severalarrowslater

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Straightforward Mitts by Mone Dräger, modified!

I made these with Dye Mad Yarns' Chester Sock base in Play for a Purpose (2023). The pattern linked above does not come with fingers, but a friend saw @ninalanfer's version modified to include half fingers and loved it. So, naturally, I had to Make These For Them :)

Huge shout-out to nina for generously linking me (an absolute finger-knitting noob) helpful patterns and notes for learning how to do fingers! It was super helpful and very appreciated, and now I feel Unstoppable!!

[anders-holmvik]

something something noodling on buck and eddie and forced boundaries. this is word salad btw with no real argument but hopefully its a side that not too many people have written. (written before 8x03-06 airing. so if im completely wrong there will be egg on my face and that is okay because almost nothing is unequivocally true in creative media analysis world.) and also this is super long sorry

i keep thinking about the way they merge buck and eddie's storylines in 7x05, not just on screen in their encounter at the restaurant, but thematically.

first, a really important part of the buck and eddie dynamic is that the two are having an intense emotional affair, and have been since season 3. but, they've always operated across the lines of plausible deniability and they're both likely oblivious to this. they're both "straight." so, anything they do can be chalked up to normalbestfriendbehavior, because there's no way they'd ever physically cheat with each other. they both consider that to be the threshold for cheating, as evidenced by buck and eddie's agreeance that he is not cheating on marisol with kim because they haven't had sex.

7x05 is titled "you don't know me," and that's the central theme for everyone. the episode is mostly about hen and karen, but also continues to weave buck, eddie, and tommy together.

there's the "eddie doesn't know about buck's sexuality exploration and buck feels guilty about this" aspect, but this applies to eddie's solo storyline too.

eddie finds out that marisol used to be a nun. he claims that this has unearthed his catholic guilt, but we know that it never really went away for him, it just became easier for him to repress himself. eddie, even though he claims to not be actively a believer, knows that he is lying to himself about being into marisol, and thinks that god has sent him a reminder that he's watching him. even if he doesn't consciously understand that it's because he's not into women as a whole, he realized his tendency to stay in relationships where he's not happy from his breakup with ana. so he Has to know that he's not genuinely in it. this is also why buck's pointing out that she voluntarily left the convent doesn't bring him any comfort- because he's already decided that marisol is a direct link to god and His disappointment in eddie (as evidenced by his vision of marisol as the virgin mary)

eddie can't have sex with her anymore, the one activity that, to him, proves he's at least attracted to his partner. he's fully prepared to break up with marisol over this, and even hides out at buck's.

buck doesn't realize this at the time because he's too focused on his own guilt, but eddie is looking for his approval to break up with marisol. eddie always does what buck thinks is best for him. he makes the excuse that it's because they're best friends and he trusts his opinion, but i think he knows there's something more to it.

but buck can't give him his approval. because buck cannot fathom that eddie is offering himself up because the idea of marisol is standing between them. the two of them are similar in this way, and that's why they're so fascinating: they're both extremely passive in their romantic pursuits because they lack 1. self esteem and 2. awareness to pursue what they actually want. buck because of his childhood/past relationships and eddie because of his upbringing/grief/repression

buck (and also eddie, but specifically buck) is a huge flirt. however, he'll rarely cross the boundary of platonic activity before the other person does (i genuinely think the last time was abby, but that was his first relationship so its weird hybrid of active and passive tendencies).

he'll flirt and flirt until the other person makes a move, i.e. asking him out or kissing him. he wants them to prove they're choosing him. once they do, he clings. they broke this pattern with his breakup from taylor (even though i consider that a special circumstance) and natalia by having buck leave them, but T may be a return to form. more on that later...

eddie offers himself to buck by letting him choose if he should break up with marisol. buck is oblivious to it because he's too focused on his own guilt of keeping a part of himself "unknown" from eddie. buck confesses about tommy. eddie does not comment on buck's sexuality, he is only surprised at tommy's. buck looks for reassurance there: is it weird that i was on a date with a man? eddie, in his attempt to offer comfort, re-draws the line between them: "this doesn't change a thing between us." what he means is that he's not weirded out, but what buck hears is "i'm straight, so don't even try it."

so, when eddie, who is subconsciously looking for buck to step over the line, asks him about what he thinks he should do, buck doubles down on wanting tommy. eddie, hearing the message, encourages buck to try again. eddie goes home and hits the restart button on his relationship with marisol. he convinces himself that maybe if they start over, it'll work this time.

he tells her that he feels like he doesn't know her well and that they moved too fast. normally, people in this type of situation would just move on and find someone else. but instead, eddie is desperate to stay in this relationship with marisol because buck has stepped over the line of plausible deniability in their relationship, and drawn a new one. buck is officially attracted to men. if eddie's relationship falls apart and buck is not with someone else, the lines start to blur.

later, buck and T get coffee. tommy points out that the two of them don't know anything about each other. they agree to start their relationship and do it "right." the same way eddie and marisol agree to reset theirs.

and the two of them cling to these relationships. marisol ends her and eddie's relationship after finding out about kim. buck remains with tommy despite awkward dates, likely because he is also excited to explore himself (as he is one to do) but also likely because he walked close to that line when he came out to eddie, and felt like he was pushed back.

but i think the sentiment of "you don't know me" really applies for buck and T's relationship as a whole. again, they started with buck flirting and toeing the line until T stepped over it by kissing him, then asking him out.

there's a whole lot of discourse on here and twitter about t's awkward flirting, flippant attitude, and dismissive comments. the thing about this is, likely none of it is tommy purposely trying to hurt buck. tommy does not know buck. he doesn't know that these are things that he is sensitive about, or that hurts him. and buck doesn't communicate when he's uncomfortable. he just internalizes it and focuses on trying to make his partners stay. and tommy will not know buck. buck ingratiates tommy in his life by inviting him to family events, but he doesn't actually open up to tommy or tell him when he's misreading him. it gives both of them a sense of false intimacy.

they're three months in at least, and tommy and buck are still, as oliver said, "getting to know each other." but they both agreed to "get to know each other" and go for it at their coffee date, and here they are months later. not having moved... i hope that holding back his own baggage is going to bite buck in the ass just as much as tommy's past is.

(and by god i hope it is tommy's racist past that gets revealed because FUCK him. but based on what oliver said about buck weighing if he should make it work im not sure they're going to address it. bc if buck found that out i do think he'd end the relationship w little/no debate)

but this is all very interesting to me.. personally i want to see buck explore his sexuality on his own for a little because i think it would be beautiful and he deserves that but i do think he is going to be a little desperate to stay in this relationship if they don't go the gerrard/tommy past route.. but god buck and eddie are so awesomely freakish about each other sometimes

[tnc-n3cl]

Tag Game: First 10 Lines Challenge

Rules: Share the first line of your last ten published works or as many as you are able to and see if there are any patterns!

Thanks for the tag @unmaskedcardinal!

It's the dead of night as Link stands at the top of the Ancient Sheikah Tower on the Great Plateau, wearing the Old Shirt and Well-Worn Trousers he found in the Shrine of Resurrection, and equipped with a Traveler’s Sword, Traveler’s Shield, and a Traveler’s Bow. The Amnesiac Hero's Quest

On Washa’s Bluff, on the top of the tallest Soko Dragon Tree there’s a lone hut of Rito make. Inside the hut, Kass is writing his journal, with a sad but determined look on his face. The Ballad of Kass

Mipha, in her Champion’s Garb, stands upon a stone walkway, similar to those in her home of Zoakora (Zo-ah-ko-ra), the magnificent sculpture at the source of the Zora River and capital of Zora’s Domain. Shifting Tides of Fate

A trio of Rito men stand on a wooden platform with a small flag blowing in the wind to their right. The Tale of the Realm Walker

An arrow flies through the air and strikes a practice target, a bull’s-eye! Revali’s Story, Chapter 1: "The Tale of the Realm Walker” Part 1 (Bonus! This is a rough draft of The Tale of the Realm Walker that I'll be taking the Revali focused bits of the story and incorporating into a future story. I'll warn you that this is a mess to read, giant walls of text, I had no idea what I was doing back then lol.)

Pretty much I just start a fic talking about the main character and where they're at and what they're doing. The Ballad of Kass and Shifting Tides of Fate give a little backstory worldbuilding as I name the mushroom shaped trees in the Ridgelands and make up a Zora name for Zora's Domain (Domain is the whole area BTW, what BotW calls Zora's Domain is the capital, although by the events of BotW that's all that's left. There used to be more towns and villages scattered around.)

The Amnesiac Hero's Quest gives some insights into Link's state of mind/thoughts in the next few lines (he's using all Traveler's gear for the aesthetics, but would switch to more powerful gear if needed).

That Revali's Story one starts off with a 10-year old Revali's first (official) archery lesson with his father. I do usually start things at the beginning, there's an upcoming chapter of SToF that starts off with Mipha and Link already in the process of clearing out a monster camp.

Oh, and while they're probably no longer able to be found, I did at one point have Star Trek: Frontlines and Stargate: Crusade posted. Both of these were written in script format, Frontlines began with an information scroll talking about all the made up events that happened before the fic starts (10 years after the finale of Star Trek: Voyager) then shifted to the commissioning ceremony of the Prometheus-class Voyager-A with Admiral Janeway attending. [Although I had decided to change it since commissioning ceremonies are kind of overdone in Trek fanfics, (and the sequel fic starts with the simultaneous decommissioning of the Enterprise-E and commissioning of the Enterprise-F) I just dropped the fic before getting around to making those changes.]

Stargate: Crusade opens with a black screen and Adria's VO “And those who are prideful and refuse to bow down shall be laid low and made unto dust.” Before cutting to a spaceship battle scene, then having Bra'tac's VO explaining the setting of this AU where the Ori take over the Milky Way. That's all the teaser, after the title sequence (if it was an actual show) act one starts with a four months ago flashback before the Ori invasion.

No pressure tags: @zeawesomebirdie, @coconi, @ghirahimbo, @dumpster-lizard, and anyone else who would like to play.

[waitingforwinterwinds]

A Clash of Kings - 48 DAENERYS IV (pages 628-639)

Dany has a bad time at the House of the Undying Ones.

-

Long and low, without towers or windows, it coiled like a stone serpent through a grove of black-barked trees whose inky blue leaves made the stuff of the sorcerers drink the Qartheen called shade of evening.

...do you think it's on purpose that the colouring of the trees basically screams anti-weirwood? "is the dress-" no, shush!

"Queen Daenerys must enter alone, or not at all." The warlock Pyat Pree stepped out from under the trees. Has he been there all along? Dany wondered.

well now I'm just imagining him hiding behind the tree trying to eavesdrop on their conversation so he can find a good dramatic entrance point.

Further on she came upon a feast of corpses. (...) In a throne above them sat a dead man with the head of a wolf.

Sounds like the Red Wedding.

I know this room, she thought. She remembered those great wooden beams and the carved animal faces that adorned them. And there outside the window, a lemon tree!

🍋=🥛

... Rheagar? "The man had her brother's hair-" babe your whole family has your brother's hair. (I think technically it's ethnically Valyrian hair?)

Could there be a secret door? A door I cannot see? Another torch went out. Another. The first door on the right, he said, always the first door on the right. The first door on the right... It came to her suddenly is the last door on the left!

Yay! she escaped! good logical thinking under pressure.

The show did not do this place justice, just btw.

"You have taken a wrong turning. Come I will lead you." Pyat Pree held out his hand. Dany hesitated. The was a door to her right, still closed... ... She walked away from him, to the door on the right. "No," Pyat screeched. "No, to me, come to me, to meeeeeee." His face crumbled inward, changing to something pale and wormlike.

Yeaahhhhhh! When in faerieland, trust the rules, trust your gut, trust nothing.

To her right, a set of wide wooden doors had been thrown open. They were fashioned of ebony and weirwood, the black and white grains swirling and twisting in strange interwoven patterns. They were beautiful, yet somehow terrifying.

House of Black and White vision time?

...oh no, the head honchos... being very not like the show?

Fake Undying king: Hail chief, we've been expecting you Fake Undying woman: we got all the loot for you, SSS grade gear, sweet kit~ Drogo: Seems sus, let me bite stuff first Secret door: ooohhhh, not a nat 20 on perception, my hide-and-seek win streak, noooo!

... I feel like I should probably be ashamed that my first alarm bell was "The breast she had left bare in the Qartheen fashion was as perfect as a breast could be." But I didn't pop alarm flags until "and magic weapons to arm you with."

I'm pretty sure I would have crumbled for the loot, I know this of myself.

A long stone table filled this room. Above it floated a human heart, swollen and blue with corruption, yet still alive.

Metaphorical reference to The Night King?

... no.

... morrows not yet made...

So there's a few things in these 'prophetic words' that I was thinking 'oh is that *previous event in the story*' but this line in particular makes me think these things she's being warned about are things that haven't yet occurred.

... mother of dragons, daughter of death... ...mother or dragons, slayer of lies... ...mother of dragons, bride of fire...

Ohhhh, that's interesting. The way these visions are grouped with these titles... Viserys, then whom I'm assuming is Aegon/Young Griff, and Rheagar being labelled Daughter of Death, literally linking the Targaryen house with death, two of them receiving death and one in the act of burning a city. Blue eyed king with red sword, I'm thinking Stannis, then a fake dragon, and a beast of shadow fire being placed under Slayer of Lies, we all know Stannis isn't really Azor Ahai, the fake dragon seems obvious, the beast of shadow fire is curious though, I'm thinking that's the one people think is the dragon escaping from Winterfell during the sack? Hmmm, I'm... not going to go with that as an answer just yet, given the theme of 'false' in this trio. Her silver by the river of stars... Drogo, that's a Drogo metaphor for sure. Middle one is curious, I'm not sure if I want to interpret this one as the Night King or an Other, or as someone who- ... I forgot about Euron for a minute there. He would make more sense in the context, I mean I think I recall there's a thing with him and Dany in the books that didn't make it to the show? And he's... yeah, creepy sonovabich. Third one, blue rose and ice wall? Jon, I'mma go with that's Jon, who's mother is associated with blue roses, and who himself 'bloomed' on the Wall. I mean it does kind of bias me that they had a thing in the show whether I shipped it or not, and this is the Bride section, mind you, the Bride of Fire title as a whole gives me the impression that her connection to fire supersedes her connection to the men.

But the 'Mother of Dragons' having both repetition and priority over the other titles, that's her unchanging title, that's her hat, her priority character trait.

You know... the description of the Undying molesting Dany has echoes of the first vision she saw, of the woman being used and violated and devoured. Not saying it is, just saying echoes.

*hefts steel chair to smack D&D around the head*

Look, I understand why they changed this scene for the show, giving Dany a girlboss moment when she turns the tables and burns Pyat alive, but I feel like it literally wasn't needed in the face of her cunning and logic in this chapter.

Except mental fortitude and wisdom isn't badass enough for some folks, and only deliberate violence is winning. bleh.

There is nothing wrong with Dany needing to be saved by Drogon here, she is still young and finding her footing and facing powers and methods of deception she's never faced before.

When Dany looked behind her, she saw thin tendrils of smoke forcing their way through cracks in the ancient stone walls of the Palace of Dust, and rising from between the black tiles of the roof.

You know what, it would actually be funny if this was the slain lie with the smoking tower and the shadow fire breathing beast. Even though it's not an actual tower and there's no beast. Metaphors~

[v0lumnius]

First Line Patterns

Thank you @baladric for tagging me! Loved your list btw.

The idea of this is "post the first line of ten fics you have published to see if there's commonality", which is very cool but I also haven't published ten different pieces of writing so I'm gonna have to fudge it a bit here. (Also cheating because some of these are OC stories, sue me)

Naiara of the Endless Sands [Unpublished draft]

Nai struggled for breath. Blue moonlight illuminated the rough sands around her. Gore dripped from the end of her war mace, and she heard the strained cries of her community.

Haberdashery Hangup

The air was cool, the sun high and bright. Rock Volnutt could hear the crash of surf in the distance as he wandered Uptown.

The Unbroken Princess and her Link

In the land of Hyrule there was a settlement by the name of Hateno, where there lived a princess by the name of Zelda.

As the Crow Flies

"You need to make friends".

Link didn't want to hear the words, especially not from Zelda, and yet here they were, just as uncomfortable as he had feared.

Legend of Ruin [Draft, but published]

Static crackled over the earpiece, garbled speech occasionally breaking through. A hulking machine, only vaguely humanoid in appearance, was rushing through the tower at a shocking pace, each of its six legs slamming to the ground in a flurry. Its red and black spiral eyes were locked onto the form of Hal, who was appropriately running as if their life depended on it.

Project Planterra [working title, draft]

Winter was in full bloom, and Olive was none the wiser.

Looking over these lines, I clearly like to stick the protagonists name in there real quick. I like the quick hits of character and setting in each of these lines, and despite being pretty harsh on myself sometimes, I actually like all of these 😊

Hey @castershellwrites, I am struggling to remember mutuals who write so I'm leaving this on your front porch and running away before you call the cops.

[avernale]

Have You Seen ScarVi's DLC Pokémon? Have You SEEN Them?

I don't know how long its been since my last one of these. Seriously. I tried searching the #haveyouseenpokemon hashtag on Tumblr, and it looks like the last one I did was for Scarlet & Violet's final pre-release trailer? Which makes enough sense, as I remember saying in that one that I wasn't sure I'd comment on DLC Pokémon or anything I encountered in-game (Quaquaval best starter evo, BTW). But then I tried searching on my own blog and it couldn't find one after Sword & Shield? The heck? I didn't even have this hashtag back then!

Pretty sure I haven't commented on the last couple of DLC trailers (mostly because I overlooked them), so let's start with the latest one. I put the video under the "Keep Reading" link since the title alone will kinda spoil it.

So, am I the only one who laughed at "Nice tea meetcha?" No one? Okay, then...

One thing that occurs to me is that this is literally the newest Pokémon. The object itself is ancient, but the Pokémon doesn't manifest until smart phones are a thing, apparently. That's pretty recent in terms of world history.

While my first thought was "Convergent evolution of Polteageist," the thought did occur that this could be an alternate evolution for Sinistea like Dipplin for Applin and Runegrigus for Yamask. But no. According to the website, it's definitely its own Pokémon. For one thing, it's made of matcha powder instead of liquid (and hence, Grass/Ghost). Unlike Polteageist's pot, the eyes on Poltchageist's tea caddy blink. It also actively poisons people (with Old Movie Disease, apparently) rather than wait for someone to drink it before sapping their energy.

I think I like this design. It's probably not going in my party, though. (I'm making a new one because my old one got to level 100 training to take on Iron Leaves) But I will catch it. I do wonder if it has an unevolved or evolved form (the website compares it to Sinistea rather than Polteageist, though maybe just for sake of distinction) or if it's just a single-stage Pokémon.

Another thought occurs that a lack of evolutionary line would be just another thing that makes it buck the pattern set by other convolutions. Toedscool and Wiglett both get one evolution each. The other thing it bucks is the naming convention. The other ones rhyme with the Pokémon they resemble but start with different words (Toed and Wig instead of Tenta and Dig). Poltchageist still rhymes with Polteageist, but still starts with "Polt." I'm not sure what else sets it apart from other convolutions' relationships to their original, but there might be. The pattern still holds that it rhymes, and that the difference uses a single syllable. Of course, if you're making up your own convolutions, you need not be beholden to any sort of pattern at all. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to come up with a good name for a pure Fire-Type Kirlia that sings.

Okay, let's look at other DLC Pokémon introduced so far real quick...

Archaludon, evolution of Duraludon. Not bad, I think. Looks kinda like a staple remover and transforms into a bridge for its signature attack. Does the Tower Bridge get struck by lightning a lot? No plans to put it in my party, though now that I think about it...

Dipplin, a new Applin evolution. When I saw this, I thought it was a regional form of Applin specific to Kitakami (Applin's already in ScarVi, I think). Nope. Also, the website says its two worms instead of one. Weird. I'm tempted to put this in my party. I wonder if its an item-evolution like Applin's other two, and if it's a candy apple or just the coating...

Iron Crown and Iron Leaves, Future Paradox forms of Cobalion and Virizion. Not impressed. Interesting that they are Psychic types instead of Fighting, though. One can assume the same will be true for Paradox Terrakion, as well.

Raging Bolt and Walking Wake, Ancient Paradox forms of Raikou and Suicune. Most Ancient Paradox forms are cooler than Future Paradox forms, and that includes these two. I saw a Humongo Walking Wake in one of Austin John's videos and was severely disappointed mine wasn't that big. At least it wasn't as hard to get as Iron Leaves was. My first thought on seeing Raging Bolt was "Giraffe" (it's yellow, c'mon), but it's actually a dinosaur, too. I feel like I shouldn't like this design, but I think it looks pretty good. I usually shy away from putting Legendaries or Mythicals in my party (unless the game gives me a reason to, like Calyrex or Arceus saying it wants to travel with me), but I could make an exception...

What's my team look like going into The Teal Mask (Teal? Tea? Hmm...) so far? Right now, I've got Fuecoco (that I got from a trade), Sprigatito (Hidden Ability, HOME integration giveaway), Toedscool, Revavroom, Miraidon (the one you can catch), and Gardevoir (one I used in my Sapphire party). The starters are low-level, and I want them to stay that way as I understand that The Teal Mask is intended for early-game stuff (though judging from Isle of Armor, who knows) while The Indigo Disk is supposed to be post-game. I still have time to change my mind, of course, but I'm also considering putting together another new team for Indigo Disk.

Which way will I actually go? We'll find out once The Teal Mask drops on September 13. There might still be something amazing that I'll be itching to train. Until then, it remains to be seen.

[liyuesbian]

✧ pygmalion!au [ningguang]

notes: btw idk how commissions from museums work i just made the process up LMAO and this one's kinda angsty? i mean, it is the pygmalion greek myth so iykyk. also, i describe this figurine of ningguang here but w/o the colour... i've linked it in case any1 needs the reference. (btw, this is not set in ancient greece specifically)

only yesterday had you been commissioned by an art gallery in the capital to create a piece for their up-and-coming collection titled desire, love and identity. yet here you are, slaving away to make the perfect image you had in your head come into fruition. your vision is exquisite once sketched on paper—you can't find any faults in it so you take the risk.

as soon as your chisel meets the marble, a feeling so invigorating dominates your body. no further references are necessary as you place your trust entirely on your hands, coarse from the labour. you find such mindless toil addicting and you work day and night, only stopping for a half-baked meal and the odd collapse into bed.

for months, love streams out of the tips of your fingers and through your sculpting tools to arrive at the stone figure. you sincerely hope the intimate emotion has been reached.

when you finish, you wipe the bead of sweat running down your forehead, rest the other palm on your hip and take slow steps backwards all while maintaining eye contact with the statue. a wave of sweet relief hits you and you fall to the floor, uncontrollably sobbing into tired hands that still grip the hammer and chisel.

it's beautiful.

you stagger, struggling to get up with your bruised knees while clumsily wiping the tears off your stained cheeks. setting the instruments aside, you lift your head to admire your handiwork up close. a woman made of stone sits elegantly atop an oriental chair, crossing her smooth, white legs over each other. her left elbow is propped on the arm of the chair while on the other side, a long smoking pipe is balanced between gloved fingers. around her lies an assortment of objects: a vase containing scrolls, a floor lamp, and a charmingly decorated folding screen.

you see, you had already thought it all out. you'd imagined ningguang's preferences for a life of luxury, her affinity for constructing and sprucing up interiors. she would be a master of the trades and a woman who likes to keep an air of mystery around her. and like how you increasingly project her to be more of a person than she ever will be, there is a creeping concern in the corner of your mind that you will lose your rationality just as quickly.

the sculpture's body is clad in a qipao with a slit that reveals alabaster skin below the waist. the dress—embellished with patterns and neat linings—hugs her figure and shows off a lean build. the extensive train and sleeves of the fabric are shaped curvaceously to mirror the flow of a waterfall. and her face. the section you strived so hard to refine. she stares at you with an imperious expression and a hint of a smirk. her gaze, so piercing, makes you avert your eyes in shyness but you find yourself gravitating back to her profile.

you muster up the courage to draw closer to your creation and unconsciously stroke her cheek with your thumb, captivated. if she were an empress, you'd be a common peasant—undeserving of setting your sights on such a goddess. you can feel your soul being sucked into eyes devoid of emotion—of anything, actually. after all, the woman sitting before you is not a person but an inanimate object.

the weeks following the completion of ningguang—which is the name you've picked up the habit of calling her—are spent in said lady's company. every minute of every day, you surround yourself with her presence as if she is your closest friend. you eat with her, tell her your troubles, even going so far as to decorate her with various types of jewellery and bringing her gifts you think she'd like.

"thank you," you whisper. "for always listening to me." in truth, you're always so immersed in your work that you forgot what conversations could feel like. though, you fear your art would never be on par with something so transcendent ever again.

you become curious, wondering what she would be like if the nymph in front of you were not just a figment of your imagination.

you perch yourself on top of ningguang's stone-cold lap and trace the contours of her visage. you inspect each crease on her lips and the minuscule crinkles in her eyes, applauding yourself for the well-crafted details. you don't know what possesses you but you close your eyes and press your lips against hers, hoping that once you open them, a living being would erupt from underneath the marble. but, of course, as soon as the light hits your retinas, ningguang is as unmoving as ever.

realising what you've just done, you drop off of her thighs and laugh anxiously. however, you could've sworn that you had felt warmth in the lips of your beloved muse.

"i've finally gone mad!" you cry aloud.

hell, you say to yourself, is it even possible to fall in love with such an... an artefact? you dismiss your glaringly obvious infatuation.

"nonsense," you mutter under your breath, sensing your heart breaking slightly. how can something so painfully humanlike also not be human at the same time? you must've caused a tremendous atrocity in your past life to have made the gods harbour a grudge against you. of all things, you'd never have guessed that a lifeless piece of art would be the object of your desire.

you can't bear to look at the handcrafted lady any longer and with an anguished face, cover her with a large cotton cloth. the plan was to wait until you could hand the statue over to the curators and try to ignore its existence until then.

for a few days, you act according to the plan, going about your daily routine but eventually, your stoic demeanour crumbles. you lock yourself in your room refusing to eat or believe that your affection would never be returned.

during the hours of sunlight, you weep under your sheets, drowning in self-inflicted sorrow. and at night, you do the same, lamenting over the loss of what could've been your true love. she would've been so perfect in your eyes, your other half, and the only one who could calm this growing turmoil!

the reality pains you. hence, you do the only thing you can do: you pray. you pray to the gods for a miracle, that the light of your life would stride into your room and pull you from the depths of despair... but she never does.

your last day "cohabitating" with the sculpture has arrived and for the first time in—what felt like—an eternity, you open the doors to your workshop. taking a deep breath, you unveil the stationary maiden.

it's still as beautiful as you remember.

you give it a sad smile, wanting to get its departure over and done with. you manoeuvre about the room to prepare the things for the movers who're due to come in a couple of hours. while you go down your little list of errands to be done, you cough and bat away the smoke—wait, the smoke? frantic, you spin around, eyes darting everywhere in search of its origin until they land on the smoking pipe you so intricately moulded for the commissioned piece.

it's strange, you don't recall colouring the statue. and how on earth is smoke coming out of the pipe? suspicious, you approach the motionless entity and almost stumble when you spot its chest rising.

oh lord! — i really must be descending into madness! you clutch your head, clawing at your hair in hysteria.

"stop, please don't hurt yourself." the sound of a low, worried voice penetrates your ears. you shut your eyes tight.

"no, the gods have cursed me! i mustn't listen to your poisonous words!" you exclaim. your state of agitation is alleviated when the woman caresses your tensed arm.

"what has happened to you? i haven't seen you lately either." the tone is more soft and more tender than you had imagined. you release your grip.

"is it really you, ningguang?" your voice cracks at the end, and the woman you sought after witnesses your features twist into an expression of longing and hope.

"yes, my darling. i dare not go anywhere else."

helplessly, you rush to cup her face to check for heat, for the blood traversing under her skin—anything that would prove that your sweetheart is truly alive and breathing. and when you do get the confirmation, you beam, trying to withhold tears born from elation.

you bend down to kiss ningguang, who is still seated on the chair, once, twice, and three times to rid your scepticism. oh, deities! she's real.

"i love you," you declare.

"i know." you watch as the same creases you'd etched on the corners of her eyes spread into a loving half-moon shape and you kiss her again.

you reach a conclusion: you couldn't give away your lover—let alone a live person—to be displayed as part of a museum exhibition so when the workers arrive, you hide your muse away in another room. you apologise profusely and spin a lie, rambling on about how you had nothing to relinquish for the piece you had prepared had been oh-so-viciously stolen by a mob of trespassers!

the movers share with you their sympathies and ask what the work of art looks like and maybe they could sort something out with the authorities. nodding, you recount—so ardently—the details of your divine maiden. you feel heat rush to your face, chuckling when you realise that you'd run your mouth for too long.

in response to this, the two labourers exchange dubious looks as they peer at the static sculpture standing in the middle of the studio—its appearance unmistakably matching your elaborate description.

[annab-nana]

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line, then tag 10 of your favorite authors!

Tagged by @ilguna who is an absolute gem that I love with all my heart :)

“I can’t believe we will be seniors in just a couple weeks,” Betty squealed when she sat down across from you and Peter at the lunch table. • Stark!reader x best friend!Peter series wip

Laughter sounded throughout the closed restaurant as you, JJ, and all of his friends—who you too have become quite close within the span of your relationship—were hanging out with cold fries and watered-down drinks before you on the table. • All A Game - JJ Maybank (will be posted later tonight or tomorrow)

“Hey, Mrs. Nikki! It feels like I haven’t seen you in forever! How have you been?” you gushed as you hugged the woman you would very much consider to be your second mother tightly in your arms. • Piss Boy Peter - Tom Holland

“Holy shit, Peter!” you exclaimed when you saw the battered and bruised boy through your window in the middle of the night. • Twitches & Stitches - Peter Parker

“I’m sorry. Let me make sure I heard that correctly. You had sex with Harry?” you asked in complete shock and disbelief at what you were hearing. • Privacy Is A Social Construct - Peter Parker (Books Tell Secrets And Lies)

“Shouldn’t you be sitting with MJ?” Flash inquired when you stayed at his table after the morning bell had rung. • Green: The Color Of Envy - Peter Parker (Books Tell Secrets And Lies)

“You’ve got this, y/n. It will be okay. You know her, so you know how to handle her,” Flash whispered in a smooth soft voice as he leaned against the locker next to yours. • Reunion & Reconciliation - Peter Parker (Books Tell Secrets And Lies)

After things went down between you, MJ, and Peter, you sort of closed yourself off since the one person you wanted to talk to was giving you radio silence on her end. • A Chemical Acquaintance - Peter Parker (Books Tell Secrets And Lies)

“Ned, I need to talk to you,” Peter whispered to the boy as he grabbed his arm and pulled him between a couple of bookshelves in the library. • Bookshelf Confessions - Peter Parker (Books Tell Secrets And Lies)

Ever since his death, things have not been the same between you and Peter. • Things Change - Peter Parker

“God, it looks like Cupid threw up here,” you groaned as you looked around at the campus that surrounded you when you and Peter walked out of the main science building. • It’s Just Not My Thing - Peter Parker

It would not be you and Rafe if you both hadn’t woken up in the middle of the afternoon after staying up way too late watching movies and joking around. • One Love, Two Mouths - Sarah Cameron

The beach, for someone who hated it so much, was your safe space. • Sweater Weather - Sarah Cameron

“I can’t believe you didn’t know who Obadiah Stane was,” you giggled with Tom as you two left the room you had just been in doing an interview to head to another one in a few minutes. • Is There Something There - Tom Holland

“Okay so can you get some brown sugar?” you asked JJ while you were searching for the chocolate chips that you had bought not too long ago for making these cookies. • A Christmas Miracle - JJ Maybank

Peter Parker was your newfound friend, possibly even best friend. • Menstrual Mess - Peter Parker

“Hey, I’m going to Jenna’s house. I should be back in a few hours, but I’ll text y’all if anything changes,” you tell the two boys who sit on the couch as you walk out of your room that you and JJ had been sharing lately. • I Believe You - JJ Maybank

November 27th, the big day. • Birthday Buddies - Colby Brock

When you walked into the gym, the last thing you expected to see was your long-time crush, Rafe Cameron. • Do Something About It - Rafe Cameron

The pain that was bubbling in your brain was quickly becoming almost unbearable. • Headache Helper - Pope Heyward

Okay so a little over half of the time, I start with dialogue but I think my favorites are the really simple ones like for Menstrual Mess, Sweater Weather, Things Change, and Birthday Buddies. Like they're short, sweet, and to the point haha also I only included the first two wips because those are two of them that I am pretty sure I will post soon.

Btw you do not have to link your work or even put the title. I just did that in case someone wanted to see where things went after the first line. Anyway, tagging: @taylathornton @samwlscns @spilledtee @peeterparkr @vintageobx @toriswrites @killingbxys @ptersmj @itsapeterthing @sortagaysortahigh

[yeswevegotavideo]

Opening Line Tag Meme

Edit: In true tumblr fashion the formatting got all fucked up so the first 10 aren't numbered anymore, fyi.

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favorite opening line. Then tag 10 of your favorite authors!

Hoo boy, ok! Gotta' figure out when I started writing what, 'cause I've got some unposted WIPs in here.

Thanks to @gottagobuycheese for the tag! I tag @arcanemoody, @teadrinkingwolfgirl, @holycatsandrabbits, @slow-burn-sally, and anybody else who wants to do it! :)

List after the cut, 'cause it's long lol Now then, from most to least recent, let's see...

In the Beginning, only the Creator existed, and She Knew Not From Whence She Came. Fic: you will exhale cinnamon clouds Fandom: Good Omens Comments: That is italicized on purpose - the fic implies that if you see italicized narration in serif font, it is possibly the Voice of God...maybe. This was my first time participating in a Big Bang, and it was very fun and EXTREMELY STRESSFUL and I doubt I'll ever participate in another one.

The Angel of the Eastern Gate was…fascinating. Fic: Time Can Do So Much (WIP) Fandom: Good Omens Comments: I'm gonna finish this someday I swear, but it's a lower priority than Close to Home. (Because let's face it, Close to Home is more popular lol)

"Little demonic miracle of my own," Crowley said casually, handing off the bag and sauntering past the stunned angel, "Lift home?" Fic: Close to Home, So Far Away (WIP) Fandom: Good Omens Comments: That line barely counts, since the dialogue is lifted directly from the show, and I almost included the next one. But the action description is obviously mine. This is the WIP that currently dominates the anxious part of my brain (along with the writer's block part, the creative part, the restless part, and the guilty part). But I'm. Going. To. Finish. It.

It was a perfectly lovely brunch. Fic: Velocity Fandom: Good Omens

Comments: First fic I ever posted in a large fandom. Well, large compared to any other fandom I've ever posted in, anyway. It was insane getting that number of comments/views/kudos on any fic all at once. (It's even more insane how quickly one gets used to such a thing and starts comparing it to subsequent works lol)

“Regis, it’s time.” Fic: Hope in Darkness (working title, unpublished WIP) Fandom: Final Fantasy XV Comments: So, I have this FFXV fic. I'm probably never going to post it. Idk. Maybe someday when the fandom is mostly dead lmao. The fic follows the lives of the quad from infancy to the start of the World of Ruin/Darkness. It's followed by another, even WIP-er fic with working title Decade of Darkness. I'm currently stalled immediately after getting their quad together, at Gladio's 21st birthday party. (Yes, that means Prompto is 17. Yes, that is exactly why I'm hesitant to post it.)

They entered the stairwell and the moment the door closed, Vyvyan shoved Rick against the wall with the force of his kiss. Fic: Love & Mobsters - The Lost Scenes (perpetual WIP, entirely PWP) Fandom: The Young Ones Comments: One of those "this is where the porn goes" WIPs that will probably never actually be closed and may or may not ever be added to. *shrug* What can I say? It's just where the porn goes.

There's something wrong with the garden. Fic: Paper Boats Fandom: The Young Ones Comments: I love this fic. I don't honestly care if others do, though I'm glad many seem to. That is all. Btw that line is in italics because it's thought. That's definitely a convention of mine. That, and writing flashbacks in present tense.

The new kid arrived around two in the afternoon, driven in especially by one of the many social workers known well to the residents. Fic: Infinity (WIP) Fandom: The Young Ones Comments: Another WIP I swear I'll finish eventually. This one kind-of lost steam because I realized I don't actually know how to write teenage British boys in the 70s, nor prison stories in general. Idk, I'll figure it out eventually, probably.

Vyvyan closed the door behind him and slinked into the night. Fic: Skin Fandom: The Young Ones Comments: In direct contradiction to what I just said two fics ago, this story features flashbacks that are in past tense. And then in present tense in the next chapter. I believe this is what they call "inconsistency".

It was December 24th, and all throughout London, preparations for Christmas were kicking into high gear. Fic: Winter Holiday Fandom: The Young Ones Comments: This was a fun one to write. I basically tried to write a Christmas episode, and commenters largely confirm I succeeded. My favorite comment was, "It was just like watching a very special extra episode, with bonus shagging."

Note: the rest of these are from The Young Ones - Love & Mobsters, my TYO series, so I'm not going to keep listing fic & fandom and commenting. The quotes will just directly link to the corresponding fic. They're still in reverse order, from newest to oldest, meaning they'll be linked to the series backwards.

"Would you still love me if I were ugly?"

Rick woke to the feeling of Vyvyan stroking his cheek. He smiled softly as he yawned and opened his eyes.

The punch to the stomach had hurt.

Vyvyan is awake in bed, staring at the ceiling.

I thought I was in love with him, diary, I really did.

I'm horribly disappointed.

A life of crime did odd things to Vyvyan.

Vyvyan talks in his sleep.

So I'm standing outside this shop, waiting for the bloody door to open and freezing my bollocks off in the meantime.

The razor buzzed by Vyvyan's ear.

More than anything I think I've learned that there's no discernible pattern to my opening lines! lmao.

[loisette]

SL Switch Up Challenge (Camus)

...Except I changed up some things: the “add at least one of his cards to your teams” was ignored for the most part and I picked my least favourite character (Camus, if you haven’t read the title) instead of the one that I have the lowest bond with because it seemed more fitting with the spirit of the challenge! Original ruleset can be found here!

I actually did this a while ago but I didn’t have time to post it because I was busy with uni and then decided to go for T3 UK Reiji. Maybe it’s for the best though, my perspective changed a little with time.

Day 1

First thing I’ve noticed are his heart links. I love how they progress, you can tell which one is the level 1 and which one is the level 3 or at least I think that’s the order they should be in, I’ve been avoiding Camus since I saw his Bond 50 lines. It’s how I wish heart links were the first place... well, maybe not to this extent but you know, something like an obvious fact for the first one and as it progresses you learn more less-known stuff that’s not that easy to notice.

I picked this heart links because even though I knew he had this sort of dynamic with Ran, I didn’t expect him to say it so openly. Maybe it’s a sign that he grew closer to the player and starts to admit what he truly thinks of the others (considering that first line is said in his butler voice), maybe it’s the heart links progression I was talking about or maybe a little bit of both - I’m not sure.

Day 2

Yeah, I know, it’s the last heart link lines, I’m sorry. I have everyone x everyone heart links level 3 unlocked so I spend the day trying to see if all of them follow the same pattern as Ranmaru’s. There are two characters that he compliments in all of the heart links - Ai and... Natsuki.

Ai I understand, I figured this one out but Natsuki was a huge surprise to me, especially that last line. I didn’t expect him to even be able to stand Natsuki’s personality. I’m not sure when does he show that smartness but okay, I don’t know his character that well either...

The vision of him and Natsuki just chillin’ and drinking tea is pretty cute and calming. Welp, another rare pair to the collection I guess! ...Now I lowkey regret that Butler Natsuki event didn’t feature Camus as the SR tbh. Maybe we’ll get some tea party set with the two as the URs in the future?

Day 3

He’s ticklish?! A-anyway... Overall, his reactions when poked are surprisingly soft. Aaand the pictured ones are all said in his deep voice (well, I’m not sure about the laugh). There’s this I guess...:

...But he still doesn’t use that prideful, condescending tone. He’s almost tsudere-like tbh. Well, almost.

Day 4

That was the day I realized that even though I didn’t pick Camus based on the bond, I should still probably show it to prove I’m doing something. So, here’s my bond with him as of Day 4:

As well as his heart links:

I started the challenge with him being on early Bond 65 too (or 7th based on the bond) but I unfortunately have no screenshots of that moment. Also yeah, I changed his costume and wallpaper because I’m not even sure how long he’s been left with it and I was getting tired of it. I guess he deserves better than the LtM outfit.

I should probably show the teams I use(d) too. It was after the event already but here are the event teams anyway:

I kept switching Prince Natsuki with Renarty for Seien no Brave Heart for higher score. I could have done so with Camus because they score the same so there’s something I guess? Also there’s no Shine team because my Dream used to be my Shine (UK Reiji saved it...at least for now) with two members swapped and I only played one Shine song - You’re My Life - because I needed more Shine gems for the weekly misson.

Here you can see the team I used (and still use!) outside of the events:

After unlocking everybody’s heart links level 3 I started farming Ai’s level 4 ones. Originally it was 3 Ren and 3 Syo cards but I added Camus. Honestly... I wasn’t really to try to follow the original rules.

I genuinely like the way Camus heart links work so he’s staying in there until I unlock that last heart link...which might turn out to be next year if KLab doesn’t slow down with the events. At the time of writing this their heart link is 1801 until rank up so not much progress but Syo and Ren need way less time so it should get faster once I finish theirs.

I don’t have many of lines from that day and I read all of the stories but the focusing on the teams gave me an idea. His cards.

He has some very gorgeous cards (two pictures below are taken from the wiki). I went for Mafia Camus just because I loved the theme. Idolized art still looks great after all this time too!:

I like his Halloween v2 so much that I tried scouting in his half to get him (no luck though) and unidolized is honestly one of my favourite cards in the game!:

...Welp, I think you can guess what kind of aesthetics I like.

Also...as silly as it is, I like singing karaoke (but with vocals left and it’s only at home so not really) with my sister and occasionally one of my friends and have color-coded lyrics for almost 40 songs atm. We all suck me the most but it’s fun and we don’t care. Anyways, the point was - out of 4 Utapri songs we have prepared the lyrics for (well, only I did...), somehow 2 of them feature Camus - Junketsunaru Ai -Aspiration-  and NorthWind and SunShine.

Junketsunaru is super fun to sing and it’s my favourite Camus solo but I really like Zettai Reido Emotion as well!

One of my favourite songs overall - Trois - also features Camus. Non-Fiction is a banger too! ...I’m not gonna list songs with 4 and more people because this would take way too long so I’ll stop here.

And as a side note, I really love how this line sounds (sorry for no clip, it’s sort of breathy, something in between his regular and fake voice):

Day 5

I’m not sure if the first line is mistranslation or not but I’ve chosen to believe it’s not. This sort of lines are the reason why Camus wasn’t at the very bottom of my favourite list for a short period of time.

Serious characters that act seriously or at least casually about stuff that sounds absurd or at least unfitting for them is something I find funny. I’m not sure if there’s a name for this trope, boke doesn’t exactly fit but I’m guessing I like it because I like this sort of Manzai humour Gintama uses anyways.

This also makes me chuckle but I felt like it didn’t match first two enough to get paired with them:

Aaand while this one might not seem particularly funny, it reminded me of my headcanons I first had when going through the profiles while SL was downloading - that the “fabulous hair guy” was a chuuni (because I didn’t believe his description) that loves Kuroshitsuji and tries to act like Sebastian because he think it’s cool:

I still headcanon that he’s a Sebastian stan btw. 

And while not from SL and not something new I’ve learned, I just had to put this in here because it turned so fun themed (gif taken from here):

Day 6

Time for Camus idle lines! I really tried looking for stuff he says in his natural voice but I couldn’t find anything better.

First one is very basic but I wanted to give an overview of Camus lines at Bond 65 so it had to do. Ai’s were better even as early on but I guess there’s not much to show when you have to fit in some of the butler persona lines and there’s less idle lines that the ones caused by tapping (I think?) so I’m probably being too impatient... I hope.

The last one is something that I could put as a standalone “line of the day” though. It’s so satisfying to make him swallow his pride and ask instead of demand! It’s a small step but it would be so fulfilling to teach him his place... Maybe that’s one of the reasons his fans like him - they feel like they could change somebody for the better. Or is it more like revealing his true, soft side?

I guess characters like this make the thing more “realistic” (can I even use this word while refering to Utapri and Camus? Probably not). But I feel like it’s not what they were going for, considering the way he acts towards the player.

Anyway, I used to think his lines would be more like: “How dare you ignore me, peasant?” and couldn’t get what are the reasons people like him other than them having a thing for jerks. Now I can see some more logical ones.

Day 7

Aka all the negative stuff I cut out from the other days and my final thoughts and the bond/heart links update.

If you just wanted some wholesomeness and can’t accept any negativity, you can finish reading here, no hard feelings! Thank you for reading! and remember that liking or disliking a character doesn’t define a person so please no pointless attacking me 

And if you are fine with it, thank you even more! A lot of this is speculations based on what I see in SL and I know still don’t understand Camus so feel free to try to change my mind if you know more than I do!

But first of all, here’s how my bond and heart links looked as of Day 7:

And this is how they look now, the week after the challenge:

Comparing Day 4 to Day 7, you can see that I was tapping him more than a couple times a day - he went up one whole level!

And about the current ones... I know Camus/Ai heart link barely moved but there was pretty much no downtime, my Bond/Link team is still the same! Most of the bond comes from being in my Star team.

Now that’s out of the way, here’s the line I mentioned Day 1, the very reason I Camus landed at the bottom of my list in the first place:

Yikes.

I already consider possessiveness a big flaw that they gave some characters because nobody’s perfect and some people are into that so it’s a win-win... but this is a whole another level (I’m not sure why out of all the words “can” is the one that’s capitalized though). It’s disturbing.

I do feel like there was a lot of potential in his character. They could give him some character development, make him show the side he shows to the player to the others too and I guarantee it would make him more popular.

I mean, my favourite is Ai. His attitude towards Syo and Natsuki in the early anime was pretty bad but he had changed, he even becomes friends with them and in the Denim stories it’s confirmed that they still hang out.

However... to me, even if Camus starts showing the same side he shows the player to the others, he will never make it higher than mid-tier of my list just because of this one line ...but I guess it still would be an improvement.

Also, I’ve heard that he’s no the only one that acts this way in the vn so if anyone could tell me the details that would be great... or not, depending on the boys but I’d still be grateful if you’d save me from liking someone like this!

Anyway, you could probably figure that out already but I find it awkward and uncomfortable how different he acts towards the player compared to how he acts towards the other idols, especially poor Cecil. Is there a legitimate reason he treats him this way?:

Other than simply “he dislikes him”, ofc. It’s a genuine question btw, if anyone knows more, especially from the VN, please tell me.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like the sort of rivalry between him and Ran but clearly it’s not how his relationship with Cecil works.

I might be reading too much into that but I feel like Cesshi seems aware of the side Camus shows to the player (which I didn’t catch first time I read the story tbh) and from the Camus side of the story I feel like he knows that he knows and yet, he still says this:

It’s just sad, really. Should I feel bad that he distanced himself from the others, is there any reason for that or is he making himself a victim to the player? ...Ugh, I know it’s not the case but it makes the most sense. Idk, is he too full of himself to notice? It doesn’t seem right, I mean... he called Natsuki smart... or smarter than he looks, at least.

Cecil is implied to know about his “true self” so I feel like he understands you to some extent. He’s trying to be nice to him, yet Camus refuses to acknowledge it... Here, despite the way he treats him, that poor baby still tries to (awkwardly) cheer him up:

I feel like his pride was hurt a little and Cecil did help him by saying that... but I don’t think I understand Camus enough so maybe not. Anyway, even though it was awkward, Cecil’s definitely being gentle here so I’m not sure why he can’t see that. Eh, I really don’t get this guy.

To quote best boy (who said this today as the 2nd bond boosting line so I had to put this btw):

And I doubt it’s just Cecil, it was probably implied by more people but it flew over my head because I didn’t know he’s so different when talking to the player.

Well, at least there's some improvement later in the story because he stops saying that kids like Cecil because he’s childish and instead rolls with the explanation Cecil gave him - it’s because Cecil has more experience with children.

I read those stories beforehand and it was why I was so surprised that he likes Natsuki - after all he acts the most childish and does what he wants. I’m not sure if there’s something important about Natsuki I’m missing don’t know or if talking to Alexander makes you smart in Camus eyes.

Okay, but back to his... triple-faceness, at this point? This is basically stuff I cut out of the Day 6 because I felt like it was getting too negative:

I don’t like how he’s only kinder to the player. If anything, it makes me wonder if he’s lying and picked just another mask good for geting what he wants. Ugh, I know it’s not the case again and you don’t need to convince me but with the character like this, I can’t really get rid of this feeling.

But I guess maybe it makes his fans feel truly special - characters like Otoya or Cecil are nice to everybody so the way they treat you in comparision to the others doesn’t have as much of an impact as it’s with Camus. Even Ran's softer side isn’t reserved only for the player. But ignoring how badly he treats the others just to feel special...it’s way too selfish for me but I get that some people find that attractive.

In conclusion, I didn’t have an accurate image of Camus personality before this challenge so I’m glad I did it. Now I understand that he’s way more complex, even if I don’t really get him. However I started seeing the reasons why some people might like him, so I feel like maybe I at least understood his fans better.

This challenge was pretty fun. I’m glad I learned something new, I might even do this again with Masato ...but probably without creating a post because I end up spending way too much time on it. I thought it’s gonna be way harder to pick the pictures (...though I made things easier for myself and started doing this by themes) or write anything about someone you don’t really like.

Even if I mainly focused on the negatives in the end, the things I said in the first 6 Day were important as well. He originally had his own separate “Nope” tier, now he’s in the bottom tier with Masato so it’s a bit of improvement? I still don’t like him (due to the stuff listed during Day 7 and more) but for different reasons and slightly less.

[rfidblocking]

What defines radical feminism as opposed to other forms of feminism, and why should people who espouse it be blocked? If you have a link to an explanation at the top of your page or something I'd appreciate just a link, as I browse Tumblr mobile and can't see it. Sincerely asking, btw. I've seen terms used in varying ways and the categories of feminist thought seem blurry to me.

Classes of feminism are not very sharply defined. Any feminist can espouse ideas influenced by radical feminism, and vice versa. Indeed, intersectional feminism is a reaction to and evolution of radical feminism.

Feminism in the Western world is roughly sorted into four “waves.” Non-western feminism addresses different cultural needs than western feminism and does not necessarily follow these patterns. It emphatically does not follow this timeline.

What we consider first wave feminism arose from upper class white women in the late 19th century. The suffragette movement, reduction of hysteria diagnoses, etc were “first wave” actions. By far, the first wave was the wave of respectability. In a world where women were property, being seen as human was already a large task.

The methodology used to achieve this “humanization” was very much focused on improving the state of the uppermost class of women, with vague notions of “coming back for the rest” later. Or not at all.

Nevertheless, first wave feminism- what we might today call “white feminism”- was the foundation upon which later western feminist ideologies were built. It is also where the first strides towards legal equality for women (voting rights, inheritance law, etc) came from.

The second wave of feminism arose in the 1960s, alongside other major protest cultures. Modern radical feminism generally considers itself to be “second wave.” Where the first wave focused on basic legal rights of personhood, the second wave focused on social limitations and domestic rights, as well as examining the specific struggles and consequences of being a woman in a man-centered society. 

This included things such as attempting to abolish dress codes that required excessive levels of modesty or infringed on the freedom of expression of women. It also included successes such as no-fault divorce, domestic abuse studies and shelters, title IX sports and education protections, etc.

It also included and fostered an enormous amount of hatred towards men. The second-wave was the wave of militancy and separatism. There was a persistent belief that if men could be eliminated from the lives of women, women would magically become utopian creatures.

This fostering of separatist attitudes also exacerbated a lot of what we would now call intersectional issues: any woman who disagreed with the party line was clearly just hypnotized by the patriarchy, and needed to be forced to agree with the party.

This led to ignoring a lot of very valid concerns from a great many women. Such as:

+ Ssecond wave feminism’s separatist attitude seeking in many cases to separate women from their sons and other beloved male family members,

+ The hatred of women who were assigned male at birth,

+ The hatred of women who worked with or for men, especially those who worked in sex,

+ Hatred for sexuality involving men,

+ Hatred for sexuality  between women,

+ Hatred for women of color,

+ Hatred for religions and religious women involved in anything other than Christian derived mother-goddess paganism,

And so on.

These are problems that still exist in today’s “radical feminists” who seek to recreate, or never left, the second wave. Indeed, while transgender status prior to the rise of second wave feminism’s influence in the US was hardly a cakewalk, it was second wave feminists, with their hatred of all things “male” who exacerbated tensions, or entirely created new ones, and created many of the most horrifying aspects of transphobia that we see today.

The third wave of feminism rose in the late 80s and early 90s.

Taking inspiration from the many, many, many women who were attacked and hated by second wave policies, the third wave of feminism, today called, “intersectional feminism,” sought to examine just what it was that caused women who weren’t in the ruling class of feminist momvements throughout history to experience a combination of patriarchal misogyny and hegemonic racism/queerphobia/classism that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Many Black and queer feminist scholars were especially active and especially well regarded during this time period. The expansion of queer theory and racial equality efforts in academia and certain public sectors including child education in the third wave time period was also a prominent influence on third wave feminism.

One especially important aspect of third wave feminism was individualism. The belief that there is no “one right way” to be a woman, and that womanhood is necessarily influenced by the individual’s other identities, as well as their internal truths. This is what led to many feminine subcultures: feminine academics, feminine punks, feminine queers.

Unfortunately, one draw back of the third wave’s strong focus on individualism was that it lacked the cohesive force of early waves. Organization of large scale protest and revolution is very difficult when no one can entirely agree on what is being fought for.

Another critical factor of the third wave, and the defining point between third and fourth wave feminism, is that the third wave existed before the spread of internet access and internet culture. This contributed to the communication problems and scale problems third wave feminists experienced.

The fourth wave of feminism is where we currently exist today.

In effect, it is the third wave, but with broadly accessible systems of communication and organization. Intersectionality 2.0, as it were.

Information overload is common in fourth wave spaces. While everyonenow knows what conflicting access needs are, at least, there is little experience in satisfactorily dealing with them.

Because so much of fourth wave feminism is “talking the talk” rather than “walking the walk,” it gives the impression of being a toothless cacophony of young modern feminists screaming at each other incoherently. Because everyone has a platform, it is difficult for leaders to emerge who are not falling back on earlier, more “cohesive” waves: the first and second.

On the other hand, when everyone has at least the potential to have a voice, then people who have existed in silence for generations finally get to speak: people with multiple stacking intersections of marginalization. People who lack the access to historic methods of learning feminist theory can now get a firm foundation in gender equality without needing to pay for 4 years at a liberal arts college. People who are too weird, too queer, to black or brown or disabled or fat or traumatized to participate in the historical forums of feminism can participate in the fourth wave, due to its strong online presence.

With easy, omnipresent recording and data collection methodologies, it becomes increasingly difficult for people to deny the existence of misogyny. With easy, omnipresent communication platforms, this data can be spread to people it could reach before. People who are trapped in controlled environments of abuse, people who are too poor or disabled or anything else to escape the small town hyper-conservative bubble they were born into.

The fourth wave has been “in progress” for between 6 and 10 years, depending on who you talk to. Currently, it doesn’t have a catchy name, but if I were going to give it one, I might call it “accessible feminism.” The barriers to entry have never been lower.

And yet, it has its many problems, too.

No social movement is perfect, because the people involved in it are not perfect. And each wave of feminism overlaps with and influences those that came before and after it.

But, given the choice, I would say each subsequent wave of feminism has been “better” than those before it, and I would also say that no wave of feminism was as openly and violently hostile as second wave feminism and the radical feminists who still espouse it. That it was more effective than the first wave is a point in its favour, but little else is.

That many modern radical feminists seek to undo the leaps and bounds we have made in the decades since radical feminism fell out of favour as the dominant feminist ideology is somewhere between regressive and openly horrifying.

So, I suppose that wasn’t necessarily as helpful as it could have been, in terms of specifically identifying radical feminist ideology today.

But with any luck, it has given you enough of a foundation upon which to build your own research in the future.

XOXOX

💮 Yazminx 💮 

PS: The title of our blog is a pun. You should only block people who you, personally, feel should be blocked. If you want to use our work as a guideline, then by all means do so. However, we are not operating any kind of blocklist here.

[junkobears]

Here Lies Dreaded V3 Discourse

So I have seemed to cause a huge kerfuffle in the hardcore Ouma conspiracy theorists standom, and a banal (if condescending, but seeing the response to it honestly justifies it more than anything now. “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it”, you better believe I can take it and will now PROPERLY dish it out right back at you) comment about one of Tsumugi’s anime references has led to someone launching a hilariously personal attack at me for Daring To Disagree With A Theory That Was Posted On A Public Website. Someone who I wasn’t even initially responding too, at that. And has now blocked me before even allowing me to respond and clarify my original comments. Don’t want to deal with the consequences of being a repugnant, rude person I guess? Shock and surprise for Tumblr.

The link to the post is here, but I’ve taken the liberty to screenshot it just in case it gets deleted later, in hope that maybe there’ll be some reflection on this person’s part that this really is not an acceptable way to respond to people who have a dissenting opinion? Anyways, I will be responding to the personal attack post and that will be the last time I interact with this group, because clearly it’s not worth it to actually have a discussion about our respective ending theories. I ain’t got time beyond this for tedious insecure fucks these days.

Anyways, my response is under the cut to save my poor followers’ dashes. Sorry to drag drama onto my blog but I can’t really let this slide. I’m also tagging @jacks-plays-drv3 just because I assume the twin comes with the other with these two, and I want my response to have been seen.

Screenshot In This Link - This post is long enough without the image taking up more space, haha.

Let’s start with this mess, shall we? And I will go into painstaking detail.

Paragraph 1: So this already starts off with a whole lot of needless aggression and projection. So I’m not even going to attempt to be nice back. But: maybe I haven’t proven anything because I literally had not typed up a response to clarify my original comments @ Jacks yet before the rabid attack dog was unleashed? Like, there was literally no attempt from you to have a discussion that was a genuine offer from me, I was not out to get you actually. I also honestly just laughed at being called shallow, JUST LIKE THAT HORRIBLE CHARACTER TSUMUGI SHIROGANE right off the bat as well. That’s a compliment really, honey. Weirdly I don’t share the same opinions as you do. Tsumugi is my fave and unlike you I actually think about and HAVE analyzed/discussed her character in detail previously, which I would’ve been happy to share had you not immediately went into Blind Raging Idiot Mode. Guess we can’t have it all, huh?

As for needing proof that she makes the Flashback Lights... nevermind the CG that literally shows her making them during Chapter 6, but do you have proof that Monokuma is the person who makes the Lights instead of just placing them for the students? I doubt it, somehow. Cuz a lot of your theories don’t actually have any concrete proof. Quelle surprise. Probably why anyone not immediately on board with your headcanon gets you so goddamn angry, huh? Cuz it’s completely baseless and you know it at heart.

As for the Ouma comments, actually I have read the assorted creator comments regarding his character even if you like to believe I’m a slobbering moron who turned my brain off as soon as I finished V3, so yes I already know that his name was chosen to sound mastermind-like. Maybe this was to emphasize and make his fake mastermind reveal appear more legit on first read? JUST A THOUGHT, SWEETIE. You know the entire fucking point of Chapter 5? You’re so slavishly devoted to your theory that you actually are incapable of reading the basic fucking text from the actual game, but again. Not a surprise. Considering what I’ve read from your blog (really, who are you again? I only knew Jacks’ blog from before all this, so you taking such a personal offense at my comments is honestly hilarious but baffling at the same time. It ain’t all about you, babe.)

As for the lab door, here’s an simpler explanation (Occam’s Razor, look it up): The star sign constellation pattern was there as a hint for the player to connect Ouma’s messages from his dorm room to the vault in Amami’s lab once its opened and you can see the star signs in there. Or perhaps it was designed like that by TDR to make the students make that connection as well in the original script and think that Ouma was the mastermind cuz of the connection to Amami’s lab? Literally, there are a lot of possibilities, cuz it’s a NOTHING DETAIL THAT DOESN’T ACTUALLY MATTER IN THE BIG PICTURE. Considering Kodaka’s track record with writing these games I don’t actually believe it’s anything major, personally. He doesn’t really strike me as the type to hide this completely separate story underneath the actual story we got, and with such vague nothing “”””””””””””clues””””””””””””. You and Jacks do yourselves (well you already do cuz you love to jack yourselves off with how CLEVER AND BETTER you are than the rest of us plebs), sure, in believing otherwise (You have way too much faith in him as a writer. Or you’re desperately trying to pretend V3 wasn’t poorly written cuz you don’t like the Ch. 6 twist) but also realize that its nothing more than extrapolation on your part that it actually means anything beyond the.... SHALLOW (horror scream) connection given in-game.

And really, who the fuck cares if it doesn’t match the title of ‘Supreme Leader’? It’s already a ridiculous talent as it stands already. The entire point of his character is that everything about him, his motives and his talent is contradictory and weird. That’s why I like him, actually. He isn’t an abused martyr who never lies like you goons believe and he also isn’t the evil monstrous chessmaster some of the fandom thinks. It’s Complex Motives™ .

Anyways moving on. Pointing out an anime reference =/= DISREGARDING PEOPLE’S ANALYSIS. Pointing out that most of the plot leads up to and supports the fiction twist =/= uncritically agreeing with everything Tsumugi says. Actually, after examining the game’s story for myself I came to the conclusion that all the clues in it really only support her version of the story, really. There are a few things I think she lied about, but it is not CONCLUSIVELY proven she lied in my opinion and so I don’t really give a fucking toss until new canon comes out and reveals more of the V3 story. Oumatwin don’t real, gurl. If there was actually anything in-game beyond one obvious joke line in the NON-CANON!!!!!!! bonus mode supporting that he existed, maybe I’d respect your theory more. Even though you don’t deserve respect after your little tantrum. 

Paragraph 2: Jesus I already am investing way too much time into this response at people who don’t actually deserve it, oh well. But laughing hard at the attempt to try and act as if you weren’t being a snobby asshole with your comments. Again, HUGE AMOUNTS OF PROJECTION at me about things I literally have never done and said. I have never interacted with you or Jacks prior to my initial comment. No fucking clue why you brought up the SaiOuma shit, cuz I don’t even LIKE Saihara as a character and don’t like that fujobait ship in the slightest? But I guess it’s easier to assume that all your critics are the exact same fucking person with the same opinions, so you can feel more persecuted, huh? You literally did not even wait for me to respond or check my blog that would’ve easily disproven these dumb-as-fuck assumptions. And get off the fucking high horse (pun completely intended), you lot are not the only people in this fandom who are capable of critical thought. How completely self-obsessed can you be? 

For someone who claims to have a lot of critical thinking skills compared to this nasty fandom, you really are terrible at parsing other people’s words. You fucking know when I said “group of anime fans” that I was referring to Team Danganronpa, the organization literally mentioned in game as running the game. The group Tsumugi is part of. She literally has a company badge FFS. THEY ARE ANIME FANS. THEY ALL STARTED KILLING GAMES CUZ THEY ALL LOVE THIS SHITTY SERIES. I can’t believe this had to be explained. And the rest of this paragraph word salad is the most pedantic argument. It’s really not hard to believe an organization in this series would have access to all this tech. And yes, it’s a popular TV show in-universe, of course it’ll have funding. And the whole damn point of the ending is that the V3 world is consuming fiction the wrong way by having real-life killing games, missing the entire point of the DR series and fiction in general? What’s your actual point?

Paragraph 3: Again more assumptions, I wasn’t ‘crying’ about being called gullible. I was just pointing it out as part of your extremely unnecessary smug dismissal of my post. That you really haven’t disproved at all, btw. Honestly the childish response you both had to me just makes me laugh out of pity more than anything. And if I was really upset I wouldn’t have offered to have a discussion with you or even continued to reply after Jacks initial (vague) post about what I said. So don’t put words in my mouth. And yes my analysis was not completed in my initial comments. It’s Tumblr fucking replies, I can’t fit the entire fucking dissertation of Tsumugi opinions in there for you to jeer at in there. Again, I offered to share my opinions and got this as a response, so lol. You are your own worst enemy when it comes to trying to get people to take you and your theories seriously. 

Paragraph 4: Especially since you immediately jump to PULLING THINGS OUT OF YOUR ASS (seriously, fucking snorted at this part. I want this whole diatribe on my fucking gravestone. It’s by far the most hilariously petty thing ever said about me on this site.) instead of letting me explain my position. If you just want to be in the creepy cult Oumatwin echo chamber you should’ve just said and blocked me ASAP instead of word salading vague bullshit justifications for why actually people who disagree with you are just stupid crybabies who can never hope to understand your genius. Again, my initial comments didn’t whine about not being taken seriously at all, I was pointing out the hypocrisy/rudeness is all. And again, get off the high horse about critical thinking. I have thought about Tsumugi’s character and how she relates to the over-arching plot and how truthful it is, and the overall ‘mystery’ of V3 (spoiler: there is none. it was all solved by chapter 6). I have thought about this game. In fact I dedicate too much time to critical analysis of this series that doesn’t actually deserve it cuz lately I find Kodaka to be a hack writer. Your assumptions are flat-out wrong, dear. And AGAIN. I WOULD’VE. SHARED AND DISCUSSED IN MORE DETAIL HAD I BEEN GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY. But rude fucks gonna vomit shit out of their mouth cuz they have literally no self-control and have meltdowns at the slightest difference of opinion, I guess. 

Your extreme hatred for Tsumugi as a character truly shines through. Clearly no thought has been put into her from your end, even though you and Jacks rage about people not taking Ouma seriously as a character. Double standards as always with fujos. Nothing I’m not used too, she is incredibly unpopular in this fandom. And everyone is entitled to their own opinions. So I’m not even mad at that. I have never said otherwise. Even you and Jacks are valid in having your own theories and thoughts. The ending of V3 is designed entirely so everyone can analyze the game for themselves and draw their own conclusions about the story and themes. That’s the whole point. Even though I personally dislike that as a writing decision on Kodaka’s part because I would prefer the story to be conclusively ended and the epilogue is a giant turd that misses the entire point of Chapter 6 and enables shit (anal pun intended, dumbass) like this to start spreading as “Analysis”. But hey, to each their own.

However I will not be interacting with either of you again after this post though, even though I was willing to discuss beforehand, because you both have shown yourselves to be incredibly vile with the way you approach other people in this fandom, and especially those who don’t share your conspiracy theory. Despite the absolutely ironic comments I’ve seen from Oumanous in their later, also terrible posts about how you need to understand your opponent before engaging, which they literally failed entirely to do before engaging the firing squad at me and other commentators who responded. So much for the sanctity of discussion, huh? Enjoy your circlejerk. Everyone else who follows me in this fandom though? Please consider blocking these two if you are also a sane human being who is capable of polite discussion/disagreements. They are not worth your time otherwise. They were really not worth my time writing this post, but I felt I had to say something.

In conclusion: Out with the both of you.

[youngmagazineruins]

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[darkzorua100]

So we just got the episode summaries for episodes 2 and 3 for Yu-Gi-Oh Vrains along with episodes 4 and 5 titles and some more info about how the dueling format for this show and can I just be the first to say that these summaries aren’t making anything less confusing but I think I’m starting to get what the spoilers have been saying about Yusaku trying out doing for the first time but yet being famous for beating the Knights at the same time. 

Episode 2: Catch the Wind! Storm Access

Yusaku managed to capture the mysterious lifeform as he chases after the Knights of Hanoi. In order to defeat them, he logs into the VR Space network, Link VRAINS, as Playmaker. He commenced a Duel, holding the lifeform as a hostage. However, the lifeform predicted that “Yusaku can’t win with his deck,” and performed a certain action…

Script: Yoshida Shin Storyboard: Sunaga Tsukasa Direction: Mutou Kimiharu Animation Director(s): Kawamura Yuya, Ushiro Yuki

Wow, that Stockholm Syndrome hit quick. The lifeform is just like “Yeah you just kidnapped me and all that but hey, I’m going to upgrade your deck because you seem like a nicer kidnapper than those other guys!” That’s what I’m understanding is happening at the moment. Yusaku challenges the Knight of Hanoi with the Cracking Dragon to a duel but has no idea what the actual hell he is doing so the lifeform is going to pull an Astral and save his behind and upgrade his deck by giving him Firewall Dragon and/or Decode Talker (I’m still convinced the lifeform is Decode Talker btw) and that’s when the episode is going to end off, him summoning one of his new aces. 

Episode 3: First Contact

Yusaku begins to examine the information hidden in the mysterious lifeform. Meanwhile, after his Duel against the Knights in the network, he became famous as the hero who saved Link VRAINS. Learning that the lifeform is with Playmaker, SOL Technology sets up an operation to capture it…

Script: Yoshida Shin Storyboard: Takada Masahiro Direction: Mikamoto Yasumi Animation Director(s): TBA

This is what I mean about somewhat understanding what’s going on. Yusaku isn’t that good of a duelist/is a noob but after beating the Knights with his new upgraded deck, he has become famous or Playmaker does but who knows if everyone knows he’s Playmaker yet. Based on the title, I think Yusaku and the AI are going to form some kind of deal like “if Yusaku protects the AI from SOL Technology and the Knights of Hanoi, the AI will allow him to study it” (yes, I know it says Contact not Contract but I feel like this still could happen in this episode). And speaking of SOL, I wonder if Akari is going to send someone after Yusaku, maybe Aoi if she is working with her brother/father? Well Shin is writing for this episode so who knows but I am really interested to know who is the contact.

Episode 4: The Charisma Duelist: Go Onizuka

Script: Takegami Junki Storyboard: Yamamoto Ryuta Direction: Fuse Yasuyuki Animation Director(s): TBA

Just by the title, it looks like Yusaku and Go are finally meeting up and more than likely dueling which will be interesting to see. I hope we get to see them dueling in a wresting ring XD

Episode 5: The Bell Rings on the Count Of Three

Script: Takegami Junki Storyboard: Arie Yuki Direction: Kamihara Toshiaki Animation Director(s): TBA

I don’t know much about wresting but I know they use bells to signal when someone is defeated so I’m going to assume that Yusaku vs Go is going to be a two parter with it being more than likely that Go is going to push Yusaku into a corner only for him to have a come behind victory and knowing this show, defeat means friendship or Go is going to want revenge, they are going to have another duel down the line, and then friendship!

Now as for the duels, it looks like we are following the 5Ds pattern with some of the duels being Speed Duel (the ones on the hoverboards that’s seen most common in Duel Links) and Master Duels (the normal standing on the ground with the normal rules). If I remember correctly, when Vrains was first announced, Riding Duels and Actions Duels might also be returning. I hope for this to be the case because while I, and most of the fandom, hate Actions Cards, I don’t want to go back to normal duels where everyone is just standing in place again but are moving around without the use of D-Wheels or Hoverboards. 

So overall, I think Vrains is starting off pretty good with action right off the bat. I can’t wait to finally see this show in four more days and just to see Yusaku being a badass from the looks of things. 

[tardisgirlepic]

Ch. 1: “The Pyramid at the End of the World” Analysis Doctor Who S10.7: Big Payoff Coming, Don’t Trust What You See & Love Is Slavery Theme

My apologies.  I was hoping to get this up here on Tumblr before the next episode aired, but I went out of town.  I did get it posted on AO3 before "The Lie of the Land” aired, as I post there first and then cross-post with photos here.  Because I posted whatever I had on AO3 before I left and hadn’t finished, I went back making some changes to make things clearer before the airing.  At the same time, I had some revelations.  I updated AO3 2 times with the revelations. [See AO3]

Update: As I was working on some changes, I had a major revelation about a Star Trek reference.  I added a bunch of sections talking about the Doctor blowing up the lab and what it references.  Also, I didn't get to finish the part about what was coming up, so I added some more things at the bottom of the chapter.

Update 2x: Another Star Trek reference connects to the Wolf. (Search for UPDATE.)

All links to my other analyses referenced in this chapter go to AO3.  I apologize for that, but I just don’t have time to do lengthy analyses and update the links here.  Check out my Meta Archive on Tumblr for the chapters with photos here.

Note: TPEW = “The Pyramid at the End of the World,” the episode with the incredibly long name that I’m not going to spell out again, unless I have to.  Yikes!

So Much to Say, So Little Time

Sadly, there just isn’t enough time to cover TPEW.  There are tons wrong with the episode and tons to say.  However, I want to get out the main points.  TPEW is very important, and tells me a lot about what is really happening, which is basically the opposite of how it looks.  I’m going to forego most images, except where absolutely necessary, due to time restrictions.

This whole pyramid ploy and impending disaster are part of an engineered plot, not a mistake as the Doctor says.   Most everything in this episode is a lie.  And you may be surprised at what the subtext says about who is part of this plan.  Before we get to the lie and how to tell, let’s look at a few other things, including the purpose of what is happening.

Tips on Learning to Read Subtext

I’m trying to break down what I do, so you can understand how I do it.  Therefore, a situation a couple of days after TPEW aired, where my husband questioned me about how I connected 2 pieces of information, prompts me to explain something. 

I had the pleasure of sitting down and re-watching TPEW with my daughter, who is an excellent subtext reader, and my husband, who is learning the basics and applying what he knows to other shows.  When he’s motivated, he actually does a little research to look up something the dialogue or subtext suggests.  If you want to read subtext at more than a basic level, you have to research stuff.

As an example, before we sat down to re-watch the episode, I saw that the actor who plays the UN Secretary-General was in the movie Eyes Wide Shut.  Many times, actors bring with them subtext from what they’ve previously done, and this doesn’t just apply to DW.  Because I had no idea what the movie was about, I looked it up.  Nothing in the description jumped out at me as making a big subtext statement for DW.

Surprisingly, I came across something in the episode with my newfound understanding.  Now, I had a new appreciation for the line

DOCTOR: Hello, I'm the Doctor, saving the world with my eyes shut.

He questioned how I arrived at this connection between the line and the movie title.  Going with the principle of no coincidences, the line was too close to the movie title to ignore. 

This made me realize I need to show you, at times, how I think in other ways than I already do.

After we finished the episode, I went back to the Wikipedia page on the movie because there was a link that I hadn’t followed.  The movie is based on a 1926 novella by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler.  It is called Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, also known as Dream Story (German: Traumnovelle).

It’s absolutely connected to what is happening in this episode and the others.  Based on this and some other new information in the episode, I believe I know where people are.

BTW, 1926 is an important year because this brings in more subtext, too, whether it’s coincidental to the novella and DW or not.  It refers to the 3rd Doctor story “Carnival of Monsters” and brings in the idea of miniaturization of people, as well as a device called the miniscope, which the 12th Doctor mentions as a possibility that he and Clara could be in during “Robot of Sherwood.” 

The miniscope allows the operator to change the emotions of the creatures inside, even making them forget that they have done something multiple times.  We’ve already seen these ideas used in nuWho but in a different way.

The idea of changing people’s emotions is what happens in “The Bells of St. John,” where Clara and others get uploaded to the Wi-fi.  Miss Kizlet, who works for the Great Intelligence, changes her employees’ emotions from a computer tablet. 

Also, this also brings in a connection to Amy.

The novella, BTW, very much pertains to the Doctor, River, Clara, and others.  That’s for a future chapter.

Ploy to Possess the Doctor: The Eagle Abducts Ganymede

The big payoff is coming! Here we see Ganymede getting abducted by the UN and Colonel Brabbit.  Where is UNIT, BTW?

The Eagle

Colonel Brabbit represents the eagle.  In the image below, there is an eagle on his uniform sleeve (red arrow).  It’s true an eagle represents a colonel in the US Army. This, however, is not a real army uniform, nor is it a real colonel’s eagle.  This is all a lie.  Besides, no colonel would be making unilateral decisions for the entire nation.

Brabbit has 4 stars in 2 different places (white and yellow arrows) on his uniform.  The 4 stars represent the Library, so this is taking place in the Library metaphor.   He also has 13 stars on his hat.  The number 13 represents a Doctor.  Here is where the Doctor is both Ganymede and an eagle.

The 12th Doctor in the subtext in seasons 8 and 9, because he has multiple faces, can be labeled 0, 1, 2, and 3, or he is 12, 13, 14, and 15.  He can also be some multiple of 12 in a series of numbers, such as 24, 25, 26, and 27.  Season 10 is running a bit different, but that will have to be topic for another chapter.

Brabbit, then, would represent the Doctor.  Also, Brabbit = “rabbit” with an added “B.”  Rabbits, as of “Thin Ice,” are associated with redemption.  Unless I missed the horse, there wasn’t any this week for once in many weeks.  This is about the Doctor’s abduction and how it happened.  The rabbit would suggest this is part of getting redemption. Abduction is opposite of rescue, which goes along with how basically everything in this episode is a lie.

This capture may come back to several things, one of which is the Doctor’s words from “Robot of Sherwood.”

DOCTOR: Quickest way to find out anybody's plans, get yourself captured.

I’m expecting the Doctor to be one step ahead, even if it doesn’t look like it.

Ganymede

Both Bill and the Doctor represent Ganymede.  They are abducted and flown to the proverbial Mount Olympus with the pyramid and the Monks. But this all has to do with the Library metaphor.

Bill can represent the Doctor because she is one of his faces. 

Bill’s Cyan Jacket & “The Fires of Pompeii”

Bill is wearing a really interesting jacket.  It’s cyan (a theme color of this episode) with black highlights.  However, before I get to that, the back of her jacket is very important and gives us a lot of information.

The white arrow points to Okinawa.  The red arrow points to a volcano, a symbol of Lobus Caecilius, Capaldi’s character from “The Fires of Pompeii.”  (Caecilius means blind, which is another reason the Doctor most likely had to be blind.) However, that’s not all…

The volcano isn’t just a volcano, and that was the shocking part to me.  Okinawa didn’t make sense when I first saw this.  The volcano looked like Mount Fuji, a sacred symbol in Japan.  When Mount Fuji is stylized like this, I’ve frequently seen a sun and flowers, like cherry blossoms, with it.   Japan is known as the Land of the Rising Sun, so the sun represents it. 

Wow, this also tells me why in TRODM, Nardole and the Doctor go to the Harmony Shoal office in Tokyo! Mount Fuji is near Tokyo.  Before TPEW, I had no clue why Tokyo was important.

Harmony Shoal hasn’t gone away.  They are truly part of this war with the Doctor. 

Anyway, I really doubted this volcano represented Okinawa, so I looked up volcanoes on Okinawa, which is at the southern tip of the Japanese islands.  There aren’t any volcanoes there.  The volcano on Bill’s jacket is Mount Fuji.

Why Okinawa? 

Names, as well as places on Earth, are always important.

I knew several things that Okinawa was famous for: the longest lived people in the world, who aren’t vegetarians; Okinawan martial arts; and the Battle of Okinawa from WWII. None of these explains why Okinawa is so important.

So I looked up Okinawa and read about the history.  Something important related to the Doctor’s subtext story jumped out at me.  Things will start jumping out at you once you understand the basic story and can connect the dots.  However, you first have to build the context into which to put the details.  This is what I’ve intensively done for the past 4 years and beyond.  I may look like I pull things out of a hat, but I don’t.  So I want to show you how I do this.  It’s all based on research that I’ve done, as well as recognizing patterns, seeing things that tend to hide in plain sight, and connecting the dots.  Everyone can do this too.

I am writing more about this than I planned, but this part is really key and is another example of how I piece together the parts of the puzzle.

Anyway, the importance of Okinawa is about usurpation.  And we just saw in previous analyses that usurpation had to be important. 

A Hungarian-born, Jewish man named Bernard Jean Bettelheim converted to Christianity and became rather zealous about preaching the Gospel.  He became, according to Wikipedia, “a naturalized British subject sometime later, married the daughter of a prominent thread producer, and, in 1844, his first child was born; she was named Victoria Rose.”

Wow, there are a couple of things here, as well!  Conversion is important because the Doctor is going through the Great Work. In fact, TPEW had a reference to “My Fair Lady” where the Doctor says, “She's got it.  By George, she's got it!”  My Fair Lady is a musical based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, where Eliza is given speech lessons so she can pass as a lady. In the 7th Doctor story “Ghostlight,” the Doctor referred to Ace as Eliza.  This is a conversion of sorts.

Also, Victoria Rose is another link.  Rose is linked to Victoria in “Tooth and Claw,” which is a story of usurpation where the Scottish boy is stolen by Monks and then possessed by the werewolf!  In Chapter 14 of Fairytales and Romance in Doctor Who, we saw how the 10th Doctor, playing the 12th Doctor in the subtext, is half him and half werewolf.  The usurpation story in DW is very old, so many of these references were set up long ago, actually going back to Classic Who. 

BTW, if you can go back to most DW stories, classic or nuWho, and tell something of how at least parts of any episode fit into the main subtext story, you then know every episode of DW is connected.  I want you to know what is possible, depending on how motivated you are.  I would understand more of the details, I’m sure, if I had watched all the Classic Who episodes that still survive.

So my advice is to go back to Classic Who and watch some of the episodes, if you haven’t already, especially ones that I might point out that are relevant to what we are watching at the time.  However, concentrate mostly on nuWho to begin with, especially seasons 8 and 9, which don’t have all the timey-whimey bits of the 11th Doctor stories.

Anyway, Bettelheim, as a missionary, went to Okinawa with “his wife, Elizabeth M., their infant daughter, Victoria Rose (born 1844), their infant son, Bernard James (born November 1845).… The local officials offered the family shelter in the Gokoku-ji temple for the night, and the priests in residence there left, out of respect for the women's privacy. The following morning, the Bettelheims refused to leave.  They would remain in the Gokoku-ji for seven years.”

Wow, he and his family usurped the temple for 7 years!  Temple is a term DW uses for the Doctor’s body, which may come with a number, corresponding to the number of the Doctor.  So in “Oxygen,” we saw “He’s in Section 12,” which felt like it had a lot more meaning beyond the episode, and now I see why.  It was, indeed, foreshadowing to find the Doctor. They linked Bill to the Doctor, and found him through her.

So Bill’s jacket is saying the sacred volcano is usurped, meaning Caecilius is the Doctor.  We’ll see how his body is appropriated/possessed/mind controlled.  And that is exactly what we’ve been examining in multiple chapters.  He puts on the beetle, just like Donna, in “The Fires of Pompeii.”  Donna’s beetle spins off a parallel world for her, so we should expect the same with the Doctor.  However, he’s a happy slave before he even puts the beetle on.

How cool is it that the Land of the Rising Sun becomes a symbol of the Doctor?  And how it ties into the amazing subtext stories that surround the symbol?  The Sun metaphor didn’t even occur to me when TRODM Harmony Shoal office was in Tokyo. This is another example of how DW repeats things in multiple ways, so if you miss it in one context, there will be others. 

So this is a subtext reference, too, showing us Harmony Shoal is involved.  The Doctor is in a psychological war with himself, which we already saw in a different context.

We know we are reading the subtext correctly when all kinds of pieces start falling into place. Things move from hypotheses to conclusions, waiting to be shown in canon.  This is the really exciting thing for me, seeing how this all comes together.

BTW, Clara, too, is connected to Japanese things since she had various Japanese items in her apartment, as well as the house in “Last Christmas.”

Bill’s Red Jacket & “The Return of Doctor Mysterio”

In the opening scenes of the episode, Bill isn’t wearing a cyan jacket.  The 2 birds on the front look similar to those on the cyan jacket, but her jacket is more of a pinkish hue with red highlights, shown below. The really interesting things about the birds are that they are phoenixes.  They also look like a forward “C” and a backward “C.”   That’s significant and refers back to TRODM, Harmony Shoal, and the Eye of Harmony, which I’ll talk about more in a few minutes.

Why does Bill have 2 jackets?

I believe part of the answer to why Bill has 2 jackets can be derived from looking at the 6 elephants in Moira’s house, shown below, from “Extremis.”

In the second image, shown below, of the elephants, there is a mirror with 2 elephant images on the right. However, those images do not match the ones we see in the elephants on the left.  The two in the mirror are ghosts.  So we, most likely, are dealing with 3 people as One and a duplicate 3 people as One.  Perhaps this is a real timeline and an altered timeline.

Both Bills can be real like Donna and alternate-Donna.  From what happens at the beginning with Penny, they are most likely in a shared dream.

The Phoenix

Because Bill’s jacket is about Japan, at least on the back, we not only need to look at the phoenix of Greek mythology, but also we need to examine its meaning in Japan.  Then, we need to try and decide from context which version we are meant to use.  Or maybe we need to use both.

The Phoenix in Greek Mythology

According to Wikipedia:

Associated with the Sun, a phoenix obtains new life by arising from the ashes of its predecessor. According to some sources, the phoenix dies in a show of flames and combustion, although there are other sources that claim that the legendary bird dies and simply decomposes before being born again. According to some texts, the phoenix could live over 1,400 years before rebirth. Herodotus, Lucan, Pliny the Elder, Pope Clement I, Lactantius, Ovid, and Isidore of Seville are among those who have contributed to the retelling and transmission of the phoenix motif.

In the historical record, the phoenix "could symbolize renewal in general as well as the sun, time, the Empire, metempsychosis, consecration, resurrection, life in the heavenly Paradise, Christ, Mary, virginity, the exceptional man, and certain aspects of Christian life".

Certainly, the phoenix’s long life, death, and rebirth describes the Doctor.  It’s associated with the Sun, which again is the Doctor. And we come back to the Christian connection and the Trinity.  It’s a symbol of transformation, which, of course, we see over and over, from the normal Doctor definitions to usurpation and “My Fair Lady.”

However, Donna’s “Turn Left” alternate universe was a living hell.  Therefore, instead of paradise, the Doctor will most likely be a slave in a living hell.  CAL, too, was enslaved in a living hell until the end.  She didn’t see it that way while the dreams were her “real life.” The Doctor probably will be very mind controlled at first, believing he’s in paradise, so he won’t see the living hell, either. 

The Sacred Phoenix in Japanese Mythology

The sacred Japanese phoenix originated in China and has different origins from the Greek phoenix.

According to Japanese Buddhist Statuary:

Chn. = Fèng Huáng, Feng Huang 鳳凰 Jp. = Hō-ō 鳳凰 or Hou-ou, Ho-o, Hoo-oo Feng 鳳 represents male phoenix, yang, solar Huang 凰 represents female phoenix, yin, lunar

Often depicted together with the Dragon, either as mortal enemies or as blissful lovers.

One of Four Celestial Guardians of Four Directions Considered equivalent to the Red Bird | Big Bird

In Japan, as earlier in China, the mythical Phoenix was adopted as a symbol of the imperial household, particularly the empress. This mythical bird represents fire, the sun, justice, obedience, fidelity, and the southern star constellations.

According to legend (mostly from China), the Hō-ō appears very rarely, and only to mark the beginning of a new era -- the birth of a virtuous ruler, for example. In other traditions, the Hō-ō appears only in peaceful and prosperous times (nesting, it is said, in paulownia trees), and hides itself when there is trouble. As the herald of a new age, the Hō-ō decends from heaven to earth to do good deeds, and then it returns to its celestial abode to await a new era. It is both a symbol of peace (when the bird appears) and a symbol of disharmony (when the bird disappears). In China, early artifacts show the Phoenix (female) as intimately associated with the Dragon (male) -- the two are portrayed either as mortal enemies or as blissful lovers. When shown together, the two symbolize both conflict and wedded bliss, and are a common design motif even today in many parts of Asia (see below).

All of this is important, too.  Interestingly, the Chinese and Japanese phoenix ties into the concepts of yin and yang, lunar and solar, which ties back into what we looked at with the taijitu in the 2nd chapter of my analysis on “Extremis.”   The lunar and solar aspects also tie back into what we’ve looked at with the Great Work and the Moon and Sun metaphors.

The “One of Four Celestial Guardians of Four Directions” probably relates to the Library, which is represented by four directions.

Once again, we have a reference to a royal bloodline related to the Doctor, especially the empress. The Doctor was associated with the Mother of God in “Extremis.”  While empress doesn’t necessarily mean “Mother of God,” the meanings in the context of DW are very similar, and the genders are the same.  Certainly, Bill and Nardole could also be of the royal bloodline.  I’m expecting it.

The Doctor has been abducted, so symbolically he has disappeared.  Disharmony or harmony, all of this isn’t so simple because of the lies, like with CAL in the Library.

The dragon is interesting because Peter Harness co-wrote this episode.  He also wrote “The Zygon Invasion” and “The Zygon Inversion,” as well as “Kill the Moon,” where the dragon hatched from the moon.  The dragon represented the Doctor.

Wedded bliss turns into mortal enemies, so this all makes sense because the altered timeline represents a threat to the main timeline if we go by “Turn Left.”

Interestingly, in southern China, regarding the Red Bird:

Its plumage is of the five mystical colours - black, white, red, green and yellow, and it has twelve tail feathers, execept in years when there is an extra month, when there are thirteen. It feeds on bamboo seeds, lives in the branches of the dryandera tree, and drinks from fountains of fresh water.

This is really interesting because 4 of the 5 colors relate to the Great Work.  Also of interest are the 12 tail feathers, which relate to the 12th Doctor, and so do the 13.  However, 13 here could also relate to Brabbit.

One more interesting thing from Wikipedia:

Phoenix talons (S:凤爪 T:鳳爪) is a Chinese term for chicken claws in any Chinese dish cooked with them.

Therefore, a chicken can substitute for a phoenix in certain cases.  Rory is associated with chickens.  He certainly is a phoenix, dying multiple times and being resurrected.  However, Bill and Penny are both associated with the chicken dish in Moira’s kitchen.  Bill is a phoenix in that she flatlined according to the audio in “Oxygen,” so she died and got resurrected.  Penny is associated with the 12th Doctor.

Usage of Colors in TPEW

One of the really interesting things about TPEW is how color is used.  I’ll have to go back and reevaluate previous episodes with these new concepts in mind.

The Story of One Bottle, 2 Images

Douglas in the lab is hung over and talks about breakages.  However, we only see one breakage the first time, which made me question that.  Not only that, the first time we see a green bottle, I thought it would be empty.  However, when it breaks, brown liquid spills out. That’s even odder, given the bottle isn’t darker.

Later, we see a brown bottle until the camera shows the green top.  This bottle looks odd too.  I’m not going to post more photos here.  If you watch the episode again, watch the bottles break exactly the same both times, which is impossible.  (Keep an eye on the cracks of the largest piece of glass.)  No two bottles will break exactly the same.  There is a point DW is trying to make, which I’ll get to below.  The bottles are the same but colored digitally incorrectly on purpose for a reason.

DW wants us to notice there is one bottle but 2 flavors, so to speak.  This relates back to the Trinity where 3 people are One.  And then we have 2 versions of Bill.  Could there be something else, too?

Bill’s Jackets: Cyan and Red

Red and cyan are both complementary colors, or in photography they are the negative of each other.  Both of those concepts give us some information.

In modern color theory, complementary colors are pairs of colors that cancel each other out when combined, producing a grey-scale color like white or black.  Modern color theory uses red/cyan, green/magenta, and blue/yellow.

The traditional color model says that complementary colors are pairs of colors that are opposite one another on a color wheel, like red/green, purple/yellow, and blue/orange. When they are combined, they produce brown.

So cyan and red are part of the modern color theory.  It’s the terminology with the colors that I find interesting.  Negative and cancelling each other out seem quite significant, especially when talking about CERN, particle physics, and Dan Brown’s novel Angels and Demons with an antimatter bomb.  This is especially relevant, too, when talking about Ragnarök and the destruction of the world.

The symbology may be that one set of people is like matter and another like antimatter.  When both are brought together, they annihilate each other, which is mostly what happened in Ragnarök.

Interestingly, Nardole is wearing cyan and red; Bill most of the time is wearing cyan and black with gray and a red stripe; and the Doctor is wearing red and black.  Since when does he go around with his button-down shirt not tucked in?

Since complementary colors cancel each other out, producing a gray-scale color, it’s possible the Doctor’s calling card is meant for 6 people as One.  The TARDIS, after all, is meant to have 6 pilots. 

Colors & the First Aid Kit

There’s a green first aid kit on the wall (yellow arrow) in the lab.  However, it’s not the normal color.  Maybe it’s a European thing, but most first aid kits that I’ve seen in the US, if the cross is not within a circle, are red with a white cross. Regardless, this may have additional meaning.

Both Erica and Douglas are not who they seem to be.  Erica has a hidden face.  She, Douglas, and the Doctor are all associated with the first aid kit, which may have something to do with the color.  It’s a fact that they are associated with the cross.

The Greek Cross is associated with the church or temple, which comes back to the Doctor’s body, regardless of a number.  Erica and Douglas are both faces of the Doctor.

Since modern color theory is used with Bill’s jackets, green becomes suspicious because it is used with the traditional color model and opposite the red of a first aid kit. Modern and traditional could be used to describe the duplicate sets of 3 people, where traditional is meant as the originals.  I’m thinking aloud here to show you that DW does get quite obscure like this. 

Also, I’m spelling out my thinking process here, so you can see how I connect ideas.  If you want to read subtext, you have to be able to do that and think outside the box.

Duplicates & Truth or Consequences

The Zygons metaphorically are showing up again here; however, the references, writer, and the setting of the Zygon episodes may be as close as we get since Capaldi is leaving. Zygon references had to return because of the duplication of the Doctor.

Like “The Zygon Invasion” and “The Zygon Inversion,” TPEW has similar weird dialogue and plenty of wrongness, which we’ll look at in a bit.  However, there are some other very important references.  First of all, the setting of Turmezistan is the same, so that brings in the Zygon training camp and splinter revolt.  Second, it brings in Truth or Consequences from New Mexico and the Doctor’s war speech with the boxes. 

Another reason for revisiting Zygon references, which TPEW pointed out, was how the Doctor should have received Consequences and died in TPEW.  Instead, it looks like we will get Truth, which is a lie because Bill sold Earth’s soul to the devil, so to speak.  This looks like it might be like the Doctor Faustus contract.

Bill signed the contract without fully understanding the terms.  She asked questions that were not answered or fully disclosed.

Also, there’s the idea in the Zygon episodes of usurping someone’s identity, which, of course, is the point of the duplicate, but once again here’s the usurping theme.

So modern and traditional could be related to the original person being kept prisoner in dreams, like Clara was, while the duplicate assumes the original’s role. 

Is Rassilon Back & Taking Prisoners?

In a previous chapter, we looked at an image from “The Five Doctors,” which showed Rassilon’s insignia.  According to the Doctor’s calling card, Rassilon may be a face of the Doctor.

It looks like Rassilon will be back because the insignia shows up below on the lab, but in the opposite direction, like the backward “C” on Bill’s jacket.  Not only that, but check out the 6-spoked pattern to the left of Rassilon’s insignia at the bottom, which I forgot to mark.  This building is a prison, referring back to Prisoner 6 from The Prisoner.

So it’s not surprising at all when 2 chains show up in the lab (red arrows).  I would have been surprised if there weren’t any.

Here’s a close up of a chain, which is odd, although the Monk’s round camera is there, which could have meaing. This photo is odd because it’s a close up without a person near it.  This may mean The Ghost is a prisoner, which would make sense, or it could mean something else.  This is the 1st time I’ve seen something like this, which is why I am questioning its meaning.

It’s a little hard to tell here, but there is a chain behind Douglas, shown below (red arrow).  He is a prisoner and is being controlled.  The whole impending disaster/non-disaster was engineered.

Not surprisingly, the Doctor has a chain behind him, which has nothing to do with him being locked in the lab.  There would be no need to use a chain for something obvious.  He is a prisoner before Bill sell’s his soul to the devil. Caecilius was a happy slave before he put on the beetle.  Why?  I expect that we’ll find out.

Most likely, the best thing to do is to think of the Doctor as CAL in the Library with Doctor Moon brainwashing him into thinking the real world is a lie and the dream world is real.

OMG, That Lab & the Silliest Dialogue!

OMG that lab dialogue, imagery, etc.!  Quick, someone call the regulatory agency in Yorkshire for, well… I’ll go over a few highlights

Most of the intentional wrongness in the episode shows up in the lab.  If you’ve ever been in a lab or have knowledge of lab practices, you may have been cringing, or maybe you played spot-the-problems like my daughter and me.  It’s a textbook case for how not to build or run a lab.  Students, don’t try these things in the lab!  There are so many wrong things in the lab, but I’ll just call out a few.

Initially, I was cringing when Erica came in with coffee (red arrow), which then started the spot-the-problems game. Douglas calls her an angel.  Um… no!  He looks poisoned when he dies frothing at the mouth, and his blurriness starts right after he drinks the coffee.  Where’s the big sign that says, “No food or drink in the lab!”?  Health and safety violation.

Also, why are they testing bacteria on live plants?  The plants should already be harvested. 

Then, Erica and Douglas are not even looking at bacteria on the monitor.  The little creatures are more complex than bacteria and much bigger. I recognized a paramecium, the big slipper-shaped thing zooming by.  Bacteria are tiny and come in specific shapes.  This is when Erica says the silliest dialogue:

ERICA: It's gone crazy. It's much too strong. It's not just breaking the root system down, it's killing the whole thing. We have to seal off the lab, the greenhouse, everything. This can't be allowed to get into the atmosphere.

Wow!  What exactly has gone crazy?  Um… why is a scientist who works with plants surprised that if you kill the roots of the plant, the whole plant dies?  How can she even tell what’s happening since there are no plant parts there? This, most likely, is a slide of pond life since paramecium are quite abundant in ponds.  Is that a clue to Amy?

And why is a biohazard lab venting hazardous materials into the atmosphere?  Where is regulatory when you need them?

Douglas running out of the biohazard lab with a sample was not a mistake.  It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway because the airlocks weren’t designed properly.  They are supposed to use pressure to force pathogens back into the lab.  People can’t run in and out of the doors like they did. 

And not wearing a biohazard suit…

I could go on and on.

One more thing, the butterfly effect comes up again with small things having a big effect.  The butterfly is a symbol of transformation.

The Lab, the Doctor, Star Trek & the Legend of the Changeling

Blowing up the lab is an absurd move by the Doctor, but he, too, is being controlled.  I feel like he is the Nomad probe from the original Star Trek.  It got damaged and had its programming changed.  Sterilize…sterilize.  It tried to sterilize everything, destroying whatever was imperfect.  (The Doctor tries to destroy non-human Heather in “The Pilot” by sterilizing her in Dalek gunfire, which doesn’t make sense.)  Sterilizing things in fire, requires a certain amount of time in the heat.  There is no way a bomb blast will do anything good, except spread the plague faster through the high-speed blast.

*** I’ve added the sections below ***

Wow, OK, I’ve had a major revelation about this whole sterilization thing.  I was going to go back and put in the Star Trek episode title “The Changeling” in the paragraph above when it dawned on me why the Doctor wants to sterilize things in ways that don’t make sense.

Spock, Rose & the Doctor

DW really is making a reference to the title of the episode “The Changeling,” which is based on an Earth legend.  Before I get to that, I forgot to mention that there is a very important original series Star Trek reference in the 9th Doctor episode “The Empty Child.”  Rose tells Captain Jack Harkness that the Doctor’s name is Spock. 

If you don’t follow Star Trek, First Officer Spock is a half-human, half-Vulcan science officer on the starship Enterprise, and he is brilliant and telepathic, like the Doctor.

Spock’s name comes up 5 times in “The Empty Child.”  Here is one of the conversations:

JACK: Good evening. Hope we're not interrupting. Jack Harkness. I've been hearing all about you on the way over. ROSE: He knows. I had to tell him about us being Time Agents. JACK: And it's a real pleasure to meet you, Mister Spock. (Jack walks forward to the ward.) DOCTOR: Mister Spock? ROSE: What was I supposed to say? You don't have a name. Don't you ever get tired of Doctor? Doctor who?

So Spock, a hybrid, is associated with the Doctor.

The Changeling: A Legend of Usurpation

Captain Kirk in the episode tells Spock about the changeling legend:

KIRK: An ancient Earth legend, Mister Spock. A changeling was a fairy child that was left in place of a human baby. The changeling assumed the identity of the human child. So, it is to sterilise, and for sterilise read kill.

Wow, here is yet another reference to someone being usurped!

In this case, the changeling is the probe, which the Doctor is, at times, emulating.  Initially, the Nomad space probe was launched from Earth during the early 21st century, and its mission was to explore the galaxy.  Clearly, something has changed in its mission, so Spock mind melds with the probe to find out what its purpose is.

SPOCK: Fascinating, Captain. The knowledge. The depth. KIRK: What does it mean, we are Nomad? SPOCK: It was, it was damaged in deep space. Undoubtedly, the meteor collision. Its memory banks were destroyed, or most of them. It wandered without purpose, and then it met the other. The other was an alien probe of great power. Somehow they merged, repaired each other, became one. KIRK: Then it isn't Nomad? SPOCK: Not the Nomad we lost from Earth. It took from the other a new directive to replace its own. The other was originally programmed to secure and sterilise soil samples from other planets, probably as a prelude to colonisation. KIRK: A changeling. SPOCK: I beg your pardon?

KIRK: An ancient Earth legend, Mister Spock. A changeling was a fairy child that was left in place of a human baby. The changeling assumed the identity of the human child. So, it is to sterilise, and for sterilise read kill.

SPOCK And it has the power and sophistication to do it. KIRK: Yes, it's powerful, it's sophisticated, but it's not infallible. It's space-happy. It thinks I'm its mother.

This sounds suspiciously like what has happened to the Doctor or will happen.  Nomad gets reprogrammed and seeks out biological infestations to destroy them. Um… this sounds ominous, but we know the Doctor has killed a lot of people.  In fact, that was certainly made clear in “Extremis” on the execution planet.

Purpose of a Changeling

This might explain why the Doctor is in an orphanage as a child.

According to Wikipedia:

One belief is that trolls thought that it was more respectable to be raised by humans and that they wanted to give their own children a human upbringing. Some people believed that trolls would take unbaptized children.  Once children had been baptized and therefore become part of the Church, the trolls could not take them.

Beauty in human children and young women, particularly blond hair, was said to attract the fairies.

In Scottish folklore, the children might be replacements for fairy children in the tithe to Hell; this is best known from the ballad of Tam Lin. According to common Scottish myths, a child born with a caul (head helmet) across his or her face is a changeling, and of fey birth.

“Night Terrors” & Another Type of Changeling

In “Night Terrors,” 8-year-old George, a mirror of the Doctor, contacts the Doctor via psychic paper, asking to be saved from the monsters.  George has very strong powers, such as the ability to use perception filters. Also, he has telekinetic powers, among other things, and sends all the things he is afraid of to the dollhouse.

His adoptive/foster parents didn’t remember they couldn’t have kids because George made them forget with the perception filter. The Doctor talks to his adoptive/foster father, Alex.

DOCTOR: George is a Tenza. Of course he is. ALEX: He's a what? (Peg dolls are approaching from all directions.) DOCTOR: A cuckoo. A cuckoo in the nest. A Tenza. He's a Tenza. Millions of them hatch in space and then whoomph, off they drift, looking for a nest. The Tenza young can sense exactly what their foster parents want and then they assimilate perfectly.

Cuckoo birds lay their eggs in another bird’s nest, letting the young be raised by foster parents. Certainly, the foster parent sounds like Moira with Bill.  And Bill is a face of the Doctor.

Interestingly, Wikipedia says

In Greek mythology, the god Zeus transformed himself into a cuckoo so that he could seduce the goddess Hera; the bird was sacred to her. In England, William Shakespeare alludes to the common cuckoo's association with spring, and with cuckoldry, in the courtly springtime song in his play Love's Labours Lost. In India, cuckoos are sacred to Kamadeva, the god of desire and longing, whereas in Japan, the cuckoo symbolises unrequited love.

We have 3 connections here: Zeus turning himself into another bird (Zeus or his proxy is the Doctor), Love’s Labours Lost in “The Shakespeare Code,” and the cuckoo in Japan with the Harmony Shoal connection with Bill’s jacket.

The Lab, Pi, Star Trek & “Wolf in the Fold”

*** This is a whole new section UPDATE 2x ***

Wow, this has just blown my mind how Star Trek is being used!  I had another revelation of something in the lab that didn’t make sense.   On one of the monitors, there is the Greek letter pi, which my daughter caught.  It was very out of place because it wasn’t part of the screen, which was blank, except for a big white pi, like more as a reflection-type thing.  Obviously, it had been digitally added.  However, it didn’t make sense at the time.

Now, I get it.  With the Star Trek reference above for “The Changeling,” I see how DW is using Star Trek.  I need to modify my thinking to include Star Trek episodes and titles.

Star Trek was my favorite TV show growing up here in America, so I'm geeking out about the Star Trek references in DW.  Not having watched the episodes in a long time, I couldn't remember which Star Trek episode had the computer calculate pi, so I looked it up. 

It’s an episode called “Wolf in the Fold,”where Scotty, the engineer on the Enterprise, is suspected of murder.  Memory Alpha says,

However, a more sinister force may provide a connection between this murder and many previous around the galaxy, including a rampage on ancient Earth.

The sinister entity can possess people, so here is yet another reference to usurpation.  The Doctor has to get usurped.  This theme is just coming up all over the place, and it’s an example of why my hypotheses get moved to conclusions, which are head canon, waiting to show up in real canon.  When a theme or topic from the subtext keeps hitting you over the head, you know it has to happen.

Check out the connection to fear and usurpation, which we’ve seen in previous chapters, and I talked about it below before adding this new section.

SPOCK: An entity which feeds on fear and terror would find a perfect hunting ground on Argelius, a planet without violence, where the inhabitants are as peaceful as sheep. The entity would be as a hungry wolf in that fold.

People who were afraid were easily taken over.  The Doctor is very afraid right now.

The entity entered the computer, and Spock told it to calculate the value of pi, which is never ending.  The crew ended up getting rid of the entity

So here is a connection to the Wolf, which goes with the werewolf and the Doctor from “Tooth and Claw.”

References to “Oxygen”

There are quite a few references in the lab that relate to “Oxygen,” although the first thing I recognized was something in the command center. 

Duct Pattern

The pattern on this duct (red arrow) was on the space base in “Oxygen.”

We see the same pattern on the duct in “Oxygen.”  They are reused to draw a comparison.

Hazardous Similarities

The biohazard lab was very similar to the dangers on the space station.  Both require special suits; both have airlocks; both have deadly environments; both are engineered to fail.  Douglas and the Doctor go without full biohazard suits, like Bill and the Doctor in “Oxygen.”   People in the lab are being watched, like the “Oxygen” suits.  The deaths were engineered just like in the lab.

Plague & Pyramid References

Both TPEW and “Oxygen” refer to plagues.  The TPEW plague is obvious, although there is also a plague cross on the plane. However, the plague in “Oxygen” is only in the subtext.  Check out the photo of the Doctor’s suit (red arrow).  There is also a pentagon, meaning a weapon of mass destruction.  

However, also notice the triangle (yellow arrow).  I had wondered about this.  Of course, it can refer to The Ghost with 3 sides, which I assumed.  However, I figured it might have some connection to a pyramid because of the shape being the side of a pyramid and because of what the pyramid shape means.  “The Wedding of River Song” took place in a pyramid in an alternate timeline.  The Bank of Karabraxos in “Time Heist” was the shape of a pyramid, where the Doctor metaphor is a slave.  Pyramids also have a connection to the 4th Doctor story “Pyramids of Mars,” where the Doctor’s body gets usurped. 

So here’s how these pyramid stories are tied into the 12th Doctor through TPEW.  It was inevitable that we had to come back to a pyramid, especially because the subtext shows the Bank of Karabraxos is on a rift, which ties in the Sisterhood of Karn and the Sybilline Sisterhood in “The Fires of Pompeii.”

As far as triangles go, the Monks monitor has triangular sides, so they can easily be related to the problems in “Oxygen.”

One more thing about the plague and TPEW: when connected to the volcano on Bill’s jacket, that connects to “The Empty Child,” “The Doctor Dances,” and “The Fires of Pompeii.”

Health & Safety Violations

Then, there are the health and safety violations in the lab.  This was also mentioned in “Oxygen” when people try to pick up Bill in her suit. The suit complains.

VELMA: Warning. This is an illegal manoeuvre. ABBY: The suit won't let us. Health and safety. NARDOLE: Health and safety?

More to Come from “Oxygen”?

This all makes me wonder if part of this dreaming is damage from lack of oxygen, like hallucinations. Or did the Doctor make a bargain with the devil to save Bill.  Regardless, it feels like there must be some other connection here that we haven’t seen that goes back to “Oxygen.”

The Lie of the Engineered Impending Disaster

If you didn’t catch all the images that flash by when people are looking at the Monks’ simulation, life still exists on Earth.  For lack of time, I’m not going to post them.  It’s a lie that everything is dead.  All the images are of natural disasters, except possibly 1 where there is a fire coming out of a building.  This is not about the plague at all.  Here are the images shown:

·      Forest fire with many burned trees

·      Flood and damage

·      Storm clouds

·      Huge flood where houses get submerged, except for the roofs.

·      Tornado/hurricane damage with a car turned over

·      Fire coming out of a building

·      Hurricane with palm trees bending severely

BTW, I have a really hard time believing the Monks have modeled every event in human history. The amount of computing power needed would be staggering, unless we are using all the dead Time Lord brains in the Matrix and all the knowledge of human history on the Library planet.

Those threads on the simulation machine are interesting.  The first thing I thought of was string theory, but I also thought of weaving a tapestry, which reminds me of the Moirai from Greek mythology or in English the Fates.  We examined fate in a different way with the Magic Haddock story from “Smile.”

The Fates & Moira

The Fates, according to Wikipedia,

were the white-robed incarnations of destiny; their Roman equivalent was the Parcae (euphemistically the "sparing ones"). Their number became fixed at three: Clotho (spinner), Lachesis (allotter) and Atropos (unturnable).

They controlled the mother thread of life of every mortal from birth to death. They were independent, at the helm of necessity, directed fate, and watched that the fate assigned to every being by eternal laws might take its course without obstruction. The gods and men had to submit to them, although Zeus's relationship with them is a matter of debate: some sources say he is the only one who can command them (the Zeus Moiragetes), yet others suggest he was also bound to the Moirai's dictates.  In the Homeric poems Moira or Aisa, is related with the limit and end of life, and Zeus appears as the guider of destiny.

…

The ancient Greek word moira (μοῖρα) means a portion or lot of the whole, and is related to meros, "part, lot" and moros, "fate, doom",[6] Latin meritum, "dessert, reward", English merit, derived from the PIE root *(s)mer, "to allot, assign".

…

Moira is a power acting in parallel with the gods, and even they could not change the destiny which was predetermined.

This also reminds me of the 3 witches in “The Shakespeare Code.”

Since it’s the Monks who have threads that simulate Earth’s events, they seem to be playing the Fates’ roles.  Interestingly, Bill’s foster mother is Moira, so it seems there may be more to her than it appears.  In fact, this all may suggest the Doctor’s entire life has been controlled by those represented by the Monks.  Certainly, the 12th Doctor has been a prisoner for his entire life, so this makes sense.  We know someone is controlling him.  Part of it, obviously is love, but why was Caecilius a happy slave in “The Fires of Pompeii” before he put on the beetle?

BTW, the actress who plays Moira played a woman in “Grid Lock,” who was married to the cat man named Brannigan, and they literally had a litter of kittens together in their Motorway car.

The Love Is Slavery Theme

In TPEW, the Monks must be loved

MONK: We must be wanted. We must be loved. To rule through fear is inefficient.

DOCTOR: Of course. Fear is temporary. Love is slavery.

Love is slavery has been a long-time theme.  Here are a few examples.

“Human Nature” & “The Family of Blood”

We’ve examined this very metaphorical image, shown below, multiple times from “Human Nature” where the 24th Doctor (Roman Doctor) is trapped in the Library metaphor. It really is one of my favorites because it tells us so much.

If you missed it, my lengthy examination is in Chapter 13 of Fairytales and Romance in Doctor Who.  Here’s an excerpt:

The gyroscope, which is centered on the Doctor’s heart at the bottom center, has an arrow through it. Gyroscopes balance themselves and provide stability or maintain a reference direction in navigational systems, automatic pilots, and stabilizers, and gyroscopes are part of an inertial guidance system.

However, this gyroscope has an arrow through it, so the system can’t balance itself. It represents Cupid’s arrow shooting through the Doctor’s heart, causing him to lose his sense of stabilization and direction.

Love has unbalanced him, which very much matches up with what we saw in the episode and its second part “The Family of Blood.

He’s trapped and framed in, meaning he is being used against his will, and he has strong fears.  He is a slave to love.

“The Shakespeare Code” & the Number 57

In “The Shakespeare Code,” the 3 witches (Carrionites, who are yet another species from the Dark Times) cast a spell on Shakespeare, enslaving him to write his lost play Loves Labour's Won, which is possibly a sequel to his play Love's Labour's Lost.  Through the power of his words and a string of numbers, a code, spoken in the Globe Theater, a gate opens allowing other Carrionites to come through.

This episode not only specifies how important words are, especially Shakespeare’s, it tells us how important numbers and shapes are, too.  Additionally, there is a hint given to us to help decipher some DW numbers, including the number 57, which comes up quite a bit.  The 10th Doctor uses it in “The Shakespeare Code.”

DOCTOR: Come on. We can all have a good flirt later.

SHAKESPEARE: Is that a promise, Doctor?

DOCTOR: Oh, fifty seven academics just punched the air. Now move!

Some numbers in DW refer to Shakespeare’s sonnets.  In fact, Sonnet 57 is about being a slave to love:

Sonnet 57

Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require. Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, Nor think the bitterness of absence sour When you have bid your servant once adieu; Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, or your affairs suppose, But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought Save, where you are how happy you make those.    So true a fool is love that in your will,    Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.

When I hear this poem, I can’t help but think of the original Star Trek.  Captain Kirk spoke the first few lines in “Plato’s Stepchildren.”  Interestingly, I’ve thought of this Star Trek episode several times lately in regards to DW, but for other reasons.  Star Trek may have a broader significance to the current events than I’ve realized so far.  Update: Once I wrote this, I started thinking about it.  Yes, it does have a broader significance, as my updates suggest, but I’m betting I’m missing a whole bunch of Star Trek connections because I haven’t thought of this previously.  This is how these things happen with subtext references. Something can radically change how you view things.  Then, you have to rethink a bunch of episodes.  The color scheme I’ve showed you in this chapter is another example of this.

Back in my analysis on “The Pilot,” I talked about “The Shakespeare Code,” as well as how the Doctor and River are stuck in looped time because the 12th Doctor wasn’t there with River in the Library to help her, so the 10th Doctor comes.  River enslaves the Doctor with knowledge of the future.  He is a slave to love and can’t get past this point until something changes.

This is a canon problem that has to be resolved, which is another reason why River has to come back or at least we need to hear another resolution to the story with how it affects her and the Doctor. 

“The Wedding of River Song” & 57 & 22

In “The Wedding of River Song,” River doesn’t want to kill the Doctor, so time is stuck in a loop at 2 minutes past 5 in the afternoon on April 22.  We don’t see the seconds until later.  All of time is happening at once, and the clock won’t move.  Once the Doctor grabs River’s arm, we see the clock advance, starting from 05:02:57.  Everyone is a slave to an alternate timeline because of River’s love of the Doctor.

The number 22 is also another reference to Shakespeare and Sonnet 22:

Sonnet 22

My glass shall not persuade me I am old

So long as youth and thou are of one date;

But when in thee time’s furrows I behold,

Then look I death my days should expiate.

For all that beauty that doth cover thee

Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,

Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me.

How can I then be elder than thou art?

O therefore, love, be of thyself so wary

As I, not for myself, but for thee will,

Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary

As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.

  Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain;

  Thou gav’st me thine not to give back again.

“The Pyramid at the End of the World” & 57

OK, I had to spell out the darn title again.  The Doctor touches his sonic shades, which then show the time as 11:57.  Everyone's phones ring, showing a time of 23:57:00. Time is caught in a similar type loop as in “The Wedding of River Song,” although time isn’t happening all at once in TPEW.  I’ll call this the Doomsday Loop for the Doomsday Clock reference.

This episode draws heavily from the 5th Doctor story “Kinda,” which I’ll talk about in a few minutes.

“Last Christmas” & 57

In “Last Christmas,” the Doctor and Clara are trying to figure out if they are dreaming.  The Doctor passes out 4 manuals.

DOCTOR: These books should be identical in the real world. But as they don't exist in your memory, in a dream, they can't be. Agreed? Clara. Give me any two digit number.

CLARA: Fifty seven.

DOCTOR: All right, all of you, turn to page fifty seven and look at the very first word. Right, when I point at you.

So 57 gets mentioned twice here.  The Doctor, in fact, puts himself in another layer of a dream to save Clara.  The Dream Crabs found Clara through the Doctor. In TPEW, the Doctor is mirroring Clara, having been found through Bill.

“Heaven Sent” & 57

We know the Doctor kept going for 4.5 billion years in “Heaven Sent” because of thoughts of Clara, so it’s not surprising that the number 57 comes up.

(A clock ticks, but it is actually the Doctor tapping a finger against the arm of his chair.)

DOCTOR [OC]: It's funny, the day you lose someone isn't the worst. At least you've got something to do. It's all the days they stay dead.

(The flies arrive.)

DOCTOR: Fifty-seven minutes?

(He gets up and leaves just ahead of the Veil's arrival.)

It’s significant that he talks about losing Clara while sitting near her portrait.  Then, he mentions 57 minutes.

“Time Heist”

The male Teller, being the last of its kind, is a metaphor for the Doctor.  It’s enslaved and doing terrible things in the Bank of Karabraxos. Later, we find out that it was because of love.  A female teller is held hostage to enslave the male Teller and make it do Karabraxos’ bidding.  The relationship between the Tellers is never mentioned, so I’m just calling them kin.

From this, we know the Doctor has to be a slave to love, whether romantic or not.  Someone he cares about and loves is being held hostage.

Bill is the one who is the face of the Doctor here.  She enslaves everyone to save him, and that mirrors River.

“The Curse of Fenric”

While the term “slavery” isn’t used in the 7th Doctor story “The Curse of Fenric,” love is used as a weapon of mass destruction.  It’s part of the curse to win the war.  Drop the love bomb on one side and wipe out lots of people.  I talked a little bit about this in Chapter 16 of Fairytales and Romance in Doctor Who.  It sounds a lot like Davros’ reality bomb.

Ace is beginning to have feelings of love, which is canon.  However, the subtext says her love is for the Doctor.  He ends up saying some cruel things to her to break her confidence in him, exactly like what the 11th Doctor had to do to break Amy’s confidence in “The God Complex.”

I expect this may happen with the 12th Doctor and Bill.  In fact, does he intentionally provoke her, so she tries to kill him? He will sacrifice himself at some point because it occurs numerous times in the subtext.  That may also be part of what the Monks have been alluding to when they said they killed him many times in the simulation.

The curse also comes back to Rose and Bad Wolf, besides Ace, Clara, and Martha.

Enslaved by Love & the Memory Block/Mind Wipe

While 57 doesn’t come up in the dialogue in “Hell Bent,” Clara and the Doctor (like River and the Doctor) are slaves to love, whether it’s romantic or not.  The subtext shows it is romantic.  Clearly, they love each other in whatever capacity that is.  And they are alchemically married.  In “Before the Flood,” Clara mentions love.

CLARA: No. Doctor, I don't care about your rules or your bloody survivor's guilt. If you love me in any way, you'll come back. Doctor, are you?

He comes back.  And she programmed him to always come back, which he does in “Hell Bent.”  This programming is also a problem.

He wants to block her memory to block any thought of him, so the Time Lords don’t find her.

DOCTOR: Because it's the only way. That stuff in your head, the image of me, they could use it to find you.

However, we see in TPEW why the memory block or mind wipe is needed.  They used Bill’s knowledge of the Doctor to find him and abduct him. Not only that, it was Bill’s love of him that has now enslaved the Earth (the Doctor) and humanity.  According to the subtext, he will be the Teller, made to do terrible things.

Enslavement & Death of the Earth

No doubt from the clips of the upcoming episode “The Lie of the Land,” we see an altered timeline, and it looks like humanity is enslaved.  It’s probably because of the enslaved Doctor’s words, since the Doctor is the Shakespeare mirror.  I imagine he becomes like Doctor Moon, who brainwashes people. 

In TPEW, we see a visual of the Earth as a metaphor of the Doctor.  After the opening credits, we get a look at the Earth (yellow arrow) from space, which fades out simultaneously as the top of the Doctor’s bent head (red arrow) fades in.  While the Earth is the Doctor, it’s his head, not his face, which is associated with the Earth.  That tells us that the metaphor applies to all Doctors.

Controlling Earth means controlling the Doctor’s mind.  The actual death of the Doctor would be the death of Earth, which needs to happen in an alternate timeline.  However, what if he is like CAL and there are living minds there?  Just thinking aloud here.  We always have to consider the bigger subtext story and how this fits in.

Tip: Ask yourself lots of questions and try to piece together as many data points as you can.

Since we are dealing with Harmony Shoal, he would get possessed like what Harmony Shoal tried with Grant.  Of course, the Doctor is a mirror of Grant, the most powerful person on Earth.  Harmony Shoal (the Monks) possesses him.  We don’t see a brain swap in the same way because that was metaphorical silliness for the Christmas specials.

If we go by what happened in the Library, River prevented CAL from self-destructing by integrating with her.  River’s and the Doctor’s actions reactualized most of the living minds like Donna’s.  Since we are dealing with the Library, I think something like this may happen at some point.

The Doctor may, indeed, be hurt more than we have been told.  He knows his death is coming shortly.  And his speech at the beginning very much reminds me of the beginning of “Heaven Sent.”

[Tardis]

(After the titles, we get a look at our blue marble hanging in space, then at the Doctor picking a melancholy tune on his electric guitar.) DOCTOR: The end of your life has already begun. There is a last place you will ever go, a last door you will ever walk through, a last sight you will ever see, and every step you ever take is moving you closer. The end of the world

[Ordinary street]

(A little woman comes out of her front door and puts her handbag down to stop it closing.) DOCTOR [OC]: Is a billion, billion tiny moments. (Her husband is following, staring at his smart phone.) ERICA: Don't shut the door! (But he does, smashing her glasses which are inside the handbag.) DOCTOR [OC]: And somewhere, unnoticed MAN: Sorry. DOCTOR [OC]: In silence or in darkness (She hold up the ruined glasses.) ERICA: Damn it! (And gives her other half a Look.) DOCTOR [OC]: It has already begun.

[Tardis]

BILL [OC]: You talking to yourself in there? DOCTOR: I'm meditating. BILL [OC]: You've been in there for hours. I've been trying to talk to you. Have you double-locked this thing?

Interestingly, he mentions silence and darkness.  Silence is another metaphor associated with River, Amy, Rory, and the 11th Doctor.  Did you notice the 11th Doctor’s theme playing in this episode?  Darkness most likely refers to his blindness.

Meditation is a reference to the Season 9 episode “The Magician’s Apprentice” and its humorous minisode prequel, “The Doctor’s Meditation.”  In “The Magician’s Apprentice,” Clara asks Missy a question:

CLARA: How's a Time Lord supposed to die?

MISSY: Meditation. Repentance and acceptance.

When I think of the Doctor’s death, while there are many episodes showing that he sacrifices his life, 5 episodes stick out: “Dark Water” & “Death in Heaven” with Danny Pink, who dies being hit by a car, like Rose’s father, but sends back his younger self because he promised; “Turn Left,” where alternate-Donna has to sacrifice her life; “Father’s Day,” where we see Rose save her father and then how he sacrifices his life; and “The Unquiet Dead,” where Gwyneth volunteers to be a gateway for what she believes are angels, but she sacrifices her life to stop them when they turn out to be malevolent, ghostly creatures.

We’ve examined all of these, except “Father’s Day,” which has some important additional subtext, suggesting who Bill might be.

“Father’s Day,” Bill & the Doctor’s Sacrifice

In “Father’s Day,” Rose and the 9th Doctor go back in time because she was a baby when her father died, and she wants to see him.  They tragically watch her father step out in front of a car.

On an impulse, seeing this about to happen a 2nd time, she runs out, against the Doctor’s orders, and saves her father from being hit.  It changes the timeline, and people start disappearing at a wedding. Reapers come to the church to take people away, or people are there one minute and not the next. One Reaper is shown below, which looks really clunky on purpose.  This image of a giant bat-like creature is not really what one looks like.  

Scientifically, a different timeline would spin off, and people would just not be there.  Or other people would show up.  A good example is the first Star Trek movie of the reboot, directed by J.J. Abrams. 

So the Reapers are metaphorical, but important.  They show us that things change when the timeline is damaged.

The Doctor, over the years, has damaged the timeline seemingly without consequences.  If he’s in a simulation, there may not be any consequences.

BTW, below is an image of Rose and the Doctor with a horse picture. They are part of the rescue plan.

Rose’s Father

Rose, the 9th Doctor, her mom, baby Rose, and dad, along with others take cover in the church that the Reapers attack.  Below, the Doctor and Rose’s father are going to look out the window.

When I first saw this scene in the church and recognized the metaphor of the crucifix (red arrow), shown below, the scene shocked me.  Both the 9th Doctor and Rose’s father are associated with the crucifix in this scene, meaning they are the crucified 12th Doctor.  This equates Rose’s father with the Doctor, so here Rose metaphorically is the Doctor’s daughter.  What this means is that the Doctor’s daughter, whomever she is, saves the Doctor and spins off an alternate timeline.

While this all really was shocking to me when I first saw it, there is an image, which confirmed this for me. We see a scene below from the viewpoint of one of the Reapers, where the 9th Doctor is walking down the sidewalk.  Surprisingly, the Doctor is 2 different people, 2 heads (red and white arrows) with a blurry body.  Scientifically, there would be the mainline Doctor and an alternate timeline version in 2 different universes.

 We’ve got dreams, illusions, simulations, etc. going, so anything is possible.  They, most likely, are in the Matrix.

Anyway, this duplication comes back to the 12th Doctor, and the 2 versions of him, Bill, etc. that we are seeing in “Extremis” and TPEW.

To set the timeline straight, Rose’s father sacrifices his life by stepping out in front of the car. We don’t see people return when he does that.  Scientifically, Rose’s father’s death wouldn’t fix the timeline because they are 2 separate universes, like the Star Trek reboot and the original series.

In “Turn Left,” alternate-Donna’s fix of the timeline by sacrificing her life suggests other things are going on.

Is Bill the Doctor’s Daughter?

Bill saved the 12th Doctor from dying, which mirrors both River and Rose, where we see alternative timelines created because the Doctor and Rose’s father survive.

Bill also mirrors many other companions, but can one be the Doctor’s daughter?

There is something in “Oxygen” that lends support to that.  When Bill and Nardole are trying to hurry the blind Doctor away from the zombies, Bill’s suit locks up and refuses to move.  The Doctor has to leave her behind.

DOCTOR: You will go through hell, but you will come through it. And I will be waiting on the other side. BILL: But what if I was going to die DOCTOR: You're not going to die! BILL: Would you just say exactly the same? DOCTOR: I will see you soon. BILL: Just tell me a joke before you go. (They all leave her.) BILL: Just tell me a joke! He didn't tell me a joke. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Mum! Answer me! (A zombie touches Velma.) VELMA: Instruction received. Complying. BILL: Mum!

We see images of Bill’s mother flash by.

VELMA: Please remain calm while your central nervous system is disabled. Your life is in our hands. (As electricity plays over Bill, her last thoughts are of the photo of her mother. Then she joins the back of the train of zombies.)

The really odd thing here is that Bill calls out to her mother twice, which doesn’t make sense for what we think we know.  Bill doesn’t know her mom, who died when Bill was a baby.  Under duress, most people are not going to call out to someone who is dead to answer about not telling a joke.  It would be natural to call out to Nardole and the Doctor.  Nardole, shown below, has a really pained look when Bill does call out, and the Doctor looks distressed, too, in the scene.

The Doctor is the one who took the photos of Bill’s Mum, but what if the Doctor is trying to protect Bill to keep her identity secret.  What if she is his daughter?

Rose spun off an alternate timeline when she saved her father.  It looks like Bill does something similar with the 12th Doctor. Shooting the Doctor, however, would be like River or Amy, where Amy shot at the little girl in the astronaut suit in “The Impossible Astronaut.”

Also, shooting the Doctor could mirror the Master’s wife shooting him.  With people playing all kinds of mirrors, many things are possible.

Where Are They?

The title of the 10th Doctor episode “The Family of Blood” suggests that it’s the Doctor’s own people who are after him.  Given who all is involved, like Rassilon, the Monks most likely are Time Lords. 

Since Bill has a forward “C” and a backward “C” on her jacket, this has to do with the Eye of Harmony. Most likely they are part of the Matrix, so for right now, I’ll refer to the Matrix as a metaphor that includes virtual reality, dreams, and illusions, like the 4th Doctor said about being in the Matrix.

A Similar Episode from Classic Who: “Kinda”

TPEW draws heavily from the 5th Doctor episode “Kinda,” which is pronounced with a short “i.” I made the mistake of using a long “i."  A few months ago, I watched about 6 minutes of the first episode and stopped, so I went back and watched the whole thing the day after TPEW aired.  It draws heavily from The Prisoner.  Also, there is a Doomsday Clock, although it is not labeled as such, which is also at 11:57.

The Kinda are telepathic, but most don’t speak.  However, there is a wise old blind woman, Panna, who can speak, along with a girl, Karuna, who speaks and is telepathic.  Women have a gift that men don’t, and they can look into a Jhana box without going mad.  Men, however, go mad or else are idiots.  The Doctor got labeled an idiot.

There are a lot of mind-bending things going on, especially with Tegan, one of the companions.  She gets duplicated, where one copy is an illusion, turning into 9 other copies of her.  An evil being wants her to become him.  He has a snake tattoo that transfers to her after she is worn down by psychological warfare.  The Mara possessed Tegan, but later transferred to a Kinda male.  He somehow ends up making all the Kinda obedient to him.

The Doctor experiences many mind-bending things, too

What to Expect Coming Up

Based on various episodes, we can get an idea of some of the things that might happen. 

Fear, Possession & Hostage Situation

Fear and a weakened condition invite possession, and we know the Doctor is very scared about his blindness, which he talks about in TPEW.  Depending on the hostage situation, he might submit willingly to a possession or a situation where he has to choose the lessor of 2 evils, so to speak.

“Tooth and Claw”

In “Tooth and Claw,” set in Scotland, the werewolf talks to Rose: 

ROSE: Where are you from? You're not from Earth. What planet are you from? WEREWOLF: Oh, intelligence. ROSE: Where were you born?

WEREWOLF: This body? Ten miles away. A weakling, heartsick boy, stolen away at night by the brethren for my cultivation. I carved out his soul and sat in his heart.

So the Doctor is abducted by Brabbit and the Monks and most likely gets possessed.

“Midnight”

In the 10th Doctor story “Midnight,” we see Skye (who most fears an invisible entity) getting possessed.  Her possession passes into the Doctor, so this supports the possession hypothesis.

“Time Heist”

There’s the hostage situation we looked at above in “Time Heist.”  In it, 3 Doctors are implied.  The one who is a hostage, the 12th Doctor that we see, and the Architect from the future.

Wealth & Empire

We know the Doctor would never pursue wealth and power if he is in his right mind, but a possessed Doctor or a Doctor-turned-human might.

“The Fires of Pompeii”

In “The Fires of Pompeii,” Caecilius, as a human, wanted to get rich, so the Doctor will most likely get rich.

“Rise of the Cybermen” & “The Age of Steel”

In “Rise of the Cybermen” and “The Age of Steel,” John Lumic builds an empire.  He is CEO, director and co-founder of Cybus Industries, which creates Cybermen.  Lumic is responsible for a lot of deaths.

The Man Who Fell to Earth

In The Man Who Fell to Earth, Newton builds an empire.  He really is trying to do good things with his businesses, unlike Lumic, but he is also psychically affecting people in not so good ways, which he probably doesn’t realize.  Much of what we see is not reliable since it looks like he is caught up in hallucinations, illusions, and other altered realities.  He is being controlled.

Some Master Episodes, Like “The End of Time,” Parts 1 & 2

We’ll most likely see the Doctor mirroring the Master in more ways, since we’ve already seen a lot of mirroring.

Eye of Harmony

At some point, we’ll have to see the Eye of Harmony, like we did in “The Impossible Planet.”  That would be the black hole and another planet, unless we see only something like what was in the DW movie.

Rescue of the Doctor

Of course, the whole rescue plan is about rescuing the Doctor, so we have to see that.  “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances” will play a large part to stop the plague that we’ve examined across many chapters. If you haven’t read about the rescue plan or the plague cross and what it means, check out Chapter 17 of Fairytales and Romance in Doctor Who plus the next 2 chapters. We examined how there had to be a plague somewhere before Season 10 even started. 

The Doctor’s Family

I expect that we will learn who the Doctor’s family is.  I’m expecting several people to come back.

Self-sacrifice

At some point, the subtext says the Doctor will sacrifice himself.

One thing is for sure: it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

[destination-of-fate]

(English Script) Mafumafu’s new “Slime-Making” video

Mafumafu posted a new live-action “cooking” video so I translated the whole script! Again, I can’t add subs to his channel because he doesn’t have community contributions enabled, so you’ll have to read it in text form, sorry ;; I tried to break the lines up by “scene” in my usual script format, but Mafu is the only “speaker” in this video, so I apologize if it’s hard to follow or anything. You can watch the original video through the link above. Enjoy!

(Btw no, he never said who was filming this whole thing, if you were wondering~ Also if you catch any references or anything that I may have missed since I don’t play Dragon Quest, please let me know! ) Please do not reprint these translations without permission or use them to upload subbed versions of the video to any site.

Title: These Dragon Quest Slimes were surprisingly delicious [Delicious]

Description: I’ve been living for the sole purpose of eating Slimes!!! If you subscribe to my channel, I’ll do a handstand out of joy.

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I think that people who perform music will find it useful in their music-making If they learn how to make Slimes as well. They’re nice and cold and feel good, after all.

Mafu: Hi everyone! Hello. I’m Mafumafu. Caption: ↓ Mafuteru Mafu: (quietly) Over here? Oh well. Mafu: I uploaded a cooking video the other day and the responses from people seemed to indicate that it was pretty good. Mafu: So today it’s Round Two! It’s Round Two! Mafu: Eh… There’s something I want to make! How about it? Mafu: Ok, here! Ta-da.  Mafu : “Mizu Shingen Mochi!” (T/N: Also called “water cakes” in English sometimes) Wait, no! *flips the container over*  Mafu : Sl- Slime… Slime… Mafu : E-edible Slimes! I want to make these.  Mafu : I’m going to be making colored water cake Slimes with these patterns! I think I’ll be able to make Slimes of various colors. Mafu: So, Edible Slimes- Edi- (starts snapping) Mafu: My plan is to make these edible Slimes here! Here’s the ingredients! Transition Image: “Mafumafu Channel” Mafu: Water! Water!! Water!!! Mafu: “Agar.” This is the gelatin stuff. Mafu: Soy flour. Image: “Can’t show it!” Mafu: Also, brown sugar syrup.  Mafu: Finally, in order to add color to each Slime, here! This is food coloring. Mafu: Yellow! Green! Red! Blue! Green! Caption: Green (for the second time) Mafu: With these five colors- Caption: (Four colors) Mafu: I’ll be making various kinds of Slimes!

Transition Image: “Mafumafu Channel”

Mafu: So now for this, we need 200 ml of water Caption: *gulp* *gulp* “Measuring by drinking” Mafu: 200 ml of water. Eight grams of agar. What is this thing? It’s huge. Isn’t this really big? How many grams are in this thing? There’s 250 in here? We need 8 grams. There’s 250 in here.  Mafu: First, 200 ml of water. I wonder how much that is? Two hundred? Caption: “Drinking again and measuring by weight” Mafu: Maybe this much?  Mafu: Eight grams of agar. How much is 8 grams? Caption: “Measuring roughly” Mafu: This much? Maybe a bit more. This might be good. Mafu: It says it solidifies at room temperature. Is this gonna be ok?  Mafu: Oh crap. Oh crap, wait! Oh crap, oh crap. It’s solidifying! Mafu: I feel like I didn’t add enough. It might not be enough. Caption: “Q. I wonder if it’s not enough” Mafu: I wonder if it’s not enough Caption: “A. Already used too much” Mafu: Eight grams~ Caption: “Adding a lot” Mafu: I think this seems good? It seems good. It’s a bit syrupy.  Mafu: This is already too much work so I guess I’ll add this (food coloring). Here I go.  Mafu: Ah! This is amazing! Doesn’t it look kinda like a Slime? See? Hey. I wonder if this is good.  Mafu: The food coloring already looks a bit dull. I wonder if it’s ok?

Mafu: It’s not boiling, so I think maybe I can put it on high heat? Mafu: It’s boiling now, so I’ll put it on low heat. Mafu: Eh, does this have enough agar? Doesn’t it not seem like enough?Maybe a bit more. Eight grams. Caption: “Adding more” Mafu: This must be enough. What’s this? It’s getting kinda white.  Mafu: Oh, this seems good. Mafu: It stinks! Eh? The Slimes stink! Ah, it’s sticky!   Mafu: This Slime base is at the right heat, so I’ll be pouring it into the molds now. Here I go. Mafu: (pouring) I put too much in! Ah, this looks good? I’ll press it down.  Mafu: Ooohhh~! (happy) Mafu: Oooh~ (confused) Mafu: Ohh… Oh… (baffled) Mafu: I think it’s fine? It’s fine? A bit… m-messy… Isn’t it fine? Mafu: Is it going to solidify? I’m going to let it chill in the fridge. Mafu: I should make Soraru-san or someone drink this. Mafu: Ah, it’s solid! Wow, look! It’s- ah ah ah, ooh?!?! Eh? Eh? Eh, isn’t this impressive? Caption: “Rejoicing at the unexpected outcome” Mafu: This is great! Wait, wait- Eh? Eh, wow!! Eh, isn’t this awesome? Wait a second- What is this? Wait, wait, wait. Look! Caption: “Look! (Extremely happy)” Mafu: Holy crap! A;gflkjas;dlfkj It’s totally a Slime! This is totally a Slime, right? Look! Wow! Yay!  Mafu: I’ll try it now.  Mafu: (laughing really hard) Mafu: You see… what should I say? What can I say here? Well… Caption: “Question. Tasty or gross?” Mafu: Well, if I had to say if it’s good or bad…… it’s a slug-

Mafu: Alright, now let’s just wait until the other ones harden. Mafu: About three minutes have passed now. How about it, I think it’s probably solidified now? Oh, water’s coming out. Should I open it? Here I go!  Mafu: Open! Please! Please! OOOOHH!! Wow!!! Eh? Wow!! Wow! Wow, wait a second! This seems like a success! Wow! Caption: “Huge success!” Mafu: This is my beloved bowl that I always use. How do they look? Oh, they’ve formed!! They’re formed! Woah!! Wow!  Mafu: Next is green. Here. Please solidify. Mafu: This is like the color of “Bubble Slimes.” Ow, it’s hot. Mafu: Should I eat it? I’ll eat it. Whoops! Mafu: I wonder how much the color will change when it’s done. This looks good! Isn’t this the color of Mottle Slimes? These are like Slimes too, WOOHOO! It’s really dry… Mafu: Here are the green Slimes! Ta-da! Open! Open! …. Hmm? Caption: “Unfinished” Mafu: ...Eh? Caption: “Gently closes it” Mafu: It wasn’t chilled enough. It needs to be more chilled. That’s surprising, since it was in the freezer.

Mafu: Here’s the green stuff from earlier. I didn’t add enough agar, so it’s a bit soft. Ah! Isn’t this great? Isn’t it? It is! Can you tell what the texture is like? Eh? Eh? Eh? Wait, wait. This is amazing! Mafu: (laughs hard) What is this? What is this? AAAH oh no!! Mafu: With the power of the refrigerator… Open!! It’s cool. Caption and Automated Voice: “Please press the ‘unlock’ button.” (T/N: I think he’s hitting a button on his stove?) Mafu: It’s stiff. (gasps) One of them is alive. Caption and Automated Voice: “Please press the ‘unlock’ button.” Mafu: Isn’t this one facing the wrong direction?! So cute! Isn’t it cute? Isn’t it cute?! Ah, one of them didn’t turn out right. Mafu: This looks good! Look at this one! The other one is a bit… Should I just eat it like this? I’ll eat it. Yeah. It’s not good. Mafu: I tried making some yellow base…. But I put it in this plastic bottle and it looks like uri- (cut off)

Transition Image: “Mafumafu Channel” Mafu: Open! Yellow ones! Freezer power! Wow, the freezer is so powerful! Eh, don’t these look really nice? I think they’re good? I think they’re good?? I think this looks pretty good! Look! Look! I’ll tweet these ones later. Mafu: This looks good too. Here I go! One, two! There they are!! So cute! Ah, I think these ones were a success! Oh, they’re still a bit warm. Look! Alright, alright. They’re pretty! Here, this is what they look like. Not bad! Not bad at all. Mafu: What do you think? Look at these. Aren’t these Slimes pretty? They all have Slime faces on them. But you know, even with these four colors, it’s a bit boring making pretty Slimes. (holds up pot of black liquid and laughs) Mafu: I put them all together. Here I go. I’m doing it. There’s something gross there at the bottom!! Here I go. It looks like dark matter. Oh boy. Mafu: Squuuuish!! The final Slimes are now finished. (hums a tune as he reveals them) G… Gross! Gross!! These ones have fallen into darkness. No doubt about it. Mafu: Doesn’t it look kind of powerful? Isn’t it kind of cute?! Look. It’s like a Dark Slime. (shrieks as he drops one) It’s totally-

Mafu: It’s finished!! Look, aren’t they cute? Time to eat them! Brown sugar syrup! Ahhh!! I’ll try it now! Mafu: This one here (the first blue one that he made) This one’s the most perfectly made of them all. This is a blue Slime (inaudible, sorry!) Mafu: I’m truly glad to have met you, my first partner. I’ll never forget you. (chomp) It’s stiff. Cameraman: (pointing right at the black Slime) Mafu: No, no, no. Why are you pointing? Cameraman: (points again) Mafu: No, no, I don’t see anything. Oh, this? This? (pointing at another one) Cameraman: (points at the black Slime) Mafu: You know… (inaudible) You can sense the darkness from it. It’s a thing you can’t even cover up with brown sugar syrup or soy flour, after all. I’m going to eat it now. It’s so stiff!! It just crunched! Here I go! I’m eating the Black Slime. Mafu: (hops) Well… the flavor is still the same, but just thinking about how I’m eating the black one gave me goosebumps! Wooooh! Mafu: Today I spent about 6 hours making these. To everyone watching, please try making them as well. That’s all, so bye-bye!