#on*... which brings us back to waiting for more lore.

[freeandiwill]

Guessing each of the Saja Boys’ deals with Gwi-Ma

I don’t know if this has been done yet but I just find them really hot fascinating okay?

Jinu

Okay, so this one we obviously already know- He abandoned his family to become a musician and live a luxurious life. This allows him to have an extraordinary singing voice, which is obviously his overall appeal as a boyband leader. Since this is directly stated this movie, it gives us a good guideline going forward with the rest of them; something that is still present in their current depreciation and overall serves to their benefit, even though they had to make a sacrifice to get it.

Since the rest of the band is extremely underportrayed this whole movie, I get to be a bit creative with my theories. Feel free to contribute your own ideas!

Abby/Abs

Obviously he is extremely muscular but I don’t think it’s a pure vanity thing. So I’m gonna say he wished for inhuman strength to defend himself during a time of violence and conflict. He wanted to feel less helpless and vulnerable in the midst of chaos, but this came at the price of him going mad with power and hurting innocent people, unable to tell a friend from an enemy. He still believes he’s a monster that can snap at any minute, relishing in some of the leverage that gives him (being a demon) but also fear that he may not have total control over himself.

Baby

The name seems pretty blatant- I think he wished for infinite youth and beauty. He was incredibly discomforted by the sight of those around him slowly aging. He constantly saw people becoming weaker and frailer, less capable of doing things themselves. Their skin sagged, their hair grayed, society seemed to find them more and more of an ugly nuisance. And it absolutely terrified him, so he asked to be spared from it. Unfortunately, he still had to watch the world around him changed while he stayed preserved, locked in time. The degradation and decay of humanity soon became more and more apparent, terrifying him further, wondering if he’ll ever be next. He constantly checks himself for any minor blemishes or shifts in his appearance, growing paranoid that he may not be as perfect as he’s desperate to be.

Romance

Another no-brainer, He wished a girl to fall in love and marry him. Aladdin-style, as in she was above his status and could never consider him as a husband until he placed himself in the same league as her and made himself seem irresistible. It was perfect at first, until her senseless infatuation with him began to ruin their relationship. She loved him but she didn’t really like him, she hardly knew him at all. She was mindlessly obsessed, and guilt began to eat away when he realized he had practically made her a slave to his affection. Woman still find him irresistible, but he can’t bring himself to love anyone back, knowing that he utterly ruined the one he held dearest.

Mystery

Admittedly, this was the hardest for me to think of, so it’s is a bit of a stretch.

He was once known for being a gentle and kind boy, but due to unfortunate circumstances, had gotten into a very aggressive and very public argument with a close friend, ending with him killing them in a blind fit of rage. This utterly ruined his reputation, so he wished to permanently hide away and never be recognized again. He was on the run for many years, continually growing his hair over his face and changing his name until he forgot who he was, only remembering what he did and the shame it caused him. He’s still quite reserved and withdrawn, wondering if- even after all these decades later- someone will be able to point him out and expose his crime to the world.

I only did a brief amount of research for this, so I’m just waiting for one of the days where a maker of this movie will release a lore drop and pull one of these on me 😭⬇️

[nymphsconstancy]

i actually have a lot of thoughts about rhine and why she's like that! way more than i thought i did. see under the cut for a lot of soundboarding/internal theorising:

explanation 1: rhinedottir's like that because of abyssal corrosion. we know from the little witch description that she has "precious little lucid time," which i'm personally taking to mean that she experiences something like the 'living hallucinations' we see in natlan's interlude chapter. unfortunately, i don't think this holds up as well - from what i remember, they were described as fairly permanent, where rhine seems to be fairly back-and-forth? so it could go either way on this one.

explanation 2 (sort of joking, sort of not): little witch vol 3 is an allegory for either rhine herself or for her kids. rhine's experiencing the "dissonance in self-perception and self-dissociation" that the mold demon king is. her 'truth of the world' is something like the mold's questions about senses of self, and in rhine's case she's more like. who can 'i' be when the world itself is illusory? i'm leaning pretty heavily on simulanka for this one, and i'd otherwise discard it, but tomorrow we're getting hexenzirkel information and little witch volume 2 is set on the same day, so. you never know!

explanation 3: rhine genuinely sees nothing wrong with what she's doing. this one relies a lot on concepts of 'vision' - as in literal sight, for once - and not so much the way that rhinedottir sees the world, but the way that her children do.

albedo's an exception to the rule, but all of rhinedottir's 'children' and related creations have differences in their perceptions of the world. durin sees his destruction during the cataclysm as both a form of play and a dance with dvalin, the rifthounds want to both 'replace' the real wolves out of jealousy and to 'make names for themselves' per the wolflord description, and elynas and the melusines both have different perceptions of what makes the world 'beautiful'. i think subject 2 fits into this pattern, following the same ideal as the riftwolves - replacing the ideal in the hopes of acknowledgement, or something like that?

so there's an established pattern of gold's creations having warped perceptions of the world. worth noting also is that they do not understand death, with the exception of sigewinne and elynas. in line with that, i think it would make sense if rhine herself also saw the world differently, and instead of the cold rhinedottir who taught albedo and the colder rhine who discarded all of her earlier creations, it was all just one version of her, who saw cause but not consequence, who like her creations did not understand that she brought death with her actions? a lot of this is more inference than anything, but it's the theory i'm most fond of

I'm thinking about Rhinedottir again, I find it so hard to place her motives and personality. She is one of the five sinners, has created many monsters and even abandoned her creation. Albedo describes her as cold and strict yet cares deeply about her and Rhinedottir spoke very lovingly of Albedo as her only child. She is also a dear friend to Alice and at least an ally to Barbatos. The latter is especially interesting considering how much her creations has caused trouble for Mondstadt. I like the conflicting dynamics and reputations she has but I wonder how things have played out. Hopefully in this patch we'll be able to get more answers.

[hauntingblue]

ENIES LOBBY TIME!!!

Sanji's face here.... he Knows he is going to fuck him up

THAT IS SANJI??? 😨

Holding them in my hands again....

Sanji struck a nerve there akdjaoajkq

Increible trio btw.... look at the evidence

............ me next please 🙏🏻

That is love right there I can see it

What if we all killed ourselves (except usopp is telling her the opposite ajahkdhsakjd)

I need sanji to go insane like this more often.... after the timeskip it doesn't happen as much and I love to see him suffering

This is so funny.... there is no denying to her face card

"It's not like she actually wants to die" well yes she does, but no because you know she doesn't really. It is in a quantum state right now

Luffy is such a menace akdhaksjkaak

TELL EM!!!! THAT'S MY GIRL!!!!

Look at franky worrying about robin.... do not fret luffy is coming and he will NOT lose!!!!!

This is zoro remarking how usopps fear of being left behind makes no sense.... this is so good.....

This is so endearing but it also breaks my heart....

Who is that sultry binch... (I don't recall this attack AT ALL and i'm sure we never see it again)

They botched his bbl.... 😔😔😔

Luffy's face here... he was convinced she wanted to go with them but was compelled to do otherwise but no.... he thought wrong and he can't fight to her.... I've just been staring at this page for minutes like damn.

Nevermind.... this is something your mother would say "you want to die??? Just wash the dishes and you can do whatever you want later"

"If you wanna die, or whatever...." this is so good like he knows what he is doing.... he Knows.... look at her face. After knowing how luffy and ace were as kids this just makes more sense (oda didn't think about this i'm sure but damn does it fit) also the slight manipulation.... look at all of us we're already here and look how we all miss you already... you know that post about luffy being selfish but his selfishness is jusg kindness to others... yesh

Thinking about robin's cinderella lifestyle.... why did her mother leave her with that aunt and why didn't some archeologist take her in?? Because she doesn't complain about anything just like she doesn't respond when that mother accused her of hitting her child without reason... that's so fucked

Alright this is funny (and also true)... I'm sorry fellow women....

*Justin Bieber voice* I like your laugh... dereishi shishishi

SHE'S GONNA ASK HER MOM TO TAKE HER TO THE SEA WITH HER??? LIKE SHE DOES AFTER WITH LUFFY??? MY GOD!!! I just bursted into tears like I got punched in the nose I can't keep going ajdhakajk

I lied i can keep going... but head in my hands over this....

Find out how my emotional stability survives this arc in ennies lobby part 2. coming soon

[aliceramblez]

Telemachus x Goddess of Joy!Reader (HCs)

pairing: epic!Telemachus x fem!reader

tags: fluff, childhood friends to lovers, telemachus is a dork, athena ships it, flower language, and some lore for the actual goddess of joy

artwork by Gigi on YouTube!

It all happens one day when you're still very young.

After a particularly stressful day working alongside your sisters to please Lady Aphrodite, you can't handle the pressure anymore, so you travel to the island of Ithaca to clear your head.

It doesn't register in your brain that you've been crying until you hear a boy's voice calling out to you asking if you're alright. It's a mortal, obviously—a boy who appears to be your age, at least physically.

“Why are you crying?���

“I... I'm tired of trying to make others happy. I just want to be the sad one for once.”

You know you aren't supposed to mingle with mortals, so you keep your responses vague in hopes of satisfying his curiosity while not giving too much away.

But it wasn't like you were lying—as Goddess of Joy, you are expected to bring happiness to the hearts of everyone around you—Aphrodite included—, and it can sometimes take a heavy toll, especially since you haven't been using your powers as long as other Gods have.

The boy stares at you for a moment before running off somewhere in the field of flowers you've been sitting in, only to come back with both a small puppy and a pink peony in hand. He hands you the flower with a smile.

“My mommy says it's okay to be sad sometimes, so don't beat yourself up over it. I think this one would look pretty on you, though!”

You take the flower, give it a look over, and then turn back to the boy with a smile of your own. That's when the puppy leaps on top of you and starts slobbering you with kisses, much to the boy's dismay but your delight.

Since then, you decide to pay Ithaca visits more frequently whenever you aren't busy, successfully meeting up with the boy again and again to play.

You finally learn who he is—Telemachus. The prince of the land and son of Odysseus, progidy of Athena. Whenever he talks to you about his father, you can see the pain in his eyes of having to be sitting around waiting for a man who may never return. You decide to use your powers once in a while to help cheer him up.

It isn't until his thirteenth birthday that he finds out who you are.

“You're a Goddess, aren't you?”

It catches you by surprise, but it's not unexpected. Telemachus is smart, so it wasn't like he wouldn't find out eventually. After revealing your true self, all he does is sit down and listen, just like he did when you met all those years ago.

“I'm sorry I never told you. I... I liked being your friend without the pressure of a title between us. I didn't want you to treat me any differently.”

Telemachus doesn't do anything other than pick up a flower from the field you're both sitting in. A purple orchid which he tucks behind your ear with a smile, making you stare in awe.

“Goddess or not, you're still my best friend! I'd think you'd know me better than that by now.”

“Haha, I do... what even gave it away?”

“You're always showing up outta nowhere and people seem much happier whenever you're around, but like, in a super quick way! Besides, there's no way someone so pretty isn't a goddess...”

It's immediately clear that last part wasn't meant to come out because pink is now covering Telemachus' cheeks, causing you to flush as well.

More years go by and you begin to share stories with him about the Gods in Olympus—how Zeus is a womanizer, Poseidon looking scary but actually being a secret softie, and of course all the beef you have with your ‘boss’, Aphrodite.

He's always so eager to listen to whatever you have to say because of his dream of becoming a noble warrior, and will also comfort you whenever you're in a bad mood.

You try doing the same when more years pass and there's still no sign of his father. You offer to use your magic to help, but he says all he needs is a friend willing to listen, so that's what you become.

Whenever the suitors are giving him a hard time, you use your powers to make them be as sickeningly sweet with one another as possible, that it sometimes looks like they're in love. You and Telemachus get a crack out of it every time.

It's you who goes to find Athena when Telemachus is fighting Antinous, begging her to come help because there's really nothing you can do on the matter. She really doesn't need much persuading, though.

You can only thank the Gods that he's fine all things considered, but seeing him all battered up with cuts and bruises all over his body breaks your heart. You're immediately by his side with a washcloth and fresh clothes so that the wounds don't get infected despite his protests.

“I-I'm fine, really! Ow!”

“You will be fine once you stop moving!”

Athena chuckles in the background as you turn to her. She's giving you a knowing smirk, causing you to look away with a blush adorning your cheeks.

Once they start their training together, you're there cheering him on from the sidelines, which kinda backfires because according to Athena “we don't need any distractions”. You apparently fall under that category, and Telemachus is covering his face all the time but you swear you can see red on the tips of his ears.

Once Odysseus finally returns home, you're surprised to see Telemachus make his way to you as you're sitting in your usual spot.

He sits beside you and seems to be fiddling with something hidden in his robe. You can't see what it is from your angle.

“Aren't you going to spend time with your father?”

“He's with my mother right now. Something tells me they're going to be a while...”

“Right, I almost forgot. She must be overjoyed! But... are you okay? I saw what happened in there and...”

“Hey, I'm okay. Athena's training paid off. I'm tougher than I look, ya know?”

He then proceeds to comically flex his muscles with a wiggle of his eyebrows, causing you to laugh at this adorkable human being. You thank the Gods that you were born in the same time period as him, because now you can't think of a life without him in it.

That's when you notice the nervous fidgeting again and he's even started to advert his gaze after the little joke he pulled off. It's strange considering he's never been the shy type—when he's got something on his mind, he'll speak up no matter what.

“Are you sure you're okay, Telemachus?”

“Y-Yeah, I'm fine! I just... wanted to give you something. As a thanks for everything you've done for me.”

And before you can say anything, he's pulling out a flower from behind his back and placing it behind your ear. You can only barely register what it is before it's out of your sight: a red rose.

“You're the most amazing person I've ever met. A-And not just because you're a Goddess! You've always been there for me even when I don't ask you to, and have my back no matter what. You're just really nice, and funny and kind... I-I..”

You can't take it anymore and before your mind registers what's happening, you're already kissing him.

As you pull away, both your faces are as red as tomatoes and you can feel the smile on your face turning large and goofy. Giggles erupt from you both.

“I love you...”

“I love you, too...”

“And I love how long it took you two lovebirds to admit it.”

Athena's owl is gazing at you both and it almost sounds as it's chuckling while you two hide your faces in each other's shoulders.

Coming to Ithaca was the best decision you could've ever taken.

[demie90s]

Memories Back Then

MASTERLIST | MORE | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4

Summary: Back on stream, this time in a hotel room, your back to pretending you’re just vibing—scrolling TikToks, lowkey lurking.

Genre: WLW, comedy, team chaos, livestream hotel edition, menace x calm energy, behind-the-scenes lesbian lore

Warnings: Unhinged sexual comments, lesbian delusion (earned), adult language, exaggerated storytelling, mild simping, playful lies, deep emotional lock-in

Word Count ~ 0.8k

The camera flicks on, this time in a slightly dim hotel room. Curtains drawn halfway, lights soft and yellow, T stretched on the bed with her hair half done and hoodie halfway on, and Court setting up the stream like she ain’t already three devices in.

“Okay we live,” Court says, balancing her laptop on a suitcase like she was built for this.

T’s already leaned back, one sock on, twisting a Capri Sun straw in her mouth. I wasn’t even assigned this room. But I’m here. Laid up against the headboard. Hoodie on. One leg tucked under me. Scrolling my phone and laughing to myself like something funny even happened.

Court glances over. “How you even get in here?”

I glance up. “Prayer. Manifestation. Hotel key I stole out her bag.” T don’t even look up. “Sounds about right.”

“This feels like a throuple I’m not in 😭”

“Y’all travel like a package deal huh”

“WHY IS SHE ALWAYS JUST THERE”

“She really said ‘you thought you got away’”

“SHE be chillin like she the background love interest in a CW show”

We chop it up. T eating as usual. I’m in a good mood. Until Court brings up practice.

“Yo, remember when y’all had mics on last week? I ain’t hear one word from you,” she says, looking at me.

That’s when I sit up. Blank face. “Bro. No. Don’t get me started.” T already giggling. She know what’s coming.

“They don’t mic me up,” I start, crossing my arms, “because apparently I say ‘outta pocket’ shit. Which is crazy to me. Crazy.”

Court shrugs. “You do.”

“No, no, no, cause what is ‘unhinged’ really? Like, context matters.”

T speaks without looking up. “You said you wanted to fuse me into your bloodstream.”

Court nearly chokes. “You said WHAT?”

“I sure did. Still do. And said it with confidence.”

“No bc I believe she be saying straight FILTH”

“She said ‘I’m not the problem’ and then admitted to it 2 sec later”

“Mic her up IMMEDIATELY”

“This is the content we need”

“Oh she in love frl. Fusion is wild”

“And they be cutting my quotes!” I keep going, like I’m testifying in court. “One time they recorded me sayin ‘honestly, I’d let her hit from the back’ and just… never aired it. Like why record it if you don’t want the truth?”

T’s laughing now, that quiet giggle she does when she’s tryna keep it together. Court is wheezing.

I shrug. “I’m literally on a team with my wife. What do you expect?”

Dead silence. Court turns. “Wait—hold up.” T just smiles at me, real calm. I nod once, like it’s nothing.

“Nah they really married cause only a wife would say some nasty shit mid drive to the basket”

“I wanna be mic’d up with my girl 😭”

“NO DETAILS JUST A NOD????”

“MARRIED???”

But we keep it pushin like we ain’t just soft launched a whole marriage on Twitch.

Then someone in chat asks, “How did y’all even meet?”

Court reads it out loud. I grin. T gives me a look like, “don’t start.” Too late.

“I pulled her freshman year,” I say, stretching a little. “Real smooth too. We was at some student mixer—music, snacks, hella people. She walked by, lookin like trouble with a basketball under her arm and a baby face, and I turned to my friend like…”

I pause. Dramatic. Then repeat it, louder.

“‘I hear something purring. And ion see no animals.’”

Court SCREAMS. “WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN.”

“She laughed!” I protest. “That was the first thing I ever said to her and she laughed. Still married me.”

T covers her face. “I should’ve run.”

“No cause she pulled a WHOLE WIFE with that line 😭😭😭”

“I’m using that”

“This is why y’all not allowed on live unsupervised”

“She 28 now,” I say, glancing at her. “I’m 27. We been in this for damn near a decade. This ain’t new.”

Court’s mouth wide open. “Y’all got HISTORY???”

I shrug again, smiling. “Like I said… wife.”

And then I see it.A TikTok edit. Of her mid-game. Hair bouncing, jersey tight, camera zooming in like it know she fine.

I turn my phone to show Court. “Y’all seen this?”

“Oh yeah,” Court nods. “That one went viral. Like 200K.”

I smirk, already typing.

“And the crowd is moving their phone… to the left hand.”

T blushes immediately. “You petty.”

Court howling. “No. No. Y’all are too much. I’m tellin you right now—next stream y’all get a time limit.”

We chill after that. Talking about old teammates. Weird hotel beds. T pulls her hoodie over her head again and slides down the pillows while I’m still leaned up against the headboard scrolling.

And then—without even looking—she leans over and kisses my cheek. Real soft. Nothing wild. Just enough to quiet me for a second. I glance over. Blink once.

“Oh… okay.”

She looks up like it’s no big deal. “You look…ight.” Court goes quiet. I double back cause “ight”?

I lean back, disappointed. “Aight. Moment gone. I tried.”

Court laughing again, typing something on her phone. T just smiling like she didn’t wreck the softness on purpose. Love and nonsense. Mic’d up and married, still acting like we just met last week.

@xxsnowxx213 @draculara-vonvamp @kcannon-1436-blog @let-zizi-yap @perksofbeingatrex @soapyonaropey @julieluvspb @non3ofurbusiness @kcannon-1436-blog

[satoruhour]

thinking of full nelson with geto right in front of a mirror while he plays your pussy and then decides to bring in his favourite vibrator and overstimulate you while praising you for taking him and the vibe so well OH MY GOD 😣😣

a/n: WOAAAHH im back ??!! this was so hot and im on my second day of my period and i am HORNY!!!!!! also technically over 2k but im lazy to make it a fic bc fics need LORE and i hardly did anything with this / tagging @na-t0 @crysugu @shotorus @slttygeto @suguruplsr ♱

warnings: non-curse au but geto still adopts miminana, feelings of insecurity from reader, soft dom! geto, fem!reader, oral (f! receiving) / cunnilingus, fingering, clit stimulation, multiple rounds, unprotected sex, use of toys (specifically a vibrator), praise, pet names, creampie / breeding kink, n*sfw under the cut

you always knew geto liked to decorate — whether it’s your room after you moved in with him or the girls’ playroom after he took them in. he knew a lot of differences between marble and parquet, or whether you guys would use a bathtub or a cubicle more. geto liked you to accompany each time he planned to upgrade the girls’ room, which turned into rooms, after mimiko complained her sister kept messing up her books and nanako only commented on how ‘mimiko’s depressing state made the whole room look like a confessional booth’.

you both laughed and kissed their foreheads after because you know they’ll make up in no time, and you know that you wouldn’t have this life any other way — geto, a high-school sweetheart who’s now a teacher, taking care of your girls who you both took in willingly at a young age.

but you’ve always wondered why he liked having mirrors on his ceiling — whether it was his questionable design tastes or whether it was a dare from satoru, you never understood why he’d want to have him staring back at himself whenever he woke up or went to sleep. you should’ve known geto would want to use it for this.

“su—” your eyes are scrunched close, not bearing to look at your nude body from above you. he swore it was everything he ever loved, from your pretty tits to the way you stomach heaves at his hands and it was perfect timing for him to make you appreciate yourself in all your glory as he eats you out—

“aht, no, baby,” his tongue on your clit halts, your hole clenching around his fingers for more stimulation again, “eyes up at yourself.”

“but . .” you prop yourself up on your elbows and pout down at him and you think the mirror should be used for your lover instead; hair tousled, fringe falling all over his face, bottom half of his face soaked with your cum, the smile he gives you makes you clench again and his smile is so teasing you feel embarrassed again.

“but what, baby?” geto moves his fingers slowly, pumping them into you as they reach deep in you and your argument fades from your mind and lips, words descending into moans as your hips move against him. “weren’t you the one telling yourself you weren’t beautiful?”

he doesn’t wait for your answer, latching his mouth back on your puffy clit and sucks and sucks, loving the way you lose all strength and fall back onto your upper back. your whines reverberate throughout the room, one hand tangled in suguru’s long hair while the other holds onto the sheets and you feel so lightheaded. your pussy’s squelching so much and the way he eats you out is just filthy, slobbering over your juices while his fingers stretch you out.

“mhm— sweet fuckin’ pussy,” he moans into your cunt, feeling the bed move beneath you and you just know he’s grinding into the bed from how much he loves your pussy, “look at yourself, princess.”

“i— i am,” you whine softly, looking at your body writhe under geto and your mouth opened in sensuality. you’re still on the fence about it, “i am.”

geto hums into your folds, eyes closing once knowing you were obeying him, continuing his assault on you with a relentless tongue and even faster fingers. by now you can feel yourself getting close, as with geto since he knows your body so well that praises fall from his lips and you only tug harder on his hair.

“close?” it’s quick, the question, because he can never get enough of you and your sweetness and just has to get back to it right away, cracking open an eye just for a moment to see your pleading eyes. he knew you’d be looking at him, a cute little pout on your face and big doe eyes, begging.

“y—yeah, suguru . .” you mumble, other hand finding his hair, too, before grinding your hips into his mouth. a distorted moan leaves your lips when you feel him curl his fingers in you, eyes rolling to the back of your head as you struggle to get a grip on reality. “f-fuck, su— w’nna cum, pleasepleaseplease!”

“gettin’ to it,” he’s mumbling now, words muffled by your pussy as his tongue and fingers increases in speed, the noises of your cum adding so much to the experience that you’re endlessly whimpering, mantras of his name added to the echo of the room, “cum for me, baby, you can do it.”

“fuuuck, suguru—” your moans reach the heavens, mind spiralling with the way geto was making you feel. his jaw hurts, your legs tremble, your head spins and you’re cumming into his hands, reflections of your pleasure reflected back at you from above. your back arches off the bed as you coat his fingers with your juices, tongue licking and flicking your clit through the mind-blowing orgasm, and all your boyfriend does is smile at your sensitive state once you come down.

“noisy little girl,” he teases, pressing a kiss to your inner thigh.

you frown in faux sadness, “’cause of you.”

geto only hums, trailing up your body and catching you in his embrace, easily helping you atop him. from there his head pokes out from behind your head and you give a small smile through the ceiling mirrors.

“hi.” you say softly, shy at how exposed your body was and how shameless he seemed to love it.

“hi, baby.” your chest still breathes hard, body heating up from the way geto treats you, “you still think you’re unattractive?”

it was a trick question; it was the thing that got you here in the first place, or even the first thing that inspired geto to install mirrors — and you’re confident you’re in for a long ride no matter what your answer may be. but the one thing you both established was to always be honest, and you’re not too fond of yourself today. you’d take your chances and lie, but geto would see right through your lies, hesitance and flustered demeanour and all that.

“a little, su—” you frown at him through the mirror, and you find that what they say is true. saying it is equal to internalising it and you find now that your body looks a little weird and your hair frames your face in an unnatural way; geto stops your thoughts from worsening almost immediately.

“look at me,” you think he’s referring to his reflection but he turns your head towards him easily with a small chuckle, “no, the real me.”

“you’re the prettiest little sweetheart i’ve laid my eyes upon, ever.”

you blow a raspberry, “you’re lying.”

“i’m not!” geto laughs again, letting you turn your upper body toward him, “being as truthful as a boys’ scout, cross my heart.”

you hum, letting your boyfriend take you into a sweet, slow kiss to calm you down. before long you can already feel his pulsing bulge below you, begging to be let out of his constraints.

“i’ll trust you.” a little grin shows on his face at your words, pressing one last kiss to your turning face and looking at you through the mirror.

“i want you to.” he mumbles, distracting you with feather-like kisses on your neck as he uses his hands to pull down his underwear. he lifts both his hips and you easily, strong like that before you feel the slap of his cock along your legs and a soft apology. “i want you to trust me with every fibre of your being when i tell you you’re the one i want for the rest of my life, when i tell you you’re the most stunning. do you trust me?”

“i trust you, suguru,” you swallow when you feel him drag your tip along your folds, collecting your slick with mouth opening in a silent moan. geto takes that opportunity to crash his lips into yours, nudging his tip just past your tight pussy and you just need to do something, clutch onto something, fingers tightening around his forearms.

“feel that?” suguru breathlessly asks, short breaths leaving his mouth and warming your neck, “feel how your pussy was made for me?”

“y—yeah,” you mumble and whine, head tipped up against his neck before his hands naturally go under your knees, spreading you so he’d go deeper, “s’full . .”

inch by inch, he eases his cock in you, so wet that he doesn’t need to prep you again and he groans continually at your walls snugly hugging him, “i know you know the feeling, baby, but now i want you to look.”

you reluctantly turn your head from the safeness of his neck, looking towards your reflection and then where you two was connected, to his cock buried deep in you. he‘s not even fully in, finding that he was staring at you from below you.

“prettiest girl with the prettiest cunt, hm?” his talk is dirty always, letting his hips grind into yours from below. geto likes dirty, just as he brings your legs closer and closer to your chest and hears you moan out his name. he looks drunk off your pussy, hooded lids and parted lips and all, whispering, “i hope you know that.”

your lover doesn’t give you time to breathe, making your jaw drop open when he thrusts up into you from below and loving the way your eyes widen in your reflection. geto does not know where to stare more: your pussy sucking him in so well or your expressions, switching between the both as he makes you sob and cry on his cock.

“sugu— s-shit . .” you’re lightheaded already, knowing he‘d want you to keep your eyes locked on the mirror as you get fucked senseless, cock driving into you so violently with every snap of his hips. they set an animalistic pace, spurts of your cum spraying everywhere.

“doing so well,” he swears under his breath, before he’s pulling your legs towards him even more, “bend a little more for me— yesss . . that’s it, sweetheart.”

your mewls reach an all time high once he’s got one hand secured on your nape, pulling you into a full nelson that your head even struggles to look at your connected bodies in the mirror, but you can just almost see your face morphed into pleasure: tongue out and cunt so pliant for your boyfriend, until you’re spotting geto’s other hand moving to your clit. he knows you’re close already, driven to the brink of sensitivity once he rubs at your bundle of nerves, and your right thigh starts to shake.

“clenching around me s’hard i can hardly move, f-fuck—” he laughs softly, hips still pistoning in you, hand rubbing violently along your clit over and over and—

“suguru— cum— cumming, cumming—!” you clench the hardest you’ve ever done, orgasm hitting you like a freight train until you’re shivering in his hold, neck hurting from being in full nelson but your boyfriend doesn’t stop his thrusts, not when you’re moaning so nicely for him. your mind’s blank except for suguru, countless whines of his name escaping your lips.

“there we go . .” he hums, focused on your pussy twitching as he rubs you through your orgasm where your entrances stretches to accommodate his fat cock — all he does is give you a little of a break and slows down, releasing you from the position briefly. until you can hear the drag of the bedside drawer; with his hands he takes out a vibrator, the one thing you simultaneously love and hate.

you know with how much you beg with your eyes, geto will still eventually use it on you, but you’re always tempted by his words.

“i’ll be gentle, i promise.” “just relax, baby.” “i’ll try not to overstim you.” he’s said all these before with a sly grin and you know he just can’t control himself when it comes to you.

“hold your legs for me, my darling.” he whispers and you obey his rasp, exchanging glances through the mirror when he starts it up and the buzz gives you an initial shock — geto laughs, you pout.

“why’d you laugh,” you huff, momentarily forgetting he has his whole cock in you.

with one arm, he wraps it around your middle while the other just presses the vibrator dangerously close to your puffy, aching clit, and he starts his hips again, bullying his throbbing dick into you with little effort.

“su . . do we really gotta?”

“’course,” geto grins, pressing a kiss to your neck, “wanna see you absolutely ruined because of me.”

“yeah, but you can do it without the vibe.”

your boyfriend only hums, “nah.”

geto liked teasing, way too much, giving you a brief warning of keeping your legs spread for him before he slams into you, hand pressing the vibrator into you and you sob out his name. the fast buzz of the toy has you squirming around on his front, arms already losing the strength to hold your legs up.

“suguru—!” you’re moaning loudly, your cum making the scene even more lewd with how wet you were. “s-sensiti—”

you can feel him grin into your neck, pressing the strong vibrator deeper into your clit which is starting to turn numb, mind muddled with the thickness of his length stretching and spreading you. every slap of his balls upon your ass is noisy and loud but your moans are even louder.

“sloppy fuckin’ pussy,” he rasps out, eyes trained on the way you limply hold up your legs like a good girl and let him use you like a ragdoll, “so goddamn wet for me.”

geto increases the speed of the vibrator and you jolt in surprise, mouth dropping open in surprise. he smiles at you through the mirror, admiring your body on display as you take him well time and time again, so satisfied with his investment in mirrors on the ceiling.

“cream on my cock, baby,” geto mumbles into your ear and you whine, fingernails digging into your own skin they might as well bruise and create marks, but you need suguru in some way — you let go one of your legs, blindly finding his fingers with yours and twining them.

“c’mon, c’mon, i’ve got you,” he reassures you from below, creating hickeys in the safety of your neck while his hips do the sinful opposite, thrusting into you in an unforgiving speed. “want to feel you cum all over me, pretty girl.”

the praise is through the roof, making you writhe in his hold just to get away from the ruthlessness of the toy and his dick, too sensitive from all the sensations. but you love it all the more, wanting to do everything geto says just so you’d hear your name from his lips over and over.

“i’m cumming— haaah . . ” you’re jerking in his hold, “su— su, i’m c—” but you’re already orgasming, legs not even able to be held up that you let go of them so they can freely tremble and you can squeeze your eyes shut. you’re clamping down so hard around suguru that he has to moan too, holding one leg for you while the vibrator still goes on, sending you into overstimulation quickly. “suguruuu . .”

little short pants leave you, rendered utterly speechless as you ride out your orgasm, although your boyfriend doesn’t stop. his thrusts turn sloppy, now, hips fatigued and brain turned to mush by your gummy walls.

“cumming— g’nna give you a big load, baby—” geto grunts out, tossing the vibrator to the side and grabbing both your legs to fold you deeper, tip brushing up against your sweet spot that you whine lewdly again, and that’s all it takes before he’s shooting his cum deep in you, painting your insides white. it’s so hot and heavy, paired with the deepness of his voice rumbling beside your ear that it makes you moan softly, feeling fuller and fuller by the second. “oh . . fuuuck—”

“t-take me so well, don’t you?” suguru murmurs, purposely propping his hips a little higher, “watch my cum drip out of you.”

he was disgusting, and yet you turn your eyes towards the mirrors, hearing and seeing the soft shlick! that sounds out when he removes his cock before white spills out and you bite your lip at the sight.

“she likes to be bred, huh?” you hum softly at the question, drunken expression taken in by the other as he also gives you a slightly tipsy smile.

“shut up— shit’s embarrassing.”

geto grabs your chin, squishing your cheeks together and whispering against your lips, “then i’ll fuck you full of my cum until it’s not, until you know you’re the most beautiful in my eyes, yeah?”

yeah, you could do that.

[ryuu242]

[Ryōshū stuff: again]

Question. Find the similarity between the moment when your mother goes to the parents’ meeting and, on her way home, tells you, “I need to talk to you,” leaving you gnawed by fear like a dog on a bone for those 30 minutes while she’s still out.

And. The scene of a sinner realizing it’s next on the platter—while it’s still lying on that very dish.

Whatever your answer, you can keep it to yourself or drop a comment below. But for now, welcome to the show: “I Play the Analysis Game: The Lore Pieces of Ryōshū Released in Canto 8, Part 1.”

(If any of the theories here are wrong, the worst would just me being wrong… and you still get something fun to read.)

[for this part i have to read on both JP and EN TL of the game to make sure they aren't too different, or else i will more fond on JP TL]

「蜘蛛の巣は恋しいか？まあ恋しいわけあらへんよな。俺っちも行くたびに気ぃ悪くなるし。」 “You miss the Spider’s Nest? Nah, course not. I'd sick by just visiting that damn place.” Spider’s Nest / Kumo no Su / 蜘蛛の巣 — For some reason, the English version chose to render this as “Spider’s House”, which gives off orphanage vibes. Like we’re about to meet a gaggle of mini Ryōshū living inside wwwww (insert spider dance BGM)

Anyway, we can temporarily refer to the Spider’s Nest as Ryōshū’s “home.” A not-so-safe one. In fact, it’s so messed up that even a Capo from the Thumb admits the place makes him feel sick.

“Heebie-jeebies” is a term used to describe a mix of anxiety, fear, unease, or nausea.

and 悪くなる (wakunaru) means "to feel worse / to become unwell," which is why I went with "feel sick"

「あとでまた顔でも見せやぁ。あんときみたいに、もういっぺん刀の握り方ちゃんと教えたるさかい。」 “Swing by later, yeah? I’ll teach you again how to properly hold a sword—just like the old days.”

「いんやぁ、そんでも・・・あんなかじゃ俺っちが一番格好よく斬る方法を教えてやったやろ？」 “Wait, didn’t I already show you the slickest way to slash someone back then?”

We’ll set aside how effective his “training” was (and whether he’s the one who got her into smoking). But out of everyone present, Lei Heng is the only one genuinely happy to see Ryōshū again—so happy, in fact, that he went easy on someone just because she showed up.

Now, remember: in a syndicate like the Thumb, where hierarchy and protocol are law, talking to a superior without permission is a massive deal. Just a few examples from Library of Ruina:

"When a subordinate dares to speak without a superior’s permission—cut off his lower jaw.” – Dennis

Katriel asked Dennis to cut out her tongue for upsetting Angela.

A Kurokumo clan head lost an arm (mercifully, thanks to sottocapo Kalo) just for apologizing on behalf of an unruly subordinate and asking a question out of turn.

So when Lei Heng only took one arm from Nangong Xianhe's young master, that was him being “merciful.” And that was after said young master’s servant got his hand shot off and tongue removed for stepping out of line just because "seein' a friendly face put me in a good mood."

Even looking at a superior could bring consequences, as Faust gently reminded Ryōshū. Yet Ryōshū made eye contact with Lei Heng—and Lei Heng jokingly called her out for not even saying hi:

「お〜い！目ぇ合ったやろ、挨拶でもしろや！」 “Oi! Our eyes met, didn’t they? Least you could do is say hello!”

This interaction leaves us with two main theories:

Lei Heng wasn’t a capo yet when he trained Ryōshū—or maybe he hadn’t joined the Thumb at that time. Now, their ranks have reversed.

He was already a Capo, but something happened—possibly Ryōshū joining Limbus Company—that significantly lowered her usual standard (or her power).

One of those must be true. Because otherwise, we’d be witnessing a full-on verbal beatdown from our temperamental artist, not some playful prodding from a capo to a muzzled mutt. This isn’t a true “conversation” anyway—it’s completely one-sided, thanks to the Thumb's law: don’t speak unless spoken to.

Then again, maybe Ryōshū just doesn’t want to talk to Lei Heng, or the power imbalance has always existed between them. But hey—you didn’t click on this post just for lukewarm takes, did you?

Another detail: Faust reminds Ryōshū of a promise she made before joining the company, which remind us that moment in Canto III when Vergilius reminded Don Quixote of their deal on the fateful day of her recruitment. It’s subtle, but may imply Faust personally recruited Ryōshū, just like she did with Yi Sang.

Moving on, this next line hints at something foreboding: one day, Ryōshū may be taken back.

「肩の力抜きぃや。お前さんを連れに来たわけやないし、あんときみたいに、なんか教えに来たわけでもないさかい。」 “Relax your shoulders. I didn’t come here to drag you back. And I’m not here to teach you a lesson like last time either.”

(“Teach a lesson” — in this context — also implies beating someone up. Classic Asian parenting energy.)

Most people hate getting smacked around, but in Ryōshū’s case—someone who practically breakdances along the boundary of sadomasochism—it’s a bit more... layered. If Lei Heng thinks that’s what sets her on edge, then it must have been that bad.

His surprise at not knowing Ryōshū had disappeared might suggest:

Ryōshū ran away. The Spider’s Nest didn’t like that and may have sent people after her.

Lei Heng, who only visits the Nest occasionally, isn’t really interested in dragging her back—and doesn’t feel like wasting his breath on her either.

His tone implies Ryōshū is fully aware she’s on borrowed time—that someone might come collect her—and she clearly doesn’t like that. Nor does she like Lei Heng, considering the entire “conversation” is him monologuing while her only line is yelling at Faust to shut up.

(Spoiler: Faust didn’t shut up. And frankly? We should be grateful she didn’t.)

「オメェのガキ、 まだあの家におるやろ。ちゃうか?」 "That brat of yours is still in that house, right? Or not?"

The word "ガキ" or "brat" in English is usually used for a boy or a rowdy, misbehaving child. That’s why I’m bringing this word to the dissection table—because it typically implies two things:

The child in question might be a boy.

The child might be really bratty, just like their parent.

It immediately feels wrong if we think of this “gaki” as Yoshihide’s pitiful daughter. Because clearly the tone and nuance of this word do not match the way the work builds the image of that girl. Now, Yoshihide’s daughter clearly isn’t described that way, but her pet monkey? That does suit the word perfectly.

"Each time he came to the Lord’s palace, he wore a clove-dyed hunting garment and a floppy eboshi on his head, but he had a vulgar appearance and his lips, too red for his age, had an unsettling bestial quality. I do not know for sure the cause of this red colour. Some said he had the habit of licking his paintbrush. Others, more slanderous, compared his appearance and gait to those of a monkey and nicknamed him Saruhide"

それが大殿様の御邸へ参ります時には、よく丁字染の狩衣に揉烏帽子をかけて居りましたが、人がらは至つて卑しい方で、何故か年よりらしくもなく、唇の目立つて赤いのが、その上に又気味の悪い、如何にも獣めいた心もちを起させたものでございます。中にはあれは画筆を舐めるので紅がつくのだなどゝ申した人も居りましたが、尤もそれより口の悪い誰彼は良秀の立居振舞が猿のやうだとか申しまして、猿秀と云ふ諢名までつけた事がございました。

--------------------------------------------

"The Prince, the Lord’s young son, who was at the time in the age of mischievousness, named the monkey Yoshihide. The monkey’s gestures were amusing indeed, and everyone in the palace laughed at the animal. If this mockery had been all, things would not have been that bad for the monkey, but each time it climbed up the pine tree in the garden or soiled the mats in the Prince’s bedroom, everyone chased him, shouting, ‘Yoshihide, Yoshihide,’ to tease the poor beast."

すると何かの折に、丹波の国から人馴れた猿を一匹、献上したものがございまして、それに丁度戯盛　りの若殿様が、良秀云ふ名を御つけになりました。唯でさへその猿の容子が可笑しい所へ、かやうな名がついたのでございますから、御邸中誰一人笑はないものはございません。それも笑ふばかりならよろしうございますが、面白半分に皆のものが、やれ御庭の松に上つたの、やれ曹司の畳をよごしたのと、その度毎に、良秀々々と呼び立てゝは、兎に角いぢめたがるのでございます。 — Hell Screen, Chapter 2

Fusion dances between characters aren’t new now—we’ve already had Linton Edgar, who combines the features of blond, sickly Linton Heathcliff. So, the idea of Yoshihide’s daughter and her monkey being thrown into the same melting pot to create a single character isn’t that far-fetched. The personification of an animal, or the animalization of a human, is a familiar motif in Japanese literature – especially when associated with the image of hell, punishment, or karma.

Of course, it could also just be Lei Heng’s way of talking. But again, what’s the point of reading an analysis if we’re going to ignore details that might be exploitable?

「う~ん、ちゃうんか? もうおらんのか? なんかあったんかいな。 俺っちはそっちの事情はよく分からんくてな。けど、何かあったんは確かっぽいな ?」 "Hmm? I got it wrong? They’re not there anymore? Guess something happened, huh. I don’t really know what’s going on over there. But seems like something definitely went down, yeah?"

So, something did happen at the Spider’s Nest—some event that caused that “brat” of Ryōshū’s to no longer be there. It’s also very likely that this very event led to Ryōshū leaving the Spider’s Nest herself.

If Ryōshū had lost a child (or some other beloved creature that was considered a child), and that animal was a monkey, then Lei Heng's use of the word "gaki" would be both an insult and a dig at the pain.

Or perhaps the "gaki" was no longer human, but had transformed into something else – an embodiment of guilt, karma, or obsession, which Ryōshū could not shake off the past.

Lei Heng’s tone and word choice make it sound like he’s bullying a child. And honestly? It doesn’t seem like it’s the first time. Their teacher-student relationship might’ve always been this one-sided.

This is also the moment he hits Ryōshū’s nerve. She nearly drew her sword if Faust hadn’t chimed in to spare our eardrums with another 5–30 Ultra Pro Max versions of Ryōshū’s wrath.

The only thing Ryōshū seems to feel when facing Lei Heng is a mix of rage and panic (焦りと怒り). This is why have to check other TL as well and English versions—the English oddly decided to go with “anxious.”

The English translation of “anxious” is a bit soft and doesn’t capture the danger of Ryōshū losing control of her emotions. Ryōshū is like a ticking time bomb here.

Saude might’ve sent Sinclair to keep both her and Heathcliff in check, but in this case, it’s Faust who had to intervene—twice—because if Sinclair, by some miracle, tried to stop her, he’d probably end up as a seven-piece chicken nugget.

"Ryōshū-san, now is not yet the time."

Why Faust? Because she seems to be the one who’s made a direct pact with Ryōshū, and also the only one who knows everything about the sinners’ pasts. That’s why she knows exactly what to do.

Let’s be real—when someone’s got deep beef with another person over past events, and then some random third party who knows nothing tries to step in, it’s only going to backfire. Or worse—it’ll throw fuel on the fire.

「次はお前さんたちのオヤジの話でもしようやないか、ヨシヒデ!」 "Next time, let’s chat about your daddies, shall we, Yoshihide?"

Another namedrop just like in Canto 7 for both Sancho and Baoyu, but it still doesn’t take the edge off the shock from the previous line.

お前さんたちのオヤジ — "your daddies."

Yes, you heard that right — plural. Not even in my wildest dreams did I imagine she'd have more than one dad. Is this… LGBT Company?/jk

But there’s something even more noteworthy here. A lot of people interpret Ryōshū as someone in a parental role — in fact, most people do, even non-fans. But have you ever stopped to think: What if Ryōshū is also someone’s child?

— Intervallo IV: Murder on the WARP Express

— Lobotomy Red Eyes E.G.O Uptie Story

— Canto VIII episode 11

From those quotes, we can tell that Ryōshū despises — or at least deeply distrusts — controlling parents. You can picture her life being smothered by overbearing fathers forcing their ideals onto her, burying her under expectations, demanding she follow the future they envisioned.

Judging by that line from Canto VIII Episode 11, it’s possible that Ryōshū was raised to reach some high position — whether that was to become “the greatest painter under heaven” or even... a lord as i mentioned before from the word "領主" (Ryōshu) — Lord.

Speaking of that, we should talk about her name, which is a whole messy process on its own.

If you’ve followed me for long time, you know that the inspiration for “Hell Screen” (Jigokuhen) came from 絵仏師良秀 (Ebusshi Ryōshū), a character from the Uji Shūi Monogatari.

And according to official sources, Ryōshū here is based on Jigokuhen. But let’s be honest — she’s not just from Jigokuhen, right? All three characters — Ebusshi Ryōshū, Yoshihide, and Ryōshū — share the same kanji for their name: 良秀 (Ryōshū / Yoshihide).

Originally, in Uji Shūi Monogatari, 良秀 was read as Ryōshū. Later, Akutagawa came along and read it as Yoshihide. And now, with the release of this Canto, it loops back again — Ryōshū becomes Yoshihide once more.

Anyway, I’m not trying to play ship-theory here, but if we’re talking about who’s the worse father, Ebusshi Ryōshū is way worse than Yoshihide.

I mean, look at it this way — one dad abandons his wife and child in a burning building and watches it like it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, totally unmoved. The other dad suffers seeing his daughter burn, only to suddenly light up with joy a few seconds later like she hadn’t just turned into a charcoal brisket.

One’s bad. The other’s horrifically bad. So between “a bad dad” and “a worse dad,” they’re both still bad dads.

With all that in mind, we can tentatively guess that Ryōshū’s “daddies” — the ones Lei Heng referred to — include none other than Ebusshi Ryōshū, since at this point, the only person who out-awfuls Yoshihide is him.

And based on Lei Heng’s promise to “chat about them next time,” I fear we’ll be seeing more of these dads again. Which means we’ll be back with Lore Dissection: Part 2.

[acid-ixx]

Ellooo! I've been a huge fan of your batfam fanfics, was a silent reader til now cuz I wanted to show my appreciation for it by making some fanart of my reader ver in Halloween costume as mabel pines from gravity falls and a reason on why I chose as such! Sorry if this turns out as a long yap session and again love your works! Also warning for spoilers on adventure time if you or other ppl are not that far into it yet or planning to watch!

Okay so my reason for choosig mabel pines is because since this is child reader, i'd like to think she connects with mabel in a more emotional way. (Yes I also see child reader connecting with dipper but we'll talk about that later.) I'd like to think child reader would pick mabel when they still had some hope for getting some attention and once they slowly lost it or was trying to gain some sort of attention from their family is where they'll see how they can also connect a bit more with dipper pines with how dipper tries to get some recognition and appreciation in the show.

I'd like to also think that my ver of child reader rlly likes cartoons like me since I found comfort in them before and now. Other than that, I also like to think that child reader would sometimes go look at some episodes and stare longily at caring, loving or literally any cartoon family that gave off that the parent figure cared for said child character like with Grunkle Stan and the twins or maybe Simon/Ice King with Marceline.

So let's say childs reader is watching a cartoon, whether it's gravity falls, bluey, or maybe adventure time and child reader would to think 'How can a con man (Grunkle Stan) or a broken/insane person (Ice King/Simon) be a better father than mine?'

I dunno I just see it as a possible thing to happen and again I love your works! I can't wait to see more in the future! Also again so sorrry that this lowkey turned into a yap session for me, the idea has been in my head for a while 😓

— masterlist !

holy shit, this is so adorable and the brush strokes up close are so delicious to look at!!! <333 my one artist friend irl pointed out how there's no sparkle in the eyes and i'm like "what if it's intentional because they're traumatized very early on as a child" and they told me it makes a lot of sense and helps with lore development so i abide by that concept now hehe.

and on god, you fanartists are like the backbones of my series because i kid you not, all your personal designs and headcanons of how the reader is slowly becoming canon. and i agree with you, the reader would probably be used to connect with mabel more back when they still had that childlike spark in their eyes— and she'll probably be their favorite twin back when they used to watch cartoons with their mom through the shabby, static screen of their television. and they'll probably cling onto her enthusiasm and charm until it very much gets destroyed and then suddenly you find dipper more favorable—

all because with just how much your rambles about mabel get ignored, with just how much people, like dick, would break his promise of watching the show with you. the only person available would be alfred, and watching shows with him, no matter how short the time allotted may be, or even if you watch it with him well past the hours of midnight, will probably contribute to how much you compare him with the guardian figures in all the cartoon shows you used to watch.

which brings me to one point:

just imagine your family's envy with just how much you associate alfred with positive characters. how often you idolize characters like simon from adventure time, often comparing him to bruce, pointing out all the details on how despite his relationship with marceline turning strained, there will always be a semblance of familial love between them whilst with bruce there's not.

which brings me to another point:

the jealousy that comes to fictional siblings, specifically raggedy anne and andy, my favorite animated movie where one song (candy hearts and paper flowers) caused me to sob a lot. just imagine the absolute yearning you'd have for someone as affectionate as andy was to anne— imagining those soft moments where it would be dick who holds your head close to his heart, or how you'd share moments with jason where it's him who'll fight the monsters away.

all fantasized back when you were a child.

but because i don't want to end this in a negative light, just imagine conner and you on a date night instead, where he helps you discover and embrace the inner childish version of you, watching those shows together clinging onto his jacket and singing along the musical numbers. he'd be a very supportive boyfriend, who also never really grew up, so your lack of childhood development just manifests itself in the form of bonding together, watching animations together no matter how outdated it may be now.

picture damian seething outside your apartment window, his breath fogging up the glass due to the sheer intensity of his jealousy. because it should be him who's watching those shows with you!!! conner's taking up his space, his territory, his time with his sibling: his rightful side with you!

but really, i personally (as an actual neglected child in real life) love and cling onto cartoon shows. i don't have a childhood at all, so i pretty much relive all the old shows i used to watch now as an adult honestly. tysm for sending this in! the lineart, the colors, and the variety of brushes are very crisp and clean!!!

[corrupted-ciphers]

Thought this would be a fun project to work on! I <3 weird women. My thoughts on each of the characters below the cut. Version without names added below the cut as well.

Current Favorite: I love Junebug, she's been my blorbo recently, she's really weird. I love her. As I started this project though, I also started playing ENA Dream BBQ. I've been waiting for it for four years now, and damn was it worth the wait. It's a surreal game about ENA's adventures to find the b̷̸̸̡̧͇̜͎͙͙̥̥͚̫̪̩̩̏͑ͩ̓̇ͪ̋̑ͧ̂̃͊͋͘͝͡͝ͅ_̗̖͕͉̻ͯ̍̒ͤ̊́a̢͉̺̫̙̳͓̣̗͔̙̻̔͑̿͛͛̀̽͒̂̒ţ̡̧̼͙̰̥̳̹̻̍ͫ͋̌̏ͮͣ́̔ͯ͊̇ͤͪ͐̿̉ͫͨͧḩ̷̧̡̛̞̩̹͙̱͍̯͇͉̪̫̹̭͙̭͉͚ͬͯ̄̄͗ͯ̅̐̀́ͯ̈́͂̇͆̾͂͘͘͢͠r̾̆͢_̽̆ơ̶̸̡̡̛̠̥͓͔̪̲̥̥̱͙̲̲̫̖̽̊̎̎͒͊̅̔͐̄̈́̓̈́͊ͩ̂̋͘ͅȍ̶̢̙͕͍̰͓̖͉̼ͯ͆ͮͩ̓ͭͭ͑̿́́͢͝͠m̵̧̛̗͉͔̯̦͙̟̼̲̜̫̱͊͋̀̊͊ͯͤͬ͆ͭ̽̃̄̔̋̾͞. Chapter 1 is out now and free to play on Steam right now, and I highly recommend it! Anyway, Junebug is my girl, I love her.

Comfort: Okay, I know the reception ch 4 of Poppy Playtime has been receiving. Do I think chapter 4 is scary? No. Do I think it's good? Also no. Do I think it's hilarious? Hell yes I do. We got several game breaking bugs that were honestly rather amusing, and also the devs letting you move around in Doey's monologues is honestly the funniest decision they made. You can clip into him and let him just eat your head mid talk. He'll also fling you if you stand on his limbs while he talks, it's great. We nearly got killed by him flinging us under the pipe in that one section where he gets froze. Having said all that bad stuff, I love Doey. Okay, there's a lot going on in my life right now, and he came along in the middle of that. As the older sister to three little brothers, I relate to Doey in multiple ways. He is me, he is my brothers, and I just want to give him a big hug himself. I too am trying desperately to pick up the pieces of our home life collapsing around us, while trying to keep my little brothers happy and managing my own angry outbursts. It was a (in my opinion) jankily written scene, but the bit where Doey was torn up over Safe Haven getting destroyed really got to me. It was probably tied to the emotional state I was in when I played the chapter, but damn, I get it man. I too failed to protect those around me from what I knew was inevitable but selfishly pushed to the back of my mind. Damn, I really was made to hurt things and fuck up too bud. I get it. And in a lore perspective, Doey is three little boys mashed together. I have three little brothers, need I say more about that? This character has consumed my life, and I just want to give him a hug. Although honestly his in-game model is a little oily looking tbh. Also Michael Kovach knocked it out of the park with his performance here. Also also, fuck you devs for making us squish/kill Doey in the end. If he's actually dead I'm gonna be so mad at you guys.

By Design: Look man, I like women. I like murderous women. I mean, when I first saw the original Alice, I was still a child and wasn't pan yet, but like, she likely contributed. hnnnrg, girls.

By Plot: Unlike Doey who brings me comfort when I relate to him and kicks in my material instincts towards anyone even remotely younger than me, Jupe's relation to me does not bring me comfort. Instead my connection to Jupe is more uneasy. Ricky and I both express our traumas in similar ways. That is to say monetize them and put them on display for all the entitled voyuers out there on the internet for attention. Now, I'm obviously not someone who was a victim of a chimp attack, but there's that familiar death of childhood there. I've grown up with an abusive father, which I didn't realize the extent of until this divorce is going through. And guess what my most prominent stories feature? yeah. I'm also the type of person to build a shrine to my trauma like him. While Ricky's is obviously a little more extreme, I still have my hospital bracelet from my appendectomy. That is not a normal response. I wear my first dog's tag on a chain, and when it's not worn it's next to that hospital band. Most of my stories involve my internal or external traumas in some way, just like Jupe capitalized on the exploitive movies and shows he was roped into as a child. I'm white, but I'm a woman and I'm queer. I get being the token item. Reduced to stereotypes. Forced to uphold other stereotypes in a never ending cycle of wanting to be on top, of vainly hoping that others will finally accept you into their group. But they won't. Jupe's storyline makes me viscerally uncomfortable, but my favorite part is the end. Just before Jean Jacket eats him, we see his lips twist into a smile. Faint, but there. Because finally, for the first time in his life, Ricky isn't defined by what groups he's part of, he's not vying for anyone's attention, he's not this special chosen one because he survived all those years ago, he's just like everyone else. He's merely food for that creature. And that is a freeing feeling. Finally, something has accepted him the way he is, with no fighting, no tense acceptance into a world that could throw you away at any time, he's finally safe. And for that, I think he loves Jean Jacket. Because I know, there's parts of me that wish the same. A release from the responsibility, and freakish nature of myself since I'm so different than those around me. If Doey is my comfort character, Ricky "Jupe" Park is my discomfort character. (In a good way)

Guilty Favorite: Look man, she's weird as fuck. She also saved my nightmare mode run. Again, I love weird women. Choo Choo Charles is great because it knows its lane and sticks to it. It knows it's a goofy ass train spider game, and it sure does deliver on that premise. Pickle Lady is so bizarre, I love her. I can't help but love her. Is she a good character? No. Do I like her anyway? Yeah.

All Time Favorite: DO I even need to say much about this guy? It's FNAF. It's toilet Bonnie. It's the boy. I love him. My favorite animatronic since I was like 12. Hell yeah dude, let's keep it up.

[thewadapan]

So why did Transformers One bomb?

Look, I'm just going to say it right off the bat: no, Transformers One is not the best Transformers movie of all time. I am (gritting my teeth) very happy for every single Transformers fan except me, who all seem to have liked it, and most of whom seem to have loved it. I agree that, as a production, it meets some baseline level of technical competence. It's a perfectly fine movie.

It's also the worst-performing Transformers movie Paramount has ever made.

Hopefully, now that its theatrical run has unceremoniously ended, people aren't going to try to rip me to shreds for theoretically threatening this multi-million-dollar film's box office revenue some miniscule amount by sharing a few teensy weensy complaints with my fifty followers.

Because I do just have a few little nitpicks, which I've tried my best to communicate, over the next 17,000 words of this post.

If you're not a Transformers fan, sorry, this essay is mostly written with the assumption that you've seen Transformers One. However, it might still be of some interest as a window into the current state of the franchise. I've written a basic plot summary of the movie to bring you up to speed, in that case. Because Transformers One purports to be the perfect introduction to the story, no homework needed, I've also done you the courtesy of elucidating background context as needed—think of this less as a review, and more as a history lesson, or maybe a "lore explained" YouTube video. After all, that's pretty much all that Transformers One is.

(And if farcically long posts aren't really your thing, you might prefer to listen to the special episode of Our Worlds are in Danger where my pals and I chatted about the film. Many of the hottest takes and silliest bits in this essay are shamelessly stolen from Jo and Umar.)

We've been waiting for Transformers One for a very long time. It's the first animated Transformers film to get a theatrical release since The Transformers: The Movie came out in 1986. It first entered development around a decade ago. Many fandom members I know online got to see it as far back as June. Its US premiere was in September; those of us in the UK had to wait a full extra month before seeing it, for no clear reason. This is a film which purports to show, in broad strokes, for the first time on the big screen, the origin of the Transformers: where they come from, who they are, and why they're fighting.

By the end of its runtime, Transformers One does not actually answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, it takes great pains trying to answer a lot of different, related questions—just ones which nobody was really asking in the first place: What does the word "Autobots" mean, if not "automobile robots"? What does the word "Decepticons" mean, if they're not actually deceitful? Why is he called "Optimus Prime"? Why is he called "Megatron"? If they were friends, why did they fall out? Why does Starscream sound Like That? Where does Energon come from? If "Prime" is a title, what were the other Primes like? How do Transformers transform?

Writer Eric Pearson, coming onto the project as an outsider to Transformers, describes having to go to Hasbro to ask these kinds of questions:

they had a script that outlined the story that they wanted to tell. I knew Optimus Prime and Megatron and I knew Bumblebee as well, or B. I had to ask about some of the other deeper ones, the mythology, “what exactly is the Matrix of Leadership?” Stuff like that.

See, Hasbro does in fact have the answers written down somewhere. The story as I understand it goes something like this. During the wild west of the '80s and '90s, Transformers "canon" was largely a by-the-seat-of-your-pants consensus-based affair between the freelance writers and copywriters the toy company would bring on to advertise their toys. That changed around the turn of the millennium, when late later-CEO Brian Goldner saw how Hasbro's licensed IP lines (such as Star Wars) were more financially successful and realised they could make more money by aggressively promoting their own in-house IP, which they didn't have to pay licensing fees for. (For the curious, a similar thought process at rival toy company Lego was what led to their creation of BIONICLE.)

The guy basically singlehandedly managing the Transformers brand at the time, Aaron Archer, eventually set to reconciling all the self-contradictory lore surrounding Transformers, an endeavour which dovetailed into the creation of the HasLab internal think-tank (best known for Battleship, the 2012 store-brand Michael Bay knockoff which was a failure critically and commercially but not in my heart) and ultimately the creation of the so-called "Binder of Revelation", an internal story bible which cost over $250,000 to produce and has strongly influenced nigh on every piece of Transformers media released since, but which we hadn't actually seen until it got leaked a week ago. As it turns out, the document itself (compiled mostly by marketers and toy designers) is patently useless to any writer: it's a typo-ridden internally-inconsistent wishy-washy mess that mostly describes the characters in terms of a made-up form of Transformers astrology that has otherwise never seen the light of day.

So although the Binder is the baseline story bible for most modern Transformers media, its influence isn't direct per se; it's more accurate to describe it as being an elaborate game of telephone between high-profile cartoons, comics, and other internal documents, with the Binder itself apparently just sitting in a drawer somewhere at Hasbro; Eric Pearson says that he never received a "binder", with the "script" he mentions either being the earlier draft from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (the guys who originally pitched the story), or some other unseen internal document. Director Josh Cooley, however, definitely seems to have been physically handed the Binder or its mass-market adaptation:

I knew that there was a lot of origin to be told, and when I first started, [Hasbro] gave me the Transformers Bible. I could not believe how big it was. I was like, "This is way more than I ever anticipated."

When trailers first dropped for Transformers One, a lot of my friends who are savvy were immediately like: "Oh, this is a weirdly faithful adaptation of the Binder of Revelation, huh."

I. The One True Origin of the Transformers

Half of the people reading this are Transformers fans, and half of you literally could not give less of a shit about Transformers, so if you're in the 'former group (so to speak), you'll just have to bear with me while I bring the rest of us up to speed.

Before the Transformers' civil war begins, Cybertron is being oppressed by the Quintessons. The Quintessons are a race of five-faced aliens (as in, not Transformers), who execute everyone they come across, first introduced in The Transformers: The Movie, presiding over a kangaroo court on a castaway world. In the followup cartoon five-parter "Five Faces of Darkness", writer Flint Dille established that, gasp, they were actually the original creators of the Transformers! But basically nobody else at the time was particularly compelled by this idea, it seems, with most fans preferring the more mythological origin story conceived by Bri'ish writer Simon Furman for the Marvel comics. I think people kind of just didn't like to think of the Transformers as being robots—mass-produced, a fabrication, programmed—as opposed to an alien race of thinking, feeling beings like us. But because the cartoon was important to many kids, a lot of early-2000s media tried to reconcile the cartoon and comic origin stories by stating that the Quintessons didn't actually create the Transformers; rather, they simply colonised the planet early in its history and pretended to be the Transformers' creators, until the truth came out and they got kicked offworld. This is how the Binder of Revelation ultimately paid lip service to the Quintessons. In Transformers One, the Quintessons are just sort of here, they're these evil aliens secretly skimming Energon from its miners, they don't speak English (or whichever language the film was dubbed into in your market region), they're just these nasty societal parasites.

Energon is Transformers fuel. In the original cartoon, it was these glowing pink cubes the Decepticons were always trying to produce using harebrained Saturday-morning-cartoon energy-stealing devices. There was a Cold War going on, America had just been through an "energy crisis", maybe you're old enough to remember any of that. Transformers are these big, complicated machines, so I guess the idea is they need this hyper-compressed superfuel to run off, and their homeworld has run out. By the time of the Binder of Revelation, the concept had been telephoned to the point where Energon is like the lifeblood of Primus or some shit.

Primus is the Transformers God—but not the kind of God you have "faith" in, rather this actual guy whose existence is objectively known in various ways. He transforms into a planet, that's kind of cool, right? Where does Primus come from? Look, it doesn't matter, he's like, the God of Creation, he was there at the start of time. He created all of the Transformers. All the other species in the galaxy, though, they evolved naturally thanks to "science". Actually wait, didn't that Quintus Prime guy go around the universe seeding all the planets with different kinds of Cybertronian life? That's why they're called Quintessons. See, now you know. Who's Quintus Prime?

Okay, so the Thirteen Original Transformers, or the Primes, are the thirteen original Transformers created by Primus. Most of them correspond to different kinds of Transformer: Nexus Prime is the god of Transformers who can combine, Onyx Prime is the god of Transformers who turn into animals, Micronus Prime is the god of Transformers who are small, and Solus Prime is the god of Transformers who are women. You might remember the Primes from Revenge of the Fallen, although there were only seven of them there for whatever reason.

Honestly, The Fallen was the only one who mattered for a long time. The whole reason there's thirteen of them is because thirteen is kind of an unlucky number, right? Twelve would've been fine. But throw in a thirteenth guy, and he betrays everyone, he's this fucked up evil guy. In the Binder of Revelation, though, the Thirteenth Prime is his own special guy shrouded in mystery, because they kind of liked the idea that Optimus Prime would secretly turn out to have been the Thirteenth Prime all along, and he just forgot or something, because that means he has the divine right of Primes. In IDW's 2010s comic-book reboot, the Thirteenth Prime was called "The Arisen"—in reference to that one line in The Transformers: The Movie, "Arise, Rodimus Prime!" (this margin is too narrow to explain who Rodimus Prime is). Towards the end of his run, writer John Barber did some actually interesting stuff with the concept, playing with the ambiguity over whether-or-not Optimus Prime was actually the chosen one.

All of Optimus Prime's immediate predecessors as Autobot leaders, Sentinel Prime, Zeta Prime, the lineage seen in "Five Faces of Darkness"... they're all false Primes. They're Primes in name only. In fact, IDW had a whole procession of these cartoonishly evil dictators thanks to a few continuity errors leading to the addition of a couple of extra narratively-redundant fuckers. Transformers One tries to simplify it slightly by just saying that Zeta Prime was one of the Primes for real—occupying that thirteenth "free space"—and it was just Sentinel Prime who was only a normal Transformer pretending to be a Prime, then Optimus Prime who's a real boy.

But if he's not a Prime from the start, Optimus Prime needs another name in the meantime. In the '80s cartoon episode "War Dawn", before he was called Optimus Prime, he was called "Orion Pax". Have you noticed that Optimus Prime is kind of an odd-one-out amongst all the straightup-English-word names like "Bumblebee" and "Ratchet" and "Jazz"? That's because his name was one of a tiny handful from very early in the franchise's development, before writer Bob Budiansky came onboard and came up with identities for the vast majority of the toys. Practically everyone Bob Budiansky named is called like, "Bolts" or some shit, long before the characters even know of Earth, which has always just been a contrivance of the setting you're not supposed to think about.

Presumably to create a parallel with Orion Pax's transformation into Optimus Prime, someone at Hasbro in the 2010s came up with a new name for the bot who would become Megatron: "D-16". In real-world terms, this was nothing more than a dorky reference to the Megatron toy's original Japanese release being number 16 in the line ("D" stands for "Destron", which is what they call Decepticons in Japan). But in-universe, the name "D-16" was drawn from the sector of the mine where he worked. I don't get the impression it was originally intended to be part of a broader pattern.

Which is why I'm baffled as to what the hell the reasoning was behind Bumblebee's pre-Earth name, "B-127". There's this bizarre situation in the Bumblebee film, where the name "B-127" first cropped up, where literally every other bot gets a normal cool name with personality like "Cliffjumper" or "Dropkick" except for Bumblebee, who is stuck with this clunky sci-fi name until he makes friends with a human teenager on Earth and she gives him the name Bumblebee. I guess I don't find it confusing that the writers would (correctly) realise it's a bit weird for Bumblebee to be called Bumblebee on an alien planet where bumblebees don't exist. What I find confusing is that they didn't extend that logic to any other character.

So despite everything else in the franchise's direction pointing away from "robot" and towards "alien", Transformers One ends up with this ridiculous situation where two of the most important guys are, for practically the whole movie, simply referred to as "Dee" and "Bee", I guess because the writers correctly realised the numbers sound fucking stupid.

And if you squint, "Elita-1" sorta fits this naming scheme. But the great irony of it is that the very same cartoon episode which coined "Orion Pax" simultaneously established that Elita-1 also used to go by a different name: "Ariel"! Like the Little Mermaid. Y'know, because an "aerial" is a type of electrical component- oh, forget it.

By the time the script made it into Eric Pearson's hands, it's obvious that he simply was not thinking about it that deeply. He describes the genesis of a scene where Bumblebee introduces his imaginary friends, "A-atron, EP 5-0-8, and Steve." A-atron was impov'd by Keegan-Michael Key as a reference to one of his own skits on Key & Peele. Steve ("He's foreign.") was literally just because Pearson thought it would be funny. It's true that Steve is an inherently funny name, and I guess if you're struggling to come up with jokes of your own, it can be handy to fall back on something which is inherently funny.

And again, our silly answers to these silly questions beget yet more questions. If he started out as "D-16", then where did the name "Megatron" come from? And if all the Primes have epic made-up fantasy names, then surely that one guy can't just be called "The Fallen", right? That's not a name, that's an epithet. Unfortunately, someone at Hasbro had the bright idea to answer both these questions at once: The Fallen's real name was "Megatronus". Later, for consistency, they threw on the title, and we get "Megatronus Prime", which sounds like what a thirteen-year-old on deviantART in 2014 would call their Steven Universe fusion of Megatron and Optimus Prime. So you see, Megatron actually named himself after Megatronus Prime, famously the most evil of the Primes. In Transformers One, this is changed slightly so Megatronus is merely the strongest of the Primes, as part of its overall effort to make Megatron not look completely insane.

Which, it must be said, is a tall order. Better stories have tried and failed. Back in 2007, Scottish writer Eric Holmes came up with Megatron Origin, a perfectly-fine comic miniseries which drew heavily from the miners' strikes that took place in the UK from 1984-1985, coinciding with the inception of the Transformers franchise. In that comic, Megatron is a lowly miner who, through a series of chance events, winds up at the head of a dangerous political revolutionary movement.

For some reason—I guess because nobody had ever tried to make Megatron anything other than a bloodthirsty cackling madman before—this take on Megatron as a guy who rose up against a corrupt system became the defining interpretation of the character, copy/pasted pretty much wholesale into the Binder of Revelation. Orion Pax also opposes the system, and bonds with Megatron over it, but they disagree on how to fix it: Pax believes in peaceful reform, Megatron just loves to kill. In Transformers One, the problem everyone has with Megatron is basically "whoa, this guy's a little TOO angry!" and there's a point towards the end of the film where Megatron suddenly starts jonesing to kill literally anyone who stands in his way, because he's irrationally angry.

The core problem here—and it's kind of the Magneto problem, the Killmonger problem, whatever better-known example you care to insert here—is that these guys all fundamentally exist just to be a big villain who loves to kill people and who ultimately gets defeated, but the kids who grew up on this stuff in the '80s are now adults who are no longer satisfied with cardboard cutout villains. People like a complex villain, they like a villain who has a point. They like to root for both sides. And in fact, it's easier to sell more toys to people who are rooting for both sides, if your villain is just another kind of hero. But you don't really need to take the same effort with the good guys: they're good by design, righteous by nature. They don't need to stand for something, they just need to stand against the guy whose whole thing is that he loves to kill people.

But again, we're starting from a place where the evil faction—who half the planet will ultimately align themselves with—are literally called "Decepticons". It's a name you'd only ever call yourself ironically, maybe reclaiming it from your enemies. In this film, there's some tortured logic that implies they're called Decepticons because they were deceived by Sentinel Prime. Like if you met a gang of guys who call themselves "The Robbers", but it turns out to be because they got robbed one time, and they actually have zero intention of stealing from anyone.

The Autobots are easier, of course. "Auto" is a prefix that just means, like, the self, or whatever. And the most agreeably American ideal of all is selfishness the power of the individual, the freedom to seize one's own destiny. Prime's original '80s motto, "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings," is bastardised in Transformers One into the slightly less rolls-out-off-the-tongue "Freedom and autonomy are the rights of all sentient beings," because (I can only assume) they forgot to work the word "autonomy" earlier into the script. If they ever greenlit Transformers Three, I suppose the motto would have ended up as something like "Freedom, autonomy, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are the rights of all sentient beings." Even though bodily autonomy is one of the most salient motifs present in the film—all but referred to by name—I suppose the filmmakers were worried that you might think, when Prime says "freedom", that he actually means something completely different. So now you see! "Autobots" is actually the descriptive name of a political movement which believes in obviously good things. Like "Moms for Liberty".

Okay, so the cannier among you have probably spotted the mean rhetorical trick I'm pulling with this encyclopedia-entry-ass introduction. By sarcastically relitigating all the storytelling choices I dislike from the last 20 years of Transformers lore, I can build up a negative association with Transformers One without even reviewing the movie itself! On a subtextual level, I'm deliberately misattributing these bad ideas to the filmmakers, conveniently ignoring the mountains of evidence to suggest that they were just trying to make the best of whatever Hasbro handed them from on high. If anything—you might think—the filmmakers deserve even more credit, for spinning this shite into something even remotely good on the big screen.

Like, you'd be wrong, but I can see why you might think that.

II. The Spider-Verse of Transformers

Okay, I can see that I've spat in your soup. I'm sorry. There are lots of good bits in Transformers One. I can even think of one or two of them off the top of my head, without really racking my brains.

Maybe halfway through the film, there is one specific moment where the story suddenly promises to get good. You can pinpoint it down to the word, down to the frame even. Our heroes have just discovered that their planet's leader, Sentinel Prime, is a complete fraud who's been secretly exploiting them ever since they were born—and worse, castrated them by removing their transformation cogs. They are all very cross about this. Orion Pax expresses that he wants to come up with a plan to expose Sentinel Prime. Megatron is too angry to listen. Orion Pax asks, "Don't you want to stop him?" And Megatron replies, "No, I want to KILL him!" And there's like, a little tint of red creeping into the glow of his eyes.

Whoa. Chills. Up to this point in the film, Megatron has been kind of surly at times, but he's otherwise a generic kids' movie protagonist. He's often chipper. He makes quips. He has this banter with Orion Pax where he's always complaining. It's literally that one "Optimist Prime"/"Negatron" comic, committed to film. Like I'm not even being facetious, one of the film's few obligatory "emotional moments" has Elita-1 sit Orion Pax down and say, "You know what I love about you? You always see the bright side. Like you're some kind of OPTIMIST or something." And then later completely unrelatedly God gives him the mandate of heaven and says "ARISE, OPTIMUS PRIME!" Y'see, as originally conceived, "Optimus" is the word "Optimum" if it was a name, which is why people sometimes localise his name as "Best #1". But it's genuinely kind of cute to reverse-engineer the etymology as coming from "optimist", I guess. Like, it's stupid, but it's cute.

Argh, I got distracted with naming minutia again! Entirely my bad. That's the last time, I promise. Where was I? Right, we'd just found out that Megatron is kind of scary. Brian Tyree Henry's line delivery as he growls "KILL" is his crowning achievement in this film.

Where Optimus Prime's character arc in this movie sees him change from a funny, rebellious spirit to a complete personality vacuum, Megatron's character arc is kind of the opposite. When we're first introduced to him, it's weirdly hard to get a handle on who he is. He's a fanboy for Megatronus, the strongest and most morally-unremarkable of the Primes. He looks up to Sentinel Prime. He likes sports. He doesn't like breaking the rules. In fact, we get the sense that, were it not for his friendship with Orion Pax, he would be literally indistinguishable from the legion of silent crowd-filling background characters he works with. But the moment he starts to become Megatron, it's like everything starts to click. Gears catch, where once they ground and idled. There is something in this guy that was made to fight, made to kill, made to rule. It's sick.

And the underlying tension in his friendship with Optimus suddenly snaps into focus. Megatron is mad at Sentinel Prime, but Sentinel Prime isn't there, he's somewhere else, far below... and he can't help but turn that anger on the next closest thing to an authority figure he has in his life, which is his peer-pressuring bestie, Orion Pax. There is a part of Megatron that wishes he'd never learned the truth, and he blames Orion Pax for his cursed knowledge, for constantly leading them into predicaments on his stupid flights of fancy. Now that he knows, he can't go back to how he was. He can't stop thinking about it.

I'll be honest, it rules. Obviously it rules. It's complicated and toxic and darker than this movie was marketed to be. In interview, Josh Cooley describes the draft of the script he was presented with when he joined the project as having been far more jokey, light-hearted, glib—and it seems we can credit him for saying "Look, this ain't right, the minute the credits roll these guys are going to be at civil war for millions of years."

So, they started talking about it in — what did you say, 2015? I came on board in 2020, and when I came on board there was the first draft of the script. So I don't think they'd been working on it that entire time, but they'd been thinking about it, for sure. And the script that I read was a little more comical? But it was clear that that wasn't the right tone for this film specifically, because we know there's gonna be a war, civil war on Cybertron, you can't have everybody making jokes and then all of a sudden there's a war. So, um, the stakes were really important for this film. And because our characters at the beginning are a little naive, and just on the younger side, not as experienced, it allowed more freedom for them to be a little looser and have fun really getting to know these characters. But once they realize something's going on and things are getting real, it needs to get real.

Cooley also describes his "in" on the film as being the brotherly relationship between Optimus Prime and Megatron (they're not literally brothers in this film, though they have been in the past), which perhaps explains why Megatron and Optimus Prime get to be characters, instead of just like, guys who are there.

That was always the goal from the beginning and what got me on board. It was this relationship between these two characters that was very human and brotherly. I thought about my relationship with my brother and how I could bring that in. It’s not like we’re enemies, but we grew up together and then went down our different paths, but we’re still brotherly. I became a writer-director and live in a fantasy land, and he became a homicide detective who deals with reality, so we’re two very different mindsets. I have always been fascinated by the idea of two people who come from the same place but end up in different ones. From the very beginning, I was like, ‘That’s something I can relate to.’

Anyway, things I liked, what else. There's that joke at the very start, after the excruciating lore powerpoint, where Orion Pax does a fake-out like he's going to transform, the music briefly swells, and then it just cuts to him legging it down the corridor. In a similar vein, I liked the idea behind the Iacon 5000, where Orion Pax has them run in the race. I felt like the execution of the race left a bit to be desired—the only other participant who matters is Darkwing—but it's still honestly the best big action setpiece in the film. There's also that bit at the end where Megatron and Optimus Prime are both changing into their final forms simultaneously, and it's basically a Homestuck Flash (what would that be, "[S] OPTIMUS PRIME. ARISE."?), so obviously I liked that. Oh, and I really liked the environment design where the planet's landscape is constantly transforming, that's brand-new, someone had an Idea there, and it creates visual interest during the initial Energon-mining scene... even if I wished it had actually paid off in a more meaningful way than "the planet's crust opens as Prime falls to get the Matrix"—like, someone really should've gotten eaten by the planet, that's a cracking Disney death scene and they left it on the table! I also liked getting to see my blorbo, Vector Prime, on the big screen.

I think, as a Transformers fan who's had to sit through a lot of really quite sexist, racist, and plain bad films, you're well within your rights to come out of this one ready to give it a fucking Oscar. You should be ecstatic! It has none of those pesky humans clogging up the frame. It has plenty of robot action. It has jokes which- well I struggle to call many of them "funny", but they're at least trying to be funny in a different way to Michael Bay's films. The film is obviously a massive love letter to... honestly every part of Transformers except the live-action movies. It is an incredibly faithful and earnest adaptation of all the lore and iconography that has randomly accumulated the way it has over the last forty years of bullshit.

My main point of contention, then, is with the overriding sentiment I'm seeing from pretty much everyone else in the fandom: that this is not just the best Transformers movie, but that it's a great animated movie period, that it does for Transformers what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man, what The Last Wish did for Puss in Boots, and what Mutant Mayhem did for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That, in effect, this film will make you "get it". That it's better-looking, better-written, and more meaningful than a silly toy commercial has any right to be.

I think you can definitely see some loose influence from Spider-Verse in the overall look of the film—particularly in its color grading, and in the design of its main setting, the underground city of Iacon, where the upside-down skyscrapers hanging from the ceiling evoke the iconic "falling upwards" shot from Spider-Verse. Like The Last Wish, it's an animated franchise film that spent much longer than you'd think in development, only for the release of Into the Spider-Verse to have an immediate impact on its visual style... without actually affecting the basic story to the same extent. Both Transformers One and The Last Wish, in many ways, feel like stories concocted using an older formula; in particular, Transformers One bears startling similarities to a similar toy-franchise-prequel, BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, which was released twenty years ago! By contrast, Mutant Mayhem—which had a much shorter development period—is a direct reaction to Spider-Verse in both aesthetic and narrative, and it has a much more distinctive creative direction as a result.

If you look at how all these titles have performed in cinemas, I think you can make a pretty strong case that audiences are perfectly willing to go out and see this kind of flick. A glance at Wikipedia tells me that Mutant Mayhem, The Bad Guys, and The Last Wish grossed double, triple, and quadruple their budgets respectively. In terms of the pre-existing cultural cachet they were banking on, we're talking about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a children's book series I'd never heard of, and fucking Puss in Boots. You cannot tell me that Transformers, as a brand, is on the same level as any of these properties. Meanwhile, Transformers One hardly broke even, while The Wild Robot—another DreamWorks film based on a children's book I've never heard of, which it ended up competing with in theatres—grosses three times its budget. My friends who've seen The Wild Robot say it made them cry.

Face it: Transformers One has not lit the world on fire. I've seen a lot of people cope with this by suggesting that it's to do with the film's staggered release, or even by claiming that the film's marketing was somehow misleading. I'll be honest, upon seeing it, it did not strike me as being at all dissimilar to the trailers. You can maybe say that the trailers undersold the depth of Orion Pax's and Megatron's relationship—which is its best aspect—but honestly, I think if they'd taken a lot of those scenes out of context and put them in early teasers, audiences would've laughed it out of theatres. Like, c'mon, it's toy robots, stop pretending it's Shakespeare. And otherwise, what you see is what you get; it's exactly what it says on the tin.

I wonder how many Transformers fans, on some level, have noticed that even when we're supposedly "eating good", and watching "peak cinema", our films just aren't as good as everyone else's. They're something you'll enjoy if you're already highly predisposed to enjoy them. But otherwise, they're not turning heads. They're not as funny, or as heartfelt, or as complex, or as exciting, or as charming, or as memorable, or as beautiful as these other films. Unlike with Spider-Verse, there's no word-of-mouth amongst normal people to say that this is a film worth seeing.

What I perceive in studios hoping to recreate the flash-in-the-pan success of Spider-Verse is a misunderstanding of what made people go crazy for that movie in the first place. Yes, it changed our conception of what an 3D-animated film could look like. Yes, the multiverse is very cool and all that. Yes, it had a huge IP attached to it. But on a more fundamental level, that movie has a fantastic story underpinning it. The script is razor-sharp. The story is beautifully complex. The vision of New York City it presents is a living, breathing place, populated by real people. It has the kind of craft to it that can only come from truly obsessive creators cultivating an absolutely miserable professional environment for a legion of passionate animators.

In interview, Transformers producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura actually spoke surprisingly candidly about his view on crunch:

I probably shouldn't answer this question, because I'm not exactly PC on my answer. I think the nature of filmmaking is, we're really lucky to work in a business that's about passion. Passion doesn't fit really well into a timeline, so inevitably you come to a crunch time. It's just true in the live action, it's true in every movie, and authors always tell me that about when they're writing their books — it's the same thing happens to them! There's something about the creative process that's not — it's unruly. So, I think if you're enjoying it, you need to recognize that. Like, you know, I don't wanna abuse anybody, and y'know — if you get into that period where people have to really work too hard, you gotta help them in that situation, then. 'Cause it's gonna come. It does on every movie. I've never seen it not come, no matter how well you plan, et cetera. 'Cause it's not a science what we're doing at all, and there's all these discoveries that happen near the end, which makes you go "oh, let's do some more, come on!". We discovered that on this movie, where we're calling ILM going "we've got a few ideas, you know, do you have enough man-hours?". [...] Like, you gotta be conscious of it — in live-action, for instance, there are some studios that are so cheap that when you're on — sort of medium location-distance and you're shooting 'til midnight, they don't pay for a hotel room. It's like, well, no-no-no, you pay for a hotel room. You protect the people.

According to everyone who worked on Transformers One, everyone who worked on Transformers One was very passionate about it. But there are parts of this film where I think you can say, pretty objectively, that it's falling short of its intended effect. So I guess maybe they weren't that passionate. I'm not saying that to be mean! It's just... isn't that better than the alternative—that this was the best they could do?

III. I did not care for The Godfather

At one point in the film, the gang's magic map leads them to a scary cave, which looks like this:

Bumblebee fills the dead air by saying, "A cave, with teeth. Nothing scary about that!" The joke here is that this is a cave that looks like a mouth. But as depicted, it's a cave that looks like a mouth that doesn't look like a cave! I get that this is an alien planet, but stalactites don't grow that way on Earth, so when you see the cave onscreen, your gut reaction isn't "oh my, what a frightening cave!". No, this is a cave that makes you say, "that's not a cave, that's some kind of alien monster".

(It's not like "cave turns out to be a monster" would in any way be a fresh twist. In BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui, there's a bit where a character swims into a scary cave, and it turns out to be the mouth of a massive sea serpent. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon briefly hides in an asteroid tunnel which turns out to be a giant space worm. So I'm definitely not saying Transformers One would've been a better film if it had used this stock trope.)

Then once the heroes go inside, we're whisked off to an entirely different set of concept artwork, for this lush organic underground paradise. There's no danger there. The cave itself is reduced to a strange little footnote. Maybe it's only in the story because a concept artist drew it before they'd worked out the finer points of the narrative, and Keegan-Michael Key just ended up ad-libbing the "teeth!" line when he was told to vamp for a few seconds. Or maybe the teeth gag was fully written into the script from the start, and the environment artists just interpreted it way too literally.

Like, I'm sorry, I don't mean to start off on the wrong foot here by harping on about the cave thing—it's not a perfect example anyway—but to me it's a microcosm for my frustration towards what I perceive to be a lack of creative vision in this film. So much of the film feels like it's not there to be entertaining, or meaningful, or narratively load-bearing... it's just obligatory, something they threw in for the sake of having anything at all. It's colors and sounds. When you see the spiky shape onscreen, you think, "ooh, this film was pretty bouba earlier, but now it's more kiki!" They get the comedian to improvise a few one-liners while the characters walk from place to place. And it's like, yes, this is a film for children. Of course the heroes have an adventure map with a big red X on it. In many respects this is a glorified episode of Pocoyo, or the modern equivalent, which I guess is "Baby Shark | Animal Songs For Children".

Nowhere is this sense of "we are obliged to put this in the movie" felt more strongly than in its supporting cast. When you look closely, you notice that Bumblebee and Elita-1—placed prominently in the film's marketing and being technically present for much of its runtime—don't actually do anything of narrative significance. They don't make choices that impact the story; they're just there, and it would not take much rewriting to excise them entirely, so it's just Orion Pax and Megatron on their little adventure. In fact, I'll just come out and say it: I think Transformers One would have been a better movie if Bumblebee and Elita-1 were not in it.

It helps that, from a Doylist perspective, the motivations for their inclusion are perfectly transparent. Firstly, think of the merchandise! Secondly, in Bumblebee's case, it's fucking Bumblebee, he's the whole reason half the kids will be watching, you can't not have him in there. Whenever Bumblebee's not onscreen, all the other characters should be asking, "where's Bumblebee?" Also, I think the creative team felt that they could use Bumblebee tactically to balance some of the darkness in the story.

In the G1 cartoon, Bumblebee just has the default Autobot personality—good-natured, a little sarcastic—with the dial turned a little more towards friendliness. There's this iconic anecdote from the production that cartoon, where writer David Wise found himself in exactly the same situation Transformers writers are finding themselves in forty years later: he was told to write a story about something called "Vector Sigma", and he had no fucking clue what Vector Sigma was supposed to be. So he asked story editor Bryce Malek, who also had no fucking idea. Malek in turn asked Hasbro, and was told that Vector Sigma was "the computer that gave all the Transformers personalities". Upon hearing this, Malek said, "Well, it didn't do a very good job, did it!" Vector Sigma, in case you missed it, does actually appear in Transformers One, as the polygonal shape that transitions into the Matrix of Leadership in the opening powerpoint; I guess they're one and the same now. Some things never change: in Michael Bay's Transformers movies, there is again just a single default personality that every single Autobot shares, a braggadacious action-hero facade over genuine bloodthirst. Who can forget that iconic moment in Revenge of the Fallen where Bumblebee rips out Ravage's spine in grisly slow-mo?

Aside from the fact that he's small and yellow, Bumblebee in Transformers One bears very little resemblance to any incarnation of the character kids might be accustomed to. Instead, he occupies a stock comic-relief archetype, he's a zany guy who goes "Well, that just happened!" If anything, his one joke in the third act—wanton murder—reads like it could maybe be a reference to his many Mortal Kombat fatalities in Bay's films. Beginning in 2007's Transformers Animated, Bumblebee has sometimes possessed deployable "stingers" that flip out from his hands, as a fun action feature for toys. Clearly someone on Transformers One saw this and thought it was the funniest fucking thing that Bumblebee has "knife hands", because the character spends the third act of the movie just shouting "knife hands!" and cutting people in half like a medieval terror.

(In the UK, Bumblebee's lines were re-recorded at the last minute so he says "sword hands" instead. This is because in the UK, we generally aren't able to kill each other using guns, so it's knives that are the big armed-violence boogeyman. Everyone's always talking about how all the kids have knives. And look, I'm not someone to indulge in moral panic, but genuinely, when I look at Bumblebee chasing around people with knives, saying, "I'm gonna cut these guys, watch!", I'm like... what the fuck were they thinking when they wrote that?)

Frankly, whatever is going on with Bumblebee is just an entirely different movie to everything else that's happening. When Bee shanks his twelfth nameless lackey in a row, the movie's like, awww, you're sweet! But when Megatron tries to kill the one (1) evil dictator who's just fucking branded him, who's still lying to his face while his people continue to die to the guy's fuckin' honor guard, Optimus Prime is like, HELLO, HUMAN RESOURCES?

Bumblebee is solely here to be funny, but there's a point in the film where it needs to become a war story, and the best they can think to do with Bumblebee is to have him kill people but in like, a funny way.

As for Elita-1... look, to put it very bluntly, she is in this movie to be a woman. Transformers has had a long, long forty-year history of boys'-club exclusionism, if not outright misogyny, and each new series usually has a token female character, as a kind of fig-leaf for the fact that really, the only fucking thing Hasbro cares about is that the boys are buying the toys. Beginning in the 1986 movie, it was Arcee who got to be "the pink one" for many years of fiction—but not toys, y'see, when parents want to buy something for their beloved young lad, they don't buy "the pink one", no sir. In the 2010s, wow-cool-OC Windblade took over for a stint as leading lady, decked out in a commercially-non-threatening red color scheme. Recently, though, it's been Elita-1—Optimus Prime's girlfriend from the original '80s cartoon—who's been the go-to female character, and she's increasingly allowed to be pink.

There is a lot of love for these characters amongst creatives and fans alike, and especially in the last decade, female Transformers have been both more numerous and better-written than ever. Unfortunately Transformers One, which depicts Elita-1 as an arms-crossing career-obsessed buzzkill, whose arc sees her learn her place in deference to a less-competent man... well let's just say it struck me as a significant step back in this regard.

There's this great interview with Scarlett Johansson, voice of Elita-1, where she's trying to describe what makes her character interesting, and it's like she's drawing blood from a stone. She's like, "yeah, so Elita-1, I would say, she's on her own journey, because at the start of the film it's sort of like she's working at a big company, you know, and she wants to get a promotion, but then later on she learns that she can't, y'know, get a promotion". Look, it's not that Scarlett Johansson does a bad job—in fact, considering the material she's working with, she practically carries Elita-1 entirely on the back of her performance—it's just that I can't shake the impression that the filmmakers would rather pay Scarlett Johansson god knows how many thousands of dollars than try to think of a second actress that they know of.

As I've already complained, Transformers One has a pretty thin cast, but it effectively only has two other female characters who do anything. Airachnid is a secondary antagonist, Sentinel Prime's spymaster/enforcer, and it's clear that some concept artist really fucking popped off when designing her. She has eyes in the back of her head, and it's ten times creepier than that makes it sound. Her spiderlegs also create some visual interest during fight scenes. As a character, Airachnid has zero internality and is not interesting, but she is cool, so you'll get no complaints from me there.

The film's other other female character is Chromia, who wins the Iacon 5000 race at the last moment. She really comes out of nowhere to clinch it. It's funny, because the leaderboards show this one guy, Mirage, hovering near the top of the rankings for almost the whole sequence. And Chromia's character model really looks suspiciously like Mirage's. In fact, there's a different character who stands around in the background a couple of times who looks much more like Chromia. Funnily enough, that background character is even called Chromia in concept art! So if you connect the dots, it really seems that the "Chromia" who is the best racer on Cybertron was originally meant to be Mirage, a guy, until they switched the character's gender at the very last minute, and didn't bother changing the leaderboards to match.

There are two possible explanations for this. The first is that Mirage was the dark horse of Rise of the Beasts, and for some reason they felt like his depiction in Transformers One would've gotten in the way of their plans for the character somehow. It's plausible, I guess. The second, infinitely funnier option, is that at some point someone working on the movie realised that they only put two women in the film, scrambled to look through the feature to find a suitable character to gender-swap, only to discover to their horror that they'd forgotten to put in any characters whatsoever. Fuck it, the racer guy! He can be a girl. Diversity win, the fastest class traitor on Cybertron... is a woman!

In case you were wondering about the Transformers One toyline leaderboards, by my count, Orion Pax has ten new transforming toys currently announced or in stores, Bumblebee and Megatron have six each, Sentinel Prime has four, Alpha Trion has two, Elita-1 has two, Airachnid has one, Starscream has one, Wheeljack has one, and the Quintesson High Commander has one. In fact, one of Elita-1's toys—the collector-oriented high-quality Studio Series release—isn't scheduled for release until some undetermined point later next year, and she was entirely absent from leaked lists of upcoming releases, which to me smacks of "we realised last-minute that it would look really really bad if we didn't bother to release a good toy of the one woman in the film". Oh, and obviously, Chromia has no toys—but there is an "Iacon Race" three-pack consisting of Megatron, Orion Pax... and Mirage. Go figure.

The thing is, all of the stuff I'm grousing about here is pretty much standard fare for kids' films targeted more at boys. Hell, even The Lego Movie—which is basically the gold standard of toy commercials—gave supporting protagonist Wyldstyle a pretty similar arc to the one Elita-1 gets here, which was probably the weakest element of that film. Evidently conscious of this, Lord & Miller redeemed themselves by devoting the entirety of The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part to deconstructing common narratives surrounding gender roles. I guess I just wish the young girls who presumably comprise some portion of Transformers One theatergoers could actually get anything out of Elita-1 as a character. Ah, what do I know, maybe it's still considered countercultural simply to depict a woman punching people.

Still, to give credit where it's due: Transformers One doesn't remotely touch the gender-essentialism prevalent in the Binder of Revelation, treating female Transformers no differently to their male counterparts in lore terms. Solus Prime is, it seems, just a Prime who happened to be a woman, rather than the mythological Eve after whom all women are patterned. There's a scene where our heroes are gifted the Transformation Cogs of the fallen Primes, and the Primes named thankfully bear no particular relation to the characters; in other words, Elita-1 isn't given Solus Prime's cog. As Alpha Trion puts it: "What defines a Transformer is not the cog in his chest, but the spark that resides in their core." Dude really remembered nonbinary people exist halfway through that sentence huh.

(Actually, the bigger mistake would've been with Megatron: if he was given Megatronus Prime's cog from the start, then this would've created the unfortunate implication that his descent into evil was only the result of Megatronus Prime's fucked up and evil cog, rather than a choice Megatron made of his own free will. The film instead has it the other way around: Megatron's radicalisation into a "might makes right" philosophy is what causes him to covet Megatronus Prime's transformation cog, to steal that power from Sentinel Prime, who stole the cogs of both Megatronus and Megatron in the first place. That's cool! This does create a bit of unfortunate narrative dissonance with Alpha Trion's words, alas, as it does seem like Megatronus Prime's cog really is more powerful than the others, because it gives both Sentinel Prime and Megatron a powerup.)

There's just something that I find so dreadfully mercenary about this movie's cast—honestly, everyone except Orion Pax, Megatron, and maybe Sentinel Prime. Take Darkwing, for example. Bro was clearly designed from the ground up to fill this stock character role of "bully who pushes our guys around and later gets his comeuppance". For a more interesting take on that exact same archetype, look no further than Todd Sureblade from Nimona, a bigoted knight who gets a whole damn character arc in the background, which directly complements that film's main themes.

Again, I'm not playing some kind of guessing game here, the authorial evidence is right there: Darkwing didn't even have a name until Hasbro designer Mark Maher was shown a picture of the character and asked, "If this was a Decepticon flyer, who would it be?" This is actually par for the course with ILM; most of their concept art is labelled with very basic descriptions, with the exact trademarks being picked in conjunction with Hasbro at a later point. Darkwing just stands out in Transformers One because he's the only recurring speaking character who's an OC in all but name (unless you count Bumblebee), he's the one guy who's been invented from scratch with total creative freedom, and he's boring as sin. It's like the filmmakers just couldn't conceive of a children's movie without that stock character—and they clearly had no idea what to do with him once they'd invented him, because he disappears entirely from the film at the start of the third act, when Orion Pax throws him into an arcade cabinet, which they have in the mines on Cybertron for some reason.

In a film with as painfully few named speaking characters as Transformers One, there's really no excuse for having this kind of one-dimensionality in their portrayals. Genuinely, I ask—who are Orion Pax and Megatron fighting to liberate? Jazz, one of the biggest personalities from the original G1 cartoon, who gets all of two boilerplate lines here? Cooley seems to think so:

As you’re designing them the background characters are almost like Lego pieces where you put different heads on different bodies just to fill in a crowd. But some of them would be brought forward and be painted specific colors so that it represents a character that I didn’t know was such a big deal. But there was stuff—like Jazz, for example, has a pretty big role. It was important to have a relationship with a character that we know gets to be saved.

To me, the idea that casual cinemagoers would be invested in any of the Transformers as characters is laughable. Michael Bay's characters are famous for being hateful non-entities. In terms of the films, Jazz is best remembered for dying at the end of the first one, seventeen years ago; he looks completely different here. The one breakout character in recent years—Mirage, as played by Pete Davidson in Rise of the Beasts—was, as I've already mentioned, written out so that the movie could reach its girl quota... not that he would've had any lines anyway.

And I just don't buy the idea that the complete dearth of compelling characterisation in this film is just an unfortunate side-effect of its clipped one-hour-thirty runtime—that, given even half an hour longer, the film would suddenly be crowded with rich portrayals of all your Transformers faves. Bumblebee and Elita-1, ostensibly two of the most important characters in the film, are not in this movie because the movie is interested in telling their stories. They are in this movie for the sake of being in this movie. It insists upon itself.

IV. No politics means no politics

In fact, putting aside merchandising considerations, Elita-1 and Bumblebee serve one very specific purpose in narrative terms. The trait Optimus Prime and Megatron have always had in common is that they are both leaders—and what is a leader, without anyone to lead? Without Bumblebee and Elita-1, you'd have this farcical situation where the only person Optimus Prime ever gets to boss around is Megatron, until the very end of the movie when God makes him king of all Cybertron. The High Guard, Starscream's gang of exiles, serve a similar narrative purpose for Megatron; they're a ready-made army who've just been sitting around waiting for him to show up and take charge.

Towards the end, the movie does actually take care to show both Orion Pax and Megatron rallying groups of Cybertronians: in Pax's case, he reveals the truth to his legion of interchangable miner friends, while Megatron riles up the High Guard mob. Again, there's a bit of that narrative sleight-of-hand, a bit of a thematic cop-out, where the question of "how do Optimus Prime and Megatron come to be leaders of their factions?" is answered only in the most literal possible interpretation. Yes, we technically see the exact chain of events that lead to this point—but both characters are portrayed as born leaders. We don't see them grow into the role, except physically. The moment Megatron decides he wants to rule, he's able to take charge. Likewise, Optimus Prime just gets divinely appointed by God. At a key point, Megatron loudly declares "I will never trust a so-called leader ever again", and the movie plays a fucking scare chord like this is supposed to be ominous. Like, oh no! Optimus Prime is a leader! And they're friends! Whatever will Megatron do when he finds out his friend, Optimus Prime, is a leader?

I don't think the movie has given any real thought to what a leader actually is. It seems to take a stance that power cannot be taken, i.e. through violent action, as Sentinel Prime and Megatron do. That one scene with Elita-1 suggests the most important trait for a leader to have, above and beyond any particular competency, is simply hope and optimism. What I just can't wrap my head around is the fact that the counterpoint the movie presents to Megatron, in the form of Orion Pax becoming Optimus Prime, does not support a belief in collective action or basic democracy—rather, it's a boring sword-in-the-stone divine-right-of-kings fantasy.

Except I do have a theory for why the film is like this. Let's look again at that interview with Eric Pearson, who came onboard in the "late middle" of production:

One of the first things that I did was a big pass on Sentinel Prime. I just felt like he was too obviously telegraphing his wickedness in previous versions, and I felt like, “No, he’s a carnival barker.” He’s got to be a big salesman. He’s a bullshitter, honestly is what he is.

(Honestly, if this is Sentinel after a "big pass" to make his villainy more of a twist, I shudder to think what the earlier drafts were like.)

Now, let's see how WIRED introduces their interview with Josh Cooley, titled "Transformers One Isn't as Silly as It Looks":

He liked the script, which traces how Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) went from friends to enemies. But as the world went into lockdown as Covid-19 spread, Cooley found his story changing, if only slightly. Trump was still in office when Cooley started working on the film, and he was having meetings with the producers and they’d “start these meetings off on Zoom just going, like, ‘Holy crap what is going on in this world?’” he says. Ultimately, the infighting they were seeing between Democrats and Republicans in the same family became an undercurrent in the film’s friends-to-enemies storyline, “because that’s what Transformers is.”

So it's like, oh, this is a 2016 election thing. This is just that one election that broke everyone's brains. Of course this movie about a made-up political struggle on an alien planet being developed from 2015-2020 wouldn't be like, hey, you know what might fix our society's problems, is if we had an election. Of course the main villain is a "big salesman" "bullshitter" who says things like "The truth is what I make it!". Wow, guys, your film is so-o-o politically-conscious, and very pretty.

The fantasy is more or less that Donald Trump's army of reactionaries is marching on Washington to seize power through violent means, and on the way he drops Joe Biden into the Grand Canyon, but just before Joe hits the ground a giant fucking bald eagle swoops in to catch him and squawks, "God finds you worthy! Arise, President Biden!"

In our escapist little morality play, our best friend slash allegorical dad gets made king of the planet, and we all get jobs in the government. As in, one of the funniest lines in the movie is straightup Bumblebee exulting, "This is the greatest day of my life. I get to work for the government!" When Prime met Bumblebee—an hour ago—the dude was talking to imaginary friends, and honestly the only fucking skill he's demonstrated since then is cold-blooded murder. We have this dissonance in the storytelling, where it's mostly a story about four friends going on an adventure (are they even friends? Most of them hate each other!), but it's also a founding-fathers political origin story, which means there comes a point where our hero just suddenly starts bossing his friends around in a deep voice, and they're like, "Yes, sir!" It creates this unhinged situation where the "good" faction on Cybertron is ruled by the biblical chosen one and his nepotism buddies.

Per that quote from WIRED (or are they just putting words in Cooley's mouth? I can't help but notice they don't give an exact quote!), the film is ultimately sympathetic to the bad guys (the Republicans, I guess). It deliberately suggests that there is really nothing that should divide the Autobots and the Decepticons: their political goals, it claims, are identical, and they only disagree on the means by which to achieve them. The Decepticons, who are angry and hateful, have simply been misled by a power-hungry liar with charisma—first Sentinel, then Megatron—and so the tragedy is that they are artificially pushed into conflict with their fellow men, when really they should be uniting to stand against their common enemy, the foreigner illuminati trying to steal Cybertron's wealth.

Now, I know I've just handed you a get-out-of-jail-free card. My political allegory here is chock full of holes. What, are Sentinel Prime and Megatron both Donald Trump? Get a grip. Obviously any real-world commentary in Transformers One was only intended in the loosest sense imaginable: things like, "people should be free to change into whatever they want!" I'm being unfair, I'm reading too much into it, this is a cartoon movie for children, and if I want politics, I should start reading some fucking books. Also, come to mention it, my whole argument about that cave earlier really didn't hold water, and- I know, alright? I know.

V. Place / Place, Cybertron

I'm not mad at this toy commercial because its politics don't quite align with mine. I'm not mad at it for having a boring-ass supporting cast. I'm not mad at it for reheating a bunch of half-baked lore I didn't care for from the early 2010s. I've actually spent a lot of time mad about Transformers media that I've thought was bad. There's Transformers: Armada, where the English translators are fully asleep at the wheel and render even the most basic cartoon plots incomprehensible though constant mistranslations. There's Transformers: Micromasters, where two white guys wrote a downtrodden race of tiny Cybertronians who greet each other like "Wattup, my micro!". There's the recent series of Transformers: EarthSpark, where there's an episode that I can only describe as "the Wonka Experience but it's an episode of a children's cartoon", with a plotline that mostly revolves around our child heroes straightup robbing a Onceler-looking businessman of his most valuable possession. There's Transformers: Age of Extinction, with that one scene, and also the rest of that movie. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most Transformers fiction is some combination of bad, offensive, and offensively bad.

So even though I've just spent thousands of words whinging and moaning about how I didn't like Transformers One, the truth is that I had a perfectly nice time at the cinema. I got to go see it with five of my pals who love Transformers just as much as I do, and we had a blast. It is easily in the top 50% of all Transformers fiction.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I guess I've always given a lot of thought to what Transformers looks like from the outside. Maybe it's that I'm compelled to spend so much time and money on it, that it somehow compels me to vomit up these kinds of essays, and all I want is to be able to make it make sense to anyone in my life. It would be so, so nice if I could just sit down in the cinema with a friend or family member for a couple of hours, and at the end of it, they'd be able to walk out and say, "Okay, I guess I see what you get out of it." Rise of the Beasts was kind of that movie for me, but Rise of the Beasts is also the seventh instalment in a blockbuster franchise. It kind of takes for granted everything about Transformers.

It doesn't answer, "what the fuck is a Transformer anyway?"

For many years now, fans have noticed a marked aversion to using the word "transform" as a verb, or even as a noun. Optimus Prime no longer says, "Autobots, transform and roll out!", he just says, "Roll out!". Transformers no longer transform, they "convert". In fact, Transformers are no longer Transformers at all: they are "Transformers bots", the italics here serving to distinguish a registered trademark. This is because the worms in suits at Hasbro are worried that, if they continue to use the word "transform" by its dictionary definition—that is, to change—then rival toy companies will be able to make the case that anything that transforms can legally be described as a Transformer. It will become a generic trademark, like Velcro, or Band-Aid, or Dumpster.

Yet in Transformers One, "Transformers" is not just the noun by which the characters are referred to—rather, it's used in a descriptive sense to specifically mean "Cybertronians who can transform"! Characters are constantly talking about whether they can or can't transform. Prime gets to say his catchphrase in full. It's a miracle. Not only that, characters even get to say the word "kill" instead of "defeat" or "destroy".

Transformers One has a level of unrestricted creative freedom not seen since the 1986 animated film. This is a film unconstrained by location shooting, or licensing deals, or uncooperative actors; through the magic of CGI, for every single frame of its one-hour-thirty runtime, the filmmakers can put literally whatever they want on the screen. They were given the assignment, "Make an animated prequel set on Cybertron telling the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron", handed an estimated $147 million and a blank page, and told to go nuts. Like those born with transformation cogs, Transformers One had the power to become anything it wanted to be.

The 1986 animated film took that carte blanche to do whatever the fuck it wanted, and basically singlehandedly defined the direction of the franchise ever since. On a lore level, in terms of tone, I would say that Transformers owes practically everything to The Transformers: The Movie. Cartoons, comics, films, and video games have adapted every single one of its scenes countless times over. I'm not necessarily saying that it's a good film, or even that it's a particularly original film—much of it is ripped off from Star Wars—just that it took the franchise somewhere it hadn't gone before. It was looking to the future. As in, literally, it was set in 2005, at the time two decades into the future.

What gets me down about Transformers One is that—like most major franchise media released since The Force Awakens—all it can do is think about the past. Swathes of it are devoted to painstakingly recreating or setting up the various bits of iconography which have arbitrarily come to define the franchise. Even when it appears to be taking things in a new direction, it's not long before it course-corrects back into familiar territory: Steve Buscemi invents a surprisingly fresh take on Starscream's voice, and then Megatron half-strangles him to death, saddling him with a post-produced rasp to emulate Chris Latta's iconic performance from forty years ago.

The very title of the film, Transformers One, is an allusion to the line, "Till all are one," which originates in The Transformers: The Movie. In an early script for that '80s feature, it was actually "Till all life sparks are one", referring to a literal metaphysical process in that draft whereby one Transformer's life force could be passed on to another, presumably with the belief that they would all eventually be merged into a single afterlife. In the finalized story, it's just this kind of mystical phrase vaguely evoking concepts of togetherness and unity.

Transformers One brushes up against the phrase a couple of times. Alpha Trion almost says it at one point, when passing on his dead siblings' transformation cogs: "They were one. You are one. All are one!" Whatever that means. Later, Orion Pax starts a chant amongst the miners: "Together as one!" And finally, at the very end of the movie, during his obligatory film-ending monologue, Optimus Prime again goes: "And now, we stand here together... as one." (Half of Cybertron has just been banished to the surface forever.) "[...] Here, all are truly... Autobots." (Again, half of Cybertron- Optimus, what the fuck are you talking about?) Regardless, this is inexplicably the one instance where the movie doesn't twist itself up into knots trying to nail the exact phrasing.

Actually, there is one other sideways reference like this I can think of. Early in the film, Orion Pax is chatting up Elita, and he remarks, "Feel like I have enough power in my to drill down and touch Primus himself." To which Elita replies, "You don't have the touch or the power." This is kind of a nonsensical retort unless you know that in the 1986 movie, one of the most iconic songs on the soundtrack was "The Touch" by Stan Bush, which had the chorus line: "You got the touch! You got the power!" It's a banger. Anyway, remember when I said Darkwing gets chucked through an arcade cabinet? Well, here's Cooley revealing why that arcade cabinet is in the film:

I actually wrote [that exchange between Orion Pax and Elita] because I love that song. [...] And we had this one version where D-16 and Orion were playing a video game, like a stand-up old arcade game—it was inspired to look like that, but a Cybertonian version of that. They’re playing that together like friends and the song, like the 8-bit song that’s playing is ["The Touch"]. But that scene got nixed. And so I wanted to work it in there somewhere. And I just felt like a natural place for it. But that was one where I’m like, "I just love that song and those lyrics and that’s Transformers to me so I want to get that in there."

(I've had to amend that quote to fill in the blanks where the article has redacted "spoilers" for the movie. Spoiler culture is an absolute pox, I swear. Can't have the audiences knowing about one (1) mid joke in advance—the movie barely has enough jokes to fill a "Transformers One Funny Moments" compilation as it is!)

This actually isn't the first time Hasbro has "nixed" a reference to "The Touch" in major Transformers media. In the Transformers: Cyberverse episode "The Alliance", a character references "The Touch" right before a training montage which is clearly supposed to have the track playing, except instead it's been replaced by a generic rock instrumental, presumably because they couldn't afford the license. And in Daniel Warren Johnson's Eisner-award-winning bestselling comic run, there's one panel where he clearly wanted to include the song's lyrics as a sound effect, but wasn't allowed, so the final sound effect famously reads "YOU KNOW THE SONG". But that's a random episode of a bargain-bin cartoon, and an indie-darling comic series—not a $147 million blockbuster. You really have to wonder if it came down to money, or if it was something else. God knows Transformers One would not actually be improved for having a chiptune remix of "The Touch" in it, anyway.

The most egregious misplaced bit of fanwank in the film isn't even in dialogue. In the 1986 film, there's this one iconic moment when Optimus Prime arrives at the besieged Autobot City, drives through a crowd of Decepticons in truck mode, then fires some afterburners, launching his cab up into the air, where he transforms mid-leap, drawing his blaster to shoot a couple of Decepticons before hitting the ground. It's a fantastic bit of original animation. It's the Akira slide of Transformers. And, surprise surprise, it crops up in Transformers One. In the climactic final fight, Orion Pax shows up to save Megatron, and he does the thing.

But the problem is... he's not in truck mode! The film just cuts to him standing there in the middle of some anonymous mooks, then he does a standing jump into the air, the movie momentarily goes into extreme slow-mo like he's doing a fucking quick-time event, then he shoots a couple of guys and drops to the ground. There's no momentum. It exists purely to create that simulacrum, to take the single most iconic frame from that bit of 1986 animation, and stretch that one frame into infinity. The context is discarded, irrelevant. All that matters is that brief moment of recognition: "I know what that iiis!" God knows Transformers One has precious little in the way of impactful fight animation of its own; the choreography is stiff and uninspired, while the shots themselves are nauseatingly cluttered. Often, the best it can do is pilfer from older, better stories.

"Did you clap at any of the new moments and memorable characters?" "Were there any?"

Look, I get it. Transformers One is a prequel. By definition, it can't change the future. It has to play with the characters that are already in the toybox. But I do think it had this really special opportunity: to show theatregoers where the Transformers come from. To show us Cybertron not as a distant star or a barren scrapyard, but as a living, thriving alien world, unlike Earth, something special and worth protecting in its own right. Something new and memorable. In Rise of the Beasts—probably the best Transformers movie by default—when Optimus Prime is at his lowest, he wants nothing more to return home... but home is something we've only ever seen as a cold dystopia, ruled by Decepticons. The version of Transformers One I had hoped to see was one that would have imbued Optimus' homesickness with greater meaning. I wanted to feel his loss, and to hope that one day the war will end, and Cybertron can be restored.

I think Transformers One sincerely tries to achieve this effect. The concept artists have clearly put a great deal of time and thought into Cybertron as an environment. When the artbook comes out, I'm keen to see how much stuff didn't make it into the finished film. You have to assume most of it got cut, because there's next to nothing left!

At the end of the film, battle lines are drawn, the civil war is about to start... but strangely, the movie's setting does not convey the sense that anything beautiful is being lost. Nobody is unwillingly turned to violence, innocence-lost; they're all too eager to get to killing, friggin' Bumblebee is gleeful about it. There's no beautiful, iconic landmark, which gets tragically destroyed, like in some kind of Transformers 9/11—"What have we done! Where will this war take us!". There's no part of Cybertron's natural ecological environment to be ruined by the war, because the surface world is already turbofucked by the Quintessons to begin with. No, rather, we have the total opposite: Optimus Prime finding the Matrix (which was just, like, hanging out in the core of Cybertron or whatever) actually restores Energon to the planet, removing the unnatural scarcity which was the entire impetus behind the film's dystopia. He made Cybertron great again. So again, Transformers One fails to answer one of the most fundamental questions one might expect of a Transformers prequel: "When did things on Cybertron get so bad?" The movie ends with the planet in better shape to how it started!

The big original idea that Transformers One has is that Cybertron, the planet itself, should be in a constant state of transformation. I've already talked about the beautiful shapeshifting landscapes, but it's also the moving buildings, the complicated mechanisms, the roads and rails that magically lay themselves between the vehicles and their destinations. I've already mentioned how odd I find it that none of these environmental transformations have any significance to the story; the closest it comes to some sort of payoff is when Orion Pax falls into the hole that makes you king.

What I find most perplexing are the deer. When the gang makes it to the surface, the idea is to show the natural beauty of the surface, which the cogless have been denied their whole lives. The mountains glisten as they move. Nebulae glow in the night sky. The surface is blanketed in organic (?) plantlife, like a watering can forgotten in a garden. And, most strikingly, there are deer: mechanical animals, just like those found on Earth, being hunted for sport by the evil Quintessons. When the cruisers near, their glowing horns turn red with alarm, and they prance around in fear.

I'm reminded of a brief gag from the third season of Transformers: Cyberverse—one of very few shows to have devoted any serious effort to Cybertronian worldbuilding—in the episode "Thunderhowl". Bumblebee and Chromia stumble across a "singlehorn" (read: unicorn), and when it senses danger, it neighs, transforms into a rocket, and blasts out of frame. And apart from being really cute and funny, it's like, oh, of course that's what animals are like on Cybertron! Everything on this planet transforms. Why not the animals?

For whatever reason, the deer in Transformers One are like the one thing that don't transform. Why the hell not? If Cyberverse could find the budget for its split-second sight gag, surely this blockbuster could, I don't know, have them turn into dirt bikes with antler-handlebars. That would've been something, right? If not, then at least could we maybe see some other animals on Cybertron, to really get across that alien biodiversity? Of course not. See, the deer exist to communicate one very specific story beat: a single moment of trepidation, where the heroes know there's danger nearby, but they don't know what. And all you need for that is a single kind of prey animal, with some kind of warning light to let you know, hey, there's danger! Once this purpose is fulfilled, the deer have no further significance to the story.

We need only look to BIONICLE 2: Legends of Metru Nui to see this exact same beat play out with a modicum of competence and creative flair. Also in the second act—in fact, at practically the exact same timestamp—our heroes, the Toa, have a run-in with the bad guys, and they're nearly captured... but then there's this sudden rumble of danger approaching, we don't know what. It turns out to be a herd of giant Kikanalo! They send the bad guys packing, except they nearly trample our heroes too! But then, Toa Nokama's mask begins to glow, and she discovers that her mask grants her the ability to talk to animals. They learn some vital information from the Kikanalo, and are able to ride the creatures for the next stage of their adventure. Finally, when they can go no further, the Kikanalo cave in the passage behind the heroes to ensure they won't be pursued. Holy shit, that's like, five different story beats with just that one type of creature!

It's not just that Transformers One struggles with that kind of basic narrative flow, where a single element serves multiple purposes. It's that often, it wastes precious time creating redundant setups to achieve the same effect twice.

For example, Megatronus Prime's face happens to look exactly like (what we know will be) the Decepticon insignia. At the beginning of the movie, Orion Pax mollifies Megatron by giving him a rare decal of Megatronus Prime's face. Traditionally, Megatron wears his insignia in the middle of his chest—but in this film, nearly every character has a big hole in the middle of their chest, where their missing transformation cog should go. So Megatron sticks the decal on his shoulder instead.

Later, he gets a cog, and the hole in his chest is filled. When Sentinel Prime captures Megatron, he notices the Megatronus sticker, and rips it off. Then, he re-applies it on Megatron's chest—purely so it's in the "right" place for the iconography. And then, he uses his gun to crudely brand Megatron with a tracing of Megatronus' face, inadvertently creating the Decepticon symbol. Finally, in a post-credits scene, Megatron has fashioned a proper Decepticon brand with which to brand himself and his followers. So in effect, there are four separate moments where Megatron gets the symbol! Orion sticking it on his shoulder, Sentinel moving it to his chest, Sentinel mutilating him, and finally Megatron branding himself. You can make an argument that the symbol starts out meaning one thing, but ends up meaning another thing, which has a kind of tragic significance—but I think you would struggle to distinguish subtle shades of meaning from all four of these brandings. Considering the movie only has an hour and a half to work with, I find this lack of narrative economy to be honestly embarrassing.

(My friend Jo also points out what a misstep it is to just have Megatronus Prime's face perfectly resemble the Decepticon symbol from the start. Had it been a looser, more stylised—that is to say, original—design, the moment where Sentinel Prime roughly carves it into Megatron's chest could be a shocking reveal, as the basic outlines are abstracted and simplified. Gasp, that's the origin of the Decepticon symbol! Instead, from the very moment that sticker first shows up, it's like... oh, well, there it is I guess.)

In a similar vein, both Optimus Prime and Megatron undergo two different transformations at different points in the movie: first, when Alpha Trion gives them transformation cogs, and second, when respectively they obtain the Matrix of Leadership/Megatronus' cog. The gun that sprouts from Megatron's arm in his intermediary form bears a much closer to resemblance to his iconic "fusion cannon" than the triple-barrelled cannon he ends up with in his final form. Again, in such a short film, can we really say whatever subtlety this brings to Megatron's arc is worth all this fanfare? Now, Redditors ask: "What is the EXACT moment D-16 became Megatron?"

In fact, probably the only point of criticism I've seen levied at Transformer One from within the Transformers fandom at large is that Megatron's arc is maybe a little "rushed". He starts out being best bros forever with Orion Pax, and by the end of the film, he's ready to drop the guy into a bottomless pit. The film takes a lot of time to justify his anger at Sentinel Prime, but the deterioration of his friendship with Orion goes much more unspoken, and is framed more as a point of irrationality: psychologically, Megatron comes to conflate his bossy friend with his oppressive ruler. I liked this, personally. I liked that it's as if a switch gets flipped in Megatron's head. But you do just kind of have to buy into it. The film itself does not put in the work to really sell you on the friendship souring, because again, it's too busy fucking around with two (2) magical girl transformation sequences for each of them.

Everything in the film is like this. They go into the cave and meet Alpha Trion, then leave the cave so they can watch a FMV cutscene with Sentinel Prime and the Quintessons, who've coincidentally arrived at that exact moment, basically just to rehash what they've just been told... and then they go back into the cave so Alpha Trion can resume his infodump, and then they end up clashing with Sentinel Prime's forces once that's done. At the beginning of the movie, they're at the very bottom in the mines, then they get banished to an even lower level, then they banish themselves all the way up to the surface, then they return to Iacon, and then Megatron gets banished to the surface again so he can be mesmerized by the beauty of the world and/or get gunched by Quintessons depending on what the film wanted me to take away from this. Compare to Minecraft but I survive in PARKOUR CIVILIZATION [FULL MOVIE], where the theme of class struggle is pretty efficiently depicted in the vertically-stratified setting.

I just find it so wasteful. Outside of the one scene where they're introduced, the Quintessons—ostensibly the true architects of Cybertron's oppressive status quo—may as well not exist. If not for Orion Pax addressing his closing remarks to the Quintessons, almost as an afterthought, I'd assume the film wants us to forget about them entirely, as it knows full well that its paltry runtime does not give it time for a second action-climax against the aliens. Even as sequel bait, it feels halfhearted at best; Josh Cooley is clearly already bored of Transformers, and seems unlikely to come back for another round unless the money is really really good (which *glances at the box office* it's not). So what the fuck are the Quintessons here for? Was the idea that Sentinel might just have pulled off his coup singlehandedly really so hard to stomach? Could the conspiracy not have been simplified to just involve Sentinel and his Transformer cronies? Hang on, are all the Transformers seen at the start of the film in on it, or just some of them? How's it decided who keeps their cogs and who doesn't?

VI. Into nothing

Why does this movie, where the main selling point is ostensibly that we're getting to see Transformers civilization for the first time, mostly focus on all these guys who can't fucking transform? Surely the entire thing that makes the setting fun is the Zootopia angle of, look, they're all different animals! Or the Elemental angle of, look, they're all different elements! Or the Emoji Movie angle of, look, they're all different emoji! Or the Cars angle of, look, they're all different cars! This is a Transformers film which features several significant sequences involving these cool trains, and there is absolutely zero indication that these trains are themselves Transformers. This is a Transformers film which extensively focuses on miners, and none of them transform into mining vehicles; they're holding, friggin', space jackhammers. Even the premise of "isn't it sad that these ones can't transform" is kind of undercut by the fact that all the miners get to wear fucking jetpacks, which is a frankly much cooler and more effective method of locomotion than driving.

I'm just sick of Transformers stories having zero interest in the basic premise of Transformers, which is to say, they transform into something. I also think this is the biggest dissonance between casual audiences, who think "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, that guy who turns into a truck", and Transformers fans, who think, "oh yeah, Optimus Prime, the messiah or something". Normal people love to know what the Transformers turn into. They ask, "Wait, is there a Transformer that turns into [insert silly vehicle here]?" Of course people are interested in that angle! Vehicles are such a huge part of our daily lives—honestly, for those of us living in cities, more so than animals, the classical elements, or emoji—but the closest Transformers One comes to engaging with this lens is that aforementioned Iacon 5000 race sequence. By and large, it presents a world which is made for standing up and walking around. And personally I do think that's an insane approach to take?

Is the excuse that cars can't emote? Nonsense. If you've ever seen a traffic jam, you'll know that cars can sure as hell emote. Pixar, where Josh Cooley cut his teeth, famously spent a lot of time working out how to put a facial expression on a car. No, the problem dates back to the very start of the franchise.

In the 1980s, two main people were responsible for writing the comic stories: American writer Bob Budiansky, and British writer Simon Furman. Budiansky approached the premise of the franchise from an external, human perspective, writing about culture clash, and taking delight in the Transformers' mechanical alien nature as "robots in disguise". Meanwhile, Furman wrote the Transformers as giant people: he focused on their own internal conflicts and motivations, and the grand history of their war. Pretty much every Transformers story ever told can be boiled down to one of these schools of thought: Budianskian, or Furmanist.

Budiansky quit the comic after fifty issues, allowing Furman to take the reigns as sole writer, and Furman basically got the final word on what the Transformers are. They did not evolve from naturally-occurring gears, levers and pulleys. They were not designed by a supercomputer, or built by an alien race. They are the chosen sons of God. The Thirteen are, of course, an invention of Furman's. And Transformers One is perhaps the most Furmanist story ever told. It's the culmination of years and years of lore building up, ossifying into something you can no longer describe as the history of a universe—no, this is a mythology. It's the most perfect form of brand alignment imaginable: this is not an origin story, this is the origin story. It's been the origin story for a better part of the decade—and now that everyone's seen it in theatres, it will be the origin story forever.

It's not just the fiction, either, by the way. These days, if you go into the store to buy a Transformers toy, chances are it'll turn into some misshapen made-up futuristic concept car with unpainted windows and wheels that don't even roll—and that's terrible.

There's truly a lot to hate about Michael Bay's Transformers films, but with each new entry that's released following his departure from the franchise, I feel like I only find myself appreciating them more. In the 2007 Transformers movie, we see the Transformers crash-landing on Earth in their "protoforms", and their movements are animated like they're shy, like they're naked until they scan an Earth vehicle and adopt a disguise. The visual impact of Megatron, meanwhile, is that he doesn't adopt a disguise in that movie: he's a horrible metal skeleton that turns into a jet made of knives. It's weird and alien and it rules.

In the 1980s Transformers cartoon, and in the last-minute Cybertron-set prologue added to Bumblebee, and now in Transformers One, the Transformers look basically the same on Cybertron as they eventually do upon their arrival to Earth. Optimus Prime turns, unmistakably, into a truck. He has windows on his chest, and smokestacks on his arms. He doesn't have these features because he disguises himself as an Earth truck. He has those details because that's just what Optimus Prime looks like. They're his "essential brand elements", or "trademark details", which "identify the must-have elements in character design to be carried across all creative expressions". Prime may take any form he wishes, so long as it looks exactly like himself. A mask of my own face—I'd wear that.

What I find fucked up about the reception towards Transformers One is that a lot of people seemed very invested in its success—and not its popular success, certainly not its artistic success, but rather its commercial success. They wanted this to be the first film to make one bumblebillion dollars. They wanted Hasbro to line its fucking pockets and make movies like this forever. So if you express any kind of negativity towards this film online, which might theoretically affect some other person's decision of whether or not to go and see it, which might theoretically affect the profit it makes at the cinema, which might theoretically affect the future of the franchise in some unknown way, then you're some sort of fandom traitor who oughta be executed.

If you're so worried about the future of the franchise, the fandom really isn't where you should be looking. Like, c'mon, the Transformers fandom has been good as gold, we buy so many toys. Meanwhile, Hasbro just got finished laying off around 100 employees with no warning to make their books look a bit better. Transformers designer John Warden—who'd worked at Hasbro for 25 years, is widely credited with inventing the modern paradigm of Transformers toylines, and ultimately became the creative director of both Transformers and G.I. Joe—was on assignment to a convention in the UK with the rest of the Transformers team when he heard the news. Suffice to say, he did not end up making a public appearance at the convention. With his work's health insurance snatched away without notice, he's had to resort to crowdfunding to pay his family's medical bills. As a well-known figure in the toy industry, he will presumably find a new job and land on his feet, but the same cannot be said for all 99 of the remaining employees we're told have been unceremoniously dumped.

The Binder of Revelation, which has been something of a holy grail of behind-the-scenes material for over a decade, has finally been leaked—presumably by one of these guys, presumably out of spite.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to have been paying particularly close attention to Hasbro's financials, but from where I'm sitting, it sure seems that ever since the sudden death of then-CEO Brian Goldner in 2021—credited for saving the company in 2000, and overseeing the explosive growth of its intellectual property ever since then—his replacement, Chris P. Cocks (or "Crispy Cocks", as we're all now calling him), has been dead set on gutting the company for all it's worth. The Power Rangers franchise, which the company acquired for $522 million in 2018, is dead in the water, with huge quantities of physical assets being flogged at auction for quick cash. In 2019, they acquired the entertainment company eOne for $4.0 billion, and now they're selling off the whole shebang (except the cash-printing Peppa Pig franchise) for just $500 million. I guess maybe they just fucked it big style?

Because now, Crispy Cocks has proudly announced that Hasbro is going to stop financing movies altogether.

I'm sure that in the wake of this announcement, many of those aforementioned fandom pundits will be drawing a correlation between this announcement, and the box-office figures for Transformers One, and the fact that you personally failed to convince your Mom to go see it with you or whatever. "Ah, you see! They didn't make enough of their money back, and now they're consolidating. Simple economic cause and effect. Market forces." And look, I'm not going to sit here and claim these things are wholly unrelated. Of course they're very related. But I am going to make the case that, in truth, nobody at Hasbro really cared how Transformers One did. Unless it turned out to be some pie-in-the-sky runaway hit, I don't think the future of the Transformers film franchise would've been particularly different if only the film had done better.

With Paramount, Hasbro has been making these movies and having them underperform ever since 2017's The Last Knight—which apparently lost Paramount $100 million—and that's because at the end of the day, what they're most interested in isn't making movies. It's making toy commercials. And on that level, the Transformers films have clearly been a success so far.

Now, Crispy Cocks' skinsuit fashions itself as a gamer, so he can personify Hasbro's hardcore pivot towards digital and tabletop gaming. While we await the release of the assuredly-dogshit, assuredly-hell-to-have-worked-on, assuredly-never-coming-out Transformers: Reactivate, the brand has been whored out to a procession of mobile games you've never heard of, glorified gambling machines designed to hack the monkey part of your brain with bright colors and Things You Recognize. The exact content of these games is irrelevant; all that matters is the announcement, on every single pop culture news outlet simultaneously (naturally—they're all owned by the same company, talk about Monopoly), of New Collaboration Between Transformers And Goon Warriors Free To Download Now. Your daily, weekly, bi-annual reminder to think about that thing you can buy.

That's all any of this stuff is.

All these words spilled about what a good movie Transformers One is, and how bad it is, and why the marketing failed it, and what the next one might be like, and- none of it mattered! It does not matter. From the beginning, this movie was always going to be too preoccupied with its own mercenary interests to be something anyone would ever be able to seriously talk about as a work of art, even corporate art. The actual content of the movie is irrelevant; I've spent very little of this review talking about it, because there's nothing there to talk about. It is the mere fact of the movie's existence that serves its purpose. Like the Optimus Prime Fortnite skin, it's enough for it to occupy our attention.

Maybe that's why they staggered the film's release date: because some marketing exec watched the rough cut and realised, if everyone saw it at once, we'd be done talking about it within a fortnight. And in ten years' time, after it has been paraded around whichever streaming services survive 'til then, and nearly every last cent of revenue has been squeezed out of it, the kids will be able to watch it on YouTube with ad breaks, and decide what they want for Christmas.

To the Transformers fans reading this, I am begging you, unless you happen to own shares in Hasbro for some fucking reason, to disabuse yourself of the feeling that you owe any kind of loyalty to a toy franchise. It shouldn't matter to you one jot how Transformers One did in theatres. The people who actually make the product you care about, the friendly faces paraded before you on livestreams and press tours, don't see this money anyway—they too are merely assets, who can be fired and replaced with cheaper, inferior equivalents.

I'm sure many of you will have, from the very start, seen this review for the foolish endeavour it is. I've wasted all this time criticising Transformers One for its lack of artistic vision, when the truth is, Transformers One is playing an entirely different game. Like the Disney Channel running "Fishy Facts!" segments to subliminally get kids interested in fish a full year and a half before the release of Finding Nemo, this is not a product—it's an ad for a product.

...

Okay I'll be honest, I don't entirely love where this review has ended up. It ends on kind of a "bummer note", I guess you could say. Flashing back to sections I. and II., I feel like things started out so fun. We had that whole bit at the start where I was telling you about the Transformers, remember that? We learned so much together. And there were even a few moments where I was able to express some kind of sincere joy and appreciation over this thing that I supposedly adore so much. Sure, I did a lot of complaining, but it was fun complaining, right? It had like, a sarcastic edge to it, sort of.

What happened? Why am I suddenly talking like I want to cut someone's head off? As I grow more bitter, I type this essay with increasing difficulty. The massive gun that's sprouted from my forearm keeps colliding with my monitor.

Hasbro descends from on high to reward @TFHypeGuy, a grown-ass adult who has spent untold unpaid hours fearlessly replying to every single viral tweet to tell people to go see the film, somehow netting himself 80,000 followers in the process, with a crate of toys, which was probably his end goal from the start. He and I duel. We trade blow after blow. Finally, he clobbers me with a Walmart-exclusive light-up Ultimate Energon Optimus Prime figure. "It didn't have to end this way," he says. Then he banishes me to the surface world to think on my sins.

VII. The Wrong Trousers 👖 | Train Chase Scene 🚂 | Wallace & Gromit

When Eric Pearson came onto the project,

It was late middle of the game. They had a script that had the outline of the story, which is still very much the structural bones of the story now. But what I found interesting about animation is there are certain things that were far along in the process. The train escape to the surface was very far along, so that was just kind of locked. Maybe you could change a line here or there. Meanwhile, the opening, the whole first 10 minutes, was all storyboards and sketches, which changed a bunch of times.

And I do think that's a really difficult position for a scriptwriter to be in. Sure, the parts of the screenplay I feel able to attribute to Pearson, I wasn't particularly impressed by. But I think this anecdote goes to show how unnatural the constraints can be on a story like this. When you think of like, a scene that's key to Transformers One, you're probably imagining something like the Megatron/Optimus fight, or the scene in the mine—not the train scene, which is basically a bit of arbitrary connective tissue bridging the two main locations in the film.

Josh Cooley, the film's director, the face of the film on the press circuit from a creative standpoint, came onboard after five years of previous development work was already done. Writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, who originally pitched the film and presumably wrote the early drafts of the story, might have already left the project by that point. Aaron Archer and Rik Alvarez, the creative forces behind the Binder of Revelation, left Hasbro years before the film was even pitched. It's no wonder to me that the final result feels incoherent, disjointed, and oddly stilted. It's certainly no wonder that nobody at Hasbro today really seems to care about the film; it's not their baby. If any of the people credited with bringing the project to completion had been given full creative freedom to make whatever Transformers movie they wanted, it would've looked completely different.

Luckily, there are still plenty of areas of the franchise where creators have just been allowed to go ham. Over in Japan, TRIGGER has taken a modest budget for a music-video and produced one of the most visually-striking bits of animation in the franchise, a true love-letter to all the weird parts of its forty-year history. And in America, comic creator Daniel Warren Johnson is halfway through his Eisner-winning new run on the title, which is the kind of thing I would basically recommend to anyone without caveats as being a phenomenal story, period. If that comic can be said to be an advert for anything, it's for Skybound's other, nowhere-near-as-good comic series, or for the unofficial unlicensed copyright-infringing Magic Square Optimus Prime toy Daniel Warren Johnson apparently used as reference the whole time.

I dunno, maybe Hasbro stepping back from financing these films is a good thing, in the long run. Maybe we can do without Transformers movies for a while. And however many years down the line, maybe Paramount or some other studio will put together a new team of talent, and they'll get to do whatever it is they want. And maybe the movie they make will be the one that knocks everyone's socks off.

Truly, I don't know where the road leads from here. It hasn't been built yet. It could turn out to go anywhere.

If you made it this far, I hope some of what I've said has been entertaining or interesting. Thanks for reading!

Time to for me to come clean. There is one other reason why I've waited so long to release this review... and that's because I have a special announcement to make. Last month I set myself a little challenge: to write something that's at least as long as this review, but which isn't another negative-nancy tirade. It's a story.

The working title is "Ice Road Transformers". It's like an episode of that one reality TV show about Canadians driving trucks across frozen lakes—except the truck is Optimus Prime.

Early reviews say it's good! It'll be going through several rounds of revisions, to turn it into a well-oiled machine, hopefully in time for a seasonally-appropriate wide release in February. I'm very excited for you to be able to read it. You can follow me here or on Bluesky to be the first to find out when it's ready!

I'd like to thank my friends Jo and Umar for their work interviewing Cooley and di Bonaventura during the film's press circuit, along with Viv, Callum, and Omar for allowing me to enjoy this film much more than I otherwise might have. I wouldn't have been able to express many of my feelings about this movie nearly so cogently if not for the conversations I had with them. Additional thanks go to Chris McFeely, as his Transformers: The Basics videos (linked throughout this essay) refreshed my memory on a lot of the Aligned stuff, sparing me from having to read The Covenant of Primus again.

[thefirstknife]

Category 10 even in Rite of the Nine for me personally. There's little engrams to interact with at the start of the zone when you load in. When you load in for the first time, you only get one and then I assume when you pick up the collectibles (so 2 this week) you get another two. There's three little cutscenes in total.

The first one features the Nine giving us a message that swaps between the Emissary to start and then goes to Orin asking us for help:

The Emissary brings you a message from The Nine. The put forth a challenge to the Lightbearers - A begrudging implement, a worn tool! Guardian, please - We ask: make known your value, so divided gods may wield you in time.

We didn't even notice that it's multiple cutscenes at first, we thought we'd just be able to rewatch this one, but the second one is different. It features various landscapes with the Vex architecture and mysterious text from the Nine, including a special symbol at the end. The text formatting and the symbol are representing one of the Nine. They're finally identifying which one of them speaks in which way and with which planet they're connected. This one is Venus:

So the Nine associated with Venus speaks in all caps no punctuation (ignore the elipses, they seem to be present either way) and have this symbol. This is the entry to the Vault of Glass btw, therefore easily identified as Venus. Intrigued by what looks like the tentacles from Heresy. Maybe it's not but it looks that way to me. Full text:

CALIBRATE LET US STOKE THE EMBERS GRASP YOUR LIGHT LIKE SHADOWS ON CAVE WALLS SUMMONS UNHEARD WHY LIMIT YOURSELVES TO SUCH TRODDEN PATHS ALLOW US TO UPLIFT

The third we got was Earth:

EDZ, Cosmodrome, speaking in small caps no punctuation, this symbol: Earth Nine. Full text, elipses included for this but I think they can be ignored for the specific formatting of how this one speaks (we have to see details when they get to the Nine that use dots and pluses and minuses in their speech):

cherished...little motes...i swaddle out...of...fondness... our...symbiosis forever...conjunct...but... decay...decay...i cannot...hold... the rot...the spilling...of neutrinos...back please...come...

Very interesting differences between them! What excites me is that we'll see others. However, from what it seems it looks like we can't get all if they're unlocked through the collectibles in the dungeons, because there's only 6 collectibles. The first cutscene was for free and it didn't feature a specific Nine. So at worst we can only get 6 of them speaking. Possible others might get unlocked in some other way that isn't the collectibles? There's 9 spots where they're positioned, so all can fit, just no idea how we'll get the ones not tied to the collectibles.

What's even more interesting is that it starts with Venus. They confirmed definitively in the reveal stream that the Nine are 8 planets and the Sun. Obviously we only have 2 so far so we don't really have a pattern but it's quite the coincidence that it goes Venus and then Earth, rather than some other bizarre order.

Also, not to use merch as lore, but the Rite of the Nine shirt shows all of the 9 symbols for them and these two, for Venus and Earth are 2nd and 3rd, aka where they should be. So the 1st symbol should be Mercury and I assume the Sun will be the last. So the cutscenes starting with Venus means that the first one was skipped and like. It makes sense. The planet is gone. This would also confirm that the Nine that's missing from the Division lore tab is indeed Mercury and also that it won't have a cutscene, unless the order is completely screwed up after starting with Venus and Earth.

I'm super excited to finally being able to match all the individual Nine to their own formatting type and symbol and planet. Can't wait to see how many of these we're going to get and if we'll get all or not. Are the rest going to be in order or not? Is Mercury entirely skipped because it's missing? Are there going to be only 8 cutscenes then? I need to know this right now.

Also, for doing the collectibles you get the lore book! It's two collectibles per dungeon so first two are this week in Spire of the Watcher. However, you can just get the collectibles on each character to unlock the whole lore book. This is definitely a bug because when I got to my other character, that triumph was labelled as unfinished despite me finishing it on my main. Either way you can get the whole lore book this way. It's definitely something else. Difficult to read and process, deals with Orin and her wrestling with the Nine. A lot of chatter from the Nine.

I did not expect this much lore from this, I was cautiously optimistic, but this is incredible. After all these years, being able to properly identify all of the Nine is huge. Getting some answers about them and how they function also, as well as the question of what's going on to the Nine that's associated with a planet that was eaten by the Witness and not returned.

[starsreminisce]

Every couple so far has built upon the lore of the mating bond, with each pair answering one of the five Ws and one H while expanding on what came before.

What: Rowaelin Who: Feysand When: Nessian Where: Quinlar Why: Elucien How: Gwynriel

What: Rowaelin

Rowan and Aelin introduced the mating bond into the series and established its importance.

Who: Feysand

Feyre and Rhysand answered the question of who are mates. ACOMAF focused on the contrast between the two males Feyre had loved, with Feyre processing why Tamlin was not the right match for her and what Rhys had that Tamlin lacked.

When: Nessian

Nesta and Cassian’s story explored when the bond snaps. Both Nesta and Elain were Made, yet only Elain’s bond snapped immediately. Nessian’s bond did not snap until two years later after a pivotal confrontation between Nesta and Cassian during Solstice about her reasons for accepting Eris’s engagement. This brings the question of whether the bond snaps at a crossroads moment for the female, when she recognizes who she could be but also acknowledges that she is not yet ready.

Where: Quinlar

Bryce and Hunt’s story demonstrated that the mating bond transcends worlds. One of the major plotpoints of HOFAS was that Bryce was able to return to Midgard was because Hunt was her home. HOFAS also featured three mated couples (four if you count the damn weapons) who, despite being across different worlds, still found their way back to each other.

Why: Elucien

Elain and Lucien’s story will answer why the bond exists. SJM has already planted this question in the text: Feyre explicitly wondered why Lucien and Elain were mated, and Azriel echoed the question in the bonus chapter. Their personalities, interests, backgrounds, and reactions align, yet their bond remains unexplored and unresolved longer than any other. Both Elain and Lucien are at a crossroads, having exhausted what they can do alone, and their story will reveal what they can achieve together. It will also restore the balance of the mating bond, shifting it away from the power imbalance it currently has. Unlike the other male mates, Lucien has not pushed Elain for a decision, which may be key to redefining the bond’s role.

The mating bond is also a huge part of their story, considering both Elain and Lucien were as content as they could be before their bond snapped. Yet once it did, they each started pushing themselves to become more. Their journey has been about stepping beyond where they were and figuring out how they can better the world. It also helps that Lucien, being fully fae, has a deeper connection to and understanding of the mating bond compared to the other couples, who are either half fae or not fae at all. Elain, described as different from her sisters, is also unique in that she was the only female who knew about her mating bond much earlier and understood how her feelings for Lucien tied in with the mating bond and what came with it.

It is no secret that the mating bond is at the center of their conflict, which means their resolution will inevitably be tied to understanding why the mating bond exists in the first place.

How: Gwynriel

Gwyn and Azriel’s story will reveal how the bond snaps though this time through a male’s perspective. In every previous case, the bond has snapped from the female’s point of view. Even when Cassian’s bond with Nesta snapped, we saw it happen through Nesta’s eyes. Lucien, Rowan, Hunt, and Rhys all had their bonds snap outside of their POVs. Azriel, having waited 500 years for a mate, is the perfect character to show the experience from the male’s side.

A rejected bond does not fit into the grand scheme of SJM’s worldbuilding, especially given how the mating bond is tied to fate with severe consequences for those who do not follow it. Rejections leave a lasting impact: both mates feel the other’s death profoundly, and it follows them for the rest of their lives. This makes it unlikely that SJM will use bond rejection as a central theme, especially with how she has framed the consequences of ignoring fate.

All in all, Elucien and Gwynriel both have the best potential to strengthen her lore of the mating bond, adding more to what we have previously known from her other couples, especially since the main couples in her series are already mates.

[dear-ao3]

well good day to all of you. i have a tale. a classified, certified absolute god tier disaster of a tale.

at the ripe hour of 6:45 am i was awoken from my slumber by a Noise. what sort of noise? you might be asking.

the sort of noise that usually accompanies my father getting up at the ass crack of dawn and trying not to turn on the tap loudly so that he doesnt wake us up.

for one blissful moment i thought that i was at home, in my bed, and all was right with the world.

and then i remembered that i live approximately four hours away from my parents and all is not right with the world.

so i did what any person would do. waited for the noise to go away.

but it did not.

so i investigated. in all my bleary eyed glory.

and found that my bathroom ceiling light was pissing.

not just a little either.

a severe, unauthorized amount of water was streaming out of my bathroom light fixture.

so after banging on katyas door and finding a bucket and throwing on a sweatshirt i dragged my tired ass down to the front desk and reported the tea as it were.

now one thing you need to know about our building is that it is old. the second thing you need to know about our building is that the maitenance guys (we call them the boys) are absolutely incredible, like tumblr funny guy posts but irl, however they take for fucking ever to respond to any situation.

this time though, nothing was in clear danger of exploding or lighting on fire. so we made some breakfast. drank some coffee. watched the bucket that we had put in the bathroom fill up with water. and we waited.

and waited.

and waited some more.

then i noticed that if you stepped on some of our kitchen floor tiles they started squelching.

so back downstairs i went and explained the tea as it were once again.

and let it be known, that i worked for two very solid and very miserable years as a resident assistant in college. i know all about the woes of people complaining to you to fix things that you cannot fix and you cannot tell them when it will be fixed because the person who needs to do the fixing is otherwise indisposed. so my general attitude towards this whole situation was "hey man you can't make this better for me and im really not pressed about it as long as someone eventually comes and sorts out my pissing ceiling." which is a great attitude to have in this general situation. and especially so because it was about to get even more strange.

at approximately 9:30am our apartment was graced by the presence of one of the boys. the maintenance man. we will call him james.

we have encountered james before. he delt with our fuse box nearly exploding. that situation was not nearly as chill as this one was.

hes also incredible.

so he comes in and he goes "hey how's it going" and i say "well you know things are just leaking!"

he proceeds to tell us that the fridge in the apartment above us had a connection pipe that froze and exploded some how and that managed to leak all into our apartment. not nearly what i was expecting but hey! at least they know what's going on!

we tell him about the squelching tiles and he says that he will bring us a dehumidifier after he turns off the water and deals with the mess of the fridge above us. we say ok great! this is wonderful!

and he goes to leave the apartment. out of habit i had locked the door when he entered. he goes "aw man did you lock me in?"

and i say

"oh sorry!"

and he pauses.

and he looks at our door in disbelief. perhaps even utter horror.

and this, my lovely audience, is what he was looking at:

surprisingly. he was not staring at the entertainment for man and horse plaque that katya and i found while thrifting. nay. he was staring at the unfortunate combination of the printed photo of lando norris and max verstappens face.

now why are lando norris and ax verstappen on the back of my door? you might be asking. you might even be asking who they are.

and if youve been following the lore of this blog, you might recognize them as formula 1 drivers. lando norris of course being a mclaren driver and max verstappen being the reigning world champion of team red bull.

and how did they wind up on my door? well at christmas katya thought it would be funny to put a picture of lando norris on top of our christmas tree and so we got one printed at cvs but when you get wallet sized photos printed they print you four of them so we ended up with four of the same photo of lando. one went on the tree, one went to my sister, one is in our bathroom and now one is on the back of our door.

as for max. well. katyas partner drinks red bull and he was on the red bull box so we cut him out and stuck him there. neither of us are particularly big max fans, it was just funny.

but anyway. i digress.

james is standing there staring at this array of perplexing stuff and goes.

"really? him??"

and i go

"yeah..." not knowing what else to say.

and james turns. and he looks at us. and he goes. and i shit you the absolute fuck not.

"now what's wrong with lewis hamilton???"

(sir lewis hamilton being the mercedes f1 driver, 7 time world champion and absolute icon)

and katya and i go

"oh no no! we love lewis hamilton! we just respect him too much to put him on the door!"

which is true

and james goes "now what did you think of him going to ferrari?"

and i say "i thought it was an interesting choice"

and katya says "i was surprised."

and james says "you and me both" and then he shuts the door behind him.

katya and i look at eachother. and we both fall to the floor in fits of laughter.

let it be known that james has come face to face with a giant tapestry of mr worldwide mr 305 pitbull himself that is in our bathroom, on several occasions, and yet, he chooses to comment on our choice of formula 1 driver that is taped to the back of our door.

im still in a state of disbelief. my ceiling is still pissing. my floor is still squelching. and my maintenance man felt the need to call our my choice of formula 1 driver at 9:30 on a saturday morning.

[fatcatlittlebox]

I think a lot about the first time Halbrand watched Galadriel fall. How afterwards, he held onto that rope to save her life and how he has held it since. Then she fell again, off the cliff and away from him. He watched their thread and his future unravel in front of him but still he held fast. And I think the impact of that was what she felt more than anything else. She felt it and then she awoke. Of all the things he has done, he has always had that ability. He awakens her. And yet he doesn't pass judgement on what that power would or could do.

The idea of threads and strings is a prevalent one in TROP. First, with the rope that bound Galadriel on the raft, then again with the image of the puppet in her likeness. At first glance, this looks like an ominous allusion to Sauron being a puppet master. Yet upon closer examination, I don't think it is. The best way to interpret these visual clues is to usually look at the preceding scene.

In this case, it is a disagreement about destiny and fate between Nori and Marigold. And the Stranger, after eavesdropping, stays silent and looks up questioningly, as if to stare at the stars or gods -- whoever is pulling the strings. The next scene shows three puppets. Sauron is one of them. And three sets of hands. Sauron is not the actual puppeteer. I think this scene is symbolic of the Three Fates instead. And I love the idea that it is not yet clear to the audience and even the characters themselves who is actually in control. Is this all Sauron’s design? Or are these threads unspooling and unraveling as they were always meant to?

This image comes up again when Galadriel compares herself to a harp, a stringed instrument, being played. This is a great insight into what she feels. The threads that keep them together do not make her feel entrapped or ensnared. They make her feel music. She feels Sauron playing that string, pulling the thread between them taut. It resonates. And music, as anyone familiar with the lore of Tolkien, is creative. It is life. Their bond is creating something and they aren’t even aware of it. Their threads are weaving into a greater tapestry.

Furthermore, it’s interesting and important to note that despite being bound in such a way, Sauron has not and never will use that thread as a leash. Yes, Sauron used the crown of Morgoth upon her. But he remembers what it was like to be lured and brought to heel by Morgoth and he never does that to Galadriel.

Galadriel will not be kept low. Not by him. How tempting that must be for an ancient and powerful entity obsessed with dominating the world? How different he is from his former master. Because think about it. In this vision he shared with Galadriel, she was at his side, shoulder to shoulder. I think that's important to note if we're looking for signs or symbols that Sauron was manipulating her. In fact, their bodies are turned towards each other suggesting intimacy and synchrony. And while some may say this was also an insincere ploy, I don't believe so. He wants her to be at his side. It shows even in the way he fights. In the heat of combat, he always treats it as a duel of equals.

In fact, whenever they are fighting, he never keeps her down. Even if he knocks her over or if she falls (which was a lot) he waits for her to bring herself back up. Every time. Shoulder to shoulder and face to face.

Which should be contrasted with what happens with her elven peers. Time and time again, she was held back. She was exiled to Valinor, doubted by her regiment, demoted and made to be supervised by Elrond. And even though they use words of loyalty and trust, it is all conditional. This is not necessarily through any fault or lack of wisdom on their part, from an objective point of view. But I like to think about how frustrating that is for Galadriel. Morfydd has talked repeatedly about how lonely and isolated her character often feels. She is put on a pedestal where she is celebrated for her light and power, only to be knocked down from it time and time again. Being alone in the light can sometimes make you feel exposed, vulnerable, scrutinized. You cannot falter. You cannot have a shadow of doubt or weakness. And then there is Sauron. Alone in his darkness. What must that feel like? A different kind of solitude, I think. He also once basked in the light and adulation. Now he is treated as an abomination, undesirable and abhorred. Sometimes worse. In Numenor, he was underestimated and humbled. He was bloodied and brought low again. This time by mortal men. Except he is not shunned entirely. Galadriel comes back. She takes that thread that intertwines them and follows her way back to him. And look at Halbrand -- he's clutching the rope of his necklace tight, as if he's tugging on that string (clever right?)

Then we have the scene where he is Adar's captive. He is alone, with nothing but time to contemplate the moments he's been in this position before: forgotten and cast out. He remembers being betrayed, slain and left in the chilling darkness. Countless years he spent like this. And then there was light, Galadriel. She is radiance and fire. The memory of that feeling still lingering, so he replays it in his mind as she did of him: She goes to him. Tells him that she sees him and that she knows him. Knows what he's capable of and what he desires. It is a speech a Lady of Gifts would give. After so many years, to have someone say aloud the very thoughts that spring forth from your mind?

And even though they are so very different, I wonder if in moments of self-doubt or on the precipice of failure, they touch that thread for reassurance. Like running your hand over a scar or taking a deep breath before leaping. I wonder if they reach back for that thread to feel what it must be like to be understood and known, to remember who you are and what you are capable of.

[sanesaviour]

Capture of Solarion

little bit of lore:

After Solarion is chased on and off by Taskamster for several weeks, his(hers) paranoia and mental health hit rock bottom and one night, during battle, in order to protect himself, Solarion begins to use his fire powers on a grand scale and loses control, ending in massive fire in the center of city… the injured Taskmaster is captured by agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Spidey’s team is ordered to stop Solarion, but when he regains his control back, he escapes…

He is nowhere to be seen for few days, but then he returns back to saving city (bc it’s his only purpose in life at the moment) and is surprised when he finds out that Spidey’s team is still after him (they tell him that Fury just want to talk to him, which he don’t believe obvi). He avoids them or runs away few times, but in the end they still meet in battle (5 against one, damn, you can imagine the amount of offensive jokes he makes about it). He doesn’t use his fire powers during fight, but only his speed, agility and bit of martial arts he knows, as he’s still shaken up from the previous incident involving fire… he is actually trying not to defeat them (which would be impossible anyway) but waiting for the opportunity to escape again.

After while of friendly like fighting (since they used to have ok relationship with Solarion before incident, so they don’t really want to hurt each other, they just want him to cooperate) and spidey’s puns, like: “This conversation is getting blazing hot!”, “let’s not fuel the argument.”, “I’d make another pun, but I don’t wanna burn out-.”, he asks Solarion: “but seriously what is with that fire powers of yours? I knew you were bit hot-headed when you get mad, but I didn’t mean it literally.” After more questions like this from others, he is pissed and serious fight begins, which quickly escalates to him kicking White Tiger into the stomach, which others consider as really bad since they think he’s man who just hit a woman (they are very protective of Ava)…

Nova rushes to help White Tiger, while others realize that things won’t go the good way and only way to bring Solarion to Nick is to chain him up. They use combo attacks on him and while he’s dodging Powerman’s attack, Iron Fist charges at him and knocks him to the ground. They handcuff him and bring him to S.H.I.E.L.D. base. Fury then gives him foreword about how he had chance to join the Shield (no one on the team knew that except spidey) and none of it would have happened, responsibility, discipline, blah, blah, blah… when spidey asks what will happen to him next, as he is little worried about him, Fury just replies that Shield will take care of him…

The last thing Fury orders team to do is to unmask him, which Solarion immediately disagrees with… Ava volunteers for this task as her revenge on him… as she holds his mask ready to snatch it off he says with bit annoyed voice: “don’t enjoy this too much…” she answers: “this is what you get for hitting woman buddy-“ when she takes off his mask everyone is shocked by Solarion’s true identity… none of them even thought that Solarion could be womam. Solarion’s nose is still bleeding from when Iron fist hit him during fight… she stares to side for moment, then she looks at them and breaks the silence: “interesting how the tables turned”

After this, she is taken away by shield’s agents and Spidey’s team don’t see her for while.

.

Yippie I finished writing this after two hours, now I can get some sleep🎉🎉

[bezierballad]

this is gonna be one really hot take when it comes to the emerald witch arc, but the more I look at it, the more I kinda feel like it's one of the more... convoluted arcs?

Like, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying it's a bad arc. It's got a lot of great qualities (being the first arc to start diving into Ciel's trauma properly, showing more of Sebastian's demonic side, giving the servants—especially Finnian and Tanaka—more time to shine, and the new characters are enjoyable and interesting for the most part.)

My personal gripe, however (and this is 100% my opinion ya'll are free to disagree) is that the whole mystery itself isn't all that great.

Hear me out: it genuinely felt like Yana wanted to write a "fantasy village led by a witch that's surrounded by werewolves" and play it straight, but was too embarrassed to actually commit to it, so she bent over backwards to try and write a "real world explanation" to explain all the supernatural stuff that went on in the village, even bringing in stuff such as extremely advanced scientific devices (aka the whole high tech control room we see) that would clearly be unheard of in that time period.

And look, I get it: even Black Butler isn't free of its anachronisms.

But aside from the television and cell phones (which the story has long since stopped using) in the earlier chapters, and the high tech gardening implements that only the reaper organization uses (lawnmowers and chainsaws), the manga restricts to extremely minor anachronisms that usually wouldn't catch your eye immediately (like certain hairstyles that wouldn't exist back then, or the dynamic of servant master relationships, stuff that's not usually all "in-your-face").

Emerald Witch arc marks the point where the manga seems to completely drop the ball on this part: tanks started being used in the 1900's, not the 1880's. The high-tech control room under the castle? Impossible. They try to explain it as "oh damn they're 50-60 years ahead of us. No wonder they kept it a top secret project" but still. Why is poisonous gas such a big deal when they've created so much other crazy shit that would've been impossible back then?

And from this arc onward, these anachronisms keep piling up.

The Blue Cult arc that comes after it gives us speaker boxes, headphones and headsets, microphones, and punk/lolita boyband fashion. Hell, in the latest chapter of the current arc, we see a ferris wheel in the background. Those wouldn't start existing until about five or six years later.

Then there's the whole idea that the entire army is relying on this one little girl to create a poisonous gas that could kill anyone within seconds. Just this one child. No one else.

So no one else had the brains to create this? Just this little girl? You had to wait eleven years (at maximum) for her to create this gas herself before the rest of ya'll can start replicating it?

Even if relying on a single kid to create a military weapon isn't unheard of (which, fair, the manga's entire premise is a 13-year-old kid being assigned to solve murders along with his demon butler) why go as far as to create an entirely different environment with its own lore to get the job done? Specifically, why waste effort and resources creating this entire thing instead of using it to possibly train other chemists? Why witches? Why werewolves?

This kind of twist could've still possibly worked on paper, but there's not a lot of stuff that hints to the fact that it's all a ploy and that chemicals and futuristic machinery were involved. Because until the third act, the whole fantasy seemed to be completely played straight.

There's stuff you have to really think about to get that "wait a minute this isn't real" feeling—such as the village being comprised of only women. If it were real, there's no way they would've lasted generations without being able to reproduce. And the gas formula Sebastian finds in the "magic circle" written in a real-world mineral (I don't remember what they called it). And that's just about it—but other than that, the clues are extremely few and far in between.

There could've been more hints that the "curse" isn't due to the "werewolves" but rather the "miasma"/poisonous gas. I feel like they could've talked to one person in Germany outside the village and they'd say something among the lines of "my great uncle went into the forest to find the werewolves himself. He didn't see any, but he came back with his skin swollen and his nose bleeding".

Also, Sebastian can sense someone is human or supernatural, so why couldn't he tell that the werewolf he saw in the forest is a normal human guy in a costume and not a werewolf? Unless the gas was somehow strong enough to completely cloud his senses at the time?

(Honestly I'd love to see an alternate take where Sullivan is actually raised to be an 11-year-old scientist creating chemical weaponry without the elaborate witch scheme. Imagine all the Ciel parallels that could possibly have.)

(Though a part of me also feels like Sieglinde was created so Yana could justify why all the modern day devices are in the Blue Cult arc, cause they're Sully's inventions. Yet Sully hasn't been seen since that same arc. Just a hunch.)