#one of the best eps of all time

[magliesport]

[shinelikethunder]

You asked me to teach you chess, and I've done that. It's a useful mental exercise. Through the years, many thinkers have been fascinated by it. But I don't enjoy playing. Do you know why not?

Because it was a game that was born during a brutal age when life counted for little and everyone believed that some people were worth more than others. Kings and pawns.

I don't think that anyone is worth more than anyone else. I don't envy you the decisions you're going to have to make. And one day I'll be gone, and you'll have no one to talk to. But if you remember nothing else, please remember this:

Chess is just a game. Real people aren't pieces. You can't assign more value to some of them than to others. Not to me. Not to anyone. People are not a thing that you can sacrifice.

The lesson is: Anyone who looks on the world as if it were a game of chess deserves to lose.

— Harold Finch, not knowing how to explain to his AI offspring that it should care about people (but doing his best), Person of Interest 4x11 “If-Then-Else”

[leafspiritz]

i have this pet headcanon that imogen actually inherited relvin’s eyes (but tinted by the moon). and when liliana looks at her she’s seeing a little bit of both the people she left behind 🌙

[luck-of-the-drawings]

so REVENGE, HUH? or justice, if that makes you feel better. it tastes the same when cooked just right. 'I REALLY WANTED A BROTHER.' such a shame to burn a bridge you so desperately wanted to keep, especially when it wasnt even you who started the fire. especially when you hope that not a single fragment of that bridge ever washes ashore.[MAY IT ROT FAR FROM MY SIGHTS] an unfortunate loss! atleast he has his friends.

[allyriadayne]

ALICENT'S REBELLION

[puppyeared]

fake ep idea + doodles

[sea-buns]

Holy fuck, man. What a trip Fearne has been on, huh?

You tell her how grateful you are to have her in your life, you flatter her, you tell her you need her, that you have to do this together. You have her make a promise that has this woman, born of chaos and fey, agreeing through shaking hands and a trembling voice.

You make her deceive your friends; you make her follow where they cannot know; you make her help you into this contraption; you make her feed this thing into you despite the fact that you both have been warned extensively of the risks. You make her watch you crumble and splinter and shatter and fracture and burst and implode. You make her watch you die, over and over and over and over, for a minute in agonizing bullet time.

You make her do all these things, because when she tries to back out, when she tries to not be the one who let you do this—how could you do this—

you tell her, "YOU PROMISED."

Because if there's one thing you know, it's that the fey do not break a promise.

[weaponizedducks]

much as i love merlin and arthur they were NOT the blueprint. they were very nearly the blueprint, but the actual og's were from a book written in 1862 by Victor Hugo. that's right. it's enjolras and grantaire. the timeline goes exr-merthur-firstprince

[seaweedstarshine]

Late to the game as I’ve kinda been kinda non-here for a minute but I scrolled through the Dot and Bubble tag, and thought I wanted to write this post into existence.

There's this part in Doctor Who Unleashed where RTD says this:

“What we can’t tell is how many people will have worked that out before the ending. Because they’ve seen white person after white person after white person, and television these days is very diverse. I wonder, will you be ten minutes into it, will you be fifteen, will you be twenty, before you start to think, everyone in this community is white. And if you don’t think that — why didn’t you? So, that’s gonna be interesting. I hope it’s one of those pieces of television you see, and always remember.”

And I'm like. Yeah. But the reason this works even as well as it does is largely thanks to the work of the previous showrunner with the previous creative team, which was notably the first era to have any writers of color (amongst other firsts in terms of inclusivity in directors, composer, actors). While Chibnall fumbled whenever he tried to write about race himself, he did have the self-awareness to have Black and South Asian writers writing the episodes where race is the focus (and a female writer for the episode where sexism is a focus; my point is, he seemed to know his shortcomings).

I wonder what the current creative team looks like? (not really, but I wasn't 100% sure for all of them)

To quote RTD:

“...before you start to think, everyone in this community is white.”

This is pretty non-self-aware, right? It's pretty “It is said, and I understand this, there was a history of racism with the original Toymaker, the Celestial Toymaker, who had ‘celestial,’ and I did not know this, but ‘celestial’ can mean of Chinese origin, but in a derogatory way,” right? (from The Giggle Unleashed) It's pretty “and I had problems with that, and a lot of us on the production team had problems with that: associating disability with evil,” right? (from Destination Skaro Unleashed)

—none of which are issues that should be overlooked, but think how much exponentially better they might’ve been addressed if he’d consulted with Chinese writers and wheelchair-using writers before going straight to giving the Toymaker weird fake accents and making Davros walk?

How many Black or non-white people do we think saw the Dot and Bubble script before it landed in Ncuti’s hands?

And this just keeps happening.

And like, from some of the shocked responses I've seen from white viewers to the ending of Dot and Bubble, maybe the episode's unsubtlety was needed? From the way RTD talks about it in Unleashed, the episode was written with a white audience in mind, Baby's First Microaggressions (where of course the microaggressions come from people who are pretty self-admittedly white supremacists). Ricky September, a more seemingly normal depiction of someone in the racist bubble of Finetime, seemed like an interesting element, up until the way he died.

The ending worked for me, because I do think the Doctor's reaction is true to how the Doctor would react. I just keep thinking of how much better the core themes could've been handled by someone with actual lived experience on the subject matter.

[britneyshakespeare]

dallon weekes has a portrait that ages for him in his attic like dorian gray but it also still looks pretty good because he doesn't really do anything wrong

[hiphopcherrrypop]

i miss themb 😢😢

[ohporcupine]

live reaction to the phineas and jonas scene in Trustfall

[doyou000me]

Okay, so.... *steeps fingers together, takes a deep breath*

I started watching Pit Babe fully expecting it to be trash, but I'd heard there was omegaverse stuff in it and I got curious. Were they really making an omegaverse series?? If so, how far will they take it? Call it a social study, if you will.

I was not prepared for it to hook me, but here we are. Episode 7 with canon-confirmed mpreg and I'm loving it, cackling like a maniac as I'm going through the tag to see the uproar. I'm having way too much fun. Someone take this show from me and put my sanity back.

This chaos is magnificent and I love it.

More, please.

[commsroom]

favorite episode? favorite Doug Eiffel(TM) moment?

oh, tough questions! hm. i always listen to wolf 359 in order, so at this point i don't tend to think about individual episodes so much as like... i know what happens in each episode, but it's all part of the show, and i love the entire show most of all. if that makes sense. that said, memoria is very close to my heart, and had a real, material impact on my life, so that has to be one of them. it's also very impressive in what it accomplishes from a technical standpoint; mayday and the watchtower would be near the top of my list for that reason, too. but also because they're episodes that are almost entirely eiffel's voice. quiet, please is genius; intentionally limiting the audio portion of your audio drama only displays all the best things about wolf 359's clarity of sound design, and its ability to communicate visuals and a tangible sense of place. it's like gabriel urbina's response to the btvs episode hush, which i know he's said he's fond of. and bach to the future is my comfort episode for when i don't want to listen to anything else; that one always makes me feel better.

my favorite Doug Eiffel Moment... even more impossible to say. i find him enchanting. i can get fixated on the most insignificant eiffel lines and moments. my favorite eiffel moment is whatever i'm currently listening to. ... but i think one of the most eiffel moments is probably the part at the start of desperate times where he talks minkowski down and defuses the tension by "relieving her of command" - and everyone starts laughing together. it's such a perfect distillation of who he is. he thinks on his feet, he stands up to authority, he's the guy who's always got another idea, and he's quick to make himself the butt of the joke. it's funny. it's heartwarming. it's so... eiffel.

[vaugarde]

pokeani moments that exist purely to make Me miserable:

the line where they call ash's oshawott a throwaway pokemon in the unova league so they're just flat out saying they think it's a worthless pokemon

to thine own pokemon be true (extra angst points for me bc ambipom was my second favorite on the team at the time)

the granddaughter of the guy who trains gliscor calling gliscor pathetic and weak to her face despite gliscor being an extremely sensitive pokemon

pretty much everything about that gible

blue episode (favorite color but they made it a fetish somehow and also dewott and brionne and meowstic are all there and its so bad)

boxing heracross immediately. also that battle frontier episode where it's literally the only returning ash mon (barring torkoal i think but i dont count it bc its native to AG) to get humiliated onscreen

pidgeot returning but gliscor didn't even show up in the miniseries despite being an Actual Character

[dullahandyke]

and like sidenote if i can make a post with a target audience of zero. i feel like fhsy was to d20 what aa3 was to ace attorney but aa3 pulled it off better for reasons i cannot explain