There are a lot of very different, very strong opinions on this scene--but I personally love how they handled it.
Nai is a character that commits many, many atrocities. Multiple genocide attempts, that whole thing with Vash and the dependents, so fucking much. But every villain is the hero of their own story.
And don't get me wrong, the scene where Knives chops off Vash's arm in Trimax? Absolutely brutal, shocking, and impactful. I love it. But this moment, for me, highlights that Knives isn't purely made of spite and hatred. He's full of fear. He's so afraid to lose what he loves.
I hate him. I hate what he does to the characters I care for, I hate how he demeans and violates others, I hate, you know, the excessive murder. But I get it. I've made fucked up choices trying to protect those I care about, I'll probably do it again. And that's what makes him one of the best antagonists I've ever seen.
93 notes
·
View notes
the thing about doctor/river is that the blatant romance is a defense mechanism. it’s playacting it’s how they sketch out the boundaries of their relationship because they can never be sure of how the scales of intimacy are balanced - they love each other, sure, but they are so rarely in a place where they both know enough about each other for mutual trust. so you get these really interesting juxtapositions like how eleven is in full flirty mode for impossible astronaut/day of the moon to the point where it feels like they’re about to make out every time they’re in the same frame but at the same time he dismisses her with “trust you? seriously?” and is shocked when she actually kisses him goodbye. in let’s kill hitler they flirt like hell when she is literally trying to murder him but not at all when they save each others’ lives. in the wedding of river song kovarian complains about them being lovey-dovey in front of her but right after that the doctor attempts to reset the timeline and river has to drag him kicking and screaming into respecting her enough to tell her the truth. in angels take manhattan we get both “just you wait till my husband gets home” (flaunting their relationship to grayle) and “never let him see the damage” (she doesn’t trust him to love her as a flawed, mortal person). they’re out of sync all the time, so sincerity is off the table except when it’s a necessary shortcut to trust that doesn’t exist yet - river whispering his name to him in the library when he doesn’t know her yet, their literal wedding being a tool the doctor uses to convince her to let him “die.”
the thing about “hide the damage” in particular is that river was responding to the doctor’s own fear of seeing the damage. she lied to him because she was trying to give him what he wanted, even if he couldn’t admit it. and it applies both to the broken wrist and to their relationship in general. every time he looks at her all he can see is the pain of her death, and she can see that he’s holding back even if she doesn’t exactly know why. this was always going to be a barrier to true intimacy between them unless they could be linear for long enough to know and see each other as they are, not as they’re going to be or as they were.
that’s why husbands of river song is such a perfect resolution for them. the only way river would ever be honest enough to let him see her insecurities is if she didn’t know who he was, so it had to be twelve and not eleven. and it specifically had to be twelve fresh from losing his memories of clara, so that he’d stop running away from confronting her death and just give them those 24 years together on darillium to really get to know each other, to see the ugliness and the imperfections and stay together anyway. it makes perfect sense that after that they could reach the level of love and trust river has for “her doctor” in the library, in a way that just isn’t possible with a relationship built on whirlwind dates done out of order and nothing else.
763 notes
·
View notes
Maybe this is a stretch driven by my hope for siuaraine, but I wonder if the final scene between Suian and Moiraine went the way it did because Suian thinks Moiraine might have turned to the dark
"You lied to me about being stilled."
My eyebrows shot up when I heard that line, bc that's a big deal accusation for an Aes Sedai. And parallels nicely with Alanna and co. accusing Lan of being a darkfriend last episode
Which I know some people hated, but the thing is, Lan and Moiraine have kind of been acting super sketchy, if you don't know the things we know
Like, from Siuan's pov: Lan shows up and tells her Moiraine has been stilled, which in MONTHS of letters, Moiraine never mentioned. Siuan is horrified that happened, has got to be terrified that Moiraine is going to kill herself, and is also lost and hurt and baffled that Moiraine would hide this from her
Like, that omission was a HUGE DEAL, relationship wise. Not a good move keeping something that important from your wife, especially when they were plotting together and it would be 100% reasonable and probably also a good move for Moiraine to turn to Siuan for help
And going back to Siuan's pov, she's dealing with ALL THAT, plus the Dragon, which is another thing she and Moiraine (seem to be?) at odds about
There's darkfriends in the Tower
Moiraine has been hiding something from her
Moiraine has been stilled
The town they're in is assaulted and set on fire
Someone has broken the Dragon out of the White Tower's custody
And when Siuan goes to try to, presumably, get him back, what happens?
She turns the corner and finds Moiraine, Lan, and Rand standing there, alone, in front of a waygate that MOIRAINE JUST OPENED
And I'm sure that normally, this wouldn't make Siuan worry about Moiraine's loyalties, but...she just found out the love of her life was stilled and then spent six months completely failing to tell her about it
Who wouldn't be shaken? Who wouldn't already be asking "If she hid something as big as THIS from me, what else could she be hiding?"
And then she shows up and Moiraine has just used the One Power to open a waygate
Earlier in the episode, when she finds out Moiraine has been stilled (well, close enough), what she says is something like "Six months of letters, and not a single word about that." The very common Aes Sedai route of lying by omission
When she shows up at the Waygate, she says "You lied to me about being stilled."
Siuan thinks Moiraine was able to break one of the oaths. Which Moiraine could only do if she'd sworn herself to the Dark.
And as Lan establishes, the idea of tying off a weave and leaving it in place is so not a thing anymore, it's barely even the stuff of legends. Why would Siuan think that's on the list of possibilities? Especially in such an overwhelming and emotionally fraught and literally things are on fire moment?
And all Moiraine says in response (in her defense there are a lot of things going on) is "I can't"
Which, yeah, Siuan knows that is (supposed to be) the case
And THEN, fucking Lanfear shows up, gets pretty easily talked into not killing Moiraine by Rand, and then Moiraine and Lan follow Lanfear and Rand through the waygate without a word
I think it would be 100% reasonable, actually, for Siuan to suspect that Moiraine is a darkfriend after all of that, and given what she knows
So much of Moiraine's life has been out of Siuan's view, for like 20 years now. So much could've happened
And now Moiraine is using the One Power even after she told everyone that she was stilled
Kind of a guilty look actually!!!
(If this is what they're doing though they definitely should've been more clear/explicit/developed with the setup, tho. But otherwise I think it's really interesting as a potential plot point!)
84 notes
·
View notes
I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears
I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!
The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.
More:
Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.
Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)
Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.
Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.
Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.
The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.
They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.
And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.
I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.
13 notes
·
View notes
tbh I really wanted the 3jimas to win that fight, to have Kiryu realize that his actions have consequences and that maaayybeee the people he keeps disappearing on to only reappear briefly to make demands of are finally sick of it and the rose tinted glasses of admiration have come off
no absolutely i really needed kiryu to just. //shakes him//
another thing i really wish we got from IW was daigo going off on kiryu- like he STARTED to but i needed that Y4 shit RIGHT NOW. if Y4 did anything right, it definitely helped broaden daigo's character in how having the chairman title pushed onto him was stressing him out and having him express this to kiryu was SO cathartic, even if daigo's words ultimately mean nothing to kiryu (or at the very least, kiryu did a bad job on understanding daigo's grievances and helping him afterwards)
it really is agitating that the jimas ended up going to the tower anyway too. i get that saejima and majima are kiryu's ex-colleagues and daigo's practically his son, and the fight was supposed to be a 'wake up call' for them. but it just diminishes the anger we saw from daigo in that first scene (and as if i have to say it, daigo becoming angry is a rare thing so that when it does happen its so jarring and it's meant to be serious) and it continues to excuse kiryu's general disregard for others if it means he gets what he wants.
its unfathomable to me that after nearly two decades of holding a position daigo didnt want for the sake of his idol, he finally gets to break away from it. and now his idol's just waltzing back into his life- after acting like he was dead for three years- asking for ANOTHER favor. and daigo's just supposed to accept it. if kiryu wasnt literally dying i just know he'd keep doing this until his last breath and no one would punish him for it because despite how many times he claims to understand daigo's woes, it's evident he doesn't care enough to leave him out of things
16 notes
·
View notes
Hi, it's the “love is a dagger” anon again! I hope you're having an amazing day! Firstly, I wanted to say thank you so much for making the gifset I requested!!
Secondly, I wanted to point out how, judging by their shape and design, the daggers Mobius had in his locker and gave to Loki for protection in 1x2 were most likely the same ones Loki lost to the Bifrost on the sacred timeline. The daggers, just like Loki, were once lost to time and space but then they were found and cherished by Mobius. It takes the entire metaphor to a whole new level and further cements the fact that the quote is specifically in relation to lokius. 🥺
You don't have to if you don't want to, of course, but a gifset of this connection between the daggers in the Loki series and the daggers in the Thor movies and how they relate back to lokius would be very nice to see, especially with how beautiful your gifsets always are!!
Hey again 🗡️ anon, lovely to hear from you!! The day has been a great one so far, hope the same for yours and had a wonderful time making your set 🥰
Completely agree with your observation about the daggers Mobius kept and tried to return to Loki being the ones lost on the sacred timeline, then considering what we know about how the TVA frowned upon personal artifacts or really anything at all to define individualization or connection outside work it means all the more for Mobius to have made a point of seeking out one of the few items Loki found comfort and identity in to treasure 🥺
As to your new request, first of all tysm for the compliment about my gifs, it's truly appreciated and I'd be more than happy to build on more Lokius parallels but (and I always feel a little sheepish confessing this LOL) I've... not actually seen any Thor movies, or hardly any of the MCU outside a bit of phase 1 + The Avengers and some clips involving Bruce and Vision so the irony of being caught up waiting for glimpses of Mobius for eternity isn't lost, trust me 😅😂 If you have any specific scenes or moments from the movies in mind though please feel free to let me know!
8 notes
·
View notes