beliefs, and is too limited for this context. So when the subtitles have conversations like “Is it a soul eater? No, no, it’s a spirit taker!” just roll with it. (Speaking of hún, if you have any interest in linguistics, do yourself a favor and go read all the wonderful meta @hunxi-guilai​)

The spirit-carrying flag looks a lot like Raava and Vaatu from Korra which...probably doesn’t mean anything.

The Demise of our Trill Host

Suicide #2 happens about 8 minutes in. 

Mo Xuanyu is that hippie roommate with the annoying wind chimes and bead curtains and blood spatter.

He is super mad at his terrible family and also at Jin Guangyao, who sent him home to his terrible family. I wonder if Fan Man Nie Huaisang influenced Jiggy’s decision-making there. Mo Xuanyu’s choice to die for revenge might be excessive, given how easy it actually is to murder the Mo family.

Being Alive Is Fine I Guess As Long As I Get To Fuck WIth People

Wei Wuxian starts his new life by splashing a little water on his face, which instantly makes his hair go from this

to this. 

He looks at his reflection and wishes he was dead, which--mood--but he gets over it as soon as he finds someone whose day he can fuck up.

And he is ALL in on being crazy. 

OP wishes she had the Wei Wuxian kind of crazy instead of the kind she actually has. 

Meanwhile, this is the sane Mo cousin:

This asshole is wearing one of the best fabrics in the whole show, incidentally. Asshole.

My favorite bit of Wei-Mo craziness is when Wei Wuxian does a meaningless 360 all the way around this dude before ducking in the opposite direction, which is like when I make 4 right turns around a whole block to avoid making a single left across traffic.

Perhaps I Do Miss One Thing In This Life

Wei Wuxian has pining thoughts about Lan Wangji, so he plays WangXian on a fucking blade of grass well enough for Sizhui to recognize it from his dad's guqin jams. 

Wei Wuxian is a better flautist than even Inspector Gadget BeatBoxing Flute Guy (Google it).

Our Many Many Spirit Lure Flags have Lured A Spirit, Oh Shit

Lan Clan has a Plan and Wei Wuxian is a Fan

Having one single lure flag stuck in Wen Ning’s torso caused spirits to basically eat him alive, so to catch one evil spirit, 6 disciples holding flags on the roof plus 8 more flags on the ground seems like a good amount. Wei Wuxian is like “yep, a single one of these will lure every spirit for five miles, carry on, younglings.”

Baxia Does the Heavy Lifting

Wei Wuxian is supposed to kill four people because of this curse situation, and in the course of the series they all die, and he kills exactly zero of them. The curse on Wei Wuxian’s arm should be called the scorekeeper curse. 

Baxia’s spirit pinballs around the Mo clan, rapidly killing three people on Mo Xuanyu’s list plus a couple extras for good measure.  Who's a good blade? Baxia is! Yess you are! Yes you are!

This here is the exact point in the show where your friend, who has listened to you squee about The Untamed for three months and finally agreed to watch it with you, will say “what the fuck am I watching?” and try to get up off the couch. Tackle them! 

This also the point where we all realize that the prosthetic and practical effects in this show were probably not made by the people who made the clothing, because the quality is...variable. The white eyeballs are pretty good, but the glove of death is ridiculous.

Camera operator: why you gotta take it out on me?

While Baxia goes to town on the Mo clan, the Lan Clan babies...watch? And tie up the various victims after they are already goners. 

Narrator: Her son is dead.

Meanwhile, 

Wei Wuxian, you motherfucker. You’ve been alive for like 7 hours and you’re already building a new zombie army. No wonder you don’t want them to call Lan Wangji.

Hanguang-Jun Cut It Up One Time

Lan Wangji shows up and very slowly kicks zombie ass with his guqin. If you are used to Hong Kong action speeds, you will find The Untamed very peaceful.

 All of the baby Lans fan squee up at Lan Wangji like he's the cultivation world's David Bowie and...they're not wrong. Jesus Fuck, he’s charismatic.

Lan Wangji is soft boi when he discovers this murderous sword full of dead-bastard energy, because it reminds him of his true love.

Like the talk about souls, the conversations about the nature of the murderous entity really don’t survive translation into English.

Servant: it’s a ghost! 

WWX: it’s not a ghost, it’s a spirit

Babies: It’s a spirit

LWJ: it’s not a spirit, it’s a [...] ghost

Our Protagonist gets the FOH

Wei Wuxian is soft boi when he sees Lan Wangji, but not so soft that he considers actually, like, sticking around. 

Wei Wuxian is also clueless boi, noting Lan Wangji’s white clothing and thinking, as in the past, that he looks like he’s dressed in mourning. The term he uses is 戴孝, which google tells me means the type of outfit worn by Jiang Yanli after Wen Ning rips her husband’s heart out someone who is in mourning. 

Actually, Wei Wuxian, you dumbass, he is in actual mourning, actually, for you. Dumbass. He probably packed away all of his blue outer robes 16 years ago and only takes them out occasionally to reminisce about that nice date you had on your mountain of corpses. 

On his way out the door Wei Wuxian manages to find a red ribbon for his beautiful hair, so things are looking up. 

Where to go next...hey I know, how about that one haunted mountain with the killer statue, you know, the one that all my executed friends and child came from? That’ll be fun and a great way to put the past behind me!

Episode 02 Restless Rewatch is here!

[wordynerdygurl]

Skin Deep - Part 6

Author’s Note:  Honestly, this story is nearing it’s ending.  Hard to believe that a little idea I couldn’t shake has now grown into this mini-series!  For all my die-hard homies, waiting for the next installment, I hope this is worth your while!  If you’re new here, take a look around, see if you like anything and please, let the management know if you have any questions!! As always, writing like this requires the emotional support of people and pets.  My dogs, Murphy and Winston, get me through a lot of plot bunnies just by being stalwart companions.  My husband, graciously, lets me take these flights of fancy when I probably should be paying better attention to him and his day... and some of my besties here on Tumblr make it possible for me to do this for you guys.  @sammy-jo1977​ , my sister from another mister!  Couldn’t/ Wouldn’t do it without you! To all the folks who follow me... My Minxes!  Love you all!  Stay well, be kind, and remember that Love, really does conquer all!  If you want to be a Minx, send me a note, I’ll happily add you to my tag list! Lastly, be sure to like and share anything that you see on Tumblr that catches your eye.  Creative types, we need the constant validation, you see?  Without it, like an unwatered plant, we wither on the vine and perish!  Be kind to those who help you through the day and reblog! Skin Deep Part 5 - click here for the previous chapter! Pairing:  Loki x Reader, Steve, Valkyrie & Thor all make appearances Summary:  Continued from Part 5, You and Loki put your plan into action, returning to Farmhouse.  When you encounter Steve again, you learn there’s more than two sides to this story. Warnings:  Loki’s POV and perspective, including mentions of his time under Thanos.  I’m re-writing MCU history here, but some of the main beats are the same, so look out for SPOILERS for Dark World, Ragnarok, and a touch of Infinity War.  The SNAP never happened because, reasons.  

Empathy used to seem such a human emotion.  Loki had no time for that on Asgard, not when Odin denied anything as frivolous as feeling.  Hiding in plain sight was the means to survival and if that made the young prince sneaky and sly, so be it.  By placing those parts of himself under lock and key; the parts that hurt, the ones that ached, Loki found it was safer to disconnect from others than subject himself to their suffering too.

Operating under the influence of Thanos and his minions when he held the scepter, Loki had purposefully divorced connection of any kind from his mind.  It was dangerous.  Weak.  And moreover, it allowed Loki to do what Thanos commanded without really experiencing the horror, the havoc, of his actions for himself. 

  Who could hear the screams of women when the voice of Ebony Maw subliminally chanted all the ways that one could be dismembered at Thanos’ hands should Loki fail?  What man would shed a tear after the near constant beatings doled out by Black Order members, just for the fun of it?  How could someone care about a house, a car, a city, when they no longer cared about themself? Losing the Battle for New York had consequences far beyond the destruction of property.  With Thanos’ hold over him vanquished, the walls around his heart, constructed in youth, crashed and burned like the dream of ruling Earth.  Suddenly and completely out of reserves, Loki was powerless.  And he felt everything.  The fresh hurts caused by his manipulated ambitions in the hands of Thanos. The furious feelings of his brother, the inadequacies of his character, the feeble needs that drove his wild ambition washed over him unceasingly.  Anger.  Loss.  Lunacy.  Loki learned a hard truth in that moment.  He was a monster.  A freak.  A creature beyond hope and salvation; proving his adoptive father right and his own hopeful heart wrong.  Bitterness soured the fallen prince. Endless hours in isolation on Earth, which continued in his father's house, had Loki believing he had no chance of seeing the world outside again, and it hardened his heart further.  To feel was so painful, so raw, and so humane.  Why bother anyway?  All that emoting, those high spirits, all they really did was expose you to derision.  What was grief to a goblin?  What was horror to a monster?  What was love to a villain like him?  An evil, conspiring demi-god, with a mind bent toward domination.  A damaged, destroyed, deity alone and in pieces.  Who would ever give someone like Loki Odinson a chance?  Why should they?

Turning to his mother, Loki did everything but ask for forgiveness.  In long rambling talks, her projection to his jailed person, the pair talked around ideas of guilt and innocence, of fate and fortune, of destiny versus desire, yet Loki never heard the words he needed in order to truly find peace.   

If Frigga was aware of her son’s need for absolution, Loki would never know, as their last exchange was harsh and full of anger.  Another stroke of loss, crippling now, because there was nothing Loki could do to change any of it from inside his prison cell.  No illusion could conceal the painful ache that consumed him entirely. 

Those days were dark, even for a soul as dusky hued as his own, and Loki’s thoughts followed a similar path.  If there had been a way for him to shake off this immortal coil, free himself of the burden of living, Loki would have done so and been glad.  Death was welcome compared to all this longing and heartache. But life, even a nearly immortal one, was funny. 

When Thor provided a chance at redemption, Loki snatched at it, in his own detached way.  He played hero, rescuing Jane, aiding his brother.  And if he took a bit more in the form of deposing his arrogant, aging father, who would be surprised?  He was Loki, God of Mischief, after all. Ruling the Nine Realms without the oppressive oversight of his father allowed Loki to prove himself in ways he never imagined.  And Loki wasn’t just good at it.  He was great. Of course, it helped that no one knew he was Loki.  Living disguised as Odin was often unpleasant, frequently frustrating, but entirely necessary.  Being Loki was still too difficult and likely to bring unwanted attention in the form of The God of Thunder, a thing that no one truly wanted, Loki least of all. Return Thor did, along with an unknown sister and the end of Asgard.  When confronted with the insanity of Hela’s bloodlust, Loki’s only thought was of his kingdom, now without a ruler.  He had worked too hard, too long, to see the land he cared for in the hands of an enemy, even if she called herself sister.  Opening the Bi-Frost, panicked, his mind was solely on saving those he had recently held dominion over.  They were his people, after all.  But he never reached Asgard. Swallowing his fear, Loki focused all his energy on staying alive in a new and distracting environment, initially.  What Loki found on Sakaar wasn't a new home base under a flamboyant, ineffective leader that he could control, even if that was his first design.  On Sakaar Loki found his loyalty.  

The proud, deep resonance of being Asgardian, of being an Odinson, of being capable and cool under pressure.  Sure, he had to prove himself to Thor, Valkyrie, Banner and honestly, the rest of the kingdom, but actions speak louder than words.  And through his actions on Sakkar, and by extension rescuing the people of Asgard, Loki had shown everybody his true mettle. It was on the deck of a stolen ship headed for Midgard that  Loki had made a commitment of sorts.  One that was not to the people, so recently saved or for his found family.  This time, the promise Loki intended to keep was for himself.  Loki was going to change. The problem is, a task like that takes time.  Patience.  Motivation.  It was something that Loki had to work at and it was exhausting. They say that the best things come to those who wait.  Loki was learning to wait everyday.  Having earned a place at the side of his brother, he worked tirelessly to win over the heroes of his new home planet.  Was it easy?  Hardly, but Loki wasn’t willing to compromise.  Not anymore. A life like Hela’s was not in his runes.  Loki was simply going to be better.  Not perfect.  No one could be as good hearted as Captain America, nor could one be as tech savvy as Stark.  So Loki was planning on being the best Loki he could possibly be, and that’s how he found himself going to meetings at The Avengers Tower, a mostly welcome addition to the team. Meetings weren’t all that exciting and boredom was an awful temptation for a deity devoted to mayhem.  In fact, Loki spent more time doodling in his notebook than listening to whoever was droning on about whatever part of the world needed the attention of this motley crew.  That was, until Pepper Potts hired her new assistant.  That you were polite, pretty and pert wasn’t lost on the young god.  Sitting outside Mrs. Iron Man’s office, typing away with a phone tucked under your ear, moving faster than anyone he had ever seen was certainly impressive.  You were quick witted, clever and most of all, funny. Everyone else seemed to fall under your spell without much effort on your part, something that Loki found frustratingly fascinating.  Here he was, struggling to get people to say his name without having a traumatic flashback, while you simply smiled and smarted off prettily, and had everyone singing your praises.  But Norns, were you adorable. If he thought about it, and while off planet, Loki definitely had, he could remember the moment he realized that you were the woman he wanted.  You were busy, as always, fielding phone calls and flipping through screens yet every moment your flying fingers weren’t hovering over a keyboard or pushing down telephone buttons they curled around a heart shaped charm at your throat.  Clearly, it was a habit and one that you weren’t even aware of, still - it transfixed him all the same.  Watching you from his side eye, your voice never wavering, your tone always so pleasing, and your nimble digits returning again and again to the small sigil around your neck.  “Loki?” “Huh?”  Dumbfounded at your call, those deep sea eyes blinked wildly at the sound of his name on your lips. “Hi!  Yes, Pepper can see you now.  Go ahead, she’s ready!” He rose on stiff legs, adjusting his tie, about to lie to Tony Stark’s woman all for the chance to see you in passing.  Who had he become? It started out innocent like that, but soon, Loki was having to invent excuses for being in the office so frequently.  Missing files, random visits, even going so far as to buy Tony coffee just for the thrill of seeing you.  Something needed to change, and quickly, or Loki was going to blow. On another made up errand, hanging around the executive’s high rise office, Loki was doing a bad job of pretending not to see you.  His mind was on your pouty lips as you sipped lemonade through a straw and not on the stately woman seated behind the desk. 

“Loki, you’re a man of some… style.”  Pepper said it so casually that he almost didn’t hear, his head lost in thoughts that would shame any other person. “I like to think so.”

Shutting her folder with a snap, Pepper smiled, “And you’d love to help your old friend Pepper out, right?” That got his attention, and quickly.  Loki, shoving his hands in his pockets, turned to face Pepper with a widening grin, “I feel like I’m being baited.”

“Baited?  Never!  It’s just, you’re always here and I have a… project that needs the kind of help that you can provide.”  At those words you entered the office, ready for action with a notebook and pen, eager and excited. Suddenly, it was all clear to Loki, “Pepper, no.”  

The noose closed in on the handsome god as Pepper gathered paperwork without looking his way, “Come on, it’s the Stark Homecoming Gala and the two of you will do great!  I have faith in you both.  I can’t wait to see what you come up with!” “Really, Miss Potts, I simply can’t-” Stopping short, the strawberry blonde whipped around, almost nose to nose with Loki.  Shrewd and straightforward, Pepper interrupted, saying, “You’ve been dancing around my office for weeks now.  Clearly you like her and… against all the odds, she likes you too.  I’m doing you a favor and when someone does you a favor, you say “Thank You”.” “Thank you.” Nodding curtly, “You’re welcome.  Now, make yourselves comfortable, order some dinner, my treat.  And do whatever you need to make sure this is one great party!” That’s how Loki found himself sitting at a clear glass table over sweating bottles of iced tea as you discussed color themes and tablecloths.  You were shy, tucking a strand of hair behind your ear as you reviewed notes from previous gatherings both large and small.  His hands itched with wanting to do that job himself. “So, what do you think?”  It was the first time you had addressed him directly since coming through the door and for a moment Loki couldn’t answer.  You were too… not beautiful, that wasn’t the right word, although you were.  No, you were too open, too easy to read, and the earnestness you offered him was downright frightening. Sitting forward in the uncomfortable, yet fashionable, office furniture, Loki cleared his throat and again tugged his tie, “What I think is that you should let me take you dinner.” Dropping your eyes, your cheeks colored slightly as your fingers found that locket charm once more, “Loki, I… I don’t know-” Grabbing for your hand, suddenly afraid that you would take those shining eyes away, Loki lowered his voice and did something he never thought he would.  He begged.  “Please?  I find that you’re all I can think about.” It rushed out of him in a torrent, the way truth so often does, and he found himself unable to look you in the eye.  Loki was afraid to see rejection on your easy to read face, afraid that wanting you had cracked open the lock box holding his heart, afraid that you would see just how weak you made him.  Your fingers twined with his own as you replied, “You didn’t let me finish.  I don’t know what took you so long.” Sighing with relief, his face melting into a genuine smile, “Me either.” Over the next two months the pair of you worked tirelessly to plan and execute a perfect party.  You were inseparable during the day, heads buried together as you discussed linens and table settings, the quality of cocktail glasses, and debating over a band or a dj.  But at night, at night Loki talked about the things that haunted him in the dark.  And you loved him in spite of the awful things he had seen and done and said. Others took notice.  Loki was more lighthearted, more available.  He listened when people spoke and wasn’t constantly doodling during meetings.   Yes, Loki was learning how to love through your loving him.  If empathy had seemed too humane before, then sharing his life, his love with you, was the kind of immortality that earned someone a place in Valhalla.  It was the bravest thing Loki Odinson had ever done and he didn’t mind one bit.

The first time Loki tasted you was burned into his brain, as bright as a flash of lightning.  A firefly in a memory jar that he kept returning to, time and again.  Loki remembered what you were wearing.  He recalled exactly how the light shone in your eyes.  If he concentrated, he could tap out the rhythm of your racing pulse as he held you in his arms. It was the night of the gala.  Inviting everyone under the Stark Industries banner, up to and including the heroes tasked with saving the world, the event was a way to earn money for one of the many charities Tony supported.  The place was full of beautiful people wearing gorgeous clothes under perfect lights set to the hand crafted soundtrack you had created together.

But, Norns, he could still remember the way your eyes sparkled under the lowlights of that hall.  How your dress, simple but sophisticated, clung to the fullness of your bottom.  Low cut but somehow still modest, Loki couldn’t tear his gaze away from the promise of your curves, willing himself to find anything else as interesting as the idea of you.  

You were across the room hanging onto Tony’s every word, eyes bright and cheerfully glowing as you sipped champagne.  It made Loki want to do something grand, something suave, something that would demand your attention for his own.  Moving towards you, his tuxedo perfectly pressed and fitting better than it had any right to, Loki looked long and lean.  Each of his steps seemed to echo, even though the room was full of sound, and you turned your head as if you also heard.  Breaking away from the cluster of acolytes surrounding Iron Man, you bit into your lip as the crowd parted, moving closer together one step at a time.  It was one of the sexiest things Loki had ever witnessed. Lifting your glass in a toast, taking in the room of mingling millionaires, wealthy hangers on and Avengers, “Well, we did it!” “You did it, my dove, I just hung around and judged everyone.” “Oh stop.  I couldn’t have done it without you and you know it.”  Playfully you pushed against his shoulder and Loki took advantage, using your momentum to pull you to his side, your curvy figure flush against his own. Crooning into the shell of your ear, his lips brushing over that sensitive skin, “Somehow, love, I think you would have managed.”  Before you had time to think, Loki had melded his mouth with your own, stealing your breath along with your heart.  Loki’s feet moved in time with the music as he pulled into a dance, laughing in his arms, your cheeks hot and your head swimming. You laughing was, without question, Loki’s favorite sound.  Nothing in this world or any other came close to matching the joyful, childlike glee of that enchanting noise.  Loki memorized its melody, the rise and fall of your giggle.  He had craved it, being away for so long, and now he wanted… no, needed to hear it.  But you were the furthest thing from happy at the moment.   

"Darling, please.  We have to go."  Loki tapped his watch, shaking himself free from the memories of your previous life together and barely suppressing his irritation.

Tears filled your eyes as you whipped your arms around Thor’s mighty shoulders, his deep voice grumbly with emotion, "Take care of him, would you?  He's a jerk, but Loki is the only brother I have."

"Of course… always.  And Valkyrie, your highness, I can’t thank you enough for-"

"No need.  Loki, and by extension yourself, will always have a safe haven here in my palace."

Looking on, Loki and Thor embraced almost tenderly before crashing their heads together.  

"Stay safe, little brother."

"Be good, Thor."

Eyes on the sky, Val ignored the show of masculine emotion, chastising your plan, "You’re going to start a war, Loki."

Straight backed, Loki turned to the king, "Not on the grass of New Asgard.  I will take the fight to them, that is my vow to you."

As Loki offered his hand, Valkyrie shook it, with parting words, "Work on staying alive.  You have a tendency to worry your brother."

Solemnly nodding, "As the king commands.  Shall we?"  With that Loki laced his fingers with yours, leading you a few paces away from the people who loved him most, before summoning the magic that had you both transcending space and time.

This time when your feet touched down it was on the familiar turf of the orchard, surrounded by the scent of apple blossoms and the buzzing of happy bees.  Morning had broken and the world seemed full of promise, with the exception of that knot in your stomach.

"Are you ready?  Darling?"

"Oh… yes.  I mean, I still don't love this plan, but-"

"But it's going to work."  Only it was no longer the baritone voice of your long, lean Loki speaking.  In his place stood Nick Fury, leather duster and eye patch in place.

"If you say so!"  And you clutched your own throat as Natasha’s bored tones came out of your mouth.  The suit, skin tight but flexible, molded to your modified form.  All in all, you were comfortable, "The boots are a bit much."

"Ya think?  This jacket weighs a ton."  Pulling at his collar, "Why does he wear a turtleneck anyway?"

"Loki, this is so weird.  It feels so weird."

"Agreed, but then, why am I so turned on?"

Laughing, you shook your false red hair, hands resting on Natasha’s waist, "God, I've missed you."

"Same, dearest.  Now… let's get your necklace and some answers!"

---

 Convincing Bucky to head home had taken a lot of work, but sometime around 2 am Steve had finally seen his friend off.  The house was empty.  Steve felt the same way.

Turning the black velvet box in his pocket, fingers crushed against the fragile fabric, Steve struggled to feel anger.  When that didn't materialize he shot for sadness but even tears seemed beyond his ability.  

With a sigh, climbing the same stairs he had trudged up a hundred times before, Steve started going through the motions of bedtime.  Only tonight you weren’t there to tease him about the wildly inappropriate amount of toothpaste on his brush.  He didn’t have your light footsteps to follow to the bedside or your help with stacking all of your extra, yet entirely essential, pillows on the chair.

Someone must have changed the sheets, he thought.  There was no evidence of you and Loki’s adventurous afternoon anymore.  Steve made a mental note to thank Buck for that little piece of kindness in the morning.

Shucking his shirt, Steve sat on the mattress, a hand to his forehead.  He had lost.  Captain America had been bested.  Beaten.  And by Loki, no less.

Moonlight in silver slivers shone through the window panes, squares of light in the deep of night.  Steve was alone.  Utterly and totally alone.

And there was no one to blame but himself.

Sighing hard, Steve stood, pacing the floor to work off some of the unspendable anxiety he kept creating.  The room still had your energy, your vibe, as you liked to call it, and the feeling was a prickling itch Steve couldn’t quite satisfy.  Traces of you were everywhere and something about you leaving all of it, and him, behind was just too big to process. “Damn it.”  Even whispering sounded like thunder in the silence of your recently vacated room.  His hands, so big, so strong, smoothed along the fabric of your hanging clothes.  All that power had done nothing to help Steve get the thing he wanted. Sorting through the baubles and trinkets on your dresser, bottles of perfume he had purchased, necklaces and pins, each with a moment of memory it hurt him to recall.  Your watch ticked away the minutes as he stood, stoic and still, surrounded by the shadow of you.  In the orchard the birds were waking, their song filling the air, as morning broke in low golden rays.  Abandoning his plan for sleep, Steve watched as the light chased away the dark, casting rainbows on the floor.  The sun was reflecting off of your Grandmother’s necklace.  A pretty, ancient, carved cameo,  heart shaped locket.  He recalled his own mother owning one just like it, pictures of loved ones pressed inside, holding them as tight as history would allow. Fisting the filigree chain, winding it around his fingers as if it would somehow undo what he had done, Steve slipped it into his pocket before settling back onto the bed.  ----

At the back door to the home you so recently shared with Steve, Loki hung back, “I think this is where we split up.  You go find your treasure and me… I’m going to find some answers.” Nodding, Natasha’s signature red hair swinging, you squeezed the hand holding your own.  It no longer looked like Loki’s long fingered paw, but that was only a skin deep change.  You felt the undeniable essence of him in the press of his fingers against your own. “Be careful.” “That’s no fun, dove.” “Loki-”  You hated the way your voice broke as you said it, but there just seemed to be so much at stake and you had already lost him once. Sensing your unspoken concerns, Loki flashed you Nick Fury’s best smile, “I will.  I promise.”

“Ten minutes.” “Ten minutes.”  You watched the black coated back of your charmed paramour as he opened the shed door, hoping that he’d find something worth knowing in that place out of sight.  Inhaling deeply you twisted the doorknob as quietly as possible, letting yourself into what was once your kitchen, “What a mess.”  It was impossible not to notice the unwrapped leftovers and empty bottles littering the table.  An overturned trash barrel, crumpled beer cans littering the counter, things that Steve, your Steve, would never have tolerated.  All evidence that the grand evening he’d envisioned had been thwarted by Loki’s arrival and your collective escape.  

You started up the stairs, praising Natasha's footwear for its stealth, when you heard the toilet flush and the unmistakable shuffle of Steve’s feet on the carpet.  There was no place to hide on the wide stairwell.  It was time to see if Loki's plan was going to work.

Voice blurry, eyes rubbed red and raw, you couldn't deny that Steve looked like shit, “Bucky?  That you?  You back?”  Steve’s voice bounced around the brightening room as morning sunlight filtered through the soft sheers you had picked out for exactly this reason. Panicked, you backed into the railing with an over loud “Oof!” “Nat?  What are you doing here?  I thought you and Fury were headed to New Asgard?”  Suddenly wide awake and wondering, Steve rushed to your costumed side, eager for information. The man in front of you now bore little resemblance to the angry Avenger you had escaped from hours before.  This man had hair sticking up in odd angles from near constant finger raking.  This man had a hint of a stuffy nose and red rimmed eyes, all indicators that tears had been shed.  Now those blue eyes were scrutinizing you closely, full of concern.

“Uh… We... We got intel.  Yea, intelligence, that Loki was headed back this way.  Turned around… and uh, here we are.” One of those sandy blonde eyebrows lifted, “Natasha?”

Squaring your shoulders, channeling that cool confidence you’d see Black Widow display over and over, “Steve?”  Something about your tone of voice convinced him in a way your words couldn’t.  He visibly relaxed, those broad shoulders going slack as he asked, “Didn’t make it to Norway, then?"

Nodding a negative, you felt the unfamiliar brush of her red hair at your cheek and had to fight the urge to tuck it away, “No.  Loki’s using some sort of transporting power to move them around.  Fury suggested I keep an eye out here, in case they come back this way.” “She won’t be back, Nat.  There’s nothing for her here.”  To you, Steve sounded so sad, so removed, that you had to will yourself not to comfort the giant before you.  “That’s not true!”  It came out of you forcefully, thoughtlessly, and you saw the shock register on the Captain’s face. “That is, Fury and I… we… have reason to believe that she will come back.  They left with nothing, Steve.  She’ll need clothes… maybe some shoes… and-”  Swallowing hard, you didn’t want to give anything away, “-a necklace from her grandmother.” Steve, patting his pocket, felt the weighted chain and it’s heart shaped locket, “I don’t think-” Stepping up to his bulky form, suddenly aggressive, you started, “Never mind what you think, Captain.  We're here for a necklace...  the necklace.  Our intel suggests that your former flame might return for it and… And, I want it, with me, as a means to subdue her when she arrives." Sounding forceful and official was enough to back Steve down.  Just a touch deflated, you watched him shrug, “If that’s what you want, Nat, here-”  From his pants he pulled out the shining bauble, a trinket really, but full of sentiment and memory. Sitting in his palm, the tiny heart that held the picture of your grandmother and mother looked so small, almost unreal.  Reaching for it with wet eyes, you smiled at Steve as you lifted the charm and chain, “Thank you, Steve.  Thank you.” Nodding deeply, that golden head bobbing, “You’re welcome.”  The large grandfather clock could be heard ticking throughout the house.  The sun was gaining on the day and you, dressed as Natasha stood in silence in front of a somber Steve.  For another long beat nothing was said, then, as if sensing a shift in your conversation, Steve flashed your fake Natasha a weak smile, “I could use some breakfast.  How about you?”

“Um… sure.  Yea, ok.  Breakfast.” 

Steve started moving again, downstairs towards the cluttered kitchen when he paused, "So how did you get back so fast?  Cause that's like a 7 hour flight, even with you in the cockpit." “Steve…”  You could hear it, the whining almost pleading tone that signaled the end of Loki’s well planned charade.  That wasn’t enough to stop Steve.  He broke hard, one of those strong arms stopping you in your tracks before you could reach the lower level. “It’s clever, I have to give you guys that.  Almost perfect, really.” Panic rising, you doubled down on the ruse, struggling to keep your voice even, “I don’t know-”  Blocking you in, his body the perfect unmovable buffer, “Loki’s here too, isn’t he?” Pushing against “Steve, I… I don’t…” “Don’t lie.  You don’t have to…” “But… how-?” “You’re not mean enough to play Natasha, doll.  Not by a long shot.”

--- It was strange to be seated at the table and chairs that you and Steve had picked out together one sunny Saturday when you thought that your future was going to be Loki-less.  Your place, the one that you had imagined filling with children that had golden hair and bright blue eyes, felt like a set.  Something false and fake.  A facade, put together simply for show. Steve must have felt it too because his fingers drummed against the white washed table incessantly.  Clearly he had something on his mind.  “Steve-” “No.  No.  Please, let me just get this out, ok?” Raising an eyebrow, you waved at him to continue, nervous but interested in what the super soldier needed to explain. With a shaky inhale, running his constantly moving fingers through his golden locks, Steve caught your eye and didn’t waiver.  “When I saw you… No, that’s not right.  Let me start at the beginning. “When Loki left Earth, you… you were so sad.  It hurt me to see you so… deflated.” “Steve, I-” “You know it’s true.  When he returned to Asgard, something in you, it dimmed, and I just couldn’t allow that… Not when I felt the way I did about you. “I don’t think you realize just how incredible you are… how full of life!  And since I had already missed one chance to be with you, I knew I needed to prove that I could be the man you needed… If you forgot about Loki along the way, even better. “Only… you never did.  I waited years for you, ya know, doll?  Years.  And just when I thought there was no chance with you, Nat gave me a reason to hope. “She was your friend.  An ally.  Someone you could trust… someone I could trust.  I swear it started out that innocently, at least for me.  I just wanted to make you smile again.  But she had other plans.  Plans that came from higher up the ladder of SHIELD. “Fury, he wanted us to watch you… something about Loki being too powerful.  And-”, grabbing your hand tightly, Steve emphasized his point, “-I promise you that I had no idea about his success, or the messages he had sent to you through Nick.  Like you, I thought that Loki was gone.  Missing.  Never coming back.” “I… I believe you Steve.  I know that you didn’t do all this on your own… but what was Nick hoping you’d find out?  I knew less than nothing about what was going on!” “I think he was worried that Loki would get to you first.  That if… when Loki returned, you would be his first stop.  Then you would know about Loki’s success and, frankly, Fury’s failures.  You would also know… well, everything you know now.  That Fury had you tailed, lied to, and led on in an effort to stop Loki from out flanking him.” Frenzied and frantic, you felt anger boiling up inside of you, “But I thought Loki was gone forever.  There was no hope for him and I… and Natasha, she told me that he was dead.” “All a part of Fury’s plan to keep you neutralized and Loki away.  If Loki thought that you’d ignored his letters, that you no longer loved him, why would he come back here?  And, if that didn’t work… when Loki came back and you were with me, what else could keep him on Earth?”

Whispering with realization, “So, they used you too.” Steve sighed and buried his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt, “Don’t feel bad for me.  I let them use my love for you, let them twist it up and shape it as they needed.  Honestly, I wish I could tell you that it was for you, but it wasn’t.  It was for me.  I wanted you, so, so badly.  I didn’t care what strings were attached.  And we built a life together, you and me.  I thought I could outrun the reality of the constant monitoring and daily reports.  Telling Natasha and Nick about every word and each email.  Don’t you see, I love you… and I wanted you, however I could get you.” Shaking your head, Natasha’s red wisps flying, “That’s not love, Steve.  I don’t know what that is… but love isn’t it.” “No?”  With a loud thunk, Steve slammed a small velvet box on the table between you. “Is… Is that what I think it is?”

“Last night.  It was going to happen last night.  Our friends here, under the lights and the stars, I was going to ask you to marry me.  I still would if-” Realization hit you like a ton of bricks, “If Loki hadn’t stepped back into our lives.” “-If Loki hadn’t stepped back into your life.” It made you both laugh in a sad way, how you finished the same thought, and for a fleeting second you could see why you had allowed Captain America to sweep you off your feet.  He was a lot of things to you now, but there was a time when he had been almost everything.  The evidence of that was in the small black square that said nothing but spoke volumes. “Steve, I don’t know if I would have said yes… even without Loki’s… arrival.  I think I have always known that you and I… we are very different people.” Sitting back in his chair, his gaze still locked on your own, “I just want you to know that I’m sorry.  I’m sorry about what I’ve done… what I’ve said… How, shit, how I’ve behaved.  I could say that it was my duty.  I could tell you it was out of love, but the plain truth is that I have always been jealous of what you and Loki share.” “You’ll find it Steve.  You really will.  There’s a person out there waiting for you.  And once you’ve found them, oh Steve, you’ll see that this… what we had, it’s a shadow.  An illusion.  Because love, real love, doesn’t come with caveats and catches.  It is an undeniable force which, in my case, even the boundaries of time and space can not deny.” Something like a sob burst out of Steve, and you were surprised to see tears in his eyes, “I was so wrong.  Could you ever forgive me?” “I want to, Steve.  I really do... “  What more could you say?  Patting his hand you started to rise, “I have to go now.  Loki and I need to keep moving and I don’t want to risk running into Nick and Natasha.  At least, not yet, anyway.” “Where are you planning to go?” “To the Avenger’s Tower.  I believe I know what Mr. Fury has been planning all along.”  Loki’s strong voice entered the conversation as smoothly as his arms wrapped possessively around your waist. Steve took in the protective stance of your returned lover with a raised eyebrow, and without further comment asked Loki, “Really?  And how are you going to breach the building?  They’ll be looking for you, even with disguises…  Fury is no fool.  Plus, there’s little chance that Tony hasn’t activated a million safety and security protocols by now.” Only interested in you, Loki refused to give Steve any of his attention, “Getting in can’t be that hard!  I’ll figure it out when I get there.  Ready pet?” With a gentle push under his broad hands your feet started to move towards the door.  Loki was eager to be off and away, especially after hearing so much of Roger’s confession.  Just knowing what Steve had done, manipulating you while also convinced of his love for you;  it was enough for Loki to commit murder.  He was having quite a difficult time not tearing the good Captain’s limbs off his body. Softening his tone, Steve practically pleaded, “Loki.  Wait.  I… I can help.” Turning his attention fully to your former flame, Loki purred venomously, “You can help?  I’d love to know what entails, Captain.” “I can get you into the place and take you exactly where you need to go.  Fury’s going to hate it, but I’m tired of taking orders that hurt the people that-”  His pause was as lingering as the look he gave you, “- That I love.”  Before Loki could offer a sincerely sassy reply you grabbed his sleeve, tugging, “Um… Excuse us a minute Steve.” Pulling him down the hall of a home that felt like a familiar faced stranger, you waited until you had a bit of distance from Steve before harshly whispering, “How long were you listening?”

Serving you that small, sexy smile, Loki grinned, “Long enough.  How did you know I was there?” “You are sneaky, but even you, God of Mischief, cast a shadow.” Swinging you close enough to catch your mouth with his own, Loki pressed a sweet kiss there before answering, “A mistake I will be careful not to make again!” “The tower, huh?  That’s where you want to go?”  Grabbing you at the swell of your hips, grinding his frame against your own, “Where I want to go, my darling, is to the nearest bed, preferably naked, with you and you alone.” Your hands traced over the lapels of his borrowed leather duster, pausing only to jerk him closer by the supple fabric, “Hmm… is that so?” “Oh yes…”  Loki’s buttery grumble filled your ear as his strong hands dug into the flesh of your bottom.  For a moment you thought he’d give in to temptation, his sweet lips teasingly close to your own upturned mouth, “But-” On your toes, leaning into Loki’s sturdy, leather draped frame, you paused, “Ugh.  But?” Moving you to a safer, less kissable, arms length away, Loki sighed with the same frustration you felt, “-But, where we need to go, as soon as possible, is the Tower.” Moaning grumpily, you stepped out of the arms you longed to linger in, “I was afraid you were going to say that.” “I know it’s less than… ideal, love, but I did find something useful before the good Captain unburdened his soul this morning.” “And that is?” “Fury’s plan.  At first I couldn’t figure out exactly what he was after.  What did Fury want?  How was I involved?” Loki was dragging this out, loving how it kept you hanging onto his every word, and you rolled your eyes, “Well?  What is it?  Weapons?  War?” “All of that, yes… and… yours truly.”  That triumphant smile that filled Loki’s whole face lit up his mischievous eyes.  Tilting your head, struggling to make sense of what Loki had just told you, “What do you mean, you.  Fury wanted you… to do what, exactly?’ “Loki was going to be the patsy.” You both turned toward the sound of Steve’s baritone at the door, suddenly remembering that the Good Captain was still there and that he was waiting to see what you were going to do next.  Leaning his 100 year old bones into the doorframe, Steve crossed his arms, “The fall guy.  An example of what happens if you cross SHIELD.” “I think, my dear Mr. Rogers, that you mean, I am to be used as an example of what happens if one crosses Nick Fury.”  Loki countered, slinging an arm over your shoulder protectively. The idea was frightening.  A man like Fury had too much power, too much at his disposal.  Just knowing the lengths he had gone to in order to keep you and Loki apart was scary enough.  Making enemies of your friends.  Threatening the people you loved.  Selling your affection to Steve in an effort to control Loki.

Now, the knowledge that all of it was done in an effort to ensure that Nick Fury was the toughest guy in the galaxy, it made your stomach clench.  “What do you mean, an example?” “Unless my intelligence is flawed, I believe that Fury was going to kill me.  Is that correct, Captain?” Steve felt the weight of two sets of eyes on him.  Yours, full of fearful love and blind hope that this was all just some misunderstanding.  Innocent and naive and as lovely as he could ever remember.  Loki’s were reflecting a deeper understanding.  The kind of knowledge that only time in the trenches teaches. There was no answer from Captain Rogers.  None was needed.  Honesty, final and resolute, was out in the open.  “Look.  I know I’m not the guy you want on your side.  I’ve… I haven’t been the man I needed to be.  Not for you-”  Steve locked his bright blues onto you, offering a small smile that spoke of sadness before facing Loki, “-Or you, Loki.  But if you let me help you now, I promise that I can get you into the tower and maybe, one day, you won’t think so little of me.” 

Around you the morning gained strength.  Somewhere nearby birds chirped wildly, blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding in the modest little farmhouse and its implications on intergalactic politics.  Without  moving a muscle, Loki plainly asked you, “Do you trust him, dearest?” Squaring your shoulders, you crossed your arms, staring down the man called Captain America.  Nodding decisively, “I do.  I don’t think he’d spill everything like that only to turn on us.  He’s not so bad Loki, really.” “We’ll see about that.  For now, we trust Steve.  Ok, what’s your plan, Rogers?” --- “Hey.  I… I have one other thing to show you.”  Steve was dressed for action in his branded tactical gear, looking every inch the super soldier that Dr. Erskine envisioned. “Steve, we have to get moving.  Loki’s eager and -” “Just open it, ok?”  The envelope was thick with folded paper, the flap tucked under and not sealed.  Clearly it had spent time in and out of pockets, the edges frayed and tattered.  In exasperated curiosity you gingerly pulled the sheets free.

Shaking, your hands trembled holding the once white documents as your voice thickened, “Is this… is this what I think it is?” Cocking his head playfully, that rueful smile pulling at his full mouth, Steve almost seemed cheerful as he teased, “It’s yours.  I think something about this place has always been yours and I want you to have it.” “But-” Folding your small hands in his mighty ones, Steve squeezed gently, “It was a wedding present, or it was supposed to be.” “But we’re not getting married.” “I know.  Still-” “I can’t, Steve.  It’s yours.  Your house, your farm, your dream.” Shaking his head, disagreeing, but feeling lighter than he had in decades, Steve insisted, “Too late, I’m afraid.  It’s done.  Actually, that version of the deed has been signed since our second week here.” As realization sunk in you appraised the man changing right before your eyes, astonished but exhilarated, “Where will you go?” “I dunno.  Think I might need to be alone for a bit.  Maybe see the world… but first-” “First, we have to stop Nick Fury.”

To Be Continued... My Minxes:   @scrumptious-finicky-illusion @iamverity​ @mizfit2​ @sammy-jo1977​ @wolfsmom1​ @jessiejunebug​ @iluvsumbucky​ @unadulteratedwizardlove​ @procrastinatinglikeabitch​ @shxdowofdarkness​ @nonsensicalobsessions​ @ahintofkiwistrawberry​ @alexakeyloveloki​ @rorybutnotgilmore​ @crystalizedcaramel​ @lokislittlecorner​ @capcapcapsicle @jamielea81​ @caffiend-queen​ @otakumultimuse-hiddlewhore​ @jenjen8675309​ @that-one-person​ @roguewraith​ @toomanystoriessolittletime​ @vodka-and-some-sass​ @just-random-obsessions​ @brokenthelovely​ @lots-of-loki​ @thefallenbibliophilequote​

[butwhatifidothis]

3H and Bleach: Where the Fuck am I

So, I’m finally hunkering down and trying to write out this post lmao. I’ve mentioned here and there how my personal experience with the 3H’s fandom is similar to my experience with the Bleach fandom’s in more than one way, and - look. Like, I get there’s definitely a semi-universal thing that goes on across all fandoms. I don’t mean for this to say that this only happens within these two fandoms, because duh, of course they don’t. But!! This post is partly me wanting to air years long annoyance towards the Bleach fandom that just so happens to coincide with my feelings towards the 3H fandom, sooo... yeah lmao

I’ll probably be skimming over some bits about 3H, since most people who come across this will already be familiar with what I’d be talking about in that regard vs Bleach, so just a heads up

Note: This is gonna talk about Bleach which will spoiler territory (writing this off the cuff so not sure where this is goin’ yet lmao but I know that much), so if you don’t wanna see that then don’t read this post lol, I know for sure I’ll be spoiling something ahhhh... noticeable, lol

Ableism against the mentally ill

Now, most people reading this post will be familiar with the blog and how this very, very much applies to 3H, but for the sake of this post I’ll lay it out anyway with a brief summary

Dimitri and Rhea are both characters within 3H that suffer from severe trauma that heavily impacts their mental state. Both are the sole survivors of a horrific slaughter, with that slaughter redefining who they are and leaving a permanent marker within their minds in some way (Dimitri with having auditory and visual hallucinations, Rhea with having obsessive tendencies towards bringing her mother back from the dead). Specifically in CF, both characters are set up in the plot as antagonists, with both characters having to relive their trauma in some way due to the actions Byleth and Edelgard take against them (for Dimitri, having his home be razed to the ground and everyone he cares for dying around him, for Rhea having someone use her mother’s mutilated remains be used to end her and her race) and express extreme anger towards Byleth and Edelgard before they are killed to progress/end the story

Now, uh, sad shit right? Not exactly fuckin’ happy sunshine rainbows. These two characters are put through the wringer and are then murdered. They are rightfully not the fuckin’ happiest because of what happened to them before and what happens to them within the present story. But we’ve heard it all before: “They were crazy!” “They couldn’t be reasoned with!” “They had to be put down out of mercy because they were too ~far gone~ to live happily!” “They needed to be killed for the good of everyone!” It’s an extremely ableist rhetoric that gets passed around the fandom as though it’s totally fine to directly state that mentally ill people should be put down if they’re deemed a “lost cause.” Especially worrying because. You know. If they are a “”””lost cause”””” then it’s directly and specifically because of actions Byleth and Edelgard take against them. 

But how does this remind me of Bleach? What kind of similar extreme, worrying ableism exists there? Well, let me introduce to best girl a certain character with... a reputation, to say the least:

Meet Momo Hinamori.

Holy shit it’s so weird writing this out because I’ve been wanting to for years but have never worked up the nerve to do it lol

It should be noted, in the Bleach verse there’s two worlds out of three - Soul Society and Hueco Mundo, though I’ll only be talking of the former - that deal with “souls” (the essence within a living human). Souls age far more slowly than human bodies do in terms of body, not necessarily the mind (so a teenage soul will likely behave as such for a long while) so keep in mind that I’m going to be using numbers that may seem weird to someone who hasn’t seen Bleach lol.  With that out of the way, here’s a similar, if longer for context to those who haven’t seen Bleach, summary for Momo’s character as it relevant to this post:

Momo is a character in Bleach that grows a deep admiration towards Sosuke Aizen, a respected captain of the military force called the Gotei 13. She comes to views him as the most important person in her world due to him both noticing and paying direct attention to her as well as saving her and her friends’ lives during a training mission gone wrong while she was younger. Note that “younger” here means 40 years ago from the start of the story. Aizen would praise her all the time, allow her to sleep over in his quarters, would drape his cloaks over her when she looked cold, and would overall treat Momo as though he was his daughter for most of the time we see them interact in the beginning portions of the show. Note that none of this is sexual in nature, nor is it ever implied to be seen as such. That’ll be important later in this post

To make a long story short, Aizen comes to betray her. He stabs her through the chest and shows and tells her that she never meant anything to him, throughout the 40 years they’ve known each other (which, mind, for a soul Momo’s approximate age 40 years is still a noticeable amount of time), and he was only using her to help bolster his image as a loveable captain so that he can hide his plan from everybody that much easier. He did horrible things to Momo - from setting her alarm clock back to a later time so that she would more likely come across his pinned, bloody fake corpse. to framing her childhood friend for the apparent murder and tricking her into fighting that friend, to far later in the series tricking that friend into stabbing her (hypnosis shit, to sum that up) for literally no stated reason - that ended up mentally breaking her. She couldn’t believe that the last four decades were all nothing but lies and she fell into a deep denial about Aizen’s true nature - someone else made him do everything he did, she must have missed something that would have warned her about Captain Aizen’s unfortunate situation that forced Captain Aizen to hurt her and everyone else. This denial would take the majority of Bleach’s entire runtime for her to get over completely, with her having hiccups in her recovery even as she works up the nerve to fight him.

Now, uh, also not the fuckin’ funnest of times to be had here. The deep, long-running mental and psychological manipulation of what approximates as a teenage girl from a trusted older figure is something that is very clearly horrific and bad of the older figure, right? Like, we’re on the same page here on that?

This wouldn’t be in this post if that was the case. No, Momo was the one constantly on fire for what happened to her. She was one of the most hated characters in the western audience, and there were endless jokes about “lol look at Momo, the pincushion!” “Crazy bitch Momo, better watch out!” making fun of her and her trauma relentlessly. If you managed to find a Momo fan in the early 2000′s you should have also bought a lotto ticket because holy fuck, everyone hated her. She acted in a startlingly real if deeply uncomfortable way in regards to years long manipulation and she was lambasted for it. She didn’t immediately get over decades long psychological abuse and she was called useless, weak, a horrible representation of female characters, stupid - you name it, she was likely called it. To this day I still tense up when I hear that someone likes Bleach and they mention Momo at all because I’m always thinking “does this person think this abuse victim is dumb for being abused?”

Dimitri, Rhea, and Momo are all victim-blamed to a disgusting degree in the 3H and Bleach fandoms. Dimitri and Rhea are always hit with “well if Dimitri hadn’t have fought back against Edelgard/Rhea caused the “”tyranical systems” in the first place, nothing would have happened to them!” and Momo was constantly hit with” well, it’s not Aizen’s fault Momo was so clingy to him, what could he have done!” and I get so fuckin’ mad dude.

But for Dimitri and Momo specifically, there’s one thing in particular that caught my attention:

The “Rejection Theories”

This had my head spinnin’ a bit when I first heard it, cuz I had managed to avoid the theory for a while in the 3H’s fandom, but apparently a sizeable amount of people seem to believe that Dimitri wasn’t just mad at Edelgard in the Holy Tomb because of... you know *waves hand* fuckin’ everything, but that the primary reason for his anger was that Edelgard... rejected his advances to her? And that the dagger he gave to her when they were 13 was a phallic symbol of baby Mitri’s want to have sex with Edelgard? And. Like. What in the fuck are you talking about. 

But like?? Bleach did this shit too with Momo?? It was also a sizeable amount of people - not everyone, but a noticeable amount - that believed that Momo was just mad that Aizen wouldn’t sleep with her? You’d see it pop up in fics so often, that Momo would want Aizen to fuck her and she’d “go crazy” when he denied her and Momo was actually just this shallow bitch who wanted a good fuck like... what.

Like, when I first heard the Phallic Dagger take the first thing that came to mind is “wait Momo was also accused of just wanting to have sex with the person who traumatized her wtf” 

“Actually it was the perpetrators that should be forgiven because lonely and also some shit about ruling better”

Those in the 3H fandom know how often the “Edelgard was lonely!” line gets thrown by just about every one of her stans. Edelgard was lonely and couldn’t trust anyone, so of course she did what she did! If she had someone near her she could trust she wouldn’t have acted like she does in the rest of the game! Nevermind that she “gets” this in CF in the form of Byleth and still acts just as shittily as she does in the other routes, or how being a little lonely doesn’t fuckin’ mean you get to start war. But anyway, we also hear that Edelgard was justified in doing what she did because her ruling Fodlan would have lead to more peace in the end, once she got rid of the power structures in place now (except that doesn’t happen but whatev I guess lmao)

Aizen? He was lonely too! He was far too strong for anyone to truly be able to understand him, and so he tragically fell down a dark path. If he had known someone who could be considered an equal to him he would have never done all the horrible things he did. And the Soul Society is unjust! It needs to be reformed! So him slaughtering hundreds of thousands of souls at the minimum to harvest all of their power to use as his own is justified because it’ll be used to create a more just society under his rule!

Like. Y’all. Lowkey? I’m so fuckin’ glad Edelgard proved herself to be just as fuckin’ awful with Byleth as without because this shit drove me up the fuckin’ wall back in the day. There was 0 ways to prove that Aizen would damn sure be just as fuckin’ bad if he had an “”equal”” to stand by him than if he didn’t, and I get to kinda be right because without fundamentally changing these characters’ backstories they would not give two flying shits about whether or not they had someone “equal to them” (which is still kinda degrading to think about anyway).

Now, this is where I move away to a different topic lol

A split in the narrative cause divides in the fandom

With 3H houses this is really fuckin’ easy to point at: there’s 4 routes, three consistent stories and one radically different story, and that difference in story causes heavy contention within the fandom. It’s very obvious so I won’t go over it much.

But how in the fuck is there a divide in Bleach? It’s not a fuckin’ Choose Your Own Adventure manga, it’s an anime and manga showing off the characters of Bleach’s stories and interactions (with, you know, plot and shit thrown in).

Well. It’s more accurate to say the anime told a story about the characters, and the manga told... the story about the characters.

In terms of plot, the anime didn’t change much from the manga, but hoo fuckin’ boy, did they change shit about some of the characters. Specifically, they changed a shit ton about three characters: the two main protagonists, Ichigo and Rukia, and another main character, Orihime.

Orihime. Got. Fucked.

The anime would make her far more ditzy and clumsy, her crush (turned growing love later on in the story) for Ichigo during more deeper moments that showcases her feelings for him were downplayed if not removed entirely in exchange for talking or thinking about food, key moments she has with Ichigo early in the manga were cut or deadass changed to something else in the anime, some key moments with her relationship with Rukia were cut, her backstory was watered down - so much of Orihime was fucked with in the anime (her fuckin’ introduction was changed drastically). Meanwhile Ichigo and Rukia were given moments that didn’t exist in the manga, they have filler arcs (remember those lmao) that would be stuffed with shit ton of moments for them that have no basis in the manga, other characters would change their behavior from the manga to reflect a sort of “thing” going on between Ichigo and Rukia.

Look, guys, the anime fucked up so bad the fucking mangaka, Tite Kubo, has said he gets stomach aches watching the early anime because it was that awful. And this divide between the anime and manga’s portrayal of these three character helped spawn the ship war of Bleach: Ichiruki vs Ichihime (oh but more on that in a bit). It tanked Orihime’s popularity because people thought she was the stupid dumbass that would stumble ass first into situations when that wasn’t her character at all. And because the majority of anime watchers only watch the anime... yeah, you can see where this went. So just like in 3H in Bleach you have these radically different tellings of the same characters that drove a big-ass wedge in the fandom

Marketing

Imma be transparent, like I’ve said before I managed to avoid nearly every marketing tactic for 3H so it’s a tad hard for me to speak personally, but from what I’ve been told Edelgard was heavily marketed towards the player base pre-release. She was the poster child of 3H, she got the figma, she was in the spotlight - unless you cleansed your board of 3H content you knew exactly who she was. On top of that, it doesn’t stop in-game - loading screen messages would assume you picked BE, Adrestia is the first option to pick when you want to impress one of the lords in the prologue, the BE class is the first option to pick in choosing which route to play, every character has some moment in the game post ts where they express sympathy with the woman who waged war on them for five years (even characters with no business doing so, like Seteth entertaining the idea that maybe Edelgard isn’t that bad during Myrddin). With all of that good PR for Edelgard in and out of the game it heavily impacted how people saw her, and much of it is used by stans to justify her being a good guy (mostly in the game marketing) despite everything else in the game clearly showing that Edelgard is the bad guy

With Bleach in that regard... you have Ichiruki

holy shit it’s so weird talking about Ichiruki i’m still lowkey nervous about talking about them lmao

With Ichiruki stans, they would cling onto outside material that promoted Ichigo and Rukia together as proof that their ship was going to be canon. Spreadsheets, calendars, poems (some of which didn’t even apply to Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship but they insisted they did anyway), novels - outside material that either wasn’t canon or didn’t pertain to Ichigo and Rukia’s relationship. They would shove it in the face of Ichihime shippers that “see, we have all this stuff for us! We ain’t starving tonight!” when the canon (note: in the manga particularly) would clearly show Ichigo and Orihime’s relationship being the one that leans romantic in multiple significant ways. They would latch onto irrelevant shit that ain’t had nothin’ to do with anything and wave around as a paragon of romance when it literally wasn’t even canon

Just fuckin’ ignoring the creators deadass

Creators and developers of 3H: Edelgard is the typical Red Emperor the only difference is Girl

Stans: that’s just a headcanon

Kubo: Ichigo and Rukia have a platonic relationship and I’ve publicly said this since 2008

Stans, now, to this day: Ichigo and Rukia were robbed

Making people reject what they’re stanning for

I’ve seen a few people express that the more they interact with the fandom and see what her stans are doing, the more they grow to dislike Edelgard despite (some) initially liking or even loving her. To put it simply, the same thing happened with Ichiruki - hell, this happened with me with Ichiruki. I can’t fuckin’ stand the ship anymore because every time I think about it I’m reminded of the absolutely rancid, disgusting things Ichiruki stans have to done to others in the fandom, and even after nearly five years after Bleach has ended I still tense up when someone says they like Ichiruki over Ichihime precisely because of the behavior of the stans, just like I side-eye people who say Edelgard is the best lord. Do they like them because they simply prefer them over the other(s) and they’re not totally fuckin’ bonkers, or are they totally fuckin’ bonkers. 

And, like, that’s not fair! I know that! But I can’t help but think that when such a loud amount of people act in such deplorable ways just because someone didn’t like a bunch of lines on paper/pixels on a screen.

To all the nice Ichiruki and Edelgard fans, hope y’all are havin’ a nice day.

Long, crazy ass explanations as to why X =/= X (and if anything actually means Y)

Teacher theory for 3H. How Edelgard totally didn’t hire Kostas to kill Dimitri and Claude and was only thwarted because Claude booked it, but how she definitely actually meant to simply scare away the teacher that was with them so that Jeritza could be pulled from his already existing position in Garreg Mach to teach one class so that Edelgard can kinda keep a sorta closer eye on exactly one of the other classes (and just do shit all about the other one I guess), because Jertiza’d be able to gleam so much from teaching a class for a few hours a day I promise 

But for Bleach, you also have one particularly infamous theory positing shit that don’t real, with enough renown to be known by a specific name, and that’s the Lust Arc = Fail essay

To explain what the essay is about, I have to set the scene up a bit. Imagine, you, with your tiny little monkey brain, are watching Bleach, and you get to the part where Main Boyo is fighting against Villain to save Girly. Other Guy is there too - this is important. Main Boyo tries his hardest to fight Villain, but is ultimately shot through the fucking chest with a laser from Villain and dies. Like, for bit actually dies. Girly breaks down, has a straight up mental breakdown because she always “knew” that Main Boyo could do anything, and now he’s been killed and is dead in front of her. She screams out Main Boyo’s name, hysterically begging him to save her and protect her because holy shit the love of her life has been brutally murdered in front of her what the fuck. But Main Boyo, from literally beyond the line of death, hears her pleas and snaps back to life as a monster, with the sentence “I MUST PROTECT” repeatedly running through his head and being the only sentence he ever says while in this form, with him fucking destroying Villain and even going so far as to directly hurt Other Guy when Other Guy tries to stop Main Boyo from utterly stomping on Villain. Girly is the only person Main Boyo does not directly hurt, and when Villain is damn sure gonna fuckin’ kick the bucket that is when Main Boyo reverts back human. Everyone is more than a little shocked at what happened, but it’s clear from how relieved Girly is when Main Boyo comes back safe and sound that while this event fundamentally will change their relationship (and it does), it is still one that is extremely strong and they won’t let it get between them (and they don’t).

Now, when looking at the summary, you, with your absolutely miniscule peanut of a brain, might come away thinking, “Hm, Main Boyo might kinda care for Girly given that he literally rose from the dead to protect her and only her and went back to normal once she was safe” and you poor fool would be oh so wrong, because actually, this is all proof that Mian Boyo doesn’t care for Girly and that Villain actually cared more for Girly than Main Boyo ever could.

Without diving too deeply into the absolute lunacy of the Lust Arc = Fail essay, that was its main premise. That Ichigo, after rising from the literal dead directly after Orihime begged and pleaded that he protect and save her and then going on to protect and save specifically her (as Uryu - Other Guy - is also a friend of Ichigo’s and got his fucking arm cut off by Monster!Ichigo), is proof against Ichihime being romantic in any way and was not, in fact, a fuckin’ giant neon flashing sign that read THESE TWO ARE GONNA GET TOGETHER. It was the dumbest shit ever, but Ichiruki stans, much like Edelstans with Teacher Theory, clung to it like white on rice. It didn’t matter how much it was utterly debunked, it didn’t matter how the base premise was stupid as fuck, they point to it as the pinnacle of meta for their respective fandoms in their respective spaces.

And all of this leads me to um... the one I’m kinda the most worried about?

Stan Behavior

Edelstans are their own unique brand of awful in that that the shit they spew is particularly... worrying (”genocide isn’t bad if they aren’t human and also they kinda deserved it” “imperialism isn’t that bad really” the mentally ill should be put down if they’re deemed ~too far gone~” among other... wonderful takes...), and their behavior is also quite shitty, harassing content creators that go against the Approved Opinions (Ghast) or forcing people to take down fanart and in general infecting nearly every Rhea space with all kinds of disparaging comments no one asked for. They actively make the fandom a worse space, and when they flare up it’s almost always noticeable (again, Ghast)

Bleach?

Oh boy.

Guys. If you weren’t there for the Canonization of Ichihime (2016). You dodged a fucking bullet.

The outrage was out-fuckin’-rageous. Their behavior was some of the worst reactions anyone has ever seen come from the canonization of a ship in a shounen. This includes, but is not limited to:

Someone tearing apart all 70+ volumes of Bleach and burning it in their bathroom

In fact, multiple people tearing up Bleach and burning it, while keeping the Ichiruki moments and taping it to their walls

A Rukia cosplayer, in Rukia cosplay, printing out the final color spread of the end-game couples and their friends lounging about - with colored ink and all - and burning it, while filming herself doing so

Ichiruki porn being sent to Tite Kubo

Tite Kubo being accused of grooming a 15 Orihime cosplayer with no proof

Tite Kubo being accused of lying about his various health issues

Ichigo and Rukia being drawn cheating on their spouses with each other - and some of that also being sent to Tite Kubo

Tite Kubo being chased off Twitter by Ichiruki stans... again

Ichihime shippers getting sent death threats

Ichihime shippers getting called delusional for thinking their ship had a chance before the endgame couples were revealed, and then being called delusional for thinking their ship had any real basis and wasn’t pulled “out of nowhere”

Tite Kubo being accused of hating women because of Orihime being shown in an apron in the last chapter and Ichiruki stans jumping to the conclusion she became a housewife, and then Tite Kubo being accused of hating women because when it was revealed that Orihime has a job in a bakery to pay for college later they insisted what Kubo should have done was have Uryu, who’s a doctor at that point, pay for Orihime’s college instead of having Orihime pay for it with her own money 

And mind you, this is only the stuff I’ve personally seen and experienced

I am hoping and praying that Edelstans never get as bad as Ichiruki stans did in 2016, but with how otherwise similar they are my hopes are dwindling more and more. I guess I can take solace in the fact that they aren’t quite... that bad yet? In terms of actions, at least? Their sentiments though are infinitely worse, so like... cool

[9worldstales]

MCU Loki Ep 1 “Glorious Purpose” intensive analysis

So, I’ve seen the first “Loki” episode and, of course, I couldn’t stop myself from talking about it.

Beware about spoilers!

We start in New York 2012 and that part is merely “Avengers: Endgame” albeit they changed a bit the visual so there’s more focus on Loki. We’ve close up of Loki when he is ‘Captain America’, when he says by to the Hulk in the lift and so on.

It’s a good choice because he’s basically the only character the visual seems to focus on (the only other character who gets a close up is the Hulk yelling ‘No stairs!’), subtly telling us the story is about him.

On a sidenote though, in “Avengers: Endgame” you might see Loki walked vaguely near 2022 Tony Stark and we also have Scott Lang asking Tony if he wears Axe body spray, which he confirms. In “Loki” we don’t see these scenes but keep them in mind, they’ll be relevant later on.

Anyway as everyone knows Loki picks up the Tesseract and disappear.

We get the Marvel opening but without the usual ‘heroic’ music, this time it’s more ominous? Or maybe it’s just me. “Marvel studios” also gets written in green and gold on a black background.

It’s not the first time Marvel changed how it presented, in the first episode of “WandaVision” for example it was in black and white instead than in the usual red and silver but it’s still a nice touch.

So we resume… with the visual showing us an insect walking through the desert. Then the camera shows us the full view of the desert, informing us it’s the Gobi Desert in Mongolia.

Rather high in the sky a space portal opens for a moment and the next we know is that Loki is lying flat on his back on the ground among clouds of sand which, I guess, were raised due to him falling into the desert. Loki is without the chains holding his wrists (did the power of the Tesseract destroy them? The fall?) and easily pulls away the muzzle Thor put on him and from his confused expression as he sits up and see people coming close to him, I get the feeling he didn’t exactly plan to fall there and in such a way.

So I guess maybe this is his first attempt at using the Tesseract and he didn’t quite gave it a direction on WHERE he wanted it to take him? Because really falling from the sky flat on the ground in the middle of the Gobi desert among people who didn’t even talk his language doesn’t seem the sort of thing one would plan.

Anyway, despite being in an unfamiliar situation Loki finds a rock to stand over and introduces himself:

“I am Loki of Asgard. And I am burdened with glorious purpose.”

Which yes, it’s how he introduced himself to Fury in “The Avengers”.

The people there have no idea of what he’s saying and asks him who he is in their own language (Mongolian). It’s unclear if Loki gets what they’re saying.

In the comics all Asgardians, can speak every language thanks to the ‘Allspeak’ or ‘All-Tongue’, in which what they say is understood by every species in their own native language.

In “Thor” earlier script though there was this dialogue:

Darcy: So, how can you speak our language? Volstagg: Your language? Ha! Silly girl, you're speaking ours.

In an interview Ray Stevenson (Volstagg) and Joshua Dallas (Fandral) discussed that bit.

Part of this seems to be set in a world where you guys fit in perfectly and the rest is very much on Earth. Ray: Yes, but on Earth we started it all, you see. This is just one of the realms. This is where all the legends come from. All the ruins have gone into myths and Norse mythology. It’s all us, love. It was all us before that. They’ve forgot their place, really. They think, “Oh, you speak our language?” and it’s actually, “No, you’re speaking ours.” Joshua: We invented it. [Ray Stevenson (Volstagg) and Joshua Dallas (Fandral) On Set Interview THOR]

The implication seemed to be that there was no Allspeak, they just spoke the same language because Asgardians invented it and Midgardians learnt it.

We also have this bit from “Avengers: Infinity War”:

Rocket: You speak Groot? Thor: Yes, they taught it on Asgard. It was an elective.

This implies it’s not that Thor was magically granted the ability to understand Groot, he had to study his language.

So well, I would say that no, so far Asgardians didn’t have Allspeak in the MCU, hence, unless Loki studied Mongolian or his magic powers granted him Allspeak, he can’t get what whose people are saying to him. So really, I don’t think he wanted to end up in Mongolia, he should have thought he wanted the Tesseract to just bring him somewhere very far from New York City. That is unless it’ll turn out someone managed to interfere and have him fall there for some purpose.

But, back to Loki.

As I said he doesn’t really get to talk with those people because a door opens up out of nowhere and near to the Tesseract which is lying forgotten in the sand and people in an armoured suit and carrying weapons start to appear.

Loki is kind of confused but he recovers fast.

Putting up a tone of confidence he orders the guy not to touch the Tesseract, thinking they aim at getting it. Another door opens up out of nowhere and we get another person in armour. To save time I’ll say the woman is supposed to be Hunter B-15. I wonder if she’ll get a name beyond this or not.

The situation of the people at the TVA isn’t exactly great but I’m running ahead.

Now, I think Loki preferred to deal with the Mongolian people because although he can understand what Hunter B-15 says, it clearly makes no sense for him.

Honestly I’m not going to blame him.

“Appears to be a standard sequence violation. Branch is growing at a stable rate and slope. Variant identified.”

This isn’t the kind of sentence that makes sense in a conversation, if you aren’t familiar with the TVA.

Hunter B-15 doesn’t care what she says doesn’t make sense to him and wouldn’t make sense to any other normal person. She calls him ‘Variant’ and talks as if everyone should know and respect the Time Variance Authority as an authority to defer and obey to.

I love Loki’s reply here:

“It's been a very long day, and I think I've had my fill of idiots in armored suits telling me what to do, so, if you don't mind, this is actually your last chance. Now get out of my way.”

He had a very bad day, he’s probably still bruised and sore due to his ‘meeting’ with the Hulk and his fall from the sky, he might very well be exhausted and he’s clearly confused but he acts as if he’s in control and won’t let himself be intimidated. I love him.

As he moves close Hunter B-15 hits him and informs him although he’s moving at 1/16th speed he’s feeling all the pain in real time.

Now… from when “Loki” trailers had started going around there had been a debate if the TVA is the good guys or the bad guys.

I’ll jump a bit ahead and tell you they clearly believe they’re the good guys.

But just from this bit you can start to question the idea they’re good guys.

They aren’t just acting as Vigilantes but they’re claiming an authority that no one on planet Earth gave them and demanding submission, not hesitating to beat people when they do not complain.

I know, some of you are thinking that Loki is a bad guy so serves him right but that’s not really the point because they aren’t even beating him for what he did to New York but for a crime he didn’t know he was committing, acting with an authority no one on Earth gave them. They just took it. And they would have taken it if the one picking up the Tesseract and ending up in Mongolia were to be a random person that out of bad luck had picked up the Tesseract and had ended activating it by accident.

This is not about Loki, this is how the TVA operates and it’s scary.

I don’t know if “Loki” will want to dig into police brutality and I honestly don’t dare to hope in it but it would be an interesting turn.

Hunter B-15 seems to be enjoying her work. I won’t call her evil yet, it’s clear she thinks she has the authority to do so, that the TVA enabled her to think she’s doing a good thing but she doesn’t seem to have… hesitation in doing so. One can still do his duty and not enjoy beating up people and causing them pain, yet the dialogue gives me the impression she’s very cool with beating up resisting Variants who has no idea they’re Variant and causing them pain.

Maybe it’s just me, maybe she’ll prove she’s actually a gentle soul but, for now, she doesn’t look as such. We’ll see.

Anyway she straps a collar around Loki’s neck and then, finally, she let him fall at normal speed before two of the men with her grabs him and carry him away while she picks up the Tesseract and orders to ‘reset the timeline’, which, at first I thought would mean they use that sort of mechanism to send back the time, erasing Loki’s appearance from the timeline. I’m not sure now. It might as well erase everything there. Loki turns to see what this mechanism does and from the look on his face it doesn’t seem anything good.

I hope not but well, in a way, sending everything back of some minutes erases lives that could have possibly be lived differently so yeah, in a way they erased lives. It’s the dilemma of changing time after all.

Whatever, Loki is dragged through the door that opens out of nowhere and appears at the TVA. The door disappears behind him and he has no idea where he is.

Now I guess it’s a good point to point out how people had been wondering which kind of Loki this one was, if he was based on the Loki on “Thor”, the one in “The Avengers”, the one in “Thor: The Dark World” or the one in “Thor: Ragnarok”.

In itself he can’t really be based on neither of them.

Loki’s characterization in “Thor” is split in two, there’s Loki prior to discovering the truth, and there’s Loki after discovering the truth, mad in shock and grief until he realizes his father would never accept him and let go of Gungnir.

This Loki can’t obviously be the Loki pre-truth but he can’t even be the one post it, as in that one the pain was still too new and raw and mixed with the desperation of denial and the attempt at ‘fixing things’.

So, can he be “The Avengers” Loki?

Marvel’s site confirmed that during “The Avengers” unknown to Loki, he was influenced by the sceptre as well. Very likely he wasn’t influenced in Clint Barton or Erik Selvig style, as the site says:

“Gifted with a Scepter that acted as a mind control device, Loki would be able to influence others. Unbeknownst to him, the Scepter was also influencing him, fuelling his hatred over his brother Thor and the inhabitants of Earth.”

Basically the sceptre on Loki works in a manner similar to how it worked on the Avengers when they started arguing in the Helicarrier. It warped his perception to the point he might have seen them as his most hated enemies, making difficult for him to see Thor was extending his hand to him or that the people were actually just scared but it didn’t make him a mindless, loyal servant. A different type of control on him but one that’s no less dangerous. Anyway I’ve talked at length about it while replying to a post so I’ll just link it here.

Loki is now very far from the sceptre so the mind stone shouldn’t be able to influence him any longer. As a result he’s probably more in control of his emotions.

So… “Thor: The Dark World” Loki?

Close enough but not quite, as that Loki had to go through Odin telling him some pretty awful things and spending a year forgotten by Odin and Thor in a jail.

Even more clearly he can’t be “Thor: Ragnarok” Loki as that one lived a huge chunk of things he hadn’t lived yet… never mentioning Waititi wanted “Thor: Ragnarok” to be his own thing, not a continuation of “The Avengers” and “Thor: The Dark World”…

“I was lucky enough they didn’t force me to acknowledge things- there were certain things in the film, like the play, which makes fun of the scene in The Dark World where Loki dies, but there’s a point to that play, sort of to recap what happened, but also to tell the audience, “This is not what you think it’s going to be, this film is not going to be a continuation of that. It’s its own thing, and what you think you expect from this film ends at this play.”” [Empire Podcast Spoiler Special: Thor: Ragnarok with Taika Waititi]

… while Loki is an alternate continuation of “The Avengers” so it has to be more “The Avengers” compliant than “Thor: Ragnarok”.

In short this Loki is his own Loki… or a Loki we hadn’t seen yet because we weren’t really shown much of Loki post sceptre influence, pre one year of solitary confinement.

Back to the story two things are interesting to point out.

One is that there’s a Variant Skrull as well in the TVA.

The other is that once there the Tesseract lost part of its shiny light as if it powered down.

Last but not least, instead than a futuristic look the TVA has the look of midcentury modern aesthetic as if, instead than going in the future ore remaining in the present, we’ve gone back in time.

Anyway, as another prisoner is dragged into the room, Loki tries to escape and discovers that Hunter B-15 can rewind his time so he’s back where he started. She then gives the Tesseract to a man at a desk, telling him to log it as evidence.

The guy, I’ll spoiler you and tell you his name is Casey, has no idea what it is and it’s Loki who has to explain him it’s the Tesseract and one should be very careful with it. Casey merely find it sounding dumb.

This is our first clue that to the TVA the Tesseract doesn’t matter at all. We’ve finished Phase 3 with the infinity stones raised at the level of immensely powerful artifact but, for the TVA, they’re nothing.

This is the first blow that the “Loki” series gives to the MCU as we previously knew it.

On a sidenote it’s nice Loki explained what it was to the unsuspecting desk man. If this weren’t the TVA he might have ended in the Gobi desert as well just by handling it carelessly.

Hunter B-15 drags Loki to a door and Loki tries to threaten her only to be showed inside that door.

Have you noticed how no one read Loki his own rights so far? That’s because he has none and the story is about to make it even more clear.

In the room there’s a robot of some sort (which I find slightly creepy despite its smile) which would like for Loki to undress. At Loki’s refusal accompanied with a comment that “This is fine Asgardian leather” the robot, without any warning, merely disintegrates his clothes.

Some assumed it was played for laugh but the music doesn’t suggest it, and Loki is clearly upset as he stutters when he speaks again. In real life, when you’re arrested, in many states your belonging are confiscated but they will be returned to you once you’re released or they’re returned to your family.

The TVA destroys them.

A trap door opens below Loki and he finds himself in another room, dressed up in TVA uniforms for Variants.

There’s something I think I need to mention which is I love how the show is characterizing TVA desk people.

The guy we’ve met before had his own character which we could guess despite the few lines and moments in which he appeared.

This new guy is also characterized.

He has a kitten in the room, which moves away slightly as Loki appears, probably scared and a mug with the image of a kitten. It’s tiny details but they made him a person instead of merely something that’s there.

He pushes in front of Loki a huge stack of papers telling him to sign to verify this is everything Loki said. Loki’s two following comments get printed and he’s demanded to sign them as well.

It’s another aspect of the TVA that’s actually unpleasant.

The amount of paper is huge and it would take a lot to read it all in order to check it but… the truth is the request is impossible. People isn’t made so that they can remember everything they’ve said, exactly as they’ve said it and it gets even more troublesome if there isn’t the other half of the conversation but just what we said.

So it’s not even a point to discuss if Loki really said just that stack of paper and nothing more or that stack of paper is too small, or if maybe there’s more paper he’ll have to sign or if that stack of paper only cover his time as a Variant and not the time in which he followed the Sacred Timeline.

The request doesn’t just make the TVA look like a bureaucratic place but shows it demands impossible tasks from its victims.

Oh, another interesting thing I noticed is that the camera is at a slightly lower point when it is on the TVA guy, so, despite the guy being seated, it gives him the impression of being higher than us viewers. On the over side when the camera is on Loki, it’s far from him, with the result of making him look small.

It’s a fine detail that gives us a certain subconscious impression.

The TVA guy stares at Loki as the latter gives up and start signing. It seems he only signed one paper, without even trying to read them all. I wish they had let us see how Loki signs. I wonder if he writes his name with runes, since the inscription on Thor’s hammer was in rune.

We’ll see, we’ll find out Loki knows how to write in English so he might use it to sign.

Anyway as soon as he finishes signing another trapdoor opens below him and he finds himself in another room.

So far the TVA is reminding me more and more of “The House that sends you mad” from “The Twelve Tasks of Asterix”. Well, of a very dark Variant of it to be exact, a Variant that reminds me of something way more unpleasant, but we’ll get there. In the next room Loki is asked:

“Please confirm to your knowledge that you are not a fully robotic being, were born an organic creature, and do in fact possess what many cultures would call a soul.”

Loki just asks if there are many people who don’t know if they’re robot and this is taken as a confirmation at which he’s urged to move through it. At Loki’s question he’s told if he actually were a robot and didn’t know it, the machine would melt him from the inside out.

Before thinking the situation is absurd let’s remember Vision exists in the Marvel universe and he’s a robot and he could have been programmed so that he wasn’t aware of this or might lose awareness of it due to a malfunctioning.

So if a Vision variant unaware to be a robot where to show up at the TVA they would just melt him from the inside out, no big deal.

The machine turns out to be a photographic machine, which doesn’t take Loki’s mug shoot but photograph his temporal area, which Loki has no idea what is and no one bothers to explain him.

Again, through the whole procedure there’s no request of consent nor explanations, Loki has no rights for the TVA, he’s merely supposed to comply.

Loki ends up in another room with another ‘convict’. They’re both demanded to take a ticket. The first convict refuses, Loki complain there’s just two of them so it’s useless but complies and put it in his pocket. Loki clearly has better manners or has figured out there’s no point discussing and is bidding his time to when arguing or rebelling might be worth something.

As Loki complains...

“This is a mistake. I shouldn't even be here.”

...we’re introduced with Miss Minute. Miss Minute is a cartoon watch which is supposed to FINALLY help people catch up before they stand to trial for their crimes. We’ll find out that Miss Minute is there not for the convicts’ benefit but for us viewers’ benefit as it explains us the origins of the TVA.

If we want to stretch things it might be there also for the TVA benefit as it might give them a sense of legitimacy.

Anyway Miss Minute’s speech feels like Odin’s speech at the beginning of “Thor”.

Is a self glorifying narration in which they paint themselves as the heroes and something that exist for other people’s benefit.

But it only paints the TVA in an even darker light because when it explains how one becomes a Variant it says:

“But sometimes, people like you veer off the path the Time-Keepers created. We call those Variants. Maybe you started an uprising, or were just late for work. Whatever it was, stepping off your path created a nexus event, which, left unchecked, could branch off into madness, leading to another multiversal war. But, don't worry, to make sure that doesn't happen, the Time-Keepers created the TVA and all its incredible workers. The TVA has stepped in to fix your mistake and set time back on its predetermined path. Now that your actions have left you without a place on the timeline, you must stand trial for your offenses.”

A break here.

From this little bit we’re introduced to the idea there’s only 1 timeline because each time another timeline could be born, the TVA erases it. This begs the question of how we’re supposed to judge this bit in “Avengers: Infinity War”

Stephen Strange: [Panting] I went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict. Peter Quill: How many did you see? Stephen Strange:14,000,605. Tony Stark: How many did we win? [Dr.Strange stares intently at Tony for a moment.] Stephen Strange: [Pause] One.

If there’s only 1 timeline, it seems impossible there could be 14,000,605 futures… but actually the key might be that there could be 14,000,605 futures… but the TVA erases them. The time stone might show those futures who had the possibility to be born… and that the TVA squashes under their feet, all for the sake to make canon their favourite future, while all the others have to cease and desist. If this is true I do wonder if the actions of the TVA can be undone, so that we can have “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”.

Back to “Loki” and to what Miss Minute said, which is pretty worrisome and not at all uplifting.

I mean… we can speculate who starts an uprising might be someone bad (which is not necessarily the truth, what about the people involved in the French Revolution or the American Revolutionary War or the Resistance in WW2?) but a poor guy who’s just late for work?

They don’t really see the difference between him and a guy starting an uprising because for them the matter isn’t what they were trying to do or which kind of people they were, just that they created another timeline, a crime they clearly weren’t aware to commit as no one warned them about how this was forbidden by this self imposed authority.

Loki clearly finds all this idiotic but then he hears the previous guy arguing with some sort of guard who demands his ticket. Now the previous guy is clearly a dumb liar, as insists he asked for the ticket but wasn’t given one, when he was loud enough and alone enough everyone in the room could notice he was the one refusing to take a ticket.

Anyway at this point the guard vaporizes him. In short they just murdered him, without trial or anything for the terrible crime of ‘not taking a ticket’.

Loki is appropriately shocked and hurries to get his ticket.

Something that’s also worth mentioning is the whole TVA is clearly structured to make people feel powerless.

There’s no explanation, they’re forcefully dragged in an unknown place by people claiming authority from an unknown structure, they’re forced to comply, they’re stripped naked against their will, dressed all the same, handled like objects who’re not called by their name but ‘Variant’ with even assigned a number, threatened to be melted if they don’t know they’re robot (and what if they know? They don’t take their picture or they just melt them?) and subjected to an explanation in form of a cartoon that feels absurd and that merely has the point of legitimizing the TVA as heroes and them as criminals.

Anyway Loki finds his ticket and shows it in a scene that reminds me of “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade”. Do you remember when Indy and his father board a Zeppelin to leave Germany and Indy tosses a Nazi out of the window and explains his actions by saying the guy was without ticket so everyone shows his ticket at him?

Anyway at this point we’re shown the title, “Loki" with a filter that makes it look like an old movie and the letters changing font.

Okay, I’m a bit late but I should probably mention that, form when Loki go to the TVA the colouring had a huge abundance of yellow and brown with basically no blue (except a little in the Miss Minute cartoon) which gives an idea of this being like an old movie. The music is kind of creepy and there’s a clock tickling as we see it.

Which is an interesting idea. Even though the TVA seems so modern, furniture and the structure of the place felt all but modern. Even the robot that stripped Loki felt as if it just came out from a very old and outdated idea of how a futuristic robot would look like.

We resume the story but this time we’re at Aix-En-Provence, in France in 1549.

We’re in a beautiful gothic church and one of the TVA agents, explains that the corpses on the ground belongs to some Minutemen (the name for the TVA agents who do field work apparently) who responded to a routine Nexus event. As soon as they arrived someone jumped on them.

Mobius is there as well, and he’s apparently playing the part of the detective as he’s studying the corpses.

Hunter U-92, another poor guy who apparently has no name but just a number clearly suspect of someone and tells so to Mobius who agrees as the stab wounds look consistent with the previous, the Minutemen were hit on surprise and the reset charge (remember? The stuff that erase the deviation from the timeline) is gone.

Oh we’re also told this is the 6th attack in the last week THAT THEY KNOW OF. I hope for them it’s Saturday, because this would mean ‘only 1’ attack each day. This would be rather terrible if they were just at Monday since the day hadn’t even ended yet.

Now… remember when I was comparing the hunters of the TVA to police and wonder if the show would dig into police brutality?

Well, we’ve this scene in which someone enters in the place and Hunter U-92 is immediately ready to attack him with the wand they used against Loki or some other similar TVA weapon.

Only the one who got in is, apparently, just a kid, not the dangerous variant they’re searching and it’s Mobius who has to stop Hunter U-92 from attacking a kid who, for all they know, is completely unrelated to the crime, a kid that’s far from them and weaponless.

I don’t want to know what would have happened in Mobius hadn’t told him ‘Wait, stand down! Stand down’ (note how he has to say ‘stand down’ twice) and had physically stopped him in his track with his arm.

Mobius approaches the kid, speaking gently in French, apologizing for Hunter U-92’s behaviour, saying he’s just an imbecile.

Hunter U-92, annoyed by his comment, reminds him that he too can speak every language on the timeline, and that in short he can understand what Mobius is saying. The sentence though is more for our benefit, telling us those men can use the TVA version of Allspeak or whatever the “Loki” series wants to call it.

There’s a lovely visual showing us the kid and Mobius met in front of a beautiful stained glass window which depicts Satan.

To get the boy to talk Mobius draws a stick figure on some sort of small tablet he has and then passes it to the boy, telling him to tap on it. The boy does and the figure becomes a walking holographic projection which causes the boy to smile instead than assuming it’s witchcraft and running away screaming.

Okay, we are in 1549 and not in middle age, but that would still feel like magic even at the end of Renaissance age. But whatever, boys sometimes can put aside their fear for something that amuses them and this one had no troubles dealing with the guy killing all those TVA agents.

Anyway Mobius asks the boy if he knows who did that and the boy conveniently does. He points to the figure in the glass stained window, a horned demon, likely Satan. We might think it’s symbolic, that for the boy whoever kills someone is a demon… but… wait a moment.

Anyway Mobius says the boy shouldn’t worry because that devil is afraid of them and that they will put the boy back to where he belongs.

The boy smiles and Mobius notices his teeth are blue. It turns out that the ‘devil’ has gifted the kid with some… candies? Bubblegums?

I’ve no idea if those ‘Kablooie’ are actually some kind of American food, sorry about it but it’s clear although the kid has pointed to a devil, he wasn’t so scared by him to turn down his gift or to not try it out. And a devil giving him a gift doesn’t really feel like someone who wanted to harm him, despite the boy seeing him.

I get this feeling this ‘devil’ is targeting specifically TVA hunters only instead than the timeline or people inside it. He leads them somewhere and then attacks and dispose them. If he’s doing so because the TVA hurt him or because he wants to control the timeline that’s up to speculation.

We’ll later be said this guy is another Loki variant, and in this scenes we were given clues to figure out ourselves, like how he stabbed the TVA agents and how the boy pointed to a demon or, more specifically, to a horned figure, and we knows Loki wears horns when in his full Asgardian attire.

Anyway Mobius takes the ‘candies?’ ‘bubblegums?’ away from the boy and orders Hunter U-92 to run the candies for sequence period and temporal aura… not that Hunter U-92 thinks they’ll find anything but he’s worried because the branch is nearing red line and they need to go. In my understanding if it reaches the red line it could risk creating a multiverse.

Mobius sends the boy to play outside while Hunter U-92 orders to set a reset charge.

Again we aren’t explained what a ‘reset charge’ works.

However we’ve seen the cartoon with Miss Minute and in that one there was a reset charge and when it activated it didn’t rewind the timeline… it erased it. So the creepy things is it could be this reset charge just… destroys everything, erases all the lives in that alternate timeline because, in a way, they’re all Variants, and the TVA disposes of Variants.

Well, I hope I’m wrong because otherwise it means each time the TVA resetted a timeline they basically killed each life living in that universe, which would make Thanos, who ‘only’ killed half the population once, a rather tame mass murderer.

Anyway before the timeline is resetted another TVA person joins Mobius and it shows him a file about the just apprehended Loki. Maybe nobody except me cares but they had previously shown an image of a Loki file and in it there were question marks on where the race was. Now they’ve written ‘Frost Giant’. Either the file shown was for another Loki Variant or they managed to remember Loki was a Frost Giant and fix the file.

It could be the file for another variant though, as his height in it is given as 6’4” while in this file he’s 6’2” (1.88m) which is Tom Hiddleston’s true height (for who’s curious 6’4” is Jeff Goldblum’s height… not that I think the Grandmaster is walking around pretending to be Loki because well, this would be weird…)… or they messed up Loki’s height as well. We’ll see.

As I know some have wondered about it, Loki’s eyes are given as blue and not as green… which is correct as Tom Hiddleston said:

Loki is a sexy villain, but that’s not part of his ambition, is it? He doesn’t seem to be interested in love or sex but he has this sexuality about him, maybe it’s his lust for power. What do you think of Loki as a sexy beast? Tom Hiddleston: [Laughs] That’s the first time anyone has ever used that phrase about Loki. It’s fascinating isn’t it? I don’t know because it’s not a part of the conscious construction. I take relish in playing him. I think there’s a physical self-possession about him, a self-acceptance. Of course I’ve been very exacting about his physicality. You know, I was born with very blonde, curly hair, and a mixture of Scottish and English genes, and my complexion is very ruddy and healthy. In making him with this raven black hair and blanching my face of all color, it changes my features. Suddenly my blue eyes look a lot bluer, which lends a severity to my face. And even my own smile has a distorted menace to it. Whatever comes through me naturally is distorted. It’s almost like a filter on a light. ['Thor: The Dark World’: Tom Hiddleston on boom times for evildoers]

Which implies he never wore green contact lenses to play Loki.

Whatever, we’ll go on.

We’re back to the TVA and Loki’s trial starts.

He’s taken in front of the judge Ravonna Renslayer who addresses to him as Laufeyson. Except for a small comic later retconned in “Thor: The Dark World”, this is the first time in the MCU Loki is called Laufeyson… which is a little sad as he never identified as such (the closest he goes is to say he’s Loki of Jotunheim when he tries to trick Malekith) yet meaningful as well as the TVA evidently never recognized Odin’s ‘adoption’ as valid. For them he’s not Odinson, he’s Laufeyson because that’s what he’s born. ‘Loki Odinson’ in his file is labelled as an alias same as ‘God of Mischief’, nothing more.

But well, they aren’t really interested in his name, for them he’s ‘Variant L1130, AKA Loki Laufeyson’. Renslayer informs him he’s charged with sequence violation 7-20-89 which can mean everything and nothing at the same time as, to us, and to Loki, is just a collection of numbers, and asks him how does he plead.

Loki tries, as it’s his habit, to put up a polite yet confident front.

He claims a god doesn’t plead and has been a very enjoyable pantomime, but he'd like to go home… and boys, we know he would really like to do so. He’s putting up a front because we saw how uncomfortable and scared he was through his permanence at the TVA.

In an old interview that’s sadly no more available Tom Hiddleston said:

“The thing with Loki is that, if he’s afraid, he won’t show it. He’s been highly trained, through the experience of his slightly traumatic life, to shield his fears.”

Why didn’t we see him scared in “The Avengers” even though he took risks in it too while now we’re allowed to catch glimpses of his fear here and there?

“The Avengers” had to paint him as the big adversary, the great obstacle the heroes have to overcome.

Are we going to feel that bad for you in this movie, or are you gonna – ? Tom Hiddleston: Yeah. He does some pretty nasty things. On one level, it was like, I knew I had to up the ante because there’s seven superheroes that make up the Avengers, and, in order for the film to work, the film is the most redemptive, feel-good, kind of fist-pumping story. And, in order for the audience to be pumping their fists for Iron Man, and Hulk, and Thor, and Captain America, they need to overcome a really big obstacle. And, unfortunately, that big obstacle is me. [LAUGHS]. I hope I have retained a sense of his kind of emotional damage [like we saw in Thor]. There is a lovely scene with Chris Hemsworth where you see a glimmer of his — his vulnerability, but… he’s yielded to the dark side, you know? [Interview With Tom Hiddleston AKA Loki]

In this episode the Loki we met isn’t the adversary, he’s the main character, so we get glimpses of his true mind. He’s afraid or confuse, yet he reacts to all that by putting up a front, by presenting himself as confident and in control. It started from when he found himself in an unfamiliar situation, facing the Mongolic people and it continues and will continue and mind you, it’s a good and popular technique to hide your fear.

By presenting yourself as confident, your opponent might believe you might have some reason to be confident and be more careful and hesitate in attacking you, and sometimes this is all the advantage you need.

Renslayer remains unfazed, as she likely knows Loki has no advantage over her. She knows he’s powerless, in an unfamiliar environment he knows nothing about, forced to wear a collar that somehow controls his time, submitted to rules he knows nothing about and surrendered by enemies.

Loki isn’t the first who was carried in front of her and she knows he won’t be the last. The system is unjust and the trial a farce but she’s persuaded for it to be righteous and the right way to deal with ‘Variants’ as this leads to the greater good of avoiding wars into the Multiverse so justice and fairness are clearly not something she has to care about.

Anyway she pressures the issue and, understanding she won’t let go, Loki shifts the blame on the Avengers, pointing out how he came into possession of the Tesseract because THEY traveled through time, according to Loki in a ‘last-ditch effort to stave off his ascent to God King’.

So yes, even though he was soundly beaten by them and he’s in a bad spot Loki still tries to play highty and mighty and not cower up in fear. But how did he know about the Avengers travelling through time? We saw he noticed the whole thing with the case, but how did he knew the Avengers were involved and not some other guy?

Remember how I mentioned that “Avengers: Endgame” had Loki walking vaguely near 2022 Tony Stark and we Scott Lang asking Tony if he wears Axe body spray?

Well, Loki clearly has a fine nose because he recognized the Axe body spray coming off from 2022 Tony Stark and figured out he was a future version of 2012 Tony Stark.

It’s kind of a pity they hadn’t kept these bits in the series but whatever, I get why they might have cut them.

Loki, like most of the fandom, blames them as the Time Criminals and suggests if Rendlayer were to provide him a taskforce he could eliminate them for her.

As he spoke we see Mobius intruding in the trial and sitting down as it carries on.

Back to Renslayer, she isn’t interested in the Avengers, claiming they were supposed to go back in the past but Loki wasn’t supposed to grab the Tesseract and escape.

Loki laughs at the absurdity of the statement and demands to know who decided this.

The answer is the Time-Keepers who dictate the proper flow of time so that Renslayer can dictate the proper flow of time according to their dictation.

And you start to see the horror of this system.

The Time-Keepers arbitrarily decide which is the proper flow of time and impose it on everyone. They basically make the rules according to what they like the most… and, of course, they don’t inform anyone of which ones the rules should be.

When Loki picked up the Tesseract and escaped there was nowhere a big warning sign saying ‘if you do so you commit a crime’. He didn’t even know there were Time-Keepers and a sacred timeline and the TVA did nothing to fix this.

While in many countries you’re supposed to know the law and pledging ignorance is not an excuse, the TVA is a self imposed and not recognized Authority of whose existence nobody knows anything which dictate rules according to the Time-Keepers’ tastes.

There’s the risk of total annihilation due to a multiverse war?

Fair worry but then why they get to decide how the sacred timeline should be? Which are their criteria for it? Why the Avengers going back to time was okay?

Although they saved lives, the whole things was incredibly messy as discussed in “The Falcon And The Winter Soldier”… and that series only touched the tip of the iceberg.

But whatever. The Time-Keepers, which Loki defines gods because that’s basically how the TVA paints them, at the moment remind me of the gods of gods in the “Loki: Agent of Asgard” comic and with them the whole idea everything is a tale.

The Sacred timeline feels like nothing else but the tale the Time-Keeper enjoyed, their canon, as if they were Marvel. Everything else is a fictional Au written by fans that gets a ‘cease and desist letter’ and is erased from the net.

Anyway Loki is feed up. He decides to plea ‘guilty’ but not of the crime they’re trying to pin on him but of… using his magic against them. Only his magic doesn’t work.

Hunter B-15 is probably the first who realizes what’s going on and, chuckling, explains it to Renslayer who’s not catching up. As Loki gets angry for not managing to use them, Renslayer explains magic powers don’t work at the TVA, which might explain why she didn’t recognize what Loki was doing while Hunter B-15, used to fieldwork, did. Renslayer might have never seen people using magic powers but Hunter B-15 might have done so.

Only no, because in an interview Gugu Mbatha-raw said about her character:

“She had a history of a hunter and a more military role like Wunmi’s character” [Many Sides of Loki | Marvel Studios' Loki Cast & Creators]

So, no, I’ve no idea why she didn’t catch up. Was she playing dumb? Has she been so out of the field she didn’t recognize the signs? Or, despite being the judge at Loki’s trial she hadn’t read his file and didn’t know he could do magic? It can be, as I said the trial is a farce so she might not have cared to document herself beyond a certain point.

Hunter B-15 is still laughing. She’s enjoying this.

Anyway she decides Loki is guilty and sentenced to be ‘reset’… you know, like the timelines.

Note again how Loki had no rights in this. He had no lawyer, he wasn’t explained things, he was just asked how he pled but that one was more a pro-forma than anything else. They had already decided he wasn’t allowed to do what he did and therefore guilty.

The trial was a farce to give the TVA a semblance of justice but it’s all a show.

Back to Loki, he has no idea what they mean with ‘reset’ and they didn’t even have the courtesy to explain it to him. Angrily he says:

“You ridiculous bureaucrats will not dictate how my story ends!”

To which Renlayer replies:

“It's not your story, Mr. Laufeyson. It never was.”

So yeah, now they’ve started with the references to stories which are another subtle jab at the “Loki: Agent of Asgard” plotline.

By the way, keep in mind Renslayer’s reply.

As Loki complains they have no idea what he’s capable of and tries resisting being taken away Mobius speaks up.

Fundamentally Mobius wants Renslayer to pass Loki to him as he has a plan.

There’s clearly a story behind the relation between Renslayer and Mobius, they aren’t just professional to each other, they’re closer than that.

Renslayer agrees although she says he’ll get the blame for whatever goes wrong.

Mobius looks at Loki, Loki stops struggling and asks him who he is and Mobius smiles in a satisfied manner and doesn’t reply.

The scene shifts to them walking through the place, Loki threatening to burn the place to the ground. Mobius clearly doesn’t take him seriously, saying he can start from his desk.

The fact is… Loki is powerless and Mobius knows. We know too, we’ve seen how the trial went. However there might be more at play. Mobius knows the whole of Loki’s life which as far as we know, included only episodes of violence post discovering who he was and during his permanence on Earth.

To him Loki’s statement might feel more an expression of frustration than a sincere threat.

As they walk Loki happens to see the world outside the place he’s in from what looks like a window. He’s surprised and Mobius encourages him to have a look.

Loki points out he though there was no magic there. I’m not sure if he’s saying so because he sees car flying and assume it’s magic.

In “Thor” and “Thor: The Dark World” magic was compared to science so maybe that’s what he’s saying, that the world he sees seems to advanced.

Mobius insists there isn’t magic there so Loki says that’s not real.

They exchange some more lines in which Mobius continues to play on Loki’s declaration he’ll burn the place down.

I’m curious.

We know Mobius is actually chasing another Loki Variant, one who killed many TVA agents (we’ll see some of them got burned down too).

He’ll later claim this Loki is not dangerous, but what’s the difference between this Loki and the other? What makes the other dangerous? And can’t this Loki get dangerous too?

Is Mobius doing the same that Loki does?

Acting confident and joking about Loki burning down the place because he actually fears he might have the potential to just do so if not handled correctly?

We’ll see.

Once they’re on a lift Mobius decides to introduce himself as ‘Agent Mobius’ and offers him his hand to shake… and I’m reminded of this scene from “The Avengers”.

Natasha: But you figured I'd come. Loki: After. After whatever tortures Fury can concoct, you would appear as a friend, as a balm. And I would cooperate.

The TVA doesn’t see what they’ve done as torture or even as ‘wrong’… but many states wouldn’t approve of some sort of vigilante capture a person for something THEY labelled a crime, force him to undress, destabilize him to the point he’s not even sure if he’s a human or a robot, put him through a mock trial and then threaten him to be ‘reset’.

It’s in dystopic universes you find authorities who can just arrest you for breaking laws they made up without your knowledge and then decide of your life.

Mobius might not be looking like Natasha but, after all this, someone acting like a friend would make him automatically more cooperative and, in a way, it does.

Hunter B-15 had to drag him where Loki just follows Mobius more or less quietly.

Anyway, back to the story.

Mobius decided to introduce himself in a friendly manner and I would want to remark Loki asked him who he was when they were at the trial so this is a rather late introduction which he might be doing right now because we just hear Loki sighing as he’s clearly unnerved.

Mobius is playing the role of the good cop in a way, trying to gain his trust.

Loki doesn’t handshake, he’s not going to make friend so easily, but asks him if he’s taking him somewhere to kill him.

Mobius says no, that’s where he just was which, if it’s not a lie, means that resetting Loki would have meant to actually kill him. So again… what about the timelines that get resetted? All the people in them get killed? The place gets razed to the ground? Disintegrated? What?

Mobius’ reply might be truthful but it’s also clever because he’s setting himself up as Loki’s ‘saviour’. Others wanted to kill Loki but he? He just saved him which begs the question of ‘shouldn’t Loki be a good boy and comply with Mobius’ requests and trust him and all the stuff?’

Now… I know that people feel like Mobius is a good guy because he saved Loki but the story will make clear he didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart… but merely because he needs him.

We’ve seen Mobius with the boy before, he made him comfortable so that the boy complied and gave him info, which is one of the many interrogating techniques.

That’s what Mobius is doing here.

Anyway we proceed with the best known scene of “Loki” as it was in the very first trailer.

I remember people discussing Mobius’ words about Loki liking to talk, as in the first movie he was often silent and quiet.

Well, to be honest if the movie had been left in his original cut Loki would have surely talked more, but what stuck with me watching “Thor” wasn’t so much that Loki was often quiet, but that many times he attempts to speak but he’s silenced.

On the Rainbow Bridge Volstagg asks him:

Volstagg: What happened? Your silver tongue turn to lead?

…which means Loki normally was skilful at persuading people to believe what they say or to do what they want them to do, which doesn’t necessarily makes him a chatter, but surely someone who knows how to talk. And we see that in “The Avengers” when nobody is there to interrupt him he allows himself to monologue. It’s an interpretation, of course, with whom people can disagree.

Anyway Loki decides to talk with Mobius. It’s not a stupid decision. Mobius is clearly not seeing him as a threat but he’s not being overly hostile either. Loki is completely a fish out of the water so it’s in his own interest to play along with Mobius, talk with him and find out more information about the place. In fact the first thing he asks is how long Mobius had been there, because this is tied in how much knowledge he could have.

In fact, the more he’d been there, the more he might know.

Mobius though remarks since time passes differently at the TVA he has no idea… which is a convenient reply as it only confuses Loki and explains nothing. In fact he could have said not the exact time he’d been there but give an approximation like ‘a lot’ or ‘very little’, instead, by giving out a vague reply he gives Loki an info he could do nothing with (time passes differently) and no real info about himself. At the same time, by giving out an answer, he again seems amicable, like how, when Loki asks what his answer means, he says Loki will catch up, as if he’s not withholding information, it’s just ‘complicate’.

Loki resorts to check the information Miss Minute gave him in her cartoon, which Mobius confirms because he has nothing to lose.

Loki laughs and tries to spark a response by being rude in defining the TVA system.

“The idea that your little club decides the fate of trillions of people across all of existence at the behest of three space lizards, yes, it's funny. It's absurd.”

Note, ‘little club’, ‘three space lizards’, ‘funny’, ‘absurd’.

He’s mocking the system, likely in order to get a response, but also in order to gain some measure of control.

It’s something he has done during the trial and is something he did in “Thor: The Dark World” facing Odin… or in “The Avengers” when he was held captive. But in “The Avengers” and “Thor: The Dark World” he had some understanding of what to expect. Here he’s blind flying, trying to test Mobius to see what he can get out of him while still trying to hold a façade of control.

On another note Loki says rather often how all this is absurd. To him this is a world of nonsense, like the one Alice found when she ended up in Wonderland (and it’s ironic how “Alice in the Wonderland” also contain a mock trial about the stealing of tarts in which rules are made on the spot as well as Alice here and there questioning her own identity or discussions about paths…) but I think having him repeat ‘it’s absurd’ so often it’s also for us viewers, to drive home we’re in a dystopic universe.

The TVA isn’t good, it’s absurd, with its rules that don’t make sense, a huge bureaucratic world and we might laugh at it if it wasn’t that’s also an organization that kidnap people from their timelines and subject them to their rules, rules they follow without questioning, like religious fanatics.

Who says what the Time-Keepers chose it has to happen is better than something else? They don’t know but, what’s more, they don’t care.

But let’s go on.

Mobius don’t fall for Loki’s provocation, he just retorts

“I thought you didn't like to talk.”

Which is a convenient way to answer Loki without giving Loki any answer.

They enter in a room which, Loki comments, looks very much ‘like a killing-me kind of a room’.

Mobius turns the situation by shifting the blame on Loki. It’s not that the room looks like a killing-him kind of room, it’s just that Loki is not big on trust. Because Mobius is totally deserving Loki’s trust because he saved him and was nice to him and acted like the perfect good cop so Loki really, should trust him. If he’s not doing it then it’s because he’s lacking in the trusting department.

But Loki had had his fill with trusting people and then discovering he wasn’t his parents’ son nor an Asgardian. His answer his moved by all the pain that discovery caused him.

“Trust is for children and dogs. There's only one person you can trust.”

Mobius’ reply again doesn’t take Loki’s words seriously, as if they were just something to slap on a shirt. He’s being passive aggressive in order to force Loki to question himself and keep control of him. The more Loki is unsure and question himself, the easy for Mobius is to manipulate him.

A break here.

It’s not that everyone has only one person they can trust… actually sometimes you can’t even trust yourself, while some other times you’ve plenty of people you can trust.

The idea you CAN’T trust in anyone is as damaging as the idea you should blindly trust in people but, in Loki’s situation yes, he should definitely only trust in himself, everyone in that situation should do it, trauma of being lied through your whole life or not, because Mobius isn’t doing all his out of good will but out of his need to use Loki.

So he’s not to be blindly trusted, he’s to be assessed so that one can see up until which point Mobius can be of some aid, so as to turn the exchange one of reciprocal benefit. If Loki were to hand himself in his hands, instead, only Mobius would get a gain for it, while Loki would risk to be used and then disposed once he has ended his purpose.

As Mobius is fiddling with a round thing that apparently control a projector, Loki questions him again, but with those words he has raised the bar a little.

If Mobius wants him to trust him, he has to start giving more clear answers.

“If the TVA truly oversees all of time, how have I never heard of you until now?”

Mobius is still good at diverting the attention as his reply irritates Loki and causes him to lose track of the conversation.

Mobius: 'Cause you've never needed to. You've always lived within your set path. Loki: I live within whatever path I choose. Mobius: Sure you do.

There are two things from the exchange.

One is that Mobius ends up confirming that the TVA is sort of a secret organization that decides for others, that’s ABOVE OTHERS. They don’t let you know which rules you’ve to follow, they decide which rule you’ve to follow and then let you blind fly until you stumble into a rule you didn’t know exist and break it. And then they come to punish you. And that’s when you learn they existed.

The second is that again Mobius, while not openly disagree with him, is dismissive of Loki. He has made him defensive by pushing him to say ‘I live within whatever path I choose’ then he hadn’t outright said ‘no, you don’t’ but by the way he replied he hugely implied it in a manner that sounds more like he had said ‘oh, you naïve child, and your delusions, of course you don’t chose your path’.

As Mobius invites him to sit down Loki tries to attack him since Mobius gave him his back but Mobius uses what we’ll learn is a Time Twister to loops him and send him standing back where he was. Then Mobius very calmly insists for Loki to have a seat, again driving home the point that Loki has no choices and is powerless.

Loki complies and sit down.

We can argue if he should have or not but the truth is there was no real point in resisting beyond making things difficult for himself because if there’s something true here is that he’s powerless and he should just bid his time and search for a weakness, instead than resisting.

Of course this is all well and good for Mobius, as things are proceeding in the way he wants.

Loki crosses his arms, which, in body language, hints that he’s feeling anxious, resistant, tense, insecure, afraid, or responding to distress. Arms crossed indicate also defensiveness, unyielding attitudes, and perseverance working as an act of self-comfort.

Long story short, Loki is not comfortable or willing to cooperate and he’s physically putting a barrier between himself and Mobius… and letting Mobius know of this.

Mobius is unfazed.

“If looks could kill.”

It’s a simple sentence that let Loki know that yes, he gets the message Loki isn’t going to go down to this willingly, but also reminds him of Loki’s powerlessness and of how Mobius is unafraid and in a position of power. ‘If looks could kill… you would kill me, but looks can’t kill so you’ll have to sit there and do as I say. Your resistance is futile. Amusing even.’

Loki doesn’t play along, making clear he doesn’t plan to cooperate. At least not easily. Mobius doesn’t believe him.

“Really? Even when you're wooing someone powerful you intend to betray? Come on.”

It’s an interesting sentence for Mobius to say, because he’s lampshading Loki isn’t using with him the same technique he used with Thanos and the Grandmaster. Since the story knows Loki should act more cooperative and obedient according to his previous records, I wonder which point they’re trying to make. Is the idea that Loki started to act as such after his one year imprisonment in Asgard, understanding opening defiling Odin got him nowhere and that he should have instead played along, therefore this Loki hadn’t gotten to that point yet?

Or is the idea Loki is deliberately choosing to act like this because he has already figured playing along with Mobius wouldn’t work?

We’ll see.

The answer could as well be a Doylist one, the audience expects him to act a certain way, the author is aware Loki normally acted in a certain way but they wanted him to act differently for… reasons.

We’ll see.

Mobius continues to make a show of his power. He is specialized in the pursuit of dangerous Variants but not like Loki, Loki is just a pussycat… only it’s EXACTLY like Loki… as it’s Loki he’s pursuing. Another version of him. He’s not telling him that though, exactly because the whole point of the discussion is making Loki feel small so that he can control him.

Credits when it’s due, Mobius is playing a dangerous game because the Loki he’s pursuit and this one might be two different Variants but they’re always Loki and this one has all the potential to become the same as the other, if he’s not already and just keeping it buried inside himself.

Anyway, the fact that Loki is so contrary, forces Mobius to act as if he were willing to make Loki some concessions for his cooperation. A reward for good behaviour if so we can call it.

“You answer them honestly, and then maybe I can give you something you want. You wanna get out of here, right?”

The truth is I genuinely doubt Mobius can grant him that, or, at least, not that in the way Loki might intend it. The TVA erased the timeline he came from. He has no more a place outside of the TVA. The most ‘getting out of there’ could mean is what will later happen, make him a worker for the TVA. He won’t be allowed to go back home, he’ll just have to serve them in exchange for having them not delete him.

Mobius though shifts cards and pretends it means he can go back to where he was, asking him what he would do, should he return.

I particularly enjoy this dialogue.

Mobius: You wanna be king? Loki: I don't want to be, I was born to be. Mobius: I know, but king of what exactly? Loki: ( Scoffs ) You wouldn't understand. Mobius: Try me. Loki: Midgard.

The ‘I don’t want to be’ echoes what Loki said to Thor in “Thor”…

“I never wanted the throne! I only ever wanted to be your equal.”

…and ties in with what Odin told him as a child…

“Only one of you can ascend to the throne. But both of you were born to be kings.”

Which is something Loki hints at in “Thor: The Dark World” as well.

Frigga: You know full well it was your actions that brought you here. Loki: My actions. I was merely giving truth to the lie that I had been fed my entire life, that I was born to be a king.

“The Avengers” suffers of a huge plot problem in this regard, which is the jump between Loki in “Thor” and Loki in “The Avengers”. In the year that went between the two Loki is deeply changed but “The Avengers” refused to explain why, it just shows us a different Loki.

To search for an explanation we’ve to read interviews:

“And in the time between the end of Thor and the beginning of the Avengers, Loki has explored the shadowy highways and byways of the universe – and he’s met some terrible, terrible people and probably had some awful experiences, which he has survived and overcome. So by the time he arrives in The Avengers, he knows the extent of his power – and he’s unafraid to use it. And more importantly, he’s unafraid to enjoy it.” In Marvel’s The Avengers, Loki sets out to remake Earth as his personal kingdom. “That’s his motivation. Thor has his own kingdom in Asgard. Why shouldn’t Loki have his own? As Loki sees it, planet Earth is a world at war with itself. All of these races and tribes are fighting each other. And if they were united in the reverence of one king, there would be peace. It’s not that he plans to attack Earth. It’s that he plans to ‘restructure’ it as a new kingdom of which he will be the head. Loki feels that it’s his birthright. He feels that he was born to rule. And he sees the human race as an incredibly weak people who actually were made to be ruled. And, in his mind and in his opinion, the human race functions better under rule.” [The art of The Avengers]

“I think he went, like with everything else, to—Joss Whedon and I discussed it—to a sort of… it was just, like, the worst place imaginable. I think he went to, sort of, all of the darkest recesses of the universe. I’m sure he had a brush with—several brushes with death. I think he ran into the shadiest characters you can find in the Nine Realms. I think he had to rely on his wits to protect himself. It was really, really, really unpleasant, I think. I don’t have any frame of reference for that, except for imagining what it might be like to be kidnapped by a terrorist or something and have to survive a very, very frightening and precarious existence. But whatever it was, it was important when Loki came back for The Avengers, that whatever compassion he had left was absolutely shriveled to a minimum because of the experience that he had. Harrowing, I think, and scarring for life—in a way that Thor and Odin and Frigga find very, very difficult to understand.” [Tom Hiddleston - live on stage Q&A: Popcorn Taxi - part 2]

And in the end we stumble into this:

“Well, I can’t tell you exactly what went on because it’s this dark, dark secret that I didn’t make up yet. But, the other day, I had trouble with that because he had this very passionate Shakespearean tragedy thing going on in Thor and then I needed a villain who’s not only capable, but ready and willing and anxious to take on all these heroes. For me, he just basically went on some horrible walkabout… That was pretty much as far as I got.” [Joss Whedon told Comic-Con the question he doesn’t want us to ask ever again ]

So fundamentally “The Avengers” didn’t know what happened to Loki that changed him, they just went with the idea something bad happened, which of course should have happened since Loki met up with Thanos, who’s famous for torturing his daughters. They also tossed in that while on Midgard he was under the influence of the Mind stone.

“Gifted with a Scepter that acted as a mind control device, Loki would be able to influence others. Unbeknownst to him, the Scepter was also influencing him, fuelling his hatred over his brother Thor and the inhabitants of Earth.” [www.marvel.com/characters/loki/on-screen]

Ultimately though, what happened is never stated nor explained.

When Loki wants Asgard’s throne it’s clear he’s doing so because he associates it with his father’s love. Who gets the throne is the son Odin’s love.

“To prove to Father that I am the worthy son. When he wakes, I will have saved his life. I will have destroyed that race of monsters. And I will be true heir to the throne!”

But Midgard? Midgard is chosen by Thanos, because he needs the Tesseract, which is there. Did Loki wanted it too? Or was it Thanos who chose for him? Hard to say but “The Avengers” still ties Loki’s wish for a kingdom to his father.

THE OTHER: You question us? You question him? He who put the scepter in your hand, who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out, defeated? LOKI: I was a king! The rightful kind of Asgard! Betrayed! THE OTHER: Your ambition is little, born of childish need. We look beyond the Earth to greater worlds the Tesseract will unveil.

It makes sense. When Loki is told his whole life is a lie, his first action is try to erase the truth by erasing Jotunheim. That was as much personal as practical (they were at war with Jotunheim). Becoming a king might have been another attempt at still erasing the truth. He doesn’t attempt to become king of Jotunheim, as it would be his birthright, but of something else, Midgard. He’s imitating Odin.

Loki: I went down to Midgard to rule the people of Earth as a benevolent god. Just like you.

All this to say that Loki’s reply ‘I don't want to be, I was born to be’ is actually a lot more layered that it sounds is actually a lot more layered that it sounds and that’s why he doesn’t think Mobius would understand it and gives him a simple answer, something he thinks he could understand. A location over which he could rule.

At the same time the irony of the situation isn’t lost on me. A moment ago Loki said he ‘live within whatever path he chooses’ yet he claims he was born to do something. This wasn’t a choice, this was predetermination. Or letting Odin dictate his path.

Anyway Loki claims he would then move to conquer Asgard and the Nine Realms and agree when Mobius suggests him to go for the space… and honestly I think here Loki is just playing a part. He’s giving Mobius the answers he thinks Mobius wants, an evil Loki. “Loki” clearly is not going to retcon “Thor: Ragnarok” and we’ve seen that in that movie once Loki had the throne of Asgard he didn’t start a conquering rampage but just contented himself with it.

So, no, Loki doesn’t want to rule the universe, he just wants to prove himself something he was told was true.

Mobius don’t take him seriously, either because he knows Loki doesn’t aim to universe domination or because this is convenient for him. He says something interesting though, albeit misleading.

Loki: Mock me if you dare. Mobius: No, I'm not. Honestly, I'm actually a fan. Yeah. And I guess I'm wondering why does someone with so much range just wanna rule?

With ‘I’m actually a fan’ I don’t think he means he supports Loki, I think he’s subtly hinting he’s very interested in Loki. The other Loki, the Variant he’s trying to catch and that holds them all in a stalemate. Kind of like Sherlock Holmes might have appreciated Professor Moriarty’s intellect. This Loki and his other Variant might have a shared past… which makes this Loki interesting as well.

Then Mobius lead Loki in a loop in Loki’s reasoning. Loki is big on how he decides what he does. He values his own freedom. A huge part of why he reject the TVA system is because they want to dictate what he can and can’t do.

Yet in “The Avengers” he said:

Loki: I come with glad tidings, of a world made free. Fury: Free from what? Loki: Freedom. Freedom is life's great lie. Once you accept that, in your heart...[Like a gunslinger, Loki turns to face Selvig who's standing behind him and places his spear against Selvig's heart. Selvig's eyes glow black.] Loki: You will know peace.

and

Loki: Kneel before me. [The crowd ignores him. Three more Loki's appear, surrounding and blocking the crowd from escaping.] I said KNEEL! [While the crowd quietly kneels, Loki embraces out his arms with a wide smile] Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel.

It’s unclear how Loki came up with those ideas, albeit the fact he came from Asgard, which is a place where Odin rules as a supreme ruler and humans are viewed as inferior…

Odin: She does not belong here in Asgard anymore than a goat belongs at a banquet table.

…this might be another result of Odin���s awesome parenting, and not necessarily the result of Thanos’ manipulation… though the two might have superimposed so that it’s hard to say where one stop and the other begins.

Loki confirms this view here as well.

Loki: I would've made it easy for them. Mobius: People like easy. Loki: The first and most oppressive lie ever uttered was the song of freedom. Mobius: How's that one go? Loki: For nearly every living thing, choice breeds shame and uncertainty and regret. There's a fork in every road, yet the wrong path always taken.

On a personal note I think Loki wants to see himself above of this, but it’s clear that he too had to deal with choices that breed shame, uncertainty and regret, never mentioning he believes he was seen as inferior by Odin and deprived of his path.

Loki: So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me.

The fact he thinks Odin would have never put on the throne of Asgard a Frost Giant (a monster and therefore even more inferior in the Asgardians’ opinion than humans) no matter what and that he thinks this got confirmed when Odin told him he couldn’t do it, which pushed him to let go of Gungnir.

Loki wants to be above… he wants to be the master of his fate after instead he was forced to dance on other people’s strings (Odin, Thanos) but deep down he’s drawing from his own experience the downsides of freedom. He just wants to overcome them.

Mobius then says he’ll show Loki a sampling of Loki’s greatest hits… which are basically the end of the battle of New York.

It’s fundamentally a close up of how he was beaten and how he asked for a drink, which Mobius mocks further offering him a drink, which Loki refuses pointing out he remembers that scene.

We kind of stumble in a problem the series has. Mobius says:

“It's funny, for someone born to rule, you sure do lose a lot. You might even say it's in your nature.”

The problem here is that the sentence is misleading. Loki at the moment has two big failures on his shoulders, the one in “Thor” and the one in “The Avengers”. It doesn’t make a lot and note that in “The Avengers” he also had minor successes. He walked away from SHIELD’s facility with the Tesseract, he managed to have Clint Barton steal the Iridium, he let the Avengers capture him so that he could let the Hulk lose, which worked and he could recover the scepter and escape, he managed to open the portal and let the Chitauri in. Basically, since he let himself be captured and even Steve knows, Loki won all the battles except the one who decided the war. Which yes, was a big loss because it was the one that mattered the most but still it shows Loki’s losing record isn’t as big as Mobius makes it look like.

Loki ends up bringing up Coulson. To prove his point that Loki isn’t really good at winning Mobius could bring up the fact that Coulson was resurrected in “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” but no, he prefers to say the Avengers came together to literally avenge him by defeating him.

Now yes, Coulson’s death played a big part in all that, they felt guilty and sorry for him, as they all were tied to him one way or the other and this made what Loki did personal enough they could easily put away their differences… but I’m not overly fond of this theory because it implies if Coulson hadn’t died the Avengers would have never came together, would have never overcome their difficulties and would have lost.

Which, I guess, might be a possibility “Loki” might want to explore, we saw in a trailer an image of New York completely destroyed… but it’s something I don’t particularly like because it paints the Avengers in a pretty dark light.

If they didn’t have a common grief, they would have never cooperate for the common good.

Of course it’s not that Mobius care, this explanation is convenient for him, an Augustinian view of evil in which evil collapse its evil’s own doing. Because Loki killed Coulson, Loki set up his own defeat. Evil loses because it’s a snake that bites its own tail… which is an interesting view, really, but, in this case, it put a huge shadow on the Avengers.

Whatever, let’s go on, Mobius’ point is to make Loki feel small, not to explain him why he lost.

But still… he would manage to make a better point if the series weren’t forced to use only the footage from the movies. But well, I guess they had no other choice.

I enjoy the next bit of discussion. Mobius asks Loki:

“Do you enjoy hurting people? Making them feel small? Making them feel afraid?”

Which is exactly what he’s doing to him. There’s a huge irony in the whole discussion. They both think they’re in the right doing what they’re doing/what they did and that this excuses their actions.

They set up a moral motive, Loki sees himself as a liberator, Mobius sees himself as the saviour of the sacred timeline so they are above others, they came make them feel small and afraid and don’t have to feel guilty for it.

They get to a stalemate, although Loki isn’t looking at the screen, which is our clue he isn’t enjoying what he’s seeing, the people suffering. He didn’t like to look at them in “The Avengers” either, not looking when he ‘freed that eyeball’ as Mobius put in. Even when Thor forces him to look at the attacked city he shows he’s distressed. Loki however enjoyed being at the centre of the attention, it’s that what got him to smile, not hurting that man.

But whatever, to try to compensate, the series shows us some unseen material from Loki’s past, namely when he played the role of D.B. Cooper.

On a sidenote this hugely confirms my theory Loki used to hang out on Earth since he could play that part. Among the other things which the series didn’t show Cooper appeared familiar with the local terrain; at one point he remarked, "Looks like Tacoma down there," as the aircraft flew above it. He also correctly mentioned that McChord Air Force Base was only a 20-minute drive (at that time) from Seattle-Tacoma Airport. He asks for 2 bourbon and soda, paid his drink tab (and attempted to give flight attendant Tina Mucklow the change). He even offered to request meals for the flight crew during the stop in Seattle This makes Loki someone who knows very well how things work in Midgard… contrary to Thor.

Mobius introduces the whole thing saying

“You're really good at doing awful things, and then just getting away.”

And yes, it was awful. Although Cooper is described as extremely polite I can’t imagine that the crew who knew he had a bomb onboard felt comfortable with dealing with that situation. The worst part though is that he did it because he lost a bet with Thor.

Now they don’t exactly dig in what the bet was, but Heimdall was likely watching his every move and Thor asking him to do something similar as penance for losing a bet paints Thor also as pretty awful.

The best part though is that Loki excuses it by saying ‘he was young’. The whole thing took place in 1971, in short, 41 years before “The Avengers”. 41 years are a lot for a human, enough to make them say ’41 years ago I was young’, but Loki is at least 1047 in “The Avengers”. We don’t know how fast exactly Frost Giants and Asgardians age but, unless they do an abrupt jump, if Loki was young 41 years ago, he probably still is, which would match with the fan theory he’s actually around 17 in human years.

Now we can take Loki’s sentence as something a young person would say, as in a span of a short time they effectively grow and change a lot so their slightly younger self might feel a lot younger to them, or he might be talking in a more metaphorical sense.

Discovering the truth about himself and what followed forced him to grow faster. Now he wouldn’t do such immature things… which is a rather sad though.

At Loki’s request of where was the TVA back then, Mobius replies they were right there with him, just surfing that Sacred Timeline. Loki asks then if that has the Time-Keepers' seal of approval.

He scores one on this one as Mobius can’t reply, he just says not to think in terms of approval or disapproval.

Let’s remember something else that had the Time-Keepers' seal of approval was Thanos wiping away half of the universe but not just that. There’s also Thanos travelling through time to get to that future and stop “The Avengers” from undoing what he did with the infinity stones, which means they approved Tony Stark’s death in order to stop him.

Awesome people, don’t you think? More similar to writers who’ve to sell a good story than to people who care and wants to protect the people who lives in the timeline.

Anyway Mobius says they’ll go back to Loki’s escape and to a little psychobabble, which tells us not even Mobius sees this as a psychology session or therapy or whatever you want to call it. This interrogatory’s aim isn’t to let him know Loki better, he believes he knows him already. He’s trying to shape Loki into a willing collaborator because that’s his goal, not heal Loki or whatever.

Mind you, I think he’d like to get to know Loki in the sense he’s trying to catch a Loki and knowing Loki better might help him in his work… but so far he really hadn’t asked anything he didn’t know already so no, this isn’t a big ‘let’s get to know Loki’, though he might find some interest in seeing what makes him tick in the conversation, this is just a ‘let’s manipulate Loki into cooperating’.

Loki wants to stand, Mobius uses the Time Twister to loops him ‘back in his cage’. Because don’t mistake the situation just because he’s not being aggressive or physically abusive, Loki is in a cage and Mobius makes a show of showing it to Loki. He can’t stand up without Mobius’ permission and Mobius further remarks it by saying he ‘can play the heavy keys, too’, in short that he can play the role of the ‘bad cop’ that slams back the prisoner in his chair when he tries to move.

Or should we assume Mobius feared Loki was going to attack him?

Maybe, as I said Loki and Mobius might be more similar than it looks like, both acting in control and high and mighty to hide they are actually in a tight spot. Mobius isn’t a hunter, he might not be strong, he might not know how to fight beyond waving that Time Twister and the TVA wand, while Loki knows. We don’t know from which race Mobius is, but Asgardians and Frost Giants are naturally very physically strong, much stronger than humans, and Mobius might belong to a race that’s just not the same.

But still the scene works conveniently for Mobius, because it’s another chance to drive home how he completely control Loki.

Loki’s reply, regardless of it being sincere or not, is good because it says Mobius just overreacted as Loki merely wanted to make a point.

After an exchange in which Mobius gives him permission to stand and Loki remarks he’ll do what he wants, which in a way he did since ultimately he stood, he asks him what he wants.

Mobius says

“I want you to be honest about why you do what you do.”

Loki calls it a lie and he’s probably not completely right but neither completely wrong. Mobius likely doesn’t care about why Loki did what he did in the past, that’s not a time he has to deal with, but he cares about forcing Loki to be honest. Loki has to trust him and cooperate with him and this includes that he has to open up. Mobius has to already know the answer to his questions, otherwise he could never know if Loki is being honest and he knows them because he knows Loki’s future, how he evolves, how it pained him to see Frigga die, how he saved Thor even though it lead him to be stabbed, how he didn’t aim for space domination when he was king of Asgard, how he came back to save Asgard, how he died for his brother.

So Mobius is not lying when he says he wants Loki to be honest… but that’s not because he cares about the answer, which is what Loki figured and why Loki called him a liar. It’s a matter of control and Loki can see it.

Loki: I know what this place is. Mobius: What is it? Loki: It's an illusion. It's a cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear. A desperate attempt at control. Now, you all parade about as if you're the divine arbiters of power in the universe.

And Mobius claims to be sure to have such a role which again, it’s an awesome irony because they both play the same game, they act as if they’re superior than others.

Mobius shows him his speech about freedom, which of course feels like a slap on his face because now it’s turned against him and his mad scramble for power.

Loki catches up and insists on his freedom, on how he’s the one in charge of his destiny who will win because HE did it, not because it was supposed to happen or was allowed by the TVA.

Mobius tries to bring him down again informing him if he hadn’t picked up the Tesseract he would have been taken to a cell on Asgard… or, you know, he might have been out there killing TVA men staging the 7th attack in the last week that they know of. But let’s not tell this to Loki at this stage. It might give him ideas about not being completely powerless against the TVA.

Mobius shows him the scene of his return to Asgard, which Loki rejects as a trick as ‘it never happened’.

Mobius agrees, it didn’t happen TO HIM, but it would have because they know also how his future was meant to be and that he should think of it as ‘comforting’. Which is not considering how his life was meant to be.

Note how Mobius is showing him only Frigga. How she was there for him when he came back, how she asked him if she wasn’t his mother and how he rejected her, hurting her. Loki doesn’t know what the argument was about or what pushed him to say so, all he sees is her being there for him and him hurting her and as he watches he moves closer.

Then Mobius explains how Loki believed to send the dark elves to Thor and instead sent them to Frigga… only he’s conveniently overlooking Loki had no idea they were Dark Elves or that there was a Dark Elves attack. Loki assumed the Kurse was just another Marauder arrested by Thor.

The Marauders were a collective of loosely affiliated alien pirates composed of many different races. When the Kurse is captured no Asgardian figured out what he is, they’re all persuaded the Dark Elves are dead, exterminated by Bor. For all Loki’s know this is a prison uprising, the Dark Elves’ ships hadn’t even appeared yet and started their attack when Loki sent Kurse on his way.

Mobius is cherry picking facts so as to shape them the way he wants.

Loki is shocked at seeing Frigga’s death which Mobius knew would have happened because he knew how he reacted when this happened.

He tries to rationalize what he saw by thinking they captured Frigga and forced her to play that part, while Mobius insists that’s the proper flow of time and that’s what has to happen because it has to and the TVA makes sure of it. However, although the TVA ensures Frigga’s death, he tries to make it all Loki’s fault. He caused it, and now Mobius wants to know if he enjoys hurting people, as if he could not know how devastated Loki was when Frigga died. He asks him if he enjoys killing people like he did with his mother.

He knows the past time Loki felt completely responsible for it, he’s trying to get him to feel the same even if Loki actually never meant to kill Frigga.

On a sidenote, he’s trying to send him on a vulnerable loop to get his collaboration like Thor did that time… but it’s a dumb move. Let’s assume Loki swallows they could send him back to his time and accepts to submit to being jailed. The TVA would still ensure he would direct the Kurse to Frigga so that she’ll die because this is the proper flow of time for them.

Although I doubt he meant it, Mobius actually isn’t giving Loki reasons to cooperate with him permanently, just to think harder to a way to avoid that future.

I don’t really know what Mobius is thinking but he seems so sure that he can come out as so overly powerful and righteous he can both bend Loki to his will by saying he’s to blame for Frigga’s death and, at the same time, that he should do nothing to prevent it.

Anyway at this point Loki attack him and is looped again. He ends on the ground with Mobius apologizing, BEFORE PUTTING THE TIME TWISTER IN HIS POCKET, saying it because the Time Twister just loops him, not the furniture… but he actually meant it, because Loki had been standing by a while and he could have looped him to just standing there.

Mobius goes on trying to make him again feel even more smaller.

“You weren't born to be king, Loki. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was, that's how it will be. All so that others can achieve their best versions of themselves.”

In short he was born to be used by the sacred timeline to create heroes. But it’s a ridicule argument, in itself, because every living being create pain and suffering in his life, albeit sometimes in smaller measure than Loki or for better reasons. And the idea that people become better only through pain and suffering and death… is scary because somehow it legitimize it. It makes right to kill Coulson because then the Avengers can be born. It makes right for Thanos to wipe away half of humanity because so the Avengers joined forces again.

It’s a damaging and wrong mindset… that Mobius is of course pushing forward because that’s the narrative the TVA spins. They don’t save people, they just decide who lives and die according to their taste… which works if you’re a storywriter but it’s awful if you’re talking of real people.

Loki calms down and asks again what is that place. Mobius offers him his hand in a classic stick and carrot game. He wants Loki to obey. Loki complies and they’re interrupted by Hunter B-15. Mobius is forced to leave with her but not before telling Loki:

“Don't go anywhere. It was just getting good. Spirited.”

In short he was enjoying making Loki feel miserable, which I don’t think he does because he’s a jerk but just because that’s his job. Like Hunter B-15, they’re very motivated in doing their job to the point they don’t realize the other isn’t just ‘a variant’ but a person with feeling. They think they’re doing the people a service by murdering the extra.

Kind of like how Thanos saw himself as noble when he murdered half of the people in the universe to save the other half and expected people to feel grateful to him.

By the way, do you think that Loki is complying too easily?

Not really, do check the way he let Mobius pull him up and how he then moves his left hand for a moment inside his pocket to pull it out immediately afterward. We’ll come back to it in a moment. For now let’s follow the plot that has Hunter B-15 claiming that talking ‘to that Variant’ is a mistake as he should just be reset, read, if Mobius had been honest, killed.

For Hunter B-15 Loki is not a person, he’s just a Variant, a Variant to destroy. Actually it’s not even because the other Loki Variant is killing their units, because Mobius says she thinks all the Variants should be reset.

And remember about how Loki could be in a jail or plotting the 7th attack in the last week that they know of? Well, that’s just what the other Loki variant did as they just lost another unit.

I know I should be cheering for this Loki but I’m also really cheering for that other Loki variant. Go burn the TVA to the ground.

Mobius goes back to Loki and… discovers he disappeared. Because when Loki let Mobius pull him up he caught his chance to stuff his hand in Mobius’ pocket, steal the Time Twister and put it in his own pocket. That’s what Loki was thinking when he calmed down, a plan to get out of there, a chance to take the Time Twister.

Now… don’t the TVA know in advance what happens in the TVA? What the Variants would do once they’re captive? Because Mobius seems genuinely surprised and they’ve to search for Loki so for all their bragging about knowing everything and controlling everything maybe they actually don’t. They can’t control the Variants, which is why the other Loki Variant can attack without them knowing in advance. Their sacred timeline doesn’t cover it so they’re blind to it.

Of course it’s possible he let Loki take it on purpose but I want to think against it.

We see that Loki has looped himself in an early point of his entrance in the TVA and has noticed Casey, the guy at the desk who has taken the Tesseract. He follows him, clearly planning to get the Tesseract back and, with it, to leave the place.

Mobius and Hunter B-15 search for Loki, giving each other the blame for his disappearance. Hunter B-15 would like to catch this chance to dispose of Loki but Mobius rejects the idea since he believes he can still help.

Loki tracks Casey down. Casey recognizes him and he forces him to kneel behind the desk. He asks him his name and once he has it he tells him in his most threatening tone to give him the Tesseract or he’ll gut him like a fish.

Only Casey wants to know what’s a fish because he wants to know what he’s being threatened with, before complying and he has spent all his life behind a desk so he has no idea what a fish is. I guess he also doesn’t know what it means gutting.

Loki can’t imagine not knowing what a fish is… which is kind of weird because he should know for example humans never head of bilchsnipes… but maybe due to his name he’s thinking Casey is human. Honestly the whole TVA staff seems human. Can I say I don’t like it?

In the comics though, the TVA staff was made by people cloned. They literally were made by the TVA. I wonder if this is Casey’s situation.

Anyway Loki clarifies he’s threatening him with death. It doesn’t unfazed Casey much (do people die INSIDE the TVA?) but, to Loki’s relief, he complies, opens his drawer and give him the Tesseract whose light is still mostly turned off. Loki feels a moment of relief before noticing that in the drawer there are assorted infinity stones.

At Loki’s confusing Casey explains they get a lot of those, enough to use them as paperweight. I guess the infinity stones influence might allow people to do different choices and become Variants as they can influence them.

Something inside the TVA though, turns off their power.

Loki is confused as he picks up a green one, which should be a time stone. We hear the sound of stones moving but we can’t see if he placed it back where it was.

Loki is utterly confused as he walks away with the Tesseract in a daze looking at the sacred timeline and wondering if the TVA is really the greatest power in the universe. Behind him, Casey nods.

The elevator opens, Hunter B-15 tries to hit Loki but Loki uses the Time Twister to disappear again so she misses him completely and almost hits poor Casey. Note that the blow would have been fatal for either Loki or Casey.

Hunter B-15 didn’t care of how Mobius said no pruning or resetting, we can see that the cart, which gets hit instead of Loki, disappear.

This time Hunter B-15 didn’t go for physical pain, she went for the kill.

Loki is back in the interrogation chamber where he put the Time Twister on the table and watches on the projector his future. First Frigga’s death, as if to try to accept it, and he’s almost in tears, then he lash forward to Odin telling him and Thor that he loves them and that they should remember that place. This too touches him emotionally. He sees Thor telling him how he thought the world of him and he sees them fighting side by side against Hela and then telling him maybe he’s not so bad. He smiles at seeing that, laughing sadly but then… he sees his death at the hands of Thanos. It’s obviously traumatic but, I hope, when he can think at all that in perspective, he’ll be able to see the truth.

He wasn’t born to cause pain and suffering and death. He also saved lives, his brother’s specifically but also the ones of some Asgardians.

And, at the same time, he could see, he could learn his father and brother did love him, or at least that was the intended message of those scenes (I won’t dig into them portraying it correctly or not).

The file about him ends.

Loki gives into a slightly hysterical chuckling and the door behind him opens. It’s Hunter B-15 who asks him what’s so funny.

Loki replies ‘Glorious purpose’ which can mean all and nothing. According to the file his glorious purpose wasn’t to become king, but not even to cause pain and suffering and death. At the same time it’s not a particularly uplifting message the one that file gave him. The moment he could start again with Thor, Thanos killed him. In the end, even if he tried to change, his life would be one of pain and suffering until his death.

Loki and Hunter B-15 fight and somehow she doesn’t have anymore her murdering wand nor the men following her.

She’s alone and disarmed but she’s clearly a trained to fight and rather strong. Loki is smarter though. As soon as she slams him on the table he grabs the Time Twister, unlatches his collar and wraps it around her neck. Then takes on her his revenge for having been looped way too many times that day by looping her a lot until he makes her disappear. Where to I’ve no idea but I hope for him far enough. He was clearly taking out on her all the abuse he suffered from her and Mobius. In the end he tosses the Time Twister again on the table.

Meanwhile Casey is retelling his misfortunate meeting… evidently finding the idea that Loki would turn him into a fish much worse than the idea Loki threatened to kill him and then complains about the hunters showing up and pruning his cart.

Really, it makes me wonder if the TVA doesn’t use the world ‘dead’ in conversation. It’s all ‘reset’ or ‘prune’. I’m not saying they don’t know of it, just that they don’t use it to define what they do because it would make them look bad. You murder a living being. You reset a timeline, prune a branch. There’s a psychological difference that allows them to see Variants not as living beings but as objects.

As he speaks Hunter B-15 appears in front of him so that’s where Loki sent her.

Meanwhile Loki has remained in the room in which he was. He seems worn out as he sat on the floor against a wall, his face in his hands and the Tesseract set next to him.

Mobius, who gets into the room holding one of those TVA wands, finds him like that. Mobius rubs in he has nowhere left to run.

Loki states how he can’t go back to his timeline, then decides to comply with Mobius previous request. He tells him he doesn’t enjoy hurting people, he does it because he has to, because it's part of the illusion. It's the cruel, elaborate trick conjured by the weak to inspire fear. And claims to be a villain.

Is he being sincere or just telling Mobius what he wants to hear?

I like to think he’s being both. In “The Mentalist” Patrick Jane once tried to teach Teresa Lisbon how to gain someone’s trust. His first suggestion was to ask that person for a favour, so that they would feel more powerful, when this didn’t work he told her to get that person to lower their guard she should lower her own. I get the feeling Loki is doing this. He’s lowering his guard, giving Mobius what he wants, so that Mobius will lower his guard too. Like when he accepted his hand only to steal the time twister.

There’s a power in being sincere as well, which is to make Mobius feel more powerful by giving him power and therefore push him to underestimate Loki.

Mobius, who previously told him

“You weren't born to be king, Loki. You were born to cause pain and suffering and death. That's how it is, that's how it was, that's how it will be. All so that others can achieve their best versions of themselves.”

Now saying him that’s not how he sees it.

He’s either giving him the carrot in his carrot and stick game or he’s just remarking one of the main characteristics of the TVA. The TVA is neutral, they don’t approve or disapprove actions, people has no choice, they’ve to follow a path and Loki’s path was to do what he did so that others could become better. The TVA doesn’t really seems to care of the moral axis of Loki’s alignment… or their own or everyone else, they only care of the ethical alignment.

Now, as I’ve seen fandom discuss this, in roleplays people created character alignments to give an ‘ideal’ for a character to live up.

This caused the birth of two Axis, the moral axis (Good, Neutral, and Evil) and the ethical axis (Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic).

The alignments of the moral axis are pretty easy to figure out, so I’m not even discuss them, but the one of the ethical axis are basically meant to tell if a character follows the law or not.

The TVA is clearly lawful aligned, they blindly follow their rules as if they were a dogma, a faith. Hydra is lawful. Steve Roger is lawful, as he wants to follow rules.

Loki in a good part of the movies doesn’t follow the rules, we saw it from the start, in “Thor” he decided to act to interrupt the coronation, which was against the rules of Asgard, and then he tricked Laufey, which is against the rules of war. In “The Avengers” he let himself be arrested so as to unleash the Hulk. In “Thor: The Dark World” he pretended to join forces with Malekith so that he would remove the Aether from Jane and then stole from Odin the throne… and so on. He’s not the only one though, Thor himself as moments in which he’s chaotic, like when he invades Jotunheim against his father’s order and how later will invade that SHIELD facility, or how he’s challenge his father again in “Thor: The Dark World”.

Actually all the Avengers here and there had been chaotic… and here and there had been lawful.

Loki’s situation places him more on the chaotic axis because he has no other master but himself. In short he doesn’t respect anyone else’s rules, sometimes not even his own as he claims Frigga isn’t his mother when he clearly feels she is and fights to avenge her… but he too had his own moments of being lawful.

That’s because people aren’t roleplay characters and they wouldn’t feel realistic if they were just sitting on one alignment.

But whatever, let’s go on.

Loki picks up the Tesseract, and Mobius asks him if he tried to use it.

“Oh, several times. Even an Infinity Stone is useless here. ( Scoffs ) The TVA is formidable.”

And here we’ve Loki trying on ‘wooing someone powerful he intend to betray’, to put it with Mobius’ words. I wonder if Mobius can realize it or he’s so sure in his idea he’s powerful he misses it.

Either way he has gotten what he wanted, Loki acting this way means he has acknowledged they’re powerful enough he has to play along with them.

Mobius tell him:

“I can't offer you salvation, but maybe I can offer you something better.”

And here I feel an echo of Thor in “Thor: The Dark World”:

“I did not come here to share our grief. Instead I offer you the chance of a far richer sacrament.”

I wonder if Mobius is trying to play that same game to get Loki to cooperate. Loki though has seen the video. Maybe he knows too. And well, at least Mobius came out more honest because he told him he can’t offer him salvation. Remember when he babbled about what Loki could do if he were to go back to his timeline? It was all a pourparler, words that weren’t meant to turn true as Loki is not meant to go back to his timeline. Ever.

That timeline doesn’t exist anymore it was reset.

But at this point Mobius has to be honest and give Loki something back, the reason why they’re interested in him… which is the dangerous Variant they’re hunting is HIM, or better another Variant of himself.

Meanwhile in Salina Oklahoma, 1858 Hunter U-92 and his men are checking on something. They find an object from the early third millennium but discover there’s oil on the ground and think it’s just someone who found himself a time machine and came back here to get rich. Hunter U-92 thinks he’s not worth the paperwork of searching for him and that they should just prune the timeline. Then they notice a figure in a black cape.

The figure has a oil lamp which they drop on the petrol covered ground. The fire spread to the Minuteman who start to die by arson. Hunter U-92 tries to crawl to the reset charge but someone grabs him and pulls him back. Then a hand, clearly not his own, picks up the resect charge.

And either this is the story sharing with us the 7th attack or the other Loki’s Variant has just managed to make the 8th attack in the last week that they know of. Really, I would say for the TVA it’s better to hope it’s not Monday.

As for me, I’m sorry for them but I hope it’s Monday there.

I’ve no sympathy for bureaucratic regimes who views people who don’t complain with their wishes as things… pardon, as Variant, and implement on them the “Final Solution” under the guise of pruning or resetting them.

This doesn’t mean everyone at the TVA is necessarily evil… but they’re dangerous, they’re fanatic who live in a regime that elect them at judges of other people’s lives. Judge Ravonna Renslayer dictates the proper flow of time according to the Time-Keepers dictations without bothering to question them, or the justice of it. At the TVA no one asks himself if it’s right or wrong, they just do it, they don’t know any other way to do it.

It’s not that they want to be evil, they actually want to be noble and just, they believe in the propaganda that’s all spread on the creepy posters around them and think they’re incredible, courageous and dedicated workers and don’t question their work or their lives at all.

They’re just many little Adolf Eichmann mostly bereft of initiative, cultural and moral depth; the latter did not go beyond the conditioning that had been given to them by society.

They lack empathy for what they destroy, for what they prune or reset and so they won’t stop thinking at what they’re doing.

Long story short, we should be grateful the TVA doesn’t exist because, really, that’s a creepy organization that pulls out the worst from people empowering them to murder others and telling them they’re doing something good.

Mobius, Casey, Hunter B-15 are brainwashed by the TVA worldview. It’ll be interesting to see if prolonged interaction with a Variant, Loki, might open his eyes or not. For now they’re like children who can’t distinguish good from bad because they buy a wrong narrative in which they’re above it.

I’m curious to see if they will ultimately eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of the good and the evil or if they’ll remain ignorant and dedicate executors of the TVA. We’ll see.

Well, this was long. Thank you to all the people who remained through this long, long episode study of mine. I can’t wait to see the next Loki episode!

[justinewt]

Getting into it - MARVEL Rewrite Chapter Two

[MARVEL REWRITE-MASTERLIST] - [THE INFINITY SAGA]

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Summary: There was no turning back now. Steve and Frainn had been enlisted and sent to a military camp for training under the supervision of the Agent Carter. Colonel Phillips and Dr. Erskine were watching the whole process to determine which soldier would be the one to become the very first super soldier. Obviously, Dr. Erskine already knew perfectly who would become this super soldier... but he wouldn’t be left alone. Frainn, who didn’t really need any serum to be a super soldier was Steve’s teammate and they wouldn’t be teared apart to fight this war. It was the two of them or nothing, and if it Colonel Phillips didn’t get that, someone else would, and someone else did.

Words: 6.4k

Warnings: spoilers captain America 1, violence, action scenes, killing/murder, car chase, Frainn being awesome and cool lol, hint of jealousy, clues as to what earned Frainn a banishment (read closely eheh),Steve having a closer relationship with his buddy Frainn than with Peggy (I like the character but yaaa know, anyway), lots of dialogue   

All the recruits were lined up, in uniforms, helmets on their heads, and waiting. It hadn’t even been three days since they arrived at the military training camp. A female voice reached their ears. Frainn didn't expect to see another woman here, until then she had only seen men and had already almost gotten herself into fights several times trying to defend Steve from the idiots who kept picking on him by mocking, but Steve had told her he didn't want her to get into trouble for him, and she had taken it upon herself, content to verbally reframe those who dared to laugh at him. Because of that, most of the other recruits were kind of afraid of her. She had made them understand multiple times that she could break every single bones in their body if she wanted to do so. She enjoyed being feared by them. They were all complete assholes. In the end, it seemed like the bullies got bullied.

"Recruits, attention !" said the woman. Everyone obeyed and stiffened as she approached. "Gentlemen, miss," She glanced at Frainn while walking in front of them. "I am Agent Carter. I supervize all operations for this division."

"What’s with the accent, Queen Victoria ?" one of the recruits said insolently. Frainn arched an eyebrow at him. She had understood that she had a distressing lack of knowledge regarding the history and geography of Midgard and therefore hadn’t quite understood why he called her that because of her accent. She had no idea who this Queen Victoria was. Agent Carter stopped  and eyed him. "I thought I was signing up for the U.S. Army." He added.

"What’s your name, soldier ?" she asked, stopping in front of him.

 "Gilmore Hodge, Your Majesty."

"Step forward, Hodge." He obeyed, looking at his friends as if he had just gained the upper hand, and walked towards her. "Put your right foot forward."

 "Mmm… We gonna wrassle ?" A man who accompanied the young woman distributed papers to us. "Cause I’ve got a few moves I know you’ll like." Immediately she gave him a violent punch that sent him right to the ground. Frainn tilted her head slightly and glanced at Steve, pursuing her lips to suppress an amused smile. She knew that if she had punched like that, Hodge wouldn't just be stunned, his jaw would be cracked and dislocated. But this chick, despite being Midgardian, earned some of Frainn’s respect. She had a strong character herself and liked women like her. A male voice rose behind her.

 "Agent Carter !"

"Colonel Phillips." she greeted, turning to the man who was approaching them.

"I can see that you are breaking in the candidates. That’s good !" He stood next to her and looked at the soldier still on the ground. "Get your ass up out of that dirt and stand in the line at attention ‘till somebody comes tell you what to do."

"Yes, sir !" Hodge answered, raising his head, swallowing his unwelcomed pride. There was a second of silence before the colonel began to walk back and forth in front of them.

"General Patton has said that wars are fought with weapons, but they are won by men. We are going to win this war because we have the best men." He looked at the recruits and fixed his gaze on Steve and Frainn. “A stick man and a girl who can’t keep her punches for herself” he must have thought. Well, even if he thought something like that, Frainn must admit, they were one hell of a chaotic duo. Frainn saw his face turning slightly to Carter, and she recognized Doctor Erskine, standing just behind the young woman, answering the colonel's gaze. "And because they are going to get better." He continued. This little additional remark was implicitly addressed to Steve more than Frainn, and he perfectly understood that it was aimed at him. "Much better. The Strategic Scientific Reserve and Allied effort made up of the best minds in the world. Our goal is to create the best army in history. But every army starts with one man. At the end of this week, we will choose that man. He will be the first in a new breed of super-soldier. And they will personally escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of hell."

The training gave none of the recruits any respite and seemed tiring for most but not for Frainn. By the end of each busy and gruelling day, she was still in great shape and was unaffected by the strain. She surprised her superiors with her physical abilities superior to those of any other recruit among the division, and she felt that she was earning the respect of the officers and the colonel, but also the jealousy and contempt of her peers who didn’t understand how she was doing so well. She never seemed tired. She was the best in the division, the most efficient, both physically and intellectually, and the strongest of course. Even Colonel Phillips, who had had doubts about admitting a woman, was more than satisfied with her and already considered her a "super-soldier". For him, it was obvious that the selected recruit would likely be her. Frainn often heard the Colonel talk about it but she also knew that the German doctor wanted Steve to be choosen. Precisely because she was already too much of a "super-soldier".

And she got the confirmation, the day before the end of the program. After a day of training, the recruits of her division -including her, of course- were working out on the field for half an hour already, when she overheard a conversation between the Colonel and the doctor, watching them. It had been a few minutes since it showed on her face that she was bored, and concentrating on their exchange was entertaining to her.

 "You stick a needle in that kid’s arm, it’s gonna go right through him." Frainn glanced discreetly at Steve. "Look at that. He’s making me cry."

"I’m looking for qualities beyong the physical." Dr. Erskine thoughtfuly explained.

"Do you know how long it took to set up this project ?" He sounded rather annoyed. "All the groveling I had to do in front of Senator What’s-His-Name’s committees ?" He was talking about things and people Frainn didn't understand, and she let herself be distracted slightly from the exercise Carter had given. She picked up their conversation for a second, challenged by the voice of the Englishwoman.

"I know this is more than easy for you, but please focus." It didn’t sound like a reproach. Carter had esteem for Frainn, that the goddess had noticed, but she couldn't show any favoritism in front of the others recruits by saying nothing to her when her lack of concentration was noticeable by anyone who looked at her.

"Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am." She said mechanically, catching up on the conversation where the doctor and colonel were, more discreetly this time.

"... Hodge passed every test we gave. He’s big, he’s fast. He obeys orders. He’s a soldier." The Colonel said, looking at Hodge.

 "He is a bully." replied the doctor immediately. The Colonel chuckled, crossing his arms.

"You don’t win wars with niceness, Doctor." Frainn felt his gaze fall on her. "Even Lockhart-"

"Lokadottir." The doctor corrected him as he also looked at her.

 "Yes, Lokadottir." The Colonel nodded and resumed what he was saying. "For a woman, she’s tall, she’s strong, she’s efficient and she was the best in all our tests. Better than Hodge. The only flaws I found in her are her flippancy and impulsiveness. She agrees to team up with Rogers but otherwise, she prefers to go it alone or she might start a fight with someone." He looked at the doctor, waiting for a reaction, for an answer from him. It was obvious he wanted to know why he didn't want her either. He had shown him his two best recruits and still didn't understand why he stubbornly wanted Steve.

"She doesn’t start fights because she likes it, Colonel. Her and Rogers have common qualities. They both have heart, empathy and strong-minds, but she's already a super-soldier. She doesn't need to be enhanced in any areas." He shifted his gaze from Steve to Frainn. "And, her free-spirit is one of her main quality, Colonel."

"Again, we don’t win wars with niceness. Neither do we win wars with soldiers who don't follow orders, Doc'." Frainn followed the Colonel with her eyes as he grabbed something from one of the crates of military equipment in the back of a truck trailer. He pulled out a small oval object and casually pulled out something from it, leaning towards the doctor. "You win wars, with guts." He threw the object into the midst of the recruits.

"Grenade!" He yelled to get everyone triggered.

"Move ! Move !" exclaimed Hodge, catching the attention of all the other recruits, who hurried away in opposite directions. For a second, Frainn didn't know what to do because she had no idea what a grenade was but when she saw Steve throwing himself and curling up around the grenade to contain the explosion, she took a few steps towards him. She realized that Agent Carter had had the same reaction and they glanced at each other.

"Get away ! Get back !" said Steve, wincing, eyes closed.

"It’s a dummy grenade." declared an officer nearby. Steve straightened up and looked around, not really understanding what was going on.

"Is this a test ?" He asked. Frainn looked at Steve and then turned to the Colonel, to see his reaction.

"He’s still skinny." Declared the Colonel as he left. The goddess approached Steve and held out her hand to help him stand up. He turned his head to her and grabbed her wrist as she grabbed his. She pulled him up, and he was briefly unsettled by the force of her grip, though he kind of expected it. For his part, the doctor was smiling. Steve's reaction had proven his point to the Colonel and confirmed that his final choice was more than relevant.

Towards the end of the day, Frainn headed back to the dorms because she knew she would find Steve there. When she reached the door, which was already open, ajar, she heard the doctor's voice coming from inside. She stopped as she was about to walk into the room and stood behind the door, wondering what he was talking about with Steve.

"Can I ask you a question ?"

"Just one ?"

"Why me ?" There was a silence and Frainn ventured to glance around the room. The Doctor was sitting on the bed in front of Steve –Frainn’s bed–, holding a bottle in his hand.

"I suppose that is the only question that matters." He observed the bottle and showed it to Steve. "This is from Augsburg. My city. So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own. You know, after the last war, my people struggled." Frainn listened intently to Erskine's words. It was the first time that she had realized the liabilities of the Midgardians. Even though they were part of the nine realms, they were far removed from the rest and fought among themselves, like the fights and tension between Asgard and Jotunheim for example, but them, on the same planet, in the same place. Frainn would have thought they were one united people, like on Asgard, but they were a many divided people on one single planet.

She continued to wait until their conversation was over, listening to what the doctor was saying. All the information imprinted in her mind as Erskine spoke, until he came to the conclusion of his explanation.

"Good becomes great. Bad becomes worse." The doctor looked at Steve in the eyes. "This is why you were chosen. Because a strong man who has known power all his life may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the value of strenght. And knows compassion."

"Thanks. I think." Steve answered. Frainn heard glass clashing and liquid being poured, and realized that the two men were now emptying the bottle the doctor was holding in his hand.

"Whatever happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing." She heard the sound of the bottle cork being reinserted into its neck. "That you will stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man."

"To the little guys." Cheered Steve. The men chuckled and glasses clashed.

"No, no. Wait, wait. What am I doing ? No, you have procedure tomorrow. No fluids."

"All right. We’ll drink it after."

"No, I don’t have procedure tomorrow, nor your friend. Drink it after ? We’ll drink it now." Frainn frowned, and she could feel Steve doing the same.

"What about my friend?"

"Come on in, and join us, Miss Lokadottir. Don’t stay behind that door." Without moving, Frainn pushed the door open with her fingertips to open it wide before entering the room under the surprised gaze of Steve, who shifted to make room for her on his bed next to him. Erskine didn't dwell on the subject and handed her the glass he had originally served for Steve.

"You will join us tomorrow." The doctor told her.

"I can come ?" She asked, taking a sip of her drink.

"If I say so, you can accompany your friend." The doctor nodded.

"It's a blessing that I actually met you," Frainn looked at Steve. "I went to an exhibition, I joined the military, sort of, and I'm going to attend, uh, not sure what I'm going to attend, but I guess it's cool." Both men smiled at her optimism. Frainn emptied her glass very quickly and put it back on the metal shelf at the edge of Steve's bed, not planning on asking for another drink.

"You are someone special, Frainn. Very peculiar." It was the first time the scientist called her by her first name. She smiled. The doctor wasn’t aware of how right he was about it.

"You don’t worry about Steve, doctor. I’m his guardian angel." She joked. The doctor smiled again, and Frainn friendly nudged Steve. Even though she had met the young man not so long ago, it felt like they were friends since birth. Her banishment had taken away everything she had, and with good reason since Odin had to punish her for what she had done, and she had found in Steve, an ideal partner, and friend. She had found her ally and she understood by observing Steve a little that he wasn’t leaving anyone behind, especially not his friends.

Sitting in the backseat of the car with Steve, Frainn watched the passing buildings out the window. Peggy was there too. She was seated in the front passenger seat, next to the driver.

"I know this neighborhood." Steve pointed to a street they were passing by. "I got beat up in that alley. And in that parking lot. And behind that diner."

“Did you have something against running away ?" Peggy asked, looking at Steve via the interior mirror of the car.

"If you start running, they’ll never let you stop. You stand up, you push back. They can’t say no forever, right ?"

"I know a little of what that’s like, to have every door shut in your face." Frainn quietly listened to the conversation between Steve and Peggy. She didn't understand why the Midgardians discriminated against women so much. There were no such problems on Asgard. Everyone had and knew their place there and everything was fine. Not everyone liked each other obviously, but everyone was respectul of the rights of their peers.

"I guess I just don’t know why you’d want to join the Army if you were a beautiful dame. Or a… A woman. An agent. Not a dame." With her back straight, Peggy twisted in her seat to turn to face Steve and look him in the eyes. He stammered. Frainn leaned against the car door to bring her hand closer to her face to hide the amused smile on her face. "You are beautiful, but..."

"You have no idea how to talk to a woman, do you ?" She glanced at Frainn. "I’m starting to wonder how a conversation between you two is like."

"I think this is the longest conversation I’ve had with one. Frainn and I talk like mates." Frainn chuckled and gave him a light hit on the shoulder. Peggy gave them a look, suppressing a smile.

"I'm not saying you're masculine, or a man..." Steve continued, not knowing she didn’t really care if he was considering her a man anyway. "Anyway, women aren’t exactly lining up to dance or talk with a guy they might step on. Frainn is an exeption. That’s what I’m trying to say."

"You must have danced then." Peggy added.

"Well, asking a woman to dance always seemed so terrifying. And the past few years, it just didn’t seem to matter that much. I figured I’d wait."

"For what ?"

"The right partner." He nodded, more to convince himself. Peggy smiled and sat back normally in her seat. Just a minute later, the car pulled up, and they got out.

"This way." Peggy motioned for them to follow her. She walked to the front of an antique shop in which old objects were displayed.

"What are we doing here ?" Steve asked.

"Follow me." Steve gave Frainn a curious look, which she sent back to him as Peggy entered the store before them. The two friends immediately followed her, intrigued. A bell ringed when the agent opened the door for the three of them. She walked further into the room without saying anything, while Steve closed the door. The room wasn’t very bright, filled with wooden shelves and various items, and the only sources of light were yellowish lamps on the ceiling. An old lady stepped out from behind curtains in a door frame and spoke to Peggy.

"Wonderful weather this morning, isn’t it ?"

"Yes, but I always carry an umbrella." The old woman went behind a counter and put her hand on the ledge, sliding her fingers under the board. Peggy walked over to the curtains behind which the woman had came out from and Frainn and Steve followed her. They arrived in a small room, one wall of which was covered with a crammed bookcase. Something unlocked and the shelves in the center of the bookcase opened on either side to create an entrance, revealing armored doors.

There was a whole facility hidden in there. Frainn and Steve looked around curiously and followed Peggy down the long, cold hallway with black and white walls. There were a few soldiers in white helmets standing guard. When they finally reached the double metal door at the end of the hallway, two of these soldiers in helmets opened the door synchronously. They overlooked a large room filled with electronics that went beyond Frainn and Steve understanding, but Peggy, even though Frainn doubted she understood everything there, didn't seem more impressed than that. Frainn and Steve walked over to the railing and the scientists present down there stopped talking. Everyone looked up at the new arrivals. Peggy gave Steve and Frainn a look and walked down the stairs to their right. Frainn understood, without the agent having to say anything, that she had to remain silent and behind. It was not about her today. It was all about Steve, and they didn't need to waste time with anything else.

Frainn, Peggy and Steve joined doctor Erskine who was there among the scientists. He turned to the three of them, a slight smile on his face as he looked at Steve. Frainn and the agent stayed behind the soldier. He and the doctor shook hands, exchanging a couple words before a sudden bright flash interrupted them. Frainn narrowed her eyes, momentarily blinded by the powerful light, and stared at the strange square machine in the hands of the man standing next to them. Whatever he did, it didn't seem to please the doctor at all. Doctor Erskine shook his head, sighing and dismissed the man. The latter left without saying anything. The goddess frowned, not understanding what had just happened. She shrugged and turned her head to Steve and the doctor.

“Are you ready ?” Steve nodded at the doctor, looking at the long metallic machine to his right. It was long and large enough to make someone lie down inside of it, and Frainn assumed it was for Steve, though she didn't quite understand why they were going to use it. “Good. Take off your shirt, your tie, and your hat.” Steve glanced at the two women behind him while slowly doing so. Peggy looked down and Frainn imitated her. Once he was done, he gave his stuff to someone who put it all away as he took place on the machine. Everyone started to get ready and Erskine turned to Peggy and Frainn.

“Agent Carter. Lokadottir. Don’t you think you would be more comfortable in the booth ?”

“Oh, yes,” Peggy looked embarrassed to have been standing there and motioned for Frainn to follow her as she left. “Sorry.” Frainn followed her immediately, frowning slightly in incomprehension. She glanced at Steve who was watching them walk away, and walked up the stairs to follow Carter into the cabin where other people were already gathered. From up there, they could see down the whole room through a large window. A weird crackle spread in the booth and the room full of scientists below, and Frainn looked around, not understanding where the sound was coming from. The voice of Doctor Erskine then rose, replacing the crackle. He could be heard from any where around them.

“Do you hear me ? Is this on ?” He looked at the grey device in his hand, which looked like the one the guy on the stage back at the exhibition had, and started talking. “Ladies and gentlemen, today we take not another step towards annihilation, but the first step on the path to peace. We will begin with a series of microinjections into the subject’s major muscle groups. The serum infusion will cause immediate cellular change. And then, to stimulate growth, the subject will be saturated with Vita-Rays.” He stopped talking and approached Steve, settled down in the machine. Their mouths moved but no sound was heard from where Frainn and Peggy were, in the booth. The doctor’s voice was for a short moment, no longer displayed all over the place, then his voice came back as he was counting down before the injections started. The vials on the sides of the machine emptied and the latter raised vertically, and closed itself. Steve was like in some kind of big hull. Frainn didn’t really know what was happening, even though Erskine had explained earlier, actually, she didn’t have even understand what he had explained so right now, she was lost but tried to keep up with whatever was happening to her friend down there.

“That’s 10%.” Stated another male’s voice, who would activate and turn stuff on a control panel. Frainn narrowed her eyes and recognized the man from the exhibition. She internally sighed at the fact she hadn’t even seen him when she was down there as he seemed to have been there the whole time. She just never paid attention to anyone else but the doctor, Peggy and Steve. 10 percent quickly became 20, 30, 40… Howard Stark was stating the percentages everytime he increased it. And as he increased it, a radiant light began to emanate from the iron shell inside which Steve was. 50 percent, 60, 70… finally, Steve started screaming loudly. Erskine rushed over to the metal shell and Peggy stood up and left the booth, Frainn followed her with her eyes before eventually following her out. The agent stepped out onto the stairwell that led to the room where the scientists were.

“Shut it down !” She yelled but no one listened to her at first. “Shut it down!”

“Kill the reactor, Mr. Stark !” Erskine had finally heard her and turned to the man near the control panel. “Turn it off! Kill it! Kill the reactor!”

“No !” Steve grunted. “Don’t! I can do this !” And then, Stark increased again the percentage of rays Steve was taking. 80 percent, 90, and he finally reached the maximum, 100 percent. A loud electric humming noise filled the room and Frainn winced. It was a quite disagreeable noise. The lights jumped in small bursts of sparks, one by one across the room and the machine powered down. The radiation emanating from it stopped as well. No one dared to make a move. Peggy and Frainn were looking at whatever was happening now, very closely.

“Mr. Stark ?” Erskine turned to the latter and he re-opened the machine. Frainn’s eyes widened when she saw the man inside. Steve was no longer the small skinny man she had met in that back alley, he was now a tall, muscular man, and he was sweating from what he had put himself through. A wide and proud smile grew across the goddess’ face. She felt proud of what her friend had achieved. Erskine approached the machine and helped Steve to get down. He looked exhausted. Stark came to their aid and together with Erskine, the two men supported Steve and kept him from falling.

“I did it.” Steve was out of breath. He couldn’t believe he made it.

“I think we did it.” Corrected Doctor Erskine with tight-lipped smile.

“You actually did it.” Even Stark seemed like he didn’t believe it. Peggy ran down the stairs and came to stand in front of Steve. Frainn crossed her arms, with that sincerely proud smile plastered on her face. She stayed back slightly and watched them. Peggy let her eyes wandered, not knowing where to put them.

“How do you feel ?” Steve looked around, catching his breath.

“Taller.” Frainn chuckled as she approached to stand closer to Peggy and him.

“Barely taller than me though, tough guy.” She teased. Steve looked at her and despite his breathing being difficult and jerky, he smirked in amusement at her remark.

“You look taller.” Peggy handed him some clothes that a nurse had given her. She seemed a little confused in front of this mountain of muscles and didn't know how to act. Seeing this, Frainn mentally praised the platonic male-female relationship she had with Rogers. As Frainn kept teasing Steve to relax him after the procedure he went through, the booth everyone had descended from suddenly exploded. Everyone exclaimed in surprise as they leaned down and turned their backs to the booth to avoid the shattering glass which fell on them into thousands of scattered pieces.

“Stop him !” Erskine pointed a man who took a vial of the serum. He had to be the one who had set the explosion on. Frainn stood near the doctor and the man tried to shoot her and since her skin was bulletproof, she didn’t even flinched, but it wasn’t the same for the German scientist, who received a couple of bullets into his chest. Frainn gasped and caught him as he fell onto the floor. Steve rushed over to them and kneeled near the doctor. He couldn’t talk and simply pressed several times his index fingers against Steve’s chest and a second later, he closed his eyes, dead. Steve looked up and Frainn and him crossed gazes. They both got up and ran up the stairs and outside the facility and the antique shop. Peggy was already onto the road, shooting at a yellow car driving right towards her. Steve took Peggy in his arms and pushed her away, falling onto the tar as Frainn followed close by.

“I had him !” Sure thing, agent. You were more close to get run over by that car than anything else, but sure.

“Sorry !” Steve got up and ran as fast as possible to catch up with Frainn, already sprinting behind the car.

Growling and annoyed at having to run after a stupid car, she eventually jumped onto it and punched a hole in the roof of the car with her left hand, to avoid falling from it. She managed to hang on, but the man driving tried to shoot her several times, causing the car to make dangerous zigzags on the road. Steve called Frainn out when he heard the gunshots and she briefly turned her head at him, too busy trying to stop the man to smile at him to reassure him. An expression of incomprehension mixed with surprise took place on his face when he realized that she had taken absolutely none of the bullets the man had fired at her. He looked down as he continued to run at full speed and noticed some metal balls rolling down the tar. She punched another hole in the roof of the car with her free hand and grabbed the man by his hair, lifting him from his seat to against the roof. He kept trying to shoot her while driving the car more and more hazardously. She turned her head when she saw Steve join her on the roof to help her. The man turned the car sharply and Steve, who was not as well hooked to the vehicle as Frainn slid to the side and caught up with the door so as not to fall any lower.

Frainn let go of the man's hair to cling tighter onto the roof when the man tried to shoot Steve and looked out of the road, bumping into a truck. She suddenly let go of all her holds and fall heavily as the car rolled over several times on the road. Steve helped her up and grabbed a door of the car that had come loose and used it as a shield when the man tried to shoot them again. People nearby screamed. The man was now holding a little ginger boy in his arms, aiming his gun at Steve and Frainn. She hesitated to use any of her powers. She didn’t want to risk the boy’s life. The two soldiers followed the man over to the docks. The latter suddenly aimed his gun at the boy’s head.

“Wait, don’t! Don’t!” Steve raised his hand in front of him, in defense, to prevent the man from shooting the boy. The latter then tried to shoot at Steve or Frainn, neither of them could really tell, but his gun clicked, meaning there was no bullet left inside. “No! Don’t!” The man threw the boy into the water, to get rid of him, before running away. Steve and Frainn rushed over the edge to see if the boy was alright.

“Go get him ! I can swim.” Frainn then nudged Steve to run into the direction the man had taken. She followed him with her eyes before looking back down at the boy, still swimming. The goddess jumped into the water and motioned for the little boy to hold onto her. She grabbed a chain hanging down the wall and pulled herself up. She wrapped the chain around her arm so that her hands would be free, and she took the boy by the waist and helped him up, before getting back onto the docks in her turn. She smiled back at him before she ran in the direction she had indicated to Steve a moment before. She found him standing still. She came close to him and put a hand on his shoulder to stop herself in her run without slipping. He stood there, as drenched as she was, facing the man who was now lying on the ground, inert, a white foam filling his mouth, making his face looks all puffy. Looking around her, she noticed some people, gathered a few feet away from them, looking at what was happening. Steve looked down at his muscular arms. He still needed a little time to fully get used to his new enhanced body. Frainn squeezed Steve's shoulder. The super soldier turned his head towards her, his gaze confused by what had happened.

“Think you got enough ?” Sitting on a chair in the nursery, he rolled down his sleeve when the nurse finally got the needle out of his arm. Frainn was there, leaning against a furniture, arms crossed on her chest. After the two of them had taken a dip back at the docks, they had been given dry clothes.

“Any hope of reproducing the program is locked in your genetic code.” Peggy was leaning against the same furniture as Frainn, to her left. Steve stood up and approached them, slightly frowning. “But without Dr. Erskine, it would take years.”

“He deserved more than this.” Steve stared straight ahead of him.

“If it could work only once, he’d be proud it was you.” Peggy added, glancing at the file in her hand. It was obvious to Frainn that Steve doubted he was the right choide for all this. She could feel it. Peggy got out of the nursery, motioning for them to follow her out.

“How did you do that ?”

“What ?” Frainn was caught off guard by Steve’s question.

“I don’t know. Everything. How did you run so fast ? How did you jump onto the car ? How did you avoid all those bullets?” She suddenly pulled his wrist, making him slow down his steps so that the two of them would walk a little further behind Peggy but they ended up stopping instead. She locked her cold blue eyes into his own.

“Stop talking so loud.”

“Why ?” He frowned. “Frainn. What are you not telling me ?” She opened her mouth to answer to him but Peggy’s voice cut her off.

“You’ll talk later. Come on.” She noticed Frainn holding Steve’s wrist in her hand but didn’t say anything. Frainn couldn’t tell what was that strange glimpse that went through Peggy’s eyes but the agent started walking away again. Frainn glanced at Steve, letting go off of his wrist and following Peggy fast enough to catch up with her. The agent brought them into some sort of garage where they found Colonel Philips, Stark and a few other men, probably other high ranked soldiers or some shit like that. Frainn hadn’t been paying as much attention as she should have but in any case, Peggy did the talking apparently. “Hydra is the Nazi deep-science division. It’s led by Johann Schmidt. But he has much bigger ambitions.”

“Hydra is practically a cult.” What Colonel Philips added got Frainn’s curiosity and she started to actually listen to what all of them were talking about. “They worship Schmidt. They think he’s invincible.”

“So, what are you gonna do about it ?”

“I spoke to the President this morning.” He and the man he was talking to walked over Carter, Frainn and Steve. “As of today, the SSR is being retasked. We are taking the fight to Hydra. Pack your bags, Agent Carter. You, too, Stark. We’re flying to London tonight.”

“Sir ?” Steve spoke up. “If you’re going after Schmidt, I want in. We want in.” The fact that he included Frainn without having to even look at her or speak to her confirmed to everyone including Frainn herself, that they had become a real duo. Real partners, despite the fact that he began to wonder about his new friend. It was the both or them or nothing.

“You’re an experiment. You’re going to Alamogordo. However, I want to take my soldier with me to London.” He pointed at Frainn with his chin. So it was going to be nothing Colonel.

“The serum worked.” Steve sounded disappointed.

“I asked for an army and all I got was you. You are not enough.” He shook his head, groaning lightly. “Lockart, uh, Lokadottir… whatever. You stay with Rogers. I need soldiers who follow the orders, in order to win this war.” She nodded. She liked it better. She didn’t want to fight a war that wasn’t even hers to fight, if she had to team up with people other than Steve. He was already about to find out the truth about her and she would tell him, at some point, but she couldn’t risk everyone else to find out. She didnt want to be locked up by them or worse, being experimented on. Of course, even if they tried, it wouldn’t happen, because she was stronger and powerful even without her godly powers but, she didn’t want to cause another slaughter. The man that had taken his hat off stopped in front of Frainn and Steve and both of them raised their eyes at him when he talked to them.

“With all due respect to the Colonel, I think we may be missing the point. I’ve seen you in action, Steve, and Frainn as well. More importantly, the country’s seen it. Paper.” He motioned his hand to another man to his right. The latter brought them one of those newspaper like the one Frainn had seen before she went to the exhibition with Steve and Bucky. “The enlistment lines have been around the block since your picture hit the newsstands.” Frainn looked at the page the other man was showing to them. There was indeed a picture of Steve and Frainn, when he had picked up the door of the car and used it as a shield to protect both of them. “You don’t take two soldiers, symbols like that, and hide them away, keeping one of them in a lab.” He took the two friends by their soulders. “Do you want to serve your country on the most important battlefield of the war ?”

“Sir, that’s all we want.” Frainn nodded at Steve’s words. She was being patriotic only by imitating Steve so that she would be able to fit in more in this world. She had said before that she was Steve’s guardian angel, but they were each a little the guardian angel of the other. The bond that had been created and continued to strengthen implicitly between them remained inexplicable, even to Frainn.

“Then, congratulations. You just got promoted.” He shook hands with Steve and then Frainn, shivering at her touch even though she had tried to make their handshake as quick as possible. The Colonel had choosen nothing, none of them, but this man chose both. It was the best decision because it was really either both of them or none of them. You don’t split a team that works well together.

[To be continued...]

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

Published (05/12/2021) by Andrea

Tag: @cathrin2405 <3

[bellakitse]

Completely, and without hesitation

Owen and Carlos talk while they wait for TK to wake up. Owen realizes TK has found the love he's always wanted for him.

Spoilers for episode 8 

(I have no self-control, okay? and a lot of feelings)

Owen Strand leans against the door to his son’s hospital room, watching as the tired cop half-sleeps in an uncomfortable chair next to TK’s bed. It’s a familiar sight he’s gotten used to in the last five days since TK got shot. Every evening since that horrible night, Owen has come into his son’s room to find Carlos still in his uniform, coming off a 12-hour shift to sit next to his son.

The young man likes to hold TK’s hand and run his fingers through his hair as he asks him to just open his eyes already.

‘I think you’re taking this whole beauty sleep thing a little too seriously, Tyler. You’re already pretty enough. What are you trying to do? Blind me?’

Owen was surprised the first time he heard the good officer use his son’s given name so casually. The fact is, even Owen doesn’t use his son’s first name, opting for TK instead of dealing with the face his kid always makes when someone calls him Tyler, or worse, Tyler Kennedy.

Carlos chuckled, his voice sounding rough when Owen pointed it out to him.

‘Yeah, he gets all pissy when I say it, but then he usually smiles so I don’t think he minds all that much. I only use it when he’s getting too big for his britches, cause no offense Captain, but your son is a real brat when he wants to be.’

Owen smiled his first smile in days at the comment, nodding in agreement, before pointing out that it seemed like Carlos liked TK anyway. Carlos blushed, his eyes straying back to TK, his expression so impossibly soft it made Owen feel like he was intruding.

‘Yeah, I do.’

He doesn’t tell Carlos that the question was rhetorical.

TK has been pretty tight-lipped about what’s going on between him and the officer, but he’s spotted Carlos picking TK up after a shift more than once, a bounce in his step and a smile on his kid’s face as he gets into the other man’s flashy car. Of course, if that wasn’t enough to let him know that TK and Carlos were something. The way the young man reacted to TK getting shot was enough to settle any doubt.

The evening of the accident is a chaotic mess in his head, everything happened in an instant and a lifetime simultaneously. The loud echo of the shot being fired, TK freezing, shock, and pain etched in his face as he looked at him with wide eyes before falling back. The frenzy of the team moving around him as he fell to his knees beside his boy, watching helplessly as Michelle sprung into action fighting to stabilize TK.

His focus had been on TK and Michelle as she worked, which is why he didn’t miss it when she looked up at someone. It was the first time since the gun went off that he looked away from his son to find who she was silently communicating with. Carlos, a step just behind Marjan, breathing hard, his eyes like saucers and his face drained of color as he stared at his son. He didn’t say it out loud, but Owen still caught the way the cop mouthed TK’s name, as shock and heartbreaking-worry colored his face. The moment sparked a distant light in his head, a moment of Oh, that made everything click into place.

Since then, the kid hasn’t left TK’s side unless he’s forced to go to work, always coming back right after his shifts. He’s always respectful, offering to leave when Owen walks into the room, the reluctantness to do so, visible even as he’s being polite. Owen has waved away the comment enough times in the last five days that the kid is finally getting that he doesn’t need to go anywhere. Owen appreciates the company, and he knows TK will too when he wakes up.

He takes a seat on the other side of TK’s bed, wincing when the scrape of the chair on the floor causes Carlos to rouse from his fitful sleep.

“Captain,” he greets him with a groggy nod, rubbing his eyes with the back of his palm.

“Carlos,” he greets back with a half-smile, the kid is so young, just like his boy. “Sorry I woke you, son.”

Carlos shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it,” he says, a small smile of his own as he looks over at TK’s sleeping form. “Tonight’s the night he wakes up, even if I have to annoy him into doing so. Isn’t that right, Tyler Kennedy?”

Owen can’t help the snort that escapes him. “If anything would do it, it would be calling him that. You might be on to something.”

Carlos grins over at him, pleased.

“But I have to warn you,” Owen cautions, his amusement slipping a bit. “TK can be as stubborn as a mule when he wants to be.”

“Don’t I know it,” Carlos mutters, blushing slightly when he catches the look Owen is giving him.

Owen doesn’t push, he thinks he knows what the comment is about. Even though it’s obvious to him now that something is going on between them besides working in neighboring fields. The fact that TK has been quiet about them makes Owen believe that maybe TK has been keeping the man across from him at arm's length.

“He’s been through a lot,” Owen says softly, unable to keep himself out of it, not when it’s his son’s potential happiness at stake. “Things in New York got heavy for him.”

Carlos gives him a nod, he’s holding on to TK’s hand now, and Owen watches as he runs his thumb over TK’s knuckles. “Yeah,” Carlos clears his throat, shooting Owen a quick look. “He’s told me about it.”

Owen can’t help the amazement he knows is on his face. “All of it?”

Carlos shrugs, making a complicated face. “Probably not all of it, but enough to severely dislike his ex, and understand why he doesn’t drink, or why the pain medication they keep giving him aren’t opioid-based.”

Owen takes in a breath, shock doesn’t even begin to cover what he’s feeling. He reevaluates the situation instantly. He already figured that TK and Carlos were in some relationship of sorts, to know that his son has felt comfortable enough with him to share his struggles, surprises him, but also settles something inside his chest. All this time, Owen’s been worried  TK hasn’t told anyone but his therapist about his battles. Knowing that’s not the case quiets the worry that’s constantly buzzing inside him.

Owen clears his throat when he realizes Carlos is watching him with a worried look like he’s done something wrong. “That’s good,” he reassures him. “I’m glad that he has someone he trusts enough to talk about things. Like I said, it’s been a lot on him the last couple of months.”

Carlos nods at him silently, looking back at TK, his hand reaching up to touch his face. The move is as gentle as when Owen does it, and Owen has to breathe through the tight squeeze in this chest.

“I never liked Alex,” he says quietly, causing Carlos to look back at him with startled eyes. “I was polite for TK’s sake, and it’s not like I thought he was a bad guy or anything, at least before the cheating. I just didn’t think he was good enough for my son.”

Owen looks down at TK. For a moment, he doesn’t see the strong guy who became a firefighter because he wanted to be just like him, all he sees is his little boy.

“He’s my kid, and I’m biased,” Owen tries to laugh, swallowing hard when it comes out stalled. Carlos gives him an encouraging look to continue. “From the moment I saw him, this tiny little thing wrapped in a pale blue blanket, I lost my heart to him. Just handed it right over without a second thought. He was just so beautiful,” he sighs, looking at Carlos to find understanding in his eyes. “Do you know what I mean?”

Carlos bites down on his lip, his eyes going back to TK. “Yes, sir, I know exactly what you mean, he –“

Carlos trails off, looking down at the hand he’s holding, giving it a soft squeeze. He lifts eyes to Owen, meeting him head-on, and Owen is blown away by the emotion and love, he sees in Carlos’ gaze. “He just has a way about him, he lights up the room when he walks in, and I can’t look away.”

Owen watches Carlos for a moment, every feeling the kid has, clear to see. “Does he know how you feel about him?”

“I’m trying not to spook him,” he admits. “The first time I came on too strong, he ran so fast he left skid marks on my living room floor. I’m letting him set the pace, letting him call the shots,” Carlos shrugs as he plays with TK’s fingers before interlocking them with his.

“You don’t seem too bothered by that,” Owen points out, getting back a wry smile in return.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Carlos starts with a soft, amused huff. “If I didn’t think TK would put on his running shoes and head for the state line. I would be introducing him to everyone as my boyfriend, and taking him to Sunday dinners with my ma so she can put some meat on his bones while making him blush as she compliments his pretty face,” Carlos grins at him as he lets out a laugh at the comment. “Carlota Reyes is a sucker for green eyes.”

“Like mother, like son?” Owen questions teasingly, amused as the big strong cop blushes.

“Something like that,” he admits with a soft grumble that makes Owen feel fond. “But he’s not ready for that, and that’s okay. He’s healing, and he’s letting me be part of it. I can wait till he’s ready for more,” Carlos’ eyes drift back to TK’s sleeping form. “He’s more than worth the wait.”

Owen believes him, completely and utterly, but it’s his kid, and he has to be sure. “Even if it’s a long time?”

Carlos looks at him again, nothing is wavering about his expression. “Even if it takes forever,” Carlos promises. “I’m not going anywhere unless TK specifically tells me to.”

Owen smiles at him. He opens his mouth to tell him he supports him when TK lets out a small groan, stopping their conversation in its track, making Owen jump from his seat as he hovers over TK.

Carlos does the same but not as close, letting Owen have the moment. They watch as TK makes a face, and a soft, pained noise passes his lips before his eyes start to open. “Dad?”

Owen has to swallow hard to not burst into tears as his eyes sting. “Hey, sweet boy,” he whispers, smiling as TK makes another face, it’s been well over a decade since he’s called him that.

“What happened?” TK gets out, licking at his dry lips.

Owen feels a hand press into his elbow, he looks up to see Carlos holding a cup of water with a straw for him to give TK.

“Thanks,” he says softly to the young man, alerting TK of the other person in the room.

He watches as his son turns his head, the smile on his face when he spots Carlos the sweetest he’s seen on TK in forever.

“Hey you,” TK says softly, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he takes him in. “You look like shit.”

Owen can’t help the laugh that escapes him as Carlos rolls his eyes down at his son, a smile of his own on his face.

“Charming as always, Tyler,” Carlos teases.

“Mean,” TK pouts, though his expression goes soft when Carlos touches his cheek.

“Not as mean as keeping us waiting for five days while you snoozed away in bed,” Carlos shoots back quickly, and Owen watches in amazement at the easy banter they fall into. “While your dad and I got crappy hospital chairs.”

TK’s eyes widen, now more alert as he looks around, evident that everything is coming back to him. “Five days?” he gets out, his eyes bouncing from Owen for confirmation, then back to Carlos, his expression going timid. “And you’ve been here?”

Carlos hesitates, he starts to pull his hand back, but TK holds it in place against his face. They stare at each other, and the emotion between them is so palpable, Owen can feel it.

“Every day,” he says softly, grabbing their attention. “Carlos has been here every day, TK.”

Carlos blushes at the words and under TK’s stare, letting out a sigh when TK gives his hand a squeeze, giving him a nod in return.

TK smiles, closing his eyes as he turns his face and presses a kiss into Carlos’ palm. Owen watches as the small gesture knocks the wind out of Carlos’ sails. The young man sways forward until he presses his forehead against TK’s.

“You’re never allowed to scare me like this again, okay?” Carlos whispers. “Promise.”

TK nods as he brings his hands to cradle Carlos’ face. “I promise,” he whispers as he holds Carlos to him. “I’m sorry.”

Owen watches them as they exchange soft words between them with a happy and warm feeling in his chest, unable to look away from his son and the man who loves him. Because there is no doubt in his mind that Carlos Reyes loves his son. What’s more, he loves him the way Owen has always hoped for his son to be loved.

Completely, and without hesitation.

[heartsywritesthethings]

Kageyama with Plants: The Plants

Okay. So. I do not have all the characters that I want to have plants, assigned to plants, yet. Now, I decided I wanted symbolism for what character's got which plant, but that's not necessarily how Kageyama picks them. So really this has zero plot basis and is wildly unnecessary. I just wanted it. Note: the symbolism listed is not always the entirety of the symbolism, but just the parts that apply. Some parts are well thought out, some are vibes, some are funny.

Spoilers for the manga through the time skip! (Not on match outcomes.)

But here's what I have so far:

Iwaizumi-senpai: rainbow pincushion cactus. Symbolizes protection, warmth, endurance, support. Iwa was a good senpai. Provided support and protection. And created him warmly. Vibes with the endurance and strength of a cactus. Also spiky and pretty.

Oikawa-senpai: venus flytrap. Symbolizes strength, persistence, eccentricities, and new opportunity. Oikawa is an incredibly strong player, a real threat. His persistence is a large part of who he is as a player, but has a tendency to lead into overworking. He's a bit eccentric. He is. Oikawa absolutely looks for new opportunity, he moves across the world to play for another country's team because it is an amazing opportunity for him. Also, when a Venus flytrap fails it tends to sulk for a bit before resetting. Dramatic. But always resets. Ready to try again.

Kindaichi-kun: lucky bamboo. Symbolizes renewal, strength, growth, facing conflicting forces, seeing past fear, peace and chaos bringing about change. Kindaichi and Kageyama have a complex interesting relationship throughout Haikyuu. There's a renewal to their friendship. Change from their fight. Facing conflict. Coming together stronger for it. They both have so much growth that brings them to renewal and peace.

Kunimi-kun: spider plant. Symbolizes mindfulness and renewal of connections. Kunimi is a very mindful player, keeps his stamina in mind and plays the long game. Then of course the renewal.

Daichi-san: weeping fig tree. Symbolizes leadership, unity, prosperity, knowledge, and the link between human and spirit. He's our captain, gotta rep those leadership skills! Unites the team. Helps them prosper! Daichi has been putting in effort from his first year to get the practice and time that his team needed even before he became captain. He led the crows to prosper with their unclipped wings. And having died, he really does connect the human and spirit. Tobe fly.

Suga-senpai: african violet. These symbolize loyalty, protection, admiration, connections. Kageyama absolutely 100% admires Suga. Suga is so loyal to this team that he told the coach to bench him if that's what he thought was best for the team. I love him. Anyway. Connections? Suga connects with his team and his spiker really well and helps teach that to Kageyama. Also, Suga would protect. Chaotically. But still.

Nishinoya-san: scarlet star. This symbolizes protection, success and passion. He's Karasuno's guardian. That just screams protection. Also. He gets the scarlet star cause he's the star. It's mostly green with one little upward spike of red that reminds me of his hair.

Ennoshita-san: baby rubber plant. This is a ficus, same as Daichi's plant. So has a lot of the same symbolism of leadership, unity, understanding. It's just the junior! Ennoshita definitely gets extra points on the understanding front with his understanding of Yamagucchi's feelings and standing in to relay that to Coach.

Hinata Boke: golden pothos. Fun fact, this is my favorite. I have a fake one. ...I think. Symbolizes determination, perseverance, a relentless attitude to chase one's dream. Try to tell me Shoyo doesn't complete embody those qualities. This plant is used to shield negative energies and this sunshine boy does the same. It climbs, which is perfect for how high this shorty can jump. Additionally, when this plant is in a hanging planter, it symbolizes reaching new heights. Pretty solid choice, I think.

Saltyshima: queen's tears. The name alone just makes it hilarious, okay? Also, please know it can be called the Friendship Plant. These two are absolutely friends, but still assholes to each other. This symbolizes respect, success, passion. It can grow alongside others. Also it's rather demanding with it's conditions. I think it nicely represents Tsukki's growth and how he found passion alongside the others. With a little bit of attitude.

Coach Ukai: fiddle leaf fig. Symbolizes understanding, unity, knowledge, leadership. All qualities of coach. A given really. A a bonus this plant has been used to roll cigars. So it fits.

Yacchan: maidenhair fern. This symbolizes hope for future generations, confidence, and fascination. The plant itself is rather delicate and small. Yachi is small and a bit delicate in that she's nervous and easily frightened at first. But she's fascinated by the game and how much everyone on the team works and gains confidence in herself in her place in the team. And as a first year manager? She is the hope for the volleyball team in future years.

Akaashi-san: monstera. Symbolizes respect, honoring elders, and suffocation. (Don't ask me how that ties in with the other two, I don't know.) Kageyama respects Akaashi. For sure. And he's one of his senpai. Also the suffocation bit is funny considering Akaashi helped Kageyama not choke and suffocate at the training camp.

Kuroo-san: kentai palm plant. Symbolizes honor, protection, truth, warmth, aspiration. He's pretty honorable in always helping his volleyball brethren. With defense being Nekoma's biggest strength, protection was a necessity. He is honest, perhaps to a fault. He told Tsukki point blank that he was going to fall behind if he kept dragging his feet. (He's also a sweetheart who wanted to apologize.) He's got aspirations for his own team and his friends' teams. Also this plant has a LOT of deficiencies of different elements that it then needs special soil for so it can get those necessary elements, but just seeing so many elements listed just made me think science. Lemme just break out the periodic table song.

Kenma-san: parlor plant. Symbolizes androgyny, vitality, protection, and means "on the ground." Kenma has vitality, not in the physical sense, but certainly in mental vigor. He's Nekoma's brain! Keeping the protection for Nekoma's defense, of course. With defense being their strength, Nekoma (and Kenma) tend to fight on the ground more than in the air. Also it reminds me of his gravity rant.

Hoshiumi-san: creeping fig. Literally means "good things come in small packages" and "little power house." That's our favorite seagull. Also symbolizes understanding and knowledge. Though he's a bit impulsive and with a quick temper, it's his perceptiveness that always sticks out to me. Being able to recognize that Hinata can likely truly see the whole court in that split second of spiking. Being conscious of how others view him and using it to his advantage. When to go for a hard spike versus a block-out. Also these plants can climb and BOY does he have hops.

Romero-senpai: corsage orchid. This symbolizes admiration and inspiration. Romero is a volleyball player they all watched and admired growing up. It fits. Also originates from South America, which works nicely as Romero's home country is Brazil.

Those still undecided: Kyotani, Asahi, Tanaka, Kinoshita, Narita, Yamaguchi, Takeda, Kiyoko, Ushijima, Tendou, Bokuto, Aone, Chiyaga (plant will be named Broccoli Jr), Atsumu, Sakusa, Komori, and the fan who gives him a plant.

I know he has not interacted with all of these characters, but the point is I want him to and so I will make it happen. I think they'd have fun dynamics.

[popwasabi]

Civilization is coming: “Black Sails” and when rage is justified

(SPOILERS ahead! You’ve been warned...)

There’s a moment late in the first episode of the highly underappreciated series “Black Sails” that hints not only at the troubled past of its lead character Captain Flint but also describes the larger theme of the story.

Flint has gotten himself into trouble. Along with his crewmember Billy “Bones,” in an effort to secure the financing he needs to capture the gold from the Spanish warship known as L’Urca de Lima, his recklessness has gotten Nassau’s governor shot and injured and his plans all but evaporated. Billy feels they are now in too deep and they should not only turn back but perhaps new leadership is needed for Flint’s crew. It is here that Flint reveals a bit where his true ambitions lie.

(Toby Stephens, ladies and gentlemen.)

On the first viewing, Flint ominously declaring the pending arrival of “civilization” to the new world could mean anything from simply the imperialistic tendencies of the British and Spanish empire, to the draconian rulership of the crown or just “taxes” as he makes light mention of in this speech. But as the series progresses, especially in the second season, “civilization” begins to take a darker, more personal meaning.

The story begins to reveal that the dangerous pirates of Nassau are not at least inherently dastardly, although certainly violent, but victims of their various circumstances; a former slave turned prostitute turned keeper of secrets in Max, a neglected daughter becoming the bookkeeper of the pirates with Eleanor Guthrie, another former slave turned ruthless pirate captain in the vicious Charles Vane, and an abused woman turned deadliest pirate on the island Anne Bony, and none more painfully revealing than that of Flint himself.

You see Flint didn’t always go by this name, he used to be a prominent officer in the British navy named James McGraw until he met Thomas Hamilton, a wealthy proprietor tasked with solving the problem of the pirates of Nassau many years prior. Thomas had the radical idea of pardoning the entire island to bring them back into society, to avoid violence and bloodshed, and to better understand the people who would turn to piracy.

As James gets to know him more and his revolutionary philosophies of empathy and enlightenment the two unexpectedly fall in love and thus seal the fates of both their downfalls from “civilized” society.

With England unwilling to see any other way to end the pirates without exterminating all of them and looking to exploit weaknesses in Thomas to Parliament, he is outed and imprisoned. James along with Thomas’s wife Miranda, who lives in a polyamorous relationship between the two, are persona non-grata-ed and the two flee to Nassau to finish what Thomas started in an act of rebellion.

(This is seriously one of the most heart-wrenching, tragic reveals I have ever seen on TV. I totally knew it was coming at the time and I was still not prepared for how it was delivered.)

There are few things as personal as love and “Black Sails” uses this to show how far society can go to villainize people. Flint wasn’t born a monster, and he is not one for loving Thomas; he is a monster because “civilization” wanted him to be one.

As our own civilization enters a timeline that may promise great change, people who have been othered and victimized by society are finding themselves grappling with their pain and grief in the same way as Flint. People have tried peaceful reconciliation and conformity into society to avoid violence throughout history despite the labels they have been given for no other crime than being who they are, but civilization’s need for a monster always brings people down no matter how hard they try to do it the “right way.”

(Tell me if you see a justice system in this picture that looks interested in listening...)

Native Americans tried playing by the white man’s rules when America began moving west. Compromising over and over again and yet they were killed and still killed and neglected today for it.

African Americans tried becoming rich like their white counterparts in places like “Black Wallstreet” in Tulsa, Oklahoma  and were still bombed and massacred for it.

Asian and Latin Americans immigrated here to flee war and death largely caused by white imperialist countries, to survive and work jobs white Americans would not. Both are othered as foreigners, face violence from the state, and are deported everyday.

Poor working-class Americans try fruitlessly to keep their head above water as they become mired in debt, fighting a pandemic on slave wages essentially, all while our government cuts wealthy companies a fat paycheck annually with our own tax dollars. And anyone who fights back finds themselves without an income and health insurance during a recession and a pandemic.

And the LGBTQ+ community ask for the dignity to be left alone and treated normally but not only are they harassed for it but they are beaten, tortured, and killed for being different.

(Remember, Stonewall was a riot.)

Flint, himself, tries one last time, toward the end of season two, to peacefully resolve his vendetta with England and save Nassau from a war with them but instead finds himself facing the gallows anyways by the Charlestown government.

As they read out his charges, many of them real heinous things he did but also many that were fabricated, Flint stops them from proceeding any further and delivers a final act of defiance to the court.

“I have one regret,” he begins to the court of high society folks who are only interested in seeing him punished before the masses. “I regret ever coming to this place with the assumption that a reconciliation could be found. That reason could be a bridge between us. Everyone is a monster to someone. Since you are so convinced that I am yours, I will be it.”

It is at this point in the story that Flint, perhaps like other revolutionaries of the past, recognize that the system doesn’t want to reason with him, that these people aren’t looking to understand or empathize with him or even try for that matter. They wanted a monster, they made one in him, so he decides there that “civilization” as he had noted in the series first episode is not worth reconciling with and certainly not worthy of forgiveness.

And Flint spends the rest of the series in bloody war with them.

(From season 3. Again Toby Stephens, ladies and gentlemen)

“Black Sails” is about queerness, race, social politics, and the way conformity by force is used against it. It’s about the rage that boils underneath many of us as we are wronged over and over again by society, while being exploited to no end, and what happens when someone finally says “enough.”

Anyone who has experienced what it is like to be othered can find something deeply personal with the anger that Flint carries around with him in each scene of this series. We feel his pain of rejection by society, his grief for feeling ashamed of himself when he and the audience know he shouldn’t.

It's what makes the eventual reveal of his relationship with Thomas so cathartic, as we see the rage-filled guard of Flint drop as he reads Thomas’s words left for him in a book they both loved and shared.

(Again, I cannot emphasize enough how much of a gut-punch this reveal was watching this...)

"Know no shame” is so important to growth of this character and the message of this story. Civilization and those who wish to keep the status quo want those who do not fall in line with their authority and judgments to feel shame for who they are. They not only want monsters, they want you to feel like one and the reason Thomas line speaks so much to both Flint and the audience is that it reminds us there is no shame in who we are.

The country we live in is a powder keg right now experiencing the same rage that Flint feels and more specifically how he felt at the end of season 2. Though this country’s racist attitudes and subjugation of the vulnerable hardly started with this presidency it cannot be argued that it has brought all that hatred in our government and the people who support those views painfully to the surface. When people peacefully protest, peacefully assemble, and peacefully try to cast their vote and are still met with resistance, still met with hatred and violence, people have to start to wonder if operating within the system’s rules can actually affect change.

A lot has been made about the way protesters may have violently lashed out over the past three weeks, with media talking heads and privileged elites asking unironically why they couldn’t do things peacefully but more has been done as result of the rising tension than the previous 50 years combined. You can tell people to “#vote” all you want but it doesn’t change the fact that people have been trying that for decades and people are still getting quite literally killed for it.

(Again, I gotta ask, who is this protecting? Who is this serving?)

If there’s one takeaway I hope a viewer gets from “Black Sails” is that revolution, no matter how serious you are about it, should never be off the table when confronting systemic inequality. A racist, sexist, classist, and/or, in the case of Flint, homophobic power structure does not concede their power if you play to their convenience and when people are being put down, beaten, and often killed for showing their anger at this, calling for “law and order” becomes a slap in the face to the victims.

A government or system that treats you unjustly doesn’t deserve peace.

I’ll say it again.

A government or system that treats you unjustly doesn’t deserve peace.

No one wants it to get this far, I definitely don’t, and certainly not every peaceful mean has been exhausted yet in this fight perhaps but this country was literally founded on violent rebellion after being slighted all the same by out of balance power structures. I’m not advocating for violence or to take up arms against the state right now BUT no one should ever rule it out when the social contract keeps being broken and broken and broken again by those in charge who clearly don’t want to listen.

A government should always feel the threat of an uprising if it keeps wronging its people.

(See my blog post about “Do the Right Thing” if you need help understanding this quote.)

As the more fiery weeks of the protests seem to be in the rearview mirror and we find less activity and calls to action on our social media timelines, I want to remind you all to not let up with whatever you are choosing to do to help and keep fighting back out there. The people who stand to benefit from having angst of the general public leave and dissipate from our collective consciousness want us to forget how angry we are, they want us to feel fatigued and disinterested in continuing the push forward because “this is how they win” as Flint would say.

(Again, Toby Fucking Stephens, everyone.)

We have so much more power than we realize, just look at how much got done just by everyone uniting behind one marginalized group finally over the past three weeks. When we realize we are fighting essentially in the same battle for respect and dignity, justice in our society can be achieved. It can be done, and maybe just maybe we can finally change the world. Afterall who else has been as close to achieving it as we are right now?

Fight for your dignity and respect and stand in solidarity with others in their own fights as well, and always remember “know no shame.”

Raise the colors and Happy Pride, everyone! (credit: Luluxa on Tumblr)

[tomeandflickcorner]

Falcon And Winter Soldier Episode 5- My Thoughts

Oh boy,  this one might be a bit longer than usual.  There’s a lot to go through in this episode. As always, spoilers under the cut.

It immediately picks up after Walker brutally murdered Nico in that crowded square. We see he’s taken off running, and ends up in some deserted warehouse of some kind.  For a moment, you almost think he’s starting to grasp the gravity of what he’s done, but he’s then plagued by memories of his time with Hoskins, which only leads to him further slipping into insanity and convincing himself that he did what was necessary. That’s when Bucky and Sam enter the scene.  They quickly figure out that Walker’s off his rocker.  Particularly when Walker tries to justify his actions by claiming that Nico was the one who killed Hoskins, even though it was clear that Karli was the one who killed him. They do their best to try and help him realize that revenge is not the same as justice, but Walker isn’t willing to listen.  Sam, slipping into councilor mode, attempts to calm him down. Unfortunately, if his words were having any affect on Walker, it all went downhill fast when Sam told Walker to hand the Shield over to them. Because Walker firmly believed the Shield was his rightful property, so he was not about to willingly give it up.  So Bucky and Sam have no choice but to take the Shield back by force.  At one point during this fight, Bucky gets momentarily dazed upon getting thrown into some sort of circuit breaker box, which also seems to briefly cause his vibranium arm to short-circuit.  Of course, Sam can’t really hold his own against a crazed Super Soldier one-on-one for long, and Walker eventually has him pinned to the ground.  He even destroys Sam’s Falcon wings.  But just before Walker could actually kill Sam- yeah, he was actually about to kill Sam there!- Bucky recovers and rejoins the fight.  Together, Sam and Bucky manage to pry the Shield away from Walker’s tight grip.  Though they have to break his arm in the process. But even then, Walker isn’t backing down.  Because he still firmly believes HE is Captain America.  It takes a pretty awesome combo move from Bucky and Sam to take Walker down. Because not even a Super Soldier can withstand getting swung into a jet-packed fueled blow from the Shield.  With Walker defeated, Bucky pretty much places the Shield at Sam’s feet, effectivly giving it to him once again, before walking off without a word.

So, after that pretty epic battle, the episode allows the characters, and the viewing audience, a chance to catch their breaths. Karli and the Flag Smashers have pretty much gone underground, making it impossible for anyone to locate them. Not that the government doesn’t try, as they conduct raids to all the GRC facilities that housed them, and even arrest the people that offered them shelter.  But still, no sign of Karli anywhere.  So Bucky and Sam decide there’s not much more they can do, particularly since they’ve been benched by the government officials.  Even so, Sam still wants to do what he can in seeing this whole thing to the end. So he asks his friend and associate, Joaquín Torres (who we haven’t seen since Episode 2), to keep him posted. Although, Sam also leaves his broken wingsuit with Joaquín. Which is probably a reference to the fact that Joaquín took up the mantle of Falcon after Sam in the comics.

Of course, there’s still the loose end of Zemo.  Bucky manages to track him down in Sokovia, at the memorial that was put up in honor of everyone who died there during the events of Age of Ultron.  Which does make sense, since Zemo’s wife and children were among the casualties.

Now, I gotta pause for a moment to talk about something here.  During the Previously On segment for this episode, we got reminded of a scene from a previous episode, in which Zemo seemed to be trying to shame Sam and Bucky for not ever visiting the memorial themselves.  Maybe it’s me, but that seems kinda unfair.  For starters, Bucky and Sam weren’t even involved during the events of Age Of Ultron.  With Sam, I don’t think he was officially an Avenger at that point.  He was part of the reserve team, if anything.  And Bucky was in Romania, trying to reacquaint himself with his true identity while hiding from both the CIA and what was left of Hydra. Even if that wasn’t the case, when exactly were they supposed to visit the memorial?  As of the events of Civil War, Sam was on the run as a fugitive alongside Steve and Natasha.  And Bucky was in Wakanda, either in cryofreeze or going through mental rehabilitation.  And then they both got dusted at the end of Infinity War, meaning they were erased from existence for the next five years.  So when exactly could they have visited the Sokovia Memorial to pay their respects? Of course, I do get what the episode was trying to say, since the Avengers didn’t really do much in offering Sokovia any sort of relief efforts.  (Though you could also argue that Tony should have been the one to handle that, considering the whole situation with Ultron was his own fault.  And goodness knows he had the monetary means to do something, with him being the billionaire and all. But I guess that’s all semantics.)

Anyway, Zemo tells Bucky that the only way they can hope to stop Karli now is by killing her, but Bucky tells him they’re going to try to do things their own way.  At this point, Bucky aims a gun at Zemo’s head.  But it’s soon revealed that Bucky had previously made sure the gun was already empty when he shows that he’d removed the bullets beforehand. Which I guess was his way of showing Zemo that he was wrong about him.  And that Bucky, despite being an enhanced individual (something that Zemo clearly hates), still chose to spare his life.  At this point, the Dora Milaje show up, with the intention of bringing Zemo to the Raft, that prison we last saw in Civil War.  Before Zemo is escorted off, he tells Bucky he took the liberty of crossing his name out of Bucky’s book, and that he doesn’t blame Bucky for doing what he thought was right.  Wow, how magnanimous of him, right?  Shame he couldn’t have extended this same level of courtesy towards the rest of the Avengers.

Still, I guess this means we’ve seen the last of Zemo.  At least for now.  Eh, good riddance, I say.  I personally hope we never see him again,  While I do sympathize that he lost his family, I still don’t like him in the slightest.  On the other hand, I did like that Ayo indicated that Bucky is at least partially forgiven for helping break Zemo out of jail.  Sure, she does tell him that he should still stay away from Wakanda for the time being, but she is calling him White Wolf again. Which indicates that their friendship wasn’t broken beyond repair.  Before they part ways, however, Bucky tells Ayo that he has one more favor to ask of her.

Here, the episode begins to focus on Sam as he begins to head back home to Louisiana.  But first, he makes a detour back to Baltimore, in order to sit down and really talk with Isaiah. Which enables us to really learn exactly what happened with him in the 1950s.  Turns out, he didn’t get injected with the Super Serum knowingly  He and a few other Black men were essentially used as guinea pigs, in which they were told they were being given tuberculosis shots or something when it was actually an experimental recreation of the Super Serum.  But it seems that, for some reason, the other Black test subjects begin displaying some manner of unfortunate side effects to the Serum, which suggested it wasn’t stabilizing with them.  Only Isaiah was able to successfully transition into a true Super Soldier like Steve Rogers.  So when the other Black test subjects were captured behind enemy lines (because this was the time of the Korean War), the US government were simply planning to drop bombs on the POW camps, in order to prevent word of their little experiment from getting out.  When Isaiah found out what they were planning, he took it upon himself to get those men out of there, in a similar manner to what Steve did in the first Captain America movie.  Except he was rewarded for his bravery by being locked up like a criminal, with the US government conducting experiments on him to try and figure out why the Super Serum worked with him and not the other test subjects.  They even told Isaiah’s wife that he was dead while making sure he never received any of the letters she’s sent him.  In the end, Isaiah only escaped because this nameless nurse took pity on him and helped him escape by essentially faking his death.  This backstory really is sad and tragic, especially when you realize it’s partially based on an actual historical event.  Just try looking up the Tuskegee Experiment sometime.  It’s really messed up.  Anyway, Isaiah finishes his sad story by telling Sam that, regardless of what he might believe, the world hasn’t changed that much.  And that not only will the world never accept a Black man as Captain America, no self-respecting Black man would even attempt to take up the mantle because of how America has always treated men like them.

With that advice still weighing on his mind, Sam returns home to rejoin his sister, Sarah, and his two nephews, AJ and Cass.  So now we’re getting back to the subplot from the first episode, involving the failing family-run fishing business.  It seems Sarah is still thinking it’s time to throw in the towel and simply sell their family’s fishing boat.  The main issue with that is, because it’s all run down and in need of serious repair, nobody would even consider buying it.  Fortunately, Sam has an idea.  Remembering how their parents, who apparently died some time ago, had been long-standing pillars in the community and had often offered aid to their neighbors, Sam makes a few phone calls and gets the whole community to come pitch in and help repair the old fishing boat, thereby repaying the previous kindness of Sam and Sarah’s late parents.  One of the neighbors even comes by with a brand new engine for the fishing boat. But then, just as Sam is wondering how they’re going to manage getting the heavy-looking boat engine off the back of the truck, Bucky appears out of nowhere, using his Super Soldier strength to effortlessly lift the motor up over his shoulders.

Bucky explains his presence away, stating he’s only there to drop off a crate for Sam, which clearly came from the Wakandans.  It’s implied the contents of the crate have something to do with the favor he asked of Ayo.  But then, Bucky ends up sticking around to help Sam fix up the fishing boat.  Cue a boat repairing montage, complete with a song playing over the whole sequence.  Bit bizarre we’re getting something like this in the penultimate episode, but it’s still pretty enjoyable.  Particularly since we get to see Bucky and Sam actually bonding as themselves.  And yes, there does seem to be vague implications that there might eventually be something between Bucky and Sarah.  Although, I don’t know if I necessarily ship it.  At least not yet.  I’d need to see more of them interacting with each other besides just seeing Bucky saying ‘hi’ to her a few times before I make up my mind.  Granted it would be an interesting thing to explore of course.  Particularly since, to my knowledge, it would be the first biracial couple featured in the MCU.  Unless you count Peter Quill and Gamora, of course.  (And that brief thing that was going on between Peggy and Jason Wilkes in the woefully short-lived Agent Carter series.)  At present, though, I think Bucky’s obvious affection towards Sam’s family seems more tied to his own memories of his life before WW2.  When he wakes up the next morning on the couch (because Sam invited him to crash at the house instead of finding a hotel room somewhere), a genuine smile appears on his face when he catches AJ and Cass playing around with the Shield in the living room.  Those of you who have read Bucky’s bio in the MCU wiki might remember that Bucky was the oldest child of four, so seeing AJ and Cass might be reminding him of how he used to play with his younger sisters.  And interestingly enough, Sam’s sister’s name is Sarah.  Which was also the name of Steve Roger’s mother, which is probably making Bucky feel even more nostalgia.  (Side note- Bucky was actually sleeping on the couch.  Which is a step up from where we first saw him in the first episode, where he was sleeping on the cold, hard floor.  This is probably an indication that Bucky is starting to heal.)

Anyway, we then see Bucky helping train Sam in throwing the Shield around.  They even set up an obstacle course of sorts, with mats being tied to a few of the surrounding trees.  They briefly discuss the lingering issue of the Flag Smashers.  There’s still no sign of Karli, but Sam promises to give Bucky a call when he gets a new lead, and Bucky promises that he’ll come back to assist Sam at that time.  However, the main focus of the scene involves Bucky finally apologizing to Sam for giving him a hard time over the Shield in the first place, with him acknowledging how he and Steve didn’t really grasp what it might feel like to a Black man to be given the Shield.  We also get an indication that Steve and Bucky did discuss Steve’s plans of retiring by staying in the past to live a life with Peggy after returning the Infinity Stones ahead of time. It was vaguely suggested in a read-between-the-lines sort of way at the end of Endgame, but it’s nice they confirmed that Steve didn’t just up and decide to do that on the fly.  Bucky then starts opening up to Sam, admitting to him that the reason why he was so angry about the Shield in the first place was that, to him, the Shield felt like his last connection he had to Steve, who was the closest thing he had to a family.  And that feeling has intensified now that Steve is gone.  (Can we please get some clarification on what they mean by ‘gone,’ by the way?  Did Steve actually pass away from old age offscreen?  Up until now, it’s something they’ve only vaguely inferred to.  Like maybe, maybe, maybe.  But if that’s what happened, I wish they’d quit tiptoeing around the issue and just tell us straight out.)  Anyway, it’s really cool that Bucky is talking to Sam about all of this.  It does show that he truly does trust Sam.  Especially more than he does that crappy therapist they forced on him. Just saying, Bucky was still denying to her that he was having nightmares, despite apparently having sessions with her for six months.  But he freely admits to Sam that he is still having nightmares after only a week or so of them working together.  If that doesn’t illustrate how poorly Bucky’s relationship with his government issued therapist was going, I don’t know what does.  

As if getting how big a deal this is, for Bucky to open up to him like this, Sam once again slips into counselor mode.  He tells Bucky that he shouldn’t put so much concern onto what Steve thought of him, because Bucky can’t let what others think of him determine his own self-value. Or something to that effect.  He also advises Bucky to stop taking the easy way out in regards of alleviating his guilt over what he did as the Winter Soldier. Up until now, Bucky was only going after past Hydra agents to bring them to justice in an effort to make himself feel better.  But if Bucky really wants to gain peace of mind, he should instead focus on helping the victims feel better.  Which probably means that Bucky is going to go back and see that old man, Yori, from Episode 1 again and help him find closure by telling him the truth about what happened to his dead son. I admit, I’m really nervous about watching that scene unfold.  Yeah, Yori does deserve the truth, but I’m scared about how he might take it.  It would be understandable if he ends up blaming Bucky, sure.  But at the same time, it’s kinda been rubbing me the wrong way how this show seems to be acting like Bucky is a reformed assassin who has to atone for what he’s done.  No, that was what Natasha was.  Bucky, on the other hand, was the world’s longest serving POW. Someone who was tortured and brainwashed by evil Nazi scientists who stripped him of his free will and autonomy.  (And, if we consider the implications that Episode 3 gave us, we can also add sexual abuse to the list of things Hydra did to him.)  Yeah, it’s only natural Bucky feels bad for what Hydra made him do.  But that just indicates he’s naturally a good man with a good heart.  I’m not exactly a fan of the idea that he should be made to feel like he should atone for anything he did.  Because he was as much of a victim in all of that as the people Hydra sent him after.  Still, if trying to make up for what Hydra forced him to do is what Bucky needs to do in order to forgive himself, then I guess I can support that.  Do what you have to do to find closure for yourself, buddy.

Anyway, after Bucky leaves, Sam and Sarah continue to finish repairs on the fishing boat in preparation for selling it.  But just before Sam is going to paint over the names of their parents, which is printed on the side of the boat, Sarah stops him. It seems she’s changed her mind about selling the boat, considering the boat is part of their family legacy. Which is something that Sam is relieved to hear, as he didn’t want to see the boat getting sold off, either.  The siblings begin having a heart-to-heart, with Sarah telling Sam that, even though she’s always given him a hard time about the matter, she’d never thought he was running away from things whenever he went off to save the world and whatnot.  She also tells him that she knows he’s been dwelling on what Isaiah said to him, but helps Sam make a decision involving the Shield.  While Isaiah had good reasons for believing the way he did, Sam ultimately decides that the pain Isaiah went through would be in vain if nobody continued to fight for the future.  And so, Sam decides that he’s now willing to accept the mantle of Captain America.  Which leads to another montage.  This time of Sam going through a self-training session with the Shied, with his nephews, AJ and Cass, helping out.  The training montage ends with us seeing that Sam has become a pro at throwing and catching the Shield.

Of course, just when you start to think this episode is feeling like the series finale, with everything wrapping up and setting the stage for a future adventure, we get the reminder that there is still one more episode to go.  It seems that Karli has been pushed over the edge after the death of Nico, as well as seeing all the GRC facilities raided and cleared out of refugees.  And she is now out for revenge.  Specifically, she plans to rally up what remains of her followers and attack the GRC headquarters, as they plan to vote on the Patch Act, which would force millions of people to relocate to their home states. To achieve this goal, Karli manage to join forces with Batroc, who had previously appeared at the beginning of Episode 1.  Strangely enough, an earlier scene does suggest Batroc was actually hired to team up with Karli and the Flag Smashers by Sharon Carter, which only further indicates that Sharon is a bit shady.  What exactly is Sharon up to?  Is she a bad guy now?  That would kinda stink, since she is Peggy Carter’s great niece or something.  Talk about besmirching your family name.  

Anyway, right when the Flag Smasher’s attack on GRC headquarters is about to begin, Sam gets a tip off from Joaquín, who had been keeping his ear to the grapevine in terms of the Flag Smasher’s movements. Apparently, the Flag Smashers coordinate their attacks via this coded cellphone signal, which  Joaquín had figured out how to hack into.  And he notifies Sam that the coded cellphone signal is now showing up in New York City.  Sam seems to figure out what the Flag Smashers are about to do when he sees a news report on the TV about the GRC voting on the Patch Act that evening.  Deciding to go and do something about it, he opens up that Wakandan crate Bucky had dropped off.  The episode ends before we can see what exactly was inside the crate, though.  They’re clearly saving that reveal for the final episode.  Although, my boyfriend, who is also my viewing partner for this show, is a bit of an expert on what went on in the Marvel comics.  (He even worked in a comic book/gaming store before we met.)  It seems that, in the comics, Sam Wilson did end up getting a pair of Falcon wings that utilized hologram technology of some kind.  So he’s theorizing that’s what it is.  Still, we have to wait until next Friday to know for sure.  Either way, it looks like this next episode will decide what happens with Karli and the Flag Smashers.  I honestly don’t see how it’s possible to resolve things with Karli peacefully, though.  She seems too far gone at this point.  But I’m sure Sam will still try to talk her down, which only deepens my respect for him.  And who knows?  Maybe Sam will succeed, with Karli going the Coalhouse Walker route- agreeing to stand down in exchange for the promise of a fair trial, which would allow her to state her case.  (Of course, I hope they don’t do things exactly how it went down in Ragtime.  Because in that story, they pretty much promise Coalhouse that he’ll receive a fair trial, but the moment he surrenders himself, the police immediately open fire and shoot him dead.  Which is not even remotely cool.)

Oh, and then there’s still the matter of Walker.  Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him.  Because even though Sam and Bucky effectivly took him down AND he received a dishonorable discharge by the US government, he still refuses to believe he did anything wrong.  He’s convinced that he still deserves to be Captain America.  While a small part of me does pity him, he really is displaying what appears to be a fragile White male ego.  He even goes up to Hoskin’s grieving parents and sister and lies to them about how Nico was the one who killed their son, and that they should take comfort in the fact that justice was served.  There’s also a mid-credits scene where we see he’s trying to make his own version of the Shield.  Doubt its made of vibranium, of course.  I Gotta say, I’m seeing a lot of parallels between Walker and Karli right now.  Both of them have convinced themselves that they are 100% in the right, and everything they do is completely justified.  Which naturally makes them both very dangerous. However, I’m mostly concerned by this mysterious woman.  Contessa, or whatever it was she called herself.  She approached Walker after his trial to tell him that he didn’t do anything wrong before giving him what appears to be a blank business card.  (I’m guessing there’s some sort of secret decoded message on this business card that Walker will decipher later on.)  I have no idea who this woman is supposed to be or what her goal is.  I’m guessing she’s someone comic book experts would recognize, but my boyfriend/viewing partner, who is familiar with the comics, didn’t seem to recognize her name, either.  So it’s a big mystery at this point.

Before I wrap up my thoughts for this week’s episode, there is something partially unrelated I should mention.  For those of you who haven’t heard, Sebastian Stan’s latest movie, Monday, recently came out.  And it seems that this movie includes Sebastian and his female co-star in a full-frontal nudity scene.  From what I’ve heard, there have been some select individuals who have seen fit to criticize Sebastian’s appearance in this scene, because he wasn’t in perfect shape or something like that.  If you were one of those select individuals who decided to body shame Sebastian after watching this movie?  Grow up!  Bodies come in all shapes and sizes.  And to expect a male actor to have a completely chiseled physique at all times is extremely unrealistic, particularly when they’re portraying an ordinary person.  The fact that people were acting like this is even more disgusting when you consider the fact that Sebastian Stan apparently already has some body issues.  The fact that he was still willing to film this full-frontal scene despite those issues just illustrates his passion and dedication to his skill as an actor and the message this movie was meant to convey.  He did not deserve to have his body objectified the way it was. Nobody does.  So once again, this is me condemning the behavior of those select ‘fans.’ 

[esoanem]

I.

“Let me tell you a story, about a Spaniard named Vasquez...”

Following this fantastic video essay by Rowan Ellis (contains spoilers for the entire show), I am currently rewatching Black Sails. The first season has a slightly different tone from the rest of the show and, in particular, has a major sexual assault storyline. I know several people who have been put off from watching the show as a result

So, with that in mind, I’m gonna give summaries and content notes for the episodes of the first season as well as timestamps of any scenes with particular content people may want to avoid. Hopefully this information can allow people to either skip those scenes or, read the summaries of these episodes and skip them entirely

Anyway, this post is about the very first episode

Major Content Notes:

Violence: some bloody violence, shot fairly brutally

Wikipedia Synopsis:

John Silver joins Captain Flint's crew as his ship's new cook whilst secretly holding a highly valuable page of the Captain's Log, which he takes from the first cook, who had stolen it from the captain himself. Meanwhile, Captain Flint faces a potential mutiny from his crew and must work to secure their support. The Captain recruits his first mate Billy Bones' help to overthrow the mutineer's leader, Singleton. Meanwhile, Eleanor Guthrie tries to keep order on the lawless island of New Providence conducting her father's business, as the Royal Navy's suspicions of the pirates grow stronger.

There’s quite a lot going on in this episode, with several speeches establishing important themes, because it has to establish all the major players, and most of their relationships, so the summary is actually quite a long (albeit quite condensed from my 8 pages of notes). Below the cut are the timestamps of any scenes requiring any of the major content notes, and then the summary (which includes all the events of the episode)

Timestamps:

All timestamps are from the “Complete Collection” DVDs which includes a Starz logo at the start. Depending on your source, timestamps may vary a little, which is why I’ve included the timestamp for the opening titles. Timestamps are only given for the start and end of scenes featuring any particularly warning-worthy content

06:30: opening titles

56:23-60:30: Flint & Singleton’s fight. The violence here is pretty brutal & bloody, moreso than most of the rest of the series

Summary:

1715 West Indies

The Pirates of New Providence Island threaten maritime trade in the region

The laws of every civilized nation declare them hostis humani generis. Enemies of all mankind

In response, the pirates adhere to a doctrine of their own… war against the world

A merchant ship is attacked by Captain James Flint’s pirates on the Walrus. During the attack, the cook steals a page from a logbook, and ends up barricaded in a compartment with the coward John Silver (below). The cook plans to joint the pirates after the fight, saying a good cook is always in demand. Silver spots the pouch the page is hidden in, causing the cook to draw his sword

The rest of the crew barricade in a separate room, but eventually the pirates break in, defeat them and the pirate captain, Flint (below), gets the merchant Captain to surrender

The quartermaster Hal Gates (below) walks through the merchant ship assessing the prize as the crew breaks down the door to Silver’s compartment, in which he finds the cook dead, stabbed in the back, Silver claims to be a very good cook and asks to join

On the deck, Singleton (below, and also pictured in the background of Flint’s picture) is giving a speech to the captured merchant sailors, appealing to their sense of class consciousness

"Now that the fight is over, you have nothing more to fear from us today. Because we know this fight was not of your making, it was the choice of our true enemy, your true enemy, the tyrant captain. Many of us once sailed on ships like this one, we know what it is to be slaves to his whims, his violence, his shit wages! His insufferable stupidity! So we’ve made for ourselves a different life, where we don’t rely on wages”

The accountant Dufresne (below, note that he is played by a different actor as his original actor sadly died after the filming of the first season) assesses the prize as barely covering their costs and, after four prizes in a row with little profit, Gates is concerned about dissent in the crew, and that Singleton is angling for the captaincy

Flint and Gates appear conspiratorial over the logbook, saying it proves that this is the ship, but Gates quickly spots the missing page, the schedule, without which the logbook isn’t very useful in leading them to the greater prize

“let me see if I have this right. This is the fourth prize in a row from which the profits will barely exceed the expenses it took to win it, Singleton’s out there trying to convince your crew to torture that poor bastard of a captain simply because he hasn’t worked out how to get them to do it to you, but all’s well, because you’ve discovered, that the information we can’t tell anyone we’re looking for, exists on a page, that we don’t have“

A Royal Navy Man-o-War, the Scarborough is spotted (unusual seeing as she’s based in Boston), and the Walrus leaves behind the merchant ship so it can get away

Belowdecks, the Bosun, Billy Bones (above) introduces Silver to Randall (below), who used to be the Bosun before him, before he was beaten to within an inch of his life and “lost his wits, but not their loyalty”. Randall is mistrustful of Silver, apparently because he feels like Silver is replacing him. Billy emphasises the equality of the pirate ship, that everyone should get the same food, including the captain & quartermaster

Gates tells Flint that Singleton plans to replace him, and now has the votes to do so. Flint tries to manipulate Gates into blaming himself, even though the crew’s poor morale is due to Flint’s seemingly poor choice of prizes to chases. Flint says that with a few more days, the schedule could be reconstructed from the logbook, but he’ll need a favour from Richard Guthrie who is responsible for selling all the goods the pirates steal. When Gates is skeptical that Guthrie will help them, Flint says they’ll just go back to normal and pretend none of this ever happened & Gates calls him out for lying

The Walrus arrives in Nassau, and the crew go ashore (below). One of the pirates tells Silver that it used to be English, now it isn’t, and that now it’s “ours”. Gates tells Billy that Flint is going to ask Guthrie for a favour and is likely to react badly when he refuses, and tells Billy to go with him and, when the time comes, restrain him, so they don’t lose Guthrie’s business. As Silver is unloading the cargo, he notices one of the logbooks is not among them and deduces the page must be from the missing volume and is in Flint’s quarters

Silver then gets hazed. He is accosted and told he needs to see Blackbeard, who “meets the new ones, no exceptions”. When thrust into a smoky room he’s told contains Blackbeard, he realises that the person in the throne is not, in fact, the pirate Edward Teach, but rather a prostitute. When he questions this, she opens her coat, revealing a large black bush. The pirates laugh, tell him to yell if he gets lost in there, and close the doors. As Silver is stripped, and has sex with the five prostitutes, he keeps glancing for the page that has fallen out of his clothes

Gates goes to speak to Eleanor Guthrie (below, left), in her tavern. She is introduced berating a captain for being scared of the mere whiff of the Navy rather than going for profit, and clapping back at a drunk pirate telling her to fuck herself. Gates warns Eleanor & her right-hand man, the former slave, Mr Scott (below, right) about Singleton’s plan to take over, and asks for a loan to buy the crew’s loyalty. Eleanor eventually agrees, but Mr Scott chides her, saying that he doesn’t think her father would approve

Max (below), one of the prostitutes from Silver’s hazing pours some tea as he scrambles for the page, which she already found, having noticed that despite having “a whore for every finger on your hand, but your eyes kept drifting to this”. Realising it’s valuable, but that Silver doesn’t know anyone to sell it to, she offers to act as a middle-man, in exchange for half

Gates enters a tent with several of the black pirates and negotiates with the eldest of them, who he knows the rest will follow, to buy their votes. Despite having spent the entirety of Eleanor’s loan on other sections of the crew, he persuades them to side with him in exchange for payment taken out of the next prize. Unfortunately for him, Jack Rackham (below) spots him and tells Singleton that Gates has been buying votes

Silver sneaks into Flint’s cabin aboard the ship with Max waiting in a rowing boat, where he finds the logbook and matches the page to it, but disturbs a feather Flint had left

Meanwhile, Flint has his meeting with Richard Guthrie (below), explaining his plan, how he heard of it, how the logbook confirms his lead, and that he needs Guthrie’s contacts to reconstruct the schedule

“Let me tell you a story, about a Spaniard named Vasquez. A few weeks ago, he staggers into a tavern in port royal, takes a seat next to an English merchant captain. Vasquez, it turns out, is dying, bleeding to death from a knife wound to the belly. The knife wound was courtesy of his former employer la Casa de Contratacion in Seville”

“Colonial Intelligence?”

“Navy, more specifically. One of the top agents in the Americas, responsible for the security of one particular ship, a ship with a cargo so rich, the king of Spain is very anxious to see it launched. Vasquez warned that it was too late, storm season was upon them and no escort could be mustered to guard her, but his superiors demanded that he sign off. They advised him that if he couldn’t arrange for an escort, he should plot a course unknown to anyone but our captain, and consider that route to be a state secret of the highest order. When Vasquez refused and threatened to report his concerns to the court things got ugly. The ship in question? Urca de Lima. The largest Spanish treasure galleon in the Americas. According to Vasquez, total cargo in excess of 5 million dollars”

Guthrie refuses to help, saying that the ship is heavily armed even without an escort, and that even making enquiries would jeopardise his standing with the Spanish. Flint twists his arm and goes to break his fingers, asking Billy to threaten Guthrie with his pistol, but Billy instead aims it at Flint

They hear a commotion outside, it’s the British! Captain Hume of the Scarborough to be precise. Billy, Flint, & Guthrie have all returned to their positions to maintain the pretence of respectability, but Hume isn’t buying it treating us to his pontifications on the relationship between gossip and civilisation, and attempts to take them all into custody. Flint & Billy resist, defeating the Navy men, but Guthrie is shot in the shoulder

“Tell me something, Mr Guthrie. Do you have gossip here?

“Gossip?”

“I’ve often wondered if it can survive in so remote a location. You see gossip is what holds civilisation together. It reinforces shame, and without shame, well, the world is a very dangerous place”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand”

“Do you know what the gossip is in London about you? The gossip is that you make your profits selling ill-gotten cargo, stolen by the pirates of Providence Island”

Singleton confronts the leader of the black pirates about his change of heart. When they refuse to change back to his side, Anne Bonny (below right) appears together with Jack Rackham and she kills them

Before the leader is killed, Captain Charles Vane (below) comes out of the shadows too

Gates tells Mr Scott & Eleanor that he’s secured the votes, only to be told by one of the remaining black pirates that their leader was killed, and his last words were “Vane”. Eleanor decides to do something about Vane

Jack, Anne, & Vane are drinking in a brothel, and discuss their plan. Singleton will become captain, fail at it, and the skilled hands will then defect to their crew. We also find out that Jack & Anne are fucking. At this point, Eleanor storms in, and punches Vane. He punches her back and then offers her a hand to help her get back up. He follows her as she goes to clean up. She explains that he’s fucked her over, and we find out he used to love her and, despite grabbing her face, he still tucks her hair behind her ears suggesting conflicted feelings about that. She threatens to cut him off from selling goods, but vane points out that her father is the one who buys the goods, and he’ll always choose profits over daughters

Max sees that Eleanor has been hit, and leads Eleanor to her bedroom, hand-in-hand. She correctly guesses that Vane is the one who hit her and, when Eleanor blames herself she scoffs at it. She nurses Eleanor, they kiss, and then have sex

Flint & Billy sail away from Mr Guthrie’s mansion, with his pale, unconscious body. Flint strips Guthrie’s rings & wig, and explains that he plans to hide Mr Guthrie, so as to avoid panicking the crew when they find out their fence is burnt

Billy calls out Flint’s constant lying, and wonders if maybe Singleton is right, and they do need a change. This causes Flint to move aggressively towards Billy, but he puts his sword between them forcing Flint to keep his distance. 

“War is coming, one ship is not the war. When a king brands us pirates, he doesn’t mean to make us adversaries, he doesn’t mean to make us criminals, he means to make us monsters, for that’s the only way his god-fearing taxpaying subjects can make sense of men who keep what is theirs and fear no-one. When I say there’s a war coming, I don’t mean with the Scarborough, I don’t mean with King George, or England. Civilisation is coming, and it means to exterminate us. If we are to survive, we must unite behind our own king”

“We have no kings here”

“I am your king”

Flint tells Gates about Guthrie, and finds out that whilst they were gone, Singleton has called a council to vote on him taking the captaincy. Flint takes a moment in his cabin and, whilst flinging some furniture, notices the feather Silver had disturbed

Taking the logbook to the council, Flint tells them of his plan, and accuses Singleton of having stolen the schedule from the logbook

"I’m sorry. For the short hauls. For the trouble I’ve caused. But most importantly, for the disregard it seems I’ve shown you

“The most important element of a healthy ship is trust. Trust between men. Trust between captain and crew. Without it, a ship is doomed

“For the past few months, you and I have been on the trail of a prize so rich, it could upset the very nature of our world. And for that reason, I felt it necessary to keep it secret

“I didn’t trust you. And that was my mistake. Right now I would like to tell you that prize is within our grasp and we are close, so close. But it would appear that my concerns about secrecy had merit

“Someone on this crew discovered my plans. And tore from this log the very page necessary to discover that prize. Stole it for their own gain. Stole it from us. And then, stoked your resentment to cover his crime, and make himself your captain”

Obviously, Singleton is confused, and protests that he doesn’t know anything about this. Gates points out that this is a serious accusation, thievery being punishable by death, and a false accusation likewise. Per the articles of the ship, Singleton must either submit to a trial (with Gates as judge, who Singleton does not consider would be impartial), or they can settle it by sword

This fight is analysed in a lot of detail by Matt Easton (a historical fencing instructor, well versed in military sabre of the late 19th and late 18th centuries, so only shortly after the period of the show) here (may contain spoilers for later in the show, I don’t remember). Flint has good form, and is clearly well-trained, but Singleton is stronger, tougher, and more ferocious, easily gaining the upper hand

There is some back and forth, with Flint temporarily gaining the advantage, before losing it again, ending up injured and covered in blood. He is finally able to grab a cannonball and smash Singleton on the head, before crawling over him and beating him to death in front of a shocked crew

Flint produces a piece of paper, seemingly from Singleton’s bloody corpse, and offers it to Billy (seeing this page, Silver confirms that he does in fact still have the real page). Billy opens it, sees that it’s a completely blank page, but as Flint coolly holds his gaze tells the crew that it is in fact the stolen schedule

“Friends, brothers, the prize that you and I have been pursuing, is l’Urca de Lima, the hulk, a prize of almost unimaginable value, now with this page securely in our possession, we can begin our hunt, and we will succeed, no matter the cost, no matter the struggle, I will see that prize is yours, I’m not just going to make you rich, I’m not just going to make you strong, I’m going to make you the princes of the new world!”

The crew all cheer whilst Billy, Gates, and Silver, who all know that this page is not real look on in disbelief

Max is called from her room, where we see Eleanor sleeping naked on the bed by Idelle, one of the other prostitutes. She goes down to meet Jack & Anne and, sitting on his lap (which Anne does not like), tells them she has something she thinks they may want to buy

[ct-offical-sexyman]

Viveza and all the prequels

First of all; how dare you make me write out the plot of my own story. Second of all: thank you, this will probably help in the future.

Remember that this can all change in the future.

Spoilers for Viveza’s story below.

The Phantom Menace

Melinoe Lanami is sent to spy on the young queen of Naboo under the fake name Nize Raza. Her orders are to keep an eye on the girl until told otherwise. She takes up the disguise of Captain Panaka’s second in command.

She escapes the blockade with everyone else. A small communicator gives her a new order to signal the group's location to Maul.

When they arrive on Tatooine, Melinoe tries to go with Padme, Jar Jar and Qui Gon into town, but Qui Gon says they have enough people and forces Melinoe to stay behind. She doesn’t push it, knowing that insisting on following them would be too risky and blow her cover.

For the scenes on Tatooine Melinoe’s scenes are made up of her talking/sparring with Obi Wan or interacting with other members of the crew. I’m currently having reader block with this part of the story, because I’m trying to work out what Melinoe and Obi Wan talk about in regards to the life of a Jedi and the politics surrounding it. Because I feel like it could be really easy for me to fuck it up, and made really obvoius that Melinoe is a spy/sith.

Anyway; Jinn brings back Anakin and friends back to the ship where they’re attacked by Maul. Once they escape Melinoe and Anakin have a scene together where Anakin is still getting used to the cold on the ship. Melinoe finds him a blanket and sympathises with him saying that she grew up on a cold planet and it took a little while for her to get used to warmer places. This scene was originally between Anakin and Padme, but this is a good way to show Melinoe’s personality under the mask she puts up for herself.

At some point before they get to Coruscant Melinoe lets her guard down for a second and accidently reveals her real name to Obi Wan through the force.

During the Coruscant scenes Melinoe is put on guard duty over the handmaidens. So she doesn’t witness any of the stuff at the Jedi Temple.

When everyone goes back to Naboo, Melinoe is given orders to kill the Jedi just as Maul shows up to fight them.

Melinoe and Obi Wan get septured from Qui Gon and Maul when Maul pushes Obi Wan into Melinoe causing them both to fall off the platform. Obi Wan saves Melinoe by grabbing her hand, but they don’t talk about it because they’re both more focused on catching up with Qui Gon and Maul.

When Obi Wan starts fighting Maul, Melinoe gets caught behind the red force field. She has the opportunity to help Maul several times, but she realises ‘why should help him? I fucking hate him and hurt Eglantine on muiltable occasions’. Melinoe ends up leaving Maul for dead in order to make her escape from the planet.

She’s later seen back on Byss, giving Darth Heiss a report of what happened while leaving out and lying about several things. She’s informed that she’ll be punished for failing her mission and is dismissed.

Later on; she tells Eglantine about what happened, while being much more honest. Eglantine expresses relief about Maul’s death and Melinoe’s safe return.

Interlude

Abridged version of events in between TPM & AOTC;

Viveza stops using her birth name after Eglantine is killed by Heiss.

She disavows Darth Heiss and defects from Byss three years after Maul’s death, and two years after Eglantine’s.

Gets a ship and a T7 unit after taking it from a group of mandalorians.

Viveza travels to Eglantine’s homeworld of Marazi where she meets her first apprentice, Jaks Jr, and her eventual second in command, Jaks Snr.

While on Glee Anselm, Viveza meets her second apprentice, Thea, after Thea tries to chew her arm off. While breaking up a slave ring, Viveza meets Orianna and Nizzal, who become her third and fourth apprentices.

Meets Obi Wan again several times, but it’s always in a situation where she’s able to escape.

Attack of the Clones

Viveza is dragged into the plot when Obi Wan seeks her out to find information on the Kamino Saber Dart (knowing that after years of breaking up slave cartels she’ll have information about underground criminals like bounty hunters).

Since she owes Obi Wan a favour for saving one of her companions at some point, she agrees to help him. She tells him that the dart is from Kaimino. She later helps Obi Wan find his way to Kaimino when he hits a dead end.

While Obi Wan is having his conversation with Lama Su, Viveza is given a tour of the cloning facilities. This is where Viveza would meet Margo for the first time. They have a conversation where Viveza asks Margo what her life is like living on Kaimio. Margo avoids the question and eventually leaves.

They later meet Jango and work out that he’s the one who was hired to kill Padme. While Obi Wan is getting the council an update, Viveza is the one to notice that the Fetts are trying to escape.

After the fight between Obi Wan and Fett, Viveza is the one to throw the homing beacon on the Slave 1.

They follow the Fetts to Geonosis. Where they find out about Gunray making the order to kill Padme. They go back to Viveza’s ship where Obi Wan sends his findings to the council via Anakin's and Padme’s ship.

They are then captured by Jango and the droidekas. Viveza has her lightsabers taken and eventually they end up in the hands of Margo.

Viveza is put in a different cell to Obi Wan, and Dooku also tries to persuade her to join (but with a completely different speech). She refuses to hear him out, due to remembering the 14 years of suffering she endured at the hands of Heiss basically saying ‘I spent 14 years trying to escape and you expect me to go right back because of some empty words’.

I thought about having Dooku try to appeal to Viveza by playing the ‘i knew your father’ card, but then I realised there was no way Dooku could know who Viveza is, so :P.

Viveza is sentenced to death in the Geonosis Arena. Where she’ll face off against a Gundark. She manages to escape by tricking the gundark into running into the piller she’s chained to, causing the whole thing to crumble.

When the battle between the Jedi and the droids starts, Viveza holds her own without any lightsabers and still has her hands tied together.

When the Clones get there, Viveza takes the opportunity to leave and go look for her ship. When she finds it, she also finds Margo, who’s having a breakdown because her father just died and her brother tried to murder her.

Viveza’s plot on AOTC ends with Margo returning Viveza’s lightsabers to her and becoming Viveza’s fifth apprentice.

Interlude 2

I love you, Lou, BUT I CAN’T SUMMERRISE ALL THE CLONE WARS IN ONE POST! All you need to know is that Viveza wants revenge on Grievous for a lot of the stuff he’s done to her and her allies during the Clone Wars.

Revenge of the Sith

Viveza learns that Grievous is on Utapau and travels there hoping to kill Grievous herself. She runs into Obi Wan and they agree that it would be in their best interest to take Grievous on together. After defeating Grievous and getting Obi Wan’s lightsaber from Cody, Obi Wan starts escorting Viveza’s back to her ship via Boga (best girl, rip, I think?).

They get blasted off the side of a cliff but manage to escape. They meet up with Bail and Yoda and head to Coruscant to change the Jedi Beacon to make sure any other survivors know to stay away. Aftering finding out that Anakin turned to the darkside, Viveza is enraged that he killed all the younglings.

They go to question Padme about where Anakin is, but she refuses to tell them anything. When Padme leaves to find Anakin, Viveza and Obi Wan stowaway on her ship.

On Mustafar when Anakin thinks Padme betrayed him by bringing Obi Wan and Viveza he tries attacking her, but Viveza stops him by shooting him with force lightning. Padme is able to get away from Anakin with minor injuries.

Viveza and Obi Wan engage in a fight against Anakin. After the facility’s shields get deactivated, Viveza gets separated from Obi Wan and Anakin.

I can either have Viveza and Obi Wan meet back at the ship or have her find them just as Obi Wan gets ‘the high ground’, but the thing about the second option is that Viveza wouldn’t want to take any changes and would probably put Anakin out of misery when he’s burning alive.

Either way they end up back at the ship with Padme. While on the ship Obi Wan and Viveza have a moment where they just lean on each other in exhaustion.

Padme goes into labour as they're travelling to Polis Massa. She gives birth to the twins and is predicted to make a full recovery in time. (because fuck you canon!). She’s heartbroken by what Anakin has done, but vows to fight for her children.

The ending is another point where I’m not quite sure where to take it. I could just go with the original ending where Leia is adopted by Bail, and Luke is sent to Tatooine right away, but I feel like Padme wouldn’t want to be separated from her children. At the moment I’m thinking she’ll go into hiding for around two years but after one too many close calls she begrudgingly accepts to send each of them into hiding. With Leia being sent to live with Bail and having her name changed to Leia Organa and Luke being sent to live with Owen. Maybe I’ll find some other direction.

Viveza sets out to see how many of her allies and connections are still loyal to her or if they decide to shift their loyalty to the newly formed Empire. Her first order of business to find out what happened to Margo, because she hasn’t contacted Viveza since Maul’s capture.

[giovanniis]

what  is  UP  my  pals  ,  mis  amigos  .  my  name  is  dab  and  i’m  ur  new  bff  .  besides  that  ,  i’m  also  twenty  ,  use  she/they  pronouns  ,  and  am  kickin’  in  over  here  in  pst  !  under  the  cut  ,  i’m  gonna  ramble  probably  a  lot  about  my  son  ,  giovanni  .  (  spoiler  alert  :  he’s  a  dumbass  who  only  ever  wants  to  talk  about  hockey  .  )   DMISMDA  anyways  .  pls  give  this  a  LIKE  if  u’d  like  to  plot  and  i  will  come  RUNNING  !  my  d*scord  is  𝒅𝒂𝒃𝒆𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒊_420#1971  if  u  wanna  hmu  there  !  i’m  gonna  shut  up  here  now  so  i  can  start  babbling  more  below  hehe

chicago’s very own GIOVANNI NARCISO has been spotted on madison avenue driving a range rover , welcome ! your resemblance to shawn mendes is unreal . according to tmz , you just had your twenty-second birthday bash  . your chance of surviving new york is uncertain because you’re stubborn , but being ambitious might help you . i think being a leo explains that .  3 things that would paint a better picture of you would be the sharpened blades of a pair of ice skates, hockey memorabilia everywhere, and late night escapades . 

╰  *  MINI STATS  !

FULL NAME  :  giovanni  noel  narciso  

NICKNAME(S)  :  gio  ,  g

AGE  :  twenty - two

GENDER  +  PRONOUNS   :  cis  male  +  he  /  him

ORIENTATION  :  bisexual   /   biromantic

ZODIAC  :  leo  sun  ,  gemini  rising  ,  pisces  moon  

BIRTHDAY  :  july  26th  ,  1997

PLACE  OF  BIRTH  :  toronto  ,  ontario  ,  canada 

LOVE  LANGUAGE  :  physical  touch  

OCCUPATION(S)  :  professional  hockey  player  for  the  ny  rangers  ,  socialite  

DRINKING  /  DRUGS  /  SMOKING  :  hell  yes  /  no  /  only  weed

TRAITS  :  stubborn  ,  hotheaded  ,  dramatic  ,  standoffish  ,  brash  ,  overemotional  ,  facetious  ,  distant  ,  provocative  ,  inconsistent  ,  unpredictable  ,  gullible  ,  sympathetic  ,  charming  ,  loyal  ,  hypocritical  ,  protective  ,  talented  ,  ambitious  ,  passionate  ,  affectionate  

LIFE  GOAL  :  make  it  to  the  hockey  hall  of  fame  and  be  remembered  as  the  G  O  A  T  

╰  *  BACKGROUND  INFO  !

giovanni narciso was born in toronto, canada on july 26th to a world-renowned hockey player and his socialite wife. needless to say, gio lived his life in the spotlight from the moment he was born, and he’s always had everything he’s ever wanted right at his fingertips.

from a young age, gio was encouraged to be active all the time. he started skating almost as soon as he learned how to stand up by himself. it’s no wonder that he had such a knack for it with his father being a hockey legend and the fact that he got so much practice. when his father realized that gio had a natural affinity, he put him onto a club hockey team as soon as he was old enough, and started making gio work with a private coach to give him a one-up on his teammates and everyone else on the ice ( despite the fact that he was only seven when he started ).

because of this, he always felt a lot of pressure to be the best he could possibly be… how could he not ? there were sports reporters showing up to his games to get the scoop on how he was doing, and how he compared to his father, and if he’d ever actually make it in professional hockey.

his parents divorced when he was eleven, and his mom moved to marry a much older, wealthy man in chicago, illinois. so, much to his despair, gio lived his life switching from toronto to chicago. the only constant in his life was hockey. so even though it stressed him the fuck out, it also made him feel at peace. he knew no matter where he was, he could get on the ice and kick everyone’s ass. he spent most of his time in chicago with his mom, and attended school there too, but during holidays or the summertime, he spent his time back up in toronto with his dad.

this really took a toll on his mental health because his mom ?? sorta just forgot about him :/ like … she fought for custody just to spite his dad ? she didn’t actually want gio. this sounds kinda dumb but like … sorta think about cinderella ( #gioella ) and how he suddenly got thrust into an entire new family that didn’t really like him or know how to connect with him. he felt really alone more often than not.

luckily, at sixteen, he was signed to a minor league hockey team in chicago. because of this development, he stopped going out to visit toronto as often ( especially when it was game season ). this caused a lot of buzz in the hockey community because oh my god giovanni narciso, son of a hockey legend, was breaking onto the scene

and it SHOULD’VE STAYED THAT WAY !!!! BUT NO ! gio’s dad had other things in mind. demon.

you see, pretty much all throughout high school, gio was dating kylie. she is the love of his life. there’s never been an ounce of doubt about that fact. the sky is blue and gio loves kylie. like ???

gio proposed to kylie when they were eighteen. fresh out of high school. this made gio’s dad LIVID. he didn’t like kylie or her family or anything about her. gio’s plan, of course, was to say a big fuck you ! and marry her anyways. but it didn’t end up working out like that.

sadly, giovanni’s father did not approve of her. was he a little salty that gio chose to stay in chicago and not visit anymore (even if it was because he was signed there) ? yes. was he incredibly greedy and wanted to cement the narciso name in history too ? aaaabsolutely.

as soon as he was eligible at eighteen, gio had multiple offers from nhl franchises to come play for their teams. he could pick and choose whoever he wanted, basically. he was a real hot commodity. but suddenly, the offers were being ripped right from his hands. and it was all because of his dad’s influence in the hockey world. he basically gave gio an ultimatum: marry kylie, and there was no more hockey. or do as he said, and he could have it all.

it was rushed, haphazardly chosen decision, but gio chose hockey. it had helped him through every rough patch in his life, and it was the one thing he knew he was good at. it’s not like he was exceptionally smart or good at anything else. if it wasn’t hockey, then he wasn’t worth anything. that’s something he honestly believes to this day.

so instead of TALKING THIS THROUGH WITH HER LIKE ANY RATIONAL PERSON WOULD ! he straight up left. packed his shit and left in the middle of the night when kylie was asleep. completely ghosted her. didn’t answer her texts, her calls, nothing. blocked her on everything.

he did as his father told him to, and started dating carolina graham, a nice girl that his father liked a lot better

their relationship was reminiscent of p*te dav*dson and ariana grande’s. they very quickly got engaged and they were the talk of all the tabloids. there wasn’t a moment where they could step out without cameras being shoved in their face. this sky-rocketed gio to socialite status. everyone that didn’t already know him from hockey wanted to know the handsome young man now engaged to carolina

ok now lightning round

when he was twenty-one , he secured the bag with the ny rangers DJSIOAJDOA and got a multi-year contract — one of the biggest contracts in the nhl history, and became one of the youngest captains ever .

* more fun facts about gio n hockey : he plays first string center and is #2 !

since his career was actually stable, he decided to stop having to pretend to be in love with someone, and immediately just broke up with carolina. he said goodbye wifey JDSAODSA  aaaaand now , a year later , he’s livin it up !

also ? 1000% still in love with kylie but THAT is a completely different story he is a #simp

╰  *  PERSONALITY  !

hockey is a rough-around-the-edges type of sport, and that’s reflected in gio’s personality. he’s very charming, and is typically a pretty nice person ? he doesn’t go out of his way to be kind or anything but he’s not gonna start a fight for no reason DSAIJDSADSjDI

he’s terribly stubborn, and once he’s set his mind on something, it will happen no matter what or who he has to do. this could be good because in a way, it just means he’s very ambitious, but it’s also bad because he will do and say things without a thought about how it makes someone feel

narciso is a fitting last name because he’s incredibly full of himself. how could he not be ? he’s the son of a hockey legend, and he’s made a great name for himself too. he’s an amazing athlete, and he knows he’s good looking too. it’s no secret that he’s a little big-headed sometimes.

he has a very short temper. he blows his lid very easily, and will say things he probably doesn’t mean just because he wants to hurt you.

he just??? doesn’t think. he doesn’t have a filter literally at all. will say the first thing that comes to mind always and it’s usually fucking stupid sdjdjas… he’s also a big jokester and very sarcastic 

also has a problem with being honest ? lies about everything? the type of person to smile in your face while he stabs you in the back? will lie when there’s no reason to? you could be like “gio did u eat breakfast” and he’ll be like “ya.” even if he didn’t like… dumb shit. don’t ever trust him about anything

ok so he comes off as cocky like… externally… but inside, he’s really insecure? like he believes that love exists because he’s felt it but he doesn’t…. think it was meant for him, if that makes sense. because every time he loves someone, he fucks it all up. because of this, he has a really poor vision of love n everything. uhhhh can u say trust issues?

he’s also a wh*re . i’m so sorry. lowkey craves affection and fills that void with meaningless hookups and one night stands 

most people think he lives up to the ‘dumb jock’ stereotype, which is something he’s also really insecure about. it’s not that he didn’t try in school. he did to a point, but then he just flat out stopped caring. school was always really difficult for him. he was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was 7, and it always made him feel really out of place in school… to the point where he just stopped caring because all it did was made him feel frustrated and dumb when all he needed was some extra help?

he’s misunderstood

and also just… a whole mess tbh djsaios….

u can find some wanted connections here